Glossary of key terms in the politics of penetration

Customarily in the west we use the word civilisation to refer to the condition of economic development, and the lifestyles and mores associated with it. To me, this seems a dishonest, decadent, imperialist arrogation; I wish we could reclaim for the term its origins in the civil, the peaceful interaction of the polity.

But there is a more sinister aspect to this origin than that might suggest. To civilise, according to the New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language (only, being American, Webster spelt it civilize), is to reclaim from a savage state; to introduce order and civic organisation among, and so on. It refers to a process that began with the Urban Revolution.

Classically defined, civilisation entails urban development, social stratification, formal government, and writing—or some form of symbolic recording system, since many early civilisations existed before any alphabet emerged; each had their own form of proto-writing, as do most complex societies, including the Australian First Nations. More about that later.

Around ten thousand years ago, in Mesopotamia, a series of brutal droughts across a landscape of scattered villages led to catastrophic social breakdown, endemic inter-clan violence, and the abandonment of unprotected homes for the building of walled cities. How did these cities get built? Which clan or clans assumed control of the construction process, administration, government, supply? Perhaps in some cities it was a council of elders from some or all the local clans, perhaps sometimes a single, brilliant despot; either way, for the first time, a new class of elites gained the power of life and death over a population larger than their own kin.

So this is civilisation; it emerges, for better or worse, from the ashes of a failed complex society. Yet not much later, in places like ‘Ain Ghazal in Jordan and the lower Danube region in the Balkan foothills, goddess-worshipping complex societies evolved peacefully into small civilisations. A complex society is a civil structure like the network of clans that co-existed across what is now Australia, before colonisation: a number of clans coexisting peacefully, settling disputes by an agreed system of laws without any central authority.

Despite not building stone cities or developing cuneiform, Aboriginal people were wiser, or luckier (or perhaps both) than the Mesopotamians: they did not over-farm the land; when they had long droughts, the social order did not collapse. It just got wiser. For sixty thousand years, the clan system developed and refined its laws without anyone ever needing to build a fortification. Each clan held the power of life and death over those who trespassed on their territory; no centralised state apparatus ever assumed that power over everyone on the continent… until colonisation.

So civilisation is a social order imposed from above; that means no matter how we twist or spin it, it’s inherently undemocratic. Democracy is a patch, a modification, an attempt to protect civilisation against its own fundamental structural weakness: a tendency to totalitarianism. Democracy is, in fact, an earlier version of what needs doing now: a reassertion of feminine values—community and egalitarianism—to temper a self-destructive patriarchy.

~~~

If—let’s dream for a moment—Australia were not, at bottom, a profoundly alienated penal outpost built on rum, sodomy and the lash; if we had ever truly faced the many horrors inherent in how we got to here; if we could even begin to grasp what magnificence we destroyed by ruthless displacement, if we had not squandered the twentieth century’s rare chance of reconciliation and revival—if we were not now a nation in the grip of a corporate oligarchy led by a vulgarian media magnate and a couple of sweaty, overfed mining billionaires; if, indeed, we were able to elect and sustain a genuinely civilised government—the study of Aboriginal message sticks would not be so outrageously neglected.

Message sticks—a traditional, continent-wide symbolic communication system—served as both seal (an authorising artefact of the sender) and message for the receiver, and as memory aid for the carrier, who also brought an accompanying verbal message containing further detail. Message sticks—together with rock carving, hand stencilling (a form of signature), plant modification and other symbolic practices—constitute an alternative, not a precursor, to writing. Signs of a different kind of civilisation.

If (when?) today’s global civilisation does collapse, it’s likely that what will emerge in its ruins will be a literate complex society—or rather, a network of literate complex societies with unprecedented, if unreliable, connectivity. Then, perhaps, we can work toward equiliberation.

Deep ecology is a philosophy originating in the 1970s, arguing that the natural world has inherent value beyond its instrumental value to human beings. Sidestepping questions of (but not incompatible with) any value endowed by God or other supernatural or extra-dimensional entities, it points to the value necessarily endowed by all living organisms on others in a vast network of shared systems, while also framing value—worth—as an intrinsic quality of existence.

It follows from this argument that the developed world’s anthropocentric view of Earth, its ecosystems and organisms as simply resources for human enjoyment or consumption is unbalanced, inappropriate, unethical and ruinous, and deep ecologists—along with ecofeminists, social ecologists, Gaianists (see below) and the like—advocate the restructuring of human societies to arrest anthropogenic destruction of the biosphere.

Generally they urge depopulation, deindustrialisation, and a greater appreciation of life in harmony with nature rather than a constant demand for higher living standards (in Philosophilia’s catchphrase: decolonise, decapitalise, reorganise). The originator of the term deep ecology, Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, theorised that these social changes would occur naturally when people understood that our notion of the self as essentially contained and separate from our environment was false. In the early 1970s, that must have seemed not only possible but almost inevitable. Today the developed-world self is a thousand removes further from recognising its enmeshment in the natural world, and the most likely causes of depopulation and deindustrialisation are sickness, war, and economic and environmental collapse.

The politics of penetration offers a language with which to mediate and ameliorate this process. Understanding the self as a field in which the closed masculine and the open feminine work together to realise the will is the first step to breaking the solipsistically sealed entity that patriarchy presents as the individual. We are all parts of many networks, an infinite number of systems.

(See also ecocentrism, and for a less technical explanation, the related biocentrism.)

