Since the beginning of history, attempts have been made to develop power techniques with which our moral sensitivities can be undermined, so to speak, which activate less resistance in the people. These power techniques are now often referred to as soft power. Soft power is the full range of techniques to manipulate public opinion. Intermediaries for these forms of exercising power are supported by foundations, think tanks, elite networks and lobby groups — in particular private and public media, schools and the entire education and training sector as well as the cultural industry. The effects of soft power techniques are largely invisible to the public, so protests against these forms of indoctrination are unlikely. Economic reasons speak in favor of primarily using soft power and refining and optimizing these technologies for manipulation purposes on the basis of scientific research of our cognitive and affective characteristics. This has happened over the past hundred years in a very systematic and consequential manner.
—Rainer Mausfeld
Along with destroying livelihoods and community, one of the most important things our “culture” needs to do to function is the destruction of the self. Because if our very selfs wouldn’t have been destroyed, we wouldn’t put up with any of this shit. We wouldn’t go to work to sell eight hours or even more of our lifetime each day. We wouldn’t let our world be destroyed by rich, pathological, insane men. We wouldn’t inflict daily violence, even if oftentimes in a quite “soft” form, on our own children.
Of course, the destruction of the self is a very long and painful process, and therefore has to start at an early age. Rainer Mausfeld, professor of psychology and cognition research at the Kiel University, stated that the term competence (or skill) is one of the most ideological inflicted terms of our time. “The question those in power have been asking,” Mausfeld says, “is ‘how do we disassemble the self of the individual into a bundle of skills.’” He also states that “School is the most important soft-power instrument of the state.”
After all, what children learn in school are skills and competences; at the very best they would learn some form of social competence. What they don’t learn is to be a human being, to evolve, to think, to feel, to just be.
This concerns me a lot, because I’m the father of a little loving sunshine named Leonard, who will start attending school this summer.
When Leo started going to kindergarten, for me that started a process of remembering my own early childhood. I remembered how much I hated kindergarten as well as school, and it got me thinking about these forms of soft power.
Leo’s kindergarten is indeed a very good one. It is one of the famous German “forest kindergartens,” which means that the kids will be outside in the forest all day. Still, we had to go through what they call acclimatization phase, because a child of three has to be accustomed to being left alone by its parents. During the two weeks of this phase, one of us had to stay with our son at the kindergarten, leaving now and then for a while to get him used to being without us.
So often I have seen little children cry, when his or her mother would hand him or her over to one of the preschool teachers and leave. “Don’t go mom, don’t leave me!” the little ones would scream in sheer panic. “I’m so sorry my little darling, I have to go to work” was the usual answer.
I live in a pretty decent social environment. Most of the middle-class people here are kind and gentle; they love their kids and care for them. Some of them even told me that it breaks their heart to leave them. But they have been conditioned–like all of us–to believe that this is the way things are.
One time a child, whose mom had just left with the usual explanation, cried and just wouldn’t stop. Ian, who was at that time the oldest boy in kindergarten because he hasn’t been considered “ready” for school (seriously, who is?), commented with one of the smartest lines I’ve ever heard:
“We have to go to kindergarten because they have to go to work; If they don’t work, they won’t earn money; without money, they can’t buy groceries, and we’ll have to starve; starvation is worse than kindergarten.”
That morning I went home and cried. Seven year old Ian had just covered most of the internal violence of our culture in one sentence with a few semicolons.
Today, I had to wake Leo early at 6:00 in the morning, because I needed to bring him to his mom who would drive him to kindergarten. He hates to be woken up, as much as I did as a kid and still do. He was crying and resisting a lot. I hate it when I have to do this, because I know I’m inflicting a “soft” form of violence on him.
I love the quote by Smohalla, the Wanapum dreamer-prophet: “My young men shall never work, men who work cannot dream; and wisdom comes to us in dreams.”
