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This is what I mean That girl Perversion inspired by Renegade Evolution
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
02-14-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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[...] I won’t be participating in Blog Against Sexism Day, because I need no such kicks in the pants to rail against the form of oppression that happens to affect me most. But I’m looking forward to Bitch | Lab’s promised entry on why “patriarchy” is a dumb word: I’m sitting here this morning drinking my joe and reading Rubin’s The Traffic In Women wherein she explains why the term is anlaytically useless: “(A)ny society will have some systematic ways to deal with sex, gender, and babies. Such a system may be sexually egalitarian, at least in theory, or it may be ‘gender stratified,’ as seems to be the case for most or all of the known examples. But it is important  even in the face of a depressing history  to maintain a distinction between the human capacity and necessity to create a sexual world, and the empirically oppressive ways in which sexual worlds have been organized. Patriarchy subsumes both meanings into the same term. Sex/gender system, on the other hand, is a neutral term which refers to the domain and indicates the domain and indicates that oppression is not inevitable in that domain, but is the product of the specific social relations which organize it.†[...]
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I’m clueified now, but I have to say that a lot of people use it without thinking, especially some of us who have been remiss in our reading. I haven’t decided what type of feminist I am yet though either.
The term “patriarchy” rankles me. And it usually causes most conservatives, or those who are on the fence or not knowledgeable about feminism to immediately stop listening. And why not? It’s inflammatory! It pisses ME off, and I’m a feminist.
For example, I think there’s a lot of good writing on the blog I Blame the Patriarchy, but the title just somehow sets me up to be more critical of it than I might be otherwise. Well, and some of the content is reactionary, too, but no one’s perfect. If that blog had a different name I might not bristle so.
“I Blame the Patriarchy’s” sensibilities tickled me. And still do, I suppose. I know Twisty takes the term seriously, but she usually wears it lightly. Funny and sane go a long way in my book. (I myself am neutral on the use of the word, I suppose, although I understand the complaint here. A fucked-up system by any other name…) I’m never going to agree with her about certain things, I expect. But mostly I stopped reading there because the Ellen Jamesian brigade was driving me nuts.
As per conservatives not listening: in my experience the sort of people who instantly switch off because of the term “patriarchy” weren’t real inclined to pay serious attention to begin with. Mileage may vary there, I expect.
(that is: in my experience, people who basically think feminists are a bunch of man-hating hairy-legged bra-burners that have nothing to do with them haven’t even gotten as far as the term “patriarchy;” it feels like more of an insider thing).
You keep it up with the theory, damnit! Tween that and Thinking Sex, I think a whole lot of feminist blogging could be so much better with just a pinch more of that, um “long tradition of feminist literature”
Are you sure it was me? I don’t remember that…
AMEN. The biggest annoyance I’ve felt with feminism is the readiness to blame males–in the abstract as well as more concretely–for female oppression. The situation isn’t as bad as it once was; we’re more aware of our own role in oppressing one another. But it only came after years of blaming patriarchy while worrying that discussion about our own oppression would only embolden anti-feminists. We can now talk about the Heathers and Mean Girls, sluts and penetration, transgenderism and queer theory and dozens more subject once taboo. But there was a time not too long past when the strictures of feminist theory was its own oppression.
Somehow this conversation reminded me of a quote:
“So the Angel said: `Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, and thou oughest to be ashamed.’
“I answer’d: `We impose on one another, and it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics.’”
– William Blake, A Memorable Fantasy 3, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004377.html Brief mention of Saharasia (the climate factor in ((non))sustainable cultures and vica versa) plus Mernissi.
As you know I get quite delirious over P words and the association or dissociation between Permaculture and Patriarchy I find usefully illustrative if you are ready to take more into account, like it’s feed rather than just love’s fickleness (women beat men hands down on that no doubt); gender is all about contrast, differentials, drops, dilutions and ‘verval’ (=decay, also used for waterlevel differences in locks or between regions, denoting potential).
