Post-patriarchalism

Polyamorous paradise – or patriarchal inferno?

A couple of days ago, I discussed the problem of sexual labels. In this post, I want to zero in on my own search for an adequate label to represent my approach to relationships (to be distinguished of course from my sexuality) and to suggest that this can only adequately be resolved within the framework of a much wider concept. (The title of the post is a bit of a spoiler: sorry for that!).

At first sight, there are a few alternatives to choose from. Subjectively, however, all of them, to my mind, are not only insufficient but positively distortive. Let me explain in a few words why.

Let’s start by throwing the terms out there. There are three expressions which I have on occasion used, and therefore which presumably displease me less on some level than the others: these are “polyamory“, “open relationship” and “consensual non-monogamy” (CNM). Then there are also terms which I do not use, but are somehow related and therefore potential candidates for my verbal affections: “free love“, “relationship anarchy” (RA) and “swinging“.

The main problem with polyamory, CNM and swinging is that these notions, because they are rather broad and mainly defined by what they are not (i.e. monogamy), do not necessarily imply a commitment to full female agency. Many people pursue polyamory, CNM and swinging because they want to satisfy certain sexual or emotional desires, without necessarily critically reflecting on those desires and without an explicit ethic of either agency or commitment. This is why I have written my own cultural critique of polyamory. The well-known “how-to” book The Ethical Slut is a good example of the problem: it starts from patriarchal norms and imagines itself subversive of them (such as by using the word “slut”) but in fact betrays a considerable concern to reassure as to the compliance of the proposed behavior with unacknowledged patriarchal norms of female behavior (presumably there are also “unethical sluts”). To this I immensely prefer those sex-positive feminists who, whether and to what extent they actually are sex-positive or not, at least claim the right to do what they want sexually and not to have to justify it.

The result is that each of these terms (due of course to the societal base-rate of patriarchal attitudes) is used in practice by considerable numbers of people with values not only different from, but fundamentally opposed to my own: especially men who believe it is OK to impose a restriction on their female partner’s expression of her sexuality towards other men, and  women who believe it is OK to acquiesce in such a restriction or are not even aware that they are doing so (which is slightly less blameworthy but still unfortunate).

“Free love” sounds attractive, even self-evident, even if a bit dated. I am guessing though that cultural historians would mostly concur that, whatever the probably considerable cultural impact of the free love movement, freedom of love was not one of its achievements. The free love movement had, and, to the extent it still exists, still has, two major flaws. One, again, is its uncritical attitude vis-à-vis patriarchal norms, which continue to enslave both women and men notwithstanding their desire to constitute themselves as free subjects. The second problem, which is closely related, I believe, to the first, is contained in the notion of “love”. In practice, free love had an ideology of love but focused on abolishing societal values and laws stigmatizing sex (as a result, its ideologues often place undue importance on the legalization of sex work, a position which can be discussed on its own merits, but has nothing whatsoever to do with love).

The societal values opposed by proponents of free love, which I am certainly not defending as such, nevertheless proscribed certain sexual behaviors in an effort to find a socially negotiated equilibrium between women and men. This equilibrium, being negotiated under conditions of patriarchy, obviously was always heavily marked by relations of power. But, nevertheless, simply dropping these norms never meant abolishing the symbolic power of patriarchy, and may even have reinforced it. This is because, while some norms restricting women’s freedoms are indeed patriarchal in nature, other norms restricted men’s freedoms, and historically represent achievements of the feminist movement, however perverse some of those achievements may appear when viewed from the partial angle which the free love movement proposes.

This is most clearly illustrated by the development of norms restricting male polygyny. It is likely, as Foucault implies in L’Usage des Plaisirs, that these norms were initially developed in the interests of militaristic agendas, and so are loosely “patriarchal”, though a more sympathetic historian would probably point to their value in societies subject to external existential threats. If the development of the norms, however, can be viewed as patriarchal until at least recent times, the development of their actual enforcement and subtle ways in which they have changed has been largely driven by feminist demands for status, security and the well-being of offspring. Moreover, patriarchal norms limiting female self-expression are written deep in the structure of society, into women’s very bodies themselves; espousing their abolition, even entirely sincerely, does not bring about their abolition in fact. It is thus a low-cost strategy for a man to espouse “free love”. These deep norms anyway remain in place, while the surface norms which limit a man’s freedom are more easily abandoned. I believe deeply in the ideal of free love, but a social critique of the notion has to take seriously the objection that it is highly asymmetric and does little if anything to empower women sexually in reality.

