Women and The State

“I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.” –Mary Wollstonecraft

Ms. magazine cover, 2009:

I’ve been struck again and again by the way the citizenry’s relationship to the State resembles nothing so much as Battered Wife Syndrome, even (or especially) if you take into account the studies showing that male partners are victimized by domestic abuse as frequently as female ones. Here is The Superfluous Man on the topic of the liberals’ desperate codependence on the State (and yes, he refers you to my earlier post on the matter), in Hope and desperation:

Like a drowning man, people threatened with the destruction of hope will cling to anything. People will try to justify or rationalize the failures and the betrayals of promises. People will reconcile themselves to things that would have rightly appalled them if Bush had done it. (See Cheryl Cline’s recent post for an example.) Some of that is just cynical partisan politicking, but I think a lot of it is sincere- the death of a beloved hope is so agonizing that people often warp or just deny their own perceptions to avoid that pain. This is a common phenomenon that we’ve all probably witnessed. It’s not hard to find relationships and marriages where one partner is blatantly unfaithful, exploitative, or abusive, and yet the victimized partner has convinced himself or herself that things are okay, that their partner is a good person who loves them.

The nauseating spectacle of the inauguration made this sickeningly apparent. The same government that brutalizes us sells itself as our savior, and the populace responds with an ecstasy that is sexual or even religious in its intensity. The parallels to an abusive relationship are almost too obvious to go into: the abuser is unpredictable and cruel but occasionally sweet and loving, and, most importantly, gives the illusion of consent via voting and physical residence (“Why don’t you leave if you don’t like it?” To go where?)

With women, however, the comparison of liberal self-delusion to domestic abuse hits home excruciatingly hard, especially since women are more likely to identify as Democrats. Women have labored too long to allow women to control their own lives and livelihoods only to surrender it all to the State. A woman who labors unpaid for her family is, at least in some circles, considered a gullible tool of the patriarchy, a brainwashed slave; a woman who forgoes childrearing or curtails it drastically just to hand over half her earnings to the State is considered liberated. A woman who takes care of her own children is somehow selfish and deluded and self-abnegating all at once, whereas a woman whose labor is ostensibly taxed to care for the children of others, but in reality is used to fund war and genocide, represents the pinnacle of feminist aspirations. (She is selfish to place a higher premium on her own reproduction than on her family’s carbon footprint, for instance; self-abnegating in that she’s bought into an outdated model of femininity.)

Feminist-minded women have long been critical, and rightly so, of power structures that are replicated via the family. But this skepticism of private patriarchy somehow evaporates when it comes to the public patriarchy of the State, and its overwhelmingly brutal and obvious power structures. Rad Geek has just one example of how this public patriarchy takes care of women in his series on sexual violence perpetrated by cops: Rapists in uniform #5: on invasions of privacy. He also examines the ceaseless rationalizations of monopolistic state power that people resort to:

When anarchists suggest that a civilized society can do without government or its cops, we are always asked how people in an anarchistic society would be protected from violent criminals like murderers and rapists. If we suggest that people could handle their own protection through consensual private arrangements — individual self-defense, cooperative community defense, or hiring out help, if need be — we are constantly told that we need monopolistic government control in order to ensure that professional police go about their policing in a way that’s transparent and accountable to the people.

A woman who said her husband needed absolute control over the family to ensure its members’ accountability would get laughed out of the Ms. board room, and quite a few other places too. The feeble offering that, say, his drinking buddies would provide a series of checks and balances on that power would turn the laughter to plain pity. But apologists for state power, like a codependent woman offering excuses for an alcoholic partner, never run out of ways to justify centralizing authority.  This power is justified, paradoxically, by appealing to illusions of individual sovereignty:  under the protective wing of federal government and federal funding, we could agitate for “local control,” increase “community involvement,” improve education, get journalists to vigilantly cover abuses, ad infinitum. The battered woman could hide the liquor bottles, too: giving a show of disapproval and agency, but in effect merely enabling the abuser.

Of course, there’s the equally inescapable conclusion that women and citizens are not mere victims, but actively collude and identify with the mechanisms of power, as the Ms. cover all too clearly demonstrates. It’s not that we ever achieved and then forgot Wollstonecraft’s vision, but rather that it was never honored to begin with.