Jacobin vs. Bumblebees
Jacobin vs. Bumblebees
Jul 25 2026, 8:07 PM
Nine years ago, Erica West of a Trotskyist group called the International Socialist Organization (or ISO for short) wrote a polemic called The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism for the main socialist magazine in the United States, Jacobin. Although Jacobin has published a number of articles accosting "terfs" over the years, this one has remained their principal critique of radical feminism as an overall phenom. I haven't counted myself a radfem in some eight years now, so you may be wondering why I care. My main motivation to write this response is the fact that West is actually critiquing female separatism specifically. Her polemic describes all radfems as separatists despite the obvious reality that (to my irritation) only a minority are. Female separatism is an area of ongoing overlap between my approach to life and the world of radfems (hence my presence here), so I feel obliged to defend it. Why this timing though, you ask, what with the polemic I'm responding to being nine years old already? Because my country is talking a lot about socialism, including socialist feminism, since a few members of the Democratic Socialists of America (or DSA for short) have recently won Democratic Party primaries, so the main socialist feminist critique of female separatism has gained new relevance lately, I feel.
The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism is dumb and poorly written, so large swaths of it really don’t earn a response and won't get one from me. I'll just stick to addressing the most pungent quotes therefrom in my response. West's article has four main tenets, which are 1) that women must tolerate pornographers because reducing their power in the world would require state action (oh my), 2) that patriarchy doesn’t exist under socialism, 3) that TIMs are the real victims of sexual violence, and 4) that female separatism is a form of white racism. I will now dismantle that load of horse shit (with a rhetorical shovel, not my hands...ew
).First of all, before I begin my critique of the article itself, I think it may be worth pointing out that, despite their rhetorical obsession with class conflict and constant claims to represent "the working class", groups like the ISO, the DSA, and so forth (which were or are, as applicable, based on college campuses, not at workplaces) , are in fact principally composed of disgruntled yuppies, not members of the working class as the term is commonly understood. Their ranks are mostly composed of what Karl Marx would've called the bourgeoisie, in other words, or a particular, often downwardly mobile subsection thereof, anyway, that struggles to afford the high cost of living in the expensive metropolitan areas where they most typically reside. Ideologically, they form the preponderance of the small group that Pew Research describes as "leftward progressives" and what I like to describe as the woke crowd. Because it's politically active and vocal, this demographic enjoys disproportionate representation in, and influence over, the public discourse. It's also statistically from this same demo that we get the most active and principled feminists (including likely the majority of our users here based on the bios I've seen), as are all kinds of idealists, so there's tons of overlap. Nothing wrong with belonging to said demographic by any means. I mean one way of summing it up would be to say that these are some of the smartest, best-educated, and most informed folks on Earth! But I just think it's worth clarifying that there is in fact some cosplay going on here insofar as intellectuals, small business owners, professional activists, and other members of the bourgeoisie go around proclaiming their worldview synonymous with proletarian interests and claim to speak for those of us who do in fact do menial or manual labor (work that's done with the hands) for a living. Whether it's by choosing to embrace a broadened definition of working class status that includes such persons or an intentional form of identity appropriation, there is something obnoxious and presumptuous about the practice. That's all I have to say about that for our purposes here. Moving on!
Quote:Radical feminists’ anti-porn work throws into sharp relief the dangers of misidentifying the roots of women’s oppression. Relying on the state for censorship, emboldening the carceral apparatus, making alliances with opponents of progressive change — this is where radical feminism’s analysis leads us.
At the core of radical feminism’s theoretical blunders is its conception of class.
For radical feminists, the two main classes in society are not the working class (who sell their labor power) and capitalists (who exploit them), but men (the oppressors) and women (the oppressed). They call this patriarchy theory.
The only thing wrong with the radfem analysis of pornography is their reversal of cause and effect. They have claimed that porn causes misogyny. In reality, it reflects misogyny. The pathetic content on the Love After Porn subreddit demonstrates with crystal clarity the complete and utter depravity of the male sex and the comical lengths to which women are willing to go to excuse and forgive it. (Some examples of what I mean.) Whoever can look at that sub and somehow conclude that pornography deserves to keep existing for any reason has no right to lecture anyone about their commitment to women's liberation!
