Feminist Doublethink, Part I

Our desires, always our desires, unspooling the thread of our labour

I likely would not have written this piece without the support of the Gilda Slifka Internship Program at Brandeis University, for which I am immensely grateful.

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I. Goodbye Women’s Movement, Hello Girls¹

From the ages of seven to eighteen, I spent most of my waking moments in a quasi-feminist haven, albeit one more frequently described as a “progressive North London only-girls’ private school”. Cocooned by—comfortably unexamined—fluoride feminism², the girls I was among were exceptionally well-versed in the liberal girl-power doctrine; it bored us. Exhausted by our positionality, we limited our magazine, ‘The Penguin’, to one feminist piece per issue, so focussed were we on debating the serious social issues du jour: cancel-culture, identity politics, censorship. When several younger students formed a breakaway faction, ‘The Femmeguin’, in protest, we scorned the endeavour, finding it juvenile and passé, and were unsurprised when their efforts fizzled, folding after one issue. No, far better to avoid the topic of feminism entirely—too hackneyed, too played-out. 

Despite our arrogance, my compatriots could, at times, be confidently wrong. I recall one memorable assembly where a coltish Year Nine was startled into confused consciousness—propelled by some uncontainable spirit, she wondered aloud, impassioned: “It’s so sexist that men get to be heroes while women are called heroines, like the drug”. A budding revolutionary in us all.

Boys might have existed, but only in imaginary form—more often, we viewed them as wildlife, local curiosities spottable on the high street at 3:45pm on a Friday; red-striped blazers on the horizon. Instead, life was punctuated by girls—endlessly girls, with the enormity of our psychodramas, our elaborate text arguments, screenshotted and forwarded to oblivion: the critic and her publics. The task of ‘decentring’, after all, requires boys to have occupied the centre in the first place. 

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Yet our separatist utopia couldn’t last. Referencing the post-mortem revelation that Andrea Dworkin—a radical activist fearlessly opposed to institutions of male dominance—was, in fact, heterosexually married, Ariel Levy wryly notes: “Ah, the real world…it’ll get you every time”³. And ‘get you’, it does—while in Dworkin’s case, her acceptance of such a patriarchal structure could have been, as suggested by her husband, partly practical, to ensure she could access health insurance, we would be lying to ourselves if it were merely practicalities that impede women’s commitment to their liberation. Indeed, remembering their marriage after Dworkin’s passing, Stoltenberg describes: “We were having a really happy time, we were really close, and we just decided to go do it. We didn't tell anybody [...] It was kind of a lark.”⁴ 

Certainly, the lives of radical activists are rarely uncomplicated—indeed, for Dworkin, this complexity was one she courted. Though she fiercely identified as a lesbian, calling her love for women “the soil in which [her] life [was] rooted”⁵ at a 1975 Pride Week rally, Dworkin felt equally at home in her life partnership with John Stoltenberg, who also identified as homosexual. Admittedly, she, too, was initially shocked by this, telling her agent, Elaine Markson, “I met someone [...] and it’s a man”⁶. And while both engaged in homosexual relationships throughout their lives, it is intriguing that they would hold onto the label so strongly when their own relationship had been “intermittently sexual”⁷. In describing his life with Dworkin, Stoltenberg ably represents their conflicting identities, neatly eliding their experiences as simultaneously queer and heteronormative: “Andrea and I live together and love each other and we are each other's life partner, and yes we are both out”⁸.

Similar conflicts can be found in Dworkin’s work. She would venerate lesbian relationships which—unlike the violence she found inherent to heterosexual relations—were full of “nurturant love”⁹. Yet, in the same breath, she would glorify the passion of ‘N’ (in the novel, ‘Ice and Fire’, which critics broadly agree is autobiographical), a woman who “fucks like a gang of boys”, leaving the narrator to describe herself as “tor[n] … apart. I bled and bled”¹⁰. The narrator’s clear admiration for N’s sadistic sexual behaviours (she loves N “devotedly”) makes Dworkin’s subsequent proclamations, for men to “make love as women do together”, hard to swallow. Indeed, such a dizzying conflation of pleasure and pain dogs Dworkin throughout her writings, a tension seen nowhere better than in the chapter, “First Love”, from her unpublished epistolary novel, Ruins. Addressing ‘E’, a man in Crete she, aged 19, thought she would marry, Dworkin describes the intensity of her feelings: 

“What does it mean that two people, a man and a woman, who share no common language, come together and for almost a year share every day in an erotic ecstasy, die in each other, are born in each other, rise and fall and intertwine and cry out, breathe in and through each other, are nourished and sustained by mutual touch, are one in the way that the sun is one, when the coming together of those two people embodies every possible feeling, sound, silence?”¹¹. 

