Crush Patriarchy: 6 Reasons Why I'm a Militant Feminist Today

My approach to advocating women's rights closely mirrors my attitude toward Zionism.

Photo by chloe s. on Unsplash

The wonderful better half of our business parter, Mike Kilgore - the art director and Vice President here at God of the Desert Books - dropped a humorous meme today that I couldn’t help but relate to a bit too deeply, as I was contemplating how to write this post:

I am my parents' oldest child. I'm male. And while I can’t attest to whether this saying is a general truism across all families, it certainly has the ring of truth when it comes to my own family! Am I really “the male version” of my mom? I'm not sure, but it's definitely true that is that I've inherited some of my most dearly-held values from my mother.

Of course, both parents get credit (Editor’s Note: “Credit?” Or “blame?” - SS) for instilling in me a passion for reading and nurturing my career as a writer. And my father, specifically, has certainly been a huge influence on me in all sorts of ways - see this previous post, in which I explain how he’s helped me learn about the dangers of playing amateur psychologist:

Bipolar Disorder Is Not an Excuse for Kanye West's Jew Hatred

While I drew much of my respect for science from my father, absorbed his ‘60s and ‘70s musical tastes, and was strongly influenced by his “liberal” Christianity, in truth, my tendency toward outspoken political advocacy actually comes from my mom.

1. I was raised with liberal political feminism as one of my religions.

She might fool you, with her sweet smile and disposition; her readiness to laugh, but my mom is actually quite radical. It’s just that she's usually much more restrained in sharing her opinions than I am, especially in polite company: she embraces her librarian’s temperament and doesn't seek to stir up controversy. But I know that, deep down, she can be intense, even revolutionary, on plenty of subjects. Usually, when I’m in my troublemaker mood, attempting to provoke a Left-Right ideological debate with my baby boomer liberal parents over something, my dad will bow out quickly. But my mother will typically have the ferocity to go toe-to-toe on whatever I’m feeling inclined to rant on at the moment.

Over the years, I’ve become pretty well-versed on the varieties of political ideologies - a project I’ll be digging into this year at Substack, as I explained in this introduction here - so it didn’t take me long to identify my mother’s variety of feminism: she is very much in the second-wave, Democrat liberal feminist tradition, symbolized by Gloria Steinem. And I see now that, growing up, my mother’s feminism was akin to one of the religions in which I was raised. Respecting women as equal in capacity to men and advocating for their rights and self-determination were simply default settings all my life.

Yet, while I continue to respect my mother for her more “liberal feminist” traditions, I admit that over the years, I’ve built on the foundation she gave me and transformed into a different kind of feminist: unapologetically militant. This is partly due to two influences in particular, and one broader ideological shift, but I have other, bigger formative influences:

2. I was married to a radical womanist artist.

First, my early marriage was to a radical feminist artist who came to embrace “womanism,” the feminist tradition created and championed by black women and women of an LGBTQ+ orientation. In many ways, this movement developed as a pushback against the more “mainstream,” white-dominated feminism that had historically been most visible to others. While my soon-to-be-ex-wife and I grew apart over the years, we remain cordial. I still encourage her in her extraordinary feminist artwork and activist convictions. My heart now wholly belongs to Sally, but she and I both still hold respect and affection for April - and for the widening renown for her important work.

3. I was strongly influenced by my work with “Feminist Hawk” author-activist Phyllis Chesler and shared her passion for confronting Middle Eastern misogyny, which she dubbed “Islamic gender apartheid.”

Second, for a number of years at NewsReal Blog and PJ Media circa 2009-2014, I enjoyed the influence of a gifted writer I had the opportunity to work with: feminist author/activist

Phyllis Chesler

, who we came to nickname “Mama Hawk." She had become the patron saint and primary voice of what my cohort of bloggers and I had described as "a feminist hawk." This tradition was named in a 2009 New York Times article, and when it came out, we just ate it up:

Consider the feminist-hawk position — the one that advocates the use of force to liberate Muslim women from persecution and burkas. This position has become an integral part of the ideological Web. Feminist-hawk arguments may even be considered an artifact of the Web, just the way the revolutionary arguments of 18th-century America can be seen as an artifact of pamphlets.

