PARTISAN!

A raunchy mural in a Melbourne suburb has caused another moral panic about public sexuality. Maya Kaufmann writes on Socialist Alternative’s pivot back toward anti-“raunch culture” busybodying, and how it reflects a conservative turn in International Socialism/Cliffite Socialism.

Thousands of emails submitted to the local council. A somewhat tepid defence by an LA-based mural artist with an odd name. A controversial piece of street art. A flurry of complaints organised by a coalition of churches and radical feminists. In short, it has all the trappings of the kind of moral panic that gets suburban retirees and letter-to-the-editor writers furious. For those of us in the socialist left, the case is of minimal interest, distinguished only by the participation of the post-Cliffite revolutionaries at the Red Flag newspaper.

The article by Sarah Garnham concerning the now defaced mural – which depicted a woman in latex, bound and gagged – and the controversial queer artist “Lauren YS” is one of two articles in the paper (the other, by Anneke Demanuele denounces the “sexual depravity” of the recent Sabrina Carpenter album), published by Socialist Alternative, signaling a return to the “anti-raunch culture” campaigning of the 2000s. For those comrades not aware of the history of this particular Cliffite bugbear, it may appear odd that a socialist newspaper would cover the harrumphing of neighbourhood busybodies in the inner Melbourne suburbs. For those of us who are somewhat aware of their history in this field, it is less of a shock.

The two articles have been released within a month of each other after a long period of non-coverage of this topic. In her article, Garnham attacks the mural as promoting:

The dehumanisation of women as legitimate sexual activity, in the context of a society in which women are oppressed and already subject to unacceptably high levels of violence, often deadly violence. How can we wring our hands at every news report of another woman killed by a man at the same time as every conceivable available space is saturated with images that erotise such violence to make money and, even worse, elevate it to art?

Of course, opposition to violence against women is a cause that all socialists would agree on. We might however disagree on the effectiveness of anti-mural campaigns in such a struggle. Accusations of being pulled into a conservative moral panic are not necessarily helped by uncritically citing Collective Shout as a feminist, “anti-violence” group.

Garnham might think twice about jumping into the trenches if she looked into Collective Shout. Despite being a nominally feminist organisation, the group’s partners include religious organisations led by Pentecostal pastors and Christian charity & youth organisations. Their representatives have spoken at various feminist events in Britain that denounce the “transsexual menace” to women and girls. On Collective Shout’s social media, they follow such luminaries as the Deep Green Resistance, a group of radical environmentalists who rub shoulders with neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. The organisation as a whole is connected to Spinifex Press, an eco-feminist outfit who publish known anti-semite Jennifer Bilek, Sheila Jeffries, and countless books on the dangers of “gender ideology”. Several of Collective Shout’s leading members have had their works published by this purveyor of gutter trash.

I am not accusing Garnham of herself being an anti-semitic, anti-gay purveyor of reactionary moralism masked as feminism. In fact, I am sure she would fiercely rebut such ideas if they were presented to her. However, the inner logic of her argument is the same one that undergirds the conservative moral panic: controversial cultural works are normalising deviant and dangerous sexual behaviours.

It would not be the first time that Cliffism has dabbled in the world of conservative morality drama. In the 2000s, when the UK Socialist Workers Party (SWP) had been playing a leading role in the Socialist Alliance left-reformist electoral coalition, they jumped ship to opportunistically shack up with George Galloway and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB; a representative body of the Muslim middle class) in the RESPECT coalition. As the Weekly Worker documented at the time, this alliance forced the Socialist Workers Party to weaken their commitment to women’s liberation, with abortion rights being dropped from the platform to appease their newfound coalition partners.

This political turn was smoothed over by the embrace of the works of Ariel Levy, a feminist author who was leading a campaign against “raunch culture” following the publication of her book Female Chauvinist Pigs, by the SWP. Levy argued that younger generations of women were sacrificing the victories of their sisters on the altar of male affection by dressing in skimpy clothes, watching pornography, and attending pole dancing classes. This book was all the rage in Cliffite circles at the time: with a dedicated panel at the UK Marxism Conference and copies sold in every SWP bookshop. A struggle against “raunch culture” allowed the moralists at the SWP to pose as both feminists and as moral guardians – and to make common cause with their newfound friends in the MAB, who have their own reasons to feel uncomfortable with women showing a little too much skin.

