Panjective Gender, 1

Feminism, Femininity and Complementarity

1. The Privatisation of Woman

Feminism emerged during the nineteenth century, when women were forced into a formal economy which, until then, had been a male enterprise. Before this there had been a long and shameful history of subjugating, abusing, objectifying and marginalising women (along with sporadic rebellion); but there was still a separation of domain, a sense that some aspects of the world belonged to men and some to women.

Ivan Illich, in his incendiary classic, Gender—the book that effectively ended his celebrity status and cast him out of the halls of established academia—explained that, in many pre-modern societies, there is no question of gendered inequality or of one sex lording it over another. Men have one approach to reality (and to time and space; with a concomitant set of tools) and women another. Although the divisions between domains may be fluid—certainly not established in law—they are kept, for the most part, separate. This does not lead to conflict but to a complementarity which governed human life for most of its history—and continued to exist in various modified or degraded forms into pre-modern planter and herder societies; if, as Illich says, ‘its rule was relaxed, this happened only among decadent elites, and then only for short periods’.

Men and women also lived in different psychological domains. They share some features of each other’s cognitive powers—there is no question that women cannot think as men do and vice versa—but with pronounced emphasis in their own gendered realities. Men, as many cultures have recognised, are naturally cut off, to some extent, from the context and engaged in a mission (from immaturity to maturity) to return to it, while women are more embodied, more sensitive to the context, and therefore more genuinely intelligent (and always more mature), with the less intelligent abstracting mind more closely integrated with contextual awareness.

With the advent of civilisation the male domain overtook the female and men began to separate themselves from contextual feminine experience—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the male self took control of experience and went on to take control of society; but in either case the two processes fed off each other, resulting in a male-dominated elite world built on abstract, compartmentalised male systems of transcendent knowledge and a male experience of time and space. The so-called ‘civilised’ systems of antiquity, the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, the horrific Greek and Roman myths of near constant rape and slaughter and the hyper-abstract (although catastrophically material in its effects) modern market system, or economy, are all entirely male creations, sprouting from a male mind completely out of contact with reality, context and body, and terrified of anything which cannot be controlled, abstractly understood, possessed or brought to the schizoid light of the fragmented male-mind—such as innocent children, wild nature, darkness, the present moment and sane femininity; which are unconsciously perceived as a threat and either ignored, violently suppressed or eradicated altogether. The whole shoddy history of man’s violence towards women, his physical and economic suppression of her spontaneity, intrinsic creativity and generosity, and his systematic, sexualising brainwashing of her—in short, his sexism—originates here.

It is this male world that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women were forced to fully enter; to work alongside men, to compete with men and, in order to do so, to think as men do. As Illich wrote, women found themselves in the novel position of being ordered around at work. They had ‘lost domain’ and now, instead of being able to decide for themselves how to work and at what speed, they had to hurry back and forth between the hoe and the kitchen. This created a form of envy which had been unimaginable under the shield of gendered complementarity.¹

Illich exaggerates—men directing women in their work was not ‘unimaginable’, the position of women in medieval society was far from enviable and, as Illich’s fairest feminist critic, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, pointed out, domains were never that separate (no society could last long under the extreme segregation Illich posits). Men had been abusing and subordinating women since the dawn of ‘civilisation’ and the Middle Ages were, ultimately, no different. But. With the rise of capitalism women were excluded from productive life (women were very often as economically productive as men, in the household, and frequently managed the family’s finances), pushed into a ‘shadow realm’ of socially necessary but economically useless labour and, eventually, forced into a domain which radically intensified their exposure to male exploitation and radically deformed their experience, intelligence, sensitivity and even autonomy. This process began, Illich explains, with the codifying of a ‘genderless we’ in the centralised marriage records of the medieval church, the first move to unpick the complementarity of traditional societies, and then massively expanded with the advent of full-blown capitalism, which demanded that women enter the market as ‘equals’. To compete in the insane male world women had to become like insane men—cut off from their bodies, from nature and from the ineffable. In order to fit into the intensely hierarchical, systematised, unreal male market system woman had to split her psyche and inure herself to the psychological pressure and emotional pain of this split that hitherto only men had dealt with.

