I haven’t been writing in a while, and it’s not because I don’t like writing any more but things have accelerated elsewhere in my life and I can’t be involved everywhere at once. As this isn’t paid work, obviously I can’t afford to put blogging first.
Anyway, there are still many posts waiting to be finished. In the meantime, I’ll start another one.
I often muse about all the things that we’d need to change about patriarchy if we abolished men’s rule over women and the earth. Everything and every single aspect of social organisation is so much the opposite of how it should be, it’s dizzying to even begin to think about all the things we should stop / change.
Mostly it’s about men stopping from doing harm. But stopping men isn’t enough because beyond that there is the entire world to relearn, to heal, and our entire society to rebuild. We would be faced with the immense task of replacing all the misogynist, genocidal, biocidal practices men have ordered our society with for eons. So many of us now are acculturated, cut from land, nature and from one another.
If we managed to overcome men’s tyranny over us, how would we rebuild our world? I just want to throw some ideas here that I often come across these days. I dream for concrete, down-to-earth, simple and easily applicable measures of stepping out of patriarchy into a female-loving, biophilic world. This isn’t by any means a realistic plan of how to achieve it, but just reading it makes me feel happy. It makes it feel more real, more possible. Enjoy!
SOCIAL STRUCTURES
Men’s position in society
Before we do anything, the very first measure to adopt is to take all men out of all positions of decision-making immediately, and actually out of any kind of social, professional position whatsoever.
Major serial killers, serial torturers, pimps, pornographers, severe domestic abusers, serial rapists, genocide planners, biocide planners and pedocriminals across the world will simply be euthanised: the decisions will be taken by women in a mass world tribunal for patriarchal crimes. This is by far the best solution, and is the most legitimate, ethical way of reducing male population to more reasonable levels. Such men would otherwise forever pose a threat to women, children, animals, the earth and society as a whole, and we know they have no chance of ceasing their violent behaviour after having reached such an advanced stage of sadism and sociopathy. It would be reckless to spend space, resources and energy in keeping them alive in prisons.
All of men’s (alive and euthanised) belongings, property, resources and land will be confiscated from men and handed back to female care and supervision – property rights over land will be abolished. You can’t own land!
All men at least above 15 (or younger if very asocial) should live separately from women and children, on their own in small huts or studios, isolated from one another and scattered around so that women can keep an eye on them (they should never be in groups or packs, that would be illegal). So it would also be illegal for male adults to impose their presence on females, girls and children. Men would have to care for themselves on their own: food, laundry, etc. No male above his age of puberty would be allowed to receive any kind of service from a female. Their life expectancy would probably drop to the age of 40, but that’s how things should be. Women’s life expectancy without men would rise to 130 years at least.
PIV would be illegal too of course, as well as the initiation of any verbal or physical contact to women and girls or boy children, unless solicited by a woman for specific matters. I’m not sure what to do about boy children. Obviously you know my opinion, but let’s say that’s up to the mother to decide what she wants to do before he turns of age to leave the female family circle.
In order to keep all men and post-pubescent boys busy, we’d send them to clean up the vast amounts of detritus, pollution and toxic wastes men have littered and almost killed the world with. Much of the damage to the earth is irreversible, however with a great deal of effort and genius, women will find sustainable, natural and simple ways of healing a lot of the damage men have caused, and send men off to do the dirty work. No man will be allowed to take any decision without female guidance. We know what happens when men decide on their own! DISASTER.
Family, child-raising and reproduction
Fathers’ rights will cease to exist. There is no such thing as fatherhood — as we all know, it’s a myth. Men will necessarily lose all and any power to dominate and control women’s reproductive capacities.
It’s the inalienable right of each woman to control every phase of her reproduction and life creation. Abortion will be possible at any stage of pregnancy, however there will hardly be such a thing as undesired pregnancy since there won’t be any men forcing pregnancies on us any more. Abortion will nonetheless be recognised for the trauma, mutilation and loss of life that it is. The number of children and human population will naturally decrease to sustainable levels, so will the number of males born. Women will be free to experiment parthenogenesis or procreation with two female eggs.
The nuclear family will be abolished, in particular the parent’s property rights and absolute power over her child. Children will be considered as persons in need for autonomy and all form of punishment, authority or educational manipulation over children will equally be abolished. Raising and caring for children will be a collective responsibility for women, and motherhood / childcare and especially capacity to be empathetic towards children will be taken very seriously, as something that needs to be (re)learned and studied over years before being fully competent for this immense task.
Schools as we know them as punitive reclusion centres for grooming into male domination and female subordination (as well as selection system for elite executors of patriarchal institutions) will be abolished. Boys would definitely not be around the girls, certainly not most of the time, and never beyond the age of puberty. And obviously no adult male would be allowed near children.
There will be no such thing as “teachers” with positions of authority over children. “Guiders” could learn also from the children or students as much the students from them. We’d learn anything we’d want from languages to sciences to art to music to medicine to building to witchcraft to swimming (etc) without restriction of age or time, as long as it’s adapted to our capacities, level and availability. Learning would be autonomous, with guidance when needed, instead of enforced and dictated. They’d be no need for external reward, marking or punishment because the process of learning in itself is so rewarding and fascinating that it’s self-sufficient. Anyway I could go on and on, non-patriarchal learning is truly riveting.
Social structures between women.
All relationships of authority, domination and subordination will be abolished between all women of all ages. We will be able to recognise each other’s strengths, expertise, guidance and capacities (or lack of) without it implying superiority, inferiority, veneration or lack of respect. We would find each other beautiful. We would live our friendships, love and affection for women unhindered.
MEN’S INSTITUTIONS
All oppressive male institutions will be abolished after men have been retrieved from them. We obviously won’t keep these institutions. They will return to the nothingness that they belong, just as a distant, bad memory.
Military:
No more military, no more army, no more wars! It would be illegal for men to hold weapons. Global peace would be the immediate consequence. Most weapons will be destroyed (or recycled into something else), such as weapons of mass destruction, anti-personnel mines, tanks, machine guns, all manners of terrestrial, marine and air-bombers, and all the many disgusting things men have invented. For the remaining weapons such as guns or blades, women will hold exclusive right of use over them in order to defend ourselves from men, from the risk of them taking power over us again.
State:
States, borders, nations, laws would be abolished and totally dispensed with. Laws mentioning the number of prohibited acts will be kept for men only. Women do not need laws to contain ourselves. Laws were created by the male elite to protect their property from other men. Laws are rigid and static, that’s because their purpose is to hold existing patriarchal powers in place. Our own society would be in constant evolution, improvement, creative renewal, yet grounded in reality and adapted to our needs and circumstances.
Women would be able to move freely.
Societal structures and decision-making assemblies wouldn’t exceed roughly 300 women (representing no more than themselves). Keeping numbers low for cooperation is important because the greater the size of the unit, the more horizontal cooperation becomes difficult and requires vertical hierarchy. Possibilities for peaceful, cooperative organisation between women are infinite – as long as they respect the individual integrity of every female – the group should never weigh over the individual but be a source for support and efficient organisation of collective life and space. There could easily be associations of exchange between different groups and peoples in order for women to cooperate regionally and globally where necessary. There would be no limit in age of participation in decision-making for women and girls, which means adapting the format to different ages and capacities.
Medicine:
Men would be permanently banned from any kind of medical practice. All woman-hating, genocidal institutions such as gynecology, psychiatry, obstetrics, big pharma, the torture of living beings in the name of “scientific experimentation” will be banned. Men’s fragmented, objectifying, sadistic view the human body will be part of history, replaced by biophilic medicine. Medical science will no longer be monopolised by a small elite but available to all at any age where appropriate. The (female) doctor’s role will be to guide the patient in her own healing, never to exercise authority over her or take decisions at her expense. Special healing spaces (where surgery is necessary, etc) will be so nice, warm and welcoming that just being there will make you feel better. The soul and life conditions of a person will always be considered part of the body, and symptoms will always be understood in a holistic way. There will be no more chemical, synthetic and toxic products with often worse side effects than the illness itself it claims to heal.
Perfect health would be the normal state of women anyway, as we will learn by experience and observation what we should eat and do to stay healthy at all seasons and times. Most women will have rediscovered our healing, divination and extra-sensory communication powers.
Religion:
Patriarchal religions will crumble down with men’s oppressive system. Religious ideologies, along with its hierarchies and vacuous rituals will cease to exist. I believe a woman’s world would be spiritual. Spiritual connection isn’t based on faith but on critical observation and experience, on a real personal connection to the elements, beings and spirits that surround us, and on the real magnetic power of beings.
Economy (tied to ecology):
Obviously, Slavery, men’s exploitation of women, men’s capitalist systems will be abolished too. The most important aspect of male economy is that it’s based on men’s competitive accumulation of resources (by killing, destroying, commodifying, taking control over, extracting the greatest possible amount of life) and based on production of poisonous, addictive, programmed obsolescent goods — in order to win the patriarchal game of achieving greater domination over women and girls.
This necrophilic relationship to the world and the environment will be abolished, to be replaced by biophilic ecological and economic principles. This will encompass every single process of our life activities, from house building, to food consumption, to communication, travelling, furniture making, cooking, etc. They will have to be carefully designed and thought out in a way as to never endanger the survival of any species, never pollute any environment, never require the use of poisonous, non-recyclable materials, never to require indentured labour or exploitation in order to be maintained. This would obviously impact the nature and scale of our activities. “Work” (exploitation and division of labour) as we know it would disappear. It would be the responsibility of each individual or group to sustain herself more or less autonomously.
We should learn to observe our environment and deeply understand the interconnectedness of all beings around us, as well our own impact before deciding whether or how to transform it. Our lives have no more or no less value than those of a rabbit, fly, tree, plant, fish, seashell or stone. For instance, if we pick leaves of some plants, it’s important not to rip the whole plant off, to take only parts of it so it can grow again. Or to only take a few plants (or seashells, whatever) where there are many, so to respect the survival of the species where it is settled. If we cut trees to build our house, replant them. There are also infinite ways of making the most of materials for energy, food or production while using it as efficiently as possible. Building houses in ways that don’t require heating in winter or cooling in the summer. It is now widely known that energy such as electricity can be infinitely renewable if we use wind power, magnetic power, water power… And everything can be made DIY.
We will learn to be autonomous again and make our own clothes, food, furniture, houses, soaps, detergent products – or maybe someone else will make them but most things can be handmade and it’s so much more rewarding.
In a biophilic world, nothing is garbage, nothing is pollution. Everything is conceived so as to be part of a life cycle. This doesn’t mean we should keep the same toothbrush for 50 years or never improve on our machines, technology and infrastructure, but there’s no such thing as a dump, or toxic spilling. All materials should be harmless, recyclable or biodegradable, given back the earth if we no longer need them.
Industrial agriculture and farming:
Genetic modification of plants, pesticides, monoculture, field ploughing and consequent aridification of the land will be considered criminal. Our right to self-sustenance would no more be confiscated by mega food corporations – as they will no longer exist.
Agriculture should always be small-scale, local, and as much as possible be modelled on wildlife, self-growing / self-renewing conditions (the less work and intervention, the better), and especially be conceived so as to nourish and sustain rather than deplete wildlife and environmental balance. Again, possibilities are infinite, we have so much to learn.
And seriously, killing animals you’ve raised yourself in a farm or keeping animals enclosed is cruel. I’m for the liberation of all farm and domestic animals. It’s up to them to decide whether they want to live with us or not, and they should be able to come and go freely. Maybe after a few decades, after the human population has stalled, male population has decreased, and after we’ve made serious efforts for reforestation and restoration of wildlife on the earth, it would probably be fairer to hunt animals occasionally. Right now, given the extinction rate of animal species, I find it criminal to hunt or fish. We don’t need to eat that much meat anyway.
****
This post is already too long!
I hope you got the point of it though. It isn’t so much as dictating what women should do but establishing basic principles of respect of life and female integrity along which we can devise an infinite number of possibilities.
radical wind 
“Men would have to care for themselves on their own: food, laundry, etc. No male above his age of puberty would be allowed to receive any kind of service from a female. ”
This part struck me in the following way: If you want many, many women, worldwide, to rise up and support a revolution, just tell them that this is central to the plan. It doesn’t sound as radical as many of the other things you mention, but I suspect that at some level the majority of women who do this now would feel so free if just this one thing changed in their lives.
I remember as a fairly young girl having to fetch things for my father so he didn’t have to move from his chair in the living room. My brothers were not expected to do this (unless my mother or I was not around). Or being expected by my father to help my mother with the work, while my brothers just played, sat around. Many women in my culture (U.S) may have the experience, once grown, of attending a family holiday like Thanksgiving and have the women do all the kitchen work, cooking, child watching, etc. while the men just loll around watching sports or just horsing around with one another like kids. The enlightened ones bring set up the folding chairs from the garage for extra seating. Or carve the turkey as their glorious contribution. A symbol of male control of the food. Disgusting really.
It is such a drain on women’s resources to take care of males as if they were babies who are not capable of self-care. Married women with young children often say that their husbands are just like another child, often worse.
Second idea: The men who are most responsible/benefited the most from damage to the earth need to be put on “ground level” cleanup details to partially ameliorate the results of their damage. The debt to the earth needs to be repaid and repaired as much as possible. A man who got rich from destroying the environment directly would be held more responsible. Lesser cleanup would be by those who less directly benefited. Those men who invested in the worst industries, the more invested, the heavier the payback responsibility. A payback system could be calculated. Fair and practical.
I agree that payback should be enforced according to degree of harm incurred. But really, the most violent ones are to be dispensed with completely, we just don’t want them around at all. The less violent ones may stay alive and clean up the mess. Harsher payback could be dealing with extremely toxic and carcinogenic or radioactive material. Lesser payback, sorting out the mountains of dumps men have planted around the world, particularly in developing countries.
Women will get to do the nice things such as reforestation, reintroduction of animals into the wild, taking care wild animals affected by pollution, etc. This is a huge responsibility and requires lots of empathy, thinking at different levels, lots of observation and genius. No woman would leave this responsibility to a man.
