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Title: Let’s Get Physical!
Author: Anarqxista Goldman
Date: 2021
Language: en
Topics: sex, sexuality, anarcha-feminism
Source: *The Anarchist Arrow* https://archive.org/details/the-anarchist-arrow-1

Anarqxista Goldman

Let’s Get Physical!

1. Sex and Anarchy

Ever since the late nineteenth century the political philosophy of

anarchism has, in some strands that go to make up its manifestation in

the world, been linked to what was then called “free love” and its

opponents might have regarded as sexual licence. This is to say that,

for some, but certainly far from all, sexual freedom has been a part of

a philosophy loudly proclaiming that it was about human freedom in

general. Some, perhaps those more immediately concerned with workers’ or

class struggles [Lucy Parsons and Peter Kropotkin would be two examples]

shied away from such emphases and, at best, thought they were secondary

concerns if they were concerns at all. Others, however, particularly

those who combined anarchism with what would become feminism, people

like Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, regarded sexual emancipation

as just as important as any other kind if anarchism was ever going to

flourish. In fact, they believed that there couldn’t be such a thing as

“anarchism” if women weren’t just as free as men – and particularly free

from a sexual bondage which, in one way and another, refused women

agency in the matters of their own bodies and their own sexual

expression. Sexuality in the time of de Cleyre and Goldman was

heterosexual and largely marriage- based and, if it was not these

things, was under the table and prone to exploitation, as in the case of

prostitution or of homosexuality which dare not openly speak its name

and which was often criminalised. [Emma Goldman was one of the few who

would openly lecture on this latter subject.]

Someone who wasn’t – as far as I know – an anarchist [although she was,

for a time, married to a Dutch abuser who claimed to be one] but was a

feminist was Andrea Dworkin. Amongst other things, this lesbian, who

subsequently lived with and loved a man who said he was gay [John

Stoltenberg] and railed against enculturated misogyny and prostitution,

regarded pornography as terrorism against women. I’d like to reproduce

her first ever speech on the subject from 1977 below in full as a

demonstration of this belief:

All through human history, there have been terrible, cruel wrongs. These

wrongs were not committed on a small scale. These wrongs were not

rarities or oddities. These wrongs have raged over the earth like

wind-swept fires, maiming, destroying, leaving humans turned to ash.

Slavery, rape, torture, extermination have been the substance of life

for billions of human beings since the beginning of patriarchal time.

Some have battened on atrocity while others have suffered from it until

they died.

In any given time, most people have accepted the cruellest wrongs as

right. Whether through indifference, ignorance, or brutality, most

people, oppressor and oppressed, have apologized for atrocity, defended

it, justified it, excused it, laughed at it, or ignored it.

The oppressor, the one who perpetrates the wrongs for his own pleasure

or profit, is the master inventor of justification. He is the magician

who, out of thin air, fabricates wondrous, imposing, seemingly

irrefutable intellectual reasons which explain why one group must be

degraded at the hands of another. He is the conjurer who takes the

smoking ash of real death and turns it into stories, poems, pictures,

which celebrate degradation as life’s central truth. He is the

illusionist who paints mutilated bodies in chains on the interior canvas

of the imagination so that, asleep or awake, we can only hallucinate

indignity and outrage. He is the manipulator of psychological reality,

the framer of law, the engineer of social necessity, the architect of

perception and being.

The oppressed are encapsulated by the culture, laws, and values of the

oppressor. Their behaviors are controlled by laws and traditions based

on their presumed inferiority. They are, as a matter of course, called

abusive names, presumed to have low or disgusting personal and

collective traits. They are always subject to sanctioned assault. They

are surrounded on every side by images and echoes of their own

worthlessness. Involuntarily, unconsciously, not knowing anything else,

they have branded into them, burned into their brains, a festering

self-hatred, a virulent self-contempt. They have burned out of them the

militant dignity on which all self-respect is based.

Oppressed people are not subjugated or controlled by dim warnings or

vague threats of harm. Their chains are not made of shadows. Oppressed

people are terrorized— by raw violence, real violence, unspeakable and

pervasive violence. Their bodies are assaulted and despoiled, according

to the will of the oppressor.

This violence is always accompanied by cultural assault — propaganda

disguised as principle or knowledge. The purity of the “Aryan” or

Caucasian race is a favorite principle. Genetic inferiority is a

favorite field of knowledge. Libraries are full of erudite texts that

prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jews, the Irish, Mexicans,

blacks, homosexuals, women are slime. These eloquent and resourceful

proofs are classified as psychology, theology, economics, philosophy,

history, sociology, the so-called science of biology. Sometimes, often,

they are made into stories or poems and called art. Degradation is

dignified as biological, economic, or historical necessity; or as the

logical consequence of the repulsive traits or inherent limitations of

the ones degraded. Out on the streets, the propaganda takes a more

vulgar form. Signs read “Whites Only” or “Jews and Dogs Not Allowed.”

Hisses of kike, nigger, queer, and pussy fill the air. In this

propaganda, the victim is marked. In this propaganda, the victim is

targeted. This propaganda is the glove that covers the fist in any reign

of terror.

This propaganda does not only sanction violence against the designated

group; it incites it. This propaganda does not only threaten assault; it

promises it.

