'Radical feminism'

a correction of terms, followed by much longer reflections

Intent

It’s long past time for me to focus a bit of writing on a most-maligned and frequently mis-identified group: the radical feminists. This will take a while, so the tl:dr folks can check out now.

Back in the Army, where I spent over two of my almost seven and a half decades, an expression that got a lot of exercise was, “He’s talking out of his ass.” It applied, because soldiers are world class gossips and bullshitters (a fact seldom remarked). Talking out of your ass means saying things when you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.

Three things I see most frequently subjected to these anal linguistics are (1) the military, (2) “Marxism,” and (3) “feminism.” One reason I spot these most often is that in the peculiar course of my own life, I’ve had deep exposure to all three. I could include the over-generalization “Christianity” as a fourth, I suppose, though I’m still in a kind of mid-absorption phase there. The intermediate point being—and here’s where it gets weird—I narrate my own conversion from a hard-materialist Marxist into a Christian through feminism, in particular, radical feminism. The prior conversion was from a kind of left-liberal in the military to Marxism. Kind of an Hegelian dialectic turned inward. (I prefer to think of it according to the title of this weblog, as Molting.)

This lengthy post is about “feminism,” and its intent to dig a good deal deeper into what radical feminism actually was and is, in a way that disabuses (to whom it may concern) of all the bullshit and gossip that makes its way through the internet in the maligning and mis-naming of radical feminism.

Feminism

To begin: what is feminism?

I have a kind of chatty-slash-catty tendency in my written “voice.” I’ll try to discipline that by being as systematic as possible. (In real life, I’m a stuttering, tic-ridden, ebonics-inflected hillbilly, whose speech is littered with grammatical debaucheries.) The term “feminism” conjures up various symbolic constellations in people’s minds. The word lives in a polemical universe, one cluttered with competing agendas, so we need to wipe off the some of the debris that clings to the word, at least in the sense that I use it.

In 1851, the term referred to a kind of study of “female qualities.” The root word of fem-inism is fem-ale. In 1875, it was a medical diagnosis of men with secondary female characteristics (gynecomastia, e.g.). The first use of it as a political term was in 1895, with the initiation of a struggle by bourgeois women for equal (liberal) rights with bourgeois men, i.e., the franchise.

For a host of historical reasons, the study of which could fill a bookshelf, feminism—as a political orientation/movement—was only possible within the bourgeois-liberal epoch, where the political fiction of rights was given the legal force that made it a legitimate and effective object of struggle. In this sense, then, feminism was evolutionarily conjoined with liberalism, and later with the struggles against liberalism (Marxism, postliberalism, etc.), for which liberalism was a kind of enemy-lodestar.

In fact, preceding the term itself, the questions of equality in suffrage and work were theoretically taken up in the mid-nineteenth century, by everyone from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to John Stewart Mill to Frederick Engels, the two former being bourgeois liberals, and the latter a bourgeois pre-Marxist (Marx famously said, “I am not a Marxist.”)

With that as a preface, I’ll more decisively declare what I mean by feminism, which has ramified into a host of hyphenations. Feminism, as I use the term, means: studies, theories, and socio-political actions taken from the standpoint of women and girls and their perceived and particular interests.

This, I pray, can successfully encompass the many strands of “feminism,” without infringing upon or taking sides with any one “school” or faction. (This may exclude certain post-structuralist employments of the term, but I’ll get to that further down.)

Because feminism so defined is taken up from the standpoint of women, the hyphenation of feminism is inevitable. Women’s standpoints, as standpoints, are predetermined by more than their sex. Women are half the highly pre-diversified population of humans overall. The history, experiences, and interests of a professional bourgeois European woman today are decidedly different than that of a Haitian peasant woman or a pre-assimilation Maori.

Moreover, feminists, like anyone else engaged in critical studies of various kinds, depend upon those interpretive frameworks with which they’ve learned through experience or mastered through study. “Natural rights,” for example, was first articulated as a political notion in the seventeenth century in the wake of civil wars, and only later taken up by women, who liberal philosophers had defined into nature, in order to maintain women’s subordination and exclusion from the public sphere. Liberal feminism is not the same as radical feminism, as we’ll see later in great detail, the latter of which took its interpretive lenses from the Marxist toolbox.

To pre-summarize, then, feminism was born out of classical liberalism (not to be confused with the vulgar employment of “liberal” in popular discourse now). Feminist study and practice resists practical and political universalization (including the liberal pretense of universalism) by virtue of the fact that women and women’s circumstances are as diverse as our species. Feminism, like any other form of research and study, did not appear ex nihilo, with its own metaphysical, linguistic, and hermeneutical entourage.

Biographical notes

We’ll start with the easiest part. The modifier “radical” here is employed in three distinct ways. For actual feminists (scholars and activists, e.g.), it identifies a particular school of feminism with a specific set of philosophical, ideological, and methodological commitments. For anti-feminists of various kinds, the term “radical feminist” is an epithet for all or most forms of feminist theory and practice. I’ve heard conservative know-nothings call Hillary Clinton a radical feminist, a claim that any actual rad-fem would view with contempt. More recently, with the rise of gender ideology, the term has been combined and reified (again, as an epithet) as “trans-exclusive radical feminist,” or TERF.

Only the first employment of the term has any legitimacy.

My own engagement with feminists began in the Army, where it lapsed due to my extreme operational tempo, only to be reignited (in close contact with my sister, who worked with Suzanne Pharr’s Women’s Project in Little Rock, Arkansas) toward the end of my career. My sympathies had been with feminism writ large, so it wasn’t a leap. Celia, my sister, had a veritable library of feminism, and she loaned and gifted me books . . . a lot of books. When I left the Army and began writing (as a Marxist), other people put me onto feminist scholarship, which—in the course of developing a book about war and masculinity—I consumed concupiscently. Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Betty Friedan, Valerie Solanas, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon (including some email correspondence), bell hooks, the Combahee River Collective, Kate Millet, Mary Daly, Maria Mies, Carolyn Merchant, Carole Pateman, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (with whom I corresponded), Kate Millet (with whom I interacted on a listserv), Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Ehrenreich, Alice Walker, Amy Laura Hall, Luce Irigaray, Susan Brownmiller, Gayle Rubin, Michele Wallace, Charlotte Bunch, Hélène Cixous, Marelene Dixon, Marilyn French, Gloria Anzaldúa, Patricia Bell-Scott, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Chandra Mohanty, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Cynthia Enloe, Patricia Hill Collins, Christine Jarvis, Donna Haraway, Shiela Jeffreys, Cynthia Enloe, Vandana Shiva (met for one conversation), Naomi Wolf, Toril Moi, Bernice Hausmann, Susan Bordo, Linda Kintz, Gerda Lerner, Ann Kibbey, Martha Gimenez (also corresponded via listeserv), Martha Nussbaum, Angela Davis, Rebecca Whisnant (met for one conversation) and her co-author, Christine Stark, Silvia Federici, Susan Douglas, Jessica Benjamin, Sarah Coakley, Kimberle Crenshaw, Barbara Duden, Zillah Eisenstein, Nancy C.M. Hartsock, Elaine Showalter, Rosemary Hennessy, Margery Hourihan, Susan Jeffords, Mab Segrest (who I knew in North Carolina), and others I can’t call to mind in this moment . . . coached along the way by De Clarke, with whom I corresponded extensively.

