Welcome to Radfem News Service!

Are you sick and bloody tired of the male supremacist spin in mainstream news reporting, passing as neutrality and objectivity?  Are you completely bored (or enraged) at the banality and woman-hatred displayed on every mainstream news outlet, in both the posts and the comments, whether they are left-leaning or right?

For as long as we can stand to do it, the bloggers at Radfem News Service will be bringing you the news with a radical feminist twist: shedding meaningful light on the issues affecting women as a sexual class, around the world where mainstream reporting doesn’t; and performing meta-analyses of the mainstream reporting itself, where that reporting spins, lies and obfuscates to support male-supremacy.

News items are delivered fresh regularly, and all new posts are accessible in the header above.  Older posts are below.

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Welcome!

ETA:  This site is now an archives and is no longer updated.  Please feel free to browse our archives by keyword or category search in the sidebar, and kindly read the project endnote here.  Thanks for reading Radfem News Service!  — Eds., 6/17/2013

Wronged man encounters language barrier: what to call jilted ex-gf who pulled all his teeth?

It seems as if the word “bitch” has become so overused, it has lost virtually all meaning, leaving the occasional legitimately-wronged man with no words to describe women who actually harm them.  Poor men!

Last week, the Daily Male reported that a dentist sedated her ex-boyfriend and then pulled out every single one of his teeth, after he had unceremoniously dumped her for another woman.  The man appeared at her office in need of emergency dental surgery just days after he had broken up with her; when questioned, she admitted what she did, saying that she had been “unable to detach from her emotions” and now faces jail time as well as professional sanctions from her licensing board.

The man explains,

I knew something was wrong because when I woke up I couldn’t feel any teeth and my jaw was strapped up with bandages.  She told me my mouth was numb and I wouldn’t be able to feel anything for a while and that the bandage was there to protect the gums, but that I would need to see a specialist.

[…]

But when I got home I looked in the mirror and couldn’t f****** believe it. The b**** had emptied my mouth.

Bitch?  Really?

Apparently, there simply are no words in the English language to differentiate women who actually cause harm from any other woman, or a woman who causes subjective or even made-up harm from one who causes objective, actual harm: the same reactionary, misogynistic slurs are used to describe us all.  What differentiates a bitch from a non-bitch seems to be a man’s pleasure or displeasure with any woman’s behavior, regardless of the reasonableness of his response — the word is never descriptive of the woman, or of anything the woman actually did.

What is revealed by this use of equivalent language (e.g. referring to women as “bitches” regardless of context) is that boys and men think of all girls and women in exactly the same way — essentially, as the scum of the earth, and morally and even criminally deficient, and to the maximum degree — no matter what we do or don’t do.

Another interpretation is that men regard all girls and women and our actions and inactions to be irrelevant in the same way — which, in a political sense, happens to be true.  Because patriarchy.

Including, as in this case, when a woman pulls out every single one of his teeth, bandages his head and jaw, and sends him home, violating several laws and rules of professional ethics in the process.

Here, one is left to wonder what this man would’ve called this woman if she would have, in addition to assaulting him, also lied about it, or worse?  Or what words he had been using to describe her before that, when he was simply no longer interested in the relationship because he had found someone else? If he had ever called her a “bitch” previously, that would indicate that he had held her in exactly the same regard before — before she had even done anything objectively harmful or wrong.

But clearly, while it is frequently the case that men think a particular woman — or all women — are “bitches” all or much of the time, this equivalent response is objectively unreasonable.  Indeed, if determinations of reasonableness or credibility were objective, men who call women “bitches” would be determined to have neither; if all women are bitches — and we all are — the pronouncement is meaningless.

Of course, since all men are presumed to be credible, the issue of “credibility” itself is a meaningless pronouncement, when applied to men.  Saying that a man is credible is like saying “an apple is an apple” or describing a tangerine as being tangerine-y.  Under patriarchy, the words are synonymous, and synonyms cannot legitimately be used to define or describe one another.  Red flags should be raised, every time anyone tries.

Just like with the words “woman” and “bitch.”

ETA:  On May 8, 2012, msnbc.com reported that the original story reported by the Daily Male has been revealed to be a hoax.  See here for additional information and links. — Eds.

‘Men acting more depraved will cause men to act less depraved,’ say sex robot advocates

Today, msnbc.com reports on the emergence of robotic sex-dolls that are allegedly poised to take over the human prostitution industry and alleviate the harms to women of the global rape-trade.

