Helen Joyce & Julie Bindel: Should TERFs unite with the Right?

I believe there is an argument to be had about how feminism more naturally aligns left. There is no doubt women are disadvantaged by bearing the reproductive burden, and the whole purpose of the left is to redress inequality and give every person a fair chance, no matter what their disadvantage.

What I don’t get though, is the argument that left wing feminists working with people who are right wing, is such a threat to feminism.

I do want to understand.

It's dominant in the media, and academia, and in classes that are mostly represented in those areas, but I'm not sure that it's dominant across the population!

I think you're right - but people who don't subscribe to this ideology are pushed out of 'polite' society. You don't even have to actively subscribe to it - just say the right things on cue. I'm convinced most people do it without even thinking about it.

I think the right are quiet, getting on with things without kicking up much dust, and the left are loud - engaging in more dominating behaviour, so there is an illusion that more people are left wing.

I do think leftism is dominant in the UK - identity politics, anti-capitalism, censorship and villification of the wrong views such as supporting brexit, the hatred of tories etc. We all know what "right thinking" people think, and it's left.

It's dominant in the media, and academia, and in classes that are mostly represented in those areas, but I'm not sure that it's dominant across the population!

I do think leftism is dominant in the UK - identity politics, anti-capitalism, censorship and villification of the wrong views such as supporting brexit, the hatred of tories etc. We all know what "right thinking" people think, and it's left.

I appreciate that this might be a version of leftism that you don't ascribe to, though.

I do appreciate your willingness to talk bike, especially when you're getting the third degree! I think I understand where you're coming from but I'm not seeing the logical underpinning of your views. I'm seeing your views but not any arguments for your views, if that makes sense. But I do wish you had a couple of others on your side on this thread so it feels less personal/intense/annoying for you. It's always good when someone pops up and says what you're trying to say!

No one is ignoring what you said. But it's hard to understand what you mean when you are complaining that HJ favours free markets, and this is bad, when in fact she seems to be suggesting exactly what you yourself are describing - free markets with a welfare state. Which is what we find in pretty much every country in the west, as it happens.Nor is it easy to see what other models have in fact better supported women's rights.

It's confusing.

As far as whether left wing thinking is dominant - it does dominate feminist thinking, to the point that many people, like Julie Bindle, claim that feminism is by definition left wing. Anything accomplished by women on the right is, in her mind, outside of feminism. Which is an interesting take because it then becomes impossible for her to claim that only the left can accomplish things for women, as we can see that the right has also done so.

Which is perhaps why she creates a scenario where she suggests that somehow a truly leftist approach, (not any past Labour parties, or the Democrats, or the Liberals in Canada, or any other place, obviously, but real leftists,) would be able to work towards the extermination of things like rape and pornography, whereas apparently a right wing approach could never do those things, or if they did it would be for the wrong reasons and would chain women to the sink, so a woman would never get to be editor of the Economist again.

I'll decline the invitations to elucidate my political views any further, as it is beyond tedious to make the same very straight forward comments repeatedly and have them either ignored or words put into my mouth.

If people are genuinely saying that the left is the dominant ideology in the UK then it's beyond sense or reason to me. Utterly mad.

I do forget the extent to which right wing thinking is so prevalent on MN from time to time and the keenest to dismiss any questioning about that as having no substance is the reminder I need to leave it's echo chamber for a while and refresh myself with different perspectives.

No idea why that came out underlined🤔

I thought, no wonder people feel so lonely and disconnected. Because instead of making genuine connections with others, they are sharing these phrases and opinions that are the same as everyone else's phrases and opinions. They were all very lovely people, but I refused to get into a 'serious' conversation with any of them and spent the whole week trying to get them to play games, drink wine, talk about their childhood trauma - anything!! Maybe I should have been the one to stir the pot a bit, but I didn't fancy being rounded on by twenty irate leftists.

I love this whole 'long post' Beastly

It's stifling living in a bubble (which seems to happen at a certain age and stage of life) and I always feel completely enlivened to meet and talk with someone who has very different views and experiences. I like to lean into it and enjoy the sense of enlarging my persoective and being able to connect based in curiosity rather than predictability and agreement.
Probably why I appreciate these exchanges on MN so much.
Learning and thinking alot from this thread!

this is turning into a very long post

This is what I love about MN - the ability to think through ideas like this.

I completely understand what you are saying here: instead of making genuine connections with others, they are sharing these phrases and opinions that are the same as everyone else's phrases and opinions.

