Diary of a mothering worker. March 21, 2023.

Post 498.

THIS MONTH, I’ve highlighted transwomen and sex workers, both categories of women about whom there are myths and stereotypes. This week, I’m explaining another pervasive myth and its problematic power: the idea that “women are their own worst enemies.”

This debasing “own worst enemy” label is untrue, but is a stereotype often cast against subordinated groups, and then repeated as a way of seeing and blaming themselves for their condition.

It’s also a way of circulating self-hate which has long been a successful divide-and-conquer strategy, encouraging those who are oppressed to be more likely to trust, stand by and forgive their oppressors than each other. It’s propaganda, propagated since Plato, which has become a cognitive short-cut for explaining who women are today.

There are moments that feel true in this representation of women as untrustworthy even among themselves. The “tief head” is when one partial view becomes the whole story, displacing how it is also and more greatly untrue. Stereotypes work in such devious and disparaging ways.

Dominant narratives about women in Western society either put them on a pedestal and require them to be perfect in feminised ways, or demonise them. We have inherited the patriarchal framing of women as either virtuous or evil, and often repeat what has come to have the feeling of common sense.

The ease with which this phrase rolls off the tongue says more about the power of patriarchal typecasts of women than about women themselves, particularly when women know how complex we are.

Men constantly undermine men, literally killing each other for walking on the wrong street. Men may be unbreakable allies against women because the “bro code” positions them as women’s opposites and superiors, but they bully, fight, wound, exploit, oppress and kill each other in unprecedented numbers, whether as individuals, gangs, armies, or male-led corporations. They are their own worst enemies. Why does this phrase not roll off our tongues so easily?

Women being their own worst enemy is untrue because women do not primarily beat, sexually assault, kidnap, sexually harass or kill girls and women. Women’s worst enemy is those who perpetrate these crimes.

Yet no one uses this phrase to describe a daily relationship between an oppressor and oppressed. In this way, men’s historic role in (violently) excluding women from power is mystified and denied. Hence, no catchphrase comes to mind.

Positioning women as their own worst enemy also names an expectation that women will automatically be allies and support each other. They certainly do. This is why the currrent wave of the feminist movement is the most powerful global revolution of the last 50 years.

It was fought by women defending each other’s rights, exercising collective power, speaking out in transnational solidarity, and building unapologetically woman-centred movements. It hasn’t been perfect. There have been hierarchies and exclusions, but it’s an unarguable example of women not being “their own worst enemies.”

Feminism is also the most demonised of social movements. Thus the major example that challenges this misogynist phrase gets successfully filtered back to us through a patriarchal lens, encouraging us to disidentify with it.

Patriarchies always recentre men so that a movement that is about caring about women becomes framed as one that hates men, or one that prioritises including and amplifying women becomes cast as one that excludes and silences men.

Today, feminism is increasingly cast as legitimate when it makes immediate sense to men, takes responsibility for meeting men’s needs, makes space for men’s perspectives, and is sensitive, gentle and kind.

Propaganda. You can tell by how quickly all this rolls off people’s tongues.

It’s also true that women are not necessarily kind or supportive to each other, and that some hold more power than others and over others.

Women are human beings. They are imperfect, and may see each other competitively, be traumatised, toxic, self-interested, aggressive and indoctrinated, or just not nice. There’s work to do individually and collectively.

Even then, we will never all get along. Sisterhood is therefore an achievement even while solidarity is a must.

More problematic is how a vast vision of women’s rights gets mixed up with, and flattened down to, whether women are nice (to each other), as if ideal nurturing behaviour is what legitimises their demands.

Focus on whether women are nice turns our gaze away from cold-eyed analysis of systemic power over women, and strategising to bloodlessly destroy patriarchy and its intersecting oppressions without mercy.

More to say, but remember this: an oppressed group is never its worst enemy.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. January 26, 2022.

Post 451.

THE SLOGAN “my body, my choice” was popularised by decades of outcry by global feminist movements. In particular, it described women’s struggle against state and religious denial of their right to safe and legal abortion. 

Watching it get taken up by the religious right, anti-vaxxers and the vaccine-hesitant today, and being printed on t-shirts sold on Charlotte Street, is nothing short of ironic. Where were these marchers when it came to women’s bodies and rights during all these decades? 

