Interview of Saba Malik ― Resistance Radio

May 25th, 2014

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Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Saba Malik. Saba Malik is is a board member of Fertile Ground Environmental Institute, a non-profit dedicated to political and environmental education. She is a mother of two and has been a feminist and anti-racist activist for most of her adult life.

Thank you so much for being on, Saba.

SM: Thank you very much for having me.

DJ: Today I was thinking that – it seems that there’s really four questions around which we’ll center the whole discussion. So I thought I would ask all four questions and after that we can take them piecemeal or however you want. The first question is “What is misogyny?” The second question is “What is ecocide?” The third question is “What is the relationship between those two?” And the fourth question is “What does all this have to do with the creation of gender, whatever that means?”

So can we start with “What is misogyny, what is ecocide, and what is the relationship between them?”

SM: Okay. Well, they’re great questions, and they’re big questions. So let’s start with misogyny. Misogyny, the word actually comes from the Greek miseó: , which means to hate (μισέω), and gyne, which means “woman,” and we’re talking about a cultural attitude of hatred for females because they are female. And this is an essential part of sexist prejudice and the ideology of rape culture. And so it’s an important basis for the oppression of females in male-dominated societies such as ours. And I would say today that most cultures worldwide are patriarchal or male-dominated. And misogyny is used to justify male supremacy.

So male supremacist cultures systematically extract resources, like labor, sexual gratification and reproduction from female people. And rape cultures are constructed around the breaking of women’s boundaries, physically and psychologically, through violation and extraction.

And if I quote some basic figures, if we talk about the fact that women are roughly half of the population and yet we are 70% of the world’s poor, we produce half the world’s food, yet we own only 1% of the world’s property. Women and girls represent 55% of the estimated 20.9 million victims of forced labor worldwide, and 98% of the estimated 4.5 million forced into sexual exploitation.

Upwards of one in four women in the U.S. currently is raped in her lifetime, and the rest of us live with the terror of it. So even these facts and figures are horrific, they don’t really fully describe the experience of being female in a male supremacist culture. Misogyny is manifested in so many different ways, from jokes, to pornography, to violence, to the contempt and disgust that women are routinely taught to feel towards our own bodies. Male supremacy means that male individuals are more likely to be able to attain positions of power and they’re more likely to have their basic needs met, and it means that the social systems of cultures like ours are set up to prevent women from collectively resisting the conditions they’re forced to endure, from the pay gap to abortion criminalization to sexual and domestic slavery, to foot binding and female genital mutilation. The institutions of male supremacy form the bars of the cage that restrains women from upsetting this hierarchy, and that is what I would say misogyny constitutes.

DJ: I know that this is in some ways kind of a trivial example, but I was thinking about this a couple of days ago, because I had to go from San Francisco for a meeting, and then I was stuck overnight because my flight got cancelled. And then the second night I’m staying there, I asked the guy at the hotel where I can get some food. And he said you gotta walk a mile south of the hotel and then walk down this street and there’ll be a restaurant. And it reminded me of a time on tour when I got into a town at like one in the morning, all my flights were late. I get into this town at one in the morning, I go to the hotel, and then they tell me that the nearest place that’s open for food at that time is a Denny’s that’s like a mile and a half down this long dark highway. And I start walking, and it’s about one thirty in the morning by now, and there’s a white van sitting in the middle of a parking lot. And I walk by, and I start thinking all these bad thoughts. And whenever I talk about this at a talk, I stop right there and say “Okay, at this point I’m a little bit nervous, but I kept walking. What would you women have done in this situation?”

And so many women in the audience say “Are you kidding? At 1:30 in the morning, walking down a deserted highway? We would never have left the room, much less walk through a parking lot with a van sitting there.” And I always think about that, in terms of it’s a real tangible example, and a really simple example of male privilege and how for me, going walking a mile and a half on a dark highway at one o’clock in the morning is slightly creepy or slightly scary, vs. for a woman it could actually be a matter of life and death.

SM: Exactly. And I’m sure that we’re both aware of, this is something that – is it Catharine MacKinnon? Or maybe it’s Robin Morgan – who calls that the democracy of fear for women. You can be a woman pretty much anywhere in the world at this point, walking down a dark street, and if you hear footsteps behind you, you have good reason to be afraid. That’s a really great example.

DJ: Yeah, that was Robin Morgan. So there’s misogyny, and you’ve done a great job of that. So do you want to move to ecocide or do you want to talk more about misogyny first?

