Happiness in Slavery

“Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.” - Abbie Hoffman

This weekend, my mate and I drove up to a family wedding in northern ********. The drive was very scenic, with floods of trees waving by the window in swelling summer hills. Some cousins or another, whom I had never heard of, were to be wed in the same chapel as my mate's brother, who is an excellent Risk player and who will be a father in less than four weeks.

Having seen photos of the chapel from said previous wedding, I was excited to experience it first-hand, as its design is one of breath-taking genius. Rather than creating the enclosed, stuffy atmosphere that so many churches do, locking the congregation away from the very creation that they seek to worship, this chapel is a massive steel building that utilizes reflective glass as its walls. Awe-inspiring arches run down the length of this architectural wonder, repeating in pattern, blending in from the distance to create the illusion of a grand web. As the chapel is located in the forest, each glass wall reveals calming, natural scenery, with leaves brushing against its surface and sunlight liberally pooling in. Nothing is quite so calming to the soul as the unified presence of nature and the assuring protection from it.

That which transpired within the chapel, however, had no where near the same soothing effect on my temperament.

As has already become evident from various family functions, my mate and I are the staple Black Sheep of the Family. Whilst everyone else shows up in their flowered blouses and talk about their latest church bake sale, my mate and I show up in all black, very gothic attire and talk about the last heavy metal concert we went to, or, in this case, our recent experience seeing a live production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Rocky fell out of his costume. T'was amusing.)

However, on this particular occasion, I felt as though basic humanity was the only thing required for blood to seep out from the corner of my mouth, courtesy of a firmly bitten tongue. White wool or no, I wonder why the rest of the congregation's faces did not turn as red as mine; why the bride's eyes seemed to twinkle with the vows she spoke; why a few black-raged glances, exchanged with my mate, were the only release I had for a rehearsal brunch that wanted to come straight back up my nostrils with stomach acids in tow.

I shall change the names of the bride and groom for their... protection, convenience, humility, or what will you... So going with a recent theme, I think I shall name the bride Betty and the groom Ralph. (Take two shots if you can appreciate the reference.)

Paraphrased, but not exaggerated...

“Do you, Ralph, promise to provide for Betty? To ensure her physical, emotional, and spiritual comfort? To rule over her with love, with compassion, and with morality? To be a Godly example for her to follow? To not lead her astray?” And so on and so forth.

“And do you, Betty, promise to stand by Ralph? To uphold his individual identity? To support him in all that he does? To accept his God-given authority as spiritual head of your household? To obey him with love, ease, and the spirit of Christ in your heart?” And so on and so forth.

[sound of record screeching] Accept his God-given authority?

When the ceremony was concluded, the priest said, “And now, by the power vested in me by so-and-so, I pronounce you Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Hapschatt. Ralph, you may kiss your wife.”

The family cheered and the priest bowed. The couple kissed, the flower girls blushed, and Betty made her way down the altar without so much as a blink to the fact that her name had just been wiped from her identity; that she had, for all intents and purposes, been declared somebody's property; that she just took vows to OBEY her partner unconditionally, transforming herself into “Mrs. Ralph Hapschatt”. No, she was busy smiling openly with tears of joy in her eyes.

And as I applauded and forced a smile, I wondered to myself what kind of absolutely f*cked up society breeds that sort of joy. The masochistic joy of being trampled upon; seen as lesser; written into the world's ceremonies as an appendage; disrespected to the highest degree, and convinced that it is honor.

Slavery, of the most clever sort, needs no corporal chains. It has occurred when you can convince the jailees to become the jailers. It has occurred when you can convince the jailees that they are not truly trapped, or that they deserve their place, or, even, that they are happy.

The most cruel and gut-wrenching example of this can be seen when we examine history's most notorious genocide. Jews, homosexuals, blacks, political objectors, and other “criminals” to the Nazi regime were maliciously snatched from their homes and driven to institutions of torture known as “concentration camps”... a phrase that even now forces chills down the spine of any educated individual.

An educated individual would also be hard pressed to hear of a wild, camp-wide uprising, in which every prisoner decided to run at the men with guns and wrestle their freedom from the hands of the devil. Why is that? Even the passengers of the 9/11 flight destined to hit the White House, knowing that they had no chance to live, raced at the terrorists and brought them down so that others would be given a chance. Seeing the smoke of the ovens, why did the holocaust camp prisoners not do the same? Why did they march, silently, into those furnaces? Why did they lay submissively in their cots, without a unified beat of revolution in their hearts?

