By Opal Skinnider

The following editorial will be published in GATT #8.

Communist morality must guide our romantic and sexual relationships. Our model of relationships should be mutual love, respect, and equality. Patriarchy and the oppression of women must be actively struggled against in personal and family relationships. Any sexual misconduct, including sexual assault, rape, or using one’s position of political leadership for sexual advantage, will not be tolerated.

…While we want all of our members to find happiness in their personal lives, we must also be conscious of how romantic and sexual relationships affect the functioning of the organization. We do not allow “hook-up culture” within our organization, nor by our members within mass organizations and political work, not as a matter of moral judgment, but because this results in personal tensions and distractions getting in the way of our political work and organizational functioning…

– from the Membership Constitution of the
Organization of Communist Revolutionaries

As the cultural and economic base of humanity changes, so will love be transformed. The blind, all-embracing passions will weaken; the sense of property, the egotistical desire to bind the partner to one “forever,” the complacency of the man and the self-renunciation of the woman will disappear. At the same time, the valuable aspects and elements of love will develop. Respect for the right of the other’s personality will increase, and a mutual sensitivity will be learned; men and women will strive to express their love not only in kisses and embraces but in joint creativity and activity. The task of proletarian ideology is not to drive Eros from social life but to re-arm him according to the new social formation, and to educate sexual relationships in the spirit of the great new psychological force of comradely solidarity.

– from “Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth”
by Alexandra Kollontai, 1923

Right now, somewhere in the US, a woman is discovering torture porn on her partner’s computer. They have a toddler together, but she wonders now if she really knows him, and if he really knows her.

Somewhere, a man is texting his situationship, “u up?” Last time they spoke, he called them a crazy bitch when they asked if he was having sex with other people, but he’s pretty sure they haven’t blocked him, and if they bring up that last conversation, he’ll pretend it never happened.

Sometime tonight, a teenage girl will watch a TikTok influencer talk about how men are biologically predisposed to be attracted to specific physical features on women. The video after that is a man rating different female celebrities’ looks. Our girl knows that men are “attracted” to her, because they harass and assault her, but she worries that she will never be really desired, or loved for who she is.

What’s love got to do with it?¹

The oppressive and exploitative nature of capitalism-imperialism plays out at our most vulnerable and intimate level within sexual and romantic relationships. In an era where the online meat market of dating apps forces us to flatten and commodify our sexualities and personalities, where social media bombards us with ass-backwards ideas about how women and men should relate to each other, and where the cabal of rapists in the White House seeks to reverse the hard-won legal rights of women and trans people, a “healthy” sex/love life can seem like an unattainable myth.

Young people today are caught in a web of fundamentalist Christian morality, ubiquitous porn, “manosphere” podcasters, and “tradwife” content, these intersecting sticky threads binding them to a bleak ideal of what it means to be a human being with sexual desires. Few of us have witnessed loving, long-term partnerships in our families as children; we see our parents struggle through dysfunctional relationships that end in animosity, we see our mothers beg and fight for child support, or we watch our parents stay together even though they appear to hate each other. About a third of children in the US have experienced domestic violence, and 1 in 4 girls, and 1 in 20 boys, have been sexually abused, usually by a family member or a close family friend.²

Is it any wonder that Gen Z, who came of age during the hyper-isolation and existential threat of the Covid-19 pandemic, often has an almost nihilistic attitude toward the idea of romantic relationships? Plenty has been written about how members of Gen Z aren’t dating or having sex as much as Millennials or Gen Xers did in their twenties,³ and certainly, an alien from another planet trying to understand US society through the lens of social media could understandably assume that women and men are at war with each other. Influencers build huge platforms coaching young men to approach dating and sex as though they are preparing to manipulate a hostile enemy, with figures like the Fresh & Fit duo, Clavicular, Andrew Tate, and Nick Fuentes preaching, in their different styles, open contempt for, and violence against, women.