The book on war and violent constructions of masculinity was prepared for my first publisher, Soft Skull Press, to follow Hideous Dream and Full Spectrum Disorder, but it landed on the rocks (early 2000s) when they assigned me a very young editor who wanted to reconstruct the actual content of the book to suit her own pop-poststructuralist prejudices. It would only reach fruition in 2015, with Wipf and Stock Publishers, as Borderline, after I’d converted.

At any rate, the reason I gravitated toward the rad-fems was I was writing a book about power and violence, and they had the best analyses, from my own standpoint, of these dynamics. By from my standpoint, I mean in unpacking my own experience as a career soldier who’d participated in multiple conflicts in various roles, and how that experience was formed by violent constructions of masculinity. Which is to say, the kinds of misogyny that other people said the rad-fems overstated was not overstated at all, at least within the all-male subculture of which I’d long been a part.

Rad-fem genealogy

Getting back on point here, radical feminism narrates its own genealogy through the Civil Rights Movement, the antiwar movement, liberal feminist movements, and various Marxist movements. The development of a “school” of radical feminism, by which I mean its more rigorous theorization, radical feminism became a contrarian element within these other social formations based on the experience of many women within them of being undervalued, pigeonholed, sexually objectified, and silenced by their own comrades.

The Marxists—we can take MacKinnon as an example, who was heavily influenced by Hungarian philosopher György Lukács—like their counterparts elsewhere, were likewise marginalized and mistreated within their movements. They made a bold hermeneutical move by applying Marxian categories of struggle to the seemingly intractable sexism of their own comrades, by defining “patriarchy”—which they saw as, in some respects at least, transhistorical—in class terms. That is, they wanted to see what insights could be gleaned from treating men as a whole and women as a whole as “sex classes.”

A lot of this, at least within the limited scope of the metropolitan world, was very fruitful. (Yes, it was flawed, but even reading glasses that aren’t my prescription, can improve my vision enough to read. We’ll return to this.) There really was (in some metropolitan cases) an arbitrary division of labor (women, even with the physical differences between the sexes, are quite as capable of being lawyers, doctors, and a host of other jobs that don’t rely on things like great upper body strength.) Men really did retain a kind of transgenerational sexual hegemony based on unjust norms and customs. Double standards apply. Women really were undervalued (this was especially prominent after early industrialization, when women were pressured into the “private” sphere and excluded from the “public” sphere «liberal categories, by the way).

As MacKinnon said, in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away.” This parallels, it must be noted, Marxism in two respects. It is alienation theory; and it is conflict theory. Radical feminism is, substantially, a post-Marxist school of feminism.

It’s strengths and its weaknesses is how sex-class works as an interpretive framework, which we’ll get to, but the main point I want to drive home here is this is a distinct theoretical approach from the more popular and popularized “liberal” feminism. One is not a “radical feminist” because you don’t like them (know-nothing conservatives and Jordan Peterson, but I’ve been redundant) or because they (woman or man) points out the incoherence of gender ideology (the accusation of being a TERF). There are plenty of non rad-fems (myself included) who do the latter. There are, in fact, many feminists of many stripes who question an ideology that attempt to erase by dilution women-as-women as political subjects. (More on that later, too.) There are also rad-fems who have been supportive of trans-ideology (MacKinnon among them).

Radical feminism underwent its own internal controversies, divisions, and evolutions as time went on. This should be unsurprising, as these kinds of permutations are inevitable with further development, corrections and adaptations, and changes in both political and academic contexts. It’s true with Marxism. It’s true with liberalism. It’s true with Eastern Orthodoxy or Thomism.

Re-summarizing:

Talking out of your ass means saying things when you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.

Feminism includes studies, theories, and socio-political actions taken from the standpoint of women and girls and their perceived and particular interests.

Feminism was born out of classical liberalism.

The hyphenation of feminism was inevitable.

“Radical feminism” does not mean (1) all feminism, (2) feminism you don’t like, or (3) every person who questions trans/gender ideology.

Radical feminism is not liberal feminism (it began as post-Marxist feminism).

Radcial feminism positions itself (as conflict theory) against “patriarchy.” (It is also very often anti-capitalist!)

Before you talk out of your ass about “feminism” or “radical feminism,” maybe take some time to learn about both terms (beyond a Wikipedia post) and engage enough feminist scholarship to gain some nuance beyond the often oversimplified taxonomies (Maria Mies, for example, has been variously classified a radical feminist, a Marxist feminist, and an eco-feminist . . . I suggest she’d reject all three modifiers as somehow definitive, rather than influences).

Jordan Peterson, et al, wouldn’t know actual feminist scholarship if it bit them squarely in the ass. They count on a similar colossal ignorance among their audiences and accolytes.

I said in the subtitle, we’d do some corrections, then follow on with more up-to-date reflections. Let’s begin that second part.

Masculinity, honorary-man feminism, and decoys

Why did I use rad-fems as sources to write Borderline? From the Introduction:

Masculinity is very often constructed as domination and violence—direct violence or sublimated and vicarious violence. War is one of the most powerful formative practices in the development of masculinity understood as domination and violence; and recursively, masculinity established as domination and violence reproduces the practice of war. In societies that celebrate war, domination-masculinity is likewise celebrated and becomes a norm to which men, speaking here of males, aspire; and war becomes a defining metaphor for male agency. When this kind of aggression is valued, its opposite is devalued. When “male” aggression is valued, “female” lack of aggression is devalued, meaning that women themselves, associated with this “womanly” trait, come to be identified as a negative. Being a good man has come to mean being not like a woman. In this way, war contributes significantly to the hatred of women, and reciprocally, contempt for women contributes to the reproduction of war.

It took me 466 pages to thoroughly make my case. The bibliography is reflected in the reading list above. I’ve not seen a credible critique of my thesis . . . in large part, because it isn’t, apparently. interesting enough to read. I thought I could resurrect the thesis—war produces violent masculinity, and violent masculinity reproduces war—more obliquely in Tough Gynes, where I did a study of violent female characters in film as “honorary men,” with an epigraph by Andrea Dworkin, but once again, I missed the bestseller list by a light year or so.

A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

—Andrea Dworkin

The woman who becomes an “honorary male” is allowed to occupy a limited number of positions in the male world provided she behaves like the men before her. In doing so, she provides that ideological gender-cover without changing either the masculinized character of the surrounding society or institution, without disrupting masculinity constructed as violence and conquest, and without changing any of the power structures that continue to exist … in spite of minor sex-gender disruptions.

True story. When I taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the 1980s, around ten percent of the Corps of Cadets were female. West Point: male institution that fought against female inclusion until they were nearly forced at gunpoint. Masculine institutional character. In the cadet lingo of the day, anyone who did anything very well was called a “stud.” He’s a football stud. He’s a chess stud. He’s a PT (physical training) stud. Interestingly, when minority female cadets did things well, they were also called studs. She’s a lacrosse stud. She’s an academic stud. The women who were disliked were still called cunts and whores and dykes and whatnot—pretty standard misogynistic Army talk—but if a young woman managed to gain the respect of some of the men, by not rocking the boat and taking the sexist shit of cadets and faculty without complaint, her sign of acceptance was to become Storm Cat, the uber-ejaculate sire of many flat-racing thoroughbreds. She became an honorary male stud. (Tough Gynes, from the Introduction)

One can infer, or extrapolate, correctly, that two forms of feminism that came under fire in my little book (this one a mere 132 pages) were liberal (Hillary Clinton) feminism and a more recent, sly, hedonistic, and monetizable “power feminism.”

