This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 33, Summer 1996.
Has something got right up your nose recently? Have you a bone to pick or an issue you want to chew over? This is a space in T&S where women (under an assumed name if necessary) are invited to bark back at the annoyances which dog radical feminists. This can be a brief yap or an extended growl, on any subject of concern to radical feminists. Here Julie Bindel and Joan Scanlon express some gnawing doubts about widespread lesbian feminist attitudes to questions of love, sex and friendship.
Since the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist paper Love your Enemy the terms of debate on sexual politics and practice have shifted dramatically. Instead of questioning heterosexuality the focus has been on the sexual practices of libertarian lesbians who claim that sado-masochism, pornography and having sex with gay men are liberatory practices. The overwhelming attention given to this issue has also pushed into the margins any critical engagement with ideas about the wider politics of personal relationships. All discussion has been virtually reduced to the question of whether you are for or against libertarianism. Moreover, it is as if, once having crudely established who your political allies and enemies are, there is no need to subject your own position to any further scrutiny.
What concerns us here, therefore, is the apparent complacency and self-righteousness that prevails in some sections of the anti-libertarian camp. It is not simply that couple-structured relationships have become commonplace amongst lesbian feminists; the problem is that they are taken to occupy the moral high ground in the current political climate and are assumed to offer the only coherent alternative to s/m culture. In our view there is nothing morally and politically admirable about resurrecting 19th century models of exclusive romantic friendship. These models are entirely unthreatening to the heterosexual establishment and can be accommodated into a comfortable parody of heterosexual marriage; moreover, when transported in the 1990s, they become sentimental and individualist, playing into the perception of radical lesbian feminists as moralists, prudes and dinosaurs.
At best there is a neglect of the issues, a feeling that since there are ‘more important’ things to be doing than challenging seemingly harmless and inoffensive lesbian couple relationships we shouldn’t challenge them at all. At worst there is tendency to associate any politics which challenges the sanctity of coupledom with the fall-out from the earlier heated non-monogamy debates, and to see such challenges as a continuation of the ghastly history of non-monogamy and the abuses which that term was used to condone. Those who defend monogamy may well be right to see that history of disastrous ‘experimentation’ with different models of relationship as responsible to some extent for the onset of s/m libertarianism. But that history was not simply destructive and exploitative; it was also, for many women, a time of serious commitment to challenging the conventions of heterosexual models of sexual relationships and friendships, rethinking previously unquestioned priorities and risking new ways of thinking about and acting (or not acting) on feelings towards other women. Even so, while it may for some have brought about dramatic and positive shifts of possibility, for others it was like trying to scale Everest with a toothpick.
From ‘non-monogamy’ to ‘couplism’
In the late 70s and early 80s, the main critique of a heterosexual model of relationships amongst lesbian feminists was the muddled and muddy (if well-intentioned) theory and practice of ‘non-monogamy’. This is such a misused word (and of such dubious etymology: mono = one; gamus = marriage) that we can scarcely bring ourselves to use it, chiefly because non-monogamy seems never to have been conceivable in terms other than the specifically sexual. Nonetheless, it was this term, and the various conflicting ideas that it was taken to represent, that was central to an important debate about heterosexuality and alternative models of relationship. It is more than a little ironic that the model of heterosexual relations that was being challenged in this way was not only the domestic model of the self-contained exclusive emotionally prioritised couple, but also (in some cases quite opportunistically) a model of sexual fidelity which was generally a myth anyway. Fidelity has been one of the cornerstones in the heterosexual romantic double-standard for men and women; it was never intended to apply to men. The irony, therefore, was that many of those lesbian feminists who practiced non-monogamy ended up simply behaving like heterosexual men.
