Why the need for consensus?

In the nineteen eighties academic psychologist Carol Gilligan identified women’s “ethic of care”.  Her research found that while boys and men tended to make moral decisions based on ethical fundamentals (such as the right to life or property) girls and women tended to think more contextually, in terms of the specific circumstances and relationships of those involved.  Girls’ and womens’ overriding ethic was the preservation of relationships, rather than adherence to rights and rules.

Eleanor Maccoby developed our understanding of gender - at least in modern patriarchal societies - in relation to same-sex peer groups in childhood.  Her empirical research on gender segregation in play demonstrated that whereas boys play in larger groups and establish a clear hierarchy of individuals based on competition (rights and rules); girls prefer smaller groups based on intimacy, consensus and mutual identification (relationships). Importantly, if a girl is cast out it’s not because she’s not winning it’s because she’s not agreeing.

What does all this have to do with Melinda Tankard Reist and the current cyber controversy being fought out in various opinion pieces in the Australian media and blogosphere? In short, it provides an explanation – an old one, but a good one – for the difficulties many women have with political, and perhaps especially personal, differences.  It helps explain how it is that “MTR” has been recently cast out of feminism by the “top girls” in the group.

As we have seen a number of high profile feminist writers such as Leslie Cannold, Eva Cox and Anne Summers declare that Tankard Reist is “not a feminist” given her putative anti-abortion/pro-life stance (as I understand it Tankard Reist is not against a woman’s right to choose, she simply has critical concerns about the context and consequences of abortion for women).

Conversely, the publishers of Spinifex Press Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein have declared that she is an “authentic feminist” and others such as Cathy Sherry, Miranda Devine, Claire Bongiorno, Emma Rush, and Lyn Bender have similarly come to her defence.

As Cathy Sherry said in her recent opinion piece on this matter, “I have long considered myself a feminist and been disturbed by the parts of the sisterhood who operate like a nasty in-group in primary school. You can’t be our friend because you don’t wear the right pink dress. You can’t be our friend unless you toe the approved party-line on abortion, childcare or sexual clothing.”

It seems that there is an implicit assumption among women - and feminists no less - that we have to agree with each other in order to be “in the group” and, further to this, that this agreement must form a tight boundary around a whole constellation of issues and beliefs. In other words, supporting one kind of politics necessarily commits us to other related beliefs and lifestyle practices.  Anything less and we risk censure, exclusion, hostility or charges of hypocrisy.

Here’s a few typical examples of the believing/doing nexus: liberal feminist – pro-choice, supports and uses childcare to maintain part-time career, heterosexual and married. Ecofeminist – pro-choice and pro-homebirth, practices attachment parenting, critical of childcare and market work, has vege garden, works in local community centre, a single mum. Radical feminist – lesbian separatist, anti “PIV” (eliminating the need for abortions), no children, a vegetarian, supports Nordic model of criminalising the buyers of prostituted women, concerned about protecting women only spaces. Third wave feminist – identifies as bisexual and reads queer theory, doesn’t think much about children or childcare because that’s at least ten years off, pro-choice, “sex-positive” and organising the upcoming SlutWalk.  There are, of course, many more feminist stereotypes but you get my point. 

Those who are clearly in one camp make sense both to their peers and their adversaries, but those who don’t – and Tankard Reist fits quite clearly here with her Christian background and her feminist foreground - are confusing at best and suspect at worst.  But the problem here is not the complexity of those who combine multiple (sometimes conflicting) perspectives, but adversarial thinking and the “group think” that lurks behind it.  It is the latter that produces insiders and outsiders, and therefore conflict and exclusion.

As moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues in his TED talk “On the moral roots of liberals and conservatives”, it is our inability to listen to those whose perspectives differ radically from our own that impoverishes the moral terrain. It is often by listening to “the other” – in this instance liberals listening to conservatives (or listening to people they are labelling conservative) – that our horizon of truth is expanded.

Of course this doesn’t mean not having a position or committing to it, it means stepping out – just for a minute – and listening to the “other” one(s). In Haidt’s terms, it is only then that we have the chance to step outside the “moral matrix”, or the lack of thinking that occurs once we are snug in our ideological niches. On this point Haidt is clear: “If our goal is to understand the world, our lack of moral diversity is going to make it harder because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team, and once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open minded thinking.”

