Psych-drugging as longest war tactic: the girls’ gulag

“Demonic Males” ( see post below) …

… invented psychiatry as used to marginalize women’s inherent dissonance with being the gender underclass and, more famously, to diagnose and drug Soviet dissidents from the USSR’s politics in gulags during that regime.  What I just wrote is a statement, a rhetorical summary of something that seems true to me.  Believing in a dissident’s or a woman’s “disability” as psychiatrically defined and then psych-drugged (when politically and sexually motivated) is therefore not for me.  Having said that, it’s because I trust female genius (and dislike what the man-made dominator system has done to the world) far too much to buy in to the predominant male theories of female mental dyfunction.  But then, I’m no M.D.; and I’ll blog more about psych-drugging another night.

Meanwhile, I’ve had what may be some better thoughts about my Sheila Jeffreys coverage and modified the She’s-my-Hero post which was prompted by a self-described feminist’s blog  which has a category for “Sheila Fu#$ing Jeffreys,” minus my redaction by symbols.   There’s no point in going back and forth on this in the divide-and-conquer game established by patriarchy.

Until I return to the topic of psych-drugging, here’s a book cover from a M.D. (Dr. Peter Breggin), another man who’s no fan of the gulag. Toxic Psychiatry

“Demonic Males”: Science text by a Harvard man about males and male-dominator violence

Demonic Males:  Does the title say it all?  (Not demonic as in woo-woo religion but demonically bad behavior from an anthropological and zoological standpoint of research by top-level scientific male minds.)  In a male-violent world like ours  … … could the answer to surviving and thriving  be as simple as to put women in charge?    More from Harvard  on the subject:  http://www.harvardmag.com/jf97/right.chimp.html.  But seriously, in a world like ours, how is putting women in charge going  to happen when the big-3 man-God religions which subordinate womankind have now been invoked by President Obama as a field of unification among men worldwide from Christian, Jewish and Islamic cultures? For days I made cell-phone calls for the guy using my laptop in his e-campaign to win swing states, and my daughter still holds on to the hope —  but I’m starting to wonder if the girls are once again going to be sold out by the big boys’ club.  Click to the prior post about the problem in the category, “President Obama.” As to Demonic Males in general as a global gender group, it is my job on this blog to say more, so after reading the book it’s my commentary that:  (1)  the s/he hyena analysis of Demonic Males seemed far-fetched toward a male author’s need to implicate the females of some species in evolutionary violence, and (2) the analysis of buddy-bonded bands of bisexual female bonobos seemed skewed to say less about primate sisterhood than an anthropomorphized sort of soft-core primate-porn. A University of Oxford zoologist reviewed Demonic Males (with a Harvard anthropologist its lead author) this way for the New York Times:  Going Ape – The New York Times

“Artist Unknown”

As mothers to the creative in the collective, too many women have been “artist unknown” due to male erasure of womankind’s genius.   This post honors the unheralded art women make of their lives, bringing humanity out of denial against unspeakable (yet image-visible) odds.   To Professor Ann Taylor Allen I credit the elucidation in her scholarly article available online about  feminist and matri-focused scholarship:   ANN TAYLOR ALLEN | Feminism, Social Science, and the Meanings of …

How often do you see any image today so clearly evocative of womankind’s collective spiritual, mental and bodily power as the one that follows from an earlier era’s  hope that winning the vote might end male dominance systems of politics:

“Artist unknown”

Elephants (Neither Whores Nor Submissives)

Elephants, we now know, are naturally an intelligent and matri-focused species of mother-and-grandmother-led clans who honor kinship ties, value elder males as role models for young males, and have  resonant emotions.   (By man’s increasing,  unwelcome and unnatural intrusions into their lives, some elephants are beginning to act out in violence, in parallels to gang violence and shooting deaths by human beings who are still mainly men with some women starting to victimize first instead of being a victim.)

When traumatized by man’s dominance and violence,  an elephant’s  body memories can combine as physical and psychological forces leading to that elephant’s death.  Dawn Adrian Adams, Ph.D., describes this scientific reality on behalf of elephants at What the Elephant Never Forgot.

