Anti-violence campaigns like White Ribbon are all about men being “part of the solution”. Around White Ribbon Day each November, for example, men are encouraged to “Take the Pledge”, go on anti-violence marches, and do more to speak out against the crisis of male violence against women.
And fair enough, too, because this crisis is one of the most important we face as a society. In New Zealand, a third of all women experience physical violence from a partner. Globally, a third of all women will be beaten or raped in their lifetime.
Some people see this increased activity by men in anti-violence campaigns as progressive — as feminist successes. But I don’t think they are. And I can’t bring myself to support them because, by and large, they’re just too white and too polite.
Anti-violence campaigns like White Ribbon are too polite because they’re silent on the true causes of male violence. They don’t challenge the systems of power that create the violence in our society. They don’t push men to ask uncomfortable questions about our own role in supporting these systems of power.
And that’s a serious problem, because it means they won’t spark the big change we need.
Male violence doesn’t come out of nowhere. Men aren’t born to hit and rape. Very few men are sociopaths, with no sense of right and wrong. Men hit and rape because we live in a system of power that puts men on top and women at the bottom. It’s this system that not only trains men to hit and rape, but also lets them get away with it at the rate that they do.
Feminists call this “patriarchy”. A blunter term is “male supremacy”. I like this term because it’s honest and direct. It doesn’t beat around the bush. It makes it clear who’s on top and who’s on the bottom.
A lot of men and women dislike these terms, because they don’t square with how we like to think of ourselves as a society. Isn’t this a country that takes equality seriously? Where everyone has a “fair go”? Where women are freer than in most other countries? Don’t we have a proud and ongoing history of strong women leaders?
Well, yes. But a system of power isn’t defined by the few individuals who make it to leadership positions or excel. They’re the exceptions, not the rule.
If we look at the realities, we can see clear signs of the inequality between men and women.
In New Zealand, women are over-represented among the poor. We still have a gender pay gap where women get paid less than men. And, globally, women make up more than half the world’s population and do two-thirds of the work. But they get only 10 percent of the world’s income and own only one percent of the world’s wealth.
Women may no longer be treated as men’s property in countries like ours — though it wasn’t so long ago that they were — but they’re still subjected to sexist stereotypes and institutionalised practices that treat them as objects.
Look at the global multi-billion-dollar pornography and prostitution industries. Look at the music, entertainment and beauty industries. All these industries treat women as objects and their sexuality as a commodity — as something that can be bought and sold. And, if you’re treated as an object, then it follows that you’re less than human.
Male violence against women is so routine under the male supremacy culture because we’ve been brought up in a world where masculinity is based on domination and control.
From the time we’re born, men are taught to avoid things too closely connected to femininity and women. To struggle for supremacy in social relationships. And to repress all those emotions that we think of as feminine.
Being a “real man” is defined by how well you can dominate others — whether on the sports field, at school, at work, or in your romantic relationships. If you can’t do this well, you won’t measure up. You’ll be called a “sissy”, a “fag”, a “homo”.
This model of masculinity doesn’t just do untold damage to the emotional lives of boys. It also makes men dangerous to each other — and to women and children. This is because the first group of people that boys are taught to exercise dominance over is females: women and girls.
This comes through clearly if we look at sex. We’re not taught to see sex as an intimate way of relating to another person and deepening our connection to them. Instead, we’re taught that sex is an arena for exercising power over women.
That’s why when we talk with each other about our sexual activities — in all-male spaces like the locker room and the gym (where there are no women around to hear what we say) — the language we use is often about dominating and controlling women. It’s a language of possession, ownership and violation.
When you combine this with a world where women are turned into sex objects, where they’re bought and sold (as they are through prostitution, stripping, and pornography), the predictable result is a world where violence, sexualised violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex is so common it’s seen as normal.
This doesn’t mean the dominant culture says rape is okay. It doesn’t. But the culture does endorse a model of masculinity that makes rape inviting.
This culture is why the All Blacks can choose to party at a strip club after winning the World Cup and not attract much public criticism for giving money to an industry that’s based on sexual exploitation and slavery.
