Developing our Politics on Sexual ViolenceWhen confronting an incident of sexual assault, we strive for clear and definitive answers and direction, both in terms of how to best deal with the particular situation and how to work more broadly toward confronting sexual assault politically. Too often feminists have looked for fundamental or reductionist truths to guide their response, mistaking hard lines for clarity. Political accountability, instead, looks to complexity in order to find direction. There is a complex interplay of economic factors, such as the gendered division of labour and the oppression of women who are forced to take on the vast majority of unpaid and low-paid reproductive labour. More sociological factors also play a role, such as the extreme objectification of women's bodies in media and mainstream culture. There is a long history of men claiming ownership and entitlement to women's bodies, and this is seen clearly in the way marriage is treated in relatively recent laws around rape. Race, colonialism, heterosexism, and ableism all interact with sexual assault. And reproductive justice, in its broadest sense, has strong links with sexual assault―women of colour, poor women, and disabled women being forcibly sterilized by the State seems like one of the very clearest examples of sexual violence.
Political accountability seeks to look at how these factors impact on issues of sexual violence honestly and complexly, without drawing forced equivalencies. That is to say that, while patterns of sexual violence are influenced by gendered divisions of labour and wealth, they also occur in great numbers in cases where there is no economic relationship between parties. The forced simplicity of both liberal feminists and MRAs―for example, MRAs' focus on gender imbalances in prisons, without any consideration of other factors or broader issues―is a type of gender reductionism that we hope to avoid. But being nuanced should not be confused with being soft: a perpetrator of assault is a class traitor, like a white supremacist, carrying out a devastating form of intra-class violence against those he holds privilege and power over. We should be harsh, but we should be clear why we're doing it. False claims of community are no justification. In this section, we consider some of the factors at play.
Capitalism and PatriarchyPatriarchal gender relations and patterns of sexual violence existed prior to the development of capitalism and have manifested in many forms throughout history. However, given that capitalism is the dominant social order of the day, and a system that structures all of our lives, focus will be given here to Capital and patriarchy. Throughout capitalism, working class men have held a cross-class allegiance with ruling class men. They have claimed ownership of, power over, and benefits from women's bodies and labour, as well as more access to property ownership and higher wages. This is evident in many ways. One is that women have historically taken on huge amounts of unpaid reproductive labour, such as childcare, cooking, and housekeeping. This has meant that, no matter how exploited a male worker may be, he has still had the ability to further exploit and oppress in his own home. This has also meant that, historically, working class men who married possessed a right to the body and sexuality of his wife.
It is important to note that while this may be an example of intra-class violence, in the sense that both the man and woman in this example belong to the working class, it is not horizontal violence ― because men nonetheless hold structural economic and political power over women. Working class men are faced with a choice ― to ally themselves with working class women and fight for gender equality and class struggle, or to continue to reproduce the gender imbalance and gender violence that they have historically benefited from. Too often, even men who called themselves revolutionaries have chosen the latter.
The concept of social reproduction is central to an understanding of how the functioning of capitalism has served to reinforce and perpetuate patriarchy as a system of male dominance. Social reproduction, in this case, refers to work required in order to reproduce workers―things like cooking, raising children, and keeping a clean home. These tasks are as necessary to capitalism as wage labour, but they are often unpaid and hidden away within the private realm of the household. However, in contemporary North American society, we often see this work being carried out by low-paid workers, who are almost all women, mostly women of colour, and often migrant workers. A key example in Ontario is the Live-In Caregiver Program, in which women workers live in employers’ homes and work for long hours, for low wages, and in vulnerable situations.
The material and ideological undervaluing and subordination of women under capitalism is the basis for the reproduction of male dominance and patriarchal relations. Women are, as a group, paid less than men, take on more unpaid reproductive labour, and make up a large part of the most precarious and low-paid workers. For this reason, a political understanding of accountability must also be an anti-capitalist struggle. This means both that instances of sexual assault must be seen in the context of gendered class relations, and that we as anarchists must engage in feminist struggle in workplaces and neighbourhoods around issues of unpaid and low-paid reproductive labour.