Yet, she follows these words with horrific disclosure—that, throughout their relationship, E expressed anger through “explicit sexual forms”, teaching that “a woman who loves a man stands the pain”¹². And while Dworkin is fully cognisant, having left E, and subsequently suffered a marriage at the hands of an anarchist Dutchman who “beat the living shit out of her”¹³, that neither E’s pleasure, nor his freedom, is “more important than [her own]”¹⁴, she still writes to E twice about the prospect of meeting and marrying—once receiving a response and then, mercifully, receiving no answer. Still, she seems ultimately unable to fully commit to her liberation, saying “I dont [sic] think that I will ever come back to you or see you again” before second-guessing herself: “Sometimes I wish that were not so”¹⁵. 

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Approaching womanhood, we, too, doubted our enlistment to the feminist project: aged sixteen, we were realising the pull of male attention was heady and hard to resist. At times, our commitments wavering, we would float ambitious exit-plans, claiming we’d be enrolling at one of the prestigious London boys’ schools which gracefully extended their doors to girls for Sixth Form. We’d turn to our neighbours in class and whisper conspiratorially, feeling a sick thrill at the thought of becoming dissidents, of breaking out of the collective: “Yeah, I’m thinking of leaving…being only around girls is just so artificial”.

And who could blame us? Even Shulamith Firestone, who sparked the ‘70s women’s liberation movement, found the possibility of female separatism ultimately preposterous; considering a suggestion to celebrate the New York Radical Women’s successful first year with a female-exclusive party, she could only ask, baffled: “What’s a party without men?”¹⁶. She wasn’t alone in her doublethink. Lesbian members of the Redstockings, another contemporary women’s liberation group, frequently expressed frustration with the inconsistencies of their sisters-in-arms. Despite claiming heterosexuality as the foundation from which oppression emerged, they would ignore lesbianism’s radical possibilities, instead “obsessively preoccup[ied] with men”—akin to “dieters obsess[ing] about food”¹⁷. The few feminists, like Judith Brown, who did recognise how male partners splintered female solidarity were eager to prescribe: “all-female communes […and] periodic, self-imposed celibacy”¹⁸. Such powerful medicine, however, could only have been undermined by the unwelcome reminder of Brown’s own, straight, marriage (a wilful concession to the enemy?). In any case, we weren’t alone in flirting with feminist betrayal—when the ‘real world’ came knocking. 

In the end, though, only a handful of girls left; craving is always simpler from a distance. Still, the cracks in our liberationist armour had begun to show. Even without men physically present, we’d entered into hypothetical competition for our access to them. Our whispered classroom remarks had served less as conversation fodder than as psychological threats, bids asserting our place in the hierarchy to come. For years, I’d harboured shame over my own easily weakened, protean feminist commitments: in the summers, when my parents woke from their secular stupor to send me to a mixed-gender Jewish camp, I’d crumbled, eagerly accepting the lowliest compliment, that pyrrhic victory—I was different; not like the other girls. 

But here we all were; here we all are—teenage girls, women, radical feminist activists, refusing to reckon with our political principles. 

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II. An Incoherent Psychology¹⁹

Personal interest has long been a spectre, hanging warningly over the feminist project. Though several founding members of the 1960s radical feminist group Cell 16, aptly characterised by its journal (‘No More Fun and Games’²⁰), doubled down on the celibacy front, calling on women to avoid “squander[ing] energy on men and sex”²¹, such militancy was quickly struck down by other members: Amy Kesselman, of Cell 16, remembers considering women who engaged in such actions “antiseptic and rigid”²². And though her criticism—that activism should “promise people a better life, not a narrower life”²³—may ring true to today’s feminists, we would be forgiven for asking why even Cell 16, the self-fashioned ‘Female Liberation Front’, were so averse to following through on their commitments. 

