It’s a year now since I started this substack. It began as a response to the death of Angela, my partner of 50 years. Writing it has become part of my therapy for a grief that seems to have no end. And now my stepson Paul (Angela’s second son) is also dead. Another huge loss.
The anniversary seems a suitable time for me to remember why I started this substack, and consider why I’m continuing it. It’s also an opportunity to take up a suggestion Paul made to me before he died, to fill in the background for the many readers who have only subscribed recently, and spell out how its many themes interconnect.
The substack’s title, When we are Real, came from a sentence in an article, Ultimate Goals, that Angela was writing around the time we first met, in 1972. “When we are real,” she wrote, “we are a real threat.” Angela understood that the political movement to end male domination had to include personal transformation - becoming real requires us to strip away the conditioning, from socially constructed sex roles of domination and subordination, that has been imposed on us. Becoming real also means confronting the reality of oppression. Angela believed that this meant men acknowledging and challenging their training as oppressors, as well as women understanding, and acting from, their experiences as members of an oppressed class. She was clear, too, that patriarchy threatened humanity’s survival - “while we go on insulating ourselves from the pain of our situation the world is hurtling towards disaster”. She was, though, optimistic about the future - “The feminist revolution will succeed because its evolutionary time has come …Patriarchy with its rigidity and inflexibility has run its course.”
Becoming real was never easy. But it has become harder. Various versions of postmodernism invite us to doubt that reality exists. Much of our understanding of today’s world comes from media whose algorithms blend truth and lies in a way that is difficult to disentangle. And, in the online world which now connects us, we are encouraged to get social validation from how others respond to the personal brands we curate for ourselves. We are being pulled further away from our roots in our bodies and in nature, and this weakens our ability to effect real change.
Facing reality, rather than denying it, is more important than ever. Until recently, the climate seemed to be behaving much as climate scientists had projected, which was alarming enough. Yet now we are experiencing extremes that were not anticipated so early this century. The mid-2023 global temperature average is way off the scale. Antarctic sea ice, which had remained relatively stable until last year, is now retreating dramatically, and collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet has become unavoidable.. Climate collapse coincides with a global attack on the reality of biological sex - an attack promoted by an unholy alliance of billionaires who want to live for ever and the medical industrial complex, which targets vulnerable young people who have been persuaded that personal salvation comes from adopting an artificial ‘gender identity’.
Our survival as a species is under threat, and too few of us are prepared to acknowledge it, let alone address it. Some who recognise the threat to our climate do not recognise the threat to our biology, while some who recognise the threat to our biology do not recognise the threat to our climate. The Green Party in England and Wales, instead of spearheading the fight against climate change, is tearing itself apart because its leadership insists that members believe that men can become women.
In 1935, T. S. Eliot famously wrote that “human kind Cannot bear very much reality.’ 88 years later, human kind cannot afford the luxury of selecting some aspects of reality to accept and others to ignore.
Abuse and memory
Choosing to ignore reality is particularly harmful when adults abuse children. Angela’s last publication , a year before she died, included the text of a speech she gave to a 1977 demonstration against rape. She described how an opportunity to speak out had helped her find her voice and end a silence she had endured since being raped as a fourteen-year-old girl..
In this 1977 speech Angela described how disbelief and distortion within the justice system, by police as well as by defence lawyers, had silenced her. And a 1981 Spare Rib article that she co-authored with a London Rape Crisis Centre colleague outlined the many different ways in which child victims of sexual abuse are disbelieved. “This disbelief protects men,’ they explained. “Professionals - social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists - take the view it is better to disbelieve (and allow the abuse to continue) than interfere, particularly in the family.”
In a more recent development, defence lawyers in child sexual abuse cases often refer to a flawed psychological concept, False Memory Syndrome (FMS), to discredit the testimony of victims. While writing a post about FMS I discovered that it had been developed by Peter and Pamela Freyd specifically to discredit one of their daughters, who accused her father of having abused her as a child. They claimed that their daughter had recovered a memory of being abused not because abuse had occurred but because a feminist therapist had implanted a false memory of it.
Defence lawyers continue to suggest that adult memories of childhood abuse are false, particularly if the victim has sought therapeutic help. This is despite the fact that FMS is now widely discredited, not least in an article by Jennifer Freyd, the abused daughter whose parents thought up the concept. In this article, Jennifer Freyd, now a psychologist, explained something that is familiar to many victims of abuse - that children can forget abuse by a trusted caregiver because they find it hard to think badly of them, and may only recover the memory much later, when they no longer depend on the caregiver.
Forced Adoption
Starting this substack was not only a celebration of Angela’s life, it was also an opportunity to honour a promise I made to her before she died, to record the campaign she initiated against forced adoption in the mid-1970s.
After her ‘Finding My Voice’ blog post appeared, Angela thought it might be good to record another occasion when she spoke out to protest an unacknowledged injustice. That time, in 1975, it was to highlight what she, like so many survivors of sexual exploitation, had suffered in addition - having their babies taken from them. But by now she was too ill to write, and she asked me if, after she died, I would take it on.
