The Fairer Sex Fights Back

"Sex Realist Feminism" and Other Nonsense

It is a brand new year and with it a brand new feminism is, apparently, emerging. Fairer disputations, an international group of scholars, thinkers, journalists, and advocates that aim to advance their concept of a “sex-realist feminism” had their launch last Thursday in which they tackled the important question: What is “sex realist feminism?”

Well, it knows what a woman is at least.

It understands sex as immutable and women as biologically female: the producers of large gametes with the potential to become pregnant. Men and women, it says, are fundamentally different and society should be ordered accordingly.

“Sex realist feminism” would have it that men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive, and therefore naturally seek to dominate. Given there is no escape from these biologically determined facts, members of the weaker sex have no choice other than to survive by seeking the best deal for themselves and their children within that paradigm. In doing so, society is then ordered in such a way as to curb men’s worst excesses. Sex realist feminism, in other words, wishes to make you an offer…

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There was never any such thing as a zipless fuck, even Jong now admits as much. Access to contraception and safe and legal abortion promised women a theoretically even playing field - a newfound freedom in which to enjoy the pleasures of sex without the dreaded consequences of an unwanted pregnancy. But casual sex with men is more often than not terrible and sex without consequences just sees them treat women as disposable objects to use and discard. Aided by technological, transhumanist advances we tried playing men at their own game and lost.

Louise Perry, Sex Realist Feminism’s featured author of ‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century’ puts forward the argument that Western sexual culture with its worship of prostitution and pornography and emphasis on commitment free sex and fast internet hook ups has been damaging for women, both physically and psychically. Certainly many feminists, including myself, could agree with that much but Perry then takes a wild turn, going on to conclude that the only redress can be for women to fully embrace marriage and the traditional nuclear family.  

Erika Bachiochi is a contributor and legal scholar at the Conservative Ethics and Public Policy Centre, plus the director of the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute. In her book, “The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision” she advocates for what she calls a “socially conservative feminism” that supposedly supports the gains women have made in professional and public life while claiming that contraception, abortion, and the sexual revolution have been harmful to women’s happiness and progress towards equality.

In her essay “How Andrew Tate Smashed the Patriarchy” (yes, really) Mary Harrington argues that a failure to accept the fundamental asymmetry of the sexes - and patriarchal norms as a set of social codes for navigating and balancing these - has created men with no self restraint or sense of duty to protect those weaker than themselves. Tate, she insists, is a product of too little patriarchy, not too much; those rules got thrown out of the window and men like Tate became untethered. Too little social control and those big strong apes go wild…  

Being then that social conservatism, in theory, restricts the behaviour of both women and men, demanding adherence to traditional family values from both sexes and specifically monogamy, protectiveness and chivalry from men, “sex realist feminists” conclude it is the best way to curb men’s natural tendency towards aggression, sexual violence and indiscriminate promiscuity, and that therefore it is ultimately the best deal for women.

That is the offer then, and it is nothing novel: that if women could just accept being the little ladies, men would also play the game and be the strong, protective, devoted family men they were always supposed to be. It’s a deal, a transaction, a fair exchange, a bargain. You keep your end up, he keeps his.

Except men don’t. We have a surfeit of analysis and statistics to show that women and girls are more in danger of becoming victims to male violence in their own homes than anywhere else. Women are killed in the place they call home by the men who claim to love them at an astonishing rate the world over. Add to this the security of marriage as an illusion, even for those women desperately wedded to it, and the theory falls apart. Men, as we know, can be prone to flight, intolerant of all kinds of unavoidable happenings: ageing, ill health, menopause, loss of sex drive. They can leave whenever they like and they often do. To add insult to injury, in the kind of traditional communities “sex realist feminists” seem to dream of, it is only ever women who are to blame.

And what of our end? The heretics among us who do not wish to trade freedom for an illusion of security and protection, who refuse domestic drudgery, refuse to go back to the kitchen, who do not believe motherhood to be our highest calling? Us who want an abortion, want a divorce, do not wish to partner with men at all, or would rather take our chances on Tinder?

What about the liberation of women from male supremacy?   

With an impressive stack of feminist analysis pointing its finger at the nuclear family as one of the main institutions responsible for the most brutal oppression of women, you might conclude that socially conservative feminism, whatever it chooses to call itself, is a contradiction in terms. And you’d be right about that.

What we are being presented with is an insistence that our biology determines we’re going to have to serve somebody. This is a terrible defeatism; a meek and crushing acceptance that by virtue of them simply being bigger and stronger we are inevitably and always at men’s mercy. We can choose between submission to the public ownership endorsed by the left or the private ownership offered by the right, but we cannot resist both.

An attempt to shove women back into the nuclear family shaped box is wholly regressive. It seeks to deprive us of freedom and choice and is antithetical to the liberation feminism has long fought for. Women who cannot access abortion and effective contraception, who are stigmatized by divorce, made responsible for men’s behaviour, and expected to do the majority of unpaid labour in the home, are trapped - their intellect and creativity stifled, their worlds made small. There are no gains to be made in professional and public life when we are robbed of all bodily autonomy. For this to be advocated in the name of “feminism” is too much to bear.  

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Feminism, much like the word woman, has real meaning. It is not whatever any woman says it is, but a political ideology with clear goals and principles. Those who would destroy it along with the right of women to live on our own terms have found a strategy more effective than simply setting themselves in opposition and attacking from the front. Instead now they appropriate our language, steal our terms, and use them to set about sabotaging our progress.

“Sex realist feminism” is pure, old fashioned patriarchy with nothing new to say. It is illiberal, deeply conservative, and fundamentally dishonest. Oh it knows what a woman is alright! Defined by our place in the natural order, it claims acquiescence to the status quo to be only in women’s best interests, demanding that we accept with a smile a shitty, centuries old offer many of us rejected long ago.