Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador's Modern Indigenous Movements, a book review by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The image above is the cover to the book reviewed below. This book can be found at Amazon.com; I found the cover and more here, at Monthly Review, September 2009.

Indigenous Resistance in the Americas and the Legacy of Mariátegui: a review by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Notes from the Editors

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (www.reddirtsite.com), a longtime activist, historian, writer, and professor emeritus at California State University East Bay, has published numerous articles and books on the history and issues of Indigenous peoples, including The Great Sioux Nation (1977) and three books of historical memoir.

Reviewed: Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements, by Marc Becker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

Following the 2005 election of the first Indigenous president of any country in the Americas — Evo Morales in Bolivia — I commented in MRzine on the fact that many were taken by surprise by this seemingly sudden occurrence out of nowhere, but only because they had not been paying attention to the development of the international Indigenous movement over the past three decades.

I called attention to the Indigenous mass movements in the Americas during the 1960s and 1970s that gave rise to the international Indigenous movement that, in turn, brought mass-based Indigenous movements into the United Nations. At that forum, significant work was done to develop international law norms for the protection of Indigenous communities and nations, in order to found collective rights analogous to those established in international law by the process of decolonization, the outstanding achievement of the United Nations. Historian Marc Becker, in his invaluable new book, goes deeper in locating the roots of those twentieth century mass movements, focusing on Ecuador.

Sixteen years before Evo Morales, in another Andean region, Indigenous peoples rose up and paralyzed Ecuador for a week. Becker begins with this moment in a chapter titled, “What Is an Indian?” He describes how the protesters blocked highways, halting all traffic in the country, and then massed in the streets of Quito, the capital, presenting sixteen demands focused on land, culture, and political rights. The pan-Indigenous organization, CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador), founded in 1986, provided both leadership and an ideological frame for the future of Indigenous movements in that country. Becker focuses on the extraordinary role of women’s leadership and participation as well (“gendered histories”). Although Becker doesn’t refer to it, CONAIE had been actively participating in the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, and after 1990, the Ecuadorian government included Indigenous representatives in its delegations to the United Nations.

Becker observes that, following the 1990 uprising: “In a manner rarely seen in Latin America, Indigenous activism in Ecuador spawned an academic ‘Generation of 1990’ with numerous articles, books, and doctoral dissertations on the subject of Indigenous politics. Anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists analyzed the uprising and the ideological shifts engendered within the Indigenous world. Academics came to see the uprising, the organizational process leading to it, and the political negotiations following it as representing the birth of a new Indigenous ideology and organizational structure.”

Becker contrasts that flurry of new academic interest with CONAIE’s view of how the resistance movement developed: “Popular, community, syndicate, associate organizations, peasant and Indigenous movements do not appear overnight, nor are they the fruit of one or two people who meet and decide to create them. . . . A movement, a mass organization is the fruit of a long process of organization, of consciousness-raising, of decision making, of uniting many ideas. . . . More than anything, it is the fruit of problems and contradictions that are produced between oppressors and the oppressed at a specific time and place.”

Becker agrees, and proceeds to provide a clear, persuasive, and brilliantly written history, based on exhaustive documentation and his direct experience in Ecuador. Noteworthy is the extraordinary collaboration between the Communist Party of Ecuador and Indigenous communities in the highlands, including the early participation of women. Becker’s case study of Ecuador suggests that the study of similar collaborations throughout Indigenous regions of the Americas would prove fruitful, not only as a matter of historical research, but also as a guide to political practice.

Thanks to the guiding light of the work and vision of Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui in the 1920s, both communist and Indigenous organizers early on were cognizant that the Indigenous peoples of the Andes are nationalities, which, in the Marxist-Leninist sense, have the right to self-determination, although Mariátegui argued against the practicality of a separate Andean state. Becker wrote a good book, exploring Mariátegui’s influence on Latin American social movements and, more recently, an article specifically addressing the relationship to Indigenous peoples.1 The book under review focuses on Ecuador, bringing to it not only his knowledge of those questions but also of current Indigenous social movements.

Mariátegui was disabled and in poor health most of his life, dying at age thirty-eight in 1930. Although he was never able even to visit the Andean region and had no Indigenous colleagues, his thorough studies of the “Peruvian reality,” that is, its colonial and neocolonial social and economic history, led him to conclude that Indigenous peoples were the source of social revolution in Perú, with land tenure as the key element. He was famous throughout Latin America and in communist and socialist communities as a staunch defender of Indigenous rights, as well as for being a brilliant and devoted socialist. During the time when the Soviet Union-led Comintern promoted the right to self-determination — including independence — of all nationalities, and promoted Black Republics in the United States and in South Africa, it proposed that an Andean Indian Republic be formed in South America.

Mariátegui accepted the fact that Indigenous peoples were nationalities and had the right to self-determination, but believed liberation and socialism — Indigenous socialism — would come from struggles of the Indigenous, peasants, and urban workers in unison. He was certain that a century of independent state formation in Latin America would not lend itself to separatist movements, nor would such movements lead to authentic liberation. In fact, even the most militant Andean leaders and organizations have not proposed separate Indigenous republics, but rather a multinational of state formations. As contemporary Ecuadorian Indigenous (Shuar) intellectual, Ampan Karakras, states: “The power of decision-making and the political will of nationalities will be exercised through the multinational state and its respective agencies and institutions.”2

Becker contextualizes the Indigenous-peasant-workers’ social movements during the 1920s to the 1950s within the history of anti-colonial Indigenous revolts from the beginning of Spanish occupation of the Andean region and the Ecuadorian Amazon. Here too, he includes the participation and leadership of women. As in the rest of the Americas, Indigenous resistance movements prevented colonialism from achieving total eradication of Indigenous cultures, and actually worked to continue the development of Indigenous identity. However, particularly in the densely Indigenous-populated areas of Mexico and the Andean states, after independence, the colonial/feudalistic latifundia land tenure system persisted, perpetuating the servile status and debt peonage of agricultural laborers, both Indigenous and Mestizo. Land reform and workers’ rights were central to Indigenous struggles, which, in Ecuador at least, brought about alliances between rural Indigenous and Mestizos and urban workers.

Becker shows that socialists not only supported labor and land reform in alliance with Indigenous communities but also Indigenous cultures, languages, and self-governance. They brought to Indigenous struggles tactics such as strikes, demonstrations, and marches, while Indigenous activists adapted socialist tactics to specific, local conditions. Ecuadorian socialists, Becker emphasizes, were not given to paternalism toward the Indians. This work culminated in the 1940s with the founding of the Ecuadorian Federation of Indians (FEI) as part of the communist-led Confederation of Ecuadorian Workers (CTE).

The thesis of communist involvement in social movements is not a popular one. The Cold War affected peoples’ movements in every corner of the world, no less the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. By the 1950s, Marxist-inspired movements were under heavy attack, ideologically, as well as physically. As mild a democratic reform government as that in Guatemala was overthrown in 1954 by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and following the Cuban Revolution, any social movement demanding land reform or workers’ rights was labeled communist. Missionary intervention and assistance in Indigenous movements, particularly following Vatican II, largely replaced the weakened socialist movements. One of the most interesting and valuable parts of the book is found in Chapter 7, titled, “Return of the Indian.” Here, Becker traces the end of the Indigenous militants of the earlier era, and the rise of new movements, assisted, and sometimes originated, by Christian religious groups, as the “secular leftists and religious activists competed for subaltern allegiance, representing two alternative trends in the evolution of Indigenous movements.”

