Author: susanw

It ain’t no use to vote in Broward County
(They don’t count ’em anyhow.)
No, it ain’t no use to vote in Broward County
(If you don’t know by now.)

I’m a-thinkin’ and a wondrin’ on my way to the booth,
They say that they count ’em but, it ain’t the truth.
I’m gonna cast another ballot in Duluth.
Just vote twice, it’s all right.

If you are expecting a titillating description of erotic techniques sure to make you a hit with your lover, stop reading now.  You will be disappointed.

What whores know about sex is the difference between Theory Sex and Practice Sex, that is, the sex we say we do versus the sex we actually do. Theory Sex is mutual desire, arousal, and fulfillment enjoyed by equal partners without a power component.  This is the myth of heterosexuality.

 Practice Sex makes Theory Sex impossible.  It makes YES meaningless when NO is impossible.  Before you protest that no IS possible, suspend judgment for a moment.
We know that over forty percent of girls have been molested before they were eighteen.  We know that over forty percent of women have been raped.  We know that women are battered and killed everyday by men with whom they share or shared a bed.

Less that 8% of American women surveyed were able to say that they had never been raped, never fought off an attempted rape, never been grabbed and groped, never been seriously threatened with physical or economic harm if they didn’t put out.  Even that depressing figure is deceptive because “rape” is not defined from the perspective of its victims. “Have you ever had sex that made you feel violated?” might be a better question, because for rape to magically transform into legal sex requires only consent. Consent; acquiescence; not desire, just consent.  Verdicts in rape cases correlate not to the degree of harm done, but to the relationship between the parties; the better you know the rapist, the less your feelings matter. This is sex in practice.

Marriage is the theoretical home of Theory Sex.  Here, despite great disparity in pay, status, and power, there is supposed to be that mutual sex free of domination and submission.  

But what about the marriages where sex is part of a beating, or the “making up” after a beating; or the marriages where refusing sex will result in a beating; where saying no means a temper tantrum, or no grocery money, or the silent treatment, or a child’s ruined birthday party? What about marriages where pornography is used to show wives how “real women” should be, as if those pictured women who are having real things done to their real, bruised bodies were enthusiastic participants instead of dehumanized objects, paid or coerced to pretend they like what’s happening to them. What does a woman’s yes mean if she can’t say no?

Even if she loves sex with her husband, but just not tonight, how many nights can she say no before she’d better say yes, and simulate the enthusiasm to go with it? How much inconvenient honesty will he tolerate?  If she loves her husband, and doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, “yes” is easier; a little acting in a good cause never hurt anybody, right? Well, not anyone who isn’t regarded as a fully authentic human, anyway.  

How many of us have wondered, in the dark quiet afterward, what sex is, and if lying and pretending are kindness or cowardice, and would it be OK to just do it without the deception, or will truth make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards? Besides, being “sexy” is much of what makes us attractive and desirable; it is a way of expressing love, if not always real passion. Can a woman ever be authentic if only inauthenticity makes her feel feminine?  

Have we dared to wonder if the man we love suspects any of this?  Is it OK with him as long as the heterosexual myth is maintained?  I ask again, what is sex, what is love, what is a woman?

I’m tired, and I’m going home to cry, not because sexual desire unburdened by dominance and inequality, love that thrives in truth, and humanness are in such short supply. I wept my fill for those years ago.

  I’ll cry tonight because I’m afraid people want to believe that they already have those things more than they actually want them.

The capture of her killer has yet again provided the opportunity to pornograph  “Murdered Child Beauty Queen”, JonBenet Ramsey.

Obscene pagent photos, displaying her tarted up like a tiny sex worker, are plastered on screens and newsprint, lest we forget that females are defined by and valued in the currency of sex.

Poor little girl, used once again as the erotication of subjugation’s poster child.

Is there no limit, no limit at all to equating dominance with sexuality ?  

There are serious issues connected with the outing of bloggers; several have been discussed here. This is the aspect that got me thinking:

If one is writing in a political forum, how far a field from one’s stated principles can personal behavior stray before hypocrisy bubbles to the surface?  (That’s not really a mixed metaphor; the big field is very wet.)

