Lillie Yifu of 2nd Sex, inspired by Julie Bindel’s column, says
Sexual violence is a pervasive part of almost every woman’s imaginary world, even those who have never expereinced more than the most mild forms of it, because I don’t think any of us can say we’ve never experienced any of it. This is because the threat of it is all around us, and it is a fear that pierces into the core of our most hard won possession. That is, namely, our sense of personal bodily control. Autonomy is won in slow hard steps, and sexual violence, the threat of it, and the imagination of it, destroy hat autonomy.
There is also the other part, and that is that pregnancy and reproduction necessarily involve the loss of this very same thing. As a result, sexual violence stares back at us from our fantasy life. Where and how to draw the line of the push in, is no easy thing.
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The bunker mentality is easy to come by, but I can only imagine what it was like to be part of radical feminism in that time. But the bunker sensation, that sensation where it seems that there are wolves with teeth and fangs in every direction, is common to every time and place I think. Little Red Riding Hood survives as a story, because there are so many woods to travel through.
Yifu’s in an awesomely interesting position. A woman in technology in real life, a virtual sex worker in the commercial virtual reality 2nd Life, she encounters a great deal of… men attempting privileged leverage in not just one but two dimensions.
Anyway her post lays out, in terms that may work really well for a lot of men, how a lot of women experience us. It explains bluntly why notions of “post-feminism” are premature. And it explains very clearly where radical feminists were coming from when they concluded that women are “the sex class.” (This doesn’t change my refinement that actually men imagine themselves the sex class and construct women as the no-sex class. Nor does my articulation of the “no-sex” class paradigm refute the core of radical feminist analysis.)
And finally, while Yifu doesn’t identify as a radical feminist I think her post nicely illustrates the frustration, irritation, and anger “radfems” express when it seems like no matter where they turn they find themselves assessed for suitability as instruments for sexuality before they’re ever acknowledged as humans with their own sexual autonomy.
Yifu is also right about what things were like when the original radical feminists began producing their most incendiary work. For instance when I was a kid, sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s it became a bit of an on-campus “fad” for men to corner and rape students from the nearby nursing school. It went on for nearly a month, helped in very large part by an almost party-like “those whacky college kids” attitude in the press and popular conversation. At least in our (major university) town that seriously radicalized feminism.
Anyway, I completely get what Yifu meant when she say sexual violence is part of every woman’s mental map of the world.
She concludes her post with
I am sorry for her that [Bindel] did not have the ability to have friendships with men until late in life. I am also even more sorry for a world where I understand how it happened.
And could happen tomorrow to a young woman trying to be herself.
Yeah, that too.
If men really wanted a real sexual revolution and not just more of the same old crap with maybe just a new balance of power even further in our favor we could start one tomorrow such that, over time, women didn’t need to map the world in terms of limits on their physical and sexual autonomy. I don’t see it happening, at all, but past a certain point it’s in men’s hands.
I dunno, I always get
Submitted by Holly Pervocracy (not verified) on Wed, 2009-12-30 20:22.I dunno, I always get offended by this kind of generalization. It makes women sound so weak. Do I NEVER think about sexual violence, do I think it’s IMPOSSIBLE? Course not. But it doesn’t rule my life. I have my bodily control, I have my sexual autonomy. (I have male friends, too, because I’m not some kind of weird sexist.) It bothers and frightens me to be talked to or touched inappropriately, but it takes nothing away from me as a person.
And frankly, I take it as an insult not to men or to society or even to bad people, but to women to describe us as all hunched up and crushed down by the world. We’re… we’re PEOPLE, man! Like, regular, get-up, send-kids-to-school, go-to-work, eat-lunch PEOPLE! I want all the rights due to a person… and I take on all the expectations and responsibilities that come with that. One of those expectations is that I can face the world, and other than the actual violent criminals, all the people in it.
I understand post-traumatic stress, I’m not blaming women with that. But positing the existence of having-a-vagina-traumatic stress, specifically in women who haven’t experienced any major violence, is at odds with both my observation of reality and my dignity as a woman.
[Funny. I see your point, Holly, but I didn’t see it that way. Possibly because I’ve been reading a lot of her and the rest of her writing doesn’t reflect a hunched-up fearful approach. Just an awareness sort of like kids in our neighborhood had of the yards with aggressive dogs and the houses with drunk uncles or with grannies who’d threaten to “call the law on you’uns.” It didn’t traumatize us, except maybe the ones the dogs, grannies, or belligerent drunks caught. But awareness of them shaped our mental maps of the neighborhood. So anyway, that’s more what I had in mind when I thought about the spree rapists in my hometown (it was the same year everyone was streaking, whenever that was… maybe 1972, 1973?) Since the fad required victims be nursing students (sort of like students in the 1920s had to swallow goldfish and not tetras) pretty much everyone else was as safe as they ever were. But the existence of it, and the reaction to it, made a lot of women who weren’t nursing students to get angry instead of adding it to their maps. (Hope that makes sense. I agree it was a disjointed post.) —fl]
I think that what this debate
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Thu, 2009-12-31 00:36. I think that what this debate comes down to is the question of whether or not their is some “universal core female experience”. And generally my answer to that is “No.”, but I do think that certain things tend to “recur” in a patriarchal society rather than it always having to be broken down by race, class, culture, etc. for any meaningful statements to be made. I would agree that sexual violence as a way of keeping women “in their place” and to a lesser extent of punishing men who aren’t deemed to be “manly enough” are a strong recurrent theme. I also agree that women and certainly girls are often told things about rape and sexual violence that are aimed more at restriction-often making them less able to protect themselves in many ways- than at any rational assessment of the risks. Often I think girls are kept away from males who might teach them things they “shouldn’t know” including self-defense skills more effectively than they are kept from actual predators. But that said, not all women have had the same experiences in anything. And the reasons go way beyond the usual suspects of class, race, cultural, religion, etc. In fact, Figleaf I have a very interesting story to tell on this issue, but will not write it online because I feel I have no right to reveal certain things about some of other parties involved in this-even if writing anonymously. It involves some very unusual experiences of a young girl in the context of the early 90’s rape debate, that would paint a picture of girls being mentored by unrelated men that’s very different from Camille Paglia’s view of why women benefit from being around men, and Bindel’s inability to make friends with them. Also I have a very different take on “Million Dollar Baby” than many feminists who were critical of it, because of these experiences.Indeed. One of the things
Submitted by Dw3t-Hthr (not verified) on Sat, 2010-01-02 16:13.Indeed.
One of the things that I’ve found when encountering feminist transphobia has been the idea that trans women don’t share the experience of being female because they haven’t encountered certain things – that I, a cissexual woman, have also not encountered.
Universal female experience is a crock.
At the same time, there are common threads of experience that many people will have to go through, though, again, the sorts of interpretation those experiences will get will vary depending on the people. And even for people who experienced similar events in very different ways, there can be some level of, “I can see where you’re coming from, I think, from where I am.”