I indeed believe that it is very unhealthy to be woken up early on a regular basis, because natural cycles of sleeping and dreaming are disturbed. That most of us have to get up early from an early age on, for kindergarten, school, work, is very bad for our mental health and therefore must be considered as part of the destruction of the self our “culture” is inflicting on us.
Usually, I wake him for kindergarten as late as possible. With everybody busy working, there is no community and no kids to play with in the neighborhood. This is the reason I want him to attend, because kindergarten is the only chance for him to regularly get in contact with other kids and gain some social competence.
We’ve had some meetings at the elementary school he’ll attend. I went there with him, and we stood with a bunch of kids from different kindergartens waiting for the teacher, with school kids playing around us. “Class 2b, to the classroom!” a teacher shouted. Immediately, about 25 children would run after her. It is amazing, I thought, how they are conditioned at a very young age to follow military-style orders.
Our teacher came and called us to follow her to the gym. At the door, she took Leo’s hand, smiled at me and said: “Daddy is going to wait outside.” While everybody else went in, I was the only one who had to stay in the cold schoolyard. After a short startling moment I understood. I’d been the only parent, while all others where preschool teachers.
The system needs to separate us very early, to destroy the strongest bonds of relationships, to make us weak and compliant. Of course, most of the teachers are nice and well-meaning people, at least at the elementary school near where I live. But they’ve gone through the very same process of conditioning. They learned that the most important thing is to follow orders. And that is what they do. Especially here in Germany, we should know that this in itself is very, very dangerous.
It terrifies me.
“Indian children are never alone. They are always surrounded by grandparents, uncles, cousins, relatives of all kinds, who fondle the kids, sing to them, tell them stories. If the parents go someplace, the kids go along,” said John (Fire) Lame Deer. Schools have been used in the US in a systematic and fierce way to destroy the kind of community Lame Deer describes. Of course, school has been much harder for them then it is for us civilized people. One reason for this is racism, another the systematic destruction of their native languages, that was largely done through school. But it is also because they just weren’t used to it. That time, they still knew how freedom and genuine community feels like. They still had something that we’ve lost long ago.
I’ve been asking myself why school is taking so long. I attended school for 12 painful years, and seriously, most of the time was wasted. Learning to read and write is not that hard; neither is learning some basic math. There are thousands of great books out there that cover much more than the things they teach you in school. Any average intelligent person could prepare for graduation in one or two years.
So, why all the wasted time?
Because the function of the school system is, first and foremost, to condition us with the experience that our lifetime doesn’t belong to us, but to a system. We have to be conditioned to sell eight hours or even more of our lifetime each day. We have to be conditioned, and broken, to identify with the company we work for instead of identifying with a community of family and friends, or even the land.
This is why they destroy all of it. The community, the land, and even the self.
Otherwise, we’d never put up with any of that shit. We’d resist, just like the American Indians did, until death.
“Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability” aims to clarify, but succeeds only in highlighting the lack of clarity which dominates transgender theory.
“Let me define the terms, and I’ll win any debate,” a friend told me years ago, an insight I’ve seen confirmed many times in intellectual and political arenas.
But after reading Jack Halberstam’s new book, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, I would amend that observation: Debates also can be won by making sure a term is never clearly defined. The transgender movement has yet to offer coherent explanations of the concepts on which its policy proposals are based, yet support is nearly universal in left/liberal circles. Whether or not it was the author’s intention, Trans* feels like an attempt at an outline of such explanation, but I’m sorry to report that the book offers neither clarity nor coherence.
I say sorry, because I came to the book hoping to gain greater understanding of the claims of the transgender movement, which I have not found elsewhere. Halberstam — a professor in Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University — has been writing about this subject for more than two decades and is one of the most prominent U.S. trans* intellectuals. The table of contents looked promising, but the book only deepened my belief that a radical feminist and ecological critique of the transgender movement’s ideology is necessary.
