Humans Have Got to Just Grow the Hell Up Already | by Esmée Streachailt
Podcast | Coda | Esmee at WLRN on the Meanings of Feminist Love
WLRN Staff
I am the kind of mind that is forever unfolding into deeper subtleties wherever possible. Or just grabbing a thought next to this one and seeing what happens. Or is just never really done with a debate. It is not a temperament that leads to concise expression. 😂 Most of my thoughts are details about other ideas. I just never feel like I’ve been really CLEAR, you know?
Here are some of those “ideatails” about some of the topics raised in my recent conversation with WLRN’s Jocelyn Crawley and her editorial coda to our conversation.
When we study feminist work on love, ethics, relationships, we find many versions of this simple formula: we have to grow up. It’s a request for humans to become their own selves, in relation, with emotional containment, and interpersonal curiosity and desire for the good of the other. In other words, a maturity that supports having a rich, full, even fun life.
On the Biology of Male Violence
So, here’s a problem for all feminists. Men’s violence and sexual violence specifically enforces patriarchal domination by being a constant, background, live threat to every woman’s psychological and bodily integrity. This is the core insight of radical feminism. If you genuinely conclude that men are biologically toxic, rapey, violent humans; AND to eliminate MVAWG from constricting and ending women’s lives: THEN you have to remove the biology, the gene complex. The only way to do that is, as Valerie Solanas also concludes, is kill a lot of men. Or neuter them to prevent reproduction. It’s just like breeding pet dogs. You don’t breed the aggressive puppy hoping to get companion dogs.
These deterministic radical feminists, like all evolutionary psychology bros, do not want to follow their own logic to its conclusion. They're more like “it’s genetic – shrug.”
If all masculinity is toxic (harmful to life) biological maleness, then why on Earth did the process of sexual selection (which in nearly all species is governed by the females, including humans, right down to the ovum) evolve women who really prefer not being subjugated, raped, and murdered by men for profit, fun, and homosocial bonding? Even the process of a reversed sexual selection, patriarchy, in which males choose their mates, has not in lo these 5000 years managed to evolve females who seek rapists to parent our children. That’s why they have to fool us or drug us or kidnap and traffick us.
And if maleness is biological and toxic and therefore universal, then how did all those matriarchies and matricultures exist for the, just call it the 40,000 years we can prove before that?
If a theory is divorced from the world, but imposed in every case anyway, this is a move called ‘overdetermination’ which leads to both grave errors and totalitarianism. In anthropology, overdetermination is the error of attributing a behavior or cultural practice with Many Causes or Influences to Just One. It’s a very patriarchal, silver-bullet, kind of thinking. It’s a flattening, an erasure, an embarrassing mistake in an era when we know just how complex our world really is.
The more research we do into the nature/nurture debate, the more nurture is winning. Boys have to be trained to be the desiccated thing we call Men in our culture. Low Emotional Intelligence and violence are not the natural fate of the human male.
"It has been suggested that the antisocial behaviors related to high testosterone are a function of the manner by which dominance is maintained in these groups," says Robert Josephs of the University of Texas at Austin. In other words, if researchers were to study other groups of folks, say the rich and famous, they might discover that testosterone is connected not to violence, but to who drives the biggest SUV or has the nicest lawn.
Dominance is a very physical synonym for Prestige. So, prestige can also be culturally assigned to cars or lawn care or human care work or excellence at supporting a community. As I said in the episode, Contribution could be Prestigious. This is fantastic news!!!! It affirms the radical feminist hope that men, while recalcitrant, are neurally and socially plastic. They can be different to … this. Rejoice! We don’t have to cull the herd to the survive the millennium!
Feminist Love is only enacted in reciprocity, in mutual support of human unfolding. Domination relations block and stunt the human instinct for connection and mutual regard.
Status – status can be accrued to anything. Shoes, that don’t really fit, for example. Excellence in sport. Owning lots of purely digital ‘money.’ So what if we, women, the ones who do the sexual selecting, tie social status to service, to contribution?? Then we move toward something closer to the matriarchies or communities-of-care we actually evolved in, that are our natural default and that patriarchy alienates us from every part of our being.
This is the difference between (separatist) radical feminism and radical materialist feminism. Radical materialist feminism is (not sure but) hopeful that men are capable of being more human than patriarchy allows. It means we can go out of business one day. It means we can center women and children as a way of life that becomes the norm and not live in fear of men every day of our lives. Is that not the goal?
Here’s my review of Carol Gilligan’s In A Human Voice which is some useful and encouraging reading (both the review and the book).
