Cop on Comrades
A week ago the Irish Times published an opinion piece by Frankie Gaffney that apparently was an instant hit with the Pepe crowd. It’s not difficult to see why.
I grew up in Dublin’s inner city, an environment where poverty, violence, and addiction were normal. Given the odds I had to overcome to get where I am today, I thought I’d meet a lot of allies among those who preach equality. But instead, I was often met with open hostility, despite the fact I campaign on a variety of related issues. Why? Because I happen to be straight, white, and male.
“Straight white male” is an identity I didn’t choose. I mean it wasn’t a decision I had any say in, what sexuality, race, or gender I am. I was born this way. But also, “straight white male” was never something I chose to “identify” as. At various times if you’d asked me about my identity, I might have said “Irish”, “a Dub”, or “working class”, but never straight, white, or male – let alone the arbitrary combination of all three. But people who talk a lot about “choice” and “freedom” chose for me, and decided that’s what my identity should be reduced to.
Well, no. That’s not how that works. Of course it’s not a choice, but the advantageous place on the hierarchy is what it is just the same. It’s not about choice. I didn’t choose to be white, but that doesn’t mean I get to deny that I have the advantages that being white bestows. I have them. I didn’t choose them, but I have them. It would be unbearably precious of me to insist that because I didn’t choose to have them I get to ignore them or brush off other people’s lack of them.
Gaffney talks about cultural appropriation for a bit and then gets down to his real business, complaining about feminism.
A recurrent theme of this ideology is patronising people. It’s a nice word, “patronise” – kind of similar to “mansplain”, except gender-neutral.
Ha, no. Consider the root. If you’re stumped, think “patriarchy.” Patronize could be rudely translated as daddyspeak.
The further irony is the most patronising people I’ve ever encountered are the people who explain to me why it’s fine to use words and phrases such as “mansplain”, “manspreading”, “toxic masculinity”, “fragile masculinity”, and to use “straight white male” as a pejorative, while simultaneously decrying gender stereotyping and the use of negative genderd terms. The proponents of identity politics discuss these concepts as if they were talking about the second law of thermodynamics, the periodic table of elements, or the disciplinary handbook of the GAA.
In other words there are plenty of dopey obnoxious feminists, just as there are plenty of dopey obnoxious people on the left generally. No kidding. There are plenty of dopey obnoxious people everywhere. We just have to soldier on somehow.
These people don’t want to separate church and state, they want to institute a new religion, just with themselves at the helm. And just like with Eve and the apple, they demand that individuals should be held responsible for the sins of their gender.
And so on and so on and so on, getting crosser as he goes. So Mary McAuliffe wrote a response:
Cop on Comrades
We are a group of activist women from a wide variety of backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Last week, a good number of the left-wing men we work and organise with seriously disappointed us. These men – our friends, our fellow trade unionists, activists, writers, organisers, and artists – shared and commented on a reductive and damaging article written by Frankie Gaffney, which was published in the Irish Times.
We live in a world where our advantages are tangled up with the things that disadvantage us – some of us are working class, some queer, some of us are poor, some of us come from minority ethnic groups or have disabilities or don’t enjoy the security of citizenship. As well, some of us have had a multitude of opportunities in our lives while some of us have had to fight our way through. It is an obligation on all of us to honestly look at our different positions within the structures of oppression and privilege under patriarchal racial capitalism. It is only by acknowledging all these differences that we have any chance of imagining and building a better world that includes us all.
Working-class ‘straight white men’ in Ireland don’t have it easy these days. They never did. They are ignored by a political class that couldn’t care less about them. They should have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, but they often don’t.
However, that doesn’t make them immune to critique. We all have to examine ourselves as oppressor as well as oppressed – because we are all both. The response to the article felt like a silencing to us and we are writing this because we are way past putting up with that. You will see from the names on this letter that we are women who have been in the thick of things. Whether in political parties and organisations, education, trade unions, or grassroots and community-based movements, we are tired of being accused of ‘bourgeois feminism’ and of betraying the struggle when we raise our voices. No campaign in this country could survive without women, without us – our work and energy and knowledge and organising have been instrumental in all the progressive movements in this country. When we say we need to be recognised and respected within our movements, we need you to listen.
