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The War Between the Feminists 4
Oct. 30th, 2010 10:05 amI have been thinking about the third wave feminists' manifesto, which according to Faludi* believes that the Wonderbra -- shorthand for do-me feminism -- is empowering.
The second wave come off as Puritannical when they say it is not empowering, and further, it is a betrayal of feminism.
I'm going to have to be true to my school here. Wonderbras are not empowering and they cause damage to other women by raising (or lowering) the expectations of potential sex partners who are strangers, who then treat other women badly in the sense of hostile workplace, and sexual harassment at work (P.S. You owe this legal precedent, one of the very few marks of progress in the last 30 years, to Catherine MacKinnon).
I'm back to my position on porn, which is, you're not allowed to enact slavery in public. This includes treating non-consenting strangers as potential sex partners, or as people over whom you wish to exert sexual power with no intention of following through, like animals, by wearing a Wonderbra. While the narcissicism is repellent, what is immoral is the contempt for men, and for women. You just don't have the right to be an Uncle Tom.
As for the argument that one has the right to sex, the answer is, you certainly do not have the right to sex. That's very close to rape rhetoric, and quite unfairly I hold feminists -- as I do Israelis -- to higher standards of morality.
What you have the right to, perhaps, is to do it any way you like to, in private, that doesn't involve the soul-murder of someone else. Actually getting some is a privilege, a luxury and a gift, as is celibacy. It's all gravy, and you certainly are not entitled to it.
The third wavers' sense of entitlement to a particularly slavish acting-out of performance sex -- formed, those more erudite than I could probably trace, by frivolous yet vicious academic culture studies and queer theory, as well as the conflation of gay civil rights with predatory sex and cruising rights, all blendered into the horrific stew A-gay Darren Star made of Candace Bushnell's thoughtful, Whartonesque Sex and the City newspaper columns in which every assay of Wonderbra slut ethics had its ineffable tragic -- humanist and not punitive -- arc. In this way, non-monogamous sex can be valued as an instrument of knowing; what one learns, however, is a mile wide and an inch deep. At a certain point, it becomes a culpable waste of energy. I think the appropriation by gay entertainment executives of female avatars is responsible for much of the performance sex ethos, with Marc Cherry and his desperate housewives and Darren Star at the top of the list.
I have to tell you something, baby girl. Gay men and entertainment executives are not feminists.
I think the sense of entitlement comes from the consoling properties of fix-me sex. Consolation really is, apparently, one of only three real spiritual needs, according to the agnostic William James and confirmed in my observation and experience. Unfortunately, the consolation and the fix-me provided by sex is not only temporary, it is fallacious, nugatory and often exploitative. It is my experience that consolation (reduction of anxiety and remorse) comes from altruism (political, communitarian, and charitable, not loving your fellow man), work, and friends.
Any theory that has as its result a sexual ethic which animalizes other people is pernicious.
Enacting slavery in public is soul-murder. Primo Levi and many other survivors of genocide all come to the same conclusion, recollecting emotion in tranquility. It is that the most caustic experience of genocide isn't starvation, extermination, forced labor, vivisection and torture. It is simply the witness of injustice performed on others.
There is a moral universe, Levi argues, in which things once enacted never cease to exist. There injustice lives and torments its witnesses forever.
The Street Singer, Eduoard Manet, ca. 1862
This is alleged to be the first work of art in which a woman returned the masculine gaze. Echoing Baudelaire's contemporary poem:
To a Woman Passing By
The deafening road around me roared.
Tall, slim, in deep mourning, making majestic grief,
A woman passed, lifting and swinging
With a pompous gesture the ornamental hem of her garment,
Swift and noble, with statuesque limb.
As for me, I drank, twitching like an old roué,
From her eye, livid sky where the hurricane is born,
The softness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills,
A gleam... then night! O fleeting beauty,
Your glance has given me sudden rebirth,
Shall I see you again only in eternity?
Somewhere else, very far from here! Too late! Perhaps never!
For I do not know where you flee, nor you where I am going,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!
— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)
The female gaze, or the glance returned to the sexually predatory painter's (film makers', photographers', pornographers') gaze can be analyzed in many ways. It is incarnating, most powerfully. To be seen is the entitlement sex appears to confer, but which it probably does not. No one is more invisible than a sexual partner you have discarded, the one who said, You made me feel this high, the jihadis who one scholar says all feel like dwarves. I thought on the day the towers fell, this is about Jews and Britney's belly button.
One of the components of the female gaze is assessment of whether or not Manet/Baudelaire is going to kill her, as per the nostrum Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them. And the energy to repel the murder can come across as an aggressively direct and therefore sexual taking of stock.
And this is a woman who is covered from her neck to the floor. Her tits, whether or not they are in a Wonderbra, are doubly inflammatory, inevitably inflammatory, because they exist only in the imagination of the stranger.
Just sayin'.
________________________
*....whose account of the WBF suffers from the very best practices of journalism, that is, careful and judicious coverage of events which seem to be a metaphor for the larger issue, but which are not; only 35 year surveys of scores of thousands of women would reveal something truer about what the second and third wave feminists think, and nobody has the money for that. Guess why?
