This essay first appeared in Cliterati on November 16th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
Every time one reads an article that doesn’t mindlessly parrot “sex trafficking” hysteria or some other aspect of the anti-sex movement, yet isn’t written by a sex worker or ally, one can be sure there will be an obligatory sentence about how it’s “surprising” or “paradoxical” or whatever that neofeminists are in bed with evangelical Christians. The only people who could actually consider this alliance to be anything other than wholly predictable are those who A) believe in the ridiculous “left wing-right wing” dichotomy which “was a poor fit to real political landscapes when it was first used in reference to the French Assembly more than 200 years ago and has become completely worthless since”; B) accept fanatical cults’ propaganda about their motives as truthful even if it demonstrably conflicts with their public behavior; and C) are completely ignorant of the history of the Anglo-American anti-sex movement. My early essay “Traitors To Their Sex” provides a brief sketch of this history, starting with the influential and charismatic Victorian feminist, Josephine Butler:
…who recognized that English law of the time…stripped prostitutes of their rights as Englishwomen and so campaigned tirelessly for the repeal of those laws for 16 years. At the same time, Butler (like most Victorians) believed that women were essentially asexual, and so could not accept that any woman might freely choose to exploit the male sexual appetite in order to earn a living; the very idea was anathema to her rigid Christian thinking. She therefore concluded that it was actually whores who were the exploited ones, childlike victims of male lust who had been forced into lives of “degradation” by male oppression…after the repeal of the Contagious Disease Acts in 1886 prostitutes were no longer the cause célèbre; when they refused to repent their whoredom and embrace “honest work” and conventional morality the feminists abandoned their sympathy like yesterday’s newspaper and declared war on our entire profession, vowing to abolish it entirely. Butler founded the Social Purity Alliance…dedicated to imposing middle-class Victorian standards of chastity (i.e. repugnance for sex) onto men, and it was but the first of a host of similar organizations which sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1880s and ‘90s…middle-class “feminists” had shown their true colors and abandoned the drive to win rights for the disenfranchised in favor of one which aimed to restrict the rights of everyone…The purity crusaders used many propaganda weapons…but chief among these were disease scares and the “white slavery” hysteria…the unholy alliance of middle-class feminists and puritanical religious zealots managed to convince the public, the media and governments that there was a huge international trade in underage girls, abducted and forced into sexual slavery…The fact that there was absolutely no evidence for such a vast conspiracy made no difference whatsoever; the public devoured lurid stories of child prostitution, and…voluntary adult prostitution was banned or severely restricted under the excuse of combating involuntary prostitution of “children”…
In other words, though some early feminists (such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges) were individualists who were not at all anti-sex, feminism did not become a popular movement until it embraced a rigid, puritanical morality. These “first wave” feminists were not merely anti-prostitution, but anti-pleasure; among other things, they campaigned against the “evil” of masturbation and drove the movement which eventually imposed Prohibition on the United States. So although this early feminism died out in the Great Depression, it is wholly unsurprising that its legacy soon infected the “second wave” which flourished in the 1960s and ‘70s; by the mid-‘80s the anti-sex forces had not only taken over feminism, but had sought out and once again joined their old allies, evangelical Christians, in another loathsome attempt to impose a puritanical anti-sex regime on all of society. Almost exactly a century after the first iteration of their social engineering crusade, they’ve brought back most of their old rhetoric (now blended with another morally-bankrupt 19th-century belief system, Marxism) and many of their old tactics, including “white slavery” hysteria (now called “sex trafficking”).
