rent is the rape of the poor...

angela davis said, “radical simply means grasping things at the root,” and with that in mind i take a radical approach to the eradication of violence। violence is the simultaneous dehumanization of the perpetrator and the victim in order to exert power-over as a means of gain. please excuse the dichotomous, hierarchical language because we know - despite the anti-violence movement having ignored this fact - that most perpetrators are victims and many victims perpetrate violence. the perpetration of violence requires dehumanization - the creation of us v. them - in order to exert power and control. They do this. Us, we do this. this creates nameless, faceless groups of people and identities, over which any exertion of power, control and exploitation can be enacted.

scarcity is the first lesson of violence – that there is not enough। either there is not enough of any given resource or there is not enough space for us to both be real, living, and valuable people at the same time. there is only space for me to be me, to be right, to count, and you have to be “them,” the other, wrong. this is the link to capitalism - and not just capitalism as an economic structure; it is so much more insidious than just economics. i am talking about capitalism as a system and bundle of messages about scarcity and abundance, dichotomy and hierarchy that we internalize and act out in our lives and relationships. intimate partner violence and sexual violence is a direct function of the imperial-capitalist society in which we live, the people exploited by our economics are the same people experiencing most of the rape and abuse in our culture. sometimes this is literal, native american women are eight times more likely to be raped then a white women and 84% of their rapists are white; in violence against queer people due to their sexual or gender orientation or expression, sexual assault is largely a factor. sometimes it is figurative, the same native americans that white people are now physically raping have had their land forcibly removed from them and their people through colonization. in the same way, rent is the rape of the poor, not providing access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare is the collective re-raping of women, and false and misleading sexual education is the rape of young people. because isn’t that what rape is anyway, a non-consensual act meant to remove autonomy and individual power? what constitutes a healthy sexual relationship? whenever I begin a workshop with that question nobody says an orgasm. nobody ever says orgasm or good sex! in the same way we can see that sexual violence is not about sex. It is about power, control, fear and scarcity.

sexual violence is a capitalist’s tool to instill fear and punish those outside of their proper roles. to understand sexual violence at the root means to understand that patriarchy is the systematic over-valuing of men over women. it is the smallest unit of government we have in our society and is mirrored in institutionalized forms. if hetero-normative, compulsorily-monogamist, patriarchal family structures are the smallest units of government-enforced capitalism, then feminism is the smallest unit of anarchist resistance. so this, combined with imperial-capitalism, forms a ruler-take-all mentality in which the privileged can do whatever in order to profit off the bodies of others. this is acted out on an interpersonal level through gender roles-a direct result of sexism and patriarchy. sexism’s bottom line though has to do with whom you have sex. this is what it comes down to, this is why masculinity, as enacted through patriarchy, is a rapist’s mentality stemming from a rape culture. finally, policing and enforcing the whole system is homophobia and transphobia.

and i do mean, “policing.” while rape is a tool of the patriarch in the private war against individual women, it is also a normalized tool of public wars. the sexualization of violence is a normal tactic in torturing our prisoners of war. the commonality of the ptsd of soldiers returning from combat and the ptsd experienced by survivors of rape and abuse. one is the result of imperial-capitalism, and patriarchal tactics of non-consensual power and control (a public war) on his life. the other is the personal result of imperial-capitalism and patriarchy in the private wars against women, trans folk, and queers.