SM: Let’s talk about ecocide. So ecocide is what it sounds like. It’s the killing of the ecological community, and it has a similar ideology, which is the ideology of progress, of human ownership of and domination over the earth. And it’s the myth of infinite growth on a finite planet. And the ideology of ecocide is regarded by industrialized people today as dogma. And it’s this ideology that is used by extractive cultures to justify the wholesale destruction of ecological communities, and, particularly, of the non-industrialized indigenous human cultures that depend on those communities. And that ideology of ecocide, that’s what fuels our food, and our wars. It requires rape culture, not only breaking the boundaries of women and girls. I’m now talking about the breaking of boundaries of nonhumans, and of people of color, of the land, the ocean, the air.

There are many ways in which ecocide and misogyny have connections. And I think that if we look from the very beginning of this culture, and when I say this culture I’m talking about civilized culture, what we call civilization today, which on this continent, when the first settlers arrived, from the first moment of colonization all the way up until today, indigenous women experienced significantly higher rates of male violence than the general population. And that’s still true today.

And the other thing that’s really important about this is the violation of ecocide and of misogyny. It’s really important. It’s not violation for its own sake, although that may be a factor. The question is always rooted in the service of resource extraction. So it’s making someone rich somewhere. Those members of a society have an ideology of hatred towards women. They’re less likely to resist or even notice as our bodies are systematically mined for labor or sexual or reproductive resources. And it’s the same with the land that we live on. If we are benefiting from the mass destruction of entire living communities because we have more conveniences in our life, like phones and televisions and big TV screens to placate us, then we’re not going to notice as the earth around us is systematically destroyed.

DJ: I keep thinking about one of my favorite lines from my book The Culture of Make Believe, which is “any hatred felt long enough no longer feels like hatred. It feels like religion, or economics, or science. It feels like the way things are.”

And I’m reading, right now, a mystery by Rex Stout, and it’s one of the Nero Wolfe books. And he’s a really good writer and there are some parts of the book I like, but I’m going to see if I can find this really quickly. It’s just a throwaway line that shows the hatred of women, which is, oh, I can’t find it. But basically it was, the main character, Archie Goodwin, is having this conversation with a woman over lunch, and she is increasingly annoying him, and he ends up – there’s a line where he thinks “I don’t know whether I want to slap her and then kiss her, or kiss her and then slap her.” And that’s pretty much it right there, isn’t it?

SM: That’s dead on. I was going to actually refer to your book, The Culture of Make Believe, because when I first read it that was a powerful part, that any hatred that is practiced long enough stops feeling like hatred. It just feels like the way things are. And I believed that you were talking about racism at the time specifically, but that’s so true for any kind of oppression or hatred that we experience in today’s culture.

DJ: I was just reading an article yesterday about these sea creatures, a type of jellyfish. First off the article called them “aliens,” which is really extraordinary. And then in addition – the thing that’s really extraordinary about these is the capacity of this type of jellyfish to regenerate, including regenerating neurons, regenerating brain matter. The subtext of all this is that what they’re doing is capturing these jellyfish and cutting them into bits. And then some types will regenerate and some won’t. And whenever I see something like that, I always think about how that article would be presented if they were space aliens who were catching humans and then cutting off their hands, cutting out parts of their brain matter to see if they would regenerate. And it always strikes me as – I mean, the article didn’t talk about how appalling it is that someone would capture these creatures who were minding their own business and then cut them up to see if they can regenerate.

SM: Nowadays, we can talk about ecocide because it’s in the service of humans, or humanity, and then that makes it okay. Because nonhumans are of course less equal than we are, apparently. And it’s that same mindset that says women are the Other, they’re less than men.

DJ: So tell me some more about the resource extraction that is at the base, or not at the base, but is so often involved – the relationship between hatred and resource extraction, because I don’t think that’s something that a lot of people will understand, or will be familiar with.

SM: It’s basically that this dominant culture is based on the extraction of resources, which economically benefits the powerful, and that’s true whether we’re speaking about economic gains, for example, for oil titans, so the extraction of oil from the earth. It’s true if we’re talking about the economic gains for sweatshop owners, or, I like to call them “slave traders.” Or, again, we can talk about the men who traffic in the bodies of women and girls and make a large amount of money through prostitution and pornography. All oppression has its base in resource extraction of some kind. Slavery was an excellent form of resource extraction. White people were able to, white men mainly, were able to extract the labor from black people who were kidnapped from Africa. They didn’t have to pay them.

