Boysh_t Watch: Gender Anxiety Disorder
Let’s start with November 2, post ‘Coultergeist’:
Did s/he claim to be a woman on his/her voter registration form? Because that could be making a false statement right there.Update 11/02 3:30 PM ET: Well, it looks like s/he beat that rap. S/he left it blank. Smart girl . . . er, whatever, Ann.
Well that’s the familiar old macho putdown of The Other Guy’s Women, ain’t it? Back in the Cold War days the Yanks used to have quite a line in cartoons and jokes about ugly fat Russian women, about butch Russian (female) athletes, etc. Accusing the loathed Other of being a Gender Fraud, or of ambiguous gender, goes right back to the heart of deep gender anxieties and little boys yelling “You’re a faaa-aaag!” and “Sissy!” at each other in the schoolyard; later on, their drill sergeants will shame them by calling them “ladies” [and worse] when they underperform, or the shopfloor boss will call them “a bunch of old women” if they make too much noise about workplace safety. Accusations of failure to perform gender correctly are a powerful social control mechanism. Furthermore, accusing the Other Guys of having Ugly Women is a none-too-subtle way of accusing them of being less than alpha males themselves, i.e. the wingnuts must be a buncha pathetic losers if their idea of a sex symbol is Coulter. Nyuk nyuk nyuk, eh?
Not to mention the implicit putdown of Coulter not only as a wingnut talking head [and no one could loathe her ideas or her way of expressing them more than I], but also as an uppity loudmouthed bitch who isn’t adequately feminine, i.e. who dares to disagree with self-appointed Dominant Male Leftyboy. There must be something wrong with anyone who disagrees with Me, see? I mean really wrong, like their gender is subject to question. If Billmon were a Righty he would most likely also be questioning her “Americanism” — a fundamental point of bonding and identity anxiety among wingnut patriots. But as a Good Librul the most totalising dogma he has — justabout the only one left to Libruls in which charges of heresy or falseflagging retain any effective sting or venom — is Gender.
You’ll hear echoes of this she isn’t even a real woman meme in many leftyboy slurs on Condi Rice, and in rightyboy slurs on HRC. Both have been accused of being “men in drag” or (almost equivalently in the mind of the slur-caster) “dykes”. Of course, if they behaved all frilly and femme, they’d be “airheads” or “bimbos” and hence not fit for public office. Some days a girl just can’t win 
Also Nov 2, But the problem with Fox News is that it is so identified with the Grand Old Prostitutes […] and There was a time when his British press whores — those at the tabloid Sun in particular […] [Foxed Out] The durable Librul meme of the “presstitutes” gets recycled damn near daily, despite little “humorous” asides like No offense intended to gay hookers, who after all are also productive members of society and have to work hard for a living — particularly when their clients are fundamentalist preachers. [The Joke’s On Us]
If I’m the Dems, right about now I’m calling up those cocksuckers and saying, “You know, there’s something about these numbers that doesn’t look right to us. […]” [Tuesday’s Real Winners] What’s the worst thing an alpha male can call a hated enemy? Why, a “catcher” of course. No offence to gay hookers or any other gay men, and gay marriage is a fine idea, but when you need a really vile name to call someone just despicable, why not reach for cocksucker? I mean, it’s right there, cued up on the jukebox of the subconscious, always ready for a replay.
And then, no hip leftyboy pundit’s week in print (or on screen) is complete without at least one vivid anal rape metaphor: But after the outrageous way the Washington tried to bully and buy the election, watching the Nicaraguan voters ram a big, fat broomstick up Ollie North’s glory hole is just pure joy. [Viva Nicaragua!] From the endless jokes about Cheney/Rove/whoever as “prison brides” after indictment and sentencing, to straightforward fantasies of Abu-Ghraib style abuses of “the enemy,” the patriarchal imagination reliably resorts to the image and metaphor of rape — and the voyeuristic observation of rape — to express rage, vengeance, and punishment. That was Nov 6.
Also on Nov 6 we return to “presstitution”, as Billmon scolds Halperin for admitting that corporate news coverage is “product”: Although in this case, the “product” resembles a part of the human anatomy — a fleshy, penetrable part [Moving Product]… back to that astonishing Librul cognitive dissonance: that prostitution is groovy and liberating, but at the same time it’s the correct and apt metaphor for the most despised institutions or individuals in our rhetorical gunsights at the present moment. Not to mention that “product” and “penetrable” are so closely associated — again the strong conceptual overlap of commodification and receptivity, and the deep anxiety of dominant males over their own protected status as full (noncommodified) human beings and impenetrable (sovereign) bodies.
Couple the GOP’s rat-fucking campaign with all the other stuff we already know about – [The Octopus, Nov 7] … well, I’m not quite sure what “rat-fucking” is, other than immediately and grotesquely lethal for the rat. But the phallolalic flavour of the discourse remains consistent.
As the Republicans start to whine about voting accuracy in the light of their national rollback and loss of face, Billmon rightly calls them on their hypocrisy as of Nov 8. But what’s the metaphor he employs? I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the GOP cross-dressing act for a while. Personally, I think Ken looks fabulous in that strapless black cocktail dress. Don’t you? [Quote of the Day] Jeez, again with the gender anxiety — and the underlying message is what, now? That cross-dressing is as despicable, as hypocritical, as morally bankrupt as Republican machine politics and election theft? or that the Republican radical right apparat in general — with its cabinet wars, its assault on civil liberties, its nepotism and war profiteering, its environmental vandalism, its imperialist delusions — is as distressing and unnatural and vexing as people who don’t obey gendered dresscodes? Wow, that’s telling ‘em.
Or is it merely that the most effective way for a guy to mock and deride (to humiliate in effigy) another guy is to literally or figuratively cross-dress him in women’s clothing? The dungeon-masters at Abu Ghraib would agree, as would Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County.
Or is the message that wingnut extremism is as fundamentally different from good progressive politics, as absolutely and unequivocally a Polar Opposite, never to be confused, as… male and female? and that when the Bad Guys try to borrow the Good Guys’ recent tactics they make themselves as ridiculous a spectacle as a woman in bloomers, er I mean a woman without a burqa, oops I mean a man in an evening gown, oops I mean a woman with unshaven legs, oops…?
By Nov 8 Bill’s envisioning the Democratic Party as Marsellus in ‘Pulp Fiction’, a male character taking bloody and sadistic revenge on his rapist. [Pulp Fiction] And the cross-dressing meme is back for an encore [Political Cross Dressing Watch] — don’t know about you, but I think Ed [Gillespie] looks pretty in pink.
And that’s just one week of one — fairly literate and thoughtful — male pwogblogger. [And as compared to real hotbeds of dickspeak on both right and left, it’s actually fairly mild.] Multiply that by thousands — tens of thousands — and we have an avalanche of unexamined phallolalia, an unrelenting memestorm dissing and downgrading everything that is not male and dominant/straight, endlessly shoring up and nervously defending that psychic Maginot Line that separates the Men from the Lesser Genders (i.e. the Punks).
If a blogger reverted as compulsively to any other social marker — endless racial slurs and metaphors leaning heavily on white supremacy vs ‘other races’, endless consumer/class putdowns emphasising the superiority of the moneyed over the poor or workers, endless flagwaving to show the unAmericanism of anyone who disagreed with him, or even the inherent greatness of his home state or town or religious denomination over all others — it would be recognised as the symptom of an ideological obsession, to put it kindly. But the magic of patriarchy, with gender as its primary binary, is that Gender Anxiety Tourette’s with its rousing choruses of “Phallus Phallus Ueber Alles” doesn’t look like neurosis or bigotry or even ideology. It just looks like normal masculine discourse. He-man talk. From — ahem — “straight shooters.”
Yaaaawn.
On Nov 3 our friend mourns, I just wish more Americans could look beyond the televised images and the manipulative ways they are used… [God Wept] … Amen to that; and me, how I wish that male lefties — with all that insight, all that intelligence, all that verbal and analytical agility — could look behind ther own misogynist tropes and the manipulative way in which they deliver the message, over and over again, predictable as clockwork: Straight Guys Rule, Girls and Punks are Losers. Ya know sometimes I wonder, reading some of our leftyboy “allies” — how the hell can they crank out so much text with so few typos, when they are so obviously typing with their dicks?
