gender

Talking about gender by @strifejournal

March 6, 2015

(cross-posted from Trouble & Strife)

At the London Feminist Network’s ‘Feminar’ in May 2010, Debbie Cameron and Joan Scanlon spoke about gender and what it means for radical feminism. What follows is an edited transcript of their remarks. 

Debbie Cameron: The purpose of today’s discussion is to try to cut through some of the theoretical and political confusion which now surrounds the concept of gender, and it’s probably useful to start by asking what’s causing that confusion.

Conversations about ‘gender’ nowadays often run into problems because the people involved are using the same word, to mean somewhat the same thing, but on closer examination they aren’t talking about the same set of issues from the same point of view. For instance, when we launched the T&S Reader at the Edinburgh radical bookfair, some women students came up to us afterwards and said they were very pleased we’d produced the book, but surprised it didn’t have much in it about gender. Actually it’s all about gender in the radical feminist sense–power relations between women and men–so this comment did not make much sense to us. Joan was initially completely baffled by it; I realised what they must be getting at only because I’m still an academic, and in the academy you hear ‘gender’ used this way a lot.

What’s going on here is that during the 1990s, queer theorists and queer activists developed a new way of talking about gender: it did have points of overlap with the older feminist way of talking, but the emphasis was different, the theory behind it was different (basically it was the postmodernist theory of identity associated with the philosopher Judith Butler, though I don’t think Butler herself would say that feminists had no critical analysis of gender), and the politics that came out of it were very different. For people whose ideas were formed either by encounter with academic feminist theory or by involvement in queer politics and activism, that became the meaning of ‘gender’. They believed what they’d been told, that feminists in the 70s and 80s didn’t have a critical analysis of gender, or that they had the wrong analysis because their ideas about gender were ‘essentialist’ rather than ‘social constructionist’.

We don’t believe that, and in a minute we’ll explain why. But first it’s worth doing a general ‘compare and contrast’ on the ‘old’ feminist view of gender and the newer version that came out of 1990s queer theory/politics.

‘Old’ gender ‘New’ gender
What is gender? A system of social/power relations structured by a binary division between ‘men’ and ‘women’. Categorization is usually on the basis of biological sex, but gender as we know it is a social rather than biological thing (e.g. masculinity and femininity are defined differently in different times and places) An aspect of personal/social identity, usually ascribed to you at birth on the basis of biological sex (but this ‘natural’ connection is an illusion—as is the idea that there have to be two genders because there are two sexes)
What’s oppressive about it?  The fact that it’s based on the subordination of one gender (women) by the other (men) The fact that it’s a rigid binary system. It forces every person to identify as either a man or a woman (not neither, both at once, something in between or something else entirely) and punishes anyone who doesn’t conform. (This oppresses both men and women, especially those who don’t fully identify with the prescribed model for their gender)
What would be a radical gender politics?  Feminism: women organize to overthrow male power and thus the entire gender system. (For radical feminists, the ideal number of genders would be… none.) ‘Genderqueer’: women and men reject the binary system, identify as ‘gender outlaws’ (e.g. queer, trans) and demand recognition for a range of gender identities. (From this perspective, the ideal number of genders would be… infinite?)

There are both similarities and differences between the two versions. For both, gender is connected to, but not the same as, sex; for both, gender as we know it is a binary system (there are, basically, two genders); and both approaches would probably agree that gender is about power AND identity, but their emphasis on one or the other differs. They also differ because supporters of the queer version don’t think in terms of men oppressing women, they think gender norms as such are more oppressive than power hierarchy, and want ‘more’ gender rather than less or none.

To make sense of these ideas and decide what you think of them, it’s helpful to understand a bit of history—the history of feminist and sexual radical ideas. There are three main questions we think it’s worth pursuing in more detail:

  1. Is it true that radical feminism is/was ‘essentialist’ in its view of gender?
  2. What is, and what was, the relationship between the politics of gender and sexuality?
  3. What do radical feminism and queer or ‘genderqueer’ politics have in common, and what are the key differences, and what are their respective political goals?

Is/was radical feminism essentialist?

Let’s get one thing out of the way: there are essentialist varieties of feminism, currents of thought in which, for instance, mystical powers are ascribed to the female body or men are believed to be naturally evil,  and some of the women who subscribe to these ideas might use or be given the label ‘radical feminist’.  But if we consider radical feminism as a political tradition which has produced, among other things, a body of feminist texts which have come to be regarded as ‘classics’, it’s surprising (given how often the accusation of essentialism has been made) how consistently un-essentialist their view of gender has been.

As a way of illustrating the point, I’ve put together a few quotations from the writing of women who are generally considered as archetypal radical feminists—along with Simone de Beauvoir, often thought of as the founding foremother of modern ‘second wave’ feminism, which her book The Second Sex (first published in French in 1949) pre-dated by 20 years. Beauvoir was no essentialist, and though she did not use a term equivalent to gender (this still isn’t common in French), she makes many comments which depend on distinguishing the biological from the social aspects of being a woman. One of my favourites, because of its drily sarcastic tone, is this: ‘Every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity’.

One early second wave feminist who has often been castigated for essentialism (because she suggested that the subordination of women must originally have been due to their role in reproduction and nurturance) is Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex (1970). Yet in fact Firestone did not see a social hierarchy built on sex-difference as natural and inevitable. On the contrary, she states in Dialectic that

just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be… not just the elimination of male privilegebut of the sex distinction itself:  genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

In the slightly later writing of the French radical materialist feminist Christine Delphy, gender is theorised as nothing but the product of hierarchical power relations; it is not a pre-existing difference on which those relations are then superimposed. Delphy’s is a view which less radical thinkers find extreme, but whatever else anyone thinks of it, it could hardly be less essentialist. As Delphy herself says:

We do not know what the values, individual personality traits or culture of a non-hierarchical society would be like, and we have great difficulty imagining it. ….perhaps we will only be able to think about gender on the day when we can imagine non-gender.

All the writers I have just quoted are women who ‘can (and do) imagine non-gender’. This willingness to think seriously about what for most people, including many feminists, is the unthinkable—that a truly feminist world would not just operate without gender inequalities but actually without gender distinctions—is, we would argue, one of the hallmarks of radical feminism, one of the ways it stands out as ‘radical’.

Another thing that makes radical feminism stand out is the way it connects gender to sexuality and both to power. Catharine MacKinnon’s writings make the connection particularly strongly, as in the following passage taken from Feminism Unmodified (1987):

The feminist theory of power is that sexuality is gendered as gender is sexualised.  In other words, feminism is a theory of how the eroticization of dominance and submission creates  gender, creates women and man in the social form in which we know them.  Thus the sex difference and dominance-submission dynamic define each other.  The erotic is what defines sex as inequality, hence as meaningful difference. This is, in my view, the social meaning of sexuality, and the distinctly feminist account of gender inequality.

This shows that some well-known radical feminists have taken a non-essentialist view of sexuality as well as gender. Indeed, one of the most radically un- or anti-essentialist accounts of sexuality we can think of—as radical as any queer theorist’s work in rejecting the idea of fixed and finite sexual identities—comes from the radical feminist Susanne Kappeler in her book The Pornography of Representation (1986):

In a political perspective, sexuality, like language, might fall into the category of intersubjective relations:  exchange and communication.  Sexual relations – the dialogue between two subjects – would determine, articulate, a sexuality of the subjects as speech interaction generates communicative roles in the interlocutors.  Sexuality would thus not so much be a question of identity, of a fixed role in the absence of a praxis, but a possibility with the potential of diversity and interchangeability, and a possibility crucially depending on and codetermined by an interlocutor, another subject.

Later on we will explain why we think these radical feminist ideas about gender, sexuality, identity and power actually pose a far more radical challenge to the status quo than the ideas of queer politics.

Joan Scanlon: As Debbie said earlier, I was completely bewildered when the two young women in Edinburgh asked why The Trouble & Strife Reader (2009) didn’t have more in it about gender.  I rang Su Kappeler (see the quotation from her above) and she said:  “The thing is Joan: it’s like what Roland Barthes wrote somewhere, that if you have a guide book to Italy you won’t find Italy in the index – you’ll find Milan, Naples or the Vatican…” So I thought about this, and realised that while this was certainly true, there was something else going on:  it was as if the map of Italy had disappeared (quite useful as a way of connecting Milan, Naples and the Vatican), and instead, the geographical, political and economic reality of Italy had been replaced by a virtual space in which Italy could be a masked ball, a tricolour flag, an ice-cream parlour – or any combination of free floating signifiers.  And so, returning to the concept of gender, I realised that we need reconstruct that map, and that we needed to look at the question historically to make sense of this shift in meaning.

Of course maps change, as political boundaries change – but you won’t get far without one.  We need therefore to look at why feminists adopted the term gender to describe a material reality – the systematic enforcement of male power – and as a tool for political change.  I am going to start with a few definitions, then talk briefly about the history of sexuality, the relationship between gender and sexuality, and how the relationship between those two constructions has changed since the beginning of the last century.  I am also going to look briefly at what feminism has in common with queer politics, and at where the key differences lie.

Definitions: feminism, gender, sexuality

When I was writing something with Liz Kelly in the late 1980s, we decided that with the proliferation of ‘feminisms’ we needed to assert that the term feminism was meaningless if it just meant whatever any individual wanted it to mean.  In other words:  You can’t have a plural without a singular – so we defined feminism simply as “a recognition that women are oppressed, and a commitment to changing that”. Beyond this, you can have any number of differences of opinion about why women are oppressed and any number of differences about strategies for changing that.

In our 1993 tenth anniversary issue of T&S we then asked several women to define radical feminismand the definitions all have this in common:  they take as central that gender is a system of oppression, and that men and women are two socially constructed groups which exist precisely because of the unequal power relationship between them. Also, they all assert that radical feminism is radical because it challenges all relationships of power, including extreme forms such as male violence and the sex industry (which has always been extremely controversial within the women’s movement and an extremely unpopular issue to campaign against). Instead of tinkering around the edges of the question of gender, radical feminism addresses the structural problem which underlies it.

To define gender, therefore, seems a necessary step in understanding the proliferation of meanings which have come about in its now plural usage.  Gender, as radical feminists have always understood it, is a term which describes the systematic oppression of women, as a subordinate group, for the advantage of the dominant group, men.  This is not an abstract concept – it describes the material circumstances of oppression, including institutionalised male power and power within personal relationships – for example, the unequal division of labour, the criminal justice system, motherhood, the family, sexual violence… and so on.  I should say here that very few feminists would argue that gender is not socially constructed;   I think radical feminism is only accused of biological essentialism because it has been so central in the campaign against male violence, and for some reason we are therefore accused of thinking that all men are innately violent – which I have never understood.  If you are involved in a politics of change, it would be fairly pointless to think that anything you were seeking to change was innate or immutable.

If gender is seen, under patriarchy, as emanating from biological sex –  sexuality is essentialised if anything even more – as it is seen to emanate from our very nature, from desires and feelings which are quite outside of our control, even if our sexual behaviour can be regulated by moral and social codes.  And so to conclude with definitions, I will borrow Catherine MacKinnon’s definition of sexualityas ‘a social process which creates, organises, directs, and expresses desire’. Apart from pointing out that this clearly indicates that radical feminists  understand sexuality to be socially constructed, I won’t unpick this further here, as I hope it will become clear from what I go on to say.

A brief history of sexuality:

It is only from around 1870 onwards that medical, scientific and legal discourse began to classify and categorise individuals by sexual type – and produced what historians would now recognise as a specifically homosexual or lesbian identity.    Prior to the late 19th century sexual behaviour was conceived in terms of sin and crime – in terms of sexual acts not sexual identities. In the UK, male homosexuality was criminalised until 1967, and lesbianism, although never illegal, was repressed by other means; it was not an economic option for more than a tiny number of privileged women of independent means until after the Second World War.   Female sexuality has always been controlled by physical coercion, by economic dependence on men, and not least by ideology, and Adrienne Rich’s essay on ‘On Compulsory Heterosexuality’ (1979) shows the range and inventiveness of these means of control.

