Enemy Women, Part 1: Left Behind (by Audrey)
When I was discharged from the army, one of the many things I was relieved about was that I would never again, as the lone female in my unit, have to share transportation with the rest of the guys when we were on travel. I would never again have to listen to Howard Stern on the way to work. I wouldn’t have to sit, leaning against the back window staring into space, while the men bonded over classic commentary like this:
I just wanna take that piece of ass body, put tape over her mouth, and do things to her. . And then like, I reach in, I yank out her vocal cords and then she just orally satisfies me by the pool. Oh, she’s totally a mute Kim. And she’s totally nude. . And then I break her legs and position them in the back of her head so that she’s sitting, and they’re permanently fixed like that.
I would never again end up standing in a crowd, waiting for them to give me a ride home, while women line up to have cold water dumped on their tee-shirts, and my co-workers line up to help rate them.
As a woman in the army, I learned not to complain about those things. I watched as a civilian woman was denied a job interview in our office, because the LTC in charge checked her personnel files and found out she’d filed an EEO complaint once. He wanted people that could work as part of a team, not trouble-makers. I nodded in sympathy when he explained this. I could have spoken up; I could have made a stand and any of those particular things would have been dealt with. But I also knew if I did that, the attention would be directed at me instead of those other women. Men have a way of knowing how to yank out a woman’s vocal cords without ever having to touch her.
Interaction and Inaction
Not so long ago, there was a blog post circulating around the internet, which began:
Memorandum for Record: Military Spending Concerns
FROM: SPC Freeman, Milo; US Army, Iraq
TO: Senate Democrats, Republicans, and “American Idol” viewers
across the nation.
1. You. Punk. Ass. Pantywaisted. Bitches.
It continued on with a fine anti-war rant intermingled with a bunch of stupidity about congress finding their testicles. It traveled around various lefty sites, and landed in an anti-war forum that I visit.
An equally irate rant appeared from my keyboard echoing the language in the original essay, beginning with:
At the risk of pissing off every member of the peace movement, who apparently are all unanimously embracing this post at the moment, let me just say that as a “pantywaisted bitch” who has been searching for my testicles for decades now without any luck, I am not going to be following suit here …
One of the responses, from an anti-war activist whom I personally know:
Audrey, and all feminists who would wish to have everyone be politically correct when voicing their opinions on (this) group. Get a fucking grip! This isn’t about you! or your pantywaistes. Your acting like little bitches! . In fact to see (it) on this group makes me want to puke. .So stop being a pantywaiste bitch and get over it.
There is another forum I wander around in from time to time, a forum of designers. A few months ago, I started putting members there on ignore if they posted racist, sexist, or homophobic content. I didn’t announce when I did it, or make a public show of stating whose posts I was no longer reading; I just quietly clicked the ignore button.
Responses from people who realized I was ignoring their posts:
“Manhoe”
“Well, Aud, fuck you. Why do you bother coming here.”
“… why don’t you care about posts that create a hostile environment for men?”
“… the last seven or so years you’ve just been a stupid cunt in disguise.”
“… all this time you’re pissing away ignoring people and highlighting supposed gender inequality as part of a worthless social experiment should be spent getting gangbanged on film for (our) enjoyment.”
I anticipated some backlash from the first incident; I was confrontational. I didn’t expect the intensity of the response I received, or that a man there would ask, repeatedly, for copies of private correspondence I’d sent to a third party. That’s something I’d expect from a supervisor, not a peer. And I didn’t expect that another woman who defended my stance would be personally attacked and subtly threatened, while the men who spoke in my defense were ignored.
In the other forum, the graphics one, I was taken aback by how angry people were at the thought of me not reading their posts. It’s a personal affront to them, I suppose, that somewhere in the Midwest, there is one middle-aged woman who isn’t looking at the slurs and porn they present, or reading further posts from them once they present it.
That last comment about my need to get gangbanged was from a left-leaning man I’d been friends with for years, and with whom I collaborated on for a small art project once. He advises me to read a book written by a “sex-positive” woman. I wonder why such a “sex-positive” man is so quick to equate sex with anger and retaliation. I view him as being “violent-porn-positive.” Perhaps it’s the same thing.
What I discovered in my “social experiment” was that men are oppressed when women don’t embrace slurs against themselves or the men who slur them, and that oppression of men happens whether the women speak out or silently refuse to read further.
