soon to be released SEXES DEFINED AND DIVIDED, A RULING CLASS ACT by Caroline Ambrus

SUMMARY OF THE CHAPTERS

Chapter 1, The nature of society
Western societies are organised in a male dominated hierarchical structure with preordained positions for everybody defined according to racial, social and sexual characteristics. The ruling class controls society through imposing gender stereotypes which results in a homogenised, obedient work force. Any promotion through the hierarchy is strictly controlled by the ruling class.

Chapter 2, Victorian times
Women were their husband's chattels along with his servants and his estates. They were completely submissive to men. They were controlled through their sexuality and were duty bound to bear sons to carry on the family fortunes. Any civil or property rights women had were controlled by men. Women who gave birth to illegitimate children were punished with abandonment or expulsion.

Chapter 3, The fifties, post war
Modern misogyny developed in the fifties which is within living memory of the older generation today. There was severe discrimination against women. Men returning from the war expected to get their jobs back so women were sent back home to breed up the next generation. Women were in the workforce but could only work in a limited number of occupations. Women who had illegitimate children were forced to have them adopted or live the cruel life of an unmarried mother.

Chapter 4, Feminism 1960 to 1980
Conditions of the 1950's gave rise to the second wave feminism. Progress in emancipating women gathered speed. Birth control was improved and women increased their presence in the workforce. They were given positions as advisors to governments on women's issues. There was co-operation between the women's movement and the Government and many reforms were passed. Feminists established specialist services to address women's issues which were supported by government grants.

Chapter five, The eighties, neoliberalism
During the 1970's the postwar boom came to an end. The economy started to falter. Economies were stuck with "stagflation" being high inflation and low growth. Neoliberalism was born which economically crippled men by the offshoring of their manufacturing and administrative jobs. In addition they were psychologically emasculated by women for earning more than them or taking their jobs. Their collective shame and rage began to build where their violence against women gave them the illusion of control.

Chapter 6, Modern misogynism
The early colonists were confronted by an egalitarian Aboriginal society where men and women shared power and control. This was an insult to the English who proceeded to destroy Aboriginal society through dispossession, rape and genocide. This treatment of Aboriginal women continues and now includes white women. The ruling class targets Aboriginals for significant "reforms" which, if successful, is later applied to white society. The way that this misogynism operates today is examined in respect to neoliberalism, gender mainstreaming, and gender stereotyping.

Chapter 7, Depp versus Heard
The justice system is the visible front of the ruling class. Judges have the power to modify or over-ride legislation through decisions based on precedents which can be misjudged, inappropriate or manipulated. Judges are appointed by the Government with a lifetime tenure. The Depp versus the Heard case is an example of the system being weaponised against an inconvenient respondent. It demonstrates that the law, which is supposed to be objective and impartial, can be captures by misogynist interests.

Chapter 8, Genders multiply and divide
Gender fluidity was something that the second wave feminists fought for as a way of breaking down sexist stereotyping. The law was changed recently to allow transgendering to take place without reassignment surgery or hormonal treatment. However, transgender women who have not had treatment are still men and are often misogynists in spite of their laying claim to being women. This is a case study in how the ruling class maintains inequality between men and women despite the development of gender fluidity.

Chapter 9, Domestic violence
Men's surveillance of women is intimate and systematic which polices women question their sex role. Men see this as women shaming them in front of the rest of society. They have been tasked with the role of administering ruling class ideology of power and control over women through their sexuality and through their emotional connection with men. Women's violence is in reaction to men's brutality. This has been taken up by the misogynistic justice system as an excuse to further disadvantage them. Police often target women as the perpetrators of domestic violence which criminalises them and is the pathway to incarceration.

Chapter 10, Rape and reality
There is a contradiction between the socially imposed genders and the way nature intended humans to behave. Theoretically, men are indiscriminate fornicators, whereas women are careful about who fathers the next generation. Women have an inherent fear of rape because the consequences may end in pregnancy. The contradictions between male and female sexuality has given rise to a rape culture where rape is condoned by society and consequently by the justice system. Women who complain about rape are silenced or criminalised by the police and the courts if they persist with complaints against men.

