Women in Dark Times

by Jacqueline Rose

  Feminism, we are being told, should wear a mask, pretend to be something else (feminism ‘by any other name’). ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ If there is an allusion to that famous saying, it is surely unconscious; the fragrance of feminism is not what is being talked about. There is also a suggestion here of the ‘love that dare not speak its name’, a subtle or not so subtle homosexual hint. Using lesbianism to dismiss feminism, as in a ‘bunch of lesbians’, is of course a regular anti-feminist ploy. The word feminism upsets people – men, but not only men – too much. It agitates, stirs things up, messes with our minds. Like an ugly stain, blood oozing across the page, Banquo at the feast. As if people offload on to the idea of feminism everything that is unmanageable in life: the secret pathways of the mind, bodies, violence, sex and death. This may well be partly to do with the evocations of the word (its semantic sisterhood, as one might say). Unlike ‘equal rights for women’, feminism brings femininity and femaleness too close – especially the latter with its intimation of the animal under-layer of a civilisation so often claimed as the unique property of the West. Because feminism is unapologetically concerned with how women live, or cannot live, their lives, because it therefore cannot but raise the question of what women are for men (and the reverse), as a political movement it is always in danger – in fact this is the point – of sexualising itself. But assigning feminism, like women, to unreason also serves another purpose. It leaves reason intact as the domain in which mankind continues to invest its credos and its powers, while carrying on with business as usual – pillaging the world, making it unfit for human habitation, and enacting its undiminished, in many ways increasing, violence against women. Claiming reason as a fiefdom is an efficient, if deadly, way of denying what is insane about our world whose instances of unreason, for anyone who chooses to look, are everywhere to see: the unreason of the human soul, the unreason of violence and of our sexual lives, the unreason of state which Europe staged in the last century like never before and whose scars we still bear to this day. Feminism should alert us to the world’s unreason. But it should also insist, like so many of the women in this book, that to respond by making reason’s diktat our sole mantra and guide is as impoverishing as it is deluded and dangerous.

  Pick one newspaper at random on any day of the week. Evidence of cruelty against women is to be found on almost every page.3 In Tahrir Square in July 2013, protesting women, whose voices were so central to the revolutions in Egypt, were surrounded and assaulted by groups of armed thugs. Before raping the women, the men spin them round and strip them naked. Humiliation, as much as sexual violence, seems to be the aim (violence against women must not just be done but must be seen to be done). The women call it ‘the circle of hell’.4 Vigilante groups of rescuers, armed with knives and flame-throwers, surround the women with protective fire and steel, and then find themselves assaulted in turn, the victims of their own defence. A woman in Iran swims twenty kilometres in the Caspian Sea in full Islamic dress, only to have her feat unrecorded because she is a woman – her woman’s body too ­vis­ible as she comes out of the water. In an earlier open water event, from which women are banned, the propellers of police boats trying to stop her from participating had sliced her hip and legs. It would seem that women’s bodies are there to be punished, that the mere sight of them is in itself a punishable offence. On the same page of the newspaper, we are told of two women activists in Saudi Arabia who face jail sentences for delivering a food parcel to a Canadian woman who had told them she was imprisoned in her house and unable to get food for her children. The judge found them guilty of ‘supporting a wife without her husband’s knowledge’. Both women had previously been involved in organising protests on behalf of women. One of them had put herself at risk by posting footage of herself driving a car, which is illegal for women in her country, on YouTube. (Later a cleric will argue that driving risks damaging women’s ovaries, in response to a campaign call for women to take a day of action by taking to the wheel.)5

  In the same week, in the same issue of the paper, two senior women in British publishing are reported as having left the profession – one of her own accord, the other it seems because she was pushed. A few days earlier, W. H. Smith’s woman boss stepped down and, six months before that, the woman who had been running Pearson, the owner of Penguin. All these women were replaced by men. On an adjacent page, we are told that Elizabeth Fry, the English prison and social reformer, is to be replaced by Winston Churchill on the UK £5 note. After an outcry, it is announced that the face of Jane Austen will go on the £10 note, a triumph for feminist protest immediately sullied by the rape and death threats received by Caroline Criado-Perez, who had organised the successful campaign. Kirstie Clements, the former editor of US Vogue, breaks ranks to describe the assault on women’s bodies that is today’s fashion machine. Girls who can’t diet their breasts away have surgical reductions. Mounted on platform heels, they are so thin they cannot stand, and have to be buttressed in case they collapse. One model with so little energy she could barely open her eyes was filmed lying prone next to a fountain to get the last fashion shot.

