The Irish Women’s Lobby (IWD) launched on March 8, 2021. I interviewed three members of the group recently about their goals and the particular issues they are dealing with in Ireland.
Meghan Murphy: What is the purpose of the Irish Women’s Lobby? What are your main aims and fights?
IWL: Well I guess the first thing we’d say is that, as Irish women, we’re in a very peculiar and disturbing time in Irish history. We are living in an environment and time where not only are our rights being eroded in Irish legislation, but the erosion of our rights is being championed as progress by people who should know better — among them some who are well paid to know better. There’s nothing unique about our situation, we see this being rolled out all across the Western world, but it is significantly more advanced in Ireland than in many other nations, and we have the “self-ID” [this is shorthand for this kind of legislation, allowing essentially anyone to self-identify as the opposite sex, easily] aspect of the Irish 2015 Gender Recognition Act to thank for that.
We set up the Irish Women’s Lobby (IWL) in response to this and other situations women are currently facing here. Ireland has become an increasingly hostile environment for any woman raising her voice in defense of her own sex-based rights, and this has been increasing year after year since 2015, but at this point we have reached a ludicrous level. Our predicament might have some comedic value if it weren’t so likely to cost some women their lives. This is because the situation here has advanced to the point where male sex offenders are now being incarcerated in female prisons.
The problem here is that Ireland passed the Gender Recognition Act in a form which allows legal “gender” changes without any requirement for medical intervention or evaluation. This was introduced with virtually no discussion and certainly no real investigation into possible negative repercussions. The enactment of this legislation has created a scenario where trans-identifying males can gain access to any spaces or services designated for females, with zero safeguarding. Alongside the legislation there has been relentless campaigning from “social justice” activists, propagating an environment where feminists are unable to voice their concerns without fear of retaliation.
Reflecting the power of the lobby, the takeover of the policy-making arena and NGOs in Ireland is extensive, and of course it is women who are targeted. The Irish Health Service removed all mention of “woman” and “women” from an ad campaign to prevent Cervical Cancer, apparently in an effort to be “inclusive.” Following protest spearheaded by Radicailín, a radical feminist group made up of Irish and migrant women, the ad was updated, but it still uses “woman” only once, and “people” five times (“women” doesn’t appear at all). Meanwhile, in Ireland, unlike with cervical cancer, prostate cancer remains a men-only disease, and has not magically become “gender-neutral” in an effort to be “inclusive.”
The public, for the most part, are largely unaware that the Gender Recognition Act is in place, nor do they understand the level of threat it carries for women and girls. The IWL is attempting to raise these and other issues, and create room for discussion across the public narrative. We are, of course, bullied and abused for it in a multitude of ways, as feminists are and always have been.
Our first and most urgent aim is to provide media and political representation for women in Ireland. This is because the National Women’s Council of Ireland is actively working against women’s rights. They — along with Amnesty International, Trans Equality Network Ireland, and other well-funded NGOs — signed a petition calling for the removal of “legitimate representation” from women like ourselves and others who “defend biology.” In a situation where we have the National Women’s Council of Ireland and Amnesty International demanding that any Irish woman (or man for that matter) who speaks out against the damaging and harmful effects of the 2015 Gender Recognition Act be denied media and political representation, we had no choice but to insist on our democratic right to that representation. When that letter was signed by those groups, and the National Women’s Council of Ireland in particular, we knew that as Irish women we had no choice but speak out in defiance of those who signed on to a call to silence Irish women in the public sphere. We feel the facts here speak for themselves; it should be plainly apparent that the signatories to that letter acted in a manner that was aggressive, disturbing, and blatantly totalitarian.
MM: How does the Irish women’s movement differ from the women’s movement in other parts of Europe and North America?
IWL: The women’s movement here differs in all sorts of ways, one unfortunate manifestation being the number of women who declare themselves feminists while undermining or outright aggressing against women’s sex-based rights. You’d have to despair for a feminism that doesn’t recognize its own purpose. All of this is of course heavily underpinned by social class, as is everything in Ireland. You could say class is to Ireland what race is to the United States – of course they’re not the same thing, but there are some startling parallels. In Ireland, class is the great unmentionable — you’re not supposed to talk about that. The problem is deeply rooted in our history of British colonialism, and has persisted for centuries.
Every part of the West will have its own regional issues. For us, a shift towards the left was socially necessary in order to counterbalance a national narrative that had leaned too heavily towards religious and social conservatism for too long, but we are knee-deep in neoliberal nonsense now. Some parts of the Western World have issues with the political narrative going too far right. We have the opposite problem: we’ve gone too far left — but like so many other places, it’s a “left” that has abandoned a class analysis, and with it, the working classes, both female and male. Ireland’s woke brigade have got drunk on their own Kool-Aid, but we’ve all got to share the hangover.
MM: What is the situation with prostitution currently?
IWL: The vast majority of women in Irish prostitution — about 95 per cent — are migrant women, predominantly from the poorer countries of Eastern Europe but also from Nigeria, Brazil, and parts of Asia. The percentages will fluctuate, but foreign women in the Irish sex trade always figure somewhere at 90+ per cent. That’s been the situation for years; it’s very sad. It’s also very sickening to see the Soros funded pro-prostitution lobbyists relentlessly campaign to decriminalize pimps in Ireland. Migrant women are generally paid a pittance once their pimp takes their cut, and the push to decriminalize their pimps comes from women who charge 300 and 400 euros an hour in escort prostitution and are salaried to press for the full decriminalization of the Irish sex trade on top of that. They’re in no way representative of the women who would suffer most if they got their way in decriminalizing the pimps of the Irish sex trade.
It is now illegal to purchase the body of a woman (or anyone) for sexual use in Ireland, but male habits of sexual entitlement die hard, and we would say there are not nearly enough convictions, though there have been some. There are numerous problems in this area, including that some organizations and individuals who speak out against prostitution use apolitical language, like “sex work” and “the sex buyers’ law” etc. This kind of framing argues against itself: you cannot say that prostitution is inherently violent while simultaneously framing it as employment, and you cannot say that what men purchase in prostitution is sexual access to women’s bodies while at the same time referring to them as “sex buyers.” The international abolitionist movement and the survivor’s movement in particular has very strong ties to Ireland. That movement has a language all of its own, much of it framed by survivors. It’s a pity more Irish campaigners didn’t take the time to learn it.
