



Newsflash, ladies: the war is over. You won. You got your freedom.

The patriarchy is no longer in a position to hold you back. You got the freedom to leave when you want to, to neglect your single-parented spawn on your ex-husband’s tab, to wave your privates in every general direction like a housewife dusting off carpets, the same salary, same freedom, same rights. I hope you are happy.

I realize there was a time when you might have needed it. When you were the polisher and the plaything, the cook and the cunt, the whore and the Madonna. The one who was supposed to be seen, not heard. The one whose opinions were limited to choosing the brand of baking powder. I get it. It was NOT what you really wanted, all right? That being said, there is a reason you are appalled by these archaic practices today.

In my experience, less than half of you have the slightest idea on how to cook or clean like a housewife. Several of you have left me on the grounds that you make better money than I do. Your premature daughters are dressing in a way that makes me wonder whether you are their mothers or their pimps. In fact, the more I learn about the modern woman, the more I understand what Jack Nicholson meant. All this is well and good, I guess. But all these things considered, how do you find the balls to still claim oppression?

Let me tell you something about life: The way you act is the way you will be treated. If you have three sprouts from different dads and you’re still quite a few years from hitting age 30, every sensible guy in the world will think twice before buying you a drink. If you act entitled at work and cry wolf whenever a colleague smiles at you, the reason you get sacked is that you are a nuisance, not that you have a giney-hole. If you cut your hair short, let your looks go and start acting up, your squeeze’s greener pastures are but a fence-jump away. If you fluff your coochies around town merely to prove that you can, you will be perceived not as a freedom fighter but as (surprise, surprise) a slut. With every act comes a consequence—and that is something feminism will never change.

Until recent years, I wholeheartedly took your stand on the connection between rape and dressing like a four-bit strumpet. I still do—pulling a gal into the bushes despite her reluctance to do so is NOT OK. However, to claim that this is a typical man thing is getting off-topic. This is as much a “typical man thing” as Lorena Bobbitian cock-chopping is a “typical woman thing.” Rape is, without exception, a psycho thing. And although most men are able to accept a “no” for what it is, not all men are civilized. Just like you don’t cross the African savannah by foot while smeared in sheep’s blood without expecting to be attacked by lions, you do not walk home alone at night wrapped in something that would make even the most flaming fairy drop his jaw. And if you do, do not go all Aileen Wuornos on men in general. Don’t lie to me, honey. You didn’t dress like that to be left alone. There is a reason the generation before you was forbidden to leave the house looking like that.

I’m aware that the most radical man-haters are a marginal clique. What worries me is that they, unlike most other extremists, far too often get taken seriously. Shrieking like banshees, tightening their mugs like a party girl’s vaginal walls around a gonorrheal love-rod in a classy, cum-stained nightclub toilet stall, they actually manage to worm their way into serious debates where they are being anointed as the spokesperson for female interests. I reckon that if you allow yourself to be branded a liberal and convince everyone that you’re proud of it, you can say pretty much whatever you want. But if Al Sharpton is not the spokesperson for black people, David Duke is not the spokesperson for white people, and Chris Crocker is not the spokesperson for gay people, how the fuck does Lindy West get to speak on behalf of womyn everywhere?

Ladies, if you should organize for a common cause again, let it be to mark your stance against these shrieking cunts once and for all. I know you are not all like that.

—GAUTE LO