by Lucy Ellmann
In contradiction of all the romanticised notions of women’s contributions to war efforts that we’ve been asked to stomach lately – all those TV shows about selfless or bitchy WWI nurses, all the photographs of women slaving away in munitions factories, all those movies about the bored-to-tears girl patriots of Bletchley Park – war is no place for women. It’s very unlikely that this form of mass homicide was ever women’s favoured plan of action (though I admit Hitler had to be stopped somehow). People were apparently killing each other with arrows thirty thousand years ago, which is not nice, but outright group warfare only developed on a grand scale once metal weaponry was developed by Bronze Age societies, which were patriarchal.
War is not in women’s interest: it is more likely to curtail women’s freedoms, as well as distress, subdue, frighten, deprive, and annihilate women, through rape, the murder of offspring, and the degradation of animals and the environment. So, at the very least, women shouldn’t have to help wars happen. They shouldn’t have to fight wars themselves, or proudly welcome home the injured and the dead. They shouldn’t have to provide the world with new men and women to be killed and traumatised in combat.43 War devalues birth: that is its primary function. War is the rejection, demolition of women.44
~ Short pause to check online for poorly paid part-time jobs. ~
This strike, Strike Two, involves withholding women’s labour in the workforce.45 But the intentions behind the labour strike are to organise not just an objection to war but also to the threats to future life on earth posed by nuclear energy, nuclear waste, nuclear bombs, and nuclear fallout – and the suffering that they have already caused, through genocide, environmental contamination, and cancer clusters.46 Men insist that these forces are manageable and necessary. They are not manageable and not necessary. A fifth of all environmental deterioration is caused by militarism. Some of the guys involved in creating the atom bomb had the grace to apologise for unleashing this cataclysmic weapon on us all, and ruining all hope for the future, merely to assuage their own scientific curiosity. But such apologies are of no value. Who in hell cares about Robert Oppenheimer’s conscience, one of the tiniest things in the universe? Nuclear bombs should never ever have been produced.
Women told men this,47 but war is a way of silencing women – through injury, exile, deracination, disease, starvation, disrespect, poverty, violation, bereavement, sexual frustration, grief, and, to top it off, a tsunami of male punditry, speculation, and decision-making. Twentieth-century warfare’s innovation was to direct itself specifically at women and children.48 Militarists claim a million compensatory motives, but as long as women remain the targets and victims of war, warfare remains just one more outlet for misogyny.
Even after a million Britons protested against the Iraq War, Tony Blair went on lying his head off to Parliament and everyone else, insisting the Iraq war was called for. He got away with it, and has played his desired role in genocide. He’s still running around pontificating on any old thing. One of the demands of Strike Two will be that Bush and Blair and their confederates are tried by the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, and that, from now on, the only legitimate military body worldwide will be a carefully monitored UN peace force.
A gentler aim of Strike Two is to give anyone who feels his or her life has been blighted by war in any way, a year’s paid vacation in order to reflect and recuperate (people providing essential services, such as farming and medical care, might have to stagger their years off). This rehabilitation drive should include not only all military personnel, their families, and their victims, but anyone who’s paid their taxes (so, count Trump out, sorry), since they too have incurred harm: it is traumatic to have your hard-earned money squandered on illegal wars.
~ Pause to sort through a pile of receipts for tax purposes. ~
There is the necessity of ending non-military uses of nuclear energy too. When exploiting atomic energy for ‘peaceful’ purposes of this kind, men seem prepared to take incredible risks with our lives and the lives of all future entities on earth. This alone is proof that men are unfit, as a sex, to rule. The deluge of nuclear mess they created may never be adequately contained.49 Nuclear power stations fail horrifically, leaving us with Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, both theoretically preventable. Where will the next mega-contamination incident occur? Hanford? Then there’s the risk that vandals, terrorists, saboteurs or mischief-makers could sneak into nuclear power stations and make off with plutonium – this sort of scenario is never mentioned by politicians when they’re foisting another bunch of reactors on us and boasting about how cheap and safe nuclear energy is. It’s only cheap if life is.
This strike will end when all men quit their jobs in the military sector (female soldiers can remain, if they must, but only to work for the UN’s peace force) and the government agrees to an immediate end to all peaceful and military uses of nuclear power. As punishment for belonging to the gender that thought this stuff up, men must also contribute means-tested contributions (ten per cent of their annual net income) to Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND), the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), Global Zero, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Ribbon International, ICAN or CND. And good luck to us all.
