THE DIALECTIC OF SEX. SHULAMITH FIRESTONE. 1970 My aim with this series is to read the books on my list as charitably as possible, since I want to come away with something valuable. I don’t want to quibble about outdated details or awkward mistakes. But my disagreements with Firestone are not incidental, they are fundamental.
In The Dialectic of Sex1, Firestone sets out with the goal of explaining women’s oppression. She intends to create a material analysis of women as a class. But her analysis is frequently metaphorical rather than material. She leans heavily on Freudian psychoanalysis, which is incapable of providing material explanations of social classes, since it focuses on individual and family psychology. Firestone extrapolates from the individual to the societal level using metaphors about the family, examining topics she believes are central to women’s oppression: biology, race, children, love, and culture. She has valuable insights at times, but she also makes some serious mistakes.
In the second half of the book, Firestone sets out her hopes for the revolution and utopia she believes we could build after we achieve total mastery of nature through technology. She imagines the elimination of parenthood and the family, envisioning group marriages, and childcare distributed evenly to all adults. I’m sorry to say her utopia includes a defence of pederasty, in the guise of total “sexual freedom” for children. I reject this vehemently. I also disagree with other aspects of her utopia that we will examine in detail later.
Despite my disagreements, what I valued about Firestone’s work is her boldness in reaching into themes and issues that seem settled, natural, or inevitable, and upending them with hitherto unasked questions. Firestone is the only writer I have read so far who truly believes we can abolish sex—not social gender, but biological sex and its social implications. This is indeed radical. While I do disagree with Firestone on many points, The Dialectic of Sex has still been an interesting read and provides important background information as I try to understand the history of feminism. Firestone has some valuable insights about this history, so we’ll begin with the past before moving on to her future utopia.
All quotes are from The Dialectic of Sex unless otherwise noted.
A PROLOGUE a little history
“The myth of Emancipation operated in each decade to defuse the frustrations of modern women… they had most of the legal freedoms, the literal assurance that they were considered full political citizens of society — and yet they had no power.” p28
Firestone writes that when the suffragettes won the vote, men extended token rights to women but kept the real power for themselves. Women were encouraged to believe themselves fully free, and “healthily selfish” radical feminist historical figures were deliberately forgotten in favour of more conservative or selfless female role models. The first wave of feminism fizzled out. Women were encouraged to find individual solutions in the “feminine mystique” of the 50s, or from the sexual liberation of the 60s. They joined other movements and groups, most notably the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the left. Firestone describes three camps of feminists from this era. The “politicos” were loyal to the left and treated men’s issues as universal, but women’s issues as niche. The “conservative” feminists wanted superficial changes within the existing system—such as the same legal right to paid work that men had. The radical feminists were disillusioned leftists and moderates who saw women’s liberation as central.
I think this is an important history, because similar patterns exist today. Women are assured they already have full equality, and are encouraged to seek private, individual responses to distress at their political situation. There are “liberal feminists” who focus on gaining more power for (educated, middle-class) women while largely playing by the rules of the male-centric, neo-liberal system. But this approach leaves economic class structures intact, failing poor and working class women, and prostituted women and girls. It also leaves intact the social arrangements that penalise mothers and primary caretakers. Leftists rally behind every progressive cause yet still somehow manage to put women last when it really matters. Feminists joke grimly about the concealed misogyny of these “woke blokes”. who love porn, support prostitution, advocate for the dismantlement of sex-specific legal protections in the name of “inclusivity”, and reach for misogynistic insults and stereotypes when confronted with real feminist critique. And of course there are still radical and gender critical feminists, disillusioned by the left and centre, who prioritise women in their politics. They still endure criticism, ridicule, and silencing from “progressives” and “conservatives” alike. For me, it was valuable to realise that my frustrations with other leftists have been shared by feminists for decades. Recognising the “progressive” pattern of putting women last and falling for individualistic solutions instead of class analysis means I can make a conscious decision to do otherwise.
