Review: Damon Galgut The Promise

 

It felt like the triumph of hope over experience when I picked up this Booker Prize winner from the Waterstones table. After the disappointments of Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other reviewed on this Blog 20 March 2020  ) and Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain, 21 January 2021 ) the odds were surely stacked against a really good novel. But, as it turns out, this one is and I recommend it.

It’s probably a commonplace that deaths and funerals and wills reveal the fault lines in family relationships; rather than creating the solidarity you might expect, they seem to do the opposite. People fall out with each other, vow never to speak again - at least until the next death if it’s not their own. Damon Galgut has seized the potential of these familiar thoughts and builds his novel around deaths in the family, adding in for good measure excruciating bit parts played by funeral parlours, ministers of religion, and lawyers who draw up the wills. Though the deaths are spread over decades, the thematic focus on how family members respond holds the novel tightly together with a relatively small (and diminishing) cast of characters.

At the same time, Galgut quite subtly provides a background of South Africa’s passage from apartheid to black majority rule and the ways it affects -and doesn’t affect - life in a farmstead-based family in rural Afrikaans-speaking Transvaal. The Promise of the title is a real promise held out to a black family servant but the fulfillment of which is avoided for decades and not achieved until the end of the story. Nations are rarely one big family - and if they are, then like ordinary families they are sure to have their fault lines.

The prose is tight and the dialogue spare and sharp at the same time. There’s not a lot of laugh-out loud humour nor is there really any invitation to grief when characters die. It’s not a book in which there is sunrise and sunset; more a long saga with no obvious resolution but a great deal of very thoughtfully presented story.

Review: The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoe Playdon.

 

 

This book is like a novel with an unreliable narrator. Zoë  Playdon assembles a great deal of interesting and important material but she has an agenda which leads her into various kinds of prolepsis: we get the verdict before the evidence  and - like the headline writers at Pink News  - Playdon can never resist a judgmental adjective, as if she fears readers will reach incorrect conclusions without them. The trouble with such intrusive prolepsis is that some readers will conclude that you protest too much, that you are less confident of your conclusions than you would like us to believe.

The larger narrative of the book offers a background survey of a hundred years’ worth of medical and legal theory and practice around questions of intersex and trans sex, much of which was new to me and which is interesting in its own right.  But the core narrative is the story of a Scottish aristocrat and medical doctor, Ewan Forbes, born Elisabeth Forbes in 1912 and who became 11^th Baronet of Forbes but only after a 1966 legal challenge to his claim, brought on the grounds that he was female not male and thus disqualified from the baronetcy by laws of primogeniture.

I will try to focus what I think is the main issue. Birth certificates, universally so, at least until recently, require that all newborns be classified by sex as either Male or Female. It’s also known, not least by midwives, that some babies show sexually ambiguous characteristics which may or may not tend to resolve (and then, more or less) into Male or Female over time. But there is no category on the birth certificate (such as “To be confirmed”) to allow for this - a fact which has proved very acceptable to nearly all parents, the great upholders of binary life, who simply want an uncomplicated Boy or Girl. It’s also known that there are invisible sexual ambiguities which will only show up on later and more thorough examination. The standard birth certificate inevitably forces a small number of square pegs into round holes, and vice versa, really quite unnecessarily.

It’s also known that there are communities without benefit of sex clinics, gender identity theorists, education, money, or friends in high places, where there is a higher than average incidence of ambiguity which then partially resolves itself at puberty without the intervention of anything except the passage of time. The best-known case is that of a community in the Dominican Republic where some (provisionally) F children become anatomically much more like M children in the course of puberty. This is a sufficiently common occurrence for there to be a name for those affected: guevedoces which means penises at (age) twelve: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guevedoce.  It’s true, these F to M children retain some distinctive characteristics: they never go bald and they do not suffer from the common M problem of enlarged prostates - they do have prostates, but small ones. Both of those facts attracted the attention of Big Pharma which has developed hormone treatments for baldness and prostate enlargement based on genetic profiles of these rural children. They most commonly go under the name of the drug Finasteride which can have unpleasant psychological side-effects.

So here we have a well-studied case of spontaneous transition without chemical or surgical intervention in relation to individuals who would, in consequence, generally be classed as intersex (the old hermaphrodite). The original research was done in the 1970s by Dr Julianne Imperato-McGinley.  Playdon does not mention it anywhere in her book though it strikes me as very pertinent to the earlier part of her discussion.

Ewan Forbes, the subject of the book, was classified as F on the original 1912 birth certificate and named Elisabeth but very early in life showed tomboyish gender characteristics which were very noticeable. When Elisabeth’s mother examined her child at the age of six she satisfied herself that the child “had a normal female anatomy, and later, she warned him that he might menstruate” (p 18) - though at that time the onset of menstruation would normally occur much later than it now does. As it turned out, at the age of sixteen  Ewan “began to have erections and emissions” (his words, p. 23).

When he was fifteen, his educated , wealthy and well-connected mother had taken him on a tour of 1920s European sex clinics where he was treated with hormone injections (p.23), presumably of testosterone or something similar. All the medical records have been lost. Playdon later comments that this treatment “meant that he did not go through the wrong puberty” (p.46).

Put baldly like that, it looks to me like a case of the fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc (After that, therefore because of that). Are we supposed to believe that between the ages of fifteen and sixteen Ewan acquired something capable of “erections” as a result of hormone injections? And “emissions” which would imply the presence of prostate and testes unless the emissions were what would now be called female ejaculation? (Playdon thinks they were and she seems obviously right: see p 185).

Is it not much more likely that mother and son were aware of (belated? continuing?) pubertal changes of an M character occurring before they set off for the sex clinics and that the injections aided a development that had already begun rather than caused it? If so, Ewan would have a lot in common with the Dominican Republic intersex children.

However, later in the book Ewan’s sister Margaret is reported as writing of Ewan that “She had her periods regularly just like every other girl” (p 132) but this was written in a context of personal hostility and is almost certainly untrue. (Upper class people have no problems about lying when it suits them and there is more to come).

When in the context of the contested baronetcy Ewan is medically examined by Edinburgh university Professor Strong at the end of 1966, he is found to have a vagina and a urethra separate from and behind what the medical report describes as a “virilised clitoris” (phallus) which would be regarded as “greatly enlarged” if thought of as a clitoris and “abnormally small” as a penis. Breast development “more resembled the female pattern than the male” - all this at pages 150-151. On this basis, Strong diagnoses a case of female pseudo-hermaphroditism, then a standard category which explained male characteristics by the presence of masculinising hormones in the womb. Ewan is a person who did not really fit into the birth certificate M and F boxes and so the original box ticked was an instance of deeming rather than simple categorisation. Ewan had successfully applied for a retrospective change to the box back in 1950, using medical reports kindly supplied by friends and colleagues and quite possibly suspect as simple favours. But without a great deal of difficulty, he became Ewan not Elisabeth, M not F, and announced the fact with a small ad. in the local newspaper.

