Post by RedFlag32 on Jun 4, 2006 15:17:40 GMT
This is an article i seen on revleft,written by an anarchist woman.Its a brave thing to do and worthy of discussion
hey all
something i wrote today for an anarchist zine. so it's centred around anarchists but it could apply to many areas of the left.
I am a sexist.
I’m a wom*n and a sexist.
This is not something that I pride myself in. It’s something that I’d rather not publicise at all. The reason I do so is that I think it’s hypocritical to criticise the shortcomings (to put it mildly) of others without being aware of your own. Anarchists have a tendency of taking the moral high ground on a range of issues. We often theorise about revolution, and we partake in activities which will ideally further our cause, without acknowledging and addressing how we are complicit in the oppression we purport to oppose. There have been writings about sexism in anarchist subcultures, and suggestions have been made on how to counter it and eradicate it altogether, but it continues to pervade our circles. There is a lot of good in anarchist communities, and it saddens me a little that my first piece of writing for an anarchist zine is one which levels serious criticism at anarchists, but it’s something that I think is necessary, for my own piece of mind even if it’s not something which people agree with or choose to adopt.
This piece is specifically about how sexism in anarchist circles manifests itself in sexual assault and rape. It’s not grounded in theory of the dead white male variety, or in any other, to be honest. It’s based on my own experiences and observations on relationships between male-identifying anarchists and female-identifying anarchists (who I’ll refer to as men and wom*n throughout. I recognise and support transgendered people in their struggle. I also recognise that sexual assault can and does occur between people of the same sex. For the purposes of this article though, I’m going to restrict my analyses of power relations to men and wom*n in heterosexual relationships).
Like I said at the start, I am sexist. When a man speaks over me and I don’t call him out on it, when I accept a man ignoring another wom*n’s ideas because he doesn’t think they’re worth as much as the man’s standing next to her (who says exactly the same thing!), when I don’t challenge the way collectives organise and allocate jobs when they do so in a way which disadvantages wom*n; I am legitimising the idea that wom*n are inferior and that their opinions and actions aren’t as worthwhile as a man’s. That is sexism in its most obvious and ugliest form. There has been some discourse on the way that anarchist men exercise the kind of sexism that is present in the rest of society, and the way that anarchist wom*n put up with it because that’s what wom*n are socialised to do. Even on its own, it’s something that is deplorable and completely contradicts everything that we claim to stand for. It becomes even worse when this equates to anarchist men violently forcing themselves onto wom*n or coercing them into sex, under the guise of politics.
And it does happen. It seems to me all too often, male anarchists have been very vocal and supportive of sexual liberation, while remaining silent on the issue of liberation along the lines of sex, except through token gestures of solidarity. And often, this is done under the pretext of respecting autonomy. Now, while I have always defended autonomous organising of oppressed groups, there is little point in having autonomous collectives if ‘white’ people, men, ‘straights’ don’t recognise their involvement in oppression and try and change themselves accordingly. Domination is a two-sided phenomenon, and it angers me when people sanctimoniously claim to recognise autonomy to cover up what is essentially laziness, complacence, and a reluctance to self-criticise. People often accept what benefits them and ignore the things that require them to actually rethink their behaviour and change it accordingly. In the same way that many male anarchists refuse to see how their actions and language are explicitly sexist and chauvinistic, they embrace the idea of free love solely because it means that they will presumably directly benefit from more sexual pleasure.
Before I’m written off as being anti-sex, let me assure you that my issue is not with sex, but with politics being used to manipulate wom*n into having sex against their will. Like I said before, it does happen. And often! It seems that some anarchist men need to be reminded that no really does mean no, it doesn’t mean “I’m only saying no because I’ve been sexually repressed for so many years, please fuck me so I can be liberated.” Yes, that’s right! We don’t need anarchists telling us how we think and feel, we get enough of that from the broader society. It’s particularly manipulative because wom*n are made to feel as though if they don’t have sex with the man in question, they are somehow going against their politics, they are being counter-revolutionary, they are exhibiting bourgeois traits, they are silly and not politically mature. The pressure to have sex is therefore heightened; not only is the man imposing his gender on the wom*n to get her to acquiesce, but also uses his ‘activist cred’ – he is clearly more knowledgeable because he has more advanced views on sexuality and sex, and so to go against his wants would be diminishing her own standing. It’s particularly sickening because as anarchists, we are meant to be rejecting and abolishing all power structures, and rape, far from being just a desire for sexual pleasure, is first and foremost an exercise of authority and domination and in these circumstances, a reinforcement of patriarchy.
