Monday, April 4, 2011

Two-Brain Willetts and the Mother-Monster

There is a (very funny and horribly astute) joke doing the rounds in the States presently...It goes something like this...

There are three people - a CEO, a Tea Partier, and a Union representative - sitting round a table on which there is a plate with ten chocolate-chip cookies. The CEO leans in, takes nine cookies, and then, as he settles back into his seat, looks at the Tea Partier and says 'You wanna watch that Union Guy, he wants some of your cookie.'

It seems that we could do a bit of jiggery-pokery with this scenario - let's replace the CEO with David Willetts as the emissary of fat-cat adminsitration intent on maintaining white upper-middle class male privilege, and replace the other two with a middle-class woman and a working-class man - and we have a fairly good approximation of the 'divide and conquer' strategy enacted by David Willetts on Friday.

Middle class women, Willetts claims, are responsible for the lack of social mobility in this country, because, they have, basically, been stealing working-class men's jobs - or rather, they have been going to university and getting themselves all educated and hence, stopping working-class men getting educated instead (well at least it makes a change from brown people stealing white people's jobs...)

Where on earth does one start with this nonsense?

Firstly - This is pure conjecture/reckless speculation/slander on the part of the government... feminism, Willett's claims, being "probably the biggest factor" in the decline in social mobility. The evidence for this appears to be no more than the fact that social mobility has been declining for the last forty years, and the convenient coincidence that it has also been about forty years since women decided in large numbers that a fulfilling life might consist of more than spending all their time looking after other people's needs. Here we might note, that we philosophy-types-with-no-lives like nothing better than spending our weekends drawing up lists with names like 'Jane's top ten fallacies,' and that one of our favourites is people who use vague correlations as evidence for causality. We might as well claim that T-Rex are responsible for social stagnation, or flares, or the craze for fondues, or the election of Margaret Thatcher...no hang on a minute....

Secondly - There really are a bunch of better candidates for the phenomenon under consideration...the destruction of British manufacturing and its effect on working class communities...the rise of neoliberalism, the 'trickle-up' of wealth and the rapidly expanding inequality gap...the abolition of grammar schools and the creation of a two-tier education system which selects on the basis of ability to pay...to name but a few...I don't know, how about we actually try and find out what's causing the trouble...of all the crazy ideas...

Thirdly - I guess the problem with trying to find out would be that we might actually find out that...oh, I don't know, free-market economics totally screws the life-chances of the bottom two-thirds of the population...well, that would be pretty inconvenient...

Fourthly - That they would devise such a fraudulent and blatantly divisive response to a pressing social problem indicates that they: a) Don't actually give two shits about social mobility...oh yes, they're Tories, they don't actually give two shits about social mobility; and b) Are intent on diverting any attention from where the real problem might be and instead whipping up a specious non-argument between the middle and working-classes while the neoliberal elite continue to scoff all the pies...

Lastly but not leastly - 'Feminism trumped egalitarianism'....seriously....what???? As has been widely noted, this suggests that somehow the person at least partially in charge of our universities (when they are not being manhandled by the Minister for Business)...doesn't think that feminism is a type of egalitarianism. That is, working class men wanting to get out of factories and mines and into offices or hospitals is egalitarianism, but women wanting to get out of the kitchen and into the boardroom is not. In the end, this can only be read as revealing that Two-Brains thinks that the movement for the greater emancipation of women is based on something other than a legitimate demand for equality...that feminism is, in essence, some kind of suspect Amazonian coup d'etat, a victory middle-class women have extracted from their poor abused menfolk by, I don't know, engaging in some dastardly form of characteristically feminine manipulation...like withholding sexual favours, or refusing to do the laundry.

That is, at base, this claim functions by subtly expressing - and also, importantly, appealing to - one of the central tropes which have, since time immemorial, underpinned patriarchy. While on the one hand the oppression of women has been historically justified by our status as the 'fairer' or 'weaker' sex - fine-boned frailties prone to faints and fits who have to be caged for our own good - at the same time, and always running through and counter this, like the dark side of the moon, is the image of the medusa, the snake-fanged hiss of the devouring mother-monster. What impels the oppression of women, has always impelled the oppression of women, is hatred...hatred which arises from a primordial fear and resentment about the way in which women use - and may sometimes abuse - their maternal and sexual power and their power over the creation of life. This is a lot of power. It's a lot of power for women to feel comfortable with, and it's a lot of power for any of us (men and women alike) to accept that another being has over us. We come, all of us, into this world, little wriggling lumps of unfinished flesh, completely dependent on another - on milk, and warmth, and air, and love. There is a stunning amount of vulnerability here...and there is still a stunning amount of vulnerability implied by our everyday dependence on earth and water and being able to buy a pint of semi-skimmed from the shop.

In a certain sense, there is nothing very interesting or notable about David Willetts misguided comments. It's just misogyny. It's just trying to divert our attention from an important issue by appealing to a whole load of more or less explicit fear and rage about the way in which women 'illegitimately' use their power to the detriment of men. However, unfortunately, there is really no 'just' about it. Insofar as misogyny arises, at root, from a steadfast refusal to accept the very vulnerability of our being living beings...it is, as we stare down the barrel of an ecological crisis, and contemplate an increasingly avaricious and unequal society...one of greatest obstacles to us extracting ourselves from the messes we currently find ourselves in.

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