The thing is, a lot of people are deeply and uncritically invested in the idea of war and violence as redemptive and hedonistic individualism. The kick-ass grrrrl doesn’t subvert male norms, it rewrites them in drag. (Ever notice how, in this trope, the grrrl remains”sexy” by the standards of uncritical fifteen-year-old boys?)

Slyer still, the gender decoy.

In a plural society like the United States, male social power does not assign women one monolithic “script.” Zillah Eisenstein has said that modern society restlessly “renegotiates” masculinity and femininity, often using what she calls “gender decoys”—individual women in power and individual women as spokespersons for enterprises that are still dominated by males and for males. . . . We can easily see that the corporate boardroom lacks females except to take the minutes and serve the coffee; but we don’t typically think of the corporation and its boardroom as the product of the history of male dominance. This blind spot is maintained by norm-alization and gender-neutral liberal speech. We are then seduced by the argument that something called “equality” can efface history by putting more women on the board (as “gender decoys”). Shuffling the board may lead to small changes in its practices, but the function of the board is imbricated within the larger context of society and law. A few women in the boardroom does nothing that improves the lot of women generally, nor will they force the institution to adapt standpoints shared mostly by women. On the contrary, women in power have consistently adapted to the existing pre-masculinized culture, where they serve as honorary males. This is why we need to read between the lines of gender-neutral speech.

Radical feminists taught me that. What I’ve noticed since, which complicates matters, is that wielding power is in itself a dangerous moral enterprise. In the divisions of labor between men and women (many disappearing with technology), men have inherited the more powerful roles (no, not all men), and are then, by default, far less caring and ethical than women (there’s my war thesis again).

Objectification & rape

Let’s take look again at Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin was brilliant, and she was profoundly damaged by her marriage to a fellow left-activist, who brutalized her, and after she left him, continued to stalk and persecute her, driving her into poverty, where, for a time, she was prostituted. This experience left an indelible mark on Dworkin’s feminist theorizing, which came to an abrupt end with her death from a heart attack at the age of fifty-eight.

I’m on record as saying that the truism, “Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power,” is complete horseshit, false on its face, requiring those who disingenuously accept this idiotic declaration to ignore a naked emperor. Yes, of course it’s about power, but it is by its very definition also sexual. The rad-fems want us to know that not only rape, but sex itself—falling outside the narrow definition of rape—is inflected by the kinds of power which are invisible to law.

Catharine MacKinnon said that the implication that rape is psychopathological serves as a smokescreen by validating the notion that rape is not about sex—because if it is about sex, then “sexuality” itself comes under review as a construction of power. This is exactly why both MacKinnon and Dworkin were vilified by both the right and the left. People don’t want to go there. “Rape becomes something a rapist does, as if he were a separate species. But no personality disorder distinguishes most rapists from normal men,” says MacKinnon.

As to “the consent standard,” I explain its inadequacy here.

The rad-fems I have known, and know of, are over-represented by rape and abuse survivors, formerly prostituted women, and women who have worked closely with abused women in shelters and so forth. Is there an occasional misandry among them? Occasional. What has surprised me, given the experiences of many of these women, and given the trans-Marxist notion of men and women as conflict-theory classes, is how little actual misandry I’ve encountered. In fact, I’ve found that if one (as a male, like myself) deals with either rad-fems (or women more generally) with respect, humility, and common decency (kind of like we should act with everyone), that this respect and decency is reciprocated. Most of the accusations of man-hatred I’ve encountered (especially since the dawn of the digital age) have been male knee-jerk defensiveness wrapped around anticipatory misconceptions about . . . well, feminism.

Radical feminism came under the fiercest attack back in the day, prior to its besiegement by pop-poststructuralists, from the left and from liberals, in response to rad-fems criticisms of pornography and prostitution. This ought to have been surprising, given that the defenses of pornography and prostitution were advanced with a decidedly libertarian framework. The problem was—and I see this now as I’ve become increasingly familiar with philosophy in my dotage—the intellectual armamentarium of liberals and leftists was insufficient to recognize the glaring contradictions between their analyses of, say, economic matters, and their takes on anything related to sex. This intellectual insufficiency was undoubtedly abetted by male self-interest in the continued sexual objectification of women.

And here we come to one of the nubs, at least in where, why, and how a God-botherer like me (and some other Christians) can find some correspondence between our profession of faith and the critiques of the rad-fems. We both adhere to the quaint, archaic notion that treating people like objects is wrong. Always. No exceptions. Ever. This includes when another person “invites” one, in whatever manner, to objectify him- or herself. Here is also—and I can feel the patellar tremors from here—where the latent full-spectrum libertarianism of left and right is ignited.

When the left was caught up in the seventies euphoria of tearing down every tradition, demolishing every cultural guardrail, the rad-fems—armed with a theory that at least recognized the problem with objectification—said, “Hugh Hefner’s a fucking pimp.” (screech, crash, breaking glass)

How is it that a leftist who calls someone who crosses a picket line “a scab” (a “voluntary” act by an individual), then reverses their ideological priors when it comes to a woman who “consents” to prostitution? (My take on consent here, and on prostitution here.)

Rad-fems were the first to center, in a systematic way, the issue of rape in politics, and they did so in a non-compartmentalized way that associated rape—which everyone claimed to abhor—with the sex trade (pornography and prostitution, which are now merging into one online thing). It is not surprising, then, that, as noted above, this rad-fem attention to women’s objectification (and sexual monetization) corresponds with their over-representation among abused women and-or their advocates.

There is no doubt that sexual harassment laws and the criminalization of marital rape were the work of the rad-fems. We tend to conveniently forget.

Liberal law

Returning to decoys, honorary men, and gender-neutral speech. Catharine MacKinnon became famous, and infamous in some circles, for her criticism of and opposition to pornography and prostitution. (As noted above, the rad-fems I’ve met and studied who work in shelters and such come in constant contact with prostituted women, none of whom would say they were “empowered” by fucking strange and potentially dangerous men for money.) For me, however, MacKinnon’s most valuable work was a less-known book written as a legal scholar (she worked at UMich Law School), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.

With regard to rape, I said above that many sexual acts and practices may well fall within the boundaries of the legal “consent standard,” and still be heavily inflected with very unequal power . . . I said these acts were “invisible to law.” This is what I learned from MacKinnon’s book, and this lesson was further fleshed out in Carole Pateman’s signature work, The Sexual Contract.

MacKinnon’s theses on liberal law applied to women (which she was still theorizing as a class), but they apply equally well to most forms of social power, most emphatically class. The aphoristic version is, that which is prior to the law is invisible to the law.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich as well as poor from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets, and stealing bread.”

—Anatole France

The most extreme example today might be Elon Musk gifting hundreds of millions of dollars to the 2024 Trump campaign (this is not an exclusively Republican problem). Because large donors are considered by law to be “individuals,” equal in the eyes of the law to you or me, Musk has the right—as do you or I—to donate as much as he likes to a campaign. This makes us legally “equal.” Our personal histories—which are “private” matters—are intentionally ignored by the law, as is the case with liberal law in the case of, say, a heterosexual married couple.

