Invasion-Based Feminism

Violence Causes Gender Role Swap In a society where men are the traditional breadwinners, women are increasingly forced to take on that role. The violence in Baghdad has forced some Iraqi families to shift gender roles, as men are stuck at home while women bear increasing responsibilities. Because many men in Baghdad are now afraid to go out to work or even to leave the house, women are earning the money, doing the shopping and handling the bills – duties that were traditionally carried out by men. Men say they feel trapped at home, while women say they are left with too much work. (...) Rabiha al-Azawi, a psychology professor at the University of Mustansiriyah in Baghdad, expressed concern that family breakups and domestic violence were on the increase in homes where the power balance has shifted. "We live in an Oriental society where a man who doesn’t work is not deserving of respect," she said.

Notice that the lady Ph.D. states this non-desert as an objective fact, Mr. Bones -- doubtless because she lives as she does in a rather severely kennebunkport-crawfordated Oriental society, plus also kindly remember her society's previous course of Ba‘th Therapy. Under the GOP yoke, Walter Mitty doesn't just "have a self-esteem problem" or anything mealy-mouthed or psychobabblish like that, the poor wimp really and truly "is not" deserving of respect, exactly like two plus two "is not" five.

"Do either Ba‘this or Bushies consciously aim at a mental or figurative emasculation of those they chose to domineer over?" Such is the question that I think of at once in eastern Massachusetts, but that is perhaps not quite what a lady Ph.D. in a post-aggression Dept. of Psych. at Brave New Baghdád would wonder about. My question is about Pol. Sci., and therefore about what patients do (more or less) on purpose. Her own branch of social scientism has come, in Westistan at least, to worry more about about "subcognitive factors," so to speak of the unspeakable, thus to attempt to know the unknowable mysteries of das Unbewusste! The late Bruno Bettleheim seemed to think at the end of life that the Dept. of Psych. could become far more intellectually respectable if only the inmates thereof could avoid clinical jargon suggestive of white-coated technocrats suffering from Physics Envy or Medicine Envy and use more ordinary language instead. Mme. (or Mlle.) R. al-Azawi may be trying to carry out that project. In isolation her "the power balance has shifted" might be pure Pol. Sci., and nothing to do with Psych. at all. For that matter, "a man who doesn’t work is not deserving of respect" seems about as ordinary and untechnocratic as human language can get, unless moralizers be supposed to have a secret technique that can dispense with jargon.

But of course she is on a different wave-length from ours, even as a moralizer. The lady Ph.D. wants at the end of the day to address "family breakups and domestic violence," matters almost certainly far too petty to draw the attention of either dictatorial Ba‘thí thugs or Big Managerial GOP geniuses, even supposing that either of these ever formally resolved to "divide and conquer," itself a dubious hypothesis, when both these crews seem to have in fact to proposed to themselves more like "unite and conquer."

Saddám I was doubtless more closely in touch with authentic indig opinion than George XLIII can ever hope to be, yet even the Yalie lad belongs to a Party that made sure its own holy Homeland was not afflicted with anything so unnatural as an "Equal Rights Amendment" in the interest of uppity females. Dubyapologists have scrambled to offer perhaps 101 different Boy-'n'-Party neo-rationales for the aggression of March 2003 by now, yet feminism simply as such has not been among them -- unless I missed it as their kaleidoscope of self-justifications rapidly flickered past.

In any case, the anecdotal evidence is lots of fun on a stand-alone basis, even without any admixture of tertiary educationalism at all:

For many men in Baghdad who are relegated to their homes, the inability to provide for their families or go out of the house is a demeaning experience. (...) Thamir Hassan, 55, is a resident of Baghdad's Jihad neighbourhood. He quit his job because of safety concerns, and his wife, a teacher, became the sole breadwinner. Hassan said he was depressed and no longer had authority over his children, who turned to their mother instead. "It’s an early death, because I feel useless at home," he said. "I don't know what [the children] are doing, and their mother tries to hide their secrets so that I won't worry." Dawood al-Jubori, 58, is a retired man living a similarly restricted life in Baghdad's al-Elam district. He has to rely on his wife to shop and handle the household bills, which are often paid at ministries. "It is difficult to have the woman doing everything, but my three sons and I have no other choice," he said. "I want things to get back to normal."

But I fear I'm incorrigible about Politique d'abord!. How, precisely, has the extremist GOP's invasion-basin' led to a situation out in the happy Land of Peace and Freedom where "household bills ... are often paid at ministries?" Do the AEIdeologues know about that? And what has the Big Management Party's guru, or former guru, their Herr Prof. Dr. Chas. Murray, to say about arrangements that seem so obviously dependency-inducin'? Might it be that some of these 'bills' are really more like, if you'll kindly pardon my neo-Semitic, demands for br*b*s?