Playdon objects to Strong’s diagnosis on the basis that Ewan had begun taking testosterone as a teenager and continued to take it into adult life, it seems regularly.  As a result, Playdon reckons that his 1966 male characteristics are more likely to have arisen from long use of testosterone than from womb facts. In other words, Playdon thinks Ewan is trans in the modern sense rather than intersex. He had set out, originally in the 1920s, with the help of his mother and long before these things were fully theorised, to fit his female body to his sense of male self. In the 1966 legal and medical context, that story would have been less helpful to his claim to maleness than the intersex story, and thus a reason not to advance it. Ewan insisted on his physical and not just psychological maleness, now additionally evidenced by the  sudden and miraculous appearance of a testicle - he faked the evidence. 

*

When I read the word “testosterone” I always recall that I have a small bit of skin in the game and I will tell the story because it is also about cause and effect.

A feature of schools in my childhood was the annual medical examination by the School Doctor. Either in 1958 or 1959, when I was eleven or twelve (I think eleven), the School Doctor discovered that I had an undescended testicle. My mother, relaying the news to me, said that this had to be dealt with because it could cause problems later - she did not name them, but when much later I looked them up they were identified as cancer and infertility. The treatment would be a course of injections and, if that failed, then an operation. So once or twice a week, my mother took me on the bus to our local GP surgery where a very large syringe equipped with a long needle was pushed deep into my thigh; on one occasion the needle could not take the strain and broke.

A first course of injections partly worked and so it was decided to give me a second course, at the end of which it was deemed that my testicle had sufficiently descended. No one told me that these testosterone injections might have side-effects and so I lived a miserable pre-teen existence believing that my semi-permanent state of erection - permanent on bus rides - signified something wrong with me. I was troubled rather earlier in life than Ewan by erections and emissions.

Many years later, I had this thought: I was eleven or twelve. I was undersized and underweight and maybe a slow developer. Perhaps that testicle would have eventually descended of its own accord. Maybe the injections just helped it along. 

Maybe something like that  happened to Ewan Forbes who had begun some physical transition, involving the development of a phallus from a clitoris, before being helped along by testosterone or some other hormone used in 1920s  Austrian and German sex clinics. They did not cause the transition; they assisted it.

This is important because Playdon wants to blur the distinction between inter sex and trans sex and subsume both into a single trans category.This seems a disservice to the small but important group of intersex-born people whose life trajectories are rather different to those of other trans people who often go through the “wrong” puberty with permanent consequences which means that they are not intersex in the traditional sense and that they have a more obvious quantum of characteristics which derive from long residence in their unambiguous birth sex - for example, in terms of bone, muscle and height.

*

Playdon believes and as an activist has committed herself to the view that the right way to proceed in all cases, intersex and trans sex, is from the individual’s own self-identification. Medical access to hormones and surgery should follow from that, where sought. This may well be the best way of looking at things, since several of the alternatives have proved pretty awful in their consequences, as Playdon elaborates. Doctors have their own weaknesses, and ambitious ones sometimes most of all.

However, it does not follow that self-identification  is all that should be needed in the wider society. There are at least some grounds for thinking that some kind of regulation is necessary, which may vary according to context and so on. Playdon disagrees:

“…the only information about themselves that trans people - or anyone - are obliged to give in a social setting is their name and perhaps their pronouns” (page 308)

Well, at present name and pronoun won’t get you into a pub if you look sixteen; it won’t get you a free bus ride even if you look sixty five; it won’t get you access over the telephone to the state of your bank account; and so on. Unthinking maximalist demands,  accompanied in the recent past by some fairly unpleasant behaviour, seem to express not so much a desire for equality as an excessive sense of entitlement. They have weakened the case transgender activists have been making and must be reckoned part cause of the more recent backlash: see, for example,  Kathleen Stock's Material Girls, reviewed on this site on 24 October 2021.

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Review Jack Kerouac On the Road

 

I can see how this book might have been a publishing sensation in 1957 just because it depicts a very different post-War American world to that represented in the dominant culture of magazines, TV, and political discourse. Sol, the narrator, and his buddies criss-cross America for the hell of it and everywhere they encounter their likes and a world of bars, jazz clubs, flop houses and whorehouses which cater to the needs of young white ex-GI males who live for kicks heightened by alcohol in excess, dope, dangerous driving, and access to girls (preferably teenage) who come free or, at least, cheap. They steal, they leave wives and babies behind, they beg and borrow. They are bums, just one grade above the hobos thanks to background Aunts, Uncles, and GI payouts. But they aren’t gun-toting and whatever racism they express is contradicted by their openness to Black cultures and non-white sexual partners which in 1957 would also have been unusual - remember that in World War Two the US army operated in racially segregated units.

But, No, because the structure and style is wearying. The novel has no plot, it’s structured as And then…and then…and then and in case you don’t get the message it repeats itself as journeys are repeated - there is no final destination despite a sort of belated attempt in the closing pages ( 280-81 in my edition). Even Kerouac’s editors queried this, reckoning that the book should at least be shorter. As for themes, it would be a very dutiful, sober reader who sought to extract a coherent Beat philosophy from the words and actions of the central figure of Dean Moriarty whose manic search for beatific moments of ecstasy and revelation drive the narrative rather as he drives the cars, which are also thematically central.

The novel itself was written at great speed on a single roll of paper (Kerouac glued sheets together as he fed them into the typewriter), so its method of production was part of the manic world it depicts. But as with surrealist “automatic writing”, writing at speed (or on speed: Benzedrine in Kerouac’s case - see  Introduction xix) does not guarantee inspiration; it may produce no more than perspiration. As one critic observed of the hagiographic claim for the speed at which On the Road was written, That’s typing, not writing. It’s true, Kerouac did re-type and revise the book as it struggled towards belated publication, but much of that seems to have been with the aim of removing potentially libellous material about characters who may have been re-named but were based on real people.

I only had one encounter with any of Kerouac's cast of real-life characters: at the 1967 London Dialectics of Liberation congress, held in the capacious Roundhouse, I chanted Om..... on the instructions of Allen Ginsberg, Carlo Marx in the novel.

Review: L P Hartley The Go Between

I admire novelists who manage both to take their time in telling a story but also  manage to meet the common expectation of readers that the story should have some pace, however measured,  to which they can respond. Among contemporary novelists, Kazuo Ishiguro pulls it off wonderfully, most obviously perhaps in The Remains of the Day (1989). L P Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) shares with that book both its retrospective character, a first-person narrator revisiting the past, and a pace which is both leisurely and engaging. That is structurally visible in the short chapters: twenty five of them, including Prologue and Epilogue, which occupy 255 pages in my Penguin edition. The trick, I suppose, is to introduce some significant new material into each chapter - something which Victorian novelists writing for serial publication were almost contractually obliged to do. So much the better if new material layers onto the older, so that character or plot develop - Ishiguro manages this in such a way that his endings are rather like musical finales where everything comes together.

Hartley’s book reminded me of What Maisie Knew. It’s true, the first person narrator is telling his story fifty years after the events it chronicles but for most of the time allows this to be forgotten and offers up  to the reader the world of a twelve year old boy who doesn’t fully understand what is going on between the adults around him and - for much of the time - the go-between role in which he has been enlisted. What is going on is a relationship in the same category as that between Lady Chatterley and Mellors, but I got no sense that Hartley was trying to allude to or invoke that literary fact.

