Fifty years ago this week, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, widely hailed as the foundation stone of second wave feminism. One hundred years ago the British Suffragette movement was at its radical peak, and June of this year will see the centenary of the martyrdom of Emily Davison at the Epsom Derby. Such things are always arbitrary, but this seems a reasonable moment to join Ellie-Mae O’Hagan in celebrating feminism’s angrier flanks.
I’m really not much of a fan of Friedan’s tome and had some issues with Ellie’s article, but the core of her argument is a good one. “To put it bluntly,” she wrote, “a new feminism should not be afraid to piss people off.”
If a political movement for change is not pissing people off somewhere, it isn’t worth a wet fart. That said, just pissing someone off is never enough. To be effective, political activism needs to somehow threaten or disturb the very structures and mechanisms of society, and those are always fiercely guarded. Ellie-Mae O’Hagan, better known as an anti-capitalist and tax justice activist than as a feminist, perhaps gets this more readily than most. It is certainly difficult to even look at the cover of the new Sexy Feminist book with anything but derision or nausea. Whatever one’s feelings towards Caitlin Moran, it is hard to deny that if she really represented a threat to the established patriarchal order, she probably wouldn’t have become rich and famous through the largesse of Rupert Murdoch.
Moran and the Sexy Feminists are the latest incarnations of the feminism of personal transformation, a safely corralled, individualistic philosophy of self-fulfilment. There is nothing wrong with that, it is genuinely a good thing if people can be made to feel better about themselves, or simply entertained and amused, by gaining a stronger appreciation of how their gender has impacted upon their lives. Ironically perhaps, The Feminine Mystique could be described in the same way, albeit with fewer jokes and vajazzling tips. The historical importance of Friedan’s book is that the story didn’t end on the final page, but continued into the political realm with the creation of the National Organization of Women, the Women’s Strike for Equality and the National Women’s Political Caucus, all of which had a profound and lasting change on the world. The Feminine Mystique didn’t just make readers angry enough to want to change their lifestyles, but to change the very foundations of society.
By coincidence, the Good Men Project this week published an impassioned defence of angry feminism by Anne Theriault which raises a similar point. This section in particular captures my feelings perfectly:
“…anger can be a good way, sometimes the only way, to fuel change. Anger at injustice is often the spark that ignites political and social movements, and anger can keep you fighting the good fight even when all your other resources feel used up”
You may recall a certain article by Suzanne Moore which was republished recently and became notorious for the wrong reason, but that too covered the same ground. Although probably due more to a moving spotlight than a shifting agenda, angry feminism is right back in vogue.
There is an important difference, however, between the angry feminism of the 1960s and its descendant. Back then there were few statutory protections for women and discrimination was all but omnipresent, Women had few reproductive options and abortion rights, virtually no legal protection from spousal abuse and sexual violence or harassment and sexual choices were tightly constrained by custom and even criminal law. Those issues and many others presented tangible, specific battles for social justice to be fought and won.
The transition from second to third wave feminism is usually pinned to changing perceptions of gender and sexual identities in the era of academic postmodernism, but I don’t think it is coincidental that the ideological shift happened at almost exactly the same time as a practical, political shift in the goals of feminism. The criminalisation of rape within marriage in England in 1991 marked the removal of the final significant structural flagstone of patriarchy in British law. Since then, it seems to me, feminism has fought on three separate fronts. The first has been to protect some of those hard-won rights from reactionary backlash, as necessary. The second has been to challenge various forms of the sex industry and sexualised media. This has proved particularly difficult for feminism, not least because it pitted the rights of women to live free from the (supposed or alleged) harms of prostitution and pornography against the rights of other women to make a living from their own bodies as they choose, or create and enjoy erotic pleasures of their own choice.
But the final battle for feminism is the biggest and toughest of all. It is the battle to change individual attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. The articles by O’Hagan, Theriault and Moore provide between them a long list of reasons for women to be angry: the continued prevalence of sexual and domestic violence, rape apologism, widespread sexism and misogyny, gender stereotyping and discrimination, all common in numerous manifestations in our own societies and around the world. It is striking, however, that they proposed not a single legal or structural demand between them.
In her piece on The Feminist Mystique for the New York Times, Stephanie Coontz asked why, after decades of progress, women’s strides towards equality in the US have halted or even reversed. Rather reductively, I think, she attributes it broadly to a failure of workplace culture and rights to keep pace with modern attitudes and lifestyles. Coontz fails to notice that in the UK, where the workplace rights she applauds remain stronger, we are seeing the precise same effects.
