Difference
…constructed as hierarchy.
That’s where this business of prostitution and pornography jumps across the lines of class, and the reason the left will not be correct until we are correct on this.
Talking with Lydia today, and Elaina yesterday (she’s in town, and it was a tremendous pleasure hanging out with her), and Elaina and Yolanda day before yesterday… sex difference is real. Males and females are not alike, unless someone out there with a Y chromosome is bearing children or menstruating or breastfeeding. Postmodernism cannot jump over this with “transgressive narratives” any more than George W. Bush can jump over his defeat in Iraq by calling it a victory. This is not “essentialism.”
There are men, and there are women, and they are different. That is not the genesis of the problem. Difference is not the issue. Power is. Difference constructed as the hierarchy of men OVER women. This is not reducible to class defined by economic exploitation. It is not resolvable with the elimination of exploitative class. It is the social contract developed by men and enforced against women — ever since the old patriarchy of feudalism died out — of male protection in exchange for female obedience.
Male or female, what gets you off sexually is not evil — we are not theocrats. But what gets you off sexually is also not natural; and because it gets you off sexually does not make it innocent of power. Swapping a role does not undermine the role; it reproduces it and re-valorizes it. Our desires and our orgasms are not off limits from critical examination. How we desire and even what allows us to come are “put inside us,” as Lydia so directly and accurately states it, and not by some generic “drive,” but by our socialization.
And gender is not mere economic exploitation; it is nto simply “inequality.” It is, at its core, more elemental. It is the demand for obedience, at all times. It is subjugation; and it is based on a real sexual difference — real men subjugating real women because they are women.
Once the real differences are recognized as heirarchy, then the differences are culturally magnified through beauty standards, through the construction of HOW we desire, through the roles that are valorized or devalued for men and women. Magnification of difference constructed as hierarchy is magnfication of hierarchy. Difference is constructed as hierarchy, then difference is magnified through all the social constructions of sex… we construct difference-magnified.
Just a late-night outburst. It starts with compulsory heterosexuality, which is not an enforced preference for certain kinds of sex, but difference = heirarchy. Access to women’s bodies… on demand… as an entitlement.
R.S. Morris:
“Access to women’s bodies… on demand… as an entitlement.
This is the single perspective that jumps out at me more than any other when I think back to my married days. Aside from all the other messed-up dynamics between my ex and I, the powerful resentment I slouched around with all day long from “not getting any” whenever I wanted it. I didn’t see it at the time, but I knew deep down what I was feeling was pretty much wrong.
Now that I’m single and aware of much of my socialized misogynistic programming (thatnks in great part to the fine people here), I find this horrific mentality cropping up unbidden whenever I find myself attracted to a new woman. At least now I can fight it, but it is a constant struggle.
Good luck to everyone involved in self-deprogramming.
12 May 2006, 11:49 pmDeAnander:
It’s interesting of course that in the same patriarchal culture where sexual entitlement of males to the bodies of women (and in some cultures kids as well) is a ground rule, there’s usually a cultural stigma attached to masturbation. Men are discouraged for self-pleasuring, mocked or even punished for it, and taught that the *only* path to orgasm is through another person’s body. I have thought about this some, and will think about it some more. I think we can’t disentangle the concept of “the sin of Onan” and the stigma of the world “wanker” from the sexual imperative to dominate and use others.
13 May 2006, 3:34 pmDeAnander:
sorry, that s/b “of the word ‘wanker’” of course. typing in haste, gotta get outdoors where the light comes from the sun and not little TFT pixels.
13 May 2006, 3:35 pmJames M:
Thanks Randy — I’m right there with you, brother, in a very similar headspace. I think we both are finding that, whatever grief may be involved, the self-deprogramming process is extremely worthwhile … sort of like being handed the keys to a cage in which you didn’t even know you were confined.
A lot of guys are suspicious of male feminist-converts — surely, the logic goes, the only reason for becoming one is to curry favor with “the ladies.” Like those frat boys who sign up for women’s & gender studies classes in hopes of impressing their buddies by “scoring with hairy-legged hippie chicks.” (Where I went to college, there was usually at least one guy per semester who did so with that intention, only to drop the class a week or so in.)
I wish it were better understood that deconstructing gender and embracing feminism isn’t about capitulating to the demands of some imagined tyrannical-female archetype, it’s about achieving a liberated point of view from which to engage in much more rewarding & egalitarian ways with women, as well as men.
On the March, I took note of how Stan referred to everyone as “brothers” and “sisters.” At first I interpreted it as a mere habit of speech, but then I realized there’s tremendous power in characterizing your fellow human beings in that way. It cuts through so much gender bullshit and helps you to see everyone with the same eyes. I’ve found an amazing level of freedom in that kind of consciousness, and that’s been the essence of my “deprogramming.”
13 May 2006, 8:04 pmR.S. Morris:
One of the things that I’ve found since beginning my patriarchy deprogramming process almost simultaneously with being back “on the market” (what a horrible phrase, huh?) is that I am at a distinct short-term disadvantage when talking to women.
James, I really identify with “taking the red pill” from The Matrix. You can’t go back, even if you wanted to–some days ignorance looks MUCH more comfortable, because right now I pretty much expect to spend the next couple decades alone. We’ll see.
It’s ironical.
14 May 2006, 12:20 amjulian real:
If there are women and men, what are the rest of us?
Those are social-political categories precisely to the same degree that Black and Aryan are social categories.
I don’t buy the gender binary thing: it only exists in hierarchy or opposition or as “difference” much to the demise of the collective human spirit.
What real difference does it make if my clitoris has a urethra running through it or not? Yes, it makes bodily experiential difference. But what other difference does it make? None. Fused labia or unfused, or partially fused? What difference does it make? Some “females” can give birth and don’t. Some can’t at all. Why is “gender” built around those things? That’s social stuff, not biological stuff.
There are far more than xx and xy folks out there too. Please don’t further invisibilise the rest of us.
