70 Comments

1. Janet W:

   “servicemen make do by way of rape”

   Lots more foul and cloying language in this article, but that one pretty much sums up the underlying attitudes, the lack of compassion or even simple sensitivity of the author, never mind the US military.

   I couldn’t even finish reading it. Maybe later I will.

   My nephew is going to be a Marines Officer this December, unless he regains his sanity, and the thought of him being lost in all that… wow, it’s painful.

   30 August 2006, 7:20 pm

2. Yolanda Carrington:

   Janet, Stan…I did finish reading it, and I’ll just let these two passages from above speak for themselves.

   “It’s rank insanity to send young soldiers to battle and deny them sex, alcohol and drugs—the three things that can make the inhuman experience barely more bearable. But they’re not allowed. Alcohol and drugs are ostensibly banned from US bases. Sex isn’t exactly available, though servicemen make do by way of rape.”

   “Then we wonder why they unbuckle and rape: Diminish a soldiers’ purpose to that of a mercenary, and he’ll oblige.”

   Spoken like a true progressive, my friends.

   30 August 2006, 11:00 pm

3. Marilyn Farhat:

   Sex and violence used together have been the subjugators of many individuals, groups, and nations. One can appreciate the dialectic relationship if one has witnessed the ways that armed and civilian entities have related to each other during such times.

   What better reward to give young, strong, and healthy men to appease them in time of conflict? What better way for young women to flaunt their availability than around such desirable men? It is those raw emotions that become prevalent during war.

   One of the ironies of our existence is: what gives us life and what takes it away from us propagate each other. Men can become conditioned to the thrill of war through its spoils, symbolic and physical.

   We have not changed much in six thousand years. Our capacity for destruction has. We have deadlier arsenals and we have developed a complex set of moral jargon to justify their use.

   There is nothing good that can be said about war. It creates its own rules that are not compatible with our moral “peacetime” beliefs.

   As long as we remain obedient consumers and willing martyrs in the service of those in power, the orgies of war will continue, and I do not see that changing in the near or distant future. We are a species that thrives on symbols, but we also die because of them.

   31 August 2006, 2:35 am

4. Stan:

   Somehwere in the moldy, dark spaces of my memory I seem to remember an apocryphal story about a famous Greek (or Athenian?) who stopped to casually masturbate next a public fountain one day. He finished quickly, then remarked, “If only it were that easy to satisfy hunger.”

   The notion of sex as an overwhelming drive, like desperate hunger, is not only physiological nonsense, it is ideological as hell. Another sexual ideology metaphor is the boiler-room… if this steam isn’t let off, the boiler will build over-pressure until it explodes.

   Sorry folks, I have known entirely too many people who have passed through extended periods of celibacy, myself included, without either suffering the sexual equivalent of kwashiorkor or blowing up like a suicide bomber.

   Certainly sex moves the species along in some functionalist universe, but it is not required by individuals, and the WAYS we experience sexual desire are thoroughly determined by culture… a baseline aspect of which is patriarchy, that structures masculinity as violence and aggression (direct or subliminal), that encodes sexuality as male-over-female hierarchy, and reduces women to objects of that aggression and domination… or devalues them altogether.

   Male culture, magnified as it is in the military, is like a great locker room, where an I-dare-ya one-upmanship prevails that accelerates the socialization of males into violent misogyny. The penalty for failure to participate is a kind of shunning, and even feminizaton of oneself (fag-baiting, etc).

   I have to wonder about the women performers (I have daughters that age, and women friends), who are trivialized in this account, as they always are, after they internalize the norms, or more likely bow to economic pressure. They play the role that is demanded, and the response is to treat them accordingly… as objects for humiliation. If they depart from the script, as in the Duke rape case, the very obedience to the norms they have exercised is used against them; the revulsion that was once part of the thrilling transgressive boundary is distilled from constructed desire into a acid that is thrown in the woman’s face.

   But hey… it’s just a secondary contradiction, eh?

   31 August 2006, 9:59 am

5. Doyle Saylor:

   The picture illustrates a cultural stereotype of the ‘stage’ and audience. The audience as a whole reacts to visual display, but in any meaningful sense can’t establish a real relationship with the woman.

   This epitomizes a one-to-many culture and how it argues for human knowledge. For example, all the guys can hoot and holler together thus establishing a vague but intense emotional ‘level’ shared by the audience, but the emotional system does not attach the men to each other, rather each individual ‘looks’ to the displayed female. And the emotion can only be to the display because the woman is in no way a potential emotional attachment.

   The immediate reaction shaped by any sense of justice is to question what every one feels as to why a woman is displayed like this, but that elides what a means of production produces here. The stage at the center of attention is a very old style of producing information. Christians enshrine the process in the pulpit at the front of the Church. Yet the same questions about how to use emotions pervades the Church as well. Morality being an outgrowth of those questions. Morality in terms of regulating how emotions are used in common social arenas.

   So long at the emotional question hangs in the air, I mean how do we really attach ourselves to each other, then abuse is going to happen. Abuse is of course hurtful interaction between people. No one, man or woman, likes to be raped for example, but one hopes the police will stop this from happening. And of course we know how far that goes.

   Were a society to guarantee to stop abuse that society must grapple with emotional interaction. With emotional attachment. That ‘knowledge’ is not one-to-many knowledge as the photo shows a woman on a stage in front of ‘men’, it is how people feel about ‘being’ in their society. Wherever they come into contact with society how they feel matters. Abuse is as it were, outlawed’, means that emotional attachment never abuses.

   A one-to-many culture can not ‘show’ that because the question of emotional attachment is never answered. Can’t be answered by knowledge shaped by a one-to-many media.
   thanks,
   Doyle

   31 August 2006, 10:36 am

6. Julian Real:

   Thank, Stan, for noting the ridiculousness of the hegemonic “fact” of men’s “need for sex with others”. It’s nothing but CRAP. I’ve been celibate for years, and more recently some form of asexual.

   From stories adult whiteboys have told me about “blue balls” to how frustrating it is when a woman kisses him but won’t “put out”, to studies which show men would rape (more often) were it not for potential, if highly unlikely, legal/criminal consequences: hegemonic heterosexuality in men, in patriarchy, is male supremacist and misogynistic. Too many heterosexual men refuse to acknowledge this simple political “fact of life”, perhaps because it is in service to men’s sexual “needs” at the expense of women’s civil dignity and human rights.

   As a trans friend remarked to a lesbian friend of mine: “[Many] humans want sex; they don’t need it.”

   Try having that message institutionalized, religiously or secularly. This notion that “men need sex” is what allows us to shake our heads at male priest-rapes-nun (or child) cases and think “If only those Roman Catholic priests were allowed to marry [read: fuck their wives].” As if having sex, whatever that is, is an “outlet” which alleviates the will to rape. As if rape isn’t sex, for the rapist. As if any man can’t masturbate if he is feeling “horny”, and as if “horniness” in hegemonically heterosexual men is not politically bound up with the political entitlement to have visual or physical sexual access to women at will.

   CRAP, is what it all is. Nothing but CRAP.

   31 August 2006, 1:54 pm

7. DeAnander:

   Greed not need.

   31 August 2006, 3:06 pm

8. Stan:

   Yes, the “hydraulic theory.” (-:

   31 August 2006, 8:16 pm

9. kimberley:

   there is so much wrong here it’s wrong how wrong it is. jarhead? you’re quoting movies to make a point? have you absolutely no concept whatsoever of reality? and while you’re busily bashing the media for their oft times inaccurate and biased reporting, perhaps you should remove the mote from your own eye. “reigning redneck of the bunch” “Sex isn’t exactly available, though servicemen make do by way of rape” gross, blanket generalizations anyone? yes. they all rape. every single one of them. all the time. they hardly have time to torture and kill because they’re so busy raping all the time.

   please. you make me ill. perhaps you despise our armed forces, but you don’t speak for me. stick to what you’re best at, arm chair strategizing and black helicopter conspiracy theorizing from the safety of your cozy, safe little home, while they’re out there fighting every day and night for your right to spout asinine judgments about their service.

   1 September 2006, 3:27 am

10. Doyle Saylor:

    kimberly writes;
    please. you make me ill. perhaps you despise our armed forces, but you don’t speak for me. stick to what you’re best at, arm chair strategizing and black helicopter conspiracy theorizing from the safety of your cozy, safe little home, while they’re out there fighting every day and night for your right to spout asinine judgments about their service.

    Doyle;
    Making you ill is a metaphor for disgust. Disgust is anti-social ‘feeling’ which is a basis for brick wall social relations. If you have a problem with the generalizations why not think about how to make your point less rigidly?

    The power of a blog is the conversation. Engagement of people to each other. In doing that you ‘risk’ changing your mind. But over all it’s harmless.

    Over generalizations are a fault of course, but generalizations from local experience is a profound way to think about the ‘meaning’ of things. Give people room to be partly wrong and partly right and that will free you and them to rise above errors.
    thanks,
    Doyle Saylor

    1 September 2006, 9:04 am

11. Doyle Saylor:

    Stan writes;
    Yes, the “hydraulic theory.” (-:

    Doyle;
    In psychology there is a phrase I found rather strong in my own experience. ‘Attachment Hunger’. Sex in itself is sort of boring. More or less soon enough one gets tired of someone one doesn’t care about, and sex dies in a quiet bed. But Attachment Hunger motivates to glom on or leach like cling to another person via intimacy contact to ease the ‘Hunger’ for contact. Like Disgust, Attachment Hunger is implacable in denying the reality of human Attachments which must be flexible and ‘nurturing’ of human development in a complex environment.

    Overall human beings are more likely to be influenced by eating socially than sex. One needs in any case some sort of way to ‘understand’ the emotional ‘pain’ structure that underlies capitalist economic relationships. Being insecure, marginalized, unable to fullfill needs then ‘intensifies’ feelings, ‘hungers’ like Attachment Hunger are created by abuse structures which result in rigidities and brickwall defenses against pain. I have felt that Attachment Hunger, and because I take anti-depressants the ‘Attachment Hunger” subsides and does not affect how I feel about social contacts with other people though I recognize the ‘reasoning’ of strong attachments in relation to abuse I’ve lived through.

    Another form of Attachment Hunger is PTSD. That is in extremely stressful violent environments of war, people’s internal emotional landscape is re-shaped by the intense feelings of battle into a re-curring upsurge of feelings. That’s really describing ‘Attachment Hunger’ as a hunger to re-live the emotional landscape of battle to resolve the fear/pain being raised in other circumstances, an upsurge in intense feelings that ‘insecures’ social relationships.

    The left viewed material ‘well-being’ as sufficient to address ‘family’ depravation in terms of capitalist pain structures. The end result is that women have not been lifted to liberation by addressing material wants like living space and enough food and education.

    Most of women’s work is still the family system. Emotional attachment abused in the family by mom or dad, produces long lasting ‘pain’ structures like Attachment Hunger that always shape social connections afterward. Producing people who can’t be socialized in ways that yield ‘happiness’.

    To address that one must call into question things like ‘Attachment Hunger’, the intensification of emotions due to abusive family emotional structures into brickwall/disgust/shame pain structures that block social connection. Or in battle pro-longed terror of death, or in unemployment utter shut down of emotions in dire chronic depression.

    Men and women desire and long for ‘intimate’ social contact in which sharing the bathroom, the bed, the dinner table foster deep emotional attachments and to which children also can grow into ‘happy’ people. To me it’s fundamentally wrong for Julian to write;

    Julian;
    CRAP, is what it all is. Nothing but CRAP.

    Doyle;
    Because the emotion being described is brickwall disgust. Not a social view at all but a pull back and refusal to engage.
    thanks,
    Doyle Saylor

    1 September 2006, 9:36 am

12. Charles Brown:

    Let me say first , I don’t say any of the below to be confrontational. I have read at length people’s ideas here on heterosex, and I have posted enough for others to know how I differ.

    It is difficult for me to see how there is no instinctive component to the desire to have heterosex,in both women and men. True , it is not like the instinct to eat , drink, sleep , et al. as these all will result in death of the organism if denied for long. However, in the larger biological picture, failure to have heterosex will cause the extinction of the species. This is a fundamental principle of biology, and we as humans are still subject to this law of biology. Put another way, there are strong biological reasons that nature would “put” and sustain a heterosexual instinct in at least a major mass of any animal population. I can’t see why humans would be an exception to this principle. Even as much of human history is an effort to transcend the limits of nature – to become “supernatural” ,in sense – ,humans remain animals, with necesary natural requirements and limits.

    All non-human primates don’t have culture and tradition. Their reproductive practices can’t be socially constructed, because they don’t have social construction as humans have so much. So, their heterosex has to be instinctive. A group of primates without heterosexual instinct would go extinct.

    I don’t see how the human species and groups would have lost this primate instinct. Why would they ? Cultural or socially constructed desire for heterosex would not cause the trait of instinctive heterosexual desire to go away.

    Today’s humans are still animals, with instincts, even with all the cultural overlay. A fundamental animal instinct is for heterosex. There can be individuals whose internal composition does not include heterosexual instinct, due to genetic mutation or congenital processes, but I’d have to see a historical biological argument as to how human heterxexual instinct has been obliterated for most of the population, before I could accept the claims here that hetersexual desire is all socially constructed, cultural.

    I can see that culture allows humans to suppress or discipline their instinct, or direct it to other than the opposite sex. Of course, people can successfully discipline themselves to be celebate. And male supremacist practices might cause women to lose their desire to have heterosex, that is sex with men. But I don’t see the _obliteration_ of the _underlying_ instinct in great masses of the population. I don’t see babies being born in large numbers without the instinct or rather the “kernel” of the instinct which comes to fruition with maturity, as with other bodily maturations in adolescence.

    The instinctive aspect of the desire for hetersex does not in any way justify rape or any male demand for sex from an unwanting woman. That desire for hetersex has a significant instinctive component does challenge the notion that women only want to have sex with men because they are forced to physically or economically.

    1 September 2006, 3:28 pm

13. DeAnander:

    the type of heterosex needed for reproductive purposes doesn’t much resemble the socially constructed desire.

    for one thing, women in a state of nature would probably not engage in sexual intercourse until this year’s baby was weaned, i.e. 2 years post-parturition.

    nor would men have an appetite for prepubescent females who cannot reproduce. women would not be attracted to males old enough to have lowered sperm counts. and so on. men would be most attracted to fecund body types, not to excessive slenderness. and so on.

    there’s much about human sexual behaviour that can’t be explained by recourse to simple theories of sex-as-reproduction. but then there’s much about bonobo sexual behaviour that can’t be explained that way either… bonobos clearly use sex as a social function. not merely a biologically generative act.

    most sexual activity in mammals is triggered hormonally and pheromonally by oestrus in the female (being “in heat”, a cyclical hormonal state in which female mammals who are normally indifferent or hostile to sexual overtures from males suddenly “get interested”). but human beings don’t manifest oestrus. this led (male!) sociobiologists in the 70′s to theorise that human females were “permanently receptive,” i.e. always in heat (some wishful thinking there, methinks, and a great deal of misogyny). the absence of a marked pattern of oestrus in human women is one strong deviation from the prevailing pattern of mammalian sexuality…

    whatever ‘instinctive’ sexual feelings we have, I suspect they are buried as deeply as our instinctive mammalian fear of fire (we love campfires and fireplaces) and our instinctive mammalian fear of large fast-moving objects (we love airplanes and race tracks). we are near-infinitely trainable, more easily than one can train the average horse not to shy at unnatural objects; and if our “instinctive sex drive” were so secure and reliable, why would the culture expend so much brainwashing, force, coercion to make us straight?

    it may well be that there is an inner drive to reproduce in women as well as men — the “baby clock panic” and other self-reported maternal urges lend credence to it — but women acting on pure animal instinct might regard sex with men as merely a means to pregnancy, not a a desirable end in itself (particularly since the act of impregnation is no big physical thrill for the average female and often failes to provide an orgasm). for many women the mutually absorbing fascination of a new baby, and the physical pleasures of breastfeeding and cuddling, might be far more emotionally and physically satisfying than “the act” which impregnates.

    but we’ll never know, because we have no control group of humans raised w/o culture. even japanese macaques have cultural traditions such as inherited rank; how much more deeply and complexly socialised are we…

    1 September 2006, 8:55 pm

14. DeAnander:

    OK, I have been putting this off because it’s so irritating… but I’ll try to deconstruct a few bits of the cluelessness.

    Tristam, who is otherwise on many occasions insightful, loftily pronounces that the news that strippers habe arr8ved in Haditha should not be a feature article. He’s wrong and right. He’s right that in the smarmy-jokey way it was presented in the ST, it was not worth a feature. But he’s wrong in that the fact of the importation of US strippers to put on a show for troops in Haditha is worth a feature article because of what it says about militarism, gender, sexism, triumphalism, etc. Tristam seems to relegate the story to unimportance because it is about women and/or sex, as if this automatically puts it beyond the pale of interesting journalism.

    This trivialising and dismissing of the sex industry’s manifestations is a major factor in allowing its abuses to go unchecked, much as clownish caricatures of occupied people (Arabs, Indians, Japanese etc) render their existence automatically “funny” or “entertaining” rather than newsworthy and make any story about their experience automatically beneath the notice of Serious People. Call it the Hardeharhar Syndrome.

    Tristam is onto the borderline paedophilia of the stripper circuit but again fails to connect this sexualisation of the teenage female with, say, the rape/murder of Abeer and the US media’s ghastly insistence on calling her “an Iraqi woman” long after her age (14 or 15) was known.

    Tristam’s contempt for the strippers exceeds even his contempt for the ST feature. In one long supercilious paragraph he dwells on the favourite gripe of leftist males against prostitutes — that they are for rent. He implicitly chides the young women for being strippers, for selling their photos online, and accuses them in passing of having silicone-enhanced breasts. He does not enquire about the terms of their employment, whether they work for a male management (pimping) hierarchy, how much of the take from their activities they actually pocket, and whether any putative breast implants were voluntary or a precondition for employment. He castigates them for the pathetic fakery of their “sexiness”, with none of the compassion and understanding of their economic and social milieu that suddenly leaps into play in the next graf when he considers the consumers (soldiers).

    “You can’t begrudge soldiers being soldiers,” though apparently Tristam can begrudge, in a huge way, hookers being hookers. Boys will be boys, the oldest excuse in the book. And then comes the old Blue Balls excuse for rape — as if providing more strip shows for Our Boys would have saved Abeer. As if the rape of female cadets by their fellow students in the citadel, or the rape of female enlistees by recruiting officers, was all due to a huge shortfall of nookie throughout the US military. [cf my link upthread on Greed]

    “This was no USO tour,” says Tristam, but in point of fact, updated for the hy0ersexualised early 21st century, it is a USO tour — a reassuring exposure of the troops to the homeland culture, a quick refresher inoculation against “going native,” a quick dose of White Womanhood and corporate culture and white supremacy to make them feel special.

    Tristam then gets — correctly — angry about the situation of this strip show in Haditha, where US troops had recently committed a minor massacre of civilians. But he seems more angry about the Times reporting on it than the military for organising it, in a kind of Rumsfeldian moment of shooting the messenger. He comes close for a moment to seeing a connection between the sex industry and male sexual predation, but again misses the boat — it’s apparently only wrong for the military to expose its troops to “whorish shows” while in-country; the 20 to 40 years of exposure to misogynist pornography, ubiquitous prostitution, that these all-American boys experienced before they went to Iraq apparently don’t count: the fact that no “whorish sex show on a plywood stage” occurred 8mmediately prior to the rape/murder of Abeer doesn’t seem to count either.

    Tristam wants it both ways: soldiers rape because they are deprived of sex and who can blame them, so why do a feature article on sex shows for soldiers — but just a few grafs later, soldiers rape because they are barbarised by the military’s provision of sex shows. He comes back to reality with a bump for a moment, noting accurately that this is one projection of “a mission that rotted long ago.”

    Tristam winds up with an indictment of the cultural insensitivity of this event — i.e. that it insults Iraqis by violating their cultural norms. He doesn’t seem to have time to wonder whether it might insult female troops or women in general — presumably because feminists are not in the habit of planting IEDs along the roadside? He can easily see that one answer to “Why Do They Hate Us” might very well be this kind of boorishness, but I will bet you a eurodollar that -as a Good Librul — he would find the rage of, say, an Andrea Dworkin totally incomprehensible and irrational.