What makes his research quite interesting methodologically is that Haidt is himself a liberal and yet he argues the case for conservatism. After conducting international survey research on morality Haidt has found that conservatives tend to use five moral registers to think through problems whereas liberals (or progressives) tend to use only two. 

Given that the loudest voices who are critical of “MTR” are liberals – whether liberal feminists or left-leaning liberal social commentators  – there is often an uncritical assumption that all conservatism, and all religious faith, is suspect, necessarily oppressive and reactionary.  Although I am myself a secular liberal (though not a liberal feminist, here my leaning is more toward the radical end), it is clear that this criticism implicitly assumes that conservatives have nothing to offer. 

Outing Tankard-Reist’s Christianity, or her concerns about abortion, therefore has a subtext in liberal circles: once identified as such she can no longer be a “real feminist”.  She is not one of “us”. Rather, she is a fake, a counterfeit, a Trojan horse about to unleash an army of conservative ideologies under the guise of feminism. 

By way of analogy Leslie Cannold cites the example of a capitalist pretending they are a communist in order to bolster their own agenda.  She implies that Tankard Reist is re-fashioning herself as something she’s not in order to promulgate her conservative views.  But with Tankard Reist and feminism it’s not that simple. Christianity is not the opposite of, or necessarily opposed to, feminism in the way capitalism is to communism. The two positions are not mutually exclusive and, indeed, if we trace the evolution of modern human rights, we find their foundations in both social contract theory and in Christianity; or, in the words of human rights scholar Micheline Ishay, we find their foundation “in a secularization of Judeo-Christian ethics”. 

Neither does it mean that Tankard Reist doesn’t struggle herself with reconciling her different philosophical, spiritual and political beliefs.  She has openly stated she is of “struggling faith”. It is likely wrong to assume she is misrepresenting herself in failing to centre her faith in recent public discussion; rather, it is likely that her faith is not the most salient dimension in her political activism regarding the sexualisation of women and girls.  Why is that so hard to imagine? Why is the automatic assumption that she has something to hide – especially, as her critics are at pains to say, given that most of her Christian background is on record? 

The more one looks in detail at Tankard Reist’s different positions – her critique of forced abortions in China, her concern about the experience of grief after abortion for some women, her concern about the sexual objectification of women’s and girl’s bodies in pornography and popular culture, her political activism to block sexist advertising - the less the positions look contradictory and the more it looks like her feminism is defined by a passionate belief in women’s human and reproductive rights. 

If we must pigeon-hole, it would appear that Tankard Reist is conservative on some issues and radical on others; at times she combines both perspectives on the one topic. I suspect that this, not her “struggling spirituality” or complex stance on abortion, are what really befuddle.  Reducing her political and philosophical complexity to a charge of deception or hypocrisy is simplistic at best and malicious at worst. One of the reasons, I suspect, that Tankard Reist irritates and confounds is that she holds multiple – dare I say it, nuanced positions – on the one subject.  She also appears to have shifted from a more conservative toward a more radical position over the past decade.

She is not the first thinker to have done so.  Obvious local examples include Robert Manne whose most recent book and blog are called “Left Right Left”. Early in his career Manne edited the conservative magazine Quadrant while more recently his position on asylum seekers, climate change, and media ownership are unequivocally left wing. His partner Anne Manne is similar – she is a feminist who believes in women’s rights and equality, yet she has serious concerns about the impact of long-day care on children under three, which easily (though I would contend falsely) aligns her with the right.  Helen Pringle is a feminist thinker who challenges the conservative or “wowser” label assigned to anyone who is critical of porn declaring herself both anti-porn and left wing. 

This debate about who is inside and outside feminism, who is an authentic feminist and who is not, who can use the name and who can’t, centres around this need to be the same, to be part of the same group, and to reflect a clear party line – pro or anti. It invokes the psychology of “group think” and closes down the possibility of nuanced, complex or even contradictory positions within groups and individuals. In reality this is more common than we recognise.

While some boundaries do need to be drawn and certainly being for women’s freedom, equality and self-determination is integral to being a feminist (or supporting feminism); however, pointing out the shadow side of liberties such the right to choose, does not and should not disqualify one from “the sisterhood”.

At the risk of sounding sexist, it may be that women hold this group psychology more than most, given our early socialisation in small relatively intimate peer-groups based on mutual identification and consensus.