Some of us aren’t men and aren’t women. And I’m not talking PoMo BS, or intellectualism. I’m talking cold, hard facts.
Why are functioning intersex babies surgically altered? The answer is political, not biological.
This gender binary CRAP has got to be destroyed, along with the hierarchies. The “this OR that” model of understanding and replicating humanity is fear/survival based, for those who own and maintain power, primarily.
There’s my more than two cents. And I dare anyone to tell me intersex people are “incorrectly formed”. I dare you.
I hope the gender binary dies a sudden and quick death.
Peace to us all, not just to women and men.
14 May 2006, 4:29 pmStan:
The fact that most people are biological males and females does not devalue anyone who is intersex. It is simply a fact, value neutral in itself.
Gender as a system of power is fundamentally based on biological men being socially constructed as a sexual class OVER biological women. Difference is not the issue. And that there are exceptions to this binary biological difference does not in any way refute the demonstrable fact of maleness and femaleness as predominant biological categories.
The problem is biological difference constructed as social heirarchy. The oppression of those who are intersex, those who are non-heterosexual, and those who just don’t know, is based on the gender policing that reproduces male power over women (which is practiced as “masculinity” and “femininity”, as a sexual division of labor, and as the “sex-right” of males).
The difference in saying that there are real biological women and saying that there is really no such thing as women is that the latter denies the basis of political solidarity between women.
Try telling an African American that s/he is not African American. “YES I am, and proud of it.”
We can have ontological and biological difference without heirarchy. This is the essence of what radical feminism has been saying.
“…there are many differences between women and men…men’s differences from women are equal to women’s differences from men. There is an equality there. Yet the sexes are not socially equal. The difference approach misses the fact that heirarchy of power produces real as well as fantasied differences, differences that are also inequalities…”
-MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified
Same book, on Schlafley:
“Mrs. Schlafly opposes feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment, and basic change in women’s condition, as if the central goal of the women’s movement were to impose a gender-free society, as if we defined equality as sameness. This is no taccurate. Our issue is not gender difference, but the difference gender makes, the social meaning imposed on our own bodies…”
14 May 2006, 6:00 pmStan:
from Sex & War:
‘Essentialist’ has become an epithet, and as such implies the moral and-or intellectual superiority of the ‘anti-essentialist.’
The desire of many people to rebut essentialism is the desire to break down the rationale for oppression based on categories like ‘race’ and ‘gender.’
This is laudable. Marxists and radical feminists stand in opposition to dominant interpretations of race and gender as natural because they want to expose the systems of power embodied in race and gender.
Post-modernists see their liberation as liberation from oppressive ideas, the liberation of individual identity, which struggles against oppressive social ‘narratives’ (racist ideas, sexist ideas) that attempt to curtail the individual’s ‘freedom.’
One obvious goal of both camps is to struggle against racial and sexual stereotypes that are used to justify oppression.
The two strategies of rebuttal against ‘essentialism,’ according to philosophy professor Ron Mallon , are “skeptical non-essentialism†and “constructionist non-essentialism.†These are extremely useful categories.
Skeptical anti-essentialists will use the ‘scientific’ argument – induction – that there is no such thing as race, because as soon as you try to define it, there are exceptions. All people we consider to be Black do not have dark skin.
Constructionist anti-essentialists will de-naturalize. Being Black is not a ‘natural’ phenomenon, but the result of being perceived in society as being Black.
Both these approaches ignore the fact that in everyday life, we readily recognize Black people, even those who do not conform to every single characteristic that might be associated with black-ness. White people recognize Black people, and Black people recognize Black people. To my mind, neither of the arguments above (admittedly over-simplified) is particularly convincing to the average person who knows damn well when she sees a Black person.
This also applies to gender. Even if there are transgendered people, men who are more fem, women who are more butch, etc., our initial registration about whom we see about whether that person is biologically male or female is overwhelmingly accurate. Pointing to exceptions to dismiss generalizations, or reducing the generalization to a ‘construction’ does not articulate with the day-to-day experience of most people, and not merely based on their prejudices, but often on a preponderance of evidence from their own experience.
It is only the most reductionist view of science, billiard ball science, which supports the kind of absolutism that demands conformity by each individual instance of a phenomenon to a set of quantifiable criteria. Science does not consist only of the application of absolute laws of nature, and purely inductive generalizations. Generalizations for which there are exceptions can still have very strong predictive and explanatory power. Nature and society embody tendencies as well as iron laws. And, as Mallon points out, there can be “kinds†without “essences.â€
One does not have to deny the kind to refute the essence.
The trouble with essentialism is this notion of ‘essence.’ But it is perfectly possible for someone to exhibit a set of real characteristics that mark that person as Black or female without implying any kind of “core-essence†whatsoever. There is such a thing as being African American, and it is more than a mere socially constructed narrative, and it exists even if it does not display some sharply inductive boundary. There is such a thing as being a woman.
Essentialism implies that each woman, or each African American shares a set of individually necessary characteristics to qualify for ‘membership;’ that these characteristics are intrinsic; and that the actions of ‘members’ of a group can be explained by a set of shared properties that might not be directly unobservable. This is obviously false.
Yet the anti-essentialisms, both skeptical and constructionist, do not do an effective job of rebutting this falsehood.
One cannot attack the notion of Black-ness simply because all those who are considered and consider themselves Black do not have dark skin. No one uses one single individually necessary criterion to make such an assessment. My youngest daughter is very light-skinned, yet most people readily recognize her as Black based on both phenotypic and cultural characteristics, and on her context (Raleigh, NC). A ‘kind-group,’ such as Black or female, is characterized by a constellation of features, which are recognizable as a pattern in a context, without any individual necessarily having all those features – features that are morphological, geographic, and-or cultural. If my daughter lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, she would blend in quite well and be mistakenly thought to be Puerto Rican… the exception to a rule that would generally work.
The problem is not the existence of kind-groups, from the point of view of a politics of liberation. It is breaking down false assertions that the kind-group is responsible for its own oppression based on an intrinsic defect or the idealization of a kind-group based on some mythical intrinsic property.
