[Some of this was revised on 8 March 2009]
When I was a profeminist youngin', I was led to believe a few things in some profeminist circles that I have since found to be not only untrue but self-serving to the interests of men and dangerous to the well-being of women. I will add that I was ignorant about a lot back in the day, and while I remain ignorant about most things to this day, I can only update my progress to note that I no longer accept that some white theories about women's oppression are more truthful or complete, to the extent anything by women is seen as such. I no longer accept that because a book has footnotes, for example, it is smarter than one without. (I used to believe that.) I no longer believe that being "anti-sexist" means being proWomanist or profeminist. (I foolishly used to believe that too.)
Another belief I sort of held, was that there is something sort of monolithic called "patriarchy", and that "patriarchy" (alone) is what harms women. This statement was and is almost always made to me by college-educated, white, class-privileged profeminist men who believe they have done sufficient reading and empathic living among diverse populations of women to make this determination. They typically hold up the work of Mary Daly, Susan Brownmiller, Sonia Johnson, or other self-defined radical [raceless] feminists, or white theorists John Stoltenberg and Michael Kimmel, believing that these women and those men, together, express the truth about what harms women and why. I have seen whole Women's Studies curricula identifying white Western women's writings as the work that must be read to comprehend, let alone challenge, this problem of misogyny. I have seen whole Men's Studies programs centrally concern themselves with "the problems of manhood for men" not the problem of manhood for women.
Such a statement about "patriarchy" is often not sufficiently qualified, in my experience, with the reality that many systems of oppression harm women in misogynistic ways, male supremacy being perhaps the most obvious and overwhelming to people who don't also experience the others. I am not making a case for decentralising a concern about and challenge to male supremacist misogyny, as a critical profeminist agenda.
Radical Black feminists, other radical feminists of color, as well as some radical racially aware white feminists have pointed out to me the serious problems with the view that "patriarchy (alone) is the problem".
I've come to believe that white supremacy is just as misogynistic as male supremacy, for example. So too is capitalism. So to is Western Civilisation. So too is anti-Indigenist policies and practices which constitute genocide. This ought to be implicit, but every genocide I've ever heard of is also gynocidal. (This is being written by someone with the great privilege of never experiencing one first-hand.) All of these systems harm women in specific ways systematically, chronically, and lethally for being women not men. In this radical white profeminist's view, the misogynist harm of white supremacy and capitalism out not be viewed without centering the experiences of women most harmed in and by those systems.
Behind the assumption of "patriarchy" being what most harms and oppresses women, is an effort to centralise the experiences of white class-privileged women, which, globally, is a minority population. Behind the assumption that patriarchy is what harms men most(relative to women of the same class and ethnic group), is the willful ignorance bolstered and encouraged by male privilege, which doesn't even allow men to own how we benefit from these systems which also dehumanise us.
For a profeminism to be "radical", in this view, anything that oppresses any woman is important to pay attention to, and ought to fall under the umbrella of "profeminist men's concerns and calls to action". But for me that action must centralise the experiences of women, not men. And specifically the experiences of women of color internationally, to the extent that one has direct information from and contact with women globally.
For more learning in this area, I recommend, if men haven't already, that we pay close attention to the messages, guidance, and demands addressed in the following:
http://www.incite-national.org/media/docs/1847_ColorsofViolence.pdf
http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/250
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/meridians/v004/4.2smith.pdf
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v017/17.1smith.html
and http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hypatia/v022/22.2hoagland.html
When white profeminist men show or tell what we've read that educated us about feminism (often in these men's own writings), I see the passing along of stunningly racist herstories of "Radical [unnamed race almost always meaning "white"] feminism". My anger with men who are not profeminist is usually much greater than at those who do profeminist activist work, which is not to say there isn't plenty of reasons to be distressed and despairing at the behavior of those of us who doidentify as profeminist men. I see many men who identify as radicals or progressives do at least one of a few things:
1. Completely invisibilise or significantly marginalise or tokenise the experiences of women
2. Make arguments, speaking of course for all of humanity, that "patriarchy" is not the problem, as if we men, collectively, would have a fucking clue about what the problems are for women
3. Only read men's analysis of women's struggles, or only read white women's analysis of the struggles of all women
4. Gender oppression came after other forms of oppression and therefore isn't the core issue. Descendants of various strains of marxists cling to this argument in order to make sure what happens to women, that men do, is never centralised as a concern
To this last point from men, I say to them: "Were you there? Given that women have not been the primary writers of history, that recording history through writing, in and of itself, is a tool of both Western white male supremacy, what makes you think any analysis that leads to this conclusion wouldn't be heavily biased in favor of white male supremacy?"
I have argued at great length over years about these issues, these roadblocks to radical activism, and have found that men are usually satisfied to be where they are in their own respective places of ignorance and privilege. We men, on the whole, are not particularly concerned about, nor do we organise against, the various methods of oppression which negatively impact the majority of women in the world. Or, to the extent we express concern, our activism must fit within white male-centered analytical frameworks to be perceived as "useful".
An assumption that keeps surfacing in these conversations, which I'll illustrate in a moment, is that because an act of harm or system of oppression does one thing well that doesn't target women (in men's view) as women, it is not misogynistic.
What follows are some classic argumentation styles utilised by U.S. liberal white males in the Academy, who've primarily and overwhelmingly read the work of privileged white men, and who don't sufficiently understand what it means, politically, to be white or a man, let alone a woman of color.
From LiveJournal I have copied and pasted some of what appears here. The substance of that discussion, about some of these issues, follows. The topic is "feminism and brett easton ellis" and the host of the conversation is a white man named kunzelman.
on feminism and bret easton ellis [Feb. 22nd, 2009|06:49 pm]
From: kunzelman
Tags | activism, bee, bret easton ellis, feminism, protest, radical
[All text not in brackets in what follows is written by kunzelman; all text within brackets was added after the fact by me, for this blogpost]
[kunzelman writes:] I just finished reading this essay on Bret Easton Ellis and free speech, from a feminist perspective, and I can't seem to agree with anything that the authors state. [Why am I not surprised?] I find it funny that the preface talks about how it was not published to begin with, and that it was hard to find a publisher in radical magazines, but at the same time I understand exactly why. The actions that Tara Baxter takes are the perfect form of disempowering radical action. [This is a classically arrogant example of "boys know best" when it comes to women organising against male supremacy and misogyny.]
Her actions themselves, though, are incredibly clever. By reading BEE aloud and being arrested, she does make a clever point, but the problem with that is that no one really cares about what she is reading. [This would be a prime example of a man being condescending and patronising regarding feminist efforts to combat male supremacy.] By standing around and proclaiming that violence should be committed against someone, all that gets accomplished is people covering their ears. What did she accomplish? Creating an arrest record, making sure that she's known as a radical, making herself a target. [And through what tools, kunzelman, do you arrive at these conclusions? Have you spoken with every person impacted by this action? Are you aware that women reading about the actions of other feminists often functions to inspire and empower women to create similar and other ways of confronting the problem?]
At the same time, I think that she ignores the huge potential for subversive action in the essay itself. It is incredibly clever to use the exact same methods that Ellis uses, making sure that we don't really know what's going on, creating a fiction within the reality of her "true story." That, however, is where the cleverness ends. She could have used the master's tools to destroy the house, as it were, but Baxter is so concerned with being "radical" and "hurting misogyny" that she misses everything that she could actually do something to change. [kunzelman, I read your use of the term "clever" here to be patronising and condescending. And borrowing from a title of Audre Lorde's essay doesn't indicate to me that you have any understanding of what the points of Lorde's essay were.]
There is nothing more painful [nothing more painful? Not genocide? Not battery? You have been a very privileged and lucky person to rank this as the thing beyond which nothing else is more painful] than the section where she calls her "teacher," Nikki Craft, who then sings happy birthday to her and tells her what a great job she's doing. [huh? Women can't look to one another as teachers? Nor celebrate together? Nor support each other?] It's just disgusting. [What exactly is disgusting there? I experience your arrogance in interpreting this woman's action's 'objectively' obnoxiously, if predictably, disgusting.] Hell, for all the change they achieve, they might as well be fifteen-year-olds who steal from Hot Topic and calling it "hurting The Man." [Your patriarchal condescension and arrogance apparently has no self-regulating mechanism, nor a capacity to become aware of what it actually functions to do.]
I suppose that I'm just frustrated because of how I perceive Baxter's method to be disempowering, [I experience your analysis of Baxter's method to be belittling and thoroughly sexist] and I really encourage other people to read the essay and tell me how they feel about it. [Consider it done, here, now] I would like to hear other opinions, simply because the essay itself is so damn polarising. [I find your writing far more polarising, to be honest, and really inappropriate.]
Comments:
From: rabidgod
2009-02-23 12:33 am (UTC)
When Tara Baxter became aware of American Psycho she was, as any feminist would be, disgusted and furious.
From: kunzelman
2009-02-23 12:41 am (UTC)
exactly. how can you miss that he's being critical of the exact same thing that she is? [And how can you and rabidgod makes claims about what "any feminist" would feel? That you both mock being disgusted by the misogyny in B.E.E.'s work is a form of misogyny, in and of itself.]
From: line_of_flight
2009-02-23 04:37 pm (UTC)
This is what happens when people don't adequately theorize radical action!
From: kunzelman
2009-02-23 05:37 pm (UTC)
Huzzah good sir!
[And are you two claiming to know how to adequately theorize radical action? And, do you understand that radical actions' function is not "to be theorised" but rather "to effect fundamental changes"?]
From: oddrid
2009-02-23 01:39 am (UTC)
I have never read that book, but that's not cause I'm a feminist. I've seen the movie though and it didn't really tick off my feminist radar too much. Those passages that she quotes in the beginning are disgusting though.
Her protests though are pretty lol.
