Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Patriarchy reigns victorious

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April 11, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

12:53

The Patriarchy reigns victorious

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	I'd like to introduce you to a Tumblr phenomenon.
	It's men taking up too much space on the train.
	Because if there's one thing that feminists can do, it's tell someone exactly how much space they should be taking up, because they are the arbiters of all things regardless of what your opinion is.
	Men taking up too much space on the train is an enigmatic tumbler block.
	I can't find any information about it other than it is a classic among public assertions of privilege.
	Well, they'd know.
	So without further ado, let's have a look at some of the, um, I'm not sure, culprits, perpetrators.
	Oh, no, what am I talking about?
	The rapists that do this.
	Here we have a noble patriarch in his natural environment oppressing women.
	Notice how the women don't look at him because he has specifically commanded them to keep their eyes away from him at all times.
	Looking directly at his face is a challenge to his dominance.
	And obviously they don't want to do that, otherwise he'll just punch them square in the eye.
	This unthinking brute has decided to stretch his leg out, presumably because he's been sat down for a while and it's more comfortable to oppress women this way.
	You can see the oppression going on in this picture.
	Look at the girl on his right.
	Look at her face.
	She screams silently, won't someone save me from the terrible oppression I'm feeling because that guy has stretched his leg out.
	One of the most interesting things about men taking up too much space on the train is that even when men don't have a seat to sit on and are forced to sit on the floor, they are still taking up too much space.
	Look at this guy.
	What a savage.
	How dare he just sit on this floor because he can't find a seat and play on his iPad.
	What a piece of shit.
	It's like he didn't realise there was a woman in close proximity who needed him to not rape her at that moment.
	This patriarchal tribal chief has even brought his slave on the train with him.
	You can tell because they're both wearing wedding rings, which is the international symbol for a man having corralled and subdued this woman with violence, and now she is his servant for the rest of her life.
	There is no way she can escape this bondage.
	Even the king of the north has privilege.
	Which shocks me because he seemed like such a nice guy.
	Little did I know that he actually hates all women.
	So we've seen the rapists in action, and obviously there is no excusing this kind of behaviour.
	But what do the men themselves have to say about it?
	Why are they such thoughtless and callous abusers of women?
	Obviously the men have an answer for why they do this, but not only does it display leagues of leagues of privilege, it also displays a wanton tendency towards man-splaining.
	This is probably the most heinous crime, because it involves using reasons.
	Actual physical logical reasons.
	And so instead of presenting their arguments as they're sent, representing them accurately, the person running this site has instead made a super poem out of them.
	They've done this by taking excerpts from the messages.
	Where convenient, I suppose.
	And the poem goes something like this.
	Males sit with legs apart for a very good reason.
	Testicles.
	Okay, men have balls.
	They can't close their legs, otherwise it really, really hurts.
	Men have something called a penis that makes it uncomfortable to sit with our legs squished together in a fetal position like you apparently insist we should.
	This is a matter of anatomy.
	Men sit like this because of their anatomy.
	The poem makes a very bigoted point and stresses that it is actually something to do with the physical condition of the male.
	But what those men haven't considered is mutilating every man on earth to make sure that wasn't a problem.
	You wouldn't expect anything else from this sociopathically oppressive gender.
	Naturally you're wondering at this point, just how could this get any worse for women?
	What more can men do to women that they haven't done already?
	Well, to maintain their iron grip on power, a group of men have created Women Who Eat on Tubes, an Orwellian website that tracks every single woman in the world who eats in public on a subway.
	Let's have a look at some of the Patriarchy's latest victims.
	This poor oppressed woman is clearly suffering.
	This is compounded by the fact that she sat next to a collaborator of the Patriarchy, a member of Vichy France, if you will, in the form of a Muslim woman, who actively cooperates with the Patriarchy by willfully engaging in the habit of covering almost every inch of skin she has.
	The amount of privilege that one gains when they simply cooperate with the patriarchy is astounding.
	The woman to her left is experiencing no oppression at all.
	You'll note that she's even been allowed out of the house without a man to take care of her.
	Naturally, the poor woman eating her apple is just desperate.
	Only there was a way of getting away from her thoroughly controlling and abusive husband, who is presumably just out of shot.
	These three women are actually victims of something called food addiction, which is a real thing, shut up, you don't know what you're talking about, and they have to eat all the time.
	They can't wait till they get home for dinner before having their snacks.
	They can't wait until they get to the office before having their snacks.
	They have to have their snacks now, damn it, right now.
	And you have no right to tell them they shouldn't.
	Stop oppressing them.
	This became a phenomenon called stranger shaming.
	And despite feminist women having started it, it obviously became a bad thing when the men started doing it back, because that is discrimination.
	And everything that happens affects women a lot more than it affects men, always full stop.
	Especially when it affected a one Sophie Wilkinson, who I believe fled to Russia and is actually currently being given sanctuary by Vladimir Putin in the face of 12,000 online haters who want to get her extradited back to her home country so she can be executed.
