This essay is the second in a four-part exchange between Catholic theologian Rachel Coleman and radical feminist philosopher Kate Phelan. Click here to see all four installments.
Time and again radical feminists have found friends in Catholics—in their opposition to prostitution, pornography, surrogacy, and trans ideology, and in their critiques of abortion, the birth control pill, and the sexual revolution.
Against the assumption that this friendship is sheer coincidence, Rachel Coleman argues that it reflects a shared foundational principle: “the body (and therefore reality) matters.”
Personally and politically, I am grateful for the friendship of Catholics. It is no small thing. But it does not reflect a shared foundational principle. And—contra Coleman—it is no less genuine and no less significant for that.
Radical Feminists: A First Look
Coleman is attentive to differences between radical feminists and Catholics, suggesting that though they share the belief that the body matters, they differ in their beliefs about why it matters.
She suggests that, from a radical feminist perspective, the sexual dimorphism of the human body is of consequence for women: the female body is physically weaker than the male body, making women vulnerable to being dominated by men; the female body carries the foetus, which, too, is a source of vulnerability, though also of power; and the female body is cyclical. From a Catholic perspective, by contrast, the sexual dimorphism of the human body is significant because it—like all else—is the work of God. But also, Coleman writes, because it is the nature of the specifically human body, the body of the creature made in the image of God.
It is true that feminists, including those of the radical ilk, have sometimes regarded the female body in much the way Coleman describes. In addition to those thinkers Coleman has enumerated, Shulamith Firestone writes that
women throughout history before the advent of birth control were at the continual mercy of their biology—menstruation, menopause, and ‘female ills,’ constant painful childbirth, wetnursing and care of infants, all of which made them dependent on males (whether brother, father, husband, lover, or clan, government, community-at-large) for physical survival. . .
Similarly, Susan Brownmiller claims that “Man’s structural capacity to rape and women’s corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself,” and Janice Raymond suggests that “men want to be women . . . [because they] recognise the power that women have by virtue of female biology . . . power . . . symbolised in giving birth.” In these quotes, the biological reality of sex explains, at least in part, the political reality of patriarchy, rape, and male appropriation of the identity “woman.” It follows that so long as we deny the reality of sex we cannot protect against this political reality. Feminists therefore have political reasons to affirm the sexual dimorphism of the human body.
At other times, radical feminists invoke the reality of the body in a very different way. They criticise the Lockean notion of property in the person, according to which aspects of the body become—suspiciously—conceivable as alienable: as one can lease one’s land, so one can lease one’s labour power (as in work), or one’s sexed body (as in prostitution), or one’s uterus (as in surrogacy). I say “suspiciously,” because consider who benefits from the alienability of aspects of the body: the capitalist, who gains a worker; a man, who gains a sexual servant; or the (usually wealthy) “intended parents,” who gain not only a child but also a reproductive vessel—a mother who is expected to nurture a child within her womb for nine months, give birth, and then immediately relinquish him or her forever. This notion relies upon a conceptualisation of the relationship between self and body: the self is the owner, and the body is the owner’s property, separate from the self and thus alienable. Were one’s self and body not separate, the sale of one’s body would be the sale of oneself—slavery.
Kajsa Ekis Ekman rejects this distinction in the context of prostitution. In prostitution, she writes, “the ‘work’ is one’s own Self and body.” This is because of the nature of sex: “sex is [not] a thing, a material good like food and water, something that can be produced, delivered and walked away from.” As a consequence, prostituted women must learn to dissociate. Ekman quotes a woman featured in the book Prostitutes: Our Life, who says: “My body . . . isn’t the same body—the one the client gets isn’t the real one, it’s not mine.” Ekman’s objection to prostitution rests on metaphysical grounds: the relationship between sexuality, the body, and the self is such that sex cannot be sold, and because sex cannot be sold, women suffer psychological harm in doing so.
Janice Raymond similarly rejects the conceptualisation of surrogacy as the lease of one’s uterine capacities. To the claim that “if men can sell sperm, women should be able to sell their uterine capacities,” she responds, “this is a grossly distorted symmetry. Contractual procreation in surrogacy amounts to the total use of a woman’s person for nine months.” Raymond is making a metaphysical point: the relationship between a woman and her uterus is unlike the relationship between a man and his sperm. While sperm is separable from the male body, the uterus is not separable from the female body. To alienate one’s uterus is thus to alienate one’s entire body.