Women influencers in turn share tips about how to attract and please a man, as if men are a tricky code to be cracked. Facebook groups and reddit subs about dating and relationships overflow with women venting about how horrible men are and how little we can expect from them, while still plaintively seeking a way to crack that code or inventing justifications for looking past unacceptable treatment. Such is the humiliating reality of being socially conditioned to desire being “chosen” by a man as justification for your very existence.

Queer relationships, once persecuted at every turn as a violation of the patriarchal social order and now, in major metropolitan centers, increasingly (certainly not completely) assimilated into mainstream US society, are often viewed as having, by nature, escaped the well-known problems of rigid gender roles that plague straight relationships. In reality, they frequently replicate the same patriarchal patterns in different forms. Non-monogamous relationships seek to get beyond the possessiveness and restrictiveness of patriarchal monogamy, but still abound with dishonesty and abuse. Hook-up culture offers a way to use other people for sexual gratification (and emotional gratification too―many a booty call has been motivated by crushing loneliness) without having to consider them as full human beings, or having to risk our own vulnerability. Within capitalism, there’s no way out of the grotesque distortions of human sexuality that patriarchy has crafted through the centuries. However, the unbearable circumstances that we find ourselves in when it comes to finding some kind of real fulfillment in our love and sex lives should fuel our motivation to destroy this system and start building something completely different.

This editorial is for readers of Going Against the Tide who want to dedicate themselves to the revolutionary overthrow of the system that degrades us all, and when it comes to sexual and romantic relationships, find themselves grappling with the question: how should we be? How should we seek out sex and intimacy and love, when all these concepts are indelibly marked by capitalism, and when sexual violence and the objectification of women stalk our most vulnerable moments?

This should be an exciting question, because through all the ways sexual and romantic relationships have been fucked for us by centuries of patriarchal rule, wanting a loving, intimate relationship is still a positive desire. That love and passion between individuals can nurture a love for the world and hope for the future; it can stabilize, excite, inspire, and comfort, challenging you to change for the better and struggle through even the thorniest conflicts for the sake of someone you love. What’s that but a microcosm of how a communist should carry themselves through the world and relate to other people? If we can break free from all the ways patriarchal oppression infiltrates and poisons our closest relationships, we strengthen ourselves ideologically from the inside out, and we model for everyone around us a material example of the world we want to create.

“Man fucks woman; subject verb object”⁴: a very brief history of our commodification

Older generations might point accusatory fingers at today’s users of dating apps and social media, correctly identifying these platforms as concentrated expressions of self-commodification. But these new forms of objectification are updated (and more sinister) versions of patriarchy’s historical playbook. When human society first stratified into divisions of labor based on gender, and then into the first exploitative division of classes, women and children were reduced to the property of men. As women’s position in society has changed alongside breakthroughs in class struggle, these patriarchal relations are remolded to serve each emerging class society. That initial objectification of women―literally, the making of women into objects to be acted upon, then commodities to be bought and sold―lives on even when women have the same formal legal rights as men. Commodity relations persist, so instead of women being bought, owned, and sold, capitalism invites us to commodify our own bodies and sexualities.

In feudal Europe, women were traded in marriage to forge family alliances and seal economic deals. Love and romance had absolutely nothing to do with any sexual relationship that could be carried out in the open, for women of any class (with some inevitable exceptions―sometimes people in an arranged marriage can form a real attachment, for example). The first inklings of courtship or “romance” had to do with the “courtly love” of a knight for “his lady,” usually the wife of his lord, a queen, or even the Virgin Mary. This was a hyper-idealized, sexually charged but celibate devotion, that served as an outlet for human yearnings for intimacy and connection (not just for the aristocrats involved, but more broadly, in the way “courtly love” influenced the consciousness of the masses) while never threatening the patriarchal status quo. In reality, the same knights that pledged their pure devotion to unattainable ruling class women raped peasant women and girls with impunity. Feudal lords had the right to rape even married peasant women, in a mockery of the supposedly sacred religious rights of peasant men.