What nobody seems to have asked is whether elephants trained in captivity can learn to revel in their “inner submissive” as the pathway to a subordinated peace in a male-dominant and violent world as some women can.

With the emotional similarities researchers are finding between elephant beings and human beings, as the conscious beings who have words (and blogs) we ought no longer let the question of women’s psychological entrainment to subordination be hidden — behind violent male-dominant cultures that spawned the mainstream man-made male-God religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) and the man-made political  philosophies (Hinduism, Buddhism, Atheism, Socialism, Communism, Capitalism) that by their action and symbolism elevate  men over other conscious life forms — whether it’s elephants or women whose lives are being diminished.

[Compare  photo of elephants with photo of woman’s body from the website of a truly creepy website pitched to wives of the submissive type, and I’m not going to link to the site because it is so very sick — but if this titillates you in even the slightest degree then consider how damaged you have been by the longest war and its eroticization of dominance and submission, something we and not elephants have words for, something particularly the women among human beings and elephants suffer and die for, in the longest war.

Some women in some parts of the world keep bravely taking action.  The women (and some men) who are enlightened elephant researchers are bravely taking their stand for TRANS-SPECIES

CONSCIOUSNESS  against man-made dominance — and some women take up the cause for other women.  For example:

In speaking against Islamic religion’s women-only veil (headgear symbolic of male dominance of women) and physically violent male Islamic means to keep women in line with what men want —  so she could speak for giving women a better option of respect and personhood in their own right — Fadela Amara founded “Ni putes ni soumises” (Neither Whores Nor Submissives). This is also the title of her book which won the “Prix du Livre Politique” of the French national assembly.

Where Islamic culture reigns (as in French immigrant neighborhoods), a male punishment against girls who rebel is the so-called “tournante” – gang rape. Samira Bellil was the first to describe this phenomena in her book Dans l’enfer des tournantes (translated, in gang-rape hell).  Three male gangs had raped Bellil  before she found the courage — after caring treatment perhaps analogous to what Dawn Adrian Adams, Ph.D. might provide an elephant —  to tell her story. Samira Bellil participated in “Ni putes ni soumises” until she died at age 31 of stomach cancer.  (Here her obituary from the Guardian–UK.)

Considering the proximity of her stomach to the bodily site of three gang rapes by men against this young woman, would we connect the physical  trauma as PTSD to the physical sickness and then her death?  If she were an elephant, we would.

The world of CoverGirl Ellen’s Ex

Check the billboard in the “normal” landscape, and ask yourself:  Whose  faces, whose bodies are normalized as the subordinated class to be what “gentlemen”  want?  Do you ever see billboard images of male faces in make-up, men in come-hither  poses for sex clubs, even so much as silhouettes of a nude male body in broadcast on the public-street space where you run errands?  Talk about the insanity of normality.

Today’s social commentary against People magazine’s backdrop:  “When they were together, [Anne] Heche and [Ellen] DeGeneres were considered the country’s most prominent lesbian couple.  [Jude’s commentary:  The Heche-DeGeneres relationship ended, triggered in part by Heche’s life to that point dealing with what male-dominant society labeled as mental illness following Heche’s reports of sexual abuse and deception at the hands of her father. Anne’s father, Donald Heche, was a choir director in a Baptist church who frequented gay bars at night. Heche found out about her father’s double life when he was dying of AIDS and she was only 12 years old.]

Heche described herself as “insane,” according to ABCNEWS.com. [Jude’s commentary:  Thus the socially high-profile Heche, by personal life history programmed with the man-God religion of Baptist He, Him and hymn which predisposes women to accept “the word” of all male authority figures, accepted the male label “insane” as directed at herself personally, instead of at society in general.  She bought into the book of male-dominant psychiatry and male-dominant insanity legalism as if only an individual matter.  Heche described her efforts to structure an alternative reality in a publicized interview, efforts that to a caring person would seem creative under her cultural and social circumstances.]