Why the Left’s Behind
It doesn’t surprise me that people use gender slurs, or equate women and their bodies with all that is bad, and men and their testicles with strength of character and all that is good. Our culture pours these thoughts into our heads. When we try to walk, it’s like we’re carrying all these buckets around that are slightly too full; they slosh and leak over the top, and run down our legs.
They’re filled with derogatory words for women who are sexually active, and for women who aren’t, and for women we wish would be more sexually active, and for women who walk around in public without looking sexually attractive enough, for women who speak when they should be making themselves more sexually attractive, and for women who haven’t learned yet that speaking makes them less sexually attractive.
These words don’t have male counterparts, because we don’t have a need, in our culture, to keep men in their place. And the buckets are filled with the notion that we on the left are noble because we’re progressive enough to say that women should have equal rights, but it’s a sort of equality that comes as a footnote to what we all know - that women’s value is, at the end of the day, based on their potential as objects for men’s sexual gratification. That also leaks down our legs when we have a discussion with or about women.
I see this sloshing around when the left talks about conservative women in the news. They tell me their comments aren’t homophobic or misogynistic; they are just serving the right’s hypocrisy back to them on a platter. But that platter’s always filled with words from those same buckets, the same ones they’re using to fill the platters they deliver to women in the news who aren’t involved in politics, and it doesn’t matter whether these women are excessively rich and privileged and white, or underprivileged women of color. I see the same dishes being served to the women on the left, when they step out of line in some way. That happens whether the women on the left are in the public eye or not. The left spends a lot of time drenching all women with what’s in those buckets.
The buckets splash no matter who’s carrying them, the left or the right. What interests me is what happens when they spill. When the right spills, they don’t particularly care. They just keep on walking. When the left gets caught doing the same, they have to slow down and make a show of denying there’s a wet spot on the floor. To do otherwise might jeopardize their status as champions of women’s rights.
And so, when we object to being drenched in sexist slurs, the left characterizes that objection as an isolated personal issue that “hurt our feelings.” As women, we are known for being overly sensitive and emotional, and incapable of analytical thought, so our objections are reduced to an emotional and personal response. When the term Macaca was used by the right, nobody dismissed it as being about one person’s bruised feelings. There was an outcry against that incident, because the left understands (when it’s not about women) that a slur against one person is hate speech against an entire group.
If the woman getting drenched is conservative and we voice a complaint, we are accused of sympathizing with the enemy. We are not allowed to simultaneously have contempt for a woman’s political positions or actions, while also believing that sexually degrading her as a woman is offensive.
The left shores up the sensitive feelings defense by hauling out “political correctness” to shame subordinate groups into silence. That phrase is a tool used to avoid the real terms that apply - racism or misogyny or homophobia. Those words assign blame to the speaker. “Political correctness” conveniently places the blame entirely on the person who is the target of such speech. Once we invoke that term, the victim becomes the oppressor.
The argument goes something like this: “I’m not offended when someone uses a slur against me based on my identity as a male. So you shouldn’t be offended when I use derogatory language against you as a woman.” In other words, “I’m not offended when you dump water on me; why are you offended when I dump a bucket of water on you, and then deny equal opportunities to you because instead of doing serious work, you’ve been parading about in a wet t-shirt?”
The objectification and degradation of women isn’t just a matter of “hurt feelings.” It plunges us into poverty, and validates violence against us. It fuels the discrimination against women in hiring, in promotions, in the way the media represents us - or doesn’t, and in the way we’re treated when we walk down a public street. The left responds by telling us they’ve been on the front lines fighting for women’s rights for decades, don’t blame them, and they say this as they’re staring at our chest and holding the dripping bucket in their hands.
If the PC argument doesn’t shut us up, we’re told we’re distracting people from the larger more important mission ahead. They can’t stop being sexist now - there’s a war to be stopped! Treating women as equals rather than as sexualized objects for male gratification, or as metaphors for all that is weak and ineffectual, would divert valuable resources from the anti-war effort. After all war has ended, then the left will address discrimination against women - which they care about, deeply.
If we can’t smile while quietly standing in the puddles they make, if we rebel against our designation as enemy targets, they escalate the hate speech and make it more personal and sexualized until we retreat.
This doesn’t mean they’re misogynistic. They believe in equal rights, and they assure us they don’t need a lecture in how language affects perceptions, or how perceptions affect reality. The left allows us to be equal because they are progressive and open-minded about such things, and they’re even willing to keep treating us as equals, so long as we can show we deserve it - and so long as we don’t ask them to mop up the floor.