Looking at the First Wave movement, led by Umar Abdullah, I can only wonder at the convenience of a partial, patriarchal take-up of the idea of bodily sovereignty and integrity. Such appropriation is happening all over the world, including by those who resist masking, quarantines and vaccines. 

He’s now leading hundreds who seem to get the concept of choice, but will it continue being a right worth defending when it comes to choices experienced by and denied to women? 

“My body, my choice” has named women’s resistance to rape culture, which normalises sexual violence, and blames and silences victims for an act which fundamentally violates their right to consent. It has articulated pushback against an array of examples of women’s subordination. 

It includes calls for lesbian women’s protection from discrimination (denied to them in Trinidad and Tobago today), First Nations’ women’s freedom from forced sterilisation across the Americas, legal inclusion of African women’s right to consent to marital sex, social recognition of South Asian women’s choice whether to marry and have children, and respect for Arab women’s refusal of the repressive ways that family honour is tied to their dress, respectability and sexuality. 

The fundamental principle is that women should exercise final decision over their bodies, sexual and reproductive health, and life. They should have a satisfying and safe sex life, and power and freedom regarding if, when and how often to reproduce. 

This would mean having the equal power of self-determination as men, without domination, duress or constraint whether by social norms, law, institutions or individuals. Such equality is currently denied in the majority of countries, including in TT. 

It would mean having access to public health support to make such decisions regardless of women’s sexuality, nationality, livelihood, religion, class, age or marital status. It also includes access to safe and nurturing communities, access to affordable housing and food, and access to work opportunities, which all impact women’s sexual and reproductive options and decisions.

This bold statement has also been about a demand to live without the harms that are experienced by so many women and girls in our world today, including rape, lack of access to contraception, forced unions and pregnancies, unwanted births, botched abortions, and maternal death. 

As our old slogan picks up renewed momentum in the contentious politics of the pandemic, I want to remind vaccine marchers of its history and the feminist labour that has gone into giving it familiarity and an ease with which it can be championed, even as its radical gender justice and social justice roots and more emancipatory feminist vision appear to be forgotten, ignored, undervalued or still foreclosed. 

I’m curious about how those now carrying this message on their placards will respond to this reminder. When does choice matter? Whose choices matter? What kinds of choices are matters of human rights and public health? What are your underlying conceptions of community, care and justice? And, what explains when state domination of bodies is considered morally right and when is it not okay?

Of course, it would be brilliant to see civic solidarity emerge from this moment and its leadership. Now that this slogan has reached diverse constituencies and communities, and is being broadly demanded, can there be an opening for a more inclusive conception of what it aims to articulate and achieve? 

Recent history suggests not. In the US, such groups bring together Christian fundamentalists who are anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, highly individualistic and opposed to gender, sexual, reproductive and racial justice. This is who local groups are aligning with ideologically, whether they realise it or not. So, it is possible that we can gain local feminist allies but, alas, unlikely. 

Arundhati Roy asked us to imagine the pandemic as a portal. We can “choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred,” she wrote. “Or we can walk through lightly…ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

For me, all this is what “my body, my choice” really requires and means.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. March 24, 2021.

Post 413.

I WAS DEEPLY saddened by the killing of 15-year-old Akid Duke and 17-year-old Christopher Cummings. These boys were still children. It made me think back to 17-year-old Denelson Smith and 16-year-old Mark Richards, whose murders in 2016 were described as a “slaughter of the innocents.” You may have missed the story of 14-year-old Michael Sooknanan, electrocuted and abandoned, until found on top of an electricity pole last month. 

All of these are tragedies, leaving grieving families.

There can be no single explanation for why people march for some dead and not others, some children and not others. Sometimes, it is a question of race, class and respectability politics. Sometimes, it is explained by the time of year, the breaking point a population has reached, or the circumstances of a killing. 

It’s been asked why the country protested the killing of women, but not the murders of men and boys. It’s a question without any single answer, but it’s not the right question. 

There is insufficient response to the deaths of men and boys, just as there always has been, and remains, insufficient response to the daily threat of sexual and physical violence in the lives of women and girls. 