MM: Can you explain the issue around language a little further? What is preferable?
IWL: Terms like “sex work”, “sex buyers’ law,” and “the Equality Model” are never used here — not by anyone political, strategical, or experienced. Irish abolitionist activists say “prostitution” to refer to prostitution, “punters” to refer to johns, and “the Abolitionist Model” or “the Nordic Model” to refer to abolitionist legal frameworks. Survivors who spent a decade fighting for the Nordic Model now have to listen to the corporate reframing of “the Equality Model,” which may work well elsewhere in the world, but that’s not what Irish women fought for. This language was imposed on Irish sex-trade survivors by corporate feminists who never took the time to ask. You’d be interested to know what they’re thinking, except they’re not thinking. Feminist organizations that ignore survivor groups in their anti sex-trade campaign planning are not thinking at all.
MM: Is anything else of note happening with gender identity legislation and ideology in Ireland?
IWL: In 2007, the Irish High Court found that Ireland was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights as it did not have a process to legally recognize the “acquired gender” of transsexual persons. In 2011, a Government Gender Recognition Advisory Group after broad consultation recommended medical gatekeeping, and living full-time for a two-year period in the “changed gender” prior to receiving a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). The subsequent Gender Recognition Bill published in December 2014 required medical evaluation and certification.
However, following lobbying and subterfuge, the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) that was passed in 2015 had no such requirements, or any gatekeeping whatsoever. In fact, the GRA allows any person to download and fill in an A4 form, have it notarized, making them, for all intents and purposes, legally the “opposite” sex.
The lack of any gatekeeping whatsoever means that any man — be he a rapist, a pedophile, a voyeur, or any type of sexual pervert — can obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) that allows him to access all areas dedicated for women. That includes: hospital wards, changing rooms, prisons, domestic violence refuges, clinics treating victims of sexual assault, changing facilities etc. There are literally no limits. What’s more, “sex” is not a specific “protected characteristic” under Irish Equality legislation — “gender” is, rendering any defence of women’s right to single-sex facilities even weaker.
Because of self-ID, any violent male sex offender can legally identify as a woman, and demand to be imprisoned with vulnerable women in Ireland. This has already happened. One man charged with ten counts of sex offences was taken directly from the courthouse to the women’s estate in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison. Another violent young man — whose court report states that the expert from the Tavistock gender clinic did not believe he had gender dysphoria — was allowed to obtain a GRC while in state care as a violent offender, and has been housed in Limerick Women’s Prison. His own mother had to move cross country to a secret location to escape him, such was the seriousness of his homicidal intentions, which are wholly transfixed on women. The Irish public, however, were fed a story in the mainstream press about “Ireland’s Homicidal Girl.” Needless to say, the safety, health, and welfare of the imprisoned women — most of whom, if not all, are victims of sexual and violent abuse — are completely disregarded. Ireland’s terrible history of abusing incarcerated women is being perpetuated, but this time in the name of the “new religion” rather than the old.
MM: The IWL has an upcoming online event, on April 29, called “Speak Up For Free Speech.” Can you tell me about that event and why you felt it was important to organize something specifically addressing free speech?
IWL: The issue of free speech has become very urgent, both here in Ireland and across the Global North as legislation is being drafted and enacted to expand “hate crimes” to include “hate speech.” Wherever this legislation is enacted, it curtails our right to free expression in harmful and dangerous ways. Women face the prospect of being accused of a hate crime for stating biological facts, or even “misgendering.” If this bill passes, the National Women’s Council of Ireland and Amnesty International won’t need to sign a petition demanding our right to political and media representation be removed, because those of us who “defend biology” will already be silenced by law.
Of the many pressing issues facing women and girls, the issue of free speech is absolutely crucial — if we are not allowed to say that women have the right to single-sex spaces, how the hell can we defend our right to those spaces?
We think the timing of this webinar is absolutely perfect — we are hosting Iseult White, who will be discussing free speech and cancel culture here in Ireland; Lisa Mackenzie, who will be talking about the Scottish experience, and of course we are really looking forward to hearing from you about what women across North America have been dealing with too.
Robert Jensen is a rare and important example of a man embracing radical feministm. As radical feminist organisation, DGR encourages men to step up against patriarchy (and this neither means to be a man-hater nor a sexual prude). As Robert Jensen states below, “Our goal is the end of patriarchy by challenging the patriarchal practices that do so much damage to so many of us.”
This certainly includes pornography.
Let’s start with the world according to pornographers:
Sex is natural. Pornography is just sex on film. Therefore, pornography is natural.
If you do not accept the obvious “logic” of that argument, you are a prude who is sex-negative.
Any questions?
But what about the intense misogyny in pornography?
You’re a prude.
But what about the explicit racism in pornography?
You’re sex-negative.
What about the physical and psychological injuries routinely suffered by women used in pornography?
You’re prudishly sex-negative.
What about the consequences of conditioning so many men’s arousal and experience of sexual pleasure to these sexist and racist images?
You’re sex-negatively prudish.
If your concerns about pornography flow from spirituality, you must be a religious nut.
If your concerns about pornography are based in feminism, you must be a man-hater.
Sadly, this is often how attempts to discuss the social problems flowing from the production and consumption of contemporary sexually explicit media play out—especially in conversations with liberal, progressive, and leftist men, and with some feminists who describe themselves as pro-porn or “sex positive.”
My goal is to mark those responses as diversions; focus on the content of pornography and its underlying ideology; examine why such material is so prevalent; and discuss why this matters for our attempts to create a truly sex-positive society that fosters meaningful autonomy for girls and women.
So, “pornographic distortions,” refers both to the ways in which pornography distorts human sexuality, and the way in which pornography’s defenders distort the views of critics. Let’s start with the latter.
Pornography’s critics
For the record, I am not a religious nut nor a man-hater.
I am a secular progressive Christian. By that, I mean that I was raised in a predominantly Christian culture, and the narratives and ethics of Christianity remain relevant in my life, even though I don’t accept all Christian doctrines and I long ago rejected the supernatural claims associated with a conventional interpretation of the faith tradition (i.e., a virgin birth and resurrection as historical facts, the possibility of miracles, the existence of a divine entity). But those stories and moral frameworks have influenced how I see the world, in conversation with many other philosophical and political traditions that I find helpful. I see no reason to ignore this aspect of my life.
