Meghan Murphy’s F-Word Interview with Sheila Jeffreys, 10 April 2011
Excerpt from ‘Where have all the radicals gone?’, broadcast on rabble.ca in 2011 and available to listen to here:
http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/f-word/2011/04/where-have-all-radicals-gone-when-feminism-gets-moderate
This interview is about an hour long and covers many topics, so I have added subheadings for ease of reference. Because it was an interview conducted by phone, the sound quality isn’t brilliant and therefore I had difficulty making out a few words: I’ve indicated any inaudible words in the transcript below. Thankfully there are few instances of this and the overall meaning is still clear.
Contents
[transcript]
[Why radical feminism is misunderstood]
MM: I’ve noticed that a lot of radical feminists, a lot of well known radical feminists, have spent much of their time and energy in their lives and continue to spend much of their energy simply trying to dispute and clarify misinformation about their beliefs and about their work, one obvious example being Andrea Dworkin who continues to be misquoted and misrepresented over and over and over again. I imagine that you’ve experienced this as well and I’m wondering why it is from your perspective that radical feminism has been so deeply misunderstood and misquoted and misinterpreted.
SJ: Yes, I think one reason is that radical feminism questions things that are so deeply understood as assumed within heteropatriarchal society that they almost cannot be understood, and so for instance Andrea Dworkin is always quoted as saying that all PIV sexual intercourse is rape, which is not precisely what she said, and I’m now being quoted on the internet as saying precisely the same thing, which is certainly not precisely what I said. So I think it’s because both of us have criticised the construction of PIV sex as what sex is under male domination, and we have criticised the harmful effects upon women of that practice and we’ve said that it’s not really in women’s interests – and that is so extraordinary, that is so out of the blue in a heteropatriarchal context that it cannot be understood. The criticism can’t be understood and therefore it has to be that we are somehow loonies. I think that’s one reason and that would go for a lot of the other things we say as well, for instance, transgender is a big issue at the moment – I might say a little more about that in a moment. I’m accused of being transphobic for instance when I’m actually criticising the social construction of transgenderism, or even saying it’s socially constructed. Because some things become so accepted and so normalized that they cannot be criticised without people thinking that you must actually be mad or recovering from a mental health problem yourself, because of course a phobia is about some kind of irrational hatred.
I think there may be other reasons – I think for radical feminists being badly misunderstood, I mean there’s stuff on the internet about me having beaten people up in public places, which is kind of extraordinary because I never havelaid a finger upon anybody. I think sometimes that’s because people are aware of the sort of things that I argue, and then in some situations they feel perturbed because my arguments may seem to make sense but they’re involved in doing things very different from that, and therefore I act as some kind of – I dunno – some kind of conscience in their minds and therefore they sort of invent me and invent me doing all kinds of things which is rather strange. It’s the only way I can begin to understand that. I’ve even apparently made extraordinary visitations at various places that I never even appeared at, and it seems to have been imputed to me that I’ve said to people at those events – because they’re things that people feel slightly anxious about I think, so it is very strange.
MM: Yeah, strange and frustrating –
SJ: It is pretty frustrating – I’ve just had to get used to the fact now that all sorts of things are said about me as they are about any other radical feminists who speak out – you have to accept that you’ve lost control of who you are and your image and sense of self, on the internet that’s certainly true. I just hope that there’s enough people with good sense to be able to work their way through that, that’s all I can hope for.
MM: Yeah I mean that happens even to me online as a blogger and as someone who podcasts and talks regularly about radical feminism and I just can’t imagine having to deal with the extent of that which you have to deal with. I’m wondering if you could maybe elaborate a little bit more – I’m glad that you brought up the issue around transphobia because it is something that radical feminists are constantly being accused of and it’s not accurate for the most part, I’m wondering if you could speak to that a little more.
SJ: Well it’s hard to be accurate since radical feminist challenges and criticisms to transgenderism as a practice are nothing to do with an irrational hatred of that practice, therefore transphobia cannot have any meaning – transphobia’s like arachnophobia, an irrational hatred of spiders (I actually quite like spiders) – so, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Attaching ‘-phobia’ to the end of something is a way of trying to traduce and make seem mad anybody who could possible have any criticism. It’s really unacceptable. Islamophobia is used in the same way as transphobia is used, it’s about eliminating all possibility of political criticism by saying that the person has a kind of madness if they utter any. And that’s very problematic. [back to top]
[The radical feminist critique of prostitution, pornography and PIV sex]
MM: I know that one of those foundational concepts and one of those foundational criticisms within radical feminism, you know, for the past forty years I would say has been around prostitution and pornography as violence against women. So I’m just wondering if you could for the sake of our audience provide a clarification of this concept.
