Things Are Against Us

by Lucy Ellmann

  23 In an interview conducted by PN Review (2001), Wilmers said: ‘I think women find it difficult to do their jobs, look after their children, cook dinner and write pieces. They just can’t get it all done. And men can. Because they have fewer, quite different responsibilities. And they’re not so newly arrived in the country. They’re not so frightened of asserting themselves. And they’re not so anxious to please. They’re going to write their pieces and to hell with the rest. And I don’t think women think that way.’ (‘Why the LRB Should Stop Cooking Up Excuses Over Lack of Women Reviewers’, Guardian, February 25, 2014.) As of 2015, eighty-two per cent of the articles in the LRB since its inception were by men (although it did also publish Mary Beard’s lecture on the silencing of women, mentioned earlier). In Three Guineas, Woolf warns against such gender segregation, citing the enthusiasm that Hitler and Mussolini shared for the practice. Dictators thrive on division. So, ideally, men should perhaps review women’s books and vice versa – if that is the only way to prevent women from being ghettoised. The LRB’s track record seems fairly progressive though, compared to the androcentric nonsense churned out by most Saturday newspaper supplements, in which all women seem able to do is eat noodles and model clothing. Most of the columnists, the gardening experts, chefs, travel advisors, car reviewers and other know-it-alls, are men! The self-aggrandisement of male chefs is particularly irksome – women cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner for thousands of years without any fandango. The worst thing about men taking over the cooking of fancy food in restaurants is that every dish now arrives covered in ejaculate, all drizzle, foam, and schmeers. Wait till male gardeners figure out how to make plants produce froth – just think of all the prizes, TV spots, and Chelsea Flower Show medals they’ll hand themselves.

  24 Why distinguish between war and war crimes? They are the same thing. WWI veteran Harry Patch said war is ‘nothing better than legalised mass murder’ (The Last Fighting Tommy, 2008). For Thomas Bernhard, war was just further proof of male iniquity: ‘War is the poetry of men, by which they seek to gain attention and relief throughout their lives… They [flee] from one misery to another, one misfortune to another, each one deeper and more inescapable than the last, and they always [make] sure of taking someone else with them’ (Gathering Evidence, 1985).

  25 See Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1967) for a semi-jokey description of the hard way: S.C.U.M. stands for the Society for Cutting Up Men. But I myself advocate only peaceful methods of revolution. Violence is so male. The hell with it.

  26 Elizabeth Gould Davis’ The First Sex (Penguin, 1972) pieces prehistory together through a study of myth, anthropology, and archaeology, to find a predominantly matriarchal past that lasted tens of thousands of years. This, and Marija Gimbutas’ archaeological work on widespread and highly creative prehistoric matriarchal cultures in Europe, give one hope that patriarchy was never inevitable, having lasted a fraction of the time that matriarchies persisted; and that there are better, fairer, and much more artistic ways to organise ourselves, i.e. with the focus on WOMEN.

  27 ‘Workers at a KFC and McDonald’s supplier punch, kick and stamp on the heads of live poultry,’ reported the Daily Mirror (August 12, 2016).

  28 Warring is a classic male trait (noisily mimicked by the ridiculous male absorption in team sports). As Virginia Woolf writes in Three Guineas, directly addressing men: ‘Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which [women] have never felt or enjoyed.’ But she admits that Wilfred Owen did not share in this penchant. And then there’s Harry Patch. And Thomas Bernhard. And all the men who refused to fight in the Vietnam War. And the Veterans for Peace who did fight but now declare: ‘We, having dutifully served our nation, do hereby affirm our greater responsibility to serve the cause of world peace.’ (My italics.) So, the male taste for war can apparently be overcome.

