The "Undeserving"

The "Undeserving"

" Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege." Doctor Who

When the conversation starts to move towards who deserves help or money it is remarkably one sided. No-one ever talks about the "undeserving" rich.
No-one cries out "but what about the drug addicts?" when discussing those who sell arms to dictators, or tobacco to children, have sweat shops with child labour or sell our health care to their family's healthcare firms. If they are "it" girls and party boys we don't hold them accountable for their actions, or that their wealth was stolen from other people (it's not stealing if an Empire does it?)That they are rich because they took it with a nice side order of genocide, slavery and contempt. 
No; that would speak to white guilt and privilege and that requires some kind of empathy.
No-one holds the rich undeserving accountable. No-one them expects to have to apologise for their ancestry or birth. Or who and how they conduct their relationships and marriages. They get to have "blended" not "broken homes".
The whole way we speak about the rich and poor pours more and more salt into the wounds.
What makes a human being "of value"? Is it the money you earn? Is it something you achieve? Something you endure?  
If a human being with money never has their validity of person-hood questioned why then do we do it to the poor? Why do we erode their person and blame them?
Blame is the discharge of vulnerable or uncomfortable feelings. It's actually quite simple.
Because they can't fight back.
If you take enough from someone they are too busy staying just alive to protest. Make them afraid and tell them they are nothing, evil, scum; long enough and they turn away.
It is our job then to fight, give voice to the voiceless.
To show them that they, at least to us, are still people and have value. That the children eating out of bins, the LGBTQ+ homeless teens, that the injured, disabled and ill are not trash.
That where their is life, their is hope, and maybe even kindness. That one person can make a difference.

Matriarchy isn't inverted Patriarchy

Matriarchy isn't inverted Patriarchy



Not as long ago as we would like to pretend the medical community agreed that women were "broken" or malformed men.
Patriarchy is still the dominant paradigm and there is this fear that equality would be more Matriarchy than equality. Matriarchy in this scenario would be an inversion of Patriarchy. A "broken" version of a male idea. In some post-Patriarchal communities (women and men who have reject male dominated concepts) do not display this at all. In fact they tend to exclude men in part, or entirely. From the Alapine's Womyns Lands in Alabama, which are a mostly lesbian older community to the Umoja in Kenya; a refuge for the women and children surviving sexual violence.
This idea of Matriarchy is a reaction to male violence, to Patriarchy at it's most vile and it is still tolerant, strong and thriving. It still doesn't look like "broken" Patriarchy. Women in these communities do not subjugate men. They do not abuse or hunt them for pleasure or sexual gratification. They live, and thrive simply without them. In Umoja there are several villages with more or less exclusion of men. There are ones that permit male contact but do not allow them to live within the village, and there are villages that allow them to live within their walls but they can not hurt, commit any violence or own any property.

This then is what reactionary Matriarchy looks like. A space where men are simply not required. A space where they are a choice, and sometimes a very temporary one.

There are still some traditional Matriarchies. The one that looks most like the idea that Patriarchal fear is in Aka in the African Congo. They live in the forests and are hunter gatherers. There are known to be several tens of thousands of them and they used to be called "pygmies". Childcare and cooking is done by the menfolk and the hunting and fishing done by the women. Violence is almost non existent and smacking a child is grounds for divorce. The men also commonly allow their nipples as a sort of pacifier.
In Mosuo in China, the 40,000 strong community with no word for "father" or "husband".Men live in the houses (large communities) of their Grandmothers, aunts and sisters, helping to raise their children whom are usually fathered by men who live with their own families house. Women do the finances and organising while men fish and tend the pigs.  Their "walking marriages"are a mature agreement that the relationship lasts as long as it lasts.

Interestingly for me, I find these echoing still in communities that have historic Matriarchies, like the Celtic cultures of Ireland and Wales I grew up in. Women ran the finances and the head of the family was likely to be an elderly and vicious woman. God help a man who beat a woman, for he would find (at the granny's behest) all the men in her family on his doorstep before the next night.The first time, they would break his left hand. A second, his right, and a third was usually his legs. Women were outspoken (if your not worried about getting a smack in the mouth you can be) and it was common for them to have "walking marriages" of their own having a distinct preference in the kind of person they wanted to have a child with and a distinctly different kind of man raise, live and love them. Out of necessity (due to dire poverty) the women in these communities often worked, be it doing laundry, raising orphans, or even in the industries pushing carts of coal, steel or iron.
Matriarchal tendencies still simmer just below the surfaces then. Yet when women in matriarchal communities rule they do not tend to horde power. When the centre or focus is mothering, nurturing, support and respect become the dominant ideals. There is emphasis on fairness, kindness and community. For the good of the many, not the few.
 Marriages and relationships tend to be a fluid and adaptive thing. No child is "illegitimate" and children are raised in a community. Crimes, especially violent crimes are greatly reduced in any society that has more egalitarian values. When men are not dominating men they do not react with rage and violence leading to calmer and happier societies.

