The Oppressors’ Trifecta: Race, Gender, and Class.

Tatou, Tatou - All Together: According to the promoters of the Tripod Theory, subsuming all other emancipatory struggles into the one great struggle between capitalists and proletarians was a mistake. Exploitation wasn’t purely a question of economics, it was a vast, multi-faceted collection of struggles in which racism and sexism featured hugely. Far more could be achieved, they argued, by recognising the co-equal status of race, gender and class in the “triple oppression” of humanity.

THE SEVENTIES had come to an end with Western Leftism in a thoroughly confused state.

Actually Existing Socialism still held sway over most of the Eurasian continent. Admittedly, the Chinese variant bore less and less resemblance to the original Soviet model, which had rounded off the Seventies by invading Afghanistan. It was, however, extremely hard to like either of the Communist behemoths. Of the French revolutionary credo: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; the actually existing socialists had mastered only equality. Although Cuba and the recently liberated Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique were making slow but steady progress towards fraternity.

For Western Leftists, Actually Existing Socialism’s evident failure to promote liberty proved to be a deal-breaker. After all, what had the Sixties and Seventies been about – if not freedom? The anarchist firebrand, Emma Goldman, had written to Lenin in 1917: “If you make a revolution, and there’s no dancing, then I’m not coming.” The New Left felt exactly the same about freedom. When Actually Existing Socialism finally embraced liberty, wild horses wouldn’t be able to keep the Western Left away, until then …

But, if class-based revolutionary politics found itself becalmed, the so-called “New Social Movements” movements arising out of the struggle for Black civil rights in the USA and South Africa, feminism’s second wave, and the energetic pursuit of gay and lesbian liberation, had storm-force winds in their sails. As the Eighties dawned, it was almost impossible to engage in left-wing politics without acknowledging these new emancipatory movements, or avoid incorporating their radical insights into the Left’s revolutionary praxis.

Predictably, the New Social Movement’s hardest sell was to that part of the Left which still clung to the ideas of Karl Marx. It wasn’t that the Marxists were incapable of recognising the oppression of Blacks, women and gays, merely that they regarded the struggle of these subordinate groups as mere skirmishes within the overarching and all-important battle between Capital and Labour. Class consciousness was the “Open Sesame!” to the free and abundant world that socialism would make possible. Since exploitation was indivisible, the struggle against it had to be the same. Unity – not Identity – was the watchword.

The fighters for racial, sexual and gender equality were having none of it. They would not be subsumed in the “world historical struggle” whose ideological generals all seemed to be straight, white, and male. If the personal was political, then these unconscious beneficiaries of white supremacy and patriarchy had some serious shit to work through.

Enter the Tripod Theory. According to its promoters, subsuming all other emancipatory struggles into the one great struggle between capitalists and proletarians was a mistake. Exploitation wasn’t purely a question of economics, it was a vast, multi-faceted collection of struggles in which racism and sexism featured hugely. Far more could be achieved, they argued, by recognising the co-equal status of race, gender and class in the “triple oppression” of humanity.

Each of these buttresses of oppression depended on and was upheld by the other two. Patriarchy provided capitalism with an already elaborate framework of sexually-charged power and control, while white supremacy had made possible the vast accumulation of slave-generated wealth that set the capitalist system in motion. Race and gender thus raised profound cultural issues that could never be accommodated comfortably in the narrow economism of class politics.

The Tripod Theory gave rise to another metaphor, one in which the Left, by embracing the concept of the “three oppressions”, constructs a fighting platform upon which Blacks, women, workers and gays can fight white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia and capitalism side by side – each group aiding the other. Race, gender and class thus become the three legs of the Left’s footstool, distributing the revolutionary load equally.

In an attempt to draw the separate struggles of the traditional socialist Left and the New Social Movements into a useful theoretical and political dialogue, Rob Stevens, a progressive academic based at the University of Canterbury, bravely launched the journal Race Gender Class in 1985. It ran for 14 issues and ceased publication in 1995.

Glancing through the issue released in 1991 it very soon becomes clear that if Stevens and his editorial collective had hoped the ideologies related to race, gender and class might, by virtue of being brought together on the pages of a single periodical, somehow give rise to a new and powerful revolutionary praxis, then they must have been disappointed. Not even the tender ministrations of Bill Birch, Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley: which had, in that bitter year, 1991, dramatically raised the Misery Index for unionised workers, solo mums and the whole beneficiary underclass (in which Māori and Pasifika figured so disproportionately) could generate the intersectional fightback anticipated by the Tripod Theory.

And just in case any unreconstructed class warriors out there feel moved to lay the blame for this failure at the feet of the race and gender contingents of the broader emancipatory movement, it is worth recalling that it was the Council of Trade Unions which refused to call the general strike that would, undoubtedly, have brought together workers, women, people of colour, and gays on the one platform where real and durable alliances are formed – the barricades.

What the 1991 issue does make clear, however, is the dramatic progress made by those who elected to march under the colours of race and gender. It’s not just the familiar names of Jane Kelsey, Moana Jackson and Vincent O’Malley that catch the eye, but also that the issues they wrote about have such a contemporary feel. Thirty years ago, discussions about the implications of the Treaty “partnership” were confined to a tiny minority of senior public servants, academics and activists (pretty much the readership of journals like Race Gender Class). Thirty years later, the issues debated by the ideologues of race and gender in 1991 constitute the political agenda of the 2020s.

But, if the Politics of Identity have thrived over the course of the past three decades, the Politics of Class have dwindled and faded. Which is not to say that the vast gulf separating the human-beings who keep the capitalist system running, and those who pocket the profits, has not widened since the days of the tragically optimistic Tripod Theory. Nor that the rate of global exploitation has eased in any way. Merely that 1991 was also the year that the Soviet Union fell to pieces.

Turns out that the only thing keeping Western Leftism remotely credible was Actually Existing Socialism. With the reality of class-based politics removed – along with the Berlin Wall – the Politics of Identity, now on two legs, race and gender, was free to run away and join the capitalist circus. What these identarians have yet to appreciate, however, is that Capitalism remains the ringmaster. Thirty years on, all that the politics of race and gender have become is the entertainment.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 18 August 2022.

From Emancipation To Denunciation: The Sad Descent of the Contemporary Left.

Going Down: The priorities of the Contemporary Left aren’t just depressing, they’re scary. Ordinary folk begin to ask themselves: if the urge to condemn and punish is all the now drives the Left, then how far is it willing to go to shut down and/or shut up the bad guys? Not many people are happy with the idea of living in a society where citizens have to weigh carefully every word and action, or fall victim to a regime in which punishment is the first resort, and forgiveness the swiftest path to ruin.

HOW TO PROMOTE a radical left-wing agenda when so few people today can even imagine such a thing? The emancipatory impulse that guided so many of the left-wing programmes of the past has almost entirely faded away. In its place we find a denunciatory political culture. Far too many contemporary leftists are driven by the desire to condemn and punish. Where once the Left’s purpose was to create a better world, its chief preoccupation today appears to be making it a less evil one.

A more realistic goal, some might say. Except that, as a goal, reducing evil rests upon the dismal presupposition that malignancy is humanity’s resting state. Striving to reduce the severity of the planet’s daily torments is not at all the same as believing it is possible to overcome them. Directing one’s efforts towards making humanity’s prison more bearable, differs fundamentally from a project dedicated to reducing that prison to rubble and setting its prisoners free.

