Ecofeminism: an intellectual imposture without any scientific basis Ecofeminism: an intellectual imposture without any scientific basis

Atlantico: Sandrine Rousseau claims to be “ecofeminist”. What is actually hidden behind this term? What is his story ? What intellectual current is this movement in?

Ero Makia: “Ecofeminism”, a contraction of the words “ecology” and “feminism”, is above all an avatar of radical feminism (or “anti- patriarchal”, these two notions being synonymous), built on the postulate that “male domination” is an indisputable anthropological and historical fact and that “the” woman like “the” nature are in essence victims of males. In fact, it implements the neo-feminist vision of victimhood, inscribing the current environmental and climatic crises, as well as all of political ecology, in the infinitely expandable field of the war between the sexes and the fight against a fantasized “patriarchy”.

Considering that “exploitation of nature” and “male domination” are one and the same, this construction of the mind offers feminists the perfect opportunity to extend their lament of victimhood to history and geography as a whole: whatever the spaces and times considered, the possibility of accusing males of all evils is multiplied, thus guaranteeing an endless war of the sexes and as many opportunities to claim damages (preferably financial) for everything and its opposite.

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Ecofeminism takes up the so-called "intersectional" feminist approach, one that allows one to pose as a victim of all oppressions, real or imaginary - oppressions of "gender", of class, of "race", of North over South, of man over nature, etc – in order to impute to them, in a way that is as simplistic as it is binary, a common origin and a universal culprit: the male, if possible white and Western. "I believe in women through their gender indignation in society, just like black Muslim people", declares Sandrine Rousseau in an interview for Backseat (July 2021), amalgamating as it should be women, blacks and Muslims behind the same victim banner: these are also the only ones she "believes" almost religiously.

If the history of the ecofeminist current sees it being born in France in the 1970s, it will first develop in the Anglo-Saxon world, as a political tool for social, anti-nuclear, anti-militarist, etc., before recently returning home. It develops everywhere in parallel with New Age spirituality, the two currents having common origins and many points of attachment.

The term "ecofeminism" would be encountered for the first time in 1974 in the work of the Frenchwoman Françoise d'Eaubonne, Le féminisme ou la mort, even if she is only one of the theoreticians of the movement and that it is not certain that she is the sole inventor of the concept. D'Eaubonne develops this simplistic and abusive idea that "women", like "nature", taken as essential entities, would likewise be "victims of male domination" and that this common exploitation would come from the "Male system", as she calls him. Evil in essence is therefore the “Male” with a capital letter; history of not naming the “Evil” directly. Because behind Eaubonne's terminology, speaking of the “possibility [that men have] of sowing the earth like women” – an implicit reference to sperm – one perceives as always the eternal neo-feminist fixation on the male phallus, object of fascination as much as of dread.

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This simplistic, sexist and misandrous vision of universal male domination is still accepted without discussion and on this basis, ecofeminism calls for an ecological and feminist “revolution”, the only possible way, according to him, of remedying the systemic influence of the masculine. The dispute initially focused on agricultural overproduction (intensive agriculture) and the "over-reproduction of the human species" (overpopulation), which is not without raising some contradictions today. All to their intersectional positioning and their blind defense of the non-white oppressed against Western civilization, the fall in fertility in the West and its parallel explosion in the South, leading to a predictable demographic imbalance, do not seem to move them much.

Another theorist of ecofeminism is Carolyn Merchant, whose 1980 book, The Death of Nature, recently translated into French, had a great influence in the second half of the 20th century in the United States. Merchant there "analyzes from a feminist point of view the links between nature, rationality and progress", explaining that "the enslavement of nature for productivist ends has accompanied that of women, and vice versa", while revisiting the history of the modern era in the light of victim feminism and by criticizing the "fathers" of modern science such as Descartes, Bacon or Newton - because they promote rationality and technology, subjects which are too masculine and which attack women, assimilated to “Mother Earth” – their body penetrated by the male being all one (always the same quasi-neurotic phallic fixation). In the aftermath, Merchant explains in a fanciful way the phenomenon of “witches at the stake”, according to a feminist mythology far removed from historical reality, but which constitutes the founding myth of ecofeminists. Alongside women, it is also “blacks and workers” who are considered “means of production”. The logics are always the same and the recurrent anti-rational and anti-scientific victim positioning.

