The Gender Contract: Engendering consent

An analysis of how using feminist critique of “The Social Contract” can be extended to give insight into the new “Gender Contract” being proposed globally by governments and institutions.

According to contract theory, when humans left the state of nature, men chose to make contracts (agreements) with each other to reduce the need for fighting and create civil society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book “ The Social Contract” suggested that the first civilisation was hierarchical, with a king or leader in charge of the other men who accepted his authority in return for protection or not being killed. Men participated in and formed political groups.

Women were excluded from this Social Contract and were kept away from politics in a separate domestic sphere.  In the ancient and medieval world, there were three main justifications for women’s exclusion and subjection: nature, god’s will or having surrendered to avoid death. The justifications for women’s exclusion from civil society were made into stories that were repeated endlessly. While men did economics, art and politics in the public world (civil society), women were owned by men and kept in servitude in a private familial world which was declared non-political. Carole Pateman describes this societal organisation in her 1988 book “The Sexual Contract”.

The stories act as props. These stories about how people are and why communities do what they do underpin how societies function. They explain, create and maintain social systems. From these stories came laws, norms and behaviour. So when a rich Athenian girl asked “why does my mother serve the food she cooked today to my father, his friends and the prostituted women who have come over this evening?”, there would be an array of ready stories to justify the situation. In Athens women were kept indoors for breeding or as prostitutes for the sexual act. Eva C. Keuls examines how women were treated in ancient Greece in The Reign of the Phallus. Not all women played the same role, but all women were excluded from full citizenship on the basis of their biological sex. In this sense, biological women formed a sex-class not on the basis of their common roles or even common interest, but on the basis of their common exclusion from citizenship. Women were a sex-class of non-men, an outcast negative reference group.

In the 18th century, with the cry of Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité (Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood) men got a new Social Contract. Fraternity or brotherhood is made of groups of men working together to defend their interests as men. These can be fraternities of priests, landowners, factory workers, agricultural labourers. They can fight for their interest against the factory owner or the law makers or their wives at home. Fraternities are multifaceted and unite to fight a variety of opponents. Now instead of “every man in his station” a new egalitarian Social Contract was based on the idea that “every man is born free and equal”. Men were said to have the freedom and choice to make contracts in the public world (economics, art, politics etc) but women were said to be born naturally subjugated and unable to make contracts. The exception was the marriage contract, which women were strongly encouraged to “choose”. Thus, women were subject to the same old sexual contract.

Women contested this story. Frenchwoman Olympe de Gouges in her 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen said women deserved citizenship. The next year, across the channel in England, Mary Wollstonecraft published “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” in which she called for  equal rights and said it is not nature, but men, by refusing to educate women, that make women appear incapable of citizenship; “Women are capable of rationality; it only appears that they are not, because men have refused to educate them and encouraged them to be frivolous”.

Later in Ireland in 1825, William Thompson called marriage the “white slave code” and suggested that men wouldn’t have accepted the unfairness of the social public contract were they not offered a woman each to dominate in the home. He said it seems as if the sexual contract was set up for men to “compensate them for their own cowardly submission almost everywhere to the chains of political power”.

Ignoring these writers, mainstream political philosophers Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke maintained that the domestic sphere was not political, but natural. As such Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité was not extended to the private sphere. Only in the public sphere did civility exist. The stories told by the contractarian philosophers were not just describing the world, they were justifying it and guiding it. The story of the Social Contract still rings true for many people today and is used as a way to understand the world, to rationalise it, to accept it (as better than chaotic violence). It seems that the new Gender Contract is partly successful because it is being framed as an upgrade to the Social Contract.  

Women are not part of the brotherhood

By the twentieth century women had broken free from domestic servitude and moved into the public political sphere. The biggest win was getting the vote, which signified their capacity to participate in politics and their status as full citizens. As women moved into public, they got the rights of freedom, equality and brotherhood, but found that under patriarchy, none of these rights are fully available to women. Freedom to walk around, for instance, is undermined by male sexual harassment and assault. Equality is of limited value if the system is set up to keep you down.  Brotherhood only sometimes includes women because often the point of brotherhood is to act as a group against a sister or sisters. Women are not part of the brotherhood, but can get a place at the table if they do its work. They can sign up by working for the brothers, perhaps by supporting men’s access to women in prostitution or pornography, supporting sports that glorify the male body or support their husband, and so forth. Then as long as they don’t whine too much, they can be sort of included.