STRIKE THREE: MONEY FOR SEX.
POVERTY IS AN ATTACK ON WOMEN.
As Woolf points out in Three Guineas, women have laboured in the home unpaid for thousands of years, while watching all the family money go on men’s education, men’s leisure pursuits, men’s beer, men’s cigars, and men’s pizzas.50 This debt has now come due. The money must be reallocated to women, and until that is done, straight women should withhold themselves sexually from men.51Men go on sex strike all the time! They are always withholding sex and making excuses for their unpredictable genitalia, in order to keep women docile. Women knock themselves out trying to be attractive, and men still can’t get it up. Well, two can play at that game. Now it’s our turn! We mustn’t be vindictive though. The pure-minded aim of our sex strike is simply to gain the assets, privileges, and power to which all women are entitled. Yes, I’m talking about the money. Since men wouldn’t give it up voluntarily, they must be forced to hand it over in return for sex. They’re always accusing us of being sluts anyway, so this equation should be easy to grasp: no money, no sex.52
The first known fictional try-out of this sexual blackmail strategy occurs in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. There, a female sexual resistance strategy is employed to bring the Peloponnesian war to an end.53 Lysistrata enlists the help of both allied and enemy women, on the grounds that the war is bad for all women. They hole up in the Acropolis together and it’s really quite a successful sit-in. Some of the women do try to tiptoe off, offering feeble excuses like: ‘the moths will be eating my sheepskin,’ ‘I turn out to be pregnant and have to go home to have the baby – I’ll be back tomorrow,’ and ‘the owls [fellow inhabitants of the Acropolis] are keeping me up at night.’ (I paraphrase.) But in the end, the plan works like a charm: the priapic menfolk are soon inspired to agree a peace deal, so they can rush the women back to bed.
Even with the sorry proliferation of porn, sex slaves, and sex arses (see footnote 6) – offering alternatives to men unwilling or unable to engage with female desire – a sex strike still seems a viable ploy with a proud history.54 For even greater effect, we might try the showstopping power of vaginal display.55 Such a strike would of course have to be carefully policed, because of men’s dependence on violence as a means of comment and coercion. Not everyone’s as sane and reasonable as Aristophanes’ male characters (witness the violent and sexual threats launched at women who dare to speak out about anything).
Now, no shirking, sisters. No lame apologies and secret assignations! Remember, there will be plenty of sex (make-up sex!), once men have recognised their responsibilities as human beings, lovers, and mensches.
~ Pause to push through hordes of mamas and babies in a cafe. ~
We might also hope for a drop in the pregnancy
rate as a result of the sex strike. Parenthood has many profound joys, and should have its rights too (maternity/paternity leave, etc.). It is a traditional and theoretically honourable part of adult life. But having a child doubles your carbon footprint. It’s also harder and harder to get close to paintings in museums. A moratorium on childbirth might give women a chance to explore the freedom, leisure, self-containment, and privacy of childlessness. The missing tax revenue and pension contributions that a lower birth rate might cause could be replenished by opening the borders to more immigration. But this birth pause does not in any way discount the whole history and heroism of motherhood.
Some feminists complain that the concept of a female sex strike implies, dispiritingly, that women have no sexual needs of their own, and that sex is just a commodity that women supply for men. No. Nobody has any automatic right to sex. Withholding sex is simply one power women can wield, amongst others, in the service of a good cause. The sacrifice incurred by the sex strike will be borne by both sides, in aid of female emancipation. Once matriarchy is established, the needs, wishes, and capabilities of women will finally be given the attention they deserve. We’ll have a ball.
The sex strike will only be called off once the majority of men permanently transfer the majority of their financial assets (on an ongoing basis) to one or more women of their choice, or contribute the same on an ongoing basis to a women’s charity or non-profit banking organisation formed to issue women loans, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Governments must also make all violence a crime, and tax men twice as much as women, the revenues raised to be earmarked for the enhancement of women’s lives, in the form of safety, education, free menstruation materials,56 childcare and reparations for slavery. In addition, schoolchildren must study prehistory in order to get an understanding of matriarchal cultures. So as to reinstate men’s natural duty to serve female pleasure, biology courses and sex ed classes in school will work to revise our decayed approach to sex, with particular emphasis on the female orgasm and the abandonment of porn. Men must spend at least one day a week listening instead to what women have to say. And I wish they’d smile more – men’s default facial expressions are too gruff. They frighten me.57
~ Pause to caress husband’s cheek.58 ~
If all else fails, we can always mobilise a pizza strike. That’s got to work.
