Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (1999)

Chapter V

Article 88:

The State guarantees the equality and equitable treatment of men and women in the exercise of the right to work. The state recognizes work at home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth. Housewives are entitled to Social Security in accordance with law.

[American Dream]

“A Smile for £300″

Women’s Struggle Notes #2 [1977]


Nursery nurse Christella McCloskey was supposed to smile all the time she was at work. But one day she found she just couldn’t, had a row with her boss, and was sacked.

The smile was back yesterday as she was awarded more than £300 compensation by an industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal.

She was under orders to smile and be happy and cheerful at her work at Warley Green Kindergarten, Smethwick.

One day, when she was in the process of divorcing her husband, the roof of her flat had blown off and she had had a row with workmen she could not manage a smile.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Commodification


Marxist theory

In Marxist political economy, commodification takes place when economic value is assigned to something not previously considered in economic terms; for example, an idea, identity or gender. So commodification refers to the expansion of market trade to previously non-market areas, and to the treatment of things as if they were a tradable commodity.

For instance, sex becomes a marketed commodity, something to be bought and sold rather than freely given. Human beings can be considered subject to commodification in contexts such as genetic engineering, social engineering, cloning, eugenics, social Darwinism, Fascism, mass marketing and employment. An extreme case of commodification is slavery, where human beings themselves become a commodity to be sold and bought. Similarly, the use of non-human animals for food, clothing, entertainment, or testing represents the commodification of other living beings.

[American Dream]

http://www.anarchist-studies.org/node/512

Women, Love and Anarchism: The Rise of British Second Wave Feminism

by Emma Dixon

Perspectives 2011

I. The Resurgence of Anarcho-Sexism

“From a girl’s point of view the important thing to remember about the 60s is that it was totally male dominated. A lot of girls just rolled joints – it was what you did while you sat quietly in the corner, nodding your head. You were not really encouraged to be a thinker. You were there really for fucks and domesticity. The ‘old lady’ syndrome. ‘My lady’. So Guinevere-y. It was quite a difficult time for a girl."(1)

Britain belonged in the 1960s to the young. It belonged to a generation that knew nothing of the shackles of war time austerity experienced by their parents, leaving them free to express their most radical social, political and sexual desires. Both men and women were brought together in pursuit of their new worlds producing a flourishing countercultural movement that was inspired by the New Left ideology of Maoism, Trotskyism and anarchism.

However, in reality the years 1960-1969 were not quite as simple as the above statements would suggest as despite the fact that men and women were both involved in striving for a new social order, their relationships were still far from equal. The liberalism of the 1960s did create a huge increase in opportunities for women, but modified little in terms of the attitudes of their male counterparts. As Arthur Marwick explains:

“the intense pressures, the almost compulsory promiscuity, could be bearing down excessively on women, depriving them of genuinely free choices and forcing them into activities which they did not enjoy, and perhaps even found unpleasant; or at any rate left them feeling oppressed, used, exploited, treated without humanity except as expressed through the sexual interest of a male lover.”(2)

Therefore, it is important to not fall prey to the stereotype of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and to look beyond its legacy of free love to its reality of sexual exploitation.

The permissive society of the 1960s meant that sex was everywhere. This was not only due to changes in obscenity law, with the Obscene Publications Acts of 1959 and 1964, but also due to the new meanings attached with sex: as Gerard DeGroot explains ‘in the Sixties, obscenity was an expression of freedom’(3). The end of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover ban in 1963 heralded the beginning of a sexual revolution in Britain, and not just for Philip Larkin. But a sexualised Britain was a double-edged sword for its female occupants – for some, it meant the opportunity to an unprecedented level of sexual expression, whereas for others it was exposure to new forms of pressures and exploitations. Larkin’s third stanza states:

“Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.”(4)

This represents a very typical male opinion of sexual relations during the 1960s: the assumption that women were enjoying it just as much as men but the reality was often very different. Nowhere was this conflict more apparent than in the world of pornography, as Marcus Collins explains:

“It spoke their language of women’s sexual emancipation and shared something of their hope that the sexes were coming closer upon the basis of mutual desire. Within these magazines appeared a utopian vision of a sexualised society populated by two sexes undergoing parallel emancipations [...] Yet, [...] pornographers found mutuality easier to imagine than to achieve.”(5)

Climactic heights were reached with the advent of Women’s Liberation at the end of the decade, which sharply separated the genders in their quests for sexual liberation and created an anti-pornographic tirade from feminists. Pornography magazines responded in tones that were at worst anti-feminist and misogynist, and at best regressive and old-fashioned providing ‘escapist fantasies of emancipated-but-not-liberated girls to counterbalance a hatred of autonomous women’(6). Of course this was solely restricted to the society created by pornographic magazines, and can not be taken as truly representative of every male attitude in the 1960s, especially not of those who were considered to be part of the counterculture; the pornography enthusiasts(7) that frequented Soho’s Walker’s Court were in sharp contrast to the marijuana smoking hippies and anarchists that hung out in Gandalf’s Garden and Mushroom Books. However, the pervasive nature of the pornography industry in the 1960s meant that it was difficult for any sector of the media to ignore it entirely. King, the Pirelli Calendar, Penthouse and Mayfair were all launched in this decade creating a conspicuous presence within British society. The publications of the underground press were strongly infiltrated by this epidemic of erotica, meaning they were often of an extremely graphic and explicit nature.

The most infamous purveyors of countercultural pornography were Oz and IT. As publications of the underground they were certainly influenced by anarchist theory, and would in turn have been read by anarchists. Indeed, Geoff Ingarfield’s article about Oz published in Zero in 1977 claims that ‘for anarchists, Oz was important because it raised issues scarcely recognised by the rest of the left’(8). Considering the extensive readership of these magazines it is likely that the pornography printed in Oz and IT would have had a significant degree of influence upon the attitudes of sexuality within the anarchist milieu at this time, and can therefore be seen as promoters of a resurgence of anarcho-sexism that was evident in the 1960s and 1970s. Oz was arguably the most notorious, but numerous front covers of IT displayed naked women(9) with the occasional ‘IT girl’ gracing the centre pages(10). Issue four contains a handy article written by Ray Durgnat entitled, ‘Strippers: A Guide to Soho Clubs’, which describes ‘an almost intellectual moment when two girls, one behind the other, started shimmying violently’(11).

Oz largely gained its notoriety due to the hugely controversial ‘Schoolkids Issue’ of May 1970, which was compiled following an advert in Oz 26 stating: “Some of us are feeling old and boring, we invite our readers who are under 18 to come and edit the April issue. We will choose one person, several or accept collective applications from a group of friends.”(12)

As a result, a group of around twenty ‘kids’ aged fifteen to eighteen met in ‘a dimly lit and exotically furnished basement flat in Palace Gardens Terrace’(13), home to Oz editor Richard Neville and Oz 28 was born two months later. Huge controversy ensued, centering around its highly explicit content, which resulted in the longest obscenity trial in British legal history at that time. For six weeks in the summer of 1971 the three editors of Oz: Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis, were forced to defend themselves against ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’(14) and were eventually sentenced to imprisonment. Neville received fifteen months, whereas Anderson and Dennis both received nine months, although these were set aside following appeal.

To many, the trial was seen as something far deeper than just a question of morality in one particular publication. It was symbolic of the chasm between the old and new order, between the establishment and the anti-establishment, between culture and counterculture.

And so it was that the sixties became sandwiched between two landmark trials: those of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Oz, representing a Britain that clearly was not prepared for the sexual liberation with which it was flooded in those ten short years. The Chatterley episode apparently signalled an age of relaxation on censorship, whereas the Oz trial offered an antidote, a regression to more oppressive and less expressive times leaving those involved wondering whether anything had ever really changed.

But the critics of Oz were not just the old-fashioned prudes of the Establishment. The publication’s apparently light-hearted exhibitions of naked women and explicit pornography held much deeper repercussions than just the courtroom drama. Marsha Rowe was the secretary of Oz in Sydney. She was hired as a ‘heartmelting teenager’ for her ‘dark eyes flashing under a halo of wavy brown hair’(15) and was soon put to work by Neville: ‘Richie had her typing his copy and I had her making the tea’(16). In 1972 Rowe launched Spare Rib, the longest running British feminist magazine, an action she largely attributes to the messages portrayed by Oz:

“During the trial, the prosecuting barrister accused the community of which the magazine was a part of being without love. Richard Neville responded that, on the contrary, Oz was against the guilt and obsession of repressed sexuality and that ‘Oz was trying to redefine love, to broaden it, extend it and revitalise it, so it could be a force of release and not one of entrapment’.

The irony of this was that, while this may have been true for men, it was rarely the case for women. The underground press used sex-objectifying images which had been developed from being fairly romantic to stridently sadistic. The women who worked on its magazines and newspapers served the men and did the office and production work rather than any editorial work.”(17)

Spare Rib became ‘a product of the counterculture and a reaction against it’(18). It was not the graphic content of Oz that was the most shocking; it was its objectification of women. David Caute explains that ‘male chauvinism was often decked out as ‘sexual liberation’, involving a gallop into pornography’(19). Flick through the ‘School Kids’ issue, and the Rupert Bear cartoon seems no less disturbing than the reduction of ‘small dark, fragile and very beautiful’(20) Berti aged fifteen on page nine to ‘Jail Bait of the Month.’(21)

It is not just the ‘School Kids’ issue that is guilty of such sexism; a huge amount of Oz’s content was dedicated to portraying the women of the counterculture as little more than sexual playthings. The front cover of issue 25 of Oz depicts a couple having sex, a man injecting himself and a woman smoking a joint while a baby looks on with the caption ‘Hippie Atrocities’(22). The woman smoking is Louise Ferrier, Richard Neville’s girlfriend, and a discussion between the couple about the cover is printed in Neville’s autobiography: ‘I look like a junkie tart.’ ‘That was the idea,’ I said.(23)

Although the cover was supposed to be satirical, a comment on the criticisms made of Oz by ‘mounting media paranoia’(24), it is significant of Neville’s attitude towards women that he was willing to make his own girlfriend look like a ‘junkie tart’ in order to sell magazines. Louise had also appeared naked on a previous cover of Oz with Jenny Kee, following a series of sexual relations between Neville, Ferrier and Kee(25). Neville clearly enjoyed publicly sharing his private relationships, and he expected his readers to do the same.(26)

Indeed it was this element of participation that made the pornography in Oz different from the pornography in magazines such as Penthouse and Playboy. Oz used women from the underground, women that the contributors to the magazine knew well, making them famous within the ‘scene’. These women set the precedent to how the remaining female population within British counterculture, including the anarchist movement, were supposed to behave, as Nicola Lane recalls:

“You had to fill so many roles: you had to be pretty and you had to be ‘a good fuck’, that seemed to be very important […] It was paradise for men in their late twenties: all these willing girls. But the trouble with the willing girls was that a lot of the time they were willing not because they particularly fancied the people concerned but because they felt they ought to. There was a huge pressure to conform to non-conformity.”(27)

In contrast, the women featured in magazines such as Penthouse and Playboy were strictly unattainable and offered ‘escapist fantasies’(28) to its readers. The consumers of mainstream pornography were therefore realistic, and able to clearly distinguish between fantasy and reality. Those indulging in the pornography of the underground, however, were led to believe that the worlds of fantasy and reality were converging, that a quick stroll down King’s Road would allow them to attain the sexually liberal woman of their dreams. The underground press not only made pornography acceptable, but it made it fully accessible and, to an extent, interactive.

The fantastical sexually liberated world created in the underground press regularly filtered into countercultural and therefore anarchist society, which massively affected the ways in which men viewed their female comrades. Unrealistic sexual expectations often piled unwanted pressures onto women, as has been demonstrated in previous testimonials from Marsha Rowe and Nicola Lane, and it can be seen in countless other examples. These attitudes even permeated campaign material, as a letter printed in Freedom in 1964 demonstrates. It is written by Maria Fyfe, an anarchist from Glasgow, complaining about a leaflet published by the Bristol Anarchists as part of their anti-conscription campaign entitled “Do You Sleep With Your Girlfriend?” which she labels ‘a childish piece of attention-mongering’. To Fyfe, the leaflet portrays women as being ‘for sleeping with only’; whereas she had previously found that the anarchist males ‘treated you as a whole human being, not only as a prospective bedmate’. She closes the letter by stating: ‘the attitude in this leaflet, comrades, of male superiority is nothing but shocking in a movement supposed to be egalitarian’(29).

The sexual liberation constructed by the publications of the underground also had a significant impact upon the manner in which many conducted their personal relationships, as the idea of ‘free love’ often proved to be far more attractive in theory than in practice. The relationship between Richard Neville and Louise Ferrier was full of jealous spats over infidelities, culminating in self-doubt and confusion on Neville’s part following his discovery of Ferrier sleeping with fellow Oz editor Felix Dennis: ‘I was angry and hurt, but I was so ashamed of this pain – which contradicted the theories of Playpower – that I shut my mouth.’(30) Like Frankenstein’s monster, Neville’s sexually liberal world had turned to harm its master demonstrating that it was not just women that fell victim to the Swinging Sixties.

Richard Neville’s sister, Jill Neville, wrote a novel about the personal relationships between the members of the counterculture, documenting the personal lives of four young revolutionaries living in Paris in 1968: Polly, Giorgio, Anna and Jane. The Love Germ was a fictional account, but its events and characters bore striking resemblance to those involved with the relationship between Jill and Angelo Quattrocchi, a flamboyant Italian anarchist with whom she eventually ‘parted in a flurry of jealousy and distress’(31). Polly and Giorgio’s relationship clearly demonstrates the differences between sexual liberation and sexual emancipation: Polly is expected to sleep with Giorgio, yet still pick up his dirty socks. He is the master of a horde of commands - ‘”Scrub my back – don’t look at the pimples”’(32) – yet failure to comply leaves Polly feeling unreasonable, ‘a harpy, a shrew, her soft hair turned to snakes of aggression’(33). It is a tale about the servitude to which women of the counterculture were subjected through the false promises of the liberal lifestyle.

However, if the author of the 1998 edition of The Love Germ’s preface, Fay Wheldon, is to be believed, the novel stands at the cusp of a second, more dramatic, sexual revolution and can be seen as a beacon of hope, rather than a cry for help. This revolution was concerned with questions of gender rather than of sexual relationships, and the counterculture would never be the same again: “The day was about to dawn when they would no longer be prepared to make coffee, fetch the wine, wash the shirts, scrub the back, fill the bed, pay the rent and in general be seen as bit-part players in the male drama of art, thought and politics.”(34)

For the main consequence of the overwhelming resurgence of anarcho-sexism in the Sixties was not one of sexually servile women performing every bidding of their male masters, it was actually that women learnt from their male counterparts how to find their voice. They were shown how to demand the revolution, and they quickly started demanding it for themselves. As a result, British feminism at its birth was not an entirely new strand of political thought: it was hugely influenced by the anarchist theories that were so prominent within the underground of the Sixties.

