Let us Say a Loud No to the Modernist and the Traditional Forms of Patriarchy

Both foster dis-integrated selfhood as the debasement of human be-ing

Despite a rubbish Eurocentric schooling (and an hour or two of senseless sex education), even as a teenager, I was quite careful about what I permitted my mind to see and my body to take in.

I knew images stayed and could influence me in ways I would not choose, while what I ate, drank, touched and permitted to touch me, would shape my physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

Above all, I was motivated by my wish not to be enslaved by anything or anyone.

So, Dear Reader, I was careful about what I watched on TV. I don’t quite know where I got this clarity from, but I literally vowed never to be a slave to anyone or anything. By thing, I mean substances, stuff — you know, like alcohol, drugs or… chocolate.

I mean, look at the level of suffering and destruction arising from these addictions! For example, just in the past couple of weeks, in my town, there have been car crashes in which drunk young men got mutilated and died. Considering the influence of drugs, the rise in knife crime alone is horrifying (two fourteen year olds got stabbed and died outside the school gates also in my town, in the past month). And shall I mention the rising levels of obesity leading to diabetes, cancer and heart disease? So this is not a trivial matter, what we allow ourselves to be influenced by, and what we take in, habitually.

It struck me as very strange, when I came across articles about some celebrity’s relationship breaking down because they were ‘addicted to sex’. It was as if, ‘sex’ was a substance, like tea, coffee and say, cocaine and alcohol.

My understanding of addiction as a teenager was very limited, based simply on talking with a middle-aged neighbour, whose hands shook as she spoke. She was also very nervous and jumpy. Despite several tests, her doctors could not find anything. Then she met me on her way home and told me, they had discovered the problem. I waited with bated breath as she told me about her meeting with the doctor.

“The doctor asked me, ‘how many cups of coffee do you drink?”

“Around ten or twelve.”

“All the tests have come back negative, so that must be it… reduce your coffee intake to one or two, preferably zero. Come back in a fortnight.”

The following day, she confided in me.

“It’s hard — today is the second day. I got a killer headache this morning, so I drank a few cups!”

“Hmmm… You’ll have to decide which is more important, your health or… ” I said.

“I know what’s more important,” she scowled at me. “But I’m addicted.”

My young self didn’t really understand that. The solution seemed clear. Go overboard with your coffee and wreck your mind and body, or reduce the amount of your intake.

If you are still with me, Dear Reader, you might be wondering what the heck has all this this got to do with flippin’ sex?

Sex is Not a Substance Nor An Out of Body Experience

The point I am coming to is to ask the question, why do people in the Anglo-American world relate to sex as if it was a substance, like coffee or cocaine?

To me, ‘being sexual’ is obviously and inextricably part of being in relationship with a particular someone. There are hundreds of ‘someones’, whom we encounter as we move through the days and weeks that compose our lives. On what basis do we move into relationship with someone, that includes also being sexual with them?

Is it okay to experiment with just someone, anyone, (even if they are ‘up for it’) or is that likely to cause harm?

Recently someone suggested to me that part of enriching one’s life is exactly this, to ‘let go’ and ‘have’ random sex with random strangers. Even, it was suggested, to ‘let go’ with someone who keeps his home filthy, lives off his girlfriend and is abusive and threatening to her.

We only live life once, so ‘be open to new experiences, like getting into a threesome’.

But just reading these words made me feel sort of … unclean. I mean, the people and the place was literally filthy… I wouldn’t leave a dog there, never mind undress. Here is the poem that arose out of that situation.

https://readmedium.com/where-have-all-the-decent-englishmen-gone-6100fefa3877

So, didn’t I make clear that there was the small matter of there being no ‘meeting of minds’? Basic hygiene and cleanliness was missing in these people’s lifestyle.

Hmmm…

Thankfully, this notion of ‘freedom’, being ‘up for it’, is something I never fell for. It always sounded absolutely disgusting and involves doing something that looks to me quite plainly stupid, like putting the cart before the horse.

Yes, you can call me boring, but I’ve always been revolted by the idea of RSwRS (Random Sex with Random Strangers).