The slickest trick of liberal law, developed by an ascendant bourgeoisie, was the concept of “the individual.” Philosophically speaking, liberal individualism is the fiction that each human being is (1) self-contained, (2) autonomous, and (3) freely choosing. Legally speaking, this individual is neither male nor female, neither rich nor poor, neither sophisticated nor naive. Everyone is the same (legally). Not a single one of these is categorically true in real life, ergo my claim the individual is a legal fiction. We are not self-contained. We are not autonomous. We do not “freely” choose.

Liberal law, using this equalizing fiction, externalizes actual inequalities. In the article linked above on consent (freely choosing), I used the following examples:

A young widow with three children and no life insurance settlement. Her daycare eats half her paycheck, and she’s falling further and further into credit card debt. A creepy co-worker who knows she’s in dire straits offers her $250 to have sex with him. If she consents, is this meaningful consent? Did she make a free choice? Are your answers juridical or ethical? Can you separate the two?

A married woman, who has no decent employment prospects and depends upon her husband financially. She no longer, for whatever reason, has any desire for sexual relations with him. When he threatens to divorce her if she doesn’t, does her acquiescence to unwanted sex constitute consent?

A young woman who’s become addicted to methamphetamine. Her habit has cost her her livelihood, she’s living on the street, and she actively solicits sex with men in exchange for money to feed herself and her habit. Are these transactions consensual? Are they ethical? What’s the difference?

Are they legal? Pretty much. In some states, even the latter is legal, and many many “leftists” now advocate for the legalization of prostitution, as “sex work.” (No, I am not arguing for the continued criminalization of sexually exploited women. Horse whipping procurers, pimps, and johns, maybe, but . . . there’s my little soldier showing again. Nonviolence is hard.)

One feature of liberal law highlighted by the rad-fems is how this externalization, this willful blindness to the forms of power prior to law, is divided from what the law internalizes through the twinned concepts of “public” and “private.”

Public & private (the real provenance of “the personal is the political”)

Here we encounter Carole Pateman’s theses in The Sexual Contract. On this one, we’re going long.

Pateman says, “Telling stories of all kinds is the major way that human beings have en deavoured to make sense of themselves and their social world.” Pateman describes stories that underwrite the idea of social contract, which, she shows, is itself an outgrowth of something she calls the “sexual contract.” There are several stories that are used to describe social contract, and when we look at liberal philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick closely, we find that there are origin myths of liberal philosophy.

Rawls has a myth called “The original Position,” about a group of people who get together to decide what rules they will need to live together. In Rawls’s story, all of the people in the group are afflicted with a form of amnesia, which Rawls calls “the veil of ignorance.” None of the people engaged in this very important deliberation together knows himself. He has no social status, no ethnic tradition, no beliefs, no history, no relationships, nothing. He is, however, grown with children and the “head of a household,” which for Rawls meant a man. His characters are so abstract that they can’t even have bodies, which might betray one of the realities that must remain concealed behind the veil. Together, they are a music played with only one note on no particular instrument.

Nozick has a different story. His is named “The original Act of Acquisition.” In this story, a man is walking on the beach (men again). The beach is covered with pretty shells. The man takes one and carries it home. It’s legitimately his, because he picked it up in the open, on no one’s property, and no one else had yet claimed the shell. There were plenty of shells, so the shell is rightly his. If someone takes the shell from him without permission, that is wrongful, but if he sells the shell to someone voluntarily, then the ownership of the shell is rightly transferred. Obviously, Nozick is preoccupied with property, and so the original rightful act is used to explain where property came from, which in fact is every bit as “historically baseless” as the story liberals reject about Eve’s chat with a perfidious snake and Rawls’s story of collective amnesia. Yet these stories support the edifice of liberal humanism.

You can see how Rawls’s fiction has several disembodied individuals collaborating on rules that cannot take any real (flesh and blood) person into account; and Nozick’s fiction has just one disembodied being—a “rights bearing individual” like Rawls’s rights-bearing individual—who deals in either acquisition or “rational” exchange with other acquisitive individuals. Both are social contractarians. They simply have a disagreement about the basis of “rights” that attach to the cardboard characters in their respective stories. They have one more thing in common.

“The pictures of the state of nature” writes Pateman, “and the stories of the social contract found in the classic texts vary widely, but despite their differences on many important issues, the classic social contract theorists have a crucial feature in common. They all tell patriarchal stories.” With the notable exception of Thomas Hobbes, it turns out, the origins of political “rights” associated with social contractarianism, in the accounts given by the “fathers” of liberalism, all begin with the explicit claim that women are subordinate to men by nature, whereas men are legitimately subordinate to other men only by contract. The fathers of the enlightenment divided nature and culture, with nature marked as female and subordinate to culture, which was marked as male. In every account except Hobbes (and Hobbes will find his way back to the subjugation of women by declaring a coerced agreement a contract), men and men alone can be regarded as “free and equal ‘individuals.’” Biology determines sex, and biology—making men the superior beings—thereby determines that men shall rule women, based on defining women into a nature that has been declared subordinate to men.

The modern struggle for women’s social emancipation began with the recognition of contradictions in liberal theory, and in the wake of that struggle, liberal theory has dropped any reference to sex, even though the conception of this unsexed “individual” retains all its earlier masculine characteristics. Jessica Benjamin wrote that “the idea of the individual in modern liberal thought is tacitly defined as masculine even when women are included. Identifying the gender content of what is considered to be gender-neutral can be as difficult as undoing the assumption of essential gender differences.” (Benjamin, Bonds of Love, 184) We’ll see as we go along that this difficulty is created by the gender-neutral language of liberalism (which is also class-neutral and race neutral) concealing the gendered origins of various forms of social power and normalizing existing culture by virtue of our lifelong immersion in it.

The characters in liberal origin myths are diverse. Hobbes boils reality down to energy-driven material. Rousseau insists on people’s inevitable sociality (as men). Rawls holds the “individual” to be twofold—a menu of preferences alongside a menu of productive functions. Rousseau insists on the retention of some human agency in a social milieu, yet he, like the others, still disembeds his “individual” from particular relations.

There is a contract operating prior to the “social” contract. This is men’s entitlement to sexual access to women: “sex right.” Paternal rights were transformed by the liberal revolution into fraternal rights, but still these were male rights. (Marx’s reference to the collapse of “patriarchy” here is not the “patriarchy” feminists cite.) Paternal rights assumed paternity, and paternity assumed “conjugal right”—that a man had a right of sexual access to his woman. Given that paternal and fraternal male political rights began with the right of a husband to exercise control over his wife, political right originates from sex right. This right originated patriarchally, through the rule of the fathers. Fathers rule mothers and daughters, and when daughters are given away it is to provide younger men with children to make them fathers, and to serve and obey them.

