The Lassies-oh
The womanosphere and a bit o' politics
A Shot of KOHJAK
Today on Nørrebrogade, the main street in the neighbourhood of Copenhagen in which I live, I encountered the annual march celebrating International Women’s Day (IWD) which temporarily halted traffic. I was prompted to do a little bit of research on the subject and discovered, very pleasingly for a hoary old red like myself, that the earliest version of International Women’s Day was organized by the Socialist Party of America in 1909. Following that, the 1910 Socialist International in Copenhagen (yay!) approved the concept with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself being the one who set the present date of 8th March later in 1922. I was reminded, as I often am, that these kinds of things – basically anything which purports to evoke the deeply unfashionable notion of what we might call ‘solidarity’ – often have their origins in the history of what all of the people peeking out of the Overton Window and waving at the rest of us would probably condemn and dismiss as ‘the far left’. I was also reminded of an IWD dinner I once spent in Kiev, Ukraine in the spring of 1994, when I was a guest of Kiev City Council for a month or so, part of a cultural twinning arrangement they had, and possibly still have, with Edinburgh City Council. The people at the event I attended were mainly teachers, cultural bureaucrats and various public figures who played a role in musical pedagogy. This was a weird time in Ukraine, close enough to the fall of the USSR for it still to be visible in the rear view mirror, and with a future that seemed both economically and politically uncertain, cautiously optimistic yet seemingly caught in a whirlpool created by the opposing currents of two kinds of algorithm, both of which alone were equally ill-suited to the organization of a functioning society. But a sweeter more welcoming and hospitable group of people it would have been be hard to find. I can only wonder, and almost not dare think, when reading reports of the carnage taking place in their land, about how they are doing these days. Vodka, bubbly wine and Russian cognac (from a bottle pleasingly labelled ‘KOHJAK’, for you 70’s kids) flowed and innumerable toasts and speeches were made, sincere, ironic, tearful, sentimental and self-effacing on the subject of how precious were the female of the species and how the mothers, daughters and wives of Ukraine were unique and a blessing to us all. At least that’s what I made up, based on what I observed of the body language and intonation of those who spoke and the reactions of those who listened. The music teacher who had been my sidekick for the whole trip, and had painstakingly translated everything in my ear at the start of the evening understandably gave up after a while once people got a bit pissed and became too long winded. My hazy recollections of the evening include a point at which everyone heartily sang a Ukrainian song in praise of women to the accompaniment of a red-faced man played the trombone. But here’s a thing; I don’t at any point remember a single woman who made a speech or proposed a toast.
Alas, no
On Nørrebrogade I watched the marchers file past to music blasting from a DJ on a truck, mostly women of course, but also a fair smattering of men. Many bore banners and placards with slogans that were more than simple expressions of unity but which honed in on specific issues, female refugees, violence against women etc. I wondered how anyone whatsoever could take exception to a celebration of this kind, a demonstration of support for an obviously good cause. There are of course many who do, although the doltish ‘But Why Don’t We Have An International Mens Day’ lobby seem more subdued of late, possibly because they’re concentrating on less complicated and more brutishly sloganeering (and therefore attention-grabbing) concerns. I’ve written briefly somewhat earlier on here on the subject of masculinity, patriarchy and indeed ‘the’ patriarchy. As a cis baby-boomer man I’m acutely aware of my privilege, ignorance and unwitting complicity in much of what I imagine many of the people marching past me on IWD are against. However I’ve generally consoled myself with the vague belief that things must be, as they say, ‘getting better', and that despite the idiocies of incel culture and the manosphere (a term which seems exactly as ugly, unwieldy and clumsy as those who operate within it) we are somehow seeing the light. Alas no. Apparently 33% of Gen Z males believe that women should ‘obey’ husbands, as opposed to 13% of boomer men. Interestingly 18% of Gen Z women also believe that women should obey their husbands. Excuse me? Let me run that past you and me again – a higher percentage of Gen Z women (14-29 year olds) than boomer men (61-80 year olds) believe that women should ‘obey’ their husbands. What, in the name of all that is fuck, is going on here?
Kind of churlish
As a young man in the 70s and 80s I remember immersing myself in reading what I felt was a canon of writers who were identified as having a ‘womens lib’ agenda – your Germaine Greers and Gloria Steinems, but also popular contemporary novelists like Erica Jong, Marilyn French and Lise Alther, all of whom wrote very readable, often funny works which illuminated some corner of a female world which had previously been hidden from me. To be curious about this stuff seemed natural, and I couldn’t understand why, as a bloke, you wouldn’t want to know more about those people to whom you were attracted, but who were in some essential ways treated differently by the power infrastructure in which you lived. Who wouldn’t want to know that stuff ? And, it seemed to me the more you read, the more the notion of men and women being of equal status seemed to be what in Danish they call a ‘selvfølge', a ‘self-follow’ or an ‘of course’. At the back of ones head was always, of course, the thought: am I doing this, reading this stuff, taking all of this on board for the right reasons or am I just trying to be teachers pet? Am I being what these days would be referred to disparagingly by men as a ‘simp’ and equally disparagingly by women as a ‘nice guy’?
Mind you, in the 80’s much of this stuff was coming out in a world in which ‘sexual liberation’ for women basically meant that it was still regarded as kind of churlish of you if you were a woman and didn’t have sex with someone you were even a little bit attracted to on the first meeting, far less the first date. And of course any awareness of the spectrum of sexual orientations, never mind gender identities, was a good deal narrower at that time. It’s hardly surprising then that there should have arisen a degree of disillusionment about the extent of this so-called liberation. In that context I’d recommend a look at some Andrea Dworkin – usually thought of as the original feminist who ‘went too far’ but actually a challenging, radical writer whose genuinely scary and bracing writings such as Intercourse can give men the absolute heebie jeebies, especially if they think they are off the hook because they see themselves as being vaguely ‘supportive’ of women.
