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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Feminism has been defeated.
Once a politics, feminism is now a philosophy, an epistemology, a method. Once for women, it is now for everyone. Once in pursuit of liberation, it now seeks only inclusion.
In Feminism, Defeated, Kate Phelan traces the depoliticization and ultimately, the defeat of feminism. She recovers the second-wave view of men and women as sex-classes, enemies, political kinds, a view more radical than the contemporary view of men and women as social constructs. She also describes how poststructuralism displaced this view and replaced it with another. In this view, the sex/gender binary constructs men and women, and excludes the gender nonconforming.
As this view replaced the second-wave one, the injustice of men’s oppression of women was replaced by that of exclusion, and the goal of women’s liberation was replaced by that of inclusion. Thus did feminism become the trans-inclusionary movement as which we now know it, and Phelan shows that this shift was not the progression of feminism; it was the betrayal of it. In this highly original and persuasive study, she argues that the recent emergence of a new gender-critical feminism presents a moment of opportunity to reclaim feminism’s political project.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Poem
Introduction
Notes
1 The Sexual Becomes Political
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
Notes
2 The Poststructural Turn
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Notes
3 In Search of a Poststructural Feminism
I
II
III
IV
Notes
4 Feminism, Displaced
I
II
III
IV
Notes
5 Lies, Betrayal, and Resistance
I
II
III
Notes
6 Feminism: Political, Not Metaphysical
I
II
III
IV
Notes
7 The Loss of the Future
Notes
8 The Emergence of Gender-Critical Feminism
I
II
III
IV
Notes
9 Choosing Women
I
II
III
IV
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Index
End User License Agreement
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Feminism, Defeated
KATE M. PHELAN
polity
Copyright © Kate M. Phelan, 2025.
The Author hereby asserts her moral right to be identified as author of the Work.
First published by Polity Press in 2025.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6657-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024945652
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
For Caroline Norma and Holly-Lawford Smith
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following people: Christine Craik and Sonia Martin, who supported me in my hour of need; Angelika Papadopoulos, whose intellectual influence on me has been profound; Rob Watts, who encouraged me to think about the political; Elise Heslinga, a conversation with whom sparked this book; Anita Samardzija, Phoebe Hollins, Andrew Romanin, Emmet O’Dwyer, Will Tuckwell, and Sun Liu for their companionship; James, Sarah, and Chris Phelan, and Chris Lyne, for their love and loyalty; Mum and Dad, who nurtured my love of the life of the mind; finally, the two women for whom I have written this book: Caroline Norma and Holly Lawford-Smith. It is to Caroline that I owe my sense of feminism as a politics (and much else besides). And it is Holly who, in so many ways, made this book possible (and who suggested the title). Feminism, Defeated is, among other things, an attempt to express my gratitude to them.
You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language
Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she’s a woman of my time
obsessed
with Love, our subject:
we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power
I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn
trying to make a call
from a phonebook
The phone rings unanswered
in a man’s bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She’ll get tired –
hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow
ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political
Adrienne Rich, ‘Translations’
Introduction
The depoliticization of feminism appears all but complete. To the trans-inclusionary declaration that ‘trans women are women’, the gender-critical feminist responds, ‘woman is adult human female’. Implicit in the trans-inclusionary declaration is a conception of woman as a gendered being; explicit in the gender-critical response is a conception of woman as a sexed being. Gender is a social kind, sex a natural one. On neither view is ‘woman’ a saliently political category.
For a flickering moment, it was. From the late 1960s until the late 1980s, second-wave feminists theorised women as a class. ‘The feminist raison d’être’, Ti-Grace Atkinson wrote, is ‘that women are a class, that this class is political in nature, and that this political class is oppressed’.1 Feminism was then a political movement, a struggle of women against men for their freedom.
By the late 1990s, the emphasis on the political had been displaced by one on the social. Feminists no longer described women in crude Marxist language, as a class; now they described ‘woman’ in sophisticated poststructural language, as a term producing its referent, and therefore they referred to women as ‘women’ – a discursive and unstable construct.2 At the same time, whether as a consequence or a cause of this shift I am not sure, feminism became a theoretical or philosophical movement, concerned more with ‘woman’ than women, more with deconstruction than liberation. Formerly the name of a politics, ‘feminism’ became the name of a philosophy, an epistemology, a method. This displacement of the political has gone unnoticed.