Randy Morris:
“…typing with their dicks…”
Wow, there’s an image.
Anyway,good stuff Stan. Thanks.
Randy
MODERATOR’S NOTE: De wrote this, not me. -Stan
10 November 2006, 3:40 amDeAnander:
ahem.
10 November 2006, 4:16 amJosiah:
Great analysis as usual, Deanander. And I’m not just saying that to correct R.M. (j/k). I am particularly interested this:
“If a blogger reverted as compulsively to any other social marker — endless racial slurs and metaphors leaning heavily on white supremacy vs ‘other races’, endless consumer/class putdowns emphasising the superiority of the moneyed over the poor or workers, endless flagwaving to show the unAmericanism of anyone who disagreed with him, or even the inherent greatness of his home state or town or religious denomination over all others — it would be recognised as the symptom of an ideological obsession, to put it kindly. But the magic of patriarchy, with gender as its primary binary, is that Gender Anxiety Tourette’s with its rousing choruses of “Phallus Phallus Ueber Alles†doesn’t look like neurosis or bigotry or even ideology. It just looks like normal masculine discourse. He-man talk. From — ahem — “straight shooters.â€
This kind of gender-exceptionalism relative to other power systems is an issue you have brought up before on this blog, and which has sparked some heated debate. Why does patriarchy remain “unreconstructed” in that its crudest verbal and symbolic expressions remain omnipresent and overt, unlike white supremacy (for example), where there is a split between the obvious material inequalities built on slavery and colonialism and the much subtler legitimations performed by a levelling rhetoric of “colorblindness” ?
I remember an earlier post you made about this that was criticized by a black woman who was, understandably, angry that white women have the luxury of contrasting race- and gender-discourse taboos in separation from each other, given that she has to deal with them together. But this goes to the heart of the problem, doesn’t it? Because, while at the level of popular discourse “white supremacist†refers to fringe groups which few have to claim allegiance to, few would deny being raised in a “patriarchal family”; if white supremacy is a central rather than a fringe ideology in U.S. society, it has been conceptually externalized to the other side of the tracks, so to speak, while patriarchy remains proudly at home everywhere.
Most of the black women I’ve discussed feminism with identify culturally, historically, and socially more easily with black men than with white women, because their family and community structure is more often intra-racial than interracial. To serve power, “races†have to cluster into community-sized groupings corresponding with nations and subnations (think of de facto apartheid zoning in most U.S. cities domestically, and immigration law internationally), while “sexes†have to mix at the micro-level of the family everywhere. I know, this is not a new observation.
But I think we can see where gender and race parted ways in this respect. Under slavery, the system of overt physical domination overlapped with the forms of physical domination that have always gone on in patriarchal relationships, i.e. the weirdly shifting butch-femme dialectic. This meant that anti-black racism had to be as overt as the physical body itself, obsessively caricaturing African appearances in everyday speech, Sambos and Mammies in newspapers on onstage, etc. The myth of the “colorstruck†white gaze (we enslave them because they are Black) is conversant with the rapist’s libidinal defense (I raped her because she was Hot).
One of the reasons for Jim Crow, not unlike the rationale for “housewifeization†described by Maria Mies in “Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale,†was that the placement of taboos on physical mechanisms of body-domination made the close proximity they required no longer practicable. Now the hierarchy had to be maintained at a distance, with the carrot-and-stick of debt and substance dependency and a rhetoric of diagnosis. There are many parallels here between the Ghetto and the Third World (not surprising given the linking power structure): welfare and WB/IMF aid programs, clinical sterilization, the “informal economy” filling employment vaccuums. Keeping in mind the growth of national consciousness among previously split ethnic groups fighting colonialism, we can remember bell hooks’ observation that segregation (de facto rather than de jure in the case of the northern cities) paradoxically generated black national unity among previously scattered ex-slaves.
If you read Betty Friedan, in stark contrast, you get a picture of atomized suburban white women segregated both from men and from each other, except for Bridge Games or shopping trips. The Moynihan Report fantasy of Black single mothers living in a welfare-funded urban matriarchy is the nightmare that the white suburban nuclear-family dream is haunted by, because it represents a breakdown of patriarchal order, a symbolic conjuncture of female solidarity, population growth and males on the street rather than at home. And the forms of female solidarity that were able to survive between and within male-dominated family structures, that created enclaves and collectives, have been in fact what made feminist movements possible.
I’m sorry for rambling. But what I mean is that, because gender is less conducive than race to macro-segregation and national identity, patriarchy has to be woven into the social fabric as comprehensively as heterosexual mixing itself, i.e. everywhere. And this is why “bitch†slides off the male tongue so easily, because most men enter close physical relationships with women in their lives and are thus the local enforcers of patriarchy. In contrast, the physical aspect of racial domination has been professionalized into the domain of cops and other local enforcers of the law, who noncoincidentially are the most likely to be overt racists, because they are on the internal-colonial frontier. The whites who are the most professedly colorbrind are often the most unlikely to actually see black people, as they are the most racially privileged and geographically segregated, i.e. Midwestern liberal arts professors or San Francisco botanists. There is a connection between actual physical domination and the body-related expressions overtly encoding it, on the one hand, and externalized domination—segregation, proxy civil warface, debt and dependency—and the territorial expressions covertly encoding it, on the other.
10 November 2006, 9:35 amJulio:
Meanwhile in Mexico City, the local legislature acknowledged legal rights to gay/lesbian “sociedades de convivencia.” Not marriage or full rights yet, but a step in that direction:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/11/10/portada.pdf
10 November 2006, 10:37 amhttp://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/11/10/index.php?section=capital&article=049n1cap
Elaina:
“and that when the Bad Guys try to borrow the Good Guys’ recent tactics they make themselves as ridiculous a spectacle as a woman in bloomers, er I mean a woman without a burqa, oops I mean a man in an evening gown, oops I mean a woman with unshaven legs, oops…”
Good lord. That one made my sides hurt and my coffee come up.
You know, you could do a similar study in phallolalia with the random tourettesy blurts that come out right here on yer own blog. THAT would make me pee my britches.
10 November 2006, 10:46 amElaina:
My kudos to De. You make me inspired to write stuff.
10 November 2006, 10:48 amYolanda Carrington:
I posted two comments on this thread this morning—one about Billmon’s racism—and neither of them were published. I’m wondering why.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Try them again. Not sure what happened.
10 November 2006, 1:28 pmYolanda Carrington:
What I tried to send was this link of Billmon’s Photoshop of Wolf Blitzer in blackface, and the reaction among bloggers of color. The shit was all over the POC blogosphere, but not too many white bloggers picked it up. With racism, that tends to happen.
I also wanted y’all to read this post over at Zuky. Brotha is on point. I reposted it at TPC as well.
10 November 2006, 2:00 pmConfused:
Wait just a minute. I am still not sure what my role is with the real new world order. That’s right, the one where women are equal. As a man who is really making an effort to ‘get’ the whole deal, I just find too many contradictions in everyone’s behavior to make any sensible conclusion about where I fit in this constantly changing (read evolving) scene. Anyone who can make sense of all of this without attacking either gender or better yet ANY gender has my respect. And yes, I agree that it is all rather disgusting, but does this mean I can’t call my brother a sissy anymore?
10 November 2006, 2:52 pm;o} ML
Randy Morris:
Heh, sorry De. Sometimes all I see is “Filed under” and the person’s name escapes me. So I will edit my previous comment:
“…typing with their dicks…â€
Wow, there’s an image.
Anyway,good stuff De. Thanks for posting this.
Randy
10 November 2006, 3:09 pmDeAnander:
@YC damn, that was on my list of things to roast him for. He was just on a whiteboy roll the last couple of weeks. And that defensive/aggro response to the accurate criticism of that disgusting blackface “joke” — just pathetic. I also meant to x-link to that excellent Kai Chang essay on “PC” at your place and forgot — late-night-itis! I’m getting too old to stay up so late blogging
and of course, it’s easy to “forget” to address those race meme-neutrons that pass through my white skin w/o much pain, and to dwell on the gender meme-neutrons that perforate my own little ego. Or in other words, apologies for noticing and being disgusted and then not “remembering” to mention… privilege just keeps leaking, like bad plumbing.
