Simon Copland

Many have tried to use Orlando to further their anti-Islam agendas. Queers need to work with each other to stop this happening.

Originally published in SBS News, 14 June 2016.

It’s been a very rough week.

Over the past few days the reality of what happened in Orlando has hit me like a tonne of bricks. I—like many other queers—have woken each day with what I can only describe as a pit of terror in my stomach.

That fear comes from the realisation that this happened in what was supposed to be one of our safe spaces. While I know there’s a history of violence in queer spaces, that realisation is still hard. I’ve been to gay clubs, many times, and I know what that night would have been like. I can picture the dancing, the music, the flirting. Then I cannot stop picturing those people, and the fear they must have felt as the bullets began to fire.

But then there’s something even worse that hits me. Every day, as I read the news, I’m terrified of what this is going to do to our community.

There’s been some amazing solidarity in the queer community following the massacre. I felt super proud watching Owen Jones storming out of his Sky News Interview, and it’s been heart warming seeing people talk about the importance of safe queer spaces. With a fire in my heart I read the ramblings of a woman who described herself as a ‘middle-aged dyke’, wracked with guilt that her generation was not able to stop this happening, and rallying the troops to continue the fight.

Yet, it’s noticeable how these stories have been missing from much of the mainstream. In the past few days we’ve seen a lot of the standard narratives about this attack. Instead of talking about entrenched homophobia, we’ve heard a lot about “Islamic extremism” and gun control. Many have been quick to use this as an excuse to continue their racism and anti-immigration rhetoric. Donald Trump reinforced his position of banning Muslim immigration, Hillary Clinton called for greater surveillance and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulljustified his “border security” policies.

This is not to say that religious ideology should not be part of the debate. Omar Mateen is reported to have pledged allegiance to ISIS, Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and we must recognise the importance of that. We cannot shy away from the realities of the radical religious ideologies that are permeating not just through the Arabic World but the West as well.

But if we let this rhetoric continue to dominate the debate, all it will achieve is turning us against ourselves.

Yes, there are Muslims, and people in the Arabic world who hate us, just as there are Christians who say same-sex marriage is akin to the atrocities of Nazi Germany or feel it’s appropriate to read passages of the Bible that call for the death of homosexuals in Congress. But just like the queer community, as with the Christian community, the Arabic World is extraordinarily diverse. As there are those Muslims who want to kill us there are also those who are struggling against these hateful ideologies. There are queer Muslims and queer Arabs who have built vibrant communities and are fighting every day for their liberation. We’ve already seen this with themultitude of stories of queer Muslims who are also mourning this tragedy.

If we let the standard narrative play out, the narrative that talks about Islamic extremism and immigration and erases the oppression of queer people — it is this community that will lose out the most. It will be queer Arabs who will likely face increasing surveillance, be blocked from immigration, or as has already occurred, be placed in detention centres on Pacific nations in the name of ‘border security’. Most of all it will be queer Arabs who will face increasing violence in the Middle East as these policies fuel the radical ideologies of organisations like ISIS.

What’s been enraging about this week has been the erasure of queer voices and experiences from so much of the debate. It highlights a continued hatred of queers that runs across cultural and religious lines. The way so many of our “leaders” have dealt with this massacre highlights this goes well beyond the experiences of those in Orlando. It is also about erasing the Muslim and Arab queers who have been fighting these ideologies from day one.

I have seen so much solidarity over the past few days. It has been extremely heartwarming. As the dust settles this needs to get bigger, better and bolder. We need to make sure it crosses political, religious and cultural barriers. That is the positive we could take out of such an atrocity.

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This article was originally published on SBS News. Click here to view the original. © All rights reserved.

Originally published in Overland Journal, 2nd June 2016.

In his new collection of essays How Did We Get Into This Mess?, George Monbiot outlines the key cause of the major economic, social and environmental issues facing our world: neoliberalism.

Monbiot observes that ‘ideas, not armies or even banks, run the world. Ideas determine whether human creativity works for society or against it.’ The essays focus heavily on Western culture, and the obsession with individuality and consumerism in particular, which underpin social issues, economic inequality and environmental destruction.

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the neoliberal proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith (which holds that the free market, unimpeded by government intervention, will answer all human needs) is nothing more than a description of a neutral, natural force – a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Monbiot is not alone in blaming the ideology of neoliberalism for our world’s issues. Another major left thinker – Naomi Klein – framed her last book This Changes Everything as a treatise on why it is ‘climate versus capitalism’. In reality, though, her real focus is on ‘neoliberal capitalism’, or what she often calls ‘disaster capitalism’. Klein takes aim at the individualisation and privatisation of the neoliberal order, arguing for a return of the kind of government intervention that existed in Keynesian-era capitalism.

The crux of these arguments is that government has been overtaken by a ‘bad idea’ and what we need to do to fix the world is to defeat that idea. Neoliberalism is a system in which the state has been co-opted by corporate and right-wing interests; this not only removes the ability of the state to engage in true social, environmental and economic reform, but, Monbiot argues, turns us into poor, selfish individuals, who have no care for our environment, society or each other.

The way to get out of this mess, Monbiot and others posit, is to return to the great age of communal cooperation – the period in which the state had the ability to implement vast social reforms; that is, the post-war period.

Of course neoliberalism is deeply problematic – but so is reducing all of the world’s current problems to this one ideology. Neoliberalism hit its heights in the 1980s, but nowadays is nowhere near as prevalent. Focusing all our energy on this one school of thought means we are misdiagnosing the problem, and, in turn, giving power back to the very people who developed the system in the first place.

Initially developed in the 1940s by a group of thinkers called who called themselves the Mont Pèlerin Society, neoliberalism as a political ideology gained traction following the oil crash of the 1970s. It was implemented first by Pinochet in Chile, next by Thatcher in the UK, then Reagan in the US, and Hawke and Keating in Australia. The system sees a dominance of capitalism and markets, and an argument that the state inherently restricts freedom – both economically and socially. As William Davies explains:

At the heart of the neoliberal era were two fundamental assumptions. Firstly, individuals, not experts, were the best judges of their own tastes and welfare. Secondly, the price mechanism of the market could be trusted to adjudicate between the various competing ideas, values and preferences that exist in modern societies. The state, by contrast, could not.

