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

About a thousand years ago, when I was 29, I was living and working as an itinerant orchard worker in New Zealand. At one point, I found myself staying at a youth hostel in one of their fair cities – maybe Christchurch – and as is habitual with the 20-something nomad denizen, a group of us went out to a local watering hole. I don’t actually remember what we were talking about during that outing, but apparently I said something that warranted a comment from one of the males in the group. And the comment, which I do remember clearly, was designed to be a compliment. He said: “Wow, you’re an anarchist, aren’t you?”

I think I gave some sort of non-committal answer like, “I guess” because I really didn’t know what exactly it meant to be an anarchist other than the general stereotype that the majority of people believe: no leadership, no rules, random and unproductive violence, and total chaos. With the exception of a few minor violent acts of self-defense in response to assaults by males in my teen years, I didn’t consider myself to be a violent person, and I certainly didn’t see myself as an eco-terrorist or a violent Black Panther type. So what did it mean that I was an anarchist? As is likely no surprise to anyone, the public education system then and still today didn’t address the nuts and bolts of anarchy or feminism or why people seemed to deem movements like these necessary. You see, capitalism and female slavery are cornerstones of our world. We are not allowed to think critically about them, and we definitely don’t want children to escape indoctrination into willingly participating in these crucial foundational systems through exposure to anecdotal evidence, quantitative data, and philosophical discussion, do we? So anyhow, there I was in 2001, a highly educated and fairly well-read, yet still selectively ignorant, young woman who still hadn’t been exposed to some of the most important written work ever produced because of lack of exposure, access, and role models.

You’ve likely noted that I included anarchy and feminism in the same ideological boat, and some feminists have seen and still see a place for themselves in both movements. But today, I’m actually going to argue that as they have been and are still practised, neither actually does much for women either separately or together. I’ll then talk about what true anarchism might look like from an actual feminist, or more specifically, a gynocentric perspective.

So let’s dive into why M is for Mayhem.

What is anarchy? Well, long before it was established as a political philosophy in the mid-19th century, the term was, in fact, used to mean disorder and mayhem. The word gradually became linked with revolutionary acts in various places, and bubbled up among disaffected male ‘thinkers’ from all walks of life with too much time on their hands and comparatively little to complain about. To a man, they saw an inverse relationship between what they felt they deserved and what they believed they should be accountable for. They were also expert wordsmiths, twisting language to create a framework for a political environment they could abuse for self-interest, while appearing on the surface to champion freedom and equality and rationality. This shouldn’t be a surprise. If you look at any and all political ideologies that males have come up with throughout history, regardless of ‘wing’ status, they all purport to champion the same things. Freedom, equality, opportunity, security, and responsibility. But at the end of the day, these ideals are never meant to be accessible to all – and by all, I mean women. And this is simply because all males operate and thrive on dominance, control, entitlement and self-interest, whether they acknowledge it or not.

I’ll just mention a few of the basic tenets of anarchist thinking, in general. If you want to do a deep dive into anarchist thought, I recommend heading over to either The Anarchist Library or Dead Anarchists; both are dot org websites. Important to note is that over time several branches of anarchist thought have emerged, some more individualistic and some more collectivistic. What they tend to agree on, however, is that the State and state-sanctioned capitalism were and are the major sources of systemic violence, coercion, and exploitation, and strip men of the rights and freedoms they believe they deserve. Key to their vision of society included:

1.. Stateless and ruler-less self-organization. Anarchist males ignorantly and arrogantly believed that they could come together in a voluntary fashion, behave in a civilized and self-monitoring way, and engage in mutually beneficial arrangements without the intervention of a policing authority. In other words, anarchists wanted order and rules without rulers. It’s laughable to imagine males magically constructing a functional society based on cooperation and peace and somehow managing not to engage in the reactive and violent emotionality that is the hallmark of every male dominated society since time began. I just don’t think males are capable of this.

2.. Anti-capitalism. Anarchists rightly understood that capitalism is a source of exploitation and violence and that wealth determines policy. But they failed to understand that capitalism isn’t the root of the problem, and that removing capitalism doesn’t solve the problems of violence and exploitation. The root problem is males themselves. Every system they design becomes coercive and exploitative and hierarchical. It’s just which males are on top that changes when systems change.

Interestingly, many of these early anarchists profited immensely from wealthy benefactors and exploitative free or indentured female labour, including the father of anarchy, himself. I so often find that males who spend their lives philosophizing about, criticizing and rebelling against the system are usually the worst hypocrites, seldom practising what they preach. It is sometimes hard for me to understand why these men attract so many female acolytes; it is quite possible that most of these men are charismatic psychopaths able to manipulate politically or ideologically impassioned as well as socially and intellectually isolated women.

