Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon has another one of those silly moments where she forgets that anti-feminists know so much more about feminism and what it really means.

[Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online] is the first to line up to explain to all the stupid feminists why we’re so stupid thinking we actually enjoy contraception, sex, and having choices. 

In an otherwise largely celebratory forum on the pill at CNN’s website, Republican strategist and book publisher Mary Matalin cleverly and jarringly wrote: “Packages of portable liberation ushered in a generation of women determined to break free from their inferior patriarchal oppressors. And how did they manifest their superiority? Their freedom? Thanks to The Pill, by casual, drive-by sex. Whoa. That really showed those stupid boys.”

They can keep telling us that feminism is about hating men, and therefore we’re breaking our own rules by having good relationships with them and (if we’re straight) enjoying sex with them, but it’s not sticking.  Perhaps they’re wrong about what feminism is?  I don’t know; I’m just an actual feminist.  So when I say that feminism is about women’s equality and creating a non-patriarchal world where men and women are freed get along as equals, I don’t know what I’m talking about.  The only people who get to define feminism are people who oppose it.

She said it here.

Say what you like about Sigmund Freud but I think the world is a better place for his articulation of projection — the tendency to see in others the evils one perpetrates, or at best most wishes to perpetuate, oneself.

I mention this because for all that anti-feminists claim they’re standing up for the definition of men as… well… by-definition superior to women, they’ve got some seriously, seriously man-hating tendencies.

I mean yeah, Lopez is dumping on women for having Teh Sex with men but… but… some times you just gotta ask yourself why she’d think that would be a problem. And the answer, I’m pretty sure, boils down to one of three possibilities:

1) she thinks men are disgusting creatures who’s penises by their very existence sully women. Or

2) she thinks men are lazy animals who can’t be persuaded to do anything at all, let alone anything productive, couth, or genteel, unless they’re positively starved for sex. Which starvation will never take place if women succumb to their own “animal” instincts and “give it up” for free. Or

3) both #1 and #2.

Lopez, who hates men, projects this hatred onto feminism. Which she also hates. Furthermore, she then hates feminism worse for “contradictions” she perceives between how feminists behave and how she thinks feminists ought to behave.

The problem being that Lopez confuses “patriarchy,” which feminists rightly oppose, with “men,” who feminists can get a little impatient with but with only the occasional exception feminists don’t hate at all.

Clue time? Patriarchy is not limited to men. Patriarchy is a coed enterprise. Lopez isn’t a dupe or a thrall of patriarchy, nor a collaborator with it, nor is she a “useful idiot” of patriarchy (though, sorry, she is an idiot!) Instead she’s a fully-invested, active agent of it, a would-be architect of it. And as part of the patriarchy she hates men even worse than she hates women who have sex with them.

Now as to the substance of Lopez’s claim I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if you go on the pill just so you can let men have “casual” sex with you then… then I think it’s a good idea to maybe rethink both your relationship to men and your relationship to sex and who your sexuality it’s really for. And about. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to rethink your relationship to the pill, as Lopez would have you do. The main thing the pill does, or any other contraception does, is help couples, of whatever duration, avoid pregnancy. Who one has relationships with, and why, is an issue contraception really isn’t going to help, except possibly to the extent it helps avoid obstacles that make exiting an unfortunate relationship very much more difficult.

Oh and can I just add one more thing about Lopez and the pill in particular but contraception in general? Who does she thinks uses contraception here? It’s at least as common among married and/or partnered women as it is among “casual” sex-having single women. And if you take into account the married women who are currently actively seeking planned, wanted pregnancies I’m… pretty sure married women who aren’t trying to get pregnant are even more likely to use contraception. So WTF with her implication that the pill primarily enables casual sex? As opposed to sex inside established and even long-term committed relationships.

When you see patriarchal framing you probably want to call it. Lopez is a patriarch. Framing contraception in terms of “casual” sex and “letting” boys have sex with you? That’s patriarchal framing.

Summary: The benefits of taking a gender-neutral approach to solving the problem of highly differential gender pressure on boys and girls are likely to be huge. So we ought to stop buying the same old gendered construction of gender construction.

