Erotic Fighting or, the Untold Currents (eros) that Course ‘Neath Calm Exteriors (fighting)

In this audio-visually erratic video, one BRIENNE and one REBECCA fight, love and become better on account of the intermingling of love and its seeming opposite. Witness the multifarious emotionality. 

Of note: Overdetermined effects, polysemous fighting, eros everywhere.

Fear —> stereotypes —> reality

This is so fascinating. Stereotypes, rather than reflecting reality, create reality.

“The perceived sexuality of Filipina women in Lebanon is double sided: on the one hand, the Filipina live-in maid is seen as an asexual binit (girl) who must be protected in order to guard the family honor; on the other hand, she is seen as a threatening sharmuta (whore). The binit can become a sharmuta at any moment and bring chaos to the home if the madame’s control over the live-in Filipina maid is lessened and the latter gets corrupted by the outside world. For this reason, many Lebanese madames are reluctant to let Filipina maids outside of the home alone. In many cases, a domestic worker’s sexual desires are assumed to be unnatural and inappropriate. The negative stereotype associated with Filipina women’s sexuality are spread through warnings and stories told by recruitment agencies, and rumors. Filipina women, compared to their Ethiopian and Sri Lankan counterparts, are seen as fairer, sexually more attractive, and promiscuous. These images of Filipina women legislate employers’ tight control of their bodies and persons. For Filipina women, their assumed sexual promiscuity and attractiveness sometimes give them opportunities for exploring and experimenting with their own sexuality. For those who are allowed  a day-off outside the house or who freelance illegally, some might start dressing and acting in a sexually assertive manner. They might go clubbing, have much younger boyfriends, or have multiple sexual partners. Among Filipina women, there is both acceptance and ambivalence toward their sexual conduct Some resent them for perpetuating the bad reputation that Filipina women have acquired in Lebanon. Ironically, then, while negative sexual stereotypes might legitimate control over Filipina women in Lebanon, these same stereotypes might also permit these women to exercise more choice in how they express their sexuality.”

Lee, Hayeon. (2011). “The public and hidden sexualities of Filipina women in Lebanon.” Introducing the New Sexuality Studies, Second edition.

What a universally transferable tragedy! Not to diminish the unique circumstances of specific people in a specific place, but by golly, the constant Otherizing, scapegoating and sensationalizing of people into GODS! and DEVILS! (virgins and whores)(vomit, so much vomit I expel at the diametric stereotypes that prove their vacuity!) If one is posited as being both GOOD (binit) and BAD (sharmuta), the only logical conclusion is that one is NEITHER; or rather: BOTH, or rather: a full human person who isn’t one stereotyped fantasy/slander or the other. When will the people of the world stop blaming other people for failing to fulfill their OWN fantasies of perfection of ruin, etc.? What if we were only responsible for ourselves?

Man o man…

Fear creates stereotypes, not the other way around e.g. “I fear that I am sexual so NO! It’s OTHER PEOPLE who are sexual, not me! THESE PEOPLE, this group, women, gays, what have you are inherently, “naturally,” biologically sexual (as if that’s a bad thing) whereas I am PURE OF HEART and GOOD OF SPIRIT/SOUL/whatever. I am normal. Others are perverse.” Stereotypes, in turn, create “reality” (i.e. reality, as the internalization of prejudices comes to seem fixed and immutable, “the way it is.”). Fear of the Self (in the Other) is the fuel that propels these stereotypes: Oppressing the other with fantasies that result from divesting yourself of responsibility.

What’s that stuff Butler says about this? We learn to be the people we’re told we are? Before we have a chance to be ourselves, who we could have been or could still be, we become caricatures that people make of us e.g. sexy or stupid, irresponsible or gloriously innocent (bleccchhhh) Filipina maids who must be sacrificed as examples of sexual depravity or celebrated as signs of independent womanhood or static object lessons in my WordPress diatribe against hypocrisy (sorry)(The Enemy is Us!).

If only dudes were taught that it was a cool thing (it is! how could it not be?) to be responsible for one’s own feelings and desires and to actively work against patriarchal hypocrisy that superficially benefits men but ultimately tramples all peoples’ ability to be decent and ethical!, if only men weren’t blindly posited as dangerous but infallible and women weren’t posited as impossibles opposites of clean or dirty, if all women weren’t responsible for whatever should befall them and all men weren’t taught that cruelty, impunity, rape & pillage were the ways of “Manhood,” then maybe we could all come into our sexual owns without being so traumatized and humiliated by this cruel, weird world.