Chapter 11, Consent or not
Men's sex drive is turned on by the entertainment media which broadcasts myths around a woman's consent which focus on her behaviour and appearance. Consequently, the most subtle of the female response is likely to be misinterpreted, overlooked or disbelieved. What the man construes as consent, the woman is likely to define as rape. A woman's automatic response to rape is to freeze which the man and the justice system misinterprets as consent. Some primary and secondary schools are teaching students about informed consent but the universities have failed to implement such programs. Consequently, women on campus are being raped without further investigation or redress by the university.

Chapter 12, Divorce tactics
Violent and manipulative men have weaponised the Family Court against women. They have been enabled to use the legal system to continue their abuse. Online, the men's rights movements have been instructing their readers on how to subvert the court for their own purposes. Ways of weaponising the divorce court are through the subpoena system gives an abusive husband details about his wife, self representation which allows the husband to cross examine the wife and parent alienation which falsely accuses the wife with turning the children against the father.

Chapter 13, Women in prison
The imprisoning of women is the logical culmination of misogynism The judicial system is used to corral women who fight back against the violence inflicted on them by men. When they are incarcerated for breaking the law, they are further demonised and punished on the basis of their gender. After a woman serves her term she is released into the community with little to no support to face poverty, post-traumatic stress and further persecution from the police and the law. Aboriginal women are especially impacted by both racism and sexism.

CHAPTER 14, Silencing women
Silencing can be through litigation such as defamation actions. It can be through police and other authorities inactions. It can be through the internet by abusive strangers, trolls, bots or pressure groups. It can be in your face through street demonstrations, peer group and family pressures to conform. Silence and hate are forms of attack on women when gender lines are crossed. Women are silenced by the ruling class because what is not spoken or heard, does not exist. The absence of laws curtailing hate speech is how the legal system creates and maintains women's vulnerability.

Chapter 15, Counter revolution ­
Whenever women rise up there is a counter revolution where the ruling class reasserts the status quo or finds new ways of subjugating women. Men's success in keeping women subjugated lies in their capacity to bond with other males. A small percentage of extremist, misogynist, powerful men, use their cohesion, their wealth and their networks to rule what society does and thinks. Politicians follow the trend when the message has a veneer of legitimacy and is loud, visible, consistent and unfaltering.

Chapter 16, What have we learned
It take twenty five percent of a population to change the society. This has worked for misogynists. It's time to turn this around to progress the women's movement. The following reforms are integral to women's emancipation
* Legislated equal pay for all women in all jobs
* Decriminalisation of abortion, freely available contraceptives
* Specialist domestic violence courts
* Gender quotas, for women to make up 50% of all public ands private organisations.

 

PREFACE

Preface

My daughter's experience with a violent husband motivated me to write this book. There has been sixty years between her story and mine. Sixty years of men exercising society's permission to damage and exploit women. When women withdraw, men turn on the nearest scapegoat, usually a woman, instead of calling out society for imposing such frightening limitations on small boys. They cry for mum, but she's not there. Hurt people hurt people.

My daughter's husband was the child of incest and his adult life has been marked with a string of relationships that ended badly because of his insanity and violence. My ex-husband was a refugee of World War Two and his pattern of behaviour was the same as my daughter's husband. He had four families, seven children and abandoned all but the last lot. I am now witnessing my daughter going through the same violence, bringing the same threat, grief and loss into her life that I have experienced. This book is my attempt to turn negative memories into something that will help her, and all the other daughters, survive domestic violence. And I hope that by understanding its genesis, men will join women in righting these gender wrongs.

When I started writing this book, my grief about at my daughter's situation spilled out onto the pages I was writing. When she read what I had written, a good friend advised me that anger might be a great motivator, but it doesn't win hearts and minds. Point taken. "Step back" I said to myself. "Take a deep breath and get some perspective". It had taken me a long while to come to terms with my own saga of family and domestic violence. And that was in the 1950's and 1960's. "Get over it" I told myself. But it always percolates through my buried memories when similar circumstances confront me. And there are many stories coming from men and women today who are living through this same nightmare.

When I wrote the first draft of this book I was totally focussed on men as the perpetrators and women as the victims. I was doing something that I would criticise others for doing, which was finding a scapegoat and making judgements within a black and white, biased framework. I was blaming men when in fact I realised most of them are the messengers more than being the perpetrators. Then I remembered the mantra "don't kill the messenger". The more I thought about this, the ruling class emerged as the main cause of the gender problems between the sexes. They are the hoarders of resources, the keepers of law and the big bosses of all life on earth and everybody has to do what they are told. This is not a singular entity but consists of a grab bag of money, power and ideology spread over the human hierarchy. The way this cohort does business is in secret, unobserved, anonymous, and unnamed. Their agendas adjusts to changing times for an orchestrated, predictable outcome, which is keeping men under control so that they can keep women under control.

