Mimi

by Lucy Ellmann

  WE ALREADY OWN THE WHOLE WORLD, but can’t resist kicking the enemy when she’s down.

  We carry out authorized and unauthorized attacks. Ignoring women is easy, erasing their contributions to the arts, to philosophy, to medicine, science, business and commerce, to history—these are all effortlessly accomplished in an atmosphere already rife with contempt. Through concerted, I would say Hitlerian, effort—no stone left unturned, no cruelty shunned—women’s place, in culture and in society, has been meticulously obliterated.

  The terror campaign is fueled by tradition, religion, misogyny, and mild grievances: women nag, we claim, they stink, they suck, they’re nuts, they’re sluts, they’re always late, they menstruate, they fail, they succeed, they refuse our advances, they accept our advances, they swell up with babies for no reason, they can’t throw a ball, they let us down. We twist the truth, turn the tables, try to make black white, night day! What wrongs have women possibly done to men that haven’t been infinitely exceeded by men in their treatment of women?

  We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to characterize women (mothers and life-givers) as reprehensible, and men (deadbeat dads and death-wielders) as right, or at least forgivable: men smart, women dumb; men creative, women destructive; men artistic geniuses, women lazy and uninspired. A total reversal of the truth! We denigrate women, and besmirch them; and when we can’t deny our culpability any longer, we make bad seem good, and blame the victim for the crime. We run rings around them, logically.

  It costs to be a woman in this society. Financially, emotionally, physically, socially, politically, and erotically, they’ve had to pay up. And boy, have they been nice about it!

  Women are killed every day by some man or another, while we yawn and turn to the sports page, telling ourselves it’s none of our business. Every day, another rapist gets acquitted, another stalker or wife-beater or child-molester gets off. But these rapes and murders are our business! Rapists work for US.

  Newspapers use the more sensational cases to sell copies, while the rest get forgotten. But a world in which such crimes come with their own inbuilt triviality is no world for women. A world in which women are disrespected, discounted, and disheartened is also no world for women. In fact, it’s no world for anybody!

  The terrorist threat to women is severe, CODE RED. It’s all around us in this woman-dissing, woman-dismissing world. What woman has not had to hear, almost daily, of violent crimes committed against women? This is terror.

  + Pimps are terrorists.

  + Priests are terrorists.

  + Fashion designers and beauty-mongers are terrorists.

  + Plastic surgeons are terrorists.

  + Employers who underpay women are terrorists.

  + Men who criticize women are terrorists.

  + Men who ignore women are terrorists.

  + Men who get in women’s way are terrorists.

  + Men who “innocently” follow women on the street (and terrify them) are terrorists.

  + Men who take up more than their fair share of space in public places are terrorists.

  + Husbands who make unilateral decisions without consulting their wives are terrorists.

  + Male religions are terror tracts.

  + Every teacher who hits a pupil is a terrorist.

  + Every man who rapes a child is a terrorist.

  + Every ass who takes revenge on his wife by killing their kids, or revenge on his girlfriend by killing her whole family, is a terrorist.

  + Anybody who takes a gun onto the streets and conducts a murderous rampage is terrorizing women—since every single person is born of a woman and probably loved by one.

  + What woman has not feared for her life at some point when walking alone at night? This is terror.

  + What woman isn’t frightened in general of going out alone? This is terror.

  + What woman’s life has not been sullied, possibly even shortened, by the unwelcome attentions of egotistical men? This is terror.

  + What woman has not been unjustly deprived of opportunity, approval, appreciation, understanding, peace, quiet, safety, pride, power, wealth, health, and respect? This is terror.

  + How is the rape of the earth itself, the ignorant and destructive capitalistic exploitation of nature (our air, our water), not part of the terrorist project? All forms of annihilation are ultimately aimed at women (as the life-givers). This is terror.

