Abortion really is going to be the issue that will win the election for Democrats and Biden. It isn't the economy, and it isn't Gaza, which few care about outside some people from a few select college campuses. It is abortion and reproductive rights. I no longer listen to or read anything about "gender identity" because I know having studied the far right for over fifty years, that it is merely a wedge issue for them. They deliberately use feminist talking points as a division tool. They don't care about it and want to roll back ALL of women's gains of the past 100 years. Women are being manipulated into voting against their best interests. The ONLY option women have to preserve what rights they still have in the US is to vote Democratic. Period. Julie Bindel and other overseas observers need to stay in their lane. They are not helping US women by saying the far right is better. The right is way worse and make no bones about their hostility over women being in the public sphere at all.
To get anywhere, including rectifying the notably disproportionately low number of male students attending post-secondary or higher education institutions, males need to have the same general mainstream media support as females have had for decades, and still very much do.
Males have observed thus known that they aren’t taken seriously by the media. If anything, the media is critical toward their cause.
When I communicated with a metro-daily newspaper editor about boys' school-grade averages considerably falling yet basically being ignored by provincial governments and sociology/education academia — and generally dismissed by the mainstream news-media — she made a sarcastic reference to the males as “the poor little boys”.
Her attitude clearly rang with incredulity, that males can’t really be a social/societal victim.
In his book The Highly Sensitive Man, author and psychologist/psychotherapist Tom Falkenstein writes that there are “numerous psychological studies over the last forty years that tell us that, despite huge social change, the stereotypical image of the ‘strong man’ is still firmly with us at all ages, in all ethnic groups, and among all socio-economic backgrounds. …
“One also gets the impression from these articles that we need to keep any genuine sympathy for these ‘poor men’ in check: the patriarchy is still just too dominant to allow ourselves that luxury.”
I’ve been consuming mainstream news for 35 years, and I tend to notice things that most others would not notice; or maybe they notice but feel like they are supposed not to notice and behave accordingly. One thing is the thick social-issue politics, or pejoratively referred to as “woke”, within the news-media, especially Canadian outlets like the CBC, Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.
When it comes to male recipients, there’s injustice that those news-media seem to consider, cover or ignore as though such gender injustice is ideologically thus politically acceptable.
Falkenstein also writes: “Women have thus been understood as the nondominant group, which deviated from the norm, and they have been examined and understood from this perspective. One of the countless problems of this approach is that the experiences and specific challenges of the ‘dominant group,’ in this case men, have remained hidden. ...
“You only have to open a magazine or newspaper, turn on your TV, or open your browser to discover an ever-growing interest in stories about being a father, being a man, or how to balance a career with a family. Many of these articles have started talking about an apparent ‘crisis of masculinity’.
"The headlines for these articles attempt to address male identity, but often fall into the trap of sounding ironic and sometimes even sarcastic and critical. They all seem to agree to some extent that there is a crisis.
“But reading these articles one gets the impression that no one really knows how to even start dealing with the problem, let alone what a solution to it might look like. …”
I see the link. Whatever has created the current masculinity crisis (boys' school grades are an example of this, so are decreasing numbers of male college educated men, men's inability to form or keep stable relationships, a loneliness epidemic etc) needs to be assessed also through a feminist lens because it poses a threat to both men and women. Increasingly a narrative is being pushed by the political right that feminism is the cause of this crisis, and such a view is aided by media representatives laughing it off ironically, or by leftist women dismissing any analysis of a masculinity crisis with the argument that men still hold the power when it comes to the places where true power lies. However, as women have made some gains (they are now more educated than ever before, more politically involved can make reproductive choices etc), men have not. It is a simple conclusion that men's losses have to do with men's gains, a conclusion that the political right has made indeed, and which poses the biggest threat to the feminist cause I can see, as this analysis further instrumentalistentalises women's losses (e.g. high number of single mothers struggling to make ends meet) to argue that the old patriarchal order must be restored, an order that doesn't allow women to "crush" men, an order where women are kept in "their place". If we do not envision a future that envisages a fruitful coexistence of men and women the backlash will be extreme. Most men are not powerful men. It is tempting for them to direct their sense of powerlessness at the women in their lives especially when they are being fed the political lie that feminism caused their crisis, and especially when their use of pornography conditions them to a hatred of women. The political religious right has answers for such men (stop using porn, go to church, clean your room, date religious women, do not use contraceptives). Which answers does the political left have? Don't kink shame! Sex work is work? Masculinity crisis? What crisis!
