Its 2018 and there are some things we just shouldn't have to keep clarifying. One of those things is if a woman, femme presenting person, doesn't give you consent to physically engage with them in any way, form, or fashion, than you cannot do it, period. No ifs, ands, or buts, about it. I don't care if she leaves her house everyday butt naked and stops in front of you and twerks with her rear-end facing you for two hours. You still don't have any justification to touch her in any way, form, or fashion. This is so despite however she's dressed or not dressed. And, how she talks or doesn't talk to you has absolutely nothing to do with it. If during your interaction with her you find out she's a transgender woman has nothing to do with anything. Whatever she may have even talked about doing to and with you before has absolutely nothing to do with it. If she is saying no in this moment and you do not honor that, you are a violent predator, plain and simple.
The reason this is is all true is because we know elderly and physically disabled women are regularly sexually assaulted. Hell, when my daughter was 11, a boy grabbed her breasts in school and all the students at that school wore the same uniforms. So, the fact these incidents happen to women regardless of the circumstances tells us that its not even just a sexual attraction issue. Its an issue of men exercising physical and emotional power over women. This is always an abusive and unacceptable practice under any and all scenarios.
Where cowardice comes in is most men already know everything I'm saying here on some level. You know it because the moment you even suspect that any man has crossed a boundary with any woman in your life, than you are ready to kill him, but the reasons for this are even dysfunctional. If it was a situation of respecting women it wouldn't matter whether you knew them or not and you certainly couldn't argue that the man deserves death if you know the woman, but the woman has brought on the issue whenever you don't know her. So, if you are a man and you subscribe to any of these weak ideas, you are a coward of a man.
And for the men who continue to actually attempt to argue that women who wait five, 10, or 50 years to report sexual assault are discredited "because why did they wait that long?" you are nothing except a weak coward. The Limbic portion of the brain is the portion that controls our emotional responses. The Limbic is 100% emotional. It has no logic. It has no sense of time. It is that part of your brain that makes you feel as if you are back in 1999 when you hear TLC's "No Scrubs" because to the Limbic, when it receives the stimuli of that song, it is 1999 so it does its job in returning you to the senses, smells, and thoughts that are meticulously stored in your brain from that year. Since the Limbic has no rationale, it protects you the best it can and often that means shutting down whenever you experience trauma. That's partially why you often can't remember details of traumatic events or that you can't remember much of anything about those events. Your brain simply will not go there. This is true for everyone, not just women recovering from sexual assault. That's why I still have a very difficult time recalling and placing details from that day in 1977 when three thirty something white terrorists physically attacked me and hospitalized me. I didn't start talking about that incident until the 90s, but if anyone tells me that the fact I waited that long is an indication that the incident didn't happen, they better duck when they say that. My trauma from that and many other incidents makes it easy for me to understand why a woman would wait for years and/or why she would never say anything. I'm sure 98% of us can understand that so for all the men who keep making that piss poor argument to discredit these women, you are a gutless coward and all the women who argue this are right there with you. Then, if you add the power component of the man being famous, the boss, etc., that's just more logic as to why a woman would not say anything. Anyone who claims not to understand that is either stupid, lying, or both. And, for you confused Africans, spare me with that tired refrain that these African men being accused are being attacked by the system. I wasn't there when the accusations took place, but Bill Cosby, Tavis Smiley, etc., have never done a second's worth of work to attack the capitalist system so why the hell would the system attack them? They are doing everything the system wants them to do. Promoting our integration into a system that has been hellbent on destroying us for over 500 years. There are plenty of men who engaged in full frontal attacks against the system on our behalf. The system did everything it could to destroy these men and often the system succeeded, but they could never accuse King, Malcolm, Nkrumah, Cabral, Kwame Ture, etc., of sexual assault because they weren't doing that, case closed.
My political development and the benefit of having a very active All African Women's Revolutionary Union and the social revolution they facilitate through the All African People's Revolutionary Party has always made me try and combat this cowardice within myself and other men, but now, I'm on the warpath. I don't want to occupy a world being a part of a species that is cowardly as too many men are displaying in this present time. If we don't act out militantly against this cowardice, than that makes me just as responsible as the ones carrying out the assaults. To me, this militant "doing something" isn't taking individual actions against cowardly men. The real solution approach is we have to get all men in organizations and we have to get those organizations operational with women's wings and an anti-patriarchal component in their organization building. In other words, we have to up the game on raising the consciousness of men. We have to do this in an uncompromising fashion though in order to raise the bar and that will require individual commitments to the collective goals. The reason why cowardice has become so normalized is because not enough people are confronting it.
Another way this cowardice demonstrates itself is you just aren't seeing men attacking the systems of power that generate and perpetuate this oppression they way men attack women. I shouldn't even have to explain why this is the epitome of cowardice. This is true of all men, but especially European (White) men who are the poster children of cowardice in the world today. The most whiny and self entitled element in the entire universe. You should be ashamed to hold space in the world today. The funny part is people have asked me my entire life if I would prefer to be White and despite the hardships being African has brought me, even as a child, I looked at how spineless so many White men are and I knew then that I'd rather be dead before I had the lack of backbone that so many of these White men walk around with today. People can say whatever they want about me, but no one will ever be able to say I'm a coward. I'll take my consistent swimming against the current existence any day over the privileged and entitlement of the majority of white men taking up space today. They are primarily responsible for the growing sentiment of anti-man expression that is becoming louder and louder. I'm not offended at all by this sentiment. I went through my anti-white sentiment many years ago. In some ways, if handled properly, that period can be an important phase in the consciousness development process so whomever feels that they don't want to interact with men, any men, that's their right. My response to that isn't to get mad at them or challenge them. My response is to challenge these cowardly men that generate this problem in the first place.
