Why the left should drop Engels on gender - Part 2
“According to Engels, women’s status is produced through social forces that give rise to ‘the origin of the family, private property, and the state.’ He assumes that answering the question, ‘How did it happen that women were first subordinated to men?’ is the same as addressing the question ‘Why are women oppressed and how can we change it?’ He equates the temporally first with the persistently fundamental. For Engels, capitalism presents the most highly evolved form of both women’s subjection and of economic class antagonism; that subjection must therefore be understood in its capitalist form if it is to be changed. But woman’s oppression, he also finds, predates capitalism; it arises with the first class society. Engels does not situate history within the present so as to tell whether or not fighting capitalism is fighting women’s subordination.” (MacKinnon, p 21)
Here is McKinnon’s explicit reference to the “history-version” argument for gender as a “secondary contradiction.”
I just want to break in long enough to highlight one question, which MacKinnon presents from the woman’s point of view, as opposed to the (unacknowledgedly gendered) “objective” stance that abstracts this discussion:
Is fighting capitalism necessarily synonymous with fighting gendered oppression?
Let me re-frame, to emphasize the right parts:
Can one fight the capitalist class without fighting gendered oppression?
The reason I bring these loaded question into this is that this is a mirror reflection of the challenge that was laid at the feet — often inappropriately — of feminists, by Marxists. It goes like this: Is Condoleeza Rice oppressed the same way as an Eastern North Carolina Black female poultry worker? Of course, it’s demagogic.
The question needs to be turned around? Do bourgeois men rape bourgeois women? Do working class men rape working class women?
Anyway, on to MacKinnon again… and note that this post is also categorized as “excerpts from my favorite books,” because I wil now quote MacKinnon extensively. If this motivates people to buy the book all the better.
“In [Engels’} double sense, women ‘originally’ became ‘degraded, enthralled, the slave of man’s lust, amere instrument for breeding children’ when and because feamle monogamy was require3d to guarantee paternity for the inheritance of private property. The same exclusive appropriation of surplus product in the form of private property divided society into antagonistic classes, first into precapitalist forms (slave, feudal, mercantile) and later into the capitalist form, as commodity production became generalized. These developments increasingly required a state to contain the social conflict between classes for the advantage fo the ruling classes. Thus the rise of private property, class divisions, women’s oppression, and the state ‘coincided with’ and required each other, linking the exploitation of man by man in production and social control through the instrument of the state with the subordination of woman to man in monogamyh and household drudgery.
“Before these four ‘conicident’ developments inaurgurted ‘civilization,’ Engels argued, labor was divided by sex within the clan, often with women in domestic roles, but woman;s social power was equal to or greater than man’s. In pairing marriage, the family form which preceded monogamy, woman was supreme in the household, and lieage reckoned according to ‘mother right.’ With the rise of private property, the unity of the clan dissolved into antagonistic classes and isolated family units. As production shifted out of the household, leaving women behind in it, and more private wealth accumulatedin men’s hands, lineage came to be traced by ‘father right,’ marking what Engels called ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex.’ The socialization of housework and the full entry of womeninto production is necessary to end woemn’s isolation in the family and her subordination to men within it. Woman’s liberation wil therfore come with the end of the the private property ownership and class relations that caused her oppression.”
An aside: Isn’t this too convenient a construction?
“Engels summarizes his view in an often quoted and as oten misread paragraph:
** Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between sexes unknown throughout the whole previous pre-historic period. The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propogation of children … the first class opposition that appears in history coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamoud marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others. It is the cellular form of civilized society in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be studied.** (close quote)
“Of this analysis, Wilhelm Reich wrote that ‘Engels … correctly surmised the nature of the relationships … the origin of class divisions was to be found in the antithesis between man and woman.’ Kate Millett concludes that Engels views ’sexual dominance [as] the ekystone to the total structure of humaninjustice.’ Both interpretations share a one-sidedsocial causality precisely backward. Engels does not think that a divisions of labor, on the basis of sex or anything else, is inherently exploitative. The firs division of labor, he says, was by sex for the propogation of children. The first CLASS [caps mine, SG] opposition, on the other hand, was presumably between slaves and slave owners. The *antagonism* between men and women — not the division of labor between men and women — arose wth economic classes. In Engels’ view, classes and sexual antagonism ‘coincided’ in that they developed at the same time, but they did not coincide in the sense of falling along the same lines.
“Women were not a class for Engels. He cannot be taken to mean, as he often is, that ‘this first class division among women and m en fomrs the basis for the exploitation of the working class,’ nor did he think that the the oppression of workers ‘is an extension of’ the oppression of women. [The claim-quotes here are from Susan Williams, a socialist feminist, writing in 1973.] To Engels, sex divides labor, not relations to the means fo production. His widely-quoted spectacular references to woman as man’s ’slave’ (’who only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let her body on piecework as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery’) and to the man in the family as ‘the voureois [while] the wife represents the proletariat,’ though highly suggestive, are essentially metaphors. To argue that women are a class renders capitalism one form of patriarchal society, rather thanone form of (economic) class society, in which the patriarchal family is the appropriate family structure. Basing class relations on gender relations would make the fundamental motive force of history a struggel or dialectic between the sexes. This is an argument, but it is not Engels’. In his work, family forms support and respond to changes in economic organization, not to a sex-bsed historical dialectic. Changes in amily fomrs changing productive structures would be contrary to all that Engels take historical materialism to be about.
“In Engels’ history of gender, the transition from group marriage to paring marriage places woman in the household with one man within a communal setting marked by matrilineal descent. The transition from pairing marriage to monogamy eliminates the communal context and the woman’s right to descent, leaving her in the modern nuclear household. Because dialectical materialism claims special competency in explaining social change, the inadequacy of Engels’ treatment of these dynamic movements is particularly telling.
“Pairing marriage first arose, according to Engels, in the transition from barbarism to savagery, at a time when slavery and private property existed but were not generalized. Class society had not emerged. Although women and men labored in separate spheres, no distinction existed between the public world of men;s work and the private world of women’s household service. The community was stilla large collective household withing which both sexes worked to produce goods primarily for use. Pring marriage was primarily distinguished from the previous communal form in that one man lived with one woman. Men could be polygamous or unfaithful, but infidelity by women was severely punished. Either party could dissolve the marriage bond; children were considered members of the mother’s family (’mother right’). Why and how did this form of marital relationship arise to replace group marriage?
(quote from Engels)
The more the traditional sexual relations lost the naive, primitive character of forest life [sometimes translated ‘jungle character’] owiing to the development of economic conditions with consequent undermining of the old communism and the growing density of population, the more oppressive and humiliating [sometimes translated ‘degrading’] must the women have felt them to be; and the greater their longing for the right to chastity, of temporary or permanent marriage to one man only, as a way of release [sometimes translated ‘deliverance’]. This advance could not in any case have originated from the man, if only because it has never occurred to them, even to this day, ot renounce the pleasures of actual group marriage. (end quote)
“Engels seems to think that the existence of more people in a smaller space — higher density — of itself generates greater demand for sexual intercourse per woman. The basis for his view that women preferred marriage to one man is unclear. It seems to assume that the present reality that women largely have intercourse at men’s will rather than their own was present at the ‘origin’ of this system. Pairing marriage arose because the women, besieged by sexual demands, wanted it.”
Another aside: This weird Victorian notion is at the heart of Engels’ specific analysis, yet it is still glossed over by many Marxists as an irrelevant curiosity.
“Could not increased populaiton density as well support less intercourse, producing less crowding, or the ocntinuance of extended groups, since people were living so close together anyway? Engels assumes, rather, than explains, that s system of restricting women to one man but not restricting men to onw woman is an improvement over a system of equal lack of restraint on both. He assumes rather than explains tha tsexual intercourse with diverse partners in imposed by and desired by men, impose upon and unwanted by women. Male lust is not explained. [And the Marxist canon NEVER theorizes desire!!! -SG] Under what conditions would woomen ‘long for chastity’? The more marxist approach, methodologically, would be to inquire into the conditions that would create a person who experienced this desire or found such a social rule necessary or advantageous. The fact that men remained able to have many wives or be unfaithful while women’s fidelity was demanded makes one wonder what women gained fromthe rearrangement. Since, ‘mother right’ had supposedly given then supremacy in the clan household, women at this point presumably need not have accepted a situation they did not want.
End of part 2
Charles Brown:
On male supremacy as a secondary contradiction, I’d say it is a non-antagonistic contradiction. The contradiction between exploiting and exploited classes is antagonistic. It can’t be resolved without abolishing classes. The contradiction between women and men can be resolved without abolishing the difference between females and males. We know this because before the “origin” , there were no antagonistic classes. There were women and men, but in non-antagonistic difference ( viva la difference !). Males and females are biological complements, a natural unity and struggle of opposites. There is nothing inherently antagonistic in their differences. It is only with the rise of “civilization” that the differences between human females and males become antagonistic.
In the next communism (the first communism being ancient society) there will still be women and men , but no antagonistic classes ( if we get there without a nuclear war exterminating us first).
22 December 2005, 5:28 pmStan:
Commenting on the various defenses of Engels, and continuing from the Engels-1 thread…
Beginning with the above by Charles, an working back:
I myself used have made the distinction bewtween the *inhering* antagonism that *defines* class, as a way of critquing what I perceive to be an error in conflating the concepts of sexism, racism, and something called “classism.”
But we need to disentangle some things here along exactly the fault line on display here, and it it NOT the difference between these forms of oppression, but the difference in how we choose to represent them. It is very important in this conversationn to have some clear definitions, even if our definitions are our own arbitrary ones, becuse there is a critical distinctionn to be made.
The fault line is between indivudual or group behavior and social systems.
Sexism is the display of individual or group behavior that discriminates based on sex, for example. Sherry once ranted about a comrade who visited, becasue he expected her to bus his dirty dishes and wash his clothes while he stayed. XXX is a sexist, she said. And she was right.
Gender, the word, is the word I have been using to differentiate and describe a system of unequal and *antagonistc* social power.
Racism is the display of racist behavior. In my own world view, the system in the US is one of national oppression, with an ideology of white supremacy.
Classism, whatever that means, seems to refer to the kind of disrespectful behavior engaged in based on realor perceived “class,” often loosely defined (that is, not as a relation to the means of production, but as income or lifestyle).
Class is a system of unequal and *antagonistc* social power. On the formulation that “class” power can not be abolished without abolishing class itself, but inequality between the sexes can be abolished without abolishing men and women.. I have myself made the same argument. And I was wrong.
We are treating these two intefused, but herein analytically separated, SYSTEMS very differently. We are still describing class as a relation, but we are describing gender as attaching to actual human bodies.
If we say that class is a separation of human beings (now there are actual bodies involved), then we can well say that class can be abolished, but human beings cannot.
Gender is INHERENTLY antagonistic. It is, just as class, and I would even argue is a form of class, a structural social relation of complimentary inequality — a system where domination and subordination exist as a unity of opposites… and must be abolished.
Its ideology is not white supremacy or bourgeois economics/individualism, but masculinity-femininity, which like the other two, construct a set of values that are internalized and mystificatory in order to reproduce and conceal structural power.
Emerson’s claim that feminism is “based on identity” is plain wrong.. and it is a gambit deployed by Mrxists far and wide to dimiss feminis as a whole, in order to avoid engaging the arguements of feminsts in the particular. The radical and socialist feminists hve never approached gender from the mere standpoint of being biological women, but from their opposition to the soical construction of power against biological women.
This power is played out symbolically, btw, in John’s prison example. The rape and sexual domination among male prisoners is not an example of the non-gendered-ness of dominaiton (as if it sharacteristic of some “human nature”). It is — when studied n the conrete — a direct reflection of the valorization of masculinity and femininity as inherently subordinate and devalued. The term “prison bitch” is reflective of the feminization of those who are dominated, and a direct reflection of masculinity constructed as aggression and domination. The roison rapis does not believe he is involved in a “homosexual” act, as long as he is “pitching” and not “catching.”
Now I will backtrack and point out that one cannot say — as liberals and conservatives alike do — that “discrimination” goes both ways (in an abstractly equal sense), the notion of reverse racism, for example. Because behavior that discriminates, for example white discrimination against Black, from a position of grater social power is not the same — because of the concrete context — as discrimination of Black against white.
I do not believe it was “racist” to tell my children that they cannot afford to give white people they do not know the benefit of the doubt. This was an exercise of parental responsibility, in a world where either of my boys could be killed for failing to put his hands in clear view on the steering wheel while saiting for a speeding ticket.
If the parent of a white kid tell their child not to give the benefit of the doubt to Black people they don’t know, there is a different social dynamic going on.
Abstract equality counterposed to actually existing social IN-equality, as MacKinnon (she is a law professor at U Mich) has pointed out in her devastating critique of liberal law, is precisely the way that bourgeois and patriachal and “white” dominated society protects itself juridically from challenges to operational power… by concealing it in abstraction.
Part of that dynamic, by the way, and a very gendered part, is the claim to “objectivity” that is lurking in the background of the debate between John and Yolanda/Julien, et al. No standpoint does not confer unconditional validity on the “OBJECTIVE” (often meaning abstracted) issues raised in an argument. But nor is standpoint irrelevant. Yolanda is young, Black, poor, living in the US South. The characterization of her argument as “silly” by a relatively affluent older white male inaugurates a host of dynamics that are not the same as John and I (I am 54, white, male, and have a personal [military] history that is highly valorized in this society) having a disagreement.
It matters. Asserting the primacy of “objectivity” in this dynamic between real people is a form of liberal-male abstraction that conceals these real relations of power. I will talk about that *concleament* further down.
Now, on to other matters.
The quote from Marx is not a typo or a misrepresentation. I gave the citation. There are numerous translations of Marx. Hans Ehrbar, in his notes on reading Capital, takes each section and looks closely at some of these translation variances. The actual book was Das Kapital. I’m pretty sure that was German.
The essence remains. Charles is even defending the position that the sexual division of labor is natural. though he has re-worked Marx’s words to make him seem less simplistic. Marx did NOT just say that the sexual division of labor was the first (Simone De Beauvoir said the same thing, as did others.. that’s an academic argument with no ultimate resolution). Marx said in “the sex act.” This is not “misleading.” It says what it says, adn we should take it as such, and se where it corresponds to other statements — like his repetition of the notion that labor is the father and nature is the mother. These are not harmless, generic claims, but illustrative of the very errors and prejudices that are later committed by Engels (albeit in a more sophisticated way, because Engels at least focused on the question of sexual inequality in OFPPS).
I want to refer people back to the nature v nurture discussion at http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=218 http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=219 http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=220
This is a false dichotomy. When it is deployed in defense of a speculative postion on the pre-historical development of gender roles and gendered power systems, it is a smokescreen.
The reason, imo, that people are clinging so desperately to this archival and ultimately scholastic position is that we are avoiding the discussion of gendered power as we know it exists now and in the documented past. Implicit in this is the notion that we can only appeal to this past as the final reference point on women’s oppression. That is plain wrong. It is an avoidance mechanism, in my view.
Charles makes the claim in an earlier post, which Emerson and John also assert, that the abolition of economic class will resolve gendered oppression. But there is no reason to assume this is so. Moreover, and this is back to my main critique of unacknowledged leftist phallocentrism, this has beocme the perennial excuse for the left to set aside gendered power and claim that the “main blow” (really an ineffectual strategic concept, btw) must be aimed at the bourgeoisie, leaving women’s direct issues of explitation and domination AS WOMEN on the back burner.
Bebel is thrown into the mix, because he at least said that women’s struggle for political and social pwoer might have to precede the overthrow of class power… but again, the engagement is exclusively with Marxist males.
The left has NOT engaged, for the most part, with the body of feminist thought, out of outright anatgonism to it in many cases. They have not read Mies, or MacKinnon, or bell hooks, or Mohanty, or Hartsock, or Benjamin, or Hennessy, or Crenshaw, etc etc etc.
The treatment of gender by these women is in every single case more current and more sophisticated that that of Marx and Engels… and all have already incorporated Marx and Engels into their thinking.
Charles cals Marx and Engels “science.” I have heard this from my first engagemnt with left politics, even the use of the term “the science of Marxism-Leninism.” But M-L began as a state dogma, and calling it a science is dogmatic.
A aside - It is intersting that Marxists still name their method for the man, and feminists name their approach after a whole class of people.
We wouldn’t cling to the microbiology of the 19th Century to supercede the developments in microbiology of the 20th and 21st, yet we are calling Engels’ work science, when most of us have not studied the work done in this field over the last 40 years.
I would ask those who are taking the pro-Engels position here to post at the earlier threads on gender, where many of these other thinkers are represented, ie,
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=185
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=186
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=187
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=189
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=190
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=191
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=215
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=218
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=219
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=220
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=224
With that, I will ask those who are debating this, if you have the time and inclination, to read over this second part, and incorporate MacKinnon’s further elaboration of her critique into this debate.
Thanks all.
23 December 2005, 7:27 amjohn steppling:
Stan;
where did you get the idea i was relatively affluent? see, this is where assumptions get you.
I once….for about seven years, made good money in Hollywood….which i spent.
I grew up in a welfare family…..desperatly poor and dysfunctional….and now teach in eastern europe…ergo, I am in the Polish economy. Check what that means…..I make about $600 a month. Even in Poland this is not a living wage….so I barely make it….but I gave up Hollywood…about the time it was giving up me (for my politics mostly) and so Im happy to be here.
But affluent i never was….and since my youth was spent in the judicial system and camps…..I think I qualify as proletarian and maybe even lumpen.
Just a clarifying remark.
23 December 2005, 12:28 pmCharles Brown:
Commenting on the various defenses of Engels, and continuing from the Engels-1 thread…
Beginning with the above by Charles, an working back:
I myself used have made the distinction bewtween the *inhering* antagonism that *defines* class, as a way of critquing what I perceive to be an error in conflating the concepts of sexism, racism, and something called “classism.â€
But we need to disentangle some things here along exactly the fault line on display here, and it it NOT the difference between these forms of oppression, but the difference in how we choose to represent them. It is very important in this conversationn to have some clear definitions, even if our definitions are our own arbitrary ones, becuse there is a critical distinctionn to be made.
The fault line is between indivudual or group behavior and social systems.
Sexism is the display of individual or group behavior that discriminates based on sex, for example. Sherry once ranted about a comrade who visited, becasue he expected her to bus his dirty dishes and wash his clothes while he stayed. XXX is a sexist, she said. And she was right.
Gender, the word, is the word I have been using to differentiate and describe a system of unequal and *antagonistc* social power.
^^^^
Charles: Yes, I use “gender” to refer to the categories of oppressor and oppressed people in male supremacist society. Technically speaking , in my usage, there are not genders before the advent of male supremacist society.
“Gender” will be abolished with the rev. Sexes will continue after the communist rev. because sexes are biological categories, and it is not a revolution in human biology, but rather in human culture.
^^^^
Racism is the display of racist behavior. In my own world view, the system in the US is one of national oppression, with an ideology of white supremacy.
^^^^
Charles: Yes, it is a system with oppressor and specially oppressed groups of nationalities or socalled races. It is integral and co-definitive of the capitalist relations of production along with the wage-labor and capital relationship. The racist relations of production are a necessary condition of capitalism. Racism arose with capitalism in definitive part of its history.
Unlike gender/male supremacy, racism begins with capitalism. Male supremacy is older than capitalism, like private property.
^^^^
^^^^^
Classism, whatever that means, seems to refer to the kind of disrespectful behavior engaged in based on realor perceived “class,†often loosely defined (that is, not as a relation to the means of production, but as income or lifestyle).
Class is a system of unequal and *antagonistc* social power. On the formulation that “class†power can not be abolished without abolishing class itself, but inequality between the sexes can be abolished without abolishing men and women.. I have myself made the same argument. And I was wrong.
^^^^
Charles: I’m here to tell you you were right ( left ) :>).
That would be abolishing males and females. “Women and men” are terms of gender.
^^^^^^^
We are treating these two intefused, but herein analytically separated, SYSTEMS very differently. We are still describing class as a relation, but we are describing gender as attaching to actual human bodies.
^^^^
Charles: I’m not sure about “we”, but , I specifically said that gender is a relationship. I specifically made that distinction. The division of labor is a complementary relationship between males and females in ancient society. Gender is not a thing. It is a relationship. So, is sex. No such thing as “male” without “female”. They are complementary, co-defining categories. Like up and down, yin and yang.
^^^^
If we say that class is a separation of human beings (now there are actual bodies involved), then we can well say that class can be abolished, but human beings cannot.
Gender is INHERENTLY antagonistic. It is, just as class, and I would even argue is a form of class, a structural social relation of complimentary inequality — a system where domination and subordination exist as a unity of opposites… and must be abolished.
^^^^^^
Charles: Yes, _gender_ is inherently antagonistic, because gender is the category in male supremacist system
Sex is not inherently antagonistic. It is inherently complementary, as with yin and yang. It is a fundamental dialectic, a non-antagonistic unity and struggle of opposites. Viva la difference ! This is fundamental to all animals that reproduce by sex, not just humans.
Humans have culture too. We have to establish cultural categories in which we place the sexes , categories that are analogous with their underlying biological, non-antagonistic categories, as was the case before the origin of the male supremacist family ( along with private property and the state in a complex called “civilization”)
^^^^^^
Its ideology is not white supremacy or bourgeois economics/individualism, but masculinity-femininity, which like the other two, construct a set of values that are internalized and mystificatory in order to reproduce and conceal structural power.
^^^^
Charles: Agree. We can say more. It’s ideology is male supremacy. That is the relationship between masculinity-feminiity is to place masculine as superior to feminine.
^^^^^
Emerson’s claim that feminism is “based on identity†is plain wrong.. and it is a gambit deployed by Mrxists far and wide to dimiss feminis as a whole, in order to avoid engaging the arguements of feminsts in the particular. The radical and socialist feminists hve never approached gender from the mere standpoint of being biological women, but from their opposition to the soical construction of power against biological women.
This power is played out symbolically, btw, in John’s prison example. The rape and sexual domination among male prisoners is not an example of the non-gendered-ness of dominaiton (as if it sharacteristic of some “human natureâ€). It is — when studied n the conrete — a direct reflection of the valorization of masculinity and femininity as inherently subordinate and devalued. The term “prison bitch†is reflective of the feminization of those who are dominated, and a direct reflection of masculinity constructed as aggression and domination. The roison rapis does not believe he is involved in a “homosexual†act, as long as he is “pitching†and not “catching.â€
^^^^
Charles: Agree with this. The trope of male supremacy goes beyond the direct relations between women and men.
^^^^
Now I will backtrack and point out that one cannot say — as liberals and conservatives alike do — that “discrimination†goes both ways (in an abstractly equal sense), the notion of reverse racism, for example. Because behavior that discriminates, for example white discrimination against Black, from a position of grater social power is not the same — because of the concrete context — as discrimination of Black against white.
I do not believe it was “racist†to tell my children that they cannot afford to give white people they do not know the benefit of the doubt. This was an exercise of parental responsibility, in a world where either of my boys could be killed for failing to put his hands in clear view on the steering wheel while saiting for a speeding ticket.
If the parent of a white kid tell their child not to give the benefit of the doubt to Black people they don’t know, there is a different social dynamic going on.
^^^^
Charles: Agree. Racism = prejudice + power. There is no reverse discrimination. The Supreme Court “reverse discrimination” doctrine is pernicious and the doctrine itself is a main form of racism of today.
Actually, my 15 year old son doesn’t understand this right now. He is arguing for colorblindness. “It doesn’t matter whether somebody is Black or white.” This is actually good as a phase. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Maybe the world will change enough in his lifetime for this to be true, but we will see how he feels if and when he gets into the “real” America.
^^^^
Abstract equality counterposed to actually existing social IN-equality, as MacKinnon (she is a law professor at U Mich) has pointed out in her devastating critique of liberal law, is precisely the way that bourgeois and patriachal and “white†dominated society protects itself juridically from challenges to operational power… by concealing it in abstraction.
^^^^
Now, on to other matters.
The quote from Marx is not a typo or a misrepresentation. I gave the citation. There are numerous translations of Marx. Hans Ehrbar, in his notes on reading Capital, takes each section and looks closely at some of these translation variances. The actual book was Das Kapital. I’m pretty sure that was German.
The essence remains. Charles is even defending the position that the sexual division of labor is natural. though he has re-worked Marx’s words to make him seem less simplistic. Marx did NOT just say that the sexual division of labor was the first (Simone De Beauvoir said the same thing, as did others.. that’s an academic argument with no ultimate resolution). Marx said in “the sex act.†This is not “misleading.†It says what it says, adn we should take it as such, and se where it corresponds to other statements — like his repetition of the notion that labor is the father and nature is the mother. These are not harmless, generic claims, but illustrative of the very errors and prejudices that are later committed by Engels (albeit in a more sophisticated way, because Engels at least focused on the question of sexual inequality in OFPPS).
^^^^^^
Charles: Not “even”, especially. I don’t think the distinction made here changes the upshot of the reasoning etc. Not very plausible that Marx was so dense as to think the division of labor overall is based purely on the minutes or hours of sexual intercourse and not the larger factual scheme that women get pregnant and men don’t, women breastfeed and men don’t, sexual dimorphism ( “weak and strong”)
Assume for the moment that Marx thought of it that narrowly. Then I’m saying it as I attribute it to Marx. So, now the issue would be confront my argument, not Marx’s. ( Marx is dead anyway, and I’m right here, so one can get a response from me, unlike Marx).
I want to refer people back to the nature v nurture discussion at
^^^^^^
23 December 2005, 1:26 pmCharles; Ok I’ll get up to blog speed on these.
Charles Brown:
This is a false dichotomy. When it is deployed in defense of a speculative postion on the pre-historical development of gender roles and gendered power systems, it is a smokescreen.
^^^^
Charles: As I say, my position is non-speculative as one can get, in that it is based on the overwhelming majority position in ethnology and anthropological _empirical_ sciences. It is fact, not speculation based.
Here’s one basic anthro text , _Anthropology: A Global Perspective_ (by Scupin and DeCorse, 2004; they probably are not Marxists) I looked up “Band Societies” subsection on “Gender”;
“Female Status - Closely related to gender roles (it has just said they are the basis for the division of labor like Marx or I, if you prefer, say - CB) and subsistence is the question of the social status of
women. Empirical data suggest that gender relations tend to be more _egalitarian_ ( emphasis in original) - men and women having more or less equal status - in foraging societies than in other societies ( Friedl, 1975; Martin & Voorhies, 1975; Endicott, 1988.”
Of course, this relies on the comparative method, fundamental in anthro, in inferring that the foragers of recent centuries are like those in ancient society. But this is the best scientifically, empirically based inference we can make. It is the least speculative and standard in anthropolgy.
^^^^^^
The reason, imo, that people are clinging so desperately to this archival and ultimately scholastic position is that we are avoiding the discussion of gendered power as we know it exists now and in the documented past. Implicit in this is the notion that we can only appeal to this past as the final reference point on women’s oppression. That is plain wrong. It is an avoidance mechanism, in my view.
^^^^^
Charles: “People” maybe. I , myself, discuss current power relations between the genders more in my analysis of male supremacy than I discuss pre-male supremacist society.
We need an ERA Equal Rights Amendment of the Constitution , today !
Vote for and support women for public office and leadership positions all around in society.
Retain affirmative action. ( Michigan has a battle against Ward Connerly this year)
Fight rape and domestic violence.
Men surrender in the Battle of the Sexes, today.
Men do more childcare and housework.
Also, I am a Black feminist, first, but also a general feminist.
^^^^^^
Charles makes the claim in an earlier post, which Emerson and John also assert, that the abolition of economic class will resolve gendered oppression.
^^^^^
CB: Did I ? Where did I say that ? I’d don’t think it. I think and say that there must be a specific struggle against male supremaccy in conjunction with the struggle for workers’ lib. That’s why in my paper I called for Marxists to raise the struggle for women’s liberation to the same level as the struggle against capitalism.
^^^^
But there is no reason to assume this is so. Moreover, and this is back to my main critique of unacknowledged leftist phallocentrism, this has beocme the perennial excuse for the left to set aside gendered power and claim that the “main blow†(really an ineffectual strategic concept, btw) must be aimed at the bourgeoisie, leaving women’s direct issues of explitation and domination AS WOMEN on the back burner.
^^^^^
Charles: Some do this. The main point of my paper was to bring women’s lib to the front burner with workers’ lib. Take a look at it again. That I say that is patent there.
^^^^^^
Bebel is thrown into the mix, because he at least said that women’s struggle for political and social pwoer might have to precede the overthrow of class power… but again, the engagement is exclusively with Marxist males.
^^^^
Charles: Angela Davis, Evelyn Reed, Martha Gimenez, Yoshie Furuhashi, Inessa Armand and Clara Zetkin are some Marxist women, who have written on feminist issues. bell hooks is a leftist.
^^^^
The left has NOT engaged, for the most part, with the body of feminist thought, out of outright anatgonism to it in many cases. They have not read Mies, or MacKinnon, or bell hooks, or Mohanty, or Hartsock, or Benjamin, or Hennessy, or Crenshaw, etc etc etc.
^^^^^
Charles; I have read Mies, bell hooks, Angela Davis, some of the Redstockings authors, Jenny Brown, Patricia Collins, Yoshie Furuhashi, Katha Pollitt, Zora Neale Hurston, Bettina Aptheker, Judith Butler, Margaret Mead, Hillary Graham, Audre Lorde, Gayle Rubin ( we were in a class together in anthro in 1972), Shea Howell, Virginia Woolf ( wrote my high school senior thesis on Woolf), Sojourner Truth, Barbara Smith, Kate Millett et al. Mary Wollsencraft,
^^^^^
The treatment of gender by these women is in every single case more current and more sophisticated that that of Marx and Engels… and all have already incorporated Marx and Engels into their thinking.
^^^^^
Charles: Some are more sophisticated than Marx and Engels. Some not so. _Some_ have incorporated dialectical and historical materialism and some have not .
It is not possible to be the most advanced in feminist thinking and have a bourgeois or liberal position. Women , race and class are interreleted issues. Faulty positions on the other issues can undermine, to an extent, analysis of male supremacy.
For example, Margaret Sanger a historic leader in birth control, undermined herself by being racist and supporting racist eugenics. ( See _Women, Race and Class_ by Angela Davis0. This racism undermines some of her feminism - not all of it. Davis addresses how bourgeois feminism undermines some content of feminism.
^^^^^^^
Charles cals Marx and Engels “science.†I have heard this from my first engagemnt with left politics, even the use of the term “the science of Marxism-Leninism.†But M-L began as a state dogma, and calling it a science is dogmatic.
&&&&&&&
Charles: Disagree :>)
^^^^^
A aside - It is intersting that Marxists still name their method for the man, and feminists name their approach after a whole class of people.
^^^^
Charles: It’s more personal that way :>). There are other names for Marxism that refer to whole classes of people.
Proletarian Internationalism, workers of the world unite, named after the class of all the workers of the world , regardless of gender or race or nationality.
Communism refers to the whole human species . “The Internationale shall be the human race…”
^^^^^^
We wouldn’t cling to the microbiology of the 19th Century to supercede the developments in microbiology of the 20th and 21st, yet we are calling Engels’ work science, when most of us have not studied the work done in this field over the last 40 years.
^^^^
Charles: The progress of sciences is that of sublation. Prior stages are overcome _and_ preserved. Most importantly many of Engels and Marx’s insights are actually and factually and practically still totally alive. It is incredible how fresh so much of what they say is today. Some of their discussion is more pertinent than much of what living writers write.
The class struggle is raging here in Detroit. How about where you are ? You can read giant passages out of Marx and Engels that apply full force to today, at least where I am.
“Labor in white skin will not be free while labor in the Black skin is branded”
fresh as a daisy !
Workers of all countries , unite ! How’s that for “globalization” 2005 ?
” Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement” - Lenin
^^^^
I would ask those who are taking the pro-Engels position here to post at the earlier threads on gender, where many of these other thinkers are represented, ie,
^^^^
23 December 2005, 2:30 pmCharles: Yes it will take me a while to review the archives.
Timothy R. Anderson:
Hi there. This post is mostly off-topic, but I think it is worth the attention it will, hopefully,
garner . The fine folks at http://www.projectcensored.org
have put together a fine article about the radiation
poisoning that the AMERICAN soldier on-the-ground
in Iraq is breathing in , along with the ” liberated ” civilians of Iraq.
http://www.projectcensored.org
That’s about it . Oh, as much as possible :
Good days to all , Timothy
23 December 2005, 2:40 pmR. Anderson
Yolanda:
I’ll just add a quick comment:
“If you think gender oppression would exist in a non-capitalistic or socialist system….then I come back, as Im saying, to why.”
John, gender oppression existed millenia before capitalism was even thought of, and there is well-documented history that bears this out. Patriarcy, then and now, can exist without capitalism. I’m sure you are well aware of this, but I may be wrong.
About “relative” affluence: You’re a White man living overseas in Europe. I’m a Black woman living with her two sisters in the same city I was born in. I think that is what Stan meant by “relative affluence.” But he can tell you better than I.
24 December 2005, 3:39 pmVinyak:
Hi
Merry Christmas
I was plesantly surprised to see this blog
I knew very little about Engels when I wrote this blog
http://o3.indiatimes.com/vinayak/archive/2005/12/04/361419.aspx
I’d request you to comment and state if feminism can carry on the struggle that Engels wanted to happen
thanks
Vinayak
25 December 2005, 10:58 amhttp://o3.indiatimes.com/vinayak/archive/2005/12/04/361419.aspx
Stan:
I’m surprised you are “pleasantly” surprised, given that this blog is dedicated to the exact opposite of this statement from your blog:
“Unless men manage to negate the feminist propaganda as a whole and create an impression opposite the one feminists have created men are unlikely to regain their basic freedom.”
No ISM will carry any struggle. Conditions create the basis for struggle, mass movements create the vehicle, and leading bodies that emerge from the specific nature of those struggles in different phases and periods are forged out of the struggle itself and give these struggles their strategic direction. Feminism as a world historcal movement is absolutely essential, however. The backwardness of the above statement demonstrates why.
25 December 2005, 1:14 pmelaina:
And, to add to what Stan has said here, I would suggest a book called “Dharma’s Daughters”, which recounts the nearly impossible struggles of women’s organizing against male oppression in India.
26 December 2005, 8:51 amI’ll get back to y’all on the name of the book’s author.
elaina:
Sara Mitter. That’s the name of the author of Dharma’s Daughters. It’s been years since I read it, but it’s worth it. A lot of it is about daily life for women, mostly of India’s higher-castes, and very enlightening. Thanks, and sorry about the back-to-back and mildly off-topic posts.
26 December 2005, 8:55 amStan:
The grandbaby will be awake momentarily, so this is hit and run again.
I have no objection to the list that Charles provided earlier, which included people like Yoshie and Martha Gimenez, I have no objection to the use of declared marxist-feminists… in fact Yoshie and I are correspondents, and we posted along with Charles to many of the same lists.
My issue is that them simply being women does not imply that “marxist-feminism” has overcome the blind spot of plain marxism… I believe that it has not.
That doesn’t mean that the direction of Marxist inquiry is not a valuable lens on gender. It is. But Engels’ and Marx’s work on this represent a poor application of that method.
Moreover, the issue I have with many fellow Marx-ISTS on this topic is that they have a tendency to weed out those feminists who are not explicitly marxist, but who have done valuable interrogations on gender too, that are not antithetical to the revolutionary project we are involved in, and in fact are essential to it. That is an error. The more culpable habit, however, is for marxists to demonstrate overt hostility to anyone who does not accept the gender-orthodoxy of the left based on Engels. This is not an error. It is dishonesty, and it has often taken the form of misrepresenting and even gratuitously attacking certain feminists.
Much of this, I believe, is a sectarian impulse born out of the hostile ideological and political encirclement of socialists, that has combined with the unexamined and intellectually-defensive sexism of male left leaders.
I myself was caught up in this dynamic for some time, so this is partly personal experience, though I am not merely projecting. Self-criticism is a duty for revolutionaries, no matter how disturbing and painful it might me.
“Mathematics is not real, but it feels real,” said Richard Feynman once.
The tendency to dwell on the speculative “origins” of gender as a system of power is a defensive and decidedly “powered” practice — the ruse of “objectivity,” the tendency toward anti-affective abstraction, and the avoidance of studying the very real manifestations of gender in our current lives… and not just in variant wage scales.
That is what makes Yolanda’s experience and standpoint, among other things, important here; and that is why this abstract validity-testing is a retrenchment against dealing with the (female?) emotional content of gender.
If we are honest, male leftists will agree that we don’t deploy these kinds of anti-affective defenses when we are talking about “workers.”
It is not A masculinity we have to divest of to get real; it is Masculinity, period. The defense of it is infinitely subtle and can be interminably intellectualized. It feels that important to us. It is also an obstacle to our movement, to the movement for socialism — to which many of us are absolutely devoted.
We have to accept the trauma of gendered disruptions to our psyches and world views the same way we accept political setbacks, personal sacrifice, and the same way other revolutionaries around the world accept the fear and pain of physical violence directed against them.
26 December 2005, 9:25 amCharles Brown:
* The grandbaby will be awake momentarily, so this is hit and run again.
I have no objection to the list that Charles provided earlier, which included people like Yoshie and Martha Gimenez, I have no objection to the use of declared marxist-feminists… in fact Yoshie and I are correspondents, and we posted along with Charles to many of the same lists.
My issue is that them simply being women does not imply that “marxist-feminism†has overcome the blind spot of plain marxism… I believe that it has not.
^^^^
CB: All the best to the grandbaby !
We should focus here. My issue would be I don’t agree that the “marxist-feminist women” you refer to have a blindspot. I’d say the non-marxist-feminists have the blind spot. The main blindness being looking at things from a bourgeois woman rather than a working class woman’s point of _view_.
Also, much of my feminist thinking is based on extensive interaction with non-Marxist women. They are not feminists, but they are “actually existing” women, with actual women strengthening life methods. Most of my interaction is with Black women ( Detroit is basically a New African location) A large amount of that is with working class, Black women. So, I arrive at my discussion on feminism and women’s liberation not only through study of Marxist women but to a great extent, non-Marxist, Black, working class women’s critique of white, bourgeois women’s approach.This is also the type of critique of the Marxist point of view that I want ( and got).
But I also, study and interact with white bourgeois feminism, such as Gloria Steinem, Ms. Magazine, Millett, . And I this is not the first I have come across MacKinnon or Dworkin. As you know, we discussed and analyzed them at length on the Marxism-feminist list.
^^^^^^^
That doesn’t mean that the direction of Marxist inquiry is not a valuable lens on gender. It is. But Engels’ and Marx’s work on this represent a poor application of that method.
Moreover, the issue I have with many fellow Marx-ISTS on this topic is that they have a tendency to weed out those feminists who are not explicitly marxist, but who have done valuable interrogations on gender too, that are not antithetical to the revolutionary project we are involved in, and in fact are essential to it. That is an error.
^^^^^
CB: It would be good to be more specific here, name names and theories.
Sojourner Truth was a non-Marxist feminist who I don’t weed out. There are many others. So, as far as my approach, no I don’t weed out all non-Marxist, women feminists. However, I’m critical in my approach to the whole thing at a certain stage of thinking here as anywhere. I can’t suspend critical thinking because I am a man. That would not help women. Well, I do do some suspension of critical thinking in some phases. But at some point _everybody_ and everything is subject to critical thinking.
^^^^^^^
The more culpable habit, however, is for marxists to demonstrate overt hostility to anyone who does not accept the gender-orthodoxy of the left based on Engels. This is not an error. It is dishonesty, and it has often taken the form of misrepresenting and even gratuitously attacking certain feminists.
^^^^
Charles: Myself, I don’t get hostile, that would be _ad hominem_ or _ad womenem_. What’s there to get mad about anyway ? I’m friendly . However, actually, I am more radically honest than just about anybody you will run across.
The problem with me is the opposite of what you say. It is that I am _way_ honest. My name is Teller of Great Truths. I have to watch out not to be too, honest because there are strict taboos in European culture on speaking some of the truths I have to pronounce, so I hold my tongue.
I note this in the longer versions of my paper _For Women’s Liberation_. I criticize Marx and Engels for not being honest enough on sexual matters. Of course , there is a strict taboo on even talking about sex in modern European cultures.
^^^^^^
^^^^^
Much of this, I believe, is a sectarian impulse born out of the hostile ideological and political encirclement of socialists, that has combined with the unexamined and intellectually-defensive sexism of male left leaders.
I myself was caught up in this dynamic for some time, so this is partly personal experience, though I am not merely projecting. Self-criticism is a duty for revolutionaries, no matter how disturbing and painful it might me.
^^^^
Charles: Notice my _For Women’s Liberation_ excoriates Marx and Engels on the issues in _The German Ideology_. It would be very inaccurate to characterize my paper as not self-critical of Marxism. The subtitle is “A comradely critique of The Manifesto.” It is just that I have different take on how Marxism should be critizied on these issues. I put my criticism of Marxism up with there with any of them in terms of radicalness.
^^^^^^^
“Mathematics is not real, but it feels real,†said Richard Feynman once.
The tendency to dwell on the speculative “origins†of gender as a system of power is a defensive and decidedly “powered†practice — the ruse of “objectivity,†the tendency toward anti-affective abstraction, and the avoidance of studying the very real manifestations of gender in our current lives… and not just in variant wage scales.
^^^^^^
CB: I’d have to turn this around and say failure to include the discussion of origins with discussion of current lives leads one astray, shall we say. Take a look at Evelyn Reed on integrating the longview with the look at today’s struggles.
Also, they are not quite as “speculative” as you imply. They are based on lots of empirical investigation ( including much by women anthropologists; see earlier citations) Can’t quite let you dis anthro like that :>)
^^^^^^^
That is what makes Yolanda’s experience and standpoint, among other things, important here; and that is why this abstract validity-testing is a retrenchment against dealing with the (female?) emotional content of gender.
If we are honest, male leftists will agree that we don’t deploy these kinds of anti-affective defenses when we are talking about “workers.â€
^^^^^
Charles: My perspective benefits from some understanding of Caroline’s emotional experience of gender.
^^^^^^
It is not A masculinity we have to divest of to get real; it is Masculinity, period. The defense of it is infinitely subtle and can be interminably intellectualized. It feels that important to us. It is also an obstacle to our movement, to the movement for socialism — to which many of us are absolutely devoted.
We have to accept the trauma of gendered disruptions to our psyches and world views the same way we accept political setbacks, personal sacrifice, and the same way other revolutionaries around the world accept the fear and pain of physical violence directed against them.
Comment by Stan — 12/26/2005 @ 9:25 am
RSS feed for
^^^^^
Charles: Comrade, ultimately, I am still with you , because the most important thing is to bring the struggle for women’s liberation up in priority on the Left, and from my standpoint, in the proletarian internationalist struggle, and the Black liberation struggle ( I have an essay on Woman/Man Umoja ( Unity) , women’s liberation within the Black liberation movement. It is timely in that we are in Kwanzaa. I may send it.)
Your efforts and leadership in self-criticism of male supremacy-patriarchy advance all these struggles.
Mine is “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” feminism. Men , what’s good for women , is good for men. This is the ultimately wise common sense.
I’m am so proud of the way you have directed this blog, brother !
26 December 2005, 1:42 pmStan:
I am running again, but have to note that many of my comments were not directed at Charles, who works hard on the gender stuff, but at the left in general. We have our struggles, but they are comradely. I DO want to address the class-woman issue, because I think there is an error there, but can’t right now. Unfortunately, I am about to tell my son goodbye until March, as he heads back to that place.
I hate this fucking war!
26 December 2005, 1:48 pmCharles Brown:
Truly.
Peace in !
26 December 2005, 5:01 pmJulian Real:
Hi Charles.
I just wanted to introduce myself and say what an education it is to read your thoughtful posts, and to encourage you to tell those truths that European-American culture may not wish to hear. More truth-telling, please!
I appreciate and respect the place you are coming from, in your political discourse, and in your life. I disagree with some of what you say, but, like Stan, not so much that I wouldn’t call you a comrade.
So, comrade, here is my latest writing on the subject at hand, and it is aimed more at John and Emerson than at anyone else I’ve read here. But it is FOR all of us.
I hope you find it useful.
With respect.
Julian (see my next long-ass post.)
27 December 2005, 12:22 pmJulian Real:
The ‘Patriarchal Racist Ignorant Condescending Know-it-all’: an experiential analysis distilled from Stan Goff’s blog discussions on Engels and MacKinnon
By Julian Real
Copyrighted 2005. All Rights Reserved
(Note: CRAP stands for Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy.)
In this essay, I will begin by making several truth claims.
