Freedom: rip it up

TRIGGER WARNING: sexual assault

A suburban comedy-drama, monumental in the way only a middle-aged, middle-class straight white American man would have the audacity to write. In this case, as in most, the monument does not yield the audacity it promises. Not even close. Here, the problem is not that the characters are simply unlikeable: they are dull, cliched, and not even believable. None of the truth, ugliness, attraction of most unlikeable characters in literature. The plot is a mess, but not a beautifully chaotic postmodern mess, simply a directionless, pointless collection of events nobody cares about. Franzen’s social realism is proudly middle-brow, what he seems to consider ambitious, without any sense that his execution of the mode is highly conventional. Yet even his realism isn’t believable: convenient events and plot holes abound. His language is trivial, ugly, too repetitive to justify six hundred-plus pages. The structure is fundamentally flawed, switching between the “autobiography” of one of the main characters, Patty, and the various viewpoints of three men, in a charade without function or finesse. If it was written by a woman, it would be read as a gossip column, dismissed as “chick lit,” hardly a Tolstoyan masterpiece of social realism. At the heart of this novel’s problem is its meanspiritedness; what Franzen sees as irony is slathered indiscriminately across the pages, the kind of sarcasm only a middle-aged white man can apply to everything that crosses his path, until the final pages when he seems to want us to care profoundly for his characters. Too late: the snow-love he wraps his ending up in is only sentimentality. In this vein, to read this book without being painfully aware of the almost unremitting misogyny is to inhabit the same world that Franzen does, the world that praises “Freedom” as a contender of the “Great American Novel.” A sexual assault early in the book is represented so gratuitously, so callously, with such a lack of understanding, that it undermines every attempt Franzen makes to cite this trauma as the “reason” for the myriad of Patty’s later issues. Women are described in terms of age, attractiveness, and pliability to men. Numerous references to men’s genitalia as cognisant conquerors and women’s as passive receptacles grow tiresome. Women and girls are the root of all of men’s problems. Later in the book, a rape fantasy is described lovingly. Every sarcastic pot-shot is a cheap shot: rather than being a sweeping, ambitious tome, it is an outdated triumph of the conventional, liberal, white, heterosexual American male in a world of (thankfully) splintering perspectives that offer far more interest and insight. But it is a high price to pay to realise, again, that the most worthwhile writing comes from women, people of colour, queers, all of us on the margins. If misogyny isn’t enough to turn a reader off this novel, let it be the presumptuousness of six hundred-plus pages of misplaced irony, directionless satire, complacent liberalism.

Insomnia

Free will, destiny, a cosmology without answers. Senior citizens play chess and wear panama hats, deaths are preordained and wanted, carried out by bald doctors. An old man mourns his wife, cannot sleep, falls into a universe of auras and violence. The opportunity is missed to render the true horror of insomnia, cheapened and never threatening, a mere discomfort, never consuming, torturous, painful, insane. A strange plotline about reproductive rights, King’s misogyny never far from the surface, until a shrill, selfish, aggressive feminist meets the fate that is the second-best fantasy of every misogynist: decapitation. Peopled by the silly, beautiful-or-ugly women of so much men’s fiction, shaped by the paternalism of old Ralph Roberts, who sympathises with the abuser but saves a women’s shelter from the lone wolf on a shooting spree. Long, as always, too long, crowded with explication, repetition, one too many interjections from the dead wife. But 90s commercial fiction at its best: read at an airport, addled with jetlag, in a time-warp, expecting nothing.

The Daylight Gate

The 1612 Pendle Hill witch trials, as real today, wilder than Salem, rich on paper. The August Assizes, Lancaster Castle, Daemonology, 1605 Gunpowder Plot, Hogton Hall, the Rough Lee, the North and its darkness, severed heads, poverty, women’s power crushed again and again, and still frightening. The foolishness of patriarchy, the banality of violence against women, children, the poor: all of this moves in a swampy sump, shifting point of view and allegiances. Spitting in the wind, galloping on horses, a woman with fire for hair, the inventor of magenta dye. She writes, rescues, and queers your dull grey Protestantism. Not only the gothic, but patriarchal and feudal oppression, fearfully resonant.

The Use of Pleasure

How did sexuality acquire its relation to truth? (In construction alone). How a decipherment of the self by the self, how a hermeneutics of desire? How in the 21st century did sexuality come to signal a revelation of the soul as a realm of knowledge about the True Self, where the smallest pieces of desire must be examined and analysed? Ancient Greece, on the other hand, turns to sexual practices themselves, not as moral/immoral, but as moderation, self-mastery, the superiority of the free man and his need to exercise his birthright as active, as ruler. Boys are the most beautiful, women are in a political relationship of ruler/ruled. All a juridico-moral codification of acts, arts of existence, regimen – for “free” men only.

The School of Roots: Abominable, Rotting Birds and Women

                  I am returning to Hélène Cixous’ astonishing book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. The section is entitled “The School of Roots.”

“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” Galatians 5:19-21.

Okay, surely we have got beyond this notion of the impure, the abomination, tied up with the body and so with women (as women are apparently trapped in the body, and so abominable).

But if we haven’t? Cixous wants us to question it not by ignoring this concept of the abominable, but looking at it more closely: “I associate women and writing with this abomination. I do this, of course, half playfully, half seriously. It is my way of indicating the reserved, secluded, or excluded path or place where you meet those beings I think are worth knowing while we are alive.”

Why do we think of such things as unclean? Why do we struggle to think of women’s bodies as something other than inherently sexualised? Why do we still call menstruation stuff “sanitary products”? Why do so many still think of homosexuality as “unnatural” or, at least, a deviation from nature?

Again, we have arrived at Cixous’ great goal: to go deep, beyond even discomfort.

And so she draws on that “chain of associations and signifiers composed of birds, women, and writing.” The Bible sets out a great list of animals that are “abominable”: unclean, not to be eaten. And so many of them are birds.

And so many laws about bodies, unclean acts, are about women.

So Cixous tells us: “If I gather these beings to talk about them in the same way, if I am worried by the fate of birds and women, it is because I have learned that not many people – unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – can really love, tolerate, or understand a certain kind of writing; I am using women and birds as synonyms.”

Birds frighten me. I shudder when I see a feather. Maybe Cixous can explain why.

“What is interesting is that birds, writing, and many women are considered abominable, threatening, and are rejected, because others, the rejectors, feel something is taken away from them. But let me leave women aside for today, since this is a controversial issue, and keep only birds and writing. Neither birds not writing take anything away, yet people feel that some forms of writing do take something from us. Clarice Lispector has never been a feminist, Genet is not a feminist, though theirs are writings that may hurt, may dissatisfy, and give the feeling that something is taken away.”

Hmm. Yes. But we need more on what it means to be “abominable,” and why it is so frightening.

“That is my theme for today: to be ‘imund,’ to be unclean with joy. Immonde, that is, out of the mundus (the world). The monde, the world, that is so-called clean. The world that is on the good side of the law, that is ‘proper,’ the world of order. The moment you cross the line the law has drawn by wording, verb(aliz)ing, you are supposed to be out of the world. You no longer belong to the world.”

This is what I want from writing, and reading, after all. But birds?

“So why are those birds imund? Because. As you know, this is the secret of the law: ‘because.’ This is the law’s logic. It is this terrible ‘because,’ this senseless fatal ‘because’ that has decided people’s fate, even in the extremity of the concentration camps.”

Maybe that’s why people seem unnerved when I cannot provide an answer to the riddle of The Loud Earth. But I don’t know how.

“Writing is not put there, it does not happen out there, it does not come from outside. On the contrary, it comes from deep inside. It comes from what Genet calls the ‘nether realms,’ the inferior realms (domains inferiéurs). We’ll try to go there for a time, since this is where the treasure of writing lies, where it is formed, where it has stayed since the beginning of creation: down below.”

Is it a hell located in the body? In the way in the cultural imagination hell has always been located in women’s bodies?

“It is deep in my body, further down, behind thought. Thought comes in front of it and it closes like a door. This does not mean that it does not think, but it thinks differently from our thinking and speech. Somewhere in the depths of my heart, which is deeper than I think.”

She must be getting at something beyond that patriarchal dichotomy: mind/body, which pairs up with man/woman, the first term in the binary being always superior. I guess collapsing them is scary.

Cixous traces this collapse in Lispector’s work: “Clarice effects an interior return journey, since we began as matter before moving away from whence we came. She makes a return journey to our concrete origins, though the journey is a spiritual one. The journey is spiritual because it is not enough to put one’s foot on the ground to come back to earth. It is an extremely spiritual exercise, reintegrating the earthly, the earth, and the earth’s composition in one’s body, imagination, thought. Clarice does not do this simply: she proceeds by feeling her way, by desiring; she moves blindly, since she is an explorer in the domain, methodically, making mistakes.”

For some reason the earth is more frightening than the spiritual.

“Our fear, since we know perfectly well that we will reach the dangerous point where those who are exclude live – and we hate exclusion. This is our emotional, our personal, and political problem, the fact that we can’t bear exclusion. We are afraid of it, we hate to be separated, that is why we are apt to commit all kinds of small crimes, self-denials, and treachery.”

