By Debra Wirth
I remember being at a Palm Sunday march in Perth in the early 1980s and coming across a group of very brightly clad women who were chanting and banging tambourines. As we were marching, a male cop on a motorbike came alongside and began aggressively demanding that we keep to one side of the road. One woman, either not hearing or refusing to hear, continued to stray onto the other side of the road.
The cop intentionally ran his bike into her, causing her to stumble and almost fall. The group of women then began angrily chanting "Take the toy from the boy! Take the toy from the boy!"
The chant seemed quite appropriate at the time, and I'm sure many of us meant nothing more than that it was unacceptable for the cop to use violence against the woman. It was only later I became aware that in some parts of the women's movement this slogan expresses an analysis of society and, more specifically, of the causes of war. The argument is that men are genetically more disposed towards violence than women; they therefore invented war and caused all past wars. Their violent genetic tendency is reinforced by the socialisation process.
There are varying extremes of this argument. From David Suzuki, in an interview in the February 2 Sydney Morning Herald: "There is no question war is a male, macho thing. The geneticists have to look at the possession of the Y chromosome. I think it is a really deadly chromosome."
In the rest of the interview, Suzuki gives the impression that the "men are the cause of war" idea isn't fundamental to his analysis of what is going on in the world. In fact, I got the impression that his first couple of remarks were a rather flippant attempt to appeal to as broad a layer as possible. After all, he can't have meant it when he said of his gender, "We've got to go, man". (The interviewer was a woman.) Got to go!
There is a degree to which this argument does away with the need to have a much more in depth analysis of war. Some of the leaflets and positions which have come out on the Gulf War for example, do not put the blame for the war directly on the US and its interests in exploiting the region and crushing Arab nationalism. They avoid the question by implying that all that needs to be said is that men, due to some combination of biological and social factors, are to blame for war.
Two bob each way
The following passage from a 1989 article entitled "The war in Lebanon" by Evelyne Accad in the Women's Studies International Forum, is an example of the crudest form of the argument:
"The more man desires omnipotence and the control of others, the more he uses his weapons. The means of conquest are given a value in proportion to their success. The gun, the machine-gun, the cannon — all masculine sexual symbols, an extension of the phallus — are put forward and used to conquer and destroy ... Man uses his penis like he uses his gun: to conquer, control, and possess."
This sounds very much like a purely biological determinist argument. Yet Accad goes on to say that if the "attitude of the people does not undergo a profound transformation — a radical change in the way they perceive power and love — there can be no solution to his inextricable dilemma ". So she begins to move away from the idea that the cause of war is biologically determined and towards the idea that it is socially determined. But it is still not a satisfactory argument.
If war is caused by the male Y chromosome, and the female X chromosome is its opposite, then surely all men would be wanting to wage wars and all women would be against all wars. Apart from this being blatantly not the case, the argument has patronising overtones, implying that women are inherently more passive than men — which isn't that far from the imagery of men as victors and women as victims.
Evidence from Third World
If you tried to sell this argument to the Third World, neither sex would be in a mood to buy. The people of Africa, South and Central America and Asia will tell you that it is not men who are their main problem but exploitation from the First World and governments which serve the interests of that exploitation. Fighting against poverty and repression in these countries, even with arms, is certainly not the domain only of men. If it were, most liberation struggles would be hopeless.
An element of confusion can enter this debate from the fact that most — not all — of the people who own multinational corporations and merchant banks, and most of the people who run their governments, are men. But they have other features (none of them redeeming).
Most of the owners and directors of the multinational corporations and banks are also of European ancestry, have great wealth (more often inherited rather than gained through any effort of their own) and are heterosexual. These features also apply to repressive puppet governments of the Third World, aside from being European, which would make it all a little too obvious. These regimes repress men as well as women.
Given that there are many times more non-European men than European men in the world, the "all men are inherently more violent and power hungry than women" argument begins to look a bit flawed. Bringing the Third World into the debate, helps explain the real causes of war and repression — not to mention sexism, racism and poverty.
These inequalities are maintained, ultimately with the use of force, to prevent people from uniting against the common oppressor. They are in the interests of the class of people — men and women — who profit from exploiting and repressing us. It is in our interests to overcome these imposed divisions of sex and race and build a united movement against exploitation in whatever form it takes.
While there are many different analyses and streams of thought in the women's movement — and its diversity is its strength — we will succeed in winning women's liberation only if we continue to build pressed groups and recognise the source of their oppression and our own.
As a participant of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp said in 1983: "What is really great about the movement and those who fight back, with everything to gain and nothing to lose, is that new human relations exist in it. People's values and attitudes change, they seem to move beyond the constraints and conditioning that society imposes on us. I think that inspires me above anything, to see the transformation in people."