SJ: Yes. I think the reason people have such difficulty understanding prostitution as violence against women is that the understanding of sex in heteropatriarchal culture is that a woman lies there thinking of something she’s going to do the next day while the man puts a penis into some part of her body and gains his pleasure in that way. Now that is extraordinary because of course it’s not egalitarian, it’s extremely problematic for women, and I suspect, indeed I know it’s the sex that an awful lot of heterosexual women have in their marriages, and indeed in many parts of the world, in many communities that’s the case. Now considering that’s the case of course that is the sex of prostitution, which is a man using the interior of a woman’s body for his pleasure while she lies there trying to survive, dissociating, and he’s not recognising her personhood or her status as a human being. Now since that’s the sex of prostitution, if many women understand and many men of course certainly understand that to be what sex is, they cannot see the violence in it. And I think that’s a huge difficulty.
Now, when I argue that the sex of prostitution is violence, I have many examples from where I live in Australia where prostitution in brothels is legalized, in the state where I live – Victoria – that is the case, then you can see the violence of it when you look at the occupational health and safety codes which are on a local government website here to advise women in the industry what to do and how to keep themselves safe. For instance one of the things that it says is – and this is about the ‘ordinary’ sex of prostitution, I’m not talking about the rape and violence that’s unpaid for that women experience, but simply the violence that they experience in their ordinary everyday life – one of the pieces of advice is that women should be careful when using local anaesthetic in the vagina because this can hide more difficult injuries. Now the fact that it’s simply accepted that women are using local anaesthetic does suggest that something is happening which is problematic. Experiencing pain in the interior of the body, it seems to me, makes it very clear that prostitution is violence. One of the women in prostitution in this state who wrote about her experience, she was an English graduate who’d been on drugs and went into prostitution, talks about the difference between street prostitution where she only had to do oral sex and doing it in a brothel where she had to do vaginal and also anal sex. And the vaginal sex was so much more painful, she said, and the anal sex was like having a red hot poker straight up through the body. It seems to me that that should very clearly be understood as violence, unless of course people understand that as the ordinary sex of their lives and therefore they cannot see what the problem is with it.
In prostitution women are used simply as a tube, as an instrument, and of course women are not instruments – women bleed because their vaginas are abraded and bleed, also the way that women have to survive their experience which is that they have to emotionally dissociate from their bodies to survive and if they don’t do that they really cannot survive in prostitution for a very long time at all – [all this] shows us that it’s violence, because who else has to do that? Well it’s most commonly associated with child sexual abuse and we do generally understand that to be violence. So there is so much about prostitution that makes it very clear that it’s violence. I really think the only reason it’s not understood as such is that unfortunately too much of the ordinary sex of male supremacy is the sex of prostitution more generally. So that some women can say things like “well I might as well get paid for it” – because that is what they experience on an everyday basis, which is coercive sex. [back to top]
[‘Feminist pornography’]
MM: Along those lines, I often feel – and I know other people have written this and said this but I can’t remember who exactly at the moment – but pornography today feels even more dangerous, even more violent, even more degrading, even more sexist than it ever was before when these arguments were first developed. And yet today many of those feminists who I identify as ‘sex positive’ feminists argue against anti-pornography discourse on the basis of what some call ‘feminist pornography’ which they claim has maybe interrupted pornography as violence against women. And I’m wondering what are your thoughts on that argument and I’m wondering – I would never want to use a term like ‘feminist pornography’ – I’m wondering what you think about that term, whether or not that would be considered an oxymoron to you?
SJ: Yes, I have written in the past about written pornography, particularly supposed lesbian written pornography – in the 1980s there was the development of the lesbian sexual revolution as I called it, when some women, usually who had experience in the sex industry and had been strippers or prostituted or in pornography themselves, and therefore abused and violated for often a considerable amount of time – they sought to take those practices into lesbianism and even into feminism more recently – when I looked at the magazines, the supposed lesbian pornography magazines, that were supposedly now feminist and empowering and so on in the 80s, I actually cried. Some of them were about things like a woman sitting on a chair with no bottom in the chair and there’s a candle under it and the heat is actually heating her vulva and … I cried, I couldn’t believe that this kind of stuff which is actually the terrorism of women, the terrible cruelty of women could be called ‘empowering’. But it was, and I think it was because a lot of those women had had very terrible experiences and reproducing those experiences in sado-masochism and various abusive practices towards women was kind of something that they couldn’t get out of. It was the days when we were told that sado-masochism was actually useful to women who had experienced child sexual abuse because it was ‘cathartic’ for them, not at all the case of course because they were then locked in cycles of violence that they couldn’t get out of. So in terms of written pornography, I think one woul d need to look at what is being described in order to work out whether it’s feminist or not, and very quickly when you look at it, it seems very clearly about punishing women, about masochism and so on.