As the twentieth century progressed, women moved further into public life, got money, a voice and undermined the sexual contract. The struggles of the nineteenth and early twentieth century are most clearly explained by Sheila Jeffreys’ in The Spinster and Her Enemies, (1985).  At the same time women disrupted the privacy and dominance men were afforded by the state in the home. Women popularised the notion that the personal is political. The personal/domestic realm should not be some protected zone, not some nature reserve where untamed men roam, dominating women and children by violence. Women demanded the state provide an end to the uncivility of the domestic sphere. Women demanded that civil protections be extended to all spheres of life. No longer would the home be a sort of reserve where men could dominate women and call it natural. All this is explained clearly in Carole Pateman’s “The Sexual Contract”.

Another great feminist, Virginia Woolf unveiled the structure of the Sexual Contract in her 1939 book Three Guineas. She noted that the domestic sphere is a prison of subordination but the public sphere made up of professions promoting patriarchy. Neither option works for women. Ten years later, in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex suggested that despite this, to claim our place in society, women should join the workplace, politics, the brotherhood and change the meaning of brotherhood. She was suggesting women scale the commanding heights of the patriarchy, entrench ourselves in the bastions of power and make change. To some extent this has worked, but women joining the unions, the churches, the police forces, the political parties found the brotherhood is built on the foundational principle that brothers are not women.

Unpicking the way society works has been furthered in another book by Sheila Jeffreys,  Beauty and Misogyny, which examines how as women leave the home they need to wear clothes and makeup to signify their submission and their acceptance of their subordinate status. This signalling by women when they go out into public of their lower status is widespread, but has also been contested by feminists.

The Social Contract stopped working

The Social Contract was based upon the Sexual Contract and it stopped working in fact, and as a story, for fratriarchalists the moment women became full citizens.  By fratriarchalist I mean a man who subscribes to the political philosophy that the brothers (any men – not just top dog alpha males) should dominate women. In this way of seeing it, patriarchalists are the men who think alpha males should rule over the other men and all women. This might explain to some extent why some alpha males don’t like fraternity/brotherhood/unions/the left because it gives too much power to beta males.

These sexist men have been fighting to put women back in their subordinate place ever since we got the vote. In addition to reduced material power over women, women’s liberation has caused a crisis of identity for men who relied on a subjugated class of non-men to revile. Now, in the 2020s, from a fratriarchalist’s point of view, civil society and its fraternities are letting in too many women and too many of these women are challenging the set up and changing it.  For instance, women demanded that men take down demeaning images of women in the workplace. These images of submissive sexually available women were nice for fratriarchs because they reminded them of their special status of men, of the rights they were given over women, of the dominance they have over women at home and women in general. In many fraternal workplaces women have demanded equal pay and to be promoted according to ability, and thus large numbers of men have female bosses. Fratriarchs are unhappy about this.  Many men want women subordinated in order to get sexual access to women and also the children that women protect. These men have been increasingly shut out in the last 20 years by safeguarding, the “me too” movements, the law courts ruling in favour of women and children who have been sexually abused.

Consent is a crucial part of the Social Contract. For individuals to accept the many contracts that make up civil society, people need to believe they are able to consent (educated, sober etc) and free (without a gun to their head, or no other options). In “Manufacturing consent” (1988), Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky outline how, since men were declared free and equal, a lot of effort has to be made to get people to consent to the unfairness of the social system. In a similar way, society has been finding it harder and harder to manufacture the consent of women to the Sexual Contract. Women are now more often are saying No!, Me too! We do not consent!