“[Heche] believed she was two people. One was Anne Heche, The other was Celestia, who was from another planet and spoke in a different language directly with God.” [Jude dude commentary: Cultural He, Him and hymn conditioning made it mentally inconceivable for Heche to rely upon Goddess (as a mental construct of iconic female-form liberator from the man-God made in man’s image as her higher power).  She could not conceive of a Goddess/female liberator for herself even in her rather creative “insane” fantasy life which temporarily allowed her to escape the dissonance of hateful hypocrisy from a father who outwardly normalized “our Father” as a Baptist choir director while secretly having one-night stands with gay men, his double life divulged to Heche only when he died of AIDS before his daughter was a teen-ager.]  [Original source, Stephen Silverman, People magazine, 2001; social commentary by Jude]

Small wonder I propose celibacy for all men, everywhere, until dominance, war and duplicity cease and desist.

CoverGirls & Unpacking Queer Politics: the female tokenized underclass as usual

The  multi-plex previews include an ad by out and family-friendly lesbian entertainer Ellen DeGeneres pimping for a major cosmetics company.  One  online report includes the following images about the sexualized commodity politics of feminizing the faces and bodies of women:

Photo’s tag line:  “Ellen-a CoverGirl spokesmodel?! It’s true, snitching spies told the New York Post on Tuesday.

The 50-year-old Emmy-winning talk show host has inked a deal to appear as the face of CoverGirl makeup in a forthcoming ad campaign, according to a new report. Ellen is “shooting the campaign this week,” an insider says. “She must have gotten at least $1 million for it.” [Online screen continued the hawt-ness with the following]

“

Everywhere you go online, scantily clad and make-up wearing women are “hawt” and “hottest,” and other women wanting desperately to be men also apparently “hawt” in the unequal roles and rules of man’s war against womankind.  Last month in NYC somebody I knew in LA wowed crowds with her ability as a drag king to  perform “gendered” as a man:

Photo’s tag line:  “World-renowned gender illusionist Dred [who still went by Mildred when I knew her (Jude’s note)] brought crowds to their feet last week after her performance in Wow Cafe’s Hypergender Burlesque show in NYC.”

One sad part is that the global culture’s entertainment over-focus on maleness as higher-caste status (and the subordinate classism of  feminization) has resulted in a bit of performing glory for a few while oppression continues against so many more women.

To excerpt again from  University of Melbourne’s professor Sheila Jeffreys (and author of Unpacking Queer Politics:  A Lesbian Feminist Perspective among her other great books on the global politics of sexuality), as social commentary:

FTM Transsexualism and Grief, By Sheila Jeffreys

In “Pornography and Grief” Andrea Dworkin writes very powerfully about the impact upon her of having to look at so much pornography in order to write about it. The horror of the pain, destruction, and just pure run of the mill hatred towards women inspired grief in her (Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, 1988). I have looked at the websites aimed at and created by female-to-male transsexuals (now fashionably called transgenders). I have experienced considerable distress from witnessing the destruction of female body parts, the pain, the blood and cutting up that is being visited presently on women who, often by their own admission, would, a few years previously, have considered themselves simply lesbians but are now ‘transitioning’ (to use the jargon). … My response [to ask why] is very different from that of most queer theorists, liberal public policymakers and lawyers who are busily working out how to `respect’ or `celebrate’ the choice and agency of transsexuals by changing laws and policies.

… Loree Cook-Daniels found FTM [female-to-male] transsexualism to be surprisingly common in her circle of lesbian friends in the US once she started asking around in response to her partner’s decision to become a ‘transman.’ … FTM transsexualism destroys the lesbianism not just of the woman who ‘transitions’ but that of her female partner too. Sadly, Cook-Daniels’ FTM partner committed suicide in 2000.

…I understand transitioning to become `gay men’ to illustrate the almost total dominance of gay male culture and gay male versions of masculinity within ‘queer’ communities. In Drag King shows, now sweeping Australia as they have the US and the UK, lesbians tend to dress up specifically as masculine gay men and seek to outdo each other in the imitation.

