47. Women's march: Feminism carrying the patriarchal light

The women's march in Paris complaining about the price of bread led to the French revolution, the march of the suffragettes led to women earning the right to vote. Today there is a Women's March in Washington and in many other big cities around the world.

Even though it would seem that feminism is against patriarchy, I would argue that it is not quite so. It is against the invisibility of the patriarchy, it is against its shadows, it is against forgetting what the patriarchy is actually about. The patriarchy has been used as a system to subjugate women but that's mostly a corruption of its function. As a function, it could be simply a phase, an emancipatory process that is has historically been associated with the father but in fact does not belong to any gender. In many respects feminism as an emancipatory movement, is the integration, the appropriation of the patriarchal drive which then takes us to a post-patriarchy.

Why do I want to write about the patriarchal drive? The patriarchal drive is the one that pushes us out of a state of dependency, of ignorance. The one where we are at the mercy of external forces. When women take that torch, the patriarchy is no longer needed.

Claiming control: occupy

As gatherers-hunters, we were at the mercy of luck, finding food, of external forces. Following the patriarchal drive, control was sought and we settled and agriculture and cattle raising began, developing techniques, knowledge, working out a schedule, a discipline.  With this, private property started, and then the issue of inheritance: how do I know that the children who will inherit my property are mine? (Men would ask). Which came with a heavy price for women as it led to control women's uterus, their behaviour, their voice, their friendships, their wisdom and their freedom. Anchoring land equated to controlling women's bodies. That's why it is said that ultimately all wars are about the control of land and the body of women.

Then came the black plague that devastated Europe and triggered the biggest assault over women to force them to take on the role of repopulating the continent. So the patriarchy turned to its nastiest form: production and reproduction were assigned to different genders. The colonisation of America began and in  parallel with this movement that represented an internal colonisation for Europe. Women were denied their voice, knowledge, friendship, access to land and money and ownership of their bodies. Women were disciplined through the persecution and public execution of the so-called witches.

Many centuries later, women were able to reclaim their bodies, but not by letting it at the mercy of chance to get pregnant or not (it was not about going back to nature), but to exert control over their own reproduction. This drive of claiming control, of not being at the mercy of external forces was internalised by women. Contraception (at to some extent the movement for access to safe abortions) are, in fact, patriarchal by nature. It was not about denying control. It was about owning it. In this move, the integration of the patriarchal drive, takes patriarchy to the beginning of its end. It starts to break the role-polarisation were women have control externalised (of behaviour and reproduction)  in men and men have nutrition, contention and care externalised in women.
This is not to say that the patriarchy came to save us and that women were lacking of control. There were some, albeit limited, knowledge of herbal contraceptives and abortives, but through the control over women's friendship this knowledge was not passed on and was prohibited. It is more to do to Rumi's notion that "the wound is the place where light enters you" or Hegel's notion that the wound heals when it finds in itself the solution. So if the patriarchy offered science as a way of cutting the dependence of nature, it was through science that the patriarchal chain on women is being cut. In a way, any intervention is patriarchal.

With this I don't mean to say either that the work is done, because it has not yet been institutionalised. Institutions, laws and science are still biased to take care of the rights and health of men (or not-poor men). Medical research puts special emphasis in rich men health issues, it performs most of its drug tests on men, women are more likely to be prescribed anxyolitics or symptoms being dismissed as psychosomatic. Research also shows that women are more likely to die of heart attacks when they have one, as early signs are not taken seriously. In Law, women (and poor people) are less likely to know their rights and to have less tools to defend them (access to proficient lawyers as in many cases they have to rely in those provided by the state) and even then they are more likely of being confronted by culturally biased judges. Very recently in a very advanced country, like Canada, judge Robin Camp asked a rape victim why she didn't keep her knees together and kept referring her as "the accused". This case caused an outrage. The case was reviewed, he had to go through gender-sensitivity training and he has apologised to the victim but also to the community, understanding that this sort of treatment has a bigger impact on society: undermines the efforts of other victims to come forward, deepens the sense of despair in victims and hurts justice. By no means, he is an isolated case.

