UTOPIA: what would a women’s society look like?

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.

It seems The End is to come.

Earth, I love you. I always have. You and your elemental inhabitants are the most beautiful beings that I have ever seen, met, felt and experienced. You are the most beautiful life experiment in this universe. You are music to my ears and soul. And your green! The sound of the leaves in the wind. The scents. The sunrise and sunset. The moon. The humming of the bees, the rushing of the waves. The infinite moments of sensory ecstasy and blissful encounters with other beings. Discovering woman-identification has been a constant dance of fire and joy.

***

Alexis linked to the convo going on at Wwomenwwarrior’s. I had already read her post some time ago, when she published it, but not followed the conversation. I had a look and this comment by bronte was of particular interest.

I’ll copy her comment here:

Re: “If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accomplished by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.”
Mary Daly

Much as I hate disagreeing with my beloved Mary Daly, with regard to the decontamination of the Earth and how it will be accomplished, I must. Mary was not an earth/climate scientist or ecologist and never professed to be one.

Apart from lurking silently on radical feminist blogs I read NTHE sites: (Near Term Human Extinction) sites, because, according to the science, Near Term Human Extinction within one or two generations is where the parasitical/ cancer tumorous system of patriarchy and Homo Rapiens (males) have brought not only humans but all complex life on Earth. The Sixth Extinction experienced in the 5 billion years or so of
Earth’s lifetime and presently underway is being caused by Homo Rapiens.
Why is this so thorougly ignored on radical feminist blogs? Please don’t tell me that radical feminists – of all people- are climate change denialists?

That is, my radical feminist reflections/ spinning/ taking my thoughts to their logical end have not resulted in Mary Daly’s happy beliefs that women will overcome patriarchy, that there will be a cosmic revolution or that evolution (an unthinking, blind process that cares not a jot about women) will somehow step in at the very last moment and save us and the planet from the male disease.

Instead, my radical feminism – based as it always has been on the search for Truth no matter how ugly and unpalatable- led to the study and cross-analysis of biology, climate science, ecology and complex systems theory.

I wanted the Big Picture of what is happening to the planet because of Homo Rapiens. And that picture is not a pretty or hopeful one.
Hence, whether the male Y chromosome goes extinct within 5 million years (as stated by Professor Jenny Graves) or whether it goes extinct within 1 million years is moot. The rabid ape Homo Rapiens has done so much damage in its 250,000 years on Earth that it is not only extincting itself but everything else along with it.

I believe all radical feminists should be preparing themselves now for what will be the collapse of civilization because the reality and inevitabily of that is, perphaps, one of our blind spots: a dangerous one.

To answer your question, Bronte, as to why this has been ‘thoroughly ignored’ on my blog: I did not know about it. For your information, of course I have never been a climate change denialist, I have always attentively read information on the destruction of the environment, read about the floodings to come, about the collapse of the monetary system, of this and that, but I believed, as Mary Daly did, that some of us could survive the impending doom, and hoped the next generation of survivors would only be females.

Now as I read Bronte’s comment a few days ago, it struck me and was very compelling but I read it in a haste (my attention span on computers is limited these days -maybe I need glasses?- so I usually just read or write things fast) and skimmed past the reference to Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE), especially as there was no link. So as much as this comment was alarming it didn’t stir me particularly, and the next day went on as usual. I didn’t really get the message, I thought ‘oh well, this makes sense, I just hope females will still survive’. Until a friend, yesterday, told me what she had found by googling “Near Term Human Extinction”.

Oh. My. I looked it up for myself. There’s this guy called Guy McPherson, who’s a spokesperson of all of this. I googled various entries and quickly found his website. And I found this essay, a summary of the findings on climate change. Read it yourselves. I’m not going to quote anything because it is too long, just read it very carefully.

What this guy, Guy, says, or rather what he demonstrates with the support of hundreds of long term scientific evidence from many sources including very conservative and mainstream sources, is that all life on this planet will come to extinction by 2030. The major cause of this extinction will be that the global warming and melting of the ice has triggered a series of feedback loops of toxic gas emissions such as methane and carbon dioxyde which were trapped in the soils and underwaters of the earth by the ice and frost. These feedback loops have already started, are now unstoppable and life on earth is already on its way to extinction. No technology can stop this – especially since male technology is part of the problem and their use and fabrication will only emit more greenhouse gases. Even if men’s system collapsed now, if all men died and we returned back to stone age, it is unstoppable. Unprecedented levels of methane and carbone dioxyde have already been released into the atmosphere because of the warming and the more gas is emitted, the more the planet heats because of the greenhouse effects of the gas, and the more gas is emitted again. Once the air is too intoxicated plants will start dying too and if all or most plants die together, all the carbon dioxyde they sequestered will be released too, which only further intoxicates the air. There will simply be no more oxygen to breathe and the time it will take for the earth to regain cool temperatures and for the gases to be sequestered again, if that ever happens, which might be between 100 or thousands of years according to the extent of the damage, all species and life will have been already gone. I’m just paraphrasing these statements from memory, so read his essay for detailed information and explanations of the different feedback loops.

