Tag: gender politics

Care Without Conquest: Feminist Lessons for the Workaday Philosopher

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2–4 minutes

I recently posted The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose. In it, I brushed – perhaps too lightly – against my debt to feminist philosophy. It’s time to acknowledge that debt more directly and explain how it spills into the mundane greasework of daily life.

[Scroll to the bottom to see Midjourney’s take on feminists. You won’t be surprised.]

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose

I tend not to worship at the altar of names, but let’s name names anyway. Beyond the usual French suspects – your Sartres, de Beauvoirs, and Foucaults – I owe much to the feminist philosophers – Gilligan, Tronto, Butler, Bellacasa, and de Beauvoir again – and, while we’re at it, the post-colonialists, whose names I’ll not recite for fear of being pompous. Their shared heresy is a suspicion of universals. They expose the myth of neutrality, whether it parades as Reason, Progress, or Civilisation. They remind us that every “universal” is merely someone’s local story told loud enough to drown out the others.

This isn’t a matter of sex or gender, though that’s how the names have been filed. The core lesson is epistemic, not biological. Feminist philosophy re-centres care, interdependence, and the politics of maintenance, not as sentimental virtues but as systems logic. The post-colonialists do the same at a geopolitical scale: maintenance instead of conquest, relation instead of domination.

On Gender, Behaviour, and the Lazy Binary

I don’t buy into sex and gender binaries, especially regarding behaviour. Even in biology, the dichotomy frays under scrutiny. Behaviourally, it collapses entirely. The problem isn’t people; it’s the linguistic furniture we inherited.

I’m weary of the moral blackmail that calls it misogyny not to vote for a woman, or racism not to vote for a black candidate. These accusations come, paradoxically, from sexists and racists who reduce people to the colour of their skin or the contents of their underwear. Having a vagina doesn’t make one a caretaker; having a penis doesn’t preclude empathy. The category error lies in mistaking type for trait.

When I refuse to vote for a Margaret Thatcher or a Hillary Clinton, it’s not because they’re women. It’s because they operate in the same acquisitive, dominion-driven register as the men they mirror. If the game is conquest, swapping the player’s gender doesn’t change the rules.

Maintenance as Political Praxis

My interest lies in those who reject that register altogether – the ones who abandon the mythology of Progress and its testosterone-addled twin, Innovation. The ethics of maintenance I’ve written about, and the philosophy of Dis-Integration I keep harping on, both gesture toward an alternative mode of being: one that prizes endurance over expansion, care over conquest.

This isn’t new. Feminist philosophers have been saying it for decades, often unheard because they weren’t shouting in Latin or running empires. I’m merely repackaging and re-contextualising, hoping that bundling these neglected insights together might make them audible again.

Knowledge never comes in a vacuum; it circulates. It leaks, cross-pollinates, mutates. To claim “intellectual property” over an idea is to pretend ownership of the air. I’ll spare you the full rant, but suffice it to say that the moment knowledge becomes proprietary, it ceases to breathe.

Conclusion

If I have a creed – and I say this reluctantly – it’s that philosophy should serve as maintenance, not monument-building. Feminist and post-colonial thinkers model that: constant attention, critical care, resistance to the entropy of domination.

I’m just trying to keep the engine running without pretending it’s divine.

Bonus

Image: Feminists, according to Midjourney 7
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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Becoming a Woman with Penetration Politics

Posted in agency, equality, identity, language, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, power, psychology, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Male flatworms, those primordial swordsmen of the slime, have invented what can only be described as penetration politics. They don’t seduce; they don’t serenade; they don’t even swipe right. They duel. Penises out, sabres up, they jab at one another in a tiny, biological cockfight until one is stabbed into submission. The “winner” ejaculates his way to freedom, while the “loser” becomes a mother by default. Gender, in flatworm society, is not destiny; it’s a duel with dicks for sabres.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
When a Meme Lies but the Story Survives
Errata: Upon further research, I share additional information on my author site.

Beauvoir once reminded us: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The flatworm demonstrates this principle with obscene literalness. You are not born female. You become female when you lose the fight and get stabbed full of sperm. Congratulations: you’ve been penis-fenced into maternity.

And here we can smuggle in that old feminist provocation – every man is a rapist. Not in the polite, bourgeois sense of candlelight coercion, but in the bare biological logic of the worm. To inseminate is to penetrate; to penetrate is to conquer; to conquer is to outsource the cost of life onto someone else’s body. The duel is just foreplay for the inevitable violation. Consent, in worm-world, is as fictional as a unicorn with a diaphragm. The “winner” is celebrated precisely because he doesn’t have to consent to anything afterwards – he stabs, struts, and slips away, leaving the loser’s body to incubate the consequences.

Now, humanity likes to pretend it has outgrown this. We have laws, customs, and etiquette. We invented flowers, chocolates, and marriage vows. But scratch the surface, and what do you find? Penetration politics. Who gets to wield the dick, who gets saddled with the debt. The radical feminists weren’t entirely wrong: structurally, culturally, biologically, the male role has been defined as penetration – and penetration, whether dressed in lace or latex, is always a form of conquest.

The worm is honest. We are hypocrites. They fence with their penises and accept the consequences. We fence with our laws, our armies, our religions, our institutions – and still manage to convince ourselves we’re civilised.

So yes, The Left Hand of Darkness can keep its glacial androgynes. For a metaphor that actually explains our sorry state, look no further than penis-fencing flatworms: every thrust a power play, every victory a rape in miniature, every loss a womb conscripted. Humanity in a nutshell – or rather, in a stab wound.

