The misogynist left

[catduckgoose]

I'm on the left and have been all my life, but I've been thinking a lot recently about the misogynist strand of leftist politics and how it is that their views cluster around so many women-hating beliefs, such as:

1. TWAW and gender ideology - seeing male desires as more important than the needs of women and girls.
2. Glorifying sex work - disregarding the physical and mental harm to women, in favour of what best supports male lechery.
3. Uncritical support of Islam - ignoring the inherent misogyny and violence of men against women, and using oppression narratives to excuse this.

The last one there has been a huge amount of in the past few days in context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, I made the mistake of watching war footage of Hamas' brutality, particularly towards women (Shani Louk video is absolutely horrifying), and then I see people on the left, mostly men, defending all this as a just cause and crying 'Islamophobia' to anyone disagreeing.

The frustrating thing is those who promote these views don't even recognise their misogyny and sometimes even try to twist it to paint anyone criticising these views as misogynist!

Anyway I just wanted to open a conversation about this and was wondering if anyone else feels the same and has other examples of similar beliefs amongst the misogynist left.

Through much of its history Islamic cultures, like many other cultures, did not share our modern conceptualization of homosexuality, or sexuality as a concept at all. (Even in our culture the idea of being homosexual has not been static, including among homosexual people.)

But it's also going to come down to what you mean by "acceptable". There are plenty of belief systems that place restrictions of some kind on sexual activity, or have ideas about when and under what circumstances sexual activity is meant to happen. If we are going to push all members of those groups out of society we could lose quite a lot of our religious and cultural diversity.

A timely piece by Meghan Murphy:

https://www.meghanmurphy.ca/p/moral-bankruptcy-and-fake-feminists?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-restack-comment&r=clsg2

Thank you, @RebelliousCow - that was a very interesting article.

"My conclusion is that British culture is a carefully built, yet fragile, culmination of centuries of trying things, getting them wrong, trying again, preserving the useful bits, evolving the bits that need to be evolved, very slowly over centuries"

This is the key point in your post, for me. This is what i believe many castigate as conservatism.......but trial and error and working with practical reality is the only real way to create social stabiity whilst also permitting for evolution and change.

Excellent points, @LongLizStridesAgain .
I have no idea why people would assume that a life under Hamas is preferable to life in a western, liberal democracy - even an imperfect one. There is a massive failure to see regimes where women have no human rights (never mind civil rights), where gay people are persecuted and murdered, (I'm not even going to get onto the situation for Jewish people), where there is no free press, association or elections, and there is no rule of law.
It must be some sort of political and cultural blindness.

Hamas operates a severe form of sharia law, I understand.

I read all of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's memoirs some years ago. She understamd Islam from the inside out.

This is exactly what gets me, how can the left support a movement like Hamas given what they stand for?

I’m not Jewish but it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that anti semitism is behind it as otherwise what is it about Hamas and other similar organisations that is so appealing.

I love Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

what my brain hears is: "I'm going to do whatever I like to you, and it's going to hurt, but you're going to keep quiet, because it's good for you."

That.

Rooted in a belief of absolute entitlement and superiority to you, and you being a lesser kind of human being who wouldn't argue back if you were Like Them. It's the kind of 1970s snobbery about the 'right kind of people' that sitcoms spent decades poking fun at.

It is heavily middle class, and rooted in middle class naivety and sense of entitlement and superiority. Hence why you see the very distasteful sight of Labour MPs who will verbally head pat useful pets such as the working class, disabled, BAME, homosexual, but if they get out of their box by going off message, saying something that conflicts with the message like 'but I want to be homosexual and not be told I have to do men' or 'I can't use a mixed sex space and this denies me health care' you see in seconds quite staggering racism, homophobia, ableism - it's a very thin veneer, identified as for useful marketing purposes, not related to any real values or understanding of the issues.

For many women, me included, it also raises grim memories of abusers who would hurt you while snarling 'don't you dare cry and upset me with your pain and distress and feelings - this is about me'. It's the hallmark of an abusive relationship and a highly dysfunctional person that we'd all advise normally to get the fuck away from. In this case, the demand is to celebrate and enable the dysfunction, we've actually had some staggering people here insisting that women must embrace their oppression for the 'greater good'.

Leftist politics is sick to the very core. I can also see signs that we may get a left government - heaven help us it may be a coalition of utter nutcases - and they are very quickly going to find themselves in charge of a very angry electorate.

Thank you for this thread, it’s given me so much to think about.

I’ve always identified as left, and economically I still am. But I keep seeing this vainglory in the left, picking up interesting causes that they’re actually removed from to decry injustice from afar. Somehow handwringing about things happening half a world away brings greater satisfaction than working in a soup kitchen once a week or volunteering. I know many left wing people also do those things, but it’s from community motivation rather than political ideology. Left wing becomes the badge of honour and righteousness, without scrutiny of thought or actions.

