Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

Note: I wrote this a couple of weeks ago. Since then, events have only increased my confidence in the points below.

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If, in some distant possible world, Buzzfeed were ever to employ me to write a version of that familiar standby, “21 Empowering Books For Your Feminist Reading List”, I’d include at least four books by philosopher John Gray. To my knowledge, Gray has nothing whatsoever to say about feminism, though admittedly my search results weren’t helped by the fact he has the same name as the author of 90s bestseller Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus. If the philosopher John Gray were to write a book about men and women, it would probably be called Men are Nothing But Efficient Hosts for Bacteria (and So Are Women). According to him, there's no meaning in nature, and nature is all there is. There’s no God, no transcendent purpose, nor universal values. Humans are animals, albeit more predatory and less effective at coordinated action than many other species.  Animals are mere assemblies of genes. Everything in the natural world, including us, came about by blind accident. The world is permanent chaotic and there is no redemption. 

In a certain mood, I find this picture weirdly comforting - the same sort of mood that finds me engaging in self-care by binge-watching The World At War. In the words of John Cleese’s beleaguered headmaster in Clockwise: “It's not the despair, Laura. I can stand the despair. It's the hope!.” Taken in the spirit of a bracing reality check, I think feminists could learn a lot from this.

Throughout Gray’s work, a habitual target is a philosophical worldview which arose in the Enlightenment, and which for want of a better term we can call “liberal humanism”. According to the liberal-humanist narrative, humans are special, distinguished by their unique capacity for rationality. This capacity is presumed to take humans out of the animal realm into the realm of “persons” - roughly, individuals who have free will, are capable of consciously choosing actions in the light of reasons rather than instincts, and who can reflect upon right and wrong. This same rational capacity is also thought to bestow upon humans unconditional rights, understood as moral prohibitions on certain kinds of treatment. The development of science, meanwhile, is viewed as helping humans overcome their limitations, the better to control the natural world with the help of technological devices invented for the purpose.  The trend in well-being is conceived of as generally upward: there may be blips, but on the whole, as we move through time and acquire increasingly objective knowledge of the world and of ourselves, it can only increase. It’s also assumed that, as time passes, the human species will become ever more morally enlightened. The popular trope of the “right side of history” betrays this conceit: as if, at some point in future, there will be a reckoning from a secure vantage point, and an incontestable sorting of the past into definitively good and bad.

Against all this, Gray replies that humans aren’t particularly rational, and don’t have free will. We are largely moved by competitive instincts and drives in response to local environments, with reason kicking in only afterwards to justify what desire first told us to do. Human rights, meanwhile, are a culturally relative illusion. Values generally are man-made. Science is more of a religion than we realise. And the idea of progress is a myth. Human history is not an inexorable journey from worse to better. Any “human destiny” style narratives - whether they come from Christianity, ethnic nationalism, Marxism, or liberal humanism - are consoling, self-important myths designed to distract us from our own irrelevance. There will never be a time when the good and the bad are retrospectively identified with any authority. The world always will be just as chaotic and random and meaningless as it is now, and we will be just as flawed.

Lessons for liberal (and radical) feminists

Gray’s most famous book is called Straw Dogs. Critics of Gray tend to object that his target is a straw man -  an overly crude version of liberal humanism that no-one serious holds. But in the realm of feminism, at least, there are apparently still true believers. Take liberal feminists. In popular liberal feminism, it’s foundational that, in virtue of their rationality, humans have a special set of rights and freedoms setting them apart from the rest of the natural world. Women and girls are morally equal to men and boys in virtue of this shared capacity for reason and choice, so should be treated as such. 

Attention is then drawn by libfems to ways in which the narrative is inconsistently applied: either leaving women and girls out in practice, or else denying that they meet basic standards for rationality and personhood in the first place. “Freedom”, “choice" and “consent” are big buzz words, underlining background connections with the humanist model. Biological features, like being sexed male or female, tend to be treated as contingent from the point of view of what matters most profoundly. At a push (no pun intended), liberal feminists will acknowledge that bodily capacities and experiences such as pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, and menopause make a difference to women’s political interests. But this grudging admission seems largely in service to a model of these phenomena as unfortunate female deficits, for which women deserve compensation in order to rejoin a sexless level playing field.

Though it’s mostly unremarked, some popular versions of radical feminism seem to me to want to extend the caricatural liberal-humanist project still further. The clue is in their mantra. The goal is “liberation” - like “freedom” but somehow even sexier. In radical feminist Utopia, we’re told, there will be “gender abolition”, understood as the complete destruction of, and liberation from, feminine and masculine cultures. That is: in the glorious future, there will be males and females, each with different kinds of body, but no cultural behaviours distinctively associated with the two different kinds of body, and no social norms or stereotypes exerting pressure on each sex to be one way or another. 