Did I say “reports”?  Sorry, I meant acts as a stenographer for the gum-flapping of a sexologist and a “futurist with an interest in tourism” who recently co-authored a paper entitled “Robots, Men and Sex Tourism” for the current issue of Futures.  In that paper, the authors

envision a future where robotic prostitutes are the solution to the sex industry’s most glaring problems, such as human trafficking, human degradation and the spread of sexually transmitted infections.

They literally envision it, and make us envision it too, by presenting a vivid scenario of Amsterdam’s red-light district in a futuristic, post-sex-robot sci-fi/porn fantasy circa 2050, “playing off the Yab-Yum, once one of Amsterdam’s most exclusive brothels before its closure in 2008”:

The Yub-Yum is Amsterdam’s top sex club for business travelers located beside a 17th century canal house on the Singel. It is modern and gleaming with about 100 scantily clad blondes and brunettes parading around in exotic G-strings and lingerie. Entry costs $10,000 for an all inclusive service. The club offers a full range of sexual services from massages, lap dancing and intercourse in plush surroundings. The Yub-Yum is a unique bordello licensed by the city council, staffed not by humans but by androids. This situation came about due to an increase in human trafficking in the sex industry in the 2040s which was becoming unsustainable, combined with an increase in incurable STI’s in the city especially HIV which over the last decade has mutated and is resistant to many vaccines and preventive medicines. Amsterdam’s tourist industry is built on an image of sex and drugs. The council was worried that if the red light district were to close, it would have a detrimental effect on the city’s brand and tourism industry, as it seemed unimaginable for the city not to have a sex industry. Sex tourism is a key driver for stag parties and the convention industry.

The Yub-Yum offers a range of sexual gods and goddesses of different ethnicities, body shapes, ages, languages and sexual features. The club is often rated highly by punters on http://www.punternet.com and for the fifth year in a row, in 2049 was voted the world’s best massage parlor by the UN World Tourism Organization. The club has won numerous technology and innovation awards including the prestigious ISO iRobotSEX award. The most popular model is Irina, a tall, blonde, Russian exotic species who is popular with Middle Eastern businessmen. The tourists who use the services of Yub-Yum are guaranteed a wonderful and thrilling experience, as all the androids are programmed to perform every service and satisfy every desire.

All androids are made of bacteria resistant fiber and are flushed for human fluids, therefore guaranteeing no Sexual Transmitted Disease’s are transferred between consumers. The impact of Yub-Yum club and similar establishments in Amsterdam has transformed the sex industry alleviating all health and human trafficking problems. The only social issues surrounding the club is the resistance from human sex workers who say they can’t compete on price and quality, therefore forcing many of them to close their shop windows. All in all, the regeneration of Amsterdam’s sex industry has been about the success of the new breed of sex worker. Even clients feel guilt free as they actually haven’t had sex with a real person and therefore don’t have to lie to their partner.

It’s difficult to digest all this depravity in one sitting, but one is left wondering about the details: how is this supposed to “transform[] the sex industry alleviating all health and human trafficking problems”?  Some specificity would be nice, as well as some actual data to back up the claim which appears to be, essentially, that “letting men act more depraved will cause them to (somehow) act less depraved.”  Adding in what we do know, the proposition could be illustrated thusly:

1.  Design and build female-human-looking robots for men to stick their dicks into;

2.  Further normalize and perpetuate the current working definitions of “sex” and “sexual” which appear to be “a man sticking his dick into any object under any circumstances” and “whatever sensations a man might experience while sticking his dick into any object under any circumstances” respectively;

3.  ??

4.  Helps women.

What?  The discerning non-misogynist reader is left reeling, wondering and concerned, and with a multitude of unanswered questions, the first of which perhaps being “Is there somewhere we can view this ‘paper’ — and its footnotes — without having to pay for it?”

But instead of asking any of the dozens of obvious questions that immediately spring to mind, the stenographer writing msnbc.com’s tech beat leaves us with this to ponder: (of course they aren’t even the reporter I mean stenographer‘s own questions, but the questions fed to him by the paper’s authors)

Robot sex is safer sex, free from the constraints, precautions and uncertainties of the real deal, but regardless of how good the sex is, will we always continue to think of it as something less than fully human?

Are they suggesting we would be wrong if we did?

Men literally ‘front and center’ at Columbia University’s Take Back the Night

Because if men aren’t front and center, that means it’s not important.

Yesterday, the editorial board of Columbia University’s student newspaper announced that it supports the “gender-neutral approach” being implemented this year at Columbia’s annual Take Back the Night march.  Previously, the march organizers had a policy of allowing only women at the front of the march, acknowledging that women-only space for rape victims was important because of the traumatic nature of rape and the fact that almost all rapes are perpetrated by men on female victims.  TBTN organizers had previously stated that

[t]he women’s space was created to ensure that female survivors, co-survivors, and allies could participate without feeling afraid, intimidated, or triggered in a co-gendered environment.

