Category: Opinion

Amanda Schlicht

“When god became lonely he created men,

Or was it,

When man become lonely he created god”

An intellectual challenge, a disregarded philosophical objective, bred from laziness and narcissism, our ecosystem is dying and once again, humanity is obsessed with submission. Often weak, weaned off in the late stages of early childhood, the human deceives itself by creating a warped sense of power, instilled by their innate agility, possible flexibility, until the muscle broadcasted on their arms assembles a mental hierarchy where they think they can wield a weapon faster than the bite of a lion. An ego thoroughly compromised and inherently neurotic to its very core, the psychological debasement of the human ego¹ has driven clear distinctions of dismantling ecosystems and institutions highly regarded to human wellbeing. Looking at Animism and Anthropocentrism, the latter can be concluded as a harmful, marring objective humans slipped into to create a similar power dynamic they have with their own god, which is to say they like being at the centre of things, especially in the realm of this universe.

To quickly digress into both conceptions, it becomes clear how Animism and Anthropocentrism are antitheses to each other when practiced upon. The former, developed by Edward Tylor in 1871, can be identified as “the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general,” also known as- everything that exists in nature has a soul and to bruise, destroy, mutilate, or kill such organisms would be in relation to killing the soul of another human being. The whole practice is a needed route for humans to understand empathy past the borders of their own convoluted consciousness but also redirect their immediate desire for power to a relative understanding that equality is a shared commonplace between himself and nature.

In my strenuous moments of chaos surrounding this topic, the primary reason for deficiency was our vicious ego. Self-centered, arguably psychopathic, the Ego is an undemanding answer and simple at best when speaking of ourselves. Twisting the simple connection of Ego to emotional irregulation or unethical reasoning, independent ideas are rather a common motivator for change, especially when the self is promised undeniable good. To be clear, Religion was the ‘promised undeniable good.’ Having been born with free Sunday schedules, and even fewer modest dresses, the infiltration of religious ideology never shaped self-defining fears, moral perspectives, and the self-mutilation that occurs when you exist outside of principles built on ‘eternal love.’ Given this statement, my opinions have not wavered after obscure church services I went to at eight years old in order to have a sleepover the night before or to please your relatives who attended church on Christmas Eve with no knowledge of the contents of the bible. So from my standpoint, the Ego exists as such due to the infection of religion that has strewed ritualistic social contracts, existing baselines of ethical reason, even the simple, concise action of death – a practice centred around the existence of one man. To take Animism to the now-present form of Anthropocentrism, the many facets surrounding religion hold reasonable cause to many warped perceptions, the main cause being the savior complex.

When thinking of ethical, a complicit synonym can be ‘good.’ It prescribes that on the baseline of given values, to be ethical is ‘to be more than’ and the ‘good’ would then surpass the goodness of just one person to all of the natural world. And so, to define anthropocentrism as ethical, it defaults to a weak claim, as the idea deviates from utilitarianism, the considered benefits for the greater good fail to include the natural world or any division of nature, but rather the comfort of humans. The innate complex humans have to protect their species from those with the same quality to life can be dedicated to an Ego that has developed over centuries when diseases can be cured, food is not aligned with hunting, buildings hold beds and working lights during the night. We have evolved, along with our conscious, bone structure, emotional intelligence, and knowledgable ego considerate of the power we could potentially wield not only against other species but toward ourselves. Our demise is centered on a natural feeling, a dopamine rush and a satisfactory smile of our ability, yet a deform can be detected in the brain and the triggers, once related to empathy wither, and we end up like the conclusion of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

For a brief moment, the development of the ego and religious consciousness will be explained in reference to one’s relationship with Biblical faith so that explanations toward Intrinsic Value and Environmental Ethics hold appropriate connotations. Cobb explains the detriment well, writing, “Where Biblical faith has dominated, pure autonomy can be attributed only to God. The human ego develops and gains heroic independence from the world through its relation to God. The relationship is purely dialogical. God calls, and the ego responds. The ego that is formed in this dialogue need not cut itself off from emotion and from caring about what happens in the world, for in its relation to God it transcends the world while sharing God’s concerns for it.” The psychological phenomenon is easily digestible, the relationship more one-sided in terms of physical attributes, yet the ego is starving, only able to assert itself on its own fear and isolation, eventually becoming power hungry when its contents cannot be reached by those around them. It is in itself another person, rid of a body and powered by perceptions until autonomy is established and its decision moves one’s hands and feet. In short, if the ego is fed from an external force, the mind will no longer be conscious of its own autonomy, rather reverting such power to said external being until actions are dictated on being led and acceptance of immoral ideologies become a knowing practice. The key part lies in religion being psychological, leaving the involvement of another body outside of the followed being, will not be heard as ‘the God calls, the ego responds‘

