Since the 1980s, second-wave feminism hasn’t gotten much love. For theorists in the postmodern wave and after, the second wave was structuralist, ahistorical, and homogeneous, interested only in bourgeois, white women’s interests. For conservative or natural-law thinkers, the second wave was too obsessed with the sexual revolution and belittling men. Against this background of critique from both sides of the political spectrum, in her new book, Feminism Defeated, philosopher Kate M. Phelan eschews apologies and barrels forward with her bold thesis: that only second-wave feminism understood the basic political reality of women as a sex class.
Phelan is sympathetic to gender-critical (or, as this journal names the group, “sex-realist”) feminists, although she has her concerns; readers of Fairer Disputations have already seen her in these pages. The feminists who receive the full blast of Phelan’s ire, however, are postmodern feminists, the ones dedicated to gender inclusion and intersectionality. These new feminists partook in the “poststructural turn,” which attained hegemonic status in feminism by the late 1990s, as theories indebted more to Michel Foucault and Judith Butler than to Marx and Catharine MacKinnon took over academia.
This sea-change occurred, Phelan argues, because of the lure of academic respectability, but at great cost. She quotes Joan Wallach Scott, who notes that the term “‘gender’ seems to fit within the scientific terminology of social science and thus dissociates itself from the (supposedly strident) politics of feminism.” This move from politics to social theory is precisely Phelan’s target. The new social theory was much less interested in women qua women. Phelan shows how Foucault’s insistence on analyzing microvectors of power made both men and women its victims: “On this theory, it is not men who govern women; it is the sex-gender discourse that governs both women and men.”
Phelan is right to critique the postmoderns, but her resistance to grounding womanhood biologically or metaphysically undercuts her claims. Further, her reliance on the political friend/enemy distinction imagines that we live in a world in which authentic heterosexual love simply cannot exist.
From Women’s Liberation to Gender Inclusion
Phelan is correct concerning Foucault’s indifference to the specificity of female experience and his rejection of the very category of the individual. For Foucault, as for poststructuralism in general, the individual does not preexist power; rather, he or she is the result of it. Thus, the goal of liberating individuals is fundamentally misguided, and feminism is wrongheaded from the outset.
Butler’s most famous interventions concerning gender found further problems with feminism. As she wrote about her ground-breaking book Gender Trouble, “Any feminist theory that restricts the meaning of gender … sets up exclusionary gender norms within feminism, often with homophobic consequences.” Such “exclusionary norms”—found in, for example, the restriction of feminism’s object to the liberation of women—“produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion.”
This new focus on inclusion versus exclusion changes what feminism is about. Phelan writes, “The displacement of the second-wave feminist account by the Butlerian poststructural feminist account was thus the displacement of the goal of women’s liberation by the goal of gender inclusion.”
Intersectionality doubled down on inclusivity while watering down categories such as “woman” that were considered unrespectable. Phelan critiques second-wave feminists on this score as well, because they claimed that the rights of women could not conflict with the rights of other downtrodden groups and, thus, that the pursuit of women’s rights was in a sense the pursuit of all people’s rights. This second-wave caveat “promised too much,” because, now, we are in a situation in which the rights of women and the rights of trans-identifying males do in fact conflict, at least in each group’s account of its due rights.
Further, intersectional theories trained feminists to engage in a rights-calculation, with the most victimized group always winning—and women were never considered the most victimized. Why is it, Phelan rightly asks, that women are asked to identify with their race, their sexual preference, or any other status, but never their womanhood? “What other political movement … has defended itself by claiming, pathetically, to be ‘for everyone’?”
Phelan’s response, refreshing in its refusal to beg for intersectionalist favors, is essentially to say: Yes, women’s rights may not be the common good, but to hell with the others. Here, we fight! She wants us to abandon the victimization algorithm and refocus on second-wave feminism’s original mission. “To ask women to choose women is to ask too much of them. Very well: we must ask too much of them.” No more redescription of “our failure as success”: The goal of gender inclusion was never and should not now be the rightful goal of feminism.