It does make you feel disconnected. I hope I can be convinced to change my position by someone else’s argument, I’d feel sharpened and more vital. Instead it feels so frustrating and disappointing, that after we have been ‘round the houses, to find there was nothing of substance.

an Irish socialist called Frankie Gaffney. … After his article What Good is Identity Politics ( iirc) he was denounced from the pulpit by over 200 feminists

Abhanmoor, my head is spinning. Were these so-called ‘third wave feminists’ who support prostitution, TWAW etc? I.E. centring men, and therefore not feminist in any visible way? Because the solipsistic individualism of identity politics seems to me the polar oposite of feminism.

Yes, that's true. I remember all the "loony left" headlines of the past. Although I think these days more right-wing people understand the left better, because it's the dominant ideology. And the right (or some sections of it) has really had to hone its arguments and ideas.

I think a big part of that, beastly, is how little people really understand the structure of opposing opinions. So you get this "right wing people believe in selfishness" idea, which is only plausible if you actually know nothing about conservative thought, have never engaged in any meaningful way with it. And it helps a lot of you've not engaged meaningfully with any conservative people.

The same thing can happen on the political right, you will meet people who have a bizarre understanding of leftist ideas.

Clearly it feels meaningful to the person saying it, but it's not clear the meaning can be successfully conveyed to someone else, at least not in concrete terms. Certainly as a feeling, or mood, or an essence, but not something objective, rather than abstract.

Yes, I think it does feel meaningful to the people having these conversations between themselves and they also shortcut them by saying "I know exactly what you mean" and never demanding logical articulations. So the left gets lazy at articulating its positions and leaves people in a situation where it's so frustrating because they're thinking, 'I know I'm right, I know this is true,' but they can't actually make it make sense to another person. And they think that their interlocutor is being deliberately obtuse or stupid or unfair in not understanding, or they impute to their opponent something which they think is the opposite of their own meaning.

That's usually something along the lines of 'oh so you're racist/don't care about women/want poor people to starve,' i.e. 'you're bad.' Which logically suggests that the inarticulated feeling driving the leftist's words boils down to something like, 'I'm good; this is what good people think.'

Which is exactly what HJ said in the discussion, and others have reprised here: the idea that left = good and right/anything else = bad. And when you believe you're good, then you also may feel entitled to silence others, to condemn others, to blame others and to hate others. Because they're bad, so it's fair, and you're still good. In fact, the more you silence and condemn others, the more it consolidates the feeling that you're good. And everyone around you understands, and says, 'I know exactly what you mean,' and no one demands a logical articulation of, e.g., why you hate Posie Parker so much. They just get it. And those who don't get it are bad people. And so it goes.

It has an internal drive that is hard to resist. It's self-perpetuating and comforting. But it's very frustrating when you're talking with people who don't automatically get what you mean, or feel how you feel, because you're not in the habit of using logic and argumentation. You may be right, but you can't say why or convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you. I've definitely had that experience and it led me to change my mind about various things. I realised that I was expressing ideas and opinions without really knowing where they'd come from. In a way, that's part of the difficulty, because it feels like they've arisen independently in me, and that they're my ideas. It's only when I really started to interrogate myself about why I believed some of the things I believed that I realised I couldn't say exactly why. I just did: like a faith or a dogma. Just growing up in that leftist type of environment and a lot of ignorance.

Sorry this is turning into a very long post. But a while ago I was at a week long course with a bunch of people I'd never met before, and I started getting really weirded out because they all said the same things all the time. Whenever the conversation veered towards politics, they all said the exact same things, independently of one another. It was weird and also it was so boring. I longed for someone to say they'd voted remain or thought that people on strike were being irresponsible - just anything other than churning out the same opinions as everyone else. Received opinions, I think is the term for it. I thought, no wonder people feel so lonely and disconnected. Because instead of making genuine connections with others, they are sharing these phrases and opinions that are the same as everyone else's phrases and opinions. They were all very lovely people, but I refused to get into a 'serious' conversation with any of them and spent the whole week trying to get them to play games, drink wine, talk about their childhood trauma - anything!! Maybe I should have been the one to stir the pot a bit, but I didn't fancy being rounded on by twenty irate leftists.

