Jill of I Blame The Patriarchy says
a femininity work-stoppage would necessitate: misogyny, sex**, marriage, reproduction, nuclear familyism, child-rearing and other unpaid labor, attractiveness, head-tilting and other submissive affectations, fashion, glowing skin, letting disaffected musician boyfriends mooch off you, hot girl-on-mop action, etc.
...
- Sex could be reinstated as soon as the consent thing described above got carved in stone.
Good to know.
I don’t know enough about different revolutionary theories to presume, but since I know she was heavily influenced by Shulamuth Firestone I was wondering the other day if Jill was holding out for Firestone’s 60’s-era’s fascination with privileged-college-student version of Marxism. Which is only a little embarrassing compared to her now even more obsolete Freudian stuff, but also nowhere near as valuable as her articulate, fresh and (for me anyway) plausible and compelling vision of what a gender free society would look like.
I still think the (non-Firestone) idea of a straight-up sex strike would be dumb and I think I can finally explain why. And I think I’ve mentioned before that in the face of a strike the chances are higher than ever before that men would just switch to sex with themselves, each other, or inanimate appliances.
I’ve also mentioned that the idea of using sex for leverage is as deeply patriarchal as it gets, with the perverse effect that whereas individual men might notice and/or be unhappy Patriarchy itself would be on it’s knees whispering “please, please, yes, let this work!” Which makes Jill’s “...could be reinstated as soon a…” footnote not just dubious but ominous. Whether she meant it that way or not, without overturning the dominant paradigm a “successful” resumption of (hetero) sex would be perceived by too many strikers and strikees as an affirmation of sex as transactional.
This is just my opinion but if I were designing a patriarchy-smashing strike I’d probably advocate refusing to either offer or engage in transactional sex. Which no matter how “consensual” and no matter how gently or genteely conducted is and always will be hard to distinguish from rape. And therefore shouldn’t be resumed even after a revolution. (And no, duh, I’m not talking about going back to that pre-Dworkin Polanski-era “sexual revolution” crap where hetero sex was still absolutely transactional but the cost for men was supposed to be at or near zero and where women were “empowered” to say yes but not yet empowered to say no.)
A lot of the other stuff Jill mentions, like familyism and unpaid domestic labor (which, incidentally, is just more fallout from the whole notion of hetero marriage as a particularly elaborate sexual transaction), would also obviously follow from rejecting sex as transactional. Same with all the other submissive affectations she mentions which are, after all, based on the idea that men are doing the paying so they should be treated with the respect employees are supposed to give their employers and vendors are supposed to show their customers.
Incidentally, clarifying the notion that it the problem is transactional sex — something women might do willingly or even enthusiastically but “ideally” must do regardless — would put a huge dent in the whole feminists hate sex business. Far as I can tell most feminists, being human beings and all, rather enjoy sex. But being human beings and all they just don’t like the idea that you shouldn’t do it unless you’re trading something for it. I think it would also make feminism a little more accessible to women who say stuff like “I’m not a feminist but…” because they like sex but heard somewhere that feminists aren’t supposed to.
Submitted by 3226 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-10-04 14:10.
I honestly do not really believe that Twisty believes it's possible to do anything of that sort without falling into a constricting role, or whatever else. She's right up there in the "You don't want what you want, and even if you did it's bad for women for you to get it" crowd that drives me batshit.
Submitted by 3226 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-10-04 07:52.
If anybody's telling me I shouldn't get married or have a family or dress nice or keep my house clean... I'm not getting on that boat. I'm sufficiently Western and comfy that I could do all those things without putting my life or livelihood in danger and I'm still not interested in making huge sacrifices for a rather nebulous goal.
It's not just sex; I want to have a family and I sometimes want to be a girly girl. I don't bleach my mustache (uh, if I had one) because men make me, but because I don't want a mustache. This is the kind of thing that always makes me feel like Twisty would like to constrain my most mundane freedoms.
For that matter about half of the purported rewards--no government? no religion? no porn?--don't seem so rewardy to me. I keep thinking practical, I keep wondering who'll arrest drunk drivers or if I'll get in trouble if I get caught saying Shabbat prayers. (Boy, that last bit is familiar.)
So what's even left of this revolution? If I stop mopping eventually my theoretical male partner will pick up the slack? Man, my parents had that revolution years ago.
I know I'm sounding like my usual "la la la, I can't hear anything Twisty says" jerkface here, but the whole thing really does sound absurd and unworkable to me. She's describing women giving up things most of us want, and our reward would be the (mysterious) abolishment of institutions that we also mostly want. Um, whee?
She's describing the creation of a world that might be utopia for her, but which many other women would have no interest in, and it's not clear where such Gender Traitors fit into her scheme.
[Yeah, you kind of get that when you read her, but while I could just be falling into Kremlinology I really, really don't think she's objecting to all those things as *activities,* she's just head-splittingly sick of those things as *roles.* 24/7 ones! Which is where I hop on her bus because, seriously, the difference between "pick someone you want to have sex with," which I think she thinks is fine, is like a whole 'nother planet from "pick someone you want to *trade sex for something else like material support, affection, money, or even just companionship* with." Which is why I think it's a pretty big difference between a temporary "sex strike," which is how she sees it, and permanent rejection of sex as a transaction which I think is the key. As for the family/home/government thing, it doesn't take a lot of digging to turn up how a lot of that is turned from perfectly cool activities (ones that, say, I might enjoy more than Twisty would) into roles where neither she nor I nor you have any say in the matter and where it really makes no difference whether you or I or she wants it that way. It also shows up a lot that those roles (provider, homemaker, madonna, whore, etc) plus the Rules of Desire, plus the no-sex class, plus slut shaming, plus opposition to porn and sex work, and even dolls for girls and Tonka trucks for boys are pretty openly designed to keeping sex scarce enough, and thus valuable enough, to serve as a medium of exchange -- instead of, you know, enjoying your family, enjoying work, enjoying dolls or trucks, enjoying sex. Which arrangements, by the way, I've noticed you're as consistently and exactly as opposed to as Twisty is. But (and this I think is the cool and paradoxical part) which not everyone else is as opposed to. But should be. Thanks! --fl]