The article expressed the view that identity politics is good for nothing except dividing movements, using language and narratives that have been made popular by MRA (Men’s Rights Activist) groups and the alt-right. According to such narratives, straight white men are the new most oppressed group. This ignores the struggles of women and others at the sharp end of misogyny, racism, anti-trans and anti-queer violence. It aims to silence those who will no longer tolerate the violence, abuse and marginalisation we have suffered for so long. These alt-right arguments have been used by people on the left to support the view that women, and feminists in particular, are to blame for the rise of the far right – for instance, for Trump’s election – and for neoliberal capitalism, which is seen as having damaged working class men in particular.
In this version of events, straight white men are made to feel uncomfortable about being ‘born this way’ by social media-fuelled ‘political correctness’. They are too afraid to say what they think or express opinions for fear of online retribution. Men who claim to be silenced in this way might try a week or even a day as a vocal woman or person of colour online and see how they deal with the rape threats and threats of racist violence that follow.
We are not concerned here about one opinion piece by one person. Rather we have all been aware of the increasing trend towards this particular new type of silencing of women from our supposed fellow activists on the left. The arguments mounted here and elsewhere are apparently to criticise some of the worst aspects of ‘call-out culture’, as well as the lean-in type of so-called feminism that disregards class and race. Yet they seem to be used now by some of our left-wing activist comrades as an excuse not to deal with the complexities of gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation in our political organising. These excuses, when accepted, prevent us from seeing clearly the state of our movements – who is taking part in them, who is heard and represented, who is doing the work. These are massive issues that have to do with how we are creating mass movements, which need to be addressed and faced to ensure that people of different classes, races, ethnicities, sexual orientation and gender have not just a voice but leading roles in our struggle. Without this solidarity in working together, we are simply imitating the oppressive structures we want to fight – the structures that say “not now, your life comes second.” It is not the straight white men who are being silenced when this argument is made.
We are working-class women, women of colour, migrant women, trans women, Traveller women, disabled women, queer women, women who are sex workers, women with children, and women who are none of these, active in our communities and committed to an anti-capitalist struggle. We are well aware that a right-wing, neoliberal distortion of feminism and what is called ‘identity politics’ exists. We know this because it erases our experiences and struggles and we resist this erasure through our work as activists every single day. It is distressing and enraging that we also have to fight against the bad faith of fellow activists on the left – mostly men, sometimes women – who, for their own reasons, blur the distinction between this kind of middle-class neoliberal faux-feminism, and a truly radical feminist politics that has class struggle at its very core. This hurts us because it erases and undermines our realities, our suffering, our analyses, and our organising, and gives more strength to the powers that are ranged against us. For many of us, it is heart-breaking to look at some of the men around us and realise that they are nodding in agreement with this erasure of their working class women friends and comrades.
Most of us have grown up learning to appease men. How to give them our space, how to deal with the fact that they dominate any political discussions, that they are paid more, heard more and believed more. However, most of us expect that the men we work with in all the social justice movements we are part of should have at least considered how they are complicit in this domination when they refuse to recognise that it exists. Patriarchy forces men into roles that damage them as well as us. Most of us have men that we love, admire and respect in our lives and for that reason, not only because it damages and diminishes the life experiences of women, we should all be fighting patriarchy together.
There are many signatures.
This is something I have been seeing more and more. Well, you (meaning me) have a college degree and a job as a professional, while I (meaning the man speaking) am [unemployed, underemployed, uneducated – fill in the blank]. And I lost my chance at a job because a [black woman, Native American, Mexican] was hired instead of me, even though I was more qualified.
First, I would like to comment on that last sentence – I have never heard of any white male (who is self-reporting) that has lost out on a job to someone more qualified. They always lost it to a woman or a person of color, and that person is always less qualified for unspecified reasons (which probably is that they are female or a person of color, but the left-leaning individual does not wish to express/understand this).