From: kunzelman
2009-02-23 01:58 am (UTC)
To be fair, the BEE allows his character to do terrible, calculating things to women. At the same time, he allows his character to do terrible, calculating things to heterosexual men as well as animals.
Does she attack those aspects? No. I don't uniquely think that the book is misogynistic, but rather a criticism of late capitalism and consumer culture. We're desensitized to everything, as Ellis says, because we "have nothing to lose."
The book is brutally long in the middle, fyi.
[For me, this is where you show a shocking level of ignorance, under the banner of being a literary and social critic, stating that someone's work cannot be both misogynistic and something else as well.]
From: rabidgod
2009-02-23 03:49 am (UTC)
that's exactly it--p.bates does brutal shit, but it's not just to women
[Ok, rabidgod--that's quite a screenname, btw--so by your "logic" that means that if a man's behavior does anything else other than that which you determine to be misogynistic, that renders every misogynistic act he does null and void as such? I think that's ridiculous thinking.]
From: kunzelman
2009-02-23 04:07 am (UTC)
I think it's funny that one of the first things she says in the essay is that he commits acts of violence on homosexuals. The problem with that is that he doesn't. Louis Carruthers is never killed, only thought about.
[So we can now discredit her work altogether, is that your ploy?]
From: julian_r
2009-03-05 08:30 pm (UTC)
misogyny or not misogyny?
Regardless of whether a man's violence extends beyond violence against women, that doesn't mean the violence done to women isn't misogynistic. If a specifically white man goes around hanging several people from nooses tied to trees, if he chooses a Black man as one of his victims, that has racist/white supremacist meaning and effect, regardless of what his intention is. Violence against women is one form of misogyny. Acts' meanings and their effects aren't determined solely by the intent of the harmer. If that were so, "rape" wouldn't ever be rape, according to most rapists. Brett's work is deeply misogynistic, among other things. American Psycho may also be offering the reader a critique of corporate capitalism's dehumanisation of all of us. But that doesn't make the text misogyny-free. Acts have different meanings and effects, after all. And rarely do works of fiction have one "right" perspective only. If women who know what misogyny is and feels like, experience his book as misogynist, that makes it misogynistic. Otherwise, we set up a situation in which only elites--like you?--decide what something means--which is a terribly modernist notion. Who controls meaning anyway?
From: kunzelman
2009-03-05 09:44 pm (UTC)
Re: misogyny or not misogyny?
I think that you have a terrible lack of distinction between a character that is misogynistic, and a work that is misogynistic. AP functions as a criticism of capitalism, identity post-Reagan, and modernity in general. I would contend, at the same time, that it is not an inherently misogynistic work. The character of Patrick Bateman deeply hates women, that is true. At the same time, he hates minorities (of race and sexual preference), the socially outcast, and most importantly, himself. He also commits terrible acts of violence against all of these groups, or he at least fantasizes about it. Sure, I fully believe that there are misogynistic elements to the novel, but you cannot reduce the commentary on that novel down to pouring blood all over it. This is the same argument that we need to burn Heart of Darkness because of its racist elements. They are there, but is that the meaning?
At the same time, you ask who controls meaning. No one, and that's what's brilliant, but the author is only dead by so much. I think that there is more than enough evidence in AP, as well as Ellis' other books, that would suggest that Bateman is struggling with the problems of modernity more than his is being violent; the violence is just a byproduct of adjustment. Representations of violence against women are important, no doubt, but so are representations of violence against anyone or anything.
In most readings of literature, or anything for that matter, I will look at all representations in a vacuum. At the same time, Guattari is always in the back of my mind. We have to be careful of fascism, of the left and right, and coming down hard on either side of representation is not the way to evaluate it and the implications implicit within it.
If you feel offended by American Psycho, remove the effect of the representation from your body proper. Burn your own copy. Don't make yourself a target. I found value in it because it gave me a touchstone for a lot of things that I had ideas on, but never explored fully, like what commodification really is, or what misogyny and class-based hate is. No one controls meaning, you're right, but if you're going to push one meaning and protest another, you need to go about it a better way.
From: julian_r
2009-03-05 10:13 pm (UTC)
Re: misogyny or not misogyny?
Regarding this, from what you wrote above, kunzelman: "I think that you have a terrible lack of distinction between a character that is misogynistic, and a work that is misogynistic. AP functions as a criticism of capitalism, identity post-Reagan, and modernity in general. I would contend, at the same time, that it is not an inherently misogynistic work. The character of Patrick Bateman deeply hates women, that is true. At the same time, he hates minorities (of race and sexual preference), the socially outcast, and most importantly, himself."
For you such distinctions are apparently very plausible. For the oppressed--for me as a gay man and a Jew, for example, if a book is written by a white gentile man who creates a white gentile male character who kills Jews because they are Jews, gay men because they are gay, in the text, the author is in any way making those acts forms of entertainment or eroticism for the reader, they constitute acts of anti-Semitism, and homophobia. And guess what? It's not for white gentile men to determine whether or not that's the case. I found The Passion of The Christ deeply anti-Semitic. Many white Christians I know found it "deeply moving" and not anti-Jewish. Who is right? Well, the point here is that their opinions alone don't count, or trump other views and experiences of that film.
As you may have noticed, it's been "all the rage" to have female characters be beaten and raped only to rise up at the end and seek revenge against their abusers, sometimes killing them. An audience sits for an hour and forty-five minutes being entertained by seeing a woman being degraded and assaulted, often while her breasts and buttocks receive a stupid and fetishising amount of the heterosexual male supremacist director's attention. The audience "gets into" the scenes where a white woman and a woman of color battle it out. The audience watches women be terrifying, horrified, by one man or many men, throughout whole genres of literature and cinema. Are you making that case that if, when the closing credits roll, she's alive and they are dead, then the film automatically becomes politically and socially responsible? If you believe this, I strongly disagree with you, about this and other matters.
Re:
"In most readings of literature, or anything for that matter, I will look at all representations in a vacuum."
I would argue that for you to even think you can do so is, well, implausible, but even if you could, that doing so is a form of dehumanisation, and extraordinary privilege. Read, for example, A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen, for more. Or Endgame, volumes 1 and volume 2. Or The Culture of Make Believe.
Re:
"If you feel offended by American Psycho, remove the effect of the representation from your body proper. Burn your own copy. Don't make yourself a target."
I believe women have the right to protest in any way they see fit to protest whatever they experience and name as misogynistic. Resistance takes many forms. And needs to. And men telling women what misogyny is, is like whites telling people of color what racism is: you'll find lots of space to do just that, but it doesn't mean you know jack.
I don't own a copy of the book, so I've nothing to burn.
I would argue that, by definition, an oppressed social group, and the individuals that comprise the group, doesn't make it/oneself a target. One is targeted by people who exploit their power over people they structurally oppress. If I put a bull's eye image on my white t-shirt, and walk outside, I am not marking myself as a target, I am wearing a t-shirt.
Only the most privileged people on Earth, who collectively, as adults, aren't especially targeted for real violence by an oppressor group, the kind that hurts, humiliates, degrades, subordinates, maims, and kills. Those of us who are primarily concerned with social and economic acts that only offend, or who wish to debate about oppressive acts we might might find philosophically problematic, can afford to believe we make ourselves into targets. That's because we're in denial about what's really going on in the world of real people who are not us.
I am not particularly offended by Ellis or any of his characters. The issue at hand is harm, not offense. The latter exists in the mind, primarily, and is regulated by shifting perspectives one is socially free to shift. The former is experienced more in the body, in a collective body of people, and, in my view, ought not be determined or named by people who don't share that experience.
Re:
"if you're going to push one meaning and protest another, you need to go about it a better way."
I fear the day white men's voices, primarily, decide how best to fight either white supremacy or misogyny, which are not at all mutually exclusive. What am I saying?! We white men already do decide these things, through law, policy, structures of civilisation, language, etc. See Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, by Marimba Ani, for much more on this.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
On Men Speaking Out on Feminist Topics: repost of "I Was A Teenage Sexist Chicken"
I just read the post located here http://thenationalgadfly.com/2009/02/21/i-was-a-teenage-sexist-chicken/
Everything that follows this paragraph was not written by me. I'll introduce this piece with a couple of qualifying remarks, in response to what follows. As far as I can tell, the post doesn't sufficiently own the extent to which men dominate conversations, including when the topic is Feminism, or "Women's Issues". Time and again I've seen young men hold conversations hostage, barely letting women get words in edgewise. So I ask all men who speak in public spaces to make sure you're hearing as many female voices as male ones. If not, chances are the conversation is male-dominated. Also, I believe men should speak, in mixed gender groups, only when welcomed to do so by women, and should generally stay out of conversations among women. Women's space, including conversational spaces in public, is not as easy to come by as men might think. And, men must interrupt any and all instances of racist-misogyny, sexism, white male supremacy, male supremacy, white supremacy that crosses our paths (or that we put in our paths). Every time that it is possible and productive to do so (as determined by women, not men). No exceptions, unless to do so would directly result in someone being killed, such as if you know that calling out a male batterer could result in him taking out his embarrassment on his female partner's body/mind, brutally. -- Julian
I Was A Teenage Sexist Chicken
Feb 21st, 2009
by gadfly.
This post is not about Sexism or Feminism, it is about my experience in talking about them.
I have had several conversations lately about how people engage in debate over sex / gender / body (SGB) identity issues. I am launching a blog that supports dialogue on those issues and in the communities that they create. As I frame the terms of the conversations and the goals of the site, I have begun to articulate my view on the structure of dialogue itself.
Simply put, I have been thinking about how we treat each other inside a conversation about SGB issues and identity. I noticed some patterns of how we seem argue with each other inside these conversations. This post is not about something specific to SGB issues, advocates themselves or the conversations. This is about how we speak to each other about those issues. SGB issue conversations are not somehow different from other conversations. I simply care about them more. This applies to Racism, Classism, TG discrimination or any other conversation regarding society and individuals.