1. Patriarchal racist ignorant condescending know-it-alls (or p.r.i.c.k.s, for short) are poorly equipped, individually and collectively, experientially and situationally, through social position and privilege (not biology) to know much about women that is useful in the activist struggle to end patriarchy. Some p.r.i.c.k.s are white heterosexual men, and some of them are caring and respectful partners to women, though many are not. Respectful or not, I know of no white heterosexual men who are anti-patriarchy activists in support of the radical feminist project to end racist patriarchy, except Stan. Note: being a p.r.i.c.k., like being a white heterosexual man, is not a permanent condition, and therefore one can be transformed into an humane citizen, as society radically transforms away from patriarchy.
2. P.r.i.c.k.s are raised with sufficient privileges to assume they have enough knowledge to discuss just about everything, and they can pretend and/or presume, against great evidence, that they know what they are talking about. Too often, p.r.i.c.k.s privilege men’s limited experiences, man-gendered and ethnically white philosophical ideas, facts of his-story, and needlessly abstract theoretical frameworks, placing them at the center of their arguments and actions, in part to avoid dealing with the way they disrespect women, daily. What is simultaneously marginalised is (surprise!) women’s experiences, ideas, herstory, and frameworks. Due to this general disinterest and ignorance of a substantial portion of reality (women’s), p.r.i.c.k.’s knowledge remains astoundingly partial and seriously biased, but is not called either by them. It is, rather, called “reality†or “important philosophical inquiryâ€â€”especially when it is so academically elite (read: abstract) as to be practically incomprehensible. That some p.r.i.c.k.s retreat to their abstract minds’ “universally important thoughts†is not questioned, until now?, as a very specific political strategy for NOT dealing with women’s real condition as women. Not all white heterosexual men participate in this pro-man prioritisation and anti-woman marginalisation, but they can choose to do so without consequence of being held accountable, systematically, by other white men. For example, a woman may speak up, occasionally, after her fury subsides from the last disrespectful comment, to call a white man on something racially sexist or sexually racist, but he can generally evade her points by taking (or maintaining) possession of the discourse used in the discussion. He will often dismiss her points of view, her experiences, as “silly†with a casual and paternalistic disregard institutionally afforded to white heterosexual men. (Note: p.r.i.c.k.s rarely call one another’s ideas “sillyâ€.) He will point out that we are talking about “ideas†here, not “emotions†as if they were disconnected. He will alert her to the wonders of white heterosexual men’s great work, ignoring, rather completely, the great works of women of many ethnicities, which he has likely never seen, let alone defended as “great†and “importantâ€. The “literary canon†was compiled around what white men, many of whom were p.r.i.c.k.s, loved to read. That academic white men love to read work that doesn’t have much to say about women’s real lives, especially those of Colour, means something. Feminists have pointed this out, many times. Academic p.r.i.c.k.s don’t seen to be able to listen, let alone hear, what these women are saying, because, well, they are so busy blissfully reading the books by their people.
3. Engels was a European married man, and, quite possibly, a p.r.i.c.k.
4. Engels was not situated or experienced, was too privileged, was not in the position, to know much about women as humans, that is, as humans altered into (e)raced women, systematically, through oppressive experiences of patriarchy, white and male supremacy, misogyny, sexism, heterosexism, racism, and other ethnic hate and discrimination. In other words, Engels didn’t know how some humans become women through practices of subordination, by other human beings, called men, in patriarchy; and brilliant man that he was, it never occurred to him to find out. He did some very valuable intellectual work, but not on this matter. Engels is an expert on “the woman question†in the sense that Shakespeare is an expert on people of Colour. That both of these “white†men can be seen to be experts on “humanity†means something very dangerous: and that is that their humanity is awfully white and manly, and, therefore, ethnically and gender specific, in terms of how they view the world, and who they see as universally human when they look out at it.
5. Due to this, it is imperative that p.r.i.c.k.s learn to listen and take in the experiences and knowledge of activist and radical women of all ethnicities, who unavoidably endure way too much CRAP.
6. Ethnically oppressed men, and white gay men, *may* know something, due to political location, experientially and positionally, about racism and heterosexism, but are also poorly equipped (politically, not biologically) to know much, if anything, that politically pertains to women of all ethnicities, as women, in various patriarchies.
7. Any men that *do* know anything meaningful about the politically harmful conditions women face as women—conditions that constitute women as women (see the next three paragraphs), know it from women or women’s writing, directly. I do not know of one single living or dead exception to this point. There are abundant examples, however, of white heterosexual men *claiming* knowledge of women’s conditions that they simply do not have the experience to truthfully claim. For this reason, Engels, among many other white heterosexual men, must be “left behind†generally, except as an example of the above claims: he and his work may, in other words, be utilised to prove the claims made above, but his work cannot disprove them.
“Womanâ€, in this view, is not primarily or essentially a biological category. While some (not all) “human females†share physiological experiences, such as menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and menopause, the meanings of and responses to those experiences are strongly cultural and political: cultural laws about menstruating women being associated with being “unclean†for example, turn what could be an morally neutral adolescent to mid-life sometimes monthly experience into one tainted with negative patriarchal social stigma. That these physiological phenomena happen to some “human femalesâ€, only at some ages, doesn’t equate with being gendered, in my view, any more than having pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes equates with being Aryan (or otherwise raced). Admittedly, physiological and biological processes such as menstruation and pregnancy are more psychologically and socially impressive and involving than having a particular eye color (usually), but this involvement still doesn’t add up to having a gender. Genitals are real, physiological processes are real, sexes (genders) are assigned in a nonconsensual, compulsory way. And if, as tons of people believe, the simple appearance of genital formations amounted to “having a genderâ€, then what “gender†do intersex babies have, when born?
As with “womanâ€, there is nothing about whiteness, heterosexuality, or manhood that is essentially biological. These are primarily social constructs, cultural phenomena, political affiliations: they are terms of position and privilege, rendered real through cultural and social forces and mandated identities. These identities and conditions are not learned from non-human animals, and what is “animal†in us is unlearned by being social, politically regulated human creatures. Seen this way, rape is not, as many men like to believe, a natural condition of being a male animal, even a human one; rape is a response learned in patriarchy, about who men and women are and how women and girls, and feminised boys and men, are to be treated. Being raped, and being “not a man,†are mutually constituting. Rape, among other atrocities, helps make some humans into girls and women, and stigmatises some boys and men as feminised.
The meaning of so-called “significant biological differencesâ€, and the enforced ignorance about actual, more diverse differences in eroticism and ethnicity, is what is relevant here, not the facts of their physical existence. As noted earlier, some people give birth: some women, not men, do this. But many women do not give birth, or cannot, or are celibate and carry a firearm, or are post-menopausal, and they are still considered women, even while misogynistically derogatory terms are attached to some of those specific categories of women (such as “barrenâ€, “man-hating lesbosâ€, and “old hagsâ€. Having a vulva at birth does not sufficiently, empirically, define “woman†as such. Some transgendered people born with vulvas do not identify as women when adults, nor appear as such. Joan of Arc escaped being patriarchally female by resisting all instructions, and refusing all associations with the sex she was supposed to be. (See pages 83-105 in Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin, for a brilliant discussion of Joan’s life in these terms). In most patriarchies, people are defined dualistically (that is, incorrectly, distortively), through physiological qualities and biological capabilities, which are then taken as significant and supportive of creating a separate allegedly natural category of sexually subordinated humans called “womenâ€. Not surprisingly, intersex, multi-ethnic, transgendered, and ungendered folks are invisibilised by these binary, hierarchically arranged social forms. (They don’t do much for women’s human visibility, either.) In the case of transgendered folks, the only way to be socially real and acceptable is to “choose†one or the other as your patriarchally correct physiology and identity. That there is no way to “choose†*not* to do this, *while* being socially real and acceptable, is not something the surgical world finds ethically and politically necessary to contend with. That women cannot choose to be not-women, yet not-men, and be socially real and acceptable means that women do not have the real choice to be ungenderedly human. No one does, really, in patriarchal cultures that have gender dualism. I once knew a person who was not born male or female, had no primary or secondary sexual characteristics, and was, in fact, fully human. That there are no pronouns for this person–in English, at least, tells you something about how our reality is denied us through language.
In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Andrea Dworkin puts it this way (p. 17): “Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming allows men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, to control perception itself.â€
As Catharine MacKinnon states in her book Feminism Unmodified (p. 47), from a talk delivered at the Conference on Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, July 11, 1983): “We purport to want to change things, but we talk in ways that no one understands. We know that discourses have fashions, that we’re in the midst of a certain fashion now, that a few years from now it will be another, that ten years ago it was different. We know better than to think that this is the pure onward progress of knowledge. We participate in these fashions, are swept along in them, but we don’t set them. […]
Sometimes I think to myself, MacKinnon, you write. Do you remember that the majority of the world’s illiterates are women? What are you doing? I feel that powerfully when I think about what brings us all here, which is to make the changes we are talking about. When someone condemns someone else for the use of jargon, they tend to suppose that they themselves speak plain plate glass. I’m not exempting myself from this criticism, I’m saying that I see it as fundamental to developing a politics of language that will be constructive as well as deconstructive.â€
To pretend that patriarchally gendered and gendering terms, or raced and (e)racing terms, are not primarily social and political is to operate out of a dangerous biological essentialism that has the effect, necessarily, of reinscribing and reinforcing each of the atrocious phenomena (the “isms†and their accompanying forms of hate and harm) named earlier, relegating them to a somehow natural state, as if beyond social critique and political intervention. Similarly, if we believe men will always create military wars—that it is men’s “nature†to do so, we are destined to live in a world where such wars persist. This point must also be made regarding men’s patriarchal war against women.
It is grossly assumed that white heterosexual men speak for all of humanity. They don’t. Much of the time, even when claiming otherwise, they speak for themselves, for their own experience, universalising it, pretending it applies to more than just them. This projection and extension of white men’s being is a consequence of extraordinary privilege, which can and often does have the effect of rendering these social creatures profoundly arrogant and self-centered. Women of all ethnicities know (experience, endure) this arrogance daily. This privileged arrogance is manifested in institutions and other practices that women cannot avoid, and, as unavoidable, may need to ignore or repress, or, tragically yet commonly, participate in and support, much to the empowerment of CRAP.
On Stan’s blog, there is a challenge to some white heterosexual men’s speech, to their forms of speech as legitimately privileged, as well as to the content of the speech (that is, what it purports to say). A note to white heterosexual men: when you, as members of an oppressor class, are oppressive, and because of that, women, and other folks, respond with anger, or in other expressive ways that make you uncomfortable, I recommend *not* trying to get those challenging you to change their manner of expression, or their style of discourse. Why? Because the requirement that oppressed people speak with a privileged tongue, in a man-gendered manner, with a white ethnic accent, is a form of oppression. Specifically, it is but one of CRAP’s entitlements to decide who can speak and who can be heard.
“That’s fucked up!†is an appropriate critical response to what many p.r.i.c.k.s have to say. That some p.r.i.c.k.s register this sort of response as “inappropriately critical†or “over reactiveâ€, to use note two such dismissive terms, does not make it either inappropriate or unmeaningful, as a response. That some white men prefer to hear “rational†(ahem) cognitive argumentation in forms familiar to those white men, means, only, that those white men do not want to learn how to hear more emotionally unrepressed and intellectually real commentary. P.r.i.c.k.s can, usually, get away with “closing their ears†to this sort of critique. They have the power and privilege to tell the rest of us how we should debate or engage in discussion. To paraphrase my main point here: “That’s just a big load of CRAPâ€.
Most women cannot and do not ignore white heterosexual men’s privileged arrogance. They instead find ways around it, under it, over it, or through it. They combat it individually and collectively, passively or actively, affectionately or aggressively. Only those women so unrelentingly inundated, insulted, and injured by this privileged arrogance pretend to not know about it, or do not, consciously, let themselves know about it. Only those for whom there seems no way around it, under it, over it, or through it, is there the solution, a political survival mechanism as it were, which does not often even allow for survival: they repress the knowledge of what white heterosexual men do, and, especially, the political meaning and reasons they have for doing it. In this repressed state, and with some privileges, at times, women are as dangerous to humanity as men, especially to children and other women. (The function of this sort of repression in creating men’s violence has already been discussed in the essay, The Trauma of the Gendered Child, elsewhere on Stan’s blog.)
In this discussion about Engels, some white heterosexual men have made great attempts to bolster the authority of one of their own. What they have not been willing to admit is this: they have no systematically lived experiences, no social-political position (no legitimate one, that is), from which to claim this authority. It is, rather, only by “virtue†of the privileges afforded white heterosexual men (privileges, which, along with their traumas, constitute them), that they make such grandiose truth claims to begin with. Acting unconsciously or arrogantly from this stance, oppressively, is what makes some white heterosexual men into p.r.i.c.k.s.
This must be systematically exposed and seriously challenged, if we are to move beyond “white heterosexual man as authority on the worldâ€, a pernicious and delusional stance they take, not from a base of knowledge, but, rather, from a base of privileged presumption and profound ignorance. P.r.i.c.k.s presume what people not in their group mean by what they say and do, while ignoring complaints about what they say and do. They march ahead like ghosts in the night, pretending they have substance and the power to illuminate. They have neither. Sometimes, of course, they white heterosexual men do have something useful to say about CRAP, usually because some oppressed “other†said it first, and they appropriated it, not giving credit to the originator of the thought. Every thought expressed here–what I write–has been informed, deeply and thoroughly, by women’s writing about patriarchy and women’s experience of it.
Charles, an African-American man, who is well-read in feminist theory, and well connected to real women, is, among the marxists here, the most understanding of the need to raise the consciousness of the Left on matters of gender oppression in male supremacy. I just don’t know if Stan calls himself a marxist or not, but if so, I include him with Charles, as another anti-racist man who is seriously concerned about the Left’s privileging of economics over gender.
I know what I know, about women-as-humans and men-as-humans, only because of my experiences of patriarchy, male supremacy, misogyny, sexism, heterosexism, racism, and other forms of ethnic hate and discrimination. I do not know these things through personal and interpersonal (social) experiences only, though this has created a solid foundation of important emotional knowledge. I know them also through reading of the experiences of women, almost never well-articulated by men. James Baldwin is one exception I can name. He was neither white nor heterosexual, and this is significant in understanding why he could know more about women’s experiences of oppression, and write convincingly about women’s plight inside racist patriarchy. (See the Communion chapter in Andrea Dworkin’s book, Intercourse, for a deeply respectful, stunning analysis of Baldwin’s worldview and ethics.)
You will find that those white heterosexual women who know most about women’s diversely oppressive condition and experiences, are those who have read or talked openly and respectfully with women of many non-dominant ethnicities and sexualities. You will find that white heterosexual women who have not consulted or learned about the experiences of women of many non-dominant ethnicities and sexualities are limited in their understandings, but still carry much experiential knowledge, of patriarchy, male supremacy, misogyny, and sexism, as experienced within their own men’s ethnically privileged arenas. White heterosexual women are, not surprisingly, less reliable on matters of patriarchal heterosexism and racism. They, like their brothers, have been and ought to continue to be held accountable to their privileged unwillingness to listen to women of Colour, women of other oppressed ethnicities, and women of many sexualities.
Generally speaking, you will find that radical feminist lesbian women are more knowledgeable on matters of patriarchal heterosexism.
Generally speaking, you will find that women of Colour are most knowledgeable on matters of patriarchal sexualised racism, as well as on matters of patriarchy, white and male supremacy, misogyny and race-hate, and sexism.
In conclusion:
White heterosexual men simply don’t know what the fuck they are talking about, when claiming to know the truth about women. What they know with any accuracy, they know from emotionally and politically meaningful intellectual contact with women.
Lesbian white women, and women of oppressed races and ethnicities of all sexualities, do know what they are talking about, when speaking of these and other matters, due to what they experience and their contact with other women similarly or differently affected. Oppressed people, it has been noted many times, often know much more about oppressors and their institutions, than oppressors know themselves.
That there is a connection between experience and knowledge is something p.r.i.c.k.s are not willing to admit, in large part because it would destabilise and challenge (to the core) their abilities to legitimately make truth claims about women.
I offer as proof of what I say, every entry in the discussion on Stan Goff’s blog about Engels and MacKinnon (see both “comments†sections).
That Stan is exceptional on these matters, means this: he, unlike *any* other white heterosexual man I know, pays attention to what women say. He listens and learns from women of all ethnicities, has emotionally close politically accountable friendships with lesbian and heterosexual women, and therefore knows, experientially, through respectful engagement and empathy with those women, what women endure that men do not, inside CRAP.
Empathy is the key ingredient in the political group “men†knowing anything at all about the political group “womenâ€. Cognitive intellectual analysis, especially abstract intellectual analysis and academic philosophising will not get any man very far—except among his own people, who, often, do the hiring in academic institutions, and the publishing of their books. College courses and academic texts often thrive by promoting needlessly abstract conceptions of the world of white men’s ideas. But unless he has found ways to respectfully empathise with women, thereby learning one dimension of those women’s bases of knowledge, and engage respectfully with their cognitive intellectual knowledge, he is lost in a tiny ethnic and gendered universe that he rather alarmingly believes is the entirety of the Universe, as he conceives of it.
I invite men of all sexualities, races, and other political locations and affiliations, to politically empathise with the women around them, in order to know and befriend them better. I challenge men to read the work of politically radical feminist women. (A suggested reading list follows.) Then, and only then, might those men have something useful to say about radically and effectively challenging CRAP.
I will conclude by making this truthful statement: The writings of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon are to a cogent critique of patriarchy and analysis of male supremacy, what the writings of Marx and Engels were to a cogent critique of capitalism and analysis of the dictatorship of the proletariat: each set of writings are profoundly important to understanding, deeply, the central conditions and key determinants of each oppressive social-political phenomenon, patriarchy and capitalism, respectively.
Recommended reading list. All works are non-fiction, unless otherwise noted.
By Andrea Dworkin:
Woman Hating
Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Right-wing Women
Ice and Fire (a novel)
Intercourse
Letters From a War Zone
Mercy (a novel)
Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation
By Catharine A. MacKinnon
Sexual Harassment of Working Women
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law
Toward A Feminist Theory of the State
Only Words
Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws
By Dworkin and MacKinnon:
Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality
In Harms Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (editors)
See also, by Patricia Hill Collins:
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism
And, by Patricia Williams:
Alchemy of Race and Rights
Seeing a Color-Blind Future : The Paradox of Race
…for additional perspectives on humanity outside the experiential and intellectual limitations of a white ethnic experience.
MacKinnon, deservedly, gets the last word on this post: from p.13, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State:
“Engels, by contrast [to Marx], considered women’s status a social phenomenon that needed explanation. He just failed to explain it.”
27 December 2005, 12:56 pmStan:
I admit to being a bit embarrassed at being singled out, no matter how flattering. There are quite a few of us out there who are working at this.
This is an important insight, but it veers dangerously close to name-calling, even in the form of an acronym.
Thanks to Julien for the hard work on this; but let’s work with an eye to persuasion.
Check rules: http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=25
27 December 2005, 2:32 pmJulian Real:
We all have our work to do, Stan. Every one of us. Dworkin did, and MacKinnon still does.
But I’m not gonna withhold support and compliments to those who, in my view (whatever that’s worth), deserve it.
You deserve my praise, brother.
Now get back to huggin’ and holdin’ that grandbaby!! Times a-wastin’!
Julian
27 December 2005, 2:47 pmCharles Brown:
Hey Julien,
Good to meet you.
Your fervor in fighting c.r.a.p. etc. is what we need more of.
Are you anti-capitalist ,pro-working class ? I suspect you are , but I don’t see a reference to the class struggle in criticisms of crap and pricks.
Just to be honest and directly to points of potential dispute (not to be argumentative, but it’s not interesting to sit around and agree about everything; no progress without struggle, too) I do not find by my empirical evidence that homosexual men have better understanding of women than heterosexual men. The women ( mainly Black women) I’m in communication with don’t seem to find this to be true either. Homosexual men, as a general matter , are as male supremacist as heterosexual men. There’s nothing about having sex with women that makes one understand them less than not having sex with them, in general. In fact, the opposite would be the case. I know my position on this is not a la mode on the Left, but like I said, I gotta tell the truth. Actually, I’m a teller of hard truths, not great truths. That was a typo. This one I tell now is hard to hear on the Left today, but…maybe I should ask you why you think homosexual men might understand women better than heterosexual men , in general ? Or why you include the adjective “heterosexual men” and not just “men” ?
I guess the more general point is that my approach is the opposite on sex between women and men. I see women and men having sex as very important ( not just to have kids) but as a major potential basis for resolution of conflicts between women and men, as a basis for unity between women and men. I’d say that intimacy and sex between women and men is one of the ways that men do learn what they know about women ( and vica versa). So, my thing would be to get the male supremacy out of sex, but not bang on heterosex. In fact, frankly, I consider banging on heterosex as reactionary ( sorry; not you personally). I’m not kidding. Anti-heterosex converges with the long term reactionary nature of the Christian Church’s attitude on sex etc. And it undermines one best potential bases for resolving the conflicts between women and men.
So, there you have it honest and frank. Lets continue to mull over this in a friendly way.
Overall, I don’t cop to “I don’t understand women , because I’m a man.” It’s too much like that old male supremacist idea that ,well, “I can’t understand women;women are inscrutible”. I understand them very well, especially after being in touch with them for 55 years. I _have_ been listening to what they say all this time. I’d have to be very stupid not to have learned a lot about them. I understand them and I understand their complaints, and so it is my responsibility to do something about their complaints. A claim that “men ( white or of color)don’t understand women” is bit of a copout.
Men, women are not a Ms-tery. So, just go and do the right thing.
Cheerio,
Charles
27 December 2005, 8:13 pmYolanda Carrington:
Hello folks,
Julian…again brotha…you’ve managed to say exactly what is on MY mind, in a clear, concise, loving, and thoroughly intellectual way. I’ve got to thank you. I know you don’t personally identify as un homme, but maybe your status as a bio-male will insure that men will hear you fully.
I’ve been purposefully staying away from Feral Scholar for the past couple of days. On blog discussions, I try to be as fair, thorough, and open-minded as possible, but I knew that I could not maintain this stance much longer. I’m going to be completely honest here. Certain people—a couple of men—made me feel worthless and stupid, when I know damn that I am neither. Whether that was intentional on their part or not, the shit happened. I tried not to get “emotional†about it, and be as “objective†as possible, but you and I know that these notions are bullshit in the face of domination.
Charles, you are one of the men I am talking about. Please let me explain why.
I’ve been reading the discourse between you, Stan, and Julian, and they have tremendous respect for your views and insights. I think that you have good ideas, too. But–Black woman to Black man–let me be complete honest: You have pissed me off tremendously with some of your comments. I have purposefully remained silent because I didn’t want to react out of hurt, but much of what you’ve have said has made me feel invisible and silenced again, and I’ve been battling invisibility in this movement for YEARS. Stan can back me up here.
I’m coming from the heart, intellectual objectivity be damned.
I never engage in this kind of argument, but please allow me great latitude here. With all due respect, Charles, I think many of your ideas on sex and gender are complete bullshit (yes folks—“silly†Yolanda said it). You consistently naturalize gender, even after you are challenged on it. I will make a redundant statement again: MAN AND WOMAN ARE NOT SEXES. “Man†and “woman†is GENDER, socially/politically/historically constructed, and NOT natural.
I emphatically reject your idea that the “unity†between men and women—sexually, politically or otherwise—is the answer to ending patriarchy. There is one important fact that you are forgetting: Men DOMINATE women. There can be no unity through domination. The domination of women by men MUST end.
I don’t feel like addressing each my beefs with your comments point-by-point, because there are too goddamn many of them, brother, but I’ll hit a few. Like this next gem:
“I guess the more general point is that my approach is the opposite on sex between women and men. I see women and men having sex as very important (not just to have kids) but as a major potential basis for resolution of conflicts between women and men, as a basis for unity between women and men.â€
Do you really believe what you just said above? Oh my God.
And this lovely non-response to Julian’s argument:
“Anti-heterosex converges with the long term reactionary nature of the Christian Church’s attitude on sex etc. And it undermines one best potential bases for resolving the conflicts between women and men.â€
“Anti-heterosex????†Are you serious? I sure hope not. (Do you have any idea how homophobic this is?)
“Conflicts between women and men???†Huh???
Since when is oppression and domination “conflict?â€
Black woman to Black man: You are gender-privileged, STRAIGHT UP. I can’t make you see this; you’ve got to recognize your privilege for yourself. All I can do is let you know how I feel. I hope that you can listen—I mean truly listen—to what I (and all women) have to say.
You cannot speak for women—Black, working class, or otherwise. Period. You ain’t a woman. As far as concrete experience goes, you don’t know what the word means.
But you are a man.
I want to offer a challenge, Charles. What can you say about being a man? How does being a man make you feel? Do you see yourself specifically AS A MAN, and if you do, what does that mean to you? Does being a man make you feel good, or not?
When you stop trying to speak for women, and be honest about being a man, I will call you a comrade. But not until then, brother.
From the heart of struggle,
28 December 2005, 1:08 amYolanda
Yolanda Carrington:
To Stan,
I want to thank you for providing this forum for folks like me to speak. I would never have felt comfortable challenging people the way I do on this blog, not even a year ago. You have worked hard to make this a safe space for women, queer folk, people of color, and unschooled folk to have put their ideas out and be challenged.
I hope you are doing well this holiday, and I hope your son gets back home safe and sound. Thank you again for all you do.
love, Yolanda
PS: Stan has been my friend for four years, folks.
28 December 2005, 3:32 amStan:
Yolanda is hitting pretty damn close to the bulls eye (again!).
I’m not sure yet, not having worked through it yet, whether “compulsory heterosexuality” can serve as the same entry point on gender that Marx made on productive relations with the “commodity.” I do know that CH can be unpacked in much the same way for a long time… like Mary Poppins’ handbag, the stuff just keeps coming out of it.
I’m struggling with another comrade — who came to socialism through anarchism — on whether gender relations are incorporated into existing captialism through “monogamy.” The fact that gay couples have often embraced and even fight for legal recognition of monogamous relations serves to complicate and even obfuscate the issue by providing exceptions that prove the rule.
The reason I prefer CH is that Rich’s formulation — which she arrived at from the standpont of a woman-identified and woman-loving woman — is that it describes the dominant social paradigm not in quantity (two = monogamy) but quality (2 = male + female, and not equally). The complimentariness of it — as opposed to mutuality — is built into the construct.
The problem before us, on gender, stems not from the number, two, but from the relation, male over female. Reducing gender to the simple dyad (monogamy) causes the powered unity of opposites between men and women to disappear. The preoccupation with monogamy opposed to polyamory is a privileged standpoint for the tiny handful of people who have individually escaped articulation into families that are themselves articulated into patriarchal capitalism and imperialism. That’s consitently the problem with anarchist analysis — its devotees fail to account for thier own class position.
The notion of “heterosexual equality” mirrors the popular rationalization for racial segregation pre-Brown v Board — separate but equal. Seems like a useful analog, no? But we have to depart from the kind of mandatory economism favored by male-marxism, almost as a scientific control measure, to extract, study, and describe the gendered content of this social relation.
Standpoint DOES matter here, a lot. No, standpoint does not guarantee validity, but trying to draw a direct line to validity is often an evasion, particularly of the affective content of this relation.
The positivism of many radicals (men esp) is rooted in the construction of every issue outside of individual child development, intrapsychic experience, and the emotional resonance of our (socially constructed) identificaiton with our OWN masculinity or femininity.
“Anti-hetero” is similar to “reverse racism” as a way of flipping the script to duck the issue of unequal power.
In erotic sexual relations and experience, many of these feelings we have that form our deep attachments to our own sexual “identities” are reinforced by overwhelmingly powerful biochemical responses etched into our body memories, and experienced as almost sacrosanct.
That’s why Ti Grace Atkinson said that “compared to feminism, commmunism was child’s play.”
That’s why Yo’s point is so important, from where I stand (-:
The serious struggle for men who want to practice real soidarity has to begin with a fearless and honest inventory not just of our behaviors, but of our very way of DESIRE, which we can only naturalize (and therein justify the evasion of critique) out of pure privilege.
This is a genuinely scary and often painful, protracted process. It is also, imho, a revolutionary duty and responsibility.
For the record, I count both Yolanda and Charles comrades.
Adelante!
28 December 2005, 9:32 amStan:
Clarification on the preceding:
I don’t mean to imply that (1) the fight for gay marriage is a distraction — I am on record as saying that it is extremely important and a key issue the left should unite with, or (2) that individuals are bound to monogamous relations until compulsory heterosexuality is a relic — only that the ability to engage in polyamorous relations is not available as an option (for MANY reasons) to most people, and that this individual “right” as well as way-of-life does not absolve us of the responsibility to interrogate the form and content of desire in those relations.
28 December 2005, 10:04 amJulian Real:
Hi Charles.
First, I hope you are able to answer Yolanda’s questions thoroughly, and non-defensively. I was giving you some benefits of my doubts about your position on male supremacy, but I have more information now, both from Yolanda, and you, to be clearer about where you stand on this matter, as well as on homosexuality, and I will respond, respectfully, and in a way that I hope brings us closer to one another in struggle, not further away. I am not invested in being close with any man who values unconsciousness (obliviousness) of their own male privilege over honest, painful self-reflection, though, and so I am telling you up front that how you respond to Yolanda is going to make a HUGE difference in my mind as to how willing you are to be, genuinely, in struggle with your own male privilege, along with male supremacy. Personally, I don’t see these as separate struggles, and I think Yolanda is completely right to call you on what she is calling you on. But she can, and does, speak for herself.
I’ll respond more specifically now, to some of what you have posted lately, including, of course, your reply to me. (Thanks for that. I am with you on the honesty and truthfulness thing. Enough bullshit. But I think that’s Yolanda’s point, isn’t it?)
But just a word on “honesty”. My brother, two years older, used to routinely disrespect and disregard me in typical older brotherly “honest” ways. I was closer with my female cousins, who were around both our ages. They did not disrespect and disregard me as he did. He used to tell me I had to be tougher. I told him, “Maybe if you weren’t so brutal in your manner, I wouldn’t have to get so tough. There’s two ways we can go here, brother: I toughen up, or you become more humane.” For the record, I refused to “toughen up” and my brother, in the decades since, has learned to be more humane, and he has sincerely apologised to me for his chronic mistreatment of me when we were young. His apology was only accepted by me on the grounds that the behaviour STOP, and never show itself again. He is not particularly insightful about why he did what he did, which I find to be typical of the oppressor: little self-awareness about matters of their oppressiveness to others. But he is very loving and deeply supportive of me now, including of my political work.
Charles: We need an ERA Equal Rights Amendment of the Constitution , today !
Vote for and support women for public office and leadership positions all around in society.
Retain affirmative action. ( Michigan has a battle against Ward Connerly this year)
Fight rape and domestic violence.
Men surrender in the Battle of the Sexes, today.
Men do more childcare and housework.
Also, I am a Black feminist, first, but also a general feminist.
J: I find your to-do list shockingly liberal, coming from a Leftist radical. The ERA was designed to make women equal to men, as men define men, thereby allowing women to be patriarchal too. What’s progressive about that? Please read MacKinnon on the ERA… hold on… I’ll go get it: She discusses the early (radical) feminist movement in the U.S., with its flaws–in part it being terribly ignorant of the white and class privilege that flowed through some of the arguments, including some overt racism and plenty of covert racism–but also notes, concisely, what the radical agenda WAS that began to be thwarted by a liberal agenda (read: deferential to patriarchy), much to the benefit of CRAP, and the demise of Radical Women’s Liberation Movement–movement from patriarchy, by, um, ENDING patriarchy, once and for all. “Ba-bye, now, patriarchy. Ba-bye. Don’t forget to close the door behind ya.”
In part, she says (after recounting feminism’s earlier radical days): “Then something happened. Or started to happen. Or maybe it had been happening all along and some of us had overlooked it. The first time I noticed it was with the Equal Rights Amendment. We were told that we could and should have this constitutional amendment because sex equality under law was not really going to do very much, would not really change anything, surely nothing basic. What the movement had identified as the pervasive, basic oppression and exploitation of women by men became transformed into an evil called ’sex-based classifications by law.’ That, suddenly, was what sex equality had to change. Under this notion of sex equality, we were given the choice of being the same as men–the left’s option for us–or different from men–the right’s version. We were told that the left’s version was clearly better and the only route to true equality. So-called gender neutrality–ignoring what is distinctively done to women and ignoring who is doing it–became termed the feminist position. I heard no one challenge the fact that, under this approach to ERA, either way it was the male standard, either way it was not what the movement had in mind by equality. The ERA strategy based on this analysis was, apparently, that sex equality can be made nonthreatening to the hierarchical status quo and still be real. This approach never identified male supremacy as what we had to contend with. It presented the extraordinary spectacle of feminists ardently denying that sex equality would make much difference while urgently seeking it.” (Catharine A. MacKinnon, Women’s Laws, Men’s Lives, p. 262)
C: Your fervor in fighting c.r.a.p. etc. is what we need more of.
J: Thank you.
C: Are you anti-capitalist ,pro-working class ? I suspect you are , but I don’t see a reference to the class struggle in criticisms of crap and pricks.
J: I don’t take litmus tests. I am anti-money economies, Charles. Pro-environmentally friendly, fully sustainable cultures. I am an activist in support of any movement that seeks to END patriarchy, not indulge it, and specifically, to END CRAP, to end rape, to end racism, and to end the oppression and exploitation of women in all myriad and atrocious forms. That’s my spiritual-political agenda, Charles. Call it what you will. (I see no signs that the Right or Left is willing to take up this radically transformative spiritual-political project.) I seek a world where women are free and safe to be human, fully human, in ways each individual human desires, in a free context, not a caged one, which is all women have now, and which, tragically, shapes women’s desires to be only women, to be female the patriarchal way. Patriarchies shape men’s desires too, in part by making men think “man” exists naturally. Also by believing that there is an “opposite sex”, and then eroticising the opposition.
C: Just to be honest and directly to points of potential dispute (not to be argumentative, but it’s not interesting to sit around and agree about everything; no progress without struggle, too)
J: Agreed. And moving right along…
C: I do not find by my empirical evidence that homosexual men have better understanding of women than heterosexual men. The women ( mainly Black women) I’m in communication with don’t seem to find this to be true either. Homosexual men, as a general matter , are as male supremacist as heterosexual men. There’s nothing about having sex with women that makes one understand them less than not having sex with them, in general.
J: You seem to be ignoring some very basic realities in patriarchies, Charles. First, it is precisely the intimate placement of women to men in heterosexual contexts that allows men the access to do such atrociously intimate harm. Most heterosexual women are injured in the home–it is the most dangerous place for those women to be, if a man lives there with them …or knows where they live. Out gay men, last time I took the survey, don’t rape women. Out gay men, also, aren’t the primary perpetrators of battery and incest against girls and women. Heterosexual men are. Your reality seems spuriously selective. Why is that? Perhaps because women will not often speak about what beloved heterosexual men do to them, as children or adults, to other heterosexual men, and, sometimes, to anyone? All the women I know, of whatever race and ethnicity, are survivors of intimate harm by men, male supremacist harm. Some of it is rape, some of it is battery, some is incest, some is child molestation, some is systematic denigration of them as girls-not-boys, inappropriate and damaging leering when the girls become adolescents, systematic condescension, systematic ignorance of their real lives, systematic privileging of girls either being “like boys” and gaining respect, or being “like girls” and gaining a very evil form of “respect” called “sexual objectification and violative interest”.
Now, I am in no way saying that gay men are not, at times, and systematically, misogynistic. Lord knows. But those gay boys grow up with bullying straight men as their roles models, or with harmed women as their role models, and so I blame straight society on that, not gay society. Do gay misogynists need to be held accountable? Sure. I’ll get right on that as soon as I’m done with all the straight misogynist men. What time do you think that’ll be, Charles? Should I schedule that for 2007? Straight white men hold privileges and positions of power, politically and socially, that gay white men do not hold. I’m going for the top of the pile of privileged folks, and not choosing to spend my time in horizontal hostility, a very important term crafted by Flo Kennedy. Women can fight each other all day long. Some, unfortunately, do. I can fight with gay men all day long, for the rest of my life. But who does that leave unchallenged? Hmmm. Oh, yeah, the most privileged and powerful men on Earth: white heterosexual men. And those with money have even more privileges, to purchase more pornography perhaps, or to purchase more female sexual slaves, or to purchase (or is it “rent”?) more prostitutes. So, yes, straight white rich men DO have more misogynist privileges, compared to poor straight white men: privileges of exploitative access to down and out women, that (patriarchal) money, coupled with male supremacist inclinations, purchases.
C: In fact, the opposite would be the case. I know my position on this is not a la mode on the Left, but like I said, I gotta tell the truth.
J: Who’s truth are you telling? Not Yolanda’s, not mine, not any woman’s truth that I know.
C: Actually, I’m a teller of hard truths, not great truths. That was a typo. This one I tell now is hard to hear on the Left today, but…maybe I should ask you why you think homosexual men might understand women better than heterosexual men , in general ? Or why you include the adjective “heterosexual men†and not just “men†?
J: Partly because heterosexual men will do anything to have the feminist spotlight taken off them, and I’m not enabling that to happen in my work. Also, most men in support of radical feminism, or most men I know who are deeply sympathetic to and empathic with women, to what women endure at the hands of men, are gay men, because gay men also endure some of the same CRAP–the sexual objectification, the sexual exploitation, the battery, the rape. There’s nothing abstract going on in my knowledge-base, Charles. I know some sexist gay men, and some gay men I would consider to be misogynistic, but none that do to girls and women what I know straight men do to girls and women. Any reason I should take the spotlight OFF straight white men? Are they getting too sunburned? And the really sweet straight white middle class men I know, and I’ve known enough of them, still do not find time in their days to take up the matter of ending rape and racism. They’re too busy playing videogames, reading comic books, listening to white music, and endlessly worrying about things which effect a tiny fraction of the world’s population.
C: I guess the more general point is that my approach is the opposite on sex between women and men. I see women and men having sex as very important ( not just to have kids)
J: I see sex between women and men as a key site of misogynist aggressive and non-aggressive harm to women’s human dignity, and bodies, and childbirth as a key killer of women worldwide.
C: but as a major potential basis for resolution of conflicts between women and men, as a basis for unity between women and men.
J: Do you mean “post-fight, make-up sex”? What are you talking about, really? What sex are you talking about? And between whom? I know some heterosexuals who have loving, respectful sex. But that doesn’t make any case FOR heterosexual sex, given the totality of its expression on Earth against women’s bodies and psyches. I’m not willing to make the exceptional into the commonplace, in order to let men off the hook for objectifying, fetishising, degrading, humiliating, and bludgeoning women sexually, in political speech, and through more physically assaultive acts.
C: I’d say that intimacy and sex between women and men is one of the ways that men do learn what they know about women ( and vica versa).
J: This reminds me of a Dave Matthews lyric. (I’m not into Dave Matthews, for the record.) “Hike up you skirt a little more, and show your world to me.” I just want to yell at the fucker: you might try looking into her eyes for the location of her world, buddy. You might try engaging her intellectually and emotionally, to find out what her world is. You ain’t gonna find it in her vagina. What you’ll find there is ‘YOUR fetishised, obsessive world’ dude. Get your head out of there, unless it’s there to give her some real pleasure.”
C: So, my thing would be to get the male supremacy out of sex, but not bang on heterosex.
J: You say this as if, generally and commonly, they are not fused at the hip, so to speak. In what universe is heterosex not a common site of male supremacy?
C: In fact, frankly, I consider banging on heterosex as reactionary ( sorry; not you personally). I’m not kidding.
J: I believe you.
C: Anti-heterosex converges with the long term reactionary nature of the Christian Church’s attitude on sex etc.
J: I’m talking, first of all, about ending male supremacy, ending patriarchy, in all its forms and “positions”. That includes heterosex. Sex uneffected CRAP might happen, in theory, but less so in practice, in my experience and that of most women I know. Women and men do find many things together in bed: mostly who each of them have become (in and by patriarchal harm to each of their humanities), and what their lives have cost them. Please read the Communion chapter of Intercourse, and the rest of it, for a reality check on this sexuality that you think is some oasis from male supremacy. I’d call that view of yours a mirage. Men and women can and sometimes do find comfort together, and occasionally something that approximates intimacy, but most women I know have felt treated like an ejaculatory receptacle, not infrequently, when in bed with men. Hetero men, by and large, like to leave their sperm in various places, rarely in someone they consider fully, humanly real.
C: And it undermines one best potential bases for resolving the conflicts between women and men.
J: I think ending patriarchy would go much further in resolving those conflicts, but I’m a radical on these matters.
C: So, there you have it honest and frank. Lets continue to mull over this in a friendly way.
J: I am genuinely interested to know where you are doing your research? Do women talk with you, openly and honestly, about the harm they endure from men? Do they talk about that feeling, while being penetrated, of knowing the man is off somewhere else, in fantasy about some woman he saw on the street or in a strip club, earlier that night? Do they tell you about waiting for the guy to get away from the computer, checking out women used and abused in prostitution (with a camera), while trying to appease their girlfriends’ rightful indignation and humiliation: “It’s just what I like to do, baby–there’s nothing disrespectful to you about me looking at these pictures. You’re a real woman. You’re the one I love. These pictures of whores mean nothing to me. It’s just my form of entertainment. Like you have Dr. Phil., and your soap operas.”
C: Overall, I don’t cop to “I don’t understand women , because I’m a man.†It’s too much like that old male supremacist idea that ,well, “I can’t understand women;women are inscrutibleâ€. I understand them very well, especially after being in touch with them for 55 years. I _have_ been listening to what they say all this time.
J: And what are they saying, Charles? Is it possible that they aren’t telling you the deepest, most painful truths of their lives? (You see, that’s why gay men know more–many gay-friendly straight women tell their close gay boyfriends EVERYTHING–things they may not tell you EVER.)
C: I’d have to be very stupid not to have learned a lot about them.
J: I have do doubt whatsoever that you have learned enormously from the women in your life. It’s not clear here, yet, what you have learned, though.
C: I understand them and I understand their complaints, and so it is my responsibility to do something about their complaints.
J: What are their complaints, Charles? What are you hearing?
C: A claim that “men ( white or of color)don’t understand women†is bit of a copout.
J: Oh, I agree with you on that. I just wish men who didn’t copout actually did understand women. I don’t think it’s in any way impossible. I think it just doesn’t happen very much, that’s all. Possible? Yes. Probable? Due to men not wanting to look at their own privileges and entitlements, as men …not really.
C: Men, women are not a Ms-tery.
J: You’d never know it by the way hetero men write about women in song.
C: So, just go and do the right thing.
J: I’m trying, I’m trying! What do you call this exchange we’re having?
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my posts, Charles. I will continue to read and respond to yours.
Julian
28 December 2005, 4:44 pmJulian Real:
To Yolanda.
I had you in my mind the whole time I wrote that piece, sister. I saw what happened to you, and we both KNOW what happened. Reality check, eh? It breaks my heart, and thoroughly enrages me, that you’ve been carrying their CRAP around in you, hopefully not doing any permanent damage to your soul. My rage is there because you and I know that’s right where it was aimed, however callously and recklessly. Whether the men you are addressing will own it and figure it out, we have yet to see. I hope they do, for the sake of all humanity, particularly yours.
For the public record, I find your voice here to be NOT IN THE LEAST BIT worthless or stupid. Far from it. I look forward to every one of your posts, because they are so honest, truthful, sincere, wise, sharp, and committed to women’s human self-empowerment. I know sexist, hurtful actions take their toll, and that is why we call them harmful, and it is why we stand together militantly opposing them. But you and I also know that no man CAN take from you your deepest knowledge of WHO YOU ARE. They can and will try, perhaps daily, but WHO YOU ARE is still there, perhaps more visible to you after the sting of their p.r.i.c.k.liness subsides, and the stink of their CRAP fades away.
As to whether men will listen to me more because I’m bio-male… This gets really tricky for me. If they DO listen more, I’ll be PISSED OFF that they are NOT taking what women say seriously. ROYALLY PISSED OFF. (I already am, actually.) But, on the other hand, if it takes a bio-male to serve as a bridge to some men’s deeper awareness, which then allows them to take YOU, and every other woman they encounter, SERIOUSLY, well, then I guess I can live with that. ; )
But it remains to be seen what they’ll do. In the mean time, let’s stay in active, engaged support, and keep up the struggle.