That is why we must have a “school of roots.” We must be schooled in roots. Otherwise we sit complacent with our pretty clichés. This is where Cixous believes writing and literature can help us be brave, if only we put in the work: “Kafka insists paradise is not lost, it is there. But we are lazy and impatient. If we were neither lazy nor impatient we would be back in paradise. But we have to deal with this laziness and impatience. And of course with all the representatives of “Those Bible.” There is a whole list of institutions, media, and machines that make for the banishment of birds, women, and writing.”

She uses “Those Bible,” that strange construction, as shorthand for all those mind-numbing clichés: shopping centres, weddings, Cosmo, football stadiums, MTV, James Patterson.

     

That stuff is only dangerous because it distracts us from real danger. They make the banishment of the abominable seem natural. Exclusion is normalised, until we have a whole range of things deemed impure.

“So in the same line of substitutions you find: Jews, women, niggers, birds, poets, etc., all of them excluded and exiled. Exile is an uncomfortable situation, though it is also a magical situation. I am not making light of the experience of exile. But we can endure it differently. Some exiles die of rage, some transform their exile into a country. I understand those who die of (out)rage.”

I wonder how Cixous foresaw so clearly how I would write about the exile in The Loud Earth. It was excruciating writing about such a recluse. I wrote about her out of hatred, yet I had love for that hatred.

It must be a reluctance to go into hell.

Only in hindsight did I learn from Clarice Lispector’s conception of hell. This was how I had been painting the cave, the grotto, the cellar in The Loud Earth:

“And if many times I paint caves it’s because they are my submersion into the earth, dark but clouded with charity, and I, nature’s blood – extravagant and dangerous caves, Earth’s talisman, where stalactites, fossils, and stones together and where creatures crazy through their own evil nature seek refuse. Caves are my hell. Caves, dreamlike always with their mists, memory or longing? Frightening, frightening, esoteric, greenish with the ooze of time. Rats, with the crosslike wings of bats, hang glimmering in the dark cavern. I see black, hairy spiders. Rats and mice run frightened on the ground and along the walls. Among the stones the scorpion. Crabs, unchanged since prehistoric times, through countless births and deaths, would seem threatening beasts if they were human-sized. Ancient cockroaches drag themselves along in the half light. And all this am I. Everything is heavy with dreams when I paint a cave or write to you about one – out of it comes the clatter of dozens of unfettered horses to trample the shadows with dry hooves, and from the friction of the hooves the rejoicing liberates itself in sparks; here I am, the cave and I, in the time that will rot us.”

I am glad I didn’t read that before I wrote the book. It is too beautiful.

So how can we get up the courage to access this place of darkness, the roots?

“How do we cross borders? It can be done in a completely indifferent and apathetic fashion, although the person who crosses borders in an indifferent fashion never crosses borders. The person who doesn’t tremble while crossing a border doesn’t know there is a border and doesn’t cast doubt on their own definition. The person who trembles while crossing a border casts doubt on their own definition.”

Not only do we have to cross into darkness, we have to be aware that we are doing it. That can be almost excruciating.

For me this evokes José Esteban Muñoz’s embrace of doubt. Can we be lost in the darkness, amidst the roots, and find something worth finding? He thinks yes:

“Being lost, in this particular queer sense, is to relinquish one’s role (and subsequent privilege) in the heteronormative order. The dispossessed are appropriately adept at critiquing possession as illogical. To accept the way in which one is lost is to be also found and not found in a particularly queer fashion.”

Crossing borders, trembling, casting doubt on our own definition, is essentially queer. So, essentially anti-patriarchy in the radically feminist way Cixous embraces.

That is why fiction is a necessary part of the feminist project: it allows us to imagine beyond the established borders: “The immersed author necessarily comes to the point of questioning his/her limits, his/her frontiers, his/her passages, his/her alterations.”

When we are trying to feel our way back to the roots, maybe to a place we have never been physically or imaginatively, but only psychically, then we have to embrace the abominable. Even if it will never stop being impure or unclean to us.

“There is passage through the animal state, then through the vegetal state, and so we move away from humankind; from the vegetal we descend into the earth, by the stem, by the root, until we reach what doesn’t concern us, although it exists and inscribes itself, which is of the mineral order, although it doesn’t hold together since we are aiming toward disassembly, toward decomposition.”

Rotting? Death? If women are thought of as closer to nature, more “bodily” than men, then our bodies must be closer to death. Is that why we have so many fearful women? Witches, poisoners, stepmothers?

Cioxus asks if “we have to be dying to go to the School of Roots.” And: “Yes, if we understand it to be an exercise in that delicate and respectful form of life we call dying. It is a difficult apprenticeship, but it has to be tried. For instance, if we are in joy and in love with writing, we should try to write the imund book. The imund book deals with things, birds, and words that are forbidden by Those He.”

Let us think of “Those He” as, less impressively, the patriarchal order. Then, “from the heart where passions rise to the finger tips that hear the body thinking: this is where the Book (Alive)-to-Live (le livre Vivre) springs from…”

Cixous asks us to radically collapse that ultimate patriarchal construction: mind vs body. It is something we have to keep at the forefront of our heads and our fingers, because it has made us what we are. We have to undermine it self-consciously.

“We must work. The earth of writing. To the point of becoming the earth. Humble work. Without reward. Except joy.”

 

Feminism is for Everybody: Come Closer (Part 1)

It is scary that a book published almost 15 years ago can be still so relevant and yet so controversial, on a topic such as the status of feminism in today’s society.

When I posted this picture on Instagram, it collected a few defensive comments from ill-informed (coincidentally male) folks. The sight of a small, brightly-coloured book with a kind, deliberately inclusive and hardly hostile title was apparently too much to handle. The very word “feminism” had raised their hackles.

Nor did they realise the irony of their remarks. On the first page of her Introduction, hooks relates the reactions she receives when telling people who she is and what she does. When she mentions the words “feminist theorist,” she hears the same ill-informed opinions: “When I ask these same folks about the feminist books or magazines they read, when I ask them about the feminist talks they have heard, about the feminist activists they know, they respond by letting me know that everything they know about feminism has come into their lives thirdhand.”

The eternal problem we face. Everyone seems to have an opinion on feminism, its aims, its history, its mistakes, its faults and its evils, and yet so few have bothered to skim anything that will educate them properly. How do you expect to learn about feminism through a patriarchal mainstream media? The irony is bitter.

In writing Feminism is for Everybody, hooks has given us a primer, a starting point, a foundational text. It is straightforward, short and easy to read. It tells those who have only come to know the word “feminism” through a mainstream media that is essentially patriarchal, because it is not radical, what the word really means. Where feminism has come from and where it still needs to go.

She says, “I had to write it because I kept waiting for it to appear, and it did not. And without it there was no way to address the hordes of people in this nation who are daily bombarded with anti-feminist backlash, who are being told to hate and resist a movement that they know very little about. There should be so many little feminist primers, easy to read pamphlets and books, telling us all about feminism, that this book would be just another passionate voice speaking out on behalf of feminist politics.”

I think this book is also for those who have labelled themselves feminists in the wake of “successful” mainstream celebrities claiming the title. This book is straightforward and easy to read, but it is rigorous. It comes from a woman who has a background in feminist theory, history and activism. She knows it is not just about “equality,” whatever that means. She will have no watered-down feminism. Her feminism is radical and intersectional because she sees that we cannot have a feminist vision without the destruction of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Hardly something these celebrities, who have profited from such a system, will ascribe to. She reminds us that feminism should be unpalatable, because it wants to disrupt the status quo. But in this short book, she also reminds us that we need it.

So, fifteen years on, we still need this book. Anti-feminists and new feminists jumping on the bandwagon alike.

“As all advocates of feminist politics know, most people do not understand sexism, or if they do, they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media. The feminism they hear about the most is portrayed by women who are primarily committed to gender equality – equal pay for equal work, and sometimes women and men sharing household chores and parenting. They see that these women are usually white and materially privileged.”

This is a kind of feminism that can fit into patriarchy. Economic power can become more “equal” so women can participate fully in capitalism without ever thinking deeply about gender, heteronormativity or race.

Recently, Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Julie Bishop, when asked if she was a feminist, replied “I don’t find the need to self-describe in that way…It’s not a term that I find particularly useful these days.”

While there was an uproar, she’s right. She’s not a feminist. She is part of a government that, rather than ending sexist exploitation, is compounding it. She has benefited from a patriarchal system of domination and would rather uphold it than criticise. Why do we expect every woman in a position of power to identify as a feminist? Because the word has become virtually meaningless in mainstream culture. Hooks explains this:

“Lifestyle feminism ushered in the notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism.”

And Mary Barfoot, in The Coming of Black Genocide, puts it in a way that certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth: “There are white women, hurt and angry, who believed that the ‘70s women’s movement meant sisterhood, and who feel betrayed by escalatory women. By women who went back home to the patriarchy. But the women’s movement never left the father Dick’s side… There was no war. And there was no liberation. We got a share of genocide profits and we love it. We are Sisters of the Patriarchy, and true supporters of national and class oppression, Patriarchy in its highest form is Euro-imperialism on a world scale. If we’re Dick’s sister and want what he has gotten, then in the end we support that system that he got it all from.”

So, is feminism about women occupying more positions of power and privilege within a patriarchal capitalist system of oppression? Is this the idea of “equality” we want to embrace? Should we be happy with the small number of women CEOs and political representatives? Watering down feminism in this way has meant, as hooks says, that “in the ‘90s collusion with the existing social structure was the price of ‘women’s liberation.’”