I will mostly use 1st person in this post, not because I think I’m ‘right‘ or ‘better‘ or anything. It is just that I think that by making statements using the 3rd person (we/they/you), it is not as honest or intimate and is often a distraction. As a reader, you may be left wondering who the subject is, whether to defend your own views and how I can claim to know other peoples thoughts & motives. My writing tends to be more effective when I am describing my personal experience.
Guys hang back (and it’s not just guys)
I was chatting with friend about how Feminism & Sexism are addressed on some blogs. She noted her experience that “men hang back” to see how the women are going to respond and later come in on the ’safe’ side with a hearty “yeah, what she said!” It’s not universal across blogs, but it brings up an interesting point: chickening out.
Why would men hide out? Maybe they have been lambasted and they are ‘gun-shy’ Certainly, I have been told a) I am sexist b) go do homework c) come back with approved answers. Sometimes in harsh terms, peppered with “@$$hole” or “troll”. I may have fully deserved that response or not. But, the idea that I would ‘hide out’ because some woman treated me harshly is in itself a responsibility dodge.
Hiding is a choice – my choice. Period. The only person that makes me hide or stop hiding, is me.
There is responsibility and there are consequences. In blogs and live conversations. I have a very clear example of this in my personal life. I had a girlfriend and she became pregnant. We sat on the bed and she asked me what I wanted to do. I told her that I would do whatever she wanted to do. Right there - I chickened out.
What I did there was to lay it all on her. When we broke up, she said to me that the relationship died on that day in that conversation. She knew I was afraid and didn’t want a child. She wanted my honesty and my intimacy. I gave her neither. It hurt our relationship. I withheld my voice, my experience and how I felt.
It’s like that on blogs and in face-to-face conversations. The problem with hanging back or hiding out, is that real communication struggles to exist without all parties involved in the conversation. Everybody in the conversation loses out when someone hides out.
It’s not just men and it’s not just Sexism or Feminism. How many people walk away from or hide out instead of speaking their mind and making a difference? How many of us hold our voice still when we are afraid? How many women identify themselves as Feminists but do not find agreement from Feminist books, blogs or speakers? I have met some. Are they the only ones? If there are more, where do they go and how do they contribute to the cause? Where are their voices heard? I don’t know.
Where else do people hide out? Work? Family? We all probably do it in our lives to some degree. Nobody alive today, invented it. We can all quit at any time. We can even relapse and quit again. Speaking up is not without benefit. In my life there is no greater feeling than feeling of being in a conversation with someone where both people feel heard by each other.
There are no correct answers
The academic hierarchy model of argument is wonderful in science - but psychology, sexism and discrimination are not hard science. It is a limiting mistake to language them in such terms. I mean that by treating subjective opinion as if it were objective fact is a disservice to the focal cause. Not just in context but in results. It sets up a false sense of truth and proof.
Also, an ‘academic’ or ’scientific’ hierarchy looks to me like a lot of other paternalistic structures, perhaps even reinforcing some of the very assumptions, definitions, prejudices and messages that are being challenged in a conversation about SGB identity.
One example of my experience from Feminism conversations goes something like this:
A certain “1st Wave” theory was proven wrong in 1971 by so-and-so. This “2nd Wave” theory was proven wrong in 1981 by so-and-so. “3rd Wave” has theory become X, as anyone who has read so-and-so would know….and so forth.
I’ve done that in life. Replaying someone else’s argument from the past is a shortcut. I was trying to ‘win’ the argument. I wanted to be right. I was not looking into my own life to see how this conversation really impacted me. Who cares why? I was not thinking for myself – but only of myself. That’s the critical factor. By doing so, I deprived myself of the full knowledge of my impact on others and the chance to grow up. I lost out. The people I was talking to lost out. The greater conversation around sexism lost out because I was both saying nothing new and denying my own personal contribution, both past and present.
It’s a classic case of ‘precedence’ - “if so-and-so said it, it must be true”. History becomes canon which in turn becomes rote. I don’t want to hear what a professor or author said sometime in the past. I want to hear how this issue has impacted the person I’m talking to – in their own life. Have they ever said or thought anything like that? Was it done to them? Have I done that to them? How did they feel? What does the person in front of me think about all of this? What is this person’s gift of intellect, reason and vision have to offer our conversation?
So, now I have started asking people how this issue has impacted them in their life. Have they ever thought or said anything like that? Has it ever been said to them? How did they feel? Have I ever said something like that to them?
On the topic of academic debate: I would like to see 1 million people stumbling through conversations together over the merits of Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin or anyone else for that matter. I would much rather the multitude of amateurs than a much smaller number of people that have read all the right materials, learned all the correct thoughts and speak in the appropriate homages to the good topics. I like academic and structured debates. I simply think that they cannot contain the larger population’s experience or contribution to any subject.
If I had to choose between a flawless argument that is given by one really smart person or 10 million amateur, untrained opinions, I would take the latter for a greater impact on improving society’s performance on the issue. The larger group represents more individual contribution to the discourse, which I think is the only valuable currency in these debates. Dogma fails where cognition succeeds. If we recorded 15 million conversations about Betty Friedan and each person spoke on the subject matter in terms of their own experience, honestly; then every one of those conversations would be relevant and contain something new.
Don’t get me wrong, structured debate has a place and a real value. I honestly love participating in them. I like discussing the history of Feminist Theory. It’s informative. I even like talking to people much smarter than myself. However, the broad and sweeping change in society will occur in the bazaar and not in the cathedral.
It’s OK to fall down
My life got better in these conversations when I realized that I was going to make mistakes. Lots of them. (Actually, I made all the mistakes then figured out what had happened.) Once I accepted that, it all got better. I don’t want to make mistakes, but I do make them. We all do. There is a difference between knowing that I may offend someone and striving to do so. I am going to get flamed or yelled at or disagreed with. I used to believe that I had to defend my position in arguments, to save face, etc. That’s not how it turned out to be. These conversations are a dance in some ways. I know that the desired result is equality and respect for all. That serves as the tempo to the dance. The words and opinions of those I speak with and myself – are the notes and the melody.
I just remind myself that there is a difference between myself and Rush Limbaugh but that does not excuse me from responsibility. I am admitting my fallibility - not giving myself license to offend.
So, what is my point? Why say all this? Because I wanted to encourage others to step forward into the mistakes and successes of these conversations. I used my own mistakes as references and examples for someone else to look at their own experience and bring it to the conversation on SGB issues, or race, or class. The water is choppy sometimes and you will spill. So long as you care and respect, you will be fine. People will insult you and me and each other. It goes with the territory and I can’t begin to judge their motives. If I’m lucky, if you’re lucky maybe those people will contribute to our lives in some meaningful way.
So, come in in from the shadows. If you have gone away, please come back. It’s OK. We need you. I need you.
-gadfly
P.S. Thank you VaginaDrum, Clarisse and Michelle for allowing me to crystallize my thoughts lately on this issue and the upcoming site.
Everything that follows this paragraph was not written by me. I'll introduce this piece with a couple of qualifying remarks, in response to what follows. As far as I can tell, the post doesn't sufficiently own the extent to which men dominate conversations, including when the topic is Feminism, or "Women's Issues". Time and again I've seen young men hold conversations hostage, barely letting women get words in edgewise. So I ask all men who speak in public spaces to make sure you're hearing as many female voices as male ones. If not, chances are the conversation is male-dominated. Also, I believe men should speak, in mixed gender groups, only when welcomed to do so by women, and should generally stay out of conversations among women. Women's space, including conversational spaces in public, is not as easy to come by as men might think. And, men must interrupt any and all instances of racist-misogyny, sexism, white male supremacy, male supremacy, white supremacy that crosses our paths (or that we put in our paths). Every time that it is possible and productive to do so (as determined by women, not men). No exceptions, unless to do so would directly result in someone being killed, such as if you know that calling out a male batterer could result in him taking out his embarrassment on his female partner's body/mind, brutally. -- Julian
I Was A Teenage Sexist Chicken
Feb 21st, 2009
by gadfly.
This post is not about Sexism or Feminism, it is about my experience in talking about them.
I have had several conversations lately about how people engage in debate over sex / gender / body (SGB) identity issues. I am launching a blog that supports dialogue on those issues and in the communities that they create. As I frame the terms of the conversations and the goals of the site, I have begun to articulate my view on the structure of dialogue itself.
Simply put, I have been thinking about how we treat each other inside a conversation about SGB issues and identity. I noticed some patterns of how we seem argue with each other inside these conversations. This post is not about something specific to SGB issues, advocates themselves or the conversations. This is about how we speak to each other about those issues. SGB issue conversations are not somehow different from other conversations. I simply care about them more. This applies to Racism, Classism, TG discrimination or any other conversation regarding society and individuals.
I will mostly use 1st person in this post, not because I think I’m ‘right‘ or ‘better‘ or anything. It is just that I think that by making statements using the 3rd person (we/they/you), it is not as honest or intimate and is often a distraction. As a reader, you may be left wondering who the subject is, whether to defend your own views and how I can claim to know other peoples thoughts & motives. My writing tends to be more effective when I am describing my personal experience.
Guys hang back (and it’s not just guys)
I was chatting with friend about how Feminism & Sexism are addressed on some blogs. She noted her experience that “men hang back” to see how the women are going to respond and later come in on the ’safe’ side with a hearty “yeah, what she said!” It’s not universal across blogs, but it brings up an interesting point: chickening out.
Why would men hide out? Maybe they have been lambasted and they are ‘gun-shy’ Certainly, I have been told a) I am sexist b) go do homework c) come back with approved answers. Sometimes in harsh terms, peppered with “@$$hole” or “troll”. I may have fully deserved that response or not. But, the idea that I would ‘hide out’ because some woman treated me harshly is in itself a responsibility dodge.