In Politics and Vision, Sheldon Wolin suggests that the ascendance of the social reduced the political to the status of a resultant of social factors, thereby effacing the distinctively political.3 Before Wolin, Robert MacIver had lamented the conflation of the political with the social,4 and so too had Martin Buber.5 Nowhere is this conflation clearer than in the declaration with which Bertrand Russell opens his book Power: ‘The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.’6 Buber considered Russell’s declaration a typical example of the confusion between the political and the social.7
Perhaps, then, the displacement of the political in feminism has gone unnoticed because, the social having usurped the political, the emphasis on the social appears to incorporate an emphasis on the political. In fact it suppresses it.
‘Political’ and ‘social’ are notoriously elusive terms, and it is only once we see the difference between the two traditions of feminism that they shape – in the analysis, in the goal, in the lexicon – that we can appreciate the difference between the two. Nevertheless, we can preliminarily say that ‘political’ is associated with state, government, authority, public, law, rights, class, interests, enmity, conflict, struggle, revolution, liberation, utopianism, vision, while ‘social’ is associated with community, fellowship, conventions, norms, roles, education (in the sense of socialisation), artificial, science, and that ‘political’ is antithetical to what is private, personal, harmonious, while ‘social’ is antithetical to what is natural, uncultivated, individual. When ‘social’ displaces ‘political’, association displaces subordination, fellowship displaces domination, and horizontal structure displaces vertical structure.8Hierarchy disappears from view. This should be of concern to feminists.
‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke).’9 Rather, Walter Benjamin writes, ‘[i]t means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’.10 In a recently emerged strain of feminism, gender-critical, a memory of the second-wave conception of women as a class flashes up at a moment of danger. It flashes up in women’s indignation at male people’s claim to be women. Implicit in this indignation is class consciousness, an awareness that ‘woman’ names a category marked out by its femaleness for a life of sexual subjection to men, a life of harassment, rape, battery, prostitution. Holly Lawford-Smith therefore locates gender-critical feminism’s roots in radical feminism, ‘a theory by women, for women, and about women, understood as a sex caste/class’.11
But this memory is at risk of being extinguished by an emphasis on the biological. While Lawford-Smith says that gender-critical feminism shares with radical feminism a conception of women as a sex class, she places primary emphasis on ‘sex’ and secondary emphasis on ‘class’: ‘In its insistence upon the importance of sex’, she writes, ‘gender-critical feminism is continuous with radical feminism’.12 This emphasis reflects its historical moment: because the trans-inclusionary feminism to which gender-critical feminism reacts emphasises the socially constructed nature of women, and because it uses this emphasis to pursue acceptance of male people as women, gender-critical feminism emphasises the biological nature of women. With trans-inclusionary feminism emphasising the socially constructed nature of women and gender-critical feminism the biological, the debate becomes one over whether women are a social or a biological kind. This obscures a third possibility: women are a political kind.
This is a moment of danger. A trans-inclusionary victory will erase women as a class. But a gender-critical victory will, so long as this feminism emphasises the biological, replace the second-wave dream of freedom with safety. It will replace the abolition of sex class with a refuge in which one class – women – can shelter from the other – men.
In this book I seize hold of the memory of the second-wave conception of women as a class in order that gender-critical feminism might become a repoliticised feminism, a feminism that resumes the struggle for women’s freedom.
Notes
1.
Ti-Grace Atkinson,
Amazon Odyssey
(New York: Links Books, 1974), 41.
2.
Denise Riley,
‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 1.
3.
Sheldon S. Wolin,
Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 257–263.
4.
‘In the first place we must distinguish the state from society. To identify the social with the political is to be guilty of the grossest of all confusions, which completely bars any understanding of either society or the state’. R. M. MacIver,
The Modern State
(London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 4–5.
5.
Martin Buber, ‘Society and the State’, in his
Pointing the Way: Collected Essays
, trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 161.
6.
Bertrand Russell,
Power: A New Social Analysis
(London: Routledge, 2004 [1938]) 4 (emphasis added).
7.
Buber, ‘Society and the State’, 161.
8.
Buber (ibid.) writes: ‘The primary element must not be superseded by the secondary element – association by subordination, fellowship by domination or, schematically speaking, the horizontal structure by the vertical.’
9.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in his
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2019 [1968]), 255.
10.
Ibid.
11.
Holly Lawford-Smith,
Gender-Critical Feminism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 22 (emphasis added).
12.
Ibid., 21.