This comes out of the patriarchal division of public and private spheres and property. As land is/was divided in public and private property, so are/were women. "Public women" were a property to be shared by many men and there are implicit rules of how women had to behave not to be labelled a public woman. This is why, in cases of rape, the first questions tend to be on the woman's behaviour and which "signs" she was giving. Public places were dangerous places for women. This sounds very old, but it is a code that is working to this day. A "public woman" is just a body to be used, like public facilities in some regard, she is not a person.

Ivette Cooper, Labour MP, will be speaking in Trafalgar square, during today's women march in London. Her speech was already published. A part of it speaks about women in public spaces:

We are marching because a talented woman MP was murdered by a far right extremist and we need to call it out as the terrorism it is.We are marching because we believe what Jo Cox said that we have more in common than what divides us and because we won’t stay on the sidelines any more.And we are not just marching, we’re singing, we are shouting, we’re tweeting, snapchatting, facebooking - standing up to the misogynists, the bullies and the haters who try to intimidate and silence people online just as for years they tried to intimidate or silence women on the street, in the pub, in the workplace.Thirty years ago, many of us marched to reclaim the night. Women in Leeds were being told not to go out after dark, because it wasn’t safe, there were too many attacks.Instead they came together - in Leeds, London and across the country to reclaim the night, to take back the streets. Our new streets are online. Social media are our new pubs and clubs. So just as we stood together to reclaim the night we will stand together to reclaim the Internet too.

Women are more likely to develop agoraphobia, the fear of open and public spaces, and stay at home, safe. Or decide not to tweet or have an androgynous name to post opinions. Reclaiming a public space is a natural step after reclaiming their bodies.

Going back to the light of the patriarchal drive, being born, separating from the parents all follow the patriarchal light. Rebelling against slavery, Moses exodus, Christ dying in the cross with the message "the father will not come to save you", Independence wars, Modernity and its drive to take people away from the dependence on the weather to avoid famines, dependence of "the will of God" to get well after falling ill, and develop modern tools, science and technology to take "control" or at least take action, all these movements of progress are following an emancipation/ patriarchal drive. Of course here there is a danger. In this sense, modernity is about consciousness and assuming responsibility rather than over-promoting a complete detachment or prevalence of rationality over emotion.

Forwards not backwards

The patriarchal drive has a second light: the direction is forward not backwards. It is forbidden to go back to the womb, the matriarchal world (infancy), the dependent state. This equates with the death drive, wishing to go back to mum's uterus, to let go and not engage with reality any more. We march for 40 years if it's needed, but we don't go back. With this prohibition, it brought the demonisation of women, particularly if they were powerful, as they represent the temptation to go back to mum's world. Women then are portrayed as witches, as narcissistic queens, as prostitutes, as corrupted human beings particularly if there are not fulfilling the roles of the good girl, obedient, mostly silent or not confrontative, a doll or happy to be the empty object of desire. Most women leaders and politicians have to deal with this demonisation publicly and Jo Cox suffered the ultimate consequence. It's been years of slow progress and today women are confronting. Today's march is also carrying this light: we cannot go back.

Ivette Cooper will finish her speech with the following words:

We are here because we want to take a stand against Donald Trump. Millions of American women and men voted for him. Marching isn’t enough - we need to persuade, to win arguments, to challenge the deep causes of division and to build a future in common.We stand on the shoulders of our mothers and grandmothers - women who have gone before us and won great victories to get us equal pay, abortion rights, rape laws, child care paternity as well as maternity leave.But we won’t be judged on our victories but on how we deal with the setbacks. How we come together and rebuild when it feels like the clock is being turned back.For the sake of our children and grandchildren - our daughters and our sons - we are here because we will not let the clock be turned back now.

But the need of moving forward not backward will come again in other political discussions: with the attempts of raising tensions again with Russia, or creating a new enemy in China. It will be discussed again in terms of workers rights, education rights, freedom of press, freedom of speech, civil rights...

