Looking back on my posts so far, I realise I have written a lot about how liberal feminists are failing other women, and relatively little about the root cause of the miserable state the planet is in: Men.
There is a reason for that. Men are utterly unimportant to me. There is nothing to be expected from them.Writing about what anti-feminist women and men should do is pointless. Anti-feminist women make choices I can only view with disgust and contempt; a sentiment that without a doubt is mutual. And men? Men can’t change.
Their fundamental set-up is faulty. When a man does horrible things to girls and women, he is doing what his very nature commands him to do. Men can’t be reformed, they can’t be reasoned with, and they can’t be fixed. They are not broken.Their lack of intelligence, depth and human emotion is built-in. Even ″matriarchal″ societies suffer from men’s inbuilt shortcomings.
Men are biologically brittle. Their Y chromosome is a joke, and their rates of life expectancy, disease, injury, addiction, education failure etc are evidence for their fundamentally faulty design. They can manage to somehow keep the upper hand as long as they manipulate the stakes against women. But even the most timid changes towards some sort of fairness (never mind liberation) make women outrun men in no time. Boys and men are not failing at school and university because these places all of a sudden have become matriarchal habitates, as certain anti-feminists suggest. They fail because as a group they are less intelligent than women. Boys and men excel only when they get to manipulate the testing method: They create IQ tests to favour white Western males, they give each other Nobel prizes and trump this as ″proof″ for their intelligence. IQ tests and Nobel prizes are tightly monitored instruments. But schools and unis exist all over the world, with millions of teachers and billions of students. Schools and unis are not controlled by a relatively small gate-keeping elite like the Nobel prize committees or the opinion leaders in the field of psychology who have the power to declare one test valid and to disregard another. Schools and unis can’t be controlled as tightly, and so boys and men are failing in them. I wonder how badly they’d fare if the schools were indeed female-centered.
Even the most intelligent of men are still incredibly dense. Talk to science phDs or techies. I had to do with this demographic more than I ever wanted, and their sheer ignorance often took my breath away. Context, history, depth, complexity, ambiguity and beauty are completely lost to them. It is like talking to vaguely human-like machines. I suspect that this is the reason why so many men are drawn to machines, instruction manuals and lifeless things.
At this point men usually come up with the last two arguments for their existence: Physical strength and sperm. They argue that they are needed for the hard work (or, according to delusional anti-feminists, ″exploited″ to do the hard work) and that without them ″mankind″ will die out.
But reality shows that all this male strength and sperm is completely wasteful and unnecessary. If tomorrow all men fell down and were dead, the biggest problem would be the stink. Sperm banks would enable the surviving women to bring just enough men into the world to stock up the banks again. There would be far less people on earth, but they would live in peace.
As for strength, nobody needs to be able to lift hundreds of kilograms. It is just not necessary. Make smaller loads and go the way twice. Or build a tackle. There is no industry – including the notorious mining industry which regularly is brought up in such discussions – impossible to function with exclusively female workers. In the very moment men step back or vanish from the picture, women do fine for themselves. Mining, metal work, construction work, fishing, hunting, making timber, finance, business, women simply don’t need men. The truth is, that men are actively keeping women from learning ″male″ skills and from working in ″male″ professions. By this they secure their financial dominance and keep women dependant on them.
And if that doesn’t help, they use violence.
Men are violent and predatory by nature. Even little boys and very old men are violent. Ask the family of Jamie Bulger (1). Other boys may not kill random toddlers, but they terrorise girls or torture animals. A male toddler squashing ants or dragging around the family dog by the tail isn’t even perceived as violent by most people. A boy hitting, insulting, bullying and harrassing his sister is not perceived as violent – siblings quarrel, that’s just how things are, and boys will be boys.
As for old men, not even physical weakness stops them from attacking girls and women. There is a reason why the phrase ″dirty old man″ exists. With the onset of the general mental decay so typical for aging men, their self-control slips and they start to make mistakes. Every ″dirty old man″ used to be a dirty young man who just was quick-witted enough to cover up his crimes, and every dirty young man is a grown up violent boychild.
Last year, there were two men prowling my neighbourhood and bashing in women’s heads from behind. One of them was 21 years old and used a crowbar in order to steal money and phones. The other one was 89 (!) years old and used a wooden meat hammer. His reasoning? He married a woman from Thailand 30 years his junior. When he abused her, she divorced him and moved back to Thailand. This made him so angry that he sneaked up on random women and hit them in the head with the meat hammer he specifically bought for this task.
No amount of oppression, weakness or illness keeps men from being violent and predatory.
Logically, men adore death. They bring death. They like death. They like dead things.
Men see women as things, as useable goods, as animated corpses. Some don’t even bother with ‘animated’. Men admit openly in the media that they prefer pornography over sex, as if the women raped on the screen weren’t real. Men work hard to develop realistic sex robots or wife robots (2). Men literally will rape dead women.
Egyptian pharaos and other historical ruling men developped intricate cults around their dead bodies, going so far as to sacrifice not only animals but humans to serve their dead carcasses in the afterlife. Modern dictators have themselves embalmed or at least their wives: Tomás Eloy Martinez wrote a whole novel on the mummy of Evita Péron and takes great delight in describing the necrophiliac interactions of living men with the dead woman (3). Historical and modern ″anatomists″ have gone far beyond scientific interest with killing, collecting, disembowelling and mummifying bodies. Gunther von Hagens does not offer any new scientific insights on the human body. He just enjoys to play with dead bodies. So did Ed Gein or the Russian man currently in the news who dug up the bodies of little girls to make them into dolls (4). So did Ted Bundy who raped the dead bodies of his victims and put make-up on them. So did Carl Tanzler who was obsessed with the actress Elena Milagro de Hoyos he treated for tuberculosis until her death. She rejected him while she was alive. So he stole, preserved and violated her body, which he kept until he died. He didn’t give a damn whether her body was alive or dead. (Don’t google him.)