Gonzo Anti-feminism
However, of all the scenarios one might have predicted, a return to trad-wifeyness would not have been top of my list. Personally I suspect that there is a rather depressing answer to this question which has broader sociopolitical implications. Simply put, there is currently a lot of money to be made from the promotion of ideologies that position themselves as a backlash against the progressive agenda of the previous generations and in the sale of reactionary alternatives to that agenda. If you are young and have been, even for a second, tempted by ultra nationalism, white supremacism, unfettered fiscal neo-liberalism or gonzo anti-feminism then there will be someone on social media assuring you that you are part of a new zeitgeist, a long overdue triumph of common sense which will, incidentally and as a fun by-product, benefit you, personally but will also require you to sign up for ‘courses’ in financial hustling, ‘courses’ in duping women into having sex with you, or would like you to donate to Tommy bleeding Robinson’s legal fees. I suspect that the progressive left, while not entirely above this kind of grift, has traditionally been slower off the mark and less brazen in lauding the praises of, for example, not treating women like second class citizens. Hence it’s only now that we’re seeing some young people coming out as good old fashioned left wing ‘radicals’, the so-called ‘Gen Z revolutionaries’I hear about in Denmark. Even at that, there seems now to be a gender split with girls and young women tending to be more left-orientated than boys and men. Now, I’ve probably never told you this before, but I’m fortunate enough to live in a day to day world almost entirely populated by women: I have a female partner, 2 daughters, no sons, a granddaughter and two female cats. I find myself, as Robert Burns once put it, ‘among the lassies-oh’, or in what I hope will never again be referred to after this sentence as the ‘womanosphere’. Consequently my contact with the manosphere has been limited. However I can’t help but feel that what’s happening here between young men and women is like one of those labyrinthine ‘Knot’ poems created by R.D Laing in which a chain of expectations and assumptions end up tumbling over each other like voices in a Bach chorale.
We (young men) think that they (young women) will only approve of us if they admire our ability to be assertive and go-getting. They think that our approval of them is dependent on them thinking that what they see as pig-headedness is actually assertiveness and so they pretend to be less assertive than they actually are in order to make us think that they think we’re more assertive than we are, relative to them. Our lack of belief in our own assertiveness leads us to think that we’ll never win their approval, no matter what we do, and so we make a show of not valuing their approval while secretly believing that they approve of us not valuing their approval, because we think they think that shows how even more assertive we are….
You get the idea.
Comically Nazi-sounding name
In other news, Mette Frederiksen the Danish Prime Minister, evidently buoyed up by a recent boost in the polls as the result of her perceived handling of the Greenland ‘situation’ and consequently coming over all atypically smiley of late, has recently called a General Election for March 24th. The word on the street is that we’ll end up with either a ‘red majority’, in other words a coalition of left, centre left, hardly-left-at-all and a-bit-righty parties, or we’ll get what we have now, which is the same, but minus the left and including actual right-wing parties though excluding the Weird-Racist-OK-Lets-Face-It-Actual-Fascist-ey factions or WROLFIAFs as I’ve just this second decided I’d like to call them. This latter scenario is that which at the last election was given the nickname ‘hands across the middle’, which sounds like a yoga pose and is, as you’re probably not surprised to hear, less wholesome than that might suggest. Like in almost every other country everywhere, the so-called centre-left in Denmark, namely the Social Democrats who hold power at the moment, have a massive problem deciding exactly how racist they need to pretend to be in order to succeed in reeling in some of the WROLFIAFs, and to appeal to a putative constituency of Danes who 1. aren’t keen on brown people but 2. are keen on publicly-funded free social services. The fiscally Right parties among the WROLFIAFs, are of course not troubled by any such concerns, as they align themselves firmly with 1. but not 2 and could never be tempted over to what they would see as the lefty dark-side of a welfare state. However in Denmark, possibly uniquely in Europe, there are some among the WROLFIAFs who, being racist Danish nationalists, are still firmly behind 1, but nevertheless hold a weird sentimental attachment to 2 because of its essential…well…Danishness. In other words there are racist nationalists who are a bit fond of free healthcare and all that. The Danish Peoples Party, led by a politician with the almost comically Nazi-sounding name of Morten Messerschmidt are an example of the latter.
To complicate matters further, there is a wide urban/rural – left/right split with a powerful farming lobby, who traditionally support the right and tend to live in places where there are fewer brown people, are therefore more disturbed by the sight of them and would prefer there to be even fewer of them overall. The ‘farming’ referred to here is the brutally intensive factory farming of pigs, a field in which Denmark is a per-capita world leader with a population of 11.6 million pigs to a human population of about 6 million. The consequence of this is a public health catastrophe in the form of run off into the domestic water supply of what I’m obliged to indelicately refer to as pigs’ pish and pigs’ shite. Because of the aforementioned farming lobby, any meddling by any party whatsoever on this subject has serious consequences for the rural vote. Consequently the left, who don’t have the rural vote anyway and so have nothing to lose, are the only ones who can afford to be outspoken on this issue. At the very least, in a multi party electoral system based on PR there is something approaching a nuanced debate. With so many parties you can generally choose your own particular poison and by definition things tend to be less adversial than in the UK or USA. Although that’s not saying much….