Note: This piece is part of our new Essay Column, dedicated to longer, more in-depth discussions.
Preface: This essay messes with the lines between an opinion piece within a discourse, a discussion about political thought, and a charged polemic. I know some will criticize the extremity of my words. It is not just ‘exaggeration for dramatic effect’, but an argument brought into light where it is not comfortable to look at.
When I write of a ‘me’ or an ‘I’, I am sometimes speaking of my personal and ideological reflections; at other times, I narrate an experience partly mine, partly drawn from other women, but ultimately forming a collective synthesis in which the testifying ‘I’ can really be a resounding, listening ‘we’.
The myopic eye does not fail at all distances, only at a distance. Bring the object closer and it becomes sharp and legible. I’d like to hope that at least some of the male left I interpellate suffer from myopia, not duplicity. I hope you prove me right.
I went to a screening of an experimental documentary about a late cultural theorist and philosopher at Paris’s hottest self-described “lieu culturel pluridiscipliane” (one of those metamodern third spaces hosting club nights, magazine launches, food events, concerts, exhibitions, and more). A panel of academics was to speak after. It’s funny, only after moving here did I discover that one of the metro stations in the 10e is actually an interdimensional portal to Hackney Wick! No Eurostar needed.
The film coupled contemporary documentary work with a fictional dystopian subplot, and had a cyber-anarchist aesthetic. I got the impression its creators see it less as a documentary and more a political and philosophical project, taking up the work of its subject and inviting us to continue his tentative ambition: a promise and (re)provocation of post-capitalist desire into the 21st century.
As I sat there, with my friend, waiting for the screening to start, I felt a bit self-conscious. Holding my posture upright, I kept messing with my bangs. The people who had come were quite attractive. And, I presumed, smart. Stylized, many sporting effectively curated evidence of certain artistic and political sensibilities, I am confident in saying this was, almost ubiquitously, a crowd self-identifying as leftist. Moreover, you don’t hear about an event that is this particular, at this selected venue, entirely by chance. For your visual: baggy denim. Mops of dark hair. All French cheekbones and strong expressive brows. Lots of modish tattoos, from micro to neo-traditional. Pierced earlobes and eyebrows. Combat boots. Needless to say, I avoided eye contact with everyone and yearned for the film to start on time before I sneezed too loudly by accident or something (it did not start on time; it was 30 minutes late, which my friend called ever so French).
15 minutes before the film started, another man went to join the one sitting to my left. I politely smiled and looked up thinking he would say excuse me as he inserted himself into the tight spot (as my friend had done to the woman sitting to our right, making sure she could still see), but he did not.
Upon his self-installation, he displayed immediate signs of no regard for personal space. Over the course of the next 5 minutes, his legs moved from a permissible, albeit uncomfortable for me, leg on the knee stance, to a massive man-spread. Within 30 minutes, I could smell his hot beer breath. His heavy respiration was audible the entire film duration. He also kept talking to his friend. While they were, in spite of disheartened glances from their disrupted neighbor (my glances), almost continuously rowdy among themselves, they interestingly became noticeably listless during the film’s interview with a female academic (a political theorist, beholder of a professorship, and writer of over a dozen books); there was even a scoff released.
It is in moments like these that I gain consciousness. The acrid, forcibly lucid kind.
This was an event for theoretically curious youth. The participants of the Gen Z left, or those who have an interest in the post-2008 left, given the film’s subject matter. The counter-culture. The hope. The campaigners and protesters (this is Paris after all). Who advocate for change, humanism, and the survival of arts and independent media. Those who are continuing the project against domination.
I wanted to take off the makeup and accessories I had picked out trying to doll myself up this morning, and cover myself in mud and shit. Harbor a Pig-Pen cloud of must, and invade my man-spreading neighbor’s space in return.
I wanted to tell him something along the lines of this.
I am angry. You make me angry.
Why, you ask?
It would not be enough for you to close your legs. You did not for the rest of the film anyway. I don’t think you were trying to intimidate me or express disrespect. I don’t think you sat down and thought, I am going to make this woman uncomfortable, make her have to squeeze her bladder so that I can nurse my beer in between my thighs. You simply occupied the space, already yours to occupy.