…

“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere,” he wrote. Furthermore, to depict Islamic regimes less as terrorists than as repressors of civil liberties may appeal even to traditional isolationists, as it “plays off of the strong communities of libertarians that dominate some prominent spaces.”

Hawkish sites that have taken up feminism include Little Green Footballs, Jihad Watch and Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine. On a recent day, the home page of the last featured reports of female prisoners being raped in Iran; prepubescent girls getting married in Gaza; and a possible honor killing by an immigrant in New York. This material is expected to help seal Horowitz’s general case for the war on terror, though he has not yet changed the name of his cause to, say, the war on misogyny.

At the time, I was an editor at FrontPage, and the often extreme levels of disrespect, degradation, and violence against women that was inherent in radical Islamist regimes and terrorist groups was one of my key motivators for participating in the counter-Islamist cause. I had shifted from a left-wing, anti-war peacenik in 2003 to a self-described “Neo-Con Warmonger” in 2010. (I don’t consider myself any variety of neoconservative today, I just liked the provocation of embracing the slurs my enemies flung at me, a tendency I still have today.)

However, in spite of the influences of these three extraordinary women in my life, and my general ideological shift toward “hawkish” foreign policy positions, there are three more important - and, perhaps, stranger - reasons why I want to talk about why a “militant” approach to feminism seems so necessary and natural to me now.

4. I am deeply cognizant of the prevalence of rape in the United States and globally, and how infrequently its perpetrators are punished.

First is the initial inspiration of this post. Over at the

Hold That Thought by Sarah Haider

Substack written by self-described "hopeless pragmatist"

Sarah Haider

the author posed a question to which I had a "controversial" and provocative answer:

What Is a Patriarchy?

Haider conceded that academic feminist discourse had made it much more difficult to speak with clarity about just what “the patriarchy” is. So she challenged her readers to consider three possible definitions, none of which seemed adequate to me:

Below I have three societal conditions, which, for the purpose of this exercise, we will assume are completely independent of each other. Each can be true (for one sex or the other) or false (true for neither). Please read and leave your thoughts/answers in the comments.

Imagine:

1. A society in which one sex occupies most high leadership positions. (Cabinets, c-suites, etc…) 

2. A society in which the average member of one sex is more powerful in everyday terms than the average member of the other. (More money, more social status, or generally more agency in life…)

3. A society in which one sex faces the brunt of deliberate, legal discriminations.

Which of these conditions, if any, are necessary for a society to be accurately deemed a patriarchy (or matriarchy)?

This reminded me why so much academic feminist writing - highly influenced by overcomplicated pseudo-Marxist and post-modernist jargon - annoys me so much. I prefer the discourses of activist, working women out on the streets, describing their life experiences, not the “privileged,” usually white elites of the “ivory tower.”

So far, the post has received 64 comments, including one from me, which has received three likes and one disapproving counter who I disputed. Here’s the exchange, starting with my opening post:

Alas, I have a simpler and more brutal measure of whether a particular society or culture qualifies as a patriarchy: how much rape occurs and to what degree is it tolerated in the broader group?

For example, in our current legal system, According to FBI statistics, out of 127,258 rapes reported to police departments in 2018, 33.4 percent resulted in an arrest.[13] Based on correlating multiple data sources, RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) estimates[44] that for every 1,000 rapes, 384 are reported to police, 57 result in an arrest, 11 are referred for prosecution, 7 result in a felony conviction, and 6 result in incarceration. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States#Prosecution_rate

So let's state it bluntly: in the United States for every 1000 rapes, only 6 of the offenders are incarcerated. That's a rape culture. That's a fucking evil patriarchy in the supposed "greatest nation on earth, in the land of the free, home of the brave." I call bullshit.

But let's consider some even scarier statistics around the world. Check out this stomach-churning set of statistics: https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2010/nov/26/survey-1-in-3-south-african-men-admit-to-committin/

A new survey says more than one in three South African men admit to having committed rape.

A 2010 study led by the government-funded Medical Research Foundation says that in Gauteng province, home to South Africa's most populous city of Johannesburg, more than 37 percent of men said they had raped a woman. Nearly 7 percent of the 487 men surveyed said they had participated in a gang rape.

More than 51 percent of the 511 women interviewed said they'd experienced violence from men, and 78 percent of men said they'd committed violence against women.

