1 In 3 (or How I Learned to Stop Fighting and Love the Hegemony)

By Kulc Lawsher

What is the greatest social problem of our time? It deeply and devastatingly affects 1 in 3 people on this planet of ours so why don’t you know about it? And why aren’t we as a society doing anything (significant or effective) to solve it? Why does this problem exist in the first place? It is in your power to stop it but, if I tell you how, will you do it?

I have spent a very long time seeing things that have caused both me and, more importantly, a great number of other people, intense pain. In this book, I attack the behaviours and the attitudes that lead to this pain. My aim is to wrench you (mercilessly if needed) out of the stupor of acceptance you are in and show you the truth of the world you inhabit. (And I am angry.)

But, if you read this book to the end, you will see that there is hope. And there is redemption. However, your world will never be the same again and, having shed the defence of ignorance, you may find that you are compelled to act.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326232030

Book preview

1 in 3

(or How I Learned to Stop Fighting and Love the Hegemony)

by

Kulc Lawsher

 Copyright © 2015 by Kulc Lawsher

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review, scholarly journal or other publication explicitly referencing this book.

ISBN 978-1-326-23203-0

First Edition

Published by Kulc Lawsher on www.lulu.com

www.kulclawsher.com

To my belle

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia. – Susan Sontag[1]

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything. – Albert Einstein

For the sake of any women you care about (assuming there are some) read this book. To – the – END.

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[1] From her book Regarding the Pain of Others

People that contributed to my thoughts and writing

My family. My friends and colleagues. All the academics, researchers, activists and so on working to improve the central concerns raised in this book.

I come in peace

It may not always look this way. But please understand, I have spent a very long time seeing things that have caused both me and, more importantly, a great number of other people, intense pain. At times, you may feel like I am lashing out at you directly in my criticism of certain behaviours and attitudes. It is not personal. It is the behaviours and the attitudes that I am attacking and, as I will be illustrating over the course of these pages, I am very well aware that the majority of people who behave or think in these ways are as much victims (though without experiencing the same amount of pain) as those that are hurt by the attitudes and behaviours. That being said, my aim is to wrench you (mercilessly if needed) out of the stupor of acceptance you are in and show you the truth of the world you inhabit. (And I am angry.)

Also, please note that to protect the identity of the individuals and organisations referred to in this book, where their actions are not within the public domain, I have changed some contextual details. These details, however, do not have any bearing on the truth value of the events themselves. Everything I write about in this book is real as I observed myself or as was reported by observers. If these observers were not truthful in their accounts, their skewed reports will be reflected here but that, in itself, has value (as we will see).

Once again, read this book to the end. There is hope. There is redemption.

Table of Contents

 Part 1

Thank God I was born a man

[Fornication,] Sodomy, Fellatio, Cunnilingus, Pederasty

Tinkerbell

Big eyes

And so we come to the unspeakable

Part 2

Winners go home and fuck the prom queen

What’s in a virgin?

Get fucked

The world’s greatest misogynist

Part 3

Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups

Lovelace

Women don’t like sex

Why Sheryl Sandberg is wrong

Part 4

The evolutionary psychology of human sexuality

CSF and SannieSaag

We’re off to see the wizard

Jackrolling is fun

Part 5

The beat generation

Terry Richardson

If there’s grass on the pitch, let’s play

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Epilogue

Gone Girl

Part 1

Thank God I was born a man

Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark are the five most gender equitable countries in the world[2]. Surprised? Of course not. In Scandinavia women have between 80 and 85 percent of the privileges and opportunities that men do. Now catch yourself. You just read a sentence that tells you that, in the most gender equitable countries in the world, women have only 80 to 85 percent of the privileges and opportunities that men do. That means that everywhere else it’s worse. Did it even make you blink? Probably not. You probably thought that that’s not too bad. (Think about that.)

The next best countries are Nicaragua, Rwanda, Ireland, the Philippines and Belgium where women have about 78 percent of the privileges of men. Are you still paying attention or have your eyes glassed over already at the mention of women’s issues? If they haven’t, you will have noticed that Nicaragua is the sixth most gender equitable country in the world. That’s right. Nicaragua. In fact, if you look at the top 30 countries, ranked by gender equality, you find such interesting anomalies, besides the already mentioned Nicaragua, Rwanda and the Philippines, as Latvia, Burundi, South Africa (despite the terrible headlines and the actual terrible events), Ecuador, Bulgaria, Moldova, Mozambique and Cuba. That’s right, 1 in 3 of the most gender equitable countries in the world are not part of the economic elite, the advanced economies, the OECD[3].

