aurora linnea presents Man Against Being at FiLiA
aurora linnea, author of Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life
Radical Feminist Voices: Spinifex Press Panel 1, FiLiA, Brighton UK, 12 October 2025
https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781922964120
It is impossible, at times, to believe the ugliness, and the cruelty, the desolation, vulgar carelessness, callousness, the stupidity and terrible lovelessness of the world in which we live. One does not want to believe it. There is genocide: in Gaza, where an estimated 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, over 100,000 more wounded, countless more displaced and starving, for where their homes once were is now only ash-strewn wreckage and contaminated water, dogs and cats made strays by the siege scavenging among the ruins; and in Sudan, where 150,000 people have been killed since 2023, where soldiers rape women and girls by the hundreds if not thousands, where 3.2 million children are expected to starve next year in the famine. And there are wars: in Ukraine, in Myanmar. The gang war in Haiti. The drug war in Mexico. And the world’s most powerful nation, heart of empire, policeman of the world, has a rapist at the wheel, not for the first time of course but openly now, unapologetically. I live there and it has been my experience that it is a land packed wall to wall with rapists—but then again, that’s everywhere, and it’s not a shock, because pornography, too, is everywhere; boys watch it when they’re 10, 11, 12, so now each new crop of rapists looks more baby-faced than the last. A U.S. study found that 64% of female college students say they’ve been choked by a male partner during sex; additional research suggests that, among women who report sexual strangulation, a quarter are first choked before the age of 17. Being strangled by men is now a major cause of stroke among women under 40. It’s a porn thing, this choking, a kink; girls try to like boys’ hands clamped tightening around their throats, the sick asphyxia haze, they convince themselves they’re into it. Like they’re into being spanked, spit on, handcuffed, anally penetrated, slapped in the face, sliced with razors, called trash; like they like to be raped—boys and men will rape them anyway, so they may as well like it. The Rapist-in-Chief of my country was friendly with Jeffrey Epstein, now deceased, who sold girls as sex slaves passed around among his associates, an elite fraternity of world leaders, power brokers, male luminaries, men of genius. Epstein dreamt of founding a human breeding ranch where women handpicked for their supposed genetic superiority would be inoculated with his seed, to spawn the new master race. In my country, abortion is now banned in 12 states; for the women who live there, to be breeders for the patriarchal regime is the law of the land, though the children they carry are cherished only hypothetically; if the mothers are poor, as many mothers are, and if the mothers survive, as many mothers do not, poor and black mothers especially, then the children will starve. Some 14 million children in the U.S. went hungry in 2023, and a global total of almost 200 million children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition, and this while over three-quarters of the earth’s arable land has been commandeered for so-called “food animal production,” meaning the earth’s surface is covered with cages for the warehousing of captive animals and scarred by the immense tracts of chemical-drenched monocultures grown to fatten the captives, who live only to be slaughtered in factories that sunder their bodies into chunks and slabs sealed in plastic for carefree consumption by those who believe themselves the creatures’ natural superiors. The total global biomass of “food animals” outweighs that of wild mammals fifteen times over. And from the industry that produces these animals, millions upon millions of gallons of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and animal wastes spill out to soak into the soil, into the groundwater, to flow into the oceans, creating Dead Zones, regions where the water has been so depleted of oxygen it can support no life. The devastation is also more intimately wreaked: day-old calves are taken from their mothers, who mourn them; men think nothing of this. And the men whose labor is slaughter – themselves typically poor, exploited, often disenfranchised by systemic racism – these men beat their wives and girlfriends at higher rates than men otherwise employed. Rates are high for policemen, too, and men in the military—one wonders why, one knows. Worldwide, roughly a third of women tell us they’ve been beaten or physically injured by men. Each day roughly 140 women and girls are murdered by their husbands, lovers, fathers, uncles, brothers, sons. In the U.S., at least one in five girls is sexually abused; incest is the most prevalent form of child sexual abuse; fathers and stepfathers are the most common perpetrators. Men rape babies, months old, it is not rare: who wants to believe this, no one, but it is true. Girls, raped as babies or toddlers or tweens, dissociate from their bodies, chased out by men’s incursions; if these girls, estranged from themselves, pay to have surgeons carve away their breasts, hoping to be reborn as other than bait, other than victims, then they are celebrated for the effacement of their violable femaleness—though when they are raped again, as too often they are, then they’re raped as hurt girls just the same. And the wasteland spreads, a billion tons of wreckage daily, land once rich lustrous green parched to desert, field and forest razed, the roads that swerve through what wilds remain littered with the carrion of an estimated 350 million animals annually in the United States alone, possums and deer, foxes, squirrels, voles, hawks, frogs, salamanders, songbirds; disdainfully, dismissively, we call them roadkill and keep driving. And the air and the water is poisoned by the concrete layered like a dead black carapace over everything—and by the cars, by the factories that make the cars. And by the wars, by the factories that make the wars. Men in their highly evolved brilliance have invented weapons capable of killing every earthly creature. They possess these weapons by the thousands, they brandish them like bludgeons in their idiot sparring, and though very gravely they promise the weapons exist only to keep the peace, what fools we’d be to believe the men do not yearn to use them. They are waiting now. They will not wait forever.