The real truth is that while Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring had an especially massive cultural impact on my entire generation, it was no aberration. Analogous, more institutionalized versions of his repressive child rape cult have been pervasive throughout all of known human history and the only reason your moid doesn't run of his own is because he can't afford to. Basically, the male sex is particularly attracted to children and animals and nearly all of your beauty practices reflect this fact. They are calculated efforts at self-infantilization and self-dehumanization, and expensive ones at that. (And guess who you pay for the privilege, incidentally? You guessed it, men!) The porn men consume reflects it as well. So anyway, to state more directly what I've just made obvious here, while you may not want to sic the state on men, rest assured that they have no problem using it against you (as any publication with the name "Jacobin" should know very well considering that the Jacobins, among other things, guillotined the author of The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, Olympe de Gouges.) Not that they need to. The male physical power advantage by itself renders stateless situations deferential to chodes as well. And speaking of that, let's talk more specifically about anti-carceralism.
It's not a coincidence that misogynists parasites like Graham Platner are among those who feel that there should no police. I'll leave you to figure out why. This is a widespread sentiment amongst the woke crowd though. For example, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a recently-nominated Democratic candidate for New York's 13th congressional district who also belongs to the DSA, was asked if convicted murderers should serve time in prison and refused to answer. Instead, she proposed the vague alternative of preventing violence from happening without explaining how that would be done. In the course of doing so, she pointed out that the American criminal justice system discriminates against people of color. While that certainly is true, it would be easy to point out that so does abolishing law enforcement. The difference being that incarceration and other state violence is almost exclusively faced by men while male violence at home and on the streets is half the time faced by women and girls.
Many feminists have pointed out the obvious problems with reframing rape, femicide, and other crimes that prodes commit against the female sex as issues of state violence against individuals or workers rather than as male violence against us, ranging from radical feminist Jen Izaakson to conservative feminist Louise Perry, but it's quite frankly the latter's commentary on the subject in her 2020 article Why Defunding the Police Will Hurt Women the Most that is the best one I've read to date, mostly because it doesn't bother reducing the problem of male violence to one of male socialization like radfems do. The entire article is highly recommended reading, especially (but not only) for those us who lived through the year 2020 in America, as it will give you a new, woman-centered perspective on many highly publicized events that took place around that time frame, but the most salient point that she made was this in answer to a contemporaneous Teen Vogue article championing the abolition of police and prisons:
"Promoting “safety, agency, and healing” sounds very nice, but does not constitute a substantive solution to the problem of male violence because what is notably absent from this vision is any means of physically separating violent men from their potential victims, with that separation maintained — as it has to be — through force. Instead, we are offered woolly solutions that are both highly ideological and highly experimental, based on the premise that offenders can readily be socialised out of their violent behaviour by nonspecific “experts” and “tailored responses” — against all the evidence.
While it might perhaps be possible that a nation like America could become the first in the history of the world to abolish violent crime, we have no reason to expect this to be the consequence of police and prison abolition, and lots of reasons to believe that the precise opposite would happen. The CHAZ/CHOP experiment, for instance, was a triumph for the Hobbesian understanding of human nature. This short-lived community set up within Seattle, beyond the reach of official authorities, soon descended into chaos and violence, with vigilante groups organised to maintain order, and a resulting homicide rate fifty times greater than Chicago’s.
In a world like this, with no police or prisons, how do you think that the smaller, weaker half of humanity would fare? The half who commit very little violent crime but are the victims of a great deal of it?
Historically, what happened was that women were forced to find male protectors who could use force to repel or punish other men, and any woman without such a protector was on her own. Because with no police, there are just two options available to vulnerable people: vigilantism, or nothing at all. The new abolitionists can imagine a third, fanciful option only because they choose to turn away from historical and international examples of what happens when the state’s monopoly on violence is undone.
Accepting the necessity of the criminal justice system doesn’t mean that we can’t criticise it, as becomes clear if we apply the same reasoning to the medical profession. There are significant racial disparities in health outcomes. There have historically been terrible abuses perpetrated by doctors against black Americans, who are still under-represented in the profession. But these facts do not justify defunding the healthcare sector, still less burning down the local hospital.
.....
...The reality of male violence does not sit well with the kind of utopianism that thrills the woke Left. But there remains an awful, unhappy fact that must still be contended with, once all the utopianism falls away. It is this: some men need to die in prison, and only the state can put them there."
She wasn't wrong. My point being that in opposing the use of state force as such, West is objectively rationalizing away male violence of all kinds.
Quote:As Marxists, we know the enemy is not men, but the capitalist class — which itself is multi-gendered and multiracial — and that our strategy must reflect this. Women’s oppression is not innate in humans but instead arose at a particular historical and political moment, alongside the development of class society and the nuclear family.
Women’s oppression persists not simply because men hate us, but because of the role we’ve played historically in the nuclear family. While men headed off to work each morning to engage in capitalist production — making cars at the factory, writing legal briefs at the office — women typically engaged in what is known as social reproduction: the biological reproduction of new workers (i.e. having children) and the day-to-day reproduction of workers — doing laundry, feeding the family, getting children ready for school, and so on.