Yeah, every girl and woman has experience of serving men, that’s how we learn the concrete reality of being forced to serve men! However I hate comparing men to babies because it’s a reversal. Men aren’t babies but oppressors: this is what oppressors do, they’re dependent on their subordinates for the work they steal from them – and they have the material means to enforce that, if women don’t comply, there is some form of repression or another, or at the very least, threat of it.
By contrast the dependence of babies on mothers is vital for their survival, and babies are themselves oppressed by their parents – they have no power to enforce adequate care from their parents whatsoever, they’re literally at the mercy of their parents (carers). Fathers can inflict whatever they want on their children in total impunity. And men’s child abuse, especially girl abuse is as bad as men’s abuse against women.
It’s really striking to see how universal this experience is: looking at your brothers and fathers sit on the sofa while women (and yourself) cook, wash, clean, hurry around working endlessly.
Something else I was going to comment about is that I haven’t mentioned the gift economy in my post because it was getting too long, also because I wonder what women would actually do about money. It’s obvious we’d reject all the male oppressive powers and statuses related to owning money in patriarchy, however I wonder whether it can be reused at all in horizontal, feminist conditions. Sonia Johnson talked about the gift economy which she read from another woman whose name I forgot. I find the idea amazing, but I think Cherry also mentioned that international exchange between peoples might have first been invented by women, and it’s true that the international (or regional) exchange of goods between women sounds wonderful. We allow other women to discover our products and specialties and vice versa.
It is always Good to read and Think about they way things Should Be, meaning the way they Would Be if men had not ruined everything and made it their Stock In Trade to Counter, Thwart, Pervert, Subvert and Obscenely Gesture toward Nature and Natural Law over thousands of years. I find myself Imagining this more and more. I do find the details to be Troubling however in that the World we are left with is so Damaged, and the People are so Damaged that thinking about Fixing everything is Thought Terminating and even obscene as it would include Violence against males in self defense, and the violence inherent to “enforcement” of laws, even ones that make sense, like these do. This makes it Difficult to think and definitely to Talk about, both in private and (perhaps especially) in public. The very use of the Word “Euthanasia” in this context is enough to bring about the Wrath of every male on the Planet, even the Good Ones (NTE activists) who talk about Suiciding themselves, amongst themselves, in the face of the End Times due to global climate change which they themselves have caused. Even though they Know they deserve it, and would do it to themselves anyway, once they realize you are talking about Them and that you do not buy their Good Guy Act, their misogynistic rage comes out. It is therefore Refreshing to hear it, and to see it and read it in public or in private.
Since you brought up Euthanasia, I would also bring up the Plague, and natural solutions to this devastating Overpopulation that men have caused and continue to cause by sticking their dicks into Women – this includes NTE activists obviously. Besides women Killing men, completely regardless to whether they deserve it (of course they do) or whether an uprising of this sort would adhere to natural law (it probably would, although our reluctance or aversion to actually doing it may have roots in our own natures) there are other ways that a Female Majority world might eventually happen. I would say that it is even Probable at this point, that Either we will end up with a Female Majority globally, Or there will be no further human population at all. And that would be a Natural remedy such as Plague (which we are seeing at the moment) and even Global Climate Change itself which could wipe out huge swaths of population with no assistance from women necessary. I have seen anecdotal evidence of Ebola being more fatal to males for example, where a husband and wife are both infected and the wife survives where the husband dies (notably I have not seen Official or Organized data of Ebola fatalities by sex). If more females than males are infected in the first place because of the female caretaking role, females refusing to Serve males in this way would help that and is more under our control, perhaps, than just killing them outright. In the case of global climate change, we have already discussed how male fetuses (but not female) seem especially vulnerable to environmental pollutants, and are spontaneously aborted/miscarried.
These are the things that Sustain me to be perfectly Honest about it. It seems that it will be a given at this Point, and that Natural law is poised to take over, or is taking over. In the Big Picture, it could be no other Way. This is where I start thinking about Women’s World, not with Euthanasia and females enforcing laws on males who would only resent us for it, even though it’s right. But even then, there will be a Transitional period which will be dangerous and Uncertain. Putting some Order to that, and thinking about it Now (as you are doing here) is only Good Sense. Thank you for this Post.
Hi, yes well I purposefully didn’t talk about the transition because I find it thought terminating and we keep going round and round like a gold fish in a glass bowl. We don’t know how things will change, in whose favour things will end. What we do know for certain is that patriarchy will end, it will collapse, but we don’t know the outcome. Maybe some women already know because they have special intuitive powers.
I think it’s fine to talk of euthanisia. Some countries have already made it legal for criminals to euthanise apparently. Death penalty is still legal in many countries. It’s not like I’m saying anything controversial about euthanising criminals. Who would disagree that pedocriminals, serial rapists, pimps, severe domestic male abusers and genocide planners are criminals? It’s a clinical, statistical fact that male criminals don’t change their behaviour, that they chronically reoffend after being released. We’re talking about criminals widely recognised as such, not regular, garden-variety male oppressors.
What a thought, what a world that will be!
I will say that not everyone wants to DIY, and there is stil value in groups organized to create needed goods, and to properly install and maintain these things. While much of modern needs and wants will disappear, many are like me in the desire to retain the best of modern life. This can be done in a way that’s not exploitive.
An example is electricity. The means of power creation would be much simpler, and would no longer rely on a central plant, which is wasteful and destructive. Distributed generation among a collective or neighborhood is a good way to ensure all are secured and served fairly. individual power would also be useful, depending on the situation.
There are many ways to run companies/collectives in a way that is not harmful or oppressive. Most of these are unknown to the public, but are a great answer to the need for some goods and services. A commonly known solution is the co-op, and also the employee/worker owned business. There are a myriad of ways to organize these in a way that benefits all. I have buikt one, and the resukts were great.
Business does not have to be a hierarchical, exploitive, nightmare. At its core, it is simply a system of trade, and can work well if kept simple. Everyone has different talents, and desires, and it is much more liberating to spend the days pursuing what you love, what will help your sisters, than doing things you have no interest in. I would hate to have to self sustain as far as growing all my food, making clothes, etc. Let those that love these things contribute them, and people can contribute what they can do. Kept on a small scLe, this can work to provide needs that require many organized people.
Another form of commerce and group living I have seen work well is the kibbutz. Groups of people self select, and start self sustaining collectives. Often, each kibbutz will speacialize in a particular thing, like growing things, offering spa services, or construction trade work. This is their offeri.g to larger society, other kibbutz groups, and they also take care of the basics in each group (care of the elderly or injured, car of children, my h of the food for the group, and all chores that go with living. Its great when the group is committed.
Envisioning these things without domiination, or exploitivs resource extraction., is something that makes me feel optimistic. Just because many ways of doingtings have been created, or perverted, to exploit others, does not mean they arent useful when in the hands of sisters. I can see a world where we are freed to follow or talents, and enjoy the love, and pride that commes from a community that cares for each other.
I would love to see a world where no woman or child willenever go without food, housing, time for contemptlation and personal hobbies, love, health care, and a co.infection to nature. I wouldn’t want suffering of any kind, if it’s avoidable.
Thanks for this post, it gives me something to ponder.
By the way, my blog has just exceeded a million viewers by 30,000. it’s been a bit more than a year now I think? I wonder why I don’t feel like celebrating it!
Hi RSM, I’ve never seen you here before, thanks for de-lurking or popping in!
As I said, and as you said, possibilities for horizontal, peaceful cooperation are infinite, and we have so much to learn still. I’m certainly not for going back to stone age model. There are many ways of ensuring access to electricity for instance in very local / autonomous ways. I do know it’s possible to organise and work together without domination, but in the current conditions it’s very difficult to find women with whom to work (even though it’s possible) for many different reasons, major ones being so few women have more material freedom to invest in such projects and lesser degree of colonisation by men. I haven’t gotten into the details of this because it would be a 20,000 word essay! There are so many different aspects to non-violent, respectful organising, and even more if we take into account previous trauma, our need to heal from the battering and crushing of our souls.
And of course you wouldn’t have to make your own clothes if you didn’t want to! However I do find it really empowering to learn how to do all these things by yourself again. However in terms of food, I do think it’s important that women do their own food, just as we’d expects adults to clean for themselves. Growing food really isn’t that difficult, and there are plenty of ways of making it super easy, for instance focusing on fruits that grow annually, gathering plants here and there, and buying or receiving a few others from friends etc. In an ideal female world there would be no scarcity, only abundance, and we’d always be able to find solutions for the things that we need and don’t have.
Anyway, so glad this post gave you food for thought, and made you feel optimistic! It made me feel optimistic to write it too 🙂 It really does help to focus on the things we’d do, assuming the ‘transition’ has already been completed. What if it were possible in some ways?
Thank you for your Response, I had read the Euthanasia part as being a solution to the Pedocriminals and other males we already have? But if you are saying that we would have New Pedocriminal Males with whom to deal even in Women’s World, I suppose you would not be wrong about that. If we believe that this is Basically men’s nature to be Necrophilic accumulators and destroyers, then this will not stop as long as there are males. You envision Women still having to deal with them. I do not, but now that you Mention it, I am not sure how I (or We) Got There. Perhaps it is Intuitive as you say, but for whatever reason, I do not think this will be an issue. Somehow, in my vision, there would be Zero proximity to males, and this is how we would “deal” with the issues of Male Necrophiliacs and Pedocriminals. Along with the severe decline in male population to begin with, we would Prevent them from ever having Victims to act upon. Perhaps if it happened anyway, the women would just kill them, easier than swatting a bug that is biting you. This would not even be considered Violence and there would be no ripple effect or social consequences at all for this. There would be no Laws, and no Tribunals, and no Female energy expenditure around policing males at all. To me, to do otherewise seems Transitional, but I am glad that you clarified that for you, it is not. It makes me more Aware of where my own Vision begins and ends, although I am fairly certain it was You who sparked these Thoughts in me in the first place, of not Expending female Energy on policing males. I thought it was an excellent and necessary point.
I love to think of ways to make positive change, w. There are things we can do today that will form a base for more action in the future. They can be transitional or be perfected for use post patriarchy.t sarting from scratch will makeus overwhelmed,and we do.not need to be. Even though it’s hard to imagine a world without patriarchy, it isn’t impossible to.envision and create the building blocks.
As in my other post, I mentioned there exist ways of organizing that can be adapted to our needs. Why not work together to make neighborhoods, kibbutz, or businesses to serve our needs? (I use these male terms, like business and industry, because they are descriptive, Though problematic.. We will need to improve them. These groups can allow us to create the materials we will need- if men make all of our goods, how will we be able to get enough for ourselves? l of these organizations will be able to.communicate with each other politically. They can also brin.g women not radical or feminist, and shoe w them another way exist
And this is why our women only spaces are under attack.
Hi. Witchwind. I have offtop, so don’t need opening my comment.
If you remember I asked you about translating some posts – Its done,
Five parts of your intersectionality serial are available at our radfem website after renovation.
http://womenation.org/cutting-through-the-throes-of-intersectionality-1/
http://womenation.org/cutting-through-the-throes-of-intersectionality-part-ii-on-the-structure-of-mens-interlocking-chains/
http://womenation.org/intersectionality-continued-part-iii-reintroducing-the-start/
http://womenation.org/intersectionality-part-iv-attractive-vs-destructive-forces-or-what-can-we-do/
http://womenation.org/cutting-through-intersectionality-5/
And some other posts, translated by other girl.
Thank you again.
In other words, based on your previous Work, I would not expect that you would envision laws and tribunals, or Females expending energy on policing males at all. And that this certainly would not be part of a Utopia, but something quite short of it. I do apologize if I have misread you, or misunderstood your Point.
I envision things post patriarchy as Unfolding and Happening Naturally. Again, in a big-picture sense, this is in fact the only way it could be, although it somewhat alleviates my Anxiety to try to Think It Through beforehand. But in some ways it makes it Worse, if that makes sense. Because there is little chance that we will be able to Predict exactly how the chips will fall. I think it will be Touch and Go for awhile as far as survival in the elements goes, but post Male Rule I envision freedom, and Peace. Even if we all starve or freeze to death, there will be no fear of Rape. This would be Utopia to me. In addition to joy, jubilation, and leisure, it will probably include some pain, suffering and a natural death, but not Torture, as Nature does not Torture the way men do. Freedom from Torture and freedom from threat of torture by men will be Utopia for women. Beyond that, the only thing I imagine is that women will survive, and/or die natural deaths (meaning cause and effect, following natural laws of gravity and temperature for example, but Notably without sadism or torture). I would like to try to flesh this out with details, as I think this is what you are asking for.
I think doing what comes “naturally” to us will be the key to our Surviving because women, free from Male influence, but even fully under male control and brutality as well, which is interesting, fairly competently intuit what to do and what not to do in order to survive. We have yet to really Thrive of course, but this is not our fault. Making sure we do not Legislate away our ability or responsibility to intuit will be important, so I agree that very small groups or even one or two person groups that move freely among other small groups will be important so that Generalities and Edicts never overshadow our Individual survival skills, or intuition. I do look forward to reading more comments on this Subject.
Good point about the men as babies being a reversal. I never thought of it that way. Also, I agree with doing away with criminal sociopaths, etc. Often these are con artists who get out of prison by conning others and do terrible damage again. But the others who are most responsible should take the most dangerous jobs in cleanup. Both these things seem practical and fair.
Re: social organisation, I think women can come up with many different ways to do this, depending on the group. I also think women can come up with fair methods of exchange of goods, etc. I used to think a lot about different forms of governing/economies and which would be ideal. The answer always was that any of the forms can be subverted by people (men) acting in bad faith. All the forms we’ve seen are forms of patriarchy or are hampered by patriarchy.
I trust small groups of women to come up with something good. Without the yoke of patriarchy, creativity and invention will go in lots of directions. Women from different cultures, in different environments, etc will have diverse ideas that will grow and change over time. Ways of healing the earth is something that women will be able to share. Some kinds of healing are specific to place. Groups of women would be responsible for different places. This is different from owning land. In the current system there were groups of women who wanted to own land to preserve it and make it safe. Of course, encroachment always interfered with this.