A (Sexual) Politics of Eternal Conflict
This clearing of the deck of rival theories of feminism allows Phelan to put forward her own account of the advantage of second-wave feminist theory. It argues that women are a political class, with clear friends (other women) and a clear enemy: men. To make this case, she presents harrowing evidence, drawn mostly from literature, of male sexuality that is inextricably tied to violence. She could have also drawn on internet pornography’s overwhelmingly violent content, most of which is targeted at men.
In the pages of Fairer Disputations, Phelan directly addresses porn, and here she states pithily the incoherence that, in my reading, calls into question her account of sex-class: “We see in pornography the essence, not the perversion, of sexuality under male dominance: conquest.” The feminist problem is not only that male sexuality is too often violent, according to Phelan; the problem is that it is structurally and irretrievably violent.
This brings to mind Andrea Dworkin, whom Phelan quotes on male-female intercourse and its intrinsic relation to violation and rape: “There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. … She is occupied—physically, internally, in her privacy.” A woman, Phelan writes, is “fated to be raped. Under patriarchy, it is the female body that is rapable, that is to be raped, whose rape is pleasurable and fulfilling.” The male body, on the contrary, “is inviolable, is not to be raped.”
Because this female-male dichotomy is a friend-enemy one, she concludes that the relation between the two is a political or class relation, “not a biological one. In short, in Dworkin’s writings, the distinguishing feature of femaleness is violability, and violability is political in nature.” Phelan summarizes: “On the second-wave conception of women as a sex class, woman stands to man as subject to master and friend to enemy.”
In Fairer Disputations, Phelan writes, “When I first read Kate Millett, I saw sexual relations through new eyes. I saw conquest, degradation, humiliation, subjection, possession, mastery where previously I had seen love.” I found this passage unbearably sad, in part because far too many sexual relations are precisely saturated by such evils. Similarly, Andrea Dworkin’s voice seems so prescient about our current porn-addled imagination that it seems churlish to criticize her. But I do think both thinkers err in making these sweeping generalizations about male-female relations and about individual men and women as well.
Phelan’s use of political class forces her into these zero-sum game pronouncements. She depends on Carl Schmitt for her friend-enemy distinction, in which politics is grounded on the ability to identify with others, for the purpose of fighting their common enemy. But Schmitt’s approach seems to me to be quintessentially modern and liberal. It views politics and life in general through a hermeneutic of power, one that reminds me of Hobbes. Schmitt’s definition provides Phelan with her sense that politics is eternal conflict rather than the public engagement with the question of how to communally pursue the good.
Unsurprisingly, this modern political view makes it difficult to parse when feminism achieves victory, because such a lens presupposes continual battle that is irresolvable. One will always have friends with whom one has things in common, as well as those who are different or opposed. How can we mark progress, therefore, if relations that look like love are actually seen to be, after reading Millett or raising one’s consciousness, always already relations of degradation?
Phelan grants the possibility of the “conversion” of her enemies rather than war against them, but her all-or-nothing approach makes it hard to see how one would verify such conversions to the cause. Wouldn’t a relation of love be an example of such a conversion? She seems to rule out such relationships a priori, however, quoting Irene Peslikis in opposition to “thinking that our man is the exception, and, therefore, we are the exception among women.” The conversion of individual men to feminism is possible in theory but impossible in fact, because we still have a society in which misogyny exists, and that can only mean that feminism has not yet won, and before feminism wins, what looks like a relationship of love is in fact one that is just hiding its misogyny better.
This is the mathematical problem of sex-class: Is it all or nothing, all women versus all men, as Phelan implies? If not, one cannot create the clean friend-enemy distinction. But if it is, 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.