Hiding is a choice – my choice. Period. The only person that makes me hide or stop hiding, is me.
There is responsibility and there are consequences. In blogs and live conversations. I have a very clear example of this in my personal life. I had a girlfriend and she became pregnant. We sat on the bed and she asked me what I wanted to do. I told her that I would do whatever she wanted to do. Right there - I chickened out.
What I did there was to lay it all on her. When we broke up, she said to me that the relationship died on that day in that conversation. She knew I was afraid and didn’t want a child. She wanted my honesty and my intimacy. I gave her neither. It hurt our relationship. I withheld my voice, my experience and how I felt.
It’s like that on blogs and in face-to-face conversations. The problem with hanging back or hiding out, is that real communication struggles to exist without all parties involved in the conversation. Everybody in the conversation loses out when someone hides out.
It’s not just men and it’s not just Sexism or Feminism. How many people walk away from or hide out instead of speaking their mind and making a difference? How many of us hold our voice still when we are afraid? How many women identify themselves as Feminists but do not find agreement from Feminist books, blogs or speakers? I have met some. Are they the only ones? If there are more, where do they go and how do they contribute to the cause? Where are their voices heard? I don’t know.
Where else do people hide out? Work? Family? We all probably do it in our lives to some degree. Nobody alive today, invented it. We can all quit at any time. We can even relapse and quit again. Speaking up is not without benefit. In my life there is no greater feeling than feeling of being in a conversation with someone where both people feel heard by each other.
There are no correct answers
The academic hierarchy model of argument is wonderful in science - but psychology, sexism and discrimination are not hard science. It is a limiting mistake to language them in such terms. I mean that by treating subjective opinion as if it were objective fact is a disservice to the focal cause. Not just in context but in results. It sets up a false sense of truth and proof.
Also, an ‘academic’ or ’scientific’ hierarchy looks to me like a lot of other paternalistic structures, perhaps even reinforcing some of the very assumptions, definitions, prejudices and messages that are being challenged in a conversation about SGB identity.
One example of my experience from Feminism conversations goes something like this:
A certain “1st Wave” theory was proven wrong in 1971 by so-and-so. This “2nd Wave” theory was proven wrong in 1981 by so-and-so. “3rd Wave” has theory become X, as anyone who has read so-and-so would know….and so forth.
I’ve done that in life. Replaying someone else’s argument from the past is a shortcut. I was trying to ‘win’ the argument. I wanted to be right. I was not looking into my own life to see how this conversation really impacted me. Who cares why? I was not thinking for myself – but only of myself. That’s the critical factor. By doing so, I deprived myself of the full knowledge of my impact on others and the chance to grow up. I lost out. The people I was talking to lost out. The greater conversation around sexism lost out because I was both saying nothing new and denying my own personal contribution, both past and present.
It’s a classic case of ‘precedence’ - “if so-and-so said it, it must be true”. History becomes canon which in turn becomes rote. I don’t want to hear what a professor or author said sometime in the past. I want to hear how this issue has impacted the person I’m talking to – in their own life. Have they ever said or thought anything like that? Was it done to them? Have I done that to them? How did they feel? What does the person in front of me think about all of this? What is this person’s gift of intellect, reason and vision have to offer our conversation?
So, now I have started asking people how this issue has impacted them in their life. Have they ever thought or said anything like that? Has it ever been said to them? How did they feel? Have I ever said something like that to them?
On the topic of academic debate: I would like to see 1 million people stumbling through conversations together over the merits of Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin or anyone else for that matter. I would much rather the multitude of amateurs than a much smaller number of people that have read all the right materials, learned all the correct thoughts and speak in the appropriate homages to the good topics. I like academic and structured debates. I simply think that they cannot contain the larger population’s experience or contribution to any subject.
If I had to choose between a flawless argument that is given by one really smart person or 10 million amateur, untrained opinions, I would take the latter for a greater impact on improving society’s performance on the issue. The larger group represents more individual contribution to the discourse, which I think is the only valuable currency in these debates. Dogma fails where cognition succeeds. If we recorded 15 million conversations about Betty Friedan and each person spoke on the subject matter in terms of their own experience, honestly; then every one of those conversations would be relevant and contain something new.
Don’t get me wrong, structured debate has a place and a real value. I honestly love participating in them. I like discussing the history of Feminist Theory. It’s informative. I even like talking to people much smarter than myself. However, the broad and sweeping change in society will occur in the bazaar and not in the cathedral.
It’s OK to fall down
My life got better in these conversations when I realized that I was going to make mistakes. Lots of them. (Actually, I made all the mistakes then figured out what had happened.) Once I accepted that, it all got better. I don’t want to make mistakes, but I do make them. We all do. There is a difference between knowing that I may offend someone and striving to do so. I am going to get flamed or yelled at or disagreed with. I used to believe that I had to defend my position in arguments, to save face, etc. That’s not how it turned out to be. These conversations are a dance in some ways. I know that the desired result is equality and respect for all. That serves as the tempo to the dance. The words and opinions of those I speak with and myself – are the notes and the melody.
I just remind myself that there is a difference between myself and Rush Limbaugh but that does not excuse me from responsibility. I am admitting my fallibility - not giving myself license to offend.
So, what is my point? Why say all this? Because I wanted to encourage others to step forward into the mistakes and successes of these conversations. I used my own mistakes as references and examples for someone else to look at their own experience and bring it to the conversation on SGB issues, or race, or class. The water is choppy sometimes and you will spill. So long as you care and respect, you will be fine. People will insult you and me and each other. It goes with the territory and I can’t begin to judge their motives. If I’m lucky, if you’re lucky maybe those people will contribute to our lives in some meaningful way.
So, come in in from the shadows. If you have gone away, please come back. It’s OK. We need you. I need you.
-gadfly
P.S. Thank you VaginaDrum, Clarisse and Michelle for allowing me to crystallize my thoughts lately on this issue and the upcoming site.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
On International Women's Day: Listen To Women, and learn about women's condition globally
Please seek out I.W.D. information here. It is one page from the website for Women for Women.
Also, from this website: http://www.internationalwomensday.com/facts.asp you can find the following facts. Please click on this site's link above for more facts about the condition of women internationally.
Women do two-thirds of the world's work but receive only 10% of the world's income
Women own around only 1% of the world's land [And what percentage of that land is owned by Indigenous women, I wonder? --Julian]
Women are 2/3 of the 1 billion+ illiterate adults who have no access to basic education
Only 21% of all news subjects (people interviewed or whom the news is about) are female
Women [comprise] less than 1% department heads, editors, media owners but third of working journalists
Females in developing countries on average carry 20 litres of water per day over 6 km
Pregnant women in Africa are 180 times more likely to die than in Western Europe
530,000 women die in pregnancy or childbirth each year
Of 1.2 billion people living in poverty worldwide, 70% are women
80% of the world's 27 million refugees are women
END OF POST.
What's so Revolutionary about being Lesbophobic and anti-Two Spirit?
The image above is from this website, and is a banner made by and to promote the work of COAL: Coalition of Activist Lesbians. (I tried to link to COAL's website, but was unable to even get there.)
Linked to below is a post I think is important to read, for it sums up a variety of problems with the the parts of the Left that are white heterosexual male-dominated. One thing the "gay" rights and/or liberation movement has got to deal with, in my view, is not only the challenged homophobia and heterosexism on the Left, but the misogyny, lesbophobia, and sexism of referring to itself as "Gay" as if "Gay" means "Gay and Lesbian and Queer". It doesn't, in my radical profeminist mind anyway. Making the term "gay" inclusive of lesbianism, is no more progressive than using the term "Man" to define "humanity".
How about we call it "The Lesbian Movement" for a while, just so folks get used to thinking of womyn-as-universal? Or, how about "The Two Spirit Movement" so we can demarginalise, which is to also say centralise, a more Indigenist understanding of queerness? (And who the f*ck uses the term "homosexual" any more, among Leftist radicals??!!) I guess the answer is below.
RCP’s Anti-Homosexual Line: Why Held So Long and Stubbornly?
Posted by Mike E on September 20, 2008
“I was told what apparently others were told - they were busy. Huh? Busy? Denouncing whole communities as hopeless bourgeois because you were busy? Revolutionaries prevented from joining the party; youth told to cease and desist on gay curiosity; having to live in fear that I’d be found and ridiculed because I couldn’t control the bourgeois gay monster inside me. But they were busy.”
* * * * *
Kasama is receiving posts from former RCP members describing the issues that brought things to a breaking point.
The question of why the party’s backward view of sexuality and gay people was so stubbornly upheld for so long emerged as an explosive controversy within the RCP during its 2001 program discussions.
This piece by Xbox mentions for the first time the “closet” that some gay and bisexual people lived in within the RCP — and discusses the RCP leadership’s claim that their bigoted view of gay people survived thirty years because they had been so busy with other matters — involving the U.S.-Soviet comflict war and the development of an international movement. Too busy all through the 1980s AIDS crisis?
This argument (and others) are laid out by Bob Avakian in his conversation with Bill Martin (published as the book “Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History and Politics“).
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Please click here for the piece by Xbox.
For related matters, see here.
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END OF POST.
On Blogpost Reincarnation
Above is one of the misogynous comments etched with venomous guile, like a scarlet letter, across a media image of Nadya Suleman. She is facing a particular form of contempt, a rage reserved for the woman who has the audacity to have many children without f*cking or living with a man. "Bad Mom Legacy" indeed! How dare she have children without having sex with "the father", or at least having the patriarchally correct decency to pretend to rely on "one man" for support?!A follow-up on the post below:
One of the things I like about blogging, as opposed to publishing via a press or periodical, is that I retain the ability to adjust things, should adjustments be necessary, to clarify a thought or position. Such was the case with the last post, on Nadya Suleman.
