Category: The Logical Feminist

Is Less Better? Women’s Day in Mexico City 2025

Posted on March 15, 2025March 15, 2025 by Karen Moe

Can it be a good thing

when the number of women at an International Women’s Day march decreases by what could very well be half from the year before and many years before that? Usually, organizers are actively recruiting and hoping for more and more protesters every year. However, in a country that has one of the highest rates of violence against women in the world, could a decrease be a positive?

Mexico is one of those countries. In an article written in 2024, an estimated 10 women and girls were recorded as being murdered by an intimate partner or family member and, with only 1 in 10 victims daring to report, the real statistic is much higher. Moreover, with a 95% impunity rate, the number of predators convicted is as exceedingly low as the number of women and girls murdered is exceedingly high. Because of the extremity of machismo culture in Mexico, feminism only began to build as an organized and vocal movement in approximately 2014, originating in the Lesbian community. Until then, the majority of women were reluctant (or afraid) to speak out. It wasn’t until 2019, after a series of rapes and femicides that received national attention, that the women of Mexico had finally had enough of male violence and began to rise up en masse.

Besides the thousands of femicides that are reported and ignored by authorities or not reported at all, one femicide that received a lot of publicity—because of the ferocity with which her family fought for justice—was the 2017 murder of twenty-two-year-old university student Lesvy Berlin Rivera Osorio by her boyfriend on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM). Lesvy’s body was found hung in a telephone booth; her boyfriend Jorge Luis Hernández González had hanged her to death with the telephone cord. As is usual in Mexico, her murder was catalogued and filed away as a suicide. The real case was closed. In order to buttress their victim-blaming tradition of suicide, the Public Prosecutors Office took to social media with accusations like “Osorio was an alcoholic and a drug user who was no longer studying at UNAM and had been living out of wedlock with her boyfriend.” Authorities insisted on investigating the victim’s sex life and family relations to build evidence of promiscuousness and mental instability that would back up their fabrication of suicide. More effort was put into making up evidence to discredit her case than investigate her murder.

Wall of unconvicted rapists and murderers, Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2025.

Impunity reached a searing point in Mexico City

in the summer of 2019 when a series of assaults were committed by the police. In July and August, three women were raped by police officers; on July 10th, a 27-year-old homeless woman was raped by two other police officers; on August 3rd, a 17-year-old woman was gang-raped by four policemen in a police car; on August 8th, a minor was assaulted by a police officer in Museo Archivo de la Fotografía in México City. The women had had enough.

In direct response to the sexual violence committed by the police, women rose up on August 12th, 2019. This was the first time they expressed their rage publicly by starting the controversial act of writing on and defacing historical monuments (the first one being The Angel of Independence)—from which the women have since been criticized and their movement, to this day, discredited. Yet, regardless of the ridiculous accusations that the women are just as violent as the men who rape and murder them, what did they write on the base of Mexico City’s iconic Angel of Independence? “You are not going to have the comfort of our silence anymore.” And, with these words, the Feminist movement in Mexico had officially begun.

“You are not going to have the comfort of our silence anymore.” Photo courtesy of Restauradoras Con Glitter. 2020

In a continued response to the impunity of the Mexico City police for the multiple rapes in the summer of 2019,

the women rose up again on November 25th, 2019 for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and the protests became increasingly vocal both in voice and act to the point where the city began covering the statues of the conquistadores (male colonizers) with saran wrap and surrounding the large monuments with corrugated metal to keep the women from covering these legacies of colonialism with such words as: Mexico Feminicidia! Basta Ya de Impunidad! (Enough Impunity Already, No Desaparecidas Ni Muertas, #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneLess), and plaster the walls with photos of unconvicted rapists and murderers. Saran wrap was gleefully torn off the monuments, climbed on and spray painted and the barriers torn down. The women were determined to be seen and heard.

On February 14th, 2020, there was a protest outside of President Obrador’s residence in the Zocalo—President Obrador, who did so much for the Mexican people initiating social programs and combating the Cartels from where they start with his Bullets Not Guns program and one of many legislations for justice, made a grave error when his response to women demanding more attention to be paid to the femicide epidemic discredited their cause as an act of the opposition. Then, on February 15th, 2020, seven-year-old girl Fátima Cecilia was found dead, her body wrapped in a plastic bag in a garbage can on a vacant lot. Fury escalated and the attendance of the Mexico City Women’s Day March from the Angel of Independence to the Zocalo began to surge: from 2020 to 2024 the march grew from 90,000 to 180,000.

Women climb on and vandalize monuments as other women cheer. Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2020

Women destroy the barricades, Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2020

I have been attending the Mexico City Women’s Day March (or 8M and it’s called here) since I moved here in 2015 and have watched it grow into one of the largest marches in the world. I was at the protest on November 25th, 2019. I remember tear gas, fires, the barricades kicked and then shoved down and gleefully jumped on to the cheers of onlookers and the hundreds if not a thousand police lining Reforma with their riot shields. I remember more tear gas. I remember when, after the city began to have only women police defending the monuments during women’s day, protesting women having fierce altercations with the women police officers accusing them of being traitors that often resulted in violence. I remember the year when the then mayor of Mexico City, now Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum, gave all the women police officers flowers, and the controversy amongst the women protesters that ensued. I remember in 2020 when protective barricades were first put in place to protect the prioritized colonial monuments from vandalism. I remember the women climbing up and over those barricades and vandalizing the monuments of the conquistadores, nonetheless. I remember every surface along Reforma covered with revolutionary writing, and the irreverent pictures including photos of some of the 95% of rapists and murderers who received impunity plastered in every available space. And I remember on one of the 8M marches between 2020 and 2024 when I was walking back to Insurgentes and from the Zocalo at 5:30 to get my bike, the march we still happening. The women were still coming like a torrent 6 hours after the march had started.

But this year, 2025, was verging on the opposite.

Hundreds of thousands were expected; however, unlike last year when an official count of 180,000 was reported on March 10th, as of March 12th, no official count is available for this year. Maybe that is because it was so comparatively unsensational. My friend and I arrived at Insurgentes and Reforma at 2:30, an intersection where—based on the numbers over the last 5 years—the parade should have been crammed with women at that time. The boulevard was virtually empty. There were only a few women straggling around or sitting on the side as confused as I was. There was little to no writing on the walls; barely any of the buildings had been boarded up. We couldn’t even hear drums and chants. There were definitely no helicopters thumping ominously over head or drones with their swat-deserving buzzing above. Yes, a few of the conquistadors’ statues had been painted green and purple and playfully blasphemed by green scarves with the women’s symbol and purple flowers perched on their heads. But that was about it.“Where is the march? Where is everyone?” I asked a row of women, their placards leaning against a wall on the side of the broad boulevard.
“They’re up there. They passed about half an hour ago.”
“Do you know why?”
“No,” they responded. “We don’t understand either.”

Some playful “vandalism” at the Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2020

My friend and I walked for about 15 minutes and finally reached the march.

There were the usual triumphant chants, and the on-cue jumping that the young women do in time with their chant about snubbing their noses at machos, a cumbia marching band with dancers and hoola-hoops; there was a 2-women feminist punk band blaring irreverence with their electric guitars followed by a feminist ukelele group strumming and the placards with the powerful proclamations for justice that Mexican women pride themselves in. There were a few walls plastered with the faces of rapists. Feminist graffiti became more visible. A few of the infamous militants clad entirely in black, balaclavaed and armed with spray paint climbed on top of bus shelters to write: #creaenella (believe her). A large sign to give justice to Fatima was help up by women who had climbed up onto the sides of a monument. But, after 3 hours, I only saw 3 women police officers. I didn’t have to get through a wall of police with their riot shields when I wanted to run farther up to get photos of the march from different perspectives. There was levity, bereft of the abundance of drawn, traumatized faces. It was different. It was more like a Woman’s Day march in Canada, in a first-world country—albeit with Mexican frivolity and flavour. It was more a celebration of women rather than the funeral marches ignited by guerilla warfare of years past.

Triumphant women at the Mexico City Women’s Day march, 2025

I’m not saying the Mexico City 8M wasn’t powerful this year

and women were not speaking out passionately against the continued reality of extreme gender-based violence in Mexico and the impunity for male perpetrators. I am wondering what it means when a march that was enormous and one of the biggest in the world was so much smaller; I am curious as to why there was less overt anger and retaliatory vandalism and what that means and whether a decrease in the number of women at an International Women’s Day march could be a mark of improvement in the lives of women in a country that has been scourged with gender violence for decades, if not centuries. Yes, there are still some reports that nothing has changed and that the 25% decrease in homicides in Mexico with the new administration of Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum has affected nothing. Yet, with the numbers at an all-time high on 8M 2024 and this year’s march—even held on a Saturday when most people don’t work—so much smaller, how can one explain this very obvious decrease? How can one explain the subdued anger? The tempered ferocity, the lack of police corresponding to the lack for the need for police enforcement? With national day care, assistance for single mothers, abortion now available to women nationally and the other social programs implemented by Obrador that could be decreasing the immasculanization and anger of men—which is so often the cause of violence against women—being continued by Sheinbaum and the decrease in homicides be making a real difference in the lives of women in Mexico? Could it be logic that when a people are better off, violence lessens in general and, thereby, decreases the rates of femicide and rape? It’s hard to say in a country where the conservative opposition will do anything to undermine a socialist government. However, in the meantime, we can only hope that the decrease in numbers at Mexico City’s Women’s Day March 2025 is a sign that violence really has lessened in Mexico—for women and men.

Yours,
The Logical Feminist.

“I come for the girls and boys who are no longer here. The girls and boys are not to be touched.” 8M, 2025.

For a more extensive look at the birth of the Mexican feminist movement, see my 2020 article:
“The Life of a Woman is More Important than an Historical Monument.”

For an analysis of violence perpetrated against Mexican men, see this article on a solution:
“Justice Begins with the One Beside You: The Revolution of Nacidos Para Triunfar.”

For an analysis of the President Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration’s (2018-2024) strategy to end violence where it starts, see Part One of my article on the Morena Revolution:
“And this is a Good Thing: Contextualizing the 2024 Mexico Election. Part One.”

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Travel Stories: Vancouver BC & the Yucatan, Mexico, December 2024.

Posted on December 27, 2024December 30, 2024 by Karen Moe

Vancouver December 23rd, 2024

He still knows what stop to get off at. Surprising as delusion has set into such a degree that he doesn’t recognize himself in his reflection on the Vancouver SkyTrain even though he is confronting himself.
     “Is that you? Who’s that? Behave yourself.” Spins away from the familiar that has become foreign; hurls a garbage bag of empty bottles and cans into the corner.
     Angry white man. The kind who could commit mass murder with a Walmart semi-automatic if this were happening in the US. Beaten down. Shut down. Lethal. He plunks down next to me. I have politely made room by shuffling my luggage to the side and underneath my legs. Not for him necessarily. Plunk. His clothes aren’t as dirty as he smells, definitely the smell of not having showered … for how long? How long does it take to get that deep musky gag-inducing smell? But, despite that, he’s clean cut. Not clean, as this expression presumes, but no beard, no long shaggy hair. Just a deep-rooted stench and clothes that should be dirtier to match the smell. And the explosive anger of the emasculated man. Two young Chinese women have long-since darted into the next car.
     The muttering starts, the only other decibel level other than shouting.
     “I think I fucked up.” I decipher. “I think I’m on the wrong train.”
     “Do you want to go to Richmond or Waterfront?” I ask the side of his bowed head.
     “Waterfront.”
     “You’re on the right train.” I pull out the book that I hadn’t necessarily planned to read during the train ride and which I still don’t. Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark is a convenient prop at this moment with which I can pretend to not be paying attention while my ears are pricked for every scrap, every gem, of what is going to happen, hungry for this next remembrance of what was once my hometown. He leaps up to confront his reflection again.
      “Is that you?” he questions; he accuses. The mutter has jacked up to the other volume of the shout. Another spin. Swaggers into the middle of the car, a ready stage as all the passengers have backed away to be as far as possible from the ensuing performance and those who have no choice but to be a bit nearby desperately pretend not to notice what is impossible not to, anxiety visible beneath the fallacy of their unperturbed faces. “Please get off the train. Oh, no not this again. Please don’t exist,” the blank faces say. Swagger. Not yet entirely drunkenly. The swagger will devolve into the stagger when he can exchange the garbage bag of rattling bottles in for a full one. But of what? I wonder. What can he buy with that? He doesn’t have enough … It’s even difficult for drunks to fulfill their tragedies in Vancouver now.
     “195 pounds of absolute killer!” He shouts, both thumbs jabbing at his chest. If his eyes were clear, if he were still here, if he hadn’t shut down inwards from so much time alone, so much rejection, so much: “No, you’re not!”, he would have been addressing us, everyone on the train. He checks his fists to make sure they’re still there. Two white thugs marked up with red. Satisfied. Unclenches,
     “Eight years in the Canadian infantry. Is that right?” The train has been silent since he got on. Now, the silence seems to hesitate, his announcement left as a question hanging. The train slows. The stop he remembers. The door opens. He retrieves his garbage bag of cans and bottles. A woman dressed as a Christmas tree gets on, green jacket, pants, scarf, toque, wrapped in flashing lights, plastic snowflakes pasted to her plaid shopping trolly.
     “What’s that!?” he shouts her direction, repulsed, as he lunges off the train.
     “I’m a walking Christmas tree!” Her too-loud laugh cuts through the heavy silence. She starts to dance to the rhythm of the flashing of her lights, spinning in the space he’s left in the center of the car.

Xcambó, Yucatan, Mexico December 13th, 2024

There were two enormous birds who were counting on me being dead. Me, an unwitting corpse as a sacrifice to their intrigue and hunger lying on top of a remote pyramid in the Yucatan. Unfortunately for them, I was only having a nap.
     Napping is a hobby of mine. Any time the inclination strikes and there is a surface where I can stretch out on my back, one arm across my stomach and the other behind my head or flopped to one side, ideally something to cover my eyes, I nap. Power nap. Recharge my computer (re: my brain), or just float, not quite sleeping, riding an arch of REM. The best naps are ones that result in a twitch, like dogs do when they’re dreaming, and then I come back. Too bad for the huge, black birds, I did.
     But what would have happened if I’d napped for longer? If I’d gone past my usual 30 minutes, indulged in an hour. They’d been circling above, I was told by my friend who was watching this small spectacle from the other side of the ancient city, a humble one by Yucatan standards with the epics of Chichenitza and Uxmal both tended to and tourist bound. No one came to this one.
     “¿Tienes muchos visitantes aquí? (Do you have many visitors here?)” I asked the attendant who emerged from a rumpled little apartment behind the sloping ticket counter. He’d roused himself from something and there was a lengthy gap between my call of ‘Hola’ and his arrival.
     “Muy, muy poco, (Very, very few)” he verged on a lifelong yawn while announcing the price of 80 pesos each.
     “¿Tienes alguna información sobre la pirámide? (Do you have any information about the pyramid?)”
     “No,” he responded as the selva rustled and I felt a swishing of wings from above. He stared out towards to the untended structure, trying to remember something, know something about this place that was his vocation that hardly anyone ever came to, tell this rare guest something.
     “Era un lugar donde la gente comerciaba, (It was a commercial center)” he smiled, pleased with this piece of information he had managed to dig up for me, flashing gold capped teeth.
     “¿Puedo escalarlo? (Can I climb it?)” I asked, and now that I think of it, pyramid climbing is another hobby, an exotic one as it requires a pyramid and sadly, you aren’t allowed to climb most of them anymore.
     “Sí.” He smiled again and I grinned back.
     “Gracias!”

The two big black birds landed on the edge of the pyramid. Watching. Waiting with the patience of predators creeping closer as I floated in the warm Yucatan sun and a forest breeze swished across my bare legs, arms, unsandaled feet, vulnerable neck. They moved closer. What would have happened if they had reached me? Would they have gone for my jugular, as cougars do? Would it have mattered that I still have a pulse?
     My eyes opened. Slowly. Coming back from a most luxurious napping arch. I sat up, still oblivious to the eyes that had been locked onto my prone flesh most likely for the duration of my nap.
     “You’ve got visitors!” the small form of my friend called from across the ruins. They didn’t leave right away; they seemed as surprised as I was that they were there and I was alive. Our gazes connected for a few seconds. Their black eyes shone from dull, wrinkly grey heads as dull black feathers almost glinted in the high afternoon sun. But then, lazily, one tipped off the edge of the pyramid and swooped up on an air current and the other swished its broad wings and landed next to a sun-cracked puddle bed to attempt a drink. Were they planning on eating me? I thought as I climbed down the crumbling stairs.
     While were exploring Xcambó, the attendant had called his friend. “Gente esta aqui! (People are here!)” he must have told him. I walked over to say adios, gracias and ask about the birds. The other man had set up a display of hand-made souvenirs for us, row upon row of brightly painted, carved animals and onyx disc necklaces to view eclipses through. I bought a turtle magnet and a turtle necklace both made from the bark of a coconut tree. There wasn’t anything representing the huge, black birds. I told the two men what had happened.
     “Ah! Zopilotes!” the attendant exclaimed. “Tzopīlōtl en Nahuatle.”
     “Creo que estos pájaros estaban pensando sobre comerme. (I think those birds were thinking about eating me)”, I stated. Both men laughed, flashing gold capped teeth.
     At dinner, I told the waiter the story of my nap and the visitors.
     “Those are the birds that eat humans.” He stated and turned to go order our drinks.

On the surface, there may not appear to be much logic involved in these two travel tales and, as I am publishing them in my blog “The Logical Feminist,” one would presume there would be some. But never fear. There’s lots of logic here.

Vancouver is filled with emasculated, angry white men. Yes, I am racializing because it’s true. All of the people who commit mass-shootings in the US are young angry white men (except there was a white woman a couple of years ago). I know PC folk: people aren’t supposed to tell such truths in Canada (the most politically correct country in the world by the way and a hot bed of cancel culture … but that’s a whole essay to delve into the logic of that … and is it logical? Maybe). The two young women who immediately bolted into the other train car, without even thinking or discussing it, just a mutual, instinctual bolt from having done it so many times, were Chinese. This is true. (Again, a corresponding essay could be written to explain why and how). Regardless, once contextualized beneath the surface, it is all logical. What do you think?
Non-human animals and nature are the most logical entities on earth. Wait for awhile to see if a body is dead. Eat it.

Happy New Year everyone!

Yours,
The Logical Feminist.

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The First Day of the Fairy Creek Blockades from Elder Bill Jones’ Legacy.

Posted on August 12, 2024September 13, 2024 by Karen Moe

Fairy Creek Blockade Forest Defenders waiting for the RCMP. Photo: Karen Moe.

In the beginning, there were twenty.

On August 9^th, 2020, twenty people connected by the desire to stop what should not be happening met at Lizard Lake, a recreational area on Southern Vancouver Island. Lizard Lake. A seemingly arbitrary place to meet, except for the fact that it’s near Fairy Creek, one of the last of the pristine old growth forest watersheds in the world, a mixed forest where Mother Trees support saplings and seedlings, the lives of these often over 1000-year-old trees that, as forest ecologist Suzanne Simard tells us, far eclipse colonialism.[1] With coastal old growth forests absorbing about seven tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare per year[2], the 1,189 hectares that comprise the Fairy Creek Watershed absorb 8,323 tonnes of carbon every year;[3] Fairy Creek is a community united with mycorrhizal, underground fungal networks that connect and communicate between the Mother Trees that are alive with the reality that everything is connected, including us, the humans, who devastate the earth for monetary profit and, in so doing, devastate ourselves. Who kill our Great Mother.

