I made nice.2 It didn’t work. Women are still oppressed, men still running the show, still running around raping, killing, and maiming women – raping, killing, and maiming children too (another way of attacking women). They’re still waging war, spraying every living thing with pesticide, distributing micro-particles of plastic everywhere, eating huge pizzas,3 and charging an awful lot for a haircut, highlights, and blow-dry. Or how about this new craze for murder-suicide, that apparently culpritless crime, whereby the execution of women and children is often transposed by police and news commentators into a mere ‘tragic family incident’? Patriarchy did this.
These people hate us! These people are trying to kill us! I don’t know why we’re all so goddam nice about it, but nothing is ever done about the way men carry on. Instead, it’s feminism that is for ever in retreat.
~ Pause to do the dishes. ~
When any outwardly positive step forward is made, say, toward equal pay or maternity/paternity benefits, something even worse always seems to happen to women on some other level. Patriarchal retribution is swift: for all the mild protests from women against the male bias of Oscar awards, topless photos on Page 3 of the Sun, or nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence shared online, we now have a global rape crisis, with an accompanying boom in female self-harm. Sure, women are permitted to work (great, thanks a lot), and a few hard-working campaigners have managed to deny Britons some Sun fun (the exhausting Page 3 campaign eventually paid off, I believe). Women can now sue hackers over invasions of privacy, or even get a prettified portrait of a female novelist on to the ten-pound note (a lot of good this does Jane Austen, who really could have used ten quid). But then our punishment comes, in the form of some new, unexpected backlash, along with a multitude of malignant jibes and threats from Twitter trolls. As the much-hounded Mary Beard said in a lecture about men’s determined efforts to ignore everything women have ever said over the last few thousand years, women ‘pay a very high price for being heard’.4
The sources of female oppression are many. Self-inflicted saturation in porn has produced a whole generation of young men who apparently cherish, or at least accept, absurd ideas of pneumatic female torsos,5 and male rights of domination.6 The consequences of recessions7 are felt most by those already disadvantaged, particularly women – in the UK, through cuts to the NHS, rape crisis centres, women’s refuges, Legal Aid and other vital services.
Police behaviour toward female victims of crime degrades us all,8 as does the revealing take on women shown by most news organisations.9 Despite the notorious 2012 gang rape and evisceration in India, quickly followed by a similar event in South Africa and the Steubenville case in Ohio – in which an unconscious sixteen-year-old girl was carried naked from party to party to be sexually preyed upon and peed upon (which some of the participants claimed to have believed was consensual sex) – doubt only seems to grow about what constitutes rape or whether it even exists.10 The worse men behave, the more their crimes seem to get downgraded to minor misdemeanours. This perversity is necessary to maintain the perverse status quo, the mass delusion which holds that men are okay and women, in so many ways, aren’t. How about the sex-slave trade, or the treatment of women and children in detention centres?11 Such cruelties are not confined to the USA. The English family court system vilifies mothers, shrouds its own proceedings in secrecy, and often issues irrefutable orders, handing children over to unpredictable fathers.12 The aim of all this is to traumatise women and subdue them. This is traditionally accomplished both through rape, but also through the labyrinthine workings of the justice system.
~ A pause to hang up washing. ~
>This is a society that’s failing women big time!13 A society in which men keep women in a simmering state of terror.14
Yet how we bustle around, trying to look good, be good, restrain ourselves in all kinds of ways, contort ourselves and our own needs and beliefs in order to work within this set-up men have moulded to suit themselves, in which women are for ever doomed to be the losers, hangers-on, the butt of jokes – funny nutso floozies that we are.15 The first suggestions the internet offers when you google the word ‘women’ are: women’s clothing, women’s shoes, women’s dresses, women’s trainers. Have we no other interests,16 no other qualities, no depths? We certainly aren’t supposed to.
~ Pause to mess – in vain – with my hair. ~
The media’s harsh treatment of Mary Beard, Greta Thunberg, and others shows the high level of hostility directed at women whose achievements single them out from the crowd.17 This, after the centuries it took us to get the vote!18 This, after people have died to protect abortion rights. After governments across the globe have finally recognised the injustice of female circumcision.19 What did all these struggles mean?
Not a goddam thing. The violence continues, as does the inequality, and the pay gap,20 and the production of about a million Hollywood movies that don’t pass the Bechdel test.21 When we peer up through that glass ceiling what we see are the soles of a lot of big dirty men’s shoes still galumphing around.22 Even Mary-Kay Wilmers defended her London Review of Books’ lack of articles by and about women, on the grounds that men make more pitches and women have a lot of housework to be getting on with.23
~ Pause to scrub the stovetop. ~
So, let’s admit it. We’ve tried equality and it doesn’t work. Equality within a society concocted by and for men? Phooey! What we need, what the victims of war and war crimes24 need, what the terrorised need, what the isolated, and frequently annihilated, radioactive nuclear family needs, what all the tormented, neglected, broken, hunted, infected, injected, vivisected, near-extinct, factory-farmed, in fact all animals, need, what every living thing threatened by disease, disrespect, disheartenment, ‘detainment’, and disenfranchisement, needs, is female supremacy.
We can do this the easy way or the hard way.25
Veneration is the only logical response to the mammalian female. Motherhood is a necessity of survival, and I suspect its offshoot, matriarchy, was a blast. People had it good there for a couple of hundred thousand years, living in stable societies with a three-hour working day and plenty of leisure time. Free to think and act without fear, women invented agriculture, pottery, weaving, music, metallurgy, medicine, painting, sculpture, and astronomy.26 Then men loused everything up, driven by fear and envy (of women) and an unquenchable longing for organised sports.
~ Pause to darn a cheap sock. ~
Vengefully appropriating or negating all the progress women had made, men turned on nature and ecology, and instituted a bunch of lousy ideas: anti-female religions and taboos, hatred of the body, particularly female bodies, a paternalistic approach to medicine, and new pastimes like imperialism, slavery, witch hunts, war, rape, drug cartels, vampires, football, darts, and Monopoly. The Industrial Revolution was no picnic either – in the last few centuries, men have managed to ruin the environment for everyone, leaving us with toxic waste, climate havoc, smog, sweatshops, suicidal workers, traumatised pigs, chickens, elephants, and whales, crazed gunmen, conspiracy theories, and a zillion T-shirts that say things. Men have disastrously assumed the right to mess with the air, the water, the land, and our heads.
They are so messy, always wrecking things. They like to desecrate things for desecration’s sake. They obliterate beavers so they can build their own dams! They shot dead the first grey wolf seen in Iowa for almost a hundred years, despite its being a ‘protected’ species (protected how?). They shoot lions and tigers, kick chickens.27 Men denude the land. Men insist, INSIST, on killing everything and using up every last natural resource. War is the quickest way they’ve found to ruin the environment,28 but they make peacetime pretty damaging too: do we really need cars and planes and air conditioning and six trillion throwaway pens and toothbrushes? Does every last thing have to be made out of plastic or concrete? Must the world be so UGLY? San Francisco Bay is still full of mercury from mining processes used during the Gold Rush, and will remain poisoned for the next ten thousand years.29 The psychotic male addiction to nuclear power, concentration camps, waterboarding, fracking, lead, WMDs, surveillance, TV, computers, the internet, reversing-vehicle beeps, and bling, will finally destroy us all.
Why should we let those Bushes (Sr. and Jr.) get away with it? Or that warmonger Tony Blair? Why’d we let Hitler get away with it? Why should we let Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris and Mel Gibson and Charlie Sheen and Ike Turner and Richard Nixon and Donald Trump get away with it, or Charles Manson, Fred West, Peter Sutcliffe, Thomas Hamilton, John Worboys, and Adam Lanza? Or Ronald Lee Haskell, who executed four children and their parents in their home in Texas, just to get back at his ex-wife. Or Stephen Paddock, the creep who shot sixty people from a hotel in Las Vegas. Not to mention IS and Boko Haram and the Charlie Hebdo slaughterers. Why should we let ANY of them get away with it? We can’t. Basta.30 And yes, I know, I know, women sometimes go along with some of this stuff. They shoot guns, they work for oil companies, they join extreme right-wing groups, they chit-chat in the Quiet Coach.31 But that is no excuse for indulging men further! Never mind what women may or may not do – it’s time for men to be mensches.32
In Three Guineas Virginia Woolf raises the possibility that patriarchy’s based on ‘unconscious sex-taboos’. But I think, if we’re going to get fancy about it, what we’re dealing with is more like mass hallucination. Among many other forms of wilful intoxication (are most adult men ever really sober?), men are drunk on self-delusion. Look at Trump: everything he says is the exact opposite of the truth. Merely by dint of their psychoses, their ridiculous conundrums (what pickles men get themselves into!), and their upper-body strength, men have forced women to engage with all sorts of surreal ideas about how life should be lived, from flirtations with nuclear warhead gaps to who gets to decide if women have babies, or how you make an omelette.33 They have fashioned a whole theatre of the absurd, an extensive literature of alienation, and a great many cowboy movies.