Acknowledging that women and Blacks exist as women and Blacks is perfectly possible while at the same time rejecting racist and sexist essentialism.
Moreover, how do Blacks and women and their allies fight for social remedies aimed at women and Blacks (I use these two categories not to exclude others, but as examples), or for self-determination, once we erase these categories?
The liberal politics of anti-essentialist ‘equality’ has already led us into this swamp, and it’s where we met David Horowitz screaming reverse-discrimination. He does not claim Black people are genetically inferior. He says Blacks are culturally inferior.
The other anti-essentialist strategy, of breaking with ‘nature’ and substituting the socially constructed narrative, is equally ineffective, and dangerous. The error of naturalization was covered earlier in the book at some length. That’s not the problem with the constructionist critique. The problem, with post-modernism generally, is its pig-headed rejection of the ‘metanarrative,’ that is, an analysis of the systems of power that contextualize oppression.
Showing that racism cannot be justified, because race is not ‘natural,’ has proven ineffective. Horowitz and his ilk have rather effortlessly redefined their racism in cultural terms, and mooted the constructionist argument against naturalism. And by reducing everything to identity (which is plain philosophical consumerism), post-modernists have surrendered any possibility of coordinated, collective struggle against oppressive systems… because they deny the existence of those systems. In a real sense, the post-modernist constructionist critique of essentialism itself falls back on skeptical anti-essentialism, because its fallback position is based on pointing out exceptions to generalization as a way of ‘proving’ the generalization doesn’t exist.
This sounds scientific, but it is bad science.
Newtonian physics loses its explanatory power if we are trying to understand a quark, but it works perfectly well to make most machines, for example, and to intuitively predict the behavior of the objects in our everyday environment.
Gender, race, and other categories are both explanatory and predictive a good deal of the time, just like Newtonian physics. These realities do, however, change over time and in relation to other changes, global and local.
If we want to avoid the pitfalls of racism and sexism, anti-essentialism is not the most effective strategy. Anti-reification is.
Returning now solely to gender, post-modern identity politics has reproduced the worst elements of bourgeois patriarchal positivism: dualism (nature vs. culture), atomization (individualism), dogmatism, and the stand-down of a politics of collective resistance.
“Identity†has replaced the notion of core-essence, not annihilated it. This is how we got stuck in the cul-de-sac of “sexual-orientation,†for example, where we define ourselves sexually by a reified attraction to a ‘type,’ (from ‘I’m a butt man’… to ‘I like fem-doms’) explained by turns as ‘genetic’ or ‘chosen’ (like a commodity). Sex as a system of power, then, disappears into subjectivity, as a defense of one’s individual right to have sex as one pleases (without reflecting on how one’s practice might reproduce systems of unequal power). Lost is the ability to describe and resist a social system based on the recursive interplay of gendered divisions of labor, colonization, compulsory heterosexuality, and male social and political power.
Some Marxisms have adopted the anti-essentialist line as well, with the intent of liquidating all questions of gender back into “class.†But we can acknowledge the differences between “white middle-class†metropolitan women and colonial women without adopting either the “skeptical†or the “constructionist†anti-essentialism, by keeping our analyses concrete and historical.
14 May 2006, 6:15 pmMichael:
You were speaking of power, The Washington Post today had an article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/15/AR2006051500875_pf.html
16 May 2006, 11:58 amentitled “Forever Pregnant”. It seems reasonable, talking about reducing infant death rates and birth defects, but the gist of it, I would wager, is institutionalizing the power of the medical establishment (AMA) over women. Interesting statistics on race, and the level of care supposedly needed for healthy babies—income levels came to mind immediately. Looks like “barefoot and pregnant” is getting a bureaucratic boost in Amerika.
Charles Brown:
Stan’s discussion here of the “essential” issues is excellent, in my opinion.
Charles
16 May 2006, 2:25 pmCharles Brown:
Just a late-night outburst. It starts with compulsory heterosexuality, which is not an enforced preference for certain kinds of sex, but difference = heirarchy. Access to women’s bodies… on demand… as an entitlement.
^^^^
Empirically, isn’t it access to women’s bodies _for a price_, with women being economically forced into taking the deal because men have more income. This would cover both actual prostitution and marriage ( as having a “prostitutional aspect). I’d say the concept of sexual “contract” fits this to some degree , though the issues of unequal bargaining power enter in. Workers have unequal bargaining power vis-a-vis capitalists , too.
The relationship is more like the relationship of worker and capitalist, in that workers’ have only their labor power to sell and must sell it to make a living. By excluding women from wage-labor or equitable pay, they are economically forced to accept the deal. Marx’s metaphorical “general prostitution of all labourers ” gets at this from another angle.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
Quoting Marx from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:
“Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to private property finds expression in the brutish form of opposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property. It may be said that this idea of the community of women gives away the secret of this as yet completely crude and thoughtless communism.[30] Just as woman passes from marriage to general prostitution, [Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes – and the latter’s abomination is still greater – the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head. – Note by Marx [31]] so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s objective substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community. This type of communism – since it negates the personality of man in every sphere – is but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. “
16 May 2006, 2:48 pmStan:
Charles, if this analogy works, why are only women “wives”? The institution of couverture in marriage (only recently legally abandoned) did not make claims on the wife’s labor power, but on her obedience. The marriage contract was like the indentured servant contract, only without an end-date. Part of that entitlement was not work, but sex. Have you ever seen an employment contract that specified sexual access to the worker by the boss as part of the bargain?
The wage laborer is called the “civil equal” of the boss. Until very recently, that was NOT the case in a marriage contract. The housewife — in the emblematic case — does not receive wages, but subsistence. This is not what happens with wage labor, but with slaves.
The oppression of women cannot be fully understood within the categories laid out by orthodox Marxism. The Holy Texts were not omniscient.