Oz published its final issue in 1973, completely owing its discontinuation to its failure to address the issues of Women’s Liberation:

“What finally knackered the underground was its complete inability to deal with women’s liberation. For the underside of the underground’s romantic revolt is its treatment of women. Men defined themselves as rebels against society in ways limited to their own sex, excluding women except as loyal companions or mother-figures.”(35)

With cap in hand, the men of the counterculture were forced to accept the dawn of a new revolution rising from the ashes of their own failed experiments.

I. The Anarchy of British Feminism

“I could acknowledge that the common deadpan response from men when I or another woman spoke might be because we had said something foolish. On the other hand, this was not how they behaved with men. If they disagreed with one another, they engaged and argued. Our remarks seemed, in contrast, to just fall into oblivion.”(36)

In 1967 Sheila Rowbotham met Henry Wortis at the East London Vietnam Solidarity Committee. Wortis, from Boston, was involved in Stop It: a group composed of Americans opposing the Vietnam War. While giving Rowbotham a lift home he introduced her to a new concept: male chauvinism: “People were always telling me I talked too much and men in left meetings often made me feel as if I was being unruly, which made me more defiantly unruly. But, Henry went on, it was because I was a woman.”(37)

The problem had finally been verbalised. It no longer ‘lay buried [and] unspoken’, but was identified and out in the open: women were being treated unequally, and it was time to do something about it.(38)

The main obstacle was that the women’s positions within the left wing organisations were completely subjective to the whim of their male counterparts, who were often far too busy bickering amongst themselves to take any great notice of the female members. Both sexes were massively hindered by the dearth of mature communication that existed between the genders within the left wing groups, but it was the women who particularly suffered as a result.

It would appear that both men and women within the New Left groups were struggling to relate to each other on an intellectual level, so instead they reverted to communicating with each other through sexual means. Rowbotham recalls her sexual encounters with men of left wing groups almost as though they were opportunities for women to finally assert dominance over the men, although this in turn led to even greater gender separation:

“I knew that in some of my encounters with men sexually I could be as detached and controlled as they sometimes were with me. I was, I thought, ‘using’ them sexually for physical satisfaction. I interpreted this as an inversion of the traditional male approach to sex and thus a dead end which simply reproduced relations of estrangement.”(39)

But while it may have been empowering in the short term, the long-term effects of being sexually active had a rather damaging impact upon the image of women in the political underground, and therefore upon the progress of the achievement of gender equality within the movement, as it largely resulted in confused opinions over the correct way for a woman to behave. Roz Baxandall explains the situation in America:“If she doesn’t want to sleep with men, a woman is ‘hung up’. If she does, she’s known as someone’s wife or girlfriend. And men still look down on women who have gone through lots of men in the movement. The reverse, of course, is not true.”(40)

Through attempting to take control of their own bodies, the women of the New Left were instead perpetuating the male-defined image of themselves as little more than sexual playthings. It was becoming apparent that new modes of expression were required, and these had to be on solely female terms. It was an issue that was actively revived by second wave feminism, but the idea of the concept of ‘woman’ as being a male-defined object had already been discussed over twenty years ago. Simone de Beauvoir notably declared in 1949 that ‘the concept of femininity is artificially shaped by custom and fashion, it is imposed upon each woman from without’(41), whereas Rowbotham recalls an occasion in her memoirs where she jotted down some notes about the male-defined concept of ‘woman’ at an early Women’s Liberation meeting in 1969:

“While women were accepted in an abstract way in an intellectual or academic milieu, men appeared to find it ‘difficult’ – I wrote impossible at first, but crossed this out as too pessimistic – to permit women also to be sexual. You were expected to be one thing or the other: ‘Bed/intell’ I called this split in my own shorthand. The notes ended grumpily with an obvious borrowing from Black Power: ‘Men’s job not to tell us what we’re like, which they do all the time. Start to explore what they are like in relation to us’.”(42)

If the women within the revolutionary left wing organisations truly wanted to escape the chauvinism of their male comrades, then a ‘new configuration of politics’ was required, in which they could become something other than ‘Bed/intell.’ This, however, was almost impossible: all of the significant underground publications were firmly rooted within the old political configuration of the New Left as they were all edited by men, meaning that there were often a million other topics deemed to be of higher importance than Women’s Liberation. It was necessary for the women to break away and begin their own publications, although this was hindered by a lack of finances and support. During its origins the Women’s Liberation movement in Britain found great difficulty in attempting to convince a great number of women, and men, that theirs was a cause worth fighting for, as many were tied up with other social concerns and struggled to reconcile their left wing beliefs with their feminist desires: class emancipation was generally perceived as being far more vital than female emancipation(43). As a result, before the 1970s and the launch of Spare Rib, the majority of noteworthy British second wave feminist writings were to be found within the pages of the left wing press.

Arguably, the most significant British feminist contribution to the socialist press before the close of the 1960s was the new year issue of Black Dwarf in 1969, with its front page headline asking: ‘1969: Year of the Militant Woman?’(44) The issue was published following the addition of Sheila Rowbotham to the Black Dwarf editorial board in December 1968 to ‘be in charge of women coverage’, which ‘doubled the representation of women’ as she joined a seventeen year old secretary, Ann Scott(45). However, publication of the issue was almost scuppered due to some extremely insensitive illustrations by Black Dwarf’s new designer, a ‘young hippy’ who normally worked for Oz(46). He was clearly very strongly influenced by the likes of Richard Neville and co., as the proposed layout had images of naked women scattered everywhere. Rowbotham’s manifesto in the centrefold was printed over ‘a naked woman with the most enormous pair of breasts imaginable’ with the result ‘that the key denunciations of male chauvinism were imprinted on the two breasts’(47). To Rowbotham it was a shameless exhibition of ‘the seedy side of the underground: arrogant, ignorant and prejudiced’, it was blatant ridicule of the concept of Women’s Liberation and was nothing short of ‘sabotage’(48). Ali lessened the political implications of the incident, claiming that it ‘was obvious that it was neither the dialectic that was at work here or an ultra-subtle deconstruction, but ignorance’, but he did ensure that all offensive images were removed and replaced at considerable cost to Black Dwarf before the issue was sent to print(49). Unfortunately one ‘nasty little personal ad’ which was inserted by the designer at the last minute was overlooked, meaning the following found its way into the final copy:

DWARF DESIGNER SEEKS GIRL: Head girl type to make tea, organise paper, me. Free food, smoke space. Suit American Negress.(50)

The chauvinistic mind-sets dominating the political underground had managed to permeate a publication that had intended to herald a dawning of new attitudes, but had instead been impeded by the petty and immature actions of one ‘young hippy’.

The issue itself however did make extremely positive efforts at creating an acceptable theoretical model that successfully combined both feminist and socialist thought, with notable articles contributed from Sheila Rowbotham, Audrey Wise, Fred Halliday and Ann Scott. The design of Rowbotham’s centrefold manifesto was rescued with a striking image of a Mexican women guerrilla from Zapata’s army, and bore the emotive headline: ‘Women: the struggle for freedom…’(51). It is a highly personal and emotional article, with original and rebellious tones that heralded a new dawn in the way British feminists were to publicly discuss their problems; the personal had become political, and a revolution ‘made about little things’ was fast approaching:

“THEY tell us what we should be. As we grow up, especially from puberty, we are under intensive pressure to be ‘acceptable’ – not to put ourselves outside the safety net of marriage. From small girls we are taught that failure means not being selected by men – the shame of being a wallflower. The sign of intelligence and subtlety is a contractual bargain as we hand over our virginity for a marriage document, a ring, and the obligation of financial support. Orgasm is a matter of merchandise. And remember THEY don’t like us to be too clever. Well she might go to University but men want someone who can cook.”(52)

The tone of bitterness is shocking, and the repetitions of ‘THEY’ and ‘us’ explicitly creates an image of female victims subservient to male domination with words appearing to gush from years of mistreatment and externally enforced beliefs of inferiority, which successfully induce feelings of both pity and empathy.

The article also discusses extensively the prescribed image of women and the male-defined role that many women found themselves playing, and Rowbotham’s influences are evident throughout. Simone de Beauvoir and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona - a film which was released in 1966 about an unwell actress and nurse reflecting upon their own identities and female roles – are inspirations which she alludes to throughout her memoirs and manifest in such comments as:

“THEY tell us what we are. The image is constantly reaffirmed. The books she reads and the films she sees are almost invariably by men. The women characters created by them, however sympathetically and with whatever intuitive understanding, must of necessity be the projection of their responses towards women. One is simply not conscious of men writers or men film makers. They are just writers, just film makers. The reflected image for women they create will be taken straight by women themselves. These characters ‘are’ women.”(53)

The very nature of female identity is placed under questioning, and Rowbotham asserts a necessity throughout the article for women to redefine themselves before any solid attempts at liberation are made: “They have to decolonise themselves. Then they can liberate the colonisers.”(54)

She clearly is not asking for a revolution without men, but is requesting that women rediscover themselves before the genders build their new world together.

Fred Halliday’s article, ‘Women, Sex and the Abolition of the Family’, discusses such issues as the franchise, equal pay, marriage and the paternal and capitalist nature of the family. He refers frequently to the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and it is doubtless that the main theoretical basis of the article is an attempt of an amalgamation of feminism and Marxism, as Halliday sees the main key to relieve female oppression is to abolish the family, with a desire for ‘the end of the family as a tool of capitalist society’, just as Engels demanded in 1884 with The Origin of the Family, Private Property and The State(55). However, a vast amount of Halliday’s article contains strong anarcha-feminist sentiments and appears to be particularly influenced by the works of Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre and Charlotte Wilson. For example, the following statement looks as though Goldman herself could have written it: “What needs to be attacked is the very insistence on marriage itself. There is no rationality in forcing people to formalise their relations by registering them in a church or a town hall. The very institution of a legalised, permanent relationship is one that must be criticised, as unnecessary and in many cases evil.”(56)

In ‘Marriage and Love’, a piece written by Goldman in 1911, she labels marriage a ‘poor little State and Church-begotten weed’, whereas Voltairine de Cleyre in ‘They Who Marry Do Ill’ calls religious marriage ‘an unwarranted interference on the part of the priest with the affairs of individuals’, and Wilson stated in 1885 that ‘it is an intolerable impertinence that Church or State or society in any official form should venture to interfere with lovers’(57). These statements bear striking similarity to those made by Halliday in ‘Women, Sex and the Abolition of the Family’, which would suggest that the article is not solely a demonstration of Marxist-feminist thought, but can instead be seen as an example of the strong presence of anarcha-feminist theory within the British second wave feminist movement.

While 1969 was the year in which socialist women discovered feminism, for anarchist women it was 1970 that proved to be the year in which they finally found their voices(58). Throughout the summer of 1970 the letter pages of Freedom were dominated with accusations of ignorance and oppression from female anarchists, highlighting a need for anarchism to start considering feminist issues. In an issue dated 25th July 1970 Freedom printed a letter written by Judith Weymant, which opened with the following statement: “It has surprised me that a paper like Freedom has ignored half the population, women. There has been little or no mention of Women’s Liberation groups which have formed in this country in the past six months. Is this because of lack of interest or lack of information?”(59)

Weymant is clearly attempting to make feminism an anarchist issue, as she believes ‘the left wing as a whole’ should be held accountable for driving women to form their own groups in the first place after being ‘ignored’(60). Indeed, Women’s Liberation was certainly becoming very difficult for anarchists to ignore, and suggestions to resolve the gender imbalance within the anarchist movement were made upon the Freedom letter pages. A letter from ‘E.C.’ published in Freedom in October 1970 calls for female anarchists to write into the newspaper to ‘contribute to the Violence/Nonviolence debate’ which was raging at that time(61). However, a response from Liz Willis instead claims that the lack of female contribution is not a ‘result of a tendency in anarchist males to dominate (oppress?)’, but is due to ‘the fact that many contributors to Freedom write not as ‘females’ or ‘males’ but as anarchists’(62). It is the persistence of unenlightened attitudes that leads to ‘the tendency to assume masculine authorship’ of contributions into Freedom, suggesting that it is not the level of female participation within the anarchist movement that needs to change, but the narrow-minded nature of some of its members(63). It is interesting that, while Rowbotham called for an awakening of female attitudes in the socialist press, the focus of contributions in Freedom, an anarchist publication, instead largely summoned changes in male attitudes. It is possible to suggest, therefore, that anarchist males were bigger chauvinists than their socialist counterparts. From the anarcho-sexism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, to the rampant male chauvinism in Richard Neville’s anarchist counterculture, throughout history men have managed to twist the principles of anarchist theory in order to prolong their sexual domination, which has led Peggy Kornegger to claim that ‘anarchist men have been little better than males everywhere in their subjection of women’(64). An article with the provocative title of ‘Screwed-up kids and Women’s Liberation’ was published in Freedom in April 1970 and solely identified the key obstacle to female emancipation as male chauvinistic attitudes and the resulting paternalistic social system:“If your relationships (communication and intercourse) with women are fashioned by an assumed superiority, tinged with a benevolent or crudely patronising paternalism, shaped by a supposed innate inequality; up yours brother. What chance the revolution whilst women remain incarcerated within the traditional abnormal authority of men?”(65)

As the anarchist movement struggled to satisfy its female members, the British feminist movement was finding organisational inspiration from anarchism. The emphasis on anti-oppression within the movement meant that much of its structure lacked a hierarchy; the focus was on absolute equality, making it perhaps more anarchist than the anarchist movement itself. A Freedom correspondent reporting on the 1970 Women’s Liberation conference in Ruskin College, Oxford, asserts that the nature of the organisation of discussion groups gave ‘the impression […] of creative anarchy’(66). Ann Taylor Allen in Women in Twentieth-Century Europe emphasises the movement’s ‘individualist and anti-hierarchical spirit’ as ‘the young women rejected hierarchical structures and proclaimed that all groups were free to develop their own agendas’; whereas Martin Pugh similarly states that “with their democratic and cooperative approach and absence of formal leadership, these [feminist] groups sometimes verged on anarchism.”(67)

They were also, unlike their suffragette predecessors, ‘more inclined to by-pass the entire political system’, which implies an anarchist desire to operate without political governance(68). To Pugh, the rejection of an official political system was symbolic of the feminists’ rejection of male-created systems, as he claims that ‘the hallmark of women’s liberation consisted in avoiding the formal, hierarchical structures typical of male politics’ by which women had commonly been ‘marginalised’(69). Indeed, Peggy Kornegger, a prominent American feminist writing in 1975, affirms that:

“In rebellion against the competitive power games, impersonal hierarchy, and mass organisation tactics of male politics, women broke off into small, leaderless, consciousness-raising groups, which dealt with personal issues in our daily lives […] The structure of women’s groups bore a striking resemblance to that of anarchist affinity groups within anarcho-syndicalist unions in Spain, France, and many other countries. Yet, we had not called ourselves anarchists and consciously organised around anarchist principles.”(70)

From its earliest stages members of the Women’s Liberation Movement were calling for a complete overhaul of society, the achievement of liberation through changes in relationships and attitudes, not economic structures. They were not interested in legal reforms, as changes in laws would only make them legally equal in a society that was built on unjust foundations. Without realising it, these women were anarchists, and it is undeniable that British second wave feminism had a strong anarchist influence. Kornegger writes about an almost spiritual anarchist subconscious within many second wave feminists, which assisted them in striving for their new society: “Before the women’s movement was more than a handful of isolated groups groping in the dark toward answers, anarchism as an unspecified ideal existed in our minds.