  LOOK at the wasted women, LOOK at the wasted earth! We have lauded the male and belittled the female, to our own cost and calamity. Through male greed, cruelty, sadism, insanity, and insouciance, as if in service of some long-forgotten gripe or decree, we have plundered and squandered the earth until there’s almost nothing left! We behave as if men must rule—but men have proved themselves unfit to do so. ONLY THE DEAD KILL.

  The success of male propaganda against women, against life itself, is reflected in our complacency about humanity’s imminent disappearance. It’s now considered fashionable and sophisticated to be entertained by visions of apocalypse. People behave as if there’s some kind of virtue in apathy. They resign themselves to radiation leaks, irreversible climate change, bee diseases, nuclear weaponry, and late capitalism’s perpetual war… without a qualm! They’ve hypnotized themselves into believing that the end of the world is not only nigh, but maybe even bearable.

  Now wait a minute!

  Nobody who cares what human beings are, what we’ve made, what we’ve loved and striven for, nobody who cares about human thought and art (as well as the arts and loves of animals, what about them??), nobody who has noticed how intricate and beautiful the world is, nobody who has studied the wide dark-green leaves and tiny, white, cupped, jiggling, bell-shaped flowers of lilies of the valley… nobody who knows what’s REAL and gives a damn what women and children feel, would be content to let the whole damn enterprise—nature, a habitable, inheritable planet, and all of human culture, history, and civilization—go down without a fight! Nobody who gave a damn would let bankers, arms dealers, nuclear industry proponents, oil merchants, and oligarchs—the biggest liars, losers, and crackpots in the world!—nobody who gave a damn would let MEN decide our future.

  3. FREE THE ODALISQUES!

  Imagine a world where women aren’t badgered or beleaguered, a world in which women have what they want and need, and are free to go about their business unmolested. A world in which you don’t have to watch your mother, sister, daughter, wife, or girlfriend get stalked and stabbed and shot and swindled and sneered at, you don’t have to watch them lose out, run adrift, go nuts.

  This would be a better place for everybody.

  We got it all wrong! The secret of life isn’t POWER, it’s PLEASURE. Arbeit doesn’t make us frei, pleasure does. The pursuit of pleasure isn’t irresponsible, immoral, dishonorable, or self-indulgent. It is a fact, and deep in our make-up. It’s not a frivolous choice but an inalienable right. Pleasure-seeking is what we’re born for, and all the rest—the corporate life, the capitalist life, the misogynist life, the sadistic life, the ignoble self-destructive life of men with their guns and their tanks and their poison gas and their goddam leaf-blowing machines (what a racket we men make!)—all of this is a mistake, a distraction from the pleasure, ease, and comfort we all really want.

  The secret of life is life, not death, and life at its fullest expression is pleasurable, not painful. Most animals aren’t in pain all the time. Even bees seem bent on being happy. The natural state of things is not suffering and mayhem, but peace and contentment. This is how you get things done!

  Would it be so hard to be fair to women? Would it be so hard to admit that, rather than witches and bitches, women are actually pretty handy members of society, a society that, it just so happens, belongs to them as well as us? Would it KILL us to admit that?

  After all, their worst ethos is coziness. Women want roses and chocolates and puppies and cushions everywhere. So what? They want pleasure: aesthetic, sensual, sexual, and cultural pleasure. Well, they invented these t
hings! Women were the first farmers, the first artists, the first astronomers, the first botanists, the first doctors, the first philosophers, the first parents, the first cooks, the first CIVILIZERS.

  It’s women who did the cave paintings! Women invented the wheel! (Men reinvented it.) Women needed the wheel to help them push around their cartloads of babies and radishes. Women were the first to harness fire. They like to keep warm—is that so bad? It’s healthy. It’s COZY. And now look at them, careworn and poverty-stricken, trailing home with their bags of groceries beneath the gigantic nuclear power plants men built without their permission.

  Men just sat on their asses or went hunting for the first two hundred thousand years or more of human history. The only things we harnessed were belching, ball games, and bubblegum. And women: that was our breakthrough.