Right. This is estimated to happen by 2030… 2030! That gives us 15 years to live, if we even survive that long. Before that there will be floodings and terrible tsunamis, the sea level is likely to rise at least 50 meters higher. The monetary system will crumble down before, and I shudder to think what men will do once their system falls apart and they will no longer be able to hide the truth.

Do I believe this? Is this credible, is it a hoax? If only. How could this not be credible? The facts are indisputable. Who am I to dispute the long term data and biological facts observed and measured by hundreds of scientists? I’m the first to be critical about male science but this doesn’t seem to be a matter of personal opinion to me. Even if there were room for doubt or error regarding the probability of certain species surviving such as bacteria or fungi, the evidence is so compelling that I don’t think it’s an option to ignore it. I sorely wish it wouldn’t be true.

Now. One by one, my reactions.

It is a Strange moment. I cannot describe the sense of utter horror and grief that first overcame me. It seems utterly surreal yet it is real. Worse than I could have ever imagined. Life on earth as we know will no longer exist. Our beloved, sacred Mother Earth, how I love you, how it grieves me to know that all this beauty of life will disappear. I look by the window, at the trees, the grass, the birds, dear companions. How painful. This is a terrible moment of realising.

I’ve known all along that patriarchy would collapse. It confirms what we have been hearing more or less explicitly for some time now. It also confirms some visions that women have shared with me. I myself have been saying it out loud for a while, that men’s system will collapse, maybe not so much online. My only question was whether men would destroy the rest of us in their demise or if some of us would survive. We now have the answer. It appears that men will take everything away with them.

Men, homo rapiens, you scum, you filth. There is no word to describe the extent of your evil, you are pure evil, pure lechery. I hate you, how I hate you. In the 250,000 years of your rotten, defunct existence, you have managed to kill 5 million years of life on earth.

Men like Guy McPherson, you are also part of the problem. How dare you – yes I’m talking to YOU, and to all liberal men like DGR & co, and I hope you will come across this – indeed how dare you continue to write about the near term life extinction while pretending it is “humanity” who has sentenced to death all life on earth. The unstoppable death-machine has always only been orchestrated by the homo rapiens. By men. YOU. Women are not and have never been responsible for the atrocities committed by men, for men’s global industrial rape and death system. By lying and deceiving you are continuing to be part of the problem, because you are masking the fact that the obvious solution all the time, long before the extinction of all life was impending, was to depopulate the earth of males or to reduce them to manageable levels again – only by doing so would have men’s patriarchal and industrial necrophilic sado-system come to an end without destroying the rest of life.

Those men warning about the final extinction have existed for centuries, predicting the end of the world. Ffs men’s end is even predicted in their genes, their dead-endness is constitutive of their biology. All of men’s stories have a deadpoint, a “the end”. Every second film for the last decades has been about the apocalypse. They Know. Even the Mayan predicted the apocalypse at this period, they got it right. Why have none of them taken action? If these men cared for the planet and knew men would end up killing her, why haven’t they created a global male euthanising service to save the planet? Women know how to care for life. We have known better all along. Goddess knows women have been trying for millennia to put an end to male rule by all means possible, including by culling men. All this time you KILLED us!! you SUPPRESSED us, exterminated women and our life-preserving, earth-loving societies, our cultures, our lives!! And now it’s too late.

Now, even if a few men talk of committing suicide and of reducing global human population – well that’s still doing us a disservice, you egotistic liberal cowards. How many men, at best, will commit suicide? Maybe 1%? Or one in five thousand? What difference will that make? Let me tell you: if the least worse men bother to commit suicide without bothering to euthanise the rest of man-kind, they will be leaving women alone to fend with the worst of worse males: the MRAs, the pornographers, the army-men, the right-wing climate-change denialists, etc. Not to mention the problem of the suiciders that will kill their wives, mothers and daughters along with them, of course. You fucking idiots! You will be leaving the few moments of life on earth to be ruthlessly raped, pillaged and looted by the reamining barbaric males.

