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In reponse to Amanda’s Response to Marc’s reponse to his reponse to the Haditha massacre, some people have declared that male groups and female groups close ranks similarly.

I guess there’s closing ranks and then there’s closing ranks.

Women’s groups close ranks but also exile the “bad” member, because if a woman’s group did protect a “bad” member like the Duke Lacrosse Rapists has done, it’d be held against the entire group and gender at the same time.

FOREVER

The Left does the same, see how often you’ll get ward churchill or cynthia mckinney bad mouthed by liberals simply because they’ve been “caught” doing something “bad”, and the entire The Left then has to loudly and publically “denounce lesbian troskyism” as I call it, loudly show that they’re not like those liberals/democrats/lefties, oh no, and those people have nothing to do with the greater movement Oh Mighty Rightwing Noise Machine, teehee. That Cynthia Mckinney is the best and most genitalia-spheres-to-the-wall politician the dems have is besides the point, that ward churchill freed native american’s rights activists from a murder conviction the FBI set them up for is also besides the point, they did something bad (i.e. said something stupid that’s too nuanced for the necrotised brains of wingnuts to understand fully, and slapped a touchy-feely security guard for being unable to identify the most easy to recognise congresscritter in the country, respectively), and thus are evil demons who the The Left must hate on, loudly, so that everyone knows that the The Left isn’t like those bad people.

And so two people who could be very useful to the progressive political cause are marginalized because…well because the right wing inexplicably hates them, ALOT, which of course has everything to do with the specific “crimes” that they’re now shunned for, and nothing whatsoever to do with them being threats to the Rightwing, nosirreebob, that’s not what’s wrong with them at all.

When they came for the trade unionists, I shunned them because I was not a trade unionist, and they had said some very silly things after all…

Patriarchal homosocial privelage is all about not having your entire group, organisation and gender thought less of just because of the non-representative actions of some crazies, even if your group really should be thought less of because you then protect the crazy from any ramifications of their actions (which in, the catholic church’s cases (plural), is raping of children remember), give them opportunity to do whatever it is again, and pretend that nothing bad actually happened that might require the group acting to rectify, make amends or whatever for the actions of the crazy or any future crazies that have yet to occur.

That, it seems is the difference between patriarchal rank closing and the regular tribalistic kind, whereas any group will close ranks if given cause to, only patriarchal privelage can cause a group to close ranks and actually protect the “bad” members from the ramifications of their actions, we’ve even heard a very common refrain about how the Duke Lacrosse Rapists shouldn’t be “judged in the court of public opinion” i.e. shouldn’t be judged and spend their entire life being looked down on as scum just for having once been convicted of raping a woman, and then lying and insulting the victim for trying to bring them to justice.

That’s not tribalism folks, that’s pure, undeniable, 200% proof, patriarchy at work, which obtains its power from that irresponsible social defensiveness being accepted as normative and good thing when male dominated groups do it, but terrible and bad when anyone else does it.