40 Comments

1. eoin howe:

   I love it when I hear right wing conservative religious types (plenty in America, and many here in Australia) say “Marriage between a man and a woman is the fundamental basis of western civilisation”.
   How right they are! The irony is, they dont even realise how right they are!
   Any thoughts or feelings about the “leftist” attacks and cries of “Islamophobia” levelled at gay rights campaigners who criticise Sharia and the killing of homosexuals (and women) by extremist bigots, who happen not to be white skinned christians?

   http://www.petertatchell.net
   Is a good place to start.

   5 June 2006, 1:52 am

2. Sks:

   I.

   Your friend Harry is a wise man, indeed.

   And of course, gender is not a secondary contradiction, it is an inherent, indivisible part of class society. As a matter of fact, class society most probably was born precisely to sustain gender oppression.

   On the other hand, A General Theory of Revolution will not make us one… or at least will make us one that will last 74 years, at most. So, we might get all of our theories in line, but what’s to be done?

   II.

   I stand for the abolition of all forms of marriage.

   Marriage is ultimately a corporation, created to concentrate, manage, and spend the wealth of those involved. It is the ultimate form of alienation and privatization of life.

   Yet I believe that the sturggle for same-sex marriage is an indispensable part of the struggle to abolish marriage. It is, from an economic stand point, the full entitlement of a section of society to participate fully in the economy.

   As wage slavery is always superior to chattel slavery, in particular to the slaves, universal marriage is always superior to hetereosexual marriage.

   Futhermore, there is a clear political advantage:

   Nader is right, Gonadal Politics are bullshit. But the stink is very much real. If we want to eliminate something, we must elminate what creates the need for it. Ignoring Gonadal Politics will not make them go aways. Creating universal marriage will.

   Likewise, gender oppression won’t go away because one ignores it. Yet, for that one I dont have the easy answer. Which is, I believe, the biggest obstacle that contemporary Feminism and gender liberation politics face today.

   5 June 2006, 7:02 am

3. Stan:

   Characterizing marriage is a little like characterizing the military… both are institutions that are associated with the state, and both are homophobic…. and both are changing. The comparison breaks down after that, but the fact that they are both state-institutions and homophobic is trying to tell us something, I believe.

   Both, also btw, are entered into nowadays by signing a contract.

   It strikes me, as a married person, as a little glib to talk about standing for marriage’s abolition. It’s a conceptual leap over history.

   The state recognition of this kinship is important — in the real world where we are paying bills, raising kids, and accumulating enough worldly necessities to escape a day-to-day struggle for mere existence. What happens, for example, if all the pizza and red meat I’ve eaten rises up and strangles my coronary artery, and I drop dead on the bicycle the doctor told me to ride to lower my cholesterol?

   And though marriage has a history that is oppressive, many people are re-making it in their own image. I certainly don’t feel alienated at home, and neither does my partner. When Reconstruction happened, manumitted African Americans flooded to get married because it was a marker of full citizenship (for the men, of course… but even partially for the women who were entitled to enter into contracts — with couverture on the other side, of course).

   One of the problems with Marx-ISM (Sks and I know each other as students of Marx, and we have a mutual respect for each others’ work… his as a highly committed Puerto Rican nationalist) has been its unfortunate tendency to confuse analysis with prognostication. The latter is probellmatic because none of us can know what socialism might look like, because we have no idea what the circumstances will be when we get to that point of actually gaining political power. Myles Horton said “Marx gave us a toolbox, not a blueprint.” Pretty smart hillbilly, Horton.

   That political tendency has erred on the question of gender from the very beginning, and our tendency to ossify the thought of particular (male) revolutionaries into doctrine/dogma, in conjunction with the defensiveness that has come from ideological encirclement, has led us into a self-referential demilitarized zone.

   One of those dogmas is Engels’ theses on gender, which is not only positivist and naturalizes women, it is a century and a half old. The conjectural history of gender (and they are ALL conjectural, since we have no record of all gender relations prior to class society) is often used to justify the envelopment of gender as a “question” within the REAL struggle over economic class.

   Then it can be marked out in stages of progress… and for some reason, by the reckoning of (still, overwhelmingly male) Marxist leadership, the final liberation becomes an outcome of the socialist transformaiton of society, and not its pre-condition.

   I think that has to be challenged.

   That won’t happen so long as we simply continue to reiterate Marxist shibboleths on gender and fail to engage the questions raised by radical feminism, which also has its roots in the Marxist tradition of a materialist conception of history — but which was “expelled” at around the same time many left organizations were still explicitly homophobic.

   Serious engagement with theories of gender means familiarizing oneself with them, and not merely the reiteration of one’s own, followed by serial defenses.

   “The Death of Nature,” by Carolyn Merchant, is a very good starting point for anyone calling him/herself a scientific socialist. Robert Biel, someone coming out of the Maoist tradition, read this and gave it major props in his book, “The New Imperialiism.”

   I’d be happy to host a thread here for people who may want to read this collectively and discuss it. Then we could follow on with a couple of others. Maybe “Public Vows,” by Nancy Cott, on the American history of marriage. Then Pateman’s “The Sexual Contract.”

   5 June 2006, 9:00 am

4. Mark:

   I simultaneously oppose the real, existing system of marriage as controlled by the church/state hierarchy and support the rights of same-sex couples to participate in it.

   I don’t see any more contradiction in this than in the fact that I support the progress made in the 20th century that finally forced the state to let the majority of adult human beings in the United States vote while opposing the system in which they were enfranchised.

   5 June 2006, 2:52 pm

5. DeAnander:

   quick thought. the assumption that women’s liberation will follow naturally from a successful socialist revolution as class oppression is swept aside is, imho, isomorphic with the assumption that legalising/unionising prostitution will result in an end to the coercion, abuse, rape, murder etc. of prostituted women and girls (and boys).

   in fact it is the patriarchal mindset that creates prostitution and its abuses as one seamless system… and tinkering with the monetary and legal relations may ameliorate conditions here or there but not undo the fundamental feral facts that no one (in the mainstream) wants to face: men want the availability of a class of women who do not have the option to say No. they want this underclass of women kept available because they want to do things to women that are not loving, caring, friendly or pleasant, things which impugn women’s human dignity, things which encode dominance and hostility and cruelty. they want to do these things because of [fill in your favourite reason here anywhere on the overlapping scale from nature to nurture] and the culture sanctions and approves this. if men did not want to abuse/dominate women there would be no prostitutes, because there would be no need for a subclass of women who are not allowed to say No. or so I read it.

   it perhaps makes sense that as women in marriage acquired, slowly and with difficulty, the right to say No — no to being beaten, no to being raped, no to having their goods/property usurped and controlled by a husband — prostitution has become more and more legitimate and mainstream. if wives are able to say No then men want to expand the pool of indentured women, to maintain the availability level required to underwrite the patriarchal definition of Man as Dominator.

   eliminating poverty or giving prostitutes full civil rights is a good ameliorative bandaid strategy, but it begs the fundamental question: empowering women is in direct conflict with patriarchy’s structural need for an underclass of women who cannot say No. poverty and its cousin, pimping, maintain that pool of “commodity women.” there is an inbuilt structural resistance to eliminating this “social resource” for men. not addressing this covert agenda in patriarchal society, or pretending that conventional labour laws or tort law will “solve the problem” of abuse of prostitutes (or of women generally) is just squeegeeing the bubbles around under the wallpaper. level the patriarchal abuse out here and it will pop up over there. you cam’t to the levelling until you have tackled the patriarchal abuse and dominance hierarchy. or at least we must work on both in tandem.

   what I’m trying to say is that the idea that prostitution or other abuse of women is “natural” but can be somehow tamed or made harmless by financial or social policy, is all backwards and inside out. the very existence of prostitution (and traditionally the institution of marriage) are about the revocation of female agency and the establishment of male power: the creation of the national or personal harem, the pool of women who cannot say No.

   5 June 2006, 6:05 pm

6. Sks:

   I.

   I do agree that gender oppression (along with sexual orientation, national oppression, ageism, and other so called “special oppressions) is very conviniently pushed to a second plane by a mostly male leadership of the left trying to protect their phallic privilege. Hell, I *was born* into it. I have seen leftists do shit to women that would make some of your ex-buddies from Delta Force blush “because you dont do that to a lady”.

   Whats more, since you have inmersed yourself into the theoretical, philosophical, historical, hermeneutic, and epistemological literature of gender liberation, to the point of writing what I dare say its a seminal book on it.

   I will stipulate that you are right on the theory even when I might have some sort of impressionist, or even learned, disagreement on a detail or two.

   Lets get that one of the way.

   We agree.

   II.

   As to abolishing marriage being glib, well, I also stand for the abolition of religion. Which doesn’t mean I stop prefering one liberation theologist like those form Haiti or COlombia over hundreds of ultra-ultra atheist marxists enamored with the sound of their oh-so-radical proclamations… (Yeah, am bitter. I got called glib! Puts me in the company of Christopher Hitchens! AM MAD! :P)

   I explain myself because I must defend my view, and contextualize it. I have nothing personally against marriage. As a matter of fact, I will marry, probablly sooner than later. But it will be for the same reason I am a wage slave doing alieanated work, two other things I want to abolish but practice nevertheless.

   I am in fact provocatively questioning the epistestomology of the universal marriage (which is how I like to frame the pro-”same sex” marriage side). We tend to belive that marriage is about love and companionship, when love and companionship exist, have existed, and will exist independent of marriage. (Next time I see one of my dogs lovingly grooming one of my cats, I will think about this). I like to question this view, because I think Engels had it fucking spot on when he described bourgeois marriage as private prostitution, however extreme the formulation, and however wrong he was on other views on gender.

   I have a generalized view of all such superstructural things as things that will wither away after the mythical Revolution (humanity’s shinning horizon: the closer we get to it, the farther it moves!). Sort of the same view most left men take on gender.

   But gender is base stuff. That Engel’s has been proven wrong on a number of things does not negate the tool he gave us, which is my reading of Engels: the critique of gender society is the critique of class society. Period. If you attack gender oppression, in a radical, materialist way, you are attacking class oppresion *AND* you *CANNOT* attack class oppression *WITHOUT* attacking patriarchy.

   I think that in practical you buy into the false dichotmy that both radical Feminism (in general) and male centered Leftism (in general) create around the question of gender. They are fucking indivisible. And to try to wedge them is the ultimate act of what used to be called “individualist ecclecticism” in those old days when half the world was red, and women went to space as pilots.

   (On this I think we can approximate agreement, at least on the general)

   Alas, my disagreement, or at least my concern, is the lack of a practical, political program, a sensible, non-liquidationist one. Sort of like what we do among veterans, or environmentalists, or national liberation groups.

   (I have ultra-left visions of armed women avenging domestic abuse, but thats not it. Althought I do see it as a sensible, non-liquidationist idea, with the plus side it arms the majority)

   I sincerely think that the radical critique of patriarchy and gender oppression, as political activism, has failed to win over people for coming up with, imnsho, knucleheaded ideas like banning porn, or creating highly scripted consent forms, etc.

