A review by aurora linnea 

Feminization drills into women a dazzling variety of handicaps meant to prepare us for the lives of acquiescence and self-abandonment that men in power intended for us. Of these, one of the most insidious is politeness. Even in these days of Female Rage and post-MeToo Speaking Out and Speaking Up, most women continue to speak in the service industry cant of Please and Thank You and Pardon Me and bitten tongues twisted to muddle our words when we’re trying to speak tactfully, always in such good taste, born-and-bred diplomats expert in euphemism and gloss as we turn our phrases unceasingly towards the inoffensive, the anodyne, the conciliatory. To avoid bruising tender feelings, stepping on toes. Worst of all: to avoid Coming on Too Strong, thereby alienating whoever has deigned to listen to us, to whom we are indebted hence deferential since we know as well as they do that no one has to listen to women; it is not mandatory, not even a social norm. So we speak in such measured tones, take such careful approaches tortuously circumambulating sore spots like landmines, dulling the bite of sharp edges and cushioning blows, that our words strike the air echoing with a tight, clammy sound, like the wringing of hands. Too readily we retreat, white flags waving, into half-truths and concessions, accommodations and appeasements, garnished with whatever niceties we’re hoping might endear us to the day’s audience. (Or at the very least protect against them hating us, and in their hatred, stalking us. Tracking us down, attacking us. Women have good reason to be sheepish when we speak: men have killed us for far less.) 

But this chronic feminine politeness that binds so many women like a straitjacket, constrained and self-censoring: it is a syndrome from which Sheila Jeffreys, for one, does not suffer. To the great advantage of feminism today, she seems to be immune. 

Jeffreys’ tonic disinterest in placation is a defining feature of her writing, and her latest book is no exception. Uprooting Male Domination: Dispatches from the Sex Wars, a compilation of lectures and speeches from the last decade, is Jeffreys’ thirteenth book, the product of some fifty years spent whetting the edge of her impoliteness to razory keenness, a blade she now wields to slice through bullshit with the kind of unapologetic forthrightness that tends to win men respect while permanently disqualifying women from public life. It is possible that Jeffreys’ imperviousness to feminized decorum is an inborn quality, some hyperspecific quirk of the double helix. Even were that the case, however, it would be no excuse for the rest of us to resign ourselves to capering and kowtowing. What patriarchal programming has pummeled into us we can put aside, with practice. Organized into four sections by theme – the “nuts and bolts” of male rule, sexual and reproductive exploitation, “gender identity” politics, and lesbian feminism – the essays in Uprooting Male Domination provide a master class in untying our tongues, that we might respond with the requisite audacity to contemporary patriarchy’s major offensives. 

Jeffreys herself is well aware of the muzzle politeness has placed on the feminist movement, and rails against it. She understands how the imperative to be polite prevails upon women to soften our tone and temper our demands, to the effect that we ask for too little and sound like we are begging while we’re at it. As an example, Jeffreys spotlights the rebranding of feminist resistance to transgenderism as “gender critical” – or, since the Internet is a fabulous breeding ground for new terminology if not rigorous, creative critical analysis, “sex realist” – which she reads as a strategic displacement of “radical feminist.” Gender critical and radical feminist are not synonymous. Whereas radical feminism is felt to be a touch too strident, unpalatably pushy, churlish even, the gender critical stance is comparatively “unthreatening,” with its insinuation“that there are just some bits of gender that are problematic and some bits…that can be saved.” Radical feminists make no pretense of preserving any aspect of the gender system; as an instrument of social control engineered to uphold male power, the whole rotten structure has to go. The gender critical pose equivocates here, the term itself signalling a readiness to compromise—and is there anything patriarchy loves more than a compromised woman? Gender critical, as Jeffreys notes, is therefore best understood as a “polite term used so as not to sound too confrontational.” 