From this basis, neoliberals moved to implement a wide-ranging set of reforms to privatise major state-owned industries, make huge cuts to social spending and the size of government, and place a focus on the market as solutions to social and environmental issues. It is the ideology behind these moves – primarily a focus on the individual – that left critics take aim at.

But it is here where we can see how those criticisms remain shallow.

First, through this history, we can see that the ideology has faltered since the 1980s. Tad Tietze, for example, notes how neoliberalism became extremely unpopular by the 1990s, resulting in the turfing of Governments in the UK (Thatcher) and Australia (Keating). The unpopularity of mass cuts to social welfare led to these governments holding back in many areas, with the agenda eventually stalling by the 1990s.

Potentially more importantly, while neoliberals advocate for a hands-off approach to government intervention, recent governance shows this is no longer a popular idea. Even though modern governments talk about ‘balancing the books’ and the need for austerity, the major programs of privatisation and drastic social-welfare cuts proposed and executed in the 1980s have largely disappeared. Indeed, government intervention seems to actually be increasing, whether through bailouts and nationalisation of major industries (such as occurred in the wake of the GFC and are still occurring today), increasing security legislation and intervention, and through social control programsranging from ‘evidence-based’ interventions into people’s health and wellbeing practicesto lockout laws that control nightlight in the city.

Clearly, neoliberalism is no longer the force it once was. Which brings us to the second reason left focus on this ideology is so flawed: thinkers such as Monbiot and Klein credit neoliberalism as the success of an ‘idea’, but it is more important to read it as a class project. Neoliberalism was not a pure anti-government ideology, but about the targeted use of the state to pursue class-based interests.

Maybe the best example of this is the way in which neoliberalism deals with unions. In his book PostCapitalism, Paul Mason describes how across the capitalist age, economic crises have always resulted in attempts to crush unions in order to suppress wages. These lower wages are seen as a solution for businesses suffering under economic pressures. The crisis of the 1970s and 80s was no different. Across the US, the UK and Australia, neoliberal governments engaged in a massive program to crush unions and the workers they represented – employing the strong arm of the state to do so. Using Thatcher as an example Tad Tietze explains:

Far from being hostile to the state as she sometimes implied, in practice Thatcher’s project was one of massive and brutal state mobilisation on the side of big business, as demonstrated by a series of major confrontations with unions.

Here we can see the contradiction of ‘neoliberal thought’. Whilst anti-unionism is integral to neoliberalism, so is anti-government intervention. And yet in the case of Thatcher (and Reagan in the US and Hawke and Keating in Australia), the desire to crush unions won out. Government intervention was seen not only as acceptable, but essential.

Neoliberalism was, in essence, a smokescreen for a well-practiced form of state intervention in the economy – one that used the state to benefit big businesses against the needs of the working class. As Tad Tietze argues:

neoliberals are clear about the need for strong state action to construct a market society in which ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ are maximized for the entrepreneur, even if they must be limited in terms of formal democracy.

By framing neoliberalism as the dominance of a ‘free market ideology’, the left misses these material underpinnings, and give too much credence to an idea and not enough to the class-based motivations of that idea. This in turn means we ignore the realities of the role of the state in today’s various crises, blaming the selfish, consumer-obsessed individual instead.

Consequently, the solutions we present – mass government intervention such as a ‘Green New Deal’, for example – see us asking the very institution that has been implementing this class agenda all along – the state – to fix the crises. In short, we attempt to use capitalism as a way to solve a problem created by capitalism.

The best way to examine this is to see how the state has reacted since the slow demise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, and in particular following the GFC of 2008. While many on the left saw this as an opportunity for mass state intervention that would create benefits for all (what was framed as a potential for a Green New Deal), we actually witnessed the complete opposite. Governments did engage in mass economic intervention, but once again it was to favour the ruling classes. Economically this included providing huge handouts to big businesses and strong-arming smaller states (for example, Greece) to implement radical economic agendas. This was matched with radical social reforms, either under the guise of increased security, or simply of governments using ‘evidence-based policy’ to do ‘what’s best’ for the general population.

But these policies are not neoliberal. In fact they are the opposite: they maintain the class interests that underpinned neoliberalism in the first place – the class interests that underpin our entire system of capitalism.

How did we get into this mess? People like George Monbiot or Naomi Klein will take aim at the ideology of neoliberalism – one that has seen a corporate takeover of the state – but the answer is far more complex. Neoliberalism was a class-based agenda, one implemented by the state and corporate powers in tandem. There’s been a decline in neoliberal policies and approaches, yet these class-based programs, situated within a capitalist economic and democratic system, continue. That is what we need to challenge if we want to get out of this mess.

Originally published in SBS Sexuality, 18 May 2016

Simon Copland was inundated with stories of other people in polyamorous relationships after he “came out” in an opinion piece.

Originally published in The Guardian, 17 May 2016.

Conservative attacks on queer communities over the past year have been swift and severe. This #Idahot, it’s worth reflecting on how we fight back. 

Looking back at this time last year, when it came to gay politics, it would have been easy to be complacent.

Ireland and the US supreme court were both about to vote yes on marriage equality and in Australia it looked inevitable that we would do the same too. Other issues were finally entering the debate, whether it was trans* rights, or recognition for other non-traditional relationship styles. The march for progress was unstoppable.

What difference a year can make.

Held on 17 May every year, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (#Idahot) is an opportunity to reflect on where queer people have come in our fight for liberation, and to strengthen our resolve to continue on.

And we’ll need strength to fight what has been a largely unexpected swing against queer communities in the past year. Momentum on marriage equality in Australia has stalled, with hostility on the issue intensifying in recent months. Rightwing forces have also opened up new fronts. The attacks on Safe Schools for example, felt like they came out of nowhere, but were swift and effective.

This pattern can be seen globally. In the US, conservatives have passed “religious freedom bills” in a number of states, and last year the city of Houston rejected an ordinance that would have added protections to queer people in housing and employment. This year, North Carolina passed a “bathroom bill”, mandating that people use the bathroom that matches their gender assigned at birth.

These attacks have surprised many in the queer communities. This Idahot it is worth reflecting on why this has happened, and what we can do about it. To do so, it is important to understand the historical context of these shifts. While these attacks may look shocking, they follow a pattern that has been occurring for hundreds of years.

