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[...] What is driving my anger is this exchange over at Bitch|Lab in which Ms. B resets one of MacKinnon’s earlier seminal essays, in which KittyMacK asserts her fundamental belief that sexual domination of women by men is the fundamental lynchpin of “patriarchy”, and as a result, no act of sex, even if willfully consented to by women, can be construed in any form other than male domination of women….if not absolute rape. [...]
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“To be sexually objectified means having a social meaning imposed on your being that defines you as to be sexually used, according to your desired uses, and then using you that way. The scenario of sexual abuse is: you do what I say.”
Isn’t this what feminism does in schematizing everything in terms of male power and seeking to subordinate it? Men are defined, social meaning is imposed on their sexual acts, they are then treated as though their sexual acts have that meaning. The only escape the feminist critique is to conform to whatever feminists say men should do, which, of course, means they are being dominated and objectified.
Where’s this Freedom Counter where we can buy our freedom? I mean, it sucks that the only acceptable form of payment is our sexualities, but for serious…they’re selling us our freedom! It must be worth it, right? A bargain at *any* price….
My mind is spinning. No one outside of the academic world is ever going to have the time or the education to understand 90% of what she’s saying. As it is, I’m 15 years out of practice in disecting academic papers, so most of this was just mind numbingly dull.
Male dominance is sexual. Meaning: men in particular, if not men alone, sexualize hierarchy
Well, that alone is proof she dosen’t know the lesbian community very well.
Female Reader
I’m confused.
If you object to MacKinnon’s argument, that men sexualize hiearchy, then if a man conforms to “whatever feminists say they should do” (which is to not sexualize hierarchy), then they aren’t being objectified but being who they are: men who don’t sexualize hiearchy.
sly –
heh. and if I need money to buy it, damn it…..
Joshn
For MacKinnon and followers, no on escapes. We all fetishize dominance and sexualize hierarchy, including lesbians.
C. MacKinnon, at the end of the essays, pretty much *snorts* at the idea that there is a more liberatory woman’s culture of special, loving, non-hiearchy fetisizing pinky sex (belldame’s term — were women lay horizontally and lock pinkies and stare deeply in each other’s eyes.)
Radical feminists trace the source of this to our ancient history where men first started dominating women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity to get and maintain power over other men. Since then, all human societies build ever more complex and tighter webs of social control such that we all sexualize hiearchy and it will never change until we get rid of Patriarchy.
my fucking head hurts after reading this… this will so require a link and rant in my own little section of blogtopia (heh, I loves linkin’ to da bitch)…
I am truly starting to believe feminists of this ilk make women victims just as much as men can.
Grrrr….
For MacKinnon and followers, no on escapes. We all fetishize dominance and sexualize hierarchy, including lesbians.
Well, yeah. I mean, given that the GLBT movement in the US and Europe was linked at conception to the kink movement, this should come as no surprise.
But MacKinnon seems to be not noticing that. Which is odd. And if correct, it’s a rather major facual error in her scholarship, right?
C. MacKinnon, at the end of the essays, pretty much *snorts* at the idea that there is a more liberatory woman’s culture of special, loving, non-hiearchy fetisizing pinky sex
I’d be interested in reading some of that. I mean, what do Correct Sexual Relations look like to her? Or do they get defined at all?
Oh, I think she notices it plenty. She doesn’t think it’s liberatory. She states in the article above that BDSM, as described by a female sadist, is paradigmatic of male sexuality as it fetishizes domination and submission.
I’m not enough of a MacKinnon scholar to know if she has a vision of what sex ought to look like or will be like or what we can best approximate in the here and now.
Dwayne Monroe, who sometimes comments, once dated a MacKinnon/Dworkin fan and he’s described the elaborate negoations in volved in getting to sex — which he didn’t seem to mind. :)
MacKinnon strikes me as someone who simply does not speak to the issue. It is irrelevant is how she seems to view it in the Radical Feminist Radio Interviews.
And I’m guessing MacKinnon wouldn’t say we don’t enjoy sex under these conditions. We do. But she’d say, just like Amanda, Twisty, and everyone else who criticizes us: the problem is, you’re a fool and you’re embarassing real feminists by ignoring the fact that it’s all about domination and submission.
At least, that’s the message I’m getting
also, forgot:
.
If you read her closely, she’s ripping apart every argument ever set for by any of us in Bloglandia. She’s attacked, above, Belledame’s arguments about sexuality, Amber’s arguments, Renegade Evolution’s, antiprincess’s posts, etc.
Which is why I think that, when we take the tack we take, they simply smirk and laugh and point like we’re clowns riding around on unicycle hoking big horns and wearing floppy shoes.
Personally, I happen to think that MacKinnon’s the real clown here…but that doesn’t hide the essential brutality of her reductionist and ultimately condemning visions of male sexuality and her repressive solutions to deal with such.
The most fascinating quote that I find from that long and windy passage was that tidbit about sex being not only one vector of women’s oppression, but THE SOLE UNDERPINNING of patriarchy and women’s inequality….even more so than even the traditional institutions of the Church, the State, and the Family. It’s almost as if C-MacK believed that everything about women’s equality with men rested upon women physically castrating men’s erections and imposing a supposedly natural “feminist” sexuality (which somehow manages to exist outside the otherwise overwhelming and domineering patriarchy in spite of the efforts of men intervening with their evil, invasive erections)…never mind political or social institutional equality or equal pay or health care or reproductive freedom. It’s all about the erect dick and its “invasion” of women for her….and anyone who actually admits to getting pleasure from such is merely rationalizing and justifying the rape and murder of other women.
No middle ground, no compromise, no negotiation at all. Either you are with her or you are with the rapists and the patriarchs and the “pornstitutes” and the “pornographers”. And if you are a woman who happens to have an experience that varies one bit from her crackpot theory of essential submission and rape (and essential male rapicity)….well, you are just a traitor to your gender who cheers and masturbates to murder and abuse of women.
And perhaps MacK may even acknowledge, as Miz B stated, that people may even enjoy “patriarchial” sex quite much….but that doesn’t matter; indeed, the fact that you enjoy such makes you that much more of a traitor in that the pleasurable sex is just a ruse to excuse and justify the murder and rape and torture of other women…and as such, it is considered that much worse in supporting women’s oppression.
It’s not surprising to me at all that from this belief sprang not only the fundamental erotophobic (sorry, Miz B and others, but that remains my fundamental view of antiporn feminsts; even if they particularly personally like sex, since they are so willing to impose restrictions on the rest of us) policies; but that they would be so obsessed with restricting and policing the sex choices of even lesbians. Since negating men altogether isn’t a viable option (since even radicallesbians want to propagate themselves, and they can’t do it without male sperm); the next best thing is to demonize and obliterate men’s erections as the root of “patriarchy”…and to regulate the boundaries of what constitues female sexuality as well.
I didn’t buy this crock of crap when it was wrapped in fundamentalist Christian language….and I’m just not buying it now, either. To paraphrase a common popular song lyric: Their shit stanks like any other’s.
Anthony
RenEv –
Linda Nicholson writes of MacKinnon:
Anthony
It doesn’t help to go reductionist to the other side and ignore the existence of rape, abuse, harassment, etc.
Alsomst every single woman here has been the object of unwanted male attention: attempted rape, rape, sexual abuse, child abuse, spousale/partner abuse, emotional abuse, sexual harassment on the job and in school, and inappropriate sexualization in the work place and other environs where such talk and advances are unwelcome.
To pretend that men are somehow harmed by this woman and her followers is a gross mischaracterization. You don’t otherwise face anyone else in this fucking society that treats male sexuality this way at all. The ideal is not embedded in our major social instutitons such as the media, law, etc.
Black men do, but they are being oppressed *as* black men, not *as* men in general.
—-
as to the second paragraph, it makes no sense. MacKinnon is saying that entire reason why sex sucks under patriarchy is not the penis, but the entire system within which sex takes place: unequal pay, the enslavement of marriage, etc.
except she doesn’t say that. She doesn’t attack those who enjoy sex under patriarchy.
She attacks argument’s like those made by Belledame, Amber, Foucault, Freudians, liberal feminists, etc.
We have to argue with what she actually says, not a figment of her imagination. I know you’re not interested in giving radical feminists any sort of fair shake.
And while I could personally give a shit, I DO care abotu feminist theory and I DO care about feminism. That means I’m not going to slash and burn them on the basis of things they do not say.
I want to understand what is said, why it’s said, the purposes and goals because it is part of a tradition of thinking I have been involved in for nearly 20 years now.
Oy….here we go again with the reductionist argument.
Look, Miz B….I do NOT IN ANY WAY deny the existence of rape or abuse of women…where did you get that from??? Heck, I know of even the most sex-positive feminist women who have been victims of unwanted male attention; why would I even want to deny that otherwise??
Nor do I deny the basic fact that women in this society do indeed face real issues with coercion….I see it all too clearly in real life.
But…I do say that MacKinnon’s theories do matter because many of her self-identified followers do in fact on occasion make direct criticisms on male sexuality in general (and not merely out of the overall system of patriarchy, either).
Also…..it’s not only MacKinnon’s words in this text that matter; it is her activism and deeds that should be held into account. After all, she did openly support and back various “civil rights ordinances” which did nothing about the traditional structures of gender inequality (unequal pay, greater freedom of women within marriage, etc.)…but did do a lot about suing producers of “pornography” for treble damages as violators of women’s “civil rights”….not to mention her support of the Butler ruling in Canada that remains the main foundation for suppressing dissident sexual speech in Canada.
And…if indeed MacKinnon does, as you say, indict the entire system of patriarchy as the root of women’s oppression, then why is she so focused on only the sexual aspects of patriarchy, and so opposed to challenging other means directly?? I’ve never, ever heard or read her ever focusing on anything other than sexual harrassment and “pornstitution”…indeed, she even goes as far as to condemn more traditional feminists who don’t follow her analysis as “liberals” who aren’t radical enough/
Yes, we should indeed analyze Catherine MacKinnon by her own words…but her deeds and the impact of her policies on the general world should be as accountable.
Contrary to your notions of me, I am more than willing to give radicalfeminists the benefit of the doubt…if only they would give us on the other side the same.
I guess that we just have a difference of approach and opinions here. Oh, well….que sera, sera….even allies can argue.
Anthony
Anthony –
I realize you’ll give them what they want if they give you what they want.
That’s what I’m complaining about. They’re not going to give it to you.
But the point isn’t to change their minds. It’s to have intelligent discussions — among us and those who aren’t radical feminists.
When you bring up the damage done to men by radfems, it seems really out of place.
i’ve explained, before, why MacKinnon and other published radical feminists often attack those who aren’t on the Radical Feminist Klew Train. It is part of their very theory about how to bring about social change. There is no accident why radfems texts always include an attack on liberals, socialists, and no postmodernists.
I’m not sure why the issue is raised yet again as if it has no answer.
Why doestn’ she talk about anything else? Because she thinks the system will fall apart, or at least the beginnings of that falling apart will be initiated, with a radical attack on all forms of domination that keep women in check through everything from inappropriate sexualization in the public sphere to harassment to the fear of saying “No, I don’t want to do that” because you’re afraid of being called a prude to the fear of being emotionally manipulated and forced to have sex to the fear of rape or actual use of rape to keep women quiet and subdued.
I did have one question though. Why is it ok to call them erotophobic.
I dislike it when anyone calls people transphobes or homophobes.
I think it removes a structural level analysis from the picture and turns the issue of one where it’s all about individual irrational fears — which I see as plain old bullshit.