Where do you draw the line?  Can one call oneself a progressive and represent Walmart?
Own Halliburton stock?  Attend a homophobic church?  How far is too far for you?

I had to quit about half of the jobs I’ve ever held because I was pressed by my employer to commit fraud.  During the times I was responsible for only myself, this was an easy matter, but while widowed and raising a child alone, I often had to keep a morally repugnant job until I could find another.  That put me in the position of ducking, weaving and lying to the boss until I could get out.  

If, at that time, I had been writing about moral integrity, shouldn’t I, in the interest of transparency and full disclosure, include this information? If my personal situation informs my opinions, am I being less than honest by holding that fact back?

Help me here;  is it the questionable conflict with progressive values, the secrecy about it, or both that is the problem?

My neighbour has guns.  Lots of guns. Lots and lots and lots of guns.  He has more guns than anybody.  He’s so obsessed with them that some of his children don’t have shoes and can’t visit a pediatrician when they’re sick, but that doesn’t stop him from buying more and more and more guns.
Having the most guns isn’t enough.  He doesn’t want anybody else to have them.  Oh, he has a few friends that he allows some guns as long as they’re always on his side, whatever that means, but  nobody else can have any.  He says guns are dangerous in the wrong hands.

A few years ago, he bullied his buddies into helping him raid a house down the block.  He said they had guns.  Turns out they didn’t, but now he’s got their house and isn’t sure what to do with it.

Some of the other neighbours want guns now.  Some of them want guns so they can acquire more houses, like he did, and some feel they need guns to protect themselves from the other people with guns.

My neighbour sits in the coffee shop and has earnest conversations with his fellow gun owners about how they can keep everybody else from acquiring these dangerous weapons.  They have decided to blow up some houses to prevent this, since the raiding thing didn’t work out very well last time.

  In none of these discussions have I heard anyone question why it’s a good thing for him to have guns and a bad thing for anyone else.  His entitlement is an unspoken assumption: he has more guns because he has more guns because he has more guns.

Lots of the neighbours would like to move, but there’s no place to go.

I have told personal stories here in the past about a childhood of abuse, an unwed pregnancy beaten out of me by my own mother,  being screwed while I cried by men who didn’t care about me, and a brief period  prostituting.  I don’t think I’ve talked about the friend of my roommate’s husband who insisted that I ride with him on a trip to Las Vegas where it was understood that my girlfriend and I would be sharing a room, since I didn’t even know him.  He drove off into the desert, tried to rape me, got scared, I guess, when he knocked me unconscious, dumped me in the 110 degree heat, and left me there.  But that’s not what this is about.

Because of that expirience, in the early seventies I was involved with a Rape Hotline.  In addition to helping the victims, we were determined to get some of these cases to court.  Rape prosecutions were very rare in those days.  Knowing how badly victims were treated, we offered support, but never encouraged anyone to go to the police.  Because I was the grind of the group, I studied everything I could find that would be of use to a woman reporting rape and going to trial.

Our first volunteer was a middle aged woman who had been repeatedly raped by her landlord.  This was and still is very common in low income and assisted housing.  It is talked about in support groups but almost never reported for reasons that are obvious.

She was willing to go to the police because she wanted it to stop, and because there were so many young girls in the complex that she feared were being abused as well.  

This man had keys to her apartment.  He would come in at night and get in bed with her, as if they were having an affair.  He said she couldn’t tell on him because she was behind that month, and he’d just say that she was trading sex for the rent.  Nobody would take the word of a welfare whore over a businessman like himself.  Her nerves finally got so bad, after weeks without sleep, that she couldn’t take it anymore.  I went with her to the police station.

We were walked back to a detective’s cubicle hung with Playboy centerfolds. She took a long look at those naked women on the walls, and turned to me.  We stood there, looking into each others’ eyes, and I knew she could never talk to this man, this representative of law and order, this man paid by our taxes to protect and serve.