In the early seventies I was active in the women's movement in Canberra. I learned a lot. But in particular the most valuable lesson I took away from that experience was to ask questions and not to give up until I found the answers. At first I accepted feminist ideology undigested. But in time I started to question even that, I had become acutely aware that feminist ideology was causing activists to proceed without acurately defining what was happening and how to proceed further, to the most effect. This was when I discovered how ideologies work. The ideology that men are superior to women is justified by the female stereotype, which leads to discrimination and then leads to misogynism.

Creating ideologies is a uniquely human process and is used as a way of organising societies. But if this process is not monitored and culled when it is taken over by extremists, then what started out as a useful ideology can become contaminated with vested interests which results in harm. Extremists find are all sorts of ways of getting rid of competing interests. Women need to be aware of this when their hard won reforms are under challenge. They need to be on their guard for the kinds of misogynist workarounds I've identified in this book. The women's revolution will never be over and its dangerous for us to rest, satisfied with our modest gains.

The challenge is to change the structures rather than trying to change the men. They are not about to relinquish any advantage over women which were handed to them by the ruling class as a reward for services rendered. So there's no point in women asking nicely. The answer to women's emancipation lies with themselves. A psychotherapist always advises clients with problems that they need to change themselves rather than trying to change other people. If this is true of individuals in psychotherapy, then it also applies to classes of people. Change the paradigm and the flow on effect will change the reality. To make these changes women have to do the hard yard which will hurt them as much as it will bewilder and confuse men. The examples of the brave Suffragettes reminds us that the ruling class is relentless, hard nosed and vicious.

I am in my eighth decade of life and I have lived for most of it with the spectre of men's violence, the injustice of denial of opportunity and the silencing of my voice. Judith Herman wrote:

"The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims." (1)

In my life I have either observed or experienced terrible wrongs done by the stronger to the weaker. This has ignited within me a passion for social justice and an essential part of that is recording our lives for posterity. There are many ways to archive this and ensure that stories from one women's generation is heard for generations into the future. The internet has proven to be a great asset in publishing women's stories and the need is great as misogynism is crowding this public space. To achieve emancipation women have to be loud, persistent, bold and very, very brave. The suffragettes took their activism to the point of bombing letter boxes and never forget the vote was finally won because Emily Davidson was killed when she tried to stop the King's horse in a protest against denying women the vote. Watch the film "Suffragette".

Whilst I'm talking about men, I am referring to them as a sex, as a class and as a stereotype. In my life I have known good men and hating all men is counterproductive when it is only a small minority of them who are acting out their misogynist desires. However, I am highly critical of all men who don't take a stand with women to call out the bad behaviour resulting from their brothers' extremism. Together men and women have a task which is dismantling misogynism which has infected the institutions which we support and which are meant to help us.

Finally, who am I writing this book for? One hopes that the answer would be everybody. Having given this much thought I decided that I'm not writing history for academics, I am not writing feminist theory for feminists, I am not writing a what-not-to-do manual for men and I don't care whether the ruling class reads this or not. I am writing this for myself so that my voice is heard. And most of all, I'm writing this for women just like myself with a track record of abuse and to make visible all the unseen scars inflicted on them by misogyny. In telling my story, I've included personal accounts of events in my life which is not meant to pass as academic history (his story). I have experienced or have witnessed much of what I have written. And beyond that, I have quoted and cited my sources. In addition, many of the issues discussed in this book are common knowledge, discussed in detail by women ever since I can remember. it's about lived experience and as such has its own validity. So to the doubters out there, take a deep breath and believe.

Hopefully readers will take from this book a sense of perspective over the last century. The problems we face now are not unlike the problems that beset us in the fifties, only today misogyny has upped the ante. What was once bashing of women has become killing of women. So we need to respond as I have outlined in the last chapter of this book which is titled "What have we learned?"

Reference

1. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York: Basic Books, 1992. ISBN 0-465-08765–5