Tourist brochures tell is how there are a lot of trails around Lizard Lake to get you out for a stroll. There is lots of wildlife to view, and you can see many kinds of birds there. Every year, Lizard Lake is stocked with rainbow trout and is a popular recreational fishing destination because the fish are plentiful and can reach 35 to 45 cm in length.

“Make sure not to pollute the lake,” a sign says. “The trout sure are big this year!” —even though there are no natural fish in the lake as participants in a healthy ecosystem anymore due to the extensive logging in the 20^th Century when the inlets and outlets were choked by debris and any thought of healing or cleaning up was deemed impractical—too much work to confront and deal with the truth.[4] There is no sign announcing the intact ecosystems that are being threatened a few kilometres away: up in the mountains inscribed by logging roads that snake their way towards the biggest trees that can still be saved. We are living in what Elder Bill Jones calls the world of let’s pretend, where direct action is the only way we can awaken from the Great Sleep.

They had to do something, right away,

the first Forest Defenders of the Fairy Creek Blockades agreed, greeting in the Lizard Lake parking lot, some connected for years through other environmental action, others meeting for the first time. They decided to go into the forest and have a circle, a circle that would become a tradition at the Fairy Creek Blockades where people come together to listen and discuss. They introduced each other. One Forest Defender remembers how:

“It was really inspiring. I remember that just having all these people around who were all feeling the same way about it. We have to stop this. This is insane and we gotta do something about it.”

There was no more time to wait. It was Sunday and industry is always right on time Monday morning. And so, twelve of the twenty decided to drive up, behind the exquisitely drawn curtain that conceals the clear cuts and ecological destruction, into reality. First step: conquer the logging road, Reid Main.

There is no predictability to logging roads as they wind precariously in rabid search of the biggest trees. There is no predictability unless one is referring to the predictability of greed, what generates the madness that snakes up and around mountains, through the open wounds of the clear-cuts, deadlands of debris and bleached-out stumps, through unprofitable stands of trees. The machinery blasts and grinds, violates our Great Mother, metal beasts held together by bolts tightened by denial, hard snouts salivating over the biggest ones, the giants, the mother trees whose thousands of years of connection to the rest of the forest are reduced to dollars and the satiation of the insatiability of greed. Elder Bill tells us how greed is an expression of deviant selfishness and becomes the guiding light in your life. Greed, always after more of the same, gouges these mad, frantic flurries of roads into the mountainsides, and it was this deviant light that the Forest Defenders had no choice but to follow that night. A predatory light. At its mercy to stop what will happen if they don’t.

“We had to find the way,” some of the first Forest Defenders recall.[5] “The edges of the road were so steep you couldn’t see around them. You could just drive over the edge on the other side because you couldn’t see where the edge was. What you were driving into … or off. You could just drive off. Like the most logical thing that would happen. Just drive off. The road was so narrow, so steep, the edges so vicarious, loose sharp rocks, the pointed shards of recent blasting, wheels spinning. Can I turn sharply enough into what I cannot see? Your fingers are crossed. Knuckles beyond blue. Survive going around the corners. Survive. The corners. You climb-climb-climb. It was getting darker and darker. Steep and sketchy logging road. Climb-climb-climb. At one point I gave up. Steep and sketchy logging road, twisted by the edges of continued colonialism, like a mass of metal that has been clenched into a fist, ready to reach out, snap and spew its imperial infrastructure whenever the opportunity for exploitation arises.”

Greed is colonialism. Colonialism is greed, and capitalism and colonialism are one and the same, Elder Bill says. And one cannot help but think of the extent industry goes to getting to the last of the big trees, machinery climbing and clinging to the same precarious road. What greed will do to fail in satiating itself.

“We arrived close to midnight.”

What must they have looked like, united around the fire that night, camping chairs and tents nestled amidst the machinery driven by humans believing they are just doing their job, doing what they have been told to do in what Elder Bill describes as a civilization that is a system of denial governed by greed and creating a world of let’s pretend?

What must they have looked like snug in the orange glow of their fire, necessary even in August at such a high elevation, its warmth exposing the long arm of the Crawler Excavator at rest, ready to gouge and grab in the morning, accompanied by its dozing partner, the Rock Drill, with its foreboding track pads of carbon black and silica, brooding in the dark? Not missing a moment of summertime daylight, the keys of industry are turned at 5 am; snorts and blasts of diesel begin the duet of squeak and crunch as the machinery enacts the mythology of progress as take, continuing where they had left off on Friday afternoon. They wobble and creak over their bereft earth, dumb machines given the power to destroy ecosystems.

Sunrise on Reid Main. The first morning of the Fairy Creek Blockade waiting for industry. August 10th, 2020. Photo: Will O’Connell.

The Forest Defenders have arrived just in time. This particular logging road is headed for Titania, an estimated 1000-year-old[6] Western Yellow Cedar and the gateway to the pristine forest of the Fairy Creek Watershed. This ancient tree’s age doubles the longevity of her name that originated with Shakespeare’s Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, in keeping with the name of the pristine watershed the ancient tree Titania guards, this makes perfect sense when one immerses themselves within the wonderland of the old growth forest. There is no make-believe here, unlike Lizard Lake and its manufactured fish and manicured trails. As we are intoxicated by the purest, oxygen-rich air, as we marvel at mosses that virtually blind with their green brilliance, as we are dazzled by the chimes of golden tanagers, there is no doubt. We are transported away from the colonial world of denial and let’s pretend to where we really are, where we have always been—we are enchanted by where we can find ourselves again.

But Titania doesn’t stop there. She touches upon another, mythological namesake: the Greek Goddess Artemis, the patroness of nature, wildlife, and childbirth. Like all mother trees, Titania is an ecosystem unto herself birthing and supporting countless other creatures. One cannot imagine how deeply and widely her roots extend, intertwining with those of all the other trees who have been embraced over the centuries by her reach; one cannot crane their neck back far enough to fully absorb the extent to which she reaches her canopy into the sky. Humility is guaranteed in her presence. How such a being can exist is a question as mystifying as attempting to comprehend the universe. And, perhaps equally inconceivable, how such a being can be cut down. How desensitized a human and a culture must be to destroy such magnificence. And think nothing of it.

I’m at loss to think when I look at Titania,

says Elder Bill, it blanks me. It doesn’t make me stupid, but it just empties me out and I don’t have any feeling, anything at all or fear or anything just vacancy. And I think this is a message from the All; it’s our pipeline to the All. It goes up and it comes down, but it also nurtures on the way up and nurtures on the way down. And then here’s an odd thing: it is rooted in this earth. It can’t live without this earth. Its roots are intertwined with other life, you know bugs and moulds and mosses. So, it is total. Ancient trees like Titania are beyond human understanding; they’re beyond our comprehension. Titania is a Gateway in our realization of the All of the total everything that is, was, and will be.

“Titania”: an estimated 1000-year-old yellow cedar and gateway to the Fairy Creek Watershed. Photo: Will O’Connell.

As the machinery advances towards Titania and her forest, one cannot help but think of Yeats’ rough beast, slouching, its hour come at last. But there is no at last here, in the twenty-first century, where exploiting others and the earth is held up as something to aspire towards. As Gabor Maté states, “materialistic cultures generate notions—myths, in effect—of selfish, aggressive striving and dominance as behavioural baselines, encouraging characteristics that place lesser value on connectedness to others and to Nature itself.”[7] This rough beast has been slouching far too long the Forest Defenders know, as they sit united and buoyant after their triumphant arrivals up Reid Main, vital in the fact that, as one of the Forest Defenders states: “we are going to protect something so valuable.” The keys will not be turned in the morning to continue the building of this logging road. The hour has come to put an end to these rough beasts slouching towards our Great Mother.

The Forest Defenders express how: “When you see those cut-blocks, you can hear the trees screaming, asking for our help. This last old growth is so remote industry reigns here. You get up there and you realize how real it is. You get up there and you can’t leave. Feeling the mountains and the earth. You can’t leave. We must always care for our Great Mother, Elder Bill tells us. You have to keep helping, the Forest Defenders respond. Your response is ultimately what matters. And she provides all our needs, Elder Bill reminds us. Even if you don’t win at least you’ll have tried. You will win more than if you hadn’t done anything to begin with. We are taught not to appreciate our Great Mother by the economic system, Elder Bill guides us. We’re the stop gap, planting the seed that we can actually do something. We need to defend the land because that’s what you do when the land is being destroyed. Give back. We are where we are meant to be.”

The Cookie is a landscape unto itself.

Slices of stumps from clear cuts, ‘cookies’ are both evidence and symbols and, from a technical perspective, used by Forest Defenders to block logging roads. This first cookie, a piece of another lost epic that had towered as an integral part of an old growth forest, was cut from a dried-out stump of an approximately 1400-year-old redcedar found in yet another clear cut in BC, this one on the unceded land of the Klanawa valley on Huu-ay-aht Territory. Like the land where it had once stood, the 6-inch slice was so dry and fragile it virtually crumbled as it was laboriously cut with a long-reach chainsaw from the top of the stump in the middle of a cut block into a two-tonne slab that was then heaved down a make-shift ramp and into the back of a pick-up truck. It took days. Like a puzzle reassembling truth, this soon to be symbolic barricade was lovingly put back together and mounted onto a piece of plywood so it can tell the stories of what it had been, what it became and what it has come to be now. Yes, gone is the core, the ancient heart of the tree, and the surrounding segments of what was once a whole would have gradually dried up and disappeared, too, if the Forest Defenders had not retrieved a sample of what was left to show what has been taken. Cracks are as arteries still running through the depth of the cedar slab leading to the disappeared heart of the ancient tree and the circles of the lived centuries have faded, but not quite, as the dried-up arteries can lead to the possibility of a renewed heart. The space we can fill again.

Like Titania, this slice from the top of a stump of the ancient redcedar used to be a Mother Tree as both progenitor and supporter of its eco-system. We humans, having placed ourselves in the center of our world of let’s pretend, laugh at the idea of a clear-cut being a crime scene, a site of mass murder. But it is far from anything less when all that is left are stumps, gaping upwards to what they so recently were; when what was a vibrant forest floor is now nothing but debris; when bark has been denuded of Speckled Belly Lichen that is no longer absorbing the carbon dioxide of human obliviousness and denial into their serrated elegance.[8]

In the clear-cuts, everyone left or died trying. Or were unable to even try as their world crashed around them. Peregrine Falcons, perched on top of cedar snags, surveying below through the layers of canopy, down, down, all the way to the forest floor, glistening with pine needles, mosses and decomposing plants, feeding the humus and then down further, layered and layered again with the next participant, gone, in however long it takes capitalism to decimate a designated area, hovered, for a split second, as their snags crashed with their trees. Short-tailed weasels, white-chested and sleek, jolted from their burrows, scampering in circles as all entries vanished; Red-legged frogs, black speckled and always ready to leap, couldn’t; owls, Spotted and Screech, didn’t swoop that night to scoop from the bounty below, their whistled hoots punctuating black; Rufous Hummingbirds stopped questing fairy bells the next morning, flashing their iridescent red throats—and the imperceptible coughs as all spores forced from gills landed on land that will no longer receive them.

The Klanawa Cookie was brought to the meeting at Lizard Lake with the hope they would mobilize that day. And so, because of the community acting on urgency that afternoon of August 9^th, 2021, the two-tonne slice of stump was hauled up Reid Main in the back of a pick-up, the truck’s gears grinding and wheels spinning up the treacherous slope over and through recently blasted granite and big rocks that sometimes had to be removed by hand before the truck could push on. Determination dug in. Once at the top of the ridge, it took four men to heave the cookie out of the back of the truck to be erected across the logging road in the middle of the night, ready for industry to arrive early Monday morning and find a slab of resistance between themselves and their machinery. Twelve feet wide and nine feet tall, the first Cookie blocked the building of the logging road headed for Titania and the watershed. Standing as a biopsy, a diagnostic study from a once living body, the slice from the stump of an ancient redcedar is evidence of what has been done and the resistance that has arisen because of it. The struggle to save the old growth is a focus for people in their care for the forest, says Elder Bill. They’re drawn to the forest because they feel a sense of wholeness with what we are all a part of. Forest Defenders put back together what has been lost so that they can save what will be if they don’t do anything about it. All life is our service to the forest, to our Great Mother, Elder Bill states.

What must they have looked like, faces glowing around the campfire that first night of the Fairy Creek Blockades? They said: we came, we’re here, we’re going to do it. We don’t know what will happen, but we’ll do it again and again.

Erecting the Cookie. The night of August 9th, 2020. Photo: Will O’Connell.

On the morning of August 10^th, 2020,

after fitful sleeps in tents or their cars surrounded by the machinery, they sit in front of the first Cookie blocking industry from climbing into the machinery and allowing the rock drills to blast, the excavators to scrape, the rock trucks to be filled, the birds to jolt and circle, displaced, no longer knowing where it is safe land, the startled cutting of their wings in the air silenced beneath the snorts of the machinery headed towards Titania. That is the plan that still hasn’t happened.

“You wake up early and sit in the dark at 3 a.m. Who knows what’s going to come out of the darkness. The unknown of the whole situation was really intense because you don’t know if people are going to be angry. You’re vulnerable out there. You’re putting yourself in harm’s way. You really just want to go home,” one of the first Forest Defenders re-calls as another remembers:

“4 am. Waiting for industry. It’s cold as anything in the morning, even in the summer. We hung the first banners on the machinery. On the rock drills. Stop Teal Jones! No Roads Into Fairy Creek! We’re all waiting for industry. We’re all nervous. We’re sitting there. We’re talking about what to do. If they, you know, if they’ll get aggressive.”

5 a.m. The sun starts to crest the mountain, casting sharp lines across the rock drill, exposing its sinews of cables, striating the resting arm of the excavator with long shadows from the trees, bringing the machinery to life. The robins begin their morning song on cue, as always, their bright notes proclaiming the new day, as they have done since long before the idea of taking the trees has cursed these shores. But their bright song is hollow today in the company of these intruders, a melody straining for what it’s supposed to be in the presence of what doesn’t belong here.

The metal brutes, hunching as mercenaries for industry, are backgrounded by striations of salmon pink and the lush purple of Oregon grape as the sun reacquaints itself with the tops of the mountains. It is a beautiful sunrise. Still carrying the night’s cold that caused the ocean mist to bunch up in the watershed, clouds extend as far as the ocean. The line of the horizon is barely discernible as the edges of ocean and sky merge. The Forest Defenders look down at a cloud forest where mountains are islands, an ecosystem vibrant with salty droplets.

“We all have something in common,” a Forest Defender explains. “We all wanted to protect the forest and we’re all breathing the beautiful air. We’re all in awe of just being up there in the fresh air. The quiet. Even though we could still see clearcuts, the sunrise was magical.”

A pair of ravens begin their daily surveillance of the treetops as night moves towards the brilliant blue of a high mountain sky. As though in comradery with the Forest Defenders, these tricksters have decided to yell today and they fly in sporadic swoops, the urgency of their calls tearing through the chill in counterpoint with the robins’ attempts at uncompromised joy. One raven is lifted by an updraft, shoots up, spins, rolls in the current, dives and spirals with the pull of the downdraft: the other follows. Wing-tips flash purple outrage. Their gleaming black bodies cut through the air as though they are transforming creation. The logging road snakes.

“There was a lot of tension. Everybody was tense,”

a Forest Defender re-calls the first morning. “Everybody was nervous and we didn’t know if the police were going to show up right away, were we going to get arrested, were we going to get criminal records, were loggers going to be pissed and come in a group and attack us. It was, yeah, it was that tense. Putting yourself in harm’s way, and it’s just kind of like this really intense homesickness, the combination of being out on a logging road deep in the woods and in the middle of some logging operation and then knowing that something’s coming to get you.”

But nothing really happened. At least what one would expect when twelve people have been sitting in the dark for a couple of hours, blocking industry in a culture that protects its extraction economy at all costs, twelve people sitting in the dark with no idea of what was going to happen, fearing the worst. No conflict. No antagonism. No hatred. But this was just the beginning. No one knew about the Fairy Creek Blockades yet. It was only a matter of months until the movement to save some of the world’s last remaining ancient forest grew from twelve to thousands from across Canada, the US and as far away as Nepal and industry and police brutality and land defender resistance would escalate to a culturally transformative pitch.

After sitting on the logging road and listening and wondering what was going to come out of the darkness, what was going to come up the logging road that was becoming increasingly delineated as the rising sun intensified the suspense:

“We hear a truck, one truck, coming slowly up the mountain. And we’re all talking to get over being silent or else we’re talking together to make each other comfortable because we were all nervous as hell.”

“The plan was to stay sitting down so that we wouldn’t be intimidating, not that we were, but of course we didn’t want to be. We didn’t want to do anything that would get anybody angry.”

“The truck came up in the dark and idled. I think he was just like what the fuck because we were way up on this ridge like nobody expected anybody to be there let alone twelve people and so he just idled for a few minutes, and it was really tense and then he backed away. He just backed out of there and drove back down the hill. We saw the headlights go.”

7 a.m. approaches and the mid-summer sun has begun to warm the forest floor and the blasted granite of the logging roads. The wind has increased from the Pacific to push up over the mountains, and the up and downdrafts have intensified, increasing the speed of the ravens’ soars and spins. For the Forest Defenders, still sitting in front of the Cookie, the salt-filled wind has intensified in tandem with the alleviation of the darkness, but not the apprehension of what is going to happen next. Of course, they will return. More of them next time. And the same tension carries on for another couple of hours.

“The unknown of the whole situation was really intense. We’re all talking to get over being silent. We were all nervous as hell. You don’t know if people are going to be angry. We’re talking together to make each other comfortable.”

“A few hours later three trucks arrived one by one around the last curve. One guy got out. Just one guy whose name was Sean. Sean was the first guy, and he was the machine operator who was supposed to be blasting that day and he had gone back to call into work to say hey, there’s these fucking people and they said, oh go back up and just see if you can make sure that the machinery is, okay. So, he hopped out. He wanted to check his machine and we were trying to be silent.”

“The other guys got out and we offered them coffee. I can’t remember if they took any. I know none of them sat down. It was silent at first. We kept sitting. They were standing. I think they were a bit nervous too because we outnumbered them.”

“Why are you here?”

a roadbuilder asks, breaking the silence, his curiosity sincere, never expecting to find twelve people blocking his way to work that morning.

“Look at Google Earth. Have you seen Google Earth?” a Forest Defender responds in earnest, grateful for the question, wanting to inform and connect. “There’s not much left. The Fairy Creek Watershed. It’s one piece. One green patch and nowhere else is like that.”

“We have to work, though. This is our job, how we support our families,” the roadbuilder speaks his truth.

“Yeah, I get it. We just want to save some old growth forest for our kids.” The Forest Defender speaks his. Silence, the ravens swirling overhead. Then: the Forest Defender looks directly into the man’s eyes, “can you do me a favor, please?”

“Yeah sure.” Gazes connect.

“When you go home, go on Google Earth and look up Fairy Creek and look at all of the watershed. Then slowly, slowly zoom out until you have all of Vancouver Island on your monitor. Can you do that for me?”

“Oh sure. That’s no problem. I’d love to do that.”

“Yeah, and once you do that, you’ll understand exactly why we’re here.”[9]

“At first, both the groups were so tense,”

another Forest Defender remembers, “but once there was a friendly conversation, it just broke that down right away and everyone relaxed.”

