by Lucy Ellmann
What riches there once were, what beauties! Raindrops on roses and crop tops on cuties. Now it’s just tear gas and water hoses, and Mexican children tied up with strings. These are a few of their favourite things. Quarry every mountain, wreck every stream.
Sure thing, ma’am, long as it’s worth frackin’.
But wait! It’s Rube again to the rescue! New president (A) clips previous president (B) on ass (C) with old boot (D) and makes reparations to Native Americans (E), African Americans (F), women (G), alligators (H), and oil-caked sea otters (I). He then reinstates US Constitution (J), establishes universal Medicare (K), defunds the police (L), distributes basic living wage to every citizen (M), bans guns (N), saves whales (O), opens all borders (P), dismantles nuclear plants (Q), discards nuclear weapons and weapons deals (R), undermines power of big tech companies (S), establishes Green New Deal (T), and erases student debt (U). What’s more, he delightedly extracts Trump’s back taxes (V) and catapults resultant dough into education (W), so scariest nation on earth (X) won’t fall into drainage canal (Y) of vapidity (Z) ever again.
Wow, what a relief. I thought we were all goners.8
__________________
1 NB. This essay was originally written when the Trump regime was in full flower. Luckily, everything’s fine now – apart from the lingering presence of guns, war, racism, sexism, fundamentalism, terrorism, democracy defilers, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, forever chemicals, universal cerebral underdevelopment, and wretched TV series.
2 Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832).
3 See Philip Gourevitch’s remarkably prescient ‘Abraham Lincoln Warned Us About Donald Trump’ (New Yorker, March 15, 2016).
4A Delicate Balance (1966).
5 A George and Jerry debate in Seinfeld.
6 She bravely testified to a Senate Judiciary Committee that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, and laughed at her. But Kavanaugh still won his place on the Supreme Court (though by just two votes, the smallest margin for a hundred and forty years).
7 Republican In Name Only: hated by fascist, white-supremacist Republicans; liked by over-optimistic Democrats.
8 There may be hope yet for America: on January 15, 2021, the NRA went bankrupt.
THREE STRIKES 1
I made nice.2 It didn’t work. Women are still oppressed, men still running the show, still running around raping, killing, and maiming women – raping, killing, and maiming children too (another way of attacking women). They’re still waging war, spraying every living thing with pesticide, distributing micro-particles of plastic everywhere, eating huge pizzas,3 and charging an awful lot for a haircut, highlights, and blow-dry. Or how about this new craze for murder-suicide, that apparently culpritless crime, whereby the execution of women and children is often transposed by police and news commentators into a mere ‘tragic family incident’? Patriarchy did this.
These people hate us! These people are trying to kill us! I don’t know why we’re all so goddam nice about it, but nothing is ever done about the way men carry on. Instead, it’s feminism that is for ever in retreat.
~ Pause to do the dishes. ~
When any outwardly positive step forward is made, say, toward equal pay or maternity/paternity benefits, something even worse always seems to happen to women on some other level. Patriarchal retribution is swift: for all the mild protests from women against the male bias of Oscar awards, topless photos on Page 3 of the Sun, or nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence shared online, we now have a global rape crisis, with an accompanying boom in female self-harm. Sure, women are permitted to work (great, thanks a lot), and a few hard-working campaigners have managed to deny Britons some Sun fun (the exhausting Page 3 campaign eventually paid off, I believe). Women can now sue hackers over invasions of privacy, or even get a prettified portrait of a female novelist on to the ten-pound note (a lot of good this does Jane Austen, who really could have used ten quid). But then our punishment comes, in the form of some new, unexpected backlash, along with a multitude of malignant jibes and threats from Twitter trolls. As the much-hounded Mary Beard said in a lecture about men’s determined efforts to ignore everything women have ever said over the last few thousand years, women ‘pay a very high price for being heard’.4
The sources of female oppression are many. Self-inflicted saturation in porn has produced a whole generation of young men who apparently cherish, or at least accept, absurd ideas of pneumatic female torsos,5 and male rights of domination.6 The consequences of recessions7 are felt most by those already disadvantaged, particularly women – in the UK, through cuts to the NHS, rape crisis centres, women’s refuges, Legal Aid and other vital services.
