Julie Bindel - too many women are unthinkingly heterosexual

Julie Bindel

Julie Bindel is a 50-year-old English feminist. For better and for worse she's an intellectual type - meaning that she's more principled than most in the pursuit of her politics.

The first thing to note is that she's a lesbian who thinks that other women should also be lesbian. That makes sense if you really believe in FTP - feminist patriarchy theory.

According to this theory, men have arranged society so that they benefit from the oppression of women and men, as a class, enforce this privilege by acts of violence against women. If this were true, then it would make little sense for women to love men, as they would be loving those who violently oppress them.

And so Julie Bindel in one article urged bisexual women to stop sleeping with the enemy (i.e. men):

When I write about making a positive choice to be a lesbian, and that I believe there is no gay (or for that matter bisexual) "gene," I am accused of being an ideological robot and therefore not genuinely sexually attracted to women. That is nonsense.

...For bisexual women living under the tyranny of sexism, choosing to be lesbian is a liberatory act.

Those of us who grew up in a time and context where there was a political analysis of sexuality were able to make a positive choice to be a lesbian. I believed then, and I believe now, that if bisexual women had an ounce of sexual politics, they would stop sleeping with men.

This opinion did not exactly endear her to bisexual women, one of whom accused her of curtailing her autonomy:

Removing the autonomy to choose who one can and cannot f.... is not feminism and it never can be.

And here is Julie Bindel making the same point about not loving the enemy:

The reason why so many of the new-wave feminists bleat on (and on) about including men in feminism is because so many of them are unthinkingly heterosexual. Women are the only oppressed group that is required to love their oppressor, sexually and every other way.

Again, that makes sense if you support views like the following ones, as quoted approvingly by Julie Bindel:

Finn Mackay, a feminist activist and academic has organised the Reclaim the Night march in London for the past six years, believes that men do have a role to play within feminism, but — it is not coming along to meetings and taking part in the decision-making process. “They can stop rape by not raping, and bring the sex industry to its knees by not paying for sex,” says MacKay, without a trace of irony. “Oppression doesn’t just happen to women like bad weather. Men as a group systematically oppress and exploit women, and feminism is the political movement to challenge and change that.”

If that's what you believe, then why not be a radical lesbian separatist feminist? And why not believe that marriage, as a patriarchal institution, should be abolished:

I absolutely agree that fighting for the rights for same-sex marriage is going too far. I would outlaw marriage for everyone, including heterosexuals...

There are two paths here. One path is to accept the claims of feminist patriarchy theory - in which case it makes sense for women to avoid friendly relations with men. The other path is to scrutinise these claims. Is it really true that men as a class have acted to perpetrate violence and oppression on women? Couldn't the very opposite claim be argued for? That men as a class have acted to protect women from violence and to work to improve the circumstances of women?

In Western societies there was traditionally a very strong ethos amongst men that it was dishonourable to commit an act of violence toward women. So if men acted as a class it was to repudiate violence against women rather than to commit it.

Similarly, there was a strong ethos amongst men that they should work hard to support their wives and families. Many tens of millions of men have laboured on behalf of their families when they could have had easier lives living for themselves alone.

There is a much more positive reading of the masculine than the one normally pursued by feminists like Julie Bindel - and it's a reading that permits women to openly embrace their heterosexuality.

Michigan Womyn's Festival invaded by four year old boys!

I found a post at a feminist website which is so way out I burst out laughing:

One hears quite a lot about male trannies being excluded from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, but you never really hear much public discussion about the fact that males as old as TEN are allowed.

Girls four and under don’t even have childcare facilities separate from males in their age-group, but are instead lumped together with them as “Sprouts.”

Males as old as four are allowed free reign of the grounds, meaning that all attendees are at all times in the presence of males, including, of course, at the outdoor showers.  It’s outrageous that girls would be expected to bathe with these males roaming around.

I should say that I’ve never been to MWMF, but my girlfriend and I have discussed perhaps going in the future.  The one thing that causes us hesitation is the fact that boys 4 and under would be running around.  In our day-to-day lives the only males we really have any contact with are the bratty 2- and 3-year-old sons of friends of ours.  And we hate being subjected to the sight of their penises and just their overall male presence in general.

It is not ... feminist to subject daughters, one’s own or others, to males of any age given the frequency with which boys harass and abuse girls.  One would also have to consider the male-supremacist implications of  the general lumping of children of both sexes in with women as an inevitable grouping, even if those boys weren’t disruptive or abusive – but of course I haven’t seen any little boys refraining from misogynist abuse of little girls.

Sheesh! These "womyn" are scared of being oppressed by four-year-old patriarchalists. Imagine having to inhabit the head space of these lesbian separatist feminist womyn. Now that would be truly oppressive.

Can liberals tolerate sex distinctions?

Things don't always go the way of liberal modernism. Take the case of sex distinctions. These are supposed to be made not to matter in a liberal order.