1The Sexual Becomes Political
I
A conception of women as socially constructed characterises contemporary feminist thought. The archetypal expression of this conception is Simone de Beauvoir’s declaration: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’1
Insofar as it opposes the patriarchal belief that women’s natures render them fit only for a life of ‘childcare, home care, and husband care’,2 and insofar as this belief plays a role in the origination and persistence of women’s oppression, the idea that women are constructed undermines women’s oppression. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft’s claim that ‘women … are rendered weak and wretched by … a false system of education’3 and that the ‘nature’ invoked to deny women a proper education is in fact the consequence of that denial undermined the exclusion of women from education.
I think it is now worth asking: to what extent does a belief about women’s natures continue to play a role in the persistence of women’s oppression? In other words, is the historical context in which an emphasis on women’s social constructedness was politically meaningful our context? I am not sure that it is. Due to the feminist movement, women in liberal democratic societies now formally enjoy the rights and freedoms of men. Their condition no longer remains in need of rationalisation. Their nature therefore need not be invoked as a rationale for anything. The current emphasis on women’s social constructedness seems, then, somewhat anachronistic, an objection to a claim no longer made, ‘a formula that ha[s] outlived itself’,4 a mark of stasis. Put baldly, the natural–social dichotomy now dominates feminist thought to no clear political avail.
Traced to Beauvoir, the current emphasis on the social is considered continuous with second-wave feminist thought. However, if one places contemporary feminist thought alongside second-wave feminist thought, this emphasis contrasts instead with one on the political.5
Contemporary feminists do not reject this emphasis. Rather, conflating the social with the political, they assume that their conception of women is continuous with that of the second wave. They assume, in other words, that in the shift from political to social nothing has been lost. In fact something has been lost. That something is feminism.
In this chapter I chart the emergence of feminism, a movement that sought the liberation of women qua women. I do so with the aim of recovering the second-wave conception of women as a political kind. By ‘recover’ I mean ‘restore to memory what has been forgotten’, but I also mean ‘salvage from misunderstanding’. For if trans-inclusionary feminists have forgotten this conception, gender-critical feminists too quickly dismiss it, wary as they are of a conception that appears to elide the biological specificity of the class ‘woman’.
II
In 1969, Kate Millett wrote: ‘sex is a status category with political implications’;6 also in 1969, New York Radical Feminists wrote of ‘the oppression of women as a fundamental political oppression wherein women are categorized as an inferior class based upon their sex’;7 in 1970, Shulamith Firestone wrote: ‘Sex class is so deep as to be invisible’;8 in 1972, Adrienne Rich wrote: ‘this way of grief / is shared, unnecessary / and political’;9 in 1973, Ti-Grace Atkinson wrote: ‘Feminism is, of course, a political position. When the term is used in any pure sense, it refers to the view that women form a class and that this class is political in nature’;10 in 1981, Monique Wittig wrote: ‘the categories “man” and “woman” … are political categories and not natural givens’;11 in 1987, Andrea Dworkin wrote: ‘Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class’;12 and, in 1989, Catharine MacKinnon wrote: ‘If one defines politics with Harold Lasswell … and with Robert Dahl … and with Kate Millett … the relation between women and men is political.’13
These feminists were responding to the failure, and then to the refusal, to consider sexual relations political, in every sense of the term – a refusal that persists. Millett begins her attempt to develop a theory of sexual politics by asking: ‘Can the relationship between the sexes be viewed in a political light at all?’14 It was not so much that the answer to this question had been assumed to be ‘no’, but rather that the possibility that sexual relations are political, and hence the very question, had been inconceivable. Inconceivable because sexual relations, relations between men qua men and women qua women, were – are – conceived of as paradigmatically non-political.15 As natural, mutually beneficial, harmonious, erotic, proper to the bedroom expressions of one’s innermost self, sexual relations stand in opposition to the political: they are natural, not artificial, harmonious, not antagonistic, private, not public, individual, not common. To claim that sexual relations are political is thus to claim that the paradigmatically non-political is political – indeed, not merely political but paradigmatically so. Millett continues: ‘However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.’16
In claiming that sexual relations are political, second-wave feminists intended ‘political’ to be taken in the expansive sense that Millett assigned to it: ‘power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another’.17 They meant that sexual relations were relations of Herrschaft, ‘of dominance and subordinance’.18 In claiming that sexual relations were political, they obviously intended to refer to relations between the sexes, between men qua men and women qua women. Perhaps less obviously, they also intended to cover, or at the very least implicated, the sense of ‘erotic’.
