On organising Afem: Lessons I learned on access and privilege, the importance of feeling uncomfortable, and of challenging things we find comfortable

“I am very sorry to have to say this, Corinne, but from your post, I think you are either incredibly politically naïve or a troll. Either way, I don’t think you are a suitable person to be moderating this list.” Gail Chester

People try to take away from Afem and its organising something positive. I think positive is not synonymous with constructive. This text is not meant to make you feel comfortable. If your involvement in anarchafeminism is about you feeling like a great person doing great things and congratulating yourself about it, this text is not for you. If your involvement with anarchafeminism is about being challenged, being made uncomfortable, reconsidering what you did or did not do, and trying to improve yourself slowly and with great humility, thinking of the way you still have to go, without great pats on the back of self gratification, welcome, friend.

After St. Imier, French organisations tried to organise an anarchafem conference, but the plan quickly fell through. I contacted T from Afed, to know whether Afed had also given up or if they were still planning something. They answered that C was looking into it, at which point I got in touch with her to know whether I could be involved, but never heard anything back from her.

The main reason I thought it was important that someone like me was involved from the start was because of the situation with the French Anarchist Federation, which I won’t detail here, see Afem’s communiqué on their exclusion as an organisation for more info. I had translated on behalf of Afed’s members a number of documents pertaining to this sordid case of harassment of anarchafeminists within anarchist organisations. When members who talked to me seemed to think things were ready to be brushed under the carpet, I constantly warned them about the French fed’s habit of fake apologies, and pretend reform, which has been their modus operandi for as long as I can ascertain.

I was not contacted before the 2013 Anarchist Bookfair, and I was not contacted afterwards. Since the St. Imier idea was to have an international conference though, the French Anarchist Federation was contacted, against all common sense or decency towards French anarchafeminists.

When I finally made it onto the organising email list thanks to friends, not only nothing was said about the French federation history of harassment, but I read that £500 were to be spent on a website, paid in half by Afed and in half by the French fed. During over 10 years as an anarchist militant, it is the first time I hear of a website costing anywhere near as much, and there were no indication of any function it would have that would legitimate the cost. This was also a proposal from members of the organisations which did not detail either what we would get for such a price, or who would get the money (with the horrible argument, well, since we are paying for it, we are deciding that, which goes against everything I believe in in matters of organising). I grew really worried as one of the main abusers in the harassment case is a rather unsuccessful computer programmer who, when he is not spamming anarchafeminists’ inboxes and blogs until they can’t use them any more, apparently designs websites. I asked details about this again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and was given the silent treatment once more. I actually still have to receive an answer about who was contracted for these £500, but no-one has bothered to alleviate or confirm my fears. This decision was actually abandoned rather than its specifics being made available to the organising committee.

The silent treatment is a technique favoured by bureaucrats of all stripes, and many people will have suffered it from managers: you ask to be treated like a human being, I will not answer your emails and prevent you from doing your job. It is psychologically devastating, despite it bringing us back nostalgically to playground tactics. Of course, for a long time, I doubted myself, thinking I was being paranoid. But a friend from Afed put my mind at ease, saying that C openly said on ACOD that she was intentionally ignoring my requests for information and that it was a jolly good thing to do because I was not a nice person (from what I gathered, I didn’t have access to ACOD, not being an Afed member). By the way, it is true, I am not a nice person, I am challenging and obstinate, I rarely give cookies when people do their job satisfactorily, and I usually point it out when they don’t, my social skills leave a lot to be desired. Whether this is a reason to exclude me from an anarchafem conference and its organising, that is debatable, see the first paragraph of this article. So I stopped being distressed about not having an answer, and started being distressed at the fact my friends and former comrades were having a great laugh about my distress (meta distress, yay!). From that point on, I cried pretty much every day until I finally “quit” the organising committee.