It turns what is clearly political into a depoliticized event in one person’s psyche.
Mm. A person I know was harmed by MacKinnon’s work. Her books (lesbian erotica) were stolen (AKA seized) by Canadian customs and destroyed. She lost money, which is certianly harmful.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but MacKinnon’s theory and personal testimony was instrumental in creating the censorship laws in canada, right? The history on the topic is a bit muddled, and I’m not an expert. I could be wrong.
She states in the article above that BDSM, as described by a female sadist, is paradigmatic of male sexuality as it fetishizes domination and submission.
I take it she’s not a proponent of the concept of subversion?
MacKinnon strikes me as someone who simply does not speak to the issue. It is irrelevant is how she seems to view it in the Radical Feminist Radio Interviews.
And I’m guessing MacKinnon wouldn’t say we don’t enjoy sex under these conditions. We do. But she’d say, just like Amanda, Twisty, and everyone else who criticizes us: the problem is, you’re a fool and you’re embarassing real feminists by ignoring the fact that it’s all about domination and submission.
Ignoring it? Heck no. I proclaim it. Proudly, even. What I disagree with is the idea that the enjoyment isn’t real, or that it’s somehow inapropriate, or in need of legal prohibitions against it.
My suspicion about MacKinnon is that she’d criminalize sex acts between willing participants even if there were no money involved, if she could get away with it. At least, that’s my reading of her work. But with so much goddamn academic jargon, it’s impossible to tell for sure.
Yup.
yeh, i dunno: there are a lot of concepts there that the woman would appear to be unclear on, irony not least of which.
between this sort of thing, and some of the hinkier expressions it had in the heyday of this sort of feminism (i.e. irate radical lesbian feminists smashing a lesbian BDSM nightclub in England, on accounta they were opposed to violence against women), and such stuff as oh i don’t know the Lynndie England crap–hey, torture’s grand, as long as it’s in a good cause! but no consensual sex please, we’re soldiers!–i keep thinking more and more maybe it’s time to go back to that idea i had of reworking Genet’s “Balcony” for the times, somehow.
…and now i know from whence the anti-Kinsey sentiment is coming, or one place, anyway. sheesh.
Re: Does MacKinnon oppress?
I would say that MacKinnon is definitely responsible for some very real oppression insofar as her legal theories have been institutionalized into law. Josh has brought up the example the example of Canadian censorship that was reinforced by her legal theories. There’s also examples of over-application of “hostile environment” sexual harassment laws (which largely came from MacKinnon, if I’m not mistaken) being overapplied in such a way that it directly violated academic freedom or attempted to prevent “harassing” images from being published. (I’ll have to dig up Eugene Volokh’s “Every Place is a Workplace” article which cites numerous examples of sexual harassment law being applied to academic speech, publishing, and a host of other clearly inapropriate areas.) MacKinnon herself said in the radio interview you linked to earlier that hostile environment law should apply everywhere.
Does MacKinnon or anybody like her oppress men as Class Men? That’s a tricky question – I think that is her end-game, and as a man, I am pretty sensitive to the deep-seated man-hatred in her kind of radical feminism. In the present, I think MacKinnon-inspired laws just reinforce estabished forms of oppression – “normal” modest people coming down on the perverts, the pornographers, the kinky, the whores, and the queers – men and women alike.
I think along with man-hatred, there is a deep-seated erotiphobia in MacKinnon. Sex seems to be presented as this terrible thing that men do to women, either to hurt them, or at the very least to seduce them into subordination, and that brainwashed gay people use to reinforce their own power relationships. So yes, I think erotiphobia is hard-wired into radfem theory.
Are individual radical feminists erotiphobic? I don’t know what their sex lives are like, and really I don’t care. (It does seem to attract an inordinate number of women with painful sexual histories, so I can see where a negative view of sex (based on some very real negative experiences) might play a role.) The ideology and the actions based on it are erotophobic, though, and I think crticism on that level is entirely valid.
It interesting that you don’t like it when anyone calls people homophobes. Do you also feel the same about calling someone a racist or a sexist? Clearly these are all systemic problems, and certainly, labels like “racist” and “sexist” are way overused to shame people as individuals. But clearly, some behaviors are racist and sexist, and if a person behaves that way enough, its probably appropriate to call them “racist” or “sexist”. I think few people would have much of a problem calling David Duke a racist or Fred Phelps a homophobe, and I think “erotiphobe” or “prude” is not out of line for somebody who puts a similar amount of energy into punishing other people’s sexuality.
Re: Debating radical feminism on its own terms
I get that its important to understand where MacKinnon and radical feminists are coming from. (Though I have my doubts that Pony, Delphyne, Sam Berg, or most other “radfems on the street” really have a deep understanding of MacKinnon’s legal theory, either.) At the same time, I just don’t accept their basic premises, so I’m not going to debate within that framework. Strip away the mystifying rhetoric, and they’re basically saying, “you’re either with us or with The Patriarchy”. What if you reject both? What if you have doubts that “Patriarchy” in the form they describe it even exists? What if you just don’t think all oppression can be boiled down to “Class Man” keeping down “Class Women”?
Also, my criticisms of radical feminism come from a very practical place. When I see radical feminists supporting some of the worst causes of the religious right (and they have done this quite explicitly, a few times), I’m not sure if I particularly care about the finer points of their theory – their activism is reactionary and should be opposed. I suppose by way of analogy, I could posit the example of somebody being picked up by the Gestapo versus somebody being picked up by Stalin’s NKVD. Does it really make a huge difference that in one case the killers are motivated by a deeply racist ideolgy and the other by a twisted version of Marxist dialectics?
In any event, I will read the MacKinnon chapter you posted. Its the kind of thing I need to print out, though – I don’t like reading at that length on my computer. (Just printed it – 12 pages!)
I am with iacb wrt: homophobe, transphobe, erotophobe, even. i don’t see the words as particularly being inconsistent with a systemic approach to those phenomena. the important thing is whether or not you see the problem as macro rather than (just) some person’s inexplicable knee-jerk hatred for Those People (the “tolerant,” moderate-to-liberal view, i guess); but that goes equally for racism. it’s not the word.
>Does MacKinnon or anybody like her oppress men as Class Men? That’s a tricky question – I think that is her end-game, and as a man, I am pretty sensitive to the deep-seated man-hatred in her kind of radical feminism. In the present, I think MacKinnon-inspired laws just reinforce estabished forms of oppression – “normal†modest people coming down on the perverts, the pornographers, the kinky, the whores, and the queers – men and women alike.>
certainly agree with the latter part of this. I have no idea what her end-game truly is, if she even has one–cynically i have this notion that she’s just fine with you know the adulation ‘n’ being taken seriously and shit, but i could be wrong–and i seriously doubt that it will ever get there even if that IS the intention, if only because there is far too much precedent and momentum in the other direction.
as they say, however, sometimes, “it’s the thought that counts.”
anyway back to “erotophobia” for a sec: i think it’s legitimate in that it is in fact a -cultural- legacy, this fear and even hatred of sexuality per se, YES. it is, as we say, in the manual: Old and New Testaments for sure (not completely unambiguously, no, but overwhelmingly so), and it’s in our collective as well as personal history.
and again, i really wanna talk more about Reich one of these days, among others.
so, yeah. it is different to my mind from just going, “oh, that dried-up prude, what does she know anyway.” as far as I can see MacKinnon herself may well like sex just fine–certainly she likes the menfolks just fine, as long as they’re quick with the metaphorical rimjobs. not really the issue here.
but eros, you know, given free rein, can be radically destablizing in many ways, personally and collectively. They don’t call orgasm “the little death” for nothing; they don’t call it “the two-backed beast” for nothing. And we are a culture dedicated (in theory at least) to Individualism. and “progress,” including in the area of health and pure survival, longevity: collectively speaking we have even more issues around death than sex. so, you know, to TRULY let go into eroticism is, well, pretty fucking scary for a lot of people: it means a loss of control, a loss of self, a melting, a fluidity…
that shit is scary. maybe not BAD scary if you really let it, but for a lot of people, even those without actual abusive experience with this powerful energy, can be very leery of it without even quite realizing just how controlled they still are.
and collectively? well, if you don’t like Reich, there’s always Orwell, 1984, you know, where Julia talks about this shit in kind of the Cliff’s Notes version, roughly (too lazy to look up actual quote):
something like, they don’t want you to have orgasms, much less be happy, physically, with another person, because happy people don’t make good warriors, and they need all that bottled-up energy for the Two Minute Hate and so on and so on.
which is why really cheap, tawdry porn is okay as long as it’s not TOO real, TOO satisfying, just as mechanical and dreary as everything else; and it’s not for the truly elite in any case; just another sop for the proles, you know.
but so yeah: MacKinnon here is voicing, among other things, the familiar complaint that the sexual revolution (which makes use of a lot of this same thinking: “make love not war,” etc.) was just another excuse for men to exercise domination over women, only more so. TF was just talking about this; Burrow was talking about this; lots of people talk about this. and with good reason. sure. “free love” without examination of sexism just means “put out for the revolution, and then go make us all a chocolate chicken pot PAH.”
of course, what Kitty conveniently ignores is that there have been a number of others in these last 30-40 years who specifically address this, you know, queer folk, and others; and yet it’s still blah blah blah GINGER…
meh.
One thing I’ve never quite figured out about MacKinnon is her self-presentation. There’s something almost Victorian and schoolmarmish about her appearance and the way she presents herself. I’ve never figured out whether that image was deliberate, or whether it was just an unconcious byproduct of the conservative Upper Midwest culture she came out of.
As for liking the menfolk, she was married for a few years to notorious lothario Jeffery Mason. He claimed that she reformed his womanizing ways – such an old line to fall for! (I guess she never read Dangerous Liasons or saw any of the movie versions.)
And according to Alice Echols book Daring to be Bad, this kind of thing was one of the main reasons for the emergence of radical feminism. But there was a lot of debate in early radical feminism between women like Ti-Grace Atkinson who pretty much adopted a “sex is sexist” line and lesser-known figures like Karen Lindsey who argued that the entire sexual revolution shouldn’t be thrown out just because of many men’s sexist appropriation of it.
OK, my first impression upon reading the first few pages of the MacKinnon chapter is that there is a clear difference between her and Dworkin. Dworkin could actually write a clear, concise sentence!
But MacKinnon, well, oh my god:
Fuck me, she’s a bad writer!
First of all, I’m reminded — with a terrible sick feeling — of just how compelling I found the arguments of Dworkin and MacKinnon when I was much younger. I believe I understand at least part of the reason B|Lab posted these long excerpts. I believe MacKinnon is wrong, but profoundly wrong. Her arguments are not to be dismissed with a handwave. Amanda Marcotte, for instance, who had been arguing for an explicitly “sex-positive” point of view from the beginning of her blogging career has recently shifted into reverse on this point, since as a liberal, she doesn’t actually have a clear political theory, and didn’t have a way to deal with the gaps in her account of sexuality.
I have always felt that pornography, for the most part, is toxic, and I think MacKinnon’s pretty much right that most of it is obsessed with abuse and power of men over women. And yet, it’s difficult to disentangle that from our experience of sexuality.
I do have to disagree with B|Lab on one point: while it is true that MacKinnon is not arguing for biological determinism, is not saying that the problem is the penis, it’s also clear that she is arguing that sexuality is violence, period. Dworkin, by contrast, spends a few paragraphs in Intercourse repeated with approval another writer’s imagination of non-coercive sex. But MacKinnon denies that there can be any form of sexual freedom for women. Though she never actually uses the phrase, MacKinnon’s entire argument is that all sex is rape, and that therefore we should do away with sexuality entirely.