Underneath the irritation about your legs and breath was something much uglier, something much more sure unearthing within me.
Perhaps this positioning wasn’t even coming from arrogance on your part. Without either of us having consciously chosen the arrangement, one of us is thought to be owed expansiveness, is given entitlement, is to penetrate and define space. And the other subject is expected to yield. Smell his wet, yeasty exhalations.
Here is the problem with many leftist men and misogyny on the left: your acknowledgement of my intelligence, of my comradeship, does not actually alter the structure of our relationship. For many of you, ‘intelligent’ has simply been added to the list of qualities you find desirable in me. A literati, this toy comes packaged with a removable political philosophy book by her side. You not only assess me as hot, but smart, and therefore, even hotter. That is, you admire me precisely as an exceptional woman: attractive and intellectual, against the category of ‘woman’ against which I am being evaluated, within which intellectual depth would never be presumed. A woman may be educated and agreeably articulate; but I am exceptional, in the seriousness, depth, and intensity you are struck to discover I possess.
Understand heterosexual sexuality as a relation of power. Living in a gendered, patriarchal society is to live in a world structured by relations of domination and subjectivation, gender being one of their principal organizing axes. Male desire defines the value and meaning of the feminized body, the object of its desire. That desire then defines how she, which she accordingly internalizes, should and is expected to act. You may recognize me as intelligent enough to be interesting to you, worthy of sexually pursuing or maybe even dating, but you will not, likely unconsciously, in that same act, recognize me as capable of intellectual authority in my own right. My intelligence does not dissolve the gendered relation in which I, the woman, am placed as the object for you to ultimately evaluate, which for most of you anyway, only ever amounts to increasing her desirability.
I am an intellectual in a skirt, and, the cherry on top, a feminist. As you confuse your capacity to desire a feminist with being a feminist yourself, my politics become a turn-on rather than the structure you continue to be complicit in.
Lust must be proof of your own feminist enlightenment. Arousal is mistaken for an unearned claim to an understanding of the world as gendered and oppressive towards women. None of the hard work to educate yourself; all of that can just osmotically be transferred by dating a feminist. And your alibi: your lust is mediated through recognition of my politics. The internal calculation goes: I find her attractive because she’s intelligent and politically interested and engaged; therefore, I’m not crudely objectifying her like all those other men do. Not like the right does. God, I’m such a feminist.
Maybe it is my anger that is sexy to you. Because I am difficult to catch, a challenge for you to approach, and a challenger of the world around me. Just like you, my dear radical.
You, seemingly forbidden to me, are let into the Amazonian kingdom. My transgression is erotic and filthy. You are the one I choose to sin with. The one I deemed moral and conscious enough of the feminist plight. Or maybe the one I defected from my politics for.
And to my delight, you think: she’s not like those bimbo, pick-me, MAGA barbies who vote away their rights. The handmaidens, idiot tradwives, ugly Mar-a-Lago lip-filled bitches, or braindead Silicon Valley waifish escorts orbiting tech feudal lords. You have no difficulty recognizing women as lesser than you, striping them of their agency, and touting misogynistic insults the second they disagree with you. If your opinions on other forms of domination, such as class struggle, ebbed away, could I tell the difference between your reeking rhetoric and that of the oppressors you speak of?
And what would happen if I were to question you? Would intellectualized vitriol be sent my way? Would you paternalize and dismiss my claims, reduce them to cooing distractions, insisting I don’t know what’s best for me? Oh yes, thank you for liberating me from the tiresome business of speaking and thinking for myself!
Into the bargain, I can also become especially desirable to you as a cultural object, like another one of the industrial rings worn on your fingers. Decorated in silver bangles and eyeliner, I have also put in work to aestheticize myself. What’s more, to others, you are seen as a feminist’s man. You will be seen as adjacent, have more authority in progressive spaces, and I, another signifier of your status; you will be imbued with my symbolic and aesthetic capital, absolved of misogynistic grievances aimed at you because you are seeing a feminist, or held on a pedestal for putting up with my annoying temperament. You are hot shit.