  Patriarchy wasn’t necessary, inevitable, or desirable, it just happened. Men have conspired ever since in the erasure of prehistory, because it was matriarchal and it makes MEN look bad. Humanity would never have survived two hundred thousand years of patriarchy—look at us now, after only five thousand years of it. Patriarchy’s not a viable long-term option: our devotion to the male death wish has brought us all to our knees.

  Women are now slaves (they make quilts!). Until relatively recently, they weren’t even allowed to vote. They are still wasting their lives trying to please, posing for us in their bikinis and high heels and doing all the housework. They push strollers uphill like Sisyphus. They bake lasagne, make jam, get their eyebrows threaded, their pubic hair shaped and shifted. Them and their little savings accounts, making do, dying from neglect, winning praise only for pliancy and self-abnegation!

  It wasn’t always so. Women once ran the show. And life was easy, and fair, and artistic! There was plenty of leisure time for art, music, dance, and other cultural activities. Neolithic people had a four-hour working day! Women, as childbearers, were recognized and valued in a society concerned with life, art, and knowledge, not ignorance, not beauty contests, bombast, and death. Women’s bodies and bodily processes were valued too.

  Then men, bored, restless—envious after thousands of years of menstruation festivities—rose up and insisted on playing things their way: war, rape, despotism, empire, carnage, genocide, racism and class divides, pollution, and energy-saving light bulbs. Okay, they also caught fish, built some stuff, created the occasional public park or nature reserve, and developed a few ideas of jurisprudence, but at what cost? The desecration of the air, land, and sea, the ruin of happiness, the ruin of intimacy, the ruin of sex.

  In a mere five thousand years, men have wrecked life on earth. Thanatossers! Power meant more to them than survival itself. Only the dead kill.

  Equality no longer seems enough. What we need is matriarchy.

  IT’S ODALISQUE TIME!

  4. WE’LL ALL HAVE CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS WHEN SHE COMES

  The odalisques Henri Matisse painted in the 1920s aren’t slaves. They feel swell, lying around topless in harem pants, taking it easy, basking in the breezes of the South of France: these are post-orgasmic women delighting in sunshine, serenity, and safety. Matisse was a guy with coziness on the brain. His odalisques, as an expression of coziness, are the designated emblems of the Odalisque Revolution.

  Ever wondered why women go to such lengths to be attractive? They want what Matisse’s odalisques are having! Joy, comfort, kindness, color, and light. They just want their DUE.

  Men have been missing the point about sex for thousands of years. Though obviously necessary and exciting for both genders, sex is not primarily about male pleasure, but female. Biologically speaking, the male animal exists to please the female. The penis is shaped specifically to enhance female, not male, orgasms—because pleasing the female is the best way for a male to help ensure his genes get carried on. Rape is rare in nature. Instead, much attention is given by most species (excepting ducks, maybe) to courtship, and to the female orgasm. Nature is very keen on female pleasure.

  Men have thwarted women’s pleasures as a psychological means of hanging onto male power. And, in doing so, we’ve depressed everybody! Instead of hassling women, we should be humoring them, instead of boring everybody to death with our dreary male desires, fetishes, and fantasies, we should be finding out what women want. Men should be the sex slaves—they’d love it!

  Because, if men are here to please women, we’ve wasted a lot of time. What a drag, when we could all have been getting laid!

  Enough guff, enough rebuff. Enough of feminism and its backlashes. Enough tweaking of the patriarchal setup here and there. It’s time to concentrate on making things monumentally better for women. We don’t have to deprive and displease them: it would be more fun to please them. A world in which the female orgasm isn’t nurtured, celebrated, applauded, and generously sought, is no world for women or men.

  We don’t even know what women are yet—that’s lost in the mists and myths of patriarchy. We’ve been so busy bossing, badmouthing, begrudging, and bullying women, and boosting ourselves, we missed out on buddying up! Missed out on a lot of stuff…

  Imagine a world of proud, content, amorous, sexually satisfied women. No more bored housewives descending into hypochondria, no more irate teachers and belligerent waitresses, inconsolable single moms, hopelessly infatuated secretaries. Ever wonder why teenage girls are (statistically speaking) the most troubled people on the planet? Because they know they are about to have to engage with all this bullshit! They already know they will never be loved, honored, and obeyed enough, they will never even be humored, hugged, and kissed enough—and it’s getting them down.

