For anarchism, against liberalism and feminism

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Why I am not an American feminist

(Content of essay temporarily deleted. May be reposted after editing.) It includes an argument against what I call the therapeutic society. I claim, among other things, that women tend to value Relationships and Feelings in lieu of Reason, Justice, and (indeed) the Political as such. These valuations are generally not acknowledged, certainly not reflected upon, but are taken for granted. I also argue that women are more conservative than men, and try to explain why.

I temporarily removed the post after I realized I had said something risky that someone could use against me. I am not a coward who is afraid to mention it, but I know that I must be careful because I aim to criticize some people who are backed by powerful institutions and ideologies.

In particular, as readers of my posts know, I positively hate the mental health system in this country and the ideologies that are part of it. (Which I think includes our increasingly dominant therapeutic spiritualities. "Therapy" is the new religion, and this has meant a move towards depoliticization and irrationality, and injustice, partly because justice has ceased to be a norm along with rationality (which almost all Americans think is only a bad joke); it has been effaced by a contrary set of norms, which are basically health and happiness. In this new dispensation, it is considered immoral to say anything that makes anyone else feel uncomfortable. And the increasing dominance of women and feminine thinking fit this very well.

I have a particular criticism (which is putting it mildly) for certain (living) individuals, practicing their professions, whom I wish to accuse of doing me great wrong. One of them is a social worker. She works at a hospital and in private practice and is a supervisor of social workers. I want to find a way to have her driven out of her profession, as a result of my accusation.

Basically, she threatened to have me incarcerated on (false) psychiatric pretenses. What she effectively did was to threaten me with something worse than taking my life.

The fact that I was released the very next day proves that she is a liar. Why did she make that threat? I think that it is because the police had decided to incarcerate me on the false psychological pretenses, and they did that to punish me for having and expressing the political opinions I hold, and to warn me by harassing me.

This is not unlike what they do to people when they shoot the dog in their yard. This is a warning. It clearly means: "Next time we come for you."

Someone who willingly lends the enormous social power of their professional position to doing the dirty work of the police state, this is vile. This should not be tolerated.

The only way 'feminism' plays a role in this is through its false use as an ideology that appears to legitimate what in fact are great injustice, and that really have little to do with gender. I claim that the liberal state does this, and that it is also done, quite commonly, with regard to race. Whenever a black security guard tries to brutalize or threaten me with violence, as has happened to me many times, I feel reminded of something I should not forget, as unpleasant and discordant with other ideological tendencies that this recognition is. For these are men and women who are quite prepared by all kinds of ideological instruction and encouragements to believe that if someone like me does not seem totally and automatically obedient, it's their racial oppression by such as myself that is at stake. When of course that is absolutely a lie and has nothing whatever to do with the matter in essence. These are willing slaves of the capitalist police state, doing its dirty work for those who benefit from it.

Of course I know that some people have it worse than I do. Though you should admit that recognizing that you are being obliquely and deniably threatened with something even worse than taking your life from you, that this would be profoundly unpleasant and jarring.

I have a cause, and a campaign. I know that I must pursue it responsibly. It is a cause of justice.

In the course of the essay that I just took down, for now, I come to the conclusion that much of 'feminism' was false, a mistake, or both. I come to this conclusion on perfectly solid left-wing grounds. I am at heart an anarchist. I don't believe that it would be glorious and happy to empower your minority or, in the case of women, historically disempowered group, at the expense of mine, because such a reversal is justice. That is the Leninist and also the 'liberal' capitalist approach, and while it sounds funny to say this, those two possibilities are actually quite similar.

(Marxist-Leninist 'socialism' was a form of industrial capitalism based on the exploitation and domination of labor on the mass society and factory model. It favored the strong administrative state much as social democratic 'liberalism' did in Western Europe and America. That is because these were basically forms the same thing, responding to the same problems, with solutions that were rather similar. These strong administrative states, largely states of exception, could be and were instituted on the ideological basis that they favored the agenda proper to some social class or group subjects. That did not make them less oppressive but gave that oppression an ideology that appeared to legitimate it.).

'Feminism' has had some interesting features. One of the things it conceals is the increasing dominance of some very conservative values that appear to be 'feminine'. I argue that among these are the presumed values of Relationships and Feelings, and that these are not quite the names of God or the divine or the good that they are taken to be. And that the substitution of these norms for those of Reason, Justice, and the Political life that is one of contestation, is a problematic good at best. Indeed, the substitution of this 'feminine' set of virtues for that 'masculine' one is no kind of revolution or true reform, but only an insistence on what really is the other side of a complex of governance on familial models that are, in some combination, those of patriarchs and matriarchs. A matriarchy that rules in the name of Relationships and Feelings might also be consistent with a therapeutic state. This might be a 'progressive' society, but it will be one with essentially no liberty whatsoever. This can be predicted from the fact that liberty is not even a value here, and that the state and its authority are figured as unlimited, just so long as they are wielded on the side or behalf of (take your pick) (a) progress and the good, (b) a formerly oppressed or marginalized social group.

I criticize and I accuse. I accuse those individuals of criminal injustice who have committed it, and I criticize the social ideologies that have made it possible for them to do the things they do, and, for the most part, to escape criticism for it, a fact I find simply horrifying.

Our society is not too 'masculine', and its problems have little to do with being ruled by men who act like protecting fathers rather than women who act like nurturing mothers. These are figures of authority imagined on familial lines. We need not more but less of that. Thus, in strict definitional terms, I advocate anarchy against feminism. Not everything that the latter term has been used to include, but more or less anything that could go by that name if we are using terms, as the philosopher in me prefers, in terms of their actual meanings.