The same objection can be made to all the other terms. Certainly, under any of these headings, there are people, even many people, who have an ethical commitment to freedom for both women and men. But there are also people, perhaps also many people, and sadly also of both genders, who do not.

This, to my mind fundamental, issue gets obfuscated, frequently violently, because all of these terms are thought of as philosophies of freedom in relationships, and under conditions of patriarchy the realization of these freedoms is always going to be asymmetric. In fact, the case can be made that the demand for freedom itself is not a progressive, but a reactionary demand which is propelled by patriarchal considerations.

Although like anyone I am a big supporter of my own freedoms, this has never been how I thought about relationships. It is not my desire to come up with a concept which ring-fences the scope of restrictions which women’s societal interests might place upon me within relationships. Rather, I have a fundamental ethical repulsion to the idea that I might unnecessarily and unreasonably limit someone else’s freedom in order to further my own self-interest. I am sure I do so unwittingly, and I am aware that societal norms do it for me whether I have active agency in the process or not, but I am committed to self-examination and doing whatever I can around me to counter this bias, including trying to help women to understand that what they “want” is not what they really want.

This is, obviously, an attempt to discover forms of relationship in which women have full agency, forms which, I am convinced, are a lot better for the planet and for men. It is a sort of feminist agenda, but it differs in terms of focus. Feminism, for understandable reasons, deploys most of its energy in the critique of patriarchy. And this is very necessary and must continue. The idea of “post-feminism” I find absurd. However, few feminist thinkers have really imagined a post-patriarchy, or taken full advantage of recent insights into human ethology. They have tended to assume that the patriarchal order suited the interests of men, and been dismissive of the idea, espoused by people like Pierre Bourdieu, that the vast majority of men are also its victim.

As I see it, neither men nor women have the slightest objective interest in patriarchy and we should all unite in a struggle to identify its strategies and disarm it. It is only when we appreciate the mechanisms underlying the social construction and reproduction of patriarchal norms that we can start to do so. The assumption of male agency, and exclusive male agency, in the reproduction of patriarchy is fundamentally distracting.

The notion that men get to control women’s sexuality is not only a cornerstone of patriarchy but doubtless its very keystone. The imposition of monoandry on (most) women, whether freeborn or slaves, appears to have characterized the vast majority of human societies, both in practice and as a matter of ideology, since the beginnings of urban civilization at least. Perhaps we might even go further and speak of anandry, because whilst the man had a right of sexual access to his spouse, not even this much applied in the opposite sense. Women’s sex lives probably varied between deeply unfulfilling and entirely inexistent.

As I said, as far as I am concerned the unconditional and irrevocable abandonment of any claim on the life, affections and behavior of another human being is an ethical imperative and a prerequisite of the spiritual process I have referred to, in baptizing this blog, as “becoming human”. Women and children are not the property of men and cannot be treated as such in a humanism worthy of the twenty-first century; every vestige of such patriarchalism has to be uncovered and uprooted. My concept of becoming human, for all extents and purposes, at least insofar as I am meaningfully able to discuss it intersubjectively, coincides with the dismantling of patriarchy and the restoration of biologically innate behavior (although I am of course aware that there is no such thing as a deculturalized biology, hopefully what I mean by this is sufficiently clear from what I have written elsewhere).

My approach to relationships flows from a constructive engagement with the imperative of building a post-patriarchal social system. This is its essence. I can hardly accept to describe myself using terms which at best relegate this essence to a secondary position and at worst lump me together with people whose ideology I find repugnant.