But, not only did I revise the piece, I also then reposted it without the "Read more" link at the bottom, leading to, uhhh, the rest of the piece.
I can't guarantee there will be no more changes to that piece but I can assure you that as of right now, the whole piece is available to be read! (Below.)
END OF POST.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Mother as Monster: The Demonisation of Nadya Suleman
The written material here in this blogpost is copyrighted 2009, by Julian Real. All Rights Reserved. [This is a revised version of a recently posted piece titled "Conceiving Misogyny: the Top Ten Steps Toward the Demonisation of Nadya Suleman".]
Social scorn hath no fury greater than that aimed by media at women for doing little to no harm relative to what men do in abject abundance with impunity.
THIS IS WHAT RACIST, CLASSIST MISOGYNY LOOKS & SOUNDS LIKE. [WARNING: The following three videos are of P.R.I.C.K.s, saying what P.R.I.C.K.s make sure they have plenty of time to say, ad nauseam]:
The media's overt and undisguised hatred for a woman seen as a thing, in this case a person named Nadya Suleman, has been upsetting and bewildering me for the last couple of weeks. I seek here to unravel or separate out some of the strategical strings that comprise the noose that dominant media have put around her neck. There is a vicious collective will at work that is manufactured and manipulated by and through the media. We are welcomed to hope she will fatally fall or, barring that, that she'll have [at least eight of] her children taken away from her because she's one or more of the following terms:] selfish, stupid, irresponsible, inhumane, psychotic, and/or a freak.
This post is not focused on the politics of over-population, an ecocidally serious topic indeed. To approach that issue, I'd start with a critique of people at the top by focusing in on privileged white heterosexual nuclear families and other politically non-threatened, socially unstigmatised kinship units who are determined to make sure they maintain dominion over the Earth, nonhuman animals, and people who are not so powerful. Nadya Suleman, viewed from the ladder of social hierarchy is--reality check--in the "not so powerful" category.
One secret wish buried inside the hope of Nadya having at least eight fewer children, a wish made considerably less secretive through death threats, is that she'll then take her own life and rid society--finally--of the Greatest Threat to Humanity by a Creature since Godzilla. According to many, she is an out-of-control beast, an entirely irrational human being. Her current media moniker, "Octo-mom", reflects this contemptuous dehumanisation and demonisation of her.
I have been considering her imagined crimes against humanity and their relative impact on the globe given events that have occurred over the last eight, sixteen, and thirty-two years, including fairly contemporary actions by only one human being, such as the case of the grand thief, Bernie Madoff. His actions and their consequences are considerably more harmful to humanity and the Earth than anything Nadya may hope to do in her lifetime. This example demonstrates how the least powerful, the poor, are systematically accused of doing what only the wealthy are capable of doing: stealing tax dollars, hiding millions of dollars that would otherwise be taxed, corruptly wasting our money, ripping off the middle and working class in ways the poor cannot even dream of doing. When news stories like the one about her hit analog airwaves and digital networks, it's enticingly easy to lose an international/global perspective regarding urgently important dangers and atrocities. Put simply, Nadya Suleman is not more dangerous and unstable than nuclear waste, or the U.S. government and its corporate-owned economy.
The media, let's not forget, is a group of human beings with political and technical power. They control a great deal, including the degrees to which some human beings can think of themselves as being unconditionally estimable, lovable, and wonderful. When a poor woman of color is systematically negatively targeted for contempt, such as in the ways Nadya Suleman has been grossly mistreated, it is never an attack on one person alone: it is an assaultive attack against a gendered class (women), a raced class ("non-whites"), and an economic class (the poor). It functions as a warning, a reminder from the elite social groups and the media that spreads their values. Such groups, which overwhelmingly comprise the populations that own media, have incessant institutional control over how we are perceived, treated, and live our lives. One of the messages in the media is that women are not really women unless they birth children.
There's irony here, given that Nadya, in the eyes of alleged pro-Lifers, has committed many egregious sins: she was born female and grew to be a woman (it would be a different kind of sin if she grew up to be a man), she is single, she is of color, she is poor, and she is reliant on relatively few tax dollars for child support (compared to people with Swiss bank accounts or corporations that take their mailing address and/or business off-shore). No woman in any of these category goes unscrutinised or unstigmatised, while super-rich individuals and corporate execs behave with little to no public awareness or any form of accountability to U.S. tax-payers.
Taking one of these categories of appropriate womanhood, being a mother, we can note an overtly discriminatory, oppressive, and misogynist double standard. The standards set by media for being 'a good mother' have all the flexibility and compassion of steel trap. To be a good father, on the other hand, one must simply be present some of the time, earn some income, not be a drug addict or alcoholic, and not be an active or caught incest perpetrator.
To be a good mother, one must approach sainthood, daily--I'm sorry, I mean hourly--with a dominant cultural clock with video capability, ticking and clicking away across the land, especially noting the actions of women who fall into one or more of the above mentioned categories of social contempt. Women struggling to balance childcare and pay-work are not only criticised, but their very existence is blamed on feminism. Systematically in the media, feminism, not our misogynist, racist economy, is "to blame" for women having to make these choices. Never mind that prior to the emergence of a Black middle class, African American women always did both. Hey, media-makers: this means before the appearance of the white middle-class feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s.
That rich white men and women often do not raise their own children is not considered a systematic form of child neglect and abuse by them as parents. Class-privileged children are sent to live out their young lives in physically and emotionally abusive boarding and prep schools; that's not deemed parental neglect: that's what the responsible wealthy parent does. Children have also been forced into boarding schools across racial lines, with no negative stigma attached at the time to those who did the forcing, even while those children were corporally punished and otherwise treated more like slaves than students.
There are bewildering paradoxical messages given to all women, though, as long as the women appear and behave the way rich media mogels tell women to be heterosexual. The media-acceptable woman must be sufficiently heterosexual. This includes being personally and legally attached to a man, perceived by media as striving to achieve white status, be at least middle class, and overvaluing a nuclear family model of kinship.
If the woman is culturally categorised as heterosexual, media messages vary from the compulsory and mandatory to the 'merely' routinely repeated and manipulative. Within the spectrum are the following proclamations: You must be chaste until such time that you are wedded to a man and then you must not be chaste; You must be sexual with only one man for to do otherwise is a sin against God and 'Man' (God being a man, and 'man' being a god); You also must be sexually attractive to men, whether married or not. Because if you can't do what women who have been trained by pimps can do, you might lose your man. Married, partnered, or single, women should present themselves as appreciative of all heterosexual men's adoration, seduction, exploitation, by being made unconscious, or, if conscious, through brute force; You must bring forth children from your own womb, and if the little ones are determined to be male, or have fleshy genital parts that sufficiently resemble or can be surgically constructed soon after birth to be a penis, all the better. If you do not succeed in these areas, be prepared for social rejection and scorn. Note: raising an intersex child who has no medical issues, without employing surgical intervention, marks you as a bad parent as constitutes child abuse.
Women who parent must also limit the number and moment-by-moment monitor the behavior of men who have access to their children. If a father, step-dad, grandfather, uncle or male neighbor turns out to have perpetrated child sexual abuse, the mother of the children is summarily blamed for this happening, not only by society but often by the incest or molestation survivors. There is absolutely no expectation that men will or even should report their own sexual interest in children, let alone their perpetration. Lorde knows the child molesters never report one another to the police, nor take responsibility for their inhumane crimes. The world of men behaving badly is taken for granted as an unshakable social given. Men have the entrenched entitlement to have sexual access to just about anyone of any age. The sphere of motherhood is expected to negotiate that patriarchally mined and perp-protecting terrain as if there is a map pointing out dangers here, here, and, don't you see?, two over there.
One spank of a toddler's butt, or yank of child's arm in a supermarket parking lot is enough to outrage the misogynous, misopedic public, a public that has been spanking and yanking children, and doing far worse, than we collectively care to admit. (I am opposed to all forms of physical and emotional abuse of children; the point is that those who point fingers hypocritically do what they are upset with "caught" mothers for doing. As in the case with Nadya, being caught in the spotlight makes you a target, and all rights to a private life may be revoked.)
That men secretly, privately rape their daughters and sons is less "controversial"--such stories come and go in the media, but there's no sustained effort by the media to prevent this from happening inside the home. And the difference here is not that the "problem behavior" isn't recorded on video; it's that because the video was made by the rapist and is often networked to other child rapists, it becomes "one of those awful things men do and can't be stopped from doing", not worthy of the kind of mass ridicule and murderous contempt reserved for, say, a poor women who has sixteen children. Social scorn hath no fury no greater than that aimed by media at women for doing very relatively little (or no) harm relative to what men do in abundance with impunity.
In the days, months, and years following mid-September of 2001, Amerikkkan masterminds and their media have been able to project what the U.S. does with impunity (except on Sept. 11, 2001) onto the existence, intentions, and purposes of what has been termed "Islamic Terrorism" or "Islamofascism". (Now please explain to me why 'white Christian Terrorist' and 'white Christofascist' and aren't commonly used terms?)
That Nadya Suleman is reportedly of Iraqi descent on her father's side, only makes this story more appropriate in garnering the around-the-clock attention of the massive U.S. media.
It is necessary to note a sequence of commercial manipulations that is now so repetitive as to be predictable. This is how misogynist media frenzy operates:
We begin by being misled as to who, really, is in charge. Morning and evening 'news' shows and channels, entertainment and talk shows are made by corporate officials to convince us that the wrong people are to blame for what ails us.
Meanwhile, the mass media--in harmonious concert with every other dominant social and cultural institution which comprises the political fire in the belly of the U.S.--remains controlled by rich white men. White male dominated politicians and press habitually get into bed with CEOs, COOs, and CFOs. They engage in "immoral and unnatural acts" while curiously opposing any loving interpersonal, non-commercial union that is not between one [allegedly] heterosexual man and one [allegedly] heterosexual woman.