BIOLOGY dependence, division
“It is everywhere. The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer.” p3
In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone intends to explain women’s subordination using the historical materialist method of analysis. Where previous thinkers had merely abhorred economic inequality without being able to explain its causes, Marx and Engels’ historical materialist approach was meant to identify concrete mechanisms of oppression and create an explanation of economic class division that would be predictive enough for the purpose of devising solutions. The same is true for feminism: without an understanding of the concrete mechanisms of women’s subordination, we cannot create solutions. Our culture tends to obscure the political aspects of power and status in relations between the sexes, with myths of gender both romanticising and naturalising difference and inequality. But in 1884, with the publication of The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels made a serious attempt to treat women’s position politically. Since then, understanding women as a class or caste has been the keystone of radical and socialist feminist thought.
For Firestone, sex is not just a class, but the original class. She begins with a call for us to realise the sheer scale of the problem: sex division is “the oldest, most rigid class-caste system in existence.” p15 It goes deeper than ordinary politics and deeper than economic class or race, since it begins before history in our animal nature. Knowledge of this fact is so painful, and the problem seems so intractable, that many women give up, or decide they don’t want to know. I agree with Firestone on this. So often I have the feeling that people are looking past the scope and depth of injustice against women and girls; the frequency of sexual assault, the fact that it shapes women’s lives and fears, the global industry of sexual exploitation, and the profound misogyny online, for example. I have seen people point out some of the few ways that men are worse off than women—usually due to male aggression, restrictive gender stereotypes, or identity politics that de-prioritise white men—and conclude that we finally live in an egalitarian society, or perhaps even a misandric society. We have a serious cultural tendency to ignore or downplay harms to women. So it’s cathartic to see Firestone write without caveat that women’s subjection is a profound and massive crisis.
“Unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different, and not equal.” p8
Firestone asserts that the first cause of sex castes is biology. In the “biological family”, women are dependent because of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. There has never been a society in which children were not dependent on women, or in which women were not dependent on men or the community. This biological inequality and dependence created the first division of labour and the first caste discrimination, as well as a “psychology of power” that we will explore later. As well as the biological family, there is also the social institution of family—for example, the nuclear family. Firestone says the nuclear family, while not biological, “intensifies the psychological penalties of the biological family.” p10 So far, this sounds plausible to me. Natural differences probably did cause the original division, even if thousands of years of male supremacist politics and culture have made it into something far worse.
Firestone rejects the natural values suggested by our biology. She thinks women should seize control of reproductive technology and social institutions, and use them to eliminate the division of reproductive labour—that is, to separate reproduction from the female body, eliminating biological difference. “The end goal of feminist revolution must be…not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.” p11 Firestone, then, is a true sex abolitionist. This distinguishes her from postmodern queer theorists or some modern trans rights activists who deconstruct the concept of sex, or suppress reference to it, even though the underlying material reality is unchanged.
Firestone’s desire to use technology to radically alter human nature also makes her a transhumanist—a position I am wary of. I have little faith that human design will be less catastrophic than nature. Firestone’s main focus is ex-utero gestation and the elimination of pregnancy and childbirth. I wonder what she would say to the young women currently attempting to escape womanhood (and its attendant low status) with “transition” involving double mastectomies, hysterectomies, and anabolic-androgenic steroids. Perhaps she would hail this superficial erosion of sex difference. To me it is a tragedy that Firestone or anyone believes we need to eliminate femaleness in order to escape male violence and domination. I would prefer to imagine and plan for a society that ensures basic goods (financial security, freedom from violence, the social basis of self respect) for everyone, regardless of what gifts and vulnerabilities nature has given us.
I believe technological alterations to the human body should be considered carefully from both individual and societal perspectives. At the individual level we must be aware that our “solutions” might interfere with something that is needed for human flourishing, which is inevitably linked to our evolved psychology and physiology. I was once challenged by a transfeminist who asked me why “endogenous” puberty is better or safer than “exogenous” puberty. (That is to say, why puberty is better than artificially stopping puberty with puberty blocking drugs like Lupron and inducing some changes in secondary sexual characteristics through artificial steroids or oestrogen). I feel that only a severely ideologically compromised person could equate the natural development of our species, which has produced mostly healthy adults for our entire evolutionary history, with a set of profoundly invasive, under researched and potentially dangerous medical interventions whose long term effects are uncertain, and at best include lifelong reliance on further exogenous hormones. At the political level we must recognise that individual technological solutions can reinforce class and sex based social disadvantage. For example, ex-utero gestation might be used primarily to allow middle class women to continue working in a system designed for men, while poor women are still penalised by motherhood. IVF has helped lesbian or infertile heterosexual couples who can afford it, but has also allowed wealthy people to exploit poor women through commercial surrogacy (whereby people pay for women’s reproductive labour and buy the fruit of said labour—their babies).