“Sexuality is the social process that creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire. Desire here is parallel to value in marxist theory, not the same, though it occupies an analogoous theoretical location. It is taken for a natural essence or presocial impetus but is actually crated by the social relations, the hierarchical relations, in question. This process creates the social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. Sexuality to feminism is, like work to marxism, socially constructed and at the same time constructing. it is universal as activity, yet always historically specific, and jointly comprised of matter and mind. As the organized expropriation of the work of some for the use of others defines the class, workers, the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. Heterosexuality is its predominant structure, gender is its social process, the family is a congealed form, sex roles are its qualities generalized to two social personas, and reproduction is a consequence. (Theorists sometimes forget that in order to reproduce one must first, usually, have had sex.) Control is also the issue of gender.”
-Catharine MacKinnon, one of the top marxist thinkers of our time.
16 May 2006, 4:19 pmDeAnander:
Michael, I note in the WashPo article that the Precautionary Principle is heartily endorsed when it comes to telling women what to do and how to live, but it’s “unthinkable” when applied to the industrial polluters who are causing stillbirths, deformed and defective children, various infant and childhood syndromes, etc.
Also note how the blame for infant mortality is being shoved off once again on individual women, as if folic acid supplements could compensate for declining food and water quality, POPs, elevated background radiation, MTBE, neurotoxic residues on factory foods, toxins in “intimate care products” and all the rest. The onky solution that can be contemplated is one that involves (a) controlling women and subjecting us to the tutelage of the med mafia, and (b) getting women to consume more (more credentialled care, more vitamin tablets, etc) — and to refrain from behaviour traditionally considered “unladylike” such as drinking and smoking.
I say not that drinking and smoking are good for you, obviously they are not. But the assumption here is that the quality of sperm is irrelevant and responsibility for a genetically successful outcome is 100 percent fetal nurture. [A wild inversion of the mediaeval fantasy that woman contributed nothing to the child except “soil” for the male “seed” to grow (even the word “semen” derives from the root concept of “seed” and “sow”) — of course in a more scientific age we know that semen is actually pollen and the seed is the ovary, ripened within the quickened flower. Men’s cultural sexual proclivity is so pollinator-like — inconstancy, mobility, infidelity — that you would think the pollen analogy would have eclipsed the old “seed” meme long ago by sheer memetic aptness.]
Anyway, how about a deal: if industrial nations, specifically the men who run governments and corporations, start treating their soil, air, water and food supplies as the essential life support for a population of “pre-pregnant” women, and apply the same standards of preventive care and precaution that are preached here to individual women, then maybe women should listen…
16 May 2006, 6:02 pmpeggy:
Compulsory sex of any kind is a turn-off. At least it is for me, and I think it is for many other people as well, whatever their gender or combination of chromosomes or bodily construction or preferred objects of desire. The idea of rape, which by definition is compulsory sex, excites some people, I do not know why.
R.S. Morris - you are like my ex-husband was for the seventeen years we were married. He believed that I owed him sex whenever he wanted it. I believed that, too. So, I let him do it to me when he wanted to, even though I did not feel like it. It was not traumatic for me; it was just boring. But he wanted me to want it, as and when he wanted it, and he got angry with me for not being more like he wanted me to be. As a consequence, I got to dreading any sex at all with him, and avoiding it whenever I could, which only made him feel more deprived and victimized. The more he insisted, the more I resisted. He accused me of showing him affection only when it did not lead to sex, which was true. I was fond of him, but I could not stand sex with him, even though I had enjoyed it before we were married. He noted this fact, too, and resented it. Thought I had tricked him into marrying me. Inevitably, each of us turned to other lovers. But the fact of these other lovers did not make our marital relationship any better. Our children’s generation would call him a jerk, and me a word they will not say to my face.
But now I think, my husband and I were just both very ignorant, and because of our ignorance, we were both frustrated and angry with each other. Try to remember this when you see an attractive woman. Maybe she will find you attractive, too, and maybe you will have good times and good sex together. Go slow, back off as soon as you see the slightest sign of reluctance from her. The minute you act like she owes you, you’ve lost her. And if she just lets you do her, it will be little different from your doing a rubber doll. So, get the rubber doll, and don’t be ashamed to let the living woman choose the moment and manner of making love to you. Because then you will know she really wants you, and that will be really nice.
16 May 2006, 10:52 pmR.S. Morris:
Thank you Peggy. I appreciate you sharing your perspective with me, especially since your experiences mirror mine. I just wish it hadn’t taken ten years to get un-ignorant.
Randy
17 May 2006, 10:37 amElaina:
I’m really feeling what Peggy said. I been through similar stuff.
And I get a little upset when, over and over, the conversation has to turn to a “nice” way to tell men that if we don’t want sex, for ANY reason, they have no fucking right to insist.
None. Nada. Zip.
One thing I noted with my ex was that he’d not just be insistent on sex when he wanted it no matter if I wanted it or not, but if I so much as touched or cuddled him when he wasn’t in the mood, he wouldn’t just say “no thanks.” He was flat-out COLD and MEAN about it alot of the time. He wouldn’t go near me when I was on the rag, either. This guy, who claimed to be the King of Kinky Sex, would fucking hide under a bush if he had to, would recoil in near-terror if he saw the string sticking out once he got down there. SO, in a nutshell, I was supposed to do what he wanted, dressed/made-up how he wanted, when he wanted and if, and ONLY IF *HE* was in the mood. And if he wasn’t in the mood I wouldn’t nag. I’d bring it up when he argued with me about “putting out,” you bet yer ass I would. But in the moment I’d generally just roll over and take care of things myself. And he’d get mad and pout, because I was supposed to reflect his sexual desires and moods at all times, and being a separate, sentient human being with my own thoughts and feelings and not some hyper-feminized sex-kitten fuckdoll, I didn’t. And I tried hard to be what he wanted me to be. I just couldn’t do it, when it came down to it. I wasn’t that non-person. I was with him for about 6 years.