Simple, but intelligent, knowledge of psychology. On the part of the Nazi, that is.

The victims were not made to realize their predicament with suddenness. Human spirits have this amazing reserve trigger that goes off when there is “nothing left to lose”, releasing a hailstorm of bravery, initiative, and energy. If the Nazi had grabbed their victims by the balls and said, “Alright, you dirty mother******, you are going to DIE!”, then you bet your 401k there would have been revolution. And I mean hardcore, desperate, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture revolution.

But the Nazi did not do that. They strategically drove their targets into the ghettos, and then collected them with swift, mysterious efficiency, loosely informing the doomed lot that they were being “relocated”.

The Nazi prevented unity. Their first step was to tear communities apart limb-for-limb, before the true torture even began. They ripped old from young, man from woman, lover from lover, parent from child, and sibling from sibling. Those who were able to go on for some time with even a single loved one were lucky. Those who actually survived with a loved one... won the lottery.

Once thus divided, the prisoners were prevented from forming any new allegiances of threatening strength. Though there were many methods, the most powerful one of all was to instill the feeling that those who cooperated with the jailers were special and would be treated with a fraction of higher decency, whilst those who conspired with anti-jailers would be shot or exceptionally abused. In this way, those who actually HAD the initiative to rise up, or to plot, or to retain their identities, were abandoned by their fellow prisoners. Therefore, any grand disruption never leaked beyond one, two, three... perhaps, on rare occasion, a small handful of people. A five person revolution is easy enough to stop with a couple of shot guns behind the tool shed.

And even if there were a seed of rebellion stirring in some belly, it did not remain long. The victims were systematically starved and kept weak. With hardly the energy to lift their own limbs, the prisoners were not going to fight back against their physically advantaged captors. They spent themselves performing the labor that they were assigned to, lest they waste, in the heat of a beating, what precious little energy they had left to live on.

Lastly, but no less powerfully, the Nazi used the dizziness of torture and mistreatment to instill their hateful views into the minds of their victims. I recall reading in a book once—perhaps it was Briar Rose—the brief narrative of a homosexual character who survived the Nazi boot. He said that before the camps, when asked about his identity, he would provide his name, his interests, his daily hobbies, et cetera, without so much as a mention of his orientation. After the camps, when asked the same question, his automatic response was, “I am a fag.” And that, more than anything, is the thievery of malicious dominance: the installment of the mentality that “I am just a Jew”, or “I am just a fag”, or “I am just a something or another”, and “therefore I cannot.”

You are waiting for me to say that this is all a grand metaphor for the situation of women, but it isn't. A metaphor is something far removed, barely related, being held in comparison to something alien. What I have written of here is simple human psychology. It is human pattern. Whether it be the holocaust, the Japanese relocation camps, the Salem Witch Trials, the Inquisition (any of them), the extermination of the Christians/Pagans/Jews/Muslims/heretics/et cetera, or any mass injustice in human history, you can apply the same sad reality, be it mild or extreme.

When we wake up in the mornings, we wake up in ghost chains. Feminists do not, for the most part, claim to be free of them; rather, we claim to actually be aware of them, and therefore exceptionally armed to fight them. Do they need pointing out?

Women are divided. We are divided by illusions created by our old jailers—power-seeking men—and by our newest jailers: each other. We are divided by a sense of competition over mainstream male approval; we are divided by male-written doctrines and religions that villainize us; we are divided by false icons and martyrs; we are divided by opposing dispositions of fear and rebellion in the face of submission. We have allowed ourselves to accept encouragement for sins against our sisters, to become our own jailers, and to shun those who might lead us to freedom. The more a woman reinforces the idea that women are meant to serve men, the more she is rewarded. The more a woman pushes the opposite, the more she is shunned, punished, hissed and spit at by society. (This is gradually becoming less true in certain circles, but it is a sad rarity for the opposite to be true, and certainly not what one will commonly encounter as they try to live free in this world. This is a strong reason why the existence of this community is so important.)

Women are starved. Not literally, in this case, but spiritually. Mentally. Emotionally. We are kept weak, with only enough personal energy remaining to fulfill blind obedience.