This is a fascinating article. I look forward to more. I would like to see more opinions from this sphere of thought on the actual material part of transgender ideology, which is transgender surgery. The medical part of advancing transgender ideology is the most vulnerable part. To say that, men especially, are capable of being physically transformed into women and that there might be therapeutic reasons for doing so seems to me to be misogynist. There is a component among those endorsing such a procedure for boys that are men. And they are men on the right, true patriarchs, most intolerant of anything they see as displays of femininity among boys especially. I reserve space in my mind for the conviction that the sexual diversity movement is a right wing conspiracy.
It is not unrelated to anti-abortionists who see women as receptacles for "unborn children". It is not a long leap to claim that a woman is nothing more than somebody with a hole in their crotch and the right hormones. I'll say without reference that most transgenders are men, not women. This has to be unusual in history where women suffer the most abuse in idealized expressions of what qualifies as desirable female physiology. The foot binding of Imperial China being the worse of recent reports.
Thanks for opening up this stage for principled and deeper discussion of these widely misunderstood social upheavals. I hope we can all benefit from your thoughtful analyses and then take some steps toward further understanding together.
My main hope in our ongoing analysis of women's status in the US is to try to clarify that we are talking about problems arising from social stratification. When I talk about a system of oppression, I mean a specific layer or vein of social stratification that is not only part of the structure but a process affecting a specific class of people, since social life is also a developing thing, Each class is positioned differently in the stratified system. That means the system of differential treatment that has developed for each class is different. There are, it must be continually emphasized, many systems of oppression.
To me this is key to understanding how and why the system of sex discrimination has been both battered and strengthened by attempts to piggyback or even conflate other systems with it. I believe the system of male domination is the first and biggest system of global social stratification. Feminists fight against that system directly. But their biggest challenge is indirect: dealing with continuous attempts to merge other systems which operate differently, for different reasons, against other groups.
The first result has been confusion about whether women should take on the duty of fighting all oppression all the time. The answer, for me, is no. Somebody has to concentrate on breaking up our own system of oppression. There are major features of this system not relevant to the struggles of other classes, revolving around the family, biological differences, capitalism's unique use of women, specific abuses like prostitution and pornography, and so on. Our success will help other groups, but we have to deal with specific problems of our own and beware of dissipating our strength and accomplishing nothing if we act as if there is only one big layer of stratification, ignoring all complexities. For instance, the historic persecution of religious minorities, their problems of refusal to serve in the military, tax difficulties, struggle against science curricula like evolutionary theory, and so on are part of a very different system. Racial discrimination has many similarities with sex discrimination (and includes a subsystem of discrimination against minority women affecting both classes), but also positions race very differently from sex in other ways because of the institution of legalized slavery in the past. The oppression of the class of workers today also overlaps in many ways, but women's work hasn't even been included in that class historically.
Which brings me to the second result: groups fighting other types of social stratification: those who are now piggybacking on our struggle, for good or ill.
Piggybacking of a weaker group's struggle on a stronger group isn't new of course, and was utilized by women too, as our struggle developed in the US. The Civil Rights Act, for instance, was originally intended to break up the stratified employment and educational structure/system affecting racial/ethnic minorities. Women did the piggybacking here in managing to get our class included, obtaining, as Kathleen Kelly says in your article, a historic legal victory they have fought to maintain since. We have borrowed so much from the struggle for racial justice.
So piggybacking for good means you connect your group's struggle with a stronger group. We've seen this occur as the "T" group got added to the LGB group. Transgenderism and sexual orientation are distinct issues, however. We've also seen the "T" get added to the protected legal "sex" class in the Bostock case by our very own Supreme Court. We've even seen the concept of biological sex get conflated with the "T" to the word "gender", cementing it to the "T". This has resulted in the public conflating the two systems to the great benefit of the "T" group.
What's good for the weaker group may not be good for the stronger, however. The "T" struggle is incompatible with the feminist struggle in several ways, as you point out very well. I'm not as sure as you that this incompatibility is found only at the extremes of "T" activism; I think it's core. There are only limited ways we can work together. As you point out, it's possible to meet at the point of equal opportunity in education and employment and housing. But it's not going to be possible to meet on other aspects of the systems such as pornography and female privacy.