A new operating system for patriarchy

A possible way to renew and fix the Sexual Contract for men who want women’s submission and manufacture consent is to install new social software, which is described in my article a new operating system for patriarchy.  This could be described as a new “Gender Contract”.[1] The Gender Contract is underpinned by transgender ideology, a political ideology that has spread like lightening around the globe in last decade. In this social system, we still have with the 18th century Social Contract based freedom, equality and brotherhood. We still have the idea and to some extent the reality of contracts “all the way down” and society still needs to “manufacture consent” on an industrial scale. The big difference from the pre twentieth century Sexual Contract is how women fit in and are understood. The new story, the Gender Contract, is a way of allowing women out of their homes in to public whilst ensuring their ongoing subordination. The key contract is no longer one big one - marriage, but lots of little ones – choosing the female gender, buying into our own oppression.

Under the new Gender Contract, the story goes that women are no longer a biological sex-class (a group of people treated in a similar way based on their biological sex – defined as adult human female) whose subordination is said to be apolitical, natural or chosen to avoid death. Women are now defined a gender-class (a group of people treated in a similar way based on their gender identity – undefined in law but based on a self-declared feeling which can be different for everyone).

Under the Gender Contract, the tale being told culturally and the new laws being swept through parliaments, often by stealth, tells of free, equal, individuals (we might as well all be brothers) who are no longer born into their sex, but who now choose their gender. Gender replaces sex and sex withers away as a concept.

As gender is a choice, there is no longer a need to justify women’s oppression based on their nature, or god’s will or their weakness. To the young, this can seem wonderful. The Gender Contract offers a way out. Girls don’t have to grow up to be women. The Gender Contract offers girls the option of choosing to be males. What’s more, this contract is backed up by all the major institutions and laws are falling into place to support the Gender Contract. In many countries people can simply say they have chosen a gender and the state will back them up. Under the new Gender Contract, gender replaces sex and people, all of whom are born equal and free, can, and indeed in most cases must, choose their gender. One’s gender is a choice and by making that choice you are giving consent to being part of the gender class. Children in kindergartens are now being taught that their gender is a choice and they are asked to choose it. By declaring pronouns, people consent daily and repeatedly, to choosing their gender.

Possibly the biggest trick is the conflation by the media, the politicians, the police, the doctors, academia etc (the patriarchal professors) of sex and gender. This means that  most people think when they choose their gender, that gender means sex. So a woman might tick the gender box “female” when joining her country’s socialist party, because she knows she’s female, always has been. After all, these days gender is just another word for sex, isn’t it? But gender is not sex. Until recently gender was undefined in law. Where it was mentioned it was normally stated to be the sex-roles encouraged by society for men and women, which change over time. Feminists have called gender a prison or even a method of enforcing patriarchy. More recently, definitions have been springing up that gender is a self-declared identity. When a woman ticks the gender box woman, if she doesn’t know that gender is not sex, she could be said to be being tricked into consenting to being part of the class of people who choose to play the roles assigned to women in her society at that time.

Another trick is that gender being undefined and a shifting concept, if she ticks the box female gender she is choosing to be part of a group that doesn’t have a clear definition. She is giving herself as a hostage to fortune. In a way it’s similar to the marriage contract of the 19th century when she consented to obey a man with no knowledge or certainty of what that might mean. Now, the implications of consenting to have a female gender or gender identity are unknowable. The definition of gender depends on who is in the power at the time the defining is done.

You could say that it’s alright because she chose it. It’s her fault that she didn’t educate herself to know what gender means. We return to the age old and central question of whether it is possible to consent from a position of subordination or lack of knowledge. In this case, it seems clear that consent is being manufactured  by the professions and institutions. Children, indeed any of us, can’t really be said to “choose” a gender when the media, schools, health services, political parties are deliberately conflating gender with sex. The institutions are pushing the new Gender Contract. You could call it engendering consent.

Engendering consent

This gender = sex manoeuvre acts as a channel funnelling women into consenting to the sex-role stereotypes current in their society at any time. Worse, given that these stereotype roles are undefined and fluid, they don’t know and cannot know what they are signing up to. They are tricked into it.  “Don’t’ worry love, gender is just another way of saying sex” – says school, the media, the courts, the UN, the government – pretty much everyone.