As the Second Wave of Feminism swept across the Western World in the early 1970s, its adherents spoke with tongues of fire about the end of patriarchy and the emergence of not only a new kind of woman, but also of a new kind of man. They argued persuasively that the bloody re-ordering of male hierarchies – which men liked to call “revolutions” – were not revolutions at all. The only revolution worthy of the name, they argued, would be the one that brought the full emancipation of women. Only when the 10,000 year-old patriarchal system of sexual and gender repression was no more, could real human history begin.

Fifty years on, so many of those fiery tongues have been stilled. As The Platform’s Ani O’Brien wrote on 8 March, International Women’s’ Day:

In New Zealand - and perhaps elsewhere - International Women’s Day has become a farcical parade of corporate pink-washing overlaid by a nepotistic circle-jerk of privileged and influential liberal (mostly white) women giving each other awards at champagne breakfasts […..] And the issues they focus on? Usually not particularly high on the priority list for your average Kiwi woman – certainly not for those who are under-privileged.

On matters of race the picture is equally depressing.

Sticking with our earlier prison metaphor, the attention of the Contemporary Left seems fixated upon the ideas and actions of the prison guards, and how important it is to make them understand the enormously harmful impact of their prejudices and practices upon the well-being of the prisoners. If the purpose of “re-educating” these oppressors was to persuade them to make common cause with the oppressed, then its inherent negativity might be overlooked. Unfortunately, that is not its goal. The ambitions of the Contemporary Left do not extend beyond ensuring that the guards and the prisoners administer the prison together – “partners” in penology.

When it comes to issues of class, the picture is even bleaker.

In tragic contrast to the leftists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Contemporary Left seem mortally afraid of offending the boss. The very notion that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle” strikes them as decidedly career-limiting. Located firmly in the Professional and Managerial Class, whose task it is to administer capitalism smoothly, with a minimum of fuss, on behalf of the people who own it, the Contemporary Left has taught itself to look at the working-class and see … nothing.

Without the determination to emancipate, the Left has no ability to inspire. Lacking the stimulus of their common advancement, the political inertness of “the people” is only to be overcome by outrage. By exposing the wickedness and brutality of those who wield power over them, individuals can be roused to anger. Rather than the emancipatory programmes spawned by the Old Left’s creative political imaginings, the Contemporary Left offers the marginalised and oppressed only the sterile alternatives of condemnation and punishment.

The “Me Too” movement replaces the New Woman and the New Man. “Black Lives Matter” replaces Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream!”

The problem with constantly parading wickedness and brutality before people’s gaze is that pretty soon they begin to think that’s all there is. Intuitively, they arrive at the dismal conclusion that the condemners and the punishers are not only fighting a never-ending battle, but a losing one. For every Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein who falls, countless other abusers will go unpunished. For every racist cop that gets put away, a thousand more contrive to hide their racism more carefully.

Not only are these conclusions depressing, they’re scary. Ordinary folk begin to ask themselves: if the urge to condemn and punish is all the now drives the Left, then how far is it willing to go to shut down and/or shut up the bad guys? Not many people are happy with the idea of living in a society where citizens have to weigh carefully every word and action, or fall victim to a regime in which punishment is the first resort, and forgiveness the swiftest path to ruin.

Abandon the Left’s quest for emancipation in favour of the politics of denunciation, and what is left to the ordinary citizen but material aspiration? If building a better world is no longer on the Left’s agenda; and this one is dominated by forces against which the Left fights and fights but cannot overcome; then surely the only sensible course of action is for individuals and families to get and keep as much as they can while the getting and keeping is good?

For the past thirty-five years this is the only consistent message the New Zealand electorate has been sent. Certainly, it is the message which the National Party never tires of sending to voters. The Old Labour Left (think Mickey Savage and Norman Kirk) was condemned for wanting to upset the settled order of things – a prospect which the comfortably situated can always be relied upon to abhor. The New Labour Left (think Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern) National condemns for its puritanical obsession with punishing the sins that make comfort possible. (The Greens are even worse!)

Since the Old Labour Left died with the Alliance twenty years ago, and the current incarnation of the Greens regards its policies as ideologically suspect relics of a bygone age, the New Labour Left has very little incentive to develop a manifesto in which the impulse to confront and overcome the evils of the status quo is blended with a determination to emancipate its victims. Evil can only be vanquished by the creation of a world in which it cannot thrive.

But, persuading voters this is true is no easy task. It requires a political party that never stops making the case for radical change. Sadly, no such party exists in the New Zealand of today. Offer voters a radical left-wing agenda in 2022 and its content will most likely inspire not enthusiasm, but a mixture of doubt and scorn.

As in this comment from a former National Party Cabinet Minister:

Is it really credible that Labour will become akin to a Corbynite party, since that is effectively what is being suggested. If they did, and that was clearly signalled before the election, I reckon you could pretty much guarantee Labour a few years in the political wilderness to contemplate the consequences of such a decision.

There is simply no appetite in New Zealand for a radical socialist change. It is no accident that the biggest selling vehicles are double-cab utes capable of pulling the 6 meter fishing boat [which is, in] fact, owned by the PM’s partner along with the beach house in Tairua. The epitome of the kiwi dream.

Just about every single policy dreamed up by such a fanciful radical coalition would be diametrically opposed to people being able to fulfil such a dream.

The party that actually trumpet the opportunity to fulfil such a dream are much more likely to electorally succeed.

The tragedy of these times is that Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party would almost certainly agree. And the even bigger tragedy – so would 98 percent of the voters.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 18 March 2022.

Men To Boys.

Being A Dick: Ignoring the restrictions of Level-4 is a way of signalling one's membership of the vast idiot fraternity of “You can’t tell me what to do!” More than that, however, it is a way of working out the fear of the Covid-19 virus that these men feel, but cannot acknowledge, except by getting right up in its face and daring it to do its worst – no matter what harm that might bring to other people.

WHY ARE THERE so many blokes out there behaving like idiots? (“Idiots” is the Prime Minister’s descriptor, most New Zealanders would, less charitably, call them “dicks”.) It’s not all blokes – not by any means – but such problems as the authorities have so far encountered during the Covid-19 Lockdown skew heavily towards the male of the species. If women can see the logic of collectivism and solidarity in combatting Covid-19, why can’t a truly irritating minority of dickish men?

Obviously, all this dickishness reflects something seriously amiss with New Zealand’s sons. At the very moment when New Zealand women are wowing the world with their smarts, their grit and their empathy (cheers Jacinda!) far too many New Zealand men have retreated into the stripped-down stronghold of sporting prowess and barred the gates behind them.

The television promotions for the various sporting codes – especially Rugby Union and Rugby League – feature a terrifying sequence of images glorifying brutal bodily contact, exaggerated aggressiveness, and exultation bordering on complete loss-of-control. What we see is what’s left of the human male when everything dignified, intelligent, creative and compassionate has been edited out of the masculine narrative.

These promos are made all the more frightful by the knowledge that they wouldn’t look that way if the punters wanted to see something else. Clearly, smearing the screen with testosterone is the best way of getting the boys to tune-in. It’s possible, of course, that the clips are assembled for the pleasure of the sporting codes’ female devotees. At least that would make a sort of – equally troubling! – sense. In the end, however, these gloriously kinetic visual packages are all about reaffirming and celebrating a particular kind of masculinity. They present the human male as a dangerous, uncompromising and predatory bundle of muscle.

The retrograde character of this brutish version of masculinity is disturbing. For centuries, English speakers have honoured males with the title “gentlemen”. Implicit in the term’s general use is an expectation that all males should at least aspire to the qualities of their social superiors. The goal was to cultivate the self-control, easy affability, intellectual discipline, moral courage, rhetorical skill and, most importantly, the ability to interact easily and pleasingly with women, that traditionally defined a “well-mannered” member of the ruling class. The ultimate social goal was to bring about a levelling upwards: something along the lines of “we are all aristocrats now”.