FAMILY the psychology of power
“The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization.” p55
Firestone began with a promise of material analysis, and with the division of sex by biology. But from here she proceeds along Freudian lines, into error. Central to her Freudian-inspired beliefs is the assertion that the dependence and division of labour caused by biological inequality creates a “psychology of power” within the family, and that this is the cause of social injustice generally.
What is the “psychology of power”? Firestone takes a Freudian view on psychosexual development, but with a feminist lens focused on power. Her story is this: small children first identify with their primary caretaker (usually the mother), and then eventually covet the power and freedom of their fathers. Children are powerless, but at some stage the boy transitions to manhood and gains power, leaving his mother behind. Girls, realising they are female and not destined for the same fate, can either “start using feminine wiles for all they’re worth” (p49) in an attempt to rob the father of his power, or they can deny that their female sex will result in powerlessness when they are adults. They can continue to deny their impending womanhood and attendant low status until puberty refutes them. I don’t think this explanation is implausible. It is less obviously ridiculous than Freud’s “penis envy” and “oedipal complex”. It also closely mirrors Simone de Beauvoir’s explanation of girls’ upbringing and psychology. But Firestone goes further.
Marx asserted, and Firestone agrees, that the psychological dynamics of the family are played out on a larger scale in society and our institutions: “he observed that the family contained within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later develop on a wide scale within the society and the state.” p12 Firestone believes that the sex division and the biological family are the ultimate causes of social injustice. Accordingly, she believes we must destroy the family in order to destroy oppression: “Unless revolution uproots the basic social organisation, the biological family — the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled — the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.” p12 Firestone has not explained to my satisfaction how family psychology translates into social institutions. The idea is new to me and I would like to see a more detailed explanation. While I might be convinced that there is a link between family structures, psychology and politics, it’s not clear to me that the family causes class politics as a whole. Hierarchies can be observed in so many animal species that I fear the psychological tendency to dominate and extract resources goes deeper than sex into the very evolutionary struggle for advantage. So I don’t know that biology is to blame or that abolishing it using biotechnology will cure injustice.
Drawing further inspiration from Freud, Firestone discusses the incest taboo (Freud asserted that children want to have sex with their parents, but that we repress it for social reasons and thereby develop neuroses). Like Freud, Firestone believes the incest taboo is not biological, but social, and is required for the stability of the family structure. On her view, children’s first love/sex feelings are for their mothers. They are forced to repress their sexual feelings for their mother in order to gain her approval. This requires the unnatural separation of sex and love. The separation later causes neuroses, including the madonna-whore complex: for men, the need to avoid sexualising the mother creates the separation of good (non sexual) women and bad (sexual) women, and “whole classes of people, e.g., prostitutes, pay with their lives for this dichotomy.” p54 While I agree that we do often separate love and sex, I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem—I love rather more people (friends, family, pets) than I would be willing to have sex with. I also don’t think it adequately explains some men’s mistreatment of the women they have sex with. I don’t believe anyone wants to have sex with their parents, and I think there must be another explanation for the madonna-whore complex. Perhaps it comes from the male obsession with purity and chastity (useful for ensuring paternity when you have a fortune to bequeath) and the conflicting desires of male supremacists to degrade and separate women and enforce their low status, but also to be sexually intimate with them.
Moving on, Firestone suggests that homosexuality and heterosexuality are equally limited and dysfunctional. She refers to Freud’s hypothesis that infants, prior to socialisation, all have a naturally “perverse, polymorphous” sexuality. She says if we did away with the incest taboo, we might all be healthy transexuals (“pansexuals” in today’s terms). So if I understand her correctly, Firestone believes that biology creates dependence and division of labour. This results in the family structure and the accompanying incest taboo, which leads to the separation of love and sex, and a psychology of power. These psychologies play out on a societal level and are the original cause of all class-based oppression. Therefore, Firestone wants to use technology to destroy the biological family and to erase the incest taboo. She hopes we will revert to a naturally polymorphous sexuality and shed the psychology that causes us to reproduce hierarchical relations in our societal arrangements. I don’t think I have exaggerated her views. She says:
“If early sexual repression is the basic mechanism by which character structures supporting political, ideological, and economic serfdom are produced, then an end to the incest taboo, through abolition of the family, would have profound effects.” p55
I am disappointed. Firestone promised a material analysis but delivered a suggestive ink blot. Freud’s views were often metaphorical, frequently unfalsifiable, and reproduced stereotypes while presenting them as universal truths. Freudian psychology (if it even counts as psychology rather than narrative) is incapable of explaining women’s oppression. For that we need an understanding of economics, institutions, law, and many other mechanisms and dynamics. Although psychology has a part to play in the explanation, we need evidence based psychology, not self-sealing, evidence-repelling fictions.
