We’re caught between a cock and a hard place.
Today, politically engaged women have two depressing options. We can align with parties on the left which refuse to recognize the existence of women let alone our humanity. Or we can work alongside the right, which in the US means with those who force women to become mothers and then leave them financially unsupported. Any self-respecting woman can’t fail but to feel unsatisfied and sullied by this grubby, and notably binary decision.
Compared to feminism, malestream politics is simple. For Marxists, people are bracketed according to their relationship with the means of production – this is naturally based on the male as default. The productivity of women as mothers has largely been seen as an inconvenience by the traditional left and an endpoint by the religious right. Arguably, in this way feminists have always sat outside of the patriarchal powerplay that is party politics.
But now many feel a sense of urgency, a need to stop an impending disaster by any means necessary. Fifty years on from the championing of PIE & NAMBLA, today’s mainstream left is still driven by male fetishes and the redistribution of resources has slipped down the agenda. Instead, those who believe themselves progressive advocate for our daughters to be sold into prostitution, for the sterilization of youth, and for the destruction of the category of ‘woman’. Whether this is a greater or lesser threat than the rolling-back of abortion rights is arguably a matter of personal morality and priorities.
It is understandable that some women feel anger that feminists have aligned with the right. We should not have had to make a pragmatic alliance with those who in other circumstances would relegate us to home and hearth. But to others what is happening to the rights of women and the bodies of children is an emergency that demands drastic measures. Given this, the rage of feminists embedded on the left towards those whose tactics differ seems misplaced. After-all, when men overcome ideological differences in pursuit of a common goal it is recognized as politics.
Ultimately, it would be more productive if we were to offer each other a little leeway. Whether one opts to work with the nihilistic perverts on the left to protect bodily autonomy, or the anti-abortionists to protect society from pornography or transgenderism, is irrelevant in the end. We didn’t make the rules within which we’re forced to play, nor did we choose the game.
The cause of women is not a left or right cause. As you so rightly point out, we are commodified and brutalised by all hues of politics, and it enforces the notion that we should look to the politics of left or right to ‘do what is right’ for women.
What we need is for both the Left and the Right to treat us as fully formed adults and drop us from their political agendas altogether.
The left and right are fighting each other over women. Not for women.
For example, they don’t fight over the right for women to access appropriate maternal healthcare out of concern for women. They do it to win votes. We are merely a platform for political power.
Only when women (feminists or not) are able to amplify the message that the politicisation of women’s health, autonomy, safety and dignity must end, and that our agency transcends political cause, can we move forward.
The wrong headed notion by many feminists that feminism ‘belongs to the left’ would be laughable if their territorialism (is that word?) didn’t distract so devastatingly from the real fight. The depoliticisation of women.
When a woman like Kelly Jay Keen is demonised and trashed so maliciously by the virtuous feminists of the left for not doing it right, despite her brilliance in the field of Woman, it says it all.
Women are a diverse bunch and the petty attempts to sideline most of us in our own reality because they see women as some kind of cause exclusively of the left is pathetic.
We all get a say in us.
I could not have said it better. We are in a conundrum and women really need to unite. Many of us may have moved into Feminism via the Left but we were not blind to their lacks regarding their attitudes and support of women. Kelly Jay Keen is brilliant