Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language —so the argument runs— must inevitably share in the general collapse.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language.
It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
-George Orwell, writing in 1946
So begins the classic essay Politics and the English Language, one of the greatest essays of the 20th century. So far as I am concerned, this tract should be required reading for anyone. If you have not read this text, please stop reading my words right now and immediately go read it.
I´ll wait.
In the essay, Orwell spells out in clear terms the problem with the English language in the wake of the Second World War, complaining that:
Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.
He argues that it is of the utmost importance to reverse the trend of cultural degeneration that he could already see over seventy years ago, explaining:
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.
The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they
are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases, one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the
light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.And this is not altogether fanciful. Acspeaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.
Sadly, the situation has gotten so bad that it has become necessary to define terms in order to make oneself understood. In Iain Davis´s excellent essay COVID Jabs: Ineffective, Oppressive, and Dangerous, he repeatedly cites dictionary definitions of commonly used words such as ownership, slavery, vaccine, infection, and immunity.
Now, one could bemoan the sad state of affairs that requiring us to now define words, but such is the world we live in. Might as well roll with it. It´s not like we´ve got a choice.
In this, Iain Davis is leading the way, doing an admirable job of using dictionary definitions to make extremely solid arguments. For instance, observe his argument that vaccine mandates, if imposed by force, would constitute state-sanctioned slavery.
The legal definition of ownership is:
“The exclusive legal right to possession.”
A vaccination mandate decrees that the individual no longer has legal possession of his/her own body. It removes the individual’s legal right to ownership of his/her physical being and hands it over to the state. This constitutes slavery.
Slavery is defined as:
“The condition of being legally owned by someone else and forced to work for or obey them.”
So, if it is necessary in this day and age to include dictionary definitions of commonly used words in essays, so be it.
Okay, enough beating around the bush. I want to talk about sexism. You ready to get your hands dirty? Let´s do this!
First off, what is sexism? Let´s start by defining the term. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines sexism as:
¨prejudice or discrimination based on sex (especially : discrimination against women)¨.
So, with that definition in mind, what is the most sexist thing in the whole world?
Rape
No. First off, rape is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman. As the radical feminist Germaine Greer has pointed out, saying: ¨If a woman allows a man to have sex with her to avoid a beating, then arguably she fears the beating more.¨
Furthermore, not only women are victims are rape. One of the most infuriating things about feminists is the same in which they play the Rape card to shut down debate, as if only females are ever victims of sexual violence, as if only women could possibly know what it is to be physically violated. The experiences of male victims of sexual violence do not seem to be of interest to most feminists.
That said, sexism has a hell of a lot to do with rape. As far as I can tell, there are two main psychological motivations for rape - lust and hatred.
I suspect that many rapists are motivated as by misogyny as by their own desire for sexual self-gratification. That is to say, they hate women and therefore want to make them suffer.
If a male is drunk and horny and ignores a woman´s refusal of his advances, however, is that necessarily sexist? If he was gay and did the same to a man, it wouldn´t be sexist then, would it? The crime is against the individual, not a category. And that is something that feminists often seem to lose sight of.
Intimate partner violence
Hmm. Here we go. Yes, when one human hurts another human, how much does the fact that one is male and one is female matter? If a gay man battered his male partner, would that be sexist? No, of course not. But language becomes prohibitively unwieldy when once is overly concerned with exceptional cases. Gender is obviously an important determinant of who is victimized in intimate partner relationships.
It will not come as news to you, dear reader, that most victims of domestic violence are female and most perpetrators are men. Male battering of women relies on the power differential which is present in most heterosexual relationships - that which results from the fact that men are physically stronger than women, as well as more aggressive.
Also, female psychology is not geared toward direct physical confrontation with males, for obvious reasons.
Furthermore, it is very possible than a wife-beater gets off on a sexist idea of himself as the boss man of his home or whatever, and enjoys the feeling of power that he gets from dominating a woman.
I therefore conclude that sexism is an important motivation for intimate partner violence, and that solidarity against such violence should be a priority for all those who value human freedom.
I´m a ¨live-and-let-live¨ person for the most part, but if you´re next door beating on your girlfriend, you better believe I´m going to have something to say about it.
My ex-girlfriend Anansia, a black feminist, defined feminism in a way that reminded me that deep down, I agree with its essence. Her definition was ¨solidarity against gender-based violence.¨
We could talk about the different ways in which women can abuse their male partners, but I feel that that would be whataboutism. The fact that many abusive relationships are mutually abusive is neither here nor there.
Misogyny is a common motivation for male violence against women, therefore I conclude that sexism is a major motivating factor for intimate partner violence.
