The New Athenas | by Esmée Streachailt

The New Athenas | by Esmée Streachailt

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The fact is that radical feminists were always correct. The Root is the sexual exploitation. And if we were to curb, or jail, or neuter, or remove every unman who participates in this particular form of extraction, we would literally clear space to re-write our cultures. We may find some allies in weird places. I'm not saying we ally with Evangelical Christians, but I am saying look at the urgency in this man's body when he talks about the national emergency of child rape in the US. THAT is the energy we need to see in more women and women.

The only thing we can do is get ready to start the mutation of our cultures to the matriarchy. The first step is to stand together to smash the fash (fascists), but what comes next cannot be a simple restoration. The art of taking power in order to destroy power is a delicate one.

Women deserve serious and effective judicial approaches to violent crimes against women and children: from incest to rape, to partner abuse, to FGM, child marriage to honour killing, trafficking and prostitution, to the air-like ubiquity of pornography, to disappearances and femicides (including forced sex-selective abortion). 

Women deserve for these crimes to be clearly defined in law and to be addressed with funding, policing, and judiciary practices equal to the trauma inflicted by these crimes. 

This from Medusa Rising's manifesto. Note that we do not call for some abstract justice, some arbitrary timeline, no. We call for practices of the same amplitude as the harm/trauma/damage these men do. Their lives should be constrained, their money should pay for their viticim's recovery, and they should be reminded of their shame by the whole community all the days of their lives. They should not be allowed to marry, or parent, or participate in social spaces where girls and women are present. Impractical you say? Really? The US (to my never ending shame) is currently building out its own gulag archipelligo of empty shipping wearhouses to hold its 'enemies.' Impractical is not the objection to reach for. When we add up the reported, only the reported, numbers of girls and women harmed in the many ways unmen harm us, that number sprints past a billion of the girls and women on earth at this moment and doesn't slow down.

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Agamemnon sacrificed a daughter, too, for the benefit of male desire and profit. This is the Trojan War. He gets home and his wife murders him for his blood crime. And her son murders her for her blood crime. And the Furies erupt from the earth to hound him night and day for his blood crime of murdering his mother. Then we have a trial, the trial of Orestes, in which the question is whether the boy is justified in the revenge killing of his own mother — that is, to which life do we owe honor, the father's or the mother's?

So. Athena breaks a hung jury saying, to hell with mothers, I never had one and I'm just fine, so I side with the men and fathers forever. Pam Bondi is our Athena. Bondi wouldn't even turn around to acknowledge the women behind her who had been raped as children for years by her boss and other masters of the universe. So intent is Athena's will to serve the fathers that she magics the Erinyes, the furies, into the Eumenides, the kindly ones, who bring benificence to men rather than hounding them to madness and death for sins against the mother-line. Poof! No more spirits to defend the old ways and off Orestes pops to found ... Athens and dedicate the city to the goddess who saved his sorry ass.

The Dow is over 50,000 she says. The justifying story is no longer a goddess chosing the only side she would ever choose, but only the money. It's OK because the money. We will douse the world's stock exchanges in these girls's blood and sing our praises to Mammon and Musk. It does not matter how many nude images of these girls we did not redact, how many driver's lisences we published. That blood is our money's food. It does not matter how many Ipheginia's we sacrifice for men's purpose and pleasure, we're rich, get with the program! Poof!

Of course, these are all girls whose parents don't have much/any stake in the stock exchange. No army of attorneys, no private army. These are the girls of whom these Godlet UnMen have made prey for 5000 years. There is no attonement for this.

Patriarchy may murder the mother again & again to make the boy a king, but capitalism makes fungible commodities of daughters for any use of any unman who asks.

Epstein Files Explorer

A comprehensive tool for exploring publicly released Epstein case documents and records.

Public Record Database

This visualization of just a portion of the files brings it all home. The entire world's systems are implicated here. Epstein & Bannon & 4Chan & Reddit & social media moguls = QAnon. That LARPing, far-right, Comicon, pick your own adventure GAMEIFIED the sacred business of breaking trafficking rings to bring them to man's justice. Heather Marsh of Binding Chaos, who actually created Anonymous, which actually does help bring down traffickers and corruption around the globe, made it clear that Q was a planned psyop to distract from the victims coming forward as Trump was running in 2015.

