And who are we talking to? Who is it, who cares so much, that we should care to convince? The men, it seems.
– Margaret A. Baldwin, “Split at the Root: Prostitution and Feminist Discourses of Law Reform”
“Our antagonist is our helper,” Edmund Burke once wrote. At Fairer Disputations I have found new antagonists: Erika Bachiochi, Serena Sigillito, Mary Harrington, Rachel Coleman, and now Angela Franks. I am grateful to Franks, whose review of my book has pushed me to think harder about what it means to describe men and women as classes. This essay is the result.
It was my dissatisfaction with the debate between trans-inclusionary advocates and gender-critical feminists that prompted me to write Feminism, Defeated. I begin,
The depoliticization of feminism appears all but complete. To the trans-inclusionary declaration that ‘trans women are women,’ the gender-critical feminist responds, ‘woman is adult human female.’ Implicit in the trans-inclusionary declaration is a conception of a woman as a gendered being; explicit in the gender-critical response is a conception of a woman as a sexed being. Gender is a social kind, sex a natural one. On neither view is ‘woman’ a saliently political category.
While my sympathies lay with the gender-critical feminists, I worried that they were wrongly citing female biology not merely as the defining feature of women but as the explanation of their suffering. Kathleen Stock, for example, suggested that sexual assault is “at least partly explicable in terms of typical differences between males and females in strength, size and direct aggression.”
Carole Pateman’s theory of the sexual contract provides an alternative explanation. The social contract is our agreement to acknowledge the authority of the state—to obey the law. Why would we agree to submit to the state? What could the state provide us with that would be worth giving up our freedom for? According to Hobbes and Locke: the protection of our life, liberty, and property. However, in Hobbes’ and Locke’s writings, it is specifically male people who enter into the social contract, so the question is not why we would submit, but why men would. Examining sexual relations in the liberal state, Pateman proposes that men receive something more than protection of life, liberty, and property. They receive a “sex-right”: a right to proprietorship of a woman for sexual purposes.
A passage from Leviathan now acquires new significance: urging his contemporaries to acknowledge a political authority, Hobbes warns them that if they do not, they will find themselves in a world where men “use Violence, to make themselves Masters of other mens persons, wives, children, and cattell.” They will suffer insecure proprietorship of their wives. The implication is that if men submit to the state, they will enjoy secure proprietorship. It is their sex-right that men express (and in some cases abuse) when they assault women. Sexual assault is thus explicable in terms of the sexual contract.
Each explanation yields a very different vision of justice. On the biological explanation, the most we can do for (inherently vulnerable) women is shelter them from (inherently predatory) men. On the political explanation, we can and ought to do much more. We ought to tear up the sexual contract. Until we do, our efforts to shelter women will be futile.
This brings the premise of my argument clearly into view: women’s condition is political. Rape, battery, prostitution, surrogacy, pornography: these exist because the state has granted men a sex-right. “The feminist problem,” writes Franks, “is not only that male sexuality is too often violent, according to Phelan; the problem is that it is structurally and irretrievably violent.” In fact, it is on the biological account that male sexuality is irretrievably violent. We can work to cultivate restraint in men, but, as restraint implies, men who do not rape will be denying their impulses. And, in the words of Horace, whom Mary Harrington approvingly quotes, “You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back.” On the political account, by contrast, male sexuality is violent only in the context of the sexual contract.
Answering Franks’ Criticisms
Franks writes that I, like Andrea Dworkin, “err in making these sweeping generalizations about male-female relations and about individual men and women as well.” When one makes a sweeping generalisation, one falsely infers from specific cases to all cases: some men are violent, therefore, all men are violent. But I am not making a claim about men’s behaviour. Nor am I proceeding from the specific to the universal. I am making a claim about the position of the male sex within the liberal state. This state grants all men a sex-right. It makes no exceptions. Indeed, the promise of the liberal state is universality: equal rights for all men. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. The crucial difference between patriarchy—the previous political order—and the liberal/fraternal one is that a right enjoyed under patriarchy by some men—heads of households—is a right enjoyed under liberalism by all men.
Individual men can refuse to exercise their right. But it is not within their power to relinquish it. Moreover, refusing to exercise a right, forgoing something to which one is entitled, is a magnanimous act, the appropriate response to which is gratitude. I want a world in which men do not have a right, in which women do not rely for relief from sexual use on male mercy, in which women need not feel gratitude for male decency. To be clear, I am not suggesting that an individual man intends his action to have this meaning; I am claiming that it has this meaning regardless of his intentions.
At any rate, I cannot help but wonder why feminists are so worried about “sweeping generalisations” about men. To whom are we addressing ourselves when we indict “society,” “culture,” “misogyny,” when we take care to stress that we are not criticising all men, when we exempt and excuse men? To whom are we appealing, and for what? I think we are engaged in assuring men—our men—of our loyalty to them.
What might we say, and in what manner, if we imagined women as our audience, and if we therefore approached our writing as a precious chance to say something to them? (Them. See: I refer to women as though they were elsewhere, as though they were not you, my intended readers.) Would we seek to assure women that men do not hate them? Or would we try to impress upon women the need for change, emphasising the diabolical nature of our current condition? We are feminists, partisans. It is not for us to defend men; it is for men to defend themselves. And what is it that men want from exemption or excusal? Acknowledgement of their unblemished consciences? As feminists, our concern is with change, not with judgement. We inhabit the political domain, not the moral.