Gender is one of the ways in which sexuality is most effectively policed:  given the constant reinforcement of the binary gender system as a means of social control, if you step outside of your allocated gender role you are likely to be stigmatised as homosexual, and vice versa.  In other words, if you eschew the rewards of femininity by for example, becoming a plumber, not shaving your legs, telling a man who is harassing you to fuck off – you are likely to be accused of being a lesbian. (A man who does not conform to the conventions of masculinity, and is seen pushing a pram, wears pink, or who doesn’t like football, is equally likely to be accused of being gay.)  And similarly if you actually are a lesbian you are likely to be expected to behave like a man, to exhibit male desire – and heterosexual women are likely to be worried you might fancy them, and are encouraged to avoid women-only spaces in case there is a risk of being pounced on (this may be less true now, but was always an issue regarding women only events when I first got involved in feminism – i.e. that heterosexual women thought that women-only meant lesbian, and therefore assumed that all such spaces/events would be sexualised.)  Anyway, this is partly what Catherine MacKinnon meant when she said that ‘gender is sexualised, and sexuality is gendered’ – in other words, the power difference between men and women is eroticised, and we wouldn’t recognise something as sexual if it wasn’t about power – so anything that is perceived as sexual – such as gay and lesbian identity – is read through that lens, and thus gendered.

Early sexologists played a significant role in creating and consolidating this myth that lesbians were  inherently masculinised women, and homosexual men were innately feminine.  It is also here, in the work of for example Richard von Krafft Ebing, that you first find the idea of a man born into a woman’s body and vice versa.  Although the early sexologists dispelled a lot of other myths about sexual behaviour, and were instrumental in challenging the criminalisation of homosexuality by presenting it as ‘natural’ and innate, in so doing, they also confirmed the idea that sexuality was an essential part of human nature that was either dangerous and needed to be controlled by medical intervention, or a positive force which needed to be liberated from the repressive constraints of civilisation.  They often disagreed with each other, and contradicted themselves, but collectively they created and confirmed the myth that we all have a ‘true sexual identity’, which sexual science can help to reveal.  Some of their writings now read like complete nonsense, but it is impossible to underestimate the significance of these texts on literature and the popular imagination of the time.

Just to give you one example:  Richard von Krafft Ebing (on whose case studies Radclyffe Hall based her characters in the Well of Loneliness) argued that homosexuals were neither mentally ill nor morally depraved – since they suffered from a congenital inversion of the brain during the gestation of the embryo.  Moreover, he was convinced that you could find evidence of masculinity in female ‘inverts’ to confirm the genetic cause of their condition.  Havelock Ellis, who wrote the preface to the Well, agreed with this position, and went on to argue that you could distinguish between true female ‘inverts’ whose nature was permanent and innate, and those women who were attracted to ‘inverts’ because, although they were more womanly, they ‘were not well adapted for childbearing’ and therefore not suited for heterosexual procreative sex.   A more enlightened view was articulated by Edward Carpenter, socialist reformer and utopian philosopher: Carpenter, who used the term Uranian(of the heavens) to describe individuals who were attracted to others of the same sex,  had a more mystical and lyrical view of the whole subject (he is easily ridiculed because he had a kind of cult following and not only made his own sandals but also made them for the rest of his community, who lived in a commune near Sheffield) – but he is in many ways the most radical of them all.  He was much more interested in temperament and sensibility than in outward (biological) signs of deviation from the conventions of masculinity and femininity, and he also believed that those who belonged to ‘the intermediate sex’ could bridge differences of class and race, and be interpreters between men and women, as they shared the characteristics of both.  Economists and politicians of the movement thought Carpenter’s views were sentimental nonsense, but he comes closest of all the sexologists to saying that the gender itself is the problem, and the extremes of the binary gender system are detrimental to the kind of ideal society he imagines.

I’m not going to plough my way through all the sexologists of the 20th century – no doubt you are all more familiar with the laboratory experiments of Masters and Johnson, and the best-selling surveys of sexual behaviour by Alfred Kinsey and Shere Hite in the 1950s and 1980s respectively, which rocked the establishment in showing, amongst other things, the diversity of sexual behaviour and prevalence of homosexual desire amongst the heterosexual population at large in the US.  The main point about the later sexologists, what they have in common, is that they made sex the subject of scientific study, and very few of them looked at gender per se, or at the social context and meaning of sexuality.

The relation of gender to sexuality changed in the late 60s and 1970s, largely because of the emergence of the women’s movement and the gay liberation movement.  With the rise of feminism, and the publication of numerous key texts such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics(1970), lesbianism was no longer seen as a subcategory of male homosexuality, and not just as a sexual identity, but as a political identity, within the context of gendered power relations – in other words it was possible to see being a lesbian as about being a woman, challenging heterosexuality as an institution, and challenging power within personal relationships.  I do think of myself as extraordinarily fortunate to have found feminism in the late 1970s (when I was in my early 20s) – as I would otherwise have been completely persuaded that I was an invert, or god forbid, a Uranian, or whatever, if I had been born in an earlier era.  The women’s movement of the late 60s and 70s offered many women an unprecedented opportunity to make sense of their experience as women, theorise about it, and do something about it.

We often forget that thinkers within the gay liberation movement in the early days had much in common with feminism: deconstructing masculinity, questioning the nuclear family, challenging misogyny, and seeking a sexuality of equality.  Although feminists continued to work very much in coalition with gay men, against a common oppression – institutionalised heterosexuality – we also found that our focus on the social construction of sexuality was at odds with the predominant view in the gay movement that sexuality was innate.   For example, in the late 1980s, during the campaign against clause 28 of the local government bill (which banned local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality, and ‘pretended’ ie same sex families, in schools) the main argument from within the gay movement was that you couldn’t make someone gay, that gays only represented 10% of the population, that you were born gay, and therefore represented no threat to the establishment.  And of course, as feminists we were arguing the opposite, that you could indeed change your sexuality, and we did indeed seek to be a threat to the establishment. The AIDS epidemic politicised large numbers of gay men around sexuality, defending individual sexual freedom against the repressive politics of the far right, but in resorting once again to a plea for tolerance from the heterosexual world, and a request for inclusion in heterosexual privilege (civil partnerships etc) – which was strategically successful in achieving those goals precisely because they were not perceived as threatening to the liberal establishment –  it is possible that this movement paved the way for a politics which not only challenged heteronormative behaviour, but sought to create a space for all the casualties of gender who fall outside of the binary gender system and outside of a parallel binary conception of sexuality. You may well say that feminism seemed to offer precisely such a politics, and such a space, so it is important to look, therefore, at the differences between feminism and the queer politics.

What radical feminism has in common with queer politics is

  • An understanding that gender and sexuality are socially constructed
  • A recognition that binary gender roles are oppressive
  • An understanding that gender roles are produced through performance, and confirmed by their constant re-enactment
  • A commitment to challenging heteronormative assumptions and practices

The differences between radical feminism and queer politics are

  • Radical feminism is a materialist analysis which argues that gender is not produced merely through discourse and performance, but is a system within which one gender (male) has economic and political power, and the other (female) does not – and the dominant group has an investment in keeping it that way.
  • Radical feminism involves an understanding that you cannot produce (or challenge) the system of gender merely through discourse or individual performance – by adopting certain clothes, language, or even changing your anatomical body.  Outside of certain limited contexts, the dominant culture will still read these gestures according to the dominant social codes – and seek to categorise you as a man or woman.  (In other words, on the tube, in the supermarket, at work, these individual gestures or performative statements will be unintelligible, and quite ineffectual as a challenge to the system of gender).
  • Judith Butler argues that feminism, by asserting that women are a group with common characteristics and interests, has reinforced the binary view of gender, in which masculine and feminine genders are built on male and female bodies.  Feminists do indeed argue that women have a common political interest (rather than exhibiting common characteristics), and that women suffer from a common oppression (which they experience in different ways according to other forms of power relationships, including race and class), and that women’s bodies are the site of much of that oppression – but this is not to argue that the category woman is an undifferentiated category.  It is simply to argue that so long as women are oppressed as women, there is a need for a common political identity, in order to organise effectively to resist that oppression.
  • Radical feminism is committed to changing the gender system, and challenging oppression in all its forms.   We thus have no investment in being outlaws, which comes from a romanticised notion of oppression.  Moreover, feeling oppressed is not the same as being oppressed.  In order to celebrate your identity as an outlaw, you have to have an investment in the system which makes you an outlaw.  Queer seems to me to encompass the most extreme casualties of the gender system, and to create an umbrella which covers those who are unwilling social outlaws (usually from the poorest and most disenfranchised groups in society, with no buffer against social prejudice – i.e. those who are outlawed without choice),  and those for whom playing at being outlaws is a privileged intellectual game rather than a hard lived reality.
  • Queer is by its own definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.  Queer then, demarcates “not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative”. It follows from this that Queer politics has no particular political goals, apart from challenging the dominant normative discourses, and if they change, Queer politics would then have to change its position in opposition to whatever is currently normative.  It’s not clear to me therefore, what its specific political goals are.
  • Queer embraces a wide array of non-normative sexual identities and practices, including some that are heterosexual:: “Sadism and masochism, prostitution, sexual inversion, transgender, bisexuality, asexuality, intersexuality are seen by queer theorists as opportunities for investigations into differences of class, race and ethnicity, and as opportunities to reconfigure understandings of pleasure and desire.” For example, Pat Califia,  in Feminism and Sadomasochism writes about how sadomasochism encourages fluidity, and questions the naturalness of binary dichotomies in society:

The dynamic between a top and a bottom is quite different from the dynamic between men and women, blacks and whites, or upper- and working- class people. That system is unjust because it assigns privileges based on race, gender, and social class. During a S/M encounter, roles are acquired and used in very different ways. If you don’t like being a top or bottom, you switch your keys. Try doing that to your biological sex or your race or your socioeconomic status.

  • This point of view places these scholars of Queer theory in conflict with the radical feminist view that sadomasochism, prostitution and pornography,  are all oppressive practices.
  • Radical feminism argues that all power differences are sexualised, including those constructed through race and ethnicity, class and disability, and that pornography and the sex industry as a whole is one of the clearest and most pernicious manifestations of that – eroticised power difference is the stuff of porn, and this is acted out on real bodies, not in the imagination of the consumer. Moreover, we need to be clear about whose pleasure and desire we are talking about – in an industry based on sexual exploitation and abuse.   S&M was the subject of much heated debate within feminism in the 1980s, and here again, radical feminism saw nothing new or radical about recreating the dominance and subordination dynamic – already prevalent within heterosexuality – within non-heteronormative relationships.  All of these phenomena, embraced as anti-heteronormative – by queer politics, are already embraced by patriarchy, so there’s no great revolution here.  Radical feminists seek not merely to challenge but to dismantle the structures of patriarchy; the challenge that queer offers to the normative culture is a provocation with no political aim to dismantle the normative, on which, by its own definition, it depends for its existence as an oppositional position.  It appears that queer is thus not attempting to seek liberation from the system of gender difference, but simply to take liberties with it.
  • In order to change the social system that creates gender difference as we know it, you have to address the underlying structures that produce and sustain gender difference – and you have to seek to eradicate gender itself.

Without gender, without power difference, sexuality could simply be the expression of desire between equal subjects.  (see Su’s quote in the handout).

At the beginning of this talk, Debbie quoted Shulamith Firestone, and it seems entirely appropriate therefore for me to conclude by returning to a central argument of ‘The Dialectic of Sex’, one which encapsulates the radical feminist approach to gender: ( I paraphrase):  The intellectual and theoretical task of feminism is to understand gender as a system which creates and maintains inequality.  The political task of feminism is to eradicate gender.

Trouble & Strife is a British-based radical feminist magazine. It appeared in print between 1983 and 2002, and is now a blog hosted by WordPress. We publish topical short posts, long-form articles and reviews, some of them illustrated by the feminist cartoonists whose work was a popular feature of the printed magazine. The website also gives visitors free access to a complete archive of our 43 print issues. T&S is edited by an all-women collective. We welcome enquiries from women who want to contribute posts, articles or reviews on topics of interest to a radical feminist readership (please note that we don’t publish fiction, poetry or artwork except if it illustrates an article). Our Facebook page is at www.facebook.com/troubleandstrifemagazine Our Twitter account is @strifejournal.

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Who owns gender by @StrifeJournal

February 24, 2015

(Cross-posted from Trouble & Strife)

Delilah Campbell reflects on the deeper meaning of recent conflicts between feminists and transgender activists.

For a couple of weeks in early 2013, it seemed as if you couldn’t open a newspaper, or your Facebook newsfeed, without encountering some new contribution to a war of words that pitted transgender activists and their supporters against allegedly ‘transphobic’ feminists.

