Are Women Oppressed or Oppressors?

The Incoherence of Critical Social Justice on Patriarchy.

Photo by Molly Blackbird on Unsplash

I recently spotted a comment from one of my readers, Analia, that said “I would love to read more about the woke discourse on women as oppressed by men, in the woke framework.” She added that she had found Cynical Theories useful for its theoretical breakdowns, but was still having trouble grasping the framework in this area. This is unsurprising as the influence of intersectionality and queer theory on Critical Social Justice scholarship has made its stance on patriarchy incoherent.

I should say that I, myself, am not convinced that women are routinely oppressed by men in the countries in which Critical Social Justice has a strong foothold. Nevertheless, we do continue to need specific sex-based rights due to our reproductive function and physicality that can be, and are being, threatened by both religious conservative and “woke” ideologues (of both sexes). For that reason, I find it particularly concerning that the dominant moral orthodoxy on the left (which has historically championed women’s rights) is so fatally conflicted and confused on these issues as to be unfit for the purpose of defending them. It will be useful, therefore, to break down how this has come about.

The belief that women are oppressed by men is an underlying assumption of CSJ and visible in its discourses which include talk of patriarchy, male privilege and toxic masculinity. However, in practice, this has been complicated so much by critical theories of race and ‘queering’ of the categories of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ that it is seldom expressed alone without considerable qualification. If a woman were to simply state the position “Women are oppressed by men” as a standalone statement she would be very likely to be suspected of being a “White Feminist” or a TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist).

A White Feminist (you don’t have to be white) is understood to be someone who cares only about issues faced by middle-class white women or who assumes that all women’s experiences are generalisable to this demographic. However, in practice, it can also be applied to anybody who has liberal approaches to opposing racism rather than Critical Social Justice ones (hence the existence of ‘white feminists’ who are not white) The term “TERF” is often accompanied by accusations of hostility and prejudice against trans people and a wish to deny their right to exist. However, in reality, it can be applied to anybody who does not think that trans women can safely and fairly be accepted straightforwardly as women in every situation and/or believes that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are biological categories, not internally felt gender identities.

Even though Critical Social Justice relies on a framework of power and privilege which assumes men to have power and privilege over women, the sex axis is very weak compared to those of race and gender identity. White women who identify as women rank very low on the CSJ oppression scale and in the last few years have increasingly been presented as dangerous and oppressive.

In the case of race, we have seen a growing drive to present white women generally as dangerous to black men. In the US, this was given a particular boost in 2016 when 52% of white American women voted for Donald Trump and this intensified in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests. Claims about the dangerousness of white women to black men generally present them as scheming instigators of violence, rather than the direct perpetrators of it. The “White women’s Tears” and “Karen” memes refer to white women trying to get black men hurt or killed by white men or the police by feigning distress and making false allegations. In a US context, the case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy tortured and murdered in 1955, by the husband and brother-in-law of Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who claimed that he had flirted with her but later admitted this to be a lie is often called upon as an example of common, malicious white woman behaviour.

.The claim that women commonly make false allegations of sexual harassment or assault would seem to conflict with support for the #MeToo movement and its hashtag #BelieveWomen but this is where we see the hierarchy of identity-based power dynamics. White men have more power than white women due to patriarchy so in this case, CSJ advocates would advocate #BelieveWomen, but white women have more power than black men due to white supremacy and are theorised to be deeply invested in maintaining it so then we are warned that “#MeToo needs to talk about predatory white women.”

“White women have always oiled the machine of white supremacy,” says Winbush. “Historically, Black men have always been at risk for being accused of sexual violence. It’s something we Black men think about a lot. I personally don’t like being alone in an elevator or anywhere else with white women.” Winbush adds that it is unexplored territory to talk about the historical accusation of white women accusing Black men of rape, as well as their continued sexual victimization of Black boys. “When Black boys hit puberty, they are viewed as sexual objects by white teachers. We don’t want to explore that idea because it’s taboo. We need to talk about the erotic projections white women have of Black boys when they hit puberty.”

According to Stacey Patton,

In this battlefield of power, the white woman’s claim to hyper-vulnerability is their response to white men’s claim of power in a white republic. White women gain power through vulnerability and claims of victimhood at the hands of racialized boys and men, making this a dangerous world for OUR boys.

The “Karen” meme, which “confronts the violent history of white womanhood” according to Cady Lang, seems to be built upon the filming of white women doing anything from hurling racist abuse at people to being busybodies to behaving in an entitled manner to being afraid of an unknown man. Lang’s article begins with Lisa Alexander who made the mistake of not knowing the house on which a man was chalking a Blacks Lives Matter slogan at the height of the protests was his own and telling him his sign was good but vandalism was not the way. At any time, Mr Juanillo could have informed her it was his house. Instead, he implied it was not and told her to call the police. Ms Alexander says she does not want to call the police but does when he will not engage with her. Lang says that phone call could have got him killed but the police quickly established that it was his own property. Ms Alexander apologised but her husband lost his job and she lost clients. Mr Juanillo insists the problem was racism.