Now why would that be? Could it be because there are really only 20 advanced economies in the world? Well no. Austria and Italy rank 36th and 69th respectively, while Japan comes in at number 104 and South Korea at 117. The almighty USA, great defender of democracy, women’s lib, the sexual revolution and so on, while getting into the top 30 makes its appearance only at number 20, behind such stalwarts as Rwanda, Burundi and South Africa and just ahead of Ecuador, Bulgaria, Moldova and Mozambique. Russia, the Western world will be glad to know, clocks in at a lowly 75th, the new red enemy China at 87th, (Greece at 91st!), the Czech Republic at 96th, Malaysia at 107th, and Turkey at 125th. Not so surprisingly (and probably very satisfyingly for many Westerners – for all the wrong reasons) Saudi Arabia comes in at 130th with the notorious sub-continent seeming to justify its reputation when it comes to women’s rights: Nepal, India and Pakistan achieve the dubious rankings of 112th, 114th and 141st respectively out of the 142 countries included in the ranking. In Yemen, the country in last place, women have only 51% of the privileges of men.

Now, before you throw this book at the TV, scoffing absolute bollocks, let me back up the rankings a little[4]. For those of you who are aware, or at least willing to indulge the possibility, that our world is one of massive, entrenched gender inequality which is not directly related to the socioeconomic development of a given country, please bear with me for a paragraph or two. I’ll focus on some of the unexpected results – the ones that are most likely to lead to scoffing jerks of the arm and mouth.

(To the less numerically inclined, the message of the next three paragraphs is this: yes, it is true, by most applicable measures countries like Nicaragua and Rwanda outperform countries like the USA and Australia when it comes to gender equality. Please feel free to skip ahead to the discussion beginning after the next three paragraphs.)

So let’s begin with three countires from the Anglophone advanced world: the USA, the UK and Australia. They all lie in a relatively tight group from 20th to 26th, have similar cultures and so can probably be, at least at this macro, national level, viewed as a fairly hegemonic group. In this case the stats confirm the similarities. Women bear ~70% of the unpaid care work burden (i.e. taking care of the children, cleaning the house, cooking etc. etc. – as, of course, women should. Doh) while men have this additional time available to devote to their careers (or drinking, watching sports etc.) Don’t get me wrong, watching sport is important. It’s how I spend most of my free time. The problem comes when I am sitting on the couch watching sport and my wife[5] is slaving away at cooking dinner, cleaning the house, taking care of the baby etc. Or maybe I’m actually crunching for an important meeting in the morning, not just being a lazy bastard. But she is still cooking dinner, cleaning the house, taking care of the baby etc. So when is she supposed to crunch for her all important meeting in the morning? Anyway…

As expected, access to basic services for women is near perfect in all these countries: literacy rates are 100%, all women complete secondary school, have bank accounts[8] and a life expectancy around four years higher than that of men. Also as expected, legislation to ensure equal treatment of men and women[9] is as good as it gets. Parental leave policies, excepting the USA, are generous. Seven women are employed for every eight men (not ideal but it could be worse) but women earn around 35% less than men for the same work (why??), men are far more likely to be employed in high income occupations like management and the professions and only about 20% of parliamentary representatives are female. (Let’s not even ask how many women have led these countries since the beginning of time.)