Boys too young for sex will do the same with animals, like the Dutch teen who recently made it into the news by turning his dead pet rat into a helicopter. He was supported in this brave endeavour by two adult engineers: http://gawker.com/teen-turns-dead-pet-rat-into-memorial-helicopter-1633038513
Artists will try to make women as corpse-like as possible, make us un-persons, faceless meat, and will be praised for it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/paul-kooiker_n_5953494.html
This fotographer’s glorified form of crime scene fotography of a faceless fat woman is not exactly new. Picasso gets praised for doing the same thing in paint: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/L/L02/L02971_9.jpg
This woman may have a rudimentary face, but still is a slab of meat. Nonetheless this picture made it into the Guardian’s rating of ‘The top 10 female nudes in art’ (5) by Jonathan Jones, who describes this pornographic shit as: ″Picasso imagines his lover as a welcoming cloud of pinkness, a constellation of curves, in this ecstatic painting. The woman, here, is a part of nature, reduced to the status of objects in a still life, to be enjoyed by the male artist. Yet his love, possessive as it is, cannot be doubted. Picasso puts his own sexuality into every pigment of this opulent painting. If his vision of the nude is utterly proprietorial, it is also absolutely honest.” (What an original idea. Woman as ″welcoming pink cloud… constellation of curves… part of nature″. Not in millennia this revolutionary thought has occurred to anyone if not for Picasso.)
Male movie and TV producers offer us endless stories about decaying zombies and fascinating serial killers, following a tradition already present in the writings of the Marquis de Sade who considered a cold-blooded, utterly pointless murder the highest art. Slasher movies gained broad influence when the backlash against feminism hit – men are invited to identify with the killer and women are threatened with what will happen to them if they get too uppity.
Men are usually very much aware that they are scum. Their delusions of grandeur and the demands towards women to cater to them are a reaction to this deep inner awareness of their inferiority. Occasionally men even will admit that they are scum.
Commenters on this article did it: http://valleywag.gawker.com/peter-thiel-admits-the-paypal-mafia-built-bombs-in-hi-1632734435
Look how many commenters casually point out that it is normal for teenage boys to build bombs just for the fun of it.
Comedian Louis C. K. did it: http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/30/04/9b/30049b5e9b976ba7dc2d1442db1411fb.jpg
″A woman saying yes to a date with a man is literally insane, and ill-advised, and the whole species’ existence counts on them doing it. I don’t know how women still go out with guys when you consider the fact that there’s no greater threat to women than men. We’re the number one threat to women! Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women, we’re the worst thing that ever happens to them. (…) But woman still go out with men! ‘Yeah, I’ll go out with you, alone, at night’ What are you, nuts? ‘Hi, where are we going?’ To your death, statistically. If you’re a guy, try to imagine that you could only date a half-bear, half-lion, like ‘Ugh, I hope this one’s nice’.”
He is a rich white male. He can say such things and people will laugh and agree. If a radical feminist says something like this, she will be ridiculed. And liberal feminists will accuse her of victim-blaming and sexism against men. How dehumanising, calling them animals! Stupid bitch!
The evidence for male love for death and destruction is overwhelming. But it would be wrong to assume that this is the end of the argument, that we just have to accept men’s natural dangerousness and adjust to it.
This we do anyway: taking self defense classes, keeping separate bank accounts when married, telling girls not to go with strange men. This is something even the most right-wing women do, however illogical and ineffective their precautions often seem. This is nothing particularly feminist. To – literally or metaphorically – carry a weapon in a world of predators is the bare minimum, not radical. (Many right-wing women carry literal weapons, something radical women should take in consideration for themselves as well.)
But unlike right-wing women and collaborators who simply accept male behaviour or at best demand cosmetical, individual change, Radical Feminists dig deeper. Beside the overwhelming evidence for male dangerousness we also find overwhelming evidence that men actually control their dangerousness when it suits them.
The picture of the man who just can’t help his nature is peddled by patriarchal apologists: The poor man was nagged and mocked by his shrew of a wife and couldn’t take it anymore. The poor man only follows his evolutionary instinct and raped her to assert his dominance. The poor man is the victim of political oppression, he just had to attack women to cope with his feeling of powerlessness. But women’s experiences make it very clear that men are highly selective towards whom they are ″losing control″.
Abusive men don’t attack their nagging and mocking male bosses with their fists. They don’t ambush their male boss on the toilet and rape him to get back at him. When they are oppressed and exploited, they don’t kick the boss from one corner of his office to the other. When their favourite team loses, they are not seeking out the quarterback to use him as a punching bag for their frustration. In a crowded train, they are not driven by some evolutionary instinct to go for the throat of their fellow male who enters their personal space or bares his teeth to them.
Men also are perfectly able to dose their violence. Male violence against women and children follows an escalating cyclic pattern. The escalation is a conscious strategy: How much will she be able to take? How far can I go? How many of my depraved fantasies can I make come true? (We observe the same deliberate escalation in sadomasochism. It is embraced there as ‘slave training’.)
Men are planning their crimes and they are able to cover them. Losing control is adverse to both. Someone who loses control does not build an air-tight terror regime in his own home, by and by cutting off his wife’s and children’s means of refuge and lowering the bar of ″reasons″ for his violent outbursts. Someone who loses control does not take upon him the logistics of building torture chambers or digging up graves. Someone who loses control does not buy a new hammer before he goes out again and again to prey on women.
Men can control themselves just fine. They make the active choice to act on the impulses their faulty nature gives them.