It is one of the many oddities of modern history that it was to these civilised and humane ideals that so many of the women who assailed the domains of male exclusivity aspired. Even odder, is the fact that in so many cases they succeeded: demonstrating throughout their careers the attributes and values that were hitherto regarded as the proof and preserve of a  “gentleman”. Tragically, as women rose up to claim so many of the things that were supposed to define a man, a worryingly large number of men began abandoning them as accomplishments no self-respecting male would boast of possessing.

Increasingly, a strong intellect, articulateness, creative ability, the willingness to listen attentively and to demonstrate empathy came to be regarded by these “anti-gentlemen” as not only evidence of effeminacy, but also of something much worse – homosexuality. The simple possession of any of these powers was proof positive of, to use the modern parlance, “gayness”. Bad enough to be called a “girl”, but to be branded “gay” meant instant excommunication from the world of “real men”.

But, what behavioural repertoire is left to such males if intelligence, expressiveness, creativity and empathy are ruled out of contention? The answer, sadly, is belligerence, taciturnity, pragmatism and toughness. Sentences are reduced to slogans; slogans to single words: Muppet, wanker, arsehole, cunt. Gentlemanly efforts to converse with these linguistically-challenged anti-gentlemen are all-too-often interpreted as condescension, or, even more dangerously, as attempts to make fun of and/or belittle them. Their responses can be savage. To be showered with one word insults (usually in Anglo-Saxon) is to get off lightly. Physical violence bubbles ominously just below the surface of these cross-purposeful encounters.

To elicit the most aggressive response, however, nothing more is required than to give the anti-gentleman a direct order. Nothing riles him more than being told what to do. And, if the person telling him what to do happens to be a woman? Oh-boy – watch out!

Paradoxically, the more reasonable the request, the more unreasonable the anti-gentleman’s response is likely to be. Reasonableness belongs to the world of education and erudition – the world they have rejected on account of it being populated by wankers, women and gays. Accordingly, defying reasonableness is more than a one-fingered salute to these wankers’ effete world: it is an act of veneration; an offering to their dickish masculine god.

Ignoring the restrictions of Level-4 is a way of signalling their membership of the vast idiot fraternity of “You can’t tell me what to do!” More than that, however, it is a way of working out the fear of the Covid-19 virus that they feel, but cannot acknowledge, except by getting right up in its face and daring it to do its worst – no matter what harm that might bring to other people.

Poor bastards. They have stripped themselves of the self-awareness that would allow them to see that puffing-up your chest and telling a micro-organism “You’re not the boss of me!” is the behaviour not of a man, but of a frightened and angry little boy.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 10 April 2020.

Smiling For Jacinda - And Democracy!

Prime Ministers Can Do Anything! Jacinda’s pregnancy not only constitutes a bold redefinition of gender roles, but also a radical redefinition of representative democracy itself. Overnight the highest office in the land has been made both more representative of, and more relatable to, hundreds-of-thousands of female voters. Quite suddenly, the Prime Minister has become a person much more like themselves.

"JACINDA’S PREGNANT!" For once, the exclamation mark was merited. There isn’t much that takes us by surprise these days, but the announcement that the prime minister and her partner were having a baby caught New Zealanders off-guard in the nicest possible way.

For younger New Zealanders, the news brought confirmation that the torch really has been passed to a new generation of leaders. For Kiwis under 40, it offered proof that the difference between political life and normal life continues to narrow, and that the House of Representatives is, at last, living up to its name.

For older New Zealanders, especially those who came of age to the strains of Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman”, Jacinda’s announcement was a kind of vindication.

This was the generation, after all, who had heard the dominant political figure of their day, Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, declare:

“Could we contemplate the situation where a woman getting equal pay is the bread-winner, and the husband stays at home and looks after the children? I don’t think we could.”

It was these same “Baby Boomers” who accepted, albeit reluctantly, the hard-nosed decision of their own generation’s pre-eminent politician, Helen Clark, to forego the experience of motherhood as the unavoidable price of achieving high public office.

These New Zealanders told their daughters that “Girls Can Do Anything!” – not as a description of the day-to-day realities of the 1980s and 90s, but as a statement of their abiding faith in feminism’s power to shape the future.

So, if a smile lingered on my lips all the way through last Friday, there was good reason. It lingered because I was thinking back to the time when, as a young married couple, we were refused a bank-loan because: “Your wife might get pregnant and have to give up her job – and how would you pay the mortgage then?” Or, recalling the expressions of scorn on the faces of “real” men when they discovered I was a stay-at-home dad, looking after our daughter while my bread-winning wife went back to work. Now, I could say to myself: “Those days are gone.”

How could anyone who had grown up amidst the debilitating sexism of “old” New Zealand not smile, and feel immense pride, when presented with two such brilliant role models as Jacinda Ardern and Clarke Gayford?

There will be some, of course, who look at this couple and frown. The unreconstructed sexists will whip themselves into a froth of rage at Jacinda’s repudiation of traditional gender roles. They will not, however, be the only ones made uneasy by her announcement.

The more “normal” our Parliament becomes, the more its elitist lustre will fade. To those who regard the cultivation of that lustre as an important feature of our Westminster system of representative government, the maintenance of its specialness is no small matter. For traditionalists, investing Parliament with pomp, ceremony and just a whiff of mystery, is all part of separating its deliberations from the ordinary and the everyday. Its members are, after all, invested with the power to upend the lives of ordinary, everyday citizens. For those who believe in our system of “managed democracy”, preserving a certain measure of distance between the people and their representatives is vital.

Jacinda’s pregnancy, therefore, not only constitutes a bold redefinition of gender roles, but also a radical redefinition of representative democracy itself. Never before in New Zealand’s political history have women been able to contemplate a pregnant prime minister. Overnight the highest office in the land has been made both more representative of, and more relatable to, hundreds-of-thousands of female voters. Quite suddenly, the Prime Minister has become a person much more like themselves.

Certainly, there have been many politicians who entered Parliament with young families. Overwhelmingly, however, these were men, whose domestic and child-rearing arrangements, far from challenging “normal” gender roles, actually reinforced them. The handful of women MPs who decided to combine raising babies with raising points-of-order encountered an institution determinedly reluctant to make itself child-friendly.

Thankfully, those days, too, have gone. The image of Trevor Mallard dandling an infant on his knee while seated in the Speaker’s Chair served as a delightful precursor to Jacinda and Clarke’s announcement. His message: The House of Representatives has become a place for everyone; fathers, mothers, children; the People’s House.

What began as a remote chamber, filled with wealthy, privileged men, has progressively been forced to open its ornate doors: first to Maori, then to propertyless men; and, finally, to the majority of the human species. With every dilution of its elitism, the number of citizens who could reasonably aspire to “do anything” has expanded. From the tangata whenua, to the working-class, to the people who hold up half the sky.

So, yes, I’m smiling. Not just for Jacinda and Clarke – but for democracy!

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 23 January 2018.

Why Isn’t An Injury To One Sister An Injury To All?

Barred Vision: The problem for western feminists is that, in spite of their cultural and political self-denying ordinances against criticising the treatment of women in other, non-western, societies, the only garden of equality currently showing unequivocal signs of flourishing, is their own. Across vast regions of the planet, not only are women’s rights not flourishing, they are being diminished.

