price masculinity? but most of us now in our thirties will recognise fect us all, whatever our gender or our sexual wornen, but in many ways it was a more pro- children. It points up the costs, particularly for
SOMETIMES IT seems as if the impetus that the women's movement gave to the discussion of sexual politics and gender relations in the late sixties and early seventies has been dissipated, that the issues raised then have lost their focus. There are no longer the same certainties, the sense of direction.
'A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle', , defiant feminist graffiti used to proclaim in the loos at political venues. That meant that if you went to the loo to sob your heart out over your bloke going off with someone else, you could cry a little harder with selfrecrimination because you knew you were a failure as a feminist as well. 'Abolish the family!' enjoined left-wing agitators, perhaps with the thrills rather than the spills of the sexual revolution in mind.
Today this all seems somehow inadequate: anyway it no longer reflects the mood of the times. There's still the perennial battle of the sexes, but few of us are quite so sure how and where the lines are drawn. Separatist feminism has lost a little of its charm, and gay liberation fell short of abolishing the emotional and even sexual traumas of straight society. The upsurge of our expectations only made the disappointments harder and the unfulfilled needs more bewildering.
The counterpart of defiant feminism was the self-blaming mode of men against sexism, but angry feminists and guilty (therefore resentful) men didn't make a very productive partnership either politically or as individuals. Many men on the left ridiculed attempts to set up men's groups, claiming that 'oppressors' didn't need self-help. or would just sit around congratulating themselves and each other on how self-critical they were. The benefit of this attitude was that the critics were able to feel superior politically (quite important for male revolutionaries) as well as absolving themselves of any responsibility to do anything (also quite important if you don't want to confront anything that makes you feel insecure). The task of these men, then, was to support women's demands as vocally as possible, and try to remember about the washing-up.
The discussion of sex showed this most stark ly: it was for women to discover and assert their sexual identity and needs, and for men to learn how to give better sexual satisfaction to women. Men's sexuality and their ability to find satisfaction, according to this approach, was unproblematic: they were assumed, even by themselves, to take their pleasure at women's expense, up to the point of indulging in pornography, prostitution and rape. Men's needs and feelings weren't part of the discussion, and if men felt they didn't conform to the stereotype they were more likely to feel inade quate about that and keep their mouths shut than own up about it. Women researched their needs and teelings and gave them voice, while men remained in a wilderness of silence and ig norance of themselves. Learning to feel asham.
ERICA FLEGG ed didn t teach them how to become more emotionally open or self-aware.
These observations may be a simplification, them as part of the experience we went orientation, in our everyday lives. through in the 'counter culture' and on the left. The same attitudes still affect us today, but they don't provide enough answers any more. We are looking, answers, to the old problems; and that entails a reappraisal of some of the more glib positions that we adotped a decade and more ago.
This reappraisal, and new initiatives, have again come mainly from women. Landmarks have been books like Sex and Love, in which some brave women said how they really felt instead of how they thought they ought to feel, and What do Women Want? by Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orback, which came out of the experience of women's therapy. Shere Hite, after her world-famous Hite Report on women, brought out a report on male sexuality. The Hite report on men may have failed to make the same popular impact as the one on found and path-breaking study. It allowed men to say, in their own words, things they had change. never said before; no-one had ever asked
Reading the Hite report on men, a fat tome of over 1,000 pages, I was struck that a woman, rather than a man, should have been motivated to undertake the study, and that I, as a woman, was more motivated to read it than most of my male friends and comrades. Reading it in public places like the tube, or the pub during a lunch-break at work, i caught enough odd looks from men to feel almost too self-conscious to concentrate. A woman reading a large, serious volume on men and their sexuality: it unnerved them. If I'd been reading the Kama Sutra, or even Masters and Johnson, they might have leered or offered to buy me a drink. It isn't yet accepted by men -although they have the most reason to know better that it is interesting or worthwhile to study and understand themselves. This, indeed, is a large part of the problem.
What is happening today, then, is not that the debate on sexual politics has petered out While it may not be as prominent a discussion
as it used to be - and needs to be ... I believe that it has reached a new level, a higher level, that will prove more fruitful in pointing the direction in which we need to look for the answers to some of these old problems that af-
Pluto Press' book The Sexuality of Men, published last year, reflects this new process: as Susie Orback says in the frontispiece, the essays 'provide us with a new stimulus for the desperately needed dialogue.. Dialogue. because in the past there has been no real exchange of insights and ideas between men and women on this subject, desperately needed because without such a dialogue there can be no real understanding, and consequently no real change.
For men to read What do Women Want? (the question posed rhetorically by Freud) must, I imagine, be an enlightening more than a guiltinducing or threatening experience, because it helps to explain. It apeals, I belive - although it is addressed to women - to something in men that might enable them to identify with women. Something similar happens for woman reading the Hite report on men or passages in The Sexuality of Men: it seems as if, at last, we might become more intelligible to each other. Our emotional needs, as human beings, are after all not so different; it is the way that those needs are experienced and expressed that is so different between men and women, because of our socialisation.