Whatever of the following I am, it is all up for you to decide. It is whatever you prefer, à la carte. After all, I’m your girl. An obsequious feminist. I am yours to wear, access, and penetrate, yours to lust for and capture.
That is why I fantasize about covering myself in shit. If I am rolling in that dirty, frightening, pitiful, sublime substance, I cannot be yours. There, I am safe. I am undesirable to you. You will not get to turn my politics into just another aspect of my desirability.
Maybe you, a man like the man-spreader, who goes to these types of events and identifies as part of the left, are reading this and feeling yourself slowly, almost intuitively, get angry with me. Let me halt you before your mind attempts the mental shortcut of calling me an anti-male, radical misandrist.
I am not saying you always consciously think this way. You do not mentally talk yourself through as such: women are objects, therefore I will now proceed to objectify women. Well, I hope not.
One cannot reasonably hold an individual responsible for having been socialized into patriarchy in quite the same way that one holds them responsible for a deliberately chosen act of theirs. You did not fully choose the socio-psychological desires, dispositions, or assumptions you inherited (I am cautious to say desires are entirely private preferences we have no control over, exonerated from examination). You, yourself, did not individually create the patriarchal social order. You were born into it too. And like under capitalism according to Marxists, to benefit from a structure of domination is not necessarily to be liberated by it. The interest of the bourgeoisie is that of capital, which is of no human, of not anyone. With patriarchy, men do receive material benefits, but ultimately, they often suffer from it as well (as evidenced by the infamous, monopolized by the manosphere, statistic of male suicide-rates) and are constrained by its norms.
Let me also be clear: this is not a simplistic indictment of intelligence, values, or political beliefs adding to someone’s attractiveness in someone else’s eyes. What I am pointing at is that we must try to never forget that just because we find ourselves in spaces (metaphorical or physical) that empower, sustain, and are committed to growing political consciousness, it does not mean that we, together in that space and individually, have somehow entirely escaped all the structures concerned. We remain in reality. Nor can we assume that just because of our commitment to the political fight, we stand outside, are immune and do not participate in any configuration or strand of the structures of domination the fight seeks to overcome. The identities, practices, and desires developed and cultivated within such spaces can still be incorporated into existing oppressive structures of desire, consumption, and social distinction, becoming compatible with, and even contributing to, the reproduction of said relations and structures of domination. Those who believe themselves to be conscious, and hopefully are indeed to some extent conscious, may nonetheless participate in reproducing the relations they believe they have learned to recognize. As you know, these structures are ever-mutable, responsive to changes in pop culture, geopolitics, technogenesis, and the myriad of other forces that have an impact and interact with our social reality. Whilst we, on the other hand, are fallible, overly confident in our acuity, and sometimes weak. But our strength lies in our hopefulness, in our belief in the need for change. This needs to be radically accessed and kept in mind.
And yes, I am saying you are quite responsible for what you do with your desire. If you assume you simply have access to me, sexualize me when I do not want to be, exercise sexual aggression, patronize me, or reach for misogynoir and transmisogyny (these two final items being absolutely some of the most popular problems within the left) behind your public shield of progressivism, you are to be held responsible for that. You inviolably, imperatively hold the responsibility of recognizing committing these incongruent, hypocritical, and harmful acts if you have the progressive values you indeed claim to have. Especially if you are a leftist and believe in radical equality. Once you identify yourself with an emancipatory political project, that identification, and the normative commitments that accompany it, bare obligations concerning how you conduct yourself, or, concerning unconscious contradiction, to correct and continuously seek to better yourself.
At its core, this is the same fundamental, formative principle we teach snotty children in kindergarten to set them on their path to growing up into good people in society. You may not have meant to hurt Mary when you knocked over her Lego tower. But now that Ms. Kudela has brought it to your attention, you can move forward and correct what you did wrong. Say sorry to Mary. Do not continue playing with your Legos in the same way and then tell me that you are a good kid. Intent matters, and disposition and environment will have an inherent influence on our actions, but they do not, and we must refuse to allow them to exhaust responsibility. If we accept the fact that our reality is one organized, understood, and effectively naturalized as structured by domination, this acceptance is certainly not a permission for resignation.