Now that socialism is back in the forefront of the Indigenous movement, most visibly in Bolivia with Evo Morales’s political party MAS (Movement Toward Socialism), Becker’s book is timely and an important source for those on the left seeking to comprehend Indigenous struggles and aspirations, as well as for Indigenous communities.

Shuar intellectual Ampan Karakras captures the specificity of Indigenous views in contrast to peasants and workers, and especially, unitary nationalism:

The different “indigenous” peoples, from within their cultural beliefs and experience, consider as part of their sovereignty the three areas that modern states consider part of their own sovereignty: the subsoil with all its riches, the soil or the national territory, and the airspace. To the “indigenous” people, in the subsoil are the living or mythological beings that should be respected, and valued, and asked for permission to extract a part of the soil’s riches. In the territory live the human beings; we share the soil with other living creatures — the fauna and the flora — because we are part of nature and not the kings of nature. In the firmament, or the airspace, mythological beings form an indivisible part of the life of human beings and the universe. This “indigenous” concept of sovereignty — that we are an indivisible part of a whole — is entirely different from Western values and concepts of sovereignty. They may be complementary, but they are different in concept and form; for the Western world, everything is money, power, and private property.

We are Nationalities.

Our sovereignty is based on our spiritual relation with Mother Earth, whom we recognize as a point of meeting with the supreme creator and the source of life.3

Readers of Monthly Review are well aware that imperialist global capitalism has brought us to the brink of planetary disaster. The notion that Indigenous resistance movements — in particular those imbued with the legacy of the genius of Mariátegui — contain the germ of successful resistance is an idea whose time has come.

Notes [for the links that go with these notes, see here and scroll down]

1. Marc Becker, “Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory,” Latin American Series, No. 20: Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Monographs in International Studies 1993; “Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America,” Science and Society, no. 4 (October 2006): 450-479. Go back
2. Ampan Karakras, “Indigenous Sovereignty: An Ecuadorian Perspective.” Go back
3. Ibid. Go back

END OF POST.

UPDATED POST: I, Julian Real, do not support or advocate any form of genocide against men, or mass murder of men, including any percent of all men being systematically killed (details at the top of this post): No! means no. Something for Runaway1956 and other Liberal to Conservative Men who claim to love and respect the women they are with

29 July 2010 ECD IMPORTANT UPDATE:
I have seen excerpts from the following discussion on other websites, never shown in context. And, some of my comments below are misleading and not representative of my own personally and politically held views, and so I want to clarify where I stand on a few matters that are discussed in the comments section. I apologise for any confusion on this matter that I may have inadvertantly contributed to. 

Here is where I stand:

1. I am opposed to any and all forms of genocide, including any that only targets men.
2. I do not endorse or support an effort to destroy 90% of men, or 80%, or any percent. Taken out of context, and also due to my own sloppy writing, something I said in response to someone could be wrongly interpreted to imply that I do endorse this.
3. I support people knowing how to defend themselves and get out of violent interpersonal situations and relationships, preferably without using lethal force.
4. I am basically a pacifist, and do not advocate the use of lethal force as a means of achieving peace, justice, or liberation for oppressed people.
5. I don't believe it is my place to tell women how best to defend themselves against male violence against women.
6. I WILL NOT accept comments, and WILL NOT POST ANY, that call for or advocate for men or women or transgender or intersex or intergender people being killed en masse, or being mass murdered, or being systematically slaughtered.

I hope that clears up some of what might be seen as confusing in the comments section below.

[4 November 2009 ECD update: I redid the link to the PDF file/document titled "Everyday Male Chauvinism" and so hopefully now it works when you click on it. I've put it in a new post, so as to give Johnetta Cole and company their own space!!!]

PLEASE NOTE: I took down the gross video made by two misogynistic white men, with thanks to Jennifer Drew for giving me some background information on who made it. In its place, I put the following video, the trailer to a film that all men need to see, called NO! The Rape Documentary:



For more on this film, please go to notherapedocumentary.org/.

END OF POST.

What to do about Rape and White Het Male Supremacy: Discussion with Jennifer Drew

[image is from here]

Hi Jennifer Drew,

[I have mildly revised some of this since your first reading and wanted to alert you to that.]

A few responses to your latest comment. (The original, unedited and not annoyingly broken up with my responses, can be found here.)

Here in the UK we have legislation making it a criminal offence to promote racism and/or homophobia but all too often public outrage is expressed only when a celebrity white male publicly makes a racist comment about a coloured male.

One problem I have with such laws--which is not to say I don't wish we had such a law in the U.S.!--is that they tend to assume two things about the majority of racism and homophobia:

--An assumption is too often made that racism is a matter of [morally] "bad" interpersonal behavior ("bad" in the liberal sense, which behavior is bad but we're not really going to stop it at its roots, because, well, our dominant society depends on it continuing, especially institutionally.

--An assumption is too often made that racism and homophobia aren't intricately woven in with misogyny; that racism and homophobia only negatively impact men and don't impact women of color in particularly harmful ways. It's not exactly that, for example, a lesbian woman of color is treated oppressively on three scores, although that's true enough. But it's also the case that there are particular forms of misogyny that are leveled at lesbian women of color that other women don't experience. So, as I see it, white heterosexual women know sexism well. White women know sexual violence intimately. And there are other forms of misogyny reserved for various women of color--depending on so much, like where one lives, for example, and one's class status, sexual orientation, appearance, upbringing, and personal history.

In fact--in the real social world, when a woman is not white or not heterosexual, her quality of life, in terms of being seen as a person deserving of full human rights, doesn't ever increase.

In the U.S., as a classic feminist text says, "All the women are white, all the Blacks are men, but some of us are brave".

And all the queers are white as well, and middle class. (Wrong. Most, in fact, are not. This is "provable" simply by noting that most people in the U.S. are not white middle class folks.)

So the realities of the lives of queer women of color are so invisibilised as to not even register in the dominant cultural imagination, unless as some allegedly bizarre aberration, or small niche or "fetish" in pornography. Hence dominants can believe such human beings don't really exist at all as real people. Wanda Sykes is the only Black "out" lesbian woman I know of who is due to have her own television program and I hope her corporate employers let her fully speak her mind.

Thank you for sharing what you did about how U.S. and UK societies do and do not differ in terms of law and society.

Misogynistic comments made by so-called celebrity male comedians are dismissed as 'just humour' rather than deliberate women-hating.

We have had one incident to date, where Black women in the U.S. were named by a prominent WHM supremacist TV and radio "personality" in misogynistic-racist ways. (Not that he's a comedian by trade. It appears he's an asshole by trade.) While he was fired from that job, he was hired again by another media empire. Various media were confused about what to do: is this just a racist incident? Just a misogynist incident? So invisible are women of color as targets of racist misogyny and misogynist racism that most dominant media didn't even know how to appropriately cover the story. Meaning, in part, Don Imus was never called a WHM supremacist. And the women he targeted for his m-r vitriol was never fully understood as the crime it was. And THE story became whether or not he should be/have been fired. That is, the mass concern was for his well-being (and the preservation of WHM's rights to fully speak their minds, which is the only protected "free speech" we've ever had in this country.

