Why ethics in education is important

Abusers generally rely upon a seemingly infallible formula which takes advantage of fuzzy and undeveloped thinking as well as of a desire for community, manifest as a sense of responsibility which can be perverted into guilt. Their advantage is based upon the principle: “You are not intrinsically separable from me.”

So, if you find yourself in a situation that is abusive it is “Your fault” / “You chose it” / “You and I are in this together.”

So, we are all meant to implicitly accept this conceptualization of abuse — that is caused by things being just the way they cannot help but be at this point in time and history — so that nobody in particular can be blamed, and nobody can be called out to answer for their abusive behavior.  After all, both parties, whether they be the one abusing or the one at the receiving end of it, participate together as a unit which creates an intrinsic whole.

Once the vulnerable party is led to accept that they are mutually to blame for whatever happened to them, an even more typical behavior of abusers is to try to paint the abused as the abuser.

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mutual bondage

Tonight I am bound to fly away for a few days, to fulfil family obligations. I shall participate, more or less on the periphery, of some archaic rituals, including one hen’s afternoon tea and one wedding celebration.

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new dress, old printer

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Granny dress

Cobwebs cling to polyester.

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Attitudes to language that play tricks.

A problem with much of postmodernisms’ default position of  linguistic determinism is that if it is taken to be somehow correct, then it circumscribes the asking of a very necessary question, at times, which is, “What do you mean by that?” I suppose that this question is theoretically made redundant because the answer to the question is supposedly already entailed in the whatever statement is given, which is itself constructed through theoretically objectifiable and theoretically transparent historical forces. Yet the failure to ask “What do you mean by that?” is a failure to recognise how many of our meanings are constructed not by some objectively determining matrix “out there” (but automatically “in here” as well). Rather, it is the similarity or otherwise of our experiences which enable us to understand the nuances of another’s meanings, if at all.  Many philosophical paradigms, including Lacan’s, rely upon the supposition that we all share a homogeneous culture to begin with. Therefore, we all know implicitly what another person means, as does the unconscious mind of person asking the question, even the person seems to lack the relevant knowledge (which is why he is asking the question in the first place).To illustrate my point.  Supposing one is traveling through Indonesia for the first time.   He says:  ”Could you tell me how to get to the bank?”  The Indonesian stranger stares through the Western stranger, thinking:  ”If he really didn’t know how to get to a bank, why did he use the term bank, as if it had any meaning?”Here there is common failure to understand what is being said, but also a lack of recognition of this failure on the part of the Indonesian man. This is exemplified by my recent talks with one significant other, who always fails to ask “What precisely is your meaning? — Is it this experience you have had, or that?” Instead, he bumbles on, assuming that any experience is somehow universal, at least in terms of its expression. Obviously, he’s wrong, for what feminism means to me cannot be what it means to him. He could only come to a practical approximation of its meaning for me if he was willing to use analogies and metaphors which could relate it to something in his own life.

Language is far from objectively determinable — for it to appear to be so depends upon an underlying similarity of context and experiences, to start with. If people do not understand this, then the role of experiences in forming our expressions is materially underestimated. This leads, in turn, to a grey and pallid existence, wherein everyone is assumed to be speaking the same language, but personal experiences don’t matter.

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The refrain

Marechera uses the refrain “Daddy! Daddy!” explicitly to indicate that which is traumatically repressed innocence. This appears to be the aspect of the “Real” which is the Lacanian unassimilable aspect of experience. The refrain appears in The Poems Semantics and in the play The Wall, where the typical Marecherean trope of patriarchal rape, betrayal and abuse is played out. In the post war play, which features A Beckettian lack of memory as its plays’ trope, the refrain clearly enunciates directly the betrayal of innocence, because the female children of the soldiers are sacrificed as victims of war. Thus, “Daddy! Daddy!” is a condemnation of a war which was ostensibly fought “for the children” and yet did not serve them, but served male enthusiasms, instead. The lack of memory also indicates the traumatic nature of the war for the men — both black and white, they cannot remember what took place, although both were participants. But, in The Poems Semantics, the traumatic refrain returnds the poet from the realm of mere perceptions to the realm of the immediacy of experience. It turns him back to nature, indeed, into the very being of nature, as a tree. So, the experience of the traumatic level of being is ultimately life enhancing and integrates one from an abstractive attitude towards life  into a direct relationship with Nature.