If we’re thinking about visual pornography, video pornography and so on, generally that is made by women who have been in the industry – the only way to get out of the industry, because there’s not much of a career structure, is to become somebody who makes the pornography themselves and I have quoted in some of my material women who have been very severely abused in pornography who, when they start to make it, also do things like slap other women and say “yes the violence is real” and so on – they admit what’s going on. But then of course there’s some who say they’re really doing something different and yes, they were in pornography for years, but they’re doing something that’s completely different. I think the difficulty with it is that real live women are being used in it – it’s not just written pornography that’s a fantasy – women’s bodies are not machines and therefore in order to do the things which are done to the women in pornography, they have to take painkillers, as well as of course enemas, as well as drugs to allow them to dissociate and so on – they have to experience very problematic practices over long periods of time, and it takes hours and hours to make the pornography during which they’re having to dissociate because it is not some joyful sexual encounter they’ve leapt into, having surprised each other behind a bush – there’s cameras and teams and hours of production. So there’s abuse of women going on in visual pornography – I don’t have any doubt about that – whether it’s supposedly feminists who are making it or not. It’s possible that there’s less actual severe violence – I’m not in a position to say – but nonetheless, whatever forms of penetration are going on, that’s extremely problematic because women are not polyethylene tubes or whatever, they’re not machines. [back to top]
[The significance of the term ‘sex work’]
MM: I also wonder – I know that in The Industrial Vagina, your recent book, you discuss the ways in which many theorists and researchers who call themselves feminists have altered both the terminology as well as the discourse surrounding prostituted women. I think one key aspect of that is the popular use within progressive circles of the term ‘sex work’ as opposed to prostitution, or ‘sex worker’ as opposed to prostituted women. How have you witnessed that change come about and what do you think are the repercussions of the use of this terminology?
SJ: In the 1980s when the term ‘sex work’ got taken up particularly by organisations like Coyote in the States – ‘Cast Off Your Old Tired Ethics’ – which purported to be a prostitutes’ rights organisation, and by some groups in the Netherlands – in theory this was simply to get rid of the stigma attached to prostitution by giving it a more positive name. You cannot of course get rid of the stigma attached to prostitution because you can’t change the power dynamic that’s going on, which is women’s bodies are being invaded by men’s penises for money with harmful effects upon those women – you can’t massage that out of existence, but the idea was if you changed the word in the head that it would somehow be possible to make that different. Now what happened from the late 80s into the 90s was that the sex industry itself, which in neoliberal times was being deregulated as something that might reasonably be on the market, as indeed absolutely anything could be – body parts and so on – as that process was taking place the sex industry found it very useful to be able to use the term ‘sex work’ because feminists, or supposed feminists (I’m very doubtful about that) had given them this term and therefore they were able to use it to make the industry completely respectable to the point where now you can’t really speak against ‘sex work’ without being seen to be insulting to the women who are involved in the industry. In other words, to draw attention to the harm is seen as being insulting to the women that are being abused.
To give an example of how useful it is to the industry, the Prostitution Control Act in this state which is from 1994 and which set in place the particular system of regulation of licenced brothels that we have here, the language of the name of that act was changed in December last year to the Sex Work Act. And that is doubtless because of the pressure of the industry – having it even called prostitution makes their industry seem slightly grubby and not acceptable. So they’ve now got the language changed so there cannot be a criticism – you can’t criticise somebody’s ordinary work. I think that’s why the term has become so important. [back to top]
[‘Victim feminism’]
MM: Thank you. I wanted to talk a little bit about – I know you’ve written about this also – back in the early 90s when Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe’s analysis of what they termed ‘victim feminism’ – I see that as having a significant impact obviously on feminist discourse at the time and I think that it’s kind of continued on and impacted the way in which we talk about words like ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ within contemporary feminist discourse. And I also see that as having tied in to this divide between feminists today, whereas then it may have been more ‘victim feminism’ versus ‘power feminism’, as they called it, today it seems like it’s ‘sex positive feminism’ versus radical feminism, which of course implies that radical feminism is anti-sex. I know that you wrote a little bit about this new feminism in Beauty and Misogyny so I’m wondering if you could talk about maybe your response to these arguments for ‘power feminism’ or ‘sex positive feminism’, or this kind of feminism that I think is trying to make feminism seem ‘fun’ or ‘positive’ as opposed to negative, and how that discourse has impacted contemporary feminism.
