anti-feminism

On Safe Spaces and "Pseudo-Feminism"

Posted by figleaf on Sun, 2011-02-13 15:54

Clarissa says

I thought I heard every pseudo-feminist piece of insanity under the sun but, never fear, there are always new and inventive ways to make feminism sound completely ridiculous. A pseudo-feminist blogger recently announced that her blog will be a male-free zone. Men will not be allowed to post comments if they insist on identifying as male:

Source: Clarissa's Blog

The blogger who's closed her comments to men is Jill, a.k.a. Twisty Faster. She's neither the first nor the last to do so. This is a two part post, first on the idea of my-team-only spaces, the other on the idea of labeling this or that faction as "pseudo-feminists."

First: I think it's fine to create people-where-you-are spaces, even when I'm not one of the people where you are. For instance there are quite a few "pickup-artist" forums that are actually quite closed to outsiders. There are feminist and womanist spaces, obviously. There's some tremendously angry guy in Portland who runs a closed anti-porn site. Glenn Beck types have their spaces. Trans people have theirs. Gay conservatives have theirs. Angry divorced men have theirs. And so on.

In each case, for better or worse, having a space where you can stand down from your belief that you must present your "unified public face" and actually talk about stuff you feel really vulnerable about. (The friend who told me about the PUA sites said, for instance, that it provides a critical space for men who are really worried about masculinity to safely *question* their masculinity.

So the question for me isn't so much that people have themselves-only spaces, or even that they brag about it. What matters is whether they *stay* in it. You sort of get to see what happens in, say, the whole Fox News "epistemic closure" phenomenon, and that sort of echo-chamber/amen-chorus effect shows up in places like IBTP.

But hey, there's a point in almost any consciousness-raising processes where frustration and impatience with the status quo boils up. And while it happens to be, I think, a huge mistake to stay angry, I think it's also problematic if you never get angry at all.

(Case in point that only seems completely off the wall: kid I was in high-school with maybe 40 years ago now still walks with a limp from the injury he got putting his whole heart, soul, and body into not losing the homecoming game in his senior year. Playing with unreported broken bones can evidently do that. At the moment, though, school spirit and winning that game was that important to him. Would he do that today? No, almost certainly not: he's gotten perspective. It's not that community isn't important to him -- I'm sure it is. It's that he, like numerous teammates who weren't crippled by zeal, were, well, so full of zeal they were willing to cripple themselves. And not to put too fine a point on it, if he hadn't felt the future of his team, his school, and his life were about to be lost to an opposing team he might not have hurled himself so thoroughly into harms way. My point is that people experience zealous feelings, and thrive on opposition. Particularly when they feel they're in an easily extinguished minority. When they can find a safe place to spread out their thoughts without opposition nearly all of them are eventually able to move on. Without feeling obliged to virtually set themselves on fire.)

So there. That's my pitch for tolerating and even encouraging safe-space venues for people to air out their demons. First, it's actually good for most people. Second, the more outsiders push, the more zealously they risk irreparably windmill-tilting themselves. When someone's in that space all the reasonable chiding in the world won't help.

Next: About the pseudo-feminist thing. I'd just point out that feminism is a very big tent -- big enough to hold the almost diametrically opposite Twisty Faster and Sarah Palin, not to mention everyone else in between. Where "in between" isn't even a single file but wide field. Considering the breadth of the field almost everyone on it can be branded a pseduo-feminist by one or more others on the field. Nor is it the case that the field slopes upward from, say, a least-feminist Palin to an ultimate-feminist Mary Daly.

sInstead I think the way to look at feminism, as with most other fields, is to look at their impact on the rest of the field rather than their authenticity. By that metric the Palin and the Daly factions are both noisy and noticable, but for all that they're neither terribly influential and thus, for all their visibility, not very significant. (Even though, referencing the "angry" stage, above, many or even most feminists may at one point or another go through a transitional Palin or Daly phase.)

Anyway, that's why I'm less inclined to call one group pseudo-feministst: it reinforces the idea that there's one single "authentic" feminism one could belong to instead; it allows us to imagine that the definition we're using to judge others is, in fact, the most authentic. Both of those require more authority than pretty much anyone has -- not me, not you, not Palin, not Twisty, not bell hooks, not Shulamuth Firestone, not Caitlin Flannagan, etc.


Tags:

On the Suspiciously Male Origins of "Feminist" Male Bashing

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2011-02-12 18:08

Photo by Flickr user Uncle Shoe. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user Uncle Shoe. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Kind of funny how many of the bitterly anti-male slanders, slurs, and stereotypes commonly attributed to "radical feminism" predate feminism. Sometimes by centuries. Occasionally by millennia!