In this case, Alexander’s cover was her politeness, Juanillo said, explaining she smiled through the entire encounter and spoke in a friendly, measured tone. From experience, though, Juanillo observed that her tone was another expression of anti-Asian racial bias.

Perhaps Mr. Juanillo was right and Ms Alexander’s mistake was based on assuming Filipino Americans were too poor and uneducated to live in an affluent neighbourhood, never having noticed this demographic is significantly more educated and wealthy than nearly every other demographic in America, including her own. She did claim to know the house not to be Mr. Juanillo’s after he had implied it was not by saying that if it were his house, he’d have the right to stencil on it. At worst, Ms Alexander’s assumption that he was a BLM protestor defacing property that was not his own was presumptuous and her attempted intervention interfering. There is little evidence that it was racist and it is difficult to see her friendly and direct attempt to engage with Mr Juanillo as dangerous or behaving like a tearful, helpless victim in need of protection. Lang manages it, though.

In a larger sense, the mainstreaming of calling out the danger that white women and their tears pose has been building up to this moment. There’s the oft-cited stat that 52% of white women voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, the constant lies of white women like Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders in service of the Trump Administration have made it abundantly clear that white women can and are often complicit in oppressive systems. Coupled with the rise of social media and the smartphone camera, the longtime narrative of white women as helpless victims in need of protection is now being challenged by video evidence of them as instigators of not only conflict, but violence.

Robin DiAngelo is the best known proponent of the danger of ‘white women’s tears.’

White women’s tears in cross-racial interactions are problematic for several reasons connected to how they impact others. For example, there is a long historical backdrop of black men being tortured and murdered because of a white woman’s distress, and we white women bring these histories with us. Our tears trigger the terrorism of this history, particularly for African Americans…. The murder of Emmett Till is just one example of the history that informs an oft-repeated warning from my African American colleagues: “When a white woman cries, a black man gets hurt.” Not knowing or being sensitive to this history is another example of white centrality, individualism, and lack of racial humility.

The other area in which women are seen as dangerous and oppressive is when they are gender critical feminists seeking to protect women’s single-sex spaces and/or the definition of ‘woman’ as ‘adult human females.’ Trans activists working on queer theory concepts of gender and even sex as something self-identified would certainly not see the people they are trying to protect them from as men, but gender critical feminists do. Sometimes they even frame the aim to give trans women access to all women’s spaces including lavatories, changing rooms, shelters, prisons and sport as a form of men’s rights activism or a patriarchal attempt by men to take women’s spaces away and appropriate womanhood. Blaming men or patriarchy for authoritarian trans activism is incorrect as I have argued here.

CSJ approaches to trans activism which begin and end at ‘Trans women are women. End of discussion” see any disagreement or qualification to this as transphobia and ‘transmisogyny.’ They see gender critical feminists as failing at feminism by refusing to include a particularly vulnerable subset of women. Sometimes, they even try to present the motivations of left-wing gender critical feminists as socially conservative. This is also incorrect. Gender critical feminists and social conservatives agree that people cannot have a gender identity different to their sex, but gender critical feminists are ultimately critical of the concept of gender with accompanying roles, traits and presentation while social conservatives are critical of non-conformity with them. Gender critical feminists therefore would like trans men and women to understand themselves as gender-nonconforming women and men and be comfortable with that, accepting that there is no right way to be a man or woman. Social conservatives would like trans men and women to understand themselves as women and men and also to behave and present in traditionally feminine and masculine ways according to their sex. These values are opposed.

Within the queer theory branch of Critical Social Justice, then, we see a belief in patriarchy as a persistent oppressive power dynamic permeating all of society but this is not expressed as“women being oppressed by men” for two reasons. Firstly, the belief that having stable categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’ is inherently oppressive makes such a declaration problematic. Secondly, within the hierarchy of power dynamics and intersectional framework, men have more power than women, but cis (non-trans) people have more power than trans people making trans women doubly oppressed and a priority.

Feminists have long criticised the social construction of womanhood as oppressive with the most famous declaration of this being Simone de Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” However, what radical and gender critical feminists mean by this is that the construction of gendered roles, traits and presentation of socially sanctioned womanhood are oppressive, not the recognition of ‘woman’ as a biological category. Queer theorists, however, take a postmodern stance on their understanding of social constructionism and believe that accepting stable categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ is inherently oppressive. “Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?” asked Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble.

