The Power

“A spark jumps between the metal of the screw and her hand. Static electricity. She’s feeling weird.” 

So begins The Day of the Girls. Trapped and helpless as thugs kill her mother, Roxy feels the first surge of the skein. The initial response is understandable. Roxy is unsure of the implications of her body’s sudden expression of new power, but it is a good form of weirdness. 

“Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far. [...] Once you’ve seen that happen, no mom would let her boys out of her sight.” 

Quickly, the reality of the skein alters life. Previously, girls were cautioned against traveling alone because they were vulnerable to street attacks ranging from robbery to rape and even murder. Now girls, long harassed and living with fear, turn the tables. With the power of the skein, girls now have nothing to fear.

“Maybe that’s what the world needs. A bit of shaking up. Something new.” 

Profoundly religious and driven by a voice in her head, Allie sees the skein not in geopolitical terms but rather in the grandiose possibilities of Christian world-building. The skein is more than a YouTube gimmick, a fad, or protection from crime. Nine years before The Cataclysm, Allie sees that the skein can destroy at last the patriarchal constructs of civilization. 

“But the body has contradictory impulses: fear is as significant as lust, physical pain as strong as desire. He holds himself there, wanting and not wanting. He lets her set the pace.” 

The only male among Armon’s protagonists, Tunde, alone with a woman for the first time since the skein was discovered, represents one male response to the new power of women. It is a combination of fascination, sexual arousal, and terror. In the end, the passage moves Tunde to a position of helplessness and docility. This concession makes inevitable the movement toward The Cataclysm. 

“They felt the presence of God around them and among them, and She was glad. And the birds flew above them, calling out in glory for a new dawn.” 

The South Carolina convent where Allie finds refuge after killing her abusive foster father becomes the epicenter of Allie’s movement. It is a new Mecca for the international community of women who embrace the emerging redefinition of Christianity and the radical idea that God is better understood as a woman. The moment here in which the nuns and Allie’s followers join together on the convent grounds signals a new harmony between humanity and nature. 

“She calls the new country Bessapara, after the ancient people who lived there and interpreted the sacred sayings of the priestesses on the mountaintops. The international community waits for the outcome. The consensus is that the state of Bessapara cannot hold for long.” 

Tatiana Moskalev, the newly installed President of Moldova, champions the radical idea of a breakaway nation of women. The idea initially seems farfetched, and the international community expects the country to collapse of its own irony. As has been the case for five millennia, men underestimate women. 

“You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbor the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies. God lies within you.”

Mother Eve’s harsh and uncompromising original message reflects the perception of women that has driven virtually all religions since Antiquity, although Mother Eve particularly singles out Judeo-Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Her message here resonates because of its unsettling truth and its unshakeable logic. Her creed dares to ask what gives men the right to define God and to position themselves as the favored gender.

“The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.” 

Two years after The Day of the Girls, the rhetoric among the followers of Mother Eve grows increasingly strident. The tenor here reflects an unwillingness to compromise and wait patiently for men to recognize the worth of women. This passage represents a tipping point in which women recognize that to create their society the current world must be destroyed, men and women both. Apocalypse is now on the table. 

“You’ve left your daughters to be raised by NorthStar day camps. Do you even care about those girls?” 

Her male opponent in her gubernatorial campaign for challenges Margot’s worth as a mother live during a televised debate. The snide slur, which before the skein would have gone unanswered, stops the debate cold. Incensed over the implication that she cannot be both powerful and a loving mother, Margot attacks her opponent with a bolt that renders him stunned. Such a display of power actually endears Margot to the electorate. 

“They want to kill us all.”

Urban.dox, the anonymous Internet advocate for men’s rights, is the first to tell Tunde that the skein represents only one thing: the end of men. According to Urban.dox, equality is not what women want. Domination is not even enough for “them.” Women wants nothing less than to have the Earth to themselves. The extremism of the argument, and the reality that extinguishing men would doom women to extinction as well within a single generation, is lost on the men who see powerful women only as a threat.

“But a full dose of the Glitter, and three or four women could take down the electricity of the island of Manhattan.” 

Glitter introduces a problematic dimension to the new era. Five years after The Day of the Girls, power has become an intoxicating lure. The drug Glitter enhances what was already considerable power. Under the influence of the purplish powder, women’s blasts are far stronger and far more menacing. Glitter marks the moment when Armon’s narrative begins to reveal the danger of the ascent of women. 

“I want you to fuck off. And I want you to tell all of them that you’re handing the business over to me. We’re not having any bloody battles, no one else is coming up to it from me, no more revenging you, no Greek tragedy. We’re doing it peaceful.” 

Without discharging her skein, Roxy assumes the control of her family’s massive crime organization, most notably its global control of the distribution of the street drug Glitter. In the confrontation with her father after Roxy discovers his complicity in her mother’s death, Roxy finds that women can be powerful now by simply threatening to use the skein. This reflects a new dimension of respect for women. 

“All we want…is the American dream, right here is Bessapara. We are a new nation, plucky little state bordered by a terrible enemy. We want to live freely, to pursue our own way of life. We want opportunity. That’s all.” 