Set in 1900, the tone is nostalgic with the usual props of the English countryside, stately houses, public schools, cricket matches, servants, and people who have no work of their own to do - still going strong in fine novels like Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday (2016). Hartley’s Go-Between is also a very fine novel. 

Review: Zoë Playdon, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes

 

This book is like a novel with an unreliable narrator. Zoë  Playdon assembles a great deal of interesting and important material but she has an agenda which leads her into various kinds of prolepsis: we get the verdict before the evidence  and - like the headline writers at Pink News  - Playdon can never resist a judgmental adjective, as if she fears readers will reach incorrect conclusions without them. The trouble with such intrusive prolepsis is that some readers will conclude that you protest too much, that you are less confident of your conclusions than you would like us to believe.

The larger narrative of the book offers a background survey of a hundred years’ worth of medical and legal theory and practice around questions of intersex and trans sex, much of which was new to me and which is interesting in its own right.  But the core narrative is the story of a Scottish aristocrat and medical doctor, Ewan Forbes, born Elisabeth Forbes in 1912 and who became 11^th Baronet of Forbes but only after a 1966 legal challenge to his claim, brought on the grounds that he was female not male and thus disqualified from the baronetcy by laws of primogeniture.

I will try to focus what I think is the main issue. Birth certificates, universally so, at least until recently, require that all newborns be classified by sex as either Male or Female. It’s also known, not least by midwives, that some babies show sexually ambiguous characteristics which may or may not tend to resolve (and then, more or less) into Male or Female over time. But there is no category on the birth certificate (such as “To be confirmed”) to allow for this - a fact which has proved very acceptable to nearly all parents, the great upholders of binary life, who simply want an uncomplicated Boy or Girl. It’s also known that there are invisible sexual ambiguities which will only show up on later and more thorough examination. The standard birth certificate inevitably forces a small number of square pegs into round holes, and vice versa, really quite unnecessarily.

It’s also known that there are communities without benefit of sex clinics, gender identity theorists, education, money, or friends in high places, where there is a higher than average incidence of ambiguity which then partially resolves itself at puberty without the intervention of anything except the passage of time. The best-known case is that of a community in the Dominican Republic where some (provisionally) F children become anatomically much more like M children in the course of puberty. This is a sufficiently common occurrence for there to be a name for those affected: guevedoces which means penises at (age) twelve: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guevedoce.  It’s true, these F to M children retain some distinctive characteristics: they never go bald and they do not suffer from the common M problem of enlarged prostates - they do have prostates, but small ones. Both of those facts attracted the attention of Big Pharma which has developed hormone treatments for baldness and prostate enlargement based on genetic profiles of these rural children. They most commonly go under the name of the drug Finasteride which can have unpleasant psychological side-effects.

So here we have a well-studied case of spontaneous transition without chemical or surgical intervention in relation to individuals who would, in consequence, generally be classed as intersex (the old hermaphrodite). The original research was done in the 1970s by Dr Julianne Imperato-McGinley.  Playdon does not mention it anywhere in her book though it strikes me as very pertinent to the earlier part of her discussion.

Ewan Forbes, the subject of the book, was classified as F on the original 1912 birth certificate and named Elisabeth but very early in life showed tomboyish gender characteristics which were very noticeable. When Elisabeth’s mother examined her child at the age of six she satisfied herself that the child “had a normal female anatomy, and later, she warned him that he might menstruate” (p 18) - though at that time the onset of menstruation would normally occur much later than it now does. As it turned out, at the age of sixteen  Ewan “began to have erections and emissions” (his words, p. 23).

When he was fifteen, his educated , wealthy and well-connected mother had taken him on a tour of 1920s European sex clinics where he was treated with hormone injections (p.23), presumably of testosterone or something similar. All the medical records have been lost. Playdon later comments that this treatment “meant that he did not go through the wrong puberty” (p.46).

Put baldly like that, it looks to me like a case of the fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc (After that, therefore because of that). Are we supposed to believe that between the ages of fifteen and sixteen Ewan acquired something capable of “erections” as a result of hormone injections? And “emissions” which would imply the presence of prostate and testes unless the emissions were what would now be called female ejaculation? (Playdon thinks they were and she seems obviously right: see p 185).

Is it not much more likely that mother and son were aware of (belated? continuing?) pubertal changes of an M character occurring before they set off for the sex clinics and that the injections aided a development that had already begun rather than caused it? If so, Ewan would have a lot in common with the Dominican Republic intersex children.

However, later in the book Ewan’s sister Margaret is reported as writing of Ewan that “She had her periods regularly just like every other girl” (p 132) but this was written in a context of personal hostility and is almost certainly untrue. (Upper class people have no problems about lying when it suits them and there is more to come).

When in the context of the contested baronetcy Ewan is medically examined by Edinburgh university Professor Strong at the end of 1966, he is found to have a vagina and a urethra separate from and behind what the medical report describes as a “virilised clitoris” (phallus) which would be regarded as “greatly enlarged” if thought of as a clitoris and “abnormally small” as a penis. Breast development “more resembled the female pattern than the male” - all this at pages 150-151. On this basis, Strong diagnoses a case of female pseudo-hermaphroditism, then a standard category which explained male characteristics by the presence of masculinising hormones in the womb. Ewan is a person who did not really fit into the birth certificate M and F boxes and so the original box ticked was an instance of deeming rather than simple categorisation. Ewan had successfully applied for a retrospective change to the box back in 1950, using medical reports kindly supplied by friends and colleagues and quite possibly suspect as simple favours. But without a great deal of difficulty, he became Ewan not Elisabeth, M not F, and announced the fact with a small ad. in the local newspaper.

Playdon objects to Strong’s diagnosis on the basis that Ewan had begun taking testosterone as a teenager and continued to take it into adult life, it seems regularly.  As a result, Playdon reckons that his 1966 male characteristics are more likely to have arisen from long use of testosterone than from womb facts. In other words, Playdon thinks Ewan is trans in the modern sense rather than intersex. He had set out, originally in the 1920s, with the help of his mother and long before these things were fully theorised, to fit his female body to his sense of male self. In the 1966 legal and medical context, that story would have been less helpful to his claim to maleness than the intersex story, and thus a reason not to advance it. Ewan insisted on his physical and not just psychological maleness, now additionally evidenced by the  sudden and miraculous appearance of a testicle - he faked the evidence. 

*

When I read the word “testosterone” I always recall that I have a small bit of skin in the game and I will tell the story because it is also about cause and effect.

A feature of schools in my childhood was the annual medical examination by the School Doctor. Either in 1958 or 1959, when I was eleven or twelve (I think eleven), the School Doctor discovered that I had an undescended testicle. My mother, relaying the news to me, said that this had to be dealt with because it could cause problems later - she did not name them, but when much later I looked them up they were identified as cancer and infertility. The treatment would be a course of injections and, if that failed, then an operation. So once or twice a week, my mother took me on the bus to our local GP surgery where a very large syringe equipped with a long needle was pushed deep into my thigh; on one occasion the needle could not take the strain and broke.