Even in recent decades, as women have entered the paid workforce en masse, they’ve still tended to be saddled with the “second shift,” carrying out social reproduction at home after they return from work.
These tasks are all vital to capitalism. Workers must be fed, clothed, and prepared every day for capitalism to function. But it is in capitalism’s interest for this work to be done for free and in the private sphere.
As a result, socialist feminists argue that the only way we can liberate women is to end class society, once and for all.
I've bolded a key claim above. West's claim here, which forms the foundation of her case for working with men to defeat the capitalist class, is a common one among Marxists because it reflects claims made by Karl Marx's chief patron Friedrich Engels in his 1884 book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Much time has transpired since the publication of said text and much more knowledge of ancient and prehistory has been gained in the interim and the simple fact is that this key, foundational claim is untrue. The men's cults that I referenced above appear to date all the way back to the Upper Paleolithic period. Arranged marriages date back to the very first migration of modern humans from Africa. And male-biased leadership patterns and patterns of extreme and rapacious male violence against females and the young are pervasive across primates as a group, not just human beings, and this definitely includes our closest living ancestors, chimpanzees. The oppression of women by men, in other words, has evolutionary roots that predate the existence of our species!
What's more, as William Buckner well demonstrated in 2018 in his article On the Nature of Patriarchy, matrilineal descent, extensive female control of resources, and relatively low levels of wealth inequality between men don't by any means necessarily weaken the power of patriarchal social relations at all. Simplistic Marxian materialist analyses that center on the merits of wealth redistribution fail to account for the kind of cultural power than men can still wield over women purely through institutions like religion or the simple threat of force alone, and how reduced wealth inequality between men can sometimes in fact increase male solidarity against women. And we have seen historically that Bolshevik governments themselves have shown a pattern of ultimately retreating on women's emancipation in the end. (Consider the example of Stalin.) Frankly, I've found that even exclusively female communities often have a way of surviving on a phallocentric basis, like by attracting male tourists with sex appeal. There is nothing I've seen to suggest that patriarchy is a transcendable condition for our species, let alone that men are our natural allies in alleviating it. The simple fact of how Marx treated his own wife and kids should tell you much about what his level of interest in the project was. (Spoiler: There's lots of female suicide involved in the tale.)
To best understand the actual roots of the human patriarchal condition, let me supply you with this excerpt from another Quillette article by Buckner entitled A Girl's Place in World:
"Understanding these trends [of male privilege and power] that we see across human societies requires a careful consideration of our evolutionary history, and the constraints imposed by this history. Based on their analysis of intersexual dominance status and dimorphism across 79 primate species, anthropologist Rebecca Lewis and her colleagues conclude that “High [sexual] dimorphism probably characterized the catarrhine LCA [the Last Common Ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes], which constrained dominance relationships within this clade and helps explain why living catarrhines are primarily male dominant.” Similarly, in their review investigating obstacles and opportunities for female leadership across 76 nonhuman mammal species, evolutionary biologist Jennifer E. Smith and her colleagues write that, “The paucity of female-biased leadership across multiple domains is evident across the other primates, suggesting that male-biased leadership within the primate lineage has deep evolutionary roots and perhaps imposes a phylogenetic (historical) constraint on its evolution.”"
Or, in other words, primate males are substantially bigger, stronger, and faster than females and social power and privilege have had a way of corresponding to those traits. And the corresponding cultural sex bias against females likely goes back all the way to our last common ancestor. We're talking tens of millions of years of evolutionary history, not just a few thousand years of human history, that the women's liberationist finds herself going up against and tasked with overcoming! And you feel that history every time you, generic heterosexual reader, find yourself physically attracted to a male precisely BECAUSE he is muscular and tall. You are literally biologically programmed to perpetuate the very condition that has rendered your sex subordinate up to now. All of which is to say that men oppress women because they can, because it works to their reproductive advantage to do so, and because women are both culturally and evolutionarily disposed to let them.
In the animal world, you will find that the bigger the size and power difference there is between its sexes, the more one tends to dominate its social life. It really is that simple. Everything else is an outgrowth of that base reality. How then have women achieved the advancement we have in recent decades and centuries, you ask? To quote feminist sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy, modern advances toward sex equality reside on a “unique foundation of historical conditions, values, economic opportunities, heroism on the part of women who fought for suffrage, and perhaps especially technological developments which led to birth control and labor-saving devices and hence minimized physical differences between the sexes.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, the most important component-part really has been the reduction of our physical differences, at least in social significance, by technological means. That is what separates this era from past periods in human history. The optimist will look at this promise and conclude that continued ascent of women is inevitable. The pessimist (as me) though will look at it and conclude that we are but one true disaster away from losing everything we've gained. All you have to do to gather the latter case is look how we responded to Covid-19. It illustrates how people respond to crises. One sex always falls further than the other when those happen.