Some people would like to believe that there has only ever been a fixed "natural" Patriarchal order to cultures but we know that they tend to be the loudest historically, like both ancient Greek and Roman cultures. However even in the male-centric  Greek cultures you find buried the Goddess underneath. Yes they have been paved over by Apollo, but Gaia's snake is underneath.
For the earliest remain of proto-cities we find Goddesses, in a multitude everywhere.

Patriarchy would like to claim that matriarchy is dangerous, wicked and just as bad as the worst kind of patriarchy but we know that it just isn't true.
We also now know that women are not "broken" men. That gender, sex and identity are a spectrum of being with huge parameters. Patriarchy is losing, no matter how hard it fights back because is not healthy for the majority. It makes for pretty monuments and large weapons, poverty and destruction. Our earth is a finite resource and we are in desperate need of a change of ideology. We first need to get rid of the idea that matriarchy looks like broken patriarchy. It looks like families, communities and freedom: sexual, economic, and emotional.  

  

Mansplaining

Mansplaining

I had no idea this was a contentious idea until I wrote it in a male dominated group. A D&D group on facebook. I put a shout out to my fellow female DM's about dealing with mansplaining, asking their advice.

Apparently my word was so hateful, so awful, so gendered and terrible I warranted death threats. I was a whore, a femin-Nazi, an attention seeker, an idiot, a liar, the ruiner of all good things.

Mansplaining is a short hand. It is the condensing of the experience of being an expert at something and having someone who is much less knowledgeable than you, "correct" you, repeat your answer as their own, wince, wrinkle their nose or simply just talk over you until they feel you have been firmly and justifiably put in your place.
It is an assumption that your grasp on any given subject is less, and predominately it is because of your gender.
I remember watching my mum when the kingpin broke on our Citron 2 CV on the motorway (we were lucky we didn't die) and while we waited for the tow truck three different men stopped and asked if she needed help with her tire.
I remember how sweet she was about it the first time. "Thank you but no, it's not the tire, kind of you to stop. Just fine..."
The programming of "stay safe, be polite" or "smile and nod" wears pretty thin, and as the thundering 18 wheelers kicked the standing water into a spay around us my mother found it increasingly difficult to stay polite. By kindly white middle-aged guy number three she had sort of resorted to yelling "it's fine" over and over while looking like she might shove him under the next lorry.

That's the thing, it an erosive and corrosive form of social violence. One that is almost always has the threat of violence behind it. The first time it happens that day your ability and patience are tested but it is an accumulative thing. Six "well meaning" assholes later it is much less easy to "shrug it off". It's a power play. When someone baby's you, it puts them in a position of authority. If you try and stay "adult" it can flip the conversation, but in terms of gender it usually goes that the man doesn't want to leave that position of power, and will do almost anything to maintain it.
This does a couple of things, firstly women learn to "be nice". You have to play along at least enough so this person doesn't violently erupt, because you can never tell which man will, and which won't. It also makes women use their "child" status much like a naughty toddler, twisting their "uselessness" into a weapon.

This is why I suspect me even voicing it's existence was met with such resistance. The hidden violence and pretence of kid glove sexual power was replaced by the real sexual violence.  (Fuck off and die).
I was told (thank you for mansplaining, mansplaining) that being patronised happens to everyone. Which is true, mainsplaining is not just about being patronised.  So if mansplaining is now a trigger word, one that makes this violence explosive, how can we ever talk about it? How can we unpick it enough to heal this power play? Undermining social verbal violence or  U.S.V.V. is a more gender neutral wording and it removes the idea that only men behave in this way (women do too, but it is not often backed by the majority and the threat of physical violence)  because the threat of dominating social physical violence D.S.P.V. is always present.

 Mansplaining is not being patronised. It is an undermining social kind of violence, one, that at anytime could explode into verbal and physical violence. It is a way to control conversations and power within a conversation, meeting or on-line thread. It is a "nice" form of gendered power play right up until the moment it isn't.

Poverty is not a meritocracy

Poverty is not a meritocracy

I used to like the Guardian. I spend more time writing responses to it's anti-poor and anti-Corbyn rubbish than anything else these days. Deborah Orr wrote a "piece" about the "deserving" poor. This was my response. 

"Deserving" 

" Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege." Doctor Who

 What makes them deserving? What makes them devoid of enough humanity to cast them aside as human waste? Poverty breeds bad choices. It breeds addiction and desperation. 
In Victorian Britain they blamed booze. If those feckless poor could just stop drinking themselves to death, then it would be acceptable to help them. The alcohol was cheap calories, it numbed the pain in the body and mind. The physical abuses, the lack of opportunity, the lack of basic human dignity and safety. 
Poverty is the same sickness for all the nice white smart phones the sickness endures and it is man made. It is easy to demonize the poor because no-one is really speaking for them. It is criminal that the taxes that huge corporations don't pay could solve this. It's not complicated. 
Poverty isn't a meritocracy. It is a social sickness, one that affects a great many and contributes to physical illness and even climate change. Will there be people that break the law, absolutely, but actually at a much lower rate than those in privilege positions. The reasons they break those laws (like stealing food from supermarket bins) are generally about survival. To say that because they are poor and "bad" they are less deserving" (by which you mean less human) is absolutely vile.