Now let us consider a set of the unusual suspects from the top 30. Nicaragua, Rwanda, the Philippines, Latvia, Burundi and South Africa all lie above the three Anglophone countries, in the top 20 on the list of gender equality. Female share of unpaid care work is only 10% higher than in the Anglophone countries discussed above (you wouldn’t have believed that before reading this, right? Would you?). While literacy rates are as low as Rwanda’s 62%, they remain almost exactly the same for men and women – yes, gender equality means that conditions are the same for men and women; not that women’s lives are perfect, just that men’s lives are no better than theirs. Contrary to your (probable) expectations, women also receive just about as much higher education as men. The overall education level is significantly less than that achieved in the Anglophone group but the point is that men and women have equal opportunities. Women live, on average, six years longer than men in our set of South American, African, East Asian and Central European countries (two more than in the Anglophone countries) showing better access to healthcare, nutrition and other life extending necessities and, while some countries have very low bank account ownership (only 16% for men in Nicaragua) the level of ownership is the same across gender, with 34% of even Filipino women owning bank accounts as compared to only 28% of Filipino men. Women earn only 30% less than men for similar work (as opposed to 35% less in the Anglophone set), and somewhere between six and seven women are employed for every eight men. Men and women are equally likely to be employed in high income occupations in these six developing countries as in the three Anglophone countries and, probably most tellingly, women make up about 35% of parliamentary representatives in this set of less developed countries. This, despite these countries having only about 70% of the gender-related legislative framework in place that the Anglophone group does. Interesting to note also, is that this is a set of countries taken from four vastly different regions of the world: East Asia, Central Europe, Africa and South America. What could possibly lead to this similarity in these countries’ overall treatment of women?

So what the hell is going on here? Have I fudged the numbers? Is it a case of lies, damned lies and statistics? Or maybe I have proven that most fundamental fear of the rationalist – somehow 1 + 1 does not equal 2[10]. Or maybe, just maybe, the numbers are right, there are no errors in the logic and we really do live in a world where women are systematically oppressed by men. Wow – strong statement right. Where’s the feminazi (I don’t like using this term for fairly obvious reasons to do with Adolf Hitler but that, in itself, makes a strong point here) police? Someone throw this sordid femimentalist (no, not a very clever pseudo-psychic woman that solves murder mysteries on TV – a radical, fundamentalist feminist) in an asylum before she (well, in fact, I am a man) hurts herself. (Because, of course, women, or men like me, have so little power in this world she could never actually do any real damage to anyone else.)

Ah, I apologise. I’ve jumped ahead a little here. One step at a time. To allow us to continue our investigation, let us assume that the numbers I have presented above are correct, the facts are sound, the mathematical methodologies acceptable and so on, and return to my question: what the hell is going on here?

How can countries like Rwanda, Latvia, Nicaragua etc. compete with Sweden, Norway, Belgium, never mind outperform the USA, the UK and Australia when it comes to gender equality? Or, to put it another way, if it is not general socioeconomic development that drives improvements in gender equality then what does? Or, to put it another way, if gender equality is not directly proportional to socioeconomic development then what is it proportional to? Or, to put it another way, if gender discrimination is not something that only happens out there among the uneducated savages in the worst parts of the world what the hell is going on?

If general socioeconomic improvement does not achieve gender equality, then what can? I mean, when people talk about improving gender equality they are always talking about the same things: increase girls’ access to education and healthcare, provide women with access to finance, pass more laws to protect/ promote women, implement female mentorship programmes in the workplace, provide free day care… Apart from the last two, it is hard to argue that all of these are not in place in the advanced economies in the world and, even in the case of the last two, they will have been implemented most extensively in these economies. Similarly, and confirmed by the data above, countries like Rwanda, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Latvia and South Africa have certainly not achieved higher standards in these areas than the advanced economies have. So why the gap, even in the most gender equitable countries in the world? And why are the most socioeconomically advanced countries not always the most gender equitable?

One answer, at least to the first question, may be that human civilization simply has not progressed far enough yet. The data do show a correlation, albeit weaker than most would expect, between improved access to education, healthcare and financial services (for everyone, not just women) and improved gender equality, suggesting that, if we could extend social advancement to infinity, men and women should become equal at that point. (If you are not hysterical with bewilderment after reading this sentence you should be asking yourself why you aren’t.)

But even if you are willing to accept this extremely chauvinist view of the world – that somehow it is a sign of an advanced civilisation for men and women to be equal (yes, that is why you should have been hysterical with bewilderment just now) – how do you account for more advanced civilisations being less gender equitable than other, less advanced civilisations? No, seriously, how?

And let me just say once again, for the record, I have quite deliberately, and because WEF does, left out one very important (for me, the most important) indicator of gender equality. Don’t worry. We’ll get to it soon enough.