A first course of injections partly worked and so it was decided to give me a second course, at the end of which it was deemed that my testicle had sufficiently descended. No one told me that these testosterone injections might have side-effects and so I lived a miserable pre-teen existence believing that my semi-permanent state of erection - permanent on bus rides - signified something wrong with me. I was troubled rather earlier in life than Ewan by erections and emissions.

Many years later, I had this thought: I was eleven or twelve. I was undersized and underweight and maybe a slow developer. Perhaps that testicle would have eventually descended of its own accord. Maybe the injections just helped it along. 

Maybe something like that  happened to Ewan Forbes who had begun some physical transition, involving the development of a phallus from a clitoris, before being helped along by testosterone or some other hormone used in 1920s  Austrian and German sex clinics. They did not cause the transition; they assisted it.

This is important because Playdon wants to blur the distinction between inter sex and trans sex and subsume both into a single trans category.This seems a disservice to the small but important group of intersex-born people whose life trajectories are rather different to those of other trans people who often go through the “wrong” puberty with permanent consequences which means that they are not intersex in the traditional sense and that they have a more obvious quantum of characteristics which derive from long residence in their unambiguous birth sex - for example, in terms of bone, muscle and height.

*

Playdon believes and as an activist has committed herself to the view that the right way to proceed in all cases, intersex and trans sex, is from the individual’s own self-identification. Medical access to hormones and surgery should follow from that, where sought. This may well be the best way of looking at things, since several of the alternatives have proved pretty awful in their consequences, as Playdon elaborates. Doctors have their own weaknesses, and ambitious ones sometimes most of all.

However, it does not follow that self-identification  is all that should be needed in the wider society. There are at least some grounds for thinking that some kind of regulation is necessary, which may vary according to context and so on. Playdon disagrees:

“…the only information about themselves that trans people - or anyone - are obliged to give in a social setting is their name and perhaps their pronouns” (page 308)

Well, at present name and pronoun won’t get you into a pub if you look sixteen; it won’t get you a free bus ride even if you look sixty five; it won’t get you access over the telephone to the state of your bank account; and so on. Unthinking maximalist demands,  accompanied in the recent past by some fairly unpleasant behaviour, seem to express not so much a desire for equality as an excessive sense of entitlement. They have weakened the case transgender activists have been making and must be reckoned part cause of the more recent backlash: see, for example,  Kathleen Stock's Material Girls, reviewed on this site on 24 October 2021.

Review: E M Forster, Maurice

 

I hadn’t read this before; it was a disappointment. Its history is fairly well-known: written fairly impulsively in 1913-1914 as a novel which the author knew could not be published, it did not appear until 1971, shortly after the author’s death. It could have been published before then but the elderly author (quite reasonably) did not want the hassle it would create - not so much legal, since there is little in the book which even the most vicious lawyer in the Mervyn-Griffiths-Jones  mould could seize upon, as personal - Forster was Establishment at the highest level: Fellow of King's, Order of Merit, Companion of Honour. The novel can  be summarised as a gay male coming out story with more than a suggestion of a happy-ever-after ending.

In terms of structure and style it is unremarkable, a chronological story told more or less in plain prose.  The author’s effort was presumably focussed on the challenging because fairly novel task of actually writing about male homosexual love and/or sex. He has two shots at it: Maurice’s anguished first affair with fellow Cambridge student Clive is framed by the Platonic ideal of the Phaedo: they do sort of have sex, but not much, and it’s not the important thing. Maurice’s second post-Cambridge affair is thrust upon him by an importunate gamekeeper, Alec, interested in physical sex as the gateway to whatever else might be possible between two men. Maurice decides - very rapidly - that a bit of rough is what he has always needed and throws up his conventional life to embrace a chance which won’t repeat itself; Alec also throws up a life. It’s Bernardine Evaristo stuff, if you will excuse the anachronism.

Over a hundred years on from its composition, this either-or framing in terms of Platonic soul and decidedly non-platonic body can only seem rather dated or, at least, limited. As a result, I guess that for most readers, the novel will present itself as a period piece which reminds us of how anguishing it was to be young and gay - and middle-class -  in early twentieth century England..

Review: Kathleen Stock, Material Girls. Why Reality Matters for Feminism.

 

 

This is an excellent book: clear, thorough, convincing and, in context, brave: Kathleen Stock is currently a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Salem but has failed to answer with an unequivocal “Yes” the Witch Question, “Do you believe trans women are women?” (p 142). As a result, trans-activist students (not to be confused with trans-people) are calling for her dismissal: in the pages of Pink News they tell us that they’ve paid their money and don’t expect to have to share their campus space with a transphobe ("No TERFS on our TURF"" reads a banner held by two students,  clearly inspired by their parents' suburban NIMBYism). 

It’s unlikely that many of the protesting students  will read Professor Stock's book, though - to be fair - reading books is not their favourite pastime anyway; the favourites are Salem’s distance learning platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Is that not so?

Stock faces more than a local challenge to be heard. There are now tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in the UK and USA with a direct investment in Gender Identity Theory (or Theories) and careers and future careers are at stake: not only do we have the faculty of hundreds of Gender Studies departments and programmes, together with their students. There are the senior university administrators who have fallen over themselves to adapt to Facebook norms and officially recognise a veritable sweet shop of student gender identities: demifluid and demiflux at Kent, for example. (p. 34. Facebook itself offers seventy-one and counting). If only it were some wonderful prank, like the old US Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINNA) which had enthusiastic, donation-offering supporters, and kept going for several years until the founding-prankster decided to ‘fess all. The name should have given the game away since the object of the society was to compel diapers and modesty clothes for cows, dogs, horses, etc. It remains true that if you want to encounter truly wacky beliefs, look to the USA.

Also with skin in the game of Gender Identity Theory are the “charities” which under light-touch UK Charities regulation can function pretty much as cause-promoting commercial organisations with large salary budgets. Stock very pointedly skewers them for misuse of statistics at pages 220-24. These pages ought to make tough reading for those responsible. Why should we regard their Fake News as any different to Donald Trump’s? These pages also remind us of the fact that activist organisations have a bad history of cutting and pasting individual tragedies onto standard issue placards to serve their own purposes, misrepresenting the original history to fit.

Then there are the columnists and commentators and even leading (though not always very bright) figures in major political parties (Labour, Liberal Democrat, Scottish Nationalist) up to their necks in commitments to trans activist demands. None of these people, any time soon, is going to declare that the Emperor Has No Clothes.

Two things.

First, I have never read anything by a Gender Identity Theorist - and I include in that Judith Butler - which has not struck me as flimsy or confused or both, excepting some early work before Orthodoxy imposed its dead hand. As it happened, faculty at what was then the University of Sussex were responsible for some of the most interesting of those early contributions though they labelled it Queer Theory (Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, etc).