How can any heart possibly endure it? I have spent my life heartbroken, a witness to this world, complicit in its iniquities, pierced and harrowed where it has scraped up against my body. Reeling towards an apocalypse of its own making, as one horror begets another begets another neverendingly, this world is unbearable, and so, so needless.
People speak of the Anthropocene: what a polite, neutral, side-stepping little term it is. For many years I held this same word nested in my own mouth, despising my whole species as blight for the damage we’d done. But like any euphemism, the word beclouds and benumbs. For it is not the Anthropocene we are living through; let us be more precise with our language: this epoch is the Androcene. Welcome to the Manmade World.
It has been my theory for some time now that our world is what it is because men hate life. This theory is the premise for my book, Man Against Being. It sounds far too simple, I realize. Surely it must be much more complicated, and surely it is. But at the quiet center of every complexity no matter how intricately snarled is concealed a knot of simple truth. In our present case, it has not even been kept particularly quiet: men have spent the last several thousand years at least articulating their hatred for life; their actions have been still louder. They could hardly have made themselves more clear, and it is my practice to listen to what men have to say, and to take them at their word. Medieval Christian writers, for example, conceived an entire literary genre out of anti-life rancor, which they called contemptus mundi, or “contempt of the world.” In texts of the contemptus mundi canon, men catalog the profusion of horrors that render life such a bane: dirt, bad smells, flies, fleas, cold, heat, hunger, thirst, worms, wild animals, poisonous plants, sex, childbirth, disease, injury, aging, death, decay. From slimy conception to stinking putrescence, life is an affliction imposed on the man unfortunate enough to exist, each instant a torment as he senses himself exiled from his god, debased and despoiled by flesh and earth. Today, we hear from men that they would like to be machines, or code ghosts safely contained inside computers, or to float through space as wisps of hyper-intelligent mist, billowing out to colonize the farthest stars. Certainly these fantasies betray a scorn for life as unequivocal as that of any 12th-century monk, lost in his dreams of bodiless ascension to god-the-father’s super-lunary heaven.
In Man Against Being, I attempt to chart the course by which this age-old execration of life has metastasized to produce the manmade world as we know it today: global human civilization as atrocity complex, a vampiric industrialized monstrosity vomiting for its yield a seemingly inexhaustible deluge of oppression, sadism, needless suffering, and world-devouring violence.
It begins with death terror: life is brutal, because life is short. For as long as men have been informing us of their desires, they’ve longed to evade death, to be immortal. Life, such as it is, deprives them of this possibility, and this is a murderous injustice. Mortality is the reality of biological life on earth, but Man – by which I mean mankind, or men collectively as the arbiters and authors of human culture, and most specifically but not exclusively white “Western” men – has failed utterly to accept this. Instead, Man has determined that if to be an earthbound biological organism is to be mortal, he shall eschew that squalid state of being altogether. Thus he rejects the animal he is, rejects his corporeality as a creature. The result is body horror: the phobic loathing of bodies and bodiliness that permeates patriarchal culture, seeping up from its foundations. Horrified by the body he is, Man revolts against nature – his own, the earth’s – for he denounces both as the death of him. Unwilling to make peace with life on earth, the ruling fathers have contrived countless self-immortalization schemes, but underlying all of these, their ideological prerequisite, is the severing of mind from body, called mind/body dualism. If Man means to dodge the body’s fate, he first must define himself as something other than the moldering flesh, derided in modern web argot as the “meat sack” or “meat suit.” What men in general have settled on as that other thing is the soul, or spirit, or mind—whatever they call it, this salvific Other Thing is figured as the body’s opposite: it is immaterial where the body is material, celestial where the body is terrestrial, pure where the body is putrid, blessed where the body is wrought from sin, essential where the body is inessential, temporary, provisional. It follows that if the body is mortal, one can be quite confident that the soul/spirit/mind is immortal. Man hitches his Self to the immaterial immortal interior essence and tells himself he’ll never have to die.
