Things Are Against Us

by Lucy Ellmann

  Quite clearly a lot of men still feel they have a right to decide if women live or die, fictionally or not. For some time now, Karen Ingala Smith has been compiling the Counting Dead Women project, a list of women murdered by men in the UK (there were about a hundred in 2020). But I agree with my friend Eloise Millar13 that Ingala Smith should start another list: Counting Fictional Murdered Women. There must be MILLIONS by now, and almost as many murder methods, along with all their associated cults and copycat killers like the much-beloved Black Dahlia mystery, the Manson family, Jack the Ripper and all the rest of them, these tragedies multiplied beyond trace for our entertainment.

  Refusing to read crime novels is a feminist act. But what about all those female crime writers, you cry, and their hordes of bloodthirsty female fans who turn up in droves at crime fiction festivals, avid for the next serial psycho dismemberer to hit the shelves? This is simply one of patriarchy’s many perverse effects on the female mind. Women have been subjected to several thousand years of disenfranchisement and abuse. So, like any other colonised population, they’re full of self-hatred. They have now picked up a habit of punishing themselves with lashings of imaginary violence – just as we routinely frighten our children with horrific bedtime stories.

  Women may also read crime fiction for practical tips on self-defence: feeling vulnerable and demoralised, and well aware of male animosity towards them, female crime addicts prepare themselves for disaster by studying the territory and the criminal mindset, while also rehearsing fight or flight moves. Their brutish predilection for gore suggests the need for therapeutic repair work, not censure. Give women a peaceful, nurturing environment, give them a little self-respect and a sense of safety, give them hope that they are not in imminent danger of being garroted, trapped in a dungeon, or dissected at any moment, and they may no longer fixate on these terrifying tales of death and woe.

  But why do MEN read this stuff? And write it? What do they get out of crime fiction except the chance to gloat over their own petrified paternalism and misanthropy? They cherish it like their prosthetic sex arse equipment. They want it because it does them no good at all, but it does violate women. The truth is, men don’t need to know more about crime, they need to know less, they need to unlearn what they already know, the mess they invented. They need re-education and rehabilitation. They need a firm hand. They need to discard maledom, not burst their brains expanding on it and profiting off it.

  How about working on the unsolved crimes of environmental devastation instead, or the chicanery of depriving people of healthcare, the petty larceny of monarchs, or the hoax of trying to resurrect Doris Day every decade or so?

  __________________

  1 All About Eve (directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950).

  2 ‘Someone Is Always Trying to Kill You’ (New York Times, April 5, 2019).

  3 ‘Who’s Afraid of Fran Lebowitz?’, All About Women Festival, March 6, 2018 (Sydney Opera House Talks and Ideas Archive).

  4 Joseph Epstein, ‘Is There a Doctor in the White House?...’ (Wall Street Journal, December 11 2020).

  5 Differences of opinion on the ideal temperature of the home is another example of metabolic discord. Men often object to the thermostat being turned up, and prefer to see female life partners shiver.

  6 From a bottle of Lagunitas IPA.

  7 ‘Study finds macaques go for tourists’ electronics and wallets over empty bags and then maximise their profit’ (Guardian, January 14, 2021).

  8 Directed by James Cameron (1984).

  9 ‘Books that made me’, Guardian (August 16, 2019).

  10 Gollancz (1946).

  11 1951.

  12 In the book’s favour, Crispin’s asides can be nicely humorous, and I like the way his characters fall into literary chit-chat in the midst of trouble: the friendly lorry driver is a Lawrence fan, the Chief Constable has a Measure for Measure obsession. (Which suggests most people would prefer to think about something else, anything other than crime.) But Crispin’s snotty about the murder victim’s ‘spinsterhood’, a character flaw deduced on Cadogan’s first sight of the corpse (with the aid of that handy torch): ‘the flatness of her breasts suggested that she was unmarried.’ Wow. So, there’s the real crime: being flat-chested and single. Get a hold of yourself, man.