They were already highly common in American and English male-only dance halls and similar entertainment venues back when "mainstream feminism" meant the possibility of women owning property and "radical feminism" was the crazy idea that women might someday be allowed to vote.

I bring this up in no small part due to allegations that these are feminist in nature. And I bring that up in no small part because those allegedly feminist characterizations of men are nettlesome to men in general and extremely nettlesome to men's rights activists and their allies.

M'kay, and now, confronted with that sort of incontrovertible proof that sexist and/or "reverse sexist" stereotypes about men predate feminism and, indeed, often originate with men themselves, a lot of guys who are still nettled will say things like "yeah, well, some feminists still propagate those stereotypes so feminism is still all about hating men.

Now it might surprise you to hear me say this but... that would actually be a pretty fair point! Some feminists really do perpetuate long, deep, ancient and... male-originated stereotypes about how awful men are.

And to the extent that subset of feminists allow themselves to be informed by patriarchal standards?  Eh, when folks like Twisty Faster talk about the inescapability of "the patriarchy" I'm not positive that's what they're thinking about... but the shoe does fit.  But why would anyone who was even remotely bothered by the dissimilarity between their own lived experience and the cultural stereotypes about how she was <em>supposed</em> to be feel any more confident that the messages cradle-sung, nursery-rhymed, and spoon fed to them about men were any more authentic?

There's certainly an idea in one of the older factions of essentialist feminist that we men are so incredibly ruled by our dicks that women can have a "sex strike," refusing to have sex with us until we accede to their demands. There's also, in a similar strand of feminism, the idea that most men are so horny that we'll willingly have sex with pumpkins, goats, and dead bodies. In terms of a coherent theory of gender these two ideas seem irreconcilable. (Which indeed they are.) But at the end of the day the genesis of the "sex strike" idea originated 2,400 years ago this year in the play Lysistrata, written by Aristophanes, a man, and performed by an all-male cast for an all-male audience in 411 B.C. And the idea that men will have sex with animals or dead bodies (but not, conspicuously absently, with themselves or each other) has been a common accusation in decidedly male military organizations from time out of mind.

And, of course, getting really down to brass tacks, if those feminists who believe it are suckers of the patriarchy what should we make of other men who blame those same feminists, who at least are trying to wrench themselves free, instead of the real fucking man-haters who cooked up nearly every so-called "feminist man-hater" tropes?

My vote would be we think of them the same way we think of the bull who sees the matador's cape as a bigger enemy than them matador himself.


Tags:

Who Knew Rick Santorum Was Straight? Also, Context for Sarah Palin's "Knuckle-Dragger" Remarks

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2011-02-11 12:26

Via anthropologist, paleontologist, and Neanderthal expert John Hawks' regular "Neanderthal anti-defamation files" feature, media diva Sarah Palin said of aspiring teabagger Presidential candidate Rick (man-on-dog) Santorum

Why do they have to bring poor Neandertals into it?

...

"I will not call him the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal," Palin continued. "I'll let his wife call him that instead."

Oh, well, this is so easy a caveman could do it.

Source: john hawks weblog

First of all, it's always funny to be reminded that over-the-top doth-protest-too-much homophobic conservative Republicans are sometimes married to members of the opposite sex.  Complete and total bias on my part, I know.  But that really was my gut response: "Rick Santorum is married?" Not that there's anything wrong with that.  Nor even anything implausible about it.  I'm just more used to the Ted Haggard / Jim Baker / Larry Craig / Fred Phelps / Jim West / George Alan Rekers / Richard Curtis / Mark Foley / Brent Parker / Matthew Glavin / Bruce Barclay / Glenn Murphy / Eddie Long / Troy King / David Dreier / Roy Ashburn / Ed Schrock / Jeff Gannon / Terry Dolan model of Republican homophobia.

Second of all, though, Palin was (for once) lashing out at Santorum in a perfectly appropriate fashion.  Columnist Ruth Marcus puts the seemingly Neanderthalist non-sequeteur in context

Just in case his wife doesn't take Sarah Palin up on her offer, I'll say it: Rick Santorum is a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal.

The former Pennsylvania senator and wannabe president was bad-mouthing Palin the other day for being a no-show at CPAC, the annual conservative gathering and showcase for presidential hopefuls.

