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In an effort to move to a greener existence, I recently switched to an ecological toothbrush. As I have been living uniquely from solar panels for almost two years, I was forced to ditch my electric toothbrush. In choosing an ecological toothbrush, I studied materials, as well as the advantages of recycled plastic brushes versus those with replaceable heads. In the end, I had to eliminate every single option aside from the single one I chose. Yes, I had to exclude that which did not meet my personal standards and convenience.

I think a lot about exclusion these days. The #MeToo campaign which emerged in reaction to the sexually aggressive acts of Harvey Weinstein is clearly a female-centered campaign. But recently I’ve seen arguments that #MeToo should be extended to include males. While being “inclusive” of everyone might seem like a nice idea, the reality is that there are perfectly rational reasons for exclusivity in many situations. Our shared experiences with certain humans help us form bonds where and when we need them. These bonds can often make life bearable for those experiencing particularly painful moments in their lives. Commonalities help to create community. The truth is that all communities are exclusive, in one way or another, of individuals who don’t share certain experiences or requisites. While some might be tempted to argue exclusion equates to segregation, such arguments are very much apples and oranges, particularly in the context of women’s rights.

There are several key differences which should be underscored, when discussing “exclusion” in the women’s liberation movement, beginning with the myth that feminism must focus on males. Thanks to liberal feminists like Emma Watson, among others, many women have been made to believe that arguing for the inclusion of males in the women’s movement is a worthwhile cause. But any group in protest of its oppression by another group is within its rights to demand that the oppressor not be included in its organizing. For instance, when labour unions secured the legal right to represent employees in 1935, employers were excluded from the class of employees because it was understood that employers (as well as managers and supervisors) held power over workers. In terms of economic class, it seems that most people are on the same page when understanding which group holds power over another.

Similarly, civil rights advocacy began with the premise that there is social inequality between people of colour and white people, making a necessary distinction between who is being oppressed under white supremacy. Robbing a person of the right to distinguish the oppressor class means that she is barred from speaking about and identifying her oppression.

Nobody expected the Black Panthers to consider the marginalization of KKK members from their organization for good reason. Similarly, no such claim of exclusion was made about the Million Man March in Washington D.C. in 1995, when approximately 400,000 African American men converged en masse in the nation’s capital to engage in teach-ins, worship services, and community organizing. While there was a discussion over the fact that women were excluded, there was also recognition that black men had the right to gather without women to discuss their issues, and this action was largely supported by African American women. Two years later, the Million Woman March was held in D.C. to focus on issues specific to women.

This sort of exclusion is not based in hatred or a desire to do harm. Exclusion is how we decide, like me and my ecological toothbrush choices, what meets our needs. Exclusion is not necessarily about owning a card to an elite club — it is about setting a particular direction for an individual, group, activity, community, and so forth. All social groups exclude in some way. While I am a big believer in reaching over the aisle to dialogue with those responsible for our subordination, I also recognize the need of any group to make decisions within its group before reaching across that aisle.

(..)

Does the fact of breast cancer support groups for women mean that males cannot get breast cancer? Of course not. And there are breast cancer support groups for males. Why? Because males and females experience breast cancer differently. Commonalities between same-sexed bodies are part of the social intimacy that both males and females alike cherish across cultures. Be it in the hammam or the steam room, the hospital ward, or the changing room at the gym, there is intimacy between people of the same sex that provides a space of security and dignity. Females especially value these spaces because the public sphere is not safe for women. Being in a female-only changing room can offer women a needed reprieve from the daily sexualization of their bodies, and from unwanted male attention and judgment.

The issue of “exclusion” has become a touchpoint for the left in recent years. Most notably, we have seen exclusion being derided as bigotry in trans activist circles where women who say they would not feel comfortable with a male in their change rooms, their women’s shelters, or in a women’s prison are labelled transphobic. Yet both these examples come from real life paradigms. In 2007, Vancouver Rape Relief Society won a case against Kimberly Nixon, a trans-identified male who had attempted to join the training group for peer counsellors at the women’s shelter.