The men who led the American and French revolutions understood their struggle as one against patriarchal succession—not against patriarchy defined as the rule of men. They opposed the hereditary rule of aristocratic families, who were seen as repressive fathers in the social family. In a very real sense, the struggle was articulated in Oedipal terms, as a struggle between sons and fathers. The French proclaimed the slogan liberté, égalité, fraternité, the latter term meaning brother-hood. The republic, this new political form, was conceived of as a polity of brothers, adult men with “equal” political agency; and this brotherhood not only constituted a representative form of governance, but something called civil society that would underwrite the political process. As we’ll see, civil society means public, as opposed to private, affairs. Included in the spoils of the struggle, in the minds of republican men, was equal hypothetical sexual access to all adult women, bypassing the father. The paternal rule over women was theoretically supplanted by the fraternal rule over women. Post-revolutionary men, in the establishment of their legal equality, were willing to grant post-revolutionary women equality to make a contract, but only for one thing: marriage. This contract was an exchange of protection from all men (who theoretically had access to her) by one man, in exchange for obedience and sexual availability to that one man. Once the contract was signed, the woman became a political nonentity, invisible except through her husband, and she could make no subsequent contracts. Pateman wrote . . .

By marriage, the husband and wife were one person by law: that is, the very being, or legal existence of the woman was suspended during the marriage, or at least was incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything; and is therefore called . . . a femme-covert . . . her husband [was] her baron, or lord. (Pateman, 42)

A covered-woman, invisible to the public realm. This is where the legal concept in early liberal marriage law of couverture originated. A woman’s husband was her representative in the public sphere, while she resided exclusively in the private, which was the “little kingdom” of the husband. Women in public, who did not have a husband, were unprotected. We can still see this idea in operation today, explicitly or not, in the number of men who feel entitled to make advances, even offensive ones, toward women who appear to be “unattached.” These unprotected women are, in a telling turn of phrase, “fair game.” (Which is why protecting and preserving [natal] women-only safe-spaces remains crucial.)

As liberal language was de-gendered, it changed expression, not meaning. The classic thinkers of modernity all saw women as inferior and subordinate to men, and as Pateman says, “Contemporary contract theorists implicitly follow their example, but this goes unnoticed because they subsume feminine beings under the apparently universal, sexually neutered category of the ‘individual.’” The masculine individual was still assumed, but in the language of liberalism, women-as-women are invisible.

Even Kant, the American experiment’s model, who didn’t peddle an origin myth with his claim to have discovered a basis for universal consensus in determinations of right and wrong, still described his purely reasoning individual in a way that was recognizable only as one of his bourgeois European male contemporaries. Kant called the contract “merely an idea of reason,” necessary, as we saw with the other philosophers, to support already existing social relations and political arrangements (prior to law).

Kant said that anyone with reason is a person, who thereby has the capacity for moral determinations, and therefore the right to enter into public life via the contract. He described the marriage contract as essentially a sexual contract—but went on to say, contradictorily, that human beings are sexually differentiated and that women did not have the capacity for public life, even though they could contract for marriage. Women, according to Kant, knew “nothing of ought, nothing of must, nothing of due.” Kant, like Rawls and Nozick after him, was fitting his conclusions to the existing order of which he was a part.

In order to make their natural being recognizable, social contract theorists smuggle social characteristics into the natural [contra cultural, SG] condition, or their readers supply what is missing. The form of the state or political association that a theorist wishes to justify also influences the “natural” characteristics that he gives to individuals; as Rawls stated . . . the aim of arguing from an original position, Rawls’ equivalent to the state of nature, “is to get the desired solution.” (Pateman, 40)

Rad-fem insights.

Rawls tells us that his own theory “tries to draw solely upon basic intuitive ideas that are embedded in the political institutions of a constitutional democratic regime and the public traditions of their interpretations.” So, contract theory is an apologetic for liberal society, a point admitted in so many words by philosophers from Kant to Rawls, who take the superiority of their class, their nationality, and their gender as self-evident. The uprooted “individual” of contract theory existed to put a universalizing gloss on the lives of the writers themselves, including the naturalization of women’s subordination.

We pointed out above that marital rape was legal until only fairly recently (and it is still tolerated legally in some forms—South Carolina allows a husband to “have sex” [rape] with his wife when she is unconscious, e.g.). At the time that the rad-fems were at their apex within the social movements, the majority of women—not in the movements, but generally, were suffering abuses and direct injustices in their homes as often or more often than they did in the “public sphere.” In the private, or [naturalized] personal realm. This, and not some fuzzy new-age bullshit, was what was originally meant by the slogan, “The personal is the political.”

The slogan was roundly attacked from both right and left.

It was Maria Mies, author of Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, who overlaid naturalization on women, colonies, and the “natural” world, her thesis similar in many respects to feminists as diverse as Susan Bordo, Silvia Federici, Vandana Shiva, and Carolyn Merchant. (Don’t be fooled by the klutzy title; this is a very lively and interesting read.) Bacon, et al, legitimized the wholesale exploitation of nature, whereupon men in the imperial metropoles “defined women and colonies into nature,” thereby justifying imperial male domination of both. This was near the root of my domination masculinity thesis in Borderline.

Paternal to fraternal—the technological re-sexualization of difference

We may be wandering afield from radical feminism more directly (there are many branches), but one of the insights about gendered domination (or variations of “patriarchy”)—shared to varying degrees between Mies, Pateman, Shiva, Bordo, Federici, Merchant, and others—was that something changed between the Enightenment and industrialization of the metropoles that subjected women to an expecially insidious form of discipline.

With industrialization and urbanization, there developed substantial differences between gender in vernacular (subsistence) communities and women in the cities. Gender of a more classically essentialist type—that perfused all of nature and even the cosmos—had gone by the wayside in modernity, such that it was displaced by “sex,” or “sexuality.” This disembedded category that is hypothetically and legally appended to an abstracted “individual,” does not conform to what I see around me. Men and women still see sex differently, and I do not believe—for reasons I’ll not diverge into here—this will ever change. The biological and the social will never be separable excepts as intellectual categories, for better and for worse. Sexuality, used in this sense, recoded gender in the way Pateman describes—women who were under a paternal regime have been placed under a fraternal regime.

Anyone who pays attention today can see that men and women still overwhelmingly have different tools, clothing, practices, spaces, preoccupations, and language, even if they can more readily move between the two spheres. What has happened, instead of displacement, has been the increased sexualization of the gender regime, and this has been most apparent in the sexualized backlash against feminism. Gender divides the tools, clothing, practices, spaces, preoccupations, and language of men and women into complementary spheres, but—as MacKinnon points out—gender also still, in many cases apart from the “upper classes,” divides power.

Certainly in recent years we have seen cross-infiltration and homogenization in several many areas, especially tools, given the advancement of deskilling technology. The computer has become a highly androgynous tool, for example, even if the use of its applications still reflects division of both emphasis and power. When we attend to what people write in virtual spaces, it is seldom difficult to determine whether a man or a woman is writing; and when these spaces turn to argument and debate, we see that men can readily push women out of those spaces with verbal bullying. The dangers that many men pose to women, and which preoccupy women more than most men know, are reflected in these virtual spaces, where women can be made to feel unsafe and abused even in virtual anonymity.

Even as the androgynization of tools has progressed in workspaces, the implements used by men and women apart from unisex workspaces have continued to be gender-divided. One particular type of tool or implement that is still seen as masculine is the weapon, especially the gun. Even with the portrayal of more and more women in entertainment media using guns, in the actual world, men are still overwhelmingly those who own, use, and show an unhealthy interest in guns. (Another rabbit hole we’ll save for another jeremiad.)