She didn’t report the rape that day.  I doubt she ever reported it.  I know she never went back to her apartment because I tried to find her for weeks.

The following is an excerpt from  Michael Lerner’s “The Left Hand of  God: Taking Our Country Back From the Religious Right”.  I have not bought his book yet, but I heard him speak this weekend.

“The unholy alliance of the political Right and Religious Right threatens to destroy the America we love. It also threatens to generate a popular revulsion against God and religion by identifying them with militarism, ecological irresponsibility, fundamentalist antagonism to science and rational thought, and insensitivity to the needs of the poor and the powerless.

By addressing the real spiritual and moral crisis in the daily lives of most Americans, a movement with a progressive spiritual vision would provide an alternate solution to both the intolerant and militarist politics of the Right and the current misguided, visionless, and often spiritually empty politics of the Left.”
“People feel a near-desperate desire to reconnect to the sacred, to find some way to unite their lives with a higher meaning and purpose and in particular to that aspect of the sacred that is built upon the loving, kind, and generous energy in the universe that I describe as the “Left Hand of God.”

By contrast, the “Right Hand of God,” sees the universe as a fundamentally scary place filled with evil forces. In this view God is the avenger, the big man in heaven who can be invoked to use violence to overcome those evil forces, either right now or in some future ultimate reckoning. Seen through the frame of the Right Hand of God, the world is filled with constant dangers and the rational way to live is to dominate and control others before they dominate and control us.

It is the search for meaning in a despiritualized world that leads many people to right-wing religious communities because these groups seem to be in touch with the sacred dimension of life. Many secularists imagine that people drawn to the Right are there solely because of some ethical or psychological malfunction. What they miss is that there are many very decent Americans who get attracted to the Religious Right because it is the only voice that they encounter that is willing to challenge the despiritualization of daily life, to call for a life that is driven by higher purpose than money, and to provide actual experiences of supportive community for those whose daily life is suffused with alienation and spiritual loneliness.

Many Americans have a powerful desire for loving connection, kindness, generosity, awe and wonder, and joyous celebration of the universe. These desires are frustrated by the way we organize our society today. A progressive movement or a Democratic Party that speaks to these desires in a genuine and spiritually deep way could win the popular support it needs to create a world of peace, social justice, ecological sanity, and human rights.

As I watch the likely Democratic Party candidates for president in 2008 scramble to position themselves as mainstream, I am all too aware that taking this kind of spiritual politics seriously is going to require a huge leap for many of us. Some Democrats think that they don’t need these changes to win power, and they may be right in the short run. The current implosion of the Bush administration as it wallows in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a failing war in Iraq, and scandal and indictments at the highest levels of government, may be enough to provide Democrats with election victories in 2006 and 2008 (though Republican redistricting is likely to dampen the chance for a Democratic landslide in 2006, and electoral fraud has increasingly characterized American national elections where so much is at stake).

But Democrats have won elections, even the presidency, before–and yet the movement of intellectual and political energy keeps on sliding to the Right, and so Democrats in office often end up acting from the assumptions of the Right in order to show that they are “realistic” and “non-ideological.”
Nothing has been more dispiriting than to watch years in which Congressional Democrats continued to vote for tens of billions of dollars to fund the war in Iraq even after learning that the country had been lied to and manipulated into that war. Even after conservative Democratic congressman John Murtha called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq within six months in November 2005, the Democrats were unable to firmly endorse that courageous call.

Without a larger spiritual vision, the Democrats too often develop their programs by poll data, reacting rather than leading. They may eventually oppose a specific war, but they are afraid to oppose war. They throw money to alleviate suffering from some particularly terrible social injustice, but they are afraid to envision and fight for an end to all social injustice.

Let me reassure you that the spiritual vision I present is not an attempt to recruit you to some particular religious community or spiritual trip. You do not have to become religious to embrace a spiritual politics or to learn from the wisdom of various spiritual practices.

