I knew there was some possibility of negative feedback on my essay series on Medusa Rising, which was a regrettable risk I had to take, but since that has come to pass I’d like to provide some more clarification about why I wrote what I did, and what it actually means, since I guess it just isn’t clear. (Everything is so complex, so the ideas just keep coming, but I hope this is the last thing I will have to write on this unfortunate subject.)
It shouldn’t need to be said, but my critique is of ideas, not people (as I said in my piece on transgenderism). We all get pulled into trends from time to time, because that’s the nature of the online culture we’re beset with. (And I do think postfeminism is a ‘trend’, which I dearly hope will fizzle out eventually.) The main piece of a very personal iteration of postfeminism that I was critiquing, though it has some flaws, I agree with in part; the elaboration of ideas further down the track left a lot to be desired, however, and the links with more problematic (even misogynistic) content provided the nail in the coffin.
Over the past year I have wondered many times whether I have just been misunderstanding and getting things wrong. Doubt is pretty much my default setting. But every time I returned to the troubling content I was reminded anew why I had disliked it in the first place: problematic use of language, often with sexist undertones; the dismissal of feminism for erroneous reasons; a sometimes gleeful expression of the need for hierarchy in relationships; appeals to ‘nature’ and ‘instincts’ based on gender stereotypes (and evolutionary psychology); a quite individualist (and therefore ironically quite liberal) take on things, and more. And whenever I sought comment about it from others the response was the same—from young women to women in their seventies and every age in between there was shrewd critique (as there was from a couple of men too). It’s not possible that I am simply misunderstanding as the problems are pretty stark.
My reading of recent feminist writings, as well as older books like Catherine Keller’s From A Broken Web (1986), Riane Eisler’s Sacred Pleasure (1995), and the work of the glorious Susan Griffin, who passed away at the end of September, whose writing is an ever-renewing fountain of wisdom, gave me so many lightbulb moments (some of which I will lay out below), I knew I had to write something to organise my thoughts. It's how I often process things. As I said in a footnote to Part 1 of my essay:
This isn’t a new trend, just the latest iteration. Riane Eisler, writing three decades ago, noted that ‘revivals of “essentialist” gender roles through fundamentalism, neoconservatism, sociobiology [now evolutionary psychology], and some neo-Jungian mythopoetic writings [are] attempts to make something that is socially constructed appear as instinctual or biological.’ (1)
I also see this wave of ‘post-liberal reactionary feminism’ as emerging from the critique of the sex-denial of transgenderism. Judith Green says in her brilliant review of Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which Green makes clear provides a powerful critique but a dismal prescription:
why are we now seeing the rehabilitation of evolutionary psychology as a supposed ally of feminism yoked together with the repudiation of the harms wrought by a sexist sexually liberal culture? I think it has something to do with the fact that the current resurgence of feminism is the product of the very urgent fight against the political erasure of sex. Knowing that men and women are different (and that men can’t be women and vice versa) is the ground zero of this movement. In the face of so much denial of the ways in which sex matters, the superficial appeal of sociobiology is perhaps not surprising. Also not surprising is the rush to blame feminism for unleashing ‘sex denialism’ in the first place. But this is a confusion. The assertion of the Women’s Liberation Movement was never that men and women were the same, but that women’s freedom required the overturning of male supremacy. Biology-knowing is a low, low bar in achieving that aim. (2)
She goes on to say:
If the appeal of sociobiology is mistaken but unsurprising, the embrace of traditional monogamous marriage is inexplicable … It would be bizarre if, in the midst of this resurgence of women’s liberation kick-started by the critique of gender, we were somehow to accept the dismal prescription for women to find fulfillment only in tending the home and crib, dependent upon men to protect and provide. If we aren’t careful, we will spend the next decades reconvening the Genes and Gender conferences held between 1977 and 1994, and rewriting the Feminine Mystique. (3)
As noted, women’s freedom requires the overturning of male supremacy, which is why I decided to focus on the idea of male dominance in my essay, as radical feminism is founded on a critique of it as the underlying system of patriarchy. It’s the very fabric of civilisation, the air we breathe. And if you add in an ecofeminist perspective we understand that civilisation can only exist because of violence and exploitation. I am typing this on a laptop which is a technology made possible because of the destruction of the homes, freedom, health and lives of other beings, human and nonhuman, and the Earth herself. There is death at my fingertips.
This dominance is often overt (which no one in their right mind supports), but much of it is more subtle, the ether of everyday life. So when I say that postfeminists uphold dominance, it’s more that embedded invisible kind that I mean: the socialisation that inculcates certain ideas into us from infancy; the imposition of gender roles and identities which inscribe power dynamics; institutions like marriage and the nuclear family, which can manifest benignly, but often don’t. Additionally, the claim by postfeminists that these things are ‘natural’, ‘biological’ or ‘instinctive’ is a fantasy, and harmful. That they feel the need to use the words ‘dominant’ and ‘submissive’ at all is puzzling, because they are such loaded words. Considering the chaotic political moment we are in, this ‘soft dominance’ is not helpful, as it could easily degenerate into the worse kind.
