[Stirner123]

[rogue]

There is a difference between pandering to someone because of guilt (which I do not support) and listening to someone who is more informed on an issue like racism or sexism because they experience it, whereas you do not. Perspective is mightily important, and one thing that tends to rub oppressed folks the wrong way is the implication that a privileged person thinks they know better than them. I have a lot of awesome male friends that I would call feminists, and they don't just do whatever I say, but they do recognize that I have a much more intimate understanding of patriarchy than they do and listen and value my opinion.

[astra]

deleted.

[Stirner123]

[silverelf]

after a decade+ of sitting in rooms, in intersections, up trees, in warehouses, etc I feel pretty safe saying that sexism - actual interpersonal fairly overt sexism, not even the subtle ways in which we are all conditioned in oppression - is a much larger problem than men who feel they can't speak their truth without fear of being silenced in the name of some politically correct bogeyman.

but like I said before, conversations like these are generally better grounded in specifics, so if you have examples of where you felt some dogmatic groupthink was silencing legitimate concerns, let's talk about them

But being upset because of some graffiti on a wall that says "men rape" just ain't gonna cut it. And saying that women who speak truth about the violence daily inflicted on their bodies and/or make changes in the way they interact in certain situations are somehow "keeping themselves in a victim role" displays a complete lack of any sort of understanding of how prevalent rape/assault/abuse are within not only dominant culture, but within our own communities, and goes so far beyond any legitimate statement into sexist hogwash.

[Stirner123]

[silverelf]

i have no problems with culture - sub or otherwise. nor language, nor rituals, nor norms - not even with strong norms that result in heavy sanctions from the community if violated - because i don't see that any human society has ever existed without some degree of constraint that encouraged some types of behavior and discouraged other types. I think the belief that somehow there could be a society where every individual is a complete person unto herself experiencing Freedom from any sort of group identity is delusional.

But I'm not sure what that all has to do with this topic - is your problem the way that supposedly anti-sexist practices have become reified within our communities into practices which now have little to do with actually critiquing/dismantling a power structure and instead have become "empty rituals" that we cling to out of some sense of guilt (I might give you some of that, but like I said, we would need to be specific) or are you back critiquing any sort of group-based identity?

--

For example, after many years of doing anti-racist organizing, and by anti-racist I mean practical work that seeks to dismantle the ghettos that perpetuate racial disparities, not sitting in a circle talking about privilege (though i've done a bit of that too), i've noticed some interesting things about well-meaning white liberals/radicals in terms of either romanticizing the ghetto, or getting all caught up in language. For example, I recently had a white friend of mine castigate me for using the term "black". Oddly enough, I've never once had any person of color take umbrage with the term - it seems a particularly odd kind-of privilege where you are more worried about the language being used to refer to a group you aren't part of, than actually doing organizing work in predominately black communities. Or, another (white) person who told me the work I was doing around deconcentrating black poverty was deeply racist because it was dispersing people around the metropolitan area, rather than having them in one place where they can be an organized revolutionary group. Excuse me? Have you spent much time in the ghetto? I've lived there. I work there. It aint some grand place of organized revolution. It's schools where shit runs down the aisles and there are no textbooks, neighborhoods littered in crack vials, houses with no food, people with no houses, way too many fucking cops, way too many fucking guns - and you're saying someone else should have to raise their family there because of your ideas about what is or isn't revolutionary?

so that would be where I would agree that the idea of what is or isn't anti-racist has become a way of simply perpetuating racist structures,

[Stirner123]

Ok, silverelf, we're not quite as far apart as I thought we were. As for the remaining gaps, I'll fill them in as soon as I can. I need a bit of rest first. ;)

[Coathanger Jay]

As a white straight man, the only thing that will set you apart from the problem is makeing it clear by your actions whose side you are on. when their is a rally you have to go and you have to stand next to the "queers" you have to stand next to the prochoice people, you have to argue the argument you've come up with for why you are there like you are a woman or a gay person. you have to put yourself in their shoes.

once you've done that people start to identify you as one of "them" and you are free to take a stand. and it does help to have men who are white and staight argueing for the other side. it shows everyone that it is possible and logical for these "non survivors" to be their.

[Stirner123]

Sorry, I'm being a shit for taking so long to respond to the latest posts. I just need to give mind, body and soul a bit of a rest for another day or two. I am slowly starting to reconnect with some radical friends on a more personal level and the positive vibes are welcome change to socio-political debates. Love all around.

Matt

[silverelf]

bump for moving debate around sexism/feminism/etc back to this aborted discussion and not letting the other organizing thread get too derailed.....

[koffeedeath]

yep. no fuckin shit, it is always some other time, and always some other place, than right here and now.

[bobstad]

I've just glanced through this thread; but am reminded of how weird I'm made to feel when commodified as "a man" so that I'm somehow held responsible for ALL the stupidity and transgressions of roughly half the population of the species.

