1. THE PRIVATISATION OF WOMAN

‘The problem with media-run “conversations” on gender is not merely the almost total absence of male participants, but the suppression of class. It is tempting to say real politics are missing, too, but bourgeois boundaries and prescriptions are real enough. Thus, gender, like race, can be presented in isolation. Class is a forbidden word; and gender subordinate to class is heresy.’

John Pilger

‘Since the public sphere was seen as liberating, it followed that putting more women into jobs, any jobs, would be liberating. So the female labour force participation rate became a measure of liberation (Sen, 1999). That is fine for middle-class, highly educated women who can anticipate salaried career-oriented employment. But for most women, labouring repetitively on an assembly line, or sewing feverishly in an ill-lit backstreet garment factory, or sitting at a check-out counter for long shifts, jobs are scarcely liberating.’

Guy Standing

Feminism emerged during the nineteenth century, when women were forced into a formal economy which, until then, had been a male enterprise. Before this there had, of course, been a long and shameful history of subjugating, abusing, objectifying and marginalising women (along with sporadic rebellion); but there was still a separation of domains, a sense that some aspects of the world belonged to men and some to women.

In many primal societies (pre-agriculture and pre-conquest) there is no question of gendered inequality or of one sex lording it over another. Men have one approach to reality (and to time and space; with a concomitant set of tools) and women another. Although the divisions between domains may be fluid — certainly not established in law — they are kept separate. This does not lead to conflict but to a complementarity which governed human life for most of its history — and continued to exist in various modified or degraded forms into pre-modern planter and herder societies; if, as Ivan Illich says, ‘its rule was relaxed, this happened only among decadent elites, and then only for short periods.’ (emphasis mine).

Men and women also lived in different psychological domains. They share some features of each other’s cognitive powers — there is no question that women cannot think as men do and vice versa — but with pronounced emphasis in their own gendered realities. Men, as many cultures have recognised, are naturally cut off, to some extent, from the context and engaged in a mission (from immaturity to maturity) to return to it, while women are more embodied, more sensitive to the context, and therefore more genuinely intelligent (and always more mature. ), with the less intelligent abstracting mind more closely integrated with contextual awareness.

With the advent of civilisation the male domain overtook the female and men began to separate themselves from contextual feminine experience — or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the male self took control of experience and went on to take control of society; but in either case the two processes fed off each other, resulting in a male-dominated elite world built on abstract, compartmentalised male systems of transcendent knowledge and a male experience of time and space. The so-called ‘civilised’ systems of antiquity, the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, the utterly horrific Greek and Roman myths of near constant rape and slaughter and the hyper-abstract (although catastrophically material in its effects) modern market-system, or economy, are all entirely male creations, sprouting from a male mind completely out of contact with reality, context and body, and terrified of anything which cannot be controlled, abstractly understood, possessed or brought to the schizoid light of the fragmented male-mind — such as innocent children, wild nature, darkness, the present moment and sane femininity; which are unconsciously perceived as a threat and either ignored, violently suppressed or eradicated altogether. The entire appalling history of man’s violence towards women, his physical and economic suppression of her spontaneity, intrinsic creativity and generosity, and his systematic, sexualising brainwashing of her—in short, his sexism—originates here.

It is this male world that, in the nineteenth century, women were forced to fully enter; to work, compete and think alongside men and, crucially, as men. Illich again;

‘Women complained that men suddenly ordered them around at work; a totally new experience for them. No matter how much the gender-defined work of women might seem subordinated to that of men, the notion that men could direct women in the work itself had so far been unimaginable. Women resented the loss of domain. Women also complained that, while men had time after working at the rhythm of the plow to relax at the inn, they had to hurry back and forth between the hoe and the kitchen. Envy of a new kind, envy for the other gender’s schedule and rhythm, thus appeared; an envy destined to remain as a central characteristic of modern life, an envy fully ‘justified’ under the assumptions of unisex work but unthinkable under the shield of gender.’

Illich is exaggerating here; men directing women in their work was not ‘unimaginable,’ and the position of women in medieval society was far from enviable. Men had been abusing and subordinating women since the dawn of ‘civilisation’ and the Middle Ages were no different; but with the rise of capitalism women were forced into a domain which radically intensified their exposure to male exploitation and radically deformed their experience, intelligence, sensitivity and even autonomy. This process began, Illich explains, with the codifying of a ‘genderless we’ in the centralised marriage records of the medieval church, the first move to unpick the complementarity of traditional societies, and then massively expanded with the advent of full-blown capitalism, which demanded that women enter the market as ‘equals’. To compete in the insane male world women had to become like insane men — cut off from their bodies, from nature and from the ineffable. In order to fit into the intensely hierarchical, systematised, unreal male market-system woman had to split her psyche and inure herself to the psychological pressure and emotional pain of this split that hitherto only men had dealt with.

This process is analogous to the privatisation of public capital and labour. Just as workers in state-controlled economies passed, during the late industrial revolution, from monarchical forms of subordination to those of the market-system, so women passed from domestic subjugation to capitalist subjugation. The winners and the wannabes of the brave new world of ‘women’s liberation’ denounce — and rightly so — domestic servitude and tyrannical paternalism, but refuse to recognise that some forms of pre-capitalist societies could protect and still (occasionally) do protect women from the far greater depravations of market-servitude. This isn’t to say, of course, that we must return to the vile practice of putting wifey in her place, any more than we must return to the state-protected ‘job for life with pensions and benefits’ fantasy-land that the more subservient of the modern precariat dream of. As with so many conspicuous either-or conflicts, there is a third way, which, unfortunately, the subjugated woman, like the subjugated poor and the subjugated blackfella, fail to perceive.