So, where does that leave us?
Right-wing women openly collaborate to secure their individual position. If they are just compliant enough, they think they will be allowed to sit at the men’s table. If they are just submissive enough, they will be taken care of and be rewarded.
Many liberal feminists de facto do the same in a more hidden manner, while they are touting an empty ideology of equality. For them, maleness by and itself has worth. Therefore, to them, males can be potential allies, partners, lovers, teachers, people worthy of shaping society. They can even be women. If only they were a bit more friendly, a bit more peaceful, a bit more loving, a bit more loyal, a bit more equality-oriented.
This is nothing new. Contrary to anti-feminist propaganda, ever since feminism came into being – even more so, ever since women started to take action against their miserable situation, pre-dating organised feminism – an overwhelming majority of women preferred the equality approach, the liberal approach. Suffragettes argued that mothers were bringing voters into the world and thusly should be able to vote (6). ‘Bread and Roses’, one of the old songs coming out of the leftist women’s movement, includes the lines ″As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men; for they are women’s children, and we mother them again″ (7). Second-wave ″women’s libbers″ won out over their radical counterparts, enabling the backlash, sex positivism and the modern mantra of ″I choose my choice!”. Modern third/fourth-wavers with their love of sexual submission, trannies and He-For-She bring this sucking up to men to a logical conclusion.
Many women do this deliberately. They are sell-outs or anti-feminists making use of a liberal feminist mien to gain something from it. TV show creators like Shonda Rhimes or Lena Dunham make good money by catering to a certain urban, slightly feminist, female audience.
Other women are too much invested in the personal privilege they obtain for being compliant to patriarchy: They get to call themselves feminist, without having to change their personal lifestyle or to risk income, while they can keep any convenient patriarchal mind blankie, from religion to sadomasochism. A sizeable portion of these women explicitly doesn’t want to be any more radical. They want to have the privilege AND the sisterhood, without seeing the fundamental contradiction between the two.
But some of them are just not aware of what they are doing. This is an impression I got in the last years. There are plenty of campaigns on Twitter and in the blogosphere (like e. g. #Yesallwomen or Project Unbreakable) documenting the horrors women experience under patriarchy. The thousands of testimonies show two things: Women are reliable, sharp and precise observers of their own lives – and many women are somehow unable to draw radical and long-term conclusions from their experiences.
Instead, they are desperately begging men to be nicer to them because they want to be able to love them. Many liberal feminist suggestions aim in this direction, e. g. trying to make men not use pejorative language. As if a man who does not call them a bitch, a cunt, a whore or a dyke to their faces was somehow rendered incapable of thinking these things in his mind. (Personally, I prefer to be called names, because I instantly know whom never to turn my back to.) On the other hand, liberal women try to achieve their goals by appealing to men’s interests, e. g. when they declare that a ″liberated″ feminist is better in bed that those other prudes. Their approach is to be inclusive, as if the oppressed class could make the oppressors relinquish their power by being nice.
These women are actually the ones I expect to do better. Women as a group are not stupid or naive or even close-minded. There is a reason why women are to be found at the forefront of every social cause imaginable. Women as a class – unlike the patriarchal lie of the ‘conservative woman’ proclaims – tend to be more open to new things and ideas than men. They are deeper thinkers than men, capable of understanding the ma-trix rather than the mechanics.
Women have to WANT to think, though. Hoping and wishing and begging is not enough.
The only realistic way for us to shape freedom for girls and women is seperatism. We as women need to put other women – any other woman – above everyone else. Men do that. Men can hate each others’ guts, but they will always close ranks towards women. It is time women do the same. This is the only way for women to make a better future: Stop catering to men in any way. Don’t make them lunch. Don’t listen to their problems. Don’t pick up their dirty coffee cups at work. Don’t have male friends. Give up male family. Don’t have children. Don’t talk to men at all if you are not forced to. Don’t live with them. Don’t sleep with them. Don’t step aside on the street. Don’t take gifts from them. Don’t interact with them online. Don’t imagine the ″perfect″ man. Het women do that and when they don’t find any man living up to their ideals, they come to the conclusion that all men are scum while still clinging to their mental image of the perfect man. But the truth is, even the ideal man still is scum.
Start with a small change, e. g. not talking to the creepy neighbour anymore, and work your way. You will realise, the less interaction you have with men, the easier you’ll breathe. This also doesn’t make you more vulnerable. Think about the statistics. We are most likely to be attacked and/or raped by men we know: Family members, boyfriends and husbands, friends, acquaintances. Random attacks by strangers do happen, but they are nowhere as likely as becoming the victim of a man we already know. Living with a man, spending time with men, this is what endangers women most. We have been told the opposite, so this seems counter-intuitive. But it is a fact that the biggest threat to a woman, statistically speaking, is the man whom she thinks of as her protector.
Put women above everything else. Live alone or build separatist communities. Show solidarity. Look for hobbies done in female-only groups. Find the beauty in every woman. Stay away from men and their empty promises.
This is what I do. Cutting one man after the other out of my life. Prioritising Lesbians and women and girls. And I will keep writing about how liberal feminism hurts all of us, because for liberal feminists I still have hope. Not much hope, admittedly, but still hope.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger
(2) http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/profile-in-male-privilege-martine-rothblatt
(3) ‘Santa Evita’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%C3%A1s_Eloy_Mart%C3%ADnez
(4) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2807572/Pictured-Inside-house-horrors-Russian-historian-held-birthday-parties-150-little-girls-dug-graves-mummified.html
(5) http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/apr/15/top-10-female-nudes-art
(6) http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rhXM91NxUSw/T5CSjZxvwAI/AAAAAAAAAAs/Z8g0l3pPk1c/s1600/suffrage1.jpg
(7) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Roses
IceMountainFire 
this text is pure genius, as visionnary and kickass as Dworkin. Can’t wai for another installment 🙂
That is so liberating to read, thank you! We don’t even allow ourselves to think stuff you write, like if it was equally hurting as how males hurt sadistically womyn. Great! Thank you!