With affection and on-going respect,
Julian
28 December 2005, 5:18 pmStan:
Quote from De, related to the real character of real heterosex (not the exceptions):
“The language reveals this at every turn. Men – in the “man talk†they speak in all-male environments and increasingly in general discourse even when women or children are present – often use metaphors of rape (male-male rape, for example) to indicate aggression, anger, submission, domination. Just bend over… we really took it in the shorts that time… check out the web site today, Juan Cole just ripped Goldstein a new ass… I’ve got a hardon for that SOB… he just rolled over for it… he thinks I’m his bitch… did you hear him reaming that guy out… and of course, the routine uses of “to fuck†as in “fuck youâ€, “we are so fuckedâ€, that’s fuckedâ€, plus the perjoratives applied to the “submissive/receptive†role, as in… he’s such a scumbag (recipient for sperm),… that sucks… what a cocksucker… and so on. The very texture of the vernacular expresses everything any sociologist could want to know about the association of sex and aggression, sex and ranking, etc. – and then every mawkish pop song rambles on about (hetero)sex being exactly equal to and definitive of Love, tra la la. It’s a wonder we don’t drop in our tracks from terminal cognitive dissonance.”
28 December 2005, 7:03 pmelaina:
Yolanda–
It sucks that the posts in this thread made you feel so shitty. I hope that it helps to let you know that I commiserate, as far as feeling, a lot of the time, that the shit I have to say wouldn’t be “smart” enough or “empirical” enough. And I thank you from deep down inside for your statement here. SO much of it echoed through my head.
I don’t have time, honestly, to focus enough on a comment thread on a website in order to produce what’s essentially a miniature research paper.
Yolanda, I always look forward to reading what you write here, because your voice is one that I can understand without thumbing through pages of other people’s words. When I read “sex and death revisited” I cried some. There’s a lot going on there that I relate to.
I’ll never know what it’s like to walk through life as a Black Woman. I’m what you’d call a “dark-skinned white woman.” I’ve had people question me about my “ethnic background,” or assume that I’m Latina because I happen to have a Spanish degree and black hair. But overall I’m poor white trash from Tennessee. It’s got it’s own set of hangups, but I full-on own up to the privilege that being “white” affords me, and I see it more and more as my self-driven study drives me forward in struggle. I struggle with it inside myself. These things I mention here are only part of the reason that I enjoy and learn so much from your words here, Yolanda. I take what you say to heart. And while I could never fully grasp the depth of oppression and CRAP that you carry, there are some things that hit me like a bullet in what you say, they hit me RIGHT there, at home, so to speak.
So. What Yolanda said DID make me kind of emotional, I don’t like that she felt so bad about the stuff she read here, I just wanna put it out there: if I ever say anything vaguely “prickish” please call me out on it immediately. Tell me what I did and how I did it. So I won’t do it ever again.
I just wanna learn how not to be a “stupid white person.” You’re teaching me Yolanda; I’m listening, too. I’m learning. YOU ARE NOT INVISIBLE, at least not to me.
28 December 2005, 7:43 pmJulian Real:
To Yolanda, Elaina, Stan, Charles, Emerson, John S., and of course the other posters and readers here.
I’m going to call myself out on a few things, and hopefully we can all do that here, for one another, in as respectful a way as emotionally possible. And it is not always emotionally possible, speaking for myself. I am deeply and viscerally affected by racism and anti-Semitism, sexism and misogyny, and homophobia and heterosexism. I cannot promise to always sound “cool” and “intellectual” when I am deeply upset. More on that a bit later in this post.
First, relating to what Elaina just wrote, I feel an obligation to make it clearer than perhaps I have:
I would be considered white in most contexts except one: Nazi Germany. My “biological” heritage specifically is Eastern European (Ashkenazi) Jewish (Soviet Russian), Bavarian, and English. My family is very mixed in terms of class and ethnicity. In what is considered by me (and the rest of my family) to be my family of origin these are the classes and ethnicities: Japanese (working 12-14 hours a day in what would be considered probably a middle class neighborhood by U.S. standards), Chinese (poorer in China, and also middle class in the U.S.), Mexican-American (working class), rural poor white, Catholic French Canadian (working class), Northern Irish Anglican (working and middle class), Jewish (all the Jews in the family are dead, except me), suburban “dominant American” white (in part of my childhood), upper middle class white protestant, and disabled/ward of the state.
I, too, am disabled, but not a ward of the state. The only part of my family I have no contact with is the upper middle class white part. While I would be considered solidly middle class by U.S. standards, I do not live as such, living a much simpler existence, as my friends know, and are often critical of (that I don’t take the best care of myself, would be an understatement). BUT, I have class significant privileges (economically and through education), many more than poorer members of my family, especially my poor white rural family members (who would be and have been considered “White Trash” by some middle class and richer folks). The Mexican-American part of my family lives in what would be considered a middle class neighborhood, but my cousin’s husband was born poorer. I really despise white middle class values, while recognising that, for some in my family, and for some of my friends, that is their goal or that is where they have settled. My goal is to see an end to classism, racism, and sexism, among other atrocities against humanity.
I am, it is fair to say, bio-male. I do not identify as either of the two mandatory genders, nor as trans, but that doesn’t mean, as Yolanda astutely and correctly points out, that “my view of myself” means anything in the real Western world that only sees two genders.
Except for a few occasions, in which people thought I was female (no, I was not in drag), most all people see and respond to me as a male. For these reasons, when out late at night, feeling afraid often, as I do, I still manage to be aware that I AM male-bodied, and so will not walk up behind any woman who is alone, preferring to cross the street well before reaching her, and staying across the street for as long as possible. I also do the same when “approaching” any woman. I know what it is to walk around in public with fear of assault. I do not have the privilege of walking while feeling safe, and so am not out much. But I do have the privilege of not being “targetable” as a woman, in public, for harassment and rape, by obnoxious heteromen, or hetero street rapists. I count my blessings–that is surely a big one.
Now, specifically to Charles:
I want to apologise to you, for a couple of things. First, after my friend read my post to you (to me, out loud), I realised that the tone was more condescending, patronising, and hostile than I now want it to sound and be. I am owning that the tone is what I have said above, and am apologising to you for that tone. Most of the content I would not change, although I would like to commend you on having sexual violence against women as something for men to contend with and challenge politically. That is far from “liberal” in my book. I hope you did not feel too dismissed or put off by my tone. I apologise if you did, sincerely.
I reacted really strongly to how hurt Yolanda was by your and one other man’s posts. I still feel deeply for her regarding that. I have no regrets or apologies to make FOR feeling that way. As I said, I react really strongly to sexism and racism when I see it, especially when I see it hurting someone I care about, and I do care about Yolanda.
But there’s no good excuse (there are, of course, plenty of not so good ones) for my tone in that email. I used the word “Charles” way more times than necessary. I didn’t give you enough credit for the searching and thinking you are doing. That was unfair of me. Again, I apologise. You offered to engage in the spirit of friendship, and, because I was angrier than I realised, about how Yolanda was feeling, based on how she’d been treated here, I let that impact on the tone of my response to you.
I am angry that Yolanda has had the experience here of feeling slighted, dismissed, disrespected, and ignored. Maybe she’s felt more than that about more things. As noted earlier, Yolanda speaks very eloquently and directly, for herself (and, whether she realises it or not) for many others who are speechless.
I am proud to be part of a community that has Yolanda brightly in it.
I’ll close for now, as I tend to write long posts–that is perhaps a form of male and class privilege I indulge myself in, too much.
With respect to all here, and in on-going struggle,
Julian
29 December 2005, 3:06 pmJulian Real:
To Stan.
Has the woman in the image to this thread, the white woman breast-feeding, given her permission for you to use that image of her? If not, I respectfully recommend changing it to something that isn’t exploitive of her nudity.
In support,
Julian
29 December 2005, 3:09 pmStan:
It’s an open-source archival photo, subject to Free Use law, I would think. Meant to be suggestive of the whole issue of women and “nature.” If it’s an issue, I can change it. Not meant to exploit nudity. The only place I’ve ever been where women breastfeeding is treated as odd (or sexualized) is in the US.
I’ll defer to collective wisdom here, however, since the image is not the crux of the post. No wish to offend.
What do folks think?
29 December 2005, 3:18 pmjohn steppling:
Yolanda:
Relatively affluent…..because Im white and live over-seas? I live in POLAND…..perhaps you should check the economic stats for this former easter bloc country. I dont live on the Riveria. I live here to escape….and to have some degree of freedom as an artist. I make 600 US dollars a month (equivalent).
I support a family on this and other odd jobs. How is this relatively affluent? You make personalized assumptions about things you know nothing about…..i.e., how and where I live. You use sterotypes. I too lived for many years in the city I was born in….and was raised in a welfare family. Do you get it? I hope so. I have very little in the way of privledge beyond a degree of respect from my theatre work (which earned me almost zero money). My family was dirt poor…on welfare….and eating via food stamps.
It strikes me that this is becoming rather silly.
So, no, Im not relatively affluent….at all. NOt in relation to you or most anyone. It all depends on how one analyses such things I guess….but the poor of Poland rank there with the poorest of the poor. Compared to the rural poor of Silesia i am affluent….the out of work coal miners and so on. Ask them this time of year when its minus ten out. Or is it just that Im a white man? I dont understand and I addressed stan’s comments because they were inncorrect.
Thats all. Stan and I have never met….but have a sort of long e-mail relationship since i reviwed his book for swans.
Affluent has nothing to do with gender. There are poor people everyhwere. Men and women. Gender oppression exists….as does class oppression….but to call me relatively affluent is almost comical…and to add that I am a white man…as if this has anything to do with affluence, is incorrect.
29 December 2005, 3:23 pmelaina:
—I dont live on the Riveria. I live here to escape….and to have some degree of freedom as an artist.—
Well. At least you’ve been able to “escape.” And have some degree of freedom as an artist. I’d love to move to Mexico, spend my time writing and playing music. Unfortunately, people depend on me and I have to do stuff like hold down a piss-poor paying job to help my family out.
Women sacrifice their art all the time due to the oppressive conditions in which they live. Not everybody’s able to move to another country and ‘escape’. Sounds like relative affluence, to me. Or, to paraphrase bell hooks, privilege consists of choices. Would you prefer it if we use “relative privilege?”
—…and to add that I am a white man…as if this has anything to do with affluence, is incorrect.—
Well, maybe “being a white man” doesn’t have too much to do with affluence. I will admit that I know a lot of poor white men; hell, my male predecessors were moonshine running hillbillies and hobos.
But being a white man DOES have a LOT to do with PRIVILEGE. For instance, you’ve had the privilege of escaping to another country to exploit its low cost-of-living. At least that’s how it looks from this and other posts you’ve made. You’ve gained some respect in the art world; do you have ANY idea what it’s like to be a woman and have men take your art seriously? To even get anybody to want to read your poems or stories, or listen to your songs? How much of our “high art” is judged based on standards set by white men? Isn’t this something to think about????
Or, do you have any idea how hard it is to get white men to listen to your political opinions with a modicum of reflection, and maybe take what you have to say seriously? No. You don’t. You WON’T.
There are modes of oppression that you will never, ever have to deal with because of your male, white, identity. You’ll never walk into a store and have people follow you around based on your skin color.
Has anyone ever told you that you ought to be a nurse, if you’re into helping people medically, or a librarian because you like books so much, instead of telling you that you should be a doctor or a writer?
Has anybody ever said to you, “you can’t play that. I’m not wasting money on lessons. It’s not a good passtime for a girl.”
When you were a kid did anybody ever force you to wear dresses you didn’t like, or uncomfortable shoes, or did they constantly tell you to keep your legs together, don’t say “damn,” don’t spit up your loogies, swallow them, don’t talk so loud, girls are to be seen and not heard? How much of that experience can you relate too?
We were never on welfare. We probably should have been. I ate a lot of beans and fried bologna as a kid. I didn’t have an ideal childhood. I got beat, I got molested. I got told that college wouldn’t be an option. I got told that I needed to “learn my place.”
I will probably never get to escape.
But there are many female people who, because they are not white, have far less opportunity than I do.
This is why dismissive, defensive, and condescending statements put forth by white men piss me off.
And, IMHO, these white men who won’t own up to their relative privilege will continue to hold back the movement, and these attitudes are, indeed, a huge part of “the problem.”
SO. You can argue semantics all you want. “Affluent” or “privileged,” you got angry when somebody said something about a White Human God that offended you and you insulted her. You got called out. And I say this with all due respect, sir. You need to get used to it. ‘Cause I ain’t about to shut up, and I know plenty other people who ain’t, either.
29 December 2005, 7:20 pmI say this as a Poor white Woman speaking to a Poor white man.
john steppling:
look, this is just becoming a bit much. Eleina…
My escape was done on almost no money…..I work quite hard here….and support a family, so no, sorry its just not relative affluence. I escaped and it cost me a lot actually. So people depend on me too….and I work full time. I dont lounge around playing music…..where do such cliches come from>? I have more freedom here because america hates its artists.
My point….and I will stick to this….is that I am not relatively affluent. Alright? There is no way to conclude I am relatively affluent. And beyond that….which should have been clear already, I worked at shit jobs for most of my life until i had a brief period making money in Hollywood….but it was quite brief. Ive worked all manner of lousy minimum wage job. So what is your point elaina>? Yes…being white contains some privledge….but my family was a welfare family, so its all in how one defines these terms.
I am from a lumpen proletarian background.
I dont understand your last paragraph….and at this point it just sounds defensive. Im not the enemy.,, and I certainly didnt tell you to shut up. But I am checking out of this discussion because its totally personalized at this point. I was only correcting Stan….and I am correct on this point since I know my income. I live and work in Poland….with a family I support. I make six hundred bucks a month. Affluence huh? right.
29 December 2005, 11:18 pmjohn steppling:
let me add, as a final thought or two….and then I will check out on this thread.
Eleina….you personalize way too much….in fact, it strikes me that I dont know you or yolanda or anyone else on this list. And you dont know me. We only know what we choose to tell about ourselves….and Julian did a lot of that…which is maybe good….but even so, we still know very little. So to ASSUME that I have escaped to exploit a low cost of living? My wife is polish……see how little you understand!!!! Her family is here…..see>?
I did escape to the extent that I wouldnt agree to write the police state apologies asked for by and in Hollywood. But I didnt escape to sit around in the sun strumming my guitar and really, its pretty offensive of you to suggest this. And its highly defensive. I have not made any dissmissive comments. People got offended by the “silly” remark to Yolanda….well, ok, if they do they do….but it was simply about one paragraph and idea of hers. I respect yolanda and I respect stan. This is supposed to be about ideas….about arguing — in this case, gender and engles…but its starting to feel like if one doesnt agree then one is going to get called names. Read back and see how many names Ive been called on this thread (and part one).
The personalizing is starting to become a bit extreme. See, your personal life is only important as it pertains to theory…and only in a limited sense, really. So is mine….but its not really all that significant at the end of the day. The discussion should really be about ideas. Claiming that only a woman can undersatnd this or that, or only someone of color, or only a man or only a queer…is to be exclusionary. There is some limited truth in some contexts….but its only very limited.
I am not affluent. Period. I am in poland for a whole complex of reasons….but it does allow me an escape from some of the restrictions of hollywood. It does not mean I am exploiting the low cost of living….which is more or less a deeply ignorant comment anyway. If one is part of the polish economy then how is one exploiting it?
I work very long hours here….longer than I did in the US actually.
And we both seem to have the use of a computer….something those out of work Silesian coal miner families dont have….i have organized up there a bit and that is serious poverty. hell, they hardly have electricity some of the time. Does that make us relatively affluent? Only in comparison to out of work coal miners…or the like. And I dont think they would think that way. They know who the real enemy is.
So, I am not going round and round defending my poverty….which strikes me as sort of funny, actually. As if poverty bestowed some particular authenticity on anyone. Poverty sucks….we all ( i hope) want to end it. We shouldnt brandish it like a badge of honor. I hope my children will not suffer as I have….and it sounds like you have. That would be progress I think. Even if limited. But progress all the same. I am not the enemy Eleina….Im not holding back the movement just because I have differnet opinions on gender and engels. Know what I mean>!?
29 December 2005, 11:46 pmelaina:
I’m sorry if it seemed like I was talking just to you, John.
I actually am glad to hear some about your life. I don’t necessarily agree that personal-life is only important as it relates to theory. I think that new understanding of people’s personal lives— and standpoint– can lead to the generation of new theory that is more encompassing, that doesn’t leave out important voices, that doesn’t leave out those folks, those voices, who’ve been silenced, who get “disappeared” on a daily basis.
I hope that you don’t stop chiming in, even if I disagree with your analysis on gender. I think that within the nexus of struggle between one another, theoretically speaking, some kind of liberatory truth can be found.
I’m sorry if I’m being “too personal.” I responded to your post sharply because one of the women, who has a lot of important things to say in this conversation, said that she’d felt as if she had to hold back here.
And I feel that “being personal” is something critical to the discussion of gender opression. It’s an opression that’s steeped in the personal, because it has commodified human bodies, in a way that is distinct from yet interlaced with other forms of oppression. Every bit of personal experience that can be documented can add to it, in my view.
And I will add again that I wasn’t speaking only to you. This commentary is directed at every man who’s, say, dominated a conversation in a meeting, or who’s been responsible for helping push out woman-centered analysis because “the class struggle is the greater struggle.”
If I’m saying “too much,” or being too harsh or whatever, then y’all let me know. I really don’t have the intention of making anybody angry. I’m just trying to bring into focus some apparent “blind spots,” if that makes any sense.
30 December 2005, 2:08 pmStan:
I have to respond to this from a lot of perspectives, especially that of a white man… and it DOES make a difference. The attempt to privilege “theory” and “objectivity” is MALE, and it is precisely this aspect of Cartesian (in the west) dualism that radical feminism tried and is still apparently trying to expose to the male left.
The masculine-feminine dyad is the most likely basis of the kind of subject-object duality that is used to justify the exploitation of nature (man conquers nature - Bacon actually described this with a rape metaphor), the conquest of (feminized) colonies, et al. It is also the basis of separating to putative “objective” from the “subjective.”
This is the whole point of the critique of Engels and other male leftists on the question of gender, and the reason feminism resurrected the notion that the personal is the political. Politics, the struggle for power, does NOT begin with theory; it begins with the experience of power and powerlessness on one’s skin, so to speak.
What Marx noted with regard to bourgeois ideology was that it used abstraction to conceal actual social relations. This is EXACTLY what radical feminists have been saying about gender, too.
The reason this is so difficult to grasp for those who have not stayed engaged with this for some time is epistemological. The inability to “see” the ideological nature of this privileging, the false dichotomies at its center, and the existence of real structural gendered power — that does not correspond laterally with class power — is because there is a tendency to retreat into the unexamined and comfortable assumptions that disguise themselves as “common sense,” objectivity, etc etc.
So the claim that “your personal life is only important as it pertains to theory…and only in a limited sense, really. So is mine….but its not really all that significant at the end of the day. The discussion should really be about ideas. Claiming that only a woman can undersatnd this or that, or only someone of color, or only a man or only a queer…is to be exclusionary. There is some limited truth in some contexts….but its only very limited,” is an appeal to abstraction.
Why should the discussion be about ideas be divorced from experience? How is experience insignficant? The exclusion of women from the world of men, the exclusion of Black or brown from the white world, the exclusion of gays from the “straight” world… these exclusions were in place before the victims of that exclusion claimed their standpoints as points of resistance.
It is not exclusionary in the first instance for oppressed people to claim their standpoint, and to assert it in the face of validity claims that are made outside of it. The exclusion began before resistance began; and the accusation of exclusion has the same quality as a claim of reverse-racism against Black folk who don’t trust white society.
For a white person to tell an African American that the validity of her experience is “very limited” is to negate the actual *experience* of structural oppression. For a man to tell a woman that the validity of her experience is “very limited” is a dismissal, a dismissal by someone who can not share that experience, and in effect, is syaing that only the experience available to the white male is valid, using white male criteria of validity.
I say this as a white male who has undergone a good deal of painful and sometimes traumatic confrontation with my own sexuality, my own white privilege, and my own male “heterosexual” privilege. Because this stuff is more than theoretical. My attachment to my masculinity in particular was deeply emotional,and rooted in my socializaton before I could speak or understand my own native language.
Even to this day, the norms of masculinity, and the ways I intutively relate to women, have a resonance that is quite authentic… I feel this stuff, and sometimes act on it… even though I know that it runs contrary to my responsibility as a revolutonary. There are times when I feel that I am hanging on by my fingernails to my principles, which do not exert a fraction of the affective power that my male socialization does.
This is not easy, and that is precisely why it is so much more difficult to overcome male power than it is to mobilze resistance to class power and national oppression. Women internalize these gender norms as deeply as men, lbeitn without the added benefit of structural power. Gender is inscribed on our very sense of self so early, and in the context of our first and often most intimate associations, that its gravitational force is staggering.
Just speaking for myself, the first step has been to check fire when I feel defensive. Defensiveness is an indicator that can tell us a lot, if we are wiling to undergo the processes of personal transformation that must correspond to a revolutionary vocation.
Understanding this as I do, I will probably tread more lightly than others on John, because I identify more closely with him in some respects. Having said that, however, I must unite with the sisters and brothers here who continue to assert these knoweldge and experience claims, and insist that this continue to be a safe space for them to do so.
This is an important conversation, and sharp as it may be, I hope it will continue.
30 December 2005, 3:40 pmjohn steppling:
thanks eleina. And believe me I appreciate the “disappeared’ in the sense you refer to.
Let me clarify for stan.
Look, the personal IS political…..and thats not what Im saying. Im saying that in a context such as this, one doesnt know who one is talking to…first….and then if they do, in some limited fashion, its still pretty limited. So lets be clear about “theory” and what this means. We are dealing with both experience on a personal level, and with the extrapolated ideas that come from it…and from other observations. People can tell anecdotal stories about their lives….but it probably doesnt prove much. I think it has relevance….but what is more important is what we fashion this into theory. If I say, hey, when I as 16 this happened to me and its heppened many times since. Fine. But its just anecdote. Its personal…but you have to link that personal to the bigger forces at work and the causes and see that it pertains to more than just yourself. And that your personal has relevance for others. This is why politics does begin with theory.
If you experience oppression in some way….class, gender, race….then you try to understand why this is happeneing. Because to change it means to understand the historical forces that have caused it. It starts with the personal, but it doesnt end there. Often if you react to a personal experience in a personal way, you are missing the point. This is like saying “I saw all those black people on death row….must be black people are inherently criminal”. The personal experience was, for someone, to see the population of death row…..and assume no historical perspective….and just ‘react’ out of fear and anger.
I never said anyone’s experience was limited….i said that in terms of theory it was limited….meaning, that unless you link it to the big picture it doesnt mean much. It certainly has meaning on the personal level….but Im not sure that ends up helping us change things much. Its important to remember that the personal is also historical.
And I sort of resist this notion (and this isnt defensivness I dont think) that a white man cant say something to a black women, or gay muslim, or whatever. Or vice versa. And it also doesnt mean that one’s racial and gender identity gives one a patent on the truth. This can become very problematic….as identify politics often become. It could be that a straight white man happens on something others have missed…..or a black queer might know something about heterosexual white life that I have missed. Not to mention I no longer much know what straight and queer mean to be honest.
But I am drifting….
Teresa Brennan said “sexual difference is not only the result of socialization, but its condition”….meaning, I think, that resolving the duality problem has to have as its goal that we not split things to begin with. That is quite hard due to, among other things, the politics of language….as Lacan often points out. The personal, as I said, above is also historical. We are shaped in our perceptions and interpretations, by historical forces. Our language is shaped by history….and our recent history is patriarchal and class based. One cannot seperate out from this matrix.
this is the comments section of a blog. It means we are all talking in shorthand to some degree. This can cause problems. All this leads back to my comment to Yolanda …. and how, while I agree engels may have it wrong, he doesnt have it wrong because he’s a dead white german male….he has it wrong because he has it wrong. Otherwise we wouldnt be able to talk about the French Revolution, because none of us were there.
Thanks again to eleina….I appreciate you last comments.
31 December 2005, 1:45 amonward, js
john steppling:
and a follow up.
First….a happier new year to all of us.
I hope.
And this from Le Colonol Chabert….a good blog….its about both gender,class, and capitalism.
http://lecolonelchabert.blogspot.com/
scroll down to Reign of Terror.
31 December 2005, 4:46 amElaina:
some Marx: (from the manifesto, p. 116)
“The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay BY PREFERENCE (my caps) to the ruling class.”
Can I ask some questions now?
Hasn’t the class struggle developed enough to include race and gender in the conversation? Hasn’t the class struggle developed in such a way that we can see, and feel, that it is not just “working MEN of the world” who should unite???
Don’t we see here that the class struggle is indeed far more nuanced than Marx thought it was when he wrote these very words?
Do we really want to cater to ruling class endeavors in our struggle? If not, how are we avoiding that when we don’t include sharp and critical race/gender analyses? I don’t think that we are.
If we can’t move beyond this stage, how can we possibly think that we’re ready, or that we ever COULD be ready, for any sort of revolution????
I think that here Marx leaves plenty of room, room that’s documented, for critique of the class struggle as he and Engles frame it. Am I mistaken?
(…from p. 117…)
“…and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary and conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the New Gospel.”
I think that yes, all you boys might be right in that Marx left us some room for thinking here.
That doesn’t make the conclusions drawn by Engles “correct,” or “conclusive.”
Happy New Year to everybody here.
1 January 2006, 5:10 amYolanda Carrington:
Happy New Year, folks.
I’ll try to keep this short as I can, seeing as the thread is really long already. I just read the recent comments on this thread, and I must say that I’m extremely humbled by the kindness of friends. I thought for sure that I would piss everyone off with my last big post, and so I stayed away. I return here for the first time since then.
Honestly, I am shocked that I could ever have such an effect on such brilliant people. I used to think I was crazy for what I felt, and still do sometimes. Elaina and Julian, I can’t begin to express what I feel to y’all, but I can say that you both have made me feel honored. Thank you both for your loving words. I know now that I’m not alone.
If you all don’t mind, I’d like to tell you about my dream in life. My dream is to help end gender and race oppression by destroying the cognitive dissonance that people have around these systems. I want to write and speak to people in a way that they can hear and feel, whatever their reading level, whatever their schooling level, in whatever life circumstance they are in. I want them to see their lives in other people, to know that they aren’t alone in the pain, hurt, alienation, emptiness, and rage, and that they share their deepest hurts with even the most celebrated and lionized people among us.
It’s why I wrote “Sex and Death.” I want to keep writing. I want to keep on talking. My challenge to myself is to find the courage. I still struggle tremendously with this. More importantly though, I need to let go of my fear. Fear is such a monster, especially in the game of domination. I want to stop being afraid.
Engels was a brilliant person. But I’m just as smart as Frederick Engels. So is Catherine MacKimmon. So are all of you. Freedom is up to us now.
To Charles:
I do respect you, please don’t think that I don’t. You are a human being, and you are in the Black Nation with me. We have survived Hell, and we’re still here. But I respect you enough to hold you accountable for what you say, and the ideas that you or anyone else puts out there. I could not in good conscience let you misrepresent the real lives of women and queer folk without a challenge. I couldn’t let you sugar-coat our pain without responding. We have been to Hell and back too. Shit, oppressed people are still in Hell.
And after all that, I still respect you. I respect where you’ve been and your struggle in this system. Being a Black Man in the United States ain’t no easy ride, believe me. And you are my (older)
brother.
Now folks, I’ll hush my mouth. Take care everyone, and I PROMISE I will talk to you all again soon.
love, Yolanda
*By the way, if anyone was in doubt, I am a hardcore Marxist, as well as a radical feminist and Black nationalist. But who cares about alla that.
2 January 2006, 4:58 amYolanda Carrington:
Oh, and about the nursing mom photo: I don’t think its context is offensive, but you know America and its good ole boys.
It’s up to you, Stan.
Yolanda
2 January 2006, 5:20 amCharles Brown:
Hasn’t the class struggle developed enough to include race and gender in the conversation? Hasn’t the class struggle developed in such a way that we can see, and feel, that it is not just “working MEN of the world†who should unite???
Don’t we see here that the class struggle is indeed far more nuanced than Marx thought it was when he wrote these very words?
^^^^^^
Wasn’t Clara Zetkin reflecting Marx’s view on these questions when she wrote the article I posted elsewhere on this blog :
“Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious” (1896) ? She seems very early on , 1896, to include women workers in the “Workers of the World” that Marx referred to. Was Marx really unaware of what you are talking about ? It was Marx and Engels who noted the sociological fact of capitalism’s employing more and more women ( and children) in factories. The greater use of machinery made it possible for women to do jobs more readily. Furthermore, a central plank in the Marxist program is _for_ women to become proletarians, i.e. workers, and certainly direct participants in proletarian internationalism. Zetkin was not saying something new in terms of Marx’s thinking on this issue, or Engels’ thinking.
On race, Marx said in 1867 ( still published after the Civil War in these words), “Labor in white skin shall not be free , while labor in the black skin is branded.” So, yes, from Marx’s standpoint the class struggle had developed enough by 1867 at least to include race, way beyond conversation but in action and practice.
3 January 2006, 11:38 amCharles Brown:
To Charles:
I do respect you, please don’t think that I don’t. You are a human being, and you are in the Black Nation with me. We have survived Hell, and we’re still here. But I respect you enough to hold you accountable for what you say, and the ideas that you or anyone else puts out there. I could not in good conscience let you misrepresent the real lives of women and queer folk without a challenge. I couldn’t let you sugar-coat our pain without responding. We have been to Hell and back too. Shit, oppressed people are still in Hell.
And after all that, I still respect you. I respect where you’ve been and your struggle in this system. Being a Black Man in the United States ain’t no easy ride, believe me. And you are my (older) brother.
Now folks, I’ll hush my mouth. Take care everyone, and I PROMISE I will talk to you all again soon.
love, Yolanda
^^^
Hello Yolanda,
Love to you ,too.
We will progress in our theory and practice for liberation through struggle, as the saying goes. It must include very honest, criticism-self-criticism. In this context, you must hold me accountable for my words and my actions. Please do.
Black is beautiful :>)
Charles
3 January 2006, 11:52 amCharles Brown:
Oh my goodness, folks, I missed these messages last time I came through this section of the blog. I will interject comments below where I am addressed.
I really missed the hottest criticisms of what I said. Oh my .
CB
Hello folks,
Julian…again brotha…you’ve managed to say exactly what is on MY mind, in a clear, concise, loving, and thoroughly intellectual way. I’ve got to thank you. I know you don’t personally identify as un homme, but maybe your status as a bio-male will insure that men will hear you fully.
I’ve been purposefully staying away from Feral Scholar for the past couple of days. On blog discussions, I try to be as fair, thorough, and open-minded as possible, but I knew that I could not maintain this stance much longer. I’m going to be completely honest here. Certain people—a couple of men—made me feel worthless and stupid, when I know damn that I am neither. Whether that was intentional on their part or not, the shit happened. I tried not to get “emotional†about it, and be as “objective†as possible, but you and I know that these notions are bullshit in the face of domination.
Charles, you are one of the men I am talking about. Please let me explain why.
I’ve been reading the discourse between you, Stan, and Julian, and they have tremendous respect for your views and insights. I think that you have good ideas, too. But–Black woman to Black man–let me be complete honest: You have pissed me off tremendously with some of your comments. I have purposefully remained silent because I didn’t want to react out of hurt, but much of what you’ve have said has made me feel invisible and silenced again, and I’ve been battling invisibility in this movement for YEARS. Stan can back me up here.
I’m coming from the heart, intellectual objectivity be damned.
I never engage in this kind of argument, but please allow me great latitude here. With all due respect, Charles, I think many of your ideas on sex and gender are complete bullshit (yes folks—“silly†Yolanda said it). You consistently naturalize gender, even after you are challenged on it. I will make a redundant statement again: MAN AND WOMAN ARE NOT SEXES. “Man†and “woman†is GENDER, socially/politically/historically constructed, and NOT natural.
^^^^^^
CB: Hello Yolanda. I’m sorry you feel that way.
On your immediate comment here, I said “women and men” are genders; male and female are sexes. So, on that I said the same as you say here.
After the rev, genders, men and women will be abolished. Male and female, sex , will not be abolished, in my opinion.
( That ain’t bullshit, :>) , smile ).
^^^^
I emphatically reject your idea that the “unity†between men and women—sexually, politically or otherwise—is the answer to ending patriarchy.
^^^^^
CB: Well, I’m not succeeding at my plan.
The ultimate goal of what I’m willing to participate in is unity and harmony between women and men. Yes, ending male supremacy is the main way to do that, but that is MY goal as a male feminist.
^^^
^^^^
There is one important fact that you are forgetting: Men DOMINATE women. There can be no unity through domination. The domination of women by men MUST end.
^^^^^
CB: Exactly. I am saying the key to unity of women and men is for men to end male supremacy or dominance of women. So , we agree on that.
Only with that can the _natural_ ( and I’m here to do some challenging myself , you may have noticed) relation of sex be a basis for unity, because without abolition of male supremacy, my plan won’t work.
Yes, sex for humans is cultural as well as natural. But it is an error to exclude the natural aspect. I was very impressed with Stan’s critique of post-modernist anti-essentialism on this. It is the best articulation of a position I have been taking on the email lists for years.
^^^^^
I don’t feel like addressing each my beefs with your comments point-by-point, because there are too goddamn many of them, brother, but I’ll hit a few. Like this next gem:
“I guess the more general point is that my approach is the opposite on sex between women and men. I see women and men having sex as very important (not just to have kids) but as a major potential basis for resolution of conflicts between women and men, as a basis for unity between women and men.â€
Do you really believe what you just said above?
^^^^^
CB: Why would I say it if I didn’t believe it ?
^^^^^
Oh my God.
^^^^^^
CB: I got some rhetorical techniques too. :>)
^^^^
And this lovely non-response to Julian’s argument:
“Anti-heterosex converges with the long term reactionary nature of the Christian Church’s attitude on sex etc. And it undermines one best potential bases for resolving the conflicts between women and men.â€
^^^^^
CB: I’m not so sure it is non-response. It may not be the same thing you think.
Besides the issue of its responsiveness, if you are going to be debating this, you might want to think a bit about the history of the Christian Church and sexual repression. It is an important fact that impinges on all these discussions. Also, you won’t be surprised at how some others who are just as feminist as you react to some of the discussions.
^^^^
“Anti-heterosex????†Are you serious?
^^^^^^
CB: As a heartattack, as they say. As I say, there is a long and powerful history of religious and societal anti-heterosex.
Are you telling me you have never run across the mentality that “sex is dirty ” ?
^^^
I sure hope not. (Do you have any idea how homophobic this is?)
^^^^^
CB: I think we may have different ideas on this issue.
No , it is not politically incorrect , if that is what you mean by homophobic ”
^^^
“Conflicts between women and men???†Huh???
Since when is oppression and domination “conflict?â€
^^^^
CB: Oppression and domination _always_ involve conflict. All oppressed and dominated groups fight back and thus, CONFLICT.
This is a fundamental notion of the Communist Manifesto. Why is it that history is a history of class _struggle_ i.e. conflict ? Because the oppressed and exploited classes fight back !
Similarly, women fight back ! Ergo, there is a conflict.
Oppression and domination generate CONFLICT.
^^^^^^^
Black woman to Black man: You are gender-privileged, STRAIGHT UP. I can’t make you see this; you’ve got to recognize your privilege for yourself. All I can do is let you know how I feel. I hope that you can listen—I mean truly listen—to what I (and all women) have to say.
^^^^
CB: I know. I’m a male feminist. I wrote a paper and put it on this list _For Women’s Liberation_. I know men are a privileged group in a male supremacist society.
I listen to many, many women. Have been for decades. I have been a feminist, and listening to women for over thirty years.
^^^^^^
You cannot speak for women—Black, working class, or otherwise. Period. You ain’t a woman. As far as concrete experience goes, you don’t know what the word means.
^^^^^
CB: I didn’t speak for women. I spoke for women’s liberation.
Think of it this way, to end male supremacy , whose conduct is going to have to change ? Men’s ,right ? So, the role of men feminists, is not, as you point out, to speak to women for women, but to speak to men for women with the goal of ending male supremacy. In that project, it would be foolish to claim that male feminists have no idea about the oppression that women experience, because then what are they going to say to other men in trying to get them to divest of male supremacy ? Surely, they must report the complaints that women have expressed.
^^^^^
But you are a man.
I want to offer a challenge, Charles. What can you say about being a man? How does being a man make you feel? Do you see yourself specifically AS A MAN, and if you do, what does that mean to you? Does being a man make you feel good, or not?
^^^^^
CB: What can I say about being a man ? I guess you mean ” being a man with respect to how I act in relation to women ” ? I don’t know. I have lots of women friends. One woman surprised me a couple of years ago when she told me I was her best friend. We aren’t lovers or anything, and she is married to someone else, but, I’m sort of good at getting close, intimacy, so I guess… Over the years, I have learned more and more about women, of course trial and error many mistakes. But I am very proud of how good the terms I am on with so many women. Frankly, I attribute it to having been a feminist ( the opposite of a misogynst) for so long. I think women can just see in my face. They can feel it by the way I treat them.
Or what ? You’ll have to be more specific what you mean
^^^^^
When you stop trying to speak for women, and be honest about being a man, I will call you a comrade. But not until then, brother.
^^^^^^
CB: You’ll have to show me where you are saying I am speaking for women. I’m listening to women’s general complaints, and trying to organize the unity of women and men.
^^^^^^
From the heart of struggle,
Yolanda
Ciao !
CB
4 January 2006, 6:21 pmCharles Brown:
* Hi Charles.
First, I hope you are able to answer Yolanda’s questions thoroughly, and non-defensively.
^^^^^
CB: See my answers above.
Whatever makes you think I might be defensive ? Was there some kind of “attack” :>)
^^^^
I was giving you some benefits of my doubts about your position on male supremacy, but I have more information now, both from Yolanda, and you, to be clearer about where you stand on this matter, as well as on homosexuality, and I will respond, respectfully, and in a way that I hope brings us closer to one another in struggle, not further away. I am not invested in being close with any man who values unconsciousness (obliviousness) of their own male privilege over honest, painful self-reflection, though, and so I am telling you up front that how you respond to Yolanda is going to make a HUGE difference in my mind as to how willing you are to be, genuinely, in struggle with your own male privilege, along with male supremacy. Personally, I don’t see these as separate struggles, and I think Yolanda is completely right to call you on what she is calling you on. But she can, and does, speak for herself.
^^^^^^
CB: Everything I have posted here since coming to this list indicates I have awareness that as a man I have male privilege. Any claim that I am less aware of that than you are is not substantiated by what is before us on this blog.
I don’t think you have noticed that my entry to this blog was a paper, “For Women’s Liberation”. You might want to ponder that a bit.
^^^^^^^
I’ll respond more specifically now, to some of what you have posted lately, including, of course, your reply to me. (Thanks for that. I am with you on the honesty and truthfulness thing. Enough bullshit. But I think that’s Yolanda’s point, isn’t it?)
^^^^
CB: Watch it on calling what I write “bullshit”. That can tend to distort discourse and communication. Plus, I know how to cuss really good.
:>)
^^^^
But just a word on “honestyâ€. My brother, two years older, used to routinely disrespect and disregard me in typical older brotherly “honest†ways. I was closer with my female cousins, who were around both our ages. They did not disrespect and disregard me as he did. He used to tell me I had to be tougher. I told him, “Maybe if you weren’t so brutal in your manner, I wouldn’t have to get so tough. There’s two ways we can go here, brother: I toughen up, or you become more humane.†For the record, I refused to “toughen up†and my brother, in the decades since, has learned to be more humane, and he has sincerely apologised to me for his chronic mistreatment of me when we were young. His apology was only accepted by me on the grounds that the behaviour STOP, and never show itself again. He is not particularly insightful about why he did what he did, which I find to be typical of the oppressor: little self-awareness about matters of their oppressiveness to others. But he is very loving and deeply supportive of me now, including of my political work.
^^^^^
CB: I reject emphatically any innuendo that somehow I am like your brother. I haven’t been tough with you. What I am being is honest, as I said. Honest is not the same thing as tough.
^^^^^^^
Charles: We need an ERA Equal Rights Amendment of the Constitution , today !
Vote for and support women for public office and leadership positions all around in society.
Retain affirmative action. ( Michigan has a battle against Ward Connerly this year)
Fight rape and domestic violence.
Men surrender in the Battle of the Sexes, today.
Men do more childcare and housework.
Also, I am a Black feminist, first, but also a general feminist.
J: I find your to-do list shockingly liberal, coming from a Leftist radical.
^^^^
CB; There’s reform and revolution. Radicals or revolutionaries do not disdain reform. They struggle for reform in a revolutionary manner. For example, the New Deal was a liberal reform, but Communists supported it as a first step, so to speak.
So, no, there’s nothing wrong with radicals having a reform agenda
Furthermore, I’m not sure how you are reasoning that fighting rape and domestic violence is liberal.
What’s your feminist agenda ?
^^^^
The ERA was designed to make women equal to men, as men define men, thereby allowing women to be patriarchal too. What’s progressive about that?
^^^^
CB: Our’s is a feminist version of ERA, wherein equality is defined by women.
Allowing women to be patriarchial too. You’ll have to elaborate what you mean.
I’ll have to chock up a criticism of you if you aren’t for an ERA. It is a sort of ultraleftist error on your part.
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Please read MacKinnon on the ERA… hold on… I’ll go get it: She discusses the early (radical) feminist movement in the U.S., with its flaws–in part it being terribly ignorant of the white and class privilege that flowed through some of the arguments, including some overt racism and plenty of covert racism–but also notes, concisely, what the radical agenda WAS that began to be thwarted by a liberal agenda (read: deferential to patriarchy), much to the benefit of CRAP, and the demise of Radical Women’s Liberation Movement–movement from patriarchy, by, um, ENDING patriarchy, once and for all. “Ba-bye, now, patriarchy. Ba-bye. Don’t forget to close the door behind ya.â€
In part, she says (after recounting feminism’s earlier radical days): “Then something happened. Or started to happen. Or maybe it had been happening all along and some of us had overlooked it. The first time I noticed it was with the Equal Rights Amendment. We were told that we could and should have this constitutional amendment because sex equality under law was not really going to do very much, would not really change anything, surely nothing basic. What the movement had identified as the pervasive, basic oppression and exploitation of women by men became transformed into an evil called ’sex-based classifications by law.’ That, suddenly, was what sex equality had to change. Under this notion of sex equality, we were given the choice of being the same as men–the left’s option for us–or different from men–the right’s version. We were told that the left’s version was clearly better and the only route to true equality. So-called gender neutrality–ignoring what is distinctively done to women and ignoring who is doing it–became termed the feminist position. I heard no one challenge the fact that, under this approach to ERA, either way it was the male standard, either way it was not what the movement had in mind by equality. The ERA strategy based on this analysis was, apparently, that sex equality can be made nonthreatening to the hierarchical status quo and still be real. This approach never identified male supremacy as what we had to contend with. It presented the extraordinary spectacle of feminists ardently denying that sex equality would make much difference while urgently seeking it.†(Catharine A. MacKinnon, Women’s Laws, Men’s Lives, p. 262)
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CB: I’m not persuaded. Women can be the lead advocates of the ERA.
Isn’t MacKinnon a liberal ? I know they don’t have Communist law professors at U of Michigan Law School. That would be a big change from when I attended there back in ‘76-79. Hey maybe she’s a secret comrade. But then why would she not build on Engels ?
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C: Your fervor in fighting c.r.a.p. etc. is what we need more of.
J: Thank you.
C: Are you anti-capitalist ,pro-working class ? I suspect you are , but I don’t see a reference to the class struggle in criticisms of crap and pricks.
J: I don’t take litmus tests. I am anti-money economies, Charles. Pro-environmentally friendly, fully sustainable cultures. I am an activist in support of any movement that seeks to END patriarchy, not indulge it, and specifically, to END CRAP, to end rape, to end racism, and to end the oppression and exploitation of women in all myriad and atrocious forms. That’s my spiritual-political agenda, Charles. Call it what you will.
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CB: Uhhuhh.
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(I see no signs that the Right or Left is willing to take up this radically transformative spiritual-political project.) I seek a world where women are free and safe to be human, fully human, in ways each individual human desires, in a free context, not a caged one, which is all women have now, and which, tragically, shapes women’s desires to be only women, to be female the patriarchal way. Patriarchies shape men’s desires too, in part by making men think “man†exists naturally. Also by believing that there is an “opposite sexâ€, and then eroticising the opposition.
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CB: OK . I have more of an idea where you are coming from.