First of all, LOL at Tracy’s “these are the things that Sustain me”
Wordwoman, It’s funny you mention that the men most responsible for destruction should be responsible for clean up,because the other day I was reading about the Fukushima clean-up operations and about how they literally rounded up a load of homeless people off the street and got them to go in and flush the reactors with water. I’m not sure if women were part of that clean-up group (wouldn’t be surprised) but suffice it to say many died shortly afterwards. The men who owned and built the nuclear plant and the government people who okay-ed its existence were sat safe at home.
Most men would die of simply being forced to cooperate with others and not be kings of their little fiefdom at home. We wouldn’t have to DO anything at all. We’d just have to STOP caring about them, as you point out. A case in point: my father in law.
I recently moved in with my in-laws and it has been an eye-opener. My mother in law serves him fresh vegetables and fish every single day. She cooks him three meals a day. You might think cereal or toast suffices for breakfast but you would be wrong. Apparently you need a wife that gets up at th crack of dawn to make an array of different healthful dishes for you. As soon as she finishes cleaning the breakfast things, she begins on preparing the lunch. At 3:30 she begins preparing the evening meal, which can take four hours or longer depending on the meal.
This is how you keep a man alive way WAY past the time he was actually supposed to pop his clogs. Seeing is believing. He can’t do a single thing for himself, and yet he lives on, terrorizing his wife and any other women that happen to cross his path. By rights he should be in a nursing home. A woman who did literally nothing would be put in a mental asylum, or nursing home. Not men though. It wouldn’t be so bad if he was modest about his obvious lack of capability, his inqdequacy, but on the contrary, he calls his wife to serve him, as though she were a dog, and she SHUFFLES around after him. I feel like shooting myself because of what I have to witness each day.
Gah, he needs to just do the right thing and DIE already and set her free FGS!
Hi Tracy,
Thanks for pointing that out, I have previously said that laws and such to contain men’s violence is a drain on our energies, you didn’t misread. I still think it’s the case. I thought it’d be a necessary evil for some time though because I certainly don’t want women to clean up the toxic wastes men have spilled everywhere. There are limits to what I can say here, and certain contradictions are apparent because of this. I still liked the idea of some men doing the dirty work. Maybe consider this stage as a post-transition transitional stage 😛
However, yes, natural unfolding towards peaceful, cooperative, sustainable, biophilic and woman-loving, woman-centred societies is how I dream things to be. This is why we don’t need to think about laws when we think of our society: just basic principles of respect of life and environment for our different spheres of life.
Oh and I didn’t reply wrt the Ebola and natural catastrophes: in patriarchy, whatever the problem, whether famine, epidemics, etc, women usually lose out. There have been “gender-based” studies conducted on Ebola, and a far greater number of women die from Ebola than men, something like 70% vs 30% men, because women are the primary carers whenever relatives and family members gets the disease, and also nurses in hospitals (doctors are male and they don’t get to touch the patients directly). The studies have shown that another aggravating factor is that Ebola prevention campaigns (explaining how to protect ourselves from getting and spreading the disease, how to care for the ill, etc) are mostly directed at men, who of course withhold the information from women.
The same is true for catastrophes: a far greater number of women die because women are usually the only ones responsible for children, which limits their capacity to flee quickly. Men can just run off by themselves, they have no-one to account for. If you have a baby and children of young age to care for, I don’t think it’s easy to abandon them to run for your life. Women’s big problem everywhere in patriarchy is either that we can’t escape, or that we have nowhere to go, or both.
In famines, women and young children are always those most severely affected, obviously. Catastrophes, epidemics, etc, never favour women. After thought, I actually don’t think anything will free women beyond women freeing themselves. Something may act as a major catalyst (anything we can imagine, for instance the things you’ve mentioned in your comments). But I think that’s the best we can hope for. I don’t think any event will rid us of male oppression *for* us, at some point we will have to confront men in some way or another. Unless the outcome of that future event is that the entire humanity becomes extinct.
Wow Cherry, that’s awful about the Fukushima clean-up plan. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t rounded up prostituted women or illegal immigrants either. I’d love to see those responsible for the existence of the plant going in there and pouring water over the reactors. When a ship sinks, the captain is the last one to leave the boat – this is the only patriarchal standard I know where someone responsible is actually required to take his responsibility to the end.
I so agree that if we stopped caring for men, their life expectancy probably wouldn’t exceed 40 years old. Given that men are by far more protected from violence than women, less violated etc, that there will always be a woman for them to turn to who will mend their ego or problems, and that even in these cushy conditions men die earlier than women, if things turned round for them many of them really wouldn’t live long on their own. I was thinking, maybe that’s why men called the middle ages the “dark ages” because men would die so early and perhaps women wouldn’t, because so many women ran away from marriage at the time. Just a speculation.
However, the problem is that, as said above, women care for men because we’re forced to, and from an age where conscious resistance is psychically and physically impossible. Even if many women potentially could dump or get rid of their oppressor, the fact is decades of violence breaks you from the inside.
Oh, and the second thing about epidemics and catastrophes, that they’re mostly man-caused in the first place. Think HIV: those who spread HIV are men. Something like 70% of people infected by HIV are women. Men who are infected with HIV in some countries deliberately go around raping as many women as possible as a way to kill the women. A large part of HIV is spread through men raping women in prostitution. Most catastrophes are caused by male destruction of the environment in the first place, or because of reckless, destructive urban planning (ie tsunamis hitting populations on the sea shores).
Another example: the plague happened in the middle-ages at a time where christian religious authorities decided to decimate cats (because they were considered evil, probably because they were associated to witches), but cats were those that regulated rat population, and the plague was a consequence of an overpopulation of infected rats (if my memory is correct). Unfortunately, the plague did nothing to free women from men and halt the deadly progress of patriarchal civilisation.
To be more precise wrt HIV, the largest global population of HIV infected people are in African countries and are women – all or the vast majority of them infected by men, or to a lesser extent by their mothers infected by men if born from an infected mother.
I got this information from mainstream “gender-based” stats, though it was some time ago.
I was just thinking to myself this morning “What was so frightening to men about the middle ages that they had to call it “the dark ages”…?”
Well, obviously it was that women were freer! Everything in patriarchy is a reversal, so you just reverse everything back the other way to get to the truth.
We can easily trace the history of men’s entrance into the birthing chambers, and it took place after the “dark ages” , which means that women had far more autonomy, and dare I say, “power” than they have today. They probably owned all the businesses too. I didn’t know that women simply left marriages back then, so that’s another one. I would absolutely love to know more about The Dark Ages.
And what nasty fuckers they were to go around killing cats! Knowing that these were mainly old women’s companions. Fancy forcing old women to hand over their cats to be killed!
I really really hate them.
@ Frau Zapka, wow, I’m impressed by the translation work! (and amazed by the fact someone considered it worth translating) You did an amazing job! Obviously I can’t understand it and see the word choice etc. it’s really strange to see it all in Russian. Cherry, do you understand it?
I really hope it will have a positive effect.
@ Cherry, yes it’s really obvious. And it’s also obvious why men had to hit so, so hard on women and nature in order assert their domination again – or maybe the greeks and then romans never really managed to overturn the more woman-centred societies in Western / Northern Europe at the time of roman conquests. Perhaps we can see the christian genocide of the middle-ages as a continuum of roman culture?
We can certainly trace all major modern patriarchal landmarks after the genocide of women and the earth locally and globally through colonisation: taking over of patriarchal medecine, patriarchal law, torture, vivisection and dissection as normative scientific / research practice for obtaining information (both from human and animal subjects as well as from nature) beginning of industrial revolution, beginning of modern tyrannies (“democracies”) etc.
Yes women were fleeing in large numbers from marriage to women’s communities, women’s convents etc. They were eventually all massacred and taken over by the christians and we have only but very few historical evidence of it left. It took men several centuries to achieve the dominance they have today however. Women
oops forgot to finish my sentence: women must have fought really hard given how much and how long it took them to overturn women’s power in society.
*it took men
Yes, I took a look and could understand it! Makes me feel like checking out what the Russians are up to with regard to feminist blogs.
I can translate Russian-English but not the other way round, so it means if anyone with a Russian article wants it published English I could do that!
Obviously if it was radical feminism it would be a labour of love, so no charge!
What a great Idea to use the concept of the Patriarchal Reversal on the so-called Dark Ages. I agree that this would be a great place to start Digging for useful feminist information, although the problem of women’s Herstory being erased is always a problem for us when we go looking for these Truths. Speculation, while holding little value in Men’s courts for example (except when used against women of course) will be all Women have many times, and connecting the dots. What a great Project to spot the reversal, speculate, and connect the Dots of information we do have, about the Dark Ages. We can also Assume that the Burning Times, which was experienced as a time of Great Evil (and extreme Fear) was most certainly a Time of great or increased Female power. It seems so Obvious once you say it. Women certainly experienced this as a time of extreme Evil and Fear too, but they were seeing Men as they really are and what they are Capable of doing to women. A different Perspective.
Regarding Plague, to flesh that point out because I think it is Important is the idea of Reserves and physical reserves based on how much “Life” one has left in them, and how this affects anyone’s ability to Recover from trauma and illness. When Joan Rivers died, I saw this spoken about in the Mainstream press exactly once, where it was said that Older People often die under General Anesthesia and surgical procedures, or do not recover, because due to their advanced Age they simply to not have the Reserves that younger people have to tap into which is necessary or at least helpful to survive trauma and illness. I have also seen this Anecdotally, but it was Nice to hear it spoken about as something Real. We know that Women have longer life expectancies than Men. And we know that Men are necrophiles to their core are are not filled with life at all, even when they are Young (and that their Natural life expectancy without Women’s intervention would actually be quite short, as we have said). We can therefore Extrapolate that these Plagues, if left to Naturally play out, would probably kill more men than women. “Naturally” here would mean that women did not Caretake men to help them recover, and also that Women would not become infected in these disproportionately large numbers due to caretaking ill males, causing the women’s own deaths and Skewing the numbers in both directions (more female deaths and less male, due to Female caretaking). We should also remember that Ebola, for example, seems to be Sexually Transmitted, although this method of transmission has been Downplayed to the point that I have literally not seen it Mentioned once, even when “contact with bodily fluids” has been shouted from the rooftops, we seem to mean Blood, Snot and Vomit, but notably not Semen. This is important to women for Biological reasons, as all STDs are more easily transmitted from Male to Female than the other way around.
Of course, this sheds quite a different Light on the field of Medicine as a whole, where it is mostly necessary in the First place due to men causing Harm, which we already knew. But it also seems more Important that males be “cared” for and treated than women, who would more likely survive anyway due to women’s natural reserves of life and life energy, including natural Fat reserves not tangentially. Men try to take that away from us too, and often Succeed.
You mention the military as not being necessary in the utopian women’s society and I agree. It’s a horrible waste right now and one of the biggest polluters and destroyers of the Earth. Not to mention the aftermath with things like landmines. Plus all the nuclear damage. Cherry, I was aware of the Fukushima stuff and people dying as a result, and I assumed it was not the execs doing it, so I’m not surprised . But the transition where the men responsible are doing cleanup (of things like landmines, toxic sites, nuclear), there would be a need for a women’s military.
Women have become more a part of the military in the U.S. and many places than used to be. These women are more subject to rape. Male soldiers are trained to rape. Always have been. This rape of women military members keeps women in the military from being threats to the men. An all women’s military would be quite different. Much more self-discipline to begin with.
Additional thoughts: Of course, the cleanup would not be done in groups. Men in groups are a danger, as you point out. Every woman knows this instinctively/though experience.
Women are made to feel more guilt for the destruction of the environment than men. After all, isn’t it the laundry soap and non-reuseable bags that are doing all the damage. If you look at the facts, it’s not these things at all, but war, industries, etc. Poisoning the earth is a tactic of war often used.
Another additional thought is that when disaster strikes, women are the unsung heroes, putting the lives of others before their own. . We know that they are far less likely to just abandon babies and kids and run for their lives, than men.I’m not sure that this is social conditioning tbh. It’s probably instinct for women who have given birth to a baby in the sense that she risked her life to have it so has already been close to death for it, and what would be the point of just abandoning it after all that effort?
But that isn’t all. A story made the news in Japan when a twenty year old woman remained on the 2nd floor of an office block when the tsunami was approaching, because that is where the loudspeaker that fed the microphones of the building was located. She had got wind of the tsunami, and remained there on the loudspeaker shouting at everybody to leave the vicinity and the area. The men of that company, the execs and the managers, were all hiding on the top floor of that multi-story building. She died, as she knew she would, because she had stayed near the ground. The men camping out on the top floor all lived.
The news story I listened to, they did say she was a hero, so they gave her that title at least. But they completely glossed over the fact that all the men were cowards who let her die. It was strange because it deemed apt that a woman should risk her life for the men. This is where we get into schizophrenic cray cray territory with patriarchy, because to look at movies and the way men talk, you would think that THEY would be on hand to save women if necessary. All complete bullshit, of course.
Sorry to comment spam. The story of the young woman risking her life like that angers me so much because, being a woman, her life was worth so much more than all of those cowardly middle-aged men put together. Of course no man stepped forward. Not save her, she didn’t need saving. But to step in her place when it came to saving other people. That’s because they’re worthless pieces of shit. They don’t have it in them.
We just need to practice sex selective abortion. Refuse to give birth to any more males. Let them die down to a manageable small minority and never allow them to repopulate above a token 10% of humanity. Use as needed for breeding purposes.
I don’t mind cleaning up after them if I know they’ll never make another mess again.
We could live in peace, cooperatively. It would be beautiful. Kind. Meaningful. Happy.
@cherryblossomlife, wow you read Russian!
We are going to translate into English some of our articles (I dont know when, hope soon) and it would be great to cooperate.since we’re not english speakers.
