2/20/2025: Spinifex Launch of 'Man Against Being'
on Thursday, 2/20, i had the surreal – and supremely humbling – experience of sitting by while the formidable Lierre Keith (of WoLF, of Deep Green Resistance) delivered a powerpoint presentation on my book, Man Against Being. in a thousand years i could not have imagined such an astonishing occurrence – a powerpoint? my book? Lierre Keith? – and yet it occurred; there’s even video to prove it (see above). the launch also included kind notes on the book from the infinitely generous Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein of Spinifex, as well as a brief but fertile discussion with some of the brilliant women who tuned in for the event. i suppose i should say, too, that i was granted an opportunity to speak, and i’ll include the text of my talk below in case you’re one of these living fossil types who still insists on the advantages of reading over listening (in which case: hello, sister fossil!).
Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life is available now through Spinifex Press, as well as through the Evil Empire Mall of Doom, Bookshop.org, and any number of other booksellers. to get the book out there and doing its work in the world outside of our admittedly rather cozy radical feminist circles, you can also recommend that your local public library purchase a copy.
2/20/25 LAUNCH TALK
Man Against Being is a simple book, simple in its premise and in its plea. As a writer, I have sometimes been embarrassed of my own simplicity, worried that, because things often seem to me straightforward, I must be simple-minded, a synonym for stupid. As if the marker of intelligence were a baroque complexity and ambiguity drifting the mind ever farther from common sense: the facts as we sense them in our direct experience of this world we share in common. Yet I’m more and more confident that what is discredited as “simple-mindedness” is better termed “clarity.” In the epilogue to her novel Mercy, Andrea Dworkin writes of her proposition, scorned as simple-minded by more academic feminist peers, that “bad things are bad.” Really, though, “bad things are bad” is a perfectly valid moral principle; it would take us a long way if we were serious about it. A simple but clear morality is not necessarily the inferior of a complicated, vague one. The same can be said for simple ideas, simple concepts, straightforward thinking grounded in the simple observation of one’s reality.
Man Against Being is the product of such a simple observation. Having lived thirty odd years amongst humans in the United States of America, and having read a great deal, and watched films, and spoken with people and listened to them, it occurred to me that, in this society, we hate being bodies.
Soon I was seeing this hatred of organic, physical, biological bodiliness everywhere. And indeed, for many years, a disgusted loathing of the body I am dominated my own life; I knew the hatred intimately. From there the line of thinking I followed was straightforward: to hate being a body is to hate being a biological organism is to hate being alive on earth, is to hate living, to hate being. It seemed clear to me that this was the basic patriarchal psychopathology, the foundational defect in the ideological framework of society as men have wrought it.
When I tell people that I write about hatred of bodies in patriarchal society, they tend to assume that my topic is the standard liberal feminist hobby-horse of women’s dismal body image, the result of a misogynist capitalist culture which deluges women with imagery of artificialized female bodies-as-sex-objects and then assails us as the target market for a legion of commodities promised to grant us that painted plastic manmade-woman look. Obviously the hatred that women and girls are programmed to feel for their bodies as imperfect sex objects is a serious problem, and a source of real pain. But what I am getting at, in writing about body hatred, is not so circumscribed. Instead, my concern is what the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Spelman in 1982 termed “somatophobia,” which she defined as the fearful abhorrence for the biological body integral to the worldview of the patriarchal west. Spelman’s particular subject was the somatophobia that runs through the work of Plato, for whom the body was a grave in which the soul is buried, a prison in which the soul is caged, and an “impediment” which thwarts the soul in its quest for pure knowledge. With this, Plato set the tone of western thinking on bodiliness back in the fourth century BCE. The state of opinion has hardly improved since then.
Somatophobia is the common theme that binds together manmade civilization’s apparently disparate yet uniformly patriarchal religious, philosophical and scientific belief systems as merely varied riffs on a single monolithic ideology. In contemporary popular culture, somatophobia finds its expression in horror movies, transgenderism, New Age spirituality, cyberculture, technofetishistic transhumanism, and even certain strains of feminist thought. With Man Against Being, I try to make evident just how pervasive somatophobia is, and how invisible, so entrenched at this point that it easily escapes notice. Just because the body-as-grave formulation has been so normalized that we rarely consciously or explicitly articulate it for ourselves, the manmade culture we inhabit has by no means outgrown its somatophobic bedrock. The ruling male master class is no less terrorized by being bodies than Plato was. What has changed over the last several thousand years, however, is that today, when men lash out in horror and hatred, their coping mechanisms are possessed of a greater destructive power than ever before.
