No Girls Allowed.

There's a bit of a controversy going on, apparently, about whether or not James Kunstler's latest book, the Witch of Hebron, is sexist. Having recently finished the first book in the series, World Made by Hand, I can say that the latest book is undoubtedly misogynistic if it is anything like the first, and the only real question is why anyone is surprised given the tone that was established.

To give you some background if you don't know, James Howard Kunstler is a well-known (in some circles) thinker and writer on the subject of peak oil. He's written several nonfiction book on peak oil -- most famously The Long Emergency -- which are quite popular (again in some circles), and also runs a successful blog addressing the issues of a contracting global economy dealing with ever diminishing returns of the things that keeps it all ticking over. Most of the points he makes in the book and blog are well thought out and convincing.

A few years ago he also started writing novels which dramatize the way he thinks the world is heading. I think this is a really good idea, since people's failure of imagination is one of the central problems facing society right now. We can't even conceive of a world other than either this-one-only-more-so with a 5G network for our iphone 8, or at best perhaps some world-ending apocalypse. Anything else is inconceivable, so helping people project themselves imaginatively away from themselves (which is what all good fiction does) is a good thing.

The problem is that when people create a world and imagine what will probably happen, one's assumptions and prejudices are necessarily employed in order to project this new reality, and it reveals an awful lot about a person and their view of the world; one of the dominant things I took away from his book was a strong feeling of misogyny and objectification. The few women who speak in the book are weak, traumatized, crazy, evil, or any combination thereof, and all are either moved about like pawns by the men in their lives, or else in one case cast off into madness without her man around.

The main character is a widower who sleeps with his best friend and neighbor's wife, who by the way usually ends their nights together crying because she's so weak and unable to handle the world they're in. He, however, wants a woman living in his house full-time to take care of him and have sex with him, preferably someone young. His wishes are answered when a younger friend of his is shot and killed. That man's wife's situation is instantly very perilous in this new world, since there is virtually no way for an unattached woman to take care of herself in Kunstler's view of the future. Not too surprisingly she falls asleep with a candle burning and sets her house on fire and she and her daughter are rescued by the main character. Partly in thanks, and partly because she has nowhere to go without starving to death (despite the author earlier stating that there were many empty houses on her block, and her garden being undamaged in the fire) she moves in with the main character. To please him, she and her daughter begin keeping house for him -- cooking, cleaning, etc. He greatly appreciates this, despite some initial reaction to having his things moved to where he can't find them (you know men!) Eventually, of course, she sleeps with him, presumably also to please him and keep her and her daughter from dying on the street. Sexy!

This is only one woman in the book, and the main one, but none of the others fare any better. Crazy abandoned woman, weird "queen bee" woman carted around by a cult, nubile girls of said cult, etc. etc. You get the idea. More than this though is the general feeling, which is best expressed in a scene of the town meeting hall (this is from memory, as I've returned the book to the library). Kunstler says that things have reverted to an older way, with powerful men from the town sitting unelected on the town board, and the unpowerful men and all the women naturally sitting outside the circle and watching.

This idea that if industrial capitalism crashes catastrophically women will go back to some "natural" order is profoundly offensive, and very unlikely to boot. Not only would women presumably not permit the rolling back of a few centuries of social progress whatever is happening to Wall Street and Wal-Mart, but in fact women's lives might get significantly better when a society as toxic as this one is gives up the ghost. This culture isn't the only thing standing between women and domination; rather this culture is the thing which teaches systems of domination to us all, man and woman. A catastrophe would at least temporarily suspend this, which is to the good (I'm currently reading a book on that very topic, A Paradise Built in Hell, about which more later.)

This kind of misogyny, and the related racism, permeates people all over this culture, so it shouldn't be surprising that it's here as well. (I linked to a good post about this a while ago.) And indeed it is. The Monkey Wrench Gang, one of the first and most famous radical environmental books, is positively dripping with sexism, badly drawn female character (no plural), and objectification. It's just a little sad that people in one movement can't see that they're perpetuating what they're fired up about in other arena. The core of the environmental justice movement is (or ought to be) a rejection of instrumentalist objectification. It isn't ok for us to do whatever we want to the world just because we're human, not because in the end we'll kill ourselves, but because we don't have the right to. Likewise we can't do whatever we want to women because we're men, or African Americans because we're "white", or whatever. Seeing the connection of domination and hierarchy has long been a problem for many on the left, but it has to change if we're going to build the kinds of communities that will be able to whether environmental and economic earthquakes and come out in a better society rather than a worse one.