Feminism Against Chauvinistic Feminism

I've long considered myself to be a feminist, even before I realized I was trans. It's always seemed like basic common sense to me that people shouldn't be defined by the contents of their genitalia but by the quality of their character. Regardless of where you stand on rape culture or abortion or Hillary goddamn Clinton, that's really what it all comes down to. That and realizing the basic fact that our society treats women and anyone perceived as feminine like second class citizens at best. If you ask most people, left, right, or center, on these basic realities of American life, they'll generally (if begrudgingly) agree with you. Then why is feminism still such a controversial subject? Try casually mentioning it on almost any given message board and count the seconds before a dozen trolls threaten to rape and gut you and leave you for dead by the highway. Seriously, fucking try it. I have. The very word feminism seems to bring the worst out of people online.

And the tough medicine is that this happens on both ends of the spectrum. The lion share of people actually willing to declare themselves feminists online seem more concerned with self-righteous virtue signaling than equality. Even with all their bluster, most cyber-feminists seem to work very hard to mirror the vitriolic hate-fuckery of the weirdly rape obsessed sexist troglodytes of the "Men's Movement". The only thing rarer than an open feminist in my lefty-libertarian neck of the web seems to be an open feminist who doesn't feel entitled to instruct other people on how to live their lives, like some role-crazy guidance counselor with a yard stick up their ass. I'm sure a lot of this ugliness is just the action-reaction-action of two camps of morons feeding off the fumes of one another's farts but in spite of what my birth certificate says, I am not a man. I am a feminist. So I can only do my best to answer for the foibles of my own movement. I can only ask, what happened to us? How did we get from basic bare bones human equality to this shit show of cunt on cunt cyber violence? Why do all feminists get treated like shit? And, perhaps more important, why do so many feminists treat anyone who disagrees with them like shit? We can't blame it all on men.

In my view, a lot of this trouble seems to go back to Second Wave Feminism. The First Wave of Feminism was as radical as it was diverse. The movement was multiracial, largely middle class, and included everything from conservative pro-life Quakers to free loving individualist anarchists. They all came together against the common foe of patriarchy, supporting equal parenting and property rights and, above all else, suffrage. Most of them were also veteran abolitionists and played major roles in nearly every revolutionary movement of the 19th and early 20th century.

The Second Wave of the 60's and 70's on the other hand was largely the product of upper middle class white intellectuals and their stance largely reflected this status. While First Gens like Lucy Parsons and Susan B. Anthony were intersectional revolutionaries, Second Gen leaders like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem were exclusive counter-revolutionary liberals who chose to gouge holes in the New Left rather than enlightening it through collaboration. Under the tutelage of such gadflies, the pinnacle of feminine excellency became the high-rise status symbol of the bourgeois office job. These capitalist assimilationists believed that they and their new class of enlightened women alone had the divine right to define what constitutes a feminist and femininity itself.

The number one targets of this polluted class of feminist usurpers wasn't men but the women and femmes who refused to fall in line. In their twisted version of the movement the world comprised of three groups; victims, feminists, and predators. If you were a trans person like myself then you were some kind of chauvinistic predator bent on appropriating the very gender you risked getting your ass kicked every day to perform. If you were a sex worker then you were an infantilized victim of rape culture in desperate need of being saved from yourself by some stuck up bitch who never had to work hard a day of their life for true economic independence. If you were a sadomasochist then you were either a rapist or a rapee rather than a sexual maverick testing the boundaries of consensual adult behavior. They had us all figured out. They were just so goddamn smart.

Sex-Positive Feminists and their idiosyncratic progeny in the Third Wave of Feminism that I grew up in fought hard to correct these wrongs. Born out of the basement revolutions of punk rock culture, fist swinging bitches like Kathy Acker, Gayle Rubin, Courtney Love, Camille Paglia, Leslie Feinberg, Wendy McElroy and Lisa Crystal Carver sought to celebrate the true diversity of the feminine experience rather than policing it. Instead of pushing to ban pornography, they made their own. Instead of looking down their tits at those who chose to lead different, less feminist, lives, they reached across aisles to build networks of solidarity on issues as diverse as polygamy, gun rights, and Palestinian self-determination. Trans and non-binary people were embraced as sisters in the struggle. And their was a veritable explosion of tribal diversity as truly empowered women embraced their places as anarchists, witches, doms, libertarians, communists, and satanists, making these movements stronger with their inclusion rather than weakening them with withering one-sided polemics.