Rather than demand a return to her own domain (e.g. to be paid and recognised for the independent ‘uneconomic’ shadow-work she had been doing), rather than refuse entry into the nightmarish market-economy, rather than demand that man face the ineffable and learn to experience the feminine source of his own fragmented hyper-rational experience, she instead accepted the capitalist assumptions of the male world and began to fight for ‘equality’ and ‘recognition’ within it. This was the beginning of feminism — an understandable movement (given that women women were denied perfectly ordinary freedoms) but ultimately a useless wrong turn into professional subordination, institutional slavery and democratic irrelevance.

Some women who call themselves feminists simply want to look after abused women, others are interested in uncovering the neglected history of women, some (so called ‘equity feminists’) are keen, quite reasonably, to ensure that women have the same access to ordinary resources as men or to help them free themselves from their often pathetic dependency on men, others just vaguely ‘support women’ and one or two wish to annihilate men from the face of the earth. Like most words, feminism has a great many meanings, some of them barely articulated, some indeed — referring to the ineffable nature of femininity — nearly impossible to express. There are feminists who would even agree with the analysis above, passionately even; but the feminist movement did not begin with an understanding of domain, a demand for the truth of femininity to be honoured, much of an understanding of the role class plays in the subordination of women, a radical critique of hyper-male insanity or the social and psychological cause and side-effects of ‘women’s liberation’ — namely 50% of the hiterto untaxable workforce entering, with much capitalist delight and encouragement, the workforce. No, feminism began with a reasonable but ultimately misguided demand for fair representation in insane male-made institutions (marriage, law, politics, education, etc.). This was followed, in the 50s, 60s and 70s, by an extensive protest that ‘male language’ (meaning the male variety of language that women were now forced to use), male modes of awareness and ‘male assumptions’ were inherently sexist or loaded with repressive beliefs and feelings about women. Recently, the misguided feminist project has reached its rational end-point; an extended campaign for the complete eradication of gender.

This final insane move is feminishism…

2. FEMINISHISM

‘Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egoism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.’

Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia

Cordelia Fine’s popular Delusions of Gender is a model of feminishist priorities. It begins with an approving quote from arch-fiendess Margaret Thatcher – after which we are expected to take seriously Fine’s moral judgements, which turn out, as might be expected, to revolve around access to top jobs as corporate psychopaths; the usual meaning of ‘gender equality’ in the mass-media today. The idea, firstly, is that it is better for women to be lorded over by a cruel, inhuman male system than by a cruel, human male husband (apologists for capitalism make much the same argument in extolling clean, professional factories over dirty, peasant farms) and secondly, that women who succeed in this system are worthy of admiration and emulation. ‘Professional Feminist’ Laurie Penny, for example, like many other high-profile corporate employees, recently gave her support to Hillary Clinton ‘because she is a woman and a feminist’. No problem that Clinton was backed by all the largest oil companies in America, or that she oversaw the obliteration of Libya, made 30 billion dollars of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and cheered on the biggest arms deal in history to Israel. No, ‘she’s a woman and a feminist’ — good enough for Penny — as was notorious psychopath Valerie Solanas, author of ‘The SCUM Manifesto’, which calls for ‘the eradication’ — indeed the ‘cutting up’ — of men. Again, no problem for Penny this (unless the men are members of a racial minority, then perhaps not ).

Another common feminishist complaint is that male culture ‘reins in’ female desire. Women, we are told, have just as high libidos as men, are just as sexual, just as hungry, just as lustful; not just for fucking but for power. This ‘hunger’ for sex and power is just fine, apparently — as long as feminishist women are allowed in to the party (i.e. that their ‘libidos are not controlled by men’).

That fucking might be an aberration, that the restless urge for it might in fact fall right into the hands of the sexist enemy, that love might be missing here, is far off into la-la land. ‘Is love even necessary?’ wonders Penny, making no reference to true love anywhere in her work. Love for feminishists is no different to love for sexists — desire, neediness, hope, attachment, care or seven stages of mounting horror culminating in heart-break. For Germaine Greer love is ‘disguised egotism’ (a state we are born into), self-sacrifice is ‘chimerical’ and altruism is an ‘absurdity’. For Greer, as for many feminists, the mysterious wisdom of woman (which man strives to attain) is actually acculturated weakness and capitulation. She must fight to claim her missing cock, you see, not fuss over all this altruism blather. (This might explain Greer’s admiration for an Australian Thatcher, Julia Gillard).

Love-making for feminishists and sexists is exclusively left-brain fucking; the mind-focused sub-dom power-play of the restless ego; masturbation with someone else there. The whole liberating presence of love does not get a look-in for feminishists who seek — demand — an externalised, definable, acquisitive sexuality. ‘Germaine Greer wrote that women will be free when they have a positive definition of female sexuality,’ says Naomi Wolf, approvingly, and then goes on to dismiss woman’s innate receptivity, sensitivity and indefinable physicality as the result of male conditioning. Not her unhappiness, or her ambition, or her confusion, fear and broken-heart. No, these are her own. It’s her femininity that men are guilty of instilling in her.

It’s interesting and telling that Penny conflates lust for fucking with lust for power. They are, indeed, the same; loveless. Just as true love plays no part in standard accounts of romance and sex, so the real body — specifically the body of a woman — plays no part in the ambitions of women to succeed in the male [virtual] world. The unpredictable, mysterious and uncanny reality of the female body is as horrifying to masculinised modern feminishists as it has always been to sexist men; the difference being, of course, that it is still hers. The sadistic, excessively abstracted male can rise without anything like as much pain and psychic stress through unnatural, anti-social, totalitarian hierarchies, while the inherently present, incarnated woman must suffer all the way up — a suffering which serves to enhance her erratic cruelty in roles of responsibility in the male world — until she has become an insane man.