It is in literary depictions of erotic relations that Millett observes the dominance and subordination that she takes to be characteristic of the relations between the sexes. Examples of the literary passages analysed by Millett include:
‘Oh, oh! Don’t. Please don’t. It hurts!’ she yelled.
‘Shut up, you bitch you!’ I said. ‘It hurts does it? You wanted it, didn’t you?’ I held her tightly, raised myself a little higher to get it into the hilt, and pushed until I thought her womb would give way. Then I came – right into that snail-like mouth which was wide open. She went into a convulsion, delirious with joy and pain. Then her legs slid off my shoulders and fell to the floor with a thud. She lay there like a dead one, completely fucked out.19
Their lovemaking is fantastic for a time:
He must subdue her, absorb her, rip her apart and consume her … And for a half year, almost a year, they have love passages of intense fury, enraged and powerful, which leave him sobbing from exhaustion and frustration …
Do you love me, are you mine, love me.
Yes yes.
I’ll take you apart, I’ll eat you, oh, I’ll make you mine … you bitch.20
She mentioned in her roundabout way that she didn’t want any of that business. ‘You don’t feel in the mood for it, I suppose’, says he, and then he adds: ‘that’s fine because now I’m going to warm you up a bit’. With that he up and ties her to the bedstead, gags her, and then goes for the razor strop. On the way to the bathroom, he grabs a bottle of mustard from the kitchen. He comes back with the razor strop and he belts the piss out of her. And after that he rubs mustard into the raw welts. ‘That ought to keep you warm for tonight,’ he says. And so saying he makes her bend over and spread her legs apart. ‘Now’, he says, ‘I’m going to pay you as usual,’ and taking a bill out of his pocket he crumples it up and shoves it up her quim.21
Millett thus, perhaps inadvertently, identifies the sexual in both of its senses – male–female and erotic – as political, and relatedly so. She suggests that the relations between men qua men and women qua women are essentially erotic and that erotic relations are essentially relations of mastery and subjection. She thereby ‘resolves the linguistic duality in the meaning of the term sex itself’:22 in having sex, a male person masters a female person, consummating a relation of mastery and subjection, thus confirming his membership of the male sex class and her membership of the female sex class.
One finds suggestions about the political nature of sexuality scattered throughout second-wave writing. Beauvoir observes that ‘[m]ales’ erotic vocabulary is inspired by military vocabulary: the lover has the ardour of a soldier, his sexual organ stiffens like a bow, when he ejaculates, he “discharges”, it is a machine gun, a cannon; he speaks of attack, assault, of victory’,23 and, quoting Benda, ‘[t]he generative act, consisting in the occupation of one being by another, imposes, on the one hand, the idea of a conqueror, on the other of something conquered. Thus when they refer to their most civilised love relationships, they talk of conquest, attack, assault, siege and defence, defeat, and capitulation, clearly copying the idea of love from that of war.’24 Atkinson refers to sexual intercourse as a ‘political institution’25 and writes: ‘“Sex” is based on the differences between the sexes. Sexual intercourse is the interrelation between these two classes, and sexual intercourse, unsurprisingly, is not in the interests of women.’26 Adrienne Rich writes of ‘the law of male sex-right to women’,27 a term – ‘male sex-right’ – that beautifully synthesises the two aspects of the right: a right of the sex class of men, and a right to having sex with women. Dworkin describes the meaning of intercourse in a man-made world: ‘The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation: colonializing, forceful (manly) or nearly violent; the sexual act that by its nature makes her his.’28
But if sexual relations were political, why were they and how did they become so? In other words, what account of sexual dominion did feminists provide?
III
Strongly influenced by Marxism – impressed by it as an account of power relations but dissatisfied with it as a theory of women’s oppression (Marxism, like liberalism, had proven incapable of recognising sexual relations as political)29 – second-wave feminists developed their claim that sexual relations are political as a claim that they are class relations.30
In adopting the Marxist term ‘class’, feminists disclosed two particular features of the relations between men and women: interdependence and antagonism. In Marxism, ‘class’ refers to a group of people with a particular relationship with the means of production. Under capitalism, two classes exist: the capitalist class, which is the group of people who own the means of production, and the proletariat, which is the group of people who own only their labour power. The relationship of each class with the means of production is necessarily a relationship between the two classes – those who own the means of production must employ those who own only their labour power,31 and those who own only their labour power must seek employment by those who own the means of production. What it is to be a member of a class is thus what it is to stand in a particular relation to a member of the other class. In the case of a member of the capitalist class, this relation is one of mastery, and in the case of a member of the proletariat, it is one of subjection. In sum, class has two salient general features: interdependence and antagonism. Each class is constituted by its relation to the other and each class opposes the other. In Marx’s description of the history of class struggle, these features are especially clear:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.32
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, oppressor and oppressed are all pairs of interdependent and antagonistic identities, pairs each of which exists in contradistinction to the other and each of whose interests oppose the other’s.