Changing a law that allows an employer to appoint a less qualified man over a more qualified woman is easy. Changing an attitude that leads an employer to perceive a man to be more qualified, or indeed an attitude that leads a woman to believe she is less deserving of a promotion or a pay rise than a man, is much, much harder. It doesn’t an Act of Parliament to change this – it takes a social shift over generations.
Progress is happening. This week the British media are consumed with the allegations of sexual harassment against senior Liberal Democrat Lord Rennard. It is notable that this scandal centres on questions of who in the party may have turned a blind eye to sexually predatory behaviour or covered it up. There is no suggestion from anywhere that his behaviour should or could have been considered acceptable or reasonable. Just a generation ago (indeed perhaps at the time it was alleged to have happened) such behaviour was broadly unremarkable in politics or anywhere else. The national mood has changed.
I understand that feminists are angry about sexism, misogyny, discrimination and violence against women, indeed they should be, and I share their anger. I understand that many men (and women) are angry about society’s tolerance of violence against men and boys, the marginalisation and othering of male victims of domestic and sexual violence, discrimination against fathers in family courts and the social perception that men’s health and wellbeing, even men’s lives, are of incidental importance. I share that anger too.
Anger is not incompatible with compassion and empathy, it is often the product of them. Indeed, unless it is tempered with compassion and empathy, anger can easily be misdirected into fascism and hatred. When I despair of debates on gender (which is often) it is usually because those involved, on either or both sides, have found their anger but lost their compassion. That is a dangerous mix.
The reasons and the need for anger go way beyond issues of gender. Take a look at the world, or even your own little corner of it, take in the panoramic vista of injustice, inequality, abuse, violence and exploitation, and if you’re not angry then you’re not paying attention. We should all be angry with those who abuse, who assault, who exploit. Those who abuse, assault and exploit on an industrial scale should reap anger on an industrial scale.
Anger has changed the world before, for both better and worse and it doubtless will do so again. We should all be proud of our anger. It is our responsibility to ensure we use it well.
Where I took issue with E-MO’H’s article is that she links to several issues such as Julian Assange (the “revered man” and Fawcett’s bogus statistics and Page 3 in The Sun), without acknowledging they are widely accepted to be controversial.
For instance, Assange was about to be extradited by (the presumably unspeakably patriarchal) UK government to Sweden for rape and many people (me included) think he is guilty of rape from what he has already admitted to doing. Fawcett’s selective figures only give half the story on low pay and the number of stay-at-home fathers is increasing, Rupert Murdoch himself suggested that maybe Page 3 has had its day. And so on.
Yet you would not believe this from the article.
OK, I understand that polemical articles don’t have to be balanced, but then don’t be surprised to see your arguments rubbished by people quoting facts that tend to go the other way.
Even then, debate BTL wasn’t enhanced by CIF’s Isabella Mackie’s interjections, saying she couldn’t understand the thought-processes of women who said they don’t call themselves feminists. Tak about condescending and patronising, also the “if you owna vagina … you must be a feminist” nonsense co-opts women entirely against their will in a cause the objectives of which they may look on with considerable scepticism, believing (as many do) that it’s all about well-off white women getting an even bigger slice of the pie.
The fragmentary and contradictory nature of much of feminsim is what calls it into question. There are the People’s Front of Judea / Judean People’s Front elements involving rows about “political lesbianism”, prostitution, sex, cis-gender, the right to stay at home and look after the kids if that’s what you want to do, (or even the right to splurge £1000 on a handbag) and similar BMW (bitching, moaning and whining) by some women against other women and it’s looking more like a dog’s dinner than a political movement.
I was kinda with you until right here;
BMW (bitching, moaning and whining)
That was actually a line I lifted from Jane Martinson in the Women’s Section of the G and I wondered if anyone else got the reference.
Hi John
Have to say I didn’t really object to either link you mention. The controversy around the gender pay gap etc is not that such gaps exist, but about what causes them, and I think the point about Assange is not about the state or the authorities in any country (who are pursuing the prosecution with what we might call an unusual zeal) but about the voices raised in his support, not least Galloway, which have been pretty repellent.
As for your final point – I did notice a stark contradiction between the claim in the OP that to be a feminist you have to believe that we live in a patriarchal world and the claim made by Bella that you refer to. They are completely incompatible.
But I also think it is foolish to imagine that feminists agree with each other about, well, just about anything. Sometimes the People’s Front of Judea-style jibes can be justified, of course, but I’m always far more suspicious and sceptical when feminists aren’t arguing with each other than when they are.