[Editor’s note: we intend this to be Part 1 of a long-overdue series on misogyny as a political weapon/practise/strategy — whether it be the abuse of “the enemy’s women” in war, or the use of misogynist hate speech to assail “the enemy’s women” in politics, or the misogynist tropes that define all Enemies as Women, or the plain ol’ everyday misogyny intended to silence or intimidate any woman defined as Uppity and hence Enemy…]
Stan:
Well, Audrey, you’re the skunk at the party now (no leftish puns intended).
Sex-positive, sex-schmozitive! This is a polemical term, like “pro-life”; designed to define the opposition by implication. If you are not pro-life; then you are pro-death. If you are not pro-life; then you re anti-life. If you are not sex-positive; then you are sex-negative.
Hidden premise: sex is an unmitigated Good. Question this, and we can pin you into our bug collection of prudes and religious fundamentalists… fit you into our bi-verse (as opposed to uni-verse, or multi-verse) of Us and Them.
So what agenda can this serve, this hidden premise that begins (arbitrarily) with Victorian aversion to all things corporeal, that leaps high into the sky, over the top of every actually existing social construction of sex (and in the name of social constructionism… how’s that for contradictory?!) and transforms “sex” into an abstract and absolute Good?
What agenda can this “vision” of Sex, that disappears both biology and male power, possibly serve?
I’ve said it until my throat is sore… IDEOLOGY is a mental construction that serves to simultaneously conceal and reproduce existing social power.
Sex-positive IDEOLOGY pretends that sex can be separated from power, even as anyone’s experience (such as you have shown lucidly and with great power) tells us otherwise. So whose power is concealed and reproduced?
Liberal-lefties, the putative allies of women who reactively spout this uncritical nonsense, are participating in the self-preservation of patriarchy… midwifing and nurturing the fraternal-patriarchy of abstractly universal access of all men to all women, as the offspring of the older paternal-patriarchy still espoused by the Right.
18 July 2007, 6:10 amLinda c:
Audrey,
Thank You.
18 July 2007, 8:26 amAudrey:
I don’t understand the “sex-positive” label at all.
The radical feminists I know who oppose porn don’t refer to women derisively as sluts or whores, even if they wear low cut dresses or high heels. They don’t use slang for women’s genitals or other gendered slurs as insults. They don’t use violent imagery of rape as a way to express anger at a woman.
The pro-porn crowd consistently does all of those things. “Reproducing the social power structure” is a perfect description. There is so much sexualized violence and contempt for women and women’s bodies embedded into their words and metaphors that I’m having a very hard time figuring out why that’s not considered “sex-negative.”
18 July 2007, 10:40 amDeAnander:
Well, taking a running jump at Audrey’s dilemma… I think it comes back to that unfortunate physiological sexual asymmetry among our branch of the chimp family, and male power. How patriarchy originated no one knows (everyone has a pet theory, but w/o a time machine we’ll never know). Howsomever, we have ended up with a multi-millennial situation where (a) men have power over women, be that muscle power or money power, and (b) “the act” (of reproductive mating) is — on average — far more pleasurable for men than women. (In some cases this would be a polite understatement: there’s the problem of the hymen and the fact that penetration by a full-size penis is often painful “the first time” and for some women, depending on their partner’s size and consideration or lack thereof, possibly every time.) Plus, women bear the serious physical consequences of pregnancy. So we have a setup where “straight sex”, for men, is a nonreciprocal experience with a lower-caste person, where risk and pain borne by the lower-caste person do not diminish the pleasure reaped by the higher-caste person. [Gee, could this be the original ur-example of the capitalist theory of “externalised costs”?]
And this heterosexist and patriarchal definition of “sex” — as something that cannot happen between equals or be fully reciprocal — appears to be stuck so deeply into our culture, you should forgive the expression, that we cannot escape it — misogyny is sex. Without that imbalance of power and the fantasy or reality of expropriation or violation, it just “isn’t sexy.” Those acts and practises that are mutually pleasurable or gift-exchange are often defined by heteronormative discourse as “not really” sex, where “real sex” means penile penetration and male orgasm. To put it bluntly, if he didn’t come inside someone’s body (or using the inside of someone’s body) then it didn’t really happen.
You note that after “sexual liberation” when women were supposed to be freed to enjoy sex rather than experience it as a duty, burden, or curse — the next move was not a popular fad for egalitarian, reciprocal sexual exchange of pleasure. It was a move towards more and more sadistic and demeaning practises foisted on women. Liberating women from sexual shame, forced pregnancy, body-hatred and theological contumely meant that some new way of equating sex with shame and humiliation had to be engineered, and the pornographers were happy to supply the demand so that sex could go on being “really sex.”