In applying the term ‘class’ to sex, feminists reconceived the sexes. Under capitalism, to repeat, what it is to be a member of the capitalist class is what it is to stand in a relation of mastery to a member of the proletariat, and what it is to be a member of the proletariat is what it is to stand in a relation of subjection to a member of the capitalist class. So, under male dominance, what it is to be a member of the male sex is what it is to stand in a relation of mastery to a member of the female sex, and what it is to be a member of the female sex is what it is to stand in a relation of subjection to a member of the male sex. Sex is a political category. As Carole Pateman writes, ‘[s]exual difference is political difference; sexual difference is the difference between freedom and subjection’.33
In reality, second-wave feminists proposed two distinct accounts of sex class. On the first, developed by Firestone, sex causes sex class. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels writes: ‘Its [socialism’s] task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.’34 Admiring this account of history, but hoping to end instead the conflict between sex classes, Firestone set out to ‘develop a materialist view of history based on sex itself’.35 The resulting view is this. The female reproductive role – carrying, bearing, and rearing children – renders women, for the period in which they perform this role, dependent upon men for physical survival, thus producing a power imbalance between men and women. This power imbalance becomes political – sex becomes sex class – when we acquire the technological means to liberate women from their reproductive role, yet men refuse to make use of these means, preferring their tyranny. Just as the proletariat must seize the means of production in order to liberate itself, so women must seize the means of reproduction in order to liberate themselves.36
As an attempt at Marxist method, this is a dismal failure. Marx and Engels insisted upon a dialectical approach to history. In contrast to a metaphysical approach, which comprehends an object in isolation, in repose, in its death, and thus as either one half of an antithesis – cause – or the other – effect, a dialectical approach comprehends an object in its connection to the whole, in motion, in its life, and thus as being one half of an antithesis – the cause – at one stage in a process and the other half – the effect – at another stage.37 Taking a dialectical approach, Marx and Engels theorise class as both effect and cause of work. Through work, those who own the means of production become the capitalist class and those who own only their labour power become the proletarian class. Once those who own the means of production become the capitalist class, they must employ those who own only their labour power, and once those who own only their labour power become the proletarian class, they must seek employment by those who own the means of production, class thereby setting work in motion. Firestone, however, theorises sex class as given, as existing outside process and in itself. From MacKinnon’s perspective, Firestone mistakes the effect of sexuality – sex class – for an eternal category – sex.
Indeed, consider the two ‘fundamental – if not immutable – facts’38 from which Firestone concludes that ‘sex class sprang directly from a biological reality’:39
The biological family – the basic reproductive unit of male/ female/infant, in whatever form of social organisation – is characterized by these fundamental – if not immutable – facts:
That women throughout history before the advent of birth control were at the continual mercy of their biology – menstruation, menopause, and ‘female ills’, constant painful childbirth, wetnursing and care of infants, all of which made them dependent on males (whether brother, father, husband, lover, or clan, government, community-at-large) for physical survival.
That human infants take an even longer time to grow up than animals, and thus are helpless and, for some short period at least, dependent on adults for physical survival.
40
At best, these facts show only that, while women carry, bear, and rear children, they are dependent upon men. First, dependence on men does not entail subordination to men. It becomes subordination only if men exploit it. Firestone simply assumes that they do: ‘Nature produced the fundamental inequality – half the human race must bear and rear the children of all of them – which was later consolidated, institutionalized, in the interests of men.’41 Indeed, she takes it to be self-evident that men exploit women’s dependence and that this dependence is therefore vulnerability – so much so that she does not even explain why or how men exploit women’s dependence. Second, on Firestone’s own account, men are dependent on women for the reproduction of the species. Why do women not exploit this dependence by threatening to harm the foetus or neglect the infant, either before men exploit their dependence or in resistance to this exploitation? On close examination, the world that Firestone describes – a world in which women are dependent on men while men are independent, men are self-interested while women place their children’s interest above their own, men are exploitative while women are not, women passively accept their mistreatment, female dependence is female vulnerability, female biology is a curse, and sexual relations are antagonistic – is our world, a world at a particular historical moment, projected back into the state of nature, a world that simply is. Notice that we can say this without refuting (or affirming) women’s reproductive role or even their temporary dependence.