Within early capitalism, marriage remained a business contract based on property relations, this time supposedly as a contract of free choice between individuals. The same style of “courtly love,” held over from feudal times, could now apply to “courtship” as a bourgeois man pursued a woman he might marry. Though the idea was that, unlike in feudal times, they would actually end up together and have sex (and, crucially, children), this idea of romance was every bit as idealized and divorced from reality as it was when knights were pledging their passion to the Virgin Mary. Women still had few legal rights and could not enter into, or leave, marriage of their own free will. At the same time, with women barred from education and all but the worst-paid jobs, a woman’s economic survival was bound up with her attachment to a male provider. Women had zero sexual freedom; your value to the man who essentially owned you had everything to do with your sexual purity and your husband’s confidence that your children were his property. Bourgeois rules for women about marriage and sexual purity were imposed on the European masses as a matter of Christian morality, then imposed on the rest of the world through colonial conquest.⁵

Without reliable birth control or abortion, women having sex outside of marriage took enormous risks. Children born out of wedlock, and their mothers, became social pariahs; unmarried mothers could not secure even the most menial employment and usually had to turn to prostitution. Bourgeois trappings of romance, in early capitalism and right on up to today, serve only to disguise the true conditions of women’s oppression within sexual relationships, and as a fantasy where women can direct our desires for real intimacy without questioning our commodification. The gulf between idealized bourgeois romance and the true condition of women in early capitalism is perhaps best illustrated by slavery in the American South, where the feudal character of patriarchy persisted in the rape of enslaved women and men, and forced child breeding, even as highly ritualized courtship among the slaveowning wannabe aristocracy formed a cornerstone of the white Southern lifestyle mythology.

The 1920s saw the first real challenge to patriarchal rule over sexual relationships in Europe and the US. Post-World War I, rigid social structures were shaken by postwar instability and the depletion of young men from the youth population. More importantly, the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union introduced communist ideas about the liberation of women and challenged bourgeois sexual morality. Young people who had seen their generation sent to be pointlessly slaughtered in an inter-imperialist war pushed back against conservative social expectations, exploring sexual relationships outside marriage and theorizing about “free love.” Gay and trans people began fighting to exist openly. Yet sexual liberation remained primarily for men; women still bore all the risks of men’s sexual freedom.

The radical and revolutionary movements of the 1960s that challenged and sought to overthrow bourgeois rule coincided with the popularization of the first reliable form of medical birth control, the Pill. In the US, a burgeoning women’s movement, which would rise to the height of its power in the early 1970s, challenged the position of women and LGBTQ people in society, and fought for expanded access to birth control and legal abortion. This brought forth a fundamental transformation of sexual culture known as the “sexual revolution.” For the first time, women could have sex outside marriage without risking the dire consequence of pregnancy, and improved access to education and jobs meant that women had a chance to provide for themselves and their children without dependence on a man. Improved freedom of divorce made marriage less of a prison; eventually, about half of all marriages in the US would end in divorce. Gradually, single motherhood became more common and accepted in US culture. Marriage and the bourgeois nuclear family structure became less crucial to the overall socioeconomic structure, and though the rigid, puritanical, patriarchal morality of the Christian Right continued to exert considerable cultural and political power, for most young people, dating and having sex with different people and living together without the permanent vows of marriage became more of the norm.

Crucially, the sexual revolution, though tied to the women’s liberation movement, did not seek to go beyond capitalism and commodity relations. In fact, the new order of sexual liberation presented brand new ways for the bourgeoisie to capitalize on women’s bodies, especially through the exponential growth of the pornography industry and the sex trade. Young people in the US coming of age in the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s were freer to explore their sexualities than their parents had been, but also grew up exposed to twisted representations of sexual relationships as portrayed by an increasingly hypersexualized entertainment industry. The commodification of women within marriage became the commodification of women within the dating game and within bitter, transactional legal battles over child support.

