One of the great tragedies of the modern feminist movement is that its members do not want to burn their bras. In fact, being a bra-burning, radical feminist is often used as a pejorative to describe women who approach their feminism with the militancy it rightly deserves but rarely receives.
This use of the phrase makes sense when you uncover the history (or lack thereof) of bra burning. The association of feminists with bra burning can be traced back to a 1968 protest against the Miss America Beauty Pageant in New Jersey. No bras were actually burned in these protests; rather, women threw lipsticks, high heels and lingerie into a “freedom trash can” to protest the patriarchal and white supremacist beauty ideals promulgated by the pageant.
The myth of burning bras reportedly comes from a comment made by a journalist covering the Miss America protest – “”Men burn draft cards and what next? Will women burn bras?”
This connection with the Vietnam War protests goes deeper than the fiery symbolism. Many of the women who participated in the Miss America protests were not specifically feminist activists, but rather young radicals who came up through the anti-war and civil rights movements. One of the organisers, Robin Morgan, cited the failure of left-wing men to advocate for feminist issues as the catalyst for action on women’s liberation.
Nearly 60 years on from these protests, left-wing men still often fail to extend their solidarity to women. Feminist issues are often viewed as being of secondary importance to more ‘serious’ ideological questions of class, and are frequently detached from discussions of race. This leads to the further marginalisation of non-white women and dismissal of the intersectional nuances of patriarchal oppression. Individual men are frequently perpetrators of misogyny, from gendered exclusion and sexist behaviour to sexual violence. Many resist accountability, and from personal experience, women and gender minorities often leave left-wing spaces because of this.
But the question remains as to why. Surely, a political movement with politics grounded in compassion and a theoretical focus on collective liberation has an incentive to fight for the feminist cause, and male leftists an ideological reason to unlearn misogynistic behaviour?
I think the root of this problem lies in the current state of sexual politics, and that this explains the continued subordination of women across the traditional left-right political spectrum.
When Kate Millett wrote Sexual Politics in 1970, she argued that heterosexual sex is one of many ways “outright force” is used to uphold patriarchy. Women are subordinated and men conditioned to be dominant by the patriarchal structures that shape the ways in which we engage with sex, and it was a failure of the sexual revolution that such structures were never meaningfully challenged.
Millett’s observations are of great modern relevance. The relationship between sex and patriarchal oppression is most obvious on the right, where women are expected to be sexually available, and thus subservient, to men as wives and mothers. Especially with the rise of the far right and a potent wave of religious extremism, sexual and reproductive labour are increasingly viewed as the primary value of women in a conservative ideal of society.
However, the way that sexual politics play out on the left is perhaps more interesting, and provides insight into why the modern feminist movement has lost its bite.
The wave of liberal feminism that characterised the 2010s was framed through the rhetoric of maximising choice. Its ultimate goal was giving women the required amount of political power to make the choices they thought best actualised their preferences. What women were actually choosing was largely beyond the scope of feminist criticism, which led to the mainstream acceptance of things like sex work, pornography, conforming to patriarchal beauty standards and opting into being a house wife as valid “feminist” choices.
Choice feminism is still the version of feminism most subscribed to by the average left-leaning person, largely because it does not ask anything of its followers. So long as the patriarchy does not obstruct you from making choices, you’re empowered to live in any way you so choose.
The more politically engaged camp of leftists would probably reject the association of liberal feminism with the left. This is fair – things like beauty culture and home making are frequently criticised by the left for being oppressive, and liberal support of them unresponsive to the broader coercive structures that exist under capitalism. But this same criticism is often missing from leftwing discourse pertaining to sex.
Radical feminist criticisms of the sex industry, that it exploits and commodifies women’s bodies and reproduces patriarchal conditions of male domination, are frequently dismissed. Discourse is stifled as we’re labelled as ‘SWERFS’ (sex worker-exclusionary radical feminists), or ill-fitting analogies drawn between the economic coercion of sex and any other economically coerced and intrinsically exploitative physical labour under capitalism. The same happens in conversations about pornography.
These responses erase not only the sharply gendered nature of the sex industry, but also the necessity of sex more generally in maintaining patriarchy as a hierarchy. Women are objectified by the patriarchal requirement that they are sexually available to men, ripe for purchase in exchange for money, a marriage contract or some other guarantee of social security.
Feminist liberation requires women to challenge both the capitalist commodification of sex and the patriarchal dehumanisation of women as sex objects, both of which are contingent on women making themselves less sexually available to men.
Right-wing men react badly when women don’t want to have sex with them, infamously so. But, left-wing men are also not exempt from impeding feminist progress. They too are capable agents of the patriarchy in their relationships with women. The sexual politics that play out in the personal sphere in left-wing contexts are conveniently obscured. So long as women who threaten to disrupt the patriarchal status quo can be easily dismissed as ‘bra-burning, radical feminists’, the modern feminist movement is damned to repeat the failures of the sexual revolution.
Andrea Dworkin was as right as she was provocative when she said that “the left cannot have its whores and its politics too.” It’s time to stop placating men who purport to be our allies and defending the choices of women that are antithetical to feminist liberation. Feminists must add some real fuel (and brassieres) to the fire – the only path forward for real liberation and to resist the patriarchal violence of the far right is a radical one.
Share this article with a lady who could stand to shed her bra.
