Leftist dinosaurs

I have been exposed to hideous sexism from leftist men for decades, and I am sick of it, and of them. But I still won't move to the Right.

I wrote this piece ten years ago, and wanted to share it with readers so you can see that I have long criticised sexist leftists, way before Owen Jones introduced his particular odious brand:

Feminism’s natural home is the political Left. The struggle for equal pay, kick-started by the female workers at the Ford Dagenham car plant who went on strike in 1968, is supported by male-led unions. Socialists are assumed to be in favour of total equality between men and women and castigate the Right for considering women to be only worthy of childrearing and housekeeping rather than the workplace.

In 2012 the TUC (Trades Union Congress) appointed a female leader [Francis O’Grady] for the first time in its 200-year history. How ironic that the Tories managed to vote in a woman as party leader as far back as 1975. Who says sexism is the domain of Right-wing traditionalists?

The great socialist feminist thinkers of the movement such as Sheila Rowbotham and Lynne Segal are certainly well-known in the Academy but will never become household names as have their male counterparts. The reason for this is straightforward. When women work with Leftist men to achieve a common aim, any issues specific to women are often seen as a “bourgeois deviation” and counter to the wider revolution.

In 1964 Stokely Carmichael, a prominent US Black Power activist, was asked about the role of women in the civil rights movement. He replied, “The only position for women in the movement is ‘prone’”. Carmichael’s remarks caused outrage amongst many women and are still considered emblematic of the entrenched misogyny of 1960s activist movements. Sexism on the Left on both sides of the Atlantic has a long and shameful history. A great example is the Berkeley anti-war leader who said of feminists in 1969, “Let them eat cock”.  At SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) meetings “brothers” reported their unique dreams for utopia which included, “Free grass, free food, free women and free clothes…” If and when women tried to criticise male chauvinism within the movement, their actions were mocked. Such sexism prompted the feminist critiques of the New Left that would later develop into the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1970s.

Despite more than four decades of feminism, sexism on the Left has barely abated. As recently as 2004 former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone warmly welcomed to City Hall a Muslim cleric who advocated domestic violence and the stoning of adulterous women and rigorously justified doing so when challenged. Al-Qaradawi was a speaker on a conference, hosted by Livingstone,  defending the “right” of Muslim women to wear hijab, but although it claimed to promote ‘choice’  Al-Qaradawi has ruled that wearing the hijab is not a matter of choice, but one of religious obligation. There were no feminists of Muslim origin invited to speak at the conference or any Muslims critical of religious doctrine. Feminist critics of Livingstone’s friendly relationship with Qaradawi described the conference as a one-sided presentation of religious fundamentalism masquerading as a human rights debate.

George Galloway is a fine example of a man on the Left that appears to consider women as inferior. Galloway, along with Leftist heroes Ken Loach, John Pilger and Michael Moore, is a supporter of Julian Assange, currently holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in order to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault and rape.

Galloway implied that once a woman had agreed to sex with a man her ongoing consent was implicit, even if she were asleep. His remarks were deemed to be so offensive to women that the then leader of the Respect Party, Salma Yaqoob resigned in protest.

“It might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder,” Galloway pontificated on his website, “and said: 'Do you mind if I do it again?' It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning."

Suggestions by a number of men on the Left that Assange’s two accusers are part of some CIA inspired honey-trap and that the great man himself is the only victim here is in itself indicative of a culture of ‘bro’s before ‘ho’s’, a term some Left-allied women have heard male comrades use.

Nowhere is sexism and hypocrisy on the Left more evident than in relation to the abuse of women. The late Stieg Larsson, heralded as a left-wing anti-sexist hero for his portrayal of women’s resistance to male violence in his ‘Dragon Tattoo’ trilogy once said that those who campaigned for the rights of women in immigrant communities wanted only to, “portray all male immigrants as representatives of a single homogeneous attitude towards women” and that such folk, “only talked about honour crime because they wanted to divert attention from how white men raised in the "patriarchal structures of Swedish society" abused and murdered women as a matter of course.”

Anna Paine is an animal rights activist and former anarchist in her 40s and tells me she is “done with men on the Left”. She recalls an anarchist group in Leeds in the 1980s known as “The Peter Sutcliffe Society”. “They thought he [Sutcliffe] was the ultimate anarchist because refused to cow tail to a police state. Women pointed out that 13 women had been murdered by this ‘anti-hero’ of theirs but it fell on deaf ears.” Paine says she now considers herself “adrift from any political movement.” It is no wonder that many young women involved in anarchism these days refer to male members as ‘Manarchists’.

Recent revelations that some male “leaders” of the SWP (Socialist Workers Party) attempted to hold a sharia-type court hearing as a response to an accusation of rape has yet again drawn attention to the dinosaur-like attitudes and behaviour of the male Left.

Tom Walker, a journalist at the party’s paper, Socialist Worker, resigned in disgust at the blatant anti-women stance taken by the central committee and said that, “…there is clearly a question mark over the sexual politics of many men in powerful positions on the left. It may shed some light to learn that ‘feminism’ is used effectively as a swear word by the leadership’s supporters. In fact ,it is deployed against anyone who seems ‘too concerned’ about issues of gender.”

