Women Are Owned

Globally women own approximately 11% of the world’s resources. The fact that very few people have a problem with this statistic is, in itself, evidence of the crucial and systemic nature of the problem.

Women aren’t allowed to own property. This is the reality. But that reality is usually covered with a fog of capitalism. It goes something like this:

“Women are so busy raising children that they don’t have time to go to college or get a full time job. That’s the reason why women don’t own land or houses. It’s because they are sacrificing for their children. After all, this is how women function. They always put babies first. Because something magical happens in a woman’s body that makes her want to be pregnant and have children. So it is natural for men to own the land and keep it in trust for future generations, for his heirs, because women are not suited to provide for children.”

This, of course, is a load of bullcrap. But it’s amazing how a lie, oft-repeated, starts to sound like the truth. And humans have been repeating this lie for thousands of years.

When one lives as an oppressed class, the multiple layers and dimensions of that oppression become very visible, as though someone walks around highlighting each and every one with a bright florescent marker. The more women fight the system, the more they learn how oppressive it is, and the more they learn how little they can do on their own to change it. But for those not living inside that oppression, they will believe that it doesn’t exist. They will call the oppressed liars and “hysterics”. They will call you this while they take away your opportunities for advancement. They will call you this while they beat you.

Women learn very early in life that we do not own the spaces we live in. That we do not own our possessions, our time, or even our thoughts. Women learn that we own nothing at all, and that everything is given to us by a man – a father or grandfather or uncle. All of our stories are about men, about male heroes, about patriarchs and boys. If a woman is present it is to support him, not herself. A woman learns from her very beginning that she can’t exist unless there is a man in the story. For girls raised without fathers, this lesson is exceptionally hard, for they learn that they have no identity, and no self, because there is no man present, and hence no owner to protect or anchor them in the world.

Our minds and our bodies do not belong to us. Women are taught that their vulva and vagina are not meant for them, but for the man that will one day fuck them. Until that day, the woman’s vulva belongs to her father, and he decides who she will or will not “date”. He may even “claim” her most intimate spaces for himself as his property and right. This happens far more often than we care to admit. That it happens at all is because of the belief that female children belong to their fathers. Estimates range as high as 6,000 children are raped every day by their father. The vast majority of those assaulted, destroyed by the man who protects them, are female.

Women are taught that the only purpose of the female genitalia – the genitalia that they were born with – is for the pleasure of men. It is not always such an overt training, and would probably be more accurate to say that such overt indoctrination is rare. In some fundamentalist circles this is precisely what is taught, and women who experience pleasure at all are labeled “depraved”. Most of the time, though, the indoctrination forms in more subtle ways through ignoring women’s pleasure altogether and pretending that it – women’s pleasure – does not even exist. It is solidified through pretending that a woman’s body isn’t even a woman’s body, but rather an object for and of sex itself. Woman is not human. She is daily, hourly, minutely proclaimed to be a thing.

When sexual biology is taught in school, is there any discussion of women’s pleasure? Men’s arousal, pleasure and ejaculation are certainly discussed, but for the women, it is passive – arousal, if discussed, is framed as preparation for insertion of a penis. In this framing, woman disappears. She is absent, not even a footnote in her own life or in her own body. She does not exist unless there is a penis involved. Is it any wonder that so many teenage girls fight for the attention of an admired male when her entire world screams at her that she can only exist in his gaze?

This suits the pro-porn outlook very nicely, which is wholly focused on male pleasure and female degradation, happening simultaneously. Our world is saturated with this, and that saturation begins when children are in gradeschool. Some of us saw our first pornographic magazine before middle school, in the days before internet. Such pornography is much more prevalent now, and far more violent. Where “gonzo” porn used to be abnormal, now it is abnormal to find a porn video that is not violent and degrading to women.

In porn, you can’t have male pleasure without female degradation. This message is reinforced in the way that sexual biology is taught in school. Men are the aggressor, the actor, the instigator, and women are the passive receptacles of men and the penis.

