Sexual Politics

What are the power relations at work in the building of a late liberal capitalism dependent on a) getting women into the labour force as quickly as possible and b) ensuring that they became the centre of an economy of consumption and then of sentiment? What has happened in the last half century has generally been good for both men and women - increased prosperity, increased respect for half the population's aspirations and the benefits of a 'diverse' female perspective on society and culture. But the simplistic socio-cultural model of feminism with its mythic history of patriarchy is not in accord with the reality of the industrial society that has now been replaced.  Matters are much more complex than that.

The society which preceded us was built not only on the standard models of exploitation (ours still is) but on a set of power relations in which men were manipulated into states that were not happy or satisfactory to themselves in order to create a society that, in many ways, was much more comfortable for a certain type of woman who has lost something in the process of change. The constraints on society identified a century before by Nietzsche which had arisen from Judaeo-Christianity resulted in a society of mutual repression in which resource-scarcity repressed both male and female desire and engineered males into compliance with social norms that gave inordinate power to women in the household and in terms of sexuality and child care even if women had no such power in the work-place.

The revolution that has given women increased power in society via their ability to access the work place may have dragged a lot of men into an improved state of being themselves (there is no doubt that improved social conditions are liberatory for both genders) but women have often been able to retain those bits of industrial and even Iron Age thinking that suit their purpose. For some women, this liberation has been half-hearted with some way to go yet in dealing with male power relations in the elite (the 'Harvey Weinstein problem') but most women are still using conservative social forms to demand male compliance in relation to households, child rearing, sexual relations and linguistic and cultural freedom.

Peterson and the Dark Web of intellectuals are probably right to draw attention to some fundamental male-female differences (without any need to allow this to have any implications for quality of opportunity or intrinsic human value) but they seem to have a problem understanding the power dynamics of gender relations. A balanced but oppressive system was replaced by an imbalanced less oppressive one where the victim status of women (part of the myth required for political campaigning under late capitalism) is enhanced without any recognition of the historic victim status of men in relation to resource-scarcity and 'social obligation'. Peterson and others want to go backwards, current liberals want to edge forward into solidifying what has been won. No one is thinking about going further forwards still towards a new progressive model that over-reaches current conditions for a more full liberation of all 'humans' equally.

Peterson and the Dark Web community are concentrating on psychology and ideas when the real issues are to be found in history and social and economic relations. Liberal elites like a debate about psychology and ideas because they certainly do not want a debate about social and economic relations. Culture wars are very convenient for the middle classes - a useful distraction. Our current problem is thus that we have an imbalanced cultural model driven by consumer capitalism, one that appears to despise the male and mythologise the female, being faced off by a reactionary attempt to return to an oppressive balance, albeit moderated somewhat. There appears to be no approach which takes account of history, resource-scarcity and the realities of gender difference to create a more progressive model in which balance and compromise are permitted between free men and women (albeit mindful of the psychological security and welfare of children) who can make their own choices without either material oppression or cultural manipulation.

Since the liberal capitalist model is based entirely on a top-down manipulative struggle for resources and status (a situation which is unavoidable to some extent) then it becomes inevitable that the embedded aspects of often unconscious female gender manipulation in our culture are not recognised and dealt with. If they were, then a recognition of the sheer scale of more general manipulation of populations and of power relations affecting class more generally would begin to undercut almost every element of middle class 'liberal' domination of the mass of the population - its politics, marketing, human resources, educational systems, media narratives, state psychological operations and even psychotherapies. And we can't have that, can we?