Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified.

First of all, yes, exactly, brilliant.

But second, “patriarchal families” is something I’d generally skip over. The pithiness of the entire statement, plus me going through and deciding where and when to cut off the part I wanted to quote, had me pass over it again, and notice it.

Anarchy asks whether patriarchal families are justified.

After years of thought, beginning while I was still embroiled in Evangelical Christianity, on through self-identifying as a non-practicing deist Christian anarcho-capitalist, is, essentially, sometimes.

First we’ve got to decide what we mean by justified. I don’t know Chomsky’s moral system, but from the fact that he’s an anarcho-syndicalist I’d guess that maximizing human prosperity isn’t the aim of his ethics.

It is mine.

And what I have decided, after looking at the evidence, is that patriarchal families are not conducive to maximizing human prosperity. So to me, they are not justified.

Part of why I broke up with the Evangelical church is that I lost faith in its moral system. I overgeneralize and hyperbolize here, I realize, but, for the sake of clarity, I’ll summarize the Evangelical moral philosophy as,

We think Jesus or Paul said this activity is right or wrong, so that makes it right or wrong.

The idea that it is morally wrong for women to teach men, or that premarital sex is wrong, is justified on the exact same grounds that one could use to justify requiring that women must cover their heads in church in order to be right with God. That they don’t cover their heads is clearly a matter of practicality, but pointing that out made my fellow churchgoers hella uncomfortable.

Similarly, I overgeneralize and hyperbolize when I describe the moral system of social conservatism to be,

This activity is different than the activity I’m comfortable with and that has a long track record so it’s wrong.

Though my social conservatism was inextricably linked with Evangelical Christianity, and fell away as I dumped it, I similarly reject its premise. Accepting or rejecting an activity as moral requires more, for me, than approval by a person or persons or a long track record. Cab companies have a long track record. Uber is better.

I get, intellectually, the idea that humans are incomplete and fallible in our intellect, information and understanding. The idea is that because we are not omniscient, we need a supernatural power to tell us how to act. How interesting that faith in the supernatural (but not church membership or attendance) negatively correlates with education and intelligence. It’s almost like the more faith one has in one’s own intellect, information and understanding, the less able one is to buy into this particular moral system.

Because when you look at it, the Evangelical moral system is actually opposed to intellect, information and understanding. God loves us, right? So surely he’d set up a moral system which would maximize our self-interest. Surely being a devout Christian would make us wealthier, happier, more fulfilled and living longer, healthier lives. But, no, it says in the New Testament pretty clearly that following Jesus will lead to alienation, persecution and suffering.

I don’t know, man. I’m just not sure I’m into that. I really mean that. I don’t know. Maybe I should be proclaiming the Gospel and being shunned and sacrificing my worldly happiness for eternal glory. But I do know that the moral code I preached when I was Evangelical, a path to heaven which consisted of renouncing homosexuality and saving yourself for marriage and eschewing drugs, was wrong. And worse, incredibly alienating and hurtful. So since following that moral code brought me to a place I shudder to remember, hurting people and making their lives more difficult, I’ve rejected and replaced it.

As well, I intellectually understand the socially conservative idea that because institutions like marriage and monogamy have “worked” over millennia, they should be protected and enshrined, and that deviation from them threatens the entire working system, and should be punished accordingly. But worked for whom? Yes, marriage and monogamy and insisting women maintain modesty and sexual purity has in the past helped establish and maintain stable, two-parent households in which children could grow up relatively unscathed. However, at what cost to the women involved? And, are we mistaking cause and effect here? Stable marriages, marriage at all, really, has always been most easily and readily available to the wealthiest, the most educated, the most intelligent and the most emotionally strong among us. Is it possible that it’s all those factors which make for the best parenting among the married, and not the marriage itself?

Furthermore, is it possible that what we’re actually seeing is a vicious cycle, in which our ideas about a woman’s proper place help keep her from being able to be economically independent, which then makes her solo parenting marred by grinding poverty, which helps bolster support for the idea that she should be parenting within a marriage?

And even beyond that, is it possible that a man as head of the household, which is what I believe Chomsky was referring to when he said “patriarchal families” only makes sense when women are poorly educated? Now that women are earning more degrees than are men, why relegate decision making to the less-informed of the two?

Another data point which challenges the justification for “patriarchal families” is whether it makes sense for men to head households when their wives outearn them. Since single, childless women in cities outearn their male counterparts, insisting that a family be headed by a man will lead to women eschewing marriage entirely, for lack of a suitable partner.

No, I find both moral systems irredeemably flawed. That’s not to say either get everything wrong. It’s to say that I reject the foundations upon which they are built. No, it’s not enough for me to accept something as moral that Jesus or Paul reportedly said it is. I’ll wear my head fully uncovered should I go to church, thankyouverymuch. And no, that people have always done it and it’s worked okay is not reason enough for me to accept that in the here and now, it’s something worth doing. You can take your admonition for me to submit to my husband and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

My moral system is essentially this: Something is moral if the empirical evidence indicates it makes people happier, more connected or wealthier. Is this arbitrary? Arbitrary as hell. I could have as easily said that something is moral if it increases equality. And I do enjoy equality, but I justify it by the evidence that equality of opportunity, and equality before the law is generally conducive to happiness, connectedness and prosperity.