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Admitting weakness

It hath been said: “The idea that showing weakness is essentially unmasculine is a huge problem”.

This is a very interesting facet of social life, and it is very correct to point it out. What I have found out about “weakness”, though, is quite interesting. Sometimes — if not usually — there is actually no correlate between what is perceived as weakness and a genuine condition of debility, or inability to act and think, at all.

So, I find that very often somebody will take something I say or do as a kind of confession of weakness (and not, well really the opposite state of being really honest about myself because I am thick-skinned and quite able to show the contempt). Well, I find that this indifference, because it departs from the norm and looks like a confessional mode, is treated like weakness.

What I am hinting at, in a roundabout way, is that it is almost not even necessary to exert much aggressive energy, one way or another, when someone assumes my strength to be  weakness. They expose their own real weakness, and somehow they also walk away being hurt.

It’s really magic!

education’s contemporary system of demoralisation.

These days, it is ideologically more common than sand to base one’s entire sense of morality on a conception of naturalness.

They so distrust authoritarianism of any sort that they consider it to be unnatural. In their minds, the world is divided up into an authoritarian camp which is presumably unnatural, and themselves, who are natural. The problem is that naturalness isn’t freedom, and doesn’t even produce freedom. Naturalness is slavery to a kind of organic necessity. If I was to live and work among those who are most natural, I would also be the victim of all of their hostility, their expressions of outrage whenever their immediate needs were somehow not entirely gratified, their sense of betrayal when I use language in a way which isn’t automatically accessible to them. This is the state of nature and of being natural: Hobbesian, all against all, with petty vindictiveness thriving. I would characterise my experiences of the Australian school education system as an experience of just this state of nature.

An embrace of the ideology of naturalness, unfortunately, also reinforces traditional gender role expectations, just as it directs one (failing the permitted intervention of any other sort of direction) towards the path of least resistance. All children grow up with the primary image of Mother The Nurturer and must be educated with great enforcement to believe that women can embody an identity which is radically different from their own primary experiences of women.

An appropriate authoritarianism is required within the school system. One sees how useful this acquirement and internalisation of authoritarianism can be, in the movie (posted below), THE HILL. Those who expect always to be seduced into trying something new, who, failing this “authoritative” intervention, will not try anything more daring than they usually do, need to pay close attention to this movie.

The point I drew from this movie is that one cannot be free unless one has within oneself the stuff of the authoritarians, to use against them. Otherwise, one is weak and malleable. Significantly, Trooper Joe Roberts (Sean Connery) understands the need for military discipline, “otherwise there’d be no army.” A career soldier, he has internalized the capacity for strict discipline, including, one presumes, a tolerance for pain. He has also internalized a sense of rationalism concerning social change, a more modernist respect for human lives. His life in the military has already been marked by his opposition to following orders which would merely waste human lives. Now he is in military prison, and the same mindless discipline is being imposed. Sean Connery can tolerate this pain, but another cannot and pays with his life.

The intensity of the military jail compels and honest exposition by each of the squad, of their own characters. There is no place to hide who and what they are. Each is forced to challenge the establishment with what they know about the murder of their associate, or to obviously lie in order to save their own skins.

Sean Connery represents the authoritarianism of the future morality which demands human decency, against the authoritarianism of blind giving of orders, and submission.

His character does not represent mere naturalism, but rather an opposition to the naturalism which would command an individual to save his own skin and not stand up against injustice. That is to say, there is something highly artificial about Sean Connery’s character’s stance. It is so in the best of ways: A purer morality is turned against the old order. Yet, to see the movie is to understand that this takes immense courage which is not the sort of attitude one could have if one’s teachers were always pleasant and had been forced into the role of being seducer of one’s mind.

Authoritarian training produces the opposite result to that which superficial naturalists presume: one has to have been exposed to some rather ambivalent treatment in the past, including some which was unyielding and authoritarian, in order to be able to internalize for one’s own use, the opposite power of being unyielding in rebellion, against one’s authorities. This film reveals this dynamic as belonging to the past.

