By Ajax the Great (Pete Jackson)
(Originally posted on the Vive La Difference! blog)
PART ONE
(Original version of Part One from 2020 can be found here)
Author Yuri Zavorotny wrote a great article four years ago for Medium, in which he articulates something that we all intuitively know (but often don't want to say out loud) about the patriarchy and how to end it. After first establishing that patriarchy is inherently evil (and thus cannot be redeemed), he then goes on about what holds it all together. This thing that holds the entire construct all together is its sine qua non and thus is it's own Achilles' heel, and that thing is control of female sexuality, and the primary tool used to control that is slut-shaming. That is, the shaming of Women for expressing their sexuality in the way they choose. And thus the "kill switch" is to put an end to this utterly toxic and outmoded practice of slut-shaming.
Wait, what? There is still slut-shaming in 2024? Absolutely. It has diminished somewhat since the (largely male-defined) "sexual revolution" half a century ago, to be sure, but it is still there. The double standard still exists, and it has in fact become more of a double bind in which Women are expected to be "sexy" (as defined by males) but not sexual by their own definition. And ending it is thus the unfinished business of both feminism and the real sexual revolution for Women.
That's not the only double bind here, there is also the historical one in which Women are expected to both obey men as well as be the "gatekeepers" of sex, with no way to opt out of either contradictory requirement.
As Yuri Zavorotny himself says:
So here is our kill switch: we stop telling women when, where and with whom she is allowed to get involved romantically. Her body, her choice. And she is perfectly capable of making it a responsible choice, thank you very much.And lest anyone misunderstand his words, read too much into it, or try to put words in his mouth:
NOTE: This is not to suggest that anyone should change their own behavior. We do whatever we are comfortable with. That, of course, includes staying monogamous, still a perfectly valid choice. But it can not be justified as a moral choice anymore -- rather, it is a personal preference.Female sexuality (or more accurately, female-defined sexuality) is an extremely powerful force to be reckoned with, which is why the patriarchy has gone out of its way to suppress it (and/or supplant it with male-defined sexuality). As I have repeatedly noted before, the suppression of Women's sexuality was not entirely about maintaining control over the male bloodline (though that was originally a major part of it), but more generally about power and control over Women directly, as well as over other men indirectly via artificial scarcity. Ditto for patriarchy's equally peculiar prohibitions against self-pleasuring and homosexuality as well. Let that sink in for a moment.
In a similar vein, patriarchy's favorite brainchild, capitalism, needs scarcity (whether real or artificial) to function. That is how the oligarchs control the serfs. And the kill switch of capitalism is thus to give it the one thing it cannot surivive--abundance. The analogy should be apparent now.
Ending slut-shaming will not end patriarchy overnight, of course, but is nonetheless necessary for it to end sooner rather than later. And if we wait until we return to full-blown Matriarchy before liberating Women's sexuality, we will never be ready, as Women's sexual liberation is a key step on the path to Matriarchy. That is, if we make the perfect the enemy of the good, we ultimately end up with neither.
One thing needs to be crystal clear. As hard as we fight for the right to say "yes" to sex, we must also fight at least twice as hard for the right to say "NO" as well. The LAST thing we want is for sex of any kind to be perceived as mandatory in any way, so enthusiastic and mutual consent must be a precondition for all sexual acts, period. And that is true for both Women and men, by the way. Also, we must be careful not to fall in the trap of the "reverse double standard" that has become in vogue in some circles these days (Oprah and Dr. Phil, I'm looking at YOU!), in which men are the ones vilified for their sexuality while Women are ignored (if not celebrated) for doing the same exact things. Doing so is a sure path to a sort of "reverse patriarchy", not the Matriarchy proper that we should be aiming for. The same goes for a "reverse double bind" as well, which is also infantilizing to Women.
Put simply: Women should have the absolute right to be as sexual--or not--as they themselves want to be, without the need for justification or apology to anyone, period. To quote the legendary Guru Rasa Von Werder:
My associate Ajax the Great & I agree, sexual freedom is the KILL SWITCH FOR PATRIARCHY. When Women do whatever they want sexually, & no longer fear men, men will have nothing to fight for. Consider a ram with his harem. The harem runs off & mates with the other guys in the woods. No more head banging, lol. We will end war by being sexually free."
Liberty (sexual or otherwise) is NOT a zero-sum game. In fact, liberty is like love: the more you give, the more you get.