So, to all men, before all life goes extinct, you could at least do us the favour of leaving us these 15 last years free of your foul presence. You never really cared about life anyway. You’re not even capable of interacting with her. What difference does it make to you? What is one sub-male human species compared to billions of species on earth? Nothing.

Also, isn’t it ironic that men can publicly talk of drastically decreasing global human population as a final attempt to save the planet without anyone batting an eyelid, when we merely state the obvious – men are responsible for this global, now irrevertible catastrophe, and since they will never change the obvious solution would have been to cull them (which is now pointless) – well, we are threatened to death, killed, and heavens knows all the atrocities men do to us. Anyway, decreasing ‘human’ population isn’t a solution because the problem aren’t ‘humans’ but males.

Phew. This was the rage part.

As I continued reading the essay, as with any moment when we are faced with imminent death and annihilation, everything around me seemed futile, petty and distant. I thought of the things that mattered most in life and all I want is to spend as much time as I can with female companions, whether human, animal, plant or elemental, before we go. We now more literally than ever before, have nothing to lose. I had already begun a survival plan for myself and female relatives for some time, but it certainly encouraged me to pursue this more readily. This feeling resonated with another nagging feeling that I’ve had for several months now, which is that all my radical feminist undertakings seemed to be in slow motion, in such a stark way that it felt like a deliberate message. The more I attempted to respect my limits and the limits of life-time and rythm in the things I did to keep on communicating radical feminism to women, in all and any possible ways, the more I realised how ridiculously slow and tiny it was compared to the sheer speed and scope of men’s destruction. I felt like a snail competing with light-speed, or a twig competing with a tornado. Especially because our situation is now so dire, that most of what I do, I have to it alone since I am either separated in distance from other radical feminists or most of my closer friends don’t have time, swamped by survival pre-occupations. I don’t have much time either but I’m the only I know who has the time to devote myself almost entirely to feminism in ways that I choose. I was more and more coming to a conclusion that radical feminism could not at this point, in and of itself, save women and the planet, and if something were to save us, it would be greater than us. These intuitions or subliminal thoughts became explicit through the last conversation, especially thanks to the intervention of Tracy.

Wandering further into my troubled thoughts, I wondered what would happen with our souls and the souls of all these dear beings on earth once we will be separated from our earthly bodies. Will we continue to hover around the earth and wail the loss of life like rattling ghosts? Will we seek reincarnation somewhere else, maybe on another habitable planet? Will we go and find our life companions and live happily ever after in the ether? Will men continue to parasite our souls even in after life? I remember a woman telling me that the problem of maleness was not only a problem on earth but reflected a cosmic problem, on the level of the universe. Well, I have no idea whether this is true or even if it can be verified.

I now acutely understand why, since when I remember, I have always felt sadness -as well as joy- whenever coming in full contact with the elements and wild life. The sadness was a feeling of loss from the present and past destruction and of a loss to come. It came from the intuition that we would be parted eventually. I think we must have all experienced this more or less consciously since the dead-endness is written in the DNA of men’s civilisation. I now see how real this sense of loss is. I have probably come to life here and now to witness this last phase of patriarchy – or maybe even the last phase of this kind of life on earth. For some life will survive, I am sure. Maybe bacteria, fungi of some sort. I wish I could have been old and left just a few years ago, like Mary Daly and millions of other women. They are lucky, they left at the right time.

I suddenly remembered a time when I was an adolescent, and I used to laugh and say that I would die when I’d be 37, or something like that, for no paticular reason, and people would look at me weirdly. I thought it was an old enough age to die, I saw it as very far away then. Until someone told me “that’s an early age to die”, so I decided it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Later I interpreted it as the effect of a family member dying when I was young, and that strong awareness of death was part of my life for a very long time, so maybe it didn’t occur to me that I could live longer. Maybe I hated myself and my life so much then that I didn’t care if I died. Maybe because I disliked old people because my grandparents had always been stiff and I didn’t see the point of living old if I were to become like them. I tried to remedy this by picturing myself older and seeing it as a good thing, and accepting myself at all stages of life. What if it had something to do with the fact that I subliminally knew I wouldn’t live very old? Maybe, maybe not. It’s a flash of memory that crossed my mind while reading the essay.