But when do women get to dream? How about allowing us a few whims too once in a while? How about indulging women in the belief that we look okay, or that we’re okay mothers and daughters, or that we have okay things to say or do? Women need time and space in which to develop our own particular brand of insouciance, our own hobbies, our own (pro-female) philosophies, our own sexuality,34 our own play, goddammit!
~ A pause to contemplate a Handkerchief Tree in the Botanical Gardens. ~
Once again, it’s up to women to sort this out, I’m afraid. We shouldn’t have to, we’ve all worked hard enough already for little if any recompense! But we will have to exert ourselves further, it seems.35 So here’s my new solution (since men wouldn’t play the game and just hand over their money to women like I told them to): my advice is for women to go on strike, on a private, public, local, national, and international level.36 Women make up the majority of the world’s population so, united, we cannot fail to have an effect. And there will be jolly times later as we begin to enjoy the fruits of our efforts (see footnote 34).
There are three forms of strike I’d recommend: a housework strike, a labour strike, and a sex strike. I can’t wait for the first two. While the ultimate object of all three of them is female supremacy, each strike would also focus on adjunct causes in women’s interest: (1) environmental and animal justice; (2) peace and nuclear disarmament; and (3) you guessed it, female appropriation of wealth, property and power.37 These issues are all bound together in the struggle to preserve nature, civilisation, and the better aspects of human culture.
~ Pause to help husband locate his manbag. ~
STRIKE ONE: NURTURE NATURE.
DESTRUCTION OF NATURE IS AN ATTACK ON WOMEN.
The housework strike will be held in protest against climate change and the destruction of the environment. Its slogan? ‘How dare you?’ – after Greta Thunberg’s admirable 2019 outburst at the UN.38 Human attitudes toward animals and the natural world are closely linked to male attitudes towards women: they spring from the same classist anti-nature, anti-life assumption that the world is there to be shaped, ravaged, and ruined by people (men), and all living things are there for the taking. (They want to ravage Mars next.) Animals, it has long been assumed, can be exploited, experimented on, and forced to yield their every atom in service to human greed. Ever since Christianity attested our superiority over other creatures, and scientists started up with their loose talk of ‘tool-users’ and ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ mammals, and philosophers chimed in with their capricious notions of instinct vs individuality, animals have been looked on as a commercial resource rather than as living beings in their own right, entitled to a place in the world. Prehistoric matriarchal cultures never conceived of working against nature in this illogical way – they left nature intact for us to destroy.
So, Strike One is a protest against patriarchy’s rejection of nature, and the way our narcissistic homocentricism leads to the direct abuse of animals, and the indirect abuse of people. Current farming methods are not only cruel to animals but dangerous to humans, causing pollution, contamination, and superbugs.39 Habitat assimilation and destruction are our legacy. For the sake of the survival not just of the natural world but of human civilisation, women need to withhold their home- and family-oriented labour: stop mothering,40 stop daughtering, stop wifeing. Stop cooking, stop cleaning, stop taking out the trash, stop making the beds and ordering the pizzas, stop shopping, stop lugging home bottles of booze for men to guzzle, stop gardening, stop ironing, stop washing your hair, stop putting on make-up (in fact, boycott the whole beauty cult41). Stop vacuuming and sterilising the cat litter tray and alphabetising the books and paying the bills. Stop making all those pots of tea and coffee for everybody and smelling the milk to see if it’s gone off. Stop embroidering cushion covers. Stop doing all the things you do to try to make a nice home for your family. Stop taking care of things. Just stop it! (This won’t be easy for most women. It goes against the grain, since women invented the home, in prehistory. Women invented cosiness. They needed to establish some domestic tranquillity, comfort and security, in which to raise children.)42
~ Another pause, this time to buy artichokes at the local corner shop. ~
You can put it all on hold for a little while, surely, in aid of animals and the natural world. And what a lot of thinking time you’ll gain.
This strike will only be called off when governments agree to end animal cruelty, fracking, factory farming, and the intensive use of herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilisers. Also, pollution, cars, and dependence on oil and freight containerisation – one of the dirtiest practices ever invented. The money saved from all these shady enterprises can be reallocated to childcare provisions. Ten per cent of every man’s net income will be devoted to animal welfare and the restoration of natural habitats and rainforests. Or he can remotely adopt a manatee or blue-footed booby. Six-pack plastic rings, in which turtles get tangled, will be banned. And every man must agree to clean the toilet weekly without being asked; and to confine the foaming, schmeering, and drizzling from now on to the boudoir.
STRIKE TWO: NO MORE WAR WORK.
BOMBS, WAR, CIVILIAN DEATH, NUCLEAR WASTE, AND OTHER FORMS OF MANMADE RADIATION ARE ALL ATTACKS ON WOMEN.
In contradiction of all the romanticised notions of women’s contributions to war efforts that we’ve been asked to stomach lately – all those TV shows about selfless or bitchy WWI nurses, all the photographs of women slaving away in munitions factories, all those movies about the bored-to-tears girl patriots of Bletchley Park – war is no place for women. It’s very unlikely that this form of mass homicide was ever women’s favoured plan of action (though I admit Hitler had to be stopped somehow). People were apparently killing each other with arrows thirty thousand years ago, which is not nice, but outright group warfare only developed on a grand scale once metal weaponry was developed by Bronze Age societies, which were patriarchal.
War is not in women’s interest: it is more likely to curtail women’s freedoms, as well as distress, subdue, frighten, deprive, and annihilate women, through rape, the murder of offspring, and the degradation of animals and the environment. So, at the very least, women shouldn’t have to help wars happen. They shouldn’t have to fight wars themselves, or proudly welcome home the injured and the dead. They shouldn’t have to provide the world with new men and women to be killed and traumatised in combat.43 War devalues birth: that is its primary function. War is the rejection, demolition of women.44
~ Short pause to check online for poorly paid part-time jobs. ~
This strike, Strike Two, involves withholding women’s labour in the workforce.45 But the intentions behind the labour strike are to organise not just an objection to war but also to the threats to future life on earth posed by nuclear energy, nuclear waste, nuclear bombs, and nuclear fallout – and the suffering that they have already caused, through genocide, environmental contamination, and cancer clusters.46 Men insist that these forces are manageable and necessary. They are not manageable and not necessary. A fifth of all environmental deterioration is caused by militarism. Some of the guys involved in creating the atom bomb had the grace to apologise for unleashing this cataclysmic weapon on us all, and ruining all hope for the future, merely to assuage their own scientific curiosity. But such apologies are of no value. Who in hell cares about Robert Oppenheimer’s conscience, one of the tiniest things in the universe? Nuclear bombs should never ever have been produced.
Women told men this,47 but war is a way of silencing women – through injury, exile, deracination, disease, starvation, disrespect, poverty, violation, bereavement, sexual frustration, grief, and, to top it off, a tsunami of male punditry, speculation, and decision-making. Twentieth-century warfare’s innovation was to direct itself specifically at women and children.48 Militarists claim a million compensatory motives, but as long as women remain the targets and victims of war, warfare remains just one more outlet for misogyny.
Even after a million Britons protested against the Iraq War, Tony Blair went on lying his head off to Parliament and everyone else, insisting the Iraq war was called for. He got away with it, and has played his desired role in genocide. He’s still running around pontificating on any old thing. One of the demands of Strike Two will be that Bush and Blair and their confederates are tried by the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, and that, from now on, the only legitimate military body worldwide will be a carefully monitored UN peace force.
A gentler aim of Strike Two is to give anyone who feels his or her life has been blighted by war in any way, a year’s paid vacation in order to reflect and recuperate (people providing essential services, such as farming and medical care, might have to stagger their years off). This rehabilitation drive should include not only all military personnel, their families, and their victims, but anyone who’s paid their taxes (so, count Trump out, sorry), since they too have incurred harm: it is traumatic to have your hard-earned money squandered on illegal wars.