And I want to say that it’s really important to remember that the way we live now is simply the predominant culture of our time. But it’s not the predominant culture of human history, as popular opinion often has us believe. More than 90% of our existence on this planet was spent in what I would call non-civilized cultures and I know you would agree with me. Homo sapiens reached, I think, anatomical modernity around 200 thousand years ago. But our most immediate ancestors, particularly Homo erectus, is currently set as arriving around 1.9 million years ago. So when we take that, when we think about the beginnings, the traceable beginnings of today’s culture, industrial civilization, that began with the emergence of agriculture and the starting point of that is only ten thousand years old. So geographically we’re talking about a blip in time.

Misogyny is like civilization. It’s anything but eternal and it does have traceable beginnings. That’s another connection. In fact, the traceable beginnings of both civilization and patriarchy as we know it today, they’re intimately intertwined. These two systems developed together and they’re dependent on one another. Civilized agricultural societies are patriarchal. But prior to those extractive social arrangements, a significant number of non-industrialized cultures were not rape cultures. Some of them even organized their spiritualities and worldviews to be – shock! – women-centered. God has not always been male.

For me this was made really clear in the 80’s when I first became politicized through feminism and I’d read a wonderful book by a historian and feminist by the name of Gerda Lerner. She wrote a book called The Creation of Patriarchy. And she says that patriarchy as we know it today is a historic creation, and it took 2500 years to form, as we know it today in its entirety, so it’s now very well established today. And it began – this is a direct quote from the book – she says “The sexuality of women, consisting of their sexual and their reproductive capacities and services, was commodified with the advent of agriculture.” And the reason is, one of the reasons is the development of agriculture in the Neolithic period that started the intertribal exchange of women, one; as a means of avoiding incessant warfare, that was one reason, it was cementing marriage alliances. But also, and much more importantly, because societies with more women could produce more children. And of course, in agricultural societies, in contrast to the economic needs of say hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies need the labor of children, and need the labor of humans to increase production and to accumulate surpluses. So agriculture developed concurrently with the early commodification of female bodies, labor, and reproductive extraction.

DJ: That’s also interesting because agricultural societies, based as they are by definition on overshoot, and thus, by definition, on conquest, are based necessarily on infinite growth, as opposed to a non-agricultural society. So that would be another reason that an agricultural society would want to be having women as basically brood chambers, because they want to produce as many eventual warriors or slaves as possible.

SM: Absolutely.

DJ: Which would be inconsistent with a non-infinite growth culture.

SM: Of course. Yeah. It wouldn’t make sense. Before, when the earth was all common land, it’s not that human cultures didn’t assert territoriality. They did. Tribes were territorial, but misuse of any land meant that you’ve perished, or that you had to move on. It became apparent really quickly. We’ve been able to avoid that so far because we’ve had this kind of gift of free energy known as fossil fuel. I think one of the most significant traceable convergences between the development of patriarchy and the development of civilization is the advent of agriculture. Because it was the main means of sustaining the human population. And really, agriculture should be the focal point of any discussion of sustainability in the modern movement. So often nowadays it’s not. There are a few voices out there, in the wilderness, talking about it, but for the main part people don’t see it as the destructive feedback loop that it is.

DJ: Also, when you mentioned that patriarchy and agriculture really sort of moved hand in hand, developed hand in hand, the other thing that developed simultaneously with that was economic-based slavery. The first slaves that I know about were probably through either agriculture, because this was back-breaking work, and also mining, because nobody in their right mind wants to go underground and spend a life digging at rocks underneath the ground. So those are really the two geneses of that form of chattel slavery.

SM: I agree.

And time and again, when you look at anthropological evidence – in her book, Gerda Lerner shows that the emergence of agriculture led to widespread shifts in the ways of living, and relationship, to land and people. And the agricultural people were marked by increased warfare, increased poverty, increased destitution, an increase in sex inequality and the concentration of resources towards the few at the expense of the many. Does that sound familiar? That’s the way we are right now, in an extreme way.