These are the dreaded images of terror.

— A Jew, emaciated, behind barbed wire, nearly naked, mutilated by the

knife of a Nazi doctor: the atrocity is acknowledged.

— A Vietnamese, in a tiger cage, nearly naked, bones twisted and broken,

flesh black and blue: the atrocity is acknowledged.

— A black slave on an Amerikan plantation, nearly naked, chained, flesh

ripped up from the whip: the atrocity is acknowledged.

— A woman, nearly naked, in a cell, chained, flesh ripped up from the

whip, breasts mutilated by a knife: she is entertainment, the

boy-next-door’s favorite fantasy, every man’s precious right, every

woman’s potential fate.

The woman tortured is sexual entertainment.

The woman tortured is sexually arousing.

The anguish of the woman tortured is sexually exciting.

The degradation of the woman tortured is sexually entrancing.

The humiliation of the woman tortured is sexually pleasing, sexually

thrilling, sexually gratifying.

Women are a degraded and terrorized people. Women are degraded and

terrorized by men. Rape is terrorism. Wife-beating is terrorism. Medical

butchering is terrorism. Sexual abuse in its hundred million forms is

terrorism.

Women’s bodies are possessed by men. Women are forced into involuntary

childbearing because men, not women, control women’s reproductive

functions. Women are an enslaved population— the crop we harvest is

children, the fields we work are houses. Women are forced into

committing sexual acts with men that violate integrity because the

universal religion — contempt for women — has as its first commandment

that women exist purely as sexual fodder for men.

Women are an occupied people. Our very bodies are possessed, taken by

others who have an inherent right to take, used or abused by others who

have an inherent right to use or abuse. The ideology that energizes and

justifies this systematic degradation is a fascist ideology— the

ideology of biological inferiority. No matter how it is disguised, no

matter what refinements pretty it up, this ideology, reduced to its

essence, postulates that women are biologically suited to function only

as breeders, pieces of ass, and servants. This fascist ideology of

female inferiority is the pre-eminent ideology on this planet. As

Shulamith Firestone put it in The Dialectic of Sex, “Sex class is so

deep as to be invisible.” That women exist to be used by men is, quite

simply, the common point of view, and the concomitant of this point of

view, inexorably linked to it, is that violence used against women to

force us to fulfill our so-called natural functions is not really

violence at all. Every act of terror or crime committed against women is

justified as sexual necessity and/or is dismissed as utterly

unimportant. This extreme callousness passes as normalcy, so that when

women, after years or decades or centuries of unspeakable abuse, do

raise our voices in outrage at the crimes committed against us, we are

accused of stupidity or lunacy, or are ignored as if we were flecks of

dust instead of flesh and blood.

We women are raising our voices now because all over this country a new

campaign of terror and vilification is being waged against us. Fascist

propaganda celebrating sexual violence against women is sweeping this

land. Fascist propaganda celebrating the sexual degradation of women is

inundating cities, college campuses, small towns. Pornography is the

propaganda of sexual fascism. Pornography is the propaganda of sexual

terrorism. Images of women bound, bruised, and maimed on virtually every

street corner, on every magazine rack, in every drugstore, in movie

house after movie house, on billboards, on posters pasted on walls, are

death threats to a female population in rebellion. Female rebellion

against male sexual despotism, female rebellion against male sexual

authority, is now a reality throughout this country. The men, meeting

rebellion with an escalation of terror, hang pictures of maimed female

bodies in every public place.

We are forced either to capitulate, to be beaten back by those images of

abuse into silent acceptance of female degradation as a fact of life, or

to develop strategies of resistance derived from a fully conscious will

to resist. If we capitulate— smile, be good, pretend that the woman in

chains has nothing to do with us, avert our eyes as we pass her image a

hundred times a day— we have lost everything. What, after all, does all

our work against rape or wife-beating amount to when one of their

pictures is worth a thousand of our words?

Strategies of resistance are developing. Women are increasingly refusing

to accept the pernicious, debilitating lie that the sexual humiliation

of women for fun, pleasure, and profit is the inalienable right of every

man. Petitions, leafleting, picketing, boycotts, organized vandalism,

speak-outs, teach-ins, letter writing campaigns, intense and militant

harassment of distributors and exhibitors of woman-hating films, and an

unyielding refusal to give aid and comfort to the politically

self-righteous fellow- travellers of the pornographers are increasing,

as feminists refuse to cower in the face of this new campaign of

annihilation. These are beginning actions. Some are rude and some are

civil. Some are short-term actions, spontaneously ignited by outrage,

others are long-term strategies that require extensive organization and

commitment. Some disregard male law, break it with militancy and pride,

others dare to demand that the law must protect women — even women —

from brazen terrorization. All of these actions arise out of the true

perception that pornography actively promotes violent contempt for the

integrity and rightful freedom of women. And, despite male claims to the

contrary, feminists, not pornographers, are being arrested and

prosecuted by male law enforcers, all suddenly “civil libertarians” when

male privilege is confronted on the streets by angry and uppity women.