Police behaviour toward female victims of crime degrades us all,8 as does the revealing take on women shown by most news organisations.9 Despite the notorious 2012 gang rape and evisceration in India, quickly followed by a similar event in South Africa and the Steubenville case in Ohio – in which an unconscious sixteen-year-old girl was carried naked from party to party to be sexually preyed upon and peed upon (which some of the participants claimed to have believed was consensual sex) – doubt only seems to grow about what constitutes rape or whether it even exists.10 The worse men behave, the more their crimes seem to get downgraded to minor misdemeanours. This perversity is necessary to maintain the perverse status quo, the mass delusion which holds that men are okay and women, in so many ways, aren’t. How about the sex-slave trade, or the treatment of women and children in detention centres?11 Such cruelties are not confined to the USA. The English family court system vilifies mothers, shrouds its own proceedings in secrecy, and often issues irrefutable orders, handing children over to unpredictable fathers.12 The aim of all this is to traumatise women and subdue them. This is traditionally accomplished both through rape, but also through the labyrinthine workings of the justice system.
~ A pause to hang up washing. ~
>This is a society that’s failing women big time!13 A society in which men keep women in a simmering state of terror.14
Yet how we bustle around, trying to look good, be good, restrain ourselves in all kinds of ways, contort ourselves and our own needs and beliefs in order to work within this set-up men have moulded to suit themselves, in which women are for ever doomed to be the losers, hangers-on, the butt of jokes – funny nutso floozies that we are.15 The first suggestions the internet offers when you google the word ‘women’ are: women’s clothing, women’s shoes, women’s dresses, women’s trainers. Have we no other interests,16 no other qualities, no depths? We certainly aren’t supposed to.
~ Pause to mess – in vain – with my hair. ~
The media’s harsh treatment of Mary Beard, Greta Thunberg, and others shows the high level of hostility directed at women whose achievements single them out from the crowd.17 This, after the centuries it took us to get the vote!18 This, after people have died to protect abortion rights. After governments across the globe have finally recognised the injustice of female circumcision.19 What did all these struggles mean?
Not a goddam thing. The violence continues, as does the inequality, and the pay gap,20 and the production of about a million Hollywood movies that don’t pass the Bechdel test.21 When we peer up through that glass ceiling what we see are the soles of a lot of big dirty men’s shoes still galumphing around.22 Even Mary-Kay Wilmers defended her London Review of Books’ lack of articles by and about women, on the grounds that men make more pitches and women have a lot of housework to be getting on with.23
~ Pause to scrub the stovetop. ~
So, let’s admit it. We’ve tried equality and it doesn’t work. Equality within a society concocted by and for men? Phooey! What we need, what the victims of war and war crimes24 need, what the terrorised need, what the isolated, and frequently annihilated, radioactive nuclear family needs, what all the tormented, neglected, broken, hunted, infected, injected, vivisected, near-extinct, factory-farmed, in fact all animals, need, what every living thing threatened
by disease, disrespect, disheartenment, ‘detainment’, and disenfranchisement, needs, is female supremacy.
We can do this the easy way or the hard way.25
Veneration is the only logical response to the mammalian female. Motherhood is a necessity of survival, and I suspect its offshoot, matriarchy, was a blast. People had it good there for a couple of hundred thousand years, living in stable societies with a three-hour working day and plenty of leisure time. Free to think and act without fear, women invented agriculture, pottery, weaving, music, metallurgy, medicine, painting, sculpture, and astronomy.26 Then men loused everything up, driven by fear and envy (of women) and an unquenchable longing for organised sports.