Exclusion from certain professions?
Now we´re getting closer. The exclusion of women from the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church, for example, is undeniably sexist.
Conscription?
Most countries that practice conscription, such as Austria, Switzerland, and Russia, only conscript males. This is undeniably sexist.
Israel is the only state in the history of the world, so far as I am aware, to draft women into its armed forces.
I wonder if feminists support this policy.
If they did, they would be placing the principle of gender equality above the interests of real live women.
I´m one of the most dogmatic anarchists you´re likely to meet, and even I think that there comes a point where common sense overrides intellectual principles.
I´m not trying to sound like Ivan Illich or Darren Allen here, but I nonetheless offer for the consideration of the reader the possibility that equality is not always desirable.
I also present this as proof positive that there is such a thing as female privilege.
Pressure to conform to gender roles?
I won´t spend too much time on this one, because one would need to use specific examples in order to speak meaningfully about such things, and one could only do a fair job of this if one were to compare examples from different cultures.
That said, it bears mentioning that both females and males face pressure to conform to gender roles. Some men are completely unable to conform to the expected masculine gender roles, and suffer greatly for it.
The pressure that girls face is different from that that boys face, and grow hard it is to grow up male depends a lot on the neighbourhood you grew up in. We could talk all day about different examples, but we would never come to any useful conclusion about whose experiences are better and whose are worse. Everyone has a story, and there´s far too much diversity between them to make any tidy generalizations.
It is also the responsibility of the individual who desires to follow one´s own path in life to resist social pressure to conform. Many people are pressured by their families to go into certain professions, for instance, or to observe religious customs.
Whereas social pressure undoubtedly feels oppressive at times, it is ultimately the responsibility of the individual to claim agency over their own lives. If you get old blaming your parents for the way you turned out, you´re fucking pathetic.
You are the master of your destiny, and anyone who tells you differently is your enemy.
Social pressure is not the same as oppression. Social pressure is an inevitable part of being human. Oppression is not.
Unpaid domestic labour?
Italian feminist Silvia Federici, author of the classic Caliban and the Witch, has long insisted that women should receive wages for performing ¨reproductive labour¨ such as cooking, cleaning, and childcare.
Personally, as an anarchist, I find this idea abhorrent, as it extends the rule of money into the one domain that still does (mostly) function as a gift economy - that of the family.
This is also obviously only an idea that would appeal to European feminists. To a black woman descended from slaves, the idea would likely go over like a lead balloon, because it would be obvious to her that the rightful fruits of the labour of male slaves were likewise stolen by the people who own everything.
That is the basis of capitalism, what Federici calls ¨primitive accumulation¨. Yet Federici wants to extend capitalist wage relations into the domestic realm, casting woman as the oppressed proletarian, thereby converting her husband into capitalist oppressor and guaranteeing class tension in the home.
It´s a sad commentary on Marxism that this is a serious proposal by a scholar who I would consider the greatest living Marxist thinker. I loved Caliban and the Witch. But, c´mon, Silvia. Is nothing scared?
No, there is nothing inherently sexist about unpaid labour. Many millions of men have been enslaved over the course of human history, often worked to death in grueling conditions.
The anarchist position is against capitalism and for the abolition of wage slavery, not for extending its logic into every sphere of human activity.
Forced arranged marriages
Okay, now we´re getting somewhere. Now, not all arranged marriages are forced, and again, a cross-cultural study would be necessary before any meaningful statement about arranged marriages in general could be made. But it is a fact that many women and girls throughout history have been forced to marry men that they don´t want to marry.
Now, I live in Chiapas, Mexico, and my girlfriend Rocio is Tzotzil, which is one of the many ethno-linguistic Mayan groups in Mesoamerica. Her parents are from San Juan Chamula, one of the few areas in this hemisphere which was never conquered by European invaders.
Now, I am a huge admirer of the Mayan people, including the Chamulas, but there is one aspect about their culture that both my girlfriend and I abhor, and that it is the fact that girls are, to this day, sold as brides.
According to Rocio, the price of a bride varies according to the girl´s age, health, appearance, cooking ability, and other factors, but would normally range between one to four cows. Really makes you think about the value of human life, doesn´t it?
The legal definition of ownership is:
“The exclusive legal right to possession.”
If a woman (or girl) cannot choose who she will marry, it is because she is the property of someone else. It means that she does have ownership of her own body. There is a word for an individual who does not own their own body. That word is slave.
Slavery is defined as:
“The condition of being legally owned by someone else and forced to work for or obey them.”
If a woman can be sold, it means that she does not have ¨exclusive ownership¨ of her own body. In other words, she is a slave.
