MANIFESTO OF THE ODALISQUE REVOLUTION
by
Harrison Hanafan
Cover illustration: Reclining Odalisque, by Henri Matisse, 1923. Museum of Modern Art, New York, © Succession H. Matisse / DACS 2012.
Table of Contents
1. VIRTUE AND CHEWING GUM i
2. ALL MEN ARE TERRORISTS vii
3. FREE THE ODALISQUES! xi
4. WE’LL ALL HAVE CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS WHEN SHE COMES xiv
5. THE STATUE OF LIBERTY IS A WOMAN xvi
6. INSTRUCTIONS TO MEN OF FEELING xxi
1. VIRTUE AND CHEWING GUM
My first rejection of a woman came at birth, when, in a tsunami of bodily fluids, my own and hers, I slid through my mother’s brutal confines, folds, and egress. Malehood had begun, and with it, my right to everything in the world:
Apocalypse, assassination, apathy, arson, type A personalities, Asperger’s, Adonis, Attila the Hun, athlete’s foot, architecture, the Army, the Air Force, the air itself, the alphabet, almanacs, Woody Allen, Aristotle, and the atom bomb.
Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, boners, barbecues, Bluegrass, business, brothels, bills, bachelor pads, the Boston Strangler, baseball, belching, bestiality, and bubblegum.
Capitalism, computers, confusion, Confucius, currency markets, castration complexes, cars, cheeseburgers, child custody conflicts, charisma, cuckoldry, catastrophe, and the cosmos.
Decisions, diplomas, discord, debate, disapproval, Dickens, Dohnányi, daggers, debt, deception, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, duty, deities, duels, dairymaids, drones, and dynamite.
Employment, eminence, edifices, enterprises, euphoniums, Einstein, ethics, entropy, extinctions, economics, equipment, enlistment, executions, education, excellence, and exactitude.
Feasts, fellowship, fraternities, Freud, fraud, firsts, fisticuffs, flatulence, fury, fireworks, flashing, fumbling with your fly, fatherhood, fame, force, fortunes, folly, fantasy, and the future.
Guns, guts, gals, gum, games, god, gall, gallantry, governments, granite, glockenspiels, the Gettysburg Address, gambling, global warming, gynecology, Gershwin, Guantánamo, geometry, Genesis, Giotto, and genocide.
Horror, homicide, heroism, Hitler, harlotry, hostility, hiking, ham sandwiches, hard-ons, hound-dogs, hangovers, hunting, Hemingway, Hollywood, highways, hypochondria, hors d’oeuvres, and heraldry.
Irritation, impotence, the internet, the Ivy League, the Industrial Revolution, ice cubes, ice hockey, institutions, the Infantry, importance, and irresponsibility.
Jesus, jism, Joyce, jail, jests, jealousy, jerking off, Jung, juntas, jalapeños, Jekyll and Hyde, Andrew Jackson, joyriding, jostling for position, jurisprudence, jilting, and self-justification.
Knowledge, know-how, knives, knots, knuckle-dusters, knighthoods, kinky stuff, go-karts, kites, karate, kick-boxing, Kennedy, Buster Keaton, Keats, King Kong, Kierkegaard, and killing.
Law, land, language, life, liberty, liquid lunches, license, luxury, lounge lizardry, logic, laurels, Lancelot, Lolita, learning, leering, Leonardo, Tom Lehrer, and getting laid.
Might, merit, muscles, medals, marching, manliness, appliance manuals, mystery, Marilyn Monroe, Melville, Machiavelli, metallurgy, machines, mountaineering, mischief, monuments, masterpieces, Molotov cocktails, museums, myths, monsters, mothers, mistresses, megalomaniacs, and the Marx Brothers.
Napalm, nations, nightclubs, nightcaps, naughty nurses, nautical talk, nuclear energy, Napoleon, Nabokov, necrophilia, neuroses, thick necks, nonsense, nerdism, and noise.
Oil, ore, onanism, 007, obedience, obligations, opinions, objections, sex objects, oysters, oligarchies, obfuscation, ophthalmology, Old Boy networks, offices, obituaries, and obliteration.
Power, pride, purpose, planets, pricks, prizes, prestige, priapism, pussy, profanity, polygamy, pedagogy, Proust, Puccini, Picasso, pianos, propofol, pulpits, parades, processions, possessions, Playboy, the police, policies, police policies, pedantry, pickup trucks, particle physics, poetry, and pointlessness.