Do you like agnation better than patriarchy?
the source of next quoted passage is Daniel Pipes outfit, possibly responsible for stoking the cartoon outrage (counterpunch). According to John Ray’s ‘body electronics’ one may achieve miracles manipulating wounds and weak spots but DP certainly doesn’t have the required touch.
links2003
vadercats/miscs-n-logs/Musicphantoms_printerfriendly.htm … meforum.org/article/386
the Arab World’s Travails: the Desert’s Burden by Gideon M. Kressel …
members.lycos.nl/vadercats/links2003.htm - 40k
The Arab World’s Travails: The Desert’s Burden
by Gideon M. Kressel
Gideon M. Kressel is head of the Social Studies Unit at the J. Blaustein Institute for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
I. ECONOMICS
The patrilineal structure goes far to account for the failure to move farther along with economic advancement. Patrilineages induce large families and high birth rates; combined with modern medicine and urban life, this has led to rapidly growing populations and a population explosion that threatens most Middle Eastern societies today.19 Agnatic pressures also make governments nearly helpless to reduce birth rates. So long as status is based in large part on fecundity, and this connection is supported by religious belief, a fatalistic approach, and indifferent governments, the population will continue to grow still faster. To break this pattern requires creative new approaches,
ones that deal with the agnatic substratum of beliefs.
Emphasis on the self-sufficiency of the family group has the effect of limiting exchanges between families, thereby depriving them of the benefits of economic specialization. Rather than go out and hire or be hired by others, families prefer to establish a profusion of small but self-sufficient workshops, retail shores, and warehouses. This way, each agnate group has its own set of commercial enterprises and custom commits the households to do their shopping from agnates, not others. In contrast, joint ownership of businesses or real estate by people from different lineages is extremely limited.20 In Lebanon, for example, nearly all industrial firms are family enterprises. Possibilities for trade and economic specialization are restricted because of the similarity of these units among agnate groups. A reluctance to employ non-agnates further discourages the growth and diversity of commercial enterprises.
This reluctance to cooperate financially with other agnate groups explains why individual or family capitalism, the most primitive form of industrial capitalism, prevails in the Middle East. At the other extreme, there are some capital-intensive industries of the sort that call on large-scale investors such as multinational corporations, national banks, and governments. Scarce is the in-between level of entrepreneurial corporationâ€â€plants employing a few hundred workers, run jointly by more than one main owner and a handful of shareholders.
This reluctance to undertake long-term collaboration on financial projects with other households or with non-agnates impedes the development of complex projects. Agnation presents barriers to investment by making Middle Easterners wary of entrusting family savings to the capital market or to bank issues. Joint entrepreneurial projects undertaken to enhance capital investments usually depend on the initiative of “Western” partners (a term that now also includes East Europeans and East Asians) whose associations are not limited by considerations of lineage.21
Middle Eastern labor unions and guilds are also partly characterized by their agnatic skew.22 Agnatically-based guilds that include only the members of a family or tribe exist in profusion; the result is hundreds of similar unions of blacksmiths, tanners, carpenters, and the like. Patrilineal infrastructure thus increases the number of identical family guilds, each of them incapable of bridging its differences with others so as to work together in pursuit of common interests. Agnatic ties thus inhibit movement toward trade unionism or a sense of class struggle. Lack of cooperation also weakens the guilds collectively vis-à-vis competitors abroad when local markets begin to carry imported consumer goods.
Agnatic attitudes toward women also have importance for economic life, resulting in the loss to society of their intelligence and labor. To face this problem is no easy matter, however, for it requires dismantling the boundaries of agnation that confine married women, often notwithstanding their professional skills, to household activities. The agnatic logic and political structure, which ranks groups by the number of their males, will have to give way to a different hierarchy, one in which enfranchised women take their rightful place.
Agnation does have its positive side, too. It de-emphasizes the social importance of wealth; tribal elders, rather than the rich, make key decisions. Wealthy and poor agnates tend to live alongside one another in the clan’s cluster.23 Strong agnatic cohesion reduces the potential for class conflicts. And it creates a liberal climate for international trade; to facilitate foreign capital investment, regulations are continuously made more inviting.
piet: The very best illustration of the results of food scarcity through competition with none — either side of a river in africa, gorrillas and chimps on one side and bonobos on the other - showing the latter could afford to stay together while the former had to roam in clumps of more mobile menfolk — in short, PATRIARCHY (I know you have trouble thinking in spatial terms, except cut up carve out style but food is sex is shit is food calls for a minimum footprint pattern/extension you know, no way around that) can be found in ‘demonic males’ perhaps a good side dish for your reading circle.