I work from a radical feminist analysis of patriarchy. By that, I mean that I recognize institutionalized male dominance as morally unjust and not only an impediment to women’s freedom but to social justice more generally (that’s feminism), and central to patriarchy are men’s attempts to own or control women’s reproductive power and sexuality (that’s radical feminism). I see no reason to be afraid of that analysis.
In more than three decades of work in the feminist anti-pornography movement and the larger struggle against men’s violence and exploitation of women, I have worked with a wide range of people motivated by religion and/or feminism. I have met many lovely people, from a variety of backgrounds and with a wide range of experiences, who reject the pornography industry’s cynical approach to human sexuality and are committed to challenging the routine abuse of women in the sexual-exploitation industries. I have yet to meet someone who is a prude or sex-negative. Such people exist, of course, but they aren’t a part of the movement I am part of. Most of us in the anti-pornography movement struggle to understand the complexity of sexuality, which is true of most people I meet. Some of us in the movement have sexual histories marked by trauma, which also makes us pretty “normal,” given how routine sexual violence is in patriarchal cultures. Our goal is the end of patriarchy by challenging the patriarchal practices that do so much damage to so many of us. We struggle to make a truly sex-positive culture possible.
That’s as much time as I am willing to spend trying to persuade people that I’m not crazy or hateful. Let’s move on to the more important task of understanding how and why the pornography industry offers such a destructive picture of human sexuality.
The pornography industry
Let’s start with terminology. I used the term “sexual-exploitation industries” to include prostitution, strip clubs, massage parlors, and escort services, along with pornography and other mediated forms of commercial sex. Applying a feminist analysis, all of these enterprises are ways that men buy and sell objectified female bodies for sexual pleasure. Boys and vulnerable men are also exploited in these industries, but the majority of these businesses offer men the opportunity to buy women and girls.
Pornography is also a form of mass media. Applying a media analysis, we examine the production process, the stories being told, and audience reception. How is pornography made and who profits? What are the patterns and themes in pornographic images and stories? How do the consumers of pornography use the material in their lives and with what effects?
I’ll focus here on the content of pornography, but first let’s recognize the importance of understanding production and reception.
How is pornography made? Andrea Dworkin, the writer/activist so central to the feminist critique, always emphasized that what you see in pornography is not simulated sex. The sex acts being performed on a woman that appear to be uncomfortable or painful were done to a real woman. Did that woman choose that? In some sense yes, but under what conditions and with what other choices available? What constraints did she face in her life and what opportunities did she have? And whatever level of choice she made doesn’t change the nature of the injuries that women sustain. Before we even ask about women’s choices, we should focus on men: Why do men choose to use pornography that exploits women?
There are many different genres in pornography, but the bulk of the market is heterosexual sex marketed to heterosexual men, who use it as a masturbation facilitator. There is a long debate about the relationship of pornography use and sexual violence, a question with no simple answer. But, as advertisers have long observed, exposure to media messages can affect attitudes and attitudes shape behavior. We know that people, especially young people, are prone to imitating behaviors they see in mass media that are presented as fashionable or exciting. Consider the advice a university sex researcher offers to male students: “If you’re with somebody for the first time, don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.” Why would such advice be necessary? Those acts are routine in pornography, and pornography is the de facto sex education for many boys and young men.
Pornographic images
My focus here is on pornographic images, specifically those produced by the heterosexual pornography industry. We’ll use a simple definition for pornography: Graphic sexually explicit material that is designed to produce sexual arousal, with a focus on material produced for men, who are the majority of the consumers. While women’s use of pornography has increased in recent years, the industry still produces material that reflects the male sexual imagination in patriarchy.
A bit of history is useful in understanding these images. The pornography industry operated largely underground until the 1960s and ‘70s, when it began being more accepted in mainstream society. That led to a sharp increase in the amount of pornography produced, a trend that expanded dramatically with new media technologies, such as VCRs, DVDs, and the internet.
The industry’s desire to increase profits drove the development of new products, in this case a wider variety of sexual acts in pornographic films. The standard sexual script in pornography — little or no foreplay, oral sex (primarily performed by women on men), vaginal intercourse, and occasionally anal intercourse — expanded to keep viewers from becoming satiated and drifting away. In capitalism, competition for market share produces “innovation,” though more often than not innovation means a slightly different version of products we didn’t need in the first place. In that sense, pornography is a quintessentially capitalist business.
The first of those changes was the more routine presentation of men penetrating women anally, in increasingly rough fashion. Why anal? One longtime pornography producer whom I interviewed at an industry trade show explained it to me in explicit language, which I’ll paraphrase. Men know that most women don’t want anal sex, he said. So, when men get angry at their wives and girlfriends, they think to themselves, “I’d like to fuck her in the ass.” Because they can’t necessarily do that in real life, he said, they love it in pornography.
That man didn’t realize he was articulating, in his own crude fashion, a radical feminist critique: pornography is not just sex on film but rather sex in the context of male domination and female subordination, the central dynamic of patriarchy. The sexual experience in pornography is made more intense with sex acts that men find pleasurable but women may not want.
Where did the industry go from there? As pornographers sought to expand market share and profit, they continued to innovate. Here are several pornographic sex practices — acts that are typically not part of most people’s real-world sex lives but are common in pornography — that followed the normalizing of anal sex:
double penetration (two men penetrating a woman vaginally and anally at the same time);
double vag (two men penetrating a woman vaginally at the same time);
double anal (two men penetrating a woman anally at the same time);
gagging (oral penetration of a woman so aggressive that it makes her gag);
choking (men forcefully grasping a woman’s throat during intercourse, sometimes choking the woman); and
ATM (industry slang for ass-to-mouth, when a man removes his penis from the anus of a woman and, without visible cleaning, inserts his penis into her mouth or the mouth of another woman).
Other routine acts in pornography include slapping and spitting on women, pulling women’s hair, and ejaculating on women’s bodies (long called “the money shot”), especially on their faces (what has come to be called a “facial”).
Even pornographers acknowledge that they can’t imagine what comes after all this. One industry veteran told me that everything that could be done to a woman’s body had been filmed. “After all, how many dicks can you stick in a girl at one time?” he said. A director I interviewed echoed that, wondering “Where can it go besides [multiple penetrations]? Every hole is filled.” Another director worried that pornography was going too far and that porn sex increasingly resembled “circus acts.” “The thing about it is,” he told me, “there’s only but so many holes, only but so many different types of penetration that can be executed upon a woman.”
