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The No-Sex Class: A Chilling Confirmation From Slavery Apologists Before the American Civil War

Sun, 2010-02-07 22:52 — figleaf

Well here’s an interesting tidbit on maintenance of the two-sphere model of gender that I stumbled across on a coffee-shop “library.” The book is called Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. In a coffee-shop setting I’ve only been able to read the introduction but the rest of the book looks interesting as well.

Here’s an eye-opening couple of paragraphs from the introduction though.

To link female honor to purity would have proven sexually inconvenient for southern white men, however, had they not bifurcated the sexuality of white and black women. The creation of Jezebel provided the rationale for allowing sexual relations between white men and black women. Southern proslavery ideologue William Harper made no apology for the sexual degrading of black women by white men. He simply extended his theory that “slavery anticipates the benefits of of civilization and retards the evils of civilization” into the realm of sexual relations.

By regarding black women as a “class of women who set little value on chastity,” he argued that slavery protected black women by saving them from the alternative of being cast out of society in the manner “justly and necessarily applied to promiscuous free women.”

Harper further argued that the sexual access to enslaved women discouraged white men from debauching “pure” white women and provided them with “easy gratification” for their “hot passions” without violating the code of southern honor. Finally, he reasoned, such sexual access made white men “less liable to those extraordinary fascinations, with which worthless [white] women sometimes entangle their victims.”

Source: Introduction, pg #9

What’s really boggling is that Harper, like Aquinas, Augustine, and countless others who’ve endorsed this view of heterosexuality imagined they could endorse this outlook and still go to Heaven when they died.

This would sound more shocking if virtually the same sentiments didn’t turn up in the Middle Ages and even earlier: a relatively small number of “jezebels:” prostitutes, slaves, and occasionally even boys are sacrificed at the alter of, well, unalterable male lust in order to… what? To preserve the nigh-unto-asexually disinterested sexual “purity” of “true womanhood.

One can only imagine how actual true women felt about it… all of them obviously — both the “bad,” “debauched,” or “fallen” ones were overborn sexually, and the “pure,” “true,” and “virtuous” who were allowed no sexual expression at all.

Anyway, it’s a totally horrifying but also very tidy encapsulation of the dominant paradigm of women as the obligatory no-sex class and men as the compulsive sex class.

Anyway, knowing nothing else about the book (though I’ll see if I can get back to the coffee shop to read more of it) the very quick skim I was able to give it looks like a seriously interesting look at a usually seriously overlooked population and the dynamics women of all social and economic classes were subject to before, during, and after the Civil War.

On the very off-hand chance anyone else has read more of it feel free to let me know what you think in comments.

Species Assumptions: Neanderthals, Being Another Species, Might Have Preferred to Stroll With Another Troll

Wed, 2009-11-04 20:57 — figleaf

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks picks up an unconsciously but hugely man-hating comment on Slashdot.


Slashdot picks up the Svante Pääbo “Humans had sex with Neandertals“ story.

Hilarity ensues.


You do not need any DNA analysis to figure that out. What do you think the troll did to the captured the [sic] princess, once he took her back to his mountain cave? And they did not call it the Stockholm syndrome if she ever was freed; it was called bergtatt (literally: taken into the mountain) or bewitched.

Mod skepticism +5…
He said it here.


We have no, zero, none idea whether the sexual behavior in Neanderthals, or Cro Magnons, or any other species in our genus would be that much like ours. We have very little reason to believe that other species would be more attracted to members of our species — presumably Neanderthals would prefer to meander down the the Neander with a man or woman with a nice bell-shaped rib-cage and undershot jaw instead of the weirdly hourglass-shaped, pointy-chinned “princess” the slashdot commentator imagines would be more “hawt.”

HedonisticPleasureSeeker on Muslims, Secret Muslims, Circumcision... and Funny Women

Tue, 2009-08-25 20:14 — figleaf

Hedonistic Pleasureseeker points out a secret flaw in Freeper plans to somehow humiliate verify President Obama’s citizenship by forcing him to show his penis in court. Or something. She says…

I confess: I’d like to see Barack Obama drop his pants for me too, but really. Their plan doesn’t even make any sense: Circumcision is addressed in the Islamic Hadith, which instructs muslims AND secret muslins to be circumcised.

She said it here.

Doh! Those wiley, Jehovah/Yaweh/Allah-worshiping People of the Book! How far back can this nefarious conspiracy to put an American citizen in the White Hose go?

Compounding her violation of Rule of Desire #1 in the preceding paragraph her introduction violates the Women Have No Sense of Humor rule with a knife-twisting play on words.

Since white racists are already obsessed with black men’s sexual equipment I’m sure they presume the President is circus-sized, but is he circumcised?