(I have to admit, there was one passage which I thought would clinch the argument on that point, but I’m not sure whether MacKinnon actually meant this bit, as it occurs in a description of a point of view she’s critiquing:
If reproduction actually had any-thing to do with what sex was for, it would not happen every night (or even twice a week) for forty or fifty years, nor would prostitutes exist.)
To counter-argue MacKinnon, I think the thing to seize upon is her denial of the possibility of women resisting their own oppression. MacKinnon does not argue dialectically. In the last two quoted paragraphs, she draws an analogy between women’s sexuality and Black culture — and proceeds to deny that either have any value as forms of resistance, because they are the creations of people who are oppressed. But of course, any form of resistance is created by the oppressed under conditions of oppression, and the conditions of repression affect the forms of resistance. By MacKinnon’s account, no form resistance against oppression could ever be a means to human liberation.
I’m reminded of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, in which he comments on trends among politically minded writers in Russia in the period shortly after the October Revolution. Some writers and artists claimed they were completely rejecting the art forms of past ruling classes and creating an entirely new, authentically proletarian literature. Trotsky’s point was that this was not what was happening, and was not how revolutions worked. The working class would begin with the material it inherited from the past, the traditions of bourgeois literature, and would adapt it to its own ends, and insofar as there would be a proletarian literature, that’s how it would be created: the new would be created from the old.
I should note, I’ve thought that Trotsky overstated it a bit, as there is such a thing as art created by the working class, even as it is oppressed.
Similarly, I would suggest that, problematic as sexuality is in a sexist world, women would begin by adopting elements of sexuality as given to them, and make it their own. The point is the oppressed finding their own agency. If, as MacKinnon describes, sexuality is entirely a social construction, that women can play the role of men, then there’s no real reason why women can’t reshape the tools of oppression into tools of liberation. The point is that women claim their own right to name their desires and pursue them.
And, in any audience worth addressing on the subject, women (and men) will have the experience of attempting to break through their restrictive gender roles and constricted sexualities to find what they really want — with at least occasional moments of success.
And I think such sweeping statements are where MacKinnon and other anti-porn writers get it entirely wrong. I guess the difference is, I’ve actually seen a lot of porn (anti-porn folks would surely say I’ve been brainwashed by it) and I find that generalizations that “pornography is….” are hardly more supportable than a statement like “film is….” or “literature is….”. The only thing I can generalize about pornography is that its about sex. The kind of porn that really is explicitly about violence and domination (like Max Hardcore’s videos) is a fringe genre.
Most of the porn I’ve seen looks like, well, sex. Often sex in weird positions so that you can get a good camera angle, often sex that’s practically sleep-walked through by bored talent, and occasionally very good erotic sex caught on camera. But definitely sex, as I understand sex from having done it (and having watched it a few times in person). This is where I’m coming from when I say that anti-porn is an erotiphobic ideology, because I don’t think a blanket critique of pornography can exist independent of a blanket critique of sex itself.
And as you point out, that’s exactly where MacKinnon is going.
Dworkin has a rather infamous passage in her first book, Woman Hating, where she advocates, come the overthrow of The Patriarchy, a kind of utopian pansexuality that can include bestiality, incest, and pedophilia. This was after the revolution, of course – right now, the priority is to restrict male sexuality.
She doesn’t explicitly ever say that, but in the context of her legal argument, its impossible to define rape, since there’s no concept of what is not rape. So presumably, any sex act at any time could ultimately be prosecuted as rape if someone (even a third party maybe?) later filed charges, without the need for prove in court that consent was not given. In itself, that would seem to be a misogynistic caricature of the feminist anti-rape movement, but it seems like that’s where MacKinnon is going. (And certainly I remember a lot of “if a man is accused of rape, he’s guilty” rhetoric in the early 90’s.)
and, too, you know, i came to “porn” from an explicitly queer/lesbian/kink angle. so i went striaght as it were for the indie shit (well as soon as i learned how to differentiate), some gayboy stuff as well; and, well, i’ve said this before, but the heterocentric teeth-gnashing over “porn” as they understand it (and admittedly it does make up by far the vast majority of what’s out there, but), well, I Don’t Get It. i mean, i DO get it but i also find it exasperating: use your damn imagination, then! at the end of the day? it’s just pictures and words and videos: about SEX. don’t like this shit? imagine your own. and if you can’t, if you CAN’T, then okay, but maybe it might be time to seriously unpack why for you is this genre different from all other genres: not horror, not comedy, not “art for art’s sake,” not agitprop, not tearjerkers, not cooking…you know.
It’s people making, yes, ART, about their experiences and their imagination, same as any damn other area in the world. it’s part of being human. the fact that so much of it is dreary sexist by-the-numbers, even hateful bilge, well, maybe it might be worth looking at that more seriously, yes.
but as long as it’s stuck in the endless parroting of IT’S ALL BADBADBADBADBAD, this is not gonna go anywhere useful, i’m convinced.
and yes, on the whole i can understand the continuing appeal of Dworkin far better than MacKinnon: as you say, much better writer. -Much.-
and, you know, passion, i get where she’s coming from even if i also think, ooooh, honey, nononono, cringe, sigh.
MacKinnon, i don’t know, but the term “duckspeak” often comes to mind. and what is her investment in all this anyway, really? maybe that shit shouldn’t matter, some people think; but it does to me, esp. if you’re gonna be all “personal is political” and make with the crafting of policy. yes.
per “sex as violence:” well i guess that is what we were talking about wrt Derrida, no? he’s not the only one: the basic idea is, i think, -maybe- even for MacKinnon, although in the context of all her other baggage it’s hard to interpret it as anything other than negative, but: “violent” as in “violation,” an intrusion into a space; not “owie ow ow, hurts.”
funny, i was reminded in the msot recent brouhaha: Violet Socks had at one point been making a similar distinction wrt “violent,” you know, as in penetration is inherently -violating.-
and some of her regulars did misread her as saying something like “therefore, all intercourse is rape, or at least: harsh, painful, something. violent like an actin movie violent.”
and clearly that -isn’t- what she meant.
but so RB says more or less the same thing (I think??) and gets clobbered for it.
and now some people in this latest thrash are referring to her, VS, as “Violent,” i have been noticing, i think unintentionally.
just, multiple ironies, really.
First off….thanks, iacb, for stating my core views on MacKinnon better and clearer than I ever could. The problem is not her (or other radfems’) personal sexual habits, but their unwillingness to acknowledge and accept any form of autonomy for others.
Next, to Miz B: Of course, labels like “homophobe” and “racist” and “fascist” and “erotophobe” are sometimes slung forth in the heat of battle and grossly overused…but in this case, I still feel that “erotophobic” is very much appropriate given MacKinnon’s totally reductionist view of sexuality as innately negative and subordinating. The only real difference between MacKinnon’s vision of sexuality and the Christian/Islamic/Fundamentalist Right’s vision (though they are indeed different) is the type of person they would place on the pedestal. (The wife and breeder for the Fundie Right; the monogamous, “intimacy-seeking” upper-class woman for the MacDworkinites.) Otherwise, the circle of the proscribed sexualities looks exactly the same.
Of course, the antiporn advocates and the MacDworkinites would simply, as B|L stated, dismiss all this with the flight of the hand (”Sure you would disagree, you’re a MAN who benefits directly from patriarchy!!”)….but nothing you say will change their beliefs anyway.
Finally to this point that iacb made:
Indeed, in both the model antiporn “civil rights ordinances” that MacKinnon helped develop in the 80s and in the sexual harrassment “hostile climate” statutes that she pioneered, there was a distinct assumption that a woman (or even a third party filing suit on behalf of “all women”) did not have to even prove any notion of lack of consent; her mere assertions would be assumed to be proof enough that hostile intent did occur.
While I do tend in the absence of real evidence to favor the one claiming to be abused, I’m not so willing to throw out the evidence and convict people based solely on assumptions like this.
And there is an even more recent case where MacKinnon shows her bias: last year she posted a column in the Los Angeles Times decrying a recent court decision to throw out a claim of “hostile climate” sexual harrassment by a former intern with the TV hit series Friends, who claimed that she was exposed to graphic sexual language and porn while on the set….though she never claimed that she was directly harrassed or propositioned by any of the talent or the staff herself. (The column is linked here.) An exerpt:
Apparantly, the judge presiding over the case didn’t agree with McK’s version of the facts, which is why the case was dismissed.
Funny…but I didn’t hear Lisa Kudrow. Jennifer Anniston or Courtney Cox-Arquette complaining at any time about any “abusive” or “derogatory” sexual behavior leveled at them….but I guess that in MacK’s mind, they are merely paid agents of the patriarchy.
Anthony
BL, BD, et all-
meh, McKinnon gives me headaches…one rant later, still she gives me headaches….
Can hetporn br violent & degrading. A yep. Does that in turn make the average joe (or jane) watching it violent or a willing sex toy to men? Nope. Is that type of porn truly the mainstream type? Nope.
Can sex itself be violent? Yep. However, is sex always all about politics and domination? Nope. Is a willing penis going into a willing vagina the same as getting your arm snapped? No way.
Are McKinnon and a lot of others seeing ghosts and demons where there are none? I tend to think so…
That’s an argument against porn that really bugs me – the idea that somebody seeing porn might be triggered to an act of sexual violence. The thing is, for somebody who’s violent or unstable, anything can be triggering.
And if we’re going to start banning things because they’re triggering, how about starting with the Bible and the Quran? It seems to me these works swamp all others as violent triggers. People have justified everything from child abuse to murder to self-mutilation to a certain act of mass murder 5 years ago today, all in the name of religion and I’m sure sanctioned by some or another chapter and verse.
You could also make a convincing case of “cultural harm” for these books.
Of course with religion there’s at least some perspective – we know that most sane religious people don’t use religion as an excuse for violence. They can even read explicitly violent passages like “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” and not go gun down the nearest coven of neo-pagans. Hell, some people even get inspired to do positive things based on religion.
I only wish anti-porn folks would figure out that most of us can similarly use our brain vis-a-vis porn.
Im notgoing to deny that mainstream male sexuality as it is sold to the public is tied to fetishizing hierarchy. I’m not going to deny that lots (but not all) of porn is a pathetic fantasy at best and straight up degrading at worst. But I have a real problem with this stuff when it comes to class.
First Id like to say that I dont think of patriarchy as as much of a human universal as MacKinnon seems to. Many diverse social systems have existed on earth only some(though many) of which were ever patriarchies, and certainly the patriarchy under which women had little rights to property, divorce, sexual expression, economic trading, martial skill and military participation, education etc etc has not been a universal. there are infinite variations of socity and in them ones sex may or may not correlate to social status .
So I dont buy that it is sexual oppresion that is the most fundemental oppression. I guess I kind of think the opposite, that sexism is a form of classism and that being sexually serviced is just one of the benifits for those in the highest class. IWomen in the world provide tons of free labor, producing and rearing children, running households, farming, trading, providing water and firewood, providing emotional support. In this country women do the lowest paying work, or the same work for less money. To me the system is about getting work/services out of women, it can be sexual but by no means is that the totality of it. Of course its hard to talk of women as a class, becuase the there are additional hierarchies of race,and class so that women may have more social status in common with men of thier own race and class than other women. But still, thats where I break with rad-fems.