There have also been vast resources spent on trying to curb men’s violence against men, gang violence, proliferation of guns, and crime. Far more than has ever been spent on ending violence against women. 

In this context, the question isn’t about why women’s deaths are getting more attention than men’s. The question is, why do men continue to be violent to women and other men? Not all men are violent, but there’s enough violence by men, including against each other, for us to ask the right questions.

Men’s murders of other men and boys, including in domestic-violence contexts, are only one side of male violence. The other sides of this triad are men’s violence against women and men’s violence against themselves. Such violence is not simply an emotional-intelligence or relationship-conflict issue. It can be to assert and prove public status and power, and gain inclusion and respect. As well, low levels of skills and literacy, family and community insecurity, limited legal livelihood options, and easy access to weapons and drugs create a risky environment for boys to grow. Schools, courts and prisons also have combined culpability.

Men and boys are not bad people. Patriarchy harms and dehumanises men even while it accords them privileges denied to women and girls. Patriarchal gender ideals that valorise violence and associate it with dominant and invulnerable masculinity are the deep root of this issue. It’s the reason why we bring up youth in a world where men call each other names such as monster, criminal, shotter, soldier and badman as signs of respect. It’s the shadowy culprit that should be the target of those concerned about the threat to our boys. 

It is true that women can also be violent and predators, but their harm to men and boys, measured in sexual abuse, rape and killings suggests far different prevalence, severity, form and impact. Not everyone is equally violent across sex, and there are good reasons for highlighting violence against women. There is a war against one sex by another, regardless of age, ethnicity or place of the victims. Indeed, women and girls become targets of men precisely because of their sex. This year’s gatherings against men’s violence against women were decades overdue. 

Our greater silence about male deaths is because we want killings to stop, but manhood to remain the same, even at the cost to boys’ lives. We practise the stoicism we have assigned to men. Our response to murders of our boys is also related to the fact that they are often, but not only, working class and Afro-Trinidadian, and those bodies are stereotypically associated with criminality and lesser humanity. Anti-blackness means that black bodies carry lower value, whether to their killers or to the public, regardless of whether they are innocent or children. 

My friend Colin Robinson cheekily said to give a boy a doll. He argued in his column that masculinity doesn’t protect boys from violence, and for “socialising boys from infancy to be nurturers and to welcome and manage loving feelings” (March 11, 2018). 

The senseless death of another boy should make sorrow boil over, again leading citizens to the streets. Not to protest attention to women, but to protest the taking of each life by cold-blooded ideals of manhood which we must let go.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. July 2, 2018.

Post 291.

Minister of Education Anthony Garcia needs extra lessons on what not to say about the SEA examination.

Last week, he found it important to note, “The student who placed first in this exam, in other words the student who scored the highest, was a male student…For some time we have been noticing that our girls have been outperforming the boys where first place is concerned…From the fact that a boy was able to top the exam, it seems as though our male students have improved.”

These statements reflect appalling and invalid assumptions.

Traditionally, families didn’t invest in girls’ education because girls were expected to marry, be helpmates and be financially provided for by boys. Boys were expected to have access to better paid employment, be able to invest more in their careers, and to exercise leadership and authority in spheres of work more greatly associated with or dominated by men.

That changed over the last decades. We began to think of girls and boys as human beings with an equal right to educational achievement and economic independence. Reforms also significantly reduced gender stereotyping in school content even if it continued to rule the hidden curriculum of girls’ and boys’ socialization.

Are boys’ struggling against beliefs in their natural role of caring for children and greater economic dependence? What’s the basis for emphasizing a boy ‘topping’ girls in the SEA examination? What historical inequality or entrenched sexist ideals are boys overcoming that we want to highlight?

Shouldn’t we also consider the significance of one boy doing better than all the other boys? Does it only matter that he dominated the girls? Why does that matter at all?

Public response to girls doing well in education has been moral panic about emasculation. From girls’ success emerged baseless opinion about women teachers’ inability to be role models for or competent teachers of boys. This insultingly assumes that women cannot be role models for all human beings, and that there is something wrong with boys seeing such adult humans worthy of emulation.

‘Single mothers’ were also wrongly blamed. Greater poverty and absence of fatherly sharing of care and costs are factors, but blaming boys’ exam ranking on resilient mothers managing many challenges again shortcuts to emasculation as the issue.