The discussions which took place amongst lesbian feminists at that time were fuelled by the desire to create new forms of relations that were consistent with a feminist politics, but the practice which accompanied this aspiration was either a variant of heterosexual practice or a self-righteous resistance to all things heterosexual that led to the deprioritising of sexual relationships and the contingent impossibility of treating such relationships as friendships. In other words, a rather crude reversal (friends are more important than lovers) or a rather crass simplification (friendships are the same as sexual relationships) often substituted for an argument in favour of trying to value each, equally and differently. With hindsight it seems as if these patently flawed propositions quite displaced efforts to look at ways of minimising the differences in our behaviour towards lovers and friends — not only to figure out the crucial common ground and acknowledge the significance of all our various friendships, but at the same time find ways of addressing the specificity of feelings of jealousy, possessiveness and insecurity in sexual relationships.
No wonder then, that the damage was phenomenal, and that a particular version of non-monogamy (i.e. promiscuity) was held responsible for a general disillusionment with sexual relations between women and a lack of optimism about creating different models of relationship. Thatcherism, post-feminism and the politics of individualism are largely responsible for the celebration of the purely sexual version of non-monogamy amongst libertarian feminists and the revival of (or reversion to) full couplism amongst radical feminists. On the one hand there is the denial of the need for an ongoing radical critique of personal relationships, and on the other hand the perception of a loss of an active political movement to sustain revolutionary endeavours in any sphere of women’s lives — positions which mesh rather than clash. In the absence of any coherent radical feminist models of relationship, and in the absence even of a coherent oppositional model, we have allowed the most traditional heterosexual model of all to creep back into our ways of organising our relations with each other. At the same time, simply because the discussion of sexual relationships has moved from the arena of sexual politics onto the feminist libertarian agenda, we are left with a sickening combination of romanticism and conservatism about friendships.
It is bad enough that lesbian feminists have resurrected couplism through a kind of slippage, but the fact that it is being reinstated as the orthodoxy of radical feminism makes it almost impossible for other kinds of relationship to coexist. Lesbian feminists who are trying to organise their relationships differently, and are trying in particular to resist the pitfalls of coupledom, cannot sustain that endeavour in a political vacuum without being accused of simply being ‘difficult’, secretive or unreasonably judgmental. Couple-identified lesbian feminists will define your relationship for you if you don’t volunteer enough information yourself, treat you as if you have a political or psychological problem if you refuse their definition, or simply ignore your protests and invite you and your alleged ‘girlfriend’ to dinner anyway. What is peculiarly depressing about all this is that it is not simply a matter of how we organise and understand our most personal and intimate relationships, including how we organise and value our friendships, it is also about our political networks, our ability as individuals to make connections across the different areas of our lives and sustain a coherent commitment to a collective political process.
Offensive practices
For this reason we have chosen to identify and respond to a number of particularly offensive practices which go hand in hand with this tendency to treat couple-structured relationships as the morally consistent application of radical feminist politics and as the accepted practice of lesbian feminism:
1. The ubiquitous, irrelevant and insulting question: “Have you got a lover?”. This question appears to be premised on a number of related assumptions about how this information is crucial in determining: a) your identity; b) your sexual availability; c) your accessibility and potential for intimacy as a friend; d) the rules of conduct towards your ‘lover’; e) the perceived need to include your ‘lover’ in social arrangements and accord to them the right to impose themselves without invitation; f) a limited expectation of your ability to function independently of your ‘girlfriend’.
We take it to be imperative that your identity as a lesbian feminist is understood to be political rather than dependent on whether or not you are involved in a sexual relationship. We consider the whole idea of ‘availability’ demeaning and profoundly anti-feminist. Moreover, your availability for other relationships should not be determined by your existing relations with other women; there may be a number of circumstantial constraints, but the imposition of a form of emotional monogamy diminishes your existing friendships as well as inhibiting the formation of new ones.
The whole area of jealousy (gross possessiveness vs understandable forms of insecurity) which exists within the discourse of relationships defined primarily by sexual intimacy is still hopelessly undertheorised; all the same, we take it as mandatory that all of your friendships operate without the unreasonable restrictions that so often go unchallenged when imposed by ‘partners’.
