Quotes by Sheila Jeffreys

Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.

Women incorporate the values of the male sexual objectifiers within themselves. Catharine MacKinnon calls this being thingified in the head (MacKinnon, 1989). They learn to treat their own bodies as objects separate from themselves. Bartky explains how this works: the wolf whistle sexually objectifies a woman from without with the result that, ``The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object (Bartky, 1990, p. 27). She explains that it is not sufficient for a man simply to look at the woman secretly, he must make her aware of his looking with the whistle.She must, be made to know that I am a nice piece of ass: I must be made to see myself as they see me (p. 27). The effect of such male policing behaviour is that, Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best (Bartky, 1990, p. 28). Women thus become alienated from their own bodies.

The fashion-beauty complex, representing the corporate interests involved in the fashion and beauty industries, has, Bartky argues, taken over from the family and church as central producers and regulators of femininity (1990, p. 39). The fashion-beauty complex promotes itself to women as seeking to, glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence but in fact its aim is to depreciate womans body and deal a blow to her narcissism so that she will buy more products. The result is that a woman feels constantly deficient and that her body requires either alteration or else heroic measures merely to conserve it (p. 39).

However, as Bordo herself notes, the problem with the adoption of postmodern ideas in general is that they have led some writers to disregard the materiality of power relations.

...womens bodies are inferiorised, stigmatized . . . within an overarching patriarchal ideology.For example, biologically and physiologically, womens bodies are seen as both disgusting in their natural state and inferior to mens (2001, p. 141).

Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

It should not be a surprise to find that s/m fantasy is significant in womens sex lives. Women may be born free but they are born into a system of subordination. We are not born into equality and do not have equality to eroticise. We are not born into power and do not have power to eroticise. We are born into subordination and it is in subordination that we learn our sexual and emotional responses. It would be surprising indeed if any woman reared under male supremacy was able to escape the forces constructing her into a member of an inferior slave class.

Transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an ‘essence’ of gender, a psychology and pattern of behaviour, which is suited to persons with particular bodies and identities.This is the opposite of the feminist view, which is that the idea of gender is the foundation of the political system of male domination. ‘Gender’, in traditional patriarchal thinking, ascribes skirts, high heels and a love of unpaid domestic labour to those with female biology, and comfortable clothing, enterprise and initiative to those with male biology. In the practice of transgenderism, traditional gender is seen to lose its sense of direction and end up in the minds and bodies of persons with inappropriate body parts that need to be corrected. But without ‘gender’, transgenderism could not exist. From a critical, feminist point of view, when transgender rights are inscribed into law and adopted by institutions, they instantiate ideas that are harmful to women’s equality and give authority to outdated notions of essential differences between the sexes. Transgenderism is indeed transgressive, but of women’s rights rather than an oppressive social system.

For women as a class, the ability to transform sexual practice, to achieve respect from men as equal human beings and thus break out of their subordinate status, is undermined by the ability of men to escape from the responsibility of acknowledging womens equality. Mens use of women in prostitution stands directly in the way of womens efforts to improve their status.

The bonding of women that is woman-loving, or Gyn/affection, is very different from male bonding. Male bonding has been the glue of male dominance. It has been based upon recognition of the difference men see between themselves and women, and is a form of the behaviour, masculinity, that creates and maintains male power… Male comradeship/bonding depends upon energy drained from women.

Fundamental to a radical and lesbian feminist politics is the understanding that the personal is political. This phrase has two interrelated meanings. It means that the political power structures of the public world are reflected in the private world. Thus, for women in particular, the private world of heterosexuality is not a realm of personal security, a haven from a heartless world, but an intimate realm in which their work is extracted and their bodies, sexuality and emotions are constrained and exploited for the benefits of individual men and the male supremacist political system. The very concept of privacy as Catharine MacKinnon so cogently expresses it, has shielded the place of battery, marital rape, and womens exploited labor. But the phrase has a complementary meaning, which is that the public world of male power, the world of corporations, militaries and parliaments is founded upon this private subordination. The edifice of masculine power relations, from aggressive nuclear posturing to take-over bids, is constructed on the basis of its distinctiveness from the feminine sphere and based upon the world of women which nurtures and services that male power. Transformation of the public world of masculine aggression, therefore, requires transformation of the relations that take place in private. Public equality cannot derive from private slavery.

The effect of legalised prostitution on women outside prostitution is to lower the status of all women. Women are recognised by the state in this system as the appropriate objects of male penetration with no consideration for their personhood or pleasure. This teaches that the penetration and use of an unwilling woman is ‘sex’, an idea that lies at the root of sexual violence against women in general. There is no chance of developing a sexuality of equality in which women’s pleasure, right to say no, and bodily integrity are respected whilst the violence of prostitution is allowed to continue with state support for men’s behaviour.

Pornography as propaganda, according to feminist analysis, represents women as objects who love to be abused, and teaches men practices of degradation and abuse to carry out upon women.

The scope of the transgender empire may be reaching its peak, as transcriticism is increasing at a fast pace both within activist feminism and from wives and regretters. There is an increasing groundswell of criticism of the concept and practice of transgenderism from a newly invigorated radical feminist movement. Moreover, the idea of transgenderism has become so vague and general that the category is in danger of being exploded.

Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.

Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.

This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the worlds religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.

Women are prevented by the threat and reality of male violence from entering public space on equal terms with male citizens.