At last, mutual understanding, communication, seem possible. Most importantly of all, this dialogue points up the possibiltiles for
Ffor men as well as for women: the possibilities for transforming the quality of our lives, our relationship with each other, and with men, of failing to take the opportunity for
This, perhaps is the most radical of the insights emerging from this new movement: that men, despite their apparent social power and privilege, are in many respects impoverished and inhibited by their masculinity. Most simply put, their opportunities for emotionally in. timate and rewarding relationships with other people - each other, women, children — are constrained by the social construction of their gender. They are not the stronger sex: as Tom Ryan, a therapist, argues in his essy on 'Roots of Masculinity', 'masculinity, not femininity, is the weaker of the gender constructs.
Ryan's experience of men's problems as they emerge in therapy has led him to view masculinity as a 'defensive construction' developed to emphasise men's difference and separate identity. Many men, he says, deny feelings of need or dependency, which they experience as threatening self annihiliation; they develop an 'exaggerated virility which is parad ed as autonomy. The result is a fear of intimacy, which can have a completely destruc-
International, No. 2, January/February 1986
tive effect on the man's central emotional relationships:
His most recent relationship, Ryan writes of
one of his clients, "survived for several years, but
repeated discord and separations left him feeling
lonely, depressed and despairing. . Away from his
partner he felt love and affection for her, but
while with her, esperially during moments of in
timacy, he experienced feelings of irritation and
anxiety. A pattern developed whereby when he
felt entrapped he behaved in a contemptuous or
rejecting manner, inducing, his partner to reject
and leave him. Ihe pattern: of rejection. separa-
tion and reconciliation was repeated innumerable
times until Daves partner frally der ded to
disengage herself trom the relationship...
The conradictory and confused nature of masculinity, then, can have a paralysing effect on the man and make it impossible for his partner to love or help him. In this contect, while it is the woman who is the most emotionally abused in the relationship, it is really the man who is most the victim of the situation, as long as he can neither confront, nor escape, himself.
Vic Seidler, in his essay on 'Fear and Intimacy takes this argument a step further. 'Socialist men, he writes of the 1970s, were learning that they could analyse the fate of the internationa capitalist economy but they were speechless when it came to talking, through issues in their sexual relationships... The power men carry in the structure of capitalist society is at a considerable cost in terms of our own emotional capacities. understandings and desires...' He describes the 'angry, spiteful and jealous' reaction many men have had to being challenged by women in sexual relationships: 'We did not understand why they were bring ing up pain from the past ... we didn't unders tand the need for the past to be opened and the pain shared if it was to be purged... We could only think that women wanted to hurt and punish us. Instead of working to resolve the problems of such a relationship, Seidler says, the man is impelled to seek another lover: 'If we feel hurt and rejected the only solution we know is to find another partner who ap. preciates us. It is because, at some level, we have never learnt to take responsibility for our emotional lives that we automatically assume that if things go wrong we have been with the wrong partner...
Seider also identifies male strength as an illusion, being based on "brittle foundations' Feminists, he says, have often overestimated it, 'even though they have experienced its con tradictions'. However, seeing this more clearly won't enable women to change men: only men can change themselves. Seidler offers no easy solution, but he shows that change can only come through men becoming more self aware - ... learning to take more responsibility for ourselves. Therapy, he says, can play an im portant part in bringing men into closer contact with their own emotions, and must be linked to International. No. 2. January/February 1980
à "collective practice (a political practice) that challenges institutional power and definitions of masculinity.
Again, many on the left particularly menare critical of psychotherapy, which they see as self-indulgent and/or only available to the relatively privileged. It won't provide any political answers, they say. Yet, many of the most valuable insights that have been developed on the subject of masculinity and gender relations have come vor or the ex perience of therapy. Herb Goldberg's The
Hazards of Being Male, published nearly ten years ago, talks piecisely from the experience of private practice for the executive class in California, but nevertheless it points to most of the same problems elaborated in The Sexuality of Men. Goldberg also gives the statistics on the price of masculinity: death rates, suicide rates, institutionalisation for psychiatric disorders, stress-related problems, behavioural symptoms.