Rather than be defensive about the ambiguity of the transgender argument, Halberstam celebrates the lack of definition as a strength of the movement, an indication that trans* offers deep insights for everyone. If we shift our focus from “the housing of the body” and embrace “perpetual transition” then “we can commit to a horizon of possibility where the future is not male or female but transgender,” he writes. Instead of “male-ish” and “female-ish” bodies we can realize “the body is always under construction” and “consider whether the foundational binary of male-female may possibly have run its course.”
The very act of naming and categorizing imposes limits that constrain the imagination, according to Halberstam, hence the use of the asterisk:
“I have selected the term ‘trans*’ for this book precisely to open the term up to unfolding categories of being organized around but not confined to forms of gender variance. As we will see, the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations. As this book will show, trans* can be a name for expansive forms of difference, haptic [relating to the sense of touch] relations to knowing, uncertain modes of being, and the disaggregation of identity politics predicated upon the separating out of many kinds of experience that actually blend together, intersect, and mix. This terminology, trans*, stands at odds with the history of gender variance, which has been collapsed into concise definitions, sure medical pronouncements, and fierce exclusions.”
I quote at length to demonstrate that in using shorter excerpts from the book I am not cherry-picking a few particularly abstruse phrases to poke fun at a certain form of postmodern academic writing. My concern is not stylistic but about the arguments being presented. After reading that passage a couple of times, I think I can figure out what Halberstam’s trying to say. The problem is that it doesn’t say anything very helpful.
To be fair, Halberstam is correct in pointing out that the instinct to categorize all the world’s life, human and otherwise — “the mania for the godlike function of naming” — went hand in hand with colonialism, part of the overreach of a certain mix of politics and science in attempting to control the world. But like it or not, humans make sense of the world by naming, which need not go forward with claims of imperial domination or divine insight. We define the terms we use in trying to explain the world so that we can meaningfully communicate about that world; when a term means nothing specific, or means everything, or means nothing and everything at the same time, it is of no value unless one wants to obfuscate.
But, if Halberstam is to be believed, this criticism is irrelevant, because transgenderism “has never been simply a new identity among many others competing for space under the rainbow umbrella. Rather, it constitutes radically new knowledge about the experience of being in a body and can be the basis for very different ways of seeing the world.” So, if I don’t get it, the problem apparently is the limits of my imagination — I don’t grasp the radically new knowledge — not because the explanation is lacking.
After reading the book, I continue to believe that the intellectual project of the transgender movement isn’t so much wrong as it is incoherent, and the political project is not liberatory but regressive. What this book “keeps at bay” is a reasonable, honest request: What does any of this mean?
In other writing — here in 2014 and again in 2016, along with a chapter in my 2017 book The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men — I’ve asked how we should understand transgenderism if the movement’s claim is that a male human can actually be female (or vice versa) in biological terms. If transgender signals a dissatisfaction with the culturally constructed gender norms of patriarchy — which are rigid, repressive, and reactionary — I’ve suggested it would be more effective to embrace the longstanding radical feminist critique of patriarchy.
Rather than repeat those arguments here, I want to try another approach, stating simply that I have good reason to believe I’m real, that the human species of which I am a member is real, and that the ecosphere of which we are a part is real. That is, there is a material reality to the world within which I, and all other carbon-based life forms, operate. I cannot know everything there is to know about that material world, of course, but I can trust that it is real.
The cultural/political/economic systems that shape human societies make living in the real world complex and confusing, and the ways those systems distribute wealth and power are often morally unacceptable. But to challenge that injustice, it’s necessary to understand that real world and communicate my understanding to others in clear fashion.
In left/liberal circles, especially on college campuses, “trans*” increasingly is where the action is for those concerned with social justice. It offers — for everyone, whether transgender-identified or not — the appearance of serious intellectual work and progressive politics. Endorsing the transgender project is a way to signal one is on the cutting edge, and work like Halberstam’s is embraced in these circles, where support for the transgender movement is required to be truly intersectional.