I do not blame many secularists who resent the way that some in the Religious Right seek to shove a fundamentalist and intolerant religion down our throats. Almost every religion, like almost every political and intellectual movement, has people of that sort, and holy texts (both religious and secular) have voices that validate an oppressive, dominating, fearful way of seeing. Yet in most religions (just as in many secular social change movements and liberation ideologies) there are also voices of the Left Hand of God, voices that embrace compassion, love, generosity of spirit, kindness, peace, social justice, environmental sanity, and nonviolence.

This political Right achieved power by forging an alliance with a Religious Right that is willing to provide a sanctimonious religious veneer to the selfishness and materialism of the political Right in exchange for the political power it needs to impose parts of its religious agenda on America.

Capitalizing on a very real and deep spiritual crisis engendered by living in a society that teaches “looking out for number one” as its highest value, the Religious Right has managed to mobilize tens of millions of people to vote for candidates who end up supporting the very economic arrangements and political ideas responsible for creating the spiritual crisis in the first place.

With this alliance now propelling them into control of Congress, the presidency, and the judiciary, they have launched a cultural crusade against liberals, secularists, activist judges, homosexuals, feminists, and anyone who still believes in peace and social justice. The country received its strongest alert to the nature of the assault on the American tradition of religious tolerance when, in the spring of 2005, the Right began to talk openly about impeaching from the judiciary “activist judges” who were imposing “secular values” on the country, then managed to torpedo Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court (Harriet Miers) and encouraged him to appoint Samuel Alito, a sophisticated conservative ideologue.
Although I do not share the goals of many leaders of the Religious Right–and in fact believe that they pose a huge danger to American society–I must admit some appreciation for their willingness to state their objectives clearly and honestly, a refreshing change from the diet of mush that often emerges from the Democratic Party. Paul Weyrich, one of the Right’s most serious strategists, said it clearly in 1980: “We are talking about Christianizing America. We are talking about simply spreading the gospel in a political context.” I was invited that same year to debate Weyrich at the Moral Majority’s annual Family Forum and found him a powerful advocate for a frightening worldview that I hoped would remain marginal in America. But twenty-five years later, having followed the advice of Jerry Falwell, who famously said, “Get them saved, get them baptized, and get them registered,” the Christian Right is now carrying out its agenda.

It is perfectly legitimate to be alarmed at the growing power of those on the Right and the way they use it, to challenge their ideas forcefully, and to warn of the dangers should they succeed in their stated intentions. I will certainly do everything I can to prevent them from popularizing the notion that people have to be religious or believe in God to be moral and to challenge their particular understanding of what God wants of us.

What I will not do, and what I urge my friends in liberal and progressive movements not to do, is attribute evil motives to those on the Religious Right or to view them as cynical manipulators solely interested in power and self-aggrandizement. The Religious Right certainly has its share of power mongers and hypocrites. But the vast majority of those involved are people who are driven by principles and who want what is best for the world.

 We can strongly disagree with those principles, as I do, and we can argue, as I will, that they lead in a very dangerous direction, one that would actually increase the pain and suffering of humanity. But I do not doubt the sincerity or basic goodness of most of those who are involved.

So where are the Democrats, the liberals, and the progressive forces that have traditionally been able to provide a counterweight to corporate selfishness and have fought for separation of church and state?
For much of the past thirty years the Democrats have been more interested in showing how similar they are to the Right than how different. Faced with both a corporate takeover of the media that increasingly portrays liberal and progressive ideas as some form of extremism or “class warfare” and with a Religious Right that has managed to put secular people on the defensive, the Democratic Party and much of the liberal and progressive world (which for convenience I’ll call the Left)* has contented itself with mild reforms. It tinkers with narrow policy goals instead of promoting an alternative vision and alternative values to those of the Right. Fearful of political isolation, Democrats listen to the wisdom preached by the media and by a bevy of corporate-friendly professional consultants who tell them to be “realistic” by accepting the contours of politics as defined by the Right. And the more they do so, the less anyone else sees these Democrats as a viable alternative. Democratic voters lose their enthusiasm. They go to the polls grudgingly, not because they believe that the Democrats have any solutions but rather to stave off the even worse consequences of Republican dominance. Many do not even bother voting, and millions of others look for vision elsewhere–and find it in the Religious Right.

