Dicks in a Box

i have about reached my limit with the modding aspect of blogging, where i put something out there for public consumption then am physically and psychically tied to the internets for as long as comments remain open.  it is documented that repeatedly “checking” things like email and comments is an addictive cycle whereupon the checker receives repeated dopamine hits, one every time you “check” something that may or may not have changed since last time you looked, even if that was literally half a second ago.  as many times as you check, and whether or not there is something new in your inbox/queue, has nothing whatever to do with whether there will be something new there in a minute or a second, so you can check as many times as is physically possible and its always a “novel” event so produces a dopamine hit every time.  that cant be good.  its not good for my readers either, because you end up doing the same thing — checking to see if the conversation has progressed since the last time you looked.  we are all junkies now, and this cannot possibly be helping us (can it?)  so, i am no longer accepting comments.

anyway, as you already know, since i have been very vocal about it, i believe that men have effectively done us all in via the self-reinforcing feedback loop of global overpopulation and global over male population, resulting in catastrophic global climate change.  there is evidence that our fate was sealed decades ago by rapacious, resource extracting, resource hoarding males who just wouldnt stop raping women (creating babies) and polluting and pillaging the earth.  there is evidence that this is a done deal and its too late now to stop it; this makes me wonder about the time before it was too late, 50 years ago, 100 years ago and earlier.  did women see what was happening and (try to) intervene?  i figure they probably did — globally and across time, women have despised intercourse and repeated pregnancies, knowing in their bones that various man-ifestations of maleness were not compatible with life, and (thus) not sustainable.

of course, any evidence of womens knowing about this, and responding to it, will have been buried so deep it will be nearly impossible to locate and extract it.  so we have to use the scraps of information we do have, along with our intuition and creative leaps of thought to try to put our herstory (and our female Selves) back together again.  the question of “what would womens resistance have looked like?” is probably a dead end since womens (real, effective) resistance is killed, cremated, and buried quickly lest other women use that information and get ideas.  and, you know, build on the knowledge and work of women who came before.  that, we cannot have.  its probably rule #1 under patriarchy, now that i think about it (isnt it?)

probably a better question would be, if women had resisted, and effectively resisted, what would mens response to it have looked like?  and this line of inquiry bears some fruit.  i think, if women were resisting effectively, anywhere in the world, that mens response to it would be testerical, brutal, and absolutely devastating, not just to the resistors themselves but to all women everywhere.  the resistors would be taken down and out, and an example made of them, the message communicated to all womankind that this behavior will not be tolerated ever, and to resist further will be the absolute worst thing you could ever do, so best not to even think of it.  ever.  again.  the intent would be to give the entire resisting class such debilitating trauma that they would be cognitively impaired (PTSD) and both physically and mentally ineffective for the rest of their lives, and furthermore, that they would pass these traumatized (submissive) beliefs and behaviors down to their own girl children forever, creating a true aversion to real, effective female resistance as surely as if it were genetic (this happens and is known as a a meme, a belief and related behaviors that travel through bloodlines almost as if they are physical and not social traits).

men would have gone absolutely nuclear on effective female resistance, and their response would have been so outrageously oppressive and brutally violent as to prevent it ever happening again.  i think this is a reasonable assumption.  which brings my thoughts to the burning times.

andrea dworkin wrote in “woman hating” about what she understood to be a mass delusion in the times of the witch hunts (approximately 1560-1760 or even later, depending on the source) which was the “dicks in a box” delusion.  apparently, women at the time were accused of telekinetically castrating males and keeping their members in boxes, where the severed dicks would root around eating corn. (!)  i have heard this rather bizarre historical fact explained 2 ways: either folks were delusional about this and were reporting truthfully about what they believed they saw, or they were lying in order to crazy-make and implicate women in practicing witchcraft.  both are plausible, and there is no way to know for sure (although i think men lying about it to justify torturing and murdering women is more likely than the mass-delusion explanation.  interestingly, dworkin herself believed they were delusional and telling the truth).

understanding that we will probably never know for sure, because it is impossible to reliably put our female past back together again because of mens erasure and mens lies, i would propose a third possible explanation.  one that takes into account the rather unprecedented male testeria and the brutality and oppressiveness of the burning times, which could very well have been mens response to effective female resistance at the time (if women had resisted, the quality and quantity of male violence and oppressiveness demonstrated during the burning times would be the likely response).

here, i would tentatively suggest that around the year 1500 or so, women somewhat-collectively came to realize what men were and the likely outcome of mens ruthless and unsustainable regime of necrophilia and rape, which would be the literal end of all (or much of) life on earth.  because there could be no other end to it but that.  knowing that in their bones, and they were right of course, women started killing men.  the dicks in a box thing could have been women keeping souvenirs (a rather male thing to do) or perhaps more likely, was a way to keep track of just how many men they had done away with.  because their intent would not have been to kill all or too many of any life form — women are not men afterall.  if they were doing this, they probably had a specific goal in mind and they planned to stop once they reached their goal (modern researchers seem to believe that a reduction of 90% (i think?) is just the right amount to achieve a level of sustainability and peace — google it).  also, it is possible that some women chickened out and lied to each other about having done in their fair share of men, so a reliable method of keeping tally would have been necessary.  could there be a better method of tallying than collecting and keeping the deadmens dicks in a box?  i cant think of one (although admittedly, i havent really tried.  when you hear pure perfection, and something which could not possibly be improved upon, you just know it).

in short, what if the dick in a box thing was real?  im just asking.  surely everyone is much more comfortable believing that men simply tortured and murdered between 100,000 and several million women because delusion, or because misogyny — nothing too repulsive or wrong with either of those, right?  surely nothing that would keep anyone up at night.  whereas the idea that women might have actually harmed men in self defense, and done something to deserve what they got from men is disturbing and wrong (“deserved” in a patriarchal sense of course — both natural law and hindsight dictate that reducing the number of men at that time in history would have been both prescient and timely.  in other words, the exact right thing to do, at the exact right time, as if women knew what was coming and really, seriously desired and endeavored to stop it).  its too late to do anything now of course.

tl;dr  dick in a box may in fact represent humanitys last best chance of survival: reducing the number of males before the start of mens industrial (necrophilic) revolution mightve actually worked.  there is evidence (although obviously not proof) to support this.  as thinking persons, we like evidence, and hypotheses/theories based on evidence.  dont we.