On the second account, developed by MacKinnon, the relationship between sex and sex class is one of historical accident. Also inspired by Marxism, MacKinnon writes:
Marxist theory argues that society is fundamentally constructed of the relations people form as they do and make things needed to survive humanly. Work is the social process of shaping and transforming the material and social worlds, creating people as social beings as they create value. It is that activity by which people become who they are. Class is its structure, production its consequence, capital its congealed form, and control its issue.
Implicit in feminist theory is a parallel argument: the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes: women and men. This division underlies the totality of social relations. Sexuality is the social process through which social relations of gender are created, organized, expressed, and directed, creating the social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. As work is to marxism, sexuality to feminism is socially constructed yet constructing, universal as activity yet historically specific, jointly comprised of matter and mind. As the organized expropriation of the work of some for the benefit of others defines a class, workers, the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. Heterosexuality is its social structure, desire its internal dynamic, gender and family its congealed forms, sex roles its qualities generalized to social persona, reproduction a consequence, and control its issue.42
Just as, through work – the process in which material need is fulfilled and created anew – those who own the means of production become the capitalist class and those who own only their labour power become the proletarian class, so, too, through sexuality – the process in which sexual desire is fulfilled and created anew – the members of the male sex, whose sexual desire is fulfilled and renewed as one whose object is dominance, become the members of a sex class and the members of the female sex, whose sexual desire is fulfilled and renewed as one whose object is subordination, become the members of another sex class. On this view, sexuality transforms sex into sex class.
MacKinnon writes her account of the construction of sex class in the present tense. This gives the impression of a process ever recurring, of sexuality ever organising the sexes into sex classes. While the process repeats itself, each repetition strengthens a relationship between sex and sex class, and finally qualitatively transforms the original condition of the sexes. As more and more members of the male sex and more and more members of the female sex engage again and again in sexuality, the male sex and the female sex become established as classes. Maleness and femaleness acquire political significance. From that moment on, a member of a sex is by birth a member of a class.
IV
As is perhaps obvious, it is the account of sex class developed by MacKinnon that I wish to recover. On the one hand, this account has been rejected by poststructural feminists, who consider it yet another ‘quasi metanarrative’,43 and on the other it is met with suspicion by gender-critical feminists, who worry that it makes the sex of this class disappear. I now want to defend this account, particularly against the latter suspicion (I will address the former in good time).
On MacKinnon’s view, I have suggested, sexuality organises the sexes into sex classes. This suggestion is misleading. For in fact MacKinnon says that ‘the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes: women and men’.44 What does she mean? With this locution, she assigns to sex in feminism the place of class in Marxism: as work organises people into classes, sexuality organises people into sexes. She thereby politicises sex. Had she written that sexuality organises the sexes into two sex classes, the sexes would have remained the pre-political substratum over which the political stratum of class is then laid. Incidentally, this is the picture that the distinction between sex and gender yields. As I read her, MacKinnon politicises sex because she regards it as referring in fact to sex class. Because the sexes have been organised into sex classes, because male people have been socialised into masculinity, thus becoming men, and female people into femininity, thus becoming women, we know the sexes only as classes – that is, male people only as men and female people only as women. If we know the sexes only as classes, then any reference to the sexes must be a reference to the sexes as classes. In other words, what we picture, upon saying or hearing ‘sex’, must be ‘sex as class’. MacKinnon therefore worries that, were she to write that sexuality organises the sexes into sex classes, the reader would picture sexuality as organising the sex classes into sex classes, hence unwittingly accepting as sex, and thus as pre-political, what is in fact sex class, and thus political. MacKinnon would then have failed to achieve what she means to – the recognition of sexual politics.
MacKinnon is writing in a context where feminists have uncovered women’s oppression and are attempting to account for it and where these attempts trace women’s oppression back to male and female biology, which examination reveals to be male and female biology under male dominance.
