This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

Who run the world?

Boys…

An improvement upon Beyoncé’s nonsense song ‘Run the World (Girls)’ by yours truly…

At the end of every year, I attribute an informal theme to the time and experiences that have gone by during the course of the year. I started doing this back in 2015 when I started writing this blog, giving it the title ‘The Year of Anger’. I felt it was appropriate as there was a lot of rage fuelling my writing. I’ve since come to think of this as a pretty normal reaction when you have a philosophical awakening that finally gives you a context for a lifetime of unfairness, suffering and violence that you’ve never been allow to talk about publicly or even among so-called friends. There is still anger, but it doesn’t fuel the writing anymore – much of it has been processed and it can be examined from outside the emotion now. In fact, 2016 was dubbed ‘The Year of the Fantasy’, which was incredibly fun, and I actually hope it has a resurgence at some point in the future, so that I can write some short stories or even something more ambitious. Although we’re only halfway through 2025 at the time of this writing, I’m feeling like it’s going to be something along the lines of ‘The Year of Reasserting the Root’ as much of my thinking and writing has focused on the essence of femalehood and really understanding my personal brand of feminism.

One post I published during the Year of the Fantasy has been helping my thinking along here. The writing came out of a frenzied brainstorming session I had one night. I imagined what life would be like if there were no males. I didn’t bother about the particulars of how to continue the species and focused on a world of women and girls after a few generations of healing and weeding out the dependent and brainwashed dick-suckers. And woman, my mind was soaring. I thought of the possibilities and opportunities, and possibly more importantly, I thought of all the problems women and girls experience that just wouldn’t exist anymore. It is quite shocking if you actually make a list of all the ways male existence negatively affects your life. And after you make that list, and you turn it positive by imagining never having to worry about any of that shit again, you feel angry and sad and a whole bunch of complicated feelings. The world of female suffering is so completely unnecessary – well it is necessary for male domination to exist, but we certainly don’t need it. Women would never design a world this way – it has been forced upon us, and most have complied out of fear. It really is amazing to me that women don’t fantasize about not having to suffer. First, men have always told us what we’re supposed to fantasize about – mostly sex with them and material things that keep us from focusing on more important things. Second, it is really, really dangerous to think about what life would be like if males didn’t exist. It’s dangerous because you can feel very adrift when your realizations destroy the worldview that forms your identity. And it is very overwhelming once you realize that you can’t change the world by yourself. You can change aspects of your personal world to a certain extent, and you can certainly have a freedom of mind, even if the other freedoms are less achievable as a single person. Amazingly, even feminists don’t fantasize. They are so focused on dealing with women’s problems and their aftermath, or finding a way to minimize the harms that men do, or even placating men so that they don’t lose their shit even more than they do under normal, unthreatening circumstances. Feminists generally aren’t inventors and visionaries and revolutionaries – they’re observers, diplomats, and combat nurses. And those roles won’t change the world for women for the better.

But I like ‘out there’ women, so that exercise in fantasy and brainstorming was an excellent experience. Some people claim to like to take hallucinogens to experience other realities, but I’m quite capable of achieving that using my brain alone. And it really is thrilling to make an alternate reality vivid in your mind. Even imagining simple things that men enjoy without thought or without having to fight to get it or things they don’t have to think twice about because there is no danger to them in doing them – having these things open to me sent my mind spinning. I realized how much time I spend negotiating simple things in the world and in my life that men don’t have to. I realized how many rules and barriers are put up because I’m female. I realized the poor treatment and limitations and general suffering that are reserved only for women and girls.

Why don’t women allow themselves to see this state of things and do something about it in their own lives, in the lives of girls around them, and in the world at large? And for women who are sort of aware – feminists – why don’t they go all the way instead of living in the safety zone? Well, of course, the answer to these why questions is complicated, and ultimately comes down to this: the answer to the why-question is the reason itself. In other words, women don’t and won’t see that men are the root of the problem because they are brainwashed not to see men as the root of the problem. And even the few feminists that do accurately see men as the root of the problem, don’t know what to do with that knowledge, and may even see males as teachable, or may get sidetracked by issues that are not the root of the problem, but the result of male domination.

If you allow yourself to see the extent of the problem – the root of the problem, if you will – then you HAVE to live differently, think differently, and solve problems differently. If you can’t accept that men are the root of women’s problems, and that they aren’t going to change because they’ve had thousands of years to change, then you can’t solve women’s problems. You slap bandages on them and nothing is fundamentally different.

It was Andrea Dworkin who said: “prostitution and equality for women cannot exist simultaneously”. I think that is a completely accurate statement, but I would take it one step further, of course. I’d say: Heterosexuality and close relationships with males and equality for women cannot exist simultaneously. And actually, I’d also take out the word equality and replace it with liberation, as I think the former is a problematic term that compels women to take their eyes off the real prize and focus on male definitions of power and freedom. I have no desire to be equal to men; that is aiming low and we should aspire to what we as women can achieve. It is extremely different and it has nothing to do with domination and competition. Actually, I think we don’t know how far we can go as there is no group of women that has ever had the freedom and opportunity to explore without a male hovering, ready to pounce and take control. Imaging being able to explore and soar without that dark cloud on the periphery.

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