As women and men have infiltrated further across the old boundaries in work—ever more specialized and deskilled—and work has been further separated from local production, residence, kinship, and community, there has been an intensification of gender division in the sexual arena, especially since the so-called sexual revolution, which rather than critique the aggressive promiscuity of men has asserted the right of women to be equally promiscuous, a trend that is celebrated and promoted by many men, as it gives them greater access to women’s bodies. This has not been a good thing for women, whose objectification has intensified (especially in the proliferation of still overwhelmingly misogynistic pornography, still produced in highly exploitative conditions).

Men and women alike are now encouraged by mass media and advertising to “market” themselves as sexual commodities; but this has not created anything that could be interpreted as equality of social power. It’s simply expanded capitalist exploitation into a freshly commodifiable periphery.

Instead, gender constructed by the hoary norms of male power, expressed as sexual desire, has been concentrated in product lines to make men appear bigger, more confident, and more muscular, and women more silent, demobilized, infantilized, and sexually receptive. I note as one example that in recent years there has been increasing pressure on women not just to eliminate the naturally occurring hair on their legs and armpits, but now to get rid of the hair on their mons pubis—which makes them appear (to sexual partners) more like prepubescent girls than women. Much of the sexual pressure on women now, both in appearance and sexual performance, is being driven by the explosion of internet pornography, which more men are demanding that their female partners imitate.

This “sexualization” of gendered (or sexed, same thing, sorry not sorry) difference, which is represented as women’s humiliation (and-or uncontrollable, “gagging for it” desire), raises the suspicion that there’s a seething fear of women at the psychoanalytic bottom of this, and fear to often produces hatred and the desire for control. Porn scenarios very often drip with a kind of lust for “revenge.” I’ll leave that to the shrinks. It’s just an observation (not a popular one).

Even fashion has been pornografied, as elites and profiteers progressively normalize women’s sexualization. More on that here.

The right-wing backlash against feminism, since the rise of the so-called alt-right, and the refreshment of the incipient fascist impulse, has put a new gloss on this sexualization, in its wholesale embrace of grab-em-by-the-pussy sexual violence. On the other hand, post-liberal conservatives have critiqued it (legitimately), though, for many (not all) of them (quite a few are very public women), the counteraction to the intensified objectification of women is returning them to some imaginary past state of protection under paternal authority.

So the debates continue. Externally and internally.

Division & evolution

There were, and are, of course, splits. As a former Marxian socialist (I am a Catholic subsistence socialist now), I could write volumes about the dynamics of The Split, which has proven both ideologically and gender irrespective. At the heart of the splintering tendency in both Marxism and several feminisms is the totalizing embrace of politics as conflict theory. Unfortunately, the antagonal perspective of war which enlivens our more troublesome masculinities is replicated in political movements. To such a degree, in fact, that movements take on martial language and project a lot of martial archetypes. We have warriors and enemies, traitors and moles, Trojan horses, etc. We can take on the mindsets of war: conspiratorialism, obsession, internal suspicion, control freakery, and the instrumental amoralities of the tactical/logistical mindset.

It’s hard to avoid. Politics is far too often a struggle over power, and war is but the epitome of the power struggle—its perfect telos. (My most despicable beliefs, as a Christian, are twofold. I reject violence altogether, and I believe in an arcane second/third century Greek neologism called apokatastasis, that is, that in the end, everyone shall be saved in the final restoration of creation. Including the worst of us.)

Radical feminism was conceived of doctrinally as a revolutionary movement, and so it shared with Marxism and some anarchisms the tendency to attract and incorporate a wide variety of interpretations about the “how” of “revolution.” This “how” question engenders the most bitter (and sometimes unprincipled) debates of all, because it’s the bridge to action. It’s how we answer when people say, okay, I accept your analysis, what do we do? Among those answering there inevitably appear thought-leaders who formulate answers that appeal to high emotions instead of sober reflection, and fantastical formulae that are both easy to imagine and entirely disconnected from history and practical reality.

The other process, especially among intellectuals, is less martial; and that’s the more pacific evolution and refinement of theories. There are three evolutionarily determinate factors I can cite off the top of my head here: (1) intellectual refinement (something that happens in various traditions more generally), (2) changes in the world around the theorists, and (3) changes in emphasis behind the scenes by those who can influence the direction of intellectual inquiry.

Gender critical

One such evolution has been the lateral displacement of radical feminism, as it pertains to those feminists who are critical of (1) pornography, (2) prostitution, and (3) transgender ideology, by a more anodyne and inclusive term, “gender critical” feminism.

I take this to have a dual meaning. In my nearly book-length piece on trans-ideology, I took a good deal of time to unpack the various phenomena to which the signifier “gender” might point. Two pertain here. First, “gender,” as used by second-wavers, as a set of social norms and expectations associated with the two sexes (there are only two!). Second, the extremely vague pop-poststructuralist notion of some inner essence that can be expressed now in ever increasing alphabetical variety.

One strand of radical feminism—with perhaps the most idealized revolutionary agenda—aspired to gender abolition of the first kind. (This is, in my view, not possible, but that’s a discussion for another time.) The current gender-critical feminists (of the second kind) exist across a fairly wide political spectrum, and frequently defy the ever-more-archaic left-right construction of politics. I include them all as feminists, because they “study, theorize, and take socio-political actions taken from the standpoint of women and girls and their perceived and particular interests.”

There is an exclusion here, based on this definition.

Pop-poststructuralism is not feminist

I’ve been banned by the Vatican for supporting same-sex marriage and I’ve written approvingly on queer theory, but am now called a terf, bigot and fascist and am censored by the LGBTQIA+ lobby because I won't promote their incoherent and growing alphabet soup of dodgy identities.

—Tina Beatty, author of Catholic Feminism

It is one of the marks of the professionalization and specialization of the [academic] disciplines that the practitioners of each discipline are preoccupied with addressing only those within their disciplines rather than anyone outside them and indeed for the most part with addressing only those who are already at work on the detail of the same problems on which they themselves are currently at work. So their mode of writing presupposes not only shared expertise and familiarity with a semitechnical vocabulary, but also mastery of the relevant professional literature—characteristically for each particular philosophical problem a large and growing literature that has only a few readers—and thereby often enough successfully obscures from view what it is that might give to their elucidations some more general importance. They successfully exclude from the discussion all but their colleagues. Such philosophers inadvertently collaborate with a philosophically uneducated public in making philosophy appear not just difficult—which it is—but inaccessible—which it need not be. (Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, p. 176)

Poststructuralism, the academic kind, once occupied itself reflectively with arcane issues like chains of signification in the field of literary criticism, for example. It’s not anti-structuralism, so it can only be described by beginning with structuralism itself, which was part of something called the “linguistic turn” in philosophy. Poststructuralism grew out of structuralism which grew out of existentialism which grew out of phenomenology . . . and on it goes back to the development of flint-knapping.

When I fish, I take five different set-ups with dozens of different lures. No single presentation works for every situation. Philosophy’s like that for me, too.

Personally, I think every “turn” in philosophy reveals something (even if that something is sometimes unremarkable and already well-inutitied by ordinary people who aren’t buzzing with intellectual pride . . . radical constructivists come to mind); but the problem with schools of thought occurs when their advocates grow so self-confident that they begin to see their own perspectives as totalizing.