We now stand at a cross-roads. The Fourth Wave of Feminism is still in its infancy and struggling to define itself. There are both good signs and bad. On the one hand, the feminist movement is more inclusive than its ever been. Most of the fag-bashers and perv-shamers have either learned the error of their ways or been roundly discredited for the shallow bigots they are. On the other hand, much like the queer movement, their is a powerful push, especially online, to assimilate feminism into the status quo and use the very real problem of institutional sexism to justify its very existence.

The state seems to have come to the conclusion that if they can't keep us down, they'll keep us busy splitting hairs with trolls in the culture wars so we don't have time to recognize the class roots of all forms of oppression, playing one side of poor people off another. The Second Wave Feminists may be an aberration of the cause but they remain a formidable presence that must be addressed. While they have largely traded in their transphobia and slut-shaming, they continue to get their elitism on by belittling softer targets like stay-at-home-moms and hijab clad teenagers. Taking part in any revolutionary movement can be a bit like being a gardener tending to a delicate crop. As a truly radical feminist I have decided that the only way to save this garden is to combat the bourgeois weeds that are strangling my movement. The only bigger threat to feminism than chauvinism is chauvinistic feminism. Let's take back the flowers and rip these un-dearest motherfuckers out by the roots. Women's rights are too vital to be left in the hands of the state.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Pristine by Snail Mail
*  I Blame Myself by Sky Ferreira
*  Asking For It by Hole
*  I Don't Care by Black Flag
*  Dig Me Out by Sleater-Kinney
*  And the Same by Fugazi
*  Rape Me by Nirvana
*  Army of Me by Bjork
*  Suggestion by Fugazi
*  Criminal by Fiona Apple

Dancing On America's Grave

Washington is a fucking zoo. The entire town seems to be teeming with an almost demonic energy that's usually reserved for Third World capitals hours before the fall of some CIA funded cannibal despot. We have had fucked up presidencies before, about 44 of them if memory serves correctly, and the temptation is always rich to proclaim the current bastard the worst, but the Donald is a very special flavor of fucked up and his ADHD appears to be contagious. For the first time in centuries, the crumbling ghettos surrounding the District of Colombia look downright pristine compared to the cracked ivory white domes that have long cast shadows across their project courtyards. If you look real carefully through the purple haze of the Sour Diesel and Sherman Hemsley of Potomac Gardens you can just barely see a teary eyed Mike Pence in a West Wing window, dreaming of some place that's green.

All across the vast expanse of Trump's America this chaos is spreading like lice. Peep through the blinds of any given ranch-style rambler from Pittsburgh to Peoria and you'll witness tableaus straight out of a Flannery O'Connor novel. Grotesque creatures ranting and raving across the dinner table at one another over their supposed loved ones' refusal to despise the right villain in this sick Southern Gothic horror story of a country. Brothers at war with brothers over two sides of  the same foul oligarchy. Republicrats or Dempublicans? Crips or Bloods? Kind of grants the concept of 'White People Problems' a sick new irony. How much for a room at the Gardens again? I desperately need some sleep and even gunshots beat the sound of gnashing teeth and cable news.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his Botox poisoned limousine liberal nemesis, Nancy Pelosi, continue to play one side of the country off the other, shutting down our crooked federal government over some fictional crisis manufactured in the middle of the fucking desert. Prison guards and TSA gropers are expected to sexually violate the public without a paycheck while Trump bets his staffers $6 billion that he can piss over that 12 foot wall.

This madness has also spread across the globe as it has become increasingly apparent that those good old Gestapo days of American primacy are numbered. In no arena is this more apparent than that blood soaked sandbox the limeys declared Syria. On any given day, at any given second, the Administration Who Couldn't Shoot Straight takes as many as 63 separate positions on that awful place. Pull the troops out. Leave the troops in. Protect the Kurds. Fuck the Kurds. Kill Assad. Throw him a surprise party. Arm ISIS. Bomb the shit out of them and then arm them again. Declare them dead as disco. Declare disco alive and well. Then a bomb goes off in Manbij and we start the same hysterical search for answers all over again.

