Sex has always been the primary instrument for population control, and the raison d’être of humans possessed with the bug of authoritarianism.  The primary reason why we cover intersectional feminism on a website called “Ancient History” is because it is an ideological movement that emerges from the failure of religion to sustain and provide meaning in people’s lives, and from commodification in this stage of capitalism, something predicted by Hegel a long time ago, which he called Entfremdung, or alienation from the self.  Bernard Munchin and the young Karl Marx expanded the concept of alienation toward a criticism of how an individual becomes alienated from the society also, and its primary culprit is not Marxism or collectivism, but it is in fact capitalism and classical liberalism in combination.

The result is a religion of the narcissist, by the narcissists and for the narcissists, which explains the cannibalization they frequently engage in, as in this clip from the “Socialists of America” conference:

What is important to understand is that this is a primal instinct that authoritarians instinctively tap into, which works something like this:  R-M-L-V-S (in the mnemonic “Romulus”)

1. Find something everyone does that no amount of authoritarian control can ever get rid of (raison d’être)
2. Declare it a moral sin (Morality)
3. Make prohibitions against it (‘the Law’)
4. Prepare a pathway “redemption” through embrace of “the Party” (The Victory)
5. Blame all the ills of society on the scapegoated instinct (the Scapegoat)

It’s briliant, and it’s fascism to the T.  Let’s try a few examples.  Let us take the original sin.

1. Eating (raison d’être)
2. The Lord god is your maker, and his authority is final (Morality)
3. If you eat from the Tree, on the very day, you will die (‘the Law’)
4. But if you don’t eat from the tree, you will forever remain in the garden of “Eden” (The Victory)
5. Because you have eaten from the tree, you and all your offspring will forever suffer, exiled from the Garden (the Scapegoat)

Let’s take Nazism:

1. Wanting more, perpetual desire to have more (raison d’être)
2. Jews: they rejected Christ, major moral failing, they have made us poor (Morality)
3. Nuremberg Laws: prohibitions against Jews (‘the Law’)
4. Once we get rid of Jews, it will all be perfect, the Party will be a “steel-hard instrument of the raising of generations of high priests.” (Adolf Hitler) (The Victory)
5. Jews are to blame (The Scapegoat)

Let’s take communism:

1. Being poor/lacking freedom under feudalism/wanting more (R)
2. Being rich is a moral sin (M)
3. Successful people are thieves, enact socialism to combat capitalism. Revolution. (L)
4. Only the embrace of Communism and socialist principles brings equality and utopia (V)
5. Rich and successful, capitalism is to blame (S)

Let’s take Intersectional Feminism:

1. Not having rights, being oppressed (R)
2. Being male is a moral sin, women are naturally virtuous (M)
3. Men are the oppressors, but Intersectional Feminism is onto them.  Pronouns, gendered laws, state intervention, “pay gap.” Kangaroo courts, hysteria. (L)
4. Only the embrace of Intersectional Feminism is acceptable. All those who don’t accept feminism are purged. (V)
5. Men and Patriarchy are to blame. (S)

It began with sex.  Sex and sexuality have been a part of each authoritarian system since the beginning of humans.  If you think about it, it makes sense.  Procreation was controlled for a long period of our evolution. Only one or a few alpha males allowed themselves to procreate.  All others were banned and their sexuality was controlled.  Lower ranked males were sacrificed in war and in hunt, as soldiers and as peasants.  The recipients of all benefits were always women and children.  We know from DNA that only between 5-15% of all males passed on the genes.

That means that sexuality has from the earliest days been associated with fear and anxiety.  Church, synagogue and mosque are all very interested in your masturbating habits because they know that everyone does it.  And that means that everyone is always guilty.  Then they can run into the loving arms of religion and have their minds brainwashed.  This pattern follows RoMuLVS points to the T.

