Tonight in Gainesville, FL: From the Expanding Porn Industry to Aggressive Religious Patriarchs: End the Enslavement & Degradation of Women

Wild Iris Books and the Civic Media Center are proud to welcome the BAsics Bus Tour and co-sponsor a talk with Sunsara Taylor - From the Expanding Porn Industry to Aggressive Religious Patriarchs: End the Enslavement & Degradation of Women. 

Join Us For the Discussion at:
Civic Media Center
Tuesday, May 22, 7:00pm

In recent years, pornography has become increasingly violent, cruel, and degrading towards women even as it has become more and more mainstream. Millions of women and young girls are trafficked as chattel in the international sex industry. This is NOT society becoming more comfortable with sex; this is society becoming saturated with the sexualized degradation of women. Meanwhile, Christian fundamentalists and others are assaulting women's right to abortion and birth control. Forcing women to have children against their will is female enslavement. Women are not objects.

Women are not things to be used for the sexual pleasure of men NOR are they breeders of children. WOMEN ARE HUMAN BEINGS CAPABLE OF FULL EQUALITY IN EVERY REALM! Sunsara will talk about how we can – and must – defeat the war against women and how doing so can contribute to the movement for the kind of revolution that can fully liberate women and emancipate all of humanity.

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Getting Oriented and Getting Started, the first 2 days of the BAsics Bus Tour

Its been two days now on the BAsics Bus Tour. The volunteers are an impressive bunch. What hit me first is our obvious diversity. Younger and older, Black, white and Latino, male and female, with a tremendous range of different life experiences and depth of experience in the revolution. What hits me just as hard, though, is our common enthusiasm for Bob Avakian and the real revolution.



The first day's orientation began with a showing of the first segment of Bob Avakian's Revolution talk, "They're Selling Postcards of the Hanging," where he gets into the founding of this country in slavery and the hundreds of years of white supremacist terror which was inflicted on Black people as part of the enforcing the “American way.” BA describes not only the lynchings, but how white people would gather in a festive atmosphere to witness the lynchings of Black people and to snap pictures and make postcards of the hangings.

All of us had watched this segment of the video before. All of us have been moved by it many times. But there was something different as we sat in the darkened room and watched it together on the first day of the BAsics Bus Tour. We were just meeting each other, the full daring crew of revolutionaries who came to the South in the wake of the murder of Trayvon Martin, in the wake of the state-sponsored execution of Troy Davis, in the midst of the slow genocide of mass incarceration, to spread the only revolution that can put an end to these hundreds of years of bitter oppression and terror against Black people.

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May 10: "Good Sex", Abortion & GIRLS!

Come to a discussion inspired by the themes in the new HBO series "Girls"...

Thurs - May 10 - 7:00 - 9:00 pm

at: Revolution Books

146 West 26th Street

[btw 6th-7th Aves., NYC  #1, R, 6 to 28th St. stop]

* Is there such a thing as "good sex"? If so, what makes it "good"?

* Must abortion be an agonizing decision?

* What makes for a "meaningful life"? A career... friends... sex... or something more?

NOTE: You do not have to have seen the show to participate!

Discussion hosted by

Sunsara Taylor

and the project to

End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women.

"It is long past time that this new generation stand up, reject, and RESIST this culture of rape and pornography; this culture that labels women "selfish" if they choose not to become mothers; this culture that reduces women and girls to sexualized objects while denying their full multi-dimensional humanity (including their right-as one essential part of this-to explore their sexuality without shame or stigma); this culture that demonizes and bullies LGBT people.

"Women are not objects. Women are not things to be used for the sexual pleasure of men NOR are they breeders of children. WOMEN ARE HUMAN BEINGS CAPABLE OF FULL EQUALITY IN EVERY REALM!"

 

Call to END PORNOGRAPHY AND PATRIARCHY:

THE ENSLAVEMENT AND DEGRADATION OF WOMEN!