Twenty years on this still seems to be the case. In making feminism palatable to the mainstream, dragging it against its will into an acceptance of feminism as “equality,” we are on the defensive. We start out by protesting, “No, it’s not anti-men!” In fact, that should be obvious to anyone who has bothered to look into the topic. But in an anti-feminist mass media, this must be the starting point.

Suddenly, these are the women who represent feminism. As hooks points out, “Radical white women tend not to be ‘represented,’ and, if represented at all, they are depicted as a fringe freak element. No wonder then that the ‘power feminism’ of the ‘90s offers wealthy white heterosexual women as the examples of feminist success.”Here we have feminism-lite. A feminism that slots nicely into the patriarchal status quo:

“Mainstream mass media has always chosen a straight woman to represent what the feminist movement stands for – the straighter the better. The more glamourous she is, the more her image can be used to appeal to men. Woman-identified women, whether straight, bisexual, or lesbian rarely make garnering male approval a priority in our lives. This is why we threaten the patriarchy. Lesbian women who have a patriarchal mindset are far less threatening to men than feminist women, gay or straight, who have turned their gaze and their desire away from the patriarchy, away from sexist men.”

Laurie Penny puts it perfectly, echoing the same sentiments hooks had fifteen years ago: “The feminism that sells is the sort of feminism that can appeal to almost everybody while challenging nobody, feminism that soothes, that speaks for and to the middle class, aspirational feminism that speaks of shoes and shopping and sugar-free snacks and does not talk about poor women, queer women, ugly women, transsexual women, sex workers, single parents, or anybody else who fails to fit the mould.”

Feminism that actually challenges the status quo, that is intersectional, cannot, as hooks argues, “be appropriated by transnational capitalism as yet another luxury product from the West women in other cultures must fight to have the right to consume.”

This means feminism isn’t about having “the answers.” If it is global, intersectional, aware of class, race, religion, age, and so many more, it must be about listening. Hooks does a great job of explaining briefly and lucidly while feminism must be anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Rather than being about some vague notion of “equality,” this is an awareness of the historical and invasive formation of patriarchy. It is a complex, overwhelming, all-consuming collection of forces that is impossible to get our heads around.

Zillah Eisenstein also says: “Feminism(s) as transnational – imagined as the rejection of false race/gender borders and falsely constructed ‘other’ – is a major challenge to masculinist nationalism, the distortions of statist communism and ‘free’-market globalism. It is a feminism that recognises individual diversity, and freedom, and equality, defined through and beyond north/west and south/east dialogues.”

So, if capitalism and patriarchy are so intertwined that we can’t talk about feminism without talking about capitalism, we can’t water it down to a fight for equal pay. Hooks explains: “The truth remains that consumer capitalism was the force leading more women into the workforce. Given the depressed economy white middle-class families would be unable to sustain their class status and their lifestyles if women who had once dreamed solely of working as housewives had not chosen to work outside the home.”

I have long thought that feminism must be inherently pacifist as well, but I wasn’t able to clarify my ideas until I read hooks’ chapter in this book: “Ending Violence.” She says, “I am among those rare feminist theorists who believe that it is crucial for feminist movement to have as an overriding agenda ending all forms of violence.” All patriarchal violence – that is, violence that is an effort to dominate, to make a person or a group of people feel inferior – must be targeted by feminism. That includes sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, war, and bar fights. Patriarchy tells us violence is gendered masculine. It tells men that by being born male, they must imprint their superiority on the world. But patriarchy is complex. It positions men in a hierarchy even while telling them that by right of being male, they must assert their dominance. Hooks explains how violence, class and gender intersect in patriarchy: “Since masses of unemployed and working-class men do not feel powerful on their jobs within white supremacist patriarchy they are encouraged to feel that the one place where they will have absolute authority and respect is in the home.” In patriarchy, violence is a way of asserting your dominance, and even your identity. Violence is used to regain power and control because in a patriarchal society it is associated with strength, even while it is often condemned.

So, even while the media reports on domestic violence, while politicians speak out against it and organisations aim to “educate” us, this won’t be effective. Because, as hooks sees, “even though representations of domestic violence abound in mass media and discussions take place on every front, rarely does the public link ending male violence to ending male domination, to eradicating patriarchy. Most citizens of this nation still do not understand the link between male domination and male violence in the home… In mass media everyone raises the question of why this violence is taking place without linking it to patriarchal thinking.”

It is also true that “early on in feminist thinking activists often failed to liken male violence against women to imperialist militarism. This linkage was often not made because those who were against male violence were often accepting and even supportive of militarism. As long as sexist thinking socialises boys to be ‘killers,’ whether in imaginary good guy, bad guy fights or as soldiers in imperialism to maintain coercive power over nations, patriarchal violence against women and children will continue. In recent years as young males from diverse class backgrounds have committed horrendous acts of violence there has been national condemnation of these acts but few attempts to link this violence to sexist thinking.”

I am reminded of a recent debate in Australia in which Greens senator Larissa Waters endorsed the campaign “No Gender December” which shows the harm of gendered toys. She stated that “outdated stereotypes…feed into very serious problems such as domestic violence and the gender pay gap.”

Predictably there was outrage over this “political correctness.” But if dolls are designated as “girls’ toys” what are you saying about the traits of caring and nurturing? If superheroes and toy guns are “boys’ toys” how can we deny that physical strength and violence are gendered masculine in our culture? If boys cannot dress up in fairy outfits, what are you telling him about girls and femininity? That it’s “weak,” trivial, and that he best stay away from it at all costs or he will be “emasculated” (one of the most amusing words in the English language). Emotional intelligence, creativity, and interpersonal closeness are for girls, while physical strength, dominance and violence are for boys? Great.

Hooks provides an explanation that the general public, crying “political correctness,” may want to think about: “We do know that patriarchal masculinity encourages men to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically dependent on the privileges (however relative) that they receive simply for having been male. Many men feel that their lives are being threatened if these privileges are taken away, as they have structured no meaningful core identity.”

Come on. Do we want to keep sticking up for an outdated patriarchal masculinity when it makes men into people like this? What would we lose by slowly ungendering toys, so that children are seen as people rather than boys or girls?

Doesn’t hooks have a better solution? “Boys need healthy self-esteem. They need love. And a wise and loving feminist politics can provide the only foundation to save the lives of male children. Patriarchy will not heal them. If that were so they would all be well.”

I will delve into the second half of hooks’ book in the next couple of weeks.

I Don’t Hate Men, I Just Want to be Equal: Feminism, Apologies and Salvaging Radicalism

“When those who have power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you, whether you are dark-skinned, old, disabled, female, or speak with a different accent or dialect than theirs, when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in to a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul – and not just individual strength, but collective understanding – to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.” – Adrienne Rich

Apparently, feminism is all about equality. All we want is for men and women to be equal, that’s all! Look, that’s the definition of feminism, you’re a feminist too then! We’re all feminists! I’m a feminist, but I’m not a lesbian, I shave my legs, and I’m not ugly! Oh, and I don’t hate men. That’s the extremists you’re thinking of. I’m not like that.

Why do we need to placate the patriarchy? Why have some of us watered down feminism so much that it becomes about “equality between men and women,” a lovely phrase signifying nothing? This defeats the entire purpose. Feminism should be radical. It should be extreme.

Feminism is ultimately about smashing the patriarchy. That goal encompasses a whole of lot of complicated, radical aims.

Of course, we need those sell-outs who pander to the system. So we have Beyoncé, constructing herself as a feminist icon while putting out music that glorifies domestic violence and sexual assault (“Drunk in Love”) and objectifies herself as a piece of marriageable property (“Single Ladies”). Then Katy Perry who claimed she was a feminist because “it just means that I love myself as a female and I also love men.” Um, what? Sometimes I need to hear statements like that, if only to remember what it was like before I ever stepped foot into a Gender Studies class. Even then though, I knew that performing desire purely for the male gaze (“I Kissed a Girl”) was pretty high up there on the list of anti-women activities.

Fine, we need celebrities like that, if only to publicise the word “feminism” and perhaps encourage people to actually look into the word with a bit more care. And I am optimistic that a fourth wave of feminism is underway that is not spearheaded by celebrities but harnessing the radical potential of social media. It also appears that the masses are far more adept at using consumer culture to subvert patriarchy rather than prop it up, as Beyoncé enjoys. Perhaps we also need figures such as Sheryl Sandberg who empower women within the existing power regime, asking them to “lean in” to the white capitalist heterosexist patriarchy rather than question it. What is called “corporate feminism” has no ounce of radicalism to it, no recognition of the fact that their category of “woman” excludes women of colour, queer women, women with disabilities, poor women, and so on.

This is similar to the way first wave feminists fighting for the vote reassured the patriarchy that they were nurturing, gentle, and a civilising influence on the future citizens of the nation and should therefore be allowed a voice in reform. They used patriarchal constructions of women and femininity to gain rights and yes, most of them probably believed the arguments.

      But why haven’t we moved on from the backlash against first wave feminists, who were apparently mannish man-hating monsters? That is still the popular conception of feminism.

And the popular way to dispel that conception is by saying “No, we love men, that’s only the extremists, that’s radical feminists, the rest of us just want equality.”

No.