So, basically, all that is part of why I’m an anarcha-feminist.

$2.00 for the first copy. $1.50 for every additional copy.

“The question now becomes: What is the growing ideal of human society, unconsciously indicated and un­con­scious­ly discerned and illuminated? By all the readings of progress, this indication appears to be the free individual; a society whose economic, political, social and sexual organization shall secure and constantly increase the scope of being to its several units; whose solidarity and continuity depend upon the free attraction of its component parts, and in no wise upon compulsory forms.

“Nothing is more disgustingly vulgar to me than the so-called sacrament of marriage; outraging of all delicacy in the trumpeting of private matters in the general ear. . . But it is neither the religious nor the civil ceremony that I refer to now . . . . The ceremony is only a form, a ghost, a meatless shell. By marriage I mean the real thing, the permanent relation of a man and a woman, sexual and economical, whereby the present home and family life is maintained. It is of no importance to me . . . whether it is blessed by a priest, permitted by a magistrate, con­tract­ed publicly or privately, or not contracted at all. It is the permanent dependent relationship which is detrimental to the growth of individual character. . . . I am [not] in the least con­cern­ed with the success of the marriage. . . . I am concerned with the success of love. And I believe that the easiest, surest and most applicable method of killing love is marriage. I believe that the only way to preserve love in anything like the ecstatic condition which renders it worthy of a distinctive name . . .  is to maintain the dist­anc­es.

“That love and respect may last, I would have unions rare and impermanent. That life may grow, I would have men and women remain separate personalities. Have no common possessions with your lover more than you might freely have with one not your lover. Because I believe that marriage stales love, brings respect into contempt, outrages all the privacies and limits the growth of both parties, I believe that ‘they who marry do ill. . . .’”

The lecture reprinted in this booklet was originally delivered by Voltairine de Cleyre at the Radical Liberal League, a social and intellectual dis­cuss­ion group in Philadelphia, on April 28, 1907. The next year, the text of the lecture was reprinted in Mother Earth II.11 (January 1908).

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) was a popular Anarchist and feminist writer, speaker and activist. Her contemporary and friend Emma Goldman called her “the most gifted and bril­liant anarchist woman America ever produced.” She pub­lish­ed tracts, dialogues, and stories in Liberty, Twentieth Century, Free Society and Mother Earth, and she worked closely with libertarian com­mun­ists, market anarchists, and mutual­ists within the Phila­delph­ia social an­arch­ist movement, but refused to commit herself to economic blueprints—first calling herself an “individualist” and later an “Anarchist, simply, without economic label attached,” adopting a plural­ist­ic view of economic arrangements in any future free soci­ety.

I am one of those people who would rather be in the coffin than delivering the eulogy.  I am also one of those people who takes a while to get to know someone, especially when I’m thrown into a whole group of new people. The result of those two things is that I am often “encouraged” to speak more in groups or on panels…

While I sometimes kinda sorta appreciate the sentiment behind it, mostly I get pretty fucking irritated.

Much of this “encouragement” comes in the form of “we need more women’s voices,” as was suggested to me in the context of the criminal (in)justice committee. That’s true.  But women aren’t interchangeable. We don’t need just any woman’s voice. We need the women who are most affected by the issues we are talking about.

There are women out there who have been in prison. There are women out there who have been taking care of their kids, their brother’s kids, and their neighbor’s kids while everybody else is in prison. And they have been doing it making poverty wages, living in low intensity conflict zones, and completely erased from the public eye – unless it is to vilify them as crack whores or welfare queens.  Those are the women who need to be heard and who probably have a damn good idea of what needs to be done.

And even when people are seeking out the women who can actually speak to the issue in question, their participation is just a diversity box that people are checking off.  It is infuriating when someone suggests that “gender balance” has been addressed by having one woman on a panel full of dudes, as someone I was working with recently claimed.

Admittedly, even under circumstances where I should speak more, I don’t do it. I realize that is a problem. And while there are plenty of men out there who also hate being the center of attention, it seems to be something that the women I know struggle with more.

We are socialized in a way that encourages men to  expect to be center stage and women to expect to be invisible. There are a lot of women who are brought up to be housewives and secretaries, to do invisible work, to be “the woman behind the man.” Not to mention how often visibility means a whole lot of unpleasant attention.

And all of us are brought up to believe that the only people that count are the dudes that make pretty speeches. That’s why everybody knows who MLK was and almost nobody knows who Ella Baker was, much less Diane Nash or any of the other women of that era. What I would really like to know is – Who typed MLKs speeches? Who kept track of all the vehicles that drove people around during the bus boycotts? Who brought the food to the nightly church meetings so that entire families could come out and plan direct actions?

