WHY FEMINISM AIN'T COOL NO MORE

THE ANARCHIST CASE AGAINST WOKE FEMINISM

Hey Folks!

As most of you are aware, I am a vocal critic of feminism.

In fact, I suppose that I might now be the second most outspoken anarchist critic of feminism in the world, after Darren Allen. That’s a good place to be, because it’s way more fun being the second most radical person than the most radical one. The fact that his views are so extreme and maladaptive makes me seem more reasonable by comparison!

For years, I was a part of activist scenes where it would have been unthinkable for a man to be against feminism. For those of us who grew up in the post-9/11 counterculture, anarchism and feminism went together like shit and stink.

Although you could be a feminist without being an anarchist, an anarchist who wasn’t pro-feminist was unheard of.

Since the debacle of the woke era, however, times have changed. This is because first-world feminism is now allied with state power. Far from being counter to the pyramidal structure of capitalist class relations, feminism has become a justification for it.

Don’t believe me? Two words - Justin Trudeau.

When Canada’s future Liberal Dictator was elected prime minister, feminism was part of his brand. And it was on his watch that the #MeToo witch hunt reached its fever pitch.

(It’s worth noting that #MeToo was started by the CBC, meaning that it is probably Canada’s number-one cultural export of the past decade. How pathetic is that?)

By now, I think everyone who’s not certifiably mentally defective acknowledges that Trudeau is a massive hypocrite and that the #MeToo era was a disaster for social movements everywhere.

Anyway, at a certain point someone needed to call feminists out for their hypocrisy, which I began doing with a piece called The Most Sexist Thing Imaginable, which is about sex-selective abortion, the practice of aborting female fetuses because the parents would prefer a male child.

This piece, while broaching a controversial subject, was still quite respectful in its tone. I was appealing to feminists in their own terms. I was saying that killing females because they were female before they are even born was the most sexist thing imaginable, and that feminists should rethink their stance that abortions were always a good thing.

In the light of what we now know about Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, white feminists in particular need to come to terms with the fact that she was a eugenicist who was a pro-abortion evangelist because she wished to prevent the birth of black babies. Abortion is one of the main tools in the eugenicist toolkit.

In the light of how white women hijacked the woke movement, which was started by women of colour, it’s time that feminists come to terms with this part of their history.

Although I was challenging feminists on a deep level, I was doing so respectfully, and I think that my piece was well-received. No one has proposed an alternative for the designation of “the most sexist thing imaginable”.

It was sometime later that I adopted an angrier approach, publishing several anti-feminist diatribes in a fit of rage after finding out that my girlfriend was cheating on me.

The most memorable of them was called Bitches Ain’t Shit But Tricks and Hoes. The title might seem misogynistic, but it was a reference not so much to the song by Snoop Dogg as to Ben Folds’s cover version. My choice of title makes a lot more sense if you watch this music video:

Anyway, much to my surprise, my anti-feminist tirades were actually quite well-received, including by some of my female friends. It turns out that a lot of people share my feeling that feminism has become a retrogressive force in the world, and that it’s fair game for men to critique it.

In other words, the “sit down and shut up” era is over. Thank God. Can we never do that again, please?

Can you imagine if one person in an intimate relationship didn’t even allow the other to raise their voice in their defence? That would be abusive, wouldn’t it? Well, that’s what feminism has been doing to men for the better part of a decade. Some will go so far as to argue against the notion of equality, promoting instead the idea that because of the history of patriarchy, it is now men’s turn to be oppressed.

It’s worth noting that our readership dramatically increased after I published my anti-feminist rants, which I believe goes to show that there is a demand for this type of content.

I think my saving grace was that I used humour throughout the whole piece, and I think that it came through that my vitriol was coming from the place of someone who had hurt. I don’t think that I said anything unforgivably hateful, although I certainly did say things that I would take back now if I could. I did take down all my most offensive posts, including Bitches and Hoes.

I think that it also helped that everyone who knows me knows that I love women. Although I have often been accused of sexism, no one has accused me of misogyny yet.

Anyway, what you are about to read is a reflection upon the current state of feminism’s relation to anarchism, and how we might approach the question of how to create a society in which both women and men benefit from the social conditions necessary for them to thrive.

I hope that you enjoy this piece, which will be the first of several in which I will explore questions regarding sex, sexuality, and the right relationship between men and women.

If our goal is to create a new culture, it should be built upon a mutual understanding that men and women have a sacred responsibility toward one another, and that one of the purposes of spirituality is to mediate this relationship.

As always, your comments are appreciated.

for the Wild,

Crow Qu’appelle

WHY FEMINISM AIN’T COOL NO MORE

Not long after I published Bitches and Hoes, my comrade Rozali Telbis published a piece called Why are women ditching feminism?, in which she wrote:

At a time when obsession with identity has reached a fever pitch, some people are choosing to opt out of labels altogether. Some are identifying as politically homeless, others are rejecting social tribalism. And in the feminist movement, there seems to be a cyclical trend of women — many of whom once called themselves feminists — rejecting feminism. 