Is it that boys must have dominant manhood enforced in order to do well? And, if so, what are the implications for girls, who will grow up in a society where, despite their educational successes, about 35 000 women will experience male partner violence in a twelve-month period. Are we prepared to pit boys and girls against each other whatever the costs?

‘The war on boys!’ was a backlash slogan which positioned girls’ beating books as an attack on masculinity itself. As if boys didn’t have a long history of reading, as if school had not always involved hours of sitting still, as if boys and not girls needed more play and active learning, and as if the demands of subordinated styles of teaching were not bad for all children. This view misdiagnoses current schooling as biased toward girls. At the same time, it is unable to explain how boys can still do well.

Panic also extended to blaming girls for doing too well or being too distracting. More than UWI Principal thought it cool to slight thousands of graduating women students by highlighting, not their historical and hard won success, but their apparent ‘outperforming’ of boys, and the expectation that they take on additional responsibility for helping male peers do well. Our message to girls is that their pursuit of power, capability and achievement should not intimidate boys and men, nor threaten the ‘natural’ balance of patriarchy.

Boys’ educational improvements are necessary, but what do they have to do with girls? Should girls not aim for first place? What, besides a moment of youthful resurgent male domination, is being celebrated here?

When we rate girls’ successes in terms of what they mean for boys, we continue to position males as the standard by which females’ lives are understood. This is called androcentrism. It refers to thinking that continually centres men and boys, and protection of manhood as obsessive priorities. Boyhood and girlhood are wholly irrelevant to children’s achievements unless these ideals in some way hold them back.

Headlines should focus on the urgent national concern of thousands of girls and boys whom schooling fails. For them, violence, mental health, learning challenges, class inequality and gender provide more complex explanation for SEA success and failure.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. January 11, 2018

Post 268.

Comandantas from Mexico’s Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) recently called for a global gathering of rebellious women. Their language reflected centuries of radical leadership of Indigenous women in the Caribbean.

“With regard to the Zapatista men”, they wrote, “we are going to put them to work on all the necessary tasks so that we can play, talk, sing, dance, recite poetry, and engage in any other forms of art and culture that we want to share without embarrassment. The men will be in charge of all necessary kitchen and cleaning duties”.

Here at home, I had just had one of those conversations about how feminists should make our work more about men and more relevant to men, but no words were said about them manning the kitchens.

This pressure is ironic. In all its diversity, feminism is the only social movement in history to put women’s rights and their challenge to patriarchal power first, and it emerged specifically because other movements, from unions to political parties, aimed for merely halfway liberation, and still do.

The millions of women who are the majority labouring in feminism’s trenches must unapologetically prioritize women’s freedom from sexual violence and equity in political and economic power, both still to be won.

Yet, this movement has also been active on issues of peace, nuclear disarmament, trade agreements, gang violence, literacy, conservation, and other areas which impact both women and men’s lives. Additionally, feminists have long been active on ‘men’s issues’ whether they are arguing for greater paternity leave, for greater care for boys’ emotions, prison reform, and much more.

And, it’s worth noting that men’s violence against women and women’s under-representation in global and national decision-making are not ‘women’s issues’. They are issues of men’s occupation and exercise of unequal power, and they should be solved by men with an iota of commitment to justice because that’s what manhood, in all its diversity, love and strengths, brings.

Do we appeal to a majority of men by leaving traditional notions of manhood and womanhood unchallenged or by prioritizing men’s needs, cleaving feminism’s radical vision and analytic challenge to precisely these from its mobilization and power?

We know that’s not necessary because men all over the world are involved and doing great work in feminist movements without us even trying to “put men and boys more to the centre of our policy solutions”, or pretend there is anything equal in experiences of domestic violence, or that one woman President is enough when women have never been 50% of our parliament.

These are brothers-in-struggle who don’t need women to exercise power behind the scenes, in the home, while rocking the cradle, or nicely because they know that commitment is about justice, not comfort, not a battle of the sexes, nor a decentering of women from feminism, even as we also care about our children, brothers, nation and planet.