Oh yeah, I also think all this pressure on women to be everything would be severely and wonderfully reduced if Masculinity weren’t defined as rigidly reactionary, powerful but impotent in that men are put forth as sexually desirous subjects requiring objects to fulfill them. Rather, if men were associated with bodies and sex in the way women have always been encouraged, required and then punished for being!, I think we’d all be more in touch with our own external “sexiness”/internal sexuality and wouldn’t have to mandate that OTHER people act out what we feel we are not permitted to feel and do what we are not allowed to do, etc. Which is to say: “Gender-bending” which is to say: Everyone being everyone. Because: come on. Who wants to always be the master man or female slave? It’s much more fun/realistic to be both.

Here’s a Facebook meme of my sorrow:

Editorial Board of One

Here’s why YOU should accept my scientific assertions as IMMUTABLE context-devoid, out-of-history, objectivity-aspirational FACT!

Rebecca Katherine Hirsch, M.Everything, is a medical entertainer. Her interests are legion. She received her Mark of Good Faith from her Mom (1985) and Dad (date unknown) in Boston, MA. She is also the director of “Psychodynamics of Gender Mythology: an exegesis and a plea” (Minnesota, New York; 1990-2012). She is known worldwide for her 20-plus years of being alive and her -12 years of being dead. Her views have been expressed in hearsay, high school yearbook, online essays and chatter amongst trusted friends. She is a “kinky” self-editorialist and has been mocking what she loves and hates, because she loves and hates (instead of consciously or unconsciously projecting her loving hatred onto unsuspecting scapegoats) for nigh on 27 years. OK, fine, sometimes! she scapegoats. It is but a human failing; the most we can ask for is awareness and humility, yes? It doesn’t seem like such a hard idea for people to take (just a little, proportional) responsibility for themselves and yet wars, genocides, culturally-created belief systems based on ephemeral material conditions creating “natural” psychological beliefs that yet create material conditions that fluctuate with time, money, temperature, etc. (and the cycle stupidly continues on and on, without awareness of our own limitations which cause us to diminish the talents and worth of others which limits ourselves) blame women! blame “minorities!” blame all people and collections of people who aren’t ourselves BUT ONLY BARELY; we blame, taunt and kill people for what we fear in ourselves! Why must we keep on fucking shit up? She holds advanced degrees in many things, like: righteous outrage, all-encompassing ethical-intellectual exploration, hyperbole, patent, trademark & copyright matters. She feels strongly and has experienced stuff. Her work may be found RIGHT HERE. You’re reading it, fool!

THE END! forever! and eva! AMEN, brother-sisters

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Yes, Earthlings Traumatized Me Into Instant Veganism–or–Gender Parallels

 

Earthlings traumatized the shit out of me–as was its intention. I have heard Earthlings referred to as ‘The Vegan-Maker’ and it’s true. I have never desired animal flesh so little. Congratulations, Earthlings. You are the most swiftly effective piece of propaganda with which I have ever been inculcated. And I’m thankful. Now if only I could get those swirling phantasmagoric nightmare images of euthanized kitties and ripped-open foxes out of my head…

The innumerably gruesome and presumably quotidian depictions of factory farms, puppy mills, animal shelters and inside-out cut-up fox carcasses freaked me out so much I wanted to write about it, and draw some parallels with gender, as well as discuss how we as a species scapegoat designated Others. Let’s go!

Here’s my makeshift bullet points to be touched upon in who knows what order:

• Parallels: idealism as objectification
• Displacement and evaded (wish-fulfillment) responsibility
• Flexibility and inconstancy of “human nature”
• The Enemy is Us

Torn out of its skin, a bloody carcass with boggled eyes is still alive and dazedly squirms. Unwanted cats are mercifully euthanized in their caretakers’ arms while less lucky household pets are gassed in a tightly packed shed. And then there’s the oceans of bloody dolphins who died trying to rescue each other alongside the children who are our symbolic surrogates strolling by, socialized to the normalization of suffering; it’s “human nature” to kill, it’s a “dog eat dog” world, women are for making babies, homosexuals are godless monster-demons….