It’s the reason people were critical of the journalists who broke the story — for “bad form” in “telling” on the boys, trying to ruin their “fun”, and not letting “boys just be boys”.
And why we can legalise the prostitution industry, which is based on commercialised rape — and not see anything wrong with it. Not see how it reinforces male supremacy’s rape culture.
But anti-violence campaigns like White Ribbon don’t say anything about patriarchy as a system of power. They’ll talk about physical violence. They’ll talk about emotional and psychological violence.
But they don’t link this violence to the economic, political, and cultural violence that male supremacy is based on. Nor do they link it to the violence of poverty and economic inequality that women suffer from. Or to the violence of militarism that women suffer from. Or the violence of pornography and prostitution that women suffer from.
We’re yet to see anti-violence campaigns like White Ribbon make these connections, and seriously discuss them. These campaigns will talk about the violence that an individual man will do to an individual woman. But they won’t talk about the forms of violence such as pornography and prostitution that are institutionalised forms of male dominance.
They don’t see these global sexual-exploitation industries as commercialised forms of rape: as rape that is paid for. But that’s what they are. The vast majority of prostitutes don’t sell their bodies because they want to have sex but because they come from backgrounds of homelessness, poverty, debt slavery, alcohol and drug addictions — and childhood sexual abuse. They experience incredibly high rates of violence and sexual abuse. And the transaction itself — men buying women to sexually access their bodies — is itself a special form of violence. These circumstances mean that the idea of “consent” is a cruel joke for most women in prostitution.
And yet these anti-violence campaigns still haven’t taken our government to task for legally sanctioning this form of sexual exploitation by decriminalising prostitution through the Prostitution Reform Act of 2003.
This law gave women and other prostitutes much-needed legal protections and support services that the previous legal regime denied them. But it also created a legal climate which says that for a man to go out on a Saturday night and buy a woman for sex — treating her like a thing, and exploiting her desperate circumstances — is basically okay.
As the pornography and prostitution industries are growing, they’re becoming more mainstream and they’re shaping and influencing popular culture — the music, fashion and entertainment industries.
This is creating the perfect social conditions, the perfect storm, for intensifying the rape crisis nationally and globally.
But anti-violence campaigns like White Ribbon are yet to challenge these sexual-exploitation industries, and their legalisation, in any serious or sustained way.
And, instead of seeing male violence against women as rooted in male supremacy, they simply focus on trying to build “respectful relationships” between partners and minimising the physical and emotional violence that goes on within these intimate relationships.
That’s like trying to turn off the stove when your whole house is burning.
If they were less polite, we’d be having serious discussions about how rugby and military culture is based on sacrificing our boys to a masculinity that will not only prepare them psychologically and emotionally to kill each other, but also to habitually destroy the lives of women.
We’d be picketing outside brothels and strip clubs to challenge the men going into them — and make it clear that what they’re doing is wrong.
We’d be staging sit-ins at the headquarters of the pimps who own these brothels and strip clubs — men like John and Michael Chow — and apply pressure to shut them down because they’re making money off the sexual abuse and exploitation of women.
We’d be shouting down political leaders at party conferences and voting them out of Parliament for closing down rape centres, for not closing the pay gap, and for minimising the voices of the victims of sexual violence.
We’d be tearing down Maxim, FHM and other “lads’ mags” for promoting the idea that women are little more than men’s sexual props.
These organised collective actions are how you change institutionalised power. Just trying to change how we talk to each other, and touch and feel each other is not a solution, as the feminist Andrea Dworkin puts it — it’s a recreational break.
Anti-violence campaigns aren’t just too polite. They can often be too white. They seem to treat violence against women as if it’s a problem men can address without facing up to three realities.
One is the effect of colonisation. Another is the institutionalised racism of white supremacy. And a third is the impact of corporate capitalism which concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, deepens poverty, and frequently damages or destroys the environment in the pursuit of economic growth.
These anti-violence campaigns treat the problem of male violence against women like it’s not connected to these wider systems of power.
But we don’t just live in a male supremacy system. Masculinity is also shaped by race and class, by capitalism and white supremacy.