ONE OF THE MOST PERPLEXING political phenomena of the twenty-first century is feminism’s silence in the face of Islamist oppression. For nearly a quarter-of-a-century, as the evidence of weaponised misogyny across the Islamic world has mounted, the absence of globalised feminist resistance has become increasingly difficult to ignore. The contrast between global feminism’s muted response to the oppression of women in the Islamic world, and its ongoing campaign against the sexist excesses of western males, is stark. Why one, and not the other?

To gain some appreciation of the discrepancy’s magnitude, it is instructive to compare the world’s reaction to the imposition of apartheid on South African blacks and the imposition of Islamic fundamentalism on Afghan women.

As news of deliberate and vicious gender discrimination filtered out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, western women and men recoiled in shocked disbelief. Girls were being sent home from school. Women professionals: doctors, scientists, engineers, teachers and nurses were being dismissed from their jobs and ordered back behind the doors of enforced domesticity. Any woman found walking the streets unchaperoned, or wearing Western dress, ran the risk of being whipped (or worse) by the Taliban’s religious police. Women found guilty of adultery were being publicly executed in soccer stadiums.

Like something out of The Handmaid's Tale. Women faced public execution under the rule of the Taliban.

There was, of course, some feminist criticism of the Taliban regime, but it was sparse and uncoordinated. Those who waited for the leaders of second-wave feminism to place themselves in the vanguard of an international movement modeled on the global campaign against Apartheid, waited in vain.

When US forces and their Afghan allies finally overthrew the Taliban regime in the aftermath of 9/11, most of the women who openly and unashamedly celebrated its demise – and the liberation of their sisters – came from the Right.

Undoubtedly, left-wing western feminists were also thrilled to see the back of the hateful Taliban government and its religious police, but they were hesitant to say so too loudly for fear of giving the impression that they in any way supported the military adventurism of President George W. Bush. The presence of US forces in Afghanistan, regardless of its collateral benefits, was proof that western imperialism was alive and well. In the Left’s hierarchy of oppression, white people lording it over brown people was considered a more egregious sin than brown men lording it over brown women.

Correcting the violent sexism of brown men was not the responsibility of privileged white women. The only people who could, legitimately, liberate the women of the Third World, were Third World women. If white women were looking for sexist male dragons to slay, then they need look no further than their own workplaces – and homes.

Western Feminism checks its privilege.

Furthermore, the whole notion of there being a universal definition of right and wrong, by which the many and diverse peoples of the world could be judged, had itself fallen under left-wing suspicion.

Westerners might be entitled to judge other westerners by how closely they adhered to the moral precepts of their common culture. Much less certain, however, was their entitlement to judge the behaviour of people from other, non-western, cultures.

Among western leftists, morality had become culture-specific. If imperialism’s victims asked for support, then they would be given it, unquestioningly. If not, then they would tend to their own political gardens exclusively.

The problem for western feminists is that, in spite of these cultural and political self-denying ordinances, the only garden currently showing unequivocal signs of flourishing, is their own. Across vast regions of the planet, not only are women’s rights not flourishing, they are being diminished.

In the patriarchal cultures the western left consistently refuses to condemn, the misogynists look on with a combination of scorn and fear as powerful western men are forced to account for their past and present abuse of women. “There but for the grace of God, and our own unyielding adherence to His laws”, they mutter, “goes our own religious and political power.”

Just because western leftists turn a blind eye to the depredations of their brothers in the Islamic world does not mean that Muslim fundamentalists are similarly blind to the consequences of treating women as equal human-beings.

Prior to the American Civil War, the southern states argued for continued tolerance of their “peculiar institution”. Northern abolitionists rejected utterly the slave-owners’ self-serving cultural relativism.

Western feminists owe their Islamic sisters nothing less.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 January 2018.

The Maker Of “Men” – Masculinity and its Origins

The God Above: It is in the indistinct depths of prehistory that the first and most profound revolution in human affairs; the overthrow of the servants of the Earth Mother, by the worshippers of the Sky Father; took place. At the heart of this masculinist revolt lay a deep-seated fear and resentment of all things female – and a burning desire to master them.

WHO MAKES “MEN”? With the behaviour of movie magnate, Harvey Weinstein, dominating the headlines, the nature and origins of masculinity have become a hot topic. At issue is whether all expressions of masculinity are to a greater-or-lesser extent “toxic” – or only some? And, whether the ultimate liberation of womankind is contingent upon the unequivocal elimination of the culturally constructed beings we call “men”?

In many ways the battle for control over the construction and meaning of gender is the greatest revolutionary struggle of them all. Indeed, it is possible to argue that until this critical issue has been resolved, all of those historical upheavals to which the term “revolution” has been applied have been mischaracterised.

The key question to ask in relation to these historic transitions is whether or not, after the power relationship between master and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletarian shifted, the relationship between men and women; between the masculine realm and the feminine realm; was similarly changed? Or, was it still very much a matter of, in Leonard Cohen’s words, “that homicidal bitchin’ that goes down in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat.”? After the “revolution”, did masculinity (like “whiteness”) continue to confer a huge societal advantage upon all who fell within its definitional boundaries – regardless of their personal beliefs and/or inclinations?

But perhaps “revolution” is the wrong word to describe the longed-for dethronement of masculinity? Perhaps the near universal institution of patriarchy (rule by the fathers) is actually the product of the first great social revolution in human history. Perhaps what feminist women are seeking to achieve isn’t a revolution – but a restoration?

And here we must step out of the hard-copy world of recorded history and enter into the much less solid realm of pre-history and mythology. Because it is here, in the indistinct depths of time, that the first and most profound transition in human affairs; the overthrow of the servants of the Earth Mother, by the worshippers of the Sky Father; took place. At the heart of this masculinist revolt lay a deep-seated fear and resentment of all things female – and a burning desire to master them.

Rule by the mothers – Matriarchy – drew its justification from the self-evident need for all living things to submit to the implacable statutes of Mother Earth. Hers was the endless cycle of birth, death and re-birth from which no living creature escaped. And the vessels within which all living things are nurtured, and out of which all new life emerges into the world, are female. Such was the deep magic of generation and fruition which flowed from the timeless creator of all things: The Goddess.

But the sons of the Goddess were lesser beings than their sisters. Helpmeets and protectors, certainly; seed carriers also; but from the deep magic of the mothers they were perforce excluded. Men were the takers of life: the killers of beasts and other men – their brothers. This, too, was a dark and powerful magic, but dangerous and destructive of the settled order. It was a force which the Mothers were careful to keep in check.

It is easy to guess where this story is going.

Men looked skyward, away from the Earth. They observed the gathering darkness in the heavens and heard the deep rumble of the sky’s anger. They witnessed the brilliant spears of light that stabbed the Earth, their mother. In awe they watched her burn, powerless beneath the thrusts of a deity who owed nothing to the slow cycles of growth and decay. Here was a magic to surpass the impenetrable secrets of femininity. Here, in light and fire, they found the power of beginnings: the shock and disruption of all that was new. Not the circles of the Earth Mother, but the straight lines of the Sky Father – the Maker of “Men”.

Masculinity is the world’s disease, and civilisation is its symptom. Patriarchy is the product of the first, and the only true, revolution in human history – and endures as its most malignant legacy.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 16 October 2017.

The Wrong Sisterhood: Forgotten Lessons of the 1984 Women’s Forums.

The Progressive Sisterhood: In 1984 Labour's women MPs launched a round of consultative assemblies - Women's Forums - to identify the priorities of their proposed Ministry of Women's Affairs (now the Ministry for Women). Unfortunately, this well-meaning exercise in participatory democracy very nearly ended in disaster. Progressive feminist reforms turned out to be much more easily engineered from above than below.