One pornographic genre that explores other forms of degradation is called “interracial,” which has expanded in the past two decades. Films in this category can feature any combination of racial groups, but virtually all employ racist stereotypes (the hot-blooded Latina, sexually animalistic black women, demure Asian “geishas” who live to serve white men, immigrant women who are easily exploited) and racist language (I’ll spare you examples of that). One of the most common interracial scenes is a white woman being penetrated by one or more black men, who are presented as being rougher and more aggressive, drawing on the racist stereotype of black men as a threat to the purity of white women, while at the same time revealing the white woman to be nothing but a slut who seeks such defilement. This racism would be denounced in any other mass media form but continues in pornography with little or no objection from most progressives.
Finally, in recent years there has been an increase in what my friend Gail Dines calls “pseudo-child pornography.” Sexually explicit material using minors is illegal and is vigorously prosecuted, and so mainstream pornography stays away from actual child pornography. But the industry uses young-looking adult women in childlike settings (the classic image is a petite woman, almost always white, in a girls’ school uniform) to create the impression that an adult man can have the high school cheerleader of his fantasy. Another popular version features stepfathers having sex with a teenage stepdaughters. This material is not marketed specifically to pedophiles but is part of the mainstream pornography market for “ordinary” guys.
Dines’ summary of contemporary pornography captures these trends: “Today’s mainstream Internet porn is brutal and cruel, with body-punishing sex acts that debase and dehumanize women.”
Radical feminist critique
For those familiar with the radical feminist critique of pornography, these trends are not surprising. If the pornography is not just the presentation of explicit sex but rather sex in the patriarchal domination/subordination dynamic, then pornographers will find it profitable to sexualize any and all forms of inequality.
This analysis, developed within the larger feminist project of challenging men’s violence against women, was first articulated clearly by Andrea Dworkin, who identified what we can call the elements of the pornographic:
Objectification: when “a human being, through social means, is made less than human, turned into a thing or commodity, bought and sold.”
Hierarchy: “a group on top (men) and a group on the bottom (women).”
Submission: when acts of obedience and compliance become necessary for survival, members of oppressed groups learn to anticipate the orders and desires of those who have power over them, and their compliance is then used by the dominant group to justify its dominance.
Violence: “systematic, endemic enough to be unremarkable and normative, usually taken as an implicit right of the one committing the violence.”
Although there is variation in the thousands of commercial pornographic films produced over the years, the main themes have remained consistent: (1) All women always want sex from men; (2) women like all the sexual acts that men perform or demand, and; (3) any woman who resists can be aroused by force, which is rarely necessary because most of the women in pornography are the “nymphomaniacs” of men’s fantasies. While both men and women are portrayed as hypersexual, men typically are the sexual subjects, who control the action and dictate the terms of the sex. Women are the sexual objects fulfilling male desire.
The radical feminist critique demonstrates not only that almost all sexually explicit material is pornographic, in the sense of reflecting and reinforcing patriarchy’s domination/subordination dynamic, but that pop culture is increasingly pornified. Pornography is a specific genre, but those elements of the pornographic also are present in other media, including Hollywood movies, television shows, video games, and advertising.
Intimacy
Let’s ask a simple question the pornographers would prefer we ignore: What kind of intimacy is possible in a pornographic world? I don’t mean just in pornography, but in a world in which this kind of pornography is widely used and widely accepted. Let’s go back to the connection between media use and behavior, which is complex. Does repeated exposure to advertising lead us to buy products we would not otherwise buy? Do violent scenes in movies or video games lead to increased rates of violence in people with a predisposition for violence? Definitive judgments are difficult, but we know that stories have the power to shape attitudes and attitudes effect behavior. We know that orgasm is a powerful reinforcer. We have plenty of reasons to be concerned about how the sexist and racist messages in pornography might influence the attitudes and behavior of pornography consumers. And we have plenty of reasons to be concerned about how the normalizing of pornographic images throughout the culture might shape how we all relate to our own bodies and understand sexuality in ways we aren’t aware of.
That all seems obvious, but industry defenders continue to assert that pornography is just fantasy and we shouldn’t police people’s fantasies. They want us to believe that in this one realm of human life — the use of sexually explicit media as a masturbation facilitator, primarily for men — people are unaffected by the power of stories and images. Even if that implausible claim were true, we still should ask, why are these particular fantasies so popular? When pornographers entered the mainstream and faced fewer restrictions, why did they create so many fantasies around male domination and female subordination? Why did they sexualize racist fantasies? Why did they encourage adult men to fantasize about having sex with teenagers? Why are pornography’s fantasies so routinely cruel and degrading to women?
There isn’t a neat and clean separation of our imaginations and our actions, between what goes on in our heads and what we do in the world. Even if we don’t know exactly how mass-mediated stories and images — what the pornographers and their supporters want to label as “just fantasy” — affect attitudes and behavior, we have reasons to be concerned about contemporary pornography.
And following Andrea Dworkin, let’s also not forget the women used in pornography. For men to masturbate to a double-anal scene, a woman must be penetrated anally by two men at the same time. Do we care about that woman? Do we care about what ideas those men carry around in their head? Think back to the advice the sex educator gives to young men, counseling them to stop behaving the way that pornography taught them to behave. Do we care about the female partners of those men?
These are not problems of a few individuals. I’ve talked to many young women who have told me that when they were in middle school and high school, they conformed to boys’ pornographic notions of sex without realizing what was happening to them. Some of those same women have told me that they would prefer to date men who don’t use pornography but they’ve given up because such men are so hard to find. I’ve talked to many adult women who don’t want to ask their boyfriends or husbands whether they use pornography, or inquire about what kind of pornography they might use, because they are afraid of the answer. I’ve talked to gay men who say that some of the same problems exist in their community.
I’ve talked to a lot of men who defend their pornography use and are unwilling to stop. But in recent years I’ve talked with more men who realize the negative effects of using this pornography but find it hard to stop. They report compulsive, addictive-like use of pornography, sometimes to the point of being unable to function sexually with a partner. These men feel profoundly alienated from themselves, from their own bodies.
