This post will be taken down shortly.
Where to begin?
I think it’s important to begin a post like this by providing some context. You can’t just ask, “Are men aware of their condition?” and then simply proceed to discuss said condition, especially when men are reading. You need to offer some background so that people know where you’re coming from; so the post can’t be distorted; so nobody can play ignorant.
How about a list of atrocities then?
But if we go there eyes begin to glaze over… It has become mundane. Male violence is mundane. The torture, pain and death of women is a trivial banality.
Well, a light discussion on porn, perhaps?
How about the current trafficking of women into the slave trade?
The rampant environmental destruction?
The pollution of the entire food chain?
The unnecessary experimenting on animals?
Or maybe a chat about war? Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps?
The massacre of the the Russians by Stalin, the Chinese by Mao, the Cambodians by Pol Pot?
Or let’s talk about men who chose not to massacre their own people, and opted instead for the people next door. The Japanese in South East Asia, the Americans in Vietnam (or on their own doorstep– the native Americans), the British in Australia etc etc ad nauseum…
Then again, maybe individual atrocities would have more impact. Take, for example, the Australian man who killed his four year old daughter by throwing her off a bridge to her death to spite his ex-wife…
At any rate, all roads lead to one point, which is the burning times.
For those readers who may not know, men systematically massacred over nine million women over the course of many centuries, and then pretended it didn’t happen. So clearly, we’re not talking about institutionalized misogyny here. This is not “sexism“, or “woman-hating”. What men have done, and continue to do to women is, I believe, the inevitable result of some pathology in their genetic make-up. The violence they commit is inevitable. They were born that way, and were born to do it. This we must accept.
Let’s look at the Y chromosome, because this is where the answer lies.
The Y chromosome is inferior to the X. It contains 78 working genes, compared to approximately 1,500 working genes on the X chromosome. As the Y passes from father to son, mutations accumulate slowly over the generations. Scientists are researching the decline of the Y with great frenzy at the moment. Take, for example this recent study on some families in a Chinese village:
“Having identified 23 candidate SNPs — or single letter changes in the DNA — they amplified the regions containing these candidates and checked the sequences using the standard Sanger method. A total of four naturally occurring mutations were confirmed. Knowing this number of mutations, the length of the area that they had searched and the number of generations separating the individuals, the team were able to calculate the rate of mutation.
“These four mutations gave us the exact mutation rate — one in 30 million nucleotides each generation — that we had expected,” says the study’s coordinator, Chris Tyler-Smith, also from The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. “This was reassuring because the methods we used — harnessing next-generation sequencing technology — had not previously been tested for this kind of research.”
What this means is that with each generation, males are becoming genetically more inferior to females.
“Once upon a time, the Y sex chromosome looked much the same as the X sex chromosome. Both were X shaped, and matched up neatly. Like our other pairs of chromosomes, the two sex chromosomes exchanged genes as necessary to repair DNA and avoid harmful mutations.
Then something went badly wrong. Around 166 million years ago, a huge chunk of the Y chromosome in one of our mammalian ancestors was turned upside down and reinserted. The change was so extreme that the Y chromosome no longer matched the X, and it became impossible for the two to swap genes. The Y chromosome began collecting mutations and losing genes, ultimately taking on its characteristic Y shape as a result.
In humans, it now carries a mere 19 of the 800 genes it originally shared with the X. Given that rate of loss, some geneticists have predicted that the chromosome will lose its final gene in 4.6 million years.” (New Scientist)
Men are loathe to admit it. Despite the evidence staring them in the face, they are apparently in denial.
Female longevity is not an accident. The Y chromosome is faulty, whereas the X is full of life-preserving properties. Take color blindness . This genetic fault manifests only in males, because females have their second X as a back up (kind of like having a second kidney in case one fails). Almost all intersex babies are male but doctors pretend they’re female. The only intersex people who are female are those with Turner syndrome. Wiki says “Turner syndrome only affects females” but this is not exactly true. Turner syndrome babies are born without an X. Males who would have been born with Turner syndrome are probably miscarried early on. They die because there are no genes in the Y to preserve life. Whereas if a foetus is female, they have their second X as a back up, and are therefore born alive. So it is not a “female” condition per se. What actually happens is that only females survive.
So while the Y gets more faulty with each generation,the X has remained almost as pure as it was millions of years ago, meaning that females are far more biologically resilient than males. That’s because females, not males, are the original prototype for humankind.
Mary Daly was fascinated by men’s obsession with DNA and cloning, and she realised it was because male scientists are well aware of the faultiness of the Y. She perceived that they were striving to change their fate before time runs out, before the Y has deteriorated to the point of no return, perhaps.
From page 217 of Quintessence:
“Radical Elemental Feminsts naturally push the question of the purpose of biotechnology further. We begin by asking: Why the accelerated, frenzied activity of geneticists in recent years? In case the Haggard Searcher doesn’t already have a clear idea of the probable motivation for this sense of urgency, she can find clues in an article that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on March 15 1997. The article states that at some point in the distant past the Y chromosome’s genes became obsolescent. As a result the Y shed them and consequently grew shorter and shorter:
Its shrinkage seems likely to continue, to the vanishing point. But geneticists are not yet declaring men candidates for the endangered-species list. They believe a different mechanism of sex determination will eventually evolve, maybe with a single X causing maleness, or with the male-determining gene jumping to a new pair of chromosomes and the story of X and Y starting all over.”
The article goes on to describe the Y chromosome as “unstable and flighty” and to acknowledge the X chromosome’s evolutionary stability. This material may be anxiety-producing (de-stabilizing?) for flighty male scientists, causing them to feel impelled to find ” a different mechanism of sex determination,” that is, to seize control of biological evolution by gene manipulation before the vanishing point arrives.
The news has been out for some time that males have a genetic deficiency. It simply has not been allowed to spread…. Ashley Montague wrote, “There seems to be a conspiracy of silence on the subject of the superiority of women.”
All radical feminist theory and analysis leads to these questions.