One reason for this is that liberals believe that to be free we must be self-determining. We must be unimpeded in creating who we are and what we do. Our sex - the fact of being a man or woman - is something that we don't get to determine for ourselves. Therefore, it is seen negatively as a "biological destiny" and traditional sex roles are rejected as being merely "conventional" and therefore "restrictive".

This orthodox, establishment liberal view, that sex distinctions must be made not to matter, is set out by Susan Moller Okin as follows:

A just future would be one without gender. In its social structures and practices, one's sex would have no more relevance than one's eye color or the length of one's toes.

Similarly, Carolyn Heilbrun has declared that:

our future salvation lies in a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen.

Here in Melbourne there is a private club called the Athenaeum which, since its formation in 1842, has restricted membership to men. A group of 130 high-profile members of the club have been campaigning to change the rules, but have not persuaded the majority of members to do so.

A Herald Sun columnist, Sally Morrell, weighed in on the issue. Her argument was simple but significant:

Of course, once there was the cry of "sexism" the usual gender war warriors came out to once more re-fight the battles of last century.

There was Victoria's Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission chief, Helen Szoke, claiming that while she had no power to change the Athenaeum's rules it was a "matter for common sense" that it should allow women to join.

Common sense?

Common sense tells me that it's actually very common indeed for women to prefer women's company, and men men's.

Barbecues in my childhood always had the women clustering around the kitchen, while the men stood around doing what they do to the snags and burgers.

And nothing much has changed. Look around at the next school social or street party, and you'll see the sexes doing their oil-and-water thing.

Sure, my women friends love the men in their lives, and love socialising with men, but we also love our women-only time.

My book club has no women-only rule, yet not a single man has even asked to join it in the years we've been going, and none of us plans to bring one along soon. It's wonderful to be among just women, free to indulge ourselves in goss and pop-psychology ...

I bet those old dinosaurs at the Athenaeum feel much the same way about their club.

And, I guess, the club offers them much the same kind of service.

A refuge from the other sex, albeit in somewhat grander environs and with a brandy after dinner to boot.

And you've got to wonder why Szoke doesn't also declare war on the women-only Lyceum Club, just a short walk from the Athenaeum.

For some reason the sight of rich women enjoying each other's company seems natural and social, but the sight of rich men doing the same seems sinister and evidence of a conspiracy.

Sally Morrell is arguing that sex distinctions do matter in our lives. That there are times when we enjoy the company of the opposite sex, but also times when we interact in a different way with our own sex.

She is arguing that this is a natural, ongoing, ineradicable, positive aspect of life which does not need to be suppressed.

In accepting sex distinctions as a natural and positive aspect of life, she has no need to explain them as an assertion of superior identity by one group over another, as left-liberals commonly do. So she doesn't assume that when a group of men socialise together, that they are acting to enforce an unjust power structure over women.

She therefore doesn't resort to the usual double-standard in which it's considered alright, or even liberating, for women to socialise or interact together, but thought dangerously illegitimate for men to do so. (Why "liberating" for women? Presumably, in socialising or interacting together separately from men, they are held to be escaping male control and male power - this is the very negative understanding of sex distinctions which leads to the retention of women-only groups, such as schools, sports clubs, gyms and girl guides, but to a voluntary or sometimes compulsory shift to unisex membership for previously male groups.)

I would add one further argument to those made by Sally Morrell. It's particularly important that young men experience masculine, and therefore masculinising, environments. Without this, it's more difficult for boys and young men to develop the strength of character and resilience they need to shoulder the burdens that will be placed on them in their adult lives. It's of considerable personal benefit to women if their fathers, husbands and sons cope well in life. So women, too, have an interest in maintaining male only spaces in society.

There's been one other setback to the liberal programme of making sex distinctions not matter. A couple of years ago I noticed that even feminists were returning to traditionally feminine pursuits:

It seems to me that the more that such feminist women reject femininity in theory, the more that they attempt to bolster it in practice. How else can you explain the feminist craze for the most feminine of interests, such as knitting, sewing, decorating, flowers and kittens.

Kate herself lists her primary interest as knitting; Mindy makes quilts; Laura likes baking and kittens; and Janet likes to sew pink clothes for her daughter. Janet, in fact, runs one website about her passion for laundry and another about her love for motherhood, her daughter, flowers, gardens and sewing.

This return to feminine interests has now become a recognised social trend. In a feature column in the Melbourne Herald Sun, Kylie Hanson writes:

For so long, the feminist movement made housewife a dirty word ...

We were proud not to cook, and shrugged our suit-clad shoulders when confronted with a sewing machine ...

It was dubbed progress ... But what women realised was that turning our backs on domesticity wasn't the easy answer.

Now, younger women are returning to the so-called domestic crafts: sewing, cooking, knitting and gardening.