I think (and say, although not as well) these things every goddamned day. And I am labelled crazy, threatened or ignored for it.
Hi and thank you for commenting! Calling us crazy is the perfect strategy to silence us. Worked in the 19th century, works in the 21st. It is admirable and a sign of strength if you still refuse to censor yourself and give in!
Me too!!! I thought I was alone
Thank you very much, sporenda and Zipper de jersey!
You are so brilliant! Thank you for this wonderful post. I wish every woman would read it!!!!
Thank you!!!!!!
And thank you very much again for helping me to really clarify and express my viewpoint. Your input was so helpful, and you are so generous with your time and experience. You are a treasure for all of us!
Thank you back! You help me too, dear friend. You’re a treasure for us too! xoxoxo
There is hope for many of the lib fems, i say this because I used to be a full on liberal, sex pozzie, male identified, fool.
It’s pretty easy to go about your life as a lib fem and never hear any real radical analysis. Most lib fems just aren’t that engaged. Their feminism is a few visits a day to mainstream “feminist” blogs like Jezebel, maybe some donations to Planned Parenthood, and possibly some minimal activism for abortion or gay marriage (which isn’t even feminist). If they have even heard about rad fems, its probably to hear them bashed as dinosaur 2nd wavers, called irrelevant, or nasty acronyms.
They go with the lib consensus on rads (made by trans and pozzers no doubt) because it seems abstract and unimportant. And if they hear us say men are the problem, and trans activism is woman hating, they just think we are extreme and move on.
Not all are like this, but a large number are. It’s not that that don’t care, per se, they are just working with faulty info and not fired up enough to learn more.
Some just need to be exposed to the ideas. I know when I first found rad fem writing my first thought was “THIS is it, this is the real deal”. Some ideas were bothersome at first but I just kept reading anyway. I figured they were right about so much, maybe they were right about the stuff I was uncomfortable with too. There is so much to learn, once you find the right people to read.
Anyway, I’m not sure what my point originally was. I guess I just wanted to give an example of how libs can change, if they just bother to read and think a bit.
And Bev really is a treasure, she is very challenging. Her writing was instrumental in my going celibate 😉
Other rad fems showed me I did not have to “take one for the team” aka have sex I didn’t want, (rape) anymore. But Bev showed me that celibacy was an option, a real choice that can be made.
Sorry, how is abortion not a feminist issue?
It obviously is and I didn’t take freefromsexpozzies’ statement as a suggestion it isn’t. It is not the end of feminist thought, though. Don’t get me wrong, I do demand abortions for free, in every hospital, without any criteria to be met. But being for the free, unrestricted access to abort on demand is the bare minimum, really.
In a perfect world, there would be almost no abortions, because there would be no unwanted pregnancies. They would all be planned. Therefore, the only abortions would be those where there are medical reasons, or, hypothetical, the woman changes her mind.
Hi sellmaeth and welcome!
I’m sort of wary to measure perfection in the number of abortions. We don’t have a perfect world. Activism has to be shaped around the status quo, not a future that hasn’t yet happened. Hetero sex always carries the danger of pregnancy, too. So failure of birth control etc would always be an issue, and changes of mind are not so hypothetical. Severely ill fetuses are always a possibility. Complications. Changing life plans.
The non-existence of force and rape would be perfect. The end of heterosexuality in its current configuration would be perfect. Abortions? Sort of a surface symptom, if they were free on demand (which they would be in a perfect world).
(Apologies if we are meaning the same thing and I misread you!)
Thank you! Now I’m curious who you are, by what other name I know you, or was this from reading my blog?
Reading your blog. I posted to it but that was before I had this blog account, so it’s under a different alias. I really don’t wanna link em together anywhere, or I would post those user names. I have 3 only because every device is signed into a different email :-).
Thank you, thank you, and thank you for this highly original, simply amazing, rad fem stimulating, and no holds barred writing! You are truly a genius, and speak the ugly truth about men. Ignorance is bliss, so they say, but in this day and age, where male violence to women is growing at epidemic proportions, I am hoping that het, non feminist women will wake up. Some see through rose colored glasses, but if they speak with me, I will remove them, and speak the truth about men, just like you have! I am so glad I found your blog….
Thank you so much for your comment and welcome!
I’m a late twenties, asexual, lifelong celibate, antinatalist woman who is just getting into radical feminism, lesbian separatism, etc. and I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the article. Thank you for sharing your very necessary wisdom with us.
Thank you and welcome!
This article and insipring, at least in its extremism (and I don’t mean ‘extremism’ in a bad way – just in the tail-end-of-the-distribution way), which gives it the power of clarity through its forcing one to reimagine/reconceptualize social relations. I’m a sellout to the patriarchy. I never wanted to get married, but did. Won’t budge, though, on my decision not to have children. Won’t wear a ring. Dependent on husband for all income. Marrying him brough financial stability for the first time in my life, which is a relief, but also a million small, and sometimes larger, indignities. My own mother won’t recognize that what he does meets the clinical definition of verbal abuse. Lacking in career skills after a life of low expectations in a Southern public school system. Many of us want to put our feminist values to practice, but it’s telling that yes, that comes with a very real risk of material suffering (no/low income, back to a hand-to-mouth existence). It’s a choice between the stress of that life and the stress of mistreatment, almost two sides to the same coin. The way out, or at least the way to have any bargaining power, is slowly building educational/career skills and squirreling away money in that separate bank account. It’s going to take years.
