by Laurie Penny
There are a lot of young men out there – I suspect even now – who sometimes wish they’d been born when things were a bit easier, when the balance of male versus female sexual shame was tilted more sharply by the formal rituals of patriarchy, when men could just take or be assigned what they wanted, as long as they were also white and straight.
There are a lot of older men out there who long for that real or imagined world more openly, and without any of Aaronson’s nuance and compassion. I would challenge men to analyse that longing, to see it for what it is. And then to resist it. You are smarter and better than that.
What can I say? This is a strange and difficult age, one of fast-paced change and misunderstandings. Nerd culture is changing, technology is changing, and our frameworks for gender and power are changing – for the better. And the backlash to that change is painful as good, smart people try to rationalise their own failure to be better, to be cleverer, to see the other side for the human beings they are. Finding out that you’re not the Rebel Alliance, you’re actually part of the Empire and have been all along, is painful. Believe me, I know. (Although I always saw myself as an Ewok.) We bring our broken hearts and blue balls to the table when we talk gender politics, especially if we are straight folks. Consent and the boundaries of consent; desire and what we’re allowed to speak of desire: we’re going to have to get better, braver and more honest, we’re going to have to undo decades of toxic socialisation and learn to speak to each other as human beings in double quick time.
And most of all, we’re going to have to make like Princess Elsa and let it go – all that resentment. All that rage and entitlement and hurt. Socialisation makes that process harder still for men. The road ahead will be long. I believe in you. I believe in all of us. Nerds are brilliant. We are great at learning stuff. We can do anything we put our minds to, although I suspect this thing, this refusing to let the trauma of nerdolescence create more violence, this will be hardest of all.
IN DEFENCE OF WHITE KNIGHTS
I would like to apologise to my long-suffering magazine editor. Each week my column comes in late. I am busy, you see, sexually servicing all the men and boys who express feminist sentiments in public. Some people have suggested that this idea – that men only treat women as human beings in order to get laid – is venal propaganda cooked up by paranoid chauvinists to explain away the growing army of men who are proud to support women’s crazy ambitions to gain basic respect and equality. But no.
It’s all true. I haven’t slept properly in four years. I hear that Germaine Greer hasn’t slept since 1981. I’m working through the backlog by consuming enormous stockpiles of coffee but the queue is long and it’s getting longer every day, so please bear with me.
Back in the real world, something fascinating is happening. As men and boys everywhere begin to realise that a society less riddled with rape, sexual violence and lazy gender stereotypes might be better for everyone, less evolved men and boys have started to round on them as traitors. One common charge is that men who support feminism are trying to be ‘white knights’, sweeping in to protect women, not knowing that we capricious females prefer the attentions of the bull-necked misogynists who holler at us in the street.
‘White knight’ and ‘beta male’ are the most common slurs flung at such men – usually by retro sexists who still think that feminism is all about poor confused chaps getting shouted at whenever they hold open a door for an enormous straw woman.
In reality, most women and girls would simply rather that men stopped slamming doors in our faces.
This has nothing to do with ‘chivalry’, which was only ever a way to codify and explain away the impulse to treat women and girls with basic respect without having to think of them as human beings. If you’re a man and you hold open a door for another man carrying a large box, that’s just manners, but if you hold the door open for a woman carrying the same box, that’s ‘chivalry’, apparently. What we want – what would delight me, for one – is for us to get to a stage where we hold doors open for other people just because doors can be heavy and we all have our burdens to carry.
So I’d like to put in a word for the white knights. Making fun of them is how self-satisfied sexists explain away this change in social attitudes. As casual sexism and recreational misogyny become less and less acceptable in mainstream culture, some people might find it reassuring to think that all of those non-misogynist men out there are merely weak-willed, sex-starved betas, desperate for a bit of sweet feminist loving. Far more challenging is the idea that men might be supporting feminism because it is the right thing to do – and because they like the idea of not having to pretend to be rigid, emotionally castrated thugs all the damn time.
One thing I have heard from women and men alike is that men fear speaking about feminism and talking about gender, power and class in case they somehow infringe on women’s special territory. There are certainly times when that is true – often the best thing you can do as an ally is to understand when it’s your turn to shut up and let someone else speak, especially when you don’t have direct experience of the subject being discussed.
Men can do a great deal of good in the feminist movement simply by listening and learning, which has the added bonus of being pretty easy, once you have done the work of swallowing your pride. Decades of socialisation do tend to stick in the throat.
It’s not only listening, though – I would love to see even more men talking about gender, more men standing up for women, more men speaking out about their own experience of living in a patriarchal society that imposes damaging stereotypes on men and boys. That’s what real courage is – and it has nothing to do with waving a sword around and slinging the princess over your shoulder.
