Gender
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against
American Women, by Susan Faludi
Bad as I Wanna Be, by Dennis Rodman
Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance Of The
Comparable Worth Movement, by Linda Blum
Changing Our Minds: Lesbian Feminism and
Psychology, Celia Kitzinger and Rachel Perkins
Controversy & Coalition: The New Feminist Movement Across Three
Decades of Change, by Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess
Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for
Women's Rights, by Nadine Strossen
Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia
Nervosa as a Modern Disease, by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and
Law, by Catharine MacKinnon
Feminism and Equality, by Anne Phillips
Gender Shock: How Australian Feminists Make the System Work-and
What American Women Can Learn from Them, by Hester
Eisenstein
Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, by Elizabeth Spelman
Jung & Feminism: Liberating Archetypes, by Demaris S. Wehr
The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets For Capturing The Heart Of
Mr. Right, by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider
The Second Stage, by Betty Friedan
Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of
Law, by Stephen J. Schulhofer
The War Against Women, by Marilyn French
Women, Race and Class, by Angela Davis
Backlash is an excellent resource for information on the patriarchal policies and practices of many major U.S. corporations, figures, and organizations. Filled with historical data, thorough case histories, and many personal interviews, Faludi's book reads like a mixture of sociological studies and politically-correct gossip on the patriarchy and sold out ex-feminists.
Faludi bases her book on the idea that Amerikan society experiences a series of feminist upsurges which are inevitably followed by anti-feminist backlashes, a process that she describes as a spiral of progress and retreat for the feminist movement that never reaches its goal of equality.
Faludi backs up this bleak historical outlook for Amerikan feminism with some convincing statistics. Her case is based on studies from all sectors of Amerikan life that show progress and then retreat for women, particularly focussing on what she says is the most recent backlash after the advances made by the women's movement of the 70s and early 80s.
The reader's interest in what could be a dull sociological study of historical trends in feminism is held by the many stories of real life anti-feminists. From leaders in the garment industry to pop-psychologists to female right-to-lifers, Faludi depicts their motivations for personal power through interviews and anecdotes of their lives, presumably attempting to explain to the reader the pervasiveness of this anti-woman campaign.
This is not a bad book for people to be reading. It is much better than most best sellers. The tactic of individual life stories and motivations is not the only evidence offered by Faludi of the obstacles presented to women, but unfortunately a number of sections in the book are just anecdotal without statistical evidence. For instance, Faludi cites the many anti-woman movies (and the motivations of their producers) of the past decade as evidence for the complicity of the movie industry in the current backlash, but she never offers any statistics on the preponderance of such movies compared over time.
As a sociological review of Amerikan women, the book presents a lot of useful data. And the book contributes to looking at the patriarchy as a problem of group power in society rather than individual incidents. Although Time magazine pointed out some errors of Faludi's work, the book is particularly useful for refuting incorrect anti-feminist theories by correctly criticizing their method and data. Faludi describes how the media and the government use these incorrect theories to create public opinion.
MIM believes that it is possible that Faludi is correct that there is a rise in anti-woman propaganda and actions in Amerika after women make advances against the patriarchy. But MIM asks, what is the significance of this phenomenon? It is important to understand that the bourgeoisie and the patriarchy often resort to increased fascism in the face of opposition. But it is even more important to develop an understanding of the most effective way to fight the bourgeoisie and the patriarchy through historical experience.
Faludi's book fails to provide any useful analysis, instead falling into the patriarchal paternalism that she professes to hate. "To expect each woman, in such a time of isolation and crushing conformism, to brave a solitary feminist stand is asking too much."(1)
As Faludi develops the story of patriarchal dominance of different sectors of society in each chapter, she also develops a story of women unable to resist, forced to give in to whatever that sector demands. From clothing to marriage, Faludi portrays women as pawns, forced to take part in whatever the patriarchy offers up.
It is exactly this paternalistic view of women that will doom any women's movement before it begins. Faludi's weak conclusion that women should form a women's party and pursue electoral reform--but don't because of the backlash--is a good demonstration of the failings of this paternalist attitude.
Faludi sees women as victims of an overpowering system. Rather than asking why women in Amerika have not risen up in revolution to overthrow the patriarchal demon that is the cause of their agony, Faludi describes women's oppression as unavoidable, in fact often women do not even realize they are being oppressed.
A cursory reading of history will show that people who are oppressed and suffering so that they have little to lose by rising up and overthrowing their oppressor are easily organized against their oppressor. These people are not duped by the propaganda of the oppressor forever: they are easily convinced of the correct ideas of revolution, at least relative to bought-off Amerikans.
Rather than wistfully wishing for a more successful feminist movement, Faludi should be questioning why Amerikan women are so unaware of their oppression. Faludi is playing into the biological determinism that she disparages--if women don't get it they must be inferior: all the men know what's up. Faludi even admits this: "All of these men understood the profound force that an American women's movement could exert if it got half a chance. It was women, tragically, who were still in the dark." Fund for the Feminist Majority founder Eleanor Smeal agrees: "The reason men 'overreact' is they get it."(2)
MIM understands that women in Amerika are not inherently stupid. They are not just "in the dark" and unable to act because they don't understand what's going on. Women in Amerika, the women that Faludi talks about--mostly white women--don't overthrow the patriarchy because they do not want to lose the privileges it gives them.
Women of the white nation receive certain privileges from the patriarchy. By using women and men of the Third World to test contraceptives, First World women can rest assured that their contraceptives are safe. First World women can accuse Third World men of rape to control Third World men and gain privilege in First World society.
First World women are oppressed by the patriarchy. But First World women are also able to use the patriarchy to their benefit. While Third World women are forced to work long hours just to feed their family, First World women can use the patriarchy to gain access to certain jobs and advancements.
If the abolition of the patriarchy were truly in the overall interest of First World women, they would refuse to use their sexual privilege to get ahead in society, they would refuse to accept the exploitation and oppression of all women, and they would ally with all women in a movement to destroy their oppressor. MIM understands that this will not happen. There are strong women's movements in the Third World, but they are not organizing against men, they are allied with the men of their nation, to fight imperialism and the patriarchy.
Material interest will not cause First World women to join the movement to overthrow the patriarchy which feeds off of Third World people, supported and used by imperialism. Material interest can only cause First World women to ally with the imperialists while trying to achieve relative equality with their men. This is a delicate fight: don't overthrow the patriarchy, just eliminate its negative effects on First World women while preserving the privileges gained from it.
MIM does not wonder why there has not been a successful feminist movement in Amerika. Overall, First World women are on the privileged end of the oppressors in relation to the patriarchy. MIM works to expose the myths of First World pseudo-feminism that is setting back the real fight against the patriarchy and against imperialism.
Notes:
1. Susan Faludi, Backlash, the Undeclared War
Against American Women, New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1991, p.
58.
2. Ibid., p. 459.
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This autobiography of basketball star Dennis Rodman covers all the most titillating aspects of Rodman's life--sex, fame and money. He has a chapter about his romance with the music star Madonna and speaks freely about many famous people in basketball.
We at MIM do not find Dennis Rodman so very unusual. He is simply right about all the stupid conformity in basketball and life in general. With the huge sums of money infused into professional sports we find that the management of the San Antonio Spurs and the National Basketball Association (NBA) generally value conformity, and safe messages for its audience, more than winning the game or playing it with greater athleticism. As such, Dennis Rodman becomes a symbol of how ruling class demands for conformity stifle sports and the economy (through analogy).
We find that public attention to Rodman's supposed antics is in fact a means of control by the owners of basketball teams set on delivering non- controversial family entertainment--even if that means the sport of basketball should be damned. What we end up with is not the best basketball, but the basketball that generates the most revenue according to the guess of conservative entrepreneurs. Rodman spells it out that big money goes into hyping players such as Michael Jordan, Shaq and Grant Hill. The referees also know what entertains the public and they cut certain kinds of players slack to do certain kinds of thing in the game if the public will be more entertained. One job of the referees is to call fouls--to make those subjective judgments which nonetheless make and break careers.
Also important are the fines imposed by the organization of the league. Fines and bad press from owners are the ways in which basketball players come to go along with the charade of competitive sport. Dennis Rodman may not play any differently than anyone else, but he can be ejected from games, called crazy, have his capitalist lifestyle cut back and get condemned in the press. If a player gets ejected from the games or fouls out of the games, that player still gets his guaranteed salary but he may lose out on other perks and his next contract may be impossible to obtain. Meanwhile, players such as Shaq and Grant Hill who the NBA thinks will bring in the entertainment money have the way cleared for them to be stars before they leave college and join the NBA. Such is the influence of money on sport.
We at MIM believe in amateur sports over spectating. Too much energy of spectators goes into sports like football, baseball and basketball which the masses should be playing themselves instead of watching. That is not to say we oppose professional efforts at human achievement. Stalin believed that all kinds of sporting, science, art and other feats should be publicized and backed with state funding. For instance, the feat of trekking to the North Pole or climbing a mountain was something that Stalin believed in giving media to. This was Stalin's way of leading the people to understand their own capabilities in a concrete way.
Such feats can be organized and massively supported with resources without the spectator craze we have in the profit-mad entertainment industry in the imperialist countries. Currently the money and the sexual rewards for athletes and other famous entertainers take on a life of their own, as Rodman himself explains of both the case of basketball players and music stars like Madonna. Rodman correctly believes there are many sick aspects to such fame and fortune.
Rodman himself is cashing in on the decadence of imperialist society that leaves people searching for stars in sports and music to fill a gap in their boring lives. We do not believe there is anything particularly radical about anything he says about being bisexual-minded or wanting to play his last NBA game nude. He is just making himself more of a commodity with that and his colored hair and female clothing stunts. (We do applaud his speaking out against homophobia.)
However, he is astute in calling himself a "sports slave" and comparing himself to prostitutes and models (p. 81). In the imperialist countries, we have this phenomenon of the Madonna and the Rodman. While biological females dominate the modeling and prostitution businesses, biological males dominate the sports. In both cases the body is the center of attention for entertainment and in both cases the stars are selected for their unique or dramatic physical characteristics.
It takes the free time that goes with money in order to have physical characteristics become sexual privilege. Somewhere in our leisure-time culture Rodman goes from being a 220 pound 6 foot 8 Black man to being a sex symbol. Rodman and Madonna are not sexploited, but in fact they hold privileges connected to their own exceptional bodies and the imperialist system of gender oppression. The issues of able-bodiedness and access to the human body are important parts of leisure-time life that form the bulk of what we call gender oppression. Men in prison may have similar physical characteristics to Rodman, but they are gender oppressed because their access to sex and the human body is completely controlled by the state.
Other so-called communist parties shy away from saying that having a harem like Rodman or Madonna is sexual privilege. They talk about "bourgeois feminism" all the time without ever talking about gender oppression. For example, most phony Marxists side with the players in the sports strikes and believe Madonna is sexploited because she is a sex object. In fact Madonna is part of the ruling class in the sexual hierarchy; she has access to the human body in leisure-time and the means of production, both to the utmost degree.
(from MIM Notes 126, Nov. 1996)
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The comparable worth movement merits Maoist attention. It could go the way of reactionary imperialist class interests, or revolutionary feminist interests. Revolutionary feminist influence is necessary to steer it on the correct course.
Comparable worth is a concept of equal pay for equivalent work. It is a method of evaluating jobs based on an assumption that equal pay is deserved for jobs that require equal training and labor.
Historically, women have been placed in a subordinate position in the labor force. Regardless of their job placement, they are paid less than men in the same or equivalent fields.
The effects of this patriarchal practice are different across classes. Those in the upper classes experience a far smaller wage disparity than do those in lower class positions. This is not surprising as upper class women often take the capitalists' side in reaping both class and gender privilege.
The movement for comparable worth has the has progressive potential of taking from the overpaid men to give to the underpaid women within each class. Obviously not an overall solution to economic economic disparity, this movement could strike blows against this the patriarchy and provide a context within which women will be educated in opposition to the concept of pay according to gender. This will make the problems of pay according to class background the much easier to grasp. This could expose the benefits of socialist society and the detriments of capitalist society, if revolutionary feminist leadership takes the movement to its correct conclusion.
The benefit to Maoists, besides the raised consciousness of those activists, is the advancement towards communism that this movement could provide. Under socialism we will still have to battle the patriarchy, and the more of that battle that is won under capitalism, the easier the fight will be under socialism.
In the converse, comparable worth could mean taking more from the Third World in the form of superprofits to raise the status of women to that of men. This would only serve to strengthen First World women's alliance with the imperialists and increase the patriarchal and class oppression of the Third World.
This book review criticizes the comparable worth movement from the revolutionary feminist perspective.
Between Feminism and Labor describes white working-class women's attempt to become equal with white working-class men. Blum premises her book on the assumption that working women in this country are oppressed based on their class position as well as their gender position. The women she studies are in clerical, library or equivalent positions. They were mobilized to work with their local union over the issue of comparable worth. Blum offers no evidence for their class oppression, perhaps because there is no material support for this class analysis.
While the comparable worth movement has potential within the white working class, it is important that activists see this as a gender inequality issue and not a movement of the proletariat. Activists should also realize that this inequality is, in fact, rather insignificant when one considers that even First World women as a group are receiving more than the value of their labor-power.
MIM understands that there are pay inequalities between men and women across classes. But the movement for comparable worth Blum describes has the typical white feminist slant that Ignores the economic realities of the proletariat in and outside of this country.
White workers in the United States are receiving the benefits of the exploitation and superexploitation of Third World workers in the form of a wage higher than the value of their labor- power. The comparable worth movement Blum studies aims to raise Amerikan working women's benefits to the level of Amerikan men's. While a potential blow for the patriarchy, but no class victory, and certainly not a union victory for the working people of Amerika.
Organizing white people in Amerika around their class oppression will not create revolutionary consciousness. This activism will only result in struggle for a bigger piece of the pie. Ironically, Blum notes that the comparable worth movement could result in a loss of income or jobs for some women while benefiting others because of the limited size of the pie.
Blum sees comparable worth as a radical leap from the affirmative action movement. The difference is that comparable worth allows women to stay in their jobs, recognizing the social influences that keep women out of male-dominated sectors, instead offering them equality with men in equivalent male sectors.
On the one hand, this approach is good in recognizing that we have to do the best we can under the current system while we try to change it It also recognizes that placing women in male jobs is often only tokenism that does not offer them better pay or status than the traditionally female jobs, since they are placed in the dead end areas of these traditionally male-sector jobs. It is also a step in the direction of recognizing the inequalities created by the capitalist wage system of evaluating the monetary value of different jobs.
On the negative side, Blum points out that comparable worth will bring men into traditionally female-dominated sectors of the job market as it becomes more economically acceptable for them to join these fields. From her brief look at this phenomenon, Blum found that these men tended to create more prestigious positions within the female- dominated fields so that even there they would hold more authority and enjoy higher pay and create upward mobility.
Blum cites several successes of the comparable worth movement in which women were promised higher pay through periodic increases. She also noted a number of failed attempts.
The movement is hampered by a job evaluation process that assigns value to labor, and thus wages, based on capitalist values. These values are hierarchical, placing mental labor above physical labor, and traditionally male labor above traditionally female labor. But it is just this problem which could lead to a greater revolutionary consciousness among the women fighting for comparable worth. The women Blum studies recognize some of the problems with the job evaluation process and focus efforts on changing this system.
Even within the constraints, the job evaluations find significant pay inequality between female jobs and their "male counterparts" in male- dominated fields. Changing this inequality comes down to restructuring Amerikan wealth so that white women can get their "fair" piece of the pie.
While MIM supports women taking from the patriarchy to receive a higher wage, MIM also recognizes that this movement does not challenge the fundamental structure of the patriarchy, nor does it attempt to help the truly gender oppressed.
Blum found that the comparable worth movement often does not enjoy the support of union men because they recognize that the pay the women are demanding has to come from somewhere, and the most likely targets are their pockets These contradictions and difficulties the comparable worth movement faces are indicative of the capitalist system it chooses to operate under.
Blum's analysis of the movement paints a picture of internal struggle within the overpaid Amerikan "working class". The women of this class are trying to eliminate effects the patriarchy has on them while leaving its symbiotic structure of capitalism as well as the patriarchal oppression of the majority of the world's people intact.
Blum does not discuss a comparable worth movement among the Black or Latino proletariat in Amerika and MIM wonders if there is such a movement There is obviously little class value in the comparable worth movement for the proletarian women who would not be significantly improving their economic position if they were to win a battle to elevate their salaries to the level of "male-counterpart jobs."
MIM understands that the current comparable worth movement is incorrect both in its practice within the capitalist system, and in its identification of gender as the principal contradiction. With these incorrect practices it will never achieve anything more than relative equality for white women in the First World.
A comparable worth movement working to eliminate the patriarchy for all people must be a revolutionary movement that seeks to destroy all class, nation, and gender inequalities, focusing on the principal contradiction at this time-- between oppressed and oppressor nations.
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In Changing Our Minds: Lesbian Feminism and Psychology, Celia Kitzinger and Rachel Perkins challenge the current degeneration of feminism into self-help and therapy for the white middle classes. Both recalling writings from the 1970s, when feminist anti-psychology theorizing was strong, and looking at present writings on both sides, the authors make some good points throughout. Although MIM has fundamental disagreements with the authors regarding their identity politics, with its subsequent focus on only middle-class white lesbians that form their community, we also have much unity with their criticisms of psychology, which we present here.
Kitzinger and Perkins describe some excellent models of non-hierarchical support as an alternative to psychology and therapy. But in their refusal to outline a strategy for making these models sustainable, the authors lapse into anarchism, seeming to hope that individuals in the "lesbian community" will be able to change their society without eradicating patriarchy altogether. MIM believes their progressive ideas could only work when applied within the context of a vanguard which has the discipline and commitment identity-defined groups lack. MIM is happy to hear feminists disavowing psychology, but stresses that the world Kitzinger and Perkins describe is only attainable through socialist revolution.
Watching our language
One of the most noticeable infiltrations of psychology into the feminist movement is the growth of its language. Among so-called feminists, psychological terminology is increasingly replacing political language to describe the situation of women in society. Psychological language adopts a particular way of communicating experience, and as such, it has political ramifications for feminism. Beyond adding its own terms like "co-dependency" and "internalized homophobia," therapy has co-opted political language like "liberation" "revolution" and "power." These erstwhile political terms now refer to individual transformation rather than social and political change, lending a feminist veneer to objectively patriarchal concepts.
Redefining "power"
Kitzinger and Perkins write: "When men exercise power, what they are often demonstrating is power over women. Male power is vested in the state that withholds free contraception, abortion, or child care facilities to women, or in governments that outlaw lesbians, endorse police harassment, and sack us from our jobs ... Kathleen Barry and Andrea Dworkin have shown how male power operates through the widespread use of rape, pornography, and sexual terrorism. Male power means domination, oppression, coercion... That is the kind of power men have. It is real, concrete, and it affects our daily lives."(1)
And what power do women have? "Lesbians know that, even under male domination, we are not completely powerless. We have power over those weaker than us... We have power over other lesbians who are oppressed in ways that we are not: because of their race, ethnicity, class or disability. A lesbian can use a power, of a sort, when she uses 'feminine wiles' to get her own way. Those are real powers."(1) The authors are not equating these types of power, but they correctly recognize that both types they describe have both material foundations and social backing.
Unlike the power offered by therapy. A power that "lies within ourselves." "Power as good as men¹s power, but a special 'female' version."(2) The way that psychology would have women gain power would be to reclaim the power of our inner selves. Significantly, this is a form of power that capitalist, patriarchal culture does not recognize! Some of the worst psychological theorists even claim that the feeling or lack thereof of personal power is the decisive element in whether a woman is raped, for example.(3)
Kitzinger and Perkins also address the political implications of child sexual abuse prevention programs that try to "empower" children to "say no."
"Power is seen in individualistic terms as something that can be 'claimed' or 'given away' by a five-year-old. The reality, of course, is that children are not 'in charge', that girls can say 'no' and still be raped, and that men often see children's bodies as their rightful property. The slogans and jingles proclaiming children¹s power conceal this reality," and encourage them to blame themselves for their victimization. (To this analysis, MIM adds that biological women can also be the abusers and biological boys the victims.)
Kitzinger and Perkins maintain that it is crucial to recognize when women and children have power, and when they do not. Fighting for power means working against patriarchal violence, for self-determination, not finding "what is ours already, waiting to be tapped, if only we stand still, breathe deeply, and pretend to be trees."(4)
The politics of "homophobia"
While pseudo-feminist therapy and psychology appropriated the language of power from political feminism, "homophobia" is a term psychology itself invented. Any form of heterosexism, whether institutional or individual, is thus defined as action based on an irrational fear by those who are "sick." Psychology¹s practitioners have graciously decided that lesbians are no longer "sick," and now apply the "sick" label to those who disagree with the experts' new philosophy.
Kitzinger and Perkins maintain that there is revolutionary potential in lesbianism; MIM disagrees with this while still recognizing the politics of heterosexism. No, lesbian practice or identification is not intrinsically a threat to male supremacy, but that does not make hating lesbians irrational. Compulsory heterosexuality has been a sturdy component of patriarchy for quite some time, and wishing to preserve that is a political, not psychological, wrong. Therefore MIM is not afraid to call opponents of homosexuality wrong. We do not resort to calling them phobic.
The term "homophobia" might be convenient for opponents of heterosexism, since there is a long history of proclaiming one¹s political opponents "mentally ill." However, to depoliticize the debate in this way is to legitimize the use of this tactic and adds to the prestige of the oppressive institution of psychology.
This tactic has led to the invention of the term "heterophobia" which, like homophobia, is supposedly an illness. Usually those who suffer from it are lesbian separatists, and, never fear, they can be treated by feminist therapists! This equation of the institutionalized practice of heterosexism with the (in MIM's view misguided) political views of lesbian separatists is false. Like the "men's rights" advocates who see themselves as the parallel of those working for women's rights, those who decry the problem of "heterophobia" distort the reality of domination. The concept also of course suggests that lesbians who fear the enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality are doing so irrationally. MIM maintains that it is not the correct political line to oppose heterosexual sex, but at the same time recognizes that fear of heterosexual domination is rational, and not a phobia as defined by psychology.
