When did Politics Theory Other pod get so conservative?
Male Violence and the Illusions of Liberal Feminism: Or, Sarah Everard did everything right and she is still dead.
The Politics Theory Other pod took a familiar, by now even cliché, turn during their discussion of the “The entwinement of police and male violence,” (20 March 2021) in the A Block with Melissa Gira Grant failures of GC/Radical Feminism (which she elides with something she calls ‘carceral feminism’) as too reliant on the state and incarceration to solve the problem of male violence.
Which, given that this asshole is the #1 top police trainer in the US, was disappointing. You can see clips of his ‘training’ on Twitter, and visit his website, The Killology Research Group (I am not making this up). The positive point you see in that thread is men saying they’d used this asshole’s books before, and will now stop, as they see the madness of the method. A wee spot of hope.
Certainly, the feminist relationship to carceral institutions is ambivalent at best. Aggressive incarceration damages communities of colour, and the lives of the women in them, by over-incarcerating both men and women of colour for non-violent crimes and minor civil infractions. Radical Feminists are against this. Meanwhile, a lax approach to prosecution and sentencing allows (encourages) (mostly white) male violence toward women (all women) as both domestic and sexual violence. Radical Feminists are against this.
The state is patriarchy. That is an original radical feminist charge. And when officers of the state itself do violence to women, we arrive at the crux of the intersection between patriarchy, the state, and male violence.
And yet, rapists and domestic abusers need to be sequestered from civil society. Men who get their dopamine and endorphin cascades entangled with violence and domination do not belong out here in the world with the rest of us. I don’t see a path toward anyone’s liberation with these dudes out here hurting people to get off.
Grant’s Meander
Which is why I was profoundly disappointed by the lack of analysis of Male Violence in the Grant’s discussion of Male Violence and the police. Here’s what Grant did not offer:
No discussion of how violent men choose policing via the same social choice mechanisms that paedophiles once chose the priesthood, or the way that violent men are rotated among police districts in much the way child-rapist priests were moved among parishes and dioceses.
No statistics on the prevalence of domestic violence in the homes of police officers.
No discussion of cops assaulting women they’ve arrested.
No discussion of red flags in psych profiles that the police union or concerned police chiefs might use to screen out the predictably violent.
No discussion of police training or indoctrination practices that support and encourage violence against any and all civilians (see above).
Nope. Grant’s analysis seems to be that the state empowers police to kill, so police kill, dot. Oh, and ‘carceral feminism’ (whatever the fuck that is) is bad for sex workers and people of color.
GC/RadFems would discuss these factors. They are material, real world, addressable ways that patriarchy just lets the evil that works for it sliiiiide. Knowing about them would help us do two things: Abolish Policing and Incarceration as we know it, and Build Back Better as we construct a liberated world.
But no, to Grants’ mind, RadFems are ‘carceral feminists’ and because we would criminalize the buying of sex, trafficking of humans for any reason, and the violence done to women, we are (a least tacitly) in league with the violence of policing.
Rather, RadFems have established via decades of interdisciplinary research that: Men buy sex so that they don’t have to care about the woman whose body they use. Men buy and sell humans on both local and international markets as a commodity more than they sell weapons or drugs: “a rising trend in modern slavery; from human smuggling to forced labour to child brides to migrant workers, this industry generates over $150 billion in illicit funds each year.” Those men, a plurality of men and the majority of men who buy sex, cannot be trusted with women’s physical or emotional safety. Sex-work is not work, the paradigm of the empowered courtesan or escort the glory of her individual agency and enjoyment of impersonal sexual encounters is not the industry average. Most women sell sex on behalf of a man who profits from her labour.
Prostitution, generally, is abject exploitation and the stain of it is not with the women but with the men who exploit us. It is entirely possible to understand the situation of the sex-worker contextually, to criminalize buying/buyers of sex, and to value the humanity of women involved. Indeed, it is in the name of the humanity of women involved that RadFems critique and condemn prostitution. RadFems have a long history of supporting prostituted women, running NGOs dedicated to their sheltering and support as they exit exploitation, simply because they are women suffering the sharp brunt of dehumanization, devaluation, violence, and stripping of agency that patriarchy would apply to all women. Sisterhood is a deeply inclusive concept.