Love the Twisty.
With that out of the way, yes, abuse of the term ‘patriarchy’ is maddening when used by those that don’t really mean it (or what it means). I cop to using it mostly when preaching to the choir, for the specific reason that I know what images and preconceptions it brings to the minds of the ill-informed. Although, Lilith, I don’t think that admitting to women’s complicity in their oppression necessarily negates patriarchy as the root oppression; to me, it simply allows (probably) more productive ways to address it.
My use of “the patriarchy” is, as Jean says, when preaching to choir, and also as a way of avoiding just what Lilith points out as a serious flaw of some feminist screeds- the tendency to blame men, as opposed to a system. Patriarchy is a way of saying, “This isn’t ‘men’ per se, it’s a whole ordering of society.” The same way that “racist” has come to have an “individual” connotation, whereas “white supremacy” has a structural connotation.
Also, I’m certainly not one of those “sexism is the basis of all other systems of oppression,” people. But, I don’t think that “patriarchy” connotes that, contemporarily. I’ve read my share of feminist theory dating way back, and though it may have that sense in older rad fem texts, I don’t think that’s any longer what’s meant by it. After all, I’d be surprised if very many third-wave-identified feminists would subscribe to the sexism-as-root idea, but many of them use the term.
Then again, that’s exactly what you’re complaining about, isn’t it? :)
I already try to use the term sparingly, but your rant will definitely reduce my blog-flinging of the awkward word.
@Jean: I hope I didn’t give the impression that womens’ self-oppression trumped other forms of oppression, or that men have no role in womens’. My more general point is that oppression is more than just “us versus them”, but includes oppression within one’s group of identification. Also, it could well be argued that women do participate in male oppression, albeit more in terms of reinforcing male-on-male oppression rather than directly.
To the degree that the term “patriarchy” draws attention to how, in a gender frame, male-on-female oppression is greater than female-on-male oppression, it remains an accurate and useful term. To the degree that oppression is more nebulous within a gender frame and also flourishes in other frames–race, class, and sexuality among others–it seems to me that “patriarchy” distracts and diffuses scrutiny of how to best address oppressive tendencies at large. With all the various -isms and -phobias out there, it’s a wonder that any time is spent arguing over which is the worst oppression.
That said, I think you’re right that addressing female-on-female oppression will make it easier to address male-on-female oppression, as I believe the former helps to reinforce the latter.
@EL: I fully understand your position, but also think that you are using “patriarchy” correctly. If only others were as precise. :)
Terminology aside, my problem with the idea that sexism is the ROOT cause of every other oppression (and I’m not sure that everyone who uses the term “patriarchy” believe this–are you saying that they should, in order to be consistent?) is–well, in a nutshell, I don’t buy it.
>To the degree that the term “patriarchy†draws attention to how, in a gender frame, male-on-female oppression is greater than female-on-male oppression, it remains an accurate and useful term.
Agree.
>With all the various -isms and -phobias out there, it’s a wonder that any time is spent arguing over which is the worst oppression.
AGREE. Lord how I hate the game of “Sociopolitical Queen For A Day.” Yes, okay, you win, you DO belong to The most Oppressed Group, congratulations: here is your Armana fridge and a year’s supply of Rice-A-Roni. Now what?
@Lilith
“To the degree that oppression is more nebulous within a gender frame and also flourishes in other frames–race, class, and sexuality among others–it seems to me that “patriarchy†distracts and diffuses scrutiny of how to best address oppressive tendencies at large.”
This has caused me no end of inner conflict, vis-a-vis the tendency to not simply declare the patriarchy as the core oppression, but to end up in a logical tail-chase that pretty squarely—albeit implicitly—discounts the systemic nature of other oppressions.
“My more general point is that oppression is more than just “us versus them.”"
Yes, yes, a hundred times. I would add that leaving it at ‘us v. them’ actually undercuts helpful analysis as to the real ways that patriarchy works.
…To elaborate a tad: “patriarchy,” to me, also comes with the understanding that it’s widespread and deep-rooted (not just limited to one place or people or epoch), and that it does come with an attendant host of other cultural assumptions. I do believe that you could tap plain male-over-female sexism as the root of all other gender and sexuality-related ugliness and have a better argument, at least.