Feminishists reject the idea that society masculinises. For Fine, Penny, Lucy-Cosslett, Moore, Wolf, Greer and company, gender conditioning is explicit and largely domestic (giving girls dolls to play which slowly puts them off welding careers). Society as a whole, which is transparently masculine, is ignored. The system corrupts and degrades everything it comes into contact with — nature, culture, society, work, love — but it’s unimaginable that it corrupts gender; because gender does not exist. Women are raised in a society designed entirely by men, they engage in technologies invented by men, go to institutions planned by men and work in a male domain which rewards masculine styles of thinking — yet none of this is deemed to make women more masculine; for the simple reason that prominent feminishists seek power in the insane male domain. Naomi Wolf, for example, in her influential The Beauty Myth, begins by celebrating women’s entry into ‘the trades and the professions’, a degrading position she uncritically accepts for the same reason professional journalists do — because she occupies it.

Creeping masculinisation is obscured by denying the existence of gender entirely, which is considered deviant. Reason; feminishists do not want to be feminine — it does nothing for their career . And just as femininity is rejected for woman, so masculinity for man is outlawed. Men are not permitted to take the manifest lead in the manifest male domain, while she leads in the world behind the world; men are not permitted to act, think and speak as men do (‘mansplain’ — see inset ) while she acts, thinks and speaks as women do; men are not permitted to to be engage in the perennial mission of man to fight his way back to the hyper-subversive point that she never leaves. Men — welpy, intellectual, ‘gender-fluid,’ perma-pubescents, forever inspecting their emotions and policing their thoughts — are expected to allow her to be ambitious, rational, violent and insensitive (i.e. male) in a system which also rewards inaction, obedience, wordiness and hypersensitivity — turning him into a bitch. All gendered activity, influence and style, in other words, must be effaced or levelled into a single, rational,. This is called ‘equality’, although the correct term for the process that leads, in all species, to a reduction in male-female differences — aka sexual dimorphism — is

Thankfully some women who call themselves feminists don’t behave consistently. They might profess a need for this bland, indiscriminate ‘equality’, and gain shady solace from hanging around puppyish semi-men — but they still expect their boyfriends and husbands to lead in a dance, to make bold decisions (even trivial ones, like choosing where to sit in a public space), to behave with male dignity and to engage in The Noble Quest — in short to grow a pair; and many women will, despite the PC opinions she overlays her instincts with, punish him if he doesn’t. Likewise she will punish him for hyper-masculinity, excessive abstraction and fundamental lovelessness; for separating himself from her strange wisdom which, as anyone with intelligence knows, is where authority lies.

Women who don’t do this, who let men get away with their disgraceful self-obsession and lack of love, their cowardliness or bastardy, are either doormats and commodities — the principle targets of feminishist ire — or… they are feminists. Feminishists cannot accuse man of his worst crimes, for they are guilty of them too. When feminoids claim ‘men cannot stand intelligent women’ what they actually mean is ‘insane male smart-arses cannot stand insane female smart-arses’, which is true, but hardly news.

Another inherently male problem that masculinised women now embody, and thus another source of modern feminist hypocrisy, is objectification. Feminists complain that, by staring at a pair of breasts or slobbering over the body of a woman cut off or ‘objectified’ from her full character, men are dehumanising her; and so they are. The chronic abstraction of the male mind does indeed pollute the world. Meanwhile… feminists are busy ‘creating a positive definition’ of their sexuality, writing their complaints into the statute books, devoting their lives to academia, technology, sport and so on, fighting to get the correct number of women in every position of power and enthusiastically engaging with the market-system. But this isn’t ‘objectification’ is it? It can’t be!

After reading the sloppy, shit-slinging mediocrity of modern feminists (cf. the extraordinarily degrading public disputes of Paglia, Burchill, Wolf and Steinem, or this kind of thing), it is something of a relief to turn to the intelligence of the original work of so-called ‘second-wave’ feminism, The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir. True, Beauvoir’s view of the universe is as bleak and loveless as that of other feminists (constant warfare — the meaningless universe of the existentialists), as dismissive of the ineffable as Greer (‘feminine mystery’ is, for Beauvoir, a lie invented by men for the purposes of dismissing women entirely) and, ultimately, founded on the same misunderstanding of pre-civilised life as Wolf. True, she was a literal sadist (i.e. admirer of the Marquis de Sade), Stalinist and a pimp for coward, sexual predator, authoritarian and nihilist, Jean-Paul Sartre. And yes, true, she believed that there was no biological basis for sexual difference, that unborn children were ‘parasites’ and that it was okay for thirteen year old girls to sleep with adult men. But The Second Sex does at least offer a more accurate and interesting account of man’s appalling record of subjugating women than that of modern feminists, along with some good critiques of male literature and a now unfashionably realistic appraisal of the difference between men and women artists. ‘No woman ever wrote The Trial, Moby-Dick, Ulysses…’ she says. Certainly, like other feminists, she blames this on civilisation and social-training, but at least she begins by admitting the superiority of these works over Oroonoko, Jane Eyre and the execrable To the Lighthouse.

There has never been a female Beethoven, a female Kant, a female Beatles or a female Monty Python and there never will be. Anyone who asserts such women exist or have existed has either never really attended to these male masters, or they lie about the make-up of their record collection, or they don’t really know what it means to be a woman (a common problem amongst ponderously materialist professional feminishists). It’s not so much that she couldn’t write nine breathtaking symphonies of transcendent beauty if she wanted to — although that’s also true — but that a real woman, one capable of doing so, would thereby betray herself — for she is those nine symphonies. As Paglia realised, in one of her more perceptive moments, she is that which poets write of.