Doesn't this trend suggest that sex distinctions are more deeply ingrained than liberals suppose? Why else would even the most "progressive" women take up traditionally feminine interests? It's not as if the current generation of women have been socialised to sew and to bake. Nor do they lack alternative pathways. But still they return to the traditionally feminine.

Why would they do so if the feminine only exists artificially to oppress them? Isn't it more likely that women are naturally oriented to some degree to what is distinctly feminine?

The evidence suggests that sex distinctions do matter and should be accepted as playing a meaningful role in society.

A model that could actually work really well?

The small town of Gloucester in Boston is in the news. A group of girls at the local high school made a pact to get pregnant and raise their children together. Seventeen girls are pregnant at the school, all of them under the age of sixteen. The fathers, one of them a homeless man, are in their mid-20s.

It has been suggested that the school has gone too far in accepting teen pregnancies:

The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers ... teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC.

But what about feminists? What attitude are they likely to take? Will they blame older men for having sex with underage girls?

Well, our own Australian feminists appear to approve of the situation. At Hoyden about Town, the feminist writer Tigtog claims that the girls are smart to take advantage of the "support structure" provided by the school and by each other and concludes:

This is a model that could actually work really well for these girls.

Lauredhel added in the comments:

I agree that I felt a little radical cheer when I heard of their plans to support each other. And I think this is exactly what the mainstream finds threatening about it. Women supporting each other, raising families, deliberately and clearly saying “We can do it”? Nothing like a hint of something that might look a little like radfem separatism to get the Patriarchy frothing at the mouth.

Beppie found this silver lining to the story:

The radical aspect of this is ... that they are planning to actually support each other– to create non-traditional family units.

Mary Tracy has the following high hopes:

I hope the girls form a commune and grow up to be badass radical feminists.

It's odd. These feminists spend a lot of time trying to pin the rape label on the average male. Here is one case where a group of men really have committed statutory rape ... and the feminists cheer.

The HaT feminists are very keen to see the destruction of the traditional family. So much so that they are heartened by some very young girls getting pregnant to older men and relying on their high school, instead of a husband, for support.

If you see society, as patriarchy theorists do, as being a contest for power and autonomy between a dominant male class and an oppressed female class, then you won't warm to the idea of a traditional family. You will want women to remain autonomous of men, which means being supported by social welfare rather than by a husband or, as an even more radical option, you will prefer women to live apart from men.

Separatism might involve a commitment to fatherless families; it might extend all the way to support for lesbian communes.

And what of the Gloucester girls? Have they really found, in teen pregnancy and single motherhood, a "model that could actually work very well".

Not according to Barack Obama. He has observed the effect of fatherless families on black communities in the US and he believes that it represents not progress but social breakdown:

BARACK Obama has demanded fathers, especially black men, shoulder their responsibility to heal broken families and restore hope in crime-ridden communities.

... The senator amplified one of his campaign themes in condemning absent fathers who have "abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men''.

"You and I know how true this is in the African-American community,'' Senator Obama said, recapping government statistics showing more than half of all black children live in single-parent households.

Such children are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison, he said.

"And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it,'' said Senator Obama ...

Should women be warned?

Hoyden about Town is arguably the most prominent Australian feminist site. It carried a story recently about a spate of attacks on young women in Cairns. The Cairns police have warned young women not to get drunk and wander off alone with men they've just met:

Some victims of sex crimes were so drunk they could not remember what had happened.

"During investigations, it has become apparent that many of the victims have been under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicating substance at the time of the offence and do not recall the act itself or the circumstances surrounding their complaint ..."

A feminist writer at Hoyden, Lauredhel, took this as an example of police blaming the victim. It seems that Lauredhel and several other comment writers at Hoyden don't want women to be warned about risky behaviour.

I wrote a comment at Hoyden gently suggesting that the police were being responsible in warning young women of the dangers they faced. I was told to get lost.

Then the Hoydenites opened up a little on what lay behind their feelings on the issue. Lauredhel started the ball rolling when she announced that it was a case of "institutionalised victim blaming". She thinks the problem exists at an institutional level. Then a commenter, Jodie, claimed the police were "ignoring the real problem of rape". Beppie then added that a woman was more vulnerable at home than passed out drunk with a stranger. Tigtog listed dating men as also being more dangerous.

At this point the influence of patriarchy theory was becoming increasingly clear. Patriarchy theory claims that the institutions of society exist so that men can enjoy an unearned privilege as an oppressor class at the expense of victimised women. According to patriarchy theory, violence and rape exist to enforce the dominant male power in society.

If you believe in patriarchy theory, then you're more likely to think that the police force, as an institution in a patriarchal society, might somehow act to enable rape by blaming the victim. You might also prefer to think that rape was relatively common within society and that it was associated with men dominating women in relationships.

It's a depressing scenario, isn't it? Imagine being a woman and believing that rape was a prevalent form of social control by men over women, one enabled by the institutions of society.

