Requiem for the Corpse of History

and a plea . . .

It’s been at least 40 years since feminists defined and condemned patriarchy in any systematic way. Women seem to have given up on trying to smash it and are happy with “equality”, or “equity”, whatever that means. They’ve decided that since women have “choice” and “agency”, we’re free. No more need for women’s liberation.

This is a disastrous perspective. It has blinded us to the newest wave of patriarchal power that promises to destroy humanity for good and all. And women are being swept away even as we cheerfully encourage the men in their sweep.

We need to reacquaint ourselves with patriarchy to see that though it may have shifted in shape and form, it is still a death cult, and it is more dangerous now for years of being ignored here in liberal western democracies. We are on the cusp of our own destruction.

So here is an allegory, a simple model of patriarchy and how it was constructed to begin with. It’s for newbies, those women and men fleeing the rampant gender industry, looking for a solid footing – an explanation and a way forward. Please note that no children were harmed during the creation of this fiction.

Take a playground.

Populate it with children. Not a crowd, but enough. Put some shady trees in it, some slides and swings, a cleared area for playing games with balls.

The boys play loud games of chase and fetch and grab.

In a while the boys start to claim their space. This is mine, one will say, and then another. You can’t come here, one will say. Some will jump to his side to defend the claim. In almost no time the playground, one large open space, will be divided into invisible zones.

This is my territory, a boy will shout joyfully, and others will join him as his followers. He has become a leader. He is king of his piece of the playground.

So this playground is now divided into, let’s say, four zones: the north, the east, the west, the south zones. All the boys have chosen the zone to stake allegiance to. Each zone has a leader.

Then the boys play war games, attacking across invisible boundaries, being forced back. Waves of boys pushing forward, falling back. They are playing games of physical power, loving being shoved as much as tackling an other. They shout across the boundaries, exulting in the power of their voices.

This is the story we all live inside – a globe divided into nations, power pitted against power. This is patriarchy, or at least part of it.

What’s missing are the girls. This playground is as full of girls as of boys. Did you notice they weren’t part of the story?

The girls have been sitting in small groups, chatting, talking, sharing information and points of view, speculating on why this and why that. They have been creating families out of clods of earth, odd-shaped rocks and rootful weeds. When they’re tired of sitting, they stroll hand in hand, or skip to another group.

They cross the zone boundaries, which they know nothing about. The playground is one large open space.

A boy notices. He might be a leader, spotting a new way to assert his power. Or he might be a follower wanting to crank up the game and keep it going. Hey, he shouts, she’s not following the rules. Stop her.

Boys leap up to stop the girl, to turn her back. You belong over there, they say. And to other girls they say you belong here, and there, and there. Wherever girls are sitting or standing, the boys tell them they belong. From now on, you can’t move, they say.

They’ve made the girls their … property.

Girls ignore them. They get up to go to the swings, or to shelter in the shade of a tree, or to visit a friend.

Some boys get angry, the girls are spoiling their game of kingdom and kingship. These girls need to see the invisible boundaries, they need to be made to see the zones. They need to see the leader, and to see he is their leader and they have to follow.

But this is not a game the girls play. They don’t have single leaders. They aren’t followers. If they did have leaders, they might not choose this boy, or that boy as leader. They might choose girls. Anyway, who cares? The whole playground is their world.

So they ignore the boys and refuse to see the invisible barriers. Now the boys get rough with the girls. When they cross their borders, they push them to the ground. When the girls get up and start across again, they kick them. They punch them.

Why can’t they just follow the rules like anyone else – like boys? Some boys feel the joy leave. This is supposed to be a game and all the girls have to do is play along and now some of them are bruised and crying. They get angrier because the girls have stolen the fun, the pleasure, the joy of body against body, the exhilaration of winning followers.

Sooner than you would think, girls are bleeding bodies on the playground.

A few are still standing, looking frightened, confused, traumatized.

Now a boy sees these last girls must be made to submit. He speaks to one girl, commands her to fall on her knees in front of him. She does. She obeys! Him! And all the other boys are watching. He has done what no boy has done before, forced obedience from another child who did not want to obey.

What must he do with this obedience? Everyone is watching. A girl on her knees is nothing. He has to make her do something. But what? Everyone is watching. What can he make her do that will show them his power? Fear is crawling up his backbone. If he doesn’t think of something, they will turn their backs on him, the other leaders and their followers. They’ll play their games without him, a boy who didn’t know how to follow through.

At last, sweaty with fear, he commands her. He uses his first obscenity. Or it is the first time he has made an obscenity of his body. He commands her to lick it. Or suck it. Or kiss it. He pulls his body into parts for her to lick, suck, kiss. A foot! A buttock! A . . . a . . . a penis!!?

And the boys join in. A raucous laughing chant. They chant the new obscenity, again and again.

And the darkness that was edging into his vision fades away again. They’ve accepted this new twist to the game. He’s a leader still. He tries to ignore the place where his innocence used to lie, the pinprick hole where shame is seeping in.

This is the world we live inside, right? All of us, male and female, men and women. This is patriarchy, a game for boys, playing with power. And a game forced on girls. An obscene game.

When I watch the television news with all those men from countries they claim to represent, gathering for this conference or that media debate, I see packs of boys acting like they own the playground, like they can divide it up, and fight over the pieces of it. Like the girls don’t also own the space.

And we don’t, not anymore.

What would the world look like, if the boys understood their game was just a game, their boundaries temporary, to be dis-imagined at the end of the day? If they understood they didn’t actually own the playground? And if they understood the space belonged equally to the girls, who play their own games?

