Given that it took close and repeated reading of at least 60 books to begin to feel informed enough to attempt a book on gender and militarism, and the fact that I now have an unread recommended bibliography from friends, colleagues, and comrades that numbers in the hundreds, it is crystal clear to me that these little thinkpieces are only punching tiny peepholes into the nature of patriarchy… or andrarchy, as some call it. My intent is pretty conservative, and that is just to make the case that there is something to see and understand on the other side of those apertures, and that the stakes are very high.

Obviously, I am also confronting the (imo) instrumentally simpleminded notion that this system can be corrected by granting women access to sexuality that mirrors the sexuality (abstractly) of men. For many years, that was exactly where I was, arguing for abstract “equality” and dismissing the question of how we desire as inexplicably mysterious. On examination, this turns out to be a blank-faced liberal front, and it has to be confronted in the most decisive way, especially on the left.

I’ve spoken to this question of Lynndie England before, and I agree with Peggy. But I would add that there would have been no Lynndie England without Charles Graner. Let’s not forget that after Lynndie England was swept into the vortex of official denial and damage control, Graner married the other young woman who was implicated in the scandal. There would also have been no Charles Graner without the US prison system that spawned him in his current form, Alberto Gonzales, Stephen Cambone, or Donald Rumsfeld. All powerful men! as well as political representatives of the reactionary pole of the capitalist class.

I hope I am cognizant of the pitfalls that Peggy mentions with regard to being an ally of women in struggle. It is contradictory in innumerable ways, not the least of which is how I can “authorize” the same thing that many women have said for years. I don’t know how to get around this, except by acknowledging it early and often. For whatever reasons, I have managed to get the attention of a few men - who are in my own mind my “target audience” on the gender issues - and I am trying to convey to them from as many directions as possible exactly what Stacia says: our liberation is wrapped up with that of women. It’s a tricky thing to get across these days, however, when an entire core society is being so mentally formatted by consumerism and the social darwinist ethos that accompanies it. Any message about recapturing our ability to emotionally connect with the world is already tautologically frozen out of the collective consciousness - men shut down on the whole message as soon as they spot these markers of “feminine weakness.” We are speaking to them in a foreign language - linguistically and affectively.

I hope I don’t come across as “blaming” men, but by the same token, let’s be honest. Patriarchy is a system of unequal power, and those who dominate do get real, material benefit from it. At the same time that I can say - as Fanon did about the settler’s emotional anesthesia and the native’s imitation of the settler (internalized oppression) - that there is a price paid for domination as well as oppression, I also have to defend the right to self-defense, and the self-determination struggles of those on bottom (now there’s a gendered metaphor!). In practice, the question is always, which side are you on?

I don’t intend to bash anyone, and I doubt Stacia does. Sometimes, as we all know from personal relationships, however reluctantly, we have to hurt the feelings of even those we love, and be hurt by them, in the intersubjective struggle to be human. That inertia has to be disrupted.

I trust the materialist conception of history enough and the dialectical method enough to know that there is the system first and last, but the latter deamnds that we not become mechanical, after all; that we recognize the stability of systems as being transient. The dualistically described “material” world IS permeable to to thought, as Hornborg says, though not to incantation. The ideological struggle and the process of critique are essential to the struggle for liberation.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/09/24/abuse.england.ap/

Lynndie England is a perfectly normal young American woman. And that is the problem right there. That is why she did what she did.

But, as a male champion of feminism, please be careful. My choice of words in the previous sentence is deliberate. Your situation is ironic, and perhaps even contradictory. I know you can transcend the contradiction. I am just not sure if you are fully aware of it yet. It seems that you are putting the blame too much on male human beings. You can do this and get away with it because you are a male human being, too. An exemplary one at that. And arguing against personal interest is always persuasive. I (an academic woman) could never get away with saying some of the things that you (a military man) can say. It is good for you to say those things. Just … avoid the traps a champion may fall into.

