The personal and the political

Sibling trauma and the infantilisation of political debate

Readers involved in opposition to the gender industry may have noticed that a skirmish has broken out over the past few months, across X and Substack, between two sets of people who not so long ago seemed to be united in their opposition to ‘gender’ (see, for example, this by Tara van Dijk, which is countered here by Donovan Cleckley). The argument has been laden with vitriol, personal attack, and appeals to intellectual authority. Strip that away, and what is left is disagreement about whether patriarchy exists - has it been destroyed by capitalism, and if it has do feminists imagine it still exists because they get perverse pleasure from that?

Much of the skirmish centres on the use, and misuse, of psychoanalysis. Ironically, the verbal skirmish is expressed, by each side, with a viciousness that hints at possible ‘sibling trauma’. As Juliet Mitchell writes: “Toddlers would be ‘terrorists’ if we gave them knives and guns. This applies to the toddler in all of us.” Particularly, I would add, when the interaction is algorithmically magnified on social media, though that doesn’t seem to be the case here - the conflict has been magnified, but the audience remains relatively small.

I have no wish to engage in this squabble. But I realise that by criticising, in my last Substack post, van Dijk’s understanding of sperm donation and pornography, and by subsequently responding to one of van Dijk’s Substack Notes on 20 May, I may have unwittingly become a minor participant in a skirmish that was already well underway. I’m sharing these Notes here because I believe the points at issue are significant, and have implications for political action. Debate is important, and should neither be avoided nor turned into character assassination.

I think this short interaction sticks to the issues, and manages to avoid the self-indulgent performance and personal insult that characterise much of the broader skirmish:

Our interaction started with one of van Dijk’s numerous posts on Substack Notes, which re-iterated her insistence that “capitalism smashed the patriarchy”. This was, she suggested, “because a regime of fixed sex-based roles, rigid hierarchical authority, and paternal control over both household and women’s sexuality were incompatible with its forces of production.”

I replied that “Capitalism may have transformed the labour market and weakened paternal control within the family, but the content of pornography, through which it influences human sexuality, is distinctly patriarchal,” and I linked to my Substack post on The commodification of sperm to amplify that point..

Van Dijk responded: “You seem to think that simply calling something ‘patriarchal’ makes it so. Is patriarchy an Absolute? Is everything patriarchy? If so, the term explains nothing—it just signals your disapproval.”

To which my response was: “My reply made no reference to ‘everything’. It was specifically about pornography. If that was just capitalism, why would its content be so focussed on men abusing, degrading, and torturing women? The pornography industry makes its profit by promoting male domination over women. What’s your problem with acknowledging that, and feeling “disapproval” (though that’s not the word I’d choose).?”

At which point our interaction ended.

Since then, I have read all of van Dijk’s posts in the ‘Critique of Feminism’ section of her Morbid Symptoms Substack. Connect the dots and the significance of van Dijk’s repetition of the ‘capitalism smashed the patriarchy’ mantra becomes clearer. The belief is carried over from a sentence in the 1848 Communist Manifesto - “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” It’s a belief, appropriate for a political manifesto, that was significantly qualified by Marx and Engels themselves in their later, more analytical, work.

Capitalism may have destroyed some aspects of patriarchy, but, as Nancy Folbre demonstrates in her book The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems (2020), patriarchy and capitalism have co-evolved to form overlapping structures of domination. Capitalism has worked over time to diminish patriarchal control within the family, but it has simultaneously benefitted from the persistence, and in some cases intensification, of male domination in the wider society. This is particularly the case with the internalised patriarchal norms that are so influential in determining who cares - which sex class performs most of the necessary, but unpaid or low paid, functions of caring for infants, the sick or disabled, and the elderly.

Patriarchy is defined narrowly by van Dijk as the original rule by the father, and she refuses to recognise subsequent developments in male domination outside the family. The only evidence she presents for the death of patriarchy relates to changes in law - changes ensuring that, in her words, “roughly 90% of the world’s women now live in countries where they have equal rights under the law.” Leaving aside the limited effect of those law changes on the actual lives of females and males, particularly in relation to sexual abuse, she ignores the role of feminism in bringing about those changes.

Within politics, for example, women’s right to vote was won by feminists, not capitalists. Within the labour market, equal pay was won by feminists, against the wishes of many capitalists. Within the family, the partial end to forced adoption was won by feminists (a struggle I’m particularly familiar with, due to the campaign initiated by my late wife), as was the criminalisation of rape in marriage and so many other instances over the past half century where patriarchal law has been weakened.

Ignoring the institutionalisation of male dominance and female subordination under contemporary patriarchy, van Dijk imagines only what she terms ‘The Patriarchy’, a fantasy which, she claims, feminists need to rail against in order to justify rule by ‘Big Sister’ instead of by a supposedly absent Authoritarian Father.

For someone who makes much use (or misuse) of psychoanalytic concepts, van Dijk interprets patriarchy (rather than ‘The Patriarchy’) too literally, ignoring Freud’s suggestion that we acquire our understanding of ideas about human relationships via our unconscious mind. Noting that capitalism has weakened literal father rule, she assumes that this has undermined Lacan’s symbolic ‘law of the father’, and she ignores the subsequent ‘fratriarchal’ reinforcement of male domination that contemporary capitalism has intensified (especially via pornography).

A 10 April Substack post by van Dijk bizarrely includes 6 photos of women who she terms ‘feminist mafia’, although only 2 of them are actual feminists. The post ends with an Anti-Feminist Manifesto which is particularly revealing of where her approach leads. It has three elements:

- “Love and value men - unapologetically”

OK - but unconditionally? The absence of any conditions either ignores or denies, and facilitates or encourages, male dominance and female subordination.

- “Prioritize family life”

Prioritising, rather than giving support to, family life? This, coupled with the unconditional valuing of men, sounds suspiciously like an attempt to reinstall the literal rule of the father. It’s also a pro-natalist message, boosting the population growth that capitalism, but not humanity, needs for its survival, and which destroys other species and harms the rest of nature.

- “Think for yourself.”

Yes, this is important. Group think is damaging, but not just within feminism. It is certainly very evident on either side of the current skirmish.

We are at a crucial point in the evolution of humanity, where technology threatens both to intensify our destruction of the living planet and to disconnect us completely from our roots in nature. We need to understand the foundations of this threat in both capitalism and patriarchy. Infantilising debate serves only to undermine effective resistance to exploitation and the ongoing technocratic attack on humanity and nature.