Yeah. I read somewhere that we live in one of the few epochs in human history that hasn’t had close acquaintance with mass death. I find this movie so valuable because it brings us closer to what seems like an honest place in terms of the acknowledgement of death and acknowledgment of our own… death-dealing, our own complicity. After watching this movie, I have to consider my decision to sanction the slaughter of animals by eating meat since eating meat is a choice and no more “natural” than any other choice whose long history is mistaken for biology or “nature.” Having this choice is a HEAVY AND UNPLEASANT BURDEN which is why, if we know we have this kind of responsibility, we generally avoid it but the good part about having this choice is that with the freedom of information comes the opportunity for ethicality. Whatever one’s decision (and veganism is not The Answer, it’s just one answer of many) at least one now knows one’s choice is a choice based on facts and actuality, not shrouded mystery and euphemisms about “where meat comes from” and how animals are treated.

So! This movie depicts the constant violence that occurs out of consciousness, hidden behind anodyne food advertisements that depersonalize animals into food and not the tied up and tortured baby cows who suffer so we can eat veal. CRAP! I can’t believe I’m becoming that self-righteous person pontificating about the maltreatment of animals! I never thought it would happen to me! But here I am (the enemy is us)(and them)(and us)…

This is the most violent movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of Holocaust documentaries. And yet I think it so ethically necessary to watch this movie because it doesn’t condescend or stylize or minimize the intense unrelenting mass murder that is occurring when creatures that are smaller and weaker than us are needlessly and wrongly killed just so we can be kept ignorant enough to eat them without compunctions…

So I’m gonna try this vegan thing. Though I am no purist. I don’t expect people to radically change their lives as weirdly instantaneously as I seem to (possibly) be, but whatever choices people make about their food and by association, their involvement in the wold of ethics! and compromise! we should AT LEAST all be made aware of where our food comes from. I’ve been told plenty of factoids about ‘inhumane factory farm conditions’ but the actual visuals, gore and whinnying, screeching sounds, faces and bodies of pain are very… reifying.

So gender!

Yeah, here’s my ungainly segue: In this movie, it is relayed that many male pet owners decline to neuter and spay their pets because it is “emasculating.” What fascinating, eerie and obvious parallels between the disinclination toward neutering one’s pets and the prohibition of birth control and abortion rights. In the human world, many men have historically limited women’s access to birth control and felt threatened (one might even say “emasculated”) by women’s ability to produce life.

MASCULINITY, O masculinity! (and by association: FEMININITY, O femininity!) Gender is such a tragically stupid-making enforced charade that seeps into our bones and makes us feel “threatened” by everything that calls into question the fakeness of the fakery! No one is all strong and stoic (i.e. “masculine)! No one is all nurturing and weak (i.e. “feminine”) Enough already! This totally artificial concept ruins lives and the lives of the poor animals (in this instance) caught up in the net of threatened and vulnerable half-people denied full access to all things strong, weak, stoic and nurturing!

So let’s say these pet owners like the IDEA that their pets/women can produce life. What a fun hypothetical idea, right? But how do we value life? Is life always a “gift?” Is it super special and magical if you don’t have adequate food, shelter, love and physical/psychological sustenance?

No. No, it is not. Without appropriate resources/conditions, life can be hell. You do not have the right to ENFORCE HELL on anyone and call it the magical gift of life.

My Gender Studies teacher once inquired of her adulatory class, what would it mean if we lived in a world where abortion was unnecessary? It’s the fantasy of a world where all children are wanted, the fantasy of a world where we are always loving and good. Where we are the heroes of our own stories.

Romanticism is a funny thing. These fantasies (people/animals are good) lead to restrictions (long live the constant procreation of people/animals!) set on enforcing the fantasy which lead to unwanted children and animals who–in the case of animals–get euthanized in shelters (if they’re lucky) and mass gassed and clubbed behind sheds and captured on secret cameras (… as seen in Earthlings) if they’re not.

In the case of humans, generally WOMEN get blamed for interfering with the fantasy. If men have big-hearted fantasies of a one-note loving universe, women fuck it up by being faulted and real, people who aren’t ready to have children or who have no money to support children or no access to birth control or they were raped or they don’t want to be parents or don’t want to be parents now or THERE ARE AS MANY REASONS AS THERE ARE PEOPLE, LET PEOPLE LIVE THEIR OWN LIVES, etc, etc.