Hello and thank you for your comment!
You very truly say that poverty and mistreatment in marriage are connected like two sides of the coin. It’s patriarchy.
Still, I want to point out that many radical feminists, myself included, come from non-middle-class backgrounds and are still poor as adults. Radical feminism isn’t the hobby of well-off women. This is something ignorant liberal feminists like to accuse us of, but it simply isn’t true.
Thank you for your honesty. It is courageous of you not to gaslight yourself. Many women in your position throw themselves into romance and the societal perpetuation of patriarchy with all their might to gloss over their own conflicted instincts. You choose not to do that and this sure is admirable.
Men are indeed dangerous, and they do inherently loathe women. Many, many women, girls, and animals are violently murdered every single day, week, month and year (by men). One really, really has to HATE a woman if they have the guts to KILL her. To RAPE her. To DEMOLISH her every inch of her self esteem and well being. These guys KNOW they will face hard prison time (well, in some cases..way too many of them get off with murder and rape, and I definitely believe their prison sentences are not equal to the crimes that they so easily commit)..yet they still do the unspeakable crimes! They KNOW they’ll be on the national sex offender registry, but CHOOSE to rape anyways. There is plainly no excuse for this type of hateful behavior, and I am tired of hearing that “they can’t control themselves.” They refuse to take responsibility for their sordid actions. They are also into VICTIM BLAMING. How a man can fuck a dead corpse is beyond me. They love the fact that the woman is dead, and cannot say no, or stop. This is very sick and demented, yet women still support “their” men, date them, fuck them, trust, and marry them. They are all nice at first, and then the truth is shown about them. Yes, they do love pornography, prostitution (both are paid rape), yes they muse over murdering women, yes, they will rape your daughter, yes they shall cheat on you, and no, we do not need them in our lives. They wreak havoc on women, yet they still stay with them; they still trust and love them. These women are in total denial of the evil that men do. If they are lucky, they’ll lose everything they own, and end up in a domestic violence shelter. Most will end up dead, severly beaten, and most definitely scarred for life. Then, they run into another man’s arms, hoping and praying he will be different, and their personal saga continues…sometimes to their graves!
I’ve noticed something recently. Radical feminists across the web say men are socialized into masculinity, when they criticize of gender. Only lesbian feminists and non feminists or anti feminist women are saying men and women are inherently different. But I have seen evidence, tv shows where someone went to a tribal people, that in ‘less developed’ places men are not at all like the machismo man of the west and modern South America. Certainly reading the values of American Indians I get the impression they respected life and understood the interconnectedness of all things. It seems macho masculinity was spread by British colonialism and the later American colonialism called capitalism. But still the primitive reasoning behind sex-designated work segregation created a culture of heteronormativity, marriage, and female inferiority.
Also, Buddhism which is of course life-sanctifying and supports the belief that all things are connected still maintains that women are inferior to men. Though they made gains in equality’ long before anyone else did.
Anyway, I think we should recognize that machismo is in most places an aspect of western colonialism, but that even without a macho sort of masculinity men still regard women as inferior.
American Indian values – there used to be a big array of vastly different cultures with vastly different values, approaches to life and living conditions for women. I’d be careful to declare this or that cultural space or timescape as somehow better for women wholesale.
Colonialism/Imperialism/Western coercion has done terrible cultural and ethical destruction (and keeps doing it, see the evangelical interference with Uganda), but we need to be careful not to romanticise. It is disrespectful for everyone, including today’s native American communities who didn’t opt to serve as white man’s uplifting example.
Life-sanctifying Buddhism – inhowfar? Seeing life as source of suffering you can’t get rid of quick enough? Gains of equality? Such as? To be a nun? Because last time I looked, women were the boogeymen of rebirth, the embodiment of punishment. Along with disabled people and animals (in particular patriarchally hated animals like rats or insects). I don’t see much life-sanctifying here. Quite the opposite.
Religion is bad for women, full stop. This has been a recurring topic in my life for the last 15 years, and so far I didn’t come across any religion that is good for women. Not Buddhism, in particular not Tibetan Buddhism, not Dianic Wicca or any other brand of neopaganism, not historical paganism, not Hinduism, not the Abrahamitic Three.
Obviously by pointing out the failures of these cultures I wasn’t romanticizing them. My point was the opposite. I mentioned American Indians because when they write about their cultures they write in English, I assume all native cultures were pretty much the same but not distinguishing seems more disrespectful.
I know no religion offers a good story for women, I know this about the big one, and I know this about witchcraft and paganism. Where women are conflated with, or rather redeemed by, their reproductive abilities.
Perhaps I should have been more clear, since the radfems only will criticism gender and insist men are made to be awful, it would be foolish to ignore that even in cultures without the socially conditioned machismo men have still treated women like garbage.
Hi!
Thank you for this incredible piece. I read it a few months ago and loved it, and I was thinking about it recently, and today I decided to read it again.
I knew this by the time I was four years old. I remember watching TV and I could clearly conclude that men were criminals.
Reading this piece today was inspiring.
I am currently dealing with two men, neither of whom has anything to do with the other, but both of whom exhibit similar characteristics, who are interfering with my ability to function in two critical areas of my life.
One is a therapist, for whom I am -not- a client, who is very needy and lonely and projects himself on to me (I would never want him as a therapist) as though I were needy and lonely, and then tries to ‘help,’ or placate me for the problem he himself has. He is constantly engaging me in back and forth conversation as though it were something that -I- really needed. No, it is something that -he- really needs. I need peace, space, privacy and quiet. He fails to perceive me, accept me, and respect me as a separate human being, who, in fact, has nothing to do with him. The entire time that I have had to deal with him, I have perceived, accepted, and respected him as a separate human being, who has nothing to do with me. We do not have a professional relationship, and other therapists will leave me alone, which is, coincidentally, what I need.
