Book review of ‘Governance Feminism: An Introduction’

Woman-work-office-Pixabay

“The long march through the institutions is complete and
feminists now occupy pivotal positions of power and decision-making
throughout the world.”

Despite being a feminist-friendly book with some of the usual agitprop, Governance Feminism: An Introduction caught my eye because I have never seen an overt discussion of feminist institutional power by a feminist. It’s a topic classified taboo for academics and authors despite the effects of that power being experienced by peoples around the planet daily .

The book intrigued and perhaps even excited me for the prospect that a veil of denial and secrecy surrounding feminist power might be perforated for the first time.

The four authors of the work dubbed their topic Governance Feminism (GF), by which they mean “every form in which feminists and feminist ideas exert a governing will within human affairs.” This definition follows Michel Foucault’s definition of governmentality in which feminists and feminist ideas “conduct the conduct of men.” Governance Feminism is proposed as a new phrase, but it deserves mentioning that MRAs have been using the synonymous phrase ‘Feminist Governance’ for many years.

The work looks at feminist infiltration into positions of institutional and cultural power – the long march through the institutions that so many of us have been monitoring. Feminists have infiltrated the UN, World Bank, International Criminal Court, every layer of national governments, and further into universities, schools, NGO volunteer orgs, and in HR departments at most medium to large scale workplaces. Not to mention Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and other social media platforms where most of the world’s people communicate with each other. We would not be off base to say that feminist gatekeeping now regulates much of the planet, from top to bottom. They are everywhere.

But of course when questioned about holding such positions of power, feminists are quick to remind us that they still work for the “oppressed” sex and are thus justified in using positions of power to correct global imbalances. Ironically feminists consider power per se to be bad, a judgment rendering any admission of their own institutional power regulated by a strict taboo – for such an admission is akin to a Catholic nun who undertook vows of chastity, and being faced with admitting she is now in a sexual relationship. The authors tell:

The first and most persistent form of resistance we have encountered is based on an idea that governance is per se bad, often expressed as an understanding that our describing governance feminism is identical with denouncing it. We do not think it is a gotcha to say that feminism rules.”

The lead author Janet Halley admits elsewhere to being an occasional feminist – in other words a feminist if/when the need arises. Nevertheless her adoption of utopic feminist narratives is apparent throughout the pages, as for example when she characterizes feminism, and more specifically Governance Feminism as an “emancipatory project”:

Feminism is by aspiration an emancipatory project, and GF is one kind of feminists’ effort to discover pathways to human emancipation. In the process, GFeminists have been, in some cases, highly successful in changing laws, institutions, and practices, very often remarkably for the better. Just scan the canonical first-wave manifesto for change, the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments,[4] for once-impossible, now well-established changes in the legal status of U.S. women: the right to vote; the rights of married women to form contracts, to sue and be sued, to acquire and manage separate property, to select their place of residence, to be criminally and civilly responsible for their own actions, to seek a divorce and to seek child custody on formally equal footing with husbands and fathers, and other powers formerly denied to them by coverture; to formally equal access to paid employment; to formally equal  access to “wealth and distinction”[5] and to the professions; and to access to education.

These are all basic elements of a liberal feminist agenda for women. Women have devoted entire lifetimes to achieving them. None of them came easily. They are not complete emancipation, surely. But compared with lack of all franchise, coverture, and categorical exclusion from the public sphere and all but the most grinding and ill-paid work, they are immense achievements attributable almost entirely to GFeminist efforts. One reason to describe GF is to be clear about its immense emancipatory achievements.

I can hear the reader’s objections now, that Halley’s overview of three waves of feminism as ‘emancipatory’ is a laughable gloss over the violence, censorship and tyranny perpetrated throughout that history. No doubt Halley is here giving a mandatory nod to the narratives of her more powerful “sisters” in order to avoid a backlash.

Framing feminist aspirations as emancipatory, and not as an urge-to-power by ruthless gender-ideologues, softens the tyrannical use of power, painting instead a soothing pastel picture. Said more directly, feminist use of power has to most observers been far more tyrannical and destructive than this glowing characterization reveals. With that in mind the authors might equally have characterized Governance Feminism as unadulterated power-seeking (ultimately for women) and been more on point.

To be fair the authors do go on to tackle some of the excesses of Governance Feminism after their apparently mandatory hand kissing of feminist theorists, and this deeper critique is where the true value of this book lies. The authors admit that many feminist visions of “emancipation” have been left at the station when various governance trains took off, confirming that the ‘“selective engagement” of feminist ideas into governmental power has left some diamonds in the dust.’