In contrast, subsistence cultures or hunter-gatherer cultures or land-based cultures, if you like, are generally marked – not always, but generally were marked by low levels of sexual inequality, vastly lower levels of pollution and resource depletion, and much less warfare. Cultures that are willing to break the boundaries of the land in order to control and to extract are also willing to break the boundaries of women and girls in order to control and to extract. So, as we see the advent of agriculture take place, males, as a group, start to have rights over females, which females as a group did not have over males. The women themselves then become a resource. They become acquired by men much as the land was required by men. Women were exchanged, or they were bought in marriages for the benefit of their families. And then later they were conquered or bought in slavery, where their sexual services were also part of their labor and where their children were the property of their owners or their masters. This still happens in so-called developing countries. I can speak about India and Pakistan because it’s where I hail from, and this is very much the norm, especially for the poor.

And, you know, in every known society, it was women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved. When a tribe would conquer another tribe, and with the advent of agriculture the men would be killed and the women would be kept because they could produce children. And it was only after men learned to enslave the women of groups who could be defined as strangers that they then learned how to enslave men of those groups, and later, subordinates from within their own society.

So this enslavement of women, which combined both racism and sexism, this was a precursor to the formation of classes, and class oppression. Class differences were, at their very beginnings, expressed and constituted in terms of patriarchal relations.

DJ: I don’t understand what you just said. That last sentence.

SM: Class differences? When we talk about people as a class. Class differences were, at their very beginnings, expressed and constituted in terms of patriarchal relations.

DJ: Let’s back up, and tell people what a class difference is. Give some examples, and then show what you mean by it having started with patriarchy. What are some classes? Name some.

SM: Okay. So, as a radical, when we talk about classes of people we are talking about, for example, women as a class. And we are talking about people of color as a class. We are talking about poor people as a class, as opposed to rich people. And then women as a class as opposed to men as a class. What benefits do men have, for example, over women in our society? What benefits, what privileges do rich people have over poor people? What privileges do white people as a class have over people of color? That’s what I mean by “class.”

Gerda Lerner was the first writer who made me realize that class differences were, their beginnings started in what she called “genderic terms.” And the reason that she said that was because men learned to – its ultimate origins, “difference” as a distinguishing mark between the conquered and the conquerors, was based on the first clearly observable difference, and that was the difference between the sexes. Okay? And once men had learned how to assert and exercise power over people slightly different from themselves, in the exchange of women, they then acquired the knowledge necessary to elevate that “difference” of any kind into a criterion for dominance and subjugation. So then you have racism come along, subjugation of the Other. And it’s the same ideology that allows civilized humans to classify nonhumans, people of color and the earth itself as alien Others who are ripe for domination and exploitation.

Is that clearer?

DJ: Let’s try to be really clear. So basically what you’re saying is – let me know if this is right. That this model takes a difference, a real difference – whether we’re talking about women having perceptible different body types, or people who are from Africa being generally darker skinned than those who were later enslaving them, who were lighter-skinned – am I right so far? A perceptible physical difference, right?

SM: Yes.

DJ: Okay, and it would be the same with – there is a perceptible difference between me and a prairie dog, or between me and a coho salmon, or between me and a willow tree, right? So we have a perceptible difference, and then… I’m thinking about what so many indigenous people have said to me about the primary difference between indigenous and western ways of being is that for many indigenous people the world consists not of resources to be exploited, but of other beings to enter into relationship with. And I’m thinking about something that, Richard Drinnon, I believe it was, said to me years and years ago when I was saying, y’know, indigenous people, they had enemies too. The Dakota and the Anishinaabe have a long history of not liking each other. So what’s the difference? And Richard Drinnon was saying that it’s not that you define another as inferior. They’re still – they’re others. Definitely, you, as a woman, are different from me in terms of physical – we can tell these discernible differences. But the problem is not noticing the differences, if I am correct. The problem isn’t noticing the differences. Of course I’m different from a coho salmon. But the problem is using that difference as an excuse to justify my feeling of superiority. Is that it?

SM: That’s absolutely correct.

DJ: Oh, I want to finish the thing with Richard Drinnon. What Richard Drinnon said is that in his perspective, a lot of indigenous people would have, a lot of indigenous names for who they are, their names simply mean “the people.” And he said that the others, just because they’re not “the people” doesn’t mean they’re inferior. What it means is, essentially they are the Other who completes me. I remember reading something about some Anishinaabe person saying that even though there was – even though they did not like the Dakota, they called the Dakota their “honored enemy.” And you could never conceive of committing genocide against them, because they are necessary for the universe to function too.

Is all this even vaguely where you’re going, too?

SM: That’s absolutely along the same lines of what I’m thinking. You’re explaining it, I think, much more clearly, a little bit more more simply, for people.