Therapeutic lifestyles
The rise of therapy among groups of feminists has been a part of the decline of consciousness- raising. Consciousness-raising, which was a fundamental part of truly radical feminist groups like the Redstockings of the 1970s, is the antithesis of therapy because it makes the personal political, while therapy is an inversion of that principle. (See MIM's article on the Redstockings in this issue of MIM Theory.)
Feminist therapists claim that they provide a sympathetic ear to women with ordinary problems. And in this context, sympathetic means non- judgmental. This limits what an (unpaid) friendship relationship can accomplish, as it furthers the agenda of profit-seeking therapists, who are in the business of loneliness.
The therapist is by definition the expert in relation to the client. "JoAnn Loulan [a therapist] compares the power of the therapist to the power of the car mechanic. The only difference, she says, is that 'unlike car repair, which can be learned, one cannot learn to be objective about oneself.' So you can learn to service your car, but there's no way a responsible owner of a 'psychology' should tinker with that herself: it has to be checked out by a psychological expert."
The hierarchy is also a matter of preferring one personality type to another. Some women are considered "self-actualized" or "fulfilled" while others, even if they are not quite "sick," are in need of healing. The therapist gets to decide who¹s who. Some therapists think that the most self-actualized lesbian considers herself just like heterosexuals and is beyond activism, while others think that activism is a high stage. Kitzinger and Perkins maintain that even if the therapist agrees with their politics, and counsels her patients to have politics like theirs, a therapy session is not the correct place or mode of imparting these political beliefs. "Therapy replaces the words 'right' and 'wrong' with 'health' and 'sickness', so concealing the value judgments made."(5)
The notion of "self"
Psychology revolves around a notion that there is a "self" inside each person that can (and should) be discovered and nurtured. This is the goal that therapy says it serves, validating what the patient¹s "self" wants and so on. Of course, it also makes itself indispensable by maintaining that finding and loving that "self" is a very difficult endeavor. Women ostensibly need to strip away all influences of culture, other people, and morality, in order to get at this elusive thing and attain happiness. What do Kitzinger and Perkins make of this?
"This is a ludicrous and nonsensical notion. It relies on the profoundly individualistic, modern liberal Western concept of what it means to be a person; a version of personhood alien to most of the world's people. We are simply unable to believe in this free-floating 'self', for the 'self' only comes into existence within a context. Individual and society are not formed apart from one another, "interacting" as though each were external to the other... There is no core 'real self' lurking beneath the layers of social experience."(6)
The influence of Amerikan individualism on the women's liberation movement in Amerika has made its theories vulnerable to psychological appropriation. If women don't care about justice, only "self-fulfillment," then psychological solutions are easy.
Not only does psychology invent a "self," it sees that "self" as wounded, fatally so unless adequate care is taken. Therapy does not provide any sense of perspective on the relative suffering of First World women and Third World women. Kitzinger and Perkins quote Wendy Kaminer, who contrasts 12-step groups with women¹s groups in Cambodia:
"There is more laughter and lightness in these meetings of vulnerable, impoverished survivors of genocide than in any twelve-step group I have attended, where people pursue recovery with deadening earnestness. Twelve-step groups depress me; so many people talking about such relatively trivial problems with such seriousness, in the same nonsensical jargon. The Cambodian women's groups enhearten me; such resilience these women show."(7)
Fact is, not all "womanhood" is equal. MIM argues that First World women enjoy class, nation and gender privilege in the world of imperialist patriarchy. Real feminists do not focus on invented frailties, appealing to therapists to heal them, but work to eradicate oppression of people over people.
And the authors of Changing our Minds make the point that there is no pre-requisite for being capable of doing political work, as the fans of "loving yourself first" proclaim: you learn to wage revolution by waging revolution.
In sex-therapy, the judgmentalism of non- judgmentalism is clear. If a woman finds a contradiction between radical feminism and lesbian sadomasochism, then she is "erotophobic" or some such disorder. Feminist therapists show their libertarian colors, the conventional wisdom among them endorses any sexual practice that¹s "fun." Kitzinger and Perkins recognize that singling out s/m for condemnation may not be the point, saying "if it is true that differences in power lie at the root of sexual desire, then this is a problem for lesbian feminism, and something we would want to change...Recognizing what is actually happening is not the same as accepting its legitimacy; and certainly does not mean 'celebrating' it."(8) MIM holds that power is indeed at the root of sexual desire, and is working to abolish the patriarchal system that makes that hold.
Therapy asserts that it would be cruel to hurt a "wounded self" with criticism. Kitzinger and Perkins are highly critical of the anti-leadership bias among feminists that led to and re-inforced the notion that women are weak. Revolution should therefore wait until women are "healed." But "what kind of revolution waits until its soldiers are happy and fulfilled before confronting the enemy?"(9)
Kitzinger and Perkins go into what they think should be done to create a lesbian community in which lesbians could support one another with consideration, not just doing "what feels right," and instead opting for sisterhood based on ethical debate and political action. MIM does not think this endeavor can work, precisely because it is based fundamentally on identity and not on politics. Trying to get all the people who claim a certain identity to adopt a political line is impossible. Lesbianism does not a feminist make, (and maleness or heterosexuality does not a non-feminist make). To put politics in command, it is necessary to form the group around political line. Politics formed around social and romantic relationships cannot be scientific.
Social disabilities
Even those who agree that most women do not need therapy may believe it is necessary in extreme cases, such as suicidal depression, anxiety so extreme a woman is afraid to go out alone, or a feeling of compulsion to spend hours performing cleaning rituals. Kitzinger and Perkins call such debilitating behavior "social disabilities." The term is good in that it recognizes the nature of so-called mental illness: a social problem that should be dealt with socially, not in the individual therapy context of isolating these women from their society in order to analyze their particular problems.
Marginalization and exclusion is not a good way to deal with women (or men) who exhibit these behaviors. Sometimes others do not believe that women with social disabilities are suffering, that their behavior is just an act best ignored. This is callous and acts on a long held and incorrect notion that women in general should not be believed. Still another form of marginalization is to say to women with social disabilities, "I know how it is, I get depressed sometimes too." This is the arrogance of a therapeutic culture that always draws false parallels to the personal experience of the listener.
Kitzinger and Perkins suggest that the lesbian community can offer practical help to women with social disabilities by doing whatever possible to help such women lead normal lives. If, for example, a woman believes that she cannot go out on certain days, then others should let her know that they disagree that going out would cause trouble, but at the same time take care of her needs.
MIM has had some experience providing this kind of support for comrades with such social disabilities, struggling with them to take responsibility for their actions as political line, and keeping the focus where it should be: on the proletarian pole. This support is not paternalistic, but important to further the goal of making the comrade fully functional again for the party and the people.
Of course, MIM has something over the ill-defined "lesbian community" Kitzinger and Perkins describe. Revolutionaries have a commitment to their comrades (through their commitment to the international proletariat) that lesbians lack for their fellow lesbians. And MIM does not use its resources according to identity politics. We use them to assist revolutionaries in furtherance of the struggle.
Kitzinger and Perkins speak of the need to create true asylums, that is "a shelter, a sanctuary, a safe inviolable place of refuge,"(10) as an alternative to oppressive psychiatric hospitals. This is sometimes a crucial part of care for comrades with severe "psychological" problems as well. If others can make sure that their material needs are met, then much of the stress of the debilitation can be alleviated. Fortunately, MIM has only had to deal with short-term problems so far. The challenge of revolutionaries with more long-term problems may be great indeed, but we are certainly better equipped for it than ad hoc groups such as those the authors describe.
Going beyond "changing our minds"
Kitzinger and Perkins hope that lesbians will abandon the current fad of "validating" poor arguments and instead use principled political debate to find the best arguments out there. MIM hopes that everyone will. Concretely, however, MIM recognizes that the women that the authors preach to have a material interest in the status quo and does not indulge in liberalism with lesbians any more than anyone else. The struggle against the pseudo-science of psychology will be more difficult than Kitzinger and Perkins realize, but it is possible through the development of independent power and the establishment of socialism. Changing Our Minds¹ authors ring hollow with their cries of "after the revolution," but MIM forges ahead on the theory and practice of revolution with confidence.
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Controversy & Coalition: The New Feminist Movement Across Three
Decades of Change
by Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess
New
York: Twayne Publishers, 1995, revised edition
278 pp.
Gender Shock: How Australian Feminists Make the System Work-and
What American Women Can Learn from Them
by Hester Eisenstein
Boston: Beacon Press, 1991
138 pp.
reviewed by MC5, October 26, 1998
These are two books on the feminist movement in the imperialist countries. We review them together, because they both concern themselves with the achievements of feminism in the imperialist countries and arguments about the fastest road forward.
Recognizing the gender bureaucracy
MIM is particularly delighted to discover Hester Eisenstein's book, because it is a conscious document of a self-described "femocrat," something MIM has called "gender bureaucrat."
The book by Ferree and Hess represents the view of spokespeople for the gender aristocracy in the United $tates. It is a nearly perfect rendition complete with a smattering of social movement sociology of mainstream "feminism" in the U$A.
Hester Eisenstein has presented a conceptually clear and well-written book from a social-democratic perspective. She argues that it is beneficial for feminists to ally with the "labor" movement and take up government positions in the equal opportunity and affirmative action enforcement bureaucracies. Her goal is incremental change, but she knows enough of other views to raise doubts about her own position.
MIM's concept of the "gender bureaucrat" runs parallel to Lenin's notion of the "labor bureaucrat." The "labor bureaucrat" is an official paid off by the capitalists to divert the labor movement into pro-capitalist channels. From MIM's perspective, the "gender bureaucrat" is a parallel creation of the patriarchy to co-opt the movement for wimmin's liberation. Avoiding the creation of such bureaucrats as extensions of the police-state is an important reason MIM stresses the "creation of public opinion and independent institutions of the oppressed."
Hester Eisenstein speaks of the gender bureaucracy as the kind of miracle for social change that many see in the social-democracy of Sweden. Not surprisingly given the lack of social-democracy in the United $tates, Eisenstein finds Australia's system of gender bureaucrats truly novel: "In particular, the creation in Australia of the category of 'femocrats' - feminist bureaucrats - and the political and cultural impact of these women on the Australian scene was, to me, an extraordinary achivement, and one that bore many lessons for the international debate about feminist interventions."(p. 5)
Right on the second page of the first chapter after the introduction, Eisenstein cuts to the chase. "When I moved to Australia, there were virtually no jobs on offer in academic life that suited my need to combine academic with feminist work. And so I took the advice of my new feminist friends in Sydney and entered the public service where I became a femocrat, that is, a feminist working in the bureaucracy for women's issues."(p. 7)
"Indeed, the demonstrated commitment to feminism had been, with some help from EEO programmes, incorporated into job descriptions. The spectacle of very traditional-looking male bureaucrats in pin-striped suits and conservative ties reading over the credentials of women candidates and discussing seriously their respective claims to authentic feminist commitment and political experience, is one that stays with me as a testimony to the effectiveness of the femocratic experiment, at least as a way into the ranks of the bureaucracy." Eisenstein found this to be possible under the Australian Labour Party government to which socialism was not a dirty word.
MIM found this interesting both in terms of imperialism and its class structure and in terms of the impact on wimmin's liberation. First it is interesting that imperialist paper-shuffling bureaucracies can create just about any job imaginable. Someone who might otherwise be severely discontented is given a job fully financially supported by the Australian imperialist government.
Secondly, as Eisenstein herself points out, the question becomes whether patriarchy has co-opted these femocrats or whether these femocrats have transformed the patriarchy. Apparently MIM did not invent the concept of the gender bureaucrat. It existed at least as early as 1981 in Australia.(p. 12) Already by that time, revolutionaries had put forward what is now the MIM view: "The opposition, then, was between revolutionary feminism of the streets, outside the corrupt system of power and prestige, and the official feminism of the state, which created bureaucrats in its own images, painted birds whose role it was to contain and to dissipate the energy of feminism."(p. 12)
While in Australia, Eisenstein learned that the offices she admired so were considered by many Australian feminists as "the Office for the Women of Status."(p. 21) Although she disagreed, Eisenstein did notice. That is typical of what makes her book a useful admission and engagement by a social-democratic pseudo-feminist.
Some points of unity with Eisenstein on Western theorists
We share many of Eisenstein's impressions in a number of areas. It is useful to have someone calling herself "the last liberal" (p. 68) admit that Catharine MacKinnon's theory and her tactics are far apart (p. 30) as MIM has also pointed out with regard to attaching her revolutionary theory to spineless sub-reformism - work on individual court cases. Such work should at least be done in connection to a revolutionary media to interpret their significance to the people or the patriarchy will take credit for whatever outcome occurs.
Like MIM, Eisenstein also has use for Jo Freeman's work on informal hierarchy that arises where there is no accountable formal hierarchy. Eisenstein is also able to at least recognize what the revolutionary Marxist position would have to be and she anticipates that Mary Daly would be one criticizing her position along the lines that it is not possible to work in the patriarchal state without being co-opted.
We at MIM believe the capitalist state has to be smashed and replaced. It cannot be treated as a "terrain" of class, gender or nation struggle the way social-democrats say. To be sure, the dominant class can never obtain 100% of what it wants, but to the extent that the state reflects that truth it is only on account of the struggle occurring outside it.
At the same time, we also credit Eisenstein for recognizing the difference between her kind of social-democracy and post-modernism. She aptly states that post-modernists see "discourse" itself as the "terrain" of gender struggle.(p. 33) In this regard, as MIM has said before, we would much prefer the old Liberal John Stuart Mill or Eisenstein over the post-modernists. Eisenstein and others like her might conclude that they failed, but post-modernists see no question of truth to assess and it would be pointless to engage them.
Although not worded as we would have worded it, the following is exactly right about the birth of post-modernism out of liberalism: "The hypocrisy of liberalism was that it was the governing philosophy of the imperialist powers who in the name of freedom and equality enslaved and murdered and oppressed the non-white peoples of the world. But now the non-white people of the world are using those same principles very effectively to say, but what about us, our self-determination and our subjectivity? . . .In effect that European males announce the death of liberty, equality and truth just at the moment when the rest of the world - the previously excluded groups are saying, hang on, we want some!"(p. 69) The idea that there might be a truth and it might reside with the world's majority of Third World peoples and not with Europeans-that is what post-modernism is running from at warp speed in the guise of an attack on the discredited imperialist traditions.
Eisenstein seems to realize this about the world's majority of people. She even has an instinctive idea about productive labor: "It is the women in Third World countries who are ruining their eyesight making components for the personal computers that feminists in the academy and elsewhere are writing their theory on. So this is a new and complicated form of exploitation."(p. 71) We only differ in that Marx described this over 100 years ago.
Where lack of a revolutionary vehicle leads
Although Eisenstein seems aware of many problems of the intersection of nation, class and gender, when it comes down to the movement, she offers no integrated strategy and she points to feminism in general as failing in this regard. Eisenstein is an example of an Amerikan womyn who when she thinks of how to move forward, she draws a blank despite having read reams of theory. Of working with the Australian Labor Party for incremental change, she says, "This is a risky fate for feminism. Yet what other path forward is there?"(p. 56)
She adopts in passing the Chinese Maoist phrase "speak bitterness" in reference to feminist campaigns under Mao, but nowhere in the book does she review the communist road forward for feminism. Like many Amerikans including MacKinnon who write about feminism, Eisenstein does not appear to have a serious background studying wimmin outside of the U$A and Australia. Hence, when she asks "what other path forward is there?" it may be from true ignorance regarding the real vehicles of feminist change this century.
MIM's answer to Eisenstein is that the Russians, Chinese and Albanians showed what could be done in revolution for wimmin. The gap in feminist theory between what many can see is wrong with patriarchy and what feminists do about it is caused by the lack of a scientific materialist analysis. By this we mean the feminists do not use their intellectual tools to find a force in the real world that could change the evils that they see. Whether it is MacKinnon or Eisenstein, the problem is that they do not see the power of proletarian led movements against imperialism. These communist-led movements do not directly target gender oppression as their principal goals, but they accomplish more for wimmin's liberation than other movements do. The reason for that is that from the beginning, Karl Marx sought to find in the society the most revolutionary social group overall and he succeeded and showed the world how it must conquer.
There are countless Western books by reputed feminists willing to discuss "liberal feminism" and "socialist feminism" and even "separatist feminism," but where is the discussion of "communist feminism" that has affected more wimmin this century than the other three combined?
The historical scoreboard for feminism
Later we learn from Eisenstein the grounds for her contentment, which given her own recognition of Third World wimmin makes no sense: "Let me say in the first instance what I mean by the success of feminism. All around us are indications of changes in the status of women that can be attributed in whole or in part to the pressures that have been brought to bear on governments by the organised strength of the contemporary women's movement. In most Western democracies legislation has been passed that provides for anti-discrimination agencies and equal opportunity measures. Legal reforms have modernised the law of rape and sexual assault and that on domestic violence to give women a more equitable chance in the courtroom against the physical aggression perpetrated on them, and to provide refuges to increase their options to leave dangerous and threatening domestic situations. The access of women to education and training has improved and women have begun to enter a wider range of jobs, including areas traditionally reserved for men, both in the trades and in the professions. Community attitudes toward sexuality have become more tolerant, and the level of debate concerning previously taboo subjects like incest, abortion, prostitution and homosexuality has become more sophisticated."(p. 74)
With regards to the success of females in imperialist countries who enter the petty-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie, MIM shall have to concede the point to Eisenstein. However, we believe the bourgeoisification of female adults has more to do with the pile of plundered surplus-value lying around in the imperialist countries than the efforts of these wimmin themselves. Moreover, it is the class and nation unity of imperialist country wimmin and men that make it so unlikely that those females actually suffer gender oppression and share a common interest with the world's oppressed wimmin.
On the subject of rape and battering, MIM has already published articles on the miserable failure of Western reformism on the subject. Notice in the above quote that giving the justice system more chances to convict men is considered success, not actually reducing rape or battering. That is an example of the class and nation sickness of Western pseudo-feminism, the type that made Willie Horton the central figure of the 1988 presidential election. It is far removed from a real discussion of goals connected to gender oppression. Ferree and Hess put forward the same view as Eisenstein on what constitutes progress: "Feminists organizing on the issue of rape led many states to change their laws to eliminate the demand for witnesses or evidence of struggle and to bar use of the victim's previous sexual history (so-called 'rape shield laws')."(p. 104)
The growing plunder of the Third World MIM discusses elsewhere made it possible for petty-bourgeois and bourgeois men to give relatively light resistance to female economic progress within the system of exploitation, but neither the men nor the wimmin really changed anything in regards to the romance culture of rape and battering. With a culture that says risking violence or arrest proves love, the police-state "feminazi" solutions never had a chance of fixing anything.
With regard to incest, the story is the same--no grounds for finding progress. Abortion--at least in Amerika more doctors and reproductive health workers are being shot dead by the loonies than ever. Where is the answer of non-proletarian feminism to that? The only glimmer of hope is the advance of technology that may make abortions as we know them unnecessary.
In the past month, we had not only the shooting death of an abortion doctor but also the hate-crime murder of a gay man in Laramie, Wyoming.
The harassment and killings of reproductive health workers across the U$A is reminiscent of the initial boldness of the nascent fascist movement in Italy and Germany. No amount of legal posturing or dissertation writing can make up for such battles lost in the streets. We shall return to this subject when we review Ferree and Hess on revolutionary violence. Pseudo-feminism played a pivotal role in enabling the reactionaries to go on the offensive as they are today.
One last point we shall make about Eisenstein's social-democratic book is that it oddly does not claim credit for the massive institutionalization of the anti-battering and anti-rape movements in Amerika, while it does seem so moved by the example of femocrats in Australia. Could it be she ignores them in Amerika, because she realizes that they have been wholeheartedly co-opted by the patriarchy? When we count up the successes and failures of the gender bureaucracy for wimmin's liberation, we cannot pick and choose just the ones we like. Nowhere does Eisenstein consider the ramifications of the extension of the police state created partly in the name of feminism, especially in Amerika, where the imprisonment rate is the highest in the world and where predominantly biological male prisoners are much more gender oppressed than the average womyn.
Despite our disagreements with Eisenstein, we respect her book as an honest one by a social-democrat, one that is fairly interesting in terms of the range of theory she addresses. Controversy and Coalition is more factual and better documented, but even more narrowly focussed within the Western imperialist liberal feminist world. It is useful to communists mainly as a gauge of where the Amerikan academy and its intellectual feminists see themselves vis a vis the pseudo-feminist movement. How does the Amerikan pseudo-feminist movement view itself? We communists are always seeking to understand what the masses are thinking and especially the patterns we can find in their thinking and the relative frequency of those patterns of thinking.
The other books reviewed in this MIM Theory have at least some degree of self-skepticism, but Ferree and Hess are unabashed defenders of Amerikan middle-class feminism and in this way these two sociologists are true gender bureaucrats representing the Amerikan gender aristocracy. According to them, the feminist movement is the "most broad-based" critique of tradition there is;(p. x) the civil rights movement was male chauvinist and the feminist reaction to it was the men's fault;(p. 55) it is a myth that the feminist movement is a white wimmin's movement, because Black wimmin in polls support it even more strongly.(p. 89)
Feminism or excuses for sell-out?
As in the book on French feminism by C. Duchen, Ferree and Hess do not try to cover up the origin of the latest feminist movement in reaction to the New Left of the 1960s. Readers will recall that by the late 1960s, the New Left was dominated by Maoism--the Black Panther Party, Young Lords Party, Red Guard Party, the Progressive Labor Party and other incipient Maoist organizations.
However, in this regard, the book by Duchen is a little more honest, because she admits that the philosophical basis opposed to Marxist materialism leads to an emphasis on diversity and paralysis. Ferree and Hess seem to believe it is enough that New Left men regarded activist wimmin as trophies (pp. 68-9) to conclude that Marxism and the revolutionary movements against imperialism were wrong. According to Ferree and Hess, Black wimmin and white wimmin really shared some things in common at that time--a notion contrary to that found in other books reviewed here--simply because they were both dealing with men in the movement.
