Looking through some of the Communist Party's recent literature and recruiting leaflets, I recognise a new political language. It talks about 'transformatory alliances', 'a marxist feminist analysis', the 'centrality of democracy' and 'new relations between men and women' that will foreshadow a socialist society. It's a language that raises a lot of issues for the CP, both in the way it conducts and thinks about politics and in the way it is organised. In many areas, this language conflicts with the CP's style of politics. I think there is a big problem in the way that the Party's hierarchical structures and centralism inhibit the development of the kind of prefigurative political organising and relationships that have developed outside the 'organised Left' and that are central to realising this new language and politics.
I don't believe we can achieve this new politics, and I think that it's vital to our survival that we do, unless we transform our own political culture. In this respect, I want to talk about heterosexual men in the Communist Party, and our response to feminism and gay liberation. After all, we represent a majority in the Party and maintain control over the Party organisation and much of its theorising. So we are the crucial factor in whether the changes happen or not.
We need to develop a sexual politics that goes beyond a mere passive support for feminist and gay campaigns. Because such a response is part of the problem and does little to address the dynamics of how men remain in control and retain power.
We exist within a political culture that has been shaped by the experiences of white heterosexual men. It's a culture that tends to see politics as being about other people's problems. We talk and write about women's liberation and gay politics as if they were completely separate from our own lives. Consequently feminism and gay liberation are viewed as the sole concern of women and gay men. It's an assumption that heterosexual men don't have a sexuality, that we have nothing to do with discrimination, sexism, sexual violence, family matters or children. Our politics, our marxist critique, suddenly stops short at our front doorstep, as though we were neutral factors in the power relations and struggles in society.
The reality is different, but it has been our resistance to recognising this fact and doing something about it that undermines a genuine alliance between men and women, that is as much on women's terms as men's. By remaining silent about ourselves we perpetuate the notion that heterosexual men are neither a problem nor have any problems. We effectively act as a block to women and gay men's desire for sexual democracy. The need for a politics that we're committing ourselves to, but also crucial to transforming our political culture. If we're to have a future, this is the direction in which it lies.
It has been a grave weakness of heterosexual men's politics that we fail to recognise the importance of sexuality in the organisation of society and the struggles around its regulation and control. The furore that is surrounding sex education in London schools and the anti-gay hysteria over the book Jenny Lives With Eric And Marten and the disease AIDS has shown what a powerful and emotional charge exists around human sexuality. Sexual identity underpins many of our deepest feelings. It is also an organising principle in social and economic relationships. The moral Right is adept at exploiting the fears and violence that exist below the surface of heterosexual respectability. No doubt it will make a big issue of sexual politics in the run up to the election.
Unfortunately, sexual politics sees the Left at its weakest and often its most conservative. We will not or cannot articulate a coherent defence of lesbianism and male homosexuality as valid, legitimate choices equal to that of heterosexual identity. Nor are men on the Left prepared to challenge the discourse on sexuality that predominates, one that constructs women's sexuality and reproduction, and homosexuality, as the problems; and makes invisible male heterosexuality as though it didn't exist.
The reality is that masculine heterosexuality is the biggest problem. Both in claiming itself as the absolute human condition and every other sexual identity as a deformation of our own. And in the way our sexual identity is tied into acts of sexual violence and the oppression of women and children. Rape, child sexual abuse, sexual harassment, the powerful fear and the violence that exists between men, the attacks on gay men, these aspects of male heterosexuality are a blight on our society and we need to address them.
The point of thinking about what sexual politics and feminism means for men is not to immerse ourselves in guilt and loathing. Many men do react by feeling deeply guilty, but to be productive we have to go beyond that and start thinking positively. Our general response so far has been rhetoric, awkwardness or an evasive silence. I think that the best way forward is to begin with what heterosexual masculinity means for us and how it affects our lives and upbringing. We have taken refuge in a style of politics where we don't talk about how we feel and what we want. Men are so fearful of each other that we daren't express confusion, doubt or vulnerability. We've created a politics in the image of our masculinity - competitive and emotionally detached - not a particularly safe environment to explore sexual politics. Men have disconnected our politics from our personal lives because it's safer for us to do so.
I'm not arguing that politics is solely a matter of the personal. It isn't. But our personal lives and experience directly inform our political practice and theorising and connecting the two offers a key to a better understanding of wider issues. Nor am I suggesting that if men could overcome our reservations and hug and love each other, life would be a bed of roses. I think it reflects both the newness and the nature of this politics of masculinity that we must start by becoming conscious of ourselves as men, as sexual emotional beings in order to redefine masculinity and what it means to be a man.
We cannot talk about a single male identity. Our masculinity is shaped by economic and cultural forces as well as psychological ones. It has a history and is neither biological nor unchanging. Masculinity is expressed in different ways in different cultures. It has assumed different forms at different points in history. It is possible for us to change it now. We need to look at how our sexual identity has been shaped by our class. Our politics has not taken account of the relationship between class and sexuality and this has often given socialist politics a one dimensional quality. Similarly we haven't taken account of the sexual dimension to racism. White men's perception and fear of black men's sexuality is an obstacle to overcoming racism. We need to look at the imagery and language we use. Depending on the way we represent men and talk about men, we can collude with, or challenge and even subvert conventional forms of masculinity. It has been a problem that the Left has, in the past, done the former; producing crude stereotypes of muscular virility.
Men on the Left need to take up the issues of sexual violence and child sexual abuse. The authoritarian values of the moral Right and their repressive consequences are legitimised by the portrayal of a violent and rampant male sexuality, one that is usually located in working-class and black men. If men on the Left don't challenge this view by developing our sexual politics and taking on these issues ourselves, their politics will continue to resonate with very large numbers of women who fear and distrust men's behaviour. Our silence not only allows the propagation of racism and classism; it also colludes with the belief that male heterosexuality really is an uncontrollable force we are not responsible for.
Any attempt to develop these issues into a politics will only succeed if men feel there is something in it for ourselves. A politics based on guilt, self-denial or service in the cause of others will never move into the mainstream, either in its own right or as a supportive politics for feminism. I would argue that while we must be pro-feminist and support and listen to gay men and women far more than we do now, we must create a sexual politics for and about ourselves. One that shows we have a personal stake in changing and getting other men to change too.
The past decade has seen an undermining of traditional male identities. The changing structure of work, deskilling caused by new technology and unemployment have tipped many men from their previously unchallenged positions as breadwinner and head of household. Men's old strategies of maintaining control within the family, managing personal relationships and minimising areas of life like domesticity and childcare that threatened our sexual identity, are being increasingly challenged by women, many of whom are simply leaving men. Many many men have been thrown into a defensive crisis. The issue for socialist men is to find a way forward for men that is not about the struggle to re-assert men's supremacy. This isn't only about forming a new politics, it's also about doing away with a lot of the old ones.
There are many good reasons for a break with the old ways, to work out some different ways of being a man. At the successful seminar called 'What's in it for men?' at the Left Unlimited Conference, organised by Marxism Today in late 1986, topics that came up included: bringing up boy children; relationships between men; gay relationships; and relating to women. We need a politics that provides a culture where such issues about personal change are central. But a politics that is only about this is not much use unless it makes the wider connections.
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
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