In fact, future men will only relinquish their enemy status when they relinquish their attraction to women, if you follow her argument closely. What seems to be a heterosexual relationship of love is always a relationship of subjection, until, in a classless feminist society, it is no longer recognizably a heterosexual relationship. At that point, “prostitution, pornography, marriage, and heterosexual relations do not exist, either in the sense that the terms … do not refer or in the sense that their referents bear no resemblance to the current ones” (emphasis mine). She calls this “political lesbianism.”
To Fight for Women, We Must Be Able to Define Them
The ease with which Phelan equates prostitution and porn to marriage and male-female relations is a sign of how thoroughly convinced she has been by Kate Millett. It is also an indication of her wafer-thin anthropology. Political class is needed precisely as a substitute for either a biological or “metaphysical” account of the sexes and their relations. Accordingly, two of the weakest points in Phelan’s argument are her refusal to define females on the basis of their bodies and, then, her almost total neglect of what those female bodies are ordered to—precisely qua female, that is, as sexed with a distinct reproductive system—namely, motherhood. These two moves undermine her load-bearing concept of political sex-class.
Both these weak points are rooted in a mistrust of universalizing concepts, which—in Phelan’s defense—can be leveraged to refuse rights and opportunities to women because they just aren’t “naturally” rational, analytical, sober-minded, or whatever is good and therefore not feminine. This mistrust is an authentically second-wave instinct, and anyone who doubts that definitions of womanhood could be used in such misogynistic ways have blessedly little acquaintance with the more fevered right-wingers of X/Twitter.
The second-wave resolution to avoid all “essentializing” conceptions of womanhood undermines its own purposes, however, and leads precisely to the poststructuralist gender feminism that Phelan rightly abhors. Without an understanding of “woman,” Phelan cannot truly say who are women and therefore who are the “friends” who oppose the male enemy.
Depending upon a political rather than a “metaphysical” definition of women means, she argues, that identity arises from loyalty. But many men identifying as women have deep loyalty to the class of women; for example, Andrea Long Chu writes that such men are deeply committed to womanhood that they are “separatists from our own bodies. We are militants of so fine a caliber that we regularly take steps to poison the world’s supply of male biology.” The existence of such allies leads Catharine MacKinnon to argue that they are in fact women and feminists. Phelan disagrees, but she ends up proposing something similar.
Both MacKinnon and Phelan shift to the political in order to avoid the biological as the criterion for decoding womanhood. But this is a move away from embodiment and toward abstract loyalties, dependent upon a false dichotomy: either the political or the biological. Once more, this is a fundamentally modern and liberal stance, which views politics as something concerning procedures and loyalties, not bodies. Matter, the Cartesian res extensa, simply functions on a plane apart from politics, and not a rational one at that. An alternative view would regard organic, embodied realities as the very raison d’être of politics.
Phelan’s understanding of the political is likewise based upon a dichotomy between politics and reality or being or what is described in metaphysics. Without an understanding of what human beings are, 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.
In this way, political sex-class won’t do as a substitute for an embodied understanding of femaleness. Women’s political interests can only be discerned based upon an understanding of what a woman is. In this way, the derided metaphysics and biology are actually the best friends of a clear-eyed politics. 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.
I find it telling that, toward the end of Feminism, Defeated, Phelan proposes that the feminist eschaton might reveal that “it is not women’s physical weakness that gives rise to their rapability but their rapability that gives rise to their physical weakness,” or that “sex might be related only coincidentally to reproduction” and therefore perhaps sex is not even “natural or unchangeable.” I fear that her resistance to universals and metaphysics has led her back to Judith Butler in the end, because this kind of social construction of the body is indebted to poststructuralism.
What feminism might be possible if the way women reproduce is not coincidental or unnatural—as the male-dominated world certainly believes it is—but instead forms a coherent whole with her person? Phelan discriminates between (biological) human beings and feminist persons, but could we find a holistic and embodied account of woman that would even enable women and men to join hands as friends in the battle against misogyny? To find that, one might need to look past the second wave of feminism to the insights of the first… or maybe just to the pages of Fairer Disputations.