Today is one day after I started reading this essay. My life will never be quite the same again, now that I have this picture in mind, now that it is so clear. It is strange to see to how much we can adapt. I am somewhat more tranquil than yesterday. What is strange is that despite this knoweldge of extinction, which still seems surreal, I also know that we will win. That we will succeed. This intuition has never left me. What kind of form will this really take I wonder, maybe this is the only solution to the end of maleness. And something new will emerge again. I still wish this wouldn’t happen, I wish this wouldn’t be true. But somehow it feels somewhat peaceful to know that there will be an end to all of this.

On writing and comments

I didn’t take the time to explain why I closed comments at the time I did. This is what I’m going to do now, as I now have a bit more time at hand.

The irony is that what made me take my decision to close comments isn’t directly because of the trolling, threats and MRA hits although it was an absolutely terrifying moment and I almost did close comments as a result; but because comments were beginning to work. I closed comments at a time where conversations were actually becoming very interesting, and the last few ones were the most interesting discussions ever held on this blog so far. Once the threats abated and the trolls decided I wasn’t their pet target any more, I expected to feel relieved and better, but I didn’t. There’s something inherently wrong with modding.

I love writing, and I love discussing with radical feminists. In fact there are few things I like more than being with and discussing with radical feminists, and if I didn’t have to find money to live, I would surely spend most of my time doing this. It’s maybe what brings me most joy in life.

Comments aren’t exactly like discussing with radical feminists in real life. They were making me feel physically and mentally sick. I wanted to run far, far away from modding and never come back to it again. I couldn’t think clearly, all these responses from so many different women were making my head spin and I didn’t know what my own thoughts were any more. I was starting to lose the desire to write, to feel that there wasn’t any point to it. It was intoxicating my entire life and thoughts, I was constantly worrying about the comments, not to mention behind the scenes tensions between this woman or that woman. And the obsessive checking, not knowing when the next message will be, or who it will be from. It might be from a woman you know, but maybe it will be form a complete stranger.

Modding is far too extreme and stressful. In no other situation in life am I to expect at any time of the day or night that someone, anyone might contact me in person, for which I have to check regularly in order to publish that message. Worrying about whether I want this or that message to be published or not. The message in itself might be good, but if you don’t know the commenter it’s stressful not to know whether she’s genuine or not. Or you see there’s a reading comprehension failure, but you don’t want to disappoint or hurt the commenter by trashing the comment because you know her. It is very unlike any form of internet communication such as emails or forums, where you may be in contact with several people but you expect a message only when you’ve sent one to them or because they said they’d write to you, and if you know the person you know more or less her speed of reply, so you’re not going to check every hour of the day to see if she’s sent you a message. And you can sense what they’re going to write about according to the conversation. You know more or what to expect, and who will get in touch with you.

No other writers but bloggers have to deal with such a high amount and scale, scope of constant intrusion, feedback and interaction. I find it insane. I only just realised this recently, as comments before used to be low enough so not to intrude in my life, but this… It’s a full-time job, and worse. I so understand why FCM decided to cut comments to three days a week for a while before she closed her blog, but even three days a week would be unbearable to me.

Paper-published writers spend a considerable amount of time writing on their own. The period before their work is published is usually fairly long, a time during which they choose who gets to read their work for feedback and with whom they want to discuss it. It may be their colleagues, friends, trusted people, etc. And once their work is published, well most writers don’t get a constant flow of letters and emails every single day in their mailboxes to which they have to reply, or republish. Their interaction with the public will be mostly through limited, specific and chosen, agreed-upon times such as gatherings, seminars, talks, conferences, workshops, inerviews etc. There will be a beginning and an end to it.

I’m not saying this is necessarily the best model but I find it so much healthier to have public interaction limited to one-time events, meetings or gatherings, maybe once a month or several times a year (or whatever is suitable), and to otherwise choose the women with whom I want to discuss my work, or thoughts. When I discuss my work with a woman, or discuss the topic of what I’m writing about, I choose her because she’s the appropriate person at this this particular moment. I don’t necessarily want to hear all women’s opinion about it right now, but only hers. Because I value her opinion, first, but also because I know her enough to be able to provide me with the kind of insight I need at this time. Because I know she’ll understand me in the way I need to be understood just now. Because I’m currently seeking one kind of feedback and she’s the person for that.