This process is analogous to the privatisation of public capital and labour. Just as workers in state-controlled economies passed, during the late industrial revolution, from monarchical forms of subordination to those of the market system, so women passed from domestic subjugation to capitalist subjugation. The winners and the wannabes of the brave new world of ‘women’s liberation’ denounce—and rightly so—domestic servitude and tyrannical paternalism, but refuse to recognise that some forms of pre-capitalist societies could protect and still (occasionally) do protect women from the far greater deprivations of market servitude. The wealthy middle-class Western woman, ‘liberated’ by her entry into the public sphere didn’t seem to understand, or care, that for most women jobs are not, nor can ever be ‘liberating’.

This isn’t to say that we must put wifey in her place, any more than we must return to the state-protected ‘job for life with pensions and benefits’ fantasy-land that the more subservient of the modern precariat dream of. As with so many conspicuous either-or conflicts, there is a third way, which, unfortunately, the subjugated woman, like the subjugated poor and the subjugated blackfella, fails to perceive.

Rather than demand a return to her own domain (e.g. to be paid and recognised for the independent ‘uneconomic’ shadow-work she had been doing), rather than refuse entry into the nightmarish market economy, rather than demand that man face the ineffable and learn to experience the feminine source of his own fragmented hyper-rational experience, woman instead accepted the capitalist assumptions of the male world and began to fight for ‘equality’ and ‘recognition’ within it. This was the beginning of feminism—an understandable movement (given that women were denied perfectly ordinary freedoms) but ultimately a useless and self-destructive wrong turn into professional subordination, institutional slavery and democratic irrelevance.

Feminism was, in some respects, salutary—in that it gave women (middle-class women, that is) legal power to extricate themselves from some of the more grisly forms of gender oppression, develop their powers and master male traditions that they had been unfairly excluded from. It was, however, ultimately a catastrophe for woman, in that it kept the root of the problem intact, and, ultimately, allowed it to grow stronger. You’ll notice that after a hundred years of the vote and at least thirty years of women having major influence over institutions, we aren’t exactly on the road to paradise.²

None of this is to say that all feminists are short-sighted middle-class career women. While some women who call themselves feminists wish to annihilate men from the face of the earth, others simply want to look after abused women or protect women from potential male violence. Some feminists (so called ‘equity feminists’) are keen, quite reasonably, to ensure that women have the same access to ordinary resources as men or are supported during pregnancy, or to help women free themselves from their often pathetic dependency on men. Still others just vaguely ‘support women’. Like all value-laden words, ‘feminism’ has a great many meanings, some of them barely articulated, some—referring to the ineffable nature of femininity—nearly impossible to express, certainly not literally. There are feminists who would even agree with the analysis above, passionately even; but the feminist movement did not begin with an understanding of domain, a demand for the truth of femininity to be honoured, much of an understanding of the role class plays in the subordination of women, a radical critique of hyper-male insanity or the social and psychological causes and side-effects of ‘women’s liberation’—namely 50% of the hitherto untaxable workforce entering, with much capitalist delight and encouragement, the workforce.

No. Feminism began with first-wave feminism, a demand for the right to own property and to vote. This was followed by an equally reasonable but equally misguided demand for fair representation in insane male-made institutions; marriage, law, politics, education, etc. This second-wave was followed, in the 50s, 60s and 70s, by third-wave feminism, an extensive protest that ‘male language’ (meaning the male variety of language that women were now forced to use), male modes of awareness, male styles of thinking and ‘male assumptions’ were inherently sexist or loaded with repressive beliefs and feelings about women, and that the battle against men need not [just] be fought in institutions but in sexist ‘attitudes’, including the idea that women shouldn’t be ‘free’ to engage in porn or prostitution.

