The centerfold as renegade in both feminism and fascism

Strange bedfellows

The other day, I was browsing through YouTube, checking out what the algorithm had selected for me, and saw that one of the selections was on the topic of feminism and fascism. Well, that piqued my interest. As a feminist, I have been absorbing all of these cultural changes over the last decade in the United States and comparing them to that slice of time in history when fascism was brand new. I might appreciate an analysis that drilled down on this critical juncture of cultural structure and social interaction.

And, for the most part, at least at first, I agreed with the general thrust of the viewpoint put forth by the interviewee, Tai Lee, in terms of her elaboration. But just at the point where she delved into the topics of sexuality, sex roles and gender, I began to diverge quite sharply from what Lee was espousing.

It’s important to note that the interview’s title in full was “Feminist Analysis: The Sexual and Gender Politics of Fascism,” conducted by Revolutionary Left Radio. So that gives you some of the flavor of the discussion and what it takes as the base of ideas. “Revolutionary left” indicates some relationship to critiques of capitalism, imperialism, and other forms of socioeconomic social control.

That’s the angle from which I was expecting Lee to bring an analysis of “sexual and gender politics,” but instead she falls back on antiquated Second-wave feminist ideas that, arguably, have set back the feminist cause by way of a regressive worldview. She echoes concepts that were cutting-edge in the ‘70s precisely because they were so radical: they were ideas that had never been approached before. But the moment we inhabited in the 1970s is not the moment we inhabit in the 2020s, and those concepts do not fit the framework of fighting against modern-day fascism.

The guest, Tai Lee, gives a very rudimentary feminist analysis of pornography, branding it as inherently violent and as privileging male sexual access to women. Lee’s argument, as it stands, employs strawmen and never actually provides a solution or even real examples. The pronouncement, then, comes across as superficial and propagandistic. Moreover, as there are no actual examples other than generalizations, the “analysis” is thin.

At around the hour mark, the host sets up a question for Lee, inquiring about the cultural lives of teenage boys in our society, how they are overly influenced by such reactionary figures as Andrew Tate (someone who has made a brand out of outsize machismo and misogyny). Lee picks up the thread, taking the host’s observations as a springboard:

~ 1:07:29: I think that a lot of these insecurities that come up, particularly when it comes to sex, [have] to do with the way that sex functions in patriarchal society. So when young boys feel insecure about certain sexual relations that they might have or desire, a lot of that comes from being taught that men are entitled to sex. That is such a taken-for-granted thing in our society. 

It is here that Lee dismissively introduces what she terms as the “pro-sex argument”:

~ 1:08:04: And even in defenses of the sex trade that you see from these “pro-sex work” blah blah “leftists,” whatever, the underlying idea even in that is that men should be able to have sex whenever they want.

How about anybody, regardless of gender, “should be able to have sex whenever they want,” as long as they’re with a consenting partner? Consent culture is what feminism is about.

Lee goes on to state that such a view promotes the idea that men should always have access to sex, which is not what a pro-sex (or even a “pro-sex work”) argument does. A pro-sex argument advances the idea that sexuality by a person of either sex should not be constrained by overly repressive societal norms. It does not privilege the seeking or satisfaction of sexual desire of one sex/gender over another. That’s one of the strawmen that Lee constructs.

~ 1:08: 15: They want sex on demand. Which is the essence of rape culture, right? That is the foundation of that.

This is a bad argument. Pornography, and even prostitution — “sex on demand” — does not lead to rape culture. Rape, by definition, occurs without consent. If someone is paying for “sex on demand,” that means that the person posing in the photo shoot or participating in the encounter has already consented on some level, and the monetary exchange is a formalization of that consent.

The counterargument presented here is not new, so it is an idea that Lee should have been able to address; but she skirts around the issue.

(And, of course, Lee’s thin analysis does not view the encounter from the perspective of the other participant, presumably female. Female sexuality, thus rendered invisible, does not enter into the picture. It’s entirely worthwhile to consider that the female may desire just that form of interaction and encounter. But that view screws up the whole “rape culture” characterization.)

Scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, where the bombardier in his cockpit extends a centerfold.

From here, Lee states that young boys get prefabricated ideas of what sexual encounters should be like from pornography, then are surprised or astonished when these things do not pan out in real life.