It had started when the columnist Suzanne Moore wrote a piece that included a passing reference to ‘Brazilian transsexuals’. Moore began to receive abuse and threats on Twitter, which subsequently escalated to the point that she announced she was closing her account. Then Julie Burchill came to Moore’s defence with a column in the Sunday Observer newspaper, which attacked not only the Twitter trolls, but the trans community in general. Burchill’s contribution was intemperate in both its sentiments and its language—not exactly a surprise, since that’s essentially what editors go to her for. If what you want is balanced commentary on the issues of the day, you don’t commission Julie Burchill. Nevertheless, when the predictable deluge of protests arrived, the Observer decided to remove the piece from its website. The following week’s edition carried a lengthy apology for having published it in the first place. Senior staff, it promised, would be meeting representatives of the trans community for a full discussion of their concerns.

Liberal consensus

This was a notable climbdown by one of the bastions of British liberal journalism. Only a couple of weeks earlier, another such bastion, the Observer‘s sister-paper The Guardian, had published an opinion piece on ‘paedophilia’ (aka the sexual abuse of children), which argued for more understanding and less condemnation. In the wake of the Jimmy Savile affair that was certainly controversial, and plenty of readers found it offensive. But it wasn’t removed from the website, nor followed by a grovelling apology. Evidently it was put in the category of unpopular opinions which have a right to be aired on the principle that ‘comment is free’. But when it comes to offending trans people, it seems the same principle does not apply.

It’s not just the liberal press: a blogger who re-posted Burchill’s piece, along with examples of the abuse Suzanne Moore had received on Twitter, found she had been blocked from accessing her own blog by the overseers of the site that hosted it. Meanwhile, the radical feminist activist and journalist Julie Bindel, whose criticisms of trans take the form of political analysis rather than personal abuse, has for some time been ‘no platformed’ by the National Union of Students—in other words, banned from speaking at events the NUS sponsors, or which take place on its premises.

More generally, if you want to hold a women-only event from which trans women are excluded, you are likely to encounter the objection that this exclusion is illegal discrimination, and also that the analysis which motivates it—the idea that certain aspects of women’s experience or oppression are not shared by trans women—is itself an example of transphobia. Expressed in public, this analysis gets labelled ‘hate-speech’, which there is not only a right but a responsibility to censor.

The expression of sentiments deemed ‘transphobic’ has quickly come to be perceived as one of those ‘red lines’ that speakers and writers may not cross. It’s remarkable, when you think about it: if you ask yourself what other views either may not be expressed on pain of legal sanction, or else are so thoroughly disapproved of that they would rarely if ever be permitted a public airing (and certainly not an unopposed one), you come up with examples like incitement to racial hatred and Holocaust denial. How did it come to be the case that taking issue with trans activists’ analyses of their situation (as Julie Bindel has) or hurling playground insults at trans people (as Julie Burchill did) automatically puts the commentator concerned in the same category as a Nick Griffin or a David Irving?

Silencing their critics, often with the active support of institutions that would normally deplore such illiberal restrictions on free speech, is not the only remarkable achievement the trans activists have to their credit. It’s also remarkable how quickly and easily trans people were added to the list of groups who are legally protected against discrimination, and even more remarkable that what was written into equality law was their own principle of self-definition—if you identify as a man/woman then you are entitled to be recognized as a man/woman. In a very short time, this tiny and previously marginal minority has managed to make trans equality a high profile issue, and support for it part of the liberal consensus.

Here what interests me is not primarily the rights and wrongs of this: rather I want to try to understand it, to analyse the underlying conditions which have enabled trans activists’ arguments to gain so much attention and credibility. Because initially, to be frank, I found it hard to understand why the issue generated such strong feelings, and why feminists were letting themselves get so preoccupied with it. Both the content and the tone of the argument reminded me of the so-called ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s, when huge amounts of time and energy were expended debating the rights and wrongs of lesbian sadomasochism and butch/femme relationships. ‘Debating’ is a euphemism: we tore ourselves and each other apart. I don’t want to say that nothing was at stake, but I do think we lost the plot for a while by getting so exercised about it. The trans debate seemed like another case where the agenda was being set by a few very vocal individuals, and where consequently an issue of peripheral importance for most women was getting far more attention from feminists than it deserved.

But as I followed the events described at the beginning of this piece, and read some of the copious discussion that has circulated via social media, I came to the conclusion that what’s going on is not just a debate about trans. There is such a debate, but it’s part of a much larger and more fundamental argument about the nature and meaning of gender, which pits feminists (especially the radical variety) against all kinds of other cultural and political forces. Trans is part of this, but it isn’t the whole story, nor in my view is it the root cause. Actually, I’m inclined to think that the opposite is true: it is the more general shift in mainstream understandings of gender which explains the remarkable success of trans activism.

Turf wars

It is notable that the policing of what can or cannot be said about trans in public is almost invariably directed against women who speak from a feminist, and especially a radical feminist, perspective. It might be thought that trans people have far more powerful adversaries (like religious conservatives, the right-wing press and some members of the medical establishment), and also far more dangerous ones (whatever radical feminists may say about trans people, they aren’t usually a threat to their physical safety). And yet a significant proportion of all the political energy expended by or on behalf of trans activism is expended on opposing and harassing radical feminists.

This has led some commentators to see the conflict as yet another example of the in-fighting and sectarianism that has always afflicted progressive politics—a case of oppressed groups turning on each other when they should be uniting against their common enemy. But in this case I don’t think that’s the explanation. When trans activists identify feminists as the enemy, they are not just being illogical or petty. Some trans activists refer to their feminist opponents as TERFs, meaning ‘trans-exclusive radical feminists’, or ‘trans-exterminating radical feminists’. The epithet is unpleasant, but the acronym is apt: this is very much a turf dispute, with gender as the contested territory.

At its core, the trans struggle is a battle for legitimacy. What activists want to get accepted is not just the claim of trans people for recognition and civil rights, but the whole view of gender and gender oppression on which that claim is based. To win this battle, the trans activists must displace the view of gender and gender oppression which is currently accorded most legitimacy in progressive/liberal circles: the one put forward by feminists since the late 1960s.

Here it might be objected that feminists themselves don’t have a single account of gender. True, and that’s one reason why trans activists target certain feminist currents more consistently than others [1]. But in fact, the two propositions about gender which trans activists are most opposed to are not confined to radical feminism: both go back to what is often regarded as the founding text of all modern feminism, Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 classic The Second Sex, and they are still asserted, in some form or other, by almost everyone who claims any kind of feminist allegiance, be it radical, socialist or liberal. The first of these propositions is that gender as we know it is socially constructed rather than ‘natural’; the second is that gender relations are power relations, in which women are structurally unequal to men. On what exactly these statements mean and what they imply for feminist politics there is plenty of internal disagreement, but in themselves they have the status of core feminist beliefs. In the last 15 years, however, these propositions—especially the first one—have become the target of a sustained attack: a multi-pronged attempt to take the turf of gender back from feminism.

Trans activists are currently in the vanguard of this campaign, but they didn’t start the war. Some of its most important battles have been fought not in the arena of organized gender politics, but on the terrain of science, where opposition to feminism, or more exactly to feminist social constructionism, has been spearheaded by a new wave of biological essentialists. The scientists with the highest public profile, men like Stephen Pinker and Simon Baron-Cohen, are politically liberal rather than conservative, and claim to support gender equality and justice: what they oppose is any definition of those things based on the assumption that gender is a social construct. Their goal is to persuade their fellow-liberals that feminism got it wrong about gender, which is not socially constructed but ‘hard-wired’ in the human brain.

This attack on the first feminist proposition (‘gender is constructed’) leads to a reinterpretation of the second (‘gender relations are unequal power relations’). Liberals do not deny that women have suffered and may still suffer unjust treatment in male-dominated societies, but in their account difference takes precedence over power. What feminists denounce as sexism, and explain as the consequence of structural gender inequality, the new essentialists portray as just the inevitable consequence of natural sex-differences.

Meanwhile, in less liberal circles, we’ve seen the rise of a lobby which complains that men and boys are being damaged—miseducated, economically disadvantaged and marginalized within the family—by a society which has based its policies for the last 40 years on the feminist belief that gender is socially constructed: a belief, they say, which has now been discredited by objective scientific evidence. (Some pertinent feminist criticisms of this so-called ‘objective’ science have been aired in T&S: see here for more discussion.)

Another relevant cultural trend is the neo-liberal propensity to equate power and freedom, in their political senses, with personal freedom of choice. Across the political spectrum, it has become commonplace to argue that what really ‘empowers’ people is being able to choose: the more choices we have, and the freer we are to make them, the more powerful we will be. Applied to gender, what this produces is ‘post-feminism’, an ideology which dispenses with the idea of collective politics and instead equates the liberation of women with the exercise of individual agency. The headline in which this argument was once satirized by The Onion—‘women now empowered by anything a woman does’—is not even a parody: this is the attitude which underpins all those statements to the effect that if women choose to be housewives or prostitutes, then who is anyone (read: feminists) to criticize them?

This view has had an impact on the way people understand the idea that gender is socially constructed. To say that something is ‘constructed’ can now be taken as more or less equivalent to saying that in the final analysis it is—or should be—a matter of individual choice. It follows that individuals should be free to choose their own gender identity, and have that choice respected by others. I’ve heard several young (non trans-identified) people make this argument when explaining why they feel so strongly about trans equality: choice to them is sacrosanct, often they see it as ‘what feminism is all about’, and they are genuinely bewildered by the idea that anyone other than a right-wing authoritarian might take issue with an individual’s own definition of who they are.

The gender in transgender

Current trans politics, like feminism, cannot be thought of as an internally unified movement whose members all make exactly the same arguments. But although there are some dissenting voices, in general the views of gender and gender oppression which trans activists promote are strongly marked by the two tendencies just described.

In the first place, the trans account puts little if any emphasis on gender as a power relation in which one group (women) is subordinated to/oppressed by the other (men). In the trans account, gender in the ‘men and women’ sense is primarily a matter of individual identity: individuals have a sovereign right to define their gender, and have it recognized by society, on the basis of who they feel themselves to be. But I said ‘gender in the men and women sense’ because in trans politics, gender is understood in another sense as well: there is an overarching division between ‘cisgendered’ individuals, who identify with the gender assigned to them at birth, and ‘transgendered’ individuals, who do not identify with their assigned gender. Even if trans activists recognize the feminist concept of male power and privilege, it is secondary in their thinking to ‘cis’ power and privilege: what is considered to be fundamentally oppressive is the devaluing or non-recognition of ‘trans’ identities in a society which systematically privileges the ‘cis’ majority. Opposition to this takes the form of demanding recognition for ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ as categories, and for the right of any trans person to be treated as a member of the gender group they wish to be identified with.

At this point, though, there is a divergence of views. Some versions of the argument are based on the kind of biological essentialism which I described earlier: the gender with which a person identifies—and thus their status as either ‘cis’ or ‘trans’—is taken to be determined at or before birth. The old story about transsexuals—that they are ‘women trapped in men’s bodies’, or vice-versa—has morphed into a newer version which draws on contemporary neuroscience to argue that everyone has a gendered brain (thanks to a combination of genes and hormonal influences) which may or may not be congruent with their sexed body. In ‘trans’ individuals there is a disconnect between the sex of the body and the gender of the brain.

In other versions we see the influence of the second trend, where the main issue is individual freedom of choice. In some cases this is allied to a sort of postmodernist social utopianism: trans is presented as a radical political gesture, subverting the binary gender system by cutting gender loose from what are usually taken to be its ‘natural’, biological moorings. This opens up the possibility of a society where there will be many genders rather than just two (though no one who makes this argument ever seems to explain why that would be preferable to a society with no genders at all). In other cases, though, choice is presented not as a tactic in some larger struggle to make a better world, but merely as an individual right. People must be allowed to define their own identities, and their definitions must be respected by everyone else. On Twitter recently, in an argument about whether someone with a penis (and no plans to have it removed) could reasonably claim to be a woman, a proponent of this approach suggested that if the person concerned claimed to be a woman then they were a woman by definition, and had an absolute right to be recognized as such. In response, someone else tweeted: ‘I’m a squirrel’. Less Judith Butler, more Alice Through the Looking Glass. 

Proponents of the first, essentialist account are sometimes critical of those who make the second, and ironically their criticism is the same one I would make from a radical feminist perspective: this post-feminist understanding of social constructionism is trivializing and politically vacuous. What trans essentialists think feminists are saying when they say gender is socially constructed is that gender is nothing more than a superficial veneer. They reject this because it is at odds with their experience: it denies the reality of the alienation and discomfort which leads people to identify as trans. This is a reaction feminists ought to be able to understand, since it parallels our own response to the dismissal of issues like sexual harassment as trivial problems which we ought to be able to ‘get over’—we say that’s not how women experience it. But in this case it’s a reaction based on a misreading: for most feminists, ‘socially constructed’ does not imply ‘trivial and superficial’.