"I wouldn't have turned it down," Santorum said of Palin's decision not to attend, "but I don't live in Alaska, right, and I'm not the mother to all these kids, and I don't have other responsibilities like she has."

All these kids? Santorum has seven, which by my count makes him two kids busier than Palin.

Oh, wait, I guess not. He's father to all these kids, not mother.

And we know who stays home with the kids.

Source: The Washington Post

That guy really is a little shit stain. I'd just add that the incident really does illustrate what a genuine outlier Sarah Palin is to the Republican mainstream.  I genuinely don't understand what the fuck she's up to these days, but once upon a time she really was a force for change -- positive change no less! -- in the Alaska Republican establishment.

I'd just add that that impulse of hers, even more than her sex or gender or even complete decent into id and not just ideology, explains the animosity against Palin by deep establishment Republicans like Rick Santorum.  She's no stupider than they are.  She's no less hypocritical than they are.  She's no less avaricious.  Nor fiscally responsible. Nor prepared to create and execute national-level government legislation or policy than they either.  But unlike the Santorums, the McConnells, and the Bohners of the party establishment she has little tolerance for those qualities in others further up her party's food chain.  And as an almost literally self-made woman, whatever her own too-real faults in the domain of reproductive rights, she really doesn't have much tolerance for their knuckle-dragging attitudes towards women.

Shame she no longer seems interested in using her abilities to do good rather than to do well.


Tags:

Jezebel's Irin Carmon Calls Out Caitlin Flanagan's Calculated Misquote of Karen Owen

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2011-01-12 17:28

Wow did f Irin Carmon ever come down hard on Caitlin Flanagan for taking a quote of hers so far out of context to make a point it amounts to lying. Flanagan's latest anti-feminist article, the current Atlantic Monthly, attempts to paint former Duke University student Karen Owen as a damaged, frail victim of "casual sex" with men. Which would be fine, I guess, since we're all entitled to our opinion. Unless you bend what someone else says you break the truth. Here's Carmon:

Flanagan also utterly mischaracterizes — willfully, by the looks of it — what Karen Owen told me back in September:

Even in the words of Karen Owen herself, we can find evidence that the balls-out composer of the Fuck List may have a very different, if little-explored, side of her personality, one that befits less the bard of the blow job than the heartbroken heroine of a Jane Austen novel. Asked by a reporter from Jezebel for her thoughts on everything that had happened, she responded with a fully human and entirely feminine sentiment. "I regret it," she said, "with all my heart."

And now we know. Except... let's go back to the original post with the interview for a moment.

She pointed out, as did our original tipster, that frats make lists like this all the time. Still, she said repeatedly, "I regret it with all my heart. I would never intentionally hurt the people that are mentioned on that."

So, as is rather plain here from the part of the quote that got truncated, she regrets violating the privacy of her partners by putting this in writing and subjecting them to ridicule for their penis sizes and poor performance.

Source: Jezebel

So there you go. Flanagan claimed Owen's expression of regret for damaging her partners' reputations into an expression of regret for having had casual sex.

Meanwhile, screw "unethical." Deliberately misquoting Owen's expression of regret for *outing* her sex partners so that it appears as an expression of *having had* sex partners is dishonest in pretty much every dimension I can think of. If, as one of the Jezebel commenters tries to explain, Flanagan is a literary or cultural critic rather than a journalist, then she's guilty not just of professional dishonesty but also intellectual dishonesty. Which makes it more rather than less disgraceful than journalistic dishonesty would be.

Carmon, not letting up, points out another routine Flanagan slam against feminism.

The central thesis of Flanagan's piece is that Karen Owen really wanted to love and affection, like all women do, but she was confused by the alleged feminist mandate to get wasted and have random sex with callous dudes. (I think I missed that memo.) The fact that there is practically no evidence for this doesn't stop Flanagan in her pursuit of the real truth.

What I don't get is where Flanagan, and evidently 60,000,000 other Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura listeners, ever got the idea that feminism prescribes *or* proscribes any particular kind of sex in the first place. (Well, unless, of course, they got it from Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura. And now, evidently, Caitlin Flanagan.)

Pretty much the only consistent message I've ever heard from feminists is that you should have the kind of sex you want, not the kind of sex "you're supposed to." Which sort of tends to be the exact opposite message Flanagan, Limbaugh, et. al. claim it sends.