As an anarchist, I oppose slavery, and therefore I oppose this cultural practice.
Zapatista communities, by the way, do not allow girls to be sold as brides, which is further proof that the Zapatista movement is genuinely anarchist.
Sexual Slavery
Surely, one of the most sexist things imaginable is keeping women (or girls) in slavery for the purpose of using their bodies for sexual gratification. Or is it?
Is it not also possible for males to be sex slaves? Arguably the important factor is not the sex of a human being, but their perceived value as a sexual object.
But let´s put that matter aside. Clearly, women and girls have been the main victims of sexual enslavement throughout human history.
Now, if we are to accept my above definition of slavery, one is forced to the uncomfortable realization that the traditional gender roles of many societies constitute sexual slavery. If we are to be intellectually honest, we must conclude that some forms of slavery are better than others.
Belonging to the harem of an Egyptian pharaoh, for instance, might have been preferable to hard physical labour under the hot African sun. Would you rather be lounging in a palace eating grapes with a bunch of beautiful women, or washing clothes in the Nile while an overseer stood by, whip in hand?
If one concedes that sex work is a valid form of work, one must then look at sexual slavery within the context of slavery more generally.
So, is the sex work of a female slave significantly different from the physical labour of a male slave?
If so, how? If sex work is always worse than other work, then why do so many women choose to become strippers? What is so bad about sex work?
The answer which immediately come to mind is ¨the violation of something sacred¨. But what of the freedom of the male slave? Is that not sacred also? What of his life, his wishes, his desires? Why is her bodily autonomy more important than his?
Sexual Slavery + Physical Violence + Emotional Abuse
As the radical feminist Germaine Greer has pointed out, rape is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman, saying: ¨If a woman allows a man to have sex with her to avoid a beating, then arguably she fears the beating more.¨
There is nothing inherently sexist about physical or emotional abuse. True, it is easy to imagine a female slave being emotionally abused in a misogynistic way, but is equally possible to imagine a male slave being emotionally abused in a racist way. Ever heard of buck-breaking?
Abuse is abuse, whether the victim is male or female, or, for that matter, whether the abuser is male or female.
Sexual slavery involving forced impregnation?
Here we have come to the essential difference between male slavery and female slavery. A male cannot conceive. A woman can.
And here my sense of morality tells me that there is something that I, as a man, can never understand. I cannot imagine how horrible it would be to be raped and then to conceive the child of my rapist. And so I concede that there is a qualitative difference between male and female slavery, and the latter is worse than the former.
With this in mind, I conclude that the sexual slavery of females is different from, and qualitatively worse than, the sexual slavery of males.
There is only one thing that could be more sexist, and that is femicide.
Femicide
I think that we should all be able to agree that the most sexist thing in the whole wide world is femicide. The Oxford dictinary defines femicide as:
the killing of a woman or girl, in particular by a man and on account of her gender.
There is much talk of femicides in Mexico, but the word seems to be used in a loose way, to refer to the murder of women in general.
However, the word femicide does not refer to the murder of women in general. If a bank robber, in the process of a robbery, killed a female bank teller, that would not be a femicide.
When one really thinks about it, there aren´t that many clear-cut examples of femicide. If a man believes that his wife is having an affair, and murders her in a fit of rage, is that a femicide?
Really, it´s debatable. I think the logic goes something like this - the crime results from the male belief that his wife is his property, and the crime stems from a sexist belief system (which is known in Mexico as machismo).
But if a man kills a woman because he believes she is cheating on him, did he really kill her BECAUSE she was female? Or did he kill her because of something she did?
It seems to me clear that the fact that she is female is not irrelevant to the crime, so I accept the common usage of the word femicide. In a sense, our hypothetical murder victim was killed ¨on account of her gender¨, though not FOR THE SOLE REASON THAT SHE WAS FEMALE.
The ultimate example of femicide would be the murder of a female human being based on no other criteria than that of her gender.
If, for example, an army invaded a town, separated the females from the males, and murdered only the females, this would be a textbook example of Femicide.
Which brings me to my reason for writing this article.
Unbeknownst to most Canadians, femicide is a common cultural practice in Canada, and is fully legal.
SEX-SELECTIVE ABORTION
And here we come to the most sexist thing imaginable: Sex-Selective Abortion.
What is Sex-Selective Abortion, you ask? It is the termination of a pregnancy after learning the baby´s gender, for the reason that the baby is not of the desired sex.
As everyone knows, it is now possible to know whether a baby will be a boy or a girl before they are born. The sex of a baby can be determined by ultrasound as early as 14 weeks.