But things are about to get worse. Let’s see what Firestone writes about children.
CHILDREN another oppressed class?
For Firestone, children are relevant to women’s liberation because women’s association with children—our responsibility for bearing and rearing them—are hindrances to our freedom. In addition, Firestone believes children themselves are an oppressed class of people who deserve freedom.
Firestone proposes that childhood itself is a recent invention. Drawing on Phillip Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood2, Firestone reports that before the 1500s, children were considered small adults, and spent their time in the adult world. Their main difference from adults was their physical inferiority and economic dependence. Schools helped create childhood as they “effectively segregated children off from the adult world for longer and longer periods of time.” p75 Firestone proposes that society invented childhood to justify the nuclear family, in particular the husband and wife unit. She claims that the invention lengthens children’s period of dependence, as well as the mother’s period of being tied to the child and the home. I think Firestone is wrong about schools. If anything, standard school hours in western countries allow both parents to work outside the home, and are particularly useful for mothers who would otherwise almost always be the primary carers of school aged children. (As we see during the COVID-19 pandemic, women are more likely to take on the burden of childcare during lockdown, even if they were fully employed beforehand).
Firestone believes children, like women, are a subordinate class of people whose status is based on physical and economic dependence. She also thinks they are sexually repressed! Firestone believes (apparently from reading Freud) that children have a naturally “polymorphous” sexuality that we repress. She believes children deserve the freedom to have sex with each other and with adults. I can’t believe I have to write this, but to be absolutely clear: children shouldn’t have sex with each other or with adults, and Firestone is horribly wrong.
Firestone is treating Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood as accurate. The briefest internet search, however, suggests that Nicholas Orme successfully refuted Ariès’ claims in his history Medieval Children3. Our conceptions of childhood have changed somewhat over time, but childhood itself was not “invented” recently. Besides, simple observation reveals that children are irrational, impulsive, inexperienced, and generally in need of control and guidance to an extent that would be totally inappropriate for adults of normal capacities. Although there is some debate to be had about how much freedom children should have (see “helicopter parents” vs “free range children”), no one with even a fleeting acquaintance with childhood should mistake children for small adults.
RACISM more family metaphors
Firestone believes racism is also a sexual phenomenon that relates back to the family. In her Freudian metaphor, white men are the father and have the power. White women are the mother, oppressed alongside the children. The black man is the son who identifies with the mother but is expected to take up the mantle of manhood and side with the father. The black woman is the daughter who has no option of attaining male power, so her only recourse is seduction of the father/white man. According to Firestone, this family dynamic pits white women, black men and black women against each other as they struggle to get some of the father’s power and sympathy.
Although I think it’s possible that subordinated groups can indeed turn against each other and compete for power, I’m unconvinced that the family metaphor adequately explains the mechanisms that create and perpetuate racial injustice in the USA. It seems to me that slavery, not Freud, should be central to a historical material explanation of racial relations in the USA—along with post-slavery laws, economic mechanisms, and the persistence of white supremacist culture.
LOVE AND ROMANCE the search for security and worth
Firestone makes the bold claim that love is even more central to women’s oppression than childbearing. She says that everyone has a need for emotional security and social recognition. In a male dominated society, however, the path to recognition through career and achievement is barred to many women, so they seek male romantic and sexual approval instead. This imbalance in power is incompatible with authentic love, which can only occur between freely associating equals. Firestone notes that many men want sex or emotional warmth from women without giving any commitment in return, so they play games to keep women hanging while they leave their options open. In response, women have always had strategies to get as much commitment from men as they can. Firestone says the sexual revolution of the sixties encouraged women to discard their demands for commitment and choose “free love”. But women’s economic and social vulnerability had not improved, and men never stopped playing their games (using women and dropping them). So the sexual revolution made women more sexually available to men, while women were “cheated out of the little they can hope for from men” (p128) in terms of commitment, economic support, and emotional security. This is an interesting take on free love and the sixties, which I am accustomed to seeing portrayed as an ideal, carefree era of peace and love and acid.
