Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Serenity Valley of Feminist Mormon Housewives has a nice piece about the conflict noted (strongly!) by Shulamuth Firestone’s 1968 “The Dialectic of Sex” between feminism on the one hand and multiculturalism on the other.

I’ve just been doing some reading for school, and I came across this article by Susan Moller Okin: “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”, published in a volume by the same name and edited by Okin, Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum. In this piece, Okin defines feminism as the belief that “women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can.”

Read the quote in context here.

Valley (and others elsewhere in the blogosphere) have rightly pointed out Orkin’s point that deference to cultural traditions that subordinate women are problematic. Activist Kimberle Crenshaw (who I posted about here) and others have clearly articulated how “rescue” policies are often no more helpful, or respectful, or less oppressive than sub-cultural oppression itself.

And any number of people have pointed out the complications of equality-based rhetoric when speaking about women in any culture, dominant or not. While in Kyriarchy it may be impossible to eliminate oppression and othering I think it’s possible to drastically limit the scope of such complications.

Orkin says “that [women] should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men.” I’m… pretty sure an awful lot of the ambiguity about how, exactly, different cultures might interpret terms like “human dignity,” “equals,” and “that of men” by replacing the clause, and underlying sentiments … and indeed much of Orkin’s preceding and following clauses, with “women should be recognized as human beings.” Or, even more tersely, accurately, and evidently radically: “women are human beings.”

This collapse of language to it’s indivisible core has twin benefits: It Disambiguates what “the same human dignity as…” might really mean. And it pitches the “accusing” or “rescuing” cultures into the same pot as “accused” or “in-need-of-rescuing” cultures since “other” cultures are not alone in reducing of some of its members to the status of objects, nor of sacrificing those members for the convenience of more intra-culturally valued, objectifying members.

To the… best of my knowledge none would defer to a subculture that claimed it needed to bring itself good luck by strangling servants in oak groves. We would not defer because servants are human beings and we would have to note that strangling in oak groves would be extraordinarily bad luck for those servants!

Similarly you can’t sew women’s pee-pees shut and claim “but it’s for the traditional pleasure of men in our culture” because it rather curtails the traditional pleasure of other human beings in that culture. Nor can you legislate that some human beings die involuntarily from preventable complications of late-term pregnancy to salve the consciences of different human beings who treat their own children abominably because that conflicts with the right of human beings not to die involuntarily.

Given this understanding multiculturalism can be in conflict with feminism only to the extent that we fail to recognize women as human beings. Not “like” human beings. Definitely not “having dignity equal to human beings.” As human beings. (Radical I know. Get used to it.)

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors is evidently unhappy about it but here’s some good news: The long-awaited and much-needed “William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008” anti-trafficking law has passed both the House and Senate.

Bartow blames Senator and Vice-President-elect Joe Biden for helping pass the law minus the House amendments that had held it up in the Senate and drawn opposition from such notorious human-rights haters as… Human Rights Watch and from international sex-traffick-loving organizations such as… um… anti-sex-trafficking and immigration-rights NGOs. Notorious anti-feminists like Eleanor Smeal, President of… oh wait… Feminist Majority Foundation said of the bill’s passage, “In addition to providing assistance to trafficking victims, this Act further puts the weight of the federal government behind efforts to combat trafficking for labor, sexual exploitation and child labor.”

In all seriousness Bartow’s issue wasn’t with Wilberforce itself, which has always focused on the issues of international trafficking. Instead she and others argued it was with inadequate federal-level legislation covering prostitution and, particularly, pimping. Given the fairly substantial levels of interstate transfers of funds, contacts, and humans engaged in commercial sex more tools for investigating, prosecuting such violations and coordinating multi-state efforts would probably be helpful as most anti-prostitution law enforcement happens at state and local levels.

However the effect of the objected-to amendments to the 2007 version of the Wilberforce act would have clumsily made the State Department a party to such interstate law-enforcement, effectively defined all prostitution as sex-trafficking, prioritized sex-trafficking over all other forms of involuntary servitude, diverted resources away from actual, you know, human slave trading, while relocating actual international sex-trafficking authority under the domestic-trafficking Mann (a.k.a. “white slavery”) Act, (forcing, incidentally, the creation of a new crime called, I believe, either “extreme” or “severe sex trafficking” to handle all the case of actual… international, non-domestic-prostitution sex slavery previously covered in all previous versions of the law.)

The new version merely strengthens and increases funding for the existing law. Disappointing I know. The good news, though, is its passage now creates a clear path for activists for whom the only form of slavery that matters is sex slavery to lobby for federal and state legislation dealing with actual domestic inter- and intrastate trafficking. And as long as they focus on actual conscription and exploitation of involuntary sex workers, and don’t try poaching funding or resources from enforcement of other anti-human-trafficking initiatives they have my blessing.

