Why and how a radical left politics must refuse "radical feminism"
Is (or was) feminism about equality for women or hatred for men, universally imagined as oppressors?
In this essay, I attempt to develop a communist, or ‘democratic socialist’, reading of this.
Looking back at the last 50 years, and at my experiences living in West Coast college towns in the 70s with the New Age, what it seems to me happened is that the professional and managerial classes became highly feminized, and that brought with it a tacit normative femininity. I began to understand this problem and what it is wrong it when I was a student at Berkeley in the 80s. Feminism then was triumphant—sort of, since as a discourse it often functioned as a kind of tacit undertow, a set of taken for granted tactics for women in authority to get what they want in conjunction with ‘hippie’ and California-style interdiction of negative affect and enforcement of a pseudo-political ethics of being calm, — it was the new normative femininity. It is in the context that I was able to begin to understand how a young man like me could expect to be systematically mistreated and then vilified, if I was at all angry (and how could I not be, as it was a gross injustice?)
Simply, I think feminism was a discourse legitimating intolerance and oppression, artfully designed so that a masculine person by definition is in the wrong in any conflict, and if he is angry about how he is treated, then, gotcha!, he’s basically a rapist! This kind of left-wing fascism has long been a possibility in America because Americans are so prone to extremism. And certainly the feminist theories that were indeed championed by some professors were extreme. Basically, it was the time of the ‘second wave’ of feminism, which was focused on rape and sexual assault and harassment. It astonishes me still that some of these people believed themselves to be on the radical left, when the only possible uses of their discursive strategies was to shore up the institutional and rhetorical, demonstrative, or personal power of female administrative personnel. And on the basis of the California mentality, which essentially was this interdiction of strong passions and disagreement.
I was once a victim of sexual assault, and I am lucky to be alive. This should not be so surprising, because in America approximately as many men as women are raped. The men are usually in jails or prisons, and for that reason fewer people care about them. This alone should be enough to give the lie to the claim that rape is something that is done to women. It is done to many women, but not only to them. There are some differences: I believe that men who rape other men often do so out of contempt for the other man’s lack of power. It is a punishment. It is the punishment of bullies, who constitute a phenomenon inadequately understood, because men and women who are bullies do not just wrongly want something; actually, what they want usually is partly a curiously ‘political’ matter: Bullies are conservative and cynical, and they generally believe that persons should be strong, because the world is run on power. They often don’t like this, and wish it were otherwise, but they “know” that it isn’t. Men in prisons and jails are usually raped to punish them for being weak. The guards may reinforce this, because after all they have rather similar values. That is one reason why cops are so often so contemptuous and hostile to people. Women often are raped by men who are angry at women somehow, and that is a bit different. But whether they are two types of crime or one, its existence and prevalence does not distinguish men from women as evil and innocent, which is tacitly the conservative belief of many radical feminists, as it does different modes of some people using power against others whom they resent for some reason, and want to express power over or anger towards.
The fact of anger is itself no criterion. Sure, Cain and Lamech were angry, and so was Hitler. Though it is comically an expression of a psychologizing culture that some people think that the Holocaust happened because Hitler was an angry men who just needed a good therapist—perhaps a follower of Melanie Klein. Some angry men (and women) become professional boxers, others become writers whose prose is angry; there’s more than one thing a person can do besides try to start a war. Revolutionaries too many be angry. The great black revolutionary theorist Franz Fanon certainly championed the rage of colonial subjects. But we need not look even that for, for in the above alluded-to text, Moses, Christ, and God himself had some serious anger management or at least issues. The Talmud says that without what psychoanalysis calls the aggressive drive, a man would not marry or build a house. Yes, there is aggression in social movements, including nonviolent ones, which develop and use it in particular ways, which is very different from just abandoning it while turning the other check. And yes, there is aggression in sex and love. To deny this is to infantilize the whole world. There is a “feminist” possibility, and one where we must keep the quotes! Perhaps people are only really ever guilty of what they do, or perhaps want to do, and not how they feel.