For an Internationalist May 1st

Friends,

THING 1: GET INTO THE STREETS FOR MAY 1ST!

INTERNATIONALISM: THE WHOLE WORLD COMES FIRST

I am getting ready to go out into the streets to join with thousands of others nation-wide in the May 1^st protests. It is very good that the Occupy movement is remounting the political stage. In the face of massive repression, including at least three police raids in the early morning hours today of NY Occupy activists and countless broken bones, bloodied skulls, tear-gas canisters, mass arrests and more of Occupiers last fall, people are coming back!

At the same time, while it is important but not enough to care about the 99% in this country – we really must fight for the “99%” throughout the world. The Pakistanis dying under – and terrorized by – US drones dropped in record numbers by President Obama. The immigrants who die crossing the US/Mexican border or who survive only to be separated from their families and forced to live and work in the shadows of this empire. The 2.4 million people locked into the hellholes of US prisons. The youth and the women and others who slave in sweatshops to produce the clothes we wear and the electronics we rely on. The peasants being thrown off their lands by US corporations and agribusiness. The climate refugees whose whole lives and lands are destroyed by the wanton destruction and pollution of the environment which is advancing everyday under the blind accumulation and competition process of global capitalism.

ALL THESE PEOPLE ARE PART OF THE REAL 99%.

ANY REAL AND MEANINGFUL PROTEST TODAY MUST INCLUDE THEM.

This is why I am marching into the May 1^st protests together with the Internationalist Contingent.

As Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, has said:

“INTERNATIONALISM – THE WHOLE WORLD COMES FIRST!”

In NYC, we are hooking up at 3:45 on the SW corner of 14^th Street and 3^rd Avenue. Join us!

THING 2: PURSUE THE BIGGEST QUESTIONS – GET INTO BA, GET INTO THE REAL REVOLUTION!

I was just listening to Todd Gitlin who was a guest on WNYC radio as part of their May 1^st coverage. Among other things, he said that he thought there was work for Occupy to do to establish, “a sustained place in American political life.”

It is hard to think of a worse thing for Occupy to find for itself than a “sustained place in American political life”! Political resistance should NOT seek to become part of the “political ecology” of America – it should contribute to a world WITHOUT America and without everything that America stands for and does in the world.

We do not need, and we should not be seeking, to get a “place at the table” of empire. We need a world without empires.

One of the greatest things about Occupy is that it WASN'T part of the ongoing political terrain of the US. It ruptured out of those ruts. That is why it inspired so many and that is why it opened up such space for people to begin to think and dream differently. And that is why, at least as much as anything else, it was so viciously and brutally repressed and attacked by police who were commanded from the highest levels the state (including nation-wide conference calls among mayors who then did coordinated brutal police attacks in different cities).

Those who rule this country and this system are deathly afraid of the big questions that just began to be posed by the Occupy movement and among those who started to think more deeply about where all the problems confronting humanity come from. But, those of us who dream of a different world – we must welcome and embrace those big questions, we must look and think ever more deeply about the root of the problem and the necessary solution.

Precisely so that we do not have to be fighting the same battles generation after generation – against the Vietnam war back then and the Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan/soon-Iran wars today, against the lynching of Emmett Till back then and the murder of Trayvon Martin today, for the right of birth control and abortion back then and... for the right of birth control and abortion today – plus the wholesale enslavement of millions of women worldwide in sexual slavery, against pollution back then and nearing the brink of total climate disaster today, and on and on – we need REAL REVOLUTION. We need communist revolution as it has been re-envisioned by Bob Avakian.

If you don't know about this – there is nothing more important to be learning about, engaging deeply with, and helping others get access to even as you yourself are learning more.

A great place to start is this incredible new interview which was just released for May 1^st at Revolution Newspaper. Read up. Enjoy. Happy May 1^st. Lets bring into being a whole different world.

http://revcom.us/avakian/what-humanity-needs/interview.html

Sunsara Taylor