The Scourge: They’re Really Fighting Is Ambiguity

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A Sequel to “The Disorder of Saying No” and a Companion to “When ‘Advanced’ Means Genocide”

In my previous post, The Disorder of Saying No, I explored the way resistance to authority is pathologised, particularly when that authority is cloaked in benevolence and armed with diagnostic manuals. When one refuses — gently, thoughtfully, or with a sharp polemic — one is no longer principled. One is “difficult.” Or in my case, oppositional.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

So when I had the gall to call out Bill Maher for his recent linguistic stunt — declaring that a woman is simply “a person who menstruates” — I thought I was doing the rational thing: pointing out a classic bit of reductionist nonsense masquerading as clarity. Maher, after all, was not doing biology. He was playing lexicographer-in-chief, defining a term with centuries of philosophical, sociological, and political baggage as though it were a checkbox on a medical form.

I said as much: that he was abusing his platform, presenting himself as the sole arbiter of the English language, and that his little performance was less about clarity and more about controlling the terms of discourse.

My friend, a post-menopausal woman herself, responded not by engaging the argument, but by insinuating — as others have — that I was simply being contrary. Oppositional. Difficult. Again. (She was clearly moved by When “Advanced” Means Genocide, but may have missed the point.)

So let’s unpack this — not to win the debate, but to show what the debate actually is.

This Isn’t About Biology — It’s About Boundary Maintenance

Maher’s statement wasn’t intended to clarify. It was intended to exclude. It wasn’t some linguistic slip; it was a rhetorical scalpel — one used not to analyse, but to amputate.

And the applause from some cisgender women — particularly those who’ve “graduated” from menstruation — reveals the heart of the matter: it’s not about reproductive biology. It’s about controlling who gets to claim the term woman.

it only works if you pretend the world is simpler than it is.

Let’s steelman the argument, just for the sport of it:

Menstruation is a symbolic threshold. Even if one no longer menstruates, having done so places you irrevocably within the category of woman. It’s not about exclusion; it’s about grounding identity in material experience.

Fine. But now let’s ask:

  • What about women who’ve never menstruated?
  • What about intersex people?
  • What about trans women?
  • What about cultures with radically different markers of womanhood?

You see, it only works if you pretend the world is simpler than it is.

The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: Applied

This is precisely where the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis earns its keep.

The word woman is not a locked vault. It is a floating signifier, to borrow from Barthes — a term whose meaning is perpetually re-negotiated in use. There is no singular essence to the word. It is not rooted in biology, nor in social role, nor in performance. It is a hybrid, historically contingent construct — and the moment you try to fix its meaning, it slips sideways like a greased Wittgensteinian beetle.

“Meaning is use,” says Wittgenstein, and this is what frightens people.

If woman is defined by use and not by rule, then anyone might claim it. And suddenly, the club is no longer exclusive.

That’s the threat Maher and his defenders are really reacting to. Not trans women. Not intersex people. Not language activists or queer theorists.

The threat is ambiguity.

What They Want: A World That Can Be Named

The push for rigid definitions — for menstruation as membership — is a plea for a world that can be named and known. A world where words are secure, stable, and final. Where meaning doesn’t leak.

But language doesn’t offer that comfort.

It never did.

And when that linguistic instability gets too close to something personal, like gender identity, or the foundation of one’s own sense of self, the defensive response is to fortify the language, as though building walls around a collapsing church.

Maher’s defenders aren’t making scientific arguments. They’re waging semantic warfare. If they can hold the definition, they can win the cultural narrative. They can hold the gates to Womanhood and keep the undesirables out.

That’s the fantasy.

But language doesn’t play along.

Conclusion: Words Will Not Save You — but They Might Soothe the Dead

In the end, Maher’s definition is not merely incorrect. It is insufficient. It cannot accommodate the complexity of lived experience and cannot sustain the illusion of clarity for long.

They are defending nostalgia.

And those who cling to it — friend or stranger, progressive, or conservative — are not defending biology. They are defending nostalgia. Specifically, a pathological nostalgia for a world that no longer exists, and arguably never did: a world where gender roles were static, language was absolute, and womanhood was neatly circumscribed by bodily functions and suburban etiquette.

Ozzy and Harriet loom large here — not as individuals but as archetypes. Icons of a mid-century dream in which everyone knew their place, and deviation was something to be corrected, not celebrated. My friend, of that generation, clings to this fantasy not out of malice but out of a desperate yearning for order. The idea that woman could mean many things, and mean them differently across contexts, is not liberating to her — it’s destabilising.

But that world is gone. And no amount of menstruation-based gatekeeping will restore it.

The Real Scourge Is Ambiguity

Maher’s tantrum wasn’t about truth. It was about fear — fear of linguistic drift, of gender flux, of a world in which meaning no longer obeys. The desire to fix the definition of “woman” is not a biological impulse. It’s a theological one.

And theology, like nostalgia, often makes terrible policy.

And theology, like nostalgia, often makes terrible policy.

This is why your Language Insufficiency Hypothesis matters. Because it reminds us that language does not stabilise reality — it masks its instability. The attempt to define “woman” once and for all is not just futile — it’s an act of violence against difference, a linguistic colonisation of lived experience.

So Let Them Rest

Ozzy and Harriet are dead. Let them rest.
Let their picket fence moulder. Let their signage decay.

The world has moved on. The language is shifting beneath your feet. And no amount of retroactive gatekeeping can halt that tremor.

The club is burning. And the only thing left to save is honesty.