I'm not trying to trivialise racism/homophobia rather what I see here in the UK is the continued male-centered and male-dominated focus on males and invisibility of females - unless of course they are portrayed as white men's dehumanised sexualised objects.

I agree with you to a point. Yes, in whiteboyland white women are dehumanised in grotesque ways too innumerable to mention here, overwhelmingly by white men. But men of color, and women of color, are marginalised and stereotyped, oppressed and turned into things, including sexual things, by white men and white women. And there's a dynamic when men of color put down women of any color that is different than when white men do it. Two things happen when men of color insult and degrade women of color:

--It is a non-event, in the sense that "nothing wrong is happening here", in the WHM supremacist media and imagination. This is partly because the WHMS media fund and fuel such racist misogyny and benefit from men of color's misogyny against women of color.

--If men of color also target white women, whites take this to mean that only men of color are misogynists. Or that men of color are misogynistic in ways that have never occurred to white men to treat white women, even while white men have spent the last 500 years teaching men of color how to commit despicable, harmful gynocidal atrocities to women of color worldwide, as well as to white women, by example. Even though white men oppress women of color more than men of color do in the U.S. To hold such a view means not ignoring the harm to WOC by WHMS institutions and industries.

Women of colour living in the UK are subjected to racism but all too commonly their experiences are invisibilised because the focus continues to be on coloured men's experiences of racism. Similarily women living in the UK and who identify as lesbian or are 'considered to be lesbian' and then subjected to homophobic comments and verbal attacks are also invisibilised because as always men are centre stage and women are marginalised.

Here in the U.S., non-heterosexual women of color are not considered period, by dominant media or dominant society. Butch white women are also rendered completely invisible.

Alan Johnson in his book The Gender Knot makes a similar statement, wherein he says medals are awarded to soldiers for the 'brave deeds they have committed in battle' but where are the medals and memorials to the innumerable women and children slaughted in men's wars?

That is a chilling thought. Imagine the land mass it would take to appropriately bury and honor every woman and girl harmed by men misogynistically, due to male privileges and entitlements, or through WHMS systems of harm? With woman-symbols as gravestones. I can barely imagine it. But it could be Photoshopped using the image above, and I think it ought to be made, with a political statement about how many women men kill annually.

What is to be done? I personally do not believe all men are rapists but certainly all men learn as they grow up that being white and male gives them automatic entitlements and privileges including the pseudo male sex right to unlimited sexual access to women and girls.

I agree that not all men are rapists, although the white woman Anonymous who is pro-separatist who comments here regularly gives me pause to think about how I can know that. Depending on how we define rape, how can I know there are men who do not rape women? I've only made the case to her that there are men who are so immobilised through injury as children or from birth that they wouldn't have the physical means to injure a woman, but still might be able to violate a woman visually, if sighted. (And what percent of men are totally immobilised and not sighted?)

And I do know gay men who have never had any sexual contact with a woman, nor any violent contact with a woman. (And what percentage of gay men is that?)

So we do not want to make the assumption that "all the men are heterosexual". MRAs and their kind will likely look on this post (stupidly) as an example of me saying "All men are rapists". Well, I didn't. What I believe is what many here have said: all men participate in systems of rapism and gynocide, directly and interpersonally, or institutionally and systemically.

I must also note that in my experience it alarms and upsets men, across sexualities and races, that any woman might "hate all men" or think "all men are rapists" than it does that many men do hate women and many men do rape women. And it certainly bothers most men more that women might feel disdain for men, when disdain for women is one of the bedrocks of many so many male supremacist societies. Where's men's collective outrage about that? (I'm listening... and all I hear are crickets chirping.)

And yes, what can be done, given white class-privileged men's entitlements, privileges, unjust power, unjust access to resources with which to defend themselves. What can be done to wipe male supremacy and white supremacy off the Earth, short of global nuclear holocaust? I welcome people posting answers to this question here at this blog. Jennifer, there needs to be a website that exists just for women to post their ideas and successes with how to stop misogyny and male supremacy from flourishing, and from existing at all. Something along the lines of holla back, but more comprehensive. Stories of successfully ending male violence against women and girls. Stories of how to approach doing so. Documentation of efforts of women in the past who have waged such campaigns. Is there such a website? Such an online network? And it would have to move past the pacifist position, no? Women's acts of self-defence need to be expanded and protected by law. Women shouldn't have to kill a man while he's raping her to be found not guilty of murder due to self-defence. She ought to be able to track his rapist ass down and shoot him dead. That's "self-defence". That's women looking out for one another, in my view. (And I'm fine with women organising groups of profeminist men to do just this, so women don't have to risk being traumatised or jailed for the act, or, if a parent, losing her children because she blew the brains out of her daughter's rapist.)

Challenging individual men on their behaviour is a step but more much more needs to be done and radical feminists have been saying for years that we need to change how our society teaches men as boys what being a man is all about. Going to the root of the problem directly challenges male entitlement and pseudo male sex right which is why I personally was not surprised on reading reports of approximately 20 males, some adults others boys who rushed to view the spectacle of males engaged in group raping a young woman. To me this demonstrates what happens when our so-called liberal society refuses to even begin to understand how and why so many men cannot even begin the long, long task of challenging their indoctrination of masculinity and supposedly innate male superiority over women and girls.

It's stunning to me how a program of socialising boys differently is met with consternation by men, yet when radical feminists argue that it is this male supremacist socialisation that teaches males to be rapists, those women are accused of being "biological essentialists" and man-haters. To any pro-patriarchal man reading this: if women really were man-haters to the degrees and depths some men claim, and if such women knew how to direct that hatred towards men, instead of against themselves and other women, you would have good reason to fear for your life.

I agree that raising boys radically differently, to not be male supremacists and girl-haters and woman-haters, needs to be a major component. But so too does the permanent removal of misogynist men from society. (And I don't mean more prisons.) And the dismantling of white men's industries, institutions, and systems of harm and exploitation. Misogynist ways doing economics, criminal justice, law, religion, academics, and medicine must also be challenged. And I saw more of that challenging going on twenty years ago than I do now. The pornography is more vicious, more degrading, more violent (if that's possible), and society as a whole is far more pornographic.

Regarding the horrific atrocities white men have committed and continue to commit against indigenous women and girls is appalling. But given white males are taught almost from birth their biological maleness supposedly automatically makes them human compared to women of colour and particularly indigenous women and girls because they are 'non-human' it is not surprising such atrocities continue to be committed. But whilst I am not surprised that doesn't mean I'm not angry at the atrocities committed by white men against white women, women of colour and indigenous women and girls.

Yes. It is no surprise and it is an outrage. And I fully support Indigenous people keeping white men off their land by any and all means necessary. I wish there was a chip in white men's heads, such that when they thought to go and rape a woman, his head would implode (keeping clean-up to a minimum).

I see a continuum of male violence wherein white male violence is even more excused and justified if the women are not white and yes racism and xenophobia plays a huge part in male hatred of women.

As I see it, the misogyny of xenophobia, of racism, needs to be understood more. That any genocide means gynocide, for example.

I'd like to see this latest atrocity as a 'wakeup call' but unfortunately I think it will be quickly forgotten and dismissed as 'just another individualised case wherein some boys just got carried away!' Or else the focus will once again be on the young woman, with minute analysis as to how and why she didn't take more precautions with regards to her safety. Because women are supposed to have built-in antenna which automatically alerts them to potential male violence being committed against them.