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C: Just to be honest and directly to points of potential dispute (not to be argumentative, but it’s not interesting to sit around and agree about everything; no progress without struggle, too)
J: Agreed. And moving right along…
C: I do not find by my empirical evidence that homosexual men have better understanding of women than heterosexual men. The women ( mainly Black women) I’m in communication with don’t seem to find this to be true either. Homosexual men, as a general matter , are as male supremacist as heterosexual men. There’s nothing about having sex with women that makes one understand them less than not having sex with them, in general.
J: You seem to be ignoring some very basic realities in patriarchies, Charles. First, it is precisely the intimate placement of women to men in heterosexual contexts that allows men the access to do such atrociously intimate harm.
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CB; Yea, but in zillions of such intimate placements where men do such wonderfully fullfilling loving, and it is very important to nurture and expand the situations where men do good things for and with women.
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Most heterosexual women are injured in the home–it is the most dangerous place for those women to be, if a man lives there with them …or knows where they live.
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CB: I think this is empirically false if you are saying most heterosexual women are battered by their men partners.
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Out gay men, last time I took the survey, don’t rape women.
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CB: However, they don’t make love to them either.
Let me just reiterate here, that discourses that treat the relationships and sexual relationships between womena and men as if there aren’t zillions of wonderful and loving interactions as well as all the bad ones, that is the thinking that is ignoring as huge section of reality. The reality of women-men relations is a lot more contrdactory than what you are claiming. There is bad stuff and there is good stuff. The best plan is to try to get rid of the bad stuff ( your focus) AND increase the good stuff ( you ignore this critical and major task and project)
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Out gay men, also, aren’t the primary perpetrators of battery and incest against girls and women. Heterosexual men are. Your reality seems spuriously selective.
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CB: No, the key selectivity is in your approach. You only mention the bad relations between heterosexual women and men. You are ignoring a gigantic and enormous part of reality: Good sex and relations between women and men.
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Why is that? Perhaps because women will not often speak about what beloved heterosexual men do to them, as children or adults, to other heterosexual men, and, sometimes, to anyone? All the women I know, of whatever race and ethnicity, are survivors of intimate harm by men, male supremacist harm. Some of it is rape, some of it is battery, some is incest, some is child molestation, some is systematic denigration of them as girls-not-boys, inappropriate and damaging leering when the girls become adolescents, systematic condescension, systematic ignorance of their real lives, systematic privileging of girls either being “like boys†and gaining respect, or being “like girls†and gaining a very evil form of “respect†called “sexual objectification and violative interestâ€.
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CB: I’d say the major fallacy in your approach is that you don’t seem to be aware of all the positive things and relationships between women and men.
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Now, I am in no way saying that gay men are not, at times, and systematically, misogynistic. Lord knows. But those gay boys grow up with bullying straight men as their roles models, or with harmed women as their role models, and so I blame straight society on that, not gay society. Do gay misogynists need to be held accountable? Sure. I’ll get right on that as soon as I’m done with all the straight misogynist men. What time do you think that’ll be, Charles? Should I schedule that for 2007?
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CB: You’re the one who is putting it off. I say you should get to it right now.
I don’t grant your claim that gay men are less male supremacist than heterosexual men. In fact, there is a elemental male supremacy in gay men’s choice of sex partners, i.e. men, not women.
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Straight white men hold privileges and positions of power, politically and socially, that gay white men do not hold.
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CB: I’m not sure this is factually correct. Gay white men are privileged men and privileged whites.
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I’m going for the top of the pile of privileged folks, and not choosing to spend my time in horizontal hostility, a very important term crafted by Flo Kennedy. Women can fight each other all day long. Some, unfortunately, do. I can fight with gay men all day long, for the rest of my life. But who does that leave unchallenged? Hmmm. Oh, yeah, the most privileged and powerful men on Earth: white heterosexual men.
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CB: White gay men are very privileged. I’m not sure they aren’t equally privileged with straight men. This is a factual question.
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And those with money have even more privileges, to purchase more pornography perhaps, or to purchase more female sexual slaves, or to purchase (or is it “rent�) more prostitutes. So, yes, straight white rich men DO have more misogynist privileges, compared to poor straight white men: privileges of exploitative access to down and out women, that (patriarchal) money, coupled with male supremacist inclinations, purchases.
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CB: Yea, rich men are the enemy. That they have more money defines them. It is not being heterosexual that gives greater privilege. Rich gay men can buy more pornography that they want too.
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C: In fact, the opposite would be the case. I know my position on this is not a la mode on the Left, but like I said, I gotta tell the truth.
J: Who’s truth are you telling? Not Yolanda’s, not mine, not any woman’s truth that I know.
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CB: This issue is not anecdotal based on individual’s experience. Your expereince or Yolanda’s might reflect the general pattern. You don’t know all women. I know women who see the truth as I do.
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C: Actually, I’m a teller of hard truths, not great truths. That was a typo. This one I tell now is hard to hear on the Left today, but…maybe I should ask you why you think homosexual men might understand women better than heterosexual men , in general ? Or why you include the adjective “heterosexual men†and not just “men†?
J: Partly because heterosexual men will do anything to have the feminist spotlight taken off them, and I’m not enabling that to happen in my work.
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CB; There are scads of male supremacist gay men, who don’t want a feminist spotlight on them.
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Also, most men in support of radical feminism, or most men I know who are deeply sympathetic to and empathic with women, to what women endure at the hands of men, are gay men, because gay men also endure some of the same CRAP–the sexual objectification, the sexual exploitation, the battery, the rape.
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CB; You define the whole of the relations between women and men based on the problems. Sexual objectivficatoin, sexual exploitation , battery and rape are not mainly what happens between women and men.
Male supremacy is especially political and economic male dominance. Gay men discriminate against women in these areas.
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There’s nothing abstract going on in my knowledge-base, Charles. I know some sexist gay men, and some gay men I would consider to be misogynistic, but none that do to girls and women what I know straight men do to girls and women.
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CB: The male suprmacy of gay men is the absence of doing things with women.
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Any reason I should take the spotlight OFF straight white men?
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CB: Just put it on men. Don’t try to give gay men a pass.
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Are they getting too sunburned? And the really sweet straight white middle class men I know, and I’ve known enough of them, still do not find time in their days to take up the matter of ending rape and racism. They’re too busy playing videogames, reading comic books, listening to white music, and endlessly worrying about things which effect a tiny fraction of the world’s population.
C: I guess the more general point is that my approach is the opposite on sex between women and men. I see women and men having sex as very important ( not just to have kids)
J: I see sex between women and men as a key site of misogynist aggressive and non-aggressive harm to women’s human dignity, and bodies, and childbirth as a key killer of women worldwide.
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CB: This is your truth, indeed. This is the crux of our disagreement. My truth would be that your truth is a half truth. There are all the terrible things between women and men ( your half)and there are all the wonderful things between women and men ( the half you miss).
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C: but as a major potential basis for resolution of conflicts between women and men, as a basis for unity between women and men.
J: Do you mean “post-fight, make-up sex�
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CB; There you go again. You have an exclusive emphasis of what is bad between women and men. You seem to be completely unaware of all the good stuff. I mean post-fun , post-helping each other lovingly, helpmates sex .
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What are you talking about, really? What sex are you talking about? And between whom? I know some heterosexuals who have loving, respectful sex.
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CB: Do tell. Are they freaks or something ?
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But that doesn’t make any case FOR heterosexual sex, given the totality of its expression on Earth against women’s bodies and psyches.
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CB: Here’s where I disagree. How do you know that the totality of heterosexual sex is against women’s bodies and psyches ? This is your truth, not mine or the women I know.
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I’m not willing to make the exceptional into the commonplace, in order to let men off the hook for objectifying, fetishising, degrading, humiliating, and bludgeoning women sexually, in political speech, and through more physically assaultive acts.
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CB: I’d say you have it backwards. The bad het sex is the exceptional. The good het sex is the mode.
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C: I’d say that intimacy and sex between women and men is one of the ways that men do learn what they know about women ( and vica versa).
J: This reminds me of a Dave Matthews lyric. (I’m not into Dave Matthews, for the record.) “Hike up you skirt a little more, and show your world to me.†I just want to yell at the fucker: you might try looking into her eyes for the location of her world, buddy. You might try engaging her intellectually and emotionally, to find out what her world is. You ain’t gonna find it in her vagina. What you’ll find there is ‘YOUR fetishised, obsessive world’ dude. Get your head out of there, unless it’s there to give her some real pleasure.â€
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CB: Telling there your version of what sex is. Having sex means making love. The vagina is a locus of great potential pleasure _for the woman_ ! Focus on pleasuring the woman is a feminist approach to sex. Attention to the vagina is a male feminist, pro-woman perspective. Do you want me to get some women to tell you that’s their truth ? That’s what they have told me.
The male supremacist approach to sex focuses on the penis, not the vagina.
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C: So, my thing would be to get the male supremacy out of sex, but not bang on heterosex.
J: You say this as if, generally and commonly, they are not fused at the hip, so to speak. In what universe is heterosex not a common site of male supremacy?
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CB; Again this is the whole dispute. I focus on ending male supremacy , in part, to make women and men’s sex together “revolutionary”, in the next society.
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C: In fact, frankly, I consider banging on heterosex as reactionary ( sorry; not you personally). I’m not kidding.
J: I believe you.
C: Anti-heterosex converges with the long term reactionary nature of the Christian Church’s attitude on sex etc.
J: I’m talking, first of all, about ending male supremacy, ending patriarchy, in all its forms and “positionsâ€. That includes heterosex. Sex uneffected CRAP might happen, in theory, but less so in practice, in my experience and that of most women I know. Women and men do find many things together in bed: mostly who each of them have become (in and by patriarchal harm to each of their humanities), and what their lives have cost them.
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CB; If you are saying that women and men should stop having sex or feel bad about having sex until we end male supremacy, I emphatically and “violently” (just kidding) disagree. And furthermore, I see the wonderfulness ( for lack of a better term) of sex between women and men, the ecstatic plearsure it can give, the fulfillment and love as having tremendous potential in defeating male supremacy, because, those wonders are had when women are happier. So, I am saying right out, that I am for finding ways to use heterosex to persuade men to give up male supremacy.
And I am saying that that is progressive, politically correct, anti-CRAP, whatever you want to call it.
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Please read the Communion chapter of Intercourse, and the rest of it, for a reality check on this sexuality that you think is some oasis from male supremacy.
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CB: It is not now an oasis. It is a potential locus of feminism.
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I’d call that view of yours a mirage. Men and women can and sometimes do find comfort together, and occasionally something that approximates intimacy, but most women I know have felt treated like an ejaculatory receptacle, not infrequently, when in bed with men. Hetero men, by and large, like to leave their sperm in various places, rarely in someone they consider fully, humanly real.
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CB; Again, this issue is not subject to solution based on your anecdotal reports.
However, anyway, I am saying that , yes, male supremacy is a main problem in heterosexual relations, even when the specific man may not be oppressing the specific woman and there is a significant level of equality in the overall relationship (women have accomplished a lot of equality in their individual relationships, in my opinion; that’s a long point that I don’t want to write now.), he may pay for male supremacy in general.
My thing is end male supremacy so as to have better heterosexual relationships.
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C: And it undermines one best potential bases for resolving the conflicts between women and men.
J: I think ending patriarchy would go much further in resolving those conflicts, but I’m a radical on these matters.
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CB: Maybe you should read what I wrote before. My proposal for improving heterosexual relationships is to end patriarchy. You seem to forget that I am a feminist. I’m for ending patriarchy.
I am a heterosexual feminist. Got it.
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C: So, there you have it honest and frank. Lets continue to mull over this in a friendly way.
J: I am genuinely interested to know where you are doing your research? Do women talk with you, openly and honestly, about the harm they endure from men? Do they talk about that feeling, while being penetrated, of knowing the man is off somewhere else, in fantasy about some woman he saw on the street or in a strip club, earlier that night? Do they tell you about waiting for the guy to get away from the computer, checking out women used and abused in prostitution (with a camera), while trying to appease their girlfriends’ rightful indignation and humiliation: “It’s just what I like to do, baby–there’s nothing disrespectful to you about me looking at these pictures. You’re a real woman. You’re the one I love. These pictures of whores mean nothing to me. It’s just my form of entertainment. Like you have Dr. Phil., and your soap operas.â€
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CB: Like I say, I am a sort of intimacy guy. Women trust me. They talk to me a lot. I’ve been a feminist for 30 plus years. They tend to be able to tell that I’m trustworthy. We talk about lots of things.
I’d say your perspective is cued to thinking that most interations between women and men , the sexual ones are negative.
Also, from what you say above, I’d say I disagree with you about the moral or political or male supremacist status of being sexually attracted to more than one woman , etc. Maybe next time I’ll get into this more
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C: Overall, I don’t cop to “I don’t understand women , because I’m a man.†It’s too much like that old male supremacist idea that ,well, “I can’t understand women;women are inscrutibleâ€. I understand them very well, especially after being in touch with them for 55 years. I _have_ been listening to what they say all this time.
J: And what are they saying, Charles?
CB: So, you want to know their secrets. I’m not supposed to kiss and tell.
I tell you some of it above. They talk about a lot of things. Actually, we don’t talk about sex most of the time.
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Is it possible that they aren’t telling you the deepest, most painful truths of their lives? (You see, that’s why gay men know more–many gay-friendly straight women tell their close gay boyfriends EVERYTHING–things they may not tell you EVER.)
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CB: Now isn’t this the whatever. I say women are telling me their intimate thoughts and feelings , pains and deepest concerns. You want to claim that they tell gay men things they wouldn’t tell me. I aay the opposite of what you say. I say they are telling me their intimate concerns. But then how are we going to decide whose correct ?
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C: I’d have to be very stupid not to have learned a lot about them.
J: I have do doubt whatsoever that you have learned enormously from the women in your life. It’s not clear here, yet, what you have learned, though.
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CB: I think you mean I haven’t said they are telling me what _you_think they have to say. But then, you don’t really know. You don’t know the women I am talking to.
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C: I understand them and I understand their complaints, and so it is my responsibility to do something about their complaints.
J: What are their complaints, Charles? What are you hearing?
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CB: They have menstrual pains, they don’t want you to have sex with other women, they need money, etc.
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C: A claim that “men ( white or of color)don’t understand women†is bit of a copout.
J: Oh, I agree with you on that. I just wish men who didn’t copout actually did understand women.
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CB; Well your wish comes true in my case, because I actually do understand women. Anything you want to know about them ?
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I don’t think it’s in any way impossible. I think it just doesn’t happen very much, that’s all. Possible? Yes. Probable? Due to men not wanting to look at their own privileges and entitlements, as men …not really.
C: Men, women are not a Ms-tery.
J: You’d never know it by the way hetero men write about women in song.
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CB; My point exactly.,
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C: So, just go and do the right thing.
J: I’m trying, I’m trying! What do you call this exchange we’re having?
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my posts, Charles. I will continue to read and respond to yours.
Julian
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Peace in !
CB
4 January 2006, 8:02 pmYolanda Carrington:
Charles,
I just read your last few posts. I’m not even going to address most of what you said, because that would take way to long and way too much space. But there is one comment that I can’t ignore:
“In fact, there is a elemental male supremacy in gay men’s choice of sex partners, i.e. men, not women.”
Charles, this is HOMOPHOBIA, straight up. I hope that you understand this, but if you don’t, I don’t know what else to say to you. In fact, I see that there is nothing anyone can say to get you to see anything.
But I will go ahead and say this too: You have got a long way to go before you can call yourself a feminist. You can’t even face the basic reality of gender oppression. You still think the “good stuff” negates the entire SYSTEM of men’s domination, a system that doesn’t give a damn how good or bad any human being is. This system is men’s domination and women’s subjugation, period. This system needs to be destroyed, yesterday.
Now about my challenge to you about being a man:
“I guess you mean ‘being a man with respect to how I act in relation to women’?”
No Charles, I did not mean that. I asked you how being a man MAKES YOU FEEL. Do you feel in control as a man? Do you feel tough? Can you cry? Do you feel superior to anyone because you are a man, or because of the kind of man you are? Do you feel inferior to any other man, and if you do, why? Do you feel the need to defend your manhood? Does this need require violence?
Because Charles, a male feminist who cares anything about ending gender oppression asks himself these questions. He takes the journey to understanding his own masculinity/manhood and what that means, for himself and for all the people in his life. After reading your posts and responses to others’ posts on Feral Scholar, I’ve concluded that you have not yet taken this journey. Now you can reply back here and deny this to the moon, but I will know exactly what’s going on by the answers that YOU GIVE, just like I do now.
Until every person—-man, woman, genderqueer, no-gender, transperson, queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or heterosexual—takes this journey, nothing in the world is going to change where gender is concerned. Ending oppression starts with the person you see in the mirror.
That’s all folks.
5 January 2006, 4:24 pmYolanda
elaina:
I’ll give a big hearty second to Yolanda’s last point, there. And may I be so bold to add that, well, the statment “I understand women”, to me, really illustrates the whole “naturalisation” idea. And it seems to be happening kinda in a loop, repeating.
With the very phrase, you are putting yourself apart from women and objectifying them. Looking at “women” as a large group (more than half of the homo sapiens in the world) through a very eensy-weensy microscope (your eyes) doesn’t quite work.
Of course, I think we can understand the mechanics of people, in a biological sense. Anyone who lives near a creek can go outside, pick up a frog, and slice it’s chest to watch it’s heart beat before it dies, if that’s what they really want to do, to “understand” the mechanics of a chordate-reptile-circulatory system in action. It would be gross, it would be messy. It would cause the life of that frog to end due to it’s “difference” from you. The frog would probably croak something awful, and it would hurt a lot.
I guess I feel like this is what happens, in my head, when men “naturalise” women. This is kinda how I feel when I hear a man say, emphatically and with all good intent, “But I UNDERSTAND women.” (Trust me, it’s something I’ve heard from literally every man I’ve known long enough to have more than 5 conversations with him.)
And then there’s the “You can’t know EVERYTHING” conversation that I’ve had with most of my male friends. Again, I’m pretty sure I’ve said that to every man I know, one way or another. I could deduce that all men think they know everything. Most of my male friends are well-off white males. Some are not so well-off. One is Black. I don’t know every man in the world. These are some of the things that cloud my lens when I’m trying to make a generalized statement about the lived experience of all men everywhere. I can’t make an assumption like that based on the demographic of my cultural-social network. I don’t think I can honestly say that I “understand” men.
I think that women in many parts of the world have lives that are shaped by what they see by looking at themselves through the eyes of men. But that would be really abstract, when it suffices to say that in many more other places, women are sliced and diced like frogs under the giant microscope that is male power, specifically white male power.
So I guess my call is for an immediate end to the vivisection of women’s psychsociobiological existence, everywhere now. When all I should really have to say is, please, stop ignoring the things in yourself that make you psychologically numb to us. Your need to “understand” us has hurt us. We haven’t been able to learn to abstractly understand ourselves because of this. You do not live apart from us. You don’t have the abstract “right” to pick up the scalpel and start slicing.
This is getting too long, sorry, y’all. I’m gonna go read now.
6 January 2006, 3:23 amCharles Brown:
Actually, I wrote a revision that was longer below, but I mistranscribed.
Reply second draft:
Yolanda argues:
Charles,
I just read your last few posts. I’m not even going to address most of what you said, because that would take way to long and way too much space. But there is one comment that I can’t ignore:
“In fact, there is a elemental male supremacy in gay men’s choice of sex partners, i.e. men, not women.â€
Charles, this is HOMOPHOBIA, straight up. I hope that you understand this, but if you don’t, I don’t know what else to say to you. In fact, I see that there is nothing anyone can say to get you to see anything.
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CB: Yolanda, disagree. This is a contradictory fact in the analysis of sexuality which is a la mode on the Left. It is evident, on the face of the structure of male homosexuality. Preference for men in any other area of life would be immediately noted as an expression of male supremacy. For various probable reasons , that I won’t speculate on now, (because they are speculations, and I want to stick close to the objective here), a blind eye is turned to this patent structure of sexuality.
It’s not the only structure , and there is a kind of opposite strucure in _some_ male homosexual personality types that are of course admiring of femininity, and thus, somewhat feminist. But this structure is foregrounded and the one I mention is left unspoken .
Like I said, I’m a teller of hard truths.
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But I will go ahead and say this too: You have got a long way to go before you can call yourself a feminist.
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CB: Sorry, too late. I have been a practicing feminist, or better women’s liberationist, for more than thirty years. Even though you are a woman, you can’t take that away from me. There are too many other women I am in touch with who give me a go.
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You can’t even face the basic reality of gender oppression. You still think the “good stuff†negates the entire SYSTEM of men’s domination, a system that doesn’t give a damn how good or bad any human being is. This system is men’s domination and women’s subjugation, period. This system needs to be destroyed, yesterday.
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CB: Disagree, comrade. Doesn’t seem an accurate statement at all that I “can’t even face the basic reality of gender oppression.” You must not be reading all I have posted to the list. I think what you mean is that you disagree with my description of gender oppression.
Your characterizations of what I said about the good stuff and the bad stuff is not accurate. It is more like the bad stuff does not negate the good stuff, such that one can only make a general characterization about heterosex as “bad” or male supremacist-ruined. Reality is contradictory. Your analysis tends to drastically understate one aspect of the contradiction.
No the system is not that stark. Women have been fighting back for millenia and for decades, and they have won some. For example, why do you think that women’s life expectancies are longer than men’s if it is not for victories in the long history of women’s liberationist struggles ? Also, part of it is that some of what men stupidly think of as their “privileges” - such as fighting in wars,or drinking heavy, or being in gangs , or working in tough jobs - are actually disadvantages parading as “superiorities.” It is not dominating women to be able to do these things and exclude women from doing them. If men established a custom that only men could beat themselves over the head with a hammer , and declared of a privilege, it wouldn’t objectively be “dominating” women. So, it is with a number of male “privileges”.
There is also a paternalistic/liberal side to male supremacy by which it is thought that women “need protection”. This is, as I say, paternalistic male supremacy, but the objective effect is that some women do get “protected” objectively, physically, whatever, and it results in better health. The whole thing of closer attention to our bodies, greater cleanliness being feminine actually redounds to better health for women. To the extent that men treat less attention to their bodies as a “privilege” or “superiority” they are stupidly actually and objectively being “inferior” and it has its objective impact in morbidity and mortality rates.
Whose “dominating” whom when the old man is sick and the old woman is taking care of him ?
These are not forms of women’s domination over men,but they are false forms of dominance from the perspective of men, and they are objective advantages of being a woman , in general.
It is not a correct women’s liberationist position to ignore the advances that women’s lib has made. As an example area, the laws of divorce and family law are a locus of basically revolutionary victories by women in the U.S. Divorce is readily available , no fault. Abortion is legal , though that front has to be defended, and poor women are denied it in the way capitalism does discriminate between classes of women. Children are overwhelmingly awarded to women in custody , and child support ordered against the father. Of course, since women do most of the childcare, it is meet and right that they are awarded custody, but the objective fact is that this is the opposite of male domination in the respect that it is quite a benefit to live with one’s children, one of the fundamental “benefits” of life. Property is strictly divided 50/50. There are a whole panoply of legal advances beyond this in divorce and family law that are basic feminist victories. I represent mostly women in divorces. I know. I’m at an advantage because my clients are women. My cousin is a family law judge. She knows. She tells me. Nothing wrong with it, but in this discussion it is bigtime evidence of the success of the feminist movement in the U.S.
Just as in the struggle for civil rights for Black and other oppressed races we look at how we have changed the law as a big measure of what has been accomplished, so with the women’s movement.
Divorce and family law is one area of advance. There are others. Law schools and maybe bar membership is close to 50/50 .
We should still pass a general ERA. We should have majority women legislatures, executives and judgeships for the rest of the time that there is a State power. That’s a long project. There are many other things still on a women’s liberationist agenda, but there are some real victories.
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Now about my challenge to you about being a man:
“I guess you mean ‘being a man with respect to how I act in relation to women’?â€
No Charles, I did not mean that.
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CB: So just tell me what you did mean. It is rather vague and general question.
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I asked you how being a man MAKES YOU FEEL.
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CB: Don’t you think that would be a sort of long thing to answer. Do you mean a man as opposed to a woman ? Do you mean “man” as in human being ?
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Do you feel in control as a man?
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CB: This is capitalism. I am not a capitalist. I feel on the edge, subject to the whims and caprice of the market, might lose my job and not be able to pay my bills. Of course, I don’t feel in control. What are you talking about ? Are you rich or something ?
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Do you feel tough?
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CB: Not much. I suppose I’d say I’m good in basketball and baseball, although “tough” isn’t exactly the word. More like “skilled”. I’m in good physical shape, especially for my age, but I haven’t had a physical fight for 40 years.
Actually, when I lose my job, I’m rather weak. Not really the tough it through well type. I cry.
Sometimes I’m honest to a fault , which can be kind of coldblooded. Like above where I mention the unmentionable male supremacist structure in male homosexuality.
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Can you cry?
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CB: Yes, See above. I don’t want to cry though.
By the way, this line of questions has underlying it a suspect stereotyping of women and men. Men are tough and unemotional , can’t cry , etc. Are you saying that the claim that generally, men are “mental” and women are “emotional” is an accurate stereotype ? Otherwise, why would you think I haven’t gone over these questions, or rather, why I would need to go over them ?
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Do you feel superior to anyone because you are a man,
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CB: No.
More specifically this would be do I feel superior to any woman because she’s a woman and I’m a man.
(Duhhhh)
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or because of the kind of man you are?
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CB: Because of the type of _person_ I am.
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Do you feel inferior to any other man, and if you do, why?
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CB: When a police officer stops me I feel physically inferior to him ( or her) because they have a gun and I don’t.
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Do you feel the need to defend your manhood?
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CB: No. What is abstract “manhood” ? Defend “it” from what ?
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Does this need require violence?
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CB: “Do you still beat your wife ? ”
There is no such need.
^
Because Charles, a male feminist who cares anything about ending gender oppression asks himself these questions.
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CB: And answers them thirty years ago, or really they are “sublated” or avoided when one takes up the cause of women’s liberation. Nothing in what I have written to this blog suggests I don’t understand fully the issues underlying this line of questions. You are talking to a straw_man_.
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He takes the journey to understanding his own masculinity/manhood and what that means, for himself and for all the people in his life.
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CB: Are you sure he does that ? Taking a journey to understand his own manhood doesn’t sound too feministic.
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After reading your posts and responses to others’ posts on Feral Scholar, I’ve concluded that you have not yet taken this journey.
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CB; The “journey ” you describe doesn’t sound like a correct path for a male feminist, but that’s just my first impression. Going on a journey into one’s Manhood, or whatever, understanding one’s manhood, is kind of bourgie, self-help , pop psych like. I’d frame it more socially: Journey into the relations between women and men, “womanman umoja”, as with Kwanzaa. Journey with brothers , journey with brothers and sisters. The focus on an individual man’s “manhood” is too bourgeois, and thereby anti-feminist, backward.
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Now you can reply back here and deny this to the moon, but I will know exactly what’s going on by the answers that YOU GIVE, just like I do now.
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CB: See reply above. You can call it “to the moon” all you want. That doesn’t make it to the moon. It is cogent.
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Until every person—-man, woman, genderqueer, no-gender, transperson, queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or heterosexual—takes this journey, nothing in the world is going to change where gender is concerned. Ending oppression starts with the person you see in the mirror.
That’s all folks.
Yolanda
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CB: This varies. Some people are doing a lot of oppression as individuals. I happen not to be one of those people. So, ….
Well, Micheal Jackson, “Man in the Mirror”. Of course, we are individuals, and we shouldn’t deny that. But this “journey” thing , I’d say you are taking on a profound and stern tone of voice, but the content of your analysis does not justify your tone.
“That’s all folks” is cartoon ending. I wrote it at the end of one of my anthro exams because it’s “looney tunes”.
:>)
6 January 2006, 10:53 amStan:
I gotta say, brother, that I find your thesis on gay men to be bizarre, especially when I am familiar with your thinking and wirting on other topics that has been celar and well reasoned. This may be the most tortured version of left-homophobia I have ever seen.
I’m in the middle of some very hectic organizing for the next couple of months, but since Charles has chosen a heavy volume of fire strategy here (Damn, comrade, these posts are LOOOONG), and I don’t have time to respond in detail (and I miss De’s wit right now), I have decided to go ahead and paste in Dworkin’s speech, linked by Julien earlier. Pretty much says where the rubber meets the road on this topic, I think:
LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE
WRITINGS 1976-1989
by
Andrea Dworkin
Part III
TAKE BACK THE DAY
I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce
During Which There Is No Rape
1983
Copyright © 1984 , 1988, 1993 by Andrea Dworkin.
All rights reserved.
This was a speech given at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men in the fall of 1983 in St Paul, Minnesota. One of the organizers kindly sent me a tape and a transcript of my speech. The magazine of the men’s movement, M., published it. I was teaching in Minneapolis. This was before Catharine MacKinnon and I had proposed or developed the civil rights approach to pornography as a legislative strategy. Lots of people were in the audience who later became key players in the fight for the civil rights bill. I didn’t know them then. It was an audience of about 500 men, with scattered women. I spoke from notes and was actually on my way to Idaho–an eight-hour trip each way (because of bad air connections) to give a one-hour speech on Art–fly out Saturday, come back Sunday, can’t talk more than one hour or you’ll miss the only plane leaving that day, you have to run from the podium to the car for the two-hour drive to the plane. Why would a militant feminist under this kind of pressure stop off on her way to the airport to say hi to 500 men? In a sense, this was a feminist dream-come-true. What would you say to 500 men if you could? This is what I said, how I used my chance. The men reacted with considerable love and support and also with considerable anger. Both. I hurried out to get my plane, the first hurdle for getting to Idaho. Only one man in the 500 threatened me physically. He was stopped by a woman bodyguard (and friend) who had accompanied me.
***
I have thought a great deal about how a feminist, like myself, addresses an audience primarily of political men who say that they are antisexist. And I thought a lot about whether there should be a qualitative difference in the kind of speech I address to you. And then I found myself incapable of pretending that I really believe that that qualitative difference exists. I have watched the men’s movement for many years. I am close with some of the people who participate in it. I can’t come here as a friend even though I might very much want to. What I would like to do is to scream: and in that scream I would have the screams of the raped, and the sobs of the battered; and even worse, in the center of that scream I would have the deafening sound of women’s silence, that silence into which we are born because we are women and in which most of us die.
And if there would be a plea or a question or a human address in that scream, it would be this: why are you so slow? Why are you so slow to understand the simplest things; not the complicated ideological things. You understand those. The simple things. The cliches. Simply that women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you are.
And also: that we do not have time. We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, “Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way.” That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.
And it is happening for a simple reason. There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body, exercised by someone who feels he has a right to exercise it, exercised in public and exercised in private. It is the sum and substance of women’s oppression.
It is not done 5000 miles away or 3000 miles away. It is done here and it is done now and it is done by the people in this room as well as by other contemporaries: our friends, our neighbors, people that we know. Women don’t have to go to school to learn about power. We just have to be women, walking down the street or trying to get the housework done after having given one’s body in marriage and then having no rights over it.
The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence.
It is an extraordinary thing to try to understand and confront why it is that men believe–and men do believe–that they have the right to rape. Men may not believe it when asked. Everybody raise your hand who believes you have the right to rape. Not too many hands will go up. It’s in life that men believe they have the right to force sex, which they don’t call rape. And it is an extraordinary thing to try to understand that men really believe that they have the right to hit and to hurt. And it is an equally extraordinary thing to try to understand that men really believe that they have the right to buy a woman’s body for the purpose of having sex: that that is a right. And it is very amazing to try to understand that men believe that the seven-billion-dollar-a-year industry that provides men with cunts is something that men have a right to.
That is the way the power of men is manifest in real life. That is what theory about male supremacy means. It means you can rape. It means you can hit. It means you can hurt. It means you can buy and sell women. It means that there is a class of people there to provide you with what you need. You stay richer than they are, so that they have to sell you sex. Not just on street corners, but in the workplace. That’s another right that you can presume to have: sexual access to any woman in your environment, when you want. Now, the men’s movement suggests that men don’t want the kind of power I have just described. I’ve actually heard explicit whole sentences to that effect. And yet, everything is a reason not to do something about changing the fact that you do have that power.
Hiding behind guilt, that’s my favorite. I love that one. Oh, it’s horrible, yes, and I’m so sorry. You have the time to feel guilty. We don’t have the time for you to feel guilty. Your guilt is a form of acquiescence in what continues to occur. Your guilt helps keep things the way they are.
I have heard in the last several years a great deal about the suffering of men over sexism. Of course, I have heard a great deal about the suffering of men all my life. Needless to say, I have read Hamlet. I have read King Lear. I am an educated woman. I know that men suffer. This is a new wrinkle. Implicit in the idea that this is a different kind of suffering is the claim, I think, that in part you are actually suffering because of something that you know happens to someone else. That would indeed be new.
But mostly your guilt, your suffering, reduces to: gee, we really feel so bad. Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don’t do, what you want to do, what you don’t want to want to do but are going to do anyway. I think most of your distress is: gee, we really feel so bad. And I’m sorry that you feel so bad–so uselessly and stupidly bad–because there is a way in which this really is your tragedy. And I don’t mean because you can’t cry. And I don’t mean because there is no real intimacy in your lives. And I don’t mean because the armor that you have to live with as men is stultifying: and I don’t doubt that it is. But I don’t mean any of that.
I mean that there is a relationship between the way that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that grinds you up and spits you out: the war machine that you go through just like that woman went through Larry Flynt’s meat grinder on the cover of Hustler. You damn well better believe that you’re involved in this tragedy and that it’s your tragedy too. Because you’re turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live. It is also part of the economy that you frequently claim to protest.
And the problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you. The pimps and the warmongers speak for you. Rape and war are not so different. And what the pimps and the warmongers do is that they make you so proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard. And they take that acculturated sexuality and they put you in little uniforms and they send you out to kill and to die. Now, I am not going to suggest to you that I think that’s more important than what you do to women, because I don’t.
But I think that if you want to look at what this system does to you, then that is where you should start looking: the sexual politics of aggression; the sexual politics of militarism. I think that men are very afraid of other men. That is something that you sometimes try to address in your small groups, as if if you changed your attitudes towards each other, you wouldn’t be afraid of each other.
But as long as your sexuality has to do with aggression and your sense of entitlement to humanity has to do with being superior to other people, and there is so much contempt and hostility in your attitudes towards women and children, how could you not be afraid of each other? I think that you rightly perceive–without being willing to face it politically–that men are very dangerous: because you are.
The solution of the men’s movement to make men less dangerous to each other by changing the way you touch and feel each other is not a solution. It’s a recreational break.
These conferences are also concerned with homophobia. Homophobia is very important: it is very important to the way male supremacy works. In my opinion, the prohibitions against male homosexuality exist in order to protect male power. Do it to her. That is to say: as long as men rape, it is very important that men be directed to rape women. As long as sex is full of hostility and expresses both power over and contempt for the other person, it is very important that men not be declassed, stigmatized as female, used similarly. The power of men as a class depends on keeping men sexually inviolate and women sexually used by men. Homophobia helps maintain that class power: it also helps keep you as individuals safe from each other, safe from rape. If you want to do something about homophobia, you are going to have to do something about the fact that men rape, and that forced sex is not incidental to male sexuality but is in practice paradigmatic.
Some of you are very concerned about the rise of the Right in this country, as if that is something separate from the issues of feminism or the men’s movement. There is a cartoon I saw that brought it all together nicely. It was a big picture of Ronald Reagan as a cowboy with a big hat and a gun. And it said: “A gun in every holster; a pregnant woman in every home. Make America a man again.” Those are the politics of the Right.
If you are afraid of the ascendancy of fascism in this country–and you would be very foolish not to be right now–then you had better understand that the root issue here has to do with male supremacy and the control of women; sexual access to women; women as reproductive slaves; private ownership of women. That is the program of the Right. That is the morality they talk about. That is what they mean. That is what they want. And the only opposition to them that matters is an opposition to men owning women.
What’s involved in doing something about all of this? The men’s movement seems to stay stuck on two points. The first is that men don’t really feel very good about themselves. How could you? The second is that men come to me or to other feminists and say: “What you’re saying about men isn’t true. It isn’t true of me. I don’t feel that way. I’m opposed to all of this.”
And I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues. Tell the novelists who think that rape is wonderful. Tell Larry Flynt. Tell Hugh Hefner. There’s no point in telling me. I’m only a woman. There’s nothing I can do about it. These men presume to speak for you. They are in the public arena saying that they represent you. If they don’t, then you had better let them know.
Then there is the private world of misogyny: what you know about each other; what you say in private life; the exploitation that you see in the private sphere; the relationships called love, based on exploitation. It’s not enough to find some traveling feminist on the road and go up to her and say: “Gee, I hate it.”
Say it to your friends who are doing it. And there are streets out there on which you can say these things loud and dear, so as to affect the actual institutions that maintain these abuses. You don’t like pornography? I wish I could believe it’s true. I will believe it when I see you on the streets. I will believe it when I see an organized political opposition. I will believe it when pimps go out of business because there are no more male consumers.
You want to organize men. You don’t have to search for issues. The issues are part of the fabric of your everyday lives.
I want to talk to you about equality, what equality is and what it means. It isn’t just an idea. It’s not some insipid word that ends up being bullshit. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with all those statements like: “Oh, that happens to men too.” I name an abuse and I hear: “Oh, it happens to men too.” That is not the equality we are struggling for. We could change our strategy and say: well, okay, we want equality; we’ll stick something up the ass of a man every three minutes.
You’ve never heard that from the feminist movement, because for us equality has real dignity and importance–it’s not some dumb word that can be twisted and made to look stupid as if it had no real meaning.
As a way of practicing equality, some vague idea about giving up power is useless. Some men have vague thoughts about a future in which men are going to give up power or an individual man is going to give up some kind of privilege that he has. That is not what equality means either.
Equality is a practice. It is an action. It is a way of life. It is a social practice. It is an economic practice. It is a sexual practice. It can’t exist in a vacuum. You can’t have it in your home if, when the people leave the home, he is in a world of his supremacy based on the existence of his cock and she is in a world of humiliation and degradation because she is perceived to be inferior and because her sexuality is a curse.
This is not to say that the attempt to practice equality in the home doesn’t matter. It matters, but it is not enough. If you love equality, if you believe in it, if it is the way you want to live–not just men and women together in a home, but men and men together in a home and women and women together in a home–if equality is what you want and what you care about, then you have to fight for the institutions that will make it socially real.
It is not just a matter of your attitude. You can’t think it and make it exist. You can’t try sometimes, when it works to your advantage, and throw it out the rest of the time. Equality is a discipline. It is a way of life. It is a political necessity to create equality in institutions. And another thing about equality is that it cannot coexist with rape. It cannot. And it cannot coexist with pornography or with prostitution or with the economic degradation of women on any level, in any way. It cannot coexist, because implicit in all those things is the inferiority of women.
I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent.
The things the men’s movement has wanted are things worth having. Intimacy is worth having. Tenderness is worth having. Cooperation is worth having. A real emotional life is worth having. But you can’t have them in a world with rape. Ending homophobia is worth doing. But you can’t do it in a world with rape. Rape stands in the way of each and every one of those things you say you want. And by rape you know what I mean. A judge does not have to walk into this room and say that according to statute such and such these are the elements of proof. We’re talking about any kind of coerced sex, including sex coerced by poverty.
You can’t have equality or tenderness or intimacy as long as there is rape, because rape means terror. It means that part of the population lives in a state of terror and pretends–to please and pacify you–that it doesn’t. So there is no honesty. How can there be? Can you imagine what it is like to live as a woman day in and day out with the threat of rape? Or what it is like to live with the reality? I want to see you use those legendary bodies and that legendary strength and that legendary courage and the tenderness that you say you have in behalf of women; and that means against the rapists, against the pimps, and against the pornographers. It means something more than a personal renunciation. It means a systematic, political, active, public attack. And there has been very little of that.
I came here today because I don’t believe that rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever or with the economic degradation of women on any level, in any way. It cannot coexist, because implicit in all those things is the inferiority of women. I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent. The things the men’s movement has wanted are things worth having. Intimacy is worth having. Tenderness is worth having. Cooperation is worth having. A real emotional life is worth having. But you can’t have them in a world with rape. Ending homophobia is worth doing. But you can’t do it in a world with rape. Rape stands in the way of each and every one of those things you say you want. And by rape you know what I mean. A judge does not have to walk into this room and say that according to statute such and such these are the elements of proof. We’re talking about any kind of coerced sex, including sex coerced by poverty. You can’t have equality or tenderness or intimacy as long as there is rape, because rape means terror. It means that part of the population lives in a state of terror and pretends–to please and pacify you–that it doesn’t. So there is no honesty. How can there be ? Can you imagine what it is like to live as a woman day in and day out with the threat of rape? Or what it is like to live with the reality? I want to see you use those legendary bodies and that legendary strength and that legendary courage and the tenderness that you say you have in behalf of women; and that means against the rapists, against the pimps, and against the pornographers. It means something more than a personal renunciation. It means a systematic, political, active, public attack. And there has been very little of that.
I came here today because I don’t believe that rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.
We do not want to do the work of helping you to believe in your humanity. We cannot do it anymore. We have always tried. We have been repaid with systematic exploitation and systematic abuse. You are going to have to do this yourselves from now on and you know it.
The shame of men in front of women is, I think, an appropriate response both to what men do do and to what men do not do. I think you should be ashamed. But what you do with that shame is to use it as an excuse to keep doing what you want and to keep not doing anything else; and you’ve got to stop. You’ve got to stop. Your psychology doesn’t matter. How much you hurt doesn’t matter in the end any more than how much we hurt matters. If we sat around and only talked about how much rape hurt us, do you think there would have been one of the changes that you have seen in this country in the last fifteen years? There wouldn’t have been.
It is true that we had to talk to each other. How else, after all, were we supposed to find out that each of us was not the only woman in the world not asking for it to whom rape or battery had ever happened? We couldn’t read it in the newspapers, not then. We couldn’t find a book about it. But you do know and now the question is what you are going to do; and so your shame and your guilt are very much beside the point. They don’t matter to us at all, in any way. They’re not good enough. They don’t do anything.
As a feminist, I carry the rape of all the women I’ve talked to over the past ten years personally with me. As a woman, I carry my own rape with me. Do you remember pictures that you’ve seen of European cities during the plague, when there were wheelbarrows that would go along and people would just pick up corpses and throw them in? Well, that is what it is like knowing about rape. Piles and piles and piles of bodies that have whole lives and human names and human faces.
I speak for many feminists, not only myself, when I tell you that I am tired of what I know and sad beyond any words I have about what has already been done to women up to this point, now, up to 2:24 p.m. on this day, here in this place.
And I want one day of respite, one day off, one day in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to the old, and I am asking you to give it to me. And how could I ask you for less–it is so little. And how could you offer me less: it is so little. Even in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.
I dare you to try it. I demand that you try it. I don’t mind begging you to try it. What else could you possibly be here to do? What else could this movement possibly mean? What else could matter so much?
And on that day, that day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can’t begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing because it is nothing: it is not real; it is not true. But on that day it becomes real. And then, instead of rape we will for the first time in our lives–both men and women–begin to experience freedom. If you have a conception of freedom that includes the existence of rape, you are wrong. You cannot change what you say you want to change. For myself, I want to experience just one day of real freedom before I die. I leave you here to do that for me and for the women whom you say you love.
6 January 2006, 12:19 pmYolanda Carrington:
Charles,
There will be no more dialogue between me and you, until you learn how to read. Your last post was pure manipulative faux-intellectual WHITE SUPREMACIST patriarchal sophistry. And I was right: You ain’t a feminist.
You ain’t radical either.
Goddamn.
Yolanda
6 January 2006, 1:01 pmCharles Brown:
* I gotta say, brother, that I find your thesis on gay men to be bizarre, especially when I am familiar with your thinking and wirting on other topics that has been celar and well reasoned. This may be the most tortured version of left-homophobia I have ever seen.
^^^^^
CB: .
what shall we call it,comrade, disingenuous to ignore the obvious structural fact that male homosexuality is an exclusion of women, especially once it is pointed out. It’s almost a tautology. In fact, I said this to you in a private email exchange several years ago.
It’s a bit male supremacist to ignore the male suprmacism of men because they are gay.
My writing and thinking on this is clear and well reasoned too,not in the least “tortured”. What is unclear to you about it ?
It is more an issue of people not wanting to hear something that contradicts some of their fundamental thinking.