“Could you take a picture of us, please? I asked Sean. And he was like, oh, I don’t know if my boss would approve of that, and I laughed and I said don’t worry. We won’t rat you out. We won’t tell him.”

“And then Sean took a picture of us in front of the first Cookie.”

When they met Sean, it was the beginning of the Forest Defenders, industry, and the RCMP being on a first name basis. However, over the months that followed, the first name basis transformed from paradoxically amicable to a source of awareness and strategy in what became guerilla warfare without the gunfire. When the implementation of the Teal Jones logging corporation’s exclusion zone made peaceful protest illegal in Canada eight months later, the RCMP’s Community Industry Response Group (C-IRG)—or private mercenaries for industry—was brought in to police the protests against multi-million-dollar resource projects under the guise of keeping the community, ironically including the Forest Defenders, safe[10]—such paternalistic proclamations of keeping the peace and protecting the community really an excuse to brutalize the people fighting to keep old growth forests and all that has resided there for millennia safe. Known to the Forest Defenders as the Green Guys, the Commanding Officers of C-IRG also became known by their first names. The Forest Defenders knew what level of aggression to expect that week based on who was in charge and, with that familiarity, how hard they had to work to block the logging roads and vigilant they had to be to protect themselves and each other. Some commanding officers were more lenient, a bit more tolerant, maybe even questioned the actions they had been instructed to follow. Others, not so much. Nothing is ever black and white in human interaction, even during a protest to end the black and white ideology of no compromise when it comes to exploiting Indigenous peoples and their land. And, in the beginning, before a duplicitous militia was brought in by the corporation-serving Canadian government, there was still what humanity should be.

“For months, it was just Sean we were blocking,” a Forest Defender laughs. “The guy responsible for the blasting. A nice guy, just doing his job, with friendly chit-chat before he drove back down the logging road again. We made a sign that said: “Block Sean.”

“The next day, industry came back to get their machinery in a bigger group and took photos of our licence plates.” Forest Defenders remember.

“They drove an excavator, rock drill and a rock truck all out of there.”

“The excavators went chomp, chomp, chomp down the hill.” And so industry was swallowed up by the ocean of clouds. And were gone. Just like that. For now.

“Did the trees have this planned?”

“After they left, we just sat there. We didn’t know if what we’d done had any impact. We just sat there wondering if we’d done anything that was going to make any big deal.”

“I was kind of numb like is this really happening or are we actually going to have this forest protected?”

But the forest, which has been clenching the burden of its steadily encroaching decimation, softens. The ravens slow, gliding back into their morning play; the robins’ songs are brightened by the infinite possibilities for renewal. The clouds continue to stretch along the endless edge of the ocean, obliviating the horizon, what is coming next. Some of the clear-cuts are still covered by the clouds, scars concealed, their momentary cancellation a gift during the celebration of this small triumph on the brink of its unforeseeable escalation.

What must they have looked like that night, awash in an ocean of stars, the inky black of a high mountain sky inscribed by an infinity of meteors shooting through earth’s atmosphere even though, down below in our enclosures, we can’t see them? What must they have looked like outlined by the glow of the campfire, surrounded by silhouettes of trees, sharing homemade spaghetti made from dehydrated garden-tomatoes, forest mushrooms, the food packed that morning because of a feeling they would go up and block the logging road right away. A cello vitalizes the hope that maybe we’re going to protect the forest, maybe even industry realizes the value of this for our future generations, maybe the men understood the value, too?

“We were so happy, bubbling, we were going to protect something so valuable.”[11] The community had begun, with all its pending challenges, flaws, and beauty. As Indigenous Forest Defender Rainbow Eyes says three years later: “the Fairy Creek Blockades is what we now live to recreate.”[12]

Later that first week, as Forest Defenders entrenched themselves on the line where they had stopped the road building with tents, an outhouse, a makeshift kitchen, fire pit, suspended tarps as shelter for always imminent west coast rain, Elder Bill came up to what became Ridge Camp, the first blockade camp at Fairy Creek. He came to welcome them and give formal permission to help protect his ancestral, unceded territory and the old growth forest. They sat in a circle, the first circle, on camping chairs and logs that were collateral damage by the roadbuilding and listened to the wisdom and teachings of Elder Bill that would become a regular event at the blockades as he became their spirit guide. Settler Forest Defenders explained how:

“One of the most important things I learned from Elder Bill was how to listen. Just sitting there listening to him was a big lesson. We learned how to listen to our Elders, the knowledge keepers.”

No treaties have ever been signed with the Pacheedaht First Nation. In the late 19^th Century, the British crown took the land from the Indigenous peoples to build what became the colonial country called Canada, like it was the most logical thing to do, and now leases it out to logging corporations like Teal Jones and Timber West. To them, this land is just T46; to the Ancestral Indigenous peoples and the Forest Defenders, it is, in Elder Bill’s words, where we become persons.

When remembering the day he visited Ridge Camp on August 13^th, 2020, Elder Bill expressed:

I was very affected when I went up to Ridge Camp for the first time. The broken rock up there is the biggest hurt to our Great Mother. It’s like stabbing her when you drill holes into her and blow it up and big chunks of granite come down. I felt numb, achy, kind of cold from my bottom up, from my feet up and I was in a cold sweat. And I now realize looking back: it was the broken rock of the granite mountain that was blown up and left there ruthlessly, shivering.

To be continued…

This is an excerpt from the beginning of our in-progress book with the working title, Flying the Coop: The Fairy Creek Blockades & the Legacy of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones. Here is the description of the full book for your interest:

“Flying the Coop will inspire personal transformation through reacquainting ourselves with our Great Mother and rediscovering our original Aboriginal selves.

This book is a work of narrative nonfiction, interviews, and research. It is the life story of residential school survivor and spiritual leader, Elder Bill Jones, and an intimate account of the Fairy Creek Blockades and its cultural and transformative effects.

The Fairy Creek Blockades, a fight to save some of the world’s last remaining old growth, became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. As forest defenders risked their safety and people travelled from as far as Nepal to show their support, between five and seven thousand people were, in Elder Bill Jones’ words, “re-indigenized”—including himself.

This book weaves together the story of Elder Bill Jones’ personal decolonization with the story of the blockades, the place where, after a lifetime of being beaten down by the colonized consciousness that continues to hold First Nations captive, he had the epiphany: “I know what happened!” At Fairy Creek, both settler and Indigenous Forest Defenders became reacquainted with our Great Mother. As Elder Bill states: “We are the Great Mother’s care-persons as she is our care-being. We are here to be guided by and protect her.”

Beginning with the first night of the blockade on August 9^th, 2020, the narrative then reaches back to the early 1890s and the stories told to Elder Bill as a child by his grandfather, Charlie Jones. Beginning with the plagues and the implementation of the Indian Act, the narrative travels through Elder Bill’s personal life and family history, his residential school experiences, his coercion into destroying his ancestral land and working as a logger, an intimate narrative of the community at the Fairy Creek Blockades with all of its triumphs and chaos, to the lawsuit against forest defenders by the logging corporation Teal Jones—including Elder Bill as their spiritual leader—and exposing the challenges facing Canadian Truth & Reconciliation. Memoir, legacy and prescriptive non-fiction, the book ends in ongoing triumph as Elder Bill proclaims: “We will show the world that we are going in peace and happiness knowing that we are the winners!”

Flying the Coop is not only a memoir and an investigation into the complexities of the Indian Act and the relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers in Canada, but also a work of literature. Our goal is to create a compelling narrative so that the reader won’t be able to put the book down even when they are confronting very difficult—yet essential—issues from under-represented voices and under-acknowledged history and current events. As such, this book is a combination of original literary fiction and non-fiction that weaves together interviews, poetic prose, and Elder Bill’s teachings with the ultimate goal of instilling personal and cultural transformation in the reader and society at large.”

Elder Bill Jones and Karen Moe (July 2024)

If you’d like to learn more

about the book and consider supporting the writing and publishing process, check out our GoFundMe page. In the updates of the GoFundMe page, you can also watch a presentation about the book by Elder Bill and Karen Moe hosted by Joshua Wright where Elder Bill and Karen talk about the process and progress of the book and Karen gives a reading.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-pacheedaht-elder-bill-jones-legacy

You can learn about author and activist Karen Moe by visiting her website:

https://karenmoeauthor.com/

Notes:

[1] Suzanne Simard Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest Toronto: Allen Lane, 2021:8.

[2] https://www.natureunited.ca/what-we-do/our-priorities/innovating-for-climate-change/forest-carbon-boreal-forest/#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20global%20forests%20that,cars%20emit%20in%20one%20year

[3] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide; https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/are-humans-causing-or-contributing-global-warming#:~:text=A%20net%205%20billion%20metric,atmosphere%20by%20nearly%2050%20percent.

[4] James Craig, Mike McCullich, Harlan Wright x “A Reconnaissance of Fish Habitat Restoration Opportunities in the San Juan River Watershed (1999)”. B.C Conservation Foundation, Nanaimo BC: 1; 12-13.

[5] The quotes are taken from interviews with forest defenders. Because of the current lawsuit against central Forest Defenders in the Fairy Creek Blockade, I have decided to maintain their anonymity at this time.

[6] Without a core or a crocs-section (Heaven forbid!) my guesstimate is anywhere between 800 and 2 ,000. Let me explain. Trees on the outer West Coast were all subjected to “Dancing dwarves” – periodic major earthquakes prior to and including the 9.2 (Richter scale) of 1700 which are part of and witnessed by First Nations stories.* So the average Big tree on the coast is “only 500-” it is one that survived our last 9.2. earthquake and tsunami. Dating any tree is difficult because it depends on orientation, slope and hydrology (how much water it is receiving and what forces it has to resist to survive.) Titania is in a water receiving downslope area, so she has to put out roots outwards to counter tipping down the slope and counterbalance her height. Hence she has to have a broad base. So my take is that she is a survivor from 1700 likely 800+ years old -but we could have surprises. [I tends to be conservative in my estimates.] Email correspondence with Loys Maingon MA, PhD, MSc (RPBio) November 23^rd, 2023. *I asked Elder Bill about stories of the ‘dancing dwarves’ and he told me that these are some of the stories that have been lost in his culture due to the plagues and residential school erasure of their culture through the decimation of their personhood.

[7] Gabor Maté, MD, with Daniel Maté. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2022: 122.

[8] Cryptogamic covers are responsible for about half of the naturally occurring nitrogen fixation on land and they take up as much carbon dioxide as is released yearly from biomass burning. https://phys.org/news/2012-06-algae-lichens-mosses-huge-amounts.html. By cutting down the old-growth forest, we interfere with these intricate cooling systems. This increases wildfires and climate heating. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/09/11/news/tiny-lichen-could-stop-teal-jones-logging-fairy-creek-old-growth. More than 400 species of plants and animals rely on BC’s old growth forests for at least part of their life cycle https://oldgrowthforestecology.org/ecological-values-of-old-growth-forests/ecological-processes-and-functions/conservation-of-biodiversity/

[9] Thank you to Steve Fisher (camp name: FunGuy) for this story. Interview May 13^th, 2024.

[10] The Fifth Estate: “Whose Police? RCMO unit acts as a private security force, critics say.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQO2RIytszY

[11] Ibid.

[12] Interview November 2023.

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Everyday Lecher

Posted on September 25, 2023August 12, 2024 by Karen Moe

In 2022, I published my first book.

It’s called Victim. For those of you who don’t know about it, the subtitle is: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor. Some people asked me why I called it that, Victim, why I named my book, a manifesto no less, with a word that traditionally denotes weakness and defeat. I responded, as I still do: I named it with reality.

Okay, that still may not fully answer your question because: why is it a reality that a word conventionally equated with weakness has anything to do with strength and even triumph over trauma, as I named my North American book tour? That’s because, even if a person (usually a woman) is a survivor of sexual violence, we are still victims. We are changed. The violation and subsequent trauma never fully goes away. And this doesn’t have to be a bad thing; the same way that the word ‘victim’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing: both are reality. Like I say in Victim, as simultaneously a victim and a survivor, I am “[a]live in the wisdom of what I have survived. Fierce in not accepting what doesn’t have to be true.” (153) And this is certainly true. The fact that I am alive in the wisdom. Because I definitely know a creepy lecher when one leches on me. And I am fierce in not letting him know that it is true: you’re abusing power. Stop.

Last week, I needed help. From a man unfortunately: the financial advisor of my deceased father and now the one who manages my mother’s finances. I am, again unfortunately, one of the many people in the North American land of individualism and excessive personal boundaries, a person whose sister has estranged me. And, yes another unfortunately, she is also the executor of my mother’s will—and my mother isn’t doing well. Recently, I found out my sister could sell the house without my consent. I thought we were all equal: my brother, my sister and I; but, no, mimetic to the hierarchical culture we live in, we’re not. And I also found out—perhaps predictably—that she doesn’t want to lose her power.

I needed advice as to how I won’t lose my home.

The house that I have been living in for the majority of my life since 2016. The house and place that I am very attached to. I certainly wouldn’t have sought his advice if I knew he is an everyday lecher, though. What I mean by the nomenclature “An Everyday Lecher” is because, in patriarchy as a system of ingrained misogyny and power abuse, these kinds of men are everywhere, committing acts of what they construe as a bit of flirtatious fun. It may sound minor. But another “what’s-she-complaining-about?” But it’s not. Sexual harassment is connected to rape. The particular man doing the sexual harassing may not be a rapist, may never go that far; however, it should go without saying as the most obvious logic: everything is connected.

Here’s yet another tale of sexual harassment and power abuse,

in the banality of a Starbucks no less, sipping English Breakfast tea, backgrounded by an Indigo/Chapters, Canada’s most common book store, not to mention but another greedy corporation manspreading around neo-liberal land (re: capitalism on crack). The Everyday Lecher sat down and immediately felt that it was his right to reach across the table and start stroking my skin. He was a dear friend of my father’s after all (and I wonder what my father would have thought of that, the entitled stroking of his daughter’s skin, that is). More: as he stroked and I pulled away, as I was of course taken aback by this friend of my deceased father’s hand lunging across the table, his eyes clamped onto my chest and, laughing playfully, like a goofy Lex Luther (he is kind of a dork), he exclaimed: “I like your ample bosom!”

Okay, you may be thinking: “what’s she complaining about? Things could be so much worse!” Yes, you’re right! They could be. Like the all-out sexual assaults I have survived and been victimized by; like child sex slavery in Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Mexico, Latin America, Africa and wherever another war-torn country is ripped open for a new batch of female vulnerability and male, entitled, violence (don’t get your backs up, men, you’re not all lechers, rapists and sex tourists). Yet, throughout the reading of this post, don’t forget the ‘everything-is-connected-of-course’ reality.

Then: (because I’ve had challenges with men and found myself in emotionally abusive relationships since the beginning of the string of my relationships with emotionally abusive men due to the emotional abuse inflicted on me in childhood by my father who, himself, was a victim of sexual assault and unresolved trauma and, subsequently, took it out on me, the child he saw the most of himself in), I am quite often single, having just survived another emotionally abusive relationship. Even though the conversation that day in one of the 32,660 Starbucks in the world was supposed to be about probate fees and a strategy to keep my sister from having the ability to sell the house out from under me, the Everyday Lecher’s conversational priority was to comment, every few minutes on how ‘dateable’ I am while continuing to reach across the table and stroke my skin, as he called it, not my arm, but my skin: “I like to stroke your skin,” he kept saying, starting to make me feel very uncomfortable, yet still always surprised when behaviour which shouldn’t be common at all happens in the first place.

I put on my jacket.

Because I was cold. And, I’m not sure but maybe subconsciously, because I wanted to cover myself, make my skin inaccessible to him. I have been afraid of men all of my life. This is because my dad was scary. It’s lessening now. But it’s still there, so I don’t process right away, especially when it’s a dear friend of your deceased father’s and you are kind of shocked this kind of thing would happen in the first place. Again.

“I don’t like it that you put your coat on. I can’t touch your skin now,” he lechered from across just another of millions of round, grey Starbucks tables. My skin started to crawl; the all too familiar anxiety began to roil in the pit of my stomach. And yet, I was there to get some answers, a possible solution as to how to save the house that heals me, how to save my father’s orchard (we had forgiveness at the end of his life—yes, a lot of context to fill you in on like everything in life— which makes the orchard even more precious to me;) my flower garden filled with sweet peas every summer; so many trees that will most likely be cut down by soulless capitalists when the house sells in order to build a monstrosity as monetarily profitably as possible; the beach that has calmed me since childhood with the clearest water where I swim every summer. As I swim, like just ten days ago now, roll around like a euphoric seal, as I float with arms outstretched and am a part of purest water and the bluest sky, I exclaim to myself and to other blissed out swimmers:

“The water is as crystal silk!”

Whenever I am away from this sea and not feeling well, I visualize its expanse, and I feel better. Always. I can’t lose this house. This place. This land. I’ll do virtually anything to keep it, even put up with an everyday-lecher/father’s-financial-advisor’s entitled, creepy advances.

The meeting ends.

There is a sort of possible solution (which ended up didn’t work out and that’s another story about first world individualism, lack of empathy, and more possible familial estrangement). Because he apparently idolized my father, he wants to see my dad’s bicycle, the one I ride when I’m in Canada. Ridiculously—yes, trauma can impel us to do ridiculous, albeit justifiable, things—I became a child again, that little girl who was abused by her father, and I tell the Everyday Lecher about the sweet peas in my garden that grew so tall this year they are a part of the apple tree. He made a comment about my ‘sweet pea’—an obvious clitoral allusion, even without the skin stroking and bosom staring previous. Yuck! The sweet pea comment would be cute coming from a real boyfriend, but from your dad’s investment guy? Yuck! And connecting my deific sweet peas with his lechery? “Men suck!” as my good friend and comrade in calling out sexual violence in all of its forms, Catherine Owen, said when I told her.

The next morning, I had to say something, of course. I texted:

“Don’t feel entitled to touch any part of me and make sexual comments again.” He responded:

“I shouldn’t have been so familial,” his response. Familial?! That’s even creepier! I had to phone him:

“Your behaviour was far from ‘familial.’ Would you insist on stroking your niece’s skin? Comment on her breasts? And then, as the climax of this apparently harmless family affair, make a clitoral innuendo?” He was shocked, the perpetrator became the victim in his patriarchal mind. He went on and on about how he would NEVER do that (the sweet pea part he found particularly ‘hurtful’). His voice was rising with horror and hurt. You did. I stated. I have been leched on by enough men in my 56 years to know a sexual innuendo when I am assaulted by one. And yes, like all of us who have lived through sexual violence, I have PTSD. It surfaced because of this everyday seemingly benign sexual violence from across but another Starbucks table. No thanks.

In the end, the Everyday Lecher couldn’t respond to my familial rebuttal. How could he? My undermining of his diminishment of sexual harassment to some kind of familial affection rendered him speechless. The object of his abuse of power had made him ridiculous and, hopefully, deep down, to himself as well.

He didn’t help me as much anymore, predictably. All of the assistance he’d promised and empathy he’d given during the meeting disappeared. And, he couldn’t look me in the eye when he came over to give my mom an update on her investments.

Epilogue:

It’s logical that victimhood never fully goes away. It’s logical, too, that we are survivors because we have survived, we are strong and we live with and do not allow the undeniable change we experience by being victimized defeat us. It’s logical that PTSD raises its re-traumatized head when we are assaulted again—even if it’s just some unconsented to skin-touching by a man who was one of your dad’s best friends and not being shoved against a wall or onto a bed or drugged and abducted and raped.