These very unnaturally corrupt and oppressive acts, with the generous support of their apologists and less generous support of their lawyers, get short-term media attention. (I mean, really: is there anything more boring or repugnant than watching CEO-madmen "coupling" with mostly male Senators, or in threesomes with Press people?)
While their selective stories are breaking news, doused are the incendiary details and perspectives which might clarify why we keep catching blurry glimpses of this endless line of competitors. Part of the dousing procedure involves replacing statused public figures with another far less corrupt perpetrator, one who has little to no impact on the global human community, the Earth, or its many nonhuman inhabitants.
The replacement might, for example, involve a disappeared North American white girl, usually blond and always class-privileged; a succession of pornographic details are periodically strewn about so as to keep the depth of her humanity, and therefore the humanity of all girls, under wraps.
Better yet, a story about a woman, preferably of color, and even better for distraction: let's hope she's poor... oh, and without a male partner!! We also need an angle on the story, something that makes it "unusual".
Enter the story of Nadya Suleman. The facts, being only partially relevant here, are as follows: a woman who grew up lonely as an only child wanted to have children, and lots of them. She prepared for this by arranging to have many of her eggs fertilised and frozen. On occasion, some of these eggs would be surgically implanted in her womb. Usually most of the eggs wouldn't thrive, and one or two babies would eventually be born. Until recently she had six children. Nothing about this story warrants special media attention.
She then decided to have another child, maybe two more at most. An utterly corrupt unethical doctor implants her body with six of her eggs at one time. All take hold, draw on Nadya's body for nutrition, and grow. Two of those eggs split, and thirty weeks after implantation, something that has never happened before in recorded history occurred: she birthed eight living babies who have stayed alive to date.
Everything else the media has done with this story is misogynist, racist, and classist scapegoating of this woman as a Demon.
A misogynist media-fueled frenzy ensued.
The only newsworthy story, if there is one, is that someone birthed eight living octoplets. Given the odds against such a birth, the story of note isn't even how this fertility doctor could make this remotest of possibilities possible. Please note: many doctors implant many eggs into many women. He is not special. His ethics don't differ significantly from many other fertility doctors. His ethics don't differ in the least with countless plastic surgeons who will perform procedure after procedure on any woman who has the cash or insurance to pay him. Where is the media outrage at the doctors who perform hundreds of breast implants? Or at routine and medically unnecessary hysterectomies? Or at the history in this country of forced sterilisation? The medical establishment is a greedy, woman-hating community. Nadya's life was put at great risk by a doctor who could have refused to put six eggs into her body. That she didn't want to selectively abort speaks to her values about fertilised eggs, fetuses, and lack of self-regard.
Giving birth to multiple children is dangerous to any pregnant woman; carrying eight fetuses is likely to be fatal for her. The patriarchal Right-wing rule about banning abortions is they are to be banned only when the woman carrying them isn't killed along with them; killing hundreds of pregnant women in Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Korea, and Japan, to name but a few places--of color--White Rightists also systematically prevent the birth of otherwise viable fetuses, en masse, through barbaric woman-killing. White men have also been ruthlessly creating and enforcing laws and policies that force U.S. women of color to be sterilised.
Putting birthing over any pregnant woman's own well-being is the patriarchally correct thing to do. Making the possibility of women of color having healthy babies much less a probability than for white women is one of white male supremacy's agenda items. A poor woman of color who has values that preclude her from selectively reducing the number of viable fetuses in her womb is not praised for her integrity, because women aren't supposed to have integrity, including physically. Her body should have been reprobed, the media shouts, to take out some of those fetuses!
One might ask: if she only wanted one more child, why didn't she just adopt? Nadya didn't have the option to adopt just one more child because she's publicly if not also legally categorised as "unfit" to do so.
The period of scrutiny of corrupt rich white men by the public generally lasts as a central spectacle, as a phenomenon, for about four days. (If the U.S. Right is personally going after a man left of centrist, the spectacle may go on for years; sometimes the criminal characters have to be recast while the story continues. But for such a story to continue, there must be "bad women" involved in the primary or secondary plot lines. Our attention, in other words, even while supposedly on men's sexual behavior, is habitually fixed on the 'questionable' behavior of women. If we can focus only on a woman or on women, this works much better; we needn't notice the evil-doing men behind or around the curtains, beneath desks, and between sheets.
Keeping all this in mind, we can see how this story of a woman of color, a poor single woman, and a mother whose fitness for parenthood is called into question.
According to the 'universal law' of misogynist media frenzy, given each of her 'crimes' her story can be expected to stay in the headlines for weeks if not months to come.
Life in the U.S. prior to President Obama's inauguration on January 21st, 2009 is meant to be a fading neo-fascist nightmare. The media helps this process of forgetting along by focusing on what a fashion plate Michelle Obama ought to be each and every day of her life; what Paris Hilton is doing; which female celebrity is sporting a 'baby bump'; which heterosexual stars are getting married or divorced; where the Jonas Brothers are currently performing; who ought to be the next American Idol; and whether or not Jennifer Aniston has bumped into her ex, Brad Pitt. The media relies on us maintaining no historical perspective and having increasingly short attention spans.
If we mentally resuscitate the recent past and are willing to take in material that is longer than a sound-bite, text message, or typical YouTube video, we can remember that G.W., Dick, and Donald committed copious impeachment-worthy breaches of the U.S. Constitution, accomplished so many unfathomably cruel and horrific acts of genocide, and violated any measure of International Human Rights, all with a very well-rehearsed plan. This plan is designed to make wealthy mass murderers richer and strengthen their control of more landmasses and their natural 'resources'. They have been doing this while children, women, and men, predominantly of color, as well as Earth's many other nonhuman beings, have been poisoned and slaughtered. That such men are pro-Death should go without saying.
Unasked are a few questions which I think are pertinent.
Why do white men, one man at a time--a man named Bernie Madoff--not garner as much public vitriol as Nadya Suleman?
Why selectively call out Nadya on bearing children with an emotional agenda that saddles her newborns with a job--to fulfill unmet needs cultivated in her lonely, siblingless childhood--and not also call out men who impregnate woman after woman, or the same woman, so as to have an emotional claim to immortality, to have a son who will carry on his name? Is this not at least as common an emotional agenda that also saddles newborns with a job?
Given the proclivities of rich white men to procure women (and pubescent girls) for sexual use and abuse, women and girls on the streets, women and girls in brothels, women and girls in far-away "exotic" places, women and girls next door, women and girls at home, and given that one of the things wealthy men like to do is have unprotected intercourse with women and girls, and given that once the "rental period" of the woman or girl has ended, what are we to make of his routine impregnation of these women? Is this not an ethical issue for him? How can it be that this behavior doesn't demonise him?
Many men who have casual sexual intercourse with women, once, occasionally, or serially, engage in behavior that gets women pregnant. The men I know in this category do little to nothing to assist in the nurture and support of those babies from birth through adulthood. Are those men demonic for bringing countless children into this world in an irresponsible manner?
If father/daughter incest is the most common form of child sexual abuse, why is it not seen as "unfit" for men to father (here meaning "raise") one or many daughters? Is there nothing more demonic (if we're going to use such a term, and apparently with women we are) than a father or father-figure crawling into the bed of his daughter to violate her sexually and traumatise her physically and psychically?
For me, this is the moral conclusion I arrive at:
What men often do (by engaging in unprotected, coercive, and/or unwelcomed heterosexual intercourse), that frequently results in women becoming pregnant, and leaves women with the trauma of sexual assault, is a form of evil. So to is what the U.S. government and military does. So too is what globalisation, The World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund does.
Nadya is doing at least one of the three interrelated things Western patriarchies tell her she exists to do: be beautiful according to media standards, be sexually available to at least one man, and have babies. Seen this way, it appears her 'crime against patriarchy' was that she didn't have heterosexual intercourse in order to conceive. Get out the stones, and consider throwing them instead at the windows of media centers: Nadya Suleman did nothing criminal nor evil.
Social scorn hath no fury greater than that aimed by media at women for doing little to no harm relative to what men do in abject abundance with impunity.
THIS IS WHAT RACIST, CLASSIST MISOGYNY LOOKS & SOUNDS LIKE. [WARNING: The following three videos are of P.R.I.C.K.s, saying what P.R.I.C.K.s make sure they have plenty of time to say, ad nauseam]:
The media's overt and undisguised hatred for a woman seen as a thing, in this case a person named Nadya Suleman, has been upsetting and bewildering me for the last couple of weeks. I seek here to unravel or separate out some of the strategical strings that comprise the noose that dominant media have put around her neck. There is a vicious collective will at work that is manufactured and manipulated by and through the media. We are welcomed to hope she will fatally fall or, barring that, that she'll have [at least eight of] her children taken away from her because she's one or more of the following terms:] selfish, stupid, irresponsible, inhumane, psychotic, and/or a freak.
This post is not focused on the politics of over-population, an ecocidally serious topic indeed. To approach that issue, I'd start with a critique of people at the top by focusing in on privileged white heterosexual nuclear families and other politically non-threatened, socially unstigmatised kinship units who are determined to make sure they maintain dominion over the Earth, nonhuman animals, and people who are not so powerful. Nadya Suleman, viewed from the ladder of social hierarchy is--reality check--in the "not so powerful" category.
One secret wish buried inside the hope of Nadya having at least eight fewer children, a wish made considerably less secretive through death threats, is that she'll then take her own life and rid society--finally--of the Greatest Threat to Humanity by a Creature since Godzilla. According to many, she is an out-of-control beast, an entirely irrational human being. Her current media moniker, "Octo-mom", reflects this contemptuous dehumanisation and demonisation of her.
