To pay my bills, I work a job in spatial closeness to extremely powerful men. The kind of powerful men that rub shoulders with state leaders and oligarchs, that buy themselves laws and the Eastern European expansion of the EU.
My position is unsteady: I’m far more educated than many of these men who never made it beyond a masters’ degree in business. I’m never and never will be one of them; I’m not upper/middle-class by origin, neither nobility (as some of them are). To my working-class collegues, I’m no longer fully one of them due to my education. To the powerful men, I’m a faceless subaltern, someone to be be deprived of a livelihood over a light-switch not working, invisible to a point where they talk business and sex next to me unguarded, because to them, I don’t exist.
I am an onlooker-within, a fence-rider between patriarchy and freedom, an anthropologist-spy in deep undercover.
The powerful men are objects of my studies of power, and observing them has taught me more about power than I’ve ever known before. My interactions with them are patriarchy in its raw form, unencumbered by any mitigating factors like e. g. a self-image of liberalism on their part. They are patriarchal sociopaths by choice, and this patriarchal sociopathy is its own raison d’être.
My observations have made understand why so much of liberal feminist, postmodern, queer, academical power analysis is so rotten:
Growing up female means you are experiencing power only over people at the bottom of the male-made hierarchy: Other women, in particular poor women, Lesbians, women of colour, and female children. Being female, we never have the experience to lord over males, over the rich, over the so-called “elite”. Most girls and women never come anywhere close the elite, despite fervently doing the elite’s work by kicking down on those they think beneath them and sucking up to those above[i].
This explains how liberals can possibly think a slew of jargon they learned at college could magically alter reality, arriving at beliefs like calling someone a victim is worse than actually victimising them, saying no to men is literal genocide, Butch Lesbians having “masculine privilege” over Fems or even “feminine transwomen”, or that violence can be stopped by identifying out of it (“I’m really a man, I’m not to be raped!”).
Girls and women feel their oppression in every cell of their own bodily being, but most of them refuse to acknowledge it. They cope with many strategies: Liberal feminists for instance cope by playing the mind games they are taught in gender studies and queer theory; slightly less oppressed women (upper or middle-class, white, able-bodied, hetero, mothers, mainstream-religious) by torturing those with even less power in the hope being a good girl will protect them; more oppressed women often by self-destructive behaviour like smoking, drinking and harmful drugs, and so on. Most, however, never allow themselves to feel the devastating scope of their oppression. Some, because they can’t bear the pain and feel too weak to fight, many, because they unconsciously or opportunistically identify with (sic!) power.
But these girls and women do not know what absolute power is. 99% of us will never be able to observe absolute power close-up and in its own habitat. Even class-conscious women have little choice but base their analysis on the image these males are projecting of themselves through the media, books or movies – and to the adherents of postmodernism and queer theory, class is an utterly meaningless concept. If nothing really matters, to quote postmodernism’s poster child Madonna, then of course there are no classes, there is no elite, and all we are left with is words and image.
This is what allowed the trans-cult[ii] to become so powerful: Conjured up by words (academia) and bolstered by image (tearjerker stories) it is the project of elites. Men like the Pritzkers, the Wachowskis and the puppet masters of the medical-industrial complex are the ones that need looking at when gender and power is to be analysed, not the semiotics, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology and idiocy of some guy wearing a skirt. The money that pays for the baseball bats and the bathroom bills, this is where transgenderism has to be attacked.
This being said, the baseball bats and the bathroom bills have to be fought anyways, and this brings me to yet another form of power I experience daily at work:
To the powerful men, my movements in their territory is tightly contained by invisible rules, but the spaces designed for my use are utterly and boundlessly accessible to them. Several of the most powerful men in the most prestigious venue the company HQ has to offer as a matter of principle use the female toilet. They do it despite the males’ toilet being only a few steps further away. In another venue, one of these powerful men used the toilet that I have to share not only with the males on my team, but also with customers. While this is bad enough, I also happened to be the next one to use that toilet and discovered he had not bothered to flush.
I was forced to flush this powerful man’s piss before I could use the toilet myself.
This isn’t marking contested territory. All the toilets at my workplace already belong to them, because the place itself is theirs. They are demonstrating that they can do whatever they want, that the social contract that makes people use the toilet according to their sexes and flush after they’ve done so is of no concern to them. They can do whatever they like, because they literally can.