@Witchwind sorry for offtop again:)
@pantypopo, we’d be free to practice sex-selective abortion and to do whatever we want only after men’s oppression will be ended. Not before. Once men will no longer have power to oppress us, many of them will die down naturally as women won’t be caring and birthing them any more. I don’t mind cleaning up either if it’s nice stuff, but I don’t want any woman cleaning up if it means dying two days after handling the problem. I think this is a tricky one.
The other thing to take into account is that nuclear plants for instance require very, very specialised knowledge in order to unbuild and maintain them (ie avoid further spill) and will probably require constant work for generations onwards. I wonder if there are special plants or bacteria that might have anti-radioactive effects. Or minerals. Who knows, we might find a solution for that.
Also I certainly didn’t envision male presence above 10% 😉
Seems the testerical men have calmed down now. It’s nice to read only sister comments!
I think it is important to note that this utopia is prefaced on the idea that all men are necrophiles and inherently dangerous to the world, this have little to no value.
Down deep, many men know they are the problem.
Some men will even admit that to have a peaceful world, without environmental destruction, you have to get rid of most men. I think the remainder was to be less than 10%, according to these few men. I was sure shocked to hear my “worse half” say this, and accept he would be fine with being eliminated if it meant saving the ecosystem. And he is no Nigel- he is all man, with everything awful that entails. (in the process of divesting myself of this mistake).
I can see the men furiously re-posting this saying “See, they DO hate us and wanna kill us, or enslave, us all! Feminazis!”
Then there will be a chorus of wanna be feminists scrambling to calm them and pander to their feelings, comforting them with “oh, those aren’t real feminists, they are a radical fringe, we love men and dick! And porn!”.
(I see lib-fems do this with the SCUM manifesto all of the time.)
As if this version of utopia isn’t a totally reasonable response, especially considering all of the oppression, death, and rape, that we have had to survive. What group wouldn’t be hoping for a worldwide calamity to take their oppressors out?
Seriously, lets put this in a way that men reading might understand, since they cannot comprehend something if it isn’t about men: Do they think that during slavery, African slaves dreamed of living peacefully with their oppressors? Don’t you think they were all wishing to kill all whites? They weren’t banned from reading, having meetings, and owning any defensive weapons, because whites thought they loved their oppression! (I am sure many blacks STILL feel this way- and who can blame them?)
Men might have their boots on our necks right now, but I know they never feel secure in their power, and know it is very precarious. There wouldn’t be MRAs and rape porn if they thought we really loved them.
(And thanks for the welcome! I usually don’t comment.)
Oops, should have edited before posting.
It OUGHT to say “lets put this in a way that lib fems and even men reading…”
Not because IGAF about whether men understand this or not, but I still hold out hope a lib fem will get it. And they ID with men so much, it is often useless to try to get them to see it through women’s eyes.
I used to be a lib fem, so there is always hope they will read this and have a “click” moment!.
(ok, no more posts, I swear. )
Hi, thanks for commenting, will reply later
“I wonder if there are special plants or bacteria that might have anti-radioactive effects.” Yes there are, they have to be genetically engineered for that purpose to be really effective though. I see an abundance of pseudoscience here which I find disturbing. I don’t know if I have it in me to point out each thing and debunk it. I think modern civilization with cities and stuff is ideal, we just have too many people. Human beings cannot live without consuming resources and making litter, but it is of course possible to be less harmful to the earth. I think it is absolutely absurd you would make genetic modification ILLEGAL! Plus you actually mean genetic engineering not modification because natural breeding (not in a lab) modifies genes too. Crop biotech has so many uses and the consensus is that’s “GMOs” as some call them, are safe. They are actually good for the environment, they can make the plants need less water to grow, add nutrients (golden rice is an example), add more flavour, antioxidants and colour etc. I would not want to live in some backwater hippie commune, even if it was free of men. I think women are the only ones who can actually achieve communism. I don’t know what your love of little boys is witch, they are monsters. They terrorize little girls, I remember it keenly. Science has already created sperm out of female eggs. We could already do away with men and their sadism if we took our natural place in the world order.
We’ll always disagree on this one, Black Metal. I never said anywhere that I’m against science or technology in and of itself. The male scientific revolution, modern civilisation, urbanisation is based on men’s killing, torturing of women and of nature, on the confiscation of land, on pillage of resources, etc, etc. Torturing and killing is the means, ends and process of their science (ie the direct consequence of all industrialised production processes). It’s not pseudo science to say that, it’s a simple fact, you only need to have eyes and to look around to recognise it. What I’m arguing against is how men use science to achieve patriarchal control over women and nature, which is at the root men’s destruction of the planet – this framework is what modern science is based on, and you seem to argue in favour of it. I really don’t understand your attachment to defending this necrophilic scientific model. You sound like a male industrialist or someone paid by the industries to sell their lies.
Who said you had to live in a hippie commune, wtf?? Is this what you’ve understood from this post, a defense of hippie communes?? Seriously. And, where did you read I love boys?
I included a reduced population of men in the picture, assuming only a small percentage would survive the transition and the ridding of the worst criminals, and being appealed by the idea that the remaining men would clean up the worst toxic wastes. I liked the idea of them paying a debt, even a tiny one. Although I would obviously prefer if all men disappeared at once – but my thought was more how we’d organise things if we’d still have to contend with males somehow – I was trying to make it more realistic in this sense. Then male adults would die out pretty soon, so would the remaining boys once they grew up, since women wouldn’t be caring for them. I doubt at this stage any woman would want to have boys, once we’d be free to practice parthenogenesis or to reproduce with two female eggs.
Also, about litter, well no, we shouldn’t be making things that we’d have to “throw away”. Every thing we throw away goes to someone’s garden, someone’s environment on which she depends on for survival. Imagine all your domestic litter was piled in your own garden or front door, how would that make you feel? Maybe you’d be more careful about the things you buy so not to intoxicate and clutter your living place if you wanted to get rid of it. Men take our litter away to places we don’t see, so we won’t know about the effects it has on the environment, we won’t even need to think about it. But we don’t live in a bubble separate from our environment. Everything we make is there, in our environment, we have to think about what it does and its effects if it can’t be recycled anywhere. If it’s toxic, it would necessarily pollute someone’s environment, someone’s life, if not ours – or not immediately at least.
Men also have the knack of transforming potentially harmless, compostable wastes in to poison for the earth – for instance by polluting the 80% of the world’s freshwaters with feces and urine!!! (drinkable freshwater, excluding rain and non-accessible groundwaters, represents something like 0,1% of the world’s waters). Pooing and peeing in freshwater is totally criminal. Wastewater treatment plants only treat 60% or 70% of the waters from sewers, and the rest is spilled back into rivers, assuming that rivers will naturally clean it up, but that’s not the case, especially when all other industries spill their own toxic wastes in the seas and rivers, not to mention all the chemical pesticides and destructive urbanisation etc that pollute and deplete the groundwaters, rivers…
It’s not even something that’s arguable, we have no right to destroy ours or someone else’s environment especially when we have the intelligence to invent things with biodegradable or non-toxic materials, that can simply be composted or reused in different ways. Again, it’s a dominant male behaviour to do things without caring about the consequences it will have, as men, especially white elite men have the power to shift the consequences over to subordinate people (women, developing countries, etc).
In the Western world we don’t necessarily see the full effects of this littering as Western countries can pay to send their dumps and toxic waste to developing countries, and spills or major intoxications are nicely hidden away from public view. Anyway, I could go on and on. This only scratches the surface.
@freefromsexpozzies, yes, well I’ve deleted about 40 or 50 comments from testerical men telling me I’m crazy in every possible way. Only a couple or so from women. Of course my point is perfectly reasonable and legitimate purely from a self-defense point of view. It’s every woman’s right to defend her life against another man who wants to kill or torture her, or from a more global perspective, to defend the right of all living beings on earth not to become extinct by men.
it is sad to think so many women will be horrified by what we’re saying here, not exactly because of what it says but because it’ll have been prefaced by men telling them how crazy this blogger is and threatening these women of similar ostracism (or worse) if the same ideas crossed their minds. It’s the consequences (= real male repression) of having such thoughts that they fear, not the thoughts themselves.
I find androcentric examples always limited because no male experience can convey even an ounce of the horror of female experience of oppression. A more apt example would be to say, whether men would want to live with and keep alive other men who had isolated, sequestered and tortured them in innumerable ways for decades in their own home. Raping them, battering them phsysically, emotionally, humiliating them, vampirising their identity, work and soul.
Sorry, by my point, I mean our point, I don’t own this perspective personally.
What’s interesting is men will accuse us of being man-hating genocidal maniacs no matter what we say. I must say I was being really mild for usual standards here.
Re: “What I’m arguing against is how men use science to achieve patriarchal control over women and nature, which is at root men’s destruction of the planet – this framework is what modern science is based on, and you (Blackmetal) seem to argue in favor of it. I really don’t understand your attachment to defending this necrophilic scientific model. You sound like a male industrialist or someone paid by the industries to sell their lies.”
Agreed here, Witchwind. It’s been quite a while since I stopped believing anything that men say or write – at prima facie- because Propaganda Is Men and always has been. Mass media (newspapers and TV) I stopped watching ten years ago because the sheer quantity of lies, insulting appeals to lowest common denominator destructive emotions such as hatred and fear- and blatant propaganda became unbearable.
Today, I do not even trust the date printed on newspapers because THAT is how insane and incessant the big lies and propaganda of the Presstitutes (journalists of the mass media paid by the three-letter agencies and corporate interests to write lies) has become.
Take the “red pill,” please Blackmetal.You’ve seen the movie The Matrix, yes?
Then read “The Limits To Growth” as a very basic primer. Go from there.
The laws of physics – most especially the laws of thermodynamics- and chemistry are most definitely not pseudoscience. They are “natural laws” and those impersonal, descriptive laws of how our planet functions do not care whether ignorant dumbos like us believe in them or not. (Written with greatest respect for women always.)
On GMOs: the female physicist Vandana Shiva: GM Seeds and the Militarization of Food – & Everything Else.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/14784-activist-seed-of-gm-foods-war-vsearth-planted-by-military-industrial-forces
and:
Hi, yes Vandana Shiva is definitely a good place to start – her view is fairly limited to certain aspect of agricultural destruction and she isn’t a radical feminist, but has great insight on men’s destructive monoculture model, and how it destroys biodiversity and aridifies the land.
There’s also the film “the world according to Monsanto” by Marie Monique Robin.
And many other sources: Claudia Von Werlhof, Carolyn Merchant, Maria Mies, Rachel Carson… Quite a lot of their stuff can be found online.
Here’s a very basic primer too, called “the story of stuff”, which shows how the basic male economic mechanism is destructive in itself (of course she doesn’t name men at all and it’s presented as if it were a “social problem”). But it’s interesting to see how things work. The woman who presents it has many other videos.
There’s also so much we don’t know. We think we have a grasp of the horror caused by men and especially male industries in the last centuries, but our estimations and understanding is usually way below reality, because there’s so much information withheld from us by men.
When I studied horticulture the idea was very much promoted that people who were wary of seeds were hippy tree-huggers that didn’t know enough about science to make an informed decision. The argument in favour of GM was that crops could be adapted to the environment, would use less resources to grow, everything that BlackMetal has pointed out.
While I *completely* understand that we need to be wary of becoming reactionary, at the same time it is impossible to over-estimate how far men have interfered with horticulture and agriculture, and how much there interference has led to a situation where using GM *might* make sense.
But on the whole, it doesn’t make sense at all.
Apart from Daly’s argument that we have no right to interfere with the integrity of life (and she draws the parallel between how easy it is for men to probe life, cells, seeds, whatever and how easy it is to probe women).
All in all I do not think anything can be salvaged from this drive to interfere in cropa, seeds and their genes.
What happens today is that most of the food you see on your supermarket shelves are grown in Africa, Asia or South America. Europe and the US try to grow as much as they can, so does Japan, but basically Africa and Asia is where most horticultural crops are grown, including all the cut flowers you see in shops. Roses in Britain are flown by plane to Britain. Russia gets its roses from Ecuador. Fruit, veg and flowers are then transported by plane to various countries around the world.
This practice has destroyed local economies in Africa and Asia because smallholders (women) were thrown off the land they owned in order to make way for the supermarket conglomerates who, in cahoots with local male-run councils, would buy up the land easily, then *re-employ* those same women as serfs, plucking coffee or green beans or whatever crop is fashionable in Europe, and paying them a pittance. Local councils shot themselves in the foot by doing this because they completely underestimated the contributions that the small-holders were making to the community, so restructuring food in this way over the past two decades has caused horrendous problems for food security. The men in power in these places fucked over their own women, in other words by receiving back-handers from Western merchants, and inadvertently made themselves more vulnerable to foreign imperialists.
Add to that, the food grown in these countries is not for the local people. Most of the time they do not even know what it is they are growing. They don’t recognize it, and often it doesn’t suit their palate. They cannot cook it because they don’t know what it is. Because the crop is not suited to the region more pesticides and other chemicals are necessary to make it grow in this foreign place. Africa uses so much water on growing roses for Northern Europe, when we know water is already scarce there. India also specializes in commodity roses to be sold abroad.
Rice seed varieties were traditionally bred by women in India. Seeds have now almost all been patented and streamlined. This means that seeds are more vulnerable to disease and other problems, which may be cured using GM technology. Again, if they’d let the women continue doing their thing, there would be no need for any interference at all. Indian women are now trying to fight to retain their traditional rights over seeds, but it’s a losing battle against the likes of Monsanto.
Therefore, creating a genetically modified rose that doesn’t need much water in order to grow only makes sense within this patriarchal system. It doesn’t makes sense outside of it.
And you always, always LOSE something when you genetically modify crops. Flowers have lost their smell. Fruit has lost its taste. Vegetables have lost their color.