Put some more troops in. Pull some more troops out. Put some more troops in then you shake them all about. Every option appears to be on the table in this satanic hokey-pokey, from Hydrogen bombs to calling in the Babadook. Every option aside from just minding our own goddamn business, that is. Trump may be the first president in history to have generals an oilmen alike quit his team for being both too violent and not violent enough. All the while, the First Orangutan makes a melange of conflicting sweetheart deals with every despot in the desert who agrees to allow their sacred sand to be violated by another gaudy golf course.

Ultimately the final position of this delirious regime-change-regime's kaleidoscope Syria policy has been rendered largely irrelevant by the fact that it has become painfully obvious that they don't have the slightest idea of what the fuck they're doing there anymore. They just keep throwing around bullets and bombs and bails of Benjamin's and pray the bodies stack up in the right direction while Putin dances the Barynya on our shallow grave. As said above, it's very fashionable to blame this smoldering train wreck on Trump and for plenty of solid reasons. He's an arrogant, impetuous, whore who is stone blind to the big picture. But the egg didn't lay the chicken. Donald Trump and his spastic brand of imbecile imperialism are the byproducts of a savage dynasty in decline, the feces created when a doomed superpower devours itself whole. We have never seen a presidency like this before because we have never seen an empire so colossal collapse so completely. Trump is Nero times twenty, stuffing his fat fucking face with Big Macs while the growing flames leap ever closer to our crumbling capital's city limits.

I say all of this without the slightest twinge of dread or even good old fashioned Spenglerian pessimism. Quite the contrary, I join the long fucked people of this world in rejoicing the death of this twisted creature called America. After raping every man, woman, and child he could hold down for the last two-hundred+ years, seeing Uncle Sam on his knees, bleeding in the doggy position, surrounded by dick-swinging Slavic mongrels feels like a site for soar eyes. Even better, it feels like a fantastic opportunity for something truly democratic to take that cunt's place. Even united, BRICS and Eurasia have just enough strength to push Humpty Dumpty off of his border wall but not enough to take his place. In this short window of time between the fall of one empire and the rise of another, anything becomes possible. The whole world becomes a great big blank slate for the stateless dreamers among us to make our philosophies into fantastic realities. Look at what Rojava and Chiapas achieved in the blind spots of western civilization. Now imagine that the whole world over. What color do you wanna paint the White House? What do you want your nationless anthem to sound like? The possibilities are literally endless.

Buck up, dearest motherfuckers. We're living in the ruins of Ozymandias. Here's where we get to make things right. Come and dance with me on America's grave. It'll be little red communes for you and me.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Is There a Ghost by Band of Horses
*  Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones
*  Rise Above by Black Flag
*  Pink Houses by John Mellencamp
*  Waiting Room by Fugazi
*  My Body is Made of Crushed Stars by Mitski
*  Helter Skelter by the Beatles
*  Ahead by Wire
*  Future Me Hates Me by the Beths

Panarchy as Full Spectrum Intersectionality

Solidarity is the guiding principle for any egalitarian philosophy. The basic idea is that all oppressed people face the same enemy and the only way any of us can defeat our collective oppressor  is with the collective force of a diverse people united against it in all its demonic manifestations. Today they call this principle intersectionality. The uncivil union of big government and big business that calls itself the state murders black people, rapes trans folks, objectifies women, dehumanizes workers, and bombs the third world into, well, the third world. Separated we are weak, impoverished, crippled. But united we are dangerous, we are a force to be reckoned with.