Canadian journalist Meghan Murphy, founder of the Feminist Current and host of The Same Drugs podcast, is one of these women.

In a Substack post, Murphy explains her reasons for leaving feminism, both as an identity and an ideology.

She explains she long felt constrained in what she could or could not say because feminists were close by, always monitoring and policing her. She also explains how feminism seems to come with the expectation that feminists must also hold the same opinions on a number of other issues that extend beyond feminism. […]

Self-declared feminists, especially those who are in the public eye, have the added pressure of articulating their arguments in a way that satisfies other feminists, lest they risk being chastised at best, or face their own form of cancellation at worst. Who needs enemies when you can have feminists calling you out? It’s a lot of pressure, and it’s unsurprising why Meghan wants to distance herself from it. 

Meghan emphasized that she still supports women’s rights, but she will continue to advocate for women in a way that is more issue-based, not ideology-based. 

She writes,

“I also started to realize that if I was truly going to be an independent thinker, I had to reject ideology completely, and just take people and policy and politics and ideas as they came, without applying an ideological lens to my analysis. I wanted to be free to work outside the box and with whomever I liked. I wanted to be free to explore ideas with genuine curiosity, not just with the intent to analyze the idea “as a feminist” (or reject it on the same basis).”

Rozali continues:

A few days before Meghan published her Substack post renouncing her feminism, Terri Strange, another former radical feminist also announced her departure from the ‘feminist’ label.

Like Meghan, Terri has been involved in the radfem movement for many years.

Terri released a couple videos explaining her reasons for moving away from feminism.

In the above video, Terri touches on a number of topics, including identity, the harmonization of the masculine and the feminine, polarization, and the destruction of the soul.

Terri made a number of excellent points worth repeating, but I will highlight just a few that resonated the most, including her remarks on being ‘soul sick’ in modern society.

She says:

“I’m done with any identity anymore. I don’t care. What matters is my soul. I’m concerned for everyone’s [souls]. We cannot sit here and feel this kind of hate towards one another. It’s wrong. . . I let myself hate men specifically. I let myself hate. And that’s not who I am. . . It brings darkness into the world. It makes people sick. It destroys. I realized I got to give that up. I have to give up hate. I have to forgive.”

In the context of feminism, Terri explains that her trajectory as a feminist led to her self-identifying as a victim, thereby removing her own sense of agency (a point that is incompatible with feminism).

“Even at the times I was at my most man-hating…even if they were kind to me.. I think about all the ways that I was cutting myself off from humanity. I was so isolated. I was so disturbed. I was letting my identity as a victim and letting my trauma run my life. Letting that define who I was.”

In many ways, social justice ideologues and feminists have this in common; they have both become obsessed with identity and their role as a perpetual victim, and at a certain point this obsession becomes a tool for complete self-destruction. 

Terri also touched on the disconnect between men and women, and the atomization of society:

“There is this chaotic culture that we live in that’s atomizing people and polarizing people against one another . . . you see there’s a real disconnect between men and women . . . there’s real hostility. There’s this anti-life ideology as well. The anti-natalism thing, encouraging people not to have children . . . I mean if you don’t want to — you shouldn’t, but trying to convince people who do want to have kids that they shouldn’t, where is that going to lead?

Interestingly, Terri has since returned to Christianity.

She explains her decision for re-embracing her Christian faith:

“I had this sense that I was being called back to the Christian faith because there’s so much that I went through and experienced and that is just talked about, and that I remember from the bible. . . Coming to realize that the bible talks about this . . . everything you want to understand about the world is in the bible. The world we are currently living in is the devil’s playground.”

Rozali goes to explore the Trad Wife phenomenon, which can be seen as an example of young women deliberately rejecting the feminism of their parents’ generation:

While some women like Terri are turning to religion, others are going further by fully embracing the ‘TradWife’ lifestyle which seeks a return to living traditional values that includes embracing traditional gender roles. The tradwife, who is ultrafeminine, stays at home and serves the household, while her husband, who is the main breadwinner, works outside the home. Supporters who applaud this lifestyle see it as a subversive act that challenges the degeneracy that comes with modern liberal feminism.

Interestingly, the demographic that consumes the most online TradWife content are 18–24 year olds. This suggests that younger generations are moving away from liberal feminism typically pushed in the mainstream.

It seems to me that the current political paradigm shift we are now living through will reimagine some sort of reimagining of gender roles. If young women are consciously choosing to invert the values of feminism, that means that feminism is not unfashionable.

Fashion is all sexual selection, meaning that young women are the most important demographic in fashion.

If young women no longer think feminism is cool, feminism is no longer cool. If this isn’t apparent to you yet, I believe it will be soon. Mainstream society always lags behind the forward-thinking people who set trends.