The concept of “civil liberties” in this country has not ever, and does

not now, embody principles and behaviors that respect the sexual rights

of women. Therefore, when pornographers are challenged by women, police,

district attorneys, and judges punish the women, all the while

ritualistically claiming to be the legal guardians of “free speech.” In

fact, they are the legal guardians of male profit, male property, and

phallic power.

Feminist actions against pornography must blanket the country, so that

no pornographer can hide from, ignore, ridicule, or find refuge from the

outrage of women who will not be degraded, who will not submit to

terror. Wherever women claim any dignity or want any possibility of

freedom, we must confront the fascist propaganda that celebrates

atrocity against us head on — expose it for what it is, expose those who

make it, those who show it, those who defend it, those who consent to

it, those who enjoy it.

In the course of this difficult and dangerous struggle, we will be

forced, as we experience the intransigence of those who commit and

support these crimes against us, to ask the hardest and deepest

questions, the ones we so dread:

— what is this male sexuality that requires our humiliation, that

literally swells with pride at our anguish;

— what does it mean that yet again— and after years of feminist analysis

and activism — the men (gay, leftist, whatever) who proclaim a

commitment to social justice are resolute in their refusal to face up to

the meaning and significance of their enthusiastic advocacy of yet

another woman-hating plague;

— what does it mean that the pornographers, the consumers of

pornography, and the apologists for pornography are the men we grew up

with, the men we talk with, live with, the men who are familiar to us

and often cherished by us as friends, fathers, brothers, sons, and

lovers;

— how , surrounded by this flesh of our flesh that despises us, will we

defend the worth of our lives, establish our own authentic integrity,

and, at last, achieve our freedom?”

Now this speech, first presented in 1977 under the title “Pornography:

The New Terrorism”, isn’t presented as anarchist thought – but I would

absolutely 100% argue that it is. I don’t see any reason why the

aforementioned Ur-anarchafeminists, de Cleyre and Goldman, wouldn’t

agree with the thrust [no pun intended] of its message if not on a

sentence by sentence basis. Both of those former writers and activists,

initially active in traditional Victorian times, write about “sex

slavery” where women are bound to either seek marriage for social

protection [where they become babymakers] or are forced to sell their

bodies to the lowest bidder in sex acts which, as Emma Goldman pointed

out, exposed them to exploitation and manipulation by men in general and

police officers in particular [who would skim their earnings].

Pornography today, overwhelmingly the sale of the depiction of women’s

exploitation, is much more ubiquitous than when Dworkin originally

delivered this speech and, thanks to the Internet, is potentially

available to anyone with access to it. You would find women exploited

[even if only in roleplay terms] on the front page of any popular porn

site that you could find. Why aren’t people in general outraged by such

a situation? Why is it being ignored and excused?

One obvious reason is that society has individualised its members to

such an extent that pornography, as an activity, is now regarded to be a

matter of the individual’s choices and action. No “social” position –

much less a political one – is taken on it. If individuals consent to

its activities [which extends from performing to viewing] then the view

is taken that this is purely a matter for them as if no social

consequences or effects accrued as a result. However, the approach of

the anarchists de Cleyre and Goldman –and the feminist Dworkin – is not

so individualised. Holistically appraising women as a class, they ask

what such control and exploitation of women means for women as women in

social and political contexts. Whether talking about women as ��sex

objects”, inside and outside of marriage, or as the objects of exploited

fascination they are in pornography, these women are for conclusions

that don’t regard human beings as privatised and individualised such

that we can almost imagine they each live in their own hermetically

sealed vacuums, unaffecting, and unable to affect, anybody else by their

choices. This is obviously completely ridiculous but that won’t stop

exploiters of female sexuality, and the women it belongs to, from using

it as an argument nevertheless. Such people never look at the phenomenon

socially and holistically and so never draw the conclusions of these

three women that women are dominated slaves, a matter of a purposeful

political action that is consistently patriarchal. And the first task of

any patriarch is to control and possess women.

This essay is about sex AND ANARCHISM. So the obvious question to ask is

“What light does anarchism shed on sex?” In quoting Dworkin in full from

one of her speeches I believe that I have started to make my anarchist

point and to relate sex to anarchism. Anarchism, as of first importance,

is about human liberty; liberty from the coercion of others in body and

in mind — and particularly from those things as perpetrated by

institutions of one kind and another. This is where the critiques of de

Cleyre, Goldman and Dworkin come from: women, who must be married to

survive, who have no economic independence, who are objects of abuse,

exploitation and domination, have no liberty, are not free and cannot

decide the course of their own lives explicitly because of the control

patriarchal society imposes upon them. The very fact, in fact, that a

woman’s primary asset in the world is regarded as her sexuality [in a

way that is simply not true for a man and in which she must either

refrain from it as the virgin or revel in it as the whore] is itself

here evidence of a basic problem. In researching the life of Emma

Goldman, as one example, for a future project I hope to undertake, I

note how, in newspaper interviews, her appearance is remarked upon in

sometimes shockingly straightforward terms. As every woman knows, no man

is ever subjected to such unrequested commentary on their appearance.

But women, for some reason, are. Its because how they look, if they can

attract sexual partners, is what this sick society thinks women are

there for. Its bad enough to even be a woman in the first place but if

you look like one who couldn’t get a shag then how much worse must you

be?

