Paralysis vs. Cul de Sac

Non-rhetorical question, particularly for figleaf and the other men who're reading this: Do you really think it's accurate to speak of "feminist indoctrination"? Feminism definitely threw a lot of the old certainties about gender and sexuality into question. And as I was coming of age in the late 1970s and '80s, I felt some pressure - as a young, feminist woman - to examine my own heterosexuality and ask how I might be complicit in an oppressive system. At the same time, I loved sex with men too much to stop having it or even modify my practices, apart from becoming more willing to initiate on all levels. Which I think was/is a *good* thing.

But figleaf, I know you've written about how you absorbed some ideas about sex that were pretty limiting - the notion that the clitoris was the only real route to female orgasm, or that blowjobs were problematic. I don't know if I was just that much younger than you, or if it had to do with where I was living at the time (SF Bay Area), or if it was just a result of my fascination with blowjobs (what better way to get acquainted with a cock?) - but I never felt any real pressure about specific acts or practices. The questions my feminist friends were raising were about whether heterosexual relationships were inherently oppressive. And since I knew I could never be a lesbian, much less a separatist, I just didn't worry about it all that much.

I'm genuinely interested, though, in whether others experienced feminist criticism of heterosexuality and masculinity as a form of indoctrination.

Recaptcha: cocktail and (... ?)

[Perfect questions, Sungold. First of all, check out *your* experience of "feminist indoctrination" and the standard (generally male) narrative about it. Check, also, how *incredibly* smoothly our *perception* of "feminist indoctrination" overlaps *anti-feminist* indoctrination! For instance for feminists blowjobs are something you can really get into *if you want to.* For anti-feminists, though, it's a degrading act that, consequently, has to be forced onto or tricked into anyone who isn't a "complete slut." From there it's just an incredibly short hop from you objecting to a degrading *way* I ask for (or demand) a blowjob to me projecting that into you refusing on general principles. See what I mean? Trying to blame, or even pin "indoctrination" on feminism is putting the emphasis an extremely unproductive place -- sort of like trying to blame organic farmers for weeds, erosion, and soil depletion when they're *not causing it* and infact are *trying to avoid it.* --fl]

Figleaf,
What do you think of addiction as a metaphor? The traditional system is like an addiction that fills people with artificial needs, but doesn't provide any lasting joy or satisfaction. Women develop the need to be considered sexually desirable at all times without ever actually having their sexual desires taken care of; and men develop the need to have women constantly stroke their egos, but also to have this ego-stroking be totally invisible. This model explains a lot of the backlash against feminism: how would you like it if someone tried to take away the substance you were addicted to?

Also, as someone who has dated a few gender nonconforming men, I have to point out that my partners don't have that much trouble attracting women. They have trouble attracting women in heterosexual meat market settings, but they're a huge success with queer women and female geeks who have opted out of the system, to the point where I'm actually a little jealous.

Sungold,
I'm genuinely interested, though, in whether others experienced feminist criticism of heterosexuality and masculinity as a form of indoctrination.

I'm female, but here's my two cents. Mostly, I experienced feminism as a helpful way to articulate feelings I already had. As a teenager, I picked up on the idea that there was a tradeoff between attracting men and keeping your dignity, but I didn't know exactly what the problem was or how to deal with it. I found some friends in college who were very critical of gender assumptions and sexual double standards, and it made me more articulate and less depressed. We had frequent dorm room conversations about feminism and sex. Occasionally one of us would read something (that we interpreted as) arguing that blowjobs were bad, or advocating political lesbianism, or claiming that BDSM was patriarchal, and we would debate whether this was true. We mostly concluded that there was nothing inherently bad about blowjobs, BDSM, or hetsex, and that the author was either being dumb or really on about something else more subtle.

About indoctrination -- I would define "indoctrination" as any setting in which the funnel method is used to communicate Truths. You have your Truth in liquid form, you open up the head of the "person to be enlightened," you take your funnel and you pour Truth directly into the person's head.

In our current social order this applies to required workshops, maybe some college orientations, but obviously not to well run classrooms. It is a very undemocratic way of imparting "education." It is authoritarian in an institutional way, whether or not one agrees (as I in fact do) with a lot of what is set forth in such workshops. I tend to resent it when even things I believe are imparted in an authoritarian and undemocratic way. Again, it's the institutional framework that is inescapably authoritarian -- I don't mean that individual "instructors" are necessarily so.

By contrast with indoctrination, education is concerned with the learner and, even when it tries to impart a point of view, does this by respecting where the learner is coming from and dealing with the learner's difficulties, objections, and differing points of view. Or at least that's the ideal.