~ Pause to sort through a pile of receipts for tax purposes. ~
There is the necessity of ending non-military uses of nuclear energy too. When exploiting atomic energy for ‘peaceful’ purposes of this kind, men seem prepared to take incredible risks with our lives and the lives of all future entities on earth. This alone is proof that men are unfit, as a sex, to rule. The deluge of nuclear mess they created may never be adequately contained.49 Nuclear power stations fail horrifically, leaving us with Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, both theoretically preventable. Where will the next mega-contamination incident occur? Hanford? Then there’s the risk that vandals, terrorists, saboteurs or mischief-makers could sneak into nuclear power stations and make off with plutonium – this sort of scenario is never mentioned by politicians when they’re foisting another bunch of reactors on us and boasting about how cheap and safe nuclear energy is. It’s only cheap if life is.
This strike will end when all men quit their jobs in the military sector (female soldiers can remain, if they must, but only to work for the UN’s peace force) and the government agrees to an immediate end to all peaceful and military uses of nuclear power. As punishment for belonging to the gender that thought this stuff up, men must also contribute means-tested contributions (ten per cent of their annual net income) to Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND), the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), Global Zero, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Ribbon International, ICAN or CND. And good luck to us all.
STRIKE THREE: MONEY FOR SEX.
POVERTY IS AN ATTACK ON WOMEN.
As Woolf points out in Three Guineas, women have laboured in the home unpaid for thousands of years, while watching all the family money go on men’s education, men’s leisure pursuits, men’s beer, men’s cigars, and men’s pizzas.50 This debt has now come due. The money must be reallocated to women, and until that is done, straight women should withhold themselves sexually from men.51Men go on sex strike all the time! They are always withholding sex and making excuses for their unpredictable genitalia, in order to keep women docile. Women knock themselves out trying to be attractive, and men still can’t get it up. Well, two can play at that game. Now it’s our turn! We mustn’t be vindictive though. The pure-minded aim of our sex strike is simply to gain the assets, privileges, and power to which all women are entitled. Yes, I’m talking about the money. Since men wouldn’t give it up voluntarily, they must be forced to hand it over in return for sex. They’re always accusing us of being sluts anyway, so this equation should be easy to grasp: no money, no sex.52
The first known fictional try-out of this sexual blackmail strategy occurs in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. There, a female sexual resistance strategy is employed to bring the Peloponnesian war to an end.53 Lysistrata enlists the help of both allied and enemy women, on the grounds that the war is bad for all women. They hole up in the Acropolis together and it’s really quite a successful sit-in. Some of the women do try to tiptoe off, offering feeble excuses like: ‘the moths will be eating my sheepskin,’ ‘I turn out to be pregnant and have to go home to have the baby – I’ll be back tomorrow,’ and ‘the owls [fellow inhabitants of the Acropolis] are keeping me up at night.’ (I paraphrase.) But in the end, the plan works like a charm: the priapic menfolk are soon inspired to agree a peace deal, so they can rush the women back to bed.
Even with the sorry proliferation of porn, sex slaves, and sex arses (see footnote 6) – offering alternatives to men unwilling or unable to engage with female desire – a sex strike still seems a viable ploy with a proud history.54 For even greater effect, we might try the showstopping power of vaginal display.55 Such a strike would of course have to be carefully policed, because of men’s dependence on violence as a means of comment and coercion. Not everyone’s as sane and reasonable as Aristophanes’ male characters (witness the violent and sexual threats launched at women who dare to speak out about anything).
Now, no shirking, sisters. No lame apologies and secret assignations! Remember, there will be plenty of sex (make-up sex!), once men have recognised their responsibilities as human beings, lovers, and mensches.
~ Pause to push through hordes of mamas and babies in a cafe. ~
We might also hope for a drop in the pregnancy rate as a result of the sex strike. Parenthood has many profound joys, and should have its rights too (maternity/paternity leave, etc.). It is a traditional and theoretically honourable part of adult life. But having a child doubles your carbon footprint. It’s also harder and harder to get close to paintings in museums. A moratorium on childbirth might give women a chance to explore the freedom, leisure, self-containment, and privacy of childlessness. The missing tax revenue and pension contributions that a lower birth rate might cause could be replenished by opening the borders to more immigration. But this birth pause does not in any way discount the whole history and heroism of motherhood.
Some feminists complain that the concept of a female sex strike implies, dispiritingly, that women have no sexual needs of their own, and that sex is just a commodity that women supply for men. No. Nobody has any automatic right to sex. Withholding sex is simply one power women can wield, amongst others, in the service of a good cause. The sacrifice incurred by the sex strike will be borne by both sides, in aid of female emancipation. Once matriarchy is established, the needs, wishes, and capabilities of women will finally be given the attention they deserve. We’ll have a ball.
The sex strike will only be called off once the majority of men permanently transfer the majority of their financial assets (on an ongoing basis) to one or more women of their choice, or contribute the same on an ongoing basis to a women’s charity or non-profit banking organisation formed to issue women loans, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Governments must also make all violence a crime, and tax men twice as much as women, the revenues raised to be earmarked for the enhancement of women’s lives, in the form of safety, education, free menstruation materials,56 childcare and reparations for slavery. In addition, schoolchildren must study prehistory in order to get an understanding of matriarchal cultures. So as to reinstate men’s natural duty to serve female pleasure, biology courses and sex ed classes in school will work to revise our decayed approach to sex, with particular emphasis on the female orgasm and the abandonment of porn. Men must spend at least one day a week listening instead to what women have to say. And I wish they’d smile more – men’s default facial expressions are too gruff. They frighten me.57
~ Pause to caress husband’s cheek.58 ~
If all else fails, we can always mobilise a pizza strike. That’s got to work.
Would we settle for less than the demands outlined here, men might ask. But we have, we have, for thousands of years. It’s terrible that Virginia Woolf had to settle for less.59
__________________
1 In baseball, three strikes and you’re out. Out on your ass. The expression therefore has some bearing on the trajectory of this essay, my pitch being that men are swinging wild. The original idea for the piece came from reading Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (Hogarth Press, 1938), to which I was alerted by a friend, the novelist Peter Burnett. But I couldn’t refer to three letters, as Woolf does, since nobody writes letters any more; and I chose strikes to replace her guineas, since nobody knows what a guinea is any more either. Woolf is being ironic about money anyway. With eccentric thoroughness and wit, her essay considers various good causes to which three guineas could usefully be put: the prevention of war; rebuilding a women’s college in Cambridge; or finding employment for women in the professions. She finally offers a guinea to each cause, this being all an ‘educated gentleman’s daughter’ could afford. Woolf ’s three guineas thus become, in their paltriness, both a significant gesture in the right direction and an emblem of women’s second-class status. The limitations imposed on women are the real subject of Woolf ’s essay. But there’s something tenacious about the image of those three guineas. They can’t be denied. It may be hard now to imagine behaving patronisingly towards Virginia Woolf – aren’t we all supposed to be afraid of her? – but she was well aware of what both the ‘intelligentsia and ignorantsia’ put women through. In Three Guineas, she concludes that women are outsiders – but in a good way. So are the many footnotes in Woolf ’s essay. Footnotes are the outsiders within a text, and make obliging underdogs in an essay on female subordination.