MIM wasn't there in the 1960s, but we begin to smell a rat in this presentation, because we know that there are many revolutionary New Left wimmin still in prison. In their case, they are prisoners of war, not people who fit the image of being "trophies." The Weather Underground and its ideological descendants such as the "Women's Committee Against Genocide" in particular come to mind; even though MIM does not agree with their moralistic misappropriation of Mao. The strength and active role of these wimmin is counter to the image given by Ferree and Hess.
It seems to MIM that there could hardly be a better way for the status quo to save its skin than to have some agents go into the movement and say that all the females in it are "trophies." According to Ferree and Hess, "Neither black nor white women, however, found their humanity and skills affirmed by the male leadership that defined them as 'support staff' or sexual trophies, and they began to discuss their common oppression as women."(p. 69)
MIM has no doubt that some really bad things happened in the 1960s, including some rather infamous remarks by New Left men to and about wimmin. There were costly mistakes, but to make blanket generalizations as easily as Ferree and Hess do reeks of police-state patriarchy. The book simply does not mention anything about the wimmin in the national leadership of SDS. Nor does it mention that Huey Newton picked a womyn to head the party while he was in prison (and after the Black Panthers were basically smashed). The commitment of "New Left" wimmin in prison to this day is also left out. Now who is responsible for making wimmin invisible in history? Even if some men sometimes treated wimmin as sexual trophies only or support staff only, it does not mean that they had the power to keep wimmin from being successful revolutionaries in their own right. To believe otherwise is a problem with the level of politicization of females and their concrete understanding of the dynamics of power.
Ferree and Hess go on to admit that females in their own organizations then went on to "trash" their own female leaders and become paralyzed in endless wrangling. They agree with us on the contribution of Jo Freeman ("Joreen") to understanding this issue, but they do not connect this to the reaction to men in the movement. Again MIM has to ask, how much of the conflict with the men arose because these pseudo-feminist wimmin were not politicized enough to understand the need for leadership and that they would have trashed anybody being effective, man or womyn? We find it very unpersuasive to say there was no political difference, just men being sexist, when the resulting female splinter groups do not take up the same goals and continue to trash leadership in any form.
The movement in the tradition of Lenin, Stalin and Mao is experienced with this kind of irresponsible pissant criticism described and championed by Ferree and Hess. The Trotskyists did the same kind of thing, with blanket generalizations about Stalin's failures being to blame for all weaknesses in the movement. For example it is true that when Stalin signed a temporary peace pact in 1939 with Hitler after England, France and Poland did, the U.$. Communist Party splintered. Fair-weather friends quit the movement entirely. What is important to note though is that the substantial fraction that left did not go on to form a similar organization differing on the Stalin-Hitler Non-Aggression Pact-they went on either to entirely different politics or no politics at all.
Likewise, Ferree and Hess talk about men making wimmin "support staff" and "sexual trophies," but they don't talk about any "New Left" or Maoist separatist wimmin's organizations forming as a result. Hence, once again, MIM infers a stinking rat. If "sexism" was the central problem of the Maoist and Maoist-influenced organizations, then the wimmin who opposed sexism should have gone on to form like organizations minus the gender problems. In both the Non-Aggression Pact and the pseudo-feminist splintering from the anti-war and anti-imperialist movements, what we have is a case where people who were never as radical as the organizations they were hanging out with left when they got an excuse of conscious privilege that seemed easy and comfortable.
It has not been done yet, but perhaps these feminologists should be looking at the relative political commitment levels of men and wimmin in the 1960s. Was the "New Left" really as uniformly bad as Ferree and Hess imply? If wimmin were uncomfortable why? Could it be that men being drafted for war identified more with the international proletariat than wimmin who weren't being drafted? Could it be that since cops were shooting and killing Black Panther men, wimmin did not feel the heat from the state as keenly as males? According to Ferree and Hess, "Only the relatively few women who had self-identified as radicals were prepared to risk ridicule and rejection."(p. 71) The question becomes the underlying social basis for female political activism. Why were few willing to risk ridicule and rejection? Why did the pseudo-feminist movement become obsessed with "self-esteem"?
Later Ferree and Hess mention "factionalism over 'revolutionary violence.'"(p. 81) In their own view, under attack in the 1980s, the "career," "separatist," "liberal" and "socialist" "feminists" united to defend gains. Yet they mention in passing this issue of "revolutionary violence" in the discussion of the demise of the New Left.
The way the issue is trivialized and many other issues left out from revolutionary history, we again smell a rat. It's the kind of reactionary thing that makes MIM have to dot the "i"s and cross the "t"s.
Imperialist country feminism is going to have to confront its reaction to revolutionary violence in the 1960s. The negative critique of Maoism or Marxism generally blames the role of activist men in the oppression of wimmin, but we have to doubt whether the wimmin in question were ever as radical as the men they listened to in their politically formative years. It does not seem that separatist wimmin's groups for revolutionary violence arose. Thus to justify the splintering away of energy into the pseudo-feminist movement will require more than talking about trophies and support staff.
For that matter, new biographical material about the Black Panthers continues to pour out and at least some of this material alleges that lower-ranking male military staff had reasons not to trust some wimmin in the organization who were not known to be sleeping with military staff. The question comes down to the relationship to the gun, not the relationship between men and wimmin. There needs to be some more investigation of this: why was it that Black Panther men died in battle? Did the Panther wimmin not want the gun or were they forbidden the gun by activist men? And if they did not pick up the gun and did not have to go through the various policies demonstrating high-levels of commitment and security within the party, how were these wimmin to be trusted? What parts of work should they be trusted with? Why should military staff have to risk encounters with people who may be less committed or even infiltrators?
The cops looking at a military organization can spread rumors about trophies even while wimmin had responsible roles in the military aspect as in the Black Panthers. They can also take the complaints of some wimmin out of context and blow them up into gender conflicts.
For Ferree and Hess and other wimmin who would lightly pass over the question of armed struggle in the 1960s, we have news for you: a million students and the plurality of Blacks favored it. Your differences with that movement have nothing to do with gender oppression at the micro level within organizations. It has to do with your lack of political commitment to the causes you participated in. You were wrong then and you are wrong now as the reactionaries take up armed struggle against reproductive health workers.
While some wimmin could avoid the question of armed struggle even in the 1960s, the half a million men doing service in Vietnam could not avoid it. In the 1860s, the planters would not give up the slaves without a fight and in the 1990s we see that the reactionaries won't even give up abortion rights without an armed struggle. This is a profound lesson for anyone claiming to be interested in serious social change.
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I highly recommend Joan Jacobs Brumberg's book Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Thousands of women in the United States die each year by starving themselves to death to meet dominant cultural beauty ideals: thin is beautiful, fat is ugly. This book is valuable because it traces the origins of anorexia from the second half of the 19th century to the 1980s, and compares the disease with women's religious fasting during the European Middle Ages. This review will focus on the historical methodology Brumberg employs.
Anorexia is found mainly among upper middle-class women in the United States, Western Europe and Japan. It uncommon in the Third World except among elite women educated in the United States or Europe. In the United States, it is rarely found among working-class white women, and almost never among Black women.(1)
Brumberg makes a number of observations concerning historical methodology that every reader ought to memorize because they are so important to critical social analysis. Some writers have made glib comparisons between religious fasting by women and anorexia today; these commentators have claimed that such behavior has a biological basis in "women's nature." Brumberg writes: "Just because a behavior occurs across cultures or times does not necessarily mean that it has the same cause or that it is biologically based."(2) She then explains: "The story of anorexia nervosa lays bare the extent to which disease is a cultural artifact, defined and redefined over time, and therefore illustrative of fundamental historical transformations. Consequently, my response to the frequent question, is anorexia nervosa a new disease must be somewhat ambiguous: anorexia nervosa is a historically specific disease that emerged from the distinctive economic and social environment of the late nineteenth century."(3) Brumberg shows that anorexia is not the same disease that it was 100 years ago because society has changed. "[T]here are significant new behavioral symptoms that mirror contemporary cultureQnamely, pervasive hyperactivity and competitiveness. Among affluent young Victorians food and eating were at the center of a web of associations that had a great deal to do with gender and class identity. The same is true today, but broad social and cultural forces, particularly the intensification of messages about the female body, have prompted the urgency of appetite control and generated a new experience of the disease in the twentieth century. Anorexia nervosa used to be an isolated and idiosyncratic disorder; over the past few decades it has become both more familiar and more formulaic, and its physical symptoms are now more acute."(4) Brumberg quotes Charles E. Rosenberg in a pioneering study of cholera in the nineteenth century: "A disease is no absolute physical entity but a complex intellectual construction, an amalgam of biological state and social definition."(5)
There are three major explanations of anorexia: (1) biomedical; (2) psychological and (3) and socio-economic (what Brumberg calls the cultural model). Brumberg clearly emphasizes the socio-economic or cultural model. The only criticism I have of Brumberg is that she does not clearly explain the dialectical relationship between culture and economic institutions; although in practice she does emphasize the relationship between anorexia and class/gender social relations in a capitalist economy. Brumberg does an excellent job of tearing apart biomedical explanations of anorexia. Some doctors have linked anorexia to imbalances in hormones that occur mainly among women.(6) Brumberg agrees that women who are anorexic may well have hormonal imbalances, but she demonstrates that these biomedical indicators are the effect of anorexia rather than the cause. It is hard to argue that anorexia is primarily caused by genes or hormones when only upper class women in the United States, Europe and Japan get the disease. No one has seriously suggested that working class white women in the United States have different hormones than upper middle class women; although some bourgeois scientists probably would put forward genetic explanations for why Black women rarely contract the disease.(7)
Brumberg demolishes psychological categories of anorexia: "The psychological paradigm is incomplete, just as the biomedical model is, in that it fails to provide an adequate answer to the same thorny problems of social address, changing incidence, and gender. After reading the psychological literature, one still asks: Why is the anorexia nervosa "epidemic" restricted by class and confined to societies like our own? Why are we experiencing more anorexia nervosa today than we did fifty or one hundred years ago? Why is it that adolescent girls and not adolescent boys engage in this form of development struggle?"(8)
Brumberg shows anorexia has changed over the last 100 years as class/gender structures have changed in response to socio-economic developments in United States, English and French capitalist societies, although the main focus since 1900 is on the United States. During the second half of the 19th century prosperous middle class families could afford to keep their female children out of the labor force. Young women stayed at home until they married, typically in their early 20s.(9) What we now call adolescence was created by the burgeoning prosperity of middle-class families during the late 19th century. Before this time women married younger and all but members of the higher aristocracy performed at least some domestic work. Obviously, working-class women started laboring at a very early age. Middle-class adolescent women were privileged in one sense because they did not have to work or yet reproduce, but they were highly dependent and controlled by their parents unlike their brothers, who had far greater educational and employment opportunities. Starvation was one socially acceptable way for middle class young women to rebel against parental control.(10) To some extent Victorian women fasted to meet cultural values about beauty, but those social pressures were weaker then than they are today.(11) Ideal female body size in Victorian culture was larger than today and women were required to wear such bulky clothing it was more difficult to tell whether a woman was thin or not.(11)
Brumberg provides information on how Amerikan popular culture since 1900 has put pressure on women to be very thin. The ideal female body size as presented by mass media has become much slimmer than it was in 1920. Thin movie and television stars have become models for many young women.
Brumberg goes beyond mere generalities about cultural ideals in the mass media. She points out that food today is usually loaded with sugar and fat. Just go eat a Big Mac at McDonald's. Fast food and prepared food are loaded with calories.(12) People have the choice of getting fat or constantly dieting to stay thin. Dieting itself is big business with all kinds of pills and dietary supplements offered to help people lose weight. Some of the emphasis on changing diet and increasing exercise is positive, but all the media hype about getting in shape can lead at least some people into dangerous diets.
Brumberg makes a valuable point about the competitive aspect of modern anorexia in the 1980s. Women are entering the labor force in record numbers today; although on average they earn far less than men. Women today are educated in competitive behavior to get ahead in the business world, this is especially true among upper middle-class women. It is not surprising that competitive values spill over into dieting and beauty. Distorted capitalist values about individualism and competition contribute to anorexia.
Beware of bourgeois genetic, hormonal or psychological explanations for behavior that is really socio-economic in origin.
Notes:
1. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of
Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1988, p. 280 n. 14.
2. Ibid., p. 2.
3.
Ibid., p. 3.
4. Ibid., pp. 5-6.
5. Ibid., pp. 6-7.
6.
Ibid., p. 25.
7. Ibid., pp. 25-8.
8. Ibid., p. 31.
9.
Ibid., p. 126.
10. Ibid., p. 188.
11. Ibid., pp. 188, 254.
12. Ibid., p. 260.
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reviewed by MC5 Dec. 1, 1991
The Feminine Mystique
New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1963
The Second Stage
New York: Summit Books, 1981
I. Women as housewives as the principal contradiction in the 1950s
II. Psychological theory
III. Friedan's paternalism
IV. Friedan against P.C.
V. Friedan's homophobia
VI. Friedan on sexual politics
VII. Friedan on the Third World
VIII. Conclusion
Betty Friedan "was the founder and first president of the National Organization for Women, and the original convener of the National Women's Political Caucus. In recent years, Ms. Friedan has been a leader in the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment."(1)
Betty Friedan's work in The Feminine Mystique is exemplary petty-bourgeois feminism and the Second Stage reveals her as a leader of left-wing petty-bourgeois politics generally. In this regard, Friedan has nothing to hide, unlike many leftists MIM must argue with: "It had more vitality than most volunteer activity because we were truly acting for ourselves. I was always irritated at the accusation that there was something wrong with the women's movement because it spoke to the condition of 'white middle-class women.' That was its strength, of course, in a country where all women (and men)--except for the Marxist daughters and sons of the rich--would like to think of themselves as, at least, middle-class."(2)
What she has to say about communism is brief and ignorant. Suffice it to say that Friedan blames communist countries for not being rich like imperialist countries. Household chores in communist countries were done "with fewer conveniences than their capitalist sisters" had.(3) Sorry Betty, China couldn't afford Hoovers when it freed itself from decades of imperialist and capitalist exploitation and centuries of feudal backwardness.
Friedan also mentions Maoism once as another expression of unauthentic sexuality that does not recognize "basic human needs." Referring to the alienation of capitalism that destroys love, Friedan says, "The anti-sexual stance of Stalinist and Maoist communism may perform the same function."(4) As we shall see, with lovers like Friedan, the Third World does not need enemies.
The Feminine Mystique has two basic messages that MIM would like to treat. One is that women do not have to be housewives and that being a housewife is destructive to society. The other is the psychological theory underlying all of Friedan's work.
I. Women as housewives as the principal contradiction(5)
Friedan is correct that for the most part her message on life as a housewife hit home in 1963 and has succeeded. Most women now work and many have a choice as to whether they become housewives or "superwomen," juggling career and home responsibilities.
Friedan is 90% correct in what she says within the limits of the subject matter of the Feminine Mystique. Perhaps that subject matter should be called "white studies," because so much of what she is talking about is a penetrating description specific to the First World. For example, she provides a blistering critique of the idea that cleaning the house and a career are either/or choices. She shows that where basic survival needs are seen to, house chores still expand infinitely if allowed and have a mind-closing dynamic all their own. Pointing to the idiocy of suburban life, Betty Friedan is a foremother of the radical white countercultural movements like the punk rock critique of life in the 1980s.
As for the 1950s, Friedan shows many social ills were connected to women's being psychologically restricted to the role of housewife. Ironically, while Friedan condemns communism, evidencing very little study of the question in the process, she and Engels are really birds of a feather. They both think that women's equal participation in the economy with men would solve many of their problems as women. Friedan simply goes a little further than Engels by holding that women's participation in the economy would solve social ills from cheating and drug abuse to suicide.
Amerikan women have proved Friedan wrong in these predictions. As they have increased their economic role outside the home, many aspects of gender oppression have remained the same or increased. For example, Friedan herself is aware that the occurrence of the typical female "nervous breakdown" simply changed from later years to younger years.(6)
Still, Friedan was able to prove that some problems of U.S. women were new to the 1950s and hence possibly resolvable. These problems followed a decline of women's enrollment in college, their role in the work force and images of independent women in the media--even compared with the 1920s, but especially the 1930s and 40s.(7) One of the strengths of her first book is that it shows that the relative strength of women to men has changed at various points in time and that the 1950s were definitely a setback. The march forward has zig-zagged as we Marxist dialecticians would say.
The petty-bourgeoisie is a class that believes it is independent of both the capitalist and working classes. Members of the petty-bourgeoisie appear to succeed economically through their own efforts, because they neither hire workers like capitalists nor work for capitalists like workers. Not surprisingly, the petty-bourgeoisie is the most favorable breeding ground for individualism and its pseudo-science called psychology.
In advancing a feminist agenda, Friedan is loathe to cede the petty-bourgeoisie to the patriarchy, so she makes psychology a centerpiece of her work. "It is the same kind of political mistake for feminists to abandon the family to reaction as it was for liberals and radicals to abandon individualism to the right I That beleaguered demand for some personal control of one's life is basic, I believe, to the strong appeal of both feminism and 'pro-life,' 'pro-family' groups."(8)
Friedan spends many pages detailing a mild critique of Freud. In the end, however, she accepts the Freudian framework of analysis, something not widely recognized in this supposed feminist leader. She merely prefaces her critique by saying, "No one can question the basic genius of Freud's discoveries, nor the contribution he has made to our culture. Nor do I question the effectiveness of psychoanalysis as it is practiced today by Freudian or anti-Freudian."(9)
Like the worst of psychologists trying to out-Freud Freud, Friedan seeks the roots of Freud's sexism in his sex life. In so doing, it is not surprising that she insults other women along the way. Speaking of Freud's wife, Martha, Friedan says, "she never dreamed of sharing his life as an equal." Later, Friedan compares Martha with another woman who was "much more intelligent and independent than Martha."(10) Elsewhere Friedan quotes women frustrated by men who choose women with less education than themselves for romantic involvement.(11)
Attributing intelligence and ability only to certain women in a mistake typical of psychological reasoning concerned with the uncovering of personality traits, Friedan insults all housewives as a group. "I went as a reporter from suburb to suburb, searching for a woman of ability and education who was fulfilled as a housewife. I went first to the suburban mental health centers and guidance clinics I and stating my purpose, asked them to steer me not to the neurotic, frustrated housewives, but to the able, intelligent, educated women who were adjusted full-time housewives and mothers."(12)
Friedan's favorite concept from Freud is the "ego." According to Friedan, society conspires to crush women's ego. Freud recognized that the crushing of the ego either by the superego (moral pressures from society) or the id (basic biologically rooted "needs" for sex and other "drives") would result in a sick individual.
This Freudian theory of Friedan's amounts to saying that the role of housewife does not allow for the ego development of women. It essentially retards the adult development of women to keep them as childlike dependents and sex objects: "Aren't the chief characteristics of femininity--which Freud mistakenly related to sexual biology--passivity; a weak ego or sense of self; a weak superego or human conscience; renunciation of active aims, ambitions, interests of one's own to live through others; incapacity for abstract thought; retreat from activity directed outward to the world, in favor of activity directed inward or phantasy?"(13)
At other times, Friedan simply substitutes the word "identity" or "private image" for Freud's "ego" and "public image" for superego. "I think that this has been the unknown heart of women's problem in America for a long time, this lack of a private image. Public images that defy reason and have very little to do with women themselves have had the power to shape too much of their lives. These images would not have such power, if women were not suffering a crisis of identity."(14)
In 1981, Friedan saw women as ready for the second stage of development and modified some of her earlier findings, but she still retained the Freudian notion of the ego. "The personhood of women, that's what it's really all about, first and finally, I say now to younger women, trying to separate the essence of the women's movement from the rhetorical chaff of 'women's lib.' Twenty years ago, breaking through the feminine mystique, it seemed as if the personhood of women meant only what a woman does and is, herself, not as her husband's wife, children's mother, housewife, server of her family."(15)
More directly, Friedan says, "It is recognized now that Freud never gave proper attention, even in man, to growth of the ego or self: 'the impulse to master, control or come to self-fulfilling terms with the environment.'"(16) From reading Friedan, it is easy to see why Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and later the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) criticized feminism from the 1960s onwards as "me-firstism." "Except for middleclass women trying to become top executives for a bigger slice of the profit pie for themselves Ithe feminist movement will decline again until a real working-class surge develops. Then the bosses will trot out their politicians and thinkers--feminists, pacifists, nationalists, and phony 'socialists'--to try to sidetrack people."(17) Friedan-style feminism was literally me-firstism as a prescription for the mental health of women.
As Friedan was to admit in The Second Stage, the struggle against the role of women as solely housewives had astonishing success. The feminine mystique fell without a gunshot. It made one wonder what was stopping women from having their own careers all along.
A disturbing answer from The Feminine Mystique is that women are easily manipulated. Whether it be as educators or advertisers, Friedan maintains that men dupe women into what they do.
Criticizing Margaret Mead, Friedan shows little respect for women's thought processes. "It was, perhaps, not her fault that she was taken so literally that procreation became a cult, a career, to the exclusion of every other kind of creative endeavor, until women kept on having babies because they knew no other way to create."(18)
It was a fine line that Friedan walked in advocating that women continue their formal educations and take on mind-expanding careers on the one hand, and not making elitist criticisms reflecting the outlook of the petty-bourgeois intellectual on the other. She did not succeed in walking this fine line, but she and others have succeeded in pushing women into the world outside the house.
At other times, Friedan more correctly points out that women are not just dupes. Often they make a choice, just not a very brave one. "'I live through my husband and children,' a frank member of my own generation told me. 'It's easier that way. In this world now, it's easier to be a woman, if you take advantage of it.' I We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face I Women went home again just as men shrugged off the bomb, forgot the concentration camps, condoned corruption, and fell into helpless conformity I It was easier, safer, to think about love and sex than about communism, McCarthy, and the uncontrolled bomb."(19)
MIM translates the above: fighting women's oppression did not seem a life-and-death issue to women at the time. In fact, nothing in politics seemed that important. It wasn't worth rocking the boat.