A quarter of the women interviewed said they'd been raped, but the study says only one in 25 rapes are reported to police.

A survey by the same organization in 2008 found that 28 percent of men in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces said they had raped a woman or girl. Of the men who had committed rape, one third did not feel guilty, said Rachel Jewkes, a lead researcher on both studies.

*****

I think statistics like these should qualify a state or culture as a "patriarchy," and as a male feminist of an especially militant variety they infuriate me beyond words. This world is filled with evil garbage males undeserving of the title "man" and much more aggressive measures are needed to stop them from continuing to commit traumatic violence against women.

One commenter, calling themselves

Invisigoth

- nice handle - disputed my apparent oversimplification of an issue that many academics choose to see in such a complex fashion:

That’s very reductionist of you. It contributes nothing to the discussion

Well, of course it contributes “nothing” to the discussion: I was declaring overtly that the whole idea of trying to define “patriarchy” in terms of c-suite positions, money, and legal discrimination missed the whole point about what “patriarchy” has primarily inflicted against women since the dawn of time. Sexual slavery, sexual violence, and sexual crimes — these must always remain at the forefront of both our understanding of the abstraction we label “patriarchy,” and the often misunderstood ideological cause now called “feminism” today.

I responded to the comment:

I am temperamentally radical and often try to cut to the core of the issue and say the difficult things which are often ignored. Too many academic discussions of oppression and various isms are intentionally over-complicated and pretentious. For my variety of radical feminism the primary concern needs to be the elimination of gender-based violence against women and LGBTQ+ persons "by any meanspirited necessary."

See, here’s the real reason why I’m such a militant feminist today: I deeply fucking hate and despise every variety of rapist, misogynist, molester, pimp, human trafficker, and sexual harasser today. In this post, I made abundantly clear that my Zionism was primarily driven by a rage to obliterate and defeat every variety of antisemitism under the sun:

What Zionism Means to Me Today

And my militant feminism follows a familiar track. While it’s certainly important for women to fight for their legal rights in legislation and their representation in corporate board rooms, I believe it is infinitely more important that every woman on the planet be trained in self-defense, and perpetually armed with one weapon or another, so that she is equipped to castrate or even kill a would-be rapist. Ultimately, every woman can only rely on herself to protect her from the barbaric primitivism innate in too many men who still pollute the planet with their presence. I recall that Phyllis would call this “street smart feminism.”

Another commenter

John Glanton

in the thread responded to me with the obvious implications of my position:

Not going to happen without castrating men.

And I agreed:

In my view every woman should be prepared and willing to do so in order to protect themselves.

5. I too am a victim of “toxic masculinity.” All my life I’ve been bullied and sometimes the victim of violence by “tough,” “macho” men who I came to realize treated women even worse than they treated me.

I’m sorry, but I’ve seen the truth about so many males of our species who I refuse to dignify by calling “men:” they are fucking awful. So many adult human males hardly behave better than overgrown teenage boys, totally unequipped to properly channel their sexuality into loving relationships and pleasuring their partners, rather than indulging their own selfish, often sick and disgusting desires.

And it isn't just women they bully and abuse: all my life, I’ve been treated like shit by “tough,” “macho,” “badass” SOBs who thought they were better than me. But as painful as that was, it didn’t take long for me to observe that such bastards treat the women around them way worse than they treat other men. Now, just as my militant Zionism is largely fueled by a rage at the antisemites, so too is my militant feminism turbo-charged by my anger at the misogynists.

My beloved George Carlin had some wonderful wisdom on this variety of male menace:

But where does all this rage at the injustices experienced by women really come from? I acknowledge how weird it is for me to feel this way and write in these caustic terms. But I do now finally have a strange potential explanation - which I encourage others to take with a grain of salt, as I certainly have not yet been able to empirically verify this theory myself, though someday I hope to try.

6. I’ve come to suspect that in a “previous life” I was a woman who may have been the victim of sustained sexual violence as a child and ultimately been gang-raped, tortured, and murdered in an unsolved crime.

As I’ve written some before, among the religious theologies I practice are mysticism and the Western occult tradition. I never took seriously the whole idea of “past lives,” a common belief in many Eastern religious traditions, until Sally and I started dating and soon became engaged. Sally identifies as a “medium.” She has much more knowledge and experience in past life studies and “regressions” than I do. (Our shared conviction that we have known and loved each other in numerous past lives is one of the hidden joys undergirding our relationship today.)