Heat and light
The radical feminist critique of the misogyny and racism in pornography isn’t about denying humans’ sexual nature. It is not about imposing a single set of sexual norms on everyone. It’s not about hatred of men. The critique of the domination/subordination dynamic in pornography is about the struggle to transcend the patriarchal sexuality of contemporary culture in search of a sexuality that connects people rather than alienates us from each other and from our own bodies.
I have no simple prescriptions for how to move forward, though I see no way forward without a radical feminist critique. We struggle for intimacy, for connection, for something that feels more authentic than the pornographic script. We can start by recognizing how we have all been socialized, whether through traditional religion or secular society or both, into patriarchal values. That’s bound to be painful — for men when we realize we’ve been trained to dominate sexually, and for women when they realize they have been trained to accept sexual subordination.
I will end with an idea I first articulated 25 years ago and continue to ponder. A common way people talk about sex in the dominant culture is in terms of heat: She’s hot, he’s a hottie, we had hot sex. In a world obsessed with hotness, we focus on appearances and technique — whether someone looks the way we are socialized to believe attractive people should look, and the mechanics of sex acts. We hope that the right look and the right moves will produce heat. Sex is all bump-and-grind — the friction produces the heat, and the heat makes the sex good.
But we should remember a phrase commonly used to describe an argument that is intense but which doesn’t really advance our understanding—we say that such an argument “produced more heat than light.”
Heat is part of life, but what if in our sexual activity, our search for intimacy and connection, we obsessed less about heat and thought more about light? What if instead of desperately seeking hot sex, we searched for a way to produce light when we touch? What if that touch could be about finding a way to generate light between people so that we could see ourselves and each other better?
If the goal is knowing ourselves and each other like that, then what we need is not really heat but light to illuminate the path. How do we touch and talk to each other to shine that light? I am hesitant to suggest strategies; there isn’t a recipe book for that, no list of sexual positions to work through so that we may reach sexual bliss. There is only the ongoing quest to touch and be touched, to be truly alive. James Baldwin, as he so often did, got to the heart of this in a comment that is often quoted and a good place to conclude:
“I think the inability to love is the central problem, because the inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And, if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And, if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive.”
Robert Jensen is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He collaborates with the Ecosphere Studies program at The Land Institute in Salina, KS. Jensen is the author of The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability; The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men; Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully; Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue; All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice; Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity; The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege; Citizens of the Empire:The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity; and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream.
Jensen is host of “Podcast from the Prairie” with Wes Jackson and associate producer of the forthcoming documentary film Prairie Prophecy: The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson.
Patriarchy is one of the pillars of civilization (aka The Culture of Empire). True justice, equality and sustainability can only be achieved by radically dismantling all patriarchal structures and institutions. As a radical feminist organization, DGR has committed to protect women’s rights (including their boundaries) and to challenge patriarchy.
Last week, women across the UK gathered to express collective grief and anger at the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard, whose body has now been formally identified after she was reported missing three weeks ago. From the large gathering that was forcibly broken up by police in Clapham — the place Sarah was last seen — to smaller tributes and vigils such as the one I attended in Oxford, to individuals lighting candles in their own homes, it seems Sarah Everard’s abduction from the streets of the capital has deeply shaken thousands of women.
Often when women are murdered by men, we can feel anger on behalf of the victim without feeling ourselves to be particularly at risk. We tell ourselves that since we aren’t in abusive relationships, or we aren’t involved in prostitution, we’re safe. As far as the public is aware though, neither of these circumstances applied to Sarah Everard. It wasn’t especially late when she walked home, she wasn’t drunk after a night out, nor was she wearing so-called “provocative” clothing. The neighbourhood she was walking in is a byword for yuppie gentrification and certainly not one that many would consider dangerous. CCTV shows her walking along a main road while talking to her partner on the phone. And yet, she disappeared. Many women find this frightening and disturbing because they wouldn’t think twice about doing exactly what Sarah did.
Other elements of this case also make it particularly disturbing. The fact that the man charged with her murder is a police officer. The fact that police are now carrying out an investigation into whether more minor accusations against the same man weeks prior were dealt with appropriately: the implication being that, perhaps if they had been taken more seriously, Sarah might still be alive; and also that if a man flashes you, he might be a murderer (and the police might not care). Then there is the fact that, before the suspect was arrested, police reportedly warned women to be careful going out alone, which has of course fuelled the usual controversies over women curtailing their behaviour due to the threat of violence from men. And finally, there’s the grim drip-dripping inevitability of it: woman missing; family concerned; searching ponds, but not assuming anything yet — man arrested but not charged; man charged with murder; “human remains;” “dental records” — yes, it’s her. It’s given this unfolding story a sickening “can’t look away, even though we all know how it ends” quality which is all too tragically familiar.
With this kind of nightmare story, it’s virtually always human female remains, and virtually always a man arrested. It seems trite to point out, because we all know it’s true. And yet, despite the obviousness of this statement, each case is seen as an isolated tragedy rather than part of a wider pattern worth remarking on. As one Twitter user commented, “If female on male violence were a thing like this, we’d be in ankle tags at the very best.”
This is not the first time women have been warned to stay at home for their own safety. During the late 1970s when Peter Sutcliffe — the “Yorkshire Ripper” — was attacking and killing women across Northern England, terrified women were told by police: “Do not go out at night unless absolutely necessary and only if accompanied by a man you know,” provoking an upswelling of anger from feminists who demanded a curfew on men, not themselves. (Julie Bindel claims this was what radicalized her as a teenager).
Forty years later, little has changed.
Less than a month before the women of Clapham were told the same thing, police in Basildon, Essex warned women not to go out alone after a spate of sexual assaults in broad daylight. In 2020, women were told to stay home in Belfast, after a spree of violence in which a man attacked five female members of the public with a knife; in Lincoln, after a teenager was sexually assaulted; and in Anglesey, following a string of indecent exposures and assaults on women. Of these, only the Belfast incident made national rather than local news, and it was a very minor story that was not reported by most newspapers and was soon forgotten.
Can you imagine how big of a news story it would be — and rightly so — if a UK police branch announced that members of an ethnic or religious minority should stay home or else risk being targeted for sexual assault, abduction, or murder? It would be regarded as an appalling failure of policing, effectively saying: people want to hurt you, and we can’t protect you — you’re on your own. This happens again and again to women in towns and cities all over the UK, and it’s business as usual. It’s almost as though male violence against women is like weather: you have to plan around it, but it’s not personal, it just is.