A hundred years earlier Emma Goldman was having furious rows with the American suffrage movement. There’s nothing new here. Betty Friedan herself had huge scraps, notably with Steinem, but later fell out with just about everyone after she wrote the Second Stage. Feminists have been arguing about anything and everything from the word dot. Feminism is a vast spectrum of beliefs and there’s nothing wrong with that. I see no reason why it should “call feminism into question” all it demands is that if you’re going to engage with feminism in any way, you have to be quite clear that you’re only engaging with a small part of it at any given time.
Oh, and I agree with Deezer about the BMW thing. That undermines your argument and just makes you look a dick, sorry to say.
Fogg:
Sometimes the People’s Front of Judea-style jibes can be justified, of course, but I’m always far more suspicious and sceptical when feminists aren’t arguing with each other than when they are.
I can live with the disagreement, but I get more suspicious and sceptical about who gets to wet the agenda and who gets thrown overboard to preserve everyone else’s peace of mind and sense of unity (see the arguments about pornography and sex work).
Yeah, it’s a line I nicked from Jane M. Sorry for any offence caused. Edit it out if you prefer.
Fogg:
It is striking, however, that they proposed not a single legal or structural demand between them.
You forgot the demand for quotas – but you’re right, the rhetoric that argues for equal representation in any and every aspect of public and private life, for example, overlooks how that will be achieved, given all the variables involved (not least the over-representation of women in areas that would need to be balanced out by men). And if the current wave of activism is more about ‘hearts and minds’ – or, as you put it, ‘the battle to change individual attitudes, beliefs and behaviours’ – ‘being angry’ may not be enough, not least because such change cannot be as easily measured or evaluated as a ‘pay gap’.
None of the three of them mentioned quotas, unless I missed it.
But yes, you’re right that anger is not enough, and anger alone doesn’t do much to change minds and hearts.
However it does provide impetus and energy, as Anne Theriault described.
It’s not that any of the writers mentioned quotas, rather that ‘quotas’ is the most often-cited ‘structural demand’….though usually only for the ‘top jobs’ (e.g. boardroom members, parliamentary candidates, judges). It’s the switch from ‘equality of opportunity’ to ‘equality of outcome’ that, for me, marks so much current activism – so ‘quotas’ become the ‘legal or structural demand’ despite the selective examples where they’re applied, and the difficulties in some ways of making them work.
Interesting article.I think angry activism in general plays a key role in raising public awareness and forcing certain issues up the political agenda.So without angry feminism it’s unlikely women would have achieved as much as they have in this country.And there’s still a way to go. However once certain doors have been well and truly kicked open it’s inevitable that the diversity of opinion and experiences that exists amongst women- as a for instance-will come into the fore and those considered to be angry feminists may find themselves marginalised.
In fact isn’t that already what’s happened with young women in particular reluctant to call themselves feminists because they equate it with a particular sort of angry feminism ?.And haven’t some older feminists been critical of younger women for not being suitably grateful for what they achieved on behalf of all women.That in their opinion young women simply take for granted what older women had to fight so hard for.And that young women are somehow lacking for not being more angry about the inequalities women can still face ?.And what about women from some ethnic minority communities in this country who feel high profile feminists have used cultural relativism as their excuse for not giving them the level of support they need when addressing their particular problems ? Anger can be highly selective.
I have real problems with Guardian style feminism because it’s driven by largely White middle class women who are already relatively privileged compared to most people of both sexes.And who invariably refuse to acknowledge that there can also be advantages to being a woman and that there is a clear difference between gender equality and having the best of both worlds. And that out there in the real world there are probably significant numbers of middle class women who’d prefer the latter rather than the former.Which probably explains why they in particular are reluctant to get as angry as some feminists want them to get.
“The criminalisation of rape within marriage in England in 1991 marked the removal of the final significant structural flagstone of patriarchy in British law.”
If only! There is still plenty of structural patriarchy in British law, in the form of infantilizing chivalry towards women. The UK has the same female sentencing discount for women as the US has – structurally disparate sentences for equal crimes – along with special indulgences for mothers but not fathers and the like.
And amazingly the law on rape defines the crime only as the insertion of the penis etc..This makes it legally impossible for a woman to commit rape, effectivley immunizing a female rapist frorm any consequences at all.
Treating women like fragile, harmelss damsels is about as patriarchal as it gets.
It’s possibly connected to the fact that many young people these days can’t even cook dinner for themselves, that many University students are completely apolitical and more interested in parties. My son is at “Uni” and says he doesn’t know anyone who would bother going on a fees demo.
I blame the parents… Many of us have made it too easy for our kids and as a result they can’t see the need for activism. I think that’s true whether we’re debating the labour movement or anything else pretty much.
