Debunking the right-wing: Misogyny and feminism
Since the 2010s, feminism has been a major topic in American popular discourse and culture wars. Critics tend to misrepresent it as misanthropic, “misandrist,” “nagging,” or confused, whereas many supporters have only a shallow familiarity with it.
To give a brief background to the contemporary feminist movement, it is usually split into three eras:
The First Wave of feminism occurred in the 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on legal equality. In particular, women’s right to vote, equality of inheritance, and equality of property rights was at the forefront of their agenda. This phase was largely dominated by women from bourgeois or aristocratic elite backgrounds. Its political expressions were largely in the terms of liberalism, although some more radical feminists were associated with the abolitionist movement. Former slaves, such as Sojourner Truth, were at the forefront of this edge.
The Second Wave blossomed in the 1960s and lasted until the conservative turn of politics in much of the world in the 1980s. The second wave focused on rights regarding the workplace, sexuality, reproduction, misogyny in media, and sexual violence. Unlike the First Wave, it had a high composition of working class women expressing their consciousness, which had grown in the mid-century. This movement had its roots in the entrance of many women into the workforce during WWII, which gave them a taste of relative independence from the men who they were traditionally dependent on. Many of the participants in his phase were politically radical, ranging from radical liberals to Marxist-Leninists.
The Third Wave emerged in the 1990s and is most often presented as the intersectional turn. Many in this phase critiqued the previous feminist movement for over-generalizing womanhood, believing that their analyses had been highly Eurocentric and otherwise limited. The Third Wave is characterized by a focus on inclusive approaches and intersectional analyses which fully account for LGBT and racialized experiences of womanhood. However, it has politically been very confused, largely dominated by radical liberals. The fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and “victory” of American capitalism was a major blow to the popularity of socialism worldwide, thus one reason why this phase has lacked a significant socialist presence. It has also been significantly dominated by academic intellectuals, although there are links to on-the-ground organizations such as domestic workers’ unions.
Some feminists argue that a Fourth Wave emerged in the 2010s centered around social media. But this is more of a distinction based on medium rather than content. Ultimately, contemporary feminism is still very much concerned with the same issues and approaches as Third Wave feminism. Its political orientation is largely still the same.
Over the course of feminist history, there has been three key conflicts: within the movement, elites versus the poor, and reformists versus revolutionaries. Outside of the movement, there has been conservative backlash. All three movements faced such a backlash. Women were argued to be too irresponsible to vote, too weak to work the same jobs as men, and, today, are considered to be “too sensitive.” This latter conflict will ultimately be the focus here, although other aspects will still be addressed.
“The West doesn’t need feminism, women are already equal!”
This argument only makes sense if you focus on legal equality alone. People are not merely a bundle of rights. They also have to work for a living, find housing, and interact with other people. As an aside, many countries in the West don’t even have real legal equality across genders. Do men have their reproductive functions closely regulated by the state in any of these countries?
As far as real, concrete inequalities in everyday life, they very much still exist along gendered lines. Women on average earn less than men, including in the same job positions, face drastically more sexual abuse and harassment, are less likely to receive proper physical and mental health treatment, and more. It doesn’t exactly help that extremist Evangelical Christians control much of the United States and push radical anti-reproductive autonomy policies. These same extremists engage in harassment and terrorism against women and employees of reproductive health facilities. The West is not some sort of post-patriarchal utopia.
“Abortion is murder! Banning abortion is the best solution!”
Such a belief only makes sense if one assumes, like most Evangelicals, that “life begins at conception.” This creates a situation where one must define life extremely broadly in order to believe this. Apparently, a fertilized egg, or, later, a fetus, constitutes a life and a human being with “human rights.” This is based on the claim that they are bound to grow into a person living outside of their mother. That is, on the potential of life. And yet, couldn’t it also become a miscarriage? Why do we treat it as if it is already the mere possibility of a future life, instead of as the possibility of a miscarriage? Based on this logic, this conclusion is just as valid.
If we are to define a living human as something which can function as a bodily system in itself and has some form of consciousness, neither a fertilized egg nor a fetus meets this definition. Both are part of their mother’s body, they cannot exist separately from it. Therefore, if we are to argue about the so-called “right to life” and “human rights,” why aren’t we focused on those of the mother? Many women can’t handle having or taking care of a baby, and many others simply don’t want one. A large share would try to get rid of their baby whether abortion is legal or not. Before abortion was legal in the United States, this happened, and women died from unlicensed and unregulated abortion procedures. If we are to be concerned with “life,” the mother’s life is the real concern.
Conservatives enjoy fearmongering about late-term abortions, even though they are extremely rare. Most people abort their babies early into their pregnancies. Late-term abortions are almost exclusively out of desperation, where women have no other choice. This can either be due to health or financial reasons. Abortion restrictions or bans do not help with these cases. Instead, they only drive more desperate women into unsafe conditions to be maimed or killed.