Similar tales of sexism and downright misogyny came to light in Scotland during the Tommy Sheridan debacle. Sheridan, a charismatic working-class life-long activist and Convener of Scottish Socialist Party stepped down from his post in 2004 citing reason of his wife’s pregnancy. But as it later came to light the News of the World had got hold of explosive evidence of Sheridan’s extra marital affairs and trips to a Manchester swingers club. Never one to be defeated, Sheridan admitted his indiscretions in a party meeting and demanded that members covered for him for the good of the party. The feminists refused on a matter of principle.

Catriona Grant, equality spokesperson at the time, says that Sheridan decided his best form of attack was to pretend that a political plot by feminists was afoot. "Seemingly the women in the party wanted to get rid of him by means of a matriarchal coup. Sheridan found himself talking publicly about witches and dark arts," Grant told me.

Sheridan went on to sue the News of The World in 2006 for defamation, and received £200,000 damages but following a subsequent police investigation was found to have lied to the court. Sheridan was convicted of perjury and served a year in prison. Gregor Gall, Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Hertfordshire is author of a book on Sheridan. I asked if he considered the male comrades that covered up for Sheridan to be sexist. “There were concerns about his behaviour when he was in Militant [prior to setting up the SSP] and complaints were made, but the leadership in London chose not to act on it. I suppose they didn't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg."

The Occupy Movement appears to be yet another Leftist movement dominated by sexist men. One key member who asked not to be named for fear of being classed as a “splitter” or “scab” explains that the movement is a perfect example of, “mostly young, almost exclusively white, almost all middle-class men, who thought that the revolution was finally here. But don’t bother mentioning the oppression of women in society, sexual harassment on site, or how we end up doing all the dirty jobs in the camp, as they’ll talk over you, or shout at you to stop monopolising the conversation.”

She tells me that there was, “No point questioning the objectification of women, or the way we’re talked down to and not listened to by men on the site despite often having many years of campaigning for social justice behind.”

Women in the workplace suffer sexism from men of all political persuasions, but the stark reality is that the very unions that can potentially support them through discrimination and sexual harassment, for example, are often bastions of male privilege. Cath Elliott is a long-time committed union activist and freelance writer who finds herself battling sexism almost on a daily basis. “Having been involved in left politics since I was a teenager, I thought I might have got used to sexist left-wing men by now,” says Elliott. “But no, it is always disappointing when men on the left sell women out.”

Brendan O’Neill, an extreme libertarian formerly associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party and Living Marxism is one of many men on the Left that defends pornography despite a long battle by feminists to show how it degrades women. In his recent article, ‘A Marxist defence of Page 3 girls’ O’Neill quoted Marx on press freedom before critically wading into the feminists who gave evidence about sexist media representation of women at the Leveson inquiry, calling them a “bevy of feminists”, “a shrill chorus”, and “boob blockers”.

Male Left MPs are certainly not exempt from uttering the odd sexist rant. Austin Mitchell, Labour MP for Great Grimsby tweeted to Louise Mensch, “Shut up Menschkin. A good wife doesn't disagree with her master in public and a good little girl doesn't lie about why she quit politics.” As much as his comments were probably intended to be more tongue in cheek than intentionally sexist it shows a blatant disrespect for women. When David Cameron told Angela Eagle, an openly lesbian Labour MP to ‘calm down dear’ it heralded justifiable criticism and was damaging to him. Somehow men on the Left seem to get away with it more easily, perhaps because of the patronising view that the working classes treat their women rough and ready (despite the fact that well-known successful lefties are rarely working class these days). 

Vera Baird QC was Solicitor General in the previous Labour government and has dealt with men on the Left during her time as a radical lawyer, campaigner, politician and, more recently, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria. Baird says that she gets tired of some Leftist men side-lining women and disregarding crucial issues such as sexual violence and harassment in the workplace. "Feminists have long challenged men's sexism, whether in Trades Unions or political groups, but unfortunately the same old stories keep being told. It is high time those particular men recognised that we are not going to wait for the so-called 'revolution' meanwhile standing there, cap in hand, waiting for our turn to speak out about what matters to women."

Sucheta Chatterjee, a lawyer and feminist activist recently posted on a social networking site what she imagines to be in the heads of her male comrades. "Just stop bitching about feminism and race issues. Stop being divisive and undermining the class war. How many times have I told you that after the revolution, life will be paradise? Women will be treated like full-fledged humans and blacks will be taken seriously. Till then, shut the fuck up. And bitch, go make me a sandwich. Only fair-trade wheat please."

As much as I loathed the Thatcher regime, I have always felt deeply perturbed by misogyny directed toward Thatcher as a woman by men on the Left. When I hear young male socialists today shout, ‘Burn the witch’ and other such grotesque slogans I realise that the vitriol towards Thatcher goes beyond a robust dislike of her political legacy. It comes also from a woman-hating resentment that she climbed to the top of the political tree. I will not be dancing on Thatcher’s grave or holding a street party when she dies unlike many of my male Left comrades. I would sooner celebrate the end of the Left-wing dinosaur and the beginning of true political equality.