Nagging and unrelenting insistence on sexual performance is coersive (dunno how to spell that, y’all.) It’s a violation of personal autonomy. Don’t fucking do it if you want to call yourself a “nice guy,” ok? Just take care of things yourself, if you’re that randy.
Nobody has a “right” to “fuck” anybody else. It’s a mutual decison, only permissible by conscious consent. Conscious consent isn’t gurgling “yes” in a drunken stupor. It isn’t flirt, flirt, then she opens her legs up when you shove harder. It isn’t “ok. Fine then!” and she tries to pretend you’re not there the whole time you’re sticking it to her.
Women shouldn’t have to have the weight of your fragile self-conscience on their shoulders. We got our own problems to worry about in that department. We got our own stuff to fix, here. We’re working towards a place where women don’t have to mold their entire and complete identities around their “sexual attractiveness” in the eyes of men, and where they don’t have to be afraid of men and where they are actually equal.
This whole, “well, if we DO these things then we won’t get laid as much” conversation is a roadblock to that place. Y’all (men) can go on ahead and just move it out of the way, you can self-reflect and deconstruct your OWN behavior and change it accordingly, and quit whining about it, or we can just plough through the damn thing on our way to that better place. Y’all pick.
I got no time for patience this morning. My sister’s stalker-ex has called her a million times and insisted that she go somewhere with him, and she finally did despite my argument, I had to get up super-early to do my CPR recert, AND my sister clogged up the toilet in my mom’s bathroom and I had to clean up the mess, AND I’ve been reading “Intercourse.” Don’t mess. It’s not a good idea.
Y’all have a great day.
17 May 2006, 11:40 amDoyle Saylor:
Hi All,
Stan writes,
This is not reducible to class defined by economic exploitation. It is not resolvable with the elimination of exploitative class. It is the social contract developed by men and enforced against women - ever since the old patriarchy of feudalism died out - of male protection in exchange for female obedience.
below the above in another reply, Stan writes,
We can have ontological and biological difference without heirarchy. This is the essence of what radical feminism has been saying.
Doyle,
The issue of hierarchy I think revolves around the first issues of human society. Early humans had small groups of people about 100 to 125 as the stable limit of the size of the group. They would split after they got larger.
The limits in that circumstance is how well one can know the group mates. People would form alliances to empower them against others. And dominance could be male or female according to the alliances. Dominance was therefore emotional attachment.
Let’s step out of pre-history and apply the above to now. As societies grew larger forms of economic activity were invented to by pass the limitations of knowing everyone and transient dominance patterns. But the knowing of everyone, and the aggression were still used as tools to construct the larger social units and those successive forms of economic activity thereby entailed.
Knowing people, and feeling attached to them is the basis for patriarchy as it stands now. For example monogamy represents a lot of pain structure that are present in emotional attachment. These enforce partnerships. People praise the good and easy going aspects of sexual partnerships, because they know from experience usually how painful breaking the bonds can be.
Knowledge is a manufacturing process these days. We have a variety of tools to make information. We tend to structure knowledge as rational because the addressing of emotion structure inequities would disturb the imbalances set in place for rewards in the maintenance of capitalism. Emotion structure more than anything represents patriarchy.
I think this imbalance is directly related to the economic system. Information production, and emotion is just a form of information, how it is organized, how it is distributed, directly bulwarks patriarchy or not. The key element mostly ignored because it goes against ‘rationality’ is emotion structure. Were that directly taken on the fetters upon women could be removed. Dominance really is an after effect of how emotion structure is built in society.
As Martha Nussbaum has pointed out some emotion is not social, disgust and shame. Socialist have to address what that sort of elementary dynamic implies. Nussbaum proposes to take the a-social emotions out of Law. But socialism demands more than reforms in legality. It requires we directly address class relationships. Perhaps Stan is right to say above ’sex class’ because the work process definitely proletarianizes women in ways that heirarchy shapes. While some women are capitalists.
17 May 2006, 12:26 pmthanks,
Doyle
Julian Real:
Stan.
Here is a response on gender difference, from a book noted later. It is one of several posts, which are all from the same book.
Gender
[Quote:] I wish I had been born a doormat, or a man.
–Jean Harris, headmistress of Madeira School and convicted killer of Herman Tarnower, her former lover. She testified she had intended to kill herself instead.
Gender is an inequality of power, a social status based on who is permitted to do what to whom. Only derivatively is it a difference. Differences between the sexes do descriptively exist; being a doormat is definitely different from being a man. That these are a woman’s realistic options, and that they are so limiting, calls into question the explanatory value and political agenda implicit in terming gender a difference. One is not socially permitted to be a woman and neither a doormat nor man.
The differences we attribute to sex are lines inequality draws, not any kind of basis for it. Social and political inequality are, I think, basically indifferent to sameness and difference. Differences are inequality’s post hoc excuse, its conclusory artifact, its outcome presented as its origin, the damage that is pointed to as the justification for doing the damage after the damage has been done, the distinctions that perception is socially organized to notice because inequality gives them consequences for real power. Distinctions of body or mind or behavior are pointed to as cause rather than effect, without realizing that they are so deeply effect rather than cause that pointing to them at all is an effect.
Inequality comes first; differences come after. Inequality is substantive and identities a disparity; difference is abstract and falsely symmetrical. If this is so, a discourse of gender difference serves as ideology to neutralize, rationalize, and cover disparities of power, even as it appears to criticize them. Difference is the velvet glove on the iron fist of domination. This is as true when differences are affirmed as when they are denied, and their substance is applauded or when it is disparaged, when women are punished or when they are protected in their name. A sex inequality is not a difference gone wrong, a lesson the law of sex discrimination has yet to learn. One of the most deceptive antifeminisms in society, scholarship, politics, and law is the persistent treatment of gender as if it truly is a question of difference, rather than treating the gender difference as a construct of the difference gender makes.
Gender inequality pervades the way we think. If a concept like difference is a conceptual tool of gender inequality, it cannot deconstruct the master’s house. Especially when it has built it. Difference is what the gender system says gender is; dominance it denies–only this should be a clue. (Feminism Unmodified, by Catharine A. MacKinnon, p. 8-9.)