~ 1:08:45: So, young boys have a kind of a break in their brain when it comes to what they’ve been taught since they’re children, and what they learn in pornography and just the overall objectification of women throughout society in every aspect of our culture, is this sexual entitlement. And so, when they step out into the real world, and that is not what it actually is — and that women do have some sort of agency, and we do have our own sexual needs, right? — these two, what they’ve been taught, what they’ve been told, and what the reality is, are so different from one another [that] it causes a very, very vicious kind of alienation, like a source of intense violence, because you feel like you have been wronged because what you’ve been told is that you get free reign over women as sexual objects, and it turns out, hey, women are actually people.

For Lee, this discrepancy between fantasy and real life is what causes a deep sense of alienation in these boys. This is incorrect. In the causal chain, it is the commercialization of the pornography that causes the alienation, because commercialization changes the relationship between the consumer of the material and the material (the depictions) itself.

Lee continues pontificating:

~ 1:09:46: It causes an intense fracturing of your own psyche, you know. It’s really destabilizing. And that’s why the most extreme of these young boys, it’s like the incel types, they go and they shoot up rooms full of children.

It is at this point where Lee’s argument becomes propagandistic. None of these statements are unsupported, not even by examples. These are merely statements meant to emotionally swamp the audience. The image of a school shooter comes out of nowhere. It’s very associative and not fundamentally sound as an argument.¹

Lee goes further:

~ 1:10:08: And I think it comes from what we teach young boys about women. And when you really pick that apart — and, again, it’s something we take for granted, it seems, because it’s so commonplace — when you really pull that apart, the ideology of the sexual entitlement, it’s so widespread and it’s so inherently violent.

No, pornography is not inherently violent. A pro-sex worldview is not inherently violent.

It is in this statement that Lee comes closest to revealing that she is working with a Second-Wave feminist viewpoint.

Second-Wave Feminism and the Anti-Sexual View

The Second Wave of feminism occurred between the 1950s and 1990s, having its high watermark in the ’60s and ’70s. Varied voices came from that movement, but of the so-called radical feminists two names stand out: Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. The two paired up in the 1980s to help craft legislation to outlaw pornography in Canada and in the states of Minnesota and Indiana, contending that such material inherently caused violence to women.

MacKinnon, in her 1997 essay “Sexuality,” imparted her ideas about the nature of male and female sexuality, as well as pornography and its relation to violence:

“[V]iolence is sex when it is practiced as sex.”²

“What is understood as violation, conventionally penetration and intercourse, defines the paradigmatic sexual encounter.”³

“Pornography . . . shows how men see the world[.]”⁴

“From the testimony of the pornography, what men want is: women bound, women battered, women tortured, women humiliated, women degraded and defiled, women killed.”⁵

“Pornography is a means through which sexuality is socially constructed . . . It constructs women as things for sexual use and constructs its consumers to desperately want women, to desperately want possession and cruelty and dehumanization.”⁶

“No pornography, no male sexuality.”⁷

While Lee does not reference MacKinnon specifically, parallels to MacKinnon’s constellation of ideas evidence themselves in Lee’s argumentation. And note the extremity in MacKinnon’s assertions, especially the ultimate remark shown here.⁸

MacKinnon, an academic, advances these ideas with a purpose, which is to clamp, rotate, and drill down on the concept of pornography in order to bring into focus the dehumanization that, in her eyes, lies at the heart of all human sexual relations. She is getting at a deeper argument. Lee, on the other hand, isn’t doing that. She’s parroting received wisdom and applying it in a context where the radical feminist analysis does not reveal or clarify. Lee uses these ideas to the point of oversimplification, where the ideas turn facile.

Picking up from above, Lee says about “the ideology of sexual entitlement”:

~ 1:10:39: And it shapes most men’s worldview — even if you’re not a guy that’s going out and raping women all the time. You know, you don’t have to be some serial rapist in order to be operating in your life in such a way that reinforces that idea.

But it’s everywhere, and it’s the groundwork for so many of these extremist ideologies. Women exist for sex and for reproducing. That’s it.

That’s clearly not a pro-sex view. Certainly it is not a sexual liberationist view. Yet, as concepts in diametrical opposition, that is how Lee has set up her argument. This failure to accurately portray the opposing argument is a fundamental inconsistency on her part, which is why her assertions come across as propagandistic. Lee appears to throw buzzwords together in order to craft a caricature of the movement she means to critique.

Lee wraps this segment of the interview:

~ 1:11:10: And so I think we need to — as feminists, as Marxists — that’s an idea that we really have to take more seriously, as a political project.