10 November 2006, 7:19 pmDeAnander:
meanwhile, put your analyst on danger money, baby… [the ref is to D Adams’ Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, apologies to those not familiar with it…] he’s at it again…
11 November 2006, 1:00 amRequired:
Homophobia from counter punch. “Don’t like Bush cause he’s a fag” is essentially the message of this CounterPunch site of the day.
http://www.bettybowers.com/isbushgay.html
A couple days later there’s an article about how Borat lowers the standards of political satire! The ironing is delicious (Simpsons fan).
11 November 2006, 10:27 amInfiltrator:
For some of the most mysogynist, leftyboy work out there, check out the tryworks dot org. http://www.tryworks.org
The writer(s)regularly position themselves as champions of the usual anti-imperialist causes, but can rarely go three posts without using the c word or calling for the rape of women they deem deserving.
One of the women the character “Mordock” called for to be raped is a professor at CU, the other a journalist. The November 9, 2006 post containing this hate speech was supposedly about comic books, but took a hellish turn out of nowhere with an image of assault straight out of a snuff film.
Sadly, Professor Ward Churchill has in the past given this hideous website first look press releases regarding his case with CU.
What happened to Churchill is an abomination.
But so is this woman hating website.
11 November 2006, 12:42 pmDeAnander:
I’m still mulling over the intersection of intimacy, propinquity, and phatic hate speech.
Digression: I distinguish phatic hate speech (the kind that is uttered without conscious intent or awareness, not even awareness of being a “cute bad boy” or “un-PC”) from overt or intentional hate speech. Overt or intentional hate speech can be denied [”hey, can’t you take a joke, I’m just being satirical, freedom of speech, blah blah”] but it is not uttered unconsciously — it is a “speech act”. For example I think white Amurkan leftyboys are at least semi-conscious of racism, even when they choose to be “edgy” and use a racist meme in childish rebellion against “political correctness” — at least that is their cover story, and the point is that they know they need a cover story and get defensive when called on their s**t. [as don’t we all…]
But 80 years ago (I’ve been reading the dos Passos trilogy, and he had an unerring ear for dialect and contemporary usage) the average Amurkan whitemale, across class boundaries and political affiliations, could say without blinking “I’ve been working like a n*gg*r” or “There’s not a restaurant fit for a white man all the way to Paris,” or “that’s white of you, friend,” with absolutely no awareness that any insult has been uttered. These were common figures of speech, as common as “raining cats and dogs” or “a stitch in time saves nine”, and uttered as formulaically with no conscious parsing of the actual content. A limerick like “There was a young girl from Malarkey / who had an affair with a darky” reflects the same non-person status of people of colour in the discourse — “young girl,” not “young white girl,” because “girl” = Human = White; if the limerick were about a young Black girl then a modifier would have been required for the marked category. There is a world of assumption in those two rhymed lines: that the person reciting them is white, that the listener is white, that no person of colour has any meaningful presence as a bystander or in the conversation. A whole apartheid world is constructed in just two lines of a stupid limerick.
It is slightly shocking to me, today, to read dos Passos because of the very neutrality and unconsciousness with which he as the writer, and his characters, utter these racist tropes. The fact that they pass unquestioned and unremarked is more shocking than the tropes themselves. Their sheer ordinariness appals.
Anyway, the bloggery of leftyboy pundits seems to contain likewise a world of assumption: het men writing for het male readership, with no woman (or gay man) having any meaningful presence as a bystander or in the conversation. Like Locker Room Talk, in which a cosy all-male, all-straight atmosphere is assumed and thus license is claimed to say things which “in mixed company” would offend. And yet what company could be more mixed than a public blog, which any passerby can read? (The consistent recourse to misogynist utterance defines the space as Boys Club, where women may be tolerated but are reminded regularly that their opinions, self-respect, dignity etc. are of zero consequence.)
Anyway, I’m thinking that distance vs propinquity does have something to do with it all. For example, there is a lot of racism against Arabs in US popular culture ever since the oil war propaganda push began — the first Iraq invasion, maybe even earlier. New hate speech vocabulary like “sand-n*gg*r” and “towelhead” was promulgated to assist the public in hating the designated enemy. But these, like “gollywog” in the British Empire, are terms for a distant Other known only (to the vast majority) via scare propaganda, racist cartoons, racist movie avatars, etc. They are terms used with a conscious animosity, a conscious desire to insult, distance, and objectify. They do not merge seamlessly into everyday discourse about other topics in the same way that phatic slurs like “jew him down” or “lies like a Welshman” rippled through British common speech of early C20 (and for all I know still do in certain subcultures). What I means is that a phrase like “jew him down” might be used in reference to a dispute between a solidly AngloSaxon customer and a solidly AngloSaxon car dealer down the block — the conversation being about cars and money, not about Jews, and no Jewish person being involved in any way in the transaction. Similarly hetmen throw around fag- and woman-hating rhetoric in their disputes with other hetmen, when ostensibly the discussion has nothing to do with gay men or women.
I suspect that the coarsening of Israeli discourse, on which many progressive/lefty Jewish social critics have remarked sadly — the creep of racist jokes from sly “bad taste” remarks made with a guilty/uneasy laugh, to openly told “Arab jokes” made at parties etc, to phatic utterance of which many speakers are not even fully conscious — reflects the intimacy of the Occupation, the propinquity of the oppressor with the oppressed. If Israeli vernacular gets to the point where Jewish citizens insult other Jewish citizens by casually comparing them to Arabs or using Arab-metaphors, the process will be nearly complete…
The phatic slur, as opposed to the conscious slur, does seem to be a product of daily interaction… a way of normalising relations of dominance and submission, naturalising them by infusing those relations into every realm of discourse? so that even when men are not “talking about women,” i.e. complaining about wives, comparing girlfriends, dissing their mums-in-law, they are still “talking (dirt) about women” every time they insult a fellow male, engage in political discourse, get angry, talk about sports, science, literature, the arts… the metaphors of gender permeate all realms of discourse so that the dissing of women and worshipping of the weaponised phallus are the paper on which most other thoughts and ideas are written. The elevator music of patriarchy…
I suspect that for some anglo speakers, racist phatic utterance is still, to this day, the paper on which other thoughts are written — metaphors of race still occupy that phatic space for some demographics untouched by the civil rights movement. But a cultural shift did happen, with enormous effort; even the overtly racist WPP/BNP and their ilk are conscious that they are speaking and thinking in opposition to another human force, indeed in opposition to the national official consensus — their utterance has a target and their animosity is in focus. Of course for anglo pwog/lefty boys (and girls) there is a consciousness of such racist phrases (at least those that are “on the list”): they are no longer seamless, they stand out from the stream of discourse and are marked as kapu (for the recovering racist whitefolks trying to not to talk like that as a conscious strategy for learning not to think like that). For some Libruls the kapu is mild, in the nature of a social faux pas like farting at the dinner table; for others (more radical) it is a serious kapu, grounds for the shunning of an acquaintance, severance of a business relationship or breaking of a friendship…
Feminists have not yet succeeded in bringing the phatic burbling of misogyny into focus, making it something that anyone (other than a few radical “oversensitive” critics) generally notices. It was at one time semi-hidden by the conventions of bourgeois “decency,” i.e. men did not speak in this way with women present. But by breaking down some of those gender-segregationist conventions the feminist movement did more or less pull the cover off of masculinist discourse, bringing it out into the open — in movies, on TV, in literature, and in the Librul blogosphere men feel free to write and talk in the argot of the locker room… I wonder what it meant that at one time “respectable” men sought to hide the worst of their misogyny (prostitution, misogynist phatic utterance and rhetoric) from women of their own caste, and now they do not and the whole culture is expected to adopt the locker-room discourse, even grade school children?
Perhaps propinquity requires this phatic stream of thought policing precisely because a higher intensity of dehumanising propaganda is required when the Other is staring us in the face every day, sharing our personal space. The underlying relationship of power has to be more obfuscated to prevent a crisis (either of hostility or of conscience)? Perhaps it is because the master is always more vulnerable to the oppressed persons in his own household (he has to sleep sometime, after all) than to the colonised population overseas?
and now I wander back to Josiah, w/whom I think I’m agreeing…
In contrast, the physical aspect of racial domination has been professionalized into the domain of cops and other local enforcers of the law, who noncoincidentially are the most likely to be overt racists, because they are on the internal-colonial frontier.