By contrast, Jeffreys’ essay “Womanface: The Insult of Transgenderism” models the heady art of saying nothing less than what you mean and demanding nothing less than what is needed. Jeffreys observes that, although a growing number of women are now objecting publicly to the transgenderist takeover, citing the breach of women’s safety and sex-based rights, significantly fewer are prepared to oppose “the very idea of transgenderism.” It is going too far, women fear, and marks one out as being insensitive and none too nice, to condemn men’s posturing at womanhood as misogynist disrespect. Jeffreys compares men’s impersonation of women, whether for purposes of transgenderist self-actualization or laugh-riot drag merrymaking, to the white supremacist pastime of blackface, wherein white people gussy up in racist stereotypes of blackness to amuse themselves and others of their racial caste. Though a popular entertainment through the 19th and 20th centuries, blackface is today “despised and called out by all people who see themselves as right thinking and progressive.” Meanwhile, womanface – men’s donning of sexist stereotypes to feign womanhood – is not only not universally excoriated, it is celebrated by exactly those same upstanding progressive folks so volubly appalled by blackface. While people in blackface are disgraceful bigots, practitioners of womanface are deemed inspirational and courageous heroes deserving of the most sycophantish praise we can muster, and legal protections to boot. 

So, why the stark difference in public opinion, despite the similarities between these two cultural practices? It is an unpopular question, one that Trans Allies are loath to answer, preferring to dodge the question by vituperating against its askers as shockingly out of line. There is simply no comparison between white people imitating black people and men imitating women! To propose any parallel is an affront: black people are oppressed, after all. There is no comparison, no parallel between racism and sexism—because racism is serious. Racism is so much more serious than sexism that even making the comparison is, itself, racist. But for those not scared off by the scolding, and who remain capable of seeing things as they are rather than disfigured by the kaleidoscopic drunk goggles of patriarchal ideology, the parallels are glaring. And the reason why blackface garners a kneejerk yelp of disgust from the “Be Kind” set while womanface is embraced, upheld, and defended? It’s obvious, Jeffreys argues: women are “not seen as capable of being insulted or offended against.” The oppression of women is equally discounted at the liberal-leftist-progressive-radical pole as at every other point along the malestream political spectrum. Women’s oppression is not taken seriously because women as such are not taken seriously. There can be no outrages against us because we have no dignity to outrage. That most women fail to perceive the insult inherent to womanface, and that those who do shrink from challenging it, reveals the extent to which we take our own social inferiority for granted. Women should be angry to see ourselves so grotesquely parodied, but we have no language for our anger, as Jeffreys writes, because feminine politeness prohibits a woman from being so proud as to imagine herself insulted. Unable to express the anger we feel, we repress it until numbness disappears it. And while we’re suffering the slights, maybe even half-believing these men have some good reason to mock us as they do, the joke that men have made of women becomes more and more impossible to see. 

Jeffreys also helps readers to kick the politeness habit by steadfastly refusing to kneel before sacred cows, charging forward to tip them instead. (Note that cow-tipping is a cruel sport favored by intoxicated and aggrieved adolescent males rampaging against boredom in rural environs, and I’m certain that Jeffreys would not partake, especially given that she hints at her sympathies for our bovine sisters on several occasions in Uprooting Male Domination. But the metaphor stands.) Nor does she dutifully navigate her craft around no-fly zones. Subjects that other feminists steer clear of out of squeamish distaste for controversy and conflict, Jeffreys faces head on. One of these is the issue of gay men. Many feminists, liberal and radical alike, continue to operate on the premise that gay men are somehow women’s natural allies, because they, too, have been denied the prestige of Prime Grade Manhood; or if feminists don’t fully buy into this conceit, they refrain from criticizing gay men out of fear of seeming homophobic. But Jeffreys does not stay mum. The trouble with gay men is that, gay though they may be, they’re still men. In her essay “Queer Politics,” she explains how lesbian feminism arose out of women’s realization of the “great political differences between lesbians and gay men.” She is characteristically laconic: “Lesbians are women and members of the oppressed sex class. Gay men are members of the oppressor class. In this way, our interests are opposed.” Moreover, gay male sexuality has been not so much a departure from heterosexual male sexuality as a variation on its themes: “[Lesbian feminists] saw male sexuality as constructed out of the power relations of male domination, as the sexuality of the ruling class. … This is the basis of gay male sexuality, too. Gay men saw their very identity as tied to the enactment of eroticized power difference… Gay men, like heterosexual women, were likely to eroticize powerful masculinity.” 