“Though she never actually uses the phrase, MacKinnon’s entire argument is that all sex is rape, and that therefore we should do away with sexuality entirely.”
Oh whatever. She never says this. She says that male sexuality is constructed as getting off on domination and that if you are having sex that narrative is probably there whether you like it or not. No where does she say that all sex is inherently had without consent of the woman.
She doesn’t expressly forbid any sex act, or condemn sex itself either. I;m not sure she does anything except state the problem as she sees it. Not having sex in her scenario would only treat the symptom and not the cause.
She does say
“to seek an equal sexuality without political transformation is to seek equality under conditions of inequality.”
Which seems to imply that she thinks the solution is to try to change the system, and change the way we percieve sex, not not having sex or condeming certain sex acts.
I mean I may think rad-fems spend a little too much time worrying about the sex-class part of class and all, but dude, be fair here.
I will grant that, Carpenter, that C-MacK does not go as far as to say that ALL sex is rape, or that sexuality should be done away with. That indeed is a myth.
However…she does explicitly state that much of male/female sexual intercourse as it exists does come pretty damn close to rape due to the innate system of male domination and female submission; and that the mere presence of a male erection penetrating a woman’s vagina does constitute a literal “invasion” of a woman’s body and integrity for mere purposes of domination.
And while she does talk a lot about changing the system and changing perceptions of how we think about sex; she also has actively promoted legislation and laws to explicitly proscribe the types of sexual behavior and expression (including behavior consentually sought after) that she perceives as “injurous” and “degrading” to all women. That’s a bit more than merely talking about changing attitudes; that’s using the power of the state to impose her will on others.
And did you catch her paragraphs explicitly condemning BDSM, sex acts in porn, and other consensual sex acts as innately “degrading”, as well as her lecture condemning men who view porn as wanting “women killed”??? Hardly the words of someone who merely wants to set the record straight.
But, as you said…whatever.
Anthony
haven’t read this thread yet, will tomorrow, but Anthony, darlin’, I have to call bullshit on this one:
What I think is interesting is that it’s TEH MACKINNON MONSTER!!!!11ONE!!11
oh my god oh my god oh my god.
great men didn’t make history and neither do monstrous women.
where IS the socialist analysis, dude! Where?
she imposed nothing. we are still living in a putative democracy.
jesus christ. read the critiques of her totalizing structuralism. are we really going to move beyond that bullshit if you turn around and totalize their power as crushing you and male masculinity like so many ants beneath macKinnon’s jackboot?
[...] What is driving my anger is this exchange over at Bitch|Lab in which Ms. B resets one of MacKinnon’s earlier seminal essays, in which KittyMacK asserts her fundamental belief that sexual domination of women by men is the fundamental lynchpin of “patriarchy”, and as a result, no act of sex, even if willfully consented to by women, can be construed in any form other than male domination of women….if not absolute rape. [...]
phobe - fear — irrational fear.
there is nothing irrational about any of this.
it’s just insulting to people who really do have phobias. and yes, time and time again, the person so charged says, “what, I’m not irrational. I have rational godamned reasons for wanting to outlaw gay marrieg.”
true that people will individualize the analysis, but to avoid the disparaging language in the first place and get right to the heart of the matter, without having it be so easy to discredit the idea.
and I honestly don’t get it: heteronormativity and the like was used long before, as a crucial recognition of the structural aspects of it. why trot out homophobia and other -phobia words and shit on the work of those who already tilled this soil?
particularly with “erotophobia” — there are systematic reasons why this sort of things rooted in a gender, class and race based analysis of sexuality and discourses around sexuality.
why fuck it up with a word that simply doesn’t capture the systematicity *and* is used as an insult rather than an actual analysis.
it’s the insult thing that is really troubling. why fucking use words that insult other people?
OK…let me try this again:
No, I did NOT say that MacKinnon was “crushing” me or any other man at any time…I do say that she supported active policies that would have directly (or indirectly) regulated the acceptable boundaries of sexual expression.
The fact that those laws were found to be grossly unconstitutional and removed from the books does not erase the basic fact of her stated intentions.
Maybe her past essays were intended to merely challenge attitudes, and that I can accept, even if it strongly disagree with her core beliefs. But when she actively works to take away rights from not only men but women, then that’s when I just have to call her out.
You can call it BS if you want to, Miz B….but that’s how I feel about it.
The socialist analysis will come later, when I’m a bit less peeved….though NOT at you.
Anthony
“impose her will on others”
I was calling you out on this language.
she hasn’t imposed her will. we still live in a godamned democracy. the rhetoric is militating against your meaning.
or are you pomo? :)))))))))))))))))
OK…so I should not have said that she wanted to “impose her will on others”..that does seem to make C-MacK to be more of a monster than I intended. I apologize for that.
Would it be clearer if I said that she helped the forces of the Right in imposing THEIR general view of sexuality, because hers was so close to theirs??
It may still be BS to ‘ya..but it’s MY BS. I’ll take the responsibility for my own words.
Anthony
well, i think the alliance is interesting. and not surprising if you kind of take a chip berlet view on it all — left right alliances that is.
i do think, though, that there are important differences. e.g.
do both see male sexuality is the problem?
do both see women as victims?
does the right even have something close to a social theory?
that sort of thing. perhaps meaningless to you, since your interest is more polemical i think. interesting intellectually, to me, and in terms of not looking like total aholes to those who aren’t MacKinnon fans, but are also not interested in MacKinnon bashing, I think it’s worth being careful in this regard.
If only because we want, perhaps, to look at other ways in which a MacKinnon-like politics of victimization plays itself out in alliance with other rightwing forces, yes?
do that make sense? I’m thinking there’s a bigger pattern here — in terms of the vicimization angle that makes sense to explore.
I’m not at all convinced that there’s that clear a delineation between “rational” and “irrational.” In general. In life.
And when you have a guy not just killing a gay man who “made a pass at him” but mutilating him and stabbing him dozens of times; when you have people acting a though gay marriage is a threat on the order of aliens coming and taking our precious bodily fluids; when you have all those shrieky nervous loud jokes about “soap in the shower” and endless crap about o I don’t know BLOWJOBS BLOWJOBS BLOWJOBS BLOWJOBS…
you know what? i don’t buy it. i don’t care what the theory behind it is; there’s ALWAYS a theory. that doesn’t mean it makes any goddam sense at the end of the day. this isn’t “rational.” or, well, frankly? no more or less so than any other phobia; after all, most people who are say claustrophobic are so for good reasons as well, even if not immediately explicable to other people or even themselves.
-There are always reasons.-
and you know: if someone with a more traditional sort of individual phobia wants to say directly that they have a problem with this terminology, well, i’ll listen.
but I am sorry: until someone comes up with a suitable replacement for this, yes, HATE and FEAR, then i’m using those words.
and once again: people use the words in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY that they use “racism” or “sexism.” You can use it to mean structural oppression; or you can use it to mean OMG BAD IRRATIONAL HATEFUL PERSON WHO CLEARLY JUST HAS ISSUES. and frankly, as we’ve been seeing lately, that’s how quite a lot of people DO use “racism.”
it’s not the word.
and no, to reiterate, none of this is by way of saying -I- believe MacKinnon herself is necessarily some sort of sex-fearing manhater.
rather that i -do- believe that it is appropriate to talk about hatred and fear at an institutionalized level, -because that’s what this is.- Inherited cultural squick. Fear and loathing. Yes. Yes. Yes.
sorry to shout, and yes i do care what the theory is.
it’s just, it’s a particular source of irritation to me, this notion that, well, some shit is “rational” and some shit is not, and there is a clear and bright line dividing the two. According to whom? Hey, my mishegoses make perfect sense to me; they may not make sense to you; but.
I could say that I’m terrified of dogs because a dog bit me when I was younger;
or I could explain calmly how dogs in fact are filthy and dangerous and should not be kept as pets, for xyz reasons;
and neither one of these explanations cancels out the other, or, I maintain, is any more -rational- than the other.
there are always reasons. Always.
it’s all kreplach, is what it is. explain to the nice rational-seeming man how gay marriage isn’t actually hurting his own marriage. nod. here are statistics showing how in fact gay marriage would be a stabilizing force for society and any children involved. nod. also leads to a decrease in the things you say you’re worried about, promiscuity, disease, broken homes. nod nod. look! these other countries have legalized it and curiously enough they have NOT fallen into the sea! nod. and as you’ve said yourself, some of your best friends are gay; you don’t want to hurt the, right? oh, no. and look: it DOES matter: here is a list of 787 or so benefits that automatically come with marriage. huh. never knew that. so how’s about it, pally? how you gonna vote? sorry, i hear what you’re saying but can’t get behind it because xyz and my religion and my philosophy and KREPLACH! SPECIAL RIGHTS! FAGGOTS! OHMIGOD FAGGOTS COMING AFTER OUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS AND KIDS NONONONONO LALALALALALA I CAN’T HEEEAAAAARRRR YOU…”
note: that last bit does not have to be actually spoken out loud to be existant.
…as you can probably guess, button pushed here.
besides yes i think it’s worth seriously talking about the line between irrational and rational (and you know, i do think there is such a thing as a collective mishegos, as Jung might have said), yeah okay, i have this…thing…about people who go “but i’m NOT a homophobe! really, i have nothing against THOSE PEOPLE, certainly don’t hate them, not scared of them, no. i -just…-”
yah, okay, they “just.” calm, smiling, makes perfect sense…until you press ‘em. and even then, oh you won’t get them to SAY they -hate- much less -fear- (who on earth would be scared of a bunch of homos? why that, that would sound downright…pathetic), just, you know, it starts to get a bit flaky around the edges.
and i am sitting here thinking: seriously? we’re supposed to take such people absolutely on the level, argue endlessly and patiently with their “logic” and “facts” and “theory” even when it’s already been shown to any person who WANTS to see it that it’s got more holes than a moth-ravaged Swiss Cheese? and that we’ve already been around this particular merry-go-round a thousand times and you can call this or that logical fallacy or inconsistency or cite the other study till you’re blue in the breasts, and none of it matters because
KREPLACH
but, you know, they never stop smiling, and they never raise their voice, and it -sounds- like it all makes sense more or less.
No, perhaps it’s not useful to reduce it to an individual pathology; but i maintain that by now “homophobia” is well understood not to be any more or less such than any of the “isms.”
and that people who try to argue that gee gosh no they don’t hate or fear, well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t; but the fact of the matter is that they are basing their arguments on, among other things, a cultural inheritance that gets much of its drive from fear and loathing.
it ISN’T rational, even if they themselves are perfectly sane by anyone’s standards.
and frankly i’d say the same for the “isms” as well, or…
well, so, yeah, that -is- a question: what makes it rational as opposed to not? Coherent arguments? A clear-to-everyone benefit for the oppressor if not so much anyone else? (i.e. material goods, real-world power)? Or?
I’ve been reading through the MacKinnon chapter (still not done) and “rational” isn’t really an adjective that comes to mind. (”Over-the-top” and “paranoid” are the adjectives that most come to mind.) There really isn’t much grounding in “if A and B are true, therefore C”. Just a series of assertions that you can take or leave, and I mostly leave.
I mean, there just is no entry point into her way of thinking unless you totally buy her basic premise that male power over women is total and absolute down to the very core of consciousness, and all sexuality (even between women) is an absolutely harmful expression of this power. If you don’t wholly buy this premise, than nothing else she has to say follows logically.
In other words, you have to be with her pretty much down to the level of zero-order beliefs or none of this makes any sense.