The radical feminist analysis of reality is one of the best, if not the best, analysis we have of why the world is the way it is, and the development of strategies for what we can do about it. Liberal feminism, on the other hand, lacks the critique of systemic dominance, though it does pay attention to some of its more obvious manifestations. Post-liberal reactionary feminism, therefore, also lacks the understanding of systemic dominance (or is actively rejecting/ignoring it). It also lacks the capacity to see, as I said in my last post, that the very polarity that characterises woman-man relations even to this day only originated a few hundred years ago, after the witch-hunts and the development of capitalism. I was particularly struck by Carolyn Merchant’s assertion that women went from being active in economic life to being ‘a psychic resource for their husbands’. (4) This clearly echoes Sheila Rowbotham’s remark, as quoted by Maria Mies, that ‘this romantic ideal of womanhood has been the “desired space” for men’s longings’. (5) Woman as resource, as complement, as gendered contrivance to suit male desires. This construction of the ‘good woman’ and the ‘domestic idyll’ culminated in the nineteenth century idea of ‘the angel in the house’, based on Coventry Patmore’s poem.
Of course, today’s woman is no longer that idealised Victorian housewife, yet the ‘separate spheres’ ideology is still alive and well in various religious groups, and with the conservative backlash to transgenderism (along with transgenderism itself), the mainstreaming of tradwives, and the ever-present stigmatisation and backlash to feminism, we seem to have entered a particularly concerning moment of regression. Postfeminism fits into that overall arc of cultural development, so I see it as aligned with some very conservative and dangerous ideas.
If some individual postfeminist-identifying women have managed to achieve happy, healthy relationships with men, good for them!—but what I care about is the bigger picture, the systems and thoughts and language that continue to uphold dominance, and the social and political developments in the world that are making it even less likely that healthy relationships are going to be possible now or in the future. As Green notes, ‘Women can attempt to make better choices for themselves, but we do so within entrenched structures which require more than individual navigation’. (6)
[Perry’s] model of post-liberal (or reactionary) feminism is one that replaces collective movements, which aim to change structures, with a cultural virality affecting personal choices. Sadly, it’s hard to imagine that even a mass match-making of Perry’s hoped-for audience of young women with Jordan Peterson’s established audience of young men would make a dent in the grim sexual culture she describes. (7)
Radical feminism, which Perry rejects as ‘utopianism’, has the structural analysis that we need to address problems from the bottom up, in all the various layers and manifestations of reality, and collectively, because individual navigation will never be enough. The Chat in the Commons podcast with Elle Kamihira and Natalie Blundell has had some excellent episodes that explore the current crises that women are facing, facing serious issues head on and in a very accessible way, especially in regard to exploration of the Bs of the 4B movement.
If we look at the problem of men as alleged ‘protectors’, for instance, this ignores the reality of the existence of the patriarchal ‘protection racket’—that it is men who are both the protectors from violence as well as the perpetrators of that violence. Kinda convenient. I mentioned this in another sense at the end of Part 3 of my essay: ‘To state the completely obvious: men are only a problem because they are a problem—endless preparation for war means that war never ends.’
Claudia von Werlhof says, in relation to the protection of nature:
Why is this special Protection necessary all of a sudden? Protection of Nature begins in the 18th century, in the very Age of Enlightenment, of clarity, of the declaration of Universal Human Rights, of Equality and Freedom and Brotherhood... Who had attacked Nature and human life all of a sudden so that they had to be protected?
... Protection of Nature deals with the results of an intervention of Man into Nature's processes. This protection necessarily presupposes an aggression. Real Protection of nature should indeed prevent such aggression, remedy its consequences … (8)
Indeed. The need for protection presupposes an aggression, a harm—an intervention of Man into Women’s processes. I’d much rather we addressed the cause of that harm than continued to tout men as protectors, and that means destroying the protection racket once and for all.
In terms of the idea of ‘submission’ I’ve been told that I have misunderstood what is meant, and that ‘surrender’ is a better word, though I already knew that was what some women are trying (though ultimately failing) to communicate. I still have issues with ‘surrender’, however, and think that a lot more contextualisation is necessary, as is explanation for why this submission/surrender idea only seems to apply to women and not men. This is an infliction of gender, not a natural state or behaviour for women. Feminism requires us, at the very least, to have a critique of gender, and I see the opposite here.