~~~

In the Greek pantheon, Gaia is one of the primordial deities, the personification of planet Earth and the ancestral Mother and sustainer of all life. Gaianism is a more self-consciously spiritual version of deep ecology, differing more in its rituals than its principles.

When I refer to the community of Gaia, I’m talking about the biosphere—all life on Earth: all living things in their myriad dynamic, interdependent, planet-dependent relationships, along with the Earth itself. When I refer to the biosphere, I’m using a scientifically-appropriate, depersonalised term for the same complex living entity.

Whether you prefer the humanist or the spiritual approach, both philosophies amount at heart to a profoundly respectful attitude toward the planet. It’s profound because it recognises some form of transpersonal connection between all life on earth, and it’s respectful because it commits, in this era of human-induced biosphere destruction, to the care and protection of what we now (from our weirdly alienated developed-world perspective) refer to as "the environment”—our sick and wounded Matrix.

Gaianism, it should be said, isn't generally a belief in the goddess Gaia; it's not even necessarily a religion at all. It’s perfectly possible to be Gaianist and Christian, for example; in fact the Biblical principles of reverence for God's Creation and our duty of stewardship should impel the true Christian to dismiss superstitious anxiety about idols and fetishes and embrace some form of deep ecology.

Nor is the idea either new-fangled or primitivist: Plato believed in a "world soul". Gaianism is often claimed to have originated in the 1970s with James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, but Lovelock and his co-author Lynn Margulis only restored to Western awareness knowledge that had never been forgotten elsewhere. Indigenous cultures the world over, ancient and modern, hold this so-called "belief" (awareness, knowledge) in common—everything in Nature (or material reality) and everything issuing from it, up to and including language and ideas, is connected, sentient, sacred. It's a little like what Christians call the Holy Spirit, Muslims call Ruh, and Jews call Shekhinah—active holiness present and in-dwelling. But there's a crucial difference: monotheistic religions abstract divinity, personify it in a super-terrestrial God, then see God as imbuing designated objects in the material world; for the older religions, divinity emanates from the material world itself. Anthropologist Edward Tylor, observing from the well-intentioned but excruciatingly alienated and utterly paternalistic vantage-point of the 19th-century ethnographer, labelled this belief animism—the attribution of spirit and sentience to the material world and material objects.

Lovelock went to the larger view—the "All is One" understanding common to animists, Buddhists, Hindus and even monotheists in their abstracted way ("all is one in God"), and tried to bring the monotheists back down to earth. He dressed the concept of cosmic oneness up in scientific language to engage a 20th-century intellectual readership, but he struggled to find adequate terminology to attract a mass audience. It never really caught on to explain that the Earth is a superorganism when that term applied already to beehives and termite mounds.

In any case, Earth is more of a holobiont—many species interacting on a host to make one live entity—but my interest in Gaianism isn't about defining the planet as a singular biological (or even spiritual) entity. It's more about an ethical, ecumenical approach to animism, accepting that if words like holy and sacred have any real meaning since the death of God it can only be in reference primarily to material reality, especially Nature, where our sense of the sacred is born and nourished. We humans and our arts and inventions are a part—a deeply interdependent part—of a vast, intricate network of energetic systems and species, in which damage done to any one part is, sooner or later, damage done to the whole.