It has, so it seems, always been this way. But that should not commit us

to the view that it always will be – much less that it always should be.

In her essay “Twenty-First Century Sex” the writer on anarchism and

feminism, Judy Greenway, makes a number of points relevant to those

imagining sex in the future from an anarchist perspective. They begin as

basically as to ask the question of what “sexual freedom” is even

imagined to be [for you cannot instantiate a freedom if you cannot even

describe what it would look like if it existed]. She notes how, in her

own past, at an anarchist gathering, a man had presumed

that sexual freedom meant he could now fuck all the women who called

themselves anarchists. Does “sexual freedom” mean “women on demand for

all the anarchist men”? Greenway points out that, in fact, “sexual

freedom” means different things to different people [as we might

reasonably expect it would. A back issue of the Anarchist Federation’s

“Organise!” magazine reminds us that “Anarchist views on sex can range

from the idea that ‘anything goes’ between consenting adults, to the

more traditional approaches of what constitutes free love between

individuals”] and many anarchists, in fact, live entirely conventional

sex lives that are barely distinguishable from non- anarchist ones. Yet

the anarchist is [or should be] one who asks “how best to structure

personal relationships” and they should be concerned about relationships

regulated by either a church or a state [both of which most of them

would regard as invalid entities]. Yet, as Greenway points out, many

anarchists have thought that “sexual freedom” was about much more than

freedom from institutional intervention in their relationships: it is

about a freedom of their own self-expression.

So one thing, as Greenway references in her essay, that anarchism should

be about is “trying to transform the power relationships involved” or

“making those visible” in matters of sexual interaction. Dworkin does a

fantastic job of this in her writing about pornography, in the process

demonstrating that pornography, besides largely being the fetishization

of the sexual domination of women by men, is also a propaganda for its

own harmlessness [for instance, by arguing it is a matter of free speech

– and so personal choice — rather than the ethical treatment of women

and other not-men]. Unless you look at things like pornography in terms

of what is actually going on in it then you might just be lulled to

sleep with the narcotic notion that it is a matter of taste rather than

of ethics. But I would argue that for the anarchist – something which,

in my view, is a matter of ethics in itself – EVERYTHING is a matter of

ethics — for anarchism is a matter of human relationships in their

widest and most holistic conception as well as a critique of, and

proposed remedy for, the operations of power and authority in the world.

So the anarchist must ask ethical questions of sex and sexuality for

these things are so basic to human relations to begin with.

Yet anarchism, as the practice of an ethical orientation towards human

beings and the world that decentralises power, is not about falling in

with dominant – and dominating – ideologies such as the patriarchal ones

which control women’s bodies and result in phenomena such as pornography

[which is why the Mujeres Libres ever existed in Spanish anarchism in

the 1930s]. Anarchism explicitly asks, in ethical context, about power

and control, exploitation and domination, coercion and authority. In

general, it wishes to annul the possibilities and opportunities for any

of these things. It wants to respect sex and sexuality as natural,

life-affirming activities without turning them into further ways to

dominate and control. So, as Judy Greenway reports of anarchist feminist

activists like Nikki Craft and the Outlaws for Social Responsibility, we

should argue that:

“Sex is not obscene. The real obscenity is the marketing of women as

products ... We

are in favour of nudity and sensuality ... There is a difference between

a genuine

love, acceptance and empowerment of the body, and the marketing of women

and

exploitation of women that is the trademark of pornography.”

Anarchists do not have, or need, to be censors. Indeed, as even the

non-anarchist Dworkin argued, the issue with pornography [for example]

is not even censorship to begin with: its equality, its the reality of

domination and combatting that, its allowing all

sexes and genders the same “freedoms to” and “freedoms from” that MEN

would expect to enjoy themselves.

But sex and sexuality are not only matters of how the straight dudes

love to control everybody else [in this sense we can speak of men and

not-men] – and pre-eminently the straight women who exist for their

consumption and control. You may have noticed how, in the last several

decades, the visibility of those who are not straight nor even, in some

cases, con-cis-tently the same thing in their gendered identity has

increased exponentially in terms of their public visibility. I am

reliably informed that 50 years ago everything that is today said, in

derogatory tone, of trans and non-binary people was then said of

homosexual people [that they are out to corrupt, and possibly even fuck,

your children being primary among them]. But today being gay or lesbian

[or even bisexual] is, in all but the most fundamentalist of places,

accepted within the spectrum of sociosexual normality. We can only hope

that trans and non-binary people will come to achieve the same

acceptance even if, right now, the very same people who control women’s

bodies and who, in former times, wanted to outlaw and make illegal a

practising homosexuality, see trans people as those who must be erased

from existence. This erasure is a common tactic of the socially and

politically dominant and, as in cases of

racial supremacy, can often be a matter of actual physical erasure [i.e.

violence aimed to make your existence as a particular gender or

sexuality physically impossible]. Even if your continued existence is

allowed it is bound to become mired in ideological struggle for how it

shall be allowed to exist and inserted into a pecking order in which

“men and not-men” becomes a controlling ideology and designation.