And men — most men, straight men, conformant straight men — are on the internal-colonial frontier where the women-natives have to be kept down. And yet unlike most racist cops (well the few I have personally met anyway) who admit to their racism fairly openly (i.e. it is conscious rather than phatic), most men do not admit that they are enforcers or that they hate and distrust women. Even when every other word out of their mouths (or keyboards) confirms this.
Once again I’m wandering around trying to understand how to explain water to fish… and at the same time thinking about my own fishness in the water of white supremacy, and how easy it was for me to “forget” Billmon’s nasty blackface “joke” while writing, even though I had consciously intended earlier to include it in my critique. This surely oughta give me some insight into how the guys can “not hear” or “not notice” the misogyny in their own discourse — just one or two notches higher on the obliviousness scale… neurons carefully taught to misfire.
And what’s to be done? (sigh)
Call them, call them, call them, and be way funnier than they are (fortunately this is not difficult in most cases). I think I’ll return sometime to Bourdain and his notorious analogy. Anyway, enough rambling for now…
11 November 2006, 5:04 pmIfy:
DeAnander sometimes I think that male feminist think they have to repent or stop being male. I suppose you have heard this from more conservative women before, but I like masculinity. I like everything about it. Even the war. But I just don’t like injustice, or oppression. I know its weird. Wonder if you can have both. Weird post ? Oh well. Like, I think General Patton, Ulysess Grant, and Robert Lee were the best of men. I don’t even like the guys who are hyper aware of a woman’s world. But its the sin, which pardon me for mentioning the bible, but which in the bible says comes in some men in oppression form. Thats the part that is a betrayal to humanity. Kind of like turning a womb into a torture chamber instead of an incubator.
11 November 2006, 9:44 pmJohn Moredock:
Infiltrator:
Well, now, to be fair, I didn’t leave the comment in question in the post about comic books, so it might behoove you to read a little more carefully.
That said, I will admit to a certain quota of misogynism on the Try-Works. And a certain amount of racism and homophobia. And I most certainly posted about Patty Calhoun what I did. Our mission statement from the get-go has been to amplify the Denver media’s racism, homophobia and misogyny, as satirically as possible. Calhoun has a predilection for running soft-core rape porn on her website as a matter of course. Take for instance this story (though now attributed to a sister paper, The Cleveland Scene): http://tinyurl.com/y3sdap
Here’s what I wrote about it at the time: http://tinyurl.com/y3l3kx
As to the C word, yes, I’ve used it in plenty, in the same vein as the above. Along with many other words equally offensive. We have a highly articulate critic of the site over at the wonderful Fire Witch Rising (http://tinyurl.com/yxoc56) who has taken issue with it, and you’ll note that it’s not been in my lexicon of late. Obviously I won’t speak for other Try-Works members. We’re an eclectic lot, and I don’t censor anyone onboard.
Things will continue to be rough at the site, and more than often a little brutal. There’s all manner of offensive material at play. But we like to think that if we post another of our longstanding jokes about Rocky Mountain News editor Vincent Carroll and pedophilia, we won’t be taken as endorsing pedophilia. The same goes for what I wrote about Calhoun, and what was written about Mimi Wesson.
Bottom line, we want the Denver local media to get a taste of what it does, as a matter of course, to others. Hopefully, with a humorous bent, at least for those whose idea of humor includes the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Rabelais and Kathy Acker. And as my dear grandpappy once said, if you want to get a mule’s attention, you hit it with a two-by-four.
I’ve said that from day one. Just as I’ve pointed out the critical difference between what we do and what they do: except by the shoddiest of readers, we’re understood to be viciously satirical. The Denver local media, not so. The people they go after have real lives, and pay in real costs. Once they initiate, we consider the gloves off. If they’re offended, good. That’s the point. If it hurts their feelings, likewise.
Lastly, if you’d like to launch a comprehensive critique, please do. Dump it in the comments or email it to me at (john.moredock@gmail.com). I’ll be happy to post it on the front page, and we’ll let others weigh in.
And that’s Moredock, with an e.
Which ought to give away 90% of the joke by itself.
11 November 2006, 11:18 pmStan:
Hi De,
Sorry to be AWOL. The suggestion elsewhere that voting for Democrats might sometimes be good tactics has sparked a wave of heretic-hunting; and responding to it has drawn me into a vortex. Oddly enough, one of the rebukes against me was that I should go join the League of Women Voters (because I am not a Alpha-Male-Enough-Radical), which just validates this thread.
The fact is, I know several League members, and they are a very good bunch…
In a conversation I had two nights ago with a couple of local friends (who do a lot of the tech-work for this blog), they mentioned a process that happens in self-organized on-line collectives called folxonomy, which is a more organic version of taxonomy.
I am certain that phallalalia fits this bill, and wonder if it shouldn’t be a whole category unto itself.
Interesting side-note. For some reason which I don’t understand, Legume Sam had three posts fail to go up. I didn’t zap him, and he didn’t write to ask what might have happened; but he went to his own blog — miffed at being “excommnicated,” and denounced Feral Scholar as “gender and race obsessed.”
11 November 2006, 11:31 pmDeAnander:
that’s too bad, I rather enjoyed Sam’s posts. gender and race obsessed huh? like the culture at large isn’t, of course…
12 November 2006, 2:00 amInfiltrator:
Simple test Mordocke.
Please replace all the instances of the word “cunt” in your website with the word “squaw” and see if you are as comfortable with that form of wink-wink “satire” of the anti indian, racist Colorado media. (For those not familiar with the etymology of the dehumanizing term squaw, it is a corruption of an aboriginal word that means literally, a woman’s genitalia. In other words, a cunt but with an extra dose of race hate thrown in.) Try calling rightwing, anti Churchill Comanche David Yeagley the s-word and see if your indigenous readers will be perfectly comfortable with it.
Please also call for the lynching of African Americans like Condi Rice and Colin Powell (while using the usual racial slurs) with the same degree of ease that you call for the rape of imperialist women.
My bet. You won’t do it. No lefty boy would dare. And as numerous commentors here have already pointed out in regards to other lefty pundits, your so-called satire is nothing but a cloak behind which you indulge predominantly in homophobic and mysogynist tropes that the dominant whitemale culture, left and right, is all-too-willing to give you a pass on.
Crikey! Next thing we know, these leftyboy f**kers will be claiming that the sexual mascotization of women in pornographic mags like Hustler and Penthouse is really just a way of honoring us!
How in the hell do you satirize the degradation of oppressed groups by degrading them? Oh, I know! The same way imperialist Amerika invades Iraq to “liberate” it.
12 November 2006, 4:04 amLegume Sam:
Yeah, OK, so “obsessed” raised a red flag with you. Sorry. Everyone’s so touchy… I removed the post Stan’s complaining about.
What’s wrong with being obsessed? I’m obsessed with the coming likely ecological disasters…
12 November 2006, 5:52 amF. U. Bar:
Hello, I am a regular reader of this blog and Billmon’s.
Oh and I am a working-class ’straight’ male of European descent. I have heard all of the offensive talk that is being discussed here, on and off the job by my unenlightened brothers. And I have unthinkingly uttered a fair amount of it myself. I have to say that on reflection that your take on Billmon’s posts is perceptive and correct. And the the Blitzer-In-Blackface post was a major lapse in judgement.
Okay. Now how you convey legitimate outrage at what you see when you take a good look around — in a way that is understandable outside of your oh-so-correct enclave? I’m sorry but sounding like a tenured English professor simply doesn’t cut it.
Secondly, I and many others are unwilling to associate ourselves with any movement that is unwilling to defend itself. (Check out the book “Deacons for Defense” for a different perspective on the civil rights struggle…) That is one of the many reasons that the word liberal has a bad odor among so many of your potential allies. Please enough of the ‘gun’ = ‘phallus’ rhetoric already. You weren’t there when my own mother backed off my violently abusive former stepfather off with a shotgun. The gun can give power to whoever is holding it. Never doubt for a moment that you are up against REAL ’skullfuckers’.