Excellent Reasons to Fear (and Find Ways Around) Fear Itself

Mon, 2008-11-17 16:37 — figleaf

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones passes on a tidbit that helps make sense of the peculiar, even egregious mindset of the largely dominant classes.

TALK RADIO....Via Digby, here is Dan Shelley, former news director and assistant program director at Milwaukee’s WTMJ, telling us about his career working with his station’s right-wing talkers:

To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.

He quoted it here.

Got that? However on top or in charge they might be they generally don’t feel that way. For instance…

The stereotyped liberal view of the talk radio audience is that it’s a lot of angry, uneducated white men. In fact, the audience is far more diverse. Many are businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, academics, clergy, or soccer moms and dads. Talk show fans are not stupid. They will detect an obvious phony. The best hosts sincerely believe everything they say. Their passion is real. Their arguments have been carefully crafted in a manner they know will be meaningful to the audience, and that validates the views these folks were already thinking.

That doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous either

[The] enemy can be a politician – either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” – local or national, print or broadcast.

Sometimes, it can even be their own station’s news director. One year, Charlie targeted me because I had instructed my midday news anchor to report the Wimbledon tennis results, even though the matches wouldn’t be telecast until much later in the day. Charlie gave out my phone number and e-mail address on the air. I was flooded with hate mail, nasty messages, and even one death threat from a federal law enforcement agent whom I knew to be a big Charlie fan.

And here comes the first crux, applied by Shelley to ‘winger talk-show hosts but applicable to all such members of the “superior” class

This brings us to perhaps the most ironic thing about most talk show hosts. Though they may savage politicians and others they oppose, they fear criticism or critiques of any kind.

And then the final, dangerous irony

It is foolish to enter into a dispute with someone who has a 50,000-watt radio transmitter at his or her disposal and feels cornered.

Thing is, the people with their hands on very real levers of power are dangerous not because they’re ubermensch harboring Nietchziean beliefs that the weak exist merely for the amusement and exploitation of the strong. They’re dangerous because they imagine themselves at the bottom of the heap, only one law, one regulation, one immigrant, one heterosexual proposition declined, one homosexual proposition tolerated, one woman’s promotion, one foreign competitor, one adherent to another religion, away from social, cultural, even physical annihilation.

I remember sitting in the lobby of a progressive Portland, OR, publisher’s office back in 1980 or 1981, waiting for a friend to conclude a meeting, and reading a report (of all things) about volunteer burnout in progressive organizations. The article cited another study about anxiety among white-collar workers. Allegedly more than 75% of all white-collar workers surveyed in this cited studies believed there was some single question that could be asked that, by their inability to answer, would reveal them as frauds and cost them their jobs. Seventy-five percent!

And yet, even by the lax standards of the 1970s, dominated by the Peter Principle that everyone rises to their level of incompetence** and by stagflation and chronic layoffs, it simply wasn’t the case that everyone was separated from the street by only a single question.

That’s just what people… still mostly men back then… believed. Of themselves far more than of others. Remember, the fear was, and I think is, real. The basis for that fear was not.

Again, that doesn’t make that illusory fear less dangerous. Remember, death threats for publishing tennis scores! Just as today you see immigrants, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, murdered by cowards goaded by a culture of cowardice. Just as you see unassuming Unitarian churchgoers murdered in their pews not like cornered rats but by self-imagined cornered rats, goaded in turn by those who imagine themselves just as cornered.

I mention all this not as some kind of call for compassion (which would be received only as condescension anyway) but as an admonition to understand the peculiar mechanics of contemporary oppression, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, homo- and transphobia in order to more effectively address it rather than exacerbate it, to mitigate it instead of magnify it.

[** Not as harsh as it was made out to be: restated more generously, you’d keep getting promoted until you reached, or barely exceeded, your full competency — in other words till you reached a maximum, not optimum, equilibrium of skill and workload. Naturally nobody saw it that way. —fl]

Twit Patrol

Fri, 2008-06-13 08:36 — figleaf


Screenshot via Feministing, hosted by PhotoBucket.

I first noticed the Right Wing’s decision to demonize Hillary Clinton some time in very late 1991 or early 1992. Although it must surely have begun warming up before then I associate it with the moment of their collective ZOMG-end-of-the-world flip-out over her post-election name change from “Hillary Clinton” to the scary-fezemeninist “Hillary Rodham Clinton”

And as I fretted last month they’ve wasted no time trying to smear Michelle Obama just as they would have Elizabeth Edwards, or Jill Tracey Jacobs (Joe Biden, not sure if she’s taken his last name), or Barbara Flavin (Bill Richardson, ditto), Elizabeth Kucinich or even long-shot Rita Gravel.