I mean, imagine the only way of getting somewhere you want to be is by horse and cart. Imagine positioning the cart in front of the horse. It’s plain stupid. You would wonder if the person was mad. And that’s how I feel about people who ‘have sex’, like its a substance external to them. Sheer madness!

Putting the Cart Before the Horse

I think it was while I was in my third year at Uni that I was given the privilege reserved for postgrads, to attend a philosophy conference in Dubrovnik. (By the way, it was the start of my third year away from home, and I still felt no interest in even holding hands with someone.)

Traveling to the conference was my first time out of England. We traveled as a group by ferry and train. It was all fascinating to me, including reading the names of places the train passed through, like Zagreb and Lubliyana!

Dubrovnik was an enchanting city, like a place out of the fairy tales I used to read as a kid. It was all higgeldy-piggledy houses topped by red tiles, in clusters along the hillsides bordering the sea.

Excited to explore more, on the very first day, during the lunch break, I went off on my own for a wander into the old part of town.

At one particular spot, there was no one around. After being with people the whole morning, I was reveling in my solitude. Bliss, to feel the afternoon sunshine on my face, and take in the view across the red-tiled houses and tall cypress trees, to the shimmering blue sea beyond. I was disappointed when a young guy, my sort of age came over… He was a local. We had no common language, but within a few moments of his arrival, he indicated he wanted to touch my breasts.

“But I don’t even know you”, I responded, quite shocked. I walked quickly away. I was angry that he had disturbed my peace. Back in the UK, I had been charged by the police with ‘disturbing the peace’, in a protest about nuclear weapons, but random ignorant males disturbing my peace was obviously not going to be a police matter, anywhere.

We are under the control of the world-wide patriarchy, thought I, brimming with rage as I made my way back to the conference hall.

The Patriarchal Solution

This situation reminded of the basis on which I as a thirteen year old, understood the Koran was definitely not a Message by the Divine, teaching humanity how to live.

Let me explain that in the context I grew up, (a conventional Muslim household in the U.K) this was a revolutionary thought. Certainly, in a Muslim majority nation, which I had never lived in, I sort of knew that voicing this thought could lead to instant death by any passing believer, or being imprisoned until one ‘sees the light’, and agrees with the majority’s opinion.

Thankfully in the privacy of one’s own mind, one can ponder on stuff and freely follow trains of thought. As I perused the Koran in an English translation, I realised it was awfully boring, and terribly repetitive, and definitely written by men, mostly in order to control women.

Dear Reader, would you like to hear the specific story in the Koran that led me to this conclusion?

A man comes rushing to the Prophet Muhammed, needing his wisdom to help to solve a problem.

“I am married, but when I see women on the street, I am very attracted to them”.

“Oh, so just think to yourself, that they have the same thing as your wife at home. Then go home to your wife”.

Reading these words aged around 13, I still recall my sense of revulsion and disgust. At that age, I had not heard of the word, ‘pornography’. But isn’t that the essence of pornography: reducing the personhood of someone to their genitals, and then behaving as if she/he/they are interchangeable entities, with only a bigger this or a smaller that, to distinguish one from the other?

For God’s sake, even swans, who have a much smaller brain than humans, don’t do that!

To be debased means ‘… the act or process of lowering oneself in status, esteem, quality or character (Oxford online dictionary).

The pornographic mindset debases both itself and others. While the illness can manifest in opposite forms, i.e. fashion dictates ‘modern, Western’ women wear revealing clothes that ‘show off their assets’. Meanwhile in traditional societies, especially the families in which the Abrahamic religions are actively practiced, women should be ‘covered up’, as a sign of our ‘modesty’. However, the fact is that both mindsets are merely opposite ends of the same spectrum of a viciously debasing objectification and commodification of women.

Showing or Not Showing Your Assets As a Woman

Capitalism has only deepened the prevailing patriarchal norms that essentially define women as objects and possessions of men.

The Western construct of ‘feminism’, has managed to present sexuality as largely unhinged from one’s Selfhood, being a thing that one consumes or an experience that one ‘has’. People say things like, “I had sex with her/him”, as if they had consumed a meal.