17 May 2006, 2:16 pmJulian Real:
Women have been deprived not only of terms of our own in which to express our lives, but of lives of our own to live. The damage of sexism would be trivial if this were not the case. A feminism that seeks to understand women’s situation in order to change it must therefore identify, criticize, and move those forms and forces that have circumscribed women in the world and in the mind. Law, like pornography, inhabits both. To remake society so that women can live here requires a feminism unqualified by preexisting modifiers. Obviously this has not been done, or things would not be as they are. Qualifying feminism by socialism or liberalism, while descriptively accurate to socialist feminism and liberal feminism, signals the limitation of feminism to that province of liberalism where we reason together about women’s issues, to that moment on the left when we take up the woman question. Until these theories abandon their gender-neutral absolutes, such as difference and sexuality and speech and the state, they will not only attribute the products of femininity and submission and silence and exclusion, to women as such, as if these are not imposed on us daily, but they will participate in reducing us to them.
Searching for a ground for feminism without giving up its romance with gender, keeping sexuality as modus vivendi [JR’s note: I had to look this up; it means “a manner of living; a way of life”] and difference as frame, liberal theory looks for truth of women in the mirror of nature. Left theory looks for the truth of women in the mirror of social materiality. In nature, liberalism discovers the female. In society, the left discovers the feminine. Having located a ground for women’s equality, they speak feminism in the liberal voice, feminism in the left voice. But feminism in its own voice does not speak this way. Feminism has revealed nature and society to be mirrors of each other: the male gender looks at itself looking at itself. Intending to convey something rather different, Norman Mailer deploys the same epistemic convergence to discuss a photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Is a woman nature or society, or do we even exist, when he says, “She is a mirror of the pleasure of those who stare at her”? Suppose this is true and she knew it and killed herself. A feminism that does nothing about that, does nothing for her, does nothing.
[…] One genius of the system we live under is that the strategies it requires to survive from day to day are exactly the opposite of what is required to change it. Of women it requires silent sexual submission, just as of workers it requires work. Until the cost of this is collectively experienced as unacceptable by those who have drawn the best of men’s options for women, and glimpsed as changeable by those who have drawn the worst, we will continue to live–if it can be called living–under its aegis [JR’s note: I had to look this up; it means “protection, patronage, or guidance]. (Feminism Unmodified, p. 15-17)
17 May 2006, 2:19 pmJulian Real:
All passages are from Catharine A. MacKinnon’s book, Feminism Unmodified.
We stand for an end to enforced subordination, limited options, and social powerlessness–on the basis of sex, among other things. Differentiation, to feminism, is just one strategy in keeping women down. Liberalism has been subversive for us in that it signals that we have the audacity to compare ourselves with men, to measure ourselves by male standards, on male terms. We do seek access to the male world. We do criticize our exclusion from male pursuits. But liberalism limits us in a way feminism does not. We also criticize male pursuits from women’s point of view, from the standpoint of our social experience as women.
Feminism seeks to empower women on our own terms. To value what women have always done as well as to allow us to do everything else. We seek not only to be valued as who we are, but to have access to the process of the definition of value itself. In this way, our demand for access becomes also a demand for change. (p. 22)
[Quote]: We made the fires. We are the fire-tenders. We are the ones who do not allow anyone to speak for us but us. –Beth Brant, Sinister Wisdom (1983)
The white man’s law, recognizing what he calls equality, has since the late 1950s prohibited discrimination. Under this law, equal treatment, without regard to race, ethnicity, and sex (among other characteristics) is thought to be secured in many areas of social life. The idea is that people should be free from arbitrary and unreasonable treatment on the basis of qualities that have no fair or reasonable or just relation to the purpose for which they are being used. People shouldn’t encounter built-in bias everywhere they go. In this idea of equality, group characteristics have no necessary relation to one’s ability to perform tasks, to merit, to potential contributions to society, or to needs for particular benefits. (p. 63)
When do you see a viewpoint as a viewpoint? When you don’t agree with it. When is a viewpoint not a viewpoint? When it’s yours. (p. 212)
[…] I have learned that feminism–in the form of a tacit belief that women are human beings in truth but not in social reality–has gone deep into women and some younger men, becoming taken for granted, becoming part of the background. The feminism of women who do not identify as feminists, feminism delivered in the form of self-respecting identity and a lived commitment to change for women, came to matter more that the identification. Women everywhere articulated their situations and analyzed their pain with confrontive realism, indominability, and solidarity–with, in short, more feminism than anything yet called feminism has exhausted or expressed. Those who have lived through or worked hands-on with violence against women displayed a more nuanced and systemic conceptual understanding than most published writing on the subject. Sometimes it seemed as though the more invisible the woman, the deeper the truth she possessed. More than any other group, former prostitutes were possessed by truth, haunted by truth, vivid with knowledge against a canon of credibility that has all but obliterated them. The professed feminism of many others, by contrast, began to seem tepid and removed, like heads talking, brittle and second hand, like upward mobility.
In the established abstract refuges of academia I have often encountered a tendency to turn women into a field or an idea or a subspecialty, an artifact of one theoretical approach or another. Little deep challenge to existing approaches is happening in these places, less understanding of the lives of most women (or, even, say, the sexual violence in academic women’s own lives) and virtually no commitment to change. (p. 216)
I think that men are the way they are because they have power, more than that they have power because they are the way they are. If this is so, women who succeed in male forms of power will largely be that way too. This will seem inappropriate only to those who expected less and to those who expected more. Which includes nearly everybody. (p. 220)
17 May 2006, 2:21 pmCharles Brown:
Charles, if this analogy works, why are only women “wives� The institution of couverture in marriage (only recently legally abandoned) did not make claims on the wife’s labor power, but on her obedience. The marriage contract was like the indentured servant contract, only without an end-date. Part of that entitlement was not work, but sex. Have you ever seen an employment contract that specified sexual access to the worker by the boss as part of the bargain?