Quotations, quotas, quips, quagmires, quandaries, quarterlies, Quasimodo, quarrels, quizzes, quests, string quartets, quarks, and quirks.
Rape, rights, reason, respect, revenge, rules, regulations, Claude Rains, rhetoric, rockets, rifles, razor blades, rumpus rooms, anything risqué, rodeos, rascals, rain checks, ridicule, retaliation, Reagan, rudeness, recollections in tranquility, riots, and radiation.
Superman, Stalin, spunk, smart bombs, sports, statistics, statues, squish mittens, solemnity, stilettos, the Stock Exchange, sadomasochism, soppiness, sloppiness, spy stuff, the space race, science, systems, soapboxes, strategies, satellites, stalagmites, stalactites, success, supremacy, snoring, simultaneous orgasms, and steak.
Terror, torture, trumpet fanfares, tyranny, technology, travel, transvestites, travesties, tragedies, Tolstoy, thrusting, threesomes, theology, The Thinker, tomes, toys, the telephone, and tinkering in the basement.
Unlimited mileage, uniforms, the universe, ugliness, underlings, untidiness, unctuousness, Übermenschen, underdogs, untold wealth, understanding, uselessness, and uxoriousness.
Vice, virtue, value, VD, vistas, visas, vivas, the vote, verandas, vacations, vessels, valet parking, vapor trails, ventriloquy, Vivaldi, Verdi, Valentino, violin virtuosi, vanity, veneration, vacillation, vixens, victims, vas deferens, and VROOM-VROOM.
War, the world, world wars, wine, women, witches, wealth, worth, winking, wanking, whaling, whittling, whistling, wrestling, weightlifting, wrong, Westerns, Whoppers, Fats Waller, wheat, Webster’s dictionary, whips, work ethic, arrest warrants, whoring, Walt Whitman, Walt Disney, and free will.
X-rays, ex-girlfriends, exoneration, Xerox machines, Malcolm X, X chromosomes, and xylophones.
Yawning, yearning, yodeling, Yeats, yachts, yawls, Yes men, yens, Ysaÿe, yuck, yellow fever, the Yellow Pages, and yo-yos.
Zippers, zithers, Zen, zirconium oxide, zoning out, zoos, zoom lenses, zucchini and zoot suits.
And I, a trusting little baby!
All my life I have been fed by women, loved by women. They have offered gifts, attention, sincerity—and in return I have ignored, pitied, and patronized them, avoided and forgotten them. I have rejected, neglected, denied, and deprived women. I have lied to them (lied to myself most of all!). I have used women for sex, and recoiled from their corresponding demands on me, which I saw as infringements of my liberty. I have dumped girlfriends without regret, showing no concern whatsoever for their future welfare—not even making sure they got home safely!
And yet, I’ve always thought of myself as A PRETTY GOOD GUY.
Falling for the notion that you must at all costs Keep The Supremacy, I perfected the ancient habits of malehood: the ability not to listen to women or understand them; the custom of mocking them; the indifference to their problems; and the assumption that women are here to do the shit jobs, and to serve us. Almost unconsciously (I have been almost unconscious all my life), I grew to inhabit a position of unspoken authority and superiority over women. And all this, while trying to be “fair” to them.
In my professional life, I have milked my patients’ insecurities, encouraging women to focus negatively on their appearance, and misled others into undue preoccupation with “beauty.” I have allowed my patients to embark on painful, expensive, and sometimes life-threatening procedures in order, supposedly, to improve their looks. And I have profited financially from this. I made a living out of preop and postop female distress and discontent. Just by participating in the beauty industry, I have pressured women from afar. What women need is less scrutiny of how they look, not more nose-jobs.
I’ve contributed to female tensions and difficulties in my personal life too. Yet, until my own sister was killed by misogyny, I was convinced there was nothing wrong with our society that couldn’t be cured or at least ameliorated by a more socialist democracy, redistribution of wealth through tax cuts for the poor, free health care for all, better laws to protect the environment, universal contraception, and stringent birth control.
Thus, I was a typical American man-child, barely able to wipe my own ass; and behaved as if I was wholly innocent of, rather than wholly complicit in, the violent and degenerate acts of a sexist society.
All my life, there has been a war conducted against women. All my life, I have inadvertently conspired in this war. I admired my arse of an arsonist dad over my splendid, loyal, resourceful, and kindly mama. I felt embarrassed by my sister, merely because she was female, while I condoned and participated in the sexual antics of my friends, merely because they were male.