My challenge to those whose goal is liberation is simple: How does this help us understand the real world we are trying to change? How does it help us understand patriarchy, the system of institutionalized male dominance out of which so much injustice emerges?
Halberstam likely would put me in the category of “transphobic feminism” for “refusing to seriously engage” with transfeminism, but I am not transphobic (if, by that term, we mean one who is afraid of, or hateful toward, people who identify as transgender). Nor do I refuse to seriously engage other views (unless we describe a critique of another intellectual position as de facto evidence of a lack of serious engagement). I am rooted in radical feminism, one of those “versions of feminism that still insist on the centrality of female-bodied women,” according to Halberstam.
On that point, Halberstam is accurate: radical feminists argue that patriarchy is rooted in men’s claim to own or control women’s reproductive power and sexuality. Radical feminists distinguish between sex (male XY and female XX, a matter of biology) and gender (masculinity and femininity, a matter of culture and power), which means that there is no way to understand the rigid gender norms of patriarchy without recognizing the relevance of the category of “female-bodied women.” It’s hard to imagine how the binary of male-female could “run its course” given the reality of sexual reproduction.
This is where an ecological perspective, alongside and consistent with a radical feminist critique, reminds us that the world is real and we are living beings, not machines. In discussing his own top surgery (the removal of breasts), Halberstam speaks of working with the doctor:
“Together we were building something in flesh, changing the architecture of my body forever. The procedure was not about building maleness into my body; it was about editing some part of the femaleness that currently defined me. I did not think I would awake as a new self, only that some of my bodily contours would shift in ways that gave me a different bodily abode.”
We all have a right to understand ourselves as we please, and so here’s my response: My body is not a house that was constructed by an architect but rather — like all other life on the planet — is a product of evolution. I resist the suggestion I can “build” myself and recognize that a sustainable human presence on the planet is more likely if we accept that we are part of a larger living world, which has been profoundly damaged when humans treat it as our property to dominate and control.
This is the irony of Halberstam’s book and the transgender project more generally. After labeling the project of categorizing/defining as imperialist and critiquing the “mania for the godlike function of naming,” he has no problem endorsing the “godlike function” of reshaping bodies as if they were construction materials. There’s a deepening ecological sensibility in progressive politics, an awareness of what happens when humans convince ourselves that we can remake the world and ignore the biophysical limits of the ecosphere. While compassionately recognizing the reasons people who identify as transgender may seek surgery and hormone/drug treatments, we shouldn’t suppress concerns about the movement’s embrace of extreme high-tech intervention into the body, including the surgical destruction of healthy tissue and long-term health issues due to cross-sex hormones and hormone-like drugs.
I have long tried to observe what in rhetoric is sometimes called “the principle of charity,” a commitment in debate to formulating an opponent’s argument in the strongest possible version so that one’s critique is on firm footing. I have tried to do that in this review, though I concede that I’m not always sure what Halberstam is arguing, and so I may not be doing his arguments justice. But that is one of my central points: When I read this book — and many other arguments from transgender people and their allies — I routinely find myself confused, unable to understand just what is being proposed. So, again, I’ll quote at length in the hopes of being fair in my assessment, this time the book’s closing paragraph:
“Trans* bodies, in their fragmented, unfinished, broken-beyond-repair forms, remind all of us that the body is always under construction. Whether trans* bodies are policed in bathrooms or seen as killers and loners, as thwarted, lonely, violent, or tormented, they are also a site for invention, imagination, fabulous projection. Trans* bodies represent the art of becoming, the necessity of imagining, and the fleshy insistence of transitivity.”
Once again, after reading that passage a couple of times, I think I understand, sort of, the point. But, once again, I don’t see how it advances our understanding of sex and gender, of patriarchy and power. I am not alone in this assessment; people I know, including some who are sympathetic to the transgender movement’s political project, have shared similar concerns, though they often mute themselves in public to avoid being labeled transphobic.