Go back to the 1890s for example, and you can see a similar explosion of sexual desire as to what has happened recently. The “gay nineties” were known for decadent art such as that from Aubrey Beardsley and the scandalous plays of Oscar Wilde. The era also saw the birth of the suffragette movement. But just as the exuberance of the decade hit its stride, so did the conservative backlash. Wilde was sentenced to hard labour, while the suffragettes faced the full wrath of the police.

This patten is common. A similar sexual revolution occurred in the swinging 1920s and 30s. This was a time when gay rights became even more prominent with sexologists such as the German Magnus Hirschfeld actively campaigning for the rights of gay and trans* people. Again, the backlash was swift.

Hirshfeld’s centre was burnt down by the Nazis, while in the Anglosphere these new sexual ideas were crushed in the post-war boom, as our society focused on the ideal of “traditional marriage”.

The sexual exuberance of the 1960s and 70s came with a similar backlash, particular as the HIV/Aids crisis hit in the 80s. Instead of dealing with HIV/Aids as a medical issue, governments around the world used it as an opportunity to scaremonger about queer people, raising fears of the spread of the “gay cancer”.

In each of these moments, the sexual exuberance of the time made change look inevitable. Progress to true liberation and equality was on an unstoppable march, so it seemed. Yet in each moment, rightwing forces responded in kind. They have been extremely successful in doing so.

Of course times today are different, primarily in that we are a much more socially liberal society, but we can still see similar themes today from the rightwing attacks of the past. Our history is potted with conservatives trying to paint queers as “dangerous”, both to the family unit and broader capitalist society. Responses to the HIV/Aids crisis for example painted gay men as dangerous disease spreaders – making queers a threat to the entire community.

That is exactly what’s happened in the past year. While most people in our community reject the premise that gays and lesbians are out to destroy the family (primarily because we gays and lesbians have given up on doing so), these attacks are still trying to paint LGBTI people as dangerous to the rest of society.

This time however the focus is on two groups: kids and trans* people. Instead of destroying the family, we are now sexualising children (ie Safe Schools) and providing a threat to the ideals of gender and in turn people’s safety (ie trans people in public toilets). Of course these attacks are not new, but they have become the focus of a new attempt to make LGBTI people a dangerous group that should be rejected.

It is in understanding this history that we can see the weakness of some of the responses of the LGBTI community. While protests against the attacks on Safe Schools were great, we have engaged in this debate through narrow and conservative frames. Responses were framed around the concept of “safety”, speaking in depth about the threat of “deaths of queer kids”. While obviously important, it is notable that no one was willing to open the debate on the need to teach kids about sexuality and sexual desire.

The LGBTI community’s response bought into the frame of the debate. We’ve once again tried to convince people that we’re not challenging any of the tenets of modern society, and instead that we just want to “live our lives”. This becomes a problem when we actually do want to challenge social institutions. It becomes an issue when we do talk about the need to teach kids about sexuality, or to challenge the dominance of the gender binary.

Here is the threat of these attacks from conservatives. While they may seem weak now, if they can frame us as dangerous in this way they could have real success. They probably won’t kick us out of society, or even marriage, but they may be able to stop further progress for queer people. The fact that we’ve seen legislation and regulation that has taken us backwards for the first time in over a decade is a good symbol of this regression.

This is the challenge. Instead of being defensive, it is time we change the frame of the debate. We need to overthrow the very idea that teaching kids about sexuality, or that changing how we deal with gender, are bad things. We need to accept that we are dangerous to parts of society, but to embrace that fact, and make the argument as to why it is necessary.

The attacks queer people face today have a long history. For centuries, conservatives have been extremely successful in painting queer people as a threat to our society. This year, and this International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, it is up to us to change that frame. Only through destroying the very premise of that argument will we be able to break the cycle of repression.

How do you balance the needs of short and long-form writing? Over the past couple of months this has become an increasing issue for me, and I’m wondering how others may do it.

When I first started writing all of my focus was on short articles. I wanted to write articles and columns and spent each week writing two or three different posts, and pitching them to different outlets. Being a ‘columnist’ was my aim, and I did okay at it as well.

Over the past year or so however I have become more  focused on long-term projects, my novel and my book Sexy Capitalism. I think I always considered these sorts of projects would one day become a focus, but in the early stages they were just something that were going to happen in the future. I didn’t see myself ready for them.

Naively, I now know, I also never saw the impact such projects would have on my capacity for other work. I saw them as an add-on — a natural development from what I was already doing. I suspect this was because I had a naive view that saw that one day freelance gigs would end up just coming naturally, and that I would not have to spend as much time pitching and searching for work.

A few years in now and I’ve realised how stupid that was. As I’ve worked on my books the amount of work my freelance writing has needed has not decreased, in fact it has just stayed the same. And writing books takes a lot of work! So in the meantime, I’ve noticed a significant drop in my freelance output — I’m writing fewer articles and blog posts, and making fewer pitches. When I am writing articles I find myself thinking I should be working on my book, and vice versa.

This has particularly hit me this year as I have also had to do more work finding paid jobs. I have been doing some tutoring and research assistant work, which both take up significant hours. In the end I’m finding balancing freelance writing, book writing, and paid work a difficult juggle.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about different ways to deal with this issue.

One solution is simply to work a lot more, but in reality that is neither what I want to do, nor a sustainable outcome. I work enough as it is and I enjoy my free time. I don’t want to give it up.

So I end up asking myself how to deal with competing projects and priorities? Recently what I have done is to regularly (every month or so) sit down and write a simple list of priorities. This list is in order, putting my major goals up the top, and secondary goals further down. It’s interesting to watch what stays the same and changes over time, and recently I’ve found that my top goals always end up being my books. This is a great way to define my priorities, but also helps me get over the anxiety when I am not being published as often as I want. If I can reflect on priorities in a clear way I can see a way forward that works for me, and make sure I stick to it.

The other strategy at the moment is to spend more time building a stronger financial base. I have discovered how exhausting the constant search for freelance writing paid work is — both in terms of the small return for work done, and in regards to the intellectual energy it takes to be constantly writing material. This energy is then taken away from my books. So I am working on finding a stronger base. This will end up likely resulting in me searching for more government and business work, which can be more sustainable. I need to accept the time it will take to build this base, understanding how it will help me spend more time on my preferred projects in the future.