All was not doom and gloom though, at the same time as this was going on, I was working at making this conference — which was mainly being organised by white, middle-class, cis women — more open to other perspectives by actively engaging with anarchists I knew who were not from that demographic and talking to them, presenting them the project, trying to reassure them that it wouldn’t be exclusionary to them, and that they could get involved. Signing people up was possible thanks to a facebook friend who happened to be in charge of signing people up to the mailing list and was not inclined to use this power as a way to filter out people they didn’t like (which some might think doesn’t deserve special cookies, but given other behaviours witnessed, it really stands out). People who directly sent an email to the address provided on the public information were not as lucky, and were added after weeks or months of delay, or not at all. But, as more diverse people got involved in this, I felt like the problems we had would diminish (and they did).

Getting people who were not from Afed/Solfed involved was important to me, because, as much as I recognise the efforts that these organisations are making in being more inclusive, I also know that they are not perfect and that consequently many (most?) anarchafeminists, especially when they suffer from multiple oppressions, organise outside organisations. However, some people are unable to go beyond the long-standing antipathy between organisational anarchists vs. anarchists deemed “non-organised” (organised in smaller groups, federated in occasional open gatherings rather than yearly private conferences), and the insistence to aim the conference to “organised” anarchists clashed with attempts to address intersectionality practically.

There seemed to be very little care given about who accessed what information and through what connection. There was very little awareness of the power structures of inclusion/exclusion at all.

Dealing with this, I ventured into the world of twitter. I am no twitter fan, I have a private account that is not public and which I have almost never used. But twitter seemed a good way to reach people more fairly (that is, randomly). So I started considering tweets as space, and thought that the first thing for Afem was to establish its intent to be a platform for often silenced and marginalised people. So I followed and retweeted announcements from antifa demonstrations to anti-ableism advice. And something great happened: I saw that some people who rarely considered class struggle were retweeting stuff about the CNT strike in Spain from our account, and that some anarchist groups who rarely considered anything else than the class struggle retweeted stuff from autistic activists too. Every time this happened I felt like this Afem thing was indeed useful.

Of course, twitter comes with arguments. And this did not fail to happen. Being accessible by more people means being accessible to criticisms and call-outs (and that is kinda the point, if you ask me). When people used twitter to express their discontent with Afem’s policies or meetings, I did what I have always been told was the right thing to do: listen and reexamine yourself. How do you ‘listen’ on twitter? I thought that retweeting people who called us out was a first step to acknowledge we were listening. I also emailed their concern to the email list for the whole group to ponder. I thanked them to take the effort to help us improve ourselves and explained what was being done regarding the issue they had raised. I do not regret anything I have done on the twitter account, I think it was right, I think it did give a good image of the conference and attracted some very interesting people into the organising group, and I regret no-one had the confidence to continue when I left and the twitter account was silent, no longer a platform for anyone except a couple of announcements about Afem for Afem by Afem.

I think maybe that is enough for now, I do not feel like documenting the events and my ensuing mental breakdown in much more detail than that, apart from a few points which are of interest:

-unrealistic expectations of “safety” which involuntarily amount to silencing. Since no-one had mentioned the elephant in the room that was the harassment from the French federation, and some people genuinely had no idea. It had to be explained. Again. And again. And again. Because some people were not ready to listen. Someone on the list got triggered by the words “victim” and “perpetrator” and would refuse even for people to use them in emails clearly labelled as containing them. Those two concepts are key to a whole lot of anarchafeminism, and eventually one of them was used on the timetable of the conference itself. This was by far not the worst thing when it comes to things that made fighting the French federation and its defenders hard, but it certainly did not help. Carving out safer spaces for victims of abuse should not make the task of defending other victims of abuse harder, or something is going very wrong.

-complete ignorance of any concept of a safer space or safer proceeding by people who are actually members of groups which have safer spaces policies. When there finally was an attempt to solve the issue of the harassment of some anarchafeminists by the French fed, safety was not even considered. The format offered was “people who care can fight it off on a private discussion thing”. Perpetrators and victims alike, no moderation or anything, just a simple free for all where perpetrators could freely continue their harassment (which they had done on the organising email list). It was objected to that that the organising group did not have a SSP at that point. Of course, drafting one was a good idea, but not having one drafted does not mean things should be dealt with completely unsafely either, especially among a group which had explicitly expressed their love for SSPs. As much as it is great to have people able to draft SSPs, and without taking any merit away from them, a policy is only ever just that, and what matters in the end is what happens and is implemented, and while an explicit SSP can help, the absence of one, or the fact that it sadly does not cover a situation, should not be used as an obstacle to the defense of the safety of victims of abuse. Neither should the acceptance of a SSP be any kind of amnesty for behaviours dating back from before this acceptance.

