second-wave feminism

Holly on Naomi Wolf on Sexualization in Porn, and In Wolf!

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2009-06-07 15:52

Holly of The Pervocracy, in a generally positive, nuanced review, gets to the core of the problem with one section of Naomi Wolf’s long-controversial article The Porn Myth

And then the weird part.

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.” ...And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

Or so constrained. I have — or mostly had — Orthodox friends too, and the way they hide women away isn’t sexy. I went to a Hasidic friend’s Bar Mitzvah once and all the women in the congregation had to sit behind a screen, looking politely at a goddamn white sheet as the sounds of the service sort of drifted through. Being sexier in private (if that’s even true) isn’t worth that shit. It’s humiliating. And when I’m asked to cover my hair, I don’t think it’s because my sexuality is special, it’s because my sexuality needs hiding. My very identity — which is being treated as synonymous with my sexuality — needs hiding.

FUCK THAT.

Read her quote of quote in context here.

A couple of critical points in there. First, it’s a mistake to imagine (as its too easy to do if your primary experiences are via media) that only one major religious tradition obliges women to cover themselves. Yes, there’s probably more controversy over Muslim women wearing scarves or veils but as Holly says, its an obligation in ultra-orthodox Judaism as well. And while we’re most familiar with wimples and veils on Catholic nuns and brides, Christian women of all stations in life were once expected to similarly veil themselves… and even in my paternal grandparent’s solidly American Plymouth Brethren denomination women wore (and may still wear) what I always though of as lace doilies to at least symbolically cover their hair.

The second point, though, is that upon reflection while Wolf spends most of her essay decrying the unreal expectations imposed on women by highly-sexualized imagery of women in pornography, Wolf’s glamorization of acres of swaddling veils and dresses is no less sexualizing.

Final point, of course, is that Holly has a bedrock deep understanding of the difference between sexuality and sexualization. And that she has no patience for the latter in any of its manifestations. Which she makes clear in the rest of her post, in which she largely agrees with Wolf about sexualization (vs. oh, say, largely missing sexuality) in porn.

Cool post.

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(Not-so) Happy Golden Days of Yore

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2008-12-18 13:18

Anna N. of Jezebel says

If you’re still using Alex Comfort’s 1972 The Joy of Sex as your guide to such topics as “frigidity,” having sex on horseback, and “tactful ways to take a woman’s virginity,” it’s time to update.

British sexologist Susan Quilliam has revised the famous book, putting more focus where you need it most: the clit. In words oddly reminiscent of Obama’s “McCain doesn’t get it” speech, Quilliam says Comfort gave short shrift to the all-important bit of female anatomy “not because he was anti-clitoris, but because he just didn’t know.” Also included now are sections on Internet porn, vulvar care, and a technique called the “Venus butterfly.” [NY Times]

Read the quote in context here.

What’s really scary to contemplate is Comfort was actually fairly state-of-the-art on the clit for 1972! He only started writing the thing a year or two after Masters and Johnson announced their research that it’s all about the clit. And only maybe ten years after “helpful” American gynecologists finally stopped cauterizing** or cutting them out of women who couldn’t stop playing with them(!!!!)

During a trial to shut down a theater for showing the Linda Lovelace movie “Deep Throat” a New York City prosecutor said, with his bare face hanging out, “The movie says it’s perfectly normal to have a clitoral orgasm and THAT IS WRONG.”

Y’ever wonder why old 2nd-wave feminists seem really cranky compared to 3rd-wavers? 3rd-wavers are all too young to remember just how jarringly bad it used to be! It was bad!

The original book is impossibly old-fashioned now in large part because… people back then read it, tried some of the then utterly-unheard-of stuff in it, and took it from there. Some of it’s laugh-out-loud now but compared to everything else available to the general public back then it was light-years ahead.