Deconstruction, in philosophy, can be useful, to a degree, beyond which is becomes a kind of intellectually masturbatory sophistry that’s great at one thing: generating obscure academic publications (and even the occasional grant).

In my own book, Mammon’s Ecology, on money as a (semiotic) sign, I employed several structuralist and even poststructuralist insights; but pop-postructuralism took root in an increasingly digital arena of public debate in the form of transgender ideology.

Poststructuralist thought entails, among other things, the “deconstruction” of “binaries.”

If deconstruction rejects anything, it is binaries. Derrida took issue with structuralism’s reliance on extremes and oppositions. For example, Lévi-Strauss treated myths as illustrations of universal conflicts between binary ideas — light/dark, culture/nature, man/woman, reason/passion, etc. Structuralism views these binaries as largely stable throughout time and across cultures. Poststructuralists like Derrida, however, argued that these binaries are actually hierarchies (one side is valued over the other) and asked critical questions about how these binary structures came to be, their usefulness for cultural analysis, and the potential to unsettle them.

While structuralism seeks unity, deconstruction seeks multiplicity. Rather than treating the boundary/limit as resulting from the center, Derrida argues that the center/unity emerges from the concept of a limit and holds that difference within it.(Paige Allen, “What is Poststructuralism”)

The problem here, in my view, is that “binaries” occur in a host of categories. In the examples above, light-and-dark is a different binary than culture-and-nature which is different than man-and woman. Light and dark are relative descriptors across a spectrum of light. We can look at two rooms and discern—objectively—that one is darker or lighter than the other. Culture and nature is an historically situated opposition, a conceptual division developed as part of post-Enlightenment philosophy (which we spoke to above), which is, in fact, troublesome once one tests it against a more fluid reality where these concepts turn out to be stubbornly inextricable. (Note, I am making the radical claim that there is a reality, and that is exists prior to and apart from our perception and interpretation of it. There is a tree somewhere in Germany of which I have no immediate perception; but if I were to go where it is, I would find it there.) Man and woman—prior to their various ideological super-additions—indicates a real and essential difference between members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, a difference shared with other species who procreate sexually. “Binaries,” then, which filtered into pop-postructuralism becomes binary=bad, is a term of art that’s really one big category error.

Judith Butler is the pivotal scholar in the creation of poststructuralist “feminism,” whose theories were then transformed into what I call pop-poststructuralism. A Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at Berkeley, she wrote a book called Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. One binary she wanted to deconstruct was man/woman. As a radical constructivist—someone who claims reality (and not just its perception and interpretation) is constructed by language, which is driven by a kind of universal will to power—she promotes a politics (if you can call it that) of “subverting the gender binary” using both performance and language: parodic performance and separating linguistic signs (words, for the rest of us) from what they normatively signify. “Man,” for example, is the “sign”; an adult human male is the “signified.” “Woman,” likewise, normatively means—and this is how most of the world sees it, transhistorically—an adult human female.

Butler was into drag shows, believing these parodies somehow “subverted” power, where men dress in often highly stylized women’s clothing — women and a cartoonish version of femininity are therein re-coupled after the second wave’s heroic efforts to disentangle them — and men play the part of hyper-femmes. Butler seems to have missed the memo that women — adult human females — very often do not themselves behave in typically “feminine” ways, or that femininity itself is a very culturally specific notion.

Butler’s ideas can find no application or operation in the real world, apart perhaps from the inherently deceptive (performative) fields of pretentious entertainment, sales, and public relations, and most recently in the highly lucrative and cult-stylish gender trade.

[Butler] has perhaps unwittingly created is the monster of naïve post-structuralism, which now seems to be the dominant form of this belief in American academic circles, outside the narrow group of experts in Continental Philosophy who actually know what they are talking about. (Christopher Lord)

She is referred to in biographical summaries like Wikipedia, Berkeley’s faculty pages, and other captives of gender ideology as “they/them,” as if she’s, amoeba-like, bifurcated into two persons.

“Performance,” in Butler, is essentially inauthentic. An actor performs, but we know the performance can be separated from the person of the actor—in fact, it must be. When a man performs in a drag show, part of the fun, so to speak, is that we know he’s a man pretending to be a woman, but in a manner that is so over the top (hyper-femme) that it is a parody, a comic performance.

Setting aside Butler’s bad scholarship (which Christopher Lord effectively demolishes), her whole gender shtick became first academically fashionable, then morphed into a kind of orthodoxy that set itself against everything in the so-called second wave of feminism.

It not only attempts to dilute the meaning of “woman,” by separating the word from what it objectively signifies—an adult human female; poststructuralist feminism abandons altogether the inhering radical feminist critique of liberal/capitalist individualism. In fact, it re-embraces the kind of super-individualism that would come to underwrite the current plague of transhumanism.

When you claim that the category “woman” is no longer moored to actual adult human females, I can’t see how one can continue to claim that what you’re doing is feminism. In fact, it becomes explicitly anti-feminist; and this isn’t a case of the True Scotsman fallacy. We’ve defined our terms in advance, and whatever this is, which claims that a natal man is a “woman” because he declares it to be so, it does not conform to feminism so defined.

Unfortunately, since this form of “feminism” has become an academic orthodoxy, it has become much easier for anti-feminists (of whatever kind) to denounce feminism (unmodified) as irrational. “Feminists,” they can say (and they do, and they get away with it), “can’t give a straight answer to the question, ‘What is a woman?’” The very political subject at the heart of feminism.

Because the historically-sedimented, female-embodied subject is, in liberal law, a mere “individual,” lacking a personal history as an embodied female, with all that this distinction entails—in however many variable forms—it’s now being inscribed (to use a fave pop-post-structuralist term) in law that men can be counted as women in formerly sex-segregated female spaces based on the given man in question simply saying he’s a woman. Hospitals are being forced to refer to birthing mothers (women, a pretty important bio-medical distinction) as birthing persons, and breast-feeding as “chest-feeding.”

We wouldn’t want to offend a man with autogynophelia and the emotional maturity of a three-year-old, who insists that everyone recognize him, in spite of his obvious sex, as a “woman.”

Michael Elred writes, (note his conflation of post-structuralist feminism with all feminism):

Butler’s metaphysics of signifying practices [follow] in the footsteps of Marx and Nietzsche, casts an ontology in which signifying practices serve as the subject. Butler’s understanding of ontology as a philosophical discourse of naturalized being, as if being were outside history, is a narrow and outmoded view. Rather, her own discourse implicitly casts, and that very insistently, an understanding of being in which signifying practices assume the foundational position underlying all else. Butler’s writing strategy of putting scare quotes around certain words derived from ‘to be’ and claiming that certain nouns are not nouns (substantives in an older terminology) does nothing at all to free her from the strictures of the metaphysics of substance, but rather indicates how helplessly and unknowingly she is entangled within such strictures. Butler is not alone in this entanglement, and despite all the gestures of progressiveness and cutting-edgedness put on display by feminist theory in its parades of obfuscating jargon, it instantiates nevertheless the metaphysics of substance it derides, even when, on the other hand, it pretends to be down-to-earth and gets sociological.