Again, this does not mean that woman can’t contribute to the male world library — and sometimes even without sacrificing her femininity — but that her priorities lie, ultimately, in living the source of art, not in manifesting it abstractly. She can create very good male-type works of art, but her genius is in being that which man merely imagines, a tragically rare but mind-boggling state of presence. Her genius is also, of course, in creating life, and those forms of art (and science) which celebrate, adorn and nourish it. In living life — in improvised theatre, in song and dance, in informal communication and speech, in discursive and picaresque literature (and letter-writing), in decorative and illustrative art, in handcrafts such as pottery and textile design, in sensuously embodied sculpture — in short, in feminine styles of spontaneously (‘pre-artistically’) living and materially creating — she is, on the whole, naturally superior to man. Such forms of expression are either considered inferior to the edifices of immortality that man seeks to create or are not allowed to flourish in the male world; improvised theatre is banished from the official ‘canon’, fashion and textile design have been dominated by tasteless institutions of megawealth for almost as long as architecture has, useful and beautiful handmade crafts are hardly allowed to exist, let alone seriously be considered as art, illustration is positively spat on by ‘artists’ and the idea that art itself, along with science and language, represents a degradation of human experience, is simply beyond the pale.

All this is sexist — a sexism that male woman has absorbed into her bones and then, after she has struggled out of her domain, into grim, unnecessary realms of bodiless ambition and abstraction , defends as ‘equality’. She spurns the imminent experiences and artforms that are her birthright, strives to master transcendent styles which are (usually — not always; usually) against her nature, assumes male forms of thought and awareness are standard, and demands equal place amongst man in his world. This she does not by showing she is his equal in it — because she isn’t, any more than he is in hers — but by denigrating the male masters that naturally dominate it.

Write a list of great classical composers down, or great film directors, great novelists, great comedians, great philosophers or great scientists and, unless you have no idea what you are talking about, it will be almost entirely composed of works by men. Partly this is because, as feminists correctly point out, women have historically been given no opportunity to contribute feminine works to our collective canon. But there is another reason — great, in this sense, indicates a combination of intense abstraction, ambition and transcendence, none of which are inherently female attributes. This doesn’t mean that female styles of art are ‘not great’, but that they haven’t been honoured — and are still not honoured; even (perhaps especially) by feminists themselves, whose complaints about such lists (as mine) will almost inevitably be rooted in a sexist [mis]understanding of creation; that, first of all, disparages activity which is not a result of sacrificing one’s life to abstract manifestations of the ineffable and, second of all, displays an extraordinary lack of taste. As if the crowds of women that are pulled from history to populate the syllabus in the name of ‘balance’ are (were allowed to be, wanted to be) anything but minor players. As if Jane Campion’s work is equal to that of Stanley Kubrick, or Kate Bush’s to David Bowie’s (or any truly great woman composer even exists — they don’t), or Hannah Arendt’s to Arthur Schopenhauer’s, or Frida Kahlo’s to Egon Schiele’s, or Marie Curie’s to Einstein’s. Not that Campion, Bush, Arendt, Kahlo and Curie are no good, they are; but, in this sense, their work doesn’t exists in the same universe as that of the greatest men.

In this sense ‘women have never had the chance to create this kind of great music, great philosophy or great art’ although true, is irrelevant. They cannot make the male-style masterpieces which we rightly honour (but, wrongly, exclusively honour); unless of course you wish to claim that although women have had the chance to be queens, prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, consultants, judges and army generals, sitting alone in a room with a guitar and writing a song equal to ‘Pennies from Heaven’, ‘Sunday Morning’ or ‘I Want you Back’ has somehow been denied them? (Even a bona-fide genius like Nina Simone, a goddess as far as I and many other are concerned, wrote only one genuine masterpiece herself.) Not that, again, women haven’t been cruelly oppressed, and still are — but they have been given the chance to create male-type masterpieces and have fallen far short of greatness in the male realm. Because they are not men.

Likewise women have succeeded (against great odds) in becoming doctors, journalists, and lawyers… yet hardly a day goes by when a journalist doesn’t wonder why are there are so few women engineers, or mathematicians or software developers (not so many complaints about under-representation in mining though). Somehow passing a postgraduate engineering exam poses a more formidable obstacle than the bar exam (although, as society continues to efface gender, this ceases to be the case). It is simply unthinkable that this might be for inherent psychological or biological reasons. It has to be down to sexism, ‘stereotype threat’ (i.e. the threat of mostly accurate ideas) and lego.

It’s instructive to take a look at the genuine artistic masterpieces of women; such as Toni Erdmann, by Maren Ade, L’Abandon, by Camille Claudel, The Moomins by Tove Jansson (one of the greatest works of art in the twentieth century), the works of Maud Lewis and similar works which have been dismissed as ‘light’ or ‘superficial’ or ‘folk art’ by the sexist art world, which confuses transcendence — the provenance of the man obsessed — with quality — which need not be ‘arrived at’ in the same way. The greatest works of women nearly always focus on the sensuous, sweet and imminent bodily reality of our actual life. In this, women nearly always excel men; but are prevented from plumbing the depths of their experience and from realising it, in art, by the structured, focused, ambitious and cruelly competitive art world.

Women are no more allowed to be women in the world of illustration or film than they are in the world of comedy. When they are granted access, they are forced to betray themselves. The creative comic genius of the naturally spontaneous woman who attempts to emulate male forms, such as ego-cracking physicality and nudity, aggressive satire or intense [transcendent] surrealism, or even written comedy, is corrupted the minute it hits the panel-show spotlight, leaving her without dignity or delight. It is, in other words, correct to say that ‘women are not funny’ — while we have to view ‘funny women’ through the prism of the male media system, the cut-throat world of stand-up and abstracted forms of comedy.