I'd add that feminism also tends to (correctly) take a dim view of using people you don't otherwise respect for one's own sexual gratification.  And I think if Flanagan wanted to do anything beyond maybe slut shaming and tradition upholding she might have dug a little deeper into the complex possibility that to the extent her partners were using her, Owen was also very clearly using her partners.  And she might have picked up on the universality of how such use can hurt others regardless of their sex, gender, or orientation. Caught up as she is in her feminine essentialism Flanagan appears to overlook what might have been a conservative but actually constructive essay... in favor of dishonestly making shit up. I mean, what's up with that?


Tags:

Marcy Wheeler on Antonin Scalia's Unlikely But Implicit Strict Originalist Repudiation of the "Personhood" of Corporations

Posted by figleaf on Sun, 2011-01-09 23:48

Good point via

Avedon Carol:

Marcy Wheeler, fascinated by Scalia's ruminations on whether the Constitution protects us from discrimination (he says no), suggests he has clearly just killed corporate personhood: "If the Fourteenth Amendment shouldn't be applied to women and gays, then it sure as hell shouldn't be applied to railroads, right?"

Source: The Sideshow

Or, conversely, if the "original" constitution can be warped to the point that a company can be protected from discrimination, a position I'm confident Scalia has never, not once in his life, ever questioned, then there's no standing for saying it doesn't permit discrimination against women and gays.


Tags:

The One and Only Way HIV, Fecal Matter, and Sperm Are... Or At Least Ought to Be... Treated Identically Under the Law

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2010-12-31 01:11

So... we're pretty agreed that it's a bad thing, and often a separate criminal offense, if an individual knowingly transmits HIV or other sexually-transmitted diseases to an unknowing sex partner.  (If we're not agreed please let me know in comments.)

And... one hopes we're even more in agreement that it's a bad thing, and hopefully always a separate criminal offense, if an individual knowingly puts fecal matter in a restaurant salad bar where patrons will unknowingly consume it.  (If we're not agreed... actually please don't let me know because I don't want to... but also please never work around a salad bar!!!)

But here's where it gets tricky.  There's evidently not agreement that it's a bad thing if an individual knowingly transmits fertile sperm to an unknowing fertile woman, let alone that it should be a separate criminal offense.

Can anyone explain why one of those things should not be like the other ones?  In each case the consequences for the recipient isn't always fatal almost always is painful, incapacitating, and costly in terms of time, health, and money.  And in each case the benefit for the deliverer is marginal: marginally less wasted washing one's hands for one example, marginally more pleasurable sex for the other two.

I'd add that there are consequences not only for the direct recipients.  When word gets out that people have been sickend by fecal mattter in a local salad bar, huge numbers of people begin avoiding that particular salad bar, sure, but almost everybody becomes more wary of salad bars in general.  Same with HIV -- indeed, exploiting that avoidance tendency is a key tactic of homophobes.  Same, for that matter, that fear of pregnancy is exploited by abstinence-only types.

So... let's say you were a big fan of salad bars -- not just for personal consumption but for general consumption.  If you're such a fan how do you feel about the benefits or liabilities of regulating fecal matter in salad bars... or even criminalizing putting fecal matter in salad bars?

Similarly, let's say your'e a big fan of casual sex -- not just for your own enjoyment but for the population at large.  If you're that kind of fan how do you feel about the benefits vs. liabilities of regulating the knowing transmission of HIV or other STIs... or even criminalizing knowing transmission thereof?

And finally, lets say you're a big fan of not just casual sex in general but casual heterosexual sex in particular.  If you're that kind of fan how do you feel about the benefits vs. liabilities of regulating knowingly transmitting sperm against the expressed preference of a fertile partner?

Can anyone explain why one of those things should be unlike the other ones?

(Note: If you say yes are you sure you want to go there?  Really sure there should never, ever be any legal consequences for knowingly transmitting sperm without the partner's consent?  Beyond maybe a stern "that's what you get for lovin' me?"  Sure the police nor courts nor laws should ever become involved?  Sure there should be no special considerations or exceptions or changes in current law on behalf of aggrieved parties? Absolutely sure?  Because just a second ago, as I was wrapping up this post, it occurred to me that the issue cuts both ways.  If you were one of the guys who was sure before reading that link are you still sure now?)


Tags:

Missing the point: After Easily Hooking Up With (At Least) Two Women in 24 Hours, Assange Calls Sweden a "Feminist Saudi Arabia"

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2010-12-27 13:11

Summary: This post is about the objectively stupid claim that feminism makes Sweden a really bad place to be an even modestly considerate sexually active heterosexual man. Sweden!

Question: Which of the following three items is not like the other ones?

