The argument for a political alliance between mature women and "young" men. And a world-changing mission, should we choose to accept the assignment.
"It is against this [patriarchal] authority that women and young men have become allies." —Carla Lonzi, "Let's Spit on Hegel"
Carla Lonzi (1931-1982) was an Italian art critic who co-founded Rivolta Femminile with artist Carla Accardi and journalist Elvira Banotti in 1970. In that same year, she wrote a manifesto entitled "Sputiamo su Hegel," translated as "Let's Spit on Hegel" by English translators Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp in Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel. In this manifesto contra Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic, Lonzi rejects both equality and difference frameworks for feminism¹, and calls for the emergence of an Unexpected Subject, woman:
"The unexpected destiny of the world consists in starting out anew, on a new path where woman is subject... Those who are not part of the master-slave dialectic are coming into consciousness and are introducing into the world the Unexpected Subject." (Lonzi, "Let's Spit on Hegel," p.295).
She spends a lot of the time going after Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic, including Simone de Beauvoir's use of it — I will return to this in an upcoming account of Beauvoir. But what interests me today is a novel and rather startling argument that she makes partway through: The real fault line running under patriarchy is not a struggle between women and men, but between fathers and everyone against whom patriarchal authority is used. Quite obviously this includes women, but also (and this is the surprising part) young men.
1970 is two years after the French student revolt of May '68 extended into the Sessantotto or "long May" in Italy, peaking with the Hot Autumn of 1969; it is also the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the States. Lonzi notes that young men, who are being conscripted into war and asked to die enforcing an order built by and for older men, are rebelling against that order. Before young men become heavily invested in the patriarchal status-quo, they find themselves subject to rule by the patriarchy, which is to say on the same side as most women. In her own time, women and young men find themselves fighting on the same side of the anti-war movements, and are, for a season, natural political allies against the patriarchy.
Lonzi writes: "The two colossal refutations of Hegel's analysis are within our power," she writes, "women in their rejection of the family, young men in their rejection of war." The alliance is women and young men against the father, not women against men.
Left to his own experience, "the young man grasps intuitively that the ancient right of life and death of the father over his children was the expression of a wish rather than the legitimation of a practice." That is, the father asserts a right over young men that is aspirational, not yet real until the young man accepts that authority. The young man's resistance to that demand is real, but on its own, it's fragile. "Without the presence of his historical ally, woman, the anarchical experience of the young man is undermined," she writes. The young man's rebellion can be redirected towards some other cause that patriarchy has ready and waiting for him: the class struggle, the nation, religious fervor, whichever story reroutes his youthful rebellion into a narrative patriarchy already controls. But women, she argues, have the two-century head start on recognizing this trap, watching their own political energy get redirected the same way, into movements that used them and then asked them to wait their turn, e.g., the French Revolution, Communist party organizing, anti-war movements, etc.
Lonzi is careful to specify that the alliance is not a maternal one, not based in women's role as mothers.² The political alignment is a shared oppression, for a time: the paternalistic state that assigns young men to war and women to the family, and punishes both for refusing the assignment. Women burned their bras (not really, but in spirit) outside of the 1968 Miss America pageant to protest our objectification, at the same time that men were burning their draft cards. Young men refusing conscription during the Vietnam War found their most durable organizing partners in the women's antiwar movement. "Don't trust anyone over 30" became a mantra of the New Left.
We should look at that window of time when women and young men are natural allies, and the mechanism through which the anarchic hearts of young men are possessed by authoritarianism. I like to call it their existentialist period, a time when a certain type of young man is reading Nietzsche and enjoying poetry, rightfully disgruntled about how things are. Both young men and women are subject to carrots and sticks to keep them well apart in this period of time.
"The persistence of patriarchy is contingent on the move from protest to despair and detachment." —Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider, Why Does Patriarchy Persist?
Before a young man is old enough to need woman as his "historical ally," as Carla Lonzi put it, patriarchy has already spent years training the connection out of him. Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider argue that the whole system runs on a specific, trackable loss, one that starts in early childhood and finishes the job by high school.
Carol Gilligan is well known for her critique of developmental psychology for measuring girls against a masculinist standard — setting her up for failure — and for developing an "ethics of care" beginning with her 1982 book In a Different Voice. Her subsequent work with Naomi Snider in Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (2018) turns the same attention to boys, borrowing a framework from the attachment researcher John Bowlby, who documents three stages through which small children move in response to being separated from their main caregiver: protest, despair, and finally detachment. Gilligan and Snider's claim is that this is the exact sequence for boys under patriarchy, except the separation isn't temporary.
