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1. DeAnander:

   Shortly after, the New York Times reported that Washington “insists” — if you own the world, you insist — “insists that the Baghdad government give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations,” a demand that “faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state.” It’s supposed to be more third world irrationality.

   I just want to make the gender connection here. This imputation of over-sensitivity to Iraq is, structurally, identical to the imputation of over-sensitivity to e.g. women, or PoC, who respond with perfectly reasonable anger to successful or attempted domination — overlordly behaviour — from higher-caste persons.

   Notice the careful framing: Iraq has deep sensitivities (i.e. is overly emotional) about being seen as a dependent state: Iraq is overly sensitive (irrational) about appearances, rather than justifiably enraged by actual invasion, actual colonisation, actual Balkanisation, actual destruction of the apparatus of civil society, actual reduction to a client state and occupied territory.

   It appears that the meme-warfare toolbox of bullies is fractal, i.e. the same tools work at any scale. From abuse/dominance w/in the home to bullying at school and work, to neighbourhood dominators like gangs, to organised regional Mafia, to nation-states acting as bullies both internally against domestic unpeople and externally on a global scale, the same tactics apply: exculpation, transference, reframing, trivialisation, denial, distraction, victim-blaming, scapegoating, dominator claiming victim status, blah blah.

   The unpeople status of women is what underlies the astonishingly “invisible” hostility and humiliation of porn — and here to make the connection, once again, perfectly clear, let’s visit South Africa for a moment, where racist college students made a humiliation-video of coerced lower-class Black cleaning staff being forced to do demeaning things on camera. Notice the sports connection (the demeaned persons, as at AG, are made to participate in travesties of upper-caste sports) and particularly the final message of the video which could not make the gender connection plainer if it tried:

   The video ends with the words: “That, at the end of the day, is what we think of integration.”

   This is followed by one of the students asking a cleaner: “What does ‘sefebe’ mean in Afrikaans?”

   “A black whore,” she replies.

   Chomsky talks in his (as usual) perspicacious address about the base attitude of US foreign policy being that Americans “own the world”. The parallel in gender policy (a kind of “foreign policy”, in that it deals with how the self-defined Us treats the Us-defined Other) is evident: men claim to own the world — not only to own women and women’s bodies, but to own the very definition of sexuality, what is sexy and what is not, what is sexual and what is not… much as America claims to own such concepts as Democracy and Progress, and overcaste persons claim to own the concept of humour and thus feel free to dictate to undercaste persons when they are required to accept insult and humiliation as “just a joke.”

   This dominator behaviour scales remarkably consistently, from the bedroom to the boardroom to the Oval Office. Seems to me it’s only our own entrapment in our pockets of Us-ness and Other-ness that prevents us from seeing it as a unified behaviour pattern with highly recognisable, repetitive tactics: hence good Librul men can discuss the heinousness of the South African students’ video without perceiving for one minute its structural twin in the Internet porn they consume, or at least tolerate with jocular good-fellowship, year in and year out; white upper-class feminists can feel and name the sting of misogynist insult quite clearly, and yet often not feel or name their own racist assumptions or condescensions that sting just as badly for the PoC receiving them… and so on.

   Unpeople cannot, by definition be humiliated — and are not allowed to be angry — because they do not own the world. If they do get angry or resentful about repeated theft, coercion, humiliation, insult, trivialisation — then they are only being oversensitive and irrational… whether the unperson is the wife objecting to being treated as a sexual servant by her husband, or the nation objecting to being “pacified” and looted by the invader.

   4 March 2008, 1:44 pm

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