I agree with you, Jennifer. That is likely how this will go. And the school system, as yolandac has noted on this blog, will never be held responsible. As for women having such antennae, this would necessitate forming women's nations ASAP with well guarded borders. And then what?

END OF POST.

Kersti Yllö's Suggested Readings on Husbands' Violence Against Women

[image above is from here]
What follows is from here.

Wheaton College, Norton, MA, USA

[image of Kersti Yllö is from here]
Kersti Yllö
Research Interests and Activities

Professor Yllö's research focuses on wife abuse, including battering, marital rape, and abuse during pregnancy. She has published a number of articles and books on these issues.Her work has also focused on intervention into violence. She has worked on projects with both Boston Children's Hospital and the U.S. Marine Corps, evaluating the effectiveness of efforts to reduce domestic violence. Her current work focuses on the need for feminist scholarship to more adequately address violence against women of color. She also serves on the editorial boards of several journals including Gender and Society, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and Violence Abstracts. She is Vice-President of Common Purpose, Massachusetts' largest batterer intervention program.

Selected Publications:

"Gender, Diversity, and Domestic Violence: Expanding the Feminist Framework." In Gelles, R. And D. Loseke (eds.) Contoversies in Family Violence. Sage Publications, 2nd ed. (forthcoming, 2001).

"The Silence Surrounding Sexual Violence: the Challenge Marital Rape Poses for the Duluth Model", in Pence, E. and M. Shepard (eds) Coordinating Community Responses to Domestic Violence: Lessons from Duluth and Beyond. Sage Publications.pp. 223-238 (1999)

"Commentary - Marital Rape: a Social Problem for the 21st Century." Violence Against Women: an International and Interdisciplinary Journal V.5,pp1059-1063. (1999)

"An Interview with Kersti Yllö" in Family Violence Across the Lifespan by O. Barnett et al. Sage Publications, pp. 21-22, (1997)

"Collaboration between Researchers and Activists (with E. Gondolf and J. Campbell) in Out of Darkness: Recent Research in Family Violence. Sage (1997)

"Reflection of a Feminist Family Violence Researcher," in Sollie, D. and L. Leigh (Eds) in Feminism and the Study of Family and Close Relationships , Sage Publications (1994).

"Through A Feminist Lens: Gender, Power and Violence" in Gelles, R. and D. Loseke (Eds), Controversies in Family Violence , Sage Publications, pp. 47-62, (1993).

"Abuse of Pregnant Women and Adverse Birth Outcome," (with Eli Newberger, et al .) Journal of American Medical Association , 267:2370-2372 (May 6, 1992).

"Re-Visions: How the New Scholarship on Women Transforms the College Curriculum," American Behavioral Scientist 32:658-667 (July/August 1989).

"Family Secrets: Teaching about Violence Against Women," Radical Teacher 36:19-22 (December, 1989).

Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse. (with M. Bograd) Sage (1988).

Stopping Family Violence: An Agenda of Research Priorities for the Coming Decade. (contributing author with D. Finkelhor and G. Hotaling) Cal: Sage Publication, (1988)

Love Stories: Women, Men and Romance (co-producer with R. Broadman, J. Grady and J. Smith). A CineResearch Production (87 minute documentary film on the social history of intimacy) (1988)

License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives. (with D. Finkelhor) Free Press (1985).

"Marital Rape: A Review of Recent Research" (with D. Finklehor) in Ann Burgess (ed.) Rape and Sexual Assault: A Research Handbook. NY: Garland Press 1984, pp. 145-158.

"The Status of Women, Marital Equality, and Violence Against Wives: A Contextual Analysis." Journal of Family Issues 5:307-320 (Sept., 1984)

"Sexual Equality and Violence Against Wives in American States." Journal of Comparative Family Studies 14:67-86. ( 1983).

"Using a Quantitative Approach in Feminist Research." in Finkelhor, Gelles et al . (eds) The Dark Side of Families: Current Issues in Family Violence Research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1983, pp. 277-288.

"Interpersonal Violence among Married and Cohabiting Couples," Family Relations , 30:339-347, (July, 1981) with M.A. Straus. (Reprinted in 1983 Family Studies Review Yearbook , Sage Pub).

"Non-marital Cohabitation: Beyond the College Campus." Alternative Lifestyles 1:37-54 (1978).

END OF POST.

“Your husband has a right to expect regular sex” and related CRAP like the "Duty Shag"

[image is from here, a site dedicated to bringing to light the problem of men's violence against women in heterosexual marriage and effective means to intervene on such violence. More about this in the next post]

What follows is from a UK white feminist's blog called Too Much To Say For Myself, that I'm now going to link to in the A.R.P. blogroll.

Rape is institutionally reinforced and protected as a practice inside and outside of marriage. The hypothesis of these sorts of arguments are that women, if married to men, are morally obligated to give them head and allow their man to fuck them whenever he feels "it's time". One can only wonder about the higher increase in incidents of marital rape due to drugs like "the little blue pill" and other erection-inducing pharmaceuticals.

Here's a thought: women never owe men sex, ever. Men do not have "the right" to obtain--by any means--sex with or from women. Such entitlements are fucked up and wrong. And any man who thinks women do "owe him sex" or that "I have a right to fuck my wife" is operating out of a rapist mentality founded on old patriarchal laws, some of which are still in effect, which try and render women as the carnal chattel property of men, by State Law and Religious Law. To all men who think you are so entitled: go fuck yourselves.

Read on....

“Your husband has a right to expect regular sex”
October 30, 2009

According to “sex therapist” Tracey Cox, the minute a woman gets that ring on her finger her rights to bodily autonomy go flying out the window.

In her response to a woman who asks:

“Do you believe you should have sex with your husband just because they want to? I’m going through a period where I’ve just gone off sex.

It’s only been six months and I’m sure I’ll come out of it soon but I resent my husband hassling me. I don’t think it’s right to have sex unless I really feel like it.”

Cox says:

“I totally disagree with you – and so do a fair majority of reputable sex therapists. Two people will never have the same desire or timing, even if their sex drives are reasonably matched. But when you said ‘I do’ you said ‘I do’ to sex as well. Sex is part of the bargain if you expect your partner to remain married to you and faithful to you.

Six months is a long time without sex without a good reason not to do it. Your husband has a right to expect regular sex and ‘duty shags’, I’m afraid, are all part of the ‘working at the relationship’ that experts rattle on about.”

Well here’s a short history lesson for Ms Cox, courtesy of Joanna Bourke:

“In Britain, America and Australia until the last decade of the twentieth century, a married woman was legally assumed to have consented to each and every act of vaginal intercourse with her husband. As in ‘Gone with the Wind‘, a husband who forced his wife to have sex was not considered to have ‘raped’ her – even if considerable violence was used. By definition a husband could not rape his wife.

This ‘marital rape exemption’ was commonly attributed to a ruling by Sir Matthew Hale in 1736. According to Hale, a wife gave lifelong consent to sexual intercourse with her husband. Under marriage vows husband and wife became ‘one person under the law’. It was a contract that ’she cannot retract’. Thereafter, as A Treatise on the Law of Domestic Relations (1870) put it, ‘wilfully declining matrimonial intimacy and companionship’ was nothing short of a ‘breach of duty, tending to subvert the true ends of marriage’.