I was in a jail for about an hour. It was the Bay Area in 1982; you can do the math. I may seem like a hard-edged irasci ble prick, but my point of view is that girls should not cry wolf. Women are raped by men who are doing something more than just being men. It is not only not true, it is a vicious and evil lie that an angry man is a rapist. Or that there is something in all men as such that makes us inclined to hate women and want to hurt them. I don’t. But if you treat me like a criminal, I will not appreciate it; I will be angry. Especially if I don’t think I have done you any wrong. I also think that people should act mature enough to not call something or someone something that they are not. One way to put it is this: I know the difference between what is and is not actual violence, and maybe you don’t, and if you don’t, I wish you did, because girls who don’t tend to cry wolf, and if you cry wolf about some man, he goes to jail, he is raped, and you are guilty of making it possible by either lying or being childishly stupid, in a way that really is unforgivable for anyone who could know better.
Metaphors are not violence, artworks are not violence, angry works of theory are not violent, “raising your voice” is only violence to American fascists, often women, usually employed by bureaucracies.
Indeed, this is why the reduction of art to anthropology, along with the fearful suspicion of both life and form that this expresses, is so wrong. This happened in the academy in the name of “theory,” which in extreme forms arrogates to itself the privilege of judging both persons and artworks, but the power of cultural criticism, then identities wholly with the theory and criticism but not art itself, deprives itself of the core capacity of art to reveal features of the world we live by creating artificial worlds that operate as metaphorical and allegorical powers, showing what is as it is by showing what it “is like,” and so operating in the freedom of the “as is,” and what Arthur Danto called the “is of artistic identification.” The powers of art ultimately are on the side of a democracy at least of speaking beings who can make claims. Only, when art is not tied to social norm enforcement, it does so much more freely and powerfully. And that means that it has visionary powers as well as critical ones, can show us possibilities to be affirmed and not critiqued or deconstructed, and talking about it can be a real conversation and not the kind of anti-democratic pseudo-conversation that amounts to putting ideas into practice, which is both implementation an enforcement.
It would be comically stupid to make this norm, and surely in a society with a post-scarcity economy, whatever “feminine” and “masculine” traits can be in any sense or on any basis identified, they are pretty much all possibilities of everyone, and whether equally so does not so much matter. But: Camille Paglia among others is absolutely right to note that this idea of art is in a way “masculine,” simply because in reproductive terms men are “outside” in a way that women are not. You can have a baby and be thousands of miles away when the kid is born, if you are a man. What you do is done in a somewhat different time and place. Men are more “ecstatic” in the sense of outside themselves, and art’s artifice has some of that character. I read Paglia not as arguing masculine superiority but just enough recognition of difference to permit the tolerance of non-normatively-feminine ways of thinking and interacting.
In fact, I have to say that being treated as I sometimes was has given me some ability to appreciate how many black men feel, when people assume that they are violent. Unfortunately, some very angry people are violent and will hurt you, and some are not. Some people think that if you disrespect them, they have the right to do you violence, if in fact, as they know themselves to be, they are part on oppressed minority who are hated partly because they are presumed to be violent.
In this respect, however, both black power and radical feminism, which in fact arose at almost exactly the same time, largely after 1968, have been politically devastating for these reasons.
Part of the problem is that so many people don’t seem to really know what is violence and what is not. Or, worse, they like using a rhetorical and ideological regime to rule the society and maintain their own class power, as professionals and managers, by way of such discourses. It is as if their politics were basically a war against evil. And so you get the social justice warrior plague and all that.
People who see violence everywhere can only really have a fascist politics, because this is a social paranoia. And fascism, we know, is a paranoid politics generally.
In light of these matters, my own political sensibility began to be strongly anti-liberal, because I think that an affective liberalism triumphed that is actually very repressive, and it is perfectly bourgeois.
As a matter of fact, I think women are the more conservative sex. That’s why they often are obsessed with the need for everything to be “safe,” and so paranoiacally seeing danger and potential violence everywhere and in everything. True, they are often much nicer than the men around them, and this does facilitate a welfare-state liberalism, for obvious reasons, but I think I have found that many women in America are cowardly timid persons who hide behind a false God whose attributes above all else are Relationships and Feelings. This right away, and logically, excludes Reason. You can’t argue with a woman in America who is like the norm if she thinks you are angry about the matter. Because she has been taught to be scared of violence, which might be personal, and to attribute this possibility essentially to men, and for radical feminists, to men when they are being men and thinking like men. Since we do have much evidence that suggests that women and men do indeed most often think a bit differently.