…`Butch’ lesbians who choose to be gay men do not have functioning penises, phalloplasties are very expensive, enormously painful and do not erect, thus they become `bottoms’ in gay male sexual practice.

This contemporary epidemic or cult of female-to-male transsexualism needs to be placed within its historical and political context in the oppression of lesbians. The vast majority of the women who ‘transition’ have identified as lesbians, or at least lived within the lesbian community and conducted relationships with lesbians. The attribution of masculinity to lesbians historically has formed a major tool of control. Lesbian feminists in the 1970s developed a sophisticated critique of the ways in which masculine scholarship and culture sought to disparage or disappear lesbians by portraying them as masculine or really wanting to be men. Many lesbians in the 1980s/90s rejected the understandings of feminism and developed fashionable sadomasochism and butch/femme roleplaying out of which the phenomenon of FTM transsexualism has arisen.

The reasons given by lesbians for their decisions to ‘transition’ in books such as Holly Devor’s FIM. Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (1999) in Loren Cameron’s Body Alchemy (1996) and the collection Sissies and Tomboys (Rottnek (ed) 1999) derive quite clearly from their oppression as lesbians and as women [Jude’s note:  when they’re not pretty-privileged, family-friendly, exceptionally funny, cosmetics-wearing, lucky-in-love-and-money lesbians like Ellen DeGeneres] … Manhood is attractive because it represents higher social status and an individual escape from the oppression of lesbians and women without any social change. But manhood is a social construction which requires the continued creation of femininity and the oppression of the vast majority of women to have any meaning.

So FTM transsexualism is a problem for all women who want to change the power relations of male dominance rather than engage in surgical social climbing. But it is most spectacularly a problem for lesbians because it is lesbians who are suffering the agony and the expense. … We must challenge those forms of self-harm which are presently being promoted as progressive and liberating such as butch/femme roleplaying, sadomasochistic self-mutilation and the instruments, drugs and surgeries now being used to enable lesbians to ‘transition.’ Though there has tended to be an attitude of liberal tolerance towards these practices on the part of many lesbians, which has allowed them to flourish, there has come a time when the very serious consequences of what have never really been ‘playful’ behaviours needs to be recognised. …” Source of Sheila Jeffreys quoted words from Rain and Thunder Summer Solstice 2002; an extended version of this piece forms one chapter of her book, Unpacking Queer Politics: A lesbian feminist perspective; an earlier version of this piece was published in Lesbian Network in Australia, April 2001.

It’s not playful, it’s not funny, it’s not okay for the longest war continually to man-ipulate womankind.

The least funny part may be how easily so-called “free will” — promoted as an ego construct and source of false pride by self-serving man-made religious theory long before the era of mass-media mental programming — can be co-opted by cosmetics payola and drag-king approval.

Unsung Heroes

This past week while folks  fretted about David Carradine’s body outside the tuxified Super-Suit, and mass media pushed  Obama’s glorification of uniformed men from World War II,  these heroes  remain in the background:

(1) The estimated millions of women (more women than men) who died under  top-male leadership, with greater atrocities practiced upon women experimentally, in World War II’s concentration camps.  Why did  more women die?  For one heroic thing, women were unwilling to flee the Nazis because somebody (the unsung heroic women) needed to stay and take care of elderly relatives and children.  Jewish women were also leaders in movements for the leadership and equality of the next generation of young women.  See, e.g., Bernard Cook, Women and war: a historical encyclopedia from antiquity to the present – Google Books Result

Post-torture mass graves, tragic and not so pretty, but here’s a small public-domain image:

(2) Two American journalists (Euna Lee and Laura Ling, women who are LA residents) captured  while near the China-North Korean border reporting on Korean women being trafficked (abducted and held prisoner as sex slaves) by men.    The cameraman and the local guide escaped.