I believe that this puts women in the unique position of being the bearers of a subsurface anarchist consciousness which, if articulated and concretized can take us further than any previous group toward the achievement of total revolution. Women’s intuitive anarchism, if sharpened and clarified, is an incredible leap forward (or beyond) in the struggle for human liberation.”(71)

However, not all British women carried their anarcha-feminism as an ‘unspecified ideal’, as many began to form anarcha-feminist groups, accompanied by their own publications.

Anarcha-feminism was present in America from 1971, but in Britain it became a recognisable force in June 1977 when the first significant anarcha-feminist magazine, Zero, was published in London by the Zero Collective who described themselves as ‘a group of anarchists and anarchist feminists’(72). Their first issue included a double-page spread containing their manifesto demanding ‘full sexual-social revolution’(73). Many of the ideas discussed within the manifesto were not new ones; they were echoes of the words written on the pages of The Black Dwarf by Rowbotham: “As women we are sex-role typed from birth into a subordinate social position. We are taught passivity and domesticity – anything that will crush our real selves and turn us into wives and mothers.”(74)

Highlighting how easily the ideas of the early Women’s Liberation Movement could be translated into an anarcha-feminist context. Moreover, there are even similarities to the Marxist-feminist theories expressed by Halliday: “[The] nuclear family is the economic basis for capitalism. Each isolated family having its individual house, car, hoover, mixer, television, adds up to create the false consumption of superfluous commodities.”(75)

The complaints made about male chauvinism and anarcho-sexism within the manifesto appear to be lifted straight out of the letter pages of Freedom, and demonstrate exactly where the members of the Zero Collective began their political education: “Even on becoming involved in left groups we are frequently reacted to as potential sex rather than potential activists and friends.”(76)

It is evident that the women of Zero, finding themselves disillusioned and marginalised within the left wing, turned to feminism, which eventually evolved into anarcha-feminism, meaning anarcha-feminism can therefore be seen as an indirect product of anarcho-sexism. This evolution is explained within the manifesto, making it seem a logical and inevitable step with the claim that ‘it is in organisation and action that women have spontaneously come closest to anarchism’(77). To Zero, ‘the revolutionary feminist perspective is essentially anarchist […] because feminism is anarchist in both its theory and its practice’(78).

The two main aims to emerge from this manifesto are of complete ‘sexual-social revolution’ and also of reform of the existing anarchist movement(79). It would appear that the Zero Collective did not intend to stay autonomous forever, as there are repeated calls within the article for anarchism to recognise feminism. As was witnessed in Freedom, the blame lies solely with the attitudes of the male anarchists, who are labelled ‘resiliently sexist’ in Zero(80). There are demands to cease ignoring Women’s Liberation ‘because anarchism is people’s liberation’, as

“Anarchist practice contradicts its own theory by not being actively feminist. Anarchism must recognise in feminism a radical extension of its own politic, beyond its critique of capital and state to include patriarchal oppression, and must base all future practice on this recognition.”(81)

This call was repeated throughout successive issues of Zero, as an article published in the magazine in August 1978 stated that “anarchism is reduced to hypocrisy if we recognise and struggle against hierarchy and domination of capitalism and the state, whilst dismissing the importance of dealing with it in our personal lives.”(82)

This suggests that calls in the first issue of Zero went unanswered as the male-dominated anarchist movement continued to ignore demands for Women’s Liberation.

Despite apparently failing in its attempts at adding consideration of feminist ideology to the doctrine of the anarchist movement, Zero was successful in helping to create a progressive British anarcha-feminist movement. It was essential in formulating a cohesive theory of anarcha-feminism, and although it only lasted for two years its ideas remained relevant for decades. The manifesto of the anarcho-feminist paper Harpy, published in the late 1980s, was strikingly similar to the one in the pages of Zero, suggesting that its influence lasted far longer than its print run:

“Feminism and the ‘equality’ of women and men is the first principle of anarchism. If these power structures that we live in and are asked to obey are to be destroyed to liberate us from control, anarchism, through the direct challenge to these structures must be the way foreward [sic.]. Anarchism is the politics of feminism.”(83)

It is evident, however, that the longevity of anarcha-feminism is significant of a lasting inability of cooperation between the sexes within the anarchist movement, suggesting a severe resilience to the existence of anarcho-sexism. As anarcha-feminism has seen a resurgence in recent years, perhaps there is some hope that there is still chance for equality between the sexes to be achieved through the use of anarchist theory.

Notes
1. J. Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English underground, 1961-1971, (London, 1988), Nicola Lane, p. 401.
2. Marwick, The Sixties, (Oxford, 1998), p. 680.
3. G. DeGroot, The 60s Unplugged: A kaleidoscopic history of a disorderly decade, (London, 2008), p. 437.
4. P. Larkin, ‘Annus Mirabilis’ in P. Larkin, High Windows, (London, 1974).
5. M. Collins, Modern Love: an intimate history of men and women in twentieth-century Britain, (London, 2003), p. 135.
6. M. Collins ‘The Pornography of Permissiveness: men’s sexuality and women’s emancipation in mid twentieth-century Britain’ History Workshop Journal, (Spring, 1999), 47, p. 117.
7. Frank Mort identifies the visitors to Walker’s Court as being ‘European and American tourists and London businessmen’, Mort, Capital Affairs, (London, 2010), p. 243.
8. Ingarfield, ‘OZ’, p. 9.
9. See, for example, IT (April 21-28, 1967) No. 11, p. 1; IT (January 17-30, 1969), No.48, p. 1; IT (March 14-27, 1969), No. 52, p. 1; IT (March 27, 1970) No. 76, p. 1.
10. See IT (June 30 – July 14, 1967) No. 16, pp. 8-9; IT (May 2-15. 1968), No. 29, p. 6.
11. R. Durgnat, ‘Strippers: A Guide to Soho Clubs’, in IT (28 September, 1966), No. 4, p. 11.
12. C. S. Murray, ‘I was an Oz Schoolkid’, The Guardian (2nd August 2001) from guardian.co.uk, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2001/au ... lishing.g2 (accessed 12/09/10).
13. ibid.
14. Gerry & Mark. ‘The Rupert Bear Controversy: Defence and Reactions to the Cartoon in the Oz Obscenity Trial’, http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/rupage.html (accessed 12/09/10).
15. Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, p. 50
16. ibid., p. 54.
17. M. Rowe, ‘Introduction’ in ed. M. Rowe, Spare Rib Reader (Middlesex, 1982), p. 15.
18. ibid., p. 13.
19. D. Caute, Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades, (London, 1988), p. 235.
20. Oz (May 1970), No. 28, p. 4.
21. ibid., p. 9.
22. Oz (December 1969), No. 25, p. 1.
23. Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, p. 180.
24. ibid.
25. Oz (December 1968), No. 17, p. 1.
26. Although he did originally object to Louise’s first topless cover for issue eight of Oz as recounted by photographer Keith Morris: ‘Richard actually didn’t like all this; Richard tried to stop it on the grounds of morality, i.e.: my girlfriend is not baring her tits all over this magazine […] Louise didn’t give a stuff and so the deal in the end was that it was cropped at the waist.’ Green, Days in the Life, p. 423.
27. Green, Days in the Life, p. 418.
28. Collins ‘The Pornography of Permissiveness’, p. 117.
29. M. Fyfe, ‘Bristol Bourgeois?’, Freedom, (30th May, 1964), p. 4.
30. Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, p. 177.
31. F. Wheldon, ‘Preface’ in J. Neville, The Love Germ, (London, 1998), p. ix.
32. Neville, The Love Germ, p. 10.
33. ibid., p. 106.
34. Wheldon, ‘Preface’, p. viii.
35. D. Widgery, ‘What Went Wrong’, Oz (Winter 1973), No. 48, p. 3.
36. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, pp. 161-2.
37. ibid., p. 161.
38. B. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (New York, 1963), p. 13.
39. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 160.
40. R. Baxandall, ‘Marry Or Die’, quoted in P. Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On: revolutionaries, rock stars and the rise and fall of ‘60s counter-culture, (London, 2008), p. 279.
41. S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (London, 1984), p. 692.
42. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 224.
43. Rowbotham, writing in 1979, questions why there was this ‘resistance to women’s liberation’ in the early 1970s from left wing organisations, particularly in the International Socialism group, of which she was a member, and believes it was partly due to ‘the bias of a male-dominated leadership’ and ‘a dismissal of women’s liberation as middle class’. (S. Rowbotham, ‘The Women’s Movement and Organising for Socialism’ in S. Rowbotham, L. Segal and H. Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: feminism and the making of socialism, (London, 1979) pp. 34-5).
44. ‘1969: Year of the Militant Woman?’, Black Dwarf, (10th January 1969), 13, 9, p. 1.
45. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 208; T. Ali, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, (New York, 1991), p. 231.
46. Ali, Street Fighting Years, p. 234.
47. ibid.
48. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 210.
49. Ali, Street Fighting Years, p. 234.
50. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, p. 210.
51. S. Rowbotham, ‘Women: the struggle for freedom…’, Black Dwarf, (10th January 1969), 13, 9, pp. 6-7.
52. Ibid., p. 6.
53. ibid.
54. ibid., p. 7.
55. F. Halliday, ‘Women, Sex and the Abolition of the Family’, Black Dwarf, (10th January 1969), 13, 9, p. 2.; F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and The State, (1884).
56. Halliday, ‘Women, Sex and the Abolition of the Family’.
57. E. Goldman, ‘Marriage and Love’, in E. Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, (New York, 1911, 2nd edn.), p. 233; V. de Cleyre, ‘They Who Marry Do Ill’ (1907), from Voltairine de Cleyre Archive, (Accessed 13/11/08), http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Ar ... arry.html; Wilson to Pearson, (8th August 1885), in Greenway, ‘‘Together we will make a new world’, p. 1.
58. Although, according to an article in Freedom written by Liz Willis, ‘one of the ‘predictions for 1971’ circulating around the media has been that this will be the year of Women’s Liberation – of the movement, that is, not of course in actuality.’ Clearly the media was relatively slow at taking Women’s Liberation seriously as a movement. (L. Willis, ‘Now, about those Women…’, Freedom, (16th January 1971), 32, 2, p. 3.)
59. J. Weymant, ‘Women’s Liberation’, Freedom, (25th July 1970), 31, 23, p. 3.
60. ibid.
61. ‘E. C.’, ‘Women’s Liberation’, Freedom, (24th October 1970), 31, 33, p. 2.
62. ‘E. C.’, ‘Women’s Liberation’; L. Willis, ‘Female Anarchists’, Freedom, (14th November 1970), 31, 35, p. 2.
63. Willis, ‘Female Anarchists’.
64. P. Kornegger, ‘Anarchism: The Feminist Connection’, Second Wave, (Spring 1975), p. 18.
65. D. Cunliffe, ‘Screwed-up kids and Women’s Liberation’, Freedom, (25th April 1970), 31, 13, p. 3.
66. ‘Our Correspondent’, ‘Conference of Women’s Liberation’, Freedom, (9th March 1970), 31, 8, p. 4.
67. A. T. Allen, Women in Twentieth-Century Europe, (New York, 2008), pp. 116-121; M. Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, (London, 2nd edn., 2000), p. 318.
68. ibid.
69. ibid.
70. Kornegger, ‘Anarchism’, p. 19.
71. Kornegger, ‘Anarchism’, pp. 19-20.
72. ‘Zero Collective’, ‘Anarchism / Feminism’, Zero, (June 1977), 1, p. 6.
73. ibid.
74. ibid.
75. ibid.
76. ibid.
77. ibid., p. 7.
78. ibid.
79. ibid.
80. ibid.
81. ibid.
82. C. Doree, ‘Personal Politics and Freedom’, Zero, (August/September 1978), 7, p. 11.
83. ‘Anarchism and Feminism’, Harpy, p. 2.

Emma Dixon received an Institute for Anarchist Studies grant in the summer of 2010 to support the writing of this piece. It is an excerpt from a longer work. Emma is a PhD student and part-time tutor at Bangor University, North Wales, and her research focuses on twentieth-century British anarchism and feminism. She also taught a seminar about anarchism to third-year students at Bangor University. Emma is currently researching her PhD thesis, “Women, Love, and Anarchism: British Counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s,” due for completion in September 2012.

[American Dream]

The Distorted Idea That the So-Called "Masculinity Crisis" Is Caused by Successful Women

By Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Seal Press
Posted on October 4, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152613/th ... sful_women

From the book Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life by Samhita Mukhopadhyay. Excerpted by arrangement with Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright (c) 2011.

When we buy into the idea that female and male are “opposites,” it becomes impossible for us to empower women without either ridiculing men or pulling the rug out from under ourselves.

—Julia Serano, Whipping Girl


In the summer of 2010, Cee-Lo’s hit song “Fuck You!” hit the airwaves. The song is a bitter testimonial from Cee-Lo about a girl who broke his heart by leaving him for another man because he wasn’t rich enough. The “fuck you” is mainly directed at the new boyfriend, but also to his ex. This song became a sort of national anthem for young men who were bitter about not being “man enough” to be with the women they wanted to be with. It became intensely popular, and with it came commentary (well, at least on Facebook) about how it was about time men speak out on their feelings of inadequacy about women, money, and romance. This declaration seemed justified given how much pressure men feel to provide in relationships (and given the state of the economy in 2010). It appeared more than ever that men were bitter about the pressure they’re under to be a “man” today.

According to the mainstream media, masculinity is in a state of crisis. Men are not “men” anymore, because women are not “women” anymore. Women today go to college, have their own apartments, jobs, and their own money; they are no longer reliant on men for their financial needs (hypothetically). Meanwhile, the expectation for men to be the primary breadwinner, while unrealistic, is still encoded in our culture. These two competing stories, one of women’s empowerment and the other of men being chivalrous manly men, have been characterized as a crisis, not of gender essentialism, but of manliness itself. The shift in actual gender disparity is quite slim, but the media circus that makes much ado about the whole thing would have you believing that men are the ultimate underdogs. As a result, men are receiving competing messages about what it means to be a man today, and the side effects include everything from anger and resentment to alienation and disaffectedness.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, masculinity describes someone or something that possesses characteristics normally associated with males and can be “used to describe any human, animal, or object that has the quality of being masculine.” Note that the dictionary definition asserts that there is a normal way to be male, but it does not make the mistake of connecting being male with being masculine.