Intrinsic Value

An anthropocentric value theory (or axiology), by common census, centres intrinsic value on human beings and regards all other things, including other forms of life, as being only instrumentally valuable i.e valuable only to the extent that they are means or instruments which may serve human beings.

Callicott, 1984:299

Value is subjective, no? Should we place a baseline, say that as humans we are inherently more valuable than inanimate objects, than constructive ideas and social determination, but naturally below anything holy whether that be a church, biblical words, and of course, their god. You see, hierarchies are how we establish the prominence of wealth, love, power, tenacity, to redefine our personal identification of position in society. While a lot of this is unconscious, our brain programmed out of fear and rejection, creates a multitude of bias, redistribution tactics, a sort of filing cabinet where we can dissect each document to our present status, our well-being, and our personhood. This intimate breakdown is how we form an identity, which in turn develops the ego, and we continue this cycle of influence by way of our relationship to religion, language, appearance, experiences, political affiliation, etc. as they begin to confirm not only a basis of thought but an allowance to pamper our own personal desires. Loneliness will always become a feeding ground for needed power.

Running with Callicott, anthropocentrism redefines intrinsic value, which if we are to play ‘devil’s advocate one might say, ‘it’s good to put yourself first, healthy even’ in which I [unfathomably, might I add] desire to reply, ‘who was disrupting us from being healthy, but ourselves?’ But I must go quietly in this sense and elaborate that considering yourself for your own benefit is not classified as redefining your species as the center of the universe due to an increased power-hungry ego that slowly mutilates your relationship with nature and all that exists around you for the simple benefit of security? comfort? pre-planning for world domination against animals? The fact of the matter remains: deliberately denying the natural world an equal spot on the food chain not only wreaks havoc on our own perception of ourselves but allows for the destruction of ecosystems and the foundation of our existence to continue without an ounce of empathy.

Now, this all seems fairly reasonable in terms of innumerable ideologies we have ingested, thrown up, and redesigned as personality traits, so when dealing with our pesky ego it is to be addressed that we have thought ourselves superior, enduring, beings and our biblical relationships show for it. God’s warriors had a ring to it a couple of centuries ago, spurred by war, torture (and the terrifying methods developed from this feeling), of course, power, men have managed to redefine their identity as humans to transcend spiritual dimension (or psychosis, whichever seems more edgy), and be in close relation to their own god. As mentioned above, ‘when God calls, the ego responds,’ the human mind grapples with this secret knowledge of holy connection, leaving to a development in their mindset, one Callicot defines as, “[…] rules not only over the body, the emotions, and women², but also over the rest of creation [and eventually history].” A clear separation is formed in which humans do not view themselves as being part of the environment but rather as a contributor or even the centre of it. They cannot humanize nature to hold the same weight of existence that would require empathy and the lack of interference toward its growth.

That is all to say a level of hypocrisy has to exist. If we are to start with animism, slowly venture into barely pulsing societies, unaware of trade or even the existence of other empires, where in the timeline did we digress fundamentally, morally, ethically? There are still waves of animism in spiritual religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, so maybe it is a colonizing form of Western thought, overruled by religion? Yet, if one is to believe in anthropocentrism, rather ‘being the center of the universe,’ your placement in the natural world, you naturally reprimand your own kind [the natural world] for their inability to gain power. This seems far off in hindsight, that from a very broad scope, animals and plants are inherently different than us as humans. To many who don’t believe in evolution, while I am worried, the clause that we didn’t originate here as told in the Bible or by conspiracy theorists is only the millennium-long era of storytelling us humans adapted from language, simply nothing more. We are nature by birth, by ability, by heartbeat, and by existence.