The Hill

I recently saw the movie, THE HILL.I was most impressed by it. There was a profound sense of authenticity of military culture, even in the wry sadistic humour, which isn’t really a laughing matter. Prisoners are forced to traverse the arid manmade hill back and forth until allowed to quit, all whilst sweating vigorously under a Libyian sun and carrying their packs. It is amusing and it isn’t to hear: “The only thing that grows on this hill is men. They grow weary.”

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Intergeneration conflict / suicide

After living as long as I have, one no longer just wonders whether cultural change can be more catastrophic than it is generally assumed to be. One knows it. Perhaps the damage that is done to psyches really revolves around shattered senses of confidence which themselves are caused by intergenerational conflict. It seems to me more than a suspicion that damage from the failed Rhodesian minority political experiment is visited upon the children of the whites – and maybe even of some blacks – of the Rhodesian era.

An obvious reason for this would be that one distrusts one’s children very much for representing newer cultural values of gender and racial equality, rational thinking and liberal values – which one’s program for white Christianity had unconsciously engaged with as an enemy. My introspection tells me that there is such a thing as an unconscious enemy. It is imperative, therefore, to make oneself very conscious of whom one fights. To make everything more complicated, one’s enemy, too, can have a deep unconscious hatred for one, without knowing rationally why (their hatred overshoots what could be considered as rational, for example based on any of the actions one has done to incite rage.) Our experiences as well as early indoctrination form character structures, and one can – and often does – hate another’s character structure without first understanding it, or where it came from (often innocently enough, because of being where one was at some time, rather than from conscious ideological intent). The hatred that Rhodesian whites of the first migrant generation feels for liberals is worked out in practice against their children. This is largely unconscious. Furthermore, the hatred that western leftists (and some liberals) feel for the character structure of the Rhodesian whites is worked out against their more vulnerable children. So it goes.

Every time I hear about a Rhodesian family’s post migration story, I do not need to listen too hard to register the nature of the fallout for the second generation. The first generation regularly presents itself in a very dutiful pose. Often there is mention of an economic struggle represented not as this but as a moral and religious struggle. Perhaps there is even intonation of sacrifice (if the offspring’s condition, which one may wish to account for, seems to be particularly dire). Then the child is mentioned, as chronically depressed. One couple had to leave my wedding early to conduct their adolescent offspring’s suicide watch. The first generation’s quality of suffering could not be portrayed as more paramount. The next generation causes a continual rubbing-in of the first generation’s overestimation of faith, which lead to a losing war. This is the trauma that the parent must repeat, perhaps for better luck with more determination, next time. Only, it is no longer the “poor blacks” viewed metaphorically as children incapable of self-governing, that the Rhodesians’ attentions alight upon. Rather, it is the children of these whites themselves, who must be taught how to obey, how not to be freethinking or liberal.

One by one, the Rhodesian whites extract their toll from each other: chronic depression. I would not have believed that so many children of these whites are forced to enact their parents’ depression at losing the war, if I had not myself lived through a great deal of harranging without a seeming cause. This produces depression. The depression leads to “incidents” which require public displays of duty – the parents dropping everything in order to publically attend to a cry for help; thus externalizing their own depression whilst appearing to be spiritually and emotionally above feeling it. They thus enact their pious hatred of their children.

And many of the Western leftists, as has been noted, also hate the Rhodesians’ children – for having too much of the parents’ character structure! So, the immigrants’ children are punished yet again.

I wonder how many of them have committed suicide for these reasons, to date?

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Pure Nerd

My score on The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test:

Pure Nerd
(69 % Nerd, 4% Geek, 21% Dork)

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the “dork.” No-longer. Being smart isn’t as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

Congratulations!

Also, you might want to check out some of my other tests if you’re interested in any of the following:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Professional Wrestling

Love & Sexuality

America/Politics

Thanks Again! — THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test
(OkCupid Free Online Dating)

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Which Historical Lunatic Are You?

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

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This amuses!

This amuses!

Go straight to Day 3.

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terrible shoes

I used not to be very happy. I had accepted a sort of compromise between what I thought I should do and what I thought was my way to happiness. A great sense of distress clothed me. I had no idea how to experience the world. I felt confined, like a chicken beating its wings against walls of transparent plastic. My shoes, too, were plastic. I wore terrible shoes to my sister’s wedding. I had dutifully accepted the role of bridesmaid, a condition of being to which I could not easily relate. I had to curl my toes to keep my feet in them whilst walking. When I walked on wet grass the short spiky heels of the shoes sunk right in. These were my hours of misery – this was the field in which we were all getting photographed.