Some women refuse and say I’m not buying into that. I don’t have a gender or a gender identity. However, in many sign up forms online these days gender is an essential box and you cannot progress (to get a doctors’ appointment, to apply to run for political office etc) without choosing a male or female gender. By making us choose we have a gender, they are making us consent to the subordinate status associated with females.

The new Gender Contract means that only women who say they have a gender will be accepted in civil society. These “good” women will be included in civil life. If the Gender Contract is installed, everyone working in the professions, politics, the media will need to believe, profess the new mantra – Equality, Freedom, Diversity, Inclusion. The Gender Contract offers protection for chosen subordination. Under this regime, most people will choose the gender that aligns with their sex, either through actual identification with the sex-role stereotypes or in resignation, or under peer pressure.

Critics of contract theory say that contract rests on the false premise of equality and the reality of choice. This is correct. What gender theory does is give us a glitter rainbow moment in our day when institutions offer us a choice. For a brief moment we can dare to believe that we are in control of our own destiny, we are choosing which sex-roles we would like to play, which sex-class we would like to belong to. It’s a great feeling to be told you are respected as an equal, free, fully civil individual and you can choose your role and status. The brotherhood and the sisters they oppress become hidden from view in the glitter of gender choice. Men’s sex-class oppression of women as a sex-class drops out of theoretical and political sight.

A further critique is that you can’t consent in a situation of oppression. A woman who is married to a bullying man who beats her up is unlikely to suddenly self-identify as a male and start “living as a male”. She knows she’s half his size and that he rapes her twice a week. He knows it too. They both know it would mean make no difference to her life at home or even out in public if she said she had a male gender identity. Her only real option will be to choose female as her gender. Gender identity is not a choice for the vast majority of women.

The new Gender Contact is still a Sexual Contract based on biological sex, but knowledge of the Sexual Contract is swept under the carpet of the Gender Contract and made taboo. Until Pateman’s book in 1988, political philosophers swept knowledge of the Sexual Contract out of view. This new system will cover it from sight again.

It is different from the 19th century sexual contract in that women’s consent is no longer mostly based on the marriage contract, but now under the Gender Contract is based on consent to our gender role via daily signals of submission, most crucially using pronouns. Resisters proclaim “Non Pronounaran” in defiance. This will make it easier for the brotherhood, the vehement handmaidens and the terrified silenced sisters (and give them their due, the terrified silenced brothers) to expel those who believe that sex matters from the civil political realm. This time it might not be back to the family, but perhaps to a new place on the outskirts of society.

Not worthy of respect in a democratic society

The Gender Contract is appealing to many because it offers choice, (and resources to make that choice a social reality in the streets if not between the sheets). Women who show adequate allegiance to the Gender Contract (most clearly by signing emails stating their pronouns and respecting other people’s) are declared worthy of respect in a civil  society. Tellingly in 2019 in the UK, it was Maya Forstater not bowing to gender ideology this was judged “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. Fortunately this judgement was overturned in 2020, and the installation of the gender story was halted by the courts and the gender story questioned more openly.

Related to this, going right back to the first contract theorist, Hobbes wrote in 1655 in De Corpore that those who subject themselves freely to the state “may expect employments of honour, rather than a servant.” This showing willing, saying it’s a choice helps cement the social system and the payback for the willing is status and honour. It looks as if the people working in the professions, perhaps even more so the women who had to do their deal not just with their with the patriarchy before they entered, have pre-bought into whatever contract the system throws at them. They made their choice years ago. They took their side and even though it might feel uncomfortable, they committed to whatever new patriarchal contract would be demanded of them when they signed up to be part of the brotherhood. The idea that transgender ideology is being implemented because most people don’t know what it means doesn’t ring true to me. I think that most people do know that it’s a new operating system for age old patriarchy and that they made their decision way back – the decision to be on the side of patriarchy or on the side of the resistance.

