Yes, you read that correctly. Modern feminists exalt the male mind. Conditioned by male styles of awareness, or wishing to succeed in the male world, they exalt cut-off hyper-abstract egoism — insane masculine, hyper-rational, scientific ‘intelligence’ or ‘realism’ — just as sexist men do. Compelled to substitute her embodied presence with intellect, anxiety and ambition, she becomes estranged from her own feminine nature which she perceives as a threat; or, at best, childish, naivety. She may wear lipstick, watch weepies, have children or even be attracted to domineering apemen, but her strange and terrifying intuition, her radical generosity, her miraculous presence, sensitivity and love are as alien to her as wild nature is. A genuinely intelligent monogendered feminishist is a contradiction in terms — they have no idea what feminine intelligence is and they never express or support it.
In order to be able to think and act as men do, such feminists uncritically accept fundamentally male styles of experience and perception, and then, to justify their self-alienation, seek to efface gender completely. There is, they assert, no such thing as masculine and feminine. Innate sex differences, which have been discovered ‘at every level of analysis’4, are a patriarchal conspiracy, and all the classics of art and culture which express innate gendered differences and the mystery of their complementarity, along with all the evidence we have that men and women lived in egalitarian gendered societies for 99% of human history; are all lies. The ‘truth’ is that ‘gender is a spectrum,’ that society determines gender and we are all free to choose our own gender identity (or fuck whoever we want5), held back only by the existence of nefarious ‘gender stereotypes,’ which (despite being mostly accurate) limit our ‘freedom’.
These ‘truths,’ alas, aside from being incompatible with science, art6, all of human [pre] history and the sane gendered experience of loving couples, also contain a couple of nasty contradictions which feminishists would prefer not to explore. The first is that women seeking access to the male world, to ‘traditionally male’ top jobs, are forced to claim that gender is the result not of nature, but of nurture, in order to justify a position in the system gained through the exercise of their will. Yet, oddly, they are unwilling to entertain the possibility that a world created by men, which forces everyone within it to act and think like men — insane men at that — masculinises women and estranges them from their embodied femininity.
Another contradiction inherent in the ideology of feminishist monogender revolves around the totemistic notion of 'diversity'. The Monogender Myth has it that we are all the same, that differences between men and women (and between black and white, straight and gay) are really illusions. Unfortunately, because those who promote such ideas are all very keen on getting good jobs, they also have to promote the idea that institutions must accept women, black people and homosexuals in equal number. Why? Because we need diversity. And what does diversity mean? It means we are all different!
Feminishists and their allies are unwilling to explore these contradictions, to accept that men and women are different and therefore possess different skills, to explore the real reasons why men are more violent and more easily (and catastrophically) addicted to porn and vr, to address the parlous state of young men in today’s world, or to admit that they are attracted to men who behave like men; who are courageous, who can perceive when no does mean no, and when it actually means, ‘try in a better way,’ who can master themselves and the skills that males excel at, such as philosophy, building houses, writing symphonies and taking super-sensitive manifest charge.
This intellectual dishonesty, along with the strident emotionality and loveless unconsciousness of feminishism, is based on a masculine experience of power within the capitalist system, the entire locus and point of prominent feminist discourse. Not a day goes by without an opinion piece published in the corporate press lamenting that women do not have access to positions of capitalist power, or exalting notable capitalist fiendesses (such as Hilary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher or Julia Gillard), or demanding that all references to gender be expunged from our culture; yet, oddly, not quite so much attention is given to raising up the powerless classes (see myth 4) comprised of several billion miserable women, to levelling structural hierarchies, or to meaningfully addressing the problems that men and women have living with or loving each other within the confines of capitalist ‘civilisation’. Love is completely ignored by monogendered feminists. They never use the word, or, if they do, reduce it to the usual red-herrings of compromise, companionship and sexual desire.
Woman has had the vote for over a century, she has participated in the male economy for half a century, she has had access to top jobs for a quarter of a century, and soon she may well achieve complete equality within the system. And yet the system remains completely unaffected. Prominent modern systemacrats are falling over themselves to promote equality, monogender-rights and ‘gender-intelligence.’ And yet the system remains completely unaffected. The mythos of the world — its movies, novels, newspapers and adverts — are full of powerful, fuck-hungry women dominating contrite, emasculated men. And yet the system remains completely unaffected. Funny that.