Meanwhile, though, the small but very real proportion of the international migrant community that winds up in outright slavery, debt peonage, or other forms of conscripted transport and servitude will receive continuing protection under the newly-reauthorized law.

Jill of Feministe illustrates the difference.

Restricting reproductive freedom is wrong in all directions — and China is a good example of what happens when you allow the state the right to decide how many children women can (and can’t) have.

A STORM of international protest is building over a Chinese ruling that a Muslim Uighur woman who is six months pregnant must have an abortion or lose her home.

Chinese authorities have ordered Arzigul Tursun, who is 26 weeks pregnant, to abort her unborn child because she has two other children.

She is under watch at the Municipal Watergate Hospital in Yining in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, which is populated heavily with Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority. Supporters are concerned a forced abortion at such a late stage could threaten Arzigul’s health.

Health concerns should be taken seriously, but that doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. This would be wrong even if the procedure was guaranteed to be safe.

Read the quote in context here.

In the late 1970s or early 1980s, after Roe v. Wade was handed down, abortion rights were generally accepted, and access to women’s health services including abortion service was well distributed two groups made two market-driven decisions.

Anti-abortion activists, recognizing they were getting very little traction in their crusades, made the conscious decision to rebrand themselves as “pro-life.” They weren’t pro-life at all, of course — they were as absolutely indifferent to miscarriage, stillbirth, life-threatening conditions of pregnancy, labor, or delivery, post-delivery death, maternal mortality, industrially distributed environmental abortifacents and tetrogens, and, say, the continuing employment of Joe Arpaio as they are today. But by lying about it, and by disguising their lies as “concern for the unborn” they were able to reframe the debate in what turned out to be a very effective way. And because they were liars their rebranding made no, zero, none difference at all in their overall outlook and, since they didn’t believe it themselves their label as a concept hasn’t expanded into more ways of saving lives. (Making shit up about ordinary hormonal contraceptives being “abortifacents” doesn’t meet the criteria for “expanded.”)

As a result, just a year or two later, once-complacent abortion-rights activists, who had never wanted people to have abortions in the first place in preference of, oh, say, avoiding unplanned, unwanted pregnancy in the first place, made a marketing decision of their own and began calling themselves “pro-choice. The difference being that since they weren’t and aren’t lying neither effort nor cognitive dissonance is required to oppose forced abortion as bitterly as forced pregnancy.

Taking the concept a bit further, Jill notes a “compromise” suggestion from the “pro-life” camp that again illustrates the contrast.

One of the only comments on the first linked article is particularly telling about the “pro-life” mentality:

Cant she just give the baby up for adoption????????

Because forcibly removing a wanted baby from a new mother is the solution here. The concern for life really does end at birth.

Choosing to have a baby is choosing to have a baby, not choosing to risk your health and life, endure three trimesters of pregnancy and the post-partum “fourth trimester” so somebody else can the baby you wanted? Yeah, right.

Bottom line: “Pro-life” activists were and remain only anti-abortion. “Pro-choice” activists meanwhile, are and always have been pro-choice!

Update: Also via Jill, Jessica of Jezebel says

It’s been less than a month since the staunchly pro-choice Barack Obama has been elected President, and already anti-abortion advocates are reassessing their goals. Some anti-choicers are taking a practical route, according to the Washington Post, supporting legislation that may cut down on the need for abortion, like providing poor women with health care, child care, and money for education. However, the hard core anti-choicers see support for such social programs as “selling out.” “We don’t think it’s really genuine,” Joe Scheidler, founder of the Pro-Life Action League, tells the Post. “You don’t have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions.” In fact, uncompromising abortion foes are actively against these bills, for reasons that don’t entirely make sense.

“You don’t work to limit the murder of innocent victims. You work to stop it,” Judie Brown, the president of the American Life League adds.

Read the quote in context here.

They’re entitled to their opinion that abortion equals murder, but if that’s really the only thing they care about then they’re still liars to claim they’re “pro-life.” And if people like Joe Scheidler and Judie Brown are indifferent to every other single factor affecting pre- and postnatal and maternal death (they are), and if they are in opposition to every effort to mitigate either those conditions or to mitigate any need for abortion in the first place (they are), and if in fact they fund and promote “crisis pregnancy” centers who’s practices actually increase the risks of miscarriage, stillbirth, and maternal and infant death (they do) then they’re liars and worse. (They do, therefore they are.)

Blue Gal says

If I as a straight woman can be in a “relationship” and decide to get married or not to get married, why can’t everybody decide one way or the other, without government interference?

She said it here.

I say: Marriage isn’t for everybody but marriage is for everybody!

If you live in California, and are able to vote, and haven’t voted yet, please consider that voting “no” on Proposition 8 is voting yes for marriage for everyone.