I’m feeling worse today after my trigger-point and anti-inflammatory injections yesterday, so it’s possible that I’m just a bit cranky.
On the other hand, at no time, ever, under any circumstance, will I choose to separate from the good, gentle, men in my life. In a war, such as the one women are in every single day of our lives, a soldier needs allies. Most of those allies are going to be female; some, though, will be males who fight, at great cost, against their own in our favor. I love, appreciate, support, and defend them. I happen to be married to one, and I’ve raised two. Biased? Maybe. But do I also know them so profoundly that I can say what I’m saying with a measure of expertise informed more by my feminism than by my motherhood/wifehood.
Nor will I condemn all PIV as rape. Never. And I’m not interested in blind hate and lazy, inflammatory rhetoric defined as radical feminism. I’m 54 years old. I’ve been a radical feminist even before I realized I was employing a root-cause, class-based sociopolitical analysis in my understanding of the shared experience of being born female. I was writing, speaking, picketing, giving money, boycotting, and committing acts of political vandalism since Junior High school. Rejecting male allies and conflating mutually-giving heterosexual sex with rape isn’t just bad strategy, but also minimizes what should never be.
Heterosexual sex is not automatically rape. Male allies are not automatically enemies. There’s enough actual sexual violence, and enough actual male predators, for us to fight. Let’s not draw ever-wider circles of Enemy-ship (Enemy-hood?) that end up swallowing everything possible.
Let’s fight the males who rape and kill us and profit from our oppression. And let’s be clear that rape, all rape, has in common not that the violator and the violated are of different sexes, but that a male violator has murdered the will, agency, psyche, body, and Self of the female violated.