As I’ve pointed out before, much of the language in “sex trafficking” and other anti-sex articles and essays is positively Victorian, and even when it isn’t the attitudes are. Women like Julie Bindel and Meghan Murphy, who would almost certainly take exception with (or even ridicule) the notion that their attitudes fit more in the late 19th century than the early 21st, nonetheless expend considerable effort in arguing for massive censorship campaigns (even though they deny it) and trying to convince other women that only feminist thought leaders have the right to determine which kinds of sex constitute “rape” or “exploitation”, and that their individual consent is immaterial (the result of “false consciousness”, itself a 19th-century Marxist concept). The “end demand” campaign backed by the Fawcett Society (itself founded in 1866) is based in the tired old Victorian conceit that men can be “taught” to dislike sex as much as prudish women do; furthermore, the recent revelation that the £45 “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirts hawked by the Society are made in Dickensian sweatshops reveals that middle-class white women’s trivial concerns still trump the serious problems of working-class and brown-skinned women, just as they did in the days when the sun never set on the Empire. And I think we can all agree that the mind which can produce over 3100 words on whether porn can be “ethical” or “feminist” is one which could’ve been perfectly delighted with thinking up new venereal nouns or arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. So no, it isn’t at all surprising that evangelical feminists conspire with evangelical Christians to make normal people’s lives as miserable as possible; they’ve been doing it for as long as there’s been such a thing as “feminism”.
Superb column
It’s likely that I’m going to screw this up, as I’m a bit pressed for time at the moment, but it seems to me that the Victorians were wrong in magnitude rather than direction regarding women’s sexuality. That is, there is a real estate negotiating principle that applies: the party that cares the least is the one that wins. Men always are the buyers of sex (with exceptions so limited as to be noteworthy), regardless of the gender of the seller. From the outside, i.e. the male perspective, it’s easy to arrive at the Victorians’ overgeneralized and overstated version of this observation.
preach!
Hear, hear! This “left – right” nonsense … I get so tired, sometimes. Some people (most people) love the notion of rules, telling others what they may and may not do, and being told those things … and a few people don’t. That’s the closest thing to a binary, one-axis scheme in terms of social/political philosophy that has any validity at all, as far as I can see.
…“left wing-right wing” dichotomy… yep, its inadequate for describing the political landscape.
A Mr. Nolan noticed that back in 1972. He created the Nolan Chart. It uses two dimensions to map the landscape. Take this quiz to find out more: http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/quiz.php
Have you ever written a column on Anthony Comstock? I didn’t find it with a quick search. Much grist for the mill on that topic…
I often quipped to my now-adult kids that any person’s perspective of “THIS is a new issue/problem/solution-to-a-problem!” would radically change if human lifespan averaged at least 200 years so a person could know history experientially. Essentially, “it’s all happened before” — just that, no one lives long enough to see the situations and circumstances repeated with yet-another generation of people.
In this alternate future, are women fecund through, say, age 100 or so? Because, you could imagine one couple and their immediate descendants populating whole towns pretty rapidly, relatively speaking.
No, lol, I wasn’t at all nor in any way intending anything concerning alternate-future scenarios.
I am merely saying that history does indeed repeat itself, but none of us lives long enough to experience those repetitions and so be able, from eyewitness observation, to say, “Hey — this isn’t new nor novel, and society has gone through this before.”
I’ve been trying with some moderate success to get people to see this for a long while now, mainly admittedly just by waffling in the Libertarian blogosphere, but my “Puritan Hypothesis” is gaining a little ground. The problem is that 2nd Wave Feminism, as it arose during (and as a reaction against) the Sexual Revolution, and notionally on the “Left”, has been able to portray itself as a “liberal” movement and- despite openly admiring the 1st Wave- avoided being seen for what it is. Especially as the history of the 1st Wave itself is heavily edited such that its profound puritannical basis is handwaved away.
A common answer is that the puritans are just one sort of feminism, that it is a broad church etc. The truth is that the puritans- the “Radicals”- are the spirit of feminism, and those other points of view- which are not represented in any significant feminist organisations or groupings- are largely irrelevant in understanding what feminism is about. It is as a movement simply a radical puritan force and always has been and, as Maggie says, is predicated on the idea that women have no innate sex drive and sex itself is something simply inflicted upon them by lustful men who must be re-educated to control their bestial urges. The Victorian campaign slogan- “Male Chastity” might have been dropped, but not the intention. It is worth noting as well that the Victorian campaign againt the Contagious Diseases Acts itself- invariably described as a campaign by women to help prostitutes- wasn’t really that either. The primary motivation was that bourgeois women were outraged that the Acts meant that decent women like themselves might be taken for prostitutes by the police, since the Acts allowed the questioning of pretty much any unaccompanied woman.