The Gender Contract is a patriarchal con trick

The Gender Contract cements the subordination of women (which can be different in different situations). Some argue that none of this matters because we can at the same time subvert gender itself and soon it all won’t matter because men will be wearing high heels and having babies and women will be raping and murdering women. Consenting to having female gender won’t mean anything. The problem women have is that our material subordination based on our biological sex remains.  By bigging up the empowerment of choosing a gender, the rest of the story is swept under the carpet. Those of us who say you can’t consent from a position of non-free subordination are telling an important part of the story. Consent to the Gender Contract is a political con trick so the dominant class of men can say you chose it. What’s more, the only people allowed to speak for the brave new gender class are people who sign up to the ideology. Either men who call themselves women (aka transwomen) or women who say they subscribe to the gender ideology (aka ciswomen).

The restructuring of society to fix the century of feminist gains (put women back in their place and reinstate male sex-right) is happening at a lightning pace. It is audacious. Male sex-right is the legal, political, cultural dominance of men – giving males right to dominate women. Not all men choose to take advantage of this, but it is offered by the system. Part of the male sex-right is the right to have sex - the sexual act with women (and often children), and indeed each other.

Thinking about the Gender Contract is useful for feminists because it lays bare the deal. It gives us a perspective. It allows us link our understanding to political philosophers from Aristotle and Plato, through Rousseau and Locke, Wollstonecraft and de Gouges, Woolf and De Beauvoir, to Pateman and Jeffreys. It is useful as a term because contract is the way the ruling class sell the deal to us and try to get us to consent. It is useful because people understand contracts and deals because they are part of our culture. I agree to wash up if you cook the meal. I agree to take the kids to school if you buy me a new car. I agree to have sex tonight if you don’t beat me up. I agree to work at the hardware store on the checkout if they agree to pay me monthly and let me have toilet breaks. I agree not to break the law if the police provide protection to me when others do. It is also useful to think of it as contract theory because the work of critiquing contract has been done.

Contract theory is a political fiction

An additional critique is that contract theory is a political fiction. It is a story we tell to explain society. The Gender Contract is sold by telling stories. It is both a story articulated by political philosophers to explain what is happening, but it can be a story told to the populace to popularise and push out, to justify. Drag queen story time has become very popular in the last couple of years and can be viewed as one of the stories that help sell the political fiction to the people. At the same time there is a massive push on social media and in schools to sell gender as a choice to children, to teach children the story.

Even if it’s inaccurate and flawed, contract theory is useful in that looks at the big picture, how structures knit together and how systems function. Rousseau said there are contacts “all the way down” and suggested they were based on free and equal men consenting to them. He relegated women to the domestic non-political sphere and said we were submissive there by nature. For women, from our perspective, it looks as if there are hierarchical relationships of dominance and submission “all the way down” and these are based on freedom circumscribed by an environment of sexual violence and harassment, an imposed “choice” of female gender which signifies our submission which is backed up by violence and a knowledge that we are not men and now the swiftly vanishing opportunity to mention it.

The final big problem with contractarianism, Pateman explains, is that in contract, you don’t sell your abstracted labour (property in the person), you sell control over your body. When you contract to do some work, you have to be there. So you give control to the buyer, and you give up your equality (free, equal, brotherhood) for the hours of the contract. Now contractarians and liberal feminists argue that as long as you chose to, (we argue there is no such thing as choice in a grossly unequal society) you can do this for a couple of hours, finish the contract, get up, dust yourself down, get your clothes back on, leave the brothel, and get on with your life in the conditions of freedom, equality and brotherhood. Of course, we all know that this is not what happens. The two hours of letting a man do as he wants with your body is not forgotten. You don’t forget. He doesn’t forget. In most circumstances everyone knows and no one in the neighbourhood forgets. Everybody knows. He had his moment of mastery, of the sex act, of dominance, of humiliating you, of control. She had her moment of being raped, of submission, of being humiliated. This rests in her memory probably forever.

Looking at transgender doctrine as the ideology underpinning a possible new Gender Contract will give new insight into this political struggle. This essay has shown that feminist political philosophy can very usefully build upon works done by our fore sisters: Olympe de Gouges, Wollstonecraft, Woolf, de Beauvoir, Jeffreys and Pateman. It would be interesting to see if we can include insights from Daly and Raymond, and of course some of the wonderful field of new feminist theorists throwing out ideas in the last few years.