So I was driving through rural Tennessee just now (I’m home on a very brief visit for an elderly relative’s funeral) and was listening to an NPR program on satellite radio.

The topic involved the beating death of a (Vermont?) college lacrosse player at the hands of her domestic partner. The host and three guests were all women with professional experience related to relationship abuse.

Without taking anything away (seriously!) from the nuanced, non-black-and-white-answer guests, or the somewhat less savvy host, all of whom I thought asked and answered questions pretty well, I would like to make a pitch for a more gender-neutral approach to the problem.

I don’t mean a “but men can be victims too” approach, although several of the guests made clear that sometimes happens. And I don’t mean a “gender blind” approach either because, sorry, even when you factor out stereotypical assumptions and biases by pretty much every measure of relationship violence the patterns of control and abuse are more likely to involve men shepherding, controlling, and injuring their partners than women.

So. What do I mean by “gender neutral” then?

Two items have been on my mind lately, and the discussion helped bring it to a head.

First of all, the host and two of the guests spoke confidently only about problems with “ever younger sexualization of girls.” In her concurrence the third guest, a judge, carefully agreed there’s a problem with increasingly sexualized youth.

And that’s the first important point where gender neutrality seems important. Yes, girls are increasingly sexualized at increasingly younger age (“anyone remember those rhinestone “hottie” and “tease” thong undies for pre-teens? I think they sold them at J.C. Pennies!) What’s overlooked is that boys are being similarly sexualized. Just not as “hotties” or “teases.” Instead they’re being groomed to value themselves by conquests, by self-confidence, by “that’s what bitches want,” and even, more prosaically, “girls my age are doing it already, what should I be doing?”

In other words, while the nature of the sexualization is absolutely, 100%, incontrovertibly gendered, the sexualization itself is gender neutral: it’s happening equally to girls and boys. Failing to recognize this — failing to see that not all the influence is generated by older men grooming eternally more precocious girls but that boys are also sucked into the vortex and are influenced to identify as sexualized earlier.

Which leads me to the other point: I think pretty much everyone on the planet can recognize that girls are often (not always but yeah, pretty often) pressured into performing sexuality before they’re necessarily ready before their ready to be actually sexual. Again, those “hottie” thongs for 4th- or 5th-graders? Rest my case, m’kay?

What I think isn’t as well recognized is that boys are often pressured into performing sexuality before they’re ready to be sexual. In fact I think it’s not just poorly recognized, I think it’s pretty much fucking invisible!

And this is where I think gender neutrality comes in handy again. Because if you just assume, as society as culture does, that “already has a y-chromosome” equals “already ready for sex” then you’re going to interpret the behavior of boys as if a) they instinctively know exactly what they’re doing, b) they instinctively know exactly what they want, and c) they themselves see their (frankly predatory) behavior as predatory rather than as, say, defensive. Oh yes, and that therefore d) predatory boys behavior, being intentional, competent, and instinctive, is therefore immutable. And therefore, e) there’s no point trying to change male behavior – except possibly by supervision, restriction, and threats.

Remember here that I’m really clearly not saying the behavior is gender neutral, it’s way generally not. Instead I’m saying that pressure to behave in gendered ways is gender neutral (it happens to boys and girls of all persuasions.) And I’m saying that the best analysis is gender neutral as a result of effort not to buy into gender-biased assumptions.

In the face of gender-biased analysis items a-e, above are taken as fixed. And consequently you see almost all discourse in the terms I heard tonight: how do we warn girls? How do we train girls to recognize abuse? How do we recognize girls who are abused? All of which, obviously, is itself highly gendered. And all of which, I think, we’re (finally) less willing to tolerate when it comes to questions of sexual assault. (For instance we’re no longer talking only in terms of what women can do to avoid assault. Nor, thank goodness, are we assuming if a girl is assaulted there must have been something she could have done to avoid it.)