It is the anti-feminists who have conjured up the image of man-hating feminists. This came from no truth except people who were invested in patriarchy feeling threatened by feminism. And so they should. Feminism should be petrifying if you are invested in patriarchy. This goes for men and women.

“It is easy to be considered a misandrist when men are socialised to feel entitled to women and our time. So, if you ignore them, you’re a misandrist. If you insist they leave you alone, you’re a misandrist. If you focus on building healthy female-centred relationships over relationships with men, you’re a misandrist. Misandry is basically prioritising your agency, autonomy and fellow women over men in a society that teaches you that being feminine relies on giving into men’s feelings of entitlement” – highly intelligent anonymous person.

Patriarchy should be scared of feminists because we want women to stop being dependent on men. Politically, economically, socially, culturally, and sexually. For a woman to feel that her self-worth and survival have nothing to do with her attachment to a man is the ultimate threat to the patriarchy. Apparently the most insulting image is a woman made monstrous because of her independence from men. And the best way anti-feminists can think of to threaten feminists is to tell us we are not attractive to men. Because that is supposed to be the ultimate blow to any woman.

In Catharine MacKinnon’s words: “Socially, femaleness means femininity, which means attractiveness to men, which means sexual attractiveness, which means sexual availability on male terms.”

That is why feminism must be anti-patriarchy. That is why feminism must question every lovingly held idea of gender, what is “feminine” and “masculine,” and break the delusion that such things are biologically determined. It cannot simply be about equality between two pre-determined sexes. Because there is no such thing. It is patriarchy that has constructed a binary view of gender – that male and female are opposites, and necessary to one another. For this reason feminism must be queer. It must also be intersectional – that is, alive to the ways that race, class, ability, age and many more “identity markers” intertwine with gender. Mainstream feminism – that is, feminism that attempts to make itself appealing to the patriarchal status quo – is utterly heterosexist and cissexist. Women who are traditionally appealing to men are less of a threat. Where are the queer and trans* feminists in popular culture? Why is there still a monopoly of heterosexual-identified, cisgender women promoting feminism? That seems to defeat the radical purpose feminism has of smashing heteronormativity and the patriarchal idea that women’s energy is directed towards relationships with men.

For feminists to go on the defensive, to always have to start from a point of saying “No we don’t hate men” only gives the winning point to the anti-feminists. It is the same as always having to start from the point of “Is global warming caused by humans?” in the climate crisis debate. It is a distraction. It wastes time.

Hearing debates in mainstream media about whether we still need feminism is truly cringeworthy. We always go right back to definitional issues. While people who haven’t read Simone de Beauvoir or bell hooks are trying to grapple with the question of whether feminism excludes men, domestic violence is going on unhampered, thousands of objectifying ads are lining the streets and infecting the television, and male politicians are flooding parliament.

But when you have read these women, when you become alive to the fact that violence against women and the oppression of women isn’t some problem located in “third world countries,” it can be tough. It’s tough to see the overwhelming discursive and structural power that infiltrates your every move. It’s more comforting to ignore, to say, “That’s the way of the world.” I don’t want to go into “Women against feminism” because the trend is simply a whole lot of misguided foolishness and nothing else. But I mean those women who are not angry, who believe it’s easier to live with the patriarchy than go against the grain.

“Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships. It is as if our oppression were cast in lava eons ago and now it is granite, and each individual woman is buried inside the stone. Women try to survive inside the stone, buried in it. Women say, I like this stone, its weight is not too heavy for me. Women defend the stone by saying that it protects them from rain and wind and fire. Women say, all I have ever known is this stone, what is there without it?” – Andrea Dworkin

Here are some common attempts the average citizen employs to shut down feminist spaces:

Get a life. Stop being paranoid. You’re making too much of this.

Ah, the tried and true way of shutting a woman up. Belittle her. Tell her she has nothing to back up her claims. Talk over her. Interrupt her. Laugh at her. She is over-emotional, irrational, perhaps explained by her menstrual cycle, which is a thing too disgusting to even mention but something we can fall back on when a woman gets out of hand. It takes a damn strong person to refuse to believe this. To see that this response actually justifies her fury, because of the very reason that is dismissed.

“Women hear it all the time from men. ‘You’re overreacting,’ we tell them. ‘Don’t worry about it so much, you’re over-thinking it.’ ‘Don’t be so sensitive.’ ‘Don’t be crazy.’ It’s a form of gaslighting – telling women that their feelings are just wrong, that they don’t have the right to feel the way that they do. Minimising somebody else’s feelings is a way of controlling them. If they no longer trust their own feelings and instincts, they come to rely on someone else to tell them how they’re supposed to feel” – Harris O’Malley.

I’m not really interested in it. There are more important things than feminism.

This implies a fundamental misunderstanding of the extent and all-pervasiveness of patriarchy. One of the most effective strategies of power structures is to make themselves invisible. If you can’t see them, if you internalise them as simply “normal” or “natural,” you can’t conceive of them as constructed, let alone figure out ways to challenge them. That’s why people laugh when you say the word “heteronormativity” or even “patriarchy” – to hear the names of these techniques of power is so out of the ordinary it becomes funny to people who have never got past their invisibility.

It’s also a misunderstanding of the way power works. People think that when you say “patriarchy” you are referring to some sort of group of white silk-suited men who write out their methods for the oppression of women. But as we should have learned from Foucault, power is not possessed by individuals, it is diffuse. Power is normalised, internalised and everywhere. It is not top-down, meted out by superiors, but exercised and re-created again and again, every day, by everyone we come across. It isn’t one thing with one definition, it’s always changing. Nor is it merely repressive, it is productive. Our every conception of gender is part of a discourse that is everywhere. Feminism attempts to make the construction of gender clear, thus to make the sources of discipline clear, so we may find new ways. It will always be a process, because techniques of power are so complex.

To say that there are more important issues is to ignore the interconnections of all of these techniques of power and knowledge. So the way we think about gender is intertwined with the military industrial complex and capitalism. This was the problem with Marxism and other left-wing movements. They failed to see that the relationship to the means of production that they took as the be-all-and-end-all intersects with patriarchy, and often such movements were as misogynistic as the regimes they struggled against.

Women have it worse in other countries.

What a terrible argument. “Hey, those women over there have it worse off than you, so shut up and stop complaining.” It is yet another way of attempting to delegitimise women’s experiences and voices. The true justice, the smashing of patriarchal gender ideology, that feminism aims for is not to be achieved “by comparison.” In other words, because Western women can drive, vote, and get educated doesn’t mean that patriarchy is not alive and well.

Men are victims of domestic violence too.

And? Yes? Go on? I don’t recall denying that. Firstly, when feminism addresses violence against women it does so with an understanding that this violence is structural, not just individual. There is not a systemic problem of violence against men by women. The power imbalance simply does not allow that. Now hold on. That does not mean there are not individual instances of violence perpetrated by women against men. But it does not come from rape culture, objectification, and entrenched cultural standards about men’s and women’s behaviour and romantic relationships.

Secondly, just look at the stats. In Australia, less than 5% of men who experienced violence in a 12-month period were assaulted by a female partner or ex-partner. [Check out http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/056A404DAA576AE6CA2571D00080E985/$File/49060_2005%20%28reissue%29.pdf] Also, “men’s violence is six times more likely to inflict severe injury and is more humiliating, coercive and controlling. Women’s violence is more likely to be expressive in response to frustration and stress rather than purposeful with the intention to control and dominate.” [Check out   McKenzie, Sarah. Domestic violence reality check for the ‘manosphere’ [online]. Eureka Street, Vol. 23, No. 18, Sep 2013: 30-32: http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=672075196326892;res=IELLCC]. That’s what I mean by entrenched cultural standards.

Similarly, if you say men who experience violence from a partner are discouraged by cultural norms to admit it, thank you for providing more evidence of the need for feminism. Which wants to smash such gendered norms as men being unemotional, stoic and needing to “man up.” We also want to smash the idea that violence is inherently masculine.

 

Male privilege? But dead soldiers, workplace accidents, homelessness, custody.

This always amuses me. Thanks for giving me more evidence of the damage done by patriarchy. Why are men sent to war and not women? Because apparently they are biologically stronger, more violent, and less important for nurturing children. Why more workplace accidents? They are more likely to work dangerous jobs that need a yellow “Men working” sign out the front. Why? Because they are seen as physically stronger and more suited to technical, practical activities such as factory work, construction and electrical work. Why homelessness? Men are not encouraged to rely on others. Women are more likely to rely on male romantic partners even when they are worse off in such relationships. Women are told they need to be protected, men are told they should be able to cope on their own and not ask for support. The ways men are taught to express their problems – through violence, alcohol and drug abuse – are also more likely to get them into trouble, destroy their support networks and make people more fearful of helping them. Again, patriarchy has created this situation. Why are men less likely to get custody of children? Simple. Patriarchy wants us to believe women are inherently more nurturing and therefore better at raising children.

Male privilege does not mean that in each and every situation men get their way. I won’t go in to hegemonic masculinity theory here – the fact that in each context, certain types of masculinity are privileged over other types, meaning some men are subordinated in favour of other men – but in a patriarchal society, men as a group are privileged over women as a group. Gendered ideas – such as men being physically strong and independent, and women being nurturing – work to uphold patriarchy, but that doesn’t mean those ideas won’t backfire on you in certain situations. The entrenched belief that women are more nurturing and should be the primary caregiver for children has benefited men in countless situations. To pick out one situation, such as custody battles, where it does not benefit them is to miss the point entirely.

