by Lava Flow
Picture this; almost half of your town’s population has become undercover police officers and most of your friends are harassed and attacked by them. Imagine that two out of five emergency room visits are now because of police violence. That the non-police half of the populace are now living in constant wariness. You yourself have stopped going outside after dark. Your roommate has been acting strange and you suspect him of being an agent…
Would you consider this a state of emergency? Low-level warfare? Would you deem this political or would it seem personal, a matter between the individuals involved?
Well, let me lay some statistics on you, and I quote my T-shirt: In the USA half of all women experience an intimate relationship with an abuser, one in four women are raped by the male “date”, every nine seconds a man beats a woman, a man rapes 1 out of 3 women, a male partner kills a woman every two hours.
How does this touch my life? A painter friend tells me her father raped her and her sister all their childhood. A musician friend says a man raped her with a knife. A writer mourns her friend, left on the side of the road, drugged, raped and killed. My friends strip so they can make as much money as some “real worker” guy who drives the road repair machinery. And I am walking around after dusk curfew, aside from me, the pedestrians are all men, comfortable men, sauntering around, thinking their own private thoughts, maybe stoned, maybe drunk, at home in a world made for them. Perhaps a police car drives by and they momentarily freeze. Oh, if all I had to fear was a uniformed man in a brightly marked car!
Do you have a class-based analysis? I’ll quote United Nations figures: Women do 70% of the world’s work, earn 10% of the world’s pay, and own 1% of the world’s property. But how easily despised is the rich woman in furs who is buying the stairway to heaven? Like the corporate receptionist, she is a buffer between us and the rich elite males. Women and children are 80% of the homeless in this nation. Women and children are an economic class or caste in themselves. So much for the noble burly-man worker of the world.
Sometimes I see the pyramid of control more like an ice berg. The visible tip is the corporate state, rich men and uniformed men doing violence to other men. But the state is a formulation of the father-controlled family unit. The huge, underwater part of that state consists of men who police women at home, work, on the streets. The obvious agents of force need only be relatively few because men are doing the work of the state, terrorizing (or supporting the terror with silence) and keeping the majority of the population — women and children — in line. Without male supremacy, the state would be impossible. But the collapse of the state can and does leave male supremacy intact. This is why anarchy without feminism has been called reformist.
Perhaps you will learn more about feminism. And when you hear “smash the state”, you’ll think about the undercover state, about what isn’t being said and how you’re going to say it.