As I write this, I recall the empty sensation of not being able to be myself. Around the time of this wedding event, my deep unhappiness had started to bloom into action. It was just a beginning but I was feeling my way through various options, a trial and error process. My levels of logic, knowledge about the world, and understanding of my fellow human in general were all quite low. Abysmally so. I’d registered this as a problem and decided that the only solution was to strike forth on my own. This was the meaning of the approach of trial and error, which requires very little elaboration. I sought an initiation, rite of passage, into a more lively world. I tried to make acquaintance of those who could subtly provide it.

It was all too subtle: half and half, because of my lack of confidence and knowledge of the outside world. It appeared my sister had her own problems preceding her announcement of the marriage. Her sense of being threatened led to her escaping to a churchly house, to pay board there for a room. Her gradual Christianization must have proceeded in leaps and bounds. Marriage was on the agenda, then came a resignation from social work, and pregnancy and kids.

As for me, I took the long route, clambering out of the religious mire that had so incredibly numbed me. I had a basic confidence in my own cautious experimentalism. Despite this, I felt a failure when I felt at all. In festive moments, like at Christmas, I sat on the chair and felt my whole mind turning numb. I did not know enough about myself at that time to know how to make myself feel happy.

This was the past – and this was the Christian past, and recovering-Christian past that I remember. Every bit of blasting away the plastic ideological material that enclosed had me, which had become cling-wrapped around my very bleeding mind, was costly to me – a costly enterprise of experimentation.

Today much has changed, the main one being that it almost seems impossible that I would not know how to make myself happy. I understand, at the very least, the finer workings of my own brain. I am delighted also with my robust tendencies. Therefore, I cannot understand how anyone might be inclined to make some kind of an assessment that I am not better off today than in those days when I was Christianised and trapped as if from within.

Yet, some would wish me back to struggle with the suffocating, life-denying cling-wrap.

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Gothic horrors sans amusement

I am to pay my respects in three more, different directions before the New Year’s season is out. Yesterday I paid respect to my parents and to their 40th Wedding Anniversary. I am happy that my parents are celebrating. I am glad they’re not dead or suffering in monumental ways. They are alive. This surprises me. The relationships we have had have never been easy. I am not a cardboard cutout, although I can stand very still like one. I have always disappointed my parents – not for any particular reasons associable with my character as such, but because I am not them. It is the separateness, the separation of identity, which has irked them. It was not supposed to have happened, as if children always remain children.From my mother’s first panic attacks when I went alone to ruminate on life, down at the stables, to my father’s continuous howls of wounded animal aggression, the war continues for my subjugation. I have to understand it in this light, even though constant vigilance may now be partly redundant. Yet the punishments for my somehow striking forth with independence are still meted out, perhaps because this war is prosecuted quite unconsciously. I am the prodigal daughter and it would not seem right if I wasn’t actually depicted to be eating food of swine. I am invited to various celebrations, but the goal, the purpose of association has always been to exorcise the adult, though shaming, aggression, coercion, conformity and normalization. Enough of the tutt-tutting and the disregard for what I have to say! I do consider this to be parental punishment to be gender based.Babies are exploding out of bodies. I saw my brother’s wife, my other brother’s wife to be, last night. Ah but how we have all followed the conservative route, my family and extended family. The women – it is clear what their role is: pregnancy. How much unconscious pursuit and clamour must have brought about my sister’s subjugation. She has had three. One does not wish to know why, if one could know. The conversation bogs, I can’t find traction in it.There are three more celebrations, and one of them is compulsory. Justifiable excuses were not accepted. Rather, “Robert and your Mother consider it absolutely vital that you attend!” my father had intoned, with dark scowled brow, the weight of eternity clumped on his shoulders. I am to fly to Sydney with Mike, participate in such archaisms as Hens nights and Bucks nights situations. (“Mike I donate thee to this awful catastrophe for an evening!”) This is the youngest son we are celebrating. No family coercion like it was ever so exerted to bring associated siblings of mine from around the world, to attend our wedding. This is something different, something more powerfully demanding, perhaps intended as more catastrophic. Will the prodigal daughter, finally beaten into submission, finally reveal herself in this, most gory light? The results will have to be seen to be believed!

