ERIS ISSUES 1: Disaster Patriarchy, Rape Culture & the Evil of Banality

 Possible Meanings of the Eris Archetype:

• Pairs of opposites that underlie all change in the world.

• Compensatory responses; the reaction of the unconscious; reactions arising from polarity; the regulatory, counterbalancing forces of nature.

• Strife and discord relating to the principle of deeply-rooted evolutionary change that underlies the separation between civilization and nature, between ego-consciousness and its instinctual foundations.

• The experience of resentment arising as a response to the discord wrought by evolutionary change.

• The expression of indiscriminate rage and violent lashing‑out fuelled by the resentment of groups that feel violated or excluded.

• Evolutionary turning points and great reversals. 

• The experience of violation and perceived injustice as a result of evolutionary change. 

• The ‘dark spirit’ in matter and nature, often conceived in myth as a ‘feminine’ spiritual principle, as a compensatory force to the transcendent divine; the polarity between these expressions of the divine. 

• The need for a differentiation of the emotional sphere to come to terms with the deep-rooted discord.

• The experience of an irreconcilable tension of opposites during individuation that stimulates psychological transformation; the juxtaposition or coming together of conflicting opposites; passing through the opposites. 

• Discord and disputes requiring evolutionary advances, greater global unity, or psycho-spiritual growth to resolve; ‘conflicts of duties’ that force a regression of libido in the psyche – that is, irreconcilable conflicts between forces of equal power in the psyche that demand the shift to a higher level of consciousness to resolve such that the problem is transferred to a higher level. 

• Competition as a spur to excellence and wholeness. 

• The movement through strife and discord towards harmony, through bringing individual human lives into alignment with the will of the One – the cosmic or divine will. 

~ Keiron Le Grice, Discovering Eris (2012)

Nothing and no one is improved by a global pandemic. Oppression and violation of women is worse than it has been for decades (and like things weren’t exactly “going well” in 2018). In an article written in June of last year by V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), called Disaster patriarchy: how the pandemic has unleashed a war on women, V states that: “Covid has unleashed the most severe setback to women’s liberation in my lifetime.” V defines Disaster Patriarchy as a process “where men exploit a crisis to reassert control and dominance, and rapidly erase hard-earned women’s rights. (The term “racialized disaster patriarchy” was used by Rachel E Luft in writing about an intersectional model for understanding disaster 10 years after Hurricane Katrina.)”

Across the world women and girls have had what rights, autonomy, education, employment and finances they had stolen from them. The first wave of viral violation came with the rattling keys of lockdown. With whole countries confined indoors, alcohol consumption (in the West at least) sky-rocketed and, like a pandemic, alcohol improves nothing and no one. Any women with abusive partners now had absolutely no form of respite or escape. V goes on to say that “we have seen an explosion of violence towards women, whether they are cisgender or gender-diverse. Intimate terrorism in lockdown has turned the home into a kind of torture chamber for millions of women. We have seen the spread of revenge porn as lockdown has pushed the world online; such digital sexual abuse is now central to domestic violence as intimate partners threaten to share sexually explicit images without victims’ consent.” Simultaneously, the doors to women’s refuge centres, safe houses, and any other possible form of escape route or safe haven were closed. In the uk there were online campaigns for women who were being abused by their partners to reach out, using specific code words, through facebook, twitter etc. Millions of girls (and boys, but more girls) have not returned to school. Millions more women are still living with the physical and emotional scars of the abuse they suffered during (and after) the lockdowns. Simultaneously, millions of women (and men, but more women) either lost their jobs, or lost their lives through trying to keep their job. In the UK 89% of nurses are female. Back in the halcyon days of 2018 there was a meeting of RCN Congress, to ask Councils to develop and promote a strategy to recruit more men into the nursing profession. The resolution was not passed.