Firestone writes that society’s contempt for women is so great that men are obliged to make a special exception for any woman they associate with: “A man must idealize one woman over the rest in order to justify his descent to a lower class.” This is a pattern I recognise; misogynists flatter individual women by telling them they’re not like other women. And some women will accept the “compliment”, agreeing that they’re not gossipy, bitchy, shallow, vain, etc. (the well known “not like other girls” phenomenon). In my experience, this kind of interaction doesn’t happen with men who believe that women are their peers. But perhaps such egalitarians were rarer in Firestone’s era.
Firestone also observes that women are encouraged to express their “individuality” by, paradoxically, meeting the same narrow beauty standard as everyone else. Women are gratified by compliments on their appearance, not realising that they are being treated as interchangeable with other beautiful women. Our struggles to conform to the same narrow beauty standard enable men laugh at women, who “can be more easily stereotyped as a class: they look alike, they think alike, and even worse, they are so stupid they believe they are not alike.” p136
If this seems too cynical, perhaps I should draw the reader’s attention to the modern humiliation of “basic bosses”—that is to say, women whose interests and appearance are too mainstream and popular. The vitriol reserved for such conforming women is totally disproportionate to their crime. And when women get older, the contempt intensifies: one only has to visit the internet to find material dedicated to abhorring and wishing violence on “Karens”. The term was allegedly coined to describe badly behaving middle aged white women, but has rapidly expanded to include any middle aged white women. This is the problem with female-specific slurs; once a word has been loaded up with contempt and violence, misogynists will gleefully apply it to any women, regardless of the original meaning. Gaining male approval by abusing “Karens” or “basic bosses” is a strategy with a limited life span, however. As Firestone says, “there comes a day “when the ‘chick’ graduates to ‘old bag’, to find that her smile is no longer ‘inimitable’.” p135 Repudiating other women is a most insecure basis for self respect or respect from others, as are beauty and sexual appeal. Firestone would have us do the harder work of developing character. On this, we are in perfect agreement.
Today, women have more options for career, achievement, and financial security. Many men see women as their peers, and do not engage in manipulative games with them (though many still do). However, much has remained the same. Women are still economically vulnerable if they have children, and they are still encouraged in a billion messages from birth to seek their worth in sexual and romantic approval from men. Even comparatively egalitarian western societies have not reduced misogyny or the sexual objectification of women sufficiently to ensure a solid basis for respect and self-respect for women. Instead we are shepherded toward the cheap compensation of attention and admiration from others, which we can earn by self-objectifying, pleasing and appeasing. The patterns Firestone identified are no longer universal, but they are still readily observable, and the chapters on love and romance are, for me, amongst the most valuable sections of the book.
CULTURE technology and art, divided
“The machine of empiricism has its own momentum, and is, for such purposes, completely out of control. Could one actually decide what to discover or not discover?” p164
Firestone defines culture as the attempt to transform our imagined ideals into reality. It consists of art (in which we imagine ideals and try to represent them in artificial mediums) and science (whereby we gain knowledge of the laws of nature in order to manipulate the world to match our ideals). Firestone says women have been so completely excluded from science that many attribute it to an innate preference. She says the two modes of culture—“aesthetic” and “technological”—clearly correspond to male and female, and that this separation of culture sprung from the sex binary. I think there is a better explanation for why women have entered art more easily than science in the 20th century. Art or writing, for example, can be done fairly easily by women if they have time and some money or financial support. But science requires a specific education, special lab equipment, and mostly happens within institutions, not in writer’s cafes or makeshift studios. It is simply harder to access without the right connections and support. In any case, Firestone believes the division of art and science is artificial and morally dangerous: “As long as man is still engaged only in the means… to his final realization, mastery of nature, his knowledge, because it is not complete, is dangerous.” p163 I can agree that our technology sometimes develops faster than our morality—this is one of the reasons I am so wary of Firestone’s transhumanism.