~ Pause to darn a cheap sock. ~
Vengefully appropriating or negating all the progress women had made, men turned on nature and ecology, and instituted a bunch of lousy ideas: anti-female religions and taboos, hatred of the body, particularly female bodies, a paternalistic approach to medicine, and new pastimes like imperialism, slavery, witch hunts, war, rape, drug cartels, vampires, football, darts, and Monopoly. The Industrial Revolution was no picnic either – in the last few centuries, men have managed to ruin the environment for everyone, leaving us with toxic waste, climate havoc, smog, sweatshops, suicidal workers, traumatised pigs, chickens, elephants, and whales, crazed gunmen, conspiracy theories, and a zillion T-shirts that say things. Men have disastrously assumed the right to mess with the air, the water, the land, and our heads.
They are so messy, always wrecking things. They like to desecrate things for desecration’s sake. They obliterate beavers so they can build their own dams! They shot dead the first grey wolf seen in Iowa for almost a hundred years, despite its being a ‘protected’ species (protected how?). They shoot lions and tigers, kick chickens.27 Men denude the land. Men insist, INSIST, on killing everything and using up every last natural resource. War is the quickest way they’ve found to ruin the environment,28 but they make peacetime pretty damaging too: do we really need cars and planes and air conditioning and six trillion throwaway pens and toothbrushes? Does every last thing have to be made out of plastic or concrete? Must the world be so UGLY? San Francisco Bay is still full of mercury from mining processes used during the Gold Rush, and will remain poisoned for the next ten thousand years.29 The psychotic male addiction to nuclear power, concentration camps, waterboarding, fracking, lead, WMDs, surveillance, TV, computers, the internet, reversing-vehicle beeps, and bling, will finally destroy us all.
Why should we let those Bushes (Sr. and Jr.) get away with it? Or that warmonger Tony Blair? Why’d we let Hitler get away with it? Why should we let Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris and Mel Gibson and Charlie Sheen and Ike Turner and Richard Nixon and Donald Trump get away with it, or Charles Manson, Fred West, Peter Sutcliffe, Thomas Hamilton, John Worboys, and Adam Lanza? Or Ronald Lee Haskell, who executed four children and their parents in their home in Texas, just to get back at his ex-wife. Or Stephen Paddock, the creep who shot sixty people from a hotel in Las Vegas. Not to mention IS and Boko Haram and the Charlie Hebdo slaughterers. Why should we let ANY of them get away with it? We can’t. Basta.30 And yes, I know, I know, women sometimes go along with some of this stuff. They shoot guns, they work for oil companies, they join extreme right-wing groups, they chit-chat in the Quiet Coach.31 But that is no excuse for indulging men further! Never mind what women may or may not do – it’s time for men to be mensches.32
In Three Guineas Virginia Woolf raises the possibility that patriarchy’s based on ‘unconscious sex-taboos’. But I think, if we’re going to get fancy about it, what we’re dealing with is more like mass hallucination. Among many other forms of wilful intoxication (are most adult men ever really sober?), men are drunk on self-delusion. Look at Trump: everything he says is the exact opposite of the truth. Merely by dint of their psychoses, their ridiculous conundrums (what pickles men get themselves into!), and their upper-body strength, men have forced women to engage with all sorts of surreal ideas about how life should be lived, from flirtations with nuclear warhead gaps to who gets to decide if women have babies, or how you make an omelette.33 They have fashioned a whole theatre of the absurd, an extensive literature of alienation, and a great many cowboy movies.
But when do women get to dream? How about allowing us a few whims too once in a while? How about indulging women in the belief that we look okay, or that we’re okay mothers and daughters, or that we have okay things to say or do? Women need time and space in which to develop our own particular brand of insouciance, our own hobbies, our own (pro-female) philosophies, our own sexuality,34 our own play, goddammit!
~ A pause to contemplate a Handkerchief Tree in the Botanical Gardens. ~
Once again, it’s up to women to sort this out, I’m afraid. We shouldn’t have to, we’ve all worked hard enough already for little if any recompense! But we will have to exert ourselves further, it seems.35 So here’s my new solution (since men wouldn’t play the game and just hand over their money to women like I told them to): my advice is for women to go on strike, on a private, public, local, national, and international level.36 Women make up the majority of the world’s population so, united, we cannot fail to have an effect. And there will be jolly times later as we begin to enjoy the fruits of our efforts (see footnote 34).