I’ve been given permission to quote a comment by the brilliant WitchWind, which was sent to me via e-mail, and was originally intended to be a comment on a post at femonade. When I first read it, I have to admit I did a double take. It was as though I was censoring my thoughts. I felt I was committing ”thoughtcrime” and it felt frightening. I believe that the only reason Witchwhind herself did not censor her own thoughts was because her comment was not supposed to go public. The fact it was sent privately and was never meant for public viewing is the reason she managed to let go and ask all of the important questions, the ones that are the holy grail of radical feminism.
Before you read it, let’s put the idea of “thoughtcrime” into context. Men are right now torturing women, and are proud of it. We have access to photographic evidence of their exploits everywhere online in the form of pornography, the fully legitimized political torture of an opressed group. They are actually hurting women as we speak, actually causing physical pain to them, getting off on women’s tears and bloodshed. By contrast, what you are about to read is words. Nothing but words. Do not allow patriarchal propaganda convince you that words on a page, and torture, are one and the same.
I would like to express how the knowledge of men being innately violent + a mutation has affected me in my everyday life. I knew that male violence was related to male biology for a year 1/2 maybe? (in that only men could be violent in that way and create a patriarchy) but when I read Sonia Johnson’s book where she explained how men were a mutation, this changed my sentiment to men. At first I was really happy to find this out because it made complete sense, in many ways (too long to explain though). It comforted me in ignoring men and acting as if only women existed, and focusing on creating safe women-only spaces. But something I never felt before, I started to feel sorrow for their state. It annoys me because I have never felt sorry for men before, only contempt, or ignorance at best. I look at them and I imagine what it would be like, knowing somewhere, deep down, that you are flawed, a mistake, and that your are dead, or not fully human, or inherently destructive, and if I knew that, I would probably kill myself. To imagine feeling this made me feel sorry. Do they know it? Or do they not fully understand it? All these efforts in making women believe we are aliens, non-human, naturally and internally flawed, walking defects => this is them projecting on us. They must know on some level they are flawed, but do they experience emotional pain from it? Do they feel emotions at all, or do they just pretend to? To which extent? Are they aware of their condition somehow?
The thing is, if I treat them as mutants, what’s stopping us from killing them? Empathy? Fear? Fear of hurting ourselves, or that it will destroy our soul to do so, because being violent to someone means cutting yourself from emotions, therefore being more dead inside? Would it be bad to kill them all? To what degree does violence affect them or not? Can they only be affected by violence, and nothing else? Do they only understand violence? How does this affect our actions and decisions to take power away from them?Also, I just realised yesterday that no man is part of me, and that litterally, I don’t have a dad, no woman has! I just understood the meaning of having the genes from my mother and my paternal grandmother. Only women are my people. Men do not exist within me and I have no father. My father is not my father but he is no-one. This may sound odd but it just struck me. And at the same time, it made me feel sorry for him. And the story Sonia tells in her book sisterwitch really resonated in me, when she explains that women felt sorry for those feeble beings and tried to feed them. Obviously I would never do that but it’s just strange to feel this. This is not a political statement, just to share the effect the knowledge has on me and I’m still processing the conclusions to be made from it in everyday life interactions with men. Perhaps it’s trauma bonding. Or over developed empathy towards dominants. How has this knowledge changed your sentiments towards men, or way of interacting with them, if at all? Other than female separatism, are there some conclusions you have made in your lives based on this knowledge?
To which I replied:
What you were saying about no woman having a dad, I’ve been going there with my own thoughts recently as well, stemming from my experiences with my own father, and the way that my husband is with my children. They’re not his kids. They don’t have a father. He might regard them as a appendages: get a wife, get a house, get some kids, and in that sense they’re his and belong to him, but other than that, he’s just an alien in the home. He helps out a lot with the kids, which I used to appreciate, but now I realise it’s another form of dominance, of trying to take over in the home and piss all over the place, leaving his mark. I’ve also realised that my 6 year old daughter humours him. How much mental energy is this taking out of her?? She certainly does not humour me, LOL! It’s no holds barred when it comes to telling me exactly what she thinks of me at any particular given moment.To answer your question about whether men experience emotional pain. I have a lot of brothers, have had various relationships with men and I’ve concluded that when they’re children they feel pain and are as close to female (i.e human) they’re ever going to be. But once they hit puberty they no longer feel emotions. They know that women do and “other” us for it. My husband was putting on one big fat act while we were “courting” before marriage. This has blown me away. If I wasn’t in such a vulnerable situation (in a foreign country with kids) he would have had to carry on with the act throughout our relationship, as almost all men do. But because he didn’t have to bother he practically dropped the act as soon as the ring was on my finger.
Yes it’s interesting that you talk about your brothers because the other day I made the same comment to myself, as I was at my grandmother’s house looking at my family photos and when they were 3, 4 years old they actually looked human, had human expressions, you can see it in their eyes. But now, They’re lost, they lost capacity to emphathise. Puberty *is* the turning point.
“Oh, they have toes, but the only feeling men have I’ve witnessed is self-pity. They have a lot of instincts like territoriality, protect your turf or woman, whatever they think they own– but I don’t call ball ingredients like testosterone, feelings or emotions. So isn’t it curious that you can’t even get most lesbians to say they’re man-haters? Instead they say, “Oh I don’t really hate men, now that I’m a lesbian, I never have to be around any. They just don’t affect my life anymore.’ This is what I call the lesbian false consciousness. When don’t we have to be around men? Don’t we ever walk the streets, buy groceries, deal with some patriarchal bureaurcracy, ride subways, trains or drive cars, see police, repairmen, don’t men live in our buildings in the cities or live around you in the country? If you work, aren’t there men around supervising you? If you’re in school, don’t you have any men teachers or have to sit with men in class? If you go to a hospital, aren’t there any men doctors or patients around? The lesbian answer is, “Oh, those; well I never pay any attention to them.” Take a good look next time you’re in what they call public which means man’s world; look at those men you don’t know and dig on how much attention your body and mind pay to trying avoid paying any attention to pigs, who are paying a lot of attention to you making sounds to scare you, stepping in your way or not moving so you have to walk around them or yield to their right of way…. Even the most down and out bum in New York has a whole repertoire of intimidation numbers to pull on women. No matter how far down you go in the prick hierarchy, every prick knows how to corner a woman, make her feel unsafe. And they all do it every day, even your good daddies and your shy brothers who never told you what they do to the women they don’t know.”