Which brings me to the comment of QoT, who announced in disgust that she was ready to start advocating radical lesbian separatism. Lauredhel replied:

QoT, I don’t see what’s inherently irrational about positing lesbian separatism as being one possible survival strategy in this world.

And so we get to the logical end point of feminist patriarchy theory. Nor is it the first time we've been there; when I was first at uni in the mid-80s there were notices for lesbian separatist communes on the housing boards.

There has not been an adequate reconsideration of the theoretical foundations of feminism since then. So we are still getting, even during a less radical period of feminism, the most dead-end of solutions for the average woman: that of joining a lesbian separatist commune in order to "survive" the world.

And all this coming from one of the more prominent and mainstream of Australian feminist websites.

Rebecca West part 1

I'm reading a biography of Rebecca West, a prominent feminist and socialist writer of last century.

I've only read the first few chapters, but already there's much to comment on. West's parents met on board a ship to Australia; her father became a conservative writer in Melbourne in the 1880s. Rebecca, the youngest of three daughters, was born after the family had returned to the UK to live in Glasgow.

Unfortunately, the parents' marriage wasn't close and the father left the family when Rebecca was eight. The consequences were predictable: all three daughters became, when still in their teens, radical feminists.

It's such a common pattern: a spirited and intellectual daughter is abandoned by her father and becomes a feminist activist. This, for instance, is what the biography tells us of West's feminist friend Dora Marsden:

Dora and Rebecca shared certain searing family experiences. Dora's father had left the family when she was eight, after years of a strained marriage, causing extreme financial hardship ...

There are plenty of more recent examples of feminist women with similar backgrounds. Germaine Greer once wrote a book entitled Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. Gloria Steinem said of her father that he "was living in California. He didn't ring up but I would get letters from him and saw him maybe twice a year." Jill Johnston wrote frequently about her missing father who never tried to contact her. Kate Millett adored her father but when she was thirteen he abandoned the family to live with a nineteen-year-old. The father of Eva Cox left the family to pursue a relationship with a pianist "leaving an embittered wife and a bewildered and rebellious daughter".

Why would paternal abandonment provoke feminist activism? It's often said that a father embodies within a family the outside social order. So if the father fails the daughter, it makes sense that the daughter would set herself against this order.

It's possible too that for a proud young woman the loss of status brought about by paternal abandonment cuts deeply; she believes she has been robbed of the place she rightfully deserves to occupy in society by untrustworthy or unreliable men.

The lesson for conservative men is clear enough: we shouldn't underestimate how important our role is in our daughter's lives, not just in personal terms, but also in influencing the attitude of our daughters (and sons) to society itself.

To return to Rebecca's biography, although the family now lacked money she was provided with a scholarship to a private school; she distinguished herself as a student but left the school at the age of sixteen when she contracted tuberculosis.

She recovered and attended drama school, intending to become an actress, but she failed in her efforts. In 1911 she began writing for The Freewoman, an English feminist magazine.

The following year she met the 46-year-old novelist H.G. Wells. He already had both a wife and a mistress, but she pursued him. She got a kiss out of him, but he told her that he wasn't interested in an affair with her. She travelled to France and Spain and twice attempted suicide. She wrote a letter to Wells, which included the following lines:

Dear H.G.,

In the next few days I shall either put a bullet through my head or commit something more shattering to myself than death ... I am always at a loss when I meet hostility, because I can love and I can do practically nothing else ... You've literally ruined me ... I would give my whole life to feel your arms around me again ... Don't leave me utterly alone.

I've included these lines because they run so much against one of the currents of feminist thought, namely that men have no necessary role in a woman's life ("a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle", "I might want a man but I don't need a man" etc). Rebecca West did need a man in her life, to the point that she felt "ruined" when left "utterly alone".

In 1913 Wells' mistress left him and he offered the position to Rebecca West. She accepted.

As for the feminism of the period, it seems to have generated the same kind of tensions in its principles that it does today. For instance, in 1913 The New Freewoman declared to its readers:

Women's movement forsooth ... Why does not someone start a straight nose movement ... or any other movement based upon some accidental physical contournation.

In other words, the magazine set up to lead the women's movement believed that the category of "woman" was insignificant, a mere accident of physiology.

Rebecca West wasn't one who followed through with the idea that "woman" was an artificial category; for instance, she praised her feminist friend Dora Marsden for being an "exquisite beauty," a "perfectly proportioned fairy," and so "flower like". She appears to have appreciated the distinctly feminine qualities of her friend, at the same time that her feminist magazine was suggesting that womanhood could be dismissed as a merely accidental attribute of a person.

The man merely has to show up at the wedding?

Back in April I posted on some research which found that traditionalist women were happier in their marriages:

adherence to traditional beliefs and practices regarding gender seems to be tied not only to global marital happiness but also - surprisingly enough - to expressive patterns of marriage ...