    Beautiful example of the doublethink and cog diss of liberals re the sex industry. Which is why it caught my eye.

    1 September 2006, 9:29 pm

15. DeAnander:

    oops I forgot to finish a thought… He comes back to reality with a bump for a moment, noting accurately that this is one projection of “a mission that rotted long ago.”

    here Tristam fails to connect another dot: that the mission of invading Afghanistan and Iraq is in part =- not in whole but in part — a component of the wingnut Kulturkampf one of whose agenda items is the resubjugation of women. from 9/11 onwards the revalorisation of dominant masculinity has been high on the media programme of the wingnut echo chamber. the “girly show” for US troops, and the message this sends to women in the forces, women in Iraq, and women back home, are part of the mission all right. part of the mission because the mission is against women and against feminism as well as against the poor, against nonwhites, against Muslims, against the Constitution and international law. etc.

    1 September 2006, 9:45 pm

16. DeAnander:

    or in other words, they can’t quite get away with a New Christy Minstrel Show, but they can get away with the gender equivalent… (well actually a drag show might be more the equiv of a minstrel show, but you get my drift) — left to themselves the troops at AG used their prisoners for both.

    1 September 2006, 9:49 pm

17. Stan:

    Most people cook food. It seems unlikely that there is a cooking instinct, however. I doubt anyone has suggested that there is not some hormonal-biological basis for that “itch” that humans feel. That it underlies, as some biological basis, reproductive sex does not in any more serve to privilege heterosexual coupling as one expression of that “itch”, combined IN EVERY CASE with powerful cultural conditioning, over any other erotic expression, any more than raw food is more an expression of “human nature” than cooked food.

    No one seems to live in fear that our species will disappear for lack of generative sex. That completely misses the point; and seems to suggest that heterosex is natural while other forms of sexual expression are not. This is not a biological point that gets made by privileging heterosex as “natural,” but an ideological one.

    If sexual desire can be polymorphous, to use the Freudian term, and generative sex happens within that realm of activity, then why in the world does the species require a “heterosex instinct”? Most heterosexual coupling does not result in pregnancy for humans, while short periods of sexual receptivity in other species almost invariably leads to generation.

    The use of the word “instinct” is also ideological, whether it is understood as such or not. Instinct is more akin to behavior that is involuntarily ritualized in its expression. As the mirror neuron post and others have suggested, human nature, as even neurophysiology is showng now, is such that we are biologically determined to NOT be biologically determined. We are wired for cultural determination. Our insincts have largely disappeared along the old evolutionary trail somewhere.

    No one has suggested that “women only want to have sex with men because they are forced to physically or economically.” What we are saying is that heterosex is so thoroughly and (for now) inextricably imbricated with our socialization into patriarchy (compulsory heterosexuality, gender as a hierarchical system) that no sexual encounter in this society happens without being inflected by that hierarchy. that is not a moral judgement, even though it has prfound ethical implication. It is a sociological observation based on the rejection of bourgeois, patriarchal science and society’s notion that actions can take place apart from their social context. They clearly cannot.

    Men are in power, so it is not surprising that we are attracted to the notion that women’s desire for us is purely a consequence of our attractive-ness (wait, that is constructed, too… drat!)… the reality is that if we are to take sexuality serously as a political issue, an issue of power, then we are duty-bound to abandon, by force of will initially, these self-aggrandizing rationalizations and the defensiveness that motivates them, and accept that political responsibility in this instance is no different than it is in other areas… like class privilege, or in my own case (not yours) white privilege. We cannot pretend the power dynamic is not there, even in the most respectful and loving heterosexual relationships. I can assure you every woman senses the existence of this power gradient, all the time. Solidarity requires that we do too.

    1 September 2006, 10:45 pm

18. Kevin:

    Stan,
    How is this any different from the USO visits you had in Nam?

    2 September 2006, 5:02 am

19. Stan:

    (1) I was in the infantry in northern Bin Dinh Province. The USO didn’t come there. I never saw a USO show.

    (2) It is no different. It’s the same.

    (3) The thread is about the article, and all the creepy assumptions and blind spots in it; but we could certainly talk about the whole notion of USO shows, including the sexually exploitative aspects of them.

    2 September 2006, 10:15 am

20. Kevin:

    The Perfect Angels went to our FOB. They were in good taste and did not seem sexually exploitive. Keep in mind that this is not the same show they do at trade events or bike ralleys.

    2 September 2006, 3:57 pm

21. Stan:

    Kevin,

    Friendly advice from an old retired sarge… get up to speed here, brother. They are called “perfect angels,” they are displayed as very typical sex objects, and they perform to the hoots of posturing males.

    Go back and read the much earlier posts on gender, and page through the comments and debates. You are coming to a firefight with a pocket knife. Nothing personal directed at you. You are who I want to have the conversation with. I’m just asking you to take this bit of initiative, familiarize yourself the level of discussion that is going on here with regard to gender, then come back. I don’t for one minute doubt that you have the native skill and ability, but you haven’t assimilated some of the basic concepts. You don’t need to agree with them; but you do need to at least understan d them.

    But what we do here is take those very assumptions that we thought were beyond question, and question them.

    I hope you are home and not still at the FOB.

    2 September 2006, 6:27 pm

22. Kevin:

    MSG Goff,
    I am well versed on gender. The topic is chicken shit; those were former NFL cheerleaders performing song and dance to a croud of warriors. Why not attack Kathy Griffin for her little USO stunt, asking the crowd for sex and rambling on about her vagina?

    2 September 2006, 7:24 pm

23. Stan:

    Bye Kevin.

    2 September 2006, 10:42 pm

24. lesliemai:

    i live in iran, and i do not want this kafr demrocacy here, when the white man come he bring all his immoral behavour, then white man wonders why we kill him on the battle field in fierce fights. our brothers in iraq will chase the amerikan satan from its ancient lands, and seeing artical like this make it even easier. i can take a measure of happiness in the knowledge that in the end we will stamp out this immoral behavior and the amerkian terrorists will be chased home as they were in vietnam.

    3 September 2006, 8:04 am

25. DeAnander:

    another thought has been nagging at me ever since reading this irritating oped, and that is the quote from Jarhead author Swofford: “I’d just turned seventeen. I’d had sex three times and been the recipient of five blow jobs and fourteen hand jobs. I was sold.”

    time for some deconstruction. first off, as we’ve discussed before, Swofford evidently doesn’t believe that oral or manual sex is “sex”. he had sexual congress, presumably with women (?) 22 times by my count, but by his count only 3 times — we are left to assume that those three times involved screwing and nothing else really counts. it’s all phallocentric, but it gets even more patriarchal than mere phallocentricity: if he doesn’t penetrate another body with his own then it is not really sex, even if he experiences orgasm. now we are back to the defining memes of intromissive and receptive, dominance and submission, and why men involved in e.g. prison sexual relations think they are safely “straight” so long as they screw other men instead of being screwed themselves.

    next — and this is something that had been nagging at me for years but has finally come into focus with this article — consider the colloquial and rather brutal locutions “blow job” and “hand job.” these are count nouns, not verbs or even noncount nouns like “sex”. Swofford didn’t say, “five times I was lucky enough to receive fellatio to the point of climax,” or “I’ve been fellated five times,” or even, “I’ve been given oral sex five times,” let alone “five times someone pleasured me with her mouth,” or “five times I managed to talk a woman into sucking me off” which might at least have introduced some mention of a partner with some degree of agency in the matter.

    he says this as matter of factly as he might say that he’s eaten a cordon bleu steak 5 times, with no particular need to mention the chef or the waiter or the name of the restaurant. the servitors are erased, and the primary relationship is between the consumer and the thing consumed.

    I think there’s a reason — other than the conventional euphemistic tendencies of my middle class upbringing — why the terms “blow job” and “hand job” ring so unpleasantly in my ear: and that is because they are the language of prostitution, of commodified, Taylorised sex. a “job” is a unit of work, not a unit of play. [day job, steady job, second job, blow job, jobbing plumber, hand job, job offer, jobs wanted, get a job...]

    a “blow job” is a standard option on the menu of services available from a brothel for a standardised price. it is defined by the recipient’s experience, not the provider’s: translated into plodding literal-minded English for an alien anthropologist it means “fellatio patiently continued to the point of male orgasm”. “oral sex” might start and resume, intensify or lighten up, according to whim or flirtation or mood or playfulness — but a “blow job” is work: it has a specific goal, and the customer/recipient is the one who decides when the job is done, not the provider: it ain’t over until the phallus sings. it’s a reified, standardised product with a price tag, a recognised “unit of sex” provided by a servant or worker to a consumer, in a transactional context where sex is a unitised, measured and priced quantity rather than a free and spontaneous nonquantified flow of reciprocal touching and exploring (play rather than work) between equals.

    I note that there is no equivalent term — not one that I’ve ever heard, at any rate, and I have not spent the last 50 years in a nunnery — for sexual acts that provide female pleasure. “cunnilingus” is a noncount and scholarly term for an activity, a practise — not for a unit of commercial exchange or a standardised, commodified procedure. we do not say, “mouth job” or “tongue job” (not to my knowledge anyway) for oral sex received by a female. and I don’t think there is any necessary implication of success in the colloquial phrase “he went down on his girlfriend” — whether she experienced orgasm or not remains unspecified. we have no count noun either for stimulation of the nipples, whether by mouth or hand — the closest I’ve ever heard was the awkward locution “a first-rate nipple-tonguing” (improbably uttered by the lead actor in the Britcom ‘Chef’ and notably he was referring to a malerecipient, not a female — ain’t that interesting?).

    my conclusion is that the controlling metaphor of prostitution — the marketisation, taylorisation, scripting, prohibition of spontenaity, prohibition of intersubjectivity in sexual congress — is wired into the language at more levels than I had realised (even after almost 3 decades of thinking about gender and power). the dominant heterosexual paradigm is that sex — for women — is work… i.e. that all “normal” or socially conformant sex is, in essence, prostitution.

    capitalism and patriarchy dictate how we are allowed to conceptualise sex. to go back to the weary old Whorfian Hypothesis, we are very short of words for snow — and this helps to keep us incapable of perceiving, referring to, or imagining the different kinds of actually-existing snow right in front of us.

    5 September 2006, 9:46 pm

26. Doyle Saylor:

    DeAnander writes;
    my conclusion is that the controlling metaphor of prostitution — the marketisation, taylorisation, scripting, prohibition of spontenaity, prohibition of intersubjectivity in sexual congress — is wired into the language at more levels than I had realised (even after almost 3 decades of thinking about gender and power). the dominant heterosexual paradigm is that sex — for women — is work… i.e. that all “normal” or socially conformant sex is, in essence, prostitution.

    Doyle;
    You can go to Wikipedia to get slang that represents female versions of what you found for men. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_slang

    That is beside the point. Your analysis comes close to a distinction about sex between impersonal and personal private sex. But your analysis fails to name what is different. It’s how partners’ ‘feel’, rather just sex. Sex is not gender specific as your comment really straightforwardly shows. The only gender specific part is childbirth. The penis and clitoris are the same organ in slightly different arrangements.

    The conundrum that Charles Brown brings up about instincts comes in here. Het sex is instinctive so Charles claims. That seems false to me. What is instinctual is to be hungry for sexual climax. Whatever creates that is immaterial. In that sense the fundamental abuse is emotional rather than what ever achieves the climax. In your words ‘agency’, but I think that rather indistinct. We ‘feel’ connected, and the connection can yield us pain mentally or it can be positive and healthful connection. Prostitutes cannot offer emotional connection. They just offer a rubbing post like a cat uses. Male or Female prostitutes.

    What is awry is the general poor or impoverished social connection for the working class. Sex is just one example, but in the case of women there is a difference that matters in terms of social justice.

    Women work more than men to make social connection. Making dinner, taking care of babies, etc., are all means to derive socially felt (emotional) connections to others. This connection work is so narrow in scale compared to public processes of state connection we tend to think it’s impossible to ‘control’ or administer. It’s left up to people how they screw.

    This narrowness of social connection best described this way, family connection, friendship connection, describes the ‘sphere’ of emotional knowledge production. The reason women do not rise up is two fold, breaking social connections is extremely painful. That hinders the rational thought, and how do all women unite around how to feel that truly address the social injustice that women experience doing care work?

    Child care does not answer personal connection. A child may love their kinder teacher, but the attachment to a parent is the ‘true’ feeling. Or at least this society says that. It means we don’t have a equitable understanding of the distribution of emotional connection in society. This can not be addressed by a state revolution in so far as no state can guarantee emotionally equal distribution of such knowledge.
    thanks,
    Doyle

    6 September 2006, 12:53 pm

27. AradhanaDevindra:

    DeAnder – brilliant analysis of sex and prostitution…

    

    6 September 2006, 7:04 pm

28. Yolanda Carrington:

    Doyle, I just gotta say—your last post—c’mon now. You’re a bio-man for God’s sake.

    “Sex is not gender specific as your comment really straightforwardly shows. The only gender specific part is childbirth. The penis and clitoris are the same organ in slightly different arrangements.”

    Dude, that’s freakin’ bull and you know it. Every man and woman ALIVE knows it. Sheesh. Oh, and I went to the Wiki page too, and it don’t refute De’s point ONE BIT. You need to step up your game, man.

    6 September 2006, 10:34 pm

29. Doyle Saylor:

    Yolanda,
    Dude, that’s freakin’ bull and you know it. Every man and woman ALIVE knows it. Sheesh. Oh, and I went to the Wiki page too, and it don’t refute De’s point ONE BIT. You need to step up your game, man.

    Doyle;
    I hope I wasn’t being so critical sounding of the slang reference DeAnander brought up to seem I was refuting DeAnander. What I want to do is clarify and shift the discussion in directions I think work best.

    How can I clarify the confusion I have sewn in your mind Yolanda? When you say it’s bull, my statement what is weak about it? Comparing clitoris and penis? What my reference to the Wiki meant?

    Over all my focus is to find the best sort of emotional understanding of what patriarchal structure does. Because I think that is the angle that offers realistic avenues of change. And the change needs to both done, and requires a radical shift in society.
    Doyle

    7 September 2006, 11:40 am

30. DeAnander:

    agree with Yolanda… despite an ingenious unlikelihood in the novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the clitoris is not a penetrative member. in terms of biomorphology or anatomy it is an “analogous” structure, not “the same organ in slightly [emphasis mine] different arrangements.”

    many of Doyle’s comments seem (to my ear) consciously or unconsciously to attempt to erase gender and sex differentiation, to defend or propose a kind of “gender blindness” which imho has the same advantages and defects as liberal attempts at “colour blindness” [sorry about the race analogy but I think it holds up here because the obfuscatory power is so similar -- and I do mean obfuscatory, not clarifying]…

    it is a good thing to remember that we’re all human beings and most of our hierarchy is purely artificial; that we all shared a common small set of ancestors 4 or 5 millennia back, that all our genomes are damn near identical; that the commonality between male and female bodies is far greater than the differences. that “race” is an artificial construct and so is gender.

    BUT in the real present, in our embodied and socialised selves, in our houses, at our workplaces, on our streets, in our beds, those “slight” differences are the difference between the rapist and his socially sanctioned prey. not so slight, in practise.

    I also did not find any phrase in the wikipedia cite that was female-centric but otherwise semantically equivalent to BJ or HJ.

    7 September 2006, 3:21 pm

31. elaina:

    Doyle: How can I clarify the confusion I have sewn in your mind Yolanda? When you say it’s bull, my statement what is weak about it? Comparing clitoris and penis? What my reference to the Wiki meant?

    What’s weak about your statement, Doyle, is that whether or not these body parts function similarly in a reflexive manner (that’s to say, to the person to whom they belong) I think it’s BLARINGLY obvious why we can’t say they’re “essentially the same thing,”
    even if you DO add the “in different arrangements” caviat.
    The sexual feelings/sensations felt by the person wearing the penis or the clitoris is NOT the only function that said body parts have. So the parts indeed are different, from a functional standpoint. But also from an emotional/symbolic/functional standpoint as regards OPPRESSION. Totally different thingies. For real.

    Men rape with penises. Women do not (and if there’s some random .000000000000000000000001% of women who have a big enough clitoris to commit a rape with the part, then I don’t want to hear it, because exceptions do not “disprove” rules, in reality as we know it).
    When recieving cunnilingus, it’s a bit difficult for a woman to choke her partner with her clitoris. The penis HAS BEEN a weapon of oppression. The clitoris has not. Men use their penises to hurt women, and men do terrible things to women’s clitori to hurt women.

    Men have systematically exploited the differences in physiology between themselves and women for a very long time. To say that that’s not so is, as Yola put it, “bull.”

    The ways that men have sex with us CAN HURT VERY MUCH. Some of us do train ourselves to enjoy that. I ain’t gonna lie. But that doesn’t make it right or non-existent. A lot of times the emotional coldness or dismissiveness that men have towards us when using us for sex is very clear in the man’s body language, and the ways that he uses his body to engage with us. Men are often rough or avoid body contact OTHER than his genitals to her *whatever*. And to add to that, we’re often objectified by men we love when we perform oral sex on them. How? “Turn that way.” “Let me hold your hair back.” “Suck it like this, or like that.” OR the hair-pulling. OR the hand-on-the-back-of-the-head. Or the lack of proper notice before… well. You get the point, I hope.

    That some women flip this scenario around in an attempt to objectify men, or whatever, is moot. This is how the patriarchy TRAINS women to do what it is that they are supposed to do to please men sexually. It’s part of the program, as it were. The program also serves to tell women what they are supposed to like as well. There are lots of women who think that liberation is tantamount to abstract equality (which doesn’t really exist, aside from it’s ideational form) and to obtain abstract equality, most women act like “one of the boys” and take on patriarchal mannerisms that invade, yup, their sex lives. Big fuckin’ surprise.

    The clitoris, for us, has historically and materially been NOTHING LIKE the penis, in terms of power-symbolism. It has been mutilated, it has been removed from us, it has been ignored. Church steeples and other phallic goodies that we see everyday are not modeled after clitori.

    The world has never revolved around the clitoris. While I guess there’s nothing inherently wrong with saying that in some aspects it’s functionality in regards to the sexual sensations it gives the person who has it is similar to those of the penis, this isn’t really productive, I don’t think, in this conversation. And yeah, you have to be that specific when you talk about it in order to be correct and not over-lumping. And I don’t really care what Wiki says about it, but I’ll go and read it anyways, when I have the time.

    Egad. Not meaning to sound harsh. But I gotta agree with Yolanda.

    7 September 2006, 4:33 pm

32. Audrey:

    Doyle, I’m with Yolanda here. Saying male and female organs are the same thing, just in different configurations, is a nice way to replace hard reality with abstract theory. It’s a bit like claiming chickens and eggs are the same thing, based on DNA and cells and whatnot. If you’ve ever tried jamming a live chicken in a fry pan and melting cheese on top of it, you’ll know it ain’t the same thing at all.

    Also, this question: “How can I clarify the confusion I have sewn in your mind Yolanda?” is some seriously patronizing BS. If you’re really interested in the “emotional understanding of what patriarchal structure does”, you might start right there, asking yourself why you characterize her disagreement with you as “confusion” on HER part.

    7 September 2006, 6:10 pm

33. DeAnander:

    oh yeah… imho Yolanda’s not the one who’s confused

    I meant to say that, thanks Audrey.

    7 September 2006, 6:59 pm

34. Doyle Saylor:

    DeAnander writes;
    many of Doyle’s comments seem (to my ear) consciously or unconsciously to attempt to erase gender and sex differentiation, to defend or propose a kind of “gender blindness” which imho has the same advantages and defects as liberal attempts at “colour blindness” [sorry about the race analogy but I think it holds up here because the obfuscatory power is so similar — and I do mean obfuscatory, not clarifying]…

    Doyle;
    Sex differentiation is a fact. The point is not to confuse what society proscribes with what humans can do through ‘instinct’. Human beings can have sex with either sex at will. The fact that humans choose to reproduce is not as far as I can tell based upon an automatic male female act. People in general ‘learn’ to like/love someone else or they are forced by family to mate in cultures that still control the sex partnership choices of young people.