To Lee’s detriment, she hasn’t treated the capitalist or consumerist lens through which pornography exists. Instead, her critique is moralistic. Again, it’s of a classic Second-Wave feminist lens, but it’s not Marxist. She uses the word ‘alienation’, but that’s not enough to call the critique Marxist.⁹

What, then, would qualify? A critique that scrutinizes fascism in light of feminism may indeed employ Marxist precepts in order to disassemble the constituent parts of fascism that rely upon the reproducible subjugation of females — both in their labor as well as their living roles. In “Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology,” Maria-Antoinetta Macciocchi does just that.

Anti-fascism as a feminist method

Written in 1979, Macciocchi’s text explores the symbolism of femininity in the belief system of fascism, how and where the female is constituted in the fascist imaginary, and how sexuality informs these systems.

First and foremost, it is clear that, in fascism, the singular role available to females is that of mother. Macciocchi notes how Benito Mussolini, the originator of classic fascism, incrementally relegated females in Italian society to one tiny aspect of society. I quote Macciocchi at length:

“The economic crisis of 1929, with its enormous repercussions, was first of all resolved by a series of decrees and measures which made women pay for the consequences of it. They were dismissed from work, especially from the professions (in the first place from medicine), and from teaching in schools. They were dismissed from higher education, where women had to pay double fees (a German measure to prevent women studying Latin). Finally they were expelled, as happened in Italy, from both state and private institutions, where it was decided that the proportion of women should not exceed ten per cent. 

“Mussolini asserted, at the level of theory, an incompatibility between women and machines, (an article entitled ‘Machine and Woman’ appeared in Il Popolo d'Italia in 1934) and said that any such relationship degrades male virility, robs men of their work, prevents births and masculinizes women. He declared that the activity of an architect was inconceivable for women, since they were deprived of any ability to create or synthesize; he proclaimed that women could not build a hut, let alone a temple. Having insulted them in this virile fashion he hurled them back into the only activity granted to them, that of producing children.”¹⁰

This severe role restriction is as much a reduction to the body as radical feminists claim pornography to be. Both at first glance render the female form into an object: in pornography, as an abstracted and compressed commodity; in fascist ideology, as the husband’s means of production.

But see the crucial difference. In fascism, for a female of reproductive age, there is no escape from the utter relegation to that of a flesh factory. The centerfold, at least, can choose to enter the profession and be compensated for her participation. She retains agency.

Another key aspect as well is the fact that, in our current economic system (at least in the West), two-income households are now the norm. That reality came about only through prying women away from the inevitability of biology. That is, the sexual revolution freed women to pursue a relatively unbroken line of career advances without being waylaid by an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy. Without society’s tacit acceptance of this state of affairs, employers very well may have continued to set aside jobs explicitly for women — positions without real advancement, as those hires could unexpectedly leave the field to bear and rear children.

The fascist system anticipates such a result — indeed, we see that Mussolini created conditions that shunted women into the household, a place with nothing more to do or be other than baby creators. No employer to disappoint, no industrial productivity that would be interrupted with the announcement of pregnancy — the matron had her realm, and it was there and only there that she was celebrated.

“The ‘emotional’ plague of fascism is spread through an epidemic of familialism, and it requires women to lose their autonomy in submitting to him who bears the whip. Women are crucified by continual procreation, and always subject to patriarchal authority as mothers, wives or daughters.”¹¹

The non-fascist way to create financial prosperity in a capitalist framework, in contrast, requires women to unlock and decouple their potential from their bodily possession. In that process — that is, in gaining access to contraception and other forms of birth control — the female also becomes free to pursue sex proactively, a role previously reserved for males.

It is this role that disrupts the cult of tradition that permeates fascist, patriarchal society.¹² At no time in patriarchy can women pursue sex for pleasure (that is, sans reproduction). That affords too much agency and disturbs the dichotomy of power between the sexes.

“[T]he anxieties fed by sexual guilt . . . prepare the ground for repressive tyranny. This female ‘character armour’ of fascism (and neo-fascism) is sustained by the four papal encyclicals which have . . . demand[ed] from [women] nothing other than procreation, and as a consequence [allow] them no divorce, no contraceptive pills, no abortion and so on. Supported by this ‘spiritual’ authority fascism and neo-fascism organize the reactionary mentality, not only of the individual, but of women, under the form of the authoritarian family. This leads to a definition of the character structure of the petit bourgeois social strata[.]”¹³

“Fascism organized the female ‘character armour’ by means of a rigorously chaste discourse, and its greatest efforts lie in its murder of sexuality; female sexuality is cheated, through language, the political liturgy and the ceremonial mystique.”¹⁴