From Joanna Bourke’s: Rape. A History from 1860 to the Present. Chapter 11: The Home

Perhaps Tracey Cox is unaware that the marital rape exemption was done away with in this country in 1992, and that to assert “I do” when reciting the marriage vows no longer equates in law to signing a contract that says “I hereby grant my husband lifelong access to and total control over my vagina”

To quote Susan Brownmiller:

“In the cool judgement of right-thinking women, compulsory sexual intercourse is not a husband’s right in marriage, for such a ‘right’ gives the lie to any concept of equality and human dignity. Consent is better arrived at by husband and wife afresh each time, for if women are to be what we believe we are – equal partners – then intercourse must be construed as an act of mutual desire and not as a wifely ‘duty,’ enforced by the permissible threat of bodily harm or of economic sanctions”

Susan Brownmiller: Against our Will. Men, Women and Rape. Chapter 12: Women Fight Back

Unwanted sex (Cox’s duty shag) = coerced sex = rape, and it has damaging consequences for its victims. Here’s Professor Robin West:

“The will of the married woman who learns to accept routinized rape is no longer ruled by or even connected to her desires. Eventually, her desires are no longer a product of what she enjoys or what she has learned to enjoy. What the victim of routinized rape within marriage does, sexually, is a product not of what the victim wills but of what her attacker demands. As an immediate consequence, her will becomes a function not of her desires but of his desires. Eventually her desires become a function not of her pleasures, but of his pleasures; she wants literally to please him rather than herself because to please herself is too dangerous. The victim of marital rape gains survival, but she sacrifices self-sovereignty. In other words, she sacrifices the ability to control her own will and to determine her own actions, pleasures, and desires, free from external influence. In short, she sacrifices selfhood.”

Robin West: Equality Theory, Marital Rape, and the Promise of the Fourteenth Amendment. (Quoted in Sex Equality: Rape Law by Catharine A. MacKinnon)

Now unlike Tracey Cox I make no pretence to being a “sex therapist”, but for what it’s worth my response to the original letter writer would be:

“If your husband is hassling you for sex when you’ve made it quite clear that you don’t want it, he obviously has no respect whatsoever for your feelings. He does not have a right to expect sex from you, and no right to demand it of you against your own wishes and desires. And if he’s unable to wait until you’re ready for it, or to respect your rights as an individual to have sex on your own terms, then I’d question his suitability to be your life partner. Seriously, you deserve better than this”

Hat-tip to Jennie Rigg for spotting this nonsense.

END OF POST.

What do you call twenty men and boys gathered around a young woman being raped?

[this image is a companion piece to the one recently posted at a post on gang rape here. This time it is a man who is allegedly in some sort of pleasure-high after being raped. For a pro-queer writer's questions about both images and commenters' replies and analysis, see here]

In a recent post, Jennifer Drew added her analysis of the atrocity of gang rape. I welcome everyone to read that by clicking here and scrolling down to her comments.

One point I'd like to clarify, as a white U.S.er, is that racism and homophobia are not considered hate crimes in the U.S. Not even close. Nor are any institutionalised abuses against oppressed people understood, legally, as "crimes"--hateful or otherwise.

Here in the U.S. racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism are systematised, accepted, bolstered, supported, celebrated ways of being and behaving, by those who are in the dominant positions vis a vis the oppressed.

Given that racism and homophobia/lesbophobia impacts more women that men, that is reason enough for neither to be categorised as hate crimes. This is to say, the oppression of any women for any multiple reasons is not a crime, including and especially if she is a working class lesbian and of color or a poor white heterosexual woman. And here in the U.S., if not in all whitemale-dominated societies that are multi-racial/ethnic, racism is one of the founding pillars, one of the GREAT VALUES of our society. Our society would not function or even exist without it. It is as far from "a hate crime" as can be. White supremacy is, in this sense, the opposite of criminal, along with male supremacy, heterosexism, capitalism, and utter disregard for the Earth and non-human animals.

What are (sometimes) categorised and (rarely) prosecuted as "hate crimes" are specifically defined interpersonal or local actions involving one or more people from a dominant class using speech or other expression, such as spray painting a swastika on the front of a synagogue, or the beating up of an oppressed person WHILE the victim is being called racist or homophobic names, for example. There is a faint and weak consciousness in this law that acknowledges that such interpersonal crimes do, in fact, denigrate and terrorise an oppressed people, and not just the one person or building being targeted.

As you say, society-at-large would have to even ADMIT that patriarchy exists, collectively, socially, culturally, interpersonally, economically, religiously, and in law, that male supremacy is an active and lethal ideology, that men and boys rape women and girls because they are demonstrating their manhood-making and boyhood-bolstering desires to be heteromen. Males rape to practice being men in the patriarchal sense, and as you note, the women and girls who raped are barely human at all to them. They are living beings in the eyes of these males, only enough only to make the assaults a sport. And they enjoy it. They ENJOY it.

To compare societies "crimes", this is vastly different, for example, from interpersonal or local mugging, robbing, or burglarising someone (or their home or office) to get money for... whatever. There's no group entertainment in such an act. Well, except for the cheering that goes on at Wall Street's stock markets, which most certainly is (consciously or not) a daily celebration of theft, vandalism, sexism, racism, genocide, and ecocide. (Unless the markets are down, in which case only those who bet on the market going down will celebrate.)

The "alleged criminals" in only interpersonal and local non-business, non-organised crime cases doesn't return to the local bar, his family, or corporate office and high five every male in it for his accomplishment. He's not met with cheers for the mugging or theft. It is completely different with male interpersonal crimes against female humanity, as you well note.

Somehow the media refuses to get how, as you say, it is MEN doing this, each and every time, and that it is ENTERTAINMENT for these men to violate, degrade, and beat girls and women.

What do you call twenty men gathered around a young woman being raped?

Profeminist answer: an atrocity.
Patriarchal answer: fun.

It's several centuries past time for men to stop one another from committing such acts of atrocity, and start behaving like the "men" they proudly proclaim themselves to be. If "manhood" is supposed to equal bravery, courage, and heroism, why don't men beat up and kill one another for committing gang rape, or any rape of a girl or woman?

Now THAT would be heroism. I long for the day when the father-rapists, the husband-rapists, the date-rapists, the acquaintance-rapists, the street-rapists, and the gang-rapists are tracked down and killed BY MEN, or woman, or any person.

AND to have the society, its anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal government and its laws, call it heroism, and give out medals of honor to the man or woman or any person who succeeds in killing the most rapists, male batterers, child molesters of girls, male pimps, and male pornographers. (Note: medals are and have always been given to U.S. men who commit these same acts--along with others--against women in other countries where people of color live.)

This would demonstrate that society really doesn't condone men's violence against women and girls.

END OF POST.

Which came first: gendered division of power or some other division?

[this is an image of the quilted artwork of Susan Brubaker Knapp, and the image was found here]

A commenter here offered the following (see "Shaukat said...), on a topic which I realised doesn't really have a "home" here, as it's not a subject I'm that interested in discussing, as it tends to become highly intellectual in a way that academically brain-trained people enjoy while allowing us academically trained white men to not confront atrocities directly, with direct action, such as rape and genocide. There's a place for conversing about such matters, of course. I'm just not sure I want my blog to be that place. Ironically, the link Shaukat shares below is from a blog I used to comment at years ago, Feral Scholar.