A female friend of mine told me about how soon after her entry into revolutionary politics, a man tried to manipulate her into having sex with him. She declined; he physically forced himself onto her. She managed to push him off and fled the room. He called out after her in disgust: “And you call yourself an anarchist!” She recalls that at the time, more than anything else she felt a sense of shame, as though she had done something that conflicted with what her ideals should have been as an anarchist. She wondered if she should go back and apologise and have sex with him, even though she wasn’t attracted to him or interested in him at all. She wondered if her newfound friends would think less of her. She wondered if this meant that she wasn’t a feminist after all. Nowadays, she only feels anger and repulsion. She says her relative newness and tentative grasp of theory made her feel vulnerable, and that man had exploited that weakness for his own sexual pleasure. Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated situation at all.
What I’ve found is that people find it hard to take criticism well, especially when that criticism accuses them of behaving in direct opposition to their ideological views, and especially when those views form a large part of their identity. This is true particularly when wom*n call men up on their sexism; the response is usually to become defensive, deny the charges, and (in secret or to her face) accuse the wom*n of being anti-sex or a man-hating lesbian separatist. This article wasn’t written in order for people to start pointing fingers and throwing around accusations, but for all of us to critique how we interact with one another and people outside the movement as well. It’s not easy to admit that you’re influenced to such a degree by the system you hate so much, but to truly overturn that system you need to know it well, and understand the degree to which it infiltrates
This was partly inspired by a male friend of mine who told me that he had recently begun to analyse his behaviour and attitude towards wom*n, and his perception of them, and he was distressed to find that he usually approached relationships with wom*n by thinking of them as potential partners. That led to him rethinking the sexual encounters he’d had with wom*n in the past, and it exposed to him the fact that there were times when had he gone through with it, it could have been interpreted as coercion. It’s something that I think needs to be taken up by everyone, and not just as an individual thing – because that just breeds a sense of guilt and shame – but as a collective issue that is quite prevalent in anarchist communities and should be addressed and defeated together. I’m not talking Mao-style denunciation meetings and frequent self-criticisms, but through open dialogue and admitting that we’re complicit in oppression but that we’re also willing to change that. Disengaging from the system goes beyond squatting and dumpster diving; it’s time we acknowledged and acted on that.
hey all
something i wrote today for an anarchist zine. so it's centred around anarchists but it could apply to many areas of the left.
I am a sexist.
I’m a wom*n and a sexist.
This is not something that I pride myself in. It’s something that I’d rather not publicise at all. The reason I do so is that I think it’s hypocritical to criticise the shortcomings (to put it mildly) of others without being aware of your own. Anarchists have a tendency of taking the moral high ground on a range of issues. We often theorise about revolution, and we partake in activities which will ideally further our cause, without acknowledging and addressing how we are complicit in the oppression we purport to oppose. There have been writings about sexism in anarchist subcultures, and suggestions have been made on how to counter it and eradicate it altogether, but it continues to pervade our circles. There is a lot of good in anarchist communities, and it saddens me a little that my first piece of writing for an anarchist zine is one which levels serious criticism at anarchists, but it’s something that I think is necessary, for my own piece of mind even if it’s not something which people agree with or choose to adopt.
This piece is specifically about how sexism in anarchist circles manifests itself in sexual assault and rape. It’s not grounded in theory of the dead white male variety, or in any other, to be honest. It’s based on my own experiences and observations on relationships between male-identifying anarchists and female-identifying anarchists (who I’ll refer to as men and wom*n throughout. I recognise and support transgendered people in their struggle. I also recognise that sexual assault can and does occur between people of the same sex. For the purposes of this article though, I’m going to restrict my analyses of power relations to men and wom*n in heterosexual relationships).
Like I said at the start, I am sexist. When a man speaks over me and I don’t call him out on it, when I accept a man ignoring another wom*n’s ideas because he doesn’t think they’re worth as much as the man’s standing next to her (who says exactly the same thing!), when I don’t challenge the way collectives organise and allocate jobs when they do so in a way which disadvantages wom*n; I am legitimising the idea that wom*n are inferior and that their opinions and actions aren’t as worthwhile as a man’s. That is sexism in its most obvious and ugliest form. There has been some discourse on the way that anarchist men exercise the kind of sexism that is present in the rest of society, and the way that anarchist wom*n put up with it because that’s what wom*n are socialised to do. Even on its own, it’s something that is deplorable and completely contradicts everything that we claim to stand for. It becomes even worse when this equates to anarchist men violently forcing themselves onto wom*n or coercing them into sex, under the guise of politics.