Why wouldn't modernist, feminist marriages work as well? Part of the answer must be that patriarchy theory, on which much of modern feminism is based, leaves little room for successful relationships between men and women.

Patriarchy theory assumes that the aim of life is individual autonomy, in which there are no impediments to our choosing to do or be whatever we want. What then matters is the power to exercise autonomy. Patriarchy theory claims that society has been organised around a pattern of dominance and subordination, and that men as a dominant class enjoy a privilege of autonomy at the expense of women. This oppression of women by men is built into the structure of society, so that even love, marriage and motherhood are instruments of the patriarchal oppression of women.

It's not easy to create a marriage based on this political world view. For evidence of this, consider the recent discussion of marriage on the feminist website, I blame the patriarchy.

A few words from the writer of the marriage post will give you a flavour of patriarchy theory at work:

... marriage benefits not just individual men at the expense of individual women; it is the very foundation of global patriarchy

... Even modern American marriages between progressive, trendy hipsters are, at the least, fanciful or ironic reenactments of a gruesome misogynistic hegemony

..."Love" ... cannot withstand the pressures wrought by the power differential between dominator and dominated. Because all of society, not to mention the global economy, turns on the difference between two classes - oppressor and oppressed, man and woman, white and black, top and bottom - love ... morphs into a class struggle. Couples struggle against the world and each other for fidelity, for money, for sex, for kids, for individual happiness or fulfillment. Thus, marriage is "work" ... but it is woman who has to do most of it; the dude merely has to show up at the wedding.

... Your Nigel is different, of course, [but] he enjoys a privilege that you will never see for as long as you live. I allude to the privilege of personal sovereignty.

The discussion which follows (over 300 comments) largely follows the same kind of themes. Most of the comments include the following propositions:

1) What matters is autonomy/personal sovereignty. It's good to be selfish and act for yourself only.

2) Women have to do everything. Men as the privileged, autonomous class don't have to do anything in a marriage.

3) Even if men are great husbands and fathers and even if they are perfect feminist liberals, they are still a drag on autonomy and self-actualisation and you should be ready to divorce.

4) Marriage is to be approached as a struggle between two people with conflicting interests.

5) You shouldn't have kids either, no matter how great they are, because they are an impediment to autonomy.

6) It would be easier to be a lesbian living in a commune. Children should be raised as autonomous beings, in female communes. It's better for heterosexual women to be lonely, rather than capitulate.

I can't reproduce all the relevant comments, but here's a selection:

23. I'm married. To a great guy. He's kind. He's loving. He's an amazing father ... He never expects adulation, kudos, or any special recognition for participating in the running of the household. I have two kids, and I love them ... But sometimes I wish I had just done whatever the heck I wanted, whenever I wanted.

33. I blame the patriarchy for the way in which social expectations and assumptions result in marriage that confines and limits the potential to take chances and dare to please yourself before everyone else!

37. I would add: Don't have kids, either. They are the ultimate trap. Frankly, if I had the chance to do it over again I'd go the whole hog and be a radical feminist lesbian separatist and organise a collective somewhere.

42. I hear you. Every day I thank dog we don't have children.

43. Despite having a "good one" as a partner ... I'm afraid of having children and sinking deeper into the wife/mother role ... Living with or depending on others for essential pieces of your life opens you up to domination, period.

44. As for post-patriarchal child-rearing, I'm fond of Shulie's utopian sci-fi scenario: 'motherhood' is eradicated; kids are not 'raised' but instead are allowed full independence in a cooperative of assorted adults; 'childhood' ceases to be sentimentalized or romanticized; kids receive fully human status ...

62. ... the boundaries I selfishly set for myself now are often the only things that make me feel like I'm still an autonomous human being. And no, it's not him. He really embraces the idea of an equal marriage and puts it in action. But the broader culture sets it up a certain way and you can't avoid these problems. What I am left with is a situation where I feel like I'm battling him to set those boundaries ...

I want everything, just like men get to have, except without having an easy life buttressed by inequality.

73. Maybe the ideal would be feminist collectives, where we could find companionship and solidarity (and look after each others' kids), without the bonds and binds of marriage.

74. Amen, sister. You know there are times I really wished I was a lesbian. It just sucks to crave male companionship when you're a woman living in a patriarchy.

75. I have been married for almost seven years to a "good guy" ... I'm going to stick with my good guy for the time being, but I am proud to say that I'm no longer terrified of the idea of ending my marriage if I ever reach a point where I feel I can no longer handle the power differential.

77. My cousin became a wife two weeks ago ... The wedding was extremely depressing for me because, as so many of you have shared, the dude does as little as possible while she has been doing every f..... thing.

78. Don't settle for anyone who isn't perfect for you, a feminist, and comfortable with the idea of divorce.

85. It's so nice to have these sentiments expressed from a source not in my head. It helps me understand why I threw away my engagement to a generally lovely man.

