Reality Queens

How men author perception to keep women in line

The following is an extract from the draft of my forthcoming book, I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage. I regretfully had to cut it because of space constraints, but a lot of the themes found here are explored in detail in the book (out in Australia on Oct 31st - and I’m still in search of a UK/North American publisher if you’re curious about how to buy it outside of Australia!) I’m sharing it here outside of the paywall, but if you enjoy this kind of content and would like to access more of it, you can subscribe to me here on Substack!

****

In her excoriating essay “To Be and Be Seen” (The Politics of Reality, 1983), the feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye ponders reality. What is it, who gets to create it and whose version is considered correct? Frye theorises that women are a paradoxical quandary for “the phallocentric system”, because we are expected to provide all of the infrastructure that enables men to occupy the foreground of perception while colluding with the pretence that we don’t exist at all. Under this system, men retain the right to author perception, which is to say they insist their perception is the only reliable kind. 

To demonstrate this, Frye asks the reader to imagine a statue. On one side, a man stands observing what it is he sees. On the other side, a woman. The man describes what he sees of the statue to the woman, but is astonished when she describes something completely different in return. That the statue might have multiple perspectives for the viewer, depending on which angle one stands at, doesn’t occur to the man. He has described what he sees in the statue, which means he’s described all that the statue is able to show. The woman, he concludes, must be looking at the statue wrong.

This persistent querying of women’s capacity to construct reality has been one of patriarchy’s most calculated attacks against us. Even today, in a world where all too many people insist the battles of feminism have been won, men still gather in groups large and small to not only author a general perception of the world that positions them as its natural, more capable leaders, but to also continually affirm their agreement that women, being feeble minded, illogical and unable to perceive in the same way as men, must not be able to perceive at all. Our perception must therefore be crafted for us by men, who are more than happy to tell us what is real and what is not.

In her book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, the philosopher Kate Manne refers to this conceit as men’s entitlement to “occupy the conversational position of the knower by default”. In retaining their right to be automatic knowers, men construct a reality in which women are good for little more than acting as maintenance workers. Being unable to perceive for ourselves and thus “hooked up to the senses of men” (as Frye has it), the minimal skills we have are put to use in the background, readying the stages on which men go forth and construct reality and facilitating the seamless, invisible transportation of props, lighting and costumes so the story suffers no interruption. We are good at being the background, the men tell us, constructing reality for everyone once again. We lack talent and capacity at a basic level, obviously, and the idea that we could ever measure up to the more complex expressions of ability that men are naturally in possession of is laughable. But there are a handful of things we’re able to do well, and maintaining the background is one we should be proud of (just as nineteenth century Victorian society expected women to take pride in their role as angels of the house, or the moral centre of domesticity and sacrificial love.)

Patriarchy conditions men to believe that their perception of the world is the correct one, and in doing so leads them to believe they are the architects of reality. In my forthcoming book, I Don’t (out October 31, through Allen & Unwin), I demonstrate how marriage is an artificial institution, unnecessary to our survival and purely the result of social conditioning. But because marriage serves men very well, the reality they’ve constructed for women in regards to it is constantly morphing in accordance with social progress. Once upon a time, women were told we needed marriage to stop us from succumbing to our vexatious, wandering wombs; now, we need marriage to keep us from being miserable old cat ladies. Our opinion on this matters very little, as does the qualitative and quantitative evidence of women’s ability to live happily outside of the marital system and the domestic service it conscripts us into. If we don’t agree with the patriarchal view that domestic subordination to men is in our best interest, we are simply seeing the statue wrong.

Attempting to annihilate the false reality doesn’t come without risk. Patrolling the perimeters of a reality they created for themselves, men reserve the right to eject or erase women who threaten the integrity of its structure. If a woman challenges male authority or attempts to assert a reality that contradicts the male viewpoint, she can expect to be met swiftly with some form of punishment. In the most extreme of circumstances, this obviously translates to physical violence (or at least the threat of it.) History is full of the stories of women whose transgressions against patriarchal reality have been met with retaliations so sadistic it’s almost too painful to bear witness to them. But bear witness we must - because who else will remember the women whose names were destroyed alongside the vessel that housed them? 

More commonly, this ejection from reality is expressed by assuming authority over our attraction or appeal to men. For example:

“You’re just angry men don’t want to fuck you!”

“Enjoy being single!”

“You’re fat/ugly/gross/old blah blah blah and that’s why you hate men.”