Further, they state;

In our view it has also done some damage: some governance feminist projects strike us as terrible mistakes; others have unintended consequences that are or should be contested within feminist political life. As some Governance Feminist projects become part of established governance, we find ourselves worrying about them more, or differently, than we did when they were unorthodox, “outsider” ideas. We are, therefore, inviting a robust discussion within feminism and between feminism and its emancipatory allies about which elements are emancipatory and which may, after all, be mistakes. [italics mine]

The authors go on to critique a number of these ‘mistakes,’ while remaining at times uncritical about assumed feminist successes. As touched on above, Governance Feminists also go to great lengths to hide their grasp on power, while taking every opportunity to exaggerate and demonize male uses of power:

Gender mainstreaming has located feminists in many organizations, from the UN to college administrations, almost always as bureaucrats. Here they wield not judicial power, not the sword of punishment, but the more fine-grained power of administration. Gender mainstreaming, which aims to universalize feminist ideas in governance and convert every governmental entity into a branch of Governance Feminism, paradoxically produces gender specialists.”

For most readers this quote encapsulates the danger of feminist power. Feminist ideologues have been inserted into every institution around the globe as gatekeepers dictating who does/doesn’t get employed, get assisted, financed, approved, credentialed, included, heard and so on. It can even descend to who gets food aid, who gets to rent a house in a scarce rental market, or who gets a job as a cleaner.

As an example, Jordan Peterson recently talked about HR departments at workplaces serving as foci for the feminist social manipulations. This development is insidious because the practice is hidden in supposedly menial bureaucratic positions, ones that just happen to wield pivotal power over the work-lives of citizens and the associated family outcomes – not to mention the outcome of amplifying gendered expectations and conventions that inevitably get instituted culture-wide through this process of rewarding or punishing via biased bureaucratic decisions. With this in mind it’s no exaggeration to call feminists social engineers who have succeeded in running the world.

beyonce?, girl, and gif image

Beyonce? ‘Who run the world: girls’

Some years ago I read a paper on the topic of “administrative discretion” which refers to the flexible exercising of decision-making allowed to public administrators. The discretionary opportunity is made available by the wiggle-room in the bureaucrat’s code of practice, and she or he uses that to deliver preferred – and often unfair – outcomes. The use of administrative discretion typifies the modus operandi of Governance Feminism, which is utilized to implement a radical feminist ideological agenda through all levels of society. Feminism-inspired women are increasingly dominating HR roles, and as revealed by teacher-preferencing biases in elementary schools they are exploiting administrative discretion to favor females over males.

Janet Halley lays much of the blame for the failures of Governance Feminism at the feet of two forms of feminism that form an operational alliance: Power Feminism (PF) and Cultural Feminism (CF). The book provides a useful overview of both, stating that they have formed an unholy alliance that came to dominate the internal battle for supremacy between different ‘feminisms.’  Power and cultural feminism meld into each other or appear side by side, writes Halley, and together they are frequently dubbed Dominance Feminism. She adds that Dominance Feminism finds male domination in two distinct forms: in the false superiority of male values and male culture, and in the domination of all things Female by all things Male:

American dominance feminism is a top-down, bottom-up model of M/F relations: there are perpetrators (men) and victims (women); people with an individualist ethic (men) and people with an ethic of care (women); people feminists advocate for (women) and people they accuse (men). This model of right and wrong is highly assimilable to criminal law and tort law frameworks. Thus the very visible elements of Governance Feminism that use the penal powers of the state to “end” sexual violence in all its forms are saturated with dominance feminist ideas. Especially where power feminism makes its influence felt, it makes sexuality the core of the problem: dominance feminist thinking places sexual wrongs front and center, and assimilates other seemingly nonsexual wrongs to sexual ones.

This is, we think, a manifestly narrow, crabbed, and even paranoid view of the gender order in the United States, and it is hospitable to quite ethnocentric, neocolonial construals of the gender order prevailing in the global South. It is remarkably indifferent to distributional consequences. Why does it play such a large role in Governance Feminism today?”

In Chapter 3.  Halley discusses Governance Feminists’ need to reflect on generating, owning, and critiquing their own governance power, which as mentioned above is hamstrung by feminism’s denouncement of power structures combined with its own denials about both possessing and wielding real power.