I like what Greer said, “There are no free lunches when it comes to our bodies.” Well, the same goes for food. Which brings us back to Daly. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what benefits there are for us from interfering in fruit. There is a radical feminist philosophy, which is to respect the integrity of living things as opposed to patriarchal philosophy which probes and dissects and destroys all living things I don’t know how to reconcile this with the fact we need to reduce the amount of boys born. Perhaps we could seriously research techniques that increase the likelihood of a girl, and in the meantime women could just stop having children. There was actually a B-type celeb recently in the UK, Josie Cunningham, who was slammed by the media for openly saying that she wants to abort her foetus because it is a boy. Women are already saying this. They’re probably already doing it. Abortion is not ideal. It’s not radfem utopia by a long shot. So there has to be another way. I’m not sure that inseminating eggs with female sperm in labs and then women only impregnating themselves with these eggs is the right way to go because I’m also against egg-harvesting!!
I’m sure we’ll think of something.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673898/Im-drinking-smoking-boy-Pregnant-model-boob-job-NHS-says-shed-abortion-shed-known-wasnt-girl.html#ixzz3FkkpgqvT
Josie Cunningham, 23, said if she knew she was having a son earlier, she would have gone through with the abortion she considered after being asked to appear on Big Brother.
Sorry, that first line was supposed to be “people who were wary of GM”, not “people who were wary of seeds”. I made the mistake because usually GM refers to the seeds.
As for information being with-held from women, being a private English tutor for business-men, doctors and scientists is kind of like being a spy because they talk nonchalantly about things that take place in their work. Just yesterday I learned from one man that he works for a company that imports medical equipment for doctors who do not want to comply to the government-mandated standards. In other words, it’s totally legal for a doctor to order equipment for his hospital and bring it in through the back door, as long as he’s got the money to pay for it. Why the hell do government checks exist then, you might ask? Well, the only reason is so that some hospitals can say “This equipment has been government approved.”
Most patients don’t ask anything about the equipment a doctor or surgeon is using. They ASSUME it’s legit, because they TRUST that men are running the show properly.
They are not!
So I learned yesterday that governments are farcical. Not that I didn’t know already, but a weekly reminder is always useful.
And don’t get me on to the medical students who experiment on animals for no reason at all.
CBL, your thoughts on male Probing and Interference are exactly what I came here to Say today, that you! This is exactly it isn’t it? The principal and goal of Non-Interference must be one that is implemented in Women’s World and I think this would happen naturally, we simply Wouldn’t Interfere and this goal would be accomplished. Interference is not even a Thought we regularly have, it’s a non-issue for most Women, and in fact I personally think about Non-Interference Consciously all the time. When I must interfere with something, such as with a sick animal, I always ask myself if my Interference will make it worse? Certainly it will change things, but if the change will not be objectively for the Better, really a net gain in quality of life, then I Best Not Do It. The concept of “side effects” of medication are Never, Ever considered in this frame, where many medications for various Illnesses have such severe adverse consequences that they cause Equally Bad or even Worse diseases than they (allegedly) treat or cure. Many of them are not even that effective for their Intended purpose on top of it, especially for Chronic illnesses. There is no Net Gain in quality of life, and may even be a net loss in fact, but there is a significant gain in the Wallets of privileged men. But it’s not just about Money, and this is Important.
My Veterinarian whom I secretly refer to as Doktor Frankenbutcher would love to Cut Into my cat who has a Digestive Issue just to see what is going on and he admits to a “Morbid Curiosity” at his own failure to properly diagnose her, and is not satisfied that the Medication she is taking works to ease much of her suffering (but not all, she is not Cured). I recently learned that 20% of the cat Population suffers from Inflammatory Bowel Disease, and when I asked if that number was Global, Regional, or what, I was given a sideways reply. To me, this means that our pet and probably our wildlife (and Human!) population is quite ill for whatever reason, either Regionally, Nationally or Globally, and this is quite Unnatural, but completely Believable. Google “Radiation Enteritis” for example to read about how Sensitive human bowel and gut tissue is to Radiation, including Radioactive pollution, and then extrapolate this to cats in that example (I think this Extrapolation is supported biologically). Then think about all the Probiotics, Magical Yoghurts and other products to “Support GI Health” (meaning, attempt to manage existing GI symptoms) for humans which have sprung up lately! And there are Other problems besides just Radiation, that’s not even considering other pollutants, or modified Food, prescription and nonprescription Drugs, or the relatively recent Proliferation of Anal Sex, all potential Entrance Points for radiation, toxins, bacteria and viruses into the body and specifically the GI tract. This is Interference taken to its extreme, both of which – interference and extremes – being men’s sick Stock in Trade.
The men cause this suffering, cannot Cure or Treat it properly with their Poisonous medications that make you equally or even more sick just in a different way, and then want to perform Exploratory Surgery to get a look at the damage from the inside as if this kind of “Looking” can be done without causing even Further harm. It cannot. What is inside men’s minds and hearts, their Essence, has got to be the purest evil imaginable, and it is all about Morbid Curiosities, Interventions, and Probing. Men are Toxic, Necrophilic, Probers and Destroyers. This is such an important point and I was glad to see Mary Daly quoted above on this topic, I had not Remembered that she had said that, but Of Course she did. This is a Big One, and Daly hit all the Big Ones didn’t she.
Witchwind, thank you for the Story of Stuff video. The woman who presents has managed to simplify/synthesize a hell of a lot of dry textbook material into a few succint minutes.
On the subject of foods and our hopelessly inefficient and destructive global food production and supply system, every time I go to the supermarket these days to buy food, I understand that food to be “eating oil.”
That is, I understand that for every one calorie of food I buy and eat, approximately 100 calories or much more of energy (oil) was used to produce and deliver it to the supermarket.
“Eating Oil” was the title of a book published in 1978 following the first world oil crisis. The aim of the book was to investigate the extent to which food supply in industrialized countries relied on fossil fuels: oil and gas.
From an article at:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2005/04/01/why-our-food-so-dependent-oil
“Virtually all of the processes in the food system are now dependent upon this finite resource, which is nearing its depletion phase…..The systems that produce the world’s food supply are heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
Vast amounts of oil and gas are used as raw materials and energy in the manufacture of fertilizers and pesticides, and as cheap and readily available energy at all stages of food production: from planting, irrigation, feeding and harvesting, through to processing, distribution and packaging.
One indication of the unsustainability of the contemporary food system is the ratio of energy inputs- the energy content of a food (calories)- to the energy inputs.
For example, when iceberg lettuce is imported to the UK from the USA by plane, the energy ratio of 127 calories (aviation fuel) are needed to transport 1 calorie of lettuce across the Atlantic. If the energy consumed during lettuce cultivation, packaging, refrigeration, distribution in the UK and shopping by car was included, the energy needed would be even higher.
Similarly, 97 calories of transport energy (aviation fuel)are needed to import 1 calorie of asparagus by plane from Chile, and 66 calories of energy are consumed when flying 1 calorie of carrot energy from South Africa.”
Read the full article at resilience. org if interested. This is an insane and unsustainable global food production system.
In pre-industrial, small-scale agricultural societies the ratio of (human) energy input to food caloric output was the reverse. That is, nature basically did all the work for humans: as it should be.
For that reason and others, much as I love Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, whenever I read her words of, “…and instigate automation” (for women to have free time in our non-patriarchal society), I shake my head vigorously and think, “No, not possible, Valerie. It’s going to be small-scale and locally co-operative communities and hand-made in the future for us whether some like it or not.’
Thank you for this post and stating this necessity, Witchwind.
I don’t mean litter in the scale of what there is now but zero waste is impossible if human beings are to have any quality of life. There is not anything inherently flawed with “modern” science, and its not modern science, all science is held to the same standards globally and has been built on for thousands of yrs. Science is a tool for observation of our world, sure men’s biases may infect it (evo psych is a good example of that) but that is not a flaw of science itself. I have seen The Story of Stuff and her other videos and read the book, and no offense, this woman is an idiot. I can’t believe you called me a shill! You know I am disabled and on welfare. I wish I could make money shilling. 🙂 “the medical students who experiment on animals for no reason at all.” define no reason at all. Are you against animal testing entirely?
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/poor-scientific-arguments-in-the-service-of-animal-rights-activism/
I am familiar with all the stuff you guys linked me and I reject it bc its bad science. You are being condescending in thinking I am ignorant just because I am a pro science skeptic and you are all hard greens, which btw, has nothing to do with women’s liberation. How are women going to study anything they want if they are tied down by childcare, clothes making, food growing, etc? I called it a hippie commune bc thats what it sounds like.
@cherryblossom, thanks for this long and thoughtful reply! It’s really important to talk about how Western industries loot the world, pollute previously infinite resources in order to make them scarce and commodify them, and patent everything beyond imagination.
I think there’s a difference between non-interference and transformation through interaction. Each living being transforms its environment by interacting with different living beings in order to improve its chances of survival. This transformation is usually in interdependence with other species. I think as humans we can play an immense positive role in favouring biodiversity, transforming our environment in positive ways that don’t meddle with the integrity of beings but allow them to flourish and grow. I think this is the best we can do as humans. We have the intelligence and skills to recreate natural environments that are self-renewing and sustaining and benefit the greatest possible number of species, according to location, climate, etc. We can make this place a real paradise for everyone.
@ Blackmetal, i’m sorry, I haven’t published one of your comments here and I will no longer publish your pro male-science comments from now on as it drains my energy and there’s nothing more that I can say that I’ve already said, and I don’t condone it. I find these views unethical and too male-identified, and to me it’s not something debatable. The problem isn’t so much lack of political understanding of how male economy and science works in patriarchy, as you seem to be familiar with the links we sent. It’s more the fact you identify to a predatory, hateful male view of nature, the environment and the world which I honestly can’t accept here.
I don’t know what you mean by “hard green”, this to me is a male-centric term, just as the “skeptic” movement which reminds me a lot of Dawkin’s atheist movement, a false dichotomy between male atheists and male religious: both are patriarchal. You won’t find any radical feminist in this thread who identifies with Hippies, so-called “hard greens” (whatever it means) or even groups such as deep green resistance, nor are none of the radical feminists here against serious, scientific investigation as such. Mary Daly wasn’t a scientist, but within her own field (philosophy), in spite of her fierce anti-academentia stance she didn’t reject rigor and science per se and was very scholarly and methodical (more even than her male peers obviously), and her works are one of the best philosophical works I’ve ever read.
I know you’re not a shill. I said you sounded like one, as if you were repeating the same lines from an advert or report by a company.
Just like women are farmers in everything but name, because they produce most of the world’s food with their labour while men reap the benefits, women are scientists in everything but name. Are the women who gently bred new strains of rice over hundreds of years in India not scientists? Just because they don’t have a white coat doesn’t mean they’re not. Isn’t cooking chemistry? With their knowledge of food, and in particular how this relates to health and healing, women still today remain the world’s most important scientists.
Gravity FFS? A man put his name on gravity and said he discovered it. Men’s discoveries are the emperor’s new clothes for the most part. Darwin? What are the chances that women already knew that life evolved from place to place and plants looked slightly different wherever you went because they had evolved to adapt. Perhaps most women just put this down to common sense. Check out Cordellia Fine’s Delusions of Gender to see just how un-scientific Men of Science actually are.
Without men around BlackMetal, our workload would be reduced considerably. We would probably only need to do a couple of hours work a week. The rest would be spent on doing what we wanted and this is how hard men’s system is for us to live in because women enjoy studying and researching and learning languages and writing. We don’t consider it work. It’s pure pleasure. Only in a patriarchy would research and science be about causing harm to life.
Some women actually making food grow, so THOSE women can be put in charge of the food. Other women can be put in charge of the babies.If nobody wants to be in charge of the babies, then we won’t have any more babies, obviously.
If a woman wants to spend her life messing about swimming down in the river, that’s fine, but if she wants to eat the food I’ve grown she’d better offer me something appropriate in return– a pretty shell she found, for example. Or a good story.
It stands to reason that women who are inclined to work more because their body demands it of them (some women just feel the need to be active) are going to be more productive than others, but they will probably have a higher status in some ways, and that’s natural. That’s the opposite to how the world is run now where women are paid tiny amounts for working hard all day, while the men who sit in air-conditioned offices, driving cars around, are wealthy.
We will work something out.
Does anyone know of the scientific endeavors of Beatrix Potter? A complete account of her life is on Wikipedia. She was a keen observer and developed a theory of the reproduction of fungi that was insightful/remarkable and based on observation but got lost because the male scientific establishment refused her papers. She was curious about how it worked and didn’t see a satisfactory explanation. However her drawings were very accurate, more than any others. She is best known for her children’s books, but her understanding of nature was amazing and based on close observation. She had many interests and was successful in many fields. It’s telling that she is only remembered for her children’s books, an allowed field for women.
Also, I googled and found a number of plants that can be used in radiation phytoremediation. They will clean the site, but the radiation will remain in them so disposal is a problem. Better to have it concentrated/sequestered than everywhere, I guess. They keep making more of it than was ever naturally present.
Not so with some other types of pollution where the plant may use the chemical and still be healthy, like copper, etc. things that naturally occur in soil and useful to plants. This kind of scientific study would be really useful in the future.
GMO’s are potentially quite dangerous, very different from animal breeding. It is impossible to breed a mouse with a plant, for instance. Yet genetic engineering can do this, and has done lots of things like this. Breeding is safer, since wolves (for instance) can naturally breed with dogs, but that’s the extent of it, they cannot breed with cats or cows, or plants. However, wolf/dog breeds are prone to a hose of ills that each one alone is not prone to. Not to mention the expensive thoroughbred animals that also suffer many physical problems. So not completely safe. Lactose intolerance has a connection to the breed of the cow.
The potential danger is the law of unintended consequences and also we should pay attention to the “Precautionary Principle.” Patriarchal science, driven by profit/hubris ignores these things. The result is the death of the earth. Science and technology that come from that science cannot be separated. Patriarchal science/tech try to make everything separate to hide the horrendous results. And the horrendous processes that sometimes come to light.
What would women’s science look like in a utopian future? It’s hard to tell, but science and technology would not be seen as separate. Would science be seen as a healing art primarily? A practical art? Curiosity would play a part, as it did with B. Potter.
@cherry, yes women the traditional arts such as cooking, housebuilding, pottery, weaving, languages, were all invented and primarily done by women. It indeeds requires science and observation in order to do it properly.