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CB: First, you mean to tell me that you believe that wives were not obligated to work in the marriage ? The fact that it is not mentioned in the law doesn’t mean that in fact wives weren’t required to work. I can’t see how feminists would accept the male supremacist claim that wives weren’t required to do work. That was a big part of the male suprmacy of the situation. Being pregnant and giving birth is work. Taking care of children is work. Cleaning the house and preparing dinner and meals FOR THE MAN, cleaning clothes AND ALL TYPICAL WIFLEY CHORES ARE WORK ! How is it that we are feminists and we are not saying that wives have to do work ? The main thing the man ordered the wife to obey was doing work. Just like the main thing the worker is required to do is obey the boss’ orders to do work.
There’s a whole feminist school of thought and movement on demanding pay for wifely work. Are we going to take a step _back_ from that ? What gives here ?
How is it that having sex is not work for a wife who doesn’t want to have sex ?! And especially for prostitutes, I hope you aren’t claiming that they don’t do work when they have sex with a john ! What kind of feminism is that ?
Secondly, where do we get that a worker’s employment agreement doesn’t require the workers to obey the boss ? The worker in a worker-capitalist agreement _must obey the boss_. Therefore, the obedience aspect exists in both relationships, making them analogous on that point. I hope nobody here is claiming that workers are not obligated to obey the boss under a capitalist employment contract. Is MacKinnon an important Marxist thinker claiming that workers are not obligated to OBEY the boss ? Wow , some Marxism.
If the workers was required to have sex with the boss, then it wouldn’t be an analogy. It would be the same thing.
But finally, I can’t really understand what you are objecting to in what I said. Do you deny that the “force” placed on women both to marry and to be prostitutes is economic ?That’s what I said ( and I think what Marx means). To deny that , again, seems to take a step back to a less critical conception of the situation. Seems to me I’m more the feminist one on this point than you are, if you are denying that it is economic compulsion that forces women to marry and to prostitute.
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The wage laborer is called the “civil equal†of the boss.
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CB: Yea, but you aren’t buying that fraud , are you ?
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Until very recently, that was NOT the case in a marriage contract. The housewife — in the emblematic case — does not receive wages, but subsistence. This is not what happens with wage labor, but with slaves.
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CB: That’s right. They are not wage-laborers, but in the legal conception they are not owned. They can “choose” not to marry. However, they are compelled to marry _by economic need_, just like the wage-laborer is compelled to work by economic need. The slave is not compelled to become a slave by economic need, but by force of arms. The slave has no choice even theoretically, not to be a slave.
So, the analogy to the wage-laborer is in that both wives and wage-laborers are under economic, not physical compulsion, to enter the unequal relationship. By the way, in slang, wage-laborers are termed “wage-slaves”, which gets at the issue you raise, i.e. econmic compulsion is just as effective as physical compulsion. We might term wives “house-slaves” in this vein.
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The oppression of women cannot be fully understood within the categories laid out by orthodox Marxism. The Holy Texts were not omniscient.
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CB: Yea, see my paper on the need to extend the concepts. However, I don’t think the above statment is correct. Engels and the Holy Texts ( I dont’ give a goddamn if people want to keep making that slander; what they are is scientific documents; it’s like calling Einstein’s or Darwin’s writing a holy text, in other words, nonesense; Adhering to the important principles discovered by Einstein, Darwin or Marx is the complete opposite of religious thinking; as a matter of fact those who don’t use Marx and Engels in this context are the ones most likely to stray over into religious, i.e. holy text type thinking; so get ready for me to start pointing out all the holy text type thinking in the non-Marxist discussion;)…Engels and the “Holy Text” do take the full measure of the economic compulsions on women to marry. So the claim that Engels and Marx’s concepts are not adequate to analyze bougeois marriage is probably out and out wrong. In fact, I believe they call the whole bourgeois system of marriage “prostitution”. Engels main practical proposal is that women must become involved in social labor ( i.e.not confined to houseWORK, and it is WORK) as a main path to women’ lib. If women have their own incomes , then there won’t be any compulsion on them to do anything with men, because the main compulsion on women is economic. Q.E.D.
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“Sexuality is the social process that creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire. Desire here is parallel to value in marxist theory, not the same, though it occupies an analogoous theoretical location. It is taken for a natural essence or presocial impetus but is actually crated by the social relations, the hierarchical relations, in question. This process creates the social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. Sexuality to feminism is, like work to marxism, socially constructed and at the same time constructing. it is universal as activity, yet always historically specific, and jointly comprised of matter and mind. As the organized expropriation of the work of some for the use of others defines the class, workers, the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. Heterosexuality is its predominant structure, gender is its social process, the family is a congealed form, sex roles are its qualities generalized to two social personas, and reproduction is a consequence. (Theorists sometimes forget that in order to reproduce one must first, usually, have had sex.) Control is also the issue of gender.â€
-Catharine MacKinnon, one of the top marxist thinkers of our time.
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CB: My main problem with this is that it indulges the myth that women don’t “desire” sex. Women value having sex too. Women desire sex. So, the idea that inherently in sex between women and men, men get something and women give something is problematic.
Also, to make an analogy between the concept of production of value in the Marxist Holy Writs and reproduction of people is best made at the level of childcare and other caring labor ( See my paper “For Women’s Liberation” ). The sex act is not analagous to the working act in the Marxist conception of value production. Otherwise the man and the woman _would_ have equal input, and the woman wouldn’t be doing more of the reproductive labor than the man. The inequality is not in the sex act, but in the childcare labor and other caring labor that is done predominantly by women.
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-Catharine MacKinnon, one of the top marxist thinkers of our time.
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17 May 2006, 2:56 pmCB: And got a job as a law professor at the University of Michigan ? My how things have changed there since 1979.
Julian Real:
In summary, Stan, I think the point, or one of them, anyway, is that hierarchy poses as difference in patriarchy. Difference is not a natural or social given, separate from that lived dehumanising hierarchy. “Difference” is what male supremacy makes gender appear to be by denying its inherent dominance.