Notably, you can still find Female Chauvinist Pigs, a book which repeatedly labels teenage girls “bimbos” and “sluts”, criticises them for exposing their stomachs, and otherwise degrades them, listed on Red Flag books for $10 (very reasonably priced!). Perhaps we can expect a new edition in which we find the music of Sabrina Carpenter thrown on the pyre. We can only hope.

Not everyone bought what Levy was selling. Luminaries of the women’s liberation movement such as Lynne Segal (author of the excellent Straight Sex) attacked the book quite strongly in The Guardian, arguing that it fundamentally misunderstood the problem of sexuality. Our own comrades, in our own times, have made a similar error to Levy. Despite attacking bondage and collars, our friends at Socialist Alternative have no real account of why women might actually want to participate in this kind of degrading sexual activity. Any real theory would require them to dip into the murky waters of the relationship between sexuality and ideology, and the very complex world of human sexual activity itself. Regardless of how much one may rail against “objectification”, the reality is that sexuality is a complex interplay of subject and object. As Seagal notes:

Let me share a little secret with you, something that hampers any attempt to rectify sexual behaviour: sex is all about wanting to be objectified, wanting to be the object of another’s desire, another’s gaze (even if, like a traditional straight man, we pretend that this is not the case). However, it is about wanting to gain this attention in ways that are reasonably safe from risk, harm or hurt – except, perhaps, for when these are the very things that turn us on.

An inability to grapple with the complexity of the sexual dynamic drives the exact reduction we see in feminist-cum-conservative groups like Collective Shout. By locating the oppression of women in the sexual act, and in particular sexual acts at that, opposition to the sexual oppression of women becomes opposition to sex-in-itself. This places feminism in a political bloc with the conservatives who also oppose the dangers of deviant sexuality. Notably, while Collective Shout and Red Flag protest depictions of women as sex slaves and prostitutes, they do not object to the constant presence of advertisements and media that depict women as blushing brides and homemakers. Surely the former is a more honest depiction of the latter! For women across the world it is marriage, not dog collars, that ties them to domestic slavery.

Whether one likes or dislikes bondage, latex, or Sabrina Carpenter, we have to contend with the fact that women are active participants in these sexual scenes. In fact, they are in some cases the biggest consumers of this material. Not only that, but these activities are not wholly done for the enjoyment of men, as many lesbians will inform you. These women are not simply brainwashed by patriarchy (despite what Socialist Alternative’s very reductive account of ideology would have you believe!). Of course, mini skirts and Sabrina Carpenter albums are not a road to liberation either – but neither is covering up! Women cannot be simply chastised into liberating themselves. Our moral guardians at Red Flag might do well to remember that.

The reality is that this kind of hack moral hectoring is very easy. Socialist Alternative has inherited Cliffism’s allergy to “programmatism” – that is, they are allergic to the hard work of elaborating a socialist program and popularising it. Instead they opt to jump from issue to issue, promoting the “socialist view”, which largely consists of reformist demands in radical language. The real task of women’s liberation is primarily concerned with the question of the sexual division of labour – it’s about housework, childcare, and doing the dishes. The liberation of women will require millions of working women to become politically organised and conscious of their historical struggle against oppression.

Opposing “raunch culture” allows the Cliffites to whip up some quick outrage without having to stand on a thorny programmatic platform and actually do the work of articulating anything that looks like Marxism. Notably, in their recent morality play, Garnham and Demanuele don’t actually propose any solution to the issue they highlight. Should Carpenter’s album be banned? Should we regulate the sex shops and ban latex? If eroticising sexual violence is morally objectionable, perhaps the works of de Sade, Orwell, and Bataille should be banned as well! It’s unclear, because actually proposing to do anything might force our erstwhile comrades to say something of interest.