The second wave come off as Puritannical when they say it is not empowering, and further, it is a betrayal of feminism.
I'm going to have to be true to my school here. Wonderbras are not empowering and they cause damage to other women by raising (or lowering) the expectations of potential sex partners who are strangers, who then treat other women badly in the sense of hostile workplace, and sexual harassment at work (P.S. You owe this legal precedent, one of the very few marks of progress in the last 30 years, to Catherine MacKinnon).
I'm back to my position on porn, which is, you're not allowed to enact slavery in public. This includes treating non-consenting strangers as potential sex partners, or as people over whom you wish to exert sexual power with no intention of following through, like animals, by wearing a Wonderbra. While the narcissicism is repellent, what is immoral is the contempt for men, and for women. You just don't have the right to be an Uncle Tom.
As for the argument that one has the right to sex, the answer is, you certainly do not have the right to sex. That's very close to rape rhetoric, and quite unfairly I hold feminists -- as I do Israelis -- to higher standards of morality.
What you have the right to, perhaps, is to do it any way you like to, in private, that doesn't involve the soul-murder of someone else. Actually getting some is a privilege, a luxury and a gift, as is celibacy. It's all gravy, and you certainly are not entitled to it.
The third wavers' sense of entitlement to a particularly slavish acting-out of performance sex -- formed, those more erudite than I could probably trace, by frivolous yet vicious academic culture studies and queer theory, as well as the conflation of gay civil rights with predatory sex and cruising rights, all blendered into the horrific stew A-gay Darren Star made of Candace Bushnell's thoughtful, Whartonesque Sex and the City newspaper columns in which every assay of Wonderbra slut ethics had its ineffable tragic -- humanist and not punitive -- arc. In this way, non-monogamous sex can be valued as an instrument of knowing; what one learns, however, is a mile wide and an inch deep. At a certain point, it becomes a culpable waste of energy. I think the appropriation by gay entertainment executives of female avatars is responsible for much of the performance sex ethos, with Marc Cherry and his desperate housewives and Darren Star at the top of the list.
I have to tell you something, baby girl. Gay men and entertainment executives are not feminists.
I think the sense of entitlement comes from the consoling properties of fix-me sex. Consolation really is, apparently, one of only three real spiritual needs, according to the agnostic William James and confirmed in my observation and experience. Unfortunately, the consolation and the fix-me provided by sex is not only temporary, it is fallacious, nugatory and often exploitative. It is my experience that consolation (reduction of anxiety and remorse) comes from altruism (political, communitarian, and charitable, not loving your fellow man), work, and friends.
Any theory that has as its result a sexual ethic which animalizes other people is pernicious.
Enacting slavery in public is soul-murder. Primo Levi and many other survivors of genocide all come to the same conclusion, recollecting emotion in tranquility. It is that the most caustic experience of genocide isn't starvation, extermination, forced labor, vivisection and torture. It is simply the witness of injustice performed on others.
There is a moral universe, Levi argues, in which things once enacted never cease to exist. There injustice lives and torments its witnesses forever.
The Street Singer, Eduoard Manet, ca. 1862
This is alleged to be the first work of art in which a woman returned the masculine gaze. Echoing Baudelaire's contemporary poem:
The deafening road around me roared.
Tall, slim, in deep mourning, making majestic grief,
A woman passed, lifting and swinging
With a pompous gesture the ornamental hem of her garment,
Swift and noble, with statuesque limb.
As for me, I drank, twitching like an old roué,
From her eye, livid sky where the hurricane is born,
The softness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills,
A gleam... then night! O fleeting beauty,
Your glance has given me sudden rebirth,
Shall I see you again only in eternity?
Somewhere else, very far from here! Too late! Perhaps never!
For I do not know where you flee, nor you where I am going,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!
— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)
The female gaze, or the glance returned to the sexually predatory painter's (film makers', photographers', pornographers') gaze can be analyzed in many ways. It is incarnating, most powerfully. To be seen is the entitlement sex appears to confer, but which it probably does not. No one is more invisible than a sexual partner you have discarded, the one who said, You made me feel this high, the jihadis who one scholar says all feel like dwarves. I thought on the day the towers fell, this is about Jews and Britney's belly button.
One of the components of the female gaze is assessment of whether or not Manet/Baudelaire is going to kill her, as per the nostrum Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them. And the energy to repel the murder can come across as an aggressively direct and therefore sexual taking of stock.
And this is a woman who is covered from her neck to the floor. Her tits, whether or not they are in a Wonderbra, are doubly inflammatory, inevitably inflammatory, because they exist only in the imagination of the stranger.
Just sayin'.
________________________
*....whose account of the WBF suffers from the very best practices of journalism, that is, careful and judicious coverage of events which seem to be a metaphor for the larger issue, but which are not; only 35 year surveys of scores of thousands of women would reveal something truer about what the second and third wave feminists think, and nobody has the money for that. Guess why?