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This is also what we find in the pen of Anne-Line Gandon who recalls that for ecofeminists, “science having always been practiced by men, it is essentially sexist; moreover, being recognized as scientific only that which corresponds to the canons of Western truth, it can become the ambassador of a contemporary form of colonialism”. Science is therefore sexist and colonialist, we are happy to learn that. “Science and technology are tools of domination in themselves, they are the heirs of the mechanistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, which makes men the “masters and possessors of nature” (Descartes, 1637)”, she continues. in the same paranoid anti-masculine vein.

It is above all thanks to the conjunction of the #Metoo movement, the 2019 climate marches (see “Global warming: the fault of the males?”), and the ecofeminist propaganda of Greta Thunberg that the movement really implanted in France – and that Sandrine Rousseau converted there opportunely, trying in passing to make it the heart of the ideological matrix of the far left ecologist. On November 29, 2019, Greta Thunberg announced in person the future program of Sandrine Rousseau: “The patriarchal, colonialist and racist system of oppression has created and fueled the climate crisis. We have to dismantle it”. Everything was there, from leftism and racialism, to victimism and the fight against the West.

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As for the intellectual current to which it is attached, ecofeminism fits, like all the developments of radical and anti-patriarchal feminism, in the wake of revolutionary and anti-capitalist Marxism; a naturally very left-wing positioning, reinforced here by the usual rewriting of history and anthropology specific to victim feminism, which strives as much as possible to trace its universal oppression back to the Paleolithic (it is difficult for it to trace upper). According to d'Eaubonne (1974), ecofeminism seeks no less than "the disappearance of wage labor, competitive hierarchies and the family. We must therefore rebuild society on new foundations, and this begins with the overthrow of the productive and reproductive systems managed by the "Males" (Anne-Line Gandon). Quite a program, we tell you.

Sandrine Rousseau is fully in line with this ideology when, on February 2, in the columns of Le Figaro, she unfolds her credo: “Ecology and feminism have the same DNA. We must deconstruct the relationship of domination of humans over nature, like that of men over women, embodied by patriarchy. We all raise our eyes to the sky that she is the very incarnation of the favored and careerist white bourgeois city dweller (some say even upstart), accumulating prebends and honorary positions. The lament of lecturers and vice-presidents of universities “oppressed by blantriarchy” always makes me smile a lot. As for his mantras on the "deconstruction" of the male ("I live with a deconstructed man and I'm super happy", LCI, 09/22/21), they are only the barely concealed expression of his authoritarianism. and its supremacist temptation.

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“Filled with anger”, “steeped in radicalism” and compelling emotions, Sandrine Rousseau embodies the ecofeminist posture par excellence: “Our entire economic, social and societal system is based on the triptych: we take, we use and we throw. The body of women, the body of racialized people. We don't want that anymore and that's the revolution I'm offering you! This will require political courage. And courage, I have. I am filled with anger. Radicality, I'm steeped in it! (Poitiers, 08/20/2021).

We cannot help but recall her famous anti-rational misandre manifesto – she who “prefers women who cast spells rather than men who build EPRs (nuclear reactors” – as he perfectly illustrates her ideological current. Ecofeminism has been rightly denounced as a binary and reductive ideology, essentializing women with great blows of "sacred feminine", of Mother Earth, of "energies", of magical thought , of mantras, visions, sensations and other realms of emotion and intuition – without forgetting the irrationality and exacerbated narcissism that usually accompany them; all things that are directly opposed to the claims of universalist feminism whose struggles carried – to excess, with gender ideology – on the rejection of any difference between the sexes.

Bertrand Vergely: As its name suggests, ecofeminism is the result of the encounter between ecology and feminism. In order to understand this growing ideological phenomenon, it is important to distinguish three ecofeminisms.

The first ecofeminism refers to the highest spirituality there is. Ecology is, as its name suggests, the science of the house, oïkos meaning in Greek the house. Home is what happens when existence is inhabited by being, being being the fundamental reality of what was, what is, and what will be. The woman embodies the fundamental receptivity through the feminine. To be in an ecofeminism therefore means to be in the fundamental receptivity of being.

Philosophically, it is Taoism that embodies creative ecofeminism. Everything proceeding from being, everything is inhabited by a harmonious principle. This harmonious principle is found in the harmonious relationship that there can be between these dynamically opposed polarities that are the masculine and the feminine. To be an ecofeminist in this way consists in being inhabited by harmony, desiring that everything can know this harmony.