For too long feminists have sought false friends. Marxist-feminists pursued the friendship of workers, intersectional feminists that of other downtrodden groups, trans-inclusionary feminists, trans people. We have refused to confront the reality of our condition. As women, we do not share an enemy with others. We are oppressed by men, not by capitalists, white people, or the sex/gender binary. Since we do not share an enemy with others, we shall not find friends in others. We must rely on one another—women—for friendship. And women are all the friends we need. Why do we doubt this?
Many sex-realist feminists have been wise to the foolishness of our alliances. Yet they too seek a false friend: men. “[C]ould we find a holistic account of woman that would even enable women and men to join hands as friends in the battle against misogyny?” Franks asks. But if men befriend women, they do not hate them, so misogyny does not exist in order that we must battle it. What, I wonder, is Franks’ analysis of women’s condition? What, for her, is misogyny, if it is not rape, battery, and prostitution—abuses perpetrated by men? Franks criticises me for “a move away from embodiment,” and yet she obscures the bodies of those who abuse women behind the abstraction of “misogyny.”
“Phelan’s use of political class,” writes Franks, “forces her to these zero-sum-game pronouncements.” Franks is not the first to admonish my “zero-sum-game pronouncements.” Once, I argued to some trans-inclusionary colleagues that women’s interest is at odds with trans women’s. To my frustration, they flatly refused to even entertain this claim. Women’s interest in recognition as a sex class conflicts with trans women’s interest in recognition as women. Likewise, women’s interest in freedom conflicts with men’s interest in all that sex-right affords them: sex, pleasure, mastery, affirmation of manhood, progeny, care, independence.
Some men might recoil at this, insisting that they do not want a sex-right. But when I speak of the interest of men, I mean the interest of the class, not a series of individuals. Individual men can disavow the interest of their class. But in doing so they simply disidentify with their class; they do not change the interest of the class.
Moreover, I suspect that many of these men fail to grasp what sex-right affords them. They imagine that it affords them the power to command an unwilling woman, the power to be brutal, and they assume that without sex-right they will continue to quite easily find a willing woman. They therefore conclude that relinquishing sex-right is uncostly, or is costly only for those few poor men whom no women will choose. They do not realise that the willing women with whom they are familiar, and who they expect will continue to exist, are the product of the sexual contract. As male sex-right entails female sex-duty, sex-right is the assurance of an obliging woman. That assurance saves men from having to overtly exercise their right and thus from noticing that they have it. A scene from Mary Harrington’s childhood illustrates this beautifully. Every day, she recalls, her mother would cook dinner and set the table, and after they had eaten her father would stand up and leave. He did not command his wife to clear the table and wash the dishes; he simply expected that she would. And so long as his wife obliged him, he had no cause to see the pattern of their lives as anything other than mutually chosen. Now imagine this dynamic between husbands and wives in the bedroom.
Since men undercalculate the cost of giving up sex-right, let me state it clearly: without sex-right, they are not assured of an obliging woman. The question is, will men give that up? Progressive men’s fierce protection of pornography and prostitution, and conservative men’s defence of marriage, suggests that we will have to wrest it from them.
As for Franks’ question, “Is it all or nothing, all women versus all men, as Phelan implies?” the answer is yes and no. Qua members of political classes, men and women owe allegiance to their respective classes. That is why gender-critical women are especially pained by other women’s support for trans inclusionism. They rightly expect a solidarity from women that they do not from men. Individual men can betray their class and support women in their fight for liberation. But simply because it is not in their power to become members of the sex class women and thus people whose loyalty properly lies with women, their loyalty to women must always be suspect. At most, therefore, men qua men can become only friends of a kind, not true friends.
What is it for Franks that hinges on the answer to this question? If it is not all or nothing, she writes, then “one cannot create the clean friend-enemy distinction.” However, what feminists need is less a clean friend-enemy distinction than clarity about who they must fight against and who they can fight with. They acquire this by exercising their interested judgement. As Carl Schmitt writes,
conflicts . . . can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party. Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.
Franks and I can be understood as participants judging differently, each trying to convince the other of the superiority of her judgement. In politics it can only be thus. While we cannot necessarily avoid making judgements that will prove mistaken, we can and ought to be clear-eyed. The clear-eyed assessment is this. Men who support women are exceptional, in the sense that they do not act as members of their class ought to. Until we have evidence of exceptionality, we ought to assume normality. That is to say, until we have evidence of a particular man’s enduring friendship to women qua women, we ought to assume enmity.