We’re all familiar with the standard understanding of masculinity. When we tell someone to “man up,” we are drawing from conventional ideas of what it means to be a man—to be strong, unwavering, chivalrous, independent, together, and courageous. While none of these are bad characteristics, they suggest that masculinity is based on strength while femininity is based on weakness, ultimately limiting the way men and women are allowed to act and implying that those who act outside these norms are misfits, freaks, or, at the very best, outliers.

Only when we understand that masculinity, like femininity, is something we are taught, can we come to terms with the ways in which masculinity is socially constructed. Male-identified folks are hurt by unfair expectations to “be a man,” and this form of gender essentialism is harmful across the board. The insistence to be a “man” and act in ways that are propagated by conventional ideas of manhood is implicated with violence (think bullying, prisons, sports, the military), repression (chastising little boys for liking “girly” things), and unfair expectations (men always have to pay, etc.) and often results in violence (intimate partner violence, sexual assault, etc.).

The burden put on men to be “men,” the shifting nature of women’s roles, and the overstated crisis in masculinity have had three side effects: (1) it has conflated female success with male failure; (2) it has exaggerated the actual success that women have made (both in the world and in romance); and (3) it has led to angry and/or disaffected male behavior. I have talked throughout this book about the pressures women feel to act a certain way in romance and love, and the purpose of this chapter is to show how unfair expectations of men hurt both men and women.

Deconstructing the Masculinity “Crisis”

If you turn on the television, read a newspaper, or listen to the radio, you’d be led to believe that men are now second-class citizens and completely disenfranchised. The supposed crisis in masculinity is everywhere you look, from men’s rights activists (a small, but very loud minority of men whose primary issues include alimony and custody, but who also manage to say appalling things about women’s rights) to progressive authors. According to its proponents, the crisis is affecting men and boys starting from elementary school–aged kids and impacting men in college, the workplace, and the domestic sphere. According to critics, men are the ones supposedly worst hit by the collapsing economy.

David Brooks writes in The New York Times that we’re living in a “woman’s world” in response to the shift in women’s roles. He writes, “The social consequences are bound to be profound. The upside is that by sheer force of numbers, women will be holding more and more leadership jobs. On the negative side, they will have a harder and harder time finding marriageable men with comparable education levels. One thing is for sure: in 30 years the notion that we live in an oppressive patriarchy that discriminates against women will be regarded as a quaint anachronism.”1 Brooks, similar to many of his “men are in crisis” contemporaries, equates female success with male failure, and even goes as far as to suggest that women’s progress has been so steady that patriarchy will cease to exist in thirty years!

I can only hope that Brooks’s predication about the end of patriarchy is right, but his assertions about the declining power of men have been overstated. As I mention in the last chapter, women overall still make less money than men, nationwide. They still own less property. They still get booted from jobs for getting pregnant or are still fighting for fair maternity leave. And while women in many cases are better educated than men, they still make less money (often in the same positions).2

As much as I disagree with his assessment, it’s not just the conservative camp that’s spouting off this kind of rhetoric. The shift in traditional gender roles has irked even some progressive writers. Hanna Rosin’s much talked about 2010 piece in The Atlantic, “The End of Men,” notes that we are in a new phase of social and economic order and the rapid success of women in the workplace shows us that the times they are a-changin’. Rosin suggests that perhaps the evolutionary psychologists were wrong: It’s not a biological imperative that demands men work in aggressive, competitive fields and women at home or in pink-collar jobs; it’s social pressure and economic need that has put men and women in these roles. She poses some important questions: “What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?” According to this argument, jobs have changed and skills that are considered feminine are more in demand—specifically communication skills, efficiency in office tasks, and multitasking—and Rosin’s claim is that since women are better at these things, they are more successful in the workplace and in life.

While Rosin is right to question evolutionary psychology and its sweeping generalizations about “natural” characteristics in men and women that have worked to establish the foundation for men’s and women’s roles in society, she still gets caught in the gender essentialism trap. The assumption that certain skills are for women and others are for men ignores how men and women are socialized to excel in certain roles. We are taught from a very young age that certain skills and characteristics are masculine while others are feminine, and then we are pummeled with constant messaging based on our sex as to which of these roles we should be fulfilling.

The problem with the “masculinity crisis” is not that women have excelled too much and therefore created a crisis for men, but that we have such a strong inability to let go of what it has traditionally meant to be a man. In response to Rosin’s piece, Ann Friedman at The American Prospect writes, “She thinks the problem is men; really, it’s traditional gender stereotypes. The narrow, toxic definition of masculinity perpetuated by Rosin and others—that men are brawn not brains, doers not feelers, earners not nurturers—is actually to blame for the crisis.” As long as we perpetuate the myth that men have inherent qualities that make them more suitable than women for certain types of work, the shifting nature of the economy (and women’s attainment of better and better jobs) is going to continue to be interpreted as a crisis of masculinity.

Lest you think this crisis in masculinity is new, think again. In her newest book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, Stephanie Coontz finds multiple points in history where a masculinity crisis arose. In an interview, she told Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory, “People have been proclaiming a ‘masculinity crisis’ since the 1890s and, actually, it’s very interesting that when you go back to the 1940s and ’50s, a lot of the vitriol directed at women was because they thought there was a ‘masculinity crisis’ at that time. The idea was that domineering women in the home were expecting too much of their husbands and were driving them to work too many hours.” What Coontz describes is not so different from what we’re seeing today, in that it’s women’s emancipation and supposed lack of reliance on or need for men’s support that have called into question the very definition of masculinity.

The truth is that masculinity has been in crisis for a long time, but it has nothing to do with women being threatening. It has to do with the fact that masculinity is a constructed fallacy to begin with. Men and women have always worked together in multiple, creative, and diverse ways for survival and convenience. Gender roles have shifted throughout history depending on political, economic, and social circumstances, and despite this the push for traditional gender roles has prevailed.

What it means to be a man also varies across race and class. Historically, working-class women have always had to work, and men from disenfranchised backgrounds (gay, immigrant, men of color, incarcerated populations, differently abled, trans) have never benefited from the privileges of being a conventional man. Yes, masculinity has been in crisis for a long time, but it’s only now starting to be paid attention to because it’s impacting middle-class white men.

And what are the subliminal messages we’re sending out when we propagate the message that female success is ruining traditional ideas of masculinity? It suggests that women should stay in “their place.” It suggests that women should have not been given access to jobs and education, as this disrupts normal ideals of masculinity. And it suggests that the only way men can feel comfortable is when women are inferior to them. The rhetoric also assumes that in order to be a man you must be better than a woman, echoing traditional ideas of masculinity that are predicated on the belief that men are superior to women.

The most serious implication of the rhetoric, however, is the ways in which it impacts pay equity legislation, reproductive rights, and other types of legislation that guarantee women basic civil liberties to protect their bodies, communities, and families. Suggesting that men are in crisis brings into question the very rights that feminists have fought to earn for women, while neglecting to build any space for men to express or explore the shifting nature of masculinity.

The idea that female empowerment equals male disempowerment puts women in a position where they feel like they have to downplay their successes for the benefit of the male ego. Often, women become afraid to claim their successes for fear they will not meet a man who wants to be with them for the long-term. Remember, lots of women are afraid to even ask men out. Similarly, men either feel like they have to overcompensate or feel embarrassed by their lack of success.

While the crisis in masculinity has been overstated, there have been some concrete shifts in how men and women date, but this is always characterized in the media as a negative trend. Trend pieces invariably decry the decline or loss of femininity while upholding conventional ideas of masculinity. They highlight how giving up sex too early hurts your chances at romance; how men are intimidated by female success; how all the good men are gone; and how specific subgroups of women are single because of their career success.

One example of this “trend” can be seen in a fall 2010 New York Times article titled “Keeping Romance Alive in the Age of Female Empowerment,” by Katrin Bennhold. On first glance you wonder if it is an Onion headline, but no, Bennhold actually states the case for why women should downplay their accomplishments in an effort to foster “romance.” Per usual, romance and female empowerment are diametrically opposed to each other. The author concludes, “Leave the snazzy company car at home on the first date; find your life partner in your 20s, rather than your 30s, before you’ve become too successful.” According to writers like Bennhold, men are fragile flowers who are easily intimidated by your success, so hide it, and while you are at it, hide who you are as well. Get married in your twenties, because when you’re old (and successful) no one is going to like you. The picture this paints of women is bleak and the assumption it makes about men is disgraceful.

It’s easy to ignore such an obviously outdated article about gender roles, but the reality is that the author is taking her cues from current themes about men, women, and romance. In a piece for TBD.com, Amanda Hess writes about the gender essentializing nature of these types of articles and how they “make light of our most basic identities as women—they tell us how our civil rights are ruining our interpersonal relationships, how our wombs are interfering with our higher education, and whether our basic body types are currently socially acceptable.” When The New York Times, one of the main purveyors of cultural trends, publishes story after story that are based on sexist attitudes toward men and women, we should be concerned. Due to its reach, these stories become talking points and impact how the public thinks about romance, female empowerment, and masculinity.

The cultural reluctance to let go of what it means to be a man is most obvious in the onslaught of “death of masculinity” flavored media. But the crisis is not an actual shift; it is more a reflection of the anxieties facing a changing world. These anxieties have made themselves known through an increasingly angry male youth culture, as seen in popular culture with violent video games and music, disaffected male culture (Judd Apatow anyone?), or in more obscure places, like men’s rights groups and the pickup art scene. What is often ignored in the “crisis” of masculinity is that male dominance in most arenas hasn’t actually shifted that much, which suggests that many of these side effects are driven by false information, insecurity, and a media saturated with conflicting images of what it means to be a man today.

Man-boys

One response to the tensions arising between men not living up to the “manly man” expectation and women striving to be empowered superwomen has been the emergence of a new type of man—the perpetually childlike man-boy who is sitting on a couch near you smoking weed, drinking beers, and playing video games. This man-boy deals with his perceived inadequacy by deciding he doesn’t have to be in a serious relationship, and as a result, he never has to grow up. This man-boy loves his friends before he loves the ladies (“bromance” anybody?), he has enough expendable income to do whatever he wants (mostly), and, well, smoking that much weed makes you pretty damn unmotivated anyway. This dude, the character featured in Judd Apatow movies, is sensitive about his lack of aggressive masculinity. He is insecure, isn’t very serious about life, and doesn’t really have to be.

The existential battles of the nerdy, nice, dorky dude, at first glance in movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, or Superbad (all hilarious), seem to disrupt traditional conceptions of masculinity, since they characterize men as more sensitive, disorganized, less methodical, and not that physically attractive. They are “nice guys” who have been wronged by life and women. But upon closer examination we see that these don’t give alternative models of masculinity per se. They do not display nicer, more compassionate, or less sexist behavior toward women; all women are cast as moms or babes, obstacles to overcome or objects of sexual desire. The movies, in fact, highlight men’s failures—failures hidden behind fart jokes, broken careers, and running from the accountability of real relationships (from needy, often shrill, but totally together women). Man-boys are characterized as failures of masculinity, but somehow continue to benefit from male privilege—because, well, they are still men.

Women who want to be dating from this subset of (mostly fictional) men are far from satisfied. In her book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, Kay Hymowitz makes the case that the rise of female empowerment has destabilized masculinity and that there are no “men” left. In a Wall Street Journal piece titled “Where Have the Good Men Gone?” Hymowitz sees men acting like boys as, “an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It’s been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess, or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.” Hymowitz, a known conservative writer, might be overstating how much progress women have actually made, but her anxiety is a common one: Where have all the good men gone?

What is overlooked in these frustrated gasps of romantic dreams unrealized is that by asking where have the “men” gone, we are feeding into toxic and traditional ideas of masculinity. It’s true, both on-screen and in real life, man-boys don’t go far enough in disrupting the ethos of masculinity to present us with an alternative male psychology. This is what prompts the question in the first place, but the anxiety and idea that there are no “good men” left stems from fictitious ideas of men. Jill Filipovic writes at Feministe, in response to Hymowitz’s description of the man-boy, “Maybe I’m hanging out at the wrong bars, but far more common is the twenty- or thirty-something dude (or lady) who has a wide variety of interests, a job he’s okay with but an eye for something better, a wide social network and few external pressures to settle for less than what he really wants, in love or family or career. He might also watch Comedy Central and enjoy a good dick joke and a beer every now and again. And you know, that describes me too. It’s actually pretty great. Dick jokes are funny. Good beer tastes good.” Man-boys are as much media constructed fallacies as desperate educated single women are. Yeah sure, there are a few of them and all of us share some of the anxieties these media constructions capture, but for the most part they don’t actually represent us in our totality.

For most men, the characterization of men as “boys,” due to not hurrying through conventional markers of adulthood, is harsh. It’s an almost feminist-style chastising of single men, but it’s ultimately just reconsolidating gender essentialism. Similar to Filipovic, in my experience, a lot of the men that might be cast as man-boys are not that different from me—they are figuring things out in a world that’s constantly changing. The ones who want to be in relationships are in relationships and will be irrelevant of their financial status or their supposed freedom not to have to be in a relationship. And men who respect women and are accountable to their feelings were like that in the first place, and a shifting economy is not going to change who they are.

Also, Filipovic points out something that the Apatow movies and Hymowitz have failed to capture—all women aren’t parading around yelling at men to man-up so they can have their babies. A lot of women are also taking advantage of a new world in which marriage doesn’t happen immediately, and where taking the time to figure out what we want with our lives and careers before we settle down is a good thing. If the supposed crisis in masculinity has shown us anything, it’s that the more natural course of action is to allow for gender to shift with the changing social, economic, and political climate, as opposed to demanding we regress to more traditional gender roles.

The Art of Womanizing: Pickup Artists and the Seduction Community

The responses to the feelings of insecurity that have transpired due to the masculinity crisis run the gamut from the less nefarious rise of “man-boys” to vivid displays of misogyny (as can be seen by the men’s rights activists and other ardent angry decriers of the new vagina overlords) to the less violent but just as toxic rise in men’s dating advice that tells men how to be pickup artists.

Pickup art, or the art of seduction, has been pushed through books, classes, seminars (full-on very expensive retreats), and websites that tell men that they need to use certain psychological tactics to get women to have sex with them. The purpose of pickup art, supposedly, is to support men with their self-esteem. But if you’ve ever survived the advances of a pickup artist, you know that their only purpose is to manipulate women’s insecurities in an effort to get laid. Pickup artists acknowledge power differentials between men and women and then come up with clever and creative ways to manipulate them.

The bible of pickup art for our generation is Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. A quick glance at the chapters gets you familiar with the language and mind-set of pickup art, including Chapter 1, “Select a Target,” Chapter 5, “Isolate the Target,” Chapter 6, “Create an Emotional Connection,” Chapter 7, “Extract to a Seduction Location,” Chapter 10, “Blast Last-Minute Resistance,” and finally, Chapter 11, “Manage Expectations.” This kind of language tells us that men are hunters, women are their game, and the ladies men should be trying to connect with are nothing but targets for the purpose of sex.10 Unfortunately, it also sounds like a manual for date rape.