Boys who are white, rich, or middle-class, for instance, can draw on their race and class privilege to go after the white collar qualifications and managerial jobs that will allow them entry into the leadership roles of society’s economic and political institutions.
Most Māori and other Pasifika boys don’t have access to this “first class” masculinity: a white masculinity. What they get forced to conform to, instead, is a “second class” masculinity. It’s a black and brown masculinity. It’s a model of masculinity that devalues intellectual achievement and prioritises athletic prowess. Being “hard”. Being physical.
This model of masculinity offers Māori boys, other Pasifika boys, and working-class boys the chance to realise a certain measure of social status and acclaim by over-achieving in sport. But it also plays a role in the psychological and intellectual stunting of our boys. And it locks them into narrow educational paths with few options other than sport, the military and the construction site (not as managers, but as the manual labour). Or prison.
The realities of white supremacy and colonisation also mean that Māori and Pasifika women don’t have the same experiences of male violence as most other women.
Every woman, regardless of class, race, or culture, is always at risk of sexual harassment, aggression and assault from men of all classes, ethnicities and culture. But Māori and Pasifika women experience the highest levels of economic hardship, the highest rates of sexual violence, and the greatest burden of keeping tamariki safe and keeping whānau/fanau together.
They bear the brunt of race-based inequality and poverty. And Māori, in particular, as tangata whenua, continue to experience the effects of colonisation.
That’s why Māori women are over-represented in prostitution: an industry that represents the social bottom for women.
All this means you can’t separate the rape crisis from the colonisation crisis. And you shouldn’t treat anti-violence campaigns like they’re separate from decolonisation struggles. At the centre of those struggles are the experiences, voices and interests of Māori women, the Māori community, and other indigenous peoples of the Pacific.
Anti-violence campaigns that don’t acknowledge this state of affairs won’t be able to fully engage Māori and Pasifika men, and even less, Māori and Pasifika women. That’s because the realities that we’re deeply concerned about, and that our people are dying from every day, are the realities of the New Zealand settler culture propped up by a political and economic system that keeps Māori and Pasifika at the bottom of New Zealand’s socio-economic ladder.
Have a look, for instance, at how anti-violence campaigns say they’re concerned about the family violence that Māori women experience, but won’t link these high rates of abuse with a history of not only institutionalised racism, but more importantly, of ongoing Crown criminality and violence against Māori.
Think about how anti-violence programmes are happy to put Māori or Pasifika All Blacks and other sportspeople on their posters and media campaigns but won’t discuss the politics of race that Western-dominated sports industries are based on — and which treats our Māori and other Pasifika boys as global commodities to be used for profit as long as they’re productive.
Most of what I’ve said here will make some people uncomfortable because it’s not part of the polite type of talk that’s so characteristic of mainstream media and most of what you’ll hear in Parliament.
But it’s exactly this politeness with all its silences about male power, about racial and class oppression, that we need to abandon.
If we’re going to develop men’s anti-violence campaigns that can help our Māori and Pasifika boys escape “the masculinity trap” that a white-supremacy, patriarchal culture has lined up for them, we need to teach them the need for moral courage. They don’t need politeness. They need the courage to look honestly at all of the systems of power that we live within.
This process of decolonisation means we need to learn and reclaim our own histories that we are not taught at school (as Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu says) because it’s these histories that can provide us with the knowledge and confidence to move beyond the limited and damaging models imposed by the dominant culture.
Decolonisation also means seeing the need to link anti-violence campaigns with anti-colonial and anti-racism struggles.
And it involves doing something that we men have so far not been very good at. Listening to women.
Most of what I’ve learned about male supremacy and decolonisation struggles, I’ve learned from women.
Women like my mother, Grace Mera Molisa, who was the first indigenous radical feminist that I knew. She was one of Vanuatu’s leaders in our struggle for independence against the British and the French. All her life, she fought for women’s rights in Vanuatu, throughout the Pacific, and on the global stage.
She fought against the way male leaders went about the business of systematically cutting women out of the leadership roles of the new Republic after independence had been gained.
