“A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE.”
A True Story about one Woman's Poetic Revenge on Woke Feminism
“A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE.”
In 2013, I returned to Ottawa for a court date. I happened to there for Halloween, where I would up at punk show at a club called Mavericks.
There, I met a woman named “Alina”. We fell in love and were together for three years. We started a whole bunch of different projects together, and we’re still friends today.
Alina was from Ottawa, but had spent the past few years squatting in Europe. She was a zealous anarchist and committed punk, but she was finding the Ottawa scene hard to relate to.
Because she had been a part of Amsterdam’s vibrant anarchist squatting scene, she possessed a revolutionary zeal that few in Canada possessed.
After several years squatting in Europe, she had moved back to Ottawa to finish her B.A., which she had started before moving away to go to clown school in Paris. She came from a Romanian Orthodox family and she felt that she owed it to her family to complete her degree. Her plan was to finish university and move back to Europe. She took her studies seriously, though. She was a serious activist and saw the chance to deepen her political analysis.
At times, however, she would get frustrated with what she was being taught, unsure whether she was simply confused or whether what she was being taught was bullshit.
One day, she came to me: “Here, read this. I have to write a paper about this essay and I want to get your opinion on it.”
The essay was called A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish needs a Bicycle or something like that. It was for a Women’s Studies course.
I read it, squinting quizzically at the words on the pages as they mused about whether or not men could be lesbians and whether wearing flannel made you a lesbian. It was one of the dumbest things I had ever read in my life.
When I was done I looked up to find Alina looking at me expectantly.
“What did you think?”
“Wow. That was… interesting.”
“Did that make any sense to you?”
“Uh, not really. That was some bona fide liberal BS if you ask me.”
“Right? Tell me the truth - Is this the stupidest thing that you’ve ever read, or am I missing something?”
“No, it’s garbage. Man, are people really paying good money to learn this crap? What in the hell is wrong with the world? Do people not have better things to do than waste their time talking about whether guys who like pussy are lesbians? I like pussy. Am I a lesbian?”
“Right? Okay, thank you. I needed a second opinion to help me feel sane. I read it three times trying to figure out if there was something I wasn’t getting. But there’s nothing to get! It’s just pure stupidity!”
We laughed about it and concluded that liberal feminism was stupid.
She was still a feminist, though. She had been politicized in Europe, where a certain type of feminism was de rigueur in the squatting scene, but her type of feminism was inspired by the punk attitude of Bikini Kill and Ani Difranco. Her feminism was about living the life that she wanted and not conforming to social pressure about how girls should behave.
POETIC JUSTICE
Some time later, when the semester was wrapping up, Alina decided to get revenge on her Women’s Studies course. She asked me to help, and I was only too happy to comply.
Late at night one moonlit night, we biked over to Carleton University, snuck onto the campus, and slipped into the classroom where her Women’s Studies course had been held.
There, we made love on the floor where her feminist professor had stood, pontificating about patriarchy and male oppression.
It was her idea, and she didn’t use a lot of words to explain why she wanted to do it. That wasn’t necessary. I got it. The medium is the message.
Afterwards, she seemed very pleased with herself, and I could understand why. There was something poetic about her private protest. It had been a secret act of performance art, made all the more special by the fact that we were the only two who got to enjoy it.
It was her way of striking back at being told how to feel about her femininity and about the male sex. I suppose it was also her way of saying: “I like men. Men are not my enemy. The solidarity that I believe in transcends sex.”
Alina’s always been ahead of her times. Years before the world got sick of woke feminist bullshit, she had already figured out that the whole trope of "toxic masculinity” was a dead end, and that a lot of first-world feminists are completely full of shit.
Yeah, great, fully entertaining and clever.
But, alas, much ado about nothing. Women need men and vice versa. Beyond all that crazy media output.-This is a strong tie, stronger than most propaganda. The aim of all that bullshit is clear enough: alienation division separation abortion of biological basic instinct.
The corruption of feminism is simply one instance of a general principle: That all institutions become corrupted over time, because humans are corrupt(ible). The process goes something like this:
1. a revolutionary new idea enters the public domain.
2. initial proponents are convinced of its validity and become strong proselytizers.
3. acolytes arrive and expand on the work of the originators.
4. the new idea spreads on the basis of an apparent advantage over previous ideas.
5. initial rejection by established authorities (guardians of old ideas) is overrun by either the strength of the new idea (its broad appeal, in the case of feminism) or a new generation not as steeped in the previous orthodoxy adopts it as its mantra.
6. people start building careers around the new idea, in the process adding their own personal biases and/or agendas, which diffuses or dilutes the original idea and generates factions.
7. the state gets involved in an oversight role, or a covert manipulative role in support of, what else? The State. From there, it's all downhill.
This is why I refuse to attach myself to movements or ideologies or anything that expresses itself with the suffix ...ism. They're all just 'belief systems.' They may work within a limited domain or time-frame, but they all suffer the effects of the human element, which has tons of empirical evidence pointing to corruption as a constant in any of these equations, no matter how well grounded they may be.
Since we're talking about general principles (well, I am anyway) there's one that stands out above all others in my mind: you don't put the cart before the horse. That is to say, you don't start from a theory and then attempt to prove it (no matter the cost). You first gather lots of data, construct hypotheses, then test them where possible. Same rule applies to social theories as to scientific ones. That it's difficult to falsify social theories without enormous human costs is a clear reason to be skeptical of all of them, because none of them meet the definition of a valid scientific theory. They are mostly just Big Thoughts, as they used to say in the USSR, and unfortunately, a lot of people like to think them.