Anti-choice dudes (and their sexism-internalizing minions), if you want to be LOVING, be loving. If you want to do over your bad childhood by creating a new childhood for a new child who will theoretically be happier than you were, then raise that child. DO NOT SADDLE YOUR FANTASIES ONTO REAL HUMAN BEINGS. But it’s complicated. Because this FEELING (scapegoating and responsibility-divesting) is universal. The issue isn’t to deny this universal desire to burden someone else with the work you want done but don’t want to do. The issue is to be aware of it! Be aware of your guilt! Be aware WE ARE ALL THE ENEMY. I mention men here because there are more male examples of violent impositions and scapegoating of less-powerful parties but this is only because men are assigned more power. If women had that power and equal amounts of ignorance, women would be that bad too. We are all equally culpable, some of us just have more opportunities to be obviously evil than others. But we all have it in us. And we all have the ability to DO BETTER.

So in sum: Idealism can be dangerously inhumane. The IDEAL of love ends up creating evil. By believing or wishing that we live in a magical land of love without responsibility (or that one’s faultlessly potent “masculinity” has the power to create that world, no work necessary), owners refuse to spay and neuter their pets. This creates incredibly hard lives for the creatures the owners think they are “saving” and begs the question: how do we value life? Is life “precious” if you don’t have enough to eat? Is it precious if you’re taken to a pound, tortured and ripped open while still alive? If life a “gift” if your parents are unable and unprepared to care for you? Life cannot be embarked ON A WISH that it be great and loving and full of rainbows without doing the WORK to make it so. Just because you love animals doesn’t mean you have the right to smother, suffocate and kill them with your “love.” Just because you wish your parents loved you and unconsciously wish to right the wrongs of your forebears by forcing women to bear and love the child you wish you’d been doesn’t mean you have the right to force separate autonomous creatures to live out your irresponsible fantasy for you. You want to live in a loving world? Be the change you want to see!! Volunteer, join a thing but don’t shove your idealism onto the real lives of people who are not you, who do not exist to fulfill your dreams. You are not involved. It is not your place. Your presence makes things worse.

Any IDEAL creates a kind of danger. Women are idealized as deities and then denigrated as demons! Any IDEAL is an extreme. We are NONE OF US all good or all bad. The OBJECTIFICATION of idealism disallows people/animals to be seen and treated as people/animals but like reflected fantasies of those viewing them. We are autonomous. We do not know each other. We do not even know ourselves (the unconscious!). But that’s OK! The lack of clear answers necessitates conversation and self-inquiry! The fairy-tale ideal of all-conquering love excuses responsibility and work. Love is not based on worship, assumptions or self-denial.

I am reminded of the anxiety of powerlessness (which afflicts me daily!) that can trigger a flight from responsibility and a cruel, totally normal conscious or unconscious desire to foist responsibility onto other parties. It happens! We’re cruel and unusual! THAT’S OK. If we are aware of our ability to be imperfect, we can change! If we believe ourselves faultless, we’re fucked. Without the ability/awareness to do something, the hard work is foisted onto designated Others. Others are scapegoats: non-men, non-whites, non-gender-conforming, non-heterosexual… or animals.

So, there are men who feel emasculated by neutering their animals; there are men who feel emasculated if “their” women exert control over their fertility/lives, etc. This fear of “emasculation” is an interesting one, as if “masculinity” (which doesn’t exist, which can be discarded, adorned, performed, deeply felt, etc.) can be LOST. If you fear losing your maleness, you probably fear women since women are the opposite of men in this bipolar Manichaean view of the world. If maleness is strong but easily vulnerable to attack and femaleness is weak, pathetic but can cause men to lose their maleness, then maleness is noble and blustery emptiness and femaleness is pathetic realness. What a horrible view of the world, this “battle of the sexes” idea that pathetic women are out to get vulnerable men! No wonder someone who subscribes to this idea wants to believe in a fantasy of love with conquest, a perfect love. This dog/cat/woman will create new life and it will be loved. I will be loved. There will be love. It will be better…

If you want to be loving, be loving. Don’t fuck with anyone else. Women must control their own fertility in the same way we all control our own food intake by not being force-fed. The fantasy of loving life without actualizing it or doing the work required is evil. It creates needless hardship and death.

Next Topic:

“As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” A good quote by Tolstoy. Obviously, there are infinite parallels between humans and animals. If you treat one group awfully, that doesn’t just switch off when you interact with another group. It’s all connected. I don’t call that ‘karma’; if something happens to me, it influences me and that influences my life and the people in it. Fact.