It is easy to see that this norm enforcement of being calm and nice, taken to the extreme that American society at its more bourgeois does, is just a bourgeois capitalist ideology that discursively hypertrophies ideas of “violence” that are essentially imaginary or symbolic.
Men are much more likely than women to be transgressive, and male artists and intellectuals frequently are and want to be. Women tend intuitively to fear that male transgression will not be violating some rule or structure or even practice or organized discourse, but their own bodies. So then all of culture is rape.
If that sounds crazy, just consider that the left in this period at least at universities, which since the end of the 60s is really the only place where it flourished, at least until fairly recently, was largely organized around the proposition that Culture is a Mask of Power. The traditional idea of the humanities that art brings with its effects of beauty (or the sublime) was one of self-cultivation on the basis of the idea that art is somehow uplifting, ennobling, or enlightening. And the culturally critical left wanted to oppose to that idea (but why opposed? does one exclude the other?) the notion that artworks really are ideological constructions that conceal and legitimate power relationships, with the consequences that both the high/low distinction is voided (comic books are as interesting as Shakespeare) and that one studies art in order to make political warfare by other means. Now, if all of culture (in both the aesthetic and anthropological senses, and obviously absorbing the former into the latter) is a mask of power and little more than that, at least from the standpoint of usefully interesting scholarship, then why not also make all kinds of metaphorical associations and reductions? For example, a man who is angry is a rapist. Why or why not? One finds a common theme. Indeed, rapists are often angry men, so there is both a commonality (as well as an important difference) and a causal relationship (which gets reversed). What is the function of this? It gives women who are seeking professional jobs something to lean on if they want to feel like they are usefully taking up the militant style in American politics, a style that has no essential need to be on the left, though the left has often wanted and promoted this militancy. The purpose of the new discourse and strategy was to fold this militant anger into claims that, when satisfied, would leave more women comfortably situated in good middle-class office jobs, where they would also have some authority, like over people beneath them in the hierarchy, and at universities, students, often despised by administrative personnel there, this being frequently done by efforts at infantilization. It was a false politics.
If culture is a mask of power, and interpretation is the practice of radical politics in a profession based on academic discourse, then anything can be said to “really” be something else, and a militancy can organize itself simply around this idea. Call it a radical hermeneutics of insurgency against imagined domination.
Recent world history ought to teach us that if someone wants to fight back and dominate others, or wage a hostile battle against them, often the easiest and best way is to convince themselves that these others are the ones who oppress or hate them.
That women in general are oppressed by men, by virtue of these men being ‘masculine’, is not an only an absurdly untenable proposition, it is a lie.
Its purpose is to provide a discourse that strategically enables the militant and punitive enforcement of a new normative femininity, on the polemical grounds that this normative is natural or good, perhaps because more pacific, and both in contrast to and as a way of struggling to defeat, the old normative masculinity.
Which is not the same thing as having neither. We should raise boys and girls with the same options of “masculine” and/or “feminine” (and/or neuter: who not have three genders, as in Latin, German, and Russian?), but also with the same tolerance of the variations in style, so that we don’t have men forced to act like women or women like men? The differences are going to persist to some extent, and we should honor “both” possibilities (and all the variations and hybrids between them), and what we need is to aim for (even if this ultimately impossible and so only approachable as a limit) is a non-normativizing distribution of (in some sense, or just historically) gender-specific personality styles.
It would greatly facilitate this to have a less bureaucratic and managed society, or one that does not empower the university-educated professional class as a managerial elite entitled to rule over powerless ordinary subject-citizens while the elites set the rules. What can make this seem possible in fact is that the managerial class that we have serves capitalism. It may be true that we don’t exactly know what might be the contours of a different society that is less oppressive, and to the extent that we don’t, we need to experiment and find out.
