There is a man in your mentions

Congratulating you

And calling all the women

Who disagreed with you

(For reasons you will not hear)

A pitchfork mob, while he

Conjures up

A pit of

Snakes.

 

You should know this tale.

The mouth

Ringed about with teeth

(He imagines)

Gapes

In its defiance.

We women who

Will

Not

Yield

To his demand that we

Are pliable and pretty

But still possess

The power of life,

Against his sovereign will,

 

He cannot stand it.

 

There, at the start,

Amidst the waves

Of chaos

The great mother Tiamat

Threatened to engulf him.

The first of the longest line,

Perseus, the hero,

Sent to slay the woman

Turned all to snakes

As punishment for

Her

Own

Violation,

Will unsheathe his sword

And slice her head clean off.

 

What could he do?

He must birth himself anew

On solid ground,

Far from the living, beating waves

The teeming nest

And the chaos

Of a chasm

He can never conquer

Really,

 

He cannot stand it.

 

We have been here

Always

And will remain

Long after his

Dreaming towers

Come

Crashing to the ground

And he learns

For the first time

Some humility,

 

Perhaps.

 

And those women with their

Sunshine smiles

Full of eagerness

To side

With the men that call us witches?

 

We understand you Alice,

For once, in another life,

We too

Were

Traitors to our sex.

 

So, after a summer recess of trying to forget that the world is manifoldly going to hell in a handcart, this week’s exciting ‘Back to Twitter’ experience has involved a good deal of feminists being berated for ‘reducing women to their genitals/biology/anatomy/whatever.’ This woke-approved soundbite has been around for an AGE, and my usual reaction to it is a long slow disbelieving blink. (It’s always slightly staggering when some wokebro comes along to pronounce on your ‘unstellar feminism’ based on his complete inability to grasp the relation between ‘biology’ and ‘destiny’). Anyway, I’m not about to write a thousand-odd words to clarify this for the benefit of the TRAs (it’s pretty clear the TRAs are not interested in anything being clarified) or even for their male accomplices (who evidently have no intention of relinquishing their shiny new ‘get out of misogyny free’ cards). I do, however, care about the many young women who are buying this bullshit, and I especially care about the degree to which they are buying this bullshit because of uninterrogated, internalised assumptions about the horror of being female. (Women? Being raised to devalue their femaleness? In a patriarchy? Nah mate).

The first thing to note about the way this apparently seductive soundbite works is that it relies on equivocations in the meanings of ‘defined by’ and ‘reduced to.’ And, moreover, these equivocations hinge, fundamentally, on an inability to think both the ‘female’ AND the ‘human’ bit contained in the proposition ‘women = adult human female.’

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