Where I start to have a problem is the (implicit or explicit) assumption that yes there IS something essentially more aggressive/dominating about men, period, and that there is no escaping this. Biology really is destiny. It is hard not to go from there to at least a certain amount of “sex is (and aggression is) ICKY. Good thing I don’t have as much of that as *those other people.* The world would really be a better place if we didn’t have those nasty, bestial impulses.” And that shit is pretty hard to differentiate from the baggage of our “Judeo-Christian” heritage, to me.
Personally I’m fascinated by the chimps and the bonobos. You could probably use the differences between them to uphold the patriarchal vs. not-patriarchal frame: yes, the bonobos are more egalitarian wrt the sexes. Yes, they’re more “sex-positive.” Yes, they’re more nurturing. Yes, they’re better at sharing. Yes, they’re more peaceful. But do any of these traits *cause* any of the others? Or are they all correlated beause they’re caused by some other common denominator?
Cause I’m bizzee, bizzee… and oooooooooooo what a brain switcharoo, from writing about linux apps to this…. I feel like there’s a membrane barrier I’m plowing through to get from one brain to the next.
This is what I was wondering: Where is the Patriarchy?
It might help, perhaps, if I related this story. I was new mom. I went to take my first course in kollidge. The tutor, a really cool Cornell gradphud stud, says, “Seeing as how you’re a new mommy, how about “History of the family?”
Sure, I thought. Easy! (And, of course, he’s thinking same.) So, we created the course (that’s what you did at my weird school), figured out how we’d evulate, and he sent me home with 7 books, among which was Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s _More Work for Mother_.
I came back and said, “Woah there, these people keep saying, ‘The culture does this’ and ‘Culture does that. What the heck is culture and how does it do these things — and why?”
He smiled and said, “Oh, so your next course is ‘What is Culture?’ And plopped Max Weber, Bellah, Durkheim, Marx, Ventura, etc. in my lap, as well as a seminal article that detailed the manifold ways social scientists deployed the term.
So, what is the patriarchy? Can you see it, touch it, taste it, smell it, fuck it?
Why not sexist oppression? Gender Oppression. Systemic gender oppression. (as for the whole ‘when you say racism ppl think individual level — well that’s my shortcoming: you don’t learn nothing else in kollidge. Racism IS structural level — you talk about prejudice, bigotry, etc. for the other things. IOW, you talk about micro-level and macro-level and how the two are related — and sometimes also a meso-level in between. But that’s my shortcoming, so I can see why the other terms are used. I’m still troubled by it and, well, I guess I’m not Arbiter of Good ‘n’ Proper Feminist Language, so maybe I need to few attitude adjustments.)
As Lilleth suggests, one problem I have with the term is that it’s applied througout history and across cultures, as if it’s this monolithic force that interacts with nothing else. It also implies that it’s always here, as Rubin suggests. There’s no alternative.
Well, i have to work, but will catch you later on this because this conversation is truly fascinating and I’m finding the various responses reall interesting to think through.
@Scott — the issue came up when you were talking about Lauren’s story about obtaining her college degree. Don’t have time now: deadline is calling my name. But I will look later or make my slave, R, do it. :)
“So, what is the patriarchy? Can you see it, touch it, taste it, smell it…”
I had this discussion with some people about why certain characteristics in music tend to close people’s ears—certain time signatures, certain keys, chord progressions, whatever. Someone answered it beautifully: it isn’t those characteristics that shut people off, it’s when the composers write pieces using those characteristics to create something within the dictates of theory, rather than using the theory to explain the creation. That’s how I’ve been thinking about the untouchable/smellable patriarchy lately: my disconnect comes when I see ‘Patriarchy’ used to force issues rather than understand them. But I think part of the problem is that if one is absolutely dedicated to viewing it as systemic, then the problem is the system, and the us/them game becomes a lot less fun for its proponents. The goal posts get moved, the issues get forced, my ears close.
“…fuck it?”
Only in a very self-loathing way. ;
I’m loving this discussion. It’s timely and instructive and also because it brings back some fond memories.