All this dictates an urgent political priority: not only to fight environmental vandalism in all its many forms but also to admit that development itself is alienation—and so, crucially, to acknowledge the peoples whose cultures have not rejected our human entanglement in Nature, who have not lost the art of custodianship. If our civilisation is to survive its own cleverness it must acknowledge the sophistication of their cultures and their knowledge. We must, wherever possible, return to them their sovereignty, and ask their help to repair, wherever possible, the damage we have done.

Equiliberation is a neologism, a portmanteau of equilibrium and liberation. I use it to avoid the misconceptions inherent in the common assumption that matriarchy would simply reverse the problem presented by patriarchy.

I don’t think we should be aiming for matriarchy as such; I don’t think such a thing has really ever existed or ever could: dominance depends on the capacity for violence; soft power does not dominate. Equiliberation preserves a diffuse and diverse “archy”, a different kind of opposite to patriarchy—a balanced power-sharing between the genders that allows for diversity, establishes the fundamental freedoms and responsibilities of all members of society, cares for the vulnerable and maintains a genuinely just and minimally hierarchical order. It might sound like an implausible utopia; in fact it's the normal state of affairs within cultures untouched by patriarchy.

Since such societies are always relatively small, achieving equiliberation in today's world would require decades of concerted activism leading to massive engagement and decentralisation of power, creating (via unprecedented global agreement) networks of networks—a process perhaps only possible with the Internet, and even then fiercely contested.

But actually—we’re realists here—this sustainable, functional global society probably wouldn’t be possible even with the Internet, if not for the likelihood of accelerating cataclysm and mass death continuing in coming decades. Persistent pandemics, worsening environmental catastrophes, societal and supply-line breakdowns, war—the causes of large-scale loss of life loom around us. Planning for the longterm includes acknowledging that we may yet find ourselves among scattered pockets of survivors on a post-apocalyptic planet. If we’re lucky, we’ll still have the Internet… for we will survive by the preservation of knowledge, the decentralisation of power, the stabilising of population growth, and the reascendance of the feminine.

There are almost as many definitions of feminism as there are people practising it and, in a way, that's how it should be. Fundamentally (and aside from all the other valid definitions), feminism is a broad-based objection to patriarchy, or patriarchal systems of governance, wherever (and, at this point, to whatever degree) they operate—on the basis of the injustice, waste, loss and suffering caused by patriarchy’s orientation toward competition, hierarchy and unification at the expense of community, diversity and the nurture of the vulnerable, and because the direction in which patriarchy has steered human development these past few thousand years has brought us literally—between the military-industrial complex, pollution, overpopulation, and environmental collapse—to the brink of destruction.

Philosophilia’s feminism is intrinsically intersectional, being built on the belief that if the feminist movement, in all its forms and conditions, is a response to historically established patriarchy and its products (imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, et cetera), it is one (or rather many) of several such oppositional responses, which come not only from women in their multitude of contexts but from all the various other demographics negatively impacted by the hierarchical societies and fast-growing, forced-competition economies favoured by patriarchy wherever it appears. Patriarchy’s oppressions are numerous and diverse, and we should all fight from our separate positions when we must, and together whenever and however we can.

Ultimately, the morality of patriarchy depends on what we can prove—spiritual convictions aside—about the nature of life in general, and human life in particular. And the one foundational fact we really can prove, logically if not scientifically, is that life exists at the very least for its own sake—to live, to be. Our fundamental moral obligation, then, is to life—to continued reproduction, to the survival of our own and related species (and the biosphere we inhabit). Biologically speaking, of course, that process is the purview of women; the male of the species exists to complete a loop, and then to provide backup. All our modern problems stem from that ancient moment when men saw, as they began to work as a team and build storehouses and count beans and weigh grain, that if they competed with women for worth instead of serving their interests, they could build a whole new world—a grander, nobler, better world; or so it must have seemed.

And so it is, in many ways—no one should argue that nothing good came out of ten thousand years of the oppression of women. We better have paid that price for a reason. Certainly men gained a great freedom of opportunity, despite nothing they did ever entirely releasing them from their bondage to women (and it wasn’t for lack of trying). Certainly the process has been one of vast learning, of extraordinary development. Yet now, via the same runaway process, all these gains are in jeopardy, along with everyone and everything.