All that energy and care burned into the eather rather than directed profitably at bringing down the powers that conspire to keep the MAGA base stupid, sick, addicted, and poor.

In the visualization above, you can see the cabal unfold, trace it through time, not only is this most basic form of patriarchy –- rendering whole human females into resources — the infrastructure of our social worlds, it is the infrastructure of the friendships of the men who run them.

Stunning lack of imagination, really, innit? All that commaradarie, control, access, education, money, influence — they have the resources to do what we want to do, remake the world in a more nourshing form — and their best unmale bonding scheme is to rape children.

Decoding an Unknown Survivor’s Journal - Part 1

Trigger Warning: discussion of sexual abuse of a minor and child loss

The Panicked WriterEllie Leonard

These are the men we are trained to admire most, to aspire to know and be, to emulate in our personal style, choices of consumption, and political commitments. Notice how the word 'billionaire' has replaced 'rock star' and 'athlete'? They're not even skeevy rock stars, or luche poets – unmen with something of divine talent – no, just ... a knack for turning everything and everyone into money. These seedy, wheedling, sadistic, cowardly, completely homosocial rapists of children. These are our paragons. We are a long way from the relatively dignified violence of Sargon of Akkad.

These unmen are both in coalition and competition. As I spent some time last year explaining, the coalition that is the global far-right movement and the Epstein Class don't all want exactly the same things, and they don't all have exactly the same values. The authoritarian Christians and Elon Musk don't have the same world view at all (the difference between 'soul' and 'intelligence' does matter though both are kinds of idealist disembodiment), but they'll cooperate for the sake the larger project of ... profting from and controlling all of us.

Feminists the meanwhile have split and split, taking even honest short-sightedness for the thump of the bus's wheels. We must not do this anymore. We must not be easy with some using our name taking comfort from or siding with the fascists and racists, but we must find points of cooperation amongst each other and build ourselves some power. We must bring the fractious Factional Era of women's movement to an end. Otherwise, we will be doomed to trundle along being concerned and critical and toothless.

The coverup is not recent. The various police forces ignoring reports from girls trapped in this sadist hellscape goes back to the late 1970s. Most of the coverup is just the everyday blind-eye turned on the suffering of girls and women. We RadMatFem have known for a long time that the whole system indicts itself with regard to the vulnerable no matter their particular demographic.

The US FBI and its DOJ received reports from victims and witnesses for decades. These children lived in violence under threat of death. Some seem to have been born into it by the rape of these girls. The trap door is real, though what it's for is still not established.

Epstein files photo shows trapdoor opening to water. Here’s its likely purpose

Social media users speculated that the door was used for nefarious purposes related to unproven “ritualistic sacrifice” rumors.

Snopes.comEmery Winter

There are orders for 330 gallons of sulfuric acid, on the day the FBI opened its investigation into Epstein. If you look at his emails (and other documents are here too) you can see that he followed the FBI's public newsletter like a journalist. But-but-but, that acid has many uses including cleaning the two large swimming pools and desalination given that the island has no standing source of potable water. But that does not mean that our fears are unfounded. What we do know is alarming enough that the horizon beyond which 'unthinkable' could lie is farther and farther away every day. But we know, RadMatFems who have a pretty clear-eyed view of just how very much creativity some men put into harming girls, and boys, and women that we can be forgiven for fearing the likelihood.

We know, in a way that most law officers and justice advocates do not (want to), just how purposeful such unmen are. Even your run of the mill domestic abuser is acting with deliberation. His abuse is part of his value system.

It's not the hottest new radfem take to make these connections. We have long been blue in the face for confronting this wickedness from the forests of our exile. What concerns us is that here is our world now confronted at last with something like the full flavor its dark heart, the yawning pit of vampiric want-want-want-want-want that whirls at the center of all our offical cultures' vaunted institutions, traditions, the whole way we make sense of the world:

He who has the most impunity wins. He may eat the souls of as many as he likes. We will feed him more so that we may have a little.