With the arrival of the internet into every US home, and most especially with the advent of social media, the new commodification of women and sexuality found concentrated and concrete forms. Freed from the direct control of husbands or fathers, women are now invited to submit to the indirect control of the bourgeoisie. In pursuit of our own sexual and emotional fulfillment, we are shown how to commodify ourselves through social media that trains us to mold our very selves into a marketable “brand,” through dating rituals that basically involve presenting that marketable brand to prospective “buyers,” and through shelling out our hard-earned wages to a punishing, predatory, and extremely profitable beauty industry. The sex trade, undergirded by the enslavement and brutal exploitation of women and children in countries subjugated by imperialism and in the lowest strata of the proletariat in the US, is now marketed to young women of all classes as an “empowered” way to profit off “human capital” you already have―your own sexuality.

Many men, embittered by women’s increased freedom to choose our own sexual partners (including partners other than men), have responded with a backlash of revanchist masculinity. The “incels” (self-described “involuntary celibates”) of the Millennial generation paved the way for growing numbers of Gen Z men who believe they are oppressed when women don’t choose them as sexual partners, and made way for the Manosphere and the fascist ideologies of men like Nick Fuentes who openly advocate for women to be imprisoned in “breeding camps.”⁶ The most violent and reactionary expressions of revanchist masculinity influence the broader masses of men, who may not set out to rape and abuse women, but still see them as a subhuman, essentially hostile species to be pursued and controlled. This kind of attitude is exemplified in the language of popular social media streamers who discuss tactics for persuading women to have sex with them, sometimes referring to women as “foids”: female humanoids. Revanchist masculinity has significant overlap with white supremacist ideology, but also resonates with some proletarian men of oppressed nationalities. These men blame their increasing disenfranchisement (at the hands of the bourgeoisie) on women, and/or cling to their patriarchal right to possess and control women as the only right the bourgeoisie grants them.

If you cannot empathize with women as fellow human beings, but only regard them as objects to be acquired and acted upon, why would you treat them with honesty and compassion?

The personal is political: learning how to seek accountability and collectivity

Even when we understand the workings of bourgeois rule and commit ourselves to overthrowing it, even when we study communist theory and know about how the liberation of women forms a cornerstone of the proletarian revolution, it can be excruciatingly hard to examine how our sexual desires might be influenced by patriarchal ideology. This shit is intrinsically personal and deeply psychological, so we have to really dig deep emotionally to understand it, and that can be painful. So sometimes, we try to justify our misogyny (or internalized misogyny) with workarounds like “this is private, it’s not anyone else’s business,” “I told the person I’m having sex with not to expect much from me,” “pursuing my own desires with no regard for other people is part of my own sexual liberation,” or “my sexual desires have nothing to do with my worldview, so I don’t need to question them.”

These excuses are all part of an individualistic, patriarchal bourgeois worldview that rejects collectivity and celebrates selfishness. This is true no matter the gender or sexual orientation of the person wielding these excuses. A crucial part of the original oppression of women was our relegation to the home and the private sphere; the oppression of women thrives in private and in isolation. To get beyond this, we have to understand that everything we believe to be our personal, private business is in fact inherently political and requires collective accountability and support. This doesn’t mean that you need to divulge every detail about your sex life; rather, it means that relationships are intensely social, affect the people around us, and reflect our most deeply held beliefs about humanity in general.

There is no justifiable reason to keep a sexual relationship secret from our friends and comrades. We should be discussing our whole lives with the collectivities we’re part of, even and especially if it means we need to be a little more vulnerable or risk embarrassing ourselves. If you live the kind of double life where you act in a principled, disciplined way with the people you respect, and then in a self-serving, hedonistic way with the people you hook up with in secret, do you really respect the people you hook up with? Why don’t they deserve your best and most principled self?