  13 Co-founder of the great Galley Beggar Press.

  TAKE THE MONEY, HONEY 1

  The simplest proof that patriarchy’s based on a load of lies, all lies – and that men are stinkers – is the way servants were treated just a century ago. In Britain, while the upper classes swanned about pretending, nauseatingly, that women were frail, helpless vessels incapable of serious thought or deed (there’d have been a lot less swooning if they’d just loosened up those corsets), the skivvies, ‘slaveys’, or aptly named ‘maids of all work’, toiled sixteen hours a day with hardly an afternoon off, emptying slops and lugging pails of water up and down flights of stairs, tending a million hearth fires, washing floors, and cooking, shopping, and ironing, all while being reprimanded, slandered, harried, underfed, and routinely molested by their ‘masters’. If rebellious, they were quickly torpedoed from the household: those impossible people, the well-respected writers Thomas and Jane Carlyle, kicked one of their maids out for giving birth (very quietly too) in a china closet. Such abuse was essentially a legal form of slavery: servants were kept in unhealthy conditions and paid a pittance (or less, due to breakages and other supposed deficiencies), while they ministered to the status quo.

  Despite men’s much-applauded upper-body strength, somehow it’s women who are still the main skivvies today, performing as maids of all works, or sometimes as presidential press secretaries. Behind every man who helps with the housework, there’s a tired woman following him around thanking him for helping with the housework. Male domination hasn’t gone away, it’s simply hidden itself behind a pretence of equality and a rather too convenient blurring of the gender divide. This game is still in play and thrives, like Trump and his buddies, on the power of IDIOCY.

  A guy in England beat up his wife on their wedding night. But he had a reason: she’d asked him to help her take off her wedding dress.2 I guess foreplay’s a thing of the past. Imagine if she’d asked him to take out the trash!

  Look, haven’t we all had just about enough of men’s idea of a good time? Drones, beheadings, The Bullingdon Club? Factory farming? Polluting every available body of water – and then charging you for a bottle of drinking water! Soon they’ll be charging us for AIR too, the air they’ve filled with petrol fumes, stone dust, cow burps, asbestos, and nanoparticles, as well as smoke from all their stupid factories, stupid cigars and stupid barbecues.

  Them and their goddam Industrial Revolution – which, when I was at school, was spoken of with such reverence! Agriculture and tree-clearance started to upset ecology long ago, but heavy industry has ruined the ozone layer, so that now we have record droughts and floods and hurricanes and blizzards in places that used to be habitable, and walruses have nowhere to lay their heavy heads. All to enable a few bellicose bully boys to make a mint. ‘Make a buck, make a buck. Even in Brooklyn it’s the same,’ as Alfred says in Miracle on 34th Street.3

  The pesticides, the herbicides, the murder–suicides! Institutional racism and sexism. Freemasonry. Online backgammon. School shootings. Diablo chicken wings. Breweries, microbreweries, whoppers and sliders, nanobytes and gigabytes and terabytes – men like anything that’s either really big or really small. I wonder why.

  And all the penile neckties. They never tire of them. Men are so repetitive! Them and their neon trainers and football scarves and football shirts and football hooliganism and baseball caps and baseball games and baseball mitts and baseball cards and other baseball memorabilia. Their dissertations on Spider-Man comics. Their lust for every sort of nonsense, for exclusive clubs and secret handshakes, for embezzlement and tax breaks and presidential pardons and golden showers and the unpardonable electric chair…

  These pursuits
come in tandem with their wilful, ruinous indifference to the enormities they have perpetrated on women’s lives: through domination, violation, and the objectification of women’s bodies, including their scorn for menstruation, gestation, parturition, and lactation, all that yucky female stuff that is, incidentally, essential to mammalian survival (which Spider-Man isn’t). What would become of us all if men had to breastfeed? When there’s so much pinball to be played and gun barrels to be oiled, so many noteworthy trains coming and going and pints of beer waiting to be drunk? Babies would starve.