We learn that it starts very early with Judy Chu's two-year study of boys from pre-kindergarten through first grade, published as When Boys Become Boys (2014) with a foreword by Gilligan. Chu found that young boys start out just as relationally perceptive, articulate, and emotionally responsive as young girls. What changes isn't the boys' capacity but what they learn to do with it: prove they're boys by demonstrating, over and over, that they are not girls. That proof requires giving up exactly the qualities, warmth, attentiveness, the wish to stay close, that get coded as feminine the moment a woman, starting with the boy's own mother, is the one who models them.
The job is finished in adolescence. We can see this in Niobe Way's Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (2011), which follows working-class boys of color through high school and finds something almost nobody expects going in: fourteen-year-old boys talk about their male friendships in intensely intimate, emotionally articulate terms, saying they'd be lost without them, sometimes even that they love their best friend. A few years later, the same boys have gone quiet. Gilligan and Snider read Way's interviews as documenting the detachment in real time: older teenage boys report a "need to dissimulate their desires for closeness, to be sure not to 'sound too sissy-like'," and the friendships that once anchored them get replaced, in Way's data, by properly masculine interests — sports, money, objectifying girls, etc.
Despair is a hinge in the middle of this process, after which a child gives up hoping that what is lost will return or be found again. This is when the boy stops protesting and begins to treat disconnection as a sign of his own maturity, as what it means to become a man. From this post-despair perspective, detachment reads as competence, and even health. It is from this perspective that empathy looks like sickness, even evil. The loss is "productive," as it is transformed into meaning. The boy is left behind as the man emerges, a man who has made a trade and is now willing to defend, Stockholm-syndrome-like, the system that required he sacrifice the maternal. There is a betrayal of the self at the heart of patriarchal masculinity, just as there is a betrayal for the woman who is made to accept her own objectification as a condition for recognition in patriarchy (as Simone de Beauvoir details in The Second Sex).
Even as the boy's grievance is redirected, underneath there remains a valid anger at the father's authority. The "manosphere" is a contemporary and concrete example of the institutionalization of this mechanism. Figures like Andrew Tate prey on what are very real grievances (precarity, a felt lack of purpose or meaning, loneliness) and redirect them into resentment for women and Others who are seen as stealing what is rightfully theirs, including their capacity for joy, rather than expose the systems that produce precarity and alienation to scrutiny. Young men have to be prepared to inherit the reins of patriarchy. If a generation were to refuse the conditioning, patriarchy begins to lose steam (as it has done in the last 50+ years). It actually takes an enormous amount of energy and coordination to maintain the status quo, keep this in mind.
Even more opaque is what happens on the woman's side. Girls are taught early that maleness itself is the unit of danger: the catcall, the hand on the subway, the walk home at night planned around which men are on the street. That training keeps her safe from a great deal. It also serves to obfuscate an important distinction between the patriarch father who holds real power over both of them, and the young man who doesn't have any yet. "Man" arrives pre-sorted as one category, and a nineteen-year-old with no job and no standing gets filed under the same heading as his boss.
When we consider racialized identity, we can see even more clearly how this dynamic of keeping us apart is constructed through a fear of the other. Angela Davis, in Women, Race and Class (1981), traces how the myth of the Black rapist was constructed specifically to make solidarity between white women and Black men, of any age, look not just improper but monstrous. And remember, the first wave of feminism emerges from women within the abolitionist movements of the 19th century: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Sarah and Angelina Grimké all developed organizing, public speaking, and political skills in the fight for the rights of enslaved peoples. A white woman who saw a young Black man as a comrade rather than a threat wasn't risking gossip. She was risking her own social standing and, depending on the decade, his life. An entire mythology engineered to keep the alliance from ever being recognized as anything but danger.