The other is an employee at a meat counter at a local supermarket. He has a tremendous amount of aggression and anxiety, detects me approaching before any of the other employees, some of whom are amicable, projects himself onto me as though I were anxious and aggressive and then tries to ‘help,’ or placate me for the problem he himself has. Sound familiar? He is also constantly trying to engage me in conversation as though it were something that -I- really needed. No, it is something that -he- really needs. I need peace, space, privacy and quiet. He fails to perceive me, accept me, and respect me as a separate human being who has nothing to do with him. The entire time that I have been dealing with him, I perceived, accepted, and respected him as a separate human being, who has nothing to do with me. The other employees at that meat counter do not try to have conversations with me, they simply give me the food.
So, I spoke to someone about the first man and I’ll see what happens, and I no longer go to that meat counter.
Whenever these creeps talked to me, it left me with a sour feeling, and detracted and distracted me from the rest of my day.
Masculinity is negativity, femininity is positivity.
Men are inferior. They project their inferiority onto women, then back up the lie with threats of physical might. Physical might is scary and is worth respecting, but for them it is a tool to exert their agenda on women. Women need to get out of every situation like that, get away from those men, and have no further contact with them. Whenever I am no longer in their ‘web,’ I can think clearly (because there are no physical threats present) and realize that they were just projecting their own inferiority on to me, and that I am not inferior to them; it is in fact they who are inferior to me.
I don’t go around thinking that men are inferior. They prove it to me every day, to my disappointment. If they were equal, I would be relieved, because then they wouldn’t try to flip reality to give themselves a momentary, but insignificant, advantage.
Thank you for this post!
Hi!
It has been two years since I read this post and written this comment in response, so I thought I would update my comment.
The man at the meat counter – gone.
I left the meat counter he was at for another one. Six months later he showed up at the new one, business as usual, but clearly following me, because he was focused very carefully and specifically on me. I take a step back, they take a step forward. Every time.
So, naturally, I went back to the original meat counter. Now, he couldn’t come back because he would be exposed for doing whatever he was doing because of me. So – he left his job. Bye, bye.
The man at the psychotherapy office – gone.
He died of cancer.
The office is quiet and peaceful, the other clinicians are appropriate, as they were before, the patients are lower maintenance, and my therapy appointments are mine again.
Now, if only I could get rid of the creep down the hall who is stalking me and saying and doing inappropriate things to me.
Or the creep where I walk, who confined me and asked if I would go out and have coffee with him, even though I have communicated clearly to him over time, that I don’t want to have anything to do with him, as politely and kindly as I could.
Both of these men are older – the creep down the hall is in his fifties, the creep where I walk is in his sixties.
The creep at the meat counter was older – late forties, early fifties. The psychotherapist was in his early seventies.
Creeps replace creeps.
There must be something about me that makes these men desperately need me (all of the sudden, even though we are strangers), and wish to act out their desires/strange behavior with me, even though I am not complicit with it, and I have communicated that as clearly and graciously as I can. It is as though I am them, in their minds, even though we have nothing to do with each other, and they attempt to require me to do as they wish, or they base their lives off of me, or they set up an abusive relationship with me, or they act out their creepy behaviors with me. They treat me differently than they would someone else. This never changes. They do not have a boundary, and cannot set one up. Hence – men cannot be reformed.
I do not see it as me, however. I honestly think there is nothing wrong with me and I am minding my own business like the next person.
I was thinking about this post lately and decided to go back to it. Thank you, again for this post.
Hi Melissa,
sorry it took me so long to reply, I’m very busy…
I’m very touched you came back after two years!! While I’m glad to hear that your older creeps are gone, it is infuriating that they have been replaced by others. I don’t think that it has anything to do with you as a person that you are targeted – could it be that you are just perceiving the creeps better than others?
It is hard to have your eyes opened by radical feminism for sure. Makes it impossible to gloss over male behaviour with the usual strategies of patriarchal women: Oh, it just was a joke, he didn’t mean it, he is just socially awkward, that was all in our heads etc.
For as long as there are men, there will be creeps. All we can do is at least build our own spaces to return to.
‘There must be something about me that makes these men desperately need me (all of the sudden, even though we are strangers), and wish to act out their desires/strange behavior with me’
It isn’t just you, and it is certainly not a failing on your part. Most men feel utterly entitled to women’s time and energy, even if we ARE strangers. I have noticed that older men are particularly creepy with it, younger men tend to aggressively demand, whereas older men have learnt to be more manipulative. What I have done is stopped being polite. Within safety parameters. of course, as most men consider rudeness for women worthy of punishment.
Reblogged this on keeva99.
This is amazing, thank you.
Thank you. Bothering with men is a waste of time. You can’t change them and even if a few of them are trustworthy, they shouldn’t be worshiped and made more important than women. I used to believe that men were only violent because of “socialization”. It is true that most men are raised to treat women like crap, but there is something else much deeper going on, as in biology. Not that that excuses them because men choose not to rape and kill when the risk is too high. I do not see the point in pleading with men to change. They know what they are like; just ask. Despite so many mothers having at least some feminist awareness/benefiting from feminism, they haven’t been able to raise harmless men.
As someone who has been in a university setting since 2008, I can say that they are definitely not matriarchal institutions. They were both into the sex pozzie and trans stuff so definitely not female-friendly.Yet both schools I’ve gone to have had more women than men. Of course, the other issue is that an average a woman needs a bachelor’s degree to make on average what a man with a high school degree has. High school is free; college isn’t.
