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Sept. 8, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
35:48
Laurie Penny and the Festival of Dangerous Ideologues
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So recently Laurie Penny gave an hour-long talk about her book Lost Boys and she did it at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House.
If you don't know what that is, I think I can explain it to you by simply saying it should have been called the Festival of Dangerous Ideologues.
Now this talk is very important for understanding a specific strain of radical feminism that is incredibly mainstream and as such I'll probably split this into two videos.
I honestly think that this is quite important for people to understand though and Laurie Penny is very articulate and she can explain her positions very clearly.
But before we begin, who is Laurie Penny?
Laurie Penny, I'm sure needs no introduction to this audience.
She's a feminist, journalist and author whose books include Unspeakable Things, Cybersexism and Meat Market.
She writes and speaks on social justice, pop culture, gender issues and digital politics for numerous news sources including The Guardian, The New York Times, Vice and Salon.
And with that, I think you know everything you need to know about Laurie Penny, except for one thing.
Okay, I didn't actually mean to make this the starting frame of this clip, but watch her hand.
Do you think that sports in general?
Wait, did she just pick her nose and then put the bogey in her mouth?
Very classy, Laurie.
Have a role to play in the over-masculine, masculined society that we have, and would we be better off seeing women's sports to be more represented in that same sphere to give a bit of a balance?
Would that empower women as maybe men feel empowered by that cultural identity?
God, this is a really interesting question.
I begin to think you're going to be asked a question about sports today.
And I'm completely the wrong person to answer this question because, like, as you can see, I'm super sporty.
No, look, I've always been a nerdy weedy goth, and I hated school sports so much.
And like, one of the best bits about leaving school was never having to do that again.
And, you know, I still have flashbacks.
It was awful.
I can't imagine how much more awful it was for, you know, I went to a posh British school, and the guys that I knew well enough to speak to at school, they would come in from the rugby field with like broken noses, broken arms, and this was considered like part of education.
I don't know about you, but it comes as no surprise to me that Laurie Penny is an upper-class nose picker who went to a posh school and doesn't like physical activities.
In fact, reviles them so much, she doesn't understand why people participate in them.
And for some reason, Laurie Penny feels qualified enough to not only give a talk about masculinity, but to write a book about it.
So that's pretty much, I think, all you need to know about Laurie Penny going into this.
Oh, except for the time that she got famously owned by historian David Starkey after she tried some post-modernist bullshit on him.
I was wondering, where are you domiciled for tax purposes?
I am domiciled here and I pay full taxes.
And can I just say, as you have chosen, as you have chosen to be personal and invidious, let me share a little story with you.
One of the great things that is essential to Britishness is a sense of public duty.
That you do things for nothing with organisations that can't pay.
Ms. Penny, who has been advertising these great left-wing virtues and I, were due to debate for a very impoverished little society called the Thomas Paine Society on the virtues of a republic on the one hand and a monarchy on the other.
I was prepared to do it for free.
She insisted on trying to charge such a large fee that the event had to be cancelled.
Now, I think that is as mean, that is as mean, that is as mean and grasping as some runt comedian.
And I will not be lectured to by a jumped-up public schoolgirl like you.
I came from the bottom, and I will not have it.
Excuse me.
May I. May I respond to that?
I think I deserve a right of reply to that.
I personally feel that asking to be.
Did you or did you not do what I've just said?
I was going to respond to that, but why not do it straight away?
Did you or did you not claim such a large fee that the event had to be cancelled?
No, I did.
I didn't.
Well, then, then every member of the committee is lying, and you clearly, as usual, are telling the truth.
Ooh, I will go and get some ice water for that burn.
Anyway, Laurie, why don't you tell us what you're going to do?
What I'm going to do is I'm going to read a short piece from a chapter of my book called Lost Boys, and then we're going to do some QA and get to the real meat of the stuff.
Okay, but don't you have some kind of social justice ablution to perform first?
I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land and their elders past and present and their ongoing struggles for justice.
Very good.
You'll be going to confession next.
For many centuries, money, power, and the ability to create large amounts of random bloody carnage have been concentrated in the hands of a few men.
Usually white men, usually European men, and usually the richest and the most well-connected.
