At the last meeting of the small student group I organise with, none of the women members showed up. A hetero couple in the group had split up, and the guy behaved very badly afterward, aggressively confronting the girl and some of her friends – all of whom also organise with the group. The result was that none of the women in the group wanted to attend because they feared an aggressive confrontation.

Two attitudes emerged from the guys in the group:

1) That it was a ‘personal’ issue, not to be confused with ‘politics’. Raising the fact that it had obviously become a political issue for the group, since none of the women had attended the meeting, the retort was that this was the girls’ fault for letting the personal get in the way of the political.

2) Having suggested that this problem needed to be addressed in terms of patriarchy and patriachal tendencies within the group, the retort was: “We’re all left people here, we’re all good people; I don’t think any of us are sexists.” The attempt to show how this belief was misfounded then led to a lot of anger and tension, and had to be dropped in order to avoid aggressive behaviour.

A similar attitude plagued the town’s feminist group, when an anarchist woman in the group began insisting that anarchist men are “different” and non-patriarchal, and should therefore be let into the group.

One way or another, it’s pretty clear that male leftists better get it clear in their heads that they do reproduce patriarchy, benefit from patriarchy, and need to struggle against their own patriarchal attitudes and those of other male members in their groups. It’s also clear that women will often have to organise separately, in order to struggle against patriarchy.

Other examples are springing to mind, but enough for now.

Best
Wit