On Patriarchy (Part 1): the Left’s new feminist ideologues

International Women’s Day on Friday 8^th March was quite an interesting 24 hours to be a man on the Left.

I found it mostly depressing and demoralising though.

I used to support the broad feminist agenda, but have become increasingly concerned by the particularly strident, strict and aggressive brand of feminist politics that has taken over: almost exclusively confined to the Left of course.

Sexism is a serious, continuing and pressing concern in our society, but the kind of treatment it is getting from feminists threatens to distract from and undermine any effective attempts to address it.

This treatment is now overwhelmingly ideological, focusing on sexism as something systemic; indeed sometimes known as ‘patriarchy’. The divisive brand of politics that comes with this should be familiar to us from the Culture Wars between Left and Right in North America: it is highly emotive in its language, quick to cast blame and careless about where the blame lands.

The Labour feminist and Guardian contributor Emma Burnell is one of the most forthright exponents of this tendency. In her article for Shifting Grounds marking International Women’s Day, she wrote of how female politicians in Britain, including Hazel Blears, Harriet Harman, Nadine Dorries and Baroness Warsi, are sometimes talked about in pejorative and specifically gendered terms.

Unfortunately she did not make any attempt to analyse these ways and lay down some principles of decency around which we might gather. Instead she subsumes her argument in an ideological, stereotypical mush of extreme rhetoric, of which a few examples here:

1)      “Politics is overwhelmingly male. Political appraisal, success and failures are set by terms that are increasingly macho.”

2)      “Women in politics are required to be just as tough, just as domineering and just as fierce and full of bravado as their male counterparts. They are equally, perhaps even more unlikely, to have the freedom to explore better ways of engaging politically with opponents and allies. If they show what the dominant culture view as “weakness” they are seen as either a typical woman or as letting down their sex.”

3)      “Panels at political events are, more frequently than ever, men only affairs.”

4)      “Everyone in politics and political journalism has got where they are by learning and playing by the rules.”

We can see that these passages each express some pretty categorical opinions without qualification. Despite this, the author does not provide a shred of evidence – anecdotal, publicly-available or statistical – to back up all the hair-raising rhetoric.  Words like ‘macho’, and ‘fierce’, ‘increasingly’, and categorical statements of how things are, are thrown around with abandon, but with no supporting illustrations or evidence.

Elsewhere in the article however, Emma does refer to the “laddism” of discussions with political colleagues, plus three comments of David Cameron’s in Parliament: that Nadine Dorries might be “frustrated”, that Labour’s Angela Eagle should “calm down Dear” and a joke that Ed Miliband wasn’t “butch” enough because he fetched Ed Balls a coffee.

Is this evidence of an overwhelmingly macho, male culture? I am not convinced.

Also on International Women’s Day, Rosie Rogers, the National Coordinator of the pressure group Compass (of which I am also a member) wrote an article for the New Statesman entitled ‘Ten ways to survive as a woman on the left’. In it, she said: “I could just crumble under the weight of everyday sexism and patriarchy on the left.”

She added: “It's because of the institution of the left and that many people may believe in democracy and equality but often don’t know or accept that they are pushing the opposite agenda.”

Now, to suggest that people who say they believe in democracy and equality are actually pushing the opposite agenda is a serious accusation. However it is not matched to anyone or anything, and is therefore left standing as a blanket accusation against men of the Left.

Rosie said: “Holding grudges, shaming people into corners won't help create allies and will only alienate people.” I agree with that sentiment generally, but not completely in this instance. Either people’s actions are not that important and not that bad really (which would render her argument redundant) or they should be held to account and allowed right of reply.

Rosie also makes a number of other accusations against men she comes across daily on the Left for general everyday behaviours. We are expected to trust her interpretation that the men she is referring to but not mentioning are being sexist and patriarchal. But the only realistic way of showing whether this is true or not would be to compare like for like with a male in her position.

I know that some men can be obnoxious and overbearing, interrupt and not listen. I say that not just because I am like that myself sometimes, but because others have been all those things to me. Yet last time I looked I was not a woman.

This sort of thought when reading and hearing of such complaints makes me wary. It is as if no man is ever rude to another man; as if no man gets nervous and apprehensive when entering a room full of important people who are mostly men; as if no man is ever outnumbered and patronised in the presence of other men. It is indeed as if only men are ever unfair and unkind, and they are only ever unfair and unkind to women.

These are basic arguments that should be obvious; yet they are relevant and necessary here. They suggest to me how little trust some of us have in basic understanding between people across the gender divide. It would seem that the Left’s ideologies of difference are shaping how we view each other and our common humanity, as not very common at all. This is a real shame.

Patriarchy versus Capitalism

The term ‘patriarchy’ that Rosie Rogers uses is where this powerful brand of feminism has its ideological centre. Emma Burnell and other feminist ideologues like Laurie Penny use the term extensively, referring to it as a ‘fact’, and something that needs to be fought, attacked and defeated.

The practicalities and consequences of trying to fight something that does not exist in any tangible form is something I will address in Part 2. Here though, we will interrogate patriarchy - defining a system structured so that social and political power lies in male but not female hands - against reality.

Let’s first compare it with capitalism: a system that can be clearly demonstrated in the workings of institutions, corporations and people through their daily consumer habits.

In terms of institutional support, what does capitalism have? 

We could start with the World Bank, the IMF, WTO, the Davos forum, the European Single Market, countless trade agreements between nations and regional blocs, Central Banks. Moving down to national and local levels in Britain we have the Treasury, BIS and other government departments, council licensing regimes, numerous free market think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute – all catering and administering to the capitalist system.

Now what does patriarchy have?

Certainly we can see that in the major religions including Christianity and Islam there are certain seats of power from which women are excluded. But other than that, what is there?

We can point to plenty of things in the past that strongly suggest at least an approximation to patriarchy for British and wider Western society: a male-only voting franchise, male-only public institutions and other Rights of Man that only applied to men.

However, nowadays women are free to do and be pretty much what they want, just like men. The only law I am aware of that institutionalises gender discrimination is the one which legalised All Women’s Shortlists in elections for office – brought in by Labour in 2002.

To see where sexism resides in practice though (and to read a little about this, check out the EverydaySexism site), we should take one step back into the hazy realm of culture where customs and attitudes are passed from person to person and through the generations.

Customs and attitudes can run through institutions in day-to-day practice of course. But when these everyday practices are not institutionalised and legally protected, they cannot possibly be systemic, at least in any demonstrable sense. The path is clear and well-prepared for them to be challenged and defeated in the eyes of public opinion and the law.

People also have choices in everyday life and culture of course. Many choose not to go along with sexist attitudes and practices, and the better among us seek to challenge them.

But patriarchy as an idea is much too flimsy and vague. It is also potentially counter-productive, for by ascribing sexism to an impersonal and universal social system, you strip actions of responsibility: you view them not as actions of people doing wrong but as representations of patriarchy.

In Part 2, to follow in a few days, I will move on to examine this ideology’s fundamentally authoritarian tendencies and its uncanny resemblances to Marxism-Leninism. I will also explore a little its astonishing success, particularly in the Labour Party, and how ideologies of this sort (not just feminist) threaten to consume the current political Left from within, by suppressing free speech, institutionalising privilege and reducing democratic culture even further from the sorry state it is in now.

Postscript,19th March: I am afraid Part 2 is taking rather more than 'a few days' to arrange and reduce down to a decent-sized blog post. It shall follow though, in time.