To sum it all up, I will quote once more from Buckner:
"Men tend to be bigger and stronger than women are. Males tend to benefit more from engaging in violence—both individually and in groups—and they can reap greater fitness benefits through mating with different partners than females do, as women’s reproductive output is more constrained by lactation and gestation time. Further, humans are a species with particularly helpless infants, who often require significant material investments from males to survive, unlike most other mammals. Across human societies, children often inherit material and nonmaterial traits or resources from parents and ancestors—like social status, lineage identity, and property—planting an even stronger importance for men to secure paternal certainty, otherwise they risk devoting substantial resources to unrelated children, which in many circumstances would hamper their own fitness interests. This has led to common domains of intersexual conflict found across the world, exhibited in phenomena like rape and bride capture, arranged child marriages and polygyny, and intimate partner violence."
It all leads me to question whether there even is a true solution to male oppression.
OTHER KEY QUOTES TO DISCUSS:
Quote:This exclusion isn’t just bigoted — it’s hypocritical: while radical feminists campaign vigorously against sexual violence, it’s trans women who suffer from disproportionately high rates of sexual and physical violence (particularly trans women of color).
TERFs may argue that trans women do not share a reproductive system with cis women, and thus can’t understand women’s struggles for birth control and against forced sterilization. But then what do they say of solidarity with lesbian women, or cis women who cannot or choose not to have children? The arguments that TERFs put forth are both weak and prejudiced.
Actually it's trans-men, i.e. the biologically female members of the trans community, who suffer the most disproportionate rates of both sexual and other physical violence. Here in the United States of Assholes, for example, 37% of trans-women report having experienced sexual assault before...as compared with 51% of trans-men; a full majority! Likewise an investigation by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found 86.1 physical attacks for every 1,000 trans-women...and 107.5 for every 1,000 trans-men. As to who it is attacking both groups, at least 81% of sexual assaults against trans-identified people in the U.S. are committed by men. So even within the trans community, just as in the larger world, the principal victims of violence (especially sexual violence) are female and the assailants are overwhelmingly male, just as you'd expect.
Males masquerading as females aren't just victims of sexual violence though, they also commit a lot of it. For example, in 2017, Fair Play for Women used publicly available data on prisoners in the UK to estimate that 41% of TIM prisoners were there at least in part for sex crimes. A follow-up Freedom of Information request from the BBC to the country's Ministry of Justice revealed it was actually 48%, i.e. about half, of all TIM prisoners who were there on sex crimes convictions. This contrasts starkly with the 3% of actual female prisoners who were there for sex crimes and even with the nearly 20% of other men who were, suggesting that TIMs are in fact especially prone to sexual aggression themselves even in comparison to other males. What's more, these investigations revealed the existence of not a single TIF prisoner in the country. So, in other words, TIMs behave like men and TIFs behave like women, just as you would expect. They behave in a way that aligns with, or even exaggerates the typical traits of, their biological sex.
These facts show both that the biological males of the trans community are more privileged and violent than their comparatively invisible female counterparts and also that especially high danger to girls and women exists in trans inclusion policies.
Now I'd like to address this claim that having a reproductive system is irrelevant to the lives and oppression of lesbians.
Quote:Radical feminism is also noticeably silent on the question of racism, and is burdened by a politically suspect strategy for fighting it.
Men of color perpetuate sexism just like white men. But their experience of racism also binds them together with the women of color in their communities. As Sharon Smith writes, “the need to fight alongside men in the fight against racism or in the class struggle [has] made separatist ideas unappealing” for women of color.
Quote:While radical feminists posit separatism as a political strategy — and for some, the goal — socialist feminists understand that our power lies in our numbers. The division between working-class men and women, between cisgender people and transgender people — these fissures are detrimental to our overall aims. They only make us weaker and our fight against capitalism that much harder.
Socialist feminists’ goal is to build solidarity across the entire working class. Our fates are tied together, and the struggle against gendered oppression is inseparable from the struggle against transphobia, racism, and capitalism more broadly. Any movement or theory of feminism that either explicitly or implicitly excludes trans people, intentionally misgenders them, or perpetuates transphobia has no business being on the Left.
Edited Aug 1 2026, 9:00 PM by Impress Polly.
