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

To be honest, this is a term I have never before used in my life, and I hadn’t even heard of it until a few months ago when I read an article that referred to it. My plan here is to introduce the term and how it pertains to women briefly, and then to take on a part of the article that inspired the post. You can find a link to the article here. Please note that it is not a feminist article, even though its topic certainly warrants a discussion from that perspective. In the conclusion, the author even tries the whole ‘suffering makes us stronger’ and ‘patriarchy-compliant women are strong’ bullshit that is force-fed to today’s women to shame them into silence about real problems, and that I talked about in a previous post. It amazes me how often women dance around disturbing issues without actually naming the problem that underlies the entire mess. It is amazing, but not surprising. If women allowed themselves to truly see and acknowledge reality, their entire world would collapse. They’d lose the perks that they get from supporting men, and they’d become social outcasts with all the negative consequences that arise from not sucking cock literally or figuratively. To be honest, most wouldn’t survive, as heterosexuality strips women of their natural strength, and most women don’t realize what exactly is being exchanged when they engage in pro-male lifestyles.

So, what is a kin-keeper? Well, it is apparently a social role that exists within a family that is taken on primarily by women. It is thought to involve three primary duties: carrying out family rituals and traditions, organizing family reunions and protecting family relationships, and maintaining family records and narratives. Basically, I call it it glue. Without a kin-keeper, you don’t have a cohesive and loyal unit with a group memory or sense of history.

Now, women typically take on the role without necessarily being asked or forced, and I think they do it for a number of reasons. On the whole, a) women tend to have better social skills than men, so it is natural for them to put work into relationships, b) they need to have social relationships both to feel human and to make up for the fact that traditional het relationships strip them of valuable social connections and outlets, c) they need to do these activities to maintain the lie of happy and successful female heterosexuality, and d) if they are housewives, they need to find a way to justify their existence and to fill their abundant free time once children are of school age and older. For some reason, liberal feminism has started trying to pass off the role of kin-keeper as ’emotional labour’ deserving of pay, and that is probably why I haven’t taken much of an interest in it. I’m sick of being pressured into fighting for the privileges of women who wholeheartedly want to maintain patriarchy and who fear and hate lesbians, the child-free and female separatists with a passion. For me, true feminism is about the prevention of women’s oppression and especially of the punishment of rebels of patriarchy, not slapping bandaids on problems so that women can continue complying and forcing their daughters to comply and submit. It is the latter mission, however, that takes up most of the limited feminist money and labour available. And of course, this ensures that women will never be free or healthy.

The Family Who Suffers Together, Stays Together

Now, before I get into the third duty of kin-keepers, I just want to say that many, if not most, kin-keepers are enablers and expert liars, and I discuss both topics in other posts in the Alphabet Series. These are crucial skills for practising straight women so that they can successfully live up to their end of the heterosexual contract. Basically, they agree to take on a particular role in the patriarchal institution known as ‘family’, and a woman absolutely cannot do this well without being able to enable men and boys and to lie as if her life depends on it – and it usually does.

The sole purpose of family is to triumph over other families. You know – that survival of the fittest type of thing that people tell themselves, especially when they screw over other people. And to do that, a family needs a narrative. Every semi-functional family has one. The kin-keeper, as protector of the family memories and records, is key to maintaining the narrative. They hold the grudges. They appoint the scapegoats. They cover up the crimes and dirty secrets, unless it is advantageous to reveal them. They dole out emotional rewards and punishments. And they take photos, maintain their collections, culling when necessary. Family, as a patriarchal institution, is about the male journey to power and female support of that journey. So the narrative, for the most part, ends up being the history of the males of the family. We all know this is true. We see it in the records kept through the ages. And we also know that male stories and success depend upon the suffering of women and girls, and that this suffering must happen in silence. No one likes truth-tellers. They ruin the narrative and upset the balance of power. Revealing that a male family member is a rapist, for example, can ruin his life, and possibly the trajectory of the family. He probably just made a mistake – there’s no need to make a big deal out of it. The female victim, however, will build character and strength through her silent and required suffering.