One question that always comes up when reading MacKinnon and other radfems, though. She points to a massive system of false consciousness that women are brainwashed by. She pretty much accuses sex-positive feminists of this in the above chapter, though she doesn’t use the term “false consciousness”. The central question is – if most women are victims of false consciousness, where did MacKinnon stumble across authentic consciousness? A related point – how can MacKinnon be sure that sex-postive feminists are brainwashed by the male-dominated sexual revolution, but her ideology is free from male-dominated puritanism? I don’t think MacKinnon has claimed that the Goddess appeared to her and handed her The Truth on golden tablets. Yet, she certainly seems to think she has The Truth.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here and I’m not sure why its “insulting”. I’m just calling her ideas the way I see them. Even if I didn’t know the first thing about MacKinnon, even if the above passage was by an anonymous author, I’d still read those words as “My God, this person has issues with men and sex”.
And none of this is denying that there’s systemic/historic reasons for MacKinnon’s beliefs. Once it was commonplace for white middle- to upper-class women to view themselves as vessels of purity and men as beastly and animal. That was Victorianism (in a nutshell) and was pretty predominant up until the sexual revolution. It’s still overtly believed in by some religious-right women (eg, Wendy Shalit) and still has all kinds of resonance in the larger culture. I’m sure there all kinds of sound historical materialist analysis as to why middle-class women needed to take on this role in the past given their socio-economic position. And considering that middle-class women have been pushed/emancipated from the domestic sphere only very recently (historically speaking), its not surprising Victorianism is still around in some form.
But as for some kind of great social or historic truth that MacKinnon is getting at – I’m afraid I’m just missing it.
totally crossed signals IACB. I was talking about why words like homophobia, erotophobia, whorephobia, etc. muddy up the water when we’re talking to radfems or whoever disagrees. it’s hurled, not as an analytical concept that has any meaning, but as outright insult.
if not, then this concept *must* be fleshed out to make it clear to the person who is so labeled why she carries that particular burden of being “phobic”.
the words, it seem to me, simply attempt to replace the concepts we already ahve and which work fine already, with words that don’t help to clarify and simply double the personal insult. and which few who hurl them actually have an actual explanation for the phenom.
where the fuck does erotaphobia come from and why? is it the result of a peculiar set of circumstances in one’s childhood. baby got dropped on its head?
erotophobia seems particularly odd. just another word for prude, slapped with -phobia to make is sound medical and authoritative.
when Nina Hartley jumped in on an Andrea Dworkin thread a long time, she’d actually thought thru her use of Puritan, with a structural and cultural analysis, and it was an argument hard to beat.
one’s opponent can simply leave it at: “oh! you called me a prude!” or “Oh! you called me erotophobic! on what basis do you have ot make that claim? I like sex! ”
Nina refused to let them play that card.
Being the Henchwoman of the Patriarchy TM and all…
Someone gives me the keys to the porn empire and says, “Okay, woman, knock yourself out!” I take those keys, set up in southern California…and what changes? I am a woman, and the porn Czar to boot?
Not much. As Porn Czar, I would want WILLING performers who are of age and using condoms, but the content of porn? From the mild and vanilla to the ruthlessly degrading gonzo? Not a thing would change, because porn embodies fantasy, and people both fantasize and DO the things seen in porn, from the romantic romp in a rose strewn bedroom to the hardcore spit-fest gangbang…REAL people do those things, people who are not forced, paid, or pressured to do them, for their own reasons. Sometimes art does imitate life, and vice versa, and that is true with porn…
Hence my overwhelming desire to know what sex WILL be like when the revolution comes…because I know a ton of females who like the rough stuff…
She never said anything was “innately” anything Anthony. Pesonally I think prohibition isnt going to do a damn thing to stop the problems with porn McK mentions, but still shes not inventing the sex police, shes not saying dont have sex, she stating the problem as she sees it. So yeah, whatever.
Well, Chip Berlet is essentially a conspiracy theorist and a believer in guilt by very loose association. I don’t see all left-right alliances as wrong, but they do point to some commonality in underlying belief systems. Sex-positive feminists and left-libertarians have formed alliances with right-libertarians, after all, in anti-censorship and anti-anti-porn politics. That’s a political issue that’s more libertarian vs authoritarian than right vs left, and people lined up accordingly.
The alliances between anti-porn/abolitionist feminists and their religious-right counterparts also point to certain commonalities, mainly in terms of cultural conservatism and puritanism. (You’re not going to argue that cultural conservatism and puritanism don’t exist on the political Left, are you?)
Yes and no – specifically, the religious right sees all sexuality as a problem (though they’re particularly upset by gay sexuality), while radfems see the problem as “male-dominated” sexuality (which also covers a lot of female sexuality).
Hell, yes – check out Wendy Shalit and Rabbi Boteach sometime. The difference is that the religious-right holds that traditional gender roles protected women. Obviously, radfems don’t have any illusions about that.
No, hence they borrow language and analysis wholesale from radical feminists, probably without even understanding the full implication of the language they’re borrowing. Here’s a page from the American Decency Association who are upset about the “objectification” in the sports illustrated issue. Boteach also borrows pretty heavily on radical feminism.
That’s why I spend more energy debating anti-porn feminism than the anti-porn right. The latter barely have any theory beyond biblical chapter and verse. Anti-porn feminism pretty much is the theory of the anti-porn movement.
(As an anarchist writer once put it, “Anti-porn is the theory, repression is the practice!” A nice turn on Robin Morgan, I think.)
You’re certainly right about that.
totally OT — i was kinda speaking to Anthony in code, b/c of his participation in the LBO list. But I’ve been reading chip since ‘98 and in all that time he’s been nothing but unrelenting in his criticisms of conspiracy theorists — like 911 nutters, and so much of his criticisms of the far right was of the earlier conspiracy theories of liberals, secular humanism, jews, etc. I mean the guy gets rabid when he starts taking those suckers on.
i am curious about how Chip is seen as conspiracy theorist.
my ref to CB here was in regard to his argument that the far left start turning round the bend to meet up with the far right in an unholy alliance because they meet on particular grounds that seem strategically important. his fear is that this forms the basis for the potential to blow up into fascistic movements that combine elements of seeming populism that all about the people but really isn’t.
Use another word then – “prudish”, “sex-hating”, “puritanical” – makes no difference to me.
You’re basically saying, don’t resort to ad-hominum argument, and I understand that. But one can still call an idea “prudish” or “erotiphobic” or whatever and not be engaging in ad-hominum argument. And that’s precisely what I’m calling many of the statements and the overall drift in the above chapter you’ve posted. I mean, how the hell else can one read it?
As for MacKinnon herself – maybe she has a perfectly fantastic sex life, who knows? Her ideas, however, speak for themselves.
I guess I blundered a bit with my comments about pornography. To be more clear, I’m saying that most of the porn I’ve seen, I didn’t like. Maybe I’ve had bad luck, and your mileage may vary. I’m NOT going to side with the censors.
I will stick by my point, though, that MacKinnon IS arguing that all sex is rape. A blog post a few days after this one, Janet Halley: MacKinnon, feminism, and queer theory, B|Lab has a long quote from Halley that describes MacKinnon as saying, not that all sex is rape, but that “there is no one alive who can distinguish meaningfully between rape and not-rape.”
Ethically, if you cannot tell whether initiating sex is rape, than you’d have to assume it is. If you can NEVER tell the difference between rape and not-rape, than it would be a moral crime to ever initiate sex at all.
Not to put too fine a point on it, part of the reason I deeply resent MacKinnon and Dworkin is that when I first encountered their writings, I was a 20 year old virgin, who only heard from women complaints about how miserable their sexual experiences were and how much they resented men’s sexual advances, and I wanted to know how not to be an asshole. Reading Dworkin and MacKinnon, I found an answer: there was no way I could escape being a monster, save by avoiding any expression of sexual interest or any sexual activity at all. It’s taken me years to overcome that idea.
Actually, I do remember reading that Berlet is essentially anti-conspiracy theory, which actually kind of surprised me. What’s problematic is that his website Sourcewatch uses some of the same very loose guilt-by-association methods that conspiracy theorists use. If you’d believe Sourcewatch, every group on the right is deeply linked to every other group on the right, from the Cato Institute to David Duke. (Personally, I see as much rivalry and division there as I’m used to from the Left.)
Plus I’ve got a bit of an bone to pick with conspiracy theorists how have tried to link the entire post-Shachtman
“third camp” Left with neo-conservatism, using Sourcewatch as one of their main sources.
The thing about conspiracy theories is, it’s both sort of pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. Yah, one the one hand: depressing, how the Powers are arrayed against us; and yet, look! it all makes sense! SOMETHING makes sense! ‘n’ i bet if you could somehow attack ‘em all at the source it’d all disappear with a lovely explodey noise.
anyhoo iacb, thanks for the Bem link, interesting. and, ooh, Fromm! altho’ i wonder how he reconciles believing in Fromm’s “culture of life/culture of death stuff” and applying it to all this other…stuff when that itself is clearly i -think- a “higher order belief,” that theory of Fromm’s.
or perhaps i misunderstand…
Josh —
they can destroy the books?
Anyway, my objection is to the language, tone, attitude that sometimes suggests that men are sometimes being systematically harmed as a group: the charge of some kind of reverse sexism.
I don’t think I should have to explain how that’s a problem. Like I shouldn’t have to explain why it’s a problem that sex harassment laws can be used by straights to claim gay men are sexually harassing them on the job, as if there is an equivalence where hets can harm homos as much as homos can harm hets.
When there is this constant harping on how terrible it is that MacKinnon and radfems place male sexuality in a box, my jaw drops and I think? She puts them in as much of a box as sexist oppression as convetionally understood by feminists?
When it is *only* MacKinnon’s theory and then laws that came out of it, then I don’t see how you can claim anything *like* oppression.
Oppression is like a bird cage (see Marilyn Frye). there are numerous bars in the cage, each representing an aspect of that oppression. It all adds up to restrict movement.
It’s like saying MacKinnon made men a birdcage made out of one or two bars and this is holding you down, keeping you back, stopping you from getting paid a decent salary, hampering your ability to find sex and romantic partners, making it so that you’re vulnerable to violent repression by the state….
Oppression is a system that operates at the structural level of society, defining norms about how we interact with one another in certain settings (job, love/romance, market, citizenship, family, consumer, etc.)
None of that goes on, for men, simply because radfems like MacKinnon and others define male sexuality in such constrained terms.
It troubles me to see it constantly brought up — on feminist blogs.
I am not a feminist who thinks it’s unimportant to study the way the system of gender oppression constrains and delimits the lives of both men and women. I agree that it does. But the system that constrains them is so much bigger than MacKinnon that focusing on her and her alone or radfems seems to miss the point.
I think there’s an obvious misunderstanding as to what oppression *is*.
Iris Marion Young, ‘The Five Faces of Oppression.’
Marilyn Frye, Oppression
Wikipedia also has a decent entry.
As Young points out, a theory of oppression is central to all left politics — their unique contribution was to develop a social theory that explained how oppression works.
——————————————-
I want to point to my perversity, however, to note that it’s pretty fun to be engaging in this conversation here and then move over to the other side, Halley’s side, where she’s working out of a Foucauldian framework that actually challenge the “oppression paradigm”.
Ha ha ha!
In other words, as I make this argument, it is plainly evidence that I can easily shift gears and argue against what I’ve just said.