There will be many who now will think that I’m reading stuff into something totally trivial. Maybe they are too stressed to take a few steps further to the male bathroom, maybe the man who didn’t flush has trouble at home and was distracted. It is just toilets. Let them pee.
But the question of toilets is not trivial, and it never was. Female-only toilets have been political right from the beginning. Women had to fight for them, despite the grim opposition of those who thought women had no place in the public sphere[iii]. Girls and women in developing countries, refugee camps or disaster zones are running the risk to be raped or infected with diseases when they don’t have access to safe, female-only bathrooms. Logically, many feminist activists have made the fight for female-only bathrooms a priority. With the trans bathroom bills, feminists now face a whole new front they have to fight at, the agents and useful idiots of the trans cult already encroaching female spaces everywhere[iv].
Invaded Bathrooms (and prisons and changing rooms and, ultimately, delivery rooms) have practical implications for all women. A mere ‘female’ sign on a door of course is not capable to keep males with delusions of femaleness out. What it does, though, is to affirm the right of females to defend the space it marks. Women in self-defense classes everywhere are taught to trust their perceptions. Self-defense requires split-second decisions based on intuition. Overthinking, which so many of us are prone to, can be critically dangerous: “Maybe he just has poor social skills”, “It is impolite not to get on that elevator with this guy”, “Maybe I just overreact”.
As soon as males are allowed in female toilets, this important mechanism of self-defense is completely sabotaged. If a girl or a woman can’t react adequately to “Male in the toilet” by making a scene, getting help or fighting back, but instead has to run the whole “Ugh, how dare I think he is male and a creep, he is a transwoman who has every right to be here and even if she is in the process of attacking me already I must not be transphobic, because I’m just a cis bitch and she is Stunning™ and Brave™” thought process, there will be more attacks and rapes than there are already.
Not even piss is trivial. Males weaponise their piss on such a scale it has left traces in language: Being pissed (off) or pissing on someone very clearly signify acts of dominance. A powerful man not flushing on the staff toilet is not just interfering, but literally marks the space and by extension its inhabitants as a place to piss onto. Psychoanalysis and postmodernism each have their fascination with bodily waste, sexualising and intellectualising (abjection), trans-lating and trans-forming the male power act of pissing where they are not wanted into an honourable act that can be discussed in polite company.
Meanwhile, males piss on women or at least women’s spaces, like they’ve always done.
In July 1976, a women’s centre in Vienna was attacked by several men who pissed against their window front while women inside held a political meeting. The women replied with a scornful article in their magazine that parodied the pissers, self-declared “experts” and political activists in one funny sweep:
“ANGEPINKELT
wurde in der Nacht zum Freitag, 27. 7. 76, das Frauenzentrum in Wien 9., Tendlergasse 6. Drinnen beschäftigte sich ein Arbeitskreis der Frauen eben mit politischer Ökonomie, draußen einige “Herren der Schöpfung” mit einem Pinkelkonzert gegen Tür und Fenster des Frauenzentrums. In einem “mediengerecht” zugeschnittenen Artikel müßte es nun folgendermaßen weitergehen: Die Polizei nimmt an, daß es sich dabei um einen phallokratischen Racheakt einiger bereits verunsicherter Männer handeln könnte. Der bekannte Aggressionsexperte und Psychiater Professor Friedrich Hacker erhob, wie in jedem publicityträchtigen Fall, seine Stimme und gab zu bedenken, daß es sich bei dem Gepritschel um das berüchtigte Freud’sche “Wasserlassen aus Urangst” handeln könnte. (…) Die im Frauenzentrum anwesenden Ohrenzeuginnen gaben übereinstimmend zu Protokoll, daß es sich um mindestens sechs geheimnisvolle Pischer gehandelt haben muß. Die amtliche Spurensicherung bestätigte den Tatbestand. Eine Verbindung zu Carlos, der PLO oder der Südmolukkischen Befreiungsarmee ist nicht ausgeschlossen. Doch ist die Methode des aggressiven Demonstrationsurinierens im internationalen Terrorismus bisher unbekannt.”[v]
“PEED UPON
was the women’s centre in the night to Friday, July 27th in Vienna’s 9th district, Tendlergasse 6. Inside women held a workshop about political economy when some “lords of the creation” held peeing concert against the centre’s windows and doors. In an article suitable for “mainstream media”, things needed to go on like this: Police suspects a phallocratic act of revenge of alienated man. The well-known psychiatrist and expert on aggression professor Friedrich Hacker, like in every case offering him potential publicity, spoke up to argue the splashing around could be the notorious Freudian “Urinating from primal fear”. (…) All the earwitnesses present in the women’s centre agreed there had to be at least six mysterious pee-ers. The crime scene specialists confirmed the facts of the case. A connection to Carlos , the PLO or the South Maluku Liberation Army cannot be ruled out. However, the method of aggressive demonstration-urination so far is unknown as a tool of international terrorism.”