Consider Susan Brownmiller’s account of rape. She argues that male and female physiology engenders a ‘first rape’,45 rape in primitive form:
Man’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself. Had it not been for this accident of biology, an accommodation requiring the locking together of two separate parts, penis into vagina, there would be neither copulation nor rape as we know it … we cannot work around the fact that in terms of human anatomy the possibility of forcible intercourse incontrovertibly exists. This single factor may have been sufficient to have caused the creation of a male ideology of rape. When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it.46
So natural does it seem to Brownmiller that a male person who could force a female person would that she takes his superior strength to satisfactorily account for the ‘first rape’. She takes can to explain why: ‘What it all boils down to is that the human male can rape.’47 Only because ours is a context in which male people’s sexual assault on female people is normalised, and thus does not truly puzzle us or demand an explanation, does can appear a satisfactory explanation of why.
Elsewhere Brownmiller speaks of a male person’s ‘psychologic urge’.48 An urge to what? To fulfil his sexual desire? To reproduce? Given that he does not need to engage in intercourse in order to fulfil his sexual desire, presumably the latter. Anthropologists have offered an evolutionary story in which rape is a reproductive strategy.49 In conjunction with this story, can would explain why. But if the male has an urge to reproduce, must not the female also have one? If she does, why does she resist, so that a man must use force?
More importantly, supposing that this story is plausible, it explains only why men have forcible sexual intercourse with women who are of childbearing age. It does not explain – except as by-products – forcible sexual intercourse with very young girls, forms of sexual assault that are not intercourse – oral, anal, penetration of the vagina through objects other than the penis, and other kinds of sexual violation – leering, upskirting, wolf-whistling, harassment, image-based abuse.
Recognising that rape in primitive society appears to be different from rape in civilised society, Brownmiller argues that the former engenders the latter:
if the first rape was an unexpected battle founded on the woman’s refusal, the second rape was indubitably planned … rape became not only a male prerogative, but man’s basic weapon of force against woman, the principal agent of his will and her fear. His forcible entry into her body, despite her physical protestations and struggle, became the vehicle of his victorious conquest over her being, the ultimate test of his superior strength, the triumph of his manhood.50
In the first rape, a male person uses force in order to satisfy an urge to reproduce. In the second (an evocative description not only of rape but also of sex in our world), a male person engages in conquest in order to realise his manhood. In these two rapes we have two wholly different ‘actions’ in the Weberian sense: ‘human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful’. Weber also contrasts action with human behaviour that is ‘purely reactive’.51 The first rape has one goal – to satisfy one’s urge to reproduce – and thus one meaning, while the second has another goal – to realise one’s manhood – and thus another meaning.52 It is the second action that is rape. Only because the first rape coincides in form with the second does it appear to be rape.
How does the first rape become the second? How does forcing a woman to surrender her body in order to satisfy one’s urge to reproduce, just as one might force another to surrender food in order to satisfy one’s hunger, and doing so because of scarcity of sexual access, which is analogous with scarcity of food – how does all this become conquering a woman in order to realise one’s manhood? Brownmiller claims that the first rape revealed to man that ‘his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear’, and thus presented rape to men as a means of subduing women. But how do men’s genitalia disclose themselves to men as a weapon? How does forced reproduction disclose itself to men as ‘victorious conquest over her being, the ultimate test of his superior strength, the triumph of his manhood’? How does the biological action of the first rape disclose itself to men as the military – the political – action of the second?53 It does not. Only because ours is a context in which, as Beauvoir observes, the sexual is described in the vocabulary of the militaristic, in which the association of sex with conquest strikes us as perfectly natural, does the penis seem to lend itself to an association with ‘weapon’ and forced reproduction to an association with the ‘victorious conquest’ just described. In sum, the second rape is both conceptually and causally unrelated to the first.
Supposing that male and female physiology engenders the first rape, the first rape does not engender the second rape, so the second rape cannot be traced back to male and female physiology. Put simply, male and female physiology does not account for the second rape, which is the rape we wish to account for.
Only because ours is a context where sex is class, where the physiology of the male and of the female is the physiology of the master and of the subject, where the penis is a weapon for penetration and the vagina is an orifice to be penetrated, where the penetration of the vagina by the penis is the possession of the female by the male,54 does male and female physiology appear to be conducive to the action of conquest that is rape. This is to say that, when Brownmiller purports to speak of sex, she in fact speaks of sex class; and, when she purports to speak of the first rape, a biological action, she in fact speaks of the second rape, a political action.
It is to such mistaking of the political for the biological that MacKinnon is reacting when, in an attempt to shift the political back where it belongs, she writes that ‘sexuality organizes society into two sexes’.
V
Can we not disentangle sex from sex class? Not, at least not with full confidence, until we have abolished sex class and can observe sex outside sex class.
