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24th February 2025:

Dear Julia

 

So I want to talk a little bit about feminism.  

 

There has been this switch, a subtle but crafty switch, over the last 50 years, as the women’s movement went from an identification with ‘women’s liberation’ to re-branding itself as ‘feminism’.  I call it subtle but crafty because it strikes me as firstly something that not many people have noticed, and secondly because it seems to me to be a tactical shift rooted in the patriarchy and aimed at maintaining a wall of oppression on women and preventing their liberation, and you are a case in point.  I mean, you are oppressed, your womanhood is oppressed, your indigenous femininity is oppressed, by feminists like Marie, yet somehow you think these kind of people are your ‘sisters’ in a shared struggle, and you regard someone like me, a male, as your ‘enemy’, when the fact is it is not I that is oppressing you.  I am at pains to point out the fact that you are held in a state of quite severe oppression by the authoritarian matriarchs in your milieu, of which Marie is without doubt the nastiest and most savage, yet this does not raise even an eyebrow.

 

I wonder who is the actual feminist here?  I have often thought that you and your milieu were, but that has totally changed over the years, as I regard myself as part of the genuine women’s movement for liberation, and you and those in your milieu as feminists conditioned by the patriarchy and existing in an oppressed state, and in no way shape or form acting to help each other achieve liberation, but mostly banding together to express a shared disdain and malice towards males, a malice that is toxic to society and to the cause of women’s liberation (I will elaborate on this latter point in a future letter).  Whereas I am acting every single day to help women achieve liberation from oppressive people, including writing to you once a week.  

 

I think this is another little shift that you need to direct your attention to, the fact that I am the real feminist, in the traditional sense of ‘women’s lib’, and not Marie or those like her, and that in fact, your liberation depends almost exclusively on me, a male, and that means that it is I who is your ‘sister’ in a shared struggle, whereas the likes of Marie are the patriarchs who seek to keep you oppressed and to prevent your womanhood from maturing.  

 

I have little respect for most women who self-identify as feminists as they tend to be pretty nasty women who have grudges against men and who act out a type of feminism that is largely patriarchal, in that it is a femininity conditioned by the patriarchy, such as the classic ‘mini skirt and tights’ femininity that I have pointed out to you on several occasions in my letters, or the type of femininity that Marie espouses which is really a teenage ‘ressentiment’ style reaction to the patriarchy, and hence still conditioned by it, rather than authentic and natural expressions of womanhood.  Women who regard themselves as feminists also tend in my view to be power hungry, conditioned as they are by patriarchy, and as a result they also tend to be very savage and cold women from the emotional perspective, yet somehow they consider this femininity to be liberated.  

 

So I don’t really identify with feminism or feminists at all, but I do strongly identify with women’s liberation.  Funny, isn’t it, how few feminists ever use this term?  None at all in fact.  You can peruse the feminist literature for hours in the library or at anarchist bookfairs or bookshops as I do and never come across the term at all.  The very notion of liberating women seems to have been completely and utterly buried and forgotten about, and instead what you have is an imposter that calls itself feminism and that masquerades around pretending to be the real thing, when it is nothing of the kind at all, and merely serves to present to women a version of womanhood that is acceptable to the patriarchy – such as wearing a mini skirt and tights, or having a career, or getting equal pay, or striving to reach ‘the top’ – but not a version of womanhood that presents a threat to said patriarchy.  Not even to the sex industry, as feminism and feminists today often embrace the sex industry and view it as ‘liberatory’, just as the mini-skirt was viewed as ‘liberatory’ in the 60s.  I listened to a podcast by Resist & Renew a couple of years ago that interviewed a sex workers collective (SWARM), and they were basically legitimising prostitution and making out that this is a legitimate industry (see Legitimising the Sex Industry if you want a more in depth look).  No recognition of why women become prostitutes, of the damage this does to the women or the social fabric, of the fact that this represents severely degraded relations between the sexes, and so on.   It was really poor, and I found myself pretty angry, hence the reason I wrote the above blog, though I did not send it to Resist & Renew as I have had enough with the activist scene – it’s infantile and people in it are not genuine, and this podcast was a really good example.

 

I think the real betrayal of feminism to the cause of women’s liberation however is the de-legitimisation of the notion of womanhood itself, and the validation of patriarchal values and attitudes to the detriment of traditional feminine values and attitudes.  This is the real crux of the betrayal, and the real reason why feminism is profoundly anti-liberatory and actually serves to keep women imprisoned and society patriarchal.  Okay, so many women would say they feel liberated by feminism, but it is a liberation that occurs within the context of patriarchal values and attitudes, and while I accept that many women consider that is worth fighting for, it does not amount to women’s liberation, but rather the conditioning of womanhood down a patriarchal pathway, which in my view represents an implicit acknowledgement that women are not able to overcome patriarchy and so instead opt for a fake version of women’s liberation that they call feminism and that at least presents to them the illusion that they are overcoming their oppressors.  In my view however, this is just classic ‘bargaining with patriarchy’, rather than the expression of a genuine liberatory impulse.