But then, this used to be what I put on all my syllabi when I was teaching. If I don’t get just the kind of censure and refutation I like, it’s quite awesome to be able to do it yourself. LOL
(Y)ou are not engaged so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism…(You) go to…school not so much for knowledge as for the arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent and dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible; for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and soberness. And above all, you go to school for self-knowledge.
–William Johnson Cory. An Eton Master writing to a student (quoted in Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis, (1979) 19-20.
#58 sounds conceited. didn’t mean for it to be. I’m simply pointing out the practical manifestation of the joy I get out of placing myself between two competing theories, pressing on them to find their differences, a kind of perverse enjoyment of the oppositions, where I know that, as I argue one side, there is yet another side.
*nod* I’ve discussed this one a lot with regard to raunch culture, something piny asked about the other day. but i was on a typing diet. since i’m still cutting back on the typage, this:
Cluck, Cluck
Is it real or is it Memorex?
Is that a Simulacrum in your thigh highs or are you just happy to see me?
Attack of the trailer brides
This isn’t much different from a Marxist argument imported into feminism, where the class in quesion is the sex class.
The proletariat is born to dig the graves of capital. As such the proletariat must necessarily kill itself as it kills capitalism. (Where I’m obviously using ‘kill’ metaphorically.)
As Foolish Owl points out, the interesting place to go with this, is to ask where does MacKinnon “fuck up”? Where does she lose it, where does she go too far, that she creates a horizonless theory of absolute domination/subjugation?
In other words, why is it that we don’t view workers as having so little agency under capitalism? If Halley is right, that the left develops ’subordination” theories of oppression, then it seems to me there is something very different about MacKinnon (who draws heavily on a Marxist framework) and the subordination theory developed by Marxists and heavy users of Marx.
my tentative argument has been that some variants of radical left theory, MacKinnon’s is but one, develop theories that inadequately conceptualize social change. (This actually comes from Roy Bhaskar’s work where he argues that such models are *merely* dialectical. That’s getting all specialist on everyone’s ass so I won’t go into it. But I’d hasten to add for the marxists here, Bhaskar has something else in mind when he uses the word dialectical this way.)
Put more simply, she has no explanation for how patriarchy changes due to its own “laws of motion”. In a Marxist theory, class society changes, not just because people rise up, but because the economy, itself, changes simply by virtue of the ruling economic class pursuing its own self-interest (at least short-term self interest). it creates it’s own contractions and crises, in other words. Those contradictions and crises are felt by people who respond to and act on them in ways that advance those changes by trying to push them forward, other groups try to stave off change by slowing it down or possibly reversing it. Blah blah blah.
The classic example would be how capitalism itself required service workers for an expanding service sector economy. This started happening in the 50s, even as the government was engaged in ideological attempts to justify women’s role as homemaker. in spite of concerted efforts to claim that the breadwinner/homemaker family was a bulwark against communism, corporations needed workers. Thus, they “pulled” white women into the job market.
But why did they pull white women? There was a significant rate of black male unemployment rate at the time.
So, there’s this contradiction: government and media are encouraging maintenance of the breadwinner/homemaker model of industrial capitalism, even while corporations were advancing the idea that white women should add to their homemaking duties the role of clerical worker, store clerk, cashier, telephone operator, etc. by day.
The contradiction produced by the drive for profit itself created the conditions under which social movements erupted in response.
a very simplistic overview above, but my point is that theories of patriarchy have no such explanation for the way the system produces its own contradictions which people react to and, quite possibly, use and exploit to advance their interest in freedom.
Instead, every contradiction at all is explained only as an instantiation of the sheer power of patriarchy.
e.g., the existence of hierarchies of men (race, imperialism, ethnicity, homosexuality) within patriarchy is seen *merely* as an instance of the patriarchy itself and not a contradiction or fissure within patriarchy. It *is* patriarchy.
That is, the existence of less powerful men in society, men who may have less power (it seems) than white wealthy women is not an instance of anything other than a way patriarchy keeps *men* in line. And the way patriarchy keeps men in line always redounds in a negative way to women. No matter what other hiearchies you have, within even the “lowest” group in the hiearchy, men are still there to oppress and dominate women in that particular strata within the hiearchy.
Hmmm. I don’t think that flies by itself. Needs a lot more explanation.
Foolish Owl –
Your story of how MacKinnon and Dworkin’s work so powerfully shaped you is, just, well … I’m speechless. really.
Foolish Owl –
I had never thought about this before, that because someone’s a liberal, their political theory isn’t clear.
Do you mean that, because it’s the theory we are raised on, we never really have to think about it, just take it for granted? And thus don’t realize when we’re engaged in contradictions.
Or maybe that we’re confused as how to justify our theories of social change b/c, in our articulation of them, we can rely so much on tacit agreement (b/c everyone else accepts it too) that it never gets fully formulated — one’s reasons for embracing both sex positive thought at the same time as embracing a radfem view of consciousness raising. (Or something like that)
Anyway, obviously, I’m curious about this one.
Josh –
Me:
Josh:
I’m editing this b/c I realized… Anyway, I don’t mean domination and subordination in the bedroom, but a system in which, according to MacKinnon and most feminists, women are systematically and systemically subordinated to men in so far as this situation delimits their freedom, confines them to very limited roles, impacts their money making potential in the market, keeps them out of decision making positions in politics, law, work, etc. etc.
Thus, under these conditions, none of us and women even more than men, do not have any idea what sex is like in a truly liberated society. every sex act that occurs now is an act that occurs under conditions in which women have less power than men. where women are a *class* and men are a *class*. (the way we’d want to look at how even a very wealthy gay man is still oppressed in a heteronormative society.)
Josh:
Not at all. She specifically attacks Foucault and those who follow him for it is largely from Foucault (and other post-structuralists [or pomos/postmodernists] that the idea of subversion was given theoretical elaboration because he advanced a completely different notion of power.
Power is *binary* for MacKinnon. You either have power or you do not have it.
The *only* place she seems to have for the possibility of freedom is in consciousness raising groups.
I’m trying to remember where I have a copy of that article so I can scan and post parts of it.
And that’s a line I specifically reject – and I don’t care if it gets me excommunicated from the Left. It is possible for women to exercise power relationships over men, for people of color to exercise power over whites, for gays to exercise power over straights. On balance, its obvious that most power relationships in our society are the reverse of that, but I just don’t buy an 100% across-the-board “women can never harm men” argument. Its simplistic.
For starters, it neglects the fact that there are multiple kinds of social hierarchies in our society. In MacKinnon’s case, other than the fact of her gender, she is somebody with a great deal of class power. She’s a top lawyer, for godsakes – the access to social power that gives you is enormous. Considering that most people would have a hard time dealing with being sued in small claims court, the kind of access to the law that she has is an enormous leg up on 90% of the rest of the population.
This line also ignores the eccentricities of interpersonal relationships. I’ve seen too many examples of male/female relationships where the woman is clearly the dominant half.
Also, I think this line justifies some pretty crappy behavior. If men completely oppress women, are women therefore justified in trying to use what power they do have to “turn the tables” on men? I really see that as where radical feminists are coming from. The whole “power relationships are a one-way street” idea strikes me as one big resentment/resentiment-based moral blank check – “I’m oppressed, so don’t even ask me to take any responsibility about how I treat others.”
On the example you give of workplace sexual harassment laws being unfairly enforced against gays. I bet that happens a lot and its one of the many weaknesses of existing sexual harassment laws. However, presuming you’re going to have sexual harassment laws at all, writing in a “straight people can never make claims against gay people” exception would seem to leave a door open to all kinds of abuse. (To my way of thinking, frivolous claims of sexual harassment against gay people are an argument for more clear and narrowly defined sexual harassment laws.)
And to make a long story short, I cut MacKinnon zero slack merely because she’s a woman.
A per my argument about the multiplicity of power relationships, if you were to seriously suggest that a gay man in this position (lets use James C. Hormel as an example) has less social power than a straight guy who socially is part of the working poor, then I really think you’re failing to take class seriously.
IACB (66) — did you read the rest of what I wrote?
IACB (68) –
:)
you’re getting a little worked up there.
Firstly, I don’t hiearchize oppressions.
Secondly, there’s a reason why I gush (kvell Henwood called it) over Halley and not MacKinnon.
But let me ask, why did you feel you had to go to a “working poor” straight man to make the comparison? From Bill Gates to my partner? What about Doug Henwood? Hugo Schwyzer? the blogger Scobleizer (forget his real name)?
What’s actually interesting in these comparisons that I’ve noticed lately, is that people feel they have to appeal to the rich …. and then the very poor.
Which is what I’m getting at above. Entrapped in the discourse of power as “subordination theory” (halley’s term), we end up trying to fight and criticize a particular theory be erecting our own subordination theory.
Instead of jumping out of it in favor of another. (Although, from the things you’ve said, I thought you’ve been interested in Foucault, yes?)
I make fun of myself, above, for this.
I have a HUGE question for the guys:
Given this conversation opened up this space, I am curious why men are attracted to sex positive feminism. Are there points in your lives where you became aware of the need to seek out some other explanation?
I have a private discussion list that we can all join temporarily if it’s stuff that’s too personal.
I’m just really curious if we have narratives of why sex positive feminism made a difference or seemed to provide answers to something that other lefty explanations for our lives didn’t.
I told my story on a thread a punkassblog.com back at the end of July in a thread on — hell can’t remember. I’ll have to go look it up.
Yes, but that just extrapolated from your first point, which is a political line I’ve long been aware of and explicitly reject. The Marlin Frye essay hasn’t changed my mind about that.
I’m just casting the class difference very starkly. But obviously, Doug Henwood and Hugo Schwyzer (both middle class academics?) don’t have the class power that, say, John C. Hormel has, but (I think) have more class power than somebody in the working poor. And presumably John C. Hormel has some issues about where he can be seen kissing his partner that Doug Henwood and Hugo Schwyzer don’t have.
But what does this mean in terms of analyzing radfeminism? How much slack am I supposed to cut this fundamentally wrong-headed ideology because it has it comes from the oppressed Class Woman?
“scobleizer?”
I think Hugo actually is closer to “upper” than maybe some of the others mentioned there, altho’ i don’t know Doug Henwood that well and don’t know how much difference it makes really. the religious/cultural background factors as well.
I guess its because on one hand, I’ve always seen the basic social equality of women as a given. I was raised by a single woman who was mother and father to me, after all. I was also raised pretty “sex-positively” – sex was seen as a good thing, most of the adults in my life seemed to be doing a lot of it, and often not in monogamous relationships, copies of The Joy of Sex, Our Bodies Ourselves, Playboy, Playgirl, etc were out on the shelf where I could easily get to them.
I was a teenager by the time anti-porn feminism came along, and my first response was “What the fuck is this?” “Women don’t like sex?” It struck me that something had just gone wrong with feminism, that it had degenerated from calling for equality into simple man-hating and sex-phobia. As I got more into anarchist politics, I soon enough came across sex-positive feminism, which to my mind was a perspective that made sense. Also as an anarchist, I began to see that there were libertarian and authoritarian wings of most major social movements, and feminism was no exception. (I don’t call myself an anarchist anymore – hell, I own property now – but my perspective is still basically left libertarian.)
IACB
I am confused. Did anyone ask you to cut her slack?
My goal is to develop an incisive critique of her on *her* terms, not on mine.
someone, can’t remember who, just posted a comment in the last week that implied, I thought, that a theory failed on his/her view, because it wasn’t Marxist.