I perused a few pickup artist websites, too, and found a wide variety of information, from less nefarious advice on how to be confident to violent language about women. One website, “Pick-up Art Mindset,” tells guys what to do when a woman responds poorly to “using a line”:

“If a girl accuses you of using a line . . . she’s not going to fuck you. It simply won’t happen. . . . Chances are she came out to make men feel small and get free drinks, so therefore you must go over the top and put that bitch in her place. . . . Say: ‘Well it got me laid last week with some slut. I don’t see why it shouldn’t work again.’ Enjoy the embarrassed look on her face as she stews in silence trying to think of a comeback. Then turn your back on her. She’ll think twice before saying that nonsense to another man.”

I think this extract speaks for itself.

Most pickup art proponents will tell you that it’s not all about hate and anger toward women; it’s about helping men with their self-esteem. Of course, healthy self-esteem is a good thing. It helps you ask people out, and not be overly offended if you are rejected. I’m sure the majority of guys drawn to these books, websites, and communities are probably decent guys with social anxiety and a real desire to connect with women, and I sympathize with that need and genuinely support actual real-world nice guys to get that help.

But none of the pickup artist materials I’ve seen support the self-esteem hypothesis, and they don’t teach men to connect authentically with women. They teach them instead how to control women. Tactics include jabbing at women (called a “neg,” short for negative remark, a.k.a., an insult couched in a compliment, like making a comment about how she looks that seems nice but actually plays on her insecurities). Or playing games, like showing interest in her, but not too much interest, for the purpose of keeping her wondering and captivated. Another tactic is “kino-ing” (kino is short for kinesthetics), which means touching someone to make the situation comfortable.

Most of the message boards and websites dedicated to pick-up art are full of trolls decrying their hatred for women, all the while professing what “nice guys” they are and how they still can’t get women to have sex with them. Anyone who claims he is a nice guy and therefore women should automatically have sex with him probably isn’t really a nice guy. In a lot of instances it appears “nice guys” believe they are nice because they don’t physically abuse women or yell at them, or because they opened a door or paid for a meal. This, of course, should give them an all-access pass to vagina park, but since it doesn’t, some of them are very very angry.

Perhaps a lot of these guys are all bark and no bite, but the dark side of the pickup community is that it glorifies misogynistic displays of power. From there it’s a slippery slope to committing crimes of coercion and violence against women. One pickup artist in Israel posted details of a recent date on a message board, citing tactics learned in The Game. Scarily, his description of the event sounded like a date rape, excerpted here from the Israel/Palestine based political blog 972:

“Things moved along . . . believe me, I came across countless objections on the way to close an FC [fuck close], but I persisted and stayed consistent to the end. Okay we started making out on the bed and she just refused to take off her clothes and made all kinds of excuses . . . but I’m a blind rhino, she doesn’t know me. I used a quick seduction technique and it totally confused her. I took her hand and put it on my cock . . . slowly slowly I closed a BJC [blowjob close].”

In this case, “blasting last-minute resistance” means forcing her into having sex.

Two recent examples of pickup artists who went on to commit violent crimes toward women are Allen Robert Reyes, known as “Gunwitch,” who shot a woman in the face at a party in January of 2011, and George Sodini, who opened fire in a Pittsburgh gym. He targeted women, at random, and killed three of them. Yes, these are extreme examples and don’t reflect the majority of men who participate in pickup art communities, but they are telling of a particular attitude reflected in the language of these communities. There is a relationship between feelings of rejection from women and the desire to control them, whether through violence or psychology.

I asked feminist/masculinity studies writer and teacher Hugo Schwyzer if, from his perspective, pickup art communities can be good for men. His response was, “Yes, in the sense that unhealthy fast food is better than starvation to someone who hasn’t eaten in a week. But it doesn’t address the root cause of so many men’s sense that they are losers in the sexual economy. It promises so much more than it delivers. . . . ” It’s unfortunate that men feel insecure about talking to women and when they go to find out what to do about it they find advice about how to control women, as opposed to learning how to respect and love them (and themselves).

Seduction isn’t inherently bad. Flirting and sexual tension are some of the most pleasurable parts of dating. The dance of meeting someone and the buildup of sexual tension that follows is exciting and can be extremely satisfying.

But there is a difference between someone who hits on you because they think you are sexy, smart, and awesome, and someone who sees you as a target to be controlled and willed into sexual submission. Pickup art is not about propping women up, supporting their sexuality, or having equal relationships; it’s about control and manipulation, plain and simple.

I have been “picked up” twice by guys who were trying the art of seduction on me. In both instances, I thought they were friendly and interesting at first, until they started making bizarre and personal comments and touching my shoulder. One even went so far as to say the girl he was supposed to meet that night was someone he had no “spark” for. (I suggested he tell her so.) I was confused by their actions in both cases, and in both cases the men were confused when I didn’t fall for their games. So it led me to the hypothesis that (feminism+self-esteem) x (pickup artist+corny lines) = pickup art dating system failure.

Moving to a New Model of Masculinity

The reason men so often benefit in the sexual economy of romance isn’t because women are too successful. It also isn’t because men don’t want to be in relationship, or because we have lost a traditional sense of what relationships should be. It is because sexism is still alive and thriving. Male self-esteem isn’t bound by the success of men’s relationships, but rather their financial status, sexual bravado, and how often they can get laid. And often what is hidden behind that bravado is a whole lot of insecurity. I know what it is like to date the cheater, the player, the self-hater, the misogynist, and the disaffected dudes. I’ve dated them all. But deep down, I’ve come to see how these behaviors all mask low self-esteem, an inability to adapt to a changing world, and difficulty navigating what it means to be a man.

If men are no longer providers, where is their self-esteem going to come from? While women may not always need the financial support of men, what we do need more than anything is the emotional support of men in our romantic relationships. Sadly, this is one thing traditional masculinity is not good at teaching young men how to do: to deal with their emotions around romance and sexuality. So instead of looking at external factors based in sexist assumptions of what it means to be a man—like lack of solid income, career goals, and ability to commit—we should be thinking about what young men need to support themselves and the women in their lives emotionally. It seems like many men are opting out of traditional ideas of masculinity, but what is the non-man-boy alternative?

A few months ago, my brother—who for many years was the quintessential “man-boy”—said something to me that really impacted the way I understood how men are dealing with this shifting idea of what it means to be a man. In previous years, he said, he thought being a man meant being unaccountable to women and ignoring their feelings. Looking back, he realized he’d abused his male privilege and acted selfishly in his relationships. In the last few years, he has made a concerted effort to be more accountable to women, even if just to tell them he was not interested. He changed the way he interacted with women to take the time to be responsible and share how he felt, listening and being as supportive as possible. This, he said, is what it really means to be a man, and part of his process was to unlearn what he had been taught it meant to be a man.

I was proud of my brother for reaching this conclusion and making such a serious effort to consciously change how he was relating to women, and this conversation opened my eyes to the damage that has been done to the psyche of male-identified folk by masculinity. Part of the reasoning behind calling the shift in masculinity a crisis is that it’s about uncovering this age-old conspiracy that men don’t have feelings. Rather than expose those feelings and the history of neglect and abuse that comes with it, it is much easier to suggest that being disaffected, abusive, unemotional, and disconnected is actually the natural way of being a man.

If men are still judged by external factors, like how much money they make, how nicely they dress, how tall they are, and how disconnected they can be from women, emotional dudes who don’t have high-paying jobs are not going to feel too good about themselves. When men are effeminate and chastised for it, this feeds into regressive ideas of masculinity and puts unfair pressure on men to act a certain way. Homophobic and sexist epithets are used to bully men of all ages into conforming to a rigid idea of what it means to be a man. All of these conditions indicate that we are lacking alternative models in masculinity.

Furthermore, women internalize these messages and they often expect their partners to be a certain way, not realizing how this expectation supports the very structure that keeps them stuck in rigid gender binaries. The worst impact of this is that it may lead men to act out violently, generally toward their intimate partners.

We are hardly living in a post-sexist culture. Male privilege is alive and thriving. But men have undue pressure on them to be studs and to act a certain way toward women as well. Until we redefine masculinity, we have to take a more radical and compassionate approach to dating. And it will take both men and women to shift the ways they think about the role of men and masculinity. For women, most of the time that means walking away when we are not getting what we need, or shifting our expectations in our relationships and working toward a conversation that allows for new and experimental types of masculinity. For men, it means thinking about how they benefit from male privilege, where they get their self-validation, and pushing themselves to think about emotional accountability and how they view women and relationships. Wishful thinking? Maybe. But it’s a good place to start.



Samhita Mukhopadhyay is the executive editor of Feministing.com and the author of the forthcoming book, Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life.

[American Dream]

http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/0 ... de-speech/

Hackney Pride speech

Jamrat Mason [Sept. 2010] [Saliva Click]


My speech at Hackney Pride did pretty well. I’ve had some requests for the transcript so I said I would post it here. People were really lovely and I certainly wasn’t expecting a standing ovation- so thanks to everyone who came, here’s to hoping that some real community organising and action will come out of it. I’ve also included the paragraph that I scribbled out on the bus down there because I was worried about length. That paragraph is in purple. Nick, reproduce, bastardise as much as you like, just remember to give me a lickle credit.




My name is Jasper Murphy and I have a vagina. I’m involved in East London Community Activism but today I’m here to speak “as a trans person” about transgender issues. The term “transgender” is a broad term that refers to to a massive spectrum of people who in some way veer away from the gender written on their birth certificate. So, I cannot, in any way whatsoever, be representative of transgendered people. I can only talk about the world as I see it, from where I’m standing, as a transexual.

I’m a lucky tranny. First of all because I’m alive. And secondly because I have a family who loves me. That shouldn’t be lucky, but at the moment, it is. My own experience is quite unique so I thought I’d give you a quick history: At 3 years old my first sentence was “I’m a boy”, at 7 years old when I was still convinced that this was true, my parents took me to a psychologist. The psychologist said I probably have “Gender Dysphoria”. My parents talked to my school and allowed me to cut my hair and wear a boy’s uniform. When I was 8 I was referred on to a specialist in London (on the NHS) who I saw until I was 18. When I was 12 I legally changed my name which my granny paid for. So I’ve been living as male since I was about 7 or 8. I went through a full female puberty and eventually got testosterone when I was 21. I had surgery when I was 22. I’m 24 now so I’ve looked like this for about 2 years.

It’s not my intention to simple ask for a complacent acceptance of trans people- for people to just stop insulting us and beating us up… I want to talk about transphobia as an issue that affects all of us- and that we can all play a part in fighting. We must, as a society, be better at gender.

In the womb we all start off as female. People who come out as little boys are changed during the pregnancy when testosterone is introduced. The clitoris grows and becomes penis, and the labia becomes a scrotum. Woman are so-called because they’re meant to be like men, but with wombs- womb-man. But in reality, men are women with big clitorises. Bigclits. Most people come out with either a vagina or a penis, but some people are somewhere inbetween- these people are ‘intersex’. As soon as we’re born boys and girls are treated drasticallly differently- boys are given lego, girls are given dolls (and then people wonder about the lack of female engineers); girls are encouraged to care and talk about their feelings, whilst boys are told to be tough. Every boy and girl, to some extent, has to grapple with the difference between who they are, and what a Real Man is. What a Real Woman is. Every body suffers from the invention of the Man and the Woman. And I consider myself an extreme casualty of this- I don’t really consider myself a Man- but I know, violently, that I’m not a woman. I think that transpeople generally are an extreme casualty of this problem.

Society is organised into men and women and I don’t fit into either. If I were to have to go to prison, I could either be a man in an all female prison, or a man with a vagina in an all male-prison where privacy is not exactly a priority. If I were to be arrested and strip-searched I’ve got a choice between a male officer or a female police officer. But I’m not a man, that is not my sex, I am a transexual. There is now a Gender Recognition Certificate so that I can be recognised as either a Man or a Woman by the state. But I am not a Man or a Woman, I am a transexual. I could be treated as a man, go to a male prison, be searched by a male officer, get married to a woman. But I don’t want to get married, I don’t want to live in a society where people are sent to prison and strip searched by police. I don’t believe in leading a fight where we’re asking to government to deal with us more efficiently, to oppress us better. I don’t want to be integrated better a rotten system, a want something different altogether. I want to take part in creating a better world.

Prejudice against transmen, that’s me, is based on the sense that we’re trying to muscle in on the privilege of being male that we don’t deserve, we are inadequate, we don’t have penises, and if we do, they’re either weird and tiny or crap. We’re inadequate men, with big bums and crap willies.

Prejudice against transwomen is based on the sense that they’re degrading themselves, they’re funny, a joke, why would you want to be a woman? They’re trying to take a step down in society.

So transphobia is rooted in sexism. Some people believe that transwomen can’t possibly know what it’s like to be a woman because they haven’t experienced sexism. But the transphobia that transwoman get IS sexism, multiplied by a hundred!

Some people say that trans men are just trying to escape sexism by turning into men. Let me tell you, when you’re a transexual, you do not escape sexism, you are pushed right into an enormous swamp of sexism. When you experience both sides and more, you begin to see the sexism, you notice it when other people don’t, when you play with gender you’re witnessing the flow of power.

Sexism, and more specifically this form of sexism which is a reaction to people’s gender deviance- not being a Proper Man, or a Proper Woman, is something that seems to be ignored. It plays a huge part in homophobia- A gay boy, who is very masculine and handy with his fists is not likely to be bullied at school. School kids don’t usually see what their school mates find sexually attractive, they see how they behave. Effeminate boys are bullied for being effeminate- and the words the kids use are gay, and batty boy, but they’re being bullied because they’re not acting like Real Men, this is sexism, but we call it homophobia. And when you call it homophobia, what organisations are there helping the effeminate straight boy? He’s being told that it’s okay to be gay, but no one’s saying that it’s okay to be a bit girly. This is the same bullying that transexual people experience in the extreme, but it is in no way reserved for us.

The experience of transgendered people is at the lethally sharp end of the wedge- and it is a lethally sharp edge, the Transgender Day of Remembrance website shows that in 2009 130 transgendered people were reported murdered- but this is a universal problem, rooted in sexism, it affects all os us and we can all take a part in fighting it.

The invention of the Real Man and the Real Woman is enshrined in the economy. For as long as someone has to work all week to get a wage, to survive, and for as long as we have babies that have to be looked after, someone else has to work in the home, and bring up babies for free. At the moment, most of the time, the man works full time and the woman works for free in the home. It’s the unpaid labour that keeps the whole system running. Take it away, and the whole thing collapses. But that won’t change by messing around with gender, or by swapping it around and turning the patriarchy into a matriarchy, or mixing it up, or by taking turns… or by paying another woman minimum wage to do the job instead. For as long as this system keeps going, someone has to work in the home for free. And this is one of the most fundamental injustices the forms the foundation of our economy. As much as transgendered people might highlight that these are not two unchanging natural roles, a liberal plea for tolerance is not the force that will bring it down.