As I said in the introduction to my essay, we’re dependent on the natural world and we’re not in control. If you like, we have to surrender to the process of Life and Evolution. That applies to everyone, and in fact, more so to men than women, since it is Patriarchal Man in particular who denies his dependence on nature and women.
You see, I think the postfeminists have in some sense got things backwards. As Esmée Streachailt writes in her ‘Re: Framing Radical Feminism’ series, in The Feminine Mystique (1963) Betty Friedan summarises a (1939!) study by Abraham Maslow which uses the term ‘dominant’—in the sense of possessing self-assertion or autonomy; a confident and well-rounded individual, in other words—to describe the women who had the best sexual relationships. Friedan says,
the more “dominant” the woman, the greater her enjoyment of sexuality—and the greater her ability to “submit” in a psychological sense, to give herself freely in love, to have orgasm. It was not that these women higher in “dominance” were more “highly sexed,” but they were, above all, more completely themselves, more free to be themselves—and this seemed inextricably linked with a greater freedom to give themselves in love. These women were not, in the usual sense, “feminine,” but they enjoyed sexual fulfillment to a much higher degree than the conventionally feminine women in the same study. (9)
Obviously the use of the word ‘dominant’ isn’t exactly ideal, but isn’t it interesting. In order to ‘submit’ a woman needs to be ‘dominant’ and ‘not feminine’. Streachailt goes on to say that ‘These high-dominance women are not conventionally “feminine” because they feel free to accept or reject convention on their own judgement, but also because they are’, in Friedan’s words,
stronger as individuals than most women. Such women prefer to be treated “Like a person, not like a woman.” They prefer to be independent, stand on their own two feet, and generally do not care for concessions that imply they are inferior, weak or that they need special attention and cannot take care of themselves. This is not to imply that they cannot behave conventionally. They do when it is necessary or desirable for any reason, but they do not take the ordinary conventions seriously. (10)
Curiouser and curiouser. These are gender non-conforming women. The ‘submission’ is merely the ability to let go in the passionate moment, not an overall relationship dynamic or some kind of essence of femininity, and it’s based on independence and a strong sense of selfhood. This woman doesn’t need a man to contain and protect her. She is self-contained.
Streachailt goes on to say:
“From a psychological point of view, a high-dominance woman was more like a high-dominance man than she was like a low-dominance woman.” The gap between low and high-dominance women created so many differences in personality, intellect, capacity, attitude, even vocation that “Maslow suggested that either you have to describe as “masculine” both high-dominance men and women or drop the terms “masculine” and “feminine” altogether because they are so “misleading”. (11, Streachailt’s emphasis)
Wow, now we’re getting somewhere. Self-actualised women are more like men than women—maybe they’re even human. The concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ pervade our reality, our thoughts, our conceptions of who we are, and yet they are … basically meaningless.
The way we use language matters as it influences our perceptions. Thus when I critiqued Nicole Daedone’s quote about ‘fuckers’ vs ‘the fucked’ in Part 3 of my essay, I was addressing the connotations of the word ‘fuck’ used in that particular manner, and how it replicates the dominator mindset, as Eisler would put it. No matter what Daedone or the women who quote her think about the meaning of the phrase from their own point of view (though it does take a certain mentality to come up with it in the first place), there are embedded undertones that need to be addressed. This is especially important considering the porn-saturated culture that we live in, which Daedone seems to revel in (which makes her a bit of an anomaly, distinguished from the likes of Perry and other postfeminists). But Derrick Jensen said somewhere that the word ‘fuck’, in its etymology, means not just ‘intercourse’ but also ‘to strike or hit’. It seems that may not be definitively confirmed, but the point still stands. There’s an implicit violence in the word.
In Louise Hewett’s novel Mist, which is a (very explicit) sexual and spiritual journey that provides a fictional example of what healthy sexuality might look like, she makes liberal use of the term, sometimes in fully appropriate and even humorous ways. However, as I said in a short review I wrote on Goodreads, I did feel that the use of the word should still be questioned due to its dominator implications; Louise in fact agreed with me on that point and told me she unpacks it in a later book in the series. Importantly, her two main male characters are not masculine, they’re humans in the male mode, and their bisexuality widens their capacity for selfhood.
I read The Flowering Wand by Sophie Strand early in 2023, so I’m familiar with ideas about the ‘sacred masculine’ that give men some possibility of escape from patriarchal roles (funnily enough, I remember now that it was annoyance about that book that prompted me to write Finding the Bedrock). However, it’s unfortunate that Strand taints her thinking with gender/queerspeak, which is confusing, obfuscating, and quite tedious, so while her book makes some excellent points, I didn’t enjoy it overall. It is also, sadly, a book about the ‘masculine’, and not so much about the fact of maleness—which is the exploration we really need.
