In the Tradition of the Wickedary by Dissenter

In the tradition of Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language by Mary Daly and Jane Caputi, some wild and dangerous words.

Male Artist Syndrome – a mental disorder commonly found in men who call themselves creative artists (artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers etc.) whereby the man in question is only capable of thinking and operating on the level of the foreground. His ‘art’ inevitably reproduces the values, ideas etc. of male-stream culture and the Phallic State, and is particularly characterised by misogyny, racism, the erasure of women, the erasure of radically Other ways of thinking/being/feeling, and thinly veiled egocentric self-portrayals. The work of Male Artists is highly prized by other Male Artists, and male supremacists in general, for its lack of thought, which is called ‘depth’ in a classic example of patriarchal reversal.

Male Artists are incapable of recognising women as creative beings, especially women who work and create in the Background and refuse to participate in the shallow narcissism and self-indulgent nihilism that passes for creativity in the foreground. The only acceptable role for women who exist creatively on a foreground level is to be the adoring disciples of Male Artists, always ready to listen to them, agree with them, champion them as brilliant, insightful etc., and support and reproduce their ideas. These women are forbidden to have ideas of their own, especially ideas that contradict the Male Artists, or to connect with creative women who have journeyed into the Background and rejected Male Artists and the Phallic State that supports and produces them.

Great Misogynists – called the Great Modernists in patriarchal his/story, generally idealised by Male Artists and their followers. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the novel was considered to be a frivolous kind of writing that was thus appropriate to be written and read by women. In the eighteenth century, the most ‘important’ texts were non-fiction, particularly history, philosophy, and theology, which women were not allowed to publish, whilst in the nineteenth century, poetry became the most important form of expression, and which again was consequently dominated by men.

Left with the unimportant and frivolous novel, many women writers used their fiction as a way of exploring and critiquing women’s place in society, of expressing women’s dreams, values, hopes and fears, and most importantly, as a way of declaring their humanity, their capacity for thought and feeling, their intellect and intelligence, their creative power, in a patriarchy that denied women’s existence as human beings, and denied the existence of any ability in women beyond bearing children, looking pretty, doing housework etc.

Examples of authors include: Fanny Burney, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Inchbald, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot.

In the twentieth century, realising the gynocentric power of the ‘frivolous,’ ‘unimportant’ novel, Male Artists set about colonising the form and wresting it away from women. They corrupted the values and characteristics that, because of women, had come to be associated with the novel, like social realism, analyses of character and society, the importance of self-integrity and moral worth, and the possibility of personal and social transformation, and dragged it into the foreground where its revolutionary potential was deadened. The novel became the carrier of patriarchal values of dissociation, including nihilism, surrealism, alienation, hatred of oneself and others, and hatred, especially, of women, expressed through graphic depictions of sex. This rape of the novel, and female culture and values, was led by the Great Misogynists, authors like Samuel Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and all those Russians with the unpronounceable names (Chekhov, Nabokov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky).

Again, in classic patriarchal reversal, this killing of the novel’s revolutionary potential was pronounced by male supremacists to be the radicalising and revolutionising of the form. Much of this claim of radicalisation was based on the fact that, with men turning the novel into a vehicle for misogyny and male values, it was no longer ‘feminised’ and automatically devalued within patriarchy.

The false his/story constructed by the Great Misogynists to obfuscate the novel’s radical women-centred origins continues to dominate foreground discussions of literature to this day, and Spinsters wishing to connect to the true, female traditions of the novel must develop the wisdom to ignore the Male Artists’ bragging (babbling), and see into the Background where radical women writers, past and present, can be found.

Rape of the novel – 1) Figurative rape of the gynocentric novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, committed by the Great Misogynists and all Male Artists who have followed them since.

2) Literally, depictions of the rape of women (called sex) that occur in the novels of the Great Misogynists, where women are portrayed as degraded and dehumanised sex objects. This tactic was an integral part of destroying the gynocentric novel, in which women authors treated their female characters as thinking, feeling beings with the right to mental and bodily integrity.

Writing – 1) Sublime meeting of feminist creative and intellectual thought. 2) Feminist act of resistance and self-affirmation.

by Dissenter