And indeed, the editorial board of the Spectator acknowledges that this reasoning is sound:

the presence of men at the front could possibly be traumatic and be a barrier in creating a safe space for the rape survivors.

We understand the reasoning behind this approach. As TBTN’s recent press release stated, a significantly higher percentage of perpetrators of sexual assault are male. Having women at the front of the march can be a visual symbol for rape’s gendered status. Moreover, while we cannot claim to fully grasp the psychology of rape, we understand that the trauma of some female rape survivors with male perpetrators—who constitute the majority of rape victims—can lead them to feeling threatened and emotionally unsafe in the presence of men.

Could they be more patronizing at the end there?  I don’t think so.  As academented, overly educated babies, none of which have apparently been raped themselves, they cannot fully grasp the psychology of rape — psychology is important, you see.  As a patriarchal, pseudo-medical academic field, psychology is key to our understanding of the world, and key to our understanding of rape — not listening to rape survivors, who say that having men at the front of the march is triggering and intimidating.  The editorial board at the Spectator might easily avail themselves of some learning on the issue however, if they wanted to, being at a major university and all.  Lots of books there, although who knows what those books would actually say.  About the psychology.  Of rape.

And while the editorial board of the Spectator understand why female rape victims might feel threatened and emotionally unsafe in the presence of men, they simply don’t care.

Why?

Because gender.  Yes!  The editorial board at the Spectator apparently cannot tell the difference between sex and gender:

sexual assault is not just a women’s issue. Gender identity does not define who rapes or is raped. Men can be rape survivors, women can be perpetrators—and wherever oppression exists, sexual or otherwise, it is everyone’s issue. Having men at the front of the march can help illustrate that this issue transcends gender. Additionally, when some of the students who will be a valuable part of the march identify as transgender or reject gender identifications, it can become problematic to enforce a rule among gender lines. A gender-neutral approach is the only way for the march to be all-inclusive. By including more than just women at the front, TBTN is showing the many faces of rape survivors and allies in the community. As a show of inclusivity and solidarity, it can only strengthen the cause.

Rape is an issue that transcends gender alright: trans men are in danger of being raped and impregnated by men, and this is due entirely to their sex — they are female — and nothing to do with their gender at all.  So opening up the front of the march to all FAABs including trans men would indeed show that rape transcends gender — but of course, this is not what the Columbia Spectator or the organizers of this year’s TBTN have in mind.

No, the Columbia Spectator and the organizers of TBTN are trying to tell us that rape — and specifically stranger rape —  transcends sex, but of course that is not true.  In fact, TBTN was specifically created to address the problem of male-on-female stranger rape, and women’s reasonable fear of that, where women were and are not free to walk the streets at night without fearing for their safety and their lives.

From the TBTN history page:

Why Take Back the Night?

A woman walks alone down a dark, deserted street. With every shadow she sees, and every sound she hears, her pounding heart flutters and skips a beat. She hurries her pace as she sees her destination become closer. She is almost there. She reaches the front door, goes inside, collects herself, and moves on forgetting, at least for tonight, the gripping fear that momentarily enveloped her life. This scene could have occurred anywhere last night, last year, or even 100 years ago. Historically, women faced the anxiety of walking alone at night and that is why Take Back the Night began.

That is the history of TBTN.  TBTN was never meant to address the problem of “unwanted sex” as such, it was specifically designed to combat rape, that overtly political, interpersonal, biological and social oppression that male-bodied persons routinely visit on female-bodied persons cross-culturally and around the globe.  Rape, where the victim often feels — and is given every reason in the world to believe — that she will be killed after her rapist penetrates her with his penis and ejaculates into her vagina.  That she will never see her family again.  That her children will be left without a mother, because she was raped and murdered by a man.

And where female rape victims are left to agonize for weeks — if they survive — whether they have been impregnated against their wills; and where they must live with the knowing that it could happen again.  Because women are members of the rapeable class, and being raped once does not mean that it won’t happen again, and again, and again.

Men never have to deal with these consequences in their own lives, no matter what has happened to them, or who did it and why.  No.  These are the realities of rape, for female-bodied persons.  And men deliver these consequences onto women by raping us.