In the year or so after undergrad, as I scrambled to get my shit together, I lived in a collective home of sorts – a huge, restored mansion in a newly gentrified neighborhood of Philadelphia. The owner was well ahead of the housing boom curve so her property sat on the market for a long time. Too long for her tastes so, till that dream couple with 600 grand (at least) came along she rented to a group of women. One of them was a good friend of mine and since I needed a place to stay, she invited me to share the wealth.
These women were all very politically and intellectually active so discussions of feminist theory were an almost daily occurrence (usually late at night over little cups of warm sake).
During one of these debate sessions a house mate turned to me and said that although I was surely an ally, my maleness bestowed – via Patriarchy – privileges upon me she couldn’t claim without hard struggle. I didn’t question this because I’d witnessed and spoke out against situations in class (my nearest real-life organizational frame of reference at the time) when certain professors had obviously treated my contributions as more valuable than those of the young women around me.
She said that Patriarchy was the root oppression – the sinister source that must be ripped out to wipe other evils off the map.
‘Maybe, so,’ I replied ‘but I don’t know. I might be a beneficiary of this Patriarchy machine Monday morning during a meeting in the office when everyone’s listening to me and not to you but how about later, when I’m driving home and a cop stops and hassles me because I’m a Black guy in a nice car and to him that means drug dealer? Patriarchy isn’t helping me then.’
‘I mean, isn’t it more likely that these issues – sexism, racism, class bias – are all mixed up in some crazily complex Venn diagram of wrong shit people do?’
This led to a discussion of how Patriarchy doesn’t benefit men in a simplistic way (or, at all, ultimately). While I got and appreciated the subtleties my amigas were throwing down it still seemed, to me at least, that under the nuances of the theoretical model was a foundational belief there was this thing – Patriarchy – that systematically performed an automated transfer of net social gains to men from women making all men, to varying degrees, actively complicit in the oppressive superstructure.
i’m not quite sure why you crossed out your original language. the term is overused, often meaningless, and, at least in this case, mindless. You’re right, i didn’t really put a whole lot of thought into the term when i put it in the description. Mostly (and this may piss off Amber even more; sorry, Amber) i think i did it because i like using inflammatory language. i like heated discussion. But that doesn’t really work in the blogosphere because anyone can just choose to not participate in that discussion. Therefore i’ve edited the call for submissions and changed Patriarchy to sexist oppression, which i would agree is more descriptive than the original term.
Although my use of the term in this instance was mindless, it doesn’t mean that i haven’t put a lot of thought into the word. But the fact of the matter is that, to me, it doesn’t really mean what it used to. While i used to identify as a radical feminist, i recently learned during a discussion at Alas that, indeed, i am not. i identify as a feminst and i identify as radical, but i’m apparently not allowed to put the words together any more because i don’t believe that the oppression of wimmin is the root of all oppression. sorry, i just don’t. i don’t like discussions of root oppressions, runs a little to close to creating a hierarchy of oppression for my taste.
My understanding of the term patriarchy may also be different from your’s, bitchlab. Although i was a wimmin’s studies minor in college, my background isn’t all that great when it comes to theory. But that’s not to say i don’t enjoy theory (even if it does hurt my head after a long day at work:). That’s why i so love this post and look forward to further discussion. I love having a better understanding of the terminology i use, especially from a hystorical perspective. I am also really interested to hear why it is you say the term is racist, ethnocentric, and anti-materialist. This really makes me feel like i have no real grasp of the word’s meaning. Its great to have you around bitchlab. And if ever there were words of truth, they were spoken here:
You certainly don’t have to agree to any language. That’s why i’ve now had to repeat myself when i say: this isn’t my Blog Against Sexism Day. I just put the word out.
@vegankid
you mean i been had? i done had my buttons pushed?!
I should pay you ’cause that was damn good therapy writing that. All I have to trade is used socks though! :)
More later, but I didn’t want to say that I really am sorry I didn’t make more clear that I wasn’t really picking on your post. It was just an opportunity to rant and it’d been brewing for a while. Lawd knows, whenever the mood comes over me, i like to post — because then i get to use the picture of that pissed off girl!
As for racist, anti-materialist, etc. the jist is that the term has been criticized for being applied to all cultures indiscriminately. As a general principle, I find that troubling. How can I compare the US, in the 21st century, to China 1000 years ago? Or to our ancestors that go much further back.