P.S. Can I please keep the phrase ‘clusterfuck’? For anyone that has witnessed — or god forbid found themselves in the middle of such an event — nothing else is as evocative.
12 November 2006, 9:20 amJohn Moredock:
I thought voice sounded familiar.
12 November 2006, 10:03 amStan:
So legitimate outrage cannot be conveyed without trashing women in the process?
Who has said anything against the right to self defense here? De used to teach it. I have trained men and women in the use of firearms several times since I left the army.
The effective and appropriate use of a firearm requires neither the fetishization of weapons (which is part of hyper-male gun culture) nor a bunch of macho misogynist bluster as a backgrond accompaniment.
I’ve been expressing outrage for the last four years, in plain language, without sexualizing the aggression of the language. All it requires is a little reflection about the language until one has internalized the implications of gendered liniguistic aggression, and done a little self-criticism and rectification.
That begins with the uncomfortable recognition that being male in this culture means being defensive. Get over it.
One of the constants of backlash against placing misogyny off-limits is that men react by seeking to trivialize that effort by calling it “oh-so-correct.”
12 November 2006, 10:19 amDeAnander:
“typing with their dicks” sounds like an English professor? wow! where’d you go to school? I see my English classes could have been far more lively than they were if I’d just had the right prof
imho words like “enclave” and arch phrases like “oh-so-*******” carry the Elitist/sissy meme-tag, as in “gated community”, as in “sissy East Coast liberal,” as in an an attempt to associate misogynist discourse with gritty workingclass realism and feminist reform with airy-fairy, spoiled-brat “sensitive” upperclassness. I personally find this pretty durned classist, like referring to sleeveless undershirts as “wifebeater” shirts because, don’tcha know, only workingclass men beat their wives (hah). some of the most gently-spoken and respectful-of-women men I’ve known have been from poverty (rural poverty, which may be relevant) backgrounds.
I also find it an irritating false flag operation: my $0.02 is that middle and upper class white leftyboys talk trash about women because it makes them feel masculine and tough, just like silly teenage whiteboys imitating prison chic and collecting misogynist Black-guy rap music. and then they pretend that this is somehow proletarian, in order to cover up the misogyny with the red flag.  like disowning their own misogyny, projecting it onto a colonised nation, then stealing the projected misogyny in an act of culture theft. anyway it all adds up to Secondary Contradiction time again, ladies get in line please and don’t get pushy, we’ll deal with your trivial concerns after the class war is won. well guess what, the class ‘war’ — and the environmental ‘war’ — and all those other struggles — are not going to be won at all until we get over the patriarchal habit of calling everything a ‘war’ and not listening to what women have to say. [takes deep breath]
Infiltrator is right on target imho, and I am guessing that she [I’m assuming gender from the wording] is well aware that the publishers of drek like Hustler mag (and worse) have consistently said over the decades that their womanhating propaganda is “satire”, that they are “satirising sexism,” etc… and that that graf is entirely sarcastic. “But we were only satirising,” is right up there with My Dog Ate It in the Threadbare Excuse Olympics.
the strong of stomach can visit Hustling the Left for some background on the operation of this all-American Der Stuermer knockoff and how it magically manages to peddle its rightwing agitprop to leftyboys as excitingly “edgy” social criticism. a great feat of leger de, er… main?
as to clusterf*ck — one of Kunstler’s favourite words [and has anyone else but me become nervous about the recent racist/nationalist turn in his writing?] — what the heck does it mean? a real mess with a bunch of guys all confusedly trying to screw each other, like an accidental orgy or mutually attempted rape? or is it a “euphemism” for a disorderly gang rape? if the latter, then it’s about as funny as “lynching”. if it’s the former then I guess it raises the issue of the f-word again and why it’s so obviously a synonym for disorder, danger, and/or violence — but at least it isn’t a direct har-de-har about rape, battery, etc.
12 November 2006, 2:29 pmDeAnander:
@Sam, you and me both. it is hard to find any hope at all these days, even at the very bottom of my pockets. but of course the environmental disasters we face have everything to do with race and gender… it’s not as if they were a separate and distinct realm of discourse. how are we to overturn the disastrous dogma of domination over nature, without first overturning the dogma of domination over women in which it is rooted?
gender so deeply informs enironmental mischief and denial — “The Sahara Club” is totally a boy’s organisation flaunting its sturdy, devil-may-care masculinity and controlfreakery in the face of “sissy” environmentalism, and that’s just one example out of thousands. masculinity and nationalism inform the Norwegian attachment to the yearly whale slaughter, the Canadian attachment to the seal clubbing rituals, the attachment of the MTR teams to the fun of blowingthe tops off mountains, the attitude of loggers to forests (cf Derrick Jensen’s insightful book Strangely Like War for an analysis of logger culture and the forest as Enemy and Other)… wherever you look, there’s an entangled nexus of Power / Dominance / Control / Ownership / Masculinity / War / Capital / Machinery / Killing / More / Bigger / Transgression that ties into gender on every level and requires, absolutely requires, colonisation and imperial racism — and the enslavement of women — to keep the machinery running.
it is no coincidence that the whiteboys consistently refer to the “lesser races” that they colonise and enslave as “emotional” and “irrational” (woman-like, child-like), as “children”, as “needing to be controlled for their own good.” no sooner do we uncover those tropes than we recognise the patriarchal family writ larger, and then as soon as we look into the patriarchal family we remember that famulus meant ’slave’ and that the ‘family’ was originally the number of chattel persons belonging to a male citizen of Rome: his slaves, wife, and children. Family Values indeed. and then we remember that ‘chattel’ and ‘cattle’ are corruptions of the same root ‘capitus’ or ‘head’ and refer to live property, property that is counted by the head, and that ‘capital’ comes from the same root… chattel, cattle, capital.
what is radical goes to the root. and at the root of capitalism (as of feudalism before it) is patriarchy. the ownership of living things counted by the head. women, animals, children, slaves. the not-Men.
what Mr Morden, sorry, Moredock, hasn’t internalised — and I fear never will — is that Lorde was right. the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. and it is quite possible to express anger and outrage — and satire — without using the master’s tools in quite such obedient, slavish imitation of the master’s voice.
12 November 2006, 2:54 pmDeAnander:
BTW, to whoever upthread said ‘can I still call my brother a sissy?’ –
sure you can. on the day that it’s a compliment instead of an insult, you can call your brother a sissy.
the day he grins and says “Thanks bro, what a nice thing to say,” it’ll be just fine to call your brother a sissy.
12 November 2006, 2:57 pmbut as long as it remains an insult or a putdown, it’s an insult to women. why is that so hard to grok?
Audrey:
If we ever have a gender anxiety award ceremony, I’d like to nominate the folks of Huntington, WV, for top honors.
A resident there began painting a bridge pink as a breast cancer awareness project last month. He originally began on one bridge, without permission, and was forced to repaint it. He does have permission from the mayor to paint the bridge he’s working on currently.
The good citizens of Huntington are outraged. “This doesn’t promote breast cancer awareness,” (councilman) Kent said. “It’s made us the laughing stock throughout the state. There are better ways of bringing this to the public’s attention without the upsetting of the residents and the ridicule.”
People have begun vandalizing it, dumping white and blue paint on it – anything to cover the unbearable shame that is the color pink.
http://www.herald-dispatch.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061110/NEWS01/611100302
It’s a bridge - an inanimate object. And yet, painting that one object pink – a color which we’ve been socialized to associate with the “wrong gender†- would clearly emasculate the entire town.
12 November 2006, 3:23 pmCharles:
DeAnander,
What’s your take on “motherfucker” ?
Stan,
I’m sure the following has been explained before,but I would you mind elaborating briefly on how you reached this conclusion ? :
“That begins with the uncomfortable recognition that being male in this culture means being defensive. Get over it.”
At first blush , I’d think it would be being female that means being defensive, given male dominance and all. Being male would mean being “offensive”, aggressive etc.
Charles
12 November 2006, 4:05 pmYolanda Carrington:
De…I’ve got to add my five cents here:
“what Mr Morden, sorry, Moredock, hasn’t internalised — and I fear never will — is that Lorde was right. the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. and it is quite possible to express anger and outrage — and satire — without using the master’s tools in quite such obedient, slavish imitation of the master’s voice.”