Ekman and Raymond suggest that the body—Ekman, the human body, Raymond, the female body in particular—matters in a way that liberalism fails to appreciate, that it is not mere property, that it belongs to an integral and indivisible whole. And it is this suggestion that forms a basis of their criticisms of prostitution and surrogacy.
In sum, radical feminists have explained and criticised patriarchal practices in terms of the body, whether that be the sexual dimorphism of the body, the unity of body, self, and sexuality, or the inalienability of the body.
Radical Feminists: A Second Look
However, taken as representative of radical feminism, these explanations and criticisms mislead. It is not the current denial of sex that radical feminists oppose; it is the current denial of sex-class. Thus, it is not the metaphysical and transcendental reality of sex that they affirm; it is the political and historically contingent reality of sex-class that they assert.
In radical feminist theory, the analytically salient feature of men and women is that they are political kinds. As Kate Millett wrote, “sex is a status category with political implications.” Whatever else men are, they are a people with “sex-right”: a right to women as women, to women in their capacities as sexed beings. (This term, coined by Adrienne Rich in a 1980 essay, was taken up and developed by Carol Pateman in her 1988 book, The Sexual Contract.) As a corollary, whatever else women are, they are a people with “sex-duty”: a duty to men as men, to men in their capacities as sexed beings. (“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul . . . And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.’” (Genesis 2:7, 2:18, KJV)). Men are human beings in possession of help meets, women are help meets.
From the standpoint of this theory, prostitution appears as a crucial means by which the state upholds men’s sex-right. In this understanding of prostitution, the “buyer” is necessarily male and the “seller” necessarily female, and the “buyer” approaches the “seller” as a master approaches his subject. Prostitution is—literally, not figuratively—the enactment of sexual hierarchy. For radical feminists, prostitution is objectionable because it subjects women, not because it denies the unity of self, body, and sexuality or the non-commodifiability of sex (though it may do this too).
In The Sexual Contract, Pateman argues that surrogacy is another facet of male sex-right. On the surface, in prostitution men exercise their right to access women’s sexed being for one purpose (sexual pleasure), while in surrogacy they exercise it for another (offspring). On reflection, what men seek in prostitution and surrogacy is ultimately one and the same: affirmation of virility, of manhood, of rightful place in the class of those with sex-right.
The left advocates for women’s access to abortion and the birth control pill, framing such access as necessary to women’s reproductive autonomy. But while men have a right to women as sexed beings, women cannot have sexual or reproductive autonomy, and while women do not have sexual or reproductive autonomy, abortion and the birth control pill serve only to remove the condition hitherto attached to sex—possibility of pregnancy, thereby securing for men unconditional sexual access to women. As Andrea Dworkin writes,
It was the brake that pregnancy put on [sex] that made abortion a high-priority political issue for men in the 1960s . . . The sexual revolution, in order to work, required that abortion be available to women on demand…. Getting laid was at stake. Not just getting laid, but getting laid the way great numbers of boys and men had always wanted—lots of girls who wanted it all the time outside marriage, free, giving it away.
Radical feminists criticise abortion and the birth control pill in political terms—in terms of their relationship to sexual hierarchy. By contrast, Catholics criticise abortion and the birth control pill in moral (and, derivatively, social and health) terms; abortion violates the sanctity of human life, while contraception severs sex from an essential part of its proper purpose: procreation.
Clearly, both radical feminists and Catholics consider sexuality to be special. For Catholicism, it is special in its unitive and procreative significance. For radical feminism, by contrast, it is special in its political significance. That is, in a world in which men have sex-right and women sex-duty, the sex act is necessarily an act between master and subject, necessarily “the prime moment of [sexual] politics,” as Catharine MacKinnon puts it. This is so irrespective of whether it is performed lovingly (or, in the sterile liberal vocabulary, consensually), for no amount of love alters the political status of the man and the woman in this act.