So -- from the framework of ending many systems of social stratification in the US, Robert Jensen and Julie Bindel see the Left and progressivism as supporting an anti-feminist group, the "T" group, over the class of women, because the US Left is part of the male domination system that oppresses women. Well, that's true IMO. The "T" group in England hasn't managed to attach itself as firmly to its Left/progressive equivalent, or to women's struggle. In the US public eye, the "T" group has successfully piggybacked on what's left of the Left.
The US Left has never been an unmitigated champion of women. Anti-feminism has always come both from the Left and the Right. As feminism became stronger, neither Democrats nor Republicans have supported breaking down the system of women's oppression. All political parties, sides, and institutions in the US continue to be systematically male-dominated, and I include the Greens. Political parties aren't stratified classes. They come and go and their interests change for other reasons. Lincoln was a Republican. Republicans are making big strides in the working class these days. Biden didn't push for the Equal Rights Amendment. He himself was part of the pillorying of Anita Hill and the placement of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.
You identify the Men's Rights Movement as on the Right. It's more organized on the Right but it's well-entrenched on the US Left as well. The specific system of women's oppression in the US functions on both of what used to be two well-defined sides. The only real difference to me is that the Left is more supportive of a strong federal government, and this position is of limited relevance to women.
You raise the feature of the system of women's oppression of forced pregnancy (including abortion). You rightly point out how there has been political piggybacking on the starkly simple issue of whether a woman can choose to terminate her pregnancy. To me, which part of the system that supports abortion today is important. But that the Democrats are more supportive today isn't the litmus test for whether a political party is pro-feminist. An acceptance that there is a social stratification system and process that results in women's oppression is the litmus test. Both parties accept American individualism as their base philosophy, and individualism is the opposite of class theory.
You wrote, "For example, after the Covid outbreak, right wing parents’ groups hounded school boards over mask mandates, teaching of “critical race theory,” and gender identity policy." That's a good example of piggybacking and packaging. It seems to have started with distaste for being forced to wear a mask, but in short order the systems of racial and sex discrimination were attached to this completely irrelevant issue and now, anti-maskers can't separate them out any more.
Thanks for providing the space for these thoughts, K. I'm only looking to deepen what you've already written above.
Abortion really is going to be the issue that will win the election for Democrats and Biden. It isn't the economy, and it isn't Gaza, which few care about outside some people from a few select college campuses. It is abortion and reproductive rights. I no longer listen to or read anything about "gender identity" because I know having studied the far right for over fifty years, that it is merely a wedge issue for them. They deliberately use feminist talking points as a division tool. They don't care about it and want to roll back ALL of women's gains of the past 100 years. Women are being manipulated into voting against their best interests. The ONLY option women have to preserve what rights they still have in the US is to vote Democratic. Period. Julie Bindel and other overseas observers need to stay in their lane. They are not helping US women by saying the far right is better. The right is way worse and make no bones about their hostility over women being in the public sphere at all.
To get anywhere, including rectifying the notably disproportionately low number of male students attending post-secondary or higher education institutions, males need to have the same general mainstream media support as females have had for decades, and still very much do.
Males have observed thus known that they aren’t taken seriously by the media. If anything, the media is critical toward their cause.
When I communicated with a metro-daily newspaper editor about boys' school-grade averages considerably falling yet basically being ignored by provincial governments and sociology/education academia — and generally dismissed by the mainstream news-media — she made a sarcastic reference to the males as “the poor little boys”.
Her attitude clearly rang with incredulity, that males can’t really be a social/societal victim.
In his book The Highly Sensitive Man, author and psychologist/psychotherapist Tom Falkenstein writes that there are “numerous psychological studies over the last forty years that tell us that, despite huge social change, the stereotypical image of the ‘strong man’ is still firmly with us at all ages, in all ethnic groups, and among all socio-economic backgrounds. …
“One also gets the impression from these articles that we need to keep any genuine sympathy for these ‘poor men’ in check: the patriarchy is still just too dominant to allow ourselves that luxury.”
I’ve been consuming mainstream news for 35 years, and I tend to notice things that most others would not notice; or maybe they notice but feel like they are supposed not to notice and behave accordingly. One thing is the thick social-issue politics, or pejoratively referred to as “woke”, within the news-media, especially Canadian outlets like the CBC, Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.
When it comes to male recipients, there’s injustice that those news-media seem to consider, cover or ignore as though such gender injustice is ideologically thus politically acceptable.