Some people will terminate a pregnancy not because they don´t want to have a child, but because they don´t want to have a FEMALE child.
In other words, female lives are being terminated for no other reason than the fact that they are female. This is the dictionary definition of the word Femicide. This is the ultimate example of sex-based discrimination. To my mind, this is the most sexist thing imaginable. Yet you never hear a peep about from feminists. Why not?
Oh yeah, abortion is a sacrament in the feminist religion. That´s why you never hear feminists criticize Planned Parenthood, which was started by rabid eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who, by the way, wanted to rid the world of people like me.
I´m a diagnosed schizophrenic, if you didn´t already know. Here´s a direct quote from Sanger:
I personally believe in the sterilization of the feeble-minded, the insane and syphilitic…
Obviously, if you support the extermination of people like me, you are my enemy. To me, Sanger was obviously evil as fuck, yet most white feminists still defend her legacy.
So, my question to feminists is this: Why do you feel like that you need to uncritically support every action taken in the name of the Holy Feminist Sacrament of Abortion? Do you feel obliged to defend eugenics out of loyalty to feminism?
That´s dumb. Does supporting euthanasia for elders with incurable neuro-degenerative illnesses mean that you automatically support the Canadian state encouraging mentally ill liabilities to off themselves?
If so, congratulations, you´re officially feeble-minded, which means that your genetic stock should be removed from the gene pool.
Welcome to the club.
Now, I know that feminism means different things to different people, but I thought that feminists were opposed to sexism on principle. What could be more sexist than femicide?
Is feminism really so morally bankrupt that Canadian feminists can´t even take a stance against femicide?
I'm 73 and can appreciate all types of music but that is not the norm when you want to share content that people will actually watch or read. Tom MacDonald is more rap, not punk but I like his honesty and talent.
I am a spoken word late bloomer. Best wishes in Chiapas. I am envious of you being in one of the recent histories more freedom living areas. Peace, love and freedom, Kman, (Ken)
You might attract a lot more attention and shares if you were to bear in mind that a lot of people read Substack articles during their mealbreaks or bus journeys etc. They also do so from a mobile phone which does not necessarily make it easy to load massive long missives with multi-points that head towards a loose objective.
I read from my laptop. I am retired so I don't often think 'TLDR' - too long, didn't read. Your title was good, it drew me in but the long meander through the various forms of sexism caused me to lose the plot. I kept thinking 'where is this going?'.
I see your answer to another comment here is that punk music lyrics are worth hearing and I am sure they are.... if one could actually decypher what is being said under that barrage of disconcerting chaotic noise.
Finally, with great relief I arrived at the concluding paragraphs and was shocked by them. Are you kidding me? My indignation at being led through a labyrinth only to arrive at a completely erroneous conclusion exploded in my head.
Abortion is a bad business, whatever the reason for doing it. But, given that we can know the sex of a foetus very early in a pregnancy, and would prefer to give birth to one sex or the other works both ways. What about the woman who has had six boys, is approaching the end of her reproductive life and is desperate to have a girl? Is she being sexist when she chooses to terminate the pregnancy if the foetus is another boy?
Like I said. Abortion is a bad business, because I have never known a single woman who went through with an abortion who did not live to regret it. Regardless of what sex the infant might have developed into.
I know one woman who terminated a baby when she was only 17 years old. She never got pregnant again - and she certainly tried.
The other issue I have with your meanderings is the focus on black slavery. The tired old assumption that slavery is an exclusively white on black crime. Is it fuck.
Here in Britain, the Romans invaded before Jesus was even a twinkle in his father's eye. Everyone, regardless of sex or ethnicity was immediately either murdered or enslaved. Many of them were hauled off to Rome to be fed to the lions or forced to fight to the death in the Colosseum. Many concubines in the harems of the Ottoman Empire where white European girls. Blondes are still most valuable in the sex slave markets.
Irish people were enslaved by the British ship owners and sold off to Caribbean estates, British men were press-ganged into working on those ships! The working classes of Britain were working for the aristocracy for a pittance right up to the turn of the 20th century and the rubbish wages we witness today, regardless of our sex is nothing short of slavery still.....
You see what ranging over a bunch of loose subjects causes?
It causes your reader to wonder what the hell your point is..... it infuriates the reader by wandering all over the place when you could have focused on your intended subject, selective abortion without associating it with feminism, sexism or slavery..... because it is none of those things.
Abortion is violence against an under-developed living being which cannot defend itself and it is indicative of a whole society which has a very thin sense of morality.
If you really want to get down to brass tacks about it, we could say that it is on a par with crushing seeds to make flour or boiling them to provide some carbohydrates to an otherwise insubstantial meal.