Firestone believes we will eventually achieve total mastery of nature. That sounds dangerous indeed. But she believes it’s our only option; it’s too late to conserve nature, so we must fully master it instead, and create an artificially designed balance. Firestone believes ecological and feminist movements have the same aim; to “free humanity from the tyranny of its biology” p175 and to create something new and humane. Firestone hopes that with biotech, we will master artificial reproduction, eliminate childhood, ageing, and death, destroy the cultural divisions of sex, and eliminate the psychology of power that springs from the sex binary. We will get rid of pregnancy, which is “barbaric”. Firestone hopes artificial wombs will be created that will totally eliminate pregnancy except as a rare, unusual personal choice.
Along with reproductive technology, Firestone believes “cybernetics” will eliminate most human work—or at least the drudgery. It would be disastrous if this technology were invented while the current power structures still exist (which is already happening, in our own time). She says we have not yet thought seriously about how we will cope with a change in “humanity’s basic relationships to both its production and its reproduction.” p183 We will need a new culture, new relationships, and the elimination of both economic classes and the family. And she has some ideas about what the utopia will look like.
THE UTOPIA cybernation, biotech, and households
“If male/female—adult/child cultural distinctions are destroyed, we will no longer need the sexual repression that maintains these unequal classes.” p187
In order to understand Firestone’s utopia, let us briefly revisit the core points of her worldview. Recall that Firestone believes the following: nature created a sexual inequality that led to a division of labour. The structure of the family required us ban incest, to split emotions from sex, and to repress our naturally “polymorphous” sexuality. This generated a “psychology of power” that causes class divisions and social injustice. Ergo, to get rid of social injustice and class based hierarchies, we must eliminate the social/biological family and its attendant divisions and psychology. Firestone says previous revolutions and utopian projects failed because they didn’t go far enough. She doesn’t promise that she has perfect solutions to replace existing structures, since these must “arise organically out of the revolutionary action itself” (p203), and we have scarcely started imagining them yet, let alone transformed our psyches in the ways that would be necessary. But she makes some suggestions:
Women should be released from childbearing, and child rearing duties should be spread evenly across all members of society. Childcare and daycare centres are a “timid if not entirely worthless transition,” since they “ease the immediate pressure without asking why that pressure is on women.” p185
Economic independence and political autonomy must be ensured for women and children. Integrating women into the existing capitalist system’s workforce won’t be sufficient, since the system relies on women’s unpaid domestic and reproductive labour. Hence full integration into the workforce will be impossible without both artificial reproduction and automation of labour.
There must be complete integration of women and children into society. All segregated institutions, including schools, shall be destroyed.
Women and children shall have total sexual freedom. Firestone believes current cultural limits on sexuality are due to capitalism/patriarchy. Non-reproductive sexual activity is discouraged because women need to create new humans for the species to survive. Free love is discouraged (at least for wives) because it calls paternity into question. She also thinks child sexuality is repressed in order to maintain the integrity of the family. With these pressures relieved, “humanity could revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality—all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged.” p187
Firestone has some suggestions for what our lives might look like in practice. Firstly, many people will take up single, celibate professions that will attract respect. Like monks or astronauts, there are some roles that work better for unattached individuals, but women have been excluded from most of them. Secondly, instead of marriage, multiple people will enter into a “non-legal sex/companionate arrangement.” p205 Firestone imagines non-sexual “roommate” arrangements and group marriages. It doesn’t sound outrageous… until Firestone says there could be group marriages involving older children.