Gay male culture, in both its made-for-primetime RuPaul version and at its shock-jocking queerest, feeds on the subordination of women by mining female humiliation under male dominion for ironic signifiers of gay male identity, from camp “wrist-flapping” to the savagely woman-hating caricatures of drag show burlesque. Gay men have also been among the loudest proponents of sadomasochism; they consistently venerate as “subversive” the august patriarchal institutions of prostitution and pornography; and, in recent years, they’ve been fighting for their right to purchase babies baked to order in the rent-a-womb ovens of women exploited within the surrogacy industry. Gay men are therefore “an influential part of the power structure of male domination” and have not, in the main, proven themselves particularly helpful “allies.” 

Jeffreys is likewise unconcerned with tip-toeing through the dicey territories of feminism’s own internecine clashes. High-profile feminists’ participation in femininity, the high heels and lipstick worn for TV appearances? Jeffreys calls it out as self-sabotage, a concession to male power. That long hair swishing in the breeze? It is “in service of the hair fetishism of the ruling caste,” and just plain “unhygienic.” While women may find fault with the “vicious and insulting adoption of womanhating stereotypes” by male transgenderists and drag performers, they decline to question their own compliance with these same stereotypes, and so participate in the naturalization of stereotypical femininity as integral to womanhood. This, Jeffreys writes, is counterproductive and counterrevolutionary. The same goes for lesbians’ tenacious attachment to gender – i.e., sex-role stereotypes – in the form of butch/femme roleplaying, rightly identified by Jeffreys as fundamentally conformist and, as such, conservative. The function of butch/femme is to bring lesbian relationships and lesbian sexuality into alignment with the heterosexual model, with the butch in the man’s role and the femme in the woman’s. Its origins are to be found in the closets of the 1950s, its resurgence is a by-product of the 80s sadomasochism craze, and yet we are supposed to believe that it is perfectly harmless and natural and nothing whatsoever to do with male rule. This is ludicrous, of course, and Jeffreys is standing by to burst the delusional bubble: “Roleplaying lesbians appeal to innateness in just the way transvestites do to promote their gender ideology. ‘Gender’ needs to be abolished, not rescued and polished up by lesbians.” Many women may not want to hear it, but someone has to say it regardless, and the woman to do so, without fail, has been Sheila Jeffreys. 

Then there are those things that we wish no one ever had to say, things so unappetizing and vile and creepy that we’d be happier sweeping them into some far-off corner, or, getting closer to the point: under the bed. Since women symbolize sex in the patriarchal mind, when our criticisms of men’s behavior stress the nasty sexual bits, it can sound to listeners like so much dirty talk. Women who expose the squalid dead ends of male sexuality are subject to exile from the domain of serious public discourse, as well as the charge that they themselves are the perverts. These women are stigmatized by association, smeared by the very sordidness they denounce. Andrea Dworkin is our textbook case here: because her work laid bare the sexuality of male dominance, she was sneered at as “sex-obsessed.” Dworkin did not set out as a writer and feminist expecting to steep her name in the muck of pornography, just as I suspect Jeffreys never anticipated she would become feminism’s foremost adult baby expert, a dubious prestige if ever there was one. 