 

This anti-life system we are caught up in, it seems to me, often, in fact, always presents to us versions of revolutionary activities that have been subverted and made to look like the real thing, but which are in fact not the real thing and are not only ineffective at achieving the required goal, but have the opposite effect, and tend to reinforce the existing status quo.  I mean, how is a mini-skirt, something that is awkward to wear and objectifies the woman wearing it, liberatory?  It is only liberatory if you are a woman and you want to objectify yourself, if you are a woman and you want to pander to the patriarchal sexuality, but that is not real liberation, it is simply the patriarchy unleashed and given a new lease of life, re-branding itself as ‘feminist’.  It is packaged up as such, but in fact it actually endorses patriarchy and patriarchal values and prevents real female sexuality from expressing itself.

 

Revolutionary anarchy is similar: it is billed as liberatory when in fact it is a strategy developed by authoritarians hungry to grab power for themselves, and not a program for genuine mass emancipation.  You don’t emancipate anyone by grabbing the reins of power – who gets emancipated?  All you achieve is a switch from one regime to the next, and the likely chance, because of the unstable nature of power vacuums, that the new regime will be way worse than the previous.  

 

Women’s lib on the other hand was a real emancipatory struggle, espoused today as ‘second wave feminism’, but in reality not a second wave at all, but rather something unique that had never happened before and has not happened since.  It is something I always longed to be part of, and I often viewed feminists like yourself as part of that struggle, and was always keen to embrace it too, but over the years I have realised that in fact said feminists betray the cause of women’s liberation, and are not interested in women’s liberation, or in anyone’s liberation, they are just in it for themselves, as an identity, as an in-group, and to express shared hostility towards other sections of society, especially men.  So I no longer feel that draw, but at the same time I find it a shame, and so I am expressing myself to you on this simply in the hope that it might kindle something in you.  I feel that there is something in you that seeks real liberation, that you are not just a fake, but like I have said before, it is rather that you are caught up in a web of social authoritarianism not of your own making, and which you are not equipped to be able to overcome, and that you have also had your womanhood smashed and your sexual instinct perverted by childhood sexual abuse and patriarchal conditioning, which has affected you in ways you are still not aware of.  You haven’t really done your inner work on this, as that was something you would have done with me, but you rejected me in favour of your ‘sisters’, though they are not interested in helping you to overcome childhood sexual abuse and to liberate your sexuality and womanhood from the patriarchal prison.  In fact they couldn’t care less.  I had to write to them, remember, telling them what you were going through, and none of them gave a damn.  That is collaboration, collaborating with patriarchy.  People who remain on the fence as bystanders collaborate in your abuse and oppression, they are not your friends.  I never stood on the fence, and I always took an interest, and I wanted to do a lot more but I told myself to back off as I knew you were wary of me and I thought if you are coming to terms with child sexual abuse then I should back off, which is what I did, but I always hoped that you would reach out to me, but you never did, and as a result you never did your inner work, you never healed or overcame it, because you did not embrace the struggle with me, the real emancipatory struggle, but instead preferred the fake version offered to you by ‘feminism’.  Of course, in doing so you also turned your back on me, and the desperate struggle I was and still am going through, and that you should have been with me and supported me through, we should have supported each other, and it grieves me still today that that never happened.  It still causes me pain because I can still feel you, I can still feel you, your presence is there but it is trapped, and so I instinctively reach out but am always met with this hostile exterior which has been conditioned by patriarchy.  That is not the real you.

 

Look at how you react to me getting in touch with you about Samantha, or about Jane – I tell you they are in abusive relationships and you basically do nothing at all, and just carry on doing bog standard activist work as though that is real anarchist work, as though that is the real work of emancipation and liberation, when it is nothing of the kind, it is infantile nonsense when compared to the real work of liberating women from domestic abuse.  That is real anarchy, not organising workshops on how to fight the state or doing a direct action on a mine.  Those have their place but all too often they are carried out by immature individuals seeking attention or status within an anarchist in-group, and not with a real eye to the cause of earth and human liberation.  So you ignore that, much to my horror but not to my surprise.  When I lived in homeless hostels in Manchester, I remember telling you about women that I had to protect from domestic violence in the early hours, and also about how vulnerable women with children fleeing domestic violence were being housed next to rapists, junkies, violent drunks, and so on.  I told you about all this and about my attempts to bring this to the wider attention of the authorities, of how I even went to the Manchester anarchist bookfair and spoke to all the ‘radical feminist’ stalls asking for help, and that in all cases I got no interest or concern whatsoever.  No-one gave a damn, including you, because you weren’t interested either.  You also ignored my own struggle when I was dealing with chronic mental health trauma from my childhood abuse by my parents, community and the state.  Though you made some critical interventions you did not offer your support, just the occasional intervention, and even that totally dried up once I left the canal, which I did because it was sinking and from that point on I was homeless, with no idea what my future would be, and no-one giving a damn, despite being surrounded by people who call them selves activists and anarchists, fighting for the oppressed and for social justice, and supposedly all being in solidarity with each other as earth activists.  What a load of bullshit hey.