I want to come back to this idea that we need to, as a society, as a community, be better at gender. The transition from one gender role to another is not just about surgery, in fact surgery plays a very small role in it. For the most part, transition is social, because gender roles are social. As I mentioned before, I lived for 12 years as male without any surgery or hormones whatsoever. I now fit into the category of male because people call me ‘he’ and regard me as male. The fact that transition is social seems to be lost on most people, when someone comes out as trans, people tend to wait until that person is manly, or womanly, enough to convince them. The onus is put on the trans person to “act like a man” or “act like a woman” just to have their identity respected. This often means, that for transmen, we are rewarded for acting like macho idiots, for only then will people respect our identity. It should be everyone’s responsibility to respect someone’s identity, to play a part in the journey to becoming comfortable in their skin.
What is it we want with our Pride Marches and our activism?

The freedom to walk down the street, dressed how you like, kissing who you like, in a couple of expensive areas of central and west London? What about kissing in Clapton? Stratford? East Ham? What about being free in our working class communities where we actually live? When will we be free to express our love, our gender, our bodies without fear of being beaten up by gangs of teenage boys? And what about those teenage boys? Our neighbours? When will that teenage boy feel free to suck off his mate, or wear a dress, without fear of complete rejection or without thinking that that would make him an entirely different person?

It might be tempting, for those middle class homosexuals who have achieved their freedom, who are happily walking hand in hand down their little street in Hampstead, to pull the ladder up behind them and not be associated with transgenders, with us deviants, or with us working class queers in areas like Hackney, who still live surrounded by homophobia, transphobia, sexism. I think we can see that temptation when we look at what London Pride has become. And that’s why it’s important to have events like this, to keep our grassroots activism, and not accept anything less than absolute and complete freedom.

[American Dream]

Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.

From The Last Straw, by Rita Mae Brown

[American Dream]

.

Alice Miller, traumas, and Youth Liberation

...if people are so good, how come they do such horrible things?

Alice Miller, who also thinks that what is in people is good, takes a crack at an answer in her books. I had dismissed the entire field of psychology for many years on the basis of Freud's "Oedipus Complex", the idea that children want to have sex with their parents, something that always struck me as preposterous.

A friend of mine suggested Alice Miller to me, though, and I found her answers to that particular argument convincing. Others have apparently made the same argument, it turns out. The argument is this - apparently Freud in 1896 came up with a hypothesis based on his "hysteria" patients that their "hysteria" was caused by childhood sexual abuse and the repression of the trauma from it. When he tried this hypothesis out, his peers rejected it. He found no recognition of it in society at the time. He himself apparently wrote in his journal or in a letter (I can't remember which) something like - if hysteria is caused by childhood sexual abuse, and there are so many people with hysteria, then there must be so much sexual abuse, and there can't be that much, therefore that can't be the cause. Then, according to Miller, Freud began to construct the "Oedipus Complex", which is an inversion of reality - instead of adults putting sexual desires and acting them out on children, Oedipus complex says it's the reverse.

In Miller's view, most mental problems are the result of some kind of childhood trauma, abuse, shame, or humiliation. Children are utterly dependent on adults for their survival, so a full understanding of the fact that they are being exploited and used rather than loved and protected would be unbearably painful to them. So they repress these memories and react by some kind of identification with the adults, even though the memories are stored in the body. Later on these things come out on their own children, or in other relationships or social - or, interestingly, political - behavior. Miller argues these points in a series of books, some of which include analyses of dictators and dictatorships like Hitler and Ceaucescu, where she shows (in a way that I found more convincing than I'd expected, given my tendency to look for political, economic, and cultural/ideological factors behind political phenomena) how they were enacting, on a grand scale, the humiliations and abuses that were done to them as children. Given that families children grow up in are basically totalitarian systems, Miller argues, it's no surprise that adults tolerate and are complicit in such systems outside of the family.

If children were treated with dignity and love, they would recognize massive-scale forms of abuse and authoritarianism and resist them, they would know that they and others deserve better. She also shows how some of those who did see through society's hypocrisies, like Sophie Scholl, had a very different childhood background or upbringing than their peers. One interesting comment she makes in one of her books is this: could Jesus have been so insightful or compelling if he had had a normal upbringing? Did not his incredible confidence and critique of his society come in part from the fact that his parents explicitly believed he was a child of God? What if, Miller asks, all parents treated their children this way?

Reading Miller can be very painful if it makes you recall your own childhood humiliations and abuses, but it is ultimately a very hopeful idea. Because Miller believes that it is the blocking off of feelings that would have killed an unsupported child that creates all the problems, she believes that being able to experience those feelings safely, as an adult, with loving support, can create genuine healing. It's very optimistic in that sense. She also suggests that specific problems and reactions in relationships have their origins in childhood trauma. Apologies if this is all cliched or well-known to you - it is all pretty new to me, since I had essentially shunned the field of psychology until recently...

Thinking about trauma led me to a book (thanks to another recommendation) called "Trauma and the Body" by Ogden et al. It's a pretty recent book and is based on a lot of scientific data about how people deal with trauma. There is a hierarchy of responses to traumatic events. First, a person will use his sociability - to try to talk an attacker out of attacking, for example. Next, the flight or fight response is activated. If that fails - as it frequently does with children who are smaller, weaker, slower than their adult assailants - the disassociation response begins. Being traumatized while disassociated causes later attacks of post-traumatic stress, disassociative responses, panic attacks, triggers, and so on. The book recommends a kind of sensorimotor therapy for this sort of trauma, in which the body can re-learn responses that didn't work as a child but would work as an adult. These readings have given me a much sharper eye for trauma and a different lens to look at my own and others' behavior, including political behavior. I continue to believe that a lot of political behavior is rational and can be predicted, and for that matter resisted if necessary, on that basis. But there is an irrational dimension in all these matters that is very important to understand. Not least because it can help us all improve our relationships and communities. Our alienation from ourselves and one another serves the existing system of power.

If people get used to being treated well and treating others well, it is much harder to threaten or control or exploit them. The most obvious place for these ideas in the world of Z thinking is in the kinship sphere and specifically "Youth Liberation", as it's often taught and discussed by Brian Dominick. Youth Liberation is all about treating kids with dignity, not very differently from adults. You do have to make some modifications for capacity, but fewer than most people realize and the point is to constantly think about whether these modifications are for the sake of the kid or for the sake of the adult. Miller's very definition of exploitation is using a child for something that's not in the child's interest. Where I think Miller can add to Kid Lib is in revealing how kids need to be liberated, but also the kids inside us need to be liberated. Miller's idea for doing this is having the support of someone (she calls them "enlightened witnesses") who identify fully with the child, don't try to explain or rationalize what adults have done or are doing, and allow the child to experience all the feelings of anger, rage, shame, humiliation that they suppressed out of fear. Children who have that support and are allowed to feel things and express their feelings are much stronger, much better in relationships, much harder to control or manipulate. Adults who can consciously go through a process where they can do this can also heal and not succumb to compulsions or neuroses or harming children themselves

Justin Podur

http://www.zcommunications.org/alice-mi ... stin-podur

[American Dream]

Young and Oppressed

By Brian Dominick & Sara Zia Ebrahimi

While most common oppressions, such as sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, even speciesism, have been identified, widely acknowledged, thoroughly discussed and deeply analyzed, one oppression remains largely untouched. This fact is astonishing given that the group oppressed by this ignored injustice is one to which every adult human has once belonged. It is the one oppression with which all humans can identify, having suffered from it directly. It is not an oppression of a tiny minority to which few will ever belong. It is not the oppression of people who can be blamed themselves — by any stretch of the imagination — for being among the oppressed.

The oppressed group is that of young people — all young people.

As we will further demonstrate, adults and adult institutions in our society regularly commit acts of abuse, coercion, deprivation, indoctrination and invalidation against young people. From the moment of conception, young people are oppressed by their elders, entirely based on the difference in age, via a process known as "ageism."

As an oppression in need of acknowledgment and understanding, ageism is vital to oppression theory. Yet its overall framework has long been ignored. Sure, many an author has attempted to discuss the relationship between parent and child, teacher and pupil, detention center officer and detainee, etc. But when has it been stated that adult society, as an institution, oppresses the young regularly, consistently, and without exception? And when has it been stated further, in any detail, that this oppression is vital to, and largely born of, society's need for maintenance at such absurd, atrocious levels?

Let's face it: when adults look at oppression theory, they do so from a "grown up" perspective — one which sees right over the heads of even their own children. While the Left takes great pride in its defense of women, the impoverished, racial and religious minorities, etc., it fails to realize that among the most thoroughly and widely oppressed are society's young. In our struggle for true liberation, we can leave no one behind — especially not those to whom the torch of revolution shall be passed. That is why ageism needs to be recognized.

Which brings us to why ageism is unique among oppressions: we are all directly its victims. It is not at all presumptuous to claim that the one oppressive dynamic* of which we have all been on the receiving end is that of ageism. Indeed, we are all victims of every oppression acted out in our society. But none other than ageism claims each of us like a man carves a notch on his headboard, like a bombardier a stencil on his airplane, a capitalist a dollar in his bank account.

That is significant. When we step back and observe the social engineering performed by society's institutions upon its members, oppressions are plainly spotted in the tool chest of the dominant. Among those oppressions which help maintain the power positions of the wealthy white Christian heterosexual male elitist adult, ageism is universal. It is also, unlike the others which are interchangeable, completely indispensable to society's maintenance of individual apathy.

In order to be a permanent victim of an unjust society's power structure — that is, accepting and not resisting one's own victimization — one must be engineered as a child to remain docile in the face of oppression. Certainly young people who are impoverished, female, African American, gay or otherwise in position to be oppressed, are conditioned for disempowerment. But what about white male children of upper class parents? Why do they show the same signs of submission and apathy when confronted by oppressors? Why do they, by and large, fail to expose and resist injustices, both in concept and in everyday encounters? Could it be because, as children, they undergo a rigorous process of indoctrination, both formal and informal, in schools, on television, at church, in the home? Could it be because they have been abused and coerced by legal systems, parents, teachers, police? Because they have been invalidated by overpowering institutions and individuals whose purpose it has been to teach them of their "incompetence," their "worthlessness"? Could they be so as a result of having been deprived of their right to self management, of simple needs, indeed of love and understanding and support? Could it be, at last, because throughout childhood and adolescence they have been treated as adult society has seen fit for its young — ignored, conditioned, neglected, brutalized, violated and compelled?

Then, as adults, they reproduce their own suffering, this time inflicting it upon those the society of which they are now full members has traditionally oppressed. As adults, they are offered power over — if no one else — the people on whose behalf few stand: their children, their younger neighbors, their adolescent customers, their voiceless constituents.

It is clear that ageism is not just another oppression. In some cases (few would disagree) age difference, aside from being the basis for oppression, is a justification for special treatment. Surely children require guidance as they learn for themselves about social realities. In many cases, clear bounds need setting by adults, for the child's safety and indeed for her or his benefit. But how much more often than not does the relationship between adult and young person — between adult institution and the young population — become counterproductive, destructive, outright violent? Why are these inequities not exposed, denounced and struggled against by those of us who regularly fight other oppressions?

These issues, equal in importance to the full examination of ageism itself, are in dire need of discourse. With that in mind, we hope to present, from our own biased perspective as young people, what we see as the issue: What is ageism? How does it manifest itself in practice? What are its results?

Political Ageism

Few oppressions are more obvious than those perpetrated by governments. From laws to bureaucracies, the manipulation factor in state systems is staggering. The most blatant mechanism employed by government towards the oppression of its subjects is certainly the legal system. Consistently, it is laws made specifically against young people which most flagrantly display the state's contempt for their youthful attitudes; mindsets which by their nature contradict prevailing social values and norms. After all, young people are one of the only oppressed groups which the US government not only discriminates against in an official capacity, but towards whom it does so unabashedly and without apology. The list of things the state will not allow people to do based on their age is seemingly endless. At the same time, the rights and "equality" of most other oppressed groups are lauded and, at least to some extent, protected by government agencies.

There is little validity to the argument that young people, due to their inexperience, need to be protected from themselves by agents of the state. It is the government's own interests which require defense from young people's natural lack of subordination and submission. Hence, authoritarian structures are forced to protect themselves by containing the expression of free thought and activity by children and adolescents. As a sort of insurance policy, the government stunts self-confidence, individuality and creativity at the earliest age possible, knowing full well that its resurgence in adult life will then be unlikely. People must be trained for submission when they are most vulnerable to impression, which happens to be when they are young.

The government displays its contempt for young people's ability to determine the courses of their own lives by trying to restrict their access to everything from R-rated movies and ear piercing to alcohol and tobacco. Conflicting with the concurrent pressures introduced by the market economy — which encourage participation in "risqué" entertainment, exotic fashion and drug usage — the imposition of such limitations is counterproductive at best, probably even devastating. The mixed messages conveyed by the two wings of the establishment that possess the farthest-reaching influence pit (commercially manufactured) impulse against (state-imposed) inhibitions, and the confused results are ruinous.

Another outstanding and pressingly current example of legal ageism is the rash of curfew laws which is presently sweeping the nation. While crime rates hover at mid-1970s levels, violent incidences have become increasingly concentrated among the young community, particularly in urban areas. Rather than take an approach which could be labeled even slightly rational, many local governments have decided to pass new laws and further restrict the rights of young people. Though laws will never keep young people indoors, they will surely keep them out of places where they can safely meet and recreate. Meanwhile, the boredom, frustration and despair felt by many young people is only fueled and aggravated. This is a clear example of coercive power used to deprive young people of the freedom to act as they choose, regardless of whether harm would be done to themselves or someone else (the usual accepted criteria for determining legislation).

As few clear-minded folks would dispute, modern states have managed with alarming success to master the art of indoctrination. Without using severe and boisterous methods of brainwashing, the government has achieved the relatively efficient production of numbed minds, conditioned for obedience, servitude and, in turn, the perpetuation and magnification of state power. Not only does the state define the curricula which will be imposed upon any student whose parents cannot afford private school (and upon many whose can), but it forces them to attend classes in Eurocentric barbarism, as dictated by powerful adults who define education standards. Those mental factories which the government does not control it at least regulates.

In the classroom, the student learns, above all else, that learning is boring, degrading and difficult. Based on quantitative systems of instruction, even the most progressive mainstream schools educate young people of little else than submission, assimilation and conformity. It's not what you learn that counts, it's how much you can prove you know. More still, as education standards and expectations regress, the rule is who knows more, not if anyone knows anything of relevance.

The enforced process of hand-raising, through which the student demonstrates her or his subservience to the teacher, is a classic display of the demeaning relationship promoted by formal scholastic activity. The teacher, at the same time, is an adult who is chosen unpluralistically and given ultimate authority — not only in the sense of "expertise" but also of "power." That is, the class is being run by someone who is vastly different in age from the students, and was chosen not because of leadership competence but knowledge alone; charisma, compatibility and attitude being irrelevant.

While the teacher is dictating many rules and little important knowledge, the students are being stratified and segregated. Young people begin the process of discrimination by gender, class, race, etc., which reflects the attitudes of parents and teachers, before they are in grade school. "Boys are good at math and science, girls needn't so much as try their best." "Black students do not possess the capacity to learn as well as whites, so we'd might as well spend less energy trying to teach them." The pattern is irrational, but it has been consistent and unwavering for centuries.