Jeffreys’ unflinching attention to the worst of the worst in male sexual ghastliness has raised disapproving eyebrows over the years, as if the aberrations that she spreads across the dissection table were her own fruit, the Frankenstein’s monsters of her own indecent mind. Thankfully, though, the disapproval has not dissuaded Jeffreys from taking core samples of the bilge at the lowest strata of patriarchal sexuality. Because as much as we do not want to know, we need to: to borrow from Audre Lorde, our blissful ignorance will not protect us. Every time I read Jeffreys I encounter some new horror more awful than anything I’d previously considered possible—and no rose-colored-glasses-wearing denialist of male depravity, I am hard to shock. Yet Jeffreys consistently unearths stories that astonish me. In Uprooting Male Domination, it was the Australian man who purchased two baby girls through surrogacy then spent the next six years manufacturing a personal pornographic treasure trove of the despoliation of these girls’ childhood. Coming in second, less of an atrocity but higher in sheer ick factor, was the fetish night hosted at a children’s playspace in the U.K., advertised as open to “age players, soLittles, middles, carers, mummies, daddies, siblings, furries, kittens, puppies, their handlers, and any wet only [Adult Baby Diaper Lover].” What amount of citrus-scented disinfectant could ever cleanse the ball pits and foam slides of the residues left behind by such an event? 

Unsavory tales like these are routinely dismissed on the grounds that, though no one will deny they set the skin crawling, they are ultimately trivial, a distraction from bigger – and more respectable – issues like the wage gap, or getting women into government, or raising girls’ self-esteem through salutary wholesome endeavours like mountaineering, STEM camp, hobbyhorsing, tap dance, et cetera. Typically this criticism is voiced by other feminists who’d be happier with the filth out of sight under the rug so that they can stride over it straight into the light of social acceptability. Jeffreys describes an example of this from the 1980s, when radical and lesbian feminists were campaigning against sadomasochism: “There were some within the [women’s liberation movement] who considered that fighting SM was an unnecessary distraction, rather an unimportant side alley for feminists. The radical feminist journal Trouble and Strife … put the shoutline ‘Not the sadomasochism debate’ on its cover to show its disdain for the issue.” Today we live within a social reality so saturated by sadomasochism that teenage girls can look forward to being choked by their first boyfriends. All manner of sexual violence has been normalized as innocuous “kink,” totally cool as long as the victim consents, with zero consideration given to the conditions under which that sanctifying “yes” was extracted. As anti-feminist backlash, the mainstreaming of sadomasochism has been spectacularly, ruinously effective. So, as Jeffreys notes with due mordancy, SM “proved not to be a minor issue, tangential to mainstream feminism,” but an invaluable tool in neutralizing the feminist threat to male power. 

Loath though we may be to sully our hands, there will be no liberation for women, nor peace, nor dignity, if male sexuality is left unattended to fester in all its unfathomable idiot brutality, rapacious destructiveness, bottom-feeding prurience, and infinite poor taste. Which brings us to politeness’s foremost prohibition: getting to the point already. And for Jeffreys, the point is clear. Male sexuality is at once an expression and instrument of male domination, the unifying thread through the tangle of patriarchal scourges blighting women’s lives today, from transgenderism to kink to the pornification of everyday life. Male sexuality is the point, Jeffreys asserts. Rooted in the eroticization of tyranny, it reinforces male power with every loveless fuck. This reinforcement is its highest purpose, achieved by individual men who, seeking to gratify their yens, enlist themselves as foot soldiers for the patriarchal regime. These men may or may not know what they’re doing, but when they do, they try to hide it, positioning their groins discreetly off-camera—concealed behind some convenient flag, perhaps? They assure us that transgenderism is not about middle-aged men getting their rocks off taking lingerie selfies: it is a rescue mission for misunderstood children literally dying just to be themselves. Prostitution is not a matter of men degrading women into things they can purchase, use, and consume in order to experience Manhood, i.e., power and supremacy over females. Not at all! Look again and you’ll see an opportunity for women to enter the free market on their own terms as their own (girl)bosses. The same is true of pornography, which comes with the added bonus of enhancing female self-esteem, assisting women in overcoming their body image hang-ups by seeing their own sexiness reflected back to them in the glazed grey mirror of the male gaze. And anyway, it’s really a freedom of speech issue, after all. For feminists to politely skirt the problem of male sexuality is to assist in men’s sanitization project, leaving them free to clean up their image so they can march out looking fresh-faced and sympathetic when they campaign for public approval. The alternative is decidedly rude: women shaming men for the creeps they are, for all to see. 