In my mind, the natural objective of solidarity and intersectionality should be anarchy in one form or the other and only the concept of panarchy allows for one form or another to be properly explored. In spite of their once lofty ambitions and their recent rise in trendiness, state socialism and communism don't destroy the class system, they just replace it. Ultimately the only difference between a bureaucrat and an oligarch is a title. The Bolshevik interpretation of the Marxist Dictatorship of the Proletariat is just asinine. If creating a state to dismantle the state worked, the Soviet Union would exist as a Kropotkinite workers paradise and Sweden wouldn't be slowly dissolving into neoliberal hell. I'm not unsympathetic to these brave and honorable experiments in collective governance. I still admire the courage of comrades like Fidel Castro and Olaf Palme. But the experiment has failed and it's time to move on. The Sandernistas are living in another century. The state ultimately exists for one purpose and one purpose only and that is to quite simply exist. You can call it capitalism or communism but when you create a state you create a business that relies on wage slavery and all to often war to justify its own solipsistic existence.

The only way to end oppression is to destroy hierarchy in every form, private or public, and the only way to achieve this is through a voluntary society in which consent reigns supreme against all else. True freedom only comes through self determination and this is what too many on the left today fail to grasp. You can't give someone their freedom. It's not a privilege to be asked for politely. It's a right to be fought for ruthlessly. Those who advocate for a state that rewards the downtrodden with the privileges of welfare deny these people of their god given right to true liberation through struggle.

Emancipation didn't free the slaves, it simply moved them from the plantation to the projects to the Prison Industrial Complex. Nat Turner had the right idea but he failed because he did it alone. If their had been a few more John Brown's who realized that their own fate rested in the liberation of all the oppressed through solidarity rather than charity, the statist horror show that was the Civil War may not have been necessary and the slaves may have been able to truly emancipate themselves the way they did in Haiti. Many ex-slaves and even a few white paupers attempted to use the chaos created by the fall of the Antebellum South to do just that, but the state remained. The Confederacy became Jim Crow with the full complicity of the Northern Establishment and by the time Jim Crow was erased, his policies had already been hardwired into the fascist ecosystem of the state. So much blood for nothing.

Black people remain oppressed for the same reason that queer people remain oppressed and women remain oppressed and brown people remain oppressed. We remain oppressed because the state continues to exist. The achievements of the Civil Rights Movement were ultimately superficial because they failed to address the root problem that unites us all. Much like the unsung black rebels of the Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement began revolutionary before it was assimilated into the half-measures of state reform. In fact, the radical left of the Sixties and Seventies may have briefly shown us the best example of truly revolutionary intersectionality in modern American history.

Black Panthers helped organize disgruntled veterans who showed pissed off white draft dodgers how to shoot straight so they could bust Timothy Leary out of prison for the acid freaks who supplied closets full of queer people with the high-powered entheogens that helped them to realize that their bodies didn't represent their Radical Faerie spirits that empowered them to join the riots fought to honor the spirits of slain Black Panthers. Once again, they only failed because they lacked the dedicated opposition to the state that would have made them impervious to the establishments face-saving sweetheart deals vis-a-vis the welfare state. Sadly, some the Twentieth Centuries finest American radicals were ultimately reduced to the status of yuppie Clintonites because with statists of every stripe, the ends always justify the means.

In the Twenty-first Century, anti-statist intersectionality has become more relevant than its ever been. In the growing shadows of the American Century, society is rapidly re-atomizing into its natural tribal state. The awesome power of the internet has left no lost soul without a tribe. Genderfuckers. Transhumanists. Gutter Punks. Adult Babies. Sex Workers. Rivet Heads. Phychonauts. Third Positionists. Primitivists. The Freaks. The Weirdos. The Broken Toys. We're already organized and empowered, now we just need to get radical, together. Posse Comitatus needs to start making undocumented farmers fake I.D.'s so they can move their guns to the Zapatistas in exchange for Psilocybin to sell on the dark web to Chaos Magicians trying to hack the DEA's database so they can tip off MS-13 so they can sell street-sweepers to the militia men at the gun shows cranking out fake I.D.'s.

And that's what the concept of panarchy is really all about, diversity. In spite of all the breathless rants from the supposed social justice warriors of ANTIFA, Panarchism and it's rough-trade gay brother National Anarchism are the only revolutionary currents accessible to anyone who wants to break free from the purgatory of state-sanctioned rebellion and actually fucking do something with our movements aside from selling out. It's full spectrum intersectionality. Either we all get free or we all get fucked. A successful revolutionary society is kind of like the clock on a time bomb. It's a thousand little gears grinding together to make one great big bang. Let's work together, dearest motherfuckers, and make some motherfucking noise.