I found that having too many different unsolicited reactions at the same time made me lose focus, it dispersed my mind to the extent that I lost the meaning of things, even if each contribution, viewed separately, was immensely insightful and valuable. When women comment on my space I have to personally approve each one of their messages, which means somehow that I have to integrate their messages and voice as my own, by agreeing it to be coherent with the political and ethical stance of my blog; this absorption of so many comments at once is what caused the dispersion of my mind and why I had the impression of having 15 different voices jabbering in my head, which really was on the verge of explosion.

By publishing women’s messages on a radfem-only space, I also become responsible for endorsing what other women have said on my blog and for judging this to be radical feminist. The responsibility of judging, approving and publishing what other women say is a heavy responsibility which I find too burdensome, and this is not what I write for. It easily creates tensions and rebuttals about whether or not I should have published or trashed this or that comment. Concessions may be contested, and rightly so, but it’s all just a headache. Sometimes it’s painful even to deal with good comments when I would have enjoyed to only discuss one point further with this or that woman, yet deleting the other radfem comments and allowing only a one-to-one discussion would have been completely inappropriate given the context of semi-public discussion. And it’s painful because just the thought of wanting to discuss with one woman over another on this specific topic makes me feel like I’m a terrible person, yet it’s a perfectly normal thing to do in real life. Besides, unlike normal conversations or meetings, the other woman is dependent on the blogger/modder’s approval for having her message heard and seen, she has to use me as a vehicle to have her message expressed to others. I find that a very unbalanced and unequal form of interaction.

Private discussions with radfems are more equal and go more in depth since privacy allows for far more freedom to go to the end of our thoughts and follow each lead after the other. With public discussions we are always more or less self-contained because of fear of what others will think, fear of reprisals from MRAs, fear of comments not being approved, impossibility to mention relevant anecdotes or thoughts since they might reveal personal information that could compromise anonymity.

Finally, I realise I much prefer writing to an invisible audience rather than a regular, visible one, as I realised that I was increasingly censoring my thoughts or writing according to what I imagined commenters would think of it – fearing their judgment in other words, fearing to be misunderstood, and always dreading those threats if I went too far. I don’t think this fear can be avoided actually, it’s inherent to the comment format, to the possibility of anyone and everyone being able to comment on your writing at any time. Not having to confront myself with people’s unsolicited reactions to what I say is really liberating.

Now at this point I really want to stress that nothing here has anything to do with what a published commenter might have said or done personally, and really the contributions and insights have meant a lot to me in many ways. My thoughts here are about the inherent problems with modding and not with radfem discussions per se. There are few exceptions, but on the whole, spinning conversations is very much hindered by the blog modding format – to which we add the constant fear of receiving threatening comments and having to bear alone the responsibility of reading and deleting the threats and trolls in order to maintain a safe space for other women (which makes the space (moderately) safe for everyone except the modder).

I never had this impression as I was reading comments as an outsider, but being an insider it’s an entirely different story, and it’s interesting to see how it works. However even as an outsider I did experience the stress of obsessive checking and replying, the anxious waiting for my comment to be approved or for new comments to show up. Sometimes it would be excruciatingly frustrating, and it’s very dissociative too, as I could stay for hours in front of my screen without feeling sleepiness or tiredness when I was tired and sleepy. Separation is what causes this – separation in time and space between the emitter and transmitter, deferred sending and receiving. The screen deprives us from the sensual experience of interaction – there is a constant delay or lapse which doesn’t exist in instant / present communication, where each interaction phrase, gesture, tone of voice, touch is communicated and sensed immediately. Interacting with a screen is sense-numbing anyway. Internet and computer communication is probably the bleakest form of human interaction from a sensory point of view, despite all the advantages it has in terms of easily accessible information and fast communication.

Now that I’ve closed comments I feel immensely relieved, freed, and my clarity of mind and desire to write reappeared almost as soon as I closed comments, which is quite funny. Or rather makes perfect sense. I’ve been thinking about the effects of blogging and of the internet on radical feminist writing for a long time and these are certainly my most informed thoughts for now. That short experience in modding was surely a learning experience and I’m glad it allowed me to better understand how it affects writing.