Hi gingko (&N4M)
You both make very good points and I broadly agree. In fact I’d add another one that I think is much bigger, and that is the workings of the family court system. As I’ve argued many a time before, I think the fact that courts routinely assume a mother to be the better or more natural carer – even when a male application is uncontested or where the father has previously been main carer – is a profoundly patriarchal anachronism. It always disappoints me that feminists don’t pick up on this more often, preferring a kind of “Team Girls” approach if they address it at all.
The laws around rape / sexual assault, and for that matter marital coercion, are slightly different matters, because they are really application of archaic gendered language to laws that also apply in the other direction. Yes, only a man can commit rape, but for the past few years the sentencing guidelines have specified sentences for “serious sexual assaults” are exactly the same as those for rape, and forced penetration is classed as serious sexual assault.
Likewise, the marital coercion defence is indeed a patriarchal relic, but there is a law of duress which covers the exact same circumstances in gender neutral language, and men can use that defence.
But yes the broad point is true – there has been much less motivation to change patriarchal laws which (appear to) benefit women than those which harm them.
Yes, only a man can commit rape
Not so Ally. It’s very rare but women can be convicted of rape.in this country.Although if your sole definition of rape is of the forced penetration of someone with a penis then obviously only men can commit rape.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/16/newsid_2521000/2521053.stm
Ah, yes Paul, fair enough, but that’s only on the basis of common purpose. Convictions like that still require penetration by a man.
As I’ve argued many a time before, I think the fact that courts routinely assume a mother to be the better or more natural carer – even when a male application is uncontested or where the father has previously been main carer – is a profoundly patriarchal anachronism. It always disappoints me that feminists don’t pick up on this more often, preferring a kind of “Team Girls” approach if they address it at all.
I take it when you say “Team Girls” approach you mean how instead of simply acknowledging that that fathers are often presumed to be insufficient parents they will twist it into “the reason that happens to men isn’t because they are undervalued but because women are overvalued when it comes to parenting” then I think I see where you’re coming from.
I take your point about the equal punishment guidelines for sexual assault, but it doesn’t strike me as decisive.
Think about redefining ‘marriage’ to allow same-sex marriages. This change did not technically extend anyone’s legal rights, since civil partnerships already gave same-sex couples the same legal status as that conferred by marriage.
But I take it that we all agree it was an important step forward? The reason is quite simple: words matter. It mattered that our legal system implicitly didn’t represent same-sex marriages as ‘real’ marriages, and most of us saw how that would come across to gay people and felt that this wasn’t merely a case of a ‘rose by any other name’. As I’m fond of saying to people, roses don’t smell as sweet if you call them “sewage-flowers.”
It matters that we choose to use this extremely emotive and loaded term ‘rape’ to describe the actions of some male criminals, and a rather more clinical, much less-loaded term ‘sexual assault’, to describe the equivalent actions of some female criminals. At the very least, it’s a cultural and legal practice that stands in need of justification. Perhaps such a justification could be mounted, but personally I’ve not even seen it attempted.
Paul, Ally is speaking specifically about rape as it is legally defined.
and then too there are two levels of the law – the law as it is written and the law as it is applied. So under the law as it is written in the UK, women cannot commit rape, and under the law as it was applied in the South under Jim Crow, a white man could not rape a black woman and a white person could not murder a black person.
Jamie Potter:
Well known feminist academic Mary P Koss who is the author of some of the most cited studies on rape in the US is one of the people trying to justify this difference in her article: Detecting the Scope of Rape : A Review of Prevalence Research Methods – although her arguments are by fiat:
The paper ends with 10 conclusion on how to best measure the prevalence of rape, here is the second conclusion:
And then we have the Woman’s Rights groups in India who protested a gender neutral rape law – their argument was that there is no evidence of it ever happening:
This is so confusing as so many self declared feminists also regard women in more or less the same way. The last bastions of this seem to be a conception of men as beastly rather in the same mould as Victorian notions that drove various laws . Also that somehow women are indeed more saintly and innocent as averred by queen Victoria herself in her diaries. So much anger now looks more like posturing to get advantages for the already privileged. The most distasteful aspect of this is the coopting of real suffering particularly in the “third world” to support the agenda of people interested in their own material advancement.
And the next most distasteful aspect is the appropriation of the experiences of gay men into feminist talking points.
“The last bastions of this seem to be a conception of men as beastly rather in the same mould as Victorian notions that drove various laws . Also that somehow women are indeed more saintly and innocent as averred by queen Victoria herself in her diaries.”
I think this shows how hard it can be to clear cultural conditioning out of your worldview even when you consciously reject that culture. However much oyu reject the values of that culture, they are the values you internalized as a child and they are you.
