Recreating Sexual Politics (Routledge Revivals)

Men, Feminism and Politics

Victor Seidler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415570893
• eBook ISBN: 9781135156282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This thought-provoking book, first published in 1991, examines sexual politics in a world which is being radically changed by the challenges of feminism. Seidler explores how men have responded to feminism, and the contradictory feelings men have towards dominant forms of masculinity.

Seidler's stimulating and original analysis of social and political theory connects personally to everyday issues in people's lives. It reflects the growing importance of sexual and personal politics within contemporary politics and culture, and demonstrates clearly the challenge that feminism brings to our inherited forms of morality, politics and sexuality.

1
Introduction
Identity, politics and experience

POLITICS AND VISION

In the last twenty years there has been a growing sense of the importance of sexual and personal politics. These questions have become central within contemporary politics and culture. People have learnt to take up quite different and challenging positions but within a shared sense of the crucial importance of these issues themselves. This is equally true on the political Right where issues of family, sexuality and morality have become critical. It could be said that Thatcherism in England and Reaganism in the United States took the initiative in moral and political issues that the traditional Left had too long marginalised as unimportant. These concerns were to be articulated within a Right libertarian language of rights and choice that was to provide a challenge to the statist conceptions on the Left. There is a growing feeling that socialism has to be redefined if it is to be able to make its own a concern with freedom, equality and community. It is important to learn from how the language of freedom was appropriated.

For many, the ascendancy of the libertarian Right in British and American politics in the 1980s was in large part an understandable reaction to the excesses and permissiveness represented by the 1960s. People look back with cynicism or with nostalgia but there has been little attempt to share some of the insight, enthusiasm and understandings of that time. And yet we still live in a very different world, partly because of the impact of those times. The attempts to bring the personal and political together in contemporary feminist struggles, in local government politics and in the peace and ecology movements, all have their source in the 1960s. This is equally true of the growth of vegetarianism, animal rights movements and the growing interest in alternative medicines and health care. These concerns are no longer the exclusive concern of the libertarian Left but have become central issues for mainstream thought and politics.

I want to set up some of the guiding ideas of the 1960s so as to begin a fuller dialogue between the generations and a clearer evaluation of those times. Too often we take these times for granted as the shared experience of a political generation. It is long overdue for this discussion to be opened up so that people can engage with these ideas and concerns for themselves in the very different political climate we live in now. This is not simply of historical interest, for it helps reveal the source of tensions and concerns within contemporary culture and politics. This should be part of redefining the nature of freedom, democracy and justice in critical relationship to the challenges of feminism and sexual politics, rather than seeking for a renewal of socialist theory and politics in a return to a pre-1968 consensus.

In the 1990s, we need to think about politics again. We need to rediscover its meaning if socialism is to become a meaningful tradition. This means asking basic questions. It means learning from the movements that have developed since the 1960s. This needs to be a collective project. It involves learning to share an experience so that different generations on the Left can begin to learn from each other. I want to show how this involves grasping the ambivalence of the politics of this period, seeing that whilst at one level it laid the foundations for the emergence of contemporary radical movements, at the same time it sustained a vision of politics grounded in will and determination. This vision was fed by a bourgeois inheritance and a particular form of masculine identity.

The year 1968 was a watershed. It released enormous energies and insight. I remember the excitement of the times. You could feel that the world was going to change. It became difficult to capture this feeling in the economic and social crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Thatcherism gained an astounding victory. It was able to take an important moral and political initiative. It seemed to promise individual freedom and control. It grasped the deep disillusionment with socialism which had come to be identified with bureaucracy and red tape. The pragmatic politics of the Labour Party had simply served to dig its own grave. It had demanded the sacrifices of working-class people but could no longer promise to provide the economic and social benefits that had become an integral aspect of social democratic politics.¹

In the 1980s we are confronting new social and political realities. The different movements such as feminism, the gay and lesbian movement, ecology and Green politics which have emerged since the 1960s have each, in their own way, reflected this new reality. They offer us new insights about the making of socialism. These have still to be integrated into our political understanding. In the mid-1970s there was a decisive turn against the hopes and aspirations of 1960s politics. This was understandable given all the dashed hopes and disappointments. We needed a broader historical and theoretical vision and understanding. Unfortunately, this turn to theory in terms of an interest in Althusser and structuralist Marxism, often meant that people had denied their own experience and understanding, even with the intensive community and industrial politics that had taken place in this time. Whatever understanding this rediscovery of theory brought, it did not make it easier to learn from the different movements which had emerged. In many ways it seemed to make this kind of learning more difficult.²

POLITICS AND UNREALITY

In 1968 I was a graduate student. I was frustrated with the abstractness of my thinking and feeling. The student movement offered me a different sense of involvement and participation. It gave me a sense of the meaningfulness of collective practice. We could get together and we could change things. We could affect the quality of our education through challenging the social relations of power we had taken for granted within education. I could change my relationship to the social world. I got a different sense of the relationship between theory and practice. I remember watching the events in Paris on the TV. They showed that modern capitalism was not the kind of stable castle that we were brought up to accept. A different reality could be brought into existence.

