Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [96]
Do you?
Abusers often conflate sex and violence. Rates of rape—so common as to be essentially normalized in the culture—make clear the conflation of sex and violence on the social level. Many films make it clear, too. So do many relationships. One can also say those magic words: breast augmentation surgery. Just yesterday I heard of a new fad in plastic surgery: reshaping the vulva to make it more visually pleasing, whatever that means (what about the notion that if you love a woman you will find her vulva beautiful, simply because it is hers?).
Really, though, this cultural conflation of sex and violence can be reduced to one word: fuck. It’s an extraordinary comment on this culture that the same word that means make love to also means do great violence to.
Abusers often actualize rigid sex roles. That this is true on the larger cultural level hardly needs remarking, and goes far beyond the stereotypically masculine values that dominate the culture. It also goes beyond the homophobia that’s based on a fear of anything that confuses those rigid sex roles.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the seeming scientific obsession to artificially create or modify life, and also the obsession to search for life in outer space. It has always seemed profoundly absurd and immoral to me that billions of dollars are spent trying to discover life on other planets as trillions more are spent to eradicate life on this one. Were scientists to discover cute furry creatures on Mars with floppy ears and wriggly noses, Nobel prizes would soon be forthcoming (for the scientists, not the floppy-eared Martians). Yet when scientists on the real world see real creatures just like these, they reach for hair spray to put in the creatures’ eyes for Draize tests (of course, the scientists would also leap to exploit the Martian bunnies faster than you can say Huntington Life Sciences).
Similarly, it makes no sense to me that we (read they) keep trying to recreate the “miracle of life” in laboratories as we (read they) daily the destroy the plenitude—we’re learning it’s not an infinitude—of miracles that surround us all.
But now I get it. It’s those rigid sex roles combined with a devaluing of the feminine and a really bad case of womb envy, all topped with a heaping of sour grapes, boiling down to the fact that women have babies and men don’t. If women are identified primarily or exclusively—rigidly—by their roles as creators of life, and if women are perceived as inferior (meaning whatever women do, men do better) then men, so as to not perceive themselves as less powerful than the women for whom they feel contempt, must figure out not only how to destroy the natural life they despise, but how to create some sort of life of their own.
A CULTURE OF OCCUPATION
Imagine if, for the last fifty years, we had sprayed the whole earth with a nerve gas. Would you be upset? Would I be upset? Yes. I think people would be screaming in the streets. Well, we’ve done that. We’ve released endocrine disruptors through out the world that are having fundamental effects on the immune system, on the reproductive system. We have good data that shows that wildlife and humans are being affected. Should we be upset? Yes, I think that we should be fundamen tally upset. I think we should be screaming in the streets.
Louis J. Guillette, Jr. 173
I’M DRIVING THROUGH REDWOODS ON A FOUR-LANE FIGHWAY. A CAR materializes behind me, then speeds by so quickly I barely make out the sentence frosted on the rear window: Drive it like you stole it.
I laugh, then marvel at the boldness of this person seeming to beg police to give her tickets. But the longer I drive this ribbon of asphalt, the more significant the phrase seems. Let’s change it in that sentence from a car to the land: Live on this land like you stole it. That’s what members of this culture do. Probably because they did.
We should admit to ourselves, and this forms