Philosophilia’s first major video premieres to Jack’s patrons today so here, as promised, is the text of the video. We publish this to enable concentrated perusal, analysis, discussion and, when necessary, worked-through clarification of what’s said in the videos – replies will be monitored and Jack will often respond personally.
(Apologies for any undetected last-minute script changes.)
THE POLITICS OF PENETRATION
A certain madness afflicts the world. We humans haven’t had a globally connected civilisation for very long, and yet here we are—utterly divided at a time when the very planet we belong to demands we unite as a thinking, caring species.
So what is this madness that divides us, and where is the path to recovery?
In 2017, American feminist Judith Butler called for “an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in society at large but also within the feminist movement.”
Four years later, I can only present this strange, hybrid telling.
I was already working on it when Butler made their call, engaged, as I was, in a decades-long research project inspired by my degree in English and philosophy, probing the steamy nexus of power, sex, religion and politics.
It goes without saying that Butler wasn’t asking us to look at “womanhood” in isolation: so, following in the footsteps of Andrea Dworkin who published Intercourse in 1985, I went right back to basics, to the root cause, you might say, of all gender conflict.
I’ve called what I found the politics of penetration.
So what is—or are—the politics of penetration?
Well, it’s “is”, because a politics is a system of power relationships and also a system of thinking about power relationships, and I see the politics of penetration as a way to reframe current debates about big world problems by looking at the philosophical underpinnings of how societies allot value and make decisions.
It’s an evolving summary of a broad field of study, a thread of thinking running through history, ethics, physics, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy, but also right back into prehistory.
The politics of penetration is a study of the interplay of power between opposing forces, opposing ideas, and complementary elements in our universe, our environment, our cultures and our lives.
As a theory, it crystallises the human dynamics of a value system we inherit and perpetuate without ever quite understanding, and offers them for critique.
It observes the path of human history, the development of human culture from cave painting to the Internet, and the evolution and proliferation of spiritual and materialist cosmologies—and, in order to presume to be a theory of cosmos, it boldly attempts a synthesis of Eastern, Western and Indigenous thinking.
Speaking of which, this work is made on sovereign Aboriginal land, and I need to honour the Elders of the Gadigal.
So, you’re impatient now: what’s penetration got to do with it?
What’s the first binary we know, the first opposition we learn upon sliding out, into this world? In…out.
And the next? In my mouth, or not?
And what is the first question our parents wanted to know about us? Girl or boy—inny or outy?
All our understanding of the world—and therefore all our thinking—is founded on these elemental contrasts, the tension between possibilities, the shock of difference, and the discovery of inequality through desire, fear and structural disadvantage.
Woah—technical term alert! We will now have a brief explanatory interlude.
Structural disadvantage is when one party has less opportunity or ability than another because of differences in their respective structures, and/or their relative positions in a larger structure.
It’s an aspect of structural inequality, which you can look up on Wikipedia. That entry starts with difference between nations: landlocked nations are disadvantaged, for example, but the structure in question may be geographic, economic, political, or personal.
The primary personal structure that can disadvantage us is gender; beyond that we’re also vulnerable by race, class, location; physical, intellectual and relational ability; and a heap of other stuff.
Everyone is structurally disadvantaged at sometime in their lives, but some of us—actually, most of us, one way or another—endure the lifelong reality.
Life, eh?
In a world at least as competitive as it is cooperative, structural inequality confers significant and cumulative advantage on certain categories of people, and commensurate disadvantage on others, and structural advantage is the basis of power.
And here we reach the crux of what divides us: Do we deserve our luck? Is it God’s will? Is this how it’s meant to be, that humankind divides into winners and losers?
Or is circumstantial misfortune just a brute fact of physics, of “Nature”, that we, as social creatures, can best transcend by helping each other?
Wikipedia doesn’t mention that the central argument between the political right and left is whether and how much to combat structural inequality in society.
And so to the original structural inequality—sex.
Biologically, the respective demands of insemination and gestation create two primary structural differences: masculine strength and feminine encumbrance—which I could detail as breasts, menstruation, violability, gestation, breastfeeding and childrearing, all of which compromise mobility and autonomy.
When a society respects and values feminine authority, this natural encumbrance means little, and a balance between masculine and feminine drivers maintains the society in sustained equilibrium.
But when wealth production and defence become a society’s primary goal, women have inbuilt liabilities. Exploited by the unencumbered, feminine encumbrance becomes cumulative disadvantage: masculine priorities come to define human goals, and equilibrium is sacrificed for development.
As Gerda Lerner wrote in 1986, “the whole system of hierarchical governance and structure is inextricably involved with gender… race, class and gender oppression are interconnected and have been from the beginning.”
This isn’t just politics: it’s psychology and biology and culture all entangled. Sex is a primary ordering system, maybe the primary ordering system. It orders not only how we see ourselves but how we think. Remember Sigmund Freud said that sexuality was the “key” to understanding the human mind; I think it’s also key to how the human mind understands.
