Man O Man is an ongoing residency-made project by Australian performance maker Mish Grigor. Sitting at the crossroads of performance, artist talk, installation and public meeting, Man O Man starts from the provocation: what would we say, formally, on the last night of patriarchy?
Over intensive residencies, revolving teams of women write speeches, together and alone. These speeches form a series of imagined futures, with multiple feminisms and disparate ideas. At the conclusion of the residency a town hall meeting is held.
Below are two examples of speeches that have come out of the process:
A SPEECH TO THE SECOND WAVE OF FEMINISM:
RADICAL CHANGE CANNOT HAPPEN THROUGH ART. The radical is extreme. Profound. Constitutional. RADICAL change cannot happen through art.
Artists will not change the world today.
As I look out into your sympathetic, interested, keen, engaged faces. I know. We all know. You are the converted and I, I, I am your preacher. And my words give you comfort and take away some of the unbearable pain of getting through the night. But tonight, tonight we will sleep. And tomorrow, the world that we wake up with tomorrow will be the same. The same same same as today.
We will not overthrow. We will not overcome.
Even if we speak our anger until we are blue in the face. Even if we give words to the unspoken. Even if we listen to the stories of the sick and the mistreated, the raped and the drowned. The ghosts of the murdered, the wronged, the spat on, the stupid. The expressions of those without voice or the speeches of them who were silenced.
We will not change the world today. Radical change cannot happen through art.
And it never has. I don’t care how many of you are hairy legged, overall wearing, crochet knitting, vegan museli eating lesbians did agit-prop roaming street performances in the seventies. You thought radical change could happen.
You wandered around with your subversive haircuts and your mildly impressive physical theatre skills. You waved some banners around. You yelled at the world and then others applauded.
Well thanks a lot wom-yn. Not only did you fail, but you filled my generation with false dreams. Now we’re still oppressed but we’ve got Beyoncé wearing a FEMINISM t shirt and pretending to like while she is fucked in the mouth by the big cock of patriarchy. Thanks a lot.
Radical change did not happen through your art.
Thanks a lot to all of you. And not just you. Thanks a lot to Germaine Greer. Gloria Steinham. Anne Marsh. Failures, the lot of you. What have you achieved? Writing things down. Getting angry. Shrieking amongst yourselves. And for what? Im still here. Im still worth less than a man. Im still hit on, and hit, and invisible.
Thanks a lot Suzanne Lacy, Helen Reddy, Judy Chicago. All of you. And not just you.… Pussy Riot, Brecht, Jill Orr, The YES Men, pvi collective, Version 1.0, Guerilla Girls. Thanks a lot Ai Weiwei. Anne Summers. Lena Dunham. I could go on but Im starting to bore myself. Thanks a lot to all of you, you know who you are.
The world is still fucked. You’ve all failed. We’re still.… If we’re women, and we’re working class – we’re fucked. We’re just bodies here to be consumed and ejaculated into. We’re nothing. We’re still just mirrors to reflect. We’re just objects to be used and abused and on display like trophies. Still. Still nothing. Still failing. Still flailing.
Radical change cannot happen through art.
And I’m a white educated Australian. I’ve got it pretty cushy. Fuck knows how the rest of them are getting through the day.
Radical change cannot happen in galleries, in theatres, in the site specific or the laneways or between the headphones.
Radical change happens outside, with weapons and with slaughter.
Radical change happens when one of you picks up a gun and goes outside and kills Tony Abbott. What would it take for one of us to do that? How many atrocities can he commit? We sit here, and we hate him together. We hate him together and we say oh oh oh the people are on Nauru or oh oh oh our land he digs digs digs and sells the coal and sells our souls along with it but oh I’ve got my fucking keep cup, I say no to plastic bags and I turn the lights off and I saw this really provocative piece the other week about rubbish where they just let fruit rot, the fruit rotted for a week and I had a good hard think about things. I had a good hard bloody think about things that day.
Radical change cannot happen through art. Why are you here? Why am I speaking? We are not changing anything. No meaning exists between you and I except for the warm fuzzy feeling that we are both on the same side. Well fuck you. I don’t want to be on your side. Fuck you, and your complacent keep cup ways. I want the extreme. I want violence. I want to blow up the offices of people planning to blow up abortion clinics. I want to hold a knife to the neck of George Pell and make him beg the forgiveness of my queer brothers and sisters whom he has so disgustingly disrespected. I want to see Karl Sandilands cry as I rip open his ball sack with a fucking fork for the ridiculous things he has said to young women. I will spit in the face of Julie Bishop for her crimes against her sex – how dare she historicise feminism. How dare she conform? How dare she leave us flailing out here, in the ghettoes, in the loser’s team.