“The bright side of this situation is that this guy has been an absolute poster-child for what to AVOID AT ALL COSTS from any client. If you wrote out a big, bullet-pointed list of his behaviours, as outlined by yourself above, and pinned it up on your wall somewhere, you could check it regularly and make sure to NEVER EVER see anyone who does ANY of those things, and then you’d be safe from 90% of the unpleasant types straight away!It’s a tough lesson to learn in life – that there are people out there who will treat you like an idiot, and will take everything they can from you without even a split-second’s doubt or empathy about what they’re doing – when you’re a decent human being yourself, but it’s important to learn quickly. These mini-psychopaths, as I think of them, are sadly common and are usually really good at toying with emotions (i.e. this guy, trying to make you feel like you owe him something because of his “feelings” for you, when I would actually bet $10,000 right now that he’s never had a genuine feeling in his life apart from self-pity because he can’t get enough attention from ladies without playing these sorts of absurd games with prostitutes) so please don’t feel like you need to feel sorry for him even one second longer. He’s having a right jolly old game with you.There is no limit to the effort he will put into his boundary-pushing with you so I wouldn’t ever see him again. Cut off contact”
“In the end, males are uncertain little creatures and the way they are made is very different in mammals, birds, insects and worms,” said Steve Jones, author of the book Y: The Descent of Man and professor of genetics at University College London.
“In the long term we are all dead, and that is certainly going to be true for the Y chromosome, which is rather an arriviste on the evolutionary scene. It may take a long time, but I am pretty confident that the Y machine will, one day, be replaced by something else. Quite what that will be, you will have to ask me in a hundred million years.”
“The question is, is the human Y chromosome hanging off a cliff edge and about to fall, or stood on a ledge and happy to stay there forever? Realistically, we won’t nail it without a crystal ball,” said Griffin.
“Everyone agrees that the demise of the Y chromosome, if it happens, does not mean the demise of the human male. All that will happen is that the process of sex chromosome evolution will start again.”
Griffin, who posed the question of the Y chromosome’s future to the conference in Manchester, later asked men and women to vote on the issue separately. When asked for a show of hands on the Y chromosome going extinct, women outvoted men two to one. When asked who thought the Y chromosome would survive, men outvoted women by the same margin.” Guardian, 2012
To conclude, I believe men do have an inkling of their condition. The world they have created is a living manifestation of this knowledge.Nature is on the side of females. We’re nature’s best, which is probably another reason why men hate us so much, and patriarchy promulgates lies about it, and constantly reverses the truth. The most absurd concept of all is the idea that there is a male God in the sky, who is the source of all life, who created Adam in his own image as the original prototype, with Eve as an add-on. Nature knows this is a reversal. It is males who are the add-ons to the species. They protest too much. They know, they know, they know.
Fascinating perspective, CBL! Really fascinating! I just got the Sonia Johnson books and am eager to read them. Thanks for your discussion of them.
Along with the destructon of the environment there has been a decrease in sperm count in males.The sperm is likely to die off in response to environmental degradation long before the Y goes. Either way, men appear to be in decline.
How likely is that to happen before irreversible destruction to the planet?
Yes exactly Wordwoman, that’s why men are so frantic about putting all their sperm in sperm banks. One of the reasons (other than maintaining the highest level possible of parasitism and overcoming their planned extinction) they created the reproductive technology of placing artificially created embryos in women’s uteruses is because 40 or so % of men are already infertile. Or is it 60%? At any rate, a great number of them.
Yes, I think I read somewhere that pesticides or plastics or something are hurrying the mutation process along. It’s come a full circle. They’ve destroyed the planet and now nature is getting its own back.
Not a moment too soon.
“Hai, I’m an MRA”
Excellent! You’re right, if they didn’t know, they wouldn’t be so violently trying hard to “be on top” and to brainwash us into believing the contrary.
thinking of what I said, the problem of taking violence in our own hands is that again, it focuses our energy on men in negative ways, it generates negativity in us – I suspect it would, but I can’t be certain. How do women who killed their batterers feel about it? Was it completely liberating or did it reinforce patterns of violence in themselves, creating addictive cycles of violence?
At least it seems to go against positive building and focusing on ourselves and on creating our own reality, rather than being outward centred and doing according to men’s presence. Would it locate, yet again, power outside of ourselves? Valerie Solanas said that all men should do us and themselves a favour, to kill themselves now. That it would be the best service they could give to the world, free the world from their presence. Obviously this seems the easiest option, but I don’t think it’s likely to happen. They are very intent on continuing to pollute us and the world with their presence.
If we applied the logic of Sonia Johnson, where there is no past nor future, all we would need to do is feel and act as if men already *were* dead, inexistant and extinct, something of a distant memory. I wonder what effect this would have!
I haven’t read her books, but this concept of us being “free already” really resonates with me, because first of all, learning about radical feminism *is* freeing. Discovering you’re a radfem and then realising you have an incessant desire to learn more is such and exhilerating process, even though your physical circumstances might not have changed a jot because you’re still living in a patriarchy in some shit job or tied to a man.
This is tricky territory because the post-modernists seem to say something similar when they go on about life existing through a certain lens, and if you change that lens you can suddenly become empowerfulized… Well, obviously this is not what Johnson was talking about by a long shot.