SJ: Well … the [inaudible] of Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf in the early 90s was clearly straightforward liberal feminism. There was absolutely no recognition there that there was any structure, any structural oppression involved in the oppression of women. It was just ‘all women are potentially equal individuals who should just be a bit sturdier in acting out their empowerment and free will’. Obviously liberal feminism, and you wouldn’t have expected that to have been taken up as it has by so many people. Because the problem is the issue of agency and structure, which is a long-time debate within political theory … it’s usually the marxists and the theory of the left who talk about structure, who say there are structures of oppression and that racism, sexism, classism are structural – they’re not simply about people not being prepared to exercise their free will enough. And agency comes from the idea of free will – it’s a completely liberal idea, the individual should be able to exercise their free will. I know that has been used on the left a little bit in terms of saying that agency should be seen as resistance – we can see agency when people rise up and resist – the fact that a feminist movement exists shows that women collectively have some agency, but that is an issue of collective agency and that’s a little bit different from individual agency which these days, I think, has come to the point where I often say agency is seen as getting out of bed in the morning. If a woman has at least got out of bed she’s got her feet on the ground. But that’s the point to which agency as a concept has sunk I think on the vast majority of the left in particular.
But I must say, this issue of ‘victim feminism’ goes right back to the early 80s. I remember in London in the early 80s going to the launch of The Feminist Review, that’s the socialist feminist journal in Britain, quite a significant one, they had a launch of this sex edition – and in that sex edition it was all about sex and power and how to express power in sex and about choice and so on – absolutely no structural analysis of sex. And I was very shocked, because I, like Catharine MacKinnon and many other feminists, came to our feminism out of a socialist feminist or marxist feminist place. So we had an understanding of structure, and suddenly when it came to sex, the socialist feminists that we might’ve expected better of, who were often our friends, lost their understanding of structure entirely. It was indeed as if, as Catharine MacKinnon said, sexuality came from the stork – it came from nowhere, it was not formed out of any structures of power and it was completely unproblematic and the only problem with sexuality was that it was sometimes repressed by the state. Not that it played any part in the subordination of women or was constructed out of women’s oppression.
So unfortunately ‘victim feminism’ is not just something that is just part of the attack on radical feminism by liberal feminists but even goes back to socialist feminists. So radical feminists, it seems to me, have no friends on the issue of trying to describe the political construction of sexuality – it is understood nowhere except by radical feminists. And that’s why these issues of choice and agency in relation to sexuality – and indeed marriage in many cases – are so problematic. Liberal feminists go further and say of course that women are in an entirely reasonable position to choose absolutely everything about what they do with their bodies, in their lives and so on – socialist feminists may well have a more nuanced analysis of some of those things, but not sex. Usually not sex. [back to top]
[The impact of neoliberalism on feminism]
MM: That’s interesting actually because I always thought about it in terms of neoliberalism, this neoliberal ideology having so deeply impacted feminism today, that third wave feminism is much more focused on individual choice versus collective choice and agency than I would like it to be. How do you see neoliberalism as having impacted on, I suppose, third wave feminism today?
SJ: I think it has, but I think it’s not the origin of the problem because in the sex wars of the 1980s socialist feminists in particular were taking the position that sex was not politically constructed, and that sado-masochism was perfectly fine and that women could express their agency doing this that and the other. So that was before neoliberalism really took a hold. So that what is deeper than that really is the problem of being able to see that sexuality is political at all, as Catharine MacKinnon so beautifully points out. I think that yes, from the late 80s and into the 90s as the ideology of neoliberalism took hold and as extremely conservative neoliberal governments in America and in Britain for instance started to use the idea of choice to justify everything. Like the destruction of the state school system in the form of ‘parents should have choice’, so choice was given as the reason for the destruction of everything which could actually require state responsibility and better citizens’ rights. So choice and consumerism was absolutely the message that was given by these neoliberal governments, and that fitted nicely into the ways that so called third wave feminism was developing, which was it was about consumerism, about destroying the body through various practices of body piercing and being harmed by various sexual practices which were seen as chosen in the industry of prostitution and so on. It was no longer possible at all to use structure, but in terms of sexuality that has not been well recognised anyway. [back to top]
[Marriage]
MM: I wanted to talk to you about the issue of marriage, the institution of marriage because as far as I can tell you seem to be one of the few who continues to write about the need to abolish marriage today. And I do find myself continually surprised by not only the way marriage continues to be the norm and continues to be kind of expected today when it’s pretty unnecessary, but also by the way in which many mainstream feminists have tried to frame marriage as a feminist act. I’m wondering if you’ve noticed this and what your thoughts are around that.
SJ: I had no idea that mainstream feminists, or any of them, were trying to frame marriage as a feminist act, I haven’t caught up with that. I do know that many lesbian and gay activists including some lesbians who might call themselves feminists have been pursuing marriage as if there were something useful and even possibly progressive about it, and that’s been very very problematic. The idea that marriage is something people might actually want as a progressive agenda has been very difficult for those of us who wish to criticise marriage. The whole gay marriage push has made it much more difficult to say what is wrong with marriage – it’s become unintelligible in fact, and I have young students around campus trying to give me things about demonstrations on gay marriage or to sign petitions on gay marriage and I say “Look, I’ve been with my partner for 25 years, I’m completely happy and why would I get married, and I’m a feminist and I oppose marriage” and they look at me as if I’ve stepped out of the ark, but I happen to think that the feminist analysis is rather more radical than theirs.
