I’ve finally figured something out. That we’re not supposed to be angry against women, as in, our anger against women is purely manufactured by men. And if we are angry, we’re angry against the male colonisation in her, not really her, though what happens is that we confuse it with the woman and hit on her instead.
This ’embedded maleness’ or ‘incarnate male presence’ as Mary Daly called it, are insidious male ideologies that men have hammered into our psyche, like an anti-personnel landmine fastened inside us which explodes in contact of other women, so that women turn against us, instead of turning against men and feeling sorry or compassion for the pitiable state that men have put us in. The things the colonised woman does out of male colonisation are effectively unbearable, or even violent because embedded maleness will always externally discharge as token torturing of other women, since it’s set up as an inside dagger pointed against all women, including the woman colonised by it, because she’s a woman too. Therefore what we must always remember is that the landmine explosion is hurting the woman infiltrated by the landmine as much as women in her surroundings. Or to put in another way, it can’t fuck with my mind without it having already fucked up hers.
I knew that on an intellectual level you see, but somehow I didn’t apply it to all cases. I would get frustrated or really angry with some women because she would want to hurt me, she would be too alienated for me to be able to communicate with her, or she would talk or write in such a male bespoken or mindfucking way that it would drive me crazy. But instead of being angry against the maleness in her, I would be angry against her, in person. What it does on an interpersonal level is that I am endlessly angry against this woman and this anger has no limit at all either in time or depth. This is because woman hatred has no bottom to it. You might as well do it forever, the reason for this is because being angry against a woman doesn’t change anything to the situation, doesn’t unblock the lock or repair the tension, it’s like running endlessly on a hamster wheel and you can feel that it’s destroying you, too. This is fundamentally because the anger is misdirected. It’s completely the wrong target. You’re targeting the victim and there’s nothing she can do for that anger. It’s not the woman’s fault she’s behaving that way, it really isn’t, but the fault of men who buried their phallocratic presence into her head, it’s the fault of that crept-in phallocratic presence. She’s behaving as an automaton for men, as a vehicle for MALE violence; it doesn’t belong to her as a woman, it belongs only to men.
Being angry against a woman for her male-embedded behaviour is destructive because it’s based on misogyny and reversal of blame, which may ultimately lead to death, because misogyny is genocide of women and necrophilia. I’m saying that because I really do feel the death and dead-endedness of anger against women.
The changing factor was to stop seeing the shit coming from her. I suddenly had this image of my friend as her whole body strangled and tangled with barbed wire and the needles sinking into her skin. The only way for her to stop the harm she was doing was by realising what harm she had been put into herself, because only then would she understand why it’s harmful to others. So I should consider it as our common interest to exorcise her from that entrapment. And it IS our common interest as women, because there’s no liberation if she doesn’t free herself from that black blob or the barbed wire. She’ll continue to harm other women and harm herself. She should better figure out how to break that evil spell on her, for instance by naming what that behaviour is, what it does, where it comes from, that it isn’t her self acting but a persona acting on behalf of men, and try to decolonise from it, break the mechanism down and get rid of it – or ‘exorcise’ it, which is a term Mary Daly used.
Before you’re all up in arms against me for saying that we should embrace token torturers and antifeminists as our best friends, that’s really not what I’m saying. What I’m suggesting is a way of understanding our own anger against any women and how we react to other women’s embedded maleness (in ANY form), what is our disposition to it so that we don’t let that blob fulfil its purpose of destroying ourselves and wreaking havoc between women, between me and her. It’s a way of cracking the blob’s soul-killing projectiles, of neutralising its deadliness. It can be with women we don’t know and whom we’ll never get to know, or with women we know and are close to, the workings are the same. It may not imply interacting with her if you don’t want to and if it’s unsafe or abusive for you to do so then it’s best to run away fast, but at least having that understanding preserves from self-destroying in pointless rage against her.
So what it means as well from an ethical standpoint is that it’s possible to consider a woman responsible for her actions in the sense that she’s the one doing it and she only has the responsibility and moral obligation to stop doing it – and at the same time see that it’s not her own agency and integrity acting because she’s been implanted with this horrible man-made self-destruction weapon inside her, telling her to go against her own interest, her own good and the good of her own kind: women.