Anyway, I’ve ordered one of her books, I’m dying to get my teeth into this concept.
it *is* tricky!!!!! seriously, it was difficult to read and to get my head around what johnson was saying in wildfire and sisterwitch bc it was very “silly” as i said, and because (frankly) someone uneducated in “metaphysics” talking about metaphysics is essentially indistinguishable from new age bullshit. this was apparently a common problem with peoples understanding of “going out of our minds” which was the earlier of those three — she clarifies in “wildfire” what she meant. i would have seen her clarification before i read sisterwitch if i had read them in order (sisterwitch is her last, but i read it first).
and honestly, even with the clarification it is still difficult to digest and i am still thinking about it. if nothing else, i can report that she conveys a “feeling” very well, and conjuring and then sitting with the feeling is helpful in itself. imagine a writer being able to convey WHAT FREEDOM FEELS LIKE to an audience of slaves. it was quite an accomplishment IMO even if thats all it was — i still havent fully grokked the tangible difference between this and new age, but i think there is one, and i hope i figure it out someday!
and i have to say, knowing that we are *not* defective mutants, and that men are, does inspire a feeling of being free from them, in the sense that we are not OF them, FROM them, or the same as them. you know? there is something corporeally freeing about this, and its probably why we are all told that we came from adams body (rib) and that we all have fathers — to make it seem like our bodies are the same as theirs or have anything to do with them at all. they dont. when i first read that, it was like i was able to peel myself off of them, or their template or whatever and i realized for the first time that i had been stuck there like a sticker this whole time, but i was actually separate. i dont know if that makes any sense to anyone else, especially anyone who hasnt read these books yet, but i can report that there is something freeing about that.
try it and see what you think!
Yes, it makes perfect sense.
We’re not of them, and what is more they ARE of us. And we’re just talking about the DNA here. THis is before we get to the very obvious point that ALL of us– (men and women) came from women’s vaginas. I bet that upsets them. They are OF WOMEN in ways that women are not OF MEN.
A man could die driving home the very evening his child was conceived and his demise wouldn’t make a jot of difference to the infant in question. (In fact it might be a better outcome for the child– no chance of DV or sexual abuse in the home, for a start…) Whereas if a woman dies the evening the child is conceived… well that’s the end of that, isn’t it.
” if a woman dies the evening the child is conceived… well that’s the end of that, isn’t it.” CBL
And here we find the necrophiliac weeping and wailing over the pregnant body of Terri Sciavo. Her life was not a concern. Her aliveness was beside the point in terms of the function her brain-dead body was desecrated to carry out. Her indispensability to the process of life creation was invisibled by the focus on the anguish (self-pity) of his husband, and her designation as a culture medium for “his” growing fetus.
I’m new at this, still. Does anyone else find that conventional language fails when describing the atrocity?
this is the holy grail right here isnt it? why isnt this more widely known? even though its “known” why isnt it screamed from the rooftops, why isnt EVERYONE given a chance to consider this and form an opinion about this? these are rhetorical questions of course. it does bother me that any mainstream coverage you see about this has people speculating about the inevitable extinction (in 4 million years or whatever) and not about what the degradation and incompleteness means means for us TODAY or if it explains what the hell is wrong with men NOW and what can and should be done about that, or why things are getting worse. no one wants to admit that things are getting worse, but they sure arent getting better are they? are they staying the same? no? well then….. it could also be a problem of sheer numbers now — there are so many of them now, thanks to mandatory PIV and global femicide that they have reached some kind of critical mass of evil, in addition to being a decaying, genetic dead-end barrelling towards extinction. it could be both, couldnt it? this could explain what we are seeing, even if the mutations themselves wouldnt necessarily take us from “friday the 13th part one” to the “saw” franchise in less than 30 years.
i first considered the defective Y chromosome when i read it in dalys work, and then again in sonia johnsons sisterwitch conspiracy. it was almost incomprehensible to me, and in fact if i hadnt seen daly address it, i never wouldve accepted it from the less-credentialled johnson and this is intentional isnt it? how many ph.ds does a woman have to have, so that citing known facts is accepted and acceptable? ffs, men can look you right in the eye and tell you up is down and it takes a very confident woman to recognize within the privacy of her own mind that hes wrong, let alone say it out loud. we just shut down from the oppressiveness of the constant mindfucking reversals. thats what we have coming FROM THEM, and yet *we* are not allowed to SPEAK about the truth, or ask legitimate questions about mens worth at all. and thats what it comes down to isnt it? MENS WORTH. and how they dont really have any — they really are so much genetic garbage. they feel sorry for themselves and we feel sorry for them — this is the sum and substance of our relationship. it is unilateral pity towards the pathetic, defective male.
saying it out loud feels good and right.
“they feel sorry for themselves and we feel sorry for them —this is the sum and substance of our relationship. it is unilateral pity towards the pathetic, defective male.”
Ha! Yes, even prostitutes feel sorry for their clients. Everybody feels sorry for men, including men themselves.. And when you look at the science, you can see this pity is not misplaced. I’d feel sorry for myself if I was born male.
And yes, it is a very well kept secret. You know when you go for a driving test, or a contact lens check-up, they test you on whether your color blind by asking you about the green and red stripes (well they did in the UK and Japan).
Well NOBODY says, “Hang on, you’re female, so you won’t need to do the color-blindness test…!”
They just fucking PRETEND that females might be color blind as well.
even the sheer physical redundancy of males is never addressed in the mainstream, even though that is obvious. we have only ever needed a few of them for reproductive purposes. their redundancy in terms of numbers, as well as the fact that they embody genetic garbage, and are at a critical mass of pure evil, is an unholy trifecta. these issues are generally not discussed even individually, and certainly not together (as in, 1+1+1=3 or 0+0+0=0 for that matter — haha) and we DEFINTELY arent allowed to even THINK about a possible solution for what is a very obvious and urgent problem.
Although it is true that head trauma can cause color blindness in females. That’s how Chonky lost her colors
Oh yes, non-genetic occurences like trauma. Sorry to hear that about Chonky
Women can have red-green color blindness genetically, just as men do, but it is a lot less frequent in the female sex. The reason is that it takes two of the recessive red-green color blindness genes (one on each X chromosome) for women to have the condition, whereas men have it with only one such gene, on their sole X chromosome. The same with hemophilia.