Real courage is about doing things that are challenging and uncomfortable because you know that’s the way to make a better world. Things such as accepting a higher proportion of women in roles of power and expertise. Or listening to women talking about our experiences of violence and discrimination without interrupting or trying to make it all about you.
It doesn’t take a lot of courage to attack other men for not living up to stereotypes of what a real man should be. It doesn’t take an ounce of bravery to shout and hurl insults and threaten violence towards anyone who stands up for women, or questions gender stereotypes, or supports campaigns to end rape and sexual harassment. What does take courage – the kind of courage you rarely hear about in fairy tales – is questioning your own assumptions and encouraging others to question theirs.
The most heroic thing you can do as a man today is to risk your own social status to do what you know is right. In recent weeks and months, I have been watching more and more men and boys take that risk, without expecting any sort of reward, sexual or otherwise, and I think that every one of them is a big, swashbuckling hero, like the feminist women I know. In a just world, we would all have our own theme tunes.
So, to the white knights out there: you can add my sword to your struggle. If anybody does shout at you for treating women as human beings, if anybody gives you grief for defending women online or in person, then I for one have got your back. I will defend you with all the discursive weapons at my disposal and, afterwards, you can get up on my horse and together we’ll ride off to a slightly better tomorrow.
THE NEW CHAUVINISTS
It’s a miracle. All over the world, conservatives and curtain-twitching bigots have taken up the cause of fighting violence against women. From Donald Trump, vowing to protect white Americans from ‘rapist’ Mexican migrants, to European far-right groups that are mustering against the supposed Muslim threat to ‘their’ wives and daughters, conservatives are rebranding themselves as the defenders of women and girls. But who will defend us from them?
The idea that Western men must shelter ‘their’ women from a terrifying mass of foreign masculinity has been around for a very long time. It was used to justify the murder of black men in the US from the slave era onwards, even as black women were
abused in their millions by white landowners. It is used to excuse state surveillance and militarised policing around the world, and by the new right to rationalise its bigotry.
The phrase that I have been using to describe this line of argument is ‘the New Chauvinism’. Chauvinism is commonly understood in the context of male chauvinism, which most people think is all about holding doors open and getting shouted at by feminists. But it is described by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘exaggerated or aggressive patriotism’, with the secondary definition of ‘excessive or prejudiced support for one’s own cause, group, or sex’.
The New Chauvinism is about both of those things. It uses crude, nationalist sentiment to cast white men in the roles of heroes, protecting ‘their’ women from hordes of, variously, migrants, Muslims and transsexual people.
On behalf of white women everywhere, allow me to say how much safer I don’t feel. It would be easier to believe in the AfD, Germany’s new far-right nationalist party, as a defender of women, for example, if it were not also campaigning to ban abortion and gay marriage, undermine the right to divorce, close kindergartens and strip single mothers of state funding – all in the name of protecting the ‘traditional family’.
Fundamentalist throwbacks of every sort have remarkably similar ideas about how to protect women, so it is no surprise that the AfD echoes the philosophy of many hard-line Islamist groups on the role of women in society. If anyone wants to turn Western Europe into a patriarchal religious police state, it is the far right and not migrants fleeing violence – but irony, to these people, is probably a small town in the Middle East that should be flattened with cluster bombs to protect Christian women everywhere.
You might think that it is nice of them to care. However, I don’t see these self-appointed defenders of women volunteering at domestic violence shelters or donating to rape crisis hotlines. Instead, they hold racist demonstrations in multicultural communities and harass women on the Internet, which is a curious way to demonstrate your commitment to public safety.
Across the Atlantic, the American Family Association – a Christian fundamentalist organisation recognised as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre – has admitted to sending men into women’s bathrooms in branches of the retail chain Target to ‘test’ its policy of allowing transsexuals to use the lavatory of their chosen gender. Unable to prove that this policy will allow ‘men in dresses’ to abuse ‘their’ daughters, the association became the creeping queer threat to American womanhood that it wished to see in the world.
These New Chauvinists, who are mostly men, want to protect women from violence, as long as they are the right sort of women. Trans women, queer women, immigrant women and women of colour are nowhere in the sticky mass of stereotypes and dog-whistle racism that passes for their analysis. The Christian groups who claim to want to protect ‘their daughters’ from trans women in the ladies’ loos seem unbothered by how some of their daughters may well be trans – and trans women face violence in huge numbers.
This sort of chauvinism has always been racist and classist, because it is all about men deciding who gets to be treated like a lady – protected, treasured and infantilised – and who gets treated like a chattel. As for ungrateful social justice warriors like me, we deserve to be oiled up and thrown to the Taliban: I’m told as much every day by white men who claim to abhor Islamic-coded violence against women but seem to have an erotic fascination with its details.