Next, Man seeks to dispose of the bad body, by placing it remote from his Self, somewhere he can gaze upon it and know that what the body is, down there, he is not. This he achieves by projecting bodiliness onto beings he classes as Not-Self, or Other. Historically, these Others have been first nonhuman animals, then women, then racialized people. All are used as scapegoats, conscripted to bear the mortal body in Man’s stead, on his behalf: Others become the body so that Man does not have to be, so he can secure the soul and the mind as special properties of his Self. Man then subjugates, punishes, destroys his scapegoats by methods he devises to provide him with the maximal sense of consoling mastery over the body he makes them symbolize. Objectification, humiliation. Commodification and consumption. Torture. Obliteration. Through the domination of scapegoated Others, men can very nearly believe they have vanquished mortal material reality, and thereby defeated death.
The projection of the rejected body onto Others so that Man can master them and imagine himself triumphant over corporeality and reality itself, the deathless king of all creation, serves as the ideological crux and scaffolding for the interlocked, interlacing systems of oppression that are manmade civilization’s hallmark. And Man’s assaults on the body of the earth itself fuse into the ongoing ecocide that prophesies our extinction. Because Man despises his own mortal material nature, terrorized by the animal body he is by birth, he has made life on earth a hateful ordeal, increasingly unlivable for creatures of all kinds. Knowing this opens us to the grace of a holistic response to the ravages of male dominion.
But we are here this weekend to address what male rule does to women, and how to stop it. To make sense of men’s war on women, though, it is first necessary to understand that what men do to women, men are doing to the living world; there is no separation between the war waged against our bodies and the war waged against the body of the earth. Because women symbolize the body to the patriarchal mind, as proxies and scapegoats we are the targets of men’s enmity for life on earth. So it is one war, one wounding, one onslaught. Such is ecofeminism’s principle lesson and one we are urgently called to learn, in these days of frenzied violence and accelerating collapse. Women are punished for the body’s crimes against Man; Man plays out his fantasies of mastering mortal matter through his domination of women; he avenges himself against bodiliness by exploiting and degrading women, desecrating our bodies; absolute power is manifest in absolute annihilation, dominion’s last rite: desperate to overpower life, men are killing us. Because for Man we are one enemy: women, matter, flesh, biosphere. He cannot escape his own body, however hard he thrashes to free himself from it; in spite of all his strategies and all the stories he tells himself, he remains vulnerable flesh and tender nerve, he’s still going to die, he cries out bitterly he’s doomed—but if the body and material reality and life on earth conspire to kill him, then he condemns them to death. His crowning glory, then, is femicide, ecocide, it’s eschaton; patriarchy is the end of the world: for what Man destroys he dominates.
Because male dominion’s onslaught is launched against our female bodies and against females as body symbols, feminist insurgence necessarily begins in, and with, the bodies we are. Andrea Dworkin wrote, “When she is ready to kill you in order to free herself, she will begin with a defense of her body.” From girlhood to death our bodies are stolen from us, expropriated for sacrifice, fetishization and consumption, debasement and destruction; our bodies, abandoned to death or like dead under the spell of feminized submission, pile up in bleeding miserable heaps, a monument to male power. We learn to hate our bodies as men hate us, and hating our bodies we disown them; men’s contempt a contaminant leaching self-disgust so we relinquish our flesh into men’s hands, to do with what they please. Thus Man has made of us the easiest prey imaginable. Women will never know freedom, will never grow vital and riotous enough to disinter ourselves, until we re-possess our bodies, and until every newborn daughter is brought up to do the same. This is the first and most basic corrective to the patriarchal oppression of women, at bottom a colonization of female flesh. It is a purging of Man from our bodies, an exorcism: of self-loathing, self-surrender, learned masochism, self-mutilation in conformity to patriarchal iconography. Anything less and we join men’s war on women as collaborators in our own desecration; and we dishonor ourselves as accomplices in men’s massacre of the living world, that vaster war of which Man’s offensive against women is but one strategic campaign. I will have no part in this war, I mean to defend the living world as I defend my own body and the bodies of my sisters, human and otherwise; I long for women to be revitalized on the side of life, of reality, to pulse full and fierce with it, our insurrection against male dominion a resurrection, a fresh start for life on earth; and so in Man Against Being I write:
What we do now is this: we declare our bodies inviolable, no longer Man’s scapegoat nor his sacrificial lamb, and we hiss we will not be closed up in cages we will not be raped we will not be murdered neither slow nor swiftly not by any means now we bare our teeth gnashed bite back foaming like rabid when he comes for us, when he comes for her, or her; we are furious feral we are not chased not cowed laid low not playing dead any longer, as if the death pose could ward off the dying, but we rush forward streaming warm breath its heat the wetness in our hair tangled incandescent like tempests of mane our faces flushed shining with this newborn resolve, so fervent, such vehemence in our movements now: our devotion to our own survival. To our bodies. To our earthly aliveness. We sanction no violence against us.