To ramble once more, our current inability to quantify the intrinsic value of the “priceless” life-supporting services of ecosystems might be due to our reliance on valuation approaches that are simply not capable of representing their economic worth⁴. As the Ego becomes stretched loose, a boundless pit, impetuous to external systems dissimilar to themselves or God, necessary emotions are replaced, leaving submission a mandatory action expressed in religious ideation and projection of obedience to intersect the relationships humans have with the natural world. This is often a starting point of war.

Environmental Ethics

We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

All forms of life modify their contexts. Human civilization has become a breeding ground of negative impacts, particularly on biodiversity and needed ecosystems. There are newspaper articles, particularly long novels on our careless actions, photographs, movies like Rio, Finding Nemo, Avatar, protests, etc. depicting the emergent crisis of our climate. Bleaching coral, overfishing, pesticides, urban development, fast fashion, fossil fuels, deforestation, pollution – The list can and will continue. Yet, the call to action is minute, rather a complicity stunt often negative in proposals deemed worthy enough of possible reversal to our actions. We could say the easiest solution is to revert back to before the Industrial Revolution, turning all major cities into cottages and forests, rejecting modern materials and STEM practices to follow a much more ‘natural’ way of life. I can feel the eye roll from here. I bear no possible solution given the rather strenuous upkeep of the population, of notable crisis in every single institution, of continuing wars decades later, of the forgotten homeless, foster care, and asylum sectors, any conclusion could only account for a small few with a mere billion strapped to their last name.

To keep this short, Lynn White, an American historian, develops his claim that Christianity was ‘the most anthropocentric religion in the world’ and as such it bears a ‘huge burden of guilt’ for our current ecological climate. An essay widely acknowledged in Christan rebuttals and testimonies, his claims in 1967 still spark debate decades later and for good reason, especially when he writes, “Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christan arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone.” Ending on the route of religion, I digress on a few mere fragments of opinion. Everything that exists, has existed, or will come into being in the future subsist in a system. Under the conditions of submission, obedience, and control, we are in our being, a system controlled by another system. Not only does this drive the foundation of anthropocentrism, but it allows us to be weak-kneed vessels sustaining one fundamental while derailing another. In this drawn-out argument, my words have been concise on the matter of the constrained relationship between religion and the ego and its damaging effects on the environment, yet I could have dropped such subject for the industries that test on animals, meat manufacturing that abuses chemicals to fatten and redesign, the 700+ species that have become extinct during our period of existence on just historical data alone, the fashion industry and the considerable damage it produced to landfills, and every single industry that has capitalized on the environment to have a little change in the bank account of their seventh company. The argument will stay the same, the evidence tedious and lingering, the environment still depleting.

I would argue for ecocentric⁵ values in the same manner I argue for women. Which is to say, no scale or relationship should deem its importance or role for its mere existence. Like most conclusions I tend to have, my opinions lack room for argument but rather a place of expression to make claims. I saw points of intersection as Lynn White did six decades prior, and in one conclusion to the many in our environmental crisis, a factor can be the implementation of Christianity. In every end, it is merely what people do to their ecology that portrays what they think about themselves in relation to all that surrounds them.

Recognising the ego as “me,” as embodying and representing an authentic, private, unique selfhood that is most genuinely my own, is tantamount to misrecognizing that, at root, the ego ultimately is an alienating foreign introject through which I am seduced and subjected by others’ conscious and unconscious wants and machinations

(Stanford Encyclopaedia)

¹: Jacques Lacan, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

²: The submissive role of women is a common role established by the church evolving from their rival with the Pagans. Callicott opens the Ego with: “To obtain his masculine identity, the boy child must break this bond. Whether the departure from this “home” is physical or psychical, it is the basic crisis of growing up. Anxiety about falling back into infantile dependence generates in men fear and even hatred for women. Yet biological need and social pressure demand an adult relation to women. This is achieved by aggression and domination. By turning women into possessions, the male deals with his dear of being possessed. Thus the hero, or the male ego, has as his primary task breaking from the dominance of the female and returning to dominate her. This gives primacy to the need for heroic independence or autonomy, and it leads to a difference between the self-understanding of men and women in out society” (74).