Item #1: According to this Time Magazine archive article from 1964!:

Sweden, which generally plays it lightly, last week was in an uproar about sex. The cause was a petition of protest to King Gustav VI Adolf signed by 140 eminent Swedish physicians, including the King's own doctor. Their plea to the monarch and to the government: take swift steps to stop sexual laxity, which "is a menace to the vitality and health of the nation."

For years, in Sweden, premarital intercourse has been widely condoned, and the government provides legal abortions when deemed "in the mother's interest." The result, warned the doctors, has been a tide of extramarital pregnancies and mounting venereal disease—with most of the victims young people. Sweden's gonorrhea rate has jumped 75% in five years, and of last year's new cases, 52% were among teenagers.

Reform Talk. The physicians placed the blame squarely on Sweden's schools, where sex education starts in the first grade, pointing out that young minds —unless taught differently—can confuse instruction with encouragement. Arguing that "chastity in no way is harmful to health," the doctors declared that "monogamous marriage [with] common responsibility for the children, is the natural order of life." In sum, the doctors urged schools to teach "what is right and wrong."

Source: Time Magazine: March 06, 1964

And item #2: And in early 2009 Kommissarie F. Curiosa of Sweden's English-language The Local said

With one of the highest birth rates in Europe, the Swedes seem to be pretty prolific when it comes to making babies, but even after six plus years of living in Stockholm, I'm still not sure how Swedish relationships actually happen.

The only obvious explanation seems to be massive quantities of alcohol. In other words, Swedish babies wouldn't exist without Finnish booze cruises and Systembolaget.

In recent months, The Local has reported that Swedes are much less inclined than their European counterparts to spend vast sums of cash in their efforts to find a mate. This didn't surprise me at all. That's because they spend it all on alcohol trying to get themselves drunk enough to talk to a member of the opposite sex.

I know that it will seem ungrateful to be accusing my host country of being a nation of stingy alcoholics, and I'll be the first to admit that a few drinks can be a fantastic social lubricant. It's probably also a case of “it's not the Swedes, it's me,” but Swedish mating and dating rituals (and usually in that order) appear to be a very slow process that go nowhere (except the bedroom) fast.

In a nutshell, it goes something like this:

A) Meet at a mutual friend's party.

B) Get really, really drunk.

C) Make out. Sex is optional.

D) If you're lucky, you are sober enough to save the other person's telephone number in your mobile, AND to put it under the correct name.

E) Send a text message along the lines of "last night was nice. Shall we have a coffee sometime?"

F) Spend hours analyzing the various ways in which aforementioned text message could be misinterpreted. Get your friends involved.

Source: The Local

Item #3: Via of Echidne of the Snakes

Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism. I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism. -- Julian Assange

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

Yeah, Sweden's such a "feminist Saudi Arabia" that Assange was easily able to hook up for casual sex with two separate, consenting Swedish women in less than 24 hours.

My understanding, actually, is that it's approximately as easy to have heterosexual sex in Sweden as it is to have gay male sex in San Francisco. I.e. pretty bloody easy. And for approximately the same reasons: however many class or income barriers might exist in San Francisco, since everybody having gay male sex is... well... male. And so on a gender level they're pretty much going to treat each other as sexual equals.

The intent of all those ferocious Swedish feminists is to... create an environment where sexual equality between heterosexuals there is as routine as is equality between homosexuals here.

M'kay. Now. Let's posit a little scenario. One that takes the San Francisco analogy a little further. Let's say Julian Assange is gay instead of straight. And let's say Assange had dropped into San Francisco instead of Stockholm last year. And let's say Assange hooked up with an anally topped two men in 24 hours. And let's say that in one case he "accidentally" neglected to use a condom, and in the other case he didn't use a condom when, after properly condomed sex he penetrated his partner a second time without a condom while the partner was asleep.

In those circumstances would a hypothetically gay Assange's male partners have any cause for complaint? Fucking right they would! In fact I believe in quite a few states they could file criminal charges, and in a few others prosecutors might file charges even if the partners themselves said it was no big deal.

Here's the even bigger trick, though. If these hypothetical partners of a condom-tossing Assange kicked up a fuss would we say "oh boy, are those gay guys politically correct?" Would we call them militant homosexualist? Would we call California, or New York, or... Illinois, Missouri, or Oklahoma(!) militantly homosexualist for their "knowing transmission" laws? Why that would be no.

With that little thought experiment out of the way, what do Assange's antics look like now? A charismatic if somewhat narcissistic young man kites into Sweden, easily arranges consensual sex with two women (at least! remember only two women complained!) And due to their intensely egalitarian upbringing the young women felt as comfortable hooking up for sex with a man as a gay man in San Francisco would. But also like San Francisco men those women expected to be treated with equal consideration.