In a final irony, marking feminist success by men’s visibility risks becoming vulnerable to those demanding newspaper space for gender – meaning only men – while failing to get definitions, facts or analysis right. Because of word space, I won’t dust out those SFATT soundboys tonight*.  

We don’t get men on our side by softening, repackaging or marginalising accurate analyses of power, but because collective transformation of patriarchal ideals of manhood and womanhood, which ultimately harm both women and men, is necessary.  

To quote these Zapatista Comandantas, “We greet you with respect and affection as the women that we are—women who struggle, resist, and rebel against the chauvinist and patriarchal state. We know well that the bad system not only exploits, represses, robs, and disrespects us as human beings, but that it exploits, represses, robs, and disrespects us all over again as women…Yet we are not fearful, or if we are, we control our fear, and we do not give in, we don’t give up, and we don’t sell out.”

 

*An earlier critique of comments in the article highlighted: 1. Murders of women do not occur when fathers are alienated from their children and respond in a wrong manner. Fathers may become alienated from their children when women end abusive relationships. Intimate partner violence, without accountability, which includes threats to women’s lives and their families created that alienation, at least in this case. 2. Withholding sex from a spouse is NOT abuse. It may mean the relationship should end but nowhere in any UN position or national law is choosing not to have sex with a violent partner an example of sexual abuse. 3. “In most cases, the perpetrator would not have murdered before or had a criminal record”. This is vastly missing the point. Anyone who is going to murder their ex/partner needed help long before that relationship or its ending, anger doesn’t turn to murder without pre-existing controlling and abusive behaviour, which may indeed be recognised and reported on…in this case, police and family were aware of reports. 4. The argument that women’s abusive behaviour to men is the “true offense”, much worse that physical violence (for which is harm is unequally borne by women), more widespread, more harmful and more at fault when cases of woman-murder happen absolves men of responsibility for femicide. 5. Men and women can be abusive. Both need access to counseling and life without violence, but when women are run down and murdered, they are not responsible. Wrapping valid arguments in equally irresponsible victim-blame does more harm than good.

 

 

Diary of a mothering worker. November 25, 2015

Post 215.

Last week, Vernon Ramesar of iETv interviewed me about hostility to feminism.

I first explained that part of the problem is that North American stereotypes are often imposed on our home-grown, centuries-old social movements. Instead, we should see feminist struggles as grounded the ways that big systems of slavery and indentureship provided the foundation for issues of sexual violence, unequal wages, or the ideal of male breadwinners and female housewives, which Caribbean women continue to negotiate today.

Not watching much further past this point in the interview, one guy wrote in response: “Gosh. I dislike when women highlight how much of a victim they are. ‘Look at me. I’m a victim since slavery. Treat me special and give me everything!’”

I was intrigued by this mangling of the message, and its hostility. Feminists don’t ask for special treatment, just what is fair. We don’t want everything, only what is just. So what is going on? Is explaining that persistent inequities still exist, and that justice inspires us to challenge them, the same as claiming victimhood?

No. Does analysis of beliefs and values about manhood and power, in religion, family, law, media and the economy, automatically mean that women are being cast as completely powerless? Here, too, the answer is no. So, what else is going on? Accusing women of claiming to be victims, when that is not what they are doing, is an act of silencing them from articulating the conditions of their oppression, which are real.

Feminism gets the biggest backlash here. That’s because, for us, it isn’t that everyone is always individually responsible for their place in power. Unequal relations aren’t just about women’s attitude. There is agency, meaning capacity to make decisions, but there are also ways that women’s opportunities and choices are delimited by, for example, the unsafe conditions for securing termination of pregnancies, the low numbers of sexual assault cases successfully prosecuted, or the greater risks women face at the point of leaving abusive relationships.

Yet, what feminism is navigating is a historical moment dominated by the tyranny of agency and denial of the big political-economic systems that still penetrate women’s lives. We hear it all the time. “Women have the vote, they have rights, what more do they want? If women didn’t dress this way or go there or say what they did, that wouldn’t have happened. You all want equality, but want special treatment, like men to hold open doors, make up your mind. Feminism is passé, women have to stop hearing there are obstacles to them achieving. Now the playing field is unbalanced because women and feminists have biased society and state against men.”