The inhumane treatment of nurses (and all NHS staff) during the pandemic was repugnant. The frantic rise of online conspiracy theories (another theme inherent in the discordian elements of the Eris archetype) over the last few years fuelled conspiracy theory-based disinformation (qanon hit the uk too), and provoked thousands into protesting against the very people who were helping heal the sick and dying. Whoever spat in the faces of nurses or doctors during those protests, I hope Eris spat back. With so many women losing their jobs, and subsequently their autonomy, there has been a surge in the phenomenon of ‘sex for rent’. Thousands of ‘sex for rent’ advertisements have flooded social media. So much so that a couple of weeks ago the UK government said it will “bring in new laws to curb "sex for rent" ads as part of its Online Safety Bill”. So far, one person has been prosecuted. Speaking of the myth of “online safety”... Over recent years the rise of ‘deepfake’ videos (and the ease of making them) has risen exponentially. In an article published last year, called The Double Exploitation of Deepfake Porn, academic Maggie MacDonald explores the way in which deepfake porn videos oppress and violate women in a two-pronged attack: the unimaginable feelings of public shame and humiliation suffered by victims of revenge porn (deepfake or otherwise), and the oppression and lack of payment/rights for the sex workers who made the original videos in the first place. MacDonald says that: “Like other forms of revenge porn, ethical issues of consent and objectification make it clear that the footage need not be real to inflict real harm.” MacDonald summarises the root cause of her concern at the end of her piece: “Deepfakes are a new and powerful genre of digital media…as long as piracy runs rampant in the industry and sharing nonconsensual images is normalized outside of it, responsible alternatives to deepfakes are unlikely to thrive.” The effects of our hypersexualised culture already manifest in myriad ways, none of them healthy. The insidious universalised implication of a link between violence, humiliation and female sexual pleasure is now implanted deep within the psyche of any 8 year-old with a phone. MacDonald quotes a 2019 study which found that 96% of deeepfake videos “involve sexually explicit scenes”. 35% of all internet downloads are porn. In a BBC documentary about Rape Culture, the presenter Zara McDermott bravely talks about her own experience of being sexually assaulted by a teenage boy, and interviews young females across the UK about their own, regular experiences of sexual violence. The majority of the young males who were asked for their thoughts declined to show up for interview; although there are a few that do later on in the documentary. Their “in front of the camera” silence and paltry platitudes about "respect" speak volumes. I'm not saying that "all boys are rapists and all girls are victims"; I'm saying that our society propagates and tacitly legitimises this ideology. An article written by Claudia Civinini and Catherine Lough and published in the TES quotes a survey which found tha: “One in three primary school staff has come across at least one instance of sexual harassment or misconduct involving pupils at their school in the past year… A third (33 per cent) of the 547 primary school employees - largely teachers - polled by Tes were aware of incidents such as verbal sexual harassment and the sharing of pornography.” And, that’s the shit that the (overworked, underpaid) teachers actually caught happening, and then the small percentage of them that were then moved to complete the survey. My own experience working with 16 - 19 year olds over the last 6 years brought me face to face wih the visceral, deeply disturbing reality of normalised sexual harassment of young women. It still largely goes unreported within the educational establishments themselves; either because staff don’t know how to go about reporting things like misogynistic language (you would need to report at least half of male students if you did), because there's absolutely no recourse (names on the register = £), let alone what you should do in the event that you actually witness any scant (usually video) “evidence” of sexual assault you might actually witness. Even if you do report it, your bosses don’t want to know, their bosses don’t want to know, the apathy atrophies, and the cycle continues. The TES article quotes a Primary School teacher as saying “We have had children threatening to 'rape' peers because 'it will make me horny' and holding girls up against the fence whilst saying this. The child was able to clearly articulate what rape and horny meant, and showed little to no remorse." Classroom-based gender inequality is nothing new. Neither is rape. However, Primary School children threatening (and acting out) rape is. I wish I had some pithy, intelligent “answers” to all this atrocity. Jessa Crispin and Breanne Fahs discuss a femenist response to the pandemic far more eloquently and intelligently than I'll ever be able to, in an episode of Crispin’s podcast Public Intellectual.

And, V offers some possible solutions towards the end of the article:

“The truth is that unless the culture changes, unless patriarchy is dismantled, we will forever be spinning our wheels. Coming out of Covid, we need to be bold, daring, outrageous and to imagine a more radical way of existing on the Earth. We need to continue to build and spread activist movements. We need progressive grassroots women and women of colour in positions of power. We need a global initiative on the scale of a Marshall Plan or larger, to deconstruct and exorcise patriarchy – which is the root of so many other forms of oppression, from imperialism to racism, from transphobia to the denigration of the Earth.” In this spirit of radical deconstruction and exorcism of patriarchy, let's talk about Gwyneth Paltrow. 