I have lost out on jobs to less qualified people – people with fewer years of experience, in some cases people who did not meet the minimum job requirements – because I was female, and as a female, I had to have requirements higher than I could achieve (in short, I had to be a male). I may have landed on my feet in the end, but it took a lot more than the men who have achieved the same status. I found fewer doors open to me, and fewer chances to excel. Perhaps someone should ask why there are so many women teaching in our college? Most people assume it’s because women are getting such a sweet deal. It isn’t. I teach at a community college, and because many of us have difficulty finding a position in the higher levels of academia, the community college is able to get women with doctoral degrees very easily – and they are willing to hire.
Why do I consider that a result of being a woman? Because in my experience in college (and I know this will not be everyone’s experience, so please don’t come in and mansplain this to me) – women were in a different position. The men were being supported by someone, someone who was paying the bills, taking care of the kids, cleaning the house, cooking the meals, and letting them do what they needed to do. The men in my college rarely graduated as quickly as the women, but this was because the women had to get out of college and get a job. Whoever was paying the bills (if it wasn’t them, which it usually was) was not about to tolerate long stays in college and long post-doc work that would allow for the amount of published papers needed to even get your application past the first stage of the process in a four-year college or a university. Our whims about educating ourselves had been humored and tolerated, but we had that piece of paper, now could we, for Chrissake, go do something useful? Which means in many cases get married and have children, but in the case of a lot of women, it means go get a job right now, and I mean yesterday. Not a post doc, which pays very poorly, but a job, a real job.
In the entire time I was in school, I saw only one woman go off for a post-doc, and she was a woman who had been left enough money when her parents died that she was able to support herself, and put her husband through college. And her husband, who held no full time job, stayed in college four times longer than she did, and spent a lot of time in Mexico doing research that earned him publications he needed to go further.
Yes, I achieved more than the men who are working class (by the way, I started pretty low myself, living most of my life in poverty). But…and this is a huge but…the obstacles that were thrown in my way were larger than men going the same path I was going. In some cases, insurmountable. And more than just what I detailed above. I also had to deal with sexual harassment, condescension, refusal to accept that my work was really my work, failure to consider me when looking for someone to fulfill an important project, etc. Meanwhile, I was in the field with the best of them, doing ecological field work that requires physical ability to complete. I was more fortunate than most on that, because my field assistant in my masters was a woman, and in my doctorate, my husband stepped into that role, so sexual harassment was not an issue in that one particular space in my life.
Now I have reached the place in my life where I am past 50, and I can be totally ignored by everyone, because I am an “old” woman. In other words, I still have to face that societal construct that says I am somehow lesser, now not only than men but also lesser than younger women, because I no longer fulfill the major status in the life of a woman – someone who is attractive to men. I should stay home and bake cookies and dust, but I refuse to stop doing science, and for that I am to be punished by being ignored.
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Of course, this was why the idea of intersectionality was developed…
The problem is these guys don’t look at the women/POC of their class or professional/economic bracket. They look up. If they see a woman of any colour, or a man of colour who has a better job or more money than them, they think that’s the right comparison to draw and conclude that they are somehow hard done by. Of course, instead they should be looking at the women and POC who grew up in the same area as them, from similar economic backgrounds. And, of course, when they cast their eyes up the social ladder, they should compare how the women and POC with money and good jobs are faring compared to the white men from that social milieu.
I like John Scalzi’s take on it. Playing a computer game on the easiest level. It doesn’t mean you can’t be beaten by a better player, or because you completely fuck up on your own, but on the whole winning is likely to be easier. It also has the advantage of being an analogy that young dudebros can sometimes grasp…
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
Why should he be surprised not to identify as ‘straight-white-male’ when that’s been considered the default ‘identity’ for all human beings? And that problem is more pernicious, and more deeply rooted, than the surface stuff about not being hired over X or Y.
And I think the needed new term might be ‘Matronizing.’ If we can intersect Gaffney’s plaint with the Tuvel train wreck, the need for the term should be clearer.