But it doesn’t have to be logical for men to be entitled to touch us, make lascivious comments all in good fun, excuse their power abuse as mere familial affection (I can’t help but wonder if he treats his niece in the same ‘familial’ fashion). It doesn’t have to be logical that we are exaggerating, making something out of nothing, maybe even making it all up. No. Such enculturated-male-in-patriarchy-entitlement that is embedded into the heads of men in positions of power can and must, someday, make no sense. Let’s call them all out. Let’s render all of their justifications and excuses ridiculous.

Me in my beloved garden in Lantzville BC. Where the sweet peas meet the apple trees xoxoxoxoox

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The Doing is the Hope: The War in the Woods is Not Over at Fairy Creek.

Posted on May 29, 2023May 29, 2023 by Karen Moe

In 2020 and 2021,

thousands of people came to defend some of the last remaining pristine, temperate old growth forest in the world at Fairy Creek on southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Surpassing the old growth forest blockades at Clayoquot Sound on the West Coast of Vancouver Island in 1993—known as The War in the Woods—with over 856 forest defenders arrested, Fairy Creek became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian History with 1,194 arrests. In May 2021, a court injunction was given to the logging corporation, Teal Jones, by the BC Supreme Court judge that made it illegal to freely protest on unceded Indigenous land of the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations and the brutality of the RCMP (Canada’s federal police) “led to serious and substantial infringement of civil liberties, including impairment of the freedom of the press to a marked degree.”[1] The Fairy Creek Blockades became the new War in the Woods.

Because of the Indian Act in 1876 that formally colonized the Indigenous peoples and began both the literal and psychological genocide that continues today, the relations between First Nations people in Canada are extremely complex. The communities are divided. One side is the Band Council, a governing body set up by the Indian Act, that is bribed by the Crown and serves the government and the corporations and supports old growth logging; the other side is the ancestral First Nations who fight to defend the land and revive their traditions and, in Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones’ words, “re-plant the seed of self-realization” that was taken from the first peoples through the Indian Act and the residential schools. It was and is the Ancestral First Nations who invited the Forest Defenders to help them defend their land and save the pristine eco-systems of the Fairy Creek watershed and its surrounding forests. The Band Council, as puppets who serve the government and the corporations, say that the Forest Defenders are trespassing. The then BC NDP premier John Horgan, through the corporate interests of the mainstream media, said: We have consulted the First Nations. They don’t want the Forest Defenders there. However, all of the First Nations people are not consulted and insidious subterfuge blocks the truth from the average British Columbian, the majority of which want to protect the old growth. As you can see, it’s an insidious mess.

The rapes and murders of Indigenous women are synonymous to the rapes and murders of Indigenous forests.

On June 5^th 2021, “the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations issued formal notice to the B.C. government of their intention to defer old growth logging in the Fairy Creek and Central Walbran areas for two years.”[2] The mainstream media reported that the forest is being protected; why are the Forest Defenders still there? However, what was not reported by the mainstream media is that the deferred area is only one-third of what was being fought to protect and now, two years later, not only has the majority of the other two-thirds been logged, the two-year moratorium of the other one-third is ending on June 5^th. Horrifyingly, on June 8^ththe deferred forests will re-open for logging. The now BC NDP premier David Eby, despite (or maybe because of) his ambivalent promise for a “paradigm shift” in forestry, has said and done nothing.

We have been invited by Elder Bill Jones and the ancestral First Nations to return to Fairy Creek to witness and fight for the little that is left, the one-third that we were able to temporarily win in 2021 because of the courage and resiliance of the Forest Defenders. We all need to go back, including those of us who weren’t able to come in 2021. There is perhaps nothing more logical than saving some of the last remaining intact ecosystems in the world for the health of our planet and for our children. Not to mention the fact that there is so little left and the ideology of corporate greed is perhaps the least logical way of being possible. With the next five years predicted to be the hottest in human history, logic couldn’t be more obvious.

The beginning of the peaceful renewed protests to save the old growth are beginning on June 4^th, 2023 at 11 AM on the BC Legislature lawn in Victoria, BC. If you are in Victoria or can get there, it would be wonderful to have a large group to show the BC and Canadian government, the citizens of BC, and the world that we are still here. And, starting on the week of the 5^th of June when the deferral ends, come to Fairy Creek to stand up for the fact that, in the words of Aunty Rainbow Eyez, “We need our Old Growth. The War in the Woods is not finished.”

In honour of making a Come-Back, I’m going back to some of my writing that I wrote during the peak of the Fairy Creek Blockades in the Spring and Summer of 2021. Today, I am re-publishing an article that I wrote for Vigilance Magazine dedicated to the Forest Defenders of Fairy Creek in June 2021. In singer-song writer Luke Wallace’s words: “We can make a come-back … I can be the comeback.”[3] We are all the instigators of truth, justice and logic. The doing is the hope. See you there!

The Logical Feminist aka Tanager.[4]

The Doing is the Hope: The Forest Defenders of Fairy Creek

It’s impossible to doubt when you’re in it.

Noble stands of Hemlock and Yellow Cedar, un-haunted by stumps, the only phantoms the layers of longevity, the conflations of life/death that soothe as they stimulate. There is no one or the other here. Amidst the old-growth, lichen, alive in the brightest possible green, has the texture of kelp. Ocean merges with forest. The air is wet. Mist adorns the rainforest as it rains, feeds itself, and this air, its density of oxygen, feeds us. It is impossible to doubt the necessity to save the intact bio-diversity of Fairy Creek—some of British Columbia’s last—when you have felt exactly what it is that must be saved. When the fibers of your being become acquainted with the fiber of what is being so fiercely fought for. In the words of elder Bill Jones of the Pacheedat Nation, the ancient trees “are guides, teachers, spiritual beings.”[5] When embraced by this absolute ecosystem, our bodies are nourished as our spirits soar. This magic is truth.

When at the Fairy Creek Blockades, I had a life altering experience. This experience is even more profound in that these forests of South West British Columbia have always been cathedrals to me; I know how crucial this battle is; I feel cutting down of old growth as deeply as rape; I know that humans are not the only creature who are violated; I have yelled justified rage when the flesh of an ancient tree is cut into and, when that tree falls and the earth shakes, I have been stung by the stunned silence at the loss of the millions of non-human creatures who lived there. But, until my journey to the blockades at Fairy Creek, I had never felt the warrior spirit of Tree Defenders who will never, as long as any old growth in British Columbia is being threatened, give up. And this warrior spirit, the people who are putting their bodies on the line to save the ancient trees, the people who have made the bodies of trees as important as their own, has made the importance of an untouched ecosystem even more profound. It has consolidated the obvious, what everyone really must know if they dig down deep enough: ancient trees are not objects to be plundered for profit, they are ancestors who must be protected. Beings worthy of worship.

I asked activists: “What do the old growth trees mean to you? How do you feel when you look up at one towering above you?” As is so often the case, kids say it best:

Trinity:

“I feel happy because I can see all of these birds. Birds and their families in the trees. I feel like I’m in a fairy tale because when I see the tall trees and I look up, I feel like something is going to come out of the trees … I really like trees.”

Finn:

“I feel very happy that they are there and I feel like, it’s just so beautiful and I love all the moss and how soft it is and how some trees’ bark is smooth and some is rough and then some have old man’s beard and then you can feel it and then there’s lichen that grows on trees and if you rub it against your skin, it makes it very smooth. Trees give you energy.”

It’s a very long walk to Waterfall Camp.

And that’s only one way. 10 km in; 10 km out. The loggers and the RCMP can drive there. The Tree Defenders have to walk. Carrying water, food, and bags of concrete to build their sleeping dragons with.

Sleeping dragons are holes that the Forest Defenders dig into the logging roads at strategic points; if industry and their RCMP henchmen get through, they will be able to slaughter bio-systems, some trees over one-thousand-years-old. The forests, like a healthy human society could be, are multi-generational: the young coexist with the ancient, the middle-aged reach higher and higher into the multi-layered canopy; the yet undiscovered species thrive without us: insects, birds, owls, and the thickest moss is another forest. All exist in a way of being that we, the destroyers of the West, could learn from if we only thought far enough ahead to survive—and not kill everything else in our wake.

After the RCMP have dismantled a camp, the first thing the Forest Defenders do is come back. And do it all over again. Dig the holes to make the sleeping dragons. Shove in the pipe as wide and as long as an arm. Surround it with concrete. Hurry. Before the RCMP return and fill up the holes with Styrofoam, before we can get our arms back in. Lie across the road. Chain ourselves there. Climb the tripod. Chain ourselves there. Don’t come down from the canopy until it’s saved. These ancient trees, these complete forests, are as important as my body. I witnessed people who have the courage to love the future beyond them.

And wait.

While the others pile up the rocks again. Drag the logs and branches back. Re-assert the blockade vehicle somehow, by people with the superhuman strength of living justice, and get it back across the logging road again. As I approached Waterfall camp, I became acquainted with a heightened level of awe.

On the logging road that curves through a decimated land with its aches of stumps, I encountered Green Duck. Why Green Duck? I asked him about his camp name. I like ducks and my favourite colour is green, he responded. No messing around. Camp name done. Let’s get to work.

I had seen him the night before at a meeting at Hayhaka Camp. Forest Defenders were organizing the installment of a Camp at 2000 Road, another entrance to another cut-block of old growth. Cut-block, I thought. The irony of trees as flesh about to be butchered. He reported something extraordinary that had happened earlier that day. I can’t remember what. But I’ll never forget how. His arms were wide, his stance fortified by pride, his young face animated with the energy of doing the right thing. A young man emanating the power of the ancient trees he is defending.

How’s it going? I asked, standing in the middle of the clear cut, a dead world made of brittle gasps. Victories, triumphs, do you think we’re going to win? My question was irrelevant as soon as it was asked:

“The police arrived at 4 am in hiking gear under cover and not identifying as police officers. One put a hand over a Forest Defender’s mouth so that he couldn’t warn the others. It took them four hours to get someone out of the last sleeping dragon. They’d filled the rest of them, they tore us down by noon and then they were out of there. By 4 pm, we had a four foot blockade up, we had lots of people on the way to come stay the night and help rebuild. It’s astonishing. We’re here for the long haul. We need to re-build that blockade otherwise they’ll move further up that road and that’s what we can’t have. We can’t have them get to those old growth forests. No matter how disheartening those police officers are, no matter how criminal their acts might be, in the end, we’re still here smiling. We’re still here because it’s right, it’s our purpose. We know that if you don’t stand now, there’s no other time to stand. These are the triumphs,” Green Duck told me.

“What were you doing when the last of the old-growth fell?” a placard asks at the Fairy Creek Headquarters. “Everything,” the Forest Defenders act.

It’s a long walk to Waterfall Camp

and, just when one starts to really wonder how much farther, rows of rocks begin to block the road. Continuing, longing for the destination to be around the next bend, the lines of rocks become wider and taller and are soon topped by branches that form a mesh of sticks and twigs, a chain-link fence made of forest. I knew I was almost there when I came upon a parade of RCMP trucks along with their battalion of men and the token woman; those who pose as public servants but behave like mercenaries. “Are you OK?” the one woman cop asks Forest Defenders who have their arms self-locked into logging roads during a routine safety check. “Of course I’m not OK,” the silent Forest Defender doesn’t answer. “None of this is OK!” the hypocrisy of such a question rings through the forests under threat.

The police trucks can only go so far until they have to clear another barricade. The cops are becoming increasingly grumpy as they bend and hurl and bend and hurl stacks of rocks that are never going to end because the Forest Defenders will always put them back. You see, unlike in countries like Mexico, Honduras, Columbia, and Brazil[6] where environmentalists are most expediently silenced, the grumpy Canadian cops will always have to keep moving rocks and logs and, so far, cannot fully serve their system of exploitation and simply assassinate these pesky people who care beyond themselves. Canada is a first world country after all. We have human rights. I will not use the disclaimer of ‘so-called’ here because, in terms of human rights, despite the atrocities the nation state of Canada commits against Indigenous peoples, we can still protest. We can still dissent. As we did in 1994 where over 20,000 protesters saved the Upper Carmanah; as when a significant portion of Clayoquot Sound was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2000 because the protesters didn’t give up for two decades. Both of these wins are far from perfect, but they were still possible. We can still win. Something. We still have some human rights. Especially the white people. Another reason why we descendants of colonizers need to join the front lines that our culture has made necessary.

I keep walking.

Up the hill of the final stretch to Waterfall Camp. The police move in circles of hurling more rocks and then standing to discuss the endlessness of it all. And then deciding, OK hurl some more rocks, drag away a few more logs. Waiting out their shifts. They let me pass. I say I’m writing a fair story. That wasn’t a lie.

And then I saw them. Separated from the approaching RCMP by three more victorious barricades, a group of forty or so Forest Defenders, defiant behind their final wall of stones and sticks, resistance art, juts and weaves of forest on top of sharp stones left behind by recent blasting, installations that await the arrival of those paid to tear them down.

These were the people Green Duck had told me about. The ones who’d been up all night. Re-building. And now waiting for the cops. Arms locked in sleeping dragons. A young woman wearing a mask that proclaims “Revolution” towers defiance from a tripod. The others a wall of not-giving-up. Ready as they are every day. When this scenario plays out again. They know each other. The cops and the Forest Defenders. A ridiculous round and round. Madness when the answer is so sane. “See you tomorrow,” a young woman called out with a grin on that Saturday afternoon when they won and the police retreated. Tired of hurling rocks as the Forest Defenders stacked three for every one they cleared. We can still do this. They cheer.

As the RCMP approach the blockades the Forest Defenders chant: “We want your children to see these forests too!” And I wonder, what must the police officers think when they hear this? They must. Hear. Something.

Why are you here? Testimonies of Truth:

Because these forests originated after the last ice age, so some of the trees are about one thousand-years-old. Fairy Creek is a single intact valley and there is no reason, except absolute greed, to log it. This is priceless. I’m here because I decided that it’s time to defend the side that’s right. I’m doing this for my children and my grandchildren who will want me to save these trees. This is priceless. I’m here standing for the trees because when I went back to the magical place where the chanterelle mushrooms grew, the whole forest was eliminated. Priceless. It’s impossible to replant the wild. This is priceless. We deeply care about the old-growth forest, the biodiversity and the ecosystems. We’re Indigenous and the lands are very sacred to us. There are so many layers to saving and preserving the forest. This is beyond commerce. Priceless. I’m here because the continued colonization of the Indigenous peoples operates through a silencing of the lack of full consent by publicizing the coerced. Because the government and the RCMP are at the service of corporations and the mainstream media never tells the whole truth. This is priceless. This is priceless. I’m here as a barrier between colonial violence and the land, between the loggers and the old growth and between the RCMP and the Indigenous youth. Because I know that even if the last of the old growth is logged, the current forestry practice is unsustainable. This is priceless. I’m here because clearcutting respects absolutely nothing. Because I want my grandkids to grow up and see thousand year old trees. They’re five and six. This is priceless. And if I have to get arrested, I get arrested. I came here because I love trees and I love our planet. I’m here because I want there to be life for future generations. Priceless. What they’re doing is arresting people, but they can’t arrest our hope. I stand in solidarity with elder Bill Jones and the Pacheedaht who have not been consulted because they say No.

At the end of this always journey for justice,

I climbed up to Cloud Camp, through an ancient forest that silently, oh so generously, gives us breath. It poured that day. The mud lay as banks of snow. It couldn’t have been more perfect. I had come to meet the Tree-Sitters.

I climbed and slipped and descended into lush valleys that ring with the indescribable calls of Tanagers. Mae West lopped past, effortless, the extent of his determination had grown into an acute awareness of slippery roots and trails that thread along cliffs, so deadly now as the rain didn’t stop. The trees became larger, some with planks for the Tree-Sitters primed for the warning: “The police are here!” I arrived clothed in mud. A circle of Tree-Sitters sat with their dripping tarp and warming fire. Dora told me that tree-sitting for days is like being in a monk cell in the canopy. Red talked of tarpology as he prepared to climb up and get to work because an old growth forest had healed him. A young woman said: the trees are home.

I came upon Lorax high up in a hemlock, flying on a perch made from a boat. How long will you be up there? My question. As long as it takes. His answer.

I asked him what he’d been doing. A bit of writing this morning, he said. What? I responded. I’ve written a poem. The rain continued: loving, laughing, irreverent. A perfect finale for these stories of unrelenting life. Will you read it to me? And he did. From high up in a hemlock, a Tree-Sitter living for as long as it takes in a flying boat in a rainforest that still has the chance to always nourish the earth. Because the Forest Defenders have made it so.

Let’s give the last words to Lorax:

Click play to hear Lorax’s poem!

All photos by Karen Moe

#iloveendnotes:

[1] https://thenarwhal.ca/topics/fairy-creek-blockade/

[2] https://thediscourse.ca/vancouver-island/old-growth-logging-deferrals-fairy-creek

[3] Lyrics by @lukewallacemusic

[4] My camp name at Fairy Creek. The Tanager is a golden bird of the temperate rainforest. They are rare and are one of the thousands of species that are threatened to become extinct by old growth logging.

[5] Quoted on the Rain Forest Flying Squad’s Facebook post on June 7^th, 2021.

[6] https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/who-killing-latin-americas-environmentalists

About the Blogger:

Karen Moe is an art critic, visual and performance artist, author and feminist activist. Her work focuses on systemic violence in patriarchy: be it gender, race, the environment or speciesism. Her art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish and she has exhibited and performed across Canada, in the US and in Mexico. She is the author of Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor: Vigilance Press, 2022. Born and raised in British Columbia, Canada, Karen now lives in Mexico City.

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Irrefutable: Last Girl First Proves the Absolute Necessity to Abolish Prostitution.

Posted on May 12, 2023May 22, 2023 by Karen Moe

I don’t think anyone

can read this book and still support the sex trade in any way—well-meaning as some of that support may be.[1] I don’t think anyone will be able to view prostitution as not only a job like any other, but necessary and beneficial to, paradoxically, the world’s most vulnerable people who would have no other way to survive if their bodies were not commodified. Rigorously researched, Last Girl First: Prostitution at the intersection of sex, race & class-based oppressions[2]is a testament that proves the abolition of the sex trade is absolutely necessary. This book is irrefutable logic. If you support the sex trade in any way, I dare you to read it.

From the first page, the study opens the reader to the big picture. It is crucial to look at a system of exploitation as a whole rather than cling to the delusion of individual choice being somehow separate from the system that we are all an intrinsic part of. Right away, the book demonstrates the necessity of revolutionizing the ideology of individualism that is responsible for upholding the exploitation of the other in order to serve the self. In this book, the sex trade as a system is thoroughly exposed in order to comprehend completely and be motivated to act accordingly:

“Prostitution does not only involve the person in prostitution but also other actors such as the sex buyer who imposes a sexual act for money and the pimp, who profits from the prostitution of the prostituted person. It is therefore important to decentralise the view: prostitution is not an individual choice but a social and commercial system that is exploitative.” [3] (Italics mine)

The view of the sex trade and all exploitation in neo-liberal[4] patriarchy must include all that produces it, maintains it and, most importantly, all who are devastated by it.