Imagine sexism is a gun. Sure, it’s going to recoil on you sometimes, but that’s nothing like getting hit with the bullet.

Not all men.

What you are doing here is putting your personal feelings above structural, entrenched misogyny. In the face of women expressing the myriad occasions they have experienced misogyny, you feel the need to point out that you are not personally at fault. Men who do this are derailing the conversation. In fact, they are reinstating the huge force of misogyny by flipping the conversation back to men.

This comeback also misunderstands the entire point of feminism. It is not anti-men, it is anti-patriarchy. When we discuss misogyny, we are not discussing men abusing women, we are talking about a power structure that enables and normalises instances of abuse by men against women.

Not all men sexually assault women, punish them for moving through a public space, or neglect to listen to women musicians, read women writers and watch women-led TV and movies. But all men profit from patriarchy. So all men need to actively assess how this privilege helps them at the expense of women. How about instead of putting in your two cents about “Not all men,” you listen to the voices of the women telling you about their experiences of misogyny? And then you make an effort to disrupt that system.

On a related note, yes, “patriarchy hurts men too.” But that is not the fact that legitimises feminism.

“My mistrust [of men] is not, as one might expect, primarily a result of the violent acts done on my body, nor the vicious humiliations done to my dignity. It is, instead, born of the multitude of mundane betrayals that mark by every relationship with a man – the casual rape joke, the use of a female slur, the carless demonization of the feminine in everyday conversation, the accusations of overreactions, the eye rolling and exasperated sighs in response to polite requests to please not use misogynist epithets in my presence or to please use non-gendered language (“humankind).” – Melissa McEwan

“We live in a society that’s sexist in ways it doesn’t understand. One of the consequences is that men are extremely sensitive to being criticised by women. I think it threatens them in a very primal way, and male privilege makes them feel free to lash out. This is why women are socialised to carefully dance around these issues, disagreeing with men in an extremely gentle manner. Not because women are nicer creatures than men. But because our very survival can depend on it.” – Brianna Wu

Don’t you just have to chill out sometimes? I mean, I agree with you and all, but you’ve got to live in the world, and this is just how it is!

“Knowledge makes me more aware, it makes me more conscious. ‘Knowing’ is painful because after ‘it’ happens I can’t stay in the same place and be comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before.” – Gloria Anzaldua

Guess what? Patriarchy wants us to keep silent, it wants us to let everyday misogyny go by unscathed. That is power’s greatest weapon: keeping itself invisible. That’s why it’s so awkward to call people out on their apparently “harmless” sexist or heterosexist remarks. I hate awkwardness. I want to avoid it as much as the next person. But also, knowing is painful. It means that those remarks that would have slipped by you before, or at most elicited an eyeroll, really sting. Because you recognise that it is just one more technique of disciplining, controlling, enacting violence. One thing I like to say is, “Hold on, I’m sorry?” Just put a halt to the conversation. They will have to explain. All of a sudden, a remark that would just be part of everyday flow is under the spotlight. They will see that perhaps it was not harmless. To make someone stop and think twice is a very powerful thing, even if they are a lost cause.

As Desmond Tutu reminds us: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

“I hate when people comfort the privileged. I want you to be uncomfortable. I want you to take notice of the people being killed, raped, beaten, alienated because of their identity. I want you to think about how the system favours you and what that means for others. I want you to reevaluate your actions to make sure you’re actively working against the systemic oppression of others. If you’re comfortable, then you’re in the wrong” – highly intelligent anonymous person.

As for the pseudo-sympathetic plea, “You’ve got to live in this world, don’t you?” which has been put to me by pro-feminist people, no, I don’t want to live in “this world” as you call it if it means accepting your patriarchy and heteronormativity. There are some people who would prefer to go against the grain and we don’t live on other planets. So I think I can survive pretty well with my dangerous consciousness, as well as my shelves of feminist literature. Yes it’s exhausting. But falling into step with patriarchy is out of the question. If you want to take up the mantle, Audre Lorde gives us a rallying cry: “Sister outsider.”

Let’s not give up all the ground we’ve won. Feminism should not be palatable to the patriarchy, that’s the whole point. You think feminists are man haters? Okay, fine. I’m not going to stroke your ego by telling you about all the men I love. You think feminists are ugly? You think feminists don’t shave? I’m not going to point to all the women whom the male gaze has deemed appealing and who are also feminists. You think feminists are lesbians? I’m not going to make you feel that feminists really need men after all, with something about “companionate” marriages from the 1950s. You think feminists can’t “get” a man? I’m not going to spout something about how a man should want a “strong” woman after all, because then he’ll know she’s with him because she cares, not because she’s forced into it! In truth all feminists are man-hating lesbians who do not shave, are hideously ugly and actually long for a heterosexual relationship because we actually know that’s the only fulfilling path in life and lesbianism is simply bitterness. Because those are your standards. Feminism wants new ones.

All of us feminists know the truth of Lewis’ Law: “the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.” Backlash against feminism shouldn’t determine its priorities. After all, the goal of anti-feminism is to discredit it. The patriarchy has made it perfectly clear what scares it the most: a woman whose entire life, daydreams and self-worth don’t depend on a man, but on herself. And, God forbid, on her vast web of human relationships.            

A Prison Cell Built for Two: Romance, Monogamy and Violence

I know I could write pretty much what I want about patriarchy and heteronormativity. I’d have to get pretty radical before progressive people got upset. And yet to criticise monogamy? People who love attacking heteronormativity with me stop when I start on mononormativity. “Well, that’s okay isn’t it?” Aren’t romance and monogamy synonymous? Isn’t it how our society works best? Then – hold on, are you criticising my relationship? This tells me I’m getting something right.

Laura Kipnis points out that monogamy is “secured through routine interrogations (“Who was that on the phone, dear?”), surveillance, (“Do you think I didn’t notice how much time you spent talking to X at the reception?”), or impromptu search and seizure. We are taught that this is necessary, romantic, even natural. That each partner should be naturally jealous and overbearing of the other’s movements, words and thoughts. Why can’t we see this for what it is, controlling and often downright abusive?

By falling for the trap that jealousy and efforts at control are “natural” (does that mean biologically determined?) we fail to see what’s really at stake. No, it’s not your relationship. It’s the social order. Again, thank you, Kipnis: “adultery puts things at risk: from the organisation of daily life to the very moral fabric of the nation.” This is why “cheaters” get called “immature,” “selfish,” “irresponsible.” It’s the language of what Kipnis calls “bad citizenship.”

When you start to see how institutionalised heterosexuality is built into the social order, you see the point of monogamy. These little units, neat little heterosexual couples, neat little nuclear families in their neat little houses, are the building blocks of capitalist society.

But wait! How can something so beautiful as romance and love and commitment be subject to social forces? It’s destiny, it’s a force of nature.

Just look at the workplace vocabulary we use to describe monogamous relationships. There’s the oldest line in the book: “Marriage takes work.” We are asked to “show commitment,” or we may get criticised for “being scared of commitment.” We are advised to “compromise,” “negotiate,” “put in more time,” “be more accommodating.” If necessary, we should question whether the relationship is “worth saving” and if we shouldn’t just “cut our losses.”

Isn’t this just a little scary? The language of business moves into intimacy. And yet, it’s not at all surprising if we see how heterosexual monogamy is always institutionalised, not the result of a “natural drive” but fundamental to the social order.

And yet apparently resistance is futile. Everywhere you turn there are heterosexual monogamous couples! Turn on the TV, there they are. Attend a family gathering, there they are. Walk into a café – still there! There would be no problem if there weren’t so many. It’s the overwhelming discursive power of heterosexual monogamy that is so damaging. You see a forty year old unmarried woman – first question: “Why isn’t she married?” You overhear the word “polyamory” and blush, or shake your head at the immaturity or downright immorality. A handsome young man always shows up to parties without a woman in his shadow – what’s going on? Must be gay.

The discourse of romance as meaning heterosexual monogamy is suffocating. Even more so, it includes the notion that all people should aim for it. My one life’s goal is apparently to meet a man, date, marry, buy house, reproduce, raise offspring, die.

Not a bad life script, but why the only acceptable one? Why the only one that is “built into my DNA”?

Okay, this is all well and good, but what’s truly wrong with this discourse? Why can’t we find a “partner” of the “opposite sex,” “settle down” and never “stray”? Apologies for the scare quotes, but seriously. Maybe you don’t mind supporting the status quo, maybe you don’t even mind the capitalist system, enjoy your relationship being legitimated by the state? Well, there are a whole lot more problems with our ideas of romance than we ever hear at the cinema.

The ultimate problem with heterosexual monogamy is the way it enshrines a hierarchy of relationships. One’s most important bond is with one’s romantic partner. Yeah, you might have friends, but it’s cool to ignore them if you find yourself in a relationship. Obviously you’ll take your partner to that social function, I mean who else is there? Couples refer to themselves as “we.” Other people refer to couples as “John and Jane” or whatever. They merge.