Metaphysics and ontology both have a history and both do not at all necessarily assert a naturalness of being beyond or independent of what Butler calls culture. Butler’s metaphysics of signifying practices is situated unwittingly within this Western history of metaphysics and is not free of it. If her implicit metaphysics were to be made explicit, then it would be confronted with questions which feminist theory consistently fails and refuses to see. The principal question in this regard is that concerning the being of social practices. It is simply repeated dogmatically like a mantra that social (including cultural) practices must be the starting-point for any theory of gender, since gender, it is claimed, is “socially constructed”. But what is society? [my emphasis added, SG]

Pop-poststructuralism is the mutation of this fundamentally incoherent “theory,” this category error of the “binaries,” into the retainer class’s ever more politically hegemonic transgender ideology. To deconstruct this binary, however, one has to deny, in the face of what’s obvious to everyone who sees that the emperor is naked, the brute and inescapable fact of human sexual dimorphism.

Invisible technology

Not even all poststructuralists buy it. [excerpted from another article] I would refer specifically here to Bernice Hausman, who has taken Butler to task in a book called Changing Sex (Chapter 6, “Semiotics of Sex, Gender, and the Body”). Hausman shares none of my Catholic metaphysical convictions, as far as I know (and as many readers likewise may not), but she’s an honest and thorough scholar who did a great deal of homework before blithely accepting what has now become post-Butlerian academic dogma in “gender studies” departments.

Hausman begins with Butler’s own attempt to correct the “misunderstandings” (gross inconsistencies?) in Gender Trouble with another book, Bodies That Matter. Hausman is very diplomatic in her critique of a fellow Foucauldian, but the critique still has teeth. Butler et al, Hausman points out throughout her book, seems to have overlooked, in their genealogical “interrogations,” the genealogy of Foucault himself and of the overdetermining role of medical technology in their interpretations of the (historically contingent) sex-gender distinction. Hausman’s whole title is Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender.

Butler would argue that we cannot wish ourselves outside of the existing ideological field in which sex and gender are understood as separate but linked phenomena. The presentation of these two terms — “sex” and “gender” — as the inevitable categories in play, however, is possible only because Butler disregards the historical production of the idea of gender as identity. Her lack of historical analysis results in the presentation of these two terms as inevitable; subversion must engage them because they are (always already) what is (and has been) available. If, however, it is acknowledged that “gender” was produced at a specific historical moment in response to particular circumstances, and that this introduction into medical and popular discourses had measurable effects in the conceptualization of sexed subjectivity, then it would be possible to investigate what were perceived as the articulations of sex prior to the introduction of “gender” and to examine the possibility of returning to and “redeploying” sex — not as the natural body, but as a conceptual apparatus designating the body and representing it in medical and other discourses. (Hausman, p. 179)

Butler’s argument that “gender” mediates sex, a perfectly plausible account thus far, breaks up on the rocks of her own metaphysical (read transhistorical) account of gender itself, which she regards, a la Foucault, as a discursive species of power. But the sex-gender distinction itself is relatively new, beginning in the 1950s with physicians at Johns Hopkins University who were trying to reconcile their own sketchy medical experiments with cases of “intersexuality” and trying to determine which was the “best sex” for patients who wanted surgical/endocrinological interventions to establish some sense of normalcy. What criteria might be used? And so speculation turned to the association of an internally experienced sense of sexual identity and outward “performances” that might be classified as (according to the norms surrounding Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s) masculine or feminine.

Gender, as such, wasn’t discovered like a protozoa or an Amazonian beetle; it was invented. . . .

. . . medico-technological dependency [totally underwrites] transgenderism and transgender ideology, both direct outgrowths of “medical” technology and sustainable only through it. There are people now who insist that there is some kind of natural right to “change sex,” which isn’t changing sex at all but changing appearance (often with grotesquely unconvincing results) and disrupting perfectly functional endocrine systems. This directly implies a “right” to something — medical technology and drugs — that exists, in fact, only as a fairly recent commercial product. I should insist on my right to a Land Cruiser or a lifetime supply of Glenlivet Scotch.

Hausman points, in her critique of Butler, at what many of us, unbridled by the academic fetish of the linguistic turn, intuit quite naturally. Yes, sexually embodied beings may come into consciousness via the mediation of culture (a fairly pedestrian insight), but that doesn’t mean that consciousness “constructs” (like some efficient cause) either sex or “the” body. Props to Bernice Hausman, even if I don’t share her metaphysical assumptions.

The reason neither academics nor the naively arrogant cohort of the professional-managerial class has been able to convince many of the rest of us is (a) we know “binary” sex is real, necessary, essential, and an animal trait shared beyond our own species, and (b) the rebuttals to that simple knowledge are either impenetrable insider language, passive-aggression, or hypertensive ad hominem bellowing — altogether as unconvincing as the proverbial emperor’s non-existent clothes. What’s remarkable, and not in a good way, is how effectively the ideological bullies have deterred people from speaking this simple truth. . .

. . . What began as cultural appropriation of Butler, the interpretational slippage that constitutes pop-post-structuralism — has become liberal political dogma. [end excerpt]

How I became a “conservative”

Well, I didn’t. I might if I thought there was anything to conserve, but pretty much all the horses are already out of the barn.

I said above, “The current gender-critical feminists (of the second kind) exist across a fairly wide political spectrum, and frequently defy the ever-more-archaic left-right construction of politics.”

I also quoted my friend, Tina Beatty, who’s far friendlier to things like postructuralism than I am. Doesn’t matter what you do, if you question the dogma, you’ll be banished from certain (often influential) spaces . . . as a conservative (among the more shrill, as a “fASciSt!!!!!!!!”).

If this were just a tempest in the social media teapot, frankly, I wouldn’t care. But it as political teeth, and people are biting back. I am convinced—as I have said elsewhere—that the backlash against this utterly, obviously, glaringly incoherent fake feminism is rsponsible, to some degree, for the election in the US of a cheap demagogue with the mind of a child. People have enough, they’ll tell you to go fuck yourself. Is that a rational response? No, but the expectation of consistent rationality among humans has proven wrong. Cut off access to accountability enough times and in enough places, insult people’s commonsense intelligence for long enough, and people will decide to burn it all down. Sow and reap.

In my own life, I don’t know a single person who advocates for the reversal of what the radical feminists accomplished (or feminists more generally). They’ve no problem with the universal franchise, no problem with women being doctors and lawyers, no problem with gay and lesbian people for their sexual orientation, no problem with marital rape laws, or with sexual harassment prohibitions. And I know a lot of people; their ideas and politics are a dizzying, boundary-breaching array. I know there are people who object to the above, but I don’t know them personally. I do know they’re in the minority.

As to the radical feminists, I’ve outlined my disagreements with them elsewhere, and at some length. Disagreements need not be attacks. We are all—myself included—sure to err. Having gotten it wrong in one instance doesn’t mean one’s always wrong, and vice-versa. Like it or not, we’re all in this together. We’re born. We struggle. We love. We suffer. We do right, and we do wrong. We die.

I set out to correct the record, and to rant a bit. But the main thing I want to do in closing, is send out my appreciation for radical feminists (and the rest). I’ve learned a lot from you. You’ve enriched my life. You’ve accomplished good. There are too many people cracking on you right now; so I just want to say, “Thanks!”