Mimi (37 page)

I’ve contributed to female tensions and difficulties in my personal life too. Yet, until my own sister was
killed
by misogyny, I was convinced there was nothing wrong with our society that couldn’t be cured or at least ameliorated by a more socialist democracy, redistribution of wealth through tax cuts for the poor, free health care for all, better laws to protect the environment, universal contraception, and stringent birth control.

Thus, I was a typical American man-child, barely able to wipe my own ass; and behaved as if I was wholly innocent of, rather than wholly complicit in, the violent and degenerate acts of a sexist society.

All my life, there has been a war conducted against women. All my life, I have inadvertently conspired in this war. I admired my arse of an arsonist dad over my splendid, loyal, resourceful, and kindly mama. I felt embarrassed by my sister, merely because she was female, while I condoned and participated in the sexual antics of my friends, merely because they were male.

All my life I have been a witness to a war against women and did nothing about it. This war takes many forms, from direct action like rape, wife-beating and strangling, to the more subtle kinds of attack: plastic surgery, discrimination at work, and a constant barrage of misogynist jibes. All of these tactics are direct and indirect assaults on women, in an ongoing terrorist offensive.

2
. 
ALL MEN ARE TERRORISTS

I am a terrorist. ALL MEN ARE TERRORISTS. The world is run by and for terrorists, in a perpetual atmosphere of male coercion of women through psychological and physical means. It is largely a guerrilla fight, with occasional public skirmishes. Men don’t fight out in the open—we fight
dirty
.

The terror and damage inflicted on women by male violence and misogynistic injustice are incalculable. THEY AREN’T SAFE. No woman is safe. The enemy is all around her: in the bedroom, in the boardroom, and on the boob tube. Exultation in terror is reflected in the male propaganda war, a diet of horror movies, thrillers, and crime novels, rap music, porn, and the nonchalant attitude to crimes against women displayed by the news media. These terrorist tactics leave women tainted with disdain, ridicule, and despair; and their doom-ridden position in society is enforced and regularly renewed through physical violence.

WE ALREADY OWN THE WHOLE WORLD, but can’t resist kicking the enemy when she’s down.

We carry out authorized and unauthorized attacks. Ignoring women is easy, erasing their contributions to the arts, to philosophy, to medicine, science, business and commerce, to history—these are all effortlessly accomplished in an atmosphere already rife with contempt. Through concerted, I would say
Hitlerian
, effort—no stone left unturned, no cruelty shunned—women’s place, in culture and in society, has been meticulously obliterated.

The terror campaign is fueled by tradition, religion, misogyny, and mild grievances: women nag, we claim, they stink, they suck, they’re nuts, they’re sluts, they’re always late, they menstruate, they fail, they succeed, they refuse our advances, they
accept
our advances, they swell up with babies for no reason, they can’t throw a ball, they let us down. We twist the truth, turn the tables, try to make black white, night day! What wrongs have women possibly done to men that haven’t been infinitely exceeded by men in their treatment of women?

We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to characterize women (mothers and life-givers) as reprehensible, and men (deadbeat dads and death-wielders) as right, or at least forgivable: men smart, women dumb; men creative, women destructive; men artistic geniuses, women lazy and uninspired. A total reversal of the truth! We denigrate women, and besmirch them; and when we can’t deny our culpability any longer, we make bad seem good, and blame the victim for the crime. We run rings around them, logically.

It
costs
to be a woman in this society. Financially, emotionally, physically, socially, politically, and
erotically
, they’ve had to pay up. And boy, have they been nice about it!

Women are killed every day by some man or another, while we yawn and turn to the sports page, telling ourselves it’s none of our business. Every day, another rapist gets acquitted, another stalker or wife-beater or child-molester gets off. But these rapes and murders
are
our business! Rapists work for US.

Newspapers use the more sensational cases to sell copies, while the rest get forgotten. But a world in which such crimes come with their own inbuilt triviality is no world for women. A world in which women are disrespected, discounted, and disheartened is also no world for women. In fact, it’s no world for anybody!

The terrorist threat to women is severe, CODE RED. It’s all around us in this woman-dissing, woman-dismissing world. What woman has not had to hear, almost daily, of violent crimes committed against women? This is terror.

+
Pimps are terrorists.

+
Priests are terrorists.

+
Fashion designers and beauty-mongers are terrorists.

+
Plastic surgeons are terrorists.

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Employers who underpay women are terrorists.

+
Men who criticize women are terrorists.

+
Men who ignore women are terrorists.

+
Men who get in women’s way are terrorists.

+
Men who “innocently” follow women on the street (and terrify them) are terrorists.

+
Men who take up more than their fair share of space in public places are terrorists.

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Husbands who make unilateral decisions without consulting their wives are terrorists.

+
Male religions are terror tracts.

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Every teacher who hits a pupil is a terrorist.

+
Every man who rapes a child is a terrorist.

+
Every ass who takes revenge on his wife by killing their kids, or revenge on his girlfriend by killing her whole family, is a terrorist.

+
Anybody who takes a gun onto the streets and conducts a murderous rampage is terrorizing
women
—since every single person is born of a woman and probably loved by one.

+
What woman has not feared for her life at some point when walking alone at night? This is terror.

+
What woman isn’t frightened in general of going out alone? This is terror.