2 As George Bernard Shaw said on his second arrival in America, ‘I told you what to do and you haven’t done it.’ I put my solution to male violence towards women in the most palatable form I could think up, a romcom novel called Mimi (Bloomsbury, 2013) about a rich guy in New York who sees the light and becomes a champion of women. Mimi’s solution to the downward spiral of patriarchal insanity is: hand over the money. Transfer all wealth into female control. Not half of it, not fifty-two per cent either – ALL THE MONEY. Given the mean little way late capitalism works, a steady wholesale redistribution of wealth seems the simplest method of ensuring women get respected more, and raped and murdered less (femicidal violence being a five-thousand-year-old fad, embedded in women’s low social status). Until we can return to a matriarchal form of socialism (or ‘commonism’, as another friend, the novelist John Aberdein, puts it) in which money has no place, we must in the short term put women in possession of serious wealth. This pro-female asset-reset, which in Mimi I dubbed the Odalisque Revolution, would be a peaceful form of male revolt – yes, it’s men who will need to do the work here, if they want to join the Odalisque Revolution (women are automatic members). It could be progressed on an individual basis, in private, by any right-thinking man who’s tired of hearing about women being deprived, denied, doubted, despised, derided, deluded, defamed, ignored, cheated, exploited, blamed, vilified, cajoled, threatened, violated, killed, overworked, messed with, ordered about, and ground into the dirt. It’s not just about money though. The ultimate aim of the Odalisque Revolution is to start a new matriarchal era. Such a revolution seems to me a safe, sensible, efficient, and really rather innocuous solution to the devastation caused by male mayhem and wars and depredations of the environment. And yet hardly any men to my knowledge have followed my very clear instructions on how they can relinquish the unfair advantages so many claim to abhor. Only one person (the intrepid writer and critic Anthony Rudolf) has actually asked to have his Odalisque Revolution Mea Culpa Declaration stamped. The detachable certificate, once stamped, ensures membership of the Odalisque Revolution. It can be found at the back of any copy of Mimi, and all the contrite philogynist has to do is sign it and give everything he’s got (or most of it: he can keep some petty cash, for pizza’s sake) to a woman, or women, of his choice. The Declaration (see footnote 59), written in plain English, invites the signatory to admit that male property and power are ill-gotten gains, the products of men’s ancient and misguided terrorist campaign aimed at the usurpation of women and, to redress this, the signatory pledges to hand over all his assets to women. Strangely enough, few besides my dear husband Todd McEwen have shown any sign of wholly acquiescing to my demands. No one has even asked me to defend my position. Instead, the usual male silence: the unspoken policy seems to be to deprive my wealth-redistribution idea of oxygen by not responding to it at all. Even some female reviewers surfaced to voice doubts, flinging around examples of unworthy female leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth I, and Lady Macbeth. Now, wait a minute! You’re telling me you object to joining other women in acquiring all the world’s wealth, and thereby subverting the murderous course men have taken during the last five thousand years, because there have existed a few women, real or fictional, with anti-humanitarian sympathies? In other words, because a few creepy women rose to high office within patriarchy, you think women as a whole should never be given an even break. But can anyone truly believe women would make as big a mess of power as men have? Come on, who are you trying to kid? Enough of this. We’ve run out of time for ambivalence, hair-splitting, and coquettish self-abnegation. What we need NOW is a radical transfer of power.
3 Why do men like pizza so much? I think it’s because the boxes look official, as if the guy has just come from some important meeting and he’s got really important documents in there or something – whereas really, it’s just a big hot slippery blop of dough covered with pepperoni, chicken tikka, and pineapple chunks.
4 In the London Review of Books (March 20, 2014), Beard described what it’s like never to feel you and your kind are properly represented in the culture. NB. America broke away from England for just such a reason: ‘No taxation without representation.’ Just saying.
5 Our inane absorption in youth and beauty has disenfranchised most of the female population. Never have the ideals of female appearance been so standardised: the self-airbrushed face, the nail polish, the long straight flowing hair, tight-ass jeans, and sassy short top are now compulsory, while the wrinkled, dimpled, frazzled, ex-Pilateased bodies of older women have become the world’s last great expanse of uncharted territory.
6 One all too literal ‘backlash’ against female emancipation is the new allegiance to anal sex, amusingly aired in the aptly named movie Damsels in Distress (directed by Whit Stillman, 2012). Men’s unwillingness to concern themselves with the clitoris and vagina is a new blight on our age. Corrective instructions on rimming, offered to ‘analphobes’, suggest any lack of interest in anal sex is inexcusable (adopting a clockwise direction is highly recommended). And women’s increasing dissatisfaction with their own genitals has kept pace with male oversights – when they’re done waxing, plucking, and scenting themselves, the next step is creating the ‘designer vagina’. Labiaplasty is a growing business, along with a belief that ‘abnormal labia tissue’ is a widespread problem. The fault is not with pudenda but with misogynists. By the sound of things, men seem to have become worse lovers than ever before (and, given the history of the missionary position, that’s saying something!), piteously unaware of their true and ancient role, that of pleasing women. Women are not here for male pleasure – men exist to give women pleasure. Biology supports this, as Catherine Blackledge points out in Raising the Skirt/The Story of V (Orion, 2003/2020), a book highly recommended for anyone interested in female sexuality, or even those who are not – in fact it should be compulsory reading for anyone who purchases a ‘sex arse’, a rubber sex toy comprising a select portion of amputated torso. (‘I voted Leave – but now my sex arses are stuck at customs!’, cried a disappointed UK patriot experiencing Brexit shambles – Sunday Sport Online, January 2, 2021.) Penis construction throughout nature is oriented more toward female pleasure than male, since the quality of the female orgasm determines the male’s reproductive influence. Even female fruit flies insist on orgasms! (They also have the most elaborate, spiralling vaginas. Who knew?) The vagina, Blackledge reports, is not a passive canal for receiving sperm and issuing offspring. It is an assessment station, selecting and expelling sperm – and one major deciding factor for sperm admission is the female orgasm. People wrongly believe the penis performs ‘as a sperm placement tool, a rigid insertion device shaped to shoot sperm quickly and efficiently into the correct orifice’. This fails to explain the varied size and shape of penises, as well as the time and care males of many species take to prepare the female for sperm insertion, throughout courtship and mating behaviour (there’s some kind of marsupial mouse that spends five hours thrusting – marsupials really know how to live). Despite the standard use of rape in war to secure a genetic advantage over enemies, female pleasure is, if not essential, highly recommended in the passing-on of men’s genes. Rape doesn’t pay, in the long run, says Blackledge. ‘The important question for a male is not: Can I place my sperm inside this female? Rather the crucial question is: Can I persuade the female to use my sperm instead of some other male’s?… The primary role of the penis is none other than to act as an internal courting device – shaped to provide the vagina with the best possible and reproductively successful stimulation.’ The male orgasm is biologically necessary too, sure, but that’s less of an influence on penis construction. All of which reminds me of a limerick:
There was a young fellow named Prost
Who tried to make love to a ghost.
At the height of its spasm,
The poor ectoplasm
Cried ‘Ah, now I feel it – almost!’
7 Disasters caused by men, but borne by women. Men run the banks and building societies after all, the property market, the stock market, industries, Parliament, Congress, the internet, monopolies and corporations and all the other enterprises that keep economic downturns happening. Not only do men create these financial collapses, but they unfairly tend to withstand them better too. Because they have all the dough! We are all being crushed beneath their insane belief in growth and progress and maniacal lust for despoiling things. Since the Romans, patriarchy has proved to be the guarantee of a society doomed to implode. (But at least the Romans, before Christianity spoiled everything, had a lot of wine and sex. And chariots. It wasn’t all bad.)
8 The accusation of institutional sexism must be added to the British police force’s proven institutional racism. Only eight out of forty-three police forces in England and Wales respond adequately to instances of domestic violence, according to the 2014 estimate of their own body, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. Police behaviour towards purported victims ranges from unforthcoming to shameful. West Midlands police officers called one female victim a ‘fucking slag’. ‘He threatened to cut my womb out with a pizza cutter. When I spoke to the police, they just laughed,’ recalled another abuse victim (Progress Report on the Police Response to Domestic Abuse, HMICFRS, November 2017). Predictably, domestic abuse committed by cops is widely covered up by their colleagues, and the victims and witnesses are arrested instead and intimidated. With domestic abuse now on the rise, due to Covid lockdowns, Greater Manchester Police have admitted that they ignored or erased seventy per cent of reports of domestic abuse reported during 2020. Not very nice of them. (NB. The police did nothing for years about reports of Jimmy Savile’s crimes either. Wherever women are ill-treated, children will be too.)
9 When Phil Spector died in prison in January 2021, the death was largely reported as that of a big important gifted and famous music producer whose life happened to end in ‘tragedy’. The tragedy was of his own making. He abused women all his life; he waved guns at people, particularly women who rejected him. He bullied his ex-wife, on pain of death, into accepting an old car and minimal alimony as part of the divorce settlement. And, finally, he shot an actress in the head, whom he’d just met, and then claimed she’d committed suicide in his house. Yet Rolling Stone treated this recurrent behaviour as incidental, tweeting about ‘Phil Spector, the famed “Wall of Sound” producer… whose legacy was marred by a murder conviction’ (January 17, 2021). Some legacy.
10 Nitpicking about rape definitions is so wearying, especially when you need all your strength for fleeing rapists. Whoopi Goldberg added to the confusion in 2009 by declaring that Roman Polanski isn’t guilty of ‘rape-rape’. What, just ‘rape’ then? Trump seems even more oblivious to all the rape allegations against him, an invincibility that must give new vigour to millions of fellow rapists. In England and Wales, few sexual molestation victims expect any solution from the criminal justice system: rape prosecutions are at an all-time low. Recent figures suggest that only 1.5% of rape claims result in any charge at all (see Julie Bindel, The Guardian, January 24, 2021). That’s a lot of consequence-free violation going on.
