"The male collective subconscious roars" (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality to end your week.
It’s Sunday morning and I’m back in grey London, coffee in hand. In a few hours we will watch the World Cup final, and how sweet will victory be if England’s long-desired World Cup win is delivered by women? Last year, I remember watching England’s triumph in the Women’s Euros and seeing my young daughter’s eyes light up at the realisation that the beautiful game is for girls too. At school, the boys in her class don’t let girls join in when they play football. They have only just finished Year 1, but at the tender age of 5 or 6, those stereotypes already colour their lives. I wrote a short piece about this last year. Here is a link.
And now for the reads…
1) Your intro to the manosphere
The loose network of online influencers and forums known as the manosphere is a symptom par exellence of the discomfort in some quarters with increased equality between men and women. On MotherJones, Eamon Whalen tells the story of the growth of the manosphere and its protagonists (the most well known of which are arguably Andrew Tate and the Canadian psychologist-turned-guru-for-troubled-men Jordan Peterson), and the role of video content and social media in enabling their outsized influence. “Aggrieved men seeking to reclaim their dominance,” Whalen writes, “has been one of the defining political trends of the last decade.” He continues:
In 2014, Gamergate—a backlash against women in video games—politicized a new generation of internet misogynists. It propelled the alpha-male blogger turned MAGA digital soldier Mike Cernovich and propped up Milo Yiannopoulos, the former editor of Breitbart. In 2016, Donald Trump won the American presidency with the largest gender margin in the history of exit polling. His campaign manager at the time, Steve Bannon, was explicit in his hope that they would tap into the political potential of “rootless white males.” Political machismo has not just been American. It fueled the rise of populist strongmen around the world, from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (who boasts about his 56-inch wide chest) to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (who once told a rival politician that she was too ugly to be raped).
And also….
As long as there has been masculinity, it has been in crisis. During the agrarian to urban migration shift in the late 19th century, political and literary luminaries like Teddy Roosevelt and Walt Whitman expressed concern (bound up with racist panic) that city life would sap European men’s primal virility. In a 1958 essay in Esquire headlined “The Crisis of Masculinity,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that American women had advanced to “a place in our society which American men have not been psychologically prepared to accept.” As a reaction to widespread social, economic, and technological change, the male collective subconscious roars: it used to be better, now it’s getting worse.
2) Where’s the wife?
Wifedom, a new book by Anna Funder, is an attempt to render visible Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the first wife of George Orwell, “a previously unremarked absence” in his diaries and published writing and in biographies of him. For instance, according to Stephanie Merritt in The Observer:
Orwell’s experiences of the revolution are well documented in Homage to Catalonia, where he mentions briefly that, while he was fighting, “my wife was in Barcelona”. What he doesn’t say is that Eileen was working at the headquarters of the Independent Labour party, a position with significant responsibility and risk attached. Funder wonders how she could have read Homage twice before and not realised Eileen’s political work, until she searches the text. “Orwell mentions ‘my wife’ 37 times. And then I see: not once is Eileen named.”
Writing in the New Statesman a few weeks ago, Rebecca Solnit was critical of the book for various inaccuracies, and also for what she describes as the clumsy overlay of modern morality on a couple living in a very different era, sexual politics-wise. She writes:
….we know far less about Eileen than her husband, perhaps because that husband was a hugely impactful figure who left behind enough published writing, journals and letters to fill 20 volumes. Unquestionably the gender roles they inhabited were unfair by our contemporary standards; but that they did not transform them is more typical of the time than an individual crime.
3) Could Barbenheimer end the culture war?
On
, has analysed the sexual politics of the summer’s unavoidable cinema (and internet) moment. He asks whether the Barbie movie and Oppenheimer, in the former’s explorations of feminism, sex, and gender, and the latter’s portrayal of masculinity, could provide an antidote to the dogmatic nature of the gender/sex culture wars. This might, Beiner writes,…represent a long-overdue vibe shift in the cultural consciousness, away from the inanity of postmodern extremism and toward a more complex, compassionate and grounded view on sexual politics. Barbie has been hugely successful, while blockbusters centered around postmodern ideologies about identity are flopping left and right. We will see other studios desperately trying to emulate its success, and that may mean steering away from social justice ideologies in film (it will also mean lots of films about toys nobody cares about).
This could be significant, because postmodern deconstruction in the absence of an essential reality to deconstruct into is a dead end artistically and philosophically. This is why stories based around it are so unsatisfying. As I’ve argued in other pieces, postmodern theory provides important critiques of power and insights into construction of identity that are worth integrating into any attempt to create a better, fairer and more compassionate world. However, sex and gender is where the project is at its most oppressive and most confused, and ultimately there’s only a small baby to save from some fetid bathwater.
I’m not sure about the term “postmodern extremism”, but that aside, it is, as Beiner points out, fascinating that two films that have been such enormous hits both touch on sexual politics, albeit from very different angles, and one more overtly than the other. Barbie, a movie but also a marketing vehicle, came at it self-consciously, as a “feminist” film. With Oppenheimer this is more by default, given that it is almost solely about, and told through the viewpoints of, men, and explores the drive to violence.
4) Speaking of the culture war….
The international chess federation, FIDE, has announced a temporary ban on transgender women playing in women’s events. The participation of transgender women in professional sports is a matter of increasing controversy. Some argue that women born male might have unfair physical advantages in sports like swimming or running. Chess, however, as the BBC points out in its report, does not require such physical exertion. Under FIDE’s new guidelines, trans men who won women’s titles before transitioning will be stripped of their titles, too. British MP Angela Eagle, a former under-18 chess champion, has said that,
"There is no physical advantage in chess unless you believe men are inherently more able to play than women - I spent my chess career being told women's brains were smaller than men's and we shouldn't even be playing….This ban is ridiculous and offensive to women”
In the Guardian’s The Week in Patriarchy newsletter, Arwa Mahdawi has a useful piece that covers the arguments for the ban. One voice in favour is trans writer Debbie Hayton. On Unherd she writes that this is “welcome news”:
The truth is that human beings are part of nature. Men and women evolved different bodies and we have also evolved different psychologies. It’s possible that evolution has left men with an innate advantage in chess.
What exactly would that “innate” advantage be, I wonder? For more context, you can also read this by
on the newsletter, which is an invaluable resource on trans legislation.5) Feminism and the caste system
The Indian magazine Outlook has a special issue on the Dalit community (previously known as “untouchables”), the lowest level in India’s caste system. One of the pieces traces the history of Dalit feminism within a broader Indian movement. As Rakhi Bose writes:
While the voice of Dalit women has grown stronger and there is increased articulation of intersectionality […] younger Dalit feminists feel that the Dalit women’s group continues to live in the shadow of mainstream feminism which is dominated by upper-caste, upper-class women. ‘Intersectionality’ might be a cool word in today’s feminist circles but the women’s rights movement, be it autonomous or political or rights-based, has been largely dominated and controlled by upper-caste women. According to intersectional women’s rights activist and author Shalin Maria Lawrence, most upper-caste feminists suffer selective blindness when it comes to the double or triple marginalisation of Dalit women.
She uses the example of the feminist movement in support of legalising sex work. “I agree that women should have the right to choose. But what about Dalit girls pushed into forced sexual work or bonded labour due to their caste? They don’t have any choice,” Lawrence says.
Bonus: A board game about “the game” women hate playing (hat tip to the ever-excellent
)Thank you for reading. See you next week.