Finally, and this is just a quick thought, I’m also realising how the focus on big stuff is making my small stuff better. The good thing about the big writing projects is that they take a lot of research. So I’m spending a lot of time reading and researching, which I didn’t do as much of before. When I am pitching things therefore it feels as though it has a stronger base. My pitches are revolving more and more around my big projects, and in turn they are gaining depth with every bit of research I’m doing. So whilst my output may be less, I think the quality has increased. This is a nice thought to have and one that can get me over the anxiety.

So how do you do it? How do you balance all of the ideas and projects you want to do? I’d love to hear your tips as it may help me with the conundrum I’m facing.

Over the weekend I finished Paul Mason’s rather excellent book, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. While I don’t agree with everything he argues, Mason presents a fascinating thesis that the advent of info-technology, mixed with other social factors (in particular the demise of the labour movement) is causing such a fault within capitalism that it is leading to its final collapse. 

Whilst Mason’s thesis is worthy of its own post (maybe later), today I want to spend a bit of timing discussing his historical analysis. Mason spends a lot of his book looking at the history of capitalism, and the concept of the Kondratieff Wave. The Kondratieff Wave is a theory of the cycles of Capitalism developed by The Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff, who was eventually murdered by the Stalinist regime.

Kondratieff argued that the inherent contradictions within capitalism caused the system to operate within fifty year cycles. Each of these cycle operate as a wave — initiated by an economic and technological boom, followed by a downswing and economic crash, which results in 20 – 30 years of stagnation. The struggles of this stagnation eventually result in another boom. Mason describes what he calls his ‘normative restatement of long-cycle theory’ (adding in extra elements on top of Kondratieff’s theory) as such (sorry some long quotes coming up): 

1. “The start of a wave is usually preceded by the build-up of capital in the finance system, which stimulates the search for new markets and triggers the rollout of clusters of new technologies. The initial surge sparks wars and revolutions, leading at some point to the stabilization of the world market around a new set of rules or arrangements.
2. Once the new technologies, business models and market structures begin to work in synergy — and the new ‘technological paradigm’ is obvious — capital rushes into the productive sector, fuelling a golden age of above-average growth with new recessions. Since profit is everywhere, the concept of allocating it rationally between players becomes popular, as does the possibility of redistributing wealth downwards. The era feels like one of ‘collaborative competition’ and social peace.
3. Throughout the whole cycle, the tendency to replace labour with machines operates. But in the upswing, any fall in the profit rate is counterbalances by the expanded scale of production, so overall profits rise. In each of the up cycles, the economy has no trouble absorbing new workers into the workforce even as productivity increases. By the 1920s, for example, the glassblower displaced by machinery becomes the projectionist in a cinema, or the worker on a car production line.
4. When the golden age stalls, it is often because euphoria has produced sectoral over-investment, or inflation, or a hubristic war led by the dominant powers. There is usually a traumatic ‘break point’ — where uncertainty over the future of business models, currency arrangements and global stability becomes general.
5. Now the first adaptation begins: there is an attack on wages and an attempt to de-skill the workforce. Redistribution projects, such as the welfare state or the public provision of urban infrastructure, come under pressure. Business models evolve rapidly in order to grab what profit there is; the state is urged to organize more rapid change. Recessions become more frequent.
6. If the initial attempt to adapt fails (as it did in the 1830s, 1870s and 1920s), capital retreats from the productive sector and into the finance systems, so that crises assume a more overtly financial forms. Prices fall. Panic is followed by depression. A search begins for more radical new technologies, business models and new supplies of money. Global power structures become unstable.”

 Pgs. 72 – 73.

Using this theory Mason outlines 4 – 5 long cycles over the history of capitalism:

1. “1790 – 1848: The first long cycle is discernible in the English, French and US data. The factory system, steam-powered machinery and canals are the basis of the new paradigm. The turning point is the depression of the late 1820s. The 1848 – 51 revolutionary crisis in Europe, mirrored by the Mexican War and Missouri compromise in the US, forms a clear punctuation point.
2. 1848 – mid 1890s: The second long cycle is tangible across the developed world and, by the end of it, the global economy. Railways, the telegraph, ocean-going steamers, stable currencies and machine-produced machinery set the paradigm. The wave peaks in the mid 1870s, with financial crisis in the USA and Europe leading to the Long Depression (1873 – 96). During the 1880s and 90s, new technologies are developed in response to economic and social crises, coming together at the start of the third cycle.
3. 1890s — 1945: In the third cycle heavy industry, electrical engineering, the telephone, scientific management and mass production are the key technologies. The break occurs at the end of the First World War; the 1930s depression, followed by the destruction of capital during the Second World War terminate the downswing.
4. Late 1940s — 2008: In the fourth long cycle transistors, synthetic materials, mass consumer goods, factory automation, nuclear power and automatic calculation create the paradigm — producing the longest economic boom in history. The peak could no be clearer: the oil shock of October 1973, after which a long period of instability takes place, but no major depression.
5. In the late-1990s, overlapping with the end of the previous wave, the basic elements of the fifth long cycle appear. It is driven by network technology, mobile communications, a truly global marketplace and information goods. But it has stalled. And the reason it has stalled has something to do with neoliberalism and something to do with technology itself.

(pgs. 47 – 48)”

As you can see Mason argues that the final cycles — the one that was supposed to begin with the tech boom in the 1990s has essentially stalled. It’s not operating as it should. The weakness of the trade union movement has stopped any wage growth, whilst the development of info-technology has challenged the profit capacity of many companies, primarily through the spread of free information. Whilst we have see a technological boom (info-tech) we are not seeing the same sort of economic boom that normally follows it. 

While reading about these cycles I had a huge lightbulb moment. I’ve started to wonder whether gender and sexual politics operate in similar sorts of cycles as capitalist economics.

From initial understandings of the 20th Century you can already see two of these cycles at play. The first is from the 1890s – 1945. Following the long depression of the late 1800s nuclear family structures in capitalist economies stabilised and flourished. This coincides with the boom period of that era, facilitated by heavy industry and mass production. This boom however ended in the 1920s and early 30s with an economic crash that caused the Great Depression. We can see a similar ‘crash’ in the traditional family form, with a sexual revolution that is now colloquially known as the ‘swinging twenties’ or the ‘roaring twenties’. The ‘swinging twenties’ was not just about music and speakeasies, but also encompassed a liberalisation of social mores across the US, Britain and Mainland Europe. Prior to the rise of Nazism for example the late 20s and early 30s were an era of great sexual liberalisation in Germany, with thinkers and practitioners such as Magnus Hirschfeld gaining a name in the increasingly liberal Berlin. These problems for the family continued right up until 1945, with women entering the workforce in force during the second world war.

