New Bitch Manifesto

The New Bitch Manifesto was a document circulated by Lila Bintam, a Turkish-Egyptian-American scholar and founder of the People's Peace Programme, one of the earliest of the Bitch Groups. The text of the document is as follows:

The New Bitch Manifesto

At one and the same time, today we are watching images of such beauty they take your breath away, and at we have the censoring and punishing of that beauty, the cutting out (with knives? Hot wax? Torture?) of all loveliness that does not conform to the iron-maiden standards of modern patriarchy, the shaming and ruining of every fat, dark, slouchy, tall, hairy or skinny body. We have the great love stories and the wonderful dances and films and even great porn to look at (just click a button), and at the same time we have the razor-edged discourse of ugliness, the final despair that is supposed to drive us mad. 

Look at men’s obsession with women’s bodies. No religion has ever been able to suppress it. No dictatorship has ever stamped out tit-worship, or ass-worship, or cunt-worship. The internet is full of it, it is the single largest database in the world. Utopia is within us, it is where we came from, it is something we will produce again for the next people in line to inhabit the Earth. This is why the wisest religions have always worshipped sex. And this is why our civilisation, where the word for sex is a swearword, is doomed unless we change. 

Rape is the ultimate act against civilisation, it is the turning back of the clock on the species, it is the ultimate unadaptive trait, to make war on the mother. This is why every battered woman should turn around to her man and say, ‘Don’t you dare.’ It is why every raped woman should say those words to her tormentor. How dare he disrespect the thing he came from? because if he does that he might as well lay down and die. 

Every dictatorship in the world has always relied on women to suck it all up and get busy producing the next generation. It doesn’t matter how many they waste, how many mother’s sons are cut to pieces, because we women are always just a punching match away from giving the men the next batch. It’s time the world’s women said, we will not be battery hens. We will not give you sons to cut down on the highway, kill with drugs or send up in airplanes to crash and burn. We won’t give you daughters to sell into slavery, or cut open in your cold hospitals or beat up in the privacy of your homes. We won’t marry you and vote for you and peck you on the cheek in public. We won’t be accessories to you or to the fact. 

No, we’ll fight and we’ll keep the clinics open and we’ll exercise our right to abort every damn one of your babies until you give us the world we want. Go on, beat us up all you want. We’ll find ways. You have to keep us alive if you want kids out of us, that’s why you never kill the women when you win, just shame them and fill them with your poisons. Just cow them down. 

Woman-terror belongs to half the human race. It is therefore the most widespread cultural practice across the globe. Nothing compares to it. Every single culture you can name oppresses its women, even the so-called matriarchies. Certainly all of the signatories to the UN charter are patriarchies. How many of them are democracies, or dictatorships, or oligarchies? Doesn’t matter. They, all of them, subscribe to one junta philosophy: keep the women down. This is the true war on terror we should be fighting. This is what the world’s armies should turn their attention to. If they can stop men dominating women, they will save the world. 

If they do not take up our call, we will begin this fight ourselves. Join us if you want to end the world of slavery, because our slavery is the basis of all slavery. Do you think if our young girls and boys could choose to love whom they wanted to, there would be racism and sexism and classism beyond two generations? Everyone would be a glorious mix of beauty and vigor and diversity. How can you have racism without race? Burn the stockbooks of humanity and set us free to love. 

We women are not your cattle. We proudly declare that we are people. We wish to survive, and we wish you to survive as well, but not at the cost of our happiness or our children's happiness. We do not want to win this war between us and you that is older than history: we want to end it. We will not be victims, and you will have to figure out how to run the world without victimising us. Only then will there be peace across the world.