Politics to the Front – Participating in Feminist StruggleThe point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.
Simone de Beauvoir
The struggle against sexual violence and patriarchy must manifest in our daily lives and organizing efforts. As we develop our politics around these issues, it is imperative that we find ways to test our ideas in practice. As we have seen, a key problem with emphasizing accountability processes is that, by doing so, we are slipping away from addressing the structural roots of sexual violence. By side-stepping an analysis of the wider systems of power that are at play, we risk containing our politics within inward-looking activist scenes. Of course, we absolutely must contend with individual instances of sexual violence, as they will continue to occur. In this regard, an attempt has been made above to underscore how we feel that an approach that stresses political accountability can potentially address some of the short-comings of the community accountability model. However, we must also deal with movements that are actively and publicly organizing to perpetuate patriarchal social relations more broadly. MRAs comprise one such movement. As we endeavour to spread feminist ideas, we can expect to contend with reactionary elements in society that see these ideas as a threat to their relatively privileged existence.
By developing and putting into practice an anarchist political analysis of sexual violence and patriarchy, we are better poised to critique and build upon the failings of current feminist challenges to MRAs. More specifically, as will be explored below, the same absence of structural analysis which seems to plague accountability processes can be detected within the more liberal feminist responses to MRA organizing thus far.
The MRA movement is a growing force in North America, appearing most prominently on university campuses as student clubs that purport to address and raise awareness about “men's issues”. By manipulating the anxieties men face under the regime of neoliberal austerity, “men’s issues” groups choose to scapegoat feminism, thereby obscuring the underlying social relations of Capital and patriarchy that both men and women must navigate in order to survive.
Men's rights groups have existed in various forms since the 1850s, and more concretely since the 1970s. Historically, this movement has been framed as a critical response to the advancement of women's rights. More than offering a mere critical response, MRAs represent a patriarchal reactionary politics. It is no coincidence that their solidification in the 1970s took place against the backdrop of an influx of women into the paid labour force, and the increasing material gains won through women’s rights struggles as part of the expansion of the post-World War II Welfare State. Over the decades, the movement's rhetoric has been finessed to include pleasant words like “equality” and “inclusivity” and phrases that attempt to highlight a commitment to “achieving equality for all Canadians, regardless of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, family status, race, ethnicity, creed, age or disability.” Rhetoric like this almost seems to betray the core message, which has remained consistent. The message being that feminists represent a special interest group that place themselves in direct competition with men for access to finite societal resources, and should therefore be opposed.
MRAs' claims that men endure hardships in society, such as lack of access to mental healthcare, problems in the judicial and prison systems, and unsafe working conditions are partly legitimate. However, like the anti-choice activist interested in fetal rights, it's clear that much of the interest MRAs have in these issues, and the debates they lead to, are occurring in bad faith. For instance, discussion of unsafe working conditions amongst MRAs does not lend focus to the operation of Capital as a force of exploitation that does harm to working class bodies through its consumption of labour power. Further, of little surprise, MRA discourse lacks any analysis regarding the gendered division of labour that has historically exposed women to uniquely unsafe working conditions. One contemporary example of such exposure is the disproportionate threat of sexual violence faced by female workers in the retail, service and hospitality industries, or the threat of workplace injury to predominantly female personal support workers in understaffed care facilities. Clearly, any attempt to genuinely contend with unsafe working conditions on the job necessarily requires an understanding of work in the context of capitalism. An understanding that lends itself to a strategy that is only enhanced, not threatened, by a knowledge of women's unique exploitation under capitalism.