I’m not asking of the transgender movement some grand theory to explain all the complexity of sex and gender. I just need a clear and coherent place to start. Asking questions is not transphobic, nor is observing that such clarity and coherence are lacking.
The most basic commandment of our culture: Thou shalt pretend there is nothing wrong.
Indigenous cultures, uncivilized societies that did not build cities and lived as hunters and gatherers or from small scale subsistence farming, were land-based cultures. Their livelihoods were based on the land and the ecosystems.
Our culture–in the broadest sense civilization, in the narrower sense western, more recently industrial civilization–is based on faith. In terms of livelihoods, our culture is no longer based solely on the exploitation of its land base, but on the hyper-exploitation of almost all parts of the world, including the oceans.
The people of our culture do not live in the real physical world. With their cities they have built their own world and with their beliefs their own artificial reality, with which they have largely sealed themselves off from the real world and the truth. Our culture is characterized by an increasingly complex technology. People are proud of it, identify with it and trust technology with an almost unshakable faith. Last but not least, they regard technology as synonymous with progress. Cultures without complex technology have for our culture about as much value as ecosystems. They are exploited, assimilated, “developed” and ultimately destroyed.
Our culture is based on faith, because only with strong belief systems coupled with the corresponding propaganda machinery can a potentially volatile mass like our modern society, with its unprecedented number of people, be managed, controlled and kept reasonably stable. Mass propaganda has always been of great importance for civilization. From the invention of writing to book printing, newspapers, mail, telegraphy, telephone, fax, radio, television and the internet; mobile phones and smartphones; to social media that gives us the illusion of contact with other people, while in reality we are sitting lonely in front of the screen of a machine. Technology is never neutral. Our form of technology is not so much a sign of a particularly advanced culture as a necessary instrument with which the rulers want to keep us under control. The current IT technology with its screen culture and digital hallucinations is the most effective opium for the masses ever invented, and at the same time the most perfect surveillance device of all time.
We have no culture and we have no society. Although I use these terms for lack of alternatives, our form of society is actually a kind of anti-culture that destroys any form of original culture and community. A culture would be a set of social rules, values and norms, aimed at organizing a stable and sustainable society. Essentially, culture regulates the relationship between human and non-human beings, i.e. the interaction with the land base as well as the relationships between humans themselves.
The current form, of liberalism, capitalism, consumerism, individualism, techno cult and popculture, neither knows rules for a meaningful interaction with the land base nor for the people between themselves. The only rule is the often unspoken, but very strong hierarchy with money as a synonym for power. Money has no value in itself. Yet for most people, money is like a religious fetish in which they believe and for which they do almost everything.
The beliefs of our culture have direct and profound effects on the real world and my own life. Why do you pay rent? I pay rent because I know that if I didn’t, ultimately the police would force me out of my apartment and I‘d be homeless. So I pay rent because I have to bow to structural violence. That the landlord owns my apartment and I have to pay for the right to live here is not based on any natural or physical laws, but is a purely social convention. It only works because the majority of the population believes in the right of the owners to exploit those who don’t own. De facto, I have to work for my landlord, for the only purpose of making him even richer than he already is.
Many of the beliefs on which our culture is based are not particularly credible in themselves and have a quasi-religious character, so the people of our culture must be indoctrinated from an early age. Without permanent indoctrination, our “culture” would immediately fall apart. That is why the rulers were so afraid of the ‚60s hippie culture and drugs such as cannabis and LSD: because they are able, in a sense, to resolve social conditioning. Obviously that wasn’t enough.
Our economic system is based on the belief in infinite growth on a finite planet. We act on the belief that we can make infinite use of finite fossil fuels. We believe that our transport system is more important than our breathing air, and we act as if a transport system based on fossil fuels and poisoning our air will last forever. We believe in infinite technological progress and consistently ignore the dramatic effects this belief has on the real world. We believe that we can destroy not only the climate and the oceans, but practically the whole planet and still live on it. We actually know better; yet we–or rather the rulers–act according to this faith. And we have been so polite and believe that the rulers have the right to diligently destroy our future and that of our children in order to increase their wealth.