When male supremacy and male domination of women by men is history only, we cannot know what gender will be, if anything.
When race supremacy and white domination are history only, we cannot know what race will be, if anything.
This does not mean, that in the very “mean” time, we ought not take pride in being survivors of racism and sexism, and/or classism, and/or heterosexism. This does not mean that identities constructed for us through force become, somehow, not ours.
It also does not mean that “the Black experience” is one experience, nor that those experiences have only been shaped by white supremacy. I support any Black person’s right to own their Blackness with pride and dignity. I used to own my gayness that way, until I realised how fully male supremacist it was. I take no pride in that, although I support efforts to eradicate heterosexism.
I take pride in being Jewish, but not in what the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinian people. I also know something that too many Gentiles seem anti-Semitically to forget, that being Jewish cannot be equated with being a Zionist. Being Jewish predates and will, perhaps, outdate the current imperialist/colonialist/classist/racist battle Israel is waging against Palestine. And Israel may one day not be, in part, a puppet of the U.S. government.
What all of this means is that the radical antiracist feminist project is not to defend, protect, and preserve those identities forged in oppression, at the expense of ending the oppression. As I understand it, the protection of these identities of oppression is the liberal and socialist approach; they define “woman” and “man”, or “white” or “Brown” or “Yellow” or “Red” or “Black” or “Colored” as naturally or socially occurring, outside of some form of male and/or race supremacy. And I do mean the labels, as such, backed by force, benefitting the oppressor in whatever social binary/hierarchy is being examined. This has not been demonstrated sufficiently, and is not apparent in how CRAP is conducting itself, in our communities, lives, and minds.
What must be acknowledged here, then, is who is to decide what identities, what societies, remain? I only know this: it better not be white men.
I believe real coalition work means being in struggle together, as we fight to root out of ourselves all that opppression has made us into, which necessarily means dismantling all the systems from which oppression flows and grows. This means, for those “on top”, learning and transforming our learned patterns of domination, condescension, and invisibilisation, while we engage in revolutionary political struggles. This means, in other words, that those “on the bottom” must have an equal voice at every stage of change, including by defining what that change is to be, as opposed to following some white-European model, for example.
From there, we see where we are.
I support Indigenous People’s rights, for example, to reclaim and re-establish their pre-colonial cultures, if that is their wish and will.
I personally believe white people ought not to be able to own land on Turtle Island (aka Amerikkka). I think as each generation of white people dies, the land ought to be returned to the Native people (originally) of that land, if they are still surviving. And if they are not, that land should be open for the rest of us who were brought here against our will, which does not include most people of Northern and Western European descent.
This is simplistic, but gets at some assumptions about the rights of white men to own and control other beings, as well as demolish and destroy the Earth and its other inhabitants. I am speaking as someone who lives in the U.S. with great privileges, and also with great knowledge, viscerally and otherwise, about degradation and dehumanisation in the U.S.
I invite into this discussion other perspectives from other places: geographically, culturally, and politically.
17 May 2006, 3:07 pmMichael:
To DeAnander—Thanks for fleshing out my thoughts a bit. The industrial polluters are almost exclusively male-oriented and male-owned. It’s also a scientifically proven fact that the DNA that sperm carry can be damaged by what used to be called an “intemperate lifestyle”—in fact(small bit of trivia stuck in my head), taking LSD will do it quicker than the rest of recreational pharmacopia. Plain stupid—survival of the “fittest” (whatever the hell THAT means) doesn’t always mean srvival of the smartest. Living proof in D.C., as we speak.
18 May 2006, 11:00 pmAnne Xiety:
Stan, sorry for posting this on your blog, but I couldn’t think of any other place to do so.
Julian, I read the piece you wrote at andreadworkin.net last night, and I just wanted to say that it is amazing and heart breaking.
But I am happy I read it, and I wanted to thank you for writing it.
So thank you.
25 May 2006, 8:18 pmR.S. Morris:
Here’s the link to Julian’s memorial:
http://www.andreadworkin.net/memorial/toandreawithlove.html
Wonderfully written, Julian. Thanks Anne, for bringing it to my attention, at least.
Randy
26 May 2006, 10:39 amJulian Real:
Hi Anne and Randy.
Thank you so much for those kind words.
My grief over Andrea’s death is on-going, which means, to honour her memory, so is my activism to assist in the revolutionary efforts to end all forms of sexism and racism, every manifestation, in identity, interpersonal exchanges, and in systems and institutions which maintain these atrocities.
I am also learning each day, how to be more responsible, more accountable, to my radical feminist anti-racist friends, to those who know more about racism and sexism than I ever could.
Any day is a better day when kind words are part of it, and so you made this a better day for me, even while I am sad.
26 May 2006, 4:32 pmAnne Xiety:
No problem, R.S. Morris! I’m not sure if it would be polite to call you Randy, so I won’t.
You’re welcome, Julian. I always learn something new when I read your posts. Your ideas, and how you phrase them, help me make sense of so many things!
29 May 2006, 10:09 pmJulian Real:
Hi Anne.
The people I have learned the most from are (in no particular order): Audre Lorde, Andrea Dworkin, James Baldwin, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sheila Jeffreys, Alice Walker, Winona Laduke, Jennifer McLune, and Yolanda Carrington, among others. Without radical feminism–its woman writers and woman activists, my mind would be confused and depressed. (Not that it still isn’t confused and depressed, mind you!!)
I have been reading Pearl Cleage’s essays in “Deals With The Devil and Other Reasons To Riot” and Sapphire’s novel “Push” most recently.
My radicalism comes from my life lived, the lives of those I know–in person, via corresponding, and through books, and seeing the suffering in each of our lives for what it is, and refusing to call it anything else, even while dominant society calls it everything else.
Peace to you.
Julian
31 May 2006, 12:58 pmR.S. Morris:
Randy, please.
1 June 2006, 1:56 am