All things considered, I’ve decided for now to try leaving comments open on the most recent article three days a month, every 1st, 2d and 3rd of each month; because these days are easy to remember. I hope I’ll remember them myself! If this is still too much to deal with, I’ll just reduce that to several times a year.

women’s supersensory powers, continued

The main point in the previous post was to say that if we look at the truth on biology from a radical feminist perspective, it doesn’t just lead to conclusions on male nature but also inevitably to certain conclusions on female nature, which is we are doted with higher cognitive and sensory capacities than men, due in part to their cerebral asymmetry and smaller corpus callosum. Looking at female brain attributes is completely different from saying “gender is hardwired” since we know that women are not naturally subordinate to men and we are not explaining any form of female behaviour here but cognitive and sensory potential. What it means is that compared to men, women simply seem to have a fully functioning brain (or far better functioning than men at least). This fits to the fact that women are genetically the default human, and men a maled mutation from women. The mutation process clearly generates a deteriorated version of the original – the question is whether this mutation is accidental or actually serves the purpose of maximising the reproduction of male species by turning their brains and bodies into potential rape-machines, which is certainly the effect of male attributes on the brain and body.

When comparing male and female cognitive / sensory powers, I find the example of male shamans very interesting. In most – if not all – current traditional societies where shamanism is still practised, males monopolise this function and pass it only to their son or the next generation male. Typically, all male shamans across the world have to resort to drugs in order to “see” and thus perform their “healing” function as shaman (imitate female healing powers). These drugs may be anything from tobacco, hallucinogenic mushrooms or other products, alcohol or also putting themselves in extreme and painful physical conditions in the aim of achieving a “second” state.

What is interesting is to see that the drug-taking is primarily a male practice. Female seers, by contrast, do not traditionally need or take such drugs. I’m certain that men need these external drugs to access parts of their brain that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access, because of their cerebral deficiency. Besides drugs always have a physical cost, they aren’t without negative consequences to the body and brain, and men often have almost as little regard to their own bodies as they have for the external world. I have always deeply distrusted drugs, saw it as a tool of control and dislike the way it shifts your consciousness in an artificial and coercive way, that makes it unsafe and unpredictable. I don’t see the need for an external product when we can simply learn to connect ourselves naturally, which is a far healthier way of doing it because it’s something that comes from you, in your own time.

If we take a look at Ayahuasca, which is a very hallucinogenic beverage male shamans from the Amazon drink; as far as I can remember, in order for ayahuasca to have its desired effects, the bark of the tree or plant has to be brewed and stripped in a very specific and precise way with other ingredients, it takes a number of hours to prepare and without this preparation the ayahuasca will not have its hallucinogenic effect. I learnt this some time ago in a detailed documentary on its fabrication, and the commenter (a British white male) was flabbergasted at the precision of the recipe, and wondered how they’d find about it amongst the million other plants and ways of preparing them for medication. It’s not something you can improvise at all and there’s no way they would have come across it just by stumbling into the plant and randomly tasting its different parts to see what it does, it would probably be indigestible. He asked some of the people there and they replied that the plants told them, something in this vein. The commenter didn’t take it seriously of course.

But here’s the thing, if men aren’t as endowed with seeing as women are and aren’t naturally connected to the elements it seems very unlikely to me that men themselves discovered the powers of that specific plant and how exactly to prepare it in the first place. To do that without the aid of ayahuasca you would have to be already connected to plants or that plant in particular would have to tell you herself, or other spirits or beings around you. And to do that you would have to be a woman, I’m sure.

In my opinion, here’s the background or truth of the story: either men coerced or tricked women into giving them the recipe for the potion, or women felt so sorry for men’s pitiable, unconnected state that they gave men this potion in the hope that would understand what it feels like to be connected. Although it’s more likely that men manipulated and implored women to give them such a thing, and once they got hold over it, they eliminated the female shamans and oracles and put themselves in stead, using this potion to give the illusion of female powers and acquire legitimacy. In other words, the same genocidal process as everywhere, where men slaughtered the priestesses, witches, oracles, seers, herbalists and other gifted women and replaced them with fraudulent male professionals.

The interesting thing is that they managed to get hold of these potions, remedies and shamanic functions everywhere in the world, in Africa, America, Asia and Europe, which suggests that wherever men started doing it, they reached a critical number and it spread to all other human males on the globe. That is, if we follow the holographic principle – for nothing else explains the universality and synchronism of patriarchal progression across the world.

I know as a matter of fact that some women do have the capacity to communicate with plants and trees and living beings in different ways, they ask the plant what kind of healing powers she has and the plant may reply, if she wants to.

 

on the importance of thinking, transformation and metaphysics of liberation.