-I do not wish to defend G, who called me a cisphobic troll which caused me to leave the organising group, but it was pretty clear from the minutes of the first organising meeting that her views were that she only wished to organise with cis women, and her transphobic views were shown, and explained at length by her at several points during the organisation of Afem. Accusing her of holding transphobic views is legitimate, accusing her of deceit seems to disregard the fact that if people were indeed “deceived” it could only be because they were ready to look the other way because she is Someone Important (with access to ressources such as a meeting place in London). Someone (me) left the organising group after being called a cisphobic troll by her, and nothing at all was done to hold her accountable for this event (as far as I know, then again, it’s a pretty weird event, since, being cis myself, it was really just a general display of cis power without any particular designated victim, but that argument was punctuated by statements like “Or do my feelings not count because I am not trans* or a sex worker?”). It is not really surprising that after this experience, she feels confident in doing what she did.

-the inability of anyone to tell C she was doing anything harmful. From the start, C was the one person in charge, Afem was her conference, and that was not going to be great in terms of democracy, effectiveness, representation of diverse views, or anything that this conference was nominally about. Her attitude was not conducive to anyone else being granted access or confidence to do anything, which would feed her feeling of being the only one who did anything, etc. That’s a pretty classic thing in anarchist groups. In my first anarchist group we had a saying: no-one is indispensable. Because it means the group falls apart if they are arrested. Because it is bad for their health. Because it gives them power whether they want it or not. C’s refusal to share info also meant she couldn’t delegate anything. She would be paranoid of anyone else getting involved as having a hidden agenda (well, apart for G, whose hidden agenda was actually pretty explicitly stated, but no-one cared). She would rather just have meetings between gender oppressed people who are in Afed and Solfed and their international sister organisations than reaching out to anyone who has been sidelined for so long by these organisations (why I am not sure as I have never met anyone in Afed or Solfed who didn’t say they were very certainly infiltrated by the police and other unsafe people). If someone called us or her out, she would immediately act defensive, as a way of not listening or discussing the matter at hand. Whether she uses her overcommitment as an excuse for acting in such a Stalinist/neoliberal managerial style or whether she is genuinely overcommitted and cannot do her job satisfactorily, I do not wish to know, and do hope it is the latter, but in any case there is only one solution: for her to take time off and leave some space for others. She has held one mandate or another for the Anarchist federation for way longer than is healthy for anyone who is concerned about informal power distribution anyway and this is causing issues within and outside the federation. No-one must be indispensable or be allowed to make themselves so. For their own good as well, although that is not what I care most about personally.

Was it worth it? Well, the French fed did not get to wash their image by “funding” an anarchafem conference (although, whether it is funding a conference when you get to decide on your own what and who your money will be spent on, that is debatable anyway), the statement which was issued after I left concerning them is mostly the one I had drafted (because no-one else wanted to do it, and it is consequently pretty harsh, which is great). I do not know whether the anarchafeminists who had been harassed by the French fed attended the conference in the end or not, or whether they felt it was safe-ish enough to do so. I did not feel it was safe-ish enough for me to go, but that was mostly because of tiredness from travel and bookfair making me very tense. When I contacted the safer spaces people about my possible attendance they were very friendly and helpful, which makes me hopeful.

In this process, I did meet a number of people who immediately understood my frustration and did not understand how I could be in a situation of fighting for months for something pretty basic. They did help me a lot for immediate care as well as for keeping hopes up about what is possible for the anarchist movement. It also allowed me better to understand power struggles, passive ways of silencing people. There were also a number of groups ready to help with a possible mediation process (from a feminist group in Germany, to the Black Rose federation in the US) so this possibility of support does exist if (when?) a similar situation arises. Was there a way to do this without the ensuing breakdown? I hope so, but I failed to find it, and I hope that next time people will be able to find this magical way, and be effective without going in for an all-out soul-destroying ordeal. But anarchafeminism is pretty sweet, even when it is an all-out soul-destroying ordeal, which is often.