As we enter the next long wave we can see a similar cycle. With men returning back from the war women were pushed out of the jobs they held in supporting the war effort. The booming economy required the growth of a new working class, resulting in the ‘baby boom’. Women stayed at home, looking after their growing families. Rising wages made this possible, with men being able to sustain their entire family, and the new consumer goods they were wanting to buy, off one wage. In this time we can also see a regression on ‘alternate sexualities’ — largely based in a medicalisation of homosexuality and other ‘deviant’ forms of sexualities. These sexualities provided a threat to the booming capitalist economy and in turn were suppressed (this is a backwards step based on the liberalisation of the 1930s).

As the long economic boom started to wane however, so did our sexual politics. With the economy starting to struggle women moved back into the workforce. Lowering wages required that they take on a chunk of the wage earning of the family. The crisis of the seventies also coincides with the birth of the modern feminist and gay liberation movements, an explosion on to the scene for liberal feminist and queer rights. This was compounded even more by the development of one of the most important pieces of technology ever — the pill. Changes in economic circumstances, alongside technological development, I argue, allowed feminists and queers to have a greater capacity to express their voice, and in turn to build stronger movements.

I need to do some more research on whether these sorts of cycles extend back into the 1800s, but on a brief glance I think they do. For example, Mason describes the third long wave to end in the mid 1890s, stating that “the wave peaks in the mid 1870s, with financial crisis in the USA and Europe leading to the Long Depression (1873 – 96).” A brief look back and we can see that the economic crisis coincides with what is colloquially known as the “gay nineties” or the “naughty nineties”. This decade (the 1890s) is known for a burst of decadent art, the plays and trial of Oscar Wilde and potentially most importantly for the beginning of the Suffragette Movement. Whilst the 1890s is would have been when this movement exploded, it is certain that its origins began well before that (coinciding with the economic crash that lead to the Long Depression).

If sex, and gender and sexual politics work in cycles therefore, we have to ask the questions, why, and how? I have already posited the thesis that sexuality exists as a contradiction within capitalist society. Capitalism, I argue, created many of the requirements for bursts of sexual freedom (a focus on individuality, increasing urbanisation etc. etc.) but that this very freedom presents a threat to the system itself. Sexual freedom challenges essential parts of the capitalist system — in particular the privatisation of domestic work, the lineages of inheritance and a focus on family that places an emphasis on breeding the next generation of the working class. Sex and capitalism therefore exist in an uneasy alliance — a contradiction and a balance that must be managed at all times in order for both systems (capitalism and an individualised politics of sexuality) to survive. This is a balance that aims to maintain a promise of sexual freedom, while ensuring that this promise never crosses the boundary to threaten the nature of a system.

As with the other contradictions of capitalism therefore this balance can, and clearly does, get knocked out of whack on a semi-regular basis. The balance can not be maintained at all times and at times must break. As capitalism fluctuates in cycles it is natural that so would our understandings and practices of sex.

On a basic we can see how these fluctuations work. In the start of the ‘long waves’ that Paul Mason describes, where new technologies lead to economic booms, families would become solidified by these economic circumstances. Economic growth would lead to stability, leading to people desiring bigger families, both for cultural means and as someone to pass their inheritance on to. Rising wages would also allow for people to cut their working hours, putting women back into the home to look after their children. This would be backed up by new cultural expectations, primarily that of families being focused on childrearing. The concept of “one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country” becomes the social norms. This cultural reaction would not just affect heterosexual relationships but also have impacts on queers — people who are increasingly seen as not doing their national economic duty.

As economic times start to falter however, the nature of the family changes as well. Women are required to enter the workforce, in turn creating challenges to the stable nuclear family. Families also have fewer children, creating more time for women to be in employment. This challenges the power structures of families, often resulting in people marrying later in life, as well as getting divorced more often. In these economic situations work is also considered to be more important that child-rearing. Here people of ‘deviant sexualities’ can be brought into the capitalist fold, as long as they conduct the required work to help the capitalist economy.

Here we can see a wave. As the global economy booms so does the state of the capitalist nuclear family. As the economy crashes, so goes down these family structures. So we can see the interactions between sex and our capitalist society — one that is far more interlinked than even I had originally envisaged.

These thoughts are just preliminary at the moment and I do not think the waves that Mason describes are perfectly lined up with different iterations of sexual politics. But this is definitely something worth pursuing!

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Hello all!

Welcome to April and Autumn in Canberra. As I write this I’m finally starting to feel a chill in the air. I’m sitting in my house with a jumper on, blowing warm air onto my fingers every now and then to keep them going while I type. I can feel Winter coming!

And what better time to write than in the cold months of Winter? There is nothing nicer than being inside with a hot cup of tea, listening to the wind howl outside, and writing something.  

On that note, here is some updates on where things are at for me. 

Forgiveness — Second Draft Finished!

As of a couple of weeks ago I have officially finished the second draft of my novel! 🙂

This second draft was a massive rewrite. The redraft included significantly changing big chunks of the structure, adding in many more chapters (and deleting some others) and completely changing the point of view of the book (from 3rd to 1st). No wonder it took me almost a year to get done!

But the work has been worth it. I am really happy with this draft and am feeling confident that I have a strong book down on paper. 

However, I’m not quite done yet. With the second draft finished I am now going through the book on paper and doing one final copy edit. This is because I often find that I pick up more things when reading a book on paper than on the screen. I am already about half way through this process but will probably take another month or so to get it done and to get the changes up onto the computer. 

Labor or Green: How to elect a progressive Government

I am really excited to announce that I will have an essay in the upcoming book How to Vote Progressive in Australia: Labor or Green? 

With a federal election just around the corner this book brings together a collection of writers and politicians to make the case of how we can elect a progressive Government in Australia. My essay however takes a different approach. I argue that under our current system progressive governance is actually impossible — whether office is held by Labor or the Greens. It is up to progressives therefore to rethink how we engage in the state, working to challenge its power rather than trying to gain access to it.

I’m really excited to be writing alongside some great writers and can’t wait until this book comes out. You can get your copy of it here.