Despite the cost to her health and life, she fought against anyone and everyone who dared to say indigenous people, indigenous women, and all women, were anything less than fully human. She’s the one who first taught me the meaning of moral courage. And she’s the one I continue to use as a guide on how to live a meaningful and morally principled life.
She was all this, and more. And yet, like most boys I know, whenever she tried to teach me these truths about the world, about life, I never truly listened. Whenever she sat me down to talk — about growing up, about the future, about what it should mean to be a man — I always saw this as lecturing and nagging.
It was only when she died, in 2002, that I finally listened.
Her death came as a huge shock to me, and in my grief, I vowed to do a PhD that took me a long 10 years to complete, and to dedicate the rest of my life to keeping the political and cultural values that she stood for. That was to honour her memory and keep her spirit and legacy alive.
My mother didn’t just understand how masculinity and male supremacy make the world and men dangerous for women. She could also see how those influences in Vanuatu and New Zealand society were making me lose the humanity that I had. And placing important barriers between me and the women in my family.
That’s an insight that I think all men can, at some level, appreciate. It’s that our identification with patriarchy always comes at the price of losing our humanity.
If we’re ever going to have any chance of escaping “the masculinity trap” and help women bring an end to rape, it’s going to have to be through the process of political struggle that feminists lay out. We men must struggle alongside women to take apart and transform all the domination and subordination that come from patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.
By criticising mainstream anti-violence campaigns, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m somehow more enlightened than other men. I’m not. Reading a few feminist texts and taking part in anti-violence campaigns, doesn’t change the fact that, like all other men, I still walk around with forms of male privilege — with all the sexist blind spots that entails.
I still battle with a lot of the sexist forms of male behaviour I’m talking about. I don’t go to strip clubs or use pornography any more, but it took me many years to give that up.
Learning how to open up, trust, and love is a constant struggle, and my actions still don’t match my rhetoric.
So what I’m trying to do here is to begin the first step of trying to honestly discuss these issues. But if an anti-violence campaign like White Ribbon were to tackle these issues head-on, I’ll be the first person to sign up.
PALA MOLISA
Pala Molisa is Ni-Vanuatu, went to Nelson College, and studied Law and Accounting at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW). He teaches as a Lecturer at VUW’s School of Accounting and Commercial Law, Victoria Business School. His PhD, “Accounting for Apocalypse”, looks at how accounting helps reinforce the social inequalities and financial and ecological crises that global capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and other related systems of power produce. His current research is looking at how accounting helps to structure and facilitate the development of Pacific aid, the sexual-exploitation industries, State-indigenous relations, and the climate crisis.
All Blacks party at strip club
The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy Of The Global Sex Trade
Tackling Maori Masculinity, Brendan Hokowhitu
Colonising Myths — Māori realities
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Absolutly awesome piece of
Absolutly awesome piece of writing which I came to via https://twitter.com/RachelRMoran never saw any reference to it in NZ media. I love you bro for this and all respect to you and your family
I could have heard all of
I could have heard all of this stuff about the evils and sin involved with sex work at my local evangelical Christian church. No doubt that’s where this Polynesian author received his indoctrination too.
Hi Simon, FYI, Vanuatu is in
Hi Simon, FYI, Vanuatu is in Melanesia.
Hi Simon,
Hi Simon,
Actually, you won’t hear about male supremacy that much in Church because the Church is also a bastion of patriarchal culture. Christianity preaches about love and equality, but most churches affirm the patriarchal family, do not challenge sex industrialists, pornographers or pimps, and use passages in the Bible to justify men’s subordination and exploitation of women in the home. Most churches also won’t talk that much about the role of neoliberal globalization, imperialism and militarization in facilitating the rise and development of the global sex trade or that it’s the men who profit and patronize it who benefit the most from the sexual exploitation of women. I didn’t learn all this from white evangelical churches. I learnt all this from Melanesian decolonization and feminist struggles.
Hi Simon.
Hi Simon.
Just want to say that your presumption that “polynesian” people must be indoctrinated by evangelical churches is a belittling racist stereotype. Pala shows amazing patience below in not telling you to piss off.