A vast number of women, maybe all of us, internalize and naturalize our oppression to a greater or lesser degree. We not only collude in our own oppression, we strengthen and develop this foundational system of domination and exploitation in many creative ways.

Once one begins to see through feminist eyes, one finds it easy, indeed irresistable, to blame men for their arrogance, their obtuseness, their cruelty, their selfishness, and on and on. But ultimately, of course, such an approach is stupid and counterproductive. The relationship itself is what is hurting us, and the relationship itself has neither consciousness nor agency. If we want to change the relationship, we must change ourselves. It does no good to insist that the person on the other side is the one who must change. Especially when the one on the other side has it good, being just how he is, acting just how he does.

WE have to change. We women have to change. Radically and collectively. One at a time won’t do it. We have to make some serious sacrifices, more than we have already made throughout our lives and our whole species history. We may have to give up what is most important to us. I am not sure if we can do this. I hope we can, but I just don’t know.

Maybe if we realize, it is not just for the sake of our own liberation, whatever that may be, but for the sake of the whole of fucked-up humanity, and if we don’t like humanity, then for the sake of life on earth, we may do this. We must do this. If we realize it is not really for us, but for the survival and well-being of gazillions of others, including not even humans, maybe we can do it.

Examples of this would be appointing Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court while letting the Justice Department turn a blind eye to racial profiling; giving Colin Powell & Condi Rice the Sec of State job but not creating fair, honest, and equitable foreign policies with neighbors like Cuba and Haiti; having a national day for environmental awareness, costing nothing(I just made this one up) but staffing the E.P.A., Dept of Interior, Dept of Energy with oil, coal and chemical corporation lawyers/lobbyists and letting them gut enforcement laws and regulations.

I wonder about language in this context. Language is a living thing and changes. It both creates reality and reflects it. What happens if I hire a woman, and I pay her a lousy wage and giver her no health benifits….but I promise not to say “bitch”? She is still exploited. Same for race…Condi Rice, now sec of state, comes out and says race had nothing to do with New Orleans. A black sec of state hasnt done much for racial equality. Raising the minimum wage might do a bit more.
Now i know language matters; dont get me wrong, please. I just think class matters much more. They obviously intersect….along with race and other things as well. How and where that intersection happens is what is complicated. This brings me back to questions about ‘difference’ and I find myself going almost all Buddhist on you. The original seperation — that endless longing for re-uniting…this is the Buddhist short version of grief. Of human suffering…a constant attempt to return to the unity we spring from. These days violence seems to be part of the attempt at regeneration — and such violence is part of a history of patriarchy.
Alright…now Ive confused myself.
I promise to contribute more coherent comments when I have time…..but I am not trying to dismiss language….or gender….but only to defend the neccessity of class awareness…for that is where material oppression begins (inho).

None of these systems is extricable from the other.

In the same way that the rich man’s wife enjoys class privilege, the poor husband enjoys gender privilege. And these are structural privileges, exploitative in every way. Marxists have been (rightly) loathe to suggest that revolutionary activity has to separate national questions from the class struggle and even develop cross-class alliances in the context of national liberation fights. But when it comes to gender, they only want to talk about gender in its economic dimension as a way of keeping the whole question subordinated to class.

To steal a quote: Sex is to feminism what work is to marxism; that which is one’s own, yet most taken away.

Part of the problem has been that Marx and Engels themselves were guilty of naturalizing sexuality - explicitly so. Given that patriarchy continued to hold sway in the left, this invisibility remained in place as Marxism (upper case) became a schematic doctrine, complete with prophets and holy texts.

I don’t think you are accusing me of fetishizing (just inferring) so much as being guilty of essentialism. On that count, I refer back to my own points on essentialism-antiessentialism in the previous installment. The fetishization of commodities happens when we see the finished product apart from its production history. The production of sexuality - so to speak - is deeply connected to but not reducible to commodity production, because patriarchy is not the power of the bourgeoisie over the worker, it is the power of men over women.

What is housework? Is it commodity production?

Gotta run. But I hope this continues.