^^^^^
I’m in the middle of some very hectic organizing for the next couple of months, but since Charles has chosen a heavy volume of fire strategy here (Damn, comrade, these posts are LOOOONG),
^^^^
CB: This one is real short. You know .Somebody writes a looooong response to me, I don’t want to ignore part of what they have to say, or give it short shrift, so I’m sort of have to write a loooong response so they won’t say I ignored some of what they said;
^^^^^
and I don’t have time to respond in detail (and I miss De’s wit right now), I have decided to go ahead and paste in Dworkin’s speech, linked by Julien earlier. Pretty much says where the rubber meets the road on this topic, I think:
6 January 2006, 2:31 pmStan:
Oooookay… so in other words, for people to practice non-sexist sexuality, everyone must become practicing bisexuals?
When sexuality is constructed socially with compulsory heterosexuality as its reference point, and male aggression opposite female submission as its paradigm, then heterosexuality is the only NON-sexist form of sexual practice?
You don’t see how preposterous this can become? Do you think all gay males belong to some kind of secret society, that has decided “we won’t bless women with our dicks as a way to lord our male supremacy over them. Only other men will have access to the sacred phallus.” ???
I don’t know a single gay man who excludes women from his life. Not one. They do not, however, burden their female friends with all the bullshit that these same women experience with around 99.9% of the straight males they know. Maybe that’s why many women find it easier to strike up friendships with gay men than with so-called “straight” ones.
I just don’t see how this is exclusionary. I’d wager most women would be delighted if the rest of us “excluded” them from our hard-on imaginations and learned to treat them as equal human beings.
6 January 2006, 9:30 pmelaina:
I know I don’t know any gay men, well, at least none has ever confided to me that they like to spend time gazing at images of tortured women for hours, or playing manipulative mind games with them, or a combination of all thee above.
Even the gay men I know who don’t strike me as what society might call “feminine” or whatever, I mean, if we talk sex shit we talk sex shit about sex with men. Make comments about guys walking by, that kinda thing.
Don’t mean they didn’t get hooked on porn.
But everybody’s got their issue. Women get hooked on porn, too. I think that’s something that’s very bad for us. But I’m off topic.
And I’m against the assumption that being “sexed”, or calling oneself gay or bi or queer, assumes a general feeling of superiority to one’s own biological sex, or a disgust for members of the opposite sex of any kind.
Human relationships can’t be qualified as simply as “gay man no like women.” Men do not only “like” women in sexual ways, in the world that we live in. They depend upon us too much for a lot of shit work. Maybe we shouldn’t begrudge them the opportunity to learn from each other, see up close how male-dominant culture has influenced the ways they see “desire.”
Intersectionality. It’s a beautiful thing. It sometimes makes life kinda hard for me. In other ways it makes me want to find ways to get through the hard shit.
Face it. The material reality that 2 men can effectively love one another in a way that isn’t immoral gives many of the dominant (read: domineering) ideologies of Gringolandia the middle-finger. On many levels.
So I guess I’m saying it’s kinda exclusionary to say that male/male love irreconcilibly “exclusionary”, as far as cultivating male relationships with women that aren’t based on CRAP. (Julian. Thank you so much for telling me about this term.)
Y’all have a good night.
7 January 2006, 3:10 amStan:
If ever anyone wants to know — given the Feminisim 101 that this blog aspires to — how utterly uninformed the left is on the most basic issues concerning gender, drop in and read the thread (you’ll have to read it from bottom to top) at http://neue-einheit.com/mixed/li-diskussion/li-2.htm
These posts are form very erudite “marxists.” But the quality of discourse on the subject of gender is shockingly shallow and bounces between arrogant dismissal and liberalism.
This is really the result of the religious marxist tendency to only read what has been written by the handful of feminists who have escaped the de facto Marxist index librorum prohibitum by continuing to adhere to the anachronisms presented here in Engels. If they read anything beyond Engels at all.
Long conversation on the phone with Yolanda yesterday, and we had to agree that the reason marxism as a political tradition had not engaged deeply on gender is precisely because it is still led by men who are largely unwilling to deal with the implicaitons of feminism for their own fundamental (male) identities. In other words, deeply pre-rational sexualized anxiety.
I am part of that movement and tradition, but if I don’t see some movement PDQ on the part of more of my own comrades, then I will seriosuly consider giving up on this bridge-building and defect.
Women are told to wait by the left on rape and every other goddamned thing for the workers revolution. They are told that this year. They were told that last year. They were told that in 2003… count backward, for the last almost a century, Marxists have been telling women that living in perpetual fear and being subordinated in their very homes is not as important as the next antiwar or trade union struggle. Many of those same women have participated in those very struggles, in the hope of some reciprocity. That hope has not been answered.
Secondary contradiction my ass!
Shame.
7 January 2006, 5:44 pmCharles Brown:
Oooookay… so in other words, for people to practice non-sexist sexuality, everyone must become practicing bisexuals?
^^^
CB; Well, lesbians pretty much practice non-sexist sex, in the structural sense discussed here. Also, I don’t accept that all heterosex is sexist. Heterosex is a great equalizer in many instances. Many women have equal power in their particular or individual relationship.
^^^^
When sexuality is constructed socially with compulsory heterosexuality as its reference point, and male aggression opposite female submission as its paradigm, then heterosexuality is the only NON-sexist form of sexual practice?
^^^
CB: Lesbian sexual practice is non-sexist, structurally.
I know you are writing about cumpulsory hetersexuality, but I haven’t quite digested it yet, so I can’t answer.
I kind of know what you mean by male aggression opposite female submission paradigm, but I’d have to put “aggression” and ” submission” in parenthesis. I’d characterize the hetersexual act as a non-atagonistic unity and struggle of opposites. This relates to the contradiction between men and women as non-antagonistic ( I did not say SECONDARY). Not secondary; non-antagonistic. There’s tension , so to speak, there are even cries out loud, but it is _not_ a fight. It is active peace, frantic peace , even.
Women have the paradoxical _power_ of “weakness”. “She stoops to conquer” and all that.
^^^^^^
You don’t see how preposterous this can become?
^^^^
CB: As I say, I don’t go down the path you set up here, so I don’t get preposterous. I can see that what you are saying might get a bit preposterous, but you aren’t accurately paraphrasing what I am saying. I don’t ascribe to the “compulsory heterosexuality” thesis nor the idea that the male is “aggressive” in the sense of fighting in sex. There’s a division of labor in the sexual act, as Marx and Engels put it. Nature requires that the male be rigid and dry and the female soft and wet. It is a profound misunderstanding and mischaracterization to call this “aggression” and “submission”, and I mean really profoundly wrong. Exactly wrong. It is the absolute opposite of aggression and submission. It is peace and love.
This is why rape is _not_ sex. It is assault.
^^^^^^^
Do you think all gay males belong to some kind of secret society, that has decided “we won’t bless women with our dicks as a way to lord our male supremacy over them. Only other men will have access to the sacred phallus.†???
^^^^
CB: No , I think their male supremacy is a mixture of conscious and unconscious as that of heterosexual men’s male supremacy is.
I would speculate that at the origin of male supremacy in places like Greece civilization, that the male supremacists then may have openly and consciously founded an institution like male pedersty based on the superiority of males and thus the superiority of having sex with a superior “being”. But I don’t know. The only reason they might have done it openly and spoken about it is that there was nobody who they considered superior to them, so why would they be ashamed to say it. But as I say , that’s speculation. We do have the fact of there being the institution, and of it arising in the era that the male supremacist family, private property and the state arise in Greece.
^^^^^
I don’t know a single gay man who excludes women from his life. Not one. They do not, however, burden their female friends with all the bullshit that these same women experience with around 99.9% of the straight males they know. Maybe that’s why many women find it easier to strike up friendships with gay men than with so-called “straight†ones.
^^^^
CB: I see it differently. Not that gay men don’t have women in their lives, but that I don’t know one straight man that excludes women from their life, so on that score, straight men are no more male supremacist than gay men.
As to engaging women intimately , I think that is men’s responsibility. Relationships are not easy for women or men in this society. Bourgeois individualism , bourgeoies personality infects both women and men, and thereby their relationships. Bullshit goes in both directions. Men do not break women’s hearts more often than women break men’s hearts. The male supremacism of our society is _not_ that men bring bullshit or heartbreak into relationships and women do not. So, my take is the opposite of yours in that regard. I give feminist credit to the men who take on the struggle of relationships, as I give the women credit for sticking in their. I give both credit, but for this discussion I give the men credit vis-a-vis men who don’t take on relationship struggles, trying to become intimate and close to women.
^^^^
I just don’t see how this is exclusionary. I’d wager most women would be delighted if the rest of us “excluded†them from our hard-on imaginations and learned to treat them as equal human beings
^^^
10 January 2006, 4:54 pmCB: Ah that’s a fundamental wager, the first part of what you say. Of couree they want to be treated as equals. In relatinships, they wouldn’t even mind if we let them have 51% of the power, affirmative action, you know, more than equality. As to whether they “want to be alone” , I don’t observe a generalized “Greta Garbo” philosophy among women. Put it this way. A lot of them do not want to be alone. Nor do I observe that women want to have sex less than men. As far as I can tell, that’s myth and a tactic in the Battle of the Sexes.
Julian Real:
Hi Charles.
I’ve been away from this discussion for a while, not out of wish, but out of having other things to attend to. I’m back.
And I have to say, you deeply discourage me. I cannot know whether you really do not get it, or whether you are playing some sort of game here. And I’m not sure which, if either, would dishearten me more.
I wish to assert that I think Yolanda’s analysis of your political position is accurate, based on what you are arguing here in this thread. I don’t find the argument that “elsewhere I have made my feminist commitments clear” to paraphrase you, meaningful or relevant. Is there some reason the feminism you support and are an active part of for the last several decades shows up on this thread as weak, misinformed, and out of touch with reality? None of us has the right to fall back on our laurels, if indeed we have any, when it comes to the battle to end CRAP. CRAP waits for no one–it destroys with a fury and callousness insensitive and oblivious to all the best of our intentions.
I specifically agree with this assessment of Yolanda’s:
“Your last post was pure manipulative faux-intellectual WHITE SUPREMACIST patriarchal sophistry. And I was right: You ain’t a feminist.
You ain’t radical either.
Goddamn.”
Well said, in my opinion. And those of us that are radically feminist here are entitled to our views, and perhaps the fact that you come off looking like a homophobic bigot, as well as thoroughly ignorant on the matter of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory gender dualism, should indicate to you that you have some studying to do, before approaching these subjects with a tone or style that enables you to not listen carefully to what Yolanda, Stan, and Elaine are saying here. Feel free to say what you will, but you seem to be digging yourself into one massive hole of individualistic, non-radical thinking/feeling on the matter of gender relations and sexual politics. Have you read Sexual Politics, by Kate Millett. It is where many feminists started their intellectual journey, their deep understanding of what woman-hate is, of what sexism is, and perhaps it would serve you well to read this ground-breaking book. Something certainly needs to happen here, to your conceptual framework, to your sensibilities, to your heart, because you are simply coming across as intellectually and emotionally naive, and we need you in the struggle better armed than that.
Consider this: go back and reread your response to me, and thank you for that response, btw. In place of every mention of patriarchy, gender, men, women, put capitalism, the bourgeoisie, the proletarian workers, etc. What you will find is that your arguments, when “translated” as such, reveal a very individualistic, liberal, interpersonal approach to challenging the patriarchy problem. Would you offer these as remarks or remedies to the problem of capitalism:
1. Better intimate relations between workers and the owning class?
2. Some people really like working in capitalism?
3. Some ruling class folks and workers find real meaning in their work “together”.
4. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are natural opposites?
Where do you get your “leftist” analysis of gender and patriarchy? Perhaps from Marx and Engels? Stan has argued effectively and sufficiently that MacKinnon, and I’ll add Dworkin, have replaced Marx and Engels as the theorists to go to for the most cogent analysis on male supremacy and the oppression of women by men in patriarchy.
To be clear, I am not saying the class analysis of Engels should be “modified” to fit the problem of gender/patriarchy. I am pointing out that your solutions to the gender/patriarchy problem are no where near as structurally-politically complex, located in reality, or sound as those you hold about economic exploitation. Why is that? The answer lies in what Yolanda and Stan have been saying to you recently, and it appears your ear is so attuned to what white European dead men had to say on this subject that you cannot hear the radical living.
Your views, represented here, are about as far from feminist as Howard Stern’s. And, to be clear, I do not adhere myself to a (largely white) male left that refuses to see how patriarchy and heterosexism work to the detriment of all women and gay men. I link myself to a radical feminism that wants patriarchy gone, “yesterday” as Yolanda says, which includes taking down (radically transforming) race, gender, and heterosexuality as constructed, understood, mandated, and enforced by patriarchy.
What I expect to see from feminist men is a full on confrontation, respectful if possible, disrespectful if not, with men about white heterosexual ruling class men’s sexist/heterosexist identities, behaviour, and their institutions. Full on. I don’t consider considerate, loving fucking to be the new or old standard of what it means to be a male feminist, and that isn’t because I’m gay, either. I don’t put out for men, I don’t suck cock or fuck men (or women) so you can’t so easily get away with pegging me as one of those super-male-supremacist gay boys. I do not, in any way, worship or adore the phallus, as you seem to suggest we gay folks do. In my experience around homosocial white hetero men, they worship their own cocks, and obilisks erected to salute them, such as the Washington Monument, at least as much as sexually active gay men enjoy their own. I find hetero men far more cocksure and arrogant than gay men, but perhaps I’m missing encounters with those “Tom of Finland” fantasy men you seem to think constitute gay men en masse. And, just in case you weren’t paying attention, many hetero men put out for gay men in shadowy areas. Living on the DL, is what it’s called. So let’s not make too many assumptions about what hetero men do and don’t do with other cock.
Should workers (meaning, of course, workers who do the out-of-house low, moderate, or well-paid-job-work that counts as real work by marxists)–should workers work on eroticising the “opposition” between the proles and plebes, as you suggest should happen between men and women? Should workers seek more intimacy with the the owning class, as a solution to ending capitalism? Your naturalisation of gender dualism and heteropatriarchal sexuality is showing. I don’t see you similarly naturalising exploited workers and the ruling class.
Too many marxist men, in my direct experience, including my experience on Stan’s blog, ignore work that isn’t paid that real people do. Real people–women–work day and night, but much of their real work is not part of what is considered to be work in capitalist economies, unless one dimension of that work is done at “real” jobs–the kind men generally do. Globally, of course, poor unpaid women of Colour do more work than any other demographic, like hauling water for miles, but that’s not “work” in the marxist sense, is it?
And I agree with this comment of Stan’s:
“I gotta say, brother, that I find your thesis on gay men to be bizarre… This may be the most tortured version of left-homophobia I have ever seen.”
I have no idea what you are talking about either, and I’d like to. This abstract structural thing you keep referencing–is that connected to real people’s lives in any systematic way? I’ve seen similarly flawed arguments before about gay men, btw, so you are not alone here, but you are sure not making any more sense than the others who try and get away with what you, very homophobically, claim. And your claims that this is somehow “what is true that leftist men are afraid to say out loud” doesn’t hold water with me, Charles. Hetero men all along the Euro-whitemale Right to Left line make the points you have made, with all the projections about and distortion of gay humanity you reinforce into this conversation. That’s hostile to my existence, in case you weren’t aware of it, and to Yolanda’s. Hostile. Now, is that meaningful to you? Is that something you can own “like a real man” and take responsibility for?
You make so many assumptions about gay men, and what gay men do, that I have to wonder if you’ve ever met a few real-life gay men. “Intimacy” is something I’ve seen far more of BETWEEN gay men and their women friends, than between hetero men and hetero women. I know of very few hetero men who have hetero women as close friends, actually. Unless they have sexual access to those women, of course. Hetero men, in my experience, get real chummy with women they want to lay.
This “lesbian sex = non-patriarchal sex” theorem of yours is totally absurd. Lesbians struggle as any other demographic does, to get CRAP out of our sex-lives. Ever hear of a strap-on? Your arguments are really weak here. I have already acknowledged that hetero men are capable, and sometimes do, seek and find real sexual intimacy with women. What I am saying is that this is often a kind gesture men offer women while those caring men also (before and after the transcendental orgasmic moments) control and demean women, sometimes the woman they are with, sometimes women generally and grotesquely, when out with the guys. Now do you want to tell me hetero men in groups do not speak disrespectfully about women and their body parts, ’cause I got the video that proves otherwise. And what do you do, specifically, when hetero men around you speak disrespectfully about women and their body parts? What, exactly, do you do?
And speaking of homosexual men hanging around together: I see this homosocial behaviour play out rampantly in straight culture. Men fuck the women they “love” and then hang with their close buddies talking all about the ass they just got, rendering those women they were “loving” public property–entertainment for hetero guy-group mockery. Are you familiar with this social misogynist phenomenon, Charles, or do you only hang out with women?
And, what exactly is “opposite” about men and women? How does one person having a vulva and another having a penis make those two people “opposite”? Please explain this fully.
I don’t consider women to be my (or men’s, or women’s) “opposite” in any political, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, or anatomical regard. Physiologically alone, we all have (more or less) erogenous areas of our bodies; males of the human species have fused labia which patriarchal English calls scrotums, and enlarged clitorises men call by so many names there isn’t enough room in cyberspace to list them all. That includes hetero men, btw. The amount of time I see hetero men referring to or touching their crotches, you’d think they, not gay men, should be awarded the gold medal for phallus worship.
So please explain this “politic” to me, as I want to understand exactly what you are talking about.
I think Stan also hits the nail on the head with this comment:
“This is really the result of the religious marxist tendency to only read what has been written by the handful of feminists who have escaped the de facto Marxist index librorum prohibitum by continuing to adhere to the anachronisms presented here in Engels. If they read anything beyond Engels at all.”
Have you read MacKinnon–a whole book of hers, I mean? Have you read Dworkin? Their theories, perspectives, analyses, and observations are quite relevant to this discussion, after all. Tell me, what books of theirs have you read? Or what chapters in which books of theirs?
Your tone with Yolanda is specific in its style and privilege, and one that precludes hearing her, or listening to what she is saying to you, in my opinion. Now, who is obligated to change their speech so that she can be heard? You or her? This is a feminist question.
You do acknowledge rape and battery of women as something hetero men should confront when among one another. Would you please share some anecdotes of you doing precisely that? They would serve as good instruction for other hetero men reading this blog thread. What, exactly, did you say to those men, and how, exactly, did they respond?
The politic you are putting lots of time and energy into defending in this thread amounts to gettin’ good above-board nookie as THE radical political anti-male supremacist activity. I can see the patriarchally heteromale appeal of taking that course of “action”, all right, rather than hetero men systematically calling each other out on their sexist and misogynist actions. That will go down as one of the most self-serving “radical” political agendas I’ve ever heard of. Yes, I fully realise, as stated, that you have promoted other strategies for confronting male supremacy here, Charles, and I think that is commendable. But the direction you’ve taken us in lately doesn’t hold much credibility.
And, no, I don’t think the ERA, as conceived, is a useful strategy for ending patriarchy. I’m on record for saying that, and I stand by it. Because allowing women more access to patriarchal values and institutions won’t, implicitly, do shit to end CRAP. This assumes women carry, in their uteruses or double-x chromosomes, some more nurturing, compassionate natures, and my experiences of women, coupled with historical examples of women in power in patriarchy, do not bear this out. I see women as just as cruel as men, when afforded the opportunities and when they know they won’t get killed for being so cruel. Men are more cruel to women than women are to men only because men can get away with it, due to pro-man laws and misogynist customs.
You write: “Oooookay… so in other words, for people to practice non-sexist sexuality, everyone must become practicing bisexuals?”
Is that as far as your imagination can take you? If it isn’t hetero or homo, the only other choice must be bi? What about an ungendered intimacy, which, I would argue, many people do find, when they are relating soul to soul. spirit to spirit. Only those who fetishise gender cannot imagine this sort of eroticism. Can you?
You wrote: “Well, lesbians pretty much practice non-sexist sex, in the structural sense discussed here. Also, I don’t accept that all heterosex is sexist. Heterosex is a great equalizer in many instances.”
I’ve already mentioned my opinion on part of this, but from what studies or experiences are you telling us about what lesbian sex is (and what values are that inhere in it)? Are you aware there are many different cultures and communities of lesbians, and within any lesbian community or couple, there are varying levels of patriarchal sexuality that expresses itself? Some lesbians play out very patriarchal heteronormative values in the sex and relationships they have, and some that have worked very hard to remove those values from their erotic-political, emotional-political, intellectual-political, spiritual-political lives. Which lesbians are you actually referring to?
And, if heterosex does, sometimes, create real love and intimacy between some hetero men and women, does that necessarily mean that the rest of the relationship is not shaped by male supremacist values and expectations? Does having loving sex make up for the guy being emotionally unavailable, for example, or for not listening, or for valuing the opinions of male friends over those of the woman he loves to fuck? Does it make up for her doing much more work at home that he does, in the maintenance of the home-as-home, I mean? Does it make up for her doing most of the child-care, statistically speaking? How does your love-making “politic” dismantle patriarchy, as an organised system with thousand-year-old institutions, hundred-year-old industries, cross-cultural and transhistorical interpersonal violence, and intrapsychic (compulsory and enforced) learned emotion-states?
Your answer has been: “This is but one suggestion, one remedy, I have offered.” I respond by saying it isn’t a remedy or a politic with any credibility, as sexual intimacy between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or among the rest of us, cannot carve out male supremacist-, misogyny- and sexism-free space. You may very well be feeling fully loving of women you are intimate with. I’m not challenging that at the moment, because I have no information that leads me to need to do that. But you certainly do not know how women internalise, and often repress and therefore deny, the ways their eroticism is bound to male supremacist values.
Please read Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, by Adrienne Rich, if interested in understanding what Stan was talking to you about. Does not the (male) worker learn to think a certain way about “his” condition, as an oppressed worker, and is not one dimension of this learned politically organised psychology the preponderance of self-blame/self-shame for the conditions “he” lives in? Do not women feel guilty for putting their own needs above or beside those of the men in their lives? All my heterosexual female cousins do, and some of them are relatively empowered. But empowered or not, they still do far more work than their husbands, overall.
You write: “I’d characterize the heterosexual act as a non-antagonistic unity and struggle of opposites. This relates to the contradiction between men and women as non-antagonistic.”
In what world, Charles, is this the case? If it is “your world”, how many people live in your world? I’m not being flippant. No Womanist or feminist women of Colour or white feminist women I know speak so unambiguously affectionately of heterosex as you do, particularly as a revolutionary act. And, do you see your unquestioned “naturalisation” of gender hierarchy-as-polarity here? Read “Sex and War” by Stan, for excellent insights into this untenable philosophical position.
You write: “I don’t ascribe to the ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ thesis nor the idea that the male is “aggressive” in the sense of fighting in sex. There’s a division of labor in the sexual act, as Marx and Engels put it. Nature requires that the male be rigid and dry and the female soft and wet.
Does nature also require that men push their way in, forcefully, when women are, in fact, dry, tearing the hell out of them? Does nature require that patriarchally gendered women be with patriarchally gendered men, in a patriarchally heterosexual way? And, what are the values these male human beings bring to relationship with women: are they “natural”? From where does the ethic of men “taking” girls and women, at knifepoint or not, using porn as a political lubricant or threat, derive? Nature?
You write: “This is why rape is _not_ sex. It is assault.”
Well, if you studied the reality of rape, you would realise that, too often, what the man did that she called rape, he called (and calls) sex. There are (too few) rapists in jail serving (too little) time for something they damn well know other men do and call sex. See “Sex and Violence: A Perspective” in MacKinnon’s book, Feminism Unmodified, for an excellent discussion of this point. Rapists, whether or not they self-identify as such, systematically and routinely commit this act of spiritual/physical violation and betrayal of women through men’s sexual force used, implied, or institutionally backed up. From what sources do those hetero men learn that playing rough, or behaving misogynistically with women, intimately, while also ignoring women’s body language, and loud silence, and lack of eye contact, and/or her saying “no, please don’t” when he impolitely pushes his way in to her drying up spirit? Every female I know has been date-raped. Those men thought they were having sex. What were they doing? And who gets to define it?
You mention throughout your response to me that I focus, way too much, on the negatives of patriarchal sex, ignoring the positives. Would you similarly argue marxists focus way too much on the oppression of workers by the bourgeouisie? How much is too much? I’d say there’s far too little focus on rape and battery as trans-economic atrocities, named as such, considered as real harm to a whole class of people. Should I focus more on the good loving you seem to be having? What about my allegiance to all the women I know who have been raped, molested, and incested? Shall I suggest to them that your radical solution is “love-making” sex? What if being “your politic of love-making” gives them flashbacks? What if a man’s touch makes them feel unsafe? Do they need a good lay, a love-making lay, to know that patriarchy is over, or on its way out?
You write: “I think their [gay men’s] male supremacy is a mixture of conscious and unconscious as that of heterosexual men’s male supremacy is.”
Just given the fact that 9 out of 10 males are, statistically, heterosexually active, why are you on the case of gay men so much? You seem disproportionately fascinated with the male supremacy of gay men. And you seem to present yourself as typical of hetero men. Given that most men won’t even use a term like “male supremacy” critically, what’s up with that?
You write: “I see it differently. Not that gay men don’t have women in their lives, but that I don’t know one straight man that excludes women from their life, so on that score, straight men are no more male supremacist than gay men.”
That’s a seriously flawed and partial argument. First, what men actually do to women, interpersonally, counts as feminist or male supremacist. If gay men mock and degrade women, they are being misogynist. If a hetero man who says he “loves” women, or one woman, but socially cares more about what his buddies think of him than what the woman in his life thinks, even if only when he’s out with his buddies, that too is an expression of patriarchy. If he’d rather play sports or other social activities with them than her, in his leisure time, then that too is patriarchal, if she is chronically left alone, without that promised companionship (out of bed, that is) that he says he’s “wanting and needing so much, baby” when they are in bed.
You write: “Bullshit goes in both directions. Men do not break women’s hearts more often than women break men’s hearts.”
Well, of course there’s plenty of emotional abuse to go around. No one is arguing that women are incapable of being emotionally abusive. But men break women’s bones far more than women break men’s bones, and its not for women not desiring to. Men are more brutal, physically to women, period. Its not, as patriarchs argue unconvincingly, because men are “naturally” stronger. If that were so we’d see big male workers punching the shit out of their smaller male bosses, wouldn’t we?
You write: “I don’t observe a generalized “Greta Garbo” philosophy among women. Put it this way. A lot of them do not want to be alone.”
How would you know this? If women are choosing to be alone, or only with other women, might it be the case that you would never meet them? There is lesbian separatist community all across the Western world, you know? I know many women who choose to be alone or in the company of women. I know women who choose to live without men in their homes, or in their bedrooms. I know women who, when widowed, feel relief. And they don’t seem unhappy or lonely to me, or at least not any less happy or lonely than the women I know who are living and sleeping with men. The loneliest women I know are heterosexual and married, actually. And the women who live heterosexually with men are the ones who are more vulnerable to rapist sexual values, in bed. And to the force of his punch or slap when he’s grumpy about one thing or another, displacing his violent frustrations onto and into her face and body.
Almost finally, what does this mean:
I wrote: I don’t take litmus tests. I am anti-money economies, Charles. Pro-environmentally friendly, fully sustainable cultures. I am an activist in support of any movement that seeks to END patriarchy, not indulge it, and specifically, to END CRAP, to end rape, to end racism, and to end the oppression and exploitation of women in all myriad and atrocious forms. That’s my spiritual-political agenda, Charles. Call it what you will.
Your response: CB: “Uhhuhh.”
I’m not sure I know what that means. Help me out here. Do you find it difficult to accept that someone could have a radical analysis of culture and society that derives more from studying primal vs industrial cultures, from studying sustainability, rather than European white men’s economies (of whatever ilk) that care little about this value? Are you familiar with Indigenous/First Nations’ environmental policies, practices, and prescriptions for a healthy world, historically? Or that of white ecofeminists? Or can you only absorb the work of white European men? Have you seen the film Koyaanisqatsi (1983)? If not, I recommend it as an non-European/non-white analysis of (white, Western) dominant destructive economies.
Now, finally, what did you learn from the Dworkin speech that Stan posted here? Please tell me two things you learned about male supremacy from her. Because then I’ll know you’re reading and paying attention to what women say. There is little evidence of it here in this thread, so far.
Julian
16 January 2006, 8:22 amCharles Brown:
Hi Charles.
I’ve been away from this discussion for a while, not out of wish, but out of having other things to attend to. I’m back.
And I have to say, you deeply discourage me. I cannot know whether you really do not get it, or whether you are playing some sort of game here. And I’m not sure which, if either, would dishearten me more.
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Julien,
CB: I get it. You should rethink and try to learn from what I am saying. However, from your tone, I don’t think you sound much open to that.
I don’t want to get into whose disheartened. I’m not thrilled with your discussion.
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I wish to assert that I think Yolanda’s analysis of your political position is accurate, based on what you are arguing here in this thread. I don’t find the argument that “elsewhere I have made my feminist commitments clear†to paraphrase you, meaningful or relevant.
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CB: I’m not submitting my credentials of feminism to you or Yolanda for judgment. So, your opinion on that issue is also irrelevant, as far as I am concerned.
I’m debating issues with you , not debating me.
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Is there some reason the feminism you support and are an active part of for the last several decades shows up on this thread as weak, misinformed, and out of touch with reality?
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CB: It appears that way to you because you disagree with me. However, in actuality you are mistaken.
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None of us has the right to fall back on our laurels, if indeed we have any, when it comes to the battle to end CRAP. CRAP waits for no one–it destroys with a fury and callousness insensitive and oblivious to all the best of our intentions.
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CB: CRAP is your special, somewhat esoteric concept. I haven’t really signed on to your program, so….
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I specifically agree with this assessment of Yolanda’s:
“Your last post was pure manipulative faux-intellectual WHITE SUPREMACIST patriarchal sophistry. And I was right: You ain’t a feminist.
You ain’t radical either.
Goddamn.â€
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CB: I emphatically disagree with this,
In particular her calling what I said white supremacist demonstrates a pretty off-the-wall assessment of my posts. As they say , “she better aks somebody.” But as I say, her judgement in general is under severe suspicion from my standpoint. I am not prone to give much weight to slanderous outbursts like the above, nor are anybody else who knows me and my political activities, and writing over the years.
But the discussion is way too much about names and labels of _me_, personally. Stick to the issues.
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Well said, in my opinion. And those of us that are radically feminist here are entitled to our views, and perhaps the fact that you come off looking like a homophobic bigot, as well as thoroughly ignorant on the matter of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory gender dualism, should indicate to you that you have some studying to do, before approaching these subjects with a tone or style that enables you to not listen carefully to what Yolanda, Stan, and Elaine are saying here.
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CB; As I say, I do not consider you all as having demonstrated the competence to make these political judgement. This is slanderous naming calling, based on flawed political and social analysis. You are in no position, again, from your posts here, to tell me I need to study. By this exchange,you could do well to read again what I have said.
If we are going to call names, I’ll call you a truthaphobic *^)(^&%$#^$%
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Feel free to say what you will, but you seem to be digging yourself into one massive hole of individualistic, non-radical thinking/feeling on the matter of gender relations and sexual politics.
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CB: No, I am continuing to demonstrate competent and well thought out understanding of the issues in question.
Ok last time Stan complained about the length of my reply to your loooongg post. So, I”ll cut it here and resume later.
Be clear. I reject emphatically your content here. It is you who are off on the issues in question. You haven’t raised any substantive points, but engaged in extended _ad hominem_ and namecalling attacks on me. This is a degenerate form of argumentation and discussion. You should be ashamed and disheartened with yourself, not me.
17 January 2006, 5:49 pmCharles Brown:
specifically agree with this assessment of Yolanda’s:
“Your last post was pure manipulative faux-intellectual WHITE SUPREMACIST patriarchal sophistry. And I was right: You ain’t a feminist.
You ain’t radical either.
Goddamn.â€
Well said, in my opinion. And those of us that are radically feminist here are entitled to our views, and perhaps the fact that you come off looking like a homophobic bigot, as well as thoroughly ignorant on the matter of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory gender dualism, should indicate to you that you have some studying to do, before approaching these subjects with a tone or style that enables you to not listen carefully to what Yolanda, Stan, and Elaine are saying here. Feel free to say what you will, but you seem to be digging yourself into one massive hole of individualistic, non-radical thinking/feeling on the matter of gender relations and sexual politics.
This is kind of a loooooonnnnggg post , Julien.
Have you read Sexual Politics, by Kate Millett. t is where many feminists started their intellectual journey, their deep understanding of what woman-hate is, of what sexism is, and perhaps it would serve you well to read this ground-breaking book.
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CB: Yes. I’ve read it about twenty years ago. Remember. I have been a feminist for 30 years. ( How old are you ?) So, it is sort of talking to the wrong person to address me as a new feminist.
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I Something certainly needs to happen here, to your conceptual framework, to your sensibilities, to your heart, because you are simply coming across as intellectually and emotionally naive, and we need you in the struggle better armed than that.
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CB: That’s my line. I’m the veteran, experienced activist-feminist. You guys are the ones who sound young and naïve.
I’m armed to the teeth for the struggle. That you don’t notice is part of why I’m thinking you are the new kids on the block. You all sound real naïve
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Consider this: go back and reread your response to me, and thank you for that response, btw. In place of every mention of patriarchy, gender, men, women, put capitalism, the bourgeoisie, the proletarian workers, etc. What you will find is that your arguments, when “translated†as such, reveal a very individualistic, liberal, interpersonal approach to challenging the patriarchy problem.
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CB: No, I find ( and I have reread my posts and yours, Yolanda’s and Stan’s a couple times) is just a I thought at first. I have a communist feminist perspective, not at all individualistic. I proposed a political agenda , which is the opposite of individualistic. What are you reading ? You seem to be reading what I wrote upside down. Let me stand you back on your feet. :>)
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Would you offer these as remarks or remedies to the problem of capitalism:
1. Better intimate relations between workers and the owning class?
2. Some people really like working in capitalism?
3. Some ruling class folks and workers find real meaning in their work “togetherâ€.
4. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are natural opposites?
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CB: :>) well, the two issues are not quite comparable in that way. “Better intimate relations between the workers and the owning class”, That’s rich.
Is the issue of domestic violence an issue between “workers and capitalists” ? No. But it is one between women and men. Therefore, it is appropriate to aim for better intimate relations between women and men , but not between workers and capitalists. See what I mean ?
:>-)
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Where do you get your “leftist†analysis of gender and patriarchy? Perhaps from Marx and Engels? Stan has argued effectively and sufficiently that MacKinnon, and I’ll add Dworkin, have replaced Marx and Engels as the theorists to go to for the most cogent analysis on male supremacy and the oppression of women by men in patriarchy.
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CB: Yes, I responded at length to this elsewhere on this blog. If you can’t find my discussion, let me know and I’ll find it for you. In a few words, yes, Engels famous discussion is where I begin, and no , I don’t think MacKinnon and Dworkin replace his analysis. In particular, I think Engels is demonstrated by subsequent evidence in anthropology to be very good on the origin of male supremacy in a complex with private property and the state. See anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock, and feminist Evelyn Reed and others for a modern feminist anthropologist support of Engels vis-a-vis MacKinnon. I have two degrees in anthropology , and I disagree with MacKinnon’s critique. Also, I wrote a feminis critique of Marx and Engels , which was my first post to the list. I’ll show you where it is. You best read that before you assess where I am as a feminist.
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To be clear, I am not saying the class analysis of Engels should be “modified†to fit the problem of gender/patriarchy. I am pointing out that your solutions to the gender/patriarchy problem are no where near as structurally-politically complex, located in reality, or sound as those you hold about economic exploitation. Why is that?
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CB: Well, I’m not sure that is. Elaborate a bit on what you are saying. First, I don’t see where you are showing that “my” solutions to male supremacy are less complex than “my” solutions to capitalism. That just isn’t demonstated by you, merely asserted without support. Secondly, I don’t right off buy into your criterion of “complexity” here. What’s that about ?
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The answer lies in what Yolanda and Stan have been saying to you recently, and it appears your ear is so attuned to what white European dead men had to say on this subject that you cannot hear the radical living.
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CB: I’m a living radical. I’m listening to me. However, I cited a number of other people .
Also, I basically give Marx, Engels and Lenin a big exception to the white male thing. I’ll argue it at length , if you want.
Also, being dead doesn’t necessarily diminish a contribution. So , that part of your basis for evaluating is in error.
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Your views, represented here, are about as far from feminist as Howard Stern’s.
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CB: This is a stupid comment by you. You are about as radical as the man in the moon.
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And, to be clear, I do not adhere myself to a (largely white) male left that refuses to see how patriarchy and heterosexism work to the detriment of all women and gay men. I link myself to a radical feminism that wants patriarchy gone, “yesterday†as Yolanda says, which includes taking down (radically transforming) race, gender, and heterosexuality as constructed, understood, mandated, and enforced by patriarchy.
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CB: Yea, that’s the impression I got from your posts.
Patriarchy doesn’t work to the detriment of gay men. That’s a fundamental error in your thinking.
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What I expect to see from feminist men is a full on confrontation, respectful if possible, disrespectful if not, with men about white heterosexual ruling class men’s sexist/heterosexist identities, behaviour, and their institutions.
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CB: Why would I respect what you expect to see in this regard ? Who are you ?
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Full on. I don’t consider considerate, loving fucking to be the new or old standard of what it means to be a male feminist, and that isn’t because I’m gay, either.
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CB: Why am I not surprised that this is what you think ? However, don’t expect that your standard of male feminist to be the one that grips masses of men, if any.
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I don’t put out for men, I don’t suck cock or fuck men (or women) so you can’t so easily get away with pegging me as one of those super-male-supremacist gay boys.
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CB: Not SUPER male supremacist, only just as male supremacist as other men. Being gay doesn’t give you a pass on male supremacy. That’s my message as a male feminist to you.
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I do not, in any way, worship or adore the phallus, as you seem to suggest we gay folks do.
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CB: I said nothing about worshipping “the phallus”. I’m saying preference for men over women in _any area of life_ is at least prima facie evidence of male supremacy at play. If in any other area of life a man were to say ” I prefer to do that only with men. I don’t like to do that with women,” the average person with feminist consciousness would at least think about male supremacy. There is no reason to make an exception to that for men exclusively having sex with men. It is not in the least tortured reasoning, as Stan claimed. It’s right there in front of everybody. For various reasons, this has been ignored in modern times, with the progressive gay liberation movement. I can actually understand the practical movement reasons for it, but I don’t think it washes because masses of actually existing gay men are not in the progressive political movement. They aren’t necessarily rightwing. They are just regular people. But they are just regular _men_ too. Which means in this society that they are bearers of male supremacy. That’s just how it is. None of that is biggotted, and you are a slanderer when you call me a bigot.
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In my experience around homosocial white hetero men, they worship their own cocks, and obilisks erected to salute them, such as the Washington Monument, at least as much as sexually active gay men enjoy their own. I find hetero men far more cocksure and arrogant than gay men, but perhaps I’m missing encounters with those “Tom of Finland†fantasy men you seem to think constitute gay men en masse. And, just in case you weren’t paying attention, many hetero men put out for gay men in shadowy areas. Living on the DL, is what it’s called. So let’s not make too many assumptions about what hetero men do and don’t do with other cock.
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CB: I didn’t say hetero men are not male supremacist. I said gay men are male supremacist too. As to living on the downlow, men living on the downlow are gay or bi, not hetero.
Giving examples of hetero men being male supremacist does not in the least address the issue of gay men’s male supremacy.
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Should workers (meaning, of course, workers who do the out-of-house low, moderate, or well-paid-job-work that counts as real work by marxists)
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CB: That’s not a Marxist definition of workers. The unemployed are workers. Marx speaks of the relative surplus population as part of the working class, etc.
I see we are going to have a lot of strawperson arguments against Marxism, ’cause you don’t seem to be clear on it.
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–should workers work on eroticising the “opposition†between the proles and plebes, as you suggest should happen between men and women?
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CB: No. Is this a purposely ridiculous interpretation of what I am saying ? Workers’ liberation and women’s liberation deal with different areas of life, with different shapes to those two struggles. Oh my, you are going to put out a bunch of nonsensical comparisons .
He who doesn’t know and doesn’t know he doesn’t know….
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Should workers seek more intimacy with the the owning class, as a solution to ending capitalism? Your naturalisation of gender dualism and heteropatriarchal sexuality is showing. I don’t see you similarly naturalising exploited workers and the ruling class.
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CB; Class and gender are not the same type of thing. Gender involves a combination of nature and culture, because gender is rooted in sex and sex has a significant biological aspect, as in sexual dimorphism, etc. See my responses to Stan. Nature impinges in class but not as directly.
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Too many marxist men, in my direct experience, including my experience on Stan’s blog, ignore work that isn’t paid that real people do. Real people–women–work day and night, but much of their real work is not part of what is considered to be work in capitalist economies, unless one dimension of that work is done at “real†jobs–the kind men generally do. Globally, of course, poor unpaid women of Colour do more work than any other demographic, like hauling water for miles, but that’s not “work†in the marxist sense, is it?
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CB: Yea, hauling water for miles is work in the Marxist concept. There is a discussion on productive and non-productive labor on LBO-talk right now. There isn’t consensus among Marxists on these issues. The issue sort of turns related to whether the work produces surplus-value for the capitalists. But it is not meant to denigrate “non-productive” labor as not labor or lesser than productive labor. It has more to do with the different roles as subordinates of the capitalists.
There have been debates no wages-for housework within among Marxists
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And I agree with this comment of Stan’s:
“I gotta say, brother, that I find your thesis on gay men to be bizarre… This may be the most tortured version of left-homophobia I have ever seen.â€
I have no idea what you are talking about either, and I’d like to.
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CB: Well take a look above. What I am saying is very straight forward, and simple. I have to be a bit suspicious of you and Stan’s’ “inability” to understand what I’m saying, because it does create a big …ohhhh shall we call it puzzle for the prevailing take on these issues on the left. But it’s not tortured or bizarre. What is bizarre by the average person’s understandings in more your position on these issues.
Here’s another way to think of it. _All_ men in a patriarchy have some male supr to deal with. There is no reason that having sex with other men would change this basic situation of a man. That’s really simple and untortured.
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This abstract structural thing you keep referencing–is that connected to real people’s lives in any systematic way? I’ve seen similarly flawed arguments before about gay men, btw, so you are not alone here, but you are sure not making any more sense than the others who try and get away with what you, very homophobically, claim.
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CB: I’m making perfect sense. I can see why you might not want to understand it. Your denying what I say is male supremacist on your part. There , see, I can call you names too.
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And your claims that this is somehow “what is true that leftist men are afraid to say out loud†doesn’t hold water with me, Charles. Hetero men all along the Euro-whitemale Right to Left line make the points you have made, with all the projections about and distortion of gay humanity you reinforce into this conversation. That’s hostile to my existence, in case you weren’t aware of it, and to Yolanda’s. Hostile. Now, is that meaningful to you? Is that something you can own “like a real man†and take responsibility for?
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CB; I want you to “own” the male supremacy of gay men, and stop thinking that because you are gay you are less male supremacist, or at least, if not you personally, that gay men in general are less male supremacist than hetero men. It’s not hostile to your existence anymore than what you are saying is hostile to mine. It is critical of your thinking and your political positions on these issues.
No, hetero men all along the line do not make the points anything like what I’m making. You are not reading accurately what I said or you are not thinking about it clearly.
Ok this is real loooonnnnngggg again . More later.
18 January 2006, 7:13 pmCharles Brown:
Here’s a Detroit call to action to do something about violence against women :
Black Men Unite…A Call to Action
Detroit City Council Member
KWAME KENYATTA
is urging you to join a
City Wide Effort to Address the
RECENT VIOLENT ATTACKS ON DETROIT’S WOMEN AND CHILDREN
Monday, January 23, 2006
6:00 pm - 8:00 PM
at the
Akwaaba Community Center
Local Community Leaders & Activists will be out in Full Force.
No Media Allowed
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What are you men doing in your community like this to fight violence against women ? -CB, feminist
19 January 2006, 6:28 pmJulian Real:
Hi Charles.
We can agree on this: male supremacy infects gay and hetero male communities, deeply shaping both their identities and their sexualities. But not in the same ways, and not with the same consequences for women. Hetero men rape women they are married to or say they love. Gay men don’t. Hetero men incest their daughters. Gay men don’t. Hetero men batter their wives and girlfriends and children. Gay men sometimes batter, but they don’t batter women, domestically.
Your point that gay and straight men are somehow “equally” male supremacist does not make sense to me, in reality. Please explain more fully how that actually works, not “in theory”, but rather, in practice.