And on and on it goes. It seems to me that once you accept the basic assumptions of patriarchy theory, you're unlikely to experience marriage and family life as positively as you might.

First, if you think that autonomy is the basic good in life, you're likely to resent the inevitable impositions that marriage and parenthood make on you. Second, if you think that men are inevitably privileged and made autonomous by patriarchy, then you won't even recognise, let alone appreciate, the sacrifices men make on behalf of their families. No matter how much a man attempts to follow feminist rules of marriage, he won't ever escape the taint of patriarchy.

Finally, if a woman sees her husband as someone who fundamentally takes something away from her, and whom she must struggle against to retain a human status, then resentments will come easily, as will thoughts of independence and divorce.

Is it any wonder that women with more traditionalist views of marriage generally experience a more satisfying relationship with their husbands?

More feminist wrongs?

What causes domestic violence? Feminists claim that the problem is “systemic” – that the whole social system of patriarchy is to blame. Patriarchy, assert the feminists, is a system of male domination over women, with domestic violence being an expression of this male dominance.

For this reason, feminists often suggest that all men are implicated in allowing domestic violence to occur and that the more powerful men in society (e.g. judges and politicians) are most involved in covering for such violence.

The feminist Gloria Steinem once wrote along these lines that,

Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself ... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home.

Swedish feminist Gudrun Schyman is even more to the point in telling us who she blames:

It’s every man and in every class of society.

In 1994 the Keating Government in Australia even unveiled a National Strategy on Violence against Women based on this patriarchy theory. The spokeswoman for the strategy, Kate Gilmore, blamed all men by denying that “men that are violent are different from every other man in the country.” She went so far as to write that,

You can see the tyrants, the invaders, the imperialists, in the fathers, the husbands, the stepfathers, the boyfriends, the grandfathers, and it’s that study of tyranny in the home ... that will take us to the point where we can secure change.

The conservative view on domestic violence could hardly be more different. Conservatives recognise, as a powerful motivating factor in men, an instinct to protect and provide for their wives and family. Therefore, men who bash their partners are, in the conservative view, breaking with a masculine code of protecting women from physical harm, rather than seeking to enforce a patriarchy.

In other words, men who are domestically violent are flouting traditional masculine norms, rather than following them.

So is it the feminist or conservative view which is more correct? Some recent research has once again cast doubt on the feminist approach to domestic violence.

One study, conducted by researchers from three American universities, and based on interviews with 1,635 couples, was recently published in the Journal of Family Psychology.

The study found that men had inflicted severe violence on their female partners in 3.63% of the couples, but that women had inflicted severe violence on their male partners in 7.52% of the couples. So women were twice as likely to be severely violent as the men.

As the researchers themselves concluded:

As expected from previous research with this and other community samples (Archer, 2000), differences were observed in the rates of male and female partner violence, with female violence occurring more frequently.

These research findings fit the conservative view, that men are likely to restrain themselves from acting violently toward women, rather than the feminist one, that men commit violence against women to uphold male dominance.

An even more detailed study was published in May of this year. The study looked at partner violence in university students across 32 different countries. Over 13,000 students participated in the study.

This research found that across all 32 countries, severe violence had occurred in 10.8% of relationships. However, of these violent relationships, only 15.7% involved male-only violence against women (i.e. roughly 1.5% of all relationships). In 29.4% of cases, there was female-only violence against men, and in 54.8% of cases both the male and female were violent.

So again, female-only violence against men is roughly twice as common as male-only violence against women.

Why were the women violent toward their male partners? According to the study “the most usual motivations for violence by women are coercion, anger, and punishing misbehavior by their partner.”

So domestic violence has other causes than the “social construction of masculinity” or “patriarchal domination”. This is clear from the fact that women are even more likely than men to initiate domestic violence. It ought to be clear, also, from other research which has found that domestic violence, like all violence, occurs much more commonly amongst the young, and that factors like ethnicity and alcohol abuse also strongly affect the incidence of domestic violence.

Hat tip: Carey Roberts

By their side

In 1966, a young Australian woman, Jean Debelle Lamensdorf, went to Vietnam as a Red Cross volunteer. She has written a book about her experiences, Write Home for Me.

Lamensdorf portrays the Australian soldiers she cared for in a refreshingly positive way. In a lengthy article on her life in Vietnam in last weekend’s Herald Sun (9/4/06), she recounts that on her first day in Saigon she visited the US headquarters and that,

In the public relations office she saw photographs of unknown soldiers scattered across a desk. One photo caught her eye.

The image was of an Australian Digger. Rivulets of sweat ran down his dirty face and his eyes told of physical and emotional exhaustion.

Lamensdorf asked if she could keep the photograph. It hung above her bed for her year in Vietnam.