Or where has thinking gone? Why are so few feminists interested in THINKING (and writing those thoughts down for other women to read)? It’s interesting to notice that while women are made to feel no longer qualified enough to listen to other women’s suffering, to relate it to our own, to support each other and see what we can do for ourselves, at the same time discussions about how men’s violence affects us has been mostly wiped out of feminism as a regular or central practice.

Feminism has indeed become much reduced to tedious, boring organisational meetings, institutional work or media campaigning, hierarchical and professionalised, father-state-controlled-and-paid women’s aid, conferences or lecturing, planning one action after the other up until exhaustion. All have in common that there is very little profound thinking, horizontal talking about our lives and furthering radical feminist thought, because it’s either focused on changing men in male-defined, energy-sucking ways, based on male top-down talk modes or patronizing “victim-helping” from a supposed “non-victim” or “non oppressed” position.

So we have this situation where talking about how men’s violence affects us has been confined to a secluded, professionalised, depoliticised and unequal ‘therapeutic” relationship, which leads to feminists dissociating their feminist-doing from their own lives, as if we didn’t need freeing any more, as if we no longer needed to decolonise from men’s mindbindings and had reached a certain point where our only task is to free other women through LOTS OF ACTIONS. Shouting, picketing, demonstrating, lobbying, campaigning, conferencing, etc. More, more, more, we just haven’t tried hard enough!

In a conversation I recently had with a friend, she noted that women new to feminism were typically action-focused. “What is the next action you’re doing”, “when is the next action?”. It’s action, action, action everywhere, and the punchier the action, the better. But only after several months of talking with women, when the absolute horror of patriarchy dawns on them, do they gradually grow out of their action frenzy, and learn to value the profundity of talking to women more. Still another friend made a similar observation about nowadays generation of younger feminists: “all they want is action, but they never stop to think about the meaning and consequences of what they are doing, of what they’re fighting against and whether it’s the best way to do it. They just don’t think any more.”

Today, if we want to talk to and think with women, we often only have the choice between seeing a psychotherapist, or if we’re lucky, there might be a “talking group” in the style of alcoholics anonymous, reserved for “victims of sexual violence” (implying that they’re a minority of unlucky women). They are group talking sessions coordinated by professional or institutionalised “non-victims” who aren’t there to share their own experiences with other women and grow from this exchange, but positioned as (sometimes but not always feminist) non-victims helping the victims, from above. The point of it is for the designated victims to get better and then carry on with their own lives, not to move each other towards freeing themselves from men’s control and men’s violence. And frankly, they sound dull and dreary. And it’s all deeply antifeminist.

I was told recently that yesterday’s feminists over-confidence in the power of CR was a massive mistake, that we should quit this abstract thought mode to focus more on concrete, to-the-ground REAL stuff such as providing women with shelters away from abusers, get women out of danger etc. But pitting reality against consciousness couldn’t be a bigger mistake IMO. Herstory demonstrates that once women stopped talking to each other to concentrate only on “more serious action” and male-style organising, women began to drift away from liberation to revert back into men’s traps. This is the reformist, male-changing trap. Much has been said on the evils of reformism, look at FCM’s place and read S. Johnson for more.

Women talking and thinking together, raising each other’s consciousness by seeking and discovering the truth about men and our condition in men’s world, is the ONLY thing that ever led thousands of women to break free from their cages all at once. Nothing else has ever transformed so dramatically and profoundly women’s lives. Men have never dreaded anything more than women talking together, realising our condition and acting upon each of our realisations. We need to remember that ALL of our radical feminist theory and writing, the theory that we read today and which continues to spark and move so many women, arose from women talking and thinking together. That the entire women’s movement arose from this. Because it IS movement – metamorphosis. It is the movement of constant intermingling, spinning thoughtstreams of women, bonding and deep exchange, of persistently growing consciousness and change/evolution.

It’s always good to take a look at the original sources again:

Consciousness-raising was seen as both a method for arriving at the truth and a means for action and organizing.  It was a means for the organizers themselves to make an analysis of the situation, and also a means to be used by the people they were organizing and who were in turn organizing more people.  Similarly, it wasn’t seen as merely a stage in feminist development which would then lead to another phase, an action phase, but as an essential part of the overall feminist strategy. [bolds mine]

See how different it is from today? Today collective and personal awakening, if it’s considered at all, is far more likely to be perceived as an initial stage to be gotten over. Once a certain shift in consciousness is experienced, the assumption is made that she now “knows it all or enough anyway” and thus settles at this point to go no further. There is a much male-fostered, rewarded and even harshly-imposed return into stasis, institutionalisation, refusal to go further, repetitive thoughtless action mode. The movement then fails to persist over time and it loses its essential transformative power.