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Eco-feminism also stems from a number of political struggles to protect the environment from the ravages of economic violence and to protect women who suffer all kinds of violence. We have not always talked about the violence that nature suffers or that women suffer. Ecofeminism was born from the freedom of speech about this violence. Since feminism and ecology have existed for a few decades, it was inevitable that at one time or another they would come together in what is known as a convergence of struggles.

Finally, there is a certain ideological disarray in ecofeminism. Following the collapse of communism, the left which was Marxist was no longer so. Whereas before, she believed in the driving role of the working class in order to change history, she no longer believes in it. As she no longer believes in it and that the working class must be replaced, she relies on the social and political forces of the moment represented by the Greens and feminism. This is a major ideological transformation. When the working class embodied the future of humanity, there was an organized social force in this case the working class organized as a class. With ecofeminism, it is no longer a class that organizes the future but a movement with poorly defined contours, ecology comprising several ecologies and feminism several feminisms. This confusion linked to the transition from class to movement is found in the fundamental contradiction that runs through this movement. On the one hand ecofeminism intends to defend nature as well as women, on the other hand there is in it a whole current denouncing the myth of nature and of women. Result: this movement does not know very well where it is, the defense of nature and women having difficulty agreeing with what intends to denounce the ideological illusions carried by these notions.

According to the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne, who is the author of the thesis, ecofeminism is based on the idea that the exploitation of nature and women are part of the same logic. Does linking these two notions have any real historical meaning?

Ero Makia: As a radical and anti-patriarchal feminist postulate, ecofeminism is based more on the usual militant victim ideology than on scientifically substantiated basis. Françoise d'Eaubonne thus blithely confused woman with nature, as if the two notions overlapped in all respects - thereby opening the way to criticism of the "essentialization" of women: "The relationship of man to nature is more than ever, that of the man to the woman” she wrote in 1978. As Anne-Line Gandon glosses (article quoted), “The destruction of nature is therefore not attributable to the whole of humanity, but to men, who have built a sexist and scientistic civilization and, more broadly, a society of domination” – so many gratuitous and misandrous assertions. As she writes in an equally Manichean way, d'Eaubonne arbitrarily opposed "masculine values ​​of destruction and feminine values ​​of life": "Yes, the bill will be heavy, in a sexist world where man had reduced and identified with the destructive Masculine to leave the conservative Feminine to the woman, he thought he was investing in the creation of techniques his forces of aggressiveness and destruction […]” (D'Eaubonne, 1972: 353-354). The world is so simple to understand when you are a feminist: "the woman" preserves and the "man" destroys...

Françoise d'Eaubonne also takes up the other feminist mythology on primitive "matriarchal" societies and gynocratic "Amazon societies" supposedly egalitarian and exempt from any "patriarchy"; a fantasized golden age during which women would have had, “in the early days of sedentarization”, control over their bodies and their fertility; rantings never substantiated and even swept away for a long time. Just like when she denounced, in 1999 in an eponymous book, "the sexocide of witches perpetrated by the Inquisition" - a story that dates back to Jules Michelet (La Sorcière, 1862) and that Mona Chollet is still serving us again in 2018 (Sorcières , The Undefeated Power of Women). She also speaks, between men and women, of a “war of civilization”, another fantasy that is only the leaven of hatred and division that ecofeminism strives to install between the sexes.

Bertrand Vergely: In the 19^th century Engels wrote a book entitled The Origin of the Family, Property and the State in order to show that capitalism, which oppresses peoples through property and the state oppresses it through the family. He thus dreamed of a world where there would be nothing but a great fraternity freed from the State, property and the family.

Ecofeminism is ideologically an offshoot of Marxism and Engels. In concrete terms, it comes up against major difficulties. Historically first, by suppressing the family communism did not liberate men and women. He made them the things of the State by exploiting them in a shameless way.

Besides, it is one thing to think that exploitation comes from capitalism and another from the male gender. When we make capitalism the source of exploitation, we are in history not in nature . When we make the masculine the source of exploitation, we situate ourselves in nature and not in history. We can think of freeing humanity from exploitation by putting an end to capitalism. By dreaming, the thing is possible. That's what communism did. This is what the communist dream continues to do. With the masculine as a source of exploitation, it is different.

If ecofeminism intends to abolish exploitation, it will have to put an end to the masculine. To put an end to it, only a fierce dictatorship will succeed. We will no longer be in the dream but in the nightmare. With gender theory, a step has been taken in this direction. Not at all problematic. When gender theory suppresses the notion of masculine, it is obliged to suppress that of feminine. While we intend to defend women and women, it is somewhat embarrassing.