I have been considering her imagined crimes against humanity and their relative impact on the globe given events that have occurred over the last eight, sixteen, and thirty-two years, including fairly contemporary actions by only one human being, such as the case of the grand thief, Bernie Madoff. His actions and their consequences are considerably more harmful to humanity and the Earth than anything Nadya may hope to do in her lifetime. This example demonstrates how the least powerful, the poor, are systematically accused of doing what only the wealthy are capable of doing: stealing tax dollars, hiding millions of dollars that would otherwise be taxed, corruptly wasting our money, ripping off the middle and working class in ways the poor cannot even dream of doing. When news stories like the one about her hit analog airwaves and digital networks, it's enticingly easy to lose an international/global perspective regarding urgently important dangers and atrocities. Put simply, Nadya Suleman is not more dangerous and unstable than nuclear waste, or the U.S. government and its corporate-owned economy.
The media, let's not forget, is a group of human beings with political and technical power. They control a great deal, including the degrees to which some human beings can think of themselves as being unconditionally estimable, lovable, and wonderful. When a poor woman of color is systematically negatively targeted for contempt, such as in the ways Nadya Suleman has been grossly mistreated, it is never an attack on one person alone: it is an assaultive attack against a gendered class (women), a raced class ("non-whites"), and an economic class (the poor). It functions as a warning, a reminder from the elite social groups and the media that spreads their values. Such groups, which overwhelmingly comprise the populations that own media, have incessant institutional control over how we are perceived, treated, and live our lives. One of the messages in the media is that women are not really women unless they birth children.
There's irony here, given that Nadya, in the eyes of alleged pro-Lifers, has committed many egregious sins: she was born female and grew to be a woman (it would be a different kind of sin if she grew up to be a man), she is single, she is of color, she is poor, and she is reliant on relatively few tax dollars for child support (compared to people with Swiss bank accounts or corporations that take their mailing address and/or business off-shore). No woman in any of these category goes unscrutinised or unstigmatised, while super-rich individuals and corporate execs behave with little to no public awareness or any form of accountability to U.S. tax-payers.
Taking one of these categories of appropriate womanhood, being a mother, we can note an overtly discriminatory, oppressive, and misogynist double standard. The standards set by media for being 'a good mother' have all the flexibility and compassion of steel trap. To be a good father, on the other hand, one must simply be present some of the time, earn some income, not be a drug addict or alcoholic, and not be an active or caught incest perpetrator.
To be a good mother, one must approach sainthood, daily--I'm sorry, I mean hourly--with a dominant cultural clock with video capability, ticking and clicking away across the land, especially noting the actions of women who fall into one or more of the above mentioned categories of social contempt. Women struggling to balance childcare and pay-work are not only criticised, but their very existence is blamed on feminism. Systematically in the media, feminism, not our misogynist, racist economy, is "to blame" for women having to make these choices. Never mind that prior to the emergence of a Black middle class, African American women always did both. Hey, media-makers: this means before the appearance of the white middle-class feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s.
That rich white men and women often do not raise their own children is not considered a systematic form of child neglect and abuse by them as parents. Class-privileged children are sent to live out their young lives in physically and emotionally abusive boarding and prep schools; that's not deemed parental neglect: that's what the responsible wealthy parent does. Children have also been forced into boarding schools across racial lines, with no negative stigma attached at the time to those who did the forcing, even while those children were corporally punished and otherwise treated more like slaves than students.
There are bewildering paradoxical messages given to all women, though, as long as the women appear and behave the way rich media mogels tell women to be heterosexual. The media-acceptable woman must be sufficiently heterosexual. This includes being personally and legally attached to a man, perceived by media as striving to achieve white status, be at least middle class, and overvaluing a nuclear family model of kinship.
If the woman is culturally categorised as heterosexual, media messages vary from the compulsory and mandatory to the 'merely' routinely repeated and manipulative. Within the spectrum are the following proclamations: You must be chaste until such time that you are wedded to a man and then you must not be chaste; You must be sexual with only one man for to do otherwise is a sin against God and 'Man' (God being a man, and 'man' being a god); You also must be sexually attractive to men, whether married or not. Because if you can't do what women who have been trained by pimps can do, you might lose your man. Married, partnered, or single, women should present themselves as appreciative of all heterosexual men's adoration, seduction, exploitation, by being made unconscious, or, if conscious, through brute force; You must bring forth children from your own womb, and if the little ones are determined to be male, or have fleshy genital parts that sufficiently resemble or can be surgically constructed soon after birth to be a penis, all the better. If you do not succeed in these areas, be prepared for social rejection and scorn. Note: raising an intersex child who has no medical issues, without employing surgical intervention, marks you as a bad parent as constitutes child abuse.
Women who parent must also limit the number and moment-by-moment monitor the behavior of men who have access to their children. If a father, step-dad, grandfather, uncle or male neighbor turns out to have perpetrated child sexual abuse, the mother of the children is summarily blamed for this happening, not only by society but often by the incest or molestation survivors. There is absolutely no expectation that men will or even should report their own sexual interest in children, let alone their perpetration. Lorde knows the child molesters never report one another to the police, nor take responsibility for their inhumane crimes. The world of men behaving badly is taken for granted as an unshakable social given. Men have the entrenched entitlement to have sexual access to just about anyone of any age. The sphere of motherhood is expected to negotiate that patriarchally mined and perp-protecting terrain as if there is a map pointing out dangers here, here, and, don't you see?, two over there.
One spank of a toddler's butt, or yank of child's arm in a supermarket parking lot is enough to outrage the misogynous, misopedic public, a public that has been spanking and yanking children, and doing far worse, than we collectively care to admit. (I am opposed to all forms of physical and emotional abuse of children; the point is that those who point fingers hypocritically do what they are upset with "caught" mothers for doing. As in the case with Nadya, being caught in the spotlight makes you a target, and all rights to a private life may be revoked.)
That men secretly, privately rape their daughters and sons is less "controversial"--such stories come and go in the media, but there's no sustained effort by the media to prevent this from happening inside the home. And the difference here is not that the "problem behavior" isn't recorded on video; it's that because the video was made by the rapist and is often networked to other child rapists, it becomes "one of those awful things men do and can't be stopped from doing", not worthy of the kind of mass ridicule and murderous contempt reserved for, say, a poor women who has sixteen children. Social scorn hath no fury no greater than that aimed by media at women for doing very relatively little (or no) harm relative to what men do in abundance with impunity.
In the days, months, and years following mid-September of 2001, Amerikkkan masterminds and their media have been able to project what the U.S. does with impunity (except on Sept. 11, 2001) onto the existence, intentions, and purposes of what has been termed "Islamic Terrorism" or "Islamofascism". (Now please explain to me why 'white Christian Terrorist' and 'white Christofascist' and aren't commonly used terms?)
That Nadya Suleman is reportedly of Iraqi descent on her father's side, only makes this story more appropriate in garnering the around-the-clock attention of the massive U.S. media.
It is necessary to note a sequence of commercial manipulations that is now so repetitive as to be predictable. This is how misogynist media frenzy operates:
We begin by being misled as to who, really, is in charge. Morning and evening 'news' shows and channels, entertainment and talk shows are made by corporate officials to convince us that the wrong people are to blame for what ails us.
Meanwhile, the mass media--in harmonious concert with every other dominant social and cultural institution which comprises the political fire in the belly of the U.S.--remains controlled by rich white men. White male dominated politicians and press habitually get into bed with CEOs, COOs, and CFOs. They engage in "immoral and unnatural acts" while curiously opposing any loving interpersonal, non-commercial union that is not between one [allegedly] heterosexual man and one [allegedly] heterosexual woman.
These very unnaturally corrupt and oppressive acts, with the generous support of their apologists and less generous support of their lawyers, get short-term media attention. (I mean, really: is there anything more boring or repugnant than watching CEO-madmen "coupling" with mostly male Senators, or in threesomes with Press people?)
While their selective stories are breaking news, doused are the incendiary details and perspectives which might clarify why we keep catching blurry glimpses of this endless line of competitors. Part of the dousing procedure involves replacing statused public figures with another far less corrupt perpetrator, one who has little to no impact on the global human community, the Earth, or its many nonhuman inhabitants.
The replacement might, for example, involve a disappeared North American white girl, usually blond and always class-privileged; a succession of pornographic details are periodically strewn about so as to keep the depth of her humanity, and therefore the humanity of all girls, under wraps.
Better yet, a story about a woman, preferably of color, and even better for distraction: let's hope she's poor... oh, and without a male partner!! We also need an angle on the story, something that makes it "unusual".
Enter the story of Nadya Suleman. The facts, being only partially relevant here, are as follows: a woman who grew up lonely as an only child wanted to have children, and lots of them. She prepared for this by arranging to have many of her eggs fertilised and frozen. On occasion, some of these eggs would be surgically implanted in her womb. Usually most of the eggs wouldn't thrive, and one or two babies would eventually be born. Until recently she had six children. Nothing about this story warrants special media attention.
She then decided to have another child, maybe two more at most. An utterly corrupt unethical doctor implants her body with six of her eggs at one time. All take hold, draw on Nadya's body for nutrition, and grow. Two of those eggs split, and thirty weeks after implantation, something that has never happened before in recorded history occurred: she birthed eight living babies who have stayed alive to date.
Everything else the media has done with this story is misogynist, racist, and classist scapegoating of this woman as a Demon.
A misogynist media-fueled frenzy ensued.
The only newsworthy story, if there is one, is that someone birthed eight living octoplets. Given the odds against such a birth, the story of note isn't even how this fertility doctor could make this remotest of possibilities possible. Please note: many doctors implant many eggs into many women. He is not special. His ethics don't differ significantly from many other fertility doctors. His ethics don't differ in the least with countless plastic surgeons who will perform procedure after procedure on any woman who has the cash or insurance to pay him. Where is the media outrage at the doctors who perform hundreds of breast implants? Or at routine and medically unnecessary hysterectomies? Or at the history in this country of forced sterilisation? The medical establishment is a greedy, woman-hating community. Nadya's life was put at great risk by a doctor who could have refused to put six eggs into her body. That she didn't want to selectively abort speaks to her values about fertilised eggs, fetuses, and lack of self-regard.