 

IT WAS ONE of the Fourth Labour Government’s more progressive initiatives, and its most productive outcome, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, endures to this day. It was, however, an initiative that also ended up spinning out of control in ways that its instigators neither anticipated nor appreciated. Indeed, so aggrieved were Labour’s feminists at the outcome of their well-meaning experiment in “participatory democracy” that its most important political lessons remain unacknowledged and, for the most part, forgotten.

 

The election of the David Lange-led Labour Government in July 1984 provided the first opportunity for Second Wave Feminism to show what it could do with the full resources of the state at its back. Labour’s women MPs: Anne Hercus, Margaret Shields, Helen Clark, Fran Wilde, Anne Fraser, Annette King, Margaret Austin and Judy Keall, along with the party’s president, Margaret Wilson, were determined to make rapid progress for women after nearly a decade of government by, of and for Rob Muldoon’s “ordinary blokes”.

 

Pushing them forward was the Labour Women’s Council – a body which had grown rapidly, both in size and influence, since the late 1970s. The consciousness-raising effects of the violent misogyny experienced by women during the 1981 Springbok Tour further strengthened the feminist impulse within Labour’s ranks.

 

Significantly, these new recruits (many of them from women’s groups active on the nation’s campuses) brought with them the non-hierarchical, loosely-structured and “facilitative” political praxis of feminism’s second wave. Born out of the New Left’s embrace of “participatory democracy” in the 1960s, this welcoming political style was founded on the optimistic assumption that, subject only to their consciousness of patriarchal oppression being raised by their feminist sisters, all women were natural allies.

 

That this assumption was far too optimistic had been demonstrated decisively in the United States by the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. What had, at first, looked like a slam-dunk victory for second wave American feminism had been stopped in its tracks, and then turned around, by the aggressive counter-attack of conservative women led by constitutional lawyer and right-wing activist, Phyllis Schlafly.

 

The sheer scale of the conservative backlash against American feminism should have been taken as a warning by Labour’s feminist MPs. It wasn’t. The Women’s Council simply refused to believe that New Zealand was prey to anything like the reactionary forces that plagued the United States.

 

In the context of the burgeoning strength of the feminist, anti-apartheid, Maori Sovereignty and anti-nuclear movements, the notion that New Zealand women might prove susceptible to Schlafly’s conservative arguments seemed preposterous. David Lange’s easy victory over Muldoon likewise appeared to confirm that the country was moving left – not right.

 

Buoyed by these convictions, the new Labour government, guided by its women MPs, was persuaded to set in motion a series of “Women’s Forums”. Open to all citizens, these consultative assemblies were intended to set the priorities for and structure the agenda of the new Ministry of Women’s Affairs foreshadowed in Labour’s 1984 Manifesto.

 

The first forums appeared to bear out the most optimistic assumptions of the Labour Women’s Council. Representatives from women’s NGOs like the YWCA and the National Council of Women, backed by women trade union delegates, eagerly advanced the stalled reform agenda of New Zealand feminism. A radical edge to the ongoing discussion and debate was contributed by the activism of Maori and lesbian women.

 

And then things began to go very seriously wrong.

 

In the words of gay and lesbian rights campaigner, Alison Laurie:

 

“Now, the election of the fourth Labour Government in 1984, which is when Fran Wilde comes to Parliament, brought about the establishment of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. And prior to setting up this new ministry, the government had held women’s forums throughout the country which lesbians attended, and many women were alarmed by the presence of busloads of Christian fundamentalist women who carried Bibles and copies of the National Anthem, and who voted against abortion, lesbian rights and also against ratifying the United Nations Convention on the elimination of the discrimination against women.”

 

On one issue, however, radical feminists and fundamentalist Christians found themselves in perfect sororal agreement: pornography. They both wanted it banned.

 

It wasn’t enough. Participatory democracy, far from demonstrating that all women were sisters under the skin, had proved the opposite. Outside the funky enclaves of progressive inner-city activism; beyond the purview well-educated, Broadsheet-reading career women; there lay a vast hinterland of deeply-entrenched and easily-activated prejudice. Nor were these unsuspected masses of conservative women restricted to the rural and provincial bastions of the National Party. Feminists were just as few-and-far-between in the suburbs. Certainly, there appeared to be many more churches in these localities than consciousness-raising circles.

 

Shocked to the core, and fearful that if the forums were allowed to continue the progressive feminist agenda might end up being rejected by, of all people, conservative women, the Labour government hastily shut them down. Yes, progressive women had found themselves surrounded by a noisy and single-minded sisterhood. Unfortunately, it was the wrong sisterhood.

 

Between 1984 and 1990 the progressive feminist agenda was advanced. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs became a useful and productive reality. LGBTQI New Zealanders were liberated from their legislative shackles. Pay Equity (briefly) became a reality. But never again were the preferences of ordinary New Zealand women so openly and democratically solicited.

 

Sisterhood is, indeed, powerful – but only when your sisters can be relied upon to vote the right way.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 19 February 2017.

Forgotten Lessons: Has Labour Just Chosen To Lose Hutt South?

Best Man Or Mandatory Woman? Are Labour’s compulsory gender quotas dictating the party’s candidate selection processes?

 

SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE THE LEFT is incapable of learning anything. Why leftists forget every lesson History teaches them – even those of the recent past – I simply do not know. Mistakes, it seems, are for repeating – endlessly.

 

Twenty-seven years ago the NewLabour Party, full of energy and idealism, decided to institute a gender quota. Half of its candidates had to be women. Had to be, you’ll note. None of this “strive to ensure an equal number of women candidates” malarkey. Fifty percent meant fifty percent. Sorry fellas.

 

The NLP women grinned and the NLP guys puffed out their chests. Theirs was a party of real democratic-socialists – completely unlike those devious traitors in the Old Labour Party. If the NLP leader, Jim Anderton, had reservations, then he kept them to himself. Or, maybe, he knew enough about working-class voters to let them do the talking for him.

 

And talk they did. Canvassing Dunedin’s working-class streets I was taken to task on doorstep-after-doorstep by a succession of narrow-eyed matrons as suspicious of my rounded middle-class vowels as they were contemptuous of the NLPs affirmative action policy.

 

“I don’t agree with quotas”, I was told over and over again. “You should pick the best person for the job.” With impressive prescience, these hard-bitten mothers and grandmothers demanded to know what the NLP would do “if your quota isn’t filled and you’ve got to choose between a really good man and an unsuitable woman? Are you really going to tell the best man to bugger off? Because if you are – then you needn’t bother coming around here asking for my vote.”

 

Not that anyone paid much attention. Even in the democratic-socialist NLP, the idea that the political leadership should be guided by the views of those whose votes they were seeking got precious little traction. If working-class women were sceptical (if not downright hostile) to the gender quota, then it was only because they had yet to throw off the dead weight of patriarchal thinking. Nothing that a little feminist consciousness-raising couldn’t fix.

 

Always assuming that those working-class women wanted their consciousness raised, which, by-and-large they didn’t. Or, at least, not by democratic-socialists so utterly unaware of how patronising they sounded. If the choice was between being talked down to by a middle-class feminist, or represented by a working-class bloke who’d grown up in the same neighbourhood as themselves, then the best man was always going to win.