It should go without saying that an anarchist is in favour and fully pro

whatever sex, gender or sexuality anyone identifies themselves as. [And

“self-identification” is also a perfectly acceptable means of

identification.] The anarchist issue, as already noted in relation to

that particular form of gendered ideological violence called

pornography, is equality, mitigation of domination, opposition to

control, and not censorship. Anarchism, if we may put it in such terms,

is a matter of how people get along all together in their glorious

rainbow spectrum of differences, without recoursing to dominating and

exploiting each other. To the anarchist, then, it does not, and should

not, matter if you are gay or straight, pan or bi, cis or trans, binary

or non-binary, static or fluid. What matters is that all these people

can get along. What matters is that one group does not decide, and

practice, the exploitation or attempted erasure, of another group.

But in our current world context this means that many of these gender or

sexual expressions are regarded as rebellious, outlaw expressions of

existence by a dominating power that wants to impose “legitimate”

expressions of sex and/or gender upon you. This is seen most heinously

in the existence of those King Canutes known as the “gender critical”

who want to hold back the tide of personal experience and expression of

self as if it could be imposed from above by a dominating cabal of

authoritative people. As an anarchist, on such grounds alone we would be

duty bound to fight against such a freedom-constricting idea. That such

people work socially and politically to actively destroy and disrupt

human lives by denying their existence only adds impetus to the idea

that the gender critical are no friends of an anarchy which is about the

cops in your head as much as it is about the uniformed ones in the

street carrying out their masters’ freedom-hating dictats. Gender and

sexuality are anarchist issues exactly because anarchism is about how

you think as much as it is about how people relate to each other in our

lived experience of the world. In fact, it must be about both because

one always relates to, and directly affects, the other.

The answer, of course, comes back to the central anarchist “agenda” —

the dissolution of power in the world, the destruction of networks of

domination and structures of coercion, the institution of relationships

of free expression and free association that are direct and unmediated

by authoritative institutions. If these central anarchist aims were

achieved only to this extent then sex and sexuality would be

transformed. Yet it is not simply [or, for some, even] about working

politically to create such a political reality; it is about

prefiguration and living in such ways right now – in effect, regarding

anarchism as an ethic to live by, one which does not proceed by the

domination of some over others but in exactly all the anarchist ways you

would imagine a future anarchist society, or decentralised

conglomeration of communities of free association and mutual aid, so to

do. This must imply that a person’s sexuality and gender, which are

individual things socially negotiated [for no one is an island and so no

one, all by themselves, comes up with their gender or sexuality in

isolation], are things worthy of respect and public recognition [which

also means all people are due the same respect and legal protections

under the law – at least as long as “the law” still exists]. Such

prefiguration, which is “the end is the means and the means are the end”

thinking, establishes that, in order to change society, people with

different values who live to educate people at large to different values

live out their lives by practising them.

I have, for myself, never been one for the “armed revolution” notion of

anarchist progress. I am much more on the side of those who have seen

anarchism as “progress through education” [although this is not to

suggest this is a binary opposition in which one can do one or the other

but never mixtures of both]. This is revolution through evolution which

recognises that changed societies and revolutionary communities grow out

of the changed individuals that make them up and only from the changed

individuals that make them up. This is something every anarchist can do

right now, both in supporting and standing in solidarity with oppressed

genders and sexualities and also by educating those not so inclined to

our common humanity of which sexuality and gender are just expressions.

Sex AND ANARCHISM is a matter of such education and the wider acceptance

of the spectrum of expression of which human beings are capable, subject

to the idea of freedom from domination [and so of uncoerced consent]

which anarchists in general proudly, and rightly, hold dear. We might

not engage in a fully anarchist existence in our world context at the

moment, but we have the ever-present opportunity to spread anarchist

conceptions of a liberated sexuality and gender expression as far and

wide as we dare. This will be a necessity if we are ever to

significantly break the chains of patriarchy and banish the foul

spectres of domination, exploitation and control through which sex and

gender have habitually been mediated.

2. Sex, Love and Agency

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were an anarchist couple who had a

relationship, sexually intimate and not, which extended over almost half

a century from the late 1880s to the mid 1930s and Berkman’s death by

his own hand. When they first met, upon Goldman’s banishment from her

family in Rochester, New York, to New York City, Berkman was one of the

first people she met in a cafe patronised by political radicals. Berkman

was, at that time, working for Johann Most’s Freiheit newspaper and he

soon brought Goldman into Most’s orbit as well. Most took a personal and

sexually intimate interest in Emma Goldman even though she was then only

just 20 and Most was around 24 years older [i.e. more than twice her

age]. Berkman and Goldman [who were similarly aged] would themselves

embark upon a sexual relationship too and both committed themselves

openly to the notion of “free love”, the idea that no one had an

exclusive sexual call on, or title over, another and so that people were

free to pursue or engage in sexual fulfilment with whomsoever they

wished, having given their consent to such relationships.