    While it may seem to you that color blindness is a liberal doctrine based upon U.S. history, I’m not advocating that, but I think your point about color blindness is also wrong. That any sort of political view of human beings has to take into account how people ‘recognize’ each other. That recognition functions as the primary way we know to feel something. I am saying that bj and hj are equivalent to scissoring, or rubbing (tribology), frot (frottage), and so on are all just ways of saying how female perform sex for their own pleasure specific and parallel to hj, bj. And that is what all human beings do with sex. And those are distinct from oppression based upon Patriarchy, in other words humans can still have sex and not be oppressive. That unequal relations can change.

    However you touch upon what I think is singularly strong about this parallel, racism and sexism have in common how people connect. To attack that as a Marxist I look at the work people do that is unequal, and oppressive, rather than I look for unthinking solutions. Unthinking solutions have to do with biological instinct.

    As to obfuscating, I’m glad to clarify to clear away obfuscating. Nor am I am interested in concealing oppression under a nice patois. My choice is to expose the ‘reality’ of a sexist and Patriarchal society.

    DeAnander writes;
    I think it’s BLARINGLY obvious why we can’t say they’re “essentially the same thing,”
    even if you DO add the “in different arrangements” caviat.

    Doyle;
    Social structure is what you are talking about, penis and clitoris perform the same function in sexual activity. They are homological features of the same body plan. For some reason you haven’t heard this before? In any case it ought not to threaten your basic views on Patriarchy. It is not biological differentiation, it is human consciousness that makes Patriarchy happen. The danger in saying so much depends upon sex differences these things DeAnander can add up as an average women is not as large as the average man. And that sort of biological determinism doesn’t raise why short small men can be world dictators like Stalin, or Napolean. Or that women are leaders on the national level like Thatcher, or Indira Ghandi.

    DeAnander writes;
    The penis HAS BEEN a weapon of oppression. The clitoris has not. Men use their penises to hurt women, and men do terrible things to women’s clitori to hurt women.

    Doyle;
    Rape is a social act, not an inherit biological fact. The penis can penetrate and most women’ clitorises can’t. But if a woman wants to she can use a steel pipe and penetrate to show power. But most women abhor the very idea. And that’s what we are talking about is power to hurt and oppress, not the comparative length of clitoris and penis. Female hyenas have bigger clitorises than male hyenas penises. The biological features of sex organs shift around a lot, and understanding that is to understand that humans do things beside what biology dictates.

    To repeat for clarity, sex itself is not gender specific. Male or Female can have sex with either sex at will. The next statement is not a repetition, oppression is not about penis length it is about the emotional prison that patriarchy creates for women. The bad thing in rape is the physical pain, and the emotional pain. The feeling is the key element. No more pain infliction and women are no longer oppressed. The problem is that tells us very little. As Lenin would say, What is to be done?

    Your point DeAnander is to focus upon intense feelings instead of having a holistic view of the process of a Patriarchal emotional mal distribution of power between men and women. How do intense feelings connect up with the whole of the social life? If people never got in a rage would that stop oppression? No. What would be necessary is to point intense oppression feelings elsewhere. Male rapist never rape any woman again, they might hj but they never rape again.
    Take care,
    Doyle

    7 September 2006, 7:51 pm

35. Stan:

    Doyle, please.

    I’m not moderating you out, becuse you haven’t broken any rules. But your disconnnected nonsense reminds me of the way I used to write when I was smoking pot morning, noon, and night. It felt profound when I wrote it, but none of it made any sense with the next morning’s coffee (until I lit up another doob).

    The fact that you puncutate this gibberish with occasonal outbursts of pedantic arrogance, like:

    “Social structure is what you are talking about, penis and clitoris perform the same function in sexual activity. They are homological features of the same body plan. For some reason you haven’t heard this before? In any case it ought not to threaten your basic views on Patriarchy.”…

    …is what no doubt compels many of us to reply to you. My recommendation, which I heretofore pledge to follow myself (to the best of my ability), is that the rest of us ignore it. The record shows, so far, that replying to this incoherent babble-text, with the expectation that said replies might stimulate more coherent babble-text, has proven to be a false assumption.

    7 September 2006, 9:49 pm

36. DeAnander:

    Ummm, whatever Doyle’s smoking, it’s got him confused enough to think that elaina is DeAnander Hints: different prose style, different signature. When attempting to refute a debating partner, first try to get their name right — just a helpful tip for more convincing presentations.

    8 September 2006, 1:47 am

37. Doyle Saylor:

    DeAnander writes;
    Ummm, whatever Doyle’s smoking, it’s got him confused enough to think that elaina is DeAnander Hints: different prose style, different signature.

    Doyle;
    Yes my error, this is correct.

    Stan writes;
    so far, that replying to this incoherent babble-text, with the expectation that said replies might stimulate more coherent babble-text, has proven to be a false assumption.

    Doyle;
    I don’t smoke dope. This is an unfair statement just to round up my thoughts and say it’s babble. Making broad generalizations like this is not what makes discussion work. In other words, you are the one who won’t make the effort. Not me. I’m not responsible for being closed off to you. How does being closed down make a broad functional liberation movement for women?

    For the left we need better ways to resolve such questions.
    Doyle

    8 September 2006, 10:14 am

38. elaina:

    Yeah.

    And I’ll just add for the sake of WHATEVER, I don’t really want to call it “argument,” but I think it needs to be added that BIOLOGICAL males have been PHYSICALLY RAPING BIOLOGICAL FEMALES with their PENISES (and other vaguely penis-ish objects) for a very, very long time. Yup, it’s a sociological mode of control. But sociology and biology are not separate or distinct from one another.

    Just for refreshment purposes: SOCIAL STRUCTURES CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT BIOLOGICAL HUMANS TO LIVE WITHIN THEM AND MAKE THEM. How fucking hard is that to understand?

    Rape is indeed a social act. No shit, sherlock. What I would like to know is how social acts play out, if they don’t play out through physical bodies?

    Is rape all in my head? I don’t think so.

    Gah. I think I’ll take your advice Stan, and ignore this weirdness from here on out. It’s making me loopy.

    8 September 2006, 11:56 am

39. Timothy R. Anderson:

    Dedicated to the choooosy among us.
    This is a reminder from October 2003 that the senior officials of the USA’s federal government take ” brief visits ” to Iraq ; they then have ” views ”
    different than the soldiers who serve on the ground in Iraq, hours and hours and hours and days and days and days and days and weeks and weeks and months and months and years and years ………..

    ( Guardian , Friday October 17, 2003 )

    ” A sizeable portion of US military forces serving in Iraq describe troop morale as low, and say they have no intention of re-enlisting, damaging the campaign by the US government to brighten up the image of the postwar occupation. ”

    ” The survey of 1,935 soldiers , published in a series of special reports on Iraq in the
    ‘ Stars and Stripes ‘ newspaper , also found that a significant number of soldiers were confused about the purpose of their presence,
    and had lost faith in their mission. ”

    ” Coinciding with the report, the US Army, yesterday ( Thursday October 16, 2003 ) admitted that at least thirteen US soldiers had committed suicide in Iraq , representing more than 10 % of American non-combat deaths there .
    The US Army said it had sent a suicide-prevention expert to Iraq. ”

    ” ‘ Stars And Stripes ‘ , which is funded by the Pentagon, says it embarked on the project
    after receiving scores of letters from disen-
    chanted US military servicemen and US military
    servicewomen. ”

    ” The mailbags belied the claims made by President Bush, last week, that increasingly negative public perceptions of his Iraq War were the product of media spin ; and that those who had been in Iraq held different views. Not so for those serving up to 12 months in Iraq , according to ‘Stars And Stripes’,
    which noted that the soldiers’ views stood in sharp contrast to those of senior officials
    on brief visits to Iraq. ”

    That’s the main bit right there. I mean, geeeeez Louise, this fiasco reeeeeks of hypocrisy . The regular G.I. Joe is truthful – enough to point out that the situation is totally f…ked up and what happens ? Some “senior official ” turns up for a 1 / 2
    day ” look around ” and says it ain’t a f…ked up situation at all.

    Well, well, well. The Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk ) was courageous enough to say it back then, when Suzanne Goldenberg reported this. I would hope that the organizations such as I.A.V.A. ( http://www.iava.org )
    would be courageous enough to say it, loudly, right now,
    because………………..

    because, since October 2003 , some US soldiers have committed suicide in Iraq . Because since October 2003 , some US soldiers have returned to the US and then gone to Iraq AGAIN .

    Because since October 2003 , more than FOURTEeEN thousand US soldiers have been wounded in President Bush’s Iraq War.
    Because since October 2003 , more than ONE ThousaND NINE HunDRED FIFTY US soldiers have been killed in Iraq.

    Uh, Butler said it, ” War is a racket. ”
    please consider signing the petition at
    http://www.warisaracket.org

    Timothy R. Anderson 9 / 8

    8 September 2006, 1:35 pm

40. Charles Brown:

    Comment by DeAnander — 9/1/2006 @ 8:55 pm

    the type of heterosex needed for reproductive purposes doesn’t much resemble the socially constructed desire.

    ^^^^^
    CB: Sure. Can’t be around this blog without being made conscious of the vast amount and range of male supremacist, violent, vicious, criminal sex types. However, I don’t think that it has been demonstrated that these “desires” are universal. For “one” , I don’t have that type of sexual desire. I’m not ready to believe I’m the only man in the world whose doesn’t desire, consciously or unconsciously, to commit sexual crimes against women.

    So, SOME heterosexual desire ain’t like the type we want in this world.

    ^^^^^^

    for one thing, women in a state of nature would probably not engage in sexual intercourse until this year’s baby was weaned, i.e. 2 years post-parturition.

    ^^^^^
    CB: As you mention below, human women don’t have estrus, uniquely among primates. This cuts against what you say above. Don’t underestimate the ability of ancient women to develop contraceptives, etc. I’m not sure why you don think women wouldn’t want to have sex until after weaning.

    ^^^^^^^

    nor would men have an appetite for prepubescent females who cannot reproduce. women would not be attracted to males old enough to have lowered sperm counts. and so on. men would be most attracted to fecund body types, not to excessive slenderness. and so on.
    ^^^^^^
    CB: Agree. “Instintive” attraction would start at pubescence, by the general logic of what I am saying. Of course, again, this instinct is culturally modifiable.

    note: pubescents are minors today.

    ^^^^^^^

    there’s much about human sexual behaviour that can’t be explained by recourse to simple theories of sex-as-reproduction. but then there’s much about bonobo sexual behaviour that can’t be explained that way either… bonobos clearly use sex as a social function. not merely a biologically generative act.

    ^^^^^^^

    CB: Yes, there is much about human eating and food customs that can’t be explained by the need for nutrition to live. We have culture. However, underneath all that culture piled up, there remains in hunger a kernel physiological need. My hypothesis is that underneath all that culture piled up in sex, there remains the biological generated want.

    ^^^^^^^

    most sexual activity in mammals is triggered hormonally and pheromonally by oestrus in the female (being “in heat”, a cyclical hormonal state in which female mammals who are normally indifferent or hostile to sexual overtures from males suddenly “get interested”). but human beings don’t manifest oestrus. this led (male!) sociobiologists in the 70’s to theorise that human females were “permanently receptive,” i.e. always in heat (some wishful thinking there, methinks, and a great deal of misogyny). the absence of a marked pattern of oestrus in human women is one strong deviation from the prevailing pattern of mammalian sexuality…

    ^^^^^
    CB: See comment above on estrus. and lack of.

    ^^^^^^

    whatever ‘instinctive’ sexual feelings we have, I suspect they are buried as deeply as our instinctive mammalian fear of fire (we love campfires and fireplaces) and our instinctive mammalian fear of large fast-moving objects (we love airplanes and race tracks). we are near-infinitely trainable, more easily than one can train the average horse not to shy at unnatural objects; and if our “instinctive sex drive” were so secure and reliable, why would the culture expend so much brainwashing, force, coercion to make us straight?

    ^^^^^^
    CB: I’m not quite signed on to an instinct specifically fearing fire. I’d say we still have fight or flight instinct somewhere. But experience , training as you say, can teach that most airplanes don’t hit us. However, fear of fast moving cars may have an instinctual component. If you zoom a car past a baby , they might get afraid, run away.

    ^^^^^^^

    it may well be that there is an inner drive to reproduce in women as well as men — the “baby clock panic” and other self-reported maternal urges lend credence to it — but women acting on pure animal instinct might regard sex with men as merely a means to pregnancy, not a a desirable end in itself (particularly since the act of impregnation is no big physical thrill for the average female and often failes to provide an orgasm). for many women the mutually absorbing fascination of a new baby, and the physical pleasures of breastfeeding and cuddling, might be far more emotionally and physically satisfying than “the act” which impregnates.

    ^^^^^
    CB: On this, I am not proposing an instinct to directly reproduce. That might seem strange. I am proposing an instinct to have sex with the opposite sex without consciousness of trying to reproduce. Your argument or position here is a stronger heterosexual instinct than what I am proposing !

    I _would_ speculate that human females were the first beings (animals) to realize the connection between sex and pregnancy. Given the pains and labors of childbirth, it is significant that women still had heterosex all these thousands of years.

    ^^^^^^^
    but we’ll never know, because we have no control group of humans raised w/o culture. even japanese macaques have cultural traditions such as inherited rank; how much more deeply and complexly socialised are we…

    ^^^^^^^
    CB: Agree. We have to use abstraction to figure it out.

    I hear these reports of monkeys with “culture”. I’m still wondering about that. Did they get it from the humans who have been studying them so much for so long now ?

    13 September 2006, 11:11 am

41. Charles Brown:

    Comment by Stan — 9/1/2006 @ 10:45 pm

    * Most people cook food. It seems unlikely that there is a cooking instinct, however. I doubt anyone has suggested that there is not some hormonal-biological basis for that “itch” that humans feel. That it underlies, as some biological basis, reproductive sex does not in any more serve to privilege heterosexual coupling as one expression of that “itch”, combined IN EVERY CASE with powerful cultural conditioning, over any other erotic expression, any more than raw food is more an expression of “human nature” than cooked food.

    ^^^^^^

    CB: See my comment on food in response to DeAnander. The key thing on food is not the cooking but hunger. Different cultures have many different tastes, literally. However, underneath all this variety made by culture, there remains instinctive hunger _for nutritious food, food that meets physiological necessities_, for all humans. If your culture comes up with a cultural taste that denies food that meets physiological needs, you die, the species goes extinct. There is a biological limit on the range of tastes that human cultures may have.

    The analogy to sex is that there is a wide variety of sexual practices. But if these do not include heterosex, the species or group dies out.

    The Shakers are extinct because they derived a cultural ideology by which heterosex was no “kosher”, to extend the food analogy.

    ^^^^^^^

    No one seems to live in fear that our species will disappear for lack of generative sex. That completely misses the point; and seems to suggest that heterosex is natural while other forms of sexual expression are not. This is not a biological point that gets made by privileging heterosex as “natural,” but an ideological one.

    ^^^^^^
    CB: Now, with 6 billion people, there is little danger of immediate species extinction from lack of heteorsex.

    We’re talking about 200,000 years ago and before when humans instincts evolved. That’s why we are considered the same species as the homo sapiens from then. Presumably,we have the same biology. At that time, if hetersex was a “take it or leave it” type a thing, there would have been a danger of the species dying out. So, when we were socalled hardwired, it seem likely that we were hardwired with a strong heterosexual instinct. In fact, that hardwiring comes from the primate and mammalian and _____ species ancestoral to homo sapiens.

    I didn’t use the word “natural”. I said “instinctive”. I know about the whole history of the law treating homosexuality as “unnatural” acts, and the resultant legitimate anger of the lesbian and gay liberation movement at the terms “natural” or “unnatural”. But that lesbian etc. sex should not be suppressed _is_ a political question, and doesn’t address the biological issue raised here. That prejudice against lesbians is wrong doesn’t mean that heterosex is not widely instinctive.

    And anyway, most of this 200,000 years plus of culture has been _overcoming_ _natural_limitations. Much of human endeavor seeks to be “supenatural” or “superorganic”, shall we say “anatural”.

    It’s unnatural for humans to fly. Yet airplanes are considered a great achievement,not a perversion. Saying that something is “supernatural”, beyond or above instinct , can be a compliment. In fact, there’s a whole other part of human judgment that considers natural, earthly, and earthy “things” to be dirty and uncivilized, animalistic, nasty ” He acts like an animal” is not a compliment. In fact, heterosex is widely reviled down through European history because it’s too “carnal”. So, the natural-unnatural thing cuts both ways in this culture.

    Nor is “natural as animalistic” always associated with female. There’s the whole “the beauty and the beast” trope in this culture. There are many “memes” in which the male is associated with savage and female with civilized. Girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice” . Boys are “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.”

    ^^^^^^^^

    If sexual desire can be polymorphous, to use the Freudian term, and generative sex happens within that realm of activity, then why in the world does the species require a “heterosex instinct”? Most heterosexual coupling does not result in pregnancy for humans, while short periods of sexual receptivity in other species almost invariably leads to generation.

    ^^^^^^
    CB: I explain above at length why 200,000 years ago a heterosexual instinct would likely be more fit than lack there of, i.e. why we needed way back then a heterosexual instinct. We needed it just like all the other species who have had it.

    To elaborate, take two groups of primates, one that has heterosexual instinct and one that does not ( somehow). The former would have a much greater adaptive fitness than the former. If you need me to elaborate on that , I will. But if you just look at a basic biology text on differential fertility, which is _the_ key thing in fitness for _all_ species ( this is an advance over Darwin himself who seems focussed more on “struggle” implying differential mortality) has an exponential component, that is a small difference can make big difference. That is, just a small advantage in differential fertility is what makes the qualitative , absolute difference as to what group survives and which one doesn’t. I’d say heterosexual instinct has a _big_ differential fertility advantage over lack of said instinct.

    We could discuss it, but I can see an argument why heterosexual instinct would have an adaptive advantage over “polymorphous” instinct because of the exponential effect of small differences in differential fertility. In other words, a group with heterosexual instinct would be more fit in a crisis, which is the points at which fitness is determined, where it “bites”.

    As to the short periods of receptivity, see discussion with DeAnander on the unique fact that human females lost estrus as part of their human biological makeup way back when. Well, what _does_ that imply in this discussion ? Loss of estrus indicates that human females became receptive to more sex than their primate ancestors. Assuming this was caused by giving an adaptive advantage ( and that is was not a Stephen Jay Gould “spandrel”), I’d guess it had to do with increasing pregnancies. In a crunch, crisis – the times when selection of one group over another occurs – the group with more pregnancies is more fit. You make the spandrel argument.

    ^^^^^^^

    The use of the word “instinct” is also ideological, whether it is understood as such or not. Instinct is more akin to behavior that is involuntarily ritualized in its expression. As the mirror neuron post and others have suggested, human nature, as even neurophysiology is showng now, is such that we are biologically determined to NOT be biologically determined. We are wired for cultural determination. Our insincts have largely disappeared along the old evolutionary trail somewhere.

    ^^^^^^
    CB: Well, now you’ve gotten to an interesting argument.

    My response is that we are hardwired not to be instinctive in much but heterosex, eating nutritious food, sleeping. Our instincts have laregely disappeared except for , especially, the instinct for heterosex. I’d rephrase it we are biologically determined to be less biologically determined than other species.

    ^^^^^

    No one has suggested that “women only want to have sex with men because they are forced to physically or economically.” What we are saying is that heterosex is so thoroughly and (for now) inextricably imbricated with our socialization into patriarchy (compulsory heterosexuality, gender as a hierarchical system) that no sexual encounter in this society happens without being inflected by that hierarchy. that is not a moral judgement, even though it has prfound ethical implication. It is a sociological observation based on the rejection of bourgeois, patriarchal science and society’s notion that actions can take place apart from their social context. They clearly cannot.

    ^^^^

    CB: Just to be clear, I’m not saying that any human action lacks important social context, cultural determination. However, I think that some culture, some social context, integrates biology and culture. Much of our culture is compatible with our biology. So, to say something has social context does not necessarily mean it doesn’t have a biological component.