Also, it is true that the X chromosome each woman gets from her father actually came from the father’s mother. However, there are also 22 sets of non-sex chromosomes, called autosomes, in the human genetic complement, and these may be passed down through women solely through the male line, the female line, or, more commonly, a combination of the two.
Thanks Branjor. WHen I googled I found that females could not be color blind, but that’s google for you.
Excuse me, that should be “…passed down TO women…”
ive been thinking about my paternal grandmother a lot today.
i love this conversation. i wonder how much of my genetic material came from my female ancestors, as opposed to male. is it possible that NONE came from my father? i never considered that (i look like my dad now, although as an infant i was literally *identical* to my mother as an infant, and the only way to tell us apart in photographs was by the age of the photograph, or the clothes etc). in fact, i wonder if children who “look like” their fathers, actually “look like” their paternal grand- or great grandmothers but no one ever thinks about that? we are always so willing to give credit to men, even when its not deserved, i think its clear that we do that with “fatherhood” in more ways than one.
god i wish fathers didnt exist at all. i cannot wait til some of you read sisterwitch.
Gosh yes. I’ve always said my daughter looks like my mother in law (which irked me a lot at first, because we don’t get along LOL), but if I was to say she looked like anyone at all, it’d be my mother in law.
could the “evil mother in law meme” be causing us to misperceive or deny the obvious when it comes to “who” children resemble (and who they dont)? interesting.
Maybe.
But she was a bitch to me as well
But I know (with hindsight, and with radfem awareness) that she has been horribly oppressed in her own life, and she was taking it out on me. I believe she saw herself in me as a newlywed: young, innocent, trusting, and she despised me for it.
Now that I’m all bitter and twisted we get along quite well. We went shopping together the other day, LOL
oh sorry, just read your comment properly! Yes, it would definitely cause people to deny who their children look like.
I love the first part of this quote from Witchwind:
Also, I just realised yesterday that no man is part of me, and that litterally, I don’t have a dad, no woman has! I just understood the meaning of having the genes from my mother and my paternal grandmother. Only women are my people. Men do not exist within me and I have no father. My father is not my father but he is no-one.
“no man is a part of me” – what a fantastically liberating phrase! Thank you for that.
I did a ‘default human is female’ post over a year ago, with pictures, so you can see the really pathetic Y. It’s another of patriarchy’s great reversals – that males insist they are the default human, when the reality is that females are the default human.
Is it my imagination, or have their crazies gone into frenzy mode in the last few decades?
silly me, forgot the link!
http://twanzphobic.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/the-default-human-is-female/
Yes, I remember that post Davina!
And they do seem to be getting crazier and crazier don’t they.
Picking up on the point about ‘new age thought’ and/or the closeness of some of this stuff to postmodernism (and whether that makes it suspect) – I think there are some important things to remember there. Point 1 – as discussed in an essay in Feminism Reclaimed if I rightly remember – is that feminists in the 1970s and 80s were actually some of the first academics to start using what eventually became postmodern ideas – ie, suggesting the idea of ‘different realities’ or ‘multiple realities’ to take into account women’s experiences, different class and race experiences etc. This ultimately got taken out of our hands and used against us and corrupted into what it is now. Not that I’m writing in defence of postmodernism or anything, but those feminists were onto something, and as so often happened men came along and derailed the conversation into something else, so that those women-centric ideas ultimately didn’t go where they could have gone, and where the women probably wanted them to go.
Point 2 – I sometimes think that the label of postmodernism gets slapped onto writers, esp women writers, as a way to keep us away from them, or maybe vice versa, or as a way of disguising what it is they actually do, or maybe just because men honestly can’t understand what it is they do in their work, which is quite possible. Two examples that come to mind are Audre Lorde (who I frequently see referred to as a postmodern poet) and Jeanette Winterson – honestly, when you read what these writers say about their work, and what they think is important, and why they do what they do, the postmodern project as understood by men is not what they’re about, but they get subsumed under that anyway, and then that means that women don’t find their work, because they accept men’s definitions, or they do find it but don’t read their own interpretations into it and accept what men say about those writers even though we can be sure the men are completely wrong.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that I think it is a shame when potential lines of women’s liberatory thought are lost or cut off from the wider feminist project because men have intervened and calved us up and put us into different boxes according to their own insane reasoning or mislabelled what we do or corrupted our original ideas so that those ideas have become something we don’t want to associate with and the net result is loss of women’s ideas and creativity and daring and original thought.
Thank you for that Weirdward! Especially the explanation of how post-modernism was feminism distorted. God, can’t they think of a SINGLE idea themselves?? Jesus Christ!
Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed is the book I was thinking of. It actually has a lot of good discussion on how radical feminism has been completely distorted and misrepresented by the academy.
THanks weirdward, that’s my pet topic. I mean, I knew all about what transwomen have done to women’s studies, but I didn’t realise that post-modernism itself is basically a bastardization of original radfem work.
Will definitely read that, thanks!
excellent weirdward thanks for that! i will order that book. what a great point that this is just more of the same shit, separating women and radical feminists from our own concepts and our own work. i remember clearly that 15 years ago, “deconstruction” meant something very different than it means today for example — does anyone else remember this? its stunning that today, its used to mean essentially “remove political meaning” and “erase women” when originally it was a very useful tool and referred to the process of removing obfuscations and reducing things to their elements, in order to further understanding. the bastardization that is “new age” you identify here helps me understand better where johnson come coming from — maybe i should read her again with this in mind.
oooh, maybe it ties in with Daly’s “background” theory! The foreground and background are multiple realities existing paralell to each other aren’t they.
yes i think so.
alternate realities, yes. they are real, we know this.
(haven’t read all the comments yet)
I remember in 1982 that the workings of DNA was just beginning to be introduced to high school students – we had projects that included base coding or whatever – and our brand new text book had really great photos of the XX and XY. I took one look at them and said: well, THAT explains it. They’re missing all this information! Of course everybody looked at me like I was crazy and postulated that our *extra* was used for gestating and nurturing babies…
Seriously, it is so OBVIOUS.