Is this relationship between ecology and feminism based on scientific foundations and academic data?

Ero Makia: While ecofeminism is a typically intellectual and academic phenomenon in its origins, that does not mean that it is scientific or evidence-based. Like any form of radical and anti-patriarchal feminism – the famous “gender studies”, “queer studies”, “postcolonial studies” and other “grievance studies” (“whispering studies”) with which universities abound –, it is generally not based only on discourse, circular reasoning and a militant rewriting of a fantasized past.

Ecofeminism is currently making a strong entry into all sectors of the French university, from the human sciences to biology, without anyone ever questioning its epistemological foundations – even though its ideological and militant positioning is jumping to the eyes. It is mainly female academics who champion it, quietly confusing research and activism, as evidenced by this subject for the thesis in preparation, noted in the recent report of the Observatory of Decolonialism: "An autochthonous ecofeminism: representations , discourses and decolonial animalist cosmologies” and of which the following is the summary: “This thesis will aim to explore the links between two multiminorized groups, Aboriginal women living in Canada and the animals with whom they live. (…) This thesis will develop within a framework of ecofeminist thought, that is to say that it will highlight the subjugation of living things in general in the name of the same domination, that of capitalist and colonial patriarchy »Domination, patriarchy , capitalism, colonialism, all the fashionable portmanteau words are strung together like pearls…

Bertrand Vergely: In theory, ecofeminism is based on Marxist sociology making capitalism the cause of the economic exploitation of humanity and violence against women. In practice, this is an impossible sociology.

If capitalism is supposed to be capitalist because it is sexist, the Marxist thesis of the economic cause of exploitation falls apart. If sexism is sexist because it is capitalist, the feminist thesis of sexism as a cause of exploitation also crumbles. The ideal would be for a general theory of exploitation to exist by making the economic cause of exploitation coexist with the sexist cause. Such a theory is impossible. Hence the lack of scientific and academic recognition of ecofeminism, scientists and academics preferring to do economic sociology to understand the origin of exploitation and leaving it to feminism to be a protest movement in the name of defending women's rights.

How does such a thesis, which is often confined to the academic world, get into the mouths of politicians?

Ero Makia: When Sandrine Rousseau, taking up the ideas of Eaubonne, declares that: “Today we are in a form of predation: we take, we use, we throw away. We take, we use women's bodies, when we rape them and when we attack them. We take, we use, we throw away nature, when we exploit resources and when we dirty the oceans with plastic blows”, she unfolds a well-rehearsed feminist rhetoric, articulated on the so-called “rape culture”.

Because for the neo-feminist, everything is rape and everything must be related to rape, always, everywhere, all the time. The male being a rapist by essence, he violates the woman, nature, the world, absolutely everything; it is an almost natural law. As philosopher Warren Shibles summed it up in 2002 in his book Humor Reference Guide: A Comprehensive Classification and Analysis, "seeing it all in terms of victimization, slavery, oppression, sexual harassment and rape" is what constitutes the core of the neo-feminist matrix. And Sandrine Rousseau is one of those feminists who base their entire political career – when they don't draw life drafts – on the concept of "rape", real or imaginary, sometimes to the point of pseudo-paranoid delirium: "Everything , in our economic, social and environmental system, is based on predation,” she says bluntly, as if it were that simple. The “culture of rape” is an inexhaustible source of elements of political language to which it is then enough to give a vague programmatic twist, and not only among ecofeminists.

Bertrand Vergely: The politician who needs to be elected is clever. In order to be in phase with society, he will glean here and there snippets of theories that he will replace in his speeches, taking care however not to appear as an ideologue. Being an ideologue worrying society, he's going to be practical in leaving it to academics to theorize. Making himself the defender of all rights, whether economic rights or even human rights, he will here and there combine a little Marxism with a little feminism and a little feminism with a little Marxism. Today we see the results.

From the far right to the far left to the center and the traditional left and right parties, everyone is environmentalist and everyone is feminist. Everyone will help themselves in ecofeminism in order to cook their own electoral cuisine, being careful not to be ecofeminist. So ecofeminism finds itself faced with the paradox of losing because it wins.

The more his themes spread in society, the more he earns. The more he wins, the more he loses, no one but a militant minority wanting ecofeminism to triumph, everyone wanting to be fashionable and everyone suspecting that ecofeminism will be a dictatorship if it comes true, everyone world is ecofeminist without being so.