Feminism is no longer simply the fight for a better deal for women; it’s a battle for the survival of the species. It’s essential that we call out, analyse, deconstruct, rebuke and resist men’s—indeed, anyone’s—tumescent tendency to regard everything in the universe as mere resources for their own utility. We demand a finer balance between exploitation and nurture. Here at Philosophilia, we hope to provide a forum for ideas, plans, policies and programs to reduce the dominance of patriarchal structures everywhere they manifest.

Not all men, not only men

Philosophilia’s definition of feminism would be incomplete without the specific exclusion of the self-proclaimed “feminist” movement among right-wing women today. “Conservative feminists” are the world’s most insincere, opportunistic women: the engine and emblem of the modern modified patriarchy. Individual women’s advancement in and through patriarchally conservative political institutions like the Liberal-National Party Coalition in Australia and the Republican Party in the US is not feminism—feminism has always demanded structural, not cosmetic change to the status of women. Individual women in politics upholding the loss of autonomy suffered by women as a population under patriarchy are in no way feminist.

“Because feminism is a movement for liberation of the powerless by the powerless in a closed system based on their powerlessness,” wrote Andrea Dworkin in 1983 with her usual lacerating perspicacity, “right-wing women judge it a futile movement.” But in the decades since the publication of her book Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females, it’s turned out that feminism isn’t futile after all—conservative women have seen it become both a threat and an opportunity. And as conservative men have fought feminism back and been forced to make a few concessions, they’ve struck a deal: men will accept women in politics and prominent in public life if those women will look nice and commit to the broad principles of patriarchy. Turns out women who can fit the job description (AND survive the inevitable abuse from both the general public and the men they work with) are plentiful.

The essential flaw in conservative feminism is its continued belief in the closed system: there is no escape from patriarchy; it’s how things are, how they’ve always been, how God made the world. This is a position of ignorance, wilful or genuine; if we look beyond our own culture, place and time, that “reality” is self-evidently untrue. The resulting internal contradiction reduces right-wing “feminism” to a bad-faith validation of personal ambition.