³: After Lynn White: Religious Ethics and Environmental Problems, JSTOR

⁴: Farrell KN, National Library of Medicine

⁵: Nature has value in its own right, independent and separate from human uses, and would not rely on any scale nor relationship to deem its importance. Nature would then inherent value even if it does not directly or even indirectly benefit humans. National Library of Medicine.

Amanda Schlicht

The patriarchy is worn-out, stretched, and damaged. A barely pulsing body, decrepit and diminished by its own apologist, its limbs prone to mutilating, marking – with an obsessive need to draw arrows, the signage to slut around the stomach and tally marks on the back, a fixation on destruction, disuse, demanded submission and god-like role-play, the depiction of ‘whore’ seems sufficient with how easily it passes itself around. A bandwagon for fantasies, harbouring hero-like storylines, their designated role in Wall Street or Billionaire Row, continual handshakes / head-nods / shoulder pats in each suit-laden room, a tight women where each portion of her body is symmetrical, poised, ‘natural’, obedient. It is submissive to its own system, bruised knees, mulled minds; they fall short in uniformed lines, spewing guaranteed words of success, originality, their uncanny appearance, until each body is the same, and each single, warm thought is wriggled out of their body, loose tongue hanging out.

The worst name anyone can be called is a cunt. The best thing a cunt can be is small and unobtrusive¹. It is best to be tight, unaware, innocent but seemingly knowledgable of his body and afraid of yours. To be forced forward over a couch, pushed back against a wall, head fisted back until the hair snaps from their scalp – the tinge of blood and petrified screams only fuel his movements. He likes the torture, the burned wrist, bruised thighs and reddened knees, rather he likes the submission, the forced obedience – which he only seeks gratification if you acknowledge your inability to escape. A one-sided sexual relationship, where his need to perform rest on the approval of your aftermath, of the applause from the lads in the other room, of the body he leaves behind.

It often starts off light, the mistreatment, that is. They see how far they can grip your shoulders in year 5, how much their hand can slide up your leg before your skirt has rises and your tinted cheeks burn in embarrassment. They leer in shops, whistling, clapping, imitating dogs with characteristically loud barking and a need to get close. They crowd in rooms with defined names of ‘locker room talk’ where their announcements focus on who they managed to fuck over the weekend, who their next prize is, how good it all felt for them. They grow up with their parents covering up each slap, shove, degradation of a young girl with ‘Boys will be Boys’ and ‘If a boy hits you it means he likes you’. High strung, their obsession evolves into images, videos, poorly written dialogue where the women needs help, and the only thing that can make her feel better is if he fucked her. They make for quotes where women feel like such: “[…] Her stomach tightens with terror and revulsion; her face becomes contorted into a grimace of self-control and fake awareness; […] She knows that they will not physically assault her or hurt her they will only do so metaphorically. What they do will impinge on her. They will demand that her thoughts be focussed on them. […] They will evaluate her market price. […] They will make her a participant in their fantasies without asking if she is willing. They will make her feel ridiculous, or grotesquely sexual, or hideously ugly. Above all, they will make her feel like a thing.”⁴ (The humiliation of catcalling)

Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist and known activist toward ‘analysis on pornography’ presents her case on the male subject with her outline of the powers men have claimed, a common ritualistic antithesis to the existence of a woman. Her carefully strung words, introduce her work, written as such: “The power of men is first a metaphysical assertion of the self, an I am that exists a priori, bedrock, absolute, no embellishment or apology required, indifferent to denial or challenge. It expresses intrinsic authority. It never ceases to exist no matter how or on what grounds it is attacked; and some assert that it survives physical death”. The comprehension of the self, the male self, is vital, and as Jacques Lacan’s evaluation of the self from birth creates a potentially devastating Ego whether it be in the Mirror Stage or in the later production of life from social institutions, a man’s crucial identification of asserting the self relies in their ability to take, as Dworkin states, “[…] it is entitled to take what it wants to sustain or improve itself.” A self-righteous conviction to sustain themselves leaves them as a ‘unselfconscious parasitism’ where the first women they reap is their own mother, and the next is every women after. Dworkin’s basis of the metaphysical self later drives the man’s interaction with other powers, known as: the power of self, physical power over and against others, the power of terror, the power of naming, the powering of owning, the power of money, and the power of sex which in their entirety contribute to the appalling confluence of desirable pornography.