I mean, if we look at where marriage has come from and the way in which it is still organised in the vast majority of the world, women are exchanged in marriage by men between themselves in order to gain money because women are sold in marriage very generally throughout the world. They’re exchanged in order to create relationships between families. The women then have no control over their own person – there’s a very tiny minority of countries in the world that even have the possibility of marital rape being an offence even at this time – women’s bodies were owned by men in marriage entirely, women have no choices whatsoever in the vast majority of the world about things like whether they can leave their home. In the Lebanon for instance marriage laws for christians and muslims women have to have their husband’s permission to step outside the door of the house. Now this is old fashioned marriage, yes, but it’s where marriage comes from.
People are saying today that marriage is not oppressive – if it’s not oppressive at all and retains none of those problematic elements then why is anybody getting married anyway, there’s absolutely no need to do so. If it doesn’t offer advantages based on the fact that it’s a heteropatriarchal institution then I don’t really understand why anybody would be doing it. Obviously we need to be moving forward to a situation where people’s relationships with each other can be recognised, because that’s important in some ways, without using the idea of marriage. Without using an extraordinarily heteropatriarchal institution. I remember in the 1970s the wonderful campaign in the UK called ‘Why be a wife?’ – there were posters everywhere and pictures of women chained to sinks saying they start off in his arms and end up being chained to a sink – we understood what marriage was. That seems to have gone. But of course we are talking now, with the strong awareness of the fact that there’s been 20 more years of very serious backlash against feminism, socialism, all kinds of possibilities of radical critique of consumerist, capitalist society and its most heteropatriarchal aspects, so we’ve had this time of very serious backlash so it’s not surprising really that all of these critiques have been forgotten. If so few people now in western society are not oppressed in their relationships then why the hell are they doing marriage? They can do something else. [back to top]
[Gender and transgenderism]
MM: Yeah, exactly. And along those lines you’ve suggested specifically that there’s been a repudiation or perhaps forgetfulness of the feminist critique of marriage that was so well developed in the 70s so I’m wondering if you see this as being more generally applicable to radical feminist critiques of dominant ideology as a whole. Do you think we’ve just forgotten how powerful much of this theory is, or was, and how applicable it continues to be, or do you think that it’s more intentional than that?
SJ: I don’t know whether ‘intentional’ is the word. Radical feminist theory was, and is particularly revolutionary because it means a total transformation of male domination, so it means the removal of it at its most basic level, it means a total transformation of culture, it means for instance no respect for culture – and I’ve been writing recently about multiculturalism because my new book is on religion, called Man’s Dominion: the rise of religion and the eclipse of women’s rights, which is coming out later this year, so I’ve been writing about how multiculturalism becomes multifaithism and how there’s this requirement in multicultural societies to respect culture, which is of course completely impossible since all cultures are based upon subordination of women and the creation of two different sexes and two different genders and the construction of oppression out of that. If you walk in any street and just look at the way people are dressed, if you look at anything that’s going on on the television, the extraordinary lengths to which women’s subordination and men’s domination goes is immediately clear to you, and that’s in major cities of the western world that I’m talking about. So of course the radical feminist critique is about overthrowing the deeply deeply cultural construction of women’s subordination which is perhaps clearest on an everyday level in what women are required to wear. The showing of their bodies, the short skirts, the shaved legs, the high heeled shoes, the extraordinary lengths to which they have to go in order to punish and be cruel to their own bodies and be degraded in public places.
Now that’s very clearly about male domination but as far as I can see it cannot be recognised, it simply cannot be recognised, so there’s a tremendous forgetfulness of the construction of what is these days called ‘gender’. Although I would call it sexual oppression as a more reasonable way of looking at it. And in its strongest manifestation of course takes place in what’s called transgenderism, which is a practice in which persons who do not adhere to the correctly gendered practices that have been placed upon the biological sex that they had at birth are considered to have gender identity disorder, and they are expected to cross over into the other sex. Not criticise the gender system as it is, because that’s unthinkable, but to make some kind of journey by mutilating their bodies and taking dangerous drugs for the rest of their lives in order to supposedly represent the opposite sex.
Now that shows to us how clearly and to what an extraordinary depth the idea that there are two genders with different behaviours constructed somehow differently biologically has entered the culture. Because of course it doesn’t make sense – I don’t have a gender, I’ve no intention of having a gender, I don’t do masculinity which is the behaviour of male dominance and I don’t do femininity which is the behaviour of female subordination. I hope to engage in human behaviour and I hope that at some point in the future everybody will be able to do that too, but gender I definitely do not have, I’m a conscientious objector to gender as I would be to being drafted into the military, and I see these things as having some connections.