The Christians conspire. Such tendencies are shared by my sister, my parents and my parents friends, who are all inclined to actively or passively disregard my adult status. Maybe they will succeed through generic blandness and subtlety, in casting the demon of self-will out of me? Worse has been tried. A singular example: the refusal of a safe sanctuary from violent domestic outrage and religious persecution on a night when Christian conspiracy to reduce me to childlike status became more virulent. Heather’s house was not the place for me on that night, not unless I read the bible and confessed I was a sinner, so I beat it back into the night.

Malcolm and Robert. Good brothers both. I sent them both emails to inform them that my father was physically abusing my mother. I did not hear back from them on this matter, so obviously par for the course. Inevitably such behaviour is considered normal enough, at least not to deal with directly. More likely, I have been tacitly given a monstrous role, with various players or family members suggesting that I made the whole thing up. I would have had to be mad, out of my mind, spiteful – above all, a dark Jungian shadow, a projection –for me to have invented the dreadful apparition. Of course, I am not.

A few more strange conservative events and I am through the burning loops. I can, if nothing else, be sure that mystical compulsions,so prevalent within my family, have no tangible force over me.

I have still been exploring the possibility (as yet unverified by general social exploration) that there are cultural markers — in fact more specifically, historically based cultural markers — for emotional identity. So much of my life has not made very much sense because a section of historical-cultural truth was missing. I recently filled this cognitive gap, which was in a strong sense a cognitive-emotional gap or an emotional-cognitive gap, and now things add up. How did this happen? Somehow reading semi-fictional works from this time and place gave me some indications of what had been ailing me.

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Am I a chair?

One of the problems with a Rhodesian styled family get-together is not just an astounding effect of the time warp, but the empty formalism. I do not have anything to bring to it, except perhaps a listening ear, and as far as this goes, I would prefer the female guests not to anoint me with their hands whilst gazing intently at me in order to make their appraisals as to my well-being. I’d prefer to stand my ground and listen without being commandeered. Funny things that Rhodesian diehards say to you: “Are you the daughter?” Am I the chair in the parlour room, and if so, how many chairs were placed within the parlour room? I am not an object easily defined relationally, for example like a chair. Blood is weaker than water. I cannot volunteer a ready answer without feeling as if I’m giving answers to some antiquated crossword puzzle. The words, “Are you the daughter?” have a form but no significant content for me. It seems quite strange, my parents’ guests, old and never changed in character, touching, touching, with their wilting ghoulish arms. Some of them must have heard so much about me, the black sheep, the ne’er do well. More likely, no knowledge is necessary to feel they know me by my orientation to the family: “The daughter, although actually, one of two.”

They make assumptions about me, which are somehow the opposite of what I feel. There are glances of female pity as if life is pain and its adherents in need of reassurance. The aging women grant me little exemption from this role of being reassured. The well regulated younger women – not Rhodesians – also clamour. “Wouldn’t you like a drink, you ought to have one for we all are!” Positive words are spent, but without thought. It seems like I am eminently knowable, but just by being there. I find the time warp of “one big and happy family” quite alarming. What an erasure! The effort that has gone towards drawing the lines in family relationships does not seem to exist.

Yet, a narrow salvation: One of the Rhodesians has a more military orientation, and does not want to touch. He seems quite happy to relate his stories from afar, congenially, and checking when I glance away to see if I am bored. He mentally locks me in as a conservative (or else why would I be here?) and proceeds to tell me of the war, his encounter with Joshua Nkomo, and The Boers, of hard days and disease and of Marondera. I nod and play the female role of withholding my own knowledge to some degree. When I ask him to justify a political assessment, he falters for a moment, not knowing how to respond. I wanted to know how he could say that the Rhodesian forces won the war at home but lost it only through global opposition. His gruffness is moderately endearing, allowing me a full retreat from cloying sympathies emitting from the touchy-feely women. He had a certain authenticity and dignity, comparatively speaking.

