Summary: A very long post about gender, power, agency, and choice, with side trips into my personal history and with a big boost in the middle courtesy of Lindsay Bayerstein.

So the other day on NPR there was one of those “contrarian” segments about some woman who’s written a book about how “feminist” it is to drop out of the economy, stay home, and… well… basically doing what my grandmother did back in the mountains of western North Carolina in the early-to-mid 20th Century: busting her ass from before dawn till after dark raising all the household’s food before cooking it, serving it and washing up after three times a day just like she busted her ass making all the clothes and linens before washing and ironing them and putting them away, and so on while her husband tended the commercial side of their farm and made sales and deliveries.

This woman on NPR (sorry, I didn’t catch her name) said she felt that such work was much more important and much more feminist than what she said was the “feminist ideal” of basically abandoning domesticity in favor of climbing the corporate ladder.

Since neither she, nor her interviewer, nor evidently the editors at NPR didn’t consider (the show not being “All Things Considered,” I guess) was that role this woman’s husband played in the enterprise.

Not to sound “all about the men” or anything but in this case I don’t think it’s possible, at all, to assess whether returning to a “woman’s work is never done” lifestyle is feminist, at all, without understanding what’s going on with their partners: what are their roles in the household? What are their roles in the domestic economy? In the outside economy? In decision-making?

Because, at least from my perspective as a classical radical feminist of the Shulamith Firestone persuasion, what’s essential about gender neutrality, gender parity, or gender equality isn’t whether the woman works inside or outside the home or whether she’s the “breadwinner” or her partner is or even whether they choose to manifest “femininity” or “masculinity.” In a way it’s not which tasks each member of the partnership takes responsibility for, or even the proportions since all individual’s affinity, aptitude, interest, energy, and need varies.

Instead it’s about the intentionality, flexibility, involvement, and relative power inside the relationship and how much room is available for both partners to determine what is done, how often, by whom. And why.

At the highest, most abstract layer of relationship dynamics, if either partner says “I’m going to be doing this therefore you must to do that” it’s not a feminist relationship. That’s no less true if the man says “wife, I’m going to work so you must stay home with the children” than if the woman says “husband, I’m going to stay home and mind the chickens so you must go out and earn all the money.” And, I might add, it’s just as true if instead it’s the man who says “wife, I’m going to stay home and make bread therefore you will go out and bring home the bacon.”

That’s what’s cool for me about Firestone’s radical vision: feminism is about power. Personal power. Relationship power. Social, cultural, and economic power. And it’s about agency: who’s got it, who’s permitted it, and what forces support or restrict it.

That’s obviously not all there is to feminism. Moving away from the high-altitude levels I’m so fond of there are more practical considerations. Which Lindsay Bayerstein of Big Think brings into focus in her own considerations of the same phenomenon:

Today, Echidne of the Snakes addresses another facet of the same trend: “reclaiming“ traditional feminine handicrafts, like knitting, as a feminist statement. Echidne wonders why today’s young women are embracing something that earlier generations regarded as drudgery.

It’s a paradox. Here’s my attempt at a resolution. Liberation has two components: objective and subjective. Objective liberation is about concrete gains in the real world like expanding rights, passing laws, raising wages, expanding opportunities, etc. In order to fully enjoy the fruits of objective liberation, however, members of oppressed groups must also subjectively liberate themselves from the self-hatred and reflexive deference has been drilled into them from birth.

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Feminists are prone to endless, and fruitless, arguments over whether burlesque or gardening or knitting can ever really be liberating for women, given their historical context. The great thing about a double standard is that you can rebel in either direction! If you like cross-stitch or knitting you choose to interpret these pursuits as a statement about the intrinsic value of discredited “feminine” activities. If you don’t, you can revel in the knowledge that, unlike your great grandmother, you will never have to darn a man’s socks. Or you can rebel by shrugging your shoulders and getting on with the rest of your life. You don’t have to care one way or the other.

She said it here.