“To me, he summed up the spirit of the Digger: good-looking, rugged, covered in sweat and dirt and though totally shattered, resilient,” she says. “I didn’t know who he was, but he made a huge impression.

“I met many men like him in Vietnam; selfless and well-trained, they never lost their humour and they worried more about their mates than about themselves.”

The man who captivated Lamensdorf was later identified as Barry Harford, a Tunnel Rat who would lead the way into the eerie darkness of the Viet Cong tunnels. Men like Harford never knew what awaited them in the darkness, but they did their job anyway.

On being an attractive young female living among 5000 troops she says,

It was like walking a tightrope. The men had been without women for a long time and there was a lot of sexual tension in the air, but they always treated the Red Cross women with respect and dignity.

After a year, Lamensdorf returned to Adelaide but,

I felt very out of step. I became intolerant of hypocrisy, insincerity and anything plastic. But at the same time Vietnam made me realise the goodness of mankind.

It sounds sugary, but I’d seen the finest that men could be to each other in Vietnam.

This is a very different view of the Vietnam War than that conjured up by films like Apocalypse Now. What’s even more striking, though, is that Lamensdorf so openly appreciates the traditional masculinity of the Australian soldiers and bears not a trace of disloyalty toward them.

Are men the cosmic enemy?

There are enemies, and then there are cosmic enemies. What is the difference?

Let me explain it this way. There are liberals who believe that humanity can be decisively liberated, so that the "new man" who is free and equal can triumph and thereby achieve the proper end of history (i.e. of human progress).

But what is stopping this decisive victory of the new man? Why can't we move forward and be liberated?

Some political moderns (usually radicals of various kinds) answer: there is an enemy group, an oppressor group, which is frustrating the arrival of the new free and equal man.

This oppressor group comes to be seen not just as a normal political rival or opponent, but as a powerful "cosmic enemy" whose existence prevents the realisation of our true humanity.

The hand of the cosmic enemy is detected in all the problems we suffer, to the point that the normal rules of morality are put aside and it is thought desirable to abolish the very existence of this enemy.

But who exactly has filled the role of this cosmic enemy? If we go back to the time of the French Revolution, the aristocracy were seen to be the enemies of "liberty, equality, fraternity" and a considerable violence was meted out to them in order to abolish the ancien regime.

So this represents, perhaps, the first development of the idea of a "cosmic enemy".

At the time of the Russian Revolution, it was the bourgeoisie who were thought to be the natural enemies of a workers' state, again with violent measures attached.

However, the fullest development of the idea came with Hitler, who identified the Jews as the cosmic enemy, and who violently sought their annihilation.

And since then? There still exist whites who see the Jews as a cosmic enemy. But it is more mainstream now for gentile whites themselves to be seen this way.

The most obvious example is the politics of Noel Ignatiev, a Harvard professor, who publishes a journal with the motto "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". Ignatiev has written that "The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any oppostion".

Finally, there is also a current within feminism which views men as a cosmic enemy. Consider the following quote from Higginbottom and Roy in Feminist Action 1 (1984):

Men's minds are not true ... We must learn about men and their archetypes in order to put them back in their place - they are an aberration and out of control ... Men won't exist for much longer.

Here we have feminists yearning for the very abolition of men. The Sydney Morning Herald published another feminist piece earlier this year, by American columnist Maureen Dowd, which also breezily contemplated the extinction of men.

Dowd quotes a male researcher, Dr Bryan Sykes, who has perfected the "men as cosmic enemy" line. According to Dowd,

He fantasises about "a world without men", a version of the mythological "cult of Diana" hunter-gatherer societies where women were in charge and men were just there for entertainment, where there would be "no Y chromosomes to enslave the feminine, the destructive spiral of greed and ambition diminishes and, as a direct result, the sickness of our planet eases. The world no longer reverberates to the sound of men's clashing antlers and the grim repercussions of private and public warfare."

It is this kind of thinking which is the most dangerous kind of "hate speech", because it is not merely a criticism of an opposing group, but a totalising world view in which the enemy is responsible for a failure to achieve the promised land, so that the abolition of the enemy, even by violent means, is eagerly anticipated.

But note that this notion of a cosmic enemy stems from a "progressive" politics. It rests on the idea that the arrival of a "new man" is imminent, but is frustrated by the cosmic enemy.

It is difficult for conservatives to understand this mentality. For us, the human condition does not allow an "end point" to history. There will always be a struggle to achieve what we think is ideal in society, not just because of the challenge of outsiders ("enemies"), but even more so because of the inevitable frailties existing within our own natures.

(Hat tip: this post, including the term "cosmic enemy", was suggested by comments made by the American traditionalist, Lawrence Auster, at his website View from the Right, as well as ideas expressed at the same site by the commentator Matt.)

Gender traitors?

There have been more developments in the Swedish feminist party, Feminist Initiative.