When Mao Zedong saw his supposedly revolutionary vanguard party falling back into bourgeois modes of thinking (as well as threatening his autocracy) he launched the Cultural Revolution to clear all that out and discredit it finally and irrevocably. Although I can see a lot of value in short-term re-education on 400 cal./day baseline for people raised in the level of privilege we see in these comentators, surely there would have been milder but equally effective ways for feminiism to have its own cultural revolution.
The criminalisation of rape within marriage in England in 1991 marked the removal of the final significant structural flagstone of patriarchy in British law
Well actually of course, there are still some laws with all the hallmarks of patriarchy, but they still exist because they happen to disadvantage men! Like, for instance ….. marital coercion!
So, there ya go, there’s a curveball for you, Ally: marital coercion, should it still exist in law or no, if it’s only ever available to one gender? Skimmington from T.R.O.M. surely makes an excellent point, when he says
What is staggering, but never surprising, is that no one in the media has actually made the connection that this law is sexist.
And perhaps all the more puzzling, when MPs and the media make such a song and dance about the laws of succession, and the only people they affect is a group of inbred toffs!
interesting the comments about anger-I find it strange that MRA’s aren’t given the same benefit of the doubt. They are often dismissed as “You’re just bitter you can’t get laid.”
but there is a law of duress which covers the exact same circumstances in gender neutral language
Hmm, not sure about this, Ally. Isn’t it the case that when someone uses the defence of duress, they’re usually at least required to give a specific, plausible reason as to why they felt compelled to break the law. Whereas ‘marital coercion’, seems perhaps to imply notions which are far more vague, and deeply rooted in societal stereotypes and prejudice?
I think Stoner is also onto something here, in that anger around men’s equality issues is often easily dismissed as something which is irrational and extreme, but this phenomenon, in turn, may be influenced by how such matters are reported (or, actually, not reported, by the media). GirlWritesWhat has expressed something similar on her videoblog: that people are bound to sound at best like eccentrics, or even conspiracy theorists, if the truths that they tell are not backed up by the authority of newspapers and national TV stations.
The most powerful example of this I can think of recently is when Philip Davies conducted a Westminster Hall debate around the difference in sentencing handed down to men and women in the criminal justice system. The figures he used were from independent research by the House of Commons Library (i.e. not some sensationalist think-tank or pressure group). As you might be aware, the evidence he cited was nothing short of staggering, showing that, on average, men received significantly tougher sentences, simply for being male, in pretty much every aspect of criminal law.
That we’re well on the way to a two-tier justice system ought to have been a big news story, but did the public hear about this anywhere, other than in obscure, postage-stamp sized pieces in the corners of the Express and Mail? Well, apparently not: it didn’t even make the TV news at all as far as one could see.
So it was that Frances Cooke felt free to comment on her blog that
Westminster Hall is sometimes used as a forum for maverick MPs who wish to vent a range of ill-informed or just plain weird opinions. On this occasion it was Conservative MP Philip Davies
But is it really so weird to try and establish the truth on a current affairs matter in this way? Well, apparently so, if you don’t have the backing of heavyweight media organisations like the Beeb and the Guardian, fulfilling their most basic duty as journalists, to inform the public of the facts.
“Hmm, not sure about this, Ally. Isn’t it the case that when someone uses the defence of duress, they’re usually at least required to give a specific, plausible reason as to why they felt compelled to break the law. Whereas ‘marital coercion’, seems perhaps to imply notions which are far more vague, and deeply rooted in societal stereotypes and prejudice?”
Here’s how you settle a question about gender neutrality of a law – look at the record of court cases. If there is disparate impact in who is prosecuted, what extenuating or mitigating circumstances are considered and for whom, or who is sentenced for how long, that’s pretty good evidence of non-neutrality. tghis goes to the distinction between the law as it is written and thr law as it actually functions.
I piss people off. Especially feminists. Glad to see they are down with that.
Yes, I especially like the line “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” So true.
I can’t remember who brought it up on the Guardian’s comments, but there’s a very important point about anger: anger is an emotion; not a mood. It requires an intentional object. We have to be angry at something. When we don’t know quite who or what to be angry about, or we are not allowed to express that anger in some way, what we do is displace that anger onto something else, perhaps even ourselves.
Deborah Jane Orr wrote a quite brilliant <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/26/speak-out-misogyny-what-causes" article, echoing Susan Faludi’s Stiffed, about the nature of misogyny, essentially making the point that misogynistic men often blame women for broad economic and technological changes that have displaced traditional male roles and jobs. I think DJO absolutely nails it, to be honest. (It follows, of course, that most of the victories feminism claim for itself are no such thing, but merely the inevitable result of things like the contraceptive pill, mifepristone, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, computers, etc.)