When the authors first encouraged the sustained study of Governance Feminism in 2006, some feminists told them that “they simply did not understand how marginal and fragile feminist gains in state and near-state power really were… If some feminist ideas and interests had managed to find their way into law, these were crumbs from the table, compromises with patriarchy on patriarchy’s terms not worthy of the name “feminist,” tiny fragments of the full feminist agenda, which was not merely to ride along on the back of power but to transform it.”

Such a response is breathtaking in its denial, and I would add predictable, leading the authors to assert that not only do feminists hold such world-changing power, they need also to ethically critique their use of it:

We think such acts of public critique are absolutely essential now that feminists and feminist ideas are so firmly embedded in legal institutions and legal power.[25] But they can be costly: insider-insiders often feel compelled to attack any feminist who does it, at the very least by depriving her of her insider credentials and her insider job and at the very most by marshaling major institutional resources to discredit her and her ideas, defund her projects, and leave her constituents out in the cold.”

In the final chapter Halley implores Governance Feminists to develop an ethic of responsibility; to both admit to the power they preside over, assess its impact both negative and positive, and own the outcome. This lofty appeal is frankly laughable when considering the ideological agendas and unethical practices that Dominance Feminists are known for. Asking them to take a more ethical approach is as likely of success as asking Mao Zedong to develop an ethic of individual liberty and a policy of free-market capitalism.

Antifeminists around the world have a very different suggestion to that of going hat in hand imploring Dominance Feminists to show more ethical and considerate behavior. Their alternative is to shine a harsh light on the moral corruption of feminist ideologues, and work to neutralize their destructive programs via effective counter-activism. The antifeminist counter-movement is in full career and I’m certain that Governance Feminists around the world are already feeling the heat. Halley’s book contributes to that insurgency move, perhaps unwittingly, by demonstrating just how much power these ideologues have been wielding. The book is therefore useful in that it speaks the unspeakable… the cat is finally out of the bag.

The authors conclude by mentioning a second volume is in process titled Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, which will provide case studies describing and assessing national, international, and transnational Governance Feminist projects by a range of feminists engaged in building them. No longer operating in the shadows, Governance Feminists are now being scrutinized in broad daylight…. and with that move they will have a lot of explaining to do for their transgressions.

What’s in a suffix? taking a closer look at the meaning of gyno–centrism

Definition

There appear to be some confused understandings of the word gynocentrism, so this piece will explore a little discussed part of the term: -centrism. This suffix makes a restrictive demand that women are most important interest we might hold.

The Cambridge dictionary describes centrism the following way:

CENTRISM: The fact of having a particular type of person, place, or thing as your most important interest; the quality of being seen from the point of view of a particular type of person, place, or thing:

  • The Academy has been accused of Eurocentrism and gender bias.
  • The artist’s newest ventures embody his commitment to ecocentrism

Gynocentrism implies that our focus on the needs and wants of woman is the most important consideration; whether such focus be contained to a brief moment in time, or as applied to the entire duration of human relationships.

For example, when we celebrate Mother’s Day we can legitimately name this brief, isolated act as gyno-centric. Or for a more dramatic illustration of a brief gynocentric event, consider the scenario of a man taking on a knife-wielding maniac who is threatening to hurt his pregnant wife, while the wife retreats and does not help the husband during the fight; in this case the actions of both husband (protecting his wife) and wife (protecting herself) are rightly defined as gyno-centric.1

Alternatively if we consider the overall relationship between the same husband and wife we might ask a new question – is the entire relationship a gyno-centric one? If that husband and wife take turns supporting each other across the duration of their relationship, then the relationship might be rightly referred to as “couple centered” — because by definition a gyno-centric relationship centers exclusively around the woman and her needs and wants. As soon as you have genuine reciprocity in a relationship, one that involves a couple-centric dynamic based on commensurate importance, the relationship can no longer be considered gynocentric.

Employing the word gynocentrism to discuss reciprocal exchanges between men and women, where women are occasional beneficiaries in certain ways, and men are beneficiaries in certain ways, is an erroneous use of the term because such exchanges, strictly speaking, do not constitute a gender centrism across the duration of the relationship – ie. its not a gyno-centric relationship.

While there can be gynocentric elements in relationships, they are historically balanced out by other elements like family-centrism, andro-centrism, child-centrism, pairbonding-centrism, or tribe-centrism. The theory that human relationships are evolutionarily gyno-centric is an exaggeration and a piece of sappy modern propaganda that even some men’s advocates fall prey to.