Look at how we arrange binaries—fundamental building blocks of meaning and understanding—analogous to the raw, emblematic, biomechanical roles of the sexes: light penetrates darkness, light is “hard”, darkness “soft”, we think of “active” male essence and “passive” female essence; these sex-based assessments are the foundational metaphors that give rise to the taijitu, the yin-yang symbol.
The politics of penetration uses a modified yin-yang for its own symbol, because this thousand-year-old Chinese wisdom is another valuable key to how humans think about sex, gender, consciousness, agency, and power.
We do this analogous gendering automatically—explicitly in the case of nuts and bolts, plugs and sockets, and other things designed to penetrate or accommodate. But we also do it when we personify complex, vulnerable ideals like Justice and Liberty as female, along with cars, ships, machines, nations, and anything else that requires a firm hand to steer.
We do it unconsciously, man, with abstractions and generalisations that reflect patriarchal priorities.
We do it implicitly too: beauty, strength, primacy, vulnerability, authority, duplicity, superiority—you personally might not gender these, but the society around you does—and not just in the west.
I wonder if you think that patriarchy is simply the way of the world, the way it’s always been. Far from it. Anthropologists estimate patriarchy to be between six and twelve thousand years old. Human culture is a hundred thousand years old, and non-patriarchal cultures still exist to this day—lots of them.
But patriarchy gives a society certain competitive advantages—and certain fatal flaws. Modern patriarchies are no longer simply about the authority of men. Rather, patriarchy—entwined from the beginning with private property, privilege, militarism and commerce—has become an economic system that privileges masculine modes of behaviour and penalises the feminine, throwing human development and society out of balance in ways that have been sometimes productive and sometimes catastrophic.
Imperialism and capitalism, patriarchy’s powerful progeny, now threaten the very survival of life on Earth.
So in summary, the politics of penetration is a neutral term, encompassing the full range of attitudes toward gender difference. That said, we are intent on defining an ideal.
Sex is a primary ordering system, and the contested hierarchy between the sexes influences how we allot value in the world.
It colours our understanding through conceptual gendering, in which valuation is influenced by a thing’s perceived relationship—actual or metaphorical, direct or indirect—to some aspect of sexual reproduction.
Patriarchy—a relatively recent development in human culture—exploits feminine encumbrance to turn women into a resource for masculine goals. In the process, patriarchy devalues the feminine, weaponises penetration, and aims to sever humanity’s connection with Earth.
That ancient alienation has reverberated throughout history and metastasised into the great crisis of our times, as the biosphere defies our imagined mastery, and counter-attacks.
Today, patriarchy is embodied in the structures of law and government, the benefits and abuses of imperialism, the proliferation of weapons, the history of monotheistic religion and, most insidious of all, the power of capitalism.
Patriarchalists are evidently willing to destroy life on Earth rather than give up their ascendancy. We call that phallic heedlessness tumescence, and mastering it is the politics of penetration.
Having already had many discussions with Jack about this concept—not to mention aspects of it being part of my own research—most of it wasn’t really new to me. But if I were to pick one phrase that stood out, it’s this: that “the central argument between the political right and left is whether and how much to combat structural inequality in society.”
Of course, that prompts all manner of consequent thoughts about…well, about the politics of penetration 🙂 About how strongly linked the political right is to patriarchy, for example, and how vehemently they assert that women are destined to serve and submit. In fact, I’m currently reading “The Making of Biblical Womanhood” (Beth Allison Barr, 2021), which traces the shift from the early church’s revolutionary rejection of patriarchy to 20th Century Christianity’s embrace of it. In her book, Barr highlights Aristotle’s contention that the male body is perfect, and therefore that women are biologically flawed. Aristotle’s reasoning is intrinsically linked to the in/out dichotomy that Jack reminds us of, since a body that can be penetrated can easily be seen to be lacking integrity/wholeness.
But it can (indeed, should) also be seen as having the capacity to embrace, to feel, to love. Jack points out that patriarchy “has become an economic system that privileges masculine modes of behaviour and penalises the feminine”—I look forward to more of her revolutionary urgings to shift the structural imbalance, celebrate the feminine, and restore the world to equilibrium.
Thanks, Clare. I have in fact included a call to “re-elevate the Feminine” in the next video, which we filmed this weekend. I heeded various friends’ feedback and put less dense content into this second one—I’m hoping it’s strong without being overwhelming 😆
There’s just such a rich field of research into these issues now—another friend is recommending Caroline Criado-Perez’s work Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men—a deep dive into the postcapitalist realities of a civilisation in which the default human is still—two thousand years after Aristotle—male.
Yes, indeed. Not least in the medical field, where so much of anatomy, medicine trials, symptomatology and more is assumed to be the same for men and women, when it so obviously isn’t. I can’t recall how long it was after they first started doing crash tests for car safety, before they began using female weight/conformation crash dummies, but it was quite some time. (I’m sure Criado-Perez mentions it; I have the book, though I haven’t got to reading it yet.)
I should have made it clear in my previous post that Barr condemns Aristotle’s view; she merely highlights it to draw attention to its contribution to the reasoning behind the argument for female submission.