  The sausages, so many SAUSAGES! Along with sausage-shaped pens, bullet trains, guns, missiles, space rockets, skyscrapers, columns, plinths, obelisks, and towers. They have littered the globe with phallic symbols and equestrian statues, hedge funds, gold futures, sub-prime mortgages, and obstructions of justice. Also, Mafia rings, cement feet, arms deals, urban blight, suburban sprawl, crack cocaine, misleading election fraud allegations, and those horrible khaki-coloured fisherman’s vests they wear, the ones with all the pockets. Not to mention all their damn fetishes: for steak, coins, stamps, guns, fishing tackle, cricket, racing, Moleskine notebooks, tool-kits, gadgetry, potato chips, birds, butterflies, Nasa, the soiled undies of schoolgirls, antiquarian memorabilia, exclusive brands of shaving cream, electronics, more electronics, high heels, rubber gear, leather gear, cars, motorbikes, unbelievably expensive hi-fi set-ups, apps, abs, six-packs, tobacco, boastful fables of derring-do, quantum theory, golf, lad mags, Mahler, Wagner, and Bob Dylan (they never shut up about him).

  We’re dying over here, man! We’re snoring in the aisles and you don’t even notice. I’m particularly tired of having to listen to them all play the guitar.

  Them and their capitalism and their corporations and conniptions and philosophical convictions, their nihilism, their defeatism, their elitism, their egotism, their optimism – inexplicably conjoined with their love of apocalypse – and all the other huge fatal male cop-outs, all the crummy ideas we’ve had to stomach for the last five thousand years, while men barely even acknowledged that women EXIST.

  They have proven themselves apocalyptically unfit to govern. Women would do a better job with their hands tied behind their backs (which, of course, they often are).

  Why do women work for men? Not only that, but now we twerk for them too! Look at us, traipsing abjectly around our polluted earth, planning the supper! Always trying so hard to be nice. Having to beg for a few measly reproductive rights, a break in the wife-beatings, or just a little help with the dishes. Poking our pink parasols up at glass ceilings, tap, tap, tap… It’s so demeaning – especially when you’re twerking at the same time.

  Women now bring home the bacon and cook it too. And men praise us for our autonomy – which leaves them free to watch their requisite ten hours of porn a day, decide on gender quotas, and pollute rivers.

  But why should women work, why should we pay for anything, when we’ve been robbed blind for centuries? And I do mean blind. And yet there are women in this world who refuse alimony, preferring a ‘clean’ break. An attempt at resentment mitigation? Please. This is no way to behave!

  Let’s just forget equality, okay? It’s dopey, it’s insane!

  EQUALITY DOESN’T WORK.

  It’s a half-measure. This is an emergency – we’ve got to think big. To end sexism, racism, violence against women, worldwide bombing campaigns, and avert the coming ecological catastrophe, women need to get their hands on the reins, and fast. In fact, forget the reins, just grab the cash.

  Sadly, in the current mercenary scheme of things, power rests on wealth and property, and is therefore mostly in male hands. Land ownership is an offensive idea but, if the world must be owned by anyone, let it be women.4 Once in charge of things, women can institute a system of common ownership, with everything shared amongst women and animals. (Men can have a beer allowance.)

  Men need to pay us what we’re owed. Not just money. We’re owed orgasms, we’re owed world peace. I know, I know, I sound like Miss America when I start talking about peace. Hey, they owe us for that too, all those beauty contests we’ve had to sit through! And John Wayne movies. Men owe us for all the lip-smacking, wolf-whistling, catcalling, ass-pinching, crone-bashing, gun-slinging, cotton-picking gas-guzzling that’s ever gone on.

  And as for orgasms, the problem with men is, they think sex is for them. Let’s get this straight once and for all:

  SEX IS FOR WOMEN.

  Throughout nature, it’s female pleasure that counts, reproductively speaking. The female multiple orgasm tops any humdrum climax a penis can achieve. Sorry, guys, that’s just the way it is. Life isn’t always fair.

  Men got everything about sex topsy-turvy. They invented monogamy and homophobia because they suffer so terribly from jealousy. But it’s men who should be monogamous; women should be freewheeling. It’s a shame to waste all that orgasmic capacity.

  Men should pay us back for their belittlement of women. (It would take an eternity.) Pay us for their vulgarising of sex; for prostitution; for the invention of the phone, the camera, the gun, the car, the airplane, the internet, TV, nuclear power, liposuction, and tanning salons. Pay for the puny percentage of rape convictions. Pay for the cyclones and forest fires, pay for the poisoned water. Pay for the world wars, pay for toxic waste. Pay for atom bombs and chlorine gas and all the Nobels they awarded themselves for creating them. Pay for the gas chambers while they’re at it, and animal extinctions, child soldier indoctrination, and the desecration of ecosystems. Pay for Hitler, Mao, Columbus, King Tut, Genghis Khan, Trump, Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and the Ku Klux Klan. Why not, why shouldn’t they pay and pay?