The need of shedding some light

In any case, it is always important to acknowledge context. Donald Trump's election did not come out of nowhere. It came after almost two decades of stagnant wages, student debt, worse jobs requiring ever higher qualifications, rising death rates, rising opiate addition, new generations being for the first time more likely to be worse off than their parents, foreclosures. Growth as an economical recipe was sold to the public saying that if the cake is bigger, everyone piece of the cake will be bigger, but it was not the case. The cake was made bigger, but all this new excess ended up on the plate of the 1%. Occupy Wall Street back then was a very symbolic gesture. Markets seem to be like these mad forces that can take economies to the ruin like the weather used to ruin crops and cause famines. Now a new modernity is needed to create a distance with these forces and work out how to prevent their potential devastating effects, a reincarnation of Nietzsche to declare the markets dead (or at least the bond markets?) or deprive them from their god-like status, perhaps and take action to curb climate change soon after. A modernity to create a distance that today does not exist between politicians and Wall Street and between ideology and the economics profession as Jo Michell's article in Prime Economics explains: "Trump, ideology and the economics profession".

There is a context too in terms of global affairs and journalism. With news consumed daily, and the pursue of mostly the salient pieces of whatever sort of news, many global events are presented to the public as the weather report would be. It rains. An attack in Turkey killed 30. Kim Kardashian is robbed in Paris. NATO forces doing the biggest war games in Poland since WWII. It simply happens. I was very surprised some time ago, watching an otherwise interesting TED talk by a highly educated prize-winning author saying (in min 14.50) "I want to figure out why so many people around the world hate us". Five years after the twin towers were attacked not even highly educated people had a clue why. They hate us. It rains. It is a fact. Them.
Now it is 2017 and we read news of Donald Trump coming out of 'scary' intelligence briefings stating "we have some big enemies out there in this country and we have some very big enemies - very big and, in some cases, strong enemies". It reminded me, funnily enough, Alec Baldwin explaining how he imagines heaven in an interview of Inside the Actors studio (I could not find the video, though). He said that he imagined that when we die, we are sat in front of a screen, like in the movies and we are explained everything, the "truth" so we can go "ahhhh, now I get it". Apocalipsis in the literal sense. The revelation.

In this sense, Wikileaks, Snowden even if they are different in purpose and circumstance are about this state of ignorance. Of course, there are many voices that have been explaining what's going on even if they don't have access to these exclusive files.

Stop the war on women

Here is the other side of the patriarchy ending. It is not only women claiming streets, using their voice, claiming power and rights, leading public offices... men are modified too. Men need to "occupy" those spaces in their psyche that are vital but that have been abandoned and externalised in these women who won't behave: the ones that provide vital attention, emotional nutrition, digestion and processing of negativity, and provide contention. The Huffington Post has a section on "Building modern men" talking about this subject. The crisis of masculinity that comes from not being able to fulfil the old role of the man as the provider, of feeling impotent in front of the economic reality, not being able to afford health care, being surrounded by an ideology that speaks about meritocracy while it invisibilises systemic distortions, de-politicises people and imposes some sort of tyranny of positive thinking inferring that whatever happens to you: it is your fault; plus cultural pressures on men that prevent them from discussing emotions are leading many of them to addiction and has been contributing to the rise of suicides. Some of them, may be tempted to go back, to blame women (and any personification of their vulnerability), to become reactionary against feminism stating that feminists are women who hate men and life itself (as these reactionary movements tend to come with the ban of abortion and limits to access to contraceptives and sexual ed). A deep sense of shame is linked with this reaction (the shame of not being able to be the man that he is supposed to be) and ultimately with fascist tendencies. Some sort of hypermasculinity that ironically sees itself as a victim. And yesterday we listened to an inauguration speech portraying the biggest economy in the world, the most powerful military force in the world, the nation that leads NATO and dictates the policies of the IMF, the World Bank and one of the few nations with a right of veto in the security council of the UN, a nation that has been bombing multiple countries... as a victim.

Feminism has a lot to offer to men in this moment, should they want to understand what is that part that is missing and how to deal with shame. That caring side that allows us to have pity on our Gollum, our shame, our shadow. The war on women is a war on everyone's feminine side. It doesn't allow men to access these tools, and look for solutions from a different place, without anger against women but rather fighting for rights, reconnecting with politics and moving forward. Staying in the patriarchy when it is time to move on is -ultimately- castrating, slavering and des-empowering, the opposite of what everyone needs.

Andrea

24. Creditors v creators: matriarchy, patriarchy and then... the almost happy ending

What on earth links the responsibility of a creditor with concepts of matriarchy and patriarchy?? The short answer is the creation and extension of dependency. 