On the flip side, if you demand respect and equality in your public life, but resign yourself to disrespectful or abusive treatment in private, why not trust your friends and comrades to support your vulnerability and personal growth? Plenty of victims of abusive relationships or people in dead-end “situationships” feel too ashamed to tell other people the whole truth about the situation. Abusive relationships are extremely hard to leave,⁷ and there’s often some overlap between the characteristics of a long-term abusive situation and an informal but deeply toxic, semi-secret relationship. The trauma, shame, and self-blame wrought by a culture steeped in sexual violence makes it hard to talk openly about these situations, and in progressive circles there’s also a pervasive idea that revolutionary women are supposed to be “strong women” who don’t “accept” abuse—in other words, twisting the concept of empowerment to fit victim-blaming norms. We deserve better than this, and the first step in breaking free is to bring these problems to your comrades and shine the light of accountability on them.

If you ghost the person you’re dating (or a more long-term partner), lie to them, or gaslight them when they challenge your bad treatment of them, that’s not your personal business. It’s emotional abuse, and it’s indicative of an underlying contempt for people in general. If you treat the people closest to you with contempt, you probably look at the masses with contempt, or as instruments of your own will, not as people.

It can be intimidating to be honest, because dishonesty is a way to exert control. If you don’t give someone all the information they need to act freely, you can control this person more and make them the object of your desires. If you open up vulnerably, they become an actor, not an object. They may reject you. This is the emotional risk that so many people, especially young men, cannot bring themselves to take. But without taking that risk, we cripple ourselves emotionally and we objectify the people closest to us.

Let’s talk about consent…⁸

Often, discussions of how to go about sexual relationships “ethically” without tying ourselves to conservative Christian morality focus on consent. Liberalism typically okays any sexual act in the name of sexual freedom as long as it’s “between consenting adults.” The problem with making “consent” the dividing line between moral and immoral sexual behavior is that it comes from bourgeois contract law, where you have to accept everything that happens after you sign on the dotted line, whether or not you read the fine print. Even when qualifiers like “enthusiastic consent” or “consent that can be withdrawn at any time” are added, we are left with a bleak situation where sex is, ultimately, transactional.

In reality, people often formally agree to things that they don’t really want or that are against their interests, especially when they are pressured, manipulated, or coerced. You might consent to sex acts that you don’t want, because you do want to please your partner or because you’re afraid to lose them. A sex worker consents to have sex with a john not because she wants to, but because she’s being exploited. Frequently, victims of sexual assault are told by the police and the courts that because they consented to sex once, they consented in perpetuity, or that it’s understandable that the rapist didn’t “realize” they didn’t consent.

Consent is the lowest possible standard for sex. It doesn’t mean that everything that happens after consent is given is morally acceptable. Holding ourselves to a higher standard in the way we approach sex involves examining where our desires come from, and whether by trying to “get my partner to agree” to fulfill a desire that they don’t share, we are coercing them.

For example, our culture is so saturated with sexual violence that feminists have coined the term “rape culture” to describe how rapist ideologies infiltrate the broader population’s understanding of sexual relationships. Rape roleplay between actually consenting partners is very common, as is BDSM. I’m not about to tell you that it’s immoral to have sex like this, just that it’s worth acknowledging that these desires don’t exist in an apolitical vacuum, examining where they do come from, and, above all, talking about it openly and vulnerably with your partner.

Same tune, different lyrics: stale patriarchal patterns play out in woke ways

Historically, patriarchy-prescribed monogamy has only been enforced for women; men could commit to formally monogamous marriages while living a more or less openly polyamorous lifestyle in practice. The purpose of monogamy was to ensure the purity of the male bloodline and to keep women under the control of one man. Modern-day critiques of monogamy rightfully label monogamous marriage as a bourgeois institution, and tie monogamy historically to the oppression of women. People trying to find alternative ways to build sexual relationships sometimes turn to different forms of non-monogamy: polyamory, open relationships, or “polycules” (romantic relationships involving more than two partners).

