Trump’s 2016 campaign strategist, Steve Bannon, did an interview on ABC’s 4 Corners a few years ago and made two significant points. First when asked about all the crazy stuff coming out of his former boss’s mouth Bannon laughed it off saying it was just noise, what mattered was the signal. That identified chaos and information theory as the theoretical basis for the communications strategy Trump’s team deployed. It was effective, the opposition was kept off balance and indignant by the noise while Trump grew the base with the signal. What was the signal? “They are coming after the patriarchy” Bannon said. He went on to explain how the patriarchy was the basis of the cultural success and dominance of the west. This is a seductive narrative for the disempowered, disenfranchised white fellas experiencing a sense of declining relevance and value.
Bannon had diagnosed insecurity correctly and proceeded to package up some snake oil for desperate people. Amidst the deluge of noise and outrage synthesised from real world situations and crazy fabrications the signal remains. ‘You deserve to be part of something great, you should have more power, there is evil against us and now they want to take away your power over your woman…’ So busy is the bombardment of outrage that time is never taken to stop and question if there are better ways to structure society than a pyramid scheme of ownership and exploitation[1].
Ok, so fuck the patriarchy, but why not a feminist?
It may be Bob Marley’s advice on ‘isms and schisms’ resonating with a general reticence to sign up to an ideology and use it as a banner but not identifying as a feminist is also strategy about the effect of using the label in dialogue. I think the fundamental issue is the nature, not just direction, of relationships in society. Our contemporary culture has structural power inequalities that includes a significant gender dimension just as it has a significant racial dimension. Status exists in these dimensions as much as it does in class, and we are kidding ourselves to accept the neo liberal fantasy that we are made equal by pretending status in our society is purely meritocratic. This should be the signal in the noise but using the word feminism can be a distraction.
What does feminism mean? A failure of the imagination can simply see swapping women for men in the same roles and relations. There are other questions. How does feminism look outside western individualised cultures, and can it become a trojan horse for colonisation? How often does the use of the word simply trigger someone to stop listening and go on the attack? Words get degraded by sloppy use and intentional sabotage, often in the form of straw man arguments[2]. Words like ‘God’, ‘socialism’ and ‘love’ can represent such different conceptions to different people that rather than being a bridge in a dialogue they become trenches from which people talk past each other. Attempts to overcome misunderstanding through careful definition of terms can be very fruitful if there is a genuine attempt to understand one another but it also risks being labelled as an ‘intellectual’ and put on the waiting list for the guillotine. Is feminism that thing where white middle class women want equal representation on corporate boards? Sometimes to some people. Sometimes feminism seems as tribal and divisive and prone to over generalisation as a standard issue sexist male pig might be. Sometimes it makes me feel that being male is the problem. Sometimes feminism gives insights critical to transcend the conditioning of being born into relative privilege in this patriarchal society. I would rather leave the battlefield over the word ‘feminism’ and get on with the war on patriarchy.[3]
Using the gendered term as the foundation of a critique of how shit it is to structure a society on domination and exploitation closes more doors it than opens. The problem is not being male or female but the nature of relations between us as determined by the power structures we inhabit. Like a fractal, the structural element of relationship repeats through society at different scales and are perpetuated by what is normal in the environments of growing children. This thread is picked up in the Narratives and Aesthetics and Alienation essays but for now, if we go back to those frightened fellas clutching to the few living things they have power over and talk to them about who is really making their lives miserable and show them that there are other ways to relate we may find a lot more people join the chorus.
Fuck the patriarchy.
[1] Abbot & Howard’s ‘study of western civilisation, no black armbands allowed’ is a part of this busy constellation of selective historical readings feeding this narrative. Note the dog whistlers in the ‘all lives matter’ camp also have a fetish for western civilisation archaeology. This trick of imposed failure of the imagination will be f
urther examined in the essay on decolonisation.
[2] In the essay on Fear of Freedom I linked a broad reaching interview with Enrich Fromm that included defining ‘socialism’ in terms of using social and not capital considerations as the primary organising principal of society. There was nothing about the top-down planned economy that the right try and paint ‘socialism’ as.
[3] Excuse the stereotypically male choice of metaphor.
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