Now when Sista Audre made that statement, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t talking to boyshit-generator pundits like Moredock. I figure Moredock and his ilk could give a flying shit about Black radical feminists like Lorde.
By the way, dear Mr. Moredock—don’t even THINK about launching a rape threat my way. You will regret it.
Yolanda
12 November 2006, 4:37 pmCharles:
What’s the practice advocated to deal with patriarchy in all its manifestations ? What is the anti-patriarchy program ? What is to be done ?
12 November 2006, 5:20 pmMarilyn Farhat:
Hello De,
I have to be honest with you and confess to something. I have learned a lot about gender issues in the United States from this website and I find myself cringing when I read the descriptions and metaphors some of the insensitive males and females in government and in public arenas use in describing each other, especially the females. As a female and human being who totally empathizes with other women, I can only imagine what it is like for many of the women to go through such degrading treatment in a “civilized” and “democratic” culture.
I guess I can consider myself fortunate. I grew up in a society where men and women’s roles were more defined and freedom for women was not as easily achieved as it is here. However, in all honesty, I can say that I have always been treated with respect by the men in my culture (except for the occasional drunk with a gun). The feminist struggles in the Middle East continue to be along the lines of the feminist struggles of the US in the early 20th century.
None of my close friends ever use such language as many of those bozos (forgive the description, but I think there are many bozos out there who think they’re hot and god’s gift to women) do. The very few times I have heard such comments sadly, are at my place of work, but that is a government institution dominated by males and I tend to not let comments like that go when my “colleagues” make them. But, then, I pay the price. I am outside the circle (there are other issues involved though, too).
I think the best approach to such asinine comments is to confront the person making them directly. Being a nurse and working with criminal, dysfunctional, and mentally challenged males for 10 years, has taught me that the best way is to be direct and firm and then let it go. It is very important that they know that women do not put up with such behavior. If I am not accepted for my views, I really couldn’t care less.
Cultures that glorify war and violence tend to censor their women in many ways. The female and war really do not mesh. I remember an incident in Lebanon years ago during the Civil War when 2 regiments that were conscripted and sent to South Lebanon to fight their countrymen decided to defect with the help of the women in the region from all sides. The women hid them in chicken coops and their homes. It really feels good when you hear stories like that and it tells me that there is hope and a chance for us and they will come on the shoulders and in the hearts of the women (with the help of the men).
I am a firm believer in holding on to our humanity as much as we can. I know things can get so overwhelming and hopeless sometimes. Many of my American female friends do not really get involved in politics or other social issues, including war and sexual exploitation of women because it is such an uncomfortable topic. I have come to realize that many in the US are uncomfortable talking about personal issues, even when they relate to public life. The idea of original sin and sex as something bad and evil has done a number on many men and women out there.
I have a number of close women friends from the Middle East locally. We are all very political and active. All people from the Middle East are. We all feel the same way. This is becoming such an alien place for us and we are neither religious nor traditional. We were all raised Muslim and chose to be independent of it all. Most of the women of my generation who were raised in war and violence and the oppression of men have found it really difficult in the US if they chose to be independent. Personal freedom is great, but we do not fit in either world and we cannot talk about what we have seen and done except to each other. People will cringe and will start talking about “terrorists” and “Islamofaschists.” They can’t go beyond that. We have all done well for ourselves on our own, a fact that alienates many Middle Eastern as well as American men.
Men are threatened by the independence of women and by their power to be self-sufficient. While they may respect us, they are literally threatened by us and afraid of us. In a way, in their minds, it becomes a reflection of who they are. We have all been conditioned into the roles of provider/recipient and stronger/weaker genders. Middle Eastern men (and some women) think we should hop on the first plane back home and get married to some guy we do not know.
One of those women friends is the Ambassador of Afghanistan to Berlin and a professor of social science at a local university. She is the only female Afghan to hold that position and she encountered much difficulty after her appointment. The other is a professor of history from Iran and teaches at the same university.
Many of my female friends from Lebanon are in the same boat and scattered all over the world. They work in war-torn areas and teach about war, genocide, gender issues, women’s and children’s issues and health. We are all drawn to the pit of humanity. The Middle East is a traumatic place for most of us and it is becoming more so for the new generations as well. But we still have families there. I can only describe Lebanon as a glitzy hellhole and only an idiot would think it is the fabulous place it was touted to be (unless you consider prostitution, nightclubs, and marinas a sign of being civilized). We were all shaped by what we saw, heard, and did (or failed to do). We do not get attached to anyone, except our children because loss is such a constant presence. We have lost many a friend or relative during the war. That is the story of one segment of women in the Middle East, but it is the story of many a woman around the world.
I think women’s salvation will come from our collective strength and discipline, coupled with our humanity and value for life. There are many restless women out there itching to do something. All we have to do is look within and be who we are and true to ourselves, and to hell with the bozos.
12 November 2006, 11:49 pmrootlesscosmo:
The problem I’ve always had with that line from Audre Lorde is that the master owns the tool factory and the tool design shop and (to a large extent) the scope of our understanding of what tools are and can do. That is–as every revolution has found, one way and another–those who want to overthrow (not just ameliorate) an existing unjust social order are people who were formed in it and by it, and if they succeed in overthrowing it, they will be responsible for imagining and creating a new, just social order, based on exactly zero experience. One reason the USSR and China (et al.) exerted such a powerful attraction for revolutionary-minded folk around the globe was that they seemed to offer a way around this problem; at first we said “We can do as they did!” and then, after their glaring flaws became impossible to ignore, “We can do as they did while learning from their mistakes!” I’m not sure even that promise is still realizable in a post-Gorbachev, post-Tienanmen Square world; meanwhile if Lorde was right, and I believe she was, we’re very, very badly stuck.
13 November 2006, 1:25 amF. U. Bar:
Clarification:
No, Stan you emphatically do not write like the stereotypical ‘post-modern’ English professor. (I have to admit that since I have never attended a ‘four-year’ college I have had little exposure to actual English professors,period.) And I have never read any writing on this site arguing against the right to armed self defence. As I said I am a regular reader of this site — and I eagerly read Stan’s writing where ever I find it posted. It is not you all that I had in mind when I made my post.
13 November 2006, 6:19 amIf you are setting out to end patriarchy, please keep in mind the realities of class and status. If I’m to be called I would much rather hear it from someone like Marilyn above than from some clueless product of the upper middle class that doesn’t let their lack of life experience get in the way of their certainty and righteousness.
John Moredock:
Infiltrator:
Again with the sloppy reading: I already conceded the point about the C word. If you’d like to continue regurgitating it ad infinitum in the interest of enjoying the sound of your own fingers pit-patting away at the keyboard, have at it.
DeAnander:
If you think the Try-Works exists to dismantle anything, you’re seriously mistaken. The Try-Works exists to mock a few specific shitheels, and to amuse me and the other members. I’m fairly anti-social, I can’t stand television nor video games, and one can’t spend one’s entire life with their nose in a book.
Those of you interested in dismantling hierarchical power structures via blogging might want to examine your motives (not too mention your heads). Blogging has to sit somewhere between attending candle-light vigils and memorizing Michael Franti lyrics on the scale of revolutionary efficacy. I suspect that’s part of the reason it’s so popular: it allows for the silliest kind of political posturing while requiring none of the backbreaking work necessary to engage in actual political activity or develop a readership beyond sixteen of your closest exact-minded friends.
If you don’t like the Try-Works, feel free not to read it. I’ll happily return the favor. If you really don’t like it, you’re than welcome to stop by and flame the comments. We’ve attracted more than one obsessed troll.
See Infiltrator, by way of example.
Yolanda Carrington:
I very much like Audre Lorde, actually. I’m not very fond of seeing her work reduced to the most vapid of lefty clichés, however.
That said, I’m out of here. One of the many things I refuse to do in life is get sucked into one of these awe-inspiringly stupid back and forths between bickering lefties as to who is the more politically pure (while inhabiting a cocoon, of course). If it floats your boat, go nuts. I’d rather watch flies fuck.
13 November 2006, 9:46 amStan:
Spoken like a Real Man.
13 November 2006, 12:53 pmJohn Moredock:
Hey, irony. Might I also point out the irony in your posturing self-righteousness, considering you spent a quarter of a century murdering people in the name of US expansionism and are, presumably, living on the retirement package thus accrued?