On Interrelation and Reciprocity
At base, Feminist Love asks us to take our best ethical systems seriously and live them. It’s really that simple. The big shift is that all our traditional and most intuitive ethical systems were, you got it!, written about and for men and deliberately excluded women from the capacity for ‘moral reasoning’ or ethical behavior. Kant, bro, I’m looking at you. Among the thinkers and researchers who have thought about ethics AND assumed that women are also moral agents are the sociologist Carol Gilligan, and the philosophers Luce Irigaray and Iris Murdoch. The latter there being a great thinker of process relations and moral imagination: two concepts that stand behind values like social justice, “people before profit,” like mutual respect and care, like feminism and anarchism and matriarchy.
On Control
Control is a spectrum ;-) It runs from impositional (power-over) to emergent (power-with). Violent domination, state and colonial violence, interpersonal and sexual violence, coercive control, propaganda, cultural and social traditions, raising and socializing children, the discipline of learning, training in a physical discipline like dance or martial arts, applying skill to a craft/art/project (from space travel to architecture to watercolor painting), meditation, mature emotional regulation — these are all flavors of control.
Dictators use impositional forms of control. Power Over. Someone like Marie Curie or Emily Dickenson use the emergent ones. Power With. In our human lives, most of us use a range of them. Even an anarchist community uses forms of control to operate and care for the people in it. It will have practices on which it relies even without any ultimate authorities wielding state power. These communities emphasize the emergent forms that require attentive relation, a fundamental quality of feminist love. Control and feminist values are not even in tension with each other.
It’s an interesting element of ‘work’ in matriarchies. When we study existing ones, we see everyone working and much of the work is meeting basic needs: creating food, cleaning the home and community, etc, and wage labor too. The need for control, in the Foucaultian ‘discipline’ way where we have to be disciplined to work for others’ profit, is not prevalent because we are not working in a totally alienated way creating surplus value for some CEO. Rather, all work is care work, work For The Clan and Community. At least, we find this in many traditional, family based such communities.
Again these are not perfect utopias. What they are, however, are communities that are not fundamentally structured by violence (work or starve, obey or suffer, …) because your labor and service are expropriated to distant, powerful, strangers.
On (feminist) Violence
Direct Action, economic disruptions, and burning down reputations of rapists is not violence. Direct actions solve problems without permission. Economic disruptions are telegrams to the owner class from the hinterlands here below. And the burning down the reputations of rapists should lead to the social death it seems to take to get them to stop. Drastic, even risky, but none of these are violence.
They can all be elements of this fight for women to survive and die natural deaths, to live unmolested by men and become whatever we may be, is as asymmetric as it gets and many on one side delight in violence. A regime that crushes its women for continued control and security. A regime that begins a three week bombing campaign on of a Muslim nation on a Friday night in the middle of Ramadan. A regime that levels a territory it has held in apartheid for decades. These are violence. Historical.
And feminism makes big historical claims, no dobut. Sure, RadMatFem wants to arrive in the new world that answers to the polycrisis. (I call it the Omegacrisis because it’s the last one our civilizations may ever get to have). Sure, RadMatFems suspect that the nutritive (rather than toxic) world is an adapted form of our ancestral matriarchies. I have said before, and I will say it here: We need to take big swings. Or rather, we need to get in a position to take big historical swings.
But how we get there is wildly unpredictable. Our prophet, Lauren Oya Olamina of the Earthseed, from Octavia Butler’s Parables, practices her rifle aim every week just like everyone else in the community. Surviving total social breakdown could be a war of all against all. We don’t know. And if it’s not that, well what’s wrong with a stronger body, the ability to defend yourself, and a skill you can apply to hunting food for your people? Not one thing.
“To take power in order to destroy power” will look like violence to many even when it’s benefiting them. Power is an abstraction of real things: money, protection, the ability to apply force/coercion, the agency to make decisions that affect others. As I said in the pod, you can tell who has power because ALL they have to do is say NO. They don’t have to explain or offer terms, or write detailed studies of problems that have already been studied in order to prove a legitimate need should be redressed if Power is in the mood.
I would love to see more women skilled in the use of violence. This is not the same thing as violent women. But women skilled can do more to refuse the Ultimate No. That makes the Ultimate No less powerful. I mean what I said about girls learning self-defense, a skill of violence.
Finally, my attitude about feminist violence is this: I simply do not know what the future will require of us.
People Before Profit
Economics as we know it is a lie. The ‘market’ is run by computers trading against each other while you and I work to keep body and soul together, fed and dry. We do that in a system that runs on turning our needs and wants into money for others – that encourages us to consume stuff, accumulate stuff, because our needs do not create enough profit on their own.
