erika’s Reviews > Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice > Status Update

Who are the fathers who want sons so much? Who are the fathers and the sons who can only be reconciled in sharing disdain for the life of the mother? And who are the sons who have become fathers to turn sons against mothers again and again?

We live in a two-gender system, in service to the father. There is no justice. There is no peace. That system is inappropriate to the memory of erotic communion with other life.
In fear and in honor of the father, sons learn to deny that memory, to rid their bodies of it. In fear and in honor of the father, sons learn an identity isolated in the phallus.

The authority of the anger of the father is interpreted by the
son as follows: (1) Not-mother hates Mother and Not-mother
hates me; Not-mother hates us. (2) It is because I am like
Mother that Not-mother hates me so. (3) I should be different
from Mother; the more different I am from Mother, the safer I
will be. These are the cardinal principles of logic in male
maturation under father right.