Marie PhD
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Love is a feminist issue

1/26/2016

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One of the best things corporations did (for themselves) was get both the democrats and republicans competing for their campaign funding. How could they lose?

The same thing happened with men when women compete for men's time and attention.

Love is one of the biggest deals in the west, the bond that (in theory) forms the foundation of homes, and it is the peak of a woman's power to catch 'that' man and becomes princess for a day heralding her new life. In reality it only makes women useful for one thing - to love and be loved and then reproduce.

Especially with the only role for women in most films is being the love interest, needing to be rescued by some man who by the mere fact he rescues her means she'll fall magically in love with him and henceforth they'll live happily ever after.

Having a partner can be extremely useful. Having someone who is on your side, who will help you makes life easier. Most often because it allows us to multi-task, we can do more things than we might normally be able to do by ourselves. Our partner is that special someone we can trust. They help alleviate loneliness, we do stuff with them for entertainment, help us enjoy life and stop us from feeling sad when things don't go well.

Friends can often help with much of this. And sometimes friends can be as good or even better than a partner in many ways, depending on the partner and friends.

Our society conditions women to put up with atrocious behavior from men because women have been told it is better to have a man than to be without. Often that atrocious behavior constitutes domestic violence and addictions or even extramarital affairs or just plain bad behavior, like put downs or insults, because women after they hit a certain age don't want to feel the need to get another man.

Men are very emotional, much more emotional than women. This is a large reason we coddle men so much is because we don't know when they will get so emotional they'll grab a gun.

A lot of this bad behavior comes from women letting men get away with terrible behavior. Often we let bad behavior slide hoping it is a one-off thing but then it becomes increasingly bad and sustained that the woman ends up not being able to control her outrage at how bad the man's behavior has become and she scolds badly all the time whenever she sees the man. Is it her fault that the man's behavior is bad? No. The man should have controlled himself in the first place. These kinds of men will trumpet on about 'Love means never having to say they're sorry'. But of course that only works if they don't demand endless apologies for the slightest perceived insult for what they consider as bad behavior in others.

The problems come about because people don't treat others as equals. I remember one man telling me when I said I wanted to be treated like an equal, "no, you want to be treated like a woman". I don't even know what that means. This person didn't even respect me enough to listen to what I wanted and assumed he knew better.

We must train women and girls who want to form partnerships with men that they should NOT put up with appalling behavior from men or other women. Men must lift their game in dealing with relationships. Men have been getting off too easily for far too long and we should not put up with it anymore.

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War is a Feminist issue

1/11/2016

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To me this is the equivalent of saying that the primary victim of suicide is the person who suicides, rather than those who are left behind to pick up the pieces and wonder what they did wrong. Often the people who love the person who suicides did nothing wrong and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

This is the same for the women left behind during war who have to pick up the pieces when the men they love don't come home from war. After all, it's never been a woman who started a war, or if a woman did start a war, I have no idea how long ago in history she lived.

Women don't start wars, men do.

War is a man thing that men do to all of us. And it wasn't until extremely recently were women even allowed to join the armed services in some countries. And when the men aren't there to protect those left behind: the elderly, women and children; when the women left behind  couldn't defend themselves and their children it was the women who got raped and/or killed, the surviving women where then left to pick up the pieces.

Clinton is right, women are once again the primary victim's of stupid shit men do.

The above image was posted from a men's rights twitter account. No surprises there. If only men would learn to control themselves rather than worry about controlling women. But the issue is really that men are victims of the whims of men, rich men who start wars for their own reasons - (aka to make money) and then wrap the war up in an increasingly thin veneer of ideological bullshit. 

But the purpose of men's rights groups is to force women back down to their station on the totem pole so the men will still feel more powerful than someone else. Of course women aren't the only people who serve the purpose of being pushed lower, non-white, non-christians, the poor, LGBTQ+, and even children will do too.

This is where our real problem comes in, we need to stop seeing people as merely positions in a hierarchy. We need to see all people as being equal to us.  When we see others as nothing other than vehicles to elevate us socially it will free us from the worry of making sure those who are supposed to be lower than us aren't raising above their station, that we can stop watching those above us to see what we are missing.

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Propaganda and Women

1/6/2016

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Women definitely have a propaganda problem. The media is owned and operated by men and consider men their principle audience. Women's TV is during the day which is usually extremely boring and relegated to a time when men are typically all out at work so can't see it.

Then there was "Sex in the City", a show that occurred in prime time and men were falling all over themselves telling women how awful the show was. (A show that was created by a man.) There were some elements of it based on how women behave but the whole 'Mr Big' thing was nonsense. Women may have a man they are interested in for awhile but they tend to move on pretty quickly when things don't work out. Of course not every woman will, but I am generalizing. Anyway, the show was directed at women and men just couldn't handle there being a show about women for women. Despite how many hours of TV is devoted pretty much exclusively to men, think sports - and how many channels are devoted to sports - and how many kinds of sports are there? Yes some women like sports because often the men they like like sports.