The indisputable fact that prostitution is a gendered atrocity is an intrinsic part of the contextualization of the study. Even though it should go without saying: the main gender sold are women and the main buyers men. It’s impossible to claim otherwise. Yes, there are a tiny percentage of women who purchase sex and, thereby, participate in the capitalist disparity of power abuse between the bought and the sold; however, this is such a small percentage and, as such, it is ridiculous to attempt to use a smattering of first world women to undermine the reality of the male buyer and female bought in a male-supremacist hierarchy.[5] In order for a hierarchy to uphold what is at the top, those below must be exploited. As a revolutionary tract that looks at the system as a whole, Last Girl First lists each of the micro-hierarchies that reinforce one another and produce the buying and selling of “the most socially, economically, psychologically and ethnically disadvantaged groups…: patriarchy, racism, colonialism, class, war and militarisation.”[6] It is through the interaction of these oppressions that men exploit (predominantly) women’s or girls’ bodies for their sexual ‘pleasure’—or pathology.

Don’t agree yet? Okay, here’s a bit of so much more:

After the wholistic definition of prostitution as a system

of sexual exploitation is laid out, a glossary of terms is provided where each component of the sex trade is defined so that there will be absolute clarity in not only the terms that will be used in the book, but also, the scope of normalized exploitation. The purpose of this book is two-fold: to prove the sex trade’s inherent violence as undeniable and a system that must be abolished, and to change mentalities and perceptions of women in society and, ultimately, eradicate demand. The Glossary lists: a person in prostitution/prostituted person (as opposed to the politically correct, misleading and damaging term ‘sex-worker’); survivor of prostitution; sex buyer; child sex tourism, sex tourism; pimping, the pimp; trafficking in human beings for the purpose of sexual exploitation; the “red light districts/areas”; brothels; indigenous people; minority; migrant person; refugee; asylum seeker; internally displaced person. Next, the different legislative approaches to prostitution are explained: The Abolitionist Model also known as the Nordic Model or the Equality Model; The Partial Decriminalisation Model”; The Regulatory Model also known as the Legalisation Model or the Total Decriminalisation Model; and The Prohibitionist Model. Once all of the parts of the system have been explained, the foundation within which all of these parts interact is given.

“Throughout time and history, women and girls from systemically discriminated and marginalised communities have always been disproportionately targeted by the prostitution system. Socio-economic factors and historical and political trends contribute to their over-representation in the prostitution system.”[7]

Weaving together statistics, personal stories from prostitution survivors, and reports from organizations like Kafa (Enough) Violence and Exploitation in Lebanon, Breaking Free USA, Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry (Canada), The National Center for Youth Law, the Columbian NGO Initiativa Pro Equidad, and Apne Aap India (to name a few sources of front lines testimonies provided in the first 51 pages), Last Girl First builds its analysis of prostitution as an intersection of sex, race and class-based oppression and proves how no oppression exists in isolation. Everything is connected; systemic analysis is essential for understanding.

When one thinks and feels in the big picture context of

exploitation of which sexual violence is a part, it should be glaringly obvious that the women and girls at the bottom of the patriarchal—most often white supremacist, but always male supremacist[8]—hierarchy suffer most. And, in a far from post-colonial world where the racializing, capitalist infrastructure is perhaps more voracious than ever, prostitution is a continued mechanism of colonization and profit. The beginning of Last Girl First moves from the over-representation of indigenous women in prostitution in Canada and the US, to the legacy of the British colonization of India, to the contemporary colonization of Tibet by China, resource extraction like mining and oil and gas by international corporations and sex tourism. We are given the infrastructure of the sex trade as a part of the history of imperialist patriarchy and capitalism whereby the women of the conquered people are converted to commodities to be exploited along with the land that was—and continues to be—taken from them.

In the next section, women and girls from oppressed castes in Asia are discussed along with asylum seekers and migrants. From the cut-throat perspective of patriarchal capitalism, the displacements of war are a great source of sexually commodifiable women and girls. As one of many statistics in this chapter informs: “In Europe, migrant women and girls are estimated to represent 84% of women in prostitution in thirteen European countries.”[9] Anyone who says that the legalization of prostitution in Germany is a “but a job opportunity like all others” needs to know that 90% of the (always very young) women being bought in Germany’s mega-brothels are migrant women predominantly from Eastern Europe and Africa and, now, with the war in the Ukraine, the displaced women of the Ukraine have become a large source of women trafficked to the legal brothels of Western Europe. As a manifestation of one of the many horrors of legalized prostitution in countries like Australia and Germany, the women are dehumanized in order to fulfill the sex-buyer’s demand to “own the woman [and] … do whatever you want with her.”[10] In one of the 3,500 registered brothels in Germany, “nearly 1,700 sex buyers flocked … during the opening weekend, complaining afterwards on forums about … women no longer being ‘consumable’ and ‘worn out’ after a few hours.”[11] Bound by the reductionist ideology of free choice for all, the women working legally in these mega-brothels need to service six men per day before they make any money themselves. So, basically, not only are the always younger and younger women brutalized and traumatized by six different men, they are not even being paid for their suffering. Like in the Netherlands and Austria where prostitution is also legalized, German nationals with the security and opportunities provided to women who are not displaced by war have better things to do with their lives—like take advantage of state-funded university, as one of many non-exploitative opportunities available to the privileged—than voluntarily signing up for a career of dehumanization.

One of my next books is going to be on child sex slavery. Not only do such horrors need to be exposed (what I call and will entitle my book, “inconceivable reality”), the fact that child sex slavery exists at all is absolute evidence that the system of exploitation we live in needs to be revolutionized. Last Girl First defines minors in the sex trade as “an alarming phenomenon which is constantly on the rise worldwide.”[12] As the basis for despicability in patriarchy as a system of male impunity, one surely cannot be affected by the fact that “[t]he demand for ‘virgin’ girls illustrates the relationships of control and domination at work in the prostitution system.”[13] An example in Mexico is provided where virgin girls are offered to sex-buyers at a high price. One could say, “Oh well, that’s Mexico. It doesn’t happen in civilized countries like Canada, for example.” But wait, we then find out that “[i]n Canada, the average age of entry into prostitution is reported to be 13.”[14] Yes, atrocity is in the back yard of the so-called first world if we take the time to look and/or read books like Last Girl First. If sex buyers are looking for younger and younger girls to exploit (and we must not forget that the majority of sex buyers seeking young girls in countries like Mexico are sex tourists from countries like Canada and the US), there is no things-are-getting-better-for-women when we include all women as the male fetish for the conquest of vulnerability is stronger than ever—not to mention the lack of empathy necessary to be able to pay to rape a child.

I ask:

do you want to be involved in this in any way except to fight for its abolition? Any justification of prostitution as sex “work” and work like all others along with the ideology of freedom of choice—including, paradoxically, circumstantial and coerced ‘choice’—maintains such horrors. Period.

It needs to be read;

I’m not going to explicate the whole book for you. This is one of those books where you can flip to any page and find more truth backed up by both primary and secondary research. When I read—especially such an important book of revolution as Last Girl First—I have a pencil handy. I underline, parenthesis, asterisk, exclamation mark, write “Wow!” “WTF?” or “Arggghhh!” on the margins. This is one of the books where I have been compelled to underline and asterisk almost the whole thing. What follows is a collage of some of the parts that leapt off of the page for me:

Women and girls from systemically discriminated communities … disproportionate impact … the sources of prostitution … the structural and systemic discrimination inherited from colonialism … in Canada … children from First Nations communities … represent 90% of the victims of sexual exploitation where Indigenous represents less than 10% of the population … victims are sold in Moldova, Romania or Bulgaria for a few hundred Euros and then taken to Turkey, the Balkans or Cyprus where exploiters enslave them and break down any will to resist by using gang rape, food deprivation, confinement and physical violence … before sending them to Western Europe to satisfy male demand … Roma women … Dom ethnic women … prostitution as a weapon of war … Iraq … Myanmar … “spoils of war” … a culture of impunity for perpetrators … sex buyers who take advantage of extreme poverty … prostitution in exchange for food … is actually part of a wider oppression inflicted by dominant groups on dominating groups … in 2018, between fifteen and twenty thousand minors were identified as victims of sexual exploitation in Cambodia, a country described as a “key destination” for paedocriminals travelling in South East Asia … in Brazil, a leading sex tourism destination, many sexual predators—mainly from Western Europe and the United States—travel to the coastal and north-eastern tourist regions seeking to force sex on children … the glamourization and trivialisation of prostitution, as well as the perception of women’s and girls’ bodies as objects of remuneration, “a means of making a career” and even tools for emancipation, contribute to the increase in prostitution of minors and students … “Student Sex Work Toolkit” … when asked why they “entered” prostitution, 88% said “needed money” and “hungry” … sex buyers would not have access to women’s bodies in the first place if the women were not in situations of immense financial insecurity and fighting for survival … sex buyers, in a position of power because they have the financial advantage, reportedly pay women in prostitution 66-79% less if the latter insist on using a condom … for 90% of the women surveyed, their first sexual encounter was in fact a sexual assault or rape … in the United States, overall, 20% of homeless youth are LGBTQ, while the latter represents 58.7% of victims of sexual exploitation on the streets … discourses normalising and promoting prostitution as a desirable and emancipatory economic option for LGBTQ people contribute to encouraging their entry and confinement in the system … in the UK … 95% of women in street prostitution use crack or heroin … in Canada and the US, all members of the Indigenous communities, with the aim of breaking all links with their original culture—considered as inferior—and to replace it with patriarchal and individualistic colonial codes … PATRIARCHY AT THE ROOT OF THE PROSTITUTION SYSTEM … male domination at work in patriarchy involves the establishment of a continuum of sexist and sexual violence aimed at maintaining the established order … while prostitution is portrayed as free choice for some, … it first and foremost affects those who have the least choice.

These are some of the parts I underlined and asterisked to page 111 in a 193 page book. Can anyone not acknowledge these undisputable and impeccable sourced statistics and testimonies? (If so, please comment at the end of this post and share why and how this is possible! If you’ve come to my blog, you obviously care about justice. Dialogue is essential for understanding and transformation that serves justice for all).

As I wrote in my first post on prostitution,

I have often been accused and chastised especially by politically correct, pro-prostitution academics: “How would you know and what right do you have to speak about this, to have an opinion, if you have never literally been in the sex industry?” And, yes, they are right: I have never literally been one of the majority of circumstantially coerced women and girls or one of the 1% of women who gloat that they freely choose what everyone else has been scathed by[15]; however, not only have I been a victim and survivor of sexual violence on three occasions, I am also a woman in patriarchy. And, like all women in patriarchy, (and men conditioned to abuse emotionally and/or physically and who have, in Robert Jensen’s words, a crippled capacity to be fully human[16]) I am personally affected by the normalisation of that which rapes us. As Last Girl First states, all of the factors in the system of sexual violence “are cross-cutting: they do not only apply to women from systemically discriminated communities but go beyond this categorisation and affect women in general.”[17]

If you were already an abolitionist before reading this or if I have convinced you, it should go without saying that I cannot recommend the importance of this book enough; if you still think that there is something good about the buying and selling of bodies and that sex-work is a necessary and benign employment opportunity, I cannot recommend the importance of reading this book even more. I have striven to give a representation of the researched reality that composes Last Girl First: the intersection of sex, race & class-based oppressions. Read it. Please. Then get back to me. It is one of my greatest wishes that everyone not only comprehends, but feels and acts on the logic of abolishing the sex trade.

Your friend in justice for everyone and everything always,

The Logical Feminist.

Order a copy of Last Girl Firsl: Prostitution at the intersection of sex, race & class here.

PS: If you have found this post provocative and important, share the logic!

#iloveendnotes

[1] The reasoning for the Sex Work is Work platform is that de-stigmatizing prostitution and making it a job like any other will increase the safety of prostituted people. The very need to increase the safety of people in the sex industry is proof in itself that prostitution is not just another job. Moreover, countries like Germany, Australia and New Zealand that have legalized and decriminalized prostitution have not resulted in an increase of safety and security for the world’s most vulnerable people. Instead, sexual violence and the use of a woman or girl’s body for the sexual relief of a man has been normalized. Read this book: Last Girl First: Prostitution at the intersection of race & class-based oppressions, Kat Banyard’s Pimp State: Sex, Money and the Future of Equality and Julie Bindel’s The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth for three researched books that explain what has really happened and happens when prostitution is accepted (and even embraced) as a legitimate part of society.

[2] Last Girl First: Prostitution and the intersection of sex, race & class-based oppression. CAP International (Coalition Abolition Prostitution) with research conducted by Héma Sibi. Translated from the French by Karl Walsh, 2022.

[3] Last Girl First: 6.

[4] Neo-liberalism, served by individualism, greed, the unregulated free market and globalisation, is capitalism on steroids.

[5] At a recent presentation of my book Victim that is about sexual violence and a conversation that inevitably led to prostitution, a woman brought up the fact that so-called first world, middle-aged women travel to destinations like the Dominican republic in order to take advantage of the global economic disparity and enjoy the sexual services of young men. This is true. First World women go to such locales as the Dominican Republic and Jamaica with the intentions of having sex with young, exoticized, locals; however, the percentage is very small in comparison to the millions of men who travel abroad for sex with young women and any abuse involved— like between the women (or girls) and the men— is non-existent. The title of Tanika Gupta’s 2006 play ‘Sugar Mummies’ is telling in that the women have taken on the behaviour of ‘sugar daddies,’ not rapists; nevertheless, using one’s economic privilege to access another human’s body upholds a culture of domination and violence that is inherent to masculine supremacy. I think it is safe to say that women do not go to so-called third world sex tourist destinations to pay thousands of dollars to rape a child. Although I do not condone power abuse on any level, comparing male sex tourism to first world women’s dalliances in the Caribbean are only superficially comparable. As I responded to the woman who brought up women sex tourists (of course, a valid question and comment): they never result in organ damage.

Julie Bindel points out in her 2013 article, the women who travel south “are looking for attention and excitement but end up, often without realising it, being one half of a prostitution deal.” Of course, as with the male sex tourist trade, poverty is the key component due to the economic disparity between the First and Third Worlds and the young men would most likely not have sex with the middle-aged women from the north if they did not have, and give them, money. The trend of women buying sex in tourist destinations like Jamaica can also be connected to female ‘raunch culture’ where fun feminists of the US, Canada and Northern Europe are all about sexual prowess and have, out of proclamations of sexual liberation, adapted patriarchal behavior. See Julie Bindel: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2401788/Sex-tourism-Meetmiddle-aged-middle-class-women-Britains-female-sex-tourists.html https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/aug/09/comment. gender

[6] Last Girl First: 7.

[7] Ibid:18.

[8] It is important to note that not all prostitution occurs in white-supremacist patriarchies that were lborn of European colonialism. In Israel and Lebanon, for example, women from the Slavic countries of eastern Europe are trafficked as ‘Natasha’s’ and their white skin and often red hair are fetishized by Israeli and Lebanese men (See Lydia Cacho Slavery Inc.: The Untold Story of the International Sex Trade and Victor Malarek The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade and The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who But It). In Iraq the Yazidi minority [is] targeted by the armed group Islamic state where the women are subjected to acts of sexual enslavement (LGF 141-142). Tibet, as an imperial victim of China, is also a prostitution destination where the male predators are predominantly non-European. Moreover, in especially Cambodia and Myanmar, Chinese and Japanese sex-buyers are rampant along with their Caucasian counterparts. The Yakuza (Japanese mafia) are also key players in not only the prostitution in Japan, but also in South East Asia along. And, we cannot leave out the Korean comfort women of Japanese Imperialism. Even though white men brought prostitution to colonial contexts like North America by exploiting Indigenous women (and this is certainly not to trivialize the impact of European colonialism and the sexual violence that continues to be inflicted upon Indigenous women today), they did not invent it: men did in the masculine supremacist hierarchy that is Patriarchy which spans cultures and races.

[9] Last Girl First: 36.

[10] Ibid: 91-92.

[11] Ibid: 167.

[12] Ibid: 48.

[13] Ibid: 49.

[14] When I was on my Trauma & Triumph Tour for Victim in 2022, I connected with sexual assault non-profits around the US and Canada. When in Kenora, Ontario Canada, I found out that young indigenous women from the reservations are abducted and taken to resorts on the Lake of the Woods to sexually service (read: be raped by) men. Canadian men don’t have to go to sex tourist destinations like Brazil or Cambodia: they can be sex tourists in their own country.

[15] Like feminist Meghan Murphy says, the privileged 1% of prostituted women who claim to be, or are, unscathed and preach the glamour and legitimacy of sex work as a good job opportunity, “drag everyone else under the bus.” https://www.feministcurrent.com/2013/08/02/interview-meghan-murphy-on-the-sex-industry-individualism-online-feminism-and-the-third-wave/

[16] Robert Jensen The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2017: 71.

[17] Last Girl First: 47.

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Follow Up. Fallout. Part Two.

Posted on April 12, 2023April 13, 2023 by Karen Moe

I don’t think she will ever read this.

And if she does, I hope that will be a good thing, that she will find some validity, some truth in what I am about to write and what I wrote in the first part of this double post: “Follow up. Fallout.” The reason these two posts are named thusly is because of the post previous: “What Fresh Hell is This? Same Old, Same Old” where a young woman calls herself the “modern whore” and adds to the myth that women can be empowered sex objects, that everyone can be one of the privileged 1% in the sex industry who go unscathed making happy memories of naughty and, yes of course, money—money that is represented as virtually free or, like the prostitution “sex work as work like all others” progenitors of the 80s Annie Sprinkle and Scarlott the Harlot celebrated, getting paid for sexually servicing men was a fringe benefit rather than the point of an inevitably unbalanced monetary exchange (and, as such, ironically, it wasn’t even the regular work they were claiming it to be at all). As abolitionist and prostitution survivor Rachel Moran states: “The only thing prostitution ever liberated me from was homelessness.”[1]

In capitalism, where the one paying always has power over the one being paid, there is no such thing as ‘free money’ as much as there is no such thing as prostitution being work like all others or abuse being liberation. I don’t know about you, but I have never had to give a blow job or let my boss bang me before work; I think I can safely say that myself along with the majority of wage labourers have never not been very aware of the fact that we are working for money and, most often, wouldn’t have performed said services without a pay cheque in mind. And, unless I was truly desperate to feed and house my children or support a drug addiction,[2] I—and I think I can also safely say pretty much all women—would never voluntarily sign up for an occupation on par with active warfare where women are routinely beaten, raped, maimed and killed.[3] But then, the happy hookers named above are either in denial of this reality and/or of the upper echelons of the all-in-one-piece 1% who, because of the cloisters of political correctness and fear of being SWERFed,[4] are able to speak for all people trapped in the sex trade and spread the dogma of the empowerment and even the glamour to be gained when selling one’s body (or, most often for everyone else in the sex trade, having their bodies sold by a pimps or traffickers)[5]. In the end, the good fortune of the modern whore, self-proclaimed pro-sex feminists (implying the rest of us are anti-sex), and sex-work as work advocates[6] affects self-righteous hyper-sexualization of many young women and implemented a revised misogyny that has become embedded in Western culture five decades later.

The fallout I am referring to in these posts about a young woman/teenage girl I know has to do with just these tendencies: the cultural patterns that emerged in the third wave feminism of the 80s and 90s when, in a lot of ways, feminism stopped being feminism at all as a political movement to challenge and ultimately dismantle patriarchy as a hierarchy that has to oppress in order to exist, as a male supremacist hierarchy that began and is centered on the oppression and exploitation of women by men. In feminist activist and author Julie Bindel’s words: “the authentic meaning of feminism is the liberation of women from male supremacy.” In the 80s and 90s though, regardless of women using their sexual liberation as a one-track-mind form of feminism, what has really happened is sex positive feminists have maintained and even fed what they claim to be liberating us from.