But it is the current state of intellectual weakness in gender identity theory, and lack of intellectual grasp by students supposedly studying it, which I believe leads to the offence, outrage and punitive reaction to any reasoned criticism. Put on the defensive, the advocates have nowhere else to go; it is as if pointed criticism has punctured a fantasy, not damaged an argument.

Insofar as there is supposed to be some kind of foundation to the claims made about gender identity, then it is usually social construction theories which are invoked. But I find little evidence that they have really been studied, understood, or critically appraised. How many have read, say, Alfred Schütz The Phenomenology of the Social World dating from 1932 but only translated into English in 1967? (Maybe I cite that work because I recall asking my mother to buy me the expensive North Western University Press translation as a birthday present, in 1967. For my own non-technical critique of social constructionism in general, go to https://www.academia.edu/45141890/Social_Construction_De_Constructed )

There is a fall-back position from social constructionism which simply says that people are who and what they feel they are, which in short order reduces simply to what they claim they are. So if you feel you are a woman trapped in a male body, then that’s what you are until you decide to claim, “I’m a woman”  as if it was in the same performative category as the “I do” in the marriage ceremony. Once you say the necessary words,  trans activists reckon that a woman has been born and that we should open any doors hitherto closed. But the claim “I’m a woman” contains no more guarantee of longevity than does the claim “I do”. Likewise, "They/Them" claimed as pronouns may last no longer than this year's Facebook account. Mere declarations, however decorated with the word "performative"  (and who has actually read J L Austin ....), are not always as robust as they really need to be.

Second, from a distance the gulf which supposedly separates Trans activists from their targetted enemy, the TERFs [Trans-exclusionary radical feminists] is just a small piece of disputed territory. As I understand it, most or all TERFs (an unpleasant term, largely applied to older, female Second Wave feminists in ways which sometimes suggest misogyny) are at least fairly accepting of transgender people and are happy to support measures which make life easier for them. They simply draw the line at some very specific areas which over long decades of hard work have been constructed or retained - and with very good reasons - as Women Only spaces: women’s prisons, women’s refuges, rape crisis centres, women only sports, changing rooms, and toilets. (One never hears any discussion of the situation of trans men in these contexts, which must be either because trans men aren’t rattling the door or because admission is allowed because it is felt or assumed that trans men are safe in a way that trans women aren’t - Stock briefly discusses this). 

It is important to note that trans-activists call for self-identification as the sole criterion for admission to Women Only spaces; no evidence of surgery or use of hormones. Likely results are already known from cases like that of Karen White, a self-identified transwoman assigned to  a woman's  prison  who promptly began to sexually assault female prisoners. Back in court, the prosecution was obliged to follow the guidelines and refer to "her penis" in outlining the assaults. Stock discusses this case.

*

I recall the moment in 2018 when I decisively lost sympathy for trans-activist demands. I saw in the news a photograph of beaming trans woman Rachel Mckinnon having just won a major US and world women’s cycle race. Mckinnon stands with the two females who had come in at 2^nd and 3^rd . As one of the runners-up, Jennifer Wagner, later tweeted, it “definitely wasn’t fair”. No, it fucking wasn’t fair, but just as in the USA here in the UK we have thousands of middle-class Neville Chamberlain intellectuals ready to declare how wonderful, how inspiring, and any other Pseuds' Corner claptrap which occurs to them as likely to pay the rent. Stock makes rather more polite remarks on this example at pp 87-88. In the current climate, she has little choice but to remain polite though she occasionally allows herself a “bonkers”. I found the photograph deeply dispiriting, as  the display of a hugely misplaced sense of entitlement and as a put-down for female athletes..  You can easily Google it.

*

Stock focusses initially on a defence of the permanent (life-time) importance of biological sex and of the sex binary, even when all necessary qualifications about intersex persons and so on are added. I found the defence impeccably argued. Then she turns to what one might call the predictive value of knowing a person’s sex which is strong even if there is little biological determination of behaviours - socialisation will do the trick even if nature doesn’t. Either way, it’s important to know how biological males and females differ in the long run. Thus it is (as I discovered when I joined this select class) that 83% of UK speeding convictions are collected by males. (The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority used to classify drivers by “Sex” which they asked me to supply many years ago; they now classify by “Gender” and have switched me - this is what Stock calls GENDER in sense 1; really, it’s just a euphemism (American?) for “Sex”.)

Then she pulls apart Gender Identity theory and sets out her own stall on “What makes a woman?”There follows a very interesting chapter which seems in one way meant as a concession to Identity theory but which would come at the price of conceding that it has an “As If” fictional or imaginary character which is nonetheless important.  

Then we get to the grim bits: the recent history of LGBT and feminist organisations. I think I am entitled to pass over these chapters, and return to my initial recommendation.

See now also my review of Zoe Playdon's The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, published 1 December 2021

 

 

 

 

Review: Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

 

My last review was of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and I have now gone on to read an obvious Compare & Contrast novel, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). I was terribly disappointed, for two main reasons.

The novel is narrated by Huck as a series of scenes, more or less improbable. Though there are fine descriptions of the setting and insightful sketches of characters, the scenes don’t really add up to anything bigger and Huck develops less in sensibility than does Kim; it would be wrong to say that his character is static but it is pretty much full formed from the outset.

More importantly, I found the long drawn-out final scenes constructed out of Tom Sawyer’s fantasies almost unendurable. They aren’t funny and (reading anachronistically, perhaps) Tom comes across as the perfect sociopath, utterly oblivious of the consequences of his actions for those who love and care for him - Uncle, Aunt, Jim, Huck. That is one main reason why the phantasmagoria isn’t funny.

Huck is more it touch with reality but, overawed by Tom, goes along far too much with Tom’s fantasy schemes. They go on for many, many tedious pages and when it is Finally Revealed, death-bed confession style (chapter 42), what has really been going on, the narrative becomes perfunctory when it needs most not to be -  as if all that is now needed to close the narrative is for Aunt Sally to pronounce, “Well, that’s all right then”.

So far from being able to set up a serious Compare & Contrast, I throw up my hands and declare, No contest. Kim is a much better book.

Review: Rudyard Kipling, Kim

This is a wonderful novel.

I had never troubled with Kipling before and doubt I could quote accurately a single line of his verse. So I came to this book with only the prejudice that it was likely to be some imperialist tale. But apart from its formal or official framing as a Great Game story, it’s not.

It’s a lyrical novel which celebrates India, land and people - and since it was published in 1901, “India” includes Pakistan and the settings are mostly in what was then the North West and North. It’s also a lyric to its principal characters: the Red Hat lama questing south from his Abbey of Such-zen; the Frontier horse dealer and government agent, Mahbub Ali; Hurree Babu, the man of many parts (some of them over-learnt from the Sahibs); the talkative dowager Maharanee of Saharunpore, careless of her veil but not of the duty of care to others; the enigmatic Woman of Shamlegh, betrayed by the Christians; the small cast of Sahibs playing the great game - Creighton Sahib, Lurgan Sahib; and, of course, centre stage, Kim.

