On political lesbianism and gender ideology

Pictured: Sheila Jeffreys

I left this in the comments section to a post by Edie Wyatt, and liked it so much I thought I’d make it a post of my own!

Not to gross anybody out, but I’d describe my own sexual orientation as “retired heterosexual”, and I am not going to hector young women about finding men wildly attractive. I’ve been there. Even so, were I designing a reading list for a young woman I think she’d be better served by the political lesbianism literature than the gender ideology literature to which it is sometimes too facilely equated. Here’s why.

The key difference between political lesbianism and gender ideology is that the first centers women and the second centers men. Political lesbianism says all decisions, all energies, all loves, all connections, all policies, should be for women. Gender ideology says all of those things should be for men.

If your snappy comeback is: "see! They are just isomers of one another and both very silly nonsense too", that only works if you pretend society and history don't exist as they actually do exist. Which is easy to do *on the internet*, but not elsewhere. To dismiss political lesbianism as "middle class" is itself an incredibly middle class internet based thing to do.

In the real and actual world produced by real and actual world history, political lesbianism asks for radical change where gender ideology asks for more of the same old shit, just gooder and harder. No surprises that political lesbianism is reviled everywhere and gender ideology is a ruling class darling.

It's possible to see this clearly while still believing that sexual orientation is innate-ish. Humans are sexually dimorphic and sexually reproducing animals: it's not foolish to assume the biological primacy of opposite-sex attraction. We also know different societies have encouraged different kinds of sexual practice, the prescribed / proscribed has surely always been unevenly compatible with people's proclivities but has always shaped them, as well: lots of men who'd be repelled at the thought in our time enjoyed sex with boys in ancient Greece and so on.

However, where more sexual range has been socially available, it's been overwhelmingly available to men and not women. Where the right to refuse heterosexual sex has been socially available, it's very very very rarely been available to women.

Because the actual situations of women and men are different and have always been different, dismisssing "political lesbianism" and "gender ideology" as two versions of the same thing is in a way a meta-version of gender ideology itself.

It has also never, never, never been the case that political lesbianism has had any institutional authority. "I went to a feminist meeting at a coffee house once and a mean lesbian told me I should not fuck men" is not in any respect akin to "I lost my job because I said lesbians should not be pressured to fuck AGP fetishists".

What is *actually* similar about political lesbianism and gender ideology is that they are forms of social critique. Whether or not you personally live by either (and most people personally live by neither), being influenced by the first prepares you to change the world as it is. Being influenced by the second prepares you to get steamrolled by it.