  Enough of men’s free-floating contempt for all forms of life. HAIL the much-maligned uxorious man! He had it right all along. This is a man’s natural role: devotion! Not disdain, not disapproval, not violence and subjugation. We got everything mixed up and turned around, upside-down, topsy-turvy, back-assward. For centuries we’ve treated uxoriousness as an oddity, a minority aberration—when in fact it’s what men are made for!

  5. THE STATUE OF LIBERTY IS A WOMAN

  The Statue of Liberty is a woman. Okay! But men can be liberators too. After all, women have done enough. It’s time for all good men to come to the aid of the people, time for them to get up off their lazy-boys, and all those fences they’ve been sitting on, and start reversing some of the damage men before them have done. In Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, there are lots of men lying around at Liberty’s feet. Rise up, comrades, and lend a hand with those barricades!

  Hand over the power and the privilege. Give women respect.

  But what bestows respect in our society, besides youth, beauty, street cred, up-to-date computer technology, a talent for learning languages, an in with royalty, and frankincense and myrrh? MONEY. At this point in human interaction, money really counts. Men base their lives, their whole sense of self, on how much dough they make—and they base their contempt for women on how little they make, these low-status appendages of ours.

  So here’s the plan, guys: GIVE WOMEN THE MOOLA.

  Next time you’re revolted by the bombing of innocent civilians or the torture of prisoners, give money to women. Next time you’re heartbroken about nuclear plant meltdowns, give money to women. Next time you hear about violence against little girls, or the raping of babies, give money to women. Turn the tide, man! Give women the freedom to act, and they just might save us. GIVE THEM THE MONEY.

  A lot of us don’t want to be terrorists, we had terrorism thrust upon us (by our fathers, teachers, priests, and peers). REBEL. Stop degrading women—parade them! Stop demoting them: promote them. Honor and obey, praise, pamper, and pleasure them. THIS IS YOUR NEW JOB (forget the old one!).

  We don’t even know how much the guilt over our complicity in their suppression has grated on us. But divesting ourselves of power might be a big relief. Then we can get on with helping women repair society. They shouldn’t have to do it all alone: they’re odalisques! They should take things easy
.

  So no more pleas of innocence whenever another woman gets garroted and dumped in a trash can, or a girl gets acid thrown in her face by an indignant boyfriend. “What the hell can I do about it?” is no longer an excuse. You know what you can do about it: GIVE WOMEN THE MONEY.

  Give a woman or women, of your choice, your checkbook, your stocks and shares, your credit cards, your spare change. Give them the land. Give them the parks and the buildings. Give them the power. They couldn’t do a worse job than we have.

  Sure, there are madwomen out there (not just in the attic either, though our literature is full of those!). Women who kill, women who go along with murder, or give their lovers HIV. There was at least one woman who stopped her husband seeing his mother on her deathbed. There are unfair women, unpleasant and conservative women. Let’s face it, they’re nuts! But you’d have a screw loose too if you’d been harassed and disrespected from birth. Women might be a lot less cranky if the world was their oyster.

  You get to choose which woman to give your money to; but if each man, throughout his life, transferred the majority of his assets, earnings, property, and wealth to one or more women (or a charity run by and for women), wealth and power would soon be in women’s hands. In such an atmosphere of respect, a diminution of violent crimes against women is likely to follow. Eventually, it should become taboo to bother a woman. So let’s do something right for once: GIVE WOMEN THE MONEY.

  This is not a bribe or bargaining ploy—no, the hand-over of money to women entitles you to nothing in return. It must be given freely, no strings attached, in acknowledgment of, and recompense for, your voluntary or involuntary participation in the campaign of terror against all women that has gone on for thousands of years. This is one way you can start to make amends.