3.. Free speech. A lot of these anarchists opposed the control of the church and the censorship of the State. Men generally believe they should be able to say whatever they want, whenever they want without consequences. But they don’t tend to extend this form of freedom to women, especially those wanting freedom from male control or proposing methods of female self-governance or suggesting that consent isn’t possible for women due to an imbalance of power. This is as true now as it was then. Again, this demonstrates the hypocrisy of male philosophers and human rights proponents. Their underlying belief is always: “I oppose dictatorship, unless I am the dictator.”

4.. A non-coercive society. Everything about an anarchist society is supposed to be non-coercive or voluntary.  For example, an anarchist would choose to pay taxes because they want to since they are using a service, not because they are forced to.

One of the problems inherent in a society without religion, capitalism, police, government or hierarchy, though, is how to get around the whole rape privilege thing and still have free access to pussy under the pretext of female free will and consent. Men realized that their right to rape was built into all of those systems they were fighting to abolish, and under anarchy, women might start to argue that they have the right to freely choose their participation, as well. No truly free woman would ever consent to what men do to women’s bodies, and all men know this on some level. And this is where the ‘free love’ movement came in.

Free love was a big part of the anarchist movement, especially among the women who joined the fray, and we saw this as an undercurrent in Second Wave Feminism and still today in the Slut Movement. It would actually have been more in line with true anarchism to refrain from engaging sexually with men altogether as the power imbalance is inescapable. But women fell for the male logic behind the movement – I think they would not have been allowed to participate otherwise. The male logic fail goes something like this. The only difference between intercourse and rape is this thing called ‘consent’. But consent is only possible between two equal parties. Women have never been equal, and cannot be equal in a world where men exist because men always hold the threat of rape over women even when the word love or equality comes out of their mouths. The exception to equality is payment. Compensating someone can be considered to be consent, so you can’t rape a prostitute or a wife since both are paid for fuck services. So how can you convince a woman to consent to rape without pay? Well, you tell her that fucking as many men as possible without compensation is the ultimate proof of female free will, bodily liberation and equality. And this constitutes the ultimate flipping off of religion, capitalism and the State.

This fooled and continues to fool a lot of anarchist and feminist women, unfortunately. But the reality was and is still that no version of free love has ever liberated women. Anarchist women were still servicing men, still getting pregnant, still dying from botched abortions and difficult pregnancies, and contracting even more venereal diseases than before, but now men didn’t have to pay for anything, they had more access to women’s bodies, and they never had to face rape charges because those existing in a state of perpetual willingness can’t be raped.  

5.. Non-violence. Contrary to what most people believe, the majority of anarchists don’t support violent agendas. But this needs to be clarified, and I’ll use the Father of Anarchy, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, to illustrate. Proudhon, who only got a good start in life because of a devoted boy-mom and the generosity of capitalists, believed in a moral and ethical peaceful transformation of society. He criticized revolutionary violence. But he did not extend his beliefs to women. So much for equality… He wrote in his private notebooks, which have since been published, that violence should be used to subdue women, and he firmly believed that “Woman does not at all hate being used with violence, indeed even being violated…” While men tell us what they think all the time, what women see but refuse to believe is only the tip of the iceberg. We see this all the time when men’s private activities come to light posthumously or even accidentally while they are alive. The best policy, in my experience and opinion, is never to give men the benefit of the doubt – or ‘yes, all men’ – and to always question their publicly stated beliefs. I think that you’ll eventually discover that their words, actions and beliefs don’t match up. They tell you flimsy lies to get your labour, support, ideas and body. Supporting them is always a mistake.

A Word on Female Anarchists

For every male philosophy and movement, there have always been female supporters. They are always fewer in number than the males, simply because radical thinking is always more dangerous or risky for women. Because of their minority status, these women tend to be very pro-male and male apologists, even if they think they are arguing on behalf of women’s rights. They have to. The limited attention and support they do get never comes from other women as they are too afraid to rock the patriarchal boat. But the male supporters end up also being their abusers. This is the history of revolution, and I touch on this in my F is for Friendship post. Men get a radical idea and garner female support by mouthing words that women misinterpret to mean shared ideals. Women then devote endless hours of labour, emotional support, money, and sexual access to their bodies to the radical male movement, and then end up in jail, and/or financially destitute, and/or sexually violated, and sometimes in the end, disillusioned when they discover that the movement was aimed at male rights and freedoms, not human rights.