If someone is harassed, physically attacked, or killed because of their race or sexuality, that is a “hate crime” in UK law. Perpetrators of these crimes can often receive a heavier sentence, and specialized governmental and policing groups work to monitor and reduce hate crime. However, there’s no such thing in UK law as a hate crime motivated by sex. This is despite the vast majority of sexual offences — from street harassment to abduction, rape, and murder — happening almost by definition because the victim is a woman or girl (Donald Trump wasn’t interested in grabbing men by the penis), and despite the fact that often the offender is explicitly motivated by hatred or disdain for women. In other words, as stated in the Metropolitan Police’s definition of hate crime, “It is who the victim is … that motivates the offender.”
Arguably, this omission is because the sheer volume of hate crimes directed at women would overwhelm the system. Arguably, it is because misogyny is so deeply naturalized, with the division between the sexes running through every family back to the dawn of our species, that it is just very hard to see that women are systematically the victims of crimes because of their sex.*
You might be excused for assuming this blind spot for sexism is an outdated status quo that will soon be consigned to history. Unbelievably, however, the idea that women aren’t meaningfully discriminated against for being women is being actively maintained in progressive politics today.
Just last week, the SNP’s controversial Hate Crime Bill was passed, after an amendment to include sex as a protected characteristic was rejected. However, the bill does take care to explicitly include “cross-dressers.” When one compares the vast global scale of violence against women to the number of crimes directed specifically at cross-dressers, the deliberate omission of sex is inexplicable. The same week, the Green Party of England and Wales voted against a motion that would have seen sex recognized by the party alongside the other protected characteristics of the Equality Act. In February, expert women-focused domestic violence services in Brighton and in North Lanarkshire both lost their funding in favour of “non-gendered” services that will devote more attention to heterosexual and gay male victims, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of victims are women. Nowadays, sexism isn’t just invisible — it’s taboo, or just embarrassingly passé.
The last week on social media has seen an outpouring of women talking about the ubiquity of sexual harassment, and the precautions they feel they have to take because of male violence. Progressive men have largely made the right noises about needing to listen and do better. However, in an environment where sexism is demonstrably not taken seriously in politics and where women are routinely shunned and demonized for raising concerns about male violence, this all feels rather hollow to me.
Many of those taking to Twitter to tell us to #BelieveWomen and #YesAllWomen very quickly forget these principles the moment it counts. If you don’t believe me, try telling your progressive circle of friends that male sex offenders should not be housed in women’s prisons. You could add that women have alledgedly been raped as a result of this policy, as any fool could have predicted. Rather than justified feminist outrage, you will likely be met with embarrassed silence at best, or some hemming and hawing about how it’s a “difficult issue;” or, at worst, ostracism and accusations of bigotry. Middle class women are allowed to be afraid to go jogging after dark, but there is no sympathy for incarcerated women — some of the most vulnerable members of society, large numbers of whom have prior trauma at the hands of males — who are now locked up with convicted rapists. Any concern raised is just hateful scaremongering masking a conservative agenda.
If you shared one of the cartoons on Instagram debunking #NotAllMen (it’s not personal, it’s a sensible precaution to be wary of all men given the bad actions of some) then what do you say to women who feel intimidated by the presence of males who identify as female in domestic violence refuges? They should just swallow their discomfort, because… Not Those Men? It’s easy to pay lip service in the form of, “Women: if a man is making you feel uncomfortable, don’t spare his feelings — your safety is more important.” It’s much harder to speak up for female boundaries when it actually does hurt male feelings.
With that in mind, do you support the signs cropping up on university campuses, which explicitly tell women that in certain situations they should ignore their discomfort because it’s impolite not to, and shame them for feeling discomfort in the first place? If someone complained about these signs, would you think she was justified, or would you roll your eyes and call her a “Karen” who is making a fuss over nothing? Would you tell women, just like the police have so many times, that if they aren’t comfortable using “all gender” bathrooms — which data shows are less safe for women — they should just stay home? In summer 2020, when JK Rowling explained that she shared many of these concerns as a result of her experience with male violence, did you nod along when people accused her of paranoia and of “weaponizing” her abuse? Do you think she deserved what she got for speaking up?
Those who only support women’s boundaries when it’s a boundary against members of the out-group, not the in-group, do not really support women’s right to draw boundaries at all. If you only stand with women when it’s socially or politically easy to do so, then you aren’t a feminist, you’re a hypocrite. Until we firmly establish that women always have the right to express their concerns and have them taken seriously, we have no hope of defeating the attitudes that allow male violence against women to thrive.
Ellen Pasternack is a PhD student in evolutionary biology living in Oxford, UK.
*It should be noted that not all feminists are in favour of expanding hate crime legislation to include women. However, I highly doubt feminist objections were the reason for the omission of women when the law was drawn up.
In this article, originally published on feministcurrent, Brenda Brooks describes how transgender ideology pushes more and more girls and young women into “gender reassignment” by dangerous surgery and hormone treatment.
Impressions formed around the delivery of bad news have a way of sticking around,
and I suppose this is why, to use a well-worn phrase, I still remember where I was the day a friend informed me that lesbians were being harassed for rejecting men as dating partners. I laughed, at first, and probably said something like, “You sure know how to inject a dose of warped humour into a relaxing coffee break.” For the next half-hour my friend’s solemn, intense explanation left me unwilling to absorb the news that men who “self-identify” as women feel entitled to add lesbians to their dating pool. I watched her grow edgy, fevered around the eyes, and anxious. She reminded me of that terrified guy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as he dodged cars on the noirish highway, warning belligerent travellers: “They’re after you! They’re after all of us! You fools!”
Why was I so reluctant to believe the news, aside from it being as unbelievable as it was true? It might be that I had let down my guard, and even gone a little bit “post-lesbian.” I mean this in a lightly humourous way, because it seemed to me that for a while, back in the olden days, it became possible to apply a touch of irony to the matter of “identity,” as people sometimes do when the worst of times are over and a relaxed atmosphere offers perspective — even jokes. I guess you could say I’d relaxed into the fair weather.