The sexualization of women and of the relationship between women and men pre-empts every other frame. Generally, the sexualization of intimacy is a barrier; the only intimacy allowed visibility is within the purview of the family and in the name of reproduction. The instant an older woman shows any real closeness to a young man who isn't hers, culture has exactly one frame ready for it: erotic and somewhat ridiculous. Cougar. MILF. Toy boy. Tropes that turn away from the potential politicization of the relation and towards sexualization. There is no script for a non-sexual bond between women and men, as famously depicted in the movie When Harry Met Sally. Men and women cannot be friends, much less allies, and culture has almost no available ways to frame or recognize closeness between a non-maternal older woman and a younger man that isn't transgressive. There is no comparably available word for "the older woman who mentors, organizes with, or fights alongside a young man twenty years her junior for reasons that have nothing to do with sex." Where there's no word, there's often no thought. She isn't rejecting the alliance so much as never quite arriving at the idea that it's on offer. The absence of vocabulary and imaginary is itself a mechanism by which that political alliance is almost unthinkable before it can even get footing in reality.
Women become less visible as they age, and just in time. Traditionally "apolitical" women, women who maybe have bought into a fairly standard womanhood, start to wise up politically in midlife, just as men become further entrenched in the status quo, often becoming more conservative as they age. Women and men can move apart significantly in midlife, as benefits accrue on one side and the lack of balance becomes more and more obvious.
Women are given a specific role to play in the lives of young men: as anchors of morality and tradition, they are deputized to enforce status-quo gender norms. Mothers, teachers, girlfriends, it is women telling the boy to toughen up, stop crying, and later telling the man to get a job, act like a man. It's a supervisory relationship, not a fraternal alliance. Even the word "fraternal" works against the very idea, as does sisterhood, but maybe that is the word we should use. We should invite young men into the sisterhood and invite them to regard themselves through the universal feminine subject, a fellow sister in resistance to an authoritarian father.
Instead, women are taught that authority over young men is supervisory, and contingent on them enforcing the law of the father. She experiences young men as something to manage and civilize on behalf of the system. Wherever women have won entry into the institutions where such an alliance might actually form — like workplaces and universities — they're just as often placed in direct competition with young men for the same narrow openings, so his gain reads as her loss before either of them has done anything to each other at all. It also makes it very difficult to be a woman inside these institutions, when men cut their teeth, professionally as well as personally, on cutting women down. It makes it very difficult to walk the line between aligning with "young" men (in this case, "young" is not a matter of age but a predisposition towards being critical of the status quo) and appeasing and collaborating with our own oppressions.
In conclusion,
If you are a woman of a certain age, I hope you understand the assignment.
Some potential ways to begin thinking and modeling non-romantic, intergenerational bonds as sites of care and knowledge transfer outside patriarchal/heteronormative romantic scripts: fictive "auntie" roles; straight-up mentorship or teacher; platonic friendship; work "spouse" if you and the young man work together, although I don't know about that one, it may lean into the sexualization of heterosexual relationships. Maybe "work spouse" works if one of you is not hetero. "Fag hag," when re-appropriated as a term of endearment, is a possibility. There is no well-established term going the other way, much less queering the binary here, but I guess "lesbro" might work. For me personally, the male feminist or male lesbian are interesting, if controversial, formations; we should look at why it is so difficult to trust these when self-affirmed.
Personally I like the idea of deepening and expanding our ideas around friendship. But truly, there really aren't any great terms for it, we have to invent. What comes to mind, for you? Maybe we should begin by telling our stories of the friendships between us (women) and "young" men, where they go right and wrong.
If you want to read and discuss the Lonzi piece, join us for the next session of Feminist Romp Through the History of Philosophy.
NOTES
"Women do not have one reason, not one single reason any more, to endorse the objectives of men. In this new stage of awareness women reject, as a dilemma imposed by male power, both equality and difference." (Lonzi, "Let's Spit on Hegel," p.277)
We pathologize mother-son closeness as smothering and un-American, giving cultural cover for mothers to push sons away as a mental-health imperative. The popular figure of the serial killer from Psycho, whose closeness to his mother is a marker of his pathology, also comes to mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. Random House, 1981.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. 1949.
de Beauvoir, Simone. America Day by Day. 1948. Translated by Carol Cosman, University of California Press, 1999.
Chu, Judy Y. When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity. New York University Press, 2014.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Harvard University Press, 1982.
Gilligan, Carol, and Naomi Snider. Why Does Patriarchy Persist?. Polity Press, 2018.
Lonzi, Carla. "Let's Spit on Hegel." Translated by Giovanna Bellesia and Elaine Maclachlan. In Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, edited by Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
Schulman, Sarah. Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Way, Niobe. Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. Harvard University Press, 2011.