    Secondly, and relatedly the social context of heterosex is not _just_ patriarchy and male supremacy. There is also the opposite. There are major aspects of our culture which promote , for lack of a better word :>) , love between women and men. I mean genuine love. I’m thinking it’s ok to say this since we have rather thoroughly acknowledged and covered at length here the cultural aspects which promote antagonism between women and men, the main one being male supremacy to be sure. General capitalist “dog-eat-dog” competition infects women/men relations too. Also, racism, et al. But the main one is male supremacy. At any rate, _some_ of the social and cultural context of heterosex promotes men treating women well. We don’t live in absolute male supremacy and misogyny. Some of the social and cultural context is in harmony with our heterosexual instinct.

    In fact your model of no remaining biological instinct implies that it would have to be replaced by a very strong pro-heterosexual culture (otherwise we’d have gone extinct). It doesn’t seem likely that all our culture that might have replaced instinct would be of the type where men coerce women into sex. Some of it would be “wooing” ; and genuine love,culturally generated ,genuine love of women by men. I don’t think men have been keeping the species going with just rape and coercive sex since the origin of the patriarchal family. There is also genuine, sincere ( both consciously and unconsciously) courting and making love, respect even.

    Well let me ask: Do any women have any instinctive desire for heterosex ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in this society in which male dominance does not dominate and control, “pollute”, the content of that encounter ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in which the man should not feel he is wronging the woman in some sense ? That he is respectfully doing what the woman actual wants him to do with , by, of, for her ?

    ^^^^^^^^^

    Men are in power, so it is not surprising that we are attracted to the notion that women’s desire for us is purely a consequence of our attractive-ness (wait, that is constructed, too… drat!)… the reality is that if we are to take sexuality serously as a political issue, an issue of power, then we are duty-bound to abandon, by force of will initially, these self-aggrandizing rationalizations and the defensiveness that motivates them, and accept that political responsibility in this instance is no different than it is in other areas… like class privilege, or in my own case (not yours) white privilege. We cannot pretend the power dynamic is not there, even in the most respectful and loving heterosexual relationships. I can assure you every woman senses the existence of this power gradient, all the time. Solidarity requires that we do too.

    ^^^^^
    CB: I agree that overall, in general and in many specifics men are in power. But I do not agree that this power is absolute and utterly universal.

    I didn’t assert the opposite of what I gleaned from here. I didn’t say women are “purely” attracted to men by instinct. My position is that women’s “attraction”-compulsion toward men is a combination of culture and instinct. And that the culture part is not all male suprmacism, but includes some cultural tropes that are not misogynist, even if mysogyny dominates.

    Nor do I see what I said as self-aggrandizing. It works the other way too. Men are attracted to women by instinct ! It’s not like I’m saying “they like us , but we don’t like them.” It’s mutual,instinctively mutual. And when I say attracted to women , I don’t mean attracted to them to “conquer” them. I mean attracted to them to genuinely love them, care about and for them.

    As to “every woman,all the time”, I don’t know if I can quite grant you that. Sure overall, men as a group have more power, but if we examine every male-female heterosexual dyad,it is not true that every single one’s power balance is determined by the male suprmacist system that is general. It’s just a fact that there are relationships where the woman is dominant, runs the relationship, and this is not 1 in a million. I’m not saying this is bad, because, in general women are better “leaders of the relationship”.

    As to Solidarity, what I am saying is that there is an instinctive _affirmative_ basis for solidarity. We don’t have to build solidarity with women _only_ based on acknowledging and fighting male supremacy, but we can build it based on common instinct. But even more, there are affirmative bases in our culture. Our culture is contradictory in this regard, even if the male supremacy is bigger than the “genuine love”. We must suppress the bad culture, but may build up the good culture too. Women are great,inherently lovable. Lets try and promote that too, the opposite of misogyny, “love of women IN GENERAL”, There isn’t even a word for it. “Somethingphilia”

    Let me throw in another point here that is not exactly on point of this exchange, but one that I think must really be considered by we feminists who are basically trying to persuade men to end patriarchy. It’s a simple point. Because women do most childcare, most boys start out in life with the experience of being subordinate to a female, their mother. ( And since father is not there all the time doing parenting with orders and commands; day to day children are subordinated to mother more than father). I’m _not_ trying to raise this to counter the notion that male power is dominant overall in society. I am raising practically to point out that the average _man_ ,in order to become a feminist, has to overcome a part of his psyche by which he experiences an important and fundamental relationship in which he is subordinate to a woman. In other words, it’s inherently misleading, widespread “veil” or distortion of the larger social pattern of male supremacy. Should we take this into account in training male feminists ?

    13 September 2006, 3:01 pm

42. Stan:

    Charles, your attempts to salvage Marxism as the last work on feminism are heroic, I’ll give you that. You’ve taken the fight outside the perimeter now, into the realm of biology and desire to rescue Mssrs. Marx and Engels from their naturalization of women.

    But now your arguments have taken on more of the aspect of a personal defense of an unnamed set of relationships… except that no one has weighed in on any personal relationships except to say that patriarchy is ALWAYS present in sexual relations (not as you reworded, JUST present in sexual relations).

    When you say: “Well let me ask: Do any women have any instinctive desire for heterosex ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in this society in which male dominance does not dominate and control, “pollute”, the content of that encounter ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in which the man should not feel he is wronging the woman in some sense ? That he is respectfully doing what the woman actual wants him to do with , by, of, for her ?”

    … that strikes me as extremely and personally defensive, as in, you are taking it personally.

    Did you read my comments about telling my (Black) children not to give white folks the benefit of the doubt, and that white people needn’t take that personally? Same thing. It is a recognition of social power, and those who inherit the (white) privilege of it don’t get to be liberal with me in order to say “I’m not racist, so you telling your kids that is making me the victim of their prejudice.” Born into power, born into responsibility, I say.

    Who in the world said that a particular man should automatically feel that his sexual relationship with a woman is “wronging” her? That has not even been suggested here.

    As for this: “There’s the whole “the beauty and the beast” trope in this culture. There are many “memes” in which the male is associated with savage and female with civilized. Girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice” . Boys are “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.”"

    One critique notes “the old fable implies that women are responsible for controlling male anger and violence. If a woman is only pretty and sweet enough, she can transform an abusive man into a prince – forever. If only it were true. But this is a blame-the-victim scenario waiting to happen. In a realistic sequel, Belle would seek refuge at the village’s battered women’s shelter.”

    In other words, these tropes have NOTHING to do with women’s sovereignty and everything to do with the scripts of compulsory heterosexuality.

    And this one: “As to the short periods of receptivity, see discussion with DeAnander on the unique fact that human females lost estrus as part of their human biological makeup way back when. Well, what _does_ that imply in this discussion ? Loss of estrus indicates that human females became receptive to more sex than their primate ancestors.”…

    … is just a pure hetero-male fantasy. I mean, Holy Nonsequitur, Batman! In fact, in the real world, women quite frequently say they’d be happier with less of the heterosex they experience.

    On this one, “I’m not saying that any human action lacks important social context, cultural determination. However, I think that some culture, some social context, integrates biology and culture. Much of our culture is compatible with our biology. So, to say something has social context does not necessarily mean it doesn’t have a biological component.”… I’m going to go carefully, because I have made the same argument, which I admit is tricky (but I think important), that I have made in reply to pomo “anti-essentialism” (which I’ll admit I think is a crock):

    From Sex & War — I want to begin with biological determinism, and one of its alternatives, biological foundationism.

    The argument of biological foundationism is different from biological determinism. Biological foundationism, according to Linda Nicholson , is a “coat-rack” theory.

    “Here the body is viewed as a type of rack upon which differing cultural artifacts, specifically those of personality and behavior, are thrown or superimposed” (pg. 41).

    Biological foundationism attempts to reconcile the obvious fact that we exist as a biological body with the equally obvious fact that our behavior is overwhelmingly a consequence of socialization. The problem with this approach is that it is still highly reified. Concrete context is withdrawn and replaced by abstraction and generalization. Human behavior is yanked out of social history, and that history is replaced with a Dawkin-esque history of the genes… which is then qualified by an element of equally unspecific social constructionism.

    The implication is one of mutual autonomy – autonomy of the biological and autonomy of the social, with some simple and linear causal interactions, like billiard balls bouncing off one another and not changing the essential shape of each ball.

    It is the failure of this autonomy in real life that makes this analysis unconvincing. It also sets us up for other fallacies that begin with this unquestioned premise of autonomy.

    There is an argument that animals, even ‘higher’ mammals and primates exhibit certain sexual and-or apparently sexualized behaviors, implying an element of biological causation. Counterposed to this is the (social constructionist, but also Marxist) claim that human behavior is not determined by these kinds of predispositions. Counterposed to the constructionist argument is the claim that denial of the biological ‘element’ (like a billiard ball) is a reversion to biblical separatism between ‘human and beast.’ This is a non sequitur .

    The rejection of biological determinism, and of biological foundationism, is not based on assumptions of divine intervention and religion’s species discontinuity. It is based on both the empirical evidence provided by the social sciences that demonstrate, through diversity, the inextricably social character of conscious human behavior, and on the assumption that socialization is interfused with every conscious behavior past infancy.

    It is also based on the recognition that these behaviors are cognitive. Social construction and cognition are not mutually exclusive. They exist apart from one another only as an analytical category, not ontologically.

    Note, I do not say the ‘social content’ of behavior, because I believe this implies some quantity; our behavior is 80% social and 20% biological, for example. This is a decidedly non-dialectical understanding. So is the false dichotomy between the determinative influences of “social being” (from means of production through epistemology) and “consciousness.” These are interfused.
    < <>>

    You say: “As to Solidarity, what I am saying is that there is an instinctive _affirmative_ basis for solidarity. We don’t have to build solidarity with women _only_ based on acknowledging and fighting male supremacy, but we can build it based on common instinct. But even more, there are affirmative bases in our culture. Our culture is contradictory in this regard, even if the male supremacy is bigger than the “genuine love”. We must suppress the bad culture, but may build up the good culture too. Women are great,inherently lovable. Lets try and promote that too, the opposite of misogyny, “love of women IN GENERAL”, There isn’t even a word for it. “Somethingphilia”

    Why in the world would we talk about soidarity based on an “instinct”? How about based on common humanity? How about based on seeing our own liberation as men bound up with the sovereignty of women?

    I cringe for you when I read “Women are great, inherently lovable.” I’m leaving that one be, because I suspect you will hear from more than one woman on that one.

    Now to the issue that provoked me to get back in this, even at this (for me) late hour. Love. Romantic love, constructed within patriarchy, has been one of the most uterly destructive, soul-killing, violent, and psychotic institutions in our emotional culture. The fact that we write songs, make movies, and scribble novels as paeans to it doesn’t change this fact. I hope that is not what you make reference to.

    http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MULR/1999/8.html

    13 September 2006, 6:25 pm

43. Yolanda Carrington:

    I cringe for you when I read “Women are great, inherently lovable.” I’m leaving that one be, because I suspect you will hear from more than one woman on that one.

    I don’t know about that Stan. So far CB has shown a marked inability to think critically about gender as it operates in the flesh-and-blood world. I doubt any cogent analysis or passionate argument from us “inherenty lovable” ladies here will change this fact.

    14 September 2006, 7:26 am

44. Charles Brown:

    Charles, your attempts to salvage Marxism as the last work on feminism are heroic, I’ll give you that. You’ve taken the fight outside the perimeter now, into the realm of biology and desire to rescue Mssrs. Marx and Engels from their naturalization of women.

    ^^^^^
    CB: Remember when I first got here and said it is not the _last_ work on feminism. I said that it should not be discarded but be the basis for further development on feminism. One of the first things I put on this list was a _critique_ of Marxism in that direction. So I’m not sure why you say the above.

    The discussion of biology stands on its own unrelated to Marx or Engels. I didn’t say a word about Marx or Engels in the post you now reply to that I remember. I’ll have to look. You want Marx and Engels out of the discussion, they are out. You are discussing it with Brown only.

    ^^^^^^

    But now your arguments have taken on more of the aspect of a personal defense of an unnamed set of relationships… except that no one has weighed in on any personal relationships except to say that patriarchy is ALWAYS present in sexual relations (not as you reworded, JUST present in sexual relations).

    ^^^^
    CB: I’m not clear what you mean by “personal defense of an unnamed set of relationships”, but by and large a rule of thumb in feminism is “the personal is political”, in some sense referring to “personal relationships”, so I’m not sure what the problem is with discussing “personal relationships. What is the problem you have with discussing personal relationships in this context ?

    I guess maybe you mean specific personal relationships ?

    I may have written something unclearly, but I don’t think you think or said that patriarchy is _just_ , not always , present in sexual relationships. I can go back and look. Anyway, addressing it now, I’d say in some heterosexual relationships patriarchy does not distort or ruin or pollute the relationship.

    Just as an analogy, there are some white people with whom I have relationships wherein racism really doesn’t distort it or pollute it. That may be more frequent in a place like Detroit where Black people are the overwhelming majority. Many white people who live and stay in Detroit substantially overcome racism in some of their individual relationships.

    ^^^^

    When you say: “Well let me ask: Do any women have any instinctive desire for heterosex ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in this society in which male dominance does not dominate and control, “pollute”, the content of that encounter ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in which the man should not feel he is wronging the woman in some sense ? That he is respectfully doing what the woman actual wants him to do with , by, of, for her ?”

    … that strikes me as extremely and personally defensive, as in, you are taking it personally.

    ^^^^^
    CB: My guess you are being “struck” wrong, because I’m asking it generally. I don’t have any reason to be defensive , and the things you are saying don’t bother me _personally_. They do seem somewhat onesidely inaccurate as to my observation of many women-men relationships “around” me, that is a bit of an unfair knock on a lot of men around me.

    I will discuss it personally if you want.

    To be frank, it is not so much being defensive , but that what you are saying seems to be something of a onesided caricature of reality (sorry :>)) There are certainly very serious conflicts caused by men wronging women, lording over women, but there are also women and men who seem to get along pretty well, not perfectly, but on balance very well. By my experience and observation, reality is a bit more contradictory than your discussion in general.

    ^^^^^^

    Did you read my comments about telling my (Black) children not to give white folks the benefit of the doubt, and that white people needn’t take that personally? Same thing.

    ^^^^^
    CB: However, I’m not taking it personally, so it’s not the same thing.:>).

    Actually, my son is Black too :>) ,and I don’t tell him that. We do tell him that racism can kinda sneak up on you and bite you, and there’s more racism than it might seem. But maybe we are wrong,and you’re right. Actually, he called his mother a racist for some of the things she said about white people ! :>) Also, I kinda think that it’s a new generation, and they should have their chance at trying to win idealistic integration, and Martin’s Dream, and not be deterred from it by our jadedness. But it’s contradictory. It’s tricky.

    ^^^^^^

    It is a recognition of social power, and those who inherit the (white) privilege of it don’t get to be liberal with me in order to say “I’m not racist, so you telling your kids that is making me the victim of their prejudice.” Born into power, born into responsibility, I say.

    ^^^^
    CB: I agree with this. I’m trying to think how to extend the analogy. It would have to be me telling a girl child of mine,and a male objecting they are not male suprmecist and being made a victim. Sure we should try to persuade that male of his social power.

    This whole analogy kinda doesn’t work, because I was not speaking personally, but generally, in what I said that you are commenting on.

    ^^^^^^

    Who in the world said that a particular man should automatically feel that his sexual relationship with a woman is “wronging” her? That has not even been suggested here.

    ^^^^^
    CB: I guess that is a bit “extreme” on my part, but that is the impression I get from the discussion I read here.

    There is an affirmative action aspect to your very correct feminist project here, that is, you are emphasizing criticism because it is so lacking in general.

    So, what are some of the types of situations where there is a politically correct hetero-sexual relationship ?

    ^^^^^^

    As for this: “There’s the whole “the beauty and the beast” trope in this culture. There are many “memes” in which the male is associated with savage and female with civilized. Girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice” . Boys are “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.””

    One critique notes “the old fable implies that women are responsible for controlling male anger and violence. If a woman is only pretty and sweet enough, she can transform an abusive man into a prince – forever. If only it were true. But this is a blame-the-victim scenario waiting to happen. In a realistic sequel, Belle would seek refuge at the village’s battered women’s shelter.”

    ^^^^^
    CB: By and large myths have multiple meanings, even contradictory meanings. If you want to contend that there are no myths in European culture by which men are associated as the “nature” part in the “nature/culture” opposition , ok. I’m pretty observant of this type of thing, doing anthropology on my own culture, and I’m a native informant (as we all are) in this case to boot.

    ^^^^^

    In other words, these tropes have NOTHING to do with women’s sovereignty and everything to do with the scripts of compulsory heterosexuality.

    ^^^^^
    CB: I dont’ know. The Beauty seems to tame the Beast. Belle seems a pretty independent woman for 1500 or whatever.

    How more specifically does compulsory heterosexuality impinge here ? I could see compulsory _beastiality_ ( Just kidding !)

    The particular trope of “Beauty and the Beast” shows that there are contradictory major tropes in our culture as to what you call “naturalization. ” I guess we could argue it but by my observation sometimes it is men who are “naturalized” relative to women. “Beast”. “Men are dogs.” Ever heard that ? And please don’t go off on something about me thinking in that “men are victims”. I am NOT saying that “naturalizatizing” is victimizing. I think that’s you who think that. Let me say straight out I don’t think The “Beast”is a victim of the woman in Beauty and the Beast. I’m merely _critiquing_ your theory at the abstract level of some universalized trope of woman = nature, or as we do in structuralism “woman is to man as nature is to culture”. In my experience, the cultural-SOCIAL facts don’t support you on that.

    In fact, sometimes male supremacist notions are rationalized by it being “men’s nature”, i.e. naturalizing men.

    And I am not saying that there are not women naturalizing tropes too. Pleeeeaaase don’t come back with “Charles says it’s only men who are ‘naturalized’”. I say there are contradictory tropes in this culture. Sometimes women are naturalized. Sometimes men.
    ^^^^^^^^

    And this one: “As to the short periods of receptivity, see discussion with DeAnander on the unique fact that human females lost estrus as part of their human biological makeup way back when. Well, what _does_ that imply in this discussion ? Loss of estrus indicates that human females became receptive to more sex than their primate ancestors.”…

    … is just a pure hetero-male fantasy. I mean, Holy Nonsequitur, Batman! In fact, in the real world, women quite frequently say they’d be happier with less of the heterosex they experience.

    ^^^^^^

    CB: You didn’t say what the non-sequitur is. I gotta go look at the larger context, because it is not clear how what you say above replies to what you quote from me.

    This was part of my replying to your saying:

    “If sexual desire can be polymorphous, to use the Freudian term, and generative sex happens within that realm of activity, then why in the world does the species require a “heterosex instinct”? Most heterosexual coupling does not result in pregnancy for humans, while short periods of sexual receptivity in other species almost invariably leads to generation.”

    Tell you what. I’ll just copy my whole response to what you said, and then maybe we can see how it “follows”. The part you quote above is at the end.

    CB: I explain above at length why 200,000 years ago a heterosexual instinct would likely be more fit than lack there of, i.e. why we needed way back then a heterosexual instinct. We needed it just like all the other species who have had it.

    To elaborate, take two groups of primates, one that has heterosexual instinct and one that does not ( somehow). The former would have a much greater adaptive fitness than the former. If you need me to elaborate on that , I will. But if you just look at a basic biology text on differential fertility, which is _the_ key thing in fitness for _all_ species ( this is an advance over Darwin himself who seems focussed more on “struggle” implying differential mortality) has an exponential component, that is a small difference can make big difference. That is, just a small advantage in differential fertility is what makes the qualitative , absolute difference as to what group survives and which one doesn’t. I’d say heterosexual instinct has a _big_ differential fertility advantage over lack of said instinct.

    We could discuss it, but I can see an argument why heterosexual instinct would have an adaptive advantage over “polymorphous” instinct because of the exponential effect of small differences in differential fertility. In other words, a group with heterosexual instinct would be more fit in a crisis, which is the points at which fitness is determined, where it “bites”.

