Can you cure racism with sexism? Do some guys get allowed to be sexist?
You know, every time there's a big brouhaha in the feminist world I look around and there's no poor feminists, or else there's feminists who are so beholden to men that feminism comes second. I'm sorry, but I just don't get why I'm supposed to tolerate the racism of some radical black feminists, when if you change the gender of the black person in a rape case their feminism goes right down the toilet. If it's a black woman victim, it's racism, but if it's black men accused of being like most rapists---men----then it's racist to point out their sexist behavior and shit. One reason the kids in the Central Park Jogger case were convicted was because they, their families, and their supporters were so unbelieveably sexist in open court. Calling the victim a whore and the prosecutor a bitch does not make you look like you're a victim of racism, however much white guys get away with it. Then again, I don't believe the solution to the higher conviction rates for black rapists is to let them get away with raping wohever they want, just like white guys. I think every rapist should be convicted, and that means convicting more white boys, get to it. They're all rapists, and I just don't care about anything else. In some highly-educated quarters, that makes me a racist, evidently. (These are the same people who cite F_W when they're feeling vicious, but nobody dares call them on it because then they'll start an interblog flame war.)It's getting on my frickin' nerves. Don't demand my help and then stand behind your man when he acts like any other man. Sexism is sexism and here's a clue, college girls: it's been around long before racism, because men discovered they were bigger and stronger than women a long time before they ventured far enough to find people with different skin colors. Yes, I am being condescending. You'd think people could look at a map and figure this out. What is one supposed to do when the defense for murder or abuse of women amounts to, "But white guys get away with it! Not fair!" It sounds an awful lot like they think that abusing women is something guys are entitled to do, and they're being deprived. So what are we, chopped liver? We're supposed to get doled out to whichever group of guys whines the most? Does anybody not get how this is pretty fucking fucked up?

It's not a luxury to be behind other women; it's a necessity, but time and again, they bring up lynchings and nobody ever dares to mention that somehow, in the popular myth, all lynchings were caused by lying white women. NOw why do you suppose that would be? Where's that feminism again? Approximately one quarter of lynchings were actually caused by accusations of rape, and of those a fair number were dreamed up by white men and blamed on sometimes non-existant women. Meanwhile, we get all the damned academic feminists ignoring the shit that poor men of all colors do to poor women. Rich women just get hated by everybdoy, a statement that F_W turned into, "Ginmar says white women can't be racist because they're oppressed." Yeah, I still haven't seen a link where I said that and I never will. When the slaves were freed, people like to forget that that meant only black men were freed. Like any white guy, they now owned their women just as much as white men owned theirs.

Sexism has always been a matter of private acts hidden behind curtains and doors, difficult to count and easy to dismiss. I once sat at a dinner table with a bunch of friends and had some young college girl say, seriously, that racism existed before sexism. I bet she thought OJ was innocent, too. Ignorance is ignorance. I hate all sexist men and women, and let me tell you poor guys can be vicious to uppity women. They don't have much else in the world, but God help us, they're men, and that's what they cling to, base their whole identity on. We had a guy on the block tell a friend of mine----whom he didn't know was my friend----that I hated black people. Turns out I'd called the cops on him because from three houses away I could hear his stereo at one AM. Typical sexist male: if you dare to take action against one guy, you hate all guys because any guy at all can apppoint himself spokesman for men. Guys sure as hell don't complain about sexist shit that other men say; what they complain about is the feminist response. It's like if they dare to betray other guys they're a girl or something. No matter how great the injustice, no matter how vile the act, no matter how unbelieveably sexist the rhetoric, men unite when the enemy is woman.

I expect F_W will try and do what they did to my RPF post, where they pulled quotes from the end of long discussions in the comments and implied they came from the essay itself, and ignored that the post was flooded by trolls such as moonjaguar from their very own membership. Then there's the way they claim the above quote in the second paragraph describes my attitude. It's par for the course with those assholes: they make up rules so they can't get called on their own behavior---i.e., snacky's law-----and when they're not calling me batshit they're saying stuff about sexism that could have come out of my mouth. You can't be a part time feminist, guys. As a matter of fact, if you give up your feminism because, well, the accused men is a buddy of yours, then you're only a feminist when it doesn't get in the way of your cheerleading for men.

You'd think there were no poor feminists out there, from the way the only ones who get cited are the college-educated ones, the ones who are sex positive, the ones who confuse 'radical feminist' with something that's trendy and not intellectual. Can you even be a feminists if you're poor? Poor girls are distrusted to a degree high above that which is levied against women, because they're uniformly assumed to be sluts and gold diggers. Poor in the case of women means you're assumed not to have any intellect at all, and that you have a wild untamed sexuality. Helps if you're pretty, too: ordinary-looking poor women are sneered at because they can't afford anything but clothes at the dollar store. Being cheap is only glamourous if you don't have to do it. Meanwhile, your more well-off feminist sisters talk about conferences and Marxism and shit like that, and you're dealing with the fact that the men around you are abusing girls and women, and the cops won't believe you, because once they were those men. Sometimes you find words to describe it. And sometimes your experiences are so alien that people whose idea of hardship is missing their train are simply made so uncomfortable that you just get shut out. Academics have only one use for poor people: as subjects. They don't bond with poor people: they study them, and sometimes, it just gets to you.

Down on the lower ladders of the economic ladder, race relations and gender relations have a tendency to look an awful lot alike, except while there are words no white person can say, anybody can call a woman anything and have it stick. Racial slurs label the person tossing them, but sexist ones attach themselves to the woman for good, and the labeller gets to further attack, often forever. A woman doesn't have to sleep with twenty men to get called a slut or a whore; all it takes it twenty guys repeating the story, or ten guys repeating it, or even five guys repeating it. That'll get listened to eagerly but if the same woman gets raped, her side of the story is conspicuously absent-----until someone brings up the fact that everybody knows she slept with twenty guys! At a party! For money! The big difference between racism and sexism is that racism makes white people feel good about themslves when they fight it, and gives black people a voice----well, unless they're women-----while fighting sexism is considered a case of the cure being worse than the diseases. It's not like feminism gets guys any more blowjobs, does it? And feminism means more ugly chicks, right? Racism inpsires long dark nights of the soul; sexism disappears from the newspapers really quickly, like the case where a man dragged his girlfriend from the back of his truck by the neck till she died. When a guy does that to a black man, it's a lynching; when a guy does that to his girlfriend, there's the sneaking suspicion that she asked for it. Anybody who's still bitching about comparing racism and sexism needs to consider that.