In the 90s and early 2000s,

empowered lap dancers and retro Betty Page style burlesque performers took center stage of what it meant to be liberated and all liberation was reduced to sex. Now, in the 2020s, this prioritization of sex has resulted in the hyper-sexualization of young women— along with and as a result of—their unwitting internalized sexism. As sex trade industry advocate Gail Dines says about the contemporary state of young womanhood: “either you’re fuckable, or you’re invisible.” And the young woman I know certainly isn’t going to stand for that.

If you haven’t read Follow Up. Fallout. Part One yet, I recommend you do so as to get the beginning of the chronology of where we’re going to arrive. I started out with Billie Eilish’s mega-hit “Bad Guy” and now we are about to devolve into NLE Choppa’s “Slut Me Out.” When the young woman first emerged from my neglected TikTok account (it mysteriously pocket dials; I have maybe five followers; whenever it turns on with a blare, it’s her), I didn’t think, as a feminist and survivor, I could be more horrified. However, with the latest blast, I found out I could. There was her pouty, pretty, indifferent face again, recently developed cleavage, heavy black eyelashes that inevitabilize bedrooms or pending back allies, her nostrils flaring into a fraudulent I’m-so-tough sneer, fraudulent because, like the oxymoron of an empowered lap dancer, any liberation this teenage girl is performing is all about attracting the coveted male gaze in patriarchy. Again. However, I think she actually knows this; this is what she wants and lives for: male attention and trumping other young women as the most desired and, hence, fuckable. And yes, over one-hundred TikTok hearts maintains what I pray is not going to become a fatal fraud.

“Slut Me Out” by NLE Choppa

is two minutes of can’t-get mo’-bad-ass-than-this. If you are sixteen or so and want to impress everyone at high school that you are so cool you’re beyond caring about anything including yourself, this is the song for you. The song starts, (as she did):

“Rip off my shirt if you love me
Spit in my face when you fuck me
Play with my gooch while you suck me
Suck my dick like you was ugly
I’m mean … Hello.”

Let’s start with the last line which is, because of its enigmatic and provocative manner of utterance, the hook. Flat, unfeeling intonation: “I’m mean … Hello” is stated as a sinister ‘oops’ emoji: as in I didn’t mean to, I take no responsibility for my actions and gee whiz aren’t I always inculpably cute in my exquisitely honed, solipsistic indifference? In a culture that is breeding new heights of individualism and self-righteous I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-anyone-expect-myself, the song and video are the opposite of empathy; they are sensationalized desensitization, a glamourized meanness filigreed with a ‘Hello’ that conjures a malevolent lost puppy. He’s stylishly numb: timbre pouting indifference, voice flat—as was hers in her one verse TikTok lip synch.

Continuing our explication from the bottom up,

“Suck my dick like you was ugly” plays right into the misogynist trope where young women who don’t fit into the category of ‘pretty’ are not even on the periphery of the in-crowd and have to work harder to get the male approval necessary to even exist. It’s assumed that this debasement and hard work sucking his cock more avidly than others is both a privilege and an honour. In a culture that pits women against one another in the fight to be the most desired by men, the pretty girls get satisfaction out of knowing they rise above those who don’t make the misogynist grade with their pert noses and butts to match and the constant grooming prioritized surfaces entail. However, all is not triumph for the young and the pretty. Because they succeed in attracting more attention from young men as ‘hot’ and, if they hyper-sexualize themselves in order to make the most of this, they will be deemed sluts and, thereby, presumed to be asking for and deserving to be sexually assaulted—which of course they often are.[7]

As young women self-objectify, their use-value is reinforced in a male supremacist culture and young men see women as things to be used more than ever before. This is certainly not to excuse them. Young men need to be educated on sexual violence and all young people need to be taught empathy. However, it’s reality. It’s logic. As young women strut down high school corridors in high-cropped, low cut tops and sparkling pierced navels,[8] young men, with their teeming testosterone, will be aroused. (Jordan Peterson is definitely correct on this point, but certainly not when according to him the hormone besieged boys don’t have to take any responsibility for not being able to control themselves). The use of date rape drugs is escalating in high schools[9] and as the teenager girl I know performs enjoying, wanting and condoning abuse, male impunity in patriarchy will escalate to the point where, because young women are literally asking to be raped, it is, therefore, consensual and no longer a crime.

And what is a slut, exactly,

now when so many derogatory terms have been appropriated and empowered or de-derogatized? As another late 20th and 21st Century prioritization of sexuality as female liberation, slut walks of the so-called first world are manifestations of a woman’s autonomy over her body and sexuality. Fine. Of course, we want the right to our bodies and to be free to choose our sexual lifestyles. But is that all there is to a slut walk: sexual autonomy? On the surface, yes—which is significant in itself as sexual liberation is again the only point—but when we flesh it out, like all cultural phenomenon, there’s much more than is-that-all-there-is.

Julie Bindel points out “the astonishment of feminists in the Global South [that] we continue to have slut walks” when in a third world reality survival is central. Bindel tells us how the FTN (free the nipple) campaign[10] that, like so-called empowered lap dancers and voluntary prostitutes, once again serves the male gaze and his sexual pleasure they line the streets to watch the liberated nipples—read: still sexualized women’s breasts. From a global perspective, the slut walk is directly connected to the sex-work-as-work mantra that, significantly, is not espoused by the majority of prostituted people who live on the peripheries of privilege in literal third world countries like Cambodia and Nigeria and in the third worlds that exist in the first in such places as Vancouver’s BC, Canada’s, Downtown Eastside low track.[11]

And so, back to the question: what is a slut?

According to the always relevant dictionary definition in regards to the history and predominant cultural understanding of the word: “a person, especially a woman, who is sexually promiscuous” (italics mine).[12] Regardless of slut walks attempting to liberate the term from its degrading and specifically gendered female definition that originated in the 15th Century, when NLE Choppa’s “Slut Me Out” is lip-synched by a teenage girl on TikTok, the dictionary definition is the only definition. This is how she has been conditioned in this era of feminist backlash to define herself. And this is how she is defined: easy, fuckable, usable, and rape-able. And, as an added bonus for men, she has tacitly exclaimed: “Sign me up for all.”

Of course, there is also a psychologically abusive twist that maintains the physical as NLE Choppa asks the women to:

“Where your friend
Bring your buddy
I don’t think you enoughie”

Okay, even though I’m doing everything you want me to in order to not be ostracized in patriarchy as undesirable by men, thanks for the blow to my self-esteem to keep me in my abuse-compliant place. If that isn’t enough, I am framed as trying really hard to fulfill his fantasy of domination when apparently my “favourite thing to say is ‘Cuff Me,’” (italics mine, again). The women represented in “Slut Me Out” are voluntarily demeaned zombies where the center of their worth—their favourite desire ever—is to willingly submit to a man and, even then, not be enoughie.

However,

in a way, the song can be construed as not as offensive and harmful in the fight to end violence against women because it is sung by a man. When I first heard it coming out of the mouth of a teenage girl, though, I assumed it was sung by a woman and I was surprised—and a bit relieved in the moment—when I discovered otherwise. The lyric that made me hot with rage, horror and heartache when it was blasted at me from her TikTok is “spit in my face when you fuck me.” Yikes. Yuck. A man spat in my face once and I left him. How did this happen? How did what could be referred to as misogyny on crack get through all that feminists have fought for since the 70s? And yet, now that I know the ‘me’ is most likely ‘him,’ that’s a bit better, and there is a third person (or persons) who are definitely women that supports the possibility that this ‘me’ is a ‘he.’ And yet, once again, as with the attempted transformation of carved-in-cultural-consciousness definition of slut as a dirty and promiscuous female, when the lyric “spit in my face when you fuck me” is celebrated by a hyper-sexualized young woman on social media and rewarded with hundreds of likes, there is no possibly male ‘me’—it’s all ‘she.’

Of course, I have no problem when cocky men turn the misogyny that their gender is responsible for onto themselves. However, this possibility is short-lived as very soon—to his narcissistic glee—women are stereotypically climbing all over him as he leans back luxuriating on black satin pillows and are ever-so-faithfully, tirelessly, on top. Naturally, in patriarchy with the pre-requisite of bigger the better, he states (definitely no longer the target of his own misogyny):

“Big dick energy, I give it
Don’t believe me then come feel it
Gon’ put this here in your kidney.”

Okay, even better! Damage my organs with your huge dick! Please! And then, promoting the plague of male emotional unavailability: “Don’t text me.”

But wait, the horror!:

poor, massive-cocked, glorified mean-guy is trapped by a lascivious flight attendant in the closet, his now puppy-dog eyes begging duped girl-fans to come and save him. I can feel them yearning starry-eyed from the other side of the screen: I’ll save you so I cannot be ‘enoughie’! Even though she is far from ugly, we know the the flight attendant will have no choice but to suck his dick like she is; however, with her desperate and cougar-ish representation, she won’t have a problem with that.[13]

Ending where it starts, the first line that is written on the opening frame of the video: “Why you being weird to me” victimizes the victimizer. Does he, after all, have his tongue a bit in his cheek as the answer to being rejected and someone (or everyone) being weird to him makes him desperate enough that he asks to have his face spat on while being fucked? Does “Slut Me Out” have something in common with Eilish’s “Bad Guy” when she enigmatically claims her hit pokes fun at the way people present themselves meanwhile representing glorified nose-bleeds, Lolita-esque bruises on innocent knees, in order to, yes again attract the male attention? In both, “Slut Me Out” and “Bad Guy,” if there is any satire to be had, young girls grasping for popularity are never going to get it. And, unlike “Bad Guy” where ambivalence runs through the song to the point where the singer-songwriter’s intentions are inscrutable, for NLE Choppa, except for this one enigmatic sentence, any undermining is undermined by all that comes next.

As a cultural theorist, I am fascinated by this anthropological study of cultural de-evolution; as a human, feminist and victim/survivor, I am horrified by how young women are being expected to want to be degraded and abused in order to, in Dines’ words, not be invisible. It is my hope that for my young woman friend this is only going horrifying a phase (but, unfortunately, her actions are also damaging to those who view it and believe it). It is my hope that she will get through it as equally unscathed as the happy hookers with their “pro-sex” initiatives and empowerment through prostitution who (most likely unwittingly) brought us here. It is my hope that she’ll read this someday and recognize the self she grew out of.

Until then?

Where does this lead to? Well, being voluntarily/non-consensually choked, of course. (Looks like there will be a Follow Up. Fallout. Part 3 after all).

Yours always logically,
LF.

#Iloveendnotes

[1] Rachel Moran Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015: 152.

[2] Simon Häggström Shadow’s Law: The True Story of a Swedish Detective Inspector Fighting Prostitution. Selina Öberg, trans. Bullet Point Publishing, 2016: 72-73.

[3] Victor Malarek The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It. New York: Arcade Publishers, 2011: 228.

[4] When I was on my Trauma & Triumph Tour 2022 across the US and Canada for my book Victim, I visited many sexual violence non-profit centres. I asked them about their take on sex-work as really being work like all others and not inherently exploitative. Many of them agreed with me; however, when counselling often mentally ill, traumatized and drug addicted women in the sex trade, they are unable to offer any exiting strategies, other opportunities for prostituted people to support themselves in a way that would most likely be interested in. This is because of the politically correct prerequisite to not question the exploited person’s ‘free’ choice even through implication. Through her extensive research and travels investigating prostitution internationally, feminist psychologist Melissa Farley reports how: “In 9 countries on 5 continents, 89% of more than 850 women in prostitution told us that they wanted to get out.” Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections. Prostitution Research & Education, 2007: 27. Prostitution survivor Rachel Moran comments in her memoir, Paid For, how when she was in the sex trade, she acted as though she had freely chosen to be there in order to psychologically protect herself and have some sort of empowerment. It is common when women get out, they realize that there was no free choice involved and that is was all circumstantial and coerced choice. When you think about it, this is logic. However, some sexual assault non-profits, so steeped in the dogma and delusion of ‘free’ will and the freedom to choose exploitation and to not offend by openly offering alternatives, SWERFed me (sex-worker exclusionary radical feminist. See this link for more details)

[5] As Detective Inspector Simon Häggström, the head of the Stockholm Police Prostitution Unit, says: “When it comes to people’s backgrounds it is clear that certain groups are more at risk of ending up in prostitution than others.” Simon Häggström: 72-73

[6] Sex-workers advocates are well-meaning. They want to protect people in the sex trade by destigmatizing it and making it regular work. This is never going to happen because the majority of men who buy sex from predominantly exploited women and girls, hate women and there will always be an unequal power relationship. When a man is paying a woman for her sexual services, he has control over what she has to do. And, if she doesn’t do it, the man feels entitled and it has often been stated by men that raping a prostitute is not rape. Prostituted women always have an escape plan set up before going with a john. And, there are emergency buttons in brothel rooms (that sometimes don’t work). Do any not-prostituted people need an emergency button or an exciting plan before starting their shift? I think it’s safe to say, No. Logic.

[7] One woman every 17 minutes is raped in Canada, one woman every 2 minutes in the US, and one woman every 18 seconds in Mexico. The most common age when a women is raped is 13-30.

[8] The teenage girl who is the subject of this essay proudly showed me what she was wearing to school the next day. I said that’s a belt; but, no, it was actually a ‘shirt.’ There needs to be dress codes at high schools and universities. However, there quite often isn’t because of the politically correct dogma of ‘freedom of choice.’ In the end, political correctness supports and maintains rape culture.

[9] In this article about a Vancouver area high school, young women are starting to fight back; however, when male teachers ‘flag’ teenage girls for wearing revealing clothes, the young women say it’s their choice to wear what they want. Yes, it is. But unfortunately self-objectification as a sex object and the inevitable male response to this does nothing to end or even abate rape culture. Sorry. More logic. https://www.newwestrecord.ca/local-news/new-westminster-students-rally-against-high-school-rape-culture-5368130

[10] Julie Bindel Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation London: Constable, 2021: 14; 80.

[11] The low track is the prostitution ‘stroll’ where some of the most desperate women in Canada are prostituted to pay for drug addictions. According to Gabor Maté who worked as a psychiatrist in the DTES for many years, all of the mentally ill and drug-addicted women being prostituted on the streets were sexually abused as children and continue to be sexually assaulted virtually every day. This is the location where serial killer Robert Pickton found his victims over a ten year period. The disappearances of these women were ignored by the Vancouver Police for almost a decade. See See Gabor Maté In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction and Lori Shehner That Lonely Section of Hell: the Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away.

[12] A substantial and historical definition of ‘slut.’ “The word’s origins are unknown, but the Oxford English Dictionary coined it as “a dirty, slovenly, or untidy woman” in the 1400s. Until the 20th century, the term ‘slut’ referred to poor women with low standards of cleanliness. ‘Slut’ was not only gendered, but also classed. According to society, the poor women it referred to should be more productive in the labour market. It was not until 1966 that ‘slut’ became what we know it as today; a “woman who enjoys sex in a degree considered shamefully excessive.” https://yeoja-mag.com/origin-word-slut/

[13] There is also the derogatory ‘cougar’ stereotype is at work in this scene as well. It is so annoying when the name of the big cat in BC, Canada forests is brought up and right away men go to the stereotype of a ravenous middle-aged woman preying on younger men. Of course, when an older man is with a young woman, if anything, he is called a sugar daddy. Women can be labeled sugar mamas, as well. However, giving someone sugar is a much more positive metaphor than a female/predatory and terrifying wild animal attacking innocent young men. This annoying topic came up once again last weekend at a dinner party (by a man of course). I explained the above and, alas, a woman said to me, “people can’t say anything these days. There is no sense of humour.” (Sigh). Derogatory stereotypes are never funny: be they racial, gender-based or class-based. In his video, NLE Choppa as a literal and ideological predator in a male supremacist system becomes the victim as he is pulled into a closet by a misogynist myth. From my experience as a middle-aged woman, they are the young men who (often to my surprise) hit on me. Hey, middle-aged women sisters: what’s your take on this myth? Tell me in the comments!

*All images of NLE Choppa and his video “Slut Me Out” are screenshots from the official video on YouTube.

About the Blogger:

I am an art critic, visual and performance artist, author and feminist activist. My work focuses on systemic violence in patriarchy: be it gender, race, the environment or speciesism. My art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish and I have exhibited and performed across Canada, in the US and in Mexico. I am the recipient of the “Ellie Liston Hero of the Year Award” 2022 for being instrumental in the life sentence given to a serial rapist who abducted and brutalized me and countless other women. Since that time, as I write in my book, Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor:

“And, believe it or not, what I suffered and survived …. all of those years ago gave me a gift of knowing my strength and what I can survive. And now, resistance, fighting for justice for all, is what I live for. My life is far bigger than myself.”(186)

My personal experience of surviving and triumphing over sexual violence and trauma is the origin of Logical Feminism.

I live in Mexico City and British Columbia, Canada. Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor is my debut book.

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Un regalo inesperado.

Posted on March 18, 2023 by Karen Moe

An Unexpected Gift — El único corazón completo es el que está roto porque deja entrar la luz—David Wolpe

Durante mi gira Trauma & Triumph Tour por Canada

para Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor el otoño pasado, tuve un pequeño respiro en Toronto, Ontario, y fui a una lectura de poesía. Estaba en un callejón, en un rincón ruinoso de Queen y Spadina. No sabía que esos lugares todavía existían en el TO brillante y desenfrenado, ya que las torres brillantes se elevan por todas partes y la mayoría de los bordes ásperos se han suavizado. Pero allí estaba. A la vuelta de la esquina y por un callejón lleno de baches: mal vino y poesía densa, el tipo de poesía que te lleva no solo a un lugar, sino a las multiplicidades de la percepción, rompiendo la superficie de hormigón y, en palabras de Donna Haraway: “deshace el pensamiento como de costumbre.”[1]

Para gran emoción de mi serendipia creativa, uno de los poetas citó a David Wolpe:

El único corazón completo es el que está roto porque deja entrar la luz. Acababa de escribir en mi diario la noche anterior: “Para tener un cambio real y duradero, ¿debemos todos saber, estar familiarizados con el trauma? ¿Debemos todos tener corazones rotos para que la luz entre?

Desafortunadamente, existen innumerables realidades sobre por qué esto es así, por qué vivimos en un mundo hecho de trauma y por qué, si queremos que haya alguna transformación y curación, debemos sentirnos, incluso heridos, junto con eso. Sin embargo, por deprimente que esto pueda sonar en la superficie, esto no es algo malo. El desamor no es solo lógico: es esperanza.

The Dzunuk’wa Society—Wild Women of the Woods en COP15 2022. Foto cortesía de Arvinoutside.

Fairy Creek, BC, Canadá,

viene a mi mente a medida que los troncos sagrados de su antiguo crecimiento siguen cayendo junto con todas las especies que vivían allí, algunas sin ser descubiertas antes de su extinción. Mientras escribo, The The Dzunuk’wa Society—Wild Women of the Woods, los Guardianes del bosque[2] fundada por tres mujeres de raíces indígenas (junto con Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones, amigos y aliados) se encuentran actualmente en la COP15 en Montreal, Canadá, con un cedro de 750 años cortado de forma transversal que rescataron de una zona talada mostrando al mundo lo que las Naciones Originarias ancestrales[3] y los defensores del bosque han estado luchando y sacrificándose para salvar desde agosto de 2020. No solo trajeron la pieza de más de 9 metros como evidencia desde la isla de Vancouver, BC hasta Montreal, los activistas indígenas también trajeron sus tambores ceremoniales con el plan de tocarlos frente a la rebanada de lo que alguna vez fue un árbol antiguo, lo que cariñosamente llaman “La Galleta.”