But I left it for good when I realised it catered to white men's privileges and entitlements to put down women of color. I felt many of what the white Leftist men were saying, that was sexist and racist, never should have been approved as comments to begin with. But that was his blog, and this is mine!

Here I wish this space to be very welcoming and safe for radical women of color. And, beyond that concern, nothing is more boring to me than theorising a past that cannot be known, especially through lenses which refuse to see gender as anything but biological and not own how being white informs the viewing of societies that are and were not. Such is not exactly the case with Joel Kovel, however, some of whose writing (theorising) appears below. It's his whiteness, more than his manliness that he doesn't seem to be able to overcome or come to terms with, or understand.

Here he argues that there was a time where humanity mutated not genetically, but socially-politically, in the context of male raiders taking females hostage thus introducing force and violence against women into societies where such raiders existed.

Here's the commenter's remarks:

Shaukat said...

Not sure if this is the right place to post this (feel free to move it to a more appropriate entry if you like) but the linked article by Joel Kovel is, I believe, an excellent piece that attempts to uncover the origins of patriarchy and male domination, the origin of which he locates in the sexual division of labor. Would be interested to know what you think.

http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2005/11/13/gender-power-continued-book-excerpt-the-enemy-of-nature-by-joel-kovel/
_________________________

Here's the content of that URL, minus typos and many of the comments there, only some of which I'll copy and paste below:

Section entitled “The Gendered Bifurcation of Nature” (pp 118-121)

[Already with the unnecessarily "studious" lingo. Academics love to show off.]

The first map of the human species was drawn according to ‘him’ and ‘her’, in that produced configuration of sexuality known as gender. Gender is the original dividing line within humanity; all constructions of humankind, whether within humanity or between humanity and nature, are inscribed by it. There is nothing more ‘material’ (to the common origin of words, material and mother). Sex is of the earth, and the primary dividing lines between genders were between earth-transforming labor. From this matrix (there is the root again) arose the beginnings of domination, and all future dominations, including that effected by capital, are shadowed by that of male over female.

This is not an exercise in politically correct male-bashing, but the recognition that the history of domination would be radically incomplete unless the role played in it by the construction of the masculine gender were acknowledged. The actual origins must remain shrouded in an impenetrably distant past. Nevertheless, everything that is known (though all too often ideologically denied) about the human species compels the reconstruction of the following, which we state succinctly and according to the ideas already developed about human nature, so as to bring us to the essential points:

* In the original, hunter-gatherer, phase of society, the first differentiation of labor occurs according to sex, generally speaking, with males hunting and females gathering — along, needless to say, with their work of reproduction. Note that this labor produces the gender itself, and that its origins were a genuine differentiation, with mutual recognition, fluid social relations and self-determination. Such can still be seen in the cultural remnants we have of these peoples, and by the reconstruction of the quality of self-experience derived from it: the ‘dream-time’ of Australian first peoples, the wandering of souls, the manifestations of Trickster, and so forth.

* The phase encompasses the great span of human prehistory, and entails a great range of human-natural transformations, including the domestication of animals and the origins of agriculture. Though without domination, the original division of labor set forth males as the takers of life and females as life givers. Moreover, the death-dealing tools of the hunt, and the fact of its often being carried out by roving bands, prepared a way for something worse.

* Here a sporadically occurring event may be certain even though no concrete first instance can be brought forward. Its agent was masculine, not as individual hunter, but as a subset of the collective; a group, or band of hunters. Its stimulus would vary, being composed however of internal as well as external forces, the latter being, say, a threat to survival, such as disease or drought, which compelled a search for new resources; while the former was a function of the psycho-dynamics of the male group. In any case, the event in question was the transformation of a hunt into a raid, with the object being not now the obtaining of food and skins from animals, but the expropriation of productive labor from other humans, taking not the life of another creature, but the life-giving and building power of one’s own kind.

* This necessarily involved the seizure of women and children from a neighboring collective. We would suppose a threefold violence; killing or driving off the males from the attacked collective, denying the self-determination of the seized women and children, and the forcible sexual violation of the captives.

* This act was a profound mutation in human being. It created a whole new conjuncture, which in time became a structure. First, the possibilities of exploiting another’s labor are introduced, always in the direction of male over female. Second, the potentials for enduring social divisions are grounded in this, again male over female; these are to extend forms of the hunting band, to the warrior band, and to the ruling class, with any number of intermediate and modern variations, such as the Vatican Curia, the NFL Superbowl champions, corporate Boards of Directors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Politburo, and secret societies like Yale’s Skull and Bones. There is a sense in which the whole world has been run by male groups since the beginnings of history. Third, the genders are further produced by this, with sharply opposed identities constituted by master and slave. And fourth, violence — physical force along with the culture glorifying this — had to become institutionalized in order to hold on to what had been stolen.

* The structures imposed by the original seizure of female labor had dramatic expansive possibilities. Social violence entered the lists of the dangers to which societies are exposed. The violence invited retaliation and/or defense, and it came to define ever larger social aggregates with expansive dynamics, as each particular group underwent a compulsion to achieve power relative to others. Internally, the drive toward power caused struggles for leadership and social control. The result, after innumerable twists and turns we are unable to detail here, was the emergence of the Big Man, the Chieftain, the King, the Emperor, the Pope, the Fuhrer, the Generalissimo, and the CEO.

We would emphasize again that these principles would variously be applied across a vast range of situations. There is no need, either, to imagine a single such event radiating outward to encompass the rest of humanity. But what has to be underscored is the absolute dynamism of this event, and the fact that it amounted to a real mutation of human society as potent as anything in the realm of genetics. Out of the nexus of original male violence arose codified property relations, as a way of holding onto what had been taken: hence the notion of legitimacy follows that of violent seizure. Similarly, the institution of patriarchy emerged, as a system of apportioning women and assuring ownership and control over children — a never ending dilemma for a man who sows his seed and moves on, as the Big Man must. Property, in this sense is not primarily that which attaches to the self, like clothing and jewelry (although in stratified and wealthy societies, the control over personal consumption is quite significant), but rather the power of producing — and re-producing — life and the means for life. The control over labor generates civilization, and this originates in the forcible control over women.

It follows that domination and property are gendered from the beginning. This means that a basic alienation is introduced at the foundations of society — alienation being the reflex, at the level of human being, of ecosystemic splitting. The dominant male identity is formed in this cauldron. From the beginning, its reference point is the other males in the hunting/warrior group, with whom it associates and identifies; coordinatively, it comes to shun and deny recognition to the subjected female. A purified male-Ego comes to define the dominant form taken by the self, which enters into the exfoliating system of splits constituting the emergent civilization. Subjectively, this alienation becomes inscribed as a progressive separation from the body, and from what the body signifies, namely, nature.

A polarization between the human and natural worlds ensues, with masculinity occupying the human (=intellectual, far-seeing, spiritual, powerful and active) pole, and femininity the pole of nature (=instinctual, limited and body-based, inconstant, weak and passive). The gendered bifurcation of nature has been set going, to configure the relations between genders, and between humanity and nature, all the way to the ecological crisis.
______________________

I'll put in a few comments from the original blogsite, to show how such conversations tend to go, if they go at all. Please note: Stan is the blog's white male moderator. Peggy is a regular white commenter there and her background is in anthropology and feminism. If she's reading this here--hi Peggy!

