Thursday afternoon found me in an Edinburgh pub, surrounded by Hibs supporters who were fueling up on their Tennents, en route to a Champions League match at Easter Road. The pub was full to the brim with Blokes. I sat quietly at a table, waiting for the Mad Studies meetup to begin:
This week we'll be discussing the phenomenon by which mental distress and anomalous experiences are treated as a personal, individual medical issues rather than political and systemic ones. Drawing on the arguments articulated in Micha Fraser-Carroll's Mad World and Jessica Taylor's Sexy But Psycho, we'll explore how capitalism and patriarchy are driving us all crazy.
How uncomfortable was I, sitting there among the crush of Blokes with my copy of Sexy But Psycho hidden discreetly from view. How determinedly did I make myself small and invisible, avoiding eye contact, playing dumb with the Clearly-Drunken-Bloke who lurched past my table and demanded to know if I were hosting a book club. How well-trained we all were in our respective behaviours: the Blokes in their overbearing ritual of male bonding and me in my complicit strategising to steer clear. How utterly vivid felt the patriarchy.
You may think that my personal feelings about this would entail resentment, and righteous feminist fury. Au contraire: I felt compassion for all of us. The Blokes may not realise it, but they're as fucked if not moreso by patriarchy. It sells them the lie that power over women – whether explicitly through acts of discrimination or abuse, or implicitly through the receipt of benefits – will somehow enrich them. It doesn't enrich them; it diminishes them and it diminishes their humanity.
But back to the meetup. The theme was about the systemic tendency to frame cases of madness as personal rather than political. Madness is framed as an individual, biomedical problem rather than as an entirely reasonable response to a social landscape featuring sexism, racism, classism, capitalism and imperialism. This army of 'isms' works to crush the warmth and humanity out of men and women both. Madness seeks out another reality, when this one becomes overwhelming.
I believe that activism occurs and succeeds in many different ways; that social change is wily and many-faceted, and subject to any and all efforts to improve the world. Maybe even madness is a form of activism, being as it is a protest against the reality in which we find ourselves. So what is the madreality we might move our world into? I would suggest that the more beautiful world we might create is grounded in love. As bell hooks writes in Feminism is for Everybody:
Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politic. The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination. Love can never take root in a relationship based on domination and coercion.... This vision of relationships where everyone's needs are respected, where everyone has rights, where no one need fear subordination or abuse, runs counter to everything patriarchy upholds about the structure of relationships.
But women can’t do it alone. Both men and women must embrace this visionary feminism, in order for a madreality grounded in love to be realised and to benefit us all. Together men and women can turn the personal into the political. Together we can recognise patriarchy as the madness that it is. We can and we will: together we will change the world.
Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash
Why is Feminism better than any other of the isms you said are patriarchial oppression? I have tried complaining about the effects of same sex sexual abuse on Psychosis however Feminists have been amongst the most brain washed by the Patriarchy who make a lot of money through destroying critical lives at an early age. Blokes drinking in the pub are far less likely to accept all the bullshit in my experiences.