So the problem with transgenderism which obviously is an expression of men’s sexual rights as well of course – it’s very much about the right to be sexually excited by female clothing and subordination and so on – but it also comes out of the gender system and it means that in order to support transgenderism, gender has to be supported. So the subordination of women has to be supported in order for transgenderism to be supported. So the transgenderism phenomenon is as clear as possible indication of the strength of the structures of male domination going on right now, and we know that in Iran, homosexuals are routinely transgendered because they’re not allowed to be homosexual. I’ve been looking at stuff on the transgender kids in the US – there are lots of organisations now who support transgender kids and their families, there’s lots of clinics and therapists who can identify transgender kids, and they’re being recognised as transgender from 4 or 5 years old, even though the literature tells us and they tell us themselves that 70% of those recognised as transgendered will end up as homosexual in later life – one of the things they’re trying to do is eradicate homosexuality at its possible origin although of course there’s no connection necessarily between homosexuality and gender, but there may be between being bullied for having the wrong kinds of behaviours.
So what’s happening in the States is that children are now to be identified in school, to be identified by their parents – this is what in the 70s we fought against, the idea that there were ‘correct’ forms of behaviour, ‘correct’ toys for children and so on – it wasn’t radical to do so, it was quite mild. Now these children are being put on programmes where – this is the big demand now – they have drugs to prevent them, hormones to prevent them developing the body of their biological sex. So they’ve got to be on these hormones from about 9 years old – you can see how the medical profession love this, the drugs, the medical expertise, it’s a very big money maker for them – and very conservative, who tend to completely believe in gender.
So these poor children are not going through puberty in the normal way, they’re not having ordinary biological changes, then by 16 they’ll be put on the cross gender hormones of the opposite sex which will make them sterile, so they’re actually being sterilized, it’s the sterilization of the ‘unfit’ when it happened in the 30s, when the Nazis did it, you know, it’s [inaudible] that that was unacceptable to do it went on until the 60s in America the sterilization of the disabled, the ‘unfit’. It’s happening now. Those who do not conform to correct gender stereotypes are being sterilized and they’re being sterilized as children. At 18 years old they’re expected to move on to surgery – parts of their bodies are going to be lopped off – and then they’ll be on these drugs for the rest of their lives.
Eventually I’m sure – because things are moving fast and there’s a lot of criticism of this particularly among young radical feminists now – within the next 10, 20 years it will come to be realised as a horrendous human rights violation. But for these children and young people who have been sterilized, this is a terrible, terrible cost. Because they’ve lost parts of their bodies, they’ve lost the ability to reproduce, it really is a human rights violation on a massive scale.
Now because I criticise this I am no-platformed pretty much by lots of feminist, lesbian and gay organisations who will not allow me to speak. Even in my own city I was not allowed to be invited to speak at the Reclaim the Night because I was seen as transphobic. A major conference in Britain which invited me to speak this year is basically not going to happen because some of them said that I was transphobic and shouldn’t speak, and everything collapsed. So there’s a kind of McCarthyism that’s going on around transgenderism now. If you criticise it or if somebody who is your friend knows you and you’re known as a transphobe, they also are now getting told they cannot speak. So it’s spreading out and the National Union of Students of Britain, their LGBT conference, the agenda I’ve just been looking at actually has a resolution saying that Julie Bindel, who is also a feminist critic of this practice in Britain and a journalist, “is vile” – that’s what the resolutions says, “Julie Bindel is vile”, this is a resolution of the NUS conference. And of course she is no-platformed, no students organisation will invite her to speak anywhere because she is also critical of transgenderism.
So really gender is of course the last bastion because it is the foundation of the subordination of women and it’s being defended to the death in this extraordinarily grim way which means that any radical feminist critics must not be allowed to speak, reading groups that discuss my books and it’s clear online that they’ve done so are being told that they were transphobic and they should not be allowed to discuss my books, so there’s an attempt to eliminate, extirpate from the public discussion and from the public forum any discussion, writing and so on that could possibly criticise gender. Because that’s what it’s about really – it’s criticising gender – and that’s the very foundation of feminism and we really have to hold on to that. We’ve got to claw back the ground now, and I’m very pleased to say that there are quite a lot of radical feminist blogs that are not only being very critical of transgenderism but even, dare I say it, laughing at it – which is a very very naughty thing to do, but sometimes the oppressed and the subordinate have to laugh at the dominant ideology that oppress them. [back to top]
[Feminism in the academy]
MM: Thank you so much for clarifying that, and it is an important analysis to include and to clarify, for sure. Along those lines I wanted to talk about what you see as happening within academic feminism because, on one hand, I feel that I’m quite immersed in academic feminism, I’m doing a graduate degree in a women’s studies department, and I see a lack of radical feminist theory within feminist theory classes and within – you know, the canon has changed I think. I know in your piece about Kate Millett … you argue that her famous text Sexual Politics which was of course foundational in terms of building a radical feminist critique of sex, and an analysis of sex as political which is largely ignored in academia, and it’s also like Andrea Dworkin isn’t included in the discourse and Kate Millett isn’t included in the discourse and you are sometimes not included in the discourse. I’m wondering if you’ve noticed that that’s changed or if it’s always been like that within academia, within women’s studies departments where radical feminism is being marginalized – do you see that as being a trend?