 

So my point is what is your feminism exactly?  It is clearly not genuine at all, because someone genuinely interested in the plight of women would not react like that to the above situations.  I am genuinely interested in the plight of women, and so I react very differently, and over the years I have developed ways and means to deal with the domestic abuse of women, and to deal with patriarchy, whereas you haven’t developed anything, because these things do not interest you at all, but you are interested in being seen to be some kind of radical feminist, when you are nothing of the kind.  Not in any way shape or form.  I am the one that can teach you about women’s liberation, but what do you have to teach me?  I can teach you about it because I have been dedicated to that cause for decades, with the most active period being the past 15 years, but you have never been dedicated to it at all.  You have not liberated yourself nor anyone else, and neither have you even supported anyone in doing so, and neither did you even support yourself to do so.

 

So why am I bothering to tell you all this, why not just leave you alone?  Because you have stolen something from me, a piece of my soul.  You brand yourself as a feminist and you have the cheek to brand me as a patriarch when I have been and still am a far better agent of women’s liberation than you, because you are not and never have been interested in it, all you have been interested in is your standing within a cheap and crappy anarcho-feminist in-group that mainly exists to pour disdain and malice on men and to virtue signal to each other their fake status as feminist revolutionaries.  So this letter is me reclaiming my soul from you.  In fact, this is me reclaiming my own stolen femininity, because one of my expressions of feminism has been the cultivation and development of my own femininity, something you have never taken an interest in.

 

Is a bystander to oppression guilty of complicity?  I would say yes, they are, and you were a bystander to my own desperate struggle to overcome my childhood trauma, a trauma that you and every other British person were responsible for, you were mostly a bystander to that, and that makes you complicit, and when a person is complicit that means that they have a stake in the status quo that they are seeking to preserve, even though they may not know it consciously, they act instinctively to preserve that stake and to ignore the plight of the oppressed person because their success at overcoming their oppression would mean the end of their privileged position within the status quo (again, it is called ‘bargaining with patriarchy’, a really quite fascination subsection of women’s liberation).  You are one such, you had a stake in seeing me fail in my attempt to overcome my oppression, because you gained from the status quo that resulted from my oppression.  You gained from a paid job, from standing, from the identity of being an anarcho-feminist and the social position this provided, and a whole host of other things that required me to remain buried under a wall of oppression, because unless that were the case, you would not be able to maintain that privilege – a life partly stolen from me.  

 

I say ‘you’, but it is not the real you, it is the conditioned you, the real you would not have done such things, and that is why I seek to liberate the real you from within this prison she is trapped in.  Your social milieu were also bystanders as you went through your own childhood trauma, and that means that they too are complicit in that, and that they too have something to gain from you remaining buried under your childhood trauma.  They seek to bury you, and because the real you is buried, that version of you buries me, and seeks to keep me oppressed in order to maintain your precarious position within the madhouse.  You can see how the ‘cascade effect’ works, the ‘pyramid scheme’ of oppression within the social body.  I’m the only one that was genuine, as I was not interested in the status quo, I was the real anarchist, not a fake one looking for a social identity that provides status within the types of counter-culture tolerated by the patriarchy.

 

So, I have been successful in overcoming my childhood trauma, and now things are changing.  In fact, a cascade effect is underway.  You see how with oppression there is a cascade effect and you end up with people at the bottom who get the brunt of it?  I gave a brief example in the last paragraph.  So if the person at the bottom of the social pyramid of oppression is strong enough to not only endure it and survive, but actually overcome it, then a reverse cascade effect is set in motion, a chain reaction if you like, as that whole social milieu is transformed.  Those who were most guilty of oppression come out of it very badly, whilst those less so come out very well, with those who did not involve themselves in oppressing anyone come out of it really well.  It is a natural process of social justice that I mentioned very briefly in one of my previous letters, and that I will talk of in more detail in a future letter.

 

I don’t know if you understand what I am saying in detail, but I think you will intuitively understand it.  I only intuitively understand it myself, I could not explain it in detail at this stage, I am just aware that that is what is happening.  You are not the source of the oppression, so you will come out of it pretty well, and will experience it as a process of liberation and enlightenment, whereas someone like Marie will come out of it very badly, as the savage nazi wolf that she is is being revealed and no longer hidden, as that required my oppression.  When you oppress someone, you repress part of their mind, and that in turn causes projections to arise, and it is these that hide the real face of the oppressive parties.  This is why I am talking to you about feminism, because that was a projection.  You being a radical feminist was a projection.  I am the radical feminist, not you, nor Marie, and now that projection is being withdrawn, and this letter is part of that process.  That in turn is going to affect our relationship, and your work, really quite profoundly, because that all rests on a house of cards that is, as we speak, coming crashing down.  I am proposing to you changes that will give you a soft landing, and I have said that I will present them to you again towards the end of March (though I know you will ignore me as the fake you that currently exists is invested in the status quo and in my continued oppression, which is the real reason why you ignore me and try your best to smother me to death and make me go away), but make no mistake, changes are afoot, and if you choose to ignore them then they will just end up being harder.  That is not my fault, that is the fault of those who build lives based on the oppression of good people, and who continue doggedly to smother their attempts at liberation to the very end, even when they continually reach out with an olive branch.

 

Love and solidarity,

 

Sonny

   

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