To have to go inside of(as well as one person can do of another) someone else; to discover their generalized negative impressions of a whole gender, is as often as not an impossible digression of the moment.(speaking figuratively; though I don't mean to discount experiences taking decades to accomplish in my case, which finally have yielded a mentality of my own I'm able to experience solo sexuality via, which I don't doubt rivals what many people accomplish only with others; though that said, I still seek partners probably with as much or more motivation than anything else I'm up to of a moment?)

That one is often confronted with just such demands must emphasize the severity of the situation, no doubt, but also curtails effective interaction of individual beings.

I'm not Charles Manson, Bill Clinton, Adolf Hitler or Georges Bush though they are/were all men too. Nor Gandhi, Phillip or Daniel Berrigan, M. L. King, Jr. or Alexander the Great, either.(Lenin, Marx, Gus Hall, etc. I'm CPUSA with an IWW red card, somewhere...)

That the society one and others currently experiences impacts women in a particular way does not determine the given society has gender itself...societies made up of both genders are genderless.(?!) The point being perhaps, that there are societies de facto or otherwise, which are gender exclusive, no?

If you look at the attached photograph this is the image of a single-reed conical bore woodwind Bert Wilson(world-famous underground avant garde' jazz legend-who has played with John Coltrane at Trane's request, and taught TOWER OF POWER/SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE saxophonist Lenny Picket and TIPTONS saxophonist Tobi Stone, etc.) commented is "chromatic."

This minature horn in E is one I sometimes call "Sasquatch TreeWoman" for an odd image I'd notice on the ligature(due to wear and scratches from the metal mouthpiece cap protecting the reed) when I was putting in the sixth through the ninth tone holes early in '96 tuning the horn to the music of the BILLY TIPTON MEMORIAL SAXOPHONE QUARTET on KPFA-FM early in '96 whose tunes were the themes of the weekly news broadcasts and the FLASHPOINTS investigative journalism show then.(playing the horn 10/7/07 for a workshop before a TIPTONS performance, reincarnation of the old BTMSQ; BTMSQ and TIPTONS co-founding member Jessica Lurie complimented the instrument saying she'd been reminded of a primative double reed[played by the men of a certain indigenous tribe whose name she'd mentioned I've forgotten] yet was amazed at the idea of the horn as a single reed instrument)

I'd not noticed until about 2004 how phallic looking this instrument is; which then I gave the aka "Botecelli Black Boy" for Joni Mitchell's tune of the same name.(at about this time I'd had a cadre' of 4-6 year olds who were Latino/Latina who'd come and occasionally hang out fooling around with my instruments in my Eureka, CA apartment I suffered a hostile eviction from by the new land lord who had a Schwarzenegger bumper sticker on the dashboard of his ton and a half work truck on the passenger side who got my apartment due to the divorce of the a daughter of a family which had owned the place since 1954)

And also "Dildo-O-Phone".(my IHSS care-giver Fred[aka Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer] thought amusing, though fooling around with the detachable ex-thumb rest/neck strap attachment while using other instruments provocatively enough!)

Also around that time(2004) I began to associate the genesis of the instrument's creation with a couple of traumatic events; just prior to when one evening while alone late at night the winter of '89-'90 in my Spokane apartment playing the Bundy resonite Eb clarinet the horn is made from I'd suddenly without thought flown into a rage and demolished the clarinet, then the next day out of the remains fashioned the initial five tone-holed instrument that eventually became the one in the photograph.







Early in October of '89 feeling disgusted at hanging around on my disability/SSI income(I have problems from ramifications of spinal diseases) getting fat eating salted in the shell peanuts and drinking MICKEYS 40s, I'd loaded up my $15 3-speed Raliegh Colt and pedaled out of town with a back pack and single burner Coleman stove once my grandfather's on the rear carrier and the Bundy clarinet wrapped in a woven cotton belt lashed on top of the load. Passing through Chelan and getting to Tonasket I'd run into RAINBOW FAMILY focalizer Barry Adams and an attractive girl friend of his from the poor people's village across from the first Bush White House, who gave me a ride in their van to the '89 fall Republic barter faire.

The great Northwest reggae band HERBIVORES(house band of the Seattle Hemp Fest now, then a regional band from the other side of the state) played that Saturday night at the barter faire, and before they began the Gypsy woman Dorinda(I'm a Rom) who'd sold me the clarinet, from the HERBIVORES stage read from a book about cannabis that all US currency is printed on hemp.