To my mind, this betrays the markings of that peskily seductive liberal-humanist conception of humankind once again. It conceptualises history as going in a fairly one-dimensional direction, at least potentially. And it appears to frame humanity as essentially rational and deliberate, and able to overcome tendencies hardwired into humans as social primates: social tendencies which, in actual fact, make cultural production around sexed bodily difference and heterosexual relations ubiquitous across time and place, though varying in its detail. It’s completely doable for feminists to identify particular norms, or other aspects of feminine or masculine cultures, for targeted alteration because they are damaging to the female sex. But it’s madly hubristic to think we could aim to transcend the existence of feminine and masculine cultures altogether. Yet, instead of framing sex-based social norms of some kind as an inevitable part of our animal life, and even as sometimes helpful in their ability to coordinate human behaviour, a lot of radical feminists seem to think of social norms as threats to freedom and individual choice, whatever their content. 

So the liberal-humanist narrative, at least in this caricatural and oversimplified guise, has led much of feminism astray. Along with Mary Harrington, who is writing a forthcoming book about it, I worry about any feminism that would frame history as a progress narrative. At the very least, it falsely encourages people to think they can skip to the end, as it were - in other words, to fake Utopia until they make it. With the future in mind, they may ignore the bloody mess they’re creating in the meantime for women in the real world, even dismissing it as acceptable collateral. (Exhibit 1: putting male rapists who identify as women in women’s prisons in the name of progress). And a progress narrative also spawns the patronising habit, rampant on the Left generally, of attributing a kind of sacred status to the self-involved musings of young and inexperienced kids, on the grounds that they’re supposedly wiser than their elders and understand the dawning of the new moral age in a way us oldies can’t. (Exhibit 2: thinking kids have a special “insight” into “gender” that their elders do not).

With its over-emphasis on the rational faculties, and on moral equality between the sexes, the liberal-humanist model has also distracted us from the fact that females and males have many distinct needs and interests based on respective reproductive roles, and different standards for well-being in some areas. In its emphasis on conscious choice, it encourages us all to disassociate from our material bodies and the environment, to downplay average physical difference between the sexes, and to ignore distinctive sex-based patterns across populations that would be useful to notice. 

The most egregious examples of this disassociation are found in third wave feminists and queer theorists, influenced by Butlerian post-structuralism, who attribute such extraordinary powers to the human psyche they apparently think the mind can dismantle nature by the power of words. Not just sex-based norms and stereotypes, but biological sex itself - not to mention, the facts of sexual reproduction - are conceived of as socially constructed in a way that hems the “self” in, restricting individual freedom of expression.  Or as transwoman Juno Dawson put it in a recent article: “I believe in individual bodily autonomy; a refusal to let the system predetermine or limit your choices is one of the ways we attack patriarchal structures.” In other words: Fight the musculoskeletal system! This is the ultimate ghost-in-a-machine narrative, with the inner ghost pictured as chafing at the confines of the outer natural machine. The good news, according to the logic of this lunatic position, is that if we “queer” biological sex - whether by choosing to surgically carve up our bodies or just by acting as if sex doesn’t exist at all - it will eventually go away, to the benefit of all personkind. (If this seems like a realistic possibility to you, you really need to get out into fresh air more).

But the liberal-humanist vision doesn’t have to be taken to these extremes to still be harmful. Another problem with it is that it encourages feminists to pursue activist strategies that over-emphasise personal responsibility, freedom and choice, rather than explicitly working within the ineliminable parameters set by our animal natures. This can be wasteful and counterproductive.

To take a glaring example: there is no rainbow’s end where we all live in a free, relatively unregulated society and yet habitually violent men have somehow disappeared, replaced with model citizens. That is, feminists can’t talk violent men out of offending, nor shame them out of it with spiky Twitter pep talks, nor ensure that the male children they bring up never turn into them. Our powers of rational persuasion are just not that great. Even if we succeed with some, we will always fail with others. When generalised admonitions towards predatory men are launched out into the ether in the vague hope that some of it sticks to the right people, the most they achieve is to annoy the large percentage of men who wouldn’t dream of acting that way. Meanwhile, violent offenders remain supremely indifferent.

So: there will never be a time when women don’t need extra safeguards to protect them from such men, just as they do now. In any society, women will need female-only spaces where they undress and sleep; custodial sentencing for violent men; social norms that discourage men from hitting women; and so on. Feminists concerned about carceral solutions for violent offenders need to explain what an effective Plan B is for women, without lapsing into consoling fantasy narratives of human nature.

Sex-positivity and other consoling myths

The aridity of the progress narrative becomes especially obvious when wheeled in to prop up so-called “sex-positivity” for women. This trend within feminism decrees that getting choked, hit, spat on, pegged, urinated on [etc. etc.] during sex are all highly enjoyable activities for many women, and should be normalised not stigmatised - but also, if you don’t want to do these things, don’t do them! Consent is supposed to be the magic ingredient that turns these experiences from bad to good. Watching feminist activists tie themselves into knots to avoid losing the cool girl tag by identifying the obvious problems with sex-positivity is very telling. They’re forced to fall back on a ludicrous progress narrative as the only way out. 