Kin-keepers also like to hide facts about drug and alcohol problems, incest and domestic abuse, sluts who have children out of wedlock, gay aunts and uncles, extramarital affairs, humble economic origins, and really, it could be anything that might bring embarrassment to the family and destroy relationships.

Digging into the Past

While most wives and mothers tend to take on informal emotional labour following marriage and breeding, once traditional women are faced with having almost nothing to do, they often turn to doing actual research into family history, often with the help of genealogy services. And this is where the article I referred to comes in. The article asks whether digging into our families’ DNA pasts should come with a trigger warning. Basically, as I interpret it, most women’s stone cold realities are depressing as fuck, but they are so well covered up, we all grow up not knowing the horrors that women go through. We ourselves think we are alone in our suffering because we are not allowed to talk about it. So facing the sheer amount of collective female suffering can cause cognitive dissonance – or what the author of the article calls ‘distress’. On some level, we all know we are rape babies. There are different kinds of rape, but unless we are test tube created, we are all rape babies. But no one wants to acknowledge that, so it can be distressing to find out that family members have been raped or were disowned because of rapes. We may also find out that male family members were pedophiles or rapists. There are all sorts of skeletons that can be unearthed when one goes digging in one’s family’s past. Whether you can handle it is another story.

In my own family, we had a ton of skeletons involving rapey men and abused women, and I didn’t even do any research or take on the role of kin-keeper. I found out that my paternal grandmother became pregnant out of wedlock and her parents disinherited her from the family fortune and married her off to a poor salesman who ended up beating her for her entire life as if punishing her for her first bastard child and general whorishness. He raped three more children out of her, but he refused to buy her a wedding ring as an additional insult. She was an unusual woman and had a full-time job outside the home during what was a generation of housewives. She bought her own wedding rings with her own money, and today I have those rings. But she became an alcoholic and died a very broken woman. Her second son ended up being a chip off the old fatherly block and molested his younger sister, my aunt, for years. He luckily died in a motorcycle accident at the age of 18, but as a further slap in the face to my aunt, he was turned into the young, dead hero of the family. My aunt went on to marry an abuser, but became a social worker focused on battered women as well as helping incarcerated men. She would bring ex-con boyfriends to family gatherings. We’d find out later that the boyfriend of the moment was out of the picture after robbing her or something like that. My aunt’s second son ended up a classic abuser like his father. He got his wife pregnant and then left her to be with some American woman he also got pregnant at the same time during one of his business trips south of the border. My father, the youngest child and a psychologist, refused to let my aunt speak of the molestation and would belittle her in front of me when she tried to talk about it. My father himself was both a child psychologist and sex therapist who used to bring home movies filled with violent rape scenes for my mother and I to watch with him. I learned about male entertainment at an early age…

Interestingly, on that side of my family, there was an official policy that women weren’t allowed to be the family record keepers. After I put the whispered stories of abuse together with my father’s pro-rape approach to child-rearing, I understood why this was so… I also understand why I absolutely hate the concept of family, and was inexplicably anti-marriage from a very early age.

I leave you with this thought or question: what does the modern kin-keeper do with the shit she unearths about her own family? She is uncovering the true stories of women, the truth of heterosexuality, the truth of what men do to women. How does a straight, male-supporting enabler deal with her cognitive dissonance? Does she re-bury it in order to keep the peace and to maintain her comfortable life, denying knowledge to the girls of her family, and instead slathering her conscience with a healthy layer of hope? Or does she wake the fuck up and actually do what adults are supposed to do – protect girls from the shit men and boys have been doing to women and girls since human time began?

I think you and I both know the answer to that question.

♀️ If you care to support Story Ending Never, we are appreciative. ⚢