Almost all the beliefs of our culture are bare lies that are not even particularly credible. Therefore, they must be constantly repeated through propaganda in order to permanently condition people. Out of these lies, the credulous people of our “culture” assemble their small, cozy, intact worlds, which they vehemently defend against the truth. Those who have a glimpse of the fact that not everything is all right will build even more defenses, choosing between New Age esoteric, the myth of the hundredth monkey, the hope of a collective paradigm shift, the belief in digital man as the consciousness of the universe, the golden age, etc., in order not to have to see the truth. Here too, the more absurd the faith, the more fervently it is believed and defended against all evidence.
It is no exaggeration to state that this culture is pathologically insane. Our self-perception as “culture” is the self-perception of a madman. We believe that we are the most highly developed culture that ever existed, and that the cultures before us were primitive and regressive. Therefore, we also believe that it is justified to brutally eradicate “primitive” indigenous cultures all over the world. Progress has its price and you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Racism, that is, the belief that a “race” of people (usually those with the lighter skin) are better, smarter, more progressive, stronger, higher developed than others–along with a distorted version of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the idea of the survival of the fittest, that applied to human societies forms the ideology of social Darwinism–has created a justification that has already proven itself in numerous genocides. Racism naturally refers to beings of other species (we do not use the term here, although it would be much more appropriate, since they actually are different races). My point is that indigenous people, just like wolves, bison, salmon, bears, lynxes, whales, gorillas and many other creatures, have been and continue to be victims of the Holocaust. And all this is based on the belief that we, as the crown of creation, have the right to eradicate all others and thus deny them the right to life.
“In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction.”
Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words
It is actually not difficult to see that our culture is based on violence and destroys all life on this planet. All we have to do is to take off the numerous cultural eyeglasses that guide our perception. Then we will lose faith in all these lies and realize the truth. This automatically puts us outside our culture and we cannot go back, because we have recognized it and all the lies for what they really are. Only from the outside do we see our civilization as the terrible monster that consumes and destroys all living things.
What remains is actually only the faith in Mother Earth and the land base on which you live. And that makes sense, because behind all of these collective hallucinations, it is still Mother Earth who keeps us alive. Nature has produced an incredible variety of creatures and continues to do so if we only let her. So it is the moral duty of every person who no longer identifies with this culture but with the real world, to defend life on the planet against the monster that is civilization.
Featured image: Ice melt in a Greenland fjord: A little heat makes a big difference. Image: By Hannes Grobe, via Wikimedia Commons
by Robert Doublin / Deep Green Resistance
Looks like April will be the first month on record averaging 410 parts per million volume (ppmv) of carbon dioxide or above in the atmosphere. We have maybe 4-6 weeks before the yearly plant growth cycle in the Northern Hemisphere pulls the concentration down a few points. We have maybe a year or two before the increases due to fossil fuel use, et al, keeps the average above 410 all year round.
“How much and how soon and under how much warming pressure is still a matter of some debate in the sciences. But the situation is now looking a bit worse for the Totten Glacier — an enormous sea-fronting slab of ice as big as France that if it melted in total would, by itself, raise sea levels by about 10-13 feet globally.”
Featured image: Edgar Degas’ “Scène de guerre au Moyen-âge,” 1865, is one of the exhibits said to be inspired by Sade RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Gérard Blot
While the alternative culture “celebrates political disengagement,” what it attacks are conventions, morals, and boundaries. It comes down to a simple question: Are we after shock value or justice? Is the problem a constraining set of values or an oppressive set of material conditions? Remember that one of the cardinal points of liberalism is that reality is made up of values and ideas, not relationships of power and oppression. So not only is shock value an adolescent goal, it’s also a liberal one.