I am tired of letting gender as an axis of oppression remain a blind spot of today’s left.
Moreover, in regards to the criticisms leveled at the ‘bourgeois individualist left’ and its moralist, essentializing, identity politics crusade – often associated with this image of an over-sensitive, over-censoring queer, POC, or feminist academic or university student (belovedly used by the right) studying something like ‘lesbian dance theory’ – whilst I do truly agree with less vilifying and blame-game-y articulations of this critique, I find another observation to be of interest. I, personally, have found that many dogmatic, orthodox Marxists men, who are also moralists, frequently possess an unmistakably sexist attitude. These de rigueur men have a conviction that the left has been emasculated, deeply unmilitant, and in desperate need of a revival in virility. Some return to a fraternal conception of its political identity, centered on a masculinist, soldiering ideal (and yet many, I can’t help but giggle and suspect, would easily be taken down in a fight by the average pub prole). This however, goes mostly unnoticed, aside from by women in leftist spaces. But instead, somehow, the face of dogmatism in media remains the blue-haired, pierced woman (our tragic heroine).
I have seen this type live at panels, on social media, and even at house parties. Sometimes, they don’t even happen to be heterosexual. Perhaps this has something to do with feminist concerns being denounced as indubitably subordinate to class struggle (I myself do not subscribe to a view that gendered domination is exhaustively derivative of class relations) or as aforementioned, reduced to the same individual essentialism the orthodox claim to oppose. There’s a nagging irony in militantly condemning identity essentialism whilst championing an idealized, gendered political subject of one’s own: an unalloyedly class-conscious worker, whose universal interests come to mean the interests of a less universal and more masculine subject. But anyhow, maybe this attitude I speak of is simply produced by the oldest explanation available: plain ol’ women-hating.
Lastly, when our feminist politics are used as symbolic capital for men, their urgency and personal stakes are subsequently lost. It becomes a way for them to be gestural, get ironic proximity without obliging change in their behavior. Let us not settle for, at worst, a wry performance of solidarity and, at best, recognition and accountability alone: leftist men must enter the fight and join us in rupturing the structures themselves, where we all have skin in the game. Too often, the Gen Z left as a whole seem caught in a cycle: we enter the fight up in arms, freshly motivated by the political science modules that tore away the veil (a veil that, in fairness, cost several thousand pounds a semester to have torn…), expend ourselves, likely find ourselves amidst toxic discourse with guilt-mongering from our own and insult from elders and those who do not think alike, retreat to our trenches in existential dread, and eventually return to confront the very same structures still intact. We move, but in circles, the structures we oppose absorbing the inertia of protest. Without actual materializing efforts of rupture, mobilization amounts to motion within the system and recuperation.
This is, most definitely, informed by my own explicitly heartening conception of the left. A left accessing, yes, its critical faculties, but also a capacity to imagine the possible, inspired heavily by Haud Guéguen, who writes about restoring hope and actualizing a desirable future. This, as opposed to resting sat, fuming and melancholic in the archaic hot tub of sexist thoughts repackaged as dogma, is what I hope from my left. My conception of the proletariat would consequently, overtly, be spacious: a plural political subject concerned with fighting feminist, racial, queer, economic, and necessarily all other (mutual, often codependent) strands of oppression. Nor must we require the oppressed to be exemplary representatives of their political emancipation. In fact, it is likely that the subject most in need of liberation, the bearer of today’s most profound oppression, will not be the perfect moral or intellectual subject or be the most able to intellectually, articulate and advocate for their case for need. The Afghan teenager banned from secondary education may, herself, express homophobic or patriarchal beliefs if asked. She has, presumably, not cracked open Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir or Sara Ahmed and can readily wield their lenses, ideas, and paradigms against the world around her. And she almost certainly does not display the aesthetic editions of her personal philosophical and literary anthology, purchased from Judd Books, Politics and Prose, and Waterstones, on her art deco nightstand (self-dig). But you, my well-read, intellectual leftist men… I know you have a nightstand like mine, or perhaps worse, a coffee table displaying philosophy and art monographs. What is your excuse for your selective curriculum? Try your hand at a woman writer1.