Others take the approach of the “let’s-move-further-to-the-left” section of the Left, insisting that the old formulas of the really radical Left, mixed with a repackaging of identity politics and presented as economic populism, would provide the magic formula, if only those Democrats would listen! But meanwhile, they can’t explain why their candidates, running in Democratic primaries or as Greens, rarely manage to get significant support from American voters. But the “let’s-get-closer-to-the-middle-of-the-road” mavens of Democratic leadership face that same challenge, since they’ve also tried the “let’s-be-softer-and-gentler-born-again Republicans” strategy, and it too has failed.

We need to look deeper.

Liberals and progressives sometimes like to make fun of the Right by pointing out that it is precisely in the Red states of the Republican majority where abortions are most prevalent, where divorce is most rampant, where the power of corporate selfishness is most unrestrained by laws, where the malls have done most to uproot small businesses, and where materialism on the whole seems to be having its greatest field day. The same is true for many of the enclaves of Red-state consciousness in Blue states, such as the gated communities and mostly white valleys of Southern California or the suburban areas of many other Blue states. But that, of course, is just the point. It is precisely because people in the Red states are suffering most from the epidemic of uncontrolled me-firstism that so many residents of those states are so desperate to find a counterforce. They are the most susceptible to the appeals of a Religious Right that has become a champion for family values, tradition, the stability that is offered by authoritarian and patriarchal norms, and the real comfort that spiritual life offers through connection to something higher than money.

The point is that there is a real spiritual crisis in American society, and the Religious Right has managed to position itself as the articulator of the pain that crisis causes and as the caring force that will provide a spiritual solution. And then it takes the credibility that it has won in this way and associates itself with a political Right that is actually championing the very institutions and social arrangements that caused this problem in the first place. And with the power that each of these has gained by their alliance, they have become ever more arrogant in trying to impose their worldview on everyone else in society. Their alliance threatens to destroy the fragile balance between secular and religious people and to move the United States toward the very kind of theocracy that people originally came to this country to escape.

So, how could this happen?

It has happened because the political Left doesn’t really have a clue about the spiritual crisis in American society and is thus unable to address it in any persuasive way. Witnessing the country give electoral victories to the Right, those on the Left are totally confused about why it’s happening. They earnestly study poll data and then reposition themselves in ways that will not put them too far beyond where they imagine popular opinion is moving. It never occurs to them to be the shapers of this social energy instead of merely the responders. For much of the past twenty-five years, since the early days of the Reagan administration, the Democrats have explained their electoral losses by claiming that the country is just in a “conservative period,” as though the political climate had fallen mysteriously from heaven and had nothing to do with the way liberals failed to develop mass support for a progressive worldview when they held political power. In this book I will provide you with an explanation of why we got into a conservative period and how that can be changed.

After the 2004 elections many Democrats read the exit-poll data and realized that some voters were motivated by “values.” Since then the Democrats have been frantically looking for a magic bullet to win back the “values voters.” But mostly their discussion has been about hype, not about substance.

If we, the American people, are going to win back our country from the Religious Right, we are going to have to reshape the Democratic Party and the Greens, or create some other party, to come to grips with the depth of alienation from liberal politics among the many people who continue to vote, unenthusiastically, for the Democrats as the only way to stop the Right.

A reshaped Democratic Party, or a new party, must minimally:

*    Understand, acknowledge, and respond to the spiritual crisis in American society–and provide a progressive spiritual vision that is more attractive than the one currently offered by the Right.

*    Recognize that people hunger for a world that has meaning and love; for a sense of aliveness, energy, and authenticity; for a life embedded in a community in which they are valued

*    Reject the tendency to regard people who are not part of the liberal culture as stupid, demented, or evil.

*    Fight for ideals that are not yet popular and be willing to stand for those ideals even if that means temporarily losing some elections.