If feminism is to succeed in its revolutionary project to dismantle patriarchy, it must look reality squarely in the eye—in all its multiple eyes. On the evidence of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies and the entire archaeological record, patriarchy developed as a broadscale system only after agriculture; it was rare or non-existent before. It has existed for a small fraction of the time since humans began to develop culture, and it was by no means everywhere. It’s still far from universal. It has now precipitated an existential crisis and is currently in a moral slough amid an unstable world. It can be undone.

~~~

My maternal uncle, an elderly statistician, is also my godfather. He’s a committed evangelical Christian, but he’s appalled by the conduct of the religious right in Australia: we’ve had some passionate conversations about faith and morality, and although his cosmology seems mad to me I can’t fault where his heart is. Even so, my jaw almost hit the table, at dinner a few years ago, when he said that as far as he could see, the only hope for a decent fix for humanity’s current problems “is to put women in charge. Women just do things differently; they could sort this all out.”

People of goodwill the world over are either coming to this realisation, or have always known it. Feminism, as the radical opposition to patriarchy, is mainstreaming because it’s plain, survival-impelled common sense. The great challenge in this quest for feminine-style global governance—collegiate, compassionate, accommodating, collaborative—is that the shift must be fast (in evolutionary terms), non-violent and massive. This revolution, this salvation—the dismantling of patriarchy—was never and would not now be possible but for two new things: the Internet—the Empire’s own most recent disruptive innovation—and, perhaps more importantly, the fury of our most formidable ally, Mother Earth herself. The planet is arming the feminist revolution with firepower far beyond that of any empire: Gaia will bring the violent compulsion which every revolution needs but which is normally unavailable to women—and Earth’s climate paroxysms will not stop until well after we pull the global rapist off her back.

A time of enormous trauma and loss is already upon us, and violence is rising worldwide. Nations will continue to compound these horrors for some years yet. Things will get worse before they get better, but the reassertion of respect for the feminine must start locally and grow globally if humankind is to have a future worth having—a future in which freedom means anything at all.

There are, you know, no guarantees of victory. Patriarchy under threat resorts routinely to carnage; this will surely accelerate. The culture wars will likely turn lethal, the state devolve into barbarism—though thinking of Trump, Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison and their ilk, one might argue it already has. But I can’t tell you it won’t get worse. Perhaps our best efforts will fail. Perhaps, with our perverse, borrow-against-the-future technological ingenuity, we’ll stumble all the way into an oversupplied, under-distributed apocalypse of alienation, neurosis, disease, violence and mass death, like the population in the mouse utopia experiment and the last gasp of humanity will be a rocket-ship full of billionaires and their servants, drifting through space until their oxygen runs out.

Perhaps. But the more we lose, the more we trash, the more the established order is disgraced. Patriarchy itself must step aside—take a negotiated package, agree to a staged transition, commit seppuku. Take your pick, gentlemen. If you’re honourable we’ll gladly accept your assistance to make the transition, but if we are to preserve anything meaningful, anything important, any real lessons from the last ten thousand years, governance must change now, and fast.

Traditionally, imperialism is the policy and the ideology of extending a nation's power and influence through colonisation of land and people, via military force, diplomacy, or pretty much any means the imperialist can get away with. Today’s empires may be built on nation-state territory or corporate wealth.

But ideologies don't just impel nations and corporations; they impel people, and I look at imperialism in the interpersonal realm as an aspect of the same ideological attitude, so "manspreading" is imperialist behaviour; bullying, ruthless competition, environmental destruction for profit, rape—all imperialist. It’s fundamentally invasive, arrogant, tumescent (inflationary, rigid, ill-considered), violent, and ultimately unstable—that is, unsustainable. That’s unsustainable on a global timeline: its few thousand years are all but up. When the climate wars come and everything falls, there will be no new empire.

If there are people at all, they may well be small communities isolated by stretches of unsafe terrain. They will probably be connected, if unreliably; solar power will be common and even global warfare won’t bring down all the satellites. In some areas, survivors may be forced to fortify, or fall to desperate marauders; in others they may sustain travellers and take in the homeless. It’s to be hoped that the best of the wisdom of millennia is preserved, not least the truth of the tradeoff between peace and prosperity, even when there is little of either left. Only thus might we reach and maintain the lost sustainability of equiliberation.

The archaeological record tells us that human art and spirituality go back at least a hundred thousand years. Patriarchy, universal and timeless as it may seem to us today, is in fact neither. It first began to appear somewhere between six and twelve thousand years ago—roughly in train with agriculture and proto-writing. It's still far from universal: there are many matrilineal and/or matrilocal societies around the world, as well as uncounted First Nations clans with more complex non-patriarchal social systems. Such differing systems may be largely intact, damaged by patriarchal colonisation, or vestigial, like Judaic matrilineality.