Becky Rosa’s work on anti-monogamy is some of the best I’ve ever read. She criticises monogamy for promoting an “ideology that as adults we should primarily bond with one person, meeting most of our needs from them.” We not only see this in the proliferation of songs, movies, books obsessed with finding a “life partner” but in the social and economic status and incentives given to married or de facto couples. This is why conservative politicians (and unfortunately most of the population) want to promote the couple, the nuclear family. It’s the most orderly way of sorting people.

Mononormativity is the pervasive normalisation of monogamous romantic relationships as the most desirable, “natural” form of relating. Once you realise its presence you feel suffocated. Double beds. Armrests at the cinema that lift up between two seats and are locked down on either side. Two’s company, three’s a crowd. The third wheel. The odd person out. A lover being our “other half.” Which is based on Plato’s myth of humans originally being connected balls, then split in two, so we search always for our “wholeness.” Why is two such a magic number?

This hierarchy is ultimately patriarchal. Women in a heterosexual monogamous relationship have greater status and opportunities than women who aren’t. They are seen as normal. They are successful. In this stasis – the status quo of heterosexual monogamy – compulsory heterosexuality is affirmed and women’s highest priority is their husband and children. Dangerous, potentially radical ways of relating, such as women’s friendships, are diminished.

Isn’t it time to deprioritise this privileging of sexual relations as comprising our most meaningful relationships? Why do we equate our most important emotional relationships with monogamy? Why have we closed off all our other options? Why are friends less important than lovers? Why is the sexual cordoned off, welcomed only in monogamous relationships? Rosa puts it best: “For monogamy to exist, there needs to be a division between sexual/romantic love and nonsexual love…We believe that there is a distinction between the romantic/sexual love people feel for their partners, the love people feel for their friends and the love we feel for our biological families, yet this is not quantified nor qualified.” How come it’s unacceptable to love two people romantically, yet we would never dream that a mother or a father couldn’t love all of their children. The fact is, monogamy suits patriarchy.

This belief sets up a hierarchy of relationships with monogamous partner at the top. The relative neglect of other relationships results in a poverty of intimacy. As Rosa puts it, this “is maintained by ensuring that certain needs can only be met within a certain kind of relationship, the couple” and “it is also very difficult for people not in couple relationships to get the love and caring they want if other people are absorbed in their pair-bond.” Friendship is always less important than romantic relationships. We are obsessed with the “story” of how a couple met each other, but do you ever ask where your friend met her friend? In meeting with a friend we ask, “How is John?” (her partner), but not “How is Marie?” (her friend). We gossip if someone is going out on a date, but not if he is going out with a friend. We gossip that a relationship is on the rocks. Couldn’t care less about the intimacy between siblings. Someone bails on a night out with friends to go on a date? All good. And of course, as Jackson and Scott point out, there’s the eternal problem of “the assumption that we have a pre-ordained right to impose a lover on our friends and that they are automatically included in any social invitation.” Our lives are impoverished by investment in a single “love” relationship.

This poverty is central to patriarchy. With women and men dependent on each other, heteronormativity is maintained and women are separated from each other. Monogamy is also deeply conservative: it keeps couples focused inside – on domesticity, on the house, the car, the kids – rather than seeking radical social change. This is the idea of “settling down,” which apparently everyone learns to yearn for as they “mature.”

Let’s turn to Kipnis again for a dispassionate summing-up: “the authorised forms of desire are those pollinated in the hothouse of the nuclear family, forever in lockstep with its oedipal technologies.”

Just as problematic is the treatment of people as objects. The language of capitalism is inherent to romance. We talk of people as an “item,” call partners “mine” or “my man,” we say “I’m all yours,” “I want you,” “I gotta have you,” “I’ll kill any man who takes you from me,” “You belong to me,” “The girl gets the boy,” “I’m not available.” Why do we speak like this about the person we apparently care for most in the world? We do we feel the need to have exclusive ownership of somebody? While many are leaving behind the abusive capitalistic features of marriage or de facto relationships, such as joint bank accounts, joint ownership of property and women taking men’s surnames (though seriously in 2014 the number of women still doing this is startling), mononormativity thrives on ownership.

Since reading some theorists on intimacy, I am constantly shocked by what I hear in songs and see on TV. Things that are so clearly violent and abusive are represented as “romantic.”

Women and men alike want to know where their partners are at all times. Men can’t talk to women their girlfriends don’t like. Women can’t go out with a man they find attractive. Why didn’t she answer the call? Why doesn’t he say the right thing in this circumstance? Kipnis lists a huge range of interdictions that most people would consider perfectly reasonable when taken one by one: “You can’t spend more than X amount of time talking to such persons, with X measured in nanoseconds. You can’t provoke the mate’s jealousy. You can’t talk to people who make the mate feel insecure or threatened. You can’t socialise with your exes, even if you swear it’s really over. You can’t transgress the standards or degree of honesty or bluntness that the other person feels is appropriate in social situations.” After a few pages of this, the panopticon of coupledom seems hideous, nothing appealing about it.

It’s apparently romantic to lust after someone, even badger or chase them, though they don’t offer any encouragement. A marriage or relationship is a failure if it ends in divorce. Inevitable human change is not permitted. To be locked inside the same rules and the same priorities with the same person – to the exclusion of all others – is apparently our hearts’ desire. Why don’t we recognise that this benefits social order, and not necessarily us? We have been sucked in to the vortex of the romance myth.

How about the lovely song “I Will Possess Your Heart” by Death Cab for Cutie?

Or the Beatles, “Run for Your Life”?

“You’d better run for your life, little girl

Hide your head in the sand, little girl

Catch you with another man

That’s the end, little girl.”

Misogynistic, obviously, but the panopticon of monogamy is practiced on both sides, being a keystone of heterosexuality.

Aretha Franklin sings in “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)”:

“I guess I’ll rap on your door

Tap on your window pane

I wanna tell you, baby

Changes I’ve been going through

Missing you, listening you

Til you come back to me that’s what I’m gonna do.”

And how can we leave out the woman who proclaimed she finds feminism “boring,” Lana Del Rey? “He hit me and it felt like a kiss.” Of course, she is referencing The Crystals’ 1960s hit, and forty years on our ideas of romance are just as entwined with abuse and control, so maybe a few more of us should try to figure out what this feminism thing is all about.

Then we have the supposed latest feminist icon, Beyoncé, singing that the only way some man can have a say in her activities is if he claims exclusive ownership: “If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it.”

And lastly (though the examples go on forever), Selena Gomez declaring in a song I can only gather is directed towards pre-teens: “When you’re ready come and get it…I’ll be sittin’ right here, real patient” and to top it off “Even if you knock it, ain’t no way to stop it.”

In these last two songs, we have the well-worn delusion that women are after “secure” monogamy, the gatekeepers of romance, always passive, and men have to give up their “natural” desire to be wayward. These women objectify themselves. Call it the oldest trick in the book of the patriarchy.

These lovely pop songs normalise abuse for the sake of monogamy. In our definition of romance, violence is never far away. It’s pop culture like this that is the reason we still have horrendous rates of violence against women. In Australia, a woman a week is killed by an intimate partner. This in a society in which women apparently participate at a level equal to men. But it’s the more insidious ideas we still have about women, men and heterosexual relationships that cause this violence. Which is why we need to look at what makes us uncomfortable: the fact that control and interdictions which are thought of as “just part of monogamy” would be better classified as abuse.

The idea that monogamy provides security is hugely troubling. Apparently women need to be in a monogamous relationship, and desire marriage, because they need to feel “secure.” Why? Are men constantly thinking about relationships with other women? Is the only thing making you feel safe the fact that you are in a relationship with rules? The fact that your partner is forbidden to leave you? The fact that the state has recognised your relationship as legitimate? Jealousy is considered a natural emotion, because we don’t want to consider the possibility that it’s actually the control at the heart of monogamy that is the problem.

In fact, romantic monogamous relationships capitalise on insecurity. They can only thrive on jealousy, anxiety and self-absorption. Simone de Beauvoir tells us that women utterly abdicate their sense of identity in romantic relationships, because “A woman is non-existent without a master.” A man is the essential, and her only chance at true life is through him. Patriarchal heteronormativity has told women that this is their only means of achievement. And who makes up the biggest market for romance novels, romantic comedies, magazines to improve marriage? Yeah.

And yet society tells us that the only way to be a mature, fully-realised person is to be engaged in a romantic monogamous relationship! Preferably heterosexual and state-sanctioned through marriage, but as a last resort same-sex monogamy will do.

This tells us romance is not the prime expression of human compassion. It is ultimately about the self. While men are less defined by their relationships and their children, they are also sucked in to this grand, totalising myth. We are told that the best way to discover ourselves is in falling in love. Oh, so it’s about us, not them? Or we are supposed to “lose ourselves in them.” In which case it is still about us. And to maintain romance, we must set up rules, interdictions, lines you cannot cross. This is because in the end it is about social order. Beauvoir tells it like it is: “Love has a smaller place in woman’s life than has often been supposed. Husband, children, home, amusements, social duties, vanity, sexuality, career, are much more important. Most women dream of a grand amour, a soul-searing love.” This is the fiction. The fact is institutionalised monogamy. Isn’t the search for our “other half” or true “wholeness” essentially selfish? It stops us from seeing the other person as they are, as we are able to see friends and relatives, without reference to ourselves, but as a whole person in themselves. As Beauvoir says, the “dream…to attain supreme existence through losing oneself in the other” is not selfless, but self-obsessed. In refusing to allow the other person freedom, in establishing so many rules about their movements, speech, glances and smiles, we are not showing care. We are creating our own insecurity. Monogamy doesn’t solve the problem of jealousy, it creates it. If you didn’t need to control your partner, you wouldn’t mind how intimate they were with another person.