We were asking basic questions. Whose values? What was a relevant education? What was worth learning about? Knowledge could no longer simply be accepted as a commodity that we were accumulating. There was a different understanding in the air. Knowledge was to be related to understanding. It was to help us grasp our experience within the social world we had been brought up to take very much for granted. This was not simply a question of what we learnt. It was also a matter of the relationships of teaching and learning. These could no longer be incidental.

There was a recognition of the difference between different kinds of learning. We wanted to learn for ourselves. We knew that this would make a difference to the kinds of lives we would live. In this way, learning became threatening. It challenged our sense of ourselves and our assumptions about the social world we lived in. It was because we could not believe what politicians and teachers were saying about the war in Vietnam that we had to learn for ourselves. We learnt that the forms of learning implicitly embodied and reproduced particular values. If we wanted to challenge these values, then we had to challenge these forms of learning. We had to discover different ways of learning, which meant challenging traditional styles of academic argument. It was not simply a matter of the confrontation of disembodied ideas.

Another aspect of this was the feeling that we only exist through others. We live in the image of others. There is the common experience of feeling that you are a different person with different people. Our individuality seems to lack a centre. We can easily experience ourselves as fragmented, as existing in separate pieces that seem to have very little relationship with each other. This was a reality that we seemed to be living with in bureaucratic capitalism. There was little that could help us understand this experience. Often these feelings had to be kept to ourselves since they did not fit with what was presented to us as the prevailing social reality. It was within the new movements that these experiences could be identified and named. In part this fragmentation accounted for Laing and Cooper’s popularity, in that they seemed to be saying something important about the everyday reality of life in the society we lived in. They seemed to recognise a reality that conventional knowledge and understanding dismissed.³

We began to question competitiveness and individual ambition. It was felt that people could only prove themselves through putting other people down. The education system was organised in a way to foster these kinds of invidious comparisons and to make people feel worthless if they did not succeed. Against this there was a recognition of the importance of people’s relationships with each other, as an area of life in which meaning was to be sought. We began to value our relationships with each other and to question a society which readily subordinated human relationships to the search for profit and individual ambition.

We began to recognise the ways in which competitiveness worked to undermine our relationships with others. We felt that more equal relationships would be meaningful because each of us would feel validated and confirmed in our own individual experience. Laing’s work helped us to feel the validity of our individual experience. This helped us discern the ways in which we felt systematically undermined and invalidated through the social relations of capitalist society and led us to challenge competitive institutions because of the quality of human relationships they fostered. If there was a risk of becoming moralistic and even rhetorical, the emerging politics nevertheless held insights into the changing quality of relationships in the larger society.

There was a prevailing feeling, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, of the ‘unreality’ of life. You would often hear people say ‘I feel unreal’, ‘Nothing seems to be real to me.’ This was related to the quality of individual lives within monopoly capitalism. Hard work and effort had lost their meaning. They had been overtaken by the everyday reality of working in a bureaucratic organisation. Work had become simply a question of obeying the rules of the organisation. A tension emerged between the replaceability of people in the work process and people’s sense of their own individuality. The social relations of bureaucratic life seemed to drain our lives of whatever meaning and significance they might otherwise have had.

POLITICS AND EXPERIENCE

Politics and experience were brought into relationship with each other as we learnt the value of individual experience. It was an axiom of the 1960s that we mattered equally. This was to go beyond the liberal idea of the equal respect that was owed to all. If it was sometimes confused with an unrealistic notion that we all have the same capacities and abilities and should all be able to learn different skills equally, the belief in the equal significance of people nevertheless helped to strengthen our confidence in ourselves. This was part of a challenge to the hierarchical division between mental and manual labour, and part of developing a fuller conception of human equality.

We realised that it was important to be able to develop both mental and manual skills. This was part of a developing sense of what it means to grow and develop as an individual, and is an example of how personal experience can be grasped as political. It was also a rejection of the workings of competitive institutions which made us feel that we should not attempt to learn to do something unless we were going to be good at it—better than others. This simply worked to undermine people’s sense of themselves and made them feel incapable and worthless. We became aware of the workings of the Protestant ethic, not only within capitalism but within a socialist theory and practice that was often blind to its own cultural inheritance. This was not understood abstractly but in its bearings upon our everyday experience and relationships.

But this was also a challenge to liberal democratic political theory. It questioned the notion that competitiveness would bring out the best in individuals and help us develop our full capacities and abilities. There was a recognition of the ways hierarchical and competitive institutions threatened to undermine democracy and democratic institutions, as well as the hopes and aspirations of liberal political theory. Crucially, it did not help people believe in themselves; rather, it fostered, if unwittingly, the idea that some people are better, or more important, than others. It worked to make us feel inadequate and incompetent and so was at odds with, and even undermined, the democratic ideal of everyone having equal, if different, contributions to make. So we learnt that our conception of democracy had to go beyond formal conceptions of representative democracy and a language of individual rights, to be related to a sense of individual experience fostering a sense of individual validity and value.