Thus we find ourselves objectified, alienated from our human be-ing… in the false name of equality, our senses and Selfhood have been reduced to an act of consumption, like a meal or a drink. These can be given freely, with no strings attached, or bought and sold. This is how sexual activity is being understood by especially the younger generation raised on quick fixes for everything.

Cultures labelled ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’, have developed a very different understanding of our being as human be-ing. A human is be-ing is not a lone, free-wheeling individual, but rather is composed of relationships vis a vis the social order, with the living earth, air, and seasons. There was recognition at the experiential, spiritual level, that our breath is linked to the air outside us, that we exist intimately and inseparably, through being a part of the landscape of trees, sunshine, plants and animals that dance in and out of what composes Life.

The so-called developed world is perhaps the most degenerate. Into the most intimate ways in which we can experience life and living, the philosophical base of the Eurokleptocene has crept in like a maggot and wrought the deepest havoc.

The degeneration central to the Eurokleptocene was the touting of the individual consciousness as a entity separate from everything else. Descartes, ‘I think therefore I am’, ushers into Western civilisation, in the words of indi.ca individualism, “… framed as freedom, as power, as control. This is lies, subjugation, and a category error in turn’.

Our alienated youth, depressed, isolated and too often suicidal, despite their many ‘freedoms’, including every opportunity for ‘hook-ups’, are testimony to a bankrupt culture that has practically raped out of existence all sense of wholeness, connection to and respect for Life that our ancestors knew and worshipped.

Dis-integrated selfhood as the debasement of human be-ing is an essential feature of the Eurokleptocene.

The fragmented consciousness by which people skewer their time, attention and labour on the altar of cannibal capitalism has become so normalised that otherwise thoughtful people have sold their sexuality to the lowest manifestation possible.

The geishas and courtesans were the women who refused to comply with the rule that ‘respectable’ women get married. Such women who valued their freedom from domesticity and control by one man often were erudite scholars, fluent in several languages. They held salons which the literati of the day vied to attend. Both the courtesans of Europe and the geishas of Japan for instance, were usually also highly skilled in the arts of music and dance.

The modern way, across the Anglo-American identifying world, is that while marriage has decreased in popularity under the white feminist rubric that it is a form of ensnaring women (which in my observation, can often be true) but still — the alternatives to marriage in which there is a structure and a degree of accountability, are frequently much worse.

The pornographic sexualisation of all women and girls, has meant that many feel under intense pressure to comply with the more violent and degrading forms of what passes for sex and sexual experimentation in the name of ‘liberation’.

Recently, a man in London rang the emergency services as he woke up, yawned his way downstairs and found his girlfriend unresponsive in the hallway.

When asked if she was breathing, this callous older ‘lover’ of the young woman in her twenties, replied, “No mate, she’s as dead as a doughnut”.

This creature had gone to bed, leaving his partner semi-conscious and bleeding in the hallway after what he called a bout of ‘adventurous sex’. At no point did he express distress, shock, pain or the tiniest remorse or self -recrimination, this monster of the developed, modern West.

Is this ‘liberation’, when such males demand women accept being treated like interchangeable bodies who must breathlessly, compulsively, take part in violent acts, that they should pretend to enjoy?

Such males often video these encounters and pass them on, from male to male. Under the guise of being ‘adventurous’ this trend is in fact a continuation of the degrading dehumanisation that captured and kidnapped women experienced from Africa and other parts of the world taken over by Europeans.

We know that the founding fathers of Amerikkka subjected young girls and women to forced sex in order to increase the number of slaves on the European Massa’s plantation.

Only now in the 21st century, under the guise of ‘freedom’, the descendants of those dirty rapist males are perpetrating the same crimes on women and girls who have been convinced to see hook-up culture as a form of liberation. But what is treating someone as an object for your sadistic gratification? Is this not the lowest form of degeneracy?

“No strings sex” is a degrading mindfuck that no healthy, self-respecting woman should accept.

If you were not taught this at school, learn it now. Better late than too late.

Where do we go from here?

So yes, I’ve rejected both the free-wheeling individualistic position which too often leaves women vulnerable to coercive, controlling behaviour posing as liberatory, as well as the Right’s traditionalist forms of control and exploitation that relies on the rhetoric and Holy Texts of patriarchal religions. I have witnessed the harm of both male-centred dynamics, many times.