In the current of feminism T&S represents, which is radical and materialist, gender is theorized as a consequence of social oppression. Masculinity and femininity are produced through patriarchal social institutions (like marriage), practices (like the division of labour which makes women responsible for housework and childcare) and ideologies (like the idea of women being weak and emotional) which enable one gender to dominate and exploit the other. If these structures did not exist—if there were no gender—biological male/female differences would not be linked in the way they are now to identity and social status. The fact that they do continue to exist, however, and to be perceived by many or most people as ‘natural’ and immutable, is viewed by feminists (not only radical materialists but most feminists in the tradition of Beauvoir) as evidence that what is constructed is not only the external structures of society, but also the internalized feelings, desires and identities that individuals develop through their experience of living within those structures.

Radical feminists, then, would actually agree with the trans activists who say that gender is not just a superficial veneer which is easily stripped away. But they don’t agree that if something is ‘deep’ then it cannot be socially constructed, but must instead be attributed to innate biological characteristics. For feminists, the effects of lived social experience are not trivial, and you cannot transcend them by an individual act of will. Rather you have to change the nature of social experience through collective political action to change society.

The rainbow flag meets the double helix

When I first encountered trans politics, in the 1990s, it was dominated by people who, although their political goals differed from feminism’s, basically shared the feminist view that gender as we knew it was socially constructed, oppressive, and in need of change through collective action. This early version of trans politics was strongly allied with the queer activism of the time, emphasized its political subversiveness, and spoke in the language of queer theory and postmodernism. It still has some adherents today, but over time it has lost ground to the essentialist version that stresses the naturalness and timeless universality of the division between ‘trans’ and ‘cis’, and speaks in two other languages: on one hand, neurobabble (you can’t argue with the gender of my brain), and on the other, identity politics at their most neo-liberal (you can’t argue with my oppression, my account of my oppression, or the individual choices I make to deal with my oppression).

Once again, though, this development is not specific to trans politics. Trans activists are not the first group to have made the journey from radical social critique to essentialism and neoliberal individualism. It is a more general trend, seen not only in some ‘post-feminist’ campaigning by women, but also and perhaps most clearly in the recent history of gay and lesbian activism.

In the heyday of the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements, the view was widely held that sexuality was socially constructed, and indeed relatively plastic: lesbianism, in particular, was presented by some feminists as a political choice. But in the last 20 years this view has largely withered away. Faced with well-organized opponents denouncing their perverted ‘lifestyle choices’, some prominent gay/lesbian activists and organizations began promoting the counter-argument that homosexuals are born, not made. Of course the ‘born that way’ argument had always had its supporters, but today it has hardened into an orthodoxy which you deviate from at your peril. Not long ago the actor Cynthia Nixon, who entered a lesbian relationship fairly late in life, made a comment in an interview which implied that she didn’t think she’d always been a lesbian. She took so much flak from those who thought she was letting the side down, she was forced to issue a ‘clarification’.

Since ‘born that way’ became the orthodox line, there has been more mainstream acceptance of and sympathy for the cause of gay/lesbian equality, as we’ve seen most recently in the success of campaigns for same-sex marriage. Though it is possible this shift in public attitudes would have happened anyway, it seems likely that the shift away from social constructionism helped, by making the demand for gay rights seem less of a political threat. The essentialist argument implies that the straight majority will always be both straight and in the majority, because that’s how nature has arranged things. No one need fear that granting rights to gay people will result in thousands of new ‘converts’ to their ‘lifestyle’: straight people won’t choose to be gay, just as gay people can’t choose to be straight.

If you adopt a social constructionist view of gender and sexuality, then lesbians, gay men and gender non-conformists are a challenge to the status quo: they represent the possibility that there are other ways for everyone to live their lives, and that society does not have to be organized around our current conceptions of what is ‘natural’ and ‘normal’. By contrast, if you make the essentialist argument that some people are just ‘born different’, then all gay men, lesbians or gender non-conformists represent is the more anodyne proposition that diversity should be respected. This message does not require ‘normal’ people to question who they are, or how society is structured. It just requires them to accept that what’s natural for them may not be natural for everyone. Die-hard bigots won’t be impressed with that argument, but for anyone vaguely liberal it is persuasive, appealing to basic principles of tolerance while reassuring the majority that support for minority rights will not impinge on their own prerogatives.

For radical feminists this will never be enough. Radical feminism aspires to be, well, radical. It wants to preserve the possibility that we can not only imagine but actually create a different, better, juster world. The attack on feminist social constructionism is ultimately an attack on that possibility. And when radical feminists take issue with trans activists, I think that is what we need to emphasize. What’s at stake isn’t just what certain individuals put on their birth certificates or whether they are welcome at certain conferences. The real issue is what we think gender politics is about: identity or power, personal choice or structural change, reshuffling the same old cards or radically changing the game.

[1] A more detailed discussion of feminist ideas about gender, which looks at their history and at what is or isn’t shared by different currents within feminism, can be found in Debbie Cameron and Joan Scanlon’s article ‘Talking about gender’.

Trouble & Strife is a British-based radical feminist magazine. It appeared in print between 1983 and 2002, and is now a blog hosted by WordPress. We publish topical short posts, long-form articles and reviews, some of them illustrated by the feminist cartoonists whose work was a popular feature of the printed magazine. The website also gives visitors free access to a complete archive of our 43 print issues. T&S is edited by an all-women collective. We welcome enquiries from women who want to contribute posts, articles or reviews on topics of interest to a radical feminist readership (please note that we don’t publish fiction, poetry or artwork except if it illustrates an article). Our Facebook page is at www.facebook.com/troubleandstrifemagazine Our Twitter account is @strifejournal.

Categories: Featured Blog, Gender
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Men and Words at Hell, Yeah. I’m a Feminist

February 15, 2015

(cross-posted from hell, yeah. I’m a feminist)

As a result of a recent exchange on a blog in which I felt insulted enough by the patronizing tone taken by the moderator that I decided not to participate any further, while another commenter (a male) responded with a mere “LOL”, I asked yet another commenter (also a male) why he thought our reactions were so different. “Don’t men know when they’re being insulted?” I asked.

His response? “We know, we just don’t care. At the end of the day, it’s just words on a screen. Most of us don’t expect to convince anyone else, this is a social event of sorts for people who like to talk about stuff.”

He went on to say “We don’t expect to change anything, we’re just engaging in venting, observation, and entertainment. If we learn something new, all the better.”

I find this horrifying. Words have meaning! Meaning is important! At first I thought maybe that’s just a philosopher/non-philosopher thing, but then I recalled conversations with male philosophers in which I similarly felt like I wasn’t being taken seriously, in which I felt like, the man nailed it, “entertainment”.

I don’t feel that when I speak with women on these matters. So it’s a sexist thing, not a philosopher thing.

But it’s not that men don’t take women seriously, it’s that they don’t take each other seriously either. Suddenly their attitude toward debate—it’s a game—makes sense.

As for the convincing, the changing, maybe that’s a non-teacher-non-social-activist thing, but again, if it’s a male thing, then again, it’s horrifying. No wonder the world isn’t getting better and better: the people in power aren’t talking, thinking, acting to make it so. Their discussions on policy are just “venting, observation, and entertainment”!

I wonder if at its root, it’s part of the male relationship to words. Women are better with language, so it’s said, whether because of neurology or gendered upbringing; men are better with action, so it’s said, again whether by neurology or gendered upbringing. So that would explain why women consider words to be important, and men don’t.

Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist: a radical feminist blog mostly about sexism

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Minding our language by @strifejournal

January 30, 2015

(Cross-posted from Trouble & Strife)

Once we had ‘isms’, now we have ‘phobias’: Debbie Cameron considers what’s in a name

Remember Betty Friedan’s ‘problem that has no name’? Or Gloria Steinem’s observation that in the 1960s no one talked about sexual harassment–not because it didn’t happen, but because ‘it was just called life’?  For feminists, naming women’s oppression has always been both a necessary task and a powerful political act. Of course you do not solve a problem just by giving it a name, but naming it brings it more clearly into focus, making it easier to recognize, to analyse and to share.

What names we choose to call things by is also important. We argue about words—about the difference between victim and survivor, paedophile and child abuser, prostitute and sex worker—because we know that words are not just empty labels. They are tools for making sense of the world, and they affect our understanding of what we use them to represent.

Since the 1990s there has been a change in the words we use to name oppression. Whereas the radical social movements of the 1960s and 70s talked about ‘isms’ (racism, anti-semitism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, speciesism), their 21st century counterparts talk about ‘phobias’ (homophobia, transphobia, whorephobia, femmephobia). The language of ‘phobias’ has gradually displaced the older language of ‘isms’; you can usually tell when some form of oppression began to be seriously discussed by whether it is labelled an ‘ism’ or a ‘phobia’.

Unlike some issues of terminology, this one has not provoked much heated debate. But that doesn’t mean it is inconsequential. It matters for the reason language always matters: because renaming reality is also reframing it.

From ‘isms’ to ‘phobias’

‘Ism’ words and ‘phobia’ words name essentially the same phenomenon: the unjust treatment of one social group by others. But they frame that phenomenon in very different ways, as we can see if we consider what ism and phobia mean in the language more generally.

Words ending in –ism most commonly denote systems of ideas or beliefs–political, religious, intellectual or artistic (e.g. feminism, communism, nationalism, Buddhism, surrealism). Terms like sexism and racism were also intended by the radicals who coined them to refer to systems—organized social systems of dominance and subordination. Though they are often used now to mean just ‘prejudice or discrimination based on sex/race’, that is a liberal watering-down of their original meaning. In the radical framework, prejudice is not the cause of systemic oppression but a consequence or by-product of it. If you are going to oppress your fellow humans—exploit them, abuse them, disregard their needs and rights—then you have every reason to buy into the belief that they are Other, inferior and deserving of unequal treatment.

Words ending in -phobia, by contrast, most commonly denote clinical conditions. The first ‘phobia’ word to appear in an English-language text was hydrophobia (Greek for ‘morbid fear of water’), meaning rabies; in the 19th century the term became associated with mental rather than physical illness, and in current medical usage it means a class of anxiety disorders in which something that is not objectively a serious threat triggers a pathological response—intense fear, panic, disgust, an overwhelming desire to avoid or escape the danger–in certain phobic individuals. In everyday parlance the term is used more loosely: it retains the sense of ‘a pathological (over)reaction’, but there is less emphasis on uncontrollable anxiety, the main symptom of clinical phobia, and more emphasis on the idea of aversion or hatred. Terms like homophobia and transphobia thus carry a strong implication that the root cause of the oppression they name is the pathological fear and loathing felt by some individuals towards a certain minority group.

Hate versus power

I do not want to deny the existence of pathological hatred, nor dispute that some oppressive acts are most readily understood as expressions of it. That is how I would understand, for instance, not only many assaults targeting gay men and lesbians, trans people and members of ethnic and religious minorities, but also some crimes against women, such as the actions of self-identified misogynists like Marc Lépine (who shot 14 women dead in the ‘Montreal massacre’ of 1989) and Elliot Rodger (the perpetrator of the California shootings which inspired the hashtag #YesAllWomen in 2014). But I do not think it is helpful to make these extreme acts of violence committed by seriously disturbed individuals into prototypes for our understanding of oppression. Deranged misogynists like Rodger are the toxic, out-of-control products of a society that normalizes and condones sexism, a system in which all men benefit from their power over women. Treating the pathological cases as prototypical is mistaking the proverbial tip of the iceberg for the less visible but much larger structure that supports it.

Yet just as ‘ism’ words have yielded to ‘phobia’ words, this understanding of the structural and systemic nature of oppression seems increasingly to have yielded to an analysis which is more and more focused on hatred as the driving force behind it. In the criminal justice system, for instance, there is now a category of ‘hate crimes’—offences  motivated by hatred of the group the victim belongs to—which are treated as more serious and punished more severely than the same offences committed for other reasons. As Liz Kelly has pointed out, this approach does not help to deliver justice for women and children, because the ways in which they are most often victimized do not fit the definition of a ‘hate crime’. Domestic violence, child sex abuse and rape are not rooted in fear and loathing of women or children as a group, but have more to do with men’s feelings of superiority and entitlement, their assumption that women and children exist for their benefit and may be controlled, exploited and abused with impunity. These are not crimes of hate, they are crimes of power and domination; but that in no way diminishes their impact on the lives of those who are or may become their victims.