Thirdly, when it comes to childrearing, Firestone imagines “households” of several adults and some children. They will apply for a licence for a limited time. But children would have the legal right to transfer into a different household if they didn’t like their current one. All adults would have some responsibility for childrearing. We would replace “the psychologically destructive genetic ‘parenthood’ of one or two arbitrary adults” (p214) with a system in which responsibility is evenly spread. Firestone says this wouldn’t succeed as long as we still have natural childbirth, because “a mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort ‘belongs’ to her.” p208 (What Firestone calls “possessiveness” I would call a dedication and connection that cannot easily be substituted). Firestone also believes that because everyone cares for the child equally, he won’t even prefer his mother and won’t “choose her as his first love object.” Even if he does, “there would be no a priori reasons for her to reject his sexual advances, because the incest taboo would have lost its function”… Furthermore, “relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of — probably considerably more than we now believe.” p215
So we now have a “utopia” with no parenthood, no motherhood, but with incest and pederasty, and in which children have the legal right to change households if they aren’t allowed to, say, eat lego pieces for breakfast, which is their right as perfectly rational small adults. Alas, the utopia is looking quite dreadful to me. I have no problem with alternatives to traditional marriage, as long as they don’t involve children, but I am not impressed by the proposal to eliminate motherhood or give children the same legal status as adults. To be fair, Firestone admits these are only ideas, and that we might not be in a position to imagine the utopia yet, since we’re still obviously shaped by patriarchal/capitalist values. “We would do much better to concentrate on overthrowing the institutions that have produced this psychical organization.” p216 Happily, apologies for pederasty seem to have gone out of fashion since Firestone wrote her book, so perhaps we’re one very small step closer to being psychologically prepared for the utopia.
CONCLUSION thanks, but no
It should be obvious that my most urgent objection to Firestone is her defence of pederasty and incest. I trust we are agreed, and don’t even need to review the reasons why this is terrible. Suffice it to say that she is outright wrong about children being small adults.
I reject Firestone’s utopia. While I strongly support the use of technology to make pregnancy a freely chosen option for women, and to make it much much safer and more comfortable than it is at present, it’s not obvious to me that eliminating parenthood is feasible or desirable. Children need the protection of a smaller number of adults who are specifically invested in their wellbeing. Of course we can and should think our current social and economic arrangements, which place an intense burden on single carers, usually mothers. But that doesn’t mean that parenting responsibility can be shifted to wholly unconnected adults—not when we know that a minority of men are either preferential pedophiles or opportunistic sexual predators. We also know that employers will exploit children for labour wherever laws do not prevent it. I strongly disagree with Firestone that getting rid of the family would eliminate these behaviours, because I don’t believe they are caused by Freudian psychosexual processes. For now, parenthood, rather than being “possessive” and “arbitrary”, may well be one of the best, if imperfect, defences against child mistreatment and exploitation.
I also have a general problem with Firestone’s transhumanism—her view that we should use biotech to radically alter our human natures. We have proven ourselves very bad at designing societies and environments around our psychology. As Firestone notes, our morality lags behind our technology, but I believe our insight into our own nature trails even further behind. For this reason I view all transhumanist and utopian plans as worthy of intense scrutiny, though I don’t rule out bio-engineering categorically.
My final objection to The Dialectic of Sex is this: the book doesn’t deliver what it promises. Firestone set out to create a historical materialist analysis of sex as a class system. She did provide some valuable insights, especially about the history of the feminist movement, and women’s search for security and recognition through romance and love. But these do not constitute a systematic overview of women’s situation or its causes. Instead of material analysis, Firestone got trapped in Freudian metaphor, which is not evidence based and is thus ill-suited to reveal the causes of women’s subordination, let alone the solutions.
I did find valuable material in The Dialectic of Sex. There were worthy insights scattered throughout. And even if I strongly disagree with Firestone, she did force me to consider an interesting question: “should we use technology to eliminate sex?” As she says in the introduction, we are not obliged to take nature’s values as our own. At the very least, imagining alternatives may help us to clarify our values. It is good to cast our gaze a little further into the future sometimes. And since reproductive technology is indeed advancing, it behooves us to ask what the consequences might be if completely external gestation were one day possible—if babies could be grown outside women’s wombs. We should also be thinking about what consequences the automation of work will have on women and families, and whether society could be arranged to lighten the burden of childbearing and childrearing. Fully considering the implications of these technologies would require another essay, so I simply want to point out that unless we achieve greater economic equality, biotech and automation will likely further entrench existing class structures, and unless we eliminate child exploitation of all kinds, getting rid of the biological/social family will make children incredibly vulnerable. My own hope is that we will one day arrange society to achieve justice for women without repudiating the female bodies bestowed on us by nature.
The Dialectic of Sex was a book with a lot of surprising material, but I’m glad I read it. It’s important to know our feminist history. The view of feminists are diverse, it seems. I hope we shall be emboldened to further clarify our own feminist philosophies in response.
Firestone, Shulamith. 2015. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Paperback edition. London New York: Verso.
Ariès, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage Books.
Orme, Nicholas. 2003. Medieval Children. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press.