Oh my god, where to even begin with this?
Yes, Laurie, the most powerful people in society are usually the richest and most well-connected.
That I don't think is going to come as a surprise to anyone.
And if Europeans are, in the last few hundred years, the ones doling out to the majority of the bloodshed, it's only because non-Europeans taught them how.
Nobody is innocent throughout history, but let's just go and see what I can pull off the top of my head.
I mean, let's begin with, say, the Persians, and then the Carthaginians, and then the Huns, then the Persians again, and then the Arabs, and the Moors, and the Turks, and the Mongols, then the Turks again, then the Timurids, and then the Turks again, and then finally, the Europeans.
And aside from the Europeans in that list, these are the people who have invaded Europe.
And this is not even considering the countless millions who have died at the hands of non-Europeans all throughout history.
People who didn't even know what Europe was.
Put simply, Laurie, if you were going to take a snapshot of what the average conqueror throughout history looked like, his hair would be very dark, his skin would be brown, his face would be craggy and rugged, and probably bearded.
And he would think very little of the rights of women when he was enslaving them after having recently slaughtered all of the men of their family.
But go on, tell me about Europeans, Laurie.
Tell me about how awful Europeans are.
Between them, these men represent only a fraction of the total male population, and yet every man and boy is expected to aspire to be just like them.
And every woman is expected to aspire to be in their company.
Are these expectations or are these observations?
Because what you have just described is very desirable for very many people.
They want success, they want fame, they want power, they want influence, they want a partner who has these things in the case of a lot of women.
You seem to be talking from the top down as if someone has constructed this system deliberately to be like this instead of understanding that this system has been constructed from the bottom up by human desires and shaped by human nature into the system that we now have today.
And what you are most complaining about really is a system that is designed to achieve results.
Hard work produces results.
People want results.
They want power and influence and money and you don't get these things without hard work.
There is no magical man in the sky that is gifting these things through what I'm sure you will term patriarchy.
Patriarchy does not mean the rule of men.
It means the rule of fathers.
Literally, the rule of powerful heads of household over everybody else in society.
Okay, but that's a really silly definition and it's going to completely disprove everything that you're saying.
We don't live in a hereditary system.
We live in modern democracies in the West.
So you're literally wrong.
There's literally no way of demonstrating that we live in what you have just defined as a patriarchy.
You would have actually had a lot more success with this sophistry if you had just stuck to men.
Men further down the chain have always been expected to be content with having power over women in order to make up for their lack of control over the rest of their lives.
The word patriarchy is a particularly hard one to hear, describing, as it does, a structure of economic and sexual oppression centuries old, in which only a few men were granted power.
Patriarchy.
Not the rule of men, but the rule of fathers and of father figures.
Most individual men do not rule very much and they never have.
Most individual men don't have a lot of power and now the small amount of social and sexual superiority they held over women is being questioned.
And that's got a sting.
I'm not really interested in your concern trolling.
What I'm interested in is who you think you are talking about.
Because to me, it sounds like you're talking to a man from the 50s.
You are speaking as if women's liberation never happened.
As if women are still confined to the home.
As if marriage rates aren't plummeting.
As you said, most individual men don't have a lot of power and they never have.
My question then is why are you punching down at these powerless men?
From your platform, from your books, from your newspapers, why are you attacking them?
I know that you think you're attacking patriarchy, but you're actually not.
You're actually using this kind of collectivist nonsense to attack individuals.
And let's just talk about your definition of patriarchy.
The father, the head of the household.
Well, as I said, we don't live in a patriarchy.
I'm using statistics from the United States, but they're broadly representative of the Western world.
But in the US, 43% of children don't live with their father.
For almost half of the children in America, there can be no patriarchy.
By your definition, because there simply isn't a man around to enforce it.
And that is assuming that every father who still lives with his family is the oppressive, domineering, emotionless, heartless beast you're portraying them out with.
The sort of people who are actually concerned with power over others.
Because believe it or not, most people aren't concerned with power.
Most people really don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about it.
In my experience, it seems that feminists are the ones always talking about power and how to achieve it.