And when all he did was skip condoms when he, and they, knew he was sperm-positive and could knowingly transmit pregnancy they went all "feminist Saudi Arabia" on him?

Dudes! Do you have any idea what kind of heterosexual casual-sex paradise America, England, or, say, Germany would be with the kind of "feminist Saudi Arabia" values Assange was carping about?

Seriously?

Sweden?

Still not convinced? Let's put it another way then, hmm. Let's say you're a sex-loving heterosexual in a culture where casual heterosexual liaisons between social equals are as easy as arranging casual gay ones because by both custom and law all parties, women and men, have equivalent or equal degrees of faith and trust in the system. Then along comes some coarse Aussie dork who's used to the idea of sex as something that has to be purchased, extorted or otherwise "scored" off of women... and he thinks that's a good thing because any sheila who didn't have to be extorted into sex is either a slut or a whore. Oh yeah, and he thinks it's of zero consequence to him if he gives a sex partner a STI or an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy and when he gets to your town instead of picking up on the handful of social rules and basic hygiene that keep your very-mutually-beneficial sex lives humming smoothly he basically goes out of his way to avoid using condoms even when his partners expect him to use them.

Even if for some reason you didn't think this was unacceptable behavior on strictly egalitarian grounds would you be happy with this guy peeing in the community water supply like that? No. You'd want him called out on the carpet so fast his comb-over toupee would still be hanging in midair like Wylie Coyote.

Now. Does this have any bearing on whether the charges against Assange are trumped up? No, not really. If Sweden's applying it's laws unevenly that's a nuisance. But is there a problem with the laws themselves? I'd argue, forcefully, that for sex-loving heterosexuals, particularly for sex-loving male heterosexuals the answer has to be no. Because, seriously, Sweden? We're talking about a country where (according to the aforementioned post from The Local) it's far more common to fret about asking for a romantic date after the third time you've had sex than vice versa! And you know one of the biggest reasons it's so easy to have that kind of casual sex in Sweden? Because feminism won! Assange just didn't get the memo and thought he could treat Swedish women like the 2nd-class pieces of shit Australians grow up getting away with. And he got busted for it. (I'll ask the question once again: what possible incentive would even deeply anti-feminist Swedes have for letting foreigners screw up their sexual gravy trains? None? Right in one.)

Kasheesh! Like we should all have those problems Swedish men have!


Tags:

Funny How Only Anti-Feminists Think Affirming Consent and Enthusiasm Would Involve Halting for Dialectical Discourse

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2010-07-15 16:57

Ampersand of Alas, a blog has a very cool contrast and compare post about consent as seen through the filter of nominally “mainstream” anti-feminism and nominally “edgy” BDSM. Read the original post, which I heartily endorse, to get the full eye-opening point. Read this post, though, for a quick dissection of the intentional misunderstanding common to anti-feminist descriptions of feminist principles.

Here’s Ampersand quoting a gee-I-just-don’t-get-it date-rape apology post from Cathy Young

Feminist critic Cathy Young, in the comments of her blog, wrote:

“I really can’t think of anything that would kill the moment (at least, for a lot of people) more than stopping in the middle of the mating dance for a clear and rational ‘consent’ discussion.”

Read the quote in context here.

In terms of the ordinary transition from neutral to lusty to actively sexual I can only think of a couple of circumstances where the kind of showstopper conversation Young frets about would ever be necessary. And since I think, speak, and write about sexual relationships all the time if I can only think of three then it’s really rarely necessary.

Before you get sexual? Sure, that’s a great time to have the conversation — it can even be an integral part of flirting. (Think of the game “I never…” only slightly more seriously.) Sometimes after sex? Sure, conversations to refine or clarify boundaries based on previous experiences together make perfect sense.

But during? While seamlessly transitioning from, say, dining and dancing, to maybe kissing in the cab or car, to standing at the door deciding whether one will ask the other in, to heavily petting on the couch, to slowly undressing each other, to slipping into something more comfortable… like a bed, couch, shower, or (heck!) even dungeon? Sorry, that’s usually pretty silly.

It’s silly first because there’s usually some lull in the action — while parking, say, or settling the bill, or while fumbling for keys at a doorstep where if a serious conversation is needed it can happen pretty naturally.