Sexy Capitalism — New Reading and New Ideas

While I have been finalising the second draft of Forgiveness I have also been doing some more reading for Sexy Capitalism, coming up with some new ideas to fill the book. In particular I have recently read The Origins of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood and PostCapitalism by Paul Mason. I’ve started (and will continue) this reading as I’ve become aware of my need to understand more the ebbs and flows of capitalist economics to understand how sex fits within this. 

There are two thoughts I want to quickly tease out. 

First it The Origins of Capitalism Ellen Meiksins Wood talks about the myth of capitalist origins. She argues that we have developed a myth which sees the development of capitalism as part of a ‘natural order’. Our desire for capitalism has always been there, it is just that we’ve only been able to fully explore this in the past few centuries. Capitalism is therefore a natural state of being. 

Meiskins Wood challenges this throughout her book, and effectively so. But for me it made me think about the myths of sexual and familial life. While there are myths of the origins of capitalism there are also myths of why we live in monogamous nuclear families — myths that tell us this is part of the natural order. I am now starting to see these two myths as being more clearly linked. They are both stories we tell ourselves about the nature of our system, excuses we give to ensure its survival. These stories are important as they shape how we deal with capitalism and sex. 

Second, in PostCapitalism Paul Mason discusses what he describes as the 50 year cycles of capitalism. These are cycles based on long booms, followed by an inevitable crash, followed by economic struggle, which ultimately results in new innovation to creates another long boom. These cycles are not new and have been discussed by Marxists in particular in the past. 

What is interesting for me is that I am now seeing links between these cycles and cycles of sexual politics. For example the two major economic crashes of the 20th Century (the 1920s and 1970s) both coincided with major upheavals in sexual politics, in particular big sexual revolutions. Both times these were followed by a ‘calming down’, largely coinciding with the following boom periods (i.e. the 50s/60s and the 90s). Do our sexual politics therefore correlate with these cycles? This is a new idea and one I have to explore more, but one that I think has real potential. 

Articles and podcasts 

Not too many new articles in the past month (I’ve been busy) but here is a selection of what I’ve been writing/podcasting: 

• SBS Sexuality: Telstra and the harsh lesson of seeking moral support from corporate giants
• Blog Post: The Tragedy of the Commons and the Family.  
• Blog Post: Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience
• Podcast: Queers Episode 5: Made Straight
• Podcast: Queers Episode 6: The Self-Help Guide to Queerness
• Podcast: Queers Episode 7: Burned by Business

That’s it from me this month! Hope you are all enjoying your Autumn and will be in touch soon. 

Remember, if you don’t already, make sure you follow me on Twitter and Facebook, where you’ll get updates of all my work. 

While many will cheer Telstra’s latest backdown as a big victory, should we be more skeptical?

Originally published in SBS Sexuality, 19 April, 2016.

Yesterday, telecommunications giant Telstra performed quite the gymnastic feat by executing a double backflip on their position on marriage equality and confusing everyone in the meantime. Succumbing to increasing community pressure, Telstra CEO Andrew Penn released a statement, saying:

“Telstra supports marriage equality. Last week we advised that out of respect for the individual our view had been that we would not add further to the debate on marriage equality ahead of a plebiscite or parliamentary debate. It is clear that rather than Telstra stepping back we should in fact step forward and support our view for marriage equality and so that is what we will do.”

This ends what has been an extremely bizarre week for the company. On Wednesday, Telstra found itself the centre of a debate about diversity and corporate responsibility after it was reported they’d pulled their support for a public marriage equality campaign following pressure from the Catholic Church. The company then faced boycotts from marriage advocates, landing itself in the position of trying to balance the needs of both its pro and anti-equality customers and staff.

While many will cheer Telstra’s latest backdown as a big victory, I am far more skeptical. I see it just like I saw their first move — a company doing what companies do best: looking after profits.

To understand this, I think it is worth looking back and clearly considering the motives of Telstra during this week. After the initial report of the marriage backdown, Fairfax journalist Jill Stark tweeted:

Rainbow phone booths and Mardi Gras floats mean nothing @Telstra when you abandon your principles chasing the dollar https://t.co/v0gKsQ3rwQ

— Jill Stark (@jillastark) April 13, 2016

Stark’s tweet is extremely insightful. She is correct in understanding that Telstra’s backdown was about them chasing a dollar. Telstra has huge contracts with the Catholic Church, in particular holding the contracts for all Catholic schools across the country. This is big business. Losing that business, which is what the church implied may be a consequence, would have been huge.

In that context their actions make sense. Companies do not have any moral lens when it comes to queer, or any other social issues. Their primary, in fact their sole goal, is to make money for their shareholders. All decisions must be seen through that lens. This is what Telstra did. From what I can read, Telstra aimed for a quiet deal with the church — remove their public support without upsetting marriage advocates at the same time. This would allow them to keep both communities — or in corporate language both markets — happy. Their problems arose when it was thrown out into the public sphere.

What’s interesting about Stark’s and other members of the queer community’s reaction is that we have not seen Telstra’s initial marriage equality support through the same lens. Whilst it looked great when Telstra set up rainbow phone booths for Mardi Gras, we have to look at those moves as about the company chasing profits as well. This is the same for all the companies who signed on to support marriage equality. I’d argue companies didn’t do so because they suddenly became great social progressives, but because they saw the potential of tapping in to the gay community and its supporters as a potential market. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is why calls for a boycott were so futile. Yes, our two other big telecommunications companies — Optus and Vodafone — did not succumb to the church’s pressure. But they also did not have the same financial considerations. In particular, they did not have the same huge contracts that Telstra has with the church, and in turn were not facing a loss of profits. Put either of those companies in the same position and I suspect they would have done the same thing.

This highlights why we should be so careful in seeking corporate support for our causes. While it may look good when companies sign up to our issues, when supporting us becomes a threat to profits — as it did for Telstra this week — these same companies will drop us if it’s convenient. That is what they are designed to do.

As anti-gay marriage conservatives campaign even harder against the march of queer progress, and target big companies as they do so, we can expect to see even more of this.

Corporate giants aren’t our friends. They’re here for the money. If profits threaten to dry up, so will their support.

This article reflects ideas developed by Simon Copland and Benjamin Riley as part their podcast, Queers. Full discussion on this issue here.

Earlier this year I took on some work tutoring at both the ANU and UC. At the ANU I am teaching a course titled “Environment and Society: The Geography of Sustainability” — one of the first courses I did ten years ago when starting my degree. The course is an introduction to environmental politics and policy, using a multi-disciplinary approach to think about the issue of sustainability.