However the most brilliant physicians, scientists and alchemists are also women, such as Jane Goodall, Beatrix Potter as Wordwoman said, Mileva Maric (married to Einstein and the true originator and author of the theory of relativity http://www.pbs.org/opb/einsteinswife/), Hildergard of Bingen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen), Ada Lovelace (founder of scientific computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace), Maria Montessori, Marie Curie, and many many others that have been written out of history books but can still be found. Google “first female physicians” or first female chemists and you’ll find loads of results. It’s really fascinating. Also I encourage you to read about some of these women especially those who had a biophilic worldview as their work is amazing.
I think the way we’d organise tasks between women will really depend on the group we’re in and what each woman individually wants to do at a given time, and what our needs are. This can be something constantly renegotiated, changing and evolving as we don’t necessarily want to do the same thing all the time, and we might want to do many things at once, and our needs may change over time. I don’t think status would work in the same way status works in patriarchy. There wouldn’t be any status at all I think, not in the sense that status now confers rights *over* other people, a right to control and take people’s labour. Some women would simply be more experienced or wiser than others in given fields and they’d be respected for that, but that’s all.
I do think that as much as possible, it’s everyone’s duty to clean for ourselves, cook and make our food – basically to be able to provide for our own very basic needs at a very basic level. Basic autonomy is both a right but also an obligation I believe, we should never depend on someone else’s work on a long-term basis for our basic survival except in special circumstances such as pregnancy, early childcare, illness, etc. But it’s more fun when we do it together, or take it in turns, or organise things in such a way so it doesn’t become a chore that takes up our entire life. Nothing should be a burden for women. And there are many ways of cooking that make it less tiring, less work. Or conversely, if we only cook a few times a week, it can be great fun to make the meals as intricate as possible.
Assigning only one task or “job” to do for our whole life is really awful, boring and deadening.
@wordwoman, i find breeding criminal. What the heck do we need to breed other animals for? Men do it just because it gives them the kicks, and as Tracy says they have this necrophiliac curiosity to see what happens when they destroy and probe with life, for instance breeding a mouse with a plant. And men make loads of money by breeding animals for the “pet” trade – but as you say it destroys the health of animals and trading them as house accessories is deeply unethical. Farm and domestic animals are for the vast majority severely abused, never considered a persons, and at the very best they’ll still need to be groomed and tamed in order to fit in our houses, which is in itself abusive. Animals, just as women, shouldn’t be bred, bought and sold. The fairest way to eat animals is to hunt them in the wild. Every animal has the right to live free.
@Tracy, that story of the vet wanting to look inside her bowels is very chilling, by the way. If he’s asked you this it certainly means he’s asked other ‘customers’ too, and we can only assume he must have had a long career of torturing cats and other animals. And SERIOUSLY what a fucking stupid oaf!!!!!!!! He’s so fucking stupid!!!!!!! In order to understand the bowel health of someone, you don’t cut the bowel up ffs, you study the content of their feces! the colour, texture, microbial content, etc. A lot of the information you need to know is in there. Then there’s the physical symptoms you study. And then you can check with the aura, which gives loads of additional visual information. Men are so fucking stupid, they see a symptom and then want to cut the body up, which is only going to make things far worse, not better, because you’re creating a massive wound in the body and the body will then need extra energy to heal the wound on top of healing the illness, which degrades your health even further. And whatever the cause, the cause is NEVER in the symptom!!! So cutting up the body where the symptom appears or making it disappear temporarily with toxic chemicals will never solve the problem anyway. Seriously men’s medicine hasn’t changed much since they took over it in the middle ages. Let me look up something i’ve read recently
Here’s an example of “scientific experiments” conducted by a huge idiot called Frederick II, “Holy Roman Emperor” no less: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor#Science
Sounds very much like what the vet wants to do with cats, doesn’t it? Seriously men haven’t changed. They’re so bloody deranged.
Note the the real purpose of it is hardly scientific research, as I’m sure his results were very unsatisfying and gave very little information. No, the real purpose is just sadistic, for the pleasure of torturing itself. This is what drives them. They just want to give their sadism scientific credibility, by putting on white coats and looking serious. Just as the Nazis who conducted their torture on the Jews and other peoples from the concentration camps or asylums, under the name of “medical research”. Just as “gynecology”, a “discipline” that very literally came out of the sexual torture of women by one American man, whose name I forgot (I’ve read this somewhere, was it on your blog Cherry? and in a book too, or someone told me IRL) who specifically tortured black women’s genitals I believe and then left many to die as he could do it with total impunity at the time.
Or was it in South Africa? I’m sure he wasn’t an isolated incident anyway.
I really recommend reading “the scientific revolution and the death of nature” by carolyn merchant
Click to access 84.pdf
She explains very well how the founding ideas for the scientific revolution came out of the torture of witches, and scientific investigation method was modeled on this method of torturing. She looks at the work of Francis Bacon, considered the “father of the scientific method” and part of the so-called “enlightenment” scientists that paved the way for the industrial revolution.
This pretty much sums up men’s lab-based, probing, objectifying, violating scientific method
fragmenting life and separating, isolating her to extort “secrets” from her. You can really see here how men feel excluded from life and magic and want to control it.
Witchwind, may I add just one more thing about science only because Cherryblossom wrote two comments that made me smile with delight because so perfect?
Cherry, you wrote: “Just like women are farmers in everything but name, because they produce most of the world’s food with their labor while men reap the benefits, women are scientists in everything but name. Are the women who gently breed new strains of rice over hundreds of years in India not scientists? Just because they don’t have a white coat doesn’t mean they’re not. Isn’t cooking chemistry? With their knowledge of food, and in particular how this relates to health and healing, women still today remain the world’s most important scientists.”
Oh,my. The above transported me back in time to the very best times in my life: working with those natural women scientists.
Over the years I have been most grateful and humbled again and again by the open generosity and enormous knowledge of those never-acknowledged women who make life worth living. (At least for me.) They were often “simple” country women with hundreds of years of passed down woman-to-woman skills and knowledge.
It is that culture of women that is being destroyed by industrial globalization and its “race to the bottom” male greed-based economic model.
I used to work in the “luxury goods” sector, with some of the world’s most gifted artisans and craftspeople: many of them women working in local cooperative networks.
I’ve seen how those co-operatives work – often with ancient or out-moded machinery or equipment- and they are do-able.
Every day I used to think to myself, “But these things should not be luxury goods only for a small number of rich people who most often don’t understand and don’t care about the deep love, passion, invaluable amount of skill and individual giftedness and genius that has gone into each of these creations. This highest quality of workmanship (workwomanship), aesthetic design and beauty should be the norm for everybody.”
And in small-scale women-run societies, I believe it would be so: individual women doing what they love and what they are best at/gifted at.
To me, every woman is gifted at something. And women would do their work with love the way I used to watch my artisans in the past do their craft with love. Not for money or power in any hierarchy or prestige but because that was their gift to the world. I imagine guild societies of women artisans or natural scientists somewhat similar to those in the so-called Dark Ages.
As for the Great Male Scientist Charles Darwin and his much-vaunted “discovery” of evolution, identically to Cherry, for years I’ve thought, “What are the chances that women already knew that life evolved from place to place and plants looked slightly different wherever they went because they had evolved to adapt.”
I bet “evolution” was open knowledge amongst women for hundreds of thousands of years before male “civilization” (classical Greece and Rome) and Xtianity stamped out that female knowledge by claiming it heresy and blasphemy to the Great Male Sky God and the Great Male Phallosophers.
Finally, to Blackmetal. In a previous comment upstream I used the expression “ignorant dumbos like us.” I wasn’t referring to you because it is not in my nature to insult women. My apologies if it seemed to you that I was.
Rather, the “ignorant dumbos like us” was in reference to the hubris of all humans ( I am radical feminist although not a human-supremacist) and specifically in reference to myself.
I say “ignorant dumbo” to myself every day because I refuse to take myself seriously. “Ignorant dumbo” keeps me on my toes because I know how often I have been wrong in the past, I know how often I have made mistakes through lack of knowledge, and I am fully aware of how much I do not know about the world. How many of us can claim to be sure of everything?
As for hating science? I love science with a passion because my best friend in teenage years was my nation’s “Marie Curie” and I wanted to become my nation’s first female neuroscientist. (Didn’t happen because of poverty.)
I don’t hate science. OTOH, what I hate is patriarchal science.
In my time, I’ve also worked with a number of scientists (teaching English to male hot shots, similarly to Cherryblossom.)
Those men indeed tell you a lot of “sacred” industy secrets in a closed classroom. One of the men I used to teach was in GMO development.
He and his family ate only organic fruits and vegetables…….Guess what he told me about GMOs?
Another man was one of the lead research chemists for the pill Prozac. He warned me with lots of accoompanying data: “Stay away from it. Never touch it. It will damage your brain with long-term usage and research showed Prozac as effective as a placebo.”
Being highly sceptical of the trumpeted claims of Big Ag and Big Pharma is not hating science.
yes not only women must have had the common sense to figure out evolution long before Darwin claimed ownership of that idea, but another idea from Darwin, which is that nature and species are in constant competition with one another and resembles the law of the jungle, is false IMO and pure male projection of male patriarchal society on nature. The reality is that species are interdependent and mutually supportive for survival: take pollinators and flowering trees and plants – examples are infnite. You take one species out of an environment, and that might be the death of many other species too.
Right, so at best they’re late to the game, or wrong. At worst, they distort truths on purpose.
It occurred to me that although I don’t really have anything to add to the conversation that I should at least say that I am enjoying the thread very much. 🙂
Perhaps my horror at nature is a form of male colonization.
Some animals were “domesticated” and it is my understanding that they could not survive in the wild. Animals like cows, for instance. They were bred to be domesticated. But now they are with us and perhaps having a cow, dog, cat, etc. might not be abusive. If it was seen as a companion/friend rather than a commodity. Of course these animals are usually horribly abused and some are bred in ways that are pure torture, for factory farming of poultry it is really terrifying what they have done. But I know people who raise chickens in their yards and they seem ok, they treat the chickens well, shelter them, and eat the eggs, etc. Most can’t eat the chickens though, who have become their companions. I don’t know whether or not these chickens which are relatively normal, not overbred like the poor turkeys in factory farms, would survive without shelter people give them. Because nature has been so messed up we don’t have that many natural species. I do agree that the ideal is hunting animals that are free for food only, but can all animals be free and survive? Certainly some can. I’m not an expert but have gotten these impressions from reading various things.
Another thought is that women in various places were not given animal protein to keep them less healthy, not strong, less mentally fit, etc. Most vegetarians are women and I wonder if that’s by design. Would most women learn to hunt? Have women been kept from hunting in times past? And still today in places where people hunt for food? The excuse is always pregnancy and caring for children, but free of enforced pregnancy, it would be a different story.
@ wordwoman, domesticated farm animals have proven to survive very well and even to transform themselves physically fairly quickly. Most of them already live outside anyways. It’s up to us to make the environment hospitable enough for them, and to reintroduce them safely. And if they want to stay in contact with us, they can. People who introduce zoo animals back into the wild do so progressively, there a special skills for that. The humans come back occasionally to see them, the animals recognise them and come and say hello, sometimes even introduce their new friends. It’s really sweet. It would probably only take domesticated animals a generation or so to readapt and become feral again, for some even less than that. It has been found out that pigs that go back to living in the forest shrink in size, lose a lot of their fat, and their hair grows longer again, as well as their front teeth. Cats have remained almost 80% feral, dogs haven’t.
Such a fascinating thread!
Eating animals is a difficult question isn’t it.
I hold that killing a wild animal (that has been living in the wild) is more ethical than genetically modifying seeds. The concept of farming and breeding animals is a completely different ball game to hunting for something that happens to be there.
I went through a phase of eating only macrobiotic food, as there are quite a few restaurants who specialize in this in Japan. Apparently it was the original Japanese diet. They didn’t even used to eat fish in some places. Poultry and dairy is quite a recent addition to the diet, and meat such as beef and pork is very new by comparison.
Anyway, there are a million different and delicious ways to prepare this food. It is tasty, and nutritious. But that’s because Japan lends itself to a climate where the variety of vegetables is stupendous. It’s also easy to grow and ferment soy beans here, and the only complete protein in those dishes is tofu.
So perhaps not eating animals would mean human beings moving to a place, like Japan, where you can live on alternative food.
I know that in the UK, and other cold countries like Russia, meat is essential for energy. Especially in Russia, actually. During the long winters there you couldn’t be messing around with bits of stalks and roots and leaves. Not if you wanted to have the energy you needed to get things done.
If you wanted to travel, or perhaps if you were pregnant, or had heavy periods, or some health issue like anemia, or worked outside you couldn’t live on a macrobiotic (vegan) diet for long.
There’s also the issue of how incredibly tasty meat is. Instantly filling. Instant energy. And the fact that they say our teeth are designed for it (is that true?), that we have the teeth of a carnivore.
I don’t think it’s by design that women eat less meat, but a product of patriarchy. Meat eating in patriarchy is an act of domination, men who eat a lot of meat is a way to show they’re dominant.
I do think we need animal meat occasionally, especially mineral rich animals or animal parts such as seashells, liver, etc. We don’t need that much of it though. Maybe once a week or so is enough. Women will have to find out by themselves what their needs are according to their body type, activities, etc, local plants available etc. Even in present traditional societies women still hunt, but they hunt small animals and gather the roots and food they need for daily nutrition while men monopolise hunting of big animals, such as deer, moose, elephants, etc – according to place. I wonder whether men developed hunting of larger animals as a way to legitimise their domination over women, or if it was previously a mixed or female activity that men took over.
What’s for sure is that women in patriarchy are mostly underfed and badly fed. And in modern countries, on top of being underfed we’re poisoned by industrial foods and we’ve completely lost common sense notion of healthy nourishment.
@ Blackmetal, I see horror of nature as a form of self-hatred too. It’s a consequence of male violence, as seeing our life or natural life in general as something disgusting. That’s a result of how we’ve been treated by men, of how men see us.
