Why does the Left not call out its patriarchy?

One of the enduring points of tension between feminists and Marxists, has been over gender, violence and sexuality

WrittenBy:PK Vijayan
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Recently, on a popular social media forum, I was witness to an abusive exchange between a man and a woman. OK, you might say, but online abuse is almost as old as the internet — so what’s new? The difference was that it was between two supposedly ‘progressive’ people: the woman, a professed feminist; and the man presumably a ‘communist’. Being “progressive” has usually included ‘progressing’ beyond being abusive. So what happened in this case?

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Apparently the woman invited the man’s wrath by posting a quote from Susan Brownmiller, essentially accusing the American Communist Party (ACP) of protecting rapists. According to Brownmiller, the ACP was as patriarchal as any in its inherent prejudice against women who allege rape, especially against men from weaker sections – a white woman against a black man, in the particular case she cited.

The man who responded to her rightly saw the allegation against the ACP as an attack on communism per se, given the Brownmiller quote also targeted Lenin. His response though was peculiar, to say the least. He accused the woman of being a sexually frustrated, misguided feminist who needed a good lover as well as psychiatric help.

So what brought this on?

One of the enduring points of tension between feminists and Marxists (of whichever hues, respectively) has been the persistent refusal by the latter to engage with issues of gender and sexuality as concerns in their own right. So also with caste, race, religion, ethnicity, etc.. But as most feminists and many Marxists will themselves vouchsafe, the resistance is strongest with questions of gender and sexuality (in fact, resistance to these is evident in other politics too, those based on caste, religion, race, etc., but that’s a whole other story….).

The source of this tension lies in the dogmatic tenet held by many Marxists that a classless society – which is the ultimate objective of most Marxisms – will automatically eradicate all other social ills. Consequently, focusing on any social problem other than the eradication of class is to be trapped in false consciousness, and to be distracted from the only real battle.

Fairly innocuous, as beliefs go, and not incorrect, insofar as the inequalities expressed in ‘class’ cannot – and should not – sustain in any society worth striving for. Even the simplistic refusal to acknowledge the range of other inequities and exploitations, that work along the lines of gender, sex, race, caste, etc., is more tiresome than troubling.

The problem arises when some of these issues are seen in the practice of Marxist politics itself. They – somewhat unnervingly, I suppose, for the dogmatic Marxist – give the lie to the firmly-held belief, that these apparently secondary social problems will disappear with class. If the purportedly de-classed Marxist, striving for a classless world, is himself (and I use the gender deliberately) seen to practise these other forms of inequality and exploitation, he becomes living proof of the fallibility of his own tenet.

When this is pointed out though, denial rises high, and the reactions can be sharp – particularly in the case of gender discrimination and/or sexual violence – as was evident in this incident.

There are many complex dynamics of power and disempowerment at work here, which (for lack of space) I will address another time. For now, I want to look at the implications of the man’s furious response. It is not only that all communists are inherently free of bias, but that women who say otherwise are psychiatric cases, in need of sex to curb their “feminist tantrums” (his words). Not only is he the living proof I mentioned earlier, he also serves as exemplar par excellence of a pervasive male attitude to sex in general. His suggestion that women can and should be controlled through sex is in fact the principle at the heart of rape, because rape is about exactly that: exercising power over women through (violent) sex.

This instrumental perception about sex hides another, sadder truth: it serves to overcome the moral disapprobation in a lot of cultures about sexual desire. Basically, if sex is about discipline (when it’s not about reproduction), then (men’s predatory) desire is really just another social function. It is the very laudable desire to discipline the errant shrew, and not about that nasty dangerous thing called sexual pleasure, which your culture forbids you from enjoying.
This is not to say that “all men are always like this only”. It is merely to point out that the ultimate goal of achieving a just society cannot afford simplistic formulas. Nor can it ignore the many ways in which the most apparently salutary of motives can hide worms of the most execrably nasty kind. And mostly, the pursuit of a just society cannot ignore the question of the pursuit of just pleasures.

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