[** Yes, that J.H. Kellogg. —fl]

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Problem Being That "Anti-Anti" is Not a Double Negative

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2008-08-19 20:11

Megan of Jezebel, in her “Crappy Hour” feature with IM buddy and political pundit Spencer Ackerman, raises a point that I think might explain some of the nature, and bitterness arising out of, for instance, the “blowjob wars.” The snippet below involves speculation about who John McCain might select as a Vice Presidential running mate.


MEGAN: ...At what point in the race do you think Lieberman would start undermining McCain the way he did Al Gore?

SPENCER: Not even SLIGHTLY and here’s why. Lieberman is animated by the classic neoconservative grievance of rejection by his first love, the Democratic Party. Jacob Heilbrunn’s book goes into this pathology in detail. And honestly, I have to admit I understand it, given my inability to let go of this whole TNR shit. [Note: Ackerman was fired from The New Republic for failing to drink kool-aid with neocons. —fl] That’s why Lieberman has been such an eager attack dog for the right ever since he lost his primary in 2006 — he wants, and wants badly, to redress what the left did to him. He’s not actually rightwing. He’s anti-anti-left, and ferociously so.

MEGAN: Well, you know, if you want to be a hawk, don’t expect a bunch of doves to come flocking to you.

SPENCER: He’s obsessed with his own transcendent righteousness.
They said it here.

The problem with transcendent righteousness, in any debate, is that, like Leiberman, one can wind up doing damage to one’s own cause at the expense of respect or influence in either camp.

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Why, Professor Higgins, Must Anyone Be More Like Anyone Else?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2008-06-07 14:30


Photo “May 20th – Liza Doolittle Day” by Flickr user Rafa from Brazil. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jill Filipovic of Feministe links to a CNN piece by Rebecca Walker (Alice Walker’s daughter)

now is the time for healing, and this can only happen if Hillary’s staunch female supporters let go of the reverse-sexist ideology that women are inherently better, wiser, and more compassionate leaders.

They will have to acknowledge that sometimes the best woman for the job is actually a man — if it’s the right man.

Read the quote, and Jill’s commentary, here.

My reflex is to say when Walker said “best woman for the job,” let alone “best woman for the job is a man” she was using language she felt would meeting halfway with the “older women” of 2nd-Wave feminism she was trying to reach out to. If so… well, it’s still not ok.

If I had a dollar for every person who told me I was in touch with my “feminine” side for being able to get newborns to settle, or burp, or sleep on my arm I’d need a suitcase instead of a wallet. And if I had a quarter for every time I heard someone say this strong woman or that had “balls” I’d need a dumpster instead of a change jar. But lookit here, if the goal of feminism is not only shared power but shared recognition and ownership of issues then to designate universal qualities (tenderness, ambition) as gendered is to step away from not towards shared recognition and ownership.

Now as it happens I only partly agree with Walker. By all accounts Senator Obama is pretty solid on women’s issues, with many of his seeming departures explainable more by his politics of engagement than revealed indifference. But you know what? When it comes to specific women’s issues Senator Clinton just knew more stuff not so much because she’s a woman but because she’s paid more attention and done more in the field of women’s issues. (It’s fine to say why she’s paid more attention: she’s a woman with a brain, duh, but that explains only her motive, not her depth of attention or understanding of the issues, or even — given how many women don’t — the extent to which she’s involved herself.) So if we were just talking about feminism I’m pretty sure the 2nd-wavers weren’t at all crazy to say Senator Clinton would have been the much better choice. Of course we’re not talking about feminism, and in other dimensions such as deep organizing ability, diplomacy, powers of persuasion, and alignment of other interests such as poverty, education, and military bellicosity that coincide more strongly with women’s issues, a President Obama may be able to advance specific women’s issues further, if accidentally, than a second President Clinton might have.

But that doesn’t make him any kind of (gendered) woman at all, any more than Senator Clinton’s courage, brashness, and unbelievable willpower makes her some kind of (gendered) man. Me? I’m a man who is or isn’t good with babies. Danica Patrick (and quite a few other women racers, by the way) is a woman who is or isn’t really good with cars. Barack Obama is a man who is or isn’t good on women’s issues. Trying to argue that because of certain gender-assigned qualities Danica Patrick is a man or that Obama is a woman, even metaphorically, probably isn’t going to reach anyone. Let alone the Clinton supporters I think Rebecca Walker was trying to convince.

