Lacunae

Gaps in contemporary anti-feminist discourse

“The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.”

(Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna)

I read Tara van Dijk’s latest anti-feminist tirade a couple of days after I finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Lacuna. The unexpected juxtaposition was illuminating.

Kingsolver’s main character, Harrison Shepherd, is a gay man with a Mexican mother and a largely absent US father. He works for Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Lev Trotsky in Mexico City, and witnesses the latter’s assassination (by a man who would, I imagine, be idolised by Van Dijk’s Stalinist comrades). Shepherd goes on to write potboilers in the USA that are loosely based on Aztec resistance to Spanish conquest, until a nightmarish investigation by HUAC (the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee) ends his career.

There are many lacunae in Kingsolver’s novel, most notably the widening gap between the reality of Shepherd’s life and the myths that others construct about it. The novel culminates in his persecution by HUAC, which is based on a confusion that its members deliberately construct between Shepherd’s beliefs and the words of a character in one of his novels - “He’d been called names before, and borne it. But when a man’s words are taken from him and poisoned, it’s the same as poisoning the man.”

The confusions which HUAC creates about Shepherd in Kingsolver’s novel are similar to the ones constructed by Van Dijk, who presents psychological portraits of feminists which bear little or no relation to the actual women. Kingsolver’s lacuna, however, is not the Lacanian lacuna imagined by Van Dijk, the supposedly absent patriarchy on which she claims feminist identity depends. Kingsolver’s lacuna stresses the need to hold onto reality when confronted with others’ distortions. Van Dijk’s lacuna denies the reality of patriarchy and presents it as a fantasy that meets a psychological desire.

Taking a writer’s words and poisoning them is a tactic favoured by anti-feminists. Perhaps it’s common to all political argument nowadays, but it appears particularly blatant with anti-feminism, whether instigated by men or by women. A classic example is Janice Flamengo, whose substack and videos are all devoted to exposing what she calls “the fraud of feminism”. A recent post rejoiced in the death of Susan Brownmiller by denouncing her classic feminist critique of rape, Against Our Will, as a “repulsive tract” that was motivated by “obvious derangement.” Flamengo’s hatchet job sometimes takes Brownmiller’s words and twists them, and sometimes distorts their meaning by ignoring the context. She gives the impression of accuracy by including page number references, but relies on readers accepting her misinterpretation and not checking against the source.

Here’s Flamengo misinterpreting Brownmiller’s account of changes in laws about rape: “In the first chapter, Brownmiller declared that, from the beginning of recorded history, men had had trouble taking rape seriously as a crime against a woman’s person. She admitted that from 1275 onward, rape was dealt with harshly, punishable in England according to the Second Statute of Westminster by death.”

Flamengo suggests that Brownmiller failed to recognise that the seriousness with which the Statute treated rape as a crime undermined her whole thesis that rape is a process of intimidation that affects all women. She neglects to point out that Brownmiller’s reference to the Second Statute of Westminster (in chapter 2, not 1) is about the penalty for rape of a woman ‘without her consent’ - a penalty that bore little relation to punishment, as lack of consent was almost impossible to prove. Flamengo doesn’t acknowledge Brownmiller’s comment that the Statute “read better on parchment than it worked in real life”, and she ignores Brownmiller’s crucial quote from the C18 English jurist William Blackstone, that in many rape cases there is “a strong but not conclusive presumption that her testimony is false or feigned.”

The gulf that Brownmiller identified is between a penalty for rape and its punishment. It’s a gulf that remains to this day, even when a girl aged 13-15 is repeatedly raped by an adult man, as Louise Casey reminded us last month in her audit of rape gangs in England and Wales.

Like Flamengo, Van Dijk exaggerates the extent to which patriarchal behaviour is modified by changes in the law. Like Flamengo, Van Dijk frequently distorts what the feminists she’s attacking have written or said. Like Flamengo, Van Dijk dismisses feminists as psychologically deranged. She plays amateur psychoanalyst to suggest that actions of feminists are symptoms of what she claims to have discovered, that patriarchy exists only as a source of ‘jouissance’ (excessive enjoyment). Appeals to reality she can then dismiss as ‘resistance’ to her psychological ’critique’. This is a typically patriarchal manoeuvre. As one of the characters in Gillian Hanscombe’s 1982 novel Between Friends puts it: “If we psychoanalysed everyone in the movement, we would find personal derivations in each case, undoubtedly. So what? We are in a political struggle.”