As I’ve said, um, a lot since at least 1992, if you want to be a twit attack someone for her gender, or race, or orientation, or whatever instead of something substantive. The right wing, intellectually as well as morally bankrupt since ketchup as a vegetable, have nothing but twit.

This has worked because, evidently, until at least 2004 the center and left have had nothing but doofus. Not so much any more.

Jessica Valenti of Feministing says

Fox’s Senior Vice President of Programming Bill Shine told the Politico that the producer responsible for labeling Michelle Obama “Obama’s baby mama” in a segment “exercised poor judgment.” Uh, yeah, I’d say so. (So much for a heartfelt apology.)

Via the newly-launched Michelle Obama Watch, created by What About Our Daughters. (Add it to your blogrolls, and get involved in keeping tabs on the media!)

I copied her entire post from here.

I’ve added the site to my blogroll. Even if you’re not a fan of the Obamas, if you’d rather they were engaged on a policy rather than personal level you might consider doing likewise. (Twittery, by the way, is not limited to ‘wingers — the left is starting to become disgracefully twittish about John McCain’s age and I’d hate for that to interfere with his enormous lapses and gaps in substance.)

[Oh yeah, and “baby momma?” Seriously? What’s worse is a lot of people are arguing “but they’re married,” and “but she’s educated,” and… and… and… yeah, and they’re playing into the FOX News frame. Instead “baby momma” is only, and entirely, and inextricably a) racist and b) sexist. No other “talking points” are necessary whether you’re talking about… well… anybody! —fl]

Reviving sketch comedy two conservatives at a time

Fri, 2007-11-16 06:45 — figleaf

Odds are fairly good that at some point in your life you’ve heard the old Monty Python sketch about a fictional radio program called “Stake Your Claim.”

Game Show Host (John Cleese): Good evening and welcome to Stake Your Claim. First this evening we have Mr Norman Voles of Gravesend who claims he wrote all Shakespeare’s works. Mr Voles, I understand you claim that you wrote all those plays normally attributed to Shakespeare?

Voles (Michael Palin): That is correct. I wrote all his plays and my wife and I wrote his sonnets.

Host: Mr Voles, these plays are known to have been performed in the early 17th century. How old are you, Mr Voles?

Voles: 43.

Host: Well, how is it possible for you to have written plays performed over 300 years before you were born?

Voles: Ah well. This is where my claim falls to the ground.

Host: Ah!

Voles: There’s no possible way of answering that argument, I’m afraid. I was only hoping you would not make that particular point, but I can see you’re more than a match for me!

Host: Mr Voles, thank you very much for coming along.

Voles: My pleasure.

Well, Hugo Schwyzer who’s just been on a wonderful tear lately accuses a reviewer of agreeing with a book that appears to blame feminism and late-60’s-era attitudes towards sex not only for the breakdown of marriage but for poverty.
Not recent poverty. Poverty!

Wilcox has this way of saying things that are so stunningly wrong that I leap up from the couch or chair or desk and start madly pacing about. From this month’s First Things review:

...Hymowitz provocatively turns on its head the standard liberal argument that the poor do not marry because they do not have good jobs, adequate income, and decent housing; instead, she persuasively argues that the disappearance of a marriage orientation—and the virtues and values associated with this orientation—among the poor and working class is a big part of the reason that they and their children are more likely to end up at the bottom of the social ladder.

I may be blaming Wilcox for Hymowitz’s sin, but his approval of her stance (the bold is mine) is clear.

...

So if the failure of the poor to marry is feminism’s fault, and the poor are poor largely because they don’t marry, then Hymowitz and Wilcox have a teeny problem with, uh, history. How to explain that urban poverty existed before the sexual revolution of the 1960s? If welfare and feminism are to blame for the plight of the urban poor today, what was to blame for the plight of the urban poor a century ago? Modern feminism can’t be the cause of a problem that pre-dates the influence of feminism.[Emphasis his. —fl] Or maybe, in “social conservative fantasy land”, it can.

Read how Schwyzer is always more polite than he needs to be here.

Yes, and last I heard Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin caused the Parliament Gunpowder Plot, the collapse of the buggy-whip market, and (with help from Hillary Clinton) the night of the Johnstown Flood. Because, you know, everything is feminism’s fault.

I’ll close with another snippet of the “Stake Your Claim”

Host: Next we have Mr Bill Wymiss who claims to have built the Taj
Mahal.

Wymiss (Eric Idle): No.

Host: I’m sorry?

Wymiss: No. No.

Host: I thought you cla…

Wymiss: Well I did but I can see I won’t last a minute with you.

Host: Next…

Next…

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