In other words, the hand that rocks the cradle is both ruling and ruining the world, and men are suffering at women’s hands, from violence, from economic exploitation and from women’s domination of family arrangements. Sound like more twisted mangling of feminist arguments about women’s subordination?

There is an ironic slip of hand here: the stereotyping of feminism in ways that force closure of victimhood to women and, simultaneously, its frequent and increasing opening to men as the new, legitimate victims.

The result is a denial of patriarchal power, combined with appropriation of feminist concepts to articulate a backlash. It’s like billionaires in the US claiming that there is a class war against the rich, using the very concept “class” that was created to name economic inequality.

Some women, even those concerned about women’s rights, may also misread feminism as claiming victimhood. The distaste and fear of being similarly labelled means that they too wield a stereotype they wish to avoid. They want to see women as powerful, networked, capable, tenacious, strategic and inspired. But, focusing on women’s personal power won’t simply erase when and why their power is devalued, denied or taken away.

Feminism has always been about women’s consciousness, aspirations, communities and capacities, and how these have been resisted by racism, classism and patriarchy.

It has long been about transforming masculinity from both benefiting from and being hurt by these systems. It has always been about facing victimisation with vision. Today, these remain valid, reasonable intentions for the Caribbean despite distortion and opposition.

• The interview can be viewed at grrlscene.wordpress.com.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 15, 2015

Post 188.

Last Thursday, my Men and Masculinities in the Caribbean students were out on campus learning through engagement with pro-feminist men’s movement-building. These were students who never imagined they would choose to publicly critique homophobia for hurting both gay and straight men. Students who never imagined they would become passionate about raising boys, not to be men, but to be good people, considered to be nurturers just as naturally as women.

Students who never imagined they would commit to the idea that men’s issues are best addressed through men and women’s solidarity to dismantle and transform men’s unequal privilege and power. Older men who never imagined they would play Midnight Robber breaking down patriarchy and younger men who never imagined they would say that this is what a feminist looks like, referring to themselves.

You might think this kind of movement-building is not possible, or too feminist for folks of all religions, races, ages and creeds to connect to. But, it’s amazing how students change once it clicks that patriarchy and the culture of male domination both benefit and hurt boys and men. For, different men occupy different positions of power and status that give them uneven access to resources, rights and respect.

While students saw men’s issues as their higher rates of suicide and alcoholism, high rates of prostate cancer, high risk behaviours, lower investments in schooling, and greater silence about experiences of child sexual abuse, they also understood women’s experiences of male domestic abuse, sexual violence and sexual harassment as men’s issues.

Such movement-building creates greater consciousness of the idea that men, not just women, are responsible for advancing women’s rights to equality and equity in politics and the economy, challenging women’s sexual vulnerability to men, and breaking the interlock between femininity, housework and care of children. It sees women’s full freedom to choose whatever happens to their bodies as a question of justice in which men should invest. For, what kind of manhood is proudly invested in injustice?

Such movement-building aims to end notions of manhood based in the beliefs of men’s natural headship of families, religious communities, the economy, the public sphere and the state. It reaches out to male allies willing to end sexism and homophobia, both of which teach that manhood is and should be nothing like womanhood, leading men to seek refuge in a macho, heterosexual ideal, despite the stigma, shame, and fears of harm it creates among men who don’t measure up, regardless of their sexuality.

Recognising men’s feelings of emasculation because of shifting relations between females and males, such movement building engages men in a conversation with women and amongst themselves about the long struggle against sexism in which men need to get involved.

In this conversation, the misleading ‘men’s rights’ myth that men are now marginalized, meaning oppressed by women and excluded from power, is questioned. Girls are not wrongly be blamed for boys’ choices regarding school work, women for earning qualifications to compete with men in the legal job market, mothers and wives for men’s resort to crime and violence, or feminists for “too much equality”. Students know that ending women’s subordination would end the pressure men face to avoid appearing too feminine or too ‘gay’, enabling men to be valued for simply being human beings.

What are men’s issues? What are our most creative, interactive and analytically sound strategies for tackling them without reproducing a battle of the sexes? And, what will a Caribbean men’s movement look like after a thousand students have learned how to explain why pro-feminist movement-building is necessary? In the decade ahead, watch and see.