 

With the NLP long since deposited on the ash-heap of history, you might assume that the Labour Party would be wary of repeating its mistakes. But, you’d be wrong. Feminism is one of the progressive traditions which Labour has never turned its back on. The support of the Women’s Council of the party thus remains indispensable to any attempt to re-write Labour’s rules. Or un-write them. As David “Man Ban” Shearer discovered when he attempted to attenuate the Women’s Council’s constitutional efforts to ensure gender balance.

 

Over the past three years, those efforts have been crowned with success. And now Labour’s mandatory gender quotas are dictating the party’s candidate selection processes in precisely the way those shrewd Dunedin working-class women foresaw nearly thirty years ago.

 

Last weekend, Labour members in the Hutt South electorate gathered to choose a successor to their long-serving MP, Trevor Mallard. The choice they faced was between a popular local lawyer and city councillor, Campbell Barry, and a well-connected party insider, Virginia (Ginny) Andersen. Barry, who attended Wainuiomata High School, easily won the support of the Hutt South members present at the meeting, but he failed to convince the selectors representing the party’s New Zealand Council. By a narrow majority (4-3) the selection panel voted to install Ginny Andersen.

 

Bear in mind that Mallard holds Hutt South by just 709 votes, and that in 2014 National won the Party Vote by a margin of 6,745 votes. National’s candidate, Chris Bishop, is a strong campaigner and will only be prevented from lifting the seat in 2017 by a Labour candidate capable of putting a large and enthusiastic team of volunteers in the field. That is very hard to do when the local membership believes “Head Office” has ignored their preferences and imposed an unwanted “outsider” on the electorate.

 

Once again, I’m recalling that doorstep dialogue of thirty years ago: “I don’t agree with quotas. You should pick the best person for the job. What do you do if your quota isn’t filled and you’ve got to choose between a really good man and an unsuitable woman? Are you really going to tell the best man to bugger off? Because if you are – then you needn’t bother coming around here asking for my vote.”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 31 October 2016.

Window Dressing A Dark Reality: Why I Won’t Be Signing On To “HeForShe” Anytime Soon.

Through A Glass Darkly: Emma Watson's passionate advocacy of Popular Feminism at the UN Women's launch of the "HeForShe" initiative in September 2014 broke with 40 years of feminist process by inviting men and boys to become part of the struggle to end gender inequality. Bitter experience had taught Second Wave feminists that this was a struggle best fought by women, for women, and on women's terms. In the immortal words of Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a demand."

 

“I AM INVITING YOU to step forward, to be seen to speak up, to be the ‘he’ for ‘she’. And to ask yourself if not me, who? If not now, when?” That was the challenge thrown down to men and boys around the world by the British actor, Emma Watson, at the launch of the HeForShe movement in New York City last year. The brainchild of UN Women, the UN organisation dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women, HeForShe openly solicits the support of men in the struggle for gender equality – tacitly acknowledging the success of patriarchal resistance to the further extension of women’s rights internationally.

 

Watson spoke movingly of her own conversion to feminism and of the many “inadvertent feminists” who had made it seem natural for her to be treated as an equal. But she also made reference to the declining influence of feminism as a mobilising ideology.

 

“I was appointed six months ago and the more I have spoken about feminism the more I have realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating. If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop.”

 

Watson’s speech thus resurrected the line of argument which some of the early advocates of what came to be known as “Second Wave Feminism” deployed in their quest for male allies.

 

“We don’t often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes but I can see that that they are and that when they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence … Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong. It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum not as two opposing sets of ideals.”

 

Subsuming the struggle for women’s rights in a grander battle for the freedom of both sexes did not, however, strike many 1970s feminists as a particularly effective strategy for securing their own liberation. Their personal experiences as political activists told them that any movement for gender equality in which men participated as full and equal partners would inevitably end up being dominated by men, and reflect a masculine view of the world. Women found their own voices much more readily in groups with a “Women Only” membership rule.

 

This herstory is well known to the New Zealand spokeswoman for HeForShe, Sue Kedgely. As one of the Founding Mothers of Second Wave Feminism in New Zealand, she is well aware of the movement’s organisational evolution. All the more surprising, then, that she should be the one inviting all good Kiwi blokes to don their shining armour and ride to the rescue of the world’s damsels.

 

Never backward in coming forward, Kedgely kicked off the New Zealand HeForShe effort, launched in Wellington on Friday (27/11/15) afternoon, by signing up the realm’s leading knight – and Governor-General – Sir Jerry Mateparae. Other high-profile fellas signing on to this noble, global quest to secure gender equality by 2030 include broadcasters Wallace Chapman and Jack Tane; economist and philanthropist, Gareth Morgan; and comedians Te Radar and Jeremy Ellwood.

 

If you’re a bloke and also feel moved to support this new cause of “Popular Feminism”, then simply pay a visit to the website and sign on.

 

Just be aware, though, that not every feminist shares Emma Watson’s views. Responding to her New York speech, feminist columnist, Clementine Ford, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald of 27 September 2014:

 

“It’s true that a person like Watson is very well placed to inspire people who may still be labouring under the weight of stereotypes regarding feminism, and that is undoubtedly cause for celebration. I applaud her for being brave enough to speak out when so many others haven’t. But feminists have been battling these stereotypes for decades and we will almost certainly be battling them for years to come because the unfortunate truth is that gender inequality is about power – who has it, and who wants to retain it. No amount of window dressing (for that is surely what the HeForShe campaign amounts to, given its entire breadth seems to be asking men to click a button and download a twibbon) is going to change the systemic global oppression that results in women’s degradation, subjugation and death in persistently high numbers. And it isn’t, as some have suggested, ‘tearing another woman down’ to want to discuss that reality.”

 

To which, as a “He”, I am happy to stand and say to that particular “She”:

 

“Right-on Sister!”

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Saturday, 28 November 2015.

Victimisers On Parade: National Demonstrates Why It’s Unfit To Govern A Decent Country.

Look Who's Talking! Michelle Boag, accuses the Opposition women MPs who staged a walk-out from Parliament, in protest at the Prime Minister accusing them of "backing rapists", of "parading their victimhood". Coming from a former president of New Zealand's victimisers-in-chief - the National Party - this is pretty hard to swallow!

 

“PARADING THEIR VICTIMHOOD” is how PR maven and former National Party President Michelle Boag characterised Wednesday’s walk-out by Opposition women MPs. Justifying her lack of sororal solidarity, Boag, explained that: “Every other woman in New Zealand who’s been the subject of a sexual assault doesn’t get the opportunity to do that. They weren’t saying, ‘Look, if you've had these issues, here are all the people you can go to for help’, they were standing up and saying, ‘Poor me’.”

 

This is, of course, no justification at all, merely an attempt to divert attention from the behaviour of the Prime Minister and the parliamentary protest it inspired. The Green Party and Labour Party women who rose to take offence at John Key’s accusation that they were “backing rapists” – some of whom had their microphones turned off by the Speaker and were ordered from the debating chamber – are members of the House of Representatives. And that is precisely what they were doing. They were representing all those women outraged by the Prime Minister’s willingness to tap into the dreadfulness of rape for no better purpose than to score points off and distract his political opponents.

 

As Boag, herself, reminds us, not every victim of sexual assault gets the opportunity to do that. Or, as Green Party List MP, Jan Logie, put it: “We used what we could as representatives of others in the country to point out that to him, as a leader, he needs to take responsibility for his actions and their consequences on others.”

 

Rather than pouring scorn on the women from the Opposition, Boag should have been upbraiding her sisters in the National Party for not having the courage to join the Opposition women’s protest. Then again, perhaps the National women were happy to go along with their party leader’s cynical exploitation of such emotionally-charged words as “rapist”, “murderer” and “child-molester” to distract the nation from their government’s failure to adequately defend the rights of New Zealanders detained in Australia’s concentration camps.