Can we not be guided by our knowledge of sex as it was prior to patriarchy, prior to its organisation into sex classes? MacKinnon disputes the existence of such a time, claiming that ‘women’s inequality has never not existed’.55 In my view, Sheila Rowbotham provides a better answer: ‘The origins of our oppression, like the roots of all domination, are lost long ago. We are completely without any memory of any alternative. Even the myths of tribes and races of strong women, the golden age of matriarchy, are the creations of male culture.’56 Unlike MacKinnon, Rowbotham does not deny the possibility of a pre-patriarchal society; rather she argues that, if such a society once existed, it is now accessible to us only from the present, that is, it can be seen and studied only from our present vantage point – the vantage point of a patriarchal society. It is therefore less a society that preceded patriarchy than a society that we, who inhabit the patriarchal present, can countenance as having preceded patriarchy.
Can we not be guided by our current knowledge – of human evolution, reproduction, and biology and of non-human evolution, reproduction, and biology? This assumes that our current knowledge will persist into the feminist future, that it is not somehow the product of a patriarchal vantage point. Can we be sure of this? Given the claim that feminism is revolutionary, that it is ‘the whole conceptual reevaluation of the social world, its whole reorganization with new concepts’,57 might not the feminist future be a world in which much of what we now know has been cast to the wind? In other words, to describe sex by holding fixed our current knowledge may be to describe sex by holding fixed the patriarchal conditions. Our description of sex may thus be little more than a description of sex class.
Can we not protect ourselves against this by developing a minimal description of sex? Examples of minimal descriptions include the following: the gamete account, according to which males are organisms on a developmental pathway designed to produce small gametes for the purpose of sexual reproduction and females are organisms on a developmental pathway designed to produce larger gametes for the purpose of sexual reproduction;58 the chromosome account, according to which a male human being is a human being with a Y chromosome and a female human being is a human being without a Y chromosome;59 and the cluster account, according to which a male human being is one who has sufficiently many important properties of one particular morphological cluster and a female human being is one who has sufficiently many important properties of another particular morphological cluster.60 As Kathleen Stock writes, these minimal descriptions of sex ‘refer only to a few structural and/or physical aspects of the body as defining conditions … They don’t … build in any particular behavioural or psychological traits – active or passive, dominant or oppressed, or otherwise – as essentially connected to maleness and femaleness’61 and thus do not condemn women to subordination.
But I wonder whether a minimal description of sex would be a description of a human being. As Pateman has written,
The attempt to set out the purely natural attributes of individuals is inevitably doomed to fail; all that is left if the attempt is consistent enough is a merely physiological, biological, or reasoning entity, not a human being. In order to make their natural beings recognizable, social contract theorists smuggle social characteristics into the natural condition, or their readers supply what is missing.62
As a description of a biological organism, a minimal description of sex might serve the biologist’s purposes, but does not serve the political theorist’s.
For instance, when Stock speaks of female people as vulnerable to sexual assault by male people, does she see in her mind’s eye nothing more than two biological organisms, one on a given developmental pathway and one on another, one with one pair of chromosomes and one with another, one with one cluster of morphological properties and one with another? In other words, is her image of a sexually vulnerable female person (and, by implication, her image of a sexually predatory male person) the image of a strictly biological organism? It appears to be, as she attributes this vulnerability, in part, to ‘typical differences between males and females in strength, size, and direct aggression’.63 But these differences only allow men who are already inclined to sexually assault women to do so. In the absence of such inclination, these differences do not render female people sexually vulnerable.
MacKinnon provides an alternative account. Qua members of the male sex class, male people find in dominance – in pursuing and conquering – sexual pleasure and self-realisation, while female people, qua members of the female sex class, find in subordination – in being pursued and conquered – sexual pleasure and self-realisation. Under the gaze of one who eroticises dominance, the female body becomes a thing to be ‘penetrated’, ‘defiled’, ‘had’, a thing to be violated and mastered. On Stock’s account, a man’s force is a means of achieving the ends of sexual pleasure when the woman is unwilling to submit. On MacKinnon’s account, a man experiences the act of forcing a woman itself as sexually pleasurable: ‘Force is sex, not just sexualized; force is the desire dynamic, not just a response to the desired object when desire’s expression is frustrated.’64 On Stock’s account, men will continue to force women so long as they remain bigger, stronger, and more aggressive. On MacKinnon’s account, once sex class has