Would we settle for less than the demands outlined here, men might ask. But we have, we have, for thousands of years. It’s terrible that Virginia Woolf had to settle for less.59
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1 In baseball, three strikes and you’re out. Out on your ass. The expression therefore has some bearing on the trajectory of this essay, my pitch being that men are swinging wild. The original idea for the piece came from reading Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (Hogarth Press, 1938), to which I was alerted by a friend, the novelist Peter Burnett. But I couldn’t refer to three letters, as Woolf does, since nobody writes letters any more; and I chose strikes to replace her guineas, since nobody knows what a guinea is any more either. Woolf is being ironic about money anyway. With eccentric thoroughness and wit, her essay considers various good causes to which three guineas could usefully be put: the prevention of war; rebuilding a women’s college in Cambridge; or finding employment for women in the professions. She finally offers a guinea to each cause, this being all an ‘educated gentleman’s daughter’ could afford. Woolf ’s three guineas thus become, in their paltriness, both a significant gesture in the right direction and an emblem of women’s second-class status. The limitations imposed on women are the real subject of Woolf ’s essay. But there’s something tenacious about the image of those three guineas. They can’t be denied. It may be hard now to imagine behaving patronisingly towards Virginia Woolf – aren’t we all supposed to be afraid of her? – but she was well aware of what both the ‘intelligentsia and ignorantsia’ put women through. In Three Guineas, she concludes that women are outsiders – but in a good way. So are the many footnotes in Woolf ’s essay. Footnotes are the outsiders within a text, and make obliging underdogs in an essay on female subordination.
2 As George Bernard Shaw said on his second arrival in America, ‘I told you what to do and you haven’t done it.’ I put my solution to male violence towards women in the most palatable form I could think up, a romcom novel called Mimi (Bloomsbury, 2013) about a rich guy in New York who sees the light and becomes a champion of women. Mimi’s solution to the downward spiral of patriarchal insanity is: hand over the money. Transfer all wealth into female control. Not half of it, not fifty-two per cent either – ALL THE MONEY. Given the mean little way late capitalism works, a steady wholesale redistribution of wealth seems the simplest method of ensuring women get respected more, and raped and murdered less (femicidal violence being a five-thousand-year-old fad, embedded in women’s low social status). Until we can return to a matriarchal form of socialism (or ‘commonism’, as another friend, the novelist John Aberdein, puts it) in which money has no place, we must in the short term put women in possession of serious wealth. This pro-female asset-reset, which in Mimi I dubbed the Odalisque Revolution, would be a peaceful form of male revolt – yes, it’s men who will need to do the work here, if they want to join the Odalisque Revolution (women are automatic members). It could be progressed on an individual basis, in private, by any right-thinking man who’s tired of hearing about women being deprived, denied, doubted, despised, derided, deluded, defamed, ignored, cheated, exploited, blamed, vilified, cajoled, threatened, violated, killed, overworked, messed with, ordered about, and ground into the dirt. It’s not just about money though. The ultimate aim of the Odalisque Revolution is to start a new matriarchal era. Such a revolution seems to me a safe, sensible, efficient, and really rather innocuous solution to the devastation caused by male mayhem and wars and depredations of the environment. And yet hardly any men to my knowledge have followed my very clear instructions on how they can relinquish the unfair advantages so many claim to abhor. Only one person (the intrepid writer and critic Anthony Rudolf) has actually asked to have his Odalisque Revolution Mea Culpa Declaration stamped. The detachable certificate, once stamped, ensures membership of the Odalisque Revolution. It can be found at the back of any copy of Mimi, and all the contrite philogynist has to do is sign it and give everything he’s got (or most of it: he can keep some petty cash, for pizza’s sake) to a woman, or women, of his choice. The Declaration (see footnote 59), written in plain English, invites the signatory to admit that male property and power are ill-gotten gains, the products of men’s ancient and misguided terrorist campaign aimed at the usurpation of women and, to redress this, the signatory pledges to hand over all his assets to women. Strangely enough, few besides my dear husband Todd McEwen have shown any sign of wholly acquiescing to my demands. No one has even asked me to defend my position. Instead, the usual male silence: the unspoken policy seems to be to deprive my wealth-redistribution idea of oxygen by not responding to it at all. Even some female reviewers surfaced to voice doubts, flinging around examples of unworthy female leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth I, and Lady Macbeth. Now, wait a minute! You’re telling me you object to joining other women in acquiring all the world’s wealth, and thereby subverting the murderous course men have taken during the last five thousand years, because there have existed a few women, real or fictional, with anti-humanitarian sympathies? In other words, because a few creepy women rose to high office within patriarchy, you think women as a whole should never be given an even break. But can anyone truly believe women would make as big a mess of power as men have? Come on, who are you trying to kid? Enough of this. We’ve run out of time for ambivalence, hair-splitting, and coquettish self-abnegation. What we need NOW is a radical transfer of power.