   Protesting porn, critiquing porn, figthing with that pig from hustler, thats different, but banning it? Its like calling to ban guns. Or ban fishing. Yeah guns kill a lot of people, yes fishing damages ecosystem, and probably makes defenseless creatures suffer in vain. Yet we *control*, *mitigate*, not ban. For me its a question not of waiting for socialism to act upon gender, but to act upon gender as if socialism will never arrive.

   Thats sort of the conversation I want to start, pararell to the very important one of engaging radical Feminism as part of the dialectical materialist critique and tradition from which mostly men, but also many women, have unilaterally struggle to banish it.

   As I still belive that in the final analysis, practice is the sole judge of the truth… however positivist that sounds

   III.

   I AM NOT A NATIONALIST.

   I AM AN INTERNATIONALIST.

   SERIOUSLY.

   STOP GRINNING!!!

   I SWEAR AM NOT!!!

   

   5 June 2006, 8:09 pm

7. Neilcaff:

   Stan: Can you explain how voting for Nader is an exercise in white privilage?

   On the question of liberating prostitutes. I hear what alot of you are saying about simply legalising prostitution or even unionising it is not a solution. I take it from some of the contributions that alot of you are involved in anti prostitution work. What I want to know is how do you conduct such campaigns? What sort of organisations do you use? What sort of relationships have you built up with prostitutes. What are the demands you raise to build support with prostitutes and the public? I vaugely remember Stan posting something about law changes in Sweden that criminalised the johns but not the prostitutes. Is this the sort of thing your talking about? This is probably a bit off post. How about Stan or someone who’s involved in this kind of work write a post about this kind of campaigning?

   6 June 2006, 10:23 am

8. Julian Real:

   Hi folks.

   Good conversation here, which I’m eager to get in on.

   I’ll have to pull many passages from what’s written above, in order to keep my mind on track–my mind tends to wander around like a vine or a trapped dog, depending on what is happening in my life. I’ll note my responses by beginning them with “JR”. (That’s me–no connection to the Dallas TV series of the 1980s, I swear!)

   Stan:
   The demands of gay couples for this simple legal recognition of their unions is directly related to the struggle against patriarchy…

   JR: Radical gays have been vomiting over a liberal gay agenda that includes “gays in the military” and “gay marriage”. So let’s be clear here: it is a liberal gay agenda item, not a radical one. No radical lesbian feminists I know are “pro-marriage” of any sort. Nor are the three gay radical feminist men that exist in the world, as far as I know. As best I understand it, author of “Refusing To Be A Man”, John Stoltenberg, married radical feminist Andrea Dworkin for health insurance reasons. (Heterosexist institutions do have their financial perks! And you hets get to hold hands and kiss outside and stuff like that, without being beaten. Now if only the men kissing the women in public would stop beating and raping them at home!)

   Eoin says:
   I love it when I hear right wing conservative religious types (plenty in America, and many here in Australia) say “Marriage between a man and a woman is the fundamental basis of western civilisation”.
   How right they are! The irony is, they dont even realise how right they are!
   Any thoughts or feelings about the “leftist” attacks and cries of “Islamophobia” levelled at gay rights campaigners who criticise Sharia and the killing of homosexuals (and women) by extremist bigots, who happen not to be white skinned christians?

   JR:
   I see no difference between what you describe above and the anti-Semitism found in some Muslim and Christian communities, of Color, or not. Anti-Semitism has to be challenged, wherever it exists. Period.

   Sks says:
   A General Theory of Revolution will not make us one… or at least will make us one that will last 74 years, at most. So, we might get all of our theories in line, but what’s to be done?

   First. Glad to meet you, Sks!! My name is Julian. I am really enjoying your voice here, and hope you stay around a while and make yourself comfortable!!!

   Some radical feminist HAVE proposed remedies, which would serve to expose male supremacy, and empower women to challenge it. See the Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Ordinance, a Civil Rights approach, not a state-empowering banning approach. When the Ordinance was trying to get passed in several U.S. cities in the 1980s, the opposition, which included every Tom, Dick, and Harry male supremacist (especially Dick), every corporate pornographer, and their apologists and defenders, which included many from the gay community (meaning, gay male) and the lesbian community who had already decided the personal was no longer political when it came to cumming. See: Orgasm Politics and The Hijacking of the Women’s Movement, by Sheila Jeffreys. See also: http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/other/ordinance/newday/TOC.htm for details on the ordinance. No feminist I know (in twenty-five years, has called for banning porn. No one. That’s an anti-radicalfeminist urban and suburban and rural legend. Find me one source, not “an account of what someone allegedly said about…” that demonstrates that ANY radical feminist has proposed banning porn. That’s one lie that needs to stay lying down, six feet under, so to speak. Pornography and prostitution are intricately linked to the matter of marriage. Most divorces now are due to men’s porn addiction, and most women feel inadequate to meet up to the standards set by pornography, which is a form of prostitution. To pretend that marriage and the sexual procurement of women for sexual exploitation and abuse are not “part of a whole” is to live in fantasy land, which, btw, porn isn’t: it’s a multi-billion dollar industry manufacturing contempt, discrimination against, and low civil status for white women and women of Color.

   Sks: Yet I believe that the sturggle for same-sex marriage is an indispensable part of the struggle to abolish marriage. It is, from an economic stand point, the full entitlement of a section of society to participate fully in the economy.
   […] As wage slavery is always superior to chattel slavery, in particular to the slaves, universal marriage is always superior to hetereosexual marriage.

   JR: So, does that mean sexxx(ism)-workers unionizing is a step towards our goals? (As De addresses above.) Seems to me we need to dig a little deeper, as De suggests here. An approach that has worked in Sweden is to decriminalize prostitutes, and to criminalize pimps and johns. I have a friend there who can show up here and tell you the amazing effect that has had on prostitution in that country.

   Sks: Likewise, gender oppression won’t go away because one ignores it. Yet, for that one I dont have the easy answer. Which is, I believe, the biggest obstacle that contemporary Feminism and gender liberation politics face today.

   JR: There are approaches, it’s just that liberals have distorted them in the press to such a degree that even some radicals I know are convinced they’re a bad idea. That you mention “banning porn” proves this point. Ask Catharine MacKinnon to rattle off some. She’s been working not only nationally but internationally to expose and end male supremacy. (You can contact her, Stan, can’t you? Would she toss out a few “to-do’s” for this blog audience to take to heart?)

   Stan says:
   Characterizing marriage is a little like characterizing the military… both are institutions that are associated with the state, and both are homophobic…. and both are changing. The comparison breaks down after that, but the fact that they are both state-institutions and homophobic is trying to tell us something, I believe.

   Both, also btw, are entered into nowadays by signing a contract.

   JR: And both depend on the existence and maintenance of racism and sexism, …and heterosexism, as you noted earlier.

   Stan:
   It strikes me, as a married person, as a little glib to talk about standing for marriage’s abolition. It’s a conceptual leap over history.

   […]And though marriage has a history that is oppressive, many people are re-making it in their own image.

   JR: If the personal is political, then why not divorce but stay together? How does that “re-making” amount to it not being a male supremacist, hetero/sexist institution? We all know that patriarchy can allow a certain amount of liberal give and take within any of its institutions. It makes itself look “non-oppressive” that way. Having a few “good, equal marriages” is precisely what patriarchy needs to show how wonderful the institution is, even while the institution is responsible for setting up a social form that creates more rape, battery, and incest, than any other.

   De says:
   quick thought. the assumption that women’s liberation will follow naturally from a successful socialist revolution as class oppression is swept aside is, imho, isomorphic with the assumption that legalising/unionising prostitution will result in an end to the coercion, abuse, rape, murder etc. of prostituted women and girls (and boys).

   JR: I agree!!

   De says:
   men want the availability of a class of women who do not have the option to say No. they want this underclass of women kept available because they want to do things to women that are not loving, caring, friendly or pleasant, things which impugn women’s human dignity, things which encode dominance and hostility and cruelty. they want to do these things because of [fill in your favourite reason here anywhere on the overlapping scale from nature to nurture] and the culture sanctions and approves this. if men did not want to abuse/dominate women there would be no prostitutes, because there would be no need for a subclass of women who are not allowed to say No. or so I read it.

   JR: I agree. And what most people forget is this: being an incest survivor doesn’t make one into a prostitute, although it can cause one to act out sexually. Being poor and on the street doesn’t make one into a prostitute, even though it may make for an unsafe life and desperate choices.

   Prostitution is a system of racist-misogynist harm, which is very specific in how it operates. Without Pimps and Johns, there is no “prostitution” industry. Girls have to be “made” into prostitutes, through specific training, force, and usually excessive drug use, or other means to numb-out; it doesn’t just happen magically, like Cinderella turning into a Princess. The illusion of romance, akin to Stockholm Syndrome levels of “close feelings for one’s terrorist” play out at times between prostitute and pimp, which is something pimps exploit. That there is now a brand of feminism that argues prostitution is empowering to women, obviously means that patriarchy is doing a good job of winning that battle–against women.

   De says:
   what I’m trying to say is that the idea that prostitution or other abuse of women is “natural” but can be somehow tamed or made harmless by financial or social policy, is all backwards and inside out. the very existence of prostitution (and traditionally the institution of marriage) are about the revocation of female agency and the establishment of male power: the creation of the national or personal harem, the pool of women who cannot say No.

   JR: I entirely agree, which is why “creating an egalitarian–legally and religiously sanctioned–marriage” (which is to say, “marriage”) is akin to “improving the conditions prostitutes work under”.

   Sks says:
   As to abolishing marriage being glib, well, I also stand for the abolition of religion. Which doesn’t mean I stop prefering one liberation theologist like those form Haiti or COlombia over hundreds of ultra-ultra atheist marxists enamored with the sound of their oh-so-radical proclamations… (Yeah, am bitter. I got called glib! Puts me in the company of Christopher Hitchens! AM MAD! )

   JR: I’m with you, and some Liberation Theology activists (especially feminist ones), and Chris!!

   Sks:
   I explain myself because I must defend my view, and contextualize it. I have nothing personally against marriage. As a matter of fact, I will marry, probablly sooner than later. But it will be for the same reason I am a wage slave doing alieanated work, two other things I want to abolish but practice nevertheless.

   I’m just wondering–and you may have some damn good answers for this question: why would you get married?

   Sks:
   If you attack gender oppression, in a radical, materialist way, you are attacking class oppresion *AND* you *CANNOT* attack class oppression *WITHOUT* attacking patriarchy.

   JR: There are plenty of male supremacist, oblivious-to-sexxxism Leftists who have been doing exactly that, no?

   Sks:
   I think that in practical you buy into the false dichotmy that both radical Feminism (in general) and male centered Leftism (in general) create around the question of gender. They are fucking indivisible.

