Will the Real Feminists please stand up!
The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time treats them as children by maintaining an excess of secrecy, and a censorship of news and expressions of opinion that renders the spirits of those thus intellectually suppressed defenceless against every unfavourable turn of events and every sinister rumour. It absolves itself from the guarantees and contracts it had formed with other states, and makes unabashed confession of its rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual is then called upon to sanction in the name of patriotism. (Freud, 1957:293-4 [1915]).
With the news of the imminent return of Afghanistan to the dreaded and derided Taliban, in spite of two decades of war and some 830 billions of dollars in funding, equipment and training, of thousands of casualties, of rapine and murder and mayhem that makes the usual business of warfare appear nonchalant, in spite of all of the hand-wringing and head-scratching and the ignoring of history, one receives, along with all of this other disbelief, the truer message of the stakes; that ‘this is a war on women and the world is watching it happen’. This is the claim now making its way into media and I think it lies near the essence of the conflict, which is in fact a global one. If one takes such a claim seriously, then can it be but tantamount to a call to arms?
Alexander ‘the great’ is still considered by many military historians to be the best leader of his kind known to history. Though he carved out a vast empire, introduced the idea of cosmopolitan into the world, exhorted both trade in resources but also in ideas, and saw the city named for him blossom into the most important cultural center of the day, including its famed library, taking his triumphs all the way from Egypt to India, yet he took one look at Afghanistan and said, ‘forget it’. This was well over 2300 years ago. Ever since, lesser leaders and lesser generals, though with equally brave soldiers, have attempted to prove their apical ancestor wrong, with dire results. It is difficult to not view the current cataclysm as both a giving up as well as a giving in.
But if this conflict is really about the oppression of women by men, then where is the army of feminists to counter it? And, we might ask more generally, why is there not such a force already in existence? The USA has ‘Blackwater’, for instance, and Russia has, rather ironically, ‘Wagner’, and so on. So where is ‘Hypatia’, as I am going to name it, though it does not yet exist? Where is that just force of women who are willing to actually fight for their global sisters, lay down their lives for them in a fifth wave of feminism that moves from the activist and somewhat ad hoc fourth wave to a true mercenary machine? How many liberated women are there, actually, in the world today, who have the prescience, the skills, and the simple guts to take on the likes of the Taliban? There is nothing about modern military equipment that would defeat a healthy woman’s physique. This is no problem of logistics, or even ‘bias’. Women can fight just as well as men, and by the gods do they have a greater cause.
The idea that, on the one hand, this is a war against women, which it surely at least in part is, and the sense, on the other, that these same women can appeal to nation-states so aptly described by Freud near the start of the first world war, led mostly by men and staffed mostly by men and protected by soldiers who are almost exclusively male, is nothing less than ludicrous. If this is truly a woman’s fight first and foremost, then Hypatia, an organization which should exist in principle, without respect of country, creed, or credit, must needs destroy the Taliban and all like them, globally and without mercy, to the very last devious, disgusting, desperate but also lost soul of man. For women to be authentically liberated means the closing of cathedrals, the jacking of gestation, the banning of burlesque, the hacking of all hackneyed hooks telling us that women are and thus can be only beautiful or nurturing, only either Eve or Mary, the seducer or the redeemer and it is thus men, and only men, who act in the world as it is. And what action we may observe.
So if those who claim to be feminists won’t say it, it falls to the middle-aged white male European philosopher to do so. That is, the scion of the history of Western consciousness, the very source of all that is feminist in this yet medieval world of ours, the space and place of general human freedom, unimaginable in other cultures, and the well-spring of the better future which still believes in not only the individual, but also her utterly human ability to act and work in the world of acts and works which only appears to be masculine and yet which desires, as with all masculinity, to rape itself into a self-loathing from which no one, woman or man, will ever escape.
G.V. Loewen is the author of over 45 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, and more recently, fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.