From a radical feminist perspective it is crucial to hold onto the understanding that oppression is only sometimes about hate, but it is always about power—about the structures and systems that serve collective political interests. The language of ‘phobia’ obscures this: it personalizes the political by concentrating on the feelings an action expresses rather than the interests it serves, and it pathologizes prejudice, representing it by implication as the irrational response of (some) individuals rather than the product of a system that benefits some groups at the expense of others. And once you stop asking who benefits from oppression or whose interests it serves, you can easily slip into a discourse reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘there is no such thing as society’. There are no material structures of power and inequality, only personal feelings and individual identities.

Renaming/reframing sexism

Recently this kind of discourse was satirized by a contributor to the anonymous blog Feminists Unknown. Adopting the persona of someone who ‘identifies as’ poor, the writer draws attention to a form of oppression that she feels has too often been overlooked:

The queer poverty theorist J’amie Olivier came up with it in his brilliant work Whipping Chav. If you’ve not read it, please do. It explains so much about how poor people are not oppressed due to having no money but due to ‘poorphobia’: a widespread antipathy towards dog racing, Lambrini and the Waitrose Essentials range.

Though ‘poorphobia’ is (so far as I know) an entirely imaginary concept invented for the purposes of satire, this parody does have an identifiable target. The fictional work Whipping Chav is clearly an allusion to the real book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, whose author Julia Serano is generally credited with inventing the term femmephobia.What that term refers to is the cultural devaluation of anything considered feminine relative to anything considered masculine. Serano points out that feminine qualities, interests and occupations are disparaged as weak, foolish, undesirable and worthless, and that feminine labels are often derogatory: the term ‘sissy’ applied to a boy is a grave insult, for instance, whereas ‘tomboy’ applied to a girl is far less disapproving.

‘But hang on a minute’, I hear you say, ‘don’t we already have a word for that?’ Indeed we do: feminists in the early 1970s drew attention to exactly this phenomenon, and the word they used to describe it was ‘sexism’. The devaluing of feminine terms and qualities follows the general sexist logic in which women, as the subordinate sex, are inferior to men, the dominant sex. Serano’s logic, on the other hand, is not a million miles from the ‘poorphobia’ parody: ‘women are not oppressed due to sexism/male dominance, but due to “femmephobia”, a widespread antipathy towards shoe-shopping, frilly underwear and the colour pink’.

From a feminist perspective it is pure obfuscation to talk about ‘the scapegoating of femininity’, as if it had nothing to do with the larger social system in which women are subordinated to men. ‘Femininity’ is not the target of oppression: apart from the fact that it is an abstraction (whereas women are concretely existing human beings), feminists since Simone de Beauvoir have pointed out that as a cultural construct—a collection of beliefs and norms which define what is acceptable and desirable in women—femininity is part of the apparatus that keeps women in their subordinate place. That analysis is further strengthened by the observation that in women, feminine qualities and behaviours are not devalued, they are idealized and rewarded. Said of a woman, ‘feminine’ is a compliment; it’s the opposite, ‘unfeminine’, which is an insult. If there’s one thing your average sexist can’t be doing with, it’s an unfeminine woman. A feminist, for instance, with her hairy legs and clomping boots and her refusal to just shut up and smile.

Serano does recognize the existence of prejudice against women who are viewed as ‘unfeminine’, but she does not attribute it to the workings of a system in which women are subordinated to men; for her it reflects the workings of a system which oppresses everyone (for what purpose and in whose interests is unclear) by imposing a strict binary gender division and requiring every individual to stay on their allotted side of the line. (For more on these contrasting understandings of gender oppression see here). What goes unrecognized in this reframing of sexism is that women are most often judged ‘unfeminine’ when they fail, or refuse, to behave like sexual subordinates. That is why feminists can be represented by sexists as simultaneously ‘unfeminine’ (i.e., too much like men) and as ‘man-haters’, without this being seen as a contradiction.

The scapegoating of feminism

Once the ‘scapegoating of femininity’ has been detached from the larger system of male dominance and female subordination, the blame for it no longer has to be laid at the door of men, or male dominated institutions, or patriarchal social arrangements. Sometimes ‘femmephobia’ is discussed as if it simply existed like a force of nature. But in any context where some identifiable agent is being held responsible for it, there is a pretty good chance that the agent in question will be a feminist, or a group of feminists, or feminism as an institution.

Suspecting this was the case, but wanting to check my intuitions against some actual evidence, I used Google to compile a sample of recent texts in which the words femmephobia, femmephobic and femmephobe appear. I can’t claim this method produced a fully representative picture of current usage (the tools a researcher would use to do that are not available in this case, because the word is still too new), but it did suggest that my intuitions were basically accurate. Not one of the items in my sample attributed ‘femmephobia’ to sexist men or patriarchal institutions. A couple of them used the word in reference to prejudice in the gay, lesbian or trans communities. But the overwhelming majority used it specifically to criticize feminism and feminists. For instance, this:

Long nails. Lace. Pink. Make-up. Dresses. Long hair. High heels.
I’ve noticed a trend in feminism that seeks to place these things as ‘lower’. As ‘less than’.
What we need to remember is that feminism is about autonomy and choice. By policing the choices of women, by telling them what to wear, what not to wear, what makes us any different than the patriarchy?

Or this:

Many feminists still have a blind spot when it comes to femmephobia. A lot of feminists are not very feminine, and were drawn to feminism because of the discomfort they felt due to enforced femininity.

These examples are good illustrations of the point that renaming and reframing go together. Neither of these writers understands feminism as a movement of resistance to male dominance. The first writer’s assumptions are basically liberal: feminism is about ‘autonomy and choice’. The second writer’s assumptions are more difficult to find an adequate political label for: they seem, in fact, completely apolitical, identity politics without the politics. The most obvious reason for becoming involved in radical politics—a commitment to social justice—seems to be entirely outside her frame of reference. Nor can she apparently imagine anyone rejecting femininity on political principle, as opposed to being ‘drawn to feminism’ because they were ‘not very feminine’ to begin with. Feminism is presented as a sort of refuge for women whose lack of femininity causes them ‘discomfort’ in the wider world, and the resulting concentration of unfeminine women becomes the explanation for the movement’s ‘femmephobia’.

Meanwhile, the small matter of power, and specifically women’s oppression within a system of male dominance and female subordination, has entirely disappeared from view. As the ‘scapegoating of femininity’ shifts from being one manifestation of sexism to being a form of oppression in its own right, the identity of the oppressor also shifts: it’s no longer men as a class or patriarchy as a system we have to blame for it, it’s a bunch of feminists oppressing other women by disapproving of their hair or their shoes. No one seems to ask what feminists might have to gain from this oppressive behaviour. In the ‘phobia’ framework that question does not need to be asked, because oppression is not seen as structural, part of a political system where actual interests are at stake, it is simply the acting out of personal hostility to other people’s choices.

Similarly, any feminist who offers a structural analysis of the sex industry’s role in oppressing women can expect to be accused of ‘whorephobia’, irrational hatred of prostitutes. This particular accusation always makes me wonder if those who make it have any concept of structure at all. I don’t know how else to explain the fact that they interpret criticism of an oppressive institution as an attack on the very people the institution’s critics believe to be most oppressed by it. It is possible to disagree about whether and in what ways the sex industry is oppressive, but ‘if you criticize the sex industry that means you hate prostitutes’ is a leap of logic akin to saying that if you criticize a large supermarket chain for paying low wages, that means you hate shelf-stackers and checkout operators.

The liberal politics of moral disgust

But the whole political discourse of ‘phobia’ often resembles the clinical condition in being more about visceral responses than logical arguments. The feminist blogger Marina S. recounts a striking example. At a conference session about woman-only space, a woman who had found some panellists’ contributions trans-exclusionary articulated her objection by describing the physical effects that listening to those contributions had produced: she reported experiencing panic symptoms like shaking and palpitations. Marina S. relates this reaction to the theoretical concept of ‘moral disgust’, a strong, instinctive feeling of revulsion which cannot be fully explained in rational terms. She explains:

Liberals pride themselves on their low levels of moral disgust, in particular in relation to the sexual practices of others. This is why we tend to conceptualise the objections of the right to certain things like homosexuality as ‘phobias’ – irrational fears stemming from an underlying moral disgust. It’s also why the ‘phobia’ frame has so successfully…migrated to be applied inside the social justice left, in terms like transphobia, whorephobia, fatphobia, femmephobia and so on.

And she goes on to point out that the woman’s reaction repeated the same gesture liberals label ‘phobic’ when it comes from a conservative position:

…here was a person literally, in every physical sense of the word, exhibiting a phobic reaction. … And much like conservative activists seeking to criminalise or marginalise homosexual relationships, she was using the very viscerality of her own reaction as a strong progressive/liberal moral argument: you have upset me, therefore I am right.

The progressive/liberal position is like a mirror image of the conservative one: whereas the conservative is revolted by queer/trans people, the progressive/liberal is revolted by the conservative’s homophobia/ transphobia: she is morally disgusted by the moral disgust she attributes to others, and the strength of her disgust becomes a claim to the moral high ground. (‘You have upset me, therefore I am right’.) As Marina S. says, it is impossible to argue with this: moral disgust is instinctive and visceral, beyond any challenge based on rational argument.

Although it is has taken root on the ‘social justice left’, the ‘phobia frame’ is actually more liberal than radical. Though radical feminists agree with liberals on some issues—for instance, both groups support lesbian and gay rights against the objections of conservatives—that is not because we share the liberal view that all sexual practices are morally indistinguishable and equally deserving of respect. If your aim is to end the oppression of women as a class then it makes sense to defend the rights of non-heterosexuals, but equally it makes sense to oppose some of the other practices liberals defend, such as the buying of sexual services. The difference between the radical feminist and the liberal is not that one judges other people’s choices and the other does not. They both make judgments, but on the basis of different values. Suggesting that any judgment you disagree with must stem from ‘phobia’—that it is not a question of your opponent having different principles or values, but is simply an expression of their irrational fear and loathing—is a way of making their position appear illegitimate without actually having the political argument. It is using language to silence views that you do not want to hear or engage with.

False analogies and misleading memes

What makes the ‘poorphobia’ parody funny is the absurdity of the idea that ‘poor people are not oppressed due to having no money’. While a full analysis of the problems facing poor people would doubtless include more than just material deprivation, it is obvious that economic inequality is the fundamental issue. Among other things, the parody reminds us that there are different systems of oppression which do not all work in exactly the same way and cannot all sensibly be talked about in exactly the same terms.

The language in which we talk about oppression has always had a tendency to depend on analogies between one group’s situation and another’s. In both the first (suffragist) and the second (liberationist) waves of feminism in the US, many women who became active in feminist politics drew inspiration from their prior experiences in movements for racial justice (the abolitionist movement of the 19th century and the civil rights movement of the 20th) and from the parallels they saw between their own situation as women and the situation of Black people under slavery and then segregation. Reflecting this history, the term sexism was created as a sex/gender analogue of racism. Although many commentators have criticized the feminists of the second wave for over-emphasizing the parallel between racism and sexism and being insufficiently attentive to the differences, the linguistic tendency to make analogies remains strong: if anything, in fact, it has become stronger than ever in the age of the internet ‘meme’.

The word meme was originally coined by Richard Dawkins, who intended it to denote the cultural analogue of a gene. Memes, like genes, are units which replicate, but whereas gene replication is a biological process, the replication of memes is a social process—they spread by imitation, and get adapted to new situations as they go. I won’t pursue the meme/gene analogy, to which there are many objections, but meme has passed into common usage as a term for cultural innovations that spread rapidly (nowadays often via digital media) and inspire many variations on the same basic theme. The ever-expanding lexicon of ‘phobia’ terms is a case in point: a word that originally described one experience became the template for a whole series of words describing experiences which were felt to resemble the original in some way.

One problem with this process, however, is that the analogies have a tendency to become progressively weaker and less illuminating. Homophobia is a reasonable term for some forms of prejudice against lesbians and gay men—it is easy enough to point to examples of the extreme, irrational loathing the word conjures up—but it is much more difficult to see femmephobia as a similarly apt description of the cultural devaluing of ‘feminine’ things. Who really feels fear, loathing or panic when confronted with an item from the list I quoted earlier (long nails, lace, make-up, pink, dresses, long hair, high heels)?