Perhaps, when you look a little closer things aren’t quite so clear. e.g., where Twisty Faster (whose writing I adore and could read all day but sometimes can’t stomach the content because I see other ways to analyze the sitch) sees only patriarchy operating with Korean farmers subsidized to find brides abroad, looking a little closer it’s not clear that it’s patriarchy, alone, that’s at issue. I posted an analysis from Yoshie awhile back and will look it up and link to it directly when I get a mo’.
It’s a whirlwind day at Bitch Dumpster!
Oh, and as for the issue I have with materialism: it’s sorta like the culture thing. How are these claims about Patriarchy operating this way or that concretely demonstrated. How does the theory, which points at (a reified — when I’m cranky) social structure, show us how it actually works in practice — and why does it work this way? Does it work the same always? Why or why not? Is there an imperative that a society be patriarchal? Why? What causes this?
One thing, as a leftist, I think about is another system of oppression, capitalism. Same problems there: capital does this and capital does that. The capitalist juggernaut rolls over the bodies of labor, prostrate before it. Capital lines its pockets with the dead bodies of labor…
All colorful expressions I occasionally use.
But, how does it actually work? One answer is that what we’re really talking about is a set of social relations. It’s not a reified thing, but something that you can see concretely operating in relationships between people, in normative expectations we hold people to. You can also point to a logic behind these social relations.
So, then my question would be: how do we see these social relations of patriarchy? What is the nature of social relations under patriarchy. Do the same dynamics apply in the 21st century West as they did in the 9th century in China?
Well, I was going to blab on about the normative property relations involved in bumming cigarettes but this is getting too long already.
To Bitch: I agree with you Bitch. I ran through stacks of texts from women’s studies and very few of them use the word in a systematic way. If it’s indexed, it’s either passim, the result of quoting other authors, or there’s a special section devoted to a discussion of radical feminism. Keep on theorizing!
To belledame: I’d fuck it if you paid me enough money. LOL
>Is there an imperative that a society be patriarchal?
Well, and here’s my question: say there *is.* Then what?
Which sort of dovetails into my other problem with radical feminism (as defined as: oppression of women=root of all other oppressions). Get rid of the patriarchal oppression and we’ll, what? Have utopia? But when has that ever worked? And how do we get rid of the patriarchy, exactly, if it’s this enormous all-pervasive monolith? (Especially if we have no concrete models of what a non-patriarchal world would look like. At least the goddess/matriarchal stuff provides some models, whether they’re based in historical reality or not). Are we truly thinking that a shift that overarching and huge is actually ever going to happen, realistically?
[And rereading I realize that I'm not only not a radical feminist, I'm not any sort of radical, at least as most radicals would define it. (I believe in *looking* deeper, but...)]
It strikes me that this kind of thinking almost serves as a religious function–even maybe one that ties into what you were saying about Calvinism in an earlier post, bitchlab. The world is “fallen” (and it can’t get up), and there’s even a predestination of sorts, if one is invested in the essentialist view of men and women. But someday, o someday, the Promised Land. Notice that more often than not, one tends to spend a lot more time describing the evils standing in our way than speculating about what the Promised Land will look like. Which is only human, perhaps. But the question becomes: how much of this is about truly wanting change, and how much of it is about the sheer adrenaline thrill of the fight?
And, and, too:
It’s one thing to say (correctly) that on the whole, men dominate women (and men); that they are far more prone, statistically, to rape, murder, torture; and that there is even a system (or systems) which maintains this state of things. That screams from the reactionary right notwithstanding, women do *not*, on the whole, have the power. (Which is not to say no individual woman has power; or that many women don’t have *some* power, even within the patriarchal framework).
It is another thing (and here’s where the essentialism comes in) to say that it is *impossible* that a situation could exist in which women were not only dominant but just as cruel and oppressive and murderous (perhaps with somewhat different *styles;* perhaps not) as men are now.
I think that honestly this is where the vigiliant anti-porn/BDSM faction in rad fem comes from. It’s not (just) objection to *being* an object. It’s protesting (too much) that women *can’t* be the objectifiers. Can’t be rapists. Can’t be murderers. Can’t be aggressors. Can’t even have any of those dark impulses. And if somehow we do, it’s because we’re colluding with the patriarchy. It certainly wouldn’t be because we have those shadowy tendencies all on our very own.