Sin embargo, la seguridad en la COP15 les prohibió tocar sus tambores y tener la ceremonia por la que habían viajado miles de kilómetros para compartir. Como dijo la tía Rainbow-Eyez, una de las fundadoras de Wild Women, en una transmisión en vivo de Instagram el 12 de diciembre con una voz temblorosa pero fuerte: “Nos están manteniendo en pedazos para que no podamos unirnos. Las personas pueden continuar con su día porque no les afecta personalmente. Tenemos que ayudarnos unos a otros a ser completos. Debido a que la voz del pueblo es tan fuerte, no hay nada más fuerte que la voz del pueblo y un tambor ceremonial que viene directamente del espíritu”. Luego agregó, metafórica y literalmente, que los tambores son un arma. Y sí, son un arma de resistencia pacífica ya que la influencia espiritual de los tambores ceremoniales tiene la capacidad de afectar las emociones, llevarnos más allá de nuestro enclaustramiento individual y socavar el atrincheramiento del sistema colonial que, en palabras de Rainbow Eyez, está tratando de mantener es una parte. Me gusta especialmente la forma en que eligió la palabra “tratando”, la forma progresiva del verbo que desaloja la fijeza del tiempo pasado. Es a través de la sabiduría que viene con un sentimiento profundo y la realidad de los corazones rotos que podremos unirnos y ser completos.

Esto no quiere decir que el trauma sistémico no esté fácilmente disponible para reconocer en países como Canadá y los EE. UU. Después de todo, el tercer mundo existe en el primero. En Vancouver BC, Canadá, está el Downtown Eastside, por ejemplo, con violencia sexual, enfermedades mentales, adicción a las drogas, estigmatización, ostraitización del apoyo familiar que crea lo que en muchos sentidos es una especie de cuarto mundo.[4] Y, como la jerarquía del color de la piel y la raza apuntala la supremacía blanca, la mayoría de las mujeres y niñas prostituidas en las calles de Downtown Eastside son indígenas, una continuación del fetiche colonial de explotación, abuso y deshumanización de los colonizados.[5]

Como escribí en mi último post, el feminicidio es una epidemia en México. Pero lo que no dije en ese escrito en particular es que los 10-16 asesinatos diarios de mujeres mexicanas están directamente relacionados con la inmasculinización de los hombres mexicanos. El machismo, como exacerbación de la supremacía masculina violenta, es una respuesta al desempoderamiento masculino.[6] En México, la inmasculinización está garantizada por la explotación económica de la mano de obra del tercer mundo por parte del primero y el cercamiento de los jóvenes por falta de oportunidades.[7] Debido a que hay tan pocas opciones, los hombres jóvenes y sin poder se sienten atraídos por la posibilidad de poder y prestigio que ofrecen los cárteles de la droga. Los asesinatos de jóvenes son a través de la violencia de los cárteles, lo que está directamente relacionado con la feroz competencia por llevar los narcóticos a los mercados de drogadictos del norte. Esto, a su vez, es alimentado por la epidemia de adicción a las drogas en Canadá y los EE. UU. que es el resultado de familias disfuncionales, la colonización de pueblos indígenas en los estados nación del primer mundo y, con mayor frecuencia, el abuso sexual infantil que resulta en enfermedades mentales. y el TEPT y la automedicación con las drogas que son contaminadas por la sangre de los jóvenes mexicanos.[8] Y vueltas y vueltas no tenemos que seguir yendo.

Si has leído hasta aquí, ten paciencia conmigo: aunque la fuente de la angustia a menudo es horrible, la angustia en sí misma es la liberación. Como me dijo la cineasta Jennifer Abbott cuando le pregunté por qué dedica su vida a luchar por la justicia social y ambiental: “Hago lo que hago porque quiero que mi vida tenga integridad y sentido”.

Detalle de la barricada que rodea La Glorieta De Las Mujeres Que Luchan, Ciudad de México. (Consulte la publicación del 7 de diciembre de 2022 para ver el artículo completo).

No podemos olvidarnos de los hombres.

El pasado domingo, andando en bicicleta por Reforma en la Ciudad de México, era imposible no parar si tienes corazón sentimental; las escaleras de la famosa Glorieta del Ángel de la Independencia estaban cubiertas, amortajadas, con redes rojas. Alrededor de los bordes de la Glorieta, como una corona de Navidad que te invita a sentir con tu rostro, había fotografías de hombres jóvenes, cara tras cara tras cara tras cara de jóvenes desaparecidos y, en su mayoría, asesinados. Los carteles de vinilo a gran escala dicen desaparecido, lo has visto, mientras son llevados por todo el país por las madres, hermanas, primas, sobrinas y amigas que nunca dejan de buscar a sus seres queridos perdidos, incluso cuando la búsqueda se convierte más en una búsqueda de concientización que en una esperanza de volver a encontrar a su ser querido individual, una acusación como activismo motivado por el corazón roto.[10]

No supe qué decirles a las mujeres que estaban sentadas en los escalones tejiendo las redes. ¿Qué les dices a las personas que se sientan rodeadas por los rostros de sus hijos, hermanos, sobrinos, primos, amigos desaparecidos y sus eternas súplicas de ayuda? Sin embargo, quería agradecerles, felicitarlos por la potencia de esta instalación, cómo los jóvenes están atrapados en la inevitabilidad de su propio derramamiento de sangre. Sangre de mi Sangre, sangre de mi sangre, sangre de toda nuestra sangre. El nombre de la organización es Colectivo Hilos. Lo siento mucho, dije torpemente y les dije que compartiría su historia con el mundo más allá de México.

¿Por qué están desaparecidos todos estos jóvenes? ¿Por qué tantos hombres en México agreden y asesinan a sus novias y cónyuges? ¿Por qué a menudo no hay otras oportunidades para los jóvenes mexicanos sino ser reclutados por los cárteles de la droga como soldados de infantería y terminar desaparecidos y muertos? ¿Por qué hay tantas personas adictas a las drogas, con enfermedades mentales y abusadas sexualmente en las calles de Canadá y Estados Unidos? ¿Por qué se está destruyendo lo que queda de las selvas tropicales antiguas de todo el mundo y, con ello, el futuro del planeta y de todo lo que vive aquí, no solo de nosotros? Mientras las mujeres mexicanas tejen sus redes rojas, todas estamos atrapadas en el hilo colectivo. Estos no son incidentes separados, cortados por fronteras, raza, clase, olvido y pura buena suerte. Y saber esto, y sentir esto, es un regalo. Si todos los traumas fueran colectivos, si nos volviéramos completos a través de la sabiduría de la conciencia, si aceptamos la necesidad de nuestros corazones rotos, la oscuridad se volverá luz.

La feminista lógica (aka Karen Moe)

#iloveendnotes #contextisrevolution

[1] Citas de Donna Haraway de https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/; https://www.dukeupress.edu/staying-with-the-trouble

[2] De Dzunuk’wa Society, Wild Women of the Woods Instagram: Únase a nosotros para proteger nuestras irreemplazables selvas tropicales para las generaciones venideras…

Poner fin a la tala de todos los bosques antiguos para las próximas 7 generaciones y más allá.

La Sociedad Dzunuk’wa, fundada por tres mujeres con raíces indígenas (junto con Elder Bill Jones, amigos y aliados), comenzó a trabajar para proteger las antiguas selvas tropicales templadas, el insustituible Bosque Viejo de la Columbia Británica… y no nos detendremos hasta que estén protegidos.

El sistema actual favorece el beneficio de la industria a corto plazo sobre las personas. El sistema actual deshonra la intención de la Declaración de las Naciones Unidas sobre los Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas (UNDRIP), no protege la soberanía indígena y la ley natural y está destruyendo nuestros sistemas naturales: nuestras tierras, bosques, aguas, aire y el futuro de los niños. .

Están recaudando dinero para continuar protegiendo y ayudar a salvar lo que queda de los últimos bosques templados del mundo. Haga clic aquí para donar Click here to donate

[3] A diferencia delBand Council, que son los representantes del gobierno colonial en las reservas que fueron establecidas por la Ley India en 1876 y que han oprimido insidiosamente a los primeros pueblos desde entonces.

[4] Ver Gabor Maté El Reino de los Fantasmas Hambrientos: Encuentros Cercanos con la Adicción (The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)

[5] “La prostitución explota y refuerza las representaciones y desigualdades racistas al transformar los cuerpos de las mujeres en objetos de mercado y deseo: es fruto de imaginarios sexuales coloniales que han moldeado las mentalidades de las sociedades colonizadoras y condicionado las de los dominados. En ese sentido, la compra de un acto sexual está enraizada en estas dinámicas colonialistas e imperialistas y es un acto fundamentalmente racista”. Last Girl First: La prostitución en la intersección de las opresiones basadas en el sexo, la raza y la clase. PAC Internacional, 2022: 106

[6] Véase Gore Capitalism de Sayak Valencia para un análisis en profundidad del tercer mundo, el hombre emasculado. Lo que ella llama, el “sujeto del endriago”.

[7] En 2021, visité la ONG Nacidos Para Triunfar en Monterrey y escribí un artículo sobre los jóvenes de los barrios mexicanos que son reclutados por los cárteles de la droga para ser soldados de infantería (y muchos terminan asesinados) y cómo Nacidos Para Triunfar trabaja en el barrios para hacer tratados de paz entre las clikas (pequeños carteles callejeros) y ofrecer educación y empleo a los hombres predominantemente jóvenes.

https://www.vigilancemagazine.com/post/justice-begins-with-the-one-beside-you-the-quiet-revolution-of-nacidos-para-triunfar

[8] México tiene una jerarquía manifiesta de color de piel. Significativamente, de todas las fotos que vi de jóvenes desaparecidos y asesinados el domingo, ninguno tenía la piel blanca: todas las víctimas eran indígenas, o al menos en su mayoría porque los conquistadores españoles se mezclaron con los indígenas en comparación con en Canadá, donde los colonizadores europeos y los colonizadores indígenas fueron segregados principalmente en el sistema de reservas.

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Abbott

Escuche a Jennifer hablar sobre su vida y trabajo aquí en un documental de YouTube:

“Empoderando lo invisible”.

[10] Ver The Raw Truth: Francisco Toledo’s Duelo and the Disappeared of Ayotzinapa una entrevista con el difunto artista Francisco Toledo, donde habla sobre su serie de esculturas de cerámica, Duelo, siendo “una acusación, una declaración al gobierno, declarándolo internacionalmente, contándole al mundo entero esta injusticia”. https://www.vigilancemagazine.com/post/la-cruda-verdad-francisco-toledo-s-duelo-y-los-43-desaparecidos-de-ayotzinapa

https://www.vigilancemagazine.com/post/la-cruda-realidad-duelo-de-francisco-toledo-y-los-43-desaparecidos-de-ayotzinapa

Soy:

crítica de arte, artista visual y de performance, autora y activista feminista. Mi trabajo se centra en la violencia sistémica del patriarcado: ya sea de género, raza, medio ambiente o especismo. Mi crítica de arte ha sido publicada internacionalmente en revistas, antologías y catálogos de artistas en inglés y español y he expuesto mi obra y actuado en Canadá, Estados Unidos y México. Recibí el “Premio Ellie Liston al Héroe del Año” 2022 por ser fundamental en la sentencia de por vida otorgada a un violador en serie que me secuestró y abusó a mí y a muchas otras mujeres. Desde entonces, como escribo mi libro Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor:

“Y, lo creas o no, lo que sufrí y sobreviví…. todos esos años me dieron el regalo de conocer mi fuerza y lo que puedo sobrevivir. Y ahora, la resistencia, la lucha por la justicia para todos, es por lo que vivo. Mi vida es mucho más grande que yo mismo.”(186)

Mi experiencia personal de sobrevivir y triunfar sobre la violencia sexual y el trauma es el origen del Feminismo Lógico.

Vivo en la Ciudad de México y la Columbia Británica, Canadá. Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor es mi primer libro.

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Triunfo bajo amenaza: la Ciudad de México y las mujeres que luchan.

Posted on March 5, 2023March 5, 2023 by Karen Moe

Triunfo bajo amenaza: la Ciudad de México y las mujeres que luchan.

La Glorieta De Las Mujeres Que Luchan, Mexico City.

Estaba exaltada y sorprendida.

No podía creer que el gobierno federal mexicano y la Ciudad de México hubieran permitido, incluso abrazado, un símbolo de las mujeres que luchan contra la epidemia de feminicidios en México en la gran Avenida Reforma, en el famoso Ángel de la Independencia que deslumbra a turistas y a nacionalistas por igual en medio de la glorieta congestionada de Reforma y Monterrey. Aún mejor, esta celebración de las mujeres que luchan se encuentra en el pedestal donde Cristóbal Colón se había erguido desde 1877 en una glorieta de Reforma igualmente prominente. Erigido el 25 de septiembre de 2021 por el grupo activista feminista Vivas Nos Queremos, Antimonumenta en alianza con la de Red Conexión Nacional (madres de víctimas de feminicidio, defensoras del agua, sobrevivientes de ataques con ácido, triquis, otomíes y mujeres nahuas, y las madres de los estudiantes desaparecidos de Ayotzinapa)[1], La Glorieta De Las Mujeres Que Luchan ahora está amenazada con ser removida. Demasiado bueno para ser cierto.

Como muchos saben,

Cristóbal Colón fue un explorador italiano que realizó cuatro viajes por el Atlántico y fue patrocinado por los Reyes Católicos de España. Su desembarco en las costas de Cuba y luego en la Costa del Golfo de México inició la colonización europea de las Américas y la posterior opresión y explotación de los pueblos indígenas que han vivido aquí durante milenios. Los europeos afirmaron haber “descubierto” lo que llamaron el Nuevo Mundo, dando a entender, por supuesto, que no había nadie aquí, o de condición humana, y que la tierra rica en recursos estaba abierta para ser tomada y, por lo tanto, estaba perfectamente bien “sacar al indio del niño” como dijo el primer primer ministro de Canadá, John A. McDonald, en su declaración de la intención de las escuelas residenciales de Canadá[2] o, como en el caso de Cuba, el exterminio total y, como en México, encantar con la estética impresionante de las Catedrales a través de la historia de Juan Diego, un hombre indígena que contempló el milagro de Guadalupe, la Virgen María de piel oscura. Pero esa es otra historia, aunque relacionada.[3]

Regreso a Reforma 2022:

Como todos los estados naciones que no existirían sin el robo de la tierra y la brutalización de los pueblos indígenas, independientemente de la eliminación de todas las estatuas de Cristóbal Colón, el origen colonial sigue muy vivo en su obsesión. Sin embargo, estamos en una era de despertar a las atrocidades que subyacen a la civilización occidental a medida que las estatuas han estado cayendo en países donde se originó el colonialismo y aquellos donde se llevaron a cabo las operaciones de glotonería: numerosas interpretaciones del primer ministro de Canadá, John A. Macdonald, han sido derribadas o removidas y ha sido salpicada pintura roja-sangre sobre la Reina Victoria; los activistas británicos aventaron al traficante de esclavos Edward Colston al puerto de Bristol; múltiples Colones han caído en los EE. UU. junto con muchos antepasados linchadores (por nombrar algunos). [4] Sin embargo, ¿se están levantando los cimientos del colonialismo a medida que caen los símbolos de los perpetradores glorificados? Es difícil de decir.

Una mujer joven en la protesta del 25 de noviembre recibió el Día Internacional para Eliminar la Violencia contra la Mujer. Se había pintado la camiseta con los nombres de muchas víctimas de feminicidio.

El gobierno de la Ciudad de México había planeado reemplazar a Colón con “La joven de Amajaca”, una réplica de una antigua estatua de una joven indígena. No se puede negar que reemplazar al colonizador clave por una réplica de un monumento prehispánico (e incluso de una mujer) es una mejora.[5] Sin embargo, es significativo que, como en todos los países coloniales, las mujeres indígenas son las más vulnerables a las agresiones sexuales y los feminicidios. ¿No es más crítico en este momento honrar las vidas de ahora -desaparecidas, asesinadas, agredidas, resistiendo, combatiendo-, el destino de esta representación prehispánica de mucho tiempo antes que las necesidades del ahora?

Las feministas y las familias de los niños desaparecidos decidieron: No.

El gesto simbólico del gobierno de honrar un pasado precolonial idealizado no es suficiente. Con su imponente Anti-monumenta triunfante, pintado de glitter y con el humo que usan las feministas mexicanas para demostrar su resistencia a la impunidad masculina y la violencia sexual, los nombres de las mujeres desaparecidas y asesinadas escritos en las paredes, y un tendedero colgado en el jardín circundante.donde las mujeres han escrito relatos personales de agresiones, las activistas han hecho de esta glorieta un sitio de protestas y reuniones que han llamado la atención sobre la epidemia de asesinatos de mujeres y niñas en México. “Este lugar es desde ahora la glorieta de las mujeres que luchan y estará dedicada a aquellas que en todo el país han enfrentado violencia, represión y revictimización para luchar contra la injusticia”, escribió en sus redes sociales Vivas Nos Queremos, Antimonumenta[6].

Fotos de seres queridos desaparecidos y asesinados en el suelo del Zócalo donde terminó el desfile.

En lugar de una exotización simbólica del pasado prehispánico y precolombino de México, la Antimonumenta representa el presente del colonialismo en lugar de exotizar lo que fue. Una representación de la inocencia previa a la explotación está lejos de ser relevante en un país donde se estima que entre 12 y 16 mujeres son asesinadas por día por sus esposos o novios.[7] En lugar de recordar a quienes fueron oprimidos, la Antimonumenta crea conciencia sobre el presente, la valentía de las mujeres que resisten y luchan por una vida presente y futura libre de violencia. Como explica Érica, integrante de la coalición: “No se trata de poner un monumento para adorar el pasado, sino para reconocer la lucha presente, a todas las mujeres que han desaparecido”[8].

Pero, ¿los mexicanos están contentos con eso?

En realidad, parece que esta vez, posiblemente es así.[9] A diferencia del 25 de noviembre de 2019 y el 8 de marzo de 2020, cuando feministas militantes vandalizaron todos los monumentos coloniales a lo largo de Reforma y la opinión popular valoró los monumentos por encima del reconocimiento de la epidemia de feminicidios[10], ha habido un clamor público para que este acto de activismo se quede donde está: en la ubicación estratégica sobre Reforma, para que México y el mundo lo vean.

Sería una decisión lógica del gobierno que las mujeres que luchan y las familias que han perdido a sus seres queridos cuenten con este símbolo de lucha, un lugar de encuentro para recordar y resistir y la oportunidad de generar conciencia de gran alcance desde un lugar destacado y simbólico. Construir “La Joven de Amajaca” costaría $12 millones de pesos y las feministas argumentan que “con esos 12 millones de pesos podrían hacer talleres creativos en escuelas y plazas públicas contra la violencia, equipamiento para buscadores colectivos, apoyo a albergues, etc.”[ 11] Cuando se trata de justicia, a menudo falta esa lógica

Cerca de tantos policías como mujeres marchando el 25 de noviembre de 2022.