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NOTE: This is my placeholder thread for the polemic I referenced the possibility of writing here on Raddish. Content will be disorganized and decidedly incomplete for a while, but...hopefully...updated from time to time until I announce that I'm finished. Once done, I'll post a thread a Raddish linking to this post.
Nine years ago, Erica West of a Trotskyist group called the International Socialist Organization (or ISO for short) wrote a polemic called The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism for the main socialist magazine in the United States, Jacobin. Although Jacobin has published a number of articles accosting "terfs" over the years, this one has remained their principal critique of radical feminism as an overall phenom. I haven't counted myself a radfem in some eight years now, so you may be wondering why I care. My main motivation to write this response is the fact that West is actually critiquing female separatism specifically. Her polemic describes all radfems as separatists despite the obvious reality that (to my irritation) only a minority are. Female separatism is an area of ongoing overlap between my approach to life and the world of radfems (hence my presence here), so I feel obliged to defend it. Why this timing though, you ask, what with the polemic I'm responding to being nine years old already? Because my country is talking a lot about socialism, including socialist feminism, since a few members of the Democratic Socialists of America (or DSA for short) have recently won Democratic Party primaries, so the main socialist feminist critique of female separatism has gained new relevance lately, I feel.
The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism is dumb and poorly written, so large swaths of it really don’t earn a response and won't get one from me. I'll just stick to addressing the most pungent quotes therefrom in my response. West's article has four main tenets, which are 1) that women must tolerate pornographers because reducing their power in the world would require state action (oh my), 2) that patriarchy doesn’t exist under socialism, 3) that TIMs are the real victims of sexual violence, and 4) that female separatism is a form of white racism. I will now dismantle that load of horse shit (with a rhetorical shovel, not my hands...ew ).
First of all, before I begin my critique of the article itself, I think it may be worth pointing out that, despite their rhetorical obsession with class conflict and constant claims to represent "the working class", groups like the ISO, the DSA, and so forth (which were or are, as applicable, based on college campuses, not at workplaces) , are in fact principally composed of disgruntled yuppies, not members of the working class as the term is commonly understood. Their ranks are mostly composed of what Karl Marx would've called the bourgeoisie, in other words, or a particular, often downwardly mobile subsection thereof, anyway, that struggles to afford the high cost of living in the expensive metropolitan areas where they most typically reside. Ideologically, they form the preponderance of the small group that Pew Research describes as "leftward progressives" and what I like to describe as the woke crowd. Because it's politically active and vocal, this demographic enjoys disproportionate representation in, and influence over, the public discourse. It's also statistically from this same demo that we get the most active and principled feminists (including likely the majority of our users here based on the bios I've seen), as are all kinds of idealists, so there's tons of overlap. Nothing wrong with belonging to said demographic by any means. I mean one way of summing it up would be to say that these are some of the smartest, best-educated, and most informed folks on Earth! But I just think it's worth clarifying that there is in fact some cosplay going on here insofar as intellectuals, small business owners, professional activists, and other members of the bourgeoisie go around proclaiming their worldview synonymous with proletarian interests and claim to speak for those of us who do in fact do menial or manual labor (work that's done with the hands) for a living. Whether it's by choosing to embrace a broadened definition of working class status that includes such persons or an intentional form of identity appropriation, there is something obnoxious and presumptuous about the practice. That's all I have to say about that for our purposes here. Moving on!
Quote:Radical feminists’ anti-porn work throws into sharp relief the dangers of misidentifying the roots of women’s oppression. Relying on the state for censorship, emboldening the carceral apparatus, making alliances with opponents of progressive change — this is where radical feminism’s analysis leads us.
At the core of radical feminism’s theoretical blunders is its conception of class.
For radical feminists, the two main classes in society are not the working class (who sell their labor power) and capitalists (who exploit them), but men (the oppressors) and women (the oppressed). They call this patriarchy theory.
The only thing wrong with the radfem analysis of pornography is their reversal of cause and effect. They have claimed that porn causes misogyny. In reality, it reflects misogyny. The pathetic content on the Love After Porn subreddit demonstrates with crystal clarity the complete and utter depravity of the male sex and the comical lengths to which women are willing to go to excuse and forgive it. (Some examples of what I mean.) Whoever can look at that sub and somehow conclude that pornography deserves to keep existing for any reason has no right to lecture anyone about their commitment to women's liberation!