So the hook is romance, but the end goal is domesticity. The end goal is institutionalised couples who lock themselves out of all the other complex network of relationships that are a whole lot more radical. Because we are told that this is the only way to stop the everlasting insecurity inside of us.

Fight Like a Girl: Constructing an Active Femininity

Why is fashion mocked but not sport, where the goal is, for example, to put a ball on the grass behind a line?

Why are girls at a pop concert thought of as stupid but not men screaming, crying and fighting at a football match?

Why are romance novels scoffed at but not ghostwritten crime thrillers?

Why do romantic comedies elicit eye rolls but not formulaic Bond films?

Why is pink a frivolous colour but not blue?

Why are girls allowed to play with trucks but boys aren’t allowed to play with dolls?

Why is it okay for girls to enjoy soccer but not okay for boys to enjoy ballet?

Why so much attention on about girls playing with pink toys but not boys playing with guns, swords, all kinds of military apparatus?

Why is it shameful to enjoy Britney’s music but not AC/DC’s? (After all, the musical value is the same)

Why is knitting foolish but not playing pool at the pub?

Why is a love of handbags laughable but not a fixation on accessories for a car?

Why is celebrity gossip shallow but (male) sports gossip, which fills TV news, newspapers and programmes like “The Footy Show,” a worthy use of time?

Why does “man up” mean “stop being weak”?

Why do women read novels by men but very few men read novels by women?

These questions all have the same answer.

It may seem that the easiest way to achieve gender equality is to do away with femininity, with the idea that women should reshape their bodies, decorate themselves, spend hours turning themselves into people that “look like women.”

But this privileges masculinity. This buys into the very idea that the patriarchy has propagated: masculinity means strength, rationality, aggression, and power. Femininity means passivity, emotion, artifice and frivolity.

     

If we want to break down all patriarchal concepts of gender, that the category of man is synonymous with masculinity and the category of woman with femininity, and are mutually exclusive (that is, that you can’t be a “real man” and be feminine and vice versa), we have to rethink femininity all together. We have to construct it in a new way, make it powerful. I use the word construct deliberately. It needs to be conscious. We are still too deep in patriarchal concepts of femininity to use femininity without consequence. Everywhere objectification and sexualisation and women and girls bombards us. How can we reconstruct femininity in a way that isn’t patriarchal?

First of all I want to say that femininity should not be associated with women. But this is a complicated idea because of patriarchy’s centuries-old construction of femininity to assist its oppression of women. Those traits I mentioned earlier – passivity, emotion, artifice, frivolity (and you could name thousands more) – are negative. Masculine traits are positive. And here is the crux: they are only positive when men possess them. So we get the typical insults applied to women who are seen to transgress femininity (and how easy to overstep the mark): “shrill” for women who speak their mind and out of turn, “bitch” for the same thing, “bossy” for women who show leadership, “slut” for women who claim sexual agency rather than passivity, and how long could we go on for? Femininity is ultimately supposed to be about attracting men. That’s why feminists are called “man haters.” Because they fundamentally oppose the idea that their existence needs male validation. That’s the scariest idea patriarchy can hear.

By the same token, insults applied to men police masculinity just as effectively. As Jessica Valenti writes:

“What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.
You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.
Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”
Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.”

Policing masculinity works through denigrating femininity and therefore women. It works through misogyny.

““Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.” – Gwen Sharp

Our binary gender system means that men who express “feminine” traits, say by crying or enjoying “feminine” things such as arranging flowers, are not “real men.” You can’t be masculine and feminine at the same time. In fact, masculinity is defined by an avoidance of femininity. How about if we de-sexed and de-gendered femininity? This means that “feminine” wouldn’t be attached to genitals, chromosomes, even bodies – however we define gender. Basically the term “femininity” wouldn’t be suitable for the kind of body-performance I suggest but since I’m working in a patriarchal symbolic I will use the word. I also use the term because I recognise the denigration of femininity has been synonymous with the denigration of women, is the basis of misogyny, and reclaiming it is a way of freeing women from being the objects the patriarchy wants them to be, to become true subjects with human agency.

Most essential to me is making femininity about subjectivity. Femininity under patriarchy is about making our bodies amenable to men. Is there a way to reclaim femininity for ourselves, as fluid and changeable, so that one day we can feel like curling our hair and wearing heels and the next wear trackpants and no bra, without feeling that we are abandoning our duty, without feeling that we aren’t “real women” today, without worrying we won’t be treated with respect, without feeling we are missing any advantages by not complying with patriarchy, without feeling guilty, without the world curling its lip or heaping slurs on us?

Traditionally femininity has been about objectification. Yes, turning ourselves into objects. Looking at ourselves as objects. Decorating our bodies by inhabiting the male gaze. The way women have internalised the male gaze is scary.

As Simone de Beauvoir said back in 1949 “Woman…is even required by society to make herself an erotic object. The purpose of the fashions to which she is enslaved is not to reveal her as an independent individual, but rather to offer her as prey to male desires.” So skirts, heels, frills, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, decorative hats, unwieldy coloured fingernails are not designed for free bodily movement and in fact often hinder it. Men’s clothing needs to be practical: shirts without lace or frills, plain pants (it’s forbidden for men to wear skirts), flat shoes, and on special occasions suit and tie. It is not supposed to draw attention to men’s body but allow him to express himself, allow his personality and opinions to shine through. On the other hand, women in positions of power are constantly criticised or evaluated on their choice of clothing, hairstyles, bodily comportment. Women in movies and TV shows are shown fretting over what to wear – this would be unacceptable in a male character. Why? Because women’s bodies are viewed as objects, something to be adorned, and women in sexist pop culture view their own bodies as objects, to be adorned for the male gaze. To be shaped to be amenable to patriarchy.

To reclaim femininity we have to understand these origins. Yes, it has been utilised for patriarchal purposes. Maybe we can say that femininity can be feminist, but it can be (and certainly has been for centuries) anti-feminist. To use Foucault’s analysis, femininity has been used to create docile bodies, though Foucault of course was bad with gender, so we have to apply his very good concept of (male) bodies being manipulated into soldiers, prisoners, students. If only he had picked up on the incredible differences in the ways female bodies are produced.

Sandra Lee Bartky’s analysis of the way female bodies are produced as objects is pretty much the best thing ever. She knows that “[t]he strategy of much beauty-related advertising is to suggest to women that their bodies are deficient” so that femininity is based on a “pervasive sense of bodily deficiency.” Shame is used to make us discipline our bodies in often crazy ways. You shouldn’t have hair there. You shouldn’t have fat there. You should have a gap there, and a curve there, and a visible bone there. This is because “[w]oman lives her body as seen by another, by an anonymous patriarchal Other” as Bartky says. This is reinforced at every turn. On billboards. In “women’s” magazines (often working against women rather than for/with them). On the street when a man thinks he has a right to comment on her appearance. In her home when a relative calls her pretty.

This is the message women get from everywhere: the most important thing is how you look. Then they are laughed at for accepting the message. Girls are told they should be pretty, they should like pop music, they should like pink, and then they are mocked for it. Girls are caught in a double-bind. Why can’t we stop telling them that being a girl is essentially weak, without giving them any alternatives?

This is also why girls claim to be “not like other girls” or to take it as a compliment when someone (usually a boy) tells them they are “not like other girls.”

When femininity is trivialised, women are trivialised. When masculinity goes unquestioned, patriarchy goes unquestioned.

So, do undo all this historical and cultural work we have to be aware of it. One way to do this is by acknowledging that all gender is artifice. Femininity has been intimately linked with artifice, superficiality, “faking it,” while masculinity has been linked with solidity, truth, natural, pragmatic, down-to-earth. “Feminine” gestures are unnecessary and foolish, such as the stereotypical hair flick, movement of the hips, limp wrist. Drag performances show up this “constructed” femininity clearly. We also get this idea through the common assumption that queer men who “act feminine” are “flamboyant” or somehow faking their speech patterns, body movements and gestures.

Heterosexual masculinity is the only form of gender expression that is “stripped back” and “natural.” Surprise surprise.

But masculinity is just as much faked and performed. Do men really need to sit with their legs so far apart? Do they need to drape their arms over nearby pieces of furniture? Do they need to swig from a glass with their elbows at a ninety-degree angle? Do they need to clap each other on the back?

Nope. Artifice. Of course, we can’t avoid Judith Butler here: gender is “a stylised repetition of acts [so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.” Basically, gender is “real only to the extent that it is performed.”

If we recognise that gender is a performance, we can detach it from arbitrary markers of genitals and chromosomes. Why would we want to reclaim femininity? It has been used to objectify us, distract us, trivialise us. All that time we spend putting on makeup could be spent reading good books. All that time spent criticising a woman politician’s outfit could be spent examining her policies. But femininity isn’t inherently any worse than masculinity. And there are some things typified as “feminine” that we need a whole lot more of: emotion, affection, kindness, carefulness, even frivolous fun. I think we can reclaim femininity by dissociating it from objectification and shame.