Most people in relationships are just trying to get by, put some food on the table, pay the rent, and maybe, just maybe try to be decent human beings as they do it.
Benefiting from patriarchy doesn't make you a bad person, although it does very little to help you be a better one.
The test of character, as with everyone who finds themselves in a position of power over others, is what you do with that realization.
And what do you do from your podium at the Sydney Opera House Laurie?
What do you do in your books?
You try to make men feel ashamed that they are part of something called the patriarchy, which is the rule of fathers.
Well, shall we have a look at what happens when you don't have a father in the house to provide structure and guidance?
The first thing you get is poverty, to nobody's great surprise, and to your lack of experience.
Children in father-absent homes are almost four times more likely to be poor.
In 2011, 12% of children in married couple families were living in poverty, compared to 44% of children in mother-only families.
But of course, Laurie Penny doesn't care about that, because she's never lived in poverty.
What she's concerned about is power.
But what about drug and alcohol abuse?
What about physical and emotional well-being?
What about educational achievement?
What about crime?
Almost all of these, of course, can be ameliorated with wealth.
And so, it's no wonder Laurie Penny doesn't understand any of them.
Patriarchy through most of human history is what has oppressed and constrained men and boys as well as women.
No, that is absolutely 100% wrong.
Scarcity is what has constrained men and boys and women and girls throughout all of history.
Scarcity and the need to eat, the needs to be warm and the need to be safe.
These have been the most constraining things throughout all of human history.
And what you are calling the patriarchy is the near universal human response to scarcity and danger.
But as a remarkably privileged white girl who has never had to want a day in her life, it does not surprise me that you cannot understand this.
Patriarchy is a top-down system of male dominance that is established with violence or with the threat of violence.
When feminists say patriarchy hurts men too, this is what we really mean.
It's become very clear that you don't know what you mean.
You think in the West we live in a patriarchy, even though we have elected officials, something like 30-35% of which are female.
You think that individual men as fathers participate in a patriarchy, despite nearly half of them not even living with their families.
Laurie Penny, you have failed to accurately describe reality.
What you have described is nonsense.
And I know it's nonsense, not because of the facts, not because of the statistics, because you are standing on stage talking to a room full of women and feminist men about how awful the patriarchy is.
If there was genuinely a patriarchy, you wouldn't be doing this.
Patriarchy is painful and violent and hard for men to opt out of and bound up with the economic and class system of capitalism.
Capitalism is not a class system.
I found that when I speak to men about gender and violence, the word patriarchy is one of the hardest for them to hear.
Modern economics creates few winners, so a lot of men are left feeling like losers.
You know what, I don't like defending capitalism.
There is so much about capitalism that is flawed and needs regulation.
In my opinion, quite stringent regulation.
But someone in a Western society saying that modern economics creates few winners is just laughable.
The condition of the poor before capitalism was just so much worse than afterwards.
It's just manifest how much better it is to be poor in a capitalist society than in one of the alternatives.
As Ayn Rand observed, capitalism didn't invent poverty, it inherited it.
In America in 1870, the average worker worked 3,069 hours a year.
By 1913, he was working 2,632 hours a year and enjoying a much greater standard of living.
Take the example of how long it takes to earn the money to buy a half gallon of milk.
56 minutes in 1900 down to 31 minutes in 1930.
And even greater is the difference between how much it costs to afford 100 kilowatt hours of electricity, 107 hours in 1900, but 11 hours in 1930.
Because this is how capitalism really shines.
Mass production reduces the prices of necessities.
This is directly how you improve the lives of the poor without debasing your own currency.
Frankly, this is one of the reasons I'm against sales taxes.
They disproportionately target the poor.
But the thing is, I'm sure this isn't what Laurie Penny is actually talking about.
Because by this standard, capitalism has created many winners, even if they're at the bottom end of the capitalist system.
What she's talking about are billionaires.
She's talking about the Donald Trumps of capitalism.
And, you know, I agree.
I think that the worst excesses of capitalism, a system that organizes society around competition, is that some people are going to win this competition.
And they're going to win so big it's going to hoard money from other people.
If current trends continue, 1% of the population will own more of the world's wealth than the other 99% by 2016.