You could say that the lyric to the characters is romanticised; it’s true that Kipling foregrounds the best in nearly all of them. He draws the line only in relation to three minor characters: the unspeakable, nameless pair of Russian spies who appear towards the end and who consign themselves to outer moral darkness with their every word and deed; and earlier on in the novel, the Anglican army chaplain, the Reverend Bennett, whose bit part it is to pose a threat to Kim’s future growth and development - he would send him to an English orphanage - and who is characterised with what I can only describe as relentless venom.

The youthful Kim, no more than a street urchin, struggles with his English - much less fluent than his Urdu - to tell that he is the lama’s chela [disciple] and that:

“…we must find that River; it is so verree valuable to us”

 “But this is gross blasphemy!” cried the Church of England. (p. 96)

Kipling hates Bennett and his prejudices. I read the characterisations, eyes agog, wondering what effect they had on early readers.  And perhaps especially when laid beside Kipling’s small sketches of native women, politely described as “courtesans” and “dancing girls” and about whom he is always positive. They are women of good heart, and that is what matters:

“Naturally, for he was never trained to consider them in any way improper, Kim had passed the time of day with one or two frivolous ladies at upper windows in a certain street, and naturally, in the exchange of compliments, had acquitted himself well”. (p. 130)

The main characters are lax in ways which the Reverend Bennetts of this world would find intolerable. Even the lama, questor after the meaning of life and triumph over the Wheel of illusion, will stretch a point for the Maharanee: she talks too much but she has a good heart and so it comes to pass:

“But I would ask thy Holy One….a charm against most lamentable windy colics that in mango-times overtakes my daughter’s eldest. [As an aside to Kim] Two years back he gave me a powerful spell.

“Oh, Holy One!” said Kim bubbling with mirth at the lama’s rueful face.

“It’s true. I gave her one against wind”. (p. 232)

In case you were (ever) inclined to see the lama as a crusty old bachelor rather too preoccupied with his Quest, Kipling definitively humanises him in just a couple of lines. 

There are other variations on this theme, of which I find the most beautiful this expression of love which Mahbub Ali, the horse dealer, addresses to Kim:

“Thou art beyond question an unbeliever, and therefore thou wilt be damned. So says my Law - or I think it does. But thou art also my Little Friend of All the World, and I love thee. So says my heart. This matter of creeds is like horseflesh …..manifestly a Kathiawar mare taken from the sands of her birthplace and removed to the west of Bengal founders - nor is even a Balkh stallion … of any account in the great northern deserts besides the snow-camels I have seen. Therefore I say in my heart the Faiths are like horses. Each has merit in its own country”. (p. 154-155)

I reckon you could call it a stroke of genius to insert that little note of hesitancy - or I think it does - into a horse dealer’s theologising with the aid of what is to hand, the horses, which are his things good to think with. As for the actual words, imagine them spoken, slowly and deliberately on stage. 

Much later, at the end of the tale, Mahbub is touched by jealousy at Kim’s role as the lama’s disciple - Mahbub has known Kim since he was ten years’ old. The conversation then goes like this:

“I am not altogether of thy faith, Red Hat - if so small a matter concern thee”.

“It is nothing” said the lama.

"I thought not. Therefore it will not move thee, sinless, new-washed, and three parts drowned to boot [Hurree Babu has recently saved him from the River], when I call thee a good man - a very good man" (p. 309).

*

It would, I guess, be an understatement to describe India at the turn of the twentieth century as a patriarchal society, whether on its native or colonial side. But Kipling manages to find a character high in the hills “where women make the love” and pay the compliments (p. 276), the Woman of Shamlegh-under-the-Snow, wife of many husbands and willing to add Kim to the tally. Kim as colonial orphan grew up native until reclaimed by St Xavier’s and now lives as native, by profession, but the woman sees something else in him and speaks eloquently and movingly to it:

“Once, long ago, a Sahib looked on me with favour. Once, long ago, I wore European clothes… I was Ker-lis-ti-an and spoke English. Yes. My Sahib said he would return and wed me - yes, wed me. He went away - I had nursed him when he was sick - but he never returned. Then I saw that the God of the Kerlistians lied, and I went back to my own people….Thy face and thy walk and thy fashion of speech put me in mind of my Sahib….Yes, once I made music on a pianno in the Mission-house at Kotgargh (p. 285).

At parting, Kim’s response to her passionate declarations is to kiss her on the cheek (“practically unknown among Asiatics” p. 287), and to reveal - against all the rules of the Great Game - half the secret of his identity, “Thank you verree much, my dear” (p. 287). The whole chapter - penultimate in the book - is deeply moving.

Kim, for his part, shortly after  makes his own self-understanding clear. Late in the story, the lama says “thou art a Sahib” and Kim rebukes him:

“Thou hast said there is neither black nor white. Why plague me with this talk, Holy One? Let me rub the other foot. It vexes me. I am not a sahib. I am thy chela and my head is heavy on my shoulders” (p. 293).

*

The dowager Maharanee of Saharunpore is something other. From behind her half-veil she is the life and soul of the party but always alert to everyone’s needs and her capacity to address them. As the bachelor lama acknowledges, “She is a woman with a heart of gold, as thou sayest, but a talker - something of a talker” (p. 294) - and not all the talk is fit to be printed. Kipling towards the end of the book allows himself a small authorial intrusion of intriguing ambiguity. Kim opens a speech thus, “Mother, I owe my life to thee…..Ten thousands blessings upon thy house …” indignantly rejected because she wishes to be thanked as by a son not a priest. Kipling gives the rejection thus: “The house be unblessed! (It is impossible to give exactly the old lady’s word)”  (p. 299). Well, it may seem obvious that unblessed has replaced damned but surely by 1901 only the Reverend Bennetts of this world would have objected. In which case, likely alternatives were indeed impossible to give exactly. On past performance, one has every reason to believe that the Maharanee could swear like a trooper and that is part of her charm. It’s as a feisty woman that she is given a recurrent place in the story. Everyone is going to end up liking her. Patriarchy, no doubt, but the Maharanee’s views on that subject are, of course, impossible to give exactly.

*

Quest novel;  Comedie Humaine; Bildungsroman; Spy story … all those things and more (the wonder of the te-rain…), though the spying seems more like a device for creating meetings in which the main characters can develop and be developed, Kim first among them. But that would be another review.

 

 

Quotations taken from the 2012 Penguin English Library edition, as illustrated at head of review

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afghanistan? Reviews of several books

If you type Afghanistan into the search bar above you will be taken to half a dozen long reviews of serious  books about the War in Afghanistan which were published here in 2012 - 2013 and thus written (both books and reviews) without the benefit of hindsight.

Review: Amia Srinivasan The Right to Sex

 

I was looking forward to the book, having read the essay which gives the book its title and which was  published in the London Review of Books in 2018. I read it as a cross over book in which professor appears as public intellectual, seeking to address a wider audience than that comprised of peers and students. It’s true it’s not a difficult book - I read it in a day - though the short text of a hundred and ninety pages is followed by ninety pages of academic apparatus. But though a crossover book, it could readily be assigned as  core text for a course in “Topics in Contemporary Feminism” or some such and I shall imagine myself as course tutor suggesting lines of discussion, despite my evident unsuitability.