“On the other hand, liberal women try to achieve their goals by appealing to men’s interests, e. g. when they declare that a ″liberated″ feminist is better in bed that those other prudes.”
That kind of stuff disgusts me. It’s like prostitution and like they believe they can fuck their way to freedom. It’s just gross. That quote sums up most of what is wrong with liberal feminism.
“Many liberal feminist suggestions aim in this direction, e. g. trying to make men not use pejorative language. As if a man who does not call them a bitch, a cunt, a whore or a dyke to their faces was somehow rendered incapable of thinking these things in his mind. (Personally, I prefer to be called names, because I instantly know whom never to turn my back to.)”
This is a great statement too! Honestly, it’s better if they say what they think so you know who to avoid and who is more dangerous. This is another reason I don’t support the Orwellian-language policing.
I second that point about language. I mean it’s what they spend all of their time on. All liberals are like that. First, it’s the attitude that the individual is a jerk as opposed to the society being sick. Secondly, it’s basically a defense of heterosexual fascism, ’cause you know, if the men behave better feminism wins and no more need be said about it! Thirdly, it’s an appalling waste of time. As opposed to looking inward and working on themselves so that they no longer have to be a part of the system or want to be, oh no stay a part of it and nag people into speaking differently. Genius.
I considered myself a liberal when I was in my teens and early 20s because I was involved in a lot of pro-choice activism and lightly involved in alphabet soup activism. I live in a conservative state so it took some time for insane tumblr logic to take over everything. Now I don’t consider myself a liberal.
Oddly enough, I’ve heard conservatism being associated with individualism, but liberals are also way into individualism. It’s like they think that if they can just nag everyone into never saying anything offensive things will magically get better. The so-called “anti-ableism” trend is a good example. The tumblrbrats really think they are helping people with disabilities or mental illness by screaming (or typing rather) at people who use offensive language. I don’t mean words like “retard” but words like “stupid” and “idiot”. (I can at least get why “retard” might be a little offensive, but picking fights over it online is such a loser thing to do.) Apparently people with disabilities are special snowflakes who need to be coddled 24/7, oh no wait that’s just tumblr liberals. I talked more about this specific language-policing in some comments at GenderTrender: https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2015/08/28/no-hunger-strike-for-conner-maccalister/#comment-59125
I agree with your second point too! Most of the women doing this are the types who will say, “we all love men, and so we know you can do better.” They even parrot this line to MRAs. Sorry, but the government is right: negotiating with terrorists is a bad idea. And speak for yourselves; I’m a lesbian and I say no to men. Making the men that het women want appear to behave better isn’t going to do jack shit for me. It’s actually really not going to help heterosexual women that much either, only trick them into thinking men can be trained to behave better.
Your final point is very true too!
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I’ve never read anything written by another person that says everything that I think so perfectly. I’m speechless. Thank you.
Thank you for stopping by and commenting!
Sperm banks would not even be needed. After the male die-off, a certain number of the remaining women would be pregnant. Of those women, a certain number would be pregnant with boys. Unless the die-off also included male embryos and fetuses.
Actually, we already male-free reproductive tech available. Look up the Kaguya method.
I am aware and available is a stretch – lab condition ins mice is nothing to change radical feminist analysis about.
I realize that this is a few years old, but I just have to say WOW.
This is a perfect piece of writing. All women should read this. Thank you.
Thank you very much!
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Reblogged this on RadFemSpiraling.
“You are a hateful lesbian hating man hater who is jealous of men and couldn’t get a man if you paid him you ugly fat disgusting crazy demented bitch …”
That is what men or men adoring like a god insecure females think of you or anyone else stating the truth…
or my FAVORITE… ” not my husband! … not my boyfriend!…not my son! (brother, whoever is the male in THEIR fantasy life)…they are not like this….not all men are like that…”
Dumb women who turn their backs on the truth are far more dangerous than any man in my opinion.
Good work by the way. It is a struggle for those of us who have always known the truth. I think we are either born knowing or see quickly in infancy or toddler or pre-teen times the truth – I don’t have much faith or others to come about it even with proof all around them at all times. I do not agree with all of your points, but I agree and applaud your general understanding of men and their “entitlements”. There are not race entitlements or whatever words some “liberals” like to throw around at the moment – there are and only has been ever been male entitlements in every single society where women are told to behave, look or do what men (or female followers) tell them or allow them to be…or in fact allow them to live. Sex slavery is getting larger all the time…male entitlements all because another was born with a vagina, their only crime.
Thanks for the article. It’s all true. If the right-wing bigoted ideas about homosexuality being a choice would have been true then IDK why any woman would want to remain straight.
Women want to be straight because it gives them at least relative privilege under patriarchy.
Absolutely. Straightness in women is a social construct. I’ve lost my desire for men completely since becoming a radfem.
Brilliant. Radical and brilliant.
Thank you, April!
Icemountainfire Hi, you mention, but do not give a link or example of, matriarchies and how males in matriarchies are also a menace. Can you give me more of this? I’m fascinated because until now it was my understanding that males are far better in matriarchies.
What a coincidence, that is something I’m researching right now! Here is a link to another post here on my blog, a review of a book by the most famous German (if not continental European) “matriarchal scholar”. The review contains, among other things:
– Info on how girls on matriarchal Palau are forced to have sex with all men in the mens’ house after their first bleeding and their father gets paid for it, while male politicians in Palau are only allowed to communicate through messenger to curb explosive aggression in negotiations
– A link to an Indian newspaper on how the matrilinear populations have a huge unaddressed problem with rape
– A list of very male raids that left children, old people and men dead while the young women were taken away by the raiders in the European allegedly matriarchal mesolithic and neolithic periods.