This is feminism today, as I use the word here. Recently however, the misguided feminist project has mutated into an extended campaign for the complete eradication of sex and its expression in gender. This final, insane move repudiates everything that went before while, at the same time, being its logical endpoint. We could call it fourth-wave feminism, for that is exactly what it is, but to retain clarity we’ll keep with a variant of its popular label; transism (or the ‘trans rights’ movement)—the idea that one can simply decide what sex one is and, following from that, one’s gender ‘identity’. This is the culmination of feminism, a term which, while accepting the many exceptions listed above, is, I submit, from core to completion, at best a terrible error and at worst, madness.

2. Feminism

Cordelia Fine’s popular Delusions of Gender is a model of feminist (i.e. waves one to three) priorities. It begins with an approving quote from arch-fiendess Margaret Thatcher—after which we are expected to take seriously Fine’s moral judgements, which turn out to revolve around access to top jobs as corporate psychopaths; the usual meaning of ‘gender equality’ in the mass media today. The idea, firstly, is that it is better for women to be lorded over by a cruel, inhuman male system than by a cruel, human male husband (apologists for capitalism make much the same argument in extolling clean, professional factories over dirty, peasant farms) and, secondly, that women who succeed in this system are worthy of admiration and emulation. Privileged ‘professional feminist’ Laurie Penny, for example, like many other high-profile corporate employees, was happy to give her³ support to Hillary Clinton ‘because she is a woman and a feminist’. No problem that Clinton oversaw the obliteration of Libya, made 30 billion dollars of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and cheered on the biggest arms deal in history to fascist Israel. No, ‘she’s a woman and a feminist’—good enough for Penny—as was notorious feminist psychopath Valerie Solanas, author of ‘The S.C.U.M. Manifesto’, which calls for ‘the eradication’—indeed the ‘cutting up’—of men. Again, no problem for Penny, this.⁴

Another common feminist complaint is that male culture ‘reins in’ female desire. Women, we are told, have just as high libidos as men, are just as sexual, just as hungry, just as lustful; not just for fucking but for power. This ‘hunger’ for sex and power is just fine, apparently—as long as feminist women are allowed in to the party (i.e. that their ‘libidos are not controlled by men’). That loveless fucking might be an aberration, that the restless urge for it might in fact fall right into the hands of the sexist enemy, that love might be missing here, is far off into la-la land. ‘Is love even necessary?’ wonders Penny, making no reference to true love anywhere in her work. Love for feminists is no different to love for sexists—desire, neediness, hope, attachment, care or seven stages of mounting horror culminating in heartbreak. For Andrea ‘all sex is rape’ Dworkin⁵ romantic love is ‘the celebration of female negation’. For Judith Butler love ‘returns us to what we do and do not know’ — a shallow platitude obfuscated with Butler’s trademark gibberish. For Germaine Greer love is ‘disguised egotism’ (a state we are born into), self-sacrifice is ‘chimerical’ and altruism is an ‘absurdity’. For Greer, as for many feminists, the mysterious wisdom of woman is actually acculturated weakness and capitulation. She must fight to claim her missing cock, you see, not fuss over all this altruism blather. (This might explain Greer’s admiration for Australian Thatcher, Julia Gillard.)

Love-making for feminists and sexists is exclusively left-brain fucking; the mind-focused sub-dom power-play of the restless ego; masturbation with someone else there. The whole liberating presence of love does not get a look-in for feminists who seek—demand—an externalised, definable, acquisitive sexuality. ‘Germaine Greer wrote that women will be free when they have a positive definition of female sexuality’, says Naomi Wolf, approvingly, and then goes on to dismiss woman’s innate receptivity, sensitivity and indefinable physicality as the result of male conditioning. Not her unhappiness, or her ambition, or her confusion, fear and broken heart. No, these are her own. It’s her femininity that men are guilty of instilling in her.

Feminists often conflate lust for fucking (‘the male gaze’) with lust for power, and they are, indeed, the same; loveless. Just as true love plays no part in standard accounts of romance and sex, so the real body—specifically the body of a woman—plays no part in the ambitions of women to succeed in the male [virtual] world. The unpredictable, mysterious and uncanny reality of the female body is as horrifying to masculinised modern feminists as it has always been to sexist men; the difference being that it is still hers. The sadistic, excessively abstracted male can rise without anything like as much pain and psychic stress through unnatural, antisocial, totalitarian hierarchies, while the inherently present, incarnated woman must suffer all the way up—a suffering which serves to enhance her erratic cruelty in roles of responsibility in the male world—until she has become an insane man.