  29 In fact, it’s getting worse, not better! (Douglas Main, Live Science, October 29, 2013.)

  30 I do, sort of, realise that most men are not directly, personally responsible for all the atrocities committed by other men; nor do women have an absolute monopoly on humanity and compassion. Women can be fucking mean! It’s the kind of animal humans are. We’re carnivorous, conflicted, spiteful (and not reacting well, I suspect, to our acute population density). But whatever the failings of women may be, this is no reason for men to be excused from the chore of making amends. The endgame we currently face was inflicted on us entirely by patriarchy and its unwillingness to live in harmony with nature – deforestation contributed to the Ebola outbreak, for example: ‘Experts say the rising number of emerging viruses is largely the result of ecological destruction and wildlife trade… It doesn’t have to be this way.’ (‘Hunting for “Disease X”’, CNN, December 24, 2020.) Clearly, as a ‘class’ (Woolf ’s term), men have bungled things badly and they should set them right.

  31 Still, ninety-eight per cent of mass shootings have been carried out by men.

  32 (Or ‘menschen’?) In The Apartment (directed by Billy Wilder, 1960), C. C. Baxter is urged by his doctor neighbour to give up his presumed playboy lifestyle (that has supposedly led to Fran Kubelik’s suicide attempt) and behave like ‘a mensch – a human being’. Baxter eventually takes the advice.

  33 A word to the wise: very hot pan. There’s nothing gentle about making an omelette.

  34 The multiple orgasm is, after all, one of nature’s triumphs. Why waste it? In a woman-centred society, there would be no further denial of the female orgasm.

  35 Get things off to a merry start by painting easily erected corrections for street names – Solanas Street, Wollstonecraft Mews, Austen Avenue, etc. – a la artist Jackie Parry’s feminised map of Glasgow, ‘Women in the City’ (2012); Sara Sheridan’s book, Where are the Women? (2019), which tackles the whole of Scotland; and Rebecca Solnit’s Revised New York subway map (New Yorker, October 11, 2016). Metaphysical acts of insubordination.

  36 Barcelona has had Vaga de Totes feminist protest strikes, and there have been repeated strikes by women in Poland over new abortion restrictions: in October 2020, women put on a powerful mid-Covid strike, in protest against PiS party’s draconian anti-abortion laws, the Catholic church, climate change, and patriarchy in general. Good posters, such as ‘The government is not a pregnancy, it can be removed.’ That’s the kind of thing we need now, globally, from small, spontaneous gatherings, to bigger shindigs like the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, V-Day, and the corresponding One Billion Rising demos initiated by V (Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues). The latter events are an annual public acknowledgement that one third of all women and girls alive today will be raped or beaten – one billion. The aim: ‘We rise to show we are determined to create a new kind of consciousness – one where violence will be resisted until it is unthinkable.’ It’s a celebration of women, in fact, and its slogan is ‘Strike, Rise, and Dance’.

  37 When I first published this essay in The Baffler in 2015, I said the precise details of the three strikes were still negotiable and invited readers to help set up strikes, hone the bargaining points, and criticise or make amendments to the adjunct causes I propose – via the email address odalisquerevolution@gmail.com, which I’d just created for the purpose. Then I promptly forgot all about that email account, for five years, and missed an approving email from V, amongst others. Some organiser, huh? (I check it more often now.)

  38 Thunberg delivered a searing speech at the United Nations’ Climate Action Summit in New York: ‘People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is the money, and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?’ On a similar theme, Fran Lebowitz’s advice to the young is to start searching for water, as ‘apparently, we drank it all’ (‘Hall of Records’, Pretend It’s a City, directed by Martin Scorsese, 2021).