And so, we discover that a movement that began with a rejection of the pre-50’s puritanism toward sex, is now becoming one of its biggest advocates.  Intersectional puritanical feminism is completely regressive today.  It is becoming a tyranny of the same sort of authoritarian faux moralist that was behind all of the ideologies and religions of the past.  And much like all the religions, it has its culture of chanting, initiations, Nicene creeds (“I am a white, heterosexual, cis male and I…”), moral outrages, paranoid delusions, hysteria, us-vs-them, purges, black and white thinking, and imagined realities, not to mention God vs Satan (feminism vs patriarchy).  All delusions.  All imaginary.

Here is an abstract from Nancy Friday’s famous “My Secret Garden,” from the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition.  Consider how much worse this form of tyranny has become.

Now, here at the beginning, let me set the record straight. I don’t want this to get lost halfway through these introductory pages: sexual freedom was never a part of modern feminism, never celebrated as such at Feminist Headquarters.

Because so many of us marched in both the Women’s Movement and the Sexual Revolution, and because they happened simultaneously, those events remain in memory as one glorious upheaval. Wouldn’t it seem irrational to exclude sexual free­dom from all the other rights-political, social, economic-for which we fought? Why separate sex and state?

I automatically assumed that those of us who marched and wrote in the late 1960s  and  early  1970s knew there would be no joy in the workplace without sexual freedom, by which I don’t mean fucking in the Ladies’ (Oops!, Women’s) Room. Simply put, I knew that we would never be equals staying in the traditional sexual straitjacket. Sex is energy and although it was a fundamental tenet of patriarchy that men held the key to eros, some of us knew in our bones that women, not men, were and remain the permission givers when it comes to sex. It is through other women’s voices that we hear our own. Without fear of their disapproval, all our sexual fuel can run into every facet of our lives­ political, personal, and economic.

Our mistake, however, was believing that every­ one on the march had the same agenda. When I sat down to write this book, I thought the feminists would embrace it. I didn't realize that it was unwel­come at Feminist Headquarters until a former friend turned https://dyeus.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/My-project.png at Ms. magazine, gave me a rap on the knuckles, proclaiming that “Ms. will decide what women’s fantasies are.” Soon after, a review in that magazine followed with the opening line “… this woman is not a feminist.”

I was shocked, couldn’t believe that I had been called a bad girl for writing about something as joy­ous as women’s sexual liberation. I didn’t realize then, as I do now, that the Matriarchal Feminists were con­sciously determined to leave sex off the agenda. Not that they discussed it. But they knew they couldn’t control an army of women pursuing sex with  men. Sex between women? That was safe, and still is.

They knew intuitively that other women’s voices enable us to hear our own and that keeping men the enemy, up to, and especially, today, allows for a fer­tile dumping ground for everything that is wrong in women’s world.

My initial reaction to the nasty review in Ms. was to forget it. The millions of women who bought My Secret Garden reaffirmed my belief in the importance of understanding sex. Besides, upon completing this book, I had too many questions of my own to pursue.

Why, for example, did women, as many do today, feel so guilty about sexual fantasies? We were just thinking, after all, not acting on our thoughts. The answer hit me the day I put down the  manuscript for this book: Mother. So I sat down to write an out­ line, then entitled “The First Lie.” It subsequently became My Mother/My Self, my study of mothers and daughters. I went on to write five more books, two about women’s sexual fantasies, Forbidden Flowers and Women on Top; one on men’s sexual fantasies, Men in Love; and jealousy and The Power of Beauty.

But the Ms. review and all that it implied never went away, and writing my most recent book, on how our looks influence our lives, it returned with full force, an horrific belch from the unconscious.  I had come to understand that competition among women was the last taboo, something the Matriar­chal Feminists were unwilling to acknowledge or discuss. Better to opt for noncompetitive quilting, as Gloria Steinem proposed in her last book, than accept the reality of competition, for looks, in the workplace and, certainly, for men. No wonder these feminists were and remain so rigid about sex. It wasn’t just that they wanted to be taken seriously, as I do, and not as sex objects. It was just as important that they outlaw competition over sex and beauty among women.