As for the question of paralysis, which isn't entirely related to this. I do sympathize with eurosabra and there were a few years in my twenties where I really wasn't clear what I could do to express sexual or romantic interest -- even though I had done so before. Indeed I felt that some "feminist" rules I had adopted for myself might have been part of what was interfering. To this day I don't like the "rule" that you don't ever tell a woman she is beautiful (I think Hugo was still upholding this one a few years back). Though I do think it is sexist to talk about this in a collegial relationship or most types of friend relationship. But one does want to sometimes say it to a friend with whom one wants to be more than friends...

I think the cure for this kind of paralysis is social intelligence. Feminisms aren't just collections of ideas, they belong to people and you only understand them when you see how people use them in their own lives. In those dark days before the Internet, how did people ever figure that out? Especially people who were peripheral to whatever social groups they were trying to participate in. There are rules, and then there are the unspoken rules about what the rules mean, when they are used, how they can be "broken" in ways that do not break them in spirit. No society will ever be totally explicit about all of these things. But if you have access to a lot of the ways people talk about what they do, after a while you "get it." When you don't have access, when you don't know, especially about sexual and initiatory contexts which are set apart from the surfaces of life -- when you want to be "feminist" and good but you don't know how to be so and also male and also able to express desire to be more than friends -- you can create your own "feminisms" out of scraps of rhetoric and "rules." And these self-constructed "feminisms" may indeed be more restrictive or inhuman than the real thing, as embodied in real live feminist women who, in my experience, have never looked at me as the embodiment of the most tonally scary constructs of the male or masculinity.

P. Burke asked:

What do you think of addiction as a metaphor? The traditional system is like an addiction that fills people with artificial needs, but doesn't provide any lasting joy or satisfaction. Women develop the need to be considered sexually desirable at all times without ever actually having their sexual desires taken care of; and men develop the need to have women constantly stroke their egos, but also to have this ego-stroking be totally invisible. This model explains a lot of the backlash against feminism: how would you like it if someone tried to take away the substance you were addicted to?

P. Burke,

I think that addiction is a very apt metaphor, and in using that term, you are in good company. When I was in graduate school, I read When Society Becomes an Addict by Anne Wilson Schaef (ISBN-10: 0062548549; ISBN-13: 978-0062548542). Her basic premise is that people can be addicted to process as well as substance. The concept of addiction to process helped me to understand the dynamics in corporate settings that make unethical behavior the norm, such as in Enron or Worldcom. The elements of addiction are there: the illusion of control, dishonesty, denial, blaming and fear. Wilson-Schaef's model also explains how racial and sexual discrimination thrive in organizations where management appears to have its own set of rules. So applying the same model to our entrenched rituals of dating and mating would reveal the degree of self-delusion needed to follow the script.

Certainly the mandatory rape-prevention seminar and the Antioch Code were indoctrination, since they provided the frame for how sexuality was to be understood in the North American academic settings of the 90s. It took me YEARS to understand that a certain amount of "male entitlement" was a good thing, to the extent that men STILL have to believe (at least) that sex with them is a GOOD thing in a context where they have to initiate. It has also been my experience that geek-and-nerd gender-fucking-queer paradises are always someplace ELSE, somehow, it was always San Francisco when I was in Santa Cruz, and always Santa Cruz when I was in San Francisco. ("You're the problem" might be a snarky reply, but really, no human intution is so perfect that a few hundred women could be unfailingly accurate in their assessment of my character. :-)). I mean, I'm a headcase, to the extent that I tend to date somewhat non-gender-conforming women while still dreaming of easy success in "heterosexual meat market" settings, then again, I should probably ponder how interesting it would be to out myself as looking for a "non-makeup-wearing fat butch poly hittyslut" (borrowing 'hittyslut' from Holly's blog) at the average SpeedDating event. Ahem.

Captcha "Immediate death". Of my dating prospects in that setting, probably.

[Not sure what to say, ES, but I still think it's a matter of being sure you're looking for what you *really* want. As for personal ads, I'm telling you what you want to say isn't what you *want* but who you *are* so that people who do want you (*however* few and far between) are able to identify you as that someone. In other words when you're putting yourself (or actually anything else) out there you have to be thinking what's wanted, not what *you* want. And actually, I know you say "entitlement" is a good thing if by that you mean self-confidence? But what *other* people think entitlement means is "expecting to be picked based on what *you're* looking for instead of what *the other person* is looking for. That doesn't mean that *once you get there* it's not mutual negotiations, just that on something like a dating site not many people are going to ping you because they match *your* criteria. Know what I mean? --fl]