Therefore I am proposing to coin, or at least promote, a term which surprisingly seems to have little academic pedigree to date. I am going to call the project of creating a society which is rid of the normative and symbolic presence of patriarchy post-patriarchalism. As monogamy is an impossible institution in a post-patriarchal world, this term necessarily implies, in the context of relationships, a form of polyamory which cannot be normatively monoandrous. Post-patriarchalism obviously implies concerns and an agenda which go beyond romantic-sexual relationships. In a broader sense, though, patriarchy (like virility and femininity) is a fundamentally relational term, which only has meaning to describe the social structuration of male-female relationships.

That still doesn’t give me a great word, and it’s a bit of a mouthful. But I hope it at least resolves what for me would be an intolerable ambiguity. I am a post-patriarchalist, committed to the sexual agency of women, whom I definitely trust, if empowered and on aggregate, to make the world a better place than it is now, and men better people. At the same time, we should not be under any illusions: most people, even feminists, are unaware and unsuspecting of how deeply the tentacles of patriarchy reach within them and shape their modes of thought. Men are also disempowered. The very notion of feminism as a marked category relies on patriarchy as an unmarked one. I am fully behind a feminist agenda, and yet it is in the nature of symbolic resistance that it inevitably creates an us-versus-them mentality of which we need to be acutely aware. Feminism is perceived as posing a threat to the relative position of men in the society in which we live because it would operate a rebalancing in favor of women.

This perception, however, aligns the vast mass of disempowered men with the interests of an empowered elite – just as that elite would wish and has always engineered – an elite which, moreover, itself disregards in plain sight the same values which it instrumentalizes and promulgates (again largely unconsciously) for the purpose of social control. In fact, I would go further and say that the control of women’s sexuality has never been a goal in itself: it has “merely” been the means employed by society to control the behavior of men. Thus many men believe they need to struggle against feminism because feminism is opposed to their interests qua men, and therefore they align themselves with the interests of patriarchy, which is much more deeply opposed to their interests. This is precisely the mechanism which reproduces the symbolic domination both of women by men and of men by elite (male) interests.

In a war of men against women, conducted within the symbolic universe of patriarchy and on its terms, it is obvious who will win. Feminist strategies will not eliminate patriarchy even centuries from now unless they address the central facts of symbolic domination. Thus, feminism is commonly thought of as striving for equality for women. However, equality is an extremely loaded term, and one which does not really mean what it says. Entitled groups have long appropriated the struggle for equality in such a way as to ensure it never happens in fact, because what is sought is impossible: it essentially amounts to pretending that disadvantaged groups can one day become advantaged groups. Perhaps a few will, but the vast majority cannot. This is not a strategy for social change but for social reproduction. The problem is not the distribution of advantage, but advantage itself. Thus, feminism will never fully realize its goals if all it seeks to do is extend male advantage to women. This is playing the patriarchal game by the patriarchal rules. It’s fully legitimate and I would never oppose it, but it is not strategic. Given that patriarchy oppresses both men and women, and given that its abolition would benefit both men and women, a way needs to be found to coopt all those of good will which does not frame the issue only as one of men vs. women. Men need to understand that they enjoy a relative advantage over women as a result of patriarchy, but they also pay a huge price for this; women’s emancipation is not a zero-sum game, but an intrinsic consequence of a whole new project of a much better society.

We are certainly not in a world where the goals of the feminist movement have been realized: far from it. Nor would I advocate shedding the label. But I think we need to be aware of some of its limitations and look for complementary notions which make clear that women and men have a common enemy, which is patriarchy. Those women and men who are reaching for personal empowerment need to strive to reinvent social institutions freed from all traces of patriarchy, not just from male privilege. These institutions need to do much more than make men and women formally equal: they need also to make them happy. Therefore women and men should unite under the banner of post-patriarchalism in their, and everyone’s, shared interest. And it seems to me that this must start in the bedroom, and it must start with an unequivocal renunciation, by men, of any attempt to control or limit the sexual and emotional freedom of women. Post-patriarchalism implies non-mononormativity in relationships. Once this is clear, who really cares what we call the relationship structures which will result?