I’ve never understood how seemingly intelligent people can champion the dissonant theory of “Gynocentrism is the evolutionary norm for relationships – Let’s stop gynocentrism!” With such a ideology as guide you may as well pack up and go home, because you won’t beat biology.  Alternatively, those same women-firsters might try understanding gynocentrism not as an evolutionary norm for all human relationships, but rather as a collection of distortive supernormal stimuli that have arisen in recent centuries…. then the pieces might fall into place that humans need not ascribe to a permanent gynocentric mindset.

NOTE:

[1] After writing this essay in 2019, I’ve since become aware of Hanna Wallen’s thesis of the ‘Natural Gynocentrism Fallacy‘ which posits that even isolated, brief acts that I have described above as “gynocentric” are more accurately described as gene-centric behaviours. I agree with Hanna’s proposition.

Mother of Christ

Mary Pixabay

The notion of Christianity as a ‘patriarchal religion’ might need a rethink in the light of the Virgin Mary’s culture-power and her ongoing influence on how we conceptualize women. I’m reminded of an interview with Joseph Campbell1 (perhaps the most famous expert on religions) who suggested Mary became a paramount influence from the medieval culture scheme forward. Here’s a snippet of the interview:

Mary shirts4

MOYERS: There are women today who say that the spirit of the Goddess has been in exile for five thousand years, since the…. 

CAMPBELL: You can’t put it that far back, five thousand years. She was a very potent figure in Hellenistic times in the Mediterranean, and she came back with the Virgin in the Roman Catholic tradition. You don’t have a tradition with the Goddess celebrated any more beautifully and marvelously than in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century French cathedrals, every one of which is called Notre Dame.

MOYERS: Yes, but all of those motifs and themes were controlled by males — priests, bishops — who excluded women, so whatever the form might have meant to the believer, for the purpose of power the image was in the hands of the dominant male figure.

CAMPBELL: You can put an accent on it that way, but I think it’s a little too strong because there were the great female saints. Hildegarde of Bingen — she was a match for Innocent III. And Eleanor of Aquitaine — I don’t think there is anybody in the Middle Ages who has the stature to match hers. One now can look back and quarrel with the whole situation, but the situation of women was not that bad by any means.

MOYERS: No, but none of those saints would ever become pope.

CAMPBELL: Becoming pope, that’s not much of a job, really. That’s a business position. None of the popes could ever have become the mother of Christ. There are different roles to play. It was the male’s job to protect the women.

[1] Joseph Campbell in discussion with Bill Moyers: The Power of Myth

See Also:
– Mariolatry and Gyneolatry
Auguste Comte’s Cult of Woman

Anti-gynocentrism is the only anti-feminism that matters

Stockfresh paid gynocentrism

Men’s Rights Advocates have often watched with bemusement as newcomers arrive declaring support for men, with a resume saying just one thing: “I’m an antifeminist,” as if that were all we needed to know.

Because antifeminism and men’s rights activism is synonymous, right? That’s literally what they assume.

With the resume tabled they quickly move to promote a gynocentric tradition that gushes about males saving women from floods, fires, bullets, or sparing them from minor inconveniences in life  – like discomfort, dirt, criticism or employment. Feminine women, they say, are best preserved as home-makers; each woman as precious as the fingers of a concert pianist which must never be put under strain. Men, they say, are heroes, put on this earth to lift heavy things as Jordan Peterson would say, and lift them specifically for the fragile, and of course pregnant, womenfolk.

“Life back then was as close as we can get to perfect” they foam, “it was an arrangement that saw feminine women give compliments to men for ongoing sacrifices — an arrangement far superior to the feminist approach which goes out of its way to denigrate men while expecting those very same sacrifices to continue.”

It is superior because massaging a man’s ego in exchange for expected sacrifice is somehow less denigrating than saying, as the feminists do, “we hate you.” But is such gratitude really better when both feminist and traditionalist women continue to expect male servitude – when they both reduce men to the role of ‘do things for me’?

That is the essence of the deal: a little ego-stroking in exchange for a man destroying himself. She inflates his ego like a helium balloon, at least in the area of saving, serving and pedestalizing her, and he signs up for a smorgasbord of self-destructive sacrifices and an earlier death.

We could be forgiven for interpreting the traditionalist woman’s complimenting of male sacrifice as superficial gushing, offered up with all the sincerity of a Miss World candidate saying she wants to bring about world peace, while watching the corpses pile up around her.

That appears to be the gynocentric tradition that most anti-feminists are peddling, the one they would substitute in place of feminist models. Here I should add that not all traditionalists are like that – at least not for the tiny minority of red pill men and women who seek to preserve the otherwise valuable, non-gynocentric aspects of tradition.