Feminists reject the idea that society masculinises. For Fine, Penny, Moore, Wolf, Greer, Butler and company, gender conditioning is explicit and largely domestic (giving girls dolls to play with which slowly puts them off welding careers). Society as a whole, which is transparently masculine, is effectively ignored. The system corrupts and degrades everything it comes into contact with—nature, culture, society, consciousness, work, love—but it’s unimaginable that it corrupts gender; because gender does not exist! Women are raised in a society designed entirely by men, they engage in technologies invented by men, go to institutions planned by men and work in a male domain which rewards masculine styles of thinking—yet none of this is deemed to make women more masculine; for the simple reason that prominent feminists seek power in the insane male domain. Naomi Wolf, for example, in her popular The Beauty Myth, begins by celebrating women’s entry into ‘the trades and the professions’, a degrading position she uncritically accepts for the same reason professional journalists do—because she occupies it.

Creeping masculinisation is obscured by denying the existence of any kind of [innate or inherent] gender entirely, which is considered deviant. Reason; feminists do not want to be feminine—it does nothing for their career, or for their constructed identity. And just as femininity is rejected for woman, so masculinity for man is outlawed. Men are not permitted to take the manifest lead in the manifest male domain, while she leads in the world behind the world; men are not permitted to act, think and speak as men do (e.g. ‘mansplain’—a sexist characterisation of ‘man explaining’, an activity which may or may not be condescending) while she acts, thinks and speaks as women do; men are not permitted to engage in the perennial mission of man to fight his way back to the hyper-subversive point that she never leaves (and God help them if they make any negative judgements about any women; as dangerous today as saying anything negative about racial minorities). Modern men—welpy, intellectual, ‘gender-fluid’, perma-pubescents, forever inspecting their emotions and policing their thoughts—are expected to allow her to be ambitious, rational, violent and insensitive (i.e. male) in a system which also rewards inaction, obedience, wordiness and hypersensitivity—turning him into a bitch. All gendered activity, influence and style, in other words, must be effaced or levelled into a single, rational, monogender. This is called ‘equality’, although the correct term for the process that leads, in all species, to a reduction in male-female differences—a.k.a. sexual dimorphism—is actually domestication.

Thankfully, some women who call themselves feminists don’t behave consistently. They might profess a need for this bland, indiscriminate ‘equality’, and gain shady solace from hanging around colourless, pulpy semi-men—but they still expect their boyfriends and husbands to lead in a dance, to make bold decisions (even trivial ones, like choosing where to sit in a public space), to behave with male dignity and to engage in The Noble Quest—in short to grow a pair; and many women will, despite the second-hand politically-correct opinions she overlays her instincts with, punish him if he doesn’t. Contrariwise, she will punish him, albeit instinctively, for hyper-masculinity, excessive abstraction and fundamental lovelessness; for separating himself from her strange wisdom which, as anyone with real intelligence knows, is where her authority lies.

Women who don’t do this, who let men get away with their disgraceful self-obsession and lack of love, their cowardliness or bastardy, are either doormats and commodities—the principal targets of feminist ire—or… they are feminists. Feminists cannot accuse man of his worst crimes, for they are guilty of them too. When feminoids claim ‘men cannot stand intelligent women’ what they actually mean is ‘insane male smart-arses cannot stand insane female smart-arses’, which is true, but hardly news.

Another inherently male problem that masculinised women now embody, and thus another source of modern feminist hypocrisy, is objectification. Feminists complain that, by staring at a pair of breasts or slobbering over the body of a woman cut off or ‘objectified’ from her full character, men are dehumanising her; and so they are. The chronic abstraction of the male mind does indeed pollute the world. Meanwhile… feminists are busy ‘creating a positive definition’ of their sexuality, writing their complaints into the statute books, devoting their lives to academia, technology, sport and so on, fighting to get the correct number of women in every position of power and enthusiastically engaging with the market system. But this isn’t ‘objectification’ is it? It can’t be.