   JR: Let’s not close down other routes and options, than the Left’s. Indigenous People’s struggles do not always fall into a Eurocentric model called “Right” and “Left” as Winona Laduke points out effectively in “Talking About A Revolution”. Radical feminists have often called on women (and anti-patriarchal men) to “invent” where there is no current remedy. We are creative beings, humans. We can invent as we go along, and given the slippery “nature” of male domination to accept and absorb some liberal feminist adjustments while further entrenching male domination, we’d better be damned creative in our efforts. Some of ‘em may not fall into what is called “Right” and “Left” approaches. Would you agree? I’d personally-politically hate to radical feminism limited by having to follow only the Euro-whitemale (originally) model for how radical social change happens. (Radical women, especially of Color, have never really gotten the chance to be at the helm, have they? So let’s let ‘em, and see where things go!)

   Sks:
   I sincerely think that the radical critique of patriarchy and gender oppression, as political activism, has failed to win over people for coming up with, imnsho, knucleheaded ideas like banning porn, or creating highly scripted consent forms, etc.

   JR: Careful here, Sks. Those have not been proposed by radical feminist activists. That such measures get discussed (often histerically) by liberals, doesn’t make them strategies of radical feminism. Be careful to not go by what liberal media SAYS radical feminists are doing. As I’m sure you know, media has no interest in informing the masses of radical approaches to changing anything.

   Sks:
   For me its a question not of waiting for socialism to act upon gender, but to act upon gender as if socialism will never arrive.

   JR: I agree!!!

   Sks;
   I AM NOT A NATIONALIST.

   I AM AN INTERNATIONALIST.

   SERIOUSLY.

   STOP GRINNING!!!

   I SWEAR AM NOT!!!

   

   JR: I like your style, Sks, and I wholeheartedly agree with you here!

   6 June 2006, 4:13 pm

9. lapetrov:

   Marriage may have been “bourgeois prositution” in the 19th century (and when defined “between one man and one woman” may still be now for some), but few people cohabitated back then. Hell, the romantics were just introducing the whole notion of “free love.”

   Almost everyone lives together now before marrying, though young adults are warned it may not be a good idea:

   10 things to know about marriage from Rutgers (2004):

   http://marriage.rutgers.edu/Publications/pubtenthingsyoungadults.htm

   For me, marriage is a necessary evil. Its bondage forces individuals to invest it the society at large, which means: in each other. A good thing. The individual loses out a bit, but in theory everyone wins. Also good in a generalized way, but only IF we function properly as a society.

   There is no reason why marriage has to be obligatory for all, nor stifling for any. It’s a legal contract that may be entered into in consultation with a lawyer, if necessary. I agree that marriage can be as unique as the pair that create it. But the laws that govern it shouldn’t be left to others to impose upon us all a singular point of view.

   This week’s Time magazine says that gay and lesbian households consititute around 2% of the total. If we suppose that they all choose to marry as soon as they are legally able, what “civilization” is so weak that such a tiny number of people can bring it tumbling down?

   Only one that insists on being absolute.

   And that is why for me, gay marriage is potentially radical. It cracks the system of absolutes and defies duality. Top/bottom, right/wrong, good/bad… there are too many people out there that still think along those facile divisions. Seriously. The complexity of life demands that we now move on to a more sophisticated means of understanding ourselves and our world. Maybe some gay weddings can get people to think differently about the artificial absolute: man/woman, erroneously constructed as “opposites.”

   You mention that “eeeiiiww factor” –in my experience, it’s mostly among men. Maybe men associate shame with the arousal homoerotic thoughts may inspire. Men worry they’re gay just because it may turn them on, ever so slightly, to see two men and imagine what they do together. Jeez.

   Sadly, another reason why to oppose gay marriage, or do nothing to ensure it. Is that patriarchy at work?

   6 June 2006, 4:47 pm

10. lapetrov:

    oops. sorry, it’s Newsweek. Not Time.

    6 June 2006, 5:10 pm

11. Sks:

    I do agree with the premise that prostitution is born out of a need of turning women (and “feminized” men) into commodities unable to say No.

    I do wish to further elaborate on some views:

    “it perhaps makes sense that as women in marriage acquired, slowly and with difficulty, the right to say No”

    I disagree that this has been a slow process, or even that this process is beyond its initial steps.

    I offer this perspective:

    It has been a relatively recent revolutionary process.

    As a matter of fact, such a revolutionary process, that like the Fascist reaction that rose against Bolshevik revolutionism, has generated extreme reactionary responses to reassert patriarchal control, such as Talibanism and Southern Baptism.

    Like Bolshevism, it was spawned by a watered-down “womens movement” that had reduced the historic gains of womens, pricipally working-class, during their industrial struggles in the the 19th century to pale, comparatively passive, and middle class movements. Suffragettes are an example (and like all watered-down versions of any revolution did mange something positive).

    Hence gets the textile factory revolutionary women that gave us the International Workingwomen’s Day get forgotten, but Susan B. Anthony gets a dollar coin. (Ironically, Susan B. Anthony’s newspaper was called “The Revolution”. It pages spoke eloquently against abortion rights, in typical watered-down fashion).

    As part of this process, marriage was not what helped women fight patriarchy, but was often the first line of defense. Even as the notion of love marriage rose to prominence, and as the patriarchial definition of a true gentleman began to include not physically abusing women.

    “eliminating poverty or giving prostitutes full civil rights is a good ameliorative bandaid strategy, but it begs the fundamental question: empowering women is in direct conflict with patriarchy’s structural need for an underclass of women who cannot say No.”

    True, but bandaids are clearly preferable to an open wound that then gangrenes. They can indeed be part of curing the wound.

    Nevertheless, legalizing prostitution is a good idea not just in anti-patriarchal terms, but on class-economic terms (which, are PART of anti-patriarchal struggle in itself).

    It is like legalizing drugs, the elimination of the pseudo-moral ostracising of both consumers and producers, which in reality exists for reasons of mantaining prices in artificial places: in the case of drugs, keep the prices up as a way of creating a huge business, and in the case of sex work, a way of keeping prices mostly low, precisely as part of creating the idea in working class men that they are still powerful and priveleged in spite of being nothing more than wage slaves. (The “high class” “call girls” exists as a way generate a certain cultural glamour to recruit more women into the business.)

    ” poverty and its cousin, pimping, maintain that pool of “commodity women.” there is an inbuilt structural resistance to eliminating this “social resource” for men.”

    I think that describing this as “an inbuilt structural resistance” is an epistemological fallacy. There is no such a thing. Its like saying that women are “naturally” weak.

    Men are dominant in our society for reasons we cannot yet describe correctly (althought certainly we have made much progress from the Engels model of matriarchal barbarism). But we certainly sustain our power, and need for power, political, economic, sexual, for reasons that are entirely super-structural, with class society as base.

    “not addressing this covert agenda in patriarchal society, or pretending that conventional labour laws or tort law will “solve the problem” of abuse of prostitutes (or of women generally) is just squeegeeing the bubbles around under the wallpaper.”

    STRAW MAN ALERT:

    1) who is not addressing this covert agenda?

    2) who is suggesting that conventional laws and tort law will “solve the problem”?

    And nevertheless, even people (like me) who do address this covert agenda, and who do think that conventional lae or tort law will not solve the problem, can, and indeed in my opinion must, support and advocate such reforms, both because of their band-aid effect, and because they raise the debate.

    “level the patriarchal abuse out here and it will pop up over there. you cam’t to the levelling until you have tackled the patriarchal abuse and dominance hierarchy. or at least we must work on both in tandem.”

    This completely true. Yet, I find it insufficient.

    We can sit down and talk and expose, and draw a perfect map of the scientific causes of patriarchy (if such a thing exists), and we still have to crush it under the mighty weight of action.

    And action includes universalising marriage, and includes legalizing prostitution, and, to use your genial analogy, pushing the wallpaper bubbles until they bunch up into one big bubble thats easier to, violently, smash. (Patriarchy will go with a bang, not a whimper, I am so sure of this, that I think even capitalism can disappear without any major violence, but patriarchy will require it.)

    That again is my concern, “the what is to be done”, in the positive sense. While I don’t believe there can be such a thing as too much critique, I do belive there can be an unproductive negative balance between concrete action and critique.

    Its the difference between analizing the effects of American Imperialism in Haiti and just standing in circles screaming “smash imperialism”, and doing the same critique, and then raising funds for those figthing imperialism in Haiti AND lobbyibg the US congress people to provide band-aids to the Haitian people.

    ps I don’t debate here the use of prostitution as mainly female work, because most men who work as sex workers are indeed “feminized” from a patriarchial stand point, and the bulk of their “clients” are men themselves, playing out exactlly the same things as men who go with female prostitutes. I mean, you dont get many prostitutes that dress as men do you? But the inverse is so prevalent, that in some mid-sized cities in the USA, the male tranvestite prostitution outnumbers female prostitution.

    6 June 2006, 11:00 pm

12. DeAnander:

    brief note: there are 2 problems for me in arguing for blanket legalisation of prostitution (I think we all agree strongly that prostituted persons themselves should be decriminalised pronto, and that the question of regulation applies to pimps and punters, not hookers who are victims of the system).

    problem 1: drugs are not harmed by the drug trade. the customer is harmed, by self-infliction and by the scheming profiteers who sell drugs. in prostitution, it is the commodity being sold (prostitutes) who are harmed, not the customer. the model of addiction and the scheming profiteer are definitely parallel, but there’s a fundamental difference between legalising the consumption of a substance and legalising the consumption of a human being.

    problem 2: legalisation doesn’t always lead to sanity or moderation in demand. a powerful and enduring meme in liberal circles is that “Prohibition doesn’t work, during Prohibition more alcohol was consumed and sold than before, Prohibition just encourages crime and raises prices.” [gee, if raping women is outlawed, only outlaws will rape women… sounds like a slight improvement to me ober the current status quo where perfectly respectable men are raised thinking there is nothing wrong — actually that it is kewl and progressive — to visit the local pay-n-rape stand.] tobacco — nicotine is dose-for-dose the most addictive drug in the pharmcopoeia — is perfectly legal. does this discourage smoking? are you kidding? 400K people a year in the US alone die prematurely from smoking tobacco. maybe if tobacco were prohibited fewer people would die? do we really think that if it were prohibited more people would die? who knows… but I would not assume that legalisation reduces demand for prostitution. it has not in Australia, where brothels are booming sufficiently to do IPO. it has not in Amsterdam. can anyone name a country or district where legalising prostitution had resulted in reduced demand?

    certainly drug-war type prohibitions which crack down on the addicts and leave the pushers alone are useless and play right into the hands of protofascistas. sanctions should be focussed on those who do harm to others, not on those who experience the most harm. hence the Swedish approach of criminalising pimps and johns — which some Libruls still can’t understand, as you can see from the ET thread which I think I linked to above.

    7 June 2006, 3:30 pm

13. lapetrov:

    Sks, would you please elaborate on this suggestive parenthetical remark:

    “(Patriarchy will go with a bang, not a whimper, I am so sure of this, that I think even capitalism can disappear without any major violence, but patriarchy will require it.)”