Glenys Livingstone’s PaGaian Cosmology, though it does misuse the word gender on a few occasions (I’m very pedantic these days), provides an excellent antidote to all of this gender polarity nonsense, and it gives me a way to further develop my idea of asymmetry. If I could go back and alter the last part of my essay now, I’d change the terms The Feminine/The Masculine to The Female Principle/The Male Principle, so as to avoid ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ altogether, because they really do give me the ick (I went with ‘The Feminine’ partly to align it with the quote from Streachailt on the ‘phenomenologically feminine’). I’d also iterate, as Livingstone does, that what I mean by The Female Principle is not so much an archetype, ‘as this tends to connote a “mindstruct”—something “merely” cultural’, but something more embodied and intrinsic to Matter/Mater—‘the sense of Her as a “physic” of the Universe’. (12) Her materia is literally everything, and thus whole:
The popular Jungian understanding of the “Feminine” is not sufficient to contain Her, shuffled off as She usually is to a portion of reality. And frequently that portion in the popular mind consists of passive receptive qualities. These qualities are only part of the whole picture. As Virgin, Mother and Crone, She is eagle, bear, lioness, snake, as well as deer, gentle breeze, flower, rabbit. She is not manifesting “masculinity” when she hunts for food, and neither is the human female when she operates in the world analytically or assertively. (13)
Jung did give us a lot of wisdom, but his scheme of anima/animus is, as Keller remarks, ‘mythically matrifocal’ but ‘psychologically androcentric’. (14) We need to be very critical of it.
The truth is that 10-15 years ago I probably would have subscribed to at least some of the ideas that the postfeminists describe, and some of the aspects of a Jungian gender polarity (though the anima/animus no longer has any credibility for me). I had been pretty conventionally socialised into patriarchy, and I am still undoing the effects of that, so that’s partly why I have such a problem with all of the absurd ideas floating around these days.
In summary, I think that the postfeminists have good intentions from within their own perspective. Each to their own I guess. But their outlook is problematic, and does have a flow-on effect in the wider culture, and I think that is concerning. I’ve based my critique on a lot of evidence, and I stand by it, even if it has had some regrettable consequences, and even if it wasn’t the wisest move for me to make. I’m prepared to be the ‘bad woman’, to be disliked, if that is unavoidable. It’s actually probably a step in the right direction for me in some ways, however painful it might be to navigate.
I’ve quoted Carol Lee Flinders before: ‘I was not suited for radical politics. I was too easily overwhelmed by feelings of confusion, despair, or inadequacy to be of much use to any movement’, (15) and it seems apt to say it again. I am not able to take part in ‘activism’ in the practical sense, and have no desire to, despite feeling deeply about many issues. I feel some internal conflict about this, about mostly not doing anything, let alone enough, but chronic illness is what it is. I feel conflicted about the needed communalism of matriarchy and female solidarity too, because I am in fact a solitary person and not much of a team player. I also wish I was far more radical and far more confident in my views, but I am not. As a highly sensitive person I’m finding the online world to be so full of conflict and misinformation these days that I feel a stronger and stronger urge to withdraw completely, though that will likely never be entirely possible.
Speaking out still seems better than remaining silent, however, so I’m glad I have had the opportunity to say my piece.
So here we are. If you can’t see the pattern yet, I can’t help you. I’m erecting a boundary to protect my health, which is precarious at present, so this is the last thing I’ll be saying on this matter.
References
1. Riane Eisler, Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body, HarperOne, 1995, pp. 310 (ebook page number)
2. Judith Green, ‘Powerful Critique, Dismal Prescription: A Review of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’, THE RADICAL NOTION, Issue Seven (Spring/Summer 2022), p. 114 – available here: https://theradicalnotion.org/
3. Green, p. 114
4. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, 40th anniversary edition, HarperOne, 1980/2020, p. 186 (ebook page number)
5. Maria Mies, ‘White Man’s Dilemma: His Search for What He Has Destroyed’, in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, Bloomsbury: London, 1993/2014, p. 134-5
6. Green, p. 114
7. Green, p. 114
8. Mies, p. 154-5
9. Esmée Streachailt, ‘Re: Framing Radical Feminism: The Plot Twist’, THE RADICAL NOTION, Issue One (Autumn 2020), p. 120 – available here: https://theradicalnotion.org/
10. Streachailt, p. 120
11. Streachailt, p. 120
12. Glenys Livingstone, PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, iUniverse, Inc.: New York, 2005, 2008, p. 39
13. Livingstone, p. 89
14. Catherine Keller, From A Broken Web, Separation, Sexism, and Self, Beacon Press: Boston, 1986, p. 111
15. Carol Lee Flinders, Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics, HarperCollins e-books, 2007, p. ix