DJ: I’m not sure about that. I’m just trying to understand it. But thank you. So basically – I interrupted a long time ago. So basically you have this difference that you now use as a rationale for your self-perceived superiority, and then what happened? You’re saying that the gender difference is a model for what came later with others, right? Is that what you’re saying?

SM: Yeah. So first of all, the ultimate origin of difference, difference to be exploited as a distinguishing mark came as that clearly observable difference between women and men. And then once men – this is what Gerda Lerner says in her book. She says it’s pretty much, if you look at nearly every society that became an agricultural society or a civilized society, the same pattern followed. That once men had learned how to assert and exercise power over people slightly different from themselves, then they acquired the knowledge to elevate or extend that difference, difference of any kind into a reason or a criteria for dominance and subjugation of the Other.

So, I don’t know whether you, or we, can begin to see how misogyny and ecocide are connected. Because for a start, they developed concurrently, and in many ways they’re dependent on each other. Agriculture depended on the extraction of labor from women and on the extraction of children from female bodies to grow the labor force.

DJ: And also on the extraction of labor from nonhuman slaves, such as oxen to pull your plow.

SM: Exactly. I was just about to come to that. So they also used the extraction of labor from nonhumans to till the soil, which is, of course the tillage of soil means the destruction of the soil, so we can’t ignore that parallel between agriculture, which is the extraction of soil from the land, and it’s fueled by the extraction of human labor from females. It’s this horrible feedback loop.

DJ: And where it comes back to resources is; agriculture is the conversion of the land specifically towards human use, and what you’re saying, if I’m understanding you correctly, is that it’s the conversion, that patriarchy is the conversion of a woman, who has her own uses and her own, I mean her own uses for herself, and her own desires and her own beingness; it’s the conversion of a woman who has her own being, into a commodity to be used by men. And so that the connection is turning the ocean into a place that exists solely for use by humans, a mountain into a place that solely exists for use by humans, and turning Africans into a population that is to be used for white people, and turning women into a population that’s to be used by men. Is this what you’re saying?

SM: It’s absolutely the same ideology. If we get back to – I just want to back up a bit. So the first gender-defined social role for women in civilized agricultural societies was to be people who were exchanged into marriage transactions, okay? In marriage transactions. And so the obverse gender role for men was to be those who did the exchanging. More importantly, actually, as those who defined the terms of the exchange. And another gender-defined role for women, around that same time, was that of what was known then as the stand-in wife. That then becomes established and institutionalized for women of elite groups. That becomes more of an elite role. And later, that role is sanctified by religion and it comes to be a position that women aspire to, as many still do today. And this role, the one of wife, it gave those women considerable power and privileges, but of course that power and privilege depended largely, or completely, on their attachment to elite men. And so it was based in some part on their satisfactory performance in rendering to those elite men sexual and reproductive services.

DJ: You know what this makes me think of? Henry the VIII.

SM: Right? Yeah. Absolutely. His first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was unable to give him a son, and it’s the reason that England removed itself, or King Henry VIII decided that England would no longer be a Catholic country, and he created a new religion called the Church of England, just so he could divorce his first wife, so that he could marry again, to be able to have a son with another woman. And when she was not able either to give him a son, he then cut off her head, and he married a third woman. He just went on and on.

DJ: She was supposed to produce and she didn’t.

SM: Yeah, she didn’t. And so he found a reason to execute her. He then moved on to the third wife, Jane Seymour, who did give him a son but as a result died shortly after childbirth, was unable to survive the pregnancy, and so he married a fourth time, and this time, this was much more of a business marriage. Anne of Cleves was from the German nobility, and when she arrived, because she was, in King Henry VIII’s estimation “ugly as a horse” were the words that are used in history, how he described her; he – because he couldn’t kill her, because she was from a powerful family, what he did was he made her his sister, and divorced her, and then he married Catherine Howard, who was 18 years old at the time he married her. And she couldn’t give him any children, so he executed her, and finally married Catherine Parr, whom he was also thinking of executing but he died before he could do that. Yes, it’s a great example. It’s a terrifying example, when you think about it, when you talk about what he actually did.

DJ: And it all comes back to production.

SM: Yeah, it all comes down to reproduction. He wanted a son, to carry on his name.