At its most basic, patriarchy is a society or system of government in which fathers or eldest males are head of the family, descent is reckoned through the male line, and men hold all or most property and civic power. Beyond that, certain markers seem to attend patriarchy wherever it operates—monotheism is usual; literacy, militarisation, economic and technological development, imperialism—and, of course, the devaluation of the feminine and the oppression of women. It's a mixed bag of good and bad, and the causal relationships linking all these phenomena are not yet clear (although Cheikh Anta Diop has some pertinent observations and Leonard Shlain proposed a provocative theory). One thing that's becoming increasingly clear, though, is that patriarchy no longer serves us—the human race—at all well.

The privileging of masculine modes has thrown the world—by which I mean both human society and the entire biosphere—out of balance. Industrial development—the fruit of patriarchy—threatens our continued survival at least as much as it enables it. But big systems do not give up power easily, even when threatening their own existence, even when asked only to share, even when forced to compromise. Evolving through the Enlightenment, the Industrial Age, two world wars and a series of social revolutions, patriarchy has modified its parameters to allow women civic power, as long and insofar as they support the system patriarchy built.

At the liberal end, it’s much like the seductive US television series NCIS, which makes one of America's favourite claims with its own particular panache: you can be a girl, a rebel, a nerd, black, disabled, and still have your talents recognised and cultivated, still play a useful, even powerful role in civic life—as long as you accept the fundamental good of ruthless competition, the fundamental precedence of masculine priorities, and the fundamental righteousness of militarised imperialism.

Much of NCIS’s attraction is in how stylishly it mediates and ameliorates these harsh principles: its merry upholding of what we might call Liberal Patriarchy’s Secondary Principle, cooperation, through the incorporation of the feminine. Oh, don’t get me started, there’s an entire essay there just on Hetty Lang.

So, since the period in European culture known as the Enlightenment, democracy—originally an agreement between elite men to prevent the agglomeration of power to a single individual—has evolved in ways such men could never have predicted. Now, in a globalised and industrialised world, patriarchy faces a crisis of operability, as global connectivity chips away at traditional hegemonies. Where once a limited concept of democracy upheld patriarchy, now the two systems are at odds.

Australia, like almost all developed nations, is a modified patriarchy. As with most modern states it expressly rejects the term, at least as an intent—only some major Churches and some Islamic theocracies are still formal patriarchies. In the secular west the rule of men is a subtler thing: a historical infrastructure: a political structure officiated predominantly by men in which all major policy-enacting systems—legislature, judiciary, enforcement, communications—privilege men's priorities, men’s activities, and masculine values. Hence working as an early childhood educator pays far less than, say, stockbroking, despite its obviously greater intrinsic importance to society; hence also police have a history of returning battered women to their abusers and even now, in the 21st century, are so often too slow to protect terrified abuse victims from spousal murder; and hence competition (a yang value) is rewarded far more liberally than its yin, cooperation, which is enforced, as far as possible, on all who lack the resources to successfully compete. As a structure that dictates, as far as it can, a ruthlessly competitive society, patriarchy cannot seem to stop itself from stripping the environment, mining the future, and driving us all toward extinction. This is a condition I call tumescence.

Patriarchy maintains its dominance by a combination of violence, threat, bribery, deception and compromise. The 20th century showcased many of its strengths but also exposed each of its many faults in turn—galloping industrial development causing ideological splintering, economic instability, world wars, a global pandemic. Overpopulation has its price, and if women (who in a strong patriarchy are forbidden even the management of their own fertility) are prevented from organising across society to manage population levels, that price must eventually be paid in chaos and death. But that was just the first half of last century: violent social revolutions, exponential weapons expansion and resource extraction, calamitous industrial accidents, and serious, now possibly fatal, environmental damage followed. Patriarchy didn't blink.

Actually, the figure of the patriarch took some heavy hits in the late 20th century, but as all fighters know, you aren't much of a warrior if you can't absorb a few body blows. By the late 1990s, patriarchy was rallying: conservative powers in the USA had succeeded in elevating the amiable, obedient son of a former patriarch to the presidency, while here in Australia John Howard, a Methodist lawyer who affirmed decisively that the human race should be referred to as “mankind”, had begun his long, regressive, media-assisted reign. In the UK, a nominally labour-oriented playboy enjoyed dinners and more with moguls while doing deals. Clearly, in the face of the spectacular intellectual, artistic and cultural developments of the late 20th century, dominant powers in the West were adamant against any further progress toward that democratic utopia which young citizens had envisioned with such optimism at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Then, literally out of the blue, came 9/11—a small but self-consciously virile patriarchy attacking the Big One. The symbolism of the planes penetrating the towers couldn't be more explicit: fuck you and your giant phalluses; fuck you. And Big Patriarchy reared up and beat its chest, and vowed, as patriarchies do, to avenge itself sevenfold, to crush all opposition. It's been pretty much all downhill from righteous outrage to paranoid persecution mania to crisis of democracy ever since, despite—or possibly because of—the equally fast-flying curveball of the Internet.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed that throughout history major technological inventions "all but wreck" the societies that create them; the Internet's rapid expansion of communications has certainly torn the West apart. The great question of the 20th century has now split societies asunder: what exactly constitutes a just society in a globalised age, in a capitalist democracy? Is it traditional patriarchy, modified patriarchy (women and non-elite men can also exercise power, though the field is not level, the rules are not fair and the opportunities are limited), or the outright rejection of patriarchy, which amounts to a revolution the likes of which the world has never seen?