Going back to criticize some of the rhetoric in The Feminine Mystique, Friedan says it is especially wrong to view women as concentration camp victims of genocide today, when the second stage of struggle is necessary. She also says, "did we exaggerate their power when we were not in touch with our own?"(20) This is a point that MIM agrees with. The result of an underestimation of First World women's strength will be the paternalist thinking that portrays women as weak--the kind of sexism especially important to avoid now that women are vying with men in many spheres of life.
In both books, Friedan takes a correct approach to a problem found at the root of the Politically Correct (P.C.) concept on Amerikan campuses today. "The point of role-playing, a technique adapted from group therapy, is to get students to understand problems 'on a feeling level.' Emotions more heady than those of the usual college classroom are undoubtedly stirred up when the professor invites them to 'role-play' the feelings of 'a boy and a girl on their wedding night.'
"There is a pseudotherapeutic air, as the professor listens patiently to endless self-conscious student speeches about personal feelings ('verbalizing') in the hopes of sparking a ('group insight'). But though the functional course is not group therapy, it is certainly an indoctrination of opinions and values through manipulation of the students' emotions; and in this manipulative disguise, it is no longer subject to the critical thinking demanded in other academic disciplines."(21)
How ironic that the academic field most likely to co-opt the method described above is women's studies! Today students are told not to think scientifically, but to listen to token in-house representatives of various social groups describe their emotions as representing the next best thing to truth.
"But the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene is no less ominous than the restless, immature sex-seeking of the young women who are the aggressors in the early marriages that have become the rule rather than the exception."(22)
One of the reasons Friedan attacks homosexuals is her academic elitism--perhaps better described as "classism." "Kinsey found homosexuality most common among men who do not go beyond high school, and least common among college graduates."(23) In contrast, she notes repeatedly that the Kinsey study that showed women with greater education obtained greater sexual satisfaction in life.(24)
Friedan accepted the Freudian theory that housewives overmothered their boys thus producing homosexuals. The immaturity of men caused by mothers overly dedicated to being housewives paralleled women's immaturity and overly strong heterosexual drive according to Friedan.
In the 1980s, Friedan was still lumping homosexuality into a grab-bag of evils caused by the lack of feminist success in society--"rape, sado-masochistic pornography and violence against women, escalating homosexuality, male impotence, divorce."(25)
VI. On sexual politics and alliances
Friedan's view of homosexuality is only a part of a larger view that the women's movement should not define itself with an emphasis on sex. By the 1980s, Friedan was consistently criticizing people she saw as extremists that set back the women's movement. Just as MIM is vigilant against phony communists and phony feminists, Friedan is vigilant against phony feminism in her own way--what even she labels as "feminist reaction."(26) She criticizes a tokenist line of thinking, saying "men may be at the cutting edge of the second stage."(27)
The errors of sexual politics prompted Friedan to define a second stage of the women's movement. In the press, Friedan comes off as conservative or just stale as a NOW-type feminist. However, The Second Stage reveals Friedan to have a line that she is willing to hold come what may. She has a clear sense of responsibility as a leader--what some Chinese dissidents call a "second loyalty" where one is loyal enough to a movement to criticize it for its own good.
Still accepting Freudian psychology, Friedan attacks all the emphasis on pornography, lesbianism and "taking back the night." "I think we must at least admit and begin openly to discuss feminist denial of the importance of family, of women's own needs to give and get love and nurture, tender loving care."(28)
Where MIM draws the line between reactionary and revolutionary feminisms based on their analysis of social structure and their impact on the patriarchy, Friedan draws the line against self-destructive feminism based on a theory of psychological needs. The result is an analysis often parallel to MIM's; where MIM sees inflexible social structure in need of revolutionary transformation that is causing problems, Friedan sees basic unchanging human psychological needs that must be recognized and obeyed lest feminists set themselves back.
"For women to live their personal lives as a political scenario as some radical feminists tried to do (man as enemy, motherhood and family as oppressors of women, sexual surrender to the enemy as betrayal of self, treason to women) surely violates basic human needs for intimacy, sex, generation. It also vitiates will and energy for real political changes."(29) In this, Friedan sounds much like MIM, but it is important for MIM comrades to repudiate the Freudian aspect of what Friedan says. The energy that is lost in the struggle from this approach is a result of taking on the structure with the strategy of an individual, not the result of ignoring Freudian-defined psycho-sexual needs.
In this sense, both MIM and Friedan do not take a pie-in-the-sky attitude toward the possibilities of change within the current time period. This is in contrast to the school of sexual politics, New Age thought and various spiritual approaches that believe change comes about one individual at a time as soon as that individual wants to start change.
Despite the parallels in thinking between Friedan and MIM, Friedan draws the line too far to the right, criticizing phenomena that MIM believes should not be criticized. In the last section, we saw her criticizing homosexuality, which is incorrect.
At further extremes, Friedan labels what MIM would call anarchist feminism, pseudo-feminism and other reactions as "pathological." "The power of those needs, and the pathological consequences of their distortion or denial, has occupied a century of psychological researchers and therapists."(30) This kind of reasoning is behind Friedan's seeing homosexuality as a mental illness.
MIM has always opposed the psychiatric approach to anything except purely medical cases of brain damage. Friedan's theory--a popular one even on the so-called left--leads no where but diversion and repression disproportionately aimed at women.
Moreover, in the midst of organizing for the ERA, Friedan said, "it seemed irrelevant, wrong, for women to be wasting energy marching against pornography--or any other sexual issue--when their very economic survival was at stake."(31) MIM sees this as white middle-class hysteria. Women as a group were not struggling for survival, especially the women that Friedan is proud to represent--the majority of Amerikan women.
With the bulk of the Amerikan feminist establishment, Friedan later joined a legal case in defense of pornography against Catharine MacKinnon. Her group was called the Feminists Against Censorship Taskforce (FACT). Friedan and others came off defending free speech and women's erotic side; but Friedan's position was a much more worked-out opposition to MacKinnon's.
With regard to rape, Friedan argues that women get stuck in the first stage of the movement that she takes responsibility for unleashing. They see men as still holding all the cards. "Some women who still are afraid of their own aggression exaggerate the feared-hated power of men. Without denying the progress of the women's movement in enabling women to protect themselves against rape, and to demand police protection without humiliation, I suspect that the current obsession of some feminists with pornography and rape plays into, and is itself an acting out of, such reaction and projection."(32)
Slamming sexual politics again, Friedan says, "In the first stage, the women's movement directed too much of its energy into sexual politics, from personal bedroom wars against men to mass marches against rape or pornography to 'take back the night.' Sexual war against men is an irrelevant, self-defeating acting out of rage. It does not change the conditions of our lives. Obsession with rape, even offering Band-Aids to its victims, is a kind of wallowing in that victim-state, that impotent rage, that sterile polarization. Like the aping of machismo or obsessive careerism, it dissipates our own well-springs of generative power."(33)
In place of sexual politics, and sounding very much like the Democratic Socialists of America or Jesse Jackson on moving from the politics of race to the politics of economics, Friedan hammered on the problems of inflation and two-income families--making ends meet, the architectural design of housing meant for 1950s families and child care for instance.
It now seems to Friedan that women no longer have the choice to be housewives. Whereas in the 1950s, women were not supposed to be workers, now they must be to survive. In the second stage of the movement, Friedan found it necessary to argue for giving women the choice between life as a housewife and a career.
To address these economic concerns of women, Friedan seems unable to relate to Third World women or men, but she does give an approving nod to Amerikan labor as a potential ally several times in The Second Stage. This is what makes her "left" petty-bourgeoisie. She vaguely sees her class's interests allied with that of First World labor. Her distrust of capitalists, Third World despots and communist governments equally and her conscious individualism also make her a natural ally of anarchism--the ideology that all governments are bad.
VII. Friedan on the Third World
Criticizing reactionary pro-family ideology, Friedan lets all her all-Amerikan wares be displayed: "In the name of the family, they would destroy the new equality that gives the family strength to resist dehumanizing forces that are emerging in the seeming importance of capitalist America, in the resurgence of fundamentalist religion, in neofascism and in autocratic communism, and in the chaos of the Third World."(34) This is truly an incredible litany of evils conceivable and connected only in the mind of a great white petty-bourgeois feminist like Friedan.
Naturally, at international conferences, Friedan has no patience for women arguing that in their countries the principal contradiction is with U.S. imperialism, can the Amerikan women please help? Friedan comes down especially hard on the Palestinian and Iranian women as simply fronting for men. "It seemed clear that an alliance of Communist, Moslem and Latin despots, now in control of the U.N., was threatened by the world spread of feminism and was using the U.N. to co-opt it and manipulate women for their own political purposes."(35) In defense, one Iranian woman said, "at our stage of development, it is all right for us to take leadership from a man if we want to."(36)
Given the parallels between Friedan and MIM, who is correct? Unlike the case of many activists who claim to share MIM's goals, Friedan is explicitly anti-communist. She is a reformist. MIM cannot just ask "where's the beef?" of internationalist liberation strategy because Friedan doesn't want beef and never claimed to want it.
Friedan has led a successful movement on reformist terms for white, middle-class women. She is spokesperson for her class and country par excellence. So to answer the question, Friedan is correct for the petty-bourgeoisie. Here is her answer to the "where's the beef?" taunt. "A sacredness, a reverence, an awe, a pride beyond arrogance and an incredulous humility that we who made this movement share truly as sisters, overriding our ideological differences and power battles: the grandiose heroics of knowing that in our own lifetime we have changed history more basically than women ever before, and more than most men; the grounding certainty that the women's movement 'changed our whole lives,' and the very terms by which the new generations of women and men approach life."(37)
Those seeking equality for all women should stick with MIM. Middle-class women, especially housewives who require psychological liberation--should seek Friedan. "It is, after all, in capitalist America that the flexibilities inherent in our own system, our democratic tradition, even our individualism, could produce the women's movement as the first stage of the sex-role revolution."(38) It is unfortunate only that in 1991, what Friedan said about the first stage is not entirely irrelevant yet.
Unknown to Friedan, those seeking transformation of the conditions of most of the world's women have succeeded more definitively in China, the Soviet Union, Eritrea and other places. Maoist strategy has done more than Friedan's to effect women's liberation.
Notes:
1. Betty Friedan, The Second Stage, New York: Summit Books, 1981,
bookjacket.
2. Ibid., p. 266
3. Ibid., p. 235
4. Ibid., p. 245
5.
See "On Contradiction" in Mao Tse-Tung, Four Essays on Philosophy,
Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1968, pp. 23-78 for the
definition of principal contradiction.
6. The Second Stage, pp.
52-3
7. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, New York: Dell
Publishing Co., 1963, pp. 12, 32
8. The Second Stage, p. 178
9.
The Feminine Mystique, p. 96
10. Ibid., pp. 104-5
11. Ibid., p. 67
12. Ibid., p. 224
13. Ibid., p. 275
14. Ibid., p. 69
15. The
Second Stage, p. 59
16. The Feminine Mystique, p. 109
17.
Progressive Labor Party, "Smash Sexism!"
18. The Feminine
Mystique, p. 139
19. The Second Stage, p. 178
20. Ibid., p. 89
21.
The Feminine Mystique, p. 161
22. Ibid., p. 265
23. Ibid., p. 264
24. Ibid., p. 266
25. The Second Stage, p. 243
26. Ibid., p. 16
27. Ibid., p. 13
28. Ibid., p. 9
29. Ibid., pp. 62-3
30. Ibid., p.
67
31. Ibid., p. 7
32. Ibid., p. 104
33. Ibid., p. 201
34. Ibid.,
p. 23
35. Ibid., p. 164
36. Ibid., p. 163
37. Ibid., pp. 14-5
38.
Ibid., p. 255
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The strength of this book is its examination of the structure of gender relations. Instead of examining issues on a personal level through anecdotes, as too much Amerikan writing does, this book analyzes and theorizes on the subject of women as a group.
Comrades should be aware of certain facts about the condition of women in the United States that MacKinnon makes constant reference to in this collection of slightly repetitive speeches:
From these figures, one must conclude that while there are individual exceptions to every generalization, on the whole, women in the United States are oppressed by rape, sexual assault and job discrimination among other things. It is pointless to talk about individual experiences of people who say they are not oppressed. Whether an individual man or woman knows it or not, women are oppressed as a group in the United States.
What does MacKinnon cite as the cause of this oppression?
"The mainspring of sex inequality is misogyny and the mainspring of misogyny is sexual sadism."(10) According to MacKinnon, the standards of sexual sadism are established by pornography.
"The first theme is the analysis that the social relation between the sexes is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual--in fact, is sex. Men in particular, if not men alone, sexualize inequality, especially the inequality of the sexes. The second theme is a critique of the notion that gender is basically a difference rather than a hierarchy ... [T]he third theme identifies pornography in America as a key means of actualizing these two dynamics in life. Pornography turns sex inequality into sexuality and turns male dominance into the sex difference. Put another way, pornography makes inequality into sex, which makes it enjoyable, and into gender, which makes it seem natural. "(11) MacKinnon deviates from the accepted feminist line, which is implemented by sexual assault centers: that rape is an act of aggression, not a product of sexual frustration or an act of pleasure for the rapist. According to MacKinnon, men are encouraged by the system to enjoy dominance of women sexually and rape is part and parcel of that eroticization of power.
In most cases, however, society accepts the inequality of the sexes because it appears consensual, even enjoyable.(12) MacKinnon's argument on this parallels Marx's analysis of exchange.
"Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism."(13) While it may seem that workers agree to a contract with capitalists in exchange for wage payments, in reality, such an agreement covers up coercion underneath. The consequences for workers not to work are more severe than for capitalists.
This raises some difficulties in MacKinnon's arguments. While it seems reasonable to say that the eight-billion dollar a year pornography business, sexist advertising, etc. set standards for male plea sure, one has to wonder about this as an explanation for why women take part in romance.
MacKinnon believes the issue is one of power. On the subject of lesbianism, MacKinnon says, "but so long as gender is a system of power, and it is women who have less power, like any other benefit of abstract equality, it can merely extend this choice to those women who can get the power to enforce it". (14) MacKinnon believes that most women are not in positions of power where they could abstain from sex or turn down sex.
To MC5, this seems a little out of line with reality in Amerika of 1989. Women in the United States who choose not to have sex will not starve most of the time or die from other consequences. The life-and-death dependency of women on men has been severely undercut by women's entry into the work force.
Now, one can say that women may be emotionally dependent." MacKinnon does speak of a continuum of coercion as if there were no fundamental difference between Playboy magazine and the production of snuff films. She states that "feminism stresses the indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage and, sexual harassment."(15)
Some feminists working against sexual assault in the United States say sex obtained by men through physical force and sex obtained through "emotional coercion" are the same thing. In arguing against calling rape non-sexual, MacKinnon says, "In other words, in all these situations there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of 'sex.'"(16) To MacKinnon all sex is roughly equivalent: "Maybe they were forced-fucked for years and put up with it, maybe they tried to get it over with, maybe they were coerced by something other than battery, something like economics, maybe even something like love."(17)
On this point, MC5 deviates from orthodox feminism including MacKinnon because it is not useful to see "emotions" as the cause of oppression. Those who take the materialist approach to knowledge will immediately agree, but another way to examine the same question is to ask what would eliminate "emotional coercion" from society?
On the social level, it is not really fruitful to just tell people that their emotions are wrong. Some will get the message, others will not. What needs elimination is the capitalist romance culture--the sick advertising, "love" songs, pornography etc.--which conditions people to have sick gender relations. This romance culture must be replaced with something that conditions people to have healthful social relationships.
Yet, even seeing the need to replace today's romance culture is not enough. One must see that this will not be possible without overthrowing the interests that romance culture protects.
While MacKinnon's theory is coherent, it is not in line with reality. Women's dependency on men in the United States is not strong enough to force them into being sexually available to men. (One might wonder if it is true the sexual availability of women is higher in countries where that dependency is greater.) Even if one were to say that dependency is of an "emotional" nature, one must still rely heavily on the argument of false consciousness to back it up.
Why do women remain emotionally dependent on men if the result is sexual assault, rape, high divorce rates, etc? One could say that women have bought into this culture mistakenly, that they have false consciousness. "What I've learned from women's experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange for survival." (18)
This is as problematic as saying that Amerikan workers are conservative because of repression and false consciousness. In previous issues, comrades have argued that American workers are not proletarians because they have a material interest in allying with imperialism. Similarly, it is not useful to make assorted individual excuses for the majority of women who could choose to resist but do not.
Parallel To Marxism
"Sexuality is the social process that creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire. Desire here is parallel to value in marxist theory, not the same, though it occupies an analogous theoretical location. It is taken for a natural essence or presocial impetus but is actually created by the social relations, the hierarcincal relations, in question. This process cre ates the social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. Sexuality to fem inism is, like work to marxism, socially constructed and at the same time constructing. It is universal as activity, yet always historically specific, and jointly comprised of matter and mind."(19)
Thus, a woman is not someone with female biological characteristics. Women are people with a certain social role. Prisoners who are forced into sexual availability are women, whether or not they are biologically men. Defining women by their biological characteristics has little use to MacKinnon, or MIM. MacKinnon says that male students also identify with women because of their powerlessness in society and their ability to identify with others in a similar position.
"Financial dependency, motherhood, and sexual accessibility (our targeted- for-sexual-violation status) substantively make up women's status as women."(20)
By viewing gender as a social role, something that is part of a structure, MacKinnon is able to draw her most radical conclusions, many of which parallel Lenin's thinking. Her conclusions on what individuals can do about their sexuality are revolutionary and unheard of to the point that the off I out backs reviewer who asked where MacKinnon stood on lesbianism missed the meaning of the following, which is an answer to all individuals who ask if "'all women' are oppressed by heterosexuality."(21)
"The question is posed as if sexual practice were a matter of unconstructed choice. If heterosexuality is the dominant gender form of sexuality in a society where gender oppresses women through sex, sexuality and heterosexuality are essentially the same thing. This does not erase homosexuality, it merely means that sexuality in that form is no less gendered. Either heterosexuallty is the structure of the oppression of women or it is not. Most people see sexuality as individual and biological and voluntary; that is, they see it in terms of the politically and formally liberal myth structure."(22) What MacKinnon means here is that no individual gets the choice of having correct sexual relationships in the current historical situation. Individuals' choices are constructed by the system/structure.
On this structural outlook--looking at power relations between groups and the impossibility of individual choices that somehow reform the patriarchy--MC5 goes further than MacKinnon: No one in the United States is having "correct" gender relations. Revolution is the only answer.
Parallels With Lenin
MacKinnon is most well-known for her work to pass a city ordinance against pornography in Minneapolis. It encountered opposition from free speech advocates.
In her book, MacKinnon reveals that she does not oppose free speech for the same reason Jerry Falwell does. According to MacKinnon, pornography promotes women's silence. "The First Amendment essentially presumes some level of social equality among people and hence essentially equal access to the means of expression."(23)
MacKinnon reveals that the dominance of men is a matter of dictatorship covered up with the illusion of free speech. What is dictatorship? It is the repression of a group by another in deeds, not just words.
As MacKinnon points out, the production of pornography involves dictatorship (a word she does not use) over women models. Some die in its production Others are forced into sexual acts for money, the way coal-miners are forced into contracting black lung for money.
She also argues, perhaps with less evidence (she only footnotes it, but we are not reviewing all of MacKinnon's work here), that pornography causes violence against women. Leninists see that as an act of dictatorship also.
Problems Of Methodology
MacKinnon demonstrates the scientific thinking needed to liberate women. This makes her lapses into demagoguery clearer.
In trying to demonstrate the relationship between pornography and violence against women, MacKinnon goes into graphic detail about the rape and assault of a 14-year-old. The assailant was found to have pornography on his person.(24)
As MacKinnon knows, however, no length of details about the sickness of various rapes proves that pornography causes violence against women. It could very well be that the same people who would commit such acts also read pornography. Both pornography reading and acts of rape might be caused by the same thing--unemployment or other sick aspects of society.
No protests by prostitutes, rape victims or police prove that pornography causes sexual violence. Real knowledge is not a privilege of any particular group. It is accessible to all.
To answer this, MacKinnon indulges in a little me-firstism. She argues that the male dominated courts do not require causal reasoning to establish a case.(25) Men may establish in court that a damage is done through mere association, not causation, (This may be reasonable if it would take too long to come to a scientific determination of the question.)
MacKinnon says that because men are allowed to use flawed reasoning, women should be too. This is fatal to the mobilization of a movement. The masses should not be confused by the crop that passes for reasoning in the status quo.
In fact, one might speculate that MacKinnon may actually believe that pornography is not the cause of rape and sexual assault. She probably knows that in some countries the rape rates are a lot lower than in the United States, which is number one in the industrialized world in rape.
MacKinnon sees her theory as a call to action against pornography. She admits that the op pression of women exists in societies without pornography. This is not a fatal admission: capitalist imperialism may be the cause of war in the 20th century, but not in the 1st century when capitalist imperialism did not exist. The causes of things may change over time and place.
MacKinnon argues that even though eliminating Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan would not eliminate racism or anti-Semitism. no one would say that action against them are unnecessary.(26) Yet, people taking action against the KKK do not claim that it is the source of racism. MacKinnon has accorded pornography a privileged position in her theory that is not accorded to the KKK in anyone's theory of racism.
It seems that someone with MacKinnon's out look should have shown the reader more comparative evidence. Her theory leaves obvious questions unanswered. Although she claims to be a post Marxist, MacKinnon doesn't treat the simple theory that capitalism is the cause of rape.
The final problem with MacKinnon's theory is that it does not fit her political practice. Many implications of her theory are easily construed as revolutionary. Yet while she is known for her work on a Minneapolis ordinance, she is not known as a member of any revolutionary organization. (One gathers that she goes to radical conferences.)
She constantly complains (and rightly so) how the media have distorted her position on pornography. What did she expect? Does working through the legal system really work? Can her law be an educational tool if there is no appropriate organization and press to publicize its meaning?
Conclusion
MC5 agrees with much of what MacKinnon says. All sex occurs in the context of inequality between the genders. There is in some sense merely a continuum of coercion, It is important not to attribute the oppressions of gender relations to biological differences between men and women: that oppression is socially constructed.