I rolled my eyes. I had enough of the Red_orange wankers to get a lifetime’s worth of listening to some wanker bitch because some theory isn’t marxist.
It is what is called a hostile and external critique. You find a theory wanting on your preferrred theory’s terms.
But, I’m kinda committed to feminist theory and a feminist project in general, not just to one feminist theory, but the whole dang project. (Ignore my serious love affair with Halley as you read this. *grin* I’m fickle like that)
And, as such, I don’t necessarily run around finding all other feminist theories wanting because they aren’t marxist.
Rather, if I’m going to engage them, I much prefer to engage them on their terms. I want to ask: how does this theory fail on *it’s own terms*. What are the lacunae? Where does it produce problems that we’re dealing with her in blogoliciousville, for instance. Where does it completely fail to address our lives at all (e.g., sexuality is where feminism fails according to Sedgewick, Butler, Halley).
Some of it’s selfish. I want to make good arguments and to make them I have to get inside the theory’s of those I’m talking with.
But, since Alison Jaggar was a big influence, it’s not so much that, but also because my own theories have improved when someone has provided for me an internal and sympathetic critique. The whole point of engaging in this critique is to advance feminist theories in generally, make them stronger.
And this is where I think Anthony and I butt heads. It’s not about, for me, trying to eradicate radfem theoriy, but simply to understand it and critique it from an internal critique.
From that project, I strengthen my own thinking — at least that’s my fantasy. :)
In other words, I think I fail in others’ eyes because I resist seeing any of this as “a fight to the death” where, if I am able to actually articulate their theory on their terms, from their POV, i don’t actually melt or crumble (die) because I could step into their world for a little while. (See the quote above about honing the ability to step from one theory into another theory at a moment’s notice.)
If Bersani asked, “Is the rectum a grave?”, then I might see this as Bitch geting a little jouissance out of all this. Where, paradoxically (?), I experience the pleasure of the loss of mastery even *within* the act of mastery (!!!!) . Thus, we can ask, “Is Bitch | Lab a grave?”
LOL
No. Really. I’m only as crazy as most other people. In spite of what those paragraphs sound like.
At this point, I fear only Randombird will get it. :)
* And yes, I’ve completely stolen this right out of Halley’s discussion of Bersani’s theory of sexuality.
I can’t give MacKinnon an internal critique, because from what I’ve read of her so far, I just can’t find any common ground or any point of entry into the most basic points of her ideology.
The only thing I can readily point to as something that might be an “internal failure” of her ideology is the question of false consciousness. She accuses others of this (perhaps not in so many words), yet I’m still not clear on how she thinks she’s escaped it. Through consciousness raising? That’s susceptible to simply raise false consciousness to the level of groupthink.
Anyway, if Halley can take apart her ideas on their own terms, more power to her.
BD –
>> “scobleizer?†< <
Robert Scoble, blog: scobleizer. Works for Bill Gates. Runs evangelizing blog about his work at Microsoft.
>> I think Hugo actually is closer to “upper†than maybe some of the others mentioned there, altho’ i don’t know Doug Henwood that well and don’t know how much difference it makes really. the religious/cultural background factors as well. <<<
Not sure what you mean.
What I’ve observed in the blogosophere is exactly this set up where people feel compelled to speak in terms of absolute power over a victimized other.
The effect of this generaltized subordination theory on the left has people talking about the very rich or the very poor whenever they talk class!
It’s weird. But it’s not. Because most people are speaking form the position of being middle class.
As a consequence, when they deal with class and power and powerlessness, the only way they want to write about it is in terms of “them”: the rich subordinating the poor.
total sidetrip riffing off the example of working poor straight guy up against a wealthy gay guy.
This is the kind of thinking that Elizabeth Spelman and others have criticized as the additive model of identity. Where you add together separate things: male, rich, white, gay
At any rate, we can stil ask how, as I said to begin with, a rich white male is still oppressed by heteronormativity even though he is wealthy.
That analysis doesn’t cancel out his social power in other ways. It just asks us to acknowledge that his life is different because he is harmed by heterosexism. He may not suffer materially, but he suffers in other ways.
E.g., he can buy himself protection from public ridicule because wealth affords privacy, but he can’t buy himself protection from the pressure to marry and procreate and carry on the family legacy and fortune by bearing heirs. he can’t escape the pressure he may feel from a family who doesn’t want him to embarass them family and tarnish the family’s reputation. it doesn’t buy him protection from his social peers. It doesn’t protect him from getting beaten up for faggery at his fancy boys’ school. It doesn’t protect him from the ridicule of women. Doesn’t protect him from teachers and fellow students who call him fag and sneer. It doesn’t mean that he can engage in a big fat smooch fest with his lover at the country club without making a few people uncomfortable or maybe even getting thrown out.
I don’t know, I am unfamiliar with the lives of the rich and famous, but that’s what I mean when I say that heteronormativity delimits the life of even a wealthy white man.
Similarly, we can say that being black can delimit the life of a rich black man.
I don’t see how their wealth cancels out an examination of the way that racism and heteronormativity plays out in their lives.
Well, you’re the one who brought up the example of the wealthy gay guy.
That’s all true enough, but I think we’re arguing past each other.
However, what if in the attempt to combat the heterosexist oppression he experiences as a gay man, he uses the social power he does have access to in very hurtful and punitive ways? Not that I’m accusing any gay people of doing this. However, I am accusing MacKinnon of doing precisely that.
::That’s all true enough, but I think we’re arguing past each other.:::
IACB — didn’t know we were arguing!
I think it’s fine to say what you said about MacKinnon. I dont’ think it’s oppression, though.
When we talk about oppression, we’re talking about people being oppressed as members of *groups*.
so, it’s really only the use of the language of “oppression” which does have a meaning or at least a range of meanings that typically point us to an examination of social structure.
so, I can look at MacKinnon and note that she’s has powerfully influenced the law and the ways judges makes decisions on cases in MacKinnon’s domain. but there, her influence starts to wane.
In your day-to-day activities in, say, Columbus Ohio will probably not put you in contact with very many people who know MacKinnon or hold MacKinnon’s views.
(In the land of Bitch Tangent Queen sidetrips are cool things, though probably confusing to a lot of people, so it wasn’t meant as an insult.)
“…she has no explanation for how patriarchy changes due to its own “laws of motionâ€Â.’
Right, & people have been asking about this for how long? It may be that somebody’s given an answer; maybe the answer’s well known, but not to me. CR comes out of nowhere, it isn’t endogenous to the system. So why, after millennia, should it happen to fall to one law professor to figure it all out, to finally promulgate women’s POV for the first? Does the theory describe any significant change at all in the system between the time it was established & her advent? Turns out it was an eternal & ahistorical structure, vulnerable only to transcendent intervention. It’s no shame to offer a partial theory, but the whole point here is that this is a closed system. Either that or you have an explanation for why only this particular exogenous factor can enter into it (which is just endogenization by another name).
It’s worth repeating that she isn’t much of a materialist. If she were to propose any laws of motion, they’d be laws of the evolution of consciousness. And it’s not as if no idealist has ever thought in the relevant terms. Both Hegel & Nietzsche have stories about the development of mind precisely under conditions of domination & subordination. It’s all right there in the books feminists have been copying out of. Not just MacKinnon, Beauvoir in the same way. In the jargon of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, she just borrowed the 1st moment, the master’s initial establishment of domination/subordination, & for some reason assumed things got stuck there. Unpersuasively. Any alert fucker can tell you that even the grisliest of these relationships are normally more unstable, more complicated, more involve intersubjectivity (the ones that don’t are literally psychologically indistinguishable from a date w/ a party doll), more reciprocal recognition, than the Standard Model allows.
IACB –
I have never heard Chip mention sourcewatch.com! He is not one to be low key onthe self promotion!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Berlet
He works with Political Research Associates and has a blog which he started abt 2-3 yrs ago I guess. It blatantly bills itself as a rightwing watch dog group, too, unlike sourcewatch.
Didn’t do a big google search and I can just ask him, but I’m wondering if it’s the same Chip Berlet.
There’s only one Chip.
KH –
Oh. my challenge would be to radfem and advocates of CR more generally.
In her essay on CR, MacKinnon asks the question, why do women come to CR, noting that it’s the first question any leftist asks because they need to know where to expend their energy organizing.
But her answer *mystifies* this issue. Which is important, I think, because it is precisely this sort of mystification of who are the elect and why that is inevitably part of this way of doing feminist theory.
Interestingly enough, of course, Catherine MacKinnon’s own version of consciousness raising puts the kabosh on any bullshit that went down in the Radom Bird threads about how CR should proceed.
*grin*
But I think that is why I was called a troll, eh?
IACB
I’m not sure. If you accept what I wrote, then it seems to me you’re accepting a theory of oppression much like that Frye offers.
So, I’m really curious what is the objection to Frye? Or, for that matter, what would be your objection to Iris Marion Young’s theory, which very much does want to account for a multiplicity of oppressions and, thus, recognizes that I’m advantaged, even with a very low income, because I’m white. (Which would, in turn, acknowledge that a wealthy white women is advantaged in comparison to you, Anthony, Sheldon, Foolish Owl, CB, etc.)
On how Dworkin and MacKinnon had a powerful impact — well, it’s not that simple. I wasn’t a blank slate, and I already had very negative feelings about sexuality, which is what led me to seek out Dworkin’s writing. I’ve spent years trying to figure out why I had such negative feelings, and I’ve yet to hit on a clear explanation, and. I’ve yet to meet anyone who describes having had to work through the same set of difficulties, though a few times I’ve read a few women writing that their male partners had some of the same troubles until they met. The funny thing is that I remember arguing for “free love” when I was thirteen — there’s been a mismatch between my feelings and my beliefs for a very long time on this subject.
On my interest in “sex positive feminism” — well, the preceding should go a fair way in explaining it. Aside from my political interests, this is quite personal. About the time I was reading Dworkin at 20, I remember a fair number of weekly newspaper sex columnists, who may have been described as “sex positive,” but seemed entirely too Pollyanna-ish about sexuality. I know there are profound problems with gender relations and sexuality, so I’m interested in finding accounts of people who’ve tangled with those profound problems and found some space for freedom and human happiness.
On liberalism — what confuses things is that there’s widespread abuse of the term, particularly in the US, where it’s used to refer to any vaguely left-of-center idea.
Liberalism involves superficial acknowledgement of real social problems, but opposition to any effective challenge to the source of those problems. Liberals believe that capitalism, bourgeois democracy, and colonialism are the solution to all the problems caused by capitalism, bourgeois democracy, and colonialism, so they favor social stability above all other considerations.
Liberals are a sort of defense mechanism on the part of the ruling class. It sounds like the ruling class is finally listening and paying attention to us, so we can rest easy. Getting us to rest is the point.
Anyway, liberals have to believe directly contradictory ideas in order to play their role. The most grotesque example in recent memory is the 2004 election, in which liberal opponents of the war against Iraq argued that the key to ending the war was electing John Kerry, who campaigned on promises to escalate the war.
Liberals will often argue, outright, that believing inconsistent ideas is a virtue, or even that thinking coherently and systematically is, in itself, dangerous: all metanarratives lead to the Gulag. For instance, consider the common use of “totalitarian” as a synonym for “tyrannical,” implying that understanding reality as a totality (as Marxism does) is intrinsically dogmatic and authoritarian.
I wrote in 83
Shit, that’s poorly worded, but I’m only now fully grasping that it is *precisely* the way she talks about the mysterious *snap* it-all-comes-together-experience that is — holy hell — so much like arguments about religious conversion experiences.
