While on some occasions an affront was claimed, on others it was suppressed when it might well have been voiced. In February 2018, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was addressing students and answering questions at MacEwan University in Edmonton, a young woman politely asked a question in which she referred in passing to ‘mankind’. The Canadian Prime Minister interrupted her, waving his hand dismissively. ‘We like to say people-kind, not necessarily mankind, because it’s more inclusive,’ he explained, getting a roar of applause from his audience. But nobody subsequently pointed out why a powerful white male embarrassing a young woman in this way was not ‘mansplaining’.
The identity groups that some people form don’t even work within themselves. In 2017 a student group at Cornell University calling themselves ‘Black Students United’ chose to issue the college authorities with a six-page list of demands. This included the obvious demands, namely that all faculty members should be trained in ‘systems of power and privilege’ and that black people who had been ‘affected directly by the African Holocaust in America’ and by ‘American fascism’ should be invested in to a greater degree. But one demand was that their university should pay more attention to ‘Black Americans who have several generations (more than two) in this country’. This was to make them distinct from first-generation students from Africa or the Caribbean.17 The Black Students United group later apologized under pressure for making this demand. But the message was clear. There is a hierarchy of oppression and victimhood which exists even within each identifiable group. Not only are the rules unclear, but the prejudices that underly them aren’t always clear either and can break out in extraordinary places and ways.
The Impossibility Problem
As a culture we have entered an area which is now mined with impossibility problems. From some of the most famous women on the planet we have heard the demand that women have the right to be sexy without being sexualized. Some of the most prominent cultural figures in the world have shown us that to oppose racism we must become a bit racist. Now a whole set of similar impossibilities are being demanded in an equally non-conciliatory manner.
There was a fine example on the BBC’s This Week in October 2017 when an artist and writer going by the mononym ‘Scottee’ appeared on the programme to discuss a short political film he had made. As a self-described ‘big fat queer fem’ he complained that he was a ‘victim of masculinity in a way because of the aggressions I put up with on a day-to-day basis’. Although he had no answers to this problem, he insisted that ‘queer, trans, non-binary people’ shouldn’t have to be the ones who have to disable “toxic masculinity”’. It has to come from within, he argued. Men ‘have got to acknowledge their privilege, and I want them to hand over power, and also I want them to hand over some platform. I’m really up for like trying a matriarchy. We’ve done patriarchy for a long time. Hasn’t really worked.’18 Avoiding the nuclear presumption of ‘hasn’t really worked’ for a moment, there was one even larger fact staring any viewer in the face. This was that one of the main complaints that this flamboyantly dressed self-declared ‘big fat queer fem’ had made about the society he lived in was that he found himself so often ridiculed. So here is another paradoxical, impossible demand. A person who chooses to be ridiculous without being ridiculed.
Other impossible demands can be found everywhere – such as the one that was on display at Evergreen State College and Yale University and was highlighted by Mark Lilla on the panel at Rutgers (where the audience member insisted to Kmele Foster that he ‘didn’t need no facts’). On that occasion Lilla provided an insight into one of the other central conundrums of our time. He said, ‘You cannot tell people simultaneously “You must understand me” and “You cannot understand me”.’ Evidently a whole lot of people can make those demands simultaneously. But they shouldn’t, and if they do then they should realize that their contradictory demands cannot be granted.
Then of course there is the question of how the hierarchy of oppression is meant to be ordered, prioritized and then sorted out. Laith Ashley is one of the most prominent transgender models in the world today. The female-to-male transsexual has received prominent coverage and done prestigious fashion shoots for leading brands and magazines. In a 2016 television interview he was asked by Channel 4’s Cathy Newman if in the two years he had been transitioning from a woman to a man he had encountered any discrimination. Ashley said that in fact he had not, but then alleviated his interviewer’s disappointment by adding that transgender activists and others he knew from transgender rights movements had ‘told’ him that he had in fact gained some male privilege. As he said, breaking it down for the viewers, ‘I have gained some male privilege. And although I am a person of colour I am fair skinned and I adhere to society’s standard of aesthetic beauty in a sense. And for that reason I have not necessarily faced much discrimination.’19 So he had taken a couple of steps further into the hierarchy by becoming a man, had taken a couple of steps back by being a person of colour, but a step forward by being a light-skinned person of colour. And then he had hit the negative of being attractive. How can anyone work out where they are meant to be in the oppressor/oppressed stakes when they have so many competing privileges in their biography? No wonder Ashley looked concerned and self-effacing when going through this list. This is enough constant self-analysis to knock anybody’s confidence. But a version of that impossible self-analysis is being suggested for many people today, when in fact there is no way of knowing how to perform this task fairly on another person let alone on yourself. What is the point of an exercise that cannot be done?