	She did have time to write an article before the death squads found her though.
	So let's just see exactly why this was worse for Sophie and by proxy every other woman than it ever could be for a white cisgendered member of the patriarchy.
	One afternoon, slightly hungover, I went to see my grandparents in the outer suburbs of London to wish them a happy 60th wedding anniversary.
	See, we can already see that despite being irresponsible, she does actually have a heart of gold.
	You know, it's not her fault that she went out and got ridiculously drunk last night, even though she knew it was her grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary the next day and she was definitely going to go see them because she is a saint at heart.
	In a rush, my toilet had decided to leak and the plumber was late, etc.
	Plumbers, part of the patriarchy.
	Probably on his boat, surrounded by his slave women and just treating them abominably.
	She grabbed a salad from Marks and Spencer's to eat on the way because she's a vegan, probably, and she's concerned about the welfare of animals.
	She is, as we said, a saint.
	You have to understand that it's a better class of people who buy salads from Marks and Spencer's.
	They're just better people, and almost certainly wealthier.
	As I was eating it, a man boarded the train, sat down, clocked me, and then moved to sit opposite me, and then took out his phone.
	The predator approaches.
	Something about it made me think he'd taken a picture of me.
	I'd known about the Facebook group Women Who Eat on Tubes for a while, but I'd never given it much attention.
	However, the group which sees members upload photos they've taken of women eating while on public transport, crucially without their permission, has somehow amassed more than 12,000 devotees.
	Still, though the group sounds so trivial, I felt a surge of shame.
	I knew I would end up on the page within days.
	I want to stress that there was no consent given here.
	Not that there was consent given in the other ones, but that doesn't matter because we're talking about women, and there was no consent.
	This woman was photo-raped on the train and no one did anything.
	Ugh, rape culture.
	Fucking rape culture.
	This country's sick.
	I tried to tell myself I was being paranoid.
	That he'd simply been drafting an email.
	We were underground, with no signal, or playing Candy Crush, because I'm sure he was either taking photos of you or playing County Crush.
	But each day afterwards, I scrolled through the Facebook page.
	After a couple of days, I gave up looking, because I didn't have time to scroll through all the entries of all those women who were stuffing their faces on the train.
	Then a friend emailed to say she'd seen me on the site.
	At first, I replied, OMG, Lol, because I felt some accomplishment in knowing that I wasn't unjustifiably paranoid.
	That man had taken a photo of me, but then I saw the comments.
	I would like the name of her finishing school fail, went one.
	Entering or exiting her gaping orifice, another.
	And bloody hell, no one is going to take it off you.
	I apologise for that.
	Naturally, this woman thought of nothing else but herself, and was so concerned that she might have her picture featured on some random Facebook page with a middling following, that she spent as much time as she could looking for it.
	And so did her friends.
	I mean, they were obviously scanning for pictures of themselves, they saw their friend, and they did a kindness.
	They sent her a message saying, by the way, you've been photo-raped.
	Now, you're probably thinking, that poor woman, and you are right to do so, that is exactly the response you should have.
	And don't let that sympathy be dimmed when you find out that she also wrote an article entitled, Women Who Eat on Tubes.
	I was hurt and humiliated when my photo appeared online.
	I'm never going to stranger shame again, because she is also guilty of doing this.
	But you should definitely feel sympathy for her because she is the victim.
	Unlike other women who have since got in touch with me to say that they've been featured on similar sites and felt helpless to do anything, I wasn't going to let it slide.
	Not only am I a journalist with time on my hands to sort this out, but with a few internet searches, I found the email address of the man who had uploaded the photo of me.
	I asked him to remove my picture, and although it's been taken down by Facebook, not by him, hundreds of other women's photos are still up there.
	Presumably where men are using them as pornography.
	She then goes on to admit her crime, but luckily she is female, so she will get half the sentence a man will get.
	Sophie's obviously learned her lesson, and she's decided she's never going to stranger shame again, which is good.
	I'm very proud of her for growing.
	There are also other things that are going to be done.
	She also says, since I appeared in the Facebook group, dozens of people have been in touch, including creators of a Women Eating on the Tube flash mob, set up with the intention of getting lots of women on the underground to overwhelm and defy any would-be photographer.
	There is also now a group setting out to shame men taking photos of women eating on the tube.
	These are both magnificent solutions, because not only are these women still doing the thing that you don't think should be done, I'm pretty sure there's no way any photographer could possibly capture an entire carriage full of women eating food.
	Flash mobs are a reasonable and completely logical response to this issue.
	But I do question whether e-vigilanteism is a way of getting things done.
	Instead, I hope that by identifying the phenomenon of stranger shaming, people will think twice before doing it.
	I'm not going to point out that that begs the question, why didn't you think twice before doing it?
	But um this is a good point.
	This is silly.
	So unfortunately that means that you, fellow man and member of the patriarchy, are no longer allowed to take pictures of women when they're eating on the train in an attempt to shame them and it also means that women are no longer allowed to take pictures of men who are taking up too much space on the train.

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