The anarchist movement was no different. Some truly amazing and brave women devoted their lives to male freedom from exploitation. I have very mixed feelings when I read about these women though. They were clearly cut from a different cloth and had so much potential to make a difference for women had they not been diverted and consumed by male whining and self-imposed suffering. Their life stories read like a never-ending schizophrenic episode filled with violence, sexual liaisons with parasitical and often mentally ill men, male apologism, and anti-woman activities dressed up by modern philosophers as feminism. Here are a few examples.

Emma Goldman, probably the most well-known female anarchist, was a Russian Jewish immigrant to the US, active in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. She was a formidable speaker and prolific in her activism, and she ended up jailed on multiple occasions. Eventually, she was deported from the US during her career of fighting for whiny men using targeted violence campaigns to stop state-sanctioned violence campaigns.  A sad history with a misogynistic father and then a violent rape in her teen years did nothing to stop her from pursuing several subordinate and degrading relationships with men, and at one point, freely choosing to become a prostitute to help a male anarchist fund a ridiculous assassination scheme. She also refused to get involved with First Wave feminists, but put energy into birth control access to facilitate women’s willingness to engage in free love. She was an anarchist in the male sense of the word, but I don’t consider her to be a feminist. I wish she had learned from her early negative experiences with men and put her vast energy and intelligence to better use as a separatist.

Voltairine de Cleyre, an American and another misguided female anarchist, was also a formidable speaker and writer. Again, she had the stirrings of feminism, as evidenced in her lecture and essay, entitled Sex Slavery, where she attacked the institution of marriage and marital rape. But instead of following this problem to its root, she was a staunch proponent of free love, and suffered personally and constantly, as a result. She carried on with various mentally ill male anarchists and as her reward, she became pregnant on multiple occasions, endured a brutal abortion, carried out one difficult pregnancy although was smart enough to hand of the male offspring to the father and refused motherhood, and she contracted syphilis. In addition, one of her male students shot her in an assassination attempt, but she immediately and ridiculously forgave him. So, definitely not a feminist, despite what people might say these days.

Since these early years, women have continued to participate in anarchist endeavours, even pairing their anarchy with liberal feminism through the Second Wave and on into the punk music scene and the Riot Grrrl movement. I think these efforts haven’t done much for women for three reasons, primarily.

First, they have usually piggy-backed on male movements or served as adolescent reactions to adolescent male behaviour. Second, they don’t address the root source of female oppression – men – and even include men in pretty much everything they do, so the best they can achieve is more freedom for oppressed men and continued sexual slavery for women. And third, feminism on its own has become diluted and polluted by intersectionality and inclusivity, and participants spend more time infighting and launching racist-misogynist attacks on white women than achieving female liberation and solidarity.

Unsurprisingly, male anarchists who, as a rule, talk about equality, have always reacted negatively to women promoting feminism within anarchism. Many tried to gaslight women into subordinating their concerns to those of class struggle. Of course, what so many fail to realize is that all oppressions stem from female oppression, so the logical pursuit is actually to liberate women from men first. Then the road is open to all other struggles. But these men knew exactly what they were doing in gaslighting women, and many women capitulated, likely due to their sexual ties to males in the movement, instead of starting their own movement separate from male anarchy. Women generally won’t allow themselves to see that male anarchists are not interested in equality, despite what they say. They never have been, and never will be. To make women truly equal is to protect them from male access and usage, and no man would ever agree to that because he rightly suspects that he would lose many of the privileges he sees as rights, and that he would actually have to work hard for the first time in his life to achieve something.

Can Anarchy and Feminism Co-Exist?

The quick and dirty answer is yes. The longer answer is yes, but you have to be clear about what you mean by both anarchy and feminism, and really, as I define it, true feminism is in and of itself, anarchy. True feminism is gynocentrism and female separatism. It is not possible to live free of hierarchy, coercion and violence if you devote energy to men, and especially if you practise heterosexuality or pour your resources into boy children. Intersectionality also has no place in this mindset as you end up with an oppression Olympics that fuels censorship and blame hierarchies and a loss of focus on femalehood as a shared status. At this point, I am not sure if women are ready or able to be just women. Men have created a world of damaged women living in archetypal boxes and who are trying and failing to escape this cage by constructing meaningless portfolios of micro-identities. I’ll bet that simplifying and separating is the answer to this, but that is another post for another time.

I’ll conclude by returning to where I started. Am I an anarchist? I think at this point, I can say yes. I’m a female separatist and I live by my words, and I can’t think of a better way to express freethinking and feminist mayhem than that.

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