Tara van Dijk is no Sigmund Freud. I’m reminded, though, of Jeffrey Masson’s uncovering of why Freud rejected his early understanding that adults’ memories of sexual abuse in childhood came from their actually having been sexual abused in childhood. Masson’s analysis of Freud’s unpublished letters to Wilhelm Fliess showed that Freud’s later insistence that the memories of his patients were fantasies rather than reality came not just from his disbelief that actual child sexual abuse could be so widespread, but from his colleagues’ insistence that their new profession of psychoanalysis depended on fantasy taking centre stage. “Freud began a trend away from the real world, “ Masson wrote in his book The Assault on Truth (1984), “that is at the root of the present-day sterility of psycho-analysis and psychiatry throughout the world.” Denial of the real world is true of much actual psychoanalysis. It’s especially true of Van Dijk’s parody of it.

Radical feminism as fascist?

Van Dijk’s psychological ‘critique’ has so far been used as a framework with which she can parody actual feminists on X. Unlike genuine parody, which exaggerates a characteristic that is actually there, Van Dijk’s parody is not exaggeration but distortion - her pseudo-psychological interpretations are carefully constructed to support her ‘thesis’ that patriarchy no longer exists, except as a fantasy that feminists need to support their identity. All of which is to pretend that there is no power imbalance between men as a dominant class and women as a subordinate class, or that there was a power imbalance in the past that was eliminated by capitalism.

Van Dijk takes denial of the real world to a new depth in her latest post. She obviously finds radical feminism particularly threatening. Here, radical feminism, and by implication all radical feminists, are characterised as Nazis. It’s there in the title - The Fascist Metaphysics of Radical Feminism. Artemesia Gentileschi’s C17 painting of Judith beheading Holofornes is shown, without any context (Judith was an Israelite, and Holofornes was an Assyrian general who had invaded her settlement and planned to slaughter its inhabitants.The artist was herself a rape survivor, who may have injected some of her feelings about male violence into her painting).

Instead of the context of Gentileschi’s painting, Van Dijk inserts a sentence from promo for aurora linnea’s book Man Against Being, which states that the violence of our civilisation is male violence. The juxtaposition is far from subtle - here’s a radical feminist saying our civilisation is founded on male violence, but here’s a painting showing a woman beheading a man. The painting is, of course, one artist’s representation of a biblical myth, involving an act of self defence. And the promo that Van Dijk quotes, like the painting she displays, is devoid of context. Van Dijk would have had to go no further than page 9 of Man Against Being to read that ”None of this is to say that men, by dint of their maleness, are in some helpless way constitutionally cursed to be biocidal maniacs. Maleness itself is neutral: the body damns no one.”

Man Against Being does not shrink from describing the damage that male violence under patriarchy inflicts, not just on women and children, but on all of living earth. It is particularly insightful in linking contemporary capitalism’s assault on the body to what linnea calls “the dualistic Severed Head ideal preached by Descartes” which underlies so much patriarchal thinking (including, she notes, its contemporary ‘born in the wrong body’ trans manifestation). Nowhere in the book, though, is there any suggestion, as Van Dijk supposes there is, that men are “inherently dangerous.”

Van Dijk has, on X (15 July), described Man Against Being as “A feminist Mein Kampf”. She elaborates on this half way into her substack post, where she juxtaposes linnea’s promo quote against quotes from Hitler, Rosenberg and Goebbels, and suggests they all share the “fascist structural logic ….. whether the enemy is the Jew or The Patriarchy, the structure is the same.” Except, of course, that for the Nazis, the enemy was all Jews. For linnea (who, needless to say, doesn’t refer to The Patriarchy, Van Dijk’s manufactured bogey man) the enemy is not all men. For linnea, the aim is unambiguously clear - “end male dominion.”

****

Feminism, as any political philosophy, should be subject to critique. But critique has to be based on what is actually there, not on the fantasies of whoever is undertaking it. Flamengo distorts reality by selective quotation that ignores the context that would give it meaning, and she gives page references to suggest she has actually looked at Brownmiller’s Against Our Will before distorting it. Van Dijk doesn’t even bother to read linnea’s Man Against Being, and she can distort its meaning only by misinterpreting a promo sentence.

“Radical reintegration of body and mind” is central to what linnea sees as needed to counter the transhumanist and anti-nature dystopia that tech billionaires are leading us towards. I don’t know if anti-feminist writers like Flamengo and Van Dijk are concerned in any way with what linnea is keen to avoid. If they are, perhaps they could start to bridge their personal lacunae and pay some attention to what linnea and feminists like her are actually saying, rather than to what they imagine they are saying.