Speeches are inspiring. But speaking is not doing.

The challenge for a lot of us women is that the expectation of being invisible often leads to wanting to be invisible.  That’s a problem. But I think the challenge is even more difficult for those people who not only expect to be center stage, but don’t even seem to see all the invisible work that the charismatic male leader is just a symbol of.

We don’t need to be checking gender boxes. We shouldn’t be falling into the trap of thinking that center stage means more important.  And we damn well shouldn’t be “encouraging” people to play symbolic roles.  What we should be doing is thinking about what our role should be in a given context and then stepping up or stepping back accordingly.

$1.25 for the first copy. $1.00 for every additional copy.

The case for a radical libertarian feminism — a critique of the state and of patriarchy which understands both as parts of an interlocking system of oppression, and which draws on the insights of both radical libertarianism, and radical feminism, in the effort to analyze, undermine, and abolish both statism and sex-class.

Libertarianism and feminism, when they have encountered each other, have most often taken each other for polar opposites. Many 20th century libertarians have dismissed or attacked feminism—when they have addressed it at all—as just another wing of Left-wing statism; many feminists have dismissed or attacked libertarianism—when they have addressed it at all—as either Angry White Male reaction or an extreme faction of the ideology of the liberal capitalist state. But we hold that both judgments are unjust; many of the problems in combining libertarianism with feminism turn out to be little more than terminological conflicts that arose from shifting political alliances in the course of the 20th century; and most if not all of the substantive disagreements can be negotiated within positions already clearly established within the feminist and libertarian traditions. …

… In an important sense, putting the libertarian in libertarian feminism will not be importing anything new into radical feminism at all; if anything, it is more a matter of urging feminists to radicalize the insights into male power and state power that they have already developed, and to expand the state-free politics that they have already put into practice. Similarly, a radical libertarianism aligned with a radical feminism may confront many concerns that are new to 20th century libertarians; but in confronting them they will only be returning to their 19th century roots, and radicalizing the individualist critique of systemic political violence and its cultural preconditions to encompass those forms faced by female individuals as well as male.

US Representative Todd Akin (R-MO) made headlines over the weekend for his scientifically inaccurate and misogynist description of how women’s bodies deal with pregnancies conceived through rape.

Akin was a guest on St. Louis-based KTVI-TV’s Sunday morning talk show “the Jaco Report.” The host, Charles Jaco, asked, “If an abortion could be considered in the case of tubal pregnancy or something like that, what about in the case of rape, should it be legal or not?”

“Well you know, uh, people always want to try and make that as one of those things — well, how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question,” Akin said. “It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

Once the story broke, Akin released a statement saying that he misspoke. While many, including GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have called for him to drop out of the upcoming Senate race against incumbent Claire McCaskill (D-MO), others, like former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, are standing behind him. Akin announced on Tuesday that he would not be dropping from the race.

During Akin’s time in the House, as a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, he co-sponsored a bill with current vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan that sought to, among other things, change the definition of rape to “forcible rape.”

32,000 women get pregnant from rape per year, according to a 1996 study by gynecologist Dr. Melisa Holmes. Additionally, women do not have biological mechanisms that kick in and abort a potential pregnancy when they suffer rape-related trauma. Finally, and most importantly: There is no such thing as “legitimate” or “illegitimate” rape. That kind of dichotomy is disgusting; implying that some victims are being untruthful when they come forward is so fundamentally misogynist that it boggles the mind.

However, it isn’t really surprising that Akin — a stereotypical religious conservative with a history of trying to legislate female reproductive rights out of existence — believes these things. He is a logical product of a state that not only incorporates patriarchy into its legal framework, but its social and cultural institutions as well.

Akin is the product of a system that promotes the false idea that women need men just to exist, that women should only ever be concerned with having and raising children and keeping the home clean; a system that looks with disgust upon women who seek to live and work and play independently of it. It is a system that permeates all aspects of all our lives. Akin — and many others, both in and outside the insulated sphere of electoral politics — not only accept this system but rush headlong to meet it, and as such, it is understandable (though by no means acceptable) that this occurred in the first place.

It’s easy to dismiss or mock Akin as “just another misogynist Republican” (and to be clear, he is one) and be done with the whole affair, but it is perhaps more useful and productive — especially as anarchists — to approach this situation and its aftermath with the intent of opening a frank and visible discussion about patriarchy and oppression. Patriarchy infects everyone under it as it endeavours to perpetuate itself. We are not immune to it, even though we recognize that it is a coercive societal force, and if all we do is point and laugh, we have helped patriarchy along.

There is a vibrant and productive current of anarchist feminism that exists today. We (speaking as a straight, cisgender, white male to my straight, cisgender, white male comrades) need to listen to this current. We need to heed what they have been trying to tell us for years. We need to start shutting down the disappointing trend of “manarchism” that has popped up in recent years and work with anarcha-feminists to popularize and spread ideas of a world without the State, a world built upon voluntary free association and mutual aid and the idea that all persons are equal — not just dudes.