  They can pay for the pay gap too.

  Once women control all the money, we can start reversing the fatal destructiveness of men. During this transition period, by the way, we won’t need any male carping. Men are always so critical, jeez. A three-year ban on the male voice in public would be a big help: women will need time to think about how to fix this mess.

  Any man in possession of a moral conscience should instantly recognise the logic and justice of these ameliorative measures and start forking out. NOW.

  But it’s not enough for well-meaning men to offer women their money. Women have got to take the money, and without shame. Why even show gratitude? It’s our bloody money. We and our female ancestors earned it – the hard way.

  So take the money, honey. And let’s have no neg-head downer shit about being a kept woman or something. That sort of consideration is a luxury of the past. This is no time for self-doubt, self-abnegation or charity. No time to go Dutch on dinner either, or share the mortgage repayments. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket, and something’s got to be done about it! (Somebody do something about that ‘handbasket’ expression too.) The time has come for all good women to peacefully plunder. Yanking cash out of male hands is a humanitarian act. It’s your new job, it’s your right… and it’s our only hope.

  TAKE THE MONEY HONEY.

  Don’t sing for your supper, sing for yourself, as Bizet’s Carmen would say – okay, bad example, since Carmen gets killed by her idiotically jealous boyfriend. Ah, men. They love to have the last word, even in operas. Listen to Helen Humes instead, with her astute ‘Million Dollar Secret’.5 (In essence? Find a rich man and make sure his will’s made out to you.)

  We will of course have to battle against some pretty powerful mind games. We’ve been bullied for centuries into believing there’s something terrible about being branded a whore, slut, floozy, or gold-digger. What a clever male trick that was, when whores had it right all along! Not in terms of contorting your sexuality or risking your life to please men, no, but in terms of TAKING THE MONEY.

  Why are we still trying to figure this out? Men can’t handle money! Look what they do with it: Harley-Davidsons, Doc Martens, vintage steam train rides, the stock market, Lolita islands, big-game hunting, and the cultivation of giant vegetables. Men are crazy. They’re always calling us crazy, but
men are completely off the beam. They must have lost the plot some time ago. You can tell by all the tornado-chasing.

  Now, there may be a tricky interval there, during the female-oriented redistribution of wealth, when newly enriched and empowered women will be bombarded by lounge lizards, murderers, rapists, thieves… So what else is new?

  Just be strong, sisters. Never mind the names they’ll call us, their pathetic pleas and hard-luck stories, the physical and emotional blackmail, the sure-thing investment opportunities, and all the other forms of backlash that will inevitably ensue once men realise they’re broke. Just be brave and take the moolah.

  It is only a matter of waiting it out. Once worldwide matriarchy is firmly established, women will at last be adequately safeguarded against male petulance. (Just being safeguarded against male decor decisions would be progress.)

  So, TAKE THE MONEY HONEY, and take it proudly. You’ve nothing to lose but your chains and your poverty and your crappy job and your crap pension and your unheard voice and your unpaid domestic labour and your painful stilettos and your time-consuming beauty treatments, and about a million trillion mother-in-law jokes.

  Just TAKE THE MONEY. It’s not prostitution, it’s your civic duty. Your skivvy duty. Take it for Carmen’s sake, take it for all the opera divas who died in poverty, take it for the maids of all work, take it for all the women violated and unavenged, take it for the seven brides of seven brothers and that woman still stuck in her wedding dress. Take it for the powerless and penniless – so that someday you can empower them.

  Take it for your mother, take it for your daughter. Come on. Just take it. Take the money and run! Take men for a ride, take them to the cleaners! Take the house, take the kids, take the cake! And for godsake take the Pill while you’re at it, or something equivalent. Let’s face it, motherhood is for the birds. If it weren’t for hormones, instinct, propaganda, peer pressure, tax cuts, faulty contraceptives, and an idle hankering to reread old children’s books, nobody would ever procreate.6