Nixon was asked to leave the group account of having been born male, and because the shelter operated on the basis that women could best counsel other women, having had the specific experience of growing up female under patriarchy. The B.C. Court of Appeals’ decided that Vancouver Rape Relief had the right to determine its own membership, as any oppressed group of people has the right to “discriminate” when organizing in their own interests, as a class. Currently pending in Texas is the case of three female inmates who are suing Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, claiming that, “They are living in a degrading and dangerous environment by being forced to share showers and bathrooms with the transgender inmates.” The truth is that, for most women, sex does matter. What is more remarkable is that males who claim to have an internal “female identity” have zero compassion for or comprehension of the reality women face in a male supremacist world, and would prefer women put aside their own material reality, comfort, and safety in order to validate men’s feelings.

Choosing a female gynecologist or desiring a female-only space for changing is not meant to incriminate all males as, to paraphrase George W. Bush, “evil doers.” Rather, a woman might choose a female gynecologist both because she feels a woman would better understand her body, but also because she feels safer in that vulnerable state with someone statistically unlikely to assault them. Women’s desire to change in a locker room without male-bodied persons would likely be based on something similar, as well as a desire to maintain healthy boundaries that too often go unrespected. In excluding males from female spaces, women are demanding that society accept the healthy boundaries of women, even if, in certain scenarios, males might wish to be on the other side of the line.

Last week, Bustle ran a story arguing that “some members of LGBTQ community feel that the [#MeToo] campaign focuses too strongly on the gender binary and seems to erase nonbinary or genderqueer people from the conversation.” But what this statement really conveys is that males feel excluded from a conversation lead by women speaking out about male violence. While I would not deny that males experience violence, it is overwhelmingly violence inflicted by other males. What makes #MeToo important is that violence against women and girls is coded into the structural social hierarchy. When women contribute their #MeToo stories, they are doing so as females who have, from childhood, been groomed as objects that exist for male use.

It cannot be overstated that females suffer disproportionate levels of sex-based discrimination and violence, including sexual harassment, domestic violence, rape, and trafficking. Women are quite aware that they are discriminated against and physically abused because of their sex, regardless of how they may feel, internally, about the gender roles imposed on them. It is entirely insignificant, for example, how the over 200 women who James Toback sexually harassed identified. To demand that #MeToo include non-binary people is to miss the point of the feminist movement: feminism has from its inception been explicitly about breaking the hierarchy and stereotypes reinforced through gender which demanded women not leave the house, not vote, and not work. It is not the “binary” that is the problem so much as it is gender itself, under patriarchy. Men who rape women don’t care whether their victims feel “binary” or not.

What Bustle would like is for women to use a language that is seemingly more neutral, less politically objectionable, and more inclusive— of males. Otherwise there would be no uproar with focusing specifically on women’s voices and experiences in this campaign. Males insisting on being “included” in women’s social protest against sexism is just more of the same sexism — women are being instructed to shut up about their oppression by males unless they include males. Beyond that, under patriarchy, women are always under pressure to be sexually available to men. This new language of “inclusion” that frames “exclusion” as inherently harmful has led to males who identify as transgender to insist that women include them not only in their groups and politics, but in their beds. That this is explicitly sexist is made clear through the fact that I have yet to see any male who identifies as trans pressure heterosexual men into sleeping with him.

A narrative that insists on coercing or goading women into including their oppressor is anything but progressive. Likewise, insisting that the language of gender neutrality is what matters in a conversation about sexual violence is far from revolutionary. Taking up the five-cent terms like “non-binary” and “queer” will have no impact on the facts of sex-based oppression for females. The challenge we face as a society is not to carpet bomb women’s movements with accusations of “exclusivity” and “bigotry” when women recognize that males and females are different and have different needs. Creating linguistic games might seem avant-garde to undergraduates, but the reality is that gender is what prescribes the behavioral cues engrained in females throughout their lives. Gender is what is hammered into females as a class, rendering them subjects of a discourse they have no power to respond to. The notion that gender can ever be neutral is patently absurd since gender is not the solution. It is the problem.