An internal issues driven by external factors, pornography at is simplest is ingested social conditions of power and pre-determined means of recognition at crucial points of development. As I love to mention Nancy Fraser at any given moment, her two-dimensional approach to gender injustice naturally aligns with men’s developed desire of violence and sexual abuse toward women. In Norman Mailers, The Prisoner of Sex, his objective seems misrepresented, a rather underdeveloped opinion on the scope of women’s struggles that would always unconsciously be overshadowed by the existence of a man. His references, harboured by radical feminist, unwittingly proved his point on the Women’s Liberation movement, rather the need for such a movement, as pulled quotes like, “In order to improve their condition, those individuals who are today defined as women must eradicate their own definition. Women must, in a sense, commit suicide, and the journey from womanhood to a society of individuals is hazardous” (66) connect back to Fraser developed approach mentioned above. Her approach to recognition is in favour of rejecting androcentric values of femininity for a women’s approach on their own self-representation in every global institution, creating ‘a positive relation to oneself’ while ‘obscuring links to sexist maldistribution’ (as recognition and redistribution cannot exist without both working simultaneously). Releasing the connotation of women having to reconfigure and/or redefine their internal identification of themselves, the viewpoint should shift once more to the development of the male self.

I often choose to be vulgar in these terms. There is no ‘love-making’, no ‘sex’, not even any sexuality, rather an action where the man assess what he can take from the girl for his benefit. His relationship with gaining control, often fronting his obsessive needs, he dehumanises her each time his skin makes contact with hers. Dworkin writes once more, “He fetishises her body as a whole and in its parts. He exiles her from every realm of expression outside the strictly ale-defined sexual or male-defined maternal. He forces her to becomes that things that causes erection, then holds himself helpless and powerless when he is aroused by her. His fury when she is not that thing, when she is either more or less than that thing, is intense and punishing”. The women becomes the root cause of the man’s erection, his rightful reaction he clings to, as it is not fair for her to have a body and not offer any hole or pit for him. His anger only continues when control is reaped from him and asserted to her, for a person granted no self should not have the ability to take, reap, or deny.

In collaboration with Dworkin’s power, the fifth tenet, naming, piques such interest when addressing the psychological effects of men desires and further actions. Dworkin goes on to write, “The male does not merely name women evil; he exterminates nine million women as witches because he has named women evil. He does not merely name women weak; he mutilates the female body, binds it up so that it cannot move freely, uses it as toy or ornament, keeps it caged and stunted because he has named women weak. He says that the female wants to be raped; he rapes. She resists rape; he must beat her, threaten her with death, forcibly carry her off, attack her in the night, use knife or fist; and still he says she wants it, they all do.” Such atrocities exist within the misrecognition of the female self, a central line to the deliberate naming of women’s appearance, attributes, personality, etc. to gain better control of their obsessive need with submission and power. They redefine the existence of women to the action of ‘serve,’ turning sexual abuse into supposed pleasure for both, and to what Tuana writes as: Woman have been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men; our own biology has not been properly analysed. Instead, we are fed the myth of the liberated woman and her vaginal orgasm — an orgasm which in fact does not exist. What we must do is redefine sexuality.²

As I have mentioned Norman Mailer frequently, I felt it was necessary to insert pieces around the male perspective on sex, moments where he also happen to be refuting Kate Millet, once again. Mailer declares, “[…] All part of that huge revolutionary statement that all fucking high or low, by any hole or pit, was pleasure, and pleasure was the first sweetmeat of reason. Whatever stood in the way of reason was foul. ” I have left behind talking about the objectivity of women due to its reoccurring and expectant nature in any socio-economic or political institution, yet Mailer’s words easily define such treatment. In terms of this novel, heterosexuality is the basis for relationship to where the ‘hole’ or ‘pit’ describes in his field of pleasure cannot even be granted the rights of being called a women, let alone female. It is to be automatically assumed that the root of reason, its link to pleasure for the male, is any hole that exists on the body of a women, not just those willingly “presented.” His speech on sex is expectant in its vulgar nature, continuing on the ideology that the ‘reason’ for the male derives in his ability to have sex: “Sex is reason, sex is common sense, sex is ego and prudence and scum on the sheets as the towels is missed on the pullout, sex is come by your kink, and freak will I on mine, sex is fifty whips of the clitoris pinging thought will all the authority of a broken nerve in the tooth, poor middle-class bewildered plain housewives’ libido coming in like an oil well under the paved-over barnyard of a bewildered cunt, modest churchgoing women with plastic vibrating dildo.” If I were to continue Mailer’s abhorrent monologue it would follow the lines of ‘Sex is for men. It is the duty of these plain housewives and modest churchgoing women to serve, loose cunts out, sprawled out on the bed next to the whips. They are to be given to men with their ego, their rationality, every ounce of common sense with a warm thanks after each hit to their browning body.’ Reflecting on text written by man on this topic, I often hate how effortless, even straightforward sex is. I frequently feel redundant in my statements, where each rebuttal to their statements are the same universal understanding for women: We are an object, a prize, some golden ticket that is warm enough to make them feel pleasure and easy in their decision to massacre the same body.