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[2] According to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2014 Global Gender Gap report

[3] The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development which comprises all the advanced economies of the world

[4] You can check out the WEF’s report here: http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2014/

[5] Hypothetical – I am not married yet

[6] The OECD publishes a pretty comprehensive set of unpaid care work data in its Social Institutions and Gender Inequality index (SIGI)

[7] That does not mean it doesn’t happen. It means that the proportion is too low to affect national-level stats. In fact, 135 out of the 150 countries I looked at (stats available from the CIA world factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2018.html) have a birth sex ratio of between 1.03 and 1.07 male births per female birth (1.05 is the natural birth rate – just like women live slightly longer than men, slightly more boys are conceived than girls). With the remaining 15 countries more or less evenly split between an unnaturally high male birth ratio and an unnaturally low male birth ratio. That is, the distribution of birth sex ratio across the countries of the world is almost perfectly normal.

[8] This one is also not included in the WEF index but, in this case, that is a good call. Despite the fact that access to financial services is one of the most often cited interventions for empowering women, the data show clearly that e.g. bank account ownership (as reported by the World Bank) is the same for men and women around the world.

[9] Includes age of marriage, parental authority, inheritance, divorce, domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, abortion, access to land, access to non-land assets, access to financial services, access to public space, parliamentary quotas, and workplace legislation (as reported in the OECD’s SIGI). Again, not included by WEF due to their choice to focus on outputs rather than inputs. To me, this is a good approach but I thought you would be interested to know about the effect of legislation. It is another one of those things that everyone is always clamouring about when it comes to gender equality.

[10] For more on why this is not as stupid an assertion as you may think, refer to some of the philosophical paradoxes no one seems to have been able to resolve. One of the most famous is that of Achilles and the tortoise in a footrace. Given his superior speed, 10 times that of the tortoise to be precise, Achilles allows the tortoise a 100 yard head start. Therefore, when Achilles reaches the 100 yard mark, the tortoise will have covered a 10th of that distance and reached the 110 yard mark. When Achilles has covered the remaining 10 yards to the 110 yard mark, the tortoise has reached the 111 yard mark. When Achilles reaches the 111 yard mark, the tortoise will have reached the 111.1 yard mark and so on… In this way, despite running 10 times faster than the tortoise, Achilles will never be able to catch it. So, does 1 + 1 really equal 2?

[Fornication,] Sodomy, Fellatio, Cunnilingus, Pederasty

Do you like Hair? Never heard of it? Ok, maybe you were born a little late. Even if you weren’t maybe a little refresher won’t do much harm. It’s originally a Broadway musical by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, opening in 1968 and running for 1 750[11] performances. Among many other successful spin-offs were a London production that ran for 1 997 shows and an original soundtrack recording that sold over 3 million copies. In 1979 a film adaptation was released which was nominated for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy at the 37th Golden Globes.

Growing up in a household dominated by 1960s and 1970s pop-culture – The Beatles, Queen, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Phantom of the Opera, Hair and a whole lot of others I can’t think of right now – for me, there really was no music other than this. When school friends played Nirvana (Smells like Teen Spirit), Bon Jovi (Bed of Roses) or Shaggy (Mr. Boombastic) I simply didn’t have a clue. So I knew Hair quite well before I went to high school, though I had always liked Jesus Christ Superstar and Phantom much more.

This is as good a time as any to introduce my high school I guess – it will feature quite prominently as we go along. It’s a pleasant, average-sized, Christian, all-boys private school in Kwazulu-Natal, with more than a handful of its own full-size cricket fields. These types of schools are relatively common in the main centres of South Africa, catering for the boys of the wealthy (dare I say white but becoming more black) elite, in the good old English tradition. I certainly enjoyed my time there tremendously, especially the charm and camaraderie, and a closeness between the boys that I would like to believe was more genuine at my school than elsewhere. (Though I’m sure that is me just being whimsical.)

Being an Christian school, biblical studies is a required subject for the first two years, that is, grade 7 and 8 (or form 1 and 2), and was taught by the resident chaplain, Father Anal (as most of the boys called him; derived from his real name in a way I won’t explain here and used in the homophobic sense not the anal retentive one). I don’t recall exactly when it was but I do know that I had settled into the school, felt familiar with my classmates and comfortable in my surroundings, so it must have been at least six months into my time at the school, when Father Anal announced that he wanted to show us a movie over the next few classes. For anyone who still remembers high school as it was before smartphones and tablets, the