by Chinweizu
'As soon as Karl comes back from work the devil is loose at home,' the unhappy wife, 36, said. 'He takes the vacuum cleaner and runs it through the whole apartment, washes all the dishes, cooks and then puts the two kids to bed. Karl never said anything against my housework, but he came home and did it all over again. It really makes me feel dispensable.'
The couple have two children, aged 2 and 3, and until Susan moved out several months ago, they lived together in a comfortable suburban apartment. Susan, a former nurse, stayed home with the children while Karl went off to work every day.
But when Karl came home at night, the couple's normal family life took a bizarre twist. The energetic husband played housewife for hours, Susan said, and even brought her breakfast in bed.
'He even ironed my blouse', Susan testified. 'I told him to stop, but he said he did it to make me look better. I put up with this for five years, all this strange behaviour. But then Karl started learning to knit and it was just too much for me.'
Susan said her housekeeping hubby refused to switch places with her, so she could go out and work.
That's when she decided she needed a divorce.101
Had this Swiss Susan been a true matriarchist, she would have been deliriously happy at having acquired a super-workaholic nest slave; she would have regarded herself as the blessed of the blest. Had she been an American Friendanite, she would have screamed that she was being {119} oppressed; and instead of filing for a divorce and making her personal exit from a boring paradise, she would have declared that "the personal is political", and demonstrated for women's lib, and campaigned for the ERA.
Anyway, however dubious the "oppressed" status of Friendanite feminists was, once their banner was unfurled, tomboys and termagants were powerfully drawn to it. Under the banner of feminism, the militant tomboy, who would rather be a man, vents her frustration on men instead of appealing to god or the surgeon for a sex change. Under the banner of feminism, the non-militant tomboy goes on to become a yuppie, a business or political entrepreneur, glad for a social climate in which, when she plays male roles, she encounters less resistance than previous generations of tomboys did. She goes into previously all-male fields, and still uses to full advantage all the skills and weapons of female power.
The termagant (the shrew, scold and harridan of old) is a misandrous sadist whose greatest pleasures come from man-baiting and man-bashing. She resents the matriarchist code which would have her pretend that she is not boss to her man. Under the banner of feminism she can fully blossom. The termagant now carries on her man-harassing and man-bossing without restraint, battering a man's ears with blows from her tongue without fear of retaliation by blows from his fist. The termagant claims for herself a tyrant's absolute freedom of conduct, and would punish any reaction, however natural, she provokes from men. She is the type of woman who would wear a miniskirt without panties, a see-through blouse without bras, and swing her legs and wiggle her arse as she parades up and down the street, and yet insist that no man should get excited by her provocative sexual display. Any man who whistles at the sight is berated for male chauvinism. She would put out all male eyes with white-hot iron spits so they would not subject the naked female to "the male gaze". She is so outraged by male energy and exuberance that she would have all males between 15 and 35 put in prison, just to spare women their attentions.102 If she flirts and teases and leads an adolescent boy-on, well beyond the limits of his self-control, and he rapes her, she would demand that he be hanged. The only males she would have in the world are lobotomized robots and enervated poodles, all at her beck and call. Under the guise of "radical feminism", some termagants, in their utter misandry, have retreated into lesbian ghettos, and from there attack, as traitors to womankind, those other {120} women who are heterosexual, and who do not totally refrain from social and sexual intercourse with men. Under the banner of feminism, all this is treated as legitimate human behaviour.
The matriarchist - as the nest-queen who happily trains, rules and enjoys the income of the male head of her house - is largely unpersuaded by feminist demands for an equality which would end her privileges. As the prime beneficiaries of the system which feminists would dismantle, the quiet army of satisfied matriarchists is the great immovable rock upon which the tidal wave of feminism spends its fury.
Though feminism parades itself as a revolt against the domination of women by men, it is in fact a revolt by some tomboys against some of women's privileges within the matriarchist paradise, and a revolt by termagants against the matriarchist restraints on their freedom to tyrannize males. However, despite basing their campaign on the principle of gender equality, only a few feminists, a rare few who recognize a need for consistency and fairness, go so far as to accept that the equality they demand must apply also in the trenches, battlefields, mines and other high risk and strenuous areas of life. For the rest, their egalitarian clamour is simply a ruse, and they scheme to head men off from insisting on its full scale implementation.
Most men did not see feminist egalitarianism as the ruse that it was. Of the few who did, a mere handful glimpsed that feminism was not a revolt against oppression by men, but a clamour for additional privileges and opportunities for women. Such men began that men's liberation movement which drew the ire of feminists like Carol Hanisch. However, lacking an analysis of female power, the men's liberation movement did not get very far. Most men, being machos, were thoroughly indoctrinated in the view that men rule women, that human societies are strictly patriarchal: they did not, therefore, take seriously the idea that men needed liberating. At best, they saw men's liberation as a practical joke to annoy feminists.