As Alan Watts once quipped, the fundamental goal of fashion is to be able to say “I have conformed sooner than you”. And because fashion thrives on novelty, the tradwives will win by default, unless there is a revitalization of feminist culture.

If you ask me, feminism stopped being cool a long time ago, which is a point that I make in “A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish needs a Bicycle”.

For years, it has been obvious that feminism was being used for nefarious propaganda purposes. Let me give you a few examples.

Exhibit A:

This song by the fake riot girl band TRAMP STAMPS, which includes the line “I would rather die than hook up with another straight white guy” in the chorus.

Despite the fact that this is a blatant example of corporate cultural appropriation, I don’t remember there being any outcry from feminists about this song at the time it came out.

Shame on all the punk feminists who gave this a pass. This is a clear example of punk culture being exploited and used for the purposes ideological subversion. But punks during the woke era were too busy getting their knickers twisted about trainhoppers with dreadlocks to notice that their own culture was being mocked and disgraced.

Exhibit B:

This song by the Argentinian faux-riot-grrl band LAS GRASAS TRANS, in which the cool radical feminist queers chase an uncool cis-male around with weapons because he dared to try to bum a cigarette from them. Really, you have to see this video to believe it. Apparently fat and ugly is the new black, which is why I say that feminism has officially jumped the shark. There’s only so far marketing can get you, and I doubt very much that marketers can override the female desire to be attractive, which is what fashion is all about to begin with.

Is anyone really going to tell me that this is cool?

If my interpretation of this song confuses you, allow me to explain. It represents a literal inversion of the purpose of fashion.

The desire to be cool is part of what sociologists call the “social desirability bias”, and is part of the universal human desire to be popular - to be approved of by one’s peers. There are good evolutionary reasons for this, not the least of which is that social desirability plays a key role in determining what mating opportunities a person will have access to. This is called sexual selection, and it is the aspect of evolutionary theory that the Darwinians don’t want you thinking about.

(Did I mention that I came up with my own theory of evolution?)

Sexual selection is the evolutionary force that has to do with who gets to breed with whom. There are countless cultural answers to this question. Who gets to fuck whom is one of the central questions that every culture must answer.

The desire to be cool comes from the desire to win the game of life by securing a desirable mate. This is true for both males and females.

You don’t hear feminists talk about sexual selection very much, because female agency in mate selection contradicts the standard feminist narrative about women being innocent victims of patriarchal oppression. This leaves out the fact that many women have been beneficiaries of class oppression all throughout history, but that’s a topic for another day.

My purposes here are to show that fashion is downstream of the social desirability bias, and social desirability is downstream of sexual selection, which is downstream of female psychology, which judges men according to their perceived value as a mate, which is what social status in human societies is really all about. The female desire to be attractive has to do with the fact that mate selection has been traditionally the most important decision of a woman’s life.

The aforementioned Argentinian faux-punk song is promoting a complete inversion of normal human attraction. Male attention is recast as something undesirable, problematic, and annoying.

But there’s a reason that women spend so many billions of dollars on clothes and cosmetics. They want male attention, and this craving goes deep. It is about as primal an urge as I can imagine, because it is intimately connected to both love and fear.

It is connected to fear because when shit gets ugly, women want male protection. As Bill Burr put it, “There are no feminists at a house fire! You can’t find them!”

It is connected to love because sexual attraction is a big part of what brings lovers together to begin with.

Female human beings want to be attractive because attractiveness is one of the factors that most reliably predicts one’s ability to secure a desirable mate. This is hugely important, because it is one of the prime determinants of intergenerational reproductive success. So pardon me for being old-fashioned, but I don’t think that it’s a great idea to problematize and invert something as primal as sexual attraction.

Plus, I’m pretty sure this is another example of corporate cultural appropriation.

I also used to live on the street and I fucking hate it when people would make you feel like you crawled out of the sewer for daring to ask them for a smoke. Fuck whoever it was who decided to write a whole song about looking down on someone for bumming a smoke.

Exhibit C:

This one might be controversial, but y’all know I like controversy. If you’re reading this, chances are so do you.

Personally, I blame the Kardashians for running feminism into the ground.

Think about it. The reason that feminism is a joke to serious intellectuals now is because mainstream feminism embraced trans ideology and ran cover for Big Pharma’s assault on linguistic intelligibility.

If we were to pin down a specific date for the exact moment at which feminism became a joke, we would have to consider one specific moment in time, which will surely go down in history as a Supreme Apotheosis of Woke Stupidity - the day that a nominee for the Supreme Court refused to define the word “woman” because she isn’t a biologist.

There was nothing in Idiocracy that compares to this.

How did things get to this point? Well, obviously, Big Pharma financing had a lot to do with it, but how did trans ideology gain such foothold?

