I know I haven’t been very active since I moved the blog to a new host. Hell, I’ve hardly been approving comments (I’m also thinking about turning off comments on old posts, because while it’s always cool to see a supportive comment a year after posting something–hell, even flames on old posts remain hilarious–the spam is too much to deal with). I’ve had some things I wanted to write about, mostly about sex. Not even the kind related to gender and physiology! The kind that word makes most people who aren’t me think about!

I’ve been a little down lately, though…I haven’t been able to find any resources specifically talking about BDSM/kink from a feminist perspective (unless it’s an extremely negative one) and that kind of steamrolled my enthusiasm for posting about such things because I’m pretty sure I’m just going to get a lot of abuse for it and I frankly don’t feel up for it…

But! BUT! Apparently there is a new blog out there, let them eat pro-sm feminist safe spaces, the existence of which makes me pretty happy. I’ll have to keep an eye on it to see how things develop, but it sounds promising.

One thing I hope to post about later is addressed in this post by Trinity, which discusses anti-BDSM feminist arguments and, well, why those arguments are effective in theory but don’t actually apply to the reality of kinky life:

So there’s not much knew I have to say. All I really want to mention is that, as a woman who tops not only women but also men, there really isn’t much about us in the internal warfare. And I wonder why this is. on the one hand, I know that it’s because the radical feminist analysis (Yes, I realize that not all radical feminists agree with this analysis, but that’s what it’s most often called, so that’s the short cut that I will use.) is concerned about dynamics between submissive women and dominant men. I know that their interminable analyses of lesbian sadomasochism, as well, center around a faulty idea that all leatherdyke are butch-femme, and at a butch is emulating men.

All that means that a woman top, unless she is very strongly masculinely identified (oddly, I think I might actually qualify on some of these analyses, though I doubt people would expect me to top men since this would slot me into “butch” if anything), doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t show up on the radar at all. Neither does a male bottom, unless he is into such stuff as feminization, in which case he’s slumming for fun. ( gay men don’t fit into this well at all either, since these sorts of feminists pride themselves on not caring much about men. The assumption is sometimes a similar butch-femme dynamic, which totally misses the hypermasculine emphasis in much of gay leather.)

…

And that’s the thing. I happen to believe, probably unlike many other sadomasochists who’ve run afoul of these people, that their analysis is actually impressively internally consistent, and difficult to argue with in some ways because of that. But the big problem with it is that it’s extremely narrow. It works, if it works at all, for a tiny set of textbook cases. Not only are they all male dominant and female submissive, or *maybe maybe maybe* *possibly* butch-femme in an extremely traditionalist way, but they are all male dominant and female submissive in a cartoony way. No one’s dynamic actually looks like that, not even the M/f folks I know who consider themselves old-fashioned.

And that’s the problem. What they’ve come up with is a theoretical analysis of a theoretical problem. It’s internally consistent enough that it can convince people that they understand what’s really going on — if said people don’t actually know or want to know about the real nuts and bolts of sadomasochists’ lives, play, and (possible) power relations (remember, they’re optional!)

More later.

There have been a few interesting posts in response to my post Eyeliner, Razors, High Heels, and Bras. I really think that much of what different authors are describing is tangential to my original post, but…that doesn’t mean I didn’t find what they had to say interesting.
To sum up: it bothers me when feminists claim that women aren’t under pressure to dress/groom/act a certain way, and seems pretty akin to saying “sexism doesn’t exist anymore” because it’s plainly untrue to anyone who critically observes the world. It also bothers me when feminists assume women have no agency because of those social pressures, and set up a feminist anti-standard which says you can only be a “good” feminist if you don’t shave/don’t wear makeup/burn your bra/etc. The problem is that women have to make a “statement” politically in an arena which should be a matter of personal comfort and preference. Women are unable to make informed decisions for the sake of their health — shaving is bad for the skin, and so are many cosmetics, people fry their hair into submission rather than styling it in a way which keeps it healthy, and wearing or not wearing certain shoes or bras is uncomfortable for different women. The problem is that we feel we need to choose one way or the other, either for sake of fashion or feminism. Neither is the solution.

I think part of the problem is that I didn’t try to pretend to offer a solution other than “maybe we all ought to carefully examine our motivations before claiming that social conditioning doesn’t affect the way we present ourselves”. People can read a lot into something when you don’t pretend to know the answer; therefore, it seems that people had some wildly divergent ideas of what I was trying to get at when I was mostly making a pretty focused point (I’m sick of people claiming social pressure on women to dress/groom a certain way doesn’t exist) rather than a broad one (do I know how to fix this? hell no. dress how you want).

