It has to be remembered that Nazism was not defeated by an internal rebellion -- one of the great shocks post-WW2 was that the masses could accept and even embrace their repression under Fascism, and would even be faster to accept Fascism than the revolutionary promises of Communism. Marxist dialectics that proposed a social and historical tendency toward greater and greater liberation were especially challenged by the self-repression of the fascist subjects in Europe (while revolution was only found in the Eastern nations less characteristic of industrialized Capitalism). After the Frankfurt school, one reaction explained that it was all a trick of ideology; the propaganda of art and media is so powerful that it distracts consumers from the more ideal organisations of society, of which they would absolutely have embraced already if they were only more aware. But hope for the logical and inevitable revolution of the oppressed was only deflated as the twentieth century went on. After the failure of the May 1968 protests due to de Gaulle's nationalist provocations, the French intellectuals were led to recognize that the masses' investment in their own repression is more powerful than what could be explained by the deceptions of ideology.
This is the typical narrative explaining why Deleuze and Guattari published Anti-Oedipus in 1972, a book confronting the libidinous desire for repression. But I think it's silly that it took men so long to come to terms with the fact that they do not have some higher and inherent tendency toward freedom just waiting to be realized. and I think I know why: that would make them a bunch of women. Men have relegated to the other half of the population a natural desire for their own repression; desiring violence, penetration, and rape. When men are made repressed and powerless, it's only propaganda that holds them back. When it's women, it's evidence of their inferiority in nature. While Anti-Oedipus is very shy about addressing the condition of the second gender -- ironic, because if anyone is contained and suffocated by the Oedipal family, it's the domestic labourers of the last few thousand years -- Andrea Dworkin is not in her Right-Wing Women.
Dworkin does not waste time infantilizing right-wing women for falling for the ideological picture-books and cartoons of the patriarchy (though men insist that the images of feminist-owned YouTube videos forgive any responsibility for their internet "nazi phases"). They are invested in the symbols of the patriarchy because men have monopolized the entire field of meaning. It is Lacan that is credited for first recognizing women's exclusion from the symbolic order, but women are always made aware of the hostility of language against them when "to fuck" is synonymous with subjugation and "to be fucked" is synonymous with being subjugated; quoting Catherine A. MacKinnon, "Man fucks woman; subject verb object."
"No one can bear to live a meaningless life. Women fight for meaning just as women fight for survival: by attaching themselves to men and the values honored by men. By committing themselves to male values, women seek to acquire value. By advocating male meaning, women seek to acquire meaning." (11)1
Sex and subjugation is the center of all representations of power and desire. To add a psychoanalytical perspective to Right-Wing Women: no desire of ours can represent anything but the phallus. Women desire men because they lack the phallus (penis envy), women desire women because they lack the phallus (lesbians want to be men), women desire sexual freedom because they lack the phallus (not only to be fucked but to fuck) … When right-wing women appeal to the values of men, it is not because they are ignorant of some more truthful self-value that exists deep down inside of them, but because no meaning is possible outside of the patriarchy and they know it.2
The most successful project of anti-feminist propaganda was not conducted by the Right but the Left. The fascists say it how it is: men hate you, so stay home and avoid as many of us as possible. "Is there a way out of the home that does not lead, inevitably and horribly, to the street corner? This is the question right-wing women face. This is the question all women face, but right-wing women know it" (52). Leftist men rather offer to women "sexual revolution." When women want birth control and abortion for their bodily autonomy, they want the same for more sex and less reasons to say no; if she says no it means she is "repressed." The same rhetoric remains today. Men on the Left either do not acknowledge feminism beyond relegating women's liberation to a secondary consequence of their proletariat revolution, or they are proud of buying sex and jerking off to porn in the name of supporting "sex workers."
"The girls of the sixties lived in what Marxists call, but in this instance do not recognize as, a 'contradiction.' Precisely in trying to erode the boundaries of gender through an apparent single standard of sexual-liberation practice, they participated more and more in the most gender reifying-act: fucking." (81)
Deleuze and Guattari argue that Capitalism absorbs or reterritorializes technological revolution (the means of production) into itself; Feudalism had its mechanisms of anti-production that slowed the development of technology and maintained despotic power for a little longer, but Capitalism's innovation is the self-perpetual displacement of its own limits, its instability and recessions made inherit to its own functioning. But I wouldn't give Capitalism the credit of inventing total immanence. The Patriarchy equally absorbs progress into itself. We already addressed the inescapability of phallic value, and the conversion of women's efforts against repression into means for men to have more sex. But there is a third issue that Capitalism and the Patriarchy take advantage of hand-in-hand: women in the workforce.
It can be said that women have gained greater access to employment and fairer wages in the last century -- and even since Dworkin wrote Right-wing women in the 80s. But she remains lucid about the same problem: "[right-wing women] see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex game of their kind: at home and at work too" (56). The moment that women in the first-world received greater means to a career, it has become impossible to afford a household on a single income. Husbands still work, and his work remains an excuse to neglect care for his children while the working mother continues to bear all the domestic labor. Right-wing women are aware, and the most obviously aware is the Tradwife grifter. The fact alone that the Tradwife influencer has access to a cellphone and knows how to use Instagram gives away that she has no genuine belief in the lifestyle that she shares online. But if women don't fall for images, men do; if she must either sell nudes to many men, or pictures of her cooking and collecting chickens' eggs that only make her the sexual object of one man (her husband), the choice is obvious. A relevant quote from Anti-Oedipus:
"We see the most disadvantaged, the most excluded members of society invest with passion the system that oppresses them … Repressing desire, not only for others but in oneself, being the cop for others and for oneself -- that is what arouses, and its not ideology, it is economy … Oh, to be sure, it is not for himself or his children that the capitalist works, but for the immortality of the system. A violence without purpose, a joy, a pure joy in feeling oneself a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes."
My only deviation from Dworkin's line of thought is that I'm not satisfied to chalk it up to right-wing women's sense of self-preservation. Like D&G's capitalist that does not really work for his survival but for the ecstasy of being a cog in the machine, I don't think it entirely escapes these women that they are at a greater risk of domestic violence than violence from strangers; and many of them experience just that. I think it's the certainty of the organisation of desire in the established Patriarchal order (despite its flows of deterritorialisation that sometimes confuse to whom abortion serves as well as the gendered organisation of labour). The Patriarchy offers meaning -- even if it's a meaning that makes all desire desire for the phallus, even if it's the meaning of the theater of Oedipus.
"The Right offers women a simple, fixed, predetermined social, biological, and sexual order. Form conquers chaos. Form banishes confusion. Form gives ignorance a shape, makes it look like something instead of nothing." (12)
Unrepressed desire would do something, not mean something. It would be an explosion to the established order. But without an order to provide it with a higher purpose, it would be meaningless. This is why I suggest that women aspire to uselessness. Like birth control and fairer wages, the Patriarchy will make any apparent progress for women useful to either reproduction (biological and economic) or to sex. It is even capable of making anti-natalism serve itself.3
I once saw a Reel of a woman pointing silently but with a smile at the following video, a comparison of young boys versus girls following a command to march:
The silent expression in the Reel seemed to imply that the argument was self-evident: women are advantaged because they have a natural disposition to order and coordination. But what can go unsaid is often the worst microfascism. Is this the meaning, the usefulness that we are settling for? Marching on command better than men?
--