While the women of Iran are liberated by American and Israeli bombs, and Melania Trump presides over a session of the UN Security Council, it’s easy to wonder what the point is in fighting for anything. But International Women’s Day is upon us, when we traditionally go into raptures for our commitment to equity and women’s rights. The leaders and institutions who busy themselves dismantling the very protections women need will be professing their eternal devotion to gender justice across myriad social media posts.

The pursuit for equity is not going well, and it’s worth asking why.

 

Internal incoherence

By allowing our fight for justice to be coopted into a fundamentally unjust and exploitative political and economic paradigm, we have made the pursuit of it feel implausible and not wholly meant on a visceral level, even to ourselves. It sure as hell doesn’t feel plausible to society at large. It comes across as insincere.

Some of it actually is insincere. Greedy corporations had no trouble dropping DEI policy like a very hot potato the second it started looking like Trump’s arrival could bring penalties for being out of sync with his orange “grab them by the pussy” orthodoxy. An extreme example, perhaps, but are the rest of us that different?

A dishonest tension sits at the heart of our value system and this is problematic. Our rhetoric contradicts our actions. In our heart of hearts, we surely feel the hypocrisy of it all. Yet we insist that others swear allegiance to our equity scripture by using our compulsory language and dutifully performing the rituals of our hollow faith. The list of examples is possibly endless:

•  How is it that we call for equity for women and not address the promotion of retrograde social and gender norms for profit via commercial advertising and internet algorithms? 
• What kind of equity are we ready to support when the gender pay gap conveniently subsidises profit margins and has done so since always? 
• What does gender justice look like when we permit the porn industry to make vast profits from the exploitation and degradation of women, and from propagating sexual norms that are exploitative and degrading for women?
• Isn’t women’s unpaid care work too convenient to give up? Who will hold up the roof if we no longer rely on it?
• Isn’t it cynical to we tell women they can have it all in a thoroughly rigged system, and blame them when they cannot in fact have it all, not even a decent chunk of it?

All of these things are trade-offs, choices, and we make them willingly. What do they tell us about ourselves?

What is actually on offer for women and men?

Women are sold an unachievable fiction miles away from the reality of their multi-layered burden. We’re exhausted. Men are, ironically, in no man’s land, no longer drawing a sense of self from the role of family provider and protector, largely deprived of class identity, many adrift with no clear roadmap of what their rightful place is in our sanctimonious sexual politics. 

Populist clarity

Populists on the other hand have no such problem. There is no internal tension in their ideological offering. Their essentially classic conservative worldview is anchored in a belief in a “natural” order of things. Many in our society welcome a return to such a “natural” order of things. To some extent we are all primed for it, and actively have to grapple with this belief as we develop a progressive worldview.

It might seem distasteful, but it’s fully and perfectly aligned with the conservative moral system (really well described by Lakoff as one of the prevalent moral orders). This is a worldview that accepts natural hierarchy and sees strength and privilege as a measure of merit, as endorsement from divinity in some cases. Men above women, adults above children, man above nature. 

This way of looking at the world assigns clear roles to men and women. Fuzzy gender identities are an irrelevance as in this way of conceptualising the world, they simply fall outside the scope of what is deemed “natural”. 

So what?

It’s perfectly OK to disagree with these views. 

What is perhaps less OK is to tolerate an internal contradiction within our own stances, an incompatibility in values that discredits everything we stand for, to others but also to ourselves. Exploitation cannot be simultaneously OK and not OK. We cannot simultaneously claim inequality is merit driven, and a symptom of injustice. We cannot really pick and choose when our values stand and when they don’t. 

The goals of feminism are not achievable under this version of feudal, imperialist, violent, anti-human, tech-enabled post-capitalism. We cannot continue to allow the heist of power and resource by a small number of morally bankrupt men and pretend we seek a world where there is plenty for all, and lives of dignity for all.

Stepping up to pay the price of solidarity

Our willingness to tolerate the current morass means, like the Manic Street Preachers sung, that our children will be next. The time has come not to describe what we’re against, but to paint a picture of what we are for, our vision of a world that offers women and men the equity and dignity we all deserve. To craft this alternative to dystopia, we need to re-learn to think and act collectively, meet in real life, pay the price of solidarity. 

See you next time.