Even more importantly Young is being silly because (as Clarisse Thorn’s example makes amply clear in Ampersand’s post) you usually don’t have to have the sort of long, drawn out, and no-doubt earnest, detailed, and possibly stridently dialectical discourses Young implies when she says “clear and rational … discussion.” Instead there’s checking in. As in “May I?” or “Are you ok with this?” and “Not so fast” or “Mmm, more!” Repeated as necessary. Instead of being assumed, taken for granted, or ignored altogether.

Point being that once you get what consent is all about it really doesn’t take much to keep enthusiasm going… and if there’s not enthusiasm? Well what the fucking hell are you doing pushing ahead anyway without checking in anyway, right? If somebody’s just said “stop,” or “no,” or even just stiffened up and stopped responding then… um… yeah, you probably need to start a conversation but it’s probably going to be about more than “consent.” Sheesh!

-==-

BTW, the three instances I can think of where stopping in the middle of a “mating dance” for a full-on negotiation of consent would be

a) When, without prior agreement, the non-initiating party appears to be playing around with “no doesn’t really mean no.“

b) When, without prior agreement, the initiating party doesn’t appear to be getting the message that no actually means no!

c) When both parties have erotic negotiation kinks such that stopping, possibly repeatedly, to discuss minutiae about what exactly will and won’t happen.

-==-

See also:Guess What Else? Sometimes Drunk Students Commit Rape and Then Claim They Aren’t Rapists In the Morning | Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex


Tags:

From Asinine to Insane: How Social Policies About Single Fathering Harm All Parents and Their Children

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2010-07-13 11:13

Monica Potts of TAPPED nails the right policy solutions for an otherwise typically, sullen, stupid MRA policy initiative — “financial abortions” for men who don’t want to be responsible parents if their partners become pregnant.

This seems like the wrong solution to a very real problem for low-income fathers. It assumes men should be able to decide not to be fathers but that they can’t do anything to prevent it, i.e., using birth control regularly. That’s an argument for male contraception — a male pill, but also an argument for making condoms increasingly pervasive and expanding access to sex education. It’s also an argument for helping low-income fathers provide the financial support they’re required to by assisting them with services that would help move them out of poverty, or make poverty less devastating.

She said it here.

The problem for men is real enough. Aside from condoms, vasectomies, and not having fluid-exchanging sex there really isn’t much heterosexual men can do to avoid unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. And one result of that seems to be a sort of passive-aggressive resentment that meshes all too well with the traditional view that everything related to pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting is womens’ responsibility. Which is why I like Potts’ take so much.

Aside: This isn’t the main point but she mentioned it first: Potts is right that men really do need more contraception options. For all the whining about men’s irresponsibility for fertility I remain seriously confident that if men had additional options that fell between the permanence and convenience curves of condoms and surgery they’d stop being so passive-aggressive about it and stop being so blazé at other men’s learned-helplessness about it. But that’s not what this post is about. But I digress…

What’s even more important, and even less broadly recognized than the limits on male contraception, is Potts’s point that low-income fathers, as well as pending and potential ones, need financial assistance as well!

I don’t know how many of you have studied the history of welfare or financial assistance but one of the reasons it’s been historically so draconian for women has been a social construction that mandates men as providers. In the 19th Century aid societies initiated the practice of surprise and midnight “bed checks” of women with dependent children to insure they really were widowed or abandoned. The idea that an able-bodied man, no matter how destitute and no matter how unemployed, might benefit directly from charity was anathema. As was the perhaps even more shameful and/or “immoral” prospect of his wife and children receiving food or shelter that he “should” have been able to provide.

And who knows, maybe you could make a case that it made sense back when women could only earn 7 cents for every dollar of equal work men could earn rather than 77 cents today. But income parity really is converging especially in the low-wage/low-income environments we’re talking about, it makes less and less sense to do so now that the “breadwinner”/“homemaker” dichotomy is even more mythical than it once was.

Anyway the whole notion of a “financial divorce” from child-rearing is such a psychotically gendered notion in the first place! Current biases against preparing low-income men for possible single and/or unmarried-to-the-mother parenthood are also similarly gender biased. And in both types of bias not only do men remain alienated from their own progeny, and not only do they maintain assumptions about mothers as “nurturing” and fathers as either supporters or abandoners, they also rather perpetuate policies that are intentionally (“financial abortion”) or unintentionally punitive against women and children.


Tags:

Kathleen Parker Uses Women's Studies Rhetoric to Attempt to Un-Man, Unseat Barack Obama

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2010-07-01 09:49

Via all sorts of sources on the left, right-wing propagandist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post correctly (correctly for a propagandist anyway) disregards reality and history in her possibly-successful attempt to frame President Obama as “feminine.”