Nevertheless, the surface utilization of partially legitimate issues by MRAs ― coupled with their reliance on liberal concepts such as “gender blindness” and “equality” as a cover for their anti-feminism ― make them a difficult group to engage with using rational discourse. In the absence of a feminist movement that could posit a revolutionary explanation as to why these problems are necessarily perpetuated in a patriarchal, capitalist society, MRAs are able to use this void as an opportunity for their further development. This has taken the form of challenging the very idea that women are structurally oppressed in society.
Men gravitate towards the anti-feminism of the MRAs, not simply because they have experienced hardship in their lives, but because of the significant material benefits they receive under patriarchy. MRAs defend a system that entitles men to the unwaged domestic work of women, as well as higher paid employment with greater social status. Ironically, MRAs consistently raise the rigid definition of masculinity, which men often adhere to (i.e. sexist behaviour) in order to maintain these privileges, as unfair to men. In this vein, the challenge to male dominance that feminism promotes manifests itself sexually as a challenge to male entitlement to female bodies. Female sexual agency is therefore viewed as a threat by many MRAs who, motivated by anger at potential rejection, and uncritical of the role masculine socialization has played in forming their views around consent and choice, like to whip up hysteria regarding so called “false” rape accusations, thereby contributing to their defence of rape culture more broadly. It's likely that female sexual agency is the primary reason men participate in MRA groups, since it seems the bulk of MRAs are in their early twenties―too young to have first-hand experience of some of the other talking points that they rally around. Their unwavering dedication to misogyny should implore us to strengthen our efforts to build an organized response to MRAs. Part of that effort must be a persistence in exposing “men's issues” for what they are―running the gamut from legitimate but misguided, to completely fraudulent.
In Toronto, MRAs are attempting to become a more permanent feature of the city's political landscape. They have established a student group, which they call the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE), on the University of Toronto campus, where they have hosted lectures by anti-feminist academics such as Warren Farrell and Janice Fiamengo. CAFE has also set up men's rights groups at Ryerson University (also in Toronto), and several other university campuses in Ottawa, Montreal, Peterborough, and Guelph, as well as two off-campus groups in Ottawa and Vancouver. Currently CAFE is trying to establish a “Centre for Men and Families” in Toronto, and claim to have already received nearly half of the $50,000 start-up funds required―mainly from private donations. The proposed centre would operate as a support hub for men who claim to experience gender-based violence or discrimination, but, unfortunately, will most likely act as an echo-chamber in which “women's issues” are assumed to undermine and eclipse the disproportionate amount of hardships that men are perceived to face in society.
Feminists in Toronto have combated MRA activity in a couple of ways. Rallies have been organized on campus to correspond with the timing of MRA events, in an attempt to engage attendees in dialogue about their issues of concern. Printed materials have been distributed that attempt to re-frame the issues raised by the MRAs as broader social problems perpetuated by patriarchy, and which contain lists of resources for men who are facing domestic abuse or depression. The goal here is to catch the fair-weather MRA before he falls into the abyss of misogyny and victimhood, while still operating within the territory of liberalism.
Much like the rise of accountability processes as a means of addressing instances of sexual violence, these attempts at dealing with the reactionary sexism of MRAs ought to be encouraged and celebrated insofar as they reflect an active undertaking to combat concrete manifestations of male supremacy. Unfortunately, this more liberal brand of combating MRAs also shares with accountability processes a shallow level of political development concerning the systemic roots of the issues they attempt to confront. Whether it is in the context of holding a presence at MRA events or through debates on social media, a re-framing approach has been coupled with the tendency to engage in a mere statistics war waged against MRA information campaigns. In this context, both sides of the debate seek to present and explain statistics concerning gendered trends surrounding issues such as homelessness, suicide, and industrial accidents, while neither group takes on a deeper analysis of the interlocking systems of power that underlie such trends. To engage genuinely, perhaps we should resist the temptation to retort MRA claims with the standard “but women have it worse”. Perhaps a more effective strategy would be an acknowledgement, “yes, men do commit suicide at a higher rate than women―so what are we going to do about it, besides standing around blaming feminists?”