Just as consensual gender relations are a myth, free speech, the right to privacy--the whole Liberal framework--is a myth that conceals power relations underneath. Dead people have no free speech; that includes women killed by pornography. Male, bourgeois dictatorship is the reality.
MC5 doubts, however, that there is as much false consciousness as MacKinnon says. Just as J. Sakai demonstrates in Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat the material basis for what appears to be the false consciousness of white Amerikan workers, there is a material basis for the behavior of Amerikan women. As class, nation and gender are often closely intertwined, Sakai's analysis should be a starting point to explain the apparent complicity of Amerikan women in their oppression.
Anyone with a comparative analysis of women's oppression--for example rape and sexual assault rates, especially in China under Mao or in other socialist countries--is encouraged to enlighten MIM for future issues. The centrality of pornography in MacKinnon's theory should be held up to the test of reality.
Future issues of MIM Theory will continue the discussion of MacKinnon's work. All are invited to contribute.
Notes:
1. Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 23
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 24
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 52
6. Ibid., p. 24
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 41
9. ibid., p. 51
10. Ibid., p. 5
11. Ibid., p. 3
12. Ibld., p. 7
13. Ibid., p. 48
14. Ibid., p. 14
15. Ibid., p. 59
16. Ibid., p. 88
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 61
19. Ibid., p. 49
20. Ibid., p. 72
21. Ibid., p. 60
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 129
24. Ibid., pp. 185-6
25. Ibid., pp. 191-2
26. Ibld., p. 222
(From MIM Notes 36, March 3, 1989)
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Feminism and Equality
Anne Phillips, ed.
(NY,NY: New
York University Press, 1987)
202pp.
Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought
by Elizabeth Spelman
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1988)
221pp.
reviewed by MC5 October 30, 1998
To come to grips with imperialist country feminism, MIM recommends its own magazines, the work of Catharine MacKinnon, the Redstockings and some others. These are two more books that can be helpful in one's theoretical studies, perhaps more accurately one's "theoretical practice."
All the people MIM has ever met require going through the question of the intertwining of gender, class and nation several times to achieve clarity and independence of bearings. In fact, it may not be possible to understand what all the fuss is about until one has practiced one's theory several times. So until the day we are all like Spock or Data in Star Trek--with great logical and mental retention abilities--we may require going over the same subjects hundreds of times.
We can say right off the bat that these are not the kinds of wimmin's studies books that are completely useless discourses on individual subjective experience that usually fill the bookshelves. These books attempt to connect feminist issues up to theory and they succeed. So if a persyn has read MIM's standard repertoire on gender, then these books can be additional exercises if taken with a proletarian grain of salt.
No Marxism
Although there are 11 well-educated wimmin claiming to be feminists writing in these two books, there is no Marxism in these books. Spelman does not claim to address Marxism in her book, just race, class and gender.
Of course, Marx cannot help being an influence including on authors that these 11 authors have read. Moreover, in Feminism and Equality, we have Michele Barrett's essay titled, "Marxist-Feminism and the Work of Karl Marx."
Unfortunately, this essay is typical of those written by Western pseudo-feminists serious enough to even address Marx. Although the article addresses Marx, it never engages him.
In the first place, most of the references are to works from his mid-20s, works that Marx hardly mentioned again in his later life. As a bourgeois teaching strategy, many teachers prefer to have students read Marx's early works with the idea that they are easier to understand than Marx's later works and that perhaps students will have an easier time digesting his work if they proceed through it the way Marx lived it. This bourgeois teaching strategy in the West has backfired in the sense that we obtain articles like this one. Certainly the article would be an "A+" for a bourgeois high school paper or as a training paper in a socialist school, but it does not deserve publication on the serious subject of "Marxist-feminism," because it is so incomplete as to be misleading.
Secondly, the article mentions the labor theory of value in a schematic way. The treatment of the labor theory of value by Barrett had the potential of going into Marx's work Das Kapital, but instead we learn the labor theory of value as it was already understood by bourgeois economists before Marx.
As a consequence of the failure to study Marx thoroughly, Barrett misses what is perhaps the most important thing that Western feminists need to learn from Marx--the difference between a system and a lifestyle. Systems determine the probabilities or propensities in the population to follow various lifestyles. Individuals may shift in and out of various lifestyles, but the basic percentages and qualitative nature of lifestyles do not change within a system. Systems reproduce themselves in ways in which individuals cannot escape them, which is not to say every individual has a predetermined lifestyle. If we toss a hundred quarters, MIM does not care which ones land heads up (the question of the individual), but we do want to know if 50 came up (the nature of quarters as a group). The next time we throw the 100 quarters in the air, different ones will come up heads, but by analogy, pseudo-feminists and other individualists are liable to say that their efforts made the quarter that used to be tails come up heads, so we better have more prisons, drug rehab and psychiatric therapy aimed at individual behavior.
Economic systems are modes of production. Much of MIM's struggle with Western pseudo-feminism is to get it to look at wimmin as a group and patriarchy as a system and not a choice of lifestyle.
After making some apologies for appearing to denigrate Marx's work because of his persynal life, Barrett nonetheless informs us that Marx fathered a son via the wife of Engels. "The feminist critique of such hypocrisy is not the normal moralistic one: it simply demands that revolutionaries practise what they preach. These questions are relevant to an understanding of Marx because they help us to identify how and why his critique of the family is so flawed and contradictory."(p. 59)
First of all Barrett didn't show us what Marx specifically preached about fathering children by wives of friends in communist circles, so there cannot be any hypocrisy. There is no reason to assume that Marx and Engels shared Barrett's Christian values. MIM has read more than one anarchist tract claiming that Marx and Engels were practicing communist free love that we should all practice now. We can be sure Engels would have held Marx to task if there was anything as reactionary about it as Barrett implies. For all we know, Marx himself might have regarded it as reactionary to father the child if he did.
Secondly, her statement is really proof that she never understood Marx's work and got stuck in the parts that do not talk about systems. Marx never claimed that he could change his lifestyle as an individual. In fact, he said no one could change anything without changing things at the group level first, by overthrowing the existing systems. For Barrett to miss this basic point about Marx and revolutionary men generally makes us wonder how much she ever listens to them.
True, Liberal ideology does judge the difference between an individual's ideology and the individual's behavior. Perhaps more relevantly, Western Liberalism is simply rooted in ancient Judeo-Christian ethics which raise the issue of hypocrisy and focus on lifestyle. However, Marxism is not Liberalism or Christianity and what we have here is really a profound failure to leave a very narrow Western worldview even for a second. C. Duchen in her book on France and Ferree and Hess in their standard text on Amerikan feminism also use this criticism of "practice what they preach" against revolutionary men and we believe that Barrett's view is representative of pseudo-feminism generally. It seems that these moralistic pre-political females can only see communists as some variety of ultra-Christian, tough to deal with and understand but still ultimately just Christians to be judged by Christian standards.
The only other real intersection of Marxism with feminism that Barrett raises is that Marx viewed feminists as people seeking to exploit wimmin in the workplace. For Barrett, Marx's view was "flawed and contradictory," but she was never able to follow what Marx's concerns were because she never digested his work. She raises all kinds of out-of-context concerns about Marx's complaints that capitalists use wimmin and children in the factories.
Those who understand Marx's view of how crisis comes about in capitalism understand that the notion of surplus-value is basic to it. Barrett does not attempt to rebut that wimmin and children received lower pay than men or that they effectively more than double the work-force. She read Marx's early papers, but did not understand all the ironic passages about how the harder people work, the more powerful the alien force that opposes them-namely their finished labor (dead labor) embodied in products turned into capital, the basis of a whole class's power over them. While that is an unfortunate irony for workers, there are also such ironies for capitalists even more powerful than the ones facing workers.
Since Barrett never understood Marx's theory of surplus-value and instead talked about the labor theory of value the way bourgeois economists had before Marx, she is not able to link the labor of wimmin and children and how it fits into the economy, namely by raising the rate of surplus value. Reading the passage about the "family wage" that should have opened her eyes scientifically, she instead complains moralistically that Marx left out some things wimmin do that can't be bought in stores.(p. 55) Yet, that was the whole point, to break down the analysis to the economy and the profit rate. Carole Pateman is even worse and ignorantly claims that Marx never mentioned housewives.(p. 118) Marx was trying to explain how capitalists bailed themselves out of economic crisis and built themselves a cushion of surplus-value, but Barrett did not attempt to follow that or any other train of Marx's thought. Barrett was uninterested in how economic crises come about and the related political possibilities for upheaval. Rather she criticized things without context much the way post-modernists do today, because for them there is no truth anyway.
Post-modernism
Barrett has the worst of both worlds, because she adopts her sense of justice from Christianity and her method from post-modernism. At least post-modernists usually have some concept of systems that cannot be escaped, if only to justify their attitude that since Western academia has been a prop of race, class and gender oppression in the past, certainly no one else stands any chance of doing any better. MIM agrees with Spelman self-critically speaking as an imperialist country academician: "Because we have produced theories reeking with our own privilege, then anybody's theories must be similarly and fatally redolent."(p. x)
Surprisingly in the 1987 collection of essays, bell hooks has the most progressive one. While the predominant attitude of the book is to "accept diversity," bell hooks attacks Liberalism and post-modernism head-on. That is surprising only because she wrote a book a decade later trying to out post-modern the post- modernists.(See MIM Theory 12: Environment, Society, Revolution, p. 81)
At least in 1987, her attitude was correct. She criticizes the idea that there should be as many feminisms as there are wimmin. She doesn't think it was funny the way that "do your own thing" had taken over the movement.(p. 62)
Then she says equality for wimmin is a bogus idea because she asks equality with "which men?" Lower- class wimmin and oppressed nationality wimmin don't want equality with their men. That's not progress!
Indeed, we should recall statistically especially amongst Blacks that there is an even larger disparity of life expectancies in favor of wimmin; there is an even wider gap in imprisonment; Black wimmin even have better unemployment and income statistics. Being equal with Black men--what good would that do Black females? That whole dynamic is determined by the fact that white people view Black females as less threatening than Black males. To be equal with Black men would make a substantial portion of Black females even more gender oppressed, because a large portion of Black males are harshly sexually oppressed in prison.
Bell hooks tries to add that at least in her community there was an overwhelming rejection of the idea of lesbian separatism that led to attacks on feminism as a whole.(p. 71) Her attack was dressed in psychological language, but as the facts go, MIM believes bell hooks is correct that it is a mistake to act as if all wimmin are lesbians and just don't know it. It's akin to thinking 90 percent of the people in the imperialist countries are proletariat and just don't know it.
bell hooks hit everything wrong about pseudo-feminism right in the chin: "The willingness to see feminism as a lifestyle choice rather than a political commitment reflects the class nature of the movement. . . . Feminist movement to end sexist oppression actively engages participants in revolutionary struggle. Struggle is rarely safe or pleasurable."(pp. 72-3) The petty-bourgeoisie can afford to "drop-out" with an alternative life-style, but there will still be a disciplined proletariat that cannot.
As bell hooks says, the political commitment to change should not be mistaken for the change itself. At the individual level, we should try to affect politics and its extension of military affairs. We cannot individually resist the profit-system, patriarchy or neo-colonialism and create results. Even if we manage to improve our individual results, the results of others will degenerate, often directly because ours improved or just because a different quarter came up heads this time.
Especially in the imperialist countries, we are a sick people. All we can do is realize we are sick, wish to live, wish to be healthy and garner the strength for arduous surgery and medication. When enough of us make this commitment because of the development of our underlying disease, a cure will arise from the furnace of class, nation and gender struggle.
Since it is true that we all start from diverse positions, unified action to end a group oppression always requires struggle within the oppressed group. Concretely that usually means unifying behind a leader as a concrete way of reducing the paralysis of diversity.
On the question of unity, struggle and leadership, pseudo-feminism has been a miserable failure. It has adopted the worst aspects of Liberalism and post-modernism to avoid the concept of uncomfortable struggle. Hester Eisenstein admitted it in her book Gender Shock when she said that MacKinnon's theory is not integrated with her legal tactics. Zillah Eisenstein also pointed this out about Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her whitewash of Stanton. Stanton's theory was revolutionary in some regards, but it too focussed on the law.(p. 86)
Thus the great would-be feminist theorists start in the clouds at the level of the group--wimmin--which is good, but they always end up at the individual level. Unlike the lifestyle feminists who have no theory, the theorists we review confront wimmin's diversity and fall apart.
There are two consequences for the pseudo-feminist theorists. One is that they take up the view of "celebrating wimmin" in all their "diversity." When they realize that means political paralysis and a wide range of views they backtrack to saying that there must be some inherent difference between men and wimmin, because wimmin can celebrate their paralysis of diversity and men can't. With this stupidity, the pseudo-feminists are forcing themselves into seeing struggle-oriented feminists as male-identified and thus undermining their view of celebrating diversity.
The second consequence is de-politicization. Where action demands that an oppressed group unite, pseudo- feminism realizes that uniting wimmin would require struggle, so they give up the goal of unity and political transformation. To MIM, this is obvious capitulation to patriarchy, because patriarchy dominates now, not feminism.
One white boy or a billion Chinese, which is "practice"?
Our pseudo-feminists are keenly aware of Frederick Demuth, rumored to be Marx's son via Engels' wife. Yet when they ask about "practice," do they say anything about the practice of the more than one billion Chinese who lived under Mao (1949-1976)?
This problem of what to count when evaluating the success or failure of theory we call a question of "praxis"--a choice or concept of how to relate theory to practice. For pre-political moralists, Trotskyists and other idealists, there is no connection. Often the moral "Principles" with a capital "P" are written in stone and handed down from heaven regardless of their effect in the real world. We Marxist materialists are not like that. We believe theory tells us about cause and effect and therefore how the social world works. We apply theory toward ideological goals and we judge it, not minute to minute like the pragmatists and empiricists who change theory to fit facts from minute to minute, but also not like the idealists who don't really have theory at all, just warmed over religion of one kind or another.
There is considerable discussion of androgyny in the book including a whole chapter, but no where does a discussion of China under Mao appear. The only mention of Mao is where he is paired with Gramsci, apparently as some kind of unorthodox Marxist in the words of Sally Alexander.(p. 169)
MIM found it nearly unbearable to read long-winded discussion of androgyny as if it hadn't ever been tried anywhere: "What would a world in which sex distinctions were ignored or denied look like?"(p. 151) The provincially ignorant nature of pseudo-feminism does make it boring.
Julia Kristeva and a whole host of female China specialists did look into androgyny in reality, not just idle conjecture. The pseudo-feminists could at least do us the favor of reading these works before generalizing about gender. They seem to be interested in ancient tribal history to know if wimmin were always subordinate to men; now they need to realize that only a minority of wimmin is white. Maybe if they spent less time trying to generalize about individual men's sexual practices, they would have time to look at the world's majority of wimmin and draw some conclusions. Less Monica Lewinsky and more Jiang Qing.
The "personal is political" is a slogan of great drawbacks despite its original radical origins in that it has been taken to mean that obsessing about one's own narrow little personal world is somehow equal or superior to struggling to understand the billions of wimmin in the world.
Anti-suffragists used to argue that wimmin will never pay any attention to politics and the world outside the home raising children because of their nature, so they should not be given the vote or any chance in political office. The pseudo-feminists seem hell-bent to prove the anti-suffragists accurate.
Child-rearing: one Western theorist or a billion Chinese?
What is true of the concept of androgyny is also true of the question of child-rearing. Much ink is spilt on sex differentiation and the psychology of infants and whether patriarchy can be traced to child-rearing practices.
Nancy Chodorow wrote a theory that says the child-rearing pattern in which fathers do not play much of a role is responsible for the reactionary nature of men when they grow up. Spelman dedicates a whole chapter and scattered references to this question, but despite the fact that the largest experiments in collective child-care took place in China in the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution, there is not a single reference to China, Mao or communism in the index. Her book is subtitled "Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought."
Spelman correctly points out the limits of Chodorow's theory. It cannot account for why white females feel superior to oppressed nationality men. The same goes for issues of class hierarchy amongst white females. How can we then account for the flaws of fascist females?
Chodorow's work also comes with Freudian baggage, but our main objection to a theory that might well be true in the main is that along with a few dozen other academic works, it receives a kind of totemic reverence while the actual experience of adult wimmin and children in China with collective child-care receives no mention. How are these pseudo-feminists relating theory to practice? Why do they think they can ignore China and talk about child-care? We call it a question of "praxis."
Neo-colonialism
Another major complaint about Spelman is that she always uses U.S. Blacks as a stand-in for all race and nationality problems. She is always speaking of whites versus Blacks. We object because it is always the practice of the oppressor to offer "special deals" to certain groups at the expense of others. Speaking of Black all the time as if whites did not oppress anyone else has that neo-colonialist effect of recognizing that Blacks and only Blacks need a better deal from the white man. Such is always the precursor to establishing some new puppet or another. Mao called it "sugar-coated bullets."
Despite this complaint, if we substituted "oppressed nations" wherever we saw "Black" in her book and if we put in "neo-colonialism" for "racism, " we would be doing fairly well. Spelman has tried to think through the intersection of the three strands of oppression (class, gender and nation) systematically.
Gender oppression and class and nation
Spelman succeeds in putting forward a systematic view on the intersection of nation, class and gender. This was her overall objective in her work, and although we do not agree with it completely, we recognize that she is talking about what MIM also wants people to do theoretical exercise on.
Although her book does not venture outside Europe, the United $tates and their internal semi-colonies, at least Spelman goes back to Ancient Greece. From studying Plato, she learns that already back then there were those who distinguished female biology from a concept of gender. A persyn with a manly soul but a female body might nonetheless be a philosopher-ruler(p. 32)--Plato's idea of a member of the ruling-class.
We would deem Spelman's understanding of Aristotle to exemplify her critique of chauvinist pseudo-feminism in the imperialist countries. In Aristotle's day, there were citizens and there were slaves. Female citizens were considered inferior to male citizens, but slaves were vastly inferior to both. In fact, Aristotle did not consider female slaves to be wimmin at all. According to him, slaves were slaves, male or female. Thus being a slave or not had a much bigger impact on one's life than being a womyn or not. At several points in the book, Spelman confronts this type of reality which would seem to leave feminism always to be dealing with relatively trivial subjects and she acknowledges that there is some kind of problem, but what she does is expand her idea of feminism to count more things. We communists find this vexing, because instead of just opposing all power of groups of people over people as communists including communist anarchists do, Spelman has to go back and work through one thing at a time about what is wrong with white middle-class feminism. She should chuck her idea of feminism which she knows is in a straight-jacket and take up communism, whether anarchist or Maoist at first. Becoming communist would save her a lot of ink.
MIM does not believe it is necessary to resuscitate feminism by giving it the subject-matter of other oppressions. Instead of artificially bloating feminism by giving it the subject matter of more important subjects, she should just confront what she thinks and say that gender was not the principal contradiction in Ancient Greece. Gender has always been one of the "Big Three" along with nation and class, but when she looks at Ancient Greece and other situations, she should just spell out that she's thinking gender oppression is not principal. Many moralistic people won't like to hear that, but we are scientists seeking to reduce the pain and suffering involved with oppression as fast as we can. If we have to prescribe castor oil and liver, we will do it. MIM has consciously relegated feminism to secondary position in the overall strategy to reduce oppression at this time and we believe real gender oppression shows up most in reproduction and leisure-time dynamics, both of which can have life-and-death consequences as in the many deaths each year connected to the leisure time activity called the "romance culture" in imperialist countries. The reason we have consciously decided that feminist struggle is not principal is that what Spelman found about Ancient Greece is not atypical even for our current day when we look at the Big Three strands of oppression.
What is missing completely in Spelman's work is the notion of principal contradiction and principal aspect of contradiction; even though she confronts exactly the same subject matter that causes us proletarian scientists to use the concept of principal contradiction that Mao described so well in his essays on philosophy. As Spelman herself seems to realize, there are contexts in which life-and-death gender oppressions may be more linked up with other oppressions than with gender itself. Certainly the class and national position of "mail-order brides" or prostitutes in Africa or Thailand infected with HIV or female slaves in Ancient Greece has more to do with their predicament than anything that can be deduced about gender. Today oppression can generally best be attacked with anti-imperialism. That's the nature of dialectics, the way oppressions are intermeshed. Solving imperialism does the most to solve severe gender oppression.
In Aristotle's day, citizen wimmin were deemed worthy of giving birth to citizen children,(p. 42) while slaves were considered incapable of following the deliberations of the citizen-man.(p. 45) Hence to know someone's biology was always possible, but to know a persyn's gender required knowledge of "race" (captured foreigner or not) and class in Ancient Greece. For this reason, Spelman criticizes the whole approach of looking at gender oppression where class and nation oppression are not present--i.e. with white middle-class adult wimmin.
While the U.$. Trotskyists compared millionaire baseball players to slaves, Spelman criticizes the pseudo-feminists for Aristotle type thinking: "She talks of scholars who considered the life of an Athenian woman little better than that of a 'harem slave' without noting that the 'harem slave' is also presumably a woman; she speaks of how protective Athenians were of 'their women,' even though in the context of her chapter she makes it quite clear that 'their women' could not possibly include slave women."(p. 49)
MIM refers to the problem Spelman put her finger on as the question of linear reasoning versus dialectics. For example can vicious national oppression fail to rub off on the oppressor nation itself? While the imprisonment rate of Blacks in the U$A can only be statistically compared with Stalin's prison system in war-time against Nazis, the U$ rate of imprisonment of Euro-Amerikans while much lower is still the highest in the world outside of Russia during recent states of emergency.
Linear reasoning is useful to cut things up and look at one thing when another does not exist. Dialectical materialism stresses that life is always interconnected in many various cause and effect ways. Spelman says it herself: "A troubling characteristic of much contemporary feminist theory is its failure to take seriously the intertwining of sexism with other forms of oppression."(p. 58) Thus we cannot rule out that once white people get used to imprisoning Blacks at such a rate, they won't get used to having other chauvinisms to imprison people for, including white people. Where there is racism and national chauvinism, religious chauvinism, regional chauvinism, anti-gay/lesbian chauvinism, education chauvinism, anti-long-hair chauvinism and all the other chauvinisms conscious and unconscious cannot be far behind.