Ask any woman which street she’d feel safer walking down: one with lots of drunk hetero men getting out of bars, or one with lots of gay men, drunk, getting out of bars. You seem not to realise the function of heterosexuality in patriarchy: it is to give men more access to women in more ways, more intimately. One of heterosexism and homophobia’s functions is to keep male supremacist entitlements, to sexually use and abuse others, intimately, directly squarely at women.
You “not being on board” with this analysis don’t make it wrong, Charles. And I’m probably pretty close to your age, buddy. So put your ageist shit aside. I’ve been in the radical feminist movement for over twenty years. Flattering me by calling me young will get you nowhere. I know an insult when I read one. Yolanda’s age doesn’t make her wrong either. And Stan isn’t a youngster, so I guess you can’t dismiss his comments so easily, can you? Is he naive too?
Please do direct me to what you have written before, critiquing marxism from a feminist analysis. There ain’t no way I’m going to find it with all these threads going. I hope you understand. But I will read what you have posted that is relevant. MacKinnon points things out that marxism doesn’t explain. What’s your explanation for why men rule women?
Julian
20 January 2006, 9:51 amelaina:
Wow, I feel like I’m stepping into an all-out WWF grudge-match here. I’ll watch out for folding chairs.
Charles, I don’t mean to “attack” you or anything, let’s get that straight. But I have some problems with some of your replies to what Julian has to say.
It seems as though you are taking things very personally, and I can understand this reaction in the face of several criticisms directed at what you’re saying.
But if you’re gonna blow the “unaffected scholar” horn, then you should know to look deeply at the criticisms and not just blow people off. I did enjoy the paper that you posted here, a while back, and am something of a fellow “anthro-nerd,” though I can’t boast more than one undergraduate degree in said field of study. I have another degree, in Spanish (concentration in “Hispanic Studies”.) I used content in both study-fields to do a sort of informal anthro. concentration in Mesoamerican studies. I learned a lot of shit about Mesoamerican culture that I thought made me really smart. Then I went to Mexico for a while and talked to some folks, and found out that I wasn’t so damn smart.
And while I think that the study of anthropology might give a person tools to better understand cultures of opression, we shouldn’t forget that this branch of academia has it’s own culture in the halls of universities, one that is racist and sexist. I took classes from very, very many white dudes with money and with romanticized notions of what white dudes can do to make the “third world better.” I’ve also had my physical body scrutinized by some of the country’s most respected physical anthropologists.
The exact comment was: “Wow, you’ve got your headlights on bright today.” Standing at a podium, after class, respectfully waiting to talk to this dude who is supposed to be one of the “best of the best.” He wasn’t looking at my face when he said that.
Just trying to lend perspective, here.
Charles, I don’t doubt your intelligence. But I have to go on and add my own critique to some of your comments, because I do want you to turn the mirror to yourself. I don’t think we live in a vacuum, and I don’t think that any of us who or white or any of y’all who are male can afford to stop looking at yourselves critically. So. Time to cut & paste.
CB: I’m not submitting my credentials of feminism to you or Yolanda for judgment. So, your opinion on that issue is also irrelevant, as far as I am concerned.
I’m debating issues with you , not debating me.
Elaina: You need to place yourself and your actions firmly in this debate an look at it all with deep introspection. You publish papers. People somewhere read what you have to say. Don’t stop struggling to develop a more nuanced and complex analysis of the world you live in, please, and how your own might be contributing to patriarchy. You don’t know everything there is to know. If that’s your goal, then your strategy should be to keep on learning.
CB: CRAP is your special, somewhat esoteric concept. I haven’t really signed on to your program, so….
Elaina: Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy isn’t at all esoteric, to me, a female-feminist. It’s something I swim around in every day, even at home. I’ve not signed on to a program, either. I’m just glad that somebody came up with a real handy name for the shit that I go through.
CB: Patriarchy doesn’t work to the detriment of gay men. That’s a fundamental error in your thinking.
Elaina: Are you aware that queer bashing happens, it’s something that older MEN teach younger MEN to do in their homes? Can you maybe look at it this way: Men beat up gay men. They do it because they don’t “belong” to the greater male culture; part of belonging to the greater male culture is using your cock to torture women. Gay men don’t do this. They get the shit kicked out of them as a result, from the time that they’re children.
If this ain’t patriarchy workin’ overtime then please, please tell me what it IS.
CB: Why am I not surprised that this is what you think ?
Elaina: Is this a vague, guarded attack on a gay man’s gayness? It’s how it sounds to me. FYI.
CB: However, don’t expect that your standard of male feminist to be the one that grips masses of men, if any.
Elaina: My not-so-humble opinion is that it BETTER, if the masses of men want to continue to be included in the feminist discussion. This is one of the most advanced male critiques of patriarchy I’ve SEEN. Again, just the opinion of a female feminist.
CB: In particular her calling what I said white supremacist demonstrates a pretty off-the-wall assessment of my posts. As they say , “she better aks somebody.†But as I say, her judgement in general is under severe suspicion from my standpoint. I am not prone to give much weight to slanderous outbursts like the above, nor are anybody else who knows me and my political activities, and writing over the years.
Elaina: Charles, I don’t see this as a slanderous outburst. It seems to me that somebody’s telling you to wake the hell up. We have a right to be angry when it seems like somebody’s using a “feminist flag” to cover up their own internalized racist, patriarchal, oppression. You’re a scientist, right? So the Ockham’s Razor thing shouldn’t be lost on you. Please stop dismissing what the women on this board have to say about feminism, even if it is critical of what you think, or what you think you know.
That’s all for now.
20 January 2006, 12:40 pmJulian Real:
Thanks for that well-stated post, Elaina. Bless you.
I met with the feminist activist group I am part of this evening, and we concluded that Charles is a lost cause in terms of “getting it” about his own ridiculously homophobic, sexist attitudes masked as unfounded “theories” and I have decided to not participate in anything resembling a cock-fight. Your comments alerted me to this on-going danger: of taking up “the man”’s speech style and argumentation in an effort to “communicate”. Yolanda is wiser than me: she gave up on him days ago.
Your “I’ll watch out for folding chairs” comment did make me laugh out loud: my first laugh of the day.
I’m done with the arguing, Charles. You win. It must be nice to be right about everything. It’s not even a goal for me–and believe me, you’re not the first hetero man to point out that my perspective is useless and wrong. I’ve been told that my whole life, as has every radical feminist.
CB writes, “don’t expect that your standard of male feminist to be the one that grips masses of men, if any.”
My hope is that human beings accept a standard of humanity that precludes misogyny and racism. I have little faith in the oxymoronic term, “mankind”.
Enjoy your amazing abstract intellectual victory over nothing. I honestly don’t know anyone else who is as “right” a feminist man as you are. If I’m hearing you correctly, you are the quintessential feminist male. Perhaps you should be cloned. Then Elaina, Stan, Yolanda, and I could just leave the blogposting all to you, armed with those anthropology degrees, as you know everything about what it means to be a feminist so astutely. The rest of us seem to be thinking too young. Maybe our ideas will mature into the likes of yours one day. Good luck fighting the battle against… what is it again? Oh, yeah, the male supremacy of gay men, which is equal to that of hetero men. There’s just no explaining gay boys and men getting beaten and killed by hetero boys and men: that couldn’t have anything at all to do with male supremacy now could it?
I prefer to fight “corporate racist atrocious patriarchy”. I never realised, until you enlightened me, that the system fosters and celebrates the exploitation and rape of women of all Colours was “an esoteric concept”. For many of us, as Elaina notes, it is what we fight and die in.
Take care, Charles, and fight the good fight, however you define it.
I’ll close with the truest words you’ve written here to date:
CB: “I’m a living radical. I’m listening to me.”
21 January 2006, 3:05 amCharles Brown:
* Hi Charles.
We can agree on this: male supremacy infects gay and hetero male communities, deeply shaping both their identities and their sexualities. But not in the same ways, and not with the same consequences for women. Hetero men rape women they are married to or say they love. Gay men don’t. Hetero men incest their daughters. Gay men don’t. Hetero men batter their wives and girlfriends and children. Gay men sometimes batter, but they don’t batter women, domestically.
^^^
CB: Hi,
Homosexual men don’t make love with women Heterosexual men do ( making love with someone is a profoundly good thing to do to them; it is as profoundly good as raping them is bad). Homosexual men don’t throw in with women in partnership to deal with all the various struggles of life. Heterosexual men do. Homosexual men don’t do millions of caring and loving things for their daughters. Heterosexual men do. Homosexual men don’t guard wives and daughters from rapists and attackers. Heterosexual men do.
Heterosexual men who do not rape or batter any women at all don’t have some closer connection or greater responsibility than homosexual men for the heterosexual men who do commit such crimes. I don’t rape and batter. I don’t have some greater “connection” to rapists and batters because I’m hetero than you do. Rape is not sex.
^^^^^
Your point that gay and straight men are somehow “equally†male supremacist does not make sense to me, in reality. Please explain more fully how that actually works, not “in theoryâ€, but rather, in practice.
^^^^
CB: See above. In their heterosexual relationships, hetero men do all kinds of positive things for women just by being in close and extensive relationships with them, which homosexual men do not do for them. So, the positive things that heterosexual men do for women because they are in intimate and loving relationships with them are on the positive side of the “ledger” for them. Homosexual men don’t have these positives. The homosexual men don’t have the negatives that a small percentage of heterosexual men do ( although it is a very small minority of heterosexual men who rape, batter etc.), but they also don’t have the enormous amount of positives. So, on balance, their failure to match the heterosexual men’s positives, “neutralizes” their not doing the bad stuff. I mean “neutralizes” in the sense that some how we are “adding” up the positives and negatives.
Then ,there are male supremacist institutions outside of personal relationships, such as predominance ( at one time _only_ men) as leaders in business, government, church. Men making more money than women systematically. Gay men participate in these privileges as much as straight men.
My basic point would be ,not that gay men are more male supremacist, but that they are equally male supremacist.
On balance, we can just say MEN are responsible for ending patriarchy. This is how this thread started. I asked you why you were putting responsibility on heterosexual men for doing something about patriarchy and not just “men”.
^^^^^^
Ask any woman which street she’d feel safer walking down: one with lots of drunk hetero men getting out of bars, or one with lots of gay men, drunk, getting out of bars. You seem not to realise the function of heterosexuality in patriarchy: it is to give men more access to women in more ways, more intimately. One of heterosexism and homophobia’s functions is to keep male supremacist entitlements, to sexually use and abuse others, intimately, directly squarely at women.
^^^^^^
CB: Depends on whether she knows the men, whether she’s with another man who will protect her ( most likely to be heterosexual; another service heterosexual men provide women more than homosexual men do, just as a byproduct of spending more time with women because of being in intimate relationships with them).
You haven’t demonstrated your claim that the “function of heterosexuality is to give men more access to women in more ways , more intimately”. It is just as much to give women more access to men in more ways , more intimately. You don’t seem to realize that heterosexual women like access to men. That’s what it means to be a heterosexual woman. Let me run this by Deb and some others so they can explain it.
The _function_ of heterosexuality is more something like reproduction of the species.
^^^^^
You “not being on board†with this analysis don’t make it wrong, Charles.
^^^^
CB: That’s just a way of disagreeing. Saying it a different way. Your asserting it doesn’t make it right either.
^^^^^
And I’m probably pretty close to your age, buddy. So put your ageist shit aside. I’ve been in the radical feminist movement for over twenty years. Flattering me by calling me young will get you nowhere. I know an insult when I read one. Yolanda’s age doesn’t make her wrong either. And Stan isn’t a youngster, so I guess you can’t dismiss his comments so easily, can you? Is he naive too?
^^^^^
CB: You called me naïve first, I do believe. Go back and check. My Might as well reply that you seem “young”, i.e. naïve.
I’m fifty-five.
^^^^^^
Please do direct me to what you have written before, critiquing marxism from a feminist analysis.
^^^^^
CB: It’s on this blog under a picture of the cover of _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_. Stan can tell you how to get to it.
^^^^^
There ain’t no way I’m going to find it with all these threads going. I hope you understand. But I will read what you have posted that is relevant. MacKinnon points things out that marxism doesn’t explain. What’s your explanation for why men rule women?
Julian
^^^^
CB: In a few words, I’d say the Marxist( materialist) explanation for male supremacy/patriarchy is control of reproduction. In the “olden” days, before male supremacy, women controlled reproduction , really sort of naturally, given they get pregnant and give birth. It sort of naturally follows that they would make the decisions on reproduction. With the rise of private property, men start to want to control women’s sex lives , confine them to monogamy, so that the men would be sure that they could pass their property on to _their_ children, not some other guy “their” woman had been sleeping with. Thus, women’s right to control abortion is a faundamental modern victory.
See Engels book, that MacKinnon criticizes,_The Origin of the Family ( the Patriarchal family; families weren’t patriarchal before this point in history that Engels analyzes), Private Property and the State_
24 January 2006, 7:55 pmJulian Real:
In the olden days, Charles, it was assumed men planted their seed in women as people planted seeds in the Earth: that women were simply the “carriers” and offered nothing in the way of genetic material. And those women were valued as carriers, not people. Both women and the Earth have been exploited for a long time, in some cultures more than others.
The Virgin Birth was assumed to allow the Son of God to be born, by Christians, because nothing “from the woman” contaminated the God-child.
It’s called old-time misogyny.
Julian
25 January 2006, 7:41 pmCharles Brown:
From: Elaina
* Wow, I feel like I’m stepping into an all-out WWF grudge-match here. I’ll watch out for folding chairs.
Charles, I don’t mean to “attack†you or anything, let’s get that straight. But I have some problems with some of your replies to what Julian has to say.
It seems as though you are taking things very personally, and I can understand this reaction in the face of several criticisms directed at what you’re saying.
But if you’re gonna blow the “unaffected scholar†horn, then you should know to look deeply at the criticisms and not just blow people off.
^^^^
CB: I’ve thought about it several times over a couple of days and I’m not entirely clear on what you mean by “unaffected scholar” horn.
I do think degenerate statements like “this is “bullshit”", the like, and all the other discussion which frames the issues as if I am the matter in question should be “blown off” to let the discussants know that I ain’t haven’ it in the least - just to be clear that you get nowhere with me with personal attacks as such a large proportion of the “criticisms” are. I am criticizing these inappropriate , personalized criticisms, teaching discussion etiquette.
^^^^^^
I did enjoy the paper that you posted here, a while back, and am something of a fellow “anthro-nerd,†though I can’t boast more than one undergraduate degree in said field of study. I have another degree, in Spanish (concentration in “Hispanic Studiesâ€.) I used content in both study-fields to do a sort of informal anthro. concentration in Mesoamerican studies. I learned a lot of shit about Mesoamerican culture that I thought made me really smart. Then I went to Mexico for a while and talked to some folks, and found out that I wasn’t so damn smart.
And while I think that the study of anthropology might give a person tools to better understand cultures of opression, we shouldn’t forget that this branch of academia has it’s own culture in the halls of universities, one that is racist and sexist. I took classes from very, very many white dudes with money and with romanticized notions of what white dudes can do to make the “third world better.†I’ve also had my physical body scrutinized by some of the country’s most respected physical anthropologists.
The exact comment was: “Wow, you’ve got your headlights on bright today.†Standing at a podium, after class, respectfully waiting to talk to this dude who is supposed to be one of the “best of the best.†He wasn’t looking at my face when he said that.
Just trying to lend perspective, here.
^^^^
CB: Yes, I had some focus in MesoAmerican archaeology. I mention my anthro background specifically because my main initial discussion on this blog is with respect to Stan’s critique of _The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State_, which is an anthro thesis.It is pertinent that I have been reading that book for 35 years, have thought about the issues in it based on many other expert discourses.
If the perspective you seek to lend is regarding the male chauvinism or sexism of the anthro prof. ( I believe that is what you are getting at , but I am not certain), I posted from several women anthropologists on the MacKinnon-Engels debate, so I don’t think Eleanor Burke Leacock or Evelyn Reed, et al, could be accused of male chauvinism like your anthro prof.
^^^^^^^^
Charles, I don’t doubt your intelligence. But I have to go on and add my own critique to some of your comments, because I do want you to turn the mirror to yourself. I don’t think we live in a vacuum, and I don’t think that any of us who or white or any of y’all who are male can afford to stop looking at yourselves critically. So. Time to cut & paste.
CB: I’m not submitting my credentials of feminism to you or Yolanda for judgment. So, your opinion on that issue is also irrelevant, as far as I am concerned.
I’m debating issues with you , not debating me.
Elaina: You need to place yourself and your actions firmly in this debate an look at it all with deep introspection. You publish papers. People somewhere read what you have to say. Don’t stop struggling to develop a more nuanced and complex analysis of the world you live in, please, and how your own might be contributing to patriarchy. You don’t know everything there is to know. If that’s your goal, then your strategy should be to keep on learning.
CB: CRAP is your special, somewhat esoteric concept. I haven’t really signed on to your program, so….
Elaina: Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy isn’t at all esoteric, to me, a female-feminist. It’s something I swim around in every day, even at home. I’ve not signed on to a program, either. I’m just glad that somebody came up with a real handy name for the shit that I go through.
^^^^^
CB: How about capitalism, which is racist and male chauvinist.
^^^^^^
^^^^^^^
CB: Patriarchy doesn’t work to the detriment of gay men. That’s a fundamental error in your thinking.
Elaina: Are you aware that queer bashing happens, it’s something that older MEN teach younger MEN to do in their homes? Can you maybe look at it this way: Men beat up gay men. They do it because they don’t “belong†to the greater male culture; part of belonging to the greater male culture is using your cock to torture women. Gay men don’t do this. They get the shit kicked out of them as a result, from the time that they’re children.
If this ain’t patriarchy workin’ overtime then please, please tell me what it IS.
^^^^^^
CB: This is prejudice against gay men, currently termed homophobia. Patriarchy would be men doing something prejudice or oppressive against women. Men oppressing men is not patriarchical or male chauvinist. It is a different type of oppression.
^^^^^^^^
CB: Why am I not surprised that this is what you think ?
Elaina: Is this a vague, guarded attack on a gay man’s gayness? It’s how it sounds to me. FYI.
^^^^
CB; No it is an explicit statement that I am not surprised that a gay man who is a feminist would not like to hear that gay men , as a general matter , are as male chauvinist as het men.
^^^^^^
CB: However, don’t expect that your standard of male feminist to be the one that grips masses of men, if any.
Elaina: My not-so-humble opinion is that it BETTER, if the masses of men want to continue to be included in the feminist discussion. This is one of the most advanced male critiques of patriarchy I’ve SEEN. Again, just the opinion of a female feminist.
^^^
CB: Actually, the vast majority of men are not feminists. In fact, the vast majority of _women_ don’t call themselves feminists, though they have feminist actions and ways. So, it is not a case of masses of men wanting to “continue” to be included in the feminist discussion, in that they are not in the feminist discussion. The task is to get masses of men (and , maybe, women) into the feminist discussion. Our feminist discussion here is very esoteric in general. We are a small minority.
This is the actually existing situation.
^^^^^^
CB: In particular her calling what I said white supremacist demonstrates a pretty off-the-wall assessment of my posts. As they say , “she better aks somebody.†But as I say, her judgement in general is under severe suspicion from my standpoint. I am not prone to give much weight to slanderous outbursts like the above, nor are anybody else who knows me and my political activities, and writing over the years.
Elaina: Charles, I don’t see this as a slanderous outburst. It seems to me that somebody’s telling you to wake the hell up.
^^^^^
CB: And I am telling you to wake up.
^^^^
We have a right to be angry when it seems like somebody’s using a “feminist flag†to cover up their own internalized racist, patriarchal, oppression.
^^^^
CB: If it seems to you that I am racist, then you are very much out of touch with reality or asleep. To be so extremely off in your assessment of the issue of racism places your judgment on all issues here under severe suspicion by me. Race, gender and class are interconnected , and it’s difficult to be so off on one without distorting your views on the others. From my standpoint , all your opinions are in sort of a limbo until you can explain why you would make such a false accusation.
Let me emphasize namecalling me “white supremacist” make you look bad. Doesn’t bother me, because to all these Black people in Detroit they would immediately think there is something wrong with somebody who calls me white supremacist. We would be laughing at you. You would be ridiculed - BY BLACK PEOPLE WHO KNOW !
^^^^^^^^
You’re a scientist, right? So the Ockham’s Razor thing shouldn’t be lost on you. Please stop dismissing what the women on this board have to say about feminism, even if it is critical of what you think, or what you think you know.
That’s all for now.
^^^^
And that’s all folks
26 January 2006, 1:06 pmCharles Brown:
One more comment to Elaina. It occurred to me last night that maybe , from your comments, you don’t know that I _am_ Black. In that regard, calling me a white supremacist or racist is a pretty risky thing from a political standpoint. In other words, whoever is calling me a racist is the one who better wake up.
CB
^^^^^^
We have a right to be angry when it seems like somebody’s using a “feminist flag†to cover up their own internalized racist, patriarchal, oppression.
^^^^
CB: If it seems to you that I am racist, then you are very much out of touch with reality or asleep. To be so extremely off in your assessment of the issue of racism places your judgment on all issues here under severe suspicion by me. Race, gender and class are interconnected , and it’s difficult to be so off on one without distorting your views on the others. From my standpoint , all your opinions are in sort of a limbo until you can explain why you would make such a false accusation.
Let me emphasize namecalling me “white supremacist†make you look bad. Doesn’t bother me, because to all these Black people in Detroit they would immediately think there is something wrong with somebody who calls me white supremacist. We would be laughing at you. You would be ridiculed - BY BLACK PEOPLE WHO KNOW !
27 January 2006, 6:04 pmelaina:
Charles:
I DID realize from other posts that I’ve read that you were indeed Black. I never said you were white supremacist. Why do you think that I’m so oblivious? I can read as well as you. I read your posts. You state several times that you are black.
If you’d please care to note, the clip you quoted me on, : ” We have a right to be angry when it seems like somebody’s using a “feminist flag†to cover up their own internalized racist, patriarchal, oppression.
I’m talking about internalized oppression here, Charles. You don’t “internalize” anything negative about the way the world looks at you? If you don’t, then you’re probably the one and only soul living who manages to slide by. Damn, you’re good.
The racist shit, the patriarchal shit that Opressed Peoples everywhere swallow every day; the ways in which we grow to think those very same things about ourselves-you know, INTERNALIZED OPPRESSION. Read the actual words, and don’t just skim my shit over for tidbits you can use to call me names.
You are trying to use feminism to cover up your own misogynist bullshit. And that’s just pissy. So please stop it. You ain’t a white supremacist. That don’t mean you don’t know nothin’ about patriarchy.
The junk you’re spewing forth here is riddled with misogyny; I’m an actual WOMAN who’s trying to debate you and you won’t even acknowledge my critiques, just as you say you for sure “understand women”; fuck your petty bullshit.
You got all the answers, then you better get them out there and when you do that then they better make some fucking sense. Or you’re off my reading list, and that’s for damn sure. Not that you’d care, but I just wanted you to know it anyways.
28 January 2006, 2:36 amYolanda Carrington:
Charles,
NEWSFLASH: You can be Black AND be a white supremacist. Your sophistry in your posts to me demonstrated your patriarchy and white supremacy. You pulled the same tired racist tricks in argument that white men have been pulling for YEARS.
You know damn well that your active non-listening was an attempt to dominate, and everyone else knows it too. That’s why I called you out WEEKS ago.
You ain’t fooling nobody man!
Stan, I had to break my silence this time. Hope you understand.
Yolanda
28 January 2006, 3:52 amJulian Real:
Charles.
The hole you are digging is getting deeper. Soon we’ll all have to lower a walkie-talkie to you so we can keep in touch.
Sir, you have been called out. Take it “like a manâ€, as they say. Or, as I’d say: “Take it like a humane being.†Are you really, truly incapable of hearing what folks are saying about the personal being political, and that the politics of your discursive style here, with THESE women, and, er, whatever I am, is coming off, consistently, needlessly defensive, obnoxiously arrogant, deeply sexist, and profoundly homophobic?
I read your piece on male supremacy and Marxism, and while I commend you on tackling the subject—sincerely, your piece was really not very informative or compelling, in my opinion. You seem unable to break free from Marxism enough to see its fatal flaws. Every theory is flawed; that is the nature of theory: it describes reality, more or less usefully for a given field of inquiry. Marxism works well in some cultures but falls apart completely when applied to others. Sorry. There is no Santa Claus.
Leacock, just so you know, is not THE pre-eminent feminist anthropologist, and is considered highly biased, in the field, as it were, by others, who see her as too married to Marxism to be able to see what the flaws are in her own arguments. This fundamentalist adherence to a theory appears to be a theme among many Marxists, but of course not all. According to Stan’s assessments, which I trust to be well-informed and grounded in reality, this theoretical rigidity IS a key problem for Marxists: they hold their ideology, their Engels and Marx, even if occasionally critical of them, to their bosoms like a White Televangelist Fundamentalist Christians holds their Bible. Infallible, is that the term? Written by God? Or, wait, Marxists are atheists and agnostics, generally speaking. Written by nature, then? Or is it: written by a Darwinian notion of social-economic evolution?
I am making the case that your ideology or your ego, or simple defensiveness-presented-as-intelligent rapport, is rigid, too rigid for you to even get up out of it to see what you are doing (how you are behaving). You are not behaving well, Charles. You have been disrespectful, stubborn beyond all reason, bigoted, and utterly dismissive, claiming you don’t comprehend anything that isn’t written out for you in Marx-speak.
End of part 1 of 4.
29 January 2006, 1:41 amJulian Real:
At any rate, here is the work of a well-respected, highly regarded feminist anthropologist, Sherry B. Ortner, from a book called Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (I recommend that you read it):
She is addressing this question, from different anthropological and theoretical-discursive vantage points: “Is female to male as nature is to culture?â€
Here is a portion of one of several discussions from her book about this matter:
‘This seemingly simple question can be constructed in a variety of ways. It may take the form of an empirical question: let us look around the world and see if all cases have this quality. This, I think, is how Rosaldo, Chodorow, and I treated it initially. We looked around and the answer seemed to be yes.
‘But the first round of reactions, as noted above, came from people committed to a certain Marxist evolutionary paradigm, especially Eleanor Leacock (1981) working from Engel’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and The State. Within this paradigm, early human societies were presumed to have been egalitarian, and factors of inequality were introduced in conjunction with the emergence of private property. Thus if examples of egalitarian cases in the contemporary world could not be found, it is not because, in this pristine state, they did not exist. It is because all societies have already been touched in one way or another by capitalism, an/or because anthropology has been theoretically blinded by capitalist culture.
‘Even granting Leacock’s points about both capitalist penetration and bourgeois blinders, there were simply too many cases that could not be worked into Leacock’s picture. Nonetheless at another level what she and others were saying is that recognizing egalitarianism is not as easy as it appears, that it is a matter of interpretation. I came to agree with this position, and in a recent paper (Gender Hegemonies, this volume) I argued that if one looks at certain cases from a certain theoretical angle, they look more egalitarian than not. It is not that these societies lack traces of “male dominance,†but the elements of “male dominance†are fragmentary—they are not woven into a hegemonic order, are not central to some larger and more coherent discourse on male superiority, are not central to some larger network of male-only or male-superior practices.
‘My point, in other words, was to look again at some cultures at the relatively egalitarian end of the spectrum. I wanted to try to rethink the significance of culturally unmarked elements of “male dominance†in such cases, to try to get a better feel for their relative weight within a culture’s gender patterns. I felt that my mistake earlier had been to play up such items too much, to seize upon any indicator of male superiority, female “pollution,†etc., and label a whole culture “male dominant.†Behind my rethinking are larger shifts in the conceptualization of “culture†in the field of anthropology as a whole, in the direction of seeing “cultures†as more disjunctive, contradictory, and inconsistent than I had been trained to think.’ (Ortner 174-175)
She goes on to a very insightful discussion about the relationship between nature and culture, in part noting this:
‘Nature/culture in one or another specifically Western sense—as a “struggle†in which “man†tries to “dominate†nature, as a confrontation with a system that obeys “natural laws,†and so forth—is certainly not universal… (175)
‘Now add gender into the equation… What I think tends to happen in most if not all cultures is that the two oppositions easily move into a relationship of mutual metaphorization: gender becomes a powerful language for talking about the great existential question of nature and culture, while a language of nature and culture, when and if it is articulated, can become a powerful language for talking about gender, sexuality, and reproduction, not to mention power and helplessness, activity and passivity, and so forth. The particular articulations of the relationship will vary greatly across cultures, with surprising and unexpected shifts and alignments. But the chances that the two sets of issues will be interconnected in specific cultural and historical contexts still seem to me fairly high.’ (179-180)
Note the influence of post-structuralism in her language. It is not possible, one might argue, to not speak “from†a discursive style, from a paradigm, from outside the boundaries of an episteme. Or, it is possible, but most people are not likely to know what you are talking about.
End of part 2 of 4.
29 January 2006, 1:42 amJulian Real:
I think a superb example of this “inability to comprehend†is the general (mis)understanding of Dworkin’s ground-breaking book Intercourse. How people can read such a complex investigation: literary, intellectually rigourous, visceral to theoretical in its scope, swirling in its structure, and conclude “she’s anti-sex†proves points she makes in the Communion chapter. In it, Dworkin analyses the work of writer James Baldwin, noting that:
‘â€Sex-negative†is the current secular reductio ad absurdum used to dismiss or discredit ideas, particularly political critiques, that might lead to detumescence. Critiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are “sex-negative†without qualification of examination, perhaps because so many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid, and without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste. There is an awful poverty here, in this time and place: of language that expresses real states of being; of search, of questions; of meaning, of emotional empathy; of imagination. And so, we are inarticulate about sex, even though we talk about it all the time to say how much we like it—nearly as much, one might infer, as jogging. Nothing is one’s own, nothing, certainly not oneself, because the imagination is atrophied, like some limb, dead and hanging useless, and the dull repetition of programmed sexual fantasy has replaced it. (Dworkin 48-49)
‘Truth is harder to bear than ignorance and so ignorance is valued more—also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge, and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth. For Baldwin, in his fiction and his essays, being human means that one pays for everything one knows and for everything that one refuses to know[…] (50)
‘Inside an unjust, embittering social universe where there are moral possibilities, however imperiled, of self-esteem and empathy, fucking is the universal event, the point of connection, where love is possible if self-knowledge is real; it is also the place where the price paid, both for ignorance and truth, is devastating, and no lie lessens of covers up the devastation. In Baldwin’s fiction, fucking is also a bridge from ignorance to truth—to the hardest truths about who one is and why. And crossing on that high and rotting and shaking bridge to identity, with whatever degree or quality of fear or courage, is the ordeal that makes empathy possible: not a false sympathy of abstract self-indulgence, a liberal condescension; but a way of seeing others for who they are by seeing what their own lives have cost them. (51)
‘Rage, hatred, bitterness, joy, tenderness, even mercy, all have their home in this passion, in this act[…] (52)
‘[…] when fucking is hatred, when fucking is revenge, then fucking is hell: a destruction in violence of and suffering of self-knowledge and self-esteem; the destruction of a human being, someone else perhaps, certainly oneself.’ (53)
Some of the deepest insights about the (at least Western) human political condition, especially but not limited to sexuality, have been articulated by James Baldwin and Andrea Dworkin.
End of part 3 of 4.
29 January 2006, 1:43 amJulian Real:
Charles, I find your views about sexuality, hetero and gay, woefully uninformed by reality, utterly superficial, and not useful to any real (serious) discussions about sexual politics. “Supposing†that gay sex has more to do with male supremacy because there are two dicks and that lesbian sex has less to do with male supremacy because there are no anatomically human penises (i.e., there might be the presence of dildos, etc.) is such bad theory-making that I hope it is not your intent to make theory. This assertion of yours is preposterous. I recommend you correct yourself, sooner than later, or no one will take you seriously on this matter. Backpedaling with statements like gay men and hetero men are chauvinistic won’t cut it, either. No one disagrees that gay men and hetero men can be misogynist and male supremacist. That’s a no-brainer. Own what you said:
CB: “In fact, there is a elemental male supremacy in gay men’s choice of sex partners, i.e. men, not women.â€
CB: “Homosexual men, as a general matter, are as male supremacist as heterosexual men.â€
CB: “It is not being heterosexual that gives greater privilege.â€
CB: “Male supremacy is especially political and economic male dominance. Gay men discriminate against women in these areas.â€
CB: “The bad het sex is the exceptional. The good het sex is the mode.â€
CB: “Focus on pleasuring the woman is a feminist approach to sex. Attention to the vagina is a male feminist, pro-woman perspective.â€
CB: “The male supremacist approach to sex focuses on the penis, not the vagina.â€
You are saying that male supremacy inheres in the use of the penis in sex? How essentialist can you get? The penis can be an instrument of male supremacy, intimately and forcefully, or a part of the body that communicates tenderness and sensitivity to another person. But to conclude that sex that involves penises is more male supremacist BECAUSE it involves penises, is, well, absurd.
You deny that heterosexual men have privileges that gay men do not have. What do you call heterosexism? A mirage? A figment of queer folks’ imaginations? I am willing to debate who is more oppressed: lesbian women or heterosexual women, but NOT whether heteromen are more oppressed than gay men. Gay men, all other factors being similar (class, race, level of ability, age) are OPPRESSED, Charles. Heterosexual men, as heterosexual men, are not. Heterosexual men, as such, are PRIVILEGED.
You say that male supremacy shows up in political and economic arenas, and that’s where gay men can oppress women. In what sense is the porn shop, the strip club, the street, the back alley, the bedroom, the home generally, the intimate sexual relationship, NOT a site of politics and economics?
Bad het sex is “exceptional� Lord. That’s not what heterosexual women tell me. Women report men being self-absorbed, body-ignorant, uncaring, compulsive, obsessed with porn, too fetishistic, too focused on orgasm (usually his own), too controlling, or too neglectful. (And that isn’t even getting into the more aggressive violence all women I know have experienced, heterosexually.)
You claim that good (feminist?) sex is the “modeâ€! From what sociological studies do you claim that? Have you read Shere Hite’s sociological studies and reports on human sexuality?
Attention to the vagina is a feminist approach? Ever hear of the clitoris? It’s part of the vulva, not the vagina.
Male supremacist sex focuses on the penis? So, that’s why you think gay men can only have male supremacist sex, huh? Btw, gay men’s sex does not ONLY involve the penis. You are subscribing to a heteronormative “penetration by penis†= sex. Among my heterosexual friends, most mean “heterosexual intercourse†when they say “sexâ€. It does not occur to them that cunnilingus is sex, because their dick isn’t involved in the “actionâ€. I’d say focus on the vagina is heteronormative and patriarchal, by heterosexual men. Focus on the clitoris, the whole body, and on the spirit and emotions and intelligence of women-as-humans, is feminist.
I also find you so adhered, like a fly to flypaper, to Marxism fundamentally, that I will reiterate that I do not see you being able “see†beyond that paradigm, or even own that you are operating, rigidly, out of a paradigm.
Julian
29 January 2006, 1:43 amJulian Real:
This quotation:
‘[…] when fucking is hatred […] certainly oneself.’ (53)
Should read: ‘[…] when fucking is hatred, when fucking is revenge, then fucking is hell: a destruction in violence and suffering of self-knowledge and self-esteem; the destruction of a human being, someone else perhaps, certainly oneself.’ (53)
Apologies to AD for the typo. God rest your soul.
Julian
29 January 2006, 1:26 pmJulian Real:
One more heterosexist doozie from Charles:
CB: “Patriarchy doesn’t work to the detriment of gay men.”
What is homophobia, then, Charles? What are effemiphobia, queer-bashing, incessant teasing and bullying of gay youth in grade schools? What is the non-depiction of gay-as-human relationships (men who don’t end up with women, that is) in media called? “Privilege”?
To educate yourself about the interplay between homophobia and sexism, inside patriarchy, see:
Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, by Suzane Pharr
URL: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1890759015/qid=1138556753/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/103-7116052-2097435?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
To educate yourself about the REALITY of homophobia and heterosexism, please read:
Overcoming Homophobia and Heterosexism, by James T. Sears and Walter L. Williams.
URL: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231104235/qid=1138556933/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/103-7116052-2097435?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
29 January 2006, 1:56 pmCharles Brown:
Charles:
I DID realize from other posts that I’ve read that you were indeed Black. I never said you were white supremacist. Why do you think that I’m so oblivious? I can read as well as you. I read your posts. You state several times that you are black.
If you’d please care to note, the clip you quoted me on, : †We have a right to be angry when it seems like somebody’s using a “feminist flag†to cover up their own internalized racist, patriarchal, oppression.
I’m talking about internalized oppression here, Charles.
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CB: Ok I was just wondering.
Anyway, I hope you don’t think I don’t know about internalized racism, selfhate, etc. To not notice that I have about as low a level of internalized racism as one can get would mean you all have a really off assessment of what I’m saying here if you somehow concluded that I have internalized racism. I mean I’ll deal with your discussions directly and substantively, but we can assume right now that you all have a very misguided analysis of racism, if somehow you read my posts as internalized racism.
Ok lets see what else you have to say.
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You don’t “internalize†anything negative about the way the world looks at you?
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CB: Maybe. But one thing I don’t have is internalized racism. I am a “Black is Beautiful, Black Power ” type a guy.
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If you don’t, then you’re probably the one and only soul living who manages to slide by. Damn, you’re good.
The racist shit, the patriarchal shit that Opressed Peoples everywhere swallow every day; the ways in which we grow to think those very same things about ourselves-you know, INTERNALIZED OPPRESSION. Read the actual words, and don’t just skim my shit over for tidbits you can use to call me names.
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CB: Ok but you got the wrong one , in terms of internalized racism. I have an extremely high level of Black Consciousness. And I’m in an New African capital, Detroit. So, what’s up on you’ll’s missing that bigtime ? Yea, lets have a talk about oppression of Black people and Black consciousness.
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You are trying to use feminism to cover up your own misogynist bullshit.
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CB: No, I’m straight out disagreeing with what you are calliong misogynist.
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And that’s just pissy. So please stop it. You ain’t a white supremacist. That don’t mean you don’t know nothin’ about patriarchy.
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CB: I ain’t stoppin’ nothin’. U all have not said one thing that makes me respect your analyses, and it’s getting worse.
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The junk you’re spewing forth here is riddled with misogyny; I’m an actual WOMAN who’s trying to debate you and you won’t even acknowledge my critiques, just as you say you for sure “understand womenâ€; fuck your petty bullshit.
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CB: You aren’t the only woman I talk with about these issues.
Plus, I believe you are white, with the nerve to tell me I have internalized racism. That puts your whole nineyards under suspcion.
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You got all the answers, then you better get them out there and when you do that then they better make some fucking sense. Or you’re off my reading list, and that’s for damn sure. Not that you’d care, but I just wanted you to know it anyways.
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CB: Like you don’t talk like you got answers.
That’s right. I talk with a certain amount of confidence, because at a certain point in one’s career one decides that one does know something. And I’m past that point. I haven’t been struggling in these movements and studying these ideas for these decades without finally learning and coming to know something. So, yea, I do talk and will continue to talk like I know some answers, that I have some new contributions to make even. And you all have said nothing substantive challenging the assertions I have made. You all relie almost entirely on conclusory namecalling without supporting argumentation, as I have told you repeatedly. Your status as a women doesn’t mean you can just say anything without a supporting argument. I talk to _lots_ of woman about these issues and they don’t have the reactions you have.
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30 January 2006, 4:34 pmCharles Brown:
Charles.
The hole you are digging is getting deeper. Soon we’ll all have to lower a walkie-talkie to you so we can keep in touch.
Sir, you have been called out.
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CB: Your confused . Turn around. I’m up here above you, not below you in a hole :>)
That’s right. Most of what you are doing is namecalling, calling out, not making substantive arguments.
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Take it “like a manâ€, as they say. Or, as I’d say: “Take it like a humane being.†Are you really, truly incapable of hearing what folks are saying about the personal being political, and that the politics of your discursive style here, with THESE women, and, er, whatever I am, is coming off, consistently, needlessly defensive, obnoxiously arrogant, deeply sexist, and profoundly homophobic?
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CB; To you. But your judgment is under severe suspicion.
This is still empty namecalling, conclusory assertion with zero argumentation
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I read your piece on male supremacy and Marxism, and while I commend you on tackling the subject—sincerely, your piece was really not very informative or compelling, in my opinion. You seem unable to break free from Marxism enough to see its fatal flaws. Every theory is flawed; that is the nature of theory: it describes reality, more or less usefully for a given field of inquiry. Marxism works well in some cultures but falls apart completely when applied to others. Sorry. There is no Santa Claus.
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CB’; Sorry. You just made zero argumentation. All you are doing is making assertions with no support.
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Leacock, just so you know, is not THE pre-eminent feminist anthropologist, and is considered highly biased, in the field, as it were, by others, who see her as too married to Marxism to be able to see what the flaws are in her own arguments. This fundamentalist adherence to a theory appears to be a theme among many Marxists, but of course not all.
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CB: Still zero argument. Basically calling Leacock names without engaging her arguments. “Considered highly biased” by highly biased commentators.
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According to Stan’s assessments, which I trust to be well-informed and grounded in reality, this theoretical rigidity IS a key problem for Marxists: they hold their ideology, their Engels and Marx, even if occasionally critical of them, to their bosoms like a White Televangelist Fundamentalist Christians holds their Bible. Infallible, is that the term? Written by God? Or, wait, Marxists are atheists and agnostics, generally speaking. Written by nature, then? Or is it: written by a Darwinian notion of social-economic evolution?
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CB: Written by human beings based on clearheaded examination of the facts and evidence of history and society.
These are typical false caricatures of Marxism and Marxists. I myself am as critical in my thinking as anyone. You find out when I turn it on the authorities upon which you rely.
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I am making the case that your ideology or your ego, or simple defensiveness-presented-as-intelligent rapport, is rigid, too rigid for you to even get up out of it to see what you are doing (how you are behaving). You are not behaving well, Charles. You have been disrespectful, stubborn beyond all reason, bigoted, and utterly dismissive, claiming you don’t comprehend anything that isn’t written out for you in Marx-speak.
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CB; You are making the claim in ignorance of the facts. My thinking is as agile and spry as you will find. The defensiveness you think you see is you projecting onto me what you want to see , but what is not there. I don’t have to be defensive , because you all are not making any assertions that challenges the substance of what I say. You just keep calling names.
As far as disrespectful, you have a lot of nerve to say that I am being disrespectful. As far as bigotted, that’s slander, like so much of your namecalling.
As far as claiming I don’t comprehend what is not in Marx speak, that’s false, and anyone who reviews the post will see it is. I”ve replied to long, long posts, comprehending most of them. I made only a couple of comments calling for clarification of what was said.
30 January 2006, 4:54 pmCharles Brown:
any rate, here is the work of a well-respected, highly regarded feminist anthropologist, Sherry B. Ortner, from a book called Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (I recommend that you read it):
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CB: Yes, Sherry Ortner and had some classes togther back at Univ. of Michigan anthro dept.
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She is addressing this question, from different anthropological and theoretical-discursive vantage points: “Is female to male as nature is to culture?â€
Here is a portion of one of several discussions from her book about this matter:
‘This seemingly simple question can be constructed in a variety of ways. It may take the form of an empirical question: let us look around the world and see if all cases have this quality. This, I think, is how Rosaldo, Chodorow, and I treated it initially. We looked around and the answer seemed to be yes.
‘But the first round of reactions, as noted above, came from people committed to a certain Marxist evolutionary paradigm, especially Eleanor Leacock (1981) working from Engel’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and The State. Within this paradigm, early human societies were presumed to have been egalitarian, and factors of inequality were introduced in conjunction with the emergence of private property. Thus if examples of egalitarian cases in the contemporary world could not be found, it is not because, in this pristine state, they did not exist. It is because all societies have already been touched in one way or another by capitalism, an/or because anthropology has been theoretically blinded by capitalist culture.
‘Even granting Leacock’s points about both capitalist penetration and bourgeois blinders, there were simply too many cases that could not be worked into Leacock’s picture.
Nonetheless at another level what she and others were saying is that recognizing egalitarianism is not as easy as it appears, that it is a matter of interpretation. I came to agree with this position, and in a recent paper (Gender Hegemonies, this volume) I argued that if one looks at certain cases from a certain theoretical angle, they look more egalitarian than not. It is not that these societies lack traces of “male dominance,†but the elements of “male dominance†are fragmentary—they are not woven into a hegemonic order, are not central to some larger and more coherent discourse on male superiority, are not central to some larger network of male-only or male-superior practices.