At least, not since the young gods murdered the Great Mother and took charge.

One of the most interesting things about the modern world’s revised patriarchy is its built-in disavowal: since two centuries of feminist agitation have not eliminated male dominance, we are invited to deduce that it's natural and inevitable for men to be the (principle) holders of societal power, and that therefore such politicising labels are vain, dangerous, subversive. It’s like Fight Club: the first rule of patriarchy is... you don’t talk about patriarchy. It’s the price we’re supposed to pay for the concessions we have won.

But in the Information Age, there’s no hiding the abuses patriarchy entails. Since the Great Depression and the two world wars, men have been forced to cede a little power; since the Internet, a little more. Patriarchy, it turns out, is more adaptable than you’d expect—or, at least, its democratic arm is. Its other arm is readying for war.

When it comes to the idea of natural rights—rights as a cosmic truth entirely independent of human ethics—I’m agnostic. Maybe our universal human ideals—love, truth, honour and so on—come from a reality beyond the one we can observe, maybe not. We can't truly know. What we can know is that we make our own laws—we decree what those perhaps-otherworldly ideals actually are, and how they should be served. So between the uncertainty of any super-universal moral power and the specific cultural contexts from which every faith’s ethics emerge, I prefer to see rights as something we humans decide.

Of course, that makes them also something in constant revision, competition, negotiation, and dispute. You may have noticed.

Regarding the singular, adjectival "right", much the same applies, only with a twist. The etymology of the word—from the Latin rectus: "ruled", via the Old English riht: "just, good, fair; proper, fitting; straight, not bent, direct, erect”—illustrates what a deeply (yes, we're going there; it's the politics of penetration) what a deeply phallic notion righteousness actually is. It shows us the ancient promotion of the concepts of straightness and firmness—impugning, on principle, curve and flexibility and deviation, making the hard line synonymous with justice and the good, when in fact there is more to real justice and actual good than simply being right. Right is a patriarchal concept.

Don’t assume I’m saying that makes it bad—on the contrary, it’s one of the finest building blocks of human ethics. But real ethics are a matter of balance between conflicting priorities: ethical principles apply differently depending on context, and when right becomes righteous it legitimises violence against those it deems wrong, and can, in an instant, become wrong itself. We can see this self-justifying violence in US and Australian politics on the right particularly, and on social media, where self-righteous verbal violence is clamorous on both sides.

Incidentally, if you've always wondered why the left and right of politics are so-named, it dates back to the lead-up to the French Revolution, and the arrangement of the French National Assembly, a short-lived governing body assembling the Estates-General (the clergy, nobility and commoners) in the hope that the king could settle their differences. Following the traditions applying to European banquets and assemblies since time immemorial, those loyal to the king and the old hierarchy took the place of honour on the right of the throne, those calling for a more equal sharing of power took up the left.

Of course, the French king failed to resolve his nation’s epic power struggle and himself fell victim to the violent restructuring that resulted. These days the arbitrating power that sits between the two sides is a function of the state, endowed not by God—as was believed of royalty—but by the people. This is supposed to ensure more responsive and responsible arbitration, but in reality—as with monarchs—it still depends very much on the attitudes of the person in the role.

From the Latin tumere, to swell (yes, it's related to tumour), tumescence is the medical word for penile erection—also, technically, for the swelling of labia, though that apparently fascinates us less. But tumescent appears in literature meaning pompous, pretentious—specifically in reference to men who think too much of themselves. In the politics of penetration, the word functions as shorthand for the destructive aspect of the “masculine erotic” as it operates in pursuit even of non-sexual goals: impetuous, opportunistic, invasive, overweening, grandiose, potentially destructive, and incapable of self-denial for the sake of long-term gain, or the greater general good, or even allegiance to avowed principle.

There is in all sexual arousal a certain self-justifying, self-serving, wilfully short-sighted force—for the preservation of species. But masculine tumescence, after several thousand years as a patriarchal fetish, has been cultivated beyond mere arousal, turned into an emblem of transcendence, abstracted in the collective psyche as what Freud, Jung, et al call the phallus—symbol and locus of male power. But tumescence (particularly for men) has a short lifespan—hence the boom-and-bust cycles of markets and economies run on tumescent principles. Build it up, knock it down, move on, do it again. Get an advantage however you can, don’t wait for permission unless you have to, find a way in, aim for mastery, thrust on toward release, tomorrow be damned—that's the nature of business, which powers modern economies. But economies depend on ever-increasing extraction of ever-dwindling resources, and rape of the earth eventually leaves the rapist standing in a ruined landscape, impotent.