Spelman gives us some more examples of "intermeshing." Even people philosophizing about how to oppose racism such as Spelman still face the fact that "Black people have to a disproportionate extent supplied the labor which has made possible the cultivation of philosophical inquiry."(p. 122) That is an example of how Spelman has connected "race" and a glimmering of the concept of "productive labor."
Most people know now that Black men have been lynched historically even just for looking at white adult females. Thus the drive of male racism is seen as partly sexual. Even more subversive to pseudo-feminism, Spelman points to the work of Jacqueline Jones on slavery: "White women performed acts of violence against Black slave women with whom their husbands had sexual relations. Often these racist acts were shaped by feelings of sexual jealousy rooted in and sustained by sexism: for such jealousy is a function of the sexism that makes the 'proper' attention of her husband a condition of a woman's sense of self-worth."(p. 106) There could hardly be better proof of the existence of a middle gender. Literally seeing its sexual privilege threatened, it lashed out in violence against the most oppressed. It reminds MIM very much of the labor aristocracy, which also seeks exclusive/monogamous relations with its imperialist master inclined to running around the planet for its labor and "free trade."
From her insight about Ancient Greece and other insights, Spelman realizes it is possible to ridicule most imperialist country feminism. Spelman shows us the exactly correct attitude to take toward this problem. She says there is no reason to take comfort in the "sexual status quo."(p. 5) At the same time she plunges ahead, with what Maoists call "materialist fearlessness." The truth is not going to hurt the oppressed, no matter how uncomfortable it may seem at first.
Spelman concludes that existing problems of feminism stem from speaking of wimmin outside of race and class context. "Thus the phrase 'as a woman' is the Trojan horse of feminist ethnocentrism."(p. 13) She seeks feminism that always speaks of wimmin in concrete context and concludes as does MIM that there must be many genders.(p. 175) For MIM, oppressor genders include the traditional patriarchs and also the gender bureaucracy and gender aristocracy. The oppressed gender we call "wimmin" except when we say "wimmin" as a concession to popular usage in reference to adult female biology.
Readers will have to pardon us theorists, because we have so many problems to take care of and a language that does not necessarily come pre-used for revolution. We have two problems. One is to distinguish biology from gender. Just as Plato had the concept of masculine soul, the imperialist country masses also have this concept when they talk of "tom-boys." Secondly, even within biology we have to distinguish between developed bodies and child bodies. Even saying "female" or "female biology" hides the central problem of gender oppression in the imperialist countries, because it is children both male and female that really have the most oppressive sexual conditions. The adult female is not the same thing as the child female at all. The very concept of consent with children is in dispute; although MIM names it as adult consent at age 13.
Because of the burden of history, the oppressed gender is called "wimmin," but in the imperialist countries the majority of gender oppressed people are boys and girls. Even if our readers recall that they too talk about "tom-boys," it is not likely most will forgive us both for distinguishing biology from social role and adult biology and child biology. It may seem too frustrating, especially when MIM says there are really at least three genders including a kind of "middle-class" of gender. This is where we must insist on theoretical practice. Our readers need to check themselves and decide whether it is true these distinctions have to be made. Then they will have to put up with the frustration of integrating those views into their everyday language and "practice." The burden of change does fall on us, the revolutionaries.
On the question of the self-esteem of the imperialist country adult females, it seems that MIM and Spelman have some bad news. It seems that the imperialist country adult females are also oppressors, even in a gender context. For those who took up feminism just for self-esteem, this will be a difficult blow to accept.
Yet, as far as the purely subjective factor is concerned, we have this to say to imperialist country adult females--that the middle-classes and middle genders often provide leadership to revolutionary movements. People in the middle classes and genders have skills and resources they can bring to bear against the system of oppression. Engels was an outright capitalist. Lenin was a lawyer. Mao was a teacher of peasant background. Jiang Qing was a female actor, very famous in China.
Conclusion
On the whole we are favorably impressed especially by Spelman's book as an exercise in dealing with nation, class and gender. We also believe that the collection edited by Anne Phillips accurately relates feminism to Liberalism and the social-democracy they call socialism.
Understanding Liberalism--and we do not mean Walter Mondale type Democratic Party reformist liberalism which is just one variety of Liberalism--is key to understanding Western thought. Although we disagree with these books, we believe it is possible to use them as study exercises. Spelman in particular is barking up the right tree. Of the books reviewed in this issue of MT, we can turn to the Ferree and Hess book to learn how pseudo-feminism views itself factually and we have Spelman's book at the other end of theory to examine the knottiest issues related to dialectics and the problem we call "the three strands of oppression."
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Jung & Feminism: Liberating Archetypes
Demaris S. Wehr
Boston: Beacon Press
1987
Reviewed by MC5
I originally intended to review Jung and Feminism as part of an article on psychology and its reactionary uses and uselessness to the proletariat. Unfortunately, there is so much to say about the book that it requires its own review.
I. Where Jung and Wehr fit in
Wehr proudly labels herself a feminist and hints that the book, a distilled Ph.D. dissertation, is a much toned-down criticism of C. G. Jung's work, which is a substantial branch of psychology descended from Freud. The Freudian school of psychology was once dominant, but has since surrendered first place to the cognitive school of psychology. Another major school of psychology with less popularity is behaviorism, one with some affinities to Marxism, that I will not cover here.
Cognitive psychology has its attraction for students, especially socially constructed women because it concerns the development of mental processes. This is of obvious concern to mothers and teachers. The notion that there should be a science to improve human learning capacities is a very attractive ideological draw for psychology. In society today where women are taught that their respected role is to raise children well, psychology appears to give women the best of both worlds--a chance to fit into traditional roles and be scientific about it while getting a college degree.
Freud, on the other hand, focussed on sexual motivations and sex-derived behaviors. While cognitive psychology is attractive to women, Freudian psychology's very subject matter is of direct concern to feminists.
Jung and Feminism contains no empirical material, no experiments or studies of histories of people. It is mostly a theoretical work, with lots of generalizations and stories relevant to women, all of which fall within the Freudian tradition.
II. Idealism
Wehr addresses the reasons Jung is popular among women:
"The primary appeal of Jung's psychology to women, it seems to me--based partly on my own experience--is that it is a 'meaning-making' psychology. I Analytical psychology offers a balance to an overly rational, materialistic world and can shed light on the darkness of a soul lacking meaning. It can be the path to a person's spiritual awakening."(1)
The translation for the above should be "Jungian psychology takes women away from the issues of political, economic and military power in society and channels them into areas where they will have no power, but where they will feel unchallenged by men, or anyone else for that matter." The attraction of Jungian psychology is part of the socialization of women in this society.
As if to underscore the point, Wehr writes, "the religiousness of Jung's psychology is an important part of its appeal and strength."(2) Furthermore, according to Wehr, "Jung's view of the contemporary world situation offers the most complete psychological/spiritual explanation of it I know."(3) Throughout the book, Wehr demonstrates hints of awareness that Jung's psychology is an exercise in what Marx criticized as idealism. But idealism is what Wehr is proud of in following Jung.
MIM critics will often say that going back to a 19th century thinker like Marx is not progressive. Yet, in 1987 people still publish books as if it were 1787. In fact, Wehr is kind enough to point out that Jung's philosophical roots are in Kant, an 18th century philosopher, and Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher.(4)
Until everyone recognizes that ideas stem from material conditions, it will be necessary to refer to the 19th century to refute the thinkers of centuries prior to the 19th century. Jung in particular is a particularly clear-cut idealist, in the Marxist sense of the word.
When Wehr speaks of "archetypes of liberation," she is referring to ideas that can be discovered in collective psychic life. This kind of approach comes from Kant: "James Heisig notes that 'Kant had already demonstrated, at least to Jung's satisfaction, that "there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.'" Kant's demonstration seemed to Jung to pave the way for his own concept of an inherited, collective, psychic structure that "conditions all experience, conscious and unconscious."(5)
Ultimately, the ideas or archetypes to be found through psychological investigation come from God and are called God-images. For this reason, some Jungists, including Wehr, have simplified Jung to say that the collective unconscious is God and that Jungism is another religion.(6)
Psychology is left to discover those ideas or images left by God in the collective unconscious. That is to say those ideas are already there, just as God-given rights are granted to every individual, according to the founding fathers of the United States.
This kind of philosophy is very compatible with psychology's search for fixed traits in individuals as an explanation for the existence of the status quo. These fixed traits, or "images" in the individual are so permanent that "reason and will are nothing against it."(7) One of the results is that "Internalized oppression in women has the power of this kind of image. It is far deeper than rationality and thought can reach, and therefore, rational thought, or even mere insight, is not powerful enough to silence it. In women, by the time oppression has been internalized, it has the character of fervent conviction."(8) Such is also an explanation for why women cannot simply adopt a rationalist method for liberating themselves, as Marxist feminists would. In Wehr's thinking, women must essentially come to grips with God before they can liberate themselves. Such a plunge into mysticism is a diversion from the rational processes women need to achieve equality, and a further reinforcement of women's powerlessness in the real world.
Long ago Marx criticized the Jung of economics who applied Kant's philosophy: "He does not regard economic categories as the theoretical expression of historical relations of production, corresponding to a particular stage of development in material production, but arbitrarily transforms them into pre-existing eternal ideas, and that in this roundabout way he arrives once more at the standpoint of bourgeois economy."(9)
Wehr asks some damaging questions about the idealist approach in examples concerning women without following through: "If a prostitute were to come to a Jungian analyst's office, the analyst's goal would be to free her from an identification with the unadapted aspect of the hetaira archetypal image [the "characteristic" of someone who forsakes emotional commitment while carrying on brief sexual relations]. The question I raise is, why archetypalize the experience of such a person in the first place? Doing so always gives a cosmic dimension to social arrangements."(10) Here, at least in this case, Wehr recognizes that searching for individual character traits in a prostitute would not have a liberating effect. What she suggests instead is in fact not an endeavor in psychology, but something more akin to the study of social institutions. So the real question Wehr should ask is, "Why do psychology in the first place?"
III. Therapy
From Wehr's point of view the liberation of women is a matter of conducting the proper struggle in psychiatry, which is the practice of psychology. She hammers home the following statement twice in the book:
"Sexism and its psychological companion in women, internalized oppression, are still so widespread in our society that any psychological theory and practice which does not take those facts into account and oppose them unrelentingly is not a freeing therapy for women."(11)
Here Wehr starts with the assumption that it is possible to solve the oppression of women through individual treatment. In reality, there is no evidence that psychiatry has any effectiveness in treating individuals for their many diagnosed problems, unless it is medical treatment for which no psychological theory or psychiatry qua psychiatry is necessary.
IV. Women's self-hatred
Referring to inner voices in women which tell them they have no worth and that their lives have no meaning in the world, Wehr starts to reveal the reactionary agenda in so-called feminist psychology. According to Wehr these voices in women, brought about by society, are part of the internalized oppression of women.(12)
"Therefore, it is on the inner level that this voice wreaks the most havoc, since it paralyzes women from within, causing them to collude in their own destruction, or at a lesser degree of intensity, to accept their own lack of development."(13) In this statement Wehr holds some implicit assumptions common in psychology. One is that a sense of self or self-esteem is a good thing for the individual. Two is that to obtain that self-esteem critical voices must be squelched or balanced out with positive ones. That is to say what is necessary is an adjustment to existing forces that cause degrading images in women's minds.
From a Marxist point of view, this is simply individualist ideology masquerading as the theory behind "therapy." In contrast, Marxists believe the individual is the product of ever-changing material circumstances and institutions--class position, educational institutions, the family, etc. The concept of the "self" is a hangover from religious thinking where God-given integrity and conscience are placed in every individual. There is no scientific evidence that such a thing as the "self" exists.
Wehr can help an individual to adjust to and enjoy existing society and its institutions, but she has nothing to say about the kind of self-criticism that puts an individual within a current seeking to transform society. On the contrary, Wehr's approach precludes the ideological radicalization of women and hence does women profound damage.
Again on the subject of women's negative self-images, at the end of the book Wehr shows how not to criticize Jung while trying to adopt a fence-sitting position:
"By advocating awareness of the social oppression of women, I am not suggesting that women need not be self-critical, that they are innocent and guilt-free, or incapable of doing wrong or wielding power over others in harmful ways. People with poor self-esteem can inflict great harm on others, and indeed often do. But I am pointing to the wounding effects of a misogynist society on women's self-esteem and the corresponding effect of Jung's psychology when he echoes patriarchy's attitudes."(14) Wehr nowhere explains how self-criticism is positive in her scheme of things despite this fence-sitting disclaimer at the end of her book.
What is more, Wehr does not distinguish between revolutionary criticism and self-criticism and reactionary criticism. Of course women are going to face lots of nonsense criticism from the patriarchy. Such criticisms must be invalidated, but this is not possible in a thoroughgoing way without simultaneously undergoing revolutionary criticism and self-criticism. Accepting reactionary criticism is bad, but so is simply avoiding it without a real rebuttal. Conservative women will buy into reactionary criticisms of women. Feminist reformist women will simply avoid the criticisms or "balance" them by building "self-esteem." However, the only way to thoroughly destroy reactionary criticism is to defeat it with the revolutionary criticism of arms, as Marx would say. That way women will no longer have to balance their lives between reactionary criticism and idealist escape.
V. Individual
Women who adopt the individualist approach of psychology also damage themselves by coming to believe that they have stable personality characteristics. Rather than mastering their environment and circumstances, women simply adjust to fit into their environment given certain assumptions about their supposedly permanent personality traits. Those assumptions generally cannot help but be determined by the patriarchy at this time.
The concept of the individual is also reactionary in its own right, not simply for its consequences. While it is indeed reactionary for women to tie their lives to romance with men, it is also reactionary to promote individualism as the solution. The individualist answer precludes collective and cooperative arrangements in life.
The reader can see the anxiety dispersed in Wehr when she explains that it is unnecessary to imitate Jung as if he were Jesus Christ, because Jung himself did not want it that way. "To imitate Jung, then, would be to fall into the same folly. Theoretically, as the self manifests itself increasingly in a human life, the individual becomes uniquely herself or himself--not an imitation of any other."(15) Phhewwww. God worked it out so each of us would be different, implies the idealist Wehr.
What the book ends up recommending should be relabelled selfish narcissism for women. Men are supposed to become a little less selfish and women are supposed to be more selfish. That would be the perfect balance in Wehr's view. Even men would benefit from this adjustment, according to Wehr.(16)
VI. Adjustment
"Individuation [the process of becoming an independent person] is the core process in analytical psychology. It is the goal of life and the way one becomes truly oneself--the person one was always intended to be. Individuation is both process and goal."(17)
The above quote is quintessential individualist, idealist adjustment ideology. It's individualist because it says the goal of life is to become an individual. It's idealist because it speaks of becoming "the person one was always intended to be." Wehr should have added "intended to be by God." Finally, the statement is adjustment-oriented in its totality because its goal is to fit into what God had in mind, which is obviously the status quo.
Another sign of Wehr's inclination to have patients adjust to systematic oppression, instead of overthrowing it, is her stance on sex between the psychiatric analyst and the client. Criticizing Jung, she says he "omits consideration of the power differential between analyst and analysand. If a male analyst has intercourse, or even engages in flirtation, with a female patient, he will be playing into her social conditioning to find her worth in her attractiveness to a man. This confirmation of her sexual attractiveness will not help her emerge to full personhood, since any therapy that does not challenge internalized oppression in a woman is not a freeing therapy for her."(18) Jung had had a long-term romantic relationship with at least one client.
In the above quote, Wehr unintentionally gives the system of oppression credit. Wehr writes as if analysts were the only men with more power than women. She then proposes a solution that implies the solution is changing of individual practices concerning sex. Yet the very practice she proposes reinforces the problem she is speaking of. Having sex with the analyst does not help the woman, says Wehr, but not having sex does, again confirming that the woman's self-worth has to do with her individual sexual behavior. Wehr leaves out the reality that the whole problem of the woman's oppression is located somewhere outside the question of having sex with an analyst. The adjustment that Wehr suggests for clients is that they sometimes build a self-image apart from sexual attractiveness, a self-image hinging on withholding sex.
Adjustment number two that Wehr proposes is that somehow the power differential between men and women can be modified so that powerful men do not have sex with powerless women. If society prevents analysts from having sex with analysands, that's one step forward, says Wehr. Other inept feminists have applied the same logic in targeting professor-student relations or boss-employee relations for prohibition. Feminists in each area have their favorite power differential for prohibition. None of these feminists propose communism with its equality of classes and genders, the only real solution to the problem.
Feminists supporting adjustment number two never stop to think through the implications of what they are saying. In society there is a group of heterosexual men and there is a group of heterosexual women. (By the way, the argument is unchanged for lesbian and gay relations stratified by class.) The two groups are unequal in power regardless of sexual policies concerning analysts, professors or even employers. Prohibiting sex between any individual woman and any individual man or any subgroup of women and subgroup of men does nothing to solve the power differential. Any individual heterosexual woman who manages to have a more "equal" romantic relationship can only do so at the expense of other women who must then choose from men even more powerful, or not have sex. In the United States today, the vast majority of women do not choose asexuality, and end up with men much better-off economically and an average of five years older. Equality is not a matter of individual choice, so it is not the fault of any individual. The contradiction of the power differential and "self-esteem" in sex cannot be solved on an individual basis or a policy basis. The only solution is equalization of the genders overall.
Another example of Wehr's adjustment ideology, which is common in psychology as a whole, comes in her discussion of neurosis. We have seen that Wehr sees thoroughgoing criticism and self-criticism as unnatural. She never really considers that maybe women should be angry with themselves and with society and not simply adjust to it by balancing whatever pair of opposites comes along even if both are oppressive--having and not having sex to build self-hood for example.
Neurosis, according to Jung, is a conflict between the individual's conscious being and the unconscious being. Neurosis is something people need psychiatrists for, according to psychiatrists. "People experience neurosis under many guises in their lives, perhaps as a relationship conflict, or as depression, or as inability to do work."(19) It is typically assumed in psychology that one should not have relationship conflicts, get depressed about the oppressive system we live in or find work unappealing. When these things happen, the psychiatrists say the individual has a neurosis, instead of saying imperialism should be overthrown. The thinking of psychiatrists on this point is both self-interested and protective of the status quo. They make money trying to help people who are square pegs fit in round holes.
Notes:
1. Demaris S. Wehr, Jung and Feminism: Liberating
Archtypes, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, p. 6.
2. Ibid., p.
7
3. Ibid., p. 8
4. Ibid., p. 28
5. Ibid., p. 78
6. Ibid., pp. 77-97
7. Ibid., p. 94
8. Ibid., p. 22
9. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Peking:
Foreign Languages Press, 1978, p. 217. Italics removed.
10.
Wehr, p. 116
11. Ibid., p. 11
12. Ibid., pp. 18-21
13.
Ibid., p. 20
14. Ibid., p. 121
15. Ibid., p. 96
16.
Ibid., p. 114
17. Ibid., p. 49
18. Ibid., p. 72
19.
Ibid., p. 58
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According to USA Today, The Rules is 20th on its best-sellers list. The book has sold over 455,000 copies and constitutes a statement about the realities of gender in a system incapable of real progress.
There is not a single fact in the book about the subject of romantic relationships. It consists entirely of 35 rules of dogma concentrating the nature of the romance culture. Among the points of advice -- never ask men out, never stare at men or otherwise indicate attention, never return phone calls, never spend more than 10 minutes with a man on the phone and always be the one to end a date. These kinds of pseudo-power games are a reflection of the fact that power is considered sexy, that we adjust to the fact of domination in society more generally and find it pleasurable thanks to the culture of the dominators.
There are about two rules that MIM agrees with: 1) Men don't change. 2) Don't talk about the book with your therapist.
MIM knows that men don't change, because that's the system we live in. Efforts of individual biological wimmin to get individual men to change are indeed futile. Men as a group are in a constant flux, but they do not change on account of individual efforts.
MIM thinks that people shouldn't talk about this book to their therapists because no one should be talking about this book to anyone, which is less useful than toilet paper. The authors do not want psychologists to challenge their book, recognizing that even though psychotherapy is about convincing women into being happy with their gender roles in relationships, even therapists find their drivel manipulative beyond the pale.
Most of MIM's readers will immediately scoff at The Rules and some will wonder why MIM takes it seriously. We answer that this book has sold more copies than any MIM book; it has received serious reviews and is in no way meant as a satire of our culture. The book is written by the Archie Bunkers of the gender aristocracy and the authors mean what they say; they spend much of their book talking about the need for determination to follow The Rules to the end.
Even the richest of people are no exception in their culture. In fact the romance life of Charles and Di or Donald Trump is the poor example that the ruling class sets for the people in the capitalist system. Indeed, following the romances of the ruling class is itself a multi-million dollar tabloid and television industry in itself. We cannot be surprised that the media conglomerate Time-Warner -- which is also the money and power behind pseudo- feminist leader Gloria Steinem -- published The Rules.
In an interview with USA Today, famous imperialist wimmin's author Erica Jong could not find the strength to condemn the book and admitted she had ambiguous feelings about it because she believes "it works" in finding Mr. Right and that men have always been "predators." Erica Jong should have developed this excellent point about the book: it sanctions men as predators. This would not be very important to MIM in itself, because dating culture is not inherently a life-and-death issue. It's a subject of leisure time activity. (But somehow our romance culture has managed to become the single largest cause of murder as defined by the FBI.) Of course, relative to other kinds of imperialist murder through starvation, war and environmental destruction, "relationship" murder is unimportant, but MIM still does not sanction it. MIM is concerned with toppling the patriarchy, not with making dating more fun or productive under capitalism. What should not be at all important involves antagonistic contradictions between the people and an enemy that is very difficult to pin down -- all men and the biological wimmin socialized to be men.
According to Fein and Schneider, men who really love their wimmin will chase them with dogged determination, and they should be forced to prove that obsessive determination or they are not worth wasting time on. The marrying kind are the ones who seek a "challenge" -- the "impossible" womyn that is "hard to get."
MIM translates: don't bother dating anyone who isn't stalking you.