Hi sarsea! thanks for passing, I’m glad you’ve been enjoying it. I’ve liked this thread too, it’s been really invigorating and refreshing.
I just mention the taste because I’m wondering whether human beings were *supposed* to eat meat. I think dogs and lions and cats were *supposed* to eat meat. It would be pretty cruel to make your cat be a vegetarian wouldn’t it? Or maybe it wouldn’t. Cats love hunting though. They’re expert hunters. They can even kill birds! Flying things.
Anyway… What I’m saying is, on the one hand we can’t very well say that men are too dangerous to exist, and then go ahead and hunt, can we? Or would we do it in a more balanced way than was done by men? Would we have to keep that side of our nature in check?
I could live without meat, for sure. This is something I’d let other women decide, I guess.
Something I’ve discovered recently is that meat, seeds and animal products are acidic, while vegetables and fruits, especially raw, are basic (ph). In order for our body to have a stable ph level, above which or below which it means we are severely ill (I can’t remember what it is, whether our normal level very slightly acidic or basic) we need a lot of basic foods and a bit of acidic. Modern food is almost only acidic (meat, processed or deep-fried foods, sodas, refined sugars, seeds, cooked and fried vegetables…) which is one (amongst many) reason why there are so many cancers.
Another thing is that the digestive enzymes for meat and seeds aren’t the same for raw fruits and vegetables. If we eat fruits after a cooked meal with meat for instance, you might get bloating or feel that the fruit didn’t do much good (this is my case). At any rate, the energy you’ve given to your body by eating the fruit won’t be sorted out and stored properly by your body so it’s as if we’ve eaten the fruit for nothing. So apparently it’s best to eat both separately in order to make the most of it. I’ve been doing this for a while and I can really feel the energetic, hydrating benefits of raw fruits and vegs now when I previously hadn’t.
Another thing is the longer you chew, the easier it is for your stomach to break down the molecules you’re sending and this energy can be reused properly. When we chew longer it allows time for the brain/ stomach to recognise the food properly and send the right digestive enzymes, and it also helps recognising the feeling of satiety more easily. When we eat fast, we start feeling full, uncomfortable or bloated only after we’ve finished eating too much.
Anyway these are some interesting stuff I’ve discovered for myself recently. I think the best thing is to experiment and observe the effects on yourself first.
One thing that is really bad for the body though is dairy products. We eat way too much of it and honestly breeding animals for dairy is so cruel. How would it feel if we were made pregnant every year or so, our baby was stolen from us right afterwards, and machines were put on our breasts to take the milk out of us?
Cherry, that microbiotic food sounds fascinating! could you explain more what’s it about?
We certainly would never hunt animals in the way men do. Never!
I don’t have a straight answer to this. Women in some countries hunt small animals such as rabbits, or insects, etc.
The thing is, vegetarianism is based on placing higher value on the lives of animals than those of plants. I disagree with this. I think plants are highly intelligent beings from whom we have many things to learn too. Just as I would take great care to leave the integrity of the plant (if there’s only one) or of the species (if there are many in one place) intact so that it can continue to grow and survive, this would be how I’d hunt, if I did. And we’d certainly not hunt that much anyway as it’s very time consuming. You never attack females because they reproduce the species: only males, or young males as for some species the testosterone in the adult makes the animal inedible (you have to cut their balls off several hours or one day before killing them apparently).
Not eating animals because it’s cruel means saying that it’s *not* cruel to eat plants, to take their life away. This isn’t true. Plants want to survive as much as any living being wants to.
We have to accept that eating and killing life is part of life. Every single living being feeds on some form of life or another. This is the cycle of life. If it’s done with deep respect and attention to our environment, to all the different species, to our own real needs, it’s fine. By respect I mean killing only the utmost necessary for our survival, never more, which is what men do. Men’s eating model is based on torturing and massacring animals, leading them to extinction.
Also by respect I mean ensuring that the killing process of the animal or plant is as painless as possible. In the least destructive way possible for the species as a whole.
We have to honour the lives we take away for our survival. Not try to dissociate from the pain of having to kill a living being but be aware of it and in peace with it.
Hi witchwind,
i also don’t have much to add, but have been enjoying this post and thread immensely!
It is synchrone-icity again. Just around the time you published this post I had been thinking about how it would be to be free now more and more often. To not be afraid and act as if I was free and most importantly to FEEL the way things could be/should be as always there, the potential of it, I mean. I can’t really explain it in words. But i think these ideas and feelings emerging is connected to the full moon/ecplipse plus the fire triad that happened midweek. And contrary to how I usually feel about this (ANGER at the way things are because I can see and feel how wrong they are), this time the awareness was/is more connected to joy and bliss.
Something is going on. 🙂
The Macrobiotic movement is very much a female-centred, female-led movement here in Japan, and the reason for that is (I believe) because women’s lives are very circumscribed here, but the one outlet and area of control they have is food. They never let go of their firm grip on food the way North-Western women did.
Wikipedia tells me a mnvented the concept, but that can’t be true because Japanese people advertise the fact that this was the traditional Japanese diet. It’s kind of common knowledge here. Monks still live by this diet.
In Japan, it’s just a “type” of food, dish or lifestyle you can follow. For example there are loads of cooking books and magazines in shops that show you how to make macrobiotic food. I buy them sometimes just because the food looks so fascinating, unusual, exotic and delicious.Then you can buy macrobiotic lunchboxes for quite cheap, or go to a macrobiotic cafe or restaurant.
It seems that articles on the internet have tried to summarize it, using percentages of this and that, but that seems to be a very “male” approach to this food! I don’t think there are any rules, from what I have seen.
But to give you an idea, from this article:
http://www.msn.com/en-nz/health/nutrition/macrobiotic-diet/a
20-30% fresh vegetables, 10% sea vegetables and about 10% beans, lentils, soy and fish. Meals should be constructed to balance the yin and yang qualities of the food.
Eat two or three meals a day
Eat only organic food.
Choose foods that are grown locally or within about a 400 mile radius of home. Avoid imported foods.
Adjust the energy of the food to the energy of the seasons or time of day.
Cook over a hot flame, not with an electric burner or microwave.
Use cast iron, clay pots or stainless steel cookware**
Cook frequently with methods that use liquids (pressure cooking, boiling, steaming, soups, stews) instead of dry methods (baking, broiling)
Eat nothing that is commercially processed or contains food additives.
Take no dietary supplements.
**actually lots of Japanese women have told me to use cast iron pans because they literally put iron in the food! Yep, the same iron that you can get from meat!
—————————————
The internet is telling me a Japanese man called George Oshawa invented the macrobiotic diet during the 1950s.
Knowing what I do about Japanese culture, the very idea that a Japanese man invented this diet is too ridiculous for words.
George Oshawa, in his own words, confesses that the diet is 5000 years old. He calls the food “medicine”, which I find a strange term. It’s just delicious food, prepared well, nothing more, nothing less. It’s the food that women were making in Japan for their families for thousands of years. It prevents illness, perhaps, but that doesn’t mean it’s medicine. Monks still stick to this diet, but it’s mainly young women with time to care about their diet, middle aged women who are health conscious, and mothers who are worried about their kids’ diet that seem to be driving the macrobiotic food culture.
I found some weird cult-like articles about “The Macrobiotic Movement” which does not represent anything I have seen here in Japan! In Japan it is mainly health-conscious women who are aware of the crap that is put in food these days. Some women do live a type of “lifestyle” where they might make their own clothes, not buy plastic toys for their children and not have electronic goods. These types of things go hand in hand with women who opt for macrobiotic food.
Interestingly, and surprisingly, there are a lot of anti-macrobiotic articles on the internet. Some of them are really hateful and angry! One man wrote an article saying that “macrobiotics killed my wife”, because she had cancer and refused to be operated on. To me, this represents the woman’s personal belief about operations, which is not connected to the macrobiotic diet. However a woman who opts for a macrobiotic diet might also opt for not being treated for cancer.
Reading between the lines of the article, the man seems to have separated from his wife for two years before she died. He had custody of her daughter. It seems to me that he was punishing her for having her own mind and her own opinions about her body. Very tellingly, he mentions that his wife’s doctor called *him* up to talk about her. He separated from her, and took custody of their daughter. It was probably this–losing custody of her daughter to this man–that killed her!!!
http://www.skepsis.nl/macrobiotics.html
And as we women know. If men are angry about something… then it’s probably good for women, and bad for men!
The hate is probably coming from the fact that women are doing things, and having opinions on things… and men doing like that..
Thank you, Witchwind. This is beautiful. Where do I sign up?
Thanks for saying that plants are intelligent, too. I agree. I do a bit of gardening for food and when I pick the food, I thank the plant for it. Cutting back some plants make them healthier, for instance leaf lettuce and other greens. In a natural setting, plants get “pruned” by animals. When grown for mass consumption, they just cut the whole plant. Plus acres and acres of the same crop is not healthy for the plants or the soil.
I was taught by my grandmothers that building healthy soil is the key and soil is living too. She buried her garbage in the garden, not calling it “compost” or anything fancy. Some people think fungi are highly intelligent and may be part of the reason that things haven’t gotten worse than they are given the destruction everywhere. Commercial agriculture would kill off all fungus. Then we’d have no soil, nothing to break down leaves/composted materials just dirt.
Patriarchal farming sees all these parts as a machine, something to be controlled rather than a living system. Their schemes about systems have been ruinous. The “green revolution” in farming (artificial fertilizer) involved unnatural processes so they could get more plants from the soil and feed more children for population growth. Also killing the soil.
I let various plants “volunteer” to be in my small garden. If you let them go to seed, you may have a garden that doesn’t look like rows but more a community. I do weed, though because some plants are too aggressive/invasive and I don’t want a monoculture. Usually these are plants that are not natural to the area. My garden is very small but maybe if it were bigger I could do it differently.
Different women have different nutritional needs depending on the genes we inherited. Women from cold climates are more likely to need fat in their diets or animal protein, from warmer climates, more plants. Listening to our bodies is important but not that easy given the interference to doing so. Still, it’s important.
I’m glad that they have brought back bison, animals that were part of natural systems in North America. Right now they grow them for food, but at least the species survived so they may be part of our future.
Rereading my latest post I noticed the words “crop” and “materials” “Crops” are plants seen as a commodity. I hate the term “plant material” that commercial landscapers use. To them it is all about making money, control, etc. Ugh!
Both my grandmothers had food gardens, as did my mother. It was about feeding their families. There are many things women can pass along to future generations.
Thanks for this great post, Witchwind. It’s good to be able to talk about and sort this out.
Wordwoman, you wrote, “Some animals were “domesticated” and it is my understanding that they could not survive in the wild…..Because nature has been so messed up with we don’t have that many natural species.”
I smiled sadly at this because I believe women were the very first natural species that men – who I consider a virus and parasite attached to us – domesticated. I have no problems acknowledging that humans (for lack of a better term) are animals.
That is, I believe the domestication of women by men for their benefit – the taming and breaking of the wild woman spirit in ourselves- was the true “original sin”: not in any biblical sense but in ecological. We are no more than breeder cows and pack animals to men. They even call us “cows” and “bitches” and “mules.”
After that, it was downhill all the way, with further and further, greater and greater domestication until we reach where we are today: the domestication of the entire planet. The process took them 200,000 or so years via the building of Empires and a globalized economic system of plundering and trashing but they got there.
This being so, I acknowledge my state of domestication. I have since childhood and the realization that I had been born into captivity with no means of escape because it was everywhere. Place me out there in the wild and I will not survive more than one week because I simply don’t know how to. How to rectify that? Today, I also acknowledge that I must go through a process of de-domestification and it is a very long process of learning and changing habits and thinking imprinted across a lifetime: a transition state from one form to another.
This post began with the question, “What would women’s societies look like?” The first thing that popped into my mind was Transition Town.
I read about them a lot from places such as resilience.org. A Transition Town is a grassroots community project that seeks to build resilience in response to peak oil, peak climate destruction and economic instability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns_(network)
Already I can hear Blackmetal mumbling, “Yeh, Screaming Valkyries, save me! Not more of this Hippie commune trash!”
Blackmetal, please bear with me. Once upon a time I loved cities more than you do: the more glamorous, chic London-Paris-New York-Rome- Hong Kong with skyscrapers and expensive restaurants and shops the better.
It was my escape from a nightmare childhood and stultifying suburbia of what I used to term “mediocres.” I thought I would find my “intelligentsia,” my brilliant minds to converse with and gracious living in cities. I was wrong.
As per previous comment I used to work in international luxury goods and found my true luxury elsewhere: with women artisans in their co-operative communites.In the future, I know it will be those women in those types of communities – in Italy, Japan, India, Spain, the USA wherever- that will not only survive but flourish because those women know how to.
I also come from studies in economics. Men call that a “science” but it isn’t: just more of the same old, same old patriarchal dogma; just another male religion in its most modern form. Over the years, I have mentally constructed my own rad fem economic theories and practicalities.
However,those communites cannot happen by just waving a magic wand and having them appear. We have to work at transformation and the Transition Town concept is the closest I have found to how I think.
Click to access small_is_beautiful.pdf
Yes, yes, I know Schumacher is a male, but ignore it.
If interested, read the book filtered through rad fem perspective the way I always do. At present Transition Town is the direction I am going myself. How to later transform that into rad fem I have little idea at present. I take things one step at a time with the resources I have.
Cherryblossom, with all your knowledge of horticulture! Why are you not doing something with it! Do you have no idea how valuable that is today?
Sorry for this long post, Witchwind. You have touched a subject is dearest to me and is on my mind constantly.
Yes, Bronte71, I agree about women and domestication. Something to think about, becoming undomesticated. How to do that when everything is colonized? Understanding is helpful, of course.
