The last time feminism did anything ‘fun’ and genuinely courageous was the #MeToo movement, which has been almost ten years ago. Since then I found nothing new being uncovered, going online has felt boring and stale and placated. The spirit of feminism is borne from expressing what is impossible to express, to reject the entire social field, so to me, the extended discussion around ‘divine feminine’ ‘high value woman’ ‘trad wife’ etc. leads back to what Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘feminism has been turned into an argument because men wanted to deny that it is a fact’. I wanted to revive the actual spirit of 1970s intellectual discourse around feminism which was by nature disturbing and uncomfortable and not a trending youtube hashtag. Feminism has become entertainment, which is how far it has strayed symbolically from its original purpose of liberation. If feminism as it is trending today is its most valid form, there would not be oppression, which there currently still is because it is still more dangerous to be a woman than a man. We have forgotten that feminism should be uncomfortable to the general male audience. Not a comforting, soothing, passively receptive ‘divine feminine’ balm, nor a sexy, dominance kink of being a toxic woman.
Breaking invisible contracts as a woman requires brute force, like trying to leave a bear trap. You do not negotiate with the bear trap. Exiting the patriarchy is a violent process, and done without preparation and in a state of exhaustion from enduring and surviving it.
The only way to successfully exit is to be stronger than a man. Women are taught to be weaker, that this is more attractive, but as far as I can see there is no woman that has benefitted from being weaker than the system. Weakness is not an exit strategy.
The proof that you must be stronger than a man and not equal, but stronger, is that if there existed a man strong enough to emancipate women from the patriarchy, we would have already been emancipated by now. The task of the exit requires greater brute strength than men have displayed.
The current popular discourse among women is to discriminate between good and bad partners. This is meant to be empowering since the discernment of our choice is power over the sexual game. However there is no discourse on how women should be more powerful as an end in itself. Although this is the education that would get directly to the heart of the issue. The discussion around how to choose a better partner, how to manage boundaries and no contact, is extremely vague and confusing. They seem to dance around the issue, the root life skill, without actually teaching it. The root life skill is how to be more powerful.
This “love literacy” is keeping all these intelligent women wasting their intelligence and potential on figuring out what love literacy is when it’s really just an argumentative trap. At this point in time, many women have reached emancipation but without being able to articulate exactly why, and there is a fear of expressing fully, publicly, the exact process of their emancipation, and it remains a blurred, personal victory, and hence a fragile one. It also means that it’s never actually taught. That means power literacy is actually never taught to women.
We circle this discussion because the missing piece of the conversation is the exit from the patriarchy which requires brute force. That is the education about power that is required to make sense of how to be treated fairly and respectfully in a relationship with a man. A man will not respect a woman that is in contract with the patriarchy, because that is not a person, that is a slave. You cannot have relationships with slaves. But in order to be respected you must make the brutal exit. Notice that I called it an education about power and not a conversation because this is not a negotiation.
The current discourse speaks on attachment styles, boundaries, healing, and partner selection as “empowerment”. The obsessive refinement of relational skills is itself evidence of structural powerlessness. Women are continuing to be trained to survive intimacy rather than to be sovereign without it.
Current discourse on healing is framed in a way that you should heal yourself so that you have some kind of emotional capital to offer to men, which is just signaling that we’re not worthy of love as we are in this unhealed state when plenty of unhealed men receive love.
Pop feminism is built on the assumption that healing leads to empowerment, which leads to better relationships, which leads to justice. However, the realistic path is more in reverse, it begins in justice. Healing is sitting in a hospital bed with stitches on your leg after you escaped the bear trap. Healing does not come before justice.
The other part of current dialog is strategies of power over men, which is not a true educational model. Because to learn an intrinsic thing like power relative to someone else is a difficult and self-defeating path, you still depend on the other to define your success. It is still not an education about power, for women, as an end in itself.
The following is a lecture on the nature of power itself, not feminine power but power which is essentially feminine in nature because it does not yield, it does not perform or prove, it uses absence, which is different from the facade of power that we are taught within capitalism and hence is the patriarchal version of power.
The ordinariness, that is my true power. There were times that I touched upon it and realized that that’s where my power was, but it was impossible for me to grasp because ordinariness is necessarily, by definition, absolutely invisible. It’s that which renders you completely invisible because absolute power requires absolutely no visibility.
Well, we say ordinariness is power, but we don’t even define what ordinariness actually is. And that definition is slippery by definition because it’s like saying, what is a normal person? But the actual definition of power is invisibility. It’s what is absolutely undetected. It’s absolutely nothing. It feels like absolutely nothing because you’re doing absolutely nothing. And that nothingness is absolutely terrifying to people because it means destruction because at the heart of power is also the trauma around power, which is destruction. But as a society within an oppressive power structure, we are constantly, constantly running away from our own nothingness. And everything about our world teaches us that nothingness is bad. Everything about capitalism, everything about power, philosophy, dialogue, teaches us that nothingness is bad. Death is bad. Just nonexistence is bad when actually nonexistence is the only true form of power.
Ordinariness is non-performance, it’s the absence of effort, of display, explanation, justification, compensation, tension. It’s what Bruce Lee and martial artists say is the state of emptiness in the midst of battle. It’s unexpressed power. Everything in ordinary life, from cooking and walking and breathing and sitting, is unexpressed power. And the unexpressed power of ordinary people is what terrifies the people who want to dominate it.
Unexpressed power is effortless, formless, unpredictable, has no taste or smell or sound. It’s ungraspable, untouchable, unbothered. It’s the power of water. And then it’s the power of oxygen, because oxygen is less than water. And then it’s the power of the empty space between the atoms of oxygen, which is more powerful than the air. Because before we need water to survive we need air to breathe and in the minute of holding our breath we need the space of existence not to collapse on us.
Power increases the more it disappears. As a warrior studies a jaguar to understand power, I study negative space to emulate it and become more like it and to learn from it.
SUBLIME COURAGE 
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