Tag: sexism

Is air conditioning sexist?

Good-Joke-2014-Feminist-Logic

Greetings comrades, tonight we will be exploring a new frontier in social justice: air conditioning. Let’s listen to Comrade Sanghani break it down for us:

Now let’s take a look at what the Communist News Network has to say concerning this issue:

All feminists need to create a most equal society is more power and most importantly, more money. You may not have known before that air conditioning is sexist but now you do. Perhaps a more important question is: what isn’t sexist? What new boundaries will social justice push? What new slights and insults will be discovered? Perhaps gay men are sexist for not wanting to have sex with women? Subscribe to Poor Me! magazine to find out!

Poor_Me_Magazine_Issue_2_Zakaria   Poor_Me_Magazine_Issue_1

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These thoughtcriminals dared to scoff at the valiant feminists in the videos. Off to the gulag with them!

JessicaJones MarkNardone

 

Prog_Off

Honestly, how is one supposed to satirize such a story? What could I add to make feminism seem any more ridiculous? I could always identify actual restrictions of liberty and persecution for them. How about Iran, where it is a matter of national policy to follow Sharia and execute homosexuals? We could look at South Africa, where one in four men admit to committing rape? I guess that it’s the white man’s fault that Iran executes homosexuals. Based upon one of the Puffington Host articles I found about South Africa that’s what progressives seem to be doing:

The South African Constitution is arguable one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, for innumerable reasons, but for the purposes of this blog post, I want to focus on the fact that Section 9, Subsection 3 specifically prohibits discrimination against people on the basis of their sexual orientation.

What is it with progressives and thinking that a piece of paper alone does anything? If no one believes in it, the piece of paper does not matter.

The problem, though, is that there seems to be a gap in South Africa between the legal realm and the sociocultural realm. And in this gap appears the phenomenon known as ‘corrective’ rape. Corrective rape is a phenomenon wherein a homosexual person is raped as a means of ‘correcting’ their sexual orientation. In most cases, the victims are black lesbians. This phenomenon takes place in other countries as well, but for the purposes of this post I’m focusing on South Africa.

So this has to do with Zulu and Xhosa culture right?

In South Africa most cases of corrective rape are against black lesbians, and I’m going to analyze this phenomenon in the context of a post-apartheid South Africa deeply embedded in a culture of heteronormativity. I read a very enlightening article by Megan Morrissey in the journal Womyn’s Studies in Communication, which talks about the discourse among black South Africans around corrective rape. In the article Morrissey discusses the common argument from black Africans that the practice of homosexuality is un-African, something brought about during colonization.

Did “heteronormativity” not exist in South Africa before some Dutch settlers founded Cape Town? Didn’t take long to blame the white man for what other people do. The Boer Republics that existed in the 19th century occupied completely different lands than the Zulu and Xhosa kingdoms occupied anyway. Based upon what the author is writing it seems like this phenomenon has happened before. Oh yeah, and the author uses “womyn” instead of women.

Many people quoted and interviewed in the article state that homosexuality is exclusive to the white man and his culture. By distancing black African culture from homosexuality, these people marginalize black gay Africans from their own culture. There is a further alienation of black lesbians, who would only be allowed back into the larger culture if their non-normative sexual orientation changed. So men subject these womyn to corrective rape as a ‘rite of passage’ back into the culture, because they believe that this act would force these womyn to ‘submit,’ become heterosexual, and assume their ‘proper’ role in society.

Even though the crime is being committed by someone else, the evil white man is to blame for someone else’s culture.

In South Africa, homosexuality is associated with white culture, and because of the years of apartheid rule, there exist tensions between black and white cultures in South Africa. Homophobia and violence, in the form of corrective rape, is a means to marginalize the white culture and regain a nationalistic identity that they believe was stolen from them due to years of colonization and apartheid.

Corrective rape is thus, on a very general level, a post-colonial and post-apartheid reaction to the white culture in South Africa. This explanation does not excuse their actions, but is does trace the violence back to the source. The question is: What next? The reason that corrective rape has persisted is that there has been a cultural, social, and even legal normalization and acceptance of the practice.

So, black South Africans are doing what they did before the British Empire pushed the Boer Republics and black African nations together in the same country? This is the fault of the Dutch, Boer Republics, and British? Amazing logic.

There needs to be a cultural and social resocialization and subsequent normalization of homosexuality in South Africa, and the first step toward ensuring that the citizens accept non-normative sexuality is to show that the state supports it. To do that, the state needs to provide legal and political recourse for victims and survivors of corrective rape in South Africa.

So South Africa needs to undergo “resocialization” does it? I thought that progressives believed that “indigenous” cultures should be left alone? The author, Ms. Okafor, doesn’t seem to realize that politics follows culture. Ms. Okafor might not also realize that reality doesn’t work like McMaster University. South Africa is a crime-ridden hellhole, and that’s probably not changing anytime soon.

The Guardian-Iran executes three men

Time-South Africa’s Rape Crisis: 1 in 4 Men Say They’ve Done It

Huffington Post-‘Corrective’ Rape in South Africa: Targeted Violence of Homsexual Womyn