Changing language to be “be more inclusive” is counter-revolutionary and pretending that such language does anything other prevent women from effectively organizing towards their own liberation is delusory. The language of gender inclusivity does nothing to dismantle the social and political inequalities that females face. It does, however, create a lovely illusion (especially for men who want to seem progressive in their attempts to thwart our movement): that saying “genderqueer” makes one a “feminist.”

[From "Sexual Utopia in Power"]

It is well known to readers of this journal that white birthrates worldwide have suffered a catastrophic decline in recent decades. During this same period, ours has become assuredly the most sex-obsessed society in the history of the world. Two such massive, concurrent trends are hardly likely to be unrelated. Many well-meaning conservatives agree in deploring the present situation, but do not agree in describing that situation or how it arose. Correct diagnosis is the first precondition for effective strategy.

The well-worn phrase “sexual revolution” ought, I believe, to be taken with more than customary seriousness. Like the French Revolution, the paradigmatic political revolution of modern times, it was an attempt to realize a utopia, but a sexual rather than political utopia. And like the French Revolution, it has gone through three phases: first, a libertarian or anarchic phase in which the utopia was supposed to occur spontaneously once old ways had been swept aside; second, a reign of terror, in which one faction seized power and attempted to realize its schemes dictatorially; and third, a “reaction” in which human nature gradually reasserted itself. We shall follow this order in the present essay.

Two Utopias

Let us consider what a sexual utopia is, and let us begin with men, who are in every respect simpler.

Nature has played a trick on men: production of spermatozoa occurs at a rate several orders of magnitude greater than female ovulation (about 12 million per hour vs. 400 per lifetime). This is a natural, not a moral, fact. Among the lower animals also, the male is grossly oversupplied with something for which the female has only a limited demand. This means that the female has far greater control over mating. The universal law of nature is that males display and females choose. Male peacocks spread their tales, females choose. Male rams butt horns, females choose. Among humans, boys try to impress girls—and the girls choose. Nature dictates that in the mating dance, the male must wait to be chosen.

A man’s sexual utopia is, accordingly, a world in which no such limit to female demand for him exists. It is not necessary to resort to pornography for example. Consider only popular movies aimed at a male audience, such as the James Bond series. Women simply cannot resist James Bond. He does not have to propose marriage, or even request dates. He simply walks into the room and they swoon. The entertainment industry turns out endless images such as this. Why, the male viewer eventually may ask, cannot life actually be so? To some, it is tempting to put the blame on the institution of marriage.

Marriage, after all, seems to restrict sex rather drastically. Certain men figure that if sex were permitted both inside and outside of marriage there would have to be twice as much sex as formerly. They imagined there existed a large, untapped reservoir of female desire hitherto repressed by monogamy. To release it, they sought, during the early postwar period, to replace the seventh commandment with an endorsement of all sexual activity between “consenting adults.” Every man could have a harem. Sexual behavior in general, and not merely family life, was henceforward to be regarded as a private matter. Traditionalists who disagreed were said to want to “put a policeman in every bedroom.” This was the age of the Kinsey Reports and the first appearance of Playboy magazine. Idle male daydreams had become a social movement.

This characteristically male sexual utopianism of the early postwar years was a forerunner of the sexual revolution but not the revolution itself. Men are incapable of bringing about revolutionary changes in heterosexual relations without the cooperation—the famed “consent”—of women. But the original male would-be revolutionaries did not understand the nature of the female sex instinct. That is why things have not gone according to their plan.

What is the special character of feminine sexual desire that distinguishes it from that of men?

It is sometimes said that men are polygamous and women monogamous. Such a belief is often implicit in the writings of “conservative” male commentators: Women only want good husbands, but heartless men use and abandon them. Some evidence does appear, prima facie, to support such a view. One 1994 survey found that “while men projected they would ideally like 6 sex partners over the next year, and 8 over the next two years, women responded that their ideal would be to have only one partner over the next year. And over two years? The answer, for women, was still one.”[1] Is this not evidence that women are naturally monogamous?