 

Perhaps, if New Zealand was blessed with a Women’s Minister who was happy to describe herself as a feminist, a mass walk-out of all women MPs might have been the result. Perhaps, if the last two Ministers for Social Development, both of them women, had been willing to educate their male colleagues about the endless, wearing, anxiety of being a woman without resources or influence, with two or three children to house, feed, educate and keep healthy on a Sole Parent Support benefit of $295.37 per week, there would have been no need.

 

Because then, their empathy aroused, those National Party men would not have been willing to countenance any reduction in the monies allocated to Rape Crisis Centres and Women’s Refuges. Nor would these compassionate conservatives have tolerated for a moment a Police Commissioner who was unwilling to impress upon his senior officers the unequivocal legal and moral obligation to prosecute any young man who intoxicates, violates, and humiliates on-line, any young woman.

 

Knowing how committed his male colleagues were to addressing New Zealand’s appalling record of domestic and sexual violence, the Prime Minister would then have understood that accusing the men and women of the Opposition of supporting rapists, murderers and child-molesters was tantamount to announcing his intention of instantly surrendering the office of Prime Minister to someone more protective of its worth and dignity.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Friday, 13 November 2015.

Of Messengers And Messages: Reflections On Rachel Smalley's Controversial Column.

Greater Gender Balance Equals Greater Diversity? Well, yes, Rachel Smalley, but only in relation to gender - a factor which in no way guarantees a diversity of viewpoints. And it is, surely, the messages which are carried on the nation’s airwaves that matter most – not the gender of the broadcasters who carry them?

 

IT WAS ONE of the most “respectable” of the Suffragette arguments. Give women the vote. Allow them to stand for Parliament. Make them ministers – even prime ministers – and society will be transformed. The mere presence of women in the halls of power (respectable women, that is, because powerful men and disreputable women have never been far apart) can only soften the raw masculinity of the political process and usher in a more caring, a more productive, and – most importantly – a more peaceful world.

 

All nonsense, of course. No sooner was war declared in 1914, than the leader of the British suffragettes, Emmeline Pankhurst, and her ambitious eldest daughter, Christabel, were up on the nearest platform, loudly urging every able-bodied British male to enlist in the great fight for King and Country. From chaining themselves to railings, the Pankhurst’s impressive army of suffragettes were swiftly redeployed to handing out white feathers to any young man not in uniform. When it came to mass slaughter, the female of the species was determined to prove herself no less deadly than the male.

 

Or, even deadlier. Because, once again, when women did become prime ministers (be it Israel’s Golda Meir, India’s Indira Ghandi, or Britain’s Margaret Thatcher) they did not show themselves to be one whit less willing to unleash fire and death than their male counterparts. (As anyone familiar with the careers of Boudica, Isabella de Valois, Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great could confidently have predicted!)

 

Old news, one might say. But, one would be wrong. Because no matter how many times it is knocked down, the argument that women, simply by being there, or by virtue of some magical essence peculiar to the female of the species, will make an important difference to the way everything from corporations to cabinets are run, keeps popping right back up again.

 

The argument’s latest protagonist is the broadcaster Rachel Smalley, who used the occasion of John Campbell’s appointment as Radio NZ-National’s new drive show host to lament the preponderance of male voices on prime time radio.

 

“The perspective a male host takes into an interview is often very, very different to that of a woman”, wrote Smalley, in her column on the Newstalk-ZB webpage. “The perspective any of these hosts take into an interview about domestic abuse, sexual violence, or funding cuts to women’s refuge will be very different to mine.”

 

Really? I would have thought that, on any issue, a journalist’s perspective – male or female – would be determined by their willingness to set aside stereotypes and prejudices and allow their professional judgement to be guided by the evidence on offer. And isn’t their personal response to domestic abuse and sexual violence as likely to be determined by their capacity for empathy as their gender? After all, it was a male, David Cunliffe, who told a women’s refuge conference that the statistics relating to sexual violence made him “sorry to be a man”. By no means all the people who pilloried him for that comment were men.

 

Indeed, Smalley’s assumptions regarding the positions a male journalist is likely to take on everything from paid parental leave, to aid for victims of the wars in the Middle East, might, themselves, be characterised as examples of sexist prejudice. Do fathers have no stake in the quantum of paid parental leave? Do journalists like Robert Fisk, and our own Jon Stephenson, not risk their lives to bring the stories of the victims of war to the world?

 

Smalley’s argument would have been a great deal stronger if she had couched it in terms of ideological, rather than gender, diversity. The problem with prime-time radio in New Zealand is not a preponderance of male voices, but of right-wing voices. It is, surely, the messages which are carried on the nation’s airwaves that matter most – not the gender of the broadcasters who carry them?

 

Mary Wilson (the broadcaster John Campbell is about to replace on week-nights between 5:00 and 7:00pm) will soon be playing a major role in shaping the messages coming out of Radio NZ-National. Reality TV suprema, Julie Christie, already plays a very similar role at MediaWorks.

 

Now, ask yourself: Are the radically different messages carried by these women’s respective networks more likely to be the product of their makers’ gender – or their politics?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of 10 August 2015.

Going Backwards: Table Talk 2 At Ika Seafood Bar and Grill, Tuesday, 19 May 2015.

Generation Why? While the next generation confronts History's camera, a young woman studies the programme of the last United Women's Convention to be held in New Zealand. (Hamilton, 1979) Thirty-six years later, the revolutionary fervour of Feminism's second wave seems impossibly remote - especially when viewed from the Neoliberal culture of contemporary New Zealand society. (Photo by Marti Friedlander)

 

“BUT WE’RE GOING BACKWARDS!” Came the anguished cry from the table in the corner. Amidst all the sororal warmth generated by Amanda Bailey’s pulled ponytail, the speaker’s uncompromising judgement arrived like a blast of cold air from the world outside. A necessary corrective to the perky inclusiveness of the many Third and Fourth Wave feminists in the audience. The women seated at the corner table had been present at the birth of Second Wave feminism in New Zealand. It lent their intervention a special force.
 

As a bloke, I did not consider it my place to enter into the public phase of “Beneath the Ponytail: Women. Work. Progress?” – the second of Ika Seafood Bar and Grill’s “Table Talks”. No matter how many times the panel (Human Rights EEO Commissioner, Dr Jackie Blue; Senior Lecturer at University of Auckland, Dr Michelle Dickinson; First Union Secretary, Maxine Gay; and Labour Party List MP, Jacinda Ardern) reiterated the view that men-can-be-feminists-too, I still recall Second Wave feminists arguing that the best thing men can contribute to discussions about feminism is their silence.
 

Effective political memories (with the obvious exception of those gathered around the table in the corner) were in rather short supply on Tuesday night (19/5/15). Poor Jackie Blue admitted to being a young university student at the time of “Women’s Liberation” and missing the whole thing! (Although, to her credit, she is rapidly making up the lost time.) Maxine Gay, by contrast, who has been a fighter on the feminist barricades since the 1970s and 80s, was for some reason reluctant to acquaint the twenty-somethings present with the often brutal history of liberal versus socialist versus lesbian separatist versus cultural feminism. Inclusiveness was not a conspicuous virtue of the Second Wave.
 

Dr Michelle Dickinson’s (aka “Nanogirl”) contribution commenced with the bleak news that although the numbers of young women entering the sciences has been rising, the number who actually make use of their scientific training (especially in Dr Dickinson’s own field of engineering) remains worryingly small.
 