Many non-feminist women understood the ruse in the egalitarian campaign of the feminists. While they were, understandably, less than eager to join a campaign which could endanger their paradise of traditional privileges, it was also not in their interest to expose it. In fact, for so long as feminism brought new opportunities to women, but without endangering traditional female privileges, many women were sympathetic to it. But when it became clear that gender equality might threaten their traditional privileges (by, for example, requiring women {121} to be drafted into infantry platoons), feminism lost many of its female sympathizers and fellow travellers.
In the USA, that threat emerged with the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the US Constitution. Some elite matriarchs then decided to safeguard women's privileges from the ravages of feminism. Turning militant, they took to the streets and campaign trails and mobilized the matriarchist majority of women to defeat the ERA.
These militant matriarchists, these "right-wing women" (as Andrea Dworkin calls them), disagree profoundly with the feminist picture of women's lot. Some hold that women are "in a superior position, and that this superior position was not to be traded for an equal position".103
They opposed the ERA because, if it was passed, "girls would have to go to war",104 and ERA would force women "to take responsibility for decision making and for money" .105 One of them told Andrea Dworkin that "pro-ERA women are ignorant and malicious," and that "pro-ERA feminists do not know what the interests of women are."106 She outlined them as "a strong home and strong laws protecting the family in which the man, not the state, protects the woman".107 What the anti-ERA women fought to protect was the traditional matriarchist arrangement where the husband takes responsibility for decision making, for earning the family income, and for the safety of his wife's nest. So many women wanted that arrangement preserved that they helped to stop the feminist tide at the gates of the ERA.
In the view of the aroused matriarchists, feminism is a revolt in paradise; and the feminist rebels jeopardise the ancient matriarchist privileges of all women. As a result, despite advertising itself as a movement for the liberation of women, feminism has provoked the opposition of the matriarchist majority of women, and has therefore remained a minority movement.
The triumph of the anti-ERA campaign was only partly due to matriarchist fea
rs of losing traditional privileges. It also capitalized on the resentments felt by many women who deplored the changes which feminism had brought to their lives. This resentment can be encountered in many parts of the world. For example, a London upper-middle-class wife denounced feminism for making her lot worse than her mother's had been. Her mother had not been obliged to take a job and earn money; but she herself had to, since men of her class, well tutored by feminism, now expected their wives to work and earn money.
As she and most matriarchists see it, that a husband now helped in the {122} kitchen, or changed nappies, or pushed prams, is pitiful compensation for a wife's loss of the privilege to stay home, out of the rat race, and be supported by a man in the style to which she was accustomed. Another London woman complained that feminism had killed off gallantry, and so a man no longer felt obliged to give up his seat on a crowded bus to a woman, however heavily laden she might be with briefcase, cosmetic handbag, and bulging grocery sacks.
Even some yuppie feminists, who have taken advantage of the new opportunities to rise in fields traditionally reserved for men, have become impatient with radical feminists, whose continuing clamour could provoke a male backlash and jeopardise their yuppie gains. They would therefore like to see radical feminism curbed or laid to rest. One of these, magazine editor Debbie Raymond, recently said:
Women today have never had it so good. We can stay at home and look after hubby and the kids. We can go out and get a job. It's all equal opportunity... take our clothes off or keep them on, the world is a woman's oyster. So what the heck is the problem?108
In growing despair at the declining support for their cause among 'women of all kinds, radical feminists (especially the lesbian luddites among them) have taken to denouncing non-feminist women (or those they feel are not feminist enough); they call them cowards, traitors, collaborators, subalterns and dupes of men!
However, despite losing momentum since the defeat of the ERA in the USA, feminism has succeeded, worldwide, in enlarging women's opportunities without reducing their traditional privileges. Both in the home and outside it, the world has indeed become a woman's oyster. The matriarchist social system has been obliged to accommodate the aspirations of tomboys, and to legitimize the man-bashing propensities of termagants. And since no country has taken feminist egalitarian propaganda seriously enough to actually send boys and girls, side by side, into battlefields, women have improved their paradise without paying the price demanded by the feminist doctrine of gender equality.
However, the fears of the matriarchists who opposed the ERA still remain: whenever men take a full and clear-eyed stock of the results of feminism, they may still insist on gender equality in every field, including the battlefield. Most women, of course, dread that day. {123}
Epilogue:
On Masculinism
If the standard privileges of women make the world of elite matriarchs the closest thing on earth to paradise, then men, on whose risks and effort women's privileges rest, are the helots of woman's world. Even the grand patriarchs are but headmen among the helots; each is merely the chief public agent for the grand matriarch whose nest he serves.
When some in paradise rebel against their condition, what should the helots do? Would it be unreasonable of them to revolt?
To understand why men have not yet revolted in the wake of feminism, we ought to note that, in their attitudes to women, there are three basic types of men: the macho, the musho, and the masculinist. A macho is a brawny, and sometimes brainy, factotum who has been bred for nest slavery, and who is indoctrinated to believe that he is the lord and master of the woman who rules him. A musho is a henpecked version of the macho who hangs like a bleeding worm between the beaks of his nest queen. A masculinist is a man who is devoted to male liberty, and who would avoid nest slavery.
