Member-only story
Herbert Marcuse in the 21st Century II: One-Dimensional (Wo)Man
At the end of Part I, we saw how sexuality, far from freeing us from servitude, became part of the repressive apparatus itself. In her 2009 book, One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power makes a similar claim about contemporary feminism. Her book takes its title from Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which argues that, despite the appearance of freedom, a ‘comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization’. What we perceive as freedom is more often than not simply the freedom to consume. As Power says of contemporary feminism, ‘that the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time’:
I contend that much of the rhetoric of both consumerism and contemporary feminism is a barrier to any genuine thinking of work, sex and politics that would break with the ‘efficacy of the controls’ that Marcuse identified. What looks like emancipation is nothing but a tightening of the shackles
As she explains, with reference to contemporary feminist texts, ‘almost everything turns out to be ‘feminist’ — shopping, pole-dancing, even eating chocolate’:
[There is a] remarkable similarity between ‘liberating’ feminism and ‘liberating’ capitalism, and the way in which the desire…