We must state firmly that these Feins and Schneiders of the world should be busy working to overturn the laws against stalking passed this year. They won't, because to them it's the men who will risk crossing the pseudo-feminists and other p.c. fascists that are the most determined suitors worth settling down with. Instead of working to dismantle the patriarchy, Fein and Schneider are holding seminars on The Rules so that they can provide personal instruction to wimmin desperate for a "real" relationship. All the women participants interviewed for a Washington Post article Style section (Oct. 21, 1996) refused to give their names for fear that their potential dates would find them out.
Capitalist romance culture teaches people that love is worth risking stalking/being stalked and killing/being killed over. That is the reason this book has sold so many copies. There are tens of millions of people so lacking in any absorbing and worthy goals -- thanks to the profit-mad capitalist-system which sets people's sights so low -- these people actually go out and buy books like The Rules.
The wimmin who buy into The Rules tend to be gender privileged -- so gender privileged they won't rock the boat on even the smallest points, to the point where they can't even ask men out. The petty nature of these concerns combined with their doggedness reminds MIM of the labor aristocracy and its outlook against the proletariat and lumpen- proletariat.
Tens of millions of people absorb books like The Rules, but these same people are no where to be found with such a passion attacking the causes of disability preventing romantic life. Physically disabled and diseased people have their sexual privilege curtailed. Other millions of people wrongfully imprisoned also have their "rights" to access to the human body for leisure time drastically cut back. These are the kinds of people who want to change the patriarchy. Children (or young adults) who are owned by their parents until they are 18 are also an especially important vehicle of change under imperialist patriarchy.
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There is so much wrong with this book that it would take another book to cover all its political errors and factual distortions. Here we will focus on just three areas: communism versus reformism, subjectivism and law, and rape as theft.
Communism versus reformism
Schulhofer is familiar with our arguments about gender and we would not be surprised to learn that he had read our MIM Theory 2/3. "If any disparity of economic or social power is sufficient to establish coercion, then unacceptable force is pervasive in sexual relationships and in all human affairs" (p. 53).
His response to radical and revolutionary feminism is aggressive liberal individualist reform. He proposes a huge array of reforms to sexual assault law and its interpretation in the United $tates -- for everything in every possible individual scenario to be argued in court. He acknowledges that men have more power than wimmin and talks about this problem -- the problem of starving wimmin exchanging sex for humyn needs at one extreme and supermodels sleeping with photographers and movie directors at the other extreme.
Schulhofer considers but rejects the idea of communism. He considers but rejects the idea that the physical act of intercourse is itself rape (see Andrea Dworkin) -- with notable exceptions discussed later. Furthermore, "if sexual interaction is ruled legally out of bounds every time one of the parties has any possible source of power over the other, our opportunities to find companionship and sexual intimacy will shrink drastically. To create a legal barrier to every relationship not formed on the purely neutral ground of the singles bar or the church social would be pathetic and absurd" (p. 14).
MIM would go further: there are no relationships that escape the dynamics of power in our society; yet, as revolutionaries, we do not tell the workers simply to give up working. That is not our solution. Neither do we think that revolutionary feminism means giving up sexual intimacy just because all sex is currently rape. Giving up intimacy is a real option for people right now, especially in the imperialist countries -- but the only complete answer is eliminating the underlying power structure.
The bottom line is that Schulhofer finds it unfortunate that starving wimmin with children might need to find a male to sexually service to survive, but he concludes there should be nothing illegal about that situation, especially in a short-term relationship where there is no divorce. In fact, in Schulhofer's individualist way of thinking, the use of power by professors interfering with wimmin's petty-bourgeois careers is worse than the use of food for the starving! (p. 110).
He spends pages and pages talking about various situations in the workplace ranging from harassment for sexual favors to bribery of superiors by wimmin seeking unjustified promotions -- where there are both spoken and unspoken threats and promises. The simple solution that exists under socialism -- the guarantee of a job -- eliminates the possibility that career power can be used to obtain sexual services the way it is now. Also, with the removal of the profit motive and the creations of a different socialist ethos, the aspiration to "climb the ladder" for persynal benefit will be sharply reduced.
Under socialism, there would be no reason a womyn would keep quiet about threats for fear of her career, because business will no longer be run by private interests. Her job and geographic job mobility would be guaranteed no matter what one particular persyn thought or wanted. In one swoop of socialism, we eliminate what is probably more than a million cases per year in the U$A.
Under communism we would go a step further and eliminate the power of people over people completely. That is the simplest and most enforceable answer to the sexual harassment in the workplace problem.
Subjectivism and the law
Law professor Schulhofer has found a gold mine for attorneys in describing how unwanted sex should be tackled -- subjectivism and individualism. The backlog of cases he wants to create will fill the courts' dockets and lawyers' pockets.
After consciously rejecting simple and revolutionary answers to unwanted sex, Schulhofer seeks to refocus the law on consent (p. 22) and figuring out how to determine if consent is given -- case by ponderous case. This means that he wants courts to enter into the subjective mind-frame of accuser and accused. The reason he gives is that too many rape cases depend on proving the use of violence, when there is also non-violent theft -- as when a thief sneaks in and out of a house undetected.
Once we accept this premise of Schulhofer, we are free to conclude that the same set of actions may result in marriage in one case and a rape case in court in another situation. He fully admits: "Physically assertive conduct that seems alluring to one woman may seem terrifying to another" (p. 49). That is what we mean by subjectivism. The fact that Schulhofer wants each case considered in all its details demonstrates both the hopeless principle of individualist reformism and the nature of legal discourse as pornography.
Schulhofer opposes corroboration requirements (medical examination or witnesses), which existed in the law until the 1970s, that made it impossible for a womyn to convict her rapist based on just her word against his (pp. 18, 19, 26). He claims that such did not exist in other areas of law; although he never deals with the fact that in murders there is usually a dead body or at least testimony to its existence by the accused in rare cases. If someone is shot dead in most cases it won't be because the victim wanted it. Contrary to consistent anti-Liberals like MIM, according to Schulhofer's view, most sex is consensual, so he has no business drawing an analogy with murder.
In thefts there can be recovery of the wallet. So in sex there is no consistent Liberal reason to leave it to the womyn's word in court. Apparently Schulhofer believes that a womyn's word may be so credible that no reasonable doubt could be raised by a man so accused.
Marxists are familiar with such reasoning. Under feudalism in Europe, there were many cases where no standard of proof by the peasant was sufficient to overturn the word of the lord. This is a hypocritical and selective introduction of non-Liberal ideas into the court system, ideas that leave 100% discretionary power to the ruling class to convict when it sees fit, case by hypocritical case. Such discretionary power does not get used to eliminate rape. It only gets used to make people think something is done about rape when in fact the ruling class has an agenda of using rape for oppression.
Some examples of what Schulhofer thought should be counted as evidence of force -- the flexing of muscles (p. 76), an unspecified threat made after sex (p. 44) and the difference in age between a 15-year-old and a 20-year-old (p. 111).
Perhaps the best subjective move made by the courts and backed by Schulhofer was to consider the act of penetration itself force worthy of conviction. Here is Dworkin being used against one man in a New Jersey case of 1992. Schulhofer admits that it was not a case where there was any "tearing of tissue, bleeding, or severe abrasions"(p. 95). There was no damage. "The requirements for a felony conviction -- penetration and physical force -- would be met by the physical thrusting involved in every act of mutually desired intercourse"(p. 95). He applauds because he believes there was no consent, and the law be damned for having to prove force. There were many disgusting cases in the book, from both the defendant's and the accuser's point of view, but this one may be the worst, because it proves that courts will take Dworkin-like arguments and apply them only when they feel like it.
A similar case that Schulhofer wanted raised was one involving a size differential. He was 6 foot 2 and 185 pounds and she was 5 foot 2 and 100 pounds. She did not utter any objections (pp. 268-9). After conviction he only won on appeal. Once again, if size is the fact of force, then we have just condemned the vast majority of relationships, but the court typically employs this kind of reasoning to go after one persyn. In other words, it is yet another discretionary tool of the ruling class available at almost all times when the court needs it.
Not all lawyers agree with Schulhofer. Michigan tried to get out of the interpretation of consent problem, but like others, it failed with its legal reform. A law passed that said any intercourse that occurred while armed was non-consensual by definition. That stood until someone got a life sentence for having a gun in his car and having intercourse with a womyn (pp. 35-6). So then it was back to case-by-case review. For MIM it is back to why communism is the only real solution -- an elimination of the causes of violence. Individualists have taken on an impossible job -- determining individual consent in sexual relations case-by-case.
In arguing for "sexual autonomy" as a humyn right, Schulhofer derives much inspiration from looking at sex as a type of property. He argues that theft of wallets is more protected against by the law than theft of sexual autonomy (p. 13).
MIM considered this idea of rape as theft in place of the idea that all sex is rape. We rejected it almost a decade before this book and Schulhofer's flawed analogies do nothing to persuade us to further build the police-state of Amerikkka.
As a matter of fact, if someone chops off a body part of another persyn, that in itself is evidence like losing a wallet. There is no failure in seeing the body as the same as a wallet within the existing legal system. What happens in contract negotiations between business partners -- that is more like the situation of rape in the United $tates. The problem lies in determining whether a transaction was lawful or not or whether it involved extortion. Just as courts are filled with difficulties determining whether contracts have been met or existed in the first place, so too rape is a question of examining something that could be "mutual" or could be illegal by Liberal ideas.
Schulhofer does admit that some court cases and laws have gone too far in the paternalist direction of over-regulation and thus treating wimmin as permanently frail victims. Yet he considers a simple answer consistent with his own property type arguments and he rejects it -- consent forms. He admits that defense lawyers in some situations are being forced to prove consent, instead of prosecutors having to prove guilt. In one particularly backward case, a court used the "crush" of the accuser on the accused and the romantic setting as evidence of the alleged rapist's guilt (p. 92). It just goes to show that courts mired in Liberal individualism do not apply any consistent logic except that which happens to serve the ruling class. Spreading confusion case-by-case guarantees that the public will never come to a common understanding. Such division benefits the patriarchy and ensures its survival.
Schulhofer ridiculed the idea of requiring signed consent forms for sex, presumably because they would inconvenience the majority and break up spontaneity. In the name of spontaneity and subjectivity, Schulhofer goes so far as wanting the public to adopt universal ideas of "body language" (p. 272), in cases where the word "yes" can't be obtained. We can just see all the lawyers' bucks that will be made on that one!
From MIM's point of view, the rejection of consent forms is typical of what is wrong with people lacking a collective spirit. We see no reason why some people should suffer the trauma of rape or unjust conviction just because the allegedly normal and free majority would be inconvenienced by consent forms. It's obvious that within property-obsessed societies, consent forms are just one more type of contract. Hence we back this idea that Schulhofer considers extremist; even though we do not agree with the "rape as theft" line. We still think consent forms would be better and more consistent than what we have now.
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The War Against
Women
by Marilyn French
Summit Books
New York,
1992
Nakived has been struggling with the MIM line on gender for some months now. S/he finally said that Marilyn French has the line s/he admires, so we challenged Nakived to write this review. MIM comments come after the Nakived review. We invite readers to review their favorite books on gender, national and class oppression and contrast them with MIM line -ed.
Review by Nakived
Marilyn French goes beyond theory and cites actual, graphic, concrete deeds widely and commonly, as an aspect of their societies, perpetrated on women by men and their female accomplices, often the mothers of their own daughters, in graphic detail, detail that can bring tears to the eyes of anyone who is civil and kind or just plain human.
Such deeds are a direct result of patriarchy and are practiced in the Third World as well as the First and she shows how the Third World, when once it was not a Third World at all, practiced these deeds on women back in history. The deeds can barely be justified as being cultural in any civil meaning of the word "culture" except in the meaning used by the alternate lifestyle crowd: "Sado-Masochistic Culture."
In this sense, some of the most primitive societies, as those found in South America in the Amazon, are civil where some of the most "civilized" peoples are and were outright barbaric. This sadomasochism, as I call it, is seen by French as an outright war against women which she rightly sees is in fact a war against humanity and a threat to humanity.
She does not incorporate dialectic, from what I can see, in her citing of facts. She doesn't theorize. She cites facts. She arrives at some conclusions and sometimes misses the "real thing" going on. For example, she'll quibble about the sexual position if the man is atop the woman. This is not a patriarchal thing and not all patriarchal societies have sex in that position anyway. She also misses what is really going on in India where she gives the facts and details of female infanticide practiced by the wretchedly enslaved women. It is clear, on reading the graphic details, that these women are living in a national concentration camp. Some of her details, accurate as they are, are so gruesome that it leads one to wonder if the entire society where such things go on is a society of madmen, of lunatics, perhaps of would-be serial killers.
The book is powerful. As bad as Christianity was, even in the middle ages during the Inquisition, it doesn't surpass some of the things that go on in hyper-patriarchal-religious societies where such atrocities against women are "the norm." Ms. French rightly says: if such things were done on one race of people by another, the world would clearly call it a crime against humanity. Yet such things go on as normal day-to-day givens, crimes against humanity perpetrated on women by men.
Imperialists or Left-leaning Humanitarians of the First World, when giving aid to such countries, might not realize that the monies go to the men. The men are paid, but the women are slaves, even often set on fire when the men are done with them as pleasure objects. This proves that the analysis by MIM of First World Patriarchy showing the Third World men in a position higher than that of Third World women is correct (see MIM Theory 2/3, p. 85), though perhaps monumentally understated. Further, one gets the idea that Third World Women don't even exist in the consciousness of the First World people who tend to lump them into a category: "the exploited." There are degrees of exploitation. Nazis didn't exactly exploit Jews and humans don't just exploit cows. Nazis killed Jews; humans eat cows. This book is gruesome; it just cites facts without trying to pretty them up with abstract terms that tend to lessen the sheer gore being done to women for the sole purpose of "turning on" their men, madmen, deranged creatures.
Even in the Nazi sense, it would "make Nazi sense" to wipe out another race to make room for your own race, but to do this to your own mothers, sisters, daughters is sheer insanity.
The best Marxist theory with its broad-spanning dialectic tends to bury the intricate details of "the life of the women" in these countries, most of them in the Third World. Neither does the best Marxist theory include data on such societies when they were not The Third World at all, but filthy-rich, ruling and imperialist empires when Europe was barbaric and primitive. The gore went on when these people were The Great Civilizations and it continues to go on now that they are a "Third World" exploited by the First World. No one has ever advanced the idea that, perhaps, these societies became a backward Third World due to what they've done to half of their own nation, the female half, primarily at the instigation of insane male priests of an insane religious mind-set. All the best talk in the world didn't make a dent in the protests against the Vietnam war, but it took one photograph of a mutilated, burned child to turn the public tide. It took naked, concrete truth to spell out what can't be seen in abstract terminology.
When you finish the book, go and read the worst anti-Stalinist propaganda on the Gulag system: you can't help but know that these poor women would be better off in such a Gulag where they'd at least be paid for very hard work. As the women in India say when they kill their female children: "Giving them to the God of Death is preferable to their having to endure being alive." Kinda makes the stupid whinings of the First World "date raped" women seem insignificant.
The book is a "must read," if you can get through it. (Nakived reports it took one acquaintance 4 months to be able to bear reading it. We suspect many would have the same problem reading Sakai's Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. -ed.)
MIM replies:
We agree with most of what Marilyn French writes about wimmin. In particular, there is a "war against wimmin." This is a correct generalization about one fraction of the violence perpetrated by men occurring in our world. Infanticide and starvation of children are far and away the largest patterns of violence in the world. Next in line would be deaths caused by pollution.
Nakived is also correct that much of the book is agitational exposure of facts of life that compel people toward the truth more quickly but in a different way than deliberate effort applied to theoretical work. However, we disagree with Nakived for downplaying the importance of theory and we don't support French's method, which is an example of what Mao called empiricism in much the way many philosophers think of empiricism. Here we shall criticize empiricism as a method that takes individual cases and incorrectly draws generalizations from them. The worst empiricism blithely draws conclusions from individual cases so often that previous generalizations also lightly constructed are repeatedly thrown out, often unconsciously. Not for nothing does Nakived sneer at theory while praising French. Empiricism and subjectivism are strong currents underlying so-called feminism in the imperialist countries.
In actuality, French is among the more theoretical thinkers in the West's problematic feminism, a feminist more solidly put together in opposition to capitalism and imperialism than most. At least French mentions her opposition to the Gulf War and cases where she sides with Black men against wimmin. Those are important starts and causes for MIM optimism.
French defines feminism as "any attempt to improve the lot of any group of women through female solidarity and female perspective" (p. 12). MIM disagrees with this notion from the beginning, both because we are not interested in just "any group" of wimmin and because it is not just a matter of female solidarity and perspective, but an issue of science. In contrast, according to French, Margaret Thatcher "was the most extraordinary world leader of her time!" (p. 47). Hence, French is making no bones about being a bourgeois feminist, if required as a matter of putting wimmin first.
In many ways a typical "leftist," French trots out a common statistic used by proponents of the labor aristocracy: "But by 1987 their average wage, adjusted for inflation, was $19,859, a 19 percent decline [since 1973]" (p. 13). What French left out was that in the same period a declining fraction of male workers were blue-collar and an increasing fraction became white collar, such that in 1980, white-collar workers exceeded 50 percent amongst whites.(1)
Those who attempted to generalize about a class based on French's statistic made severe and sentimental errors. We are not surprised to see French buy into this statistic while also putting forward the view that wimmin in the U.$. are still economically dependent on men for survival (pp. 38, 183-4). It is a case of consistent sentimentalism with regard to the middle-classes of imperialism.
Since French bought into "Marxism" as represented by the numerically-dominant imperialist country chauvinists, we are not surprised that French also has her feminism wrong and sometimes champions groups of people who are not gender oppressed, despite her having a much better overall internationalist perspective than most pseudo-feminists.
Factoids
French has picked up many of the popular left "factoids," which are either complete inventions or ripped from context. The most important factoid that French does get right is that biological wimmin likely are no longer the world's majority (p. 115) thanks to female infanticide in India, China and other countries. In countries with less female infanticide, wimmin live longer than men and outnumber men, but countries with large populations are more than making up for that trend.
If there was any doubt, the capitalist restoration in China in 1976 removed it by starting a huge trend toward female infanticide. Contrary to Nakived though, the cause of this trend is capitalism and not ancient male-oriented religions, because female infanticide was not the practice in China just prior to 1976.(2) In the case of female infanticide - which by itself is sufficient proof of the war against wimmin - gender oppression is not necessarily caused mainly by something intrinsic to gender. If institutions linked to capitalism and imperialism fell, ages-old female infanticide practices would too. Thus while we agree with Nakived about all of patriarchy's abuses that existed before modern day capitalist-imperialism, it is still the case that at this juncture in history the fastest progress for wimmin internationally comes through anti-imperialist communist-led revolution. China from 1949 to 1976 proved that more than adequately.
For the majority of the world's wimmin, First World pseudo-feminism is an obstacle to liberation much like revisionism and First World oppressor nation chauvinism. White pseudo-feminists in particular strive mightily to divert attention from the principal contradiction between oppressed nations and oppressor nations as part of their denial of a role in oppression; even though resolution of the national question is what will bring the fastest and easiest progress for wimmin globally, especially the 80% in the Third World. Whenever people rise up to change their situations, small corrupted elites of Third World countries backed up with weapons and military training from the U.$. send out the death squads.
Another important question is the distribution of property in the world by sex. Here French cites the famous 1980 United Nations conference which simply invented the figure out of thin air that wimmin receive 10 percent of the world's income and own 1 percent of the property (p. 30). The agenda of this invention is to allow First World wimmin to hide their role in international class oppression and thus bring their baggage into the feminist movement, specifically making wimmin out to be in a hopelessly weak position. See for example how the fact that there are supposedly so few wimmin with money is used as an excuse for why Ms. magazine is such garbage politically speaking (p. 171).
Before MIM was aware this issue of the distribution of wealth by sex existed, Sakai refuted the pseudo-feminist position(3). In the first place, when it comes to income and personal wealth, most white wimmin live with white men. Unlike nations that live apart, the sexes live together and hence statements about the standard of living of one group versus the other tend to be misleading if abused for political agendas.
French seems vaguely aware that the U.N. figure is problematic, because she admits that wimmin own 16% of the property in the U.$. Even that is a tepid admission limited to what are known as "female heads of households" and not counting other female-owned assets. To really know the whole story, we would have to look at real estate wealth, which is half the wealth of the U.$., and who lives in it now - and what happens in divorce court - in order to know who "really owns" the real estate when both men and wimmin appear to live in it. French and pseudo-feminist authors never provide these figures, only anecdotes. The next obvious fact is that there is a huge gender imbalance in pension-holding - in favor of wimmin (primarily married wimmin) who both live much longer than men and inherit their fathers' and husbands' wealth. Those pensions are based in stock assets. For this reason, in the U.$., wimmin actually own more stock than men do. Admittedly we have no complete figures on the value of assets broken down by gender, but we are not the ones trying to pretend white wimmin are not benefiting from imperialism. These facts would be needed by the many sentimental analysts commenting on gender oppression to prove their point.
Nor is the story limited to just the ownership of children, real estate and pensions. In the prime of life, wimmin also have a much larger role in imperialism than the pseudo-feminists of the First World admit: "28 percent of all businesses in the U.S. are now owned by women, and by the end of 1992 women-owned businesses will employ more people than the entire Fortune 500!"(4) Moreover, French would not dispute that wealth is concentrated at the top, and in 1994, data was released on the part in the U.$ owned by wimmin. The figures show the breakdown by biological sex of those holding gross assets of $600,000 or more. They show that 1.4 million biological wimmin within U.S. borders own $2.1 trillion in net worth. Two million biological men own $2.7 trillion in net worth. Hence, in this elite bourgeois category that comprises less than 2% of the U.S. population, wimmin hold over 43% of the wealth.(5) The pseudo-feminists do not provide these statistics precisely because the truth would not support these First World pseudo-feminists looking to pass off the blame for class and national oppression.