While proponents of non-monogamy often emphasize that these kinds of relationships require a high level of maturity and communication to navigate, in reality, there’s a wide gulf between the ideal of open and communicative polyamory and the way it is practiced. Often, rather than rising to the challenge of open, honest communication, people pursue so many partners that it becomes impossible to forge deep relationships with most of them. In these cases, non-monogamy becomes hook-up culture by another name, and the person juggling multiple partners can indefinitely avoid the hard work of introspection and collective accountability while also claiming to be free of possessive monogamous limitation.

Many couples have one partner who wants to “open” their relationship and one partner who goes along with it while their sense of neglect or betrayal silently grows. In some cases, people cheat on their monogamous partners and then claim they are truly polyamorous (and therefore can’t be held to account for being unfaithful). There’s also a question about commitment to be considered: if you initially commit to sexual and romantic exclusivity with one person (and there are plenty of good reasons outside of conservative morality for doing so) and later want another partner, does this demonstrate your ability to love more than one person intensely? Or does it maybe indicate that you’re looking for excitement or fulfillment apart from your original partner because you’re not practicing the patience, empathy, and discipline it takes to grow and change together? In many cases the answer really may be the former, but again, we have to question where our desires come from and weigh our individualistic impulses for self-gratification against the ways that other people are impacted. Non-monogamous relationships can certainly work out, but non-monogamy itself is nothing new to patriarchy, and oppressive social relations play out within these arrangements just as often as they do in monogamous relationships.

(On a practical note, there’s another real question to be considered about the time and effort required to build a healthy connection with more than one person at a time. Those of us who have committed ourselves to revolutionary political work already have very limited personal time and energy, and since our political work should always take priority, we should consider whether our time is best spent cultivating multiple sexual and romantic relationships.)

Another way patriarchal relations find expression even among people who are actively trying to leave them behind is in the question of who, in a long-term partnership, shoulders the burden of reproductive labor: cooking, cleaning, childcare, and the millions of pieces of essential minutiae it takes to keep life going, from keeping track of bills and medical appointments to organizing a healthy and reciprocal social life. These burdens, famously, play a huge role in the oppression of women. Most of us have to take on the majority of this uncompensated and unacknowledged labor even when we also work full-time for wages.

Men who are well studied in the oppression of women and have taken important steps to transform their own patriarchal attitudes frequently still resist taking up their fair share of reproductive labor. This isn’t simply a petty domestic conflict; it’s indicative of serious inequality within a relationship. Resistance to reproductive labor or weaponized incompetence when faced with household tasks is not a phenomenon limited to straight couples; it’s still an expression of patriarchal attitudes when it happens in queer relationships or even between roommates.

Women who have survived abuse in past relationships might be inclined to put up with partners who are overall thoughtful and considerate but ignore their chores. These “good guys” may draw the line at violence against women, but they are benefiting from the violent oppression of women by other men who lower cultural standards for male behavior. Sexual violence traumatizes us, but it’s the insidious ways that patriarchy creeps into even safe and loving relationships that can also really grind us down and sap our inner strength and our hope for real social change.

Higher Love⁹: toward a future of collectivity and solidarity

Communists commit to ongoing personal transformation in service of proletarian revolution. To do this, we have to fight a constant struggle against individualist, bourgeois ideology all around us and within us. This is a beautiful, honorable struggle, because it opens up a far more fulfilling life for people than anything the narrow roles of capitalism can offer, even before communist victory. The dead-end games, the objectification and commodification, and the demoralization of sexual relationships within capitalism are all things we should be eager to leave behind. And if we really want to change the world, we have to leave that all behind. A victorious communist revolution will be fought by people who have rejected isolated and dysfunctional love between individuals in favor of a higher, outward-facing love for all people, reflected in the way individuals relate to each other on an intimate level.

