Militant Women | by Esmée Streachailt
Essay | The YES of Feminist Negation
The Feminist NO opens a conversation about the future.
Even in armed conflict.
Even in political extremism.
The Patriarchal NO shuts down the future.
The Feminist YES negates the shut-down future.
This essay does not recommend violent action. It does encourage us to direct action. This essay contemplates both among the many pathways to a living future. The YES of feminist negation.
Rojava
The Kurds live divided by "men's grids" and national borders. One people, FOUR countries, and under threat in all of them. Like the Basque or Catholic Northern Irish — any occupied people — some are willing to use property destruction and/or deadly violence in the name of their liberation. Like rogue/terrorist organizations such as Hamas, the Kurds benefit from extra-national support – but its very conditional on those nations' agendas and never really enough to liberate Kurdistan.
Meghan Bodette
Jina Mahsa Amini was a Kurdish woman. #WomanLifeFreedom
The YPK and is all-female military units had been developing along with the Rojava region's robust egalitarianism in the context of the Syrian Civil War, but gained most of their international attention for their success against ISIS in Syria. They are also labeled a terrorist organization by Erdogan's regime in Turkey.
An apocryphal story I picked up in those years told that the women of the YPK each carried a bullet in their chest pocket with their own name carved on it. They had vowed to kill themselves (and some to kill their daughters) rather than let them be taken into slavery by ISIS. These women took "feminism or death" for a law in the context of the total subjugation ISIS intended for them.
For religious and political and power reasons, all of the regimes under which Kurdish women live are threats to their well-being and their lives.
This is (as we know) true in more and less formal/legal ways for women everywhere. But in Rojava, "Despite conditions of constant war and isolation, the people of Rojava are building and defending a society rooted in principles of direct democracy, women’s autonomy, cultural diversity, cooperative economics, and social ecology" (Bioneers, just below). They are building something that can easily become matricultural, and with women having the militarist skills of men what they are building is less likely to degrade back into patriarchy than otherwise.
Bioneers
There are obvious ideological reasons why, say, The Wall Street Journal isn’t tripping over itself to tell you all about this movement that’s trying to make corporations and the state obsolete. They might want you to see this picture of the woman with the scarf and the AK-47; that’s compelling, and it’ll get you to click on their articles, but people talking about how to create a direct democracy to overcome patriarchy and capitalism, that’s another thing. (Bioneers, above)
Something I've noticed about women in ancient Crete, where war was heard of but not practiced, and the women of the YPK/Rojava region is that they are REGAL: confident, relaxed, easy in their own skin, sovereign in the sense of self-determining.
Women in ancient Crete jumped bulls with the men. Archaic hunter burials found have been re-examined and half of them are found to be female. The sling, the atlatl, ... and the rifle are all levelers of physical advantage. And all are still in production (this family seems dedicated to the craft).
Why would I reference such dated, indeed two are prehistoric, hunting weapons? Because facility with the tools of group defense and food provision are physical skills that coordinate bodies and communities, and that result in that regal confidence of free women.
The Women of Rojava have opened a conversation with the world. They spiral over the grids of nations that divide them. They have said NO to even "benevolent" patriarchy. They have said YES to Women, Life, Freedom.
CONTACTJulia Wartmann j.wartmannunibas.ch
Schaffhauserstrasse 80, 8057
Zurich, Switzerland
The US
Jane's Revenge
The US regime's health agencies think (white) US women are "under-babied."
That's fucking cute, isn't it, that rhetorical flourish? This country is over-Trumped. Men's sperm counts are dropping globally, but it's the women not letting the babies come forth to labor for the owners and rentiers. It could not be the microplastics, the PFAS, the general degradation of the planet and ecology that capitalists call GDP, and so on, &c.
What's needed to fix this, of course, is for women shut up, have babies, and make sandwiches; a formula Helen Lewis has reported MAGA men think will make women happy and contented. Dr Oz and Sec Kennedy being two.
So. The year of our lord 2026 finds women taking matters into our own hands again. Jane's Revenge is barely even a network, but it is willing to both graffiti and sometimes fire bomb anti-abortion pregnancy centers.
What's impressive about this campaign is not its law-breaking property damage, but that it operates underground enough to show up only in news stories after an action. The response to these actions has been enormous, really, weighed against the disinterest the US has shown in women's prenatal and maternity care ... or survival. Home invasions, assassinations, and threats of death, to children, SWATing, and now alleging child abuse against a gay former Marine, who speaks eight languages, and has a real shot at the presidency are regular practice on the US right now. Random citizens terrorizing public officials passes nearly unremarked, but leave a public trace, a tag, and all hell breaks loose.
Judith Levine
Responses to political shifts like Jane's Revenge are controversial. Does it help women's cause for fake clinics to operate in fear? For women to be arrested for violent direct action (that's really just minor property damage)? What is the relative effectiveness of image projection over, let's call it, 'vibe projection'?
Sure, non-violent movements have a greater success rate than violent ones, but they always get less than they demand, and they have never succeed without that shadow stalking the horizon.
The people who have their hands around the throat of our republic are not going to let go. They can't. They have committed so many crimes, ignored so many laws, shredded so much of the Constitution, and destroyed so many lives that there is no safety for them outside of power. They will only escalate and bear down.