Valeria Solonas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, feigns that men have ruined the world and by nature women are the only solution. She proposed her manifesto as a resting guide on how to overthrow and eliminate the male sex. With its many criticism and even further terse history for Solonas herself, there was quote from the manifesto I thought to be relevant in the psychology of men and their explicit behaviour mentioned above. She writes, “In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene state […] The male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female. He attempts to do this. by constantly seeking out, fraternising with and trying to live through and fuse with the female, and by claiming as his own all female characteristics — emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc. — and projecting onto women all male traits — vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. […] Women, in other words, don’t have penis envy, men have pussy envy” (SCUM manifesto). While Mailer finds it necessary to devote pages on how the average man doesn’t experience pussy envy, rather falling short on the whole argument all together, Solonas decisive categorisation of personality traits and attitudes leaves little interpretation, a feat I quite appreciate. While the SCUM can be perceived as misandry, there is a noticeable truth in her work, a more inquisitive approach to man-hating, if you must.

Digressing once more into pronography, Dworkin serves as a guide by reverting back to Ancient Greece, a time of prostitution and degradation, delivering a needed monologue of porn and the women becoming such: “In the male system, women are sex; sex is whore. The whore is pornē, the lowest whore, the whore who belongs to all male citizens: the slut, the cunt. Buying her is buying pornography. Having her is having pornography. Seeing her is seeing pornography. Seeing her sex, especially her genitals, is seeing pornography. Seeing her in sex is seeing a whore in sex. Using her is using pornography. Wanting her means wanting pornography. Being her meaning being pornography.” Progressing to modern times, the women left to prostitution, sex work, a rotating body on a pole for those to throw money toward, the exchange between money and sex is hardly dissimilar. It leads to a very simple pathway: The women lack a declared self by the male, she is stripped of human authority and objectified for the budding fat on her body, she is homed near fathers, uncles, distant male relatives to comment on the shortness of her skirts and mothers always forcing them to cover up, she acknowledges in every institution where she lacks a penis she is valued only for how she can service his, her suffering becomes their pleasure, a turning point to get off at, and so she is once more categorised by her family issues, her clothes tailored to her profession, even her hair colour and the way it is parted, until every action she does is labeled worthy enough to jack off to, to video, to enjoy. A summary by Dworkin is written as such: “The word whore is incomprehensible unless one is immersed in the lexicon of male domination. Men have created the group, the type, the concept, the epithet, the insult, the industry, the trade, the commodity, the reality of women as whore. Woman as whore exists within the objective and real system of male sexual domination.”

Simon De Beauvoir makes an appearance once more, a reference to her novel, Must We Burn Sade?, where she declares Sade’s sexuality to be akin to that of ‘autistic,’ which can better be defined as, “it is violent and self-obsessed; no perception of another being ever modifies its behaviour or persuades it to abandon violence as a form of self-pleasuring.”³ In connection to Mailer’s claim on the voice of reason being pleasure and to intervene on pleasure is to remove reason, the connection stands in the male’s pleasure of violence toward to women, being an allotted raison d’être as the inability to achieve one leaves the other faulty and displeasurable.