*    Unite secular people in a movement with “spiritual but not religious” people and join both of those groups with progressive religious people.

*    Reject and combat the religion phobia that dominates important sectors of liberal and progressive culture.

Only a political party that can incorporate these goals at the center of its agenda can hope to win a majority, which would allow it to implement the other peace, justice, and ecological goals of the liberal and progressive agenda. For many Americans, meaning needs are the most pressing issues in their lives.

 This hunger for meaning, mutual recognition, and a spiritual foundation for their lives–for a sense of aliveness to counter the emotional and spiritual deadness that people experience in work and on television–is just as significant as the hunger for material well-being. Hence these are not issues that can be addressed “later,” after all the peace and justice and ecological issues have been solved. These needs lie at the center of many Americans’ lives, and unless we address them powerfully and convincingly, the Democrats and the Left will continue to lose power.”

As a “spiritual, but not religious”, this speaks to me.  In the segment I saw on C-SPAN, Rabbi Lerner also spoke about the wisdom of the civil rights and women’s movements exemplified by their refusal to be drawn into pointless debates about how to fit their demands into existing institutions.  Instead they imagined a world transformed by equality.

His talk also made me think of all the Republicans I know who are not evil, or stupid, but who blame the left for rampant pornography, ridicule-based entertainment, the cheapening of sexuality, the break-up of families, and corruption everywhere.  Those are values I share; I would propose different solutions, but still there is a lot of common ground.
Let me conclude with a quote from Lerner’s interview with Evan Derkacz:  

“We spiritual progressives have to work on both fronts — challenging the Right and its very destructive policies and on challenging the superficiality and one-dimensionality of the Left with its resultant self-defeating policies. And yet, please understand that this is the opposite of trying to capitulate to or mimic the Right; we are calling for a challenge to the globalization of selfishness that goes under the title of “capitalist globalization,” and we seek to replace it with a globalization of love and caring.

We believe that this is the most effective way to challenge the logic of the capitalist marketplace and will create far more radical politics than any other strategy currently in consideration in the Left. A world that takes love and kindness, generosity and caring for others, and responding to the universe with awe and wonder seriously will be a world that has no place for exploitation, manipulation or technocratic, reductionist and manipulative thought or action.

So we are not calling for some capitulation to a mythical center, but a transcending of all those categories and reaching toward higher ground, which is the basis for common ground. And our central spiritual notion is this: The well-being of Americans depends on and is intrinsically tied to the well-being of every other person on the planet and on the health of the planet itself, so every chauvinistic and every ecologically insensitive approach is not only immoral but self-destructive, as it abandons the divine mission of human beings to be partners with God in the healing, repair and transformation of our world, our planet and ourselves. A politics that takes seriously both working on our inner lives and working on our social healing is the only politics that is sustainable, and it is the only politics that can win.”

Forgive me for referencing a book I haven’t read yet, but I was very moved by Rabbi Lerner, and couldn’t wait.

Fire away.  I have to go home soon, but I’ll return and respond tomorrow.

We have been discussing our dissatisfaction with the strategies of our Democratic candidates: clever framing vs. plain truth, civil discussion vs. all out attack, strong statements of liberal values vs. courting of moderates.

We have complained that the Democratic message isn’t clear, that our leaders are lukewarm or unfocused. These problems will persist until we deal with a conflict of interests that cripples all our efforts.

America is represented by the Enthusiastic Big Business Party and the Reluctant Big Business Party.  While the Republicans gleefully shovel our country’s wealth from the poor and middle class into the pockets of the rich, the Democrats passively queue up at the troth.  

Democrats cannot credibly campaign for the reduction of poverty, support for unions, fair wages, worker protection, comprehensive safety nets, equal opportunity, social justice, universal health care, fair taxes and peace unless they are willing to forego corporate  support, and honestly work to redress the terrible imbalance wrought by unchecked, rapacious capitalism.

As my grandmother used to say, you can’t lie down with the cattle and the corn.  Well, you can, but nobody will believe that you represent the corn’s best interests.