To put it bluntly, if you’re a young person joining the fight for a communist revolution, you shouldn’t be participating in hookup culture and you shouldn’t be watching porn. At the risk of being prescriptive, we should encourage each other to form stable, long-term relationships, if possible and desired, and then collectively support those relationships. At the same time, we have to take great care with how we approach romantic relationships with people we work with politically. The OCR Constitution sets a 6-month waiting period for comrades to begin a relationship to ensure that nobody uses communist political work as dating pools, and this rule shouldn’t feel like a leash to strain against if we really take our work and collective life seriously.

Alexandra Kollontai, OG women’s liberation badass and Bolshevik leader, called sex divorced from emotional attachment “wingless Eros,” as opposed to “winged Eros,” the sexual love between individuals that has the potential to transcend oppressive forms. You don’t have to commit to a long-term, committed relationship with every person you date, but when you try to detach emotional connection from sexual relationships, it becomes dangerously easy to objectify your partner. The postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie would have you think that by saying this, I’m coming out as “sex-negative” or against freedom of sexual expression. But I’ll stand on this: there is nothing less erotic or sexually fulfilling than being reduced, or reducing another person, to a collection of body parts. I want to see “winged Eros” fly free, and for us all to discover the emotional and sexual fulfillment that capitalism obscures from us.

Friedrich Engels wrote in his groundbreaking book on the origins of women’s oppression, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State:

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice…

Engels’ words hold true today in that we can’t foresee how sex and love will be expressed in a communist society of the future. But we can take great inspiration from the billions of people throughout history who have fought for love and connection in defiance of the socioeconomic systems that degrade humanity. From queer people fighting for their right to live beyond the bounds of the patriarchal nuclear family, to the Chinese revolutionaries who overthrew bourgeois rule and dared to design a new social structure with the liberation of women at its foundation, we do have models for how we could be.

This editorial began with a few sketches of how patriarchal relations play out at a very intimate level every day. Here are a few small glimpses of what relationships might look like when we draw our strength and wisdom from collectivity and dare to create new ways of relating to each other:

A young woman opens up to the comrades she organizes with and tells them that her abusive ex is stalking her. They don’t just comfort her; saying, “this isn’t just your problem, it’s our problem,” they go with her as a group to confront him.

Two people, who care for each other deeply but need to break up, rely on their friends and comrades to get through the breakup. Years later, each partnered with new people, they reflect together that the relationship, and even the breakup itself, fundamentally changed the way they each see the world, for the better.

A couple who thinks of marriage as a bourgeois institution decides to get married because they want to celebrate their commitment to each other with all the people they love. In their wedding vows, they promise, not obedience or forever-no-matter-what, but rather to support each other through transformation and growth, and their wedding guests take part in the vows to promise their support, too.

A teenage girl with an abusive father joins a revolutionary study group. She meets people there who treat each other with love and respect because they really believe a different world is possible. Our girl starts to hope that one day, she’ll be part of making that new world.

1Thanks, Tina Turner!

2Centers for Disease Control, “About Child Sexual Abuse,” cdc.gov, May 16, 2024.

3A good example of this kind of opinion piece: Christine Emba, “The Reason Gen Z Isn’t Dating,” The New York Times, March 3, 2026.

4Quote from feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard University Press, 1991).

5Prior to the rise of capitalism and European colonial conquest, the rest of the world had a wide variety of gender and sexual relations, from forms of patriarchy to forms of equality among genders, and everything in between. My focus here on the development of gender relations in Europe is due to the fact that these relations were violently imposed on the rest of the world, and particularly for today’s readers in the US, that historical legacy is what we have to confront and overthrow.

6See Going Against the Tide‘s pamphlet “Revanchist masculinity and the wannabe oppressors trying to put women back in servitude” for more on this phenomenon.

7See Going Against the Tide‘s pamphlet “Domestic violence: Patriarchy behind closed doors” for a fuller treatment of intimate partner violence.

8Thanks, Salt-N-Pepa!

9Thanks, Steve Winwood/Whitney Houston!