Radical feminists therefore do not criticise pornography in terms of its deleterious effects on sexuality. We would not say that pornography is “to sex as McDonald’s is to food,” as Louise Perry does. In that analogy, pornography corrupts our healthy sexual desire by sating it with something degraded and addictive. By contrast, radical feminists ask why the sex of pornography—sex in which men choke, slap, and spit on women—is addictive. To what in healthy sexual desire does it appeal? We see in pornography the essence, not the perversion, of sexuality under male dominance: conquest. Needless to say, our concern is not to rescue this sexuality from pornography. From the radical feminist standpoint, the distinction between “bad” and “good,” “corrupted” and “healthy” sexuality is a distinction between abuse and use of male sex-right, between a conquest so brutal or demeaning that it exceeds the limits of male sex-right and a conquest that respects those limits.
The argument between Catholics and liberals is an argument over the proper limits of male sex-right. Radical feminists want a world without male sex-right, not a world with a circumscribed male sex-right.
“Woman” As a Sex-Class
Finally, radical feminist opposition to trans ideology is opposition to the denial of the reality of sex-class and only derivatively to the denial of the reality of sex. To claim the identity “woman” in spite of the absence of a female body and of the political status that accompanies this body is to deny that “woman” names a political class. It is to deny the history of women, a history of subjection to men, a history that is not yet and, so long as we deny it, will not become history.
If radical feminists affirm a transcendent reality, it is that of female humanity, not that of the sexually dimorphic human body. This transcendent reality is, in the final analysis, as inconceivable to Catholicism as to liberalism. For both, the paradigm human being is a man, and not simply a man but a man accompanied by a female subject: for Catholicism, Adam and Eve, for liberalism, Rousseau’s ideal citizen Émile and his dutiful wife Sophie. Coleman’s assertion of the reality of the sexually dimorphic human body is the assertion of the reality of Adam and Eve, against a liberal feminism that seeks for women the status of Émile. Catholics are right: women cannot (and ought not wish to) be Émile. But they are wrong about why: women cannot be Émile because the political order precludes it. Were women Émile, there would be no Sophie, and were there no Sophie, there would be no Émile as we know him.
The reality of Adam and Eve, of Émile and Sophie, is a political reality. Liberalism denies this political reality, pretending that women now enjoy the status of men, that Sophie has become Émile, that the prostitute and the surrogate are gender-neutral individuals exercising their self-proprietorship. Refusing to bear false witness, Catholicism declares the pretence. But, mistaking the pretence for one about nature, it affirms this political reality as natural and transcendent. Thus, it too denies this political reality. Against both, radical feminism asserts this political reality in order to surpass it, that is, in order to reconstitute the political order.
A Common Rejection of the Individual
While radical feminists and Catholics do not share a foundational principle, they are nevertheless alike in one significant way: they both reject the individual as the arbiter of reality. As Coleman writes, this rejection is now heretical.
In our liberal world, it is individual desire that is sovereign and to which the world must—through discourse or technology—be bent. There is nothing bigger than I that I must acknowledge. The only constraint on my desire is the desire of another I: I can use a surrogate or a prostitute, provided she consents.
For Catholicism, there is something bigger, something that transcends our individual desires: God. To acknowledge God is to acknowledge his will, which is to acknowledge his work: the sexually dimorphic human body.
For radical feminism, too, there is something bigger: a future in which women are free. An individual woman may desire to be a prostituteor a surrogate. But in the radical feminist view, the abolition of prostitution and surrogacy is necessary for female freedom, and the possibility of female freedom transcends individual desire. The question of choice is therefore not for radical feminism what it is for liberalism – decisive (or all but). Historically, radical feminists have sometimes argued on liberal terms, insisting that women do not choose to be prostitutes or surrogates. As liberal terms are the prevailing ones, this is understandable. But it is nevertheless mistaken. For it tacitly accepts the sovereignty of individual desire – the wrong of prostitution lies in its contravention of individual desire. In fact, it lies in its contravention of female freedom.
At bottom, Catholicism and radical feminism are two irreconcilable visions. I feel compelled to insist on this, though it pains me to do so, because I think that, unsure of herself, feminism has too often been willing to forget who she is in the hope of acquiring a friend: Marxism, anti-racism, leftism, and, most recently and devastatingly, trans-inclusionism.
Feminists are not Marxists by another name, nor anti-racists, nor leftists, nor trans activists. Nor, I must now say, Catholics. Ours is not the language of economic class, race, social justice, gender-identity, or sex; it is the language of sex-class. We are radically—to the root—feminists. Ours is a vision of something new, something as yet unseen, a vision as unintelligible in a patriarchal (or fraternal) world as Catholicism is in a disenchanted one.