So, you know how I try to stay positive despie the past few translations about the French AF? Well, I just found out someone has already did something I had no time to do myself: a sound analysis of language in politics, and here is their blog: http://lifeglug.wordpress.com/

You know how sectarian I sound when i say ‘blablabla, austerity is a terrible word, stop using it’? Well here is an excerpt from that blog much better put:

“To use or accept the word ‘austerity’ uncritically can lead to these associated inferences being activated and legitimised. Any argument against the principles of government public spending reduction will have to battle through those tacitly accepted implications. Construal effects by no means control our understanding – these frames can be rejected and dissected. But they do help to guide the public’s perception of complex political issues when they are not openly challenged.”

(please note I, owner of this blog, has never been in the French AF, I simply translated this text, will try to pass on the messages of solidarity received though 🙂 )

Resignation letter from the AF

15 months ago, in February 2012, I joined the group Quartier Pirate of the AF. Several reasons pushed me to join one of the groups of the AF, I think the main one was the will to act, to try and contribute to stop or, at least, annoy this rotten system. I wished to meet people for whom some issues were obvious and with whom I wouldn’t have constantly to explain and justify my ideas endlessly, because these would already be shared by these people. I could have worked with such people to move towards anarchy ? I could have organised, shared and fought alongside my comrades, no longer alone against a wall of hostility, but as a group, to finally break it. After 15 months, I draw conclusions from this choice, and I realise I was wrong.

I arrived in the AF just a few weeks before March 8, when Quartier Pirate was organising the libertarian bloc for the demo on that day of feminist struggle. Very young in the group, I was only observing. I was telling myself that it was a good choice to have joined the AF, that what many female friends had told me was not true, including that I would have joined an organisation in which issues of sexism are summarily treated and, most importantly, an absolutely not feminist organisation… Actually, where were the women of the AF ? Oh, yeah, I was also discovering there weren’t many. Why ? I couldn’t tell, I didn’t want to believe gossip.

On the day of the demo, I give out leaflets for the women-only night march in the AF bloc. People look at me with contempt, many women, next to their male partners, to whom I handed the leaflet, also looked me with contempt, and tell me that non-mixed events are shit, and that they wouldn’t attend without their partners. They wouldn’t even take the leaflet !

A bit disappointed, I stopped leafletting and joined our bloc. Why does no women from the AF want to attend the non-mixed demo ? I was wondering. It is strange that anarchafeminists (because I thought these women would be feminists, even if I didn’t know them yet) don’t want to attend a non-mixed night demo, refuse the practice of non-mixed events, and claim that their partner should be allowed to attend… This was only the first of many stories which made me realise that antisexism in the AF was only a facade, and most importantly that the AF is not a feminist organisation, but an organisation which tolerates, as long as they shut up, feminists.

How many meetings I attendedwhere there were almost no women, or where the few women around served coffee to the men, or, if they spoke, it was because they were taking the names of people who wanted to speak ? It was only one instance, it was not always that way in the AF. Certainly.

Let’s move on to other details from this year sent in the AF. Curiously, these past few months, a word has become taboo : « hysteria ». Everything started when the Quartier Pirate group proposed a poster and a leaflet for the 8 March demo. The poster read : « Hysterical, for as long as necessary ! » and the leaflet explained why March 8 was a day of feminist struggle. We benefitted from lessons of so-called psychologists who explained to us the word « hysteria », we were attacked because we had proposed a problematic poster because « the AF has issues passing as an antisexist organisation and this poster could not have been understood », I wonder who did not understand the poster ? So were there issues of sexism in the AF ? Of course not, but, well, there have been… So we are not going to put up problematic posters !

As for the pamphlets, it could not work, because, you see, not only it was only about women (let me remind you, that was for March 8), but it didn’t mention class struggle ! It was of course inadmissible not to mention class struggle in a feminist leaflet. This was clearly highlighting how sexism and feminism are secondary issues for the people of the AF. Our poster and leaflet were binned discretely and without a need for consensus, a new poster and a new leaflet became the official ones for the Paris region AF for March 8. The official leaflet not only was lying about March 8, but it was also antifeminist by calling for proletarian women to rise up… against bourgeois women. Divide to rule, an old custom.

