This issue of Under Lock and Key focuses on the topic of gender. Usually
when people think about gender oppression they think in the black and
white terms of wimmin being oppressed and men being in power. But the
reality is a lot more complex. For instance, in prisons, which
overwhelmingly house men, gender oppression takes on a special form
where men experience gender oppression regularly at the hands of male
and female guards and at the hands of other prisoners.
Gender oppression is one component of imperialism, and it is a
particularly difficult topic for those living in the First World where
the majority enjoy gender privilege but also experience gender
oppression. Overall MIM(Prisons) sees First World wimmin and men as
mainly oppressors, not oppressed, when it comes to gender. Globally we
find gender privilege in the Amerikan men who buy wives/prostitutes in
other countries. This leisure time privilege is connected to economics,
with men’s greater access to jobs and positions of power around the
world. With First World wimmin we see gender privilege in the form of
contraceptive testing on Third World wimmin and nannies who allow First
World wimmin to raise healthy children while experiencing great leisure
time. In addition, gender and economics intersect creating the ho
relationship where First World wimmin benefit from their access to rich
men thanks to closed borders. Pornography that elevates the white womyn
also allows, what we call the “gender aristocracy,” to benefit from
leisure time financially through the entertainment industry. While it’s
clear that First World men have more gender privilege and power than
First World wimmin, overall both are oppressors on a global scale
relative to Third World men and wimmin. As a group, the First World of
all genders are more united than ever in their exploitation of the rest
of the world.
Yet, even within the U.$., there are groups that fall closer to the
gender oppressed including those without citizenship, children and
prisoners. In prisons, guards use their power to gain sexual access to
prisoners (both male and female). And among prisoners there are some,
generally sanctioned by the guards, who also enjoy sexual access to
other prisoners. This sex between prisoners comes with a significant
power differential because of the nature of imprisonment. That’s not to
say that sex outside of prison is free of power. MIM(Prisons) upholds
the MIM position that no sex under the patriarchy can be fully
consensual as long as there are power differentials between people. In
other words, all sex is rape under patriarchy. There may be different
types of coercion - the overt physical overpowering of someone is a very
different kind of rape than the couple who both want to have sex.
However, we can not downplay the importance of things like money, looks,
education, political power, and other things which lead someone to
“consent” to sex. Desire is fucked up under capitalism and we can’t
pretend things are equal when they are not.
An article in Under Lock and Key #1 took an in depth look at gender and
rape in prisons:
“To help sort out the gender status of biomale
prisoners, a recent Department of Justice report gives us the surprising
statistics that, “In State and Federal prisons, 65% of inmate victims of
staff sexual misconduct and harassment were male, while 58% of staff
perpetrators were female”. (Here we are discussing the 52% of reported
sexual violence in prisons where the captor assaulted captive. The rest
were inmate-on-inmate assaults, addressed more below.) (1) In the
general population 97% of sexual violence reports are wimmin victims and
the perpetrator is generally male (around 98%). The instance of female
perpetrators is actually a higher rate in instances of assaults on
males, estimated at around 14%. (2) Much higher than female assaults on
wimmin, but nowhere near the 58% of assaults on prisoners of any
biology.
“With 93% of the u.$. prison population being male, we would expect a
much higher percentage of assaults to be against males than females,
even if rates of assault for wimmin was higher. But assuming 97% of
victimization is of bio-wimmin as it is on the street, you’d only get
29% of the absolute number of assaults being against men in prison. So
we’re seeing a ratio of male to female victims on the order of 2 times
the general population. In other words, if wimmin are five times as
likely to be assaulted in prison than they are on the street, then men
are 10 times as likely.