Two words - Caitlin Jenner. Trans ideology was not a problem before Bruce Jenner changed his name and became the poster boy for transgender ideology. And guess what? Bruce Jenner is part of the Kardashian clan.

See what I mean?

Successfully introducing trans ideology into mainstream culture, however, was not the only contributions the Kardashians have made to feminism.

If I was to choose a specific date for the death of feminism, I would choose August 7th, 2020, the release date of Cardi B’s song WAP, which stands for “Wet Ass Pussy”.

The video for the song, which was hugely popular (for obvious reasons), includes a cameo by Kim Kardashian.

The song includes the lines “I don’t cook / I don’t clean. But let me tell you how I got this ring.”

Now, don’t get me wrong - the song is a banger, and one level I appreciate the sex-positive message, because I’m all for pleasure. Let’s be real, though - the song is also about playing men for suckers. Men are portrayed as a source of cash to be taken for all they’re worth, and the basic message is that if a woman has money, she doesn’t need a man.

If any women out there don’t understand my reaction, I encourage you to listen to Bitch, I’m Broke, which is the exact inverse of WAP (with the gender roles reversed).

It is getting increasingly unignorable that feminism is promoting a message that is diametrically opposed to traditional gender roles, to the point where it has become necessary to point out that there’s a reason that such things exist. Namely, biology.

If feminism is going to “stick it to the man” by training girls to act like uppity, spoiled rich bitches, I want no part of it. Anyone who thinks that WAP represents a step forward for the human race is out of their minds.

It seems increasingly unlikely that male anarchists can make common cause with woke feminists. Bill Burr hit the nail on the head when he pointed out how contemporary feminism has morphed into “some reverse pimping shit”.

At the end of the day, I’m a man. I’m a big believer in being on your own side, and if feminism is anti-me, then the only way for me to true to myself is to be anti-feminist. I’m pro-me. That’s a non-negotiable.

Men certainly shouldn’t be expected to expend energy supporting something that doesn’t benefit them. That would be acting against their own self-interest, and acting against your own self-interest is dumb.

Furthermore, from what I’ve observed, feminism is of limited value because the female solidarity that it is based on tends to work best for the purposes of countering male domination. It works well when women are united against a male enemy, but tends to dissipate without one.

Why, you ask? Well, I would argue that it comes down to evolutionary psychology. The way that sexual selection works is that men are not in direct competition with one another. How sexual selection works is that men compete against one another in different ways in attempts to impress women, which is the root cause of sports, war, and juggling. Given the choice, women will choose to mate with the man who impresses her most. Because the choice rests with women, men tend not to see each other as rivals in the same way that women do.

Whereas men compete with men indirectly, women compete against women directly. Female solidarity tends to be short-lived because high-status females compete amongst themselves for the most desirable male mates, which undermines female solidarity that isn’t related to countering overt male dominance behaviour. Feminists need a common enemy to maintain their basis of unity, which explains why feminists so often attack men who were previously their allies.

But maybe I’m over-intellectualizing. Perhaps it would be better to let Chris Rock explain.

WHY I FIND THE FEMINIST NOTION THAT WOMEN DON’T NEED MEN SO OFFENSIVE

No one cares about what offends me, but I’m going to tell you anyway. I am personally offended by the feminist idea that women don’t need men.

Imagine that, like the comedian Jon Lajoie’s character MC Vagina, said that “the only thing that women are good for is cooking, cleaning, and vaginas”.

Now imagine that I said “women are good for nothing and men would be better off if we didn’t need them.”

Which is worse?

In the former example, Jon Lajoie is saying that the usefulness of the female sex is limited. In the latter, I am saying that women are useless.

Let me ask you again: Which is worse?

Do you get it now? Do you see why a man might be offended by the feminist claim that women don’t need men? What such people are saying is that they regard men as useless.

Do you like feeling useless? Neither do I.

No one would deny that men need women, because that human procreation undeniably depends upon women’s reproductive labour. But are men any more dispensable to successful reproduction than women are? No!

I think that the idea that women don’t need men is completely false and ignorant. All successful human societies are built upon some kind of understanding that men and women must work together in order to raise children.

And this is the heart of the matter - first-world feminism has been dominated by non-mothers for so long that it no longer represents the majority of the world’s women.

Something like 80% of females worldwide will become mothers in their lifetimes, and each of them will require support from men. Even if one lives in a rich country with a welfare state, all women depend on male labour just as surely as men rely on female labour.

Men and women need each other. Isn’t that completely obvious? What’s the point of denying it?

THE NEXT WAVE OF FEMINISM

First off, I’m guessing that the next wave of feminism won’t be called feminism.

It’s no secret that the Feminism brand has suffered greatly in recent years. After being embraced by deplorable swine such as Hilary Clinton and Justin Trudeau, feminism just doesn’t have the same cachet it used to.