As a feminist, having put my group in this position of complete isolation, I felt guilty and responsible towards my comrades who had supported me, despite the pretty emails we were receiving on the Paris region list which attacked and denigrated our work. This feeling of guilt vis-a-vis my group drove me to make a decision : never again would I engage in issues of sexism in the AF, my feminist struggles, I would lead them somewhere else, with comrades from other organisations.

This was already a huge dent in my resolve to stay in the AF. That said, the Quartier Pirate group is made of comrades who I esteem and respect to the point of deciding to remain in an organisation only to work with the on other issues. I informed them of my decision no longer to take part in any action around antisexism and my will to remain in the AF as long as my group will remain in it.

Today, I think I shouldn’t have imposed myself this choice. It would have avoided me seeing what happened over the next months. But at this point I thought I could ignore, or pretend to ignore, latent sexism of many people from the AF.

Then, Dadoun’s article happened, and the emails on the federal list attacking a feminist woman because she had made public her indignation and anger at an aticle which made an apology for rape. I had decided no longer to intervene on these issues in the AF. I had told my comrades I would not bring them into issues of antisexism again. So I shut up. I regret this. I regret having left a comrade alone, only because I had just received painful attacks, I would have liked it so much if I had been less isolated over the past few months and now I was leaving a comrade alone because I was afraid in my turn to be abandoned by my group, exposed to the anger (because, for men, it is only anger) of the AF people. To pass once again for hysterical, to have to listen to morality lessons from the older militants who know all about the AF and who, of course, were feminists before I was born (although they seem they had forgotten the meaning of the term), to feel alone and guilty because I did not want to be subjected to very heavy attacks on a personal level. I left a comrade alone. That is the only regret which I have about those past few months, because I only know too well what it feels like to live this silence and this isolation.

However, the importance that this Dadoun article took left me confused. Not because we talked about a men’s rights’ article (that would have been good!) but because the article and its contents were completely secondary compared to the grave sin committed by a brave woman from the AF : to publish a counter-article on Indymedia critiquing Dadoun’s article and questioning the God-given antisexism of the militants of the libertarian milieu.

The fact that a highly-problematic article by an Emeritus uni professor who hangs around the anarchist milieu, because let’s say it, it’s so cool to be an anarchist professor or at least pretend to be, was published by the AF’s newspaper, that was not the issue ; the fact that a cis straight white man claim that rape was an access of « hysteria », that was not an issue either ; the fact that the rape perpetrated by a cis white straight man in power on a black, powerless woman is narrated as the « chance meeting of two bodies » and an act of fate (no luck, woman, you entered a room when the man was naked and wanted it) it was not an issue, it was a depiction of facts. But what was a problem was that a woman spoke up to denounce the fat that yes, it is unbelievable that it is an article published in the newspaêr of my organisation which is supposed to represent me.

What I witnessed then was not a questionning on the article, but a personal attack against the woman who had spoken out to denounce that fact. What mattered was not that rape appeared like an inevitabe incident of a chance meeting, what mattered was that a woman dare publicly denounce this article. What a crime ! Attentat ! Terrorist ! Let’s all take up arms against her !

With disgust, I was following the emails who attacked this brave woman, who hinted at intimate trauma which could explain her hysteria, preaching like good old paternalists, who wlaimed that rapes affected mainly men. I realised with the same disgust that she was left all alone, isolated. The AF is a feminist organisation who still attacks its feminists so that they shut up.

Finally, the Quartier Pirate group published a communiqué in which we distanced ourselves from Dadoun’s article, and we linked to the article by this brave woman on Indymedia. What a scandal ! My comrades first received personal phone-calls telling them to take off the communiqué from the blog (I wonder why I didn’t have this honour!). Then we received an email from the female general secretary, ordering us to take off the communiqué from the blog right away. Er, what organisation had I joined again ? The AF ? Orders ? We had a good laugh ! We didn’t take off the communiqué and I thank comrades to have kept going and not given in to pressures from influential people of the AF.