Shame is really hard to get through. As women we feel obligated to shave our legs, our armpits, shape our eyebrows. We are obligated to make ourselves objects. If we can come to a different, more liberating understanding of our bodies we can spend hours looking for a nice dress or putting on makeup if we feel like it, but if we would rather sleep in or read a book we won’t think anything of it. Above all there should be no requirement for women to shape their bodies and faces as if they were deficient, just as there is no requirement for men. If a woman never shaves, plucks, dyes, whatever other regimes that get thrown at women as compulsory, why should we care? Her body isn’t there for us to look at. Rather than looking at our bodies we can experience them, how they move fast, sweat, beat, let us feel pleasure, let us feel pain, the thrill and exhaustion of running or scoring a goal or lifting weights, how they show what we’re feeling, tears or embarrassment or laughter. If we feel all this, if we know our bodies in this way, shame takes up less space. This is body positivity – knowing all the things our bodies can do rather than all the ways that they don’t look. Let’s not leave Riot Grrrl in the 90s. Femininity can be feminist – if we don’t view our bodies with the male gaze, but experience them as our own, as our connection with the world and all its sensations and joys and tragedies.

45 years ago Germaine Greer wrote: “Whenever we treat women’s bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art-nouveau they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female.”

The definition of strength that suits patriarchy is aggression, competition, denial of emotion and self-reliance. But when you have all this, who would suggest that tanks, guns, brawls on footy fields, hacking a path through jungle, speeding around in a loud and decorated car, swallowing back tears, looking at women’s bodies as if they had no heart, soul or mind and shuddering at the idea of drinking a “chick drink” are examples of strength? Until men stop viewing “feminine traits” as weak and seeking to avoid them at all costs, we won’t be rid of our stupid notions of gender and the damage patriarchy has wrought on women, men and the world.

We need to detach “being a woman” from objectification. A femininity that is not about attracting men. We need a feminist patriarchy-smashing femininity.

I am an I, not a she, not a her, not “my girlfriend” or “my daughter” or “my wife” or sweetheart, baby, darling. My lipstick is the colour of blood, the lifeforce. I know that flowers grow from nothing, everywhere. My hair is long and not ornamental, it catches the light and gives out its own light, it whips and warms me and drips with sweat. I cry when I feel beautiful music and I feel the beauty and spirit of the wide mountains like a kick in the guts. When I cry it is salt and water and heat and intensity. I eat pizza, read philosophy and keep my nails sharp enough to cut skin. I don’t smile in deference, I smile because I am strong enough to show kindness. I am not scared of my emotions. I don’t need to beat nature or prove my survival skills because I know I am part of it. I don’t leave a room that is filled with sadness. I touch without violence. I am not an empty space, I am filled with strength. My body moves fast, sweats, heats up. I am not pretty. I wear skirts and occupy my own space and don’t apologise for it. If you undermine me I can protect myself. I lift weights with my brothers and box with my sisters. I’m wear heels and I haven’t shaved my armpits. I wear a thousand bracelets and I am quick to anger. I cry when I see somebody crying and I shout at those who take me for decoration. I see no contradiction. My makeup is warpaint.

They look like white elephants: Hemingway, writing and feminism

I have loved Hemingway for a long time. I must have first read him in my late teens, and I was stunned by him in that all-consuming way I’ve experienced with only a few other writers. It is the simultaneous clarity and obscurity that I love. Everything is laid on the surface: action, gestures, drinks, rain. But you hear very few internal thoughts, read very little emotion. Hemingway trusts his readers to make their own meaning from the surface he has constructed so plainly. The iceberg theory and all that.

Hemingway taught me that dialogue is not the conversation of everyday life. Dialogue must be constructed as tightly as anything in fiction. In real life, people waste words. In dialogue they should not. Repetition is good. It sometimes conveys the gap between people, whether it’s a difference of opinion or something more permanent. Look at this:

“How you feel now?”
“I’m awfully tired,” he said. “And I’ve got a bad headache. But I feel a lot better. Let’s have another one and then go up to your place and get a bath.”
“Maybe we ought to eat first.”
“I’m too dirty to eat. You can hold a place and I’ll go get a bath and join you at the Gran Via.”
“I’ll go up with you.”
“No. It’s better to hold a place and I’ll join you.” He leaned his head forward on the table. “Boy I got a headache. It’s the noise in those buckets. I never hear it any more but it does something to your ears just the same.”
“Why don’t you go to bed?”
“No. I’d rather stay up with you for a while and then sleep when I got back down there. I don’t want to wake up twice.”
“You haven’t got the horrors, have you?”
“No,” he said. “I’m fine. Listen, Hank. I don’t want to talk a lot of crap but I think I’m going to get killed tomorrow.”
I touched the table three times with my fingertips.
“Everybody feels like that. I’ve felt like that plenty of times.”

A lesser writer would have put, “He rolled his eyes” or “He shook his head yet again.” We get the full relationship and scenario between these men through dialogue and repetition only, no explication. What hit me when I first read Hemingway, and what enchanted me to the point where I tried to imitate it as so many writers have, was the artificiality of his dialogue. It is obviously and deliberately contrived. Not being a realist writer, he isn’t afraid to cut and shape. After all, all fiction is contrived. Hemingway’s dialogue shows the difficulty his characters have “connecting” with each other, the inadequacy of external things – dialogue, appearance, movement – to truly express the internal world of a person.

Reading all of his stories recently, I was struck by how many of the images had stayed somewhere in my unconscious. It was like happening on a scent that brings back the entirety of a place, a time, a set of feelings.

I think this is how influence works sometimes. When you write, you aren’t cognisant of what you’re drawing on. But a lot of what you’ve read – especially those images, passages, characters, motifs – stays buried, where only your unconscious can reach it. It’s going off-topic, but the role of the unconscious, bringing things out of the dark into the light, sometimes only partially, is I think the centre of writing.

Here’s something that was buried for me:

Into a skillet he was laying slices of ham. As the skillet grew hot the grease sputtered and Bugs, crouching on long nigger legs over the fire, turned the ham and broke eggs into the skillet, tipping it from side to side to baste the eggs with the hot fat.
“Will you cut some bread out of that bag, Mister Adams?” Bugs turned from the fire.
“Sure.”
Nick reached in the bag and brought out a loaf of bread. He cut six slices.

What is special about that? There’s no intensity of feeling or language. It is the starkness, the food, the atmosphere, the Americanness. I know that for me, what I see as good writing is connected to concreteness. Abstract, transcendental concepts which aren’t tied to something tangible on earth are too vague to have much impact. I don’t really know what strikes me about this particular Hemingway passage, what took me back to the first time I read this scene. But good writing is like that. There is a certain amount you can analyse, but as an aesthetic and emotional experience good writing is like good music – it hits you somewhere beyond expression.

This is all aesthetic. As a feminist, how do I come to terms what is truly Hemingway’s unavoidable misogyny? He gives us no complexity in his female characters. They are always passive and are defined by their relation to men. This is their mode of being. If Hemingway isn’t eager to chronicle interior lives in general, he certainly completely avoids giving us the subjectivity of any female characters. They are defined by their usefulness or agreeableness to men. They are either “good” women who do their job by serving men, or “bad” women who have deceived or hurt them.

I don’t think the excuse that “he was writing in another time” is tenable. I don’t see gender politics as moving in a straight line, always tending toward progress. I think it is more complicated than that. But if you are a radical feminist, when you read any literature, and of course with any work of art or pop culture, you have to come to a point of compromise. You have to use the critical lens you have developed to interrogate what you’re reading/watching/listening to.

As a feminist I am as interested in masculinity and its construction as I am in femininity. They are both central to the deconstruction of patriarchal power. So Hemingway’s representation of war, bullfighting, boxing, drinking, “man in nature,” homosociality is fascinating for me. He somehow manages to interrogate this hypermasculinity while being enthralled in it. As a reader I can see the violence, anxiety, loneliness and impossible expectations of this kind of masculinity and I don’t have to celebrate this masculinity as he does. Being a writer of complexity, he necessarily shows the “negative” aspects of this kind of masculinity, he gestures towards the underlying uncertainties his male characters have. His style itself is reflective of the way hypermasculinity obscures the anxiety it provokes. The spare sentences, focused on external action, simultaneously make us think about what is not being said, what is under the iceberg, what men are supposed to hide and bluff their way through. He is still in love with the façade of masculinity, but as a reader I can see it as artifice in the way femininity is understood in Western culture as artifice. His male characters are trying to get to some “truth” of manhood through war, bullfighting, boxing, drinking, getting “back to nature” but it never works out. As a feminist I can see that this is because there is no truth to manhood.

Reading Hemingway critically like this, far from making me a “bad feminist,” I think makes me a better one. Yes, I roll my eyes at the waif-like “girls” who beg men to love them, but I can see that this is the misogyny that must attend hypermasculinity. Hypermasculinity of the sort Hemingway celebrates depends on misogyny for its power. Just as it depends on homophobia. Because it is not just a celebration of “masculine” activities and traits, it is a conde   mnation of everything “feminine.” To be a man means to objectify women, which means to embrace a misogynistic heterosexuality. Hemingway definitely writes masculinity with complexity but he doesn’t go the next step and interrogate its attendant misogyny and homophobia.
But reading him gives me a better understanding of masculinity, and patriarchy, and misogyny. And it has made me a better writer.