LOL at you being so perplexed that nobody could see the obvious. That’s really what it’s like living in a patriarchy. Nothing makes sense, until you find radical feminism.
Thanks Cherry for your courage and insights!It is so difficult to try to think straight from within this masculinist global society.
When I consider the state of the land, sea, women, animals, and plants, and the constant and increasingly potent attacks on them, what I see is that a deformed masculine spirit has seized control of the earth and it has, freed of any controls, run rampant. By suppressing the female side of themselves and humanity as successfully as they have, the masculine spirit has – how to say this – become extreme, exaggerated, monstrous, lost any ability to abate the more destructive aspects of masculinity. I often speculate about what women would be like if we were raised in freedom.
I’d add to that the question of what the world would be like if men were raised in balance and with destructive instincts controlled by a non-masculinist society. In a way I’m talking about both an essentialist view of human males as having all this destructive potential readily available within them, coupled with a social-constructionist view that the global society they have built increasingly encourages them to go mad with it. The madness is, in this way of thinking, getting progressively more destructive in its manifestations because it is unchecked.
I’m currently reading Lierre Keith’s analysis, locating this loss of balance and suppression of the feminine and pathological exaggeration of the masculine in the rise of agriculture. Of course many other feminists have discussed this theory. The geneticist Adam Sykes ( in “Adam’s Curse”) starts from the notion that the Y chromosome at that point had the opportunity to obtain complete power over humanity’s course: “Driven on and on by the crazed ambition of the Y-chromosome to multiply without limit, wars began to enable men to annex adjacent lands and enslave their women. Nothing must stand in the way of the Y-chromosome. Wars, slavery, empires – all ultimately coalesce on that one mad pursuit…The mad scramble, fuelled by the most basic of unseen genetic impulses, seriously endangers the survival of the species – and the planet. In ten thousand years we have changed from an intelligent and resourceful animal…into a teeming species very rapidly destroying our beautiful planet.” I don’t agree with Sykes on many basic points, because he still writes with blinders, but I’ll take his moments of clarity gladly.
Anyway, destruction caused by male domination has obviously become runaway. Women have enough to do with the process of getting free of their enslavement. But we aren’t going to have time to do this in any kind of orderly fashion – men aren’t going to stop the runaway and we have to address this concurrently with recovering our power. I even ask myself if the women’s liberation movement is directed by our own XX genes, sensing the impending destruction and impelling us to take action at this precise time of escalating threats to the earth. In any case, if male domination causes massive destruction, I don’t really think our planet will be destroyed. She can weather men pocking her with holes, poisoning her atmosphere, ruining her ecologies, killing her water – and come back in a few million years. She’ll be okay, but it’s a damn shame that this is the most optimistic thing I can say about the future, that a complete wipeout won’t destroy her. Too bad only trilobytes will be left to start over, or whatever non-human species make it through.
Thanks Karmarad, fascinating comment, as always.
this is exactly my perspective as well karma — natural, yes — inevitable, no, or only inasmuch as men are given complete social and political control to inflict their sick natures on the rest of, and on the world. this does NOT have to be the case, and its patently dishonest or at least evidence of a complete lack of imagination, to say that just bc something is “natural” that its inevitable, and that theres nothing that can be done to change it, or stunt it, or redirect it, or any number of alternate outcomes.
women have been taking birth control pills for decades for example, when its perfectly “natural” for semen exposure to cause pregnancy. seems like altering biology (or “nature” if you will) is perfectly acceptable when its WOMENS biology thats being fucked with, and where the intent and effect is to support male power at womens expense.
This post will be taken down shortly.”
Whyyyy? It is so, so, so GOOD! And, I have to go to class, so I don’t have time to read it all again, slowly and deliciously.
I hope it’s still up tomorrow…?
Thank you for all of this amazingness. ARIGATO GOZAIMASuuuuu (sp?)
A voice for men shows up on my stats every day. They’d have a field day with this post. Then again, they probably can’t understand it. I’ll see how it goes.
hahahaha!
bahahaha! oh look at the mansplainer mansplain:
http://reallyrad.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/the-man-box-and-the-cult-of-masculinity/
its all cultural, because i say it is. its not natural at all, because i wish it wasnt, and im a man so i get to have my wishes fulfilled. the biggest lie of at: if its natural, THEN its inevitable, AND theres not a good goddamned thing anyone can do about it.
wrong.
I couldn’t get passed his smarmy face.
Hang on, I’m going back to read it.
What makes me laugh is for the past 200 years or so men have been obsessed with evolutionary psychology and have used it as a way of justifying women’s oppression. (Remember the berry debacle? Scientists “discovered” that women liked pink because our ancestors were gatherers and this trait made it easier for femals to spot pink berries…)
Anyhoo, after pulling all this stuff out of their arses for many years in an attempt to show that men are human, and women are inferior animals, they’ve FINALLY noticed that radfems have been going, “Yes, yes we know men and women are different. Yes, we’re not like you. Yes, you’re natural predators, and we are not. And?”
So they’ve realised we’re onto them and they’re now attempting to do an about turn. “Ohhh, we didn’T MEAN that we’re NATURAL predators.. No, no, we LEARN how to do that. It’s teh culture of masculinity, you know, gender, that concept first articulated by male academics….or was it radfems…”
This is a brilliant post. Thank you for your clarity and courage. The gynocide will fail. It must. This post demonstrates very clearly why that must be the case.
Yes, I think so citizenaqueau. Nature is on women’s side, at least. Maybe that’s why men love cutting down rainforests and shit.
It’s precisely why. Men hate anything that reminds them of how limited, small, and irrelevant they are.
I cried.
Thank you
Thank you. I also posted it here: https://www.facebook.com/NameTheProblem?bookmark_t=page
I wasn’t aware of the dad who threw his girl child off the bridge while his boy children watched from car. I added him here: http://nametheproblem.com/
This is endless. I am VERY AFRAID it is not fixable.