We … saw [consciousness-raising] as an ongoing and continuing source of theory and ideas for action. [still the same source]

And this, which was also quoted in FCM’s article on the importance of thinking and writing:

MINDLESS ACTIVISM

The call for “action” can sometimes be a way of preventing understanding — and preventing radical action.  Action comes when our experience is finally verified and clarified.  There is tremendous energy in consciousness-raising, an enthusiasm generated for getting to the truth of things, finding out what’s really going on.  Learning the truth can lead to all kinds of action and this action will lead to further truths. […] In fact, part of why consciousness-raising is the radical approach is that women are not coming to take immediate action.

[…] In the end the group decided to raise its consciousness by studying women’s lives by topics like childhood, jobs, motherhood, etc.  We’d do any outside reading we wanted to and thought was important.  But our starting point for discussion, as well as our test of the accuracy of what any of the books said, would be the actual experience we had in these areas.  One of the questions…we would bring at all times to our studies would be — who and what has an interest in maintaining the oppression in our lives.

Consciousness and awakening is at the core of our liberation potential and power. Consciousness precedes all action, and by action I mean transformation in our reality. Consciousness becomes and is the action, but the action cannot supersede or precede it – it can only flow with or along thought transformation. Consciousness centredness also means that any action can be food for thought, insight or new ideas and thus continually generate new actions, too.

Awakening and consciousness is different from positive thinking, intellectualism or abstraction, because the latter is either wishful thinking / dissociation (in the case where women are required to deny the reality of violence and adapt to it) or a mind-on-reality enforcement pattern, based on male rapism and semen-tic emission. Men have a thought in mind, and for it to become reality they have to impress it on their living surroundings by violating them – because it inevitably entails treating surrounding life as a permanent shallow, dead canvas, battered to fit into their rigid mind schemes – schemes which are inherently unnatural and separated from life. A shift in consciousness does not require an internal-to-external emission, impression or enforcement, because it already IS an experience of transformation in which mind, body and spirit (the elements) are one. Our reality gradually transforms as we transform, it is a natural, inevitable and harmonious process. Harmonious, meaning that no unnatural authority, machinery or effort is required to experience the change of reality, as it is VISCERAL and NECESSARY. Necessary in the sense that it will necessarily happen over time, as doing integrates into being.

To talk of my experience, there is a very physical aspect to this shift, movement or sparking. The first and most overwhelming awakening I experienced actually felt like a bolt of lightening had struck through my head and uncluttered the calcified, buried and glued parts of my brain. Uncluttered is maybe too mild a word, rather it felt as if my soul had burst free, igniting and reuniting the dormant, isolated synapses in myself through a stream of light: everything suddenly made sense. It didn’t happen overnight but gradually, I wouldn’t be able to give a particular point in time – I know it lasted several months, maybe even a year. But I clearly remember this distinctive feeling. It wasn’t all joyful. I was first overcome by a shrieking, horrified rage at discovering and seeing for the first time with unfettered eyes the unlimited genocidal crimes of men committed against ourselves and our kind, and the whole world crumbled down. There was this constant scream. My first coming home to woman-identification and to the awareness of belonging to women as an oppressed group, was a howl of despair and anger at seeing the bleak, ravaged wasteland that men had left behind them. I suddenly felt the pang of pain of men’s violations in full blow, as my anaesthesia faltered away and I reincarnated in my body. So began my gradual return to life, the journey into radical feminism and bonding with women, which of course isn’t without many obstacles. And I can tell that this shift has led to many deep transformations and transforming decisions and actions in my life that would have been impossible had I not experienced it. And the movement never stops really.

As Mary Daly says in Pure Lust, apparent microshifts in consciousness have the power to bring macrochanges in our reality, in women’s world and possibly the universe. The power yielded by moving ourselves and other women along with us is incredible. This is what I understand by the physics, or metaphysics of liberation – meta because it isn’t just a physical process, it transcends the physical realm. It reunites our male-fragmented parts and reintegrates ourselves to natural life movement. (Finally I get what Sonia Johnson meant by metaphysics!! this is how I understand it at least, I don’t know if that’s what she meant.) Anyway please read pure lust by Mary Daly, especially the last chapters on friendship and happiness and movement, it’s amazingly refreshening and tells a lot about the meta-physics of liberation (ie the experience of transformation on all levels).