After reading the sloppy, shit-slinging mediocrity of modern feminists (take a look at the degrading public disputes of Paglia, Burchill, Wolf and Steinem), their total, predictable mediocrity (every ‘issue’ filtered through the same lens), their largely system-friendly, technophilic,⁶ statist and workist⁷ political philosophy, and their creepy predilections,⁸ it is a great relief to turn to the work of women with something interesting to say about the female condition, such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Arlie Hochschild. It is even something of a pleasure to turn to the original work of so-called ‘second-wave’ feminism, The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir. True, de Beauvoir’s view of the universe is as bleak and loveless as that of other feminists (constant warfare—the meaningless universe of the existentialists), as dismissive of the ineffable as Greer (‘feminine mystery’ is, for de Beauvoir, a lie invented by men for the purposes of dismissing women entirely) and, ultimately, founded on the same misunderstanding of pre-civilised life as Wolf. True, she was a literal sadist (i.e. an admirer of the Marquis de Sade), Stalinist and a pimp for cowardly, sexual predator, authoritarian and nihilist, Jean-Paul Sartre. And yes, true, she believed that there was no biological basis for sexual difference, that unborn children were ‘parasites’ and that it was okay for thirteen-year-old girls to sleep with adult men. But The Second Sex does at least offer a more accurate and interesting account of man’s appalling record of subjugating women than that of modern feminists, along with some good critiques of male literature and a now unfashionably realistic appraisal of the difference between men and women artists. ‘No woman ever wrote The Trial, Moby-Dick, Ulysses…’ she says. Certainly she blames this on civilised social training, but at least she begins by admitting the superiority of these works over Oroonoko, Jane Eyre and the execrable To the Lighthouse.

There has never been a female Beethoven, a female Kant, a female Beatles or a female Monty Python and there never will be. Anyone who asserts such women exist or have existed has either never really attended to these male masters, or they lie about the makeup of their record collection, or they don’t really know what it means to be a woman (a common problem amongst ponderously materialist professional feminists). It’s not so much that she couldn’t write nine breathtaking symphonies which express transcendent beauty through an almost unfeasible mastery of technique—although that’s also true—but that a real woman, one capable of doing so, would thereby betray herself—for she is those nine symphonies. As Camille Paglia realised, in one of her more perceptive moments, she is that which poets write of.⁹

Again, this does not mean that woman can’t contribute to the male world library—and sometimes even without sacrificing her femininity—but that her priorities lie, ultimately, in living the source of art, not in manifesting it abstractly. She can create very good male-type works of art, but her genius is in being that which man merely imagines, a tragically rare but mind-boggling state of presence. Her genius is also in creating life, and those forms of art (and science) which celebrate, adorn and nourish it. She may express this in purely rational forms, but it is in living life—in improvised theatre, in song and dance, in informal communication and speech, in discursive and picaresque literature (and letter-writing), in decorative and illustrative art, in handcrafts such as pottery and textile design, in sensuously embodied sculpture—in short, in feminine styles of spontaneously (‘pre-artistically’) living and materially creating—that she is, on the whole, naturally superior to man. Such forms of expression are either considered inferior to the edifices of immortality that man seeks to create, or are not allowed to flourish in the male world. Improvised theatre is banished from the official ‘canon’, fashion and textile design have been dominated by tasteless institutions of megawealth for almost as long as architecture has, useful and beautiful handmade crafts are hardly allowed to exist, let alone seriously be considered as art, illustration is positively spat on by ‘artists’ and the idea that art itself, along with science and language, represents a degradation of human experience, is simply beyond the pale.

All this is sexist—a sexism that male woman has absorbed into her bones and then, after she has struggled out of her domain, into grim, unnecessary realms of bodiless ambition and abstraction, defends as ‘equality’. She spurns the immanent experiences and artforms that are her birthright, strives to master transcendent styles which are [usually] against her nature, assumes male forms of thought and awareness are standard, and demands equal place amongst man in his world. This she does not by showing she is his equal in it—because she isn’t, any more than he is in hers—but by denigrating the male masters that naturally dominate it.