I see the issue of sex work
I see the issue of sex work in a more nuanced light than you. The earlier comments have covered the issue well, and I’d just like to join their call for legislation which doesn’t prohibit sex work, but which establishes appropriate working conditions in the sex work area so that it can be said that the decision to work in the field is in fact made freely, and that there is no more exploitation in this area of employment than in any other. Let’s also reflect on our attitudes towards sex generally. Why do men go to sex workers and not so many women? Why do we think it’s a weakness when a person wants to buy sex? Maybe if it was as acceptable to buy sex as it is to buy a hamburger, the nature of our other relationships may shift.
Kia ora koutou Pala and
Kia ora koutou Pala and followers.
I only have time to touch on a few of your opinions Pala, so by no means is this an exhaustive critique.
I notice that you mention sex work many times, and whenever you do, you switch to talking about women as passive objects and victims ‘being brought and sold’, and seem to blame sexual violence on sex workers; asserting that it’s a ”predictable result” of sex work:
Quote: ”When you combine this with a world where women are turned into sex objects, where they’re bought and sold (as they are through prostitution, stripping, and pornography), the predictable result is a world where violence, sexualised violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex is so common it’s seen as normal.” Unquote.
Note: sex workers are not passive victims, they are people who have voices and opinions, and they do not want you campaigning against their existence.
You also speak of Maori women experiencing ”the highest rates of sexual violence”, and seem to tie this with Maori women in sex work, however, there is no *credible* research which follows: it has been shown that sex workers experience sexual violence at no higher rates than students or health workers. And goodness me, let’s not quote Farley or Dworkin! Their work has been discredited and shown to be absolutely full of poorly conducted and biased ”research” time and time again – not to mention Dworkin openly hating sex workers and transgender women.
On to ”commercialised rape”.
Sex workers are not selling their bodies, they are selling a service – like your dentist, physiotherapist, massage therapist. Like someone working in an aged care home on low wages, yes there can be varying levels of job satisfaction and various labour rights issues, however these occupations are not ”commercialised slavery”, and those employed in sex work are not being ”commercially raped”.
Sex workers do not see their occupation as ”’an industry that represents the social bottom for women”, but as employment with flexible hours, and as a job where they can have a high degree of autonomy over their work (please see the Report to the Prostitution Law Review Committee, conducted by The Christchurch School of Medicine, entitled ”The Impact of the Prostitution Reform Act on the Health and Safety Practices of Sex Workers”, as this has accurate information on the reasons why people in Aotearoa start sex work, how long they stay in sex work, the ages and genders of people who are sex workers, why people stay in sex work, whether they want to leave sex work, even what they spend their money on.
It is so important that we have evidence supporting our claims about sex workers, and that anyone wanting to support Maori sex workers is listening en mass to the voices of Maori sex workers.
Yep. The need for action
Yep. The need for action against structural discrimination, violence against women, people of colour, diverse sexual identity, status.
The action needs to come from those who understand and all who have privilege must learn to listen, concede and not to defend their /our ground. Power to you, thanks.
Hey there, I’ve seen this
Hey there, I’ve seen this shared a bit and I can see why peeps like it but please just remember sex work is not “commericalised rape” and it is not right or safe to say this or sell out sex workers as a target to make a point, remember they are people, not just ‘ideas’. Sex work is not rape. That kind of mentality is called ‘whorephobia’ or sexwork-phobia and is really harmful to workers, it’s harmful to their safety to be isolated and judged. Also the kind of mentality of SWERFS (sex worker exclusionary radical feminists) who are also often TERFS (trans exclusionary radical feminists) is very much something that is associated with so-called white feminism or the feminism of privilege too and lacks any kind of safe feeling class analysis as sex work is often carried out by people from all backgrounds. This article has some good stuff but also some really uncomfy stuff so please be sure to consider this – it’s very important we don’t call something rape on behalf of others, that’s not our place. That’s their body and those are their words to own. Imagine if a sex worker reads this and finds that someone else is telling them they’re letting themselves be raped. That’s not good and it’s not right nor kind. We must respect each other as the top priority INCLUDING sex wokers. <3 Thank you for reading <3
a brilliantly thought
a brilliantly thought provoking piece. Thank you for raising the All Blacks post-match trip to the strip club which was glossed over at the time.