To wrap this up, I digress into the personal. The first day I entered middle school, it was mandatory to take a sex-ed class. Deciding to get it out of the way, I was in a trailer for five days a week, covered in artificial light and decaying carpet with my enthusiastic gym teacher whose monologues rides the line of professionalism and her experiences often exacerbated for our enjoyment. The boys took home on one side of the class, their remarks and intentional laughter, drove us girls on edge. Frustration was a common symptom when diagrams, videos, painful personal stories drove the class lectures, yet reflecting back almost a decade later, it is painful to know how us young girls never laughed, each hand always raised to answers on body parts, a sort of unity, formed by a needed convulsion to stay together when each class began. As mentioned before, external factors play significant roles in the way men develop an obsession for pornography, mostly that of abuse and violence, but their internal factors spurs by such exterior notions, became our external experience. That is to say of the talks mother’s have with their young daughter if someone has every touched them in their ‘no-no square,’ of conflict toward what shows the least so you don’t get followed home by the viewpoint of your collarbone, of the knowledge that you can harbour more scars upon your skin if you deny your first date a hand to your body, following an even more common occurrence of death. It all drives one another until the mere knowledge that you wield a vagina become the only currency of your needed existence.

While I should have some extensive, meaningful conclusion to all that I have managed to write down, I personally don’t think a solution can be granted. More so, I aimed to capture the loss of humanity women are granted at the need for men’s pleasure, and how such a facet concludes the lives of each women in every single institution, industry, and path in life.

To be a woman is to know death so intimately you live it a thousand times over through the existence of the life, handed to you by your mother and ended by the moving hand of every man you encounter.

¹: Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (ibid); Great Sex-pectations, Isabel Owen

²: Nancy Tuana, The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance

³: Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

⁴: The Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life

Amanda Schlicht

The notion of honouring a women has developed into the context of sexual gratification, as the man ceremoniously falls to his knees and the woman lays on her back. While facilitating women’s fantasies and men’s stringent appetites, the basis of ‘honouring’ a women wreaks havoc on our death sentence, representing our last depiction to those in black heels and even blacker ties. The core of women’s struggles lie in the simplicity of ‘honouring,’ as they are tied up in sexual escapades and unwarranted death sentences. The issue remains simple: Eulogies have become overrated.

This opinion is rooted in my identity as a woman. A woman who has a present mother, a known grandmother, a sister, female relatives. It stands in a future of black dresses, wet grass and stained mud trousers, empty tissues boxes, flower-filled tents and an eventual grey headstone. It means those who have surpassed me will come to recognise in shame-filled speeches huddle up at the podium, as they announce to many, or even few, of the latest moments spent together, and while they laugh over our past conversations they imagine I might be doing the same too. Now, ridden with normalcy in this context, imagine a speech of children remembering their mother, their partner coming to the podium, a possible grand-child carefully announcing each word they have written the night before, and while those burdened by grief may push their heads together and tighten their pinky’s, this symbol of unity is entrenched in monologues developed from Pinterest, rewritten in sprawled handwriting where the letter ‘y’ is a straight line, but in their rush they made sure to dot each ‘I’. A blur of monotone syllables, praising the women’s devotion to her family as she managed to self-sabotage, self-slaughter, reinvent, and tarnish her personality and passions and excitement as they made their way through late school mornings and every home-cooked meal. Women, mothers, deserve more than the context of their labor as means of appreciation, as means of ‘I love you and I’m sad you passed‘. The overall lack of change of their level of gratification toward their death degrades each un-slept sick nights and stretch-marked layers of skin, leaving each women’s monetary value to be based on their proficient ability to be a mom, rather than be a person.

Euology Example for Mothers.. from son and daughters, cancers and suitable poems to read in front of others, the issue extends further than this, runs deeper than sudden death speeches and unknown relatives aged 20 years. Why does death and sexual favours all we are promised as women? To some, the issue is ‘not that deep’ nor does it house any relative ground of importance in the matter of death, but I am willing to disagree on the notion that women have deserved more in every single current period of history than they were ever given, and developing such claim as I have now, my digression on reused eulogies stems from a certain lack of empathy, that in some respects explains the debasement women face in socio-political and economic terms. In continuation of this supposed ‘theory,’ it is necessary to acknowledge that these speeches are not the root cause of degradation or inequality women face, but rather a facet to explore, compared to the usual gender pay gap or physical abuse women are to endure in their lifetime.