And it's this 1% that Lori Penny is talking about when she says, Modern economics creates few winners, so a lot of men are left feeling like losers.
And this must be what she's talking about.
Because viewed from the other perspective, modern economics has created millions upon millions of winners.
So to answer your point, Laurie, no.
Men are not considered to be losers if they don't become rich and famous and powerful.
That's stupid.
That is, like almost everything else you have done, a misrepresentation of reality.
And a loser is the last thing a man is supposed to be.
Obviously, nobody wants to be a loser, man or woman.
But this really highlights the sophistry involved here.
She's created a false dichotomy.
If you're not one of the richest, most powerful people in the country or in the world, then you must feel like a loser.
It's also very relative.
Maybe for someone who had Laurie Penny's very privileged upbringing, that might cause someone to feel like a loser, but for someone who was, say, raised on a council estate, to pull yourself into the middle class, one of millions, will make you the envy of everyone you grew up with.
But either way, I really don't think that a wealthy woman should be trying to establish that she knows the feelings and thoughts and motivations of poor men.
I don't think that her life experience gives her enough information to be able to understand what's going on.
Losers aren't real men, desirable men, strong men, and if neoliberals, if neoliberalism is creating more losers, it must be because men aren't being properly appreciated, and it's probably the fault of feminism and not fiscal management.
As the Spartans said in reply to the Macedonians, when Philip said, if we come to your lands, we will burn Sparta to the ground.
If.
You have not proven anything.
Your proposition is faulty.
Your logic is flawed, and what you have created is a straw man of what actual men think.
This is the heart of sophist rhetoric.
You are talking nonsense, Laurie.
And it disturbs me that so many people think your anti-liberal, collectivist ideological position is so credible.
Neoliberalism may have set up vast swathes of people to fail, but the real problem isn't allowed to be a crisis of capitalism, so it has to be a crisis of gender.
Neoliberalism is what's giving people the opportunity to succeed.
But you're not a liberal, so I wouldn't expect you to understand.
You're just simply reaping the benefits of that system, and then telling everyone what a terrible system it is.
But tell me, how exactly did you come to the conclusion that everyone else is making this a crisis of gender when that is exclusively what feminism focuses on?
It is, of course, feminists making this a crisis of gender because that's all they know how to talk about.
Across the global north and south, people are realizing how they've been cheated of social, financial, and personal power by their elected representatives and unelected elites.
But young men still learn that their identity and virility depends on being powerful.
What I hear most from the men and boys who contact me is that they feel less powerful than they expected to be and they don't know who to blame.
Bollocks.
The great obstacle to women's progress is not men's hate, but their fear.
The men's rights activists who organize to drown out and silence women on the internet are usually fearful, lonely creatures who are desperate to speak about gender, but are only able to do so in the context of shutting women down.
Lonely and powerless creatures who organize to shut women down, to the extent where you have to bring them up in your book and this talk.
I'm sure you don't see any contradiction there, but let's talk about your collectivist nonsense.
Instead of these being individuals who are just simply disagreeing with what is being said by feminists on the internet, male and female, you are attempting to expropriate the label of women from individual women and force them to be part of a collective group that feminists claim to speak for when they don't.
62% of women do not consider themselves to be feminists.
And so you do not get to say that because men are disagreeing with feminists on the internet, men you think are MRAs, whether they are or aren't, that does not mean that they are shutting down women.
And it's a weird linguistic trick that you're pulling by dehumanizing yourselves.
You're not even individuals with goals and motivations and ideological beliefs now.
You're simply reduced to your biological and gender classifications.
You are simply just women.
That expression of fear comes from a profoundly childish place.
A posture which is as fascist in its policing of gender roles as a playground bully, but which uses words like feminazi with apparent seriousness.
Because fighting for equality is what the Nazis were known for.
Actually, the Nazis were known for dehumanizing people by reducing them to the arbitrary categorizations of which they were born into.
Which is exactly what feminists do when they say women or men.
And the patriarchy is your very own international Jewish conspiracy.
Congratulations.
But that's beside the point.
I'm more concerned about why you think you know how they feel.
It is as if by talking about the hurt that women experience, often just because we are women, we are somehow preventing men from speaking about the painful pressures of masculinity.