So, in this culture, to be sex-positive is to be misogyny-positive, because any sexuality that is not misogynist or power-trippy is “not really” sex, it is mere “foreplay” or “making out”. I remember having a moment of flashpoint rage many years ago at the (otherwise a very nice guy) stepdad of a lesbian friend who, in a very mixed company of extended family members including radfems and lesbians, reminisced about his high school days and what they called “Anything But Sex” — meaning sexual activity without penile penetration. The flashpoint of rage was realising that without even giving it a conscious thought, this nice liberal man was defining the sexual practises of the lesbian couple(s) in the room out of existence: they were not having sex, you see, they were having “Anything But Sex”.
Where only penile penetration is defined as really sex, there’s a drift towards defining “only nonreciprocity” as really sex, and from there it’s an easy further slide to “only dominance and coercion”, and from there an easy further slide to “only contempt and sadism.” One could pause at any of several landings on this stairway to Hell, but most people just slide down the bannisters happily into porno-ganda land. Over and over again in the literature of porn we hear the excuse that “ordinary sex just wasn’t exciting any more.” Which implies that what was exciting about ordinary sex all along was not just the physical release or comfort, not the intimacy with a loved one (god forbid, how sissy), but the real or imagined transgression. When “ordinary sex” became legitimate, more extreme practises had to supply the addictive appetite for transgression.
In evidence I offer Exhibit A: Anal is the New Third Base from the scintillating radfem blog “I Blame the Patriarchy.” Twisty (blog author) and the gang analyse the accelerating trend for men in the US to demand that their female partners permit anal penetration — and worse. Exhibit B: over at Feministe is an interesting discussion of (among other things) the difference in tone and content between the treatment of anal penetration in gay-male sexual literature and in straight-male sexual literature. Despite straight men’s quivering horror of “buggery,” the gay lit is mostly about safety, cleanliness, comfort, courtesy, etc when undertaking a potentially erotic act — not about domination, humiliation, and contempt. In other words, the gay lit is about a sexual practise between more-or-less equals, the het lit is about a political act of terrorism or shaming of a lower-caste person who needs to be shown, and kept in, her place.
18 July 2007, 12:54 pmAudrey:
De, not sure if you’ve seen the BBC documentary, Guys and [Real]Dolls. http://www.videosift.com/video/BBC-Documentary-Guys-and-RealDolls
18 July 2007, 1:57 pmIt’s sort of the ultimate in nonreciprocal relationships.
DeAnander:
I also want to comment tangentially on nonreciprocity as a denial of communication: note that the Howard Stern quote above focuses on silencing a woman by “ripping out her vocal cords”, and compare to — oh dear, my mental filing system is failing me — the description of a lynching by, I think, Alice Walker, in which she described the white mob hooting and hollering around the charred remains of “what had once been a human being capable of pleading and protesting until they cut out its tongue.” (quote may be approximate or misattributed, I can’t remember the source accurately enough to check it). it is that last descriptive detail that perfectly encapsulates the denial of reciprocity, the repudiation of the I/Thou and the insistence on the I/It — denying the other person the capacity of speech, the ability to speak and assert his/her humanity.
the theme of gagging or silencing women — with cloth gags, leather bridles, objects, penises and the like — resonates throughout the porn industry from the allegedly “benign” to the hardcore. it resonates through the popular romantic imagination in the cinematic kiss with which the rugged hero silences the protesting or babbling heroine (occasionally the scenario is reversed for dramatic novelty, but the preponderance of “shut-up” kisses are M2F).
an alternate way of gagging or silencing women is to assert that what women say is not what they mean, i.e. she says No but what she really means is Yes. again there’s a denial of reciprocity, an inability or unwillingness to allow the Other any independent existence, opinion, PoV, or reality, to deny that the noises they make have meaning (cf the hard-dying fantasy of colonial cultures that indigenous cultures have “primitive” languages or communicate in grunts): an attempt to make person into object, hence the hoary old feminist jargon-word: objectification.
communication is in some fundamental sense symbiotic, or symbiosis is fundamentally communication; the insistence on non-reciprocity is antisymbiotic, and that gets us into a realm of discourse so large and footnoted that I can’t go near it for a while (not until I have more free time). the ideological construction of sex under patriarchy is all about the denial of symbiosis/reciprocity and the fantasy/mania for one-way resource transfer (accumulation), separation, and hierarchy (graded taxonomies). not to mention, of course, your basic greed, cheating, and theft
18 July 2007, 2:24 pmpierre:
Thanks everybody for those analyses .
18 July 2007, 2:41 pmAnother horror in my opinion :
Today a woman just hasn’t the right not to be beautiful !
Excuse my poor english .
Richard:
I really appreciate this post and look forward to the rest of the series. I’ve been thinking about these topics for a while, and this post (as well as recent excellent posts and subsequent discussions here, such as the one about the barring of certain language in a rape trial) have been very helpful.
On a somewhat related note, I posted a comment here before, trying to alert people to Chris Knight’s book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. I bring it up again because actually posted about it earlier this week at my own blog here, if anyone’s interested.
Thanks.
18 July 2007, 3:18 pmDisgruntled Warthog:
Audrey,
Insightful post. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend after I had “objectified” her (by saying jugs instead of breasts or mammary glands). Clearly it has been ingrained in my colloquial jargon to associate physical attributes to predefined objects. However, I do not think you are explaining everything here. Ojectification is a means of classifying. We are taught from day one to determine objects as a whole (the body) and parts that make up the whole (torso, legs, arms) and even further (abdomen, breasts, forearm, etc). Objectification of the human anatomy is nothing new, however, there is obviously more attention given to the female body. Some of these labels are now used to label people. No not just women, men too. So why is it that it is common to hear an outcry from feminists when partciular words are used against them but less commonly from their male counterparts when they are exposed to the same treatment. I disagree Audreay. There are male equivalents for the words you are offended by and those are the same words used against you.
“Nigger” now commonly used by everyone who attends public school in my region is used recklessly. Clearly, not even middle and high schoolers cannot tell the difference in the meanings of words. Why are sexist comments any different? No it is not what many claim to be a term of endearment. It is a contextualized adjective and in my opinion “derogatory” remarks should be used in the same way. Recklessly. It is not by hushing up men and women from using non-PC words in public that eliminates the pain, but the thorough recreation of meaning and the reclassification of groups.
—————————————————————————————
MODERATOR: Clearly this post will be ingrained in our colloquial jargon as a predefined equivalent of contextualized adjectives. Translation: The warthog will be disgruntled… elsewhere.
We have been discussing the notion of having a “last-post archive” where people can review the kinds of foolishness and/or hatefulness that gets people thrown off the site. Now, it seems, we may have to sub-categorize to differentiate between hateful, clueless, disingenuous, exploitation of the bandwidth to promote bizarre conspiracy theories, garden-variety trolling, and unintelligible… or diverse combinations thereof.
OTHER MODERATOR: off-the-cuff reasons for bouncing: attempted obfuscation/denial of gendered power (no, “pr*ck” is not the same kind of epithet as “c*nt”, as you’ll find out pdq if you try ‘em both out on the tattooed bruiser on the neighbouring stool in a “real men’s” bar ), use of “non-PC” as a euphemism for hate-speech, and insistence that material power structures can be altered at will by merely learning to assign different meanings to pejoratives, i.e. the linguistic equiv of “lie back and learn to like it.” plonk.
19 July 2007, 7:37 amBrighid:
DeAnander, thank you for this, can’t wait for the rest.
[Moderator note: this is actually Audrey’s deathless prose, so credit where credit is due… DeA is just the humble editor in this case.]
19 July 2007, 6:52 pmRequired:
Excellent article. I’m actually working on something similar at the moment. Basically I’m making a short film that will “unpack” objectification. With particular focus on the point Audrey raised about how “The objectification and degradation of women isn’t just a matter of “hurt feelings.â€
20 July 2007, 11:54 amL.W.M.:
DeAnander: How patriarchy originated no one knows (everyone has a pet theory, but w/o a time machine we’ll never know)
Pregnancy (the very long gestation period of humans, one of the longest for mammals) and the even longer post-natal development of human offspring and their dependence on the mother for sustenance immediately after birth?
If we were Intelligent Designers we could blame it on the Creator, (God or Goddess, or… ), but I think I’d look into Evolutionary Psychology for the answer. It may be in the different reproductive strategies of the sexes.
20 July 2007, 5:49 pmLWM:
Now, it seems, we may have to sub-categorize to differentiate between hateful, clueless, disingenuous, exploitation of the bandwidth to promote bizarre conspiracy theories, garden-variety trolling, and unintelligible… or diverse combinations thereof.
I’m not sure which one of those my previous comment was representative of, it’s gone, apologies, (just as well, I was thinking out loud), but I think I was pulling at the latest theoretical threads, (i.e. mating patterns, but I postulated reproductive strategies). This might be a theory that has some evidence to back it up. I am aware that our ancestors’ early societies (40,000 to 10,000 years back) tended to be acephalous and matrilineal, but whence came patriarchy? This truly surprised me.
I think it comes back to that unfortunate physiological sexual asymmetry among our branch of the chimp family, and male power. How patriarchy originated no one knows (everyone has a pet theory, but w/o a time machine we’ll never know).
Not quite a time machine, but…
Cattle ownership makes it a man’s world
14:32 01 October 2003
NewScientist.com news service
Shaoni Bhattacharya
Early female-dominated societies lost their power to men as they acquired cattle, a new study demonstrates.
The idea that early communities became “patrilineal”, with male status and inheritance being most important, when they gained cattle has been debated since the beginning of modern anthropological studies in the nineteenth century. However, no one had been able to convincingly demonstrate a causal link.
Now Clare Janaki Holden and Ruth Mace at University College London, UK, believe they have produced some of the firmest evidence yet to back the theory.
They made a linguistic tree of the evolution of 68 African Bantu languages, which include modern day Swahili and Zulu, and correlated this with the acquisition of cattle herds by those language speakers and the type of society they lived in.
The researchers then used a clever mathematical model to infer what had happened in the past to produce the pattern of languages seen today. “At an early stage these populations were more matrilineal than today,” Holden told New Scientist. “They then adopted cattle and became patrilineal.”
“I think this study is very important,” says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK. “What they are trying to show is that human mating patterns, wealth inheritance and dominance systems respond to ecological variation in the same way that we would expect animal populations to behave.”
Bride wealth
Holden believes the reason the acquisition of cattle led to a switch to male-dominated societies is most probably linked to the system of “bridewealth”. This tradition, in which a bridegroom gives cattle to a bride’s family, is particular to the Bantu speaking regions of sub-equatorial Africa.
“If a man’s got lots of cattle he can have lots of wives. So if you have cattle it makes sense to give it to sons rather than the daughters,” she says. The fundamental reason for this is that wealthy, and therefore attractive, sons are likely to have more children than daughters, because while women must bear each child a man need only impregnate a woman.
Holden believes that the acquisition of wealth may generally causing a shift in power to men: “If you have valuable resources they are probably going to become monopolised by men because men can use them to acquire more wives or women.”
Another factor that could be important, Holden says, is cattle raiding, with men better able to defend against marauders.
Maximum likelihood
The Bantu linguistic tree created by Holden and Mace charts the divergence of the languages from a common starting point about 3000 years ago. They then added data about each population’s ownership of cattle and their type of society, matrilineal or patrilineal.
The pair then applied the mathematical model, developed by Pagel, to find the “maximum likelihood” historical scenario that would have produced the modern day situation. They found that acquiring cattle did indeed cause a shift to a man’s world, or one of “mixed descent” where both sexes are important for inheritance.
Crucially, they were able to account for the fact that the cultures were related. Cultural traits tend to be passed down generations in the same way as genetic ones.
Pagel, who is also Mace’s husband, says the study shows the cultural phenomenon arose independently a number of times and “greatly strengthens” the belief that the cattle ownership and patrilineal societies have a causal connection and are not observed together for some other reason.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI 10.1098/rspb.2003.2535)
21 July 2007, 2:57 amStan:
And now we see how — yet again — De’s set-side reference to these pet theories is used as the hook to hijack the thread away from the issue raised by Audrey… by extensive exploration of… a pet theory.
And men have the nerve to call women things like passive-aggressive, sly, and diversionary.
As always, this plunge into the lost archives of prehistory simultaneously accomplishes at least three things:
(1) it “objectifies” the discourse, changing the affect from immediate and personal to academic and abstract,
(2) it takes the responsibility for men’s hatefulness and aggression now and places it on “evolution” (ie, nature)… we call that naturalization (the Devil [Nature] made me do it),
(3) and it leads the thread away from the discomfort felt by men when it becomes apparent that Men are the problem.
The year is 2007. Neither spear-hunting nor cattle inheritance nor Richard Dawkins’ pristine, decontextualized genes can be called to account for putative leftist American men calling women (or men they want to devalue) “stupid cunts,” pantywaists, bitches, and the like… and suggesting that they need a good punishment by Phallus.
We acknowledge biology here; that’s not the same as being biological determinists. These behaviors are intentional, directed at a subjected population, and culturally constructed. They are, in a word, bullying.
Here is an original idea. Why don’t men admit they do this stuff, apologize and take responsibility, and then stop doing it? (gasp)
Now here is a truly “transgressive” idea as a kind of follow-up: Why don’t men, once they stop acting like this long enough to stop thinking like this, tell other men to men admit they do this stuff, apologize and take responsibility, and stop doing it? (double gasp)
The world will not screech to a halt. Your little pollinators won’t fall off. And there will begin to be less fear and misery in the world… even for men.
Meanwhile, the subject is misogyny as a political weapon/practice/strategy.
21 July 2007, 7:28 amLWM:
And now we see how — yet again — De’s set-side reference to these pet theories is used as the hook to hijack the thread away from the issue raised by Audrey… by extensive exploration of… a pet theory.
Mr. Goff,
I’d like to be here, not because I agree with everything yet, (How could I? I barely understand it.) but because I respect you and the others here because I want to learn about these issues, and sometimes that might mean I’ll say or ask something [stupid] that will elicit such a response. I know you are angry. We all are, and about a great many things. I readily admit I haven’t read much feminist theory. I wasn’t intending to hijack the thread. When a question like that is posed, being naturally curious, I wonder about it. I’ll just be more careful about what I post.
Certainly I am guilty of some of what you ascribe to me. OTOH, I may not be as completely unevolved as you make me out. Something I wish you would explain in greater detail, so I can know if I do understand it since it seems to be analogous to what you are saying:
“I’ve said it until my throat is sore… IDEOLOGY is a mental construction that serves to simultaneously conceal and reproduce existing social power.”
It’s elegant (and deceptively) simple and some of the most important concepts are.
21 July 2007, 4:31 pmStan:
The attacks against Audrey, and against women, and against “enemy” women, are the essence of pornography.
Catharine A. MacKinnon: Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Chapter 11, pages 195-196.
Possession and use of women through the sexualization of intimate intrusion and access to them is a central feature of women’s social definition as inferior and feminine. Visual and verbal intrusion, access, possession, and use is predicated upon and produces physical and psychic intrusion, access, possession, and use. In contemporary industrial society, pornography is an industry that mass produces sexual intrusion on, access to, possession and use of women by and for men for profit. It exploits women’s sexual and economic inequality for gain. It sells women to men as and for sex. It is a technologically sophisticated traffic in women.
This understanding of the reality of pornography must contend not only with centuries of celebratory intellectual obfuscation. It must contend with a legal tradition of neutralization through abstraction from the realities of power, a tradition that has authoritatively defined pornography as not about women as such at all, but about sex, hence about morality, and as not about acts or practices, but about ideas. Uncovering gender in this area of law reveals women to be most invisible when most exposed and most silent when used in defense of speech. In both pornography and the law of obscenity, women are seen only as sex and heard only when mouthing a sexual script. When pornography and the law of pornography are investigated together, it becomes clear that pornography is to women’s status, hence its critique is to feminism, as its preservation is to male supremacy in its liberal legal guise.
The law of obscenity is the state’s approach to addressing the pornography problem, which it construes as an issue of regulation of expression under the First Amendment. Nudity, explicitness, excess of candor, arousal or excitement, prurience, unnaturalness–these qualities raise concerns under obscenity law when sex is depicted or portrayed. Abortion or birth control information or treatments for “restoring sexual virility†(whose, do you suppose?) have also been covered. Sex forced on real women so that it can be sold at a profit to be forced on other real women; women’s bodies trussed and maimed and raped and made into things to be hurt and obtained and accessed and this presented as the nature of women; the coercion that is visible and the coercion that has become invisible–this and more grounds the feminist concern with pornography. Obscenity as such probably does little harm. Pornography contributes causally to attitudes and behaviors of violence and discrimination which define the treatment and status of half the population.
Obscenity law is concerned with morality, meaning good and evil, virtue and vice. The concerns of feminism with power and powerlessness are first political, not moral. From the feminist perspective, obscenity is a moral idea; pornography is a political practice. Obscenity is abstract; pornography is concrete. Obscenity conveys moral condemnation as a predicate to legal condemnation. Pornography identifies a political practice that is predicated on power and powerlessness–a practice that is, in fact, legally protected. The two concepts represent two entirely different things.
[emphases added]
22 July 2007, 6:38 pmRichard:
Um, I’m sorry. I don’t know if Stan’s comment was directed in part towards my comment, but I hope it didn’t seem like I was trying to hijack the thread, either, by referencing the Blood Relations book/theory. I completely agree with Audrey’s points in the post–and I increasingly agree that men are, in fact, the problem. I brought it up because of the question about our not knowing where patriarchy came from; in that sense, I thought it was worth bringing up, even if it was only related to a branch of the discussion. For me, this book helps show a way in which we can get away from ideas that certain masculine/patriarchal behaviors and ideas are NOT evolutionarily determined, but socially/culturally constructed. If that wasn’t clear, I apologize.
24 July 2007, 12:45 pmRichard:
Re-reading my last comment, I see I was unclear again. That last sentence should say: “this book helps show that masculine/patriarchal behaviors and ideas are not biologically determined, but socially/culturally constructed.”
24 July 2007, 5:56 pmLegume Sam:
De said:
This reminds me of certain depictions of sex in Classical society…
24 July 2007, 11:45 pmJames M:
More evidence showing the left’s behind (double entendre intended):
http://www.lgbtees.com/index.cgi/lgbt/lgbteescom/2065509?gclid=CJSMlqzD8I0CFQYNYAodHwkYNQ
12 August 2007, 1:33 pmElaina:
Good lord.
13 August 2007, 8:25 amTOMMY:
AUDREY,
AS A VETERAN MYSELF I WOULD LIKE TO THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE ! FOR MOST OF MY TIME IN I WAS IN A FRONT LINE UNIT WITH NO FEMALE TROOPS, THE LAST 3 YEARS I WAS IN A SIGNAL UNIT BECAUSE MY KNEES ARE A BAG A OF BB’S AND OF COURSE THE MALE TO FEMALE RATIO IS 70 TO 30 % AND YES MEN ARE PIGS ! I THOUGHT BEING AN ENGINEER WE WERE DISGUSTING, BECAUSE THAT WAS OUR JOB ! BUT THESE GOOFS WERE OUT OF LINE. MY BEST FRIEND IN THE UNIT WAS A FEMALE, SHE WAS MARRIED AS WAS I, IN FACT THE STORY ABOUT A WEDDING RING ATTRACTS MORE WOMEN IS TRUE, BUT I STAYED FAITHFUL TO MY WIFE. I AM A STUDENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY, AND WATCHING YOUNGER TROOPS FALL OVER THEMSELVES CHASE MY BUDDY, AND FIGHT FOR HER ATTENTION WAS HILARIOUS, YET SAD. SHE HAS STORIES LIKE YOURS, ALTHOUGH SHE DOES LIKE STERN. HER AND I ARE STILL FRIENDS, SHE WAS HER FOR THE SUMMER, AND SHE AND MY NEW WIFE ARE GREAT FRIENDS. MOST OF THE ENGINEER DOGS I WAS WITH NEVER BEHAVED LIKE THAT AROUND WOMEN, BECAUSE AS THEIR LEADER I TOLD THEM, JUST PRETEND THAT IS YOUR WIFE OR DAUGHTER INTHAT SITUATION, WOULD YOU WANT HER TO BE TREATED LIKE THAT? NO WAY ! I WOULD KICK THE SHIT OUT OF ANYONE OF MY SOLDIERS WHO DISRESPECTED A FEMALE SOLDIER OR FEMALE LIKE THAT !
PEACE !
13 August 2007, 11:05 amAudrey:
Hey, Tommy, sorry about your knees.
It takes a big leap for men to confront other men about sexism, because it’s one of the ways men bond, by objectifying or trashing women. It’s also a big leap for women to confront men over it. We risk losing our status as “one of the guys” if we speak out. Once we lose that status, we become one of the targets.
It’s an even bigger leap to confront it when the target is a woman we don’t respect or admire - one of those “enemy” women. That’s a tougher test of character, the willingness to speak out against sexism when we have absolutely nothing to gain from doing so - when we aren’t defending one of our own.
STAN: Direct, succint, and very very well put.
16 August 2007, 6:59 pmLinda c:
Aubrey,
This also applies to women trashing women. When WE as a sisterhood understand the importance of not “trashing” each other, then, maybe men can begin to learn from example.
Just a thought.
I can’t say THANKS - enough!!!!
17 August 2007, 8:48 amLinda c:
Sorry - I misspelled your name. One of my best friends name is Aubrey.
17 August 2007, 3:57 pm