All my life I have been a witness to a war against women and did nothing about it. This war takes many forms, from direct action like rape, wife-beating and strangling, to the more subtle kinds of attack: plastic surgery, discrimination at work, and a constant barrage of misogynist jibes. All of these tactics are direct and indirect assaults on women, in an ongoing terrorist offensive.
2. ALL MEN ARE TERRORISTS
I am a terrorist. ALL MEN ARE TERRORISTS. The world is run by and for terrorists, in a perpetual atmosphere of male coercion of women through psychological and physical means. It is largely a guerrilla fight, with occasional public skirmishes. Men don’t fight out in the open—we fight dirty.
The terror and damage inflicted on women by male violence and misogynistic injustice are incalculable. THEY AREN’T SAFE. No woman is safe. The enemy is all around her: in the bedroom, in the boardroom, and on the boob tube. Exultation in terror is reflected in the male propaganda war, a diet of horror movies, thrillers, and crime novels, rap music, porn, and the nonchalant attitude to crimes against women displayed by the news media. These terrorist tactics leave women tainted with disdain, ridicule, and despair; and their doom-ridden position in society is enforced and regularly renewed through physical violence.
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 things! 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.
Enough lip service to women’s freedom and equality—just go ahead and empower them! Don’t creep up behind them on the street. Help them. Give women priority, give them a fair chance, give them the benefit of the doubt. Stop stereotyping them from birth to death. Stop criticizing and complaining about them. Stop glorifying that minute proportion of women chosen to act as examples of womanly perfection to beat other women with. Just enrich them all.
And stop taking up all the room on the couch! That couch was made for ODALISQUES.
Enough mother-in-law jokes too, and all the jovial sneers at women. These are the condescending chortles of the slave-owner. Enough fatherly disapproval of daughters. ENOUGH. Dad, you’ve had your day. Show them you regret their being terrorized, show that you don’t condone the massacre of women all around us. Show them some respect. Stop sitting on your slave-owner ass talking the talk, and put your money where your mouth is: start freeing those slaves, man! GIVE WOMEN THE MOOLA.
I used to scorn the ancient womanly pursuits, like my mother’s bottling and baking. A cake, or a jar of jam, seemed feeble and futile efforts to me (compared to my father’s hotshot job at a gum factory!). I scorned domestic comforts like quilting and cleaning and childcare. I scorned cushions! But I was really just scorning femaleness, that half-buried force for good in the world, and those lowly female concerns like life, pleasure, and well-being. I had no respect for them (but I ate the jam!).
GIVE WOMEN THE MONEY. Respect will follow.
During and after the revolution there will no doubt be “pockets of patriarchy” (male tyranny): bankers banking on their banks, toy-boys toying with their toys, farmers who won’t hand over the deeds to the land. Vulnerable women, targeted by resentful men, may be persuaded to divert their newfound wealth to them. Don’t let this deter you. As with speed limits, you only need the majority of people to go along with the idea for it to work. Women will gradually get braver about keeping the cash.
Mayhem isn’t amusing anymore; we’re all sick of slaughter. The Odalisque Revolution is a last heroic stand against the male death wish. Therefore, its aim is an unobtrusive, undisruptive, nonviolent hand-over of power. The beauty of the Odalisque Revolution is its gentleness, and its voluntary nature. Giving your money away can be an entirely intimate, intuitive, personal, private, even clandestine, process.
In time, the Odalisque Revolution may be refined to become a truly cooperative redistribution of wealth—not communism perhaps, but commonism. Once capitalism, patriarchy, and war have been superseded, women will be free to rethink the entire monetary culture that has ruined life for everybody, and new designs for human happiness may be instigated. But that’s up to them, not us. All we have to do is clear the way for women to act, and assist them in carrying through their wishes.
Puccini’s Rodolfo would have given Mimì all his money (if he’d had any) but in the end, it’s Musetta who buys Mimì her muff. Let’s do something right for a change:
GIVE WOMEN THE DOUGH!
6. INSTRUCTIONS TO MEN OF FEELING
When combined, in order of appearance, the first letters of each item above form an apt final instruction, dependent of course on the woman’s consent. (H.H.)
$ GIVE women a chance: first chance. Never mind maintaining the “Supremacy.”