The New Chauvinism functions on two levels: it stokes up the fear of outsiders by casting foreign, black or queer masculinity as the real threat, and it undermines feminist activism by claiming that women just don’t know what’s good for us. Here we are, iron-knickered harpies, making a fuss about equal pay and domestic violence and rape culture, when if we would only shut up and listen to men like we’re supposed to, we would know that the real threat comes from outside.
The New Chauvinists must not be allowed to co-opt feminist rhetoric. These people are not defenders of women. They are the ones who seek to put women in their place, substituting genuine respect for female autonomy with patronising ‘protection’, which is conditional on our good behaviour and only available if we are white.
Misogyny is not the preserve of any one group. It is a structural, cultural problem that exists in every nation on Earth. The vast majority of Western feminists are not fooled by those who seek to undercut our cause to rationalise their racism; but who cares what we think? We’re only women, after all.
FEMINISM AGAINST FASCISM
In a perverse sort of way, it’s progress. After months of dog-whistle xenophobia, European authorities have finally started to treat migrants as they would treat any other citizen. They have achieved this by being slow to respond – at least initially – when migrants are accused of raping and assaulting women.
On New Year’s Eve 2016 in Cologne, Germany, hundreds of men, almost all of reportedly ‘Arabic and North African’ appearance and including many asylum seekers, viciously attacked women who were celebrating in the central plaza, robbing and groping and tearing off clothes. At least one rape complaint has been filed. The police and the press were initially slow to react, and the Mayor of Cologne responded to eventual protests by suggesting that women should adopt a code of conduct in public and keep an ‘arm’s length’ distance between themselves and strange men.
This is not the first time a European city administration has responded to an outbreak of sexual violence by blaming the women. It is, however, the first time in recent history that the right-wing press has not joined in the condemnation of these wanton strumpets who dare to think they might be able to have a good time without worrying what ‘invitation’ they’re sending to men. Instead, the right wing blames . . . liberals. Who apparently caused all this by daring to suggest that refugees should be able to come to Europe in safety.
It’d be great if we could take rape, sexual assault and structural misogyny as seriously every day as we do when migrants and Muslims are involved as perpetrators. The attacks in Cologne were horrific. The responses – both by officials and by the armies of Islamophobes and xenophobes who have jumped at the chance to condemn Muslim and migrant men as savages – have also been horrific. Cologne has already seen violent protests by the far-right anti-migrant organisation Pegida, a group not previously noted for its dedication to progressive feminism. Angela Merkel has responded by tightening the rules for asylum seekers, but for many commentators, it’s not enough.
Finally, the right wing cares about rape culture! Finally, all over the world, from Fox News to 4chan, a great conversion has taken place and men who previously spent their time shaming, stalking and harassing women are suddenly concerned about our rights! And all it took was a good excuse to bash migrants and Muslims and tell feminists they don’t know what’s good for them.
You know what has never yet prevented sexual violence? Unbridled racism.
This theft of feminist rhetoric in the name of imperialism and racism has been going on for centuries. It’s been an active part of the political conversation in the West since 2001. Since the Cologne attacks were reported in the global press, a great many men have taken it upon themselves to educate me and other feminists on the point that only Muslim men are sexist. They have chosen to do this by sending orchestrated waves of abuse and sexual slurs to any woman whose opinion they dislike. Nobody has to pass a self-awareness test to go on Twitter.
Personally, I just love it when random men on the Internet tell me what my feminism should be like, because gosh, you know, this whole resisting oppression thing is really hard sometimes and it’s great to have people who know what they’re talking about take over for me so I can get on with the ironing. These people have repeatedly demanded that I ‘condemn’ the attacks in Cologne, which is a lazy way of implying that somebody doesn’t really care about an issue.
So let me be clear: sexual violence is never, ever acceptable. Not for cultural reasons. Not for religious reasons. Not because t
he perpetrators are really angry and disenfranchised. There can be no quarter for systemic misogyny. And if we’re serious about that, there’s not a country or culture on Earth that won’t have to take a long, hard look at itself. I stand with the many, many Muslim, Arab, Asian and immigrant feminists organising against sexism and misogyny within and beyond their own communities. Nobody seems to have thought to ask them how best to deal with systemic sexual violence – even though attacks on Muslim women have increased since the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.
The sensible thing to do in response to the Cologne attacks would be to call, as many German feminists are doing, for a far more rigorous attitude to rape and sexual assault across Europe. Instead, the solution on the table seems to be to clamp down on migration. That fits in with the shibboleth that only savage, foreign men and hardened criminals rape and abuse women – despite the fact that most rapes, in Germany and elsewhere, are committed by people known to the victim, and migrants have not been shown to be more or less sexually aggressive than any other group. As usual, white supremacist patriarchy only concerns itself with women’s safety and women’s dignity when rape and sexual assault can be pinned on cultural ‘outsiders’.