(Editor's Note: 🥰 -SS)

The “past life regression” ritual, performed by believers and skeptics alike, to try and gain information from “past lives,” is a pretty fascinating and harmless exercise. It’s neat to try and figure out what you might have been up to in, say, Elizabethan England, or during the Revolutionary War. (Our current speculations there are that I was a Norwegian-based merchant during the former and a Native American during the latter, which disappointed me some: I was hoping to be someone more famous and influential like John Dee or John Adams, two historical figures I’ve felt great affinity toward for years.) And, if nothing else, the ritual often yields insight about our motivations and priorities in the present, especially when we consider what we hoped to “see” in our regressions, and why.

But when Sally and I did a series of regressions on each other, to try to figure out how we may have known each other in the “life” immediately preceding our current one, we were in for quite a shock. We got a reminder of why these practices are tricky, and even emotionally dangerous, when not performed under closely-controlled circumstances.

If previous lives exist, I wondered at first, then why is it that the vast majority of people have no memories of them? If we get to live over and over again in some kind of reincarnation fashion, why must we forget about what we did previously? But now, I know quite certainly, this lack of memory, of baggage, is a gift: by being able to forget, we don’t have to remember, and endlessly carry with us the abuse, torture, trauma, and sometimes shocking ways in which we died. I’ll save the story of “Julie and Stevie” for another time; Sally and I have more mystical digging to do, not to mention some real-life investigative work to try to find any sort of verification of facts whatsoever.

But these are the broad strokes of what I now suspect about my most recent previous life: I was a young Asian girl living in 1950s America, the daughter of Chinese refugees fleeing Communism. This girl was, for many years, the victim of incestuous sexual abuse by her father, which was ignored by her fearful mother, another of his victims. This little girl eventually adopted the nickname “Stevie” rather than going by her Chinese name, and one day found friendship, and later, romantic affection, in a slightly older Mexican-American girl named “Julie,” who was Sally in that life. These two young lovers - an artist and a teacher, respectively - built a peaceful life together in Southern California throughout the counterculture years of the ‘60s and ‘70s - which is part of the reason Sally and I suspect we both have so much romantic affection for that era, its fashion, ideals, and, especially, the music.

But then, at some point in the early 1980s, a horrific tragedy struck one night on a secluded beach outside of San Diego. Julie and Stevie had gone for a swim when a group of biker thugs, perhaps insulted by the couple’s discomfort with their catcalling - or even insulted by the mere fact that these women were a couple - chose to gang-rape and murder them, before disposing of their corpses in the ocean, where they would never be found.

Did such a story really happen? We don't know. But it seemed like an awful lot of strangely specific things for Sally and me to just imagine. And honestly, Stevie’s experience of being raped and tortured to death is just so vivid to me, like a genuine memory. Even more haunting: the actual act that killed her, a knife driven into her heart by one of the bikers, is the very suicidal image that has most haunted me for over 20 years. Could my own long-term struggle with suicidal ideation be in some way driven by unresolved trauma and injustice from a past life? Has my seeming obsession, since 2009, of advocating for women of color in the East, who are experiencing oppression and violence, been in some way driven by having been such a woman myself? Has Sally's and my shared deep affinity for the LGBTQ+ community, in spite of our own preferences for heterosexual relationships, been a holdover from being victims of anti-gay violence in another life, and never finding justice?

Neither of us knows.

The Robert Anton Wilson skeptic in me is still totally unwilling to really believe in this wild, mystical, paranormal tale, no matter the degree to which it seems to explain much of my weirdness and intensity. While my mind is much more open to the ideas of “past lives,” at this point until I can nail down much more empirical evidence, then the science-minded side of me - from my father - will still continue to doubt.

But whatever the “true” origins of my rage against the world’s women haters, I’ll still very much follow how I was raised by my mother and conclude with similar sentiments to my Zionism definition essay:

FUCK ALL EVIL PATRIARCHAL SOCIETIES AND EVERY MISOGYNISTIC PIECE OF SHIT IN THEM.

EVERY WOMAN, MAN, AND NON-BINARY PERSON HAS THE MORAL RIGHT TO CASTRATE OR KILL THEIR RAPIST.