Last week was one of my favourite tutorials where we talked about Garrett Hardin’s theory of the Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin’s essay is arguably one of, if not the most influential pieces of work in environmental policy and politics. It forms the basis of much of environmental policy and planning and is hardly criticised despite its deep problems.

Hardin’s theory is based on the idea that when a resource is available to all — when it is a common — the acts of “rational people” will ultimately lead to its destruction.

“Picture a pasture open to all,” he starts. In this scenario, a “rational” herdsmen will want to maximise the amount of cattle he can herd. This is part of an inherent desire to grow production and increase one’s wealth. Yet adding more cattle brings cost, so when deciding whether to increase his herd a herdsman needs to think of the positives and negatives. Hardin explains: 

“What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of âÂÂ1.

With a hersdman being the only one to gain the benefits of the extra cattle, and with the costs being shared amongst all, inevitably “the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd.” 

But this is a method for disaster. As each herdsmen adds more cattle the pasture becomes depleted and destroyed and eventually everyone fails. The environment collapses and a “tragedy’ ensues. This example, Hardin argues, can be replicated across all resource issues. Allowing resources to fall to the commons is a tragedy of disaster. 

Hardin’s theory is one that I’ve dealt with quite a bit in my previous work. It runs throughout mainstream environmental management and politics, forming the basis of a lot of our decision making. The Tragedy of the Commons is an assumed, inherent, part of human nature — one that we must find ways to tackle whenever dealing with the environment.

But when teaching this topic last week I began to think about the connections between this theory and the family. This is something I’m still developing but plays out into a broader discussion on the relationship between the environmental politics and familial structures, one I think is much stronger than many think.  

Let’s be clear first that the evidence behind Hardin’s theory is scant at best. Angus for example quotes Engels, who looked at communal resource management in Germany. Engels said:

[T]he use of arable and meadowlands was under the supervision and direction of the community. . . .

Just as the share of each member in so much of the mark as was distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in the use of the “common mark.”  The nature of this use was determined by the members of the community as a whole. . . .

At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they met in the open air to discuss the affairs of the mark and to sit in judgment upon breaches of regulations and disputes concerning the mark.  (Engels 1892)

This sort of communal management has been well documented by many ranging of Engels and Angus to Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for her research into communal resource management schemes. This evidence we also presented to my class, getting them to think critically about Hardin’s work.

The question I asked my class therefore was, given this evidence, what was Hardin’s motive for writing his essay, and what is the motive for ensuring it remains as the basis of environmental policy making?

To understand this we need to look at the main solution he provided. Apart from his advocacy for eugenics (which he talks about in the essay), Hardin was a huge advocate for privatisation. As humans were unable to manage the “commons” we had to split up land and resources and privatise them. People who owned resources and had an economic reason to maintain them would likely look after them better than a collective.

It is here where you can start to see the connection with the family unit. Privatisation requires units who can do the privatising, and in capitalism this unit is the family. Many others have explored the idea of the family being the major ‘economic unit’ of capitalism, “an integral part of the reproduction of capitalist relations.” 

Families play a major role in capitalism. At the most basic level the modern nuclear family allows for the reproduction of labor power (i.e. the birth of children who will become new workers) and the passage of wealth and inheritance, both of which are essential to the continuation of the system. But more importantly for this discussions the dominance of families privatises functions that were once under communal control. Nuclear families privatised domestic work, ensuring it was not the burden of the capitalist class (who refused to pay for it). Families also looked after ‘unproductive’ members of the working class (the sick, elderly, children etc.) and wives were placed in charge of looking after their husbands to ensure they were ready and able to participate in a full day’s work. Martha Gimenez states this in these terms:

As long as the family continues to operate as an economic unit, ’society’ does not assume responsibility for its members except under limited circumstances; distribution and consumption are organized in ways that presuppose family membership and specific relations between the family and the ’economy’ which severely restrict women’s lives and opportunities. 

What Hardin’s essay does is provide some form of ‘scientific’ basis for this. These processes occurred well before Hardin wrote his essay — hundreds of years in fact. Hardin wrote the Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, notably at a time when environmental concern and the environment movement was growing. In doing so he provided essential ‘scientific’ cover for a system that was already well entrenched, but was also being challenged. This was not just cover for the way we manage our resources but for our social system as well. Hardin entirely rejected communal forms of living, favouring privatisation of both the means of production and the family unit. This entrenches our understandings of how societies operate, in particular entrenching modern family forms.

This is a pretty common trend in capitalist society and its interaction with the sciences. Every year for example we see new ‘data’ that reinforces the norms of our familial and sexual life, whether it is research that says that monogamy is ‘natural’ or that women inherently have lower libido and sexual desire. Science is commonly used to reinforce our social norms — from psychology to genetics. 

For me, this is the link between Hardin’s work and the family. Hardin didn’t create a challenge to the commons. Pastures, land, the atmosphere and water had all started to be privatised by the time he wrote his essay. He was just the right man, at the right time. In the heart of a burgeoning environment movement he provided some (unsubstantiated) “science” to reinforce the system as it existed. This influence continues today — invading both neoliberal politics, but potentially more importantly, environment movements across the globe.

I’m increasingly seeing connections between our families and all of the other elements of capitalism. Hardin has opened up some thoughts about how we think about resource management, and in turn the environment, builds in to this. It’s an important connection, particularly given the timing of his essay and the prominence it still has. Was a good use of my teaching as well!

Time for another review of something Sexy-Capitalismy.

Last year I read the important and influential essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience published in 1980 by Adrienne Rich. This week Ben Riley and used the essay as a launching pad for our latest episode of Queers. So I thought, why not also do a bit of a review?

Rich’s essay is an important entry in lesbian theory and the idea of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. Rich outlines her theory of compulsory heterosexuality as such:

“I am suggesting that heterosexuality, like mother-hood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution–even, or especially, by those individuals who feel they are, in their personal experience, the precursors of a new social relation between the sexes.”

Rich’s essay is long and in-depth and I’m not going to be able to cover it all here, but let’s have a look at what she means by this, and what implications it has.

The idea of heterosexuality as a political institution is not an unheard-of one. The concept is simple: heterosexuality (and in turn homosexuality) are not inherent “natural” terms — they represent political realities. We can see this most clearly through the use of the terms themselves. Heterosexuality and homosexuality only really appeared as terms in the late 19th and early 20th Century, a reaction (in my view) to a growing individualisation around sexuality, which framed sexuality as an inherent part of one’s “self”.