If it is all or nothing, Franks continues, “then any kind of incremental gain toward sexual justice seems to be ruled out from the start, because men are always the enemy, until all of sudden, in the feminist eschaton, they aren’t.” I think Franks is right, in the following sense. Of the transition from the existing scientific paradigm to a new one, Thomas Kuhn writes, it “cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.” I think this is applicable to the transition from the existing political paradigm—liberalism—to a new one – feminism. The distinction between “all at once” and “not necessarily in an instant” is important. Over time, scientists do the work that will unsettle the existing paradigm and yield a new one. But only once the work “all of a sudden,” to use Franks’ words, coalesces and a new paradigm emerges can the work be seen for what it was: progress toward a new paradigm. By analogy, only once we arrive in the feminist eschaton will certain events and changes be revealed as ushering it in, for only in the context of the feminist eschaton will those events and changes acquire their full meaning.
One of those events is talk of women as members “of the family of man.” In the current paradigm, “woman” and “man” are contrast sets, meaning that women can no more be men than day can be night. “Women are members of mankind” can therefore be heard, literally, as “women, in some respect other than their womanhood, are men” or, figuratively, as “women are men … of a kind.” What feminists meant was that women are, qua women, every bit as much men as men are, but this will become audible only once we have succeeded in reconceiving humanity so that it is no longer synonymous with “mankind.”
Insofar as second-wave feminism rejects the prevailing conception of humanity without yet offering a fully-fledged alternative, Franks is correct: it does lack an understanding of the human being. Consequently, she continues,
Phelan and her fellow second-wave feminists cannot give an account of what is good for human beings. In this sense, it is not clear how she can even defend the truth that mastery and subjection are an unjust way to form male-female relations. Why aren’t the pornographers and pimps correct? A good answer to the question will have to describe what is good for human persons.
But to say that sexual subjection is unjust, feminists need no more than the claim that women have dignity such that they are demeaned by subordination. The fact that it is no longer seriously suggested that women’s rightful condition is subjection—that progressives defend prostitution on the grounds that it is meaningful work, while conservatives insist that the relationship of Adam and Eve is one of mutual help—shows as much. Franks’ criticism is therefore moot.
On the other hand, until we have reconceived humanity, until women are paradigmatic members of mankind, they will not have the dignity of men, so we will be unable to truly describe the way in which prostitution and pornography violate women. This, however, is not wholly debilitating, for it awakens us to the unsettling possibility that we are all, feminists included, blind to the full horror of female suffering.
Franks’ concluding criticism is that “Feminist rhetoric can only be compelling to women if it is naming realities, and Phelan’s account too often departs from many women’s experiences concerning their bodies, their children, and their husbands.” It is significant that the women for whom Franks speaks are wives. Recall Hobbes’ suggestion that in the absence of an authority men are at risk of being dispossessed of their wives by other men, whereas with an authority they enjoy secure possession of their wives. In presenting men with their options, Hobbes implicitly presents women with theirs: in the absence of an authority, women are at risk of being successively possessed by different men (the condition of the prostitute), whereas with an authority women are securely possessed by one man (the condition of the wife). What the social contract promises women can now be seen: protection from prostitution, in exchange for acknowledging the authority of a husband.
Why, then, does prostitution exist? The explanation implied by the social contract is that some women have failed to acknowledge the authority of a husband and are therefore not entitled to protection.
Wives who accept this explanation infer that their protection is contingent on ongoing demonstration of loyalty to their husbands. A wife’s loyalty to her husband consists in her sexual faithfulness to him. Pateman’s theory makes sense of this: because the husband is the sexual master of his wife, the wife owes to the husband the loyalty of the sexual subject to the sexual master. A wife proves her loyalty, then, by proving that she has not been the sexual subject of another man, that she is not a whore: my experience does not resemble hers.
The true explanation, however, is that the state must provide men with prostitutes. The prostitute is the final assurance of male sex-right. It is to her men can turn in the absence of a willing woman. If the state must provide men with prostitutes, then some women are not prostitutes only because other women are. They are shielded from prostitution not by their husbands or by the state, but by other women. It is therefore unsurprising that wives should not see their experiences reflected in my analysis. They are the women who have had the good fortune—and it is nothing more than fortune—to have been spared their fate and shielded from the truth of their condition.
So long as we accept Hobbes’ picture of women’s options, we shall see marriage as the antithesis of prostitution. Marriage is security, protection, safety, and above all, respectability, while prostitution is insecurity, vulnerability, harm, and unrespectability. I now understand why Franks criticises the “ease with which [I] equate[] prostitution . . . to marriage,” and why Mary Harrington and Louise Perry view marriage as the solution to women’s woes. For all their critique of liberalism, these feminists remain enthralled to its picture of women’s options. While Hobbes could envision for women life as only either secure or insecure sexual property, feminism insists on the possibility of life as persons. If we accept this possibility, we shall see marriage and prostitution as of a kind: both are forms of life as sexual property, in contrast to life as persons. This leads to the realisation that wives have not been spared their fate after all; they have lived a form of it.
I ask Franks: if I am wrong, then what is the explanation of women’s condition? Why do women suffer a distinctive—a specifically sexual—abuse at the hands of men? Why does prostitution exist? Is prostitution not imagined as consolation for unmarried men? What does this reveal about the male entitlements of marriage? Why is marital rape practically inconceivable? Why do wives feel that they have a sexual duty to their husbands? Why do they believe that they must have sex with their husbands to show them that they love them? Why are they afraid of their husbands doubting their love?