So what are we waiting for? Kill Switch Engage! Let the planetary healing begin!PART TWO
In Part One above originally from while ago, I had discussed how Women's sexual freedom would be the ultimate kill switch to end patriarchy. But one aspect of this topic had been a bit neglected in that article, unfortunately.
Basically, I have gotten into some online debates from time to time about the "incel" (involuntary celibacy) problem. Many self-identified incels are of course misogynistic trolls with an entitlement complex, but not all of them are. And even some genuine ones seem to think that the "permissiveness" resulting from the sexual revolution has made their situation worse, and give various "evolutionary psychology" arguments. So here is my response to all of that:
First and foremost, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are mutually exclusive, and trying to force equal outcomes on everyone by fiat has a way of backfiring hard, as many have learned the hard way throughout history. That is true for economics as well as for sex and relationships. So aim for equal opportunity as your North Star instead.
And in any case, since there are really only two ways to attempt to force equal outcomes on everyone in terms of sex and relationships, either 1) treat all Women as "private property" of individual men, or 2) treat all Women as "public property" of all men collectively, that means that there is absolutely NO ethical way to do so whatsoever. (The late Andrea Dworkin would have a field day with that!) That is because Women are, you know, full human beings, NOT "property" in any sense of the word, period. Capisce?
Any ethical solution must, at the very minimum, fight twice as hard for the right to say "no" as for the right to say "yes". After all, rape culture with a smiley face is still rape culture.
Furthermore, most "evolutionary psychology" is, in a word, BS. With NO apologies to Jordan Peterson at all.
"Hypergamy" (dating or marrying "up") by Women is really NOT natural, but is rather a socially constructed effect of capitalism and a hangover of patriarchy, for obvious reasons. Ditto for the bandied-about "80/20" rule, which itself is grossly exaggerated. But to the extent that the sexual revolution has anything at all to do with it, it is basically the opposite of what the manosphere claims. If anything, slut-shaming only makes Women that much MORE picky and/or superficial in regards to men than they would otherwise be, and thus MORE likely to prefer high-status men over low-status men, because if they are going to take such a risk, they might as well make it as "worth their while" as possible. (After all, despite their actually higher sex drive overall, Women's demand for sex is far more "elastic" than men's is: for Women, no sex is typically better than bad sex, for obvious reasons, whereas for men, it's typically the reverse.)
And since the sexual revolution in the Anglosphere, especially the USA, was half-assed and did NOT go to completion, thanks to the "culture wars", what has resulted is that our society is now JUST barely permissive enough for Women to go all-in with high-status men, but still NOT quite permissive enough yet for them to do the same with lower-status men, lest they get shamed for it. And in parallel with that, when high-status or elite Women hook up with many male partners it is considered "classy", provided those men are also high-status, while many of those same Women hypocritically consider it "trashy" when lower-status Women follow in their footsteps, because reasons. (News flash: that is NOT what a sisterhood looks like, that is a CARTEL.) Thus, the real solution is NOT to roll back the sexual revolution, as that would only further deepen this quagmire, but rather to let it finally go to completion like it largely has in the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, and also Brazil to some extent.
(Now, the Nordic countries are NOT perfect by a long shot, of course. Three out of the five Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, and Iceland) currently practice some flavor of the Entrapment Model for sex work, and one of those three (Iceland) even bans strip clubs. And like all societies, they all have their own set of problems too. But otherwise they seem to be the healthiest in terms of sexuality as well as economics, especially Denmark, the land that the temperance movement, and their ideological descendants, forgot.)
There are indeed lots and lots of otherwise very prosocial and community-minded Women out there who are unfortunately deterred from doing what they really want to do sexually, and would otherwise do largely for mutual pleasure in a sexually free society, due to all of the slut-shaming that still exists even in 2024, especially when also combined with the relative lack of a Nordic style social safety net in the USA as well. This is yet another way that the patriarchy has a nasty habit of backfiring on men, and especially when it is combined with the brutal logic of capitalism and neoliberalism.
(That's simply "erotic plasticity" put another way, with no apologies to Roy Baumeister.)
As for the thinly-veiled misogynistic manosphere canard that when Women (but not men, because reasons) have many sex partners, they supposedly "lose their ability to pair-bond", kinda like how adhesive tape becomes progressively less sticky the more times it is re-used, well, that utterly specious claim of a causal link has never actually been proven. The supposed observational evidence they cite can be very easily explained away by reverse causation, namely, those of either gender with a low capacity (or paradoxically, a very high capacity) to pair-bond to begin with are more likely to have many partners, NOT the other way around. And sometimes, you may simply need to "kiss a lot of frogs" to find the prince, as the saying goes. Either way, we all need to stop slut-shaming, yesterday. It serves NO valid purpose whatsoever.