Its time to tell men that most of what you are saying are weak excuses. And, certainly, much of what you are doing is unacceptable. Shut up and start doing work to change our behavior. Some of us men are really sick of hearing your cowardly voices. We are going to do everything we can to make your sorry existence as uncomfortable as possible.
The reason this is is all true is because we know elderly and physically disabled women are regularly sexually assaulted. Hell, when my daughter was 11, a boy grabbed her breasts in school and all the students at that school wore the same uniforms. So, the fact these incidents happen to women regardless of the circumstances tells us that its not even just a sexual attraction issue. Its an issue of men exercising physical and emotional power over women. This is always an abusive and unacceptable practice under any and all scenarios.
Where cowardice comes in is most men already know everything I'm saying here on some level. You know it because the moment you even suspect that any man has crossed a boundary with any woman in your life, than you are ready to kill him, but the reasons for this are even dysfunctional. If it was a situation of respecting women it wouldn't matter whether you knew them or not and you certainly couldn't argue that the man deserves death if you know the woman, but the woman has brought on the issue whenever you don't know her. So, if you are a man and you subscribe to any of these weak ideas, you are a coward of a man.
And for the men who continue to actually attempt to argue that women who wait five, 10, or 50 years to report sexual assault are discredited "because why did they wait that long?" you are nothing except a weak coward. The Limbic portion of the brain is the portion that controls our emotional responses. The Limbic is 100% emotional. It has no logic. It has no sense of time. It is that part of your brain that makes you feel as if you are back in 1999 when you hear TLC's "No Scrubs" because to the Limbic, when it receives the stimuli of that song, it is 1999 so it does its job in returning you to the senses, smells, and thoughts that are meticulously stored in your brain from that year. Since the Limbic has no rationale, it protects you the best it can and often that means shutting down whenever you experience trauma. That's partially why you often can't remember details of traumatic events or that you can't remember much of anything about those events. Your brain simply will not go there. This is true for everyone, not just women recovering from sexual assault. That's why I still have a very difficult time recalling and placing details from that day in 1977 when three thirty something white terrorists physically attacked me and hospitalized me. I didn't start talking about that incident until the 90s, but if anyone tells me that the fact I waited that long is an indication that the incident didn't happen, they better duck when they say that. My trauma from that and many other incidents makes it easy for me to understand why a woman would wait for years and/or why she would never say anything. I'm sure 98% of us can understand that so for all the men who keep making that piss poor argument to discredit these women, you are a gutless coward and all the women who argue this are right there with you. Then, if you add the power component of the man being famous, the boss, etc., that's just more logic as to why a woman would not say anything. Anyone who claims not to understand that is either stupid, lying, or both. And, for you confused Africans, spare me with that tired refrain that these African men being accused are being attacked by the system. I wasn't there when the accusations took place, but Bill Cosby, Tavis Smiley, etc., have never done a second's worth of work to attack the capitalist system so why the hell would the system attack them? They are doing everything the system wants them to do. Promoting our integration into a system that has been hellbent on destroying us for over 500 years. There are plenty of men who engaged in full frontal attacks against the system on our behalf. The system did everything it could to destroy these men and often the system succeeded, but they could never accuse King, Malcolm, Nkrumah, Cabral, Kwame Ture, etc., of sexual assault because they weren't doing that, case closed.
My political development and the benefit of having a very active All African Women's Revolutionary Union and the social revolution they facilitate through the All African People's Revolutionary Party has always made me try and combat this cowardice within myself and other men, but now, I'm on the warpath. I don't want to occupy a world being a part of a species that is cowardly as too many men are displaying in this present time. If we don't act out militantly against this cowardice, than that makes me just as responsible as the ones carrying out the assaults. To me, this militant "doing something" isn't taking individual actions against cowardly men. The real solution approach is we have to get all men in organizations and we have to get those organizations operational with women's wings and an anti-patriarchal component in their organization building. In other words, we have to up the game on raising the consciousness of men. We have to do this in an uncompromising fashion though in order to raise the bar and that will require individual commitments to the collective goals. The reason why cowardice has become so normalized is because not enough people are confronting it.
Another way this cowardice demonstrates itself is you just aren't seeing men attacking the systems of power that generate and perpetuate this oppression they way men attack women. I shouldn't even have to explain why this is the epitome of cowardice. This is true of all men, but especially European (White) men who are the poster children of cowardice in the world today. The most whiny and self entitled element in the entire universe. You should be ashamed to hold space in the world today. The funny part is people have asked me my entire life if I would prefer to be White and despite the hardships being African has brought me, even as a child, I looked at how spineless so many White men are and I knew then that I'd rather be dead before I had the lack of backbone that so many of these White men walk around with today. People can say whatever they want about me, but no one will ever be able to say I'm a coward. I'll take my consistent swimming against the current existence any day over the privileged and entitlement of the majority of white men taking up space today. They are primarily responsible for the growing sentiment of anti-man expression that is becoming louder and louder. I'm not offended at all by this sentiment. I went through my anti-white sentiment many years ago. In some ways, if handled properly, that period can be an important phase in the consciousness development process so whomever feels that they don't want to interact with men, any men, that's their right. My response to that isn't to get mad at them or challenge them. My response is to challenge these cowardly men that generate this problem in the first place.
Its time to tell men that most of what you are saying are weak excuses. And, certainly, much of what you are doing is unacceptable. Shut up and start doing work to change our behavior. Some of us men are really sick of hearing your cowardly voices. We are going to do everything we can to make your sorry existence as uncomfortable as possible.
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