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CB: So this supports me and Leacock
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‘My point, in other words, was to look again at some cultures at the relatively egalitarian end of the spectrum. I wanted to try to rethink the significance of culturally unmarked elements of “male dominance†in such cases, to try to get a better feel for their relative weight within a culture’s gender patterns. I felt that my mistake earlier had been to play up such items too much, to seize upon any indicator of male superiority, female “pollution,†etc., and label a whole culture “male dominant.†Behind my rethinking are larger shifts in the conceptualization of “culture†in the field of anthropology as a whole, in the direction of seeing “cultures†as more disjunctive, contradictory, and inconsistent than I had been trained to think.’ (Ortner 174-175)
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CB: Uh Julien, Ortner is supporting , not contradicting the position Leacock espouses and I’m suppporting.
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She goes on to a very insightful discussion about the relationship between nature and culture, in part noting this:
‘Nature/culture in one or another specifically Western sense—as a “struggle†in which “man†tries to “dominate†nature, as a confrontation with a system that obeys “natural laws,†and so forth—is certainly not universal… (175)
‘Now add gender into the equation… What I think tends to happen in most if not all cultures is that the two oppositions easily move into a relationship of mutual metaphorization: gender becomes a powerful language for talking about the great existential question of nature and culture, while a language of nature and culture, when and if it is articulated, can become a powerful language for talking about gender, sexuality, and reproduction, not to mention power and helplessness, activity and passivity, and so forth. The particular articulations of the relationship will vary greatly across cultures, with surprising and unexpected shifts and alignments. But the chances that the two sets of issues will be interconnected in specific cultural and historical contexts still seem to me fairly high.’ (179-180)
Note the influence of post-structuralism in her language. It is not possible, one might argue, to not speak “from†a discursive style, from a paradigm, from outside the boundaries of an episteme. Or, it is possible, but most people are not likely to know what you are talking about.
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CB: Yea, we all got this from Marshall Sahlins. We’ve been studying structuralism since 1972 or so , because of his study with Levi-Strauss. I know about male/female being use metaphorically in a lot of cultures. In can go both ways. Can be man is to woman as nature is to culture, or vica versa.
Anyway, Ortner just supported me in what you copied
30 January 2006, 5:05 pmCharles Brown:
* Charles, I find your views about sexuality, hetero and gay, woefully uninformed by reality, utterly superficial, and not useful to any real (serious) discussions about sexual politics.
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CB: You’ve already communicated a few times what your view is. You just haven’ supported it with argument.
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“Supposing†that gay sex has more to do with male supremacy because there are two dicks and that lesbian sex has less to do with male supremacy because there are no anatomically human penises (i.e., there might be the presence of dildos, etc.) is such bad theory-making that I hope it is not your intent to make theory.
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CB: However, it is a logical conclusion just on the face of the facts. Two men is twice the male supremacy, and two women is zero male supremacy, _prima facie_ unless you give some reason they are not. And just asserting “it is bad theory” doesn’t make it bad theory. I’ve shown a prima facie maleness -two men. Any other circumstance which is all men gives rise to a prima facie case of an expression of male chauvinism. It’s on you to show why , of all things, all men having sex is not male chauvinist. Why would sex be the one exception to the general rule that “all men” anything is male chauvinist ?
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This assertion of yours is preposterous.
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CB: I’ll take that to mean it takes you out of your comfort zone. You are rigid in your thinking on this, as you accuse Marxists of being rigid. Why don’t you try suspending _your_ rigidly held beliefs, since you are so against rigidity ?
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I recommend you correct yourself, sooner than later, or no one will take you seriously on this matter. Backpedaling with statements like gay men and hetero men are chauvinistic won’t cut it, either. No one disagrees that gay men and hetero men can be misogynist and male supremacist. That’s a no-brainer.
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CB: Show me one thing you have written that would make me take a recommendation from you on this subject.
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Own what you said:
CB: “In fact, there is a elemental male supremacy in gay men’s choice of sex partners, i.e. men, not women.â€
CB: “Homosexual men, as a general matter, are as male supremacist as heterosexual men.â€
CB: “It is not being heterosexual that gives greater privilege.â€
CB: “Male supremacy is especially political and economic male dominance. Gay men discriminate against women in these areas.â€
CB: “The bad het sex is the exceptional. The good het sex is the mode.â€
CB: “Focus on pleasuring the woman is a feminist approach to sex. Attention to the vagina is a male feminist, pro-woman perspective.â€
CB: “The male supremacist approach to sex focuses on the penis, not the vagina.â€
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CB: Ok. I own them all.
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You are saying that male supremacy inheres in the use of the penis in sex?
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CB: No, I’m saying it inheres in preferring men over women in any positive activity, including in sex
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How essentialist can you get? The penis can be an instrument of male supremacy, intimately and forcefully, or a part of the body that communicates tenderness and sensitivity to another person. But to conclude that sex that involves penises is more male supremacist BECAUSE it involves penises, is, well, absurd.
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CB: However, I’m not saying the focus is “use of the penis” ( otherwise urinating would be male chauvinist :>) ) So, this whole paragraph addresses a “strawman”.
More later -CB
30 January 2006, 5:29 pmJosiah:
Damn. It’s getting heated in here. I respect the opinions of everyone involved, but I can’t help but thinking that the disintegration of this debate is due to something partially beyond all of our control: the unresolved overlappings/tension/contradictions of sex and race. Perhaps because of the white male domination of discursive space on the left, there still is no good theoretical vocabulary for reconciling such things as the race privilege and gender oppression of white women with the race oppression and gender privilege of black men, and so these battles of hierarchical order ensue in which one seems, by itself, to contest the other. It’s like a “standpoint perspective” system malfunction: gay white male calls straight black male misogynistic; straight black male calls gay white male a male supremacist; straight (or if not do your thing
) white female and gay white male call straight black male misogynistic; straight black female calls straight black male misogynistic white supremacist; straight black male calls straight white female and gay white male white supremacists…etc. If only there was a way to integrate critical race theory, feminism and marxism that did not stratify these identities into a sort of leftist Great Chain of Being connected by hyphens. But as long as the society is organized that way, with rich whiteboys at the top, perhaps it’s ineivitable that we will be mirror-imaging that power structure. Blah.
30 January 2006, 6:40 pmAnyway, peace to all. Keep posting, Charles, Elaina, Yolanda, Julian and the rest.
Yolanda Carrington:
Charles…you got FOUR fucking people calling you out now, one of whom is a BLACK WOMAN (the very people you insist love you so damn much). The reasoning of all of us is “seriously under suspicion” by you. Yeah, bruh. Denial aplenty.
Yeah, I’m mocking you, Charles. I think you’re sad and pathetic. Your masculinity is so fragile that you can’t risk losing face ONCE. You’re a textbook case of partriarchal masculinity—hell, a bloody stereotype of it.
Stan, I apologize to you again for making this damn thread even longer than before. But we have all tried our best to hold Mister Charles accountable for his words, and he ain’t studying us. As he just told Julian, he is “up here above” us.
I just beg of you, Mister Charles: Please stop posing as a feminist. You’re making a mockery of the damn word.
Yolanda
31 January 2006, 1:45 amcharles brown:
Charles,
NEWSFLASH: You can be Black AND be a white supremacist. Your sophistry in your posts to me demonstrated your patriarchy and white supremacy. You pulled the same tired racist tricks in argument that white men have been pulling for YEARS.
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CB: One can be Black and a white supremacist BUT I AM NOT, AND YOU HAVEN’T SAID ONE WORD THAT SHOWS THAT I AM.
There is no sophistry in my posts, and you haven’t said one thing that shows that there is.
You are pulling the same trick that white racists have pulled for years. Sitting up here and lying on a Black person. That’s internalized racism on your part, assuming that you are Black.
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You know damn well that your active non-listening was an attempt to dominate, and everyone else knows it too. That’s why I called you out WEEKS ago.
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CB: You know very well that the above is slanderous , pop psychobabble, with absolutely no foundation in fact or reality.
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You ain’t fooling nobody man!
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You ain’t foolin’ me, friend.
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Stan, I had to break my silence this time. Hope you understand.
Yolanda
31 January 2006, 2:04 pmCharles Brown:
Continued reply from yesterday to Julien:
CB: “The male supremacist approach to sex focuses on the penis, not the vagina.â€
You are saying that male supremacy inheres in the use of the penis in sex? How essentialist can you get? The penis can be an instrument of male supremacy, intimately and forcefully, or a part of the body that communicates tenderness and sensitivity to another person. But to conclude that sex that involves penises is more male supremacist BECAUSE it involves penises, is, well, absurd.
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CB: You misunderstand what I am saying. I am saying that for a man in having sex with a woman to concentrate on his own plearsure ( through his penis) and not to focus on the pleasure of the woman is male supremacist.
Sex involving a penis is not male supremacist if the concentration is on giving the woman pleasure by way of the penis.
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You deny that heterosexual men have privileges that gay men do not have. What do you call heterosexism?
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CB: I don’t use the term. Homophobia is enough. We don’t need two different terms for the same thing. Also, the trouble with the term “heterosexism” is that it converges with the long term problem of anti-heterosexuality in the Church, among Puritans, the whole repression of heterosexuality thing, as dirty, earthly, etc.
Homophobia is prejudice and oppression of homosexuals. Homophobia , or prejudice and oppression of gay men is not male supremacy because male supremacy is oppression of women by men, and gay men are not women, so not the subject of male supremacist oppression.
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A mirage? A figment of queer folks’ imaginations? I am willing to debate who is more oppressed: lesbian women or heterosexual women, but NOT whether heteromen are more oppressed than gay men. Gay men, all other factors being similar (class, race, level of ability, age) are OPPRESSED, Charles. Heterosexual men, as heterosexual men, are not. Heterosexual men, as such, are PRIVILEGED.
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CB: Yea, they are, but it’s not male supremacy, because gay men are not women.
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You say that male supremacy shows up in political and economic arenas, and that’s where gay men can oppress women. In what sense is the porn shop, the strip club, the street, the back alley, the bedroom, the home generally, the intimate sexual relationship, NOT a site of politics and economics?
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CB: Your question doesn’t make any sense in terms of what we are talking about. Gay men have the privileges of men with respect to the economic and political erenas. Therefore they participate in the oppression or discrimination against women. The fact that they aren’t in bedrooms etc. with women, and aren’t oppressing them there doesn’t meant they aren’t oppressing them outside the bedroom. Then I’d add they are not doing the positive things that men do for women in heterosexual relationships. So, that is a male chauvinism of omission that gay men are in.
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Bad het sex is “exceptional� Lord. That’s not what heterosexual women tell me. Women report men being self-absorbed, body-ignorant, uncaring, compulsive, obsessed with porn, too fetishistic, too focused on orgasm (usually his own), too controlling, or too neglectful. (And that isn’t even getting into the more aggressive violence all women I know have experienced, heterosexually.)
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CB: I don’t suppose hetwomen would sit around discussing good heterosexual relationships with you
Anyway, from the standpoint of what heterosexual women tell me, they sure ain’t running away from relationships with me. And my heterosexual women friends who I’m not in a relationship with are in relationships with other men. So, their actions speak. To the extent we talk about their relationships with their partners , they “love” him.
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You claim that good (feminist?) sex is the “modeâ€! From what sociological studies do you claim that? Have you read Shere Hite’s sociological studies and reports on human sexuality?
Attention to the vagina is a feminist approach? Ever hear of the clitoris? It’s part of the vulva, not the vagina.
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CB: But it’s very close to the vagina, and when stroked it causes the vagina to get wet. What does that tell you ?Yea, like Alia’ song, rock the boat. change position.
I dare say I know as much about pleasuring women as you do :>). I ain’t gettin’ no complaints. There is no problem with attending to “both” sex organs. Women have multiple genitalia, not just two.
The women I talk to think the reports about the vagina not being the basis for orgasm are crazy. They definitely like to have their vaginas stroked, and have orgasms by it, rolling orgasms from vagina massage. I really don’t know why these scholars are getting these findings, but I’m going by what real live women say, not some book. Anybody who wants to “practice” sex based on the idea that the vagina is not a site of orgasmic stimulus with women , just go right ahead. I’m going with what the women I know say and do. And they contradict Hite and others on no vaginal orgasm. I mean if they are having vaginal orgasms in fact, what do we care what Hite or you or anybody else says ?
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Male supremacist sex focuses on the penis? So, that’s why you think gay men can only have male supremacist sex, huh?
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CB: No. That’ not what I’m saying. I’m saying having sex with men in preference over women is, like any preference for men over women, male chauvinist.
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Btw, gay men’s sex does not ONLY involve the penis.
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CB; Howver, I’m not saying its male chauvinist because it involves the penis. It is male chauvinist because it is a preference for men over women. So, this line of discussion does not address what I said, doesn’t correct something I think.
I know male homosexuality involves other than the penis. Duh .
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You are subscribing to a heteronormative “penetration by penis†= sex. Among my heterosexual friends, most mean “heterosexual intercourse†when they say “sexâ€. It does not occur to them that cunnilingus is sex, because their dick isn’t involved in the “actionâ€.
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CB: cunnilinugus is exactly focus on the women’s sexual pleasure, as I said. If you think a lot of men don’t know about cunnilingus then you are just out of touch. I know people who brag about it.
^^^^^^
I’d say focus on the vagina is heteronormative and patriarchal, by heterosexual men.
^^^^
CB: You’d be wrong. It is inattention to the vagina that is male chauvinist
^^^^^
Focus on the clitoris, the whole body, and on the spirit and emotions and intelligence of women-as-humans, is feminist.
^^^^^
CB; I only mentioned the vagina in contrast with the penis, as a standin for all the women’s pleasure points. Yea, your motives in giving her pleasure should be because you like her, you love her as a whole person. However, while having sex, it is important to focus on her pleasuring body parts, because it is a task, an effort. It takes focussed attention to do well.
^^^^^^
I also find you so adhered, like a fly to flypaper, to Marxism fundamentally, that I will reiterate that I do not see you being able “see†beyond that paradigm, or even own that you are operating, rigidly, out of a paradigm.
Julian
^^^^^
CB: Your error here is that Marxism is a more truthful and accurate understanding of society than the paradigm you are using. One shouldn’t “see” beyond that paradigm, because as of now it is the most advanced theory we have. Your failure to take a Marxist view puts your thinking behind rather than ahead of mine. There is nothing you have said to me that is a cogent criticism of the Marxist paradigm in the least.
You need to study Marxism a lot more before I would listen to your criticisms of it. You basically don’t know much about it at all, from what I can tell. So, your opinion that I adhere to it , and your insulting analogy to a fly, is based in serious ignorance.
31 January 2006, 4:03 pmElaina:
Josiah-
Thank you for a calming breath in the middle of this storm. I have to admit that I have some volatile emotional reactions to this kind of conversation. I came in and started flinging folding chairs myself, which wasn’t my intention.
I am, however, still deeply troubled by what I am hearing, and am not quite sure how to proceed in arguing here. I’m tired of having to cut and paste conversational bits.
Charles-
I can’t make myself see heterosex as a useful organizing tool. I can’t see ANY type of sex/sexual intercourse/cunnilingus/etc. acted out under the auspices of White Supremacist Patriarchy as a useful organizing tool.
I think that males already have great enough acess to female bodies. Punto. To call for more, and to do it in a politicized context, to say that males having greater access to female bodies will aid in women’s “liberation,” this kind of reasoning is suspect to ME. The reason that I call it internalized oppression, on your part, is because it reflects a very white, very male, very libertarian paradigm– sticking to notions of “sexual pleasure” that are constructed in order to foment the continued growth of a white, male, capitalist system. Your debate over the supposed non-existence of the vaginal orgasm and your boastfulness about your sexual abilities are red herrings. I want to be clear on this, too: I am not calling you a racist. I am trying to point out where it seems, from these posts, that you have internalized a very gringo-ized construct of how sex should be.
There has been no international feminist summit that would determine what the actual “sexual preferences” of women are. There’s good reason for that. Women across the world have been busy organizing and fighting and dying to stop things like rape, genocide, brutalization, and other of the sundry forms of exploitation and abuse that women experience. We’ve been told it’s “our problem,” and it’s been put on us to fix it. Everywhere.
How, Charles, does your notion that relations between men and women can be soothed by good sex, aid in stopping these problems? How does it help? I need something concrete here. I don’t see it helping.
Maybe you have found something that works in your personal life and that the women in your life enjoy.
I don’t think it can be extrapolated in such a way as to produce political theory. Sorry.
I also still stick to my guns on it being a strategical flaw to deny the anti-capitalist power of homosexual male existence. The sexual exploitation of women is a building block of capitalism as we know it, right here and now– just look at the porn industry. Rape is a weapon in war, a powerful one, that has torn up and hurt and killed women in especially gruesome ways since the rise of gringo capitalism. Men who are openly homosexual push against this trend in living their everyday lives. I mean, I’m sure that there are some sects out there that are actively anti-woman. And there’s the Gay Republicans. But you can’t really see these as representative of male homosexual culture. (And right now I’m speaking of that culture as it exists in the USA.)
I have never heard a gay man talk about a woman and say, for example, “I’d like to bust that wide open.” I’ve never seen a gay man obsess over pictures of women being brutalized. I’ve never been pressured into sex with a gay man. In my experience, this has not been seen as “rejection.” It’s been relief, and it’s let me hang with men who will look at my face and not at my tits. I don’t have to think to myself, “God, do I look OK? Am I going to have to put out later tonight, since he bought me a couple of drinks?”
If my experience means nothing to you, Charles, then why should yours mean anything to me? Do you only listen to women who say that they want to have sex with you?
I’ll have more commentary later. Have to go to work now.
This discussion’s giving me an ulcer, I think.
2 February 2006, 3:13 pmJulian Real:
To the groups (the first of several consecutive posts):
Thanks, Josiah, for that synopsis. It was really useful to see it written out that way! It really helped me, and I appreciate you taking the time to go through all of this to distill what you did.
Elaina, I think you have been commendably responsive to Charles, and he has not been commendably responsive to you.
Yolanda, Charles has treated you worst of all, and given that you are a Black Feminist Radical Woman, I am beyond troubled by Charles’ on-going “selectivity” about what he can hear and in what discursive form it needs to be for him to listen and “hear” at all.
He clearly cannot or will not (or both) hear INTO what you are saying, and keeps defaulting to “you aren’t making points clearly in the way I make points clearly, so your points are not really points.” Ahem.
Yolanda, you’ve made more sense here than Charles. Just a reality check.
Julian
3 February 2006, 2:16 pmJulian Real:
Charles, empirically it is the case here that you choose who you listen to (and I don’t mean with that well-honed and not terribly accurate or useful overly abstract academic mind of yours, which contains a voice and value system well-honed for discussion in the way (originally ONLY) white academic men talk “logically”, so as to exclude other’s voices, and their own capability to expand “how” and “what” they can hear as real meaningful sound, as real points, as real, valid argumentation. Since you have completely determined these things so systematically in this discussion, in ways that reveal the arrogance and privilege (the biases and elitism) of that very discourse, you will no doubt win at whatever argument you engage in, because you have set all the terms and rules for what gets heard. Can you recognize that? Was this paragraph written in a sufficiently academic discursive style for it to register as meaningful sound to you?
You determine whose voice is valid based on “how” you listen. You determine which women you find to be representative of all women, and which women you have decided are “feminist” in a way that meets your standards of feminism. Shere (Hite)-nope, the women you sleep with-yup. Yolanda and Elaina-nope. The women you talk or sleep with–yup. Radical feminist women–nope. The politically unidentified women you talk to–yup. Leacock-yup. MacKinnon-nope.
Do the women you socialize with call themselves Radical, politically? Do they call themselves Feminist? Radical Feminist? Because I can find lots of folks out there to agree with any political position under the sun, including folks who think the Nazi Holocaust never happened. I can find folks who don’t know that heterosexism exists too, even in my own family.
Do I believe some women experience vaginally-produced orgasms? Yes. Are you aware that what has been termed “the G spot” is actually PART of the clitoral super-structure, which connects to the “ceiling” of a portion of the vagina, as well as to areas around the vulva? And that it is the clitoris that is still, in this sense, responsible for THAT vaginal pleasure?
CB: “The vagina is a locus of great potential pleasure _for the woman_ !” Who is “the woman”, Charles. Some people (female and male) have sensitive nipples and some do not. My childhood best friend, a male, could reach orgasm just from touching his nipples. Is he “the man” who we should turn into your prototype for how “all men are”? Some women can experience orgasm during intercourse and some cannot. Who is “the woman”? Does she have a name? Can you introduce me to her? Given basic female anatomy, I would say that the clitoris is the “locus” of a specific kind of intense sexual pleasure for women, as such terms are used currently in this society. This is why, in some cultures, it is cut out of girls–to (further) control women’s sexuality the old fashioned patriarchal, male supremacist way. That the vagina, a strong muscle, registers pleasure generally, has lots of nerve endings generally, has not been found to be the case; if the vagina was as loaded with nerve endings as the clitoris, childbirth would be an excruciatingly (not pleasurable) and (more) difficult experience from the overwhelming sensation “from” the vagina, specifically. The vagina is touch, Charles. It is designed to withstand a lot, the human spirits and minds to which they belong are not meant to endure what patriarchal serves to them, in violation and violence. Note “where” in the vagina pleasure is felt, specifically, and note it’s proximity to the root of the clitoris. You might need to study female sexual anatomy to know this, Charles… or just pay attention. Now, given that we live in a male supremacist culture which eroticizes the social and physical dominance of women by men, it is also the case that women being “taken” by men is highly eroticized socially/culturally, moreso my heteromen than heterowomen, but both can and do eroticise this, because that’s what patriarchy DOES to the malleable mind’s sense of eroticism.
Just last night I heard a woman who loves dancing discuss how much having a man in charge (on the dance floor) created an unbelievable “rush” of excitement in her. This is not biology, Charles. That’s politics. I know some men and women who “desire” rape. (Though the men desire the humiliation, domination, and force of it, and the women desire the force and submission of it–no woman I know desires to be fully out of control and brutalised. But there are men who desire absolute domination of women, and they often fuck their just-killed bodies, to prove it). Snuff films have been and are made, Charles, not by women either. That’s not sexual biology, Charles. That’s patriarchal politics. No one has clarified this more–analyzed and described this more–than Andrea Dworkin. Have you read “Intercourse” or is she also one of those women who are not “the woman” you know so well and listen to so intently and carefully? Is Dworkin on the same heap of women you refuse to listen to with new ears, as Yolanda, Elaina, Catharine MacKinnon, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and Patricia Williams? I think once upon a time you mentioned that you had read Audre Lorde, who HAS discussed heterosexism–as a reality, not as an unnecessary (or rendundant) term to describe real oppression. Does the fact that heterosexism is real in the work, the observations, the analyses, the lived life of Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins make THAT CONCEPT real yet? Or, whenever they bring it up, are they deluded, misguided, and illogical?
3 February 2006, 2:18 pmJulian Real:
The points made by Shere Hite and others is that patriarchal “sex researchers” systematically reinforce the sexual (read: political) necessity of a lonely (hetero) penis finding its way into every vagina, for WOMEN’S pleasure, not owning how fucking self-serving (literally) that is. Some women NEVER have orgasm from vaginal stimulation, and some women DON’T like anything other than parts of the hand touching their vaginas (I’m not talking about vulvas here, Charles, just to remind you of the difference). That’s what SOME women report to me. But because heterosexual fucking is compulsory, mandated, linguistically reinscribed and socially and interpersonally enforced, with force, women DO experience it, NOT NECESSARILY with pleasure, but out of obligation, out of weariness, out of not knowing how to say no because to say no would be terrifying, or to avoid getting beaten or killed by the men “they love”.
I cannot let these remarks go, either:
CB: “I only mentioned the vagina in contrast with the penis, as a standin for all the women’s pleasure points.”
THAT is a completely patriarchal statement, Charles. The clitoris is the physiological corollary to the penis. The penis is an enlarged, urethrae’ed clitoris. THE VAGINA is not “a stand-in” for ALL WOMEN’S PLEASURE POINTS. Ever hear of women’s MINDS as a “pleasure point”? Geez, Charles, that hole you’re in is getting deeper. I hope you have a cell phone–never mind, you’re in so deep it wouldn’t get any reception. Patriarchy WANTS all men to think “the vagina” is THE sex organ of women, so as to legitimate men’s obsessive and abusive attention to female human beings, in part to spare more males the experience of men’s patriarchally learned hostility which gets sexualised. The g spot in SOME women would be better correlated to YOUR prostate gland area of your rectum, Charles, in terms of an internal zone which, when caressed, can intensify orgasm. Do you know about that area, Charles, or are you too homophobic to “go there” with the women you love so much and so well?
CB: “I don’t suppose hetwomen would sit around discussing good heterosexual relationships with you.”
Why, Charles? They do. I served as a Student Advisor (personal and academic) for nine years at a college, and have spoken with tons of students (ages ranging from 17 to 63), female and male all about their positive and negative and confusing and mystifying experiences: emotional, spiritual, sexual, intellectual. I counsel young adults on how to have better sexual-emotional relationships. So why would you assume that Charles? Because I’m gay? I’d like an answer to this question, please. Why do you NOT SUPPOSE hetwomen would “sit around” discussing good heterosexual relationships with me?
CB: However, it is a logical conclusion just on the face of the facts. Two men is twice the male supremacy, and two women is zero male supremacy, _prima facie_ unless you give some reason they are not. And just asserting “it is bad theory†doesn’t make it bad theory. I’ve shown a prima facie maleness -two men. Any other circumstance which is all men gives rise to a prima facie case of an expression of male chauvinism.
This is a classic example of how a closed discourse cannot let in knowledge outside of itself. That there are male supremacist women and men, and anti-male supremacist women and men, in hetero and queer communities, has been known for decades, Charles. But your “logic” precludes “recognizing” this “reality” because your “logic” doesn’t register this as real, only those “realities” that fit your closed logic-system. Is that clear to you? Do you understand what I’m saying here?
You do not wish or choose to acknowledge heterosexism, calling it the same thing as homophobia, arguing “why have two words for the same thing?” That’s a reasonable question from someone who is completely ignorant about the social-political reality of heterosexism.
Heterosexism is not synonymous with homophobia, Charles: heterosexism is to homophobia what sexism is to misogyny, what racism is to ethnic hate: these are not synonymous. The latter terms derive from, inhere in, and reinforce the former term, in each pair. Does that makes sense? Can you hear that as meaningful sound?
Have you ever read Patricia Hill Collins or Audre Lorde? Both Black feminists speak a great deal about heterosexism. Are they “the right kind of women” for you to listen to? Do they meet up with your biased and limited criteria of “women’s intelligence”?
Do you think that Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins have “useful” things to add to the discussion, a political one, in service to liberation for all people from systems of harm and dehumanization, including the harm and dehumanization of HETEROSEXISM?
The next post of mine will quote passages from Black Feminist Thought, by Patricia Hill Collins, and possibly also from Black Sexual Politics, by the same author.
3 February 2006, 2:20 pmCharles Brown:
Charles…you got FOUR fucking people calling you out now, one of whom is a BLACK WOMAN (the very people you insist love you so damn much). The reasoning of all of us is “seriously under suspicion†by you. Yeah, bruh. Denial aplenty.
Yeah, I’m mocking you, Charles. I think you’re sad and pathetic. Your masculinity is so fragile that you can’t risk losing face ONCE. You’re a textbook case of partriarchal masculinity—hell, a bloody stereotype of it.
Stan, I apologize to you again for making this damn thread even longer than before. But we have all tried our best to hold Mister Charles accountable for his words, and he ain’t studying us. As he just told Julian, he is “up here above†us.
I just beg of you, Mister Charles: Please stop posing as a feminist. You’re making a mockery of the damn word.
Yolanda
^^^^
Four people or forty, you can call out until you are horse, but since the content of what you are saying is empty…
You haven’t said anything that shows anything I have said is non-feminist. Repeating again and again that I am not a feminist doesn’t make it so. You have to say, “you said so and so and so and so. That’s anti-feminist because.” You don’t even bother. You just started “shouting” and namecalling and haven’t stopped.
Why on earth would I pay attention to anything you say here ? Your comments here are empty of content, argument, sense.
I don’t care if you mock me. You think I’m sad and pathetic. Why would I care what you think about me ? All you have shown me here is a person who doesn’t have any sense with respect to the issues under discussion. I have zero respect for your opinion of me.
Textbook example ? Point to one thing I have said.
What are you talking about my masculinity ? I have not said one word about “my masculinity”
Losing face ? I look so good compared to you all, I’m GAINING face.
You really do need to apologize. Your discussion is shameful. Full of slanders and delusions about me or what I have said. You ought to be ashamed.
CB
3 February 2006, 5:38 pmCharles Brown:
Charles-
I can’t make myself see heterosex as a useful organizing tool. I can’t see ANY type of sex/sexual intercourse/cunnilingus/etc. acted out under the auspices of White Supremacist Patriarchy as a useful organizing tool.
^^^
CB: What do you see as an organizing tool uner White Supremacist Patriarchical CAPITALISM ?
^^^^^^^^^
I think that males already have great enough acess to female bodies. Punto. To call for more, and to do it in a politicized context, to say that males having greater access to female bodies will aid in women’s “liberation,†this kind of reasoning is suspect to ME.
^^^^^^
CB: Framing it in terms of male access to female bodies is not correct. More like mutual , natural co-enjoyment, with reduction of male chauvinism as a premise.
I don’t view sex between women and men as men getting something and women giving something. It is a mutual exchange.
^^^^^
The reason that I call it internalized oppression, on your part, is because it reflects a very white, very male, very libertarian paradigm– sticking to notions of “sexual pleasure†that are constructed in order to foment the continued growth of a white, male, capitalist system.
^^^^
CB: Well, no ,what I say doesn’t reflect a very white, very male, very libertarian paradigm. It reflects a Black, feminist communist theory. :>0
But say more: why do you think that what I say about sexual pleasure foments the continued growth of a white , male, capitalist system ?
^^^^
Your debate over the supposed non-existence of the vaginal orgasm and your boastfulness about your sexual abilities are red herrings. I want to be clear on this, too: I am not calling you a racist. I am trying to point out where it seems, from these posts, that you have internalized a very gringo-ized construct of how sex should be.
^^^^^
CB; I’m trying to see where you have made an argument for your claim. Far as I can see, I have made a very Black construct of how sex should be. Why don’t you explain why what I say is not Black ? A gringoized version of how sex should be is what we have right now, what we got from the Catholic gringo church, the gringo Puritans, the gringo Victorians. That’s why I’d say it is you who have the “internalized” gringo version of how sex should be. But what is your argument that what I am saying is gringoized ?
^^^^^
There has been no international feminist summit that would determine what the actual “sexual preferences†of women are. There’s good reason for that. Women across the world have been busy organizing and fighting and dying to stop things like rape, genocide, brutalization, and other of the sundry forms of exploitation and abuse that women experience. We’ve been told it’s “our problem,†and it’s been put on us to fix it. Everywhere.
^^^^
CB: I don’t ignore the non-sexual issues in women’s liberation. I’ve only discussed it at length because that’s what you all have written back on. My first post to the list was an essay on women’s lib issues, with almost no sex in it. The focus on sex here has been you all’s choice. I just responded to the topic you picked.
Why don’t you try responding to the essay I submitted ?
^^^^^
How, Charles, does your notion that relations between men and women can be soothed by good sex, aid in stopping these problems? How does it help? I need something concrete here. I don’t see it helping.
^^^^^
CB: It’s pretty much on its face. By and large, women and men having sex are or have to be on friendly terms. It’s a mutually enjoyable, co-soothing activity. So, then when not having sex, the recall of coenjoying each other can improve the activities together when not having sex. It is a natural peace maker.
Then my premise is that there has to be a significant reduction in general male chauvinism - the issues you list above - as a premise. Men decrease male chauvinism; women reward them; men decrease m c more; women reward them more… A positive cycle.
Overall, my thought is based on the theory that some of why women are angry in their individual relationship is because of the general male chauvinism of society, not necessarily anything “their” man has done to them. Rather each individual man pays the price for the general male chauvinism. Now this is a theory. Of course, individual men’s reducing their direct male chauvinism with their women is necessary and adds to the solution.
At any rate , the idea is that to the extent that men, somehow, someway, could influence all men to change male chauvinism, women would appreciate it, and not be angry or upset in day to day relationships as much. It’s somewhat problematic for feminist men to get the rest of men to “reduce male supremacy”, but what else are we going to do ? The demand is for men to somehow get other men to end male supremacy anyway, and the same difficult problem of how to do that arises whether using my suggestion or not.
What’s your proposal for getting men to reduce male chauvinism ?
^^^^^^
Maybe you have found something that works in your personal life and that the women in your life enjoy.
I don’t think it can be extrapolated in such a way as to produce political theory. Sorry.
^^^^^
CB: Yes, I would say that women treat me better because I am a feminist. I don’t just mean my “girlfriends”, but all my women acquaintances. If you have an underlying attitude of just genuinely liking women in general, appreciating them , respecting them the opposite of misogyny ( there is no word for it “womenloving”) , women can tell. They treat you better in return.
As you say , the leap to political, i.e. getting other men to do it, is not easy. But what are you expecting feminist men to do anyway ? Lets say we just want feminist men to get other men to change. How are you going to get them to do it ?
^^^^^^
I also still stick to my guns on it being a strategical flaw to deny the anti-capitalist power of homosexual male existence. The sexual exploitation of women is a building block of capitalism as we know it, right here and now– just look at the porn industry. Rape is a weapon in war, a powerful one, that has torn up and hurt and killed women in especially gruesome ways since the rise of gringo capitalism. Men who are openly homosexual push against this trend in living their everyday lives. I mean, I’m sure that there are some sects out there that are actively anti-woman. And there’s the Gay Republicans. But you can’t really see these as representative of male homosexual culture. (And right now I’m speaking of that culture as it exists in the USA.)
^^^^^^
CB: How big are you saying the porn industry is $ wise ? I don’t think it is big enough to be considered a key economic building block of capitalism. Capitalism makes money on gay men too, probably as much as on porn. In general, my impression of economics is that sexual exploitation of women is not a big money maker for capitalists. So, my response is I don’t see your argument that the porn/prostitution industry is a key one to undermine capitalism. Also, the way to defeat capitalism is not to knock off individual industries, but to abolish private ownership of the basic means of production. Cuba and Venezuela are current models.
Then as I say, I would take the course of increasing friendly and loving relationships between women and men as a direct solution of antagonism between women and men. I directly disagree that more men having sex with men instead of women moves to a solution.
^^^^^^
I have never heard a gay man talk about a woman and say, for example, “I’d like to bust that wide open.†I’ve never seen a gay man obsess over pictures of women being brutalized. I’ve never been pressured into sex with a gay man. In my experience, this has not been seen as “rejection.†It’s been relief, and it’s let me hang with men who will look at my face and not at my tits. I don’t have to think to myself, “God, do I look OK? Am I going to have to put out later tonight, since he bought me a couple of drinks?â€
^^^^
CB: And the women who have good , enjoyable dates with sex with men don’t have them with gay men.
I’m not saying that you don’t have the experience you say, but are you saying all women don’t like singles scenes and dates with sex ?
You are correct that getting together sexually has work in it. Anything in life worthwhile has struggle involved. There is challenge for the men in trying to date you too. They can be rejected.
You’ve never been pressured into sex with a gay man. Well, uh yeaa, I guess not :>) Pressured into sex. Are you saying you don’t want to have sex, and you just do it against your desire ? I guess I would say , if you don’t want to have sex, then don’t go to singles scenes where people are trying to get together for sex, don’t let men buy you drinks. Yea, if you don’t want to have sex, then just date gay men, or go out with women.
^^^^^^
If my experience means nothing to you, Charles, then why should yours mean anything to me? Do you only listen to women who say that they want to have sex with you?
^^^^
CB: Well that was a pretty small sliver of an experience,and the scene is typical of things in my experience from probably 30 years ago. I don’t pressure anybody. In fact, I don’t talk to a woman in the sense of “getting together” unless she talks to me first. I rely on the woman taking the lead. And I don’t really go to singles bars. All my women friends I know from many,many times together at the speakeasy or something else. We know each other really well before we have sex. Long ago, I established a policy of I only like you if you like me. So, I don’t really run into the situation you describe, strangers in a single scene. Women have to initiate sex with me. I don’t initiate sex. That way I know for sure that they do want to do it. So, in that sense ,no, I “listen” to women who don’t want to have sex with me, in that hey, we just don’t go there. Of course, the vast majority of women I socialize with I don’t have sex with.
^^^^^^^
I’ll have more commentary later. Have to go to work now.
This discussion’s giving me an ulcer, I think.
^^^^^^
3 February 2006, 7:09 pmCB; Yea, you guys are not exactly …you know
Julian Real:
One more tidbit from CB that requires a response:
CB: “…the trouble with the term “heterosexism†is that it converges with the long term problem of anti-heterosexuality in the Church, among Puritans, the whole repression of heterosexuality thing, as dirty, earthly, etc.”
Last time the anyone bothering to look into all of contemporary Western civilization checked, Charles, Christianity MANDATES, naturalizes, and normalizes “hetero”sexuality. It makes it COMPULSORY, Charles. Heterosexuality is ENFORCED by the Christian Church. Women and men aren’t even considered “officially” married, in the eyes of The Church, unless the woman is fucked (in so many ways).
That would be “homo”sexuality that some branches of the Christian Church call “sinful,” “evil,” “an abomination.” That would be HOMOsexuality that leads some (usually white, heterosexual, fundamentalist) Christians to hold “loving” picket signs like “GOD HATES FAGS” and “AIDS CURES GAYS”. I’ve never seen a Christian sex-bigot publicly condemning heterosexuality, Charles, have you? I learned THAT from life, “not some book” (as you say). See, Yolanda, Elaina, Stan, and I live in CRAP, and we can see it, and how anti-gay bigotry, the (generally white) HETEROSEXUAL MALE corporate pornography industry’s appropriation of lesbianism, and blatant heterosexism are A CENTRAL PART OF THAT. Apparently, you can’t, because… you don’t like the particular acronym?
Get a clue.
3 February 2006, 11:50 pmElaina:
*SHAKES HEAD*
Lord have mercy, y’all.
CB: Then my premise is that there has to be a significant reduction in general male chauvinism - the issues you list above - as a premise. Men decrease male chauvinism; women reward them; men decrease m c more; women reward them more… A positive cycle.
E: Men shouldn’t be rewarded for behavior that they should already be practicing, especially men on the left. Men need to get their shit together, listen to the women in the movement re: what they’re doing that’s wrong and hurtful, and change their behavior accordingly. The patriarchal behavior of men has hurt women, does hurt women, and will continue to do so. No rewards, except for the self-knowledge that y’all did the right thing. No blue ribbons, no plaques, not even a cookie, much less sex. Asking for sex as a reward for good behavior is ESPECIALLY patriarchal and ESPECIALLY fucked-up. Y’all have to learn how to act like somebody around the sisters you work with without expecting some kind of reward or pat on the fucking head. We aren’t training show dogs, here, we’re asking human beings to treat us like human beings.
^^^^
CB: And the women who have good , enjoyable dates with sex with men don’t have them with gay men.
I’m not saying that you don’t have the experience you say, but are you saying all women don’t like singles scenes and dates with sex ?
E: To clarify, I don’t think I mentioned “sex-dates” here. I’m just talking about hanging out with guys. I’ve not felt AS pressured into lots of things since I’ve kind of restricted the men that I hang out with to primarily leftist men. I DO expect the behavior of men who adhere to a movement philosophy to be different than that of others. I don’t go to bars and don’t troll the singles scene, or anything like that. I’ve been to those places, sure, seen just enough of them to be horrified. It’s never been the kind of place I’d hang out at on a regular basis.Most of the sex I’ve felt “pressured” into doing was with men who supposedly had feelings for me, with whom I was involved on a more intimate level. Friends who were lovers. That kind of thing. I don’t get “pressured” anymore; I have fewer male friends now. That’s how it goes.
I’m trying to emphasize here that you don’t have to be hanging out anywhere special, like a singles bar, to get groped and oogled by men. You don’t. It happens all the time, to every woman that I have contact with, in all kinds of places. Men look at my chest, they TALK to my chest and not to my face, all the fucking time. In the grocery store, in the classroom, @ the library, in the doctor’s office, @the gas station or the drive-thru. I know from living among women that this experience is not unique to ME. It happens to women with flat chests, large chests, ane all in between. And it’s just one example of a tiny, electric, spark of engagement in this fucking gender war.
I’ll have to post more later.
I have to catch a ride to the store.
4 February 2006, 3:26 pmJulian Real:
Clarifications and corrections:
This:
Charles, empirically it is the case here … as real points, as real, valid argumentation.
Should read:
Charles, you chronically demonstrate that you choose who you listen to based on how they speak to you, not based on the merits of what they are saying. You “listen” with an hyper-logistical academic mind. That mind, it appears from what you say here, contains a voice and value system well-tuned only for certain kinds of discussion. The form of discourse you seem to default to is (originally ONLY) men’s and academic. We are speaking to you in a variety of styles, utilising a variety of approaches, because your blatant arrogance will not abate, but we keep trying to make the obvious real to you. You are unwilling, it appears, to be open to hearing anything that brings you, as subject, into the conversation. You prefer to discuss “ideas” which is a very common patriarchal strategy men employ to get out of being held personally accountable for what they are doing.
You show a capacity to hear and to speak that only values a very particular form of illogical “logic”. This shutting down of your ears and heart, necessarily results in you “not hearing” what some people here are saying to you. By your responses, it would appear their language “does not compute”. That is too bad. Writing off the validity of others’ voices means you remain ignorant about what some people are saying. This is not their problem, Charles. The problem is the values and terms of engagement you have placed on “how†they are to speak to you, if they wish to be understood by you. It is a variation of a man telling a woman “I can’t hear what you’re saying when you’re angry.” Perhaps it is her anger that he most needs to be listening to, and comprehending, in whatever ways it is delivered.
Patriarchal men are fond of telling women how to speak, and how to say things so that “they make sense”. This is a basic control strategy of patriarchal/male supremacist interpersonal oppression. Men control the language, its use, its meaning.
Instead, we might conclude that your capacity to hear and listen and understand has been severely impaired by patriarchy. Yolanda is saying real things to you, Charles, and has been all along. Rather than take the time to “hear” her, and respond caringly, you pull the “you make no sense” card. This is an obviously patriarchal ploy (to everyone here but you, it seems). This ploy enables, er, entitles you avoid being accountable. Accountability to feminist women is a key component of being a feminist man, wouldn’t you say? And not “just” the women you put on your VIP list.
You just have decided “to not engage with that sort of discourse” because to do so would take you out of your arrogant-control-of-discourse comfort zone.
I hope that is clearer than the too-long sentence I opened with initially.
This:
The vagina is touch, Charles. It is designed to withstand a lot, the human spirits and minds to which they belong are not meant to endure what patriarchal serves to them, in violation and violence.
Should have read:
Vaginas are tough, Charles: they are designed to withstand a lot (childbirth, for example). The human spirits and minds to which the vaginas belong are not meant to endure what patriarchy serves to them, in violation and violence.
Finally, the piece I am almost finished with, on the work of Patricia Hill Collins, will be posted as a separate topic for discussion, soon, on Stan’s blog.
Thanks for your patience as I complete my work on it.
5 February 2006, 12:16 amJulian Real:
From Julian to Charles:
CB: I guess I would say , if you don’t want to have sex, then don’t go to singles scenes where people are trying to get together for sex, don’t let men buy you drinks. Yea, if you don’t want to have sex, then just date gay men, or go out with women.
JR: Charles, this is one of the more sexist things you have said here, and there are several to choose from at this point. Why is that sexist? Because women go to bars to socialize, often with female friends, sometimes in mixed gender groups, sometimes with male friends, gay and heterosexual. You are saying women shouldn’t go to bars “unless” they want to have sex, as if that’s what bars are for, and as if that’s what all men are in bars to do. How ridiculous. First, you assume all men in bars are all heterosexually predatory, or heterosexually lust-crazed, or heterosexaholics. I know some hetero men (not a lot) who, when they go to bars, go to have homosocial experiences with other heteromale friends, not to “score”. Second, you assume that women should limit where they go to socialise based on how men behave in those places. Given what Elaina just told you, can you not understand that if a woman wants to not be hit on, objectified, and worse, she’d have to stay in a padded cell without windows, locked, with the key held tightly in her hand?
Women should be free to go wherever they want, whenever they want to “without” encountering heterosexual men’s predatory and/or violating and/or degrading behaviour. You can play a role in moving some men towards that goal for women’s public sense of safety and human dignity.
