War on Biology

You can tell a polemical book has been worth your while when it could easily conclude 'and then, comrades, we can explore the cosmos together!' Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex doesn't quite do this, alas, but it quite easily could have. This book, which is somewhat key to any discussion of the spectre of sexpol, has been my tube reading of late, and what an extraordinary thing it is. Not for its critique, which is in places predictable (comics and Eldridge Cleaver are macho, romance is ideological, etc) but for what the programme. This is a feminist equivalent of the very American techno-utopianism of your Buckminster Fuller types, in that it very much precedes the technophobia that has been a plague on the Left since the late 60s, and instead proposes a feminist revolution via an unrelenting war on nature.



Biology, which as she points out was already hugely mutable by humanity (and become more so since she wrote this in 1969) is the irreconcilable enemy of the revolution. In the later stages of the book, this seems like a revolution based on the abilities of the more impressive humanoids in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. A humanity in which eroticism has been diffused across the whole of society and all human interaction, via a total abolition of the couple, pregnancy, marriage, childhood and capitalism - replaced with something which resembles the social life of the bonobo colliding with what she calls 'cybernetic communism'. Even more than the third wave feminists, this is something astoundingly far from contemporary sexual politics: the fetishism of birth and biology has if anything increased: a matter which reminds of the book's one laugh-out-loud moment, the anecdote on birth as akin to 'shitting a pumpkin'.



Also enormously valuable is the concomitant contempt for 'culture', something to be obliterated in her programme as much as the natural. The impressively Hegelian diagrams show a humanity progressively attaining a unity, via feminist and socialist revolution, of art and life (not on the model of the previous failed attempts, mind you: hence the dismissal of the Bauhaus as 'neither art nor science'). Culture, like the couple, would be abolished because of its exclusive character, the private nature of its exchanges. This scientific sexpol socialism would terrify half of the Left, not to mention most feminists, today - on which note, the embarassed comments of its recent readers on Amazon are apposite...