But yes, wouldn’t it be much more convenient if you could just avoid chewing on any of the thoughts I’ve articulated above? Wouldn’t it be easier to just be seen out in public with a feminist woman a couple times, have sex with her, and then ghost her?
That itsy-bitsy word, ‘casual,’ deceives in its liberatory clothes. How politely brought up us young women have been in the emotional discipline of the postfeminist subject, the neoliberal individual subject, and heterosexual womanhood! Nor would you remain unscathed, likewise confronted with alienation and a culture rewarding your detachment. As interrogated in sociologist Eva Illouz’s work on contemporary heterosexuality and author Erin Williams’s continued reflection, our casual arrangement, (what I am referring to as ‘casual arrangements,’ I am problematizing as a participatory instance within a modern culture or institution, the problem not being, strictly speaking, ‘casual sex’ per se) organized around market logics and, par for the course, have gendered consequences. It would follow that I would tolerate “interpretive effort,” as Williams puts it, as part of my alienated, emotional labour: feeling insecurity and self-blame for your lack of attention and the lack of stability, perceiving my feelings as personal psychological faults. The minimization of my own wants would become evidence of my autonomy; my willingness to tolerate deprivation, evidence of my self-sufficiency. An occultation of sensation. To be smaller, to always make myself smaller, into infinite, lithe exiguity.
I would act lax publicly, say it’s an easygoing (get ready for the dreaded word…) ‘situationship’ to friends when asked. Oh! Nothing’s the matter with me (said whilst unlocking and locking my phone, flashing an empty screen). This era of transactionality, where commitment is seen as optional and the abundance of hinge matches responding to prompts about top 4 on letterboxd choices makes everyone interchangeable with the flick. of. a. finger. Aren’t relationships just so bourgeois? A normative path we won’t take. We call this independence, freedom, and being liberated enough to enjoy what is perfunctorily offered.
We are no longer in the age of the patriarch or cultural variations of the New Man, but of a policed (heterosexual) masculinity: you, the self-fashioned progressive, sensitive boy. He who, before he touches her, paints his nails to hide the inveterate dirt underneath them. You have committed to memory certain vocabulary: consent, boundaries, her pleasure. You become the altruistic misogynistic subject, dosing emotional vulnerability and access. There can often be a reciprocity in bed, even bona fide reciprocity, worn like a credential. But in spite of the egalitarian affect, there is a unilateral determination of when closeness is granted or withheld. At the end of the day, the relational leash will proverbially be put in your hand to grip.
So, like I said, you could opt to just like one of my old Instagram posts, eventually slide up on my story, and text me. Text me inconsistently, a fluctuating string of heavy bursts and silences, always keeping me on my toes, keeping me addicted, imprudent, as I try to tell myself that all of this was never anything more than my head overanalyzing. As we both try to convince ourselves that all of this is normal and totally aboveboard on either end. The discontinuous reinforcement, asynchronous intimacy, and my perennial obsession fed by our constant digital availability, always just one click of the send button away. We could eventually (not necessarily too early, according the butchered, unintelligible timeline of contemporary talking-stages) end up spending a night together when you text me late to come over. And then you could slip away, go radio silent. Return to your full-time job of arguing on ‘brocialist’ threads on X, wearing your t-shirt that has ‘real feminists eat box’ written on it.
Enjoy me, discard me, and call it nothing more than the messy, fucked business of being a twenty-first-century man. You’re too busy anyway, getting ready to fight a revolution.
That is what I am angry about.
I’ll start you off with one rec. For those who felt called out by my remark about usage of misogynistic insults against women on the right, I offer Chapters 1 and 6 of Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin (it is readily in stock at the Gower Street Waterstones right next to UCL, or can be accessed on Internet Archive).