I commend you on not socially approaching women first, and encourage you to “spread that strategy” among any man you encounter, as a feminist act of support to women. Please tell all men you encounter socially to “only speak to women who speak to you first” and not to approach any woman unless it has been made explicitly clear to them that the woman wants his interpersonal attention. And by interpersonal attention that does NOT include staring at her breasts, treating her like a thing, gawking at her, being rude, being patronizing, being condescending, being arrogant, being pornographic, being aggressive, hostile, or violent.
Between your justice-producing sex-acts, please encourage heterosexual men to stop hitting on women and stop objectifying them. Tell heterosexual men that a woman smiling at them doesn’t mean “I want to have sex with you, hot stud”. Please tell heteromen that women being playful with men doesn’t mean “I want to have sex with you.” It could mean, oh, say, that women enjoy being playful in social settings. Please tell men that unless a woman asks a man to have sex with her to not assume any woman does. Please tell heteromen not to take home a drunk woman for sex, whether or not she wants to go home with him–tell heteromen to tell that woman “Sorry, I don’t choose to have sex with anyone who is drunk, to be sure that consent is meaningful.” Tell heteromen to tell heterowomen who show interest in them, “I like mutually willful, conscious, consensual sex.” Please tell heteromen you know to ask a woman if she is sure she wants to have sex before he assumes she does and goes ahead and tries, or does. I know several women who have been so drunk they were in a black-out, still conversing, and the heteromen took the opportunity to have sex with them. Tell heteromen that’s not cool, and it is often rape.
These would be useful feminist actions for heterosexual men to implement, daily. And tell each of those men to do the same with every heteroman they know. And on, and on.
5 February 2006, 1:04 amelaina:
I’m back, like I said I’d be.
CB: What do you see as an organizing tool uner White Supremacist Patriarchical CAPITALISM ?
E: Uh, I dunno… networking? Phone banks? Dissent and direct action??? Boycotting??? Was the purpose of this question to remind me that I left out capitalism? ‘Cause to me, white supremacist patriarchy don’t exist without it, not in this day and age. Sorry about the typo. But you’re assuming that my theoretical hierarchy of “isms” is the same as yours, and I don’t think that it is. To me, gender is NOT and WILL NOT BE a “secondary contradiction,” because without the forceful supression of half of the population based on both their culturally gendered “femaleness” and their biological sexuality, or means of reproduction, I don’t think that capitalism as we know and experience it today could fly. The same holds true in my head for national oppression. Take a leg away, you cripple the monster. But we’re not aiming for crippling, we’re aiming to paralyze and eventually kill, not cripple. Treating sexual oppression as a secondary contradiction instead cripples the movement that would kill the monster.
I guess you could say that I don’t think that there is one “Primary Contradiction.” There are several working together at any given time.
CB: Framing it in terms of male access to female bodies is not correct. More like mutual , natural co-enjoyment, with reduction of male chauvinism as a premise.
E: I guess your argument would work provided that the minute the clothes came off, all oppressive, racist trappings were shed from the act of sex as well. They aren’t. And I’m not saying that women can’t have orgasms under these circumstances. They can and do. That doesn’t take the patriarchal sting out of having sex in Gringo society.
CB: Overall, my thought is based on the theory that some of why women are angry in their individual relationship is because of the general male chauvinism of society, not necessarily anything “their†man has done to them.
E: If “their man” ain’t doing anything oppressive, then where is all this “general male chauvinism of society” (read: patriarchal oppression) coming from? I guess it’s all in our pretty, little heads. *Rolls eyes* Jesus Christ Almighty. It’s incredibly hard for me to believe that you actually talk and listen to all these women you talk about when you say things like this. ‘Cause everyday I hear and see concrete evidence that says it’s the other way around.
CB: Why don’t you explain why what I say is not Black ?
E: I can’t say what is or isn’t “Black” about your statements, Charles. I’m not Black. I’m not any kind of expert on Blackness. Don’t try to bait me.
I am, however, on pretty familiar terms with the ugly side of white-male-patriarchal-CAPITALIST sexuality. And I call it as I see it, to be honest. All I can tell you is why what I see in what you write reminds me of that. Of CRAP.
CB: But what is your argument that what I am saying is gringoized ?
E: Well, there’s a few places that, to me, reflect a gringoized view of sexuality. One would be in your insistence that you’re absolutely right about all the stuff you say about sex. You claim to “understand women,” as if women were some sort of field-experiment, and not full human beings. You seem to imply that men should adopt feminism so that the women in their lives will “treat” them “better.” You leap to an assumption that because I don’t think that hetero-sex is a good organizing tool against white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, that I don’t like sex. And, I’m looking around the room, here, and I can see that while you have (after ignoring my arguments for quite sometime [also a very gringo-masculine thing to do]) attempted to break down my argument and answer some of my questions, while you were outright insulting and crude, IMO, to the only person commenting here who I know for sure identifies as and IS a Black Woman. WTF is that about???
CB: How big are you saying the porn industry is $ wise ?…In general, my impression of economics is that sexual exploitation of women is not a big money maker for capitalists.
12.6 billion, just in porno sales. Not to mention the money involved in sexual slavery; not to mention the money made by Hollywood in it’s over-sexualization and dehumanization of women in mainstream cinema. Not to mention lots of things.
Capitalists do indeed make money by exploiting women.
CB: Anything in life worthwhile has struggle involved. There is challenge for the men in trying to date you too. They can be rejected.
E: I guess that I’d rather see the men I know struggling to get rid of their misogyny than struggling to get dates with women, or to get women to have sex with them.
CB: But what are you expecting feminist men to do anyway ? Lets say we just want feminist men to get other men to change. How are you going to get them to do it ?
CB: What’s your proposal for getting men to reduce male chauvinism ?
E: I’m gonna take the 2 questions above and answer them at the same time.
I’d say one thing, one VERY important thing that men can do to stimy their own use of patriarchal power/privilege is to TAKE WOMEN SERIOUSLY when they criticize their use of said power. Don’t get so defensive. Realize that our bodies are not something that you have some sort of “right of access” to. Encouraging autonomy of women’s organizations, as in, supporting them without expecting to run the show. Be honest and thorough with self-criticism. Stop treating women’s oppression as a “secondary contradiction.”
I ain’t about subtle persuasion. This shit has to stop. It has needed to stop since it started. I shouldn’t have to “convince” men, especially leftist men, that the liberation of ALL women from white capitalist patriarchal oppression is good for them. As I said in my post earlier, men shouldn’t be expecting some kind of extra reward for recognizing and working to correct their use and abuse of patriarchy.
CB: I guess I would say , if you don’t want to have sex, then don’t go to singles scenes where people are trying to get together for sex, don’t let men buy you drinks. Yea, if you don’t want to have sex, then just date gay men, or go out with women.
E: I’m gonna reiterate here that I don’t do the “singles-scene” thing anyways. But even if I did choose to hang there… let’s see… I should only hang out with women or gay men or I shouldn’t “let” men buy me drinks if I don’t want to have sex with them later. What are you gonna tell me next? If I don’t wanna get raped I shouldn’t go out showing my cleavage and wearing a miniskirt? ‘K. Remember how you asked earlier what sort of “gringoized notions” about sexuality the ideas you present here reflect?? Well, this one’s a good example. Classic “blame the woman for lookin’ so damn good” reasoning. Comes straight from the Western-European-Right-Wing-Christian-Patriarchal-White-Supremacist, and subsequently Capitalist school of thought that women are the root of all evil.
CB: Pressured into sex. Are you saying you don’t want to have sex, and you just do it against your desire ?
E: You speak as though this is a rare phenomenon, as though I’m the first person who’s said it to you. Men pressure women into having sex all the time. I’ve done it; I’ve had sex at the end of the day with my partner to avoid arguing about not having sex with him enough. I’ve had sex before in order to assure that my partner wouldn’t be “angry.” I’m not unique at all. Every day I hear women talking about men’s idiotic expectations in the bedroom. I hear women complain about having to do it even though it hurts after childbirth. These are commentary that pass through normal conversations as though nothing wrong is happening. Women who are queer stay with men in order to support their children. Women avoid trying to correct men’s “sexual technique” so as to avoid erectile dysfunction in their partners. There’s a million ways that this happens. If you don’t think it happens, you’re blinder than Ronnie Millsaps.
And for the record, yes. I like having sex. I like having sex with men, in fact. I also like smoking cigarettes. Doesn’t mean it’s good for me, in either case.
CB: Yea, you guys are not exactly …you know
5 February 2006, 8:00 amE: No, Charles, I DON’T know.
elaina:
http://www.ainews.com/story/9814/
That there’s the link to where I got the $12.6 billion figure for the porn-industry revenue. A site called “Adult Industry News.” Warning: it’s porno-friendly.
Just thought y’all might want to know where that figure came from.
5 February 2006, 8:20 amStan:
Dualism
This is the trap. Dualism is not dialectics. It is bourgeois and gendered-male. Marx and Engles’ account of gender was a regression from their own theses. ANY!!! separation of nature from nurture, even for analysis, results in dualizing. Dialectics focuses on the dynamism inhering in relations, NOT the “difference” between the polarities. This fundamental failure by marxists to apply this BASIC interpretation to gender can only be an effort to salvage male privilege and power. That male marxists (an even many female marxists, though they are in the minority among the mass of marxists… hmmmm) have such elaborate rationalizations for this is an outcome of the sincere belief that how they experience gender personally is reflective of actual systems of power, when it is in fact internalized ideology… complex constructs that simultaneously reporduce and conceal power.
Part of the assertion of masculine privilege is the objective pose, because it devalues affective experience.
http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/content/v12.4/birkeland.html
5 February 2006, 9:13 amhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=218
Charles Brown:
My gosh , looks like you guys are digging yourselves deeper and deeper into that hole that Julien thought I was in but he was actually in. “Hey down there, stop digging ; we’ll never be able to get you all out.” I’ll have to read over these latest notes , but it ain’t looking good for your political credentials from my skimming.
CB
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-PCAACA at xxxxxxxxxxxxx (May, 2000)
Daniel Horowitz. _Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine
Mystique: The American Left, The Cold War, and Modern Feminism_.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. 255 pp. Notes,
index. $30.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-55849-168-6.
Reviewed for H-PCAACA by Robert E. Weir , Bay
Path College
A Jewish girl leaves Peoria, Illinois, for Smith College. Upon her
1942 graduation she goes to grad school, works in New York, then
marries. A move to the suburbs and three children complete the
conformist cycle. But middle-class housewifery becomes a “gilded
cage,” devoid of self-worth, identity, and purpose. The realization
that other educated women share “the problem that has no name”
prompts the writing of _The Feminine Mystique_ (1963), the seminal
text during the rebirth of American feminism in the 1960s.
Sound familiar? Betty Goldstein Friedan’s transformation from nave
Illinois schoolgirl and bored housewife to feminist firebrand is a
popular culture staple of mythic proportion. According to Smith
College American Studies professor Daniel Horowitz, that’s precisely
the problem. Most mythic odysseys, includng Friedan’s, are equal
parts reality and fancy. Like other social historians in the wake
of E.P. Thompson, Horowitz turns his attention to the “making” of
Betty Friedan, and the private drama behind the public persona.
During Goldstein’s childhood, Peoria was Illinois’s second-largest
city, and witnessed clashes between capital and labor. Labor
conflict was discussed freely in the Goldstein household, as was
anti-semitism, the rise of fascism, free-thought, and literature. By
the time Goldstein graduated from high school, she already enjoyed a
reputation as a budding intellectual.
Goldstein’s mind blossomed at Smith. Horowitz draws on Goldstein’s
undergraduate papers and editorials in the campus newspaper she
edited, to show that Goldstein was also an activist. He does a
masterful job of linking Goldstein to Smith professors who shaped
her thought. Goldstein’s capacious mind led her to write on topics
like pacifism, student rights, fascism, and socialism. Many
articles were spirited defenses of labor unions and, at the urging
of a professor, Goldstein visited Tennessee’s Highlander Folk
School, a hotbed of union activism.
As a graduate student at Berkeley (1942-43), Goldstein immersed
herself as much in the Popular Front as in psychology labs. She
moved to New York, where from 1943 through 1946, she reported on
labor and women’s issues for the Federated Press. When she lost her
job — partly due to sexism — Goldstein began writing for the UE
News, the official journal of the United Electrical Workers, a
radical union with a relatively progressive record on women. She
continued to write for the News into 1952. Horowitz notes that her
1949 marriage to Carl Friedan did not silence Friedan’s union
radicalism, McCarthyism did. The UE’s communist organizers led to
right-wing attacks that so decimated UE membership that Friedan fell
victim to staff cutbacks.
Retreat to the suburbs failed to stifle Friedan. First in Queens,
then in Rockland County, Friedan edited a community newsletter and
immersed herself in grassroots organizing on multi-cultural housing,
racism, rents, and education. She also commuted into New York City
to teach college writing and conduct research for her burgeoning
freelance writing career.
So why did _The Feminine Mystique_ represent Betty Friedan as a
naive housewife awaiting revelation? It is here that Horowitz makes
his most important analytical contribution. As a Jew, a radical,
and a woman, Friedan was particularly vulnerable to right-wing
persecution. Horowitz chronicles the Red Scare nightmares and
concludes that Friedan realized that neither her writings nor
feminist thought would gain currency if tainted with Old Left
radicalism. The myth of the trapped housewife was a necessary
fiction.
Horowitz speculates that Friedan repeated her own myth so often she
came to believe parts of it, and that as an intellectual she has
been overly protective of her turf. Friedan refused to talk with
Horowitz and has leveled an indefensible charge of red-baiting. If
anything, Horowitz places more stock in what historian David Caute
dubbed “the great fear” than Friedan, and sees her as a right-wing
victim. Horowitz argues that McCarthyism was so fearful and
damaging that it continues to compel Friedan to repudiate her roots
and intellect in order to protect herself against enemies that can
no longer harm her.
It’s a great pity. If Friedan read Horowitz’s book she’d find that
he takes her more seriously as a thinker than any other scholar to
date. His is a nuanced account that traces Friedan’s intellectual
development and shows her deftly developing her views, skillfully
negotiating slippery political terrain, and evolving strategies that
kept her one step ahead of right-wingers.
This is a work of first-rate scholarship that reads like a complex
mystery novel. There are limitations. Horowitz admits he should
have spent more time interviewing Carl Friedan, whom Betty divorced
in 1969, but the chief shortcomings appear when Horowitz is forced
to speculate on areas where Friedan would not cooperate. Judith
Hennessee’s official biography corrects several small errors, though
her book lacks the intellectual wallop of Horowitz’s and repeats
myths that he demolishes.
Small problems detract little from a masterful work. Students of
popular culture can read this work on many levels. It shows how
“truth” is relativized by historical forces, and adds to a growing
body of literature on the use of fear as a political weapon, a
tactic whose currency is sadly all-too-relevant. Horowitz’s
findings raise questions about how ideas are appropriated by various
groups who stamp them with their own political agendas. There is
also a fascinating lesson in the controversy surrounding this book.
What happens when scholars challenge sacred ideals? But on a more
prosaic level, Horowitz’s book is simply a fascinating story of what
lies behind ideas that change the world.
Copyright (c) 2000 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
5 February 2006, 6:17 pmmay be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact H-Net at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Charles Brown:
* One more tidbit from CB that requires a response:
CB: “…the trouble with the term “heterosexism†is that it converges with the long term problem of anti-heterosexuality in the Church, among Puritans, the whole repression of heterosexuality thing, as dirty, earthly, etc.â€
Last time the anyone bothering to look into all of contemporary Western civilization checked, Charles, Christianity MANDATES, naturalizes, and normalizes “heteroâ€sexuality.
^^^^
CB: Look a little closer and at practice. The Church considers much heterosexuality a direct sin - fornication, adultery, any sex outside of marriage - and as to in marriage , St. Paul just said it is better to marry than to burn, not exactly a ringing endorsement. The Catholic Church considers contraceptiona a sin. It doesn’t permit its highest members, priests, bishops, cardinals and Popes to have sex, supposedly; but in practice in the U.S. there has been a significant amount of sex practiced by priests, non-heterosex. Prostestant churches are repressive in their attitudes to heterosex in general.
^^^^^^
It makes it COMPULSORY, Charles. Heterosexuality is ENFORCED by the Christian Church. Women and men aren’t even considered “officially†married, in the eyes of The Church, unless the woman is fucked (in so many ways).
^^^^^^
5 February 2006, 6:27 pmCB: Surely you are not saying that the church is pro-sex. That’s not the vibe I ever got from the church. Sex is guilt tripped by the church. Sex is dirty,fleshly. Jesus was born of a virgin and never had sex, otherwise he wouldn’t have been perfect. Having sex in anyway is stigmatized as sinful.
Charles Brown:
That would be “homoâ€sexuality that some branches of the Christian Church call “sinful,†“evil,†“an abomination.â€
^^^
CB; That too, but, heterosex is damned pretty widely or at least badmouthed by the churches. Also, in practice, the priests and ministers seem to practice a significant amount of homosex, while talking against it.
^^^^^
That would be HOMOsexuality that leads some (usually white, heterosexual, fundamentalist) Christians to hold “loving†picket signs like “GOD HATES FAGS†and “AIDS CURES GAYSâ€. I’ve never seen a Christian sex-bigot publicly condemning heterosexuality, Charles, have you?
^^^^^
CB: Uh yeaa. They damn fornication, adultery, birth control ( which would only be needed for heterosex) etc. all the time. Lust is one of the seven deadly sins Where have you been ? It’s all sinning. Jesus says you aren’t even supposed to even look at a woman lustfully, or else PLUCK OUT YOUR EYE !
Hello , Julien. Are you living in the real world ?
^^^^
I learned THAT from life, “not some book†(as you say). See, Yolanda, Elaina, Stan, and I live in CRAP, and we can see it, and how anti-gay bigotry, the (generally white) HETEROSEXUAL MALE corporate pornography industry’s appropriation of lesbianism, and blatant heterosexism are A CENTRAL PART OF THAT. Apparently, you can’t, because… you don’t like the particular acronym?
^^^^
CB: Your acronym is fine, but don’t act like lots of people aren’t opposing the same stuff but under other names, and names that have been around for much longer than CRAP. Why do we need a new name ? We already have lots of activists opposing what you call CRAP under more conventional names. Join the already existing Left.
^^^^^^
5 February 2006, 6:36 pmCharles Brown:
*SHAKES HEAD*
Lord have mercy, y’all.
^^^^
CB: Shakes head: Is anybody home over there ? Y’all is about five people out of billions in the world. Not too many of them, women included, who think like “y’all”.
^^^^
E: Men shouldn’t be rewarded for behavior that they should already be practicing, especially men on the left. Men need to get their shit together, listen to the women in the movement re: what they’re doing that’s wrong and hurtful, and change their behavior accordingly.
^^^^
CB: Well, they should, but they are not going to. So, it is necessary to come up with a way to get change. They are not going to change their ways in response to your saying they should. How many of them are listening to you ?
^^^^^^
The patriarchal behavior of men has hurt women, does hurt women, and will continue to do so. No rewards, except for the self-knowledge that y’all did the right thing. No blue ribbons, no plaques, not even a cookie, much less sex. Asking for sex as a reward for good behavior is ESPECIALLY patriarchal and ESPECIALLY fucked-up. Y’all have to learn how to act like somebody around the sisters you work with without expecting some kind of reward or pat on the fucking head. We aren’t training show dogs, here, we’re asking human beings to treat us like human beings.
^^^^^^
CB: It’s a bit more mixed than the way you portray it. There are millions of men treating women like human beings and even devoting much of their lives to loving and treating particular women and girls very , very , very well. Your failure to acknowledge this and portray men’s treatment of women as one big mistreatment is way out of touch with reality. And the vast majority of women know this ( and accordingly don’t join with “feminist” positions that are exaggerations and distortions of the totality of relations between women and men) Again you tell a half-truth above, and thereby it will not be the basis for winning more gains against male chauvinism.
^^^^
5 February 2006, 6:50 pmJulian Real:
To Elaina, Stan, and Charles:
Thanks for that stat, Elaina, on the pornography industry. Here’s the figure for the whole of the bloody sexxxism business (of interlocking and overlapping industries of destruction-as-sex, primarily geared to producing orgasms for men, at the expense of humanity): approximately $56 billion-with-a-”b” annually. Not exactly spare change. That money is paying for the maintenance, reinforcement, and recreation of hegemonic gender, race, and sexuality, and other systems of ethnic and erotic destruction. See: http://www.hustlingtheleft.com for more on this harm, including pornographic images of hate and dehumanisation. (Warning: they are racist to the core, sexist to the core, anti-
Semitic to the core, heterosexist and homophobic to the core, and female-child hating to the core, among other things.)
Thanks to Stan for that excellent recent post here. I want to print that one out and keep it! So well put!
Charles, I hope you know in your heart that you are not my personal political adversary, or anything even close to that. You might be more of a problem for feminism’s radical agenda, which includes listening, and caring to listen, to radical feminist women, especially those you do not agree with. I believe you do not wish to hear what Elaina and Yolanda have been saying to you, about your behaviour. And I think that it is worth reflecting on why you do not wish to know what they are saying, and why you haven’t asked for clarification, from them, in the spirit of care, not defensiveness.
As is clear from earlier posts, I passionately and fiercely support radical feminist work, projects, campaigns, and methods of and for exposing and challenging hegemonic male power. I also fight racism, anti-Semitism, other forms of ethnic hate, gender dualism, heterosexism, “sexuality” as it is constructed in and by white Christian heterosexual male supremacy, and all other forms of institutionalised “dehumanisation”–as most humanitarians would define that term.
Charles, you are an intelligent, witty, articulate scholar, from what I can tell. I appreciate the efforts you have put forth to make any form of marxism VISIBLE in the U.S., which, before, during, and since Sen. Joseph “Fuck the Truth” McCarthy, has been frantic about the fellow not only because he was a Jew (Marx, not McCarthy). I also deeply appreciate you taking on the mighty task of calling marxists to take on the matter of male supremacy. I also appreciate any warmth and comfort you bring into the lives of real women who want to be treated like real human beings. This is a lot to be doing with your life, and it should be recognised and commended.
I am asking you, person to person, radical to radical, do you care that you have been dismissive of Yolanda and Elaina’s comments to you here? What I am asking is not about logic or theory. It is a simple question, asked earnestly. Do you care? If you do not find their comments absorbable, relevant, or meaningful have you indicated to them that you wish to, that you care to, that what they have to say is important for your own growth as a human being?
That is my first question to you, human being to human being. My second follows from your most recent comments: why do you keep arguing to feminists that we are focused too much on the harm of hetero/sexism and male supremacy? Do you similarly argue with Marxists who focus exclusively on the harms of capitalism, and argue with agnostics and atheists who argue the harms of Christianity? Please help me understand this difference.
I know a few good heterosexual men, who treat women respectfully most of the time. I know one in particular who is the primary parent of his three year old girl. He is a survivor of rape (he was ages two to four when he was repeatedly raped–by a very young man). He wants his daughter, against his female partner’s heterosexist feelings, to be a lesbian, because he knows very well what men do to women that men call “sex” that really is violation and violence. You and I know men do terrible things to women systematically. Feminists focus on this as real harm, yes. And those same women, including Andrea Dworkin, often love men, care about men, and have deep connections to men. So what’s the problem with what Elaina and I have been saying about men’s violence and violations of women? We are radical feminists, after all: do you really expect Marxists to talk up and cheer all the perks of capitalism. Do you similarly tell them they are “too negative” every time they point out how harmful a system capitalism is? Help me understand the difference, but please first read “Sex and War” by our pal Stan.
I also recommend reading Patricia Hill Collins’ books: Black Feminist Thought, and Black Sexual Politics. I honestly think you will enjoy them and learn from them, as a scholar and seeker of truth.
Take good care of yourself and others.
Julian
5 February 2006, 9:23 pmJulian Real:
Hi Charles. (Stan, if easily done, could you HTLM code the website below, after the fourth “CB/JR” exchange? Thanks. You can phrase it “John Shelby Spong” if you want.)
CB: Look a little closer and at practice. The Church considers much heterosexuality a direct sin - fornication, adultery, any sex outside of marriage - and as to in marriage , St. Paul just said it is better to marry than to burn, not exactly a ringing endorsement. The Catholic Church considers contraceptiona a sin.
JR: Well, I’m no Catholic, as a Jew, but I will say that the Roman Catholic Church (compared to the Greek and Russian Orthodoxy) seems the most rigidly patriarchal, including (but not limited to) the promulgation of heterosexism and homophobia and a sex-is-bad mentality, as you properly note, unless a woman is wed to a man.
CB: It doesn’t permit its highest members, priests, bishops, cardinals and Popes to have sex, supposedly;
JR: That too would apply more to Roman Catholicism than other branches.
CB: but in practice in the U.S. there has been a significant amount of sex practiced by priests, non-heterosex.
JR: Most of the sex practiced by priests, if actual accounts mean anything, is the rape of nuns, and the rape or molestation of male and female children. The misogyny of mass culture recognises and is alarmed by only one aspect of that atrocity: the harm of boys by men. Men’s harm to women and girls, by male priests, barely gets any attention. Funny that. (Not really, at all.)
CB: Prostestant churches are repressive in their attitudes to heterosex in general.
JR: Again, you are really blurring some widely divergent values and policies of the Protestant Church. Have you read the work of Anglican Bishop (a U.S. priest) John Shelby Spong, who is anti-patriarchy, anti-heterosexism, anti-racism, anti-misogyny, and not anti-Semitic? Here is a site with his books listed: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/173155/002-3812079-4945648
CB: Surely you are not saying that the church is pro-sex.
JR: Some parts of the church are pro-sex, yes. I would say that in the way that you mean it, that is a minority view in “the church” if by “the church” we mean all of Christianity as it is currently manifesting.
CB: That’s not the vibe I ever got from the church. Sex is guilt tripped by the church.
JR: Which church, Charles? (And, for the record, I don’t go to church. I’m a Jew. I don’t go to Temple either!)
CB: [According to the church] [s]ex is dirty,fleshly. Jesus was born of a virgin and never had sex, otherwise he wouldn’t have been perfect. Having sex in anyway is stigmatized as sinful.
JR: Well, let’s see. First, according to Jews, and many Christian scholars who are part of what is called “The Jesus Seminar”, Jesus was born to Mary-the-maiden, not Mary-the-Virgin (a Greek to Latin mistranslation by those Roman patriarchs), and Jesus’ father was Joseph, not [G-d], any more than HaShem is anyone’s “parent”, which is not the mystical Jewish understanding of what [G-d] is. God-as-whiteheterosexualChristianfatherfigure is certainly not a Jewish notion.
CB: heterosex is damned pretty widely or at least badmouthed by the churches.
JR: Some expressions of heterosexuality, perhaps. ALL forms of homosexuality are condemned by those same churches, though.
CB: Also, in practice, the priests and ministers seem to practice a significant amount of homosex, while talking against it.
JR: As noted above, it is not “homosex” they are practicing, Charles, and I do think that statement is profoundly and deeply heterosexist, and possible also homophobic. An alarming number of male priests, and other male Christian religious figures are guilty of child-rape and the rape of women, often nuns (by Roman Catholic priests, that is). None of that is “homosex” if by that we mean “sex between men”. Now who’s blurring the lines between sex and abuse? You seem offended when Yolanda, Elaina, Stan, and I do that with heterosex, but you seem perfectly comfortable doing it here, when referring to child molestation. Can you explain that difference of valuation to me please? What else is that besides heterosexism?
CB: They damn fornication, adultery, birth control ( which would only be needed for heterosex) etc. all the time.
JR: You forgot masturbation, but we can move on.
CB: Lust is one of the seven deadly sins Where have you been ?
JR: Hanging around in CRAP.
CB: It’s all sinning. Jesus says you aren’t even supposed to even look at a woman lustfully, or else PLUCK OUT YOUR EYE !
JR: I don’t think Jesus said that, actually. Please check your sources.
Hello , Julien. Are you living in the real world ?
JR: Only when I’m not escaping into bad dreams.
CB: Your acronym is fine,
JR: Thank you.
CB: but don’t act like lots of people aren’t opposing the same stuff but under other names, and names that have been around for much longer than CRAP.
JR: Where do I do that? I don’t do that. I like bell hooks’ term too: white capitalist patriarchy. I just prefer acronyms that also reveal something about the condition of our lives, rather than saying three words every time. Think of the time I’m saving by coming up with that term. Try saying them both three times and see how much time you save just saying “CRAP, CRAP, CRAP!” (I have found it to be very therapeutic, and somewhat fun as well. I don’t know about you, but since I don’t “have good feminist sex” (as I don’t have any sex) I need all the fun that I can get out of my political life! Please don’t deprive me of my acronyms!
CB: Why do we need a new name ?
JR: Well, if you don’t like it, don’t use it. Some of my friends and political colleagues, including Elaina, do like it, and so we use it. Dos that pose any significant problem for you? I hope CRAP isn’t threatening to you, as a term I mean. We both know it is serious threat to humanity, yours, mine, Elaina’s, Yolanda’s, Stan’s, Josiah’s, and anyone else reading this. (Is there anyone else reading this?)
CB: We already have lots of activists opposing what you call CRAP under more conventional names. Join the already existing Left.
5 February 2006, 10:57 pmJR: Oh, now Charles, I’m not one for political conventions, and you know I don’t join groups that dismiss, demean, and disrespect women and refuse to fight for women’s humanity. When the Left does that, when it is fully on board with that radical enterprise, when it does as you rightly suggest it should do, and take male supremacy seriously as a source of political harm to humans (women)–as seriously as it takes what happens to populations of men (or boys, or groups of men that just happen to include women), then I’ll look into what it takes to join up. Let me know if the application form is long. I’m not good with long forms. Until then, I remain a radical feminist, of the “independent” variety. Oh, and when the Left stops thinking of itself as radically different than the Right. And when it stops being bigoted about the Right, about Christianity, about Republicans. And when it stops its intellectual elitism, stops its put-downs of “stupid” people, which is almost always a regional and class-based slam. And when it stops supporting the racist sexxxism industries, financially and intellectually. But by then, who knows, I may not be around to join!
Charles Brown:
From the Los Angeles Times
BETTY FRIEDAN / 1921-2006
Catalyst of Feminist Revolution
By Elaine Woo
Times Staff Writer
February 5, 2006
Betty Friedan, the visionary feminist who launched a social revolution with
her provocative 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” died Saturday, her 85th
birthday. Friedan died of congestive heart failure at her home in
Washington, D.C., according to Emily Bazelon, a cousin who was speaking for
the family. She said Friedan had been in failing health for some time.
Her bestselling book identified “the problem that has no name,” the
unhappiness of post-World War II American women unfulfilled by traditional
notions of female domesticity.
Melding sociology and humanistic psychology, the book became the cornerstone
of one of the 20th century’s most profound movements, unleashing the first
full flowering of American feminism since the mid-1800s.
It gave Friedan, an obscure suburban New York housewife and freelance
writer, the mantle to meet with the pope and heads of state, and to lead an
international movement that would shake up marriage, the workplace, politics
and education.
She founded the National Organization for Women in 1966, making it the first
new major feminist organization in half a century. She also was among the
founders of the National Women’s Political Caucus and the group that became
the National Abortion Rights Action League.
“I never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change
history,” said Friedan, who always kept a sense of wonder about her place in
history as the mother of the contemporary women’s movement.
“It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from
other women.. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a
woman and it was the truth of every woman.”
Friedan’s affinity with mainstream values was the foundation of her
authority. Her emphatic belief that women should have equal rights - but not
at the expense of alienating men - distinguished her from many feminist
leaders who emerged later.
“She found that love between unequals can never succeed,” writer Gloria
Steinem once said, “and she has undertaken the immense job of bringing up
the status of women so love can succeed.”
Her more moderate brand of feminism, combined with her often irascible
nature, led to ruptures with other movement leaders, such as Steinem and
Bella Abzug, the late New York congresswoman. Some feminists eventually
denounced Friedan as a reactionary.
By the 1980s, feminism had ceased being her primary focus, and she spent her
last decades focused on issues of aging, families, work and public policy.
She wrote six books and held teaching posts at many institutions, including
UCLA and USC.
Friedan did not conform to conventional notions of feminine beauty or
decorum. She was short - 5 feet 2 - and stocky, with a hawklike nose, large,
deep-set eyes and a gravelly voice that no one could call timid. She was
fast-talking, impatient and abrasive. Her rudeness was especially perplexing
when she directed it at other women. “I could be,” she acknowledged in later
years, “a bad-tempered bitch.”
She remained formidable in her old age. Even as she was approaching 80 and
enjoying her role as doting grandmother of nine, she could demolish
interviewers who asked what she considered inane questions.
Yet she always bore a trace of the little girl from Peoria, Ill., at times
giddy, vulnerable and stuck on appearances. Peoria, she once observed, was
the source of all her hang-ups.
Friedan was born Bettye Goldstein on Feb. 4, 1921, the year after American
women won the right to vote. She was the oldest of three children of jewelry
store owner Harry Goldstein, a Russian Jew, and the former Miriam Horwitz.
Although a sickly child who suffered from asthma and vision problems, Bettye
(who later dropped the e from the end of her first name) was precocious and
skipped a year of school. In high school she was valedictorian, but her
braininess, she said, made her feel “like a freak.”
Anti-Semitism barred her father, a successful businessman, from joining the
country club and other elite Peoria circles, and it kept Bettye and her
sister out of high school sororities. “When you’re a Jewish girl who grows
up on the right side of the tracks in the Midwest, you’re marginal. You’re
in, but you’re not,” she said, “and you grow up an observer.”
Her mother was an unhappy housewife whose disposition and health
dramatically improved when her husband’s health faltered and she took over
management of the jewelry business. In her 1976 book “It Changed My Life,”
Friedan said her mother’s discontent gave her an early glimpse of the perils
of the malaise she would later call the “feminine mystique.”
Envious of her mother’s social grace and her sister’s beauty, Friedan did
not feel at home until she arrived at Smith College in the late 1930s.
A contemporary of Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, who attended Smith about
the same time, she became editor of the campus newspaper and quickly
established a reputation for brilliance. Friedan finished summa cum laude in
psychology in 1942 and entered graduate studies at UC Berkeley.
At Berkeley, she won a prestigious science fellowship that had never been
given to any psychologist, much less a woman. But she turned down the award
when it became apparent that a physicist she was dating felt threatened by
her success. Although she said she had little, if any, awareness of it at
the time, she was fearful of being “brighter than the boys” and violating
the mystique she would later so studiously dissect. Against the advice of
her professors, who included the eminent theorist Erik Erikson, she gave up
psychology all together.
Having discovered Marxism in college, Friedan decided that she would work
for the “revolution.” By 1943, she was immersed in popular-front journalism,
first at the Federated Press in New York and later at UE News, the official
newspaper of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America,
then one of the nation’s most radical unions.
In 1947 she married theatrical producer Carl Friedman, who later dropped the
m in his last name to create the more distinctive “Friedan.” In 1948 the
Friedans had the first of three children, Daniel. Four years later when she
became pregnant with her second child, Jonathan, and requested maternity
leave, she was fired from her job at the union paper, an event she later
would call a “formative experience” in her evolution as a feminist. Her
third child, Emily, was born in 1956.
As the family expanded, the Friedans settled in prosperous Rockland County,
N.Y. Though she was determined to be a happy housewife, she suffered renewed
attacks of her childhood asthma and resumed psychotherapy. Urged by her
therapist not to waste her education and training, Friedan began to write
for women’s magazines. What commenced for the unwitting Friedan was an
education in the feminine mystique.
She had wanted to write a profile of a woman who had given up a successful
career as an advertising executive, married and become a serious sculptor,
but editors were doubtful that their housewife-readers would be interested
in such a woman. They accepted the article but only after deleting
references to the woman’s career. Within a few years, Friedan said, “I began
to lose my zest” for writing the rigidly formulaic articles that women’s
magazines seemed to want.
In 1957, she was asked to conduct a survey of her Smith classmates for their
15th reunion and found that the women who did not conform exactly to
traditional notions of womanhood were happier than those who did. A light
bulb went on for Friedan: “Maybe it wasn’t education that was the problem,
keeping American women from ‘adjusting to their role as women,’ ” she wrote,
“but that narrow definition of ‘the role of women.’ ”
She wrote a magazine article based on that argument, but it was repeatedly
rejected. Realizing that her thesis “threatened the firmament” of women’s
magazines, she decided to bypass that venue and put her ideas into a book
instead.
She interviewed scores of suburban women, repeating many of the questions
she had asked her Smith sisters. Another part of her research entailed long
days in the New York Public Library, looking for shifts in the types of
heroines depicted in women’s magazine fiction. The results of her study were
stark: Friedan found that the avid career woman who dominated the magazines
in the 1930s had given way by the 1950s to a less adventuresome model: the
contented homemaker.
Was the 1950s image reality, or was it a self-fulfilling fantasy cooked up
by magazine editors and advertisers? Suspecting the latter, Friedan plowed
on with her interviews. She was staggered by the dissatisfactions aired by
wives and mothers, by their vague laments about feeling empty, anxious and
incomplete. A mother of four who had shirked college for marriage and family
told Friedan: “There’s no problem you can even put a name to. But I’m
desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and
putter-on of pants and a bed maker, somebody who can be called on when you
want something. But who am I?”
“I came to realize,” Friedan would later write, “that something is very
wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today.. For
the startling pattern that began to emerge as one clue led me to another in
far-flung fields of modern thought and life, defied not only the
conventional image but basic psychological assumptions about women.”
She found that books on the psychology of women, such as those by Freudian
analyst Helene Deutsch, generally adhered to traditional ideas of women’s
fulfillment in hearth and home. Seeking a theoretical basis for her views of
women’s plight, Friedan turned to the work on identity and self-realization
by psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and her old Berkeley advisor,
Erikson. Their ideas informed what became her central tenet: “that the core
of the problem for women today is . a problem of identity - a stunting or
evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique.”
Writing in longhand in makeshift workspaces at home while raising three
young children, Friedan finally produced a 1,000-page manuscript. It took
her five years.
Lacking faith in the book, Friedan’s publisher, W.W. Norton, printed only a
few thousand hardcover copies in 1963. Friedan did not experience the full
force of fame until Dell issued the paperback in 1964. That year, “The
Feminine Mystique” became the top-selling nonfiction book in the country.
Much of the initial reaction was hostile. Friedan was cursed, told to seek
psychiatric help and accused of posing “more of a threat to the United
States than the Russians.” She was shunned by neighborhood women who had
once been friendly, her children were kicked out of car pools, and her
marriage began to crack under the weight of her growing celebrity.
The book’s focus on the struggles of educated, middle-class white women was
faulted by critics as a major shortcoming. To many black women, more
concerned with survival than self-fulfillment, Friedan’s emphasis on finding
meaningful careers “seemed to come from another planet,” according to
historian Paula Giddings.
The personal narrative that gave “The Feminine Mystique” much of its power
was misleading in another way: By omitting references to Friedan’s earlier
career as a left-wing journalist, she created the impression that she had
never been anything other than a suburban matron.
Years later, biographer Daniel Horowitz would accuse Friedan of obscuring
her past to sell books. But Friedan insisted she was only being politically
savvy. “It was the McCarthy era . and I didn’t go around parading my
left-wing background because it wouldn’t have helped in organizing the
women’s movement,” she told The Times in 2000. “On the other hand, I never
kept it secret.”
Friedan’s radical past explains “how she came as a housewife to politicize
so deftly the ‘problems that have no name,’ ” said historian Ruth Rosen.
“People in the old left got experience in naming things. That’s not
unimportant. It explains the power of ‘The Feminine Mystique.’ ”
The book received many positive reviews and was excerpted by some of the
leading women’s magazines Friedan had attacked as messengers of the
mystique.
Thousands of women wrote to her and stopped her in the street to pour out
the details of their lives, beg for advice or just tell her, “You changed my
life.”
“I had no idea,” Friedan said, “that my book would start a revolution.” Or,
as futurist Alvin Toffler put it, Friedan “pulled the trigger on history,”
launching a tumultuous decade for American women with Friedan at the
epicenter.
In June 1966, Friedan joined members of state commissions on the status of
women for a national conference in Washington. Frustrated by their
powerlessness, some of the members decided that a new, nongovernmental
organization was needed to make women’s rights a top national concern.
Huddled with Friedan at the closing banquet, the women whispered their ideas
for a feminist NAACP. Friedan scribbled these words on a napkin: “National
Organization for Women.”
Four months later, the women reconvened in Washington for an organizing
conference. Friedan was elected president, and NOW plunged into battle.
In one of its first campaigns, it pressured the federal Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission to prohibit sex-segregated help wanted ads. Soon
after, it forced airlines to change a long-standing policy requiring
stewardesses to resign once they married or turned 32. Later it successfully
lobbied President Johnson to sign an executive order prohibiting sex
discrimination by federal contractors.
Today, the group is anchored in Washington and has 500,000 members and
branches in all 50 states. But in its early years, NOW’s headquarters was
Friedan’s New York City apartment, and Friedan was indisputably in charge.
On Valentine’s Day in 1968, she led a platoon of angry women into the
exclusively male Oak Room at New York’s Plaza Hotel to draw attention to sex
discrimination in public places. After a series of similar dramatic
demonstrations, individual states began to outlaw such exclusionary
practices.
In 1970, the largest feminist demonstration since the suffrage movement took
over 5th Avenue as Friedan called for a national Women’s Strike for
Equality. Held on the 50th anniversary of the passage of the women’s
suffrage amendment, it drew 500,000 women and heightened awareness of the
women’s movement across the nation.
Feminism was blooming: in universities, where women’s studies courses began
cropping up; in politics, where the House of Representatives passed the
Equal Rights Amendment and Shirley Chisholm ran for president; and in
popular culture, where books such as Robin Morgan’s anthology “Sisterhood Is
Powerful” and Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” and a new magazine named Ms.
were fomenting debate and adding phrases to the American lexicon.
But during those heady years, Friedan’s marriage was crumbling. She claimed
years later to have been a battered wife, a contention that outraged Carl
Friedan, who vociferously denied the charges. Their 22-year marriage ended
in divorce in 1969. He died in December.
In 1970, Friedan stepped down as NOW president amid growing dissatisfaction
with her vision of the movement. But not even her critics could deny the
power of the changes she had unleashed.
By this time, however, the mother of the movement was being assaulted by its
more radical elements. In 1969 she had delivered her first public attack on
lesbianism, labeling it a “lavender menace” that would tarnish the entire
feminist agenda. Enraged, many lesbians quit NOW. Susan Brownmiller, then a
member of New York Radical Feminists, blasted the group and its founder as
“hopelessly bourgeois.”
By the end of the 1970s, Friedan was relegated to the sidelines of the
movement she had inspired. She was dismayed not only by its direction but
what she saw as its mounting toll and the growing political backlash. In her
view, the movement had burdened rather than liberated women, burning out
those who were trying to juggle motherhood and career or penetrate the
corporate glass ceiling. Moreover, she observed, women in lower-level jobs
were still earning only 59 cents to every dollar earned by men - this after
almost two decades of renewed feminist activism.
What to do?
Friedan’s response was “The Second Stage,” published in 1981. The movement’s
senior theorist had always insisted that men were not the enemy. In her new
book, she startled many by insisting that the enemy was the victim herself.
“I believe we have to break through our own feminist mystique,” Friedan
wrote, arguing that “the equality we fought for isn’t livable, isn’t
workable, isn’t comfortable in the terms that structured our battle.”
Feminists, she charged, had fallen into a new trap “which denied that core
of women’s personhood that is fulfilled through love, nurture, home..
“We have to free ourselves from male power traps, understand the limits of
women’s power as a separate interest group . and put a new value on
qualities once considered - and denigrated as - special to women.”
The reaction to Friedan’s book was swift and unforgiving. Calling the
feminist foremother “hopelessly confused about whose side she’s on,”
theorist Ellen Willis wrote that Friedan “would destroy feminism in order to
save it, and beat the Moral Majority by joining it.” Journalist Susan
Faludi, writing in her 1991 book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against
American Women,” said Friedan was “yanking out the stitches in her own
handiwork.”
Amid this controversy, Friedan began to turn her focus to other issues. She
received a call from the head of the National Institute on Aging, asking her
to become an advocate for older Americans. She at first fought the idea,
“locked in denial” about the fact that she was approaching 60 and hating it.
What changed her mind was remembering conversations she’d had with older
women while researching “The Feminine Mystique.” The healthiest and most
vital women she interviewed had been older women - in their 50s and 60s -
who had careers.
She plunged into several years of research, producing in 1993 “The Fountain
of Age,” a book in which she again challenged the prevailing stereotypes,
arguing that an active, engaged life was the secret to a rewarding old age.
The book earned mixed reviews, with some critics