Another example which illustrates the point is the recent proliferation of words constructed on the model of mansplaining. That word was coined to describe a particular form of sexist condescension, where men who assume themselves to be knowledgeable, and women to be ignorant or stupid, explain something to a woman that the woman already knows, and possibly knows more about than the mansplainer himself. The term caught on because the experience it names is one that many women recognize; but it was swiftly followed by analogous terms like whitesplaining and cissplaining,and while writing this piece I’ve also spotted straightsplaining and abilitysplaining. ‘Splaining’ has clearly become a political meme; but the further it travels from the original example, the less it seems to serve any useful political purpose.

For a start, it is not clear that all the new ‘splaining’ terms describe a real and recognizable experience. ‘Straightsplaining’, for example, rings no bells with me: since being stupid/incompetent is not something gay men are stereotyped for (nor lesbians except insofar as they are also women) I would be surprised if this behaviour were particularly common. Stupidity and incompetence do figure in negative stereotypes of other subordinated groups: not only women but also people of colour, working class people, the elderly and people with disabilities are likely to have had the experience of being patronized and treated as stupid. But we might still question whether this is exactly the same experience in every case—whether it has the same motives, takes the same form or produces the same consequences. There is, for instance, a very particular way in which able-bodied people patronize people with disabilities, and this has been analysed for decades as one manifestation of ‘ableism’. Does the term ‘abilitysplaining’ add anything to the analysis? It could be argued that on the contrary, it confuses the issue by emphasizing the parallel with women’s experience rather than the connection to other oppressive practices which are part of everyday life for people with disabilities.

I suspect that’s what’s behind the endless extension of formulas like ‘x-phobia’ and ‘x-splaining’ is  a rather muddled interpretation of intersectionality. People reason that if all oppressions matter equally then (a) they all have to be covered in any discussion of anything—there has to be such a thing as ‘straightsplaining’, because to deny that it exists would be to treat queer oppression as less important than other kinds; and (b) they all have to be discussed in the same terms, as if treating oppressions equally required us to use the same analytic framework for all of them. As I understand it, what intersectionality really means is more or less the opposite of this: it means being attentive to the particularities of different systems of power in order to understand the differing experiences of oppression which are produced by their intersections (e.g. why sexism is not experienced in exactly the same way by women of different ethnicities or social classes). And if there is a need to be specific about the workings of oppression, there is also a need for language that can capture that specificity. Using variations on the same terms for everything/everyone flattens out the differences and stops us seeing how things really work.

We need a political language that can make distinctions between things that are related but not the same, and that does not reduce every form of oppression to a single cause or mechanism. We need a political language that does not mystify the workings of power and inequality, or pathologize prejudice, or obscure whose interests a given form of oppression serves. A language which does not meet these criteria is not really political at all. And—to adapt another recently popular meme—‘my feminism will be political or it will be bullshit’.

 

Trouble & Strife is a British-based radical feminist magazine. It appeared in print between 1983 and 2002, and is now a blog hosted by WordPress. We publish topical short posts, long-form articles and reviews, some of them illustrated by the feminist cartoonists whose work was a popular feature of the printed magazine. The website also gives visitors free access to a complete archive of our 43 print issues. T&S is edited by an all-women collective. We welcome enquiries from women who want to contribute posts, articles or reviews on topics of interest to a radical feminist readership (please note that we don’t publish fiction, poetry or artwork except if it illustrates an article). Our Facebook page is at www.facebook.com/troubleandstrifemagazine Our Twitter account is @strifejournal.

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Setting the Tone by @strifejournal

January 2, 2015

(Cross-posted from Trouble & Strife)

Delilah Campbell ponders Facebook’s new approach to gender

Heinz comes in 57 varieties, grey comes in fifty shades, and gender, according to Facebook, now comes in 51 different forms. The social media giant announced this month that in future, account-holders (at least, those whose language is English) will be able to choose from a menu of 51 terms describing gender identification. Subscribers in the US can already access the new options, which include ‘androgynous’, ‘bigender’, ‘genderfluid’ and ‘intersex’ as well as the more predictable ‘trans’, ‘trans*’, ‘transsexual’ and ‘man’/‘woman’ prefaced by ‘trans’ or ‘cis’.

Cartoon by Cath Jackson - 57 varieties of Facebook genderThis move towards greater diversity and inclusiveness has been hailed as—in the words of one source quoted by the Independent— ‘a milestone step to allow countless people to more honestly and accurately represent themselves’. This speaker, described as a ‘human rights activist’, went on to express the hope that others would emulate the example set by Facebook in ‘supporting individuals’ multifaceted identities’.

I will pass over the question of what ‘supporting individuals’ multifaceted identities’ has to do with human rights, and ask instead if Facebook’s policy, overall, would actually qualify as ‘supporting individuals’ multifaceted identities’. To describe identity as ‘multifaceted’ is to acknowledge that gender is only one element of it, and that others are in principle no less important. But Facebook profiles are not constructed on that principle. Gender is the only personal characteristic that has to be specified explicitly, and displayed publicly, on a Facebook page. You do have to give your birthdate, but you can choose to keep it hidden. You are not asked to select a category from a menu of ethnic labels, or social class labels, though ethnicity and class are also facets of identity; and displaying your educational or relationship status is optional rather than compulsory. So, it’s hard to see the new policy as a sign of Facebook’s commitment to making users’ profiles more fully reflective of their multifaceted identities. It’s more a manifestation of the contemporary obsession with gender identity, gender categories and gender distinctions.

It’s also an illustration of another contemporary phenomenon, the power of the drop-down menu. In a world where we are constantly required to fill in online forms, where you can only proceed to the next screen if you click on one of the options provided (not several, not none, not an alternative of your own devising), there is a tendency to take those options as a map of reality. Like the boundaries marked on an actual map, the lines they draw between this category and that become reified, treated as objective facts to which we must try to fit our own subjective experience.

Facebook’s 51 gender labels are a case in point. There is nothing objective about them: they don’t represent a single conceptual scheme or comprise a scientific taxonomy, they just reproduce as many terms as the designers could think of which are currently used by some subset of English-speakers to describe some kind of non-traditional orientation to the traditional male/female binary. The glossaries which various ‘experts’ have hastily produced to explain them suggest that many of the new categories overlap or duplicate one another: ‘androgynous’, ‘bigender’ and ‘genderfluid’, for instance, all denote an identification with both masculinity and femininity. But once they appear as discrete options in a drop-down menu, there’s a good chance people will treat them as definitive, and if necessary create the semantic distinctions that are needed to make them coherent. Just as having the choice of ‘Miss’ ‘Mrs’ and ‘Ms’ has persuaded many English-speakers that ‘Ms’ must denote a distinct category of ‘others’ (older unmarried women, divorced women and lesbians) rather than subsuming (as it was meant to) the previous, marital status-based categories, so asking people to choose between ‘genderfluid’ and ‘bigender’ will prompt them to invent criteria for distinguishing the two. Meanwhile, some people will inevitably feel that the available options exclude them, or fail to represent them fully, and will lobby for new ones to be added. As if any nomenclature, however many terms it included, could possibly capture all the nuances of our lived and felt experience.

Facebook’s new nomenclature certainly doesn’t work for me, because it presupposes that there must be some form of gender that I feel a positive identification with. In fact, as a radical materialist feminist my position is that gender, like ‘race’ and class, is essentially a system of domination and subordination, and as such I am politically opposed to it. While I acknowledge its existence as a material social fact, and accept that it has shaped my own experience and sense of self, I do not identify positively with any form of gender, either actual or imaginable. Being willing to call myself a woman (again, in recognition of a material social fact) does not mean I have a positive identification with femininity. My relationship to both femininity and masculinity is entirely negative. Facebook doesn’t provide any terminology with which I could ‘honestly and accurately represent’ that position. It allows me to list my gender as ‘neither’, or the more arcane ‘neutrois’ (glossed as ‘people who do not identify within the binary gender system’), but the problem with those terms (also ‘gender non-conforming’ and ‘gender variant’) is that in this scheme they all denote identities: they define you as a certain kind of person, rather than as a person (of any kind) who takes a certain political stance.

Though from my point of view Facebook’s approach to gender is more or less apolitical, the company evidently wants to be seen as a champion of progressive attitudes. The spokesperson quoted in the Independent presented the new policy as part of the company’s commitment to equality and diversity, as well as a sign of its openness to concerns expressed by users (in this case, LGBT groups who campaigned for new terminology). However, anything Facebook does in the area of user profiling is liable to be interpreted in the light of our knowledge that its money is made by selling data to advertisers. I always assumed that the real reason why your profile had to specify whether you were male or female was the importance accorded to that information by Facebook’s real customers, the marketeers. Some commentators have suggested that the new gender nomenclature will serve their purposes even more effectively: by getting people to define themselves in less blandly generic terms (or as one comment put it, ‘finding 50 more ways to violate my privacy’), Facebook can help businesses to target a more specific market niche.

On that point, I’m slightly sceptical: it’s hard to see how this confusing set of labels could be mapped onto the consumer preferences that are of interest to the niche-marketers. Are there products which appeal more to the ‘gender variant’ than the ‘gender non-conforming’, or services for the ‘androgynous’ as opposed to the ‘bigendered’? If you identify as bigendered, will that just mean you get a double helping of spam?Cartoon by Cath Jackson - 57 varieties of Facebook gender

Yet at a deeper level I do think the revamping of Facebook’s gender options shows the influence of consumerism on what is now thought of as ‘political’ action—the idea is that people are empowered by having as much choice as possible, and that minorities in particular are empowered by the public validation of their choices. ‘Put my preferred gender identity label on your drop-down menu so that I can display it in my profile’ is the kind of political language that Facebook understands, but in the real world, arguably, the effect is pretty trivial. (How often does anyone even look at what genders their Facebook friends have specified?) Other political demands, for instance that Facebook should stop hosting pages which promote violence against women, have not been so easily accommodated (though they have sometimes been successful when accompanied by actions that threatened the site’s advertising revenue).

If Facebook had wanted to do something really radical, it could surely have gone for the simpler option of taking gender off the menu altogether. Instead of requiring every user to select a label from a predefined set of options, it could have said it was going to let individuals make their own decisions about how to define and present themselves—permitting them not only to use their own preferred terms, but also to decide how far to foreground their gender in their profiles.

I’d just as soon leave it in the background myself; but since that is apparently unthinkable, I’m considering setting up a Facebook group to lobby for some additional menu options—some boxes a radical feminist could tick, like ‘gender indifferent’, ‘gender resistant’, ‘gender hostile’ and ‘nowadays when I hear the word “gender” I reach for my medication’. Anyone want to join?

Cartoons by Cath Jackson

 

Trouble & Strife is a British-based radical feminist magazine. It appeared in print between 1983 and 2002, and is now a blog hosted by WordPress. We publish topical short posts, long-form articles and reviews, some of them illustrated by the feminist cartoonists whose work was a popular feature of the printed magazine. The website also gives visitors free access to a complete archive of our 43 print issues. T&S is edited by an all-women collective. We welcome enquiries from women who want to contribute posts, articles or reviews on topics of interest to a radical feminist readership (please note that we don’t publish fiction, poetry or artwork except if it illustrates an article). Our Facebook page is at www.facebook.com/troubleandstrifemagazine Our Twitter account is @strifejournal.

 

In the coming year, I have ambitious plans to expand AROOO, including a full professional blog redesign to increase accessibility and optimise sharing of individual bloggers’ writing across multiple social media platforms, as well as publishing feminist reviews of books, radio, television, and film. I also want to expand outside of traditional blogging platforms and start a chat forum. In order to do this, I need to raise £ 3000 so that I can pay the women web designers for their work. The work I do for AROOO is out of love for women and their writing, art, photography and lives. My tech skills simply aren’t adequate to develop AROOO to its full potential. The women involved with AROOO deserve to have their work shared to a larger audience and this requires financial support. This platform will remain non-profit, and advertising free, but the amount of work to redesign the site is substantial. Even one pound makes a huge difference to my ability to support feminist writing by creating a professional platform for feminists by feminists.



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The Blame Game — We Need to Stop Blaming Women for Gender Inequality by @CratesNRibbons

November 15, 2014

(Cross-posted from Crates N Ribbons)

One of the more slippery tricks that the patriarchy employs to uphold itself is to further the illusion that gender inequality is really the fault of women themselves, and a natural and inevitable state of affairs. If the gender pay gap exists, it is argued, it is because women lack the ability to negotiate salaries; if the duties of childcare fall predominantly to women, it is said to be because women choose to stay at home; if women are underrepresented in government, it is the female disinterest in politics that takes the blame; if women are attacked by men, it is once again presented as somehow the woman’s fault. This blaming of women is a handy excuse to avert one’s gaze from the problems of gender inequality; if it can be framed as something that is caused by the very people who are its victims, then it can be more easily dismissed and ignored, and members of the dominant group are spared feelings of guilt or responsibility.