Further, to use a common retort against anti-choice conservatives, the most “pro-life” people are rarely the ones who support social assistance for mothers or young children. Evangelicals, the main bloc behind anti-choice campaigning, are the loudest in decrying nonexistent “leeches” and “welfare queens.” Clearly, they aren’t as concerned with life as they claim.
The real reason that conservatives claim to care so much about abortions is because they want to control biological reproduction. This is to ensure that the state and the church have power over the births of new generations, namely the future labor-force. If people are forced to unwillingly birth children into a world without social assistance, who finds such an outcome the most appealing? Capitalists who can’t bear to part with their capital stock to invest in social assistance or well-paid workers, and who want more competition in the workforce to drive down the cost of labor for themselves.
“The gender pay gap is a myth! Women just choose bad jobs!”
This is a common argument by contemporary anti-feminists. And it is the most patently incorrect. The gender pay gap exists, even where women hold the same positions as men. Further, women’s relegation to lower-paying careers is proof that patriarchy is not a myth. Hiring practices tend to be discriminatory toward women, with men being considered better suited for certain jobs.
Many industries which are considered “feminine” for historical and cultural reasons, such as domestic labor and education, are devalued and more likely to be paid lower with that justification. Aside from capitalists taking advantage of the lower status of women, these policies are motivated by the assumption that women are ideally dependent on breadwinner husbands anyway. They become self-fulfilling prophecies through patriarchal ideology.
“Why do we need free access to birth control? Just don’t have sex!”
Abstinence-only education is empirically proven to fail at its goals. It is far less effective than comprehensive sex education that does not shy away from topics frightening to religious fundamentalists. Ultimately, abstinence simply doesn’t work. People are going to have sex.
Free access to contraceptives, which is not expensive to implement, is better for public health. If people have free access to birth control, abortions are less frequent. Yet religious extremists do not care about this, since they consider birth control to be evil as well. Why? Because the point is control over reproduction, not whatever moral veneer they give to their whining.
“Women are raped because they ask for it! They should dress modestly and shouldn’t go into men’s spaces!”
How is wearing less clothing than is the norm consenting to sex? This assumption is based on the Neanderthal-style belief that revealing clothing on a woman automatically indicates a desire for sex with men in general, or the specific man engaging in harassment or rape. The pressure should be on men to not act like animals, not on women to dress however a petulant moralizer demands.
Besides, women are vulnerable to rape regardless of how they dress. Women in more conservative clothing are also victimized. A greater indicator for likelihood of being victimized is the situation they are in. In particular, it is most frequently in intimate situations that women are raped. Most rapists are people who the victim knows. What do outfits or other choices have to do with that?
“Let women choose to be housewives if they want!”
The negative implications of liberal conceptions of “personal choice” become very clear here. This argument is based on the assumption that desires come from nowhere, or that they are otherwise irrelevant. Perhaps the fact that we live in a patriarchal society has something to do with people’s values and what sort of idealized futures they imagine for themselves. And how about advertisers, the media, churches, and the state promoting this ideal to women for decades?
Just because women become accustomed to something does not mean it isn’t patriarchal. The point is not to take an atomistic viewpoint, but analyze society as a living structure. To be conscious of how to structurally attack patriarchy, it is necessary to analyze desire with a critical lens.
“Women who sell sex are just stingy!”
Most women who enter the sex trade do so due to financial desperation, housing insecurity, and other economic motivations. The majority are not exactly planning to accumulate wealth from the trade, but to survive. The majority of women in the industry are not bourgeois or wealthy celebrities. They lack the independence of bourgeois women and are left at the mercy of the market, whether through direct contact with consumers or mediated by a capitalist manager.
Capitalism has a long history of using the sex trade as an outlet for “surplus population”; women displaced by privatization, enclosure, and marginalization in the labor market. It was something observed by Marx and Engels in the 19th century.
Besides, women who actually enjoy the industry are not evil. Why moralize about this instance of monetizing sexual relations when marriage has a long history of doing so through marriages of convenience? Further, is it not the capitalists and consumers who are to blame for the commodification of sex? It is the capitalists who create hyper-atomized societies like the United States and depend on the expansion of the sex trade to safe on labor costs and loss of revenue to taxation. It is not that these women are exploiting their consumers, rather it is the other way around.
“We just need more women CEOs and politicians!”
Representation politics helps no one except for the wealthy and powerful. More women sending airstrikes into Afghanistan does nothing to liberate either Afghan or American women. For women’s liberation, we need a social reconstruction that changes the conditions of the masses of women.
The majority of women in both the United States and the world are working class. They staff many industries. But they are highly represented in the domestic industries, service industries, and sex industries. They are from oppressed ethnic and racialized groups, diaspora communities, and peoples displaced by imperialism.
Liberation must come in the form of social transformation, not more bourgeois celebrities and neoliberal politicians.