3 Why do men like pizza so much? I think it’s because the boxes look official, as if the guy has just come from some important meeting and he’s got really important documents in there or something – whereas really, it’s just a big hot slippe
ry blop of dough covered with pepperoni, chicken tikka, and pineapple chunks.
4 In the London Review of Books (March 20, 2014), Beard described what it’s like never to feel you and your kind are properly represented in the culture. NB. America broke away from England for just such a reason: ‘No taxation without representation.’ Just saying.
5 Our inane absorption in youth and beauty has disenfranchised most of the female population. Never have the ideals of female appearance been so standardised: the self-airbrushed face, the nail polish, the long straight flowing hair, tight-ass jeans, and sassy short top are now compulsory, while the wrinkled, dimpled, frazzled, ex-Pilateased bodies of older women have become the world’s last great expanse of uncharted territory.
6 One all too literal ‘backlash’ against female emancipation is the new allegiance to anal sex, amusingly aired in the aptly named movie Damsels in Distress (directed by Whit Stillman, 2012). Men’s unwillingness to concern themselves with the clitoris and vagina is a new blight on our age. Corrective instructions on rimming, offered to ‘analphobes’, suggest any lack of interest in anal sex is inexcusable (adopting a clockwise direction is highly recommended). And women’s increasing dissatisfaction with their own genitals has kept pace with male oversights – when they’re done waxing, plucking, and scenting themselves, the next step is creating the ‘designer vagina’. Labiaplasty is a growing business, along with a belief that ‘abnormal labia tissue’ is a widespread problem. The fault is not with pudenda but with misogynists. By the sound of things, men seem to have become worse lovers than ever before (and, given the history of the missionary position, that’s saying something!), piteously unaware of their true and ancient role, that of pleasing women. Women are not here for male pleasure – men exist to give women pleasure. Biology supports this, as Catherine Blackledge points out in Raising the Skirt/The Story of V (Orion, 2003/2020), a book highly recommended for anyone interested in female sexuality, or even those who are not – in fact it should be compulsory reading for anyone who purchases a ‘sex arse’, a rubber sex toy comprising a select portion of amputated torso. (‘I voted Leave – but now my sex arses are stuck at customs!’, cried a disappointed UK patriot experiencing Brexit shambles – Sunday Sport Online, January 2, 2021.) Penis construction throughout nature is oriented more toward female pleasure than male, since the quality of the female orgasm determines the male’s reproductive influence. Even female fruit flies insist on orgasms! (They also have the most elaborate, spiralling vaginas. Who knew?) The vagina, Blackledge reports, is not a passive canal for receiving sperm and issuing offspring. It is an assessment station, selecting and expelling sperm – and one major deciding factor for sperm admission is the female orgasm. People wrongly believe the penis performs ‘as a sperm placement tool, a rigid insertion device shaped to shoot sperm quickly and efficiently into the correct orifice’. This fails to explain the varied size and shape of penises, as well as the time and care males of many species take to prepare the female for sperm insertion, throughout courtship and mating behaviour (there’s some kind of marsupial mouse that spends five hours thrusting – marsupials really know how to live). Despite the standard use of rape in war to secure a genetic advantage over enemies, female pleasure is, if not essential, highly recommended in the passing-on of men’s genes. Rape doesn’t pay, in the long run, says Blackledge. ‘The important question for a male is not: Can I place my sperm inside this female? Rather the crucial question is: Can I persuade the female to use my sperm instead of some other male’s?… The primary role of the penis is none other than to act as an internal courting device – shaped to provide the vagina with the best possible and reproductively successful stimulation.’ The male orgasm is biologically necessary too, sure, but that’s less of an influence on penis construction. All of which reminds me of a limerick: