If i was any of the woman who was caught up in a heinous crime of falling pregnant to a rapist – i would leave the country and get an abortion elsewhere. The depths of shame, and psychological pressures to bring a child into the world this way cannot be expressed.

You’ve made some good points about mencanstoprape.org, but I don’t see the “my strength is not for hurting” theme as being as problematic as you do. It can be interpreted as implying a subordinate, dependant role for women, but it can also be interpreted as a refutation of conventional masculinity without any such connotations. The patriarchal definition of a man is someone who dominates other people and hurts them, and the more hurt he causes the higher his status. So the suggestion that hurting people is not desirable seems highly subversive to me.

Also, I don’t think that the way they talk about strength implies that it is exclusively a male characteristic. So I don’t think it perpetuates any sort of dichotomy in this regard.

I see this kind of campaign as being a necessary transitional step, because the intention is to communicate ideas to people who have grown up (or are growing up) in a patriarchal society, and to do that you need to relate those ideas to something they understand. The concept of strength does have some odious connotations, but it has other meanings as well. I think the use of the word has the potential to change its meaning over time, rather than perpetuating the current value system.

On the “jineteras”.

This a great question in that it hits right on the head what constitutes prostitution or not.

First in Cuba, it is socially considered that there are two types of prostitutes:

1) The “classic” prostitute with a pimp. This type gets called prostitute by everyone, and takes both cuban and foreign clients. She is paid for sex, never companionship. Her market is mostly bureaucrats, businessmen, and business travelers.

2) Tourist hanger ons, mostly independent (although lately I have hear of a phenomenon of older jineteras staking out territory and charging others for the privilege to use it, in effect becoming madams). She doesn’t take money upfront, and is not considered and doesnt consider herself a prostitute. You could call her a barter prostitute and provides companionship and even sightseeing guidedance. They entirely go for tourists, and many in fact are seeking marriage to get out of Cuba.

Now I think both are prostitutes, social euphemism aside. But you asked.

Now as to “why”, well thats a a question that party sociologists are still debating, but the consensus in what I have read is that the classic prostitute tends to be a woman more or less forced into it by the pimp, who is usually either her husband or boyfriend (he maight have others). The motive of the pimp is luxury wealth.

The barter prostitutes however tend to be women who want to live outside of Cuban society, having a sort of wanderlust. There is also a luxury profit motive, but this seems secondary to the wanderlust. In fact, women who are not sucessful in a few years tend to forget about it.

What is interesting, more ever, is that this wanderlust tend to be even out of the Cuban exile community. In a sense it is a escape.

Some Cuban feminists have written positively of the jinetera experience in this shade of it, seeing it as a break with patriarchial traditions of ownership. Ill try to dig some biblio up.

II

Yeah I am all for defending and upholding the many triumphs of the Cuban Revolution. Its just that gender isn’t one of them, at least from the perspective of radical undertakings.

Using jail figures in the USA is quaint: those represent less than 10% of the total prision population, the bulk of which are black men. This is not to say women are not oppressed int he USA, just that prisions are not even in the top ten. So, next…

What I did mean is that in the USA women have legal guarantees and even in places social mores that allow them to exist independent of men to a degree that would be unthinkable in Cuba. Partly, it is related to “freedoms” in the liberal capitalist sense, but partly it is related the the strong, century old women’s movement and its struggles. This movement, in all of its complexity has always had in common a true independence from men.

The “mass organizations” for women in Cuba are a caricature of a women’s movement, and represent in fact a continuation of gender oppression under the guise of feminism. It is very similar to the existence of class society in Socialist Cuba, except people do have free health care, while “mass organizations” do jack shit, and sometimes cover up, all kinds of gender oppression.

I have become less tolerant of leftists that try to pass Cuba off as this kind of socialist utopic paradise when it isn’t.

While the poverty in Cuba has to do much more with it being a poor country than it being socialist, and in fact its socialists elements ail the suffering of millions, the class struggle, racism, and sexism, are still fundamental parts of Cuban society, and the Cuban state does very little to stop this things.

They have done some positive things, but I am not the complacient type. A constitutional ammendment forbidding sex discrimination is useless if all your major ministers and military commanders, in a militarized State, are men.

The USA lacks such clear constitutional language, however women have been in all of the important executive positions short of vice president and president.

That they did imperialism’s bidding is another discussion. What is important is that the leader of the USA, themselves patriarchal men, have been forced to recongize in practice the equality of women.

As usual the women become a political football in duels between men: rightwingnuts in the States point to Cuban prostitution [talk about the mote in your neighbour's eye, when the US is home afaik to the biggest porn/prostitution industry on earth] as proof of the immorality and brutality of Communism; the Castro regime meanwhile denies that there is any problem all, because these things don’t happen in socialist states, yada yada. The women don’t seem to get a word in edgewise… you can find a fair amount of text about Cuban prostitutes online, but it’s hard to find anything by these women, despite the fact that their literacy rate is probably the highest of any population of prostituted people in the world…

The advent of information technology and internet connectivity has only made it harder for the Castro government to ban prostitution. Some civil libertarians celebrate this as a victory for human rights in Cuba… the wonderful Internet disabling the State’s power to control individuals and “interfere in the bedroom”. Making it easier for men to rent women’s bodies, some victory for human rights… When “the bedroom” is also “the sweatshop,” do we celebrate the State’s nose being kept out of it?

“Poverty” is cited as the reason for Cuban prostitution, especially in the rightwing Western press which always has to emphasise Cuba’s poverty (the socialist state must be painted as a failure). But given the excellence of Cuban healthcare, the island’s exemplary food security, guaranteed housing, etc., the teeth of poverty are blunted in Cuba as compared to other third world nations or the inner cities or devastated rural counties of America (the thirdworld hinterland of the firstworld superpower). It seems clear that a guarantee of the basics of survival is not sufficient to ensure that women are not prostituted. One thing we don’t really know — since all the easily-accessible reports seem to come from men with an axe to grind one way or another — is whether Cuban female prostitutes are exploited by pimps, or organised into socialist collectives, or each woman independent, or what…? If anyone knows more about the riddle of prostitution in socialist Cuba, I for one am curious to learn.

Here is what happens to many of the 140,000 women in US prisons…
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0315-04.htm

And here is another relevant report….
http://web.amnesty.org/report2001/webamrcountries/UNITED+STATES+OF+AMERICA?OpenDocument

Cuba is roasted for having 300 political prisoners, I don’t know how many are female. On the other hand, the Cuban gov still refuses to repatriate one of my heroes, feminist Assata Shakur(a leader of the BLA), even in return for a slackening of some parts of the long-running and illegal US embargo against the island. Evidently, Cuba is far from a simple country.

and now the good….Cuba’s post-rev literacy rate and life-expectancy is 98% and 76 respectively, compared to the US’s 99% and 76. Life expectancy reflects overall quality of life. Cuba’s policies on homosexuality are another discussion, one which I’m not knowledgable enough to take up at this time.

Vincent’s comment may be relevant to the Ortega allegations. A lynch mob mentality presented as a fact, then used to portray other ideological enemies as “best buds” with the alleged molester. Guilt by association. What follows some context on my own development…(no direct connection to the above)

After I myself was molested as a child(among many) by a man with a beard, it took many years to rid myself of what had developed into an instinctual fear of and deep hatred for guys with beards.It took even longer to learn to separate gay men from child molesters. Until I had learned that separation, I would have been the first to unjustly accuse and attack someone who seemed a likely perpetrator based upon my previous experiences. Such an (understandable, in retrospect) orientation inhibited my development for some years.
If I hadn’t luckily happened to meet some 100% solid guys with beards and been forced to re-examine my flawed convictions, I would doubtless still carry them with me.

I see signs, and am hopeful that this site, among its many good projects, also births a new type of North-American feminism within which a strong will to power figures prominently. All of these great ideas merit implementation ASAP.

I’ve noticed how in spite of your generally critical attitude toward accusations and government prosecutions, anytime any male is accused of anything criminal — be it violence, sexual abuse, or threats — against a female, you are the first to lead the lynchmob toward an immediate guilty verdict absent any kind of hearing or evidence or opportunity for the accused to defend himself.

The truth that women are oppressed does not mandate that every male accused of something by a female is automatically guilty. As a human being and as a criminal defense attorney, I have personally observed the infinite range of possibilities–other than the
simple, no-need-for-evidence-or-thought judgment of “guilty”–that exist every time a criminal accusation is presented. The potential of individuals to (1) deliberately lie, (2) unintentionally misremember events, and/or (3) tell an incomplete picture of the truth, cannot be overestimated. These possibilities are at least as common, if not more so, in accusations of child abuse, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, as in other types of criminal allegations.

In each of these well-publicized accusations, people love to jump to conclusions without actually knowing any of the persons involved, hearing/seeing evidence, or subjecting the accuser to any kind of inquiry or test of their claims.

It’s a lynch mob mentality, plain and simple, and it’s the type of flawed mentality that we cannot tolerate on the Left.

Otherwise, your insight is powerful and persuasive.

Best,

VP

Actually, even the USA is better in gender matters than Cuba.

I speak from experience.

Now, the *women* of Cuba against overwhelming odds, including a homophobic, womanizing patriarch of a Comandante, do give a lesson or three in their struggle.

But far from won, it is.

(which is very on topic: Fidel is buddy-buddy with Ortega since forever)

In fact, Marxism was among the first european philosophical schools to view the body as is.

Joseph Dietzgen, who both Marx and Engels credit (and not so magnanimously as they thought) as being the creator of “historical materialism” (a large chunk of what we call “Marxism”) says:

“Thinking is a work of the body[...]In order to think I require a substance that can be thought of. This substance is provided in the phenomena of nature and life[...]Matter is the boundary of the mind, beyond which the latter cannot pass[...]Mind is a product of matter, but matter is more than a product of mind”.

Yes, gender is not touched, and one can presume patriarchial inclinations in working-class Dietzgen (later a rather influential anarcho-syndicalist in Chicago).

However, that quote (which Lenin also quoted, and is perhaps Dietzgen’s most famous), is exemplary of the Marxian/Marxist philosophical preocupation with the body. Philosophers until then spoke of the mind as supreme, above the puerile, dirty, and sexually (in THAT sense) problematic body. After marxism, body and mind are one, and hence we can begin to see the mind as also puerile, dirty, and sexually problematic. It was the key step that allowed western science and philosophy to go beyond thinking and into acting. It planted seeds that among its many outgrows lies gender radicalism.

Definitely it is interesting to explore why marxism was and is so dominated by patriarchal thought, but definitely a source of this thought is not ignorance of the body.

I offer that the existence of a great deal of marxian mannerism and language in early radical gender theory and early radical feminism actually put lie to this perception: it was because marxism was the closest available linguistic tool capable of touching the body as it is, rather than as we want/need it to be.

No coincidence either that radical anthropology, which is the scientific forebearer of contemporary radical gender thought, also shares this link to marxism. If the thought of, say, Stephen Jay Gould as intellectual enabler of radical feminism sounds contradictory, perhaps it is. It doesn’t diminish its truth.

I do recognize I sound like I am defending marxism in terms that might sound fetishist, but it is not. My goal is rather to question the revisionist epistemology that seeks to deny marxism as a force for liberation of concrete oppression, including that of the body.

In seeking to purge from marxism its oppresive existence (which rather sadly, outweights in practice other aspects), I do not think it is positive to deny its liberationist existence… Doing so is an exercise of extremism, like equating Hitler and FDR, because both were corporatist capitalists, or Hitler and Stalin because both presided death camps…

On other things:

mencanstoprape.org is interesting and ultimately positive, but still stirs a tought. Its propagandistic emphasis on male strength diverter to other uses seems a bit problematic. Not just the obvious reinforcement of male stereotypes as brawny dimwits, but also of far more dangerous (for gender relations) archetypes of men as protectors of damsels in distress. There is an entire body of “erotica” (and not so erotica: any “Danger Mouse” episode would do) dedicated to this archetype, in which men stop rape.

And lets not get into the USA’s racial politics, were rape victims are overwhelmingly white and rapists overwhelmingly black, *IF* we are to believe the prision-industrial complex.

Ultimately it perpetuates both a self-image and attitude to gender thats completely patriarchal. “Be a *man*, *choose* not to rape” is ultimately both conterintutive and condesending: men are both told to be more manly as a way to stop the quintessential male behaivior and incapable of stopping being men (or at least the most nefarious side of its existence), with out somehow being “less”.

I might understand it as a transitional step in the development of men as they relate to women, but leaves a bit of a bad aftertaste. Am I just being sour?

Treason to gender is loyalty to humanity!

Great leap forward – life expectancy increased by years for both men and women. Literacy soared. Women’s rights advanced. Mao’s group should have known better, right rootless?

Cultural revolution: the old political class and family joined the party at the last second when it looked like the party would prevail. weaseled into roles as corrupt party officials. How do you get rid of parts of the government without repeating Stalin era mistakes?
As we know, Mao’s group’s plan didn’t work out either.
But those men and women were still living longer, and could still read! Where were you to tell them they were better off before, rootless?
This post is getting too long…so I’ll save clarifying the Cambodian and Peruvian situations for another time.Radical means from the root.Think big, rootless.

[on masculinist styles of argumentation and competitive, insistent verbal duelling/sparring:] [feminist divorce-lawyer friend] tells her clients, “Just disengage.” But he’ll get the last word? — Yes. He’ll feel victorious? — Yes. But he’s wrong? — You’ll never persuade him of that. But he’s insulted me? — Indeed he has, and continuing the exchange only lets him do it some more. But this means the loudest, most bullying voices dominate the public arena? — Yes, and what else is new? The one thing that will make him–eventually–look elsewhere is for you to fall silent and stay that way. The first rule of family law: Boys Win, Girls Lose. The system works.

[on the Doctrine thread (one of the longest in FS history I believe):] I have skimmed it, and yes, it’s fairly tedious, because it feels to me as though this (to me pointless) dispute is dragging Stan back into the sectarian swamp when I wish he’d engage some deeper theoretical problems. I really liked Joaquin’s (I think) quote from a pretty obscure work of Marx about the difference between innovators and their followers, but nobody (as far as I’ve seen) has stopped to ask what class is or why it matters. One loyalist announced that the proletariat is a minority in the US — not what Marx predicted at all — and that what matters is its historic mission, not anything transient like what it wants or thinks — admittedly hard to divine since we’re not sure who’s in it.

I really think the whole theoretical apparatus needs to be laid aside — listening to that solemn whiteboy reading passages from the Manifesto under the cartoon Stan linked to only reinforced this opinion. Society reduced to two antagonistic classes? Wages depressed to a uniform level of misery? The executive of the state “nothing but” a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie? Come on. If we don’t know our world any better than that, we’re not doing serious politics, and the claim to be practitioners of a “science” is pitiable.

In fact I think the debate over Primary Contradictions is also not a useful way to invest time and intellectual energy, because it’s still trying to find a way to explain history in terms Hegel would have recognized (even if “with a new content,” as we used to say, ignoring the Hegelian principle that Form and Content, too, make up a dialectical unity.) Why do we need Marx’s idea of class to defend workers’ rights? Why do we need to talk about Marx at all to understand the pervasiveness and depth of women’s oppression? Do we need Marx on the Irish to grasp the way racism has shaped every aspect of US history, from railroad labor law to the actuarial tables? Sure, if something the old boy said seems apposite, quote him by all means; quote Melville or Sylvia Plath or William Blake, but let’s not bother about the definition of Melvillism-Plathism, OK? when there’s a calamitous world out there and a very slim chance of saving it from utter disaster.

I’m definitely a Bernsteinian, at least as far as political strategy goes: all we know for certain is that there is injustice, that those who are treated unjustly will resist, that self-respect dictates we side with them and not with their oppressors, and that — as [feminist friend] says, and I’ve come to agree very strongly — we’re lousy at foreseeing the consequences of our choices and we’re responsible if they’re terrible, even if our intentions were the best and our information the most reliable we could get.

[and apropos of good intentions and bad results:] I really do not know what Jonny means by citing George Jackson and Mao. Did George Jackson’s goal of uniting prisoners across “race” lines come to pass? Was George Jackson’s 1971 declaration that “fascism is here” accurate, and if so, why are we still debating whether it’s coming? Was Mao’s homily about unity against an external enemy borne out by events in China? How can any sane person, knowing what happened to the Chinese people under the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, suggest that Mao is a guide to building a better world? Good god, what next–the wisdom of Abimael Guzman? The thoughts of Comrade Number One, Pol Pot?

NB: these are rootless’ words and thoughts, not my own. he has gone back to using Safari, which hiccups when interacting with WP or at least with this instance of WP, so I post on his behalf.