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my youthful impression of the medical profession

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my new hair

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Back in the military dream last night, following the paper trail to the mess hall — actually children’s obscure drawings layed out on the ground in a kind of disorderly continuum. Found the tiny shack and single filed around the verandah section, past my mother who’s been living there for some time. The question floating through my mind was would I be able to do the skydive, leaping into thin air, without an adequate length of psychological preparation? A panther loomed in the corner of the loosely hewn bamboo wall, as we, more routinely than obediently marched on by. “Watch out for it!” I cautioned, but a second later it was too late as the animal had taken a whole skull between its jaws, and then I heard the fatal crunch.

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causing evil

I’ve been musing, of late. I’ve been considering the way in which things can be right and wrong at the same time. Political and social movements are like mechanical forces. They exert a pressure, moving particles away from their line of trajectory. They might be wrong at the same time. Potency has never equalled correctness, except for after the fact. And so there are feminists who think the male is evil. I do not think the male is evil, and yet many are. Immunity from criticism creates the environment for a kind of evil, because those who have been given such an immunity often freak out because they cannot sense the world any more: It seems like a vacuum to them, and so they try to invoke its forces, often masochistically (while including others in their masochistic destinies). In other ways, the lack of culpability can make those who are conceded an unearned social supremacy believe themselves to be gods. So, evil in produced.

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OLDIES AND GOODIES

i’M MUCH FITTER NOW; MORE PROFICIENT

PICTURES TO COME.

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Which Famous Revolutionary Are You? Spartacus “I fought fire with oil.” (Quote from the movie)

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

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When girlzz are treated differently.

in my experience, very few reasonable courses of action open to me as a woman are legal, ethical, sustainable and/or practical.

Yes– I have found this to be true as a female and as a proletarian. Supposing, for example, just one patriarch has it in for you because you are too certain of yourself or too full of the joys of life to sufficiently kowtow to the patriarchy? I have found that to have just one patriarch gunning for you can severely limit, in the long term: one’s health, one’s career prospects, one’s credibility (and so on).

Why does it have to be that way? — Mostly because all the other patriarchs show their true colours in such a situation. At the very least, they will not step in to help you or to see it your way. And the women? Generally, they are just as blinded — terrified.

 

What they would want to do with nonconformist girls, I shudder to think. Although given the generally positive spin put on stereotypical boy traits, and the higher tolerance -only up to a point, granted – for tomboys vs. sissies (damn and blast, are we back to that? – not that we really ever got away) I suppose it’s possible that they’d be tolerated to a degree, just not have their educational needs met in any way. In this very best case scenario, of course, I suspect you’d see a surge in acting out/withdrawing behavior, with attendant consequences.

Yes — but I think what they would do to nonconformist girls is what happened to me. And the pitiful aspect is that I did not know I was being nonconformist. Conformity and nonconformity — these are very private evaluations, usually. To make them public, one would need to know what it is one should conform to, or conversely, what it is that one has done which shows a failure to conform. In any case, I first learned that I was attracting parental disapproval when my father turned up one day, out of the blue, to take me on a birthday lunch. I was just recovering from the flu. He told me on that day that I had overestimated his and my mother’s tolerance (for what?). I was living independently at that time, so overestimation or underestimation of tolerance did not seem meaningful in any sense.

But so it went. Maybe — but who am I to know for sure — this was the beginning of a guerilla campaign to sabotage my life. Really, I don’t know what caused the hostility, the sense that philosophy books were Satanic, that feminism was shameful, that education was for dilettantes. The extra burden to conform to values I didn’t know for sure, and which I hadn’t chosen did lead me to become deeply suspicious of all socially conformist attitudes.

Seeing is believing

It can be really hard to see the patriarchy until you develop an eye for it. It’s not as easy as having it pointed out, but rather being able to distinguish particular instances of it, which are so much a seemingly natural part of life, that you would really have to be alert to catch it. One of the ways in which I discern the presence of patriarchal airs is through the intersection of two principles with particular outcomes — X marks the spot, I divine. The first principle which internally drives the patriarchy is psychological sado-masochism — the imposition of a sense of hierarchy for hierarchy’s sake, imposed by inflicting verbally barbed hurts, for hurting’s sake. The second principle of patriarchal determination is to question and find the answer: “Is the hurting really just for hurting’s sake, or could said male have thought differently, acting differently, imposed his views differently?” So, when I find that there is sadomasochism and also the option not to behave in said sadomasochistic manner, I discern patriarchy at work.

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