    7 June 2006, 5:11 pm

14. dave brown:

    Couldnt resist jumping in here. I live in NZ where both civil unions (technically not marriage but carries the same legal protections and rights for partners) and decriminalisation of prostitution have been introduced in the last couple of years. There was a backlash before, during and after the legislation, yet an Islamic MP who voted for both has survived in parliament without being locked up or shot. Of course these are very small steps forward which can easily be reversed by a a conservative government.

    But really I don’t believe capitalism is capable of gender neutrality, nor do I think that this was the full import of Marx’s understanding.

    This is how I see it:

    Bush is in trouble so he plays the gender (and illegal alien and Islamic etc) card to exacerbate divisions in the majority working class. The fact that he is so desperate doesnt, IMO however, make gender THE main contradiction under capitalism.

    I think Engels was half right, the overthrow of mother right was analogous to the first ‘class’ oppression. But Marx and he (he was reporting on some of Marx’s late in life studies on the question) never considered gender relations to be class relations proper.

    If they had, then patriarchy or the Domestic Mode of Production could be seen as the first historic form of class society which has persisted in articulation with subsesquent modes insofar as it provides unpaid labor to supplement slave, serf and wage-labor. Not only that, but, women’s liberation then becomes coterminous with the end of class society i.e. communism. And it won’t happen unless women go through men to get there.

    8 June 2006, 5:53 am

15. Stan:

    Dave, didn’t we meet in Sydney? At any rate, thanks for jioning the conversation.

    I’m not sure the whole notion of THE primary or secondary contradiction is at issue. It seems a construction that needs to be subjected to criticism itself.

    The point feminists (of the “radical” stripe) keep hammering away on, because it seems very difficult to get more than a nodding acknowledgement of it from the left, is that women’s liberation is not merely an economic phenomenon. Engels, and others, talked about mother-right. They’ve already shifted women’s standpoint to being a parent. But women are not born and developed as parents, and this is not their only experience of power and powerlessness.

    Feminists want to talk about sex-right. About the entitlement that men want to exercise over women in the practice of sexuality.

    This is what De refers to in her critique of prostitution… as a reserve army of women who cannot say “no.” It is the implication — only recently challenged in a few places — that marriage contract entitles a husband to the sexual services of a wife (ergo, the denial of the possibilty of marital rape).

    When radical feminists, like MacKinnon who paid close attention as she studied Lukacs, applied the essence of the marxist critical method to the question sexualized power. What this inevitably leads to is that place where we recognize that Marxism as a political tradition has taken an unrecognized and unexamined, but male, point of view. For me personally, this is most apparent when we highlight “desire,” and make the conceptual plunge of critiquing THAT. In exactly the same way that Marx showed how ideology functions to conceal and thereby reproduce the power of the bourgeoisie — and how those who are subordinated to the bourgeoisie can themselves not only adopt the bourgeois world-view, but form powerful emotional attachments to it via national chauvinism, et al, feminists have shown how desire is also a social construction, one that is reinforced by extremely powerful affective (and physiologiclly pleasurable) associations, but a social construction that is constructive OF… male power over women, in the realm of sex, and not merely the economy. The intractible nature of gender as a system of domination and subordination is, at least in part, due to a reification of sexuality that is embedded in our psyches earlier and more deeply — as sexual identity — than our awareness of class. Boys and girls are born into blue and pink, and it’s all downhill from there, so to speak.

    MacKinnon: “In my view, sexuality is to feminism whar work is to marxism. By saying that sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism, I mean that both sexuality and work focus on that which is most one’s own, that which most makes one the being the theory addresses, as that which is most taken away by the what the theory criticizes. In marxist theory, we see society fundamentally constructed of the relations people form as they do and make those things that are needed to survive humanly. Work is the social process of shaping and transforming the material and social worlds, the process that creates people as social beings, as their interactions create value. Work is that activity by which the theory comprehends people become who they socially are. Class is the social structure of their work, production is the process, capital is one congealed form. Control is the principle issue, that which is contested, that which we care about, the relations of which Marx wrote to attempt to alter.

    “A parallel argument is implicit in feminism. In my view… this argument is that the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organize society into two sexes, women and men. This division underlies the totality of social relaitons; it is as structural and pervasive as class is in marxist theory, although of course its structure and quality of pervasion are different. Sexuality is the social process that creates, organizes, and directs desire. Desire here is parallel to value in marxist theory, not the same, though it occupies an analagous theoretical location. It is taken for a natural essence or presocial impetus but it actually created by the social relaitons, the hierarchical relaitons in question. This process creates the social beings we know as women and men, as their relaitons create society. Sexuality to feminims is, like work to marxims, socially constructed and at the same time constructing. It is universal as activity, yet always historically specific, and jiontly comprised of matter and mind. As the organized expropriation of the work of some for the use of others defines the class, workers, the orgasnized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the sue of others defines the sex, woman. Heterosexuality is its predominant structure, gender is its social process, the family is its congealed form, sex roles are its qualities generalized to two social personas, and reproduction is a consequnce… Control is also the issue of gender.”

    Now Carole Pateman: “The locus classicaus for the argument that wives are like workers is, of course, Engels’ conjectural history of ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.’ Engels argues that ‘the first class oppression’ was that of male oppression of the female sex, and he states that ‘within the family [the husband] is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat’. However, he also claims that in the monogamous family the wife became ‘the head servant’, and that ‘the modernindividual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slvaery of the wife.’ Engels’ famous statement about the oppression of wives thus sues all three feminist terms of comparison; the upper servant, the slave, and the worker. Despite his references to the slave and the servant, Engles treats all subordination as class subordination: all ‘workers’ lack freedom in the smae whay whether they are located in public workplaces or the private workplace of the home, whether they receive protection or the token of free exchange, the wage. Sex is irrelevant to subordination, and the position of wives is understood as exactly like that of proletarians. Thus, Engles argued that the solution to the subordination of wives in the home was to ‘bring the whole female sex back into public industry’/ If wives became public workers like their husbands, the married couple would stand together as equals against capitalism, and the husband would have lost the means through which he could control is wife’s LABOUR POWER [emphasis mine, SG] in the home.

    “Engels’ solution assumes that the original contrct was purely a social contract and that the terms of the social contract are universal; conjugal relaitons in the family are like those in the market. That is to say, he assumes that men have no stake as men in their power over women…”

    A thought exercise: How is the experience of a woman faking an orgasm different for men and women? Go beyond the obvious. Why does she fake the orgasm (I’ll infer from personal conversations that most women have done this at one point or another)? How does that make her feel? Why did she do it? What does it say about power? How does this make men feel, to know that some orgams, possibly many of them, are faked? How alienating is this for women… to feel obliged for whatever reason (and we should ask the question WHAT ARE the reasons?) to fake an orgasm?

    Answering an earlier question about Nader and privilege.

    Nader saying he doesn’t “do gonadal politics” is copping out… and he’s copping out on some of the places where over half the population experiences the most humiliating and alienting oppression… in sexual relations, often with those who profess to “love” them. This categorical dismissal is a dstinctively MALE point of view… an exercise of male privilege, just as a categlircal dismissal of Democrats (and I don’t like that institution), by its categorical nature, fails to take into account the far more precarious situation faced by, say, African Americans, when Republicans, the real-live worse of two evils, come to power. I don’t object to voting for Nader. I object to the intellectual dishonesty of those who say there is not difference between the two. Blacks in the south, as well as their allies, died for the franchise; and a Republican legislature in Texas has redistricted the state to ensuere that an African American going to the polls is engaging in a symbolic gesture in the majority of districts now. They have taken the franchise back. Jim Crow is alive. The erasure of international family planning grants by the Bush administration has caused hundreds of thousands of women around the world to DIE!!! This is a number that could populate Raleigh more than once. Not saying that there is never a necessity to push out, but we need to stay honest while we do it, and quit trying to posit a mirror-image of the right’s Manichean universe, and pretending we have a patent on panaceas.

    8 June 2006, 8:10 am

16. DeAnander:

    claim no easy victories eh Stan — and no snake oil either. good stuff.

    I would actually go back a step further into human physiology — and commonsense — and say that a fundamental problem for the social construction of sexual relations bt men and women is physical. women — on average, there are of course exceptional women and exceptional moments — simply do not get the same kind of physical thrill, pleasure, or benefit from heterosexual intercourse that men do. whether this is adaptive or just happenstance, who knows. but this asymmetry — that a man can get a perfectly satisfactory orgasm from an activity that leaves a woman unsatisfied/frustrated, or entirely unpleasured, or — in worse cases — discomforted or hurt or injured — is at the root imho of the notion that men have to trade or pay something for “sex” (that is, fucking). for men, sex (=fucking) is something that can be taken or stolen or imposed without consent or reciprocity.

    in a progressive/humanist world — or in a loving and caring relationship — with egalitarian/humane pretensions, hetero lovers would practice a gift economy and reciprocal altruism: the asymmetry might be acknowledged freely, and a man would feel obliged by affectionate bonds and by altruism to offer “extra” (ahem, note the implicit priority there?) sexual attentions to his female partner to ensure her pleasure and contentment as well as his own. BUT conflicting with this gift-economy solution is the (imho biological, but we can argue that until the genomes come home) wiring between fucking and domination; a male dog will hump another male dog to express dominance, and those dogs were never dressed in pink and blue as pups. for a man to do anything other than fucking in bed — as someone illustrated on another thread with a popcult reference from The Sopranos — is in patriarchal eyes a loss of face. in fact as late as 1920 or so, a man who fucked in any position but the missionary one was considered decadent — and possibly unmanly — in conventional middle class and upper-middle British culture.

    so for a man to offer “sexual services” to another person makes him a gender traitor and a possible sissy. and the asymmetry of the fucker/fuckee relationship in traditional heterosexuality reinforces masculine norms and sense or status.

    this conundrum has been addressed in many ways by different cultures. exchanging gifts for sex is a popular practise worldwide, even in cultures with relatively little patriarchal hierarchy. in some cultures the asymmetry is balanced by female power, as in matrilineal land inheritance and the right to instant divorce (she throws his sandals out of the hut and that’s and end to it)… but our own timeline — the one that ends with 14 year old hookers on the streets of our cities — is mostly patriarchal…

    one obvious way patriarchy solves the problem of asymmetry in hetero intromissive pleasure is to treat women as sexual consumables or toys for men and to declare that female pleasure is simply irrelevant (the harem, the prostitute, the “dutiful wife”, the practise of rape). in each of these a reified pleasure has been expropriated or there is an implicit captive-market contract in which the extraction or mining of pleasure from the woman’s body is exchanged for protection from worse depredations, or for food and shelter.

    other reconciliations of the problem have been attempted — all of them twisted into baroque forms by the underlying kapu on challenging male power. an early one was that “nice” women don’t experience orgasm at all, and that only “loose” or “bad” women ever enjoy sexual contact. this belief is still prevalent in parts of Africa and was near universal among the upper/middle classes of the Anglo world in C19. side effects of this belief include clitoridectomy and the enduring myth that prostitutes are “liberated” and have a lot of sexual fun (by false logic: if respectable women are not allowed to have orgasms, because orgasms are Bad, then Bad Women must be having them instead, QED).

