The Misogyny Suburb

Some time ago it occurred to me that my earnest attempts to correct misogynistic notions are based on a misunderstanding. I thought misogynists were not aware of the facts. But when it comes to the battle of the sexes, the facts are not all that important. They are not even the point. Misogyny is an article of faith. A case in point is the imaginary misogyny suburb discussed by Rebecca Solnit in Harpers Magazine. It may be futile, but I will always have sympathy for those who insist on stating the facts.  That’s what Solnit did in her article, Shooting Down Man the Hunter.

“Sooner or later in conversations about who we are, who we have been, and who we can be, someone will tell a story about Man the Hunter. It’s a story not just about Man but about Woman and Child too. There are countless variants, but all of them go something like this: In primordial times men went out and hunted and brought home meat to feed women and children, who sat around being dependent on them. In most versions, the story is set in nuclear units, such that men provide only for their own family, and women have no community to help with the kids. In every version, women are baggage that breeds.

“Though it makes claims about human societies as they existed 200,000 or 5 million years ago, the story itself isn’t so old. Whatever its origins, it seems to have reached a peak of popularity only in the middle of last century…”

This version of human history traces the dominant socioeconomic arrangements of the late Fifties and early Sixties back to the origins of our species. Therefore, Solnit calls it the story of the 5-million-year-old suburb. ¹

Patriarchy is an Article of Faith.

In the past I thought the facts mattered. So, I walked into Wikipedia’s Patriarchy article and wasted years of my life. My arguments against the nonsensical claims and unfair tactics of unidentified editors changed nothing.

Now I know better. I have learned for example that while human evolution may not have progressed the way the sociobiologists say it did, everything they say is ‘true’. What’s more, it has always been ‘true’. And last but not least, it always will be ‘true’. Sociobiology is a scientific remake of the Adam and Eve story.

Misogyny in the Art World

The Nation Magazine recently published an article about Sonia Terk. ² I knew her from Albert Gleizes’s ³ biography as Sonia Delaunay. I hadn’t realized she was Jewish, but according to David Cottington (cited below), just being female would have been enough of a handicap among the French avant-garde.

One of the changes that took place in the French art business was the appearance in the mid-1890s of sufficient numbers of buyers to make speculation in, and collection of, contemporary art feasible. At first, interest was limited to established artists but the entrance of American collectors like Morgan, Rockefeller and Whitney led to a rise in the cost of impressionist paintings and eventually to increased interest in post-impressionist work. This gave legitimacy to neoimpressionists and nabis. Prices for these works were too high for many collectors, but they encouraged a speculative interest at the lower end of the contemporary market, in the work of young, unorthodox or unknown – but invariably male – artists.

A Separate Critical Category for Women Artists: Femmes Peintres

In response to the growing number of women studying and practicing art around 1900, (Terk studied at the Palette) a new critical category was added: femmes peintres. Their work was perceived to carry ‘feminine’ aesthetic sensibilities and interests. As one critic helpfully put into words, the works of females threatened to become a plague, a fearful confusion, and a terrifying stream of mediocrity’. This attitude was a direct result of the construction of artistic identity in terms of masculinity. The idea of individualism, the belief in the autonomy of genius, mastery over the city and its urban spaces, were all seen as male prerogatives. The fantasy was the earthy but poetic male whose life is organized around his instinctual needs. ⁶

It’s a sociobiological-feminist apology for fossil fuels!

1. Shooting Down Man the Hunter By Rebecca Solnit. Harpers Magazine, June 2015.
2. Barry Schwabsky, An Experimental Life. The Nation Magazine, June 2, 2015.
3. Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century, Yale Univsersity Press, New Haven and London, 2001
6. Cottingham, David, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The avant-garde and Politics in Paris, 1905-1914. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998⁴

   Fossil Fuels to the Rescue

   On more humorous note I’d like to share an article by Ian Morris on stratfor.com. I appreciated his article, “The Retreat of Patriarchy”, for its humorous and savvy use of sociobiology in the service of geopolitics. It makes the argument that patriarchy is in retreat, but only because farmers can’t compete with societies that use fossil fuel.

   Morris begins the relevant section literally at the beginning: “Reproduction through the mingling of two organisms’ DNA creates much more genetic variation than does cloning. Thus sexual species adapt and evolve much more quickly than asexual ones, as evidenced by our own evolution from chimpanzee-like ancestors to Stratfor employees and subscribers in a mere 7.5 million years.”

   This article was obviously intended to be funny. I get it, but it’s also instructive. He goes on to discusses male and female chromosomes and the economies of reproduction. This is followed by the standard sociobiological explanation for human sexual arrangements. However Morris’s version has a twist.

   He argues that the subjugation of females was not a result of their inferiority. It was a natural result of ‘fundamental economic shifts in history’:

   “Patriarchy has been in retreat since A.D. 1800, but not because men have become saints and women have found their voices, but because shallow gender hierarchies work best for industrial societies, and farmers simply cannot compete with fossil fuel users’ populations, wealth and military power.”⁵Morris, Ian, The Retreat of Patriarchy, Stratfor.com, June 17, 2015.