In the book, I write:
“Body horror churns septic at the core of Man’s delusional mentality, from which fear leaches steadily out congealing into the anxious alienation and anguished rancor that pollute to pathological the sum total of Man’s relations with the living world and its creatures, his fellow Man and himself not least of all. The revolt he launches against his own being is the original war, the primary antagonism that turns Man against the world.”
The war is ongoing, a constant smoldering just beneath the surface, until, vented as men’s violence against women, animals, and the biosphere, it reignites. We are all living in the war zone. Simply put: this is why our world is burning.
It is not difficult to understand Man’s fear. Bodies die, after all. As bodies, we are wounded, we sicken, we age unto infirmity, we die and decay back into the earth. Death is nonexistence, is the sudden cessation of oneself. It’s a frightening prospect. I cannot blame the forefathers for being spooked. But what they do deserve blame for is their total failure to reconcile themselves with the reality of mortality, turning instead to delusions of control, domination, and revenge. Ernest Becker, in his 1973 book The Denial of Death, theorized that the fear of death, and the stratagems devised to evade and to vanquish it, is what makes Man human, supreme over all other creatures. Becker writes, too, that manmade civilization has from its inception been molded by this nonacceptance of mortality. In his view, Man has created culture as a fantasyland within which he tries to insulate himself from the realities of his condition as a biological organism. On this count, I agree with Becker. I disagree, however, that Man’s anxious rejection of mortal material reality is the natural, reasonable, right and good response to death. I would likewise dispute Becker’s claim that this rejection is what makes men human. More correct would be to say that it is what has made the male into Man as we know him. In other words: Manhood, or masculinity, is an outgrowth of death-denying body horror. Like most developments rooted in the avoidance of reality, it is not reasonable or positive or helpful, but dangerously dysfunctional. Masculinity, defined by the craving for power and control, a hardening of the body, the desire to become steel or stone, is an armor that men don dreaming it can shield them from mortality. For Man, ideally, in his own mind, is immortal. Desperate to realize this fantasy, he devotes himself to grasping after disembodiment and dominion.
Mind/body dualism is the ideological prerequisite for both masculine disembodiment and male dominion as strategies of self-immortalization. If Man means to believe he’ll live on despite the demonstrable perishability of biological bodies, of which he is one, he must first convince himself that he is in fact something other than deathly flesh. What he has settled on as that other thing is the soul, or the spirit, or the mind. Whatever he calls it, it is an immaterial essence figured in opposition to the body, set down at the opposite pole. The logic holds that if the body is mortal, then the soul and mind are immortal. Thus by identifying himself with the soul, or the mind, Man saves his own eternal life.
If the first phase of the dualistic defense against death is Man’s assertion that he is the immaterial immortal mind/soul, the second is to project the material mortal body onto beings designated as Not-Man, or Other. Within the western cultural model that has historically dominated and has metastasized within the last century into a truly global white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the readymade Others have been nonhuman animals, women, and racialized peoples. They are used as scapegoats, conscripted to carry the hated body on Man’s behalf, their presence the concrete proof he needs to trust in his own liberation from bodiliness. As proxies for the body, these scapegoated Others can also be dominated and abused in ways providing Man with a soothing sense of mastery over material reality. I write in the book,
“Man lines up his scapegoats for the sacrifice. He is the Self and they are the Others … Identified with sex, filth, stupidity, excrement, sin, disease, decay and degradation both physical and social, Others become the earthly matter that Man rejects, the biological squalor, the dirt, the evil and the End; they are the deaths Man refuses to die. … [And so] Man rises, for now he has disburdened himself of the terrible weight that once polluted him, and now he can reign on earth as in heaven, the immortal MasterMind over all.”
So there you have it, that’s my theory, very simple, as I said. The ruling fathers of male dominion, unwilling to make peace with mortality as their creaturely reality, have rejected bodiliness, projecting it as a base condition onto Others they could overpower and avenge themselves against. By doing so, they have imagined themselves transcendent masters over the earth, above biology and self-snatched from nature’s murderous jaws. Body horror, and the delusional denial of our human nature as organisms, festers as the ideological foundation for patriarchal society, the conceptual root of this sick civilization’s attendant atrocities and architectures of oppression. Because Man hates what he is, he has mutilated life on earth into a hateful ordeal, increasingly unlivable for creatures of all kinds.