The women as prisoners have now been sentenced by North Korea’s top-male government to 12 years of punishing hard labor.  When you see cropped photos about South Korean men  protesting for the release of these two women, the bigger picture is one group of men (South Korean) vying for power with another group of men (North Korean, headed by Kim Jung II):

Baby Blue, Powder Blue, What’s a Woman to Wear …

AP – Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor meets with Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., in his hideaway office  …

Without womankind as a one-down global gender caste to the male Suits (see the wall pictures and Sen. Specter), men cannot perpetuate the hypocrisy of one-up leadership and control of womankind.  Despite intensely personal criticism of Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor,   nobody seems to know where she really stands on a woman’s right to abortion.  (As graffiti used to show, before Roe v. Wade:   “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”) In this skirmish of the longest war, at  least there is a woman friend who tells the truth about female genius:   Rep. Nydia M. Velazquez, D-N.Y., a friend of Sotomayor: “She has the responsibility as a judge to question and to challenge. If it’s a man, that is `tough’ — it’s OK — if it’s a woman then somehow she is a bully or has a bad tamper,” Velazquez said.

What’s a Super-Suit’s gal to do …

You  can see before and after photos of  greasy and not-so-greasy gams  when  Gwyneth Paltrow appeared on the Tonight Show (gams rhymes with hams, and we all know where hams come from):

Gwyneth’s Greasy Gams – Goddess: celebrity moms – omg! on Yahoo

It’s not sick (as in culturally creepy) enough that any culturally notable “she” like Paltrow is expected to appear in American public culture with more touchable body on view than men typically need to show.  The 180 degrees from sick that’s still sick (i.e.,  culturally creepy) in patriarchal Islamic culture would literally cover up her thinking-instrument head and shroud her body as if dead from any contact with the natural world.

But I’m American and posting this post as a post-Christian not a Muslim (thank Goddess to disdain the multi-culti nonsense that refuses to call misogyny the woman-hating it is), so check out today’s online hysterics about  Gwyneth Paltrow’s legs.  The “greasy gams,” not the prodigious talent.  In context of  last season’s blockbuster movies, Oscar-winner Paltrow  played an iconic feminine subordinate gal putting her own life at risk to support a Super-Suit Iron Man’s exploits.  (She wore perfectly a slinky backless dress bought by her boss the Super-Suit.  She deadpanned the weak lines of script for her underwritten character with outrageous humor.  She acted heroically in high heels.)

Today’s online Gwyneth buzz irreverently links the hubbub about Paltrow’s gams  to  Goddess  in the same week  man-made religion’s big-three God (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) was front and center the Obama news as if that God has ever been about peace instead of piece.

Today’s trivialization of Goddess and woman occurs in context of the  beautiful Gwyneth (whose extraordinary good looks few could ever hope to achieve), who is also an actor of genius,  a mother and otherwise gifted.  If Paltrow is not a woman to be respected instead of trivialized —  then any normal woman might wonder, beneath being the “good sport” she’s constantly being asked to be despite man’s trivialization of her own life and womankind in general — who is?

If you doubt there’s a longest war …

Collectively the images here show the longest war, so if you have any doubt, go to prior month’s archives including a click to “older entries.”  Also check out the iconic super-male Hugh Jackman.  He’s super-hawt in his all-inclusive sexuality for normalizing focus on the physical body yet, being male, he usually wears a tux or power suit to cover all but his head and hands (thinking and take-action instruments) when seen in public.  The super-suit preserves the power image of the  overlord icon.

Not that Hugh Jackman is necessarily conscious of the social impact while he’s in the limelight raking in money.  But the rest of us need to ask how our minds are being manipulated in the name of others making a buck.

Ask not how hawt the he-man (any him, Him, He or hymn), but ask how to protect yourself because forewarned is forearmed.    What you don’t know can hurt you in the longest war.  Today’s “Scoop” for a male-dominant icon in summer 2009 theaters as  Wolverine —   Hugh Jackman  wielding the tarot card of “Death” while speaking down to a rapt, silent  young woman:

Other male-dominant images of media icons old and new shaping popular culture from  May 2009 older entries (prior posts):

“‘Bikini Girl’ praises, then rips into Kara.“