There are three forms of strike I’d recommend: a housework strike, a labour strike, and a sex strike. I can’t wait for the first two. While the ultimate object of all three of them is female supremacy, each strike would also focus on adjunct causes in women’s interest: (1) environmental and animal justice; (2) peace and nuclear disarmament; and (3) you guessed it, female appropriation of wealth, property and power.37 These issues are all bound together in the struggle to preserve nature, civilisation, and the better aspects of human culture.
~ Pause to help husband locate his manbag. ~
STRIKE ONE: NURTURE NATURE.
DESTRUCTION OF NATURE IS AN ATTACK ON WOMEN.
The housework strike will be held in protest against climate change and the destruction of the environment. Its slogan? ‘How dare you?’ – after Greta Thunberg’s admirable 2019 outburst at the UN.38 Human attitudes toward animals and the natural world are closely linked to male attitudes towards women: they spring from the same classist anti-nature, anti-life assumption that the world is there to be shaped, ravaged, and ruined by people (men), and all living things are there for the taking. (They want to ravage Mars next.) Animals, it has long been assumed, can be exploited, experimented on, and forced to yield their every atom in service to human greed. Ever since Christianity attested our superiority over other creatures, and scientists started up with their loose talk of ‘tool-users’ and ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ mammals, and philosophers chimed in with their capricious notions of instinct vs individuality, animals have been looked on as a commercial resource rather than as living beings in their own right, entitled to a place in the world. Prehistoric matriarchal cultures never conceived of working against nature in this illogical way – they left nature intact for us to destroy.
So, Strike One is a protest against patriarchy’s rejection of nature, and the way our narcissistic homocentricism leads to the direct abuse of animals, and the indirect abuse of people. Current farming methods are not only cruel to animals but dangerous to humans, causing pollution, contamination, and superbugs.39 Habitat assimilation and destruction are our legacy. For the sake of the survival not just of the natural world but of human civilisation, women need to withhold their home- and family-oriented labour: stop mothering,40 stop daughtering, stop wifeing. Stop cooking, stop cleaning, stop taking out the trash, stop making the beds and ordering the pizzas, stop shopping, stop lugging home bottles of booze for men to guzzle, stop gardening, stop ironing, stop washing your hair, stop putting on make-up (in fact, boycott the whole beauty cult41). Stop vacuuming and sterilising the cat litter tray and alphabetising the books and paying the bills. Stop making all those pots of tea and coffee for everybody and smell
ing the milk to see if it’s gone off. Stop embroidering cushion covers. Stop doing all the things you do to try to make a nice home for your family. Stop taking care of things. Just stop it! (This won’t be easy for most women. It goes against the grain, since women invented the home, in prehistory. Women invented cosiness. They needed to establish some domestic tranquillity, comfort and security, in which to raise children.)42
~ Another pause, this time to buy artichokes at the local corner shop. ~
You can put it all on hold for a little while, surely, in aid of animals and the natural world. And what a lot of thinking time you’ll gain.
This strike will only be called off when governments agree to end animal cruelty, fracking, factory farming, and the intensive use of herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilisers. Also, pollution, cars, and dependence on oil and freight containerisation – one of the dirtiest practices ever invented. The money saved from all these shady enterprises can be reallocated to childcare provisions. Ten per cent of every man’s net income will be devoted to animal welfare and the restoration of natural habitats and rainforests. Or he can remotely adopt a manatee or blue-footed booby. Six-pack plastic rings, in which turtles get tangled, will be banned. And every man must agree to clean the toilet weekly without being asked; and to confine the foaming, schmeering, and drizzling from now on to the boudoir.
STRIKE TWO: NO MORE WAR WORK.
BOMBS, WAR, CIVILIAN DEATH, NUCLEAR WASTE, AND OTHER FORMS OF MANMADE RADIATION ARE ALL ATTACKS ON WOMEN.