Which doesn’t mean the Acts were a good thing or defensible, but the fury against them by early feminists wasn’t much to do with sympathising with actual prostitutes either.
It is worth noting as well that the radicals these days are increasingly returning to using the word “progressive” to describe themselves. This is pretty apt, since the New New Left are once again radical puritans, whose “nanny state” policies are predicated on puritan values of restraint for the moral good of society. The first “progressive” era was the era of controls on sex, drink (temperance) and other drugs, censorship, and the general imposition of an intense speech controls/politeness system which one can reasonably call the first wave of political correctness. The current political and social wave is, indeed, very much a re-run of the Victorian Era. Set in a society whose ordinary people are probably the most liberal ever- relaxed about pornography and the like, happy to watch almost naked pop stars gyrate for entertainment, and so on- it has resulted in also probably the most schizophrenic Anglosphere ever. But our rulers are racing back to the 1860s as fast as their little legs will carry them, largely impelled by the cohort of hankie-waving upper class matrons we call “Feminism”.
Feminism as a label is useful, but only in a very limited sense. I have long thought that it would be very interesting to poll self-described feminists to get a picture of their beliefs in aggregate, because I do often see lay feminism collide with the dogma of its more visible advocates, e.g. Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, Laurie Penny, etc., not to mention its vociferous entrenched factions in academia.
The use of the term “lay feminism” is interesting, because there are useful parallels to a religious organisation, between the intellectual theology and the simple beliefs of the laity. I tend to differentiate them as “core” and “broad” feminism. So in say Christianity, you’ll get a broad mass of followers with no deep theological understanding, but who will repeat slogans such as “Jesus loves you” or “He died for our sins” without any real understanding of what they mean at a theological level. Likewise in feminism, you’ve got a lot of people broadly identifying with feminism and repeating its slogans without having read the core texts or knowing what they say.
In one sense, half the battle is educating the general public- including many who identify as feminists- as to what feminism actually says, at a Womens Studies Department level.
Third-wave feminism (Christina Hoff Sommers calls it “gender feminism”) is unquestionably, functionally a religion in that it has a set of unassailable first principles that form a core part of its dogma. Particularly, “patriarchy” and “rape culture”, which assert certain things about society that are risibly untrue (e.g., this incredible column from Laurie Penny). Yet, like the aether before Michelson and Morley, these stories are generally agreed upon as foundational. It is a series of ghost stories they tell each other.
It’s also rather ironic is it not? Considering that any and (nearly) all actual female oppression stems solely from religion. Because religion is so successful at influencing society it leaves traces that last decades, even centuries after it has gone.
Even though I’m an outspoken atheist, I’m not here to attack religion (there’s a time and a place for these things), but to point out that most bad attitudes towards women aren’t to do with us men guarding privileges to keep women down for…some reason, (neofeminists aren’t great at explaining this one) but certain religious attitudes/scriptures/certain religious leaders. Some of the hard-won freedoms for women were won by the common man in the enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries, with the female freedoms following suit in the 20th century.
Such an irony that the very hypocrites who swear to fight any and all oppression of women everywhere (even if they have to make it up to stay relevant), cuddle up to the very source of said oppression in the first place!
(Again, this isn’t aimed at Christians/theists or general believers per se, rather identifying a problem.)
As an atheist, I don’t see religion as the source of female oppression; rather, I see religion as having been a convenient and powerful tool employed by such people as Butler, whose use of religion to allay/excuse/justify her own dysfunctional view of sexuality extended to imposing her view upon all women in a psychological effort to make her view and therefore herself the “normal”. Rejecting sexuality, male and female, as it naturally is, Butler and those such as her utilized “God” to support and promote their personal, perverse notions of what sexuality should and should not be. Butler and other women, therefore, are a source of oppressing other women — religion was merely an effective tool with which they hammered.
In the discussion of the oppression of females by religion, I think the point is often overlooked that the willing acceptance of and devotion to religion by WOMEN have been essential to the long success — and oppressiveness –of Christianity.
Brilliant essay — visionary, even. If journalists had your grasp on history and politics, the public would be well-informed for a change. As a former journalist, I believe the standard of writing here is head and shoulders above the trend-chasing, fear-mongering stories we’re fed every day.