Although experimentation with a progressive concept known as "inclusive education" is now being undertaken around the country, the separation of students according to their perceived ability to learn is still dominant throughout most US schools. Elites are formed of "gifted" students who display a propensity to learn at a faster pace, while "normal" students are herded into overcrowded classrooms across the way from those tagged "disabled." Do these distinctions haunt the adult lives of students grouped as such because they were originally accurate or because they became self-fulfilled prophecies during childhood and adolescence? Furthermore, in case the labelling system does not sufficiently stabilize a young person's self-image, requiring that his or her class ranking be included on every high school transcript does the trick.

Formal education, whether it be collegiate or secondary, is wonderful practice for one experience which can be looked forward to by prospective adults: routinization. School teaches people to fall into line, obey rules and, most of all, to qualify. Whether one learns anything or not, one had better pass the final; whether one works a fulfilling job as an adult, one had better bring home a paycheck.

Other government institutions practice ageism as well. There is little argument on the Left that the US military — any military, for that matter — uses severe forms of indoctrination, coercion and invalidation, whose effects overshadow even those of the most thorough scholastic "education." The recruitment practices of the armed forces are diabolical in their use of propaganda and outright lies, as well as their focus on young people, not so much for the acquisition of strong, young bodies as impressionable minds. Save for professional criminality, the military is often seen by America's poor to be the only way out of poverty, a fact illustrated by disproportionate numbers of Latino, Afro-American and working class recruits. And again, the military complex instills the same biases and psychological effects as the education system, only with much greater severity. The broad effects of military service on the individual young person, not to mention whoever s/he is manipulated or forced or bribed into killing, are clear and disastrous.

As our world becomes more and more technologically advanced, it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to maintain any sense of individuality. As humanity is herded and oppressed as a whole, it is the young who receive the most trampling. As if the isolation felt by adults is not enough, their needs are often fulfilled by the state (over which adults at least have some power) far prior to the needs of their children. We live in a system where even those adults whose voices are allowed hearing receive very little from the power structure which holds them down. So how can we (especially those of us on the Left) have gone so long without recognizing that young people, whose voices are seldom heard if ever, are even more severely oppressed by that same, inherently violent system of authority and subordination?

Economic Ageism

Anytime an economic apparatus exists which is not specifically designed for equity it will oppress certain groups in society. Throughout the world one of the groups most heavily oppressed by nearly all economic systems is that of young people. In relation to the work force, young people are violated in several ways. At times they are excluded from the workplace; at other times they are forced against their will to become a part of it. Moreover, at the other end of the assembly line, primarily in the market system, capital* exploits the paradoxical combination of young people's youthful open-mindedness and their desire to assimilate.

In a system of centralized capital, whereby wealth and power are manipulated by interests other than those of society as a whole, the individual's needs are automatically excluded from the concern of those coordinating the flow of capital. Whether an economy is public but coordinatorist or "free" but private, young people constitute the last group to have a say in the management process (again regardless of how little voice most adults may have). Therefore, as they are ignored by the rule makers, the economic activity of young people is drastically restricted, perhaps more so than any other oppressed group.

Where politics collide with economics, the state has substantial influence over the economic freedom of young people. The system of compulsory education, whereby young people are forced to work without pay, is similar to slavery, the product being the student her or his self. Prior to the age of 16, people are neither allowed to work at a regular job nor to leave school. Even after 16 adolescents are offered a limited spectrum of opportunities in the workplace, almost never including work which could possibly be considered empowering.

Although child labor laws were originally created to protect young people from exploitation by business and parents, and they undoubtedly serve that purpose today, in many cases they also prevent adolescents from obtaining money legally and without soliciting parents. And while family incomes vary, they are hardly indicative of the amount of money children will be allowed. Still, when children below age 16 are permitted to work, most commonly in the family business or farm, their labor is heavily exploited by parents who treat them as capital. This demonstrates the importance of a substantially deep look at economic institutions as a whole in their relationship to young people. Any time the capitalist system can exploit, it will, and those with no recourse are by definition most vulnerable.

Of course, there is a fundamental difference between young people and adults where this matter is concerned. Namely, young people are still socializing (or being socialized) at a rapid pace, and thus schooling is of greater importance than the production, through labor, of other goods. However, the fact remains that the education apparatus is an industry, and the chief laborers — not teachers or administrators but the students themselves — are not rewarded for their labor in the same way workers in other industries are. In this case, the students are not necessarily alienated from the fruits of their labor (i.e., themselves), but are alienated from the process by which production takes place.

While young people in the US are kept from earning money, they are simultaneously bombarded by specifically-geared commercialism and its introduction of "wants." Of course, many young people see their wants fulfilled by parents who are willing to appease the desires of large corporations as well as those perceived interests newly instilled in their child (which isn't to say that such children are not oppressed by capital simply because they can satisfy their material desires). However, this process forms a significant group of young people in whom wants are being commercially conjured but who themselves cannot allocate the material manifestations of those desires — that is, they simply can't afford all the things they're told they desire.

Such is not meant to imply that society should pity those young people who cannot afford the latest fashions and the action figure or video game of the month, so long as they have sufficient clothing and entertainment. Rather, we should recognize that it is a primary purpose of private capitalist institutions to take advantage of young people's culturally reinforced need to conform and their search for identity, as well as their relatively free minds whose desires and initiatives are malleable.

One of the market's most manipulative and socially-destructive weapons is its elimination, via the "entertainment industry," of the community and family relations which previously raised children without heavy commercial interference. We have seen the substitution of seemingly realistic film and television for actual experience.

More subtly, the commercial aspects of the modern market serve to manipulate or even eliminate the community and family relation as well. A 30-second dousche advertisement on TV, in which an imaginary daughter confronts her make-believe mother with simulated feminine problems (e.g., the "not-so-fresh feeling"), actually replaces an entire conversation between real-life mother and daughter. Not only does the adolescent woman, as viewer, no longer think she needs to discuss certain personal things with her mother, but now she even knows the name of the product she is supposed to use.

The contradiction of want creation and accompanying restrictions from the ability to satisfy those wants places young people in a position which is even more blatantly discriminatory than capital's obvious abuse of women and minority races. Yet, while the Left adamantly supports the rights of those oppressed groups to have access to satisfactory amounts of wealth and privilege, young people's right to economic independence is almost nowhere advocated.

As young people are forced into dependence on parents and (often) the paternal state, their own potential is neglected and invalidated. Meanwhile, the state system forces them into a subjective conditioning process while young people are economically manipulated to, in all their social activity, serve the interests of capitalists.

In an alternative economy, the production of laborers could easily be taken into account as such, and the producers rewarded for their efforts. Such an economy could separate young people's consumption rights from those of their parents, thus circumventing the problem of misappropriation of excessive or inadequate amounts of goods to those young people. Furthermore, by eradicating markets and capital, we could eliminate misguiding commercial pressures and the inheritance of intemperate or deficient wealth.

Continues at: http://www.zcommunications.org/young-an ... n-dominick

[American Dream]

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Jam ... itics.html

Jamie Heckert

Maintaining the Borders: identity & politics

Identity is the process of creating and maintaining borders, creating different kinds of people. This keeps the world packaged in tidy little boxes. These boxes, in turn, are necessary for the violence and domination of hierarchical societies. There cannot be masters or slaves, bosses or workers, men or women, whites or blacks, leaders or followers, heterosexuals or queers, without identity.

Social movement [1], both past and present, often attempts to use identity as a tool of liberation. Movement based on gender, sexual orientation, class, ethnic and ability identities all have some success in challenging hierarchy and oppression. By no means do I mean to diminish the impact of past and present activism. Personally, my life would have been much more difficult before feminist and gay liberation/equality movement arose. I argue that identity politics is inherently limited in its ability to challenge hierarchy because it depends upon the same roots as the system it aims to overthrow. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”[2]

Does that mean we should all be the same?

Identity is also the answer to the question, “who am I?”. This is different from answering, “what kind of person am I?”. Labels like “woman”, “white” and “heterosexual” tell us about someone’s position in various hierarchies. These positions, these identities, are significant to how a person thinks of themselves. But, they don’t answer the question, “who am I?”. Each of us is unique, both similar and different to everyone else in various ways. Working to eliminate identity in the hierarchical sense (e.g. some animals are more equal than others) isn’t the same as eliminating identity in the individual sense (e.g. I’ll still be Jamie). When I talk about the problems with identity, I mean the “boxes” rather than individuals.

Let me use “sexual orientation” as an example. Supposedly people can be put into three boxes, depending on whether they fancy women, men or both. While this is a popular idea, it seems to cause an awful lot of suffering. People worry a lot about their image, and try very hard to make sure that others realise “what” they are. We also worry about “what” other people are — are they like me or are they different? Some people are so unhappy and anxious about these things that they attack others, either physically or verbally. Even people who think of themselves as heterosexual can be attacked. Finally, people suffer when they desire others of the “wrong” gender, or if they worry that others think they do. One alternative is that we all try to be “equal opportunity lovers” and fancy everyone. Those who succeed could then feel superior to those whose desires are less politically correct. Another alternative is that we try to give up thinking of people (including ourselves) in terms of sexual orientation and instead recognise that everyone’s sexual desires are complex and unique. This would mean being yourself rather than a heterosexual, a queer or whatever, and to recognise people as people instead of members of categories. We could never all be the same, even if we tried!

What is wrong with political identity?

Identity separates people. It encourages us to believe that “we” are different from “others”. Identity can also encourage conformity. How else do I show that I am one of us other than conforming to the accepted codes prescribed to that identity? This construction of similarity and difference exists whether we are talking about traditional identity politics groups like “disabled people” or political identities like “environmentalists”. This separation of us from them has serious consequences for political movement.

Identity encourages isolation. Political ghettos cannot exist without political identity; and their existence reinforces it. Not only are the “activists” separated from the “non-activists”, but within a broad political ghetto, anarchists, feminists, and environmentalists (amongst others) often see themselves as involved in separate struggles. People who consider themselves politically active are separated both from each other and from others who do not share an “ctivist” identity. Effective movement for radical social change cannot be based on such divisions.

Identity reduces social phenomena to individuals. Concepts like anarchism and racism are social. They are not embodied by individuals as terms like “anarchist” and “racist” suggest. Rather, they exist as ideas, practices and relationships. In most societies, racism is inherent in our institutionalised relationships and ways of thinking. We can and should be critical of racism, but to attack people as “racists” can only further alienate them from our efforts. [3] Besides, it is a dangerous fantasy to believe that “racists” can be separated from those of us who are non-racist. Likewise, anarchism exists throughout every society. Every time people co-operate without coercion to achieve shared goals, that is anarchy. Every time someone thinks that people should be able to get along with each other without domination, that is anarchism. If we only see racism in “racists”, we will never effectively challenge racism. If we only see anarchism in “anarchists”, we will miss out on so many desperately needed sources of inspiration.

Identity encourages purity. If we believe that concepts like feminism can be embodied in individuals, then some people can be more feminist than others. This leads to debates about “real feminists” and how feminists should act (e.g. debates regarding feminism and heterosexuality). Feminist purity allows for hierarchy (e.g. more or less and thus better or worse feminists) and encourages guilt (e.g. asking yourself “should real feminists think/act like this?”).

Political identity simplifies personal identity A related problem for feminist identity, for example, is that it demands we focus on one aspects of our complex lives. Feminist movement has often been dominated by white middle-class women who have a particular perspective on what is a “women’s issue”. Many women have had to choose between involvement in a woman’s movement that fails to recognise ethnicity and class issues, or in black or working class politics that did not acknowledge gender. But, the alternative of specialised identity politics could get very silly (e.g. a group for disabled, transgender, lesbian, working-class women of colour). Likewise, if I describe myself as a feminist, an anarchist, and a sex radical, I am suddenly three different people. However, if I say I advocate feminism, anarchism and radical sexual politics I am one person with a variety of beliefs. [4]

Identity often imagines easily defined interests. Feminism is often presented as for women only; men are perceived to entirely benefit from the gender system. Many men do clearly benefit from the gender system in terms of institutionalised domination. If we perceive interests as inherently stemming from current systems, we fail to recognise how people would benefit from alternative systems. If we want to encourage and inspire people to create a very different form of society, we should share with each other what we see as beneficial. We must recognise that different value systems (e.g. domination versus compassion) result in very different interests.

Identity discourages participation. If people are worried that they might be excluded through labelling (e.g. racist or homophobic), they won’t feel welcomed and won’t get involved. Likewise, people do not get involved if they believe that it is not in their interests. If we pepetuate the idea that feminism is for women, men will never see how it could also be in their interests to support feminism. Or they might support feminism, but feel guilty for their male privilege. Either way, men are not encouraged to be active in feminist movements. Radical social change requires mass social movement. Identity politics, by definition, can never achieve this. Political identities, like “environmentalist”, can likewise become a basis for minority politics.

Identity creates opposition. By dividing the world up into opposing pairs (e.g. men/women, heterosexuals/queers, ruling class/working-class, whites/blacks), identity creates opposite types of people who perceive themselves as having opposing interests. This opposition means that people fail to recognise their common interests as human beings. The opposition of two forces pushing against each other means that very little changes.

Identity freezes the fluid. Neither individual identity (the “who am I?” kind) nor social organisation are fixed, but are in constant motion. Political identities require that these fluid processes are frozen realities with particular characteristics and inherent interests. In failing to recognise the nature of both identity and society, political identity can only inhibit radical social change.

It may not be perfect, but can’t it still be a useful strategy?

It is a very good strategy if you don’t want to change things very much. Identity politics fits in nicely within the dominant neo-liberal ideology. Groups created around oppressed identities can lobby the state for civil rights. This idea of trying to protect individuals without changing relationships or systems of organisation is compatible with the individualistic basis of capitalism and representative “democracy”.

I would never argue that a strategy has to be “perfect” to be useful, but it must be consistent with its aims. Ends and means can only be separated in our minds. If the aim is to reduce or eliminate hierarchical social divisions (e.g. gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, class), a strategy which depends upon those very divisions can never be successful.

If political identity is such a poor strategy, why is it so common?

On a personal level, political identity makes us feel part of something larger at the same time that it makes us feel special were different. In the short-term, this can be very successful defence mechanism. For example, I’m sure I would have been a lot more damaged by the sexist and homophobic environment in which I grew up if I had not been able to convert stigma into pride. However, feeling yourself to be different and separate from other people is not a successful long-term strategy, either psychologically or politically.

What’s the alternative to political identity?

If borders are the problem, then we must support and encourage each other to tear down the fences. Two crucial tools for dismantling borders are systematic analyses and compassionate strategies.