The real truth is that while Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring had an especially massive cultural impact on my entire generation, it was no aberration. Analogous, more institutionalized versions of his repressive child rape cult have been pervasive throughout all of known human history and the only reason your moid doesn't run of his own is because he can't afford to. Basically, the male sex is particularly attracted to children and animals and nearly all of your beauty practices reflect this fact. They are calculated efforts at self-infantilization and self-dehumanization, and expensive ones at that. (And guess who you pay for the privilege, incidentally? You guessed it, men!) The porn men consume reflects it as well. So anyway, to state more directly what I've just made obvious here, while you may not want to sic the state on men, rest assured that they have no problem using it against you (as any publication with the name "Jacobin" should know very well considering that the Jacobins, among other things, guillotined the author of The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, Olympe de Gouges.) Not that they need to. The male physical power advantage by itself renders stateless situations deferential to chodes as well. And speaking of that, let's talk more specifically about anti-carceralism.
It's not a coincidence that misogynists parasites like Graham Platner are among those who feel that there should no police. I'll leave you to figure out why. This is a widespread sentiment amongst the woke crowd though. For example, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a recently-nominated Democratic candidate for New York's 13th congressional district who also belongs to the DSA, was asked if convicted murderers should serve time in prison and refused to answer. Instead, she proposed the vague alternative of preventing violence from happening without explaining how that would be done. In the course of doing so, she pointed out that the American criminal justice system discriminates against people of color. While that certainly is true, it would be easy to point out that so does abolishing law enforcement. The difference being that incarceration and other state violence is almost exclusively faced by men while male violence at home and on the streets is half the time faced by women and girls.
Many feminists have pointed out the obvious problems with reframing rape, femicide, and other crimes that prodes commit against the female sex as issues of state violence against individuals or workers rather than as male violence against us, ranging from radical feminist Jen Izaakson to conservative feminist Louise Perry, but it's quite frankly the latter's commentary on the subject in her 2020 article Why Defunding the Police Will Hurt Women the Most that is the best one I've read to date, mostly because it doesn't bother reducing the problem of male violence to one of male socialization like radfems do. The entire article is highly recommended reading, especially (but not only) for those us who lived through the year 2020 in America, as it will give you a new, woman-centered perspective on many highly publicized events that took place around that time frame, but the most salient point that she made was this in answer to a contemporaneous Teen Vogue article championing the abolition of police and prisons:
"Promoting “safety, agency, and healing” sounds very nice, but does not constitute a substantive solution to the problem of male violence because what is notably absent from this vision is any means of physically separating violent men from their potential victims, with that separation maintained — as it has to be — through force. Instead, we are offered woolly solutions that are both highly ideological and highly experimental, based on the premise that offenders can readily be socialised out of their violent behaviour by nonspecific “experts” and “tailored responses” — against all the evidence.
While it might perhaps be possible that a nation like America could become the first in the history of the world to abolish violent crime, we have no reason to expect this to be the consequence of police and prison abolition, and lots of reasons to believe that the precise opposite would happen. The CHAZ/CHOP experiment, for instance, was a triumph for the Hobbesian understanding of human nature. This short-lived community set up within Seattle, beyond the reach of official authorities, soon descended into chaos and violence, with vigilante groups organised to maintain order, and a resulting homicide rate fifty times greater than Chicago’s.
In a world like this, with no police or prisons, how do you think that the smaller, weaker half of humanity would fare? The half who commit very little violent crime but are the victims of a great deal of it?
Historically, what happened was that women were forced to find male protectors who could use force to repel or punish other men, and any woman without such a protector was on her own. Because with no police, there are just two options available to vulnerable people: vigilantism, or nothing at all. The new abolitionists can imagine a third, fanciful option only because they choose to turn away from historical and international examples of what happens when the state’s monopoly on violence is undone.
Accepting the necessity of the criminal justice system doesn’t mean that we can’t criticise it, as becomes clear if we apply the same reasoning to the medical profession. There are significant racial disparities in health outcomes. There have historically been terrible abuses perpetrated by doctors against black Americans, who are still under-represented in the profession. But these facts do not justify defunding the healthcare sector, still less burning down the local hospital.
.....
...The reality of male violence does not sit well with the kind of utopianism that thrills the woke Left. But there remains an awful, unhappy fact that must still be contended with, once all the utopianism falls away. It is this: some men need to die in prison, and only the state can put them there."
She wasn't wrong. My point being that in opposing the use of state force as such, West is objectively rationalizing away male violence of all kinds.
Quote:As Marxists, we know the enemy is not men, but the capitalist class — which itself is multi-gendered and multiracial — and that our strategy must reflect this. Women’s oppression is not innate in humans but instead arose at a particular historical and political moment, alongside the development of class society and the nuclear family.