A lot of good people whom you’re painting with your awfully broad brush lost their lives and livelihoods resisting exactly what it was you spent the majority of your adult life embodying. You might remember that as you’re climbing up your high horse.
13 November 2006, 1:44 pmStan:
Nothing pisses Real Men off like gender treason.
13 November 2006, 3:17 pmMelissa:
I got a hint of how deep our predjudices go while watching a documentary on India. An upper class man was sitting at a table with the moderator and another man. They were discussing how abominable the class system was. All were in agreement. Then the moderator told the upperclass gent that the third man was an untouchable. The upperclass gent looked like he was about to throw up and launched himself from the table. He didn’t think, he just felt.
13 November 2006, 7:49 pmInfiltrator:
I guess we did not pass Moredock’s purity test for effective engagement with whitemale hegemony. It will be interesting to see what kind of organizing he will do now to take down all his enemies in the Colorado media.
Something tells me he won’t be allying himself with local feminists to confront the trafficking of women in papers like the Westword.
Imagine my shock.
Do men like this always bail when cornered by their own hypocrisy?
13 November 2006, 9:10 pmtaikab:
If, for a moment, we were to think of ethics– not in terms of categories, genders, or other representational formats– but, instead, in terms of the ability to make connections with others, perhaps we could make some headway in this conversation.
Dostoevskey, Dos Passos, Faulkner and Fitzgerald certainly never shied from presenting the sexist and/or racist content of public opinion. The words they used never fit in a lexicon of the “correct”.
Their greatness stems, instead, from framing language and syntax such that the loneliness, the oppression, and the permanent feeling of the worlds they evoke becomes palpable for other times, other witnesses, and other perspectives.
Writers use words to make the feeling of a feeling transcend time. And sometimes the ugliest word might just do.
So it will not not do to impugn language, or to ban word X or word Y.
A ‘clusterfuck’ is a failed attempt to conjugate an arrangement (cluster), to conjugate a verb (or action/fuck). Given the infinitely malleable semantics of ‘fuck’ itself, let’s not not trip about the word’s possible usage.
Instead, let’s recognize that as prisoners of language and empire, it’s up to us to refine words until they begin to speak for us, and not against us.
In which case, it’s much less a matter of denunciation, than it is a matter of enunciation. Not what should or shouldn’t be said, but what can we say?
From this perspective, the pattern of Billmon’s faux pas are less a matter for critique than they are a matter for contemplation.
How can we formulate a language of resistance that is as compelling as the language of reaction?
14 November 2006, 6:56 pmpeggy:
John Moredock says: “I’m fairly antisocial.”
Aha. That explains it. John, you need help. Read this
Antisocial Personality Disorder
Diagnostic Criteria
There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:
failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest
deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure
impulsivity or failure to plan ahead
irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults
reckless disregard for safety of self or others
consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations
lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
***********
I think the rest of us should just ignore this guy. Or better yet, politely escort him out the door.
14 November 2006, 7:00 pmhoward:
A thought/question:
I wasn’t sure which place to post this (either on the elections discussions on this site or on gender discussions) because it is at the intersection of the topics. Anyway, the question is: what will feminists do in 2008 if for example the Dems nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton (very possible) or the Reps nominate Condoleeza Rice (not very probable)?
What if one is either on tactical considerations organizing for HRC or on principle organizing against Rice or even both of them?
I ask this because so much (if not most) of the anti-HRC stuff is, as we all know, really just a bunch of woman-baiting without any real content other than being prime examples of classic phallolalia. I haven’t noticed a lot of what leftyboys are saying about CR so I don’t know what is going on there, but I assume there are similar issues there — or does her racial status make this a kapu topic for leftyboys?
And let’s say one does for tactical reasons decide to work for Dems to win the presidency (a la Stan Goff 2006) and that
1) HRC is the Dem nominee and some guy is the Rep nominee
OR
2) some guy is the DEM nominee and CR is the Rep nominee
OR
3) HRC is the Dem nominee and CR is the Rep nominee
It would seem to me that in the latter two cases, one’s opposition to the Reps could be conflated in others’ mind as misogynist (case 2) and/or racist (cases 2 and 3) — and the Reps would be sure to play it as such, hoping to peel away hitherto impossible support from women and people of color.
In the case where both major parties nominate women and the Reps nominate a woman of color (case 3), we shall see a test of the idea mentioned by DeNander that racist (public of course) discourse is at this juncture in our society kapu while misogynist language is more acceptable. I bet Rove or whoever his successor is, is working on this one.
Could the most useful thing that feminists do in 2008 be to call those on whichever “side” (Red or Blue) in this ritual combat on their boysh**t? Might it even be more important than who wins the presidency that year?
16 November 2006, 5:47 pmhoward:
I have followed the discussions on this site with increasing respect for the thinking of regular contributors here — and this thread is a prime of example of why I feel that way.
Something in the main essay and the ensuing discussion made a light bulb go off over my head about the linkage between what had been two seemingly disparate but supposedly related topics: On the one hand, there is violence against women and patriarchal violence in general (whether or not specifically directed against women); on the other hand, there is the existence of formal, logical, scientific, “neutral” activity and discourse which is also a part of patriarchy.
I have a friend with whom I maintain occasional discussions via email about the Iraq war. He is best described as a “centrist democrat” politically, meaning he has instrumental objections (ie as to how it’s handled) to the Bush admin’s conduct of the war — but the idea of just killing innocent people (never with malicious intent, of course) is not in itself a bad thought for him. In our discussions, he had characteristically waxed a bit bombastic (”so you say X’s position is useless dreck, huh” and so on) and I was replying in kind (”well, yes, it’s dreck, and worse than useless…”) — but at a certain point I decided to get a bit less dramatic in my language, while at the same time not conceding an emotional stake in what we were discussing. I then noticed that a lot of his language was in subtle ways “feminizing” my discourse. For instance, in an effort to pre-empt my reaction to something rather outrageous he had quoted (about how European fascists make a lot of sense on immigration problems) he characterized my imagined reponse as a “hissy fit.” He also chided me for not getting sufficiently exercised about “steely-eyed realists’” assessment of the possibility of a suitcase bomb. I then realized that a lot of his discourse was an attempt to construct his positions as the “adult” or “grownup” positions and to place those of us who might think otherwise amongst the “dewy-eyed idealist” crowd (read, “weepy girls”).
Now, with this discussion about the various levels of consciousness and intention in patriarchal discourse, I feel (at least intuitively) that I can fit the type of discourse I just mentioned in the previous paragraph into its place on a continuum that stretches from murder, rape, war on the one end all the way to say nuclear technology on the other.
16 November 2006, 6:18 pmDeAnander:
Steely Eyed, eh howard? zowie, lingo straight out of Boys’ Own Comics, 1920. “Our steely-eyed, lantern-jawed hero gripped his Bowie knife in his strong white teeth and prepared to scale the wall of the Evil Dr Fu Manchu’s fortress…”
of course another description of “steely eyed” might be “a fixed psychotic stare characteristic of those who clamber up water towers toting rifles in order to take pot shots at passing citizens.”
or the vacant, fixed and dissociated gaze of male patrons in strip clubs.
or the unwavering confident expression of the professional card sharp…
but yes, there’s a lot of gendered rank-pulling in those tropes.
interesting that you should put nuclear tech at the far end of a continuum including murder/rape/war… I’d have put them fairly close together… or is it the “dryness” and technocratic quality of the discourse that makes the continuum, from physical acts of rape and murder and skullf*cking to a similar mentality of domination and control “civilised” and hiding behind that neutral (it isn’t really) “scientific” prose style?
16 November 2006, 8:21 pmAnne:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HE09Aa02.html
May 9, 2006
Put a stake through Freud’s heart
By Spengler
The psychiatric profession observed the 150th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s birth on May 6. My modest proposal for the event is to exhume his body and put a stake through his heart. Freud’s Viennese contemporary Karl Kraus quipped that psychoanalysis was “a disease posing as a cure”. Kraus was closer to the truth than he could have imagined.
