Cameron Delusion by Peter Hitchens

Author:Peter Hitchens
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Political Ideologies, Political Process, General, Conservatism & Liberalism, Political Science, Political Parties
ISBN: 9781441135056
Publisher: Continuum
Published: 2010-05-27T23:00:00+00:00

9 Sexism is Rational

Of course the irrational oppression of women is wrong, as is every thought or action based upon the idea that women are inferior to men. The just person must reject any such ideas of unearned superiority of one human over another, which are the intellectual foundations of slavery. I cannot see how any civilised human being could believe anything different. There is not a word of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own with which I could disagree, yet because I resist some other, wholly different, ideas, many of my opponents assume automatically that I believe in the subjection of women as domestic chattels. I am diagnosed with a pathology called ‘Sexism’, which (like ‘Racism’ and ‘Homophobia’) instantly diminishes me into a suffering, irrelevant and contaminated person, whose arguments do not need to be listened to, and who must first be crushed and then perhaps pitied.

Yet again, there is no logic in this. One thing is being confused with another that is quite distinct from it. This alliance between political Leftism and revolutionary or radical feminism embodies the Left’s decisive change from nineteenthcentury social democracy, aimed at the capture of state power and the economy, to twentieth-century moral, cultural and sexual radicalism, aimed at the through-and-through transformation of social relations, and at a complete moral revolution. As it happens, the Marxist Left of the 1960s and early 1970s were not especially feminist. I seem to remember a fair amount of crude and backward attitudes being expressed towards women by many of my male comrades in that era. If the personal is political then the comrades were about as male-chauvinist as the clientele of White’s Club.

The revolution did not express much interest in this subject until some years after that. I do not, for example, remember anyone feeling particularly uncomfortable about the lyrics of such Rolling Stones songs as ‘Under my Thumb’ (see below) or ‘Look at that Stupid Girl’. A sample from this masterpiece follows:

She’s the worst thing in this world

Well, look at that stupid girl

Shut-up, shut-up, shut-up, shut-up, shut-up Shut-up, shut-up, shut-up, shut-up, shut-up Shut-up, shut-up, shut-up

But during this period the lyrics of popular songs often contained strong cultural or political messages (‘Sympathy for the Devil’, ‘Street Fighting Man’, ‘Revolution’, ‘You’ve Got to Admit it’s Getting Better’, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ (whose lyrics were changed in the more puritan USA to ‘Let’s Spend Some Time Together’), ‘She’s Leaving Home’, ‘When the Ship Comes in’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’, ‘Blowing in the Wind’ and many others). And in those days the Rolling Stones were considered (and considered themselves) just as much part of the general radical movement (see my account of the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards trials in my book The Abolition of Liberty) as the Vietnam solidarity campaigners or the nuclear disarmers.

Their song lyrics had more influence than any amount of Herbert Marcuse’s prose. In fact, during the fascinating and forgotten few weeks in 1967 when Mr Jagger and Mr Richards were prosecuted

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