This idea (that our sexualities are political) is naturally a challenging one, something which Rich identifies in her piece. As she says:

“The assumption that “most women are innately heterosexual” stands as a theoretical and political stumbling block for many women. It remains a tenable assumption, partly because lesbian existence has been written out of history or catalogued under disease; partly because it has been treated as exceptional rather than intrinsic; partly because to acknowledge that for women heterosexuality may not be a “preference” at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized and maintained by force is an immense step to take if you consider yourself freely and “innately” heterosexual.

This is the difficult thing about compulsory heterosexuality (and homosexuality). It is something we all live with, and something that feels innate to ourselves and our society. In turn it is hard to see, and even harder to challenge. This difficulty however does not mean we cannot engage with the political realities of heterosexuality:

Yet the failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness. 

After establishing this system Rich spends most of her time looking at the impacts of it. Naturally (as described in the title) she takes an approach that focuses on female oppression, arguing that compulsory heterosexuality is used as a way to oppress women. Rich pulls from a number of sources for this but it is her commentary on Kathleen Gough’s work that I find the most interesting. She states:

“In her essay “The Origin of the Family,” Kathleen Gough lists eight characteristics of male power in archaic and contemporary societies that I would like to use as a framework: “men’s ability to deny women sexuality or to force it upon them; to command or exploit their labor to control their produce; to control or rob them of their children; to confine them physically and prevent their movement; to use them as objects in male transactions; to cramp their creativeness; or to withhold from them large areas of the society’s knowledge and cultural attainments.”

Rich expands on Gough’s schema before looking at how they relate to the idea of compulsory heterosexuality. Here she says:

“These are some of the methods by which male power is manifested and maintained. Looking at the schema, what surely impresses itself is the fact that we are confronting not a simple maintenance of inequality and property possession, but a pervasive cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness,  that suggests that an enormous potential counterforce is having to be restrained.

“Some of the forms by which male power manifests itself are more easily recognizable as enforcing heterosexuality on women than are others. Yet each one I have listed adds to the cluster of forces within which women have been convinced that marriage and sexual orientation toward men are inevitable, even if unsatisfying or oppressive components of their lives. The chastity belt; child marriage; erasure of lesbian existence (except as exotic and perverse) in art, literature, film; idealization of heterosexual romance and marriage– these are some fairly obvious forms of compulsion, the first two exemplifying physical force, the second two control of consciousness. While clitoridectomy has been assailed by feminists as a form of woman-torture, Kathleen Barry first pointed out that it is not simply a way of turning the young girl into a “marriageable” woman through brutal surgery; it intends that women in the intimate proximity of polygynous marriage will not form sexual relationships with each other; that–from a male, genitalfetishist perspective–female erotic connections, even in a sex segregated situation, will be literally excised.”

Assumed heterosexuality is a system designed for male oppression of women —   a system of controlling women’s sexuality, largely for the benefit of men. Rich builds on this by exploring the work by Mackinnon, who looks at the intersection between compulsory heterosexuality and economics (long quote!).

“In her brilliant study Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination, Catharine A. MacKinnon delineates the intersection of compulsory heterosexuality and economics. Under capitalism, women are horizontally segregated by gender and occupy a structurally inferior position in the workplace; this is hardly news, but MacKinnon raises the question why, even if capitalism “requires some collection of individuals to occupy low- status, low-paying positions such persons must be biologically female,” and goes on to point out that “the fact that male employers often do not hire qualified women, even when they could pay them less than men suggests that more than the profit motive is implicated”. She cites a wealth of material documenting the fact that women are not only segregated in low-paying service jobs (as secretaries, domestics, nurses, typists, telephone operators, child-care workers, waitresses) but that “sexualization of the woman” is part of the job. Central and intrinsic to the economic realities of women’s lives is the requirement that women will “market sexual attractiveness to men, who tend to hold the economic power and position to enforce their predilections.” And MacKinnon exhaustively documents that “sexual harassment perpetuates the interlocked structure by which women have been kept sexually in thrall to men at the bottom of the labor market. Two forces of American society converge: men’s control over women’s sexuality and capital’s control over employees’ work lives.”  Thus, women in the workplace are at the mercy of sex-as-power in a vicious circle. Economically disadvantaged, women–whether waitresses or professors–endure sexual harassment to keep their jobs and learn to behave in a complaisantly and ingratiatingly heterosexual manner because they discover this is their true qualification for employment, whatever the job description. And, MacKinnon notes, the woman who too decisively resists sexual overtures in the workplace is accused of being “dried-up” and sexless, or lesbian. 

This is what I really love about Rich’s article. Rich manages to synthesise theories of male oppression of women with capitalist oppression of workers, linking it all to a system of heterosexuality. And here we can see how compulsory heterosexuality works as a system. The system, in my mind, is one built on the needs of capitalism — the need for a growing work force (requiring constant reproduction) and the existence of a family unit to ensure the proper upbringing of these children, the correct passage of inheritance, and the continued passage of individualist capitalist ideals. Women bear the brunt of this oppression due to being the carriers of children, and in turn those who end up suffering the force of compulsory heterosexuality. This expresses itself in a number of ways, economically, socially and culturally — all the features described by Kathleen Gough in her essay.

To end, we should ask the question, does this, however, mean the abandonment of heterosexual relationships? Rich says that is the wrong question to ask:

The question inevitably will arise: Are we then to condemn all heterosexual relationships, including those that are least oppressive? I believe this question, though often heartfelt, is the wrong question here. We have been stalled in a maze of false dichotomies that prevents our apprehending the institution as a whole: “good” versus “bad” marriages; “marriage for love” versus arranged marriage; “liberated” sex versus prostitution; heterosexual intercourse versus rape; Liebeschmerz versus humiliation and dependency. Within the institution exists, of course, qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent on the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives.

As we address the institution itself, moreover, we begin to perceive a history of female resistance that has never fully understood itself because it has been so fragmented, miscalled, erased. It will require a courageous grasp of the politics and economics, as well as the cultural propaganda, of heterosexuality to carry us beyond individual cases or diversified group situations into the complex kind of overview needed to undo the power men everywhere wield over women, power that has become a model for every other form of exploitation and illegitimate control.