    the elaborate myth of the Vaginal Orgasm was another theory: “mature” or “real” women, it contended, would find fucking perfectly satisfying because fucking is naturally what is right and good for men and women to do. women who did not find it satisfactory were dysfunctional in some way. does the pressure to fake an orgasm begin here? further elaborations of this durable theory included the “G spot” fad. a variant on it is the ludicrous and (to me) appalling fantasy of “deep throat”, the fictional construct of a woman with a clitoris in her throat which would render her ideally pleasured by deep fellatio, i.e. a woman engineered to experience pleasure from giving oral sexual service to a cock. attempts to reconstruct “woman” as something which would enjoy and be satisfied by sexual practises which in reality are asymmetrical and — without genuine free will and reciprocity — expressive of male power and female subordination.

    here I emphasise that I don’t say no woman has ever had a vaginal orgasm or that “g-spot” stimulation never lit up anyone’s neurons, simply that the promotion of these “solutions” to pleasure-asymmetrybhas an agenda: to solve the problem while still keeping male-centric fucking the main, or real, definition of “sex”.

    another wriggly attempt to conceptualise and acknowledge the manifest asymmetry is the notion of “foreplay” — i.e. that men should indeed do some reciprocal pleasuring of female partners, but that this should be clearly understood as merely the warmup to the Main Event (penetration and fucking). this was something of a step forward for women, since a larger percentage of women can achieve orgasm from fucking if they are extremely aroused and/or relaxed to start with, than if they are unaroused or tense to start with also it gave more opportunity for affectionate touching/tenderness/cuddling, which many men of course claimed to despise as “girly stuff” and an irritating “payment” that had to be made to “get her to let me”. some men started complaining that it was a lot less work to rent a prostitute.

    then a strange subtext which had been marginal a century before, became more mainstream; men started regarding their skill at pleasuring women as a potential manliness and status marker, and there was an explosion of sexual self-help books on “how to drive a woman wild in bed” and so on. but the power dynamic was unchanged, so now women were facing men who not only wanted to fuck, but wanted documentary proof in the form of a female orgasm that they were “good at it” — and could get downright nasty if the woman didn’t perform on cue with the textbook vocalisations and a real, or convincingly faked, orgasm. for reasons which don’t seem too obscure, the most highly valued female vocalisations were those which could easily be misconstrued as cries of pain.

    well I’m running out of steam here (supposed to be working) but two more stray thoughts:

    ironically, as I read the literature, men are more likely to experience erection and/or orgasm from vigorous anal penetration (something about prostate stimulation) than women are from vaginal penetration — an involuntary erection, so I have read, is experienced by many men on anal penetration even in the absence of pre-existing desire, even with an object. the “vaginal orgasm” which men project onto women is more like a description of a physiological reaction men themselves might experience from consensual or nonconsensual anal penetration. it may be that the male/male fuck which men use as a model, conceptually and linguistically, for the ultimate in domination and hostility, might be more physiologically reciprocal (ignoring emotions, trust, love, etc) than the hetero kind.

    in the realm of traditional lesbian sex there is a real reversal and moebius twist of these sexual rules/roles. in the conservative tradition of butch/femme romance, it is the butch or ‘mannish’ partner who goes to great effort to physically cherish and please her femme lover. the most conservative or “stone butch” does not permit her lover to make love to her and is always the giver, not receiver, of sexual attentions. while in one sense this is a mimicry of hetero norms — claiming an exclusive right to be the “active” partnerband insisting on pasivity in the Other/Beloved — in another sense it is a profound reversal, as pleasure is being given rather than extracted by this active partner. some of the same pressures of course arise, perhaps compounded by the fact that it’s harder for a woman to fake an orgasm that fools another woman.

    maybe someone else can find some pattern in these random musings on orgasms, sex in marriage/relationships, and ‘faking it’…

    8 June 2006, 4:57 pm

17. Julian Real:

    Hi folks. Lots to respond to. I’ll note to whom I am responding as I go along. Yikes, this can get complicated!

    re (by Lapetrov): Hell, the romantics were just introducing the whole notion of “free love.”

    JR: That such love was not free-for-women, in any real-life political sense, needs to be pointed out. As we all know, the “free love” movement of the 1960s was largely the latest manifestation of male supremacy, this time in hippie clothing.

    re (by Lapatrov): For me, marriage is a necessary evil. Its bondage forces individuals to invest it the society at large, which means: in each other. A good thing. The individual loses out a bit, but in theory everyone wins.

    JR: Why so many necessary evils? What about the necessary “goods” (goods as in humane systems and institutions)? People investing in each other is not necessarily good, in some decontextualized way. There are social-political contexts in which real people get to know each other, and they are infused with white power and male power, to name but two. In practice, many lose out: just ask any mistreated divorced Black or Brown woman who endured her white husband’s racism and sexism. Just ask battered women. Just ask incested kids. Just ask neglected kids.

    re (by Lapetrov): There is no reason why marriage has to be obligatory for all, nor stifling for any. It’s a legal contract that may be entered into in consultation with a lawyer, if necessary. I agree that marriage can be as unique as the pair that create it. But the laws that govern it shouldn’t be left to others to impose upon us all a singular point of view.

    JR: I think its important to note what actually is happening in marriage, and in heterosexual relationships generally: are they proving to be “equal” by humanitarian feminist standards? Most are not. Are some males “progressing” in learning to live with women-as-equals. Of course. Is that due to the institution of marriage, or to the impact of feminist activism ON the institution of marriage. I’d argue the latter, for sure.

    That marriage doesn’t have to be obligatory or stifling, ignores the reality that it not only is precisely those things for many people I know, including some cousins of mine, but misses the point that heterosexuality is compulsory, and heterosexuality is a form of relating built upon male supremacy’s hierarchical and dualistic realized notion of gender. Marriage exists to uphold heterosexuality and “family”, which–we shouldn’t forget–includes physical battery and marital rape, incest and child neglect, as well as the non-physical abuse and neglect of women by men.

    re (by Lapetrov): And that is why for me, gay marriage is potentially radical. It cracks the system of absolutes and defies duality. Top/bottom, right/wrong, good/bad… there are too many people out there that still think along those facile divisions. Seriously.

    JR: Yeah, including many far too many married heterosexuals and partnered gay men. That gay men’s politics–and lesbian politics that is, basically, gay men’s politics, in and out of bed, are, by and large, male supremacist and/or heterosexist, ought not be ignored here. There’s nothing radical about gay marriage if it replicates all the key power dynamics of heterosexual marriage. Two co-habitating men can replicate patriarchy very nicely, thank you. Not all do, of course. But these exceptions–and gay men who are not covertly or overtly invested in patriarchal sex/life are exceptional–ought not cloak the rule. The rule is that heterosexual men’s male supremacy is to be replicated regardless of the genders involved in the relationship. See Unpacking Queer Politics, by Sheila Jeffreys for much more on this. I would call gay marriage a liberal reform of society, if seen from a radical feminist point of view.

    re (by Lapetrov): The complexity of life demands that we now move on to a more sophisticated means of understanding ourselves and our world. Maybe some gay weddings can get people to think differently about the artificial absolute: man/woman, erroneously constructed as “opposites.”

    JR: No doubt. Of course any new social phenomenon will get some people to think in all manner of ways about standard life. This doesn’t make a case for gay marriage being radical, though.
    re (by Lapetrov): You mention that “eeeiiiww factor” –in my experience, it’s mostly among men. Maybe men associate shame with the arousal homoerotic thoughts may inspire. Men worry they’re gay just because it may turn them on, ever so slightly, to see two men and imagine what they do together. Jeez.

    JR: First, you are clearly assuming “men” are heterosexual. They aren’t (all). Yes, before coming out, due to internalized homophobia, I thought the sight of two men kissing was gross. This points to the fact that what is experienced–and the history of it being experienced or portrayed or rumored as a negative or sinful or evil, is key.

    One not uncommon experience by “heterosexual” men is that they can and do find themselves turned on/erotically engaged by another male, not necessarily because the other person is male, mind you, and for misogynist/homosocial reasons HAVE to publicly declare such experiences as “eeewwy”. All this and more determines what is registered as positive sensation or feeling.

    (I won’t get–or maybe I will get–into the fact that any orgasm is believed to be “good experience” by patriarchal definition. That incest, molestation, and other sexual assault survivors sometimes experience “arousal” during their grossly horrific and/or grossly mundane abuse, and that that is used against survivors of abuse, by perpetrators, juries, and judges, as “a sign” that it was, in fact, “pleasurable” which somehow also equals “welcomed and wanted” misses the point that children and women do not live in a society where they can be “never approached for sex by men”. So the approach becomes expected or not surprising, or “here we go again” and acquiescence, compliance, and dissociation ensue.

    Now, as a gay adult male (oh, sometimes I call myself formerly gay, but let’s not complicate things THAT much!), let me say that the most “eeeeww’ing” I hear is from hetero and gay men about women’s menstrual cycles, from hetero men about gay sex, and from gay men about lesbian sex. What do all those “eeeeww’s” have in common? Answer: misogyny/effemephobia/the hatred of all things which are seen to “participate in the degraded status of the female”, to use John Stoltenberg’s term (in his radical book, Refusing To Be A Man).

    re (by Lapetrov): Sadly, another reason why to oppose gay marriage, or do nothing to ensure it. Is that patriarchy at work?

    JR: I’d say that’s misogyny at work. And gay (male) marriage isn’t necessarily anti-misogyny, last time I checked.

    re (earlier quote–by De?, then comment following it, by Sks): “eliminating poverty or giving prostitutes full civil rights is a good ameliorative bandaid strategy, but it begs the fundamental question: empowering women is in direct conflict with patriarchy’s structural need for an underclass of women who cannot say No.”
    True, but bandaids are clearly preferable to an open wound that then gangrenes. They can indeed be part of curing the wound.

    JR: I think the point is: what is a liberal reform remedy, and what is a radical reform remedy? I’m all for the latter, and am not a fan of the former.

    re (by Sks): Nevertheless, legalizing prostitution is a good idea not just in anti-patriarchal terms, but on class-economic terms (which, are PART of anti-patriarchal struggle in itself).

    JR: I think De and Stan have spoken to this. Legalizing prostitution does nothing good for women as a class. De goes into this in multi-cultural detail.

    re (quote by ??, with commentary by Sks) : ” poverty and its cousin, pimping, maintain that pool of “commodity women.” there is an inbuilt structural resistance to eliminating this “social resource” for men.”

    JR: I wouldn’t call poverty and pimping “cousins”. I checked the family tree: their parents aren’t sibs. Pimping and procuring women may be cousins. Poverty and desperation can be closely related. But the predation of women by pimps is not the child of poverty, it is the child of male supremacy. Just note that corporate pimps are not at all poor, financially.

    re (by Sks): I think that describing this as “an inbuilt structural resistance” is an epistemological fallacy. There is no such a thing. Its like saying that women are “naturally” weak.