And when our stomachs scream, and are most ready for a savior, we are fed false, sweet fruits by the invisible enemy. Fruits of consumerism, telling us that we may find happiness and purpose in continuously decorating ourselves towards the heterosexual male's ideal, whilst abandoning important life tasks that we may otherwise have embraced. Fruits of tradition, telling us that our most important purpose in existence is our reproductive abilities. Fruits of legality, telling us that our bodies are not ours to control, and that our sexuality is indecent. Fruits of religion, telling us that it is divine, rightful, and altogether meaningful in a cosmic, inarguable way that we should be the lesser... the submissive... the slaves of the Earth.

Our very identities are smeared in the muck. The thievery prevails upon us every day: “I am just a woman, and therefore I cannot.”

I am just a woman... and therefore, I smile as I declare inferiority in my own lifelong partnership before the gathering of all my family and friends, and I cry with joy as they cheer, for it is as they have all done, and all their mothers before them, and their mothers before them, and their mothers...

It never snapped all at once for us, as a group. No one ever grabbed our balls, so to speak. Perhaps if we had instantly been robbed of equality in every capacity, and cast down with force, we would never have forgotten. But we wake up now, in the modern era, and find ourselves slipping once more...

Even alone, we are each our own individual jailers. Inside of our heads, we have the woman who wants to be free, and we have the woman who is convinced that she doesn't.

Yesterday, on the 4th, they actually played the 1812 Overture. The orchestra, at the river market, before a thousand people who were gathered to observe the fireworks. If you have seen V for Vendetta, then you know when the fireworks kicked in. The similarity seemed a bit quaint to me, considering the occasion, and I wondered if someone had wanted to hide a bit of a secret message in there, or if this was a custom that simply did not wish to be interrupted by a highly impactful movie that went so far as to inspire a new anti-terrorism media law in Britain. [sideways grin] Who knows. Either way, the show was a spectacle, shining with calico glory upon the night sky. “How sweet to think,” thought I, “that humans do go through all of this effort to create such spectacular booms... for the sake of beauty, and not for the sake of death.”

I tried not to think about the fact that the fireworks were supposed to emulate “the rockets' red glare”.

Behind us, one of my mate's old friends approached. They had not seen one another for a few years, and launched into conversation. I stood there, holding my mate's hand.

Without so much as looking at me, the friend said, “I see you've got yourself a new girlfriend since last time.”

“Yeah, yeah, I do.”

“She's not as [something or another] as the last one.”

Still, not so much as a glance.

Um... excuse me? Thank you for speaking about me as though I were not just standing right there. What am I—an object? My mate's accessory?

I wanted to speak out. I wanted to say these things. But instead, a voice rang in my head that said, “I don't want to be 'the bitchy girlfriend'”, and therefore I kept quiet. My jailer, hard at work.

It is no where near as powerful as Betty's, but it is there. It is in you. And we enact it upon each other, to higher or lower degrees, without realization. To kill that internal jailer who relishes slavery; who allows themselves to be convinced of weakness and seeks protection in squandering submission; who smiles sweetly when a fellow woman marries away her identity; who blindly follows the societal, religious, and ethical creed that compose the walls of her cage... to kill that jailer is to sever the chains.

A good place to start? Divide the jailers. Do not allow other women to reinforce that voice in your head that tells you of your inherent "feminine weaknesses"; do not bond with friendships whose only basis is the pursuit of male attention and consumerist behaviors.

Starve the jailer. Do not feed its sadism. Encourage other women; support them; embrace them; accept them. Do not speak ill of them because of their breast size, marital status, career choices, et cetera. Every time you act in kindness rather than in cruelty, you steal a morsel of bread from your inner enemy.

Punish the jailer, and give privilege to the liberator. Do not stand by idly whilst other women strengthen one another's chains, or hurt one another, or bring one another down. Step in, and point out the naked shame in their actions. Lift those who do the same upon your shoulders. Make the world a wonderful environment for women to fight back against millennia of oppressive history.

Turn your back on the jailer's identity. Do not help to make it “glamorous” for a woman to enslave herself. Do not pat yourself on the back when you let the jailer take control. Gather your strength, and feed your own identity... the identity that exists separately from the one you are expected to fill due to your gender. Every time you make yourself stronger, make yourself bolder, make yourself more independent... you give yourself a drop of liberty.

I hope you all had a happy 4th of July.