It's Time to Take Sexism Seriously as a Political Force

From ELLE

Once upon a time, it would have been laughable to refer to WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange as "right-wing." That, of course, was back before Assange made appearances on Fox News, before WikiLeaks tweeted anti-Semitic memes, before liberal mainstay Keith Olbermann called him "an enemy of this country and freedom." In other words, before Assange stood accused of helping far-right authoritarian Vladimir Putin subvert the United States democratic process in order to help elect Donald Trump.

Before all that, believe it or not, Julian Assange-radical transparency advocate! Antiwar hacktivist! Martyr!-was a more or less undisputed hero of the American left. In fact, he was so untouchable that, when he was arrested in 2010, Michael Moore personally paid his bail. Olbermann actually took to Twitter to launch fiery invective at anyone who dared impugn Assange's honor.

Of course, there was the minor detail that Assange had been arrested for the rape of two Swedish women-and the people that Olbermann shouted at online were feminist protesters, asking him to take those allegations seriously. (Full disclosure: I was among them.) Which leads one to the unpleasant hypothesis that if more people had actually listened to women at the time, Assange might never have built up the credibility necessary to sway the election in the first place. And if these women had been taken seriously, the unlikely alliance of Assange, Putin, and Trump might not seem that surprising after all.

Though Assange, Putin, and Trump look like a motley crew-they are, respectively, far left, far right, and a shrieking mass of chaos punctuated by Breitbart headlines-they are united by one coherent, mutually shared political philosophy. They are all misogynists. All three have made openly sexist and/or anti-feminist statements; Trump and Putin have both moved to pass those beliefs into law; Trump and Assange both stand accused of sexually assaulting women. If one tracks these men in this way, their seeming alliance is anything but surprising. The issue is that sexism is still seen mostly as a matter of personality, not politics, even as sexism continues to operate with the power of a political force that can change the world.

When sexist thought crops up under different rationales, and at different points on the political spectrum, it's easy to dismiss as somehow apolitical-to see it as a matter of individual men being mean or maladjusted, or to conclude that "our side" is never sexist, whereas "their side" always is. What we don't give enough credit to is the idea of sexism itself as a political vector-a self-sufficient cause, capable of aligning with and uniting otherwise disparate factions.

To get a sense of how sexism operates within different ideological strains, it's useful to contrast these three men and the different ways sexism has defined their political engagement. Putin's governing style has been described as "patriarchal nationalism," in which homophobia and sexism, and the resulting confinement of women to traditional heteronormative roles, is used to constitute the national identity. This doesn't just mean a lack of support for things like abortion rights (although there is that) but actively framing women's empowerment as a threat to national security: Putin policy advisor and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, is known for giving statements like, "Woman must be focused inwards, where her children are, where her home is. If this incredibly important function of women is destroyed then everything will be destroyed-the family and, if you wish, the motherland." Feminist activists in Russia are jailed-not just in the relatively high-profile Pussy Riot case, but also in incidents like a 2013 International Women's Day march, where "police broke up and arrested 17 women because they shouted out slogans that were not approved, like 'Feminism is liberation.'"

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Next to all this, Assange's misogyny can seem like small potatoes. (After all, if he has two sexual misconduct allegations, Trump has two dozen.) Still, since 2011, the official WikiLeaks Twitter account-widely believed to be run by Assange himself-has mentioned the word "feminism" 10 times, and none of those mentions have been favorable. Most of these tweets are directly related to Assange's rape case and frame women's rights as inherently conservative and destructive:

Assange also routinely frames Sweden as a misandrist dystopia, which he has done since 2010, when he called it "the Saudi Arabia of feminism" and claimed that the rape allegations were due to the fact that "[he] fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism"; meanwhile, he says, his male critics behave like "schoolgirls" and have "failed [his] masculinity test." In July, WikiLeaks doxxed every female voter in 79 out of Turkey's 81 provinces.

It's probably impossible to say anything new about the misogyny of President-elect Trump at this point-as Franklin Foer has written, the idea that women are pieces of meat to be acquired and violated may be the only belief of Trump's that has never changed-but, shocking as his sexist remarks were to his critics, they were also seemingly responsible for his win. In several polls, hostile sexism was found to be a better predictor of Trump support than economic concerns, and roughly as good as actual party identification. One study found that evangelical Christians, who supported Trump despite the fact that he is not religious, may have done it at least in part because the majority of them agreed with statements like "society as a whole has become too soft and feminine."

We may never be able to fully parse the level of witting or unwitting collusion between Putin, Trump, and Assange in the DNC hack, but it's no trouble at all to identify a common motive. All three men deeply, publicly loathed Hillary Clinton. Assange, according to former associates, saw Clinton as primarily responsible for U.S. hostility to WikiLeaks, and was eager to "settle a score." Trump, especially in the late stages of the general election, seemed to harbor hatred for "Crooked Hillary" in a way that verged on the physical: stalking her around debate stages, hinting that "Second Amendment people" could "do something" about her, hissing "nasty woman" while she spoke. And Putin, well, his response to Clinton's criticism of his regime speaks for itself: "It's better not to argue with women. But Ms. Clinton has never been too graceful in her statements," he said in 2014, after she'd criticized his invasion of the Ukraine. "When people push boundaries too far, it's not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman."

It would be foolish to attribute all of this to sexism. Clinton was a legitimate threat to Trump's presidential ambitions, Putin's national interests, and Assange's freedom. but it would be equally foolish to count sexism out. When three men, with three nominally different world views, are all so singularly, obsessively angry at a powerful woman that they all somehow wind up working to destroy her career and reputation, and when at least two of those men explain their anger in terms of the target's refusal to behave "correctly" (i.e., correctly for a woman), it's really hard to tell a coherent story of their alignment without bringing misogyny into the equation.

Yet we continually refuse to bring misogyny into the equation, or to see violence against women as political violence. Political commentators parse elections in terms of the gender of candidates or voters, divide issues into "economic" and "social," divide causes or actors into "right" and "left," rather than considering that repressing women's participation in public life may be its own coherent political ideology, shared by men and some (admittedly self-destructive) women across the political spectrum.

By failing to account for misogyny all this, we somehow missed the rise of one of the most damaging international alliances in the 2016 election. If nothing else, the DNC hack and Assange's turn to the far right might serve as a wake-up call: a sign to listen to women early, and take their concerns seriously, before a powerful man moves on from harming individual women and focuses on harming the future and the world.

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