Placing men and men’s concerns literally front and center at TBTN is ahistorical, acontextual, and the organizers know it will be damaging to women — and the editorial board of the Spectator and the organizers of this year’s TBTN are demonstrating that they do not care.  That it will be damaging to women alone should be reason enough to not do it, but the truth is that there are other options that are apparently not even being explored; damaging women and disrupting women-only space is the first resort here, when it could be made the last resort — it could, if anyone cared even that much.  But they don’t.

Whoever believes there is a need, could encourage male crime victims to start their own movement, instead of leaching off of the women who started and continued TBTN for themselves and for other women because men can’t seem to stop raping us.  Let male victims start their own movement if it’s so important to them: let them amass their numbers in public and demand the kinds of change they want and need.

But do not let men — overwhelmingly the perpetrators of rape against both male and female victims — march in the front of, or take over, Take Back the Night.  And definitely don’t do it because gender.  That argument simply and obviously doesn’t hold any water at all.

Rape does not transcend sex.  Rape is the use of sex and its attendant reproductive consequences as a tool of political oppression by men against women.  Putting men literally front and center at this year’s TBTN is wrong.

Coverage of One Goh Murders Invisibilizes Male Violence Against Females – Again

How many women does a man have to kill to “target” them?  It seems the answer is “more than six.”

In early April, news outlets reported that One Goh, a former student at Oikos University, a small Christian college near Oakland, California, killed seven “people” at the school, which recently expelled him.

Early reports indicated that Goh walked into the single-story building housing the university, took a (female) receptionist hostage and went looking for a particular (female) administrator.  When Goh could not find his (female) target, Goh took the (female) receptionist  into a classroom, shot her  and ordered the (mostly female) students to line up against the wall, where he executed them.

Of those killed, six were women, but Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said “investigators do not know whether Goh was targeting women.”

So, Goh went to the school to look for a female administrator, and then shot six females, but the police do not know whether Goh targeted women? And the media accepts this?

Days after the murders, another news outlet addressed the “targeting of women” by Goh. That report noted that Goh, fueled by anger at the school and a particular (female) official, may have killed six females as proxy victims for the intended (female) target.  Countering the meme put forth by the MSM immediately after the killings that Goh murdered six women because of teasing over his poor English, Oikos nursing professor Romie John Delariman reported that Goh spoke perfect English but “had a problem working with females.”

“He can’t stand women,” Delariman told the Associated Press . “He said he never used to work with women, or deal with women in a work setting or a school setting.”  The husband of one of the victims confirmed that his wife feared Goh and predicted that Goh would do something like go on a murderous rampage – against females.

Hey, this looks like Goh targeted his victims based on sex.

We already know that males commit most violent crimes, with males committing 87% of all homicides. With rampage killings in particular, might it be helpful to know what motivates rampage killers? Say, in order to PREVENT it?

MSM’s failure to name the problem of male violence against females is not new.  A 2000 New York Times account of rampage killers noted that although “rampage killers were overwhelmingly male,” the presence of six females out of 102 cases examined led the Time to conclude that mental illness, not male violence, was the “problem.”  The Times study also did not bother to examine the sex of the four hundred twenty-five people killed and 510 people injured in these 102 cases, thus further avoiding the question of male violence against females in rampage killings in particular.  Another article that catalogs the “top” rampage killers suggests rather obliquely suggests that “problems with women” may have motivated some of the (male) killers, including Luby’s restaurant killer George Hennard and Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-hui.

Another notorious rampage killer – George Sodini – killed three women in an aerobics class in 2009 and even stated that he had “(n)o sex since July 1990,” but, apparently, that was proof of intent to murder based on class warfare, not hatred of females (or male entitlement to female bodies backed up with the threat of male violence).  Apparently, the only time the MSM will allow that a male targets females is when the killer himself indicates that motivation, as seen in the Montréal Massacre of 1989.  In that rampage, an anti-feminist, female-hating man murdered 14 women at the École Polytechnique after telling them “you’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.”

And in a post-secondary setting, where there are often more female students enrolled than male, it would seem reasonable to ask in every case whether targeting of specifically female victims was the intent, and an analogy made between “school shootings” in a university setting and a white man going into a predominantly black establishment and shooting the place up.  In the latter case, the discriminatory overtones would be easily recognizable — but in the case of university shootings, which are often predominantly female establishments, apparently, not so much.

See this chart demonstrating the “gender gap” in post-secondary enrollment in California showing that as of 2004, female enrollment outshines male, sometimes drastically so (depending on other factors such as ethnicity).  And Okios University specifically appears to have been well-known for its troubled nursing program, as well as offering degrees in Music, Theology and Asian Medicine.  Shooter One Goh himself had been enrolled in the nursing program before he dropped out (or was expelled) — a man with known “problems with women” who left the school perhaps feeling humiliated over his failure, while other (female?) students continued with their educations.