Women’s oppression persists not simply because men hate us, but because of the role we’ve played historically in the nuclear family. While men headed off to work each morning to engage in capitalist production — making cars at the factory, writing legal briefs at the office — women typically engaged in what is known as social reproduction: the biological reproduction of new workers (i.e. having children) and the day-to-day reproduction of workers — doing laundry, feeding the family, getting children ready for school, and so on.
Even in recent decades, as women have entered the paid workforce en masse, they’ve still tended to be saddled with the “second shift,” carrying out social reproduction at home after they return from work.
These tasks are all vital to capitalism. Workers must be fed, clothed, and prepared every day for capitalism to function. But it is in capitalism’s interest for this work to be done for free and in the private sphere.
As a result, socialist feminists argue that the only way we can liberate women is to end class society, once and for all.
I've bolded a key claim above. West's claim here, which forms the foundation of her case for working with men to defeat the capitalist class, is a common one among Marxists because it reflects claims made by Karl Marx's chief patron Friedrich Engels in his 1884 book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Much time has transpired since the publication of said text and much more knowledge of ancient and prehistory has been gained in the interim and the simple fact is that this key, foundational claim is untrue. The men's cults that I referenced above appear to date all the way back to the Upper Paleolithic period. Arranged marriages date back to the very first migration of modern humans from Africa. And male-biased leadership patterns and patterns of extreme and rapacious male violence against females and the young are pervasive across primates as a group, not just human beings, and this definitely includes our closest living ancestors, chimpanzees. The oppression of women by men, in other words, has evolutionary roots that predate the existence of our species!
What's more, as William Buckner well demonstrated in 2018 in his article On the Nature of Patriarchy, matrilineal descent, extensive female control of resources, and relatively low levels of wealth inequality between men don't by any means necessarily weaken the power of patriarchal social relations at all. Simplistic Marxian materialist analyses that center on the merits of wealth redistribution fail to account for the kind of cultural power than men can still wield over women purely through institutions like religion or the simple threat of force alone, and how reduced wealth inequality between men can sometimes in fact increase male solidarity against women. And we have seen historically that Bolshevik governments themselves have shown a pattern of ultimately retreating on women's emancipation in the end. (Consider the example of Stalin.) Frankly, I've found that even exclusively female communities often have a way of surviving on a phallocentric basis, like by attracting male tourists with sex appeal. There is nothing I've seen to suggest that patriarchy is a transcendable condition for our species, let alone that men are our natural allies in alleviating it. The simple fact of how Marx treated his own wife and kids should tell you much about what his level of interest in the project was. (Spoiler: There's lots of female suicide involved in the tale.)
To best understand the actual roots of the human patriarchal condition, let me supply you with this excerpt from another Quillette article by Buckner entitled A Girl's Place in World:
"Understanding these trends [of male privilege and power] that we see across human societies requires a careful consideration of our evolutionary history, and the constraints imposed by this history. Based on their analysis of intersexual dominance status and dimorphism across 79 primate species, anthropologist Rebecca Lewis and her colleagues conclude that “High [sexual] dimorphism probably characterized the catarrhine LCA [the Last Common Ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes], which constrained dominance relationships within this clade and helps explain why living catarrhines are primarily male dominant.” Similarly, in their review investigating obstacles and opportunities for female leadership across 76 nonhuman mammal species, evolutionary biologist Jennifer E. Smith and her colleagues write that, “The paucity of female-biased leadership across multiple domains is evident across the other primates, suggesting that male-biased leadership within the primate lineage has deep evolutionary roots and perhaps imposes a phylogenetic (historical) constraint on its evolution.”"
Or, in other words, primate males are substantially bigger, stronger, and faster than females and social power and privilege have had a way of corresponding to those traits. And the corresponding cultural sex bias against females likely goes back all the way to our last common ancestor. We're talking tens of millions of years of evolutionary history, not just a few thousand years of human history, that the women's liberationist finds herself going up against and tasked with overcoming! And you feel that history every time you, generic heterosexual reader, find yourself physically attracted to a male precisely BECAUSE he is muscular and tall. You are literally biologically programmed to perpetuate the very condition that has rendered your sex subordinate up to now. All of which is to say that men oppress women because they can, because it works to their reproductive advantage to do so, and because women are both culturally and evolutionarily disposed to let them.