I’m not saying Gwyneth Paltrow is “evil”. I’ve never met her. The only thing she’s ever done to upset me personally was choosing to play Sylvia Plath in the monstrous piece of shit film Sylvia (2003). Paltrow played a better Plath (or, at least, a better Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Plath’s novel The Bell Jar) as Margot Tenenbaum than she did playing Sylvia Plath. 

Paltrow is one of those celebrities lots of people love to loathe and, tbqh she doesn't really help herself. In a 2017 article called ‘The Unbearable Wrongness of Gwyneth Paltrow’, academic scientist and writer Yvette d’Entremont calls attention to the possible health dangers of G.P.'s “advice on how to diagnose a parasite you probably have (and that is destroying you), how to best shove a fancy rock into your vagina — sorry, your yoni — to improve your sex life and, as always, how to detox.” through her website, Goop. 

D’Entremont goes on to say that the advice (and products sold) by Paltrow are “pure, unadulterated, blood-diamond free, organic-certified, biodynamic, moon-dusted bullshit.” She quotes examples such as Paltrow's advice on throwing away any lingerie you wore with previous lovers, because the offending articles “can carry the toxic residue of those relationships, along with painful memories… While we might not think to trash lingerie that once made us feel so good — or that we spent a lot of money on — it’s a powerful, healing gesture to make.”

It’s this element of Palrow’s narcissistic white privilege which seethes with Erisian energy. Quite apart from the luxury of having the money to waste discarding expensive items of clothing, it’s the propagation of the idea that throwing away one’s underwear (and/or burning a candle that smells like Gwyneth's vagina) is somehow “powerful” and “healing”; that it is in some way a feminist statement. The banality of universalised feminism, the efforts made to dumb it down into something less threatening and more palatable, so it can be appropriated by (patriarchal) capitalism in order to fuel profit margins, is the rotten core of the Erisian discord here. Jessa Crispin explores this phenomenon and its inherent dangers in her paradigm-shifting 2017 book “Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto”. 

One of the most important books of the 21st Century, my own copy of “Why I Am Not a Feminist…” (pictured) is stained with blood, from when I leant it to a friend whose (male) cat scratched her while she was reading it.

The book's opening chapter is so powerfully incantatory I know it by heart, and I implore all human beings of every gender to read, absorb and live out its message:

“Radical change is scary. It’s terrifying, actually. And the feminism I support is a full-on revolution. Where women are not simply allowed to participate in the world as it already exists—an inherently corrupt world, designed by a patriarchy to subjugate and control and destroy all challengers—but are actively able to re-shape it… My feminism is not one of incremental change, revealed in the end to be The Same As Ever, But More So. It is a cleansing fire. Asking for a system that was built for the express purpose of oppression to, “um, please stop oppressing me?” is nonsense work. The only task worth doing is fully dismantling and replacing that system. 

If feminism is universal, if it is something that all women and men can “get on board” with, then it is not for me. 

If feminism is nothing more than personal gain disguised as political progress, then it is not for me. 

If by declaring myself a feminist I must reassure you that I am not angry, that I pose no threat, then feminism is definitely not for me. 

I am angry. And I do pose a threat.” 

Today is my niece’s 9th birthday. She is fucking awesome. She is a living, breathing example of everything that is healthy and vital about Aries energy (“the primordial urge to survive; to be the hunter, not the prey”). She gives zero fucks what anyone thinks of her, and decided to spend the entirety of lockdown dressing and acting as a cat (the most healthy  response to the events of the last few years that I have witnessed, in anyone).

For the last few months I’ve been giving her guitar lessons, trying to teach her how and what she wants to learn. She didn’t care for chords, so I used open tunings and have been teaching her how to play slide. And, she can really jam! There’s a rare point sometimes, when you're teaching an instrument, where the music being made crosses over from a “lesson” and magically turns into a “jam”; where I’m no longer a "teacher", I’m just a human being enjoying making music with another human being. Our lessons are becoming more and more like this. So much so that last week I recorded her, and I'm going to spend tonight converting the recordings so she can listen to them and send them to her mates. She won’t give a shit; the moment is gone and she’ll be interested in whatever she’s doing in this moment (she is one of my greatest spiritual teachers), but it will make my sister happy at least. No one knows what the future holds, but I do know that my niece is going to be a far more formidable force in its creation than I am, and that she most definitely poses a threat. 

#focl #fnord