And where to next? One of the pleasures in recent years has been watching people who think they are being a good liberal boundary keeper discover that one of their feet has nicked one of the tripwires. One Saturday evening in 2018 Vox’s David Roberts was spending his time happily auditioning for the committee for public virtue on Twitter. In one tweet he wrote, ‘Sometimes I think about America’s sedentary, heart-diseased, fast-food gobbling, car-addicted suburbanites, sitting watching TV in their suburban castles, casually passing judgement on refugees who have walked 1000s of miles to escape oppression, and . . . well, it makes me mad.’ As he sent it off he must have thought ‘Sounds good. Attack Americans, defend migrants, what could go wrong?’ A more cautious member of the new media might have wondered whether it was wise to sound quite so disdainful of people who live in the suburbs. But in fact it was not Roberts’s suburbo-phobia that caused him to spend the rest of his Saturday evening frantically trying to save his career in dozens of remedy tweets. The thing that caused an instant backlash from the very crowd he was hoping to impress was that he had been ‘fat-shaming’ and this was ‘problematic’.
By his 17th tweet attempting to mop up his crime Roberts was reduced to begging: ‘Fat-shaming is real, it’s everywhere, it’s unjust & unkind, and I want no part of it.’ Soon he was apologizing sincerely for only being ‘half woke’, and blaming his upbringing.20 The potential for claims of offence, allegations of shaming and new positions in the grievance hierarchy based on ever-evolving criteria could go on indefinitely. But how would they be arranged? Is a fat white person equal to a skinny person of colour? Or are there different scales of oppression which everyone should know even if no one has explained the rules because the rules are made not by rational people but by mob stampedes.
Perhaps rather than derange ourselves by working out a puzzle that cannot be solved, we should instead try to find ways out of this impossible maze.
What if People aren’t oppressed?
Perhaps instead of seeking out oppression and seeing oppression everywhere, we could start to exit the maze by noting the various ‘victim groups’ that aren’t oppressed or are even advantaged. For instance, studies have shown that gay men and lesbian women consistently earn more on average than their heterosexual counterparts.21 There are a variety of possible reasons, not least the fact that most of them won’t have children and can put in the extra hours at th
e office which benefits both them and their employer. Is this a gay advantage? At what stage can heterosexuals claim that they are unfairly disadvantaged in the workplace? Should there be a ‘stepping back’ by gay people to allow their straight contemporaries a better run at work opportunities?
In recent years earning disparities between racial groups have consistently been weaponized. While it is often cited that the median income of Hispanic Americans is less than that of black Americans, and the earnings of black Americans lower than that of white Americans, there is never as much focus on the group which out-earns everybody.22 The median income of Asian men in America is consistently higher than any other group, including white Americans. Should there be some attempt to level this figure out by bringing Asian men down a few earning percentiles? Perhaps we could get out of this mania by treating people as individuals based on their abilities and not trying to impose equity quotas on every company and institution?
Because the most extreme claims keep getting heard, there is a tendency for people to believe them and their worst-case scenarios. For example, a poll carried out in 2018 for Sky found that most British people (seven in ten) believed that women are paid less than men for performing exactly the same job. The ‘gender pay gap’ that does exist is between average earnings across a lifespan, taking into account differences in career, child-rearing and lifestyle choices made by men and women. But ‘the pay gap’ has become such a staple of discussion on the news and on social media that most people have interpreted it as evidence of a gap that does not exist as they have been led to believe it does. It has been illegal to pay women less for performing the same task as a man since 1970 in the UK, and since 1963 in the US. Just one result of this confusion is that even though seven in ten people in the poll thought women were paid less than men for performing precisely the same job, almost exactly the same percentage of the public (67 per cent) thought that feminism had either gone too far or as far as it should go.23 This finding might epitomize the confusion of our time. We see oppression where it doesn’t exist and have no idea how to respond to it.
The Important discussions we avoid
Just one of the negatives of portraying life as this endless zero-sum game, between different groups vying for oppressed status, is that it robs us of time and energy for the conversations and thinking that we do need to do. For example, why is it, after all these decades, that feminists and others have been unable to more fully address the role of motherhood in feminism? As the feminist author Camille Paglia has been typically honest enough to admit, motherhood remains one of the big unresolved questions for feminists. And that isn’t a small subject to miss or gloss over. As Paglia herself has written, ‘Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of the mother in human life. Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts.’24
If asked to name her three great heroes of twentieth-century womanhood, Paglia says that she would select Amelia Earhart, Katharine Hepburn and Germaine Greer: three women who Paglia says ‘would symbolize the new twentieth-century woman’. Yet as she points out, ‘All these women were childless. Here is one of the great dilemmas facing women at the end of the century. Second-wave feminist rhetoric placed blame for the female condition entirely on men, or specifically on “patriarchy” . . . The exclusive focus of feminism was on an external social mechanism that had to be smashed or reformed. It failed to take into account women’s intricate connection with nature – that is, with procreation.’ Or why, ‘in this era of the career woman, there has been a denigration, or devaluing of the role of motherhood.’25
The ongoing dishonesty about this leads to presumption being piled on dishonesty, and ugly, misanthropic notions of the purpose of women becoming embedded in the culture. In January 2019 CNBC ran a piece flagged with the heading, ‘You can save half a million dollars if you don’t have kids’.26 As the piece went on: ‘Your friends may tell you having kids made them happier. They’re probably lying.’ It then referenced all the outweighing problems of ‘extra responsibilities, housework and, of course, the costs’.27 Or here is how The Economist recently chose to write about what it called ‘the roots of the gender pay gap’, a gap which the magazine claimed has its roots in childhood. One of the main factors which is responsible for women on average earning less than men during the course of their working life is the fact that women are the ones who bear children. As The Economist put it, ‘Having children lowers women’s lifetime earnings, an outcome known as the “child penalty”.’28 It is hard to imagine who could read that phrase, let alone write it, without a shudder. If it is assumed that the primary purpose in life is to make as much money as possible, then it is indeed possible that having a child will constitute a ‘penalty’ for a woman and thereby prevent her from having a larger sum of money in her bank account when she dies. On the other hand, if she chooses to pay that ‘penalty’ she might be fortunate enough to engage in the most important and fulfilling role that a human being can have.
