Stop Patriarchy

These two young women living in Bayview/Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, through their involvement with Stop Patriarchy!, decided to take a stand against porn and rape culture:



One of them said, “I’m not gonna lie, I’ve watched porn.  And I’m always like, ‘Why does the woman look like she’s dying’??”  After having engaged with Sunsara Taylor’s talk, “From the Expanding Porn Industry to the Aggressive Religious Patriarchs: Stop the War on Women!”, and with a good sense of the relationship between porn as an industry that enslaves women, and the objectifying and dehumanizing impact it has on broader society, they went out after school to spread it around!  Here’s some of what that looked like:









These youth in Hunter’s Point are surrounded at every turn by porn culture that celebrates pimping and has turned the more-accessible-than-ever internet into an avalanche of sexualized torture, the “dog-eat-dog” poison of individualism, and the aggressive campaigns of the anti-abortion movement.  Many of them, upon engaging with Stop Patriarchy!, are acting out against all that in different ways, and some of them will join us this summer on Stop Patriarchy’s Abortion Rights Freedom Ride.  

In this moment, when the system is doing everything it can to make sure this generation thinks that they should just be grateful for what they do have — and that real, radical change is either unnecessary or impossible — there is a real basis for this message of liberation and open condemnation of patriarchy and this whole capitalist system, to puncture the stifling atmosphere of acceptance, and give young people who have a hunch that the way things are right now is UNACCEPTABLE, a vehicle through which to ACT and CHANGE the world!

To find out more about building the Liberation Generation, a new generation of youth ready and willing to STAND UP to END PATRIARCHY, the enslavement and degradation of women, contact: karlee.tiller@gmail.com

http://revcom.us/a/298/arkansas-law-biggest-assault-on-right-to-abortion-en.html

—- from President Obama’s inaugural address, January 21, 2013

And finally: how the hell does the “little girl born into the bleakest poverty” only apply to those who are American?  The women of the Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh don’t count?  The women who make our iphones don’t count?  The women sold into brothels and sex slavery world-wide – a great many of them “servicing” the men of the U.S. military – don’t count?  The millions of girls who make up a huge portion of the ten million children in the Third World who die unnecessarily each year of preventable disease and malnutrition don’t count?

Jan 26^th, 2013 was a great day in San Francisco for Stop Patriarchy and for the fight to win women’s liberation! We started out the day at a celebration of Roe v. Wade, and went there to let people know about the protest against the “Walk for Life.” We also went to convince those who already knew about it, but weren’t going to come out to protest, that it would make a difference if they were part of directly confronting the anti-woman, anti-abortion movement and send the message to them and to the world that Fetuses are Not Babies, Women are Not Incubators, and ABORTION IS NOT MURDER. That they should not go home, they should not settle for celebration, that they should not be deceived into thinking that abortion rights are safe, and that there is no need to turn the tide on the trajectory that we are on towards abortion being more inaccessible, more restricted than it is already, and/or outright illegal.

Outrageously, when we asked to announce this protest from the stage, the organizers for this event denied us the chance to speak, and many that were in attendance at the celebration didn’t even know about the “Walk for Life.” REALLY?! There are 10’s of thousands of woman-hating christian fascists that want to force women into motherhood by denying them the right to abortion and birth control that are descending in their droves into San Francisco….and you don’t TELL people about it?

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from Alex

Stop Patriarchy! Bay Area started our day on Saturday, January 26, at the Trust Women / Silver Ribbon Campaign’s ”Celebration of Women, Life, and Liberty,” a decisively non-confrontational commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Our purpose was to call on every single person at that celebration to join us in directly CONFRONTING and RESISTING the thousands of anti-abortion activists — not even two miles away — who were mobilizing at that very moment to A) march against the basic right of women to have abortions, and B) rally people together under their patriarchal political agenda to overturn Roe v Wade.  

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Here’s a message sent to StopPatriarchy from Nikki who is coming to Washington DC for the Week of Action.  Read. Take a moment to think about what this means for women’s lives.  ACT. 

“Last year around this time a friend of mine bought the iPhone 4S, he was so excited about it and so was I. I wanted to play with Siri, the voice interpretation and recognition program that comes on that model and all subsequent models of the iPhone. The first thing I did, as a proud feminist, was to start talking to Siri about women’s issues. I asked Siri where the nearest abortion clinic was. Her response: 

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N17 report sent to Stop Patriarchy from Atlanta, Georgia:

The Military Culture of “Be All You Can Be” Patriarchy

(Inside the military and in the lands they invade and occupy)

As a part of the Call “N17: Take to the Streets! Stop the War on Women!” by the movement to “End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women,”  Revolution Books Atlanta brainstormed with some people to come up with a bold expression that could be taken to the annual School of America’s Watch (SOAW) at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia.   People come from all over the country (and some other parts of the world) to participate in the SOAW protest demanding the closing of the School of Americas because of its program of training reactionary armies from Latin America in CIA torture techniques, and consequently being responsible for torturing and murdering tens of thousands of people over the years.

Since the military is such a concentration of the oppression of women, we really wanted to expose the whole culture of patriarchy it embodies. We decided it would be important to have an interactive piece that would draw people in and find out their thoughts on the war on women.  We waited until we got to the protest to put it together in order to bring others into the process on the spot.  Three women enthusiastically took it up right away.  The title of the piece was “The Military Culture or ‘Be All You Can Be’ Patriarchy (Inside the Military and in the Lands they Invade and Occupy).”

We had a very bright piece of yellow felt that was 7’ x 8’. One of the women lied down and her body was outlined on the fabric.  Then we attached pieces of paper in the shape of bullets going into and exiting the outline of the woman’s body, with words on each bullet:  Rape, Pornography, Sexual Harassment, Homophobia, Torture, Degradation of Women, Denial of Abortion, Prostitution, Strip Clubs.  As people came by to check out the display they added more to it, expanding the Homophobia bullet to include Transphobia, Heterosexism and Cissexism; and adding more bullets for Sex Trafficking, Domestic Violence and Glass Ceiling.  Attached at the bottom of the display was a scroll of paper for people to write their comments, and next to that was the mission statement of “End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women.” The whole piece was taped down in the middle of the street leading to the entrance of the military base that had been closed off for the protest.

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Spread the word!!

“Stop the war on women!”