![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Living, for the first time since I left my parents' house, in a big house with all my books, has brought among other things Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian by Noel Annan back to me.
The great British tradition of trained debate and a really good education is one of the sub-themes -- the theme being how Stephen (1832-1904) drove the bus from the 18th century abolitionist Clapham Sect to atheist, socialist, queer, pacifist, feminist Bloomsbury. Which, as the foremost critic, after Arnold, of the latter half of the 19th century, and the likely founder of muscular Christianity and later, ethical atheism, Stephen did.
One of the many tidbits of gossip in it -- for scholars of Virginia [Stephen] Woolf -- that I'd forgotten, was the long tradition of incredibly hard work, manic talking, several nervous breakdowns and starving yourself to death among Virginia's paternal forebears. Nothin' feminist about it. Her father was known as the Old Serpent in one of his Cambridge debating or rowing societies -- the same name she called her road dog Lytton Strachey. And, last but not least, Queenie Leavis, one of V. Woolf's most implacable critics, took up the cause of Sir Leslie's literary reputation -- she was for him -- some 40 years after his death. Oh that Queenie was a piece of work, to ally herself with the man who tortured his daughters and deprived them of an education.
The real thing is this. Queenie, in her long contemplated and closely argued defense of Sir Leslie, said, "Art is not immoral, and everything is not as valuable as everything else."
Before you flame her as a running dog of the Aristo -Telian or -Cratic hierarchy, you have to understand that Queenie was a big ole Jew at Cambridge, not a good place to be, one of the smartest Jewgirls of the century, a pioneering woman scholar, and the incredibly hard-slogging, poverty-stricken, servantless, academic wife of F.R. Leavis and the champion of -- well let's just say D.H. Lawrence over what she saw as V. Woolf's rather sexless elitist perplexities. The Leavises were the first serious critics of Bloomsbury, which they (wrongly) saw as elitist.
Everything is not as valuable as everything else is an interesting thing for a supposed proletarian to say. It touches on what I think is wrong with the argument that women who wish to veil themselves must be allowed to do so because what women wear, or choose, has been dictated for far too long. Concommitant is the argument that freedom to choose means freedom to wear the veil, and all the alleged permutations of "freedom" to "choose", including sexual freedom to be, and to enact in public, sexual slavery.
My views on the latter -- the performance of sexual slavery -- are well known. You can be anything you want to in private. I am unalterably opposed to enacting or performing slavery for pleasure in public. Because it's wrong.
But I think the freedom to choose the wearing of the veil is a bad argument. I can't say right now if my problem with the wearing of the veil is entailed in my proscription of the enactment in public of slavery, because I don't think veiling has the pornographic privilege the pomoes like to claim for play parties and -- let's just call it slave porn. Actually, I'm okay with play parties. But not with slave porn. (One is sex and the other is slavery.)
I think many defenders of the veil, or the freedom to choose it, are reacting against racist bastards on the right, and atheist bastards on the left. But this ignores the real arguments against the wearing of the veil, which I think have to be conducted in the world where God exists.
Let's just say he does. (I choose to believe he does because there are a number of problems I simply can't solve myself. I call him he pretty much to annoy you, as much as your calling God she annoys me. My grandmother, also named Pure, was an imperial wizard of the Christian Science church. Founded by a woman. The childrens' prayers are addressed to "Father-Mother God." As imperial wizard, I saw Grama Pure every Sunday morning up in the pulpit in a formal morning dress. I'm over it. Women are just as crazy as men.)
And let's just confine my thinking to societies in which women may choose to wear the veil, not those in which 16-year-olds like Aqsa Parvez are killed by their father and brother for not wearing it. Ooops, that was here in laidback diverse Toronto, land of the free.
First of all, I would wager that every Muslim woman in the world, whether or not she can read, knows the story of Aqsa Parvez and has taken it to heart. Men fear women will laugh at them, as that notable feminist Gavin DeBecker points out. Women fear men will kill them.
This puts the idea of the "choice" women have to make to wear a veil in its proper context, a context in which all women live every day. It is a choice with which I am familiar as a scholar of genocide -- the survivor's choice: to die today or die tomorrow. It sharpens the mind marvelously to think that once the patriarchy is finished with Aqsa Parvez, they're coming after you. The idea that the veil protects women from men's violence is incorrect. It is men's violence.
http://www.rawa.org/beating.htm
But let's take this out of the hands of the patriarchs, and back to God. Who, if he exists, must love us all.