“Unfortunately, the study does not breakdown the statistics of female on
male vs. female on female assaults. But even if we assume that all of
the 35% of staff sexual assaults on wimmin in state and federal prisons
are perpetrated by wimmin, that leaves another 23% of the perpetrators
who are females attacking males (assuming one-to-one incidents, which
was the vast majority). Even if you want to argue that no male guards
ever sexually assault female prisoners, you see a significantly greater
rate of bio-wimmin engaging in sexual violence against males in prison
compared to the general population. Since female assaults on males in
the general population are much higher than female assaults on females,
we would be better off assuming the opposite. If we assume a
proportional breakdown you’d be comparing 58% female perpetrators
against bio-men in prison against the 14% on the street. If that weren’t
bad enough, we must factor in that females are still only a minority of
prison staff, accounting for 22% in the federal system. (3) So that 58%
of assailants is coming from maybe a quarter of the staff that happen to
be bio-wimmin. These are the statistics that back up our line on Lynndie
England that it could have been any amerikkkan womyn sexually assaulting
Iraqi bio-men. And if we acknowledge that Iraqis under occupation are
much more powerless and oppressed than amerikan citizens, then these
statistics speak even louder to say that amerikan bio-wimmin are the
enemies of the oppressed.”
Just as the labor aristocracy usually outdoes the imperialists in its
racist oppression, here we see an extreme example of the gender
aristocracy outdoing men in gender oppression.
While discussing how to define gender that same article went on:
“…..Prisoners (of both genders) and youth (of both genders) are
reporting more sexual assaults than wimmin over all. If being young or
incarcerated is really twice as risky as having female genitalia as the
report rates suggest, then not only are there other considerations to
determine someone’s gender status, but there are factors that are much
more important than what genitalia a persyn is born with. Below we will
see how age and incarceration intersect to create one of the most gender
oppressed groups in the united $tates.
“MIM has established the basis for gender as purely gender in a persyn’s
physical development, age and health status. Therefore, when nation and
class are not major complicating factors, such as within the amerikan
labor aristocracy, these are the basis for gender differences.
“However, the greatest differences in gender are found between the
imperialist nations and the Third World people. Therefore when we talk
about the spectrum of gender oppression we place most First Worlders on
the male end of the spectrum, regardless of biology. We have
demonstrated how First World bio-wimmin benefit by the patriarchy
elsewhere. (4) The picture of bio-wimmin as sexual assailants in prisons
above only adds to this argument….”
The fight against gender oppression must be waged directly in a battle
against sexual assault and psycho-sexual warfare, and also as a part of
the larger fight against imperialism because the patriarchy is
intimately tied up with the capitalist system. In this issue we have an
article about pornography in prison and why we oppose its censorship but
at the same time we also oppose pornography in general. We take a global
view comparing what some called the “feminism” of Sarah Palin with the
real world slaughter of children in Gaza this month. We also have
several responses to an article on psycho-sexual warfare in prisons that
was printed in ULK4. That article inspired a lot of prisoners to write
in about their experiences with the various ways that sex is used as an
oppressive tool in the context of the prison system: guards paying for
access to prisoners sexuality in various ways, guards manipulating
prisoners by offering sex, guards using sex to pit prisoners against
each other, and guards just using sex to straight up harass prisoners.
Some of those stories appear in this issue.
The lumpen get a bad rap when it comes to gender for not fitting into
pc-white cultural norms, which is exacerbated by white-owned
entertainment companies that make their money selling images of the
oppressed nations that exaggerate the negative to white consumers. The
experiences of gender oppression faced by millions of oppressed nation
men are an educational opportunity that we see far more potential in
than a college course in so-called feminism or a “Take back the Night”
rally. We welcome further responses and analysis on this topic and
encourage our comrades who want to study this issue in depth to get a
copy of the MIM Theory 2/3 on Gender and Revolutionary Feminism.
Notes:
(1) U.S. Department of Justice. Sexual Violence Reported
by Correctional Authorities, 2006. August 2007.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/svrca06.htm
(2)
Whealin Ph.D., Julia M. National Center for Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder Fact Sheet: Men and Sexual Trauma.
http://www.ncptsd.va.gov/ncmain/ncdocs/fact_shts/fs_male_sexual_assault.html?opm=1&rr=rr88&srt=d&echorr=true
(3)
http://www.bop.gov/news/quick.jsp
(4)
How does the gender aristocracy benefit?
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/gender/garistocracybenefits.html
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