If you got it by now, you can stop reading, because what comes next is the long answer which I'm not so sure clarifies the topic any further. 

This entire entry will focus on the problem of the creditor and its responsibility to make a deal of equals as very closely related to the problem of parenthood and the patriarchy stage in which we are all immersed in. With this I don't mean to say that the debtor is not responsible for their part. But the debt crisis is the "approved narrative" that gets repeated and goes on unquestioned.

Looking down on the debtor: the guilty one

I find this article in The Independent "Greece referendum: the Monty Python sketch that (sort of) explains the Greek debt crisis" very interesting in many ways. I'll pick upon one of the minor comments it makes: 

One of the key economic ideas in German philosophy — and, to be fair, that of other cultures as well — was that there was something unnatural about debt, indeed immoral. The German word schuld means both debt and guilt. As Foreign Affairs pointed out this year, one of Nietzsche's big works looked at the relationship between shame and debt. "In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche looked back to the 'oldest and most primitive' personal relationship between creditor and debtor as the origin of how 'one person first measured himself against another,'" author Kenneth Dyson wrote.

When we look at debts, the cultural narrative (not the pure economic one) points out at the debtor as the one that is inferior, the guilty, the one that "needs", that can't provide for himself and owes. It is the creditor's narrative, which will always exclude itself and its behaviour of lending too much and thus creating debt as means of creating dependency instead of being a genuine investment. Watch Ann Pettifor Interview by the Renegade Economist.

Beyond this, when a language shares the same word for debt and guilt, we should reflect on how this language construction affects the way we perceive and build our inner narrative, the one that explains the world. At the end of the day, a word is a brick.

(What follows is a big leap, but bear with me, it will all come together at the end).

Matriarchy, Patriarchy and then...

When thinking about dependency, we should think at the oldest, most primitive personal relationships of dependence: the matriarchy. Here I need to clarify that I consider myself a feminist and the matriarchy a stage on the individuation process, as much it is the patriarchy, even if the latter comes with a heavy bill for women to bear.

First, the matriarchy
Since we are in our mothers wombs we are fused to their psyches. From the moment we are born, a long process of individuation starts: the one in which we slowly realise we are our own person and are free to make our own decisions and to write our own history. But it takes some time. For the first years of our lives, our mothers organise with their words our consciousness, with their silences and disapproval, our shadow. Her narrative (even if it is patriarchal script) is the virtual womb in which we are immersed until we are born out of it by recognising it as foreign.
During these first years, she provides food, comfort, attention. We are dependent and she has the power. This is the matriarchal stage. Eden. 
During this stage, she is perfect to our eyes. This is "the reign of the perfect mother". 
But of course, the mother is not perfect and we need to be born out of the matriarchy to develop our own independence to become free.

Then, the patriarchy
At this point the perfect mother dies. The patriarchy kills the mother (the good mother). 
God expels us from Eden. We fall. 
In almost every fairy tale, the real story begins when the "good mother" dies because this is the beginning of the hero's story, when we have to learn to make decisions and earn our bread. We cannot separate ourselves from the good mother and that's why this false perception of perfection has to die. We need to challenge the narrative we have received from her so we can build our own.
In fairy tales, the good mother and the stepmother (or witch) are two halves of the same person. When the good mother dies we start to see our mother's shadow, the side she does not acknowledge of herself: the stepmother (not completely emotionally invested) or the witch (eating children, a narcissist "feeding" from children). In this demonisation, we find the strength to destroy some of the things we have inherited and are not ours or are not useful to us. Up to this point, fused to our mother's psyche, we could not see this shadow because our mother was blind to it. If she could not see it, neither could we. The fact that we start to see it, is a sign that we are becoming independent.

This stage is the patriarchy, because a father figure is the one the invite us to go outside the world of mum and penetrate the external world. During the patriarchal stage (which is by no means the final one), we need to learn four main things:
-Listen to our instinct 
-Re arrange our unconscious world, our beliefs 
-Feed ourselves (our basic needs... you shall earn your bread)
-Learn to use our resources through the development of self-discipline and self-mastery
Basically, to become independent.

(all these steps tend to appear in stories as animals talking, Goddess guiding the hero, princesses doing a lot of cleaning up, battling evil forces, finding food in the forest, etc).