I'd been sitting later that night with Dorinda's son Dwaine and co-founding HERBIVORE members Jim and Share when Dwaine's then wife Kara(I haven't seen either since then, but heard they'd seperated) entered the tiny SAINT ALPHONSO'S PIZZA trailer we'd been sitting in that is the business Dwaine and Kara operated then at many of that area's barter faires.(selling slices)

She'd been cogent though very distraught and told of having a few minutes before been searched while naked with a speculum in front of a crowd of people at the main barter faire gate, by officers of the DEA, the Colville tribal police and either the county sheriff's office or the state patrol.(I've forgotten which?)

Dwaine had been in the midst of a court case then where he was being prosecuted for allegedly growing commercial illegal cannabis, so that this public police rape of his wife was seen as harassment of him and also due to the very satirical set of music HERBIVORES had just finished playing about the first George Bush as a crack-head in the White House running the country high on cocaine; due the Iran-Contras scandal then.(they'd also busted for possession of a joint or two, a very elderly and poor hippie/hobo who had a tiny "peep-show" in a wooden box about the size of an apple box he'd charged a quarter for people to look at who was excellent at implying the vision was exceptionally dirty and lewd, which was a collection of highly polished old automobile hood ornaments and really a work of art to look at)

I remembering noticing later that the state of mind I'd seen Kara in then, who I'd been exceptionally fond of who'd reciprocated my affection; was exactly as I'd felt during and following an incident where I'd been violated by a man who'd offered me a massage I'd smoked a joint and drank a couple tall cans of Bud with just prior to my victimization when I'd been very exhausted; which happened in a place in Spokane I later learned is called The Haunted House,(that was a tree secluded old run-down mansion) on a water bed in a room with light bulbs in a fixture overhead I was told had colored bulbs taken from the Reagan White House.(as if this were sacred!)

I later learned the fellow I'd been with then was one of a cult of men there locally known as "pervs" who were violent male homosexuals into organized crime, right wing politics and Tibetan Buddhism.

Also before then when I was homeless in January of '89 living out of my car, I rented a room from a man there named Paul Kern who was a convicted child molester of his own children who'd mentioned being a friend of twice convicted cop-killer Alvin Hegee who was the president of the local chapter of THE GHOSTRIDERS outlaw motorcycle gang.(I'd had a friend from high school who is a GHOSTRIDER and have partied with them a little so Kern really didn't impress me, who'd also mentioned being involved with SEVENTH DAY ADVENTISTS?!)

Kern had been a manipulative character with occasionally a leering sinister tone to his voice, as when I'd first discussed the room over the phone I'd seen his ad for on a bulletin board at the local health food store LORIEN'S; who after he'd assaulted me in the house I'd rented the room in, which got me involved with domestic violence counseling there through the YWCA who I eventually went to court against to try to recover my damage deposit, I found has a scam going where he victimized people renting rooms from him.

I'd been lucky to've gotten two police in a patrol car to wait for me as I moved my things out of my room there who were the same pair who'd had me stand for about a half an hour it had seemed a few days earlier in 10 above zero foot of snow on the ground cold as they'd looked at my I. D. and shown me a photo-copy of a man who didn't look any thing like me they'd wanted to confirm was not me they'd said I resembled because we'd both had beards.(a woman with a room in Kern's house the same time I was there I heard had to get a couple of nuns help her to leave)

Later in the winter following that fall '89 Repubic Barter Faire, I'd been upstairs with friends at the CEDAR STREET MARKET; a hole in the wall organic food store in Spokane's tiny Peaceful Valley neighborhood where I'd lived in an apartment half a block down the street. Typically partner, part owner of the business and store manager Mike White(aka "Three Apples") and others hung out in his office above the business which was also the store's ware house, smoking the potent local cash crop.

I'd partaken and as we were leaving I'd been very proprietarily approached at the front door long after the place had closed by a guy named Ernie who worked there who was a teetotaler, who'd asked me where I thought I was going, which had deeply annoyed and aggravated me as I'd brushed past him and on into the night returning to my apartment.

I'd gotten back to my place and to calm myself I'd started to play on my clarinet I'd been improving on and enjoying a lot, I liked to play when high; when suddenly in an unconscious rage I'd broken the keybody in half(a single piece) and then twisted and broke all the keys so the instrument could never be repaired. The next day feeling despondent over having ruined my instrument, I then fashioned the five tone-holed version of what later became the horn as pictured in the photo.

[bobstad]

Actually this instrument has no thumb-rest; which Fred never fooled around with anyway.

There is a Bb clarinet thumb-rest adapted as a neck-strap attachment which is removable.

Fred had been fooling around with the protruding screw and its nut the neck strap attachment(the former Bb clarinet thumb-rest) can be mounted on.(the instrument itself is unplayable using the neck strap, which is so an instrumentalist playing a variety of instruments is able to have the tiny horn close to hand)

Fred is a self-described "anarcho-syndicalist" currently employed by the SEIU in Frisco.

[bobstad]

"White straight man"

WHAT KINDA NONSENSE IS THAT?

"Who's on first?"

"Who is on first!"

etc.