Not that such hypocrisies went unnoticed; in fact, the practice of ‘trashing’—purifying the ranks of women’s liberationists for lacklustre adherence to feminist expectations—was ubiquitous. Emerging as early as a few weeks into the founding of the first women’s liberation group, New York Radical Women, in 1967, trashing could involve drawing up a statement against a member of the group—in this case, Shulamith Firestone herself—and would, in its more democratic forms, culminate in a vote to “eject”²⁴ said member. But trashing could be more insidious too, involving private character assassination, both “to one’s face [and] behind one’s back”, ultimately making one feel that their “very existence was inimical to the Movement and that nothing [could] change this short of ceasing to exist”²⁵. Yet, contrary to its—ostensible—aims, trashing was more responsible for stultifying the movement, than advancing it²⁶— undeniably, engaging in the practice was informed by more than just pure politics. 

Reanalysing from the perspective of the 21st century, Lawford-Smith suggests that—among other reasons like anti-hierarchical ideology—trashing can partly be explained by envy and resentment. Indeed, contemporaries emphasised that trashing did not “occur randomly”²⁷. Instead, it was more frequently levelled at talented women, labelled “achiever[s]” or “thrill-seeking opportunist[s]”²⁸, who were barred from speaking or writing on behalf of the group, possibly due to fears of “asymmetry in recognition”²⁹. Such intentions simmered sub-textually, concealed by morally righteous accusations: being “defensive”, “unsisterly”, or “too male-identified”³⁰ (e.g. wanting to go to grad-school) were all considered transgressions, deserving of suspicion. 

But the trouble with such attempts at purification lie perhaps deeper than envy alone. Jo Freeman, unlike many ‘women’s libbers’, was well aware of trashing’s damaging implications, going so far as to viscerally liken the experience to “a psychological rape” in a furious piece published in Ms. magazine in 1976³¹. Still, despite her incisive descriptions of trashing, which spread cancerously “from those who stood out as individuals to those who failed to conform rapidly enough to the twists and turns of the changing line”, Freeman’s critique fails to acknowledge another group who particularly suffered the consequences of trashing: women with male partners, or those who “slept with the enemy”³². Perhaps, in doing so, she would have revealed the existential contradictions at the movement’s very core; that no matter how sincerely radical feminists believed in the electrifying promise of theory, it could never compete with the allure of heterosexuality. Our desires, always our desires, unspooling the thread of our labour. 

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Today’s feminist discourse has long repressed the conflict between our personal desires and our ideological disciplines. We are, as Amia Srinivasan argues in her critique of sex-positive feminism, startlingly content to “take…women at their word”, expected to “trust” that women can find acts like “engaging in rape fantasies…emancipatory”³³. As successors to the feminism pioneered by Ellen Willis, one consumed by justifying women’s choices, today’s ‘women’s liberationists’ see little need to resolve such inconsistencies. Instead, this merry flotilla of ‘dissociative feminists’³⁴ is content to be marshalled, by media like Waller-Bridge’s much-lauded TV show ‘Fleabag’, into a position simply rendered as “tortured enough to be interesting but not enough to be repulsive”³⁵. Women who are allowed to confront conventional femininity must do so while remaining gorgeous; embracing “abjection” is only encouraged in individuals already conscripted to the status quo, thus subsuming and depoliticising any attempt at radical protest. Put another way, the ideal feminist is really “feminist-nihilist”³⁶, a “hot girl with deep palpable sadness”³⁷, likely on a ‘hot girl walk’, whose radical decisions—to forgo shaving, for instance—function more in lockstep with a Twitter edict for a ‘hot bush summer’ than any genuine theoretical position. After all, what’s a feminist critic without sex appeal?

Still, there’s a reason why such feminisms are punctuated by an undercurrent of anxiety, simultaneously capable of “identifying the problems of heteronormativity [while] remain[ing] unwilling…to step outside of its gendered and sexual confines³⁸”. Indeed, although Srinivasan is wary of second-wave feminism, particularly its involvement with carceralism, she sees potential in renewing our focus on politicising desire, to question where our urges really come from. She argues that desire cannot be sanctified—given a holy, unassailable status away from the feminist project; instead, we have a duty to challenge, and perhaps reform, our potent first-order desires in line with our utopian second-order ones. 