But the question of “Do you have the right target?” is a pressing question for feminists too. Are feminists angry at the right people? Or is there an all-too-understandable, but nonetheless dangerous tendency towards blaming men as a class for the actions of specific men, a tendency that appears to be so widespread amongst self-ascribed ‘feminists’ that it starts to look like a characteristic of the ideology, as opposed to the regretful tendencies of a ‘few bad apples’?
The question I need to ask myself is: why can I never master using html? I’ll try again. Here’s the link to DJO’s article
Thank you for this . Your observation on rape as a special law riddled with emotive historical allusions is very apposite. It’s legal incarnation in English law is really a Victorian formulation. Of course now built upon in more recent times. With their mania for categories and horror of sex the Victorians were very busy bees in turning rather general terms in traditional law into something rather more specific. Hence we end up with a law about a specific form of sexual assault with all the emotional power of outrage our Victorian forbears would savour. Rather like Page 3 the rape law has a totemic magical presence in our debates. I recall a decade ago being persuaded by a QC that justice would be better served(in both convictions and reporting) if the name was dropped. Her view was formed after many years both prosecuting and defending. Needless to say at the time she was roundly condemned as politicos etc reached for the “appalled” button.
“Are feminists angry at the right people? Or is there an all-too-understandable, but nonetheless dangerous tendency towards blaming men as a class for the actions of specific men, a tendency that appears to be so widespread amongst self-ascribed ‘feminists’ that it starts to look like a characteristic of the ideology, as opposed to the regretful tendencies of a ‘few bad apples’?”
It depends on the feminist, and on the feminism: radical feminism has precisely the tendency you summarise in the above quote: ‘men as a class’ constitute ‘patriarchy’ while women ‘as a class’ are oppressed. All other contexts and considerations (history, economics, areas such as ethnicity and race) are either secondary issues or don’t matter. Still, it keeps things nice and simple for some.
Popular (or ‘vulgar’) feminism uses a similar approach, but doesn’t bother with anything like theoretical or political models (best summed up in the joke attributed to Christine Lagarde/Harriet Harman that we wouldn’t have a banking crisis if the business was known as ‘Lehman Sisters’)* it’s an adversarial model which, as Faludi noted in Stiffed, has served feminism very well.
* For a similar example of this, see Morrissey’s comment on how gay men don’t fight wars
“Are feminists angry at the right people? Or is there an all-too-understandable, but nonetheless dangerous tendency towards blaming men as a class for the actions of specific men,”
Jamie, here the problem is, i think, a tendecny to personalize the object of anger rather than the borgification oyu speak of.
Generalized anger is appropriate when the object of the anger is general enough, e.g. and entire legal and cultural system. FGM (and MGM) is this kind of issue, and overwhelming generalized anger is a really predictable response. The problem comes when we succumb to our monkey brain’s need for an animate object for that anger even when the true object is inanimate.
damn i posted in the wrong thread
I think the object of anger of might be understood in a Benedict Anderson ‘imagined comunities’ way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities
I have a sneaking feeling that the framing of things which happen to both genders (sexual violence, partner violence) as something that only happens to one and is caused by oppression of one gender by the other might be intended sometimes to create an ‘outgroup’ of ‘others’ or oppressors to reinforce ingroup solidarity among disparate people.
@Jamie Potter
there was an excellent counterpoint to that Judith Orr article by Nancy Fraser in the new left review a while ago.
http://www.newschool.edu/uploadedFiles/Faculty/NSSR/Fraser_NLR.pdf?n=4644
TL/DR
feminists made critiques of traditional institutions without much proposal for alternatives and solutions, these were taken up by neo-liberals who also wanted to destroy those institutions as they were resistant to market reform.
Of course angry feminists blame all men for setting up a mythical conspiracy. The effects of technology etc.etc. Get ignored in favour of this comprehensive conspiracy theory. So misandry, handy that, all the nasty stuff is men’s fault.
It is striking, however, that they proposed not a single legal or structural demand between them.
I’m not sure who proposed it but the decision to allow maternity leave to be shared between partners might be considered one and it will be interesting to monitor how much this opportunity is taken up by the men in the partnership – what you refer to as the “social shift over generations”.
And of course how ready mothers are to give up their primacy in child care. Changes will take both sexes to see the virtue of new ideas.
Family courts in the UK award mothers sole custody in 71% of cases and fathers sole custody in 7% of all cases, joint custody is awarded in the remaining 21% of cases.
