Foreign Policy has a special issue out titled ‘The Sex Issue.’ But it’s really an issue about women, featuring a long essay about misogyny in the Arab World that does very little beyond telling us – in case we didn’t know – that misogyny exists, a list of ‘The 25 Most Powerful Women You’ve Never Heard Of,’ and an article about Chinese society’s angst about rising numbers of single women.
Charli Carpenter has an excellent post up at Duck of Minerva dismantling many of the assumptions in the individual articles. It’s worth reading in full, but I would like to highlight two points Carpenter makes that gets to the heart of what’s wrong with FP’s approach:
You can’t just assert that “sex is the missing part of the equation” and that this works “to shore up the abusers and perpetuate the marginalization of half of humanity” and then tell us that besides “this one issue” (which by the way mostly focuses on sexuality, not on women’s issues or gender relations broadly) you’ve done your due diligence and let’s get back to writing about “real” issues: as if gender, sex and sexuality aren’t relevant to many of the stories you routinely cover: peace negotiations, missile defense, intelligence gathering, cyber-security, population shifts, pandemic disease, transnational crime, the financial crisis...
What if we really took masculinity seriously as a cultural norm that regulates not just men’s attitudes toward women but also their attitudes toward other men, that is embedded in the entire way we think about nations, states and markets, and that impacts foreign and economic policies around the globe, even those that have on the surface nothing to do with women’s rights?
Ultimately, the FP Sex Issue starts from two assumptions: that sex matters in politics insofar as politics seeks to regulate female sexuality, and that women matter in politics insofar as we have political debates about said regulation. These assumptions miss the most critical insight of feminism: that both men and women have a right to full spectrum of human experience. Sex isn’t the only women’s issue – all political issues are women’s issues. But just as importantly, sex isn’t only a women’s issue, and engaging with the pressures put on men by a rigid definition of masculinity is a central component of any serious engagement with the politics of sexuality.