(Listen, men spend their teenage years fucking socks. Morgues are leery of hiring men because they’re more likely to fuck the corpses. They’d fuck a hole in the road if they could. The idea that men are particularly discerning about where they’ll stick their dicks is laughable.) 

But our disruption of patriarchal reality can’t be due to our own dissatisfaction with the reality on offer, because - as men love to lay claim to - it’s been built for us. More than that, it’s been designed by the people - again, men - who understand women better than we could ever understand ourselves. Men, whose good opinion (within the reality of their own design) is maintained as essential to women’s well being. Being unable to understand the complexities of reality herself, the disruptive woman’s frustration with it must therefore be a product of men’s disregard.

Not infrequently, men will fabricate a scenario in which a woman’s behaviour is directly linked to a man’s poor treatment of her. You’d think this would garner sympathy for her, an understanding at the very least that the anger she expresses has been prompted by great harm. And yet, for this she will also be flung out of existence. Part of maintaining patriarchal reality is the framing of women’s anger as pathological and twisted, evidence of the demonic energy that’s thought to be intrinsic to our existence. One of the (many) jobs men take on as the conservators of our extant livelihoods is to regulate our perception away from the whispers of insanity that lie within and towards the even keel of their own. Those who respond well to this paternal love can be assured that the madwoman who runs back and forth along the attic floors of our minds will never be unleashed. We might hear her, but she can be suitably maintained as long as we commit ourselves fully to living under the banner of men’s authority.

The underlying message is that women’s only purpose within reality is to satisfy men’s needs. To be deprived of this opportunity means to be literally without purpose.

Women learn early on that if we don’t facilitate men’s demands within their constructed reality or express gratitude for being allowed (peripheral) entry into it, we cease to have form within that reality. That there could be another reality - one we are able to see and construct for ourselves - is not immediately viewable to women conditioned by patriarchy, we who have learned that our eyes must be trained completely on men in order to stay tethered to reality. Men see the world, and we see the men. That’s the deal.

Aristotle - who is often referred to as the “father of western civilization” - believed that women were inferior beings, deformed versions of men whose creation was due to weak, cold semen. Charles Darwin - considered the “father of evolution” - maintained this belief in women’s inferiority, attributing the rare circumstances in which a woman might demonstrate intelligence to her paternal genetic inheritance. Sir Matthew Hale - considered one of the “greatest scholars on the history of English common law” and whose seventeenth century views on abortion (“it is a great moral crime”) were quoted by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the majority opinion that successfully overturned Roe Vs. Wade - is responsible for codifying the legal doctrine that made it impossible to prosecute a man for raping his wife, because his conjugal rights dictated that her body belonged to him. In the UK, this doctrine wasn’t overturned until 1991, which makes the criminalisation of marital rape in that country only as old as Ed Sheeran. For thousands of years, men have asserted themselves as the seers of the world, far more capable than us dimwitted girlies of articulating its reality and therefore responsible for guiding us safely through it. 

You’d think the passage of time might have jettisoned us into a progressive future but no - we can still see the fallout of men’s unwavering faith in their right to see playing out today. Rather than presenting as the strangled cries of a beast in its dying moments, the democratisation of the internet and the increased accessibility men now have to take up space in the online village square has arguably made the problem worse. Once upon a time, it was men in the ruling class who reserved the right to formally decide what women were and why we existed at all. Now, it’s men everywhere, determined to share every last nonsense view they’ve concocted or borrowed about women, our true purpose and the innately trivial impact we’ve had on the world. Rarely have these men actually talked to women. Even rarer still are the times they’ve read women’s work, consumed women’s art, observed women with curiosity rather than disdain. Despite this abject disinterest in viewing women as humans capable of speaking for ourselves, men continue to assert an expertise on women that supercedes our own. Why would they need to engage with women at all to know exactly who we are, what we want and, most importantly of all, what we need? They’re men! They wrote the story of women!

And they will tell it, and tell it, and tell it again until you accept that they know best.

***

What does it mean when women begin to see for themselves?

“To Be And Be Seen” was published in 1983, but its essays were written during the 1970s. With that in mind, Frye also attempts to answer a paradoxical quandary being dealt with at the time by feminist lesbians like herself: how can the term “lesbian” be properly defined when lesbians don’t exist?

Stick with me here. To a modern audience, this might seem like a bizarre endeavour. I mean, we all know what a lesbian is - a lesbian is a woman who has more orgasms than those of us who sleep with cis men.