Some readers might protest that we should be grateful for those charging forward to destroy progressive gynocentrism (feminism) in order to substitute traditional gynocentrism in its place. But for this old timer that program reads like a rejection of Judas, in order to take sides with Iscariot.

I’m sure you all get the point.

As Paul Elam once summarized, ‘anti-gynocentrism is the only anti-feminism that matters.’

Compare the traditional gynocentrist as described above with women who are neither feminist nor traditional gynocentrist; women like Janice Fiamengo, Suzanne McCarley, Elizabeth Hobson, Alison Tieman, Hanna Wallen and countless others who are as quick to question the unbalanced privileges of traditional women as they are the privileges held by feminists. The difference in perspective between these two kinds of women couldn’t be more stark.

The rest unfortunately are frauds, women masquerading as allies while inviting men to adopt a women-serving scam with the bait of a 1950s smock and a demure look, women who are today unwilling to match men with reciprocal gestures or labor, nor the shouldering of life’s stresses. When traditional gynocentric women are featured in media interviews, gushing praise for the usefulness of “masculinity” and “real men” who save women from house fires, one can’t help but notice there’s an absence of discussion of what’s in it for the men, as if its not a relevant concern.

Perhaps praising is a form of respect for men, but respect for what? On face value it looks like that of a narcissist who “respects” others as food to satisfy his/her impersonal gluttony for special treatment.

Perhaps I could be more generous and say that rather than trying to enslave men, the I’m-Not-A-Feminist Gynocentrists are simply behind the times, believing that they are championing the lesser of the only two evils on offer. They view it as the lesser of the two evils because, under traditional gynocentrism, men were at least complimented for their labor, and given medals after their deaths – a thing denied under the feminist vision which sees men and women as competitors for narcissistic turf in which only women receive compliments; not men, but women alone are the ‘Stunning and the Brave.’

Sadly, the traditional contract under which that situation worked, the one that limited men’s and women’s options in favor of narrow set roles, can no longer work in a culture that refuses to encourage and support that same contract.  Wave after wave of feminist activity has seen the toothpaste squeezed completely out of the tube. Women will never go back to the role of baby-making, apple-pie cooking wives, because any attempt to reduce women’s multi-option life will be met with resentment, if not interpreted as abuse. Therefore any attempts to enact that traditional role today will amount to little more than cosplay.

Swapping progressive gynocentrism for traditional gynocentrism is going nowhere. We can no more turn back the clock on Women’s Liberation than we should ignore the fact that’s Men’s Liberation now is due — men who no longer need to be tied to the traditionalist role of He-for-She.

Before bringing this article to a close I want to come back to the question of what, if anything, is the value of anti-feminism for the men’s rights movement. To that, two of the more obvious answers come to mind.

Firstly, antifeminist work pushes back against efforts to create more He-For-She demands, e.g. for men’s supposed responsibility to stop partner violence; for men’s responsibility to address the wage gap; for men to assist in promoting affirmative action policies; to do more household chores; for taking up too much female space on public transport, or for not setting the office air conditioning to women’s desired temperature. These and many more ‘patrarchy-do’ lists amount to little more than collective female nagging, which anti-feminists are helping to call out in the public domain.

Secondly, anti-feminists fight the widespread censorship of men’s issues by feminists. The problem of feminist-driven deplatforming and censorship was even apparent in Ernest B. Baxs’ day, which he described in the year 1913; “[Feminists] seek to stop the spread of the unpleasant truth so dangerous to their cause. The pressure put upon publishers and editors by the influential Feminist sisterhood is well known.” In response there has always existed people within the MRM who push back against feminist-driven censorship of men’s issues, and indeed censorship from other sources, and this needs to continue with full force.

To put these two concerns in context, pushing back against feminist demands on men, and feminist censorship, have never been the only goal of the men’s movement despite claims by some that the MRM is synonymous with ‘antifeminist backlash.’ To suggest equivalence is to confuse purely antifeminist movements with the much broader portfolio of the men’s human rights movement.

A survey of the last 100 years reveals that the MRM is concerned more directly with issues impacting men and boys such as alimony, genital mutilation of male infants, homelessness, mental illness, false accusations, family court bias, suicide, child custody, low funding for male health issues, legal discrimination, educational performance, and misandry in mainstream culture just to name a few. And just as important, a pressing issue today is fostering of more life choices for men: Its time for men to embrace whatever options exist beyond the narrowly prescribed role of serving women – just as women long ago rejected narrow roles and responsibilities toward men.

The time for the multi-option man is now.