Srinivasan is compelling in her postulation that we can shape our desires or—at the very least—ask ourselves “what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want”³⁹. She imagines a world where desire, “set free from the binds of injustice”, is characterised by “surprise”—where our erotic imaginations lead us to “somewhere…or someone we never thought we would lust after, or love”⁴⁰. In particular, she finds hope in a letter, in response to her original piece, from a gay man who “teaches [himself] to erotici[se] [and] let…be sexy⁴¹” his husband of fourteen years, whose “large, fat” body escapes convention. Muddying the distinction between acts of discipline and love, Srinivasan argues that, if desires are not formed in a vacuum, we must take seriously the possibility of their “transformation”. To thusly “transform” is by no means a novel exhortation; the Radicalesbians group of the 1970s, which protested the discrimination they experienced within the women’s liberation movement, regarded embracing lesbianism as the ultimate feminist resistance; “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion”⁴². 

Indeed, an unlikely ally to this thinking could be found in the parent of one of my peers, who asked, distressed, whether sending her daughter to an only girls’ school would “make her a lesbian?”. As the necessity for strict, ‘born-this-way’ essentialising recedes, we can start to give a truer answer: not per se, but, in coming-of-age in this environment, the exploration of sexuality is necessarily broadened. In lieu of expected objects of desire (with the exception of a few pitiable male teachers), our conceptions of who could be desired expanded. Such experience was anticipated by the prominent lesbian-feminist theorist Adrienne Rich, who provocatively asked her female readers to interrogate whether, as Srinivasan puts it, “the envy [they] feel for another woman’s body…her charm, her ease, her brilliance, were not envy at all - but desire?”⁴³. Is it such a jump, then, to accept conjointly the positions of Srinivasan and ‘political lesbians’—that it is possible to actively choose a predominantly female space, in line with second-order preferences, and then be erotically surprised by the opening of feminist possibility?

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Yet, even when we uncovered them, our desires did not always stick around; instead, our homosexuality would lie dormant, obscured by fears that women were ‘scarier’ to approach, and that relationships with them were somehow more ‘serious’, more consequential. In doing so, we would trade latent bisexuality for rampant heteropessimism—venerating women as perfect, but refusing to date them; disparaging men as animals, but continuing to fixate on them. We might’ve done well to ground ourselves in the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group’s more realistic position: “We never promised you a rose garden. We do not say that all feminists should be lesbians because it is wonderful⁴⁴”. Instead, we were lost in limbo, neither “taking [our] politics seriously”⁴⁵, nor blissfully unaware of their relevance. Unlike the fervour which fuelled the demands women’s liberationists’ made of love, our conceptions were not hot to the touch; instead, they lay, cold and inert, a “requiem for bygone dreams”⁴⁶. 

Even worse, the promulgation of our guilty heterosexuality would contribute to the sidelining of those with no such desires. When lesbians would pass comment on a man who, unbridled by low expectations, was eagerly presented as ‘better in person than the photos suggest’—his questionable actions sweepingly excused—a petty staking of identity would ensue, elucidating disdainful alienation: what would you know?

And, indeed, what would you know: an unwelcome reminder of our separatist childhood, unbewitched by this haunting presence, the paradigmatic ‘boy’. Challenged on our Schrödingerian sapphic desires, we’d bond over the artificial closeness of our hidden knowledge—our ineffable explanations for why we were so preoccupied with those we were constantly deriding. To be present in these conversations would be to witness in real-time the further imbuing of heterosexuality with social capital; to silently watch one girl’s despair over a man ooze, losing its context, its specificities, “not contained within the contours of a subject⁴⁷”. Slowly, the boy would emerge: mute, but boundless. Unmoored from any particular anecdote, he would stretch out eagerly, gleeful to take up his space. ‘The impossibility of reducing [him] to a particular body allows [him] to circulate […]; it is the failure of [him] to be located in a body, that allows [him] to reproduce’.⁴⁸ 

No one recognises the futility of warring with the personal better than Andrea Long Chu, who is sceptical, though admiring, of the revolutionary feminist’s attempts to “change her own desires and reorient herself” through “the sheer force of political will”⁴⁹. We might wish to police our actions, with disciplined rule-setting in advance and backhanded ‘trashing’ in hindsight, but how feasible are these constraints when met with Chu’s admission that “unfold[ing] [her] political critique at its creases” would leave us with “nothing but flat, blank envy”⁵⁰? She parallels her thinking with the honesty of a writer in the New York Times, who confesses to wanting to conceive a child with her trans partner “the way fertile cisgender people do”—this, to Long Chu, is who we really are: selfish, more truthful when not papering over our flimsy political commitments, but, instead, accepting our inability to “justify [these desires] politically”⁵¹. After all, she seems to say, who can impose discipline—even framed as emancipation—when wanting bad things comes so very easily. 