Write a list of great classical composers down, or great film directors, great novelists, great comedians, great philosophers or great scientists and, unless you have no idea what you are talking about, it will be almost entirely composed of works by men. Partly this is because, as feminists correctly point out, women have historically been given no opportunity to contribute feminine works to our collective canon. But there is another reason—great, in this sense, indicates a combination of intense abstraction, ambition and transcendence, none of which are inherently female attributes. This doesn’t mean that female styles of art are ‘not great’, but that they haven’t been honoured—and are still not honoured, even (perhaps especially) by feminists themselves, whose complaints about such lists will almost inevitably be rooted in a sexist [mis]understanding of creation; one that, first of all, disparages activity which is not a result of sacrificing one’s life to abstract manifestations of the ineffable and, second of all, displays an extraordinary lack of taste. As if the crowds of women that are pulled from history to populate the syllabus in the name of ‘balance’ are (were allowed to be, wanted to be) anything but minor players. As if Jane Campion’s work is equal to that of Stanley Kubrick’s, or Kate Bush’s to Bowie’s (or any truly great woman composer even exists—they don’t), or Hannah Arendt’s to Arthur Schopenhauer’s, or Frida Kahlo’s to Egon Schiele’s, or Marie Curie’s to Einstein’s. Not that Campion, Bush, Arendt, Kahlo and Curie are no good, they are; but, in this sense, their work doesn’t exists in the same universe as that of the greatest men.

In this profound sense, ‘women have never had the chance to create this kind of great music, great philosophy or great art’ although true, is irrelevant. They cannot make the male-style masterpieces which we rightly honour (but, wrongly, exclusively honour); unless you wish to claim that although women have had the chance to be queens, prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, medical consultants, judges and army generals, sitting alone in a room with a guitar and writing a song equal to ‘Pennies from Heaven’, ‘Sunday Morning’ or ‘I Want you Back’ has somehow been denied them? (Their delicate little fingers also seem to have difficulty picking up chess pieces). Even a bona-fide genius like Nina Simone, a goddess, wrote only two genuine masterpieces herself. Not that, again, women haven’t been cruelly oppressed, and still are—but they have been given the chance to create male-type masterpieces and have fallen far short of greatness in the male realm. Because they are not men.

Likewise, women have succeeded (against great odds) in becoming doctors, journalists, and lawyers… yet hardly a day goes by when a journalist doesn’t wonder why are there are so few women engineers, or mathematicians or software developers (not so many complaints about under-representation in mining though). Somehow passing a postgraduate engineering exam poses a more formidable obstacle than the bar exam (although, as society continues to efface gender, this ceases to be the case). It is simply unthinkable that this might be for inherent psychological or biological reasons. It has to be down to sexism, ‘stereotype threat’ (i.e. the threat of mostly accurate ideas) and Lego.

It’s instructive to take a look at the genuine artistic achievements of women; such as Toni Erdmann, by Maren Ade, L’Abandon, by Camille Claudel, The Moomins by Tove Jansson, the works of Maud Lewis and similar works which, notwithstanding their lightness, have been dismissed ‘superficial’ or ‘folk art’ by the sexist art world, which confuses transcendence—the provenance of the man obsessed—with feminine quality—which need not be ‘arrived at’ in the same way. The greatest works of women nearly always focus on the sensuous, sweet and immanent bodily reality of our actual life. In this, women nearly always excel; but are prevented from plumbing the depths of their experience and from realising it, in art, by the structured, focused, ambitious and cruelly competitive art world.

Women are no more allowed to be women in the world of illustration or film than they are in the world of comedy. When they are granted access, they are forced to betray themselves. The creative comic genius of the naturally spontaneous woman who attempts to emulate male forms, such as ego-cracking physicality and nudity, aggressive satire or intense [transcendent] surrealism, or even written comedy, is corrupted the minute it hits the panel-show spotlight, leaving her without dignity or delight. It is, in other words, correct to say that ‘women are not funny’—while we have to view ‘funny women’ through the prism of the male media system, the cut-throat world of stand-up and abstracted forms of comedy.