Peace, Love, & Panarchy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem
* Come Together by the MC5
* Loaded by Primal Scream
* I'm Set Free by the Velvet Underground
* Waterfall by the Stone Roses
* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones
* Karma Police by Radiohead
* Turn! Turn! Turn! by the Byrds
* Sit Down by James

Lessons From Rojava

This holiday season was unusually kind to the anti-imperialists among us or at least it could have been. Trump shocked the world the week before Christmas by actually putting America first for a change and calling for the immediate withdrawal of the some 2000 troops still illegally occupying North Eastern Syria. Regardless of his motives, which I'm sure had very little to do with anything vaguely resembling the Christmas spirit, it's hard to deny that this executive decision would have been a decisive win for peace.

Hard but not impossible. The doves of the progressive left have enthusiastically jumped through their own pinched assholes to stomp on McGovern's grave with talking points straight out of Karl Rove's playbook. Sadly, their onslaught of non-stop pro-war agit-prop, aided and abetted by the double-speak of Mad Man Bolton and the other rabid war junkies of Trump's own administration, may have worked. The perpetually spineless Trump has moved the goal post for the pull-out from 30 days to 90 days to 3 months to 'maybe later, we'll see...'

Regardless, the rift within the Pentagon is likely irreversible and the chaos its caused can only be interpreted as the official failure of America's 6 year imperial project for the region. Being the peace-loving bomb-thrower that I am, the one part of this splendid fiasco that feels truly tragic to me is the increasingly likely implosion of the Rojava Revolution.

 Amid the apocalyptic hellscape of Uncle Sam's latest jihad jamboree, one tiny light burned bright enough to singe the dim. While the rest of Syria collapsed in panic over the crumbling of the Baathist state, the nation's long maligned Kurdish community embraced their new found statelessness with open arms and created a successful anarchist society among the wreckage. Guided by the philosophy of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned Nelson Mandela of the Kurdish independence movement, the people of the Syrian region of Rojava busied themselves establishing a multi-ethnic, non-sectarian, and gender equal confederation of fully autonomous collectives, councils, guilds, and syndicates. All while defending themselves from the genocidal onslaught of the Islamic State.

This display of ferocious courage stoked a fire in the hearts of many disenchanted anarchists across the globe, much the way Catalonia did during the Spanish Civil War. I include myself among these wide-eyed renegade dreamers. During one of the darkest times of my life, the Rojava Revolution inspired me to keep up the good fight. The sad fact that the good name of this revolution became tainted by America's illegal troop presence in Rojava didn't make the YPG's stand any less heroic, though it did cast a black cloud over it for those of us who are familiar with America's long tradition of leaving these impoverished mountain folk holding the bag.

Indeed, Trump's triumphant Christmas peace declaration came just a week after the Donald spoke with Turkey's revanchist sultan, Recep Erdogan, who subsequently announced his intention to invade the region with America's consent. It appears that Trump may have simply been attempting to outsource the war to Turkey who has long seen the entire nation of Syria as lost territory held by Shia savages. With Rojava out of the picture, what would be left to stop these neo-Ottomans from reinvesting in what's left of their former friends in ISIS? Perhaps this is why Assad has readily offered his Kurdish frenemies back-up on the border. If Russia steps in as well while Trump dicks around with a swamp-friendly exit date, this could prevent Erdogan from creating another Yemen-style proxy-genocide in Rojava. But it will also likely still spell out the tragic end for the Kurds dreams of a truly autonomous and stateless society.

So what do we take away from this tragedy so that the brave actions of the fallen YPG not be taken in vain and so that future stateless liberation movements can emulate their triumphs while avoiding the pitfalls that prevented their permanence? I don't pretend to have all the answers but I do see a few clears lessons worth learning in no particular order.