Remove the distorting influence of the capitalist world, its insane hyper-egotiism, its [consequent] separation from nature, its hostility to embodied awareness, its destruction of culture, its fundamental sexism, its gender-effacing priorities7 (indeed its gender effacing chemicals), its limited selection of remunerative tasks and its total ignorance of love and you remove everything that creates the warped sexual psychology8 it rewards; which is why prominent defenders of monogenderism have no interest, whatsoever, in meaningfully criticising the system, or its roots, any more than their pseudo-gendered sexist counterparts do. If they did, if gender-rights crusaders made any real effort to deracinate the world-brain, they would uproot the cancerous tree they wish to climb.
A final note. Many people on the left who have read up to this chapter will have been nodding and sighing with appreciation only to discover what!? He’s against us! The fact that I have spent the majority of the book criticising the racist, sexist, disabling, elitist, anti-natural system will go out the window when they read that I am also criticising the so-called ‘radical’ left. How can it be? We’re the good guys! We would never construct an identity out of our beliefs, huddle in identity-reinforcing groups or violently suppress people who are different to ourselves. Look, we’re the victims here. We’re innocent.
Victims you may be (or may not — a lot of radical agitation is made by extremely comfortable folk), but innocent? I think not. Innocence comes from independence from the system, something which large numbers of socialists, feminists, leftists and radicals have no interest in. They are trying to change the system so that it gives them power, prestige and comfort, and thus leave its foundations unaffected, even unexamined.
It goes without saying that I believe the sexism of the system, the kind outlined in this chapter, along with its racism, its hatred of any kind of difference (such as men who have sex with other men), its suppression of true creativity (genius and scenius), its obliteration of nature, its violence towards children, its unending brutality towards the poor and the psychological abominations that the system allows to own and run the world are all worse than a few entitled nobs declaiming in the paps on the subject of gender-neutral toilets, or a few menopausal hags squashing dissent under the banner of ‘feminism,’ or a few university students swooning at the ‘n-word’.
My point, in this chapter and the next two, is not that leftism (feminism, socialism, etc, etc.) is worse that rightism (sexism, racism, etc, etc.), but that it is misguided. It is, for the most part, aiming at the wrong target, for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way. Of course it is right to stand up against violent racists, dogmatic priests, corrupt bosses and so on, but the target, as this entire book is attempting to show, is not them. It’s not ‘the right’ or ‘men’ or ‘sexists,’ or ‘racists.’ It’s not even the hyper-wealthy, the professional class or capitalists. Even if rich, right-wing, sexist, racist, professional men are currently in capitalist power, the problem, and the target is the system; and the system doesn’t care what colour, sex or size you are, or what ideology you follow. Many of the fuck-wits in charge, they care — but the system doesn’t9. If you care, then you are barking up the wrong tree. In fact it’s not a tree, it’s a lamppost, and by the time you get to the top, the lights will be out.
Unless society ‘pre-splits’ them. Then we find socialised men and women on much the same mission.
See e.g. Sex equality can explain the unique social structure of hunter-gatherer bands by M. Dyble et al, and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. As I mention in the introduction, we can never know for sure how people lived tens of thousands of years ago. Ultimately our only guide is self-knowledge, tempered by what facts there are; facts which indicate that domained sexual equality was the norm.
It might, but I wouldn’t count on it.
‘Neurobiologists have discovered that there are sex differences in how our brain hemispheres are wired, with women’s being more highly connected across the left and right hemispheres, and men having more connections from front to back. There are sex differences in the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus, in both size and activity… Activation of the left side of the hippocampus is found to be more dominant in females, and activation on the right is found to be more dominant in males. There are fundamental sex differences in basic neurochemistry. Men and women have different baseline amounts of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine. They also differ in their abilities to synthesize these neurotransmitters. When neurons of male and female rats are placed under a microscope, the ways in which these cells die are different — a discovery with profound implications for the treatment of brain injuries, Alzheimer’s, and stroke…’ Claire Lehmann, The xx Factor. See also Evidence supporting the biologic nature of gender identity by Saraswat et. al or A meta-analysis of sex differences in human brain structure by Amber Ruigrok et al. See also The Essential Difference by Simon Baron Cohen, Brain Gender by Melissa Hines and Gender by Ivan Illich.