That said, female resistance to male oppression is definitely here to stay, and some women will always feel called to have solidarity with their sisters. The primal motivating force of feminism is to stop gendered-based violence and to leverage collective female bargaining power to counter the possibility of male dominance, which is always present in every human society.

Woke feminism has become a joke, but it does not follow that feminism itself is going away. It might get called something else, but female solidarity against male oppression is a primal force in maintaining social harmony in human societies, and feminism is fundamentally about counterdominance.

Feminism is never going away, nor should it. Female solidarity against male exploitation is an essential levelling mechanism necessary for the maintenance of egalitarian forms of social organization.

If we were to define feminism as the spirit of female solidarity against gender-based violence, then there is no anarchism without feminism.

Given how tarnished the word feminism is at this point, though, I would suggest that true feminists consider rebranding. The world does need some kind of gender egalitarian ideology, but it needn’t be called feminism. I would suggest looking for a basis of unity that would be acceptable cross-culturally, and places more value on the concerns of mothers, which necessarily entails thinking also about what is best for children.

The teachings that I carry tell me two things which are relevant here:

1. It is my sacred responsibility as a man to provide and to protect women, children, and elders.

2. When making important political decisions, we must ask ourselves how our decisions will affect the seven generations to come.

If one follows these two precepts through to their natural conclusion, one will realize how imperative it is to raise children who are able to meet the challenges that they will experience in their lives. If we accept that male parental investment is of vital importance in child-rearing - which is especially true in stateless societies - it follows that society should be organized so as to encourage long-term heterosexual pair-bonding, although said pair-bonding isn’t technically coterminous with either marriage or monogamy.

Though we would do well to keep our minds open to different possibilities, we should be careful to ensure that the decisions we make are made with future generations in mind.

If we are to think of the seven generations to come, we are thinking of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. If a generation is 25 years, seven generations is about 175 years. A lot can change in that amount of time. How might I transmit something that will stand the test of time to my grandchild’s grandchild?

As far as I can tell, the best thing that I could possibly do is to be part of a lineage which transmits certain ideas from past generations to future ones. The highest possible good I could aspire to, then, would be to play my part in a chain of transmission passing on ancient ideas. I think that it would be vanity to think otherwise. It’s a humbling thought.

Perhaps the goal of today’s anarchist revolutionaries, then, should be to transform society into one which is one amenable to the needs of mothers. I suppose that would involve reimagining the world through the lens of what would be best for children. This is something that I believe would be enthusiastically supported by the vast majority of female Earthlings, especially mothers and those who plan to become mothers.

It seems likely to me that the next wave of feminism will frame the struggle against gender-based oppression differently than previous ones. If it is rooted in wisdom, it will recast the proper relationship between men and women as fundamentally based on a symbiosis of male and female labour.

And this does seem to be happening. The pendulum is now swinging back, as evidenced by the reactionary feminism of Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress, who argues persuasively that women are best served by a social system which strongly encourages monogamous pair-bonding set up to assure male parental investment and economic interdependence.

In other words, feminists are coming around to the idea that maybe marriage isn’t such a bad thing after all.

Laura Dodsworth, another leading feminist, has also suggested that perhaps it has come time to rethink certain assumptions of the Sexual Revolution. She invites her readers to consider whether a society where heterosexual monogamous marriage is the norm might actually be better for women. After all, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding are limited in the types of labour they can do. Nature requires them to be dependent on the labour of their kin, including male relatives. The most optimal type of male relative, of course, is a loving husband who is also the father of a woman’s child, because that man will be more invested in raising his child than a stranger would be. It is certainly possible to raise a child without a father, but does anyone really think that that should be the default? If for no other reason than redundancy, two parents are better than one.

So where do feminists get off acting like they don’t need men? Could it be that feminist discourse is confused because first-world feminism has been dominated by non-mothers for so long?Do they not think that a child needs a father? What are they basing this belief on? Have they conducted a meta-analysis of the best available evidence about developmental psychology? I somehow doubt that would help their cause. I haven’t consulted the literature, but I feel quite confident it would show that children need fathers almost as much as they need mothers.

It is true that women nowadays are able to support themselves by working outside the home, but it is downright insulting to men to suggest that the only purpose that fathers serve is to provide money. Apparently, feminists nowadays think that the existence of the welfare state does away with the need for a committed spouse.

THE GOVERNMENT IS YOUR DADDY

Really, the truth is that woke feminists assume the existence of a welfare state, and believe that the state should provide for women, especially single mothers. For this reason, they aren’t particularly interested in having conversations about kinship, which is the way that non-state societies provide a social safety net.

Indeed, many feminists are influenced by Marxism, and Marxism holds that the human institution of the family is inherently oppressive. Marxists are not interested in reimagining kinship as part of a revolutionary strategy, and neither are feminists. This is a damn shame if you ask me, because nature requires men and women to collaborate for the purposes of child-rearing, and kinship forms the foundation for the social safety net in stateless societies.