The challenge to liberal theory also involved challenging the distinction between the public and the private. It could no longer be thought that the private realm could be loving and supportive while the public realm was competitive. We had to learn to think about the quality of people’s experience, which involved thinking about both the public and the private and finding ways of relating them. It was recognised that the family could work as an oppressive institution, especially for women and children. Private and personal relationships were also relationships of power and subordination. They were not simply relationships of love. Rather the quality and meaningfulness of these emotional relationships could only be fully grasped if we understood them also as relationships of power and dependency. This involved a recognition of the personal as political. It threatened our conception that politics was what happened in the public world. There was also a politics of everyday life and of personal relationships.⁴

Liberal theory had prevented us from thinking about this seriously. It encouraged us to think that our personal lives were ‘free’ because they were simply areas of individual decision and resolve, and that institutions of representative democracy gave people freedom and control over their public lives through the legal and political rights they are guaranteed as citizens. This vision was to be challenged.⁵ We were forced to recognise a tension between formal and substantial conceptions of freedom and that, whatever the rhetoric, we did not have effective control over our lives. Just as workers did not have power over the organisation of their work, students had little control over the character and organisation of their education. The notion of ‘control’ became important as the desire to connect freedom to the control of different areas of our lives was conceived. This involved an implicit challenge to the moral and political theory of liberalism.

There was a developing understanding that personal change involved developing different kinds of relationships with others and so a challenge to prevailing liberal conceptions of individualism and individuality. There was a recogmtion of the importance of developing more egalitarian relations with others as part of the critique of personal relationships as ‘possessive’. Different kinds of relationship between people were imagined in which people would be able to learn to relate to each other more equally. Distributive conceptions of justice were brought into question as we realised it was not simply a matter of making sure that people were earning the same. Rather, we needed more concern for the quality of human relationships. This was not something easily achieved, but had to be learnt through people being more open and honest in their feelings and responses to each other. In this way, it was grasped that personal change involved the support and criticism of others. We need others to change, and it is through developing different kinds of relations with others that change is made possible. So conceptions of personal change had to be firmly grounded in social relations.

As it turned out, we had a very optimisticmany would now say naïve - conception of personal change. We tended to think that it would follow more or less automatically, as long as we were open and honest. We tended to think that the mere fact of living collectively and so reorganising the social relations we lived in, would bring about important changes in the kind of persons we were, through giving us an experience of relating differently to others. But the experience of this period can still help us think more creatively about different conceptions of personal and social change that have often remained implicit within the socialist movement. At one level it can help us question the liberal idea that we can change through acts of will and determination alone. It also challenges an orthodox Marxism which would assume that once the economic organisation was transformed, other social and personal changes would follow more or less automatically.

THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL

Within the Black movement and the student movement there was a language of power and liberation that went beyond liberal notions of guaranteeing certain legal and political rights, however important these are. A different and challenging conception of the forms of politics was taking place in the 1960s, which still resonates in contemporary culture. This involved connecting the personal with the political, the everyday reality of our individual experience with the larger structures of power and subordination. It was a struggle to redefine our inherited liberal conceptions of freedom and equality as people sought to live a more human life within a society that was more clearly identified as oppressive and unjust. So, initially within the Black Power movement in the US, there was an awareness of the connection between one’s identity and consciousness as a black person and one’s oppression and powerlessness within the larger society.

Black people had to learn to value their experience, culture and history as black people. This was recognised as an aspect of the struggle against oppression and integral to defining the possibilities of freedom. This involved people both individually and collectively learning to redefine an experience and history that had so often been degraded and diminished within the larger society. It meant developing a different sense of self and involved a process of personal and individual change. Others could not go through these changes for you, however important they could be for you, which meant that individuality could never be subordinated to an abstract collectivity. In a very real sense, you had to make these connections for yourself; so a process of consciousnessraising became extremely important within the women’s movement and gay liberation movement as well as within the movements for sexual politics more generally.

This redefinition of politics involved a new grasp of the relationship of individuals to the larger society, as it was built around an understanding of the conceptions of freedom and oppression. Capitalist society brings us up to think of ourselves as individuals with a unique set of qualities and abilities. It teaches us that we are responsible for the quality and meaningfulness of our individual lives and that, if we are unhappy or miserable, then we have only ourselves to blame.⁶ If we do not like the kind of life we have, then we should have worked harder at school, or else we just do not have the abilities and capacities to achieve more in our lives. This is the way in which we come to validate our experience within a liberal moral culture.

We inherit a conception of freedom as non-interference by others and a vision of equality as t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Male orders
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction: Identity, politics and experience
• 2: Consciousness-raising
• 3: Feminism
• 4: Self-denial
• 5: Morality
• 6: Emotional life
• 7: Work
• 8: Violence
• 9: Fascism
• 10: Therapy
• 11: Politics
• 12: Conclusion: Recreating politics—socialism, feminism and ecology
• Notes
• Bibliography