SJ: I think it certainly is a trend. I think when Women’s Studies were set up in many university departments from the 70s onwards it was more possible that there would be radical feminist theorists there. But certainly from the 90s onwards, when many of those women’s studies departments were exterminated – that happened in Australia – the one at Deakin University was got rid of and there’s been a whole series of getting rid of women’s studies, of course it had to change to Gender Studies, and gender studies in many places is simply a way of talking about gender and transgenderism is seen to be OK within gender studies because it’s all about any manifestations of gender. Instead of being the problem we wanted to get rid of it got its own studies, which was kind of extraordinary. So yes, there’s been a process of getting rid of radical feminist women’s studies departments and persons.
I think what’s happened, when feminism went into the academy there was a very serious period of backlash – you don’t see much socialism in the academy either – any kind of radical political ideas are not really tolerated and haven’t been in the academy for 20 years. We’ve had neoliberalism and corporatization in the academy and managerialism and anybody who’s not got the right ideas can’t get the competitive grants, at least in this country, and therefore they can’t stay in the academy – they’re of no value, because you can only get competitive grants from the state if you say something very anodyne. So women within the academy – I think to protect themselves – over the last 20 years or so have adopted the very safe and anodyne ideas of postmodernism and poststructuralism, meaning that there’s no meaning in anything and there’s no purpose to pursue and you mustn’t be making any grand statements, you mustn’t be trying to do anything and so on – you know all of that stuff. Well that language was acceptable in the academy, and indeed there was at least one time a situation where in my school of political science if people didn’t mention Foucault in an essay they couldn’t get any kind of decent grade. And he’s a chap who, as you know, was a sado-masochist, who had no kind of understanding of power as I understand it because he didn’t have any feminism whatsoever and didn’t recognise that women were oppressed. But he became the person you had to mention, and all of these supposedly feminist academics started mentioning all these men in postmodernism – all men, usually French, because you know they were trendily difficult to understand and therefore they must be the best ones. And, yes, radical feminism pretty much disappeared, and you don’t find my books or Dworkin or MacKinnon or whatever on any reading lists.
Young students in women’s studies – it’s not usually women’s studies now it’s called gender studies – have to discover radical feminism. They ferret it out, it’s marvellous that they do, but they really have to go down rabbit holes and try desperately to recover this material which otherwise they would know nothing about. And so yes, it’s quite determined I think to keep it out, because it’s about safety in the academy. What happens is that women cannot have any advancement in the academy if they have strong feminist opinions, or very often feminist opinions at all.
At the last Australian Political Science Association conference I was at, I was at the women’s caucus, and a young woman said that her mentor had actually said to her if she did anything about women at all she would get no advancement and she was unlikely to get promotion. He was just telling her the truth: that’s just how it was. So you can see why women have tried to be terribly docile and obedient and say nothing that would frighten the horses in any way. But also, in the end, even to approach women or anything feminist can mean that they think they will get no kind of advancement whatsoever. Whereas back in 1991 I was brought into my university in Melbourne because the students were demanding a feminist – I mean it’s difficult to imagine that now, but I think that will happen again. We’ll come to the point again when students demand feminists, not these airy-fairy people doing all kinds of papering over the cracks with ideology and ideas and words that make no sense at all, which are hard to read and once you’ve got through them you discover women’s oppression is in the head or something ridiculous like that.
MM: Yeah, and it’s funny because women’s studies departments are attacked constantly and feminists are attacked constantly and accused of being radical and the existence of women’s studies departments in universities is attacked by the right and whoever for being too radical, and yet those departments and those feminists and this movement is becoming less and less radical in many ways.
SJ: Well it’s more anodyne and antifeminist in many cases unfortunately …
MM: and what’s framed as insane and radical – that is hardly radical because radical feminism has been excluded from all of the discourse
SJ: That’s right [back to top]
[The current resurgence of feminism]
MM: So what do you see as being the state of feminism today, I mean what’s your perspective for example on third wave feminism, what’s your perspective on the feminist movement today, I’m wondering – obviously you think it’s in danger – do you think that maybe in some ways it’s gaining force, or is it disappearing? Where are we right now in feminism?