In 1892 Berkman would commit to an act of propaganda by attempting to

kill the industrialist and union-buster, Henry Clay Frick. He shot and

stabbed him but failed to kill him and was captured, subsequently being

imprisoned for 14 years. When he emerged, he bore all the scars, visible

and invisible, of his time inside in which he had attempted escape both

via a tunnel that was dug but also by hanging himself. It is

unsurprising that the now thoroughly changed Berkman found it difficult

to take up his life where he had left off almost a decade and a half

before. Notably, relations with Emma Goldman modulated from sexual

intimacy to a deep, supportive, mutual friendship which would continue

for the rest of their lives. But this is not where I leave this matter

for, in 1907, when Goldman helped assist Berkman’s transition back into

productive life by handing him the editorship of her magazine, Mother

Earth, a magazine which would become the most popular anarchist magazine

in the USA under his editorship, Berkman took the opportunity of Goldman

being abroad on a lecture tour and attending anarchist conferences, to

begin a relationship with the anarchist activist, Becky Edelsohn, who,

at least according to Goldman and Berkman in their various writings, was

about 15 years old. Berkman was, at this time, 37 years of age.

This example of Berkman and Edelsohn, as with the earlier similar

example of Goldman and Most, would, for many today [and even those of

anarchist self-description], be a challenging revelation. The spectre of

“pedophiles” stalks public discourse as the ultimate slur everyone is

keen to avoid and many are eager to dish out, so they think, to suspect

others. Even where the participants are of legal age [as with Goldman

and Most], age difference is often wielded as a weapon by some

commentators eager to find “creepy” or “stalkerish” men who are

“preying” on much younger women. Notably [for me, at least] the question

of the agency of the females in these situations is barely ever raised.

It is assumed [often consequent on, and in relationship with, the age of

the females concerned] that the women in these situations have no

agency. Yet in the cases I have raised here neither Goldman nor Berkman

ever seem to make reference to the illegitimacy of either of these

relationships. Goldman, for example, feels upset that Berkman can no

longer be intimate with her but, in her comments on it in her own

writing, she never remarks how young Becky Edelsohn is. The age

difference, similarly, does not elicit any remarks from her. She

considers it only as a seemingly consensual relationship in which

Berkman and Edelsohn themselves can decide if it is right for them or

not. It is worth noting here that Goldman came to know Becky Edelsohn

quite well as Edelsohn became a member of her circle [and was previously

arrested as a 14 year old at a meeting at which Goldman had spoken] and

helped out with Mother Earth, moving into Goldman and Berkman’s communal

apartment [which was also the Mother Earth offices] by the time her

relationship with Berkman became active. She would be associated with

their circle of friends for several years thereafter, Goldman’s lover,

Dr Ben Reitman, even performing a then illegal abortion for her in 1911

when she would’ve been 18 or 19 years old.

In a contemporary context of near ubiquitous pedophile scares, examples

such as this serve to raise numerous questions. Here are a few that I

can think of [you may be able to think of more of your own and I

encourage you to do so]:

if so, under what circumstances?

relationships?

ability, and with a partner who gives her every opportunity to consent

without coercion, is it for third parties to tell her she should not

engage in sexual behaviour or to censure any potential partner?

public perspective?

Of course, it is not only in matters of age that women and girls have

had their agency removed from them by protective [or perhaps simply

controlling] others. In the area of sex work there are those who argue

that female sex workers are a coerced workforce who are unable to

articulate their own best interests, so pervasive is the coercion they

suffer [financial and sometimes physical] imagined to be. This applies

not just to girls of teen age but also women of legal adult age. Such

complainants are often revealed to be anti-sex work activists who argue

that women should not offer sex for money to begin with as they regard

such work as giving women in general a bad reputation and encouraging

men, predatory or otherwise, into viewing women in general as sexually

available. We also see in other areas, such as the furore some generate

about trans people undergoing transition, that both teenagers and even

those into their early twenties are argued by some, possibly bad faith,

actors to be incapable of agency in their own lives. In fact, we may say

that it is a strategically used tactic of some to argue that, in certain

moral spheres, people should be regarded as not having agency. This, I

suggest, applies to sexual relationships regarding teenagers [and

especially teenage girls] as well. As anarchists, this should concern

us.

Put simply – but, in contemporary context, requiring a lot of

explanation that the reactionarily quick of thought will not engage in –

my argument here is to be that simply because someone is a certain age –

say the 15 years of age that Becky Edelsohn was in the example given

above – that is, in itself, not enough to entirely preclude sexual

activity on their part. But I must make it clear straightaway that this

essay is, consequently, not to be a piece that argues for an unethical

licentiousness and a free for all where sex is concerned. I do not

believe that adults should, in general, be having sex with children nor

even that children should be having sex with each other. The point of

this essay is, in fact, that uncoerced consent is the primary deciding

factor in sexual engagement with another person and that teenagers, as

human beings, have agency and that this should be encouraged, educated

and recognised in an ideal world. Of course, we do not live in an ideal

world. But this does not mean we cannot educate each other and encourage

educated engagement with each other nevertheless. This is, in fact, what

I hope this essay will contribute to in a necessarily nuanced way.

