The Somme, WW1

Conflict. While I do not think that letting select issues just “fly under the radar” will solve any problems I get a feeling that fighting across well-worn battlefields will only obscure the ultimate goals of reducing the need for conflict at all. I am responding creatively here to a previous post about the predominance and apparently endless ascendency of Man and masculinity at the cost of Woman. I agree that there is a certain undeniable centrality and power that has been assumed by the male in relation to the female in culture, history, media, politics and so on. However - I feel that the battle is being fought over ground so wretched with despair and the intellectual corpses of so many great thinkers that it has come to resemble a kind of Somme battlefield of muddy and endless carnage and destruction. I frame this as a separate discussion than that of the analysis and uncovering of the many ways in which men do exploit, dominate and abuse women - the argument as demonstrated here is about what may be underlying issues to this gender imbalance.

It is true that men have run the show. They have run the world into the ground and it is predominantly men who control the economies, the corporations and the militaries of the world. It is perhaps not too obvious, at first, but if the battlefield is characterised as one delineated as purely (or primarily) by gender and gender iniquity I think we may be only seeing a part of the picture and in characterising the struggle as something inherently confrontational we already (in some sense) hand a victory over to the masculine, the destructive, the mechanical and the authoritarian. We find ourselves in a situation where the notionally “masculine” traits of aggression, dominance, power and control may in fact form something of a free-floating masculinity which seems to itself have become the prize to which a radical feminism (or socialism, or fundamentalism, or whatever “-ism” you may see this in terms of) aspires. By setting this whole problem up as a conflict or battle we are already ensuring that we will only become that which we oppose, even should we notionally defeat it.

For whatever cultural, historical, political and purely psychological reasons we find ourselves in a world where the male and masculinity has grasped the central vantage point. When we characterise this situation as a battle for Woman to “get back” what is rightfully hers we miss the point altogether. That the male is at the center of this symbolic matrix is not the issue. The issue is that there is a center to this system of thought, communication and organisation at all. It is perhaps inevitable that one side of the gender polarity would fall into this role and it should in some ways be unsurprising that whoever sits in this notional center is unwilling or unlikely to give up the position simply. For as long as this is considered as a confrontation or conflict, the masculine will win; precisely because it is of the symbolic, psychological and political nature of the construction of masculinity to be more innately aggressive, volatile and domineering. A battle is sometimes better fought counter-intuitively and when it is no longer even seen as a battle, half a victory has already been won.

My contention: that to truly and unflinchingly appraise the issues of gender imbalance in our world is to first and foremost analyse and unravel the very assumptions that underlie this human world in the first place. Masculinity may sit in the center (and may assume many other guises) but trying to seize that center does not resolve anything other than placing someone else (gender, political or ideological identity) in that position - perpetuating the very structural iniquity that one at first sets out to address. The issue here is something of a Gordian Knot that to untie or otherwise solve requires more than just a political or symbolic reshuffling of the primacy of any gender, political theory or ideology to mend. I think that the challenge here lies in almost totally restructuring our understanding of the nature of ourselves and the world without totally invalidating the great achievements of politics, culture and intellectual endeavour. So, I feel that we need to characterise this struggle as not at all being about gender, ultimately, (and while still recognising the great gender imbalance, disparity and unfairness in the world) and being about the essential ways we understand, explain and organise the world around us.

Resolving conflict and gender disparity should really (by this view) be a very subtle affair. I have a bad feeling that to even make one’s views heard one has to assume (even if only symbolically) the position of the center, a problem apparently well-understood by Foucault, and in this we become so rapidly subsumed to the very system of power and dominance that we have stood against in the first place. This is therefore not a science of addition so much as a science of subtraction - removing all that one does not require until all that is left is what one truly needs.

This article originally published here on Issues Beyond Borders group blog.