Of course, shame and sexuality is a combination with a long and repressive history. Male-fronted, male-centered sexual “liberation” movements’ solution to this has been to de-link the two completely: anything goes, all sex is good sex, don’t yuck my yum. As a consequence the feminist rejection of male sexuality is derided as pouring shame over sexuality, full-stop. Yet the sexuality that Jeffreys and other radical feminists reject is the product of male dominion, violent and fetishistic, solipsistic and cruel, wholly antagonistic to real intimacy, real reciprocity, real tenderness. It is a sexuality spawned by an oppressive political system and then implemented in the preservation of that same system. Outside of the political, social, cultural context of male rule, who can say what forms human sexuality might take? Sexuality, full-stop, cannot be criticized, for the simple reason that we have no idea what it is. All we have is the sexuality we’ve inherited from patriarchy, poisonous and pathological as it is, and all we can do is seek to understand this sad miscreation, so that we might defuse it, defang it, in hopes of one day re-creating human sexuality as a source of connection and shared joy, no longer a deadening ritual of predation, debasement, alienation, and abuse. 

For this reason, the question of male sexuality’s origins and development deserves greater feminist attention. Jeffreys, in her execration of this sexuality, can seem at times to accept it as a given, some congenital defect of the human male, biological and inevitable, changeless. Given that she is a social constructionist, I doubt she believes this. Whatever she may believe, to avoid pessimistic biologizing, and to thwart detractors who resist criticism of patriarchal sexuality because it’s the only sexuality they know and they lack the imagination to desire anything better, more analysis on this point would be useful. Jeffreys might retort that it is not her job to rehabilitate male sexuality or prove herself other than “anti-sex,” that lame potshot launched at all feminists who challenge men’s predilections—and she would be right. She might insist that male sexuality is at this late hour beyond redemption or remedy and that women should convert to lesbianism en masse. Again, she’d get no argument from me. All the same, it is too loose an end left dangling for my irrepressibly thread-tying mind, just to throw up our hands and say men are perverts to the core incurably, let’s send them to an island, let them go extinct out of sight in their gimp suits and ruffled gingham sissy bloomers. I have no interest in defending men, but I do endeavour to retain a basic love for the animals that humans are, beneath the disastrous, ugly trappings of manmade civilization, our species’ male contingent included. Thus I am forced to face the following: sexuality is by its nature oriented towards life and life’s continuity, yet it has been warped into massacre and it is men who have warped it, but how, and why? If our objective is to salvage and redeem human life on earth, then we have equal cause to make sense of male sexuality as to condemn it. 
That said, I admire Jeffreys’ categorical revilement, so staunch that she denies male sexuality even the time it would take her to chart the trajectory of its devolution or contemplate how it might be transformed. Jeffreys does not owe men her time, as no woman does, and she does not give it. Instead, she focuses on what male sexuality means for women, the harms it inflicts, and she refuses to look away, just as she refuses to sidestep, genuflect, flirt, or beg. For this refusal, Jeffreys continues to pay the price: singled out as intellectual enemy #1 by queer theologians everywhere for her 2014 book Gender Hurts, she has found herself thrown under the bus by other feminists as well, considered “too controversial” to speak at events, including this fall’s FiLiA conference. Yet Jeffreys continues to defy feminine decorum, and she does so with a jouissance that uplifts as much as it edifies. Jeffreys should not be the outlier in her supposed rudeness, which is in fact just clarity and confidence and a glorious lack of compromise; she should be our model. The time for social niceties is long past; Please and Thank You and Pardon Me get women precisely nowhere; we cannot kill patriarchy with kindness, and male dominion does not deserve the protection that women’s politeness affords it. And besides, there are things worse than being rude. Like collusion with the oppressor, to secure a mouthful of crumbs. Like being a coward.

Aurora linnea is a radical (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North American colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth. She is the author of Man Against Being: Body Horror & the Death of Life published by Spinifex Press.