A woman in the modern world doesn’t need a man to provide for her because the function of kinship has been usurped by the state as part of a deliberate strategy to make people dependent upon their rulers so that they are easier to tax and control.

(You didn’t think that the government was giving you those food stamps out of kindness, did you?)

This is why the difference between statist feminists and anarchist feminists is so important. The goal of statist feminists is to increase female power, which often involves countering male power through female solidarity. In other words, statist feminism tends to increase female power at the expense of male power. This creates a war of the sexes in which feminists see men as their enemies. This isn’t good for commoners, but it does serve the interests of the divide-and-rule merchants to if men and women keep fighting amongst themselves.

Anarchist feminists, on the other hand, imagine a world in which women form part of robust kinship structures which limit male power, especially the ability of men to exploit women. These kinship structures would also serve the functions of a social safety net.

Basically, there is a world of difference between woke feminism and anarcha-feminism, but because female solidarity is the motivating force for both of them, the two end up getting conflated much more than they should be.

From my perspective, a statist is a statist is a statist, and statists should only be taken so seriously, whether they happen to be female or not. A statist who calls herself a feminist is still a statist, and statists are our enemies.

Anarchists are opposed to the welfare state because we are opposed to the state, and we are opposed to the state because it is an extortion racket. Let us never forget that taxation is theft, and the only wealth that the state has is that which it has stolen from the people.

Now, to be fair, woman might make do quite well in the modern world without a man if:

1. She doesn’t have any children

2. She has a rich family

3. She lives in a country where the modern welfare state provides a social safety net with generous benefits

Otherwise, she would be best served by a social system in which she is provided for by her kin, with whom she is in a reciprocal relationship. Feminists have a problem with the idea of women serving men, and it is easy to understand why, given how often it is that men take female labour for granted. But in stateless societies both women and men must serve the kinship group of which they are a part - this is what generates the surplus social value which allows egalitarian communities to be resilient. Bob Dylan spoke the truth when he sang “you gotta serve somebody”.

Statist feminists have convinced women that it is preferable to serve one’s employer than one’s husband or father, but there are signs that women are now rethinking this assumption.

So where does this leave us? Well, I’m sure that things will work themselves out in time. Marxism always fails because it is out of touch with certain realities of the human condition, and liberal feminism is no different. I think the tides have already turned.

I have chosen to break the ice on this topic because I think the feminist attitude that men don’t have anything valuable to say on the subject of gender relations is completely disingenuous. Women need men as much as men need women, and that means that our voices are just as important when it comes to conversations about how optimal human social organization might be achieved.

Really, though, what women will replace feminism with is something that they will need to work out for themselves. The work of Mary Harrington and Laura Dodsworth suggests that this much-needed process of political reorientation is already well underway.

The one thing that I will say is that I really think that feminists should take an interest in comparative anthropology. There are countless examples of egalitarian societies which have had gender egalitarianism, and there’s a lot that we can learn from them.

For example, the most gender-egalitarian societies practice immediate-return hunting and gathering. Why is this? Why does this type of foraging tend to lead to higher statuses for women? Can we mimic or recreate such conditions somehow?

What about things not to do? Nomadic pastoralism tends to create patriarchal societies in which women have less decision-making power, and where gender-based violence is more common. Why is this? What can be learned from societies which are characterized by male exploitation? Can we enumerate certain things that we should avoid if we wish to live in a free society?

Most importantly is that we stop conceiving of gender politics as a “war of the sexes”. Egalitarian societies do not treat political power as a zero-sum game. Greater female power need not come at the expense of male privilege. Harmonious relations between men and women are good for both sexes.

The question of how to create a more just world is, to a significant degree, a question of how men and women might best share responsibilities so as to provide optimal conditions for child-rearing.

Far from being a “war between the sexes”, politics is a matter of harmonizing relations between men and women. The good news is that human nature geared men and women towards cooperation. Human sexuality, for instance, serves a prosocial function by fostering intimacy, something that is not true of other mammals (with the possible exception of dolphins).

At the end of the day, any human society that isn’t geared towards successful reproduction probably isn’t built to last. Over time, evolution will do its thing, and balance will be restored.

And on that note, I’ll sign off for now, but I will leave you with an extended excerpt from an article by Camilla Power entitled Gender egalitarianism made us human.

The article persuasively argues that women are best served by cultures which strongly encourage male parental investment, and in which strong kinship systems prevent them from being overly dependent on their husbands. It also argues that monogamy is good for women.

Although feminism has traditionally seen religion as a male-dominated means of social control, one could argue that by enforcing taboos against extramarital sex, traditional religions defend female interests.