Clara Mattei is a dangerous economist running a very interesting project in Tulsa OK
Gary loves you and wants you to be free
In love, in a paradigm beyond ownership and extraction, we do not have relationships, but we are in them, indeed we are embedded nothing but relation. RadMatFem does not understand this embedded as a complex future goal we must create from the ground up. We understand this embeddedness-in-relation as the condition of all existence – one that capitalist patriarchy ignores at our now obvious peril. All aliveness is relational, interdependent, permeable, and evolving. Even human cultures. For more on this, take a tour of process philosophy, phenomenologists like Henri Bergson (see Creative Evolution especially), feminist philosophers like Luce Irigaray, and the human relational psychological models of Carol Gilligan and relational life therapy.
Patriarchal relation as property right reverses and denigrates this embeddedness, lets the default male stand outside nature and pretend that it and women belong to him. That whole operation grates and harrows the actual relational and reciprocal nature of all things which is why our world is so painful to live in, so sickening to the world, and on its way out. The basis of the Patriarchal Subject, Default Man, the Godlet (Jane’s word) is an ideal of isolation that would (and does actually) destroy most living things. The embeddedness in relationality needed to operate in feminist love is humble always and humbling until we learn to stand in our human authenticity.
On Toxic Masculinity, one more time
Adjectives exist to help us distinguish elements of nouns and among nouns that belong to a larger category. Every part of all varieties of the hellebore plant are toxic, that’s why there is no designation “toxic hellebore.” It’s just plain hellebore. Men, as problematic and toxic – even poisonous and lethal – as many of them are, are not all toxic. That would already have been the end of the human species had that been the case. Patriarchy, however, is all toxic.
Whatever is natural in humans would be hard to parse after 5000 years of this fuckery. By striking at sexuality and mating, patriarchy reverses the natural order. It takes sexual selection out of the evolutionary process described by Darwin and reinforced by nearly every biologist after him. Females choose mates. Females choose mates with the qualities they think will give their babies the best chance at survival. “Best chance at survival” is what Darwin meant by “fittest.” But Fittest is tricky because Nature also constantly throws surprises and accidents into the process: like giant meteors, or 2 million years of rain, or fire or flood or earthquake or … One can be very very fit for a set of natural circumstances that can change pretty fast – and then not so fit.
By basing its subjugation of women on sex, patriarchy appropriates from the female the process of sexual selection and proceeds to encourage the most brutal men to breed a lot. Turning women into sites of extraction of reproduction, labor, emotional support, and violent entertainment is no part of the natural order. If it is, as I have said before, feminists need to put down our mics, our pens, books, and keyboards, and pick up our weaponry. If all masculinity and all men are live dangers to women at all times, and this is The Natural Order, our only recourse for creating safety for women is to cull the male herd. Feminists who argue that all-men-all-masculinity are toxic/violent/deadly to women but do not then follow their own logic are more in the business of staying in business while doing feminism than of actually solving patriarchy.
The phrase “toxic masculinity” describes a complex of human behaviors that are harmful or deleterious to others (and often the agent himself). To oversimplify: the comparison is not between toxic masculinity and wholesome femininity, but between toxic and wholesome masculinities. These are both complexes of behavior AND of intentions. A motive, after all, is a goal. Charm can be a sign of genuine interest and elegant generosity, or it can be cover for a malignant desire to manipulate. But it looks the same at first. The first is an element of wholesome personality because it is relationally intended and the second is toxic because it is extractive in intention. We have to feel our way into understanding them either way.
We do have toxic femininities, too. And we know good and well that they are not the only kind of feminine. Why would the situation be different with men?
There’s also just numbers. One rapist is typically also responsible for something like 1200 crimes of abuse and assault against people in his lifetime. One toxic man does way more harm in the world than he should be able to do. And while there are many such men, their collective effect is far, far larger than their numbers. As a feminist, I want us to hold onto two facts here. One, the harm is how we should measure the severity of the problem, not the number of men doing it. And two, wholesome men ALSO affect many hundreds or thousands of people in ways that are Good For Them. And good men, with a bit more real courage than we see in them now, are the antidote to toxic men.
Radical Feminists have always believed in the existence and agency of wholesome masculinity and good men. One of our goals is to see more of it and more of them. It is patriarchy that teaches men that they are ‘naturally’ atavistic, violent, lustful, competitors in a zero sum game of wealth and prestige. Patriarchy wants toxic men. It must create them. It does not accommodate them. It builds them.
