At some point our human expression somehow leaned into an atrophied gender asymmetry where the outer, unguided masculine began to make all the rules, and have now, for thousands of years, subjugated and dehumanized other groups thereof, only to harden their own hegemony.
Today we’ve inherited such white male dominance, a hallmark signature of global market capitalism, too, penetrating penises of fossil extraction, gun shafts erect, fleshy fingers pointing, shouting and shooting and shooing and spouting over the calm, over the collected, verbal and sexual and ecological assaults at every corner firing shots across the world without consent, barreling through town to clench what’s left of our psycho-adolescent control of the sandbox while previously unsung voices continue to shine through with ever-more truth, ever-more vitality, ever-more authenticity, and, therefore, ever-more authority.
It’s all a threat to the Secret, the lie we’re told as young boys, of hyper-masculine dominance, of power acquired through the Take: steal the football, steal the base, capture the flag, go for the jugular, go for the gold, that never-take-no-for-an-answer approach to making deals, making friends, getting paid and getting laid.
This calculus of oppression—colonial, racial, sexual, environmental—are all to be glazed over, set firm to law and textbook, truth eclipsed by a machismo perpetuated through failed generations of broken men just following protocol: to be a man, to nut up, that, to be a feminist is to somehow threaten one’s manhood, to get down and give me twenty, to some militant allegiance to secrecy all the way down to its hollow core, a core stewing in lies, lies that keep us on top, so to speak.
No more. I am a man. I am also a feminist. And I believe her. All the hers.