And so if we back up to what I was saying, if you don’t mind, if we go back to what I was talking about as the gender-defined roles when they first started, that what we observe is that from the beginning, from its beginning in slavery, class dominance of any kind, it took different forms for enslaved men and women. Men eventually, when they weren’t killed, they were primarily exploited as workers, whereas women were always exploited as workers but in addition they became providers of sexual services and reproducers. And, you know, Gerda Lerner, in her work she shows very thoroughly that the historical record of every slave society offers evidence for this same pattern. And so the sexual exploitation of, especially, low-class women by upper class men, that can be shown throughout civilized history until the modern day. Under feudalism, in bourgeois households of 19th and 20th century Europe, in the sex/race relations between women of colonized countries and their male colonizers, it’s ubiquitous and it’s pervasive.

So, for women, sexual exploitation is what I would call the mark of class exploitation. And this, the class position of women becomes consolidated and actualized through their sexual relationships with men. And it’s always expressed within degrees of limited freedom. It ranges on the spectrum from the slave woman, who obviously has no rights, and whose sexual and reproductive capacity is commodified, as she herself is. Then we go to the slave concubine, whose sexual performance might elevate her own status, or that of her children, and then the so-called “free” wife, whose sexual and reproductive services to one man of the elite classes entitles her to property and legal rights. But that’s obtained only through her relationship to her husband.

And so, while each of these groups have vastly different obligations and privileges in regard to property, law, economic resources; they still share the limitation of being sexually and reproductively controlled by men. And this specific exploitation happens to females because they are female. And you know the interesting thing is that class, for men, was, and still is, based on their relationship to the means of production, and that’s another connection. So those who owned the means of production could dominate those who didn’t. So the owners of the means of production also acquired the commodity of female sexual services, both from women of their own class and from women of subordinate classes, and they also get to extract and exploit the land, at the same time.

DJ: So we have about four or five minutes left. So can you do like a two minute introduction to the fourth question we talked about, and you talked about this, but what do you mean by the creation of gender? Can you do that in two minutes?

SM: (laughing) That’s a very difficult thing to do in two minutes. My point in relating this history of how we moved from subsistence cultures into agricultural cultures was to show how men and women’s roles significantly changed. And so women become, in agricultural societies, and with the advent of agriculture and what we call civilization, their gender role became one of a person who is used for their sexual services and for their reproductive services, and are at the behest of men to be exchanged and bought and traded and sold off and owned. Whether it’s by their fathers or their brothers or their husbands or their masters, or their owners.

And, you know, conversely, men have the role of being the ones that define the terms of those exchanges. And whether they were rich or poor, men always had more rights than women, because they could not be sold by, at least by a woman. They could not be sold by a woman. They could be sold by a man who was in authority over them. But they would not be sold by a woman. If they were sold by a woman who was their master’s wife, that was because that was what the master wanted. And that was my point in saying whether women of elite classes who were married to elite men – of course they had more privileges in regard to property, law, and all of that. But, you know, they had those because of their relationship with an elite man. It wasn’t because of themselves.

DJ: So maybe what we should do is hold off on the whole creation of gender. I’ll have you back on another time, and then we can do a short version, or reintroduction, so we can move to that. In the one or two minutes left, can you say what you want people to do with the information you’ve given them today? Somebody’s listening to this interview, what do you want them to do with this information?

SM: Well, I think that one of the really important things is we have to understand that the dominant culture is not only hierarchical, but it’s also patriarchal. And it’s not only anthropocentric, but it’s male-centric. And that the social origins of the current ecological catastrophe that we find ourselves in, they can’t be overlooked. And unless we make those connections, that the subjugation of the earth and the subjugation of females as a class can’t be disentangled from one another, we won’t be successful in fighting the systems that are currently killing the planet. And that’s why militarism is a feminist issue. It’s why rape is an environmental issue. It’s why environmental destruction is an anti-racist issue.

And making that connection is really really important. I don’t want to downplay the importance of it. But it’s not enough. We need organization. We need strategy. We need to materially, physically halt the extraction of resources from female bodies and grant women the right to a future that’s free of exploitation in the same way that we need to physically halt the extraction of resources from the earth, especially fossil fuels, if we want there to be a future at all.

And, just in conclusion, I’ll say that the last, and the most important parallel between misogyny and ecocide is that they both can and must be fought, and resisted.

DJ: Well thank you so much for saying all that. And thank you for being on the show. And I would also like to thank the listeners for listening. My guest today has been Saba Malik. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio, on the Progressive Radio

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