The War Is Over (If You Want It), Feminism and Men

Rebecca Solnit argues strongly that The War Is Over (If You Want It), Feminism and Men.

The situation as it has long existed needs to be described bluntly. Let's just say that a significant number of men hate women, whether it's the stranger harassed in the street, the Twitter user threatened into silence online, or the wife who's beaten. Some men believe they are entitled to humiliate, punish, silence, violate, and even annihilate women. As a consequence, women face a startling amount of everyday violence and an atmosphere of menace, as well as a host of smaller insults and aggressions meant to keep us down. It's not surprising, then, that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies some men's rights groups as hate groups.

In this context, consider what we mean by rape culture. It's hate. Those sports-team and fraternity rapes, the ones that sometimes result in young men swapping phone videos that they never seem to recognize as evidence of felonies, are predicated on the idea that violating the rights, dignity, and body of another human being is a cool thing to do. Such group acts are based on a predatory-monster notion of what masculinity is, one to which many men don't subscribe but that affects us all. It's also a problem that men are capable of rectifying in ways women are not.

Emphasis Mine

Here is where the real time War on Terror should be waged. It should be waged against the terrorism that afflicts women everyday and every hour of the day. Terror forms their lives.

This war can not be won by participating in the current power structure because misogyny is the key to power. In order to have power in a Capitalist, one must be a misogynist. Becoming a feminist excludes one from power.

We must change the system to overcome this misogyny. An inclusive political system is the basis for an anti-rape culture.