    JR: I beg to differ. Heterosexism is ingrown in contemporary patriarchy, as is misogyny. That is to say, if left alone (from feminist tampering), Western (at least) patriarchal institutions breed both, and when squeezed by feminism, both ooze out.

    re (by Sks): Men are dominant in our society for reasons we cannot yet describe correctly

    JR: I would say radical feminists have done a sufficient job of describing what is going on. The story cannot be complete until every voice is heard, but too many voices are dying each day for that to be possible, and of course most subordinated voices go unheard by dominant classes generally. I stand by what I said a while ago: Dworkin and MacKinnon are to patriarchy what Marx and Engels were to capitalism. So both need to be studied just as much as Marx and Engels have been, by the Left that purports to care about “human rights abuses”. As I learned from Dworkin and MacKinnon: if a human rights abuse only or primarily happens to female human beings, why is it called something other than a human rights abuse?

    re (by Sks): even people (like me) who do address this covert agenda, and who do think that conventional lae or tort law will not solve the problem, can, and indeed in my opinion must, support and advocate such reforms, both because of their band-aid effect, and because they raise the debate.

    re (by Sks): We can sit down and talk and expose, and draw a perfect map of the scientific causes of patriarchy (if such a thing exists), and we still have to crush it under the mighty weight of action.

    JR: That’s a mighty patriarchal way of understanding radical social change, I’d say. Perhaps transformation-through-action is what is called for, more than crushing-as-action. We’re dealing with human beings, and their institutions, not soda cans. If I’m getting too nit-picky for you, Sks, let me know. I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Not that that excuses over-analyzing, or taking apart what someone is saying to the point that the other person feels undone. I don’t wish for you to feel too analyzed, or too “taken apart” intellectually or personally. So just clue me into how this is for you, and I’ll work at modifying my “leave no stone unturned” approach. : )

    re (by Sks): And action includes universalising marriage, and includes legalizing prostitution, and, to use your genial analogy, pushing the wallpaper bubbles until they bunch up into one big bubble thats easier to, violently, smash. (Patriarchy will go with a bang, not a whimper, I am so sure of this, that I think even capitalism can disappear without any major violence, but patriarchy will require it.)

    JR: I have a similar response to Stan about this passage of yours. First, the case has not been made that either universalizing marriage (is that cross-cultural?, and if so, is it cultural and gender supremacist?) and legalizing prostitution are anti-patriarchal. De offers sufficient evidence that the latter, at least, is not.

    Again, there’s already plenty of “banging” going on in patriarchy. I’ve not heard that as a feminist approach to bringing dignity and freedom to women as a class.

    re: (by De) [gee, if raping women is outlawed, only outlaws will rape women… sounds like a slight improvement to me ober the current status quo where perfectly respectable men are raised thinking there is nothing wrong — actually that it is kewl and progressive — to visit the local pay-n-rape stand.]

    JR: Excellent point!

    re: (by De) but I would not assume that legalisation reduces demand for prostitution. it has not in Australia, where brothels are booming sufficiently to do IPO. it has not in Amsterdam. can anyone name a country or district where legalising prostitution had resulted in reduced demand?

    JR: I hear silence in the house and crickets chirping outside–not a good sign. I think you’re right, De.

    re (by Stan): A thought exercise: How is the experience of a woman faking an orgasm different for men and women? Go beyond the obvious. Why does she fake the orgasm (I’ll infer from personal conversations that most women have done this at one point or another)? How does that make her feel? Why did she do it? What does it say about power? How does this make men feel, to know that some orgasms, possibly many of them, are faked? How alienating is this for women… to feel obliged for whatever reason (and we should ask the question WHAT ARE the reasons?) to fake an orgasm?

    JR: Indeed we should be asking these questions. A few steps toward answering them: Women’s sexuality, and, as deeply, their non-sexual being, is constructed through male supremacist forces, which is not to say women aren’t human also, only that women don’t get much of a chance at being human in non-gendered ways, without being rejected, ostracized, punished, or killed, that is. That according to international human rights standards, women, overall, are not considered “human” is something that obviously needs to be addressed–soon, systematically, and radically.

    (Men are given more latitude to play around in the gender garden of atrocities, frolicking in the woods with one another while letting go of all that armor and homophobia, for example.) The issue is not just women “faking” orgasm, but women having actual orgasms to sex that is sexism (and, er, men having that kind of orgasmic sex too). But, on faking it… doesn’t the fake orgasm work well as an accessory with fake eyelashes, fake faces, fake breasts, and fake love? What have women got that is theirs, if by “theirs” we mean not made compulsory, mandated, or enforced by patriarchal institutions and interpersonal behavior?

    8 June 2006, 7:33 pm

18. Julian Real:

    P.S. Credit to an anarchist-socialist-feminist male in Sweden for this: Andrea Dworkin was to patriarchy what Karl Marx was to capitalism.

    8 June 2006, 7:36 pm

19. Sks:

    Before I continue with all the other conversationists let me address the question to me by “lapetrov”:

    “Sks, would you please elaborate on this suggestive parenthetical remark:

    “(Patriarchy will go with a bang, not a whimper, I am so sure of this, that I think even capitalism can disappear without any major violence, but patriarchy will require it.)”

    Certainly. First, am a communist. Hence, I take the view that revolutionary permanent solutions are needed. I believe this revolution, for objective reasons, will be violent.

    Yet as a “Marxist” or better, as a dialectical materialist, I understand that under certain limited, very implausible, but possible scenarios, the establishment of the political hegemony of the working class might come to pass with comparatively little violence in the transitional period, or at least violence that is more at the level of an inner city drug war than of a large-scale civil war.

    In other words, me, who both prepares as supports violence as political method in certain circumstrances, is nevertheless willing to admit it might yet turn to be innecesary, when it comes to a social and economic anti-capitalist, pro-working class revolution.

    Yet I cannot see any other exit for women than their eventual violent self-organization, and confrontation (along with male allies) of patriarchy, be it before, after, or during a process of anti-capitalist revolution.

    Said in a short manner: Men appear to be willing, under certain circumstances, to let go their ownership of the means of production, but as social construction won’t let go of our ownership of women unless violently confronted.

    If this views sounds surprising, it is actually quite moderate compared to what others have raised here:

    Banning something implies PRECISELY a treath of violence that most from time to time be enforced to be credible, on the part of The State.

    The main difference is that I believe such violence should be exercised as part of process that includes the expropiation of the privately-owned means of production from both men and women who posess them (along with the whole other infrastructure that brings), and not by the same State that protects such private ownership (and the whole other superstructure).

    I go farther, to expect that such violence might have anything positive to bring to the abolition of patriarchy, rather than its re-inforcement by other means, is to have a highly trusting relationship with such State, and I will question your epistemological attachment to it.

    (there I strayed into something I wanted to speak about to De, but said here… in any case De, what applies to you take it!

    ps

    Julian, perphaps you would be better served by answering specific points to specific people in separate posts, or by conversing without direct reply to specifics. After all, we all have access to any previous contribution by any one.

    Helps with readability

    8 June 2006, 8:58 pm

20. Sks:

    ———-MUSIC BREAK———–

    It aint all those books, ya know?
    (consider this a postscriptum to to my other post)

    PROPAGANDHI

    “Refusing To Be A Man”

    i’m not going to try to tell you
    that i’m different from all the rest.
    i’ve been subject to the same
    de-structure of desire
    and i’ve felt the same effects;
    i’m a hetero-sexist tragedy.
    and potential rapists all are we. but don’t tell me this is natural.
    this is nurturing.
    and there’s a difference between sexism and sexuality.

    i had different desires
    prior to my role-remodelling.
    and at six years of age
    you don’t challenge their claims.
    you become the same.
    (or withdraw from the game
    and hang your head in shame).

    i think that’s exactly what i did.
    i tried to sever the connections between me and them. i fought against their further attempts
    to convince a kid that birthright
    can bestow the power to yield
    the subordination of women
    and do you know what patricentricity means?
    i found out just a couple of days ago.
    it means male values uber alles
    and hey! whaddaya know…

    sex has been distorted and vilified.
    i’m scared of my attraction to body types.
    if everything desired is objectified
    then eroticism needs to be redefined.
    and i refuse to be a “man”.

    dead men don’t rape.

    a gender war in your fucking face.

    a battle hymn to celebrate
    the fact that we don’t have to become
    or remain what we’ve come to hate…

    8 June 2006, 9:11 pm

21. DeAnander:

    let me say that the most “eeeeww’ing” I hear is from hetero and gay men about women’s menstrual cycles, from hetero men about gay sex, and from gay men about lesbian sex. What do all those “eeeeww’s” have in common?

    wow julian… what a can-o-worms. the eeeeyew reflex is an absolutely reliable indicator of deeply internalised social norms (like ‘eeeeyew I could not possibly eat a bug’)… what those norms actually mean, how much is idiosyncratic, how much is gendered or culturally relative, could keep us busy for several books’ worth.

    just to fill out your informal survey I would say among lesbians of the radfem and sep persuasion that I have known (and been in my time) the big Eeeyew factors are penises and semen, men’s bodily hairiness and often stronger (than women) body odour, and the sweaty physical vigour/violence of fucking… but how much women’s distaste for these features is actually an acquired distaste for the repeated experience of being used as a masturbation aid by a guy who clearly doesn’t give a s**t what his partner is feeling, once he gets wound up enough — i.e. loutish, selfish sex or rape, and where do we draw the line? — is an open question… some of the same women as I recall were not at all put off by sweaty females doing vigorous and violent exercise (in the bedroom or out of it) or by the kiss of a female lover who has just eaten garlic bread. and hirsute women were — at least in the earlier rad feminist movement of the 70’s — accepted as attractive lovers and mates.