Anyone can commit good or evil acts, we are all malleable, all potentially guilty. I’ve many times disregarded the impact of suffering in the haze of “It’s human nature” and/or “this is how the world works” static defeatism that pretends to inevitability. We are constantly changing our ideas of the normal. There is no “normal,” only ‘socially acceptable.’ It is said in this film: If we all had to kill our own meat, we’d all be vegetarians; likewise, if we were all women–who said this?–abortion would be a sacrament which doesn’t mean there Would Be No Love, it just means children would be brought into the world when they were wanted and their parents were prepared. It is CRUEL to bring children or animals into the world without resources; a gift becomes a punishment if forced.

Also of interest:

About animals used for entertainment, the movie says: “We are intrigued by exotic things.” But of course. Except no one is exotic to themselves; exoticism requires a fetishistic spectator and lack of relativity.

From Teju Cole’s Open City: “Which Western publisher wants a Moroccan or Indian writer who isn’t into oriental fantasy; or who doesn’t satisfy the longing for fantasy?”  Fetishizing the Other assumes the Other exists to provide a foil for you, the Normal, you who are the Everyperson unlike the “exotic” Other (a mystical goddess-woman, an unknowable outlander from ANOTHER CULTURE OMG!). This reminds me of the concept of “witnessing” in my ma’s psychoanalytic stuff. “Witnessing” is the humble, responsible understanding that while you cannot ever know what another person feels because you’re not them, you can still be kind and you can empathize. Otherizing, in social justice-speak is a kind of opposite of this: the self-centered assumption that other people are unknowable and hence not really people in their own right; they merely exist to highlight you. The Other is a dumb animal that doesn’t matter or someone or something that satisfies the longing for fantasy without responsibility. For as long as we objectify Others in the unconscious hope that they will somehow complete or complement or provide contrast to us we will forever be engaging in SPLITTING ourselves, thinking in all-or-nothing terms, not seeing the basic connectedness between all beings (while also being aware that we cannot know/read another).

Penultimate thought:

Joaquin Phoenix’s calm/bombastic voiceover pleads for the welfare of animals in saying: “These are benign and innocent beings and they deserve better.” I am in disagreement with this assessment. We shouldn’t value things because they’re benign or “innocent.” We should value people and animals BECAUSE THEY’RE BAD, because we’re all bad, because good and bad are interchangeable and we’re complicated. If we don’t value ourselves we can’t possibly expect to value others. We must allow for the bad, accept the bad and by not denying or sanitizing the bad… ONLY THEN do we have the tools–the honest awareness of our culpability–to be good. Goodness is WORK, it isn’t any more natural than badness and it isn’t the sole province of ‘young girls’ or whatever. You like the idea of being untouched and innocent of experience? Great. Be an idiot but don’t force idiocy onto women. You want all creatures to be loved? Great. Love your children/animals–but in order to do so, get to know your own darned self. Think “love” is important? Don’t kill animals.

And the final thought…

Lotta talk about LOVE in this diatribe here I’m writing. I don’t usually roll this way: Throwing around the word “love” makes me sick but then again I just watched multitudinous animals die gruesome deaths so I’m coming around to seeing the potential of the word love to denote actual kindness as opposed to facetious bribes and hurtful insincerity! And I finally see the merit behind that old chestnut “love your enemy.” Why? Because THE ENEMY IS US. If we don’t love/put up with/get to know ourselves a little, we fuck up other people–and animals. Hurt people hurt people (see:  awesome Greenberg movie review).

We are complicated and contradictory. We are complicit. We are villains. When we accept this, I think, then we’re finally getting brave enough to start working on being good.

Sarah’s Exciting New Disembodied Parts Video (NSFW)

Eh, voila:

More from Barbarism coming soon.

“If you cuddle a baby, get a promotion…

“If you cuddle a baby, get a promotion, see billboard after billboard of near-naked women or hear a gender stereotype that places one sex at a higher status than the other–don’t expect your hormonal state to remain impervious. Our political, social and moral struggles become, quite literally, embodied, incorporated into our very physical being. And so when researchers look for sex differences in the brain, they are hunting a moving target. We are in continuous interaction with the social context.” -Cordelia Fine

Judy Dater

Social context of this near-naked woman: As I view this photo, thoughts form. What kind of thoughts? Hmm… my culturally-cultivated internalized misogyny is continually coming to the fore which makes it somewhat easier to do away with, since it’s conscious. That’s good… I am reminded of my newfangled psychological hopes for an unenforced “sexless” freedom and a whole new definition of sexuality that isn’t performative or prescriptive (and ‘sexuality’ in this fantasy of mine means what exactly? an act? an attitude? a continuous, contextual assortment of subjective desires, fears, stasis, etc.?); “sexuality as a way of talking about freedom” (or at least not grounds for belittlement, censure, execution, displacement of fear onto scapegoats who are just hanging out, smoking on wicker chairs..).

