Caroline Norma, “Talking ironically about tricky topics: Robert Jensen’s latest book”

Caroline Norma

Robert Jensen, It’s debatable: Talking authentically about tricky topics, Olive Branch Press, 2024, 173pp.

The irony at the heart of Robert Jensen’s latest It’s Debatable is the book’s most striking feature, and will be the first thing every review mentions. This review, too, will mention it, but after first commenting on the book and its author. Comprehending fully the extent of the book’s irony requires some background.

Robert Jensen, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, is a long-time radical feminist. Over the decades of his academic and writing career, he participated in, and contributed to, the activism and scholarship of the radical feminist movement, including the book The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (Spinifex Press, 2017). Concurrently, though, he was involved in other progressive causes, like green, anti-racism, and peace movements. It was this latter aspect of his biography that gave rise to the arguments of It’s Debatable, as will be shortly explained.

It’s Debatable conveys insights that draw from Jensen’s very substantial political experience in a style that profits from Jensen’s serious writing expertise. It is written to address the problem of our age that has arisen with the gradual thinning of liberalist commitments of Western societies. Jensen summarises this problem the book is written to address in clear and powerful terms:

Discussions about a complex world are bound to be contentious, inevitably leading to conflict. In a healthy society, people…would not only accept the inevitability of debate but encourage it. In a healthy society, institutions…would provide spaces and resources for managing the conflict to make it as productive as possible. I’m not sure I have ever lived in a healthy society. (p. 23)

He emphasises nonetheless that ‘we all are responsible for cultivating…intellectual, moral, and political virtues in ourselves’; namely, those of ‘thinking freely, speaking responsibly, and acting authentically’, but must ‘recognize that upholding those standards is as much a collective as an individual effort’. So, ‘we need a little help not just from our friends but also from our enemies’ (p.17). However, ‘finding a way to talk to enemies but also being honest with friends’ is hard. For Jensen it became particularly hard when his lifelong friends from green, anti-racism, and peace circles protested, punished, and waged pitchfork-style resistance to his radical feminist concerns about transgenderism.

This experience of failed political solidarity in the form of unwillingness to engage in debate drove Jensen to write the book. He had run into ‘It’s wrong for you to make that argument and I won’t listen’-type responses ‘more often in the past decade of my intellectual and political life than in previous decades’ (p. 12). So, he was inspired to encourage both leftists and rightists to heed John Stuart Mill’s warning that ideas undebated become dogma. Jensen saw this task as urgent, because of the ‘considerable chaos ahead, which makes forming and strengthening real communities today all the more crucial’ (p. 140). This ‘considerable chaos’ is the environmental catastrophe described in Chapter 6. In other words, we need to strengthen our collective capacity for debate and political engagement if we are to overcome dogma and find real ways of securing the future of humanity.

While this focus on global goals of environmental survival is highfalutin, the book’s first chapter, ‘Where I’m coming from’, translates it to ground level. Jensen’s modeling of a personal political stance in this chapter will be useful for sociologists looking to move away from hackneyed recitals of ‘researcher standpoint’ and ‘positionality’ in the social sciences. He offers a fresh epistemological perspective that commits to ‘eagerly’ offering ‘conclusions I’ve reached about contemporary issues with confidence, even when—perhaps especially when—members of my herd disagree’ (p. 11). Jensen advocates a stance of ‘mediocrity but stubbornness’ in debate that recognises one’s own ‘mediocre’ tendency to get things wrong while still exercising ‘stubborn’ adherence to views arrived at through years of thinking and engagement. He explains that, ‘as I have gotten older, I think I’m clearer about the difference between digging in for the sake of staying dug in, and holding one’s ground because intellectual standards matter. I like to think I’m stubborn the right way’ (p. 15).

Whether or not he is ‘stubborn in the right way’ is a question readers are given the chance to judge when, two-thirds of the way through, they encounter the book’s dramatic turn. Jensen informs us that, ‘[s]everal times in this book I have asserted that “reasonable people can disagree” and continue a healthy and productive conversation. I believe the way that Interlink and I resolved this disagreement is an example of that’ (p. 99). He refers to the book’s publisher, Interlink, refusing to allow the inclusion of a chapter critical of transgenderism in the book. The chapter’s omission, and placeholder statement on page 99 that includes the tiresome line from the publisher that ‘Interlink Publishing has a long history of supporting LGBTQIA+ rights’, functions as an ironic exemplar of the approach commended in the book. In it, Jensen advocates an expansive, accommodating attitude to differing political opinions and disagreements with adversaries while, at the same time, stubbornness in not backing down or tilting at windmills. To be sure, Jensen’s view that the compromise reached was better than the publisher unilaterally nixing the whole project (which others do without a moment’s thought) is correct. But readers of the missing Chapter 5 on Jensen’s website will be hard-pressed to sympathise with his view of any disagreement having actually been resolved.

This is because of Jensen’s own insight that ‘gender is a weapon to control girls and women in the service of institutionalized male dominance’ (p. 6). Interlink’s willingness to compromise on anything but their commitment to gender was entirely predictable, and resolves none of radical feminism’s disagreement with the male left that political movements shouldn’t be waged on the sacrifice of women. Jensen knows this, and explains in the published part of the book that:

many leftists become liberals when it come to the sexual exploitation industries, the term I use for pornography, prostitution, stripping, massage parlors, and other ways that men routinely buy and sell objectified female bodies for sexual pleasure. The same is true in the case of transgender ideology—people on the left routinely embrace a liberal position on these issues, focusing on maximizing personal choice rather than on the oppressive system of institutionalized male dominance and its gender norms.(p. 136)

The approach to debate that he commends is shown to reach its limits when it comes to leftist male engagement with radical feminism. The book’s embedded case study resolves nothing of the absolutism of the liberal left in committing to gender hierarchy maintained through practices of male supremacist sexuality.

Chapter 5’s omission is a shame, and radical feminists are robbed of useful political insights because of it. The chapter does not function well as a standalone page on Jensen’s website because its interesting critique of transgenderism is heavily contextualised within the discussion of the book’s other chapters. Jensen writes that ‘[i]n addition to the intellectual incoherence and anti-feminist consequences of transgender ideology, we should consider the conflict between the transgender conception of the body and an ecological worldview (p. 12). This ‘ecological worldview’ is developed in his chapters on racism and environmentalism that explain our collective failure to come to terms with reality and the limits it imposes on us: politically, biologically, and materially.

The final irony of It’s Debatable, though, is that radical feminists are the ultimate beneficiaries of its wisdom. The book functions in radical feminist terms to remind us of the fatal contradiction at the heart of ‘progressive’ politics. Liberal commitments to reasoned debate, compromise, and political coalition are premised on broad-based agreement over women’s sexual subjugation. The view of some radical feminists that their politic aligns roughly with this left shows a naïve understanding of this basis of progressive politics. This basis requires, like the excision of Chapter 5, active and continuing banishment of feminism from the political conversation. Jensen’s hopefulness, nonetheless, in producing It’s Debatable, that one-day liberalism will move beyond this imperative, is admirable and praiseworthy. While it will stand in historical terms as a product of its time (when resolution was yet achieved), its discussion will be an interesting yardstick for future judgments of leftist progressivism and its relationship to feminism.