This link is about congress of matriarchal studies that happened 2005 in Switzerland (written in German). A Khasi woman (from the north east of India) told the European matriarchal scholars that men in her culture try to dodge matrilinear living by marrying outside the culture, that only a few rich clans have access to power and that they have big problems with “domestic” (read: male) violence and alcoholism. (The reaction of the European congress participants to her honesty was anger and feeling insulted.)
Nothing of this info was particularly hard to find when I researched for the review, so I believe if I put systematical effort in it, there is much to be found.
What a coincidence, that is something I’m researching right now! Here is a link to another post here on my blog, a review of a book by the most famous German (if not continental European) “matriarchal scholar”. The review contains, among other things:
– Info on how girls on matriarchal Palau are forced to have sex with all men in the mens’ house after their first bleeding and their father gets paid for it, while male politicians in Palau are only allowed to communicate through messenger to curb explosive aggression in negotiations
– A link to an Indian newspaper on how the matrilinear populations have a huge unaddressed problem with rape
– A list of very male raids that left children, old people and men dead while the young women were taken away by the raiders in the European allegedly matriarchal mesolithic and neolithic periods.
This link is about congress of matriarchal studies that happened 2005 in Switzerland (written in German). A Khasi woman (from the north east of India) told the European matriarchal scholars that men in her culture try to dodge matrilinear living by marrying outside the culture, that only a few rich clans have access to power and that they have big problems with “domestic” (read: male) violence and alcoholism. (The reaction of the European congress participants to her honesty was anger and feeling insulted.)
Nothing of this info was particularly hard to find when I researched for the review, so I believe if I put systematical effort in it, there is much to be found.
Males are inferior to females. And it’s just basic biology. I’m glad you mentioned their inferior Y chromosome. Men wants to RUIN us physically, psychologically, economically and I should say they does it very well. They use rape, violence of all kinds, sadomasochism and crap like that. And sadomasochism, just like rape makes me extremelly mad. It’s literally the same, the only difference is that it’s ,,consensual” and that they also torture women (the fact that there are dominant women makes no difference.) We should free our minds and bodies from males. We should have a right to well being. WE SHOULD HAVE A RIGHT TO BE INVIDUALS. This blog, just like Valerie Solanas ,,S.C.U.M Manifesto” is pure gold. Love it.
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Yup, men cannot change.Sexual liberation did nothing for us, besides giving men/patriarchy another thing to “conquer”. We should have just given up on them before it happened .
Some of us never tried with them, but chose women first.
Thanks for this. Your writing is brilliant. I no longer subscribe to the popular notion that men’s bad behavior can be chalked up entirely to socialization. I do think men are more violent by nature. After all, we’re mammals and in mammals, males are more violent than females.
Men will even tell you what they are. I remember watching a short clip on youtube years ago in which Gail Dines and another woman were debating with a couple of men about pornography. I wish I could find it again, but I can’t. Sorry about that. Anyway, one of the men said that men’s minds are full of horrors. The other man agreed with him, but both women strenuously argued against him. Well, who would know better than men what horrors their minds contain? We women don’t know and I think we make a mistake when we assume that they think like we do.
That is so true and so good to remind all women. Men know. They openly say how evil they are. On television, Michael Moore, who otherwise I appreciate in fighting classism and being proudly working class, said “We want to fuck everything in front of us.”
Women know too, but most will never admit it since they are so deeply invested in men and the privilege they get from them. Saying they are trying to help males change is just an excuse to explain their collaboration.
Wow, this blog is an absolute revelation. It feels so good to read something so eloquent that gives voice to feelings I’ve had buried for so long. Thank you for all you are doing x
thanks for writing this, i just found it. mind blown. thanks. im speechless right now.
Thank you, Monica!
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“Last year, there were two men prowling my neighbourhood and bashing in women’s heads from behind. One of them was 21 years old and used a crowbar in order to steal money and phones. The other one was 89 (!) years old and used a wooden meat hammer. ”
I do not carry a weapon outside, to defend myself towards those creeps, I’m way to small to impose any danger to anyone. But I carry one so I’ll be able to interfere when I witness a man assaulted a woman. We can no longer stand by and watch assault hapenning towards our kind.
I feel like you equate sexuality with gender and expression. How many times do I have to say this Genes! = gender and all expression is cultural.
Maybe you should try to think rather than “feel” for a change. Maybe then you would realise that the whole gender paradigm is bullshit. Also, who do you think you are, coming up to a perfect stranger to lecture them and start with “How many times do I have to say”? I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know why you think you have any authority to talk to me like that – or to talk on matters mentioned in my post, if my arguments so obviously are over your head.
Wow! This is so true. When I read this article it was amazing to see my thoughts spelled out like that. I guess I’m not really saying anything new here by making this comment, but I just wanted to show my appreciation for this article. It really makes me feel better to know that I’m not totally alone in thinking like this…
Thank you. I’ll love you all my life wholeheartedly for this article.
Thank you Sybilla!
I would dearly love to read this article aloud on my tiny Lesbian Separatist YouTube channel.
Your post is an important piece of work, and I have come back to it many times over the years. It fits in with a wider discussion we’ve been having lately, and you’ve stated the issues clearly and put the inescapable logic of the thing right out there for all to see.
May I have your permission to do so? (Obviously, no response would be a ‘No’, so no response is required on your part if you’re opposed.)
Many thanks for your work,
Jonquil Jones
Oh wow, thank you so much!
I looked at your channel and it is amazing!
Holy cow, thanks!!! That means the world to me, as I deeply respect our work.
I’ll put it up in the near future – will let you know when it’s there.