Falkenstein also writes: “Women have thus been understood as the nondominant group, which deviated from the norm, and they have been examined and understood from this perspective. One of the countless problems of this approach is that the experiences and specific challenges of the ‘dominant group,’ in this case men, have remained hidden. ...
“You only have to open a magazine or newspaper, turn on your TV, or open your browser to discover an ever-growing interest in stories about being a father, being a man, or how to balance a career with a family. Many of these articles have started talking about an apparent ‘crisis of masculinity’.
"The headlines for these articles attempt to address male identity, but often fall into the trap of sounding ironic and sometimes even sarcastic and critical. They all seem to agree to some extent that there is a crisis.
“But reading these articles one gets the impression that no one really knows how to even start dealing with the problem, let alone what a solution to it might look like. …”
In summation: Suck it all up, guys!
I fail to see how this is a response to my post. I'll leave it up, but any more off topic comments on any of my posts will be deleted.
Excellent analysis.
I see the link. Whatever has created the current masculinity crisis (boys' school grades are an example of this, so are decreasing numbers of male college educated men, men's inability to form or keep stable relationships, a loneliness epidemic etc) needs to be assessed also through a feminist lens because it poses a threat to both men and women. Increasingly a narrative is being pushed by the political right that feminism is the cause of this crisis, and such a view is aided by media representatives laughing it off ironically, or by leftist women dismissing any analysis of a masculinity crisis with the argument that men still hold the power when it comes to the places where true power lies. However, as women have made some gains (they are now more educated than ever before, more politically involved can make reproductive choices etc), men have not. It is a simple conclusion that men's losses have to do with men's gains, a conclusion that the political right has made indeed, and which poses the biggest threat to the feminist cause I can see, as this analysis further instrumentalistentalises women's losses (e.g. high number of single mothers struggling to make ends meet) to argue that the old patriarchal order must be restored, an order that doesn't allow women to "crush" men, an order where women are kept in "their place". If we do not envision a future that envisages a fruitful coexistence of men and women the backlash will be extreme. Most men are not powerful men. It is tempting for them to direct their sense of powerlessness at the women in their lives especially when they are being fed the political lie that feminism caused their crisis, and especially when their use of pornography conditions them to a hatred of women. The political religious right has answers for such men (stop using porn, go to church, clean your room, date religious women, do not use contraceptives). Which answers does the political left have? Don't kink shame! Sex work is work? Masculinity crisis? What crisis!
This is a fascinating article. I look forward to more. I would like to see more opinions from this sphere of thought on the actual material part of transgender ideology, which is transgender surgery. The medical part of advancing transgender ideology is the most vulnerable part. To say that, men especially, are capable of being physically transformed into women and that there might be therapeutic reasons for doing so seems to me to be misogynist. There is a component among those endorsing such a procedure for boys that are men. And they are men on the right, true patriarchs, most intolerant of anything they see as displays of femininity among boys especially. I reserve space in my mind for the conviction that the sexual diversity movement is a right wing conspiracy.
It is not unrelated to anti-abortionists who see women as receptacles for "unborn children". It is not a long leap to claim that a woman is nothing more than somebody with a hole in their crotch and the right hormones. I'll say without reference that most transgenders are men, not women. This has to be unusual in history where women suffer the most abuse in idealized expressions of what qualifies as desirable female physiology. The foot binding of Imperial China being the worse of recent reports.
Thanks for opening up this stage for principled and deeper discussion of these widely misunderstood social upheavals. I hope we can all benefit from your thoughtful analyses and then take some steps toward further understanding together.
My main hope in our ongoing analysis of women's status in the US is to try to clarify that we are talking about problems arising from social stratification. When I talk about a system of oppression, I mean a specific layer or vein of social stratification that is not only part of the structure but a process affecting a specific class of people, since social life is also a developing thing, Each class is positioned differently in the stratified system. That means the system of differential treatment that has developed for each class is different. There are, it must be continually emphasized, many systems of oppression.
To me this is key to understanding how and why the system of sex discrimination has been both battered and strengthened by attempts to piggyback or even conflate other systems with it. I believe the system of male domination is the first and biggest system of global social stratification. Feminists fight against that system directly. But their biggest challenge is indirect: dealing with continuous attempts to merge other systems which operate differently, for different reasons, against other groups.