And then you follow it up with...
Interestingly for many men, the only time they do feel able to talk about their own suffering is that when they're trying to stop women from talking about theirs.
In every other context, men and boys are discouraged from talking about their pain.
Thinking in a new way about sex, gender, and power, call it feminism or masculine or whatever the hell you like, as long as you do it.
It can help men to process that pain.
But it's easier just to blame women.
And then you unironically end up saying this.
I want to say, I know that we have spent quite a lot of this talk talking about women when a lot of people came to a talk that was meant to be about men.
And I want to say, get used to that.
It's hard not to see a privileged white woman demonstrate how entitled she is by telling everyone else that she should come first.
As more and more women and girls and a growing number of male allies start speaking out against sexism and injustice, a curious thing is happening.
Some people are complaining that speaking about prejudice is prejudice itself.
Look, don't even try to pretend that you have ever been the victim of injustice.
And once again, you have managed to misrepresent what people are complaining about.
They are, of course, not saying that speaking out against prejudice is prejudice.
You are claiming that you know what all men are thinking.
And you think all men are power-hungry sociopathic control freaks who want to oppress women for their own personal gratification and ego.
I don't know whether you've noticed, Laurie, but that is prejudice.
Increasingly, before we talk about misogyny, women are asked to modify our language so that we don't hurt men's feelings.
Don't say men oppress women, that's sexism, and it's just as bad as any sexism women ever have to handle and probably worse.
Instead, say some men oppress women.
Whatever you do, don't generalise because that's something men do.
Are you sure it's not something feminists do?
It's not about how men feel.
It's about you and what you're doing.
Because what you're doing is broadly inaccurate.
And surely you don't want to base your position on a falsehood just to satisfy your own prejudices.
And secondly, good people don't embrace their own prejudices so readily.
This type of semantic squabbling isn't a very effective way of getting women to shut up.
After all, most of us grew up learning that being a good girl was all about putting other people's feelings ahead of our own.
We aren't supposed to say what we think if there's a chance it might upset somebody else or worse make them angry with us.
It's more that vulgar displays of bigotry are not socially acceptable.
You are complaining that you do not get to indulge the very worst of human nature.
I see this used as a silencing technique across the social justice movements with which I've been associated.
Black people are asked to consider the feelings of white people before they speak about their own experience.
Gay and transsexual people are asked not to be too angry because it makes straight people feel uncomfortable.
And so we start to stifle our speech with apologies, caveats, and soothing sounds.
We reassure our friends and loved ones that, of course, you're not one of those ones.
You're not one of those racists or those homophobes or those men who hate women.
Are you saying that everyone is all of those things?
Because it sounds like you are confessing to being a man-hater.
What we don't say is, of course, not all men hate women, but culture hates women.
How do you think you can say something like that and not have it challenged?
Culture hates women.
Are you fucking mad?
I would really love it after this if people could just tweet me their favourite phrase from Laurie Penny.
I think my favourite one is culture hates women.
That's just on its own, just a slice of insanity.
Just put out there, she just says it as if it's axiomatically true.
Just unbelievable.
I mean, I don't even know that we need a better word than sophistry because that doesn't even sound believable.
And men who grow up in a sexist culture have a tendency to do and say sexist things, sometimes without meaning to.
We aren't judging you for who you are, but that doesn't mean we're not asking you to change your behaviour.
What you feel about women in your heart is actually of less immediate importance than how you treat them on a daily basis.
You can be the gentlest, sweetest man in the world and still benefit from sexism and still hesitate to speak up when you see women hurt and discriminated against.
And that is how oppression works.
Thousands of otherwise decent people are persuaded to go along with an unfair system because changing it seems like too much bother.
The appropriate response when somebody demands a change in that system is to listen rather than turn away or yell as a child might that it's not your fault.
Of course it's not your fault.
I'm sure you're lovely.
That doesn't mean you don't have a responsibility to do something about it.
Imagine what it must be like to be the product of a wealthy home, to go to the best schools, to have the highest education possible, to be able to stand on a stage in front of thousands of other people and tell them that you are oppressed and that it's not their fault, but they still have to be responsible for it.
