Women in Dark Times (40 page)

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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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This is the realm in which ‘man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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, not 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.

Let feminism, then, be the place in our culture which asks everyone, women and men, to recognise the failure of the present dispensation – its stiff-backed control, its ruthless belief in its own mastery, its doomed attempt to bring the uncertainty of the world to heel. Let feminism be the place where the most painful aspects of our inner world do not have to hide from the light, but are ushered forth as handmaidens to our protest. To return once more to one of this book’s opening epigraphs, the words of Rosa Luxemburg in a letter to her lover, Leo Jogiches, in 1898: ‘Just imagine, it was precisely those bruises on my soul that at the next moment gave me the courage for a new life.’ She had just arrived in Berlin, ‘a complete stranger and all alone’ as she put it, determined to make her mark on politics in the city, only to find herself confronted with its ‘cold power’.
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‘Cold power’ will do nicely for what the world expects of men, and what women, provided they are not co-opted by its lure, are up against. Just for a moment, she allows herself to think that maybe she should return to the quiet, harmonious and happy life they had shared in Zurich. But she then realises this is a delusion. They neither lived together nor found joy in one another, ‘and in fact there was nothing very happy’.
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Indeed looking back, she feels such a ‘completely bewildering sense of disharmony, something incomprehensible, tormenting and dark’, that she gets shooting pains in her temples and ‘exactly the physical sensation of black-and-blue places, painful bruises on my soul’. She knows that the idyll of their life together, past and future, is a myth (as the rest of their relationship will sadly confirm). Such knowledge, when the mind slips the moorings of its own strongest wish, is almost unbearable. It presents her with something incomprehensible and dark, far from the ‘cold power’ which faced her on arrival in the harsh and indifferent city: ‘completely indifferent to me’.
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It is, then, Luxemburg’s genius not to deny this anguish but to give it the free play of her mind, allowing it to fuel the energies with which she will go on to challenge the world’s inequality and injustice. She is just one of the women we have met on these pages for whom courage does not mean painting over the dark, as if the real predator were our inner life, but embracing that life, looking it full in the face, acknowledging its part in our histories.

The feminism I am calling for would have the courage of its contradictions. It would assert the rights of women, boldly and brashly, but without turning its own conviction into a false identity or ethic. It would make its demands with a clarity that brooks no argument, but without being seduced by its own rhetoric. The last thing it would do is claim sexuality as prize possession or consumable good. This is a feminism aware that it moves, that it has to move, through the sexual undercurrents of our lives where all certainties come to grief. Otherwise it too will find itself lashing out against the unpredictability of the world, party to its cruelties and false promises. Such a feminism would accept what it is to falter and suffer inwardly, while still laying out – without hesitation – its charge sheet of injustice. This might just, I allow myself to think, be an immense relief for many of both sexes. Not all the women in this book have been feminists by any means. But they have each in their unique way given me a glimpse of what such a feminism might look like as it attempts to build a viable future and enters the next stage of its struggle.