A normative femininity is simply a bourgeois liberal discourse that wields a discursive and ideological weaponry that operates largely by falsely (or with hermeneutic creativity) attributing to its opponents a “violence,” that is in fact entirely imputed. It is imaginary or symbolic, largely imaginary, and it works by saying that x and y and z are: violence. Of course this violence can only be identified as a latency. And so we get the hermeneutical creativity of ex-scholars who think evil can be identified in almost anything, and this helps produce the phenomenon of “micro-aggressions.”
If people cannot engage in “micro-agressions” generally, then what this means is simply that the controversy and polemical character of all discourse when it is at all political, or involves principled disagreements in matters of consequence expressed between persons in public spaces, — if that is not tolerated, then we have by definition an anti-political culture which cannot be democratic. And moreover is surely deployed partly with the effect, often intended, often not, of defeating such a culture before it can even get started.
This normative femininity operates largely by calling everything “violent” that is “agressive” because not calm and agreeable. It wants what Foucault called “docile bodies” and it gets them through the normative femininity.
“God” becomes one of Relationships and Feelings, as that is what girls and women — in a still surprisingly traditional culture that is not today exactly patriarchal, but does continue to ascribe to men and women different normative personality traits. Of course, for all we know, some at least of the predisposition of women to be kinder, gentler, more concerned with how they and other people feel, more sensitive to that in the first place, and so tending always in situations of discussion or conflict to emphasize the relatively supreme importance of empathy and maintaining contentment in relationships of whatever kind.
The reason why this would be partly genetic — though it clearly is the case that affective dispositions that are generic by gender are a given-ness that, “like anatomy” as feminists used to say, rightly, is not a destiny — is that women can become mothers in certain ways that men generally cannot. Women may or may not — we should probably expect as a matter of policy that the matter is open in every individual case — be just as suited as men to becoming physicist or football players, but men do not give birth, do not suckle infants at their own breasts, and because the affective contact between mothers and infants is normally so intimate, and needs to be — we surely could only not expect women to care more, and intuitively, almost as if it were automatic - about Relationships and Feelings. And less about such now so thoroughly discredited social practices and styles of, let’s say, mind and personality, as logic, or even the artful manipulations of symbolic forms. There is no sense here in arguing a masculine superiority. It is enough to observe that there are women mathematicians and other things to know that we would be very wrong to want to discourage and not encourage girls from going into math and science. Nor can it make sense in today’s society, with its wealth and opportunities so different from traditional societies tied to agricultural routines, to expect all women to become others. Math is good, math and mom-hood are optional. My claim is simply this: because of the evolutionary logic in the need for mothers to be affectively sensitive to their infants, women in general are more Feeling and Relationship-intensive beings than men.
Given that, and the obvious difference it involves, how can anyone justify a feminism of normative femininity, which demands that men treat other people and express or conceal their emotional or affective states in only the ways in which most women have learned to do, and in societies that are still structured by normalizing, normativiized, gender difference?
What happened to me at Berkeley is just that I suddenly found myself having regularly to deal with female functionaries who regularly would treat me like some kind of evil man. Yes, I am a bit irascible, and I’m also Irish, which helps in this, or doesn’t help, depending on your point of view. Like most people, I feel angry when I think I or some person or thing or matter that I care about is wronged, damaged, violated, or threatened. Unlike most women, I don’t normally have much inclination, and maybe even limited ability, at least relatively, to moderate my reactions such that I am oh so sensitive always to the subtle nuances of feeling in interactions, and to the point that these are permitted or required to substitute for rational thinking. I deny the validity of any communicational or social norms — in what is now called our “communicative capitalism” — that are based on the prejudice that Reason does not matter and Feelings and happy Relationships do.
I also think that I was encountering then a pseudo-left-wing university culture that is in fact a form of the right wing. The people I could not find any way to get past or get along with were members of the professional class, and they also were in a position of relative power over me, because students at universities do not as individuals have very much power. I believe that in fact the difficulties I had with these women, and some men, some of whom were perhaps either gays or ‘hippies’, was not about what they thought it was. It was about justice and power. I was denied any way of participating in the power that we were exercising. Which by definition means that these were anti-democratic situations.
