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Quote by Abigail Bray

“Living in a rape culture means adjusting to being hyper-vigilant about male violence to the point where risk management becomes second nature. It means living with the continuum of male sexual violence on a daily basis, form creepy and threatening looks and comments in the street, home and workplace, to online rape threats, attempted assault and actual assault. It means inhabiting a paradoxical space where the rape and murder of women is prohibited but everywhere eroticised and the object of laughter.”

Quote by Abigail Bray

Work

Misogyny Re-Loaded

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Abigail Bray

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“Many men, when asked a simple question about why male domination exists, reply that it is because men are stronger than women. This answer seems innocuously simple minded, but the explanatory statement that ‘men have power over women because they are physically stronger than women’ also means ‘men can rape and kill women if they want to’. There is no point replying that it is illegal to rape and kill women. The law does not come into it at all. It is as though the legal prohibitions against male sexual violence are little more that the sales pitch of a corporation eager to hide its criminal intent behind images of satisfied customers.”

“Gender is to sexism as woman is to misogyny. Sexism and gender are male friendly neo liberal words. “Won’t somebody please think of the men?” because they are, apparently, equal to women in their oppression by sexism and gender. The male elite of the new world order are actually victims of heterosexual masculinity. It would make as much sense to replace ‘white supremacy’ with the concept of ‘racially based discrimination’, or ‘ruling class oppression’ with the concept of ‘economically based prejudice’. The tactic is about obscuring forms of violence which, despite the laboriously pompous deconstructions of identity politics, are still identity based.”

“Telling rape jokes or laughing at women being brutalised has become a sign of virility and a marker of masculine freedom. In this context, raping women becomes a status enhancing smashing of the feminising legal restraints imposed on male sexuality. The trending of rape jokes on the internet also gains cool currency precisely because the internet is seen as a feral outlaw social technology, anarchic carnival space where every kind of subversion is permitted and defended in the name of freedom of speech – for those men who have access to the playground, at least.”

“Every gun, warship, jet and bomb is also a theft from women as a sex class. There is more than enough money for public education, health, state funded day care systems, food and other necessities; there is more than enough money to protect single mothers and their children from deadly forms of poverty and social exclusion. There is more than enough money. Austerity is the propaganda of the new fascism which delivers violent budget cuts against its own citizens just as it ramps up global inequality and steadily arms itself with weapons of mass murder.”

“She had just as much a right to be out on the street as any man. She was dressed as a lady, and if these roguish-looking men did not treat her as one, they would soon find out that she was no damsel. Reaching into her valise, her fingers wrapped around her steel scissors and, gripping the handle like a knife, she held them at the ready as she strode home.”