For that is what the emptiness in patriarchy's dark triad most loves to eat –- the fear, the pain, even the moment the girl collapses into the inevitable. Feed us your girls, indeed. Next to forcing that collapse of self into thing, coming or shorting a housing market or inventing a life saving technology are all nothing. No thrill there.

They're not mad, manic, scattershot. It's not that we can't reason with these unmen. Except that we have done so for decades. Except that they have no reason to accept reason from us. They are the power we need to seize in order to destroy power. Them and all their assets.

Why suggest this? Because there are holes in the world where these girls-now-women, new such girls every few seconds, whole and healthy lives once awaited them. The same is true for every black and brown family shattered, every young black man harassed, arrested, killed by our 'justice' system. These breaches of values our cultures say they hold most dear are a particular kind of betrayal, they leave a particular kind of mark on a life and the world of that life.

Societies that eat their young are doomed. Let us save the young and still doom the society. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is end a thing.

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The Great Mother these little men keep killing is a creature of death-regeneration-life. She is the Situation. She is both Intimate and Impersonal. She is the mother which births the lamb, and she is the lamb, and she is the mother wolf who feeds that lamb to her pups.... A justice that is aligned with the Mother's cycles and methods needs to be genuinely dignified rather than performatively genteel, a justice that embraces the reality that some harms are indeed worse than death.

These godlets are afraid of the debt of life we all owe Her and they are terrified of their vulnerability to the death that we all also owe Her. Something in their fantasy of kingliness and invulnerability, in the ease with which they inhabit their impunity, has convinced them that they are exceptions to the blood debt we all owe the Earth-Mother and our mother/s that must be paid either willingly and with grace and open-eyed trust in Her processes, ... Or after the Erinyes have driven us to raving self-destruction.

I am not a peaceable person all the way through. I admire the energy of the Erinyes, of Medusa, of Morrigan. RadMatFems may not want to admit this kind of energy to our politics, to our future world, but I for one could watch the crows eat Pam Bondi's eyes with resolved equilibrium and then cheer as they moved on to these sinners against Life Itself.

The Morrígan — The Order of the Crows

The Morrígan is an ancient Irish goddess of war, battle, prophecy, sovereignty, and otherworld power. While She was worshipped primarily in Iron Age Ireland, the earliest recorded mention of her dates back to 750 BC - however, this is widely believed to be a retelling of much older (oral) stories, a

The Order of the CrowsHome

I know I have settled nothing here. I know this post brings nothing like comfort. The fuck of it is that history like this simply has to be lived through with with all the unrelenting determination, fortitude, and wisdom we can bring to it.

There are new Athenas on the march. Bondi. Maxwell. Leavitt. Owens. Kelley. Not a flicker of care of Iphegenia. Repeated cooperation with the male forces that come against Medusa. Acceptance of the constant rape of women and goddesses by the Brother Gods and their Sons. And it's not that these women feel safe so close these Godlet Unmen, how can they? It's that they cannot feel us in themselves, cannot hear the vibration of becoming, for Athena is a guardian of the grid, the order, of the law of the father, of that idealist and immortal permanence.

But the vibrations of becoming, of Be-ing, are the deeper inevitability. We can begin to find power there. Those vibrations, the quantum music, the probabilistic buzz of particles that arise from them: these flow through us and our grief, and rage, and the resplendent unfolding of our communal joy and sensual pleasure. Feeling how we are occilation and vibration, the troughs and crests of waves of being. May from there, even if we must begin by keening our grief to unknot its tightness, maybe from there we can find our solidarity and rise again against these kinglets.

Journeys in the Mirror-World

Introduction: Rape, Power, and the Epstein Files

Culture War BluesJane Clare Jones

For a more political analysis, Jane Clare Jones. For a more "Left Bros Do Better" analysis, Max Dashu with Gail Dines on WBAI on Chomsky's association with the unman.

WBAI Radio Archives

Esmée Streachailt is the the founder and editor of Medusa Rising. She lives 14 miles from the Hellmouth of the White House, and is ready to build worlds even if she has to pave over these rapists to do it.

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