That continuing need helps explain its opposite, the enduring popularity of this book’s erotic themes. These fantasies are perennials that speak to women today as they did twenty-five years ago. A woman masturbating wants to reach orgasm. To do so,  she has to win the competition against those who would deprive her of owning her own sex. Who are her competitors? Well, as I learned writing My Mother/ My Self, it begins with the Giantess of the Nursery, a loving Giantess as often as not, but one who would not tolerate sexual independence.

No man can cut me as another woman can. Femi­nism’s refusal to address issues of competition leaves us eternally vulnerable to the dangerous power that women hold over one another. All this comes to mind when I think about today’s Lesbian Chic, which is in part a celebration of the easy access women have always had to one-anothers’ bodies and in part a “natural” solution for women conditioned by the Ma­triarchal Feminists’ anti-male agenda. A woman lies down with another woman and the world shrugs.

Few women care to live with exclusion from women’s world. And so the garden of sexual desire and fulfillment becomes the “secret” garden, and the sentence I first heard from women twenty-five years ago continues today: “Thank God you wrote that book. I thought I was the only one.”

How could it be, you might ask, that  women today, at the turn of the century, would still  think they were the only Bad Girls with erotic thoughts? What kind of prison is this that women impose on themselves? It is, of course, an unconscious pres­sure, where we seemingly do things against our will. Some part of us chooses the pressure that perfectly fits our need to be taken, to be bad-yes, ultimately, to reach orgasm.

Need I add that we win in all of our fantasies? Yes, even those involving the so-called rapist, that deus ex machina we roll in to catapult us past a lifetime of women’s rules against sex. That fantasy is as popular today as ever. The women whom I have interviewed don’t really want to be hurt or humiliated. His male presence, that effective battering ram, neatly “makes” her relax sufficiently to enjoy orgasm and then allows her to return to earth, her Nice Girl, Good Daughter self intact. The rape fantasy fools them into thinking the loss of control isn’t their fault.

What tribute to the power of the unconscious that in the day of the internet, of  pornographic  videos, not to mention of the erotic assaults on television, that with all this seeming permission, there is still a nay-saying voice that requires answering before we can reach orgasm.

As I have said, Mother isn’t an ogress. She is merely human. Love isn’t without ambivalence. What we do when we lie down for sex is to reconcile the power of that most important person in our early lives with the power of our own sexual appetites.

Women’s lust has always been feared as that ex­traordinary force that, left unbridled, could bring down not only individuals but also society itself. The bridling comes so early, in mother’s milk-and, oh, my dears, how fixated the infant remains as she grows to girlhood, watching her, that source of love, warmth, food, life. We never take our eyes off her, and in these earliest preverbal lessons, we learn those lifelong feelings about our bodies.

Nothing plants the seeds of our private sexual guilt more deeply than her admonitions, threatening loss of love should we ever love our own body. Noth­ing need be said. Little eyes learn life’s lessons most efficiently when we are most dependent. Little girls copy her hatred of her own flesh, assuming it un­consciously though we may later deny that we are in any way like her. We may disobey her anti-sex rules in adolescence when our erotic muscle so demands, but it is temporary, this war with her.  Eventually, most women cave in to one or another’s anti-sex rules which demand that no woman get more sex or be more sexual than any other.

That is what the Matriarchal Feminists under­stand and why they have eliminated sexual fulfill­ment from their agenda. The Matriarchals would keep us all the same. You rarely hear them talk about birth control and the ravages of unwanted pregnancy. Few of them came to the defense of Sur­geon General Joycelyn Elders when she dared sug­gest that our schools teach the role and importance of masturbation.

My fury is only tempered by people like you, who share my interest in true feminism, striving for equality in matters sexual as well as everywhere else. When I first started this journey twenty-five years ago, it was so hard to find women who would even admit to having such sexual reveries.  It  took me years to find women in numbers who knew what I was talking about when I would ask if they had sexual fantasies. But as the years have passed, more and more women have been willing to talk about en­joyment of our sexual selves and to acknowledge its inextricable link to true liberation of women.

 

Nancy Friday

Key West, Florida January 1998