    I’m gonna go out on a personal limb here and make myself a test case. unlike some of my women friends, I don’t think of the penis as inherently eee-yew, ugly, gross, etc. but my best experiences were with it held in the hand — where it fits nicely, feels warm and firm and slightly yielding like the handle of a good ergonomic tool [apologies to those of the male persuasion who are falling off their chairs or blushing to the hairline at this point]… also of course for most people our hands are a seat of power and agency, not vulnerability and incursion. (it is easier for a strong hand to hurt a penis than vice versa, but it is easier for an inexpert or selfish penis to hurt a vagina, rectum or mouth than vice versa.) and — perhaps more to the point — the penis is a pretty reliable indicator of the state of arousal of the male lover. guys can’t really fake it. (I never had a male lover with “ED” as they call it, so I don’t know whether extreme arousal can go along with nontumescence/deflation… if someone has personal or expert knowledge of this, I’d be curious to add to my store of general knowledge). anyway, back to “reliable indicator”…

    sex at its best is interactive and intersubjective, not extractive [same could be said of agriculture and every other human activity but let’s not get even more fractalised here]. the thrill of sex, at least imho and imle, is in the magical responsiveness of the Beloved Other [or hopefully at least the well-liked and trusted Other] to one’s actions, etc. it is the fascination of conversation, the magic we first learn as babies when we realise — tadah! — that other humans respond to us when we talk and make faces. mothers and attentive fathers are endlessly fascinated by the response mechanisms of their babies. kids are fascinated by responsive toys and pets and other kids — and computers and video games are the most sophisticated and hypnotic responsive toys ever to hit the market.

    and in sex, imho, the deep magic and fascination is in the unpredictable, complex and subtle response of another sentient being to our intimate touch. there is a gamelike aspect to it — a mystery to solve, “what can I think of that will turn you on,” and some very fractal and complicated rewards (success, tenderness, closeness, the reassurance of touching and grooming, enhanced bonding of a mated pair, enhanced trust between friends, feelings of ego-gratification in being found desirable, strengthening the web of reciprocal altruism and storing up happy memories, and so on).

    all of this is tossed in the trash when sex becomes extractive or even — as in snuff films and ghastly perversions like necrophilia or the [oh how I wish I thought it was merely legendary] ’skull fuck’ - exterminist.

    anyway, the penis as a frank and apparently fakeproof barometer of a male lover’s arousal had for me, personally, a certain charm… this was however in an era before Viagra, and my very small sample of male lovers were unlikely to be fantasising desperately about porno to keep it up, so conditions were perhaps more ideal than average.

    but back to the Eeeyew Factor. the eeeeyew factor for me personally is the Extractive Attitude, whether in a male or female partner. expressed contempt or commodification/reification/reduction of the lover’s body is for me a huge eeeeyew factor. yes, ‘men are gross’ (and so are some women though not nearly so dangerous on average), but what is gross about them is the extractive and reifying mindset, objectification, the rejection of interactivity or intersubjectivity, the embracing of selfishness and what we might call self-inflicted autism (that’s not really the best metaphor, as many genuinely autistic people are totally nonthreatening sexually since they cannot tolerate much touch or intimacy… maybe ’solipsism’?).

    so in summary I suspect that some of the ‘men are so gross’ eeeyew factors among women represent (a) traumatic memory and/or (b) a seizing upon the physical gender characteristics of the male body and making them into symbols of the patriarchal attitude — as in ‘dickhead’.

    the eeeeyew-grossness of semen, of course, must be coloured partly by its implicit threat to women’s bodily integrity (pregnancy) — a man without a vasectomy is like a hazmat spill waiting to happen. and what is dangerous we label culturally as eeeeyew gross, to keep ourselves safe — babies will play with their own shit, but most adults will feel disgusted or even vomit if they have to handle human faeces, even their own; rotten food that could make us ill is “eeeeeyew gross and yucky” and we don’t want to touch it or look at it. similarly semen, for women, or so I suspect.

    what’s puzzling is that many men (more straight ones I would guess) also think that semen is eeeeeyew-gross. their fascination with inflicting it on women — masturbating onto women’s bodies and faces, or forcing women to ingest semen, as a means of humiliation — seem to indicate that they think semen is unclean. I was close enough to male lovers that they felt comfortable masturbating in company, but I noticed that they always cleaned up fussily with kleenex afterwards, as if convinced that their own emission was ‘dirty’. they didn’t lick their own fingers, if you see what I mean. how the heck this ties in with traditional patriarchal myths about semen as a holy, mana-filled substance I cannot figure out. the practise of ejaculating onto a woman’s face to shame and punish her is actually quite ancient (called bukkake in Japan where it was used at the village level to punish unfaithful wives), so this association of semen and Taint (or eeeeyew gross) is not just a modern phenomenon.

    menstrual kapu is as old as patriarchy of course, and I’ll just note that overcoming the eeeyew factor is considered a mark of manliness in some subcultures; it’s said that the old Hell’s Angels (before they became a purchasable fashion brand for wealthy corporate lawyers and the like) used to wear insignia denoting certain sexual “accomplishments” — note the not-coincidental parallel with military decorations — “brown wings” iirc meant that the guy had fucked a Black woman, “red wings” meant he had fucked, or performed cunnilingus on, a menstruating woman, and there was some other badge indicating that he had participated in a “gang bang” (multiple men partying by serially fucking one woman, who was of course always said to be a volunteer, and if we really believe that then we should all show each other our title deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge). clearly all these were seen as badges of achievement or some kind of “courage”. go figure.

    8 June 2006, 9:11 pm

22. Sks:

    I.

    On what Stan and De bring, both as responses an original contributions…

    I think you both, in different ways, but ultimately with the same conclusion are ceding to the temptation to somehow still see gender oppression as separate-but-analogical from/to class oppression.

    Epistemologically up to Dworkin, and specially MacKinnon or so, it was a needed break, both from a self-determinational stand point, from the point of generating a balance, and as a critique of the convinient patriarchal treatment of “the woman question”: women needed to have a separate movement, controlled by them, led by them, organized by them (that task is far from complete, but certainly it *is* where before it *wasnt*), while at the same time needed to take in the trully revolutionary changes in gender relations WORLD WIDE that capitalism’s maturity has brought.

    In this sense MacKinnon is, rather than the Marx of Feminism, its Franz Fannon.

    The critique of the secondarization of “the national question” by Fannon is more like MacKinnon’s of “the woman question” to the point of attacking the reduction of this things to mere footnotical (is that a word?) “questions”.

    All that said, we live in a post-MacKinnon world. And just like Hugo Chavez, or Prachandra or others leading national liberation struggles of a new type, building upon a thick, self-determined critique of Fannon, radical Feminism must move beyond MacKinnon: the previously veiled reality reveleaded, its time to act upon the conciouness raised.

    The Situationists, those fun-loving orthodox marxists (orthodox to the point of denying, like marx, that they where marxists!), came up with a fascinating slogan:

    End Alienated Work!

    Sadly, it is to densely academic to be of real use to organize workers, but it does concentrate the basis of the communist program, which is not the end of work, but of alienated work. Perhaps a left that loves to support economicism and other forms of ultimately pro-capitalist “workers rights” might be served well by engaging on a critical and practical application of that slogan.

    Why bring this up?

    Well, if sex is to feminism what work is to marxism, then the slogan should be:

    End Alienated Sex!

    And likewise, a feminism that engages in womenism and other forms of ultimately pro-patriarchial “womens rights” might be served well by engaging on a critical and practical application of that slogan.

    But even beyond, and this is my point throught, it is than rather to struggle against alianated work and alianated sex (and a whole other bunch of things both entail - End Alienated Nations!) we should be figthing and critiquing against alienation, against all forms of alieantion, but ultimately from alienation from the capacity of humans to develop solidarity, to engage to world with curiosity, and to build things that we imagine. (And have real sex)

    In other words, I am not so much reducing gender oppression to “mere” economics, than trying to demonstrate that class oppression, by its very nature, its no “mere” economic oppression, but rather as something very similar to gender oppression. And not the other way around, as the classic marx-IST *movement* can be rightly accused of.

    (Even the analogy of work/sex might be now wrong: sex is more like consumption -it is bound to pleasure-, which in this society is made possible by selling work. Which makes prostitutes service workers, not industrial workers. Am not sure, but this just occured to me, and had to write it down.)

    It is, in my view, a case of radical feminist critique objectively advacing the workers struggle, and I am trying to make that connection explicit, both to further a critical conversation, and generate practice that concentrates the critique.

    Comsumption is to sex what Fannon is to MacKinnon.

    The rooster comes home to lay eggs, so to speak.

    Ultimately, in advanced capitalist countries at least, the issue of control become issues of alienation. And this is why if we stay with MacKinnon, it would be like staying with Mao: you still better than average, but still have a bit of the drape over reality covering your eyes.

    (Me not being academically inclined at this moment, will admit to being impressionistic, sure as hell not from TV, but nevertheless. As such, I am more interested in sounding off to hear the echoes or the responses than in documenting. I apologize in advance for this. And lets get it out of the conversation. Yeah, I mean you. )

    II.

    More or less to Julian (but also in general).

    I am sorry, but while I can accept I have to control a tendency to get Engelian and positivist, the allusion that violence, and smashing things, and so on and so forth is a patriarchal thing, its my foremost, most complete, and absolute break with right-wing “womenism”, even as it gets expressed within the left.

    Patriarchy is a system of oppression. It is not a choice men make to oppress women. And systems are the least subjective of human creations. Upon condition of being male, I am a participant in patriarchy. So are you. We *can* will ourselves out of *personally* being involved in patriarchy, but will never escape it completely, nor will us leaving pratriarchy significantly make it weaker. As a matter of fact, by choosing this harder road, I have a feeling we ultimately perpetuate the patriarchy by creating illusions that men can somehow escape it.

    We cant.

    We are still too enamored by our social construction, by the very construction of our being, to love screaming, painful sounding “orgasms”, to enjoy nothing better than a highly submissive blow job, and in the end, have our laundry done for us.

    Fuck yeah, I enjoy all these things.

    The only men who can say they dont are those who are transgendered, and hence ceased to be men in patriarchal terms. Even “bottom” gay men top from the bottom. They still men, even if they are feminized by patriarchy.

    (Yet like the song says:
    “i’m scared of my attraction to body types.”)

    A system will always reproduce itself, it is for this reason you must both smash it and elminate its underlying causes, for it to cease to exist. There is no escape posible from this quandry. You might think there is, but thousands of years of human history attest to the contrary.

    I am not into post-modern ultra-individualism, nor into identity politics.

    I think that is a completely ass-backwards way of loking at reality, and ultimately one that reduces systems of oppression into quaint academic labels who need not be connected to reality nor confront outside the real of theoretical literature or lifestyle middle-class liberal smugness.

    Being a gender pacifist is like being a rich atheists, it is someone who has no need for false conciousness because s/he is on top and can have the luxury to do so.

    Opossing the positive role violence plays in gender liberation is like being white and voting for Nader and not understanding why a black person votes Democrat.

    If you think that rapists can be convinced not to rape by the goodness of their hearts, well, you are entitled to your opinion…

    (where have I heard that before… hum…)

    III.

    On legalizing prostitution, De raise interesting points, some of which brings an element I had no previously considered (I am embarased to say!): the difference between pimps and johns (or their equivalent in the porn industry, to equate both as we should), and sex workers when it comes to prostitution and that of their analogues in the drug trade.

    (I mean, obviously there is a difference, what I mean is the deep, systemic one, not the shallow ones.)

    That is an interesting point in so far it relates to how different drugs and prostituion are, which I will admit previous to this conversartion I saw as almost analogous.

    This simple idea escaped me all this years!

    Based upon this seemingly correct assuption (or at least I will accept prima facie as correct, because it just fits better into observed reality than the previous model I held as true), De then elaborates it further into a critique of legalization.

    It is in this part I must bring my previous post to mind (on prohibition, when I was replying on the nature of violence in the anti-patriarchial struggle), and elaborate:

    In general, I stand for regulation of things, even draconian regulation, but very seldomly prohibition.