OK, I’m not THAT good at it.  I always want to say, “What are you, NUTS ?  How can you continue to support that stupid, hypocritical……” etc., etc.

But while discussing torture in Steven D’s excellent diary, I realized that I have actually had some successes by contrasting the values I know my Republican co-workers hold with the behavior of the current administration:

Those people in the White House aren’t Republicans.

  Republicans have moral clarity. They don’t condone torture. Republicans believe in the rule of law. They don’t have one set of rules for us and another for everybody else. Republicans are honorable.  They don’t disgrace and shame America. Republicans support the military. They don’t jeopardize our troops by violating the Geneva Convention.  Republicans are logical. They know not to trust information obtained through torture. Republican are civilized.  They do not stoop to embrace the tactics of our enemies. And Republicans don’t squander tax payers’ money on foreign adventures.

These folks in the White House are NOT Republicans.

 
These discussions have been focused on torture, but I think there are many areas amenable to this approach.

Please, Tribbers, if you think this can work, (and I HAVE had some people soften and admit that they voted for Bush, but can no longer support what he’s doing now), help me develop this from the narrow torture focus to an issue wide exercise in values clarification for our Republican neighbors.

I know from experience that backing them into a corner and forcing them to defend extreme positions that they don’t really believe is not the answer.

 

There was an interesting diary recently, equating the vicissitudes of of being male in “post feminist”  America with women’s on-going struggle for equality. The diarist blamed “female liberation” in part for forcing the sexes apart in an unnatural way, and contends that this makes being a man in America just as difficult as being a woman.

It has never escaped me that rigid male roles are uncomfortable, limiting and dangerous for the men that adopt them, and for everyone they affect.
I am not totally unsympathetic, although I reserve the bulk of my respect and empathy for the brave men who dare to defy the stereotypes.  Because rejection of inflexible, traditional roles is at the heart of feminism, I was at a loss to understand how we could be blamed.  The complaint seemed to be: “The women these days don’t respond well to the way I behave, and I resent it.”

Maybe I’ve been missing something. Perhaps my femicentrist viewpoint has blinded me to the real pain of the privileged when their entitlement runs out.

For instance, I have always felt great outrage at the institution of slavery, but I have identified only with the slaves.  I never thought about how hard it was being a master in a changing world.

I Am a Masterist

Nobody appreciates the difficulty of owning people.  For one thing, you have all this responsibility and the burden of command.  I have to make all the decisions and see to it that everybody acts right.  That is a lot of work.  The other thing is, I know in my heart that I, personally, would hate being a slave, so even when they act all content, sometimes I have my doubts.  I even imagine occasionally that they may hate and resent me even though I take care of them.  That’s very stressful.  Luckily, they are NOT like me because they’re black.  Well, most of them are pretty black, except the ones whose daddies are white.  Some of them are even my own children, and I can’t tell you how hard it is to remember that even though they are my blood, that blackness keeps them from being like me.  That’s the part I hate worst, because it’s natural to love your children and want what’s best for them.  Keeping all slaves in their place is a necessary but painful sacrifice a master has to make to keep the system going.  No, it’s a good thing that blackness makes them like the opposites of whites, or I’d be even more uneasy and afraid.  Those people cook my food, wash my clothes, care for my children and sleep in my bed.  If I believed that they had the same feelings as white people, I’d be afraid all the time, and maybe even ashamed.  
Now, what really gets my goat is that some the masters have got religion or something, and went and freed their slaves.  This is a very bad precedent which might give my slaves dangerous ideas.  Besides, I have to see these “free men of color”, and they don’t act right.  What’s worse, I don’t know how to act with them.  How do you talk to a slave who’s not a slave any more, that’s what I want to know.  Suppose they were all free, and I had to figure out a way to get along with them as equals.  That is sick and unnatural.  I will not be dragged down to the level of slaves who were intended by God to show me service, deference and respect. We need legislation that will invalidate all manumission, because I am just as entitled as any white man to the respect I’ve always enjoyed, and nobody is going take that away from me.