    As to the short periods of receptivity, see discussion with DeAnander on the unique fact that human females lost estrus as part of their human biological makeup way back when. Well, what _does_ that imply in this discussion ? Loss of estrus indicates that human females became receptive to more sex than their primate ancestors. Assuming this was caused by giving an adaptive advantage ( and that is was not a Stephen Jay Gould “spandrel”), I’d guess it had to do with increasing pregnancies. In a crunch, crisis – the times when selection of one group over another occurs – the group with more pregnancies is more fit. You make the spandrel argument.

    (end of what I wrote before)

    CB:Back to the present:

    I’m talking about 200,000 years ago , and I’m talking about the earliest human women RELATIVE TO THEIR PRIMATE ANCESTORS who had estrus. You seem to turn that into something like I’m wishing that women in 2006 want to have sex “more”, but actually (some) woman say they want less heterosex than they have now. Right off, that doesn’t contradict women in 2006 wanting more heterosex, it might just be that they want better heterosex. It could just be a commentary on the poor performances of the particular men they are having sex with. It doesn’t prove much about the instinctive desires of these women. Then of course, it ain’t all women who say that.

    ^^^^^^

    Stan: On this one, “I’m not saying that any human action lacks important social context, cultural determination. However, I think that some culture, some social context, integrates biology and culture. Much of our culture is compatible with our biology. So, to say something has social context does not necessarily mean it doesn’t have a biological component.”… I’m going to go carefully, because I have made the same argument, which I admit is tricky (but I think important), that I have made in reply to pomo “anti-essentialism” (which I’ll admit I think is a crock):

    From Sex & War — I want to begin with biological determinism, and one of its alternatives, biological foundationism.

    The argument of biological foundationism is different from biological determinism. Biological foundationism, according to Linda Nicholson , is a “coat-rack” theory.

    “Here the body is viewed as a type of rack upon which differing cultural artifacts, specifically those of personality and behavior, are thrown or superimposed” (pg. 41).

    ^^^^^^
    CB: Is a coat _integrated_ with a coat rack ?

    ^^^^^^

    Biological foundationism attempts to reconcile the obvious fact that we exist as a biological body with the equally obvious fact that our behavior is overwhelmingly a consequence of socialization. The problem with this approach is that it is still highly reified. Concrete context is withdrawn and replaced by abstraction and generalization. Human behavior is yanked out of social history, and that history is replaced with a Dawkin-esque history of the genes… which is then qualified by an element of equally unspecific social constructionism.

    The implication is one of mutual autonomy – autonomy of the biological and autonomy of the social, with some simple and linear causal interactions, like billiard balls bouncing off one another and not changing the essential shape of each ball.

    It is the failure of this autonomy in real life that makes this analysis unconvincing. It also sets us up for other fallacies that begin with this unquestioned premise of autonomy.

    There is an argument that animals, even ‘higher’ mammals and primates exhibit certain sexual and-or apparently sexualized behaviors, implying an element of biological causation. Counterposed to this is the (social constructionist, but also Marxist) claim that human behavior is not determined by these kinds of predispositions. Counterposed to the constructionist argument is the claim that denial of the biological ‘element’ (like a billiard ball) is a reversion to biblical separatism between ‘human and beast.’ This is a non sequitur .

    The rejection of biological determinism, and of biological foundationism, is not based on assumptions of divine intervention and religion’s species discontinuity. It is based on both the empirical evidence provided by the social sciences that demonstrate, through diversity, the inextricably social character of conscious human behavior, and on the assumption that socialization is interfused with every conscious behavior past infancy.

    It is also based on the recognition that these behaviors are cognitive. Social construction and cognition are not mutually exclusive. They exist apart from one another only as an analytical category, not ontologically.

    Note, I do not say the ‘social content’ of behavior, because I believe this implies some quantity; our behavior is 80% social and 20% biological, for example. This is a decidedly non-dialectical understanding. So is the false dichotomy between the determinative influences of “social being” (from means of production through epistemology) and “consciousness.” These are interfused.
    >

    ^^^^^
    CB; This is, of course, a fundamental issue and discussion. Maybe I’ll reply at length later. Basically, I think about this relationship between biology and culture in humans regularly and often ,and have for a very long time because of its centrality in anthropology.

    I’d say biology puts limits on culture, but if a group meets the biological minimums, then culture is free to develop beyond that in anyway it happens to. Take the food example from earlier. As long as a culture’s principles don’t make life sustaining, nutrious food taboo, and of course don’t have a taste for poison, a people are free to eat anything they want beyond these biological minimums.

    So, the relationship between nature and culture is the logical relation of modus ponens: culture ==> nature ( I thought of this a long time ago in dealing with my teacher anthropologist Marshall Sahlins move away from materialism). If culture, then nature. Not nature, not culture. “Not nature” means not meeting the biological minimum. If a people don’t , there won’t be any culture either. You need naturally living humans in order for there to be culture. But nature does _not_ determine the content of culture beyond this minimal limit. Culture is free to develop however the people please , as long as that culture meets the physiological and biological minimums. Fertile sex (like adequate nutritional food) is one of these biological minimums. As long as a culture doesn’t have any aspects that prevent some sufficient fertile sex to produce the next generation, then the culture can have “anything”. A culture is free to have any type of sexual practices it wants as long as it has a minimum of fertile sexual practices.

    ^^^^^^^^

    You say: “As to Solidarity, what I am saying is that there is an instinctive _affirmative_ basis for solidarity. We don’t have to build solidarity with women _only_ based on acknowledging and fighting male supremacy, but we can build it based on common instinct. But even more, there are affirmative bases in our culture. Our culture is contradictory in this regard, even if the male supremacy is bigger than the “genuine love”. We must suppress the bad culture, but may build up the good culture too. Women are great,inherently lovable. Lets try and promote that too, the opposite of misogyny, “love of women IN GENERAL”, There isn’t even a word for it. “Somethingphilia”

    Stan: Why in the world would we talk about soidarity based on an “instinct”?

    CB: That’s an easy one. Why in the world _wouldn’t_ we !? :>) What is this instinct-phobia ? :>)

    ^^^^^

    How about based on common humanity?

    ^^^^
    CB: Part of our common humanity is our human instincts, no ?

    ^^^^^

    How about based on seeing our own liberation as men bound up with the sovereignty of women?

    ^^^^^
    CB: How about both ? No contradiction between our instincts and our own liberation as men bound up with the sovereignty of women that I can see.

    ^^^^

    I cringe for you when I read “Women are great, inherently lovable.” I’m leaving that one be, because I suspect you will hear from more than one woman on that one.

    ^^^^
    CB: I cringe for you guys and girls who think there’s something wrong with that. I’ve already heard from _lots_ of women on that, and the response is quite loving and appreciative. That’s a fact, brother. I have women who tell me I’m their best friend (platonic). You don’t think you all are the first or first women who I’ve talked about this stuff with, do you ?

    You know maybe we aren’t on the same planet here or something. The women in the real world that I’m in don’t seem to react to my ideas the way the women in the real world where you are. The real world I’m in is Detroit.

    Hey, you do your feminism, and I’ll do mine. Mine seems to be really appreciated by the real women I know, lots and lots of them, feminists, Black women , working women, mothers, sisters, grandmothers, City Councilmembers, talk show hosts… Almost none of them my lovers. I even related my ideas in Kwanzaa terms, Woman/Man Umoja (unity).

    :>)

    ^^^^^^^

    Now to the issue that provoked me to get back in this, even at this (for me) late hour. Love. Romantic love, constructed within patriarchy, has been one of the most uterly destructive, soul-killing, violent, and psychotic institutions in our emotional culture. The fact that we write songs, make movies, and scribble novels as paeans to it doesn’t change this fact. I hope that is not what you make reference to.
    ^^^^^

    CB: Yea, I’m an anti-romantic, but you gotta use a word, and as I said for lack of a better on, “love” will do.

    The reason I’m anti-romantic it that the problem with the European romantic love (socalled _in_ love) tradition is that it emphasizes _not_ getting together, lack of fulfillment. Romeo and Juliet, a prototype of romantic love, are kept apart by the circumstances of their life. Guenaveer and Lancelot can_not_ get together because she’s married to someone else. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the main trope is a lover eternally reaching for but _never_ actually reaching his loved one. Marriage is inherently _un_romantic because by defintion the two _are_ together. It is the anti-sexual fulfillment aspect of European romantic love that is no good. A big problem with Europe in this area is it’s anti-sex tradition, as reflected in its concept of romantic love as defined by the impossiblity of getting together; and of course in the anti-sex philosophy of Christianity. priests are better than the average person because they are celebate, etc.

    By the way, one of the leading activist feminists nationally who I know suggested to me that romantic love is instinctive ! So,we might get criticized by a feminist woman on that.

    love,

    CB

    14 September 2006, 4:57 pm

45. Charles Brown:

    Comment by Yolanda Carrington — 9/14/2006 @ 7:26 am

    I cringe for you when I read “Women are great, inherently lovable.” I’m leaving that one be, because I suspect you will hear from more than one woman on that one.

    I don’t know about that Stan. So far CB has shown a marked inability to think critically about gender as it operates in the flesh-and-blood world. I doubt any cogent analysis or passionate argument from us “inherenty lovable” ladies here will change this fact.

    ^^^^^^

    Hey, Yolanda. African-centered , self-loving Charles, in Africantown Detroit here.

    Actually, a _lot_ of flesh and blood ,”inherently lovable” ladies kinda think I got good ideas on this, kinda think the opposite that you do about my critical feminist consciousness.

    There’s a mystery here.

    lovingly,

    CB

    14 September 2006, 5:23 pm

46. elaina:

    *is still waiting for all these mystery “ladies” to come and expand on how brilliant mr. CB’s “critical feminist conscious” embued self is… or any woman, for that matter, who might happen upon this blog and read the contents therein*

    Because, as we all know, women tell men so much more about how they honestly feel than they tell other women. Why wouldn’t they? Men are brilliant. Especially when they call themselves “feminists.”

    Your argument just doesn’t hold. The exceptions are not the rules- e.g. an example of a “non-patriarchal” relationship, or the hope that one exists out there somewhere, can’t take the focus away from fighting patriarchy, no matter how many vaguely-disguised biologically deterministic “theories” about humanity are flopped around to defend the approach.

    Yeah. Let’s stop thinking about the sisters who hurt for a minute, all the millions and millions of them out there, so that we can give cookies to the “good” men. Yeah, right.

    -signed, The Inherently Unlovable Elaina

    14 September 2006, 7:53 pm

47. Yolanda Carrington:

    I love you, Elaina.

    lovingly, Yolanda the Hardass

    14 September 2006, 11:21 pm

48. peggy:

    Back to the comments on estrus. At some point, long ago, women ceased going into estrus. I hope we are all agreed that this biological change did *not* mean our ancient foremothers became “receptive” to sex all the time, and consequently the women of today are always “receptive” to sex. Rather it meant that there was *no* time of the year or month when our bodies were set to be longing for sex from whatever male or males were available and willing at the time, like the bodies of bitches (female dogs) in heat. In the absence of estrus, women could choose when and from whom they wanted to have sex. And that choice could mean, for some women, never to have sex with any man or boy, ever.

    To play at sociobiology for a minute, imagine this scenario: Long ago, a few female members of our species, not all but a few, because of some random mutation, did not go into estrus. Did it mean that those few were at a selective disadvantage, because there was no time when their bodies demanded SEX NOW? Evidently the absence of estrus, far from handicapping estrus-free women with a selective disadvantage, conferred a strong advantage upon them, because today *all* female human beings are estrus-free. The estrus-bound females ultimately could not compete, viable-offspring-wise, with the estrus-free ones. We might imagine that the advantage freedom from estrus conferred upon our foremothers was precisely the ability to be choosy about when, whether and with whom they had heterosex. The babies would be healthier (if only because their numbers were limited), and so would the mothers be. And maybe even, around the same time that estrus was dropped, human beings got the intelligence to figure out that heterosex is a sine qua non for babies, and even to figure out that each baby had one father only, which father that baby resembled. It is not unrealistic to imagine that our long ago forebears had that much intelligence.

    Here is a thing with human beings and, to a lesser extent, with certain other animals: culture has taken over certain tasks that once were assigned to biology. One of those tasks is that of deciding whether, when, and with what opposite-sex partner to reproduce. Of course there are still many unplanned pregnancies, but the point is, we are *capable* of planning them. We do not need “instinct” to ensure the continuation of the species. We *do* need culture. No human being, or community of human beings, can exist without culture. We can, however, exist without certain “instincts” or “biological imperatives.” It is not even an absolute must-obey biological imperative to eat. Some human beings intentionally starve themselves to death, and you or I could do the same thing, if we chose. And among those who undertake a fast to the death are some very fine human beings indeed, who are not at all mentally or emotionally deranged. Our conscious minds can override our desire and need to eat. But that ability will not cause our species to die out. Nor will the ability to do without heterosex. Nor even will the sexually polymorphous nature of our species, which renders heterosex entirely optional. It’s just that, as long as even a fraction of living women desire to have babies, and as long as even a fraction of men desire to impregnate those women, there will be babies. And meanwhile, every individual and every society will be better off if no one succumbs to the belief that our biological “nature” makes “need” sex. Because, then we will be more motivated to take responsibility for our own sexual activities. And because, after all, over-reproduction in other species leads to massive starvation and die-offs. And human beings are in general far more fecund than we need to be to stay at replacement level.

    And we also need not fear that culture will render our bodies out of work in some sense. Our bodies still have plenty to do, all on their own, with no conscious input from us consciousnesses that inhabit them, without regulating our reproductive capacities as well. Like keeping us breathing while we sleep, and a whole lot of other stuff.

    15 September 2006, 1:23 am

49. Charles Brown:

    FYI

    Charles

    ^^^^

    http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/djglp/articles/gen11p7.htm#H1N1

    QUEER THEORY BY MEN
    IAN HALLEY*

    I. A MINIMALIST DEFINITION OF FEMINISM, AND SOME DISTINCTIONS

    II. FEMINISM 101 AND BEYOND
    A. Male/Female Model and Cultural Feminism
    B. Gay Identity Politics, Sex-Positive Feminism, Postmodernism, Queer Theory

    III. QUEER THEORY BY MEN
    A. Is the Rectum a Grave?
    B. Sexy Dressing
    C. What Next?

    IV. TWYMAN V. TWYMAN

    IV. CONCLUSION
    APPENDIX

    FOOTNOTES

    In this essay I present parts — not all — of my argument that it would be good for left pro-sex intellectual and political work, including feminist work of this kind, if people doing it could occasionally Take a Break from Feminism.1 The essay has four main parts and an Appendix. In Part I, I attempt a minimalist definition of feminism as it is now practiced and produced in the United States, and draw some rudimentary distinctions among various forms of feminism that fall within this definition. The basic idea here is that a minimalist definition of feminism actually maximizes the range of projects that can be described as feminist, and makes it harder to Take a Break from them. In Part II, I give an extremely cursory genealogy of feminism, gay-identity politics and queer theory. In Part III, I analyze two examples of queer theory by men. These are close readings; by that means I attempt to find with some precision the trajectory of these postmodernizing, sex-positive, left analytics of sexuality and the precise points of their debt to and departure from feminism. The basic idea here is to travel deeply into the domain that could be called queer theory and to start the journey as far as possible from feminism; it seemed to me likely (and I think it turned out to be the case) that my two male authors — one a gay man, the other a straight one — would place themselves in relation to feminism rather than in it and would therefore make manifest some conceptual and/or political possibilities for Taking a Break from Feminism (and would also give me the pleasure of identifying publicly with them and disseminating their work). In Part IV, I give [*pg 8] a close reading of a fascinating legal decision, Twyman v. Twyman,2 following a “re-reading protocol” I have developed that allows highly divergent theoretical hypotheses to generate highly divergent re-readings of legal texts. The point here is to see whether there can be any conceptual upsides to re-reading the case deploying hypotheses that Take a Break from Feminism. For legal readers this section should provide whatever “payoff” they might be able to derive from all the preceding analytic work. Finally, in the Appendix I deduce from the experience of writing Part III (and of reading in the field more broadly) some maxima for queer theory, feminist and otherwise.

    I. A MINIMALIST DEFINITION OF FEMINISM, AND SOME DISTINCTIONS
    Here are some observations about how feminism defines and taxonomizes itself in the United States today. I am not claiming that these attributes are essential in the sense that they are absolute or natural; rather that they are essential in the sense that current conventions seem to require them as a disciplinary matter.

    First, to be feminism, a position must make a distinction between M and F. Different feminisms do this differently: some see men and women, some see male and female, some see masculine and feminine. While “men” and “women” will almost always be imagined as distinct human “groups,” the other paired terms can describe many different things: traits, narratives, introjects. However a particular feminism manages these subsidiary questions, it is not “a feminism” unless it turns in some central or core way on a distinction between M and F.

    Second, to be a feminism in the United States today, a position must posit some kind of subordination as between M and F, in which F is the disadvantaged or subordinated element. At this point feminism is descriptive and not normative: M>F.

    And third (here is the normative turn), feminism opposes the subordination of F. It frames itself as a justice or emancipatory project. As between M and F, and possibly because M>F, feminism carries a brief for F.

    I think these attributes are noticeable in virtually every form of feminism in the United States today, and will treat them as definitional — as essential in an Aristotelian sense.3

    Beyond that, feminisms can be distinguished in many ways. It has been helpful to me to suppose that about half of feminism in the United States today concerns itself with male power and female subordination in sexuality, and that the other half concerns itself primarily with reproduction, care work, work in the paid economy, and related matters. Of course these overlap, but people [*pg 9] seem more or less comfortable with treating them as the “phyla” of this intellectual kingdom.

    Further, across the full range of these issues, feminism often concerns itself in very sustained ways with powers that operate not across the M/F distinction, but along the many distinctions that we refer to when we speak of “class,” “race,” and “empire.” We could call the results socialist, antiracist, and postcolonial feminisms. I like to think of these as “hybrid” feminisms, because they set out to examine (at least) two incommensurate modalities of power at once.

    So assuming I can proceed with those givens, I will also note that, on the sexuality side, feminism finds itself in alliance with and in conflict with other left/liberal/progressive projects that take sexuality and power as their domain of operation but that often lack a primary focus on M/F and often do not primarily concern themselves with M>F. Chief among these are gay identity politics, transgender and transsexual politics, sex liberationism that is not primarily feminist, and queer theory. In this essay I will examine some aspects of the relationship between feminism as a theory about sexuality and power, and queer theory.

    At this point (and always in the hybrid feminisms), a person framing a conceptual, descriptive, normative, and/or political project can choose between converging the two or more modes of conceptual or social organization or diverging them. That is, we could decide that normatively it would be terrible to have a theory of homosexuality that was not ultimately feminist, or a feminism that did not wholly encompass our theory of homosexuality; we would then be aiming for complete convergence. Or we could say that it is better for some reason to have some division or autonomy or even conflict between the two projects; we would then be aiming for some degree of divergence.

    My overall goal in this discussion is to make a case for the proposition that divergence in left thinking about sexuality and power can get us some conceptual gains that seem unavailable from convergence. Specifically, I think we don’t always need feminism in order to have meaningful left projects about sexuality. I hope to show that left/liberal/progressives can Take a Break from Feminism in their theorizing, their alliance formation, and their activism from time to time, and that the results can be (not that they must be — only that they can be) good, not only for projects that fall outside the domain of feminism, but for feminism, too.

    There are many reasons to think this is a bad idea, and there is a large literature, that will certainly continue to grow, on the upsides and downsides. I am working on several papers and a book that will take up some of the more normative, consequentialist and discursive dimensions of this fascinating debate.4 In this essay I hope it will be permissible to circumscribe my goal: I want to provide an elaboration, in a somewhat high degree of detail, of some conceptual moves that may be possible only if one pursues a divergence between feminism and queer theory as I imagine it. Some, not all; and a, not the. To be sure, if the instances of divergence that I expose here seem valuable, perhaps we will decide we want to find or produce more of them. The argument is not that [*pg 10] the convergence of feminism with queer theory is impossible or undesirable; it is merely that divergence is both possible and possibly highly valuable.