And it does happen. It seems to me all too often, male anarchists have been very vocal and supportive of sexual liberation, while remaining silent on the issue of liberation along the lines of sex, except through token gestures of solidarity. And often, this is done under the pretext of respecting autonomy. Now, while I have always defended autonomous organising of oppressed groups, there is little point in having autonomous collectives if ‘white’ people, men, ‘straights’ don’t recognise their involvement in oppression and try and change themselves accordingly. Domination is a two-sided phenomenon, and it angers me when people sanctimoniously claim to recognise autonomy to cover up what is essentially laziness, complacence, and a reluctance to self-criticise. People often accept what benefits them and ignore the things that require them to actually rethink their behaviour and change it accordingly. In the same way that many male anarchists refuse to see how their actions and language are explicitly sexist and chauvinistic, they embrace the idea of free love solely because it means that they will presumably directly benefit from more sexual pleasure.
Before I’m written off as being anti-sex, let me assure you that my issue is not with sex, but with politics being used to manipulate wom*n into having sex against their will. Like I said before, it does happen. And often! It seems that some anarchist men need to be reminded that no really does mean no, it doesn’t mean “I’m only saying no because I’ve been sexually repressed for so many years, please fuck me so I can be liberated.” Yes, that’s right! We don’t need anarchists telling us how we think and feel, we get enough of that from the broader society. It’s particularly manipulative because wom*n are made to feel as though if they don’t have sex with the man in question, they are somehow going against their politics, they are being counter-revolutionary, they are exhibiting bourgeois traits, they are silly and not politically mature. The pressure to have sex is therefore heightened; not only is the man imposing his gender on the wom*n to get her to acquiesce, but also uses his ‘activist cred’ – he is clearly more knowledgeable because he has more advanced views on sexuality and sex, and so to go against his wants would be diminishing her own standing. It’s particularly sickening because as anarchists, we are meant to be rejecting and abolishing all power structures, and rape, far from being just a desire for sexual pleasure, is first and foremost an exercise of authority and domination and in these circumstances, a reinforcement of patriarchy.
A female friend of mine told me about how soon after her entry into revolutionary politics, a man tried to manipulate her into having sex with him. She declined; he physically forced himself onto her. She managed to push him off and fled the room. He called out after her in disgust: “And you call yourself an anarchist!” She recalls that at the time, more than anything else she felt a sense of shame, as though she had done something that conflicted with what her ideals should have been as an anarchist. She wondered if she should go back and apologise and have sex with him, even though she wasn’t attracted to him or interested in him at all. She wondered if her newfound friends would think less of her. She wondered if this meant that she wasn’t a feminist after all. Nowadays, she only feels anger and repulsion. She says her relative newness and tentative grasp of theory made her feel vulnerable, and that man had exploited that weakness for his own sexual pleasure. Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated situation at all.
What I’ve found is that people find it hard to take criticism well, especially when that criticism accuses them of behaving in direct opposition to their ideological views, and especially when those views form a large part of their identity. This is true particularly when wom*n call men up on their sexism; the response is usually to become defensive, deny the charges, and (in secret or to her face) accuse the wom*n of being anti-sex or a man-hating lesbian separatist. This article wasn’t written in order for people to start pointing fingers and throwing around accusations, but for all of us to critique how we interact with one another and people outside the movement as well. It’s not easy to admit that you’re influenced to such a degree by the system you hate so much, but to truly overturn that system you need to know it well, and understand the degree to which it infiltrates
This was partly inspired by a male friend of mine who told me that he had recently begun to analyse his behaviour and attitude towards wom*n, and his perception of them, and he was distressed to find that he usually approached relationships with wom*n by thinking of them as potential partners. That led to him rethinking the sexual encounters he’d had with wom*n in the past, and it exposed to him the fact that there were times when had he gone through with it, it could have been interpreted as coercion. It’s something that I think needs to be taken up by everyone, and not just as an individual thing – because that just breeds a sense of guilt and shame – but as a collective issue that is quite prevalent in anarchist communities and should be addressed and defeated together. I’m not talking Mao-style denunciation meetings and frequent self-criticisms, but through open dialogue and admitting that we’re complicit in oppression but that we’re also willing to change that. Disengaging from the system goes beyond squatting and dumpster diving; it’s time we acknowledged and acted on that.