But at the time of Frye’s writing, the Oxford English Dictionary was still defining a lesbian as “a person from the Isle of Lesbos”. Not especially helpful! 

Lacking grammatical definition, perhaps lesbians were defined by the legal system?

Again, no. Although lesbians have been persecuted throughout history, laws themselves have focused solely on criminalising sodomy between cis men. If the legal system persecuted homosexuality, lesbianism must have been subject to criminalisation. The sticking point here was that the law didn’t recognise lesbianism as a crime - and if lesbianism was invisible in the eyes of the law, did this render it invisible in reality too? 

Were lesbians simply women who had sex with each other?

This couldn’t be it, she concluded, because ‘real’ sex (at least according to the culture) had to involve penile penetration and ejaculation. If two or more people roll around together naked but a dick neither enters a hole nor explodes from excitement, did the sex really happen? Not even today’s audience would reach consensus on that, let alone the cock obsessed folk of the 1970s.

But say you did believe that sex between women was possible. Were lesbians like Frye subjected to hostility and homophobia because of a widespread belief that such things were perverted and evil? Given that girl-on-girl action had been a pretty constant theme in erotica and pornography throughout human history, it seemed unlikely. 

After examining it from all angles, the evidence was clear. Lesbians represented an ontological paradox incompatible with reality, and as a result could be definitively dismissed as imaginary. 

Case closed.

But if lesbians didn’t exist - if lesbians couldn’t exist, which would of course mean that Frye herself didn’t exist - she wondered how it was also possible for them to inspire so much anger and hatred. Why did people seethe so deeply with rage when lesbians - who did not exist - were suddenly dragged into reality as if they did? Could there be something else that defines a lesbian, some scale of measurement as yet undiscovered because it exists (for now, at least) outside of reality as well?

(Spoiler: yes.)

Lesbians very much exist, this we know. But Frye concludes that the lesbian is cast out of reality not because of how and whom she fucks, but how and whom she sees. 

Yes, lesbians are women who have sex with women. But this isn’t what scares patriarchal society. Patriarchy reserves the rights of men to construct reality for women. We have been taught, sometimes through coaxing and sometimes through force, to keep our eyes on men in the centre of that reality, all so we can be kept from wandering off and creating a reality of our own. 

The lesbians of Frye’s philosophical problem violate the conditions required to exist in patriarchal reality because they refuse to train their eyes to the men at its centre. This is also why “lesbian” is still wielded with such ferocious violence as retaliation against any perceived transgression against a man and his ego, regardless of the sexuality of the woman involved - because the punishment for a woman who refuses to defer to the man or men at the centre of reality is to be “spat summarily out of [it]”.

With respect to Frye - and indeed, with respect to lesbians, whom we know very much exist, have always existed and will always exist - I think fifty years on from her essay, we can extrapolate her meaning to include all women who violate the deeply encoded rules of patriarchal reality. 

Witches, spinsters, cat ladies, suffragettes, feminists, loud mouthed bitches on the internet who won’t shut up, Chelsea Handler, single mothers, divorced mothers, teenage mothers, childfree women, trans women, non-binary people, women with their wandering wombs, wombs that have wandered right out of the body and refuse to return, women who tell them off, women who say no, women who won’t laugh, women who laugh at them, me, you, them, all of us together, one long and binding line right back through history to the very first woman, whose name has long been forgotten, deliberately written out to erase her from reality, to spit her out and rewrite her story the way that suits them - all of these women and not-women have asked ourselves at one point or another whether we exist. 

Because if we exist, why are we so frequently told that we do not exist? That we cannot exist, that women like us aren’t real, that we’re aberrations? 

And if we don’t exist, why do we feel the pain of existence so keenly? Why do we feel the fury of not being listened to or understood, not being allowed even to speak? 

How can a thing that doesn’t exist feel so clearly all the ways she wants to exist, and yet be told such an existence is impossible?

This is the threat to patriarchal reality that cannot be allowed to take root, neither from Frye’s lesbians nor from any of us who risk pulling the thread loose and unravelling the whole thing from start to finish. As Frye concluded, patriarchal reality hates lesbians because lesbians look beyond the reality on display and see the women in the background - the thing you are not meant to see. In seeing women, lesbians show not only that women can be seen - but that they too can see. Seeing is believing. Nothing is more powerful than a woman who regains the power of her own perspective. 

Because when you are able to properly see, you learn, finally, that you are real.