French also quotes Maria Mies to the effect that the IMF, World Bank and USAID (p. 36) originated the world's oldest profession. Here there was every good intention of blaming imperialism for patriarchy, but it simply backfires, making anti-imperialists look stupid. Yes, it is interesting that the imperialists support having Third World countries develop sex tourism. No, it is not necessary to exaggerate and create historical myths like, "the sex industry was first planned and supported by the World Bank" (p. 36). There is no need to exaggerate oppression or invent things to fight it. Real knowledge goes into firing real weapons that will destroy the imperialists. Mythology is like handing someone a weapon in battle that will not only not fire, but also will blow up in the users' hands.
Method
Although French has many facts wrong, more often she gets them right. Her method of reasoning is very typical in the "Left" in the U.$. and England. Here is a typical example of her approach: "Black mayor Marion Barry was prosecuted for taking drugs (by white men who coerced a black woman into betraying him), while important white men in the Reagan administration either escaped prosecution or were punished lightly for subverting the Constitution by selling arms and importing drugs" (p. 66). In this case as many others, French takes two individual and correct facts and draws a conclusion from them. In contrast, we at MIM only back this statement of hers, because it is true overall. If the figures did not show that Blacks systematically received biased treatment in the courts, we would not support what French said about Marion Barry and Oliver North. Too often, however, French generalizes about individual facts without the overall context and summation of data.
An example of generalizing from the individual to the general is the many cases of First World wimmin or wimmin heavily exposed to First World culture who come to MIM and proclaim that wimmin do feel sexual pleasure, maybe even more than men. Like many calling themselves feminist, French has bought into the idea that wimmin under patriarchy can experience sexual pleasure and hence certain aspects of the feminist movement against pornography, Hollywood and pop music are wrong. She realizes this often brings her into conflict with Third World wimmin who she perceives as not speaking of or actually experiencing sexual pleasure. In fact, according to French she has been told bluntly by Third World wimmin: "sexual pleasure is male" (p. 114).
Nakived has a similar position, claiming that Asian wimmin seem to see the pleasure of sex as giving pleasure to the man.
We at MIM are agnostic on the question of "natural" sexual pleasure in wimmin and men, because we are not utopians as Marx said. We have no doubt sadism runs deep in our class society, especially imperialist societies. What people "enjoy" is highly suspect. Catharine MacKinnon refers to the "eroticization of dominance" as the gist of the whole matter. For this reason we say: Let's wait till power is abolished before we decide if there is "desire" and "sexual pleasure" of some nearly universal sort. It may turn out that what we used to find pleasurable is no longer.
For a Third World womyn to tell French that she is male reverberates profoundly for MIM. Despite her biology, French has absorbed sexual privilege to a large extent just as all imperialist country wimmin have at the expense of children, wimmin and even men of the Third World. It would not surprise us that a number of First World wimmin are running around saying, "there is sexual pleasure!" as if having discovered the word of God. It is very much parallel to what happens with the labor aristocracy. On the surface, a worker is a worker anywhere in the world, but it is not true, because some workers are "bourgeoisified," which is why Lenin distinguished between proletarians and workers. Now there are a minority of workers in the world running around saying, "yes, capitalism improves living standards," just as we have a gender aristocracy running around so sure that "wimmin experience sexual pleasure too!" In reality, capitalism raises the living standards of the bourgeoisified workers and patriarchy allows some of female biology to enjoy the same oppressive pleasures men do.
We would declare sexual desire and pleasure as completely bankrupt ideas, but the humyn species is also an animal species. What is known about mating, hormones and genetics is going to improve dramatically in the foreseeable future, especially if we can destroy imperialism before it destroys us. Hence, we take an agnostic position and await the future without trying to resolve every question now when we don't have the power to do so.
French too readily generalizes from the individual or the few to the whole. If in fact she believes most Third World wimmin do not experience sexual pleasure, she should conclude that she is in fact male for her position and not try to foist the experience of the minority on the majority. It would appear that biology is no guarantee for sexual pleasure.
Another case in point of empiricism is in connection to court. In the First World, empiricist, sometimes ultraleft, Christian pseudo-feminists and anti-racists commit themselves to a stand on the court system and its individual results. In contrast, we look at statistics on courts in general. We are not surprised that with her method French draws the conclusion that wimmin receive longer sentences than men for the same crimes of passion - based on a court case or two (p. 127) when in fact the exact opposite is the case. "Men receive longer prison sentences. A man convicted of killing his wife receives an average of 17 years. A woman convicted of the same crime receives only six years. Women also benefit from more plea bargains than men. And we never hear that mothers commit twice as much child abuse as fathers."(6)
National Public Radio on April 18, 1997 ran an interview with pseudo-social-scientist James Q. Wilson on crime. Angling for political influence his whole career and never evincing much interest in the truth of his profession in criminology and related fields, Wilson lends a veneer of respectability to the ruling class's prison craze.
On the radio he admitted that one quarter of Black men would face imprisonment or some such discipline from the justice system in their lifetime, and he said, "we can't be satisfied with that" while quickly adding that more resources have to be dedicated to crime prevention including pre-school development. He went on to say, "they [Blacks] really are committing crimes," while defending Mark Fuhrman as a fair cop.
Wilson lent his credentials to the topic of expert witnesses in court and his conclusion was that social scientists cannot predict humyn behavior, so they should not be allowed in the courtroom as experts, or if they are, it should only be a few certified by the National Academy of Sciences - presumably to say they don't know anything just like Wilson says. MIM is not surprised Wilson dumped on his profession, because he has been in the orbit of conservative theology his whole life despite his academic credentials. He even came out at one point in the interview and said he did not care about the evidence concerning gun control, because it would never fly with the public politically. This confirms our image of this demagogue - someone who probably knows better but takes up opportunism almost instinctively as a matter of being "effective." This sort of intellectual is always aiming for some Cabinet job or other kind of influence-peddling job.
Wilson especially spent his time saying that social science should not be used to rationalize crime. When confronted with the idea of causation, he simply rejected the whole idea saying that social scientists cannot predict behavior. Thus, he took everyone back into the pre-Enlightenment era when behavior was seen as essentially a religious matter.
While he was speaking on the radio, people called in to say that there should be an exception to the idea that there is no causation - wimmin. When wimmin commit crime said the callers, it was only because of their violent boyfriends and husbands - and Wilson agreed. One attorney for wimmin murderers called in to say that the two months one womyn served was too long a sentence for being convicted of shooting her lover to death in his sleep. French would have fit right in during this talk with Christopher Lydon, James Q. Wilson and the womyn attorney.
Wilson explained that he had a recent change of heart on mandatory sentences, partially because of the case of wimmin accused of murdering their batterers. He and the attorney calling in agreed that wimmin sometimes have no other recourse.
Having already said that wimmin are economically dependent on men for life and death, French also says battered wimmin live with "almost no recourse" (p. 188). Like the typical pseudo-feminist, French says, "Many men (and women) blame the women whose husbands beat them, asking why they did not leave their abuser. But even if a woman has enough money to leave and someplace to go, there is no escape from a man obsessed. You can move, you can hide, you can change your name, but they follow" (p. 188). If this were true, there would not be many wimmin left, but this common line backed up with the additional factoid, that "75 percent of reported assaults against wives or lovers are committed after separation" - has more to do with Hollywood fantasies of female powerlessness than reality. What portion of that 75% of assaults occurred precisely because wimmin believed they had no recourse and could not leave even sooner?
The fact that so many assaults occur after break-up again shows that it would be impossible to predict which tiny percentage would result in murder. The pseudo-feminists never tally up the number of divorces and break-ups in a year that end successfully for the wimmin, while they are always quick to point to every murder as the trend. In actuality the 75% figure for the portion of assaults that occur after separation is a very significant back-handed admission that millions of people are involved in battering after an attempt to escape. Coupled with the fact that only 4,000 wimmin are murdered a year, we have proof that wimmin manage to separate in millions of cases at a time while a few thousand are killed.
The pseudo-feminists and their paternalist backers never lay out all the facts in a meaningful way. It is simply wrong that wimmin cannot leave their men (without shooting them while they sleep). The same stupid pseudo-feminists and paternalists who make a loose use of the facts know that battering runs into the millions of couples a year in the U.$. Estimates run up to one half of all couples involve battering in a lifetime, and one-sixth or 9 million couples have battering in any given year. Of those, 1 or 2 million involve "kicking, biting and punching" - what is considered more serious violence.(7)
Now what does it mean when the pseudo-feminists say that wimmin cannot leave their batterers? (And some are so opportunist they just say they cannot leave their "men," not just men with history of battering, and of course that number of people is even larger than 9 million.) They are saying 9 million people cannot leave. If we count just the most serious violence, we are talking about 2 million people involved (including the majority of cases where wimmin initiated the violence) who supposedly cannot leave. If we listen to these unprincipled demagogues, wimmin should kill at least two million men a year while they sleep. That's what these wimmin in court are doing - trying to win Oscar nominations and succeeding: witness the Farrah Fawcett movie about the "burning bed" case based on real life. They are saying that because men used severe violence against them, they should shoot them when they are sleeping. In that case, a seven digit figure of men should be shot every year while sleeping. Much as men are the enemy, it would seem to MIM that people should give up the romance culture before they give themselves the right to kill millions of people a year on its account. The romance culture is not worth that much to keep. At the very least, the sexes should cut each other loose. Every persyn an island would be better than rationalizing mass murder for romance.
After all these centuries everyone knows that participating in the romance culture is a risk, like going to a beach with no lifeguard. Some of the same pseudo-feminists complaining about men obsessed as French does are also complaining about men who leave wimmin for younger wimmin and treat each womyn as a sex object, only to move on to the next "conquest." It seems that romance has to walk a fine line or it is called harassment, battering, rape, obsession or conquest. Even more galling, Wilson, the attorney for wimmin murderers and French all deliver the message that romance culture is worth so much that we should take the chance that someone will have to shoot someone while sleeping - then they wonder why men are "obsessed." The people truly obsessed are the ones who don't realize that their love lives should be expendable, not people's lives.
Saying the battered can't leave is clearly a lie. Only 4,000 wimmin die from all family violence every year.(7) That is less than .05% of the total people involved in serious battering violence in a year. So when Wilson said he could not predict humyn behavior, he should not have made an exception for wimmin and battering. To guess who is going to kill out of 2 million serious battering couples, that is impossible. To know that one can escape, that is possible to know, with the vast majority successfully escaping.
And who is to say those 4,000 would not have gotten away if the pseudo-feminists, paternalists and Hollywood weren't telling them they were so powerless their whole lives? If people were more rational about their romance culture facts, and less involved in Amerikan fascist crime hysteria more people would survive. French never connects to the overall truth of battering: wimmin can and do leave. They only think they cannot because of the fear of crime hitting them disproportionately and as part of socialization. The inexorable monsters following and tracking wimmin down to kill them are more common than they should be, but they are closer to the stuff of Hollywood than the ordinary condition of wimmin. The people denying this fact are hysterically fearful of crime and buy into a patriarchal socialization of wimmin. In cases like the intellectual leaders of French's sort, the lie is a desperate diversion from the truth of national oppression in the criminal injustice system.
Another misleading factoid is that lovers account for a higher percentage of murders of wimmin than murders of men. One government statistic showed 30% of murdered wimmin being killed by male lovers, while 6% of murdered men are killed by wimmin lovers.(7) This is a very misleading figure, simply because men are victimized by murder approximately five times more often than wimmin are. So the figure can be 6% compared with 30 percent but the number of murders can be almost the same. In fact, in some cities and demographic groups, wimmin kill more of their male lovers than vice-versa.
No pseudo-feminist ever accounted for the unsolved murder rate of men, approximately 30% of all murders of men. Because men are murdered so often compared with wimmin, if only 10% of all those unsolved murders of men were really perpetrated by wimmin lovers who were never caught or suspected, then the fact would be that wimmin lovers kill more men than vice-versa. That is an image we will never see in Hollywood or pseudo-feminism, but it is something that should be raised by anyone doing a thorough analysis of the facts, including the fact that wimmin are considered less threatening than males, often to the point of being viewed incapable of crime.
In all but one imperialist country second-hand smoke will kill more wimmin than violence by lovers who won't let their wimmin leave. If we count all family violence, 4,000 wimmin die in the U.$ each year, but, comparably, 3,000 people die each year from second-hand smoke inhalation that causes lung cancer.(8) Since the U.$. has the highest murder rate by far in the imperialist countries, in other imperialist countries, more wimmin will die from lung cancer caused by second-hand smoke by far than from romance culture, decadent though it is. Second-hand smoke is now tied to heart disease as well. A study of 32,000 nurses showed that those most constantly exposed to second-hand smoke at home and work had a 91% higher risk of death from heart disease. That translates to 60,000 deaths a year from heart disease caused by second-hand smoke in the U.$.(9) So second-hand smoke dwarfs domestic violence as a cause of death in wimmin, even in the decadent, gun-happy United $tates. Should we champion the people who shoot smokers in their sleep? Escaping second-hand smoke is more difficult than escaping men in the imperialist countries.
The whole fact that this subject turns so readily to guns is part of the decadence of imperialism in its most individualist form. It is not feminism. It is conservative anti-crime mythology and the utmost in rarified romance culture. MIM says it is decadent to get involved in the first place if the result is someone shot in their sleep. No one has such an absolute right to a love life that they have the right to shoot people while sleeping. Again it is Hollywood intertwining violence and romance that way. The priority given to romance culture is the real problem for feminism.
Even when French does generalize correctly, her generalization is out of context of larger ones. She holds that male judges are treating male rapists and harassers lightly, because they throw out the cases where the wimmin knew the men. However, this is not something specific to male judges with female victims. Courts discount conflicts between people who know each other in general.(10) That includes the case where the victim is male and the perpetrator female or the case where there is simply a property dispute between men and wimmin or the case where both parties are male.
In actuality, these examples that French found are highly skewed. Patriarchy rules over wimmin in connection to the court system through paternalism, not discrimination. Despite French's anecdotes, statistically, wimmin are less likely to be arrested, charged and convicted of crimes and once convicted receive lighter sentences than men. This is thanks to the notion that wimmin are in need of protection. If anything, they should be accessible to men, not in prison, according to the patriarchy. Despite the prisons full of drug users, the imprisonment rate of wimmin for drug abuse is a tiny fraction of that of men, mainly because wimmin drug-abusers are not viewed as a threat to society at large. Since the "war on drugs" is an excuse for a crackdown on the oppressed nationalities, this is one of the many reasons there is a shortage of Black men compared with Black wimmin.
The whole problem with wimmin believing the myth that they are discriminated against in prison is that it allows the majority of wimmin within imperialist country borders - white wimmin - to focus on their "own oppression" and deny responsibility for the big picture. Rather than accept the blow to the ego that "yes, my nation oppresses others," pseudo-feminists invent mythologies to avoid responsibility: "Oh, that's just white men doing that!" Carried over into political practice these ideas result in hypocrisy and political burnout, not a sustained movement for change. That is at best, because at worst, the myths invented by pseudo-feminists on the court system prop up the state, encourage fascism and divert attention from the principal contradiction. There is plenty of gender oppression to talk about without inventing it.
The utmost indignities to logic face those who do not consistently confront theory and method. French sees a conspiracy in doctors' resisting lumpectomies to fight breast cancer. In much of the book she is consistent in that she is talking about how religious-oriented men and wimmin mutilate wimmin. On the other hand, we can just see how if doctors preferred lumpectomy over whole breast removal, there would be some who would say doctors were risking the health of wimmin just to preserve their role as sex objects.
The ultimate indignity occurs when French claims that a study of 43 people showing that men metabolize alcohol faster is "skimpy evidence" (p. 144) when she herself draws conclusions throughout the whole book based on individual, media-grabbing court cases! In that same context, French also spreads the mythology of false egalitarianism. She asks why there is more attention to mother's influences on gestation than there are studies of men ruining their sperm with bad lifestyles and environments! (p. 146). This is the same womyn who claims that wimmin do so much more work than men, among other reasons because they emotionally bond with their babies through gestation (she favors the non-biological mother Whitehead rented as an incubator in the surrogate mother custody case, p. 150) and at the same time she holds that when it comes to biological influences on the child, men and wimmin are equal! This is just denial of scientific reality to benefit a mythology. Men and wimmin are equal in that they each provide a genetic seed, but that's where the equality ends when it comes to pregnancy. It's also selfishness to complain about the scrutiny mothers receive for gestation: people's lives and futures are at stake. This selfishness is in fact a kind of patriarchal thought, so common in discounting children, as mere property or less.
In conclusion, we do not agree with Nakived's anti-theory conclusions and his/her distaste for Third World patriarchy relative to First World patriarchy. It is a common matter of national pride for supposed feminists to believe that their society is better than others. Nothing is more obvious than the labor aristocracy which believes it has earned its higher living standard when it fact the wealth was plundered from slaves, colonies and neo-colonies. Likewise, if patriarchy gives some people of female sex sexual privilege in the imperialist countries and turns them into men grateful for their privileges relative to the patriarchy in the Third World, we cannot be surprised. Those in the imperialist countries claiming to truly oppose the genocide against wimmin in the Third World will take responsibility for their share of the problem caused by their governments' support for death-squad regimes and the status quo generally.
Notes:
Angela Davis
Women, Race and Class
Review by MC206
Angela Davis' Women Race and Class is a fine introduction to the history of the split in the feminist movement in Amerika, despite Davis' own failure to recognize the depth of this split and its material basis. As Lenin pointed out in Imperialism and The Split in the Second International, some nations' working classes benefit from imperialism, and the social-democratic political movement sprang into existence to defend these benefits at the expense of the nations oppressed by imperialism. Similarly, because white wimmin benefit from their membership in an oppressor nation and have some gender-privileges vis-a-vis oppressed nationals, the pseudo-feminist movement came into being to defend white wimmin's privilege. Pseudo-feminists have failed oppressed-nationality wimmin, because they do not recognize that that the liberation of oppressed-nationality wimmin requires the overthrow of imperialism. Instead, pseudo-feminists have used wimmin from oppressed nationalities as bargaining chips to achieve minor reforms which serve the narrow interests of white wimmin.
For example, Davis recounts the development of the wimmin's suffrage movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the Civil War leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton took up white supremacy "on the ground of expediency," as Anthony put it (p. 112). Both Anthony and Stanton opposed Black men's suffrage on narrow grounds, saying almost literally: "How dare you get the vote before us?" Stanton appropriated many of the racist myths used to justify lynching for her anti-Black men's suffrage campaign, saying "I would not trust [Black men] with my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic ... than ever our Saxon rulers are ..." (p.75). The organizations led by Stanton and Anthony allied themselves with the likes of Henry Blackwell, who made the following statement in favor of white wimmin's suffrage: "Your 4,000,000 of Southern white women will counterbalance your 4,000,000 of Negro men and women, and thus the political supremacy of your white race will remain unchanged " (p. 114).
Many of the false theoretical premises behind the pseudo-feminists' white-chauvinism at the turn of the century are still around today. Davis does us a favor by digging some of the old skeletons up. One of the biggest false premise Stanton, Anthony, and other early "feminists" shared was gender reductionism. Anthony used her belief that gender oppression was "the most odious oligarchy ever established on the face of the globe" to downplay other forms of oppression and to silence any critics who advocated that wimmin should also be involved in class- and nation-related struggles. As a result, Anthony tended to believe obvious liberal lies about all men having equal chances at success: "The great distinctive advantage possessed by the working men of this republic is that the son of the humblest citizen, black or white, has equal chances with the son of the richest in the land" (p. 141). Gender reductionism remains a problem today, since it still allows pseudo-feminists to claim that class and nation oppression do not exist or are secondary.
Davis devotes a chapter each to "The Myth of the Black Rapist" and "Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights" - subjects which MIM has discussed extensively in MIM Notes and MIM Theory. For the most part, Davis' analysis on these subjects agree with MIM's:
(a) The myth that Black men are hypersexual is used to incarcerate them in disproportionate numbers (or lynch them), and white anti-rape activists have bought into this myth.
(b) For wimmin in oppressed nationalities, birth control is often a tool of imperialist genocide, since it involves forced sterilization or forced contraceptive use. Birth control and abortion rights activists who do not take this into account provide a "left" cover for forced sterilization programs.
The best thing Davis adds is historical perspective. In the case of the myth of the Black rapist, Davis explains how the myth was a post-Reconstruction fabrication. During the Civil War, "not a single Black man was publicly accused of raping a white woman" (p. 184). During Reconstruction, lynching was "undisguised counterinsurgency." But after Reconstruction, when much of the threat of Black power had been defused, white-supremacists needed a new excuse to continue the terrorist practice of lynching. Rape provided a good cover - although the vast majority of lynchings did not involve charges of rape (pp. 183-190).
To illustrate the link between pseudo-feminist birth-control advocates and imperialist population control programs, Davis discusses the career of Margaret Sanger. Sanger - who coined the term "birth control" - worked with the Socialist Party in the early 1910s but eventually became a eugenicist. She argued that "morons, mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes and dope fiends" ought to be surgically sterilized (p. 214). Again, the theoretical basis for Sanger's reactionary positions has relevance today. According to Sanger, "women were inadvertently perpetuating the exploitation of the working class by continually flooding the labor market with new workers" (p. 213). The idea that the "population explosion" is somehow the root of poverty and oppression is the ideological underpinning of the imperialists population control programs, as MIM has explained in MIM Theory 12 (available from MIM for $6 postpaid).
Davis also does a good job of debunking by example the false idea that wimmin are powerless and therefore cannot enter the broad political struggle. She argues that the struggle for wimmin's' suffrage and emancipation was in large part a by-product of the anti-slavery struggle. Male chauvinism held back the leadership of abolitionist wimmin and therefore held back the abolitionist movement. So, as part of their participation in the anti-slavery struggle, wimmin fought male-chauvinism. "'The question of equality for women,' as Eleanore Flexner put it, was not 'a matter of abstract justice' for the Grimkes [abolitionist activists], 'but of enabling women to join in an urgent political task'" (p. 44).
Elsewhere, Davis gives an example which shows how the wimmin-are-powerless line can be used to justify complicity with reaction - in this case the Jim Crow policies of certain railroads. Susan B. Anthony's comments at a National American Women