Speaking for my own life, and possibly for the author interviewed on NPR, I really enjoy knitting, and cooking and cleaning, and childcare (though I also really enjoy technical conferences, database programming, website development, and adult education.) But because I’m in a pretty pluralistic relationship with my partner, and because at least so far we’ve been able to avoid the necessities of subsistence living, those activities are optional rather than obligatory for me. And if I ever chose to do them all day, every day, it would be a choice… though one negotiated with my partner.

My mom, on the other hand, has worn 100% drip-try polyester clothes since the day it came out, precisely because growing up washing and ironing was her foreordained role in life. As a small child (like my dad she also grew up in western North Carolina) she helped wash clothes in a crank washing machine with a crank wringer because there was no other choice but a washboard, she hung load after load of clothes on the line to dry because there was no other choice, she re-dampened clothes with water sprinkled from a old 7-Up bottle with a patent cork and aluminum sprinkler head and then ironed with real solid-metal irons heated on a stove because there was no other way to iron clothes. And she and her sister did it from childhood because that was the foreordained fate of all women in domestic life no matter what age. And so the instant she could escape from the clutches of “blue Mondays“ she was out of there like static-electricity sparks from nylon sweaters pulled from a drier and fifty or sixty years later she still hasn’t looked back.

That my brother and I, when we were single young men, bought cotton dress shirts and ironed them ourselves instead of just buying permanent-press annoyed and perplexed my mother to no end. The difference, though, was that unlike her conditions growing up we (like so many other baby-boomer men and women) had the agency, the power, and the luxury of time and opportunity for washing and ironing to be a choice instead of a necessity.

So when it comes to questions about whether going back to washing clothes on rocks in a river is or isn’t feminist, or is or isn’t liberating, or instead whether getting off the “mommy track” and striving up the corporate or political ladder is is or isn’t feminist it again comes down to that fundamental question of power, self-determination, luxury of time, and… I’m going to add respect.

Is it your choice (do you have agency to make the choice?) Is the choice a negotiated or mandated part of your relationship with your partner (do you have the power to make that choice?) Will your choice be recognized in the broader context of gender expectations — meaning will it perhaps be submerged, and thus made invisible, inside those expectations, or instead be seen as challenging and thereby expanding the scope of what can be expected for your gender? And finally, as a member of your socio-economic class or era do you have a choice to do it any other way, period, at all?

The reason I think feminism is for everyone, or at least why it’s important to me, is that it opens those avenues, and makes those questions available not just for middle- or upper-class cis-women but for everyone.

Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper points out yet another one of those fascinating cases of gender blindness. This one’s over an article in the blog of well-established but new-to-me LGBT Just Out Newspaper. Hess quotes the article and says (emphasis mine)

“For all the flack gay men get for their sexual antics, it turns out the ladies have them beat for an oft-chastised but ever-present-in-porn act -— barebacking.” Hey, way to get personal! It takes two to bareback, so why focus all the shaming on the receptive partner?

Read the quotes in context here.

Before jumping all over the Just Out author’s assumptions I’m going to agree with the underlying message: heterosexual partners are at least as inclined to practice “barebacking” as are gay partners. But I have to agree with Hess that thinking about condoms and sex safety in general only in terms of the “receptive partner” isn’t just phallocentric and one-sided, it increases the risks for all concerned.

You might think it also takes two to transmit a sexually or socially transmitted illness. Instead it actually takes at least three since whoever gives the STI to the “recipient” (who, by the way, isn’t necessarily the sexually “receptive partner”) by definition will have received it from a previous partner.

You saw that, for instance, from both sides of the recent HPV vaccine debate. It was touted as “protecting girls” from cervical cancer, which is in fact a very real risk and which in fact the vaccine offers protection from. And yes, unlike many forms of HPV which can be transmitted from any skin-to-skin contact the varieties the vaccine was designed to stop are transmitted primarily sexually, and especially though penis-in-vagina insertions. And so in one way it made sense to focus on “receptive partners” to the exclusion of, I guess, “penetrating partners.”