And we certainly do NOT need a "price floor" for sex. Rather, what we need is a DIGNITY floor, where both genders treat each other as ends in themselves, not solely as means to an end, per Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative in general. (Too bad he was so antisexual himself, otherwise he would have had a great model of sexual ethics too.)
There are also ecological benefits to sexual freedom as well. Once the sexual revolution is fully complete, hypergamy has withered on the vine, and the "cost" of sex has thus been rightsized, maybe then the men of the sci-tech persuasion wouldn't feel the need (as much, at least) to keep raping the Earth to build more ever-larger phallus-extending "Towers of Babel" (i.e. frivolous, destructive, and/or inappropriate technologies) of mindless aggrandizement to impress Women just so they can get laid. (Even nerdy men tend to have one-track minds, lol.) Maybe men of the warrior persuasion would be less likely to want to start wars or go to war, for the same reason. And, God willing, maybe men in general in the rich countries would be far more willing to reduce their outsized "standard of living" (in terms of material and resource consumption) to one that the Earth can actually afford in the long run, and not one that requires multiple Earths worth of resources, for the same reason. Conspicuous consumption as a thinly-veiled, plausibly-deniable mating ritual would thus be far more likely to desist.
And thus this whole silly game of "king of the hill" writ large will finally end, God willing.
Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents thesis has really long since jumped the shark! It's not the 19th century anymore.
(And to any angry incels reading this: seriously, lose the entitlement attitude, yesterday. It is really quite unbecoming. Or to put in your very own lingo: stop simping for Stacy, and give Becky a chance. Let Stacy and Chad have each other. And take a long, hard look in the mirror as well. Think "internal locus of control, NOT external". Oh, and bonus points if you are fortunate enough to find an older Woman as a "mentor with benefits" willing to "show you the ropes".)
To reiterate from my previous article:
As Yuri Zavorotny himself says:
So here is our kill switch: we stop telling women when, where and with whom she is allowed to get involved romantically. Her body, her choice. And she is perfectly capable of making it a responsible choice, thank you very much.
And lest anyone misunderstand his words, read too much into it, or try to put words in his mouth:
NOTE: This is not to suggest that anyone should change their own behavior. We do whatever we are comfortable with. That, of course, includes staying monogamous, still a perfectly valid choice. But it can not be justified as a moral choice anymore -- rather, it is a personal preference.
Female sexuality (or more accurately, female-defined sexuality) is an extremely powerful force to be reckoned with, which is why the patriarchy has gone out of its way to suppress it (and/or supplant it with male-defined sexuality). All the more reason to unleash it in like fashion, and put an end to the toxic "commodity model" of sexuality.
Until then, we will have 1) too many men chasing too few Women overall, AND simultaneously 2) too many Women chasing too few high-status men, with the latter having plenty of options and taking full advantage of such bargaining power. And both low to average-status men, as well as Women in general, get screwed (and not in a good way!) in this stagflationary quagmire. It's "musical chairs" both ways. The song "Land of Confusion" by Genesis comes to mind.
So what are we waiting for? Kill Switch Engage! Let the planetary healing begin!
P.S. If anyone still thinks that Jordan Peterson's idea of "enforced monogamy" is a real solution to the incel problem, well, I've got a nice bridge I'd like to sell you. As for the jealousy problem, the best his "solution" can do is to "flatten the curve" of jealousy in the short run, while in the long run, that green-eyed monster will unfortunately still be there waiting to pop up and strike at any moment, and thus the area under the curve will be the same or even greater. Better to deal with it head-on instead, and try one's best to sublimate it as much as possible into its antithesis, known as "compersion", or "frubbly" in the vernacular. In other words, think "abundance mindset", not "scarcity mindset". Liberty is like love: the more you give, the more you get. It's not pie.
And speaking of jealousy, for those Women who are worried about men choosing AI girlfriends and robots over them, worry not. Remember, "it is the SPIRIT the quickens" (i.e. gives life), NOT the flesh. And AI has neither. Thus, any man who is even remotely worth your time and energy will not choose AI over you (unless you literally bring nothing at all to the table, but even then, they would choose another real-life Woman instead, not AI). If anything, AI and robots would be good for keeping the misogynistic miscreant trolls happily occupied so they (hopefully) stay far away from real-life Women, and since they would be less likely to procreate, that problem is thus largely self-correcting in the long run.
(Mic drop)