SJ: Well I’ve no doubt that a serious third wave is coming – I don’t think there was ever a third wave before, there was just backlash – but now a third wave – if you call the 70s second wave – a third wave is starting to happen, I’ve no doubt about that whatsoever. There’s huge numbers of young women in the UK, not quite so much here in Australia and I don’t know what’s happening in the US, are becoming involved in feminist organisations, there’s feminist books coming out again – not necessarily from feminist publishers because they’ve all gone – but it is all starting to happen again. What I do notice is that most of the books and so on tend to be not very structural analyses, they’re not tremendously radical, but I’m not too worried about that – it took a long time in the 60s and towards the 70s for radical feminism to develop and gain the strength that it did, so I’m hoping that will happen. [back to top]
[lesbian feminism]
I think one of the problems for this new wave of feminism – I’m absolutely sure that it’s there because I did think that I would never see it happen – one of the problems is that lesbian feminism is pretty much dead in the water. And that is because of a massive lesbian community and culture developed that was very hostile to feminist values indeed and was simply consumerist and developed the sexual values in many cases of the sex industry. So there’s no lesbian feminism out there any more because when lesbian feminism developed in the 70s, and I was involved in it, we were the counter culture, we were the challenge of standing up and saying that you were a lesbian and criticising heterosexuality and so on was radical and feminist in its own right. Now lesbians are supposed to be just like anybody else – they’re supposed to go for marriage, and they’re just another kind of people with no criticism of heterosexuality, there’s no feminism within the lesbianism now. That’s a big problem because the radicalism of lesbian feminists in the 70s really set the tone of the movement that developed at that time, of radical feminism in particular. And I’m not sure where that’s to come from when there’s really no possibility of that lesbian feminism now, unless young lesbians who create a reaction against the very dire lesbian culture that’s been created over the last 20 or 30 years. And actually create a lesbian feminism in reaction against the crap and the rather nasty stuff they’re being offered. If that happens then this third wave of feminism is really going to take off. [back to top]
[What needs to be done to re-radicalize feminism]
MM: Thank you. I’m wondering, what should radical feminism look like today – what needs to be done, what are the key issues that we need to address in order to reradicalize feminism, in order to ensure that radical feminism is still present in feminist discourse, to ensure that radical feminism is still present in women’s studies departments, within the feminist movement as a whole. What are the most important things that we need to be paying attention to and working on right now?
SJ: The things that the young feminists who are becoming radicalized at the moment are interested in are the same things that many young women in the 70s were interested in as well. They’re concerned with the effect of pornography upon their bodies, their sexuality, the culture. They start from their bodies and their lives, which makes absolutely perfect sense. And so a radicalizing of that analysis of sexuality is what we need – it’s not just seen as an individual problem and I’m sure many of these women have got this very well worked out – from the blogs it seems clear that they have. An analysis of sexuality is crucial. Sexuality is foundational in the subordination of women which means that – once you’ve got that – you can’t go wrong on pornography and prostitution and the global sex industry, marriage or any of these other issues. I think that a radical analysis of sexuality is fundamental to the radical feminism of the moment. I think that will happen, but, what else – well we need to be looking at religion – I’ve just written a book on religion and that’s absolutely crucial, we need to be looking at marriage internationally, the sex industry internationally and of course we need to be re-educating the left. That’s very very important. [back to top]
[the need to re-educate the left]
I came from the left. I am horrified at the way they have lost their values and we need to re-educate them on all sorts of fundamental issues. For instance a couple of weeks ago I was invited to give a talk in a series on racism and I thought “well, what am I going to do” so I did racism in the global sex industry and I looked at the racism of arranged marriage, trafficking, mail order brides, pornography, the trafficked women in the brothels in Melbourne and the way they’re treated and so on and so on. And I’m thinking to myself as I’m doing this, and the question I was asking at the time was: why is the left simply not interested? They’re not interested in women, we know, so they cannot see the harm of the sex industry because it’s for women and all these forms of oppression are what women should naturally enjoy. But when the racism is so vicious – when for instance the website of the Queensland licencing authority for prostitution specifically has a list of approved terms, which include Japanese and Asian and all sorts of signifiers of an ethnicity, and it says there that the reason they’ve got to have a list is because if women of basically the wrong skin colour go to a male buyer he will beat them up. When the racism is so extraordinary, how come the left, who once we would’ve relied upon to have at least an analysis of racism even if they don’t care about women, but they cannot see it. Of course the reason they cannot see it is it’s still women! Yes. It’s women who are racially oppressed, but … it still can’t be seen. It’s completely extraordinary, and I said I’d be teaching [inaudible] and when I wrote The Industrial Vagina on the political economy of the global sex trade I thought I don’t normally do global political economy but I have to do it here, because the left are not getting it. I’ve just written another piece on international political economy before christmas – I’m thinking, you know, I’m over 60 now, I can write whatever I like and maybe I’m going to have to do everything the left should be doing and it blimmin’ well isn’t. That’s tiring. But I think radical feminists are going to have to re-educate the left. [back to top]
[end of transcript]