It is devastating to see perfectly intelligent, often economically independent women in debasing relationships.

My own Muslim friend from school days, wearing headscarf and ‘modest’ dress, sought respectability and acceptance by agreeing to the arranged marriage organised by her parents. Not long after the marriage, she had her head bashed in by her husband. She was 22 and she died on the spot in her parent’s house. She died at the hands of her stupid, ignorant, vicious husband as he felt humiliated that his wife had a job, while he did not. Her parents were downstairs when he murdered her.

So honestly, from a young age, I had no illusions about the religiously fundamentalist / right-wing positioning of women which defines our entire goal in life, as women finding (or in the case of arranged marriage) or accepting to be to assigned a man, and play the self-sacrificial wife-mother who finds her entire meaning in life being the economically dependant, ‘Angel in the Home’.

In all the damned Abrahamic faiths, women are supposed to exist to ‘please their man.’ In the Koran, it is written that a woman should make herself sexually available as and when her husband demands. If she ever does refuse, angels supposedly curse her all night! Not only that, but the key to a woman’s entry to Heaven is simply to always obey her husband. That’s it.

No need for the ideal Muslim woman to have an actual moral code, or grow her intellect and her understanding, in any direction! Obviously, this is abhorrent.

Andrea Dworkin’s ground-breaking analysis ‘Right Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females’ is a brilliant analysis of why conservative women and girls decide that sucking up to the traditional forms of the patriarchy, might well be the optimal path for survival under the patriarchy.

Dworkin documents in her writings the devastating price she paid as a young women who rejected the Jewish version of patriarchal relations, in favour of the Left rhetoric about being anti-establishment plus ‘free love’ under the banner of ‘women’s lib’, that arose in the 1960’s.

Awful physical violence and rape was the price she paid for her youthful, principle-filled naivety.

Ravyne Hawke commented to me that

It has only been in the last century that women have gained independence and autonomy in western cultures. Before that, women were considered the property of their fathers until married and were then the property of their husbands. They couldn’t own land, no income of their own, couldn’t vote, and had no voice in matters outside the home. I do think that sexual freedom has been detrimental to women though. But even before then, women were sexualized.

So, what’s the solution? Well, in my experience and observation, there are some families/heterosexual relationships in which there is indeed, real respect for one another and where people seek to fulfill the aspirations of their daughters/partners, despite the limitations of the patriarchal vision.

For example, as a father, Newson Garett stood up for his daughters’ right to education, in a society that vociferously denied it in late Victorian England. Garett was a merchant of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. He used his wealth to ensure that his daughter Elizabeth, was tutored at home and at a private school. In 1860, Elizabeth resolved to study medicine and despite enormous obstacles, she did go on to become the first woman in the U.K to qualify as a doctor.

In contemporary times, we have another father, a headmaster of a school in Pakistan, who was passionate about girls’ education, despite receiving death threats. I’m guessing you have all heard of his daughter, Malala Yousafzai.

Similarly we do occasionally see adult relationships in which a nurturing respect-based dynamic is central. Both parties of the relationship jettison manipulation and seeking the kind of control which is always linked to some sort of exploitation. Instead, such unusual people have the courage to break out of the patriarchal mold and envisage living and sharing in ways that are mutually life-enhancing.

This is genuinely liberatory, rather than the rhetoric of ‘free love’ which has ensnared too many women on the political Left.

The blatant violation of women’s rights that the Right/ traditional/religious values promote, has always been too obviously fake for me to fall for. But yes, I confess, the Western/modernist/Lefty model of self-centred, self defining autonomy, the ‘free love’, model, I did almost fall for.

To return to my hero, Andrea Dworkin… she was campaigning and was a published author when she met John Stoltenberg. The healthy dynamic of their relationship helped both continue to be creative agents for social change, while also healing themselves from the wounds of patriarchal family formation.

So that’s where my hope rests, that couples, families, small communities forming eco-villages, work towards transcending the various manifestations of the hydra-headed structure that is patriarchy, rather than being enslaved by any one of them.

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