But over lunch that day, as my friend grew more emphatic, and I grew less relaxed, I soon found myself thinking: “What fresh hell is this”?
Now, a few years later, I know a heartbreaking amount about the nature of “fresh hell.” I know the number of American girls attempting to escape being female by seeking surgery quadrupled between 2016 and 2017. Journalist Abigail Shrier addresses this trend in her book, Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which transactivists and Big Tech have done their best to shut down. Her first publisher cancelled the book after threats from staff, and Amazon refused to allow Regenery, her new publisher, to sponsor ads on its site.
The phenomenon of girls transitioning to become “male” isn’t limited to the US.
A shift has been noted in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, and beyond. In the UK, the number of children being referred for gender reassignment went from 77 in 2009 to 2,590 in 2018-19. But most striking of all is who is being referred — in 2017, according to TheGuardian, 70 per cent of referrals were female.
I’ve also apprised myself of the dangerous health projections for girls who proceed along the route from puberty blockers to surgery, which reminded me that I had once explored the idea of having my ovaries removed in order to escape the hormone-generated migraines that plague the women in my family until menopause. My doctor was quick to state the impossibility of that notion, stressing that surgery wasn’t available to “someone so young” (I was 35 years old). Why? Because my hormones protected me from heart disease and bone loss, among other things.
In her 2018 study of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), Lisa Littman determined that, “Without the knowledge of whether the gender dysphoria is likely to be temporary, extreme caution should be applied before considering the use of treatments that have permanent effects, such as cross-sex hormones and surgery.” Who could argue with erring on the side of being careful, responsible — ethical? Many, apparently, who have done just that, dismissing Littman’s suggestion that some cases of gender dysphoria may be “socially contagious,” accusing her of bias and promoting misconceptions about trans people. Among the young people she studied (83 per cent of whom were girls), more than one-third were in friendship groups in which half or more began to identify as trans in a similar time frame.
Despite all this, nothing affected me more than Dysphoric — a four part documentary series by Vaishnavi Sundar, an independent filmmaker, feminist, writer, and activist. Subtitled, “Fleeing womanhood like a house on fire,” Sundar’s film elucidates the way young women’s dysphoria is heightened through social media, as well some branches of the medical and therapeutic community, and of course trans activist ideology itself. There are a few clips in the film of social media personality Jeffrey Marsh, who refers to himself as an “internet mom,” offering a sort of alternative family (at least online) for the young, lonely, and confused. But the thing is, he is not a “mom.” Marsh, the author (ironically) of, How to be You, is a man — a gay man (who identifies as “non-binary” and “queer”) and his current metier involves promoting himself on YouTube — an activity actual mothers rarely have time for.
In Sundar’s film, endocrinologist Dr. William Malone stresses that most girls who experience dysphoria will outgrow the symptoms post-puberty, and psychiatrist Dr. Roberto D’Angelo reminds us that many of these girls will grow up to be lesbian. But, until then, they are simply young, vulnerable, and confused about how to handle their attraction to other girls.
I thought we had broken the back of this problem decades ago
— encouraging girls to be themselves, and grow up to accept their sexualities without shame. But that hard-won fight has been set back. And now the repercussions may mean the sacrifice of countless girls who are abandoning their bodies to a devastating illusion.
If this process of turning lesbian girls into straight boys isn’t conversion therapy, I don’t know what is. But now that “gender” has been added to the definition of the term, things have become confused. Now it is claimed that protecting young girls from rushing into body modification in an attempt to enter boyhood (and a life of medical intervention) is the real crime — the authentic “conversion therapy.”
I recently received a ballot from my local MP inquiring how I would like him to vote on Bill C-6, an Act to Amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy.) If conversion therapy still meant making it illegal to impose “correctives” on those who are attracted to the same sex, my position would be straightforward, and I’m sure many politicians feel they are being progressive in voting to prohibit such practices. But adding “gender identity” has changed things to mean that prohibiting “conversion therapy” pressures therapists and medical professionals to validate a child’s feeling that they have been “born in the wrong body” and require irreversible medical treatments. The Cassandra Project, a coalition of women’s organizations concerned about Bill C-6, have articulated a number of worries, not the least being that “services and therapy that do not encourage hasty transition” will be criminalized.
Considering the daily realities faced by so many girls in today’s world, there is a kind of logic to their transformative wishes — if only they could become wild horses instead, and run far away.
Teaching girls to believe in repressive and obsolete gender stereotypes — encouraging them to believe it is possible to be born in the wrong body because they don’t look, feel, or act the way a girl “should” — is the actual conversion therapy. The most authentic betrayal is leading girls into surgeries that remove their healthy breasts, endanger their health, and doom them to a lifetime of medical oversight. That is the true conversion therapy, and its message is as it ever was, except that now bodies are ruined along with minds — the message is that it is better to betray and renounce body and spirit than to be a lesbian (or a woman).
So much for being “post-lesbian.”
It seems I was too optimistic about the future. I failed to imagine its profound loss of soul. I grew complacent. I let down my guard. And now I am a member of the authentic counterculture once again. My primary surprise is that the repugnance and contempt for women is still great, and the example we set as lesbians is fragile.
Invoking Invasion of the Bodysnatchers feels eerily accurate. The urge to dart out onto that rain-slashed highway and implore fellow travellers to see what is in front of their faces — Look,you fools! You’re in danger! Can’t you see?! —is almost irresistible. One can only be grateful to those who have been running into traffic for some time. I only wish somebody could assure me that this dystopian reality will be put right. Meanwhile I’ll hold my wish that young girls could become wild horses that no one can break.
At the close of Sundar’s film, she speaks of the various political, social, and religious dangers to girlhood: “We have this one life, and we must have the opportunity to live it the way we want. But this industry of hate that gaslights girls into turning against themselves infuriates me.” The one question that keeps Sundar awake at night, as posed by a future generation of girls, is this: “Where the hell were you?”
Brenda Brooks’ novel Gotta Find Me An Angel was a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her 2019 book, HONEY, was shortlisted for the U.K. Staunch Book Prize, an award for thrillers “where no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, or murdered.”
Also listen to an interview of Vaishnavi Sundar in Resistance Radio.
In Part One of a two part article Jocelyn Crawley offers the reader a history and systemic analysis of the harms towards women. Part two will be published the following day.