Significantly, the only viable route out of this situation was deemed to be through the good offices of sympathetic business leaders – most of whom are, predictably, men. A number of these individuals were mentioned, and it would be churlish to disparage their efforts in any way. But the fact remains that it is now only in the business world; only in the place where the values of the marketplace reign supreme; that womankind’s quest for full sexual equality is being realistically contextualised. Grasp that, and the full extent of feminism’s retreat is made apparent.
 

It took the Labour List MP, Jacinda Ardern, to spell out the consequences of this depressing reversal. Paired with National’s Nicky Kaye in what was called “The Battle of the Babes” for Auckland Central, Ardern was faced with a hard choice. Either, take offence at the blatantly sexist framing of the contest and forever afterwards be stereotyped as a humourless feminist harridan. Or, by taking it in good part, risk being dismissed as Labour’s bimbo. Quite rightly, she reasoned that the latter stereotype would be more easily overcome than the former and played along. More than 30 years after Helen Clark poured out her heart to a female journalist about the extreme sexism she’d encountered in the male-dominated Parliament of the 1980s, Ardern’s testimony made me wonder exactly how much has really changed.
 

Indeed the whole evening’s discussion – ably chaired by TV3’s Lisa Owen – had about it a decidedly self-referential quality. Just as it had on the occasion of the first “Table Talk” – about the beleaguered (now cancelled) Campbell Live – the Ika Seafood Bar and Grill had turned into a large left-wing echo-chamber. I got the strong impression that only the women at the corner table understood that the evening’s discussion – for all its undoubted passion and sincerity – was taking place in the belly of the beast: a monster whose ideological victory was as complete as it was unacknowledged.
 

As the Australian sociologist and feminist Professor Raewyn Connell puts it in her paper “Understanding Neoliberalism”:
 

“With a few exceptions neoliberal leadership is composed of men. It’s treasured figure, ‘the entrepreneur,’ is culturally coded masculine. Its assault on the welfare state redistributes income from women to men and imposes more unpaid work on women as carers for the young, the old, and the sick. Its attack on ‘political correctness’ and its rollback of affirmative action specifically undermine the gains of feminism. In such ways, neoliberalism from the 1980s on offered middle-class men an indirect but effective solution to the delegitimation of patriarchy and the threat of real gender equality.”
 

The young women who joined in “Beneath the Ponytail: Women. Work. Progress?”, so inclusive in their definitions of feminism, but, at the same time, so concerned to escape the shaming label of “feminazi” that men of all generations are so quick to pin upon them, seemed to bear out Professor Connell’s bleak observation.
 

Was that what the Second Wavers at the corner table sensed also? That the push-back had somehow been reversed? That the enormous sense of empowerment, of emancipatory élan, that had characterised the feminist revolution of the 1970s and 80s, had, without anyone really noticing, been subsumed in something much, much larger?
 

It’s not as if the many gains of the Second Wave have been rolled back – not at all – but rather that, in some ill-defined way, they no longer matter. As if all the changes that were extracted with so much pain and effort could only ever have worked in a more caring, just and equitable world – the world which a triumphantly masculine Neoliberal Revolution long ago destroyed.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday 23 May 2015.

Rescuing Us Right Back: Further Reflections On The Roastbusters Scandal

Rescuing Each Other: Between them, the early medieval troubadours and their aristocratic patronesses of Southern France created a new and enduring cultural style: the Ideal of Courtly Love. For a thousand years in the West it has been possible to like and respect women, seek out and enjoy their company, heed their advice – and still be considered a man.

 

THEY CAME FROM THE SOUTH, wandering the rough roads and sweeping beaches of Aquitaine. Bringing with them all the news and scandal of the day and singing long strange tales to the rhythm of a tabor and the ripples of a harp. They were the troubadours: half journalists, half rock-stars; and wholly welcome in the castle-based culture of Southern France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

 

As often as not those castles were ruled by women. With their lords far away, settling old feudal scores; or even further afield, crusading in the Holy Land; these ladies found themselves temporary matriarchs. They may have been ruling over men in their husband’s name, but they were ruling nonetheless.

 

Out of these two – the troubadours and the matriarchs – emerged a new cultural style that was to influence the relationship between the sexes for centuries to come: the ideal of courtly love; chivalry; romanticism.

 

Powerfully influenced by the sparkling cultures of Islamic Spain and Sicily, this new cultural style was aimed directly at the uncouth brutality of the fiercely patriarchal societies of Northern Europe. From across the Pyrenees the troubadours brought glimpses of a world where manhood was not defined entirely by the violent assertion of power and control, but by how completely he was able to enter the life of the mind. To read, to write, to make music, to patronise beauty and knowledge: these were accomplishments of which men could also be proud. Yes, and women, too.

 

Women were the key, the means by which a feudal brute could be transformed into a courteous knight. The Ideal of Courtly Love challenged men to seek out and savour all the qualities that a warrior culture despises: tenderness, vulnerability, longing, patience, generosity and sacrifice.

 

Patriarchy rejects these emotions precisely because they are the qualities it associates most closely with the world of women. Were men to open themselves to these experiences, then interaction between the sexes would at once become both more intelligible and more equal, and the rigid barriers of patriarchy would crumble.

 

It was this, the revolutionary potential of courtly love, that inspired Eleanor of Aquitaine (Queen to both the King of France and of England) and her daughter, Marie, the Countess of Champagne, to champion courtly love throughout the courts of Europe. Aristocratic feminists they may have been (did serfs even have feelings?) but the cultural style which they and their troubadour propagandists promoted has, over the intervening millennium, become a defining motif of Western culture.

 

For a thousand years in the West it has been possible to like and respect women, seek out and enjoy their company, heed their advice – and still be considered a man.

 

Modern feminists tend to give the Ideal of Courtly Love short shrift. Queen Eleanor and her troubadours have largely been denounced for “putting women on a pedestal” which, according to their latter-day sisters, confers upon women an entirely spurious superiority, rather than the equality that is theirs by right. “Benevolent” sexism chivalrous behaviour may be, but it’s still sexism.

 

In a week during which New Zealand women have become acquainted with all the gut-wrenching details of malevolent sexism, feminism’s swift dismissal of chivalry’s benevolence surely warrants reconsideration? The narrative of courtly love may have been a literary, historical and sociological fiction, but it provided men with a model of “the perfect knight” they could become. By the rules of chivalry, honour and virtue were the consequence of neither a man’s genealogy, nor his wealth, but of his character. A man attained honour by the virtue of his choices.

 

Where was honour and virtue among the Roastbusters? In a room full of young men made brutes by the fictions of pornography, isn’t it tragic that not even one boy was raised on the fictions of chivalry? Not one young man who, perceiving the evil intent of his companions, recognised damsels in distress and chose to become their perfect knight? Not one 17-year-old boy who chose to, in Matthew Hooton’s anguished father’s appeal to shock-jocks Willie Jackson and John Tamihere: “look after them and get them home safely”?

 

For all stories have power. As the Canadian producers of a documentary looking into the sexualisation of young women revealed, a huge number of girls are still raised on the fictions of the Disney Corporation. Encouraged to see themselves as little princesses, they grow up expecting their very own Prince Charming.

 

Sadly, their brothers grow up with very different expectations. Rather than draw inspiration from the chivalrous deeds of King Arthur and his Knights, they revel in the murders and rapes depicted in Game of Thrones.

 

Perhaps Queen Eleanor and the troubadours were right: in a world of brutal exploitation and violence, men must be encouraged to rescue women. So that women, in their turn, can rescue us right back.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, November 12, 2013.