I did a search for Transition towns and came up with their org page. The problem I have with that is it seems like men are behind it and are featured in most of the articles on the pages. It was co-founded by a man, though it doesn’t say who the other person was (why not?). I’m pretty wary of these groups, because a lot of the stuff they advocate seems labor-intensive, woman-labor, that is. This happened before. One reason not to like the hippies, or the similar movements before that, like the Bohemians that Cherryblossomlife posted about on her blog is that they are male-run and male-led, designed to steal women’s labor in a way that looks new to those who start to figure it out and want to escape. No more male movements for me. Even feminism was taken over by males and subtly redirected, subtle at first, not so subtle now as we see clearly. So how to become undomesticated is a very good question.
@AlexistheFlamethrowerDaemon
I smiled a wry smile at your question here “Cherryblossom, with all your knowledge of horticulture! Why are you not doing something with it! Do you have no idea how valuable that is today?”
I have a Masters of Science, and yet I’ve just spent the weekend taking care of my father-in-law, an old patriarch.
WHY? and HOW? and WHY NOT? are excellent questions that I’m trying to find the answers to.
Sorry, that was @bronte71! not Alexis Flamethrower Daimon
Oh, one more point I wanted to make tangential to my comment above about western merchants growing crops in Africa and Asia that are not suitable for the climate, and which the local people don’t recognize.
What happens often, is that there is a surplus, or over-supply of food that cannot be taken to the western supermarkets because of logistical reasons (getting stuff on planes takes time and space etc), or because the cost it’d take to import the over-supply wouldn’t be justified because they wouldn’t be able to sell the food on time, so they want to keep the prices up, and keeping the food scarce means people have to pay more for it.
Anyway, this has led to dumping the food into the local communities, literally handing out this surplus for free. Free food? Great, no?
Well no. Because the local women who have set up their own stalls to sell their garden veg cannot compete with free food.
But then there’s the fact that some of this food is unrecognizable to the local people, and often they refused it because they didn’t like the taste, so managers of TEsco or Carrefour or whatever had the problem of dumping food onto people WHO DIDN’T WANT IT.
THus began an “education programme”. They began educating the thicko natives on how to prepare these vegetables or grains. Women, of course.
It makes me so angry!! “Educating” women on things they don’t need to be educated about, so that you can justify the unethical practice of dumping food into their communities??
It was very much a “we are deigning to share our knowledge about the world with you, and to educate you how to live, with our superior knowledge of Things.”
Whereas if they’d just left the women alone to manage their small-holdings they would have happily carried on growing the food they needed for their families and community.
Re: Transition Towns. Yes, I understand perfectly that they are a male-organized system: a clog in my throat like undigestible food.
However, the rest of the “economics” and psychology of the idea is sound. Damn those men forever for stealing what were, of course, female ideas in origin. They never tell you this but this is the way it has always been.
Ten years ago I was writing a book length thesis on female-run co-operative communities and even had a major European publisher for it.
I didn’t finish it for reasons I can’t go into.
I considered it the project of my lifetime: “This is how women do international business. With soul.”
I was furiously angry at the time because I was witness to those co-operatives being destroyed by globalization.
So these days, I go for far less ambitious projects that are do-able with the resources and time I have and I’m not a purist. I’m a hard pragmatist – because I grew up very poor- so I use whatever materials are available to me. I don’t tilt at windmills because I’ve done that in the past and it doesn’t work.
I think it was Audre Lorde who wrote, “You can’t tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools” but I disagree. I’ll use the master’s tools (ONLY at present) if I have to. That means corporate structures and Transition Towns according to prevailing conditions and the financial system because they ain’t going to last long.
Women have our greatest opportunities then, as we have always had when male Empires fail.
Witchwind, I should have added, there will be Strictly Only Women Allowed in my future – small- transition venture.
I find the presence of men not just irritating these days but my body recoils in disgust and they notice it.
“We are deigning to share our knowledge about the world with you, and to educate you how to live, with our superior knowledge of Things,” is what Cherryblossom wrote of the male food conglomerate system managers and their condescending attitute to local women.
How well I know that male condescension but it doesn’t work with me anymore because I’ve seen men wreck everything they touch.
I happen to think that we live in interesting times where prepared and aware women can find the loopholes in men’s (crumbling) systems and take advantage of them for our benefit.
Re: Audre Lorde’s “You can’t destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools.” Lorde wrote that in the 70’s, I think.
Well, forty or so years later and the Masters are destroying their house with their own tools all on their own.
Women don’t have to do much more than watch that Master’s house come tumbling down in dust …….and make certain we have our own, alternative, “house” prepared. Thus, our women’s communities.
Bronte71, yes no reason to invent the wheel if organizations do something we can use. Likely the good ideas are women’s ideas, anyway, taken credit for by the men. Like Einstein, mentioned above. That was a shocker for me. I’d never heard about his wife.
I looked at their org site and the lefty men (shudder) stood out as being in key roles, top roles. Women in support roles or roles involving the “heart and soul”. Well, perhaps that last one is right because women do have those things, but blended with science, all the things we’ve talked about here. But the men co-opt hearts and souls and unsuspecting women trying to break free become confused instead of becoming radical feminists. Radical feminism helps protect us and helps clarify things. It’s heartbreaking to see women get taken in who might become radical feminists. Being in any organization with these men is difficult. If you are involved with these organizations, perhaps you can spread some radfem goodness to help prevent women getting badly taken advantage of.
Further: The heart and soul emphasis (looked like the top woman leader focused on that) reminded me of the whole “earth mother” trip that got put on women where women were supposed to mother the men (and provide sex along with it). This was a detriment to feminism. Same with the new age stuff where women were put in these roles that were so stereotypical. All diversionary stuff. Derailment. Very harmful to us all. Also very commercialized in selling all kinds of meditation retreats, etc. to women and stealing their meager financial resources.
P.S. Good luck with your small transition enterprise for women. You should call it something different, though. The term “transition” can mean other things as we know all to well 😉
I completely agree with you on evolution witch.
Bronte71- When I work, I work in solar power. about 8yrs ago, I was seeing how the industry was starting to consolidate. This was killing off so many local installers, usually the community minded, true believers in renewables, like my boss (the sole female master electrician in that state, a true butch pioneer, and a most amazing women). I learned about co-ops and thought “why not?” this could help everyone fight the profit guzzling exploiters.
So I learned all I could, and built a co-op, and it was awesome. Installers lined up to participate. Sadly, the people we got funding from decided they wanted it to be for profit, and then kept changing my structure, against my advice. They screwed it up, and then cut off the money. I wish we had the cash to make a go of it ourselves, but that was just not possible.
Then, a few years later, I run into another company, across the country. Same model as mine, exactly, even offering the same group of services. But instead enriching all of the participants/communities, and helping them succeed against big murder businesses, he made it a profit model and that profit went straight to the man in charge. And he makes millions a year.
Typical.
I made a vehicle for getting solar power into the hands of those that needed it most, while keeping local installers that were community and ecologically minded, in business. That MAN made a vehicle for sucking the work and cash from everyone he could get near.
And that’s the difference between what women seek to do, and what a mans goals are.
Black Metal- I feel you; though I love all of nature, living in it in an “old school” way is not my thing. If that is how we must live in order to respect life and not destroy it, I will just have to adjust, because my wants cannot override all other life. But that doesn’t mean I have to love every bit of it 🙂
Food- Lierre Keith from DGR has a great book for those looking for an ethical, Eco sustainable, way to eat. It’s called “The Vegatarian Myth,” IIRC. I’m sure you all know about it, but I didn’t until recently.
I believe the “ethical omnivore” is the way for me. I have no problem with eating animals any more than plants, so long as its not cruel and done with respect. Male ways of eating are so distorted and defective, it’s hard to envision what the alternative would be.
Where I live local, small scale, farming is popular, as is personal/community gardening; even public schools are growing their own food (no gmo or really nasty poison of any type, even organic!). There is plenty of (mostly) affordable, locally grown, tasty food here, even small scale “free range” meats and dairy. It’s amazing, especially after other places I have lived. I can see this type of thing continuing, and being improved upon.
*Whenever I do this type of thinking/dreaming, I realize just how colonized my mind is. I think it’s vital to examine what ideas you have because of patriarchy, and this was a perfect way to do it. So much to think about!!! Its great, even though it really points how how male my thinking can be.
I am also “free from sex pozzies”, from above 😉
I didn’t realize I was logged in with this account until after I saw the post.
Wordwoman, you wrote, “If you are involved with these organizations, perhaps you can spread some rad fem goodness.”
Yes, that was the intention. I have been an “outsider” since childhood – wrong nationality, wrong single mother family, wrong this, wrong that.
I learned to be a chameleon: the “outsider” who the “insiders” always listened to because rebelliously outspoken and because I needed desperately to change some small part of my world for it to be even barely liveable. That still applies. I work with the materials available to me and shape them – as much as able- to my own needs. In the past that has meant infiltrating any given system and carving out a small place for myself.
In biology, it only takes one small rebellious cell in a cancerous system to start the healing process – even if it remains only local- and that is my personal philosophy.
The women I used to work with were so-called “traditional” women with husbands and children. They weren’t rad fem but scratch the surface -I always did- and their ideas sounded very close to rad fem. It is neither “left” or “right wing women” because they don’t fall into Anglo stereotyped camps.
They weren’t Earth Mothers, either. They were hard-headed, no-nonsense businesswomen who had been knocked around by men and life since they were born and had no illusions about the world. Their mothers and grandmothers had also seen and lived through it all. I’ve always liked the hard-headed, “peasant”-origined type of women. They have wonderful, earthy, self-mocking and world-mocking senses of humor that I relate to.
Not Earth Mothers. Blah! I have no time for the whole, new-agey, Earth Mother, phony yin-yang/anima-animus trip, either. And don’t get me started on Hippie communes with their “free love” (free sex) jive.
Renee Martin – Both your comments resonated strongly because I’ve been where you’ve been albeit not in solar power. My heart was broken in early adulthood by the first co-op style system I built up for my male boss. He made millions and then destroyed the company. Very typical.
I cannot ever work with men again because of past experiences. Too often I’ve seen them appropriate/steal women’s ideas, women’s hard work, women’s systems and transform it all into (highly profitable) junk. This is what I call the male “race to the bottom”: the cheapening and lowering of quality of everything they touch.
I am unemployable in the nation in which I presently live because I refuse to lower my high standards. I may as well be a Martian to the men here because all they care about is cheap, cheap, cheap and wringing out every tiny cent of profit. I laugh because I know those men do not see the future coming – if there is to be one at all- but I do. (As much as is possible. Not much)
That future – if there is to be one at all- MUST BE small, co-operative and female-run communities because only women know how to manage and conserve resources. (I can’t go into the brain research that has shown this. Too long for one comment.)
Finally, Blackmetal. I understand your fear/hatred or whatever it is of nature.
I used to live in a place immersed in nature: rolling hills covered in vineyards, olive groves, forests of chestnut, walnut and fruit trees of all kinds. It was like living in an eternal embrace. I loved it.
However, this was human-made nature. It was nature altered across millennia to fit human purposes. The only large predator to be found was the occassional wild bore crossing the road or foxes. I have no problem with that because every species changes its environment to some extent. Even the Amazon rainforest was a human intervention. It was not natural. It was cultivated.
I don’t have a “Disneyland Nature” or “Bambi” view of the natural world.
I recognize nature as a merciless, uncaring of its living inhabitants system: red in tooth and claw. Yet, it is our “operating system” and respect for it, and understanding its natural laws as much as we are able, is critical for our survival.
Sorry, that should have been “wild boars” above. Not “wild bores”…..Was I thinking of the all the wild bores of men I’ve had the misfortune of meeting when I wrote that?
Wordwoman: the Einstein’s wife fact. That stunned me, too, when I was told. Ever since, I’ve never believed in any of the Great Male Discoverers of patriarchal history. Then, of course, there was Rosalind Franklin (sp?) who was the real discoverer of DNA. The male phonies Crick and Watson – who later won the Nobel Prize for DNA discovery-broke into her laboratory one night at Cambridge University.
Repeat: the two male thieves Crick and Watson broke into a woman’s locked laboratory at the dead of night. They knew what was in that lab. Rosalind Franklin was a chrystallographer. The two men stole one photograph: the structure of the DNA molecule.
And so it goes.
If women had only had a fraction of the free time available that men have had and have wasted, what would we have been able to achieve?
I have been pondering that question all my life.
They steal our time and energy, they kept us illiterate for millennia but STILL we managed to discover and invent. And then they go and steal those discoveries and inventions for themselves, as well.
I would be radical feminist for this reason alone.
@bronte,
When I mentioned Yin and Yang, I wasn’t saying I supported that idea or anything. I was just quoting from an article. I don’t know anything about it and from what I saw it represented “masculine” and “feminine” energies, which is obviously not something I would be on board with at all.
But I wouldn’t go so far as to knock earth mother type women, who believed in this and get something out of it, any more than I would knock women who are ostentatiously consumerist and materialistic. Those earth mother women are (rightly) reacting against what they see as patriarchal-capitalism. The consumerists are trying to find a creative outlet as best they can. Both are sane reactions to what women see and hear around them. It’s also very much a middle class thing.
How can I put it..the word “earth mother” said in a certain way reminds me of the word “wifey”. idk. There are lots of derogatory ways to describe what women do and believe in, when we don’t know how they got to the point where they believe XYZ. Dworkin’s Right Wing women labours this point very well.
One thing about nature, bronte: nature and the forest predates humans by far. Forests, trees, insects, animals and flowering plants were there long before humans, as well as the plants we eat, in their wild form, which women selected and transformed over years. While it’s true that in modern patriarchy (the last 3,000 years) men have gained so much control over the earth that everything has been transformed by them, nature isn’t a product of humanity. Humans, before patriarchy (or at least its worst manifestations) aren’t the only species to transform the environment: every single species participates in that evolution. It isn’t a blank page on which humans can project their fantasies, which is how men treat it.
It is true however that these days it’s pretty much up to us to rebuild natural spaces. But the less intervention, the better. No life should be dependent on sole human intervention in order to survive.
Thanks for the info about Rosalind Franklin! I knew she was the discoverer of DNA but had forgotten about the robbery of her work, I think it was mentioned on someone’s blog a few years ago.
I’m closing comments now, I loved this conversation! Hope to post soon again.