Tatiana Moskalev’s speech reveals how in their ascendancy into real power women have adopted men’s ability to mask their grandiose schemes for domination and conquest in the coaxing and reassuring rhetoric of peaceful coexistence. With Putin-like charm, Tatiana lays out what seems to be a reasonable position that masks the reach of her real ambitions and the depth of her paranoia. The rhetoric makes Bessapara seem harmless, their aspirations understandable or even laudable, and their goals limited and modest. None of this, as it turns out, is true.

“She goes down for a moment into the black mud, and when she fights her way back up again, they are cutting into her so carefully it feels like a compliment. She’s numbed, and it doesn’t hurt, but she can feel the knife going in.” 

The forcible removal of Roxy’s skein—akin to castration of a man—marks what should be the nadir of the narrative. It is the moment when Roxy, stripped of her biological superiority, becomes little more than another man: helpless, vulnerable, and useless. However, this violation of her body actually marks the ascendancy of Roxy as the novel’s moral and ethical center. She is stronger for having the biological advantage removed.

“Many men who have been subjected to curbing will never be able to ejaculate without pain.” 

Between chapters of Neil Adam Armon’s elaborate recreation of the rise of women, he inserts archival material that underscores his diligence as a historian of an era all but lost to his time. In this case, he explains a piece of four-thousand-year-old rock art recovered in northern France that depicts the mutilation of male genitalia—a procedure, he says, still practiced in European countries as a way to render men harmless. The interlude reveals both the corruption of power in the matriarchal society and the corruption of power in the 21st century patriarchy. The practice parallels similar acts of clitoral circumcision and removal practiced today in the Middle East and Africa. 

“You are the victim and we are the victors. You are the slave and we are the masters.” 

The ritual in the woods that Tunde witnesses is an unsettling scene as it reveals the corruption of women in power. It shows the entrenched cult of female power just months before the world spirals into The Cataclysm. As Tunde witnesses the young man sacrificed to a blind priestess in the name of asserting female dominance, he realizes the extremes that women have reached with the power of the skein.

“The subject is: how many men do we really need? Think it over, they say. Men are dangerous. Men commit the great majority of crimes. Men are less intelligent, less diligent, less hard-working, their brains are in their muscles and their pricks.” 

Tunde’s sobering reflection while he is held captive by the same women he witnessed sacrifice a man in a bloody ritual ceremony reveals the dangers of either gender assuming the right to dominate the other. Here are all the stereotypes of men used for generations to disparage a world run by men. In the emerging union between Tunde, a disempowered man, and Roxy, a woman stripped of her biological superiority, the novel offers a vision of cooperation and trust between genders. 

“They come with soft, animal grunts, snuffling into each other’s necks, and fall asleep like that, legs intertwined, underneath a found blanket, in the center of a war.” 

The intense lovemaking scene between Tunde and Roxy seems out of place in a narrative otherwise focused on scenes of rape and sexual violation. The lovemaking is gentle and easy; the two respect each other and understand their mutual pain and suffering. They strike a moment of conciliation and respect that under any other circumstances would be a moment when two people fall in love. 

“The voice says: You want the whole world turned upside down. Allie says: Yes.” 

This is Mother Eve’s last communication with the voice in her head. She admits that women can only right the millennia-old wrongs done to them by men by allowing the apocalypse. Despite her rhetoric of Christian serenity, here the message is clear: Cleansing is the only way. As she says a short time earlier, the only way forward is to blast everyone, men and women, back to the Stone Age. 

“‘Trust me,’ she says as she slams the trunk closed.” 

Tunde, as he departs the novel, escapes the chaos of Bessapara and the consequences of being a man in Tatiana Moskalev’s authoritarian regime only by trusting Roxy. She tells him she will get him out of the country and arranges for him to be picked up by a stranger—a woman—in a car. He must trust her, an act that defines the need for men and women to move beyond suspicion, hostility, power plays, and paranoia.

“They pull the skein, lithe and wriggling, from his living chest, just before they get his head off, and at last he is quiet, their fingers dark with blood.” 

The scene in which the women who work in the Glitter factory attack Roxy’s brother is graphic. The workers, high on Glitter, rip the transplanted skein out the brother and then literally tear him apart. It is the prelude to The Cataclysm as it reveals that under the intoxicating feel of new power, many women have become little more than animals. 

“Her own self, her beating heart, the part of her that powered all the rest. A thin and rotting piece of gristle. The muscle straited, purple and red.” 

In this moment, Roxy moves away from thinking about the skein as something central to her power, her identity, and her heart. As she looks at the gruesome remnants of her brother, she picks out the skein. It is exposed for what it is: little more than a strip of rotting muscle. Roxy, in turn, will survive by tapping into something far more powerful: her heart.

“She cuppeth the power in her hand. She commandeth it to strike.” 

This passage from the writings of Mother Eve is quoted frequently to explain the unleashing of The Cataclysm. Mother Eve refused to use her considerable international clout to avert the military showdown between the men supported by the ousted Saudi government and the Glitter-engorged women of Bessapara. Her rhetoric casts the war as an expression of female empowerment.