Of course, blaming women for everything, or putting inequality down to women’s individual choices, obscures the very real discrimination that women face on a day-to-day basis, and conceals the societal pressures behind the choices that women make. Let’s explore three myths that seek to blame women for gender inequality, and see why they should never be allowed to go unchallenged.

 

Myth 1: Women are generally less successful in their careers than men are because they don’t negotiate for their salary, and are not assertive enough.

From jesadaphorn, freedigitalphotos.net

This myth is an absolute favourite of the business world, and is the foundation of countless ‘inspirational’ books for women such as Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In”, Gail Evans’ “Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman: What Men Know About Success that Women Need to Learn”, Lois Frankel’s “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office – 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers”, among many others. The recurring theme is that women are currently going about their careers all wrong, and while there is usually a cursory nod to the existence of sexism, the gist of the message is that it is women’s behaviour that needs to change, and if only we could act more like men, gender inequality in the workplace would slowly disappear.

What makes this idea so popular is that there are indeed documented differences between the way women and men behave at work. For instance, in a study by Babcock, it was found that while 57% of men attempt to negotiate their salaries, only 7% of women do. And when it comes to communication in the workplace, Deborah Tannen has found that women tend to be more apologetic, gentle, and indirect. Such discoveries have been pounced on eagerly as evidence of women’s cluelessness in the workplace, as evidence of institutional sexism being merely a small factor in comparison to the enormity of women’s mistakes.

Certainly, women behave differently from men in the workplace. But is this difference in behaviour really a mistake on the part of women, or is it simply a way of adapting to the difference in the way women are treated and responded to at work? Study after study has shown that while men are rated favourably for behaving in an assertive, even aggressive manner, women acting in the same way are disapproved of and punished, be it through social sanctions like isolation and name-calling, or by being rejected for promotions and denied career opportunities. The same is true when it comes to negotiating salaries. Most women choose not to negotiate for a very good reason — they believe, rightly, that any attempt to negotiate will reflect badly on them, something that would not occur to the same degree if they were male. As researcher Hannah Bowles says, “This isn’t about fixing the women. It isn’t about telling women, “You need self-confidence or training.” They are responding to incentives within the social environment… You have to weigh that against social risks of negotiating. What we show is those risks are higher for women than for men.”

Another aspect of this myth that I find irksome is the assumption that the current dynamics of the workplace are immutable, even desirable. There is no link between confidence and competence, and if there is one, research suggests it is an inverse relationship, meaning that it may be the most incompetent individuals who seem the most confident (look up the Dunning-Kruger effect). Quieter qualities like cooperativeness and empathy are essential to good leaders, yet are sadly too often overlooked, or scorned as ‘feminine traits’. In a society where a culture of aggression, over-confidence and reckless risk-taking led to the financial crash, are these really the behaviours that we want to continue to promote?

 

Myth 2: Women take on more housework and childcare responsibilities because they choose not to work outside the home.

from freedigitalphotos.net

This myth is annoyingly persistent, and it’s not hard to see why. To some, there is a pleasing symmetry and fairness in the idea of women and men occupying different spheres of work — she in the home, and he in the workplace, happily toiling away at their respective tasks. Yet, not only does this completely erase same-sex couples and non-traditional living arrangements, the idea that women shoulder the brunt of domestic responsibilities within the family in exchange for men working outside the home is completely inaccurate.

While women have been making greater gains in the workplace, with more than 40% of womennow taking on the role of primary breadwinners, the division of labour when it comes to domestic chores has not shifted. Women working full-time do more than three times as much housework as men working full-time; even more appallingly, in households where the female partner is the primary breadwinner and the male partner does not work, domestic chores still fall to the woman. Women do not do the bulk of the housework because they spend less time in paid employment, they simply do the bulk of the housework, full stop.

The second part of this myth is the concept of a woman’s ‘choice’ to stay at home, combined with a man’s ‘choice’ to seek paid employment. Let’s take a look at some of the factors that might lead to this choice, starting with maternity and paternity leave. In the UK, women can generally take up to 52 weeks of maternity leave, while paternity leave is only 2 weeks long (though this may hopefully be changed next year). When a heterosexual couple expecting a baby discusses future working arrangements, what makes economic sense? For the mother to stay home with the baby of course. And when one partner has to stay home permanently or work part-time, who will it be? Given that the mother has already spent close to a year caring for the child and is thus a lot more comfortable with the routine of childcare, added to this the fact that the female partner is likely to be earning less than the male partner, owing not only to the gender wage gap but men’s socialised reluctance to be the lower earner in the relationship, plus societal expectations of what a good mother should do, and society’s mocking of men who decide to stay home… given all this and more, it is hardly a surprise that most households fit neatly into the pattern of the man being the primary breadwinner, and the woman taking full responsibility for the domestic sphere. Can this really be said to be women’s free choice at all?

 

Myth 3: Women’s clothing and behaviour lead to sexual assault.

And now we come to the most painful myth of all. On average, 404 000 women are victims of sexual offences every year in the UK, compared to 72 000 men, and 98% of perpetrators are men, making this a crime that is heavily gendered. However, society seems to think that it is women who are to blame for this state of affairs, and up to us to prevent sexual assault. Even as a child, my friends and I were familiar with all the rules we had to live by, and these messages were drummed into us again and again — wearing short skirts leads to sexual assault; drinking leads to sexual assault; going out alone at night leads to sexual assault; taking lifts from strangers leads to sexual assault; flirting or ‘sending mixed messages’ leads to sexual assault; having many sexual partners leads to sexual assault. We were told, in subtle (and often not-so-subtle) ways, that if we were to do any of the things above, we were “asking for it”, and were being stupid, and had no one to blame but ourselves, for “what did we expect, really”?

Except it isn’t women who are causing rape and sexual assault. Women have been assaulted while wearing anything, from dresses, to jeans, to hoodies, to burqas. Women have been assaulted when drunk or sober. And women have been assaulted anywhere, be it a deserted alley, or the bedroom of a trusted friend, or at a crowded party. And there is nothing women can do to prevent these assaults, for they are not our fault. We do not cause them, and so we cannot stop them.

 

*******

These three myths are only a small selection of the myriad ways in which women are blamed for manifestations of gender inequality, and for gender inequality itself. From a young age, boys are taught to exert control over their world, through building, inventing, fighting, and being aggressive. Girls, on the other hand, are taught to internalise this control, to master not our surroundings but ourselves, through dieting, cosmetics, fashion, and being agreeable. Too often, then, women are told to change ourselves, and that if we do not succeed in this society, then it is we who must readjust, and not social structures and societal attitudes that are flawed. This habit of blaming women has gone on far too long, and it is only once we shift our focus from women’s ‘mistakes’ to analysing and overhauling unequal power structures in society, that any real progress can be made.

 

Crates&Ribbons:  A feminist analysis of society [@CratesNRibbons]

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When does the magical metamorphosis happen? at Hell, Yeah I’m a Feminist

October 25, 2014

(Cross-posted from Hell Yeah I’m A Feminist)

Our brothers were bossy know-it-alls, and they did cruel things to us and to animals.

The boys in our class taunted us and always got into fights with each other. They were rude and forever demanding to be the center of attention.

In high school, they became socially awkward, struggled with the material, and became fascinated with sports.
In university, they used pick-up lines (i.e., lies) to impregnate us, seemingly unaware of the immensity of the consequence. In the lecture hall, they were always so full of self-importance, so full of themselves.

So how is it that they become our supervisors, our MPs, our CEOs? How is it they get to be in charge of things? How is it they come to have power?

Why do we think they magically become competent, mature, responsible— When they graduate? When they put on a suit?

Because apparently we do think that. I saw that magic with my own eyes happen with my brother. He graduated, put on a suit, bought an attaché case, and suddenly the world was his. His entitlement.

When did that metamorphosis happen? When did he become so qualified? So worthy?

We commonly joke that ‘B students’ become our bosses, because they’re the ones that go in to business, whereas the ‘A students’ go into the humanities and the sciences.

We’ve got it wrong. The ‘C students’ go into business. The ‘B students’ go into the humanities and the sciences. The ‘A students’ were girls. And they’re nowhere to be seen now.

 

Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist: a radical feminist blog mostly about sexism

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Boy Wonder by Head in Books

October 24, 2014

(Cross-posted from Head in Books)

I’ve had a version of this in my drafts pretty much since I started this blog. I wasn’t planning on revisiting it any time soon but a real life conversation earlier today and then a brief Twitter exchange this evening have me wound me up so much on the topic that – weeeeee – off I go on an autorant.

It’s the whole boy thing. Or the girl thing. The pink/blue thing. The nature/nurture thing. I suppose, it’s the wilful blind eye turned to the fact that children (people, really) are an exercise in and-and-and rather than simply either/or.

Little Princess

My youngest child (who happens to be a boy) has brought this book home from nursery for the last two weeks running. It’s a not-so-subtle hint that he doesn’t want to be the youngest anymore (which is a burden he will have to live with). We’ve read it what feels like endless times, but in case you’re not familiar with the work, Little Princess wants (you’ve guessed it) a sister, because a brother will be smelly, rough and have all the wrong toys. She wants a sister, notwithstanding the gentle reminder from the maid, the admiral and, er, the Prime Minister (I wonder if David Cameron will have a word with No3?) that she can be just as smelly, noisy and various-toyed as the boyiest boy of her imagination.

Of course she goes on to have a brother. Of course it all ends happily.

But.

There seem to be a lot of grown-ups who would benefit from reading it too. Grown-ups who treat girl babies as a prize, a lucky escape from the one-step-up-from-bubonic-plague-unwelcomeness of a smelly, noisy, rough boy. Grown-ups who like girls because they are determined that they will be quiet, and affectionate and amenable to dressing up. Grown-ups who know that girls will play nicely whereas boys will blaze a trail of destruction through their parents’ homes and lives. Grown-ups who believe, in short, that girls enhance, while boys, on balance, detract.

It’s not everyone, of course. I’d hope it’s not even the majority, despite the inexorable increase in gendered toys and books and clothes and the rest. It’s a lot, though, and it’s not fair.

It’s not fair to the girls who want to wear a superhero costume and go out to save the world rather than waiting, hair intact, to be rescued. It’s equally unfair to the boys who are afraid of heights and aren’t so keen on the prize awaiting them at the top of the tower anyway. It demands one thing and one thing only of both boys and girls, and makes any form of deviance from that one thing problematic. I don’t want my little girl to be constrained in what she can do, but nor do I want that for her brothers.

Are my children different from each other? Well yes, of course, but not necessarily along “boy/girl” lines. Plus, I only have a sample size of three – and for all my good intentions, I know that I treat them differently and project my own experience and expectations on to them. The theory and debate around gender and socialisation fascinates me, but don’t worry, I’m not trying to add to it.

I just think that we are, too often, unrealistic in our expectations of parenthood and unrealistic in our expectations of what our children will be. We need them, increasingly, to cause as little upheaval as possible, and the image of a cute, biddable daughter seems to fit the bill most nearly.

To the people who want a girl because of that, I want to say: what will you do if she doesn’t match up? What will you do if she wants to run around, and play fight; get covered in mud and wear scruffy clothes? Even if she doesn’t, how do you think she’ll get on with boys in later life if you tell her to expect them to be rough and noisy and train her to notice it whenever she sees it? What are you telling her about those who don’t meet the expected standard of maleness: that they are somehow not real boys, real men?

I think it’s normal and natural to have a sneaking preference for one or the other. That little, guilty,  sinking feeling  when the preference isn’t realised – no matter how much delight there is in the actual, rather than the dream, baby – is no cause for shame either. But if you’re sure that you don’t want a boy because they’re noisy or rough or smelly, or because the clothes or toys that come with him aren’t quite the thing, I’d show you my loving, dreamy, imaginative, boisterous, beautiful boys and ask if you’re absolutely sure.

Or perhaps I’d just introduce you to the Little Princess.

picture from amazon.co.uk

 

Categories: Featured Blog, Gender
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To Be a Girl by Bungling Housewife

April 24, 2014

Baby-Girl-In-Garden

What does it really mean to be a girl? Does our society demand too much of them? Or too little (yeah right)? Is there really such a thing as being too ‘girly’ or not being girly enough?