“Slut”

“Sluts are a figment of the patriarchal imagination and in that imagination they are not only sexually active women, they are also thinking, working, productive women who strive to be the best they can be.” –Nicole Ouimette

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‘Slut’ is a catchall idea that only nominally attacks any woman for any “sexual” behavior. In reality, it serves as a culturally fraught check against any female agency–from independent thinking to interest in controlling one’s own body–in a society where privilege is bestowed on men precisely because it is not bestowed on women. Male power rests on female powerlessness. (to clarify.. men, women, anyone, can be powerful, but ethical power is contrary to the enforced powerlessness of others. That is, ‘real’ power doesn’t require victims). In our anal-retentively dualistic world that unrealistically demarcates mind and body, where sexuality and other forms of expressing desire, love, energy, etc. is degraded and perverted, the possibilities, multiple meanings and personal idiosyncrasies of sex are discredited in place of humiliating ignorance combined with patriarchal privilege resulting in things like rape, sexual harassment and general shameful acting-out and lack of understanding. This resultant anger and hatred of the unnecessarily enforced “mystery” of sex finds a release in the scapegoating of one group and blamelessness of another–women and men, respectively.

Associating women with madness and casting men as normal and/or perfect Everymen, women and especially female sexuality become the targets for the dominant group’s frustration and a strategic (sometimes unconscious) way to avoid responsibility. Birth and menstruation are mysterious to people who don’t give birth or menstruate in eras that don’t understand bodies and this incredulous belief in female “mystery” then becomes codified in cultural lore. The female body is said to inspire “fear” and that fear inspires justification for oppressing women and pathologizing them as sick if they are mentally or physically active (since desire is the opposite of intelligence in this essentialistic, dualistic world, women stay down if they lose their ability to be desirable–their only allowance–by utilizing their intelligence).

The accumulated mythology and manipulation surrounding the idea of women makes women the problem, the solution, the target–but in all capacities, the focus; whereas men swaddle themselves in the cloak of normalcy. Women are in all ways abnormal, either benevolent goddesses or reprehensible witches. Men are normal, women are the problem. Women “inspire” men to act poorly; men are without blame. And this utterly unfounded prejudice against seeing women as people and men as responsible for themselves makes its way down the ages in history until the fantasy that ‘inherently bad women tempt bumbling, blameless men into doing bad things’ is legitimated. ‘In order for men to be good citizens, women must be good sub-citizen helpmeets–that is, sexually desirable but desireless robots–so that men have something to inspire and motivate them BUT NOT TOO DESIRABLE AND ONLY TO A SPECIFIC DEGREE THAT VARIES WITHOUT WARNING).’

Men aren’t held accountable; women get raped. Women are stripped of their agency and lifeblood; men of their accountability and integrity. In rape culture, all people are squashed down and made stupid. When sex is made taboo, sex is all we think about and the dominant group blames the less powerful groups for its humanity, twisting it into something cruel and weird and treating all things “sexual” as “sick” and all women as “sexual,” hence anything female and sexual is a “slut.” Anything that threatens the tenuously held make-believe of male sexless perfection and female sex-saturated sickness is “slutty.” Anything that forces anyone to see the unfair and unequal construction of sex is “slutty.”

Everyone who’s been manipulated by and internalized the tacit terms of patriarchy would do well by exploring their own feelings, their own desires, their own boundaries and fears, contradictions and sources of confusion. Only when we have the guts to look at ourselves and calm down our own defenses can we even begin to identify and challenge the social structures that enforce, enable and encourage sexual violence in place of sexual awareness. When we all have the self-confidence to trust in and listen to ourselves, we won’t saddle other, less powerful parties with our problems.

Solution! Sex education, basic psychological self-investigation and lack of reliance on media dictates will help in unraveling all the lies we’ve been taught, all the hateful repression and self-hatred we’ve built up and heaped onto others. ‘Slut’ is a symptom of a society that teaches hatred-as-a-solution-to-repression.