Women as property -- a Stepp behind the times

Via non-sex blogger Matthew Yglesias I got wind of a circulating joke at the expense of Washington Post lifestyle reporter Laura Sessions Stepp. Stepp has written a book decrying the practice of hooking up. Unhooked contains the unfortunate line

Your body is your property. . . . Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?

Matt points to the blog Grammar.Police where authors and commenters have been having much fun (largely, and deservedly, adolescent) at Stepp's expense. For example...

Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. You want to have a big party and invite all your friends over.

Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. If you're ever in a bind you can always take out a mortgage.

Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. Do you want some teenage kid messing with the plumbing, or are you going to call a pro?

If you're into it you can find more of the same here.

If you want to take your own potshots you can head over to Grammar.Police or, as one commenter suggested, on the book's Amazon page.

But while the analogy of bodies as houses is barkingly stupid the idea of bodies -- especially women's bodies -- as property, while also stupid, is too ingrained to dismiss with mockery. So instead of piling on I'm going to take Stepp's version in a different direction, based on my (amateur, external) impression of successive waves of feminism.

For roughly, oh, the last 5,000 years of Indo-European history women have been considered the unambiguous property of men. While nobody should need an example of this I'll offer two. First, consider Mark Twain's discussion of German pronouns wherein men get masculine pronouns, generic women get feminine ones, but young women and married women become things.

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print -- I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

Gretchen: Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm: She has gone to the kitchen.

Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm: It has gone to the opera."

The whole essay is so funny I nearly sprained a rib reading it last night. See for yourself here.

Less frivolously and more to the point, English Common Law, the basis for much of American law holds that rape is an offense not against the victim but a damage-of-property crime committed against her father and/or husband.

One more thing, which relates both to the examples of German and English Common Law -- whereas at least after the Renaissance single adult women had some legal rights, in the eyes of the law women effectively disappeared when they married -- their property, their legal rights, and their ability to make economic or political decisions vanished under the umbrella of their husbands. In other words (as in the German language) when it came to the law they ceased to be "she's" and "her's" and became "it's."

The first wave of modern feminism (within in the narrow women-as-property scope I'm talking about) was directed towards creating or (depending on who you're talking to) recreating women as legal entities -- the right to vote, the right to own property, and the right to an education. (Incidentally, my great-grandfather, the first president of Vassar College, was passionately committed to that cause in the 19th Century.) It's worth noting, however, that that Suffrage had relatively little effect on women's roles *within* the home and in domestic relation to their husbands.

That's where second-wave feminism came in 40 years later, as the post-war "Ozzie and Harriet" social experiment was collapsing under it's own weight. One significant issue (not the only one at all, at all, but the one I'm focusing on) was that while women could vote and own property, their *sexuality* remained the property of their fathers (who were expected to keep their daughters chaste till they "gave them away" at weddings) or, after being given away, the property of their husbands. And husbands had the legal right to unencumbered sex with their wives. (Until fairly late in the 1970s there were no laws against husbands forcing their wives into sex!)

I'm old enough to have learn the pre-second-wave assumptions, and also old enough that I stepped onto the beach of relationships just as the second wave hit shore. And my (surely biased) perception in retrospect was that in women-as-property terms women were acting to take possession of the property of their sexuality. *But* while they were claiming or reclaiming sexuality for themselves it was still in terms of property to be guarded or harbored and -- assuming heterosexuality -- conditionally shared with men of *their* choice. In other words women were taking ownership of their sexuality but still with the idea that they rather than their fathers would determine whether it would be transferred and to whom.

And then, after Holly Near and Shulamith Firestone towards the middle of the second wave, and the critically important activism of Andrea Dworkin towards the end, along came third wave women like Susie Bright who... didn't really look at sexuality as property at all. Sex was an experience -- a *personal* experience undertaken in expectation of personal enjoyment-- and not transferrable property at all.

In a nutshell, and within the narrow scope I'm working in, first-wave feminism established women's legal right to owner property in general but retained men's rights to transfer her sexuality as if it were their property, the second wave established that a woman's sexuality was her own property to transfer if or as she saw fit, and the third wave proposed that women's sexuality isn't transferrable property at all but a function to be exercised for her own gratification.

Now. You're perfectly welcome to disagree with my assessment. (I'm nervous about it myself.) However, if you're willing to accept it for the sake of the argument, then I'd like to propose that when Stepp says "Your body is your property... Think about the first house you hope to own..." she's speaking from the heart of second-wave feminism.

A few clues spring to mind. First, that bodies are property. Second, that it's something to be held in reserve for later, "a house you hope to own." And finally there's the implication that having hookup sex amounts to throwing a rock through the window of your future home which, again by implication, spoils the house... for whom? It sounds to me as though she's proposing it spoils it for whatever man will eventually want to occupy it. In other words, it sounds a lot as if she's still approaching sexuality in terms of transfer of ownership and not in terms of occupying her own body, or experiencing her sexuality, herself *for* herself.

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I apologize for the length of this post but I'd like to say one more thing. I didn't write this post to defend hook-up culture. Nor am I saying anyone should go out and have sex sooner, more frequently, with more partners, or with less sense of attachment. Instead I just feel *very* strongly that *when* people have sex they should having it *for themselves* rather than for someone else. The "Think of a house you hope to own" mentality, like it's older, even stupider cousin "why buy a cow when the milk is free," is all about having sex for someone else. And that's just not real, adult sex.