Obama: Our first female president

If Bill Clinton was our first black president, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman president.

She said it here.

Parker’s pretty good at wielding feminist and gender-study language and theory

We’ve come a long way gender-wise. Not so long ago, women would be censured for speaking or writing in public. But cultural expectations are stickier and sludgier than oil. Our enlightened human selves may want to eliminate gender norms, but our lizard brains have a different agenda.

Women, inarguably, still are punished for failing to adhere to gender norms by acting “too masculine” or “not feminine enough.” In her fascinating study about “Hating Hillary,” Karlyn Kohrs Campbell details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, “like a man.”

M’kay, nothing you wouldn’t hear in a 1st-year gender-studies paper, and also perfectly true. Not too surprising either since Karlyn Kors Campbell was a pioneering women’s-studies professor who focused on the rhetoric and reception of women speakers in American political history. She’s also the part-namesake of an academic prize in Rhetorical Criticism. So good call on Parker’s part!

Of course as with all good propaganda she uses two paragraphs to cite credible people and accurate statements in order to make you less-critically receptive to the first sentence in the sentence that follows. Which would be

Could it be that Obama is suffering from the inverse?

Well, nice try but no, Obama is almost archetypically male of a type well-understood, admired, and often feared by socially or hierarchically subordinate men. See “father, remote.” See also the myriad leaders among aviation engineers, software developers, biotech researchers, research university employees, merchant transoceanic shippers, bureaucrats and technocrats, career-military, and industrial-scale, export-oriented commodity-crop farmers for examples.

The reasonable-sounding way Parker sets up her assertion, though, you could almost agree that his distant-father routine might… somehow… um… be feminine. Incredible reframing if she could pull it off, yes. Maybe she’s bucking for an award in rhetoric herself.

You wanna know how much of a stretch this is, by the way? Karlyn Kors Campbell didn’t just study women’s political speech, she’s also written about male Presidential rhetoric. And possibly since Campbell is still alive, Parker acknowledges a… slight problem with her attempted spin

Campbell’s research, in which she affirms that men can assume feminine communication styles successfully (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), suggests holes in my own theory. She insists that men are safe assuming female styles as long as they meet rhetorical norms for effective advocacy — clarity and cogency of argument, appropriate and compelling evidence, and preempting opposing positions.

Ooh, that’s gotta hurt your thesis! Barack Obama’s “feminine” just like… um… Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton? Oh yeah, that’s going to get you an award, but only if you can make that one stick. In the next paragraph Parker wisely relies on the rhetoric of uncertainty to express confidence.

I’m not so sure. The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell’s argument that “nothing prevents” men from appropriating women’s style without negative consequences.

Yeah, masculine-coded contexts that evidently weren’t in place in those crisis-free, no-need-for-decisive-action years when Reagan was President (1980-1988) or when Clinton was (1992-2000) but magically are today. Oh, and speaking of crises that demand decisive action, how ‘bout My Pet Goat boy from 2001-2008?

My Pet Goat collage From my Flickr account

But suddenly Parker’s saying President Obama somehow will finally be the guy who finally gets hit with the consequences? Of being to “womanly” as opposed to, say, too male-professor/remote-father-figure aloof?

Give her credit for trying. And give her credit, as well, for her women’s studies bone fides… which, incidentally, I think really are bone fides!

Parker’s pretty clear throughout her piece that while she’s criticizing Obama for… well… obviously like a lot of her peers she’s just throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks… but while she’s critical of Obama’s “femininity” she doesn’t actually see anything wrong at all with “womanly” leadership styles or, indeed, women leaders!

Indeed, negative reaction to Obama’s speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.

And, perhaps, next time will be a real woman’s turn.

She’s not talking about Hillary Clinton. But only because Clinton is a Democrat, not because she’s a woman. She’ll support, campaign for, and might would outright prefer, a Sarah Palin to a Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney for President, and prefer a Nikki Haley to a Haley Barbour for Vice President.

Don’t underestimate the significance of this.

The patriarchy is alive and well, and women like Parker, Palin, Haley, Bachmann, Angle, and others are utterly committed to its maintenance. But this is not your father’s patriarchy!

Update: Oh cool, and professor Mark Lieberman of Language Log has a technical takedown of Parker’s factual assertions about “feminine” vs. “masculine” language usage at Rhetorical testosterone and analytical hallucinations


Tags:

User login