Grant’s Feint
Maybe that’s why Grant is so keen to paint us as ‘carceral’ and ‘white’ and ‘anti-sex-worker’ and ‘colonialist.’ Which, is a lot of time on ‘other women who are problematic’ in a slot devoted to Male Violence And Policing.
But, Grant is not finished, you see, because these ‘white, carceral feminists’, we only cared about Everard’s death because she ‘did everything right’ and ‘was a perfect victim.’ She was white, she was pretty, she was middle-class, etc. etc. But that was not our analysis at all. The media may have cathected over Everard for those reasons (they almost always do), but not RadFems. We noted that she did everything right because she did everything right and she is still dead.
Our complaint is not that a nice girl died. Our complaint is not that a nice white girl died. Our complaint is that in patriarchy women (all women) carry the burden of male violence with us at all times, including the times that men are not doing violence to us. Our complaint is that within each race and class, women carry the burden of men’s violence. Our complaint is that there is no way to be safe.
Everard walked on lit streets, in a ‘nice part of town’, wore bright clothes, wore non-provocative clothes, was on the phone with her boyfriend to witness-just-in-case, was sober … she might even have had her keys spiking out from between her fingers. And she is still dead.
Women are told to be careful, to take care, to watch out, to watch out for each other, to never be alone, to never be in the wrong company, to defend ourselves, to never aggravate an agitated man … We are trained up from childhood to anticipate and try to avoid or defuse male violence. We are told to expect it the way one expects weather, and to be prepared. Didn’t bring your mace? More’s the pity.
Men (who) do violence to women do it because they can and they like it. That’s why the alleged murderer in the Everard case attacked and murdered Sarah. He wanted to. He did not do it because he was a police officer (though the culture of violence within policing would not have inhibited him at all), he attacked her because it would be fun for him. This does not make him either an outlier nor a monster. Perhaps the mythic image of the police as community protectors contributes to the scandal: paid protector becomes perpetrator. But this would hardly be the first time a pin has been stuck in that particular ideological balloon.
Daniel Holtzclaw, a US police officer and serial rapist serving a 263 year prison sentence for a conviction on 18 of 36 charges of sexual assaults against mostly black and brown women while in the course of his duties has his own Wikipedia page. Indeed, we should be under no illusion that predators often wear the blue.
Dominance and domination are part of masculine gender performance and embodiment, control of others is to be secured even at the cost of violence to or the destruction of any disobedience or disobedients. Men are expected to be violent, and more and more, the images they consume confirm and ingrain this prerogative. From men’s rights activists to incels to mainstream pornography, hurting women is presented to men as desirable, enjoyable, normal, orgasmic, ordained.
At the heart of the RadFem agenda is a vision of a world so disdainful of, so structurally opposed to this violence that almost no man would dare harm anyone in anything other than self-defence.
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Addendum—What Even Is ‘Carceral Feminism’?
It’s a gaslighting term meant to imply that radical feminists or gender critical feminists are not interested in the plights of prostitutes, or women of colour, or women in poverty and the working class, or the structural elements of society that oppress or marginalize them. Noooo, Radical Feminists are only interested in equal pay and jeans with pockets and going about promoting incarceration!!!! – I mean, seriously.
Grant is anti-carceral in that she would legalize prostitution. She does not favour the Nordic Model for dealing with prostitution. To her mind, criminalizing the buying of sex is “de facto criminalizing the people who sell sex”, and keeps the women in prostitution in a state of social disgrace.
That is, in order to welcome women who sell sex into the human family, we have to approve of the men who enact the very core of patriarchy by purchasing the right to ignore those women’s agency and will. This liberal feminist position goes unchallenged on the podcast. We liberate women by maintaining patriarchy.
I can’t with these people.
‘Carceral feminism’ (her term), Grant reports, is criticized by younger people, queer communities, and Black Lives Matter, and is just old and conservative and punitive. RadFem’s support the Nordic Model because we are anti-sex-worker and maybe even anti-sex, they’re just so, like, behind the times.