But on the other hand the debate largely overlooked HPV in terms of women’s partners. Well, that’s not completely true. Most opponents of the vaccine were abstinence-only advocate who argued with passion verging on hysteria that the only way “real” way women could be safe from HPV was complete and thorough avoidance of Teh Cock. But even more rational proponents tended to miss that with STIs it always takes three or more to tango: every heterosexual man who gives a woman HPV pretty necessarily first got HPF from a different woman. Who, in turn, got it from a different man who in turn… through thousands, or tens of thousands or millions of turns!

That same focus on the “receptive partner” also disregarded the minor point that the same virus that causes cervical cancer also causes cancer of the penis, of the throat, of the anus, and very likely other parts of the body not normally associated with sexual activity.

HPV, like HIV and other STIs, isn’t a unique event of concern only for “receptive partners.” Nor is it something only one partner “gives” to their current partner. Instead it’s a chain with those same thousands or millions of prior links.

The point of practicing sexual safety isn’t just to protect one partner from another. It’s to protect everybody by breaking those chains. Not just the “receiving partner” but their next partners too. And not just the “receiving partner” but their current partners: infections aren’t all one-way — one partner who has HIV or syphilis will still need protection if his or her partner has herpes, or HPV, or chlamydia, or another strain of HIV, or…

Emily Nagoski of sex nerd, celebrating her 100th post, says

So here we are. Almost none of the sex we have is reproductive, yet we’ve managed to populate the planet beyond its capacity to sustain us. We use sex to every end – as a commodity, as a weapon, as a status marker, as plain old recreation. In everything that makes us most human – our economy, our wars, our art, our language, our complex relationships and social systems – sex plays a role.

Read the quote in context here.

And then adds

“Emily, if you could be any animal, what animal would you be?” I’d be a human, any day of the week.

Why, then, with all this genius, all this creativity and innovation, can we not stop using sex as a weapon of war, when we have so many other weapons? Why can’t we let women’s sexuality belong to the women in whose bodies it resides, rather than treating it as a commodity in the public domain? Why can’t we even just let two people who love each other get fucking married, without worrying about how their genitals might fit together?

What, in short, the fuck is wrong with us?

I still think she’s over-reliant on the whole evolution-as-destiny thing — after nearly all the sex we have really isn’t reproductive. Nor, for that matter, is most of the sex we have political or weaponized. But it is heavily socialized, and (mainly in our culture but not all) heavily overloaded with status and self-esteem. And, again more in our culture than many others, we have a tendency to make it highly transactional.

I’d just add, too, that what humans really seem to be evolved for (in the sense that you see us doing it in all manner of circumstances by all manner of methods among all manners of age, gender, class, orientation, etc.) is competing for status. And among humans status really does seem to confer reproductive benefit in the sense that more of one’s offspring are more likely to survive to reproduce in turn. You’ll also see there are plenty of instances where we compete for status even when, whether by disinterest or glut, sex isn’t significant to status.

I think there’s a tendency (particularly strong among, say, those inclined to speak English as a first language) to see sexual conflict as its own thing instead of a single, particularly pervasive instance of conflict for status. And sex in this instance, going back to Nagoski’s first sentence, being almost completely separate from sexual reproduction in the directly evolutionary sense.

That’s actually a good thing, though. Because one consequence of feminism is that women are resisting the layers and layers and layers of social and status significance that’s been put on, almost literally, their asses independent of their own autonomy or desire. The end result will never be the “free love” free for all imagined in, say, the 1960s Playboy mansion — which was itself a vision of bypassing rather than eliminating use of women’s sexuality to measure one’s own status. Instead it would more likely offload much of the social overloading we currently put on sex in favor of… well… almost any other form of interchange or competition between adults.

Just to be clear what I mean when I say that getting over Nagoski’s question “what the fuck is wrong with us” isn’t that we’d, well, fuck less. It’s that we’d de-galvanize sex to the point where we might instead ask ourselves “what the food-consumption is wrong with us” or “what the stamp-collecting is wrong with us” or “what the fashion-sense is wrong with us” or, getting closer to the bottom line, “what the pecking order is wrong with us?”

Note: I also agree completely that if I could be any animal I’d pick human every time.