I deplore right wing economic policies in the U.K. which has made me very anti Tory, but I don’t know what labour is actually offering other than “not being the tories” and I can’t seem to find anything in their social policies or even their identity to inspire me. Neither side offers any kind of competence, just doing the “pick me” dance to their choirs.

someone up thread blew my mind by saying “It feels like misogyny on the right sees women as the private property of men and on the left, we are public property (particularly the enthusiasm for sex work and surrogacy).” And someone else said that the left always act like women’s rights and issues will be resolved after the revolution has been won. But instead now we’re being told our struggles aren’t real because men can be women and so woman is a costume rather than a lived experience facing certain circumstances to be acknowledged and changed. I don’t think it’s left or right to want self definition and autonomy, as well as community and family and purpose.

none of it seems to be working. I really felt the terror and heartache of what hamas did to the civilian Israeli women and children. And now more civilian Palestinian women and children will suffer from Israeli retaliation. And so it keeps going, historic justification and whataboutism tumbling over each other because there will always be more young men saying “right on” and more old men manipulating and directing them. And they’ll only be happy when they’ve killed each other so no one has “won”.

and it’s the same with politics in the U.K. they only care about winning, not actually making things better for people.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemns support for Hamas on the left:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/10/aoc-palestinian-rally-new-york

Wow, very pleased to see this re AOC.

On the other hand, leftists have been using an image of a person paragliding:

https://nypost.com/2023/10/10/blm-chicago-under-fire-for-pro-palestine-post-featuring-paragliding-terrorist/

I think that's the most sensible thing I've ever seen from her.

Tbh I think for some on the left the thing that makes them most uncomfortable about Israel is that it is a proper government, a democracy that is supposed to be western in its type, but also having an explicit ethnic/religious element attached to that. They don't really see Hamas as being a government so much as a sort of rabble, (I am not sure this applies to the Jeremy Corbyns mind you,) so just don't apply the same standards. If Israel is a western democracy, they feel it needs to be held to the same kinds of standards as other western democracies. And they are uncomfortable with the whole situation, some of that I suspect in ways that they find difficult to put a finger on (maybe due to historical illiteracy?), or that they aren't allowed to articulate out loud because they will be accused of bigotry. But that doesn't actually make the things go away, it just means their discomfort becomes kind of a mess of inarticulate emotion.

This has been kind of a hallmark, in my adult life, of the progressive left. I am not sure that this was so much the case in my younger years, there seemed to be more intelligent public intellectuals on the left, but maybe my perspective has just changed. It's like now seeing people talk about how they could never be a Tory because they are evil, they are on the left, or Labour voters, because they care about people. It's pure emotion, if you ask them how the policies are going to work, the best that seems to be forthcoming is "they will spend more money on things." And you can say, OK, like Tony Blair who fudged it by borrowing from future generations, or the Labour governments that ended with the nation having to get an IMF loan and taking an austerity approach? Or they want to accept large numbers of migrants, because of the evils of colonialism, but seem to offer no concrete plan to house them.

It's all emotive thinking, based on a kind of confidence in a utopian solution I guess. I suppose their view of the Middle East may be similar - if only the people in power do the right things, the Utopian solution will manifest.

The modern Left never fail to disappoint. All out to pull down Israel. But not a murmur on Myanmar, or Uighurs in China. Whenever terrible things are revealed in Venezuela or Nicaragua, nothing from the Left. But Trump threatens to put up a wall with Mexico, and the Left all coalesce in opposition. I don't see any concerted Left opposition to Iran.

Now, the Right never cover themselves in glory, quick to dismiss the Saudi killing of that journalist, looking the other way when money and oil are involved. But then again, the Right never proclaim themselves to be paragons of virtue as the Left do.

For me, stuff like whataboutery and ad hominems and strawmen arguments re Hamas butchery, and the total abandonment of women and girls to trans ideology, are connected re the Left. And absolutely prove the moral bankruptcy of this movement.

What an interesting thread, thanks.

I didn't appreciate it at the time, but my parents gave me a rare and valuable gift; an almost completely apolitical childhood. That meant they refused to discuss how they voted and left me to find my own alignment, in my own way. At university in the late 90s I met people for the first time who were vehemently Labour/Tory (mostly Labour) because their parents were and I found this puzzling. One of those uni mates posted a picture on Facebook of her posing with her postal vote for Corbyn surrounded by her kids. You only seem to find this performative "correct public opinion" theatrics on the left.

My first job after university was in a former Soviet country ~ a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I learnt more there in my first 3 months than in my entire 3 years of doing a nice middle class degree with other nice middle class girls. I suspect a lot of earnest lefties have never had anything other than a graduate job, surrounded by fellow Arts graduates.