Our culture is radically liberal in many ways, but this can be purchased at the precise of being less democratic. You can now have whatever gender or sexual identity you like, and this is your private matter that you are allowed as a public matter to be and declare with a kind of absoluteness. It is above criticism, and of course since the points of liberation and liberty chosen are the styles and names of personalities and identities, this makes perfect sense. But what happens when people hide between the privilege of their radically self-fashioned identity to refuse genuine and open dialogue, with the result that whoever is already in a position of superior power wins.
I believe in the importance of democratic situations, and politicizing modes of interaction. That means re-making political what had been made private and personal. Radical or culturally political feminism failed because its claim to make the personal political was actually used by the new wing of the managerial bourgeoisie to make the political personal. In that way, someone like me could not possibly make any claim. If a person like me was treated unfairly, or believed he (or she) had been, there would be nothing he could be permitted to do or say about it, because if he did, they would say you are angry, and then you lose so that they win, and don’t have to accommodate your request or claim at all.
The notion that it is immoral to express anger is widespread, and in the professoriate I have found it among men, including even Jews, who are conservatives. The idea that it is immoral to be angry - and it was made clear to me, that it does not matter what the wrong is that was done to you, or that you believe was — this is as purely fascist a mentality as you can get, and it develops naturally both out of and as a kind of liberalism. It’s a liberalism that fears the Other and wants to pacify and civilize him. In other words, it’s ultimately a colonialist discourse.
It can only be fascist to have a politics that seeks to redress the oppression of one population group by another. Therefore, the idea that all (and maybe only) women are oppressed by all (and mostly or maybe only) men is fascist, and the same thing is true of black and white.
This is what the American liberal-left and the academic and university-trained left does not understand.
If it fully learns this lesson, the options for radical social change in the direction of a more democratic and freer society, against the neoliberal police state with its ultra-capitalism, will be greatly enhanced. If it fails to learn this lesson, too many Americans will feel annoyingly left out by liberal elites directly or tacitly affiliated with the corporate and governmental establishments. That empowers the forces who like Trump. For Trump succeeded largely because of widespread disenchantment of the kind of liberal Democratic politics represented by Hilary Clinton (and Biden, Obama, Bill Clinton, and all major Democratic nominees and candidates since FDR). The left or what passed for it mostly took the wrong direction after 1968. It did not, incidentally, favor black Americans. It led to greater inequality. And as welfare states were in many places dismantled, social control of everyone who is not part of the capitalist elite increased.
And if this lesson is not well enough learned and the right conclusions drawn, than to the extent that the left is successful, it will bring with it the fascist-leaning liberal plague. I realize this sounds counter-intuitive in the sense that today there are real American fascists and far-right politicians and forces, and both they and the university-based and trained left-liberals who are dominant in the corporate and government elites, tend to understand each other as not only ideological enemies, but as the enemies, the one of the other. But in fact those of us on the left proper, which is, and must be, as it was historically, socialist/communist/anarchist/radically democratic, both egalitarian and libertarian, and certainly inclusive to gender and other differences without trying to institute new normativities that work by inclusions that entail exclusions, — the left proper must effectuate a scission, a break, where “one divides into two,” as Maoists used to say, between our radically democratic politics and these elitist liberalisms.
It is only from the point of view of a left-wing that is outside both the standard corporate liberal Democratic establishment, with its identity politics at the center, serving as a placeholder for the empty chair of the social force that would bear in itself the subjective dispositions of wanting, needing, demanding, and struggling for, a different kind of society and economy, and using this place of the void as a way to substitute in various identities, all of whom wind up being treated as clients to be bought off and placated, supporting the political and economic power of elites with largely symbolic goods and benefits. Part of the purpose of a visible radical left party or faction, or set of loosely affiliated groups, is to serve as a point of identification for something from whose standpoint it is possible to see clearly that right fascism and corporate liberalism are really variants of the same thing. For they are both strategies, and ultimate quite repressive ones, serving the purposes of capital.