Women seldom complain about how much male TV is directed at men, whether it is action movies or general prime TV, women just are expected to enjoy the primary culture, mass media TV and they do so mainly without question. This is similar to other cultures, cable channels devoted to Asian, hispanic, and black american culture. These shows seldom make it onto white western male channels.

We already know if a woman to be considered a love interest she must be younger than 30, typically, and fit the usual physical requirements. Older women seldom qualify as the male fantasy love interest - because face it guys, the media is selling you the fantasy that the hero is a cypher for you and this is the dream girl you are going to get when you defeat the bad guys.

And for the most part, the media has destroyed what passes for female culture. Indeed it destroys subcultures - but we also knew that as we've seen native cultures destroyed in the wake of western culture.

But another more insidious aspect to the primary culture, as we know, demonizes outsiders, blacks, LGBTQ+, native Americans, and women.

If you see an article talking about Donald Trumps crazy supporters, the article will almost always have a picture of a woman on it, for example. The media loves crazy women, think about how crazy Michelle Bachmann's eyes were in the previous primaries. Or women are just labelled as crazy in general. When in reality women aren't necessarily crazy they are angry when men don't want them to be. And women go along with this because they think the media is acting on their behalf and is being representational but it is not.

And if women aren't being portrayed as being crazy, they are portrayed as completely facile. I still have no idea why that Kardashian woman is famous or the media's previous obsession with everything about Paris Hilton, and then they become no one.

But even more insidious is the need for more women to go to prison because the prison industrial complex must be fed and women are very much under represented in the prison system so women have been deliberately painted as more evil by the media so we won't flinch when we find out more and more women are being sent to jail and given harsher sentences. The best vehicle for painting women as evil are murder channels (which is what I call them) and they typically have women telling you how bad the women are. One such show is Deadly Women on Investigation Discovery. I quite like how completely over the top this show is and it often has me laughing. It has to draw on female murderers from several continents and from the past 100 years or so to be able to get the quotient of female murderers to make it's slim season.

On one episode they talk about a daughter who's boyfriend killed her mother and the daughter was painted as the truly evil one because 'she stepped over the corpse of her mother'. A police detective came on saying how he doesn't know how anyone could do anything so heinous as stepping over the corpse of their mother - I can only imagine the cop had lived an extremely sheltered life - the boyfriend who actually did the killing was less evil than the girl who 'stepped over' the corpse? I guess the cop missed Hitler and the holocaust and I don't know how many serial murderers...

Then there was this woman who complained about having her NYE ruined by someone having a heart attack. Why this is even covered I have no idea - although it is sad anyone would feel this way about another person dying, it is hardly news worthy especially when you consider Gary Southern (who?) who is a guy who poisoned the WV water supply with chemicals used in fracking. Or the lawyers who play legal football over Fukushima or over the death of a Walmart employee or the people governors of red states who let people die waiting for transplants because it cost too much or the CEOs of health insurance corporations who let people die by denying coverage for health care or...

The media has been eroding any power women have by telling us how evil women are and this has worked in the best interests of republicans because now when anyone says something outlandish about Hillary Clinton everyone, even left leaning voters, believe it's true.

Because mature, intelligent women who we should take seriously do not exist on TV.

Of course the media is really on the side of corporations, as we all saw with all those jokes about McDonalds being sued by a little old lady for spilling coffee on herself. Everyone was laughing about outrageous lawsuits. And if you were laughing about it, then you too were duped by the media because they are definitely on the side of corporations, and who owns corporations - men, rich white men and who runs those corporations - white men.

Why would women be seen as problematic for white men in corporations? Because women are often thought of as more ethical in business. This may be why there was such a propaganda campaign against Clinton in 2008, no one likes rocking the status quo. And we are used to the sweet little lies men running for office tell us. (Do people really think Sanders stands a chance in hell of getting his agenda met without massive corporate backlash? Meanwhile I rather suspect Clinton will not promise anything she doesn't think she could actually get delivered. Can you imagine the haranguing she'd get if she fails to deliver?)

Note that Walmart waged a war against paying a fine for letting its employ die and spent way more trying to avoid paying the fine than the fine - it did lose. Also Gary Southern faces up to 3 years (yes only 3 years) in jail and I bet its a minimum security jail or an ankle bracelet at home. But the media doesn't tell you these things, it's forgotten so we'll forget - but remember the insanity surrounding Casey Anthony - blown completely out of proportion to the awful things rich white men get away with. Yes I think children dying is terrible, but think about how much media outrage there is about W and Cheney now.

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    I am interested in progressive politics, women's rights, science & art. I believe the only way we'll survive is if we help each other.

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