Compare a naked, dumpy, man and a naked, dumpy woman running away from an angry landlord. The former is, or at least can potentially be, funny; we laugh at the uglier male form and the breaking of the uglier male dignity, whereas we just feel pity at a debased woman’s body. Or put Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Donna McPhail and Bridget Christie alongside [early] Robin Williams, [early] Steve Martin, [early] Eddie Izzard and [early] Steve Coogan. Or watch a decent comedy show by multiple writers (Rick and Morty, for example, or Parks and Recreation[note]Not the first or anything later than the fourth series.[/note]) and see who wrote the worst episodes. Or compare the genius of the great woman improviser with that of the great male impro-artist — and note how she fills his transcendent narrative structures with her imminent magic. The miraculous comic actress (Julie Walters, Alison Steadman, Brenda Blethyn, Amy Poehler and countless superb exponents of impro on the UK, US and Canadian stages) is a genius, but as soon as she forces her artistic truth to excessively inhabit his psychological domain all charm, creativity and, in this case, comedy, instantly evaporates. Feminishists of course, like groupthinkers since time began, laughing at their membership of the club (the depraved comedy of ‘us vs them’), don’t notice that anything is missing.

Women haven’t had the chance to create great music, great novels, great art and great comedy in feminine styles (a fact abetted by their natural and sane lack of abstract aspiration). Forms of art that are organically wedded to human production, that spontaneously arise from the free play of free people making and adorning the things of life, that celebrate imminence, that do not demand fantastically abstract male traditions to find form, that can find widespread informal, vernacular expression… such art forms have either been denied woman (and common people whose lot she has, naturally, always shared) or are so intimately wedded with life that it would be odd to call such genius ‘art’. This has been so since the dawn of the cut-off male world; and it won’t change by women achieving ‘equality’ in that world, by apeing male styles of expression, by hopping into bed at the drop of a hat, by teaming up in male-made hyper-abstract realms of the internet, by shattering in offended outrage at the mention of a bad word or by learning to subjugate, dominate, decimate and destroy as men do.

For woman to be recognised as the genius she is, the whole world must be turned upside down.

3. THE TAO OF GENDER

‘To know the male,

But to abide by the female,

Is to be the valley of the world.

Being the valley of the world,

And departing not from the everlasting power,

One again returns to the infant.’

Tao te Ching, Chapter 28

‘Sex can be discussed in the unambiguous language of science. Gender bespeaks a complementarity that is enigmatic and asymmetrical. Only metaphor can reach for it.’

Gender, Ivan Illich

‘Woman has learned to make love through man who does not know how to make love. Hence the dreadful mess that love is in.’

Making Love, Barry Long

Women have softer bodies and softer, more integrated selves / psyches, men harder bodies and harder, more concentrated selves / psyches. Women, consequently, tend to avoid dirty, gruelling work, tend to be better at absorbing the whole context (and therefore better gatherers), tend to be in charge of informal, private social domains and tend to be more interested in the reality of our material lives, rather than in ideals and ambitions; they tend to have greater feeling intelligence, empathy, overall [soft] awareness and their creativity tends to be intrinsic or imminent. Women have a reduced facility with perspective, less interest in isolated abstract systems and ideas, less ability to make systematic, clock-based plans and, overall, less need to get somewhere.

Men tend to prefer risky, abstract or filthy activity, tend to be better at isolating elements of the context and relating them to each other (and therefore better hunters), tend to be in charge of formal or public social domains and tend to be more interested in ideals or ambitions than in whether their underpants are clean. They tend to have greater visual-spatial thinking intelligence, a greater ability to focus on abstractions and their creativity tends to be extrinsic or transcendent. Men have a decreased ability to think discursively or to perceive intuitive embodied similarities between distant concepts and are susceptible to plan-addiction and obsessive intellectual insensitivity.

Women, typically, have a tendency to emotional egotism, to masochism, body-obsession and self-harm, to neediness (particularly after the sex-threshold has been crossed) and to avoidance of manifest conflict (preferring subterfuge and wars of attrition), Men, typically, have a tendency to mental egotism, to a restless desire to mark the world with the piss of their selves, to tease women, children and animals into reaction — or to torture them — to obsessive plan-addiction, to explicit aggression, to sex-obsession, schizophrenia and outright sadistic psychopathy (see ‘notes on the male rights movement’ below).

These tendencies are innate, and so have existed throughout pre-history , exist across wildly different cultures, no matter how men and women are conditioned and can be roughly and indirectly observed in neurology and physiology. ). The truth is though that it is impossible to prove the existence of masculinity and femininity in brains, genes, bones, art or anything else. There are unquestionable vital differences between men and women in measurable brain function, influence of hormones, body shape and so on but, ultimately, as I point out above, the nature of gender (particularly of femininity) is enigmatic to the mind. This doesn’t mean it cannot be meaningfully spoken of, quite the opposite, rather that — as with every other subject of real importance in our lives — wandering through a hall of academic mirrors on the subject, for all its interest and use, will never allow us to perceive the heart of the matter.[/note] Claire Lehmann summarises current findings;

In the last 15 to 20 years overwhelming evidence [has] been amassed to show that sex differences, both large and small, exist at every level of analysis in the human animal. Neurobiologists have discovered that there are sex differences in how our brain hemispheres are wired, with women’s being more highly connected across the left and right hemispheres, and men having more connections from front to back. There are sex differences in the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus, in both size and activity. For example: Activation of the left side of the hippocampus is found to be more dominant in females, and activation on the right is found to be more dominant in males. There are fundamental sex differences in basic neurochemistry. Men and women have different baseline amounts of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine. They also differ in their abilities to synthesize these neurotransmitters. When neurons of male and female rats are placed under a microscope, the ways in which these cells die are different — a discovery with profound implications for the treatment of brain injuries, Alzheimer’s, and stroke. This evidence has been a difficult pill for some to swallow.