This is the thesis of the popular Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá; that gender is a modern, social invention and that our ‘natural’ state is therefore one in which men and women think and behave like men, having sex with whoever they please. The outrageous bias and sheer incompetence of their argument (notwithstanding a few decent central chapters) is exhaustively detailed in Sex at Dusk, by Lynn Saxon, which despite itself being a biased (and biastified; see introduction) account of human psychology, resting entirely on the insane hyper-objective scientism of Neo-Darwinism and its inflated assumptions about the role of genes in evolution, is a far more measured, complete and fair account than Ryan and Jethá’s which, as Saxon correctly points out, ‘reveals itself as a contemporary middle-class, child-free, sex-obsessed, male fantasy projected back onto prehistory.’
Women have had the chance to be queens, prime ministers, presidents, ceos, consultants, judges and army generals, but 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.
Both modern — the heroic quest of man and the transcendental wyrdness of true men and women are punished today — and ancient — domestication is well known to reduce sexual dimorphism.
See 33 Myths of the Ego for an extended investigation of sex and love-making.
The people in charge of the system might lock up socialists or persecute environmentalists, but, as we have seen in the Myth of Truth and as we shall see in the next three sections, the system encourages you to fight them, to rebel, to be a ‘radical’.
30. The Myth of Catastrophic Offence
You come across [negative online comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it’s a very dehumanizing thing. It’s almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanizing thing.
Gwyneth Paltrow
The religious instinct to treat words and ideas as real leads to the creation of powerful, and power-serving, religious taboos · · · These taboos serve the system by ignoring power, which is the source of violence, and by raising the wall between what can and cannot be officially said. This permits the violence of power-relations to be concealed by gentility, politically correct language, advertising campaigns and other totemistic presentations · · · Questioning totems is intolerable to groups which are jockeying for power within the system, whether they are on the left or the right.
When society is run by priests, any idea which criticises their God, or their right to rule in His name, is deemed ‘heresy’. When society is run by uptight, nationalist capitalists, any idea which throws their sadistic power into question is judged to be improper, unpatriotic or hysterical. When monogendered feminists, homosexuals and metrosexuals gain or are granted power any idea which questions their foundational ideology, that gender does not exist, becomes unsayable. When drug pushers and mind police are granted the power to determine reality, invent phantom illnesses and implicitly conspire with malingerers (see myth 26), so-called ‘ableist slurs’ enter the lexicon of the damned. And when a few members of hitherto excluded racial minorities are granted their own big desk (see myth 5), then ‘racist language’ is given the power to instantly render all within earshot subdued and tyrannized.
As soon as women, homosexuals and racial minorities were fully admitted into the workplace, so feminism, lgbtiqacφ, anti-racism and disability-rights campaigns became integral elements of [late] capitalist ideology. But it is not simply as a capitalist advertising campaign, or in straightforward defence of group-power that criticism of any woman must now be rendered ‘sexist,’ or criticism of any black man ‘racist,’ or criticism of any politician ‘abusive,’ or criticism of the conceited, the selfish, the lazy or the stupid ‘ableist.’ There is another reason why modern capitalist states and corporations — the most dishonest, repressive and destructive organisations ever to have existed in human history — are scrupulously fair, respectful and tolerant in their use of language and publish guidelines on the correct language to use when referring to disabled people, women, ‘people of colour’ and members of the lgbtiqacφ ‘community;’ another reason why, although the global south is poorer than it has ever been, black people are more marginalised than they have ever been, ordinary people are more disabled than they have ever been (less able to use their legs to move, or use their mouths to speak and be heard), and femininity is more rigidly suppressed than ever before; another reason why we are less able to use words that might offend women, the poor, black people or the disabled. Corporate power is hyper-vigilant about offensive language because, in order to conceal its inherent, implicit racism, sexism and classism, it must be scrupulously just in its formal, explicit speech and behaviour.