The blurring of boundaries and rejection of categories is one of the four primary and persistent themes of postmodernism we identified in Cynical Theories. The thinking behind this is that for any group of humans to be oppressed by another, they first have to the categorised into groups. Therefore, resisting categorisation is, in itself a form of subversive activism. Foucault was very influential on this thinking, but when it comes to sex binaries, Derrida is even more so. Derrida argued that we can only make sense of our world through language and language works by its relation to other language. For example, the words ‘hot’, ‘warm’ ‘cool’ and ‘cold’ are understood in relation to each other. We often understand things in binaries. This is, of course, true. How could we have a concept of cold without a concept of hot? How could anybody be considered ‘black’ without other people being considered ‘white’ or anybody be ‘heterosexual’ without other people being homosexual? However, Derrida argued, binaries are inherently hierarchical and by thinking in them, we make one category better than another. We see this thinking in many queer theorists’ rejection of feminism that understands men and women as sexed classes. It is probably most clearly expressed in Wilchins, Queer Theory, Gender Theory,

Feminism may have torn down many gender boundaries. But by unconsciously basing itself on binary genders, it has actually solidified structures like male/female, man/woman, masculine/feminine in new and unexpected ways. Woman turns out not only to be opposed to Man, but in some fundamental way—just as light requires dark—it actually produces binary notions of Man and Manhood. After all, what could it mean to be a Woman if not for Man and Masculinity? The terms are not only completely interdependent, like all binaries; moreover, they act to squeeze whatever doesn’t fit, whatever queers the binary out of existence. In this way, feminism has actually helped obscure ideas of gender transgression (and the political needs to those who gender transgress) by articulating its politics as everyone was divided neatly, naturally, into binary Boys and Girls.

Of course, contemporary trans activism and scholarship is often less theoretical and few people cite Derrida even as they insist binaries are inherently oppressive hierarchies. However, the rejection of understanding our (sexually reproducing) species as comprising of male and female people is deeply entrenched within it. Within this thinking, then, the statement ‘men oppress women’ would be seen to reinforce the binary of male and female and arrange them in a hierarchy which also reinforces men’s power over women. Anybody who understands male and female as sex categories can come under fire for this, but feminists (who are mostly female) face particular hostility for doing so in the interests of protecting women’s sex-based rights. They are accused of upholding patriarchy using biological essentialism while perpetuating transphobia which is particularly dangerous for trans women from their privileged position of being ‘cis’ women.

We see this combination of the belief that understanding sex in binary terms upholds oppressive stereotypes and the belief that trans people are a particularly vulnerable group while women are not in need of any protections in spaces where they are vulnerable in papers like Schilt and Westbrook’s “Bathroom Battlegrounds and Penis Panics.”

Raising the specter of the sexual predator in debates around transgender rights should be unmasked for the multiple ways it can perpetuate gender inequality. Under the guise of “protecting” women, critics reproduce ideas about their weakness; depict males as assailants, and work to deny rights to transgender people. Moreover, they suggest that there should be a hierarchy of rights in which cisgender women and children are more deserving of protections than transgender people.

This is repeated in popular outlets like the Guardian which often publishes articles, like this one by Rebecca Solnit saying things like: “Trans women pose no threat to cis-women, but we pose a threat to them if we make them outcasts and pariahs (and insisting they use men’s bathrooms endangered them horribly)” This is, of course a false dilemma. The options are not “regard trans women as sexual predators, treat them as pariahs and have no concern for their safety” or “happily open up spaces which have been single sex for reasons of privacy and safety to anybody who identifies as a woman.” Solnit is incoherent in her assertion that trans women are horribly endangered if forced to enter single sex male spaces but that no danger is presented at all by enabling any of those dangerous men to enter single sex female spaces as long as they identify as a woman at the time they do so. We can accept that only a tiny minority of men commit sexual offences and that sex offenders who attack strangers have a high degree of recidivism and will go to great lengths to seek out victims in spaces where they are vulnerable. Arguably, we have seen the clearest evidence of this in prisons. While increasing numbers of people are accepting that self-ID in prisons, (and elsewhere) endangers women and positive moves have been made to prevent this, queer theorists and trans activists influenced by queer theory still typically do not and continue to present the feminists who address this most strongly as the dangerous ones.

Consequently, notions of patriarchy, misogyny and the oppression of women by men within the dominant Critical Social Justice theories are, at best, confusing and highly qualified, and at worst, downright incoherent and lacking in anything recognisably feminist. The concept of intersectionality takes many binaries like black/white, man/woman, cis/trans, heterosexual/homosexual, coloniser/colonised, thin/fat, able-bodied/disabled and deems one to be dominant and the other marginalised, one to be oppressive and the one oppressed and throws them all together and then attempts to position and rank people according to how many marginalised identities they hold. Women as a group only hold one and so they do not register on the intersectional calculator unless they hold another for this to intersect with. In addition to this, although the framework is intended to factor in all marginalised identities, in practice, race and gender identity have become increasing focal points for activists with sex, sexuality, weight and disability often seeming like afterthoughts. With the advent of the ‘white women’s tears’ and ‘Karen’ memes presenting white women as particularly dangerous to black men and the main obstacle for trans activists being feminists pointing out how self-ID conflicts with women’s rights, women feature strongly on the ‘oppressor’ end of the two most influential identity binaries. Therefore, Analia, there can be no straightforward theorising about women as oppressed by men, because once all the necessary qualifications and adjustments have been made on the grounds of race and gender identity, ‘women’ as a class have disappeared.