    II. FEMINISM 101 AND BEYOND
    A. Male/Female Model and Cultural Feminism
    By far the most brilliant, comprehensive and forceful thinker about sexuality in American feminist legal theory for the last twenty years has been Catharine A. MacKinnon. Her formulation — which, for shorthand, I will call the “male/female model” — has become the paradigmatic understanding of sexuality in sexual-subordination feminism in the United States. The chief alternative source of descriptive and normative insights is cultural feminism.

    It took me a long time to understand how profoundly MacKinnon altered several of her basic positions between 1982-1983, when Signs published two articles by her that fully deserve the name “radical feminist,”5 and the mid-1980′s, by which time she was fully engaged as a feminist legal activist. As I show elsewhere, Feminism Unmodified, the 1987 volume on which most readers rely for a restatement of MacKinnon’s thought tout court, significantly modifies MacKinnon’s position as of 1983 on a whole array of crucial points.6 All the feminists who want to resist the influence of the Late MacKinnon should consider whether their own reasons for resistance appear as MacKinnon’s own position in the Signs articles. As I see it, many of them do.

    The Early MacKinnon argued that male dominance was not merely a social subordination of women by men, but an almost total capture of reality and knowledge themselves by male dominance and female subordination. Male dominance and female subordination did not merely rank the genders: they produced them (that is, the very existence of men and women may well derive from this domination), and, because they also produced the eroticization of domination by everyone so constituted, they also produced the consciousness by which we might apprehend these arrangements. Our very desire and our very modes of knowledge are inhabited throughout by the epistemology of this power structure. Men emerge as objective knowers, and women as known objects; and this turns us all on and is our basic grammar of action: man fucks woman, subject verb object. Feminism is a project in quest for women’s point of view, which, because it is already constituted as its subordination, is not only a profoundly deferred but also a deeply problematic starting place.

    On this understanding, male dominance was so complete that no aspect of gender could be distinguished, ultimately, from rape. MacKinnon did not claim that every act of heterosexual intercourse was a rape. Rather, she made the [*pg 11] much more interesting and subtle claim that, because of the constitutive role of male dominance and female subordination in producing all the existing people, in generating the very rudiments of our knowledge and desire, there is no one alive who can distinguish meaningfully between rape and not-rape.

    I call the result a male/female model because those terms map the entire field of analytic possibility for this feminism. Male power produces female subordination, which is gender, which is the eroticization of this hierarchy; all of this generates rather than arises from the conceptual and social difference between men and women. The model is highly convergentist: it causes MacKinnon to say that, if a man rapes a man, the latter has been sexually dominated and is therefore feminized. The homosexuality of the event does not elude, but must rather merge into the male/female model.

    All of this led the Early MacKinnon to embrace a critique of the state and of the law. The state and the law were, she proposed, male — not in the sense that men ran them, but in the sense that they fully recapitulated male ontological and epistemological powers and were in a sense therefore fully dependent on female subordination to be what they were. The state could not be used against something so constitutive of it as male power; and female subjectivity, which was a constitutive element of male power, provided no way out of the dilemma. Criminalizing rape would merely legitimate all the dominance in sexuality that escaped the definition of the crime; deciding particular rape cases on the basis of the woman’s instead of the man’s testimony merely recapitulated the subject/object, subjectivity/objectivity distinction of male dominance; asking trial courts to find that some acts of heterosexual intercourse were “rape” imputed to others a legitimacy feminism should deny them. Insight into equality and the political will to seek it could come only from consciousness-raising — the painful search for a transformation of consciousness achieved at the most micro level.

    It was not too long before MacKinnon significantly departed from some of these claims. She retained the structural view of male domination: it is horizonless; it produces men and women; it relates them to each other in gender, which is eroticized domination. But by the mid-1980s she claimed to know many, many things, and to know them because women’s point of view had disclosed them to her without distortion. Rape, sexual harassment, domestic abuse, pornography — all the lurid catalog of sexual nastiness — these are the core elements in male domination. Rights against them enforced by the state would be feminist. Women who disagree with any part of this line, MacKinnon was willing to suggest, have been co-opted by male consciousness. It is possible to deploy the Early MacKinnon against the Late.7

    It also took me a long time to realize that MacKinnon has consistently refused to be a cultural feminist in the sense I use that term. To be sure, male/female-model and cultural feminism have a lot in common. Both insist on M/F, on M>F and on carrying a brief for F. Both are structural subordination projects. Both see equality as the almost-exclusive vocabulary for their justice ambitions. But while MacKinnon focuses our attention on the unjust male [*pg 12] domination of women through power, cultural feminism emphasizes the unjust male derogation of women’s traits or points of view or values or experiences through male-ascendant normative value judgments. If MacKinnon’s equality project is a massive attack on power as it constructs everything, cultural feminism is an effort to transvalue values — to find women’s or feminine values (like care, or intersubjectivity, or particularity) and to restore them to a place at least equal to, probably superior to, the corresponding male values (like self-interest, or objectivity, or generality) that have unjustly pushed their way to the top. Cultural feminism is not nearly as likely as MacKinnon’s thinking to be structural in form: after all, women exist as exemplars of a better way; and if we could put them in charge, or make men more like them, things would get better fast. But it is equally ambitious on the social dimension it cares about: MacKinnon would like to get men by the balls because she does not believe their minds and hearts can follow; whereas cultural feminism has detailed plans for their hearts and minds. Cultural feminism is a fighting faith seeking the moral conversion of a little less than half the human race.

    Both the male/female model and cultural feminism support women’s identity politics. That is, they see women as a human identity group with a common problem — subordination to men. Though cultural feminism roughly speaking divides its attention between the cultural re-valuation of women’s distinctive relationship to care and the cultural re-valuation of women’s distinctive engagement in sexuality, when it focuses on sexuality, cultural feminism agrees with the male/female model in characterizing male sexuality as a vast social problem. Women are the client base of these feminisms, and women are the people they would help first if they had to pick. M/F, M>F, and carrying a brief for F.

    B. Gay Identity Politics, Sex-Positive Feminism, Postmodernism, Queer Theory

    (continued)

    15 September 2006, 5:56 pm

50. Charles Brown:

    Comment by elaina — 9/14/2006 @ 7:53 pm

    Because, as we all know, women tell men so much more about how they honestly feel than they tell other women. Why wouldn’t they? Men are brilliant. Especially when they call themselves “feminists.”

    ^^^^
    CB: Oh I see. You don’t want men to change. You don’t want men to become feminists. You want them to do what ? What exactly is all this feminist talk ? It’s not aimed at changing men to stop being misogynists and become “women-loving”. No. That’s not your goal. You don’t want to not be hated, that is loved. You want….??????

    Women-loving, what a disgusting concept. Makes one want to vomit. We have got to encourage men to _hate_ women or at the very least be indifferent to them. Love them ? Are you kidding ?

    ^^^^^

    Your argument just doesn’t hold.

    ^^^^^
    CB: What argument ?

    ^^^^^^

    The exceptions are not the rules- e.g. an example of a “non-patriarchal” relationship, or the hope that one exists out there somewhere, can’t take the focus away from fighting patriarchy, no matter how many vaguely-disguised biologically deterministic “theories” about humanity are flopped around to defend the approach.

    ^^^^^
    CB: So, all this complaining about the big problem of misogyny ( the hate of women in general) is not sincere. You don’t want the end of hating of women in general, which seems to me would be “loving women in general.” This vast number of complaints about misogyny is just , what, shooting the breeze ? This word “misogyny” tossed around in the feminist circles all the time. What does it mean ? the hate of women in general. What would be the end of misogyny ? Oh silly, patronizing me. I thought the end of hate of women in general would be the love of women in general. Must be my linear male thinking. The opposite of hate is love. The end of hate is the beginning of love. No that’s not it. Feminists are not trying to get men in general to change. They want things to stay the same. The end of hate is not love. It’s …..?????

    On the other hand “fighting patriarchy” ,what form does that take exactly ? It’s all some general and abstract thing. Shadow boxing in the air with the big demon “PATRIARCHY”. It doesn’t involve specific and individual non-patriarchal relationships, between actual human beings female and male. You don’t want individual men in individual relationships to struggle to change them from patriarchal to non-patriarchal. In fact, if an individual man takes on the responsibility in his individual relationship to make it non-patriarchal and loving of the individual woman instead of hating ( and afterall hating of women is everywhere , isn’t it ?), he’s being …patriarchal and patronizing. What a patronizing thought ? Loving women in general. Makes you cringe. The very idea of loving women in general, trying to get these “women hating in general” men, these misogynists to stop it, reverse, do the opposite of it is so nasty , so patronizing , so ridiculous.

    ^^^^

    Yeah. Let’s stop thinking about the sisters who hurt for a minute, all the millions and millions of them out there, so that we can give cookies to the “good” men. Yeah, right.

    ^^^^^
    CB; Yea, because these women , these feminists don’t really want you men to stop hating women and start loving them. Actually, contrary to what it seems like you are saying, you don’t want men to change. You want them to keep hating women. I should have realized that your words are the opposite of what they seem to mean.

    All those millions and millions of sisters hurting out there, you don’t want men to change their anti-woman , woman hating consciousness about them. You don’t want men to CAEE ( oh dreaded word ; it makes one cringe because it reminds of that horror love)about those sisters. You want men to just keep their uncaring attitude about them. Afterall, if men started caring about those millions and millions of sisters out there hurting, that would be like loving them, and as we all know that’s patronizing.

    -signed, The Inherently Unlovable Elaina

    ^^^^^^
    CB: Yea, that’s what I’ll tell my brothers. Actually, these feminists don’t want you to care about them. They want you to think about them as inherently unlovable. Ok I’ll spread the word. DON’T LOVE WOMEN. CONTINUE TO HATE THEM because they are inherently unlovable, inherently hatable.

    15 September 2006, 6:35 pm

51. Charles Brown:

    Looks like Lou Reed beat me to the cringeful terminology.

    What a disgusting idea ? Try to get men to love women in general. Yea I see now. We don’t want men to love women in general. That would be a disaster.

    CB

    ^^^^^^^

    If it wasn’t so insulting, male chauvinism would actually be pretty
    comical
    Ian Bell
    The Sunday Herald, 10 September 2006

    HERE follows one of those crashing generalisations that have made the
    great British press a shining example to world civilisation. There are
    four types of men. No more, no fewer. The first is gay, and has no
    interest whatever in the opposite sex. The second is gay, but treats the
    habits and tastes of the opposite sex as golden rules written in stone,
    with added lip gloss and long-lash mascara. The third is straight, but
    regards the little girlies as a gender to be placated, feared, bullied,
    patronised, or generally managed. The fourth is a man who likes women.

    A quarter of a century ago, or thereabouts, Lou Reed devoted a song to
    the topic. Sexual ambiguity was not paying off as a career move for the
    singer. Uncle Lou, therefore, elected to come out in reverse, as it
    were, with a song entitled – but you guessed – I Like Women.

    In one of his less-thrilling lyrics, he said he thought them “great”.
    Moreover, “a solace to the world” in something of – you just knew this
    rhyme was coming – “a terrible state”. Was this horribly patronising?
    Obviously. Somewhat ironic? Possibly.

    I didn’t care. I thought it was about time, at that time, that someone
    should write as Reed wrote: women are smarter, better-looking, more
    hygienic, harder-working, and more reliable than any bunch of available
    beer guts. Yet to say so as a man implied that you were merely “secure
    in your identity”. Not a big help. Thanks a bunch, fellow simians.

    Men get away with murder, actual or metaphorical. The world is theirs to
    command and control. They elevate or lower the glass ceiling according
    to their own career needs. Their behaviour towards 50% of the species is
    more or less abominable. Then, for such is their claimed right, they
    grumble.

    Feminism. Political correctness. The arduous business of blokeishness.
    Laws that oblige them to keep their personal and financial promises.
    Poor bloody saps: anyone might think, reading the usual red-tops, that
    patriarchy and wife-beating had been abolished by the do-gooders.

    I like women more than I like men: sorry chaps, can’t help it. The
    concept of a stag night, or a “boys’ night out”, I find bizarre. I tend
    to the view that the world would be a better place if we only let women
    get on with it. I grasp the horrific Thatcher anomaly. I understand that
    I retain certain age-specific prejudices towards power tools and
    altercations in the street on a Friday night. It remains the case that
    the prevalent male attitude towards the graceful gender does the world a
    disservice.

    In Japan, last week, a few creepy chauvinists were yelling “Banzai!”
    just because their emperor’s consort had “produced” a healthy, perhaps
    bouncing, male heir. The suggestion appeared to be that one of the most
    sophisticated industrial societies on the planet would struggle through
    endless travails if it lacked a spoiled boy. I mean the kid no harm, but
    this does not sound like the modern world.

    It did not sound like the modern world, equally, when the distressed
    Diana, Princess of Wales, produced her impeccably masculine heir and
    spare. By her own admission, the woman was not the brightest tiara in
    the box, but to treat her as a breeding unit, and to treat her capacity
    to breed as a constitutional issue, was grotesque. To put it no higher,
    British men did not emerge with distinction from that hysteria.

    I was in Westminster Abbey for the Diana funeral: more fool me. It was
    strange on every level imaginable. The children, understandably, were in
    some bleak world of their own. Even nine years after the event,
    nevertheless, the memory of an institutional obsession lingers. The
    entire point of vain, foolish Diana, for the House of Windsor, was the
    production of young males, on behalf of a family and a husband who
    despised her. Long afterwards, amid all the daft conspiracy theories, I
    retain one belief: they never intended that she should become a queen.
    Her death was handy.

    I could care less, obviously. The monarchic principle does not count
    among my favourites. It is striking, for all that, how casually women
    can still be acquired and discarded within the upper reaches of power in
    the Western world. Our own queen was never intended to ascend to the
    throne, but when push came to shove they were stuck with her. When push
    came to a second shove, HM, with all the innate empathy of her class,
    struggled to find a sisterly feeling for the wrecked corpse of her
    daughter-in-law. If that is not a failure of simple humanity, what is?

    There is, in fact, a paradox of sexism: blaming men does not explain
    everything. One Japanese empress is no different from all the young
    Scottish women in ordinary maternity wards desperate, right now, for “a
    boy”, no matter what. But why? Have little girls ceased to count? Do
    they do less well at school? Do they show fewer signs of wit or will?
    Are they not, in fact, and by the usual educational measures, the
    superiors of their grubby little male counterparts? I believe the
    educationalists.

    In the United States, the smart money these days says that Hillary
    Clinton is contemplating a run at the presidency. Those who claim to
    know say she is ferociously bright. They add, however, that she is
    burdened by two handicaps. First, her profile is defined by a spouse who
    would not recognise the truth if it took a bite from his rear. “Bubba”
    Bill lied grandly to a grand jury over his semi-sexual abuse of “that
    woman”. So why is Hillary still attached to the creep?

    Secondly, and more important, the former First Lady – and how insulting
    is that appellation? – is a woman. America has never had one of those in
    the White House, with the big jet, the big car, and in charge of the big
    boys’ stuff. Check the US press and you will find people wondering,
    seriously and at length, over whether the continental republic is
    “ready” for a genitally alternative chief executive. Do they truly
    believe she could make things worse?

    They mean, I think, that we men become uneasy when the bit of office
    skirt cannot be patted on the head (or otherwise), and decides to do
    some serious work. They mean, I suspect, that persons of my gender are
    uneasy at the thought of being found out.

    When the day arrives at which Cherie Blair, or equivalent, refuses to be
    the on-call arm-candy for the usual superior male figure, progress may
    just have commenced. I am not holding my breath. Mrs Blair, like Mrs
    Clinton, is complicit.

    I like women. I think (thank you, Lou) that they’re great. Truly. The
    next leader of the Labour Party will be portly and male, nevertheless.
    The next president of the United States will be one of the usual spoiled
    rich boys. The next emperor of Japan, the next British monarch, the next
    individual to win the Nobel Prize for Literature – compose your own list
    – will arrive with a certain grisly inevitability. Balls, and that other
    reproductive device, will be obligatory. I am not surprised, just a tiny
    bit depressed.

    In my four arbitrary categories of common modern male traits, I failed
    to make one important distinction. I failed to say that those men, very
    possibly a majority, who regard “girlies as a gender to be placated,
    bullied, patronised, or generally managed” actually do not like the
    mothers of their children terribly much, or women, mothers and
    girlfriends included, in general. I find the very idea extraordinary,
    but I smell a truth. There are too many people of my gender who deserve
    this trouble.

    Women have illuminated every undeserved chapter of my undeserved
    existence. Grandmother, mother, wife: each of these individuals has set
    the standards for any success I ever managed, and for any failure. I
    doubt that many men of my generation would think, or say, differently.
    Women bear us: parse the words as you prefer. If you truly work to keep
    such people in the kitchen or the hall, you insult yourself.

    Still, men, eh? How bright are they? Beauty is female; intelligence is
    female; art is female. Rational toil was invented by women with a need
    to provide for children: what remains? Japan’s “need for a male heir” is
    both idiotic and hilarious. We need men, I suspect, who are prepared to
    be men. And to understand, seriously, what that means.

    15 September 2006, 6:58 pm

52. peggy:

    Charles and Elaina,

    I request that you take your quarrels off-site. You are just sniping at each other. And Charles, I request of you that you provide the URL of any interesting website you find, rather than copying and pasting it onto Feral Scholar. Stan has asked this of other posters as well. It is just a matter of courtesy.

    That’s all.

    15 September 2006, 10:56 pm

53. peggy:

    Since I’m in a way different geographical time zone from the rest of you, it looks like I’m the only one posting right now. So I will just go on, and you can deal with it in the morning (your time). To comment on the quote from above:

    “It’s rank insanity to send young soldiers to battle and deny them sex, alcohol and drugs—the three things that can make the inhuman experience barely more bearable. But they’re not allowed. Alcohol and drugs are ostensibly banned from US bases. Sex isn’t exactly available, though servicemen make do by way of rape.”

    It is interesting that sex, alcohol, and drugs are all put in the same category here. Because they are obviously not all the same kind of thing. Just shows how off-base and dysfunctional our military men, and their supposed supporters, are.

    I have read about some societies where young men in training to be warriors must renounce sex for the duration, because it is thought that the renunciation of sex makes them stronger, while sexual intercourse saps their manhood. This belief may or may not be groundless, but it is no more groundless that fighting men need sex for “release.”

    And alcohol may be cathartic, but the only way it may enhance a certain kind of warriorhood is that it makes the inebriated person stupidly reckless and fearless.

    And I will say one more time what I’ve said before on this site: I know, first-hand and by extended research, one group of warriors who are not allowed alcohol ever, nor allowed drugs ever, nor allowed premarital sex, nor shown or allowed to watch sexy movies or shows, and for whatever else you might say about them, they are very good warriors indeed – brave, strong, intelligent and disciplined combatants.

    And even when they leave combat and the whole military movement of which they were a part for so many years, they keep to the habit of not drinking or doing drugs. And they marry and have children whom they adore. And some say (this is just a rumour, conveyed to me by other women) that they make really hot lovers.

    16 September 2006, 2:03 am

54. Yolanda Carrington:

    Peggy,

    Elaina is not the only one who “quarrels” with Charles; damn near everybody here does, including Stan. Besides, most of the women here stopped responding to him a while ago, but he just can’t seem to keep his no-so-well-thought-out opinions to himself.

    It’s deeply offensive that you would single her out, and I find your public reprimand to her to be really condescending, if not outright sexist. She has done nothing to deserve such treatment. I believe you owe her an apology.

    16 September 2006, 9:42 am

55. Julian Real:

    Re: Charles’ comment: “Women are great, inherently lovable.”

    The question, or one of them, Charles, is what are women lovable AS, in male supremacist societies? And what makes that “lovability” inherent? Are women lovable if they are fat, hairy, lesbian, militantly anti-male supremacist, not pretty, not light-skinned, not white, not blond, angry, irritated, annoyed, furious, unapologetic, not deferential, and fully armed?

    And, what makes that generalized category of “woman” GREAT?

    From my own lensed experiences and observations, what makes women “great” is men’s ability to have and get sexual and emotional access and attention, welcomed and unwelcomed, wanted and unwanted, consensual and nonconsensual, to women, with women, from women, against women. The women men I know call “great” are the women from whom men can obtain sex and get their emotional needs met. If a man cannot get sex from a woman, nor get his emotional needs met from/by her, no man I know calls THAT woman “great”. Your own lensed experiences here?