11 Intolerance toward immigrants and foreigners closely resembles the negative male treatment of women and animals and other groups that are left out of calculations except as objects of blame. According to Teresa Hayter, all border controls are counterproductive and unjust: ‘Their object… is to exclude poor people, and especially black people. The denial of free movement across frontiers gives rise to some of the worst and most vicious abuses of human rights, and provides perhaps the most fertile terrain for the agitation of the far right.’ From Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls (Pluto, 2004).
12 The UN’s Special Rapporteur Rashida Manjoo’s statement on sexism in the UK (April 15, 2014) dropped like cool rain on a desert, and even managed to affront the Mail (or was it the male?). Amongst many acute observations about Britain’s noncompliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (to which, incidentally, the British government had already signed up), Manjoo raised concerns about the machinations of the family court system. She said it ignores ‘children and women’s safety when hearing applications for contact with estranged parents. … Lawyers and magistrates have limited understanding of the dynamics of domestic abuse and force children and their mothers to enter into unsafe and inappropriate contact arrangements, which are mostly unsupervised. Shared parenting is increasingly seen as an appropriate, default position without the adequate consideration of the best interests of the child principle and ignoring the history of family abuse…’ The best interests of children rarely seem much of a priority in Britain.
13 We think we treat women okay? Then why do they feel they have to wear six-inch heels to work? And that their only purpose in life is to sculpt their eyebrows, give good head, and learn to lap-dance? Why does Melania Trump have to organise those ‘fucking’ Christmas decorations? Why do some women feel they need plastic surgery in order to look like a Barbie doll? This form of self-mutilation is becoming the norm, and is now being sought at an earlier and earlier age (if you can afford it, that is; and, if you can’t, you may well be fired, demoted, dumped, snubbed, harassed, or shunned). Discrimination on the basis of how you look has long been an effective repressive weapon against women. Every cosmetic procedure performed puts pressure on other women to submit to body enhancements. When the fact is, even if you miraculously manage to be whatever’s considered beautiful in your era (the ideal is always changing), you’ll still be stuck in a sexist society that hates you! Women’s self-esteem is in tatters, smothered under a deluge of photoshopped celebs, the grotesqueries of the designer fashion parade, the realities of poverty, and a gushing river of porn and big-eyed, big-breasted superwoman types in films and cartoon animation, all geared to prioritise male pleasure and artificial styles of female body. As a result of all this, there are girls on anorexic websites who congratulate each other for dying. Why is female life held so cheap? The young opera star Tara Erraught was described in the Independent as ‘dumpy’, by The Times as ‘unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing’, and by the Financial Times as a ‘chubby bundle of puppy fat’. Ever considered focusing on the woman’s singing ability? (See Susannah Clapp’s great retort to these insults – Observer, May 25, 2014.) Why does female fat worry people so? Because it implies a freedom from constraint, a vice, a failure, a lack of decorum. But what heaven does slimness win you? As the novelist Elfriede Jelinek wrote, ‘The slim ones, who have worked hard for their figure… climb up the mountains every day or climb the walls at home…’ (Greed, 2006.) One defect of Susie Orbach’s book Fat is a Feminist Issue, by the way, is that it offers diet advice: this seriously undermines the radicalism of its empowerment message. It’s fattism that is the real feminist issue. Meanwhile, in ‘The Obesity Era’ (Aeon magazine, June 19, 2013), David Berreby suggests that being overweight may actually be caused by global pollution rather than shameful lapses in self-control. This places guilt back where it belongs, in patriarchy’s lap, as the instrument of all this environmental destruction.
14 No one has so far questioned my use of the term ‘terrorism’ to describe all the really lousy stuff men do to women en masse as a gender – perhaps because the word is so self-evidently spot on. But it all depends on who’s doing the defining. Men, the current controllers of language, seem reluctant to admit that all men in a patriarchal society are terrorists. Instead, they trip all over themselves trying to keep the definition of terrorism fuzzy. White American males rarely commit it, apparently. The police and media hesitate to name their barbaric acts ‘terrorism’. Nobody even bothered to keep an eye on Anthony Quinn Warner, though his girlfriend warned police a year before his 2020 suicide bombing in Nashville that he was making bombs and plotting some destructive act. Instead, CNN reported after the incident, ‘The man who detonated an RV bomb in downtown Nashville early Christmas morning was a loner with no significant criminal record and as yet no signs of a political ideology’ (Eric Levenson, CNN, December 30, 2020). Here’s what his ideology was: patriarchy. The US Department of Defense’s dictionary of military terms defines terrorism thus: ‘The calculated use of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.’ According to FBI special agent Doug Korneski, terrorism is ‘the use of force or violence in the furtherance of a political or social ideology’ (Levi Ismail, News Channel 5, Nashville, December 28, 2020). What is male oppression if not a coercive campaign that depends on propaganda, blackmail, and the calculated use of unlawful violence to further its ideology? Through violence, or the threat of it, patriarchal terrorists indoctrinate, malign, silence, subdue, guilt-trip, and murder. Misogyny can be lethal. Just because this particular terror agenda has been in play for thousands of years doesn’t absolve it of criminality. ALL VIOLENCE IS A TERRORIST ACT. Unless committed in self-defence or to protect life. All violence aids patriarchy. And all violence is a hate crime against women, since women gave birth to the people being murdered or mutilated, and women are usually the ones left to tend the wounded and mourn the dead. Family annihilation, that euphemistic term for massacring the people closest to you whenever you feel like it, is a good example. Killing your family out of pique is not just an unfortunate offshoot of domestic disharmony, as in ‘it takes two to tango’ and other victim-blaming guff. It is an intimidating display of male power, a misogynistically motivated hate crime, an act of patriarchal terror. The truth will out. The New York Times has now introduced the clumsy term ‘male supremacy terrorism’ (March 17, 2021) and even Wikipedia has a page on ‘misogynistic terrorism’.
15 In The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), Tolstoy’s narrator Pozdnyshev complains bitterly that the whole world is pro-woman – essentially because women are big shoppers. There are all these products, he says, aimed at women: they may be hopeless at making money, but they sure can spend it. This picture of male victimhood is neatly contradicted later on though, when it emerges that Pozdnyshev has murdered his own wife in a jealous rage. Mrs Pozdnyshev has had her last spree.
16 Women have to be kept on their toes, worrying and consuming, to keep late capitalism afloat. So-called fashion is a way of corralling women’s psyches into acquiescence, even to the point of personal financial ruin. There is continual pressure on women to throw out one set of clothes in favour of another, at great cost to the environment, or risk humiliation. Marks and Spencer released a self-satisfied ad campaign in 2014 called ‘Leading Ladies’, which involved well-known, middle-aged women like Emma Thompson, Annie Lennox and others, swanning about distractedly in M & S gear (S & M gear would have been more appropriate, given the slavish predicament of the fashion-conscious). Somehow, these celebs all seemed a lot more celebratable before they were roped into modelling those dopey black-and-white duds. Again, a vague ‘advance’ made by women (in this case, excelling as actors, artists, movers and shakers) is somehow twisted into its opposite, in the service of commerce. So, instead of offering middle-aged women reason to feel somewhat proud of themselves for what they’ve accomplished through talent and hard work, M & S’s ‘Leading Ladies’ adverts implied that whatever lofty things these high-flyers may once have had on their minds, what they really care about is towing the line in very conventional clothing. For marketers, respected public figures become just more gals on which to hang products. The hidden purpose of it all is to reduce any supposed independence in women to signs of compliance – in this case, compliance with the dictates of fashion. These ‘Leading Ladies’ weren’t leading the way anywhere but the fitting room.