The papers we had kept from that campaign showed how much it had centred on the need to respect reality, and to address the harm that came from denying it. Its immediate focus was on mobilising support for a law change that would allow adoptees to see their original birth certificate - a basic human right, denied them because it would reveal the name of the mother who had given birth to them. At the time, the adoption lobby insisted that their mother’s existence should be hidden from them. Or, if it was acknowledged, that an adoptee should be told a lie that their mother had died, or that she had given them away. The reality back then was that unmarried mothers were deprived of the resources and support that would enable them to bring up their children, and that their children were taken from them. The severing of the mother-child bond was the source of enormous lifelong pain for many mothers and for many of their children who were taken for adoption.
Angela’s contact with adoption workers and adoptive parents during that campaign was a consciousness raising experience for her. She came to understand how the adoption lobby encouraged childless couples to feel entitled to take another woman’s child. How it bolstered the culture of shame that surrounded unmarried pregnancy at the time, and persuaded unmarried mothers who wanted to keep their children that this was selfish. And how it not only destroyed the mother-child bond, but sought total erasure of the mother’s existence.
Unbeknown to us, during Angela’s last months the UK Parliaments’ Human Rights Committee had been undertaking an Inquiry into forced adoption. It concluded, after hearing harrowing evidence from both mothers and adoptees, that forced adoption was a human rights abuse, for which the UK government should apologise. That apology never materialised, even though the Committee’s Report insisted, wrongly, that the abuse ended in 1975. It didn’t take much digging to discover that, although adoption practices had changed, children were still being taken from their mothers, often because of the violence of abusive male partners. Rather than removing the abusive partner, the state was continuing to remove the child.
Surrogacy and the synthetic sex industry
Not long before the UK Parliaments’ Human Rights Committee acknowledged the human rights abuses of forced adoption, some of the same human rights abuses were being proposed in relation to surrogacy. The Law Commissions in the UK were suggesting that surrogate mothers should not be registered on the birth certificates of the babies they had borne. Again, the entitlement of ‘intended parents’ to exploit women to provide them with offspring was being prioritised. And, again, harms from breaking the mother-child bond were being ignored. In one of my substack posts on surrogacy, I quoted from Angela’s 2019 response to the Law Commissions’ consultation: “I wonder whether in our cavalier and superficial rush to reduce motherhood to merely a transaction between an egg, sperm, and a rented womb we have any idea what we are storing up in the future for those who will be the product of it.”
With both adoption and surrogacy, lobby groups campaigned for laws to erase the mothers who provided the children. In an even more sinister development, the gender and fertility industries are now coming together to promote what I have called ‘transurrogacy.’ Big Pharma is profiting from a new market - young people who are being persuaded to dissociate from their bodies, to adopt a synthetic ‘gender identity’, and to embark on lifelong medicalisation with puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones. The result, inevitably, is sterilisation. And Big Fertility seizes a new profit opportunity - to freeze sperm and eggs, for combination later in a lab and insertion into a woman whose body can be exploited as a surrogate mother.
As I moved on from adoption with posts on surrogacy and ’gender identity’, it became clear how each of them relied on reality-denying devices to disguise what they were doing. Legal fictions - pretending that women who give birth are not mothers in the case of adoption and surrogacy, pretending that people can change sex in the case of ‘transgenderism’. And distorted language - reducing mothers to ‘birth parents’ in the case of adoption, or ‘surrogates’ or ‘gestational carriers’ in the case of surrogacy, and erasing womanhood and biological reality with the slogan ‘trans women are women’ in the case of ‘transgenderism’.
It is hard to face reality when laws and language pretend it does not exist. The current UK debate about conversion therapy ia another example. The UK government is proposing a ban on therapy that questions mutilation of gay and autistic children to affirm a synthetic ‘gender identity’, and framing this as a ban on LGBT conversion therapy. Many well-meaning people support the proposed ban, thinking it is about preventing gay conversion by psychiatric torture. They do not realise that it is actually about promoting gay conversion by mutilation in gender clinics.
Patriarchy, pornography, and the break with the mother
Breaking with the mother, so brutally enforced with adoption and surrogacy, is central to all patriarchal culture. I explored the dramatic representation of its origin in a post about Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and also its recent promotion in a post about Robert Bly’s book Iron John - an influential text that reacted to the feminist challenge by proclaiming a need for ‘men’s liberation’.
Men’s power over women is reinforced most immediately nowadays through the consumption of pornography. It’s through porn that we learn to associate pleasure with objectification and control. Thanks to the easy accessibility of hardcore pornography on the internet, boys are taught, at an ever earlier age, that being a man means being cruel and dominant. Here, too, the centrality of the break with the mother is apparent - statistics published by Pornhub reveal that the most searched for category by its 15 million UK viewers is MILF (Mothers I’d Like to Fuck).