It seems to me we desperately need to imagine such a world – one where male ownership was not legitimated. We need to imagine alternate worlds and spread those visions around so that women’s rights are more than demands for mere “equality”, which only allow girls to join the boy followers in the playground zones.

In a hundred years of feminist activism, that’s all we’ve done – clawed our way from servicers of men to the crowd of followers. And we’ve let the majority of women stay where they are – on their knees, servicing men as sex receptacles, cooks, word-processors, nannies, cleaners.

But our place as followers, those of us who’ve managed to claw our way there, is suspect and equivocal. Women are not natural followers of men in the same way boys are. We don’t create heroes, like boys do. We don’t cloak ourselves in a man’s glory the way boys do. We don’t wrap ourselves in team colours. Men know this and regard us with a wary eye.

Men know this and periodically demand we drop down into the service role, just to reassure them we know that is our real place. And the service role is the same for women judges, police officers, artists, accountants, professionals of all sorts and of all economic grades – it’s on our knees, licking someone’s ass. Want to keep your job? Suck my dick.

We need to swing the gates of our imaginations wide open and imagine a completely different world, one where the men know all their games of war and conquest and territorial expansion are just temporary games, where they collect their weapons and free their slaves when the school bells ring. Where they leave women alone to play our games and don’t expect us to honour the boundaries they’ve created.

What games would we play if men and women lived in parallel worlds?

Or how would the world look if men and women took it for granted that the planet belonged to women as much as it did to men? Imagine if men planned their games and then took them to women for approval or disapproval so that all choices were shared choices?

And imagine if women still saw the world as one big, open space where they could hold hands with one another as they skip from place to place? We look at the world too much now as men do, and we see ourselves as ‘natural’ supporters of men. Too many of us cannot see the world anymore from the perspective of women who have not been subjugated. I wonder what the world might have looked like to women who had always been free and whose authority was taken for granted, before the concept of male power was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

But let’s imagine, for example, if those men who designed the machinery that instigated the industrial revolution 600 years ago had had to show those plans to women before they could build the engines that ended hand spinning and weaving of cloth, that drove men, women and children into inhumane factories for fourteen hours a day, that filled the cities with polluted air, and that made a few men obscenely rich?

Would women have said, “um, the human cost looks too great. No.”?

Almost non-stop women’s protests across Europe right until the Great War shut them all down strongly suggests they would have. Millions of people, after all, died as societies transformed from agricultural to industrial.

And what would the world look like now if the industrial revolution had not been allowed to proceed? If families had not been broken up into wage-earners, men being paid a “family wage” and women pin-money? If men hadn’t been driven into the pubs to find community and drunkenness? If millions of African men, women and children hadn’t been driven onto ships to service the cotton and tobacco plantations of the new world?

We are still dealing with the residue of that terrible time, those terrible decisions, though (male) historians insist the steam engine was an invention that rocketed us all upward into the “arc of progress”, that proved men are worthy of the adoration that men yearn to bestow on manhood. A great reset, they called it, with regrettable losses, but, well, all for the best in the end.

We have not progressed. We have not left the charnel houses of the wars, revolutions, and conquests western men have constructed over the last half millennium. The stink of all those deaths is in our loneliness, our isolation, our fractured towns, our hordes of “undesirables”. Our inability to love. Our ever more desperate need for ever more demanding stimulants.

 We can’t free ourselves from the past until we can see the past clearly. This is as true for the collective as it is for the individual suffering from a private trauma.

We need to rewrite the history books and change them from propaganda for male glory to a proper science – the analysis of patriarchy. If we haven’t learned from history, it’s because history, as written and compiled, is trying to teach us the wrong things. Instead of teaching us how power is gained and held and lost – the recipe for heroism -- it should be teaching us the consequences for all humans of the decisions made by the powerful few for their own self-aggrandizement.

If we looked at those consequences, truly, we could not repeat the actions of the “great” men of history.

We need imagination enough to envision a different kind of world.  

This world would be one in which it is understood that women’s perspectives are as important and relevant to all decisions as men’s. And our perspectives are different not because of some essential difference from men, not because women are morally superior, but because our monthly sloughing keeps us connected to material reality, and because that same cycle makes us always cognizant that pleasure can lead to creation, and what is created must have room to thrive. And because we understand that our lives are bound by people physically stronger than us on one side, and weaker and more helpless on the other.

We need a world in which men never gather in conference rooms or in tents to make decisions for all humanity. Not even one in which a few women participate as tokens. Because there is really not enough difference between G7 or G20 men in suits and ties, and tribal men in turbans and robes.

We need a world where women gather together to consider together the consequences of actions on all of us. Men won’t look at the price. It’s up to us, we who are required to have a different point of view.

So this is a call to women to call out the true history of the world – a history of domination by the powerful to appease their lust, their greed and their envy. And a history of men given free licence to invent technologies without consideration of the costs. And when we have replaced the heroic mythologies created by men with reality, we must create blueprints for a new kind of world.

We’re running out of time. With no more playgrounds to capture and colonize, men are turning to cannibalism. Still failing to see women as separate human beings with wills and desires and needs of our own, they fetishize the “femininity” they have assigned to us and pretend to replace us as the sexually desirable ones.

And they are snapping their jaws at the children, eyeing them as imperfect constructions that can be stripped for parts, made more available for male gratification, but deprived of the ability to have their own sexual pleasure. They contemplate sterile plastic “wombs” where children can be gestated in silent isolation.

If we don’t learn how to authenticate the power of women, and check the power of the masculine, we’ll be left with nothing – no children, no women, no earth, and finally, no men either. Maybe the artifacts of male invention will remain – humanoid robots click-clacking and buzzing as they endlessly circle a barren rock.

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