You see it in the US manosphere-to-far-right pipeline. They want angry, entitled, violent young men to help them subjugate you and me. But the disciplines of socialization remain imperfect and some men remain more wholesome than the system would prefer. You see this in the breakdown of individuals in military basic training. Most men and women have to be re-made from regular humans into soldiers ready to use lethal violence. If men were just naturally violent and dominating and driven to control others at all cost, they would only need to be trained to aim well and wait for orders. That is not what basic training is. I see no reason for radical feminists or RadMatFems to hold patriarchal beliefs or values. (Except maybe wanting to stay in this work forever? Having no other vocation or interest? Like, I can think of a lot of interests and abilities I would like to develop in my life. I don’t really want to dissect and correct patriarchy my whole life long.)
I agree good men need to do better, more, and consistently.
But I do love and respect and appreciate many men who do their best to be “good men.” I assumed all “good men,” all men with empathy, all men with hearts, all men who call themselves doctors or healers or therapists or trauma healing model-builders, at the very least, would join us women in moral outrage, center us for a while, and validate our pain and the wrongness of it all. Some men I know are indeed responding that way. But far too many “good guys” are acting really squirrelly, irrational, and flat out wrong-headed. They get defensive the minute you even mention words like “patriarchy” or “misogyny” or “male entitlement.” Which we all know as male fragility.
But shouldn’t we all be on the same page when it comes to believing and validating Epstein’s victims and holding anyone who was an accomplice or enabler of Epstein to account? Why are these alleged “good guys” insinuating that women have gone crazy, that Epstein’s victims are lying or exaggerating, or that women with moral outrage are preparing for some kind of witch hunt?
From The Body is a Trailhead, Lissa Rankin, “Why are so many powerful “Good Guy” gaslighting us about the Epstein Files?”
There is toxic masculinity, and bad men embody it. They do global scales of harm to women, children, and institutional society. They must be changed for that to change. But the idea that they might change necessarily means we know of a wholesome masculinity they could embody instead.
All Patriarchy is toxic. That’s why we just call it “patriarchy.” Patriarchy is hellebore without the gorgeous winter flowers. Which is to say, ugly, serrated, and sharp.
On Intellectual Property and Political Boundaries
Someday, “after the revolution” as the socialists say, we will not link creativity or thought to physical property in our economic systems. But we do. And feminists have almost no access to them as feminists. We are anathema, cancelled. So, credit for our creativity and cleverness is essential to two elements of our work:
- It honors women’s work and brilliance, both of which are erased in patriarchy.
- It helps us keep our boundaries as feminists with differing theories, prioritized goals, and even political commitments or allies.
When one or more ‘radical feminists’ take some pretty clearly not-radical-feminist choices, the patriarchs stereotype us all as whatever the least rigorous of us have done, and it really fucks with our ability to make any material and effective progress for women.
To that point, WLRN is not the origin of the following definition of patriarchy and Medusa Rising’s mission:
Patriarchy is the interlocking legal, economic, cultural, and religious systems and traditions that support male supremacy. It was born in the commodification, rape, and murder of women. It has existed in remarkably consistent forms for five thousand years. Medusa Rising means for this millennium to be its last.
We are very pleased these sisters read our website and agree with us, however.
US feminists operate in the world of no money and no access to power, so the one thing we have and can offer each other is clear and enthusiastic credit for and sharing of our work and creations. This is not the first time I have seen a feminist organization accidently blur the lines of intellectual credit for origination, and I would like us all to be more respectful.
Feminism, Love, Duty
We have a duty to win. That’s what I keep front of mind. We have a duty to win for the sake of our sisters and future great-great-granddaughters. To win we will have to develop our facility with feminist love for each other and practice it every day. At the same time feminism has boundaries, it has commitments, it is not a brand or a social club. It does not include among its values or commitments the surrender of women's rights to one group of men rather than another. It does not make friends with the authors of such policies as the SAVE Act or Project2025 or Project250. Rights, serious political actors understand, are not badges, they are civil guarantees of material resources for living a human life: the vote, an education, employment to keep a roof, &c, &c. These resources help people be alive and determine the course of their own lives. Take that away and you have only subjugation.
Genocide is not feminist. Goalless military excursions are not feminist. Manipulative uses of civilian aid are not feminist. Supporting racists and rapists is not feminist. Confusing sex for gender and insisting that some men ARE women is not feminist. Threatening to “annihilate” feminists for holding to our values and commitments is not feminist and it certainly is not love.
It's hard, love is. It requires that we stand in our truths, that we discuss them honestly, and that we part ways if we cannot reconcile them. It requires that we grow up enough to know the difference between a paradox and contradiction, to accept that how we want the political landscape to be hedged and how it is actually hedged may not match.
Esmée Streachailt is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising.
Reach out anytime for any reason: info@medusarising.org.
Find us everywhere we are with the social web: @gorgons@medusarising.org.
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