Thanks for adding him. I’d never seen a pic of him before. My God these evil men are ugly aren’t they.
And yes, he only killed his daughter, not his sons.
I know this is *personalizing* it. My daughter just turned 5. When I clicked on that link you linked and saw her picture, I just lost it. What a fucking awful man.
NO, it is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard a man do.
And that’s saying something.
Indeed.
For nametheproblem.com, every couple of days I search “man kills child,” “man rapes baby,” “man rapes child,” “man rapes baby.” There is never a shortage of material.
So did I.
What about the men who oppose such thing? There are organizations of men who are against violence against women (and some women are not against this horrible violence either). This is too much biological determinism. It does not talk about the political system, the conditioning that men and women have in the environments they grew up in
To be honest Aishwarya, WHen I read a comment like yours, do you know what I think? I think, “This woman needs to go and have a look at some porn, in order to educate herself about men, so that she can SEE– for the first time in her life– what men really think of women; this woman is in denial; this woman has had her head in the sand; this woman is relying on wishful thinking”
Honestly, go and google “BDSM porn” then come back here and say, “Well, some men are nice”. It doesn’t fly. And to be honest, it doesn’t MATTER, because those few nice men aren’t WORTH the millions and billions of women and children who have been hurt, tortured and killed by men since patriarchy began.
Remember the political system was INVENTED by men. WOmen had nothing to do with it. Yes, it’s a complex system, but patriarchy is a political system indeed, which employs all the same oppressive tactics as any other authoritarian regime (terrorizing and torturing the oppressed, using propaganda in the form of pornography, the stifling of women’s speech, discriminating in the job market etc etc). The question you have to ask is:
“WHY do men create authoritarian regimes?” “WHY do they violently oppress women (and in some cases men of other ethnic or racial groups)?” “Why do they kill and hurt women and children so frequently?”
Women haven’t a jot of political or economic power.
And exactly WHO is conditioning men to be violent? Don’t you think maybe pornography, computer games and the mass media (ALL invented by men) are a form of political control, a form of political propaganda, encouraging violence against women?
omg. the first words of her comment were LITERALLY “what about the men.” haha!
YES, I never spotted that. Omg
NO men are against violence against women. none of them. it physically hurts me to read such wishful thinking about boys and men, and such lies about what men are capable of, and what they allegedly believe, AGAINST ALL EVIDENCE. stop hurting me! thanks!
I’ve thought about this ever since I read the Scum manifesto years ago, How the Y chromosome is a mere mutation, and a paltry one at that. It’s hard to address as a man what that does mean, even harder for me, a gay man to address.- Ha, there’s some self pity. But seriously, how is one to take this information? Male violence has always been a horrible panademic, and most likely will until Men cease to exist, and something has to be done about that…then on the flip side, I KNOW I have emotions, I KNOW I feel love, empathy etc. but not having the ability to experience what women feel, how can I be sure it’s the same from one to the other? Anyhow, this was a very interesting post, and truthful in the genetic implications.
Thank you for your comment, justinthehomo.
Thank you for allowing it, and I would encourage you to keep this post up, because afterall, how is the problem ever going to be addressed if no one ever talks about it? It’s a hard subject(more so for men and/or women who love them.), but that doesn’t mean it should be swept under a rug.
I intend to take the post down because of the aggression I receive from men whenever I post something they don’t like, not because I feel this work needs to be swept under a rug.
I have let your comments through because I’ve seen your blog and I believe that you are genuinely searching for answers.
Just want to stress something brought up by fcm…from the evidence to date, men, with fourteen times as much testosterone as women, tend strongly toward aggression, hierarchy, and dominance. Yes, making use of these instincts/predispositions, they have wrested control of human society. The result is urgent danger to our planet.
BUT there is no such thing as biological determinism.
A mature society can contain these instincts (I mean a society that does not valorize, hierarchy, domination, and aggression). They can be controlled and neutralized. There are many methods for containing male violence. Men themselves are inventing new methods for doing so as we speak. Many men are ashamed of their instincts and would like to have methods to control the destructiveness.
Hormonal adjustments are important to look into. I look at trans people taking hormones, women coerced into taking hormones, birth control pills, Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodriguez and all the other sports figures trying to hypermasculinize by using hormones. I look at the ongoing efforts to control sex predators using chemical or surgical castration, especially men who have castrated themselves because they know they are dangerous. I see how modern medicine is using hormones to treat breast and prostate cancer. Treating women for “menopausal” symptoms of course is just filling them up with hormones to keep them looking younger and more available.
One case haunts me. It was an Army doctor during and after the Civil War in the US. He became a rapist and was put into a mental institution. A very intelligent individual, he analyzed his situation and one day castrated himself. The relief he felt was enormous.
There are many twists and turns in history. There are many intelligent men as well as the huge number of women pointing out the obvious here. I look at Derrick Jensen (Deep Green Resistance), for instance, who wants to save the earth and is right on the edge of understanding that it is men who must be contained first and foremost.
I do think there is hope. Brute force is irrelevant to power today. Women are superb at the verbal swordplay of law and medicine and now have their entrees. I figure that all we have to do is continue to encourage birth control, literacy, access to the Net, and abortion if needed. Other feminists can help me here, explaining what exactly we need.
And one other thing. It is crucial to insist that we are agents. We are subjects, not objects, and won’t be treated as objects in the media, in philosophy, in politics, or in any other way, any more. To be human is to be a subject. Let’s call it out each time men try to pretend we aren’t subjects, agents, just like them. It’s a good place to start.
And good god, they’re still trying to prostitute us. They are still jacking off to pictures they have stolen from us. They think paying poor women (made poor by their system) a pittance somehow makes it right to perform virtual rape. They think their sex drives are the most important things going on. They feel entitled to degrade us. Let’s be honest, and I have talked to several men candidly about this: the necessity is to pretend we are not human. We’re like nice dogs to them in pornography and prostitution. Good doggie! (growl/attack/eat) Dogs like us are close to our wolf origins, remember! or even more close to human, let me say these words: shame, shame on you, you are disgusting to do this to other humans, and the women are human, and you are sickening.