$ RELINQUISH any lingering sense of superiority over women. It is wholly erroneous.
$ ALLOW women to decide the future.
$ SCORN the mockery of women, the denial of women, the judging of women, and discrimination against them.
$ PRIORITIZE women’s welfare, women’s concerns, and women’s interests.
$ HAND OVER the dough (but without fanfare or self-aggrandizement). Regularly transfer any funds you can muster to a woman or women of your choice, and help any woman you can to acquire more money, so as to improve her social status and the status of women generally—any increase in women’s status will lead to greater safety for us all.
$ END all war, which has always been used to oppress women.
$ RESIST all impulse to bully, baffle, belittle, and buffalo women.
$ NOMINATE yourself to redress the injustices done to women and all the errors, misconceptions, crimes, and outrages committed in the name of your terrorist organization (patriarchy).
$ OBJECT to being a terrorist and belonging to a terrorist group (men). Your organization has pestered half the human race for thousands of years through violence, coercion, exploitation, and selfishness, helped along by financial, political, religious, medical, and psychological pressure. It has denied women rights, opportunities, respect, sex, peace, and pleasure. It has even denied them pie!
$ WITHHOLD your critical assessments of women’s looks, clothes, plans, aims, snacks, foibles, fripperies, and book choices. THEY ARE NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
Warning: For formal deeds and transfers of assets in the USA you will have to go to the County Clerk’s office. Retirement and insurance policies can be transferred only by written arrangement. Gift Tax is an impediment if you are handing money over to your wife. This will be taxable.
The OR (Odalisque Revolution©) takes no responsibility for individual consequences resulting from the policies proposed above such as outrage, affront, altercations, disinheritance, blackmail, family jokes, and jealousies which may result from your reallocation of private funds to a woman or women of your choice. It is up to each man individually to decide how best to accomplish this financial readjustment. Be tactful, and good luck!
ADDITIONAL SUGGESTIONS (TO BE DECIDED UPON BY WOMEN ONLY):
1. The immediate confiscation of all firearms and other assorted weaponry.
2. The automatic confiscation of the financial assets of any man convicted of committing any crime against a woman, women, or children, or violent crime against anyone. (Proceeds to go to women’s charities, such as the Bee Hanafan Foundation.)
3. Legal redress in a case of violent attack will no longer depend on the victim’s willingness or ability to press charges. All violence is a crime against society as well as the individual: the society can take the perpetrator to court on behalf of the victim.
4. Public and private disparagement of women to be made a crime subject to automatic fines. Likewise, incitement of violence against any person.
5. Reclassification of all violence, including war, as a crime against humanity.
6. Reclassification of the nuclear power industry as a crime against humanity.
7. The UN to be made the only body entitled to use force, and then only in direct relation to the procurement of peace. (A system of checks (or chicks) would have to be put in place to ensure the UN itself did not become a tyrannical military force set on global tyranny and Esperanto exams.)
8. All investment in defense programs, space programs, genetically modified food, oil exploration and drilling, fracking, strip-mining, and other polluting processes to be diverted to social improvement projects, health care, education, the arts, and environmental repair.
9. Encouragement of childlessness, through government incentives, so as to reverse population growth.
10. Education in female sexuality, and the place of women in history and prehistory, for all! Also, a working knowledge of gardening, first aid, midwifery, weaving, ceramics, painting, sculpture, music, literature, cooking, brewing, and contraception.
11. Non-compulsory sex camp for teenagers.
12. Car manufacture to be phased out. Cars eventually to be banned. Public transport and bicycles to be free. Emergency initiatives to save the environment to be set up.
13. The natural world to be placed under protective orders of all kinds.
14. Donkeys never to have to work again.
15. Everything essential to human health and happiness to be free: air, water, basic foodstuffs, energy, medical care, contraceptives, tampons, Band-Aids, aspirin, etc.
16. A cap on all income, with all further earnings above that level to be diverted to women’s charities (such as the Bee Hanafan Foundation).
17. Gradual abolition of TV, porn, pop music, computers, the internet, and other forms of mass hypnosis and enslavement. Also, energy-saving light bulbs.
18. Revision of the calendar to incorporate the lunar month: thirteen months in a year.
19. The abandonment of nations and borders: we are all citizens of the world.
20. Membership of the Odalisque Revolution eventually to be made a compulsory requirement of world citizenship.
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So ends The Manifesto of the Odalisque Revolution.
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