But what do we do with this understanding, practically speaking? How can we apply it, incorporate it into a daily praxis of living in resistance against patriarchal madness and male violence?
Being the daughter of two veterinarians, it is my conviction that if we cannot render an accurate diagnosis of the disease, we have zero hope of curing it. What I love about radical feminism is its matchless efficiency as a diagnostic instrument for probing the buried heart of the malignancy known as manmade civilization. If we determine that the causative pathogen is a bad ideology, and its symptoms are manifold forms of male violence accelerating unto world murder, then we can conclude that, to become well, to save the world, our task is to purge the contaminating ideology from our culture, a process which will necessarily involve purging it from our own consciousness. If we do not, we will remain vectors of the disease, and we will risk reproducing it in our own strivings toward cultural transformation.
Mind/body dualism is therefore to be resisted rigorously. Many of us thrash against the recognition that we are flesh-and-blood animals, and not some mysterious ghostliness temporarily tenanting a corporeal vessel, because we’ve been trained that to be a body is diminishment and disgrace, degradation to a subhuman state. I’m asking you to slow your thrashing. Try to sit with the possibility that there is no soul, that consciousness is bodily, that the self you are will not outlast the earthly matter that is your substance, because between self and substance there is no dividing line. Overcoming patriarchal body horror demands that we accept the creatures we are.
Which of course means accepting that we will die. Feminists who desire an end to male dominion cannot succumb to the temptations of masculinist immortalism. Any and all dependency on the anodyne delusions of manmade civilization compromises us. Simone Weil wrote, “There is not any love of truth without an unconditional acceptance of death.” She wrote, too, even more simply: “Truth is on the side of death.” Death not as in killing, not the necrophilic infatuation with the unalive, but death as in mortal material reality. Somehow, we have to get on its side. Male dominion is a DisneyWorld turned wasteland by fantasies doomed to spoil. Feminists need to live in the real world, wholly committed to reality. For the real world is the living world, and feminism fully realized is a vital revolt against male dominion’s vast morbidity. Fully realized our movement is a loving, lively defense of all vulnerable mortal bodies targeted as Man’s sacrificial scapegoats. This means every body, our own bodies, the body of the living earth. All the cruelties men inflict to degrade, dominate, desolate, dispossess and destroy what he calls corporeal are to be recognized as male violence and repudiated. Which means knowing that male violence is rape and pornography and femicide, yes, but also animal experimentation, and deforestation, also militarism, and pesticides, and nuclear power, nuclear war. Recognizing the full scope of male violence, and its roots in body horror, feminism is the choice to live gently, reverent of the shared sensitivity that unites all creatures as kin. And where male dominion is somatophobic, biophobic to the point of mass-extinction-level suicidality, feminism, fully realized, is a conscious disciplined delighting in aliveness.
I’d like to close by reading from my book again, to leave you with the invitation that is all, in the end, that I have to offer. It’s an invitation into life as it is, not as men have perverted it, but life on earth in its real – real, yet how unbelievable – material biological organic earthbound beauty, which even Man in his wrath has not succeeded in snuffing out:
“...it is a simple thing but it will take practice, to see the world clearly again, to re-enter into intimate relation with reality. Such a homecoming requires the humility to fall quiet. The ecofeminist Deena Metzger suggests a meditation: ‘Allow yourself to be a tree and let that be sufficient.’ Can you stay still, just be here awhile? The bloodsea tidal inside you, the thick sap of it: listen.
Learn to take your own pulse, fingertips finding your throat’s most plainspoken cleft. Trace the swerve of veins that blues your slender wrist. Rest your hand over your breast and let your heart rise to it, as it plaits its ancient melodies of systole, diastole – the birth music. Close your eyes and let the darkness glide red down your optic nerve, now float a moment in that incarnadined lull.
…And can you remember the scent of your own sweat? Never be ashamed. Can you remember the taste of your own rhythmic bleeding, the monthly slick of it glossing warm your fingers, or a lover’s mouth? Who would dare make you ashamed? Let your own flesh, its wending nerves and venous filigree, its miles of gut held safely coiled, the matrix of womb and marrow, let this lavish profusion of cells become irresistible to you, all that you desire, and worship the simple miracle of your aliveness.”