More than contributing to just and humane societies, the international gender industry, feminism’s institutionalized offshoot, has undeniably become part of multi-faceted attempts at periphery control.

Just like threats and enemies often don’t turn out to be who we are told or believe them to be, measures and movements with an apparently noble and humanist purpose do not always serve it. Draconic laws against “hate speech” and “extremism,” for instance, are perhaps not as much about promoting tolerance or stopping evil white supremacists and evil Salafists as the public is told. The latter groups rather serve as mediagenic scarecrows, the threat of which serves to legitimize a set of laws, policies and control organs that are set up for the purpose of intimidating or silencing all forms of effective dissent against the neoliberal order in the future. Likewise, tightened gun-control laws are not in place for the protection of ordinary citizens, but rather represent attempts by the power elites to curb the circulation of firearms that could, one day, be turned against them as the cropped-up frustration, bitterness and despair that ferment at the grassroots level, explode. 

Orwellian doublethink and newspeak have never been as lavishly used as under the neoliberal hegemony that arose after the demise of the Cold War and the bipolar world order. Now, the same paradox applies to feminism and its more comprehensive and slick spin-off and alibi, gender. Much can be traced back to so-called “second-wave feminism,” a movement that originated among upper-middle class and elite women in northwestern Europe and in the US between 1965-75. Its major aims were the financial independence for women through their full integration into the labor market, and the so-called “sexual liberation.” There is no doubt that the movement initially addressed real inequalities, abuses and hypocrisies. Yet, it lost part of its moral superiority once it became an instrument of ingraining a neoliberal world order – a dehumanizing system in which all aspects of life have to become marketable, with everyone and everything as merchandise, subordinate to oligarchic and cosmopolitan financial elites — in the deepest fabric of society. How did this happen?  

Is Freedom Slavery?

Let us look at its actual legacy in the countries' societies where it started: that is the OECD sphere, and northwestern Europe and the US in particular. If one makes abstraction of the rhetoric about emancipation, progress, equal opportunity and freedom of choice, which have been truly or allegedly obtained, one sees that over the last decades men and women in the OECD sphere’s core societies have reached almost complete equality — that is, in the first place, as consumers and taxable subjects. It’s important to emphasize this; for the upgrading of women to fully-fledged laborers, consumers and taxpayers was the actual purpose of the establishment’s recuperation of feminism, or at least a number of its issues. In terms of marketization of society, the so-called sexual liberation also came into practice as the full incorporation of the sexual mores of the left-libertarian protest subcultures from the 1965-75 period, into marketing and mass consumerism. But perhaps the most important is this: the steered vilification and destruction of the core family and the clan as the cornerstones of a natural societal order, and the power struggle and hostility between the sexes that is being constantly incited by lifestyle magazines, reality TV, women’s organizations, social workers and lawyers, has proven to be an ultimate divide-and-rule tactic.

Perhaps it's somewhat bluntly put. But let’s stick to the essentials. The fragmentation and mutation of the social fabric also came to serve a major purpose of ensuring ideological continuity, in the sense that corporate media, subsidized pedagogues and all sorts of therapists became major players in the education and acculturation of children and young adults instead of the family. At a loss because of the breakup of the family structure and degradation of the father figure, they become much easier to indoctrinate with the systemic values and norms through the said channels. Finally, in terms of society control, the promotion of feminization and metro-sexuality among boys and men through media and commercials is to dilute the physical and psychological capacity for effective rebellion and revolution against the order of things. The oligarchy has understood all too well that the physical input on the streets during turmoil and revolutions have always primarily been carried out by men.

So, one starts to wonder whether it’s really about creating a more soft and gentle society, or, rather, a submissive one that lives an illusion of freedom and equality. More recently, the gender sector went further with the promotion of gay rights, which after a while have become rights of “sexual minorities” in international policy discourse. On the whole it looks like in some way, feminism and the gender sector eventually came to serve the oppression that they pretend to fight. Is it this that the thousands of well-intended feminists and gender activists wanted? Most probably not. The thing is, that their movements, and real and perceived achievements, were recuperated by a system, the nature of which they failed to understand — at least in time. But on the other hand, feminism’s recuperation into a tool for the neoliberal oligarchy was only possible because part of the feminist elites understood that they could make careers on this, especially once the baby boomers and soixante-huitards, who propagated second-wave feminism, found their way into the upper echelons of national politics and international institutions.

The Wrath of the Peripheries

For sober minds, it had been clear for a long time now that resistance against, and alternatives to, neo-liberalism would not come from the secular Lefts. As Oswald Spengler rightly said at the time – and as the former Socialist sphere in the 1990s as well as the devolution of European social-democrats illustrate – every “outbreak” of Socialism creates new paths for capitalism. Neither can much be expected from established democratic structures and actors, because these have been largely reduced to entertainment and periodic political rituals that do not affect the real powers that be. Instead, the resistance and alternatives come and will continue to come from the internal and global peripheries and from emerging powers. They will be grafted in existing or re-composed solidarity groups, existing or born-again forms of traditionalism, and religion. Depending on the society and the geographic sphere, the latter particularly includes Islam, Christianity, and perhaps neo-paganism.

Even within the OECD sphere itself, remnants of traditional structures and religion might one day prove vital for the survival of individuals and for the recomposing of societies once the current order implodes, as it sooner or later will. Therefore, these have to be discredited and discarded so that no alternatives can form, or that they can be marginalized where they exist. What the protagonists and agents of global neoliberal hegemony especially fear is that emerging powers and traditionalist and non-secular resistance movements will somehow find a common cause. Furthermore, similar to what took place in the OECD sphere, the global consumers’ base has to be expanded so that the economic system can extend its survival. This means that collective identities, norms and values that form an impediment to the transformation of the peripheries’ societies into fully-fledged consumer bases, have to be dealt with. And this is where the gender industry, amongst others, comes in. So, what it essentially comes to, is that the process of social fragmentation of feminism’s original turf has to be propagated and grafted in the internal periphery – that is, the non-Western and in particular Muslim immigrants in the OECD sphere – as well as in the global periphery and, here again, with particular attention to its Islamic sectors. This also includes the exportation of the sexual minorities agenda.  

A major channel of what is definitely becoming gender imperialism is international development aid. The use of aid to transform peripheral societies and gain some control over them in the process has been conceptualized by authors like Mark Duffield, amongst others. The following figure offers a concrete look at what aid for the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment as a principal or significant goal, represent in the overall aid volume from the OECD sphere, and how it evolved over time. These figures only reflect reported official aid. If one adds the activities where gender equality is an implicit and not a major goal, as well as the contributions from private donors, the portion of such aid is likely to be higher. Nonetheless, if we look at the timeline, we see that aid related to gender systematically increased after 1999, and especially from 2002 onwards. This is no coincidence. For a start, gender equality was streamlined and integrated as a priority development goal at a number of global summits under UN aegis between 1995 and 2000. More importantly, there was the shifting geopolitical paradigm. Earlier, the “opening” of the former Socialist societies in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Eurasia had already created a real or hoped-for space for “social reconstruction” along neoliberal lines. The rapid impoverishment and the social and moral dislocation that these societies went through in the early 1990s created opportunities for the international gender industry too. Officially there to save women from degradation and exploitation, its task, in fact, was to help prevent any return or rehabilitation of traditionalist and non-secular alternatives to defunct Socialism.