    What makes women “inherently lovable” is their learned capacities to endure men’s violence and dehumanization such that they do not strike back nearly as often as they ought to, given what is being done to them individually-while-systematically. Specifically, women are not safe to kick men in the nuts, let alone shot to death, nearly as often as men ought to be kicked in the nuts, for what (yes, SOME) men do to (yes, SOME) women, on the street, in the home, and in every private and public space known to and created by MAN.

    Your thoughts on this, Charles?

    16 September 2006, 10:10 am

56. Julian Real:

    This:

    Specifically, women are not safe to kick men in the nuts, let alone shot to death,

    Should read:

    Specifically, women are not safe to kick men in the nuts, let alone shoot men to death, …

    16 September 2006, 10:14 am

57. peggy:

    Yolanda and Elaina – I apologize. It seemed at the time as though Elaina was the most recent one caught up in a quarrel (what else would one call it?) with Charles. I did not want to single anyone out – not Charles, not Elaina – even though I had my opinion as to who was more to blame, and it wasn’t Elaina. I know that Stan has taken Charles to task for what he has said, and so have you. I don’t get why my post was sexist. Anyway, I’m sorry.

    16 September 2006, 5:58 pm

58. Stan:

    I’m remarking and replying… remarking on the latest exchanges on this thread, and replying to Lapetrov (on another thread… hope you’re here), because the RE-mark/ply seems to embrace the same issues.

    Text is a dangerous medium for freewheeling discussion and debate. We haven’t developed the cultural etiquettes for it. We have no body language before us, no facial expressions, etc., to modify the abrupt, linear directness of text. We are safe to assume personnae that are more dramatic, bolder, and often more abrasive than we might be in real life, or would be willing to “risk” in person. So we can accidentally hurt, and in reply to the hurt, we can express our pain in reciprocally hurtful ways. The boundaries between debate and personal attack can get blurry. That’s why we have a few rules here — none of which have been broken as far as I can see, but we do seem to have some treading-on of toes. So I will remind myself as well as others to dance carefully.

    The fact that feminism begins with the assumption that the personal and the private are both poitical as hell means we have to be able to find our way with each other in this unfamilar (dare I call it) no-man’s-land.

    Lapetrov asks how do we advance the struggle against patriarchy when the obstacles are so numerous and daunting.

    I wish I knew. I totally get separatism when I debate this and run into the same same same same same plays from the same playbook, again and again into apparent infinity. Just got an internal publication from my own political group in which — even after sending out volumes of material trying as patiently as I can to explain the basic radical feminist position — I read: “our stuff refers only to men and women and is very gender binary, our language, practice, theory reflects that”… and “develop our line around QUEER and TRANS [caps in the original] — how they are different from LGBTQQ” [this list gets longer all the time]. The utter failure to comnprehend that there is a materialist analysis (BY supposed historical materialists!!!) on gender that does not redefine the issue as a department store shelf of identities, as well as — forgive me, but I have to say this — a marxist who participates on this list who employs a host of rhetorical tactics to evade and reinterpret the core issues around gender… is not giving me a great deal of confidence in my own earlier hypothesis that leftist men are the first place we need to take this struggle.

    In a small book I am working on now, “The Insurgent’s Handbook,” I have included a short section on adventurism:

    The dictionary definition of “adventurism” is recklessness and unnecessary risk taking. The political definition is different. Adventurism is a bias toward violence as a method that seeks to justify itself with more-revolutionary-than-thou rhetoric.

    Adventurism is always accompanied by god-awful phrase-mongering, macho posturing, sectarian arrogance, and plain self-importance. It is precisely for these reasons its appeals to mostly young, mostly males, and mostly the so-called metropolitan “middle-class.” Once motivated by a newfound political awareness, this stratum is characterized by extreme individualism, by dramatic and unrealistic fantasies born of decades of watching television and movies, and by impatience.

    There is no tendency within movements that creates a greater vulnerability to infiltration and agents provocateurs than adventurism. This is because it is an appeal to the most under-acknowledged and poorly understood of social dynamics within movements — and one that I never tire of pointing out, because people haven’t learned yet to pay closer attention: Gender.

    The power of masculinity-constructed-as-violence cannot be overestimated for our insurgency. Like guns, which I will discuss in short order, masculinity carries with it an aura, a force field that operates independently of our critical capacity, distorting that critical capacity… sowing rationalization in lieu of reason, by which the means begins to justify the ends.

    The reason I bring this up is that Marxists — at least those who have been activein the lives of their organizations and particiapted in “line struggles” — are familiar with this: god-awful phrase-mongering, macho posturing, sectarian arrogance, and plain self-importance. It is precisely for these reasons its appeals to mostly young, mostly males, and mostly the so-called metropolitan “middle-class.” Once motivated by a newfound political awareness, this stratum is characterized by extreme individualism, by dramatic and unrealistic fantasies born of decades of watching television and movies, and by impatience: as the textbook definition of what we commonly refer to as petit-bourgeois radicalism.

    We recognize it in every area related to class struggles, but we completely miss the glaring fact that what many Marxists are now grafting onto their theoretical house as the “gender room” is taken straight from the solipstitic swamps of academic “queer studies” departments, and petit-bourgeois anarcho-counter-culture.

    My own organization is at the forefront among leftists in rejecting the class-first, mechanistic fallacy of black-and-white-unite-and-fight that tried to graft “race” on leftist theory — because it ignored the actual material relations that constitute race. Yet, rather than take the trouble to understand feminism, my comrades are rapidly being shifted by (mostly younger) comrades to accept this pomo solipsism, which wants to deny the category “women”, out of fear (based on lack of familiarity with feminist scholarship and debate) that they will be branded as out-of-it, passe, “transphobic, or whatever. We would never deny African Americans — as one example — this category, knowing full well that there is an entire system that relates to African Americans in a very specific way, and that the independence and solidarity required to fight back is fundamentally based on embracing that very category… proudly and militantly. But we have people arguing that there is no such thing as a woman?! And we do!

    We have seen where this is a Trojan Horse for feminism; and we have seen how the many malignant idealizations of women, no matter how carefully attenuated, serve to perpetuate this system.

    So… long story short… I am revisiting my own earlier hypothesis that leftist men are the next in line to learn. I very well may have been entertaining a fantasy. Or maybe I am just tired tonight. I’m not generalizing, not completely, about men on the left. I got a call the other day from a young male veteran who wanted to get copies of the gender book to sell at a sit-in on the DC mall.

    So, Lapterov, I have not the foggiest notion what to do. If we all keep going, hopefully it will come to us. What does seem clear is that though there are some of us on the male side of humanity who have crossed this river, males — by and large — right, left, or center — are not going to surrender the power.

    16 September 2006, 8:51 pm

59. peggy:

    Stan – Don’t give up. You may feel discouraged, but just don’t give up. You owe it to those of us who continually learn from you to keep on keeping on.

    Yah, you are right that you were wrong to think that leftist men would be the first men to join the feminist struggle – if that’s what you thought. I guess you were probably in Vietnam when the SDS was active on college campuses. Talk about leftist adventurism, posturing, preening, and giving women in general and feminists in particular a very unpleasant time. I remember that. Wrt gender-relations, the Black Panthers were just as bad.

    It is very very difficult to find a man who won’t give up the power. The closest I have found are certain gay men who treat me with respect, as an equal. Not because I am a woman (there are certain other women that my gay male friends abhor) but just because I am me, evidently. It is a nice change from the usual. But these guys will never ever join the feminist struggle. They say they hate feminists. I tell them I am a feminist, but they just ignore that. So maybe they haven’t given up the power after all.

    And then there are those guys who pretend to be feminists and oh-so-sympathetic, but really it is just for the purpose of hooking babes.

    And poor old Charles has made an utter fool of himself desperately trying to maintain the upper hand over all of those, male and female, who disagree with him, meanwhile trying to show us that so many ladies love him because he is such a loving man, even while acting quite unlovingly toward Elaina and Yolanda. Charles, do you never experience any cognitive dissonance at all? Any self-doubt? Ever said to a woman, “Thinking about it, I see that you are right and I was wrong”? Here is a wee hint – you will win more respect from women if you do that. But it has to be not fake, because you will be caught in your fakery, and then you will be worse off with the lovable sex than you were before. Let it go, Charles. Just let it go.

    Stan, I have no answers, not even clues. The only thing I am pretty sure about is that it will be a long hard struggle. No glory in sight. I hope for women younger than me that they will find happiness in what they are, and continue to find happiness in all their becomings through long and fulfilling lifetimes. I hope for all members of both sexes that they will find and accept the truth, whatever it is. For myself, occasional respites from pain and a peaceful death. Nothing more.

    16 September 2006, 11:10 pm

60. Julian Real:

    Charles writes:

    If MacKinnon’s equality project is a massive attack on power as it constructs everything, cultural feminism is an effort to transvalue values — to find women’s or feminine values (like care, or intersubjectivity, or particularity) and to restore them to a place at least equal to, probably superior to, the corresponding male values (like self-interest, or objectivity, or generality) that have unjustly pushed their way to the top. Cultural feminism is not nearly as likely as MacKinnon’s thinking to be structural in form: after all, women exist as exemplars of a better way; and if we could put them in charge, or make men more like them, things would get better fast. But it is equally ambitious on the social dimension it cares about: MacKinnon would like to get men by the balls because she does not believe their minds and hearts can follow; whereas cultural feminism has detailed plans for their hearts and minds.

    Hi Charles.

    What of MacKinnon’s have you carefully read, may I respectfully ask? Which books, or which chapters of which books.

    Because your grasp of her work and her ideas are, in my view, not useful, distortive, and wrong.

    You begin by placing MacKinnon in some sort of HISterical heteromale sexual fantasy position she cannot possibly occupy: that of having the power you ascribe to her. Her project is one of many that comprises the efforts of millions of women to survive, and to endure, and to maybe live to tell about what happened to them honestly, and maybe, maybe, once or twice a year, perhaps, strike out against patriarchy in ways that register as something, but never as “a massive attack on power” if we understand your use of power to be patriarchal power.

    MacKinnon carefully notes in her work her regard for Carol Gilligan’s work, while also radically critiquing it. Have you read this critique by MacKinnon of Gilligan? She notes that while Gilligan and others attempt to give women status by statusing what many (but not all) women do, they fail to acknowledge that what women do they do in contexts of terrorism and control, which is to say, patriarchal contexts, which makes what they do and what they value and who they are allowed to be all very unfree, overly determined while not completely determined by patriarchal force, often called love, sex, and Life in These United States, to borrow from Reader’s Digest.

    Women, Charles, molest children, take control of institutions in patriarchal ways, are mean to one another, harm people, sometimes kill.

    Is this what you are talking about when you talk about “women” or are you lost in a fantasy-land of what women are and are made to do, in this real world of suffering where battered women watch their children be smashed sometimes, and cower, and do not, as is presumed, “protect their young” as if a lioness.

    Please keep in mind MacKinnon doesn’t just “think”. She acts in the real world, on behalf of women, that completely diverse population of human beings often and usually systematically deprived of human status. This inability to achieve human status does not make women, somehow, magically, “better”. It makes them suffer. There’s a difference.

    If you are going to speak at all of MacKinnon, I respectfully ask you to quote her and cite the quotes, and I’ll promise to do the same.

    You are misrepresenting what she is doing in the world, the power she has available to her with which to do it. You are participating, in my view, in absurd responses all too typical of Western academically educated male and female intellectuals, which, it sometimes seems, willfully miscomprehend her work, including but not limited to her writings.

    She is fighting, yes–but this doesn’t mean she has power, in the sense in which Larry Flynt has power. It means she has determination. For that I applaud her, as well as for her work, including her writings.

    With the anticipation of a cynical Jewish adult awaiting Santa Claus’s appearance in the wee hours of a December 25th morning, I especially look forward to you citing the parts of her writings where she mentions wanting to get men by the balls and where she states she doesn’t believe their minds and hearts can be humanized, in the ways that many feminists and other humanitarians use the term.

    17 September 2006, 5:34 pm

61. Stan:

    Preicsely why I (with typos) said that Charles is trying to rescue Marx as the last WORD (not work) on “the woman question.” His beef with MacKinnon is that I extensively posted what she had to say in critique of Marx & Engels (esp the latter).

    Recycling second-hand arguments against MacKinnon is always easier than engaging her work directly. The cut-and-paste debate method Charles prefers resets the trains of thought of others, decontextualizes them, and makes it easier to use a grab-bag of argumentitive forms against one decontextualized portion.

    MacKinnon has never once stated that she is anti-male, wants men “by the balls,” or any other such drivel. MacKinnon and Dworkin both have had loving, respectful, personal relationships with men… just as an aside.

    In this case, however, Chalres simply pasted in a long piece of “queer theory” gleaned from the internet, and left us with no real understanding of whether he agreed with the purported representation of “cultural feminism” that this particular writer composed, or if he was simply posting it as a point of interest. This ambiguity leavews some wiggle room to say, this is not my point of view but someone else’s. perfectly acceptable, though I would second Peggy’s request that in these cases we get a portion with a link.

    But my antennae are up on this, BECAUSE MacKinnon is its subject, and because Charles and some of us have a history here about MacKinnon. And it that history, MacKinnon’s cardinal sin has been to critique Engels with both force and clarity.

    This is not a function so much of Charles’ “vive le difference” stuff, and his painful grasping at “heterosex instincts,” etc., as it is (I believe) the discomfort of a religious acolyte when something threatens to shatter the absolute faith.

    I can’t count any longer how many times I have seen this now, among my fellow commies (I remain red as the provberbial baboon’s ass), still experiencing that sense of existential angst, that feeling of a goldfish whose bowl has been shattered, when the True Prophets’ omniscience is challenged.

    That was my last grouse, the one that Peggy feared represented my despair (it was just ordinary fatigue, and withdrawal from a benzodiazepine… but thanks, Peggy for the concern). My insight on this is as a veteran, not the military kind, but one who was once a member of a poltical organization from which both Charles and I can both claim alumni status, where I was required as a matter of duty to “defend the line, even if I disagreed with it,” and which I left in large part due to my emerging consciousness that this organization’s formal (and often tokenish) commitment to women’s legal equality covered up a deeper hostility to the kind of “ultra-feminism” (I had that term used agaisnt what I’d written once) represented by MacKinnon and many others. I felt that discomfort, again and again, that Marxism — which meant so much to me in my own evolutions, and still does — might have made a tremendous error on anything.

    The irony here is that this is part of MacKinnon’s history, too. She began in the Marxist tradition, and was a scholar of Georg Lukacs, the Marxist theorist who delved most deeply into the subject of reification. Marxists rejected MacKinnon. MacKinnon remains, in my opinion, one of the better Marxist theorists alive today in the US. The critique from those trying to reconcile her “social” feminism with “post structuralism” that say she dogmatically freezes women into victimhood are easy to repeat, because it sound erudite to those who haven’t read her directly and paid attention ot whqt they were reading. It is also, to be blunt, bullshit. MacKinnon and the rest of radical feminism has been shouting from the rooftops that “this is how things are right now,” and the urge to try and move beyond that when the basic situation remains unchanged is not the imposition of some kind of victimhood; it is saying, goddamnit, this has NOT changed yet, and it is dishonest, debilitating, and dangerous to suggest otherwise.

    Victims don’t transform themselves into non-victims with a decree. It requires a political struggle, and until the forces at hand acknowledge that the problem exists, that struggle has not yet been decisively and broadly engaged. We cannot ignore it for 35 years, then say, “you’ve been saying this for 35 years… let’s move on now.”

    The reason I thnk it is simple, but not so simple, is that a dumb shit like me, who just has a stubborn streak, can get out of the army at 45, then do politics-and-study for ten years to hack through all this historical undergrowth to a point where what MacKinnon and others are saying is pretty damned obvious. It can’t be that friggin hard to understand. I am not particularly smart. I can hardly do algebra, fercrissake. It is NOT so simple, because if it IS that simple, then my own gut tells me, from my own experience, that the resistance is coming from someplace a lot deeper than the intellect, and that men’s attachment to man-shit, over ot covert, is motivated by some combination of a sense of entitlement and terrible fear. It’s surprising how smart people think you are sometimes, when all you are is tired fo being afraid.

    That’s why my gut is telling me, more and more, that feminism is not just some aspect of the revolution; it IS the damned revolution. Nothing else is going to ever work without it. It’s like Celie’s curse on Mister in “The Color Purple,” where she tells him that nothing good will ever come to him until he does right by her.

    This one may seem rantish, too, because I am still stepping down the dose on the meds. (-:

    17 September 2006, 7:14 pm

62. Marilyn Farhat:

    I was not going to post any more about this subject, but I started choking up as I read Stan’s last post. I will not say much about the reasons, but it really puts the important things in life in perspective where the relationship between men and women is concerned, politically, socially, etc.

    Many of us go through life shattering experiences that put our beliefs and our strengths to the test. War is one of them. Violence in general does the same. Our experiences, money, education, friends, husbands, wives, political affiliation, none of those can give us security. By the same token, none of those things will give women in particular the power and respect they are so aptly entitled to. And, I agree that the change for women will have to come from a deeper place. It has to come from within.

    Western women have come a long way where the law is concerned. They have equal rights with the men. In this culture, women do have an earning and freedom of action and expression capacity that is pretty close to what men have. The prejudice that exists is the sort that cannot be eradicated by law. Despite progress, many women remain locked into submissive roles and those who choose to be otherwise end up alone. I am serious. They are alone because society does not know how to deal with them and they are uncomfortable around them. There are exceptions of course. The issue of Gay people and women in the military is an example.

    I sometimes use Middle Eastern women in my examples because I identify with them, have experienced similar and identical things with them, and they remain one of the most vulnerable groups.

    For a Middle Eastern woman, it is really bad, especially if you are single and relying on yourself for survival and raising your kids. The men cannot handle it, the women are constantly pressuring you to marry or go back home because it is the right thing to do. All the education, money, independence, brains, public work, take second place. They do not do it on purpose. It is just the way they have always been. Your feelings, hopes, dreams, and fears (yes fears) are not part of that world view and your status is reduced to how well you represent the image of the family and what is right by the tradition. That is an intrinsic dilemma in the traditional patriarchal world view. How many preachers do you know who are women, really? And religion is one of the most important driving forces in most people’s lives. Look at the controversy of Mary Magdalena and women in the Catholic Church (Let’s not even touch Islam right now).

    I was 15 when the civil war in Lebanon started. Many of the neighborhood girls were approached by the communist females who were seeking our assistance in helping further the cause of the “oppressed.” We were young, excited, and willing to help. But after the first meeting, all of us young girls just rolled our eyes. What we were asked to do was cook for the men and provide moral support when they came back from the “Green Line”. Scrap that!!!! We knew then, at age 15, that we were not indentured servants for anybody’s cause. We grew up and out of the war mentality pretty soon after that, but it did have its toll. Even women who chose to fight alongside the men and were considered heroes, went back to their second class status after the fighting stopped. Much has been written about the status of women in war.

    My point is that women have to feel comfortable in their independence and when they do feel that, they can struggle as women (with the help of men), but it is a woman’s struggle, and it is internal and external. The reality may be such that it will remain a never-ending struggle. But I have to tell you, I would rather die than be hostage to another human being or entity.

    I think that maybe the fear you were talking about Stan is in all of us. We are all afraid of being alone. We are afraid of “screwing up” by some higher standard we hold. Both men and women fear it and deal with it in different ways.

    Spirituality is an important part of the puzzle, in my opinion. But I think we may not have a grasp on what it entails. My mother used to tell me that it is better to believe in something, anything. Even if you believe in a stone, it is better than believing in nothing. This coming from a woman raised as a Muslim. But maybe it is faith in ourselves and our accomplishments, within a moral framework which puts human beings above all else, that holds part of the answer.

    Maybe it is our destiny to struggle throughout our lives. And I am glad the meds are being tapered. They are not all they are cracked up to be. You, we, all deserve to be happy and feel good about who we are despite the psychopaths and criminals and despite the horrible things we may have gone through. Maybe retiring from the military at 45 and focusing on a new career/interest was a blessing because it gave this nation, your friends and family a decent human being who is willing to speak up, share and help. Trust me, not many of those around.