Today, after a year observing the AF ecosystem, I realise there are informal but deeply-rooted powers ; that the word of some matters more than others ; that any project aiming at transforming, or at least changing in the tiniest way the organisation or anything inherent to the organisation was constantly blocked ; that an organisation which claims itself to be anarchist is trapped in eternal and petty quarrels on its email lists ; that evil intent is never far away and that the freedom and autonomy of the groups only exists as long as we follow the party line which the informal leaders drafts in secret. I observe that for my word to matter, I would have to have been a better militant for longer han others, but that anyway I will always miss something vital for them – balls – to be allowed to express myself without being suspected of only speaking because of intimate trauma, in other words, my hysteria.

I observe that the AF fights systems of oppression, but not all of them, because to stop sexist jokes would be a bit like not enjoying a good steak. I observe that to stay in the AF would mean to accept a domination that I want to destroy.

I realise that I am now weaker than a year ago, because having to fight and defend myself all the time against people who should have been my comrades has destroyed my vitaliy and my resolve. I observe that I no longer want to do anything because all the projects we have proposed with my group have been blocked by people who had power within the AF, when we opposed this. I observe that I ended up fighting against people who I first thought I would be fighting alongside with. I observe that to go on within the AF would mean to be subjected to a way of organising that is not anarchist but is made up of threats, orders, pressures and hierarchies. I observe that to stay in the AF would mean to renounce to fight against sexism and accept to be feminist within the limits which are tolerable to men, also known as as long as their priviledges are preserved.

I now resign from the AF and I go back to being a lone wolf, but with other anarchafeminist comrades by my side.

The AF wins once more : another feminist resigns.

I know that I renounce a fight, but I do’t want to fight pointlessly, and to fight to make the AF a feminist organisation seems a delusion to me.

I resign from the AF because I never want to receive orders again, be pressured into things or receive morality lessons. I resign from the AF because I no longer want to witness collective attacks on isolated women. I resign from the AF because I won’t take part in the perpetuation of anarcho-patriarchy. I resign from the AF because it was only a tool, but this tool I discovered is rotten.

I resign from the AF because if one day anarchy is realised, it would be a shame if it looked like the French Anarchist Federation.

1. Don’t date fellow anarchists.

There are many reasons why this is a bad idea. But if you like strong, feminist women, there are a lot of them out there, they might be more career-oriented than revolution-oriented, but deal with it.

Most women have a very special set of experiences linked to becoming anarchists. You are a young teenage girl, and you discover anarchism. You become very excited with it: why didn’t people tell you about it before? It’s all you were thinking, but better expressed. You start talking about it to people around you passionately. That’s the age you discover that a lot of men don’t give a shit about what you’re saying, they just like that you are talking to them. If you were advocating fascism, their attention would be exactly the same. You get the same impression when you’re leafletting. People talk to you not because they care about your politics, but because it’s the first time in weeks they talk to a woman who is not at work serving them or part of their family. It is sad, but also little to do with you.

Now, being comrades is a bond of trust I place much value in. And when you find one comrade that seems to be interested in the same stuff you are, and that you like doing actions together and it’s all great fun, it is extremely disappointing to then discover that really your ‘comrade’ was feeling all this as a budding romance, and that if you had been into other actions and mocking what you did, he would have scorned the same stuff he did enjoy with you. It’s just not a comfortable place to be.

2. Don’t talk shop in your free time.

If you do date an anarchist woman (or to some extent any woman), you’ve got to understand it is not okay to use the fact that she allocates you a larger part of her time to drill your important views on an issue into her. It is intellectual intimidation. If a discussion on an issue is coming up, and you have differing views on the subject try discussing it as much as possible in a larger group. And only alone together as long as both people are enjoying discussing it. Don’t bring it up and keep it up until she caves in and decides that yeah, sure, she’ll support your position. This is not a healthy way of spreading the word. Also, don’t feel betrayed when she pretends to agree to shut you up, then persists with her heresy at broader meetings.