[Note: Being further charitable, I’m assuming the exhortations about “reverse” sexism were also attempts to reach out. —fl]

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Generations of feminists, of women, of men

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2007-11-13 21:43

Hugo Schwyzer again, on a major issue separating different generations or waves of feminism.

...I’ve just finished Astrid Henry’s Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (I learned about the Henry book from Courtney Martin at Feminsting.) The book explores the “mother-daughter” model to describe the conflict between two successive waves of feminism: the Second Wave of the 1960s and early ’70s and the Third Wave that began to emerge in the early 1990s. Feminists of the Second Wave (everyone from Betty Friedan to Shulamith Firestone) were born between 1920-1955; the Third Wave roughly corresponds to “Generation X” (1964-1981). Some folks, of course, now speak of a Fourth Wave. To outsiders, it all gets very confusing. Though imperfect, the Wikipedia definitions of Second and Third Wave feminism are helpful.
...

Henry’s point is fairly straightforward: beginning in the early 1990s with writers as different as Katie Roiphe, Rene Denfield, and Naomi Wolf, feminists of “my” generation (born in the 1960s and early ’70s) began to publish a series of critical attacks on their “mother’s” feminism. This generation — my generation — shared the Second Wave commitment to women’s equality, but were eager to rebel against what they saw as certain feminist orthodoxies. Where an earlier generation of feminists embraced collective action, this new generation — or so it is often argued — favored the pursuit of individual happiness. Where an earlier generation of feminists was mistrustful of open displays of sexuality, worrying about the ways in which a sexualized culture exploited women, the Third Wavers embraced women’s sexual agency, talking frankly about desire and pleasure in ways that made their mothers uncomfortable.

Read the excerpts in context here.

I’m old enough to remember the generational transition pretty distinctly. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the break Henry mentions happens right about the time Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon’s work on consent, the “stop rape by any means necessary” activism by, especially, separatists, and the spread of the first “no means no” campaigns. One thing I’ve noticed over, and over, and over, is that *if you can’t remember * when, say, World War II ended and “the boys” came home, or Kennedy was shot, or they landed on the moon, or when no didn’t mean no then it’s almost impossible to sympathize with those who do. And, furthermore, if you do remember those things it’s inconceivable that everyone wouldn’t defer to your totally-well-earned on-the-battlefield wisdom and experience.

Looking from the outside, anyway, the success of no means no among younger women changed everything about women’s experience of sexual dynamics. A fairly ruthless way of putting it would be that 2nd-wave feminists saw sexual choice still as exerting control over who to say “yes” to, and it was a fairly short list. 3rd-wave women, thanks entirely to the sacrifices of their 2nd-wave colleagues (intergenerational, yes, but generally all still alive.) Having the luxury of recognizing that no means no (and that it’s a problem when it’s not) they had the luxury of contemplating not just who to say yes to but what as well.

The problem I’m wrestling with, and in some ways it’s the biggest problem of all, is that on the whole men aren’t getting any of this. Women are exercising sexual agency in greater degrees and men, by and large, are reacting with “huh, huh, she said blow job” style adolescent disbelief.

And with that (intolerable to me) situation, bingo: both generations are miraculously correct: 3rd-wavers are right to the extent women are employing sexual agency for their own enjoyment; 2nd-wavers to the extent men just see it all as perhaps a smarter version of “girls gone wild” or maybe even just “some girls are easy.”

To the extent the two “generations” (really schools of thought) keep their conflict between each other instead of with you, me, us men in general, then it’ll be even harder for you, me, and other men on paths following, paralleling, and supporting feminism to continue moving our gender out of the old 20th Century and into the new. Which is sort of a big deal because as men we’ll not only be happier we’ll be healthier, longer lived, more financially stable, more sexually satisfied, and more respected.

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