Like any radical thesis, ecofeminism wants to find an ideal. Is it really applicable in the world as we know it? Do we see in this way the limits of Sandrine Rousseau's discourse?

Ero Makia: Ecofeminism is in itself a utopia and it has long claimed and accepted itself as such – even if all its chapels do not are not as radical and aggressive as these recent media protests. Many observers, however, point out that the radicalism displayed by Sandrine Rousseau can hardly be part of a state logic and that as a result, it automatically closes doors.

And how, we would add, could a political ideal be based durably on a revengeful and supremacist hatred towards an entire section of humanity? Ecofeminism, which separates humanity into the group of predators (the white man) and that of its victims (the rest of the universe) has nothing of the emancipatory and egalitarian ideal that it claims. The egalitarian happiness of the sexes cannot be built on a permanent, caricatural and simplistic indictment of the male sex. Political ecology itself cannot claim to thrive for very long on a feminism that is hateful and contemptuous of the civilization that saw it born. If he currently wins a few punctual or opportune battles, the backlash can only be bitter, because in the game of the bad war of the sexes, women are not always winners, far from it.

One of the main criticisms of ecofeminism is its equating of women with nature, an effective means for it to overwhelm men exponentially, but which lends itself to essentialist reductions seen as so much ideological regressions. This criticism comes from feminists themselves, who fear being sent back to their homes or to motherhood when they hear ecofeminists asking that the "invisibilized" work of women in the home be revalued - and we here touches on one of the major contradictions of feminism in general. Ecofeminists campaign to revalue female domestic work, while universalists, in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir, consider that any gendered feminine role, particularly the care of children, is enslavement and alienation incompatible with an emancipation that would only pass through the servile imitation of men. The two feminist chapels, however, share in their detestation of everything that is attributable to “patriarchy” – instead of celebrating the technological progress that they owe to it, starting with washing machines or dishwashers.

There are many ecofeminist contradictions, when they demand contraception on the one hand while denouncing it on the other (concerning clinical trials on women). They celebrate abortion on the one hand, but denounce the elimination of female fetuses on the other. And naturally, the question of infanticide, when the perpetrator is a woman, remains a blind spot (70% of infanticides are committed by women). How can the sweet Gaia, so attached to "conservation", so naturally kill her children?

In the political platforms, ecofeminism seems for the moment to be more about chatter and electoral propaganda than concrete measures – anyway, how to put in place discriminatory and sexist measures in the against men without arousing a justified outcry? The misandre temptation is nevertheless a leitmotif among ecofeminists, crudely illustrated in France by the collaboration of Sandrine Rousseau with Alice Coffin: “It is not enough to help each other, we must, in turn, eliminate them”, wrote this one. ci about the men in The Lesbian Genius (2020). Red alert, then.

The ecofeminist discourse of the street, mixing childishness with stupidity (“Fuck me rather than the climate”, chanted in 2019 post-adolescent girls in decline) is difficult to implement; and it is not these idiotic slogans that are likely to change anything in the way the world works (it would even make “patriarchy” laugh heartily, insofar as the latter still exists in our regions).

We should also remember that climate change is not a plot by men against women and that each sex suffers equally from climate change and the exploitation of natural resources. Western feminists, from the height of their vociferations, often even forget that they are the main beneficiaries of this exploitation – for example the university feminists who jump from plane to plane, between their conferences and their weekends abroad, and who in fact have a carbon footprint much higher than that of the declassed white man who never takes the plane, for lack of economic means.

More broadly, the squared or cubed victim posture of the intersectional ecofeminist remains deliberately blind to the real sharing of power between men and women, a sharing that has always existed: women have always exercised and will always exercise a powerful ascendancy over men. A reality that only feminists continue – or pretend – to ignore in order to better push their agenda.

Bertrand Vergely: For decades, the characteristic of the far left has been to give the impression of wanting power when in reality it wants not power but opposition. The same is true with ecofeminism. This one gives the impression of wanting power when in reality only the opposition interests him There is a reason for this paradox.

Both the far left and ecofeminism pursue the same goal. They want to be ideologically right. It is the thought that preoccupies them. When one is on the left, one likes to be right and one suffers from not being recognized as being the one who is right. Everything suggests that ecofeminism will experience the same course as the far left. Wishing to be right, he will give the impression of wanting power, when in reality he only wants one thing: to be in the opposition in order to have a monopoly on prophetic protest.