Anti-Patriarchy

Just got into a mini-argument on Discord, in a channel dedicated to Pirates of the Caribbean, over how I like to interpret pirates as being inherently Anti-King and also Anti-Patriarchal. 

I was bewildered by the dismal and depressing -- and very one dimensional outlook -- that the people in the chat room, had about pirates. They just kept repeating the same standard lines like, for example, "pirates were just poor men looking to eat!" and "pirates just robbed things! Grrr..that was all!" "Stop trying to apply some politics to this!" "There was nothing more to it than high seas robbery!"

What a bunch of small minded cretins, eh? So boring.  Like, yes, I get it, the pirates themselves, in that window of time, weren't thinking big mighty thoughts about what they were doing, and yes, most just wanted to eat and rob things, and live on the high seas -- but don't f'n act like nowadays, centuries later in 2018, that there isn't more than a little bit of symbolism behind everything that happened then. Anyone who doesn't see symbolism in the pirate story is ...well, in my opinion, pretty much a moron. Or they're just one dimensional, and they don't want to see just how deep things can get, especially in retrospect. It's been hundreds of years now. People called intellectuals and writers get to see things much diferently after the fact. And what I see is deep symbolism. What I see in the age of pirates is an anti-patriarchal scream. A shout for liberation. A desire to escape the chains of things like country, like home, like family. Like tradition.

For starters, let's look at some important dates, in terms of piracy, and other things that happened after piracy. The Golden Age of Piracy is generally said to have lasted between the years 1650-1730 or thereabouts. This might seem meaningless to the average joe, and was pretty meaningless to me, until I started researching that glorious movement called the French Revolution (referenced also in my Trump article posted before this), which occurred decades later in the 1780s.

The 1780s aren't really all that far from the 1730s, and personally, I absolutely believe that there is a connecton between the two periods. For my mind, the Golden Age of Piracy was like a beta movement that ultimately led to the real game of the 1780s, when the French decided to kill their king, and start a democracy, and then of coursr the Americans also did the same (in 1777, a few years earlier, in fact). To me, there's absolutely no way to disconnect all of this, especially when you keep in mind something like the famous "Black Flag' of piracy.

Think about how obsessed people are with flags (especially Trump lovers, aka patriarchy lovers) even in the year 2018! And now think back to this Black Flag of piracy that was flown, all the way back in the 1700s. Does it not strike you as an incredibly powerful symbol? Agin, for my mind, the Black Flag isn't just some silly thing that looks cool as a tattoo (though it does). It's not just the Skull and crossbones. It is something much more than that. Its a literal blank slate to begin over with. It's blackness..or darkness...emptiness.

Emptiness for what, though? Well, in my mind, re-invention. Pirates seem to symbolize this weird (and almost other worldly) coming together of people, to get away from being locked down, to one flag or another. As I always write, pirates were lucky because they were born right after the Great Age of Exploration and Sailing.

 In other words, before the Sailing Age, most people -- especially the poor -- were essentially locked in their own countries, trapped in a pretty mono-racial world. The pirates were an escape from all this.

Were most pirates, as those people in the channel wouldn't let you forget, just thieves looking to get drunk and sleep with someone and steal gold? Absolutely. But that doesn't take away from the overarching theme of the movement or from the specific points that are visible there, that are so clearly different than the themes of previous centuries.  Plus, there's always just the theme of the Ocean in the pirate story, that is really very important. I am always fond of saying that the ocean is the literal definition of "gender fluidity". Unlike land or rock, the ocean obviously isn't solid. It's always changing. Sometimes its crazy and vicious, and other times its calm. It also, as we all know, leads to tons and tons of different countries and cultures. The ocean is hard to pin down as masculine or feminine. It simply is. Not to mention the creatures in the ocean. Many types of fish change gender all the time.

This is all really important, for me, because, when you look at the pirate story, especially something like the fashion of the pirate story, you start to see that it's all much more wild and "fluid" than pretty much any other historical character our cultures have. It's no coincidence to me, for instance, that Black Sails, which was basically the first big pirate TV show of all time, had a gay plotline, that involved the star Captain of the show. LGBT plots basically never happen in male-oriented film. Yet we got an LGBT plot right off the bat in the first pirate show. A pirate show, mind you, which probably only got made, thanks to the success that Johnny Depp's pirate film had. Johnny Depp who, you might not know, was once quoted as saying that "don't you know all my roles are really women characters?"