Giving birth to multiple children is dangerous to any pregnant woman; carrying eight fetuses is likely to be fatal for her. The patriarchal Right-wing rule about banning abortions is they are to be banned only when the woman carrying them isn't killed along with them; killing hundreds of pregnant women in Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Korea, and Japan, to name but a few places--of color--White Rightists also systematically prevent the birth of otherwise viable fetuses, en masse, through barbaric woman-killing. White men have also been ruthlessly creating and enforcing laws and policies that force U.S. women of color to be sterilised.
Putting birthing over any pregnant woman's own well-being is the patriarchally correct thing to do. Making the possibility of women of color having healthy babies much less a probability than for white women is one of white male supremacy's agenda items. A poor woman of color who has values that preclude her from selectively reducing the number of viable fetuses in her womb is not praised for her integrity, because women aren't supposed to have integrity, including physically. Her body should have been reprobed, the media shouts, to take out some of those fetuses!
One might ask: if she only wanted one more child, why didn't she just adopt? Nadya didn't have the option to adopt just one more child because she's publicly if not also legally categorised as "unfit" to do so.
The period of scrutiny of corrupt rich white men by the public generally lasts as a central spectacle, as a phenomenon, for about four days. (If the U.S. Right is personally going after a man left of centrist, the spectacle may go on for years; sometimes the criminal characters have to be recast while the story continues. But for such a story to continue, there must be "bad women" involved in the primary or secondary plot lines. Our attention, in other words, even while supposedly on men's sexual behavior, is habitually fixed on the 'questionable' behavior of women. If we can focus only on a woman or on women, this works much better; we needn't notice the evil-doing men behind or around the curtains, beneath desks, and between sheets.
Keeping all this in mind, we can see how this story of a woman of color, a poor single woman, and a mother whose fitness for parenthood is called into question.
According to the 'universal law' of misogynist media frenzy, given each of her 'crimes' her story can be expected to stay in the headlines for weeks if not months to come.
Life in the U.S. prior to President Obama's inauguration on January 21st, 2009 is meant to be a fading neo-fascist nightmare. The media helps this process of forgetting along by focusing on what a fashion plate Michelle Obama ought to be each and every day of her life; what Paris Hilton is doing; which female celebrity is sporting a 'baby bump'; which heterosexual stars are getting married or divorced; where the Jonas Brothers are currently performing; who ought to be the next American Idol; and whether or not Jennifer Aniston has bumped into her ex, Brad Pitt. The media relies on us maintaining no historical perspective and having increasingly short attention spans.
If we mentally resuscitate the recent past and are willing to take in material that is longer than a sound-bite, text message, or typical YouTube video, we can remember that G.W., Dick, and Donald committed copious impeachment-worthy breaches of the U.S. Constitution, accomplished so many unfathomably cruel and horrific acts of genocide, and violated any measure of International Human Rights, all with a very well-rehearsed plan. This plan is designed to make wealthy mass murderers richer and strengthen their control of more landmasses and their natural 'resources'. They have been doing this while children, women, and men, predominantly of color, as well as Earth's many other nonhuman beings, have been poisoned and slaughtered. That such men are pro-Death should go without saying.
Unasked are a few questions which I think are pertinent.
Why do white men, one man at a time--a man named Bernie Madoff--not garner as much public vitriol as Nadya Suleman?
Why selectively call out Nadya on bearing children with an emotional agenda that saddles her newborns with a job--to fulfill unmet needs cultivated in her lonely, siblingless childhood--and not also call out men who impregnate woman after woman, or the same woman, so as to have an emotional claim to immortality, to have a son who will carry on his name? Is this not at least as common an emotional agenda that also saddles newborns with a job?
Given the proclivities of rich white men to procure women (and pubescent girls) for sexual use and abuse, women and girls on the streets, women and girls in brothels, women and girls in far-away "exotic" places, women and girls next door, women and girls at home, and given that one of the things wealthy men like to do is have unprotected intercourse with women and girls, and given that once the "rental period" of the woman or girl has ended, what are we to make of his routine impregnation of these women? Is this not an ethical issue for him? How can it be that this behavior doesn't demonise him?
Many men who have casual sexual intercourse with women, once, occasionally, or serially, engage in behavior that gets women pregnant. The men I know in this category do little to nothing to assist in the nurture and support of those babies from birth through adulthood. Are those men demonic for bringing countless children into this world in an irresponsible manner?
If father/daughter incest is the most common form of child sexual abuse, why is it not seen as "unfit" for men to father (here meaning "raise") one or many daughters? Is there nothing more demonic (if we're going to use such a term, and apparently with women we are) than a father or father-figure crawling into the bed of his daughter to violate her sexually and traumatise her physically and psychically?
For me, this is the moral conclusion I arrive at:
What men often do (by engaging in unprotected, coercive, and/or unwelcomed heterosexual intercourse), that frequently results in women becoming pregnant, and leaves women with the trauma of sexual assault, is a form of evil. So to is what the U.S. government and military does. So too is what globalisation, The World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund does.
Nadya is doing at least one of the three interrelated things Western patriarchies tell her she exists to do: be beautiful according to media standards, be sexually available to at least one man, and have babies. Seen this way, it appears her 'crime against patriarchy' was that she didn't have heterosexual intercourse in order to conceive. Get out the stones, and consider throwing them instead at the windows of media centers: Nadya Suleman did nothing criminal nor evil.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Heterosexuality Is Unnatural, no matter what Sex Essentialists say
What follows is a book review from Achille's Heel: The Radical Men's Magazine
The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Ned Katz
Twelve years ago, Gore Vidal asserted that "there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or hetero acts." He repeats this hypothesis in an argumentative foreword to Ned Katz's book. But Katz seeks to dig deeper than this and questions the assumptions that lead us to divide people, acts, relationships and feelings into binary opposites. Starting with the first appearance in the United States of the word hetero-sexual, in 1893, he shows how it has moved from its original medical definition to its use in describing "normal", different-sex eroticism.
The original definition is important in the argument that Katz develops. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, attempts were made to identify and name various deviations from the procreative norm. "Hetero-sexuality" described one type of non-procreative perversion involving different-sex desire. Erotic attraction was seen as a healthy sexual instinct when procreation was its aim, but not if it involved only the satisfaction of lustful impulses. It was these drives and impulses that were taken up by Freud, from 1905 onwards, in the development of his theories of sexuality.
It is difficult to imagine a time before knowledge of the powerful concepts and images that Freud put before us. Katz shows how the presumption of a predominantly male, heterosexual norm pervaded Freud's writing, creating an assumption of the biological and historical roots of the hetero/homo divide. In a similar way, Freud displaced the procreative norm and replaced it with the concept of sexual libido and its satisfaction.
In terms of individual development, the choice of sexual object (same- or opposite-sex) was not fixed or restricted, but Freud made it clear that a heterosexual outcome would be both normal and preferred. Homosexuality is seen as "fixated" and "immature" and an undesirable developmental outcome. This impression of an essential, historical and biological truth focussed negative attention on abnormal homosexuality. More importantly, it directed attention away from the heterosexual norm. Katz invites us to check the relative invisibility of discourse on heterosexuality by browsing the indices of relevant seminal texts. As an example, he cites the standard index to Freud's complete works. This contains only one reference to heterosexuality but more than a column of references to homosexuality. Katz goes on to show how heterosexuality grew rapidly from a preferred developmental outcome into a universal, cultural norm. He places Gore Vidal's distinction between persons and acts as post-Kinsey in that Alfred Kinsey's research, reported in "Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male" (1948), described a range of behaviour and practice that did not fit neatly into exclusively homo- or heterocategories.
In the same decade, the words "gay" and "straight" were being used as descriptions of sexual identity, with "straight" meaning "not homosexual". The concept of a gay or lesbian identity and the growth of identity politics have been instrumental in affirming the feelings and lifestyles of those who are glad to be gay. Ned Katz recognises the importance of this movement, but is pessimistic about its potential in the breaking down of the heterosexual norm.
Acceptance of genetically-determined sexual orientation is compared with similar biological "evidence" used to justify the practices of slavery, racism and sexism. Rather than argue on these grounds, he sees a way forward, through a focus on what is held in common and not through an emphasis on what makes us different from each other. His model for this is based on challenges to the dominant male, heterosexual culture posed by liberal, radical and lesbian feminists since the early 1960s. Katz draws together the strands of a feminist de-construction of heterosexuality, from Betty Friedan's dissatisfaction with arbitrary sexual designations, placing limits on women's potential, to Adrienne Rich's explicit criticism, in the early 1980s, of institutionalised heterosexuality.
Katz looks forward to a time when homo- and hetero- distinctions will become redundant. As Lisa Duggan points out in her afterword, this is bound to make some readers uncomfortable, if not downright hostile.
Conservative "essentialists" will perceive an attack against the institutions of marriage and the family. On the other hand, those working for lesbian and gay rights may feel that their position is undermined and that it is better to argue for equality on the basis of gains already made. Katz and Duggan both suggest that an acceptance of "difference" can lead, at best, to a state of tolerance, whereas true equality can only come if we "change the notion that heterosexuality is normal for the vast majority of people, and shift social, cultural and political practices based on that assumption".
Ned Katz's main aim in this book is to focus attention and to encourage debate on the problem of heterosexuality. In this respect, he has produced a valuable resource. "The Invention of Heterosexuality" distils almost fifteen years of discussion, research and writing. It contains a wealth of notes and references that will provide an excellent platform for further study. But, above all, this is an essential read and a fascinating journey through the sexual politics of the 20th century.
Andrew Martin
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
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