You read it from MacKinnon and you think — oh! — I wanna get me some of that experience.
And who wouldn’t want to have thsi mystical alteration, this bonding, this community, this elation?
fuck the reader indeed.
Although I notice the copulary isn’t nearly so evident in this early essay.
I love that word I made up: the MacKInnon Copulary. It sounds kinky.
Jeez, FO – You’re not really arguing against liberalism so much as strawliberalism. Being wary of the excesses of radical ideologies is not the same as not wanting to change anything. (And liberalism supports colonialism? Where are you getting that from?)
And considering that the history of radical ideologies in power hasn’t exactly been a smashing success in terms of incrasing the sum of human freedom, you can hardly blame liberals for their wariness.
Plus you’re way to quick to dismiss any kind of critique of totalitarianism with a quick hand wave. Totalitarianism (a term coined by Mussolini, not by liberal anti-radicals) refers specifically not just to tyranny or authoritarianism, but to authoritarianism ratcheted up to the greatest degree possible. It refers to a situation where authoritarianism is so highly developed that mere non-resistance to the State is no longer sufficient, but where anything short of total active support of the State is considered treasonous.
In other words, merely having a totalizing metanarative (however prolematic that is) hardly constitutes “totalitarianism”.
Personally, considering the history of 20th-century radical states going over to totalitarianism, I fundamentally mistrust any strain of radical thought that doesn’t have a sufficient critique of totalitarianism (and authoritarianism, for that matter).
> It’s not about, for me, trying to eradicate radfem theoriy, but simply to understand it and critique it from an internal critique.>
Yah, I certainly don’t want to wipe it all out either, and even if one did i think it’s important to, as you say, understand it, critique from an internal perspective.
but mostly i just think: at least in blog O’Sphere, it, or rather some weird bastardization of it (or both? something) has become influential disproportionate to its adherents’ actual numbers.
so in that sense i do protest, i guess.
>In other words, merely having a totalizing metanarative (however prolematic that is) hardly constitutes “totalitarianismâ€Â.>
Which is why i’m not -really- out to exterminate radfem theory or even the wonkier talkers about it, just keep kind of a beady eye trained on where it’s all going;
>Personally, considering the history of 20th-century radical states going over to totalitarianism, I fundamentally mistrust any strain of radical thought that doesn’t have a sufficient critique of totalitarianism (and authoritarianism, for that matter).>
Yup.
>I’ve spent years trying to figure out why I had such negative feelings, and I’ve yet to hit on a clear explanation, and. I’ve yet to meet anyone who describes having had to work through the same set of difficulties, though a few times I’ve read a few women writing that their male partners had some of the same troubles until they met. The funny thing is that I remember arguing for “free love†when I was thirteen  there’s been a mismatch between my feelings and my beliefs for a very long time on this subject.>
I don’t want to pry at you, much less in public; but this interests me. I suspect that there are people who’d relate to what you’re talking about; it’s shame that keeps people silent.
but it’s one of the reasons that i’m personally rather heavy on the need for a more erm intimate sort of consciousness-raising as well as the more overtly politcal, extraverted (? wrong word, still tired, need caffeine) sort.
I think, just in general, that in fact men–straight ones too, yes–deal with a LOT of internalized shame about their own sexuality. same as everyone else, more or less, iow. with their own unique…mm, stuff, sure.
and while i’m sympathetic to the women who are so focused on their own anger, their own real grievances, that they simply have no empathy to spare for men, much less in the arena of sexuality,
it frustrates me that this notion that male sexuality is so inextricably bound up with domination and violence and rape and abuse and so forth is so, well, prevalent, with no real solution at all being offered except for more EXAMINE your shit (and, i really am getting, in the case of the men as well as of the “sexbot” women, MORE SHAME. SHAME SHAME SHAME ON YOU AND YOUR DISGUSTING LITTLE URGES).
yah, you’d think i’d not have much personal investment in this, male sexuality, and in a way i don’t i expect;
at the same time, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that this shame-dumping, esp. on one’s erotic core, no matter -what- the ideology, is not only not helpful but actually contributes to the overall problem–misogyny, abuse, violence and all.
>> I think Hugo actually is closer to “upper†than maybe some of the others mentioned there, altho’ i don’t know Doug Henwood that well and don’t know how much difference it makes really. the religious/cultural background factors as well.
crap, i dunno why that got cut off, let’s try again:
>> I think Hugo actually is closer to “upper†than maybe some of the others mentioned there, altho’ i don’t know Doug Henwood that well and don’t know how much difference it makes really. the religious/cultural background factors as well.
fuck! why does this keep happening?!
>> I think Hugo actually is closer to “upper†than maybe some of the others mentioned there, altho’ i don’t know Doug Henwood that well and don’t know how much difference it makes really. the religious/cultural background factors as well. >>
Not sure what you mean.
What I’ve observed in the blogosophere is exactly this set up where people feel compelled to speak in terms of absolute power over a victimized other.
The effect of this generaltized subordination theory on the left has people talking about the very rich or the very poor whenever they talk class!
It’s weird. But it’s not. Because most people are speaking from the position of being middle class…>
Just that I agree with you, on the whole, but/and was oberving that -maybe- Hugo is even a little different from that; he seems to speak more from almost a sense of i want to say noblesse oblige or something.
but maybe that’s the religious thing. shrug. like i say: not really that important, just an idle drive-by observation.
He really does come off as a “old-fashioned gentleman” slightly updated with left/feminist ideology. Actually, he’d be “Exhibit A” in my case that the left/feminism really does have its share of social conservatives and traditional moralists.
Jesus, don’t you people sleep?
Bitch:
Yep, they can. But beyond that, they can raid bookstores, and drag people into court for expensive court cases, spending taxpayer money to hound businesses they don’t like.
I’ll come right out and say it. it’s a core axiom if my life censorship is morally wrong. I admit to shades of grey for stuff likem libel, nonconsensual porn or death threats, but beyond that, censorship is wrong.
When feminism advocates censorhip, it’s wrong, and harmful, and it is not a good solution for harmful pornography any more than banning sex is a soution for rape.
That said, the reverse sexism comments are bullshit, much like reverse racism comments. But my main criticism is about censorship. I thiink some pretty dumb things are said about sex and sexual relationships in the essay you’re citing, but I don’t think that the essay amounts to opression, just that it’s wrong in a lot of points.
Bitch:
Ah. I think I understand. For all the validity of the message, she fails to ge tit across in any sensible way.
OK yes. I agree with that. That makes sense. I’m all for debating solutions to the problem. They do not include censorship as up for debate, but other than that, I’ll listen.
Me :
See, this is an issue, you keep making sense of a lot of the academic handwaving in such a way that I agree with it, and then you explain something like this, that I consider flat out nonsense. “You either have power or you do not have it.” ?
Please tell me I don’t have to explain why that’s bullshit.
Oh crap. Please close the bold tag after “censorship is morally wrong”
Anyhow
Bitch
I’d be ahppy to get into that here, but a seperate thread would have it feel a bit cleaner for me, and less intwined with the essay. Is that OK?
IACB, I expect you’re right about the origin of the term “totalitarianism,” so I’ll accept I’m wrong on the narrow question of the usage of that term. It’s certainly not the case that I take fascism, Stalinism, and other species of extreme authoritarianism lightly, nor that I don’t have any analysis of them.
Again, on liberalism — as I said, particularly in the US, lots of people with undeveloped political positions, or positions well to the left of liberalism, still label themselves liberal, which makes things quite confusing. I was describing what I consider the essential characteristics of liberalism proper. And it’s not something I hit on out of thin air, but a generalization from years of political activism. Recognizing the patterns of liberal betrayals was part of what radicalized me. I wrote about a couple of examples here, but I could cite many others.
Josh in 94
Yah. knew about this. I just didn’t know they actually destroyed books.
You don’t have to convince about anti-censorship, not at all.
I expect she wants to be provocative, yes? I think she also wants to take it farther than any other feminists had at the time.
It’s also part of the fact that she completely drew for her theory on Marxism, but also left crucial aspects out (I think). She reversed Marx’s focus on the polarity between the working class (which is everyone who must work for wages to live) VS. the capitalist class. She took that framework, of two oppositional classes of people (not individuals, but classes. which is probably getting to theory head. :) and said that it was women vs. men — as classes, not individuals.
And, yes, I have problems with her binary notion of power.
But a lot of folks don’t they don’t really know how to talk or think about it because our concepts aren’t very good — EVEN tho they actually experience something very differently.
but the interesting thing is, what I’ve sometimes noticed is that, even when you raise the experience — as you did at Alas, A Blog and as RenEv did at http://www.punkassblog.com — the way we think about power almost invariably requires people to respond precisely the ways they do. And a lot of it boils down to either claiming that you’re a man so you just can’t get it or claiming you must be a man in female drag or simply claiming that you are just wrong in your interpretation.
At other times, it seems like people want us to go ahead and talk about the experience we have, but make sure to say — in a ritual like way — that we recognize that absolute power of men over women.
If that makes any sense at all….. well, it’s too broad a generatlization, I think, because certainly that wasn’t the only set of responses.
Belledame
it doesn’t really matter since I was pointing out the tendency, which I think emanates from subordination theory, to try to score some kind of ideological point by comparing huge contrasts.
i think this is the *exact* same impulse behind the focus on third world sex workers.
because we are tending to operate — whether you’re conscious of it or not, a more foucauldian conception of power — we are butting up against their subordination theory of power.
but this also happens a lot with class — because people also think that it’s about a subordination theory of power there, too.
So, people when they talk about class, are always talking abt the very rich or poor.
Thus, I said, what about these guys. Hugo is not rich in the sense that he’s some kind of multi-billionaire or something.
Hugo’s from the Carmel monied (California) he said here on this blog once. So yeah, a step up from Henwood.
Henwood grew up in lower middle class Jersey, was in the Merchant Marines for a stint, got into Yale, was in Skull and Bones during his first couple of years.
Different in their participation in class privilege in so far as it’s unlikely that Henwood’s family has a great deal of wealth beyond that which they got from their home == which is not the same thing from wealth one gets from investments beyond personal property (stocks, real estate, etc.)
And since, in our stratified society, people almost always look “up” the social ladder to compare, people do experience a *felt* deprivation. Henwood also experienced the demand to deny his roots/ identity while at Yale, no doubt. My experience and others’ I know at schools outside the Ivy league was bad enough. I can’t even imagine what it must be like at place like Yale.
Belledame –
One of the things I was really curious about is, if we understand what “shame affirmative” means — and assuming we all agree on this issue that humiliation and shame are parts of our sexualities on a queer theory approach, what does that do to the discussion of shaming?
are we engaged in a contradiction? can we explain how slut shaming is bad, even while we acknowledge that shame and humiliation are part of sexual desire.
that’s what i called the other thread, Shame Affirmative, because I was hoping someone besides me would have some thoughts!
——–
You’ll be happy to know, btw, that MacKinnon chapter on CR does address the issues you raise about talking about things such as what Foolish Owl raised.
And the neat thing about Halley, also, is that she’s trying to work out a way for us not to have to fucking apologize if we want to be concerned about men’s experience of shame and humiliation about their sexuality. We can “take a break” to work on that problem with men, to listen to them, understand them, “get it” without it making us feel like we’re going to melt or crumble because we do. A way to say, we’ll get back to feminism and we know all this about oppression, but in the mean time, there’s this problem over here and we’re going to work on it.