Johnny hasn't really done too many traditional roles. He especially wasn't keen on doing them back in the early 2000s. Aside from a film like the Libertine, he basically kept away from historical fiction, probably because he saw it as boring and too conservative. He dove right into a pirate role in the 1700s, however, because he saw very clearly the truth: Pirates were very much liberals. 

I always try to point out, for instance, the differences between pirates and cowboys. In the USA, cowboys are beloved, and seen as these really archetypical msculine rebels. Nearly everyone (except, oddly enough, many women) tends to love a good western, in the States. But think about how dry and bland a cowboy looks, in comparison to a pirate. Typically, cowboys don't wear colorful scarves in their hair, they don't wear earrings, they don't wear lots of jewels, nor do they know a lot about other cultures outside the Wild West. Cowboys are beloved in American conservative tradition for a reason: They represent people who never change. People who are, literally, trapped. Who better to help build a boring old country than people who never change? Cowboys, for all their male bravado and wildness, were actually pretty conservative and traditional. At the end of the day, they wanted the wife, the kids, and the fence to keep them all locked in.

Pirates, on the other hand, couldn't be any further away from this. They were men of the sea, and they only came to port occasionally, and most of their favored ports were in areas where there was no goverment or country yet established. It's pretty rare to hear a story about a pirate with a wife, and if they had any kids, they probably got separated pretty fast. Pirates weren't about having "families", nor were they too interested in any sort of traditional hierarchies.  They often killed their Captain if he went too crazy or they did not agree with him (pirate mutinies are famous). They also spoke badly of Kings,  because they were out at sea--where kings do not live! Beyond that, they mixed and matches cultures pretty much at random. Say what you will about fictional interpretations of pirates, but there's a reason that Captain Jack Sparrow is seen wearing such a wide array of jewels and things, from all over the world. He was a man of no where and everywhere at once. As were most pirates.

So, you see, even if pirates themselves did not realize it at the time, the beautiful truth about the movement is that it was, indeed, all sorts of anti-patriarchal and anti-tradition. Alas, some people might find it preposterous, to try and argue that a movement that was primarily made up of strong arming men, could be anti-patriarchal, but the core reasoning here is that pirates were trying to escape their own roles as future/former patriarchs. They were either cast offs or runaways. Men who either didn't want a family of their own (to rule over as a "father") or men who, for some reason, couldn't figure out how to play that dreadfully boring role. And that unwillingness to be a father, to live in a regular home in London etc., and to instead stay out on the high seas, without, for example, sending money back home (like a posh little Navy sailor would do) is a dramatic detail. It is a massive diversion from anything we saw centuries prior, and it is still a pretty massive diversion from our current cultures today. The killing of the king in the French Revolution is, for me, one of the most symbolic events in all of human history. The mighty decision to shear King daddys head off. It's gorgeous! And it's so viciously anti-patriarchal.

As i said before, pirates helped ushered the anti-monarchy ideas into society. If there had never been pirates, im willing to bet there would have never been any revolutions. So I owe them a great debt, as the feminist I am. A huge, huge debt....

Yes, again, pirates often got forced into this life against their will, but that doesn't change the fact that,prior to the Great Age of sail, and the Golden Age of Piracy, such a lifestyle pretty much was not even a remote option. One has to keep in mind that, by the 1650s, pretty much all the land on a continent like Europe, was owned by someone or other. There was no where to run to be an outlaw and live by your own terms anymore. Everything was taken. When the boats got invented, there was finally an escape route. Pirates were the men who took this escape.  To simply write them off as the boring sods in that channel did, as "merely thieves", is a gigantic mistake. It's also an enormous prejudice against the poor. As though only the wealthy ever have ideals, and the poor no? I think not, scallywags. The poor have plenty of ideals too. They just follow them in different ways.

--Bambina BankzZ --QUEEN OF THE HIGH SEAS--- PIRATE BITCH TIL THE END