Attitudes to women formed by exposure to pornography cross over into the public arena. This is apparent in the aggression shown by young male ‘trans rights’ activists whenever women speak out at public meetings about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of men. One repeated chant used to drown out (mainly middle-aged) women at a Let Women Speak event in Liverpool earlier this month went as follows;
Call: “Shut your stupid fucking mouth”
Response: “You stupid fucking terf.”
(This echoes the ‘Shut the fuck up, terf’ caption that accompanies an image of an anime character pointing a gun at the viewer, often posted by ‘trans rights’ activists to intimidate feminists on social media. Terf, an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, has become a pejorative term frequently used to justify violence against women. ‘Trans rights’ activism is men’s rights activism, rebranded to appear progressive.)
Consciousness raising by men, in an era of addiction to brutal internet pornography, is perhaps more needed than ever. That might enable us to re-connect with what we used to want, before the power structures of patriarchy were incorporated into our understanding of what it means to be a man. Then, maybe, we could rediscover a desire for intimacy and empathy, not domination and control. And campaign, as men, against pornography’s poisonous influence over all our lives.
John Stoltenberg, as one might expect from the life partner of Andrea Dworkin, knows how damaging pornography is, to both women and men. But it’s only when I reread his book, Refusing to be a Man, before writing a post on pornography, that I realised how much he had absorbed the ‘gender identity’ theories developed by child abusing psychologist John Money. Stoltenberg’s respect for Money explains, perhaps, why he has become an Influential promoter of gender ideology, and why he is keen to claim that if Dworkin was alive today she would oppose radical feminist insistence on the need for women-only spaces. Stoltenberg now actively promotes a ‘trans’ activism that not only erodes the boundaries of women but is the latest weapon in the patriarchal quest to break the mother-child bond, subjecting mothers to increasingly vicious attacks if they try to protect their (often gay) children from the harms of irreversible medical intervention.
Climate emergency and the war on nature
Patriarchy exploits not only women, but nature. Its industrial capitalist manifestation has provided higher material standards of living, but for only a small proportion of the global population whose growth it has stimulated. Now that its impact on climate stability is inescapable, it is perhaps understandable that politicians seek technological solutions that might achieve decarbonisation to limit climate damage, while allowing economic growth to continue. Whether or not such solutions can be introduced quickly enough to avert climate catastrophe is extremely doubtful. What is certain, though, is that mining for the materials that those solutions require will contribute massively to deforestation, biodiversity loss, and species extinction. The climate crisis is part of a wider planetary crisis, and cannot be ‘solved’ by policies that reduce carbon emissions but continue to pursue economic growth.
This has enormous implications for how our economies are organised. Degrowth has become a precondition of our survival. It can only be achieved fairly if production is re-oriented to focus on basic needs rather than artificially created wants, and if there is much greater equality in the distribution of rewards. It won’t be easy to achieve, but the longer we delay facing up to that reality, the harder it will become.
Where now?
All the topics I have explored on this substack remain live issues. Important elections are coming up, in the UK and USA,.where critical policy choices will be on display. Policies pursued, or not pursued, over the remainder of this decade will determine our futures for decades to come. So I imagine I will be writing more about them over the coming months.
This morning, a copy of Bea Campbell’s updated book on the 1987 Cleveland child abuse scandal, Secrets and Scandals, came through my letterbox. It’s a book that, once opened, is hard to put down. Skimming through it, I am not surprised to learn that the Government Inquiry to investigate the scandal was a cover up that minimised the extent of the abuse, to reduce the costs of supporting the abused children. I am shocked, though, to discover that the only international expert the Inquiry consulted to understand why abused children might remain silent was Ralph Underwager, a co-founder, with Peter and Pamela Freyd, of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and a paedophile supporter. This is truly scandalous. The reality of children’s experience was yet again dismissed by those with a vested interest in denying that abuse occurred, and this ensured that public policy protected abusers for decades afterwards. It’s definitely something I need to explore further, once I have digested Campbell’s shocking revelations.
I want, too, to explore some of the crazier ideas that are being explored by the tech billionaires who have the power to determine so much of our lives nowadays. The engineering of human reproduction, life extension, the colonisation of space - these are high up their wish lists, and they are pouring billions of dollars into them. I need to understand why they are pursuing these obsessions, and how close they are to achieving them.
The current situations in Ukraine and in Israel-Palestine remind me that to dethrone patriarchy we cannot avoid confronting one of its major manifestations - war and conquest. It’s something I have wanted to write about since living and working on a kibbutz in the 1960s and working as a volunteer with CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) in the 1980s. So far, I have not felt able to do that writing. I hope this will change.
I believe that it’s important for writers, particularly women writers, to be paid for their work. But I live on a pension that is perfectly adequate for my needs, so I intend subscriptions to this substack to remain free of charge. So do subscribe if you are interested. Previous posts can be accessed in the archive.