The first result has been confusion about whether women should take on the duty of fighting all oppression all the time. The answer, for me, is no. Somebody has to concentrate on breaking up our own system of oppression. There are major features of this system not relevant to the struggles of other classes, revolving around the family, biological differences, capitalism's unique use of women, specific abuses like prostitution and pornography, and so on. Our success will help other groups, but we have to deal with specific problems of our own and beware of dissipating our strength and accomplishing nothing if we act as if there is only one big layer of stratification, ignoring all complexities. For instance, the historic persecution of religious minorities, their problems of refusal to serve in the military, tax difficulties, struggle against science curricula like evolutionary theory, and so on are part of a very different system. Racial discrimination has many similarities with sex discrimination (and includes a subsystem of discrimination against minority women affecting both classes), but also positions race very differently from sex in other ways because of the institution of legalized slavery in the past. The oppression of the class of workers today also overlaps in many ways, but women's work hasn't even been included in that class historically.
Which brings me to the second result: groups fighting other types of social stratification: those who are now piggybacking on our struggle, for good or ill.
Piggybacking of a weaker group's struggle on a stronger group isn't new of course, and was utilized by women too, as our struggle developed in the US. The Civil Rights Act, for instance, was originally intended to break up the stratified employment and educational structure/system affecting racial/ethnic minorities. Women did the piggybacking here in managing to get our class included, obtaining, as Kathleen Kelly says in your article, a historic legal victory they have fought to maintain since. We have borrowed so much from the struggle for racial justice.
So piggybacking for good means you connect your group's struggle with a stronger group. We've seen this occur as the "T" group got added to the LGB group. Transgenderism and sexual orientation are distinct issues, however. We've also seen the "T" get added to the protected legal "sex" class in the Bostock case by our very own Supreme Court. We've even seen the concept of biological sex get conflated with the "T" to the word "gender", cementing it to the "T". This has resulted in the public conflating the two systems to the great benefit of the "T" group.
What's good for the weaker group may not be good for the stronger, however. The "T" struggle is incompatible with the feminist struggle in several ways, as you point out very well. I'm not as sure as you that this incompatibility is found only at the extremes of "T" activism; I think it's core. There are only limited ways we can work together. As you point out, it's possible to meet at the point of equal opportunity in education and employment and housing. But it's not going to be possible to meet on other aspects of the systems such as pornography and female privacy.
So -- from the framework of ending many systems of social stratification in the US, Robert Jensen and Julie Bindel see the Left and progressivism as supporting an anti-feminist group, the "T" group, over the class of women, because the US Left is part of the male domination system that oppresses women. Well, that's true IMO. The "T" group in England hasn't managed to attach itself as firmly to its Left/progressive equivalent, or to women's struggle. In the US public eye, the "T" group has successfully piggybacked on what's left of the Left.
The US Left has never been an unmitigated champion of women. Anti-feminism has always come both from the Left and the Right. As feminism became stronger, neither Democrats nor Republicans have supported breaking down the system of women's oppression. All political parties, sides, and institutions in the US continue to be systematically male-dominated, and I include the Greens. Political parties aren't stratified classes. They come and go and their interests change for other reasons. Lincoln was a Republican. Republicans are making big strides in the working class these days. Biden didn't push for the Equal Rights Amendment. He himself was part of the pillorying of Anita Hill and the placement of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.
You identify the Men's Rights Movement as on the Right. It's more organized on the Right but it's well-entrenched on the US Left as well. The specific system of women's oppression in the US functions on both of what used to be two well-defined sides. The only real difference to me is that the Left is more supportive of a strong federal government, and this position is of limited relevance to women.
You raise the feature of the system of women's oppression of forced pregnancy (including abortion). You rightly point out how there has been political piggybacking on the starkly simple issue of whether a woman can choose to terminate her pregnancy. To me, which part of the system that supports abortion today is important. But that the Democrats are more supportive today isn't the litmus test for whether a political party is pro-feminist. An acceptance that there is a social stratification system and process that results in women's oppression is the litmus test. Both parties accept American individualism as their base philosophy, and individualism is the opposite of class theory.
You wrote, "For example, after the Covid outbreak, right wing parents’ groups hounded school boards over mask mandates, teaching of “critical race theory,” and gender identity policy." That's a good example of piggybacking and packaging. It seems to have started with distaste for being forced to wear a mask, but in short order the systems of racial and sex discrimination were attached to this completely irrelevant issue and now, anti-maskers can't separate them out any more.
Thanks for providing the space for these thoughts, K. I'm only looking to deepen what you've already written above.
by Dar Guerra