Right now, since I don’t want to make a massive post from hell, I’ll just address what Bitch | Lab had to say:

I don’t think young folks believe it — though it may still exist — but there was pressure on feminists to wear a kind of uniform. Anyone who wore make up or a dress? She had to have a really good fucking reason to get away with it and it would only be something temporary — like making your parents happy for their yearly visit. Your car should be appripriately “green” or a Volvo. Certainly not a beat up Plymouth that I had to crawl into from the passenger side.

But those things really aren’t the issue — though they are signposts marking the path I took to get to where I am now. Signposts that mark a rejection of what some might otherwise call hypocrisy. I was interested, not so much because it was hypocrisy, but to wonder why it existed at all. What seemed to make it impossible for us to not reproduce taste and style, even a feminist taste and style, which was enforced with its own judgments about what was feminist and what wasn’t, who belongs and who didn’t? Why, in spite of wanting to get away from that, did we reproduce it?

Where I differ is with Earlbecke is with the seeming certainty that it might be possible to create a world where everyone just wore whatever they pleased because they possess a self capable of making those decisions based on their little ol’ desires. It is a potentiality, this self, but it is a potentiality that’s being banked on: the potential for a self untouched by society in the self’s expression of its _true_ desires.

On this model, our true desires are like something we carry around with us in a little knapsack. In an ideal society, we’d be free of social structural systems of oppression and the stufff in the knapsack — our desires — would magically express who were are. We’d have this self beneath all the gunk and junk of oppression. It’d be our own special, unique self.

This really isn’t much different than the famous billiard ball model upon which classical economic theory is built. The little selves just bang up against each other: there are no internal relations. They carry around their properties and attributes, unfazed by banging up against all the other little self-encapsulated monads in a Leibnizian universe. (Leibniz is a philosopher who spoke of a world composed of monads)

On this model, we have our monad selves with attributes called preferences. We whip those preferences out of our knapsack when we go shopping, making decisions based on those preferences.

From a lefty perspective, the problem is that those preferences (desires) carry with them the mark of a structurally oppressive society. That society shapes our preferences and desires. We aren’t free. Our freedom is constrained by the demands of the system. We are, in other words, ideologically blinded by hetero/sexism, racism, ablism, and class exploitation and oppression.

Here, the problem is the knapsack — structural forms of oppression — that crush our true desires like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that got tossed around in a poorly designed knapsack.

But the problem, for me, is that this assumes that we just need to fix the knapsack so it doesn’t crush the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That, underneath the massive weight of those oppressions, there exist selves that could otherwise be free to have and express true needs and desires. They’ve just been prevented from expressing their true desires.

And what does this remind you of? Well, it reminds me of the essentialist gender categories that Butler worries about. Butler says that, even while social constructionists recognize that gender is largely socially constructed, you can still read an essentialism. It’s not just imported into the theory by accident. It’s also not simply a mark or trace left over by an ideology that hasn’t been completely erased from the theory. Rather, it is an essentialism that is constituted by social constructionist thought itself. Not shaped, but actually constituted by it.

Which is a fair enough point, and, I think, important to keep in mind when arguing just about anything. (Have I mentioned I love Bitch | Lab? Well, I do. She’s, like, so much more educated than I am.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Or, you know, you can. If you’re a masochist. As I apparently am.

First, via Daily Dose of Queer, a young man who is surprisingly insecure about other people’s gender identity. Apparently, allowing people to check “male”, “female” or write in an “other” as their gender on a college application is the end of the world. Or, at the very least, marks the other as “psychotic”. But what I really love about this editorial is that parts of it are right on the mark. The author knows what he’s talking about. It’s pretty entertaining when it’s not so stupid it’s infuriating.

For example:

There are, to be sure, rare individuals who are born intersexed (possessing attributes of both sexes), but in the Western world corrective surgery assigns a distinct sex soon after birth. [Note: Yeah, and I consider that “corrective surgery” to be mutilation, but that’s neither here nor there.] …

The push for recognizing “gender variance” has little to do with genuine biological aberrance. Its goal is not to treat those burdened with physical forms that are imperfectly realized more charitably, but to abolish sex by destroying the normative standard.

Well, speaking for myself? Yes. And? I’ve run across so many articles which talk about the feminist agenda of demolishing gender roles, establishing gender and sex as a continuum, etc, etc, and, without fail, these articles simply cite that as if it’s some self-evident flaw in feminist reasoning. They have never explained to me exactly why this is a bad thing. I assume this is because there’s no argument against the idea other than stubborn adherence to principle.

