I’m trying to find that feminist article/essay I read that talked about how males become worse (sicker and more sadistic and violent) once females are removed from their lives, I think it was focused on separatism and why it’s so resisted and how women are a buffer for male violence
can anyone help me find it?
I would be interested in this article
I FOUND IT! An essay written by Marilyn Frye in 1983!
There is a mention of political lesbianism (or an implication that the author may have believed in political lesbianism) which I don’t like, but overall it’s compelling essay! My favorite part:
The parasitism of males on females is, as I see it, demonstrated by the panic, rage and hysteria generated in so many of them by the thought of being abandoned by women. But it is demonstrated in a way that is perhaps more generally persuasive by both literary and sociological evidence. Evidence cited in Jesse Bernard’s work in The Future of Marriage and in George Gilder’s Sexual Suicide and Men Alone convincingly shows that males tend in shockingly significant numbers and in alarming degree to fall into mental illness, petty crime, alcoholism, physical infirmity, chronic unemployment, drug addiction and neurosis when deprived of the care and companionship of a female mate, or keeper. (While on the other hand, women without male mates are significantly healthier and happier than women with male mates.) And masculist literature is abundant with indications of male cannibalism, of males deriving essential sustenance from females. Cannibalistic imagery, visual and verbal, is common in pornography: images likening women to food, and sex to eating. And, as documented in Millett’s Sexual Politics and many other feminist analyses of masculist literature, the theme of men getting high off beating, raping or killing women (or merely bullying them) is common. These interactions with women, or rather, these actions upon women, make men feel good, walk tall, feel refreshed, invigorated. Men are drained and depleted by their living by themselves and with and among other men, and are revived and refreshed, re-created, by going home and being served dinner, changing to clean clothes, having sex with the wife; or by dropping by the apartment of a woman friend to be served coffee or a drink and stroked in one way or another; or by picking up a prostitute for a quicky or for a dip in favorite sexual escape fantasies; or by raping refugees from their wars (foreign and domestic). The ministrations of women, be they willing or unwilling, free or paid for, are what restore in men the strength, will and confidence to go on with what they call living.
—Marilyn Frye, Some Reflections on Separatism and Power (1983), Crossing Press
(Quick add-on to the point about likening women to food/ men "consuming" women/sex as eating: this metaphor is attested already back in ancient Greece! Many texts showcase it, especially in plays, witty sayings, and descriptions of prostituted women. There are a couple good articles on this, I'll see if I can fish them out. The idea that men have been conceiving of women in this specific way over a long period of time is as fascinating as it is depressing)