Sin siquiera acceso a kits de violación

como parte de la agenda del gobierno para rastrear a los perpetradores a través de su ADN y al menos reconocer la validez de la agresión sexual; una inquietante presencia de policías encapsulando Reforma a la par de las mujeres que marcharon el 25 de noviembre por el Día Internacional de la Eliminación de la Violencia contra la Mujer; fotografías a gran escala de una joven mexicana desaparecida y asesinada tiradas y pegadas en todas las superficies del Zócalo; una conferencia de la UNAM ese mismo día titulada “El derecho a una vida libre de violencia: el duro camino hacia la justicia feminista” donde los cadáveres fueron el tema principal de la agenda, para las mujeres, nosotras humanas que luchamos, está lejos de terminar.

Algunos de los cientos de nombres de mujeres desaparecidas y asesinadas que están escritos en las paredes que rodeaban el pedestal de Cristóbal Colón después de que fuera retirado. Sin embargo, la presencia y la celebración de Colón no se eliminarán de la ciudad: se mudará a Polanco (una colonia rica en la Ciudad de México).

#iloveendnotes

[1] https://www.netflix.com/mx-en/title/81045551

[2] https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/here-is-what-sir-john-a-macdonald-did-to-indigenous-people

[3] https://www.mexperience.com/la-virgen-guadalupe-y-juan-diego/

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/confederate-statues-photos.html

[5] La ocupación se dio en un contexto en el que funcionarios de la Ciudad de México anunciaron que retirarían la estatua de Colón, figura colonialista, y que sería reemplazada por una estatua del artista Pedro Reyes. Su estatua se llamaba Tlali y fue motivo de quejas por la forma en que representaba el cuerpo de una mujer indígena. https://piedepagina.mx/ciudad-de-mexico-activistas-defendemos-monumento-a-las-mujeres-en-lucha/

[6] https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/mexico-city-take-down-feminist-anti-monument-1234637007/

[7] Se puede argumentar que una epidemia de machismo debida al varón tercermundista emasculado en el patriarcado es la principal responsable de la tasa de feminicidios en México. Ver Gore Capitalism de Sayak Valencia.

[8] https://piedepagina.mx/ciudad-de-mexico-activistas-defendemos-monumento-a-mujeres-en-lucha/

[9] https://www.animalpolitico.com/2022/10/glorieta-mujeres-luchan-antimonumenta-cdmx/

[10] Consulte mi artículo de marzo de 2021 en la revista Vigilance “La vida de una mujer es más importante que un monumento histórico”. https://www.vigilancemagazine.com/post/la-vida-de-una-mujer

[11] https://www.sopitas.com/noticias/plan-gobierno-cdmx-antimonumenta-reforma-esconder-circuito/?fbclid=IwAR3Xw5qvSI8asImA4s2uE32mojEA2KW-XK9D_-_WJqk3f_gxe7msBc6-TDI

Sobre la blogger:

Soy crítica de arte, artista visual y de performance, autora y activista feminista. Mi trabajo se centra en la violencia sistémica del patriarcado: ya sea de género, raza, medio ambiente o especismo. Mi crítica de arte ha sido publicada internacionalmente en revistas, antologías y catálogos de artistas en inglés y español y he expuesto mi obra y actuado en Canadá, Estados Unidos y México. Recibí el “Premio Ellie Liston al Héroe del Año” 2022 por ser fundamental en la sentencia de por vida otorgada a un violador en serie que me secuestró y abusó a mí y a muchas otras mujeres. Desde entonces, como escribo mi libro Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor:

Mi experiencia personal de sobrevivir y triunfar sobre la violencia sexual y el trauma es el origen del Feminismo Lógico.

Vivo en la Ciudad de México y la Columbia Británica, Canadá. Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor es mi primer libro.

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Follow Up. Fallout. Part One.

Posted on February 22, 2023April 14, 2023 by Karen Moe

A follow up to my previous post, “What Fresh Hell is This? Same Old Same Old.”

I doubt she’ll ever read this.

And if she does, I’d like to think that would be a good thing.

As not only a logical feminist, but also, through the wisdoms gleaned from logic, a fierce one, I discovered recently that a young woman, a teenager whom I am very close to, embodies my worst nightmare.

I am a survivor and, what I designate in my book Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor, also a victim because: “the bodies of rape victims stand as accusations. Our scarred, vibrant beings as memorials.”[1] With a memorial, a never forgetting, comes memory; memory is knowledge and with knowledge comes knowing what is going on; by honoring our scars,[2] victim/survivors know not only in our minds, but deep within or bodies. The inevitable scars of surviving violence are legacies of trauma. And, paradoxically, never forgetting the sources of our trauma is a good thing because our awareness can help change the pathology of a culture built with exploitation that creates a generation of young women who could be described as voluntary victims.

How did I find out about this nightmare?

Well, I have a TikTok account as “The Logical Feminist.” I haven’t used it much. Only three or four posts. As you will know if you use social media to try and effectively share a message that extends beyond your personal life, it’s tough to keep up with all of the posting not to mention actually creating the projects that you will post about! That said, it’s on my extensive list to get on the TikTok and get Logical Feminism more extensively out into the world and help stop this nightmare backlash.

Every now and then when I am walking with my phone in my pocket, my TikTok turns on. I have only about five friends and every time the TikTok comes on and startles me out of some peaceful state, it’s her.

The first time it happened, I didn’t recognize her at first. She was lip-syncing to a song insulting other women, internalized sexism blasting from this insolent and, dare I say, lethally ignorant, young woman. Her eyelids heavy with hyper-feminine, excessive black lashes, push-up bra cleavage, her beautiful so-recently-still-a-girl face pouting “I’m more fuckable than she is.” My ire flared instantly and I was just about to comment “You’re an idiot,” when I saw her name and recognized her beneath all of the horror I was seconds away from lashing out at. I felt like I was going to puke; rage, panic and heartbreak momentarily darkened all hope and, amidst the gains a lot of women have made at least in the so-called first world, I thought: how the hell did this happen? This toxic backlash has to stop.

She’s sixteen now. When she was twelve or so she told me all she wanted was to be ‘cool.’ I thought “Oh No … here it comes ….” But, even though I have been studying and writing about sexual violence, feminist backlash and internalized sexism for decades, I never imagined how bad it could get.

It all started with Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy.

Yes, I know. It’s a great song; it can be seen as a farce, a critique of terrible, power abusive men—up to a point. However, in the numerous interviews when Eilish has been asked what her enigmatic lyrics mean, she doesn’t get close to any analysis of what actually constructs the “bad guy” (what to me as a feminist and one who deconstructs systems of exploitation is obvious); but then, not to excuse her lack of feminist awareness, good art often goes beyond the intentions of the artist. She replies that the song “pokes fun at the way people present themselves.” Okay, if Eilish is taking the piss, it certainly isn’t obvious.

Unfortunately for inevitably impressionable girls, the main thing about the song and the super-slick video is that it’s cool. As a clever, catchy pop-song riddled with artful rock & roll ambivalence, right off the bat the ‘character’ Eilish is playing is a seamless combination of predator and prey. And, as demonstrated by the out-take laughter between Eilish and most likely her brother before the video starts, the brutality that is about to come is funny. This is rock & roll frivolity at its finest, the little snippets between songs that give ravenous fans a taste of their idol’s private life. However, what is about to come is far from funny.

Low-fi super-cool catchy:

Eilish kicks out of mustard-yellow paper that is the same colour as her be-hoodied sweat suit both defiant and energy-sapped as she slouches sulky gangsta’ groove in the baggy suit; cut to “white shirt now red my bloody nose,” and, yes, her nose starts to bleed. I researched the nose-bleed trope and found out that it is supposed to signify sexual arousal. Tellingly, in terms of what is being communicated as young women’s sexuality in this 2019 hit, if she is sexually aroused, she looks pretty numb (and/or indifferent) to the whole thing or like she’s coming back from being raped on a date-rape drug. However, if one doesn’t know about this connection between sexuality and nose bleeds, the young woman is just plain bleeding. And what is blood typically connected to? Well, logically: violence.

Cut from the nose-bleed:

dressed in pressed, white Bermuda shorts are little girl legs with “bruises on both my knees for you”; the bruises are red, raw, and suggest pre-bruise, recently-peeled scabs matching the fact that these bruises are ‘for you,’ as the young woman, simultaneously martyred and tough, is offering her wounds as a macabre valentine to the multiplicity of men who trail behind her on tricycles. Of course, these men are all really hot, those whom she is both victimized by and dominates while she is riding and rocking out on a bright red kiddie-car doing her soon to be very trendy manic-slouch dance as she states in super cool[3] unfeeling zombie-voice I’m the “might seduce your dad type.” (As in my last post, here comes the sensationalized Lolita trope again).

Eilish (or the non-self-character that is impossible to pull off as a rockstar in their music video because fans will always see them as the rockstar) is the epitome of the delusional empowerment so many young women think they achieve through their external and internalized hyper-sexualization[4]. Confiding: her chin is raised in male defensive/offensive defiance and/or having just received an upper-cut as eyes roll insolent and exhausted with “just can’t get enough guy.” However, despite—or perhaps because of—abuse, she states simultaneously gloating and indifferent: “I’m the bad type, make your girlfriend mad type.” Ambivalence reigns as the tough-girl/victim smears the blood from her nose-bleed all over her face.

The final shot is in a dimly lit, luxurious apartment. It isn’t hers. Not that it isn’t possible for an eighteen-year-old rockstar to own such an apartment, I think it’s safe to say it belongs to the man who is at least ten years her senior whom she is apparently dominating or is a five star hotel room paid for by him. This is another layer to the regurgitated mythology that luxury can be gained by young women using their sexuality to manipulate men. And where is Eilish (oops, I mean the character that we aren’t aware she’s playing)? Well, she’s oh-so-scandalously sitting cross-legged and cheeky as a little girl who wants to be more than spanked on of the man’s back as he does push ups (this requires her of course to be the idealized slender female of patriarchy that so many young women ferociously fight against their bodies to achieve).

Simultaneously smug and innocent,

she states, looking as though she is about to pass out (again date rape drug comes to mind): “I like when you get mad. I guess I’m pretty glad” and then asks, “you say she’s scared of me?” (referring again to the jilted girlfriend and the all-powerful “she” existing in her sexuality as the triumphant source of the jilt). Here (another segment, yawn amidst the apparent edgy innovation, of again and again) is the message of women having so much power over men that they betray their girlfriends for us because we are such hot bad bitches; however, by aspiring towards this representation of an indifferent, emotionally shut down person, we simultaneously betray our sisters and, at the same time, this triumph is based on the fact that the men want us because we are self-victimizing and we like, even ask for, abuse. Does anyone really want to be abused even when they have been conditioned to ask for it?

I know, this is gender-politics-twisted-madness and the artful ambivalence of the song and its video swirls round and round. As an art critic, I must admit this is a riot to write about, but there is no way a pre-pubescent girl who wants to be cool will get anything out of the video except the desire—or need—to be like that. She’ll gobble up this dangerous candy; embody what will piss off her parents; be what will put her in the danger that she either doesn’t know about or doesn’t acknowledge or it’s cooler to feign indifference to or, worse yet, it doesn’t matter because putting herself in danger is the whole point: asking to be abused. This is what she’s been trained to do. In the end, this representation of a hot, insolent young woman (who is being played by a teen idol whose concerts sell out in minutes) turns young women who want to be mainstream-cool against themselves.

The only ‘empowered’ lyric exists in the midst of its undoing:

“I like it when you take control even if you know that you don’t own me, I’ll let you play the role. I’ll be your animal.” (Italics mine). Okay: in terms of gender politics, I get it: things are a mess in so called post-feminist so-called first world young womanhood. But, at the same time, what does this mean exactly? What does this mean in terms of young women thinking it’s cool to imitate this contradiction laden way of being a woman? Let’s unpack it, or try to:

She says she likes being dominated and maintaining the male role of domination and the female submission. Men will continue to see themselves as dominant and women as mere things to be dominated and vessels for the enactment of their power. They will continue to dominate and often brutalize women because they are not valued fully as human. And, better yet, the women ask for it now. They have consented to being an object. She is objectifying herself.
This he who is the paradoxically submissive ‘bad guy’ might know he doesn’t own her. Might being a key word. The consent of this role-play has not been consented to and acknowledged as play (read: not entirely real because even play contains reality). How does this play out in what it maintains beyond this apparently benign sex game? Especially when she’ll be ‘his’ animal? Isn’t the animal that she is playing that is ‘his’ but then, at the same time, not owned by him of the same body? He doesn’t own her and yet she is his. It’s titillating. Great rock & roll angst. And edgy rebellion for teenage girls to get their trying-to-figure-out-who-they-are-peer-pressured-to-be-cool-and-part-of-the-in-crowd teeth into.

By the end of the song, Eilish—or the bad-guy-girl she is attempting to be acting—is the bad guy. As her male victims’ decapitated heads hang around her in bags, any sort of empowerment in the song has simply flipped the hierarchy of power abuse: the woman is now as violent as the most violent of men to the point of achieving the indifference of a sociopath serial killer as she playfully pokes a hole in one of her victim’s head-bags. There is no empowerment here as my teenage girl friend has chastised me. This is but a sensationalized reperpetuation of that which exploits and now she, as the exploited, is the exploiter—or, in a still male supremacist culture, so she thinks.

However, in yet another interview where yet another music critic is trying to unravel her enigmatic lyrics, Eilish tries again to explain: “The initial idea for the song is like people that have to tell everybody that they are a certain way all the time? They’re not that certain way. […] In general, I feel like you will never catch a bad bitch telling everyone she’s a bad bitch. It’s on—it’s you.”[5] Okay, I don’t know about you but I only sort of understand this, and I only sort of understand this in the context of an interview and as a convoluted comment on pretension and narcissism. But as an intention readily accessible in the work of art as the ‘bad bitch’ is more glamourized than critiqued? Not so much. Or even at all.

Even though we love it,

even though it is one hell of an ear-worm, I don’t think anyone got what the artist insists she was trying to do in Bad Guy—and this is most likely why so many music critics have had to keep asking her. I know the young woman I am close to didn’t. I think it’s safe to say that all of the other young women and pre-pubescent girls who strive to be cool didn’t. However, there is one almost useful revelation: beneath the unfeeling bravado performed by a bad bitch who, in the end, is the mirror image of the bad guy; through the internalized sexism that has simmered to the point of self-brutalization that pathologically produces a twenty-first century “liberated” young woman, Eilish is crouching on the sidewalk, despondently feeding pigeons (an urban pass-time that is often equated with loneliness and mental illness). Yay! I love it! An acknowledgement of vulnerability! There is a trajectory of logic here as a young woman trying to be a bad guy does quite often fail as she is abused in order to be accepted in the boys club of inherently power abusive men. And yet, again, this inevitability is washed away as the despondency becomes a decadent, stylized, first world depression, yet another act of coolness as the insolent, young woman performs being unaffected by trauma and teenage girl “Duhs” punctuate the groove.

Don’t get me wrong,

Billie Eilish is a brilliant artist and singer-songwriter. The song and its video are a pop masterpiece. However, because all artists find their inspiration in the fodder of the everyday, what does it say about our culture that this song exists in the first place? And what happens when girls imitate the very thing Eilish claims to be critiquing?

My young friend took all of Eilish’s stylized sulky, saucy slouching as real, as what she is supposed to be in order to embody coolness. And, yes, she is ‘cool.’ Hundreds of hearts on TikTok whenever she performs and posts acts of toxic, internalized sexism, but at what cost both to her personally and to reinforcing misogyny and either maintaining or increasing violence against women? Huge.

And after this early adulthood education what has she graduated to? Well, this: stay tuned for NLE Choppa “Slut Me Out.”

Yours,

#iloveendnotes

[1] Karen Moe Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor. Vigilance Press: Mexico City/Lantzville, BC: 2022: 39.

[2] Ibid: 144.

[3] I can’t help but repeat this term ‘super cool’ as it’s the main theme despite being otherwise expressed by Eilish.

[4] Read Natasha Walter Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism for numerous examples where T-shirts that say “So Many Boys, Not Enough Time,” are marketed to the parents of toddlers. 3-year-old girl maturity through young woman (even girl) sexuality

[5] https://www.nme.com/news/music/billie-eilish-breaks-down-bad-guy-lyrics-2543500

Note on images: all images of Billy Eilish are wallpaper free downloads except for the first and last which are screen shots from a live concert posted on YouTube.

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Can it be a good thing

Impunity reached a searing point in Mexico City

In a continued response to the impunity of the Mexico City police for the multiple rapes in the summer of 2019,

But this year, 2025, was verging on the opposite.

My friend and I walked for about 15 minutes and finally reached the march.

I’m not saying the Mexico City 8M wasn’t powerful this year

Vancouver December 23rd, 2024

Xcambó, Yucatan, Mexico December 13th, 2024

In the beginning, there were twenty.

They had to do something, right away,

I’m at loss to think when I look at Titania,

The Cookie is a landscape unto itself.

On the morning of August 10th, 2020,

“There was a lot of tension. Everybody was tense,”

“Why are you here?”

“At first, both the groups were so tense,”

“One of the most important things I learned from Elder Bill was how to listen. Just sitting there listening to him was a big lesson. We learned how to listen to our Elders, the knowledge keepers.”

To be continued…

If you’d like to learn more

Notes:

In 2022, I published my first book.

I needed advice as to how I won’t lose my home.

Here’s yet another tale of sexual harassment and power abuse,

I put on my jacket.

“The water is as crystal silk!”

The meeting ends.

Epilogue:

In 2020 and 2021,

The Doing is the Hope: The Forest Defenders of Fairy Creek

It’s impossible to doubt when you’re in it.

It’s a very long walk to Waterfall Camp.

And wait.

It’s a long walk to Waterfall Camp

I keep walking.

Why are you here? Testimonies of Truth:

At the end of this always journey for justice,

Let’s give the last words to Lorax:

All photos by Karen Moe

#iloveendnotes:

About the Blogger:

I don’t think anyone

Don’t agree yet? Okay, here’s a bit of so much more:

After the wholistic definition of prostitution as a system

When one thinks and feels in the big picture context of

I ask:

It needs to be read;

As I wrote in my first post on prostitution,

#iloveendnotes

About the Blogger:

I don’t think she will ever read this.

In the 90s and early 2000s,

“Slut Me Out” by NLE Choppa

Continuing our explication from the bottom up,

And what is a slut, exactly,

And so, back to the question: what is a slut?

However,

But wait, the horror!:

Until then?

#Iloveendnotes

About the Blogger:

Durante mi gira Trauma & Triumph Tour por Canada

Fairy Creek, BC, Canadá,

No podemos olvidarnos de los hombres.

#iloveendnotes #contextisrevolution

Soy:

Triunfo bajo amenaza: la Ciudad de México y las mujeres que luchan.

Estaba exaltada y sorprendida.

Como muchos saben,

Regreso a Reforma 2022:

Las feministas y las familias de los niños desaparecidos decidieron: No.

Pero, ¿los mexicanos están contentos con eso?

Sin siquiera acceso a kits de violación

#iloveendnotes

Sobre la blogger:

A follow up to my previous post, “What Fresh Hell is This? Same Old Same Old.”

I doubt she’ll ever read this.

How did I find out about this nightmare?

It all started with Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy.

Low-fi super-cool catchy:

Cut from the nose-bleed:

On the morning of August 10^th, 2020,