Finally, imagine the idea of anyone welcoming or even tolerating the presence of an uninvited stranger joining you on holiday, coming to dinner, staying overnight in your home, if she wasn’t simply taken on ‘faith’ (however much you may dislike her as a person in her own right) simply by virtue of her sexual connection (however short-lived) with an established friend who you have no wish to offend. This attitude, and this commonplace practice, is reserved almost exclusively for lovers. We all have friends who we would move heaven and earth to avoid putting in the same room, and we tend to introduce friends to each other only when we think they have something in common. Yet most lesbian feminists move heaven and earth to impose their lovers on other friends, however unlikely it is that they would choose that contact independently, and when they are the only ‘thing’ they have in common. If the situation then proves difficult or impossible, it is usually the friend who gets dumped (and usually gets the blame as well).
2. The assumption that (a) sexual relationships should be public knowledge and (b) all such relationships inevitably follow a heterosexual pattern, i.e. romance followed by a catastrophic break up or the onset of tedium and loss of desire in long term relationships. This is particularly offensive when the basis for this latter assumption is that women who are known to be in a relationship are not fawning over each other (despite the fact that they have never behaved like that publicly). The ‘first flush’ of uncontrollable passion which is supposed to ‘overtake’ us all in the early stages of a sexual relationship is often used as an excuse for women behaving in this way towards each other. What is rarely acknowledged, if it is not self-censored (because of the fear of misinterpretation), is the excitement and enthusiasm which any new friendship can inspire; this is a circular process by which intense feelings are restricted to sexual relationships. What is also denied is the way in which this feeling may change but not diminish in any relationship.
3. The uncritical use of the term ‘in love’ to describe feelings within sexual relationships as distinct from friendships. If pushed to define the emotion referred to in this way, most women revert to full-on heterosexual romance constructions, and feelings generally remarkable for their self-destructive capacity. The argument generally goes like this: that we need a term to describe all these very distinct emotions that go hand in hand with sexual feelings for someone (desire has too much of a postmodern psychoanalytic ring; passion has religious connotations; lust is too simply carnal; love is too general and inclusive). We would agree that we need a term to describe all the horrible tendencies that follow from the impulse to categorise and classify a relationship by virtue of its sexual status, and the tragic chain of consequences that can ensue, but the term ‘in love’ is intended to connote something positive. As for all the positive feelings that can appear to make a sexual relationship distinctive — the overcoming of vulnerabilities, a heightened sensitisation to the physical world, the excitement and comfort of intimacy without words, the enhanced sense of self-worth in being valued by someone that you are astonished and pleased to be close to, even the sense of amazed good fortune at being on the same planet as someone you respect and care about intensely — all of these things are true in different ways of our friendships, so why is the term love not good enough?
What makes sexual relationships distinctive, at their most positive and negative, is their capacity to challenge or reinforce the particular meaning of the sexual in our personal lives. As women, the baggage of our sexual histories and the damage done to our physical self-perception is likely to differ only in the degree of harm (and the harm may well be irreparably great). The specific meaning of the sexual in our intimate relationships can therefore either serve to heal or to do further damage in very particular ways, which are often intensely private. The public curiosity about sexual relationships is in conflict with this, as is the impulse to publicise such relationships.
Some may argue that this notion of privacy could be used as a cover for abusive relationships, but it would be impossible to imagine a relationship in which many or all of the positive things we associate with love were present, and for this abuse to be restricted to the specifically sexual. Moreover, publicly abusive forms of behaviour are far more frequently condoned when the women in question are known to be lovers, and so it is hard to be convinced that the desire to publicise relationships is necessary or even useful in preventing abuse between women. Instead we should be trying to find ways of challenging each other when we behave without respect for other women in private and in public — not when we are simply tired and bad tempered — but where we can see, for example, that a particular dynamic is operating in which another woman is being systematically humiliated or diminished. That may well be more likely to happen in a sexual relationship, but it is not the fact of knowing it to be sexual that should affect our decision to act or not.