  All these stories are different, although in the year that has passed since I chose these news items you could select a run of equivalent stories from papers almost every day of the week. Some of them – the £5 note and the demise of women in the publishing industry – can be seen in terms of a backlash against feminism’s past success (the industry is being re-masculinised). But we blind ourselves if we respond to the stories from Tahrir Square or Saudi Arabia by insisting that women are simply freer, that such things do not happen to women, in the West. At the time of writing this, violence against women, and the sexual abuse of young girls, as reported in the UK has reached new heights.6 Something vile is increasingly coming to light. The revelations about Jimmy Savile turn out to be simply the most obvious example. We now know he was just one piece of an entertainment culture where such abuse was as rampant as it was tolerated and ignored, yet the very fact of his quirky fame and popular appeal also allows the scandal to be dismissed as the behaviour of a freak – although not quite, as hundreds of victims of abuse in the industry have stepped forward since the story broke, a strong, steady run of complaints from women speaking of abuse that could not previously be spoken and that shows no sign of diminishing since the Savile story first broke (even if some of these women’s voices are not credited in court due to the decades that have passed, the gap – which psychoanalysis would treat as normal – between trauma and speech). Far harder to dismiss is the dull refrain of violence against young girls which covered the papers in the spring and summer of 2013 both in the UK and the US. The murder of five-year-old April Jones by Mark Bridger, her neighbour in Wales, and of twelve-year-old Tia Sharp by her grandmother’s partner, Stuart Hazell, and then in the US the abduction, sequestration, rape and impregnation of Amanda Berry and two other women in Cleveland, Ohio. We need to be careful. These stories are meant not just to appal but also to excite. The fact remains, as noted by the first report of the agency UN Women, published in 2007, that more than half the working women in the world are without any legal rights, a similar number have no protection again domestic violence, and sexual assault has become a hallmark of modern conflict.7 On International Women’s Day, 8 March 2013, fifty signatories, ranging from human rights lawyers Helena Kennedy and Philippe Sands to singer and songwriter Annie Lennox, observed in a letter to the Guardian that women aged fifteen to forty-four the world over are ‘more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, car accidents, war and malaria combined’.8

  A year later, in spring 2014, domestic violence, female genital mutilation and rape as a weapon of war, now classified as a war crime, are increasingly in the public eye.9 Seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Fahma Mohamed has spoken out on FGM and succeeded in getting the UK government, and the Secretary-General of the UN, to listen. Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Taliban on her way to school in Afghanistan, has shown
to the world the violence women can face if they assert their human right to be educated (to be human, one might say). These hideous acts cannot be equated. Together and separately, they each require a sustained form of reckoning. We can also only hope that the policy changes that have been promised – greater police sensitivity towards domestic violence in the UK, education on FGM in all UK schools, an international public summit on rape in times of war, involving 141 countries, in London in June 2014 – will be sustained and make a difference (although it will of course take much more than any of these separate initiatives). In each case, however, something is being spoken, mostly by women, which has been ignored or hidden away. That in itself is worth noting. More than once in this book we have seen women – Rosa Luxemburg for example – never more hated than when they venture into the realm of public speech. This has been the case more or less whatever they are talking about (although being a revolutionary surely does not help in this regard). We saw an attempt made by the defence in the trial of Shafilea Ahmed’s parents to discredit the speech of their murdered daughter (she had told the police she was in danger). We saw other women, such as Fadime Sahindal, take a public platform at huge risk. Young women like Fahma Mohamed and Malala Yousafzai are, we might say, following on this path: they are not just speaking out as women to a world that does not want to listen; they are daring a form of speech addressed directly, and without apology, at the violence targeted against them.

  There was a time when such talk would be seen to target all men as responsible for the ills of the world. To which other feminists, myself included, would object that to do so is to paint men in only their worst colours, to shut men and also women, with no exit route, inside society’s most debilitating frame. It is also to assume that men are only ever men, that testosterone-fuelled behaviour, as one feminist argument runs, reflects – across the centuries and for all time – who or what men inevitably are and always will be. This is to ignore the fact that, even if many embrace the task all too readily, men, as indeed women, have to be built into their roles. Since Simone de Beauvoir it has been the fundamental premise of feminism that women are not born but made, an argument which assigns sexual identity to the realm of culture and can therefore only work if it also applies to men. Otherwise we enter a weird scenario where men are pure biology, women pure culture, whose only advantage might be that it reverses the prevalent cliché: that women belong in some bodily realm, closer to nature, and men out there in the world, at the heart of public, social life. It is also to ignore the fact that the rise in violence against women over the past years, in the UK at least, has mirrored the country’s economic downturn to which it is a desperate, brutal response.10

  Still we might ask why it is that men turn against women when it is their own masculinity which is threatened, why assaulting a woman is the best way to compensate masculine failing and distress. To ask this question takes us down difficult paths. It is to suggest that when men enact violence against women, they are at once fulfilling their requisite identity but also bearing witness to its frailty. As Nawal Sa’dawi put it in The Hidden Face of Eve, Arab men – but not only Arab men she suggested – cannot abide an intelligent woman because: ‘She knows very well that his masculinity is not real, not an essential truth.’11 So-called masculinity is at once the crudest of weapons and a confidence trick. Like a dodgem car at a fairground, it always knows somewhere that its number might be up at any moment – that it might be sent back to fretting and waiting, often in fury, on the side of the track. It is because asserting masculinity never really works that it has to be done over and over again.