Were the students at Okios University predominantly female?  Was the nursing program in particular dominated by female students?  These are questions that immediately arise, yet statistics on enrollment by sex at Okios University following this mass woman-murder are not forthcoming, and a quick internet search does not reveal them.  Why not?

Six women shot dead in a university setting.  Male former nursing student did it.  Nursing program.  Nursing program.  Questions linger, and so far have yet to be satisfactorily addressed, but this is always the case when women are gunned down by men, including by men who are known to hate women and where only or predominantly women are targeted, or where the violence occurs at a predominantly female or female-only space.

The first question reporters should ask when they hear “he’s got a gun” is “how many women did he kill?,” “was it a female-only or female-dominated space?” and “how were his ‘issues with women’ manifesting before he targeted them for violence?”

Memorial service for victims from Okios University’s website.

Witches don’t exist, you know.

Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy has been commissioned to write a tribute to ten women who were executed for being witches four hundred years ago. Guardian’s Martin Wainright has some rather…interesting… things to say on the matter.

He sets the scene for his article by using a fictional, fantasy picture of witches (see above) which appears to have been lifted from some movie. The witches in the image are, of course, a joke. The picture is ironic. (Don’t you feminists have a sense of humour?) The murder of women should never be taken seriously. All a bit of a laugh. And it’s downhill from there. He describes Carol Duffy’s tribute as:

“a thoughtful celebration of ten women who were hanged for witchcraft 400 years ago”

From the way the sentence is written, we immediately get the feeling that what happened to these women was a rare, unique anomaly. That these particular ten women happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and, as bad luck would have it, they ended up dead. There is no mention at all of the systematic killing which lasted for centuries: the planned, premeditated, ongoing purge in which millions of women were killed by their paranoid rulers, men. He appears to be searching for reasons why the women were targeted:

“two of the women hanged at Lancaster castle aged over eighty and blind, another probably driven mad by a disfigured face with one eye lower than the other, and all ten convicted largely on the evidence of a nine-year-old child.”

Looking at the figures of the deaths at the time, the real question is not “Why were these women picked?” but “Why were those women spared?” Indeed Wainright would do better to ponder over the characteristics of the women who managed to survive the slaughter, not of the ones who were killed. For example, were they particularly meek? Unusually submissive? I think we’re on the right track.

Rather than honouring their deaths, he mockingly re-writes history:

“Their fate has always been controversial, with even contemporaries divided over whether they were genuine conspirators against the wobbly social order (their deaths in 1612 came seven years after the Gunpowder Plot), or victims of prejudice against ‘wise women’ herbalists whose village medicine sometimes went badly awry. They may alternatively have been a bit too feisty for the masculine establishment or simply the victims of feuds.”

A bit too feisty for the masculine establishment? Two of the women were over eighty years old. Wise women in scare quotes? Eh? And what does the gunpowder plot have to do with the price of fish? (Is he suggesting again that the executions were a rare occurence, a blip in an otherwize orderly and just world? Or is it a (what-about-teh-menz) men-were-sometimes-executed-too allusion?).

Village medicine sometimes went badly awry? Has he read about the botch jobs and butchering of bodies that took place, (and continues to take place), once men took over medicine? Does the author realise that in order to be taken seriously in this field men had to first kill off the women herbalists?

Why would the word of a child (male, I guess?) be taken more seriously than the word of the adults who were being charged with witchcraft?  Are we to believe that it’s insignificant that a woman’s word was worth shit in the eyes of the law? If the child had pointed out a couple of powerful men instead of two old women, would they too have been marched off to be hanged? (And it’s funny how children are rarely believed when it comes to the crimes men commit against them–crimes that actually exist– such as sexual abuse)

Why is it acceptable to depict the executed women in any other light other than innocent victims?  From where I’m standing, there is nothing “controversial” about the Burning Times/ Witch-craze. Any moreso than the killing of the Jews, or slavery.

There’s controversial, and then there’s wrong.

Perhaps he thinks witches did actually exist? Is the notion of “controversy” connected to the possibility (in his mind) that the ten women may have been witches? [Grasping at straws here]

But the more pressing question is:

Would it be appropriate to write an article about the hollocaust headed by a photograph of rats… simply because the propaganda at the time depicted the Jews as sub-human?

I think not.

ETA: Since this post was written, (and following a complaint by a commenter called nihonshu) the original “three witches” photograph used for the article has now been changed.