Rad Fem’s are anti-prostitution because it is the very paradigm of patriarchal sexuality, and because no amount of regulation can make prostitution safe for the women who sell sex.
In the discussion of the murder of Sarah Everard particularly, Grant begins with the premise that violence is the job of policing, that being legally empowered to kill means that killing is the work of policing. I don’t have time for all the logical problems in that view. But, she’s right that laws that govern policing take a very liberal view of justified killing during police interactions. De-escalation is not central to their training (Killology).
The US military is not allowed—by treaty, convention, and local MOD (Management Operations Directorate), to shoot and kill people in active war zones in the situations that US police do. Back to you? Can’t shoot. Dropped the weapon? Can’t shoot. No longer has hand on the trigger device for the IED? Can’t shoot. Even after the IED went off? Can’t shoot. Dealing with small and large crowds, protests? De-escalate, de-escalate, de-really-escalate. Are these rules of engagement followed perfectly? No. Do they apply to para-military contractors? Rather not. But the rules exist, as usual it’s enforcement that can be weak.
US police have a magic legal status call ‘qualified immunity’ and the right to lie to just about anyone other than a judge. US police seek to gain control by escalating situations. Is there also a huge male violence problem in the US military? Why, yes, yes there is. In a country where over 27 women are murdered by family/lovers, and over 5000 are sexually assaulted EVERY SINGLE WEEK, you would only expect endemic male violence to be … endemic. Cops and soldiers are not uniquely violent to women—they’re just more explicitly permitted. Police can just claim they ‘feared for their lives’ and blow us away.
Grant is completely correct that male violence in policing is a unique kind of male violence, in that women cannot rely on police to assist or protect us in any circumstance. The thing is that Everard’s alleged murderer was off duty. He wasn’t policing when he attacked her. He was man-ing. He may have expected more support from the police force, more lenient treatment, maybe to be let off at trial (given some other ridiculous rulings lately in English courts letting men off for murder of women)—but he did not murder Everard in the line of duty. I am certain that he was not confused about this.
Grant is correct the US policing is deeply racist. Indeed, has its historical foundation in the arrest and return of people escaping enslavement to their enslavers. Policing has been deployed like every other US institution from medicine to education to banking to impoverish, disempower, corral, and generally harass people of colour all through the Jim Crow era right down to the present. Today’s RadFems object to this manner of policing specifically because of the harm it does to women and whole communities of colour. Liberation as women doesn’t mean much at all if a woman is still oppressed by structures of race, sexuality, class, or colonization.
Patriarchy is all these things. In seeking women’s liberation, Radical Feminism seeks to abolish all these iterations of patriarchy and to imagine new structures in their place. Radical Feminism is concerned to change the material conditions of human life to suite the well-being of women. That will mean reimaging how we define and address crime.
But, Sarah Everard was killed in 2021, not 3021, and for the moment all we can do with such men who violate and damage women is put them in jail.
For my part, and this is not a standard feature of all RadFem political theory, the problem may not be incarceration so much as its overzealously classist and racist application and its ubiquity. In the US we just throw policing at every kind of social problem including illnesses of despair like drug addiction. Despair cannot be addressed this way. Odds are good that restorative justice would answer to many non-violent crimes, and even some minor violent offenses, but adult violent crime is another order. Violent crime done by minors is likely also best addressed with restorative justice approaches—if whole communities (not just a few families or one or two people) commit to the healing of the victim and the perpetrator, both. This too is very sadly not a ready remedy as the US is not deeply in the habit of community-wide commitment to the guidance of that minor’s rehabilitation. To my mind, many people incarcerated for violent crime should not be only punished in prison, but offered substantive rehabilitation, training, and education. The person who comes out of prison should be a better person and citizen than the one who went in. Extended sentences and life-time imprisonment should be reserved for the most violent crimes (rape, murder, Daniel Holtzclaw), and for people recalcitrant to rehabilitation or repeat offenders.
Liberation, in other words, should be radical or it will be bullshit.