3. Talk about your man problems to other men.

“Men don’t talk about their feelings”? Yes, they do, at length, and it’s a pain. It’s not that your partner does not care about your man feelings: the way you worked in the mines since age 10, learnt all the stiff-upper-lip nonsense growing up on the estate, had to strangle your kitten because it peed on a picture of the Pope, and had to give up your dreams of being a professional harpist after two lessons because your neighbour once mocked you. Well, yes we care in as much as we care about you, but the whole dramatisation around it is just ridiculous. You know, the whole “o no, I never talk about my feelings” five drinks later, sobbing on your lap about his entire lifestory. Accept it, you’re as self-absorbed as the rest of us.

I take my examples out of the worst working class coming of age litterature to stress the fact the “pressure to really be working-class” which sometimes exists among some anarchists really does not help. You want to be pro-feminist? Talk about your daddy issues with your dad, your men issues with other men, etc. Don’t dump it all on your partner because she’s safe.

4. Talking about your feelings is not always great.

So, you love feminism, so you think men should be less manly and open up about their feelings. All the fucking time. Tip: women also find it really hard to express what they are feeling. And they don’t care about your feelings all that much. The good thing about having a partner that often asks you how you are feeling, it’s that if she doesn’t, you know it’s because she is not wondering. Women are not free shrinks. You are not being a wonderful deconstructed man, you’re invading her space and her time and taking all her emotional and mental energy for your own selfish ends.

Let women lead the conversation! Why do men say that they are too manly to discuss feelings when actually they really aren’t? Because they don’t want to discuss it right now. A lot of behaviours can be explained as a way of deciding what is discussed when. Men are terribly good at that. However, your partner might have a different emotional calendar, and she might just want drinks and sex the night you decide to reconnect with your inner child, and want to discuss feelings and relationships the day you want to be all macho. She might even want to discuss feelings: with other people present! Even other men! Because the couple is toxic.

5. Don’t lead the conversation, don’t lead the relationship either.

You like her and you want her to know it, because you’re in touch with your feelings. Good for you. But don’t suggest to meet: her time and her space are sacred. Don’t be like “can I come round with the cookies I just made”, be like “hypothetically, if I made cookies, when would be convenient if you wished to have some, and would you like to eat them with me around, and if so where would you like this eating of cookies to take place”. Don’t impose things, even if they are good things that she likes like cookies. When you tell her about a concert she would like, just tell her about it. If she decides to go, she might invite you to go with her. Don’t be like “I have given you this information that is relevant to your interests, therefore if you want to go you have to go on a date with me!”

Fetishism is ascribing magical powers to an object. In Marx, it is used about money, commodities, work, etc. Money is the most common example: it only has power because we believe it has power, but we cannot free ourselves from it by refusing to believe in it in our society.

People often write about the Left being fetishistic, about having shied away from theory towards magical rituals. To name a few that you can read about: demonstration fetishism, picket line and union fetishism, Occupy, activism, class struggle fetishism, riots, fire and broken glass fetishism, fetishism in numbers, policy fetishism (and Safer space fetishism), Marx fetishism, standing in front of shops for full communism… Anything can be fetishised or be described as fetishism.

Opponents also ascribe such magical powers to the manifestations of the Left (belief that unions will bring about the collapse of the economy, that demonstrations will bring about the collapse of civilisation). However, Left fetishism can be more delusional than real. Whereas money can’t really be challenged, union authority can be ignored without much consequences in many cases. This leads to the label ‘fetishism’ being ascribed to anything which does not work, when it can actually stem from flawed theory, or bad execution.

Anarchism is supposed to keep away from fetishism through rational examination and the adequation of means and ends. We cannot fight alienation with alienated means, and all that. In practice, anarchists do subscribe to a lot of fetishistic attitudes. Sometimes they stem from Left fetishism: the idea that the Left will actually achieve something that we can somehow stir and make into our way to emancipation. Some anarchists think that fetishism can be empowering, or helpful, or at least completely inocuous.

If accusing someone of fetishism is seen as such an insult, it is very much because of the more usual term of sexual fetishism and the stigma related to it. Sexual metaphors are often used to describe fetishistic political attitudes “it makes them hard” “they have wet dreams about it” “they wank over it”. It is one of the rare occasion where sex negativity is wildly accepted by anarchists.