There are two reasons for this; for taboos on ‘offensive language’ (on insulting prophets, calling girls ‘chicks’, rape-jokes and so on) and for continually decamping from one word to another ‘safer’ one (e.g. from ‘the n-word’, to ‘black’, to ‘person of colour’). Firstly, the sanctity of taboos upholds the religious belief upon which the system is founded; that words, ideas and emotions are as real as things and that a bad word can smite those who hear it senseless (particularly women for some reason) as if from a percussive blast (see myth 25). In this way can all the lies of the system, conjured from thin air, be given the material ground that credibility demands, while all intellectual criticism and verbal mockery be banished as acts of violence. Murdering a million Iraqis for their oil, obliterating Libya, exploiting half of Asia for cheap underpants, felling Brazil, or other actions — yaaawn — but wait! hold the press! He said what? He called women ‘birds’!? Christ on crackers, this man is a monster!
Secondly, taboos don’t just ignore the source of racism, sexism, etc, but, ultimately, they raise the wall between formality and informality higher. Children, friends and comedians will continue to use non-standard words, but we must now use the correct word in public. This actually serves power. Without the formal smokescreen of inoffensive language, the actual repression and bigotry of criminal state-corporate activity would be visible. Thus a standard matrix of prohibitions is employed to conceal capitalist power-relations and personal egoic insanity behind gentility. Only a stupid slave-owner uses racist language, only a drunk upper-manager calls his wage-slaves ‘plebs’ and only an ageing comedian calls women ‘birds.’ An elite, racist, sexist system is far better served by limitations on such language, for the same reason that the most abusive parents never explicitly suppress, belittle or even criticise their children.1
This is how ‘racism,’ which actually means indiscriminate, prejudiced hatred of or violence towards an entire race (‘I can’t stand black / white people’) has come to mean bias, criticism or antipathy towards a group of people who are of the same race (‘I can’t stand those black / white people’). Wealthy and powerful people, and their sometimes well-meaning professional servants, seek to conflate the two in order to redefine popular resentment of their privilege into forms of racism. Thus criticism of Israel, or animosity towards isolationist groups of wealthy Saudis (Jews, Russians, Americans, whoever) or revolutionary ire directed at the dominance of institutions by certain races (old, white, Anglo-Saxon ceos, for example) must all be understood as ‘racist’2. Such misdirection is not difficult, as those who express their frustrations at privileged groups, or at immigrants shipped in by privileged groups to destabilise local workers, frequently make the same error (due either to the influence of media-enhanced availability errors or of genuine racists); assuming that, for example, rich Brit is synonymous with Brit (or Professor is synonymous with White Man, or Parisian is synonymous with French, or Bogan is synonymous with Australian).
Concealing actual racism, sexism, ableism etc. and ensuring that just criticism be conflated with prejudice and violence is the reason why Western governments and public figures bend over backwards to accede to demands for correct usage and to express contrition for linguistic-transgression. Modern power is perfectly happy for language to be policed, books to be banned, free speech to be curtailed, criticism to be criminalised, ‘racists’ to be sacked, ‘sexists’ to be reprimanded, a rigidly policed taxonomy of categories and spectres to take the place of reality and words to be conflated for the things they represent. The system is also quite comfortable with a ‘radical’ movement which requires a massive and powerful pyschocratic-punitive legal apparatus to make them ‘safe’ from ‘abuse’, from ‘hate speech,’ from various forms of ‘phobia’ (islamaphobia, transphobia, biphobia, etc.) and ‘mental illness’ and from catastrophic thought crimes which stand in for ‘all the things I don’t like’. The system, in other words, welcomes the modern leftist.
