The Seven Ages of Man-Power

1. The Age of Embodiment

(Prehistory to ~2000 BCE)

Before states. Before scripture. Before borders. Before The Other was othered.

Gender was not fixed. Sex was sacred — a communal act.

Playful and divine.

The gods we created changed forms, lovers, and pronouns.

Filled with powerful goddesses, trickster genders, and queer magic.

We were many and we were ordinary.

2. The Age of Inheritance

(~2000 BCE — 500 BCE)

Settlements become cities. Cities want borders.

Men want to pass land down bloodlines.

That meant locking down wombs.

Sex becomes proof.

Marry a woman. Have sons. Own a legacy.

Everything else? A threat to the line.

From Foraging to Farming

• In hunter-gatherer societies, gender roles were fluid. Everyone contributed.

• Food was shared. Property didn’t exist.

• There was no need to control reproduction, survival was collective goal.

Agriculture

• Land a commodity

• Food a tool

• Surplus meant power-

Power meant more.

Inheritance mattered.

Patriarchy sharpened into a glinted flint point.

Control the Womb. Control the Wealth .

• Women reproductive infrastructure.

• Marriage guaranteed lineage. A fallacy. Manufactured.

• Virginity an asset. Bought. Sold. Like sheep. Branded, bled, led.

• Pregnancy proof of ownership.

• A baby. Proof of life.

• The womb now a vault. And men forged the lock.

Across newly knifed borders, tribes declared savages.

Other. Lesser.

Skin colour justification for domination.

Labour stolen. Languages erased.

The myth of racial difference birthed and nurtured —

to protect profit.

Expansion –

War Needed More Men

• More sons meant more power.

• Women just baby factories for the state.

• Anything that didn’t contribute to population growth — queer love, nonbinary identity. A waste.

Love that didn’t make armies. Deviance. Unneeded.

Fear of Chaos

• Queerness a symbol of freedom.

• freedom threatens control.

Patriarchy sharpened itself into a sword:

• Against “promiscuity”
• Against androgyny
• Against pleasure, softness, fluidity
• Anything unpredictable must be tamed.

Kept down.

We were many. And we were complications.

3. The Age of Doctrine

(500 BCE — 400 CE)

Religions rise.

• Laws carved in stone tablets by those powerful enough to know how to write.
• Scripture canonised: Judaism. Christianity. Islam.
• Nuanced. Flexible. Contradictory.
• Empire and psalms.
• The body became a battleground. Ready for the taking.
• Sex must be for reproduction.
• For the future.
• Gender must be binary.
• Desire must be disciplined.
• God became a he. Only a he.
• Eve became the problem to rewrite.
• Lilith erased.

We were many and we were crafted into a convenient sin.

4. The Age of Empire

(400 CE — 1500 CE)

The fall of Rome. Ideas metastasising. Growing into a theocratic dictatorship.

• Sodomy a crime.
• Gender variance now witchcraft.
• Bodies burned.
• Hearts repressed.
• Monasteries hide queerness in shadows and code. Buried beneath the vaults of the gold-plated apses, purchased with the blood of the poor.

We were many between the footnotes and fire.

5. The Age of Colonisation

(1500 CE — 1900 CE)

• Europe sails the seas they do not own.
• Blackness made monstrous. Whiteness sanctified.
• Queer and colonised — two sides of the same threat.
• Something wild. Something free. Something to fear.
• Trading. Brutalising. Raping and pillaging.
• Queer was a life.
• Two-Spirit, hijra, fa’afafine, mahu, bakla.
• They named them all deviant in the name of a God they did not write.
• Criminalised. Controlled.
• Entire cosmologies erased.
• Erased.
• Colonial law was global anti-queerness.

We were still many. And we were outlawed, exported, exterminated. Vanished.

6. The Age of Science and Surveillance

(1900 CE — 2000 CE)

• New gods: Medicine. Psychology. Nation-states.
• Queerness pathologised.
• Diagnosed. Institutionalised. Broken down.
• Corrective rape. Electroshock. Conversion therapy.
• Cameras, census forms, sex tests at borders.
• Visibility is dangerous.
• But resistance is rising.
• Stonewall. Compton’s. ACT UP. We stood up.

We are many.

7. The Age of Simulacra

(2000 CE — )

• Corporations sell rainbow capitalism with glitter precision.
• Governments grant rights with one hand — folded between criteria and faux empathy — strip them with the other. Bare.

The bathroom breaks we all take.

A political agenda.

Not a bodily function.

• With increasing visibility comes violence
• Violence perpetrated by the brainwashed masses.

Too blinded to see,

They’ve been had.

They think they’re normal.

Believe it so. Special for it.

Mediocrity worshipped like

The false

Idol

Of the man-god they manifested. And made.

We are targets.

But we are still here.

We are the echo of every name they buried.

So you can:

“As long as they don’t rape and murder…”

When you raped and murdered your whiteness

to the top

of the stock exchange.

Pockets lined,

With the money you

Stole.

You can

“Live and let live”

all that you like.

If it makes you feel

Better.

We lived.

We live.

And we are many.

We have always been many.

But history burned those pages.

And you watched the flames.