I can’t find any surveys on the reasons for the 7% figure but it’s not difficult to suggest reasons. However the web provides plenty of advice to fathers about presenting their case in court, not least of which is:
You cannot go into a courtroom, tell the judge that the mother does a certain action poorly, and expect to get custody. You need proof, solid reasoning and an organised presentation. Reasons such as being upset because she has a new love interest and, therefore, not wanting her to have your child as much are not valid. Judges look for the best environment for the child, and they need proof of the living conditions.
[…] not surprising that my posts appear to be blocked from Ally Fogg’s Heteronormative Patriarchy site. He […]
You’re not blocked here. Bitethehand, but posts containing lots of links trigger the spam filter. If a comment doesn’t appear, let me know in a comment without links and I’ll dig it out.
Thanks for that I’ll try again without the links.
“Progress is happening. This week the British media are consumed with the allegations of sexual harassment against senior Liberal Democrat Lord Rennard…The national mood has changed.”
I disagree. The most notable thing about the whole affair was just how little the British public gave a damn, even when the British media was trying to force it down their throats for days on end. (Someone even said as much on the panel show ‘9 out of 10 cats’*. Funnily enough it wasn’t one of the “top three things the public have been discussing?”).
* For Non-Brits: 9 out of 10 cats is a British comedy panel show focusing in part on current affairs.
…I think the fact that courts routinely assume a mother to be the better or more natural carer – even when a male application is uncontested or where the father has previously been main carer – is a profoundly patriarchal anachronism.
According to UK Men and Father’s Rights website,
Family courts award mothers sole custody in 71% of cases and fathers sole custody in 7% of all cases, joint custody is awarded in the remaining 21% of cases.
I can’t find any surveys on the reasons for the 7% figure but it’s not difficult to suggest some. However the web provides plenty of advice to fathers about presenting their case in court, not least of which is:
You cannot go into a courtroom, tell the judge that the mother does a certain action poorly, and expect to get custody. You need proof, solid reasoning and an organised presentation. Reasons such as being upset because she has a new love interest and, therefore, not wanting her to have your child as much are not valid. Judges look for the best environment for the child, and they need proof of the living conditions.
Incidentally, Ally, since Jamie Potter brought it up on this thread, is there any chance you might care to explain why you were so incredibly enthusiastic for the sentiments and ideas expressed in Deborah Orr’s article, which he posted a link to?
I mean, surely it’s the case that if left-wing journalists stand for anything positive at all, it’s that the media (but particularly the state) can and should have a role in shaping economic opportunity and well-being for it’s citizens. For Deborah Orr to just fatalistically throw up her hands, and say that lots of working class men have been sidelined due to technology and macro-economics, and there’s nothing that could (- or by implication – can) be done about it, it’s surely just appalling!
And how can we completely rule out that if people like Ms Harman and Cooper had not monopolised the debate around gender during that parliament, such imaginative solutions could not have been found or arrived at? To be p*ssed off that that happened is surely not the same thing at all as hating and blaming women, as Deborah Orr most shamefully suggests!
Looking at it on an objective level, it does appear that there aren’t the same sort of commissions and inquiries going on in parliament specifically examining men’s relationship with work, as there have been for women, and this in itself surely signifies a very real institutional bias and discrimination which has been taking place over the years.
I’ll give it a go.
I’m not sure “incredibly enthusiastic” is entirely accurate. In my comment I pointed out a number of reasons why I didn’t think her entire argument stood up to scrutiny.
That said, I did say it was a fascinating article with loads in its favour and I stand by that. I think Deborah Orr, of all the Guardian columnists who cover this kinda stuff, is the least constrained by dogma and ideology, she is a genuine free thinker, and that comes across in the article. Her main point, that women’s social progress has primarily been driven by economic factors not feminism, is one I very much agree with.
For Deborah Orr to just fatalistically throw up her hands, and say that lots of working class men have been sidelined due to technology and macro-economics, and there’s nothing that could (- or by implication – can) be done about it, it’s surely just appalling!
I don’t see anything in her article saying that there’s nothing that could or should be done about it. I’ll agree that she doesn’t specifically say what could or should be done about it, I’m guessing she doesn’t really know and for that matter neither do I. She’s trying to explain where the anger aimed at the likes of Mary Beard comes from. As I pointed out in my comment, I think her diagnosis is faulty, but I agree with Jamie that it echoes Faludi’s Stiffed much more than it does, say,Hanna Rosin.
And how can we completely rule out that if people like Ms Harman and Cooper had not monopolised the debate around gender during that parliament, such imaginative solutions could not have been found or arrived at? To be p*ssed off that that happened is surely not the same thing at all as hating and blaming women, as Deborah Orr most shamefully suggests!