17 Gallantry is dead. In 2013, the BBC sports reporter John Inverdale felt his negative estimation of tennis star Marion Bartoli’s feminine allure was required by the nation the day she won Wimbledon. Not very sporting of him. Here is Inverdale on the champion, in her moment of glory: ‘I just wonder if her dad did say to her when she was twelve, thirteen, fourteen maybe, “Listen, you are never going to be, you know, a looker. You are never going to be somebody like a Sharapova, you’re never going to be five foot eleven, you’re never going to be somebody with long legs, so you have to compensate for that. You are going to have to be the most dogged, determined fighter that anyone has ever seen on the tennis court if you are going to make it,” and she kind of is.’ The message was clear: get back to your mirrors, girls. Because, however good you may be at something else, your only real function in life is to be found attractive by jerks like Inverdale. The BBC received seven hundred complaints about Inverdale’s comments (and even a reprimand from Maria Miller, the Tory Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport – though what induced compassion in a Tory, I do not know). Inverdale apologised later for his obnoxiousness, and the BBC issued this grudging statement: ‘We accept that this remark was insensitive and for that we apologise.’ But what good was that? The damage was already done to the psyches of women and girls across the country! The last resort of the cornered misogynist is often hypochondria. Behind every male fist, every declaration of male displeasure, there is always the threat of self-pity. Inverdale claimed illness had interfered with his judgement. Harvey Weinstein succumbed to back trouble (after all his lively antics in hotel rooms too!), travelling to his 2020 trial in a wheelchair. And in June 2014, Michael Fabricant used novocaine confusion (he’d just been to the dentist) as his excuse for his threatening tweet about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: ‘I could never appear on a discussion prog with [her.] I would either end up with a brain haemorrhage or by punching her in the throat.’
18 While American women got there a little earlier, British women were only fully entitled to vote, at age 21, in 1928 – just ten years before the publication of Woolf ’s Three Guineas. (Women couldn’t vote in Switzerland and Bangladesh until 1971, and in Iraq had to wait until 1980.)
19 Although the only FGM conviction to succeed in Britain so far occurred in 2019; three other cases ended in acquittal. Meanwhile, a form of virtual FGM goes on at Evangelical ‘Purity balls’ (now spreading to Europe from America). At these cheery gatherings, the sacrificial victim, a teenage girl, dressed all in white, pledges her virginity to her father (eeeugh!), in his capacity as ‘High Priest in the home’. I am not kidding. Proffering her virginity to her dad for safekeeping, the girl effectively neuters herself (temporarily) for the sake, she’s led to believe, of another bloke: her future husband. Not even kissing is allowed in this community before marriage. Weirdly borrowing abortion lingo, the doting fathers, or ‘High Priests’, claim to be protecting their daughters’ ‘choice’. What a tangle of hypocrisy, when in fact any worship of virginity is a denial of female sexuality and bad news for women.
20 The Equal Pay Act was passed in Britain in 1970, yet it is still unlikely that any woman now working in the UK will see pay equality in her lifetime. The pay gap for British women is currently twenty per cent below men.
21 The modest requirements of the Bechdel test: (1) A movie has to have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man (bechdeltest.com).
22 Despite seven women successfully suing the New York Times in 1974 for sex discrimination in hiring, pay, and promotion, the paper has never outgrown its male bias. In 2014 the paper fired its first female executive editor, Jill Abramson. Curiously enough, Le Monde fired its first female editor Natalie Nougayrède the same week. What unanimity! Female CEOs are more likely to be fired, and fired sooner, than their male counterparts (Edward Helmore, Observer, May 17, 2014): male bosses are given more time to settle in, while employers, colleagues, and junior staff are swift to grow impatient with female bosses. Female politicians are treated with greater scorn too. The murderous venom directed at Hillary Clinton, Theresa May, Nicola Sturgeon, Angela Merkel, Diane Abbott, Caroline Lucas, Jill Stein, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kshama Sawant and Alexandra OcasioCortez are examples of this intolerant attitude towards women who wield some power in the public sphere. But the harshest treatment of all has been reserved for Greta Thunberg, a child who dared to tell it like it is. The fact that she speaks out infuriates a lot of men. One attack came in the form of a cartoon depicting her being raped. Thunberg’s unflinching response was: ‘This shows we’re winning.’ (If only.)
23 In an interview conducted by PN Review (2001), Wilmers said: ‘I think women find it difficult to do their jobs, look after their children, cook dinner and write pieces. They just can’t get it all done. And men can. Because they have fewer, quite different responsibilities. And they’re not so newly arrived in the country. They’re not so frightened of asserting themselves. And they’re not so anxious to please. They’re going to write their pieces and to hell with the rest. And I don’t think women think that way.’ (‘Why the LRB Should Stop Cooking Up Excuses Over Lack of Women Reviewers’, Guardian, February 25, 2014.) As of 2015, eighty-two per cent of the articles in the LRB since its inception were by men (although it did also publish Mary Beard’s lecture on the silencing of women, mentioned earlier). In Three Guineas, Woolf warns against such gender segregation, citing the enthusiasm that Hitler and Mussolini shared for the practice. Dictators thrive on division. So, ideally, men should perhaps review women’s books and vice versa – if that is the only way to prevent women from being ghettoised. The LRB’s track record seems fairly progressive though, compared to the androcentric nonsense churned out by most Saturday newspaper supplements, in which all women seem able to do is eat noodles and model clothing. Most of the columnists, the gardening experts, chefs, travel advisors, car reviewers and other know-it-alls, are men! The self-aggrandisement of male chefs is particularly irksome – women cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner for thousands of years without any fandango. The worst thing about men taking over the cooking of fancy food in restaurants is that every dish now arrives covered in ejaculate, all drizzle, foam, and schmeers. Wait till male gardeners figure out how to make plants produce froth – just think of all the prizes, TV spots, and Chelsea Flower Show medals they’ll hand themselves.
24 Why distinguish between war and war crimes? They are the same thing. WWI veteran Harry Patch said war is ‘nothing better than legalised mass murder’ (The Last Fighting Tommy, 2008). For Thomas Bernhard, war was just further proof of male iniquity: ‘War is the poetry of men, by which they seek to gain attention and relief throughout their lives… They [flee] from one misery to another, one misfortune to another, each one deeper and more inescapable than the last, and they always [make] sure of taking someone else with them’ (Gathering Evidence, 1985).
25 See Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1967) for a semi-jokey description of the hard way: S.C.U.M. stands for the Society for Cutting Up Men. But I myself advocate only peaceful methods of revolution. Violence is so male. The hell with it.
26 Elizabeth Gould Davis’ The First Sex (Penguin, 1972) pieces prehistory together through a study of myth, anthropology, and archaeology, to find a predominantly matriarchal past that lasted tens of thousands of years. This, and Marija Gimbutas’ archaeological work on widespread and highly creative prehistoric matriarchal cultures in Europe, give one hope that patriarchy was never inevitable, having lasted a fraction of the time that matriarchies persisted; and that there are better, fairer, and much more artistic ways to organise ourselves, i.e. with the focus on WOMEN.
27 ‘Workers at a KFC and McDonald’s supplier punch, kick and stamp on the heads of live poultry,’ reported the Daily Mirror (August 12, 2016).
28 Warring is a classic male trait (noisily mimicked by the ridiculous male absorption in team sports). As Virginia Woolf writes in Three Guineas, directly addressing men: ‘Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which [women] have never felt or enjoyed.’ But she admits that Wilfred Owen did not share in this penchant. And then there’s Harry Patch. And Thomas Bernhard. And all the men who refused to fight in the Vietnam War. And the Veterans for Peace who did fight but now declare: ‘We, having dutifully served our nation, do hereby affirm our greater responsibility to serve the cause of world peace.’ (My italics.) So, the male taste for war can apparently be overcome.
29 In fact, it’s getting worse, not better! (Douglas Main, Live Science, October 29, 2013.)
30 I do, sort of, realise that most men are not directly, personally responsible for all the atrocities committed by other men; nor do women have an absolute monopoly on humanity and compassion. Women can be fucking mean! It’s the kind of animal humans are. We’re carnivorous, conflicted, spiteful (and not reacting well, I suspect, to our acute population density). But whatever the failings of women may be, this is no reason for men to be excused from the chore of making amends. The endgame we currently face was inflicted on us entirely by patriarchy and its unwillingness to live in harmony with nature – deforestation contributed to the Ebola outbreak, for example: ‘Experts say the rising number of emerging viruses is largely the result of ecological destruction and wildlife trade… It doesn’t have to be this way.’ (‘Hunting for “Disease X”’, CNN, December 24, 2020.) Clearly, as a ‘class’ (Woolf ’s term), men have bungled things badly and they should set them right.
31 Still, ninety-eight per cent of mass shootings have been carried out by men.
32 (Or ‘menschen’?) In The Apartment (directed by Billy Wilder, 1960), C. C. Baxter is urged by his doctor neighbour to give up his presumed playboy lifestyle (that has supposedly led to Fran Kubelik’s suicide attempt) and behave like ‘a mensch – a human being’. Baxter eventually takes the advice.