Before actually reading the
Before actually reading the entire article:
I tend to use the term “Rape Culture”. It’s blunt BUT it also points out that it’s a culture. During my whole “holy crap! It’s everywhere and I am an unwitting part of it” revelation, it was important to note that it’s perpetrated EVERYWHERE. It’s in the music we listen to, television, advertising, how we react to news, everyday interactions (I witnessed an incident where woman in a discussion had their arms raised waiting their turn to speak while men just jumped in and dominated the conversation) etc. It’s even perpetrated by a lot of woman a lot of the time.
Want to be part of the solution? Notice it. Get angry about it. If you’re, like me, a man, try to see the thousand and one cuts everyday and know that this can not be anything but an emotional subject.
Perfect article, excellent
Perfect article, excellent words and mindset. Thanks for sharing and actively contributing to the common good!
So refreshing to hear about
So refreshing to hear about male dominance, patriarchy or male supremacy from a men who understands what he is talking about. Well done Pala! You have made your mother extremely proud. We need more male champions to champion the cause of women”s inequalities in the world over.
Kind regards
AKLT
Article over-simplifies male
Article over-simplifies male privilege as the root for intimate partner violence, and omit substantial facts that include not all men are physically violent towards their partners, neither are perpetrators homogeneous in their violence, nor the simple fact that other men, primarily younger men, are and have always been the greatest victims of violence. These simple facts negate all relative positions feminists pose regarding this so-called ‘epidemic’.
Suggesting that only men and all men commit violence against their partners is ridiculous and no body of evidence to date can support such claims. Even if we consider a broader understanding of IPV to include emotional and psychological harm, and adjust for trends in same-sex relationships, women are recognised as equal perpetrators, albeit the more flippant forms of violence.
While the trauma of IPV should never be minimized, the focus on the most extreme examples of IPV (e.g fatalities) which are often perpetrated by men are also the smallest in incidence relative to all forms of IPV, and thereby diminishes more subtle examples such as emotional and psychological forms of violence, which has been scrutinized as pandering to social political agendas on par with other campaigns including poverty, indigenous and disability rights.
If we are honestly talking domestic, private domain and consider violence in the home, women are in fact greater perpetrators of violence towards children if forms of abuse such as emotional and neglect, which represent the greatest incidence of abuse, are considered in the definition of violence, as welfare institutions have done. And lets not get started on abortion.
Further, violence against other males, not women nor children, has led all statistic for all time since the construct on measures, and this is what the statistics will show as the epidemic. But no. Apparently the lives of females are more important. And they are. As important as children and males.
It is glaring that violence is prevalent in our society and both genders practice it widely. Everybody has a view, but I don’t agree with demonizing men and all women are victims. If we consider other lens of privilege such as white privilege, white women are more privileged than both ethnic men and women especially in developed countries and there goes this so called male privilege.
White Ribbon has its place but feature as a gimmick. If society want to address violence against women, it first must address violence in general, which includes across all cultural, social and political spheres.
Thanks for your very strong
Thanks for your very strong piece. I would add one more struggle to those that need to be included in the fightback that you have advanced, and that is regarding people who are same-sex attracted, who have a gender identity that may not align with their physical sex, and intersex people. The colonial gender roles impact on everyone who belongs to this diverse grouping. Because the ‘white colonial system’ is so invested in pigeon-holing and according privileges everyone based on perceptions of gender, we are right in the firing line, both male and female identified. The remnants of church-driven dogmas in our Pacific societies only serve to reinforce the attitudes to ‘non-masculinity’ … I hope that we and our circumstances can be included in the ongoing dialogue. Warm regards.
“Too white and too polite.”
“Too white and too polite.” Great analysis. I’m a passionate advocate for men’s roles in ending men’s violence against women, and I thought this was a great contribution. I quoted it in a presentation today at a domestic violence conference in Canberra, Australia.