    Why? Well, simply because prohibition is the simply the cohersion by part of the State via the mostly implied but often real threat of violence. It is also an alienated way to deal with that which is prohibited (that is, someone ELSE takes care of it for you). Hence it both strengthens the State and weakens the self-organization (and hence self-determination) of the people.

    In our society, a schizophrenic society, in which theft is prohibited to a certain class but a way to make a living to another, prohibition is always schizophrenic and convinient to domination.

    There has never been anything prohibited for which there wasn’t a more sinister reason than the “good” ones were good.

    In other words, when it comes to prohibition of anything, it matters to me less what the contents of this prohibition is, rather than a careful look at who actually benefits.

    Yes, in sweden they prohibit johns and legalize prostitutes, but this has been the result of radical feminist politics gone active, and not a cause for these politics: in general women in Sweden have more political self-determination than women in the USA, in spite of it still being a patriarchal state.

    Hence, it is not the patriarchal state imposing prohibition for its advantage: it is a historic victory of the women’s movement, a victory that was reached by other means.

    In the USA, and other patriarchial societies with schizophrenic social mores, the prohibition of porn and prostitution is advocated by three major groups:

    1) Religious patriarchal conservatives

    2) Bourgeosie womanists

    3) Radical feminists

    Guess who will gain the most political capital?

    Aint us, thats fer sure…

    Which agains brings me to the point of moving beyond critique and into concrete action. If the critique is to be an effective one, it must develop a practive that is both plural (ie includes sex workers) and on message (ie doesnt water down the critique). The goal might be eleminating prostitution, but I think we have a looooooooong road before advocating this is not being objectively reactionary, like voting for Nader if you are black in Alabama.

    Prohibition, regardless of what is being prohibited, carries a big yellow label that says “handle with care”. And for better or for worse, feminism (in all brands) has gained a rep for being prohibitionist in all things but abortion.

    I am not so much against prohibiting prostitution, as for finding other ways to generate positive outcomes for the struggle. Prohibition is both passe and politically dangerous.

    IV.

    As to the biological, like the question as to how patriarchy first came into being, I think we still have a lot to learn.

    As such, I think we must operate under assumptions that ignore this factor, until we gain a better understanding.

    After all, we are not dogs, nor is dog behavior predominant animal behaivior (mammals are the only animal branch in which there is a large number of male dominant species, and even among mammals this is not majority… quick google result: http://www.uga.edu/srel/ecoview9-22-03.htm)

    For example, Bonobos, a primate and our second closest animal in genes -and certainly closer than dogs-, have both highly sexualized lives, and lives where domination is practically absent, EXCEPT IN SEXUAL ROLE PLAYING (!!!), and who are *ALL* bisexual, and engage in a whole kamasutra of sex positions, multiple partners, masturbation, mutual masturbation, and anything the most pornographic of minds can come up with this animals out do… (I half remember reading they have sex on average every 1 1/2 hours). They have a gift economy, and are almost completely gender blind. In fact the only non-observed sexual behaivior in bonobos is sex between adult mothers and their adult male children (ie, sex between fathers and adult daughters and mothers and male children has been observed)

    In fact, anyone who have studied Bonobos come out baffled: the two main reasons for sex you see in the animal kingdom, social domianance and reproduction, are almost completely absent. Offspring are cared for collectivelly.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo

    (When I think communism, I think bonobo society + electricty, internet, and space travel. :D)

    Still, those are bonobos. Not humans.

    (I do tend to distance myself from any socio-biological views, even those of a soft sociobiologist like bonobo expert Frans de Waal, because I think humans are the first completely cultural animal. Yet this is an informed belief, not something I can prove conclusively.)

    8 June 2006, 11:40 pm

23. Sks:

    OMFG STAN, PUT ME ON HOLD!!!

    Anyways, on ewww factor, etc, not only spot on, but points in the direction.

    As to the sexual details, Bukkake is not an ancient thing. Bukkake is an invented marketing term for semen-fetish videosfrom the early 1990s on.

    The village humilliation story is in fact an invention of an inteprising porn website pedler, playing on racist stereotypes, as if anything from Asia needs some sort of mystical/traditional explanation of The Other. (you know what I mean!)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukkake#History

    What the japanese do have is an ancient fascination with sadomasochism, more specifically bondage, and are in fact with Hindi culture the only pre-modern culture outside of western europe to be know to have such ritualized sexual cultures in wide appeal. Unlike the western european variants, tho, both indian and japanese bondage put more emphasis on control via tying up, than via direct pain via whippings and cannings, like the Opus Dei etc.

    This is al subject to great discussion amoung anthropologists, as one might guess.

    Yet this brings me to Brenda Howard, who was:

    1) A socialist

    2) A vetaran of stonewall rebellion

    3) Organizer of the first gay pride march in honor of stonewall

    4) Bisexual activist

    5) Sadomasochist activist

    6) A feminist

    7) A woman

    A freaking contradictory handful. Thing is, what about her, where do we put her? As reificator? A patriarchal tool? I have heard she was heard to get along, so thats not what I am interested. I am interested on how do her, with her radical sexuality that played into the “ewww gross” while genderfucking the whole while, fits in? Reactionary? Revolutionary?

    And via that, to the orignal post, on gay rights.

    Something I forgot to mention, in the context of gay marriage etc, is how the struggle for gay rights has gone from a struggle against the system, led by the mostly black and brown faces of the “beautiful faggots” of stonewall, to a campaign for the integration of mostly white men and women into bourgeoise repectability and economic oppression.

    The volkswagen van with a folk singer-songwriter singing “this is my land” has given way to the Fabolous American Airlines Float, complete with perma-tanned Latin hunkbodies, and perfectly made-up queens.

    Talk about reification!

    9 June 2006, 12:03 am

24. R.S. Morris:

    DeAnander, all I can say is “Wow!” and let you know that you just brought me very close to tears reading your personal “test-case.” It is, sadly, *extemely* rare for me to hear this kind of laid-bare clarity concerning sexuality related from a female standpoint–at least in such an immediate venue. Thank you very much.

    Also, I feel it necessary to isolate (for humors’ sake) the single most…poignant line in your post:

    “…the penis as a frank…”

    

    Randy

    9 June 2006, 1:15 am

25. Stan:

    This is feeling like a linguistic Tower of Babel. Carlos is pulling me into the idiom of marxism, and De into the idiom of feminism (there are many cognates, as Carlos points out). This should, perhaps, be taken as a good sign. I hope I am coherent. Sometimes when I come back from Haiti and stop in Miami, I find myself ordering food at the little Cuban tienda on 4th Street, and the woman behind the counter is looking at me like I’m from Mars… having just given her my request in Kreyol.

    I appreciate Carlos’ attempt to identify common conceptual ground with the comparison of MacKinnon to Fannon. I take this as an idication of real engagement and good will. Both of us are familiar with a list in which we have participated in the past where there was an absence of both oft times (a list of 95% males, btw), where the sectarian one-upmanship persists like an epochal heat wave.

    Having said that, I want to address just a couple of these points more speicifically and leave the rest to others. There is a rich mosaic — as De says — of standpoints here, of people who are interested not merely in udnerstanding the world, but changing it (where have I heard that?)

    The first point I will make, and not to be clever, is that Fannon and Mao are dead. Catharine MacKinnon is alive and well and living actively in the 21st Century in the vicinity of Ann Arbor, Michigan. She has just published a new book, which I intend to order next time I swing by Durham and The Regulator Bookshop. It’s called Are Women Human? http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=0674021878

    We have no ore “passed” the critique made by radical feminism than we have passed the critique Marx made of capitalism. Familiarity with either or both is extremely limited and still firmly outside the hegemonic episteme of our society.

    My own sort of personal mission is to find ways to get people who call themselves marxists to actually familiarize themselves with the radical feminist critique. My experience with this, so far, has been that the VAST VAST VAST majority of marxists has NEVER actually studied any of the radical feminists, and has instead relied on secondary commentary written by approved sources. That’s why there is such a reluctance to abandon Engels’ on gender, even though there is an existing critique of Engels on this subject, by people reared in a rigorous marxist tradition, that has made a drop-dead prima facie case against Engles on this.

    Of course, as we have indicated here more thanonce, there is a body of canonical feminist literature out there that needs to be studied, and it is not limited to MacKinnon and Dworkin by any stretch. The reason these names come up again and again, to make a marxist metaphor, is that they have been effectively Stalinized… and that is not comparing them to Koba, but to the process of dumping an avalanche of hostile public discourse on someone until defending them in any sense becomes tantamount to heresy, whether we know what we are talking about or not. So there is a duty, in my view, and a strategic imprerative, to defend and explain these women’s work, just as we lefties have found it necessary again and again to patiently explain what Marxism is about an what it is not.

    But the canon is broader than that, and I will submit again — from my limited reading over the last few years — that Carolyn Merchant’s “The Death of Nature” is a good starting point for us Marxies, because we have a kind of common toehold with a critique of bourgeois science and her explanation of the patriarchal roots of the same. Mies’ “Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale” is also easy for Marxies to read, especially if we have engaged the variants of what is now coming to be called “world system theory.”

    I also want to say that radical feminists have not called for “prohibition” in the way Carlos suggests. This is a common misconception that is trotted out by anti-rad-fems so frequently that is has the force of — well, the notion that Stalin killed 20 million of his own people. it has become a truism… except it is not true. The approach to the issue of prostitution-pornography has been pragmatic and episodic (tactical), and in the most famous case involving the collaboration between MacKinnon and Dworkin, they were ot arguing for the application of criminal law, precisely because they understood all the obstacles and contradiciton of criminal prohibition. Their approach, a tactical one, was to employ civil law… to allow people who were harmed to sue for damages, so to speak.

    There is a shocking number of women who nowadays, in filing for divorce, identify their partner’s pornography addiction as a major reason for their troubles. These are not merely puritanical reactions to the content of porn (as many anti-rad-fems often say, creating a straw man); these women say that engagement with porn is correlated with behavioral issues … he turns exclusively to this form of non-accountable sex … he asks her to perform in ways he has observed … he has become more disrespectful and aggressive in bed … etc etc.

    One of the best reasons to read MacKinnon, for marxists, is that she has constructed what I believe to be the best critique of liberal law out there (she is a law professor), one that fits us like a glove, and constitutes a major advance in the evolving theory based on a materialist conception of history.

    I used this critique to write about Hasan Akbar.

    On the issue of practice and connection with the masses, I don’t think “alienation” works terminologically, but describing alienation concretely, as it manifests itself in people’s lives , does.

    Pateman suggests we revive the term wage slavery to talk about capitalism (to escape the eocnomism of” “exploitation as surplus value” and put the emphasis back on domination — doing as you are told at work — capital as a social relation). This is where we can show the real similarities between patriarchy and capitalism… domination. As De says, the inability to say “no.”

    I’ve gone on long enough, so I’ll cede the microphone.

    9 June 2006, 9:42 am