Take Laurie Penny, interviewed in the Guardian a few weeks ago. First, the standard line is trotted out about not stigmatising extreme kinds of sex: “A culture where sex is stigmatised is also one where we can’t talk about [taboo subjects] and I don’t believe there’s anything progressive about a society that wants to control or limit women’s sexuality.” But then comes an acknowledgement that a culture in which dangerous and degrading activities are normalised encourages men to mistreat women: “In this apparently sexually liberated culture, women still don’t feel able to have boundaries and say what they want, and everything is dictated by what men feel they’re supposed to want.”  

Now: you would think, would you not, that this creates a bit of a conundrum. On one hand, women can’t publicly stigmatise sex that’s terrible for them, but equally they can’t create effective boundaries to avoid mistreatment from men. What’s the solution, then, you might wonder? Why, it’s faith in the glorious future, of course, in which - somehow - male violence magically will get sorted out. Says Penny: “I don’t think the problem is too much sexual liberation, I think it’s not enough. You have to actually deal with sexual violence in order to create substantive sexual liberation.” 

Another commentator in the same article is equally optimistic: “Sex-positive feminism has laid the foundations, it’s given us a platform and a voice and a space to use our voices. But without getting men on board and proper sex education, we’re all going to be on the same old hamster wheel.” Yet even on its own terms, this progress narrative is wildly incoherent. How exactly we are supposed to reach a point where we “deal with sexual violence”, or “get men on board”, or disseminate effective “sex education”, when we can’t even say out loud that choking is bad for us, is a bit of a mystery. But in any case - to repeat the main point - there is no plausible future where we have already dealt with sexual violence, or where the dangerous men are onboard, or where the right sort of sex education has solved it all. That’s a comforting delusion. So we need start talking unambiguously about the problems of encouraging potentially dangerous men to hurt us - right now.

A related area in which the liberal-humanist vision misleads feminists is in arguments about who, exactly, is expected to change their behaviours in female-hostile environments. Many feminists get understandably riled at the suggestion that women should modify their behaviour or dress in environments where violent males tend to be, in order to reduce risk to themselves. Telling women not to wear sexually revealing clothes or to walk in dark, lonely places late at night is interpreted by feminists as victim-blaming. And sometimes it’s exactly that. There’s a misogynist tendency to suggest that assaults on women are somehow their own fault.  But it’s not always victim-blaming. Sometimes, I’m sorry to report, it’s just very good advice, given the kind of society we live in.

To this, it’s replied that it isn’t women’s moral responsibility to change these behaviours and so limit their own freedoms. It’s the responsibility of violent men to stop being violent. But this reply misses the point. There need be nothing moralised about advice to women to reduce their risk, and no blame of them need be implied either way. Interpreted a different way, the advice is simply prudent, aimed at reducing risk for women in the kind of world in which we actually live - the one where there are hulking great men that are stronger than you, revved up on testosterone, who don’t give a shit about your freedom to wear practically nothing on a night out, or your consent either for that matter. 

Effectively this advice says to women, just as a parent might to a daughter: “given that you’re a particular kind of human (female), you’re especially at risk from the sexual aggression from another type of human (male), who tends to be much stronger and faster than you, and may be attracted by certain kinds of dress which they read as inviting their attention. Here’s how to look after yourself as best you can, bearing in mind that the world is chaotic and you can’t control other people”. Complaints that this isn’t “fair” are beside the point. There is little fairness in this life, as Gray so vividly reminds us. The problem of violent men won’t go away by wishing it were so; and there’s no point pretending we already live in a world where male violence is on its way out. Doing so only hurts women all the more. (NB This is not to say we should accept male violence - see the paragraphs above. Admitting its inevitability makes us more effective in combatting it, not less so).

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There are, of course, limits to what feminists can get from Gray’s bleakly pessimist sort of take. For one thing, his stance isn’t compatible with activism, including feminist activism. If there were no values or meaning in the world, there would be no point to any sustained politics, except perhaps one based on naked self-interest and the survival of offspring. At times, Gray seems to recommend quietism and a stance of resigned acceptance - not a position a feminist can accept (or I can’t, anyway).  Equally, it would be a foolhardy feminist who denied that freedom was a real value, given the power of men to control them to their detriment in many societies. 

The modified point I prefer to take away from Gray is that freedom is not the only value, and we shouldn’t fetishise it. Facts about our bodies and minds, put there by natural selection, are not constraints on freedom in any coherent sense. But that doesn’t mean we are mere blind automata either. Yes, we are animals, but animals in whom evolution has produced relatively advanced cognitive faculties.  Thanks to these faculties, meaning, purpose, and value can be pressing issues for us. (Indeed, in a broad sense, Gray is clearly pursuing these issues obsessively himself.) The trick - if we can pull it off - is to keep up a relentless pursuit of women’s well-being in a chaotic world, to act effectively where we can, and to avoid flying off into consoling fantasy or hubris in the process.

Illustration: A scene from Dante's inferno. Engraving from 1870. Engraving by Gustave Dore, Photo by D Walker.