In the animal world, you will find that the bigger the size and power difference there is between its sexes, the more one tends to dominate its social life. It really is that simple. Everything else is an outgrowth of that base reality. How then have women achieved the advancement we have in recent decades and centuries, you ask? To quote feminist sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy, modern advances toward sex equality reside on a “unique foundation of historical conditions, values, economic opportunities, heroism on the part of women who fought for suffrage, and perhaps especially technological developments which led to birth control and labor-saving devices and hence minimized physical differences between the sexes.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, the most important component-part really has been the reduction of our physical differences, at least in social significance, by technological means. That is what separates this era from past periods in human history. The optimist will look at this promise and conclude that continued ascent of women is inevitable. The pessimist (as me) though will look at it and conclude that we are but one true disaster away from losing everything we've gained. All you have to do to gather the latter case is look how we responded to Covid-19. It illustrates how people respond to crises. One sex always falls further than the other when those happen.
To sum it all up, I will quote once more from Buckner:
"Men tend to be bigger and stronger than women are. Males tend to benefit more from engaging in violence—both individually and in groups—and they can reap greater fitness benefits through mating with different partners than females do, as women’s reproductive output is more constrained by lactation and gestation time. Further, humans are a species with particularly helpless infants, who often require significant material investments from males to survive, unlike most other mammals. Across human societies, children often inherit material and nonmaterial traits or resources from parents and ancestors—like social status, lineage identity, and property—planting an even stronger importance for men to secure paternal certainty, otherwise they risk devoting substantial resources to unrelated children, which in many circumstances would hamper their own fitness interests. This has led to common domains of intersexual conflict found across the world, exhibited in phenomena like rape and bride capture, arranged child marriages and polygyny, and intimate partner violence."
It all leads me to question whether there even is a true solution to male oppression.
OTHER KEY QUOTES TO DISCUSS:
Quote:This exclusion isn’t just bigoted — it’s hypocritical: while radical feminists campaign vigorously against sexual violence, it’s trans women who suffer from disproportionately high rates of sexual and physical violence (particularly trans women of color).
TERFs may argue that trans women do not share a reproductive system with cis women, and thus can’t understand women’s struggles for birth control and against forced sterilization. But then what do they say of solidarity with lesbian women, or cis women who cannot or choose not to have children? The arguments that TERFs put forth are both weak and prejudiced.
Actually it's trans-men, i.e. the biologically female members of the trans community, who suffer the most disproportionate rates of both sexual and other physical violence. Here in the United States of Assholes, for example, 37% of trans-women report having experienced sexual assault before...as compared with 51% of trans-men; a full majority! Likewise an investigation by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found 86.1 physical attacks for every 1,000 trans-women...and 107.5 for every 1,000 trans-men. As to who it is attacking both groups, at least 81% of sexual assaults against trans-identified people in the U.S. are committed by men. So even within the trans community, just as in the larger world, the principal victims of violence (especially sexual violence) are female and the assailants are overwhelmingly male, just as you'd expect.
Males masquerading as females aren't just victims of sexual violence though, they also commit a lot of it. For example, in 2017, Fair Play for Women used publicly available data on prisoners in the UK to estimate that 41% of TIM prisoners were there at least in part for sex crimes. A follow-up Freedom of Information request from the BBC to the country's Ministry of Justice revealed it was actually 48%, i.e. about half, of all TIM prisoners who were there on sex crimes convictions. This contrasts starkly with the 3% of actual female prisoners who were there for sex crimes and even with the nearly 20% of other men who were, suggesting that TIMs are in fact especially prone to sexual aggression themselves even in comparison to other males. What's more, these investigations revealed the existence of not a single TIF prisoner in the country. So, in other words, TIMs behave like men and TIFs behave like women, just as you would expect. They behave in a way that aligns with, or even exaggerates the typical traits of, their biological sex.
These facts show both that the biological males of the trans community are more privileged and violent than their comparatively invisible female counterparts and also that especially high danger to girls and women exists in trans inclusion policies.
Now I'd like to address this claim that having a reproductive system is irrelevant to the lives and oppression of lesbians.
Quote:Radical feminism is also noticeably silent on the question of racism, and is burdened by a politically suspect strategy for fighting it.
Men of color perpetuate sexism just like white men. But their experience of racism also binds them together with the women of color in their communities. As Sharon Smith writes, “the need to fight alongside men in the fight against racism or in the class struggle [has] made separatist ideas unappealing” for women of color.
Quote:While radical feminists posit separatism as a political strategy — and for some, the goal — socialist feminists understand that our power lies in our numbers. The division between working-class men and women, between cisgender people and transgender people — these fissures are detrimental to our overall aims. They only make us weaker and our fight against capitalism that much harder.
Socialist feminists’ goal is to build solidarity across the entire working class. Our fates are tied together, and the struggle against gendered oppression is inseparable from the struggle against transphobia, racism, and capitalism more broadly. Any movement or theory of feminism that either explicitly or implicitly excludes trans people, intentionally misgenders them, or perpetuates transphobia has no business being on the Left.