Just imagine anyone else on earth doing this other than a wealthy white woman.
That is what privilege looks like.
Society tends to discourage us from thinking structurally.
Pondering upsetting things like poverty, racism and sexism as parts of a larger architecture of violence does not come easy in a culture that prefers that we all see ourselves as free-acting individuals.
But the body politic is riddled with bigotry like an infection.
You can't see it or touch it until it breaks out on the skin, but it's there under the surface, bursting and separating in individual wounds that suggest something else is going on there.
Your friend is raped by another friend at a party.
Your colleague has to leave work because she can't afford full-time childcare.
Your daughter comes home sobbing that she feels fat and refuses to eat dinner.
It's simpler and less scary to imagine all of these things as individual unrelated experiences rather than part of a structure of sexism that infects everybody, even you.
You think a woman being raped at a party and a teenage girl feeling insecure about her body are directly connected?
That is the most wacko conspiracy theory I have ever heard.
And I love me a good conspiracy theory.
But seriously, that is absolutely mental.
It is insane to suggest that underneath society is a secret structure of sexism built by men for the express purpose of oppressing women.
You are a fucking fruitcake, Laurie Penny.
It should not, therefore, be as difficult as it is to explain to the average human male that while you, individual man, going about your daily business, eating crisps and playing Bioshock, may not hate and hurt women, men as a group, men as a structure do hate women.
Men as a group hate women.
That's what you have said, Laurie.
That is honestly your position as far as I can tell.
And I'm only saying this because I can't believe anyone would be so crazy as to adopt that as their position.
I don't know whether you've noticed.
I mean, obviously you haven't.
But men are not a group.
Men are not a structure.
They are a demographic.
I do not believe that the majority of men are too stupid to understand this distinction.
And if they are, we really need to step up our efforts to stop them running almost every global government.
Once more, your sophistry gets away from you.
Do you not recall saying, Most individual men do not rule very much, and they never have.
The people you are talking about are so few and far between that it is unfair to use the general category of men.
Because that doesn't connect them.
That doesn't bind them.
It doesn't give them a shared interest or purpose.
And they certainly don't see each other as brethren or comrades or in any way allies in the grand patriarchal plan to oppress women.
You paranoid conspiracy nutcase.
They are individuals.
They act as individuals.
They are not in any way tied together.
Anger is an entirely appropriate response to learning that you're implicated in a system that oppresses women, but the solution isn't to direct that anger back at women.
The solution isn't to shut down debate by accusing us of reverse sexism as if that will somehow balance out the problem and stop you feeling so uncomfortable.
Everyone is uncomfortable when they are around an unrepentant bigot of any stripe.
A racist, a sexist, a homophobe.
When someone is just preaching hate and trying to come up with any number of excuses why this hate is acceptable.
Whether it's the black people commit all the crimes, the gayer gender, the Jews, or men controlling everything through the patriarchy, when someone is so indiscriminately hateful to a certain demographic based on their natural properties, everyone gets embarrassed for that person.
Saying that all men are implicated in a culture of sexism, all men, not just some men, may sound like an accusation.
In fact, it is a challenge.
You, individual man, with your individual dreams and desires, did not ask to be born into a world where being a boy gave you social and sexual advantages over girls.
What social and sexual advantages?
You keep saying this, but you never substantiate it.
You're on a stage preaching about how awful boys are, these advantages that they have, and how they're all responsible for a conspiracy theory that none of them have any idea about but are apparently all implicated in.
This is not much of an advantage as far as I can tell.
You don't want to live in a world where women get raped and then told they provoked it in a court of law.
Where women's work is poorly paid or unpaid, where we are called sluts and whores for demanding simple sexual equality.
You did not choose any of this.
What you do get to choose right now is what happens next.
You can choose as a man to help create a fairer world for women and for men too.
You can choose to challenge misogyny and sexual violence wherever you see them.
You can choose to take risks and spend energy supporting women, promoting women, treating the women in your life as true equals.
You can choose to stand up and say no.
And every day, more men and boys are making that choice.
The question is: will you be one of them?
And Laurie sums up exactly what she's after.
Very candidly.
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