This is from The XX Factor, Claire Lehmann. Lehmann edits the frequently ludicrous alt-right rag, Quilette, most of the contents of which is complete nonsense, but if she’s suspect, and you still have doubts that men and women are different, try this piece in The Scientific American by Scott Barry Kaufman; in which we learn that;

By applying a multivariate analysis of the whole brain, researchers are now able to classify whether a brain is male or female with 77%-93% accuracy…

How do ‘male brains’ and ‘female brains’ manifest?

On average, males tend to be more dominant, assertive, risk-prone, thrill-seeking, tough-minded, emotionally stable, utilitarian, and open to abstract ideas. Males also tend to score higher on self-estimates of intelligence, even though sex differences in general intelligence measured as an ability are negligible. Men also tend to form larger, competitive groups in which hierarchies tend to be stable and in which individual relationships tend to require little emotional investment. In terms of communication style, males tend to use more assertive speech and are more likely to interrupt people (both men and women) more often– especially intrusive interruptions– which can be interpreted as a form of dominant behavior… [while] females, on average, tend to be more sociable, sensitive, warm, compassionate, polite, anxious, self-doubting, and more open to aesthetics. On average, women are more interested in intimate, cooperative dyadic relationships that are more emotion-focused and characterized by unstable hierarchies and strong egalitarian norms. Where aggression does arise, it tends to be more indirect and less openly confrontational. Females also tend to display better communication skills, displaying higher verbal ability and the ability to decode other people’s nonverbal behavior. Women also tend to use more affiliative and tentative speech in their language, and tend to be more expressive in both their facial expressions and bodily language (although men tend to adopt a more expansive, open posture). On average, women also tend to smile and cry more frequently than men, although these effects are very contextual and the differences are substantially larger when males and females believe they are being observed than when they believe they are alone.

Kaufman tells us that;

Contrary to what one might expect, for all of these personality effects the sex differences tend to be larger — not smaller — in more individualistic, gender-egalitarian countries.

No prizes for guessing which group have refused to accept the many studies which confirm that sex differences (brain structure, function, differences in personality and choice of occupation) exist between men and women ; which group have demanded that such findings be labelled as ‘neurosexist stereotyping’ or that neuroscientists be trained in gender studies, and which group have been, on the one hand, roundly criticised by neuroscientists and, on the other, universally exalted by the middle-class press.

This isn’t to say that, in certain respects, sex differences, like bodies and minds, aren’t malleable and cannot be shaped by culture. They evidently can; which is how the natural gender complementarity of pre-history became, via the subjugation of women by men, the hellish world of pre-modern gender-warfare (hyper-masculinised sexist men vs. hyper-feminised submissive women — which still exists in the lower classes) followed by the even more nightmarish world of modern monogendered decadence (emasculated metrosexual man vs. sharp, hungry ambitious woman — typically a middle and upper-class phenomenon). Feminists stress nurture as the foundational determinant of gender, yet seem curiously unwilling to accept that a world built by ten millennia of men might make women more male.

Modern ‘liberal’ elites who wish to aggressively police gendered language (so called ‘political correctness’) base their violent assertions that gendered tendencies are illusory on the malleability of gender, pointing to the legions of confused, unhappy monogens around them (Look how untypically sadistic she is! How unstereotypically masochistic he is!) or pointing to the unconfused — but equally unhappy — sado-masochistic nonsense of times past (or ‘heteronormative’ / stereotypically ‘cis’ types and classes below).

None of this means that there are no inherent differences though. Take as an example of the relationship between innate differences and inculturated similarities, the relationship that men and women have to the context. Men, being more cut off from it (and, fuelled by aspiration, engaged in a mission to return to it) tend to be far more literal in their speech than women who, embodied, and therefore closer to reality, tend to use more fluid, contextually dependent forms of speech. When man speaks, woman looks for what he really means and man, frustrated, thinks ‘but I didn’t say that!’ When woman speaks, man assumes she means what she says and woman, frustrated, thinks ‘why can’t he see what I really mean?!’ But as masculine society masculinises woman into extreme forms of feminism she joins him in his ponderous literalism, then forces the passing of literal laws to defend literal speech (‘no means no’) and consent and declares, in her new en-maled stupidity, that gender is an illusory social construct. Nobody seems to notice or care that, in all the talk of many-gendered (many-faithed, many-coloured) diversity, that, underneath all of these aggressively clung-to identiies, everyone everywhere increasingly resembles each other in their behaviour, attitudes and atmosphere.

Of course the matter is extremely complex . Men and women are naturally quite free to encroach on the gender-realm of the other, men can be astonishingly contextually sensitive, women can be ‘on a mission’, men can do male tasks, women can do male tasks, traditional societies show a massive range of domain (such as the ‘two-spirit’ gender-ambiguity of a few native Indian tribes along with a few tribes where women hunt and men gather ), and, in reality, selves are composed of many components, layers and predispositions, each of which can be masculine or feminine, or even coloured quite neutrally (see notes below). Vulnerable men, strong women, male carers, female farmers, sensitive gentlemen, raucous ladies — the list is infinite, thank God. What’s more, the nature of femininity reaches into realms impossible to describe in the clear, concise form of a male essay such as this, written by a man (or by a woman); which means that its relationship with the definable is equally enigmatic — as Illich says, only metaphor can reach for it (which is why women have always been more at home with metaphor than men). But none of this means that useful generalisations cannot be made, or that, in this case, there are not some essential qualitative gendered differences between men and women, which complement each other; and which the modern world — particularly feminishist and trans ideologues — has a vested interested in caricaturing or effacing.

