16. All We Want is Everything - A Zine
An A-to-Z of Male Supremacism
The last few weeks have been hard ones and I haven’t been able to write as I’d planned. However, as a habit, I try to draw or paint every day, if even for just a few minutes. It’s a good way to detach from devices and think free of words for a while. In addition to whatever counts as normal these days, in terms of life and work, I have a book, All We Want is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy, coming out November 11 and, frankly, I intensely dislike book promotion, especially in today’s media, a circus. I wouldn’t have written the book though, if I didn’t think it might be of some use in how we talk about backlash and fascism. It seems fairly clear that male supremacy, globally, is central to this era and on the rise. At the very least, we should talk plainly about what it looks like and means and how to resist it.
There is a real press today (and a massive shift of money along with it) to orient feminism and social justice efforts towards cis men and their feelings. All We Want describes what this looks like and is substantively about why NOT doing this is essential and in everyone’s interests. I write about women and feminism decentering men to disrupt male supremacy and patriarchal violence. (“Decentering,” by the way — this is rich — keeps getting autocorrected to “recentering” when I type the word lol.) I also go into the many ways that today’s backlash is deeply, at its core globally, about restoring straight, cis men’s centrality and “natural” power, particularly in the US, white men’s. We see this every day in the news, in labor markets, in our politics, and more (think, for instance, of what’s going on in the military, an extreme and gobsmacking in its idiocy example). Even though it seems plain enough, we are also constantly being gaslit or scolded for “moral panic” for gaining this out or naming patriarchal coercion, control, violence and abuse.
Take this from The New York Review of Books’ recent publication of Mark Lilla’s on conservatism: “As he details, the alliance of alt-right neoreactionaries, Catholic postliberals, Christian nationalists, Straussian cranks, techno-futurists, misogynistic strongmen (and their acolytes, the “manosphere meatheads”), America First paleoconservatives, racists, and apocalyptists that makes up the MAGA right is guided not so much by an intellectual tradition progressing from Edmund Burke to Dwight Eisenhower as by “chthonic forces in human nature…” Which of these constituencies isn’t male supremacist to its core, even if they are not self-evidently misogynistic? The use of “misogynistic” to describe strongmen and their manosphere troops makes it seem as though the others aren’t either male supremacist or misogynistic. Whose interests does this serve? I, too, write about these disparate movements and their support for Trump and others like him, but from the perspective that the most predictable, cheap, and obvious link between them is commitment to fraternity and a deep sense of men’s “natural” superiority in All Things Important. This includes glam young things, bright and shiny women, and gay billionaire ascetics.
The book is also about how refusal = resisting this tide, and how, in refusing, we have been slowly but surely dismantling male supremacy, and building new ways of relating and being. Hence the powerful backlash. It was both enraging and optimistic to write and, I hope, will be to read.
So, this week, in lieu of a thinky, wordy post, I thought instead I’d combine all of these ideas, needs (to rest the brain and body), and thoughts (about other ways of doing things) into a feely, vivid zine that distills things to their essence. It feels better to put something maybe beautiful and joyful into the world. So here it is!
Best, and thanks as always, for reading and sharing. It means so much!
Soraya
PS: Please feel free to use and share any of these images, but if you do, please credit/tag me/All We Want is Everything. I’d love to know if you find them useful or a good way to engage others. (A download available at the bottom of the post.)
Incredible generous spot on. Thank you
Amazing! And beautiful and powerful and necessary! Thank you.