All through history, the overwhelming majority of men have been machos; a henpecked minority have been mushos; and very few have been masculinists. As feminism won prominence, and brought greater social accept, ability to termagants, more and more men have come under their influence, and become mushos. On the other hand, stung by feminist accusations, a very tiny minority of men have re-examined the male condition, found it to be nest slavery, and have rebelled and turned masculinist.
The macho (or male chauvinist, or manly man) is a strutting factotum with bulging biceps, stone-dry eyes, brains that are ruled by his gonads, and an ego indoctrinated to believe that he is the lord and master of the woman who rules him. His psyche is primed to defend his woman's {124} supposed honour from other men's advances. Thoroughly conditioned to serve women, his life satisfaction comes from loyally serving his nest queen. Naturally, he is the matriarchist's ideal man. When young, he suffers from the delusion that he is stronger, cleverer, and naturally superior to the woman who controls him. However, an older and wiser macho, if obliged to confess the truth, might say: "I am the captain of this ship, and I have the permission of my wife to say so." But by then, it is too late for him to be anything but a habitual macho.
The modern musho (the new or feminal man) is one of that breed of diffident men who have been bullied, guilt-tripped, ego-bashed and penis-twisted into pram pushing, diaper changing and breast envy. He is the befuddled, henpecked male who lacks the wit to recognize his male interest. He is one of those male wives of female husbands who have been described, in Julie Burchill's apt phrases, 'as the "bleeding hearts" and "crying males" who make up "the walking wounded" of the modern sex war.109 The more articulate musho even becomes a missionary for his hen's anti-male views. This pathetic wimp is, quite naturally, hailed by feminists as the "new man". He is the termagant feminist's ideal man.
The masculinist belongs to an altogether different species from the macho and the musho. He does not suffer from most of the illusions of the macho; he is not drawn to macho ambitions; and he views the musho with robust contempt. In keeping with his commitment to the liberation of men from nest slavery, the masculinist would end the psychological, social and legal conditions for that slavery, and create instead conditions for equitable relations between the complementary sexes.
If men have not yet revolted in the wake of feminism, it is because there are still two few masculinists around. This is so because motherpower still produces far too many machos; and because termagants have taken so many lapsing machos in tow and made them into mushos; and because far too many men are ignorant of female power and its ways and means. Consequently, the liberation of men depends crucially on the spread of the masculinist understanding of male-female relations.
The masculinist is a libertarian. His commitment to men liberty, and his understanding of the conditions for male liberty, shape his beliefs.
The masculinist accepts that, contrary to what the macho believes and the feminist claims, it is a woman's world, and not a man's. {125}
The masculinist accepts that, contrary to feminist propaganda and macho illusions, the arch enemies of feminism are not men, but that vast majority of matriarchists who do not wish to give up their traditional powers and privileges. Since patriarchy is but a facade for a basic matriarchy, the men whom feminists claim as their enemies are simply fall guys for the matriarchists. Masculinists, therefore, would redirect the feminist arrows to their proper destination, namely, matriarchy.
The masculinist accepts that, as the calypso songs say, "the woman is smarter" and "woman is boss". The masculinist accepts that men are the biologically more dispensable sex - which is why societies train men for high risk occupations like hunting and war, whereas wombs (and their carriers) are protected to maximize a society's reproductive capacity, hence its chances of survival.
The masculinist does not believe in being owned by any woman; nor does he believe in owning any woman. He recognizes that the owning of a human being by another was abolished long ago, and quite rightly too, and he has no interest in having the practice revived in any form.
In his encounters with women, the masculinist's role mod
el is not Adam, who he has little reason to respect; he takes after Gilgamesh and Odysseus, who knew women well enough to defeat their schemes and survive their revenge; who demonstrated that the resolute man, who understands woman, has little cause to fear her.
The masculinist believes that every woman has every right to do whatever she wants with her body, except enslave a man with it. If she wants to hoard it, and tender her unbroken hymen to the worms in her grave, that is her prerogative. If she wants to give her genitals to any man, or to twenty men, or to a thousand; or to a chicken or goat or gorilla or horse or hippo or elephant or polar bear (in that alleged order of mounting vigour) - that too is her business.
The masculinist does not believe in clitoridectomy; he sees it as a great strategic weapon against men. The uncut clitoris, he knows, would make women as randy as men, if not more so; it would end that sexual restraint which gives a woman power over the sexually desperate male.
The masculinist is not prepared to sell his lifelong labour to any woman in exchange for her ova and her womb. If he decides to rent ova and womb, he pays the going rate or even better; but he will not enslave himself to a nest, just for the illusion of owning ova and womb. He cannot wait for the day when cloning will make the womb obsolete, and womb renting superfluous. {126}
The masculinist has no quarrel with love itself. He knows that a woman's love, when she is not nest-minded, when she is either pre-pubescent or post-menopausal, can be quite safe and pleasant for a man. But he also knows that it is rare, most rare, for a woman, between puberty and menopause, to indulge in non-nesting, non-predatory love.
Being a seasoned realist, a masculinist is, in Diane Wakoski's words, "a beast of the jungle and knows better than to disregard the nature of an animal"110 Therefore,
When he tangles with a nest -age woman;