So some of feminisms bigger aims:

Ending VAWG on the macro level, on the micro level - better conviction rates for rape and sexual assault, stemming the tide of pornography and reversing it, ending prostitution, education around domestic violence, making sure the police take stalking seriously, better funding for domestic violence and rape services, tackling FGM, forced marriage, so-called ‘honour’ crimes, etc.

Equality, tacking the pay gap and pregnancy discrimination, tackling the male as default, normalising male involvement in housework and childcare.

In my opinion, a sophisticated understanding of what a woman is and why women are oppressed by men around the world, is happening, as a result of having this nonsense forced upon us by the biology denialists. Feminists arguments are being mainstreamed. People who would have balked at ‘whiney feminists’ are starting to go “oh, I see”.

Honestly I think it's because it's dogma. It's using language to obfuscate rather than reveal. Repeating things that leftists say to one another which they all agree on but no one ever manages to articulate exactly what they mean.

That's the conclusion I've reached as well. It's a milder form of what reaches its pinnacle with people like Butler, but you have the same problem that you can't pin down the definitions to the point you can actually identify an argument well enough to counter it.

Clearly it feels meaningful to the person saying it, but it's not clear the meaning can be successfully conveyed to someone else, at least not in concrete terms. Certainly as a feeling, or mood, or an essence, but not something objective, rather than abstract.

Latest issue of Helen Joyce's newsletter actually touches on some of this stuff. Paywalled, sorry, but an excerpt:

But that first editor was right: what the hell does it mean? Are queer theorists simply saying that “nothing means anything”, or “everything good is really bad”? Is their point to do with the difficulties of definition or the difficulties of action, or both? Are they nihilists or are they cynics? Or is the point something else entirely?

I often re-read “The Professor of Parody” when my rage at the sheer futility of much of what now calls itself feminism bubbles over. This wonderful essay by philosopher Martha Nussbaum excoriating Judith Butler was written in 1999, but reads like Nussbaum had a crystal ball that allowed her to see the dire state of mainstream feminism today. If you haven’t already read it, I urge you to do so.

She writes:

> “Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly.”

I couldn’t agree more that the point of activism should be to make life perceptibly better for people who are getting a raw deal—not to provide fancy redefinitions, or justifications for doing nothing. But I’m also someone who has a pretty high tolerance for abstruse definitions, and for “academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness”. So what is it that bothers me so much about this particular sort of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness?

I think it’s that it’s not just obscure and abstract; it’s uselessly so. And I don’t mean in terms of the activism it does or doesn’t support; I mean on its own terms.

Forgive me for a somewhat lengthy detour into my long-ago degrees in mathematics. [...]

So what do you mean by 'in balance'?

Honestly I think it's because it's dogma. It's using language to obfuscate rather than reveal. Repeating things that leftists say to one another which they all agree on but no one ever manages to articulate exactly what they mean.

What are feminists' bigger aims and what does it mean to lose sight of them? How does working with the right (wtm) cause Feminists to lose sight of their bigger aims? Why doesn't it work the other way around?

Can anyone break it down into a clear argument, linking these ideas together step by step with logic? Examples would be welcome too.

I don't understand how stopping child abuse and retaining single sex spaces wouldn't be a victory for women's rights.

It's almost like those things are being leveraged by left wing Feminists in order to get to the things they really want to achieve, rather than being meaningful goals in themselves.

Or is it that if we win those battles, Feminists will be back where they started and all those lucrative career opportunities will go away?

Maybe that's too cynical but I really don't understand this.

Maybe we could have WTM instead of commas

Or once again, why this supposedly only works one way. Imagine if the religious right 'lost sight' of how much they hate lesbians.

To be frank, I think you missed a "(whatever that means)" after 'lost sight'. But I think we're getting a bit clogged up with them...

I don't understand why women 'working with' (whatever that means) 'the right' (whatever that means) means they lose sight of those other battles.

Or once again, why this supposedly only works one way. Imagine if the religious right 'lost sight' of how much they hate lesbians.

I just don't think women are that stupid.

I did. You said it's not a victory for women if we retain single sex spaces and stop child abuse, as long as other inequities remain.

What did you mean by this, if not what you said?

Losing sight of the bigger aims of feminism plays right into the hands of those who would be very happy to preserve the status quo

I feel that you are getting to the crux of what you mean here.

In what ways do you believe we are in danger of losing sight of feminisms bigger aims?

Yes but what does that mean? I set out three possibilities and you apparently don't like any of them, so I'm at a loss. It's meaningless unless you can actually explain it.