The next major step to secure their hegemony is The SAVE Act which I reminded us of while cheering for DemocraShe last weekend. This podcast was a delight!!
Medusa Rising
Jane's Revenge are responding to the entrapment of women, to the deaths of women, to the tragedies visited on families by a renewed patriarchal assertion that is wholly a choice born of resentment, avarice, sadism, and twisted desires.
Roe was always a thin veil of protection. No law and no judicial precedent can stand against all three branches of the federal government working in concert both by action and by omission to advance domination by a high-tech, christo-capital-fascist, reassertion of feudal orders and powers.
As I have said before, we need to think mean. We need to think ahead of these men and their minions.
Jack Dutton
As the UK government escalated pressure on the Suffragists, some of them escalated right back. The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by figures like Emmeline Pankhurst, carried out roughly 250 bombings and arson attacks between 1912 and 1914. Remembered more for his MLKjr-like later years, Nelson Mandela was more Malcom X in his younger days. Also responding to increasingly violent pressure from the states he founded Spear of the Nation, the militant wing of the ANC, which carried out a campaign of economic sabotage targeting infrastructure. He was imprisoned for resisting South African apartheid, but he was also imprisoned for, well, terrorism is what we call it now.
Tessa Stuart
The christian nationalist abortion bans have killed an estimated 59 to 68 women, and further studies have estimated that for every maternal death, there are approximately 100 cases of severe maternal morbidity (so that's around 6800 women severely traumatized along with their infants).
Jane's Revenge re-opened the conversation about abortion. It said, basically, NO, we want a future in which women don't die like this, a future where children are not born in deep trauma, a future where women are people and people are treated like the precious expressions of life that we are. Yes, that NO comes with a warning: keep creating risk for us, and we will create risk for you. But the goal is differently oriented because motive is differently vectored. Jane's Revenge doesn't want the harm for power's sake, to harm these people or their buildings in order to force them to have abortions, they use the harm for women's sake because abortions save lives. Abortion enables the future.
Still, not recommending. Just pointing. Ruminating.
250 Years Is the Clock
The Heritage Foundation and some other crackpots with power have published 168 pages detailing their designs on re-subjugating women to men at every level of society and culture by the 500th anniversary of the US's founding. Helen Lewis also does not miss this point and takes it as seriously as it is proposed.
Fuck that. No, sir. Do not pass Go. Do not collect all that sweet anonymous donor money. I mean, unique patriarchal social orders/civilizations don't tend to last that long, so this is all very bold. Still, they are serious and they are quite manifestly powerful.
Feminism or Death | The Future Is Feminist | Death Before Coverture
To the Matriarchy and Beyond!
(Turns to address Man.) It's enough with the shenanigans, right? Enough redefining basic ontological concepts to erase women, enough loud-frightened braggadocio to convince yourself that you're man enough, enough killing us in the name of life, enough flaccid 'nudifying' women you'll never actually see naked with any enthusiasm, enough agro Jesus hype, enough sadism, enough resting your entire power structure on ever-present background threats of rape that are the context of women's lives. Enough. ¡Basta!
New worlds are built on the ruins of old ones and the bones of their people. That's the process men have preferred for 5000ish years. They're good at it, but at very little else at that scale.
Matriarchy does civilization better, and it's the one spark of hope I carry now that so many young women are taking their feminism in a matriarchal direction. More and more, all the evidence is pointing to matriarchal structures and practices resulting in more livable, happier, pro-social, and crucially Much More Endurable civilizations – with sourdough bread and everything!!
Nimet Kirac
From around 9000BCE to 5700BCE the Ubaid civilization thrived, and Çatalhöyük in particular. 4300 years. In the same spot. That, cousins, is some sustainability.
To return is impossible. To recreate is foolish. But to constitute anew matriarchies beginning in these high-tech times, Hyperlithic or Matriocene (a new geological era!), a matricultural future demands we take it as seriously has the Heritage Foundation has taken to realizing the fictional Gilead.
They say facts don't care about your feelings. Well, feelings, here are the facts. Humans evolved in woman-and-child-centred, care-based, socials systems of cooperation and deep social bonding. We lived like this for most of our 300,000 years, and our ancestors controlled fire for 100,000 years before that. We've been farming for 9000 years. Women hunted the mammoth, too. All of the truly essential-to-life technologies were invented in this matricultural world that everywhere organized its year astronomically, and that honored life and death in its many avatars of Goddess. Those are facts. They give me very good feelings, like hope.
But those are the past. We're here now with our cousins, lovers, children, and a very powerful opposition. We have a non-violent political movement in Matriarchy Now. We have blogs, newsletters, books, courses by many experts we should support and learn from, music, festivals, and each other.
And we have some decisions to make.
- Do we help reclaim and reinforce liberal democracy so that we get a chance to move beyond patriarchy?
- What to do with all this god-like technology?
- How organize our social worlds for care and well-being?
- What aspects of matriculture to phase in and when?
- How to bring the others along with us?
- What to do if they won't come?
- To work together or not? Network? Confederate?
- How best to connect each other across the globe?
- What to do when they come for us? (Because they will.)
- What's the strongest lever for starting from zero?
- Do you want to win the future?
- What are you willing and able to do to liberate women?
The Feminist NO opens a conversation about the future.
Comment below.
Feminism or Death | The Future Is Feminist | Death Before Coverture
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