No one did more than Freud to reduce women to sexual objects, a condition against which women rebel by seeking to destroy the objectified body. Epidemic self-destructiveness has reached proportions that are difficult to grasp. Eating disorders reportedly threaten the lives of 10 million American women. [1] “Anorexia or bulimia
in florid or sub-clinical form now afflicts 40% of women at some time in their college career,” wrote the journal Psychology Today. [2]
Self-harm often accompanies self-starvation, and millions of these women also mutilate themselves. One study claims that up to one in seven British adolescents self-harms, but up to half of those enmeshed in the “Goth” subculture do so. In the US, a recent survey of 1,000 pupils at one secondary school found that one-quarter had deliberately harmed themselves. [3] Some British hospitals dispense “self-harm kits”, including razors and antiseptics.
What impels so many young people in Anglo-Saxon countries toward slow-motion suicide? It is easy to blame the undernourished wraiths who haunt the runways of the fashion industry for disseminating a twisted ideal of beauty that lures young women into anorexia. But that cannot be a complete explanation, because anorexics starve themselves into extreme ugliness, and in many cases mutilate themselves as well. These women are not enhancing their bodies, but rejecting them altogether.
Freud claimed to have discovered the source of all neurosis in the repression of the sexual impulse, or libido. In fairness, Freud did not think repression was a bad thing, for without it society would disintegrate. The object of psychoanalysis was not to spread universal joy, but to proceed “from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness”. He did not count on the adolescent narcissism of the 1960s, when the complacent and affluent youth of the industrial world demanded something better than ordinary unhappiness. Freud provided the ideological foundation for the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, and popularized versions of his theory dominated popular culture.
All the major religions of the world attempt to sanctify the family; Freud sought to expose it as a hypocritical viper’s nest of neurosis. Religion, he taught, totemized power relations; God was the projected form of the castrating father. The mother provides sexual pleasure to the infant she nurses, whose initial polymorphous perverse sexuality focuses upon the mother; the authority of the father then represses the son’s sexual fixation on the mother through the threat of castration, while little sister laments the lack of a penis. Such a chamber of horrors cannot be entrusted with the upbringing of children, the left interpreted Freud. Sexuality must be severed from reproduction, through abortion, equal status for homosexuality, and so forth.
Few psychiatrists today defend Freud’s sexual derivation of neurosis, but the damage was done. Sexual liberation remains the core of the social agenda of the left. In US politics, the most embittered battles are fought over gay marriage and abortion, not war and taxes. For adolescents in the industrial world, however, the battle was lost a generation ago. Seeking a sexual outlet in the companionship of one’s peers now is more common than the search for romantic attachments among American adolescents. New York Times journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis reported in a 2004 feature:
Over the course of several months spent hanging out and communicating online with nearly 100 high-school students (mostly white, middle- and upper-middle-class suburban and exurban teenagers from the northeast and Midwest), I heard the same thing: hooking up is more common than dating …
A 2001 survey conducted by Bowling Green State University in Ohio found that of the 55% of local 11th-graders who engaged in intercourse, 60% said they’d had sex with a partner who was no more than a friend. That number would perhaps be higher if the study asked about oral sex. While the teen intercourse rate has declined - from 54% in 1991 to 47% in 2003 - this may be partly because teenagers have simply replaced intercourse with oral sex. To a generation raised on MTV, AIDS, Britney Spears, Internet porn, Monica Lewinsky and Sex and the City, oral sex is definitely not sex (it’s just ”oral”), and hooking up is definitely not a big deal. [4]
Women enter adolescence with the expectation that they will be used but not loved. Men no longer need to feign affection to receive sexual favors; they merely need ask. It is no surprise that young women have come to despise their bodies, some to the point of destroying them. Women can expect only a brief flowering of beauty before age and child-bearing attenuate their sexual attraction. The love of a life partner, the shared love of their children, the honor of the community and the knowledge that the human life cycle is linked to something eternal are the consolations to women for the loss of their beauty.
Sexual objectification, I wrote elsewhere (Women as priests? Women never forgive anything!, April 27, 2005), makes women paranoid:
Whether this is a cultural quirk subject to eventual remedy or a characteristic of humankind since the Fall is a different matter. Adolescent girls suffer the most. The therapists talk of “low self-esteem”, but this amounts to uncertainty as to what features of a developing form will attract the opposite sex. If a woman succeeds in manipulating a man on the strength of her value as a sexual object, she never can be sure that another woman will not (or has not already done) the same thing with greater success. The most attractive woman in the world is a miserable creature, as Giuseppe Verdi’s Princess Eboli lamented, because her physical presence will overwhelm any other perception of her in the eyes of men. When age eventually destroys her beauty, she will be left with nothing at all.
Having cured society of repression by making sexual pleasure a commodity, enlightened opinion is shocked, shocked to discover an epidemic of depression. In consequence some 70 million Americans have taken anti-depressants. Psychotropic drugs, I hasten to add, work miracles for many who suffer from imbalances of brain chemistry, and I mean no criticism of psychopharmacology in general. But the vast numbers involved suggest that a spiritual ailment is epidemic for which anti-depressants cannot be the solution.
To whom do families turn when a child starves or mutilates herself? There is nowhere to turn but to the psychiatric profession, the “disease posing as a cure”. That is not only an exaggeration, but thoroughly unfair: thousands of well-meaning therapists, including many with strong religious convictions, seek daily to keep children from destroying themselves, and I do not mean to diminish their contributions. But the prevalent notion that self-destructive behavior stems from a malfunction in adolescent brain chemistry, or an idiosyncratic neurotic disorder, does not square with the epidemic manifestation of symptoms.
The therapeutic community has perfectly valid explanations for anorexia and self-harm at the individual level. But it reminds me of a doctor who explains with great precision how a metal object has passed through your body wreaking damage on various organs without also mentioning that the city in which you live is subject to aerial bombardment. Without addressing the cultural catastrophe, the therapeutic profession will be hard put to save many of the individuals.
If Freud were allowed a rejoinder, doubtless he would remind us of the “death drive” that he purported to discover in the human psyche in the aftermath of World War I. Perhaps he would blame the “death drive” for the morbid refusal to reproduce that condemns most of the industrial world to depopulation and eventual extinction, not to mention the epidemic of suicide attacks in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world. The trouble with the “death drive” is that some people seem to have one and others don’t. With a sexual “life force” and a “death drive” (which Freud attributed to a desire to return to mother’s womb), you can explain everything and nothing.
Human beings are not beasts content with daily fodder and rutting in season. To be sentient is to be sentient of one’s mortality. The status of wife and mother in a family within a community offers women an honored position and a link to the eternal. Sexual objectification leaves women with a foretaste of death, and it should be no surprise that Freud’s program drives women into deadly behavior.
It will take long and painful efforts to repair the damage, but putting a stake through the old reprobate’s heart is not a bad way to begin.
Notes
16 November 2006, 11:47 pm1. Statistics: Eating Disorders and their Precursors, National Eating Disorders Association.
2. Psychology Today, November/December 2004, p 62.
3. Self-harm study takes top prize, Knoxville News Sentinel, April 26.
4. Friends, friends with benefits and the benefits of the local mall, New York Times Magazine, May 30, 2004.
howard:
True, DeNander, I was thinking of a linguistic/stylistic continuum (yeah, ok, I was almost an English prof at one point in life). For more on the concept of “neutral scientific†discourse, I might mention that sometimes my friend and I get into discussions of how to find a moral basis for decisions (say withdrawing from Iraq) and he basically falls back on what I think of as a C19 kind of empiricist-utilitarian viewpoint – that by simply getting more and more facts and then applying logic, the incontrovertibly one true decision will come out of the process to the greatest benefit of the greatest number. My fallback positions in this discussion are a very laymannish appeal to a pastiche of chaos theory, emergent systems, quantum uncertainty, Godel’s proof, and of course just the mystery of existence aka spirituality. For him, everything is ultimately knowable and susceptible of rational apprehension, so that as (I think) Leibniz said, we can simply calculate the answer to any moral/ethical question.
…and for my friend, we just don’t have enough facts to make a decision on whether or not to leave Iraq. And our leaders of course have more facts.
And did I mention, there are also Manly Expletives involved. And lots of capitalized words with exclanation points (I think the Manly Expletives might be necessary to offset the somewhat fem cachet exuded by the exclamation points).
17 November 2006, 12:41 am