This program of attacking boundaries rather than injustice has had serious consequences on the left, and to the extent that this attack has won, on popular culture as a whole. When men decide to be outlaw rebels, from Bohemians to Hell’s Angels, one primary “freedom” they appropriate is women. The Marquis de Sade, who tortured women, girls, and boys—some of whom he kidnapped, some of whom he bought—was declared “the freest spirit that has yet existed” by Guillaume Apollinaire, the founder of the surrealist movement.63 Women’s physical and sexual boundaries are seen as just one more middle-class convention that men have a right to overcome on their way to freedom. Nowhere is this more apparent—and appalling—than in the way so many on the left have embraced pornography.
The triumph of the pornographers is a victory of power over justice, cruelty over empathy, and profits over human rights. I could make that statement about Walmart or McDonalds and progressives would eagerly agree. We all understand that Walmart destroys local economies, a relentless impoverishing of communities across the US that is now almost complete. It also depends on near-slave conditions for workers in China to produce the mountains of cheap crap that Walmart sells. And ultimately the endless growth model of capitalism is destroying the world. Nobody on the left claims that the cheap crap that Walmart produces equals freedom. Nobody defends Walmart by saying that the workers, American or Chinese, want to work there. Leftists understand that people do what they have to for survival, that any job is better than no job, and that minimum wage and no benefits are cause for a revolution, not a defense of those very conditions. Likewise McDonalds. No one defends what McDonalds does to animals, to the earth, to workers, to human health and human community by pointing out that the people standing over the boiling grease consented to sweat all day or that hog farmers voluntarily signed contracts that barely return a living. The issue does not turn on consent, but on the social impacts of injustice and hierarchy, on how corporations are essentially weapons of mass destruction. Focusing on the moment of individual choice will get us nowhere.
The problem is the material conditions that make going blind in a silicon chip factory in Taiwan the best option for some people. Those people are living beings. Leftists lay claim to human rights as our bedrock and our north star: we know that that Taiwanese woman is not different from us in any way that matters, and if going blind for pennies and no bathroom breaks was our best option, we would be in grim circumstances.
And the woman enduring two penises shoved up her anus? This is not an exaggeration or “focusing on the worst,” as feminists are often accused of doing. “Double-anal” is now standard fare in gonzo porn, the porn made possible by the Internet, the porn with no pretense of a plot, the porn that men overwhelmingly prefer. That woman, just like the woman assembling computers, is likely to suffer permanent physical damage. In fact, the average woman in gonzo porn can only last three months before her body gives out, so punishing are the required sex acts. Anyone with a conscience instead of a hard-on would know that just by looking. If you spend a few minutes looking at it—not masturbating to it, but actually looking at it—you may have to agree with Robert Jensen that pornography is “what the end of the world looks like.”
By that I don’t mean that pornography is going to bring about the end of the world; I don’t have apocalyptic delusions. Nor do I mean that of all the social problems we face, pornography is the most threatening. Instead, I want to suggest that if we have the courage to look honestly at contemporary pornography, we get a glimpse—in a very visceral, powerful fashion—of the consequences of the oppressive systems in which we live. Pornography is what the end will look like if we don’t reverse the pathological course that we are on in this patriarchal, white-supremacist, predatory corporate-capitalist society.… Imagine a world in which empathy, compassion, and solidarity—the things that make decent human society possible—are finally and completely overwhelmed by a self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking. Imagine those values playing out in a society structured by multiple hierarchies in which a domination/subordination dynamic shapes most relationships and interaction.… [E]very year my sense of despair deepens over the direction in which pornography and our pornographic culture is heading. That despair is rooted not in the reality that lots of people can be cruel, or that some number of them knowingly take pleasure in that cruelty. Humans have always had to deal with that aspect of our psychology. But what happens when people can no longer see the cruelty, when the pleasure in cruelty has been so normalized that it is rendered invisible to so many? And what happens when for some considerable part of the male population of our society, that cruelty becomes a routine part of sexuality, defining the most intimate parts of our lives?64
All leftists need to do is connect the dots, the same way we do in every other instance of oppression. The material conditions that men as a class create (the word is patriarchy) mean that in the US battering is the most commonly committed violent crime: that’s men beating up women. Men rape one in three women and sexually abuse one in four girls before the age of fourteen. The number one perpetrator of childhood sexual abuse is called “Dad.” Andrea Dworkin, one of the bravest women of all time, understood that this was systematic, not personal. She saw that rape, battering, incest, prostitution, and reproductive exploitation all worked together to create a “barricade of sexual terrorism”65 inside which all women are forced to live. Our job as feminists and members of a culture of resistance is not to learn to eroticize those acts; our task is to bring that wall down.