“The body of fascist discourse is rigorously chaste, pure, virginal. Its central aim is the death of sexuality . . . .”¹⁵

“[M]ysticism favours sexual repression and consumes sexual energy. . . . [E]ver since the end of the last century, marxism has accused sexual repression, mysticism and chastity as the womb of reaction[.]”¹⁶

It is for this reason that sexual liberation — freedom from being bound to the body, to the idea that biology is destiny — must be implemented as a bulwark against fascism. Societies that guarantee women’s sexual freedom, in its full fanned-out panoply, are in the least danger of falling prey to fascism, precisely because of this incompatibility.

Indeed, this is why one cannot begin to think of banishing pornography in a society that hopes to keep fascism and similar forms of extremism at bay. One cannot restrict female sexuality to such an extent so that its very image disappears. No, the image of the liberated female must be allowed to be celebrated; and, in a capitalist society, that means the possibility of being commodified, as it is commodities in such systems that are highly prized.¹⁷

Money distorts a true appraisal of the body

Make no mistake: the problem of pornography is a problem of capitalism. Why? Because, under capitalism, human relationships are not just distorted but fundamentally changed, altered by the properties of the system itself.

In capitalism, people are fundamentally abstracted and reduced in terms of the ever-extensive, overarching and downward-pressing economy, which restructures the way that people interact in social spaces.

In the instance of pornography, the consumer — already an abstraction and distortion of one’s relation to oneself — purchases the pornographic magazine or video, a further compression. The centerfold is abstracted even further, and it is at this level that the consumer begins to interact with the image.

This concentric level of reduction effects the same problem as a copy of a copy of a copy. Information is lost as one gets further away from the original representation (i.e., reality).¹⁸

This effect is compounded by the distortions generated by distinctions of class. The major difference, in terms of socialization, between middle and working classes is the quality of interpersonal relationships. By ‘quality’, I don’t mean intrinsic worth; rather, I speak of the indelible texture or fabric of those relationships. Middle-class interpersonal interactions are more processed — they are overdetermined. Many more tiny, even imperceptible, symbolic gestures and rituals are incorporated in middle-class relations, much more than is present in working classes (who, it could be said, are not known to stand on ceremony).

So there is already an inherent distortion in intra-middle-class relationships; and it is middle-class culture that appears to have the most profound problems with pornography and establishing an equilibrium with such material in their social environment. Already, when they come into contact with the material — either as a consumer at the point-of-sale or as a person in society thinking about the impact of pornography on the culture — they arrive loaded for bear with these distorted material relationships, the sum of which creates its own lens for any further interaction with that material. It is simulacra upon simulacra, falseness made exponential.

From that perspective, the pornographic image could never reflect the human body: it is too removed. Again, this is a complication of capitalism.¹⁹

Unresolved tension between the image and the real

What I would like to see in Lee’s analysis would be an exploration of what it means for the pornographic image to stand between the consumer — in her case, the teenaged boy or young man — and the real-life partner that he has taken and who is then expected to perform as a pornographic person. The image, consumed prior to the flesh-and-blood interaction, appears to function as a determinant of behavior. 

(This interpellation could be seen as symbolizing the alienation brought upon the individual in his everyday interactions in industrialized culture. In a way, the pornographic image could be seen almost as a stained-glass window through which the person on the other side is already and always imbued with predetermined pornographic “color.” As long as the image remains in mind, the color palette will hang between, mediating interaction.)²⁰ 

Lee touches upon this! But, again, she falls back on a moralistic analysis, one that gets us no closer to comprehending either consumerism, sexuality, gender, or fascism. Lee’s treatment is so superficial that it lends no understanding.

With what does Lee leave us? Positioning herself against “sex-positive” leftists or feminists, she presents instead sex prescriptivism (i.e., do this approved thing) and proscription (don’t do this other thing). That’s a system of permission and forbidding — in other words, a system of morality. As Lee does not set down a marker as to what would differ in her system from what surrounds us in our current culture, her restrictions default to our already established system of mores — that which has served patriarchy for centuries.