In some ways I wish to relay the delicacy of womanhood, the grace and pride we hold like the hands of our mothers, to grasp at every crevice of our bodies and show the purpose of each finger and piece of skin attached to our beating hearts while we managed to create the body of another. Maybe, I just wish to bring life into each women carpooling seven children for her third night in-a-row and her dinner’s once again, forgotten. I want to shield the bodies of the younger girls who have known other hands than their own. Often, in my head, such issues regarding the health, safety, and overall well-being of women become redundant, scarily normal, and always a hinderance. I remember each tear shed in windowless rooms, the act of weaving through the sidewalk as I pushed the bodies of my friends away from the catcalls, fisted hands, beer bottles near empty and another in their back pocket. I didn’t have a word for such fear, if it was intended to men as a whole or to those I felt I couldn’t outrun, but in a minute conclusion, the effects of womanhood follows the ultrasound and pink balloons to death and even past the grave.

Furthering the discussion of womanhood, why has honouring women become so hard? To alter the descriptor of the sentence, words such as cherish, accept, uplift, dedicate, heal, might create for an easier conversation but the significance is consistent: The lack of such descriptors above created the narrative that punished women for centuries as their place in society was seen as less than a indicator for respect and more so a position of earned merit. While easy to acknowledge, it is rather hard to digest when force-fed a subservient status out of common place tradition instilled in society centuries, even millennium prior, and so therefore even in present moments, adjusting to the inferiority become the first acknowledgement of being a women, the next step is determining how little you wish to adjust for social acceptance.

I divulge once more into the commonplace ritual of reused eulogies. Expressing the nurture women often neglect toward themselves, a sort of degradation of personal worth in order to uplift their children, or family, or even socially established standards, the daily practice is seen as normal, a sort of rival to hustle culture where you are deemed a ‘mother’ if sleep is conditional, every home-cooked meal takes personal free-time, that by extension you live vicariously through your kids in theme parks, school events, children’s tv programs. While I hate to demean children in such a light, mother’s begin a process of being condemned for their children who cry in grocery stores as they juggle shopping and crinkled receipts as they wonder when they next phone bill hits their account. They are personal chauffeurs in cars oiled in three-week-old fries and misplaced gum dried in summer heat. They become professional cleaners three-months in and juggle coinciding naps, late homework, PTA meetings, and food the kids are willing to eat. All of this is to say, the existence of mother, and by extension women, has been misconstrued, punished, diminished, and blindly encapsulated into a few minor point of gratefulness for their ability to provide attached to a few remarks of their unwavering generosity, are the last words attached to the mother, by their tender impartialness.

Often, scrolling through social media, in this case Tiktok, the movement of slideshows filled with forlorn quotes paired to slowed music meant for the effects of personal devastation and splicing parental issues, misogyny makes an appearance in forms of personal encounters and statements delivered by women congregated in moments of unity, where women can like, repost, comment, follow, inform, rebuild and so on of how men have affected them. In relation to motherhood here is a quick comment, “If you knew as many women I know, who are forced or coaxed into marriages, where the man uses then only for sex, to birth kids, to take care of his parents, to iron his clothes and serve his tea to his friends, with absolutely no regard for her well being or happiness and you saw women just tagging along walking behind them, hands full with kids and a belly full with another one, doing things on command existing as nothing but to serve them, you’d want to set them on fire too.” While strung together from quotes of women’s secret belief of their own insanity, the strange abuse of personhood as a teenage girl, God and his detriment to womanhood, the mourning women shelter for themselves, the background solidifies the present post with Adele’s, “Love in The Dark.” It is the multitude of posts akin to the emotional depth, everlasting empathy, women don and in itself allows women to complain, and argue, throw pity parties and question each intimate detail about themselves on their displayed bodies. Women know what they want, how they wish to be treated, and even more presently the standards they hold themselves to. A resilience unmatched, unwavering, and purely female.

I’ll end this with one simple idea: Eulogies women receive on the day to commemorate their death are too mundane, overworked, and dissolve women personhood to a mere recognition of their labor and ability to cater. Should you ever have to honour a women past the sentence of death or foreplay, may you understand the preconditions their body were forced to handle and should you leave commonplace poems, know that actions become much more complacent with recognition than toleration.