Sexual activity in general today is carried out – unbelievably so – in

an atmosphere to a large degree characterised by ignorance. On the one

hand, we have those who are sex- obsessed, who see everything in terms

of a largely [so they think] inconsequential ubiquitousness of sexual

activity. Such people never seem interested in anything but sex and

having an unending stream of orgasms seems their pre-eminent interest in

life, something which is consequently full to the brim of sexual imagery

of an often dubious or coercive nature. On the other hand, we have

those, perhaps of religious persuasion, who vilify sex and the body

[supremely the female body] as dirty and evil and to be avoided at all

costs. It is something to be ashamed of and hidden away in the dark as

if it doesn’t exist and its not how each one of us got here to begin

with. Somewhere between these two the rest of the population are,

somehow, supposed to develop healthy attitudes towards sex and sexual

behaviour but, in such circumstances, its hard to see how they ever

could.

This is unfortunate for perhaps the most helpful and advantageous thing

contributing towards a healthy sex life is education, an education most

people simply don’t get, either held in the sway, as they are, of those

who don’t want you to know about sex at all or those who don’t want you

to think about anything else. But it is this lack of education about sex

and, yes, love, which leads to broken or ill-considered encounters and

relationships, sexually-transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancy and

traumatic consequences. What’s more, its education about sex, love and

relationships which reduces the possibility for coercion of others in

sex and so education which is, in many respects, the cure for ills which

are easily diagnosed. Human beings, in a situation where

their offspring may become sexually capable by their early teenage

years, leave these same people bereft of education or context in regard

to their very own bodies and the feelings they may quite naturally

encounter as a result of their natural maturation. It is entirely

negligent behaviour on our [society’s] part.

It is my view that people with a mature and appropriate attitude towards

sex would be teaching their children about it BEFORE their bodies became

capable of it and their bodies start to respond to sexual stimuli. I see

no reason why 10, 11 and 12 year olds could not be taught fully about

sex, the development of the human body and sexual relationships before

such things naturally begin to occur. For some backward,

emotionally-stunted people this is seemingly only to encourage such

things. But education is not encouragement: it is education; and, as

anarchists, we should be all in favour of such education for it gives

its recipients agency. Agency, or the ability to choose for oneself

honestly and responsibly, is one of the pillars upon which anarchism

rests. We should not be in the business of denying it to people but of

encouraging it in everyone such that everyone – adult and teen – becomes

the “self-thinking people” that the anarchist Lucy Parsons eulogised in

an essay written in 1905. I believe it is fundamentally dishonest to say

that people cannot decide things for themselves when it is often we, as

a society, who have kept them in the ignorance which so disables them.

Put simply, education increases agency and ignorance decreases it.

Perhaps people are kept stupid so that they can be better controlled. As

anarchists, however, that’s just one more reason why people should be

educated all the more about their bodies in a sexual context.

That this education is lacking, and that people are often not

“self-thinking people”, is clear to see on social media as I shall now

demonstrate in a genuine example that I am aware of. Recently a 19 year

old woman posted a photo of her bottom in booty shorts on Twitter. She

apparently did this of her own free will and there’s no reason she

shouldn’t have. The woman then apparently received a direct message in

which a 42 year old man expressed his approval of the woman’s photo,

something the woman apparently received with distaste. What followed was

the woman outing the man for his, at best, bland approval of her photo,

as if it was something both outrageous and shameful, and a pile on

resulted in which the vast majority of people accused the man concerned

of being a predator, a sex pest, a pedophile [for, of course, so they

reasoned, he would’ve gone after a younger female if he could have], a

creep, a stalker, etc., in a massive and unthought out example of

overreaction and immaturity. Perhaps, we may say, the man should have

kept his thoughts to himself. But is an honest and measured expression

of another’s beauty now to be justifiably met with character

assassination for the crime of saying someone looked nice? Is every

older man necessarily a pedophile, every teen [or even just woman]

necessarily a victim? This whole incident smacks of immaturity all round

and an inability to appropriately and reasonably contextualise sexual

interactions, things which subsequently become matters of predators and

victims, male creeps and always innocent women.

When I became aware of this situation – and the focus, in some, on the

age difference which, somehow in their minds, made the thought of any

sexual interaction between them inconceivable [although, I stress, it

was never even raised] – I immediately thought of Goldman and Most and

Berkman and Edelsohn, which are tolerably similar examples of age

differences and which, in both cases, led to actual bodily sexual

interactions. I wondered how the commentators on this relatively

inconsequential online case would have received such real world facts

had they been aware of them. But then I also wonder how those reading

about them now in this essay perceive and receive them too. The

historical actors in these relationships seemingly had no concept, and

so make no comment about, an imagined inappropriateness. It seems – in

absence of evidence to the contrary – as if all four simply regard these

relationships as matters of free choice, of agency, and of their own

consent and self-responsibility. Free people may choose to enter into

whatever voluntary associations they choose, we may imagine. This, after

all, is an anarchist verity.

So it is not inconsequential that all four people here are, of course,

anarchists and anarchists, as we know pre-eminently from Emma Goldman of

these four, are those opposed not only to cops in the streets

constraining our behaviour by fiat and by force but also against the

cops in our head which would impose moralities of control upon us too.

[Goldman often seems to have regarded the Church in this way and that is

extremely appropriate where sex is concerned since its often the

religious who want to control sexuality and especially female bodies.]

Goldman’s ideal was educated men AND women who could freely choose to

express their sexuality in ways uncoerced by others, ways that had been

educated to be able to be uncoerced by others. She carried out such

education herself personally over many years and to numerous audiences.