1. Never Trust an Imperialist-  You would think that the Kurds would have learned this one by now, after getting railed by Kissinger in the 70's and HW in the 90's. Some habits die hard, I suppose. As alluring as the uranium tipped largess of the world's only super-power may appear, it always comes at a steep price. America is an empire on the ropes. The last thing they want to do is empower a movement that could render their influence in the region irrelevant. Why do you think we skull fucked Somalia so hard under Clinton? Their booming Khat industry? No, they formed an alternative to the state in the wake of the Cold War that empowered Africa's pre-colonial tribal roots much the way Rojava did and we didn't want it to spread. In the Middle East, where no one has been left unmolested by American weaponry, endorsing the Rojava Revolution was the smartest way to damn it while encouraging Turkey to bring NATO into the clusterfuck. Think about it, America has created a disposable allie too toxic for it's neighbors to touch. Machiavelli would be jealous of such artful treachery. But that's what you get when you fuck around with empires.

2. Keep it in the Neighborhood-  The second worst thing the US could do to the YPG was to turn them into a mercenary army and stretch them razor thin by sending them to fight ISIS in regions with little traditional Kurdish presence. The Kurds were riding high with US air support until they began dipping into the hinterlands. They would have been much better off solidifying their gains then doing the Yankees dirty work in Raqqa. And the Turks would have struggled to get popular support for yet another all out toss-up with the Kurds, something Erdogan originally ran on putting an end to, if the YPG would have stuck to their end of the Euphrates. Revolutionary 101 should be 'let the other motherfucker throw the first punch then kick his fucking ass on the high ground'. In other words, fighting ISIS when they attack Kobani is fine but chasing them into the desert where they came from is just moronic. Initiatory violence is always stupid. Stay on the defense, think Globally and act locally.

3. Socialists and Nationalists Over Globalists and Neoliberals-  Perhaps this is redundant considering lesson 1. but nations with an emphasis on soil and/or anti-colonialism will always make for more reliable allies than massive states with lofty global ambitions. Even bourgeois nationalists like Putin will almost always prize regional stability over all-out conquest. These certainly make for some uncomfortable bedfellows for anarchists, as do Third World socialists like the Syrian Baathists, but at least they have some kind of principles to be bargained with as well as more frugal budgets. When you're talking to Russia and Syria, for better or worse, you're talking to Russia and Syria. When you're talking to the US, the EU, or NATO, you're talking to the banks and, just ask anyone who's ever been foreclosed on, there is no bargaining with the banks. You're better off with the fucking buzzards. I hate the idea of Rojava going back to the Syrian Army and their Russian handlers but at least they'll stop at the border. The US will never stop. They couldn't if they wanted to. They're hooked on capitalism and our only hope may be a Trumpian overdose. Lets just hope Pence forgot the Narcan.

4. Never Underestimate a Peoples Will to be Free-  I spent over six years without leaving my house. The Kurds have spent over six centuries without a homeland. I should have hung myself years ago. The Kurds should have assimilated and melted into the Arab world forever ago. They're still there and the centuries of oppression have only lead them to embrace a liberty that transcends the jerry-rigged borders of Sykes-Picot. As I've said, their fight is part of what inspired me to burn the noose. Justice will find the Kurds and their enemies alike. Erdogan can't kill them all anymore than MBS can kill every Houthi or Nixon could kill every Vietcong. Those who underestimate the will of the oppressed will find themselves decorating the light posts of a future utopia. Rojava had a taste of that dream and that taste will never die on their tongues.


We can all learn from those who dare to die for their dreams, dearest motherfuckers. As long as we keep their spirits alive, those dreams will never die. Power to Rojava! Power to all the people! And death to the imperialist insect that preys upon them. They will never win. They have no soul to keep alive. They will grow to fear us.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Lessons Learned by Matt & Kim
*  Rock and Roll Nigger by Marilyn Manson
*  Oblivion by Grimes
*  Grey Cell Green by Ned's Atomic Dustbin
*  Venice Bitch by Lana Del Rey
*  Dose Your Dreams by Fucked Up
*  Drowners by Suede
* Two Slow Dancers by Mitski
*  Hyperballad by Bjork
*  Peacocks by the Mountain Goats