When I first discovered how widespread acceptance of and/or compliance towards rape, pornography, pedophilia, prostitution, and sex trafficking are, I was enraged. I once viewed a documentary indicating that pimps systematically show little girls videos of women performing fellatio on men to “educate” them on how to provide this “service” to the males they are trafficked to. One thought I had while attempting to process what was transpiring was: this is crazy. In addition to drawing this conclusion, I was filled with unalloyed shock and deep ire. I then reconceptualized the prototypical way I interpreted reality (men and women coexist together in a state of relative peace marked by periodic hiccups, spats, “trouble in paradise,” etc.) and came to understand that patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet with women being reduced to the subordinated class that men systematically subjugate and subject to a wide range of oppressions.
Part of patriarchy’s power is making its perverse rules and regulations for how reality should unfold appear normative and natural while categorizing anyone who challenges these perversions as insane. Insanity is defined as a state of consciousness confluent with mental illness, foolishness, or irrationality. According to patriarchal logic, any individual who attempts to question or quell its nefarious, necrotic systems and regimes is thinking and acting in an illogical manner. To express the same concept with new language to further elucidate this component of material reality under phallocracy: anyone who does not accept patriarchal logic is illogical or insane according to patriarchal logic. For this reason, it is not uncommon for women who challenge men who sexually harass or intimidate them into sex trafficking to be called insane. It is critically important for radical feminists to examine and explore this facet of the patriarchy in order to gain more knowledge about how phallocentrism works and what can and should be done to abrogate and annihilate it.
To fully understand the integral role that accusing women of being insane plays in normative patriarchal society, one should first consider the etymology of the word.
As noted in “Stop Telling Women They’re Crazy” by Amber Madison, the term hysteria entered cultural consciousness “when people didn’t want to pay attention to a woman” . When this happened, the woman was oftentimes taken to a medical facility and was subsequently diagnosed with hysteria. The phrase “hysteria” was an umbrella term meant to reference women who “caused trouble,” experienced irritability or nervousness, or didn’t reflect the level of interest in sexual activity deemed appropriate by men. The word hysteria is derived from the Greek term “hystera,” which means uterus. Thus the etymological history of the word informs us of the attempt to conflate the psychobiological experience of insanity with the material reality of being a biological female.
In recognizing the role that patriarchal societies play in attempting to establish confluence between insanity and the material reality of being a woman, it is important to note that individuals who take the time to carefully scrutinize patriarchy are cognizant of the male attempt to make mental instability a fundamentally female flaw. For example, Elaine Showalter has noted that the primary cultural stereotype of madness construed the condition as a female malady (Showalter, 1985, as cited in MacDonald, 1986). As noted by Julianna Little in her thesis “Frailty, thy name is woman: Depictions of Female Madness,”
“The most significant of cultural constructions that shape our view of madness is gender. Madness has been perceived for centuries metaphorically and symbolically as a feminine illness and continues to be gendered into the twenty-first century” (5).
In the twenty-first century, individuals who have wished to challenge the notion that the thoughts and emotions experienced by women are automatically and inevitably signs of insanity utilize the term “gaslighting” to refer to this insidious mindfuckery.
The history of men accusing women of being insane in response to accusations of sexual abuse is well-documented.
One significant case which should be a part of public consciousness is that of Alice Christiana Abbott. Abbott poisoned her stepfather in 1867 and, upon being questioned, stated that he had had an “improper connection” with her since she was thirteen. After informing others of this, the majority believed that “something was the matter with her head.” However, there was nothing wrong with her head. In fact, I argue that she operated according to a rightness of mind which recognized sexual assault as fundamentally wrong. Abbott’s stepfather threatened to have her put in reform school if she spoke of the abuse, and this was the assertion that prompted her to act. When her case took place in the Suffolk County Grand Jury, Abbott was committed to the Taunton Lunatic Asylum (Carlisle, “What Made Lizzie Borden Kill?”) That the sentence for challenging a man who sexually abuses a woman incorporates classifying her as insane indicates the patriarchy’s ongoing attempt to construe its malevolent, depraved rules and regulations (which include normalizing and in some cases valorizing the sexual abuse of women) as natural and appropriate.
(The historical reality of men accusing women of being insane and utilizing the assertion to severely limit their life choices and thereby sustain patriarchy is not limited to issues of sexual abuse. In fact, men have appropriated the accusation of female insanity against women who committed any acts which challenged their power. This fact becomes plain when one considers the case of Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard. Packard married Theophilus Packard and experienced ideological disparities with him pertaining to religious philosophy. Specifically, Packard began demonstrating interest in the spiritual ideologies of perfectionism and spiritualism (Hartog, 79).
Perfectionism is a thought system advocating the notion that individuals could become sin-free through will power and conversion. Packard also assented to the notion of spiritualism, with this religious movement promoting the idea that the souls or spirits of dead individuals continued to exist and were also capable of communicating with living people. Theophilus Packard maintained conservative religious views that stood in diametric opposition to the aforementioned ideologies, with his own perspective including the notion of innate human depravity. After Elizabeth Packard began openly questioning his ideas and exploring her own, their ideological dissonance led to his accusation that she was insane. The accusation was officially made in 1860 and Packard decided to have his wife committed. Elizabeth Packard learned of his decision on June 18, 1860. It’s important to note that the patriarchal nature of this scenario is not limited to the interactions and ideological disparities existing between Elizabeth Packard and Theophilus Packard as two individuals. In fact, state law revealed its own patriarchal proclivity for privileging male interpretations of reality for the purpose of disempowering and dehumanizing women. This is the case as when, in 1851, the state of Illinois opened its first hospital for those who were allegedly mentally ill, the legislature passed a law which enabled husbands to have their wives committed without their consent or a public hearing.)
To be continued . . .
Jocelyn Crawley is a radical feminist who resides in Atlanta, Georgia. Her intense antagonism towards all forms of social injustice-including white supremacy-grows with each passing day. Her primary goal for 2020 is to connect with other radicals for the purpose of building community and organizing against oppression.
Macdonald, Michael. “Women and Madness in Tudor and Stuart England.” Social Research, vol. 53, no. 2, 1986, pp. 261–281. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40970416. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985). quoted in Macdonald, Michael. “Women and Madness in Tudor and Stuart England.” Social Research, vol. 53, no. 2, 1986, pp. 261–281. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40970416. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.