    18 September 2006, 12:35 am

63. Timothy R. Anderson:

    Uh, hi there, everyone. I typically don ‘t get impressed by ” Yahoo ” ” news.” Today is an exception. Today, Saturday, September 23, 2006
    my Yahoo got me a direct link to a L.A.
    Times newspaper article , ” Many Iraqi soldiers are no-shows in Baghdad. ”
    This is gooood infoRmation.

    To which I will add one ( possibly bizarre ) thingy. American soldiers lack the ” option ”
    of ” not showing . ” They wear the uniform ; they are stuck in Iraq, where the borders HAVE STILL NOT BEEN SECURED .
    Pardon my shouting in capital letters, it is just that the non-profit org called Iraq And Afghanistan Veterans Of America and I seeeeeeeeeeeem realizing the facts at different speeds. ( Some people take a long time to learn, some people don’t learn, etc. )

    http://www.iava.org

    Who am I ? I am Number One Oh Two on the Petition. The petition is at

    http://www.warisaracket.org

    ( Because it IS . ) T. R. Anderson

    23 September 2006, 5:44 pm

64. Bitch | Lab:

    Julian

    Actually, the words Charles quotes are the words of Janet Halley a legal theorists at Harvard. In her book, Split Decisions: How and why to take a break from feminism, she says that MacKinnon carefully reviewed those words. One assumes that MacKinnon rather approved of them. Halley is a great fan of MacKinnon, the early, but not so much of MacKinnon the late. Halley’s project is to ask about the problematic assumptions embedded in MacKinnon “power feminism,” cultural feminism in its sexual subordination mode, as well as in what she calls “convergentist feminisms” such as socialist feminism, antiracist feminism, postcolonial feminism. While she applauds their work, she wants to ask how such projects, in their attempt to synthesize and explanations for all opressions — even in an intersectional framework — get caught up in a notion of power as absolute surbordination which obscures the very real power that feminists can sometimes have. Here, Halley examines the way that MacKinnon’s arguments in the Oncale case can be used against gay men and lesbians in the work place.

    In other words, she looks at the power MacKinnon’s work wields in its limited domain — sexual harassment law — to ask how that theory, because it operates on a model of power as pure domination and victimized surbordination can be twisted to harm gays/lesbians.

    23 September 2006, 10:48 pm

65. Marilyn Farhat:

    Timothy,

    I hear you.

    The US soldiers serving in Iraq may not have an option regarding their choices of whether to show up or not for obvious reasons, but the ones on the home side do.

    I think a few in the veteran groups (especially the younger ones who have been to the first and this current Gulf War) are doing great things to educate citizens and support their fellow soldiers who are choosing not to participate in an illegal and murderous war. They are already writing books and speaking out and mobilizing (and facing trial and prison).

    The problem remains that there are too few soldiers willing to say no. There is the belief that soldiers “can’t” voice their opinion and cannot resist, especially among some veterans speaking against the war at peace rallies and election booths. I would argue that they can and should speak out in an illegal war and in situations that do not pose an immediate threat against innocent people or jeopardize the lives of their fellow soldiers.

    Many have no problem calling Bush a criminal but they have a problem asking their fellow soldiers to disobey criminal orders given by the criminal leadership and their Commander in Chief. Many are still not convinced that what is happening in Iraq in all its aspects, including robbery, torture, violent patrol tactics, humiliation of the civilians, etc. are illegal. It is attributed to “war” and to the fact that those soldiers may not know what they are doing (they are too young and under a lot of pressure). Well, if they are not up to that kind of responsibility, why are they there and why do we as their parents and citizens continue to allow it if we know they are being abused? There is still a lot of political posturing going on, and there are many who do not want to “offend” during peace actions and while “speaking out.”

    My questions to those people always are: is the blowing up of soldiers into 3 or 4 pieces while they are conscious offensive enough to take a real stand? Are the charred bodies of children and headless corpses disgusting enough? Is your political discomfort comparable to the discomfort of those who are wallowing in the mud in the desert and living in holes out of fear because they are constant targets and while they are on missions?

    Are you there for those same soldiers when they come back with mental and emotional “issues” because years ago they blew someone’s head off because they were ordered to and they did it more than 30 times in their career? Will you tolerate their outbursts, constant anger, distrust, and aloofness or will you only invite them to come and speak at YOUR rally, and they had better be some famous veteran who did put their career and safety on the line while disobeying and speaking out (preferably with some time spent in prison. Makes them more marketable) while you refuse to do the same? Are you going to pay for their mortgage or fix their broken marriage?

    The next question is: where are the officers and why are THEY silent? But, I am hearing the beginning of some stirring.

    The burden at this point in time lies with 2 groups in the US nation: those who are fighting on behalf of a criminal administration (the military) and those who are not participating at all (the non-voters and politically and morally apathetic). They remain a sizeable majority and, until they get involved, we will still be in Iraq for many years to come and we will still be scratching our heads and commiserating at peace rallies. We will burn candles at vigils and feel good about ourselves for it while wondering what the heck we should do to stop the Republicans and the war on Iraq (and to hell with the other problems in the world which we are inflaming and are equally bad).

    Drinking coffee at the local “peace coffee shop” while we fuss about the war and looking “groovy” at peace rallies with all our colorful and ethnic clothing and competing slogans does not cut it. Blood and gore do and people need to know what THAT is like.

    I gave a presentation in San Luis Obispo in 2003 about the kinds of injuries and long-term disabilities and implications the victims (military and civilian) of war can face and have faced. People in the audience were crying and, I am not kidding you, many had no clue what weapons and trauma could do to the body, mind, and soul. I made sure the invitation went out to as many high school and college kids and their parents as possible and quite a few did show up and were interested. But you could tell from their faces, they were cringing and shaking their heads, and that was just talking about it without even showing pictures.

    I would hope that our younger generation is better at this than we are, but looking at my son’s age group (late teens-early 20s), I am not too hopeful at this time. However, there are good signs. Most of them know that war IS a racket especially this one. But they do not trust the way we are handling things at this time.

    24 September 2006, 12:18 am

66. Charles:

    Re: Charles’ comment: “Women are great, inherently lovable.”

    The question, or one of them, Charles, is what are women lovable AS, in male supremacist societies? And what makes that “lovability” inherent? Are women lovable if they are fat, hairy, lesbian, militantly anti-male supremacist, not pretty, not light-skinned, not white, not blond, angry, irritated, annoyed, furious, unapologetic, not deferential, and fully armed?

    And, what makes that generalized category of “woman” GREAT?

    ^^^
    CB: Hello Julian .How have you been ?

    Here’s how I arrived at women are inherently lovable and great. There is the term and concept “misogyny” which is very common in the womanist literature. I understand “misogyny” to mean “hate of women in general”. I’m thinking that if it is possible to hate women in general, then it may be possible, as a counter measure to “love women in general ”

    Women are lovable AS women, because , in general they do more of the caring labor of society. As men, we can use this to cultivate a feeling of prowomen in general. It is an effort, as I say to counter misogyny, the hate of women in general which many seem to agree is a phenomenon.

    Now this loving women in general is ,well , actually kind of crude, impossible even. But I don’t know what else to do as a first, crude level of anti-misogyny. Specific situations and experiences will require using common sense and trying to be consistent with the general principle.

    ^^^^^^^

    From my own lensed experiences and observations, what makes women “great” is men’s ability to have and get sexual and emotional access and attention, welcomed and unwelcomed, wanted and unwanted, consensual and nonconsensual, to women, with women, from women, against women. The women men I know call “great” are the women from whom men can obtain sex and get their emotional needs met. If a man cannot get sex from a woman, nor get his emotional needs met from/by her, no man I know calls THAT woman “great”. Your own lensed experiences here?

    ^^^^^
    CB: Well, other examples are many men consider their mothers great , and usually don’t get sex from them. I would guess that most men do not have sex with most women they have association and social contact with. The idea is to just willfully give women an extra “cheer” in daily life, at work, here and there. It is just a mental practice to counter the male supremacism that is rife. It is a conscious effort to ,as an individual, fight back against male supremacy and misogyny in general, even though an individual can only achieve so much against a social structure that is male supremacist.

    That’ my idea. It’s crude, but over the years what’s a supporter of women’s liberation to do. Be a cyberwomensliberationist ?

    ^^^^^^

    What makes women “inherently lovable” is their learned capacities to endure men’s violence and dehumanization such that they do not strike back nearly as often as they ought to, given what is being done to them individually-while-systematically. Specifically, women are not safe to kick men in the nuts, let alone shot to death, nearly as often as men ought to be kicked in the nuts, for what (yes, SOME) men do to (yes, SOME) women, on the street, in the home, and in every private and public space known to and created by MAN.

    Your thoughts on this, Charles?

    ^^^^^

    CB: I think we want to cultivate among men an idea that women are inherently lovable as an anecdote to the mentality many men have that creates the terrible things you list above.

    Now this is not enough. We must do other things ,such as support women for public office, love individual women , which is vast project, support the right to abortion, and other elements of the basic feminist program.

    4 October 2006, 5:01 pm

67. Charles:

    Preicsely why I (with typos) said that Charles is trying to rescue Marx as the last WORD (not work) on “the woman question.” His beef with MacKinnon is that I extensively posted what she had to say in critique of Marx & Engels (esp the latter).

    Recycling second-hand arguments against MacKinnon is always easier than engaging her work directly. The cut-and-paste debate method Charles prefers resets the trains of thought of others, decontextualizes them, and makes it easier to use a grab-bag of argumentitive forms against one decontextualized portion.

    ^^^^^^
    CB: On the other hand, my approach is conversational, attending to most of what is said. It also allows the reader to see whether I am replying to something that was actually said ,since my comments are annotations , replies that are clearly about something because they sit next to what they comment on. The linearity of writing makes it difficult to preserve “context”

    Certainly your comments above on what I say are far, far from the contexts in which I wrote. Are they a grabbag of argumentative fores , too ? I certainly can’t tell what parts of what I said you are referring to.

    As to cut and paste, I don’t cut anything up except to insert comments.

    ^^^^^

    MacKinnon has never once stated that she is anti-male, wants men “by the balls,” or any other such drivel. MacKinnon and Dworkin both have had loving, respectful, personal relationships with men… just as an aside.

    ^^^^
    CB: I haven’t said the MacKinnon wants men “by the balls” or other such drivel. I don’t use that. Why do you put this here when I never said any such ?

    ^^^^^^

    In this case, however, Chalres simply pasted in a long piece of “queer theory” gleaned from the internet, and left us with no real understanding of whether he agreed with the purported representation of “cultural feminism” that this particular writer composed, or if he was simply posting it as a point of interest. This ambiguity leavews some wiggle room to say, this is not my point of view but someone else’s. perfectly acceptable, though I would second Peggy’s request that in these cases we get a portion with a link.

    ^^^^^
    CB: I put “fyi” meaning for your information. It is of the literature, so to speak. As to the article, it’s pretty “technical” and I can’t say I understand the whole thing, but, hey we have to study, study, study. I actually thought it was sort of pro-Mackinnon since it refers to her as the most “brilliant” or some such. That’s part of why I posted it, because you are a respecter of Mackinnon and it had a big fat compliment of her there.

    ^^^^^^^

    But my antennae are up on this, BECAUSE MacKinnon is its subject, and because Charles and some of us have a history here about MacKinnon. And it that history, MacKinnon’s cardinal sin has been to critique Engels with both force and clarity.

    ^^^^
    CB: Ah yes sin. That you say I have a religious mentality about this is another part of the history on this.

    I don’t think of it as sin, but as throwing out part of the valuable base of women’s liberation theory. The virtue of Engels in later years is his combining women’s issues with class and state issues integrally. I also criticized Engels, but one cannot throwout Marxism without falling into the woods. Somehow, main parts of it must be retained in developing the best feminist theory. I’ll have to study M more and be more specific

    ^^^^^^

    This is not a function so much of Charles’ “vive le difference” stuff, and his painful grasping at “heterosex instincts,” etc., as it is (I believe) the discomfort of a religious acolyte when something threatens to shatter the absolute faith.

    ^^^
    CB: Yes, you have me quite psychoanlazed as having a religious faithful mentality. My thought on that is one day it’s going to occur to you that my thinking is quite lively, critical and not at all religious.

    You might do better to compare my thinking to that of a lawyer than that of a religious person.

    ^^^^^^

    I can’t count any longer how many times I have seen this now, among my fellow commies (I remain red as the provberbial baboon’s ass), still experiencing that sense of existential angst, that feeling of a goldfish whose bowl has been shattered, when the True Prophets’ omniscience is challenged.

    ^^^^^
    CB: I can’t tell you how many times Stan has used this metaphor of stodgy old religious like thinking to describe me. I’m trying to think when you have pointed to something to what I said specifically and argued your point, rather than repeating it again and again like a mantra, without trying to show that that is an accurate characterization of what I think or the way I think. I can’t remember any such times. Actually, my thinking includes quite a bit of anthropology that has come about years after Marx and Engels. And as I say, there’s probably some lawyer’s style in it.

    It would help to be more specific rather than make generalizations not tied to something specifically I said.

    ^^^^^

    That was my last grouse, the one that Peggy feared represented my despair (it was just ordinary fatigue, and withdrawal from a benzodiazepine… but thanks, Peggy for the concern). My insight on this is as a veteran, not the military kind, but one who was once a member of a poltical organization from which both Charles and I can both claim alumni status, where I was required as a matter of duty to “defend the line, even if I disagreed with it,” and which I left in large part due to my emerging consciousness that this organization’s formal (and often tokenish) commitment to women’s legal equality covered up a deeper hostility to the kind of “ultra-feminism” (I had that term used agaisnt what I’d written once) represented by MacKinnon and many others. I felt that discomfort, again and again, that Marxism — which meant so much to me in my own evolutions, and still does — might have made a tremendous error on anything.

    The irony here is that this is part of MacKinnon’s history, too. She began in the Marxist tradition, and was a scholar of Georg Lukacs, the Marxist theorist who delved most deeply into the subject of reification. Marxists rejected MacKinnon. MacKinnon remains, in my opinion, one of the better Marxist theorists alive today in the US. The critique from those trying to reconcile her “social” feminism with “post structuralism” that say she dogmatically freezes women into victimhood are easy to repeat, because it sound erudite to those who haven’t read her directly and paid attention ot whqt they were reading. It is also, to be blunt, bullshit. MacKinnon and the rest of radical feminism has been shouting from the rooftops that “this is how things are right now,” and the urge to try and move beyond that when the basic situation remains unchanged is not the imposition of some kind of victimhood; it is saying, goddamnit, this has NOT changed yet, and it is dishonest, debilitating, and dangerous to suggest otherwise.

    ^^^^^^^
    CB: Oh

    What does Mackinnon say about the need for women to get equal incomes in order to change things.

    ^^^^

    Victims don’t transform themselves into non-victims with a decree. It requires a political struggle, and until the forces at hand acknowledge that the problem exists, that struggle has not yet been decisively and broadly engaged. We cannot ignore it for 35 years, then say, “you’ve been saying this for 35 years… let’s move on now.”

    The reason I thnk it is simple, but not so simple, is that a dumb shit like me, who just has a stubborn streak, can get out of the army at 45, then do politics-and-study for ten years to hack through all this historical undergrowth to a point where what MacKinnon and others are saying is pretty damned obvious. It can’t be that friggin hard to understand. I am not particularly smart. I can hardly do algebra, fercrissake. It is NOT so simple, because if it IS that simple, then my own gut tells me, from my own experience, that the resistance is coming from someplace a lot deeper than the intellect, and that men’s attachment to man-shit, over ot covert, is motivated by some combination of a sense of entitlement and terrible fear. It’s surprising how smart people think you are sometimes, when all you are is tired fo being afraid.

    ^^^^^^
    CB: Yea, also the women’s movement has had successes. It hasn’t done nothing since Sojourner Truth or Mary Wollsencraft ( spelling). There is much more to do , but we have to take note of where there are successes. I mean the women’s right to vote or an abortion did not come through menshit largesse. It was won by feminists. It’s like Black people taking note of the fact that we won the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement , while recognizing that Freedom is a Constant Struggle.

    ^^^^^^^

    That’s why my gut is telling me, more and more, that feminism is not just some aspect of the revolution; it IS the damned revolution. Nothing else is going to ever work without it. It’s like Celie’s curse on Mister in “The Color Purple,” where she tells him that nothing good will ever come to him until he does right by her.

    This one may seem rantish, too, because I am still stepping down the dose on the meds. (-:

    Comment by Stan — 9/17/2006 @ 7:14 pm

    4 October 2006, 5:41 pm

68. Charles:

    Charles and Elaina,

    I request that you take your quarrels off-site. You are just sniping at each other. And Charles, I request of you that you provide the URL of any interesting website you find, rather than copying and pasting it onto Feral Scholar. Stan has asked this of other posters as well. It is just a matter of courtesy.

    That’s all.

    Comment by peggy — 9/15/2006 @ 10:56 pm

    Peggy,

    The URL is there. I put it there when I posted it. All you have to do is click on it.

    Charles

    11 October 2006, 4:59 pm

69. Charles:

    Charles writes:

    If MacKinnon’s equality project is a massive attack on power as it constructs everything, cultural feminism is an effort to transvalue values — to find women’s or feminine values (like care, or intersubjectivity, or particularity) and to restore them to a place at least equal to, probably superior to, the corresponding male values (like self-interest, or objectivity, or generality) that have unjustly pushed their way to the top. Cultural feminism is not nearly as likely as MacKinnon’s thinking to be structural in form: after all, women exist as exemplars of a better way; and if we could put them in charge, or make men more like them, things would get better fast. But it is equally ambitious on the social dimension it cares about: MacKinnon would like to get men by the balls because she does not believe their minds and hearts can follow; whereas cultural feminism has detailed plans for their hearts and minds.

    Hi Charles.

    -clip-

    Comment by Julian Real — 9/17/2006 @ 5:34 pm

    ^^^^^
    CB: Julian, I didn’t write the above. It is written by a woman feminist, who wrote under a man’s name. I just posted it fyi, because it discusses Mackinnon , and it’s sort of feminist theoretical discussion _au courant_.

    12 October 2006, 4:41 pm

70. Charles:

    Comment by peggy — 9/16/2006 @ 11:10 pm

    Clip-

    And poor old Charles has made an utter fool of himself desperately trying to maintain the upper hand over all of those, male and female, who disagree with him, meanwhile trying to show us that so many ladies love him because he is such a loving man, even while acting quite unlovingly toward Elaina and Yolanda. Charles, do you never experience any cognitive dissonance at all? Any self-doubt? Ever said to a woman, “Thinking about it, I see that you are right and I was wrong”?

    ^^^^^
    CB: Don’t think I saw this before. Yes, Peggy, that’s the story of my life for a while now. In fact, I became a Marxist because of a close friend of mine about 25 years ago. I wasn’t a Marxist. She was. I eventually said “you are right and I was wrong”. And I have pretty much adopted that as a way to develop my character in general: Obeying women friends, in general. Take their advise on how to modify my personality. I have a couple of essays on it: Intimacy as the way to develop as an individual. The one growing out of the two.

    I do experience self-doubt, but not as to my general attitude of the anti-thesis of misogyny, or yielding to women to develop my character.

    And the theoretical basis for it is in the essay I put on the list. I’ll find a quote on it.

    Anyway, the answer to your question is an emphatic yes. It has been a method of self-improvement of mine for over 25 years.

    ^^^^^

    Here is a wee hint – you will win more respect from women if you do that. But it has to be not fake, because you will be caught in your fakery, and then you will be worse off with the lovable sex than you were before. Let it go, Charles. Just let it go.

    ^^^^^
    CB: Actually, yes, I’ve long experienced that doing what woman say is the way to get them to respect you. If a man subordinates himself to women, things go better in the relationship.

    Of course, there is a limit to this, because, alas, women in this society are also enculturated as individualists. They can’t really take responsibility for your life and lead you in all things, so I have to still be the final decisionmaker for myself. I mean a woman can’t be your mother. She gets pissed off at you if she has to tell you everything. Plus, she can’t actually run your life and hers. It’s too much work.

    12 October 2006, 5:11 pm

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