The Sexuality of Men and the other books referred to give most of their attention to heterosexual relationships, but not excusively so. Another advance in the last decade or so has been to draw away from seeing the heterosexual and homosexual forms of sexual behaviour as separate or exclusive worlds, and to look more closely at the construction of gender and social relations. Oddly enough, however, it is the essay on gay sexuality in The Sexuality of Men that has the most limited focus in this respect, and does less to explore the problems of homosexual relations than is attempted in What do Women Want? or Sex and Love. Another book published by Pluto last year. Gay Liberation in the Eighties, by Jamie Gough and Mike McNair, goes much further in abolishing the division in its discussion of 'Beyond Heterosexuality'. The latter study, however, is more concerned with th. discus sion of society than of personality; for the left. it is critical to bring both levels of analysis to bear on the study of what is experienced as 'the personal'
We spent the seventies defining men as the problem. but analysing women instead Perhaps in the eighties we will come at last to analysing the social construction, and the ex perience, of masculinity as a social problem that is oppressive not only to women, and to children, but to men themselves. for men will never change purely out of guilt teelings or under pressure from the women's movement: they'll only be motivated to understand and change themselves when the price they pay in terms of the impoverishment of their own lives begins to seem too high
The gain of such pressure for change will represent a gain not just for men but for socie ty as a whole. In that sense, The Sexuality of Men is an important book for the British left, particularly since it attempts to integrate its analysis with a political critique. The questions addressed in these essays are at the heart of our lives, where too many of us never look... or eise we feel that our personal experience is not subject to analysis, it is isolated from our politics. It is to be hoped, then, that this book will enlarge and widen the dialogue that it has helped to start: that depends, in large part, on the ability of the left to respond to the challenge to open the discussion that is so badly needed Andy Metcalf and Martin Humphries, eds., The Sexuality of Men, Pluto Press, 1985, €4.50.
Farewell to Sartre KATHY LOWE FOR MANY Marxists who have followed the work of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the 1970s was a time when he lost his political bearings, when the intellectual energies that made him one of the century's outstanding thinkers and writers finally deserted him. For Simone de Beauvoir it was a time when she watched her comrade and companion of 50 years confront the anguish of illness and the sudden shrinking of his creative world
Sartre died in 1980, physically broken and almost blind. Simone de Beauvoir's latest book Adieux, a Farewell to Sartre is written, she explains, for those who would like to know more about his last years. It is divided into two parts. The first is a narrative, largely based on the diary she kept in Paris during the 1970s. This is followed by what she calls her 'Conversations' with Sartre - interviews she conducted with him in August-September 1974.
Structurally, the two sections of the book fail to hang together. Some of the Conversations, by her own admission, are disjointed and repetitious. Yet the book as a whole is as disturbing as anything she has ever written .... at times so frank, so personal, that the reader feels almost an intruder.
In recounting her day-to-day collaboration with Sartre in Paris, the many projects and pleasures shared, de Beauvoir sets the 70s before us... in France the factory struggles, police repression and the lingering influence of Maoism... the Yom Kippur war... the stillborn Portuguese revolution... the gradual disillusion and disorientation of left intellectuals Europe-wide
She describes how Sartre, while working on his massive study of Flaubert, helped to occasion as 'a living corpse' establish and to write for left journals like La cause du peuple, Liberation and latterly his own journal Les temps modernes. He joined demonstrations, spoke at factory gates, campaigned for the rights of immigrant workers, for prison reforms, for the cause of the Bas ques and the Palestinians. Politically, he had formally renounced Marxism, defined himself as a 'socialist-communist' but was moving towards what Perry Anderson has described as a radical neo-anarchism
Insights into his ideological evolution are plentiful in this book. But its scope is far wider, its value of a very different kind.
Increasingly, the account of Sartre and de Beauvoir's daily round of writing, reading, giv ing interviews, evenings spent listening to music or dining with friends is overshadowed by her anxious references to his failing health. Thus we come to the heart of the matter. How does an intellectual and activist so prolific, so long at the centre of things come to terms with 'decline .. with restrictions imposed by sickness and age ing, and with the relative political isolation those restrictions bring!
Simone de Beauvoir
Sartre suffered a series of strokes in 1970 72. With each setback his friends feared that he would be left crippled. Even more, they feared for his mind. Yet each time, to their amazement, he managed to regain lost ground sometimes showing sudden bursts of his old
The blindness, when it came in 1973, was quite another matter. It prevented him from reading, writing, and, most paintully. developing his ideas. He knew moments of profound despair, referring to himself on one
He acknowledged his greater dependence on those closest to him without ever being able to fully accept it. De Beauvoir recalls how one day when she picked up a book to read to him as usual he remarked sadly: 'Before, when I was more intelligent, we didn't read, we talked.' So they talked. Still, she started to notice a new detachment in his manner. He would let discussion drop after a short time, without asking questions or introducing fresh ideas.
Towards the end of Sartre's life, many on the European left became disturbed by what they saw as his increasingly erratic political pro nouncements. in particular, an interview with him conducted by his secretary. Bernard Henry Levy and published in le nouvel observateur on the eve of his death, caused great concern. It was seen by many as a sign that Levy, a former Maoist student leader who later turned to the jewish religion, had 'taken over' Sartre.
De Beauvoir, who often voices her own political disagreements with Sartre in the book, was horrified by this interview and told him so However, she also argues that Sartre's physical disabilities (for example, being unable to read
back over what had been written rather than simply hearing a tape recording) and his troubled state of mind left him more prey to manipulation. Momentarily her stated vow to merely tell Sartre's story breaks down as she gives full vent to her anger against Levy whom she despises as a political maverick, arrogant and ambitious.
De Beauvoir's relationship with Sartre has been extensively documented, not least in her own four-volume autobiography. Adieux, a