[to be continued]
( Veiled Americans )
The great British tradition of trained debate and a really good education is one of the sub-themes -- the theme being how Stephen (1832-1904) drove the bus from the 18th century abolitionist Clapham Sect to atheist, socialist, queer, pacifist, feminist Bloomsbury. Which, as the foremost critic, after Arnold, of the latter half of the 19th century, and the likely founder of muscular Christianity and later, ethical atheism, Stephen did.
One of the many tidbits of gossip in it -- for scholars of Virginia [Stephen] Woolf -- that I'd forgotten, was the long tradition of incredibly hard work, manic talking, several nervous breakdowns and starving yourself to death among Virginia's paternal forebears. Nothin' feminist about it. Her father was known as the Old Serpent in one of his Cambridge debating or rowing societies -- the same name she called her road dog Lytton Strachey. And, last but not least, Queenie Leavis, one of V. Woolf's most implacable critics, took up the cause of Sir Leslie's literary reputation -- she was for him -- some 40 years after his death. Oh that Queenie was a piece of work, to ally herself with the man who tortured his daughters and deprived them of an education.
The real thing is this. Queenie, in her long contemplated and closely argued defense of Sir Leslie, said, "Art is not immoral, and everything is not as valuable as everything else."
Before you flame her as a running dog of the Aristo -Telian or -Cratic hierarchy, you have to understand that Queenie was a big ole Jew at Cambridge, not a good place to be, one of the smartest Jewgirls of the century, a pioneering woman scholar, and the incredibly hard-slogging, poverty-stricken, servantless, academic wife of F.R. Leavis and the champion of -- well let's just say D.H. Lawrence over what she saw as V. Woolf's rather sexless elitist perplexities. The Leavises were the first serious critics of Bloomsbury, which they (wrongly) saw as elitist.
Everything is not as valuable as everything else is an interesting thing for a supposed proletarian to say. It touches on what I think is wrong with the argument that women who wish to veil themselves must be allowed to do so because what women wear, or choose, has been dictated for far too long. Concommitant is the argument that freedom to choose means freedom to wear the veil, and all the alleged permutations of "freedom" to "choose", including sexual freedom to be, and to enact in public, sexual slavery.
My views on the latter -- the performance of sexual slavery -- are well known. You can be anything you want to in private. I am unalterably opposed to enacting or performing slavery for pleasure in public. Because it's wrong.
But I think the freedom to choose the wearing of the veil is a bad argument. I can't say right now if my problem with the wearing of the veil is entailed in my proscription of the enactment in public of slavery, because I don't think veiling has the pornographic privilege the pomoes like to claim for play parties and -- let's just call it slave porn. Actually, I'm okay with play parties. But not with slave porn. (One is sex and the other is slavery.)
I think many defenders of the veil, or the freedom to choose it, are reacting against racist bastards on the right, and atheist bastards on the left. But this ignores the real arguments against the wearing of the veil, which I think have to be conducted in the world where God exists.
Let's just say he does. (I choose to believe he does because there are a number of problems I simply can't solve myself. I call him he pretty much to annoy you, as much as your calling God she annoys me. My grandmother, also named Pure, was an imperial wizard of the Christian Science church. Founded by a woman. The childrens' prayers are addressed to "Father-Mother God." As imperial wizard, I saw Grama Pure every Sunday morning up in the pulpit in a formal morning dress. I'm over it. Women are just as crazy as men.)
And let's just confine my thinking to societies in which women may choose to wear the veil, not those in which 16-year-olds like Aqsa Parvez are killed by their father and brother for not wearing it. Ooops, that was here in laidback diverse Toronto, land of the free.
First of all, I would wager that every Muslim woman in the world, whether or not she can read, knows the story of Aqsa Parvez and has taken it to heart. Men fear women will laugh at them, as that notable feminist Gavin DeBecker points out. Women fear men will kill them.
This puts the idea of the "choice" women have to make to wear a veil in its proper context, a context in which all women live every day. It is a choice with which I am familiar as a scholar of genocide -- the survivor's choice: to die today or die tomorrow. It sharpens the mind marvelously to think that once the patriarchy is finished with Aqsa Parvez, they're coming after you. The idea that the veil protects women from men's violence is incorrect. It is men's violence.
http://www.rawa.org/beating.htm
But let's take this out of the hands of the patriarchs, and back to God. Who, if he exists, must love us all.
[to be continued]
( Veiled Americans )