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Read Part II here

1. Andrea Dworkin, in ‘Last Days at Hot Slit’

2. Astrid Henry, ‘From a Mindset to a Movement: Feminism since 1990’, in ‘Feminism Unfinished’

3. Ariel Levy, ‘Foreword’, in ‘Intercourse’

4. John Stoltenberg & Beth Ribet, in ‘First Year: An Interview with John Stoltenberg’

5. Andrea Dworkin, ‘Lesbian Pride’, in ‘Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics’

6. Ariel Levy, in ‘Prisoner of Sex’

7. Martin Duberman, in ‘Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary’

8. John Stoltenberg, in ‘Living with Andrea Dworkin’

9. Ariel Levy, in ‘Prisoner of Sex’

10. Sophie Lewis, in ‘Battlefield Ecstasies’

11. Andrea Dworkin, ‘First Love’, in ‘Ruins’ (unpublished)

12. ibid—emphasis mine

13. Ariel Levy, in ‘Prisoner of Sex’

14. Andrea Dworkin, ‘First Love’, in ‘Ruins’ (unpublished)

15. ibid

16. Alice Echols, in ‘Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975’

17. Victoria Hesford, in ‘Feeling Women’s Liberation’

18. Alice Echols, in ‘Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975’

19. Camille Paglia, in ‘Sex, Art, and American Culture’

20. See ‘No More Fun and Games, A Journal of Female Liberation’ 

21. Alice Echols, in ‘Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975’

22. ibid

23. ibid

24. Susan Faludi, in ‘Death of a Revolutionary’

25. Jo Freeman, in ‘TRASHING: The Dark Side of Sisterhood’

26. See Joyce Antler, ‘Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement’

27. Jo Freeman, in ‘TRASHING: The Dark Side of Sisterhood’

28. Anselma Dell'Olio, in ‘Divisiveness and self-destruction in the women's movement: a letter of resignation’

29.  Holly Lawford-Smith, in ‘Trashing & tribalism in the gender wars’

30. Susan Faludi, in ‘Death of a Revolutionary'

31. Jo Freeman, in ‘TRASHING: The Dark Side of Sisterhood’

32. Eli Zaretsky, in ‘Rethinking the Split Between Feminists and the Left’

33. Amia Srinivasan, in ‘Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?’

34. Emmeline Clein, in ‘The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating’ 

35. Billy Holzberg & Aura Lehtonen, in ‘The Affective Life of Heterosexuality: Heteropessimism and Postfeminism in Fleabag’

36. Eliza Gonzalez, in ‘A Defensive Posture’

37.  See comment under @rayneincorporated’s post 

38. Billy Holzberg & Aura Lehtonen, in ‘The Affective Life of Heterosexuality: Heteropessimism and Postfeminism in Fleabag’

39. Amia Srinivasan, ‘Coda: The Politics of Desire’, in ‘The Right to Sex’

40. Amia Srinivasan, in ‘Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?’

41. Amia Srinivasan, ‘Coda: The Politics of Desire’, in ‘The Right to Sex’

42. Victoria Hesford, in ‘Feeling Women’s Liberation’

43. Amia Srinivasan, ‘Coda: The Politics of Desire’, in ‘The Right to Sex’

44. Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, in ‘Love Your Enemy: the debate between  heterosexual feminism and political lesbianism’

45. ibid

46.  Rosemarie Ho, in ‘Pessimistic’

47. Sarah Ahmed, in ‘Affective Economies’

48. ibid

49. Andrea Long Chu & Anastasia Berg, in ‘Wanting Bad Things’

50. Andrea Long Chu, in ‘Extreme Pregnancy’

51. ibid