  39 It’s now thought that Covid-19 is unlikely to have begun with a pangolin in a Chine
se wet market; it was probably transmitted from bats or farm animals. But the disruption of animal habitats, with resulting contact between species which formerly kept their distance from each other, is probably ultimately to blame. The emergence of bird flu, SARS, swine flu, variant CJD, and now Covid, seems related to the increasing interest in bushmeat, and farming malpractice. See Ravi Letzter in Live Science (May 28, 2020), and the Meat Atlas (Heinrich Böll Foundation/Friends of the Earth Europe, 2014), for evidence of the destructiveness of industrial livestock farming. Rachel Carson’s outcry, Silent Spring (1962), remains a vital treatment of the subject. See also Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s documentary, Our Daily Bread (2006), a quietly tragic examination of intensive farming. Fishing is now intensive too, causing unchecked pain, collateral death and damage, depletion of stocks, and waste, as well as incendiary disputes about international quotas. Whales, dolphins, and sharks are caught ‘accidentally’ in fishing nets, leading to repeated trauma and often death, even when attempts are made to free them. Seals, blamed for eating the fish, are summarily culled, or mangled in the rudders of boats. Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corals since 1995 (BBC News, October 14, 2020) and is unlikely to survive. Due to climate change, pollution, and acidification, the oceans are on track for mass extinctions this century (Carl Zimmer, New York Times, January 15, 2015). WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH US? ARE WE ALL TOO BUSY GETTING LAID TO GET MAD?

  40 This strike is not meant as an attack on motherhood. Men thrive on deriding women’s bodies and reproductive power. This is why childcare, maternity services, abortion, family planning, schools, and parental access arrangements after divorce are so critical in any battle for equality. Laura Mulvey’s film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) movingly pinpoints the political implications of childcare provision. When women have control of their bodies and society within matriarchy, these practical matters will be resolved with ease. In the meantime, carry on shielding your children from danger, providing them with food, clothing, and shelter and helping them with their homework, even during the housework strike – since life, health, comfort, security, education, and freedom of movement are all principles we want to protect.

  41 We are now totally obsessed with looks in the West. But the meagre delights of our enthrallment to beauty come at the cost of so much misery: anorexia, bulimia, OCD, suicide, the mercenary diet industry and plastic surgery, injuries from tumbling over in high heels, melanomas from sunbathing and tanning salons, the horrors of unaesthetic gymwear, and jokey vocab for aspects of bodies deemed physically deficient according to current mores (turkey neck, muffin top, cankles, bingo wings, spare tyres, love handles, hairanoia, etc.). People are so corrupted by the modern beauty fixation, they now have ‘body dysmorphia’, not just about their own but other people’s bodies: we are troubled by all bodies and can see only the supposed faults. It’s distracting, depressing, and a great waste of energy. There is no real need to assess people’s appearance all the time. It’s rude, it’s abusive, it’s dull, it’s objectifying. It is thus part of a spectrum of abuse that ranges from anti-female biases at school and work, to their full-blown expression in rape and murder. Supreme beauty is a rarity, after all, an aberration. We don’t all have to aspire to it. Our concepts of beauty are also based on class and race privilege (we’re all aware of ‘the skin of the rich’). Audre Lorde talked about ‘the racist distortions of beauty’, and the way ‘gorgeous’, even in the gay community, used to be decided by white male standards, ‘that world that defined us as doubly nothing because we were black and because we were women.’ (Speech at UCLA, early 1990s, https://youtu.be/OUXj0BVQkpw.) Therefore, in conjunction with Strike One, I would like to instigate a one-year moratorium on any mention of people’s appearance. We can chat about other topics for a change. The beauteous would survive a slight lessening of attention and acclaim, and the rest of us could relax. After a year of such abstinence I bet we’ll be cured of the habit, and be much better conversationalists.

  42 For further elucidation of ‘cosiness’, see Mimi, ibid., pp. 24, 32–33, 37, 64, 66, 72, 82, 171, 195, 198–199, 223, 226, 230–231, 234, 273, 294. (Courtesy of the Mimi Index, kindly compiled by the writer Suzy Romer, odalisquerevolutionblog, 2014.)

  43 This motive for refusing to bear children is mentioned in the two women’s letters to the Telegraph in 1937, quoted by Woolf in Three Guineas.

  44 Even military marching is bad for women. Female soldiers have been injured by the requirements of marching, which are always oriented to the length of the male leg. For further glimpses into such marching, including a chicken who’s pretty good at it, see marchright.com. (And for the best male marching, see the bersaglieri of the Italian Army’s infantry corps. They run while blowing trumpets.)