We must assume, with Goldman’s explicit comments upon the case of

Berkman and Edelsohn, by which she was personally affected, that this

agency and freedom to choose voluntary associations was something she

even extended to 15 year old females too. It would seem she regarded

this relationship as a case of exactly such a thing, Becky Edelsohn’s

age notwithstanding.

But should she have – and what follows from this? Let me make it clear

that as an anarchist I am one who believes in the principles of an

educated human agency and free association. I do not believe it right

simply to say that Edelsohn and Berkman’s relationship was wrong simply

based on their ages and some uneducated notion of its inappropriateness.

This is not least the case when neither of those involved seemingly ever

voiced any regret about the relationship – and neither did those close

to it. I do not regard it as self-evidently obvious that those concerned

could not have found sexual satisfaction from such a relationship and

neither do I hold to moral interpretations which would seek to impugn

one or other of the participants here for some imagined [and it would be

a purely imagined] fault.

In fact, this essay has largely been dismissive of any public moral

context in regard to the matters I have discussed at all. I am not even

sure that such cases are public matters in an anarchist context or that

it is for moralistic and controlling third parties to be interfering in

the lives and choices of others. Anarchism is about educated freedom and

responsibility and so this must extend to everyone possible, even 15

year olds if we can make it so. Anarchism is the doing away with the old

philosophy of ignorance and coercion, of force and control, and its

replacing with agency and association which is educated, free and

unconstrained. This applies to love and sex as it does to politics. This

is not a licentious free for all but a taking seriously of human

interactions in a way that neither the sex-obsessed nor the sexually

controlling ever will. So it is time to stop being sex police and to

start educating ourselves about sex so that we may engage in it

responsibly in as many cases as possible. We have nothing to fear from

this except free people making free and educated choices. But that is

exactly what the opponents of such thought will always be afraid of. Sex

is an anarchist issue.

So, taking this on board, let us now try to close this essay by seeking

to provide some anarchist answers to the questions that came to mind

earlier:

if so, under what circumstances?Yes, of course a female has agency in

sexual encounters and over the use of her body – and she does so every

bit as much as a man. Ideally, this would be in the educated way I have

been describing in order that she may make educated free associations as

she so chooses but, regardless, a woman’s body is hers to use as she

wants, be that in sexual relationships or in selling it for sexual

gratification on terms she openly agrees to.

debates naturally occur as people are concerned about predators [who do

exist] and the protection of those too young in their emotional

development to handle sexual contact. However, they also appear to be

both lazy and clumsy devices to deal with necessarily individual and

personal matters. Having an “age of consent” is what a society does when

it is disconnected from the education of its citizens and its children

and just wants a relatively easy [yet very coercive] fix.

ridiculous to imagine that a single day in the life of a person

determines whether they may engage in sexual activity or not. It is

equally ridiculous, if characteristic of the controlling mind which

cares more about control than logical consistency, that in some places

[such as the UK] teens may legally engage in sex but photos or video of

them doing so constitutes child pornography, the sharing of which, even

with friends or other lovers, may criminalise them for the rest of their

lives.

positive affirmation of activity proposed or undertaken by each

participant. We cannot second guess what is in people’s heads or ask

what reasons people may have for doing something. We can only go by

their outward signals regarding it.

relationships?I tend to the view that they are of no importance at all.

It is no more “creepy” of people of 20 or 30 years age difference to

engage in uncoerced and consensual sexual activity than it is for people

of 4 or 5 years age difference or no age difference at all.

ability, and with a partner who gives her every opportunity to consent

without coercion, is it for third parties to tell her she should not

engage in sexual behaviour or to censure any potential partner?Taking

the example in good faith, I do not believe it is a matter for third

parties at all. Whilst it is natural [and right] that people would want

to protect the vulnerable from exploitation, this is not carte blanche

to control the lives of others. This is exactly why I prescribed full

and frank education of everyone above. Informed people make informed

decisions and the anarchist is not then in the business of controlling

behaviour regardless. With education comes self-responsibility [which we

may assume Becky Edelsohn displayed herself].

public perspective?If people are freely consenting to sex, the public

should largely be minding their own business and hoping they enjoy it.

merely those participating in them.

This essay has been written to promote the anarchist idea of human

agency and especially in the context of the anarchist values of

[self-]education and [self-]responsibility. It is written in the belief

that coercive control of people is damaging, wrong and so undesirable

and that that society is best in which people make educated choices and

engage in free and voluntary associations. It is a model for the whole

of human society but, that being so, it must apply to those most

intimate of human relationships and interactions too. It is not, as I am

sure my critics would claim, a predator’s charter for it is my belief

that educated people are also safer people and so that the ignorance

people are currently kept in in order to control them also keeps them in

danger [from predators and the exploitative] that they need not be in to

begin with. So my argument here is not only that educated people may

make better choices for their own lives and can be trusted to freely

associate with who they will for whatever common purposes they share,

but that the resulting society would also be safer as well as people

become more aware of the dangers and more active in their negation.

Educated freedom is, thus, not something to fear but something to

embrace for all our sakes and life’s better [sexual] enjoyment.