She doesn’t suggest that. She’s not suggesting that all men who have found themselves socially and economically marginalised hate women, she suggests that the men who do hate women have found themselves socially and economically marginalised. That’s not the same thing. (again, I don’t think she’s correct, but whatevs)
And as for your question about Harman and Cooper, I think you’re vastly overestimating their significance. It wasn’t their policies that drove the economic marginalisation of working class males, but economic policies pursued by parties of both stripes going back 30 years. As both Faludi and Rosin documented, the precise same thing (perhaps worse) has happened in the USA, and it has happened in most developed countries on earth to a greater or lesser extent.
The fundamental problem is that economies in the first world now have little need for much physically demanding labour in the manufacturing industries, as that has all been outsourced to countries that can do it much cheaper.
I think it is a bit of a stretch to blame Deborah Orr for not having the solutions to that.
First of all, many thanks for having a go at a reply, Ally. I think you know that I do sincerely hold these beliefs, even if I’m completely misguided or wrong!
I’m not sure “incredibly enthusiastic” is entirely accurate
Well, ok,on Twitter you’ve written that ‘It was a brilliant article’, ‘which I think could more or less count as a paraphrase of that kinda sentiment, but anyway….
She’s not suggesting that all men who have found themselves socially and economically marginalised hate women, she suggests that the men who do hate women have found themselves socially and economically marginalised. That’s not the same thing.
Well, of course, even that would clearly be a pretty ludicrous suggestion, which would not stand much scrutiny: I mean, Richard Desmond and Alan Sugar are not exactly pro-women, and they have not ended up poor! But then it’s also a bit of a straw man, to tell the truth, as of course I didn’t claim that she said that, either.
She does write:
A lot of men simply fought a rearguard action to hang on to the best of what they already had. Powerful men generally succeeded. Dispossessed men often failed. And if they wanted to turn their anger on women, not on the men who’d been at the top of the heap all along, pulling the strings – well, bingo. Deflection. So much the better for the kingpins.
But the trouble is that, in the context of the piece, she is using the phrase ‘turn their anger on women’ interchangeably with men holding the belief that a certain form of feminism might have had a malign influence on society, which in truth, is a slightly crafty, underhand trick, since even most women probably don’t think that the concepts ‘women’ and ‘feminism’ are totally equivalent. To hide behind that moral screen of conflating the two things is surely just not on.
It wasn’t their policies that drove the economic marginalisation of working class males, but economic policies pursued by parties of both stripes going back 30 years.
The trouble is not the power Harriet wielded herself, but the way she was held up by Labour to symbolise what the party stood for. If someone is Deputy Leader it means that they have been chosen as a figurehead: no-one inside Labour openly criticised what she stood for, as far as I could see, except Prescott and Mandelson after they were no longer in parliament.
Some countries are said to have preserved their skills-base (like Germany, most obviously), but then of course that’s largely about political priorities: to what extent you value certain kinds of people and economic endeavour.
The big difference is that, as we saw in a certain film about ‘Sheffield strippers’ at the time, New Labour had been given a significant warning shot (i.e. those trends had become part of mainstream public consciousness), and they stillchose to do nothing about it.
New Labour proudly proclaimed that it was ‘the most feminist government in history’ and who knows, perhaps if there had been a voice in government for working class men, to look out for them and their interests and concerns, then certain trades and abilities would not have been run down in the way that they were.
The idea, as is Deborah’s main contention in the piece, that feminism really enjoys very little power is blatantly untrue, as we witness this lobbying force in the media and in political life virtually every other week. It is solipsism, pure and simple, to try and claim that it hasn’t been having a major effect on public life in this way.
Mind you, Ally, having got that rant out of me system…
I do agree with you that Deborah Orr does have many great qualities as a writer and media personality, and that she’s often one of the most visionary and creative of the Guardian’s hacks.
She’s also a million times more caring and compassionate about various aspects of society than the Barbara Ellens and Suzanne Moores of this world.
I suspect it’s just that the F-word has become so much her life-blood, on a political level, that she doesn’t even want to admit the possibility it might have had some very bad effects along the way (and that in parliament, especially, it has become more associated with vested interests than equality).
(Possibly one of your very few flaws as a writer as well – who knows!) 🙂
But what I just can’t buy is the argument that it hasn’t been affecting major aspects of policy: we just see it so often, time after time, that that particular special interest stamps its foot, and then gets exactly what it wants, or very close to it.
To turn a blind eye to this power, and then pretend that it doesn’t really determine anything, other than the ‘detail’, is surely just a tad hypocritical to say the least.