We should recognise oppression is not simply a practice of individuals who have power over those who do not. Instead, we could see how forms of organisation (including institutions and relationships) systematically produce hierarchies and borders. People will only see an interest in getting more involved if they realise that their individual problems — anxiety, depression, exhaustion, anger, poverty, meaningless work,unsatisfying sex lives, etc — are not unique, but are systematically produced. Furthermore, their action will only be effective if they work to reduce all forms of hierarchy and domination. Constructs including gender, sexuality, capitalism, race and the nation state are interdependent systems. Each system of domination serves to reinforce the others. This doesn’t mean we have to solve every problem instantly, but we must recognise that all issues are human issues. At the same time, we must not imagine that a particular system of domination (not even capitalism!) is the source of all others.

Radical politics is rarely appealing because it focuses on the evils of the world. This offers little that is hopeful or constructive in people’s daily lives. If we want to see widespread social movement for radical change, we have to offer people something they value. Listening to people’s concerns, caring about their problems and encouraging and supporting them to develop systemic solutions requires compassion. Offer people a better quality of life instead of focusing so much on depressing aspects of our current society.

We should also recognise that people positioned in more privileged categories may in some ways suffer. At the very least, people who feel a strong need to dominate and control must suffer deep insecurities, the results of competition and hierarchy. Insecurity, domination and control are not conducive to fulfilling and meaningful relationships with other people. Attacking people in “privileged” positions does little to dismantle these systems. It also gives entirely too much credit to people in those positions — they are both products and producers of systems, just like the rest of us.

To radically reorganise our society, we should aim to both diminish systematic domination and suffering and encourage systematic compassion. Just as apparently disconnected and often incoherent forms of domination can reinforce and maintaining each other, so too can a compassionate organisation of society become systematic and self-sustaining.

Encouraging people to be more comfortable with sexuality in general has been a key focus of my own political efforts. But, sexuality is only one area in which a compassionate and systematic approach has much more radical potential than politicising identity.

Find sources of suffering, whatever they are, and support and encourage people to find ways of relating to themselves and others that reduce that suffering. Help build compassionate, co-operative institutions (e.g. social centres, support/discussion groups, mediation services, childcare support, food not bombs). Tell people when you admire or appreciate their efforts. Support people trying to change their environments (e.g. workplace resistance). Offer alternatives to people who are involved in or considering authoritarian positions (e.g. military, police, business management).

Demonstrating the pleasures and benefits of co-operative, compassionate organisation offers a strong threat to the world of borders and guards. I suspect that fragmented groups, anti-whatever demonstrations, unfriendly, exclusive meetings and utopian “after the revolution” lectures will never be quite as enticing to people outside the activist ghetto.

Further Reading

Anonymous (1999) “Give Up Activism” in Reflections on June 18th. http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no9/activism.htm

Begg, Alex (2000) Empowering the Earth: Strategies for Social Change Totnes, Green Books.

CrimethInc. (2002) “Definition of Terms” in Harbinger (4). http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/harbing ... nition.php

CrimethInc. (2002) “Why We’re Right and You’re Wrong (Infighting the Good Fight)”in Harbinger (4). http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/harbing ... ghting.php

Edwards, David (1998) The Compassionate Revolution: Radical Politics and Buddhism. Totnes, Green Books.

Heckert, J. (2004) “Sexuality/Identity/Politics” in J Purkis and J Bowen (eds) Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age. Manchester, Manchester University Press. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=etb2 ... CA4Q6AEwAg

hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for Everybody: passionate politics. London, Pluto Press.

LeGuin, U. (1999/1974). The Dispossessed. London, The Women’s Press.

Footnotes

[1]^ Following bell hooks, I refer to social movement, rather than maintaining that boundaries can be placed around identifiable “social movements”.

[2]^ See Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”, pp110-112 in Sister Out-sider: Essays and Speeches (1984), who took the title from an old US civil rights adage.

[3]^ See Border Camps : The New “Sexy” Thing? in this issue.

[4]^ See pretty much anything by bell hooks for more on this.

[American Dream]

Camila Vallejo – Latin America's 23-year-old new revolutionary folk hero

As the second female president of Chile's leading student body, known as Fech (Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile), Vallejo – who is also a member of the youth arm of the Communist party, the JJCC – has presided over the biggest citizen democracy movement since the days of opposition marches to General Augusto Pinochet a generation ago.

The government response has reminded many older Chileans of that same dark era. Three days ago, on Thursday, Chilean riot police ambushed Vallejo and a group of fellow student leaders just after a press conference in downtown Santiago. "They [police] targeted the leadership with violence," said Ariel Russell, a University of Chile student who witnessed the attack. "We had not even started the march and the police apparatus was upon us."

Vallejo, a 23-year-old geography student, was singing and marching with a handwritten sign when a squad of military vehicles closed in and attacked her with jets of tear gas. A pair of trucks mounted with water cannons unleashed a barrage of water fierce enough to break bones and scrape a person across the pavement. Vallejo was soaked, a cloud of tear gas was then blasted on to her body. With her skin wet, the chemical reaction was massive and incapacitating. Vallejo was paralysed. Her body went into an allergic reaction and welts from the gas erupted over it.

"At first, we resisted, but it was intolerable," she told the Observer. "You could not breathe, it was complicated, we had to run away from thecarabineros [police] then another water cannon hit us in the face with a different chemical, this was much stronger … my whole body was burning, it was brutal."

What began as a quiet plea for improvements in public education has now erupted into a wholescale rejection of the Chilean political elite. More than 100 high schools nationwide have been seized by students and a dozen universities shut down by protests.

Classes for tens of thousands of students have been suspended since May, and the entire school year might have to be repeated. Polls show an estimated 70% of the Chilean public backs the students' demands and an equal percentage find the government's proposal insufficient, according to figures from Chile's leading newspaper, La Tercera.

La Concertación is now polling at just 11% approval. Sebastian Piñera, Chile's president, a billionaire businessman, has just 22% public approval ratings, the lowest ever in Chilean history.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oc ... olutionary

[American Dream]

Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now

By Naomi Klein - October 6th, 2011

Published in The Nation.



I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I said had to be repeated by hundreds of people so others could hear (a.k.a. “the human microphone”), what I actually said at Liberty Plaza had to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.



I love you.

And I didn’t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout “I love you” back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.

Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”

That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.

“Why are they protesting?” ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: “What took you so long?” “We’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.” And most of all: “Welcome.”

Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called “the movement of movements.”

But there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We’d appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It’s because they don’t have roots. And they don’t have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen.

Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to non-violence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality. Which we saw more of just last night. Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows. More wisdom.

But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media was drunk on easy money. Back then it was all about start-ups, not shut downs.

We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite -- fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful -- the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society – while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.

What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I’m not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that’s important.

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.

That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says “I care about you.” In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say, “Let them die,” that is a deeply radical statement.

A few final thoughts. In this great struggle, here are some things that don’t matter.

- What we wear.

- Whether we shake our fists or make peace signs.

- Whether we can fit our dreams for a better world into a media soundbite.

And here are a few things that do matter.

- Our courage.

- Our moral compass.

- How we treat each other.

We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets – like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that’s easier to win.

Don’t give in to the temptation. I’m not saying don’t call each other on shit. But this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.

Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.

[American Dream]

Cross-posting to the Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS") thread:

The sections of this book which are readable here are very interesting indeed...


Magia sexualis: sex, magic, and liberation in modern Western esotericism By Hugh B. Urban

[American Dream]

From The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda, by Stan Trout:

"Even a penny coming as a gift should be regarded as belonging to God and religion." -Muktananda

MUKTANANDA'S movement was both a spiritual and a financial success. Once Siddha meditation caught on, said Chandra Dinga, "money poured into the ashram." Particularly lucrative were the two-day "meditation intensives" given by Muktananda, and now by his successors. Today, an intensive led by the two new gurus costs $200. (Money orders or cashier's checks only, please. No credit cards or personal checks.) An intensive given in Oakland in May 1983 drew 1200 participants, and people had to be turned away. At $200 a head, Chidvilasananda and Nityananda’s labors earned the ashram nearly a quarter of a million dollars in a single weekend.

There was always a lot of secrecy around ashram affairs, Lotte Grimes remarked. During Muktananda's lifetime, that secrecy applied to money matters with a vengeance.

The number of people who came to intensives, for example, was a secret even from the devotees. Simple multiplication would tell anyone how much money was coming in. And when Richard Grimes set up a restaurant at the Oakland ashram, he said Muktananda "had a fit" when he found out that Grimes had been keeping his own records of the take.

Food services head Chandra Dinga said the restaurants in the various ashrams were always big money-makers, where devotees worked long hours for free. On tour during the summer, she said, they would feed over a thousand people, and bring in three thousand dollars in cash a day. Sally said that a breakfast that sold for two dollars actually cost the ashram about three cents.

Donations further fattened the coffers. if somebody important was coming to the ashram, Chandra’s job was to try and get them to give a feast and to make a large donation. $1500 to $3000 was considered appropriate. "There was just a constant flow of money into his pockets," said Chandra, "it let him get whatever he wanted to get, and let him buy people."

Muktananda himself was said to have been very attached to money. "For years, he catered only to those who were wealthy," said Richard Grimes. "He spent all the time outside of his public performances seeing privately anyone who had a lot of money."

A parade of Mercedes-Benzes used to drive up to the Ganeshpuri ashram with rich visitors, said Grimes. In Oakland, Lotte Grimes saw Malti order a list drawn up of everybody in the ashram who had money, to arrange private interviews with Muktananda, by his orders.

Devotees, on the other hand, had to get by on small stipends, if they got anything.

Chandra Dinga, despite her status as head of food services, never got more than $100 a month. Devotees with less prestige were completely dependent on the guru's generosity. Sally once cried for two days when she broke her glasses, knowing she would have to beg Muktananda for another pair.

How much money did Muktananda amass from his efforts? Even the officers of the foundation that ostensibly ran Muktananda's affairs never knew for sure.

Michael Dinga was a foundation trustee, and used to cosign for deposits to the ashram’s Swiss bank accounts, but the amounts on the papers were always left blank. In 1977, however, he got a hint. Ron Friedland, the president of the foundation, told Dinga that Muktananda had 1.3 million dollars in Switzerland. Three years later, Muktananda told Chandra it was more like five million. "And then he laughed, and said, ‘There’s more than that.’"

A woman called Amma, who was Muktananda's companion for more than twenty years, told the Dingas that all the accounts were in the names of Muktananda’s eventual successors, Chidvilasananda and Nityananda.

Michael and Chandra Dinga finally quit the ashram in December 1980. They had served Muktananda for a combined total of sixteen-and-a-half years, and had risen to positions of real importance. Both knew exactly how the ashram operated.

Together, they went to Muktananda to tell him why they wanted to leave. The guru wasn't pleased. To get the Dingas to stay, Muktananda called on everything he thought would stir them. He offered them a car, a house, and money. When that failed, he started to weep. "You're my blood, my family," he said. Then Muktananda abruptly changed tack. "You've come on an inauspicious day," he said. "I can't give you my blessing." Next morning, he called Chandra on the public intercom and said she could leave immediately.

After they left, the Dingas say they were denounced by the guru, and their lives threatened.

"Muktananda claimed he had thrown us out because Chandra was a whore" said Dinga, "that she was having sex with the young boys who worked in the restaurant. Later he said I had a harem. In other words, he was accusing us of all the things he was doing himself." Muktananda also claimed that none of the buildings Michael had built were any good. When one of Michael's crew stood up for him, he was threatened physically.

Leaving all their friends behind in the ashram, the Dingas moved to the San Francisco area, but Muktananda's enmity followed them. Their doorbell and telephone started ringing at odd hours, and Michael saw the "enforcers" running away from their door one night. A cruel hoax was played on Chandra. Someone followed her when she took her cat to the vet, then phoned the vet's office with a message that her husband had been in a bad accident. Chandra waited frantically at Berkeley's Alta Bates Hospital for three quarters of an hour, only to learn that Michael was at work, unhurt.

Death threats started to reach the Dingas toward the end of April 1981, six months after they had left the ashram. On May 7, Sripati and Joe Don Looney visited Lotte Grimes at her job in Emeryville with a frightening piece of information: "Tell Chandra this is a message from Baba: Chandra only has two months to live." Another ex-follower said he got a similar message: If the Dingas didn't keep quiet, acid would be thrown in Chandra's face; Michael would be castrated.

The Grimeses and the Dingas reported the threats to the police. The Dingas hired a lawyer.

The threats stopped soon after Berkeley police officer Clarick Brown called on the Oakland ashram, but Chandra was badly frightened. Some ex-followers still are.

Michael and Chandra's departure sparked a small exodus from the ashram. Some of the ex-followers began to meet and compare notes on their experiences in the ashram. "We were amazed and rejuvenated," said Richard Grimes. "We got more energy from learning he was a con man than we ever did thinking he was a real person."

Just the same, the devotees who left the ashram are still dealing with the damage done to their lives. Michael and Chandra's marriage broke up, as did Sally's. Michael is only now coming out of a period of depression and emptiness. Richard and Lotte Grimes are bitter at having wasted years of their lives in the ashram. Stan Trout still considers Muktananda a great yogi, but a tragically flawed man.

Chandra Dinga has taken years to come to terms with her experience with Muktananda; "Your whole frame of reference becomes askew," she said. "What you would normally think to be right or wrong no longer has any place. The underlying premise is that everything the guru does is for your own good. The guru does no wrong. When I finally realized that everything he did was not for our own good, I had to leave."
Muktananda’s two successors were at the Oakland ashram in May end I asked Swami Chidvilasananda about the accusations against her guru.

To her knowledge, did Muktananda have sex with women in the ashram? "Not as far as I saw," she said carefully. What about the charge that Muktananda had sex with young girls? "Those girls never came to us," Chidvilasananda said. "And we never saw it, we only heard it when Chandra talked to everybody else."

Chidvilasananda also denied that there was a bank account in Switzerland. When asked about the ashram's finances, she said that all income was put back into facilities. "We are a break-even proposition," the new leader said.

As for the alleged beatings, she said that Americans had their own ways of doing things. She said, "You can't blame the guru, because the guru doesn't teach that."

Why then, I asked, do the other ex-devotees I talked with support the Dingas in their charges?

Chidvilasananda replied, "I'm very glad they gave you a very nice story to cover themselves up and I want to tell you I don't want to get into this story because I know their story, too, and I do not want to say anything about it." When I said, "You have a chance to tell us whether or not you think these are accurate charges, falsehoods, or delusions," Malti's answer was: "I’m not going to probe into people's minds and try to find out what the truth is."

Two swamis and a number of present followers also said the charges were not true. Others say they simply don't believe them.

On the subject of money, foundation chief Ed Oliver conceded in an October 1, l983, interview with the Los Angeles Times that there is a Swiss account with 1.5 million dollars in it. And when I repeated Swami Chidvilasananda's denials about women complaining to her, Mary, the woman who says the guru seduced her in South Fallsburg, said, "Well, that's an out-and-out lie."

"The sins committed at any other place are destroyed at a holy centre, but those committed at a holy centre stick tenaciously - it is difficult to wash them away." -Muktananda

http://www.leavingsiddhayoga.net/secret.htm