A gender neutral approach, one that I think is finally seeping in to the issue of sexual assault, is…

Not just checking in on boys. Not just intervening with boys. Even though thouse are good ideas. But also instructing boys. Also reassuring boys. Also warning boys. About the sexualization that’s happening to them. About the risks of feeling pressure not just to respond but to act before they’re ready. Of the patterns of pressured behavior that can first shade and then plunge into abusiveness.

Because it seems to me it’s doing a great disservice, not just to boys but to everybody to write them off as unalterably malevolent, whether or not its imagined to be intentional or impulsive malevolence.

I’m trying to think of a comparable example and one of them would be the whole “purity ball” abstinence-fetish business where the purity instructions for boys are… all about girl’s purity — “you wouldn’t want your sister…” or “how would you feel about some other boy touching your future bride…” all with no, zero, none regard for the possibility that “purity” could be anything besides a euphemism for “untouched pussy” or that “not ready” could be anything but a euphemism for “keep her pristine for her purchaser,” or that “protect from emotional harm” could mean anything more than “kept naive enough to imagine picking out the wedding dress is the last choice she’ll ever need to make… or be allowed to.”

Never mind that boys don’t automatically know what to do any more than girls do. Never mind that boys actually seem to start being “ready” a year or two after girls their ages are. Never mind that boys have their own emotional needs, their own crushes, their own naive assumptions, their own internal and external experiences of peer pressure.

And here’s the point: it’s a gendered assumption that only girls are vulnerable to sexualization just as it’s a gendered assumption that boys are immune to it. It’s a gendered assumption that only girls are responsive to mitigation of gendered construction. And when we’re able to start assessing boys with a gender-neutral eye I have a feeling the social benefits will be exponential rather than incremental.

We ought to start trying it.

Via Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, who has paid access to academic papers, the concluding paragraph of a new paper by economics researchers Dalton Conley, Emily Rauscher claims that not only does having more daughters tend to make politicians more conservative (despite prior research saying the contrary) there’s an sociobiology/evolutionary-biology angle that explains the whole thing! (Emphasis mine.)

Using nationally-representative data from the General Social Survey, we find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive fitness strategy that daughters may evince.

...

The conservative emphasis on family, traditional values and gender roles, and prolife anti-abortion sentiments all stress investment in children – for both men and women. Conservative policies mirror the genetic interests of women, writ large. They attempt to promote paternal investment in offspring. Further, they stress investment in conceived offspring – “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” In short, Conservative policies support the genetic fitness of women by capitalizing on each pregnancy, reducing male promiscuity, and increasing paternal investment in children. Such policies may impinge on the freedom of parents’ immediate offspring, but they increase the expected number of grandchildren via daughters.

You’ll have to pay to confirm it but they allegedly say it if you begin reading here.

Got that girls? Keeping you at home, in the kitchen, with the children, while government policy rains Hell on the kind of hussies that “ask for it” from men, and scowling and sternly tapping it’s foot at the men who give it to them, is all in your own best genetic interest.

Maybe not your individual, personal, mental and psychological or even corporeal interest, sure. But your genes? Oh yeah, you mousey little baby-maker, your genes know better than you. They know you want it.

It’s an even more cellular-level version of the same old worth-of-a-woman-is-her-offspring argument.

Otherwise, whereas it’s entirely possible that the researcher’s data supports their contention that politicians who have (proportionately) more daughters tend to be more conservative, I’m extremely skeptical of their implications that

a) politicians with daughters become more conservative in order to maximize their own 2nd- and 3rd-generation offspring
b) that conservatism even maximizes the reproductive potential of those women under their dominion
and, especially,
c) that very many conservative politicians are going to be that thrilled that they’re either the products or the beneficiaries, let alone the vehicles for Darwinian evolution.

In her introduction to Feminism is for Everyone bell hooks mentions that her mother was the most patriarchal person she ever knew. But even though it’s unlikely the words “just wait till your father gets home” were often spoken by a 20th-Century man this isn’t about “but women do it too.” It’s about how deeply that conditioning goes.

You could spend all afternoon unpacking the gender assumptions, the disempowerment, the paradoxes of traditional “wisdom” (who’s supposed to be the authority in the domestic and child-rearing spheres?) and still not reach the bottom.

Discuss.