And further, and more. I will take a spanner to the guts of the straight white men. There, deep. Rip. Each and every mother fucking one of you. Take it in the guts so that you can feel it, and you’ll know, you’ll know for one second. You’ll know for one second what a lifetime of pain feels like, you insignificant fucks.
This is the only way forward. Radical change cannot happen through art.
I was born with an act of violence. I came into the world, ripped my way out of the womb through layers of skin and tendons. As I ripped my way out, and then lay there, covered in shit and fluid and red with the excitement of it all, that was the beginning of becoming. That was the first violent act. And Now, here, I call for the next one. And then, after the guns and the bombs, and the murders and the violence. Then, then we can sleep easy. Then we can turn the page. Then we can wake up, open our eyes on a new day. We can stand up, and look at each other. Then, and only then, will we be a full human.
Then, only then, we can start talking.
WHO IS WITH ME?
A SPEECH FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF AN ARSEHOLE:
This speech was complied with quotes from North American politician Rush Limbach. Made in collaboration with Bron Batten.
I’m a huge supporter of women. Feminism is what I oppose. Feminism has led women astray. I love the women’s movement – especially when I’m walking behind it.
I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are – feminazis. The term describes any female who is intolerant of any point of view that challenges militant feminism. I often use it to describe women who are obsessed with perpetrating a modern-day holocaust: abortion.
A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed. Their unspoken reasoning is quite simple. Abortion is the single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren’t necessary. Nothing matters but me says the feminazi, the foetus is an unviable tissue mass. Feminazis have adopted abortion as a kind of sacrament for their religion/politics of alienation and bitterness.
You have to understand the mindset of a lot of these feminists. These women have paid their dues. They’ve been married two or three times, they’ve had two or three abortions; they’ve done everything that feminism can ask them to do. These kinds of women who have been attacking testosterone, who have been attacking traditional male roles.
We’re not sexists, we’re chauvinists – we’re male chauvinist pigs, and we’re happy to be because we think that’s what men were destined to be. We think that’s what women want. The definition of a misogynist is a man who hates women almost as much as women hate women. That’s what a misogynist is.
Did you know that? A misogynist is a guy who hates women almost as much as women hate women.
And what is it with all of these young, single white women? Overeducated doesn’t mean intelligent. I think this is the reason why girls don’t do well on multiple choice tests – it goes all the way back to the Bible, all the way back to Genesis. Adam and Eve. God said, ‘All right Eve, multiple choice or multiple orgasms, what’s it going to be?’ We all know what was chosen.
Universities have been chickified. Men aren’t showing up in as many numbers as they used to. This is what we’ve done to boys and men. The feminists/ feminazis have been working for years to this end: advance women by diminishing men.
Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to society. They’re out protesting sexual harassment when they actually wish it would happen to them. I’ll tell you, you women. Why don’t you just make it official, put on some burkas and I’ll guaran-damn-tee you nobody’ll touch you. You put on a burka and everybody’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want.
It’s the same in politics. Female politicians get a pass on every aspect of their appearance. You would never have stories about how some female politician’s fat – there are plenty of lard-ass women in politics and they get a total pass on it.
For example it doesn’t look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary dietary advice. And then we hear she’s out eating ribs at 1500 calories a serving. I’m trying to say that the first lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue.
You may suggest that my comments are below the belt. Well, take a look at some pictures. Given where she wears her belts. I mean, she wears them high up there around the bust line. Isn’t just about everything about her below the belt when you look at the fashion sense she has? And what does it say about women in politics when US college student Sandra Fluke goes before a congressional committee and says that women in her law school are having so much sex they’re going broke, so the American tax payer has to pay for their birth control. So what does that make her? That makes her a slut right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex that she can’t afford the contraception.
So Miss Fluke and all the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If you are going to get the public to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay you to have sex, we want something. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.
And now, I’d like to finish with a note about my cat Fluffy. My cat comes to me when she wants to be fed. I have learned this. I accept it for what it is. Many people in my position would think my cat’s coming to me because she loves me. Well she likes me, and she is attached, but she comes to me when she wants to be fed. And after I feed her, she’s off to wherever she wants to be in the house, until the next time she gets hungry.
She’s smart enough to know she can’t feed herself. She’s actually a very smart cat. She gets loved. She gets adoration. She gets petted. She gets fed. And she doesn’t have to do anything for it – which is why I say this cat’s taught me more about women than anything in my whole life.
Thank you and goodnight.
‘Man O Man’ was originally written by Mish Grigor in 2014, and has not previously been published.