All men are rapists

“All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.” So says Val, a militant radical feminist character in The Women's Room (1977) by Marilyn French. I had to put up with this discourse in the 1980s while living in the Camdens and Islingtons of right-on johns and trendy wendys. It was, after all, the decade of the so-called New Man: where did he go?

I was bemused at the time by the “All men are rapists” discourse and can remember how difficult it was to challenge it in progressive, lefty circles like CND and Raised Voices political choir without being denounced as insensitive and unaware, or similar. So I just kept quiet.

“All men are rapists” is the worst kind of sweeping, sexist generalisation. I’m fairly sure it has by now been consigned to the dustbin of history, thank goodness. An internet search today finds, for example, this Tweet by Julie Bindel, @bindelj, on 3 Sep 2021: 

“… we don't have single sex spaces for women because all men are rapists, but because enough of them are to require putting safety measures in place…”  

That is a view I can easily support. Indeed, I defy anyone to look at the empirical evidence and conclude anything else.

The Woke Authoritarian Left

Why post about this today? It is to highlight that the Woke Authoritarian Left that wants to police and discipline the thought within its community is not actually a New Century phenomenon. My take is that the ‘Woke’ label is a creature of the 2010s and emerged from the Black Lives Matter movement and then spread to the Trans Ideology movement.

But what of the Authoritarian Left, sans the Woke moniker? It was there in the 1980s and, furthermore, it’s as old as the word ‘Left’ itself.

The Authoritarian Left

• Only a few years after the word ‘Left’ was coined as a political term during the French Revolution of 1789, Robespierre emerged as the first incarnation of the Authoritarian Left. (Ironically, he thought he was the incarnation of the general will.) He orchestrated the ‘Reign of Terror’ during which, according to britannica.com, at least 300,000 suspects were arrested, 17,000 were officially executed, and perhaps 10,000 died in prison or without trial. (All Terror is a Bad Thing, but I can’t help adding that the 'Reign of Terror’ pales by comparison with various atrocities in French history, like the Albigensian Crusade or the execution of Communards after the short-lived 1871 Paris Commune. The latter are less well-known because the victims were only peasants and anarchists, after all.) 

• About a century after the 'Reign of Terror', at the International Workingmen’s International of 1872 (the Hague Congress), Marx, representing the AuthoritarianLeft, led the expulsion of Bakunin, the anarchist. Noam Chomsky, quoted at www.marxists.org said this of Marx:

“My impression, for what it is worth, is that the early Marx was very much a figure of the late Enlightenment, and the later Marx was a highly authoritarian activist, and a critical analyst of capitalism, who had little to say about socialist alternatives.”

• Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin must surely be the worst exemplar of the Authoritarian Left. His Great Purge to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party and anyone else he considered a threat probably led to the execution (estimates vary) of 750,000 people between about 1936 and 1938 and the exile of more than a million other people to forced labour camps, known as Gulags. 

Marx's expulsion of Bakhunin may seem a trivial instance of the Authoritarian Left in action. But I believe it's important because Marx is still a guiding light to many (myself included, for his exposition of capitalism). This incident, which has been almost forgotten, sets a precedent that many on the Left have followed since. While hardly anyone still sees Robespierre or Stalin as role-models, Marx is still an inspiration to many.

Against this background, my experience of the soft Authoritarian Left of the 1980s may seem rather trivial too. Nevertheless, it’s where I started this blog today because, firstly, it impacted on me personally and, secondly, the authoritarianism was hidden behind a mask of otherwise libertarian Left sentiment. That was the element that I found shockingly dishonest and hypocritical at the time.

Today, the Authoritarian Left seems to have much more power than in the 1980s. Keyboard social justice warriors, with the connivance of Silicon Valley tech giants like Twitter, seem to be able to cancel people they don’t like more effectively than before: Meghan Murphy, Graham Linehan, Kathleen Stock and Maya Forstater are a few random examples and I hope to write more about them in another blog...

If you have been, thanks for reading.