There is in that Economist viewpoint something which is widely shared and which has been spreading for decades. On the one hand women have – largely – been relieved of the need to have children if they do not want them, the better to pursue other forms of meaning and purpose in their lives. But it is not hard for this reorientation of purpose to make it look as though that original, defining human purpose is no purpose at all. The American agrarian writer Wendell Berry put his finger on this almost 40 years ago when there were already, as he put it, ‘bad times for motherhood’. The whole concept of motherhood had come to be viewed in a negative way: ‘A kind of biological drudgery, some say, using up women who could do better things.’ But then Berry hit on the central truth:
We all have to be used up by something. And though I will never be a mother, I am glad to be used up by motherhood and what it leads to, just as – most of the time – I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses. What better way to be used up?29
Is this not a better way to think about motherhood and life? In a spirit of love and forgiveness rather than the endless register of resentment and greed?
What is really going on
Yet if the absence of serious discussion and the innate contradictions alone were enough to stop this new religion of social justice, it would hardly have got started. People looking for this movement to wind down because of its inherent contradictions will be waiting a long time. Firstly because they are ignoring the Marxist substructure of much of this movement, and the inherent willingness to rush towards contradiction rather than notice all these nightmarish crashes and wonder whether they aren’t telling you something about your choice of journey.
But the other reason why contradiction is not enough is because nothing about the intersectional, social justice movement suggests that it is really interested in solving any of the problems that it claims to be interested in. The first clue lies in the partial, biased, unrepresentative and unfair depiction of our own societies. Few people think that a country cannot be improved on, but to present it as riddled with bigotry, hatred and oppression is at best a partial and at worst a nakedly hostile prism through which to view society. It is an analysis expressed not in the manner of a critic hoping to improve, but as an enemy eager to destroy. There are signs of this intention everywhere we look.
Consider the example of trans. There was a reason to linger over the difficult and poorly discussed issue of people who are born intersex. It was not for prurience but to make a point. As Eric Weinstein has observed, anyone genuinely interested in addressing the stigmatization and unhappiness felt by people who are in the wrong bodies would have started addressing the question of intersex first. They would have seen there the clearest hardware issue of all, an issue which has been woefully under-represented. It would have raised awareness of the situation of such people, to get them better recognition as well as a better understanding of how to deal with an issue which really needs
medical and psychological support. Social justice campaigners might have done this.
But they didn’t. They decided instead to push vigorously on trans: to pick up the hardest part of the whole question (‘I am who I say I am and you can’t prove otherwise’) and run with it: ‘Trans lives matter’; ‘Some people are trans. Get over it’. Everywhere, with a wearying predictability, the people who always complain about every aspect of the patriarchal, hegemonic, cis-supremacist, homophobic, institutionally racist, sexist state, decided to run with the trans issue. They specifically claimed that yes, if a man said he was a woman and didn’t do anything about it, then yes he was a woman and it was transphobic to suggest otherwise. The pattern is clear. Why in her first weeks in Congress did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do a fundraiser for the British trans-rights group ‘Mermaids’ which advocates introducing hormone therapy to children?30 Why are these people willing to defend, organize and argue for the hardest possible part of the case?
In 2018 there was a debate in the House of Commons about trans issues. During it the case of Karen White came up. This was a man who was a convicted rapist but who now identified as a woman. Although he had not had gender reassignment surgery he asked to be put in a women’s prison, and (with his male body) proceeded to sexually assault four female inmates. During the debate one Liberal Democrat MP, Layla Moran, summed up the extreme of trans thinking perfectly. Asked whether she would be happy to share a changing room with somebody who had a male body, Moran replied, ‘If that person was a trans woman, I absolutely would. I just do not see the issue. As for whether they have a beard [a matter that had also been raised] I dare say that some women have beards. There are all sorts of reasons why our bodies react differently to hormones. There are many forms of the human body. I see someone in their soul and as a person. I do not really care whether they have a male body.’31
The Madness of Crowds Page 30