Seriously at cross purposes with lady Ph.D.'s from aggression-based Psychology Departments am I, alas. And when it comes to that second anecdote, I'm even incorrigibler still. "Thamir Hassan" does not yield at once to my amateur and vicarious "sectarianism." Is the name Thámir or Thamír, is the bearer of the name a (displaced) Natural Master or only some accomplice of poor praeternaturally exalted M. al-Málikí? But give me "Dawood al-Jubori, 58" and I believe I know where I stand sectarianismwise and I am, rather dreadfully, aware of what neocolonial personnel unit DJ58 probably yearns for under its own rubric of "get back to normal." Not exactly Saddám Redux, hopefully, but nothing much to do with discouraging "family breakups and domestic violence," either.

All the most self-approving gentry assure me that it's a serious no-no to think about our aggression and occupation policy like that. Crawfordites and Blairites assure me that my Uncle Sam's neo-liberateds, apart from a few oddball exceptions, take a cui servire est regnare of their neo-liberation. Oh what a sweetness to be shipwrecked in that sea! To be briefly (and of course only analogically!) "emasculated" by Tony and George will be only the briefest of preludes to full initiation into The Higher Manhood, even perhaps initiated into all the Big Management secrets of the Harvard Victory School!

Unit DJ58 thinks that's all "abnormal" tripe and baloney, and so do I, although our notions of GOP tripe and baloney agree far more closely than our ideas of what an ideal normalcy with the militant and extremist GOP nowhere in sight would be like.

More abstractly put, is the State somehow intrinsically a macho phenomenon, a permanent locus of extremism and militarism, always more engaged in stern preëmptive retaliations abroad -- "A perpetual h*rd-*n," even, as one might venture to express the paternal vision of the Wicked State in neo-Semitic? -- than in any maternal fosterings at home?

With both Ba‘thís and Busheviki, some such nightmare vision is probably ineluctable. All the same, it doesn't strictly follow from the textbook, which only said that the State is to have "a monopoly of legitimate violence," without any specification of what ends such a monopoly is for. To accommodate Psych. Dept. terminology, the Legitimate State (as traditionally conceived in Westistan) possesses a monopoly of uncontestable, or anyway, not-to-be-contested, violence, and therefore sets up in loco parentis. The State is to be as formidable to its subjects as all-wise parents ten feet tall are to ignorant kiddies, or as Rancho Crawford really is to Green Zone collaborationist pols, and idly wishes to be to "terrorists." That's in the textbook, more or less, that the State should be a Great Parent. Unfortunately, the textbook doesn't specify which parent, whether the Textbook State is to be a Mommy parent or a Daddy parent.

Perhaps personnel unit DJ58 might, after due reflection, conclude that what's happening to it under the invasive GOP yoke that it bitterly dislikes is not an "emasculation" but an "infantilization." 'Twould be a better analysis, for Pol. Sci. purposes, although the Dept. of Psych. may complain that it's only a renaming proposed. 'Tis far more than that, as it seems to me: if the alien Yoke of Imposition be conceived as imposed upon incompetent minors rather than upon manhood-challenged adult males, a broader panorama opens to the political eye at once. All those females out shopping, or paying "bills" at "ministries" whilst their mates cower at home under the bed, can be reincorporated in a plausible solidarity at once. The Kennebunkport-Crawfordites naturally like little occupied girls ("sugar and spice and everything nice") far better than they like little occupied boys, whom they account much more likely to make troubles.

The way to defeat aggressor intentions seems easy and evident: just stick together, males and females both, and everybody adult unanimously refuse ever to accept bein' treated as mere children by the 566/640 Yalie and its Big Management Party minions.

Maybe that's not the WHOLE way, to be sure, but unless that is the first step, I can hardly imagine any way towards eventual success and victory for the unlawfully invasionized the least bit likely to work. First comes "stick together," and only after that everything else. This is not a word some off-the-map Mr. McCloskey thought of just yesterday, it is the word of Ibn Khaldún, is it not, his very word ‘asabiyya , the word of the ever-glorious Founder of All Global Sociology?

Allow me to recommend that word in the present quagmire. Let the horn of that word be exalted first, and then after that seemingly discouraging, or even contradictory, words like "Violence Causes Gender Role Swap" will probably fit into the Soc. Sci. Big Picture readily enough.