And then there are the others... white dudes with little to no feminist consciousness:

#
peggy:

This is the most retrograde piece of writing I’ve seen in a while. [...] He/she naturalizes the violent domination of women by men. There is no substantiation for his/her claims about human prehistory.
16 November 2005, 12:48 am
#
eoinmonkey:

I'm not sure that is what the piece is saying. Pointing out something that used to happen in the past, even the pre-historical past, is not ‘naturalising’ it, merely reporting it. Part of the whole point he is making is that there is nothing ‘natural’ (or unnatural) about human behavior, despite its having grown up unconsciously. The very fact that our reason can identify trends within human development, and critique whether they are positive or negative, as well as posit alternatives, means that the subjugation of women by men (a historical fact) is no more ‘natural’ or defensible than thinking brown cords are less fashionable than blue jeans.

His claims about human prehistory do seem to be based on deductive reasoning, rather than hard (archaeological?) evidence, but does that render them completely without merit? If there is another explanation for how gender roles came to be solidified around the biological fact of physical gender, then perhaps it should be explained, or posted.
17 November 2005, 6:10 am

[Ah, eionmonkey shows his bias right away: noting "the biological fact of physical gender" as if physical attributes necessarily assign meaning and value. A good example: in Nazi Germany having blue eyes meant something, as did having brown eyes. Blond and blue-eyed was regarded as intrinsically "better" according to the racist beliefs of the Nazis. In this country, while being blond and blue-eyed still has its perks: you're more likely to get a modeling job at Abercrombie & Fitch, for example, those physical attributes alone do not constitute a separate "race" from other white people (such as Ashkenazi Jews) in the way that they did seventy years ago in Germany. Although they do still function to produce valued meaning, as anyone who has read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye can attest.] [...]

#
Stan: [...]
Joel Kovel is a colleague of Maria Mies, and her work argues vehemently against the naturalizaton of women. When JK is saying “Sex is of the earth,” that is not HIS position; he is engaging in a bit of literary ventriloquism.

Alas… the perils of excerpting.
18 November 2005, 6:58 pm

#
milosevic to eoinmonkey:

"His claims about human prehistory do seem to be based on deductive reasoning, rather than hard (archaeological?) evidence, but does that render them completely without merit? If there is another explanation for how gender roles came to be solidified around the biological fact of physical gender, then perhaps it should be explained, or posted."

How about this: once class differentiation became a permanent feature of (some) human societies, the rulers quickly realized that an effective way to enhance their own wealth and power would be to increase the number of serfs and slaves under their domination by attacking and subjugating neighboring societies. This program would obviously have generated resistance from the targeted nations, both those which were also class-divided and those which were not.

Overcoming this resistance would have required large numbers of disposable soldiers — arrow-, spear-, and sword-fodder. In order to produce these troops in the required quantities, it would be necessary for the social managers to assert control over the means of (re)production — to convert women from citizens into baby-making machines, denied the right to control their own bodies and lives. This innovation would itself have required an appropriate ideology to normalize and justify it. And once this whole process was underway in one society, there would have been strong pressure to emulate it in all its neighbors, again in order to make possible the otherwise insane waste of human effort and emotion inherent in having babies, supporting and socializing them until maturity, and then sending them off to die to serve the interests of a tiny clique of nobles, warlords, and priests.

I think that there is rather more historical evidence to support this theory than the one advanced by the writer in question. For a discussion of this, I would suggest a book called “The Chalice and the Blade”, by Riane Eisler.
23 November 2005, 9:12 pm

[milosevic, for me, takes far too many liberties with his assumptions, particularly in imbuing men with some power to control women, which he neither explains the history of, or sees a problem with stating as a given. For example, "to convert women from citizens into baby-making machines" implies women are not the converters. Why? He just assumes men have this sexist role, this dominant power.]

#
peggy:
[...]
When the human species first emerged, we were all foragers. Big game hunting came along much later, after we had developed the technology and kinds of social organization needed to capture and kill big fast animals. We were not naturally endowed with such capacities, as were wolves and large cats. We were omnivores, like bears, and our diet and means of subsistence were certainly more like those of bears than those of large hunting animals. Our protein supply would have come from insects and small animals like mice. We were the prey of the large carnivores for a long time before we were predators. We probably first developed means of defense against the predatory animals before, and on the way to, becoming predators ourselves. Thus there was a long period of time when males and females would have been on an equal footing wrt food-procuring techniques and abilities. Females were handicapped by childbearing and nursing, but they could forage as well as males, as they still do. There is no reason to suppose that during this long period of time a gendered division of labor, based on "hunting" versus "gathering", was in operation.

AFTER the technology for big-game hunting was developed, THEN there MAY have come into being a gendered division of labor, based on the ability to engage in displays of virtuosity along the lines of running fast for long distances and throwing projectile weapons far and hard enough to bring down large and fast animals. Still, it seems to have been not so much a matter of subsistence labor as a matter of sport, displays of skill, as it is today. In those particular kinds of display, men seem to have always had the edge. But day-to-day food supplies would still have been obtained by foraging.

The domestication of animals and plants on a regular basis resulted in a profound transformation of human social organizations. This period is generally known as the Neolithic, it began about twelve thousand years ago, and is distinguished from the phase known as Paleolithic, when people lived by foraging, and domestication of plants and animals was uncommon, because it was unnecessary. Foraging provided enough for all. When this ceased to be the case in certain areas, then people took to growing their own food, so that they could have a larger supply of it. For a long period of time after the domestication of plants and animals, people lived peacefully in small settlements. Last time I read about the Neolithic, the small settlements showed no sign of needing defense from raiders. As soon as raiders appeared on the scene, settled people built defenses against them. Those settled people had weapons as well as the raiders. If Neolithic settlements were raided, which I do not know if they were or not, it would have been by desperate bands of outcast people. The loot would have been food, or stuff that could be traded for food or other useful valuables, like what thieves and robbers of today look for. But raiders were at a distinct disadvantage until the advent of horseback riding, about 4000 BC. By the time horseback riding and raiding became, for some people, a way of life, full blown civilizations with irrigation systems and walled cities and iron tools and the rest were already in existence. With a horse, you could get in and out fast, the horse was the first military vehicle, and it became the prototype of military vehicles thereafter.

So maybe we can blame it all on the horse.

The abduction of women and children by bands of male raiders, who wanted the labor of those women and children for the sake of their own subsistence, did not, to the best of my knowledge, happen until way later -- i.e. in modern times in the Amazon. But that is a whole 'nother story. If anyone has specific evidence of raiding and abduction of women and children as a phase in human prehistory, please bring it forward.

And if the raiders simply killed or drove off the men and abducted the women, are we to suppose that the men and women in the settlements were unable to defend themselves and their families against such onslaughts?

Kovel asserts: "This act ['killing or driving off the males from the attacked collective, denying the self-determination of the seized women and children, and the forcible sexual violation of the captives'] was a profound mutation in human being. It created a whole new conjuncture, which in time became a structure."

Or in other words, Kovel is here asserting that bands of men raiding settlements in the above stated manner constituted an evolutionary, transformation of human society as a whole. In implying that this forcible violence against women was an evolutionary human development (virtually inevitable? Like capitalism?) Kovel really loses me, because this is all fantasy, with no material evidence to back it up, and much material evidence, as well as much logic, to contradict it.