But I can explain why seeing gender, and even physical sex, as a false duality, as a continuum, is a good thing. With gender, recognizing however people define themselves is only polite and respectful. With physical sex, the differences are not as clearly-cut as most people would like to believe. Why construct these broad categories which often don’t apply? Obviously, there is benefit to constructing categories which fit most people, but the problem is that usually this ends up forcing everyone else into one or the other, which is marginalizing and often physically or psychologically damaging. This is a problem in the case of, say, the discrimination that transgendered and non-gender-normative folks face. This is a problem when intersex children are mutilated before they’re old enough to understand their own gender identity and express it, in operations which often compromise future reproductive or sexual function, which often lead to trauma when a child who identifies as one gender is raised as the other and/or that child learns what was done to them. (Though “trauma” seems an inadequate word if one means crippling depression and eventual suicide.)

But wait! It gets better:

If I approached the director of the student government’s Queer Affairs Task Force and I claimed to be an eggplant trapped in a man’s body, she would smile, nod politely (she is a nice person), and then call for friendly people in white coats to haul me off to a padded cell. But if I claimed to be a woman trapped in a man’s body, she would force others to act as if my view were correct. In short, psychosis is considered quite alright, provided it obliterates sexual norms, traditions, and taboos.

Do I even have to say anything about this quote? Really? Yeah, I think it speaks for itself. This isn’t even good or logical writing.

And, of course, the obligatory strawfeminist:

Believing in the modern liberal view of sex must require at least an hour of practice each day. How else can they believe, for example, that masculinity and femininity are social constructs with no relation to the biological differences between the sexes, while also holding that homosexuality is inherent? Or that gender is unimportant, except when someone insists that he or she is stuck in a body of the wrong gender?

The problem here, I think, is that someone a) doesn’t understand the terminology being used and b) doesn’t care. Masculinity and femininity are gender roles. Anyone can act in a way society deems “masculine” or “feminine” regardless of being male or female, man or woman, intersex or genderqueer. Gender is an internal identity, a state of mind. Sex is an inherent physical characteristic which can be medically altered to a certain extent. These are not interchangeable. That is how I can believe all these things at once; because they are not synonymous. And believing that gender should be unimportant so far as social or legal issues go, that everyone should be treated equally, is not opposed to the idea that people’s right to self-define is important.

The rest of the editorial kind of veers off into a bunch of pseudo-philosophical crap that I admit I got bored and stopped really reading closely. (I skimmed!) But apparently “Our culture has become so oversexed that it is abolishing sex.” I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, since it’s confusing the two totally different definitions of the word sex: namely, that which is related to reproduction and all its happy perks, and…innate physical characteristics that don’t necessarily have anything to do with definition number one. As I said before: logic? Decent writing skills? Anywhere to be found?

And then there’s this awful thing someone linked to in the feminist LJ community. I can’t even begin to articulate how much this article pisses me off. Whatever one thinks about Ariel Levy (Personally? I think she has some good points to make, but I don’t think she’s a very good writer from articles I’ve read. I haven’t read the book, just excerpts and articles she’s written about the book which make me disinclined to read it. I expect I’ll get around to it sometime.), I hope we can all agree that whoever wrote this thing is living in a different universe. Observe:

We’re not trying to be empowered. The twentysomething women I know don’t care about old-style feminism. Partly this is because they already see themselves as equal to men: they can work, they can vote, they can bonk on the first date.

Putting aside the myth that women have never been allowed to work outside the home (as women of color and poor women and just about any woman who wasn’t rich and well-off have always been forced to work rather than having the luxury of staying home with the kids); men and women are hardly on an equal playing field. Things are better in many ways, but it’s not equal. This remains true of all civil rights struggles. And sure, women can bonk on the first date, it just means everyone will call her a “slut”. Being called degrading names! Empowering!

Oh, but it GETS BETTER. By which I mean, much, much worse:

Another reason for the rise of raunch is that women are rediscovering the joy of being loved for their bodies, not just their minds. … Instead of desperately longing for the right to be seen as human beings, today’s girls are playing with the old-fashioned notion of being seen as sex objects.

I defy anyone to seriously argue that women are now valued for their minds at the expense of their physical characteristics. Or that women’s minds are valued. Or that women are valued. I don’t know about you, but this twentysomething girl is still at that desperately-longing-to-be-seen-as-a-human-being stage.

And you can read the rest if you really want, because there are so many gems in there I didn’t want to bother quoting. I’ll just close with this explanation on why sexual harassment in the workplace is the greatest thing ever:

If a thong makes you feel fabulous, wear it. For one thing, men in the office waste whole afternoons staring at your bottom, placing bets on whether you’re wearing underwear. Let them. Use that time to take over the company.

I would, personally, prefer if no one except possibly a sexual partner spent any time thinking about my undergarments. If they can’t help themselves, there’s no need to speak about this thought aloud. I can’t be the only one who finds this quote extremely nasty.