4. The assumption that you do not experience feelings of any significance at all unless you manifest them through gross forms of objectification, jealousy, public exhibitions of flagrant sexualised behaviour and the use of a language of sentimentality and gush and chocolate box romanticism.
5. The notion that women who have any public profile should be flattered by the fact of complete strangers (in this case lesbians) ‘fancying’ them, and that this attention goes with the territory so those women who are on the receiving end are ‘asking for it’. While there is an explicit commitment on the part of British radical feminists to a movement without stars, there is a completely negative and contradictory combination of resentment and heroine-worship towards those who are seen as the public face of feminism, and an allegedly ‘harmless’ collusion in the objectification of various (often explicitly anti-feminist) female film and pop stars.
This love-hate tendency is straight out of the Mills and Boon tradition of being infatuated with those who you may reluctantly admire, mistrust or who even stand against everything you believe in, and who you know mainly through other people’s representations of them. How is this tendency compatible with a politics of relationships based on, or striving towards, equality and respect rather than the objectifying practice of ‘fancying’ other women?
This practice operates across the board within lesbian feminist networks. For instance, the lack of critique of the phenomenon of ‘lesbian icons’, whether we are talking about kd lang, Martina Navratilova, Tracy Chapman, Sigourney Weaver or Helen Mirren, means that we purposely avoid looking at the criteria by which these women acquire that dubious status. The fact that some lesbian feminists are also committed to a form of visibility politics which involves celebrating the public existence of lesbians and images of strong women, whatever they stand for (and still others are simply hungry for representations which bear any resemblance to their lives) somehow legitimates this practice of objectification. We need to unravel these apparently harmless hobbies which involve ‘fancying’ women, for they are continuous with the way we talk (and think about) our relationships with women we do know. There should be room for a real debate about the significance of public female role models, and the place of representation in radical feminist politics. Instead, any expression of dismay at objectifying tendencies of this kind — whether in the form of a refusal to join the Annie Lennox fan club or being pissed off or depressed (rather than flattered) at being told that somebody’s friend fancies you — is usually treated as if you have a problem, in that you are humourless, arrogant, prudish, puritanical, and probably in denial.
6. The way in which the personal is political has come to mean the private is public, and that it is entirely politically consistent (and a measure of your interest in and concern for other women) to gossip, speculate, overinterpret information, such that any significant friendship which evidences intimacy, commitment, enthusiasm,is the subject of speculation. This is not only a grotesque and prurient form of objectification of the women in question and their relationship; it reduces all forms of intimacy to the sexual, and it implies that significant relations between women must be sexual or they cannot be valued. It assumes that relationships can only be valued by being named, categorised and understood within a borrowed heterosexual framework for analysing and conducting relationships.
‘Can’t change our feelings?’
Inherent in the practices we have outlined above is the belief that although feminist politics may inform your behaviour, they can’t change your feelings and that it is therefore at best hopelessly idealistic and at worst completely dishonest to try to have relationships that are politically coherent, because in reality they just don’t work like that. It is probably true that no aspect of our lives is likely to be more messy and contradictory than that of our personal histories and sexual feelings. It is probably also true that our friendships with other women have sustained most of us in the political work that we do and in our commitment to radical feminism in theory and practice. How can it not make sense, therefore, to try to conduct and represent all of our significant relationships with women in terms of friendship, and where we choose to be involved in sexual relationships to try to formulate and experience the inevitable differences in ways that are consistent with the reasons we value friendship (within and outside of the sexual)?
As radical feminists, committed to change in every other area of women’s lives, we ought to be convinced of the fact that if we change our behaviour, our conduct and our representations of relationships and friendships in the light of our political beliefs, our structure of feeling will inevitably change as a result of the opportunity to put those things into practice.