No, it is not. Women know their own sexual urges are unruly, but traditionally have had enough sense to keep quiet about it. A husband’s belief that his wife is naturally monogamous makes for his own peace of mind. It is not to a wife’s advantage, either, that her husband understand her too well: Knowledge is power. In short, we have here a kind of Platonic “noble lie”—a belief which is salutary, although false.

It would be more accurate to say that the female sexual instinct is hypergamous. Men may have a tendency to seek sexual variety, but women have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best. By definition, only one man can be the best. These different male and female “sexual orientations” are clearly seen among the lower primates, e.g., in a baboon pack. Females compete to mate at the top, males to get to the top.

Women, in fact, have a distinctive sexual utopia corresponding to their hypergamous instincts. In its purely utopian form, it has two parts: First, she mates with her incubus, the imaginary perfect man; and, second, he “commits,” or ceases mating with all other women. This is the formula of much pulp romance fiction. The fantasy is strictly utopian, partly because no perfect man exists, but partly also because even if he did, it is logically impossible for him to be the exclusive mate of all the women who desire him.

It is possible, however, to enable women to mate hypergamously, i.e., with the most sexually attractive (handsome or socially dominant) men. In the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes the women of Athens stage a coup d’état. They occupy the legislative assembly and barricade their husbands out. Then they proceed to enact a law by which the most attractive males of the city will be compelled to mate with each female in turn, beginning with the least attractive. That is the female sexual utopia in power. Aristophanes had a better understanding of the female mind than the average husband.

[...]

Fallout of the Revolution: “Date Rape”

A few years into the sexual revolution, shocking reports began to appear of vast numbers of young women—from one quarter to half—being victims of rape. Shock turned to bewilderment when the victims were brought forward to tell their stories. The “rapists,” it turns out, were never lying in wait for them in remote corners, were not armed, did not attack them. Instead, these “date rapes” occur in private places, usually college dormitory rooms, and involve no threats or violence. In fact, they little resemble what most of us think of as rape.

What was going on here?

Take a girl too young to understand what erotic desire is and subject her to several years of propaganda to the effect that she has a right to have things any way she wants them in this domain—with no corresponding duties to God, her parents, or anyone else. Do not give her any guidance as to what it might be good for her to want, how she might try to regulate her own conduct, or what qualities she ought to look for in a young man. Teach her furthermore that the notion of natural differences between the sexes is a laughable superstition that our enlightened age is gradually overcoming—with the implication that men’s sexual desires are no different from or more intense than her own. Meanwhile, as she matures physically, keep her protected in her parents’ house, sheltered from responsibility.

Then, at age seventeen or eighteen, take her suddenly away from her family and all the people she has ever known. She can stay up as late as she wants! She can decide for herself when and how much to study! She’s making new friends all the time, young women and men both. It’s no big deal having them over or going to their rooms; everybody is perfectly casual about it. What difference does it make if it’s a boy she met at a party? He seems like a nice fellow, like others she meets in class.

Now let us consider the young man she is alone with. He is neither a saint nor a criminal, but, like all normal young men of college years, he is intensely interested in sex. There are times he cannot study without getting distracted by the thought of some young woman’s body. He has had little real experience with girls, and most of that unhappy. He has been rejected a few times with little ceremony, and it was more humiliating than he cares to admit. He has the impression that for other young men things are not as difficult: “Everybody knows,” after all, that since the 1960s men get all the sex they like, right? He is bombarded with talk about sex on television, in the words to popular songs, in rumors about friends who supposedly “scored” with this or that girl. He begins to wonder if there isn’t something wrong with him.

Furthermore, he has received the same education about sex as the girl he is now with. He has learned that people have the right to do anything they want. The only exception is rape. But that is hardly even relevant to him; he is obviously incapable of doing something like that.