I would start us off with the chapter “The Right to Sex”. I suspect that if you begin with a narrative of the crimes and thoughts of a violent incel [ involuntary celibate] like Elliott Rodger, who in 2014 went on one of those killing sprees enabled by American gun laws, then you are not going to find anyone in the seminar room to argue that there is a right to sex. No one wants to side with Elliott Rodger; the only interesting question is whether he, and those who have followed his path, should be thought of as terrorists or - to use a term with a long history - criminally insane. Possibly, we need a new category because the USA sometimes looks from outside like a country as much at the mercy of terrorists and the criminally insane as of COVID. But deeply unhappy people does not quite cut it.

Within the Western traditions of political theory only one writer, Charles Fourier (1772 -1837), readily springs to mind as having argued for a right to sex. He appears briefly at page 87 and I think more could have been made of what he says, not least because his ideas have - unknowingly - been accepted into fairly common practice. Those who care for adult people with profound  disabilities - people who need 24-hour care - have to deal with the fact that some of those they care for want sex and perhaps deserve more than a right to solitary masturbation. A fairly common but discretely conducted solution is for carers to take their charges to visit sex workers, quite a few of whom advertise willingness to see disabled clients and many of whom are willing to see women as well as men. Public money is quite often used to fund these visits. Fourier would have wanted to garland the sex workers with ribbons and flowers.

This is not the stuff of trending social media discussion, though the film The Theory of Everything (2014) does frankly depict aspects of Stephen Hawking’s sex life. But my fairly  simple example of carers accepting the case for some kind of right to sex could get one into a frame-maintaining discussion in the way that documenting the activity of incels probably won’t. No one is going to want to read endless incel manifestos anyway, unless as a student with forensic interest - think  how Freud read the Memoirs of Judge Schreber or Foucault read Pierre Rivière.

If there was a right to sex, what would it be a right to? It might be disappointingly minimal and hardly connect with what we think of as paradigmatic of sexual desire or fulfilment.

But what is paradigmatic of sexual desire and its fulfilment? Srinivasan’s discussion of this is scattered over the whole book, but I would start with her first chapter “The Conspiracy Against Men”. Over the past half century or more, feminists have painted a very bleak picture of male sexual desire. Either men are natural-born rapists [ * see footnote right at end] or they are shaped by patriarchal societies into less-than-fully-human beings who lose no chance to display a toxic masculinity [I don’t think that Srinivasan actually uses that expression and that may be a choice] they don’t even realise is theirs. The only advantage to the second way of thinking is that it leaves open the possibility that in a different kind of society, men could be shaped differently. The same either-or framing can, of course, be applied to female sexuality.

One feminist strategy has been to argue that sexual relations in general, and not just between men and women, would be better if regulated (legally, morally) within a shared or enforced commitment to a basically Kantian ethics in which human beings - persons - are always to be treated as ends and never as means. Some feminists have reckoned that this approach can also be deployed to build a case against pornography, the subject of Srinivasan’s second chapter, “Talking to my Students about Porn”. But she doesn’t discuss a Kantian approach as such. It does run into at least a couple of difficulties, though they pull in opposite directions.

Back in the 1970s the British government established a Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship and, perhaps remarkably, appointed a very talented academic philosopher, Bernard Williams - Knightbridge Professor in Cambridge - to head it. Williams did look at the question of whether pornography should be regarded as depersonalising, and therefore bad on the Kantian view, but found - perhaps to his surprise - that most of those who figured in the pornography of the time, and however much they might be turned into subjects of fantasy, were generally given quite definite personal characteristics and were not “just” bodies. This was true of Page Three girls but also of characters in what was then called hard core pornography. In accompanying text, they were generally given names, school leaver qualifications, ambitions, hobbies, and so on. Whatever people wanted from pornography it did not appear to be just bodies. The same is probably true today, and video and cam shows allow for the creation of narratives which the still photography of older pornography could only supply in accompanying text.

But in another direction, one of the few academic Anglosphere philosophers to write about sexual desire - Roger Scruton in his 1987 book Sexual Desire [see my review  on this Blog 13 June 2020] - was not entirely convinced that objectification has no legitimate part in sexual desire. It is not just that sexual desire in unruly but that it is at least in part satisfied by objectifications (or less strongly, thematisations) which are consensual and often playful. The key distinction for Scruton is between sex considered as (merely) appetitive and sexual desire as intentionally directed towards persons and thus involving imagination in a way that “appetite” or “instincts” don’t.

Times change and Srinivasan addresses the pervasive part internet porn now plays in young people’s lives. It leads men who have watched porn to say to their girlfriends, You’re doing it wrong (p. 44) and that is a worry because it introduces into inter-personal relations ways of organising experience which have been honed by very large and not disinterested capitalist enterprises. Fifty years ago, it was women who said You’re doing it wrong to their male partners and who proceeded to provide elementary sex education, guiding the man to the location of something called the clitoris and helpful conduct in relation to it. In 1970 Britain’s National Secular Society published a booklet entitled Sex Education: the Erroneous Zone which did indeed show that the sex education offered to young people at the time was inaccurate and misleading. And many argued: it was meant to be. There is a long history in which organised religions have sought very actively to suppress sexual knowledge, including of things (like contraception) which were known about in very distant pasts. The UK publication of the fully-illustrated The Joy of Sex in 1972 was a breakthrough and hugely important for many people. An obscure but very different approach to sex education was provided in the same year by the  English translation of Freudian and Marxist Wilhelm Reich’s The Sexual Struggle of Youth (1934). The translation was the (unpaid) work of someone who went on to become a well-known Anglo-American feminist theorist, though I don’t think she ever claimed credit. It was felt worth doing because Reich challenged a narrowly economistic socialist politics and at the same time showed that obstacles to sexual happiness - like lack of privacy - are differentially distributed by social class. I was reminded of this old book by Srinivasan’s final chapter, of which more later.

 The word “young” in the previous paragraph leads me to a further point. Sexual desire is something experienced over a life time and during a lifetime if changes in intensity, in focus, and in circumstantial exercise. It’s not unreasonable, in my view, to think of sexual desire as something which for many teenagers is experienced at the beginning in an urgent, unfocussed way - they just need to orgasm and beyond that they can’t think very clearly. It is more like something appetitive in Scruton’s sense. The jazz musician, George Melly, famously wrote when late in life he became impotent, “It’s wonderful, like being unchained from a lunatic”.

Time often removes the original urgency, allowing desire to flourish in the form of marital sexuality. (For husbands, there is even the word uxorious; there is no equivalent for wives). Feminists had their doubts about such happy images of marriage and it was with the institution of marriage that much feminist writing was concerned; once it gets going, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch of 1970 is simply a rant against marriage [ see my review on this Blog, 27 September 2016].