Being a girl these days isn’t too easy. Everyone seems to have their own pet ideas about what makes a girl or what a girl should or should not do. Right from the time a girl is born, she’s seen as an object, a ‘doll’ to be dressed up, to be made ‘pretty’. As she grows older, this idea is reinforced again and again and again: a girls job is to look ‘nice’, to stay well groomed, to wear nice clothes and above all else, to always match her purse to her shoes. As she grows older, this list of what a girl needs to be is added to, little by little. A girl needs to learn how to cook, she needs to be neat and be capable of multitasking. A girl should always have time for her appearance, no matter how busy she is. A girl should always be careful not to darken her complexion or put on any excess weight. A girl should be capable to keeping her house neat as a pin without any help. A girl needs to always guard her ‘reputation’ and her modesty. Nice girls don’t hang out with friends too often, they stay home with the family. If, God forbid, anything bad does happen, it is somehow always the girl’s fault for just not being careful enough.

It is the girl who needs to compromise in her relationships, to always put others happiness above her own. It is a girl’s job to keep her husband happy and her children clean, fed and well-behaved. A successful girl will marry, keep house, cook, clean, raise her children, manage the household, and all while balanced precariously on pretty heels beneath a pretty dress. Boys will be boys, their sins (no matter how big or small) forgivable by those that love them and by society at large but girls can never have that option. A girl must always be perfect because any mistake she may make will haunt her for the rest of her life. A boy will get multiple second chances but a girl, she will get only the one chance and so she better make the best of it.

Society expects a lot from girls, but it’s not the high expectations that break a girl, it’s the lack of appreciation it implies. All this is your duty ladies, so of course you have no choice in the matter so why should we appreciate you? What do you want, a medal?

Yes. A medal would be nice. But short of that, at least a good word here and there won’t kill you. Girls are the mothers of all nations and all families and they are stronger than any boy can ever hope to be. It won’t kill you to appreciate them from time to time.

 

Bungling Housewife: I’m an Anthropologist by training, a housewife by choice, a voracious reader, a lover of fantasy fiction and Sci-Fi, a new mommy, an observer of human nature, a closet optimist and a cupcake enthusiast. I write about all of the above and anything that might strike my fancy :)

Categories: Featured Blog, Gender
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@BrianMcFadden, and The Mistake Of Thinking Victims Are “Just As Bad” by @FrothyDragon

February 10, 2014

Cross-Posted with permission from Frothy Dragon and the Patriarchal Stone

First published in 2012

Screen Shot 2014-02-01 at 11.12.07

This isn’t my usual  takedown of male upholders of the patriarchy. It’s one that’s filled with facepalming and irony. I mean, it was just the other day I wrote about the importance of supporting women who are in abusive relationships, trying to leave abusive relationships, or fresh out of abusive relationships. See, the “Women who make excuses and stay” may have hit me harder than usual. I suspect, from McFadden’s subsequent tweet, he tweeted out of a mixture of anger and misunderstanding. I mean, to the outsider, you wonder why women stay, why women make excuses. There’s no end of reasons. All of which are down to the abuser. So, in a simple, easy to read list, here we go. (If you think of any more, add them in the comments)

  1. Blame: It’s common for the blame to be misappropriated onto the victim of abuse. As mentioned in my above linked post, it’s not uncommon for people to ask the abuser what they may have done to upset the abuser. It’s simple. The abuser doesn’t act out of anger, he acts out of a desire to control his victim. However, the abuser knows that it makes him appear (slightly more) favourable if he can blame the victim. After all, acting out abuse for a desire for control comes across as pretty shitty. (Understatement). But if he’s struck his victim, and laid it on “dinner being ruined”, “talking to your (male) friend”, “answering back”, he tells the victim (and anyone that asks) what she should have done differently. The victim then begins to believe if she walks on eggshells, and avoids the “triggers”, things will change. Things don’t change. The abuser just finds different excuses.
  2. Denial: I can’t speak for every victim/survivor of abuse, but I suspect I can speak for a large number. The first time your abuser hits you, it doesn’t seem real. You don’t understand where it came from. After all, he’s been Prince Charming, right? Wants you all for himself, has told you he couldn’t live without you… You don’t realise he’s been doing all the things that make up abuse all along, so you convince yourself it was a “one off”, while he’s telling you it won’t happen again.
  3. Lack Of Support: Last year, on average, 230 women were turned away from the refuge system due to a lack of space. Often, housing women trying to escape abuse can mean placing them in refuges miles away from any support network. But even before then, there’s the problem of trying to call Women’s Aid. I was lucky that I was never fully restricted to the house, except for when Dom hid my keys. But in the refuge system, I met women who had been denied access to a phone, unable to phone the National Domestic Violence Helpline, or even the police. Even those who had been able to phone had had to sneak out of the house to do it in private (I’d used “going to Tesco”  as an excuse the day before I left Dom). But even then, you can’t always get through first time. The lack of refuge spaces saw women placed in Bed and Breakfast’s, with no real support, or sometimes unable to reach help at all.
  4. Lack Of Finances: I had, like many other women, every penny controlled by Dom. As a barmaid, earning around £900 a month, Dom would ensure I had £200 to get through the month with; through this, I had to pay bills, buy food, buy electric… The rest, Dom would keep for himself, and spend on beer, vodka, anything he wanted. Before I knew of the refuge system, I believed I couldn’t afford to leave. After all, I was always broke, struggling to make ends meet. It never occurred to me I could survive, financially, outside of abuse. Even for those who do not face financial abuse know they’ll face being the sole payee for everything, and wonder how they’ll make ends meet.
  5. Children: We have this preoccupation with two parent families. How many times have you heard the phrase “Stay together for the kids?” Blink 182 even have a song of the same name, right? We’re told children function best in two parent families, and we get told that children, especially boys, need a male influence in their lives. All of this builds up to a troubling sense for any mother planning to leave an abusive relationship. Society has already told her that lone parents are failing their children. Add to that, abusers often use children to target the mothers, the abuser’s victim. A common tactic is for the abuser to threaten the victim with custody; a tactic I remember from Dom, who regularly told me that, should I leave, he’d make sure I never saw our son again. Other abusers will try and turn the children against the mother, meaning that should the mother attempt to leave, the children will voice dissent at the idea of leaving with the mother. For a lot of victims, leaving the abuser means they have to face the possibility of losing their children.
  6. Fear: Long before I left Dom, I was aware of the fact that leaving, or attempting to leave, Dom would be dangerous. He’d admitted once, that, after she’d left him, he’d put a brick through his ex wife’s window. And sadly, I was already no stranger to his death threats; within the first ten months of our relationship, he’d threatened to stab me twice; he’d tried to kill his best friend for offering me comfort after another of Dom’s assaults, and told me that if I ever tried to leave him, he’d hunt me down and kill me. Women don’t leave abuse because they’re scared of the consequences if they get caught trying to leave. They’re scared of the consequences if they do leave. Hell, four years on, I still think I’ve seen Dom in the streets, and that’s enough to scare the hell out of me. We know leaving our abuser is the most dangerous time in our relationship. That’s why we look for the right time to leave.

We don’t stay because we’re “just as bad.” We stay because a number of factors coerce us into staying with our abuser. Factors our abuser carefully puts in place.

Frothy Dragon and the Patriarchal Stone I Got 99 Problems, And The Fact You’re Still Calling Me A Bitch Is One [@FrothyDragon]

Categories: Featured Blog, Violence Against Women
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The science behind sex differences is still in dispute, by @feministborgia

January 24, 2014

Cross-posted with permission from Feminist Borgia who blogs occasionally about feminism, rape culture and games [@feministborgia].

In November 2013 a study was published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA’ titled, ‘Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain’. Now if you don’t know what a connectome is, don’t worry, the term was only coined in around 2005. It refers to a map of neural connections in the brain, and it exists as a way of trying to connect the physical structure of the brain with its function. Fancy new terminology aside, the purpose of the study was to measure structural connections within the brains of just below 1000 young people (aged 8 to 22) and their results showed some interesting differences. Using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging (an MRI technique that measures the restricted diffusion of water) they found that after the age of 13 there were significant differences in how the brains of men and women were connected. In the study men’s brains were found to connect more within a given hemisphere. and women’s had great cross connectivity (seen below the connectome maps published, showing the male brain in blue and the female brain in orange:
Image

As you can see, the male brain shows more longitudal connections whilst the female brains shows more transverse connections.

The abstract for the study states, ‘the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes’, having earlier noted that ‘Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills’.

The publication of this paper resulted in a number of excitable and fairly familiar newspaper headlines:

The Telegraph announced boldly ‘Brains of men and women are poles apart’, (demonstrating once and for all that broadsheets aren’t immune to headline puns) telling us that women’s brains are set up to have better memories (for anniversaries!) and gauge social situations better while men’s brains coordinate their actions with their senses, so can navigate better (not to mention be better at parking cars).

The Independent declared these differences, ‘could explain why men are ‘better at map reading”.
The Belfast Telegraph gets the prize for the best reporting on this, by first reminding us that ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ before going on to declare that the study has shown ‘men and women’s brains are wired in completely different ways, as if they were species from different planets.’

With the possible exception of the Belfast Telegraph (who seem to have got themselves hopelessly overexcited), you can’t place too much fault on the reporting here. It is a clear cut case of ‘science says’, and in this case has the benefits of a peer reviewed journal to back it up. The study itself made reference to differences in male and female behaviours, stating that men have better ‘motor and spacial abilities’ whereas women show, ‘superior memory and social cognition’. Unfortunately, whilst this paper may make that claim, the preceding study (of which the participants of this study were a subset) does not back that up (abstract here ). Of the 26 behavioural measures made for comparison (for example executive control, memory, reasoning, spatial processing, sensorimotor skills, and social cognition), 11 showed sex differences that were non existent, or as small as 53:47 (the expected sex outperforming the opposite only 53% of the time), Even in those areas where the differences are meant to be the greatest (spatial or social awareness) the performance difference was only 60:40-a measurable and noticeable difference for sure, but hardly enough to declare difference species.

My problem is not with this study or with their results, but rather with the way the conclusions have been drawn, and with the extrapolations. They have shown interesting differences in how men’s and women’s brains connect with themselves, but then rather than taking any further interesting steps, drilling down further into the data, they have attached some male/female stereotypes and called it job done. One of the authors has even suggested that the ‘hard wired’ differences found could explain the ‘gut feelings’ that women demonstrate more than men, and which makes them good mothers (‘intuition’ and ‘mothering’, or indeed ‘nurturing’ was not in fact measured in this study).

There could be other reasons than ‘men are better at map reading’ for the differences observed. Men’s brains are frequently bigger than women’s brains, the difference in the wiring could be due to physical necessity (there are also studies on this).

Then there’s the most interesting part of the study that has been the least discussed: the structural differences are not observed in a significant manner until after age 13. And we have to ask ourselves why. One of the proposed explanations is that this is the approximate average age for the development of secondary sexual characteristics. There are massive changes in the body, hormones flooding everything, the logic seems to be that the brain changes at this time too. However there is a better explanation, and one less routed in speculation. See, there’s this thing called neuroplasticity. It refers to the changes in neural pathways and synapses due to changes in behaviour or environment. Literally as you learn, your brain changes shape. Then we have to bear in mind that gender as a social construct is learned. It is taught. Little girls aren’t born liking pink. They are taught that girls like pink, and that they are a girl, therefore they then like pink. You put those two things together and what you end up with is the possibility that, rather than being innate, related to the release of hormones at puberty, the structural differences in the brains are programmed in by telling girls that boys are boisterous and girls play nice, that boys are good at maths and girls are caring, that boys build things and girls decorate them. But no mention is made in the study of any consideration of gendered activities in their subjects, or indeed any activities that may (and in fact do) influence how our brains are wired.

If you take this into account, the claim that ‘sex differences are hard wired’ seems a little less proven than it was before.

I am very fond of saying ‘peer reviewed journal or it didn’t happen’. But we have to be able to treat even these studies critically. Their data may be fixed and immutable (tho that is not always the case) but the conclusions have more room for movement. And the people making those conclusions are not immune from sexism.

The study may have shown that men and women’s brains connect differently. But it hasn’t shown why. And it hasn’t shown that the differences are innate. It has shown they are learned. ‘Men and women are taught to be different’ is a less interesting conclusions perhaps, but it is a more truthful one.

Post script: If you are interested in this subject, may I recommend the very excellent Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. Her article on this study was also very useful to me.

Cross-posted with permission from Feminist Borgia who blogs occasionally about feminism, rape culture and games [@feministborgia].

See also: Extra, Extra! Scientists Misunderstand their own Research by @Marstrina

Categories: Featured Blog, Gender, Women in STEM
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