The leftist (‘sjw’ or, occasionally, ‘intersectionalist3’), usually some kind of [political] feminist, gay-rights activist, anti-racism campaigner or member of a racial minority, complains about privilege, yet is typically a member of the privileged classes (ideally with a working-class accent). The leftist complains about ‘victim-blaming’ yet never criticises the system which relentlessly suppresses the idea that the environment causes conflict, crime, physical ill-health or outright madness. The leftist complains about ‘objectification’ yet sees the entire world and everyone in it as a collection of categories; you are not an individual, you are ‘white’ or ‘a man’. The well-to-do leftist regularly expresses ‘solidarity’ [i.e. intense identification] with those most affected by the system (the global poor and excluded) while making demeaning professional interventions in their lives and patronising pronouncements about how they should resist the system. The leftist complains about ‘fragile egos,’ yet demonstrably possesses a self so extraordinarily delicate and brittle, it can shatter at (be traumatised, triggered, even infected by) a word. The leftist complains about ‘being silenced,’ yet shuts down all criticism immediately and ferociously with arguments largely based on belittling interlocutors, or ruling out their entire view based on a single piece of information, rather than on making a persuasive case. The leftist regularly meets fact, knowledge and truth4 with feeling5 — ‘what you are saying is irrelevant, because it (it and nothing else; certainly not powerful social forces that stand to benefit from my feelings) makes me feel threatened, offended and angry; and because you do not belong to my category, you can never understand this feeling’ — a minority version of the standard mainstream position; reality is what we say it is6. The leftist has a great deal of difficulty speaking for himself; opinions are prefaced with ‘as a’ [homosexual, white man, a writer, a mammal]. The leftist believes himself to be cruelly abused, not just constantly harping on the actual insults he receives (‘see how awful they all are! look what names they call me!’) but constantly interpreting as derogatory ‘pretty much anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identified)’7. The leftist believes herself to be a radical while aspiring to state control and professional advancement, regularly supporting centralised, hierarchical or artificially distributed power, happily working for a large corporation, or implicitly supporting apparently opposed ideologies (e.g. the absurd collusion between feminism and Islam). The leftist often claims that knowledge is a product of one’s race, privilege, gender and so on, yet demands that her intensely relative philosophy8 take first place on the institutional syllabus. The leftist — black and white, male, female and transgender, able-bodied and disabled — is terrified of the total abolition of the system.
These characteristics, along with their herd-like self-reinforcing groupthink, their uniformity of opinion on matters of importance and the astonishing mediocrity of their intellectual output, would suggest that the modern leftist is, in a general sense, a morbid, masochistic infant with no self-confidence, beset by a chronic sense of inferiority, bitter, reactive, essentially uncreative and without a sense of humour. Individuals vary, one to the other, and, tragically, a massive number of decent, intelligent, easy-going, gentle and genuinely creative people are attracted to leftism (and you might be one of them?) as it seems to offer fairness, freedom, kindness and so on, without too many inconvenient sacrifices. Unfortunately, as we shall see, this is an illusion. Reform is impossible.
The mirror image of the left-wing identity politician, identical but for superficial details reversed, is the right-wing identity politician. There is no fundamental difference, for example, between white supremacists and modern third-wave feminists. The identity is different, as is their proximity to state power, but the character is the same; absent, which is why the identity is clung to so desperately. Both leftists and rightists see the world as a collection of categories, both rely completely on the system and refuse to critically examine its foundations, both believe, despite ten thousand years of evidence to the contrary, that world-society can be controlled (through autocratic rightist edicts or rational leftist plans), both yearn for power, both are, in lieu of anything deeper than identity, extremely up-tight and, consequently, both fly off the handle when their identity, or the religious ideology that is based upon it, is intelligently criticised. Truly, they deserve each other, which is handy because while one exists, so will the other.
As RD Laing put it: ‘Rule A: Don’t. Rule A.1: Rule A does not exist. Rule A.2: Do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A.1, or A.2.’
All ego-bound members of minorities seek to do something similar; ‘you’re just saying that because I’m black! because I’m a woman! because I’m gay!’ No, I’m saying it because you’re a cunt.
Intersectionalism, a subset of identity politics, is an extended enquiry into various nuances of ‘discrimination’ in the workplace, based on the idea that minority identities (e.g. black people) are (ipso facto) ‘oppressed’ and that multiple identities (e.g. black, disabled, gay people are therefore more oppressed. The foundational oppression of, or liberation from, the entire working system, or the ego which feeds it, are, predictably, nowhere in sight.
Which are not the same thing.
Actually, or more accurately speaking, emotion. The difference is discussed in 33 Myths of the Ego.
Or ‘power determines reality’. The modern leftist may be in an inferior or minority position, but the group as a whole is still enormously powerful and the individual still has power to stir up emotion and create justifying belief based thereon.