We have always borne the responsibility, and never received the credit for it. Let’s face it. We are the stable, grounded, child-raising, feeding, life-affirming sex, and men with their loud voices, their boundary violating, their pecking orders, have fucked our society up royally. Even in my lifetime I have seen a revolution. Cultural change won’t take long considering that there are three and half billion of us who are tired of not being quite human. That we are not killers, exploders, destroyers, has held us back since these methods are common in male arsenals but not in ours. These days these methods are irrelevant. Men are irrelevant. actually. If they want to become relevant again, they will have to learn self-fucking-discipline.
AMAZING comment karmarad. And very optimistic, in a sense.
Please elaborate on this point, I’d love to hear more
“Even in my lifetime I have seen a revolution”
I was interested to notice that a man has liked this post, and his gravatar is interesting. It reads “SUpport Radical Feminism”. Now, any woman who supports radical feminism IS a radfem, whereas any man who understands radical feminism knows that, by default, he cannot be a radfem. Compare it to the Hugo Schwyzers of this world, self-proclaimed feminist men who believe they’re leading women to freedom… What an imbecile. So feminist men, egalitarian men, non-capitalist men, animal rights men, male ecologists and the like can fuck off… But if a man wants to “Support Radical Feminism”, then I feel very heartened by that… UNLESS he, and his ilk goes and does what men have always done, which is take over the movement and distort it.
Padawanrfboy,
This is a female-only space.
—CHerryblossomlife
“Only women are my people. Men do not exist within me and I have no father.”
These two lines just electrify me. They are so powerful and transformative. Like FCM, I agree there is something corporeally freeing about understanding women as complete and separate from men. I feel a wholeness and a radiant clarity inside at that realization – maybe it is a glimpse of the true self that men and (their) society are determined to occlude and alienate from us. Thank you so much, Cherryblossom and Witchwind. This post (and your dialogue within it) is invaluable.
Yes! It’s a paradigm shift.
“Hai. I’m an MRA”
Oh God, they’ve turned up.
This one said something about us all realising how much we “need men” once they’ve gone.
Yes indeedy, Jimmy Zinn, once the species has evolved men out of existence, women are surely going to miss all that rape and murder.
“Hai. I’m an MRA”
“Hai. I’m an MRA”
–Cherryblossomlife
“Hai. I’m back”
—CHerryblossomlife
“Hai. I’m an MRA”
Sigh. MRAs ruin everything, don’t they? Women having a conversation together on the internet – HOW DARE WE!
“I’m back”
“Can’t keep away”
Peaceful Antithesist, I think yours was the lengthiest comment I’ve ever had here on cherryblossomlife. Well DONE.
Why do MRAs come here? We’re talking about how much men hate women. What are they trying to prove? Are they trying to convince us they DON’T hate women..? Coz if that’s the case their tactics are crap, and they’re not very convincing. In fact, all they’re doing is proving us right. And if we’re right, and they DO, in fact, hate women… then why are they complaining about this post at all?
Fucking oppressors.
yep, men hate women and women FEEL SORRY for men. god forbid women get together and talk about feeling sorry for men — actually wait, why do MRAs care about that again?
its so obvious that its not the content they have a problem with — its that we are speaking AT ALL, or more to the point, we are expressing an opinion incompatible with being mens fuckholes and slaves. when liberal dickwads like arthur goldwag explore this issue they are left with the question (and get stuck there, bc liberal dickwads are pathetically inadequate like all men are, and benefit from men oppressing women) “well, if the MRAs do, in fact, hate women, and obviously so, why do they hate it being pointed out?” and the answer, if course, is that they cant stand the focus being on them, because if the focus is on *them* it takes precious resources away from threatening women with rape, and interrupts their project of threatening women with rape. if the focus is on *them* it means *we* arent being actively oppressed and silenced enough.
i mean OBVIOUSLY they hate women! duh! “hate” being a verb — they rape and kill us, and silence us. they probably also “feel” hatred for us — hate, in the noun sense — but since i dont give a crap about how men feel, i really dont care about that.
Yes, and there’s also a big difference between “ball ingredients like testosterone”, which cause male “emotions” such as territoriality and misogyny, and being exhilerated at the sight of a sunset, or feeling compassion, or any of the other wonderful emotions that women experience on a daily basis.
This post got 1858 hits just today, and counting
its so funny that you are posting their gravatars, but not their messages. lol. they probably hate that.
they are really incapable of feeling anything besides “hate” arent they? fucking pathetic. and lol @ “ball ingredients.” its really weird to think about mens “emotions” being basically a response to testosterone and a little outside stimulus — like they have no soul. god that just gave me the shivers.
Why can’t you all piss off? —Cherryblossomlife
Well, Cherry, great job protecting our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and association for a few days. As a commenter I thank you. I can see the derailment starting to happen in spite of your excellent gatekeeping at this point though – you are being swamped. Some of your male commenters just want to engage in debate (on their derailing and controlling terms), some just want to have male voices booming here for their own comfort, some want to send their coded intimidation signals, but the desire to have a chilling effect on a female-centered conversation unites them all.
I hope to see a lot of new radfem blogs this year, nimble little blogs that advance the truth and move too fast for ticks to identify and latch on to. It’s no use pointing out our right to post freely without interference – they will instinctively interpret any woman speaking critically as a threat that must be demolished, not because of the merits of our critiques, but because speaking critically is itself an act of freedom, an act that asserts our own full humanity and citizenship, an act outside male control and therefore frightening and alien. Let’s do plenty of it!
Reblogged this on You think I just don't understand, but I don't believe you. and commented:
I kind of love how easily Men sitting behind a computer get their fees hurt when we refuse to post their derpy comments. Hai guyz, you have REDDIT. All betters: http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/17slyx/i_commented_on_that_radical_feminist_piece_on_the/