Laurie Penny - Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

BITCH DOCTRINE

For my sisters, now and always

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Unspeakable Things

BITCH DOCTRINE

Essays for Dissenting Adults

LAURIE PENNY

CONTENTS

Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that.

Ellen Willis

Sometimes you have to be a bitch to get things done.

Madonna

In case you hadnt noticed, theres a war on. The field of battle is the human imagination. This is a book about the hard stuff, about the painful places where theory crashes into flesh and bone. Its a book about desire and control and contested bodies. Its a book about gender and power and violence, and about a world beyond them, which is scarier still.

As I write, it feels like the world is falling apart. A craven billionaire real-estate mogul and reality television shyster has just been elected to the presidency of the United States, swept to power by a wave of racist rage and violent populism. The British government is collapsing after the worst political crisis in living memory, the centre-left opposition is eating itself, bigots are getting brave in the streets and the stock markets are tumbling. Not for the first time in my years as a writer and a political thinker, I find myself wondering why I still care as much as I do about gender, about sexism, about power and identity. Arent there bigger things to worry about? Why cant we put these girlish things aside until after the revolution, when it comes, if it comes?

Ill tell you why. Because if the women dont win, nobody wins. If queer people and marginalised people and freaks and outsiders cannot live free, freedom is not worth the paper its printed on.

It is no longer an overstatement to suggest that toxic masculinity is killing the world. Feminists, of course, have been banging on about this in our shrill, hysterical way for years, but until the election of Donald J. Trump, the victories of the far right across Europe and the waves of violence against women and minorities that followed, nobody took us seriously. This book deals directly with that violence with the alt-right and the radicalisation of young men into extremism across the world, with the apoplectic male resentment that is consuming our culture from within. The feeling that men, particularly white, working-class men, have been cheated of their birthright is the root and centre of this discord. They are right that they have been cheated, but dangerously wrong about who pulled the con.

Some people believe that at times like this, the correct approach is to abandon identity politics and speak, instead, about class and only class. Even on the notional left, the usual suspects are at pains to point out that geopolitical disaster could have been avoided if we had all been less precious about gay rights and womens rights and Black Lives and concentrated on the issues that matter to real people. Real people meaning, of course, people who arent female, or queer, or brown, or from another country. You know, the people who really matter.

In the wake of successive victories for a new, frightening Nationalist Capitalism, commentators from all sides of the self-satisfied chin-stroking debate school are blaming identity politics. What they seem to mean by identity politics is politics that matter to people who arent white men in rural towns or young boys in bedrooms convinced that their inability to get laid is an injustice that must be answered in blood and suffering.

This is an idea that has remarkable staying power across a fractious and divided left: the idea that issues of race, gender and sexuality are at best a distraction from class politics and at worst a bourgeois tendency that will be destroyed after the revolution. The logic is that by focusing on issues of social justice, the political class has abandoned real working people to the vicissitudes of economic hardship.

This notion is horribly wrong, and the worst thing is that its wrong in the right direction, in the manner of a passenger plane that maintains a perfect flight path right until it slams into the field next to the runway. The political class has indeed rolled over and let kamikaze capitalism wreck the lives of working people around the world. Identity politics, however, have little to do with that cowardice. That the two are now yoked together in the popular imagination is something everyone who believes in a better world must answer for.

All politics are identity politics, but some identities are more politicised than others. The notion that the politics of identity and belonging have been allowed to overwhelm seemingly intractable issues of class, power and poverty is, in fact, entirely correct but this is not a problem for the traditional left. It is a problem for the traditional right, which has pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy for centuries, pitting white workers against black and brown workers, men against women, native-born citizens against foreigners in a hierarchy of victimhood that diverts energy and anger away from the vested interests bankrolling the entire scheme. When they promise to give you your country back, is that not identity politics? When they tell you that Muslims and migrants and uppity women are the real threat to your security, is that not identity politics? When they tell you that you will feel great again if only you stand behind the strong men waving the flag of white nationalism and chauvinist violence, what is that, if not a politics of identity infinitely more dangerous than any weve seen since the 1930s?

Its a shell game. A con. It did not start with Donald Trump, but the real-estate mogul and social-media tantrum artist has taken the Ponzi scheme to its logical conclusion. The president and his fellow travellers and sugar daddies have committed political fraud against the entire Western world. They have compounded it by making us believe as all good fraudsters do that it was our fault for being so naive in the first place.

It is, to some extent, reassuring to believe that its all our fault. If its all our fault for being too politically correct, too committed to diversity, if it was liberals and leftists who messed up by listening to these whining hippies with their patchouli-scented ideals of fairness and tolerance and police not shooting young black men dead for no reason, we might not have to face the more frightening notion that whats happening is, in fact, beyond our control.

The truth is that social justice and economic justice are not mutually exclusive. Those who would sacrifice one for the other will end up with neither, which is of course what the unscrupulous narcissists manspreading at the gates of power are counting on. The mainstream political left has, for generations, been unable to answer the core economic issues that shocking, I know, but hear me out affect the lives of all human beings, of every race, gender and background. For decades, in the face of late capitalist hegemony, all that the established left could realistically achieve has been to tweak the system incrementally, making things a little fairer for individual groups, without challenging the structural inequalities that created the injustice in the first place. This must change, and soon. Not just because of fine moral principles. Trying to fix economic policy without tackling structural inequality is not just morally misguided it is intellectually bankrupt.

Race, gender and sexuality are not side-issues in the current crisis. They are the bedrock and expression of that crisis. Capitalism has always divided its labour supply along lines of race and gender, ensuring that in times of crisis, we dont start setting fire to the machine, but to one another. All politics are identity politics, and this is no time to back away from our commitment to womens rights, racial justice and sexual equality. This is when we double down. The fight against the corporate neo-fascism funnelling out of every television set is not a fight that can be won if liberals, leftists and social-justice campaigners turn on one another. It is a fight that we will win together, or not at all.