33 A word to the wise: very hot pan. There’s nothing gentle about making an omelette.
34 The multiple orgasm is, after all, one of nature’s triumphs. Why waste it? In a woman-centred society, there would be no further denial of the female orgasm.
35 Get things off to a merry start by painting easily erected corrections for street names – Solanas Street, Wollstonecraft Mews, Austen Avenue, etc. – a la artist Jackie Parry’s feminised map of Glasgow, ‘Women in the City’ (2012); Sara Sheridan’s book, Where are the Women? (2019), which tackles the whole of Scotland; and Rebecca Solnit’s Revised New York subway map (New Yorker, October 11, 2016). Metaphysical acts of insubordination.
36 Barcelona has had Vaga de Totes feminist protest strikes, and there have been repeated strikes by women in Poland over new abortion restrictions: in October 2020, women put on a powerful mid-Covid strike, in protest against PiS party’s draconian anti-abortion laws, the Catholic church, climate change, and patriarchy in general. Good posters, such as ‘The government is not a pregnancy, it can be removed.’ That’s the kind of thing we need now, globally, from small, spontaneous gatherings, to bigger shindigs like the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, V-Day, and the corresponding One Billion Rising demos initiated by V (Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues). The latter events are an annual public acknowledgement that one third of all women and girls alive today will be raped or beaten – one billion. The aim: ‘We rise to show we are determined to create a new kind of consciousness – one where violence will be resisted until it is unthinkable.’ It’s a celebration of women, in fact, and its slogan is ‘Strike, Rise, and Dance’.
37 When I first published this essay in The Baffler in 2015, I said the precise details of the three strikes were still negotiable and invited readers to help set up strikes, hone the bargaining points, and criticise or make amendments to the adjunct causes I propose – via the email address odalisquerevolution@gmail.com, which I’d just created for the purpose. Then I promptly forgot all about that email account, for five years, and missed an approving email from V, amongst others. Some organiser, huh? (I check it more often now.)
38 Thunberg delivered a searing speech at the United Nations’ Climate Action Summit in New York: ‘People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is the money, and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?’ On a similar theme, Fran Lebowitz’s advice to the young is to start searching for water, as ‘apparently, we drank it all’ (‘Hall of Records’, Pretend It’s a City, directed by Martin Scorsese, 2021).
39 It’s now thought that Covid-19 is unlikely to have begun with a pangolin in a Chinese wet market; it was probably transmitted from bats or farm animals. But the disruption of animal habitats, with resulting contact between species which formerly kept their distance from each other, is probably ultimately to blame. The emergence of bird flu, SARS, swine flu, variant CJD, and now Covid, seems related to the increasing interest in bushmeat, and farming malpractice. See Ravi Letzter in Live Science (May 28, 2020), and the Meat Atlas (Heinrich Böll Foundation/Friends of the Earth Europe, 2014), for evidence of the destructiveness of industrial livestock farming. Rachel Carson’s outcry, Silent Spring (1962), remains a vital treatment of the subject. See also Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s documentary, Our Daily Bread (2006), a quietly tragic examination of intensive farming. Fishing is now intensive too, causing unchecked pain, collateral death and damage, depletion of stocks, and waste, as well as incendiary disputes about international quotas. Whales, dolphins, and sharks are caught ‘accidentally’ in fishing nets, leading to repeated trauma and often death, even when attempts are made to free them. Seals, blamed for eating the fish, are summarily culled, or mangled in the rudders of boats. Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corals since 1995 (BBC News, October 14, 2020) and is unlikely to survive. Due to climate change, pollution, and acidification, the oceans are on track for mass extinctions this century (Carl Zimmer, New York Times, January 15, 2015). WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH US? ARE WE ALL TOO BUSY GETTING LAID TO GET MAD?
40 This strike is not meant as an attack on motherhood. Men thrive on deriding women’s bodies and reproductive power. This is why childcare, maternity services, abortion, family planning, schools, and parental access arrangements after divorce are so critical in any battle for equality. Laura Mulvey’s film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) movingly pinpoints the political implications of childcare provision. When women have control of their bodies and society within matriarchy, these practical matters will be resolved with ease. In the meantime, carry on shielding your children from danger, providing them with food, clothing, and shelter and helping them with their homework, even during the housework strike – since life, health, comfort, security, education, and freedom of movement are all principles we want to protect.
41 We are now totally obsessed with looks in the West. But the meagre delights of our enthrallment to beauty come at the cost of so much misery: anorexia, bulimia, OCD, suicide, the mercenary diet industry and plastic surgery, injuries from tumbling over in high heels, melanomas from sunbathing and tanning salons, the horrors of unaesthetic gymwear, and jokey vocab for aspects of bodies deemed physically deficient according to current mores (turkey neck, muffin top, cankles, bingo wings, spare tyres, love handles, hairanoia, etc.). People are so corrupted by the modern beauty fixation, they now have ‘body dysmorphia’, not just about their own but other people’s bodies: we are troubled by all bodies and can see only the supposed faults. It’s distracting, depressing, and a great waste of energy. There is no real need to assess people’s appearance all the time. It’s rude, it’s abusive, it’s dull, it’s objectifying. It is thus part of a spectrum of abuse that ranges from anti-female biases at school and work, to their full-blown expression in rape and murder. Supreme beauty is a rarity, after all, an aberration. We don’t all have to aspire to it. Our concepts of beauty are also based on class and race privilege (we’re all aware of ‘the skin of the rich’). Audre Lorde talked about ‘the racist distortions of beauty’, and the way ‘gorgeous’, even in the gay community, used to be decided by white male standards, ‘that world that defined us as doubly nothing because we were black and because we were women.’ (Speech at UCLA, early 1990s, https://youtu.be/OUXj0BVQkpw.) Therefore, in conjunction with Strike One, I would like to instigate a one-year moratorium on any mention of people’s appearance. We can chat about other topics for a change. The beauteous would survive a slight lessening of attention and acclaim, and the rest of us could relax. After a year of such abstinence I bet we’ll be cured of the habit, and be much better conversationalists.
42 For further elucidation of ‘cosiness’, see Mimi, ibid., pp. 24, 32–33, 37, 64, 66, 72, 82, 171, 195, 198–199, 223, 226, 230–231, 234, 273, 294. (Courtesy of the Mimi Index, kindly compiled by the writer Suzy Romer, odalisquerevolutionblog, 2014.)
43 This motive for refusing to bear children is mentioned in the two women’s letters to the Telegraph in 1937, quoted by Woolf in Three Guineas.
44 Even military marching is bad for women. Female soldiers have been injured by the requirements of marching, which are always oriented to the length of the male leg. For further glimpses into such marching, including a chicken who’s pretty good at it, see marchright.com. (And for the best male marching, see the bersaglieri of the Italian Army’s infantry corps. They run while blowing trumpets.)
45 Of the three strikes I propose, I think the labour strike should be the easiest to pull off – because, after all, who wants to WORK? Why should women, any more than bees, participate in the Protestant work ethic devised by men? A Day Without A Woman was a labour strike staged in the US in 2017 in protest against Trump. If the necessity of women’s labour must be proven in such an elementary way as this, then, so be it. Even a strike of a day – by all women everywhere – will bring things to a complete standstill. (Theme song: ‘Union Maid’, Woody Guthrie, 1940.) Employers will soon ‘come to the table’ (such a nice domestic phrase!) and meet our terms – and think of the delicious sensation meanwhile of a day/week/month/year off. Overwork silences dissent and original thought and destroys physical, emotional and community health. That’s what capitalists like so much about it. WoHeLo, short for Work–Health–Love, the motto (and greeting) of the youth group formerly known as the Campfire Girls (now just Camp Fire), may be a slightly better exhortation than ‘eat–pray–love’ but it makes no real sense, since most work is anathema to health and love. Anyway, women have already worked hard enough. For centuries! It’s time they took things easy. This is why the Odalisque Revolution will entail much relaxation in cosy surroundings, eating bonbons and wearing harem pants.
46 The Hanford nuclear site in Washington State contains some of the most radioactive material in the world (fifty-six million gallons of it). Closed for the last thirty years, the containment and clean-up effort costs two billion dollars a year. So many people who live near the site get thyroid cancer that the now familiar throat scar caused by thyroidectomy surgery is known as the ‘Hanford necklace’. See also Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946); John Adams’ 2005 opera Doctor Atomic; Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen (1998); and Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove (1964), which offers a superbly ironic takedown of the hypocrisy and folly of warmongering in the age of the atom bomb. In one scene, US forces fight each other beneath a billboard asserting their official ethos: PEACE IS OUR PROFESSION. You can’t stifle American bullshit.