As mentioned above, despite extremely gendered societies, gender inequality — or any kind of repression — did not and does exist in pre-civ / pre-conquest societies. The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Hunters and Gatherers presents an overview:

‘Turnbull writes of the Mbuti: “A woman is in no way the social inferior of a man” (1965:271). Draper notes that “the !Kung society may be the least sexist of any we have experienced” (1975:77), and Lee describes the !Kung (now known as Ju/’hoansi) as “fiercely egalitarian” (1979:244). Estioko-Griffin and Griffin report: “Agta women are equal to men” (1981:140). Batek men and women are free to decide their own movements, activities, and relationships, and neither gender holds an economic, religious, or social advantage over the other (K. L. Endicott 1979, 1981, 1992, K. M. Endicott 1979). Gardner reports that Paliyans value individual autonomy and economic self-sufficiency, and “seem to carry egalitarianism, common to so many simple societies, to an extreme” (1972:405). Stressing complementarity, Sharp observes that women are as fully involved with and responsible for generating Chipewyan culture as are the men (1995:47). Leacock (1981) interprets the historical record on seventeenth-century Montagnais-Naskapi (Innu) gender relations as egalitarian, with individuals, male and female, making decisions about their own lives and activities. In short, differences between what men and women do in these societies make no difference. Instead of reinforcing inequalities and constructing hierarchies, these societies deliberately level differences.’

Many other anthropologists have found plenty of evidence for egalitarian relations amongst hunter-gatherers. John Zerzan summarises;

In the context of the generally egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherer or foraging societies, anthropologists like Eleanor Leacock, Patricia Draper and Mina Caulfield have described a generally equal relationship between men and women.

So how do gender domains affect decision making? What are the gender domains that govern such societies? Here’s a clue, again from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia:

‘Chipewyan women defer to their husbands in public but not in private, Sharp cautions against assuming this means that men control women: “If public deference, or the appearance of it, is an expression of power between the genders, it is a most uncertain and imperfect measure of power relations. Polite behavior can be most misleading precisely because of its conspicuousness”… Some foragers place the formalities of decision-making in male hands, but expect women to influence or ratify the decisions. Gitxsan male chiefs do not support community-wide initiatives without their mothers’ and aunts’ approval (Richard Daly, personal communication). Andamanese men act together to make a decision, then get women to endorse it before its implementation. Sometimes, too, women instruct men to undertake specific tasks (V. Pandya, on the Andamanese, personal communication). Other foragers expect both men and women to participate in group decisions.’



What is happening here is that men are exerting more influence in the obvious, explicit, polite, manifest, ‘political’ domain, while women are exerting more influence in the occluded, implicit, unspoken, unmanifest, ‘domestic’ domain. Originally these worlds were considered equally valid — indeed the female realm was given priority — a long way from the degrading prison that ‘home’ was to become for her. As male civilisation and self took hold of society the obvious, public, mental male realm came to wield more power and be, insanely, considered superior to the hidden, private, female vibe-realm (when the reverse is true). It was at this point that ‘domestic’ became a euphemism for ‘out of harms way’ and darkness and femininity began to be considered negative, diabolic states of sin or ignorance; an attitude that prevails in sexist and feminishist worldviews, which denigrate or ignore both the sphere of influence that women feel naturally at home in and the heroic mission men have to return their fractured selves back to a source which women never leave.

For masculinised feminishists the problem is formal, explicit and definable (the patriarchy! ); and so is the solution. We need only do this, do that, restructure society this way or that, respect this group, give up that opinion; and everything will be alright. A classic, much harped-on example is the complaint that feminists of all stripe make against ‘objectification’; men telling women what they can wear, defining norms of beauty which women must conform to and so on. Clearly this is a grotesque state of affairs — but what is the solution? For men — and male cultures — to stop having preferences? For men to stop wolf-whistling or chatting girls up? For men to stop admiring divine breasts or using the word ‘chick’? Such measures are as absurd and pointless as preventing women from wearing burkhas.

Men will be free of their obscene need to control, possess and objectify when they can perceive women — and reality — directly, not when they are using the correct words and admiring the right body shape. Likewise when women are experienced, valued and seen as they actually are they will cease wearing preposterous clothing or starving themselves to death in order to feel accepted by men and by a male culture.

What this perception and experience amount to is the great taboo amongst sexist men and feminist women. Love: a word hardly uttered by either, and when it is, almost completely devoid of meaning. The ink spilled in feminist discourse on desire, pornography, objectification, sex, and ‘what women want’ could fill a lake, while that spent on truthfully expressing or ‘calling for’ love would barely overrun a teaspoon. Love is either taken to mean needing, fawning, craving or sentimentally exalting or, more often than not, it’s simply ignored, as if we know what it is. Oh yes, love, all very well and good, but it has nothing to do with the issues.

Love is central to the problem of gender. Take, as one example, the dreadful problems women have over their body-images; an anxiety which is cynically (if sometimes unconsciously) exploited by men (not to mention by the feminishist movement ). Would they worry so if they felt love, smouldering sweetly in their bellyminds? Absolutely not. A woman who actually feels love, the unmistakable mysterious confident warmth of it in her body, couldn’t care less if her male-friends, her boyfriend or her whole society preferred skinny women to full-figured women, or perky young girls with glasses to middle-aged women with sagging breasts. Somatic ideals and preferences — which individuals and societies have always had and will always have — are completely irrelevant to the actuality of love and the reality of attraction between two people; as irrelevant as the ‘sexist language’ that so many feminists lose so much composure over. If there is love, a man can call a woman a cow and she’ll smile. If there is no love he can elect her prime minister and she’ll feel offended.