But what about the rapists? as Srinivasan asks to good effect in her final chapter. Looked at one way, sexual violence often enough looks like male violence which happens on some occasion to be sexual. Maybe soldiers who rape are just deploying a different weapon in a context where violence is part of what they are expected to use. Looked at another way, rape is specifically sexual and the fantasies or anger or frustrations or whatever which fuel it have to be analysed within a more specific theory or narratives - since not all rapes may be alike. One could, of course try to break down this contrast. Srinivasan does describe cases, some of which are hard to respond to in a considered fashion. She mentions the case of Jyoti Singh, raped and murdered in 2012 (pp. 11-12). I knew the story and remembered that at the time my reaction had been immediate conversion to the righteousness of the death penalty. Her killers should all be hanged, no doubt at all. End of.

Some feminists have ventured into the demanding task of making forensic examination of male violence: in 1987 Deborah Cameron [now an Oxford professor] and Elizabeth Fraser published The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder. But Kate Millet followed up her Sexual Politics (1970) with The Basement (1979) a disturbing study of a single case of the protracted torture and murder of a teenage girl in which the principal part was played by a woman. I think there were people who reacted badly to this book, but in principle it could be seen as an attempt to ask a question about what might be different about (extreme) female violence.

*

Srinivasan’s book is full of relevant, topical, and challenging examples. But I have always had ambivalent feelings about relevance. I think that students should expect to get from university study fluency in one or more ways of studying the world, just as a student of a  language expects to get fluency in that language. In that sense, I want university studies to be relevant. So a philosophy student fluent in Kantianism could pick up and run with the sketchy remarks I made earlier; a student familiar with the nature of rights-based legal and political theories would be able to assess whether sex is something which can helpfully be addressed in the language of rights or whether a rights-based approach is really too thin, too rationalistic. Some theories are more all-embracing than others, like Marxism and Freudianism, others are more limited tool boxes. Feminism sometimes aspires to be a theory - though Srinivasan calls it a movement rather than theory (page xi and then again on the last page p 179) - but there is a problem that those supposedly fluent in it either seem to be speaking different languages or aren’t on speaking terms. True, it’s a tall order to expect half the world’s population to agree with itself.

But in terms of relevance considerations, fluency is often achieved pedagogically through the study of simplified examples rather than full-blown topical narratives to which we quite often can find no other immediate reaction than shock or outrage, like my own illustrated above. To achieve understanding of how a theory works and how it can be made to yield results, it is often necessary to take an uncomplicated, quieter, example in order to see clearly how the basic machinery of our thinking works or doesn’t work. In a different context, if I was asked to address the giant (or possibly elephant in the room) Nature / Culture topic, I would start with handedness (left/right-handed). Later on, one can look at hard cases - Srinivasan’s book provides many such cases and she invites us to see that there are sometimes no easy answers and sometimes no case to answer.

One approach within contemporary feminism, that associated with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) strikes me as obscurantist and impossible to become fluent in, so that instead of effective analyses we end up with ritual repetitions of positions to which everyone is expected to nod agreement. Martha Nussbaum provided a trenchant critique back in 1999. But right at the beginning of her book, Srinivasan invokes Judith Butler: “Sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise” and then takes us to her very first footnote reference, to Judith Butler (p.xii. p. 185). Nope. It won’t wash. "Gender in disguise" is a nice try, but it's  rhetorical flourish not argument.

Whether anyone teaches the history of modern social constructionist theories from Alfred Schütz, through Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann and on to John Searle I don’t know. But, when considered, I don’t think there is any coherent version of social constructionism which will lead to the conclusion that the world is a better place for having “gender reveal” parties. I state my case at

https://www.academia.edu/45141890/Social_Construction_De_Constructed

 

***

I found Srinivasan’s final chapter the most impressive and it should be saved for the last course session. “Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism” fluently deploys theory and argument, sweeps up a lot of apparently disparate material, and points in a clear direction. It’s very well written, refreshing, and persuasive. It is deeply humane and finds a way of formulating that humanity in simple terms picked up and then  re-framed from an old 1977 manifesto which includes the sentence, “As feminists, we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics”. Srinivasan catches the thread and runs with it: “This basic principle - of not ‘messing over’ people as a means to a political end - implies that any choice between improving the lives of existing people and holding the line for a better future must be settled in favour of the former” (p 159). She is at that point specifically concerned with making the argument for the full decriminalisation and legalisation of sex work. But if you pause and think about it for a moment, the formulation is also a rebuke to all those who have been willing to concede to the Stalins and Maos of the world, big and small, that the end justifies the means and that it is the Future (as it is imagined for Us by Them) which trumps the Present (as we experience it).

Srinivasan then broadens the argument into a critique of what she calls “carceralism” of which Law & Order feminism has been a sponsor. Here the focus is on the United States and its extraordinary prison Gulag, fed by an out-of-control police and (to outsiders) theatrical criminal justice system, and some frankly weird laws. She rightly makes out the case that those who are already most disadvantaged are further disadvantaged by Law & Order “solutions” and that the only solutions which have any chance of working will necessarily involve a big redistribution of income and wealth from the increasingly rich to the increasingly poor. I sometimes think that even getting back to where we were forty or fifty years ago would help a lot. (Switch to the UK for a moment, and answer this question: When Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, one of her first important acts was to cut the top rate of income tax from xx% to yy%. What were the values of xx and yy? Answer at the bottom of the page).

Srinivasan has published a very well written, forthright, committed, and in many respects, unusual, book which will, I am sure, be much read and appreciated. I look forward to reading in the next book what she has to say (there is already a lot in article form) in the narrower part of her role as professional philosopher.

* * *

Times change:

Amia Srinivasan is the seventh person to be appointed to Oxford University’s Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Theory since it was created in 1944. The first holder was G D H Cole (1889-1959), the only holder to be born in the United Kingdom, and notable as a World War One pacifist, Fabian, Guild Socialist and  mentor to two leaders of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson. In Church of England Oxford, he stuck out as an atheist and when it was his turn to say grace at meal times in All Souls, substituted a two minute silence.

His domestic relations were rather more conventional; in the biography of her husband which she published after his death The Life of G D H Cole (1971), Dame Margaret Cole wrote that though they were married for over forty years and had three children,

….he was always under-sexed - low-powered. If he had not married, I doubt very much he would have had any sex-life at all in the ordinary sense ….For women generally, except his wife, he never seemed to have any sexual use at all, and by and large to regard them as rather a low type of being….He believed as strongly as any anti-Socialist that no woman (except Jane Austen) had ever achieved first-class honours in art or literature; and he felt that the main purpose in life of the majority of them was to distract a man from his proper work …. his sex life diminished gradually to zero for the last twenty years of his life. Concurrently, he developed by degrees a positive dislike of, and disgust with, any aspect of sex almost equal to that of the early Christian fathers …… (pp. 91 - 94)

When they could have been having sex, husband and wife were instead busy jointly writing popular detective novels: The Walking Corpse (1931), Disgrace to the College (1937), Murder at the Munitions Works (1940) - and over twenty more like that. They employed household servants so one does not have to imagine titles being worked up as she washed and he dried.

* * *

83% was cut to 60%

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* Footnote: In 1978 I recall going into a large University of London student dining hall, greeted by a large banner strung across the entire length of the balcony: ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS. As I ate my lunch I tried to think of a disruptive response which might be hung on a second banner, underneath. I reckoned that  a syllogism would do the trick.