In fact, the right and left together make a cozy little world that entombs women in conditions of subservience and violence. Critiquing male supremacist sexuality will bring charges of being a censor and a right-wing antifun prude. But seen from the perspective of women, the right and the left create a seamless hegemony.
Gail Dines writes, “When I critique McDonalds, no one calls me anti-food.”66 People understand that what is being critiqued is a set of unjust social relations—with economic, political, and ideological components—that create more of the same. McDonalds does not produce generic food. It manufactures an industrial capitalist product for profit. The pornographers are no different. The pornographers have built a $100 billion a year industry, selling not just sex as a commodity, which would be horrible enough for our collective humanity, but sexual cruelty.67 This is the deep heart of patriarchy, the place where leftists fear to tread: male supremacy takes acts of oppression and turns them into sex. Could there be a more powerful reward than orgasm?
And since it feels so visceral, such practices are defended (in the rare instance that a feminist is able to demand a defense) as “natural.” Even when wrapped in racism, many on the left refuse to see the oppression in pornography. Little Latina Sluts or Pimp My Black Teen provoke not outrage, but sexual pleasure for the men consuming such material. A sexuality based on eroticizing dehumanization, domination, and hierarchy will gravitate to other hierarchies, and find a wealth of material in racism. What it will never do is build an egalitarian world of care and respect, the world that the left claims to want.
On a global scale, the naked female body—too thin to bear live young and often too young as well—is for sale everywhere, as the defining image of the age, and as a brutal reality: women and girls are now the number one product for sale on the global black market. Indeed, there are entire countries balancing their budgets on the sale of women.68 Is slavery a human rights abuse or a sexual thrill? Of what use is a social change movement that can’t decide?
We need to stake our claim as the people who care about freedom, not the freedom to abuse, exploit, and dehumanize, but freedom from being demeaned and violated, and from a cultural celebration of that violation.
This is the moral bankruptcy of a culture built on violation and its underlying entitlement. It’s a slight variation on the Romantics, substituting sexual desire for emotion as the unmediated, natural, and privileged state. The sexual version is a direct inheritance of the Bohemians, who reveled in public displays of “transgression, excess, sexual outrage.” Much of this ethic can be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, torturer of women and children. Yet he has been claimed as inspiration and foundation by writers such as “Baudelaire, Flaubert, Swinburne, Lautréamont, Dostoevski, Cocteau, and Apollinaire” as well as Camus and Barthes.69 Wrote Camus, “Two centuries ahead of time … Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom.”70 Sade also presents an early formulation of Nietzsche’s will to power. His ethic ultimately provides “the erotic roots of fascism.”71
Once more, it is time to choose. The warnings are out there, and it’s time to listen. College students have 40 percent less empathy than they did twenty years ago.72 If the left wants to mount a true resistance, a resistance against the power that breaks hearts and bones, rivers and species, it will have to hear—and, finally, know—this one brave sentence from poet Adrienne Rich: “Without tenderness, we are in hell.”73
Under patriarchy, women have been groomed into a perpetual state of tolerance; today, “tolerance” has been taken up by certain feminists, making it impossible to define a set of collective values or assert shared goals.
