The Balancing Act
A manifesto for a world after men.
What is a man?1
In all my time in being a woman it had never occurred to me to ask this question. I consider everything that came before its asking to be my Dark Period, a time in my life defined by adherence to willful ignorance, living in a cloud of unknowing. For it was in this ignorance that I became complicit in perpetuating one of the longest and most heinous crimes one half of the human population could commit against the other half. It was only when, in a solitary moment, sobbing in a zoo bathroom for reasons I am not obligated to disclose here, the question flashed in my mind from an uncertain but still very acute source.
I ask again: what is a man? The question begets no one simple answer. But I spent every minute between dabbing my mascara at the zoo and typing the first sentence of this essay considering all of them.
So I’ve actually forgotten most of those answers. But that’s because they’re not especially important for the conclusion I’ve arrived at. Something I’ve learned in this process, and which will be more evident in the course of this treatise, is that deciding what goes and what stays is the most essential virtue of societal upheaval, and something that must be cultivated from the smallest instance.
And so I ask for a third time: what the fuck is a man?
A man has both more hair and less hair. A man sows while being certain that he is reaping. A man is first and last and, somehow, the center. A man is seemingly all places at once: guiding and perceiving and following and constructing. A man is in the driver’s seat even while he’s in the cargo. A man is expected to place great importance on his having a penis as if it has been cruelly overlooked by those around him. No excuse is beneath a man to bring it up in polite conversation. He will talk about it haltingly, wistfully; as if he lost it. As if it broke up with him. “Have you seen my penis lately? Does it mention me at all? Please don’t tell me if my penis is seeing someone else. But blink once for no and twice for yes.” A man will coin words absent of any meaning to puff his chest when physical fitness fails him. Words like “contrapuntal” and “laxity.”
More importantly, a man is not a woman. Maybe the more interesting question is how this distinction came about, second only to how was it that we came to endure it for as long as we have.
Theories around the first question are several and inconclusive. Some say men were prescribed their role in simpler societies through their tasks as hunters and providers against the females that gathered and gave care. Others insist that men were the heretical outcome of a utopian past, either as the spoils of a thoughtless female sage’s experiment or a conscious rebellion brought about by a corruption of moral hygiene that proved destructive and irreversible—a thought experiment that mutated into an extinction-level virus. What we do know is that men proved so adaptable and resilient across the ages that they were able to obscure the questionable context of their origins and persuade even the strongest of us that not only was there some valid point in their existence, but that their existence was dominant and ours subordinate.
But in the carrying out of this astoundingly long con, women held back and adjusted accordingly. We developed the skill of biding our time as one humiliation lapsed into new and more exacting humiliations. In our silence and acquiescence, we all but challenged the opposing gender to prolong the charade. We knew, of course, that this was not going to last, because people at the top of a pyramid are always lacking an advantage possessed by those at the bottom, and of which they don’t even see the reality until it’s too late.
Through the previous millennium, women have made tactful advances in social roles. This created a sort of “grace period” in which men and women were on plausibly equal footing as individuals as opposed to communal custodians. The notion of “exclusive” male spaces appeared increasingly fanciful. The Industrial Revolution permitted women to endure its occupational hazards alongside their male counterparts. The proliferation of corporate work after World War II made the woman a permanent fixture in the workplace. That place remained largely subordinate, but it was not as stubborn as the subordination of the past. It was now unthinkable that women could not seek higher education for the purpose of pursuing a more fulfilling career, allowing women greater latitude in their lives, such as being able to delay marriage or children, or to relinquish both altogether.
Yet that “grace period” seems at the same time to be coming to a close. The gender roles of the forgotten times reassert themselves like a relapse of a long-kicked addiction. A fear of the future is answered with a fetishistic conjuring of a darker past.
Just as the subordination of women throughout history inadvertently allowed for our advancement into more fulfilling, nuanced roles, the dominant place of men has proved much more limiting. The man today shares office space, even boardrooms, with female equals. The man is less relied upon for funding and securing a household. This is not new to women, but men having been slower on the take are responding to it in such a way that highlights an emerging personal and social burden.