I have no doubt that a review of the anthropological record will prove illuminating for women who wish to pull on this thread. I would also really recommend checking out the What is Politics? YouTube channel.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS ABOUT HOW THE CURRENT PARADIGM SHIFT PERTAINS TO SEX AND SEXUALITY

1. Feminism is a modern expression of something primal and timeless - the strong tendency for female solidarity against gender-based violence, especially rape.

2. First-world feminism is allied with state power. Far from being part of the solution to the Crisis of Civilization, it is part of the problem.

3. In stateless societies, kinship systems provide a social safety net through which single mothers, widows, and orphans are provided for.

4. The goal of creating a stateless society involves the creation of new kinship systems, which are supported by mythological aspects of that society's culture. The importance of such systems is then encoded in songs and stories and transmitted through ceremonies and customs.

5. Because the solutions of the future can often be found in the traditions of the past, we should look to examples of gender-egalitarian stateless societies for examples of customs and practices which might be reverse-engineered to serve our purposes of ethnogenesis - becoming a people.

I hope that you found these thoughts interesting, and I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.

Love & Solidarity,

Crow Qu’appelle

ONE WOMAN, ONE PENIS

Excerpted from Camilla Power’s essay Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow's 'How to change the course of human history'.

Women’s bodies evolved over a million years to favour the ‘one woman, one penis’ principle, rewarding males who were willing to share and invest over those who competed for extra females, at the expense of investment. But we’ve got to remember that as we became more Machiavellian in our strategies, so did would-be alpha males. The final steep rise in brain size up to the emergence of modern humans likely reflects an arms race of Machiavellian strategies between the sexes.

As brain sizes increased, mothers needed more regular and reliable contributions from male partners. In African hunter-gatherers this has become a fixed pattern known by anthropologists as ‘bride-service’. A man’s sexual access depends on his success in provisioning and surrendering on demand any game or honey he gets to the family of his bride – mainly his mother-in-law who is effectively his boss. Where women are living with their mothers, this makes it almost impossible for a man to try to dominate by controlling distribution of food.

The problem for early modern human females as they came under the maximum stress of increased brain size would be with males who tried to get away with sex without bride-service. To deal with this threat, mothers of costly offspring needed to extend their alliances to include just about everyone against the potential alpha. Men who were relatives of mothers (brothers or mother’s brothers) would support those females. In addition, men who willingly invested in offspring would have interests directly opposed to the would-be alpha, who undermined their reproductive efforts. This pits a whole community as a coalition against a would-be dominant individual. Evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm describes this as ‘reverse-dominance’, a political dynamic that for the first time established a morally regulated community.

So the occasion for reverse-dominant collective – moral – action happens whenever a prospective alpha male tries to abduct a potentially fertile female. Can we describe this in any more detail in terms of actual behaviour?

The alpha male strategy is to find and mate with a fertile female, before moving on to the next one. But how does a male identify fertile females, considering that in human evolution ovulation became progressively concealed? One cue to the human reproductive cycle could not be so easily hidden: menstruation. With no sign for ovulation, menstruation became a highly salient cue to males that a female was near fertility.

For an alpha male, a menstruating female is the obvious target. Guard her and have sex with her until she is pregnant. Then, look for the next one. In nomadic hunter-gatherer camps, women of reproductive age are pregnant or nursing much of the time, making menstruation a relatively rare event. Undermining cooperative childcare, menstruation threatens to trigger male competition for access to an imminently fertile female, and also competition among females, because a pregnant or nursing mother risks losing male support to a cycling female.

Mothers have two possible responses to this problem. Following the logic of concealed ovulation, they might try to hide the menstruant’s condition so that males would not know. But because the signal has potential economic value by attracting male attention, females should do the opposite: make a big display advertising imminent fertility. Whenever a coalition member menstruated, the whole coalition joined that female in amplifying her signal to attract males. Females within coalitions would begin to use blood-coloured substances as cosmetics to augment their signals. This has become known as the Female Cosmetic Coalitions model of the origins of art and symbolic culture.

In creating a cosmetic coalition in resistance, females deter alpha males by surrounding a menstrual female and refusing to let anyone near. They are creating the world’s first taboo, on menstrual blood or collectively imagined blood, speaking the world’s first word: NO!

But even as a negative, this cosmetic display is encouraging to investor males who are willing to go hunting and bring back supplies to the whole female coalition. Those cosmetically decorated females who create a big show of unity and solidarity against alpha males ensure that investor males will get the fitness rewards. It is fully in the interests of investor males to sexually select females belonging to ritual cosmetic coalitions, because they then eliminate competition from the would-be alphas.

The Female Cosmetic Coalition (FCC) model shows us the prototype of a moral order, upheld through those puberty rituals, taboos, and prohibitions that surround menstruation in so many ethnographic accounts. Ekila, discussed above, is a classic example.