I hope I need not go on. But reading that far in Kovel's article, I got riled, and proceeded to write my original refutation, which alas for posterity has been forever lost in the bowels of the internet.[...]
24 November 2005, 9:21pm

[I'm with Peggy: "In implying that this forcible violence against women was an evolutionary human development (virtually inevitable? Like capitalism?) Kovel really loses me, because this is all fantasy, with no material evidence to back it up, and much material evidence, as well as much logic, to contradict it."]

#
Stan:
Peggy is an anthropologist, and this is valuable food for thought. One point that is in her post and that Kovel also means to suggest - a point they may have in common - is the point that gendered power may have emerged BEFORE class power, and very well may have served as the model for future forms of social inequality… … before the advent of agriculture, the development of class, and the introduction of warfare.

Much of the speculation about which came first - class or male supremacy - has been characterized by a paucity of archeological information (thanks to Peggy for filling some things in); but more importantly, the hoary left agenda to subordinate the question of gendered power within a class-first (primary contradiction) framework has been selective with facts to make them fit the agenda (and often just wrong). This raises my own index of suspicion that the male-led left is not as immune as it often pretends to plain dominant-class (seeing gender as a class system) interest in preserving power. That gender is do deeply psychologically embedded only serves to make it more difficult to exhume the gender-ideology hiding inside constructions of secondary contradiction, “woman-questions”, and the embrace of liberalism on questions of gender while eschewing liberalism (in favor of revolutionary analysis and action) with regard to class.

Kovel’s aim, however imperfectly he might have pursued it with this excerpt, is to show the connections between gendered power, colonization, and ecocide - based on white male capitalist objectification as the rationale for domination… with gendered power serving as the epistemic base model. He and Peggy are both exquisitely sensitive (as they should be) to the operation of naturalization in this regard.

Since beginning my reading of feminist-womanist literature and theory in earnest three years ago, I have been drawn further and further toward the conclusion myself that gender preceded class, though I see them as absolutely inextricable and therefore without hierarchy in relation to “one another.” A quick look at the language used to describe relations between colonizer and colonized, between “Man” (of course) and “Nature”, and men and women, reveals a very consistent linguistic reflection of this.

I am working on a very comprehensive piece for posting soon that will attempt to observe this whole question from many angles - this time starting with semiotics, linguistics, and working out from there.

Many male leftists have been dismissive of these linguistic questions, behaving as if prevailing attitudes of the past, providing the excuse for leftists of today to get off the hook. They will tell you about primary contradictions until they are blue in the face, while a woman somewhere is washing their dirty drawers or cleaning their hotel room.

I don’t mean to crack over-hard on male leftists, but they have the virtue, fro the most part, of having accepted self-criticism as part of their practice without becomng defensive. Those are props. I push at us because I think we are the next layer that has to be won over to the revolutionary ideas and practice of feminism-womanism.
25 November 2005, 9:22 am

#
milosevic to Stan:
Stan:

"I push at us because I think we are the next layer that has to be won over to the revolutionary ideas and practice of feminism-womanism."

I’d be a lot more sympathetic to this idea if it didn’t seem like most of the people who identify themselves as “radical” “feminists” have an unhealthy fascination with state power. Dworkin and MacKinnon, for example. The punch line always seems to be more laws, more cops, more gun control, more censorship, more taxation — in other words, the revolutionary agency which is going to liberate women from men turns out to be the existing capitalist state, and almost anything which further entrenches its control over the lives of ordinary people is thought to be A Good Thing. I don’t consider that to be a particularly revolutionary agenda.

[I'd jump in here to blast this guy off the page, but Stan responds appropriately.]

Somebody will say here “not all feminists agree with those policies”. Perhaps not, but there is a remarkable lack of public criticism of hese kinds of ideas from the womanists, as far as I can see. The only people who bother to oppose them are liberal feminists. If I have to choose between people who support the institutions of ruling class power, with civil liberties, and people who support the institutions of ruling class power, without civil liberties, I’ll go with the former, every time.

All of which is to say that I don’t enjoy being a slave for the corporations, and I don’t feel particularly sympathetic towards people who seem to want to be cheerleaders for the corporations’ enforcement and extortion agency, the capitalist state. I find it more than slightly odd that a body of theory and practice which started off thirty-five years ago, as “women’s liberation”, emphasizing the intimate connection between women’s oppression and class oppression, has mutated into “radical feminism”, which amnesties the state and the people who own it, so that it can blame the whole problem on individual men, who it considers to be an undifferentiated reactionary mass. It’s not particularly hard to figure out whose interests are served by that kind of theory. And it’s not unreasonable to assume that the gradual transformation of a promising social liberation movement into another ideological prop for the capitalist state, was something other than an accident. It’s almost like somebody planned it that way.
25 November 2005, 2:35 pm

#
Stan:
This is a gross misrepresentation, though the same one we’ve heard for years, of rad-fems, and displays not one iota of study of womanism. The most trenchant and on the money critique that has been written, to my view, of liberal law, using marxist categories, was from Catharine MacKinnon.

This is the same left male hostility to feminism I’ve seen a hundred times.

What actual feminist theorists have you read? This might give a starting point to have this conversation. There are dozens of things calling themselves feminism out there, including the crap from Camille Paglia and her reactionary ilk.

I’m serious. What feminists are you referring to, specifically and individually, and what did they say? This kind of artillery salvo does absolutely zero toward reaching any clarity or precision.

Your characterization with regard to “civil liberties’ is a grotesque straw (wo)man.
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peggy:

Stan - One strong argument for the primacy of gendered power distinctions over class distinctions comes in Nancy Chodorow’s gentle book, The Reproduction of Mothering, in which she shows on a psychological level why male human beings would feel compelled to assert their superiority over females, sometimes aggressively. Although psychology is generally considered an individual matter, Chodorow argues that almost all male human beings go through the experiences that would lead them to derogate women. This does not mean that almost all male human beings *do* derogate women, as there are many means to mitigate the factors that push them in this direction. Chodorow’s book in no way suggests that women deserve derogation, or that they have somehow earned it. The main thing is that the urge for boys to push away from, and prove themselves superior to girls and women is *learned* and happens in early childhood. Chodorow’s work is worth reading, even if you end up disagreeing with what she says.

[I don't buy Chodorow's theory at all, except and unless we take it as a given that male supremacy is already in place, so that boys grow up learning which sex is presumed superior. MacKinnon has good challenges to such theorists, who seem to forget that we first need to understand that male supremacy is in place, and also how such an enforced ideology impacts everything, including the devaluation of motherhood, the valuation of manhood and "it's a boy!", and the rampant misogyny that boys grow up absorbing, consciously or not.]

Let me know if all this doesn't answer your question, Shaukat. What I truly despise about such conversations is the ways in which they just assume Indigenous people don't exist, don't carry stories of their past, and ought not be consulted as the "experts" on such subjects. Indigenous Australians, for example, have been around for about 50,000 years. Why does it not occur to white folks to inquire about the history of humanity from them? One answer is because many Indigenous people, if not impacted dramatically by white men, tell stories about their ancestors, as did the Jews. Not "literal" stories, either. (Christians take note.) But is the knowledge offered by Indigenous Australians not important, and if so, who decides what's important to know? A society that has survived for 50,000 years, until white men came and fucked everything up, might have something to say about oh, for example, sustainable living!