As Macciocchi says in describing this unfortunate parallel:

“The outcome is thus a putrefying ideological bog which can exist alongside fascist ideology: in the devalorization humiliation of the other sex, in a new amputation of sexuality in the relation with men. . . . [W]hile, by tacit compromise, women undertake not to go beyond the limits of masculine socio-political power, they receive in exchange the guarantee that as far as men are concerned, sexuality will not be encouraged, that the social fabric will be emptied of sexuality, it will be hygienic and sterilized in relation to reproduction.”²¹

Those persons (especially females) looking to slip the strictures of patriarchy may encounter what appears to be a philosophy that extricates them, a freeing philosophy known as feminism; but if that feminism offers them a form of sexuality that is as restrictive and reductive as what those persons had known before, can it really be said to offer an escape?

1. It also is worth pointing out Lee’s shoddy logic. While there have been instances of some of those self-identified as incel — “involuntarily celibate” — becoming mass shooters (Elliot Rodger is a notable example), there is little evidence going the other way, that any significant number of the population of mass shooters are also incels. That is to say, the correlation is rather incidental. More likely, it is that incel culture provides a gateway to ideas that are shared in common with other extreme ideologies and, depending on the individual, may coagulate into a personal worldview that emphasizes grievance and retaliation. But, again, there is no causal link yet found between incel self-identification and outcome of school or mass shootings. It is an associative link only.

2. Catharine MacKinnon, “Sexuality.” In The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (1997), Linda Nicholson, ed., p. 164. Routledge: New York.

3. Ibid., p. 165.

4. Ibid., p. 166.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 167.

7. Ibid.

8. Andrea Dworkin, in her 1987 work Intercourse, in many ways goes further than even MacKinnon. Among her many statements include: “[G]etting fucked and being owned are inseparably the same; together, being one and the same, they are sex for women under male dominance as a social system” (p. 66); “There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered” (p. 122); “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women” (p. 138); “[T]o have sex . . . means creating a victim” (p. 192). Dworkin, Intercourse (1987). Free Press Paperbacks: New York.

9. Alienation in Marx’s view should be distinguished from the ordinary, sociological definition. The more everyday meaning of alienation refers to feeling distant or removed from society or groups. Marx referred to alienation, however, as regarding a fundamental state of being in capitalist / industrial society, at least among the vast majority of people who do not own the means of production (i.e., the machines and material that can create commodities). As those who are forced by the conditions of modern society to seek to “sell their labor,” the worker is removed from the product of that labor — the item or service that the labor created. Indeed, the product is given over to the industrialist, removed from the person who created the commodity. For Marx, this loss of the fruit of one’s labor, via this process of abstraction, manifests as a deprivation of a fundamental part of self.

10. Maria-Antoinetta Macciocchi, “Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology.” Feminist Review (1979), Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 72. Emphases in original. Paragraph spacing added for clarity in reading.

11. Ibid., p. 73.

12. Wilhelm Reich, in his treatise on fascism, affirms this, saying, “The anti-revolutionary movement originates from political reaction’s creeds, which are held together by the lower middle class’s economic mode of existence and by ideologic mysticism. The core of political reaction’s cultural politics is the sexual question. Accordingly, the core of revolutionary cultural politics must also be the sexual question.” The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946 / 1970), p. 114. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.

13. Macciocchi, op. cit., pp. 73-74.

14. Ibid., pp. 74-75.

15. Ibid., p. 75.

16. Ibid.

17. That does not mean that the commodified relation is ideal — indeed, this is where a true Marxist analysis could make its entrance, delineating the dangers of the falseness and alienation inherent in the commercial exchange. However, note that that type of analysis is antipodal to what Lee presented in her interview with Revolutionary Left Radio. Indeed, her commentary is ultra-ironic, as Marxism is about piercing false consciousness, whereas her discourse serves to perpetuate a suppression of female sexuality under the guise of protectionism — a pernicious form of false consciousness if ever there was one.

18. In a pre-industrial society, presumably the representation — a cave drawing, perhaps, or a stone figure — found its source closer at hand. Under capitalism, the consumer’s first relationship is with money, and the exchange of that for the material is what informs the relationship to the material itself.

19. Working classes don’t escape this effect, either, as they too are affected by capitalism. However, they, being more “down to earth” and not overly burdened by having to observe all of these symbolic gestures before being able to consume the image before them, are “closer” to the image, for the lack of those forced enactments.

20. “Media theorist David Gauntlett argues that ‘interpellation occurs when a person connects with a media text: when we enjoy a magazine or TV show, for example, this uncritical consumption means that the text has interpellated us into a certain set of assumptions, and caused us to tacitly accept a particular approach to the world.’" Wikipedia, “Interpellation (philosophy),” quoting Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction (2002), p. 27.

21. Macciocchi, op.cit., p. 80. Emphases added.