First, Susanne Linde, a leading figure in the party, has resigned after being bullied by another leading member, Tiina Rosenberg. Rosenberg, a professor of gender studies, taunted the more politically moderate Linde, by saying that "a good moderate is a dead moderate". When Linde spoke of resigning Rosenberg said "I'm glad that our intelligence reserve won't fall with you." Linde said of this "I felt so violated I started to cry."

Now, this kind of bickering is not unheard of in political parties. But remember, feminists keep telling us how much nicer and more peaceful the world would be if only they could run things, instead of nasty men. But it seems that feminists can't even keep the peace in their own little party, let alone on the world stage.

The second development also concerns Tiina Rosenberg. She is reported to have said that, "women who sleep with men are traitors to their gender."

This statement is a real blast from the past. It harks back to the feminism of the 1970s and early 1980s. I caught the tail-end of it when I was an undergraduate uni student in the mid-80s. On the housing advertisement board, there used to be ads for women only communes. Within a few years, though, feminist separatism had run out of steam.

And now it reappears in Sweden. It is a wildly perverse attitude, which runs directly counter to healthy human instinct and social solidarity. I can only presume it has its origins either in lesbianism, or else the left-liberal idea that there are oppressor groups (men) who have set up artificial categories (male and female) in order to achieve a will to power of their own group over a deprived and oppressed victim group (women).

If you were to take such an ideology seriously, then perhaps you might see men and women as enemies locked in combat, so that a heterosexual woman could be castigated for "sleeping with the enemy."

But what a dreary, life-wasting philosophy! Imagine relegating the differences between men and women to the realm of "oppressive, artificial, social construct". This does not fit well with heterosexuality, in which it is precisely the masculinity or the femininity of the opposite sex which we love. Nor does it judge fairly the real motivations of men in working hard to establish and provide well for their families.

In a way, Rosenberg is right: if you follow the logic of the leftist view, a woman would be led into the hopeless situation of rejecting heterosexual love and the traditional family.

You would think that someone led to such a position would reconsider the ideology being pursued. But perhaps Rosenberg is a lesbian and so has little to lose from rejecting heterosexual love and family life.

Noble feminism?

David Huffman is a student at the University of New Hampshire. Being a bold soul, he decided to attend a feminist poetry reading and story telling event. He was only allowed to stay for the nicer part of the proceedings - but this was more than enough to reveal the less than lovely side of the campus sisterhood. As David describes it,

Throughout the first part of the evening, the girls sang songs about "man-hating" and glamorized it. They also read poetry about castration and cutting off men's genitalia. The girls wore scissors around their necks. It was angry, violent, hateful speech.

As David quite rightly points out, this does not quite seem to measure up to feminists' own supposed commitment to tolerance and diversity. Are they not in contravention of their own left-wing campus codes?

Is this freedom? Is this equality?

It's difficult not to be disturbed by Jared Taylor's latest article at Vdare. It details various cases to have come before Sweden's anti-hate speech courts.

Sweden, as usual, is at the forefront of social democracy (left-liberalism) in pursuing these laws. In one case a Swedish pastor gave a sermon critical of homosexuality and was sentenced to a month in prison. The state prosecutor explained that "Collecting Bible [verses] on this topic as he does makes this hate speech".

In another case a man was sentenced to two months prison for writing, after some gang rapes of Swedish girls, that "I don't think I am alone in feeling sick when reading about how Swedish girls are raped by immigrant hordes".

Most incredible, though, is the case of feminist Joanna Rytel. She wrote a most vitriolic diatribe against white Swedish men for a major Swedish newspaper. If the title of her article, "I Will Never Give Birth to a White Man" was not offensive enough, she then went on to demand "no white men, please ... I just puke on them, thank you very much" and she wrote openly of wanting someone "to talk with all night long about my hatred towards white men".

Did Ms Rytel end up behind bars for such vile hate speech? No, she didn't. She wasn't even charged, because, as the state prosecutor explained, "Cases where people express themselves in a critical or derogatory way about men of ethnic Swedish background were not intended to be included in this law."

So, in a country which has actually abandoned free speech, and imprisons people for political incorrectness, it's considered OK to express the most outlandish hatred against a large segment of the population: Swedish men.

This is where advanced liberalism is leading us. Not toward the promised goals of freedom and equality, but toward the imposition of thought crimes and inequality before the law.

It's now up to Swedish men to show some fighting spirit. Why should they stay loyal to a liberal politics which openly treats them this way? It's time for Swedish men to radically rethink the liberal politics which has brought their country to such an unenviable condition.

Men as untouchables

I opened up my TV guide today to find an ad for a new charity group, dedicated to fighting poverty overseas. The strange thing is that the charity will only help women, not men.

This seems to me to be an act of politics rather than charity. You could only justify it if you had political notions about men being privileged oppressors, or if you saw politics primarily as a struggle of women against men.

It makes me pity the women who think this way. Men and women are not meant to be set apart like this.