Compare a naked, dumpy, man and a naked, dumpy woman running away from an angry landlord. The former is, or at least can potentially be, funny; we laugh at the uglier male form and the breaking of the uglier male dignity, whereas we just feel pity at a debased woman’s body. Or put Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Donna McPhail and Bridget Christie alongside [early] Robin Williams, [early] Steve Martin, [early] Eddie Izzard and [early] Steve Coogan.¹⁰ Or ask yourself why the greatest comedy of modern times, the Monty Python television show and the work of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, which, at their height, expressed the pure, mad truth of God Himself, included no female comedians.¹¹ Or put the ‘comedy’ of George Eliot, Jane Austin and the Brontës alongside that of Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens or even the lord of bleak, Thomas Hardy. Or compare the genius of the great woman improviser with that of the great male impro-artist—and note how she fills his transcendent narrative structures with her immanent magic. The miraculous comic actress (Julie Walters, Alison Steadman, Brenda Blethyn and countless superb exponents of impro on the uk, us and Canadian stages) is a genius, but as soon as she forces her artistic truth to exclusively inhabit his psychological domain all charm, creativity and, in this case, comedy, instantly evaporates. Feminists, like groupthinkers since time began, using their laughter to signal membership of a club (the depraved comedy of ‘us vs. them’), don’t notice that anything is missing.

Women haven’t had the chance to create great music, great novels, great art and great comedy in feminine styles (a fact abetted by their natural and sane lack of abstract aspiration). Forms of art that are organically wedded to human production, that spontaneously arise from the free play of free people making and adorning the things of life, that celebrate imminence, that do not demand fantastically abstract male traditions to find form, that can find widespread informal, vernacular expression… such art forms have either been denied woman (and common people whose lot she has, naturally, always shared) or are so intimately wedded with life that it would be odd to call such genius ‘art’. This has been so since the dawn of the male world; and it won’t change by women achieving ‘equality’ in that world, by aping male styles of expression, by hopping into bed at the drop of a hat, by teaming up in male-made hyper-abstract realms of the internet, by shattering in offended outrage at the mention of a bad word or by learning to subjugate, dominate, decimate and tear the world apart as men do.

For woman to be recognised as the genius she is, the whole world must be turned upside down.

Part 2 (for paying subscribers) here. The essay in full can be read in Ad Radicem. See also The Apocalypedia and Self and Unself for extended enquiries into the nature of sex and gender.

1. Ivan Illich, Gender.

2. Recently I watched a documentary about Play For Today, the BBC television series of the nineteen seventies which launched or supported the careers of, if you can believe it, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Alan Bleasdale, Alan Clarke, Stephen Frears, Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett. The documentary, in honour of one of most complete, original and courageous cultural records ever produced anywhere, had obligatory chapters on race and gender, the latter of which presented the views of women who complained that, at the time, women formed a minute fraction of the management of the BBC. Now nearly fifty percent of ‘leadership roles’ are held by women — but no Play For Today, nor any possibility of anything remotely similar. Well done girls.

3. Penny has stated a preference for the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them’, a preference I shall, in honour of both clarity and reality, be ignoring in this essay.

4. Unless the men are members of a racial minority, then perhaps not; her fierce championing of women diffused into abstract apologetics when 1,000 women were sexually assaulted by immigrants in the 2016 Cologne sex attacks.

5. A Zionist who believed that women should have a ‘homeland’ just as the Jewish people should.

6. For so-called ‘cyberfeminists’, such as Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway and Cornelia Sollfrank, technology liberates women from sex and gender.

7. An expanding economy is required by feminists to fit women into all these super-smashing-great jobs.

8. Influential feminist theorist, Gayle Rubin, for example, was chill about child porn and paedophilia and defended ‘boy-lovers’ as misunderstood victims.

9. See also Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West.

10. Early because these comedians became caricatures of their former selves, sometimes monstrously so.

11. Except Morwenna Banks, for a moment.