Men [Must Not] Rule. How Can We Support Women Taking Leadership to Stop Men From Continuing to Destroy Women and the World?

image of book cover is from here

"Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more--also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth." -- Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, page 63

For a demographic that repeatedly claims to possess intelligence, white men really don't get a whole lot about what's going on, except to make sure it continues unabated. When you are practiced in the autocratic art of not being accountable you stop needing to know why you are what you are. You just need to keep that same old train rolling along its tracks. Steven Goldberg is not smart. He's not intelligent. He gets published because he's got connections and privilege. Not because he knows what he's talking about.

The train keeps rolling.

How to derails the train and crack the code of domineering men's desire-in-action to own things that aren't his, and to profit and gain pleasure off the backs of women, and girls? The code has been well-analysed and continues to be. Women know so much more about men than men know about themselves. And one way to know is to witness men making decisions to be callous and cruel rather than to care and feel compassion for those who are not "him". When you watch men do this enough times it is quite striking how much men seem to want to behave this way. Willfully. With "agency" and power. Not because women in short skirts make them behave this way, either.

But there are male-controlled forces, industries, and perspectives beyond individual acts that keep things headed in a deathly direction. These have been identified too. Women the world over have described how the struggles to end slavery and trafficking are fused to the struggles to stop men's militarism and warfare. And yet the U.S. government maintains militarism and pimping as a priority-use of middle and working-class tax dollars, letting the richest U.S. Americans keep their tax money to spend on more militarism, pimping, and procuring. Surely the man who can spend 20,000 U.S. dollars for a day with a prostitute can afford to pay more in taxes, no? Or is this the support of business that the rich speak of when they claim they desperately need those tax dollars to re-invest in the economy?

Women have noted, in some detail, how those human rights struggles are fused to Indigenous and Women's Liberation struggles globally, for clean water, for nutritious, locally-grown food, for safety, and for sovereignty. Men might see something called "wisdom" in the eyes of these women leaders if they cared enough to look deeply into them, or just listen and learn.

Arrogance and authoritarianism are two of Man's ugliest chosen traits. Their grossly selfish self-interest; their fear of speaking out against white, corporate, and patriarchal power; their refusal to listen, to learn, and to place the observations of wise women above their own corrupt conclusions about themselves and the ways of the world still rule. When will these men let women govern, rule, and remedy the nightmare of men's imaginations continually manufactured into a relentlessly rapist reality? How can women, en masse, stop waiting for men to let them take charge? In what ways can women who "get it" be supported to take charge?