Does this mean that women need the love of men to feel confident, happy and [that immense red-herring] ‘self-worth’? Yes! We all need the love of men; and we all need the love of women. The alternative to love — to self-sacrifice, altruism, selfless consciousness — is self-love, desire, disinterest, casual coupling, suspicion, boredom, anxiety and constant misery. Ultimately love comes, unconditionally, from experience — lack of which leads to neediness. But, together, in relation, we either love each other or nothing works. This applies to friendships, families, partnerships and planets. Women need the love of men; that they settle for less is why they suffer so much. Men need the love of women; that they expect to get it without first actively, confidently, sweetly delighting is why they cause so much suffering.

How does a woman know a man loves her? How does she know that the look in his eyes is the simple, generous warmth of love and not fawning, grasping neediness or the cruel stare of acquisition? How does she know, living with him, that he really loves her and isn’t just using her somehow or taking her for granted? If she has to ask such questions — if the reality of love in her body is so distant and questionable — things have come to a pretty pass. The simplest answer is that in love there is no sex. Male sexuality (which feminishists are so keen to appropriate) is acquisitive, aggressive, unconscious, irritable, restless, cruel, creepy, competitive, hard, predictable, self-aggrandizing, easily bored and unfulfilling. It poisons the atmosphere of the family and the office (you could call it ‘toxic’!), it ruins the most casual interactions and it shreds the heart of woman in partnership.

Love, on the other hand, is warm and accepting, ungrasping and not in the least bit creepy. A loving man can play with young girls, flirt with companions, fill the hearts of aunties, and only good results. A loving man, in partnership, makes love — every day, all the time, whether he feels like it or not, and it is always good. He delights her, he gives to her—not merely pleasuring her to orgasm first, but sacrificing his cut-off (symphony-writing) self to the physical mystery of her complete body, igniting it as only he can. Such incarnate love— so tragically rare, as all women know — makes both of them less anxious, less fearful, less needy, less self-conscious and less dependent on or enslaved by ‘moods’. Love doesn’t dominate, put-down or attempt to control, yet is absolutely immovable before emotional demands and the sly games of the false emotional self. It inspires confidence, respect, gratitude, loyalty and affection — all those good things that the false self demands, wheedles for or attempts to seize.

Is such a love possible? Yes! There is a world where this does happen, a world where men and women harmoniously inhabit and master their domains without exerting excessive influence in realms where the other is more competent; yet still free to cross boundaries on a whim, a world where stupendous love-making, filthy fucksex, bumslaps, high-heels, ballet-flats, any damn thing you please is permitted, yet is free of psychic vampirism, heartbreak, restlessness, violence, weird male imaginative self-isolation and the ghost world of compromise — a world that you don’t have to journey ten thousand years back in time, or to the last undiscovered hunter-gatherer tribe of the Amazon, to reach. And that world is the true love of the sane.

It exists. It is possible to live together as the Chipewyans, Gitxsans and Andamanese do, with the man making the manifest decisions, leading in the dance, taking charge of the ship of the partnership and standing firm against emotional storms — while all inspiration emerges from her love, all intelligence has its source in her femininity and all judgements of importance cannot proceed without her superior discernment. It is possible to live in fluid gendered domains, without being imprisoned by them; with men and women free to do and feel (and say) whatever they please — but without denying the marvellous, mysterious, complementary reality of gender. It is possible to live together harmoniously, knowing the male, but abiding by the female.

4. CONCLUSION

Man has been terrified of love for ten thousand years. Woman, more loving than man, has always been the more intelligent, perceptive and, in the very best sense, weirder sex, and so he had to bar her from entering or benefiting from the destructive, iniquitous and oppressively realistic world he created; until it served his interests to let her back in. At which point feminism magically appeared to give woman the ideological foundation she needed for her demands for equal pay, equal rights and the vote. As woman entered more fully into the male system and began to think (i.e. objectify), fight and suppress her natural instincts as the systems-man does, she began to lose her capacity for brilliant discursive thought, her extraordinary physical presence, her enigmatic imminence, her innate irrational generosity and her superior non-abstract intelligence — everything that might have actually made the world she entered better. When it was suggested to her that she was losing her femininity, that there might be something misguided about the whole project, she responded with feminishism, the idea that gender does not exist; that it is a social construct. In so doing she lost the power to understand the real reason why man treats woman so badly, why he gets bored of her so quickly, why he tends to either exalt or desire her — but never really to see her, why he is such a poor lover, why he takes himself so seriously, why he gets so easily addicted to porn and to video games, why, despite his manifold problems, and his predictable desires, there is something mysterious and alluring about him and why he created this shitty world in the first place. In denying the existence of gender feminishist woman (and society) also lost the power to understand the real reason why woman feels such dreadful self-doubt and lingering depression, why she feels so utterly out of place in male systems, why she feels more subjective well-being and more depression than man, why even the most satisfying sex can leave her feeling needy or irritable, why her heart breaks so agonisingly when a partnership ends, why there is such conflict between how she feels and how she feels she ought to feel and what it really means to be a woman. If you cannot understand gender, if you assume that it is an illusion, or a social-construct, or a result of genetics or the composition of the brain, nothing that happens between men and women makes sense, and no solution to the problems caused by this ignorance will ever work.

In short feminism is patriarchy’s greatest invention. It has fooled woman into being man, in treating love lightly, in reinforcing the insane male-world and in profaning femininity; while fighting for woman’s ‘right’ to degrade herself as thoroughly as man in his system — be it capitalist or socialist. While woman disregards the revolutionary potential of true love, the shattering wisdom of being a real woman and the harmonious nature of complementarity which has stood our species in good stead for hundreds of thousands of years, she will never know true love, she will never know who she really is and she will never be free. She will be as sick and imprisoned as he is.

Notes on Homosexuality, ‘Men’s Rights’, Responses to Objections and References are on the next page.

For how monogendered feminism and pseudogendered sexism fit into the civilised system see my free guide, 33 Myths of the System.

Notes