  Most disturbing of all, however, might be the suggestion that there is something about sexual difference that generates violence in and of itself, which might help us understand the agony of feminism, why the progress of women, despite the many hard-won advances or perhaps because of them, is so tortuously slow, liable to go into reverse at any point – which is also why feminism cannot stop and why it is folly to suggest that the task of feminism is done. This is neither a biological argument nor simply one based on culture, but belongs in a murky, not easily graspable place somewhere between the two. A place of unreason where, I have suggested throughout this book, we all, women and men, also reside and which runs through the world, fuelling as much its hatreds as its strengths. What do men see when they look at women? No more or less, one psychoanalytic account would argue, than a threatening difference from themselves. For Hannah Arendt, who has been present throughout these pages, difference tout court was unmanageable and could easily explain violence in the modern world. Stripped of her or his national status, the stateless person of the twentieth century is anathema because she or he presents difference – she called it the ‘dark background of mere difference’ – to the world in its rawest, most debilitating state.12 This is the realm in which ‘man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy’.13 We are up against the paradox of power which feminism lays bare like nothing else: the worst exercise of human power is the consequence of mankind’s impotence.

  Arendt’s focus was not hatred of women, but it only takes the smallest nudge of her theory for something about the death-dealing side of sexual difference to come into focus. ‘Human sexuality is inherently traumatic,’ psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall begins her 1996 essay on ‘The Many Faces of Eros’.14 Sexuality unsettles because it confronts us with what we cannot master, the realm of the unconscious where desires run havoc, where it is impossible by definition simply to be true to oneself. This is a place where knowledge falters and confronts the limits of its own reach. For the famous British analyst Melanie Klein, there is a mismatch between the two sexes (we are a long way from the heterosexist ideal which celebrates men and women as each other’s perfect complement). The boy struggles to relinquish an identification with the woman sourced in the earliest proximity to the body of the mother. No infant, boy or girl, is ever spared such proximity from which all human subjects take their primordial bearing in the world. Klein was not renowned for her social commentary, but in an intriguing remark almost thrown out as an aside, she suggests that this might help us understand why, as she puts it, a man’s rivalry with women ‘will be far more asocial than his rivalry with his fellow men’.15 The possibility of being a woman is etched into the body and soul of the boy, because he has already been there. For the boy, knowing the terrain in the most intimate part of himself and then rejecting it with all his might is how he comes to be a man. For the girl, however complex her future sexual identity, whatever difficult sexual path she may take – and for psychoanalysis all sexual paths, even the ostensibly ‘normal’, are difficult – this is a realm in which, one way or another, she will come to recognise, to place and displace herself. It is not one which, in order to become a woman, she is required – commanded might be the better word – to repudiate.

  A man’s rivalry with women can be traced to a knowledge he would prefer to forget. His rivalry with men, however ghastly – war, political conflict, or simply sizing up in the changing room – is in a strange way more civilised, expected. According to this argument, men who assault women do so not because it is in their blood – we are not talking about an instinctive, inbuilt violence of the male species – but because every woman is a reminder of a ghostly, womanly past which no man ‘worthy’ of the name, if that is what he is, can any longer afford to recognise. ‘Honour’, to cite again the words of Lama Abu-Odeh, ‘is not only what women must keep intact to remain alive, but what men should defend fiercely so as not to be reduced to women.’ When a man turns on a woman, it is not just as the cause of a desire he cannot master, but also because she once was, is still somewhere now, a rejected part of himself (the key is the unexpected word ‘rivalry’ of Klein’s formula, which implies men and women are not too different but too alike). There is of course something potentially liberating about the idea that somehow, in the beginning, the sexes were so profoundly intermeshed. But not for long, no
t in the ‘normal’ run of things, not if the police of our inner lives do their work and subordinate the untold vagaries of our sexual being to the world’s requirements.

  It does not always work – that too is the founding insight of psychoanalysis. The requisite sexual identity never exhausts our possibilities, the psychic repertoire of any one life. Not all men behave in this way. Men, for example, are a regular part of the anti-harassment groups operating in Tahrir Square. Not all men have any interest in being men in this sense. But there is no violence more deadly and uncontrolled – asocial precisely – than the violence that is intended to repudiate the one who, deep down in a place beyond all conscious knowledge, you once were and perhaps still might be. The result is a kind of literal-mindedness. Men cannot see the fraudulence of their identity – psychoanalysis would add of any identity that blindly believes in itself – which is why they have to enact it so hard and fast. Any woman is then liable to attract the residue, the afterbirth, of that earliest moment along with everything that cannot be fully controlled or known in the world and in the mind: the realm which, in Arendt’s words, ‘men cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy.’ And, she suggests, what cannot be controlled above all is the messy, unpredictable moment of a new birth, a new beginning, to which women are summoned and with which, whether mothers or not, women are identified. This returns us to where this book began. Over such beginnings, to evoke these words by Arendt once again, ‘no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power because the chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, a new beginning’. Terror, notably totalitarianism in the past century, is needed, ‘lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world’. We cannot control the world and we destroy it if we try. None of the women in this book has wanted to control the world, not even when the fight against an unjust destiny, seizing their own lives, has been the very core of their struggle.