"I think the war of the sexes is not the only war going on, and that war cannot be the most important in our lives," said Doris Lessing (1919-2013) in Manhattan in 1970. It was a call to women and men to come out of the male-female trenches and make a truce to stop the war in Vietnam together.
Would any contemporary feminist today dare to so publicly call men and women to stop spreading mutual hatred on social networks and unite in resistance to, for example, the war in Gaza? It's possible, but she'd have to be willing to clash with woke culture, risk cancellation and automatic right-wing, whatever that means.
In those "world-shaking" 70s of the 20th century, when Doris Lessing called men and women to a truce, the male-female trenches had already been dug, but there was still political space for universalist projects and hopes. In the meantime, that space has disappeared: neoliberal gender-political and identity discourses have been radicalized to extreme particularism. The discussion of universality has become politically suspect and undesirable - neoliberal capitalism does not need men and women on the same front except, of course, where its ideology and capital are reproduced.
For whom sex is free
The war between the sexes can, of course, be fought over different interests. It turned out, however, that none of the male-female disputes can confront modern men and women as uncompromisingly and fiercely as the issue of sexual (non)harassment of women.
In those 70s, when Doris Lessing said what she said, liberated sex was, on the contrary, an unifying factor, a lure that was expected to draw men and women out of the trenches and line up on the same front. The Vietnam War and the anti-war movement went hand in hand with the sexual revolution, the discovery of the anti-baby pill, and the search for unprecedented personal and sexual freedom. It was all part of the same package that was unwrapped in 1968.
"Let's make love, not war" - the catchphrase of this movement was just a liberal, hippie variation of the old idea that sexual desire and aggression are connected by the law of connected courts, that they stir in the same dark cauldron of the human psyche and ventilate through the same channels, which were already recognized by psychoanalysis and literary imagination.
These were, of course, unrealistic expectations. Sexual freedom cannot stop war. It cannot even reconcile men and women. Accumulated disputes between men and women, concerning power relations, cannot be overcome by an abundance of free sexual enjoyment. Not only because people are not only sexual beings, but also because patriarchal power relations are already written into sexuality itself, which means that "free sex" will still not be equally free for men and women.
Ramparts around the Black Continent
This culturally grounded, structural "sexual injustice" became a key source of gender tension in the following decades. The war between men and women was not only not stopped by liberated sex, but sex itself became the reason for the war, the escalation of which is represented by the MeToo movement.
We can understand this movement as the culmination of the ultimate (and justified?) female resistance to centuries-old, structural male sexual (and not, of course, only sexual) dominance, which has now finally found a powerful punch in social networks. But would it have this form if the way we understand female and human sexuality had not undergone a change in the meantime?
It is certainly no longer the ideal of female sexuality that Doris Lessing stood for. When she was once asked to comment on sexual propriety, she called modern women puritans who "expect the male genital organ to be presented to them first". As for many other feminists and writers who emerged from the legacy of 1968 (Ani Erno, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Elfride Jelinek), for her the question of female sexuality was first and foremost a question of a woman's right to enjoy herself sexually as much as possible, as authentically as possible. , as freely as a man, without fear of pregnancy or accusations of promiscuity.
The topic of women's sexual pleasure, which was important to feminists of that generation, is now off the agenda. She was relegated to the background by the issue of women's right to restrict male desire. After all the feminist critiques of Freudian-oriented ideas about female sexuality, the project of discovering authentic female sexual enjoyment ended in a dead end. That "dark continent," as Freud described female desire, ended up building walls around it. The whole enterprise is reduced to defense, and the woman is again nailed to the status of a sexual object who now, admittedly, has more weapons for defense, but still knows nothing about her desire (except what the consumerist culture markets to her as her own desire).
Confusion before the physical
Feminist and writer Kamil Palja once caused an avalanche of hostile comments when she connected the sexualized appearance of women with their responsibility for sexual violence. At one point, she said that to deny women's responsibility for violence is to deny everything we know about sexuality. But it is possible that it is precisely the fact that the moment has come for us to forget everything we think we know about sexuality and believe when we are told that the sexualized appearance of a woman has nothing to do with her sexual desire or the desire to arouse desire, therefore - with by sex.
Italian philosopher Franco Berardi Bifo, among others, wrote about the denial of the physicality of sexual desire in the conditions of its medialization: in the circumstances of the "desexualization of desire" and its semiotization, sexuality is reduced to a sign of renunciation of physical, "contact" sexual desire and its media sign. This would mean that the extremely sexualized female bodies that bombard us from all sides are actually just signs of sexual desire that does not strive for its physical fulfillment, that only seeks its place in the media space, in the system of signifiers (at the same time, the place it seeks is the place of the object, therefore a place that is extremely patriarchal).
This leads us to think about the possibility that in addition to the understandable desire to stand in the way of male sexual dominance, the MeToo movement also includes a new confusion about the very physicality of sexuality, which is again related to the loss of trust in the possibility of spontaneously setting boundaries and recognizing desire.
The abalone flies
The war between men and women in the digital space continues. Oysters fly between trenches. They are mostly digital (although some end up in court and there is a lot of real, female and male pain), which relieves the warring parties of responsibility and increases the ferocity.
How will this war end? I guess that's the million dollar question. More and more often, the digital space is flooded with male and female calls for celibacy as the best solution, which does not seem like an illogical outcome of this war - the semioticization of sexuality could eventually lead to the renunciation of "true sexuality". But, on the other hand, the "old-fashioned" male sexual aggression does not stop, providing new arguments for raising barricades and continuing the war.
The situation at the front is not simple at all. Certainly, there is no prospect that this war will stop soon and that the conditions will be created for men and women to unite in any front against the common enemy, as Doris Lessing wished.
So, the exact opposite of what Doris Lessing advocated happened - the war between men and women became "the most important war in our lives" and challenged all political energy. And the opposite of what the sexual revolution stood for - sex became a source of conflict, not reconciliation.
(ROZA, Portal for feminist and left politics)
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