The message is clear: women do not own their genitals – men own them. It is reinforced by calling a woman who has sex a “slut”. It is reinforced by shaming a woman who has been sexually assaulted by multiple men. Such a woman has failed to act according to her place. She has failed to find a proper owner, and has been “claimed” by the mob of men and their uncontrollable animalistic desires. She has failed – not society, not the men who brutalized her. She has failed to find ownership and thus protection, so deserves her ridicule and shaming.

Women do not own. Women ARE owned. And this status is cemented by strict social structures that segregate women away from male-dominated arenas such as engineering, mathematics, sciences, technology, politics, sports and property ownership. Not coincidentally, all of these areas are where the total of human social power reside, which enforces the notion of women’s inferiority to men, and ensures, quite easily, that women never attain social power at all.

If women want to be free, we must teach girls that they are autonomous, free, and not owned by anyone. We must teach them that their lives are defined by their womanity, that life is not defined by men. If we want a society where women can live in freedom rather than in fear, we need a revolution in our thinking. We must free ourselves, and we must also demand that men free us. Women must stop thinking of their bodies as vessels of male pleasure, and spend time in self-reflection, and self-action, to understand their own happiness without men. We must stop asking for permission and take our rightful place as full human beings. We must demand recognition of who we are.

About that woman symbol on truck mud flaps…

Those things really piss me off. I mean — come on. What exactly is the point? To let the drivers behind you know that you’re a “real stud”? That you like the ladies? Are you so insecure in your sexuality that advertisement is required? Or maybe what you are really saying is that women are only good for one thing, and that message must be broadcast everywhere — including on a tire mud flap. After all, those uppity girls might start thinking they deserve something more than receptacle status of the mighty penis.

Oh was that too harsh? Don’t like to have your depictions of “sex” criticized? So riddle me this…why is that when people talk about “sex” what they really mean is the naked female body?

I wish more people would question why “sex” equates with the female body, not the male one, or why we conflate the ubiquitous porn symbol of this silhouette commonly located on truck’s mud flaps with “sex”. I mean, is she having sex? Is she wearing some kind of secret bat signal that is only visible with special glasses attached to the binding of Penthouse…you know…like the cheap 3Ds you have to tear out carefully lest the cheap perforation give way and bend the plastic film. Why can’t she just be relaxing on the beach, reading a book? Or maybe she’s doing post-dance cool off stretches. No wonder intellectual young girls grow up to be angry women.

But I think what is really going on is that when men say “sex sells” they’re trying to justify treating women like objects by calling a naked woman “sex”. Such a statement affirms in our culture that human beings with round breasts and round hips are only good for one thing – to stick a penis inside of them, usually as roughly as possible, to demonstrate “male power”. Think about that – a man only has “power” if he is hurting a woman. This is the message. This is what men are taught to believe about themselves, about each other.

When women question this, when women insist that they are human beings capable of all the things men do, men will reassert this message again and again, with all the force of rape, that women are meant for fucking, and for nothing else. That’s the message of the truck flaps. That’s the message of “sex sells”. Women are garbage bins for males to use and toss.

While men have been busy with their porn addictions and their hate of women on the internet, women have been very busy talking to each other, and paying attention to the horrid things men say and think about us. Women are fighting back now, with greater force and commitment than, say, 20 years ago. Back then, you rarely saw this type of pornified objectification questioned. Now, the questions are everywhere, and they are getting louder as more and more women’s voices join in the chorus. And men are threatening us, claiming that we are destroying them. Funny. How is protesting our own dehumanization destroying a man? Maybe because a man’s humanity is predicated on the dehumanization of a woman. Think about that for a bit while you’re trying to wrap and warp your brain into the torturous labyrinth of rationalizations that support the porn culture. It cannot exist without taking away the humanity of a woman.

Saying that women ARE sex, instead of women have sex, gives men the control of sexuality. Women, in this context, can’t be given control, because of the possibility that they will refuse men and deny what the man wants. It also assumes that sex itself is a penis going into a vagina. But that’s another post for another day.

Grow the hell up already, boys. Mommy left a long time ago. We are not here for your pleasure. We are here for ours. We are here for our own lives, our own survival, our own happiness. We are not going to sacrifice ourselves to support your peevish, destructive, anti-woman attitudes and actions. Welcome to the New World Order.