  45 Of the three strikes I propose, I think the labour strike should be the easiest to pull off – because, after all, who wants to WORK? Why should women, any more than bees, participate in the Protestant work ethic devised by men? A Day Without A Woman was a labour strike staged in the US in 2017 in protest against Trump. If the necessity of women’s labour must be proven in such an elementary way as this, then, so be it. Even a strike of a day – by all women everywhere – will bring things to a complete standstill. (Theme song: ‘Union Maid’, Woody Guthrie, 1940.) Employers will soon ‘come to the table’ (such a nice domestic phrase!) and meet our terms – and think of the delicious sensation meanwhile of a day/week/month/year off. Overwork silences dissent and original thought and destroys physical, emotional and community health. That’s what capitalists like so much about it. WoHeLo, short for Work–Health–Love, the motto (and greeting) of the youth group formerly known as the Campfire Girls (now just Camp Fire), may be a slightly better exhortation than ‘eat–pray–love’ but it makes no real sense, since most work is anathema to health and love. Anyway, women have already worked hard enough. For centuries! It’s time they took things easy. This is why the Odalisque Revolution will entail much relaxation in cosy surroundings, eating bonbons and wearing harem pants.

  46 The Hanford nuclear site in Washington State contains some of the most radioactive material in the world (fifty-six million gallons of it). Closed for the last thirty years, the containment and clean-up effort costs two billion dollars a year. So many people who live near the site get thyroid cancer that the now familiar throat scar caused by thyroidectomy surgery is known as the ‘Hanford necklace’. See also Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946); John Adams’ 2005 opera Doctor Atomic; Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen (1998); and Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove (1964), which offers a superbly ironic takedown of the hypocrisy and folly of warmongering in the age of the atom bomb. In one scene, US forces fight each other beneath a billboard asserting their official ethos: PEACE IS OUR PROFESSION. You can’t stifle American bullshit.

  47 See Terre Nash’s documentary If You Love This Planet (1982), in which the great anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott challenges the official (male) acceptance of nuclear energy and weaponry. Consider too the noble life’s work of Sisters Ardeth Platte and Carol Gilbert, in collaboration with the Plowshares movement.

  48 Bombs and the suppression of women are passionate bedfellows. Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing (1999) charts men’s deep love of the bomb, and their willingness to make civilians (women, children, and the elderly) its primary targets. Drone strikes are a variation on this sport. And now we have Boko Haram’s massacre of 2,000 civilians in Baga, Nigeria in January 2015, the use of girls and boys as suicide bombers, the abduction of schoolchildren, and their reliance on rape, forced marriage, and slavery to achieve their ends. See Abdulwahab Abdulah and Uduma Kalu in Vanguard, May 5, 2014, and Helon Habila’s short personal account, The Chibok Girls: the Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamic Militancy in Nigeria (Penguin, 2017).

  49 Are we really depending on men to safely dispose of nuclear waste? What, are we CRAZY? These are people who have to be reminded to take the dog out. You have to beg them to change a poopy diaper. These are people who use
every pot and pan and mixing machine in the house when they cook anything and leave the dirty dishes lying all around the kitchen after. ‘They don’t cover anything when they put it in the fridge,’ Harriet the waitress remarks in Sleepless in Seattle (1993). ‘Hot Particles’ and ‘buckyballs’ from the meltdown at Fukushima will drift around the planet to the end of time. The Fukushima plant poured so much contaminated water into the sea, tuna on the West coast of America now have higher levels of radioactive contamination than ever before. (See Makiko Inoue and Mike Ives, New York Times, September 30, 2020, on the plan for compensation.) For the latest on nuclear waste containment strategies – strategies that probably won’t ultimately work – see Michael Madsen’s devastating documentary about Finland’s radioactive waste repository, Into Eternity (2010). NB. No level of radiation is safe – yet, as far as I know, no government has abandoned the idea of nuclear power. Who gave men permission to risk life on earth for all eternity? Did we have a global referendum on this, I can’t remember.

  50 ‘The daughters of educated men received an unpaid-for education at the hands of poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties… an unpaid-for education that fitted them for unpaid-for professions’ (Three Guineas).