47 See Terre Nash’s documentary If You Love This Planet (1982), in which the great anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott challenges the official (male) acceptance of nuclear energy and weaponry. Consider too the noble life’s work of Sisters Ardeth Platte and Carol Gilbert, in collaboration with the Plowshares movement.
48 Bombs and the suppression of women are passionate bedfellows. Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing (1999) charts men’s deep love of the bomb, and their willingness to make civilians (women, children, and the elderly) its primary targets. Drone strikes are a variation on this sport. And now we have Boko Haram’s massacre of 2,000 civilians in Baga, Nigeria in January 2015, the use of girls and boys as suicide bombers, the abduction of schoolchildren, and their reliance on rape, forced marriage, and slavery to achieve their ends. See Abdulwahab Abdulah and Uduma Kalu in Vanguard, May 5, 2014, and Helon Habila’s short personal account, The Chibok Girls: the Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamic Militancy in Nigeria (Penguin, 2017).
49 Are we really depending on men to safely dispose of nuclear waste? What, are we CRAZY? These are people who have to be reminded to take the dog out. You have to beg them to change a poopy diaper. These are people who use every pot and pan and mixing machine in the house when they cook anything and leave the dirty dishes lying all around the kitchen after. ‘They don’t cover anything when they put it in the fridge,’ Harriet the waitress remarks in Sleepless in Seattle (1993). ‘Hot Particles’ and ‘buckyballs’ from the meltdown at Fukushima will drift around the planet to the end of time. The Fukushima plant poured so much contaminated water into the sea, tuna on the West coast of America now have higher levels of radioactive contamination than ever before. (See Makiko Inoue and Mike Ives, New York Times, September 30, 2020, on the plan for compensation.) For the latest on nuclear waste containment strategies – strategies that probably won’t ultimately work – see Michael Madsen’s devastating documentary about Finland’s radioactive waste repository, Into Eternity (2010). NB. No level of radiation is safe – yet, as far as I know, no government has abandoned the idea of nuclear power. Who gave men permission to risk life on earth for all eternity? Did we have a global referendum on this, I can’t remember.
50 ‘The daughters of educated men received an unpaid-for education at the hands of poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties… an unpaid-for education that fitted them for unpaid-for professions’ (Three Guineas).
51 It would be important to enlist the support of sex workers in this endeavour, since men (currently) have the means to buy their way out of sexual privation (something the cheerless incel brigade seems to have forgotten). Financial compensation will be offered to female sex workers, to sustain them through the furlough.
52 Lesbians need not participate in the sex strike. They can protest in other ways. Gay sex in both genders will be unaffected by the strike, or might even enjoy a surge in popularity. That is beyond our control. The purpose of the strike is male sexual privation, not female. Heterosexual women will have to handle this temporary hiatus as best they can. I don’t agree with Andrea Dworkin, though, that feminism precludes heterosexuality. It’s time for the fun to begin, not end! (Once all three strikes have succeeded.)
53 Lysistrata, by Aristophanes (411 BCE), in Lysistrata and other Plays, translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2002). Spike Lee’s fun and moving musical Chi-Raq (2015), transposing Lysistrata to the gun-filled streets of the South side of Chicago, bolsters the idea that sex can still be used as a major bargaining tool today.
54 Chris Knight writes about sex strikes in his spectacular book on prehistory, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Yale, 1991). Women held a sex strike in Nicaragua in the 1530s, as a protest against slavery, and Igbo women in Nigeria have often scared men with their sex strike power. More recently, the tactic was used in Liberia to protest against the vicious civil war (2003), in Naples in protest against dangerous, illicit fireworks on New Year’s Eve (2008), in Kenya (2009), and in Ukraine (2010). The Strike of Crossed Legs worked in Pereira, Colombia (2006/2011), in protest against gang warfare: ‘We want them to know that violence is not sexy.’ Pereira’s murder rate, at the time the highest in Colombia, dramatically declined as a result. In 2011, women in Barbacoas, Colombia successfully used a sex strike to ensure long-awaited road repairs were done. And it was utilised in the Philippines (2011), Belgium (2011 – proposed at least, by a socialist senator, if not implemented), Togo (2012), Sudan (2014), and Tokyo (2014), when women threatened not to sleep with any man who supported the corrupt governor Yōichi Masuzoe, who’d proclaimed that women should never hold top roles in government because they’re nutty when they have a period (he was later ousted for his misuse of public funds, which he could not blame on menstruation). Femen too has sometimes advocated sex strikes. And a sex strike added an extra dimension to a protest against the Russian presence in Ukraine (2014), publicised with the slogan ‘Don’t Give It To A Russian’.
55 The vulva’s mythic significance as the basis and origin of all human life makes vaginal display the perfect antidote to the male death-lust. In ancient history, women resorted to vaginal display both as a fertility rite and as a form of protest. According to Catherine Blackledge, Raising the Skirt, women in Greek mythology used this method to subdue Bellerophon, who was threatening to flood the Xanthian plain. In addition, ‘making derogatory remarks about female genitalia is punishable by vaginal display en masse… in [parts of] Africa’. In a rare acknowledgement of female sexuality, Sheela-na-gigs, those exaggerated ancient and mediaeval stone carvings of women pulling their vulvas wide open (surely a remnant of prehistoric mother-goddess cult symbols), were added to buildings to ward off evil and promote fertility. Femen activists not only use upper-body nudity to shame men, but sometimes go bottomless as well.
56 Scotland voted in November 2020 to become the first country in the world to provide free menstrual products to all who need them. But there is progress elsewhere too: Canada, Australia, India, Colombia, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Lebanon, Trinidad and Tobago, and a number of US states have stopped taxing period products.
57 At a small Bloomsday celebration at the Irish consulate in Edinburgh on June 16, 2014, I noticed that all the men there were standing around scowling, while the women tried to be genial. This wasn’t because the men were having a lousy time (the Guinness was really flowing), they’re just LAZY. (What would Joyce have made of it?!) Men really need to acknowledge how threatening the male scowl is. They need to start learning how to adjust their faces into more frequent displays of beneficence. Is it fair for women to do all the giggling and smiling and buttering-up, forever trying to make everybody feel comfortable? Why should we, after what we’ve been through? It’s MEN who make everybody uncomfortable, so it’s they who should make more of an effort to be friendly. Sheesh, do we have to explain every little thing? Just as they can learn not to walk menacingly down a dark street behind a lone woman, they can also master the art of smiling.
58 Husband remarks encouragingly that, once the aims of all three strikes have been realised, capitalism will be kaput.
59 The Mea Culpa Declaration: ‘I, the undersigned, confess to having, consciously or not, overtly or not, been part of a worldwide conspiracy that has constrained women’s lives through centuries of violence, repression, distress, and discouragement. I recognise that this treatment of women has been a ploy in a power game – the result of male cowardice, stupidity, perversity, cunning, and corruption – and that the status of men has been artificially exalted by it.
I acknowledge that vast numbers of women have been unfairly treated throughout the era of male rule. I therefore apologise for any tyrannical behaviour of my own, and that of other men, and pledge to do my utmost to correct the problem, and prevent such injuries, insults, and injustices from ever occurring again.
I apologise too for stubborn male resistance over centuries to women’s ideas, thoughts, decisions, and remarks –in the home, at work, in business, in the arts, in education, and in government. In light of the loss of valuable female input over centuries, I now agree to abide by the decisions women make, without resorting to mindless criticisms and the usual reflex contradictions and derision, no matter how wacko or whimsical the ideas expressed by women may seem to me to be.
I renounce male power and privilege, on the grounds that they were unsportingly won, and I wish to relinquish all remaining economic, social, and political advantages I may have obtained, either as a mere consequence of being male, or because of my active participation (now regretted) in misogynist behaviour and acts of patriarchal terror, either overt or underground.
In aid of this, I have transferred, or will transfer and continue to transfer, my financial resources to a woman or women, no strings attached. By such means, I hope to see a societal shift and foster a more humane environment in which women and children are less likely to be mistreated or maligned. It is my hope that the handover of power and property to women will ultimately transform and benefit people, animals, and the natural world, as well as ensuring a future for thought, languages, nature, culture, and the arts.
I believe in the pleasure principle, and therefore renounce the male work ethic as an indecency imposed by men who wished to profit off the subjugation of others. I hereby renounce male privilege and assert the inalienable right of all creatures to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’
SIGN HERE: ____________________________