AGA Roll Call: Violence & Feminism

I've been reading through everything I missed, and let me tell you I have twenty or so tabs left to check out. But I don't know how long I have online, so let's get this up now, yes? Yes. KK. WARNING: violent. Could be triggering.

There's a post that Micki is going to war. I wish her all the best, knowing that...war is something I both love and hate. It may tear people away, and you can never be sure they will come home alive. So I hope, for the sake of Micki, her family, and all of us here, that she comes back alive and relatively unharmed.

But then Heather and Irmelin believe that war is unfeminist in many ways. But why? Is it not traditional that women will not fight? A woman should have every right to fight for what she believes in! If she believes in a conutry, if she believes in fighting to prove everyone wrong, if she believes in...she should act upon it.

Violence is a big part of our culture. Violent films, music, video games. Violence is anything but new. Our country was founded on violence, on war, on slavery. Our country went through a very bloody civil war, the bloodest battle of all occured about a half an hour from where I am sitting now. Gettysburg, war, men killing each other always makes a good film. It doesn't make a good home or environment to grow up in however.

My brother's hand gripped firmly around my neck. A million thoughts whipped through my head. Was I still breathing? What did I do now? How was I going to get out of this one?

"We always knew when we took on the issue of violence against women that somehow our opposition would come after us. " - Patricia Ireland

"[We need to] talk about the root causes of terrorism, about the need to diminish this daily climate of patriarchal violence surrounding us in its state-sanctioned normalcy; the need to recognize people's despair over ever being heard short of committing such dramatic, murderous acts; the need to address a desperation that becomes chronic after generations of suffering; the need to arouse that most subversive of emotions -- empathy -- for "the other"; the need to eliminate hideous economic and political injustices, to reject all tribal/ethnic hatreds and fears, to repudiate religious fundamentalisms of every kind. Especially talk about the need to understand that we must expose the mystique of violence, separate it from how we conceive of excitement, eroticism, and "manhood"; the need to comprehend that violence differs in degree but is related in kind, that it thrives along a spectrum, as do its effects -- from the battered child and raped woman who live in fear to an entire populace living in fear." Robin Morgan, from The Demon Lover