Absolutely nailed it! I am
Absolutely nailed it! I am gonna share this.
From my experience, men need to know about this power and control imbalance – it’s not something we’re taught. I used to think that a woman’s violence towards a man was the same as a man’s violence towards a woman…but one of those (most of the time) doesn’t involve fear. And think about what we’ve been taught by our father and other men in our lives. When you’re angry, you get violent…and anger is the only acceptable emotion for me. I could go on forever – great jobm, Pala
So refreshing to read this
So refreshing to read this article and so very true. I work in a field that supports women and children affected by Domestic Violence. Throughout my career I have been challenged by questions that put the emphasis on victims to “fix” the problem (i.e. why doesn’t she leave?) Domestic Violence is a men’s issue – not women’s, and all the ideas, comments and criticisms you speak of need addressing.
I urge the author to listen
I urge the author to listen to the voices of women who experience monetised sex (prostitution, etc.) not as exploitative of women but as empowering. Describing these professions collectively as ‘rape’ and ‘the social bottom’ for women comes from the perspective that women need to be ‘protected’ and have no autonomy to frame their own professions how they choose. Don’t go to strip clubs if you don’t want to, but thinking that selling sex is collectively beneath women (the paternalistic protector stance) isn’t a feminist position.
Great point, Anna. I find
Great point, Anna. I find this argument can be made about many areas of feminism, especially when it’s males making comment. I often find myself struggling to figure out if there is one correct views on things like this, or if — as is true in many things — it’s a complicated and delicate mix of both?
“She could also see how those
“She could also see how those influences in Vanuatu and New Zealand society were making me lose the humanity that I had. And placing important barriers between me and the women in my family.” Not sure if you will read this Pala but that is how I felt about boarding for all the guys that survived their time at NC. I would watch boys come in, young, a bit nervous, human and I would see that slowly get lost. As boys became increasingly distanced from their whanau, the mamas, sisters, aunties, they found it increasingly easy to objectify women. I grew up bearing the brunt of that – being one of three or four girls on a campus with 200 boys. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that our PhDs each try to deal with power, inequality and patriarchy in their own ways. Awesome piece. S.
I don’t quite buy the line
I don’t quite buy the line about a white-dominated culture being a factor in Pasifika and Maori violence.
Consider Samoa. At a glance, the domestic violence rates in Samoa, where we can assume there is less influence from white culture, are pretty abysmal. Moreover, I’m also fairly certain my grandmother could vouch for the notion that violence against women in Samoan culture predates contact with Europeans.
What a penetrating analysis.
What a penetrating analysis. Congratulations to you and your mother.
Thank you… this post has
Thank you… this post has certainly given me something to think about, and has prompted me to revisit my own beliefs.
But how do u tackle this
But how do u tackle this stuff head on? Just keep on talking about it?
Nicely articulated and up
Nicely articulated and up front. I have a posibble way forward to help as well. Men must first acknowledge that they are violent, own it and then fix it. This must happen first before finding the cause of the violent behaviour towards women. A mere walk down a wrong path if the focus is on patriarchal culture, white supremacy and the masculinity trap. The person must first own their problem and then find remedies to fix it.
Wow, this made me tear up. It
Wow, this made me tear up. It’s refreshing to hear a perspective that not only understands and owns the power dynamic, but can identify opportunities for change. Thank you for being brave Pala.
Beautifully articulated…to
Beautifully articulated…to also add -paraphrasing Steinem, until we do right by Women, Papatuanuku will continue to suffer.
Magical
Magical
That’s like trying to turn
That’s like trying to turn off the stove when your whole house is burning.
Tautoko this analogy, and its
Tautoko this analogy, and its message. But wrote a poem about it, too.
THE STOVE
Make no mistake –
I am on the stove.
The house, the world,
is on fire.
Your analogy.
My world is on fire.
In my world,
I am in the kitchen.
I am on the stove.
I am a woman.
In your analogy,
A man’s house
is on fire.
In a man’s house
Who is in the kitchen?
A woman.
On the stove.
Turn off the stove.
Turn off the stove.
Turn off the stove.