“It’s not (just) objection to *being* an object. It’s protesting (too much) that women *can’t* be the objectifiers. Can’t be rapists. Can’t be murderers. Can’t be aggressors. Can’t even have any of those dark impulses. And if somehow we do, it’s because we’re colluding with the patriarchy. It certainly wouldn’t be because we have those shadowy tendencies all on our very own.”
That’s something to think about…I don’t know why many radfems won’t draw the distinction between the Patriarchy causing the ’shadowy tendencies’ *spooky* as if the Patriarchy were some big, cosmic First Mover, as opposed to the much more supportable position that women with *shadowy tendencies* are drawn to Patriarchal behavior. Not because they looked at it and said ‘aha! patriarchy! Think I’ll join!’ but because birds of a feather, blah, blah, blah…
I like the Venn diagram analogy.
@bitchlab
i didn’t take it as a persynal attack or necessarily as an attack on my specific post. i recognized it for what it was… an exhalation of sorts:) You make some excelent points. But i’m just getting home from a long work week so I’m going to eat some food, take a nap, hang out with some friends, and then jump into the realm of theory tomorrow, when i’m well rested and refreshed. I will also get back to you on the Milk Gone Wild ads.
As far as the socks go - what color? I’m starting a quilt made of old, used clothing.
@belledame222:
You summarized why I could never consider myself an essentialist. That, and my being transgendered. :)
But in all seriousness, females outside our species may not have the moral concepts of rape, murder, or domination, but all the same they have the capability of violence. Proofs: Stand between a mother grizzly and her cubs, if you have a death wish, and observe that the mother will not hesitate to mutilate you for being in the way. Or, if you value your life more than that, simply observe how most species of spiders and mantids will eat their males as soon as copulation is completed–or, in some cases, well before completion. (Some species’ males cannot fertilize females *unless* their heads are bitten off first.) Even among chimpanzees, which have a strict patriarchal order, females full well have the capability to be violent, as Jane Goodall has noted. Also, in examining mythology, one finds goddesses that existed before patriarchy had established itself, and many are capable of violence, malevolence, wrath, and disorder, e.g. Ereshkigal, Bast, Kali, Eris, Artemis, Hel, etc.)
So, no, I do not buy the notion that females cannot be violent in any sense–on the contrary, there is little in nature to suggest females *aren’t* violent. One could easily make the counter-argument that only patriarchy keeps women from being as violent, or more so, then men; such is suggested by the steady increase in violent female prisoners over the past few decades.
Personally, however, I prefer Patrick Califia’s opinion on the matter:
“Men rule us because they are willing to be violent. They are too stupid to realize that our capacity to be violent exceeds theirs. Women have to stop being afraid of that potential, and learn instead to exercise it with wisdom and justice.”
Of course, Patrick Califia is a transman and a BDSM enthusiast, so essentialists may disregard his warning as patriarchal poison–if they dare.
Women have to stop being afraid of that potential, and learn instead to exercise it with wisdom and justice.â€Â
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ah fucken men .. er i mean ah fucken wimmin. whatever. ah fuchen neutral whatthefuckever!. praise be.
praise bob? anything. whatever. praise the dead guy on a stick even!
[...] I won’t be participating in Blog Against Sexism Day, because I need no such kicks in the pants to rail against the form of oppression that happens to affect me most. But I’m looking forward to Bitch | Lab’s promised entry on why “patriarchy” is a dumb word: I’m sitting here this morning drinking my joe and reading Rubin’s The Traffic In Women wherein she explains why the term is anlaytically useless: “(A)ny society will have some systematic ways to deal with sex, gender, and babies. Such a system may be sexually egalitarian, at least in theory, or it may be ‘gender stratified,’ as seems to be the case for most or all of the known examples. But it is important  even in the face of a depressing history  to maintain a distinction between the human capacity and necessity to create a sexual world, and the empirically oppressive ways in which sexual worlds have been organized. Patriarchy subsumes both meanings into the same term. Sex/gender system, on the other hand, is a neutral term which refers to the domain and indicates the domain and indicates that oppression is not inevitable in that domain, but is the product of the specific social relations which organize it.†[...]