+
What woman’s life has not been sullied, possibly even shortened, by the unwelcome attentions of egotistical men? This is terror.

+
What woman has not been
unjustly
deprived of opportunity, approval, appreciation, understanding, peace, quiet, safety, pride, power, wealth, health, and respect? This is terror.

+
How is the rape of the earth itself, the ignorant and destructive capitalistic exploitation of nature (our air, our water), not part of the terrorist project? All forms of annihilation are ultimately aimed at
women
(as the life-givers). This is terror.

LOOK at the wasted women, LOOK at the wasted earth! We have lauded the male and belittled the female, to our own cost and calamity. Through male greed, cruelty, sadism, insanity, and insouciance, as if in service of some long-forgotten gripe or decree, we have plundered and squandered the earth until there’s almost nothing left! We behave as if men
must
rule—but men have proved themselves unfit to do so. ONLY THE DEAD KILL.

The success of male propaganda against women, against life itself, is reflected in our complacency about humanity’s imminent disappearance. It’s now considered fashionable and sophisticated to be entertained by visions of apocalypse. People behave as if there’s some kind of
virtue
in apathy. They resign themselves to radiation leaks, irreversible climate change, bee diseases, nuclear weaponry, and late capitalism’s perpetual war. . . without a qualm! They’ve hypnotized themselves into believing that the end of the world is not only nigh, but maybe even
bearable
.

Now wait a minute!

Nobody who cares what human beings
are,
what we’ve
made
, what we’ve
loved
and striven for, nobody who cares about human thought and art (as well as the arts and loves of
animals
, what about them??), nobody who has noticed how intricate and beautiful the world is, nobody who has studied the wide dark-green leaves and tiny, white, cupped, jiggling, bell-shaped flowers of lilies of the valley. . . nobody who knows what’s REAL and gives a damn what women and children feel, would be content to let the whole damn enterprise—nature, a habitable, inheritable planet, and all of human culture, history, and civilization—go down without a fight! Nobody who gave a damn would let bankers, arms dealers, nuclear industry proponents, oil merchants, and oligarchs—the biggest liars, losers, and crackpots in the world!—nobody who gave a damn would let MEN decide our future.

3
. 
FREE THE ODALISQUES
!

Imagine a world where women aren’t badgered or beleaguered, a world in which women have what they want and need, and are free to go about their business unmolested. A world in which you don’t have to watch your mother, sister, daughter, wife, or girlfriend get stalked and stabbed and shot and swindled and sneered at, you don’t have to watch them lose out, run adrift, go nuts.

This would be a better place for
everybody
.

We got it all wrong! The secret of life isn’t POWER, it’s PLEASURE.
Arbeit
doesn’t make us
frei
, pleasure does. The pursuit of pleasure isn’t irresponsible, immoral, dishonorable, or self-indulgent. It is a
fact
, and deep in our make-up. It’s not a frivolous choice but an inalienable right. Pleasure-seeking is what we’re born for, and all the rest—the corporate life, the capitalist life, the misogynist life, the sadistic life, the ignoble self-destructive life of men with their guns and their tanks and their poison gas and their goddam leaf-blowing machines (what a racket we men make!)—all of this is a mistake, a distraction from the pleasure, ease, and comfort we all really want.

The secret of life is life,
not
death, and life at its fullest expression is pleasurable, not painful. Most animals aren’t in pain all the time. Even bees seem bent on being happy. The natural state of things is not suffering and mayhem, but peace and contentment.
This
is how you get things done!

Would it be so hard to be fair to women? Would it be so hard to admit that, rather than witches and bitches, women are actually pretty handy members of society, a society that, it just so happens,
belongs
to them as well as us? Would it KILL us to admit that?

After all, their worst ethos is
coziness
. Women want roses and chocolates and puppies and cushions everywhere. So what? They want pleasure: aesthetic, sensual, sexual, and cultural pleasure. Well, they invented these things! Women were the first farmers, the first artists, the first astronomers, the first botanists, the first doctors, the first philosophers, the first parents, the first cooks, the first CIVILIZERS.

It’s women who did the cave paintings! Women invented the wheel! (Men reinvented it.) Women needed the wheel to help them push around their cartloads of babies and radishes. Women were the first to harness
fire
. They like to keep warm—is that so bad? It’s healthy. It’s COZY. And now look at them, careworn and poverty-stricken, trailing home with their bags of groceries beneath the gigantic nuclear power plants men built
without their permission
.

Men just sat on their asses or went hunting for the first two hundred thousand years or more of human history. The only things
we
harnessed were belching, ball games, and bubblegum. And women: that was our breakthrough.

Patriarchy wasn’t necessary, inevitable, or desirable, it just happened. Men have conspired ever since in the erasure of prehistory, because it was matriarchal and it makes MEN look bad. Humanity would never have
survived
two hundred thousand years of patriarchy—look at us now, after only
five
thousand years of it. Patriarchy’s not a viable long-term option: our devotion to the male death wish has brought us all to our knees.

Women are now slaves (they make quilts!). Until relatively recently, they weren’t even allowed to vote. They are still wasting their lives trying to please, posing for us in their bikinis and high heels and doing all the housework. They push strollers uphill like Sisyphus. They bake lasagne, make jam, get their eyebrows threaded, their pubic hair shaped and shifted. Them and their little savings accounts, making do, dying from neglect, winning praise only for pliancy and self-abnegation!