This is all so interesting. It is just so important to take an analytical and thoughtful approach to issues and look at them on an individual basis rather than be blindly swept along by tribalism.

To me the “left” and “right” labels are largely redundant.

Sorry, I couldn’t rtft. Too depressing. Back in the 60s and 70s sexism was so normal throughout society, including on the left, that only feminists even noticed it.

We worked hard and achieved a lot. Sexism gradually became noticed and officially disapproved of. It never totally disappeared, but it diminished. I thought we’d made so much progress that things couldn’t slip back. (Others may have been less optimistic.)

Now it has come storming back, in the far more savage form of misogyny, undisguised hatred or contempt of women. Twenty years ago if you’d written what was happening now as a novel it would have been considered implausible. Now we’re living a bloody nightmare.

And as a lifelong socialist, seeing my supposed comrades and trades unions including my own absolutely arselicking to the misogynists makes me vomit.

Sorry to sound defeatist. I’m probably too old to hope for a better future, but I’m not going to stop fighting for it.

If this helps you.
The future can still be claimed back, despite the obstacles being large, and the night being dark.
It requires bravery and straight speaking from those of us who know the odds.
I'm hoping Generation Alpha grow up to provide pressure from the other direction.
This phenomena needs application on its many pressure points.
And like a balloon, it will deflate.
Now is the time to be brave.
We're all doing our bit, that I know for sure.

It's all emotive thinking, based on a kind of confidence in a utopian solution I guess.

I'm not against left leaning economic policies, but one worry I have is that for socialist types, you can't falsify their beliefs, (in their minds anyway).

If their policies, as far as they can get them implemented, result in social harm, it will just be, "look at the poverty, we need socialism even more"; or they can always look to blame some oppressive power structure.

And I'm inclined to think they ignore possibly important things, (on the conservative side), like whether less "traditional 2 parent family" contributes to poverty or crime.

Or as you mention, mass immigration may place pressure on housing which makes life very difficult for upcoming generations, unless you're towards the top end. It's not the only factor in play obviously, but seems like it could be an important one.

And on crime, they appear too willing to take responsibility away from the individual and blame society. So to fix crime, the real answer, they think, is their socialist agenda.

But if you go soft on law and order, (if it turns out that wasn't such a good idea), the people that suffer most as a result of that policy, may be in disadvantaged areas, perhaps disproportionately minority areas. Or more vulnerable people may be particularly at risk, live in fear for their safety, have to deal with anti social behaviour as a constant background to their lives.

Well let's assume this is correct with the example of homosexuality.

So the Islamic world has been quite varied down the centuries, and at times has been more tolerant of homosexuality, and at times has taken a more extreme approach.

You can then ask the question: Well is the more tolerant position better supported? Is the more extreme position better supported? Or are they both equally plausible interpretations of Islam?

If the more extreme position is either, (a) better supported, or (b) equally plausible, then you may have a problem.

https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Islam_and_Homosexuality

The four Sunni schools of jurisprudence all agree that practicing homosexuality is an egregious crime that earns an especially harsh punishment, although the schools vary regarding what exactly this punishment should be. In the Hanafi school, the practicing homosexual is to be beat harshly and then executed if they persist. In the Shafi'i school, the practicing homosexual is punished in the same manner as one who engages in illegal intercourse (zina) - that is, they are lashed 100 times if unmarried and stoned to death if married. Some scholars, referencing the practices of the four Rightly-Guided (Rashidun) Caliphs, hold that the practicing homosexual should be thrown off of a tall building.[1] Others, referencing the Quran, maintain that the homosexual should be imprisoned until they die. Still others, also referencing the Quran, maintain that practicing homosexuals should in all cases be stoned to death.[2] Yet another view is that while the passive party in the male homosexual act should be killed in all cases, the active party escapes execution if unmarried and is to be lashed 100 times.[3] Some scholars also suggest that homosexual, when executed, should be beheaded rather than stoned.

Ummm so the punishment for homosexuality seems to be death, death or death?

This makes me so angry about the so called ' progressive Left'. My DH was captured by the Corbyn cult, and it is so difficult to discuss this with him that I've stopped bothering, but I still hear some of the crap the Left comes out with. The article above really helped put into words how frustrating it is to try and explain these issues when the counter argument is just ' well you're brainwashed by mainstream media or the dismissal of people's opinions and right to believe something different from them because it means you're basically a nazi. I am desperately hoping that we get a coalition of Labour and Lib Dem that changes the electoral system to PR. I believe that will smash the two parties into their constituent parts and the radical Left can bugger off and leave a proper Social Democratic party who don't have to keep constantly fighting to keep the Hard Left from destroying them.