The perpetrators were never caught.
In December 2018, professor Rosa Freedman, a Jewish survivor of sexual violence, had males piss against her office doors after she said something that upset the trans cult.
Times change, but males don’t.
So, the question we need to ask remains the same as it was in 1976: What can we do to negotiate the harm males in female spaces do, while we are not yet liberated and free from patriarchy as a whole? The international laws regarding single-sex spaces allowed us a basis to defend ourselves, and it was only males we were up against.
Nowadays, we are also faced with women who defend their right as feminists to be pissed upon by males. Whether they yearn for “transwomen” to share their most personal space or for “dominants” to piss on them in sadomasochistic scenes, they are choosing their masochist craving for male approval over the safety of girls and women. Their minds have been male-invaded already, so for them it makes perfect sense to let males have all the rest as well.
Their analysis of power is muddled by their ignorance of how power actually works, their greed for male approval and other emotions like the desire for reward and punishment patriarchy tries to instill in females everywhere.
They refuse to see the structure of power; even more so, postmodern academia and queer theory gave them permission to deny there could be structures of power in the first place. They can’t and won’t see the all-encompassing power structure behind seemingly trivial and small everday experiences – like a male on a female toilet. This makes them the perfect collaborators, easily manipulated by emotional pleas of males who claim victimhood.
To overcome the patriarchal baiting and gaslighting, it is inevitable to accept a reality in which elite males are shaping laws, the economy, politics, war and peace according to their need to keep themselves in power. It is inevitable to accept that this form of power is self-preserving by nature, and rolls down through a hierarchy we all are caught in. It is necessary to accept that, wherever a person stands in the hierarchy, they will experience pressure from above to kick down, to pass on the power that is being exerted onto them.
To damage this structure of power, like any other machine, delusions of grandeur are not going to be of any help. The world revolution with the 1% going to the wall isn’t any more likely to happen than a world in which the individual as a free agent is identifying, subverting and queering real life oppression. The machine needs to be sabotaged by cutting its circuits over and over again; every act of withdrawal from males, every act of solidarity with women, in particular those further down the male-made hierarchy, brings the machine close to failure.
Power is exerted by males on a tiny scale every day, everywhere. From manspreading to #MeToo, from every sexist joke at the workplace to every dirty sock left to wash for a woman, from every birth to every rape, from males pissing on us to try and erase/replace us, patriarchy offers us death by a million cuts.
It is about time we turn around and offer it the same.
[i] The only brush with absolute power for many females in the West occurs when they are assaulted or raped. Many cope by filing these experiences as horrible exceptions to the norm, a malfunction of masculinity rather than an millennia-old enslaving force they were targeted by. They refuse to acknowledge that they encountered an ancient evil for whom they are nothing but cattle, that they were at the mercy of some random male who held the power over their life and death in his hands – a random male who really could have been literally any male they know.
[ii] This term most succinctly describes what transgenderism is all about: Ruthless leaders wrenching money, sex and energy out of disciples by selling them fairytales incompatible with reality and a promise of salvation.
[iii] When pro-trans writers misrepresent the struggles of working class women toward sex-segregated bathrooms in factories as basically Victorian prudisness, they are either deliberately lying or on the other hand not at all deliberately giving away their utter lack of understanding of the working conditions of female factory workers. The author of this Guardian opinion (sic!) piece in that sense is a perfect illustration of my analysis here.
[iv] As a matter of fact, brilliant blogger Gallus Mag, who for years meticulously collected water-proof evidence about the crimes of the trans cult was silenced over the paedophile phantasies of a “transwoman” who wished to approach twelve year old girls in changing rooms for tampons and explain to them their use. Google ‘tampon’ and ‘Yaniv’ and you should come across the evidence.
[v] ‘AUF – A women’s magazine (7/1976)’, in part reprinted in: Frauenkollektiv RitClique (eds.) (2018) Zündende Funken. Wiener Feministinnen der 70er Jahre. Wien: Löcker, pp. 118-9.
IceMountainFire 