The FCC strategy is also the prototype symbolic action, with collective agreement that fake or imaginary ‘blood’ stands for real blood. While it is revolutionary at the level of morality, symbolism and economics, the strategy emerges as an evolutionary adaptation, driven by male sexual selection of female ritual participants. On this basis, through reverse gender dominance, the hunter-gatherer institution of bride-service emerges, with roughly equal chances of reproductive success for all hunters.

Finally, the FCC model is the only evolutionary hypothesis that explains what we find as the earliest symbolic material in the archaeological record. When the theory was first put forward in the mid-1990s, it predicted that the world’s first symbolic media would consist of blood-red cosmetics. It predicted where and when we should find them: in Africa, preceding and during our speciation, in relation to the increases of brain size. This points to a pigment record from 6-700,000 years ago and especially with the rapid growth of brains in the last 300,000 years.

These theoretical predictions have been strikingly confirmed. The evidence which Graeber and Wengrow neglect to mention, coming long before the European Upper Palaeolithic, and pervading the record of the African Middle Stone Age is of blood-red iron oxides, red ochres. These pigments are the first durable materials to be mined, processed, curated and used in design. They date back at least 300,000 years in the East and southern African record, possibly as old as half a million years. From the time of modern humans they are found in every southern African site and rock shelter. They become the hallmark of modern humans as they move out of Africa around the world, found in copious quantities in both the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe, and in Australia from the first entrance of modern humans to those continents.

Gender ambiguity lies at the core of earliest religious ideas
As we know in the era of #metoo, men find it hard to hear women say NO. With that sexual physiology designed by evolution to keep men interested on a fairly continuous basis, women have to work hard to override their signals of attraction. And if they want men to go away and get on with some hunting, they will have to work very hard indeed.

Whispering ‘not right now, darling’ won’t work. They need noise, rude songs, militant dance formations to get men’s attention: ritual. But the clincher is a symbolic overturning of reality. If men are looking for a mate who is female of the right species then change that, collectively act out “We’re actually males, and not even human but animal!’ Signal ‘Wrong sex, Wrong species, wrong time’. Be a red ochre body-painted coalition pantomiming the rutting behaviour of the animals you want men to hunt. Men with all that Machiavellian intelligence will get the message and understand the world’s first metaphor.

Now we begin to see why hunter-gatherer puberty rituals take the forms they do. Because it is found among so many different Khoisan groups, the Kalahari Eland bull dance is hot favourite to be the world’s oldest living ritual. Women of the camp flash naked buttocks as they dance in playful imitation of mating antelopes. Men can watch but not approach close to the menstrual girl’s seclusion hut. She is identified as the mystically potent Eland Bull, with whom the women pantomime mating.

In the Hadza maitoko ceremony, girls dress as hunters, acting out the story of the matriarch who used to hunt zebra with a bow and arrow and tied their penises onto herself. What first appears inexplicable now makes perfect sense as women’s supernatural construction of taboo – ‘wrong sex, wrong species’. This is telling us about what the first religious concepts looked like and how they were embodied.

Now we can begin to look at the ‘female’ images of the Upper Palaeolithic with a bit more theory. Rather than appear as Palaeolithic sex toys, the Venus figurines can be seen as initiate women in states of ritual taboo, not accessible to mere males. Their ambiguous gender, possessing female and male attributes at once, embodies their taboo state, belonging to another world.

Gender egalitarianism made us human: the untold secret
The Female Cosmetic Coalition hypothesis can help us make sense of the archaeological record of earth pigments, the rock art of ancient hunter-gatherers, their myths and beliefs, and enable us to decode the rituals that some of them still perform to this day. It tells us that, far from revolution being against human nature, everything that is human about our nature was forged in a sexual and social revolution.

But even if you don’t believe this particular story and want to work out another explanation for the red ochre and the origin of the supernatural, we are still left with all the biological and psychological evidence that our ancestors went through a prolonged phase of egalitarianism. Without that, we would not be here as language-speaking modern humans. We might have evolved into a smaller-brained hominin with rounder-shaped eyes, using primate-style gesture/call systems of communication, and the planet would look a very different place.

Does all this matter? Does it matter that women organizing as the revolutionary sex bust through the ‘gray ceiling’ of brain size? That deep social mind gave us the platform of trust for sharing language, rhythm and song? That female political strategies created human symbolic culture? That resistance is at the core of being human? Should we be telling our children the story of our Paleolithic heritage of gender equality – the untold secret – and how it gave our African ancestors an extraordinary future? If we want that future stretching ahead of us as far as it stretches back into our hunter-gatherer past, I think it does.

We are lingering in the dying days of a clapped-out Neolithic gender system. The more that women all over the world achieve true equality, the more they regain the Palaeolithic birthright of all humans. Through gender egalitarianism, we became language-speaking, artistic, shamanistic, all-singing, all-dancing human beings roughly 200,000 years ago. Against the lifespan of our species, Neolithic patriarchy is a historic blip in time.