“The crisis of the modern man” sounds like magazine bullshit—but it is a crisis and its impacts cannot be understated or unaddressed. We are witnessing a shift in our society in which men are fixed less and less within it and of diminishing influence over its course and conduct. Left at the bottom of the pyramid, women had no other option but to ascend; while men being so long at the top, and so bored (at least implicitly) with being at the top, could only go down, and could only go down in the most baroque fashion. The more men come to realize this, then, the more they hasten their decline. The more we ignore it, the more they pull women and the rest of society down with them.
Now for a fourth time: what is a man? The answer has narrowed considerably while also having grown more troubling. A man is an impediment to progress. A man is a child with a credit score, yet still doesn’t know how to tie a tie. A man is a machine with a defective engine requiring costly upkeep. We now know all there is to know about men, of what they were and what they are degrading into. It is more important to determine their position in a new era that, through fits and starts, is flashing in the minds of more and more women of sense.
Who, then, are these new women? These new women, in addition to being better equipped for modern living than their counterparts, are less reliant on fear than their foremothers. With increased courage comes reduced hesitancy in considering ideas which previous iterations of women were not as eager to engage with, even abstractly. Greatest among them is the idea of keeping men at a more severe distance from the more functioning elements of society.
Thinking the Unthinkable
Even now, segregation-by-gender has an aroma of the quixotic. The more skeptical among us must wonder how it is to be carried out, and at what possible end is it meant to arrive. Sound and brave women need the more skeptical sisters to keep them honest and humble. They will observe that men have not completely displaced themselves from societal functions, and even have many crucial administrative roles. Well, sure, if we’re being super-literal about it. There’s plenty of evidence that the fall of man is a bit of a ways from completion. But it is completing at a steady enough pace that we must prepare as much as we can in advance to stave off disaster and conflict.
Since finding my own clarity I convened with sisters who’ve had similar ruptures of understanding. From there, a series of intensive and instructive discourses were engaged in. Steadily we arrived at consequential steps of forging what we’ve all agreed should be called the Gynopocene Age.
At Work
Segregation-by-gender begins where it is already being implemented: in the office. Human Resources have made pathbreaking strides in this regard: remapping the framework of productivity along the new rubrics of its most essential and assertive adherents. No longer conducive to the rational, instinct-driven style of male office-workers, the office falls under the direction of its more cerebral and intuitive employees. Collaboration is key to accomplishment, but collaboration among incompatible workers is a recipe for poor-quality work and total productive freefall. New workspaces will be constructed to maximize that productivity. Office floors will be rearranged or assigned by gender. Individual desk spaces will be reconfigured to minimize distraction of any kind. Communication between workspaces, when necessary, will be conducted by monitored internal electronic servers or through Human Resource intermediaries. It goes without saying that office socializing during hours will be discontinued and afterhours socializing will be discouraged and penalized if discovered at any point.
At Home
This mentality extends to the bedroom. Modernity having fostered mutual disappointment in sexual relations, the genders have come to rely increasingly on bespoke, self-administered remedies for their satisfaction. If this is not ideal in a classic sense, it is optimal in ushering in the future where interdependence is no longer taken as granted or even desirable. Divorce for the sake of maintaining normalized separation of the genders will spread and become customary; those who hold out will be looked upon and treated as exceptional in a disadvantageous and censorious way.
Once this is achieved, custody allotment will be simple. Male offspring shall be given over to male parents; daughters will be given over to mothers. Should this situation inadvertently give way to offspring who are parentless and vice versa, a new adoption system will be put in place to move orphans into new homes, provided each party consents to be housed or granted new parenthood.
In Public
Public space has long agitated the relations between the genders, but aside from self-policing, the burden of which is far out-weighed on one gender, this seems unmanageable. To segregate public space in a very deliberate way is not possible, but once the workplace segregation trickles from the offices to the service industries—the bars, the diners, the night clubs, etc.—the segregation will occur organically. New business districts will be erected serving men and women exclusively. Women will no longer have to endure the imposition of men in bars or the condescension of male bartenders and servers. Female bartenders and servers will be spared the countless indignities of male customers. Instances of catcalling or other untoward breaches of decorum will be fully and finally abated in this new redistricting of our space.