See, this principle works with women only because women have a default humanity underneath the male layers of shit, and only women can be colonised by maleness / male violence. Women aren’t natural mindfuckers, we are born integral and healthy, or this is the way we are meant to be at least. We become more like men because we are forced to assimilate to them through violence and trauma which turns us into a sort of victim mirror image to them. But this isn’t how we would normally be. Men obviously can’t be colonised by maleness because men already *are* men, they *are* the male colonisers. It’s not only false but really dangerous to project our being and experience of oppression onto our oppressors, to apply the same kind of understanding with men because it keeps us exposed to their violence without the man or men ever changing for the good: it will only make them worse in fact, because men knowing exactly what you think of them and you intend to do increases their lethality.
Also I’m not saying it’s easy not to be angry against women, because women are the most hated, downtrodden, debased and blamed people on earth, despising and being angry with women in this context is the easiest thing to do.
oh and another thing, I’m not implying either that I’m not colonised or above anyone else. As a matter of fact all women are colonised, to different degrees, this is inevitable since we can’t escape men’s violence entirely, or the threat of it, and colonisation is exercised through violence. Decolonisation or exorcism is a constant process and requires persistence over time (something Mary Daly said in pure lust, too). There’s no one moment, so long as men are still there and patriarchy is still there, where we can pause and think “oh well I’ve got it all now, all I’ve got to do now do is free other women!”. It’s more than “getting it all”, it’s about constant transformation of your life and relationships/bonding with women in ways that you would never have achieved just the day or week before.
This is why consciousness raising is so important to our liberation because decolonisation, the act of rejecting men and the embedded maleness in our selves (internalised violence, internalised hatred, fragmentation of the mind and personality, etc.) requires becoming aware of what we’re decolonising from. And the very purpose of men’s psychic colonisation is to destroy our awareness of men’s embedded violence and push that awareness into the unconscious memory, the traumatic memory, through violence and constant reversals and erasure.
so consciousness raising is also a work of memorising, re-membering, that is, mending the broken parts and splintered selves / putting back together and reintegrating all those multiple personalities we were forced to cut ourselves into to survive ongoing repression, revealing lost memory back to our consciousness …
Thank you for writing this. It has always been very easy for me to be angry at women and I think that one of my first steps into feminism was to learn to empathize with women around me, I thought that in order to make sisterhood real I needed to be benevolent, to understand while welcoming with open arms even the most anti-feminist women because they are my sisters and I love them. But then the more feminist I became the easier it was for me to identify the problem (= male violence/male intrusions/parasitism) and to identify a violence when I see one. This made me feel angry at women again even if I know that women are not evil by essence but only reproduce male violence, I need to tell myself constantly that every time I feel a woman is toxic : 1- It is not HER but THEM in her. 2- I am not supposed to just ignore the harm she (they) is (are) causing because “sisterhood”.
Your article is very illuminating, but I think that to sum up the relation that we could have with colonized +or- dangerous women, we would couple this post of yours to that other one : https://witchwind.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/radical-feminist-you-say-2/
I’m glad I never had much of a problem with this. I just keep in mind to name the agent which is men when women speak from a male identified place. I just feel bad for them.
Oh hi, nice to see you back! yes indeed it’s very important never to put up with violence or toxicity in the name of feminism, solidarity to all women or sisterhood, because we’re just going to be hurt and destroyed by it, which will be of no help to me/you or anyone else. I didn’t dwell on that point too much because I talked about it at length in that ‘radical feminist you say‘ post so didn’t think it was necessary to ramble / repeat myself. So thanks for putting the link back up here!
As Germaine Greer put it, “… every girl child is conceived as a whole woman but from the time of her birth to her death she is progressively disabled. A woman’s first duty to herself is to survive this process, then recognize it, then to take measures to defend herself against it.”
Gendering reduces Girls’ humanity, it recreates her in the image and behavior desired by men. It ensures her womanhood will be occupied and colonized by men.
Save yourself first, open your eyes. Then take steps to put the sex class of women first in all you do. All women: all races, ages, abilities, sexual orientations, religions, ethnicities, nationalities. None of us are free until all of us are free. Put women first. Ask other women to do the same. Sometimes, all you have to do is ask.
Also, it’s easier to see things better and be less affected by a woman’s anti-womanness when you’re not emotionally dependent on her, dependent on her in any way in fact, forced to interact with her for work or projects ot whatever, when you can choose not to see her for a while without problem.