When a princess marries a prince at the end of the story it has little to do with "only a man can rescue a woman". It is in fact the princess integrating her masculine side, the one that allows her to focus her energy and with a sword cut the dependency with the evil stepmother.
But of course, the mother is NOT evil. And the father is also castrating figure and we need to be born out of his narrative, which is blind to its own shadow too. We need to integrate the father role by being able to build our own structures instead of depending of external ones.

And finally... the almost happy ending
Of course here comes the happy ending for the hero. We did our hero's journey: "we loved, we hated and we became". And we are all at the verge of the end of the patriarchy.

But this entry was about the creditor's point of view. The step-mother and the King in our fairy tale. What happens when they see the empty nest? Do they know how to create again? What's their own mission and purpose? Do they remember how to feed themselves? 

Patriarchal inertia - Creditors v creators

For a while, there is a patriarchal inertia that will try to extend dependency through debts. A king needs feudalism and the rentier economy to feed from. Or else, it will empty the coffers. It will keep on demonising and disempowering anything considered social (maternal), citizens and democracies (accusing any policy of populist if it works in their interest), and crashing start-ups and entrepreneurs, that if left unchecked will destroy countries. Mothers under patriarchy (and states under current thinking) are left lost, disconnected, not knowing where to feed from (austerity, austerity). The patriarchs (bankers, insurance companies, hedge funds, private equity firms, big corporations) will pass a bill to the next generation, to the children. 

These creditors create a unpayable debt to extend a state of dependency and avoid addressing their own emptiness. This is not "conspiratorial" thinking. It's mostly survival behaviour, that in some cases turns into predatorial eg Hedge Funds arguing in favour of sacking teachers and close schools in Puerto Rico to avoid a default that would affect them. This behaviour is only possible within a particular structure of institutional and social order. I said before: The creditor's narrative will always exclude the creditor and its behaviour of lending too much and thus creating debt as means of creating dependency and concentrating power instead of being a genuine investment, with its rewards and its risks I should add. 

Blue scream - Survivor series
Jaco Van Der Vaart

The first problem with this creditor is that does not know how to create himself. Does not know his own purpose. He depends on extraction of wealth or others creating for him. He has the resources but in reality does not know how to use them or what for. The liberal tragedy is that it fought to become independent from the monarchy, only to concentrate as much wealth as the monarchy and start to behave similarly: unquestionable, with some sort of divine right.

These creditors do not lend to equals. They need "empty" people fearing for their survival to capitulate their power: 

• a robot/slave (the one that does not think for itself and follows orders), 
• a "prostitute"/a corrupt (the one that sells him/herself to survive), 
• a coward (the one that fears the fight/cutting the dependency), 
• a child (the one that is/feels dependent).

The second problem is that this creditor does not assume the responsibility nor the risk (s)he took. During the development of capitalism, there were many steps taken to lower the risk of investment in order to encourage it (Societies with limited responsibility were created, the figure of stake holders that can own stakes only for minutes, isolated bankers etc). In the case of Greece, they were able to issue debt at the same rate as Germany (even if the difference of strength of the economy was always big), because banks assumed Germany would bail out Greece, should it ever defaulted.

It's what Zizec described as the age when we want a soft drink without sugar, bier without alcohol, love without the fall and -I would add- sex without children and investment with no risk. But we reached a point where responsibility is almost out of the picture entirely, producing a social fracture. Watch Gillian Tett interview by Renegade Economist.  

The third issue is that they are unable to see their own emptiness (or insolvency).

Translation: The blue child (by Rep)/ Hole / The temptation of falling into the hole / But who was the first to fall into the hole? / The hole.
Blog de Rep: NIÑO AZUL

The true economist knows this. They know that sometimes creditors lend too much and borrowers take too much. Debts must be restructured with a clean cut, insolvent banks need to fail as it was done many times before. 

But we are not looking at economic issues with economic lenses. We are looking at them with cultural narratives that are passed on with trans-generational codes that are castrating the next generations and their ability to be and create for themselves. 

At this stage the narrative must be reversed: we need to stop speaking about debt crisis and start to speak about the lending crisis and the issue of lending as a false production.

Only speaking about the lending issue will turn the mirror to the narrator which will enable us to make progress.

Andrea