Founding Sisters of the Gynocracy
The idea of male-based governments with all-male constituencies and female-based governments with all-female constituencies will, with time, become conventional, with all but the most committed never having realized it.
Given what I’ve said about the state of the male in this era, in real terms, the female-based government will be all too aware of the nature and health of the all-male society. Each all-male commune will be monitored by female administrative attachés—our deputized Human Resources officials. We expect that the conditions of the all-male communes will vary. Based on their makeups, some will be more dejected, depressed, and difficult to manage than others. All manner of deviancy, crudity, and foulness one can think of will be more likely to occur the more unruly the commune is. Not much can be done about their occupants other than to allow them to phase themselves out and be kept docile in the interim through some sort of a humane drugging regimen via the water and food supply. Leftover Xanax most likely.
Men with evidence of lingering potential are to be observed more strictly, their physical and psychological heath to be routinely guarded should either be required for manual labor, defense action, or extraction of reproductive material. (Additional discourses2 on this subject are forthcoming.) These are regrettable compromises of a new society’s birth pangs. But progress under the post-feminist regime will be constant, welcomed, and managed capably.
The Balanced Society
The post-feminist society is one where women, lifted of what remained of their chains, are finally free to dream. Not just to dream, but to realize. It is as terrifying as it is enchanting to envision just how much is possible in this new society. Ideas once mocked, even by feminists at the peak of the “grace period,” will become commitments that will form conventions.
Consider a society that has finally achieved the dream of automation. Long feared in the male-dominated world, automation of industry and service will liberate us from our dependence of the remaining competent and semi-competent men and of less desirable forms of work and interaction. Our new generations of scientists and engineers will design and build the most sophisticated and lasting machines making the workplace, the supply stores, and the household more efficient and bearable.
Consider also a society that has achieved the holy grail of feminist world-building: all-female reproduction. Generations have been delighted and inspired by this idea. Its status as a reality remains very far off, but stripped of the male-scientific anxiety too long restricting us, we inch further away from mere idea and closer to a shocking and revolutionary new paradigm. More sophisticated fertilization and cloning technology feels much more within our reach than it ever was, perpetuating generation after generation of sisters.
Lastly, consider a society that has transcended equality. Our sisters and foremothers speak and have spoken eloquently of achieving it at some undetermined juncture. I was once taken in by its promise as well. But in the course of waiting and waiting, it rang phony to me. What the post-feminist society means to achieve is not equality but balance. The true craft of the feminist is achieving the right balance of society, determining with confidence and commitment to her inherited principles: what is needed and what can be set aside, now on the largest possible scale.
Yet in establishing the post-feminist order, I don’t see us as setting aside the entire male gender to make way for a gynotopian revolution. The only people who can set aside men are men; they have been preparing for this descent for generations. It is up to the women, as good neighbors, to set up the proper fences to allow them to complete their cycle in peace and to allow us to take the reins of society into a brighter future.
Once their cycle is complete, in however much time it takes them, the women will keep what records they can, passing on the story of this once abundant species, proud and powerful and undone in kind: the greatest cautionary tale ever told; that once-living-and-breathing warning sign that current mothers and future daughters must avoid at all costs.
I’ve hesitated in reposting this essay, given that thousands of people have already looked at the Wordpress version when an aggregating newsletter curated it for one of its roundups, for reasons that remain a mystery to me. But now that I can make some improvements upon it, it completes the below essays for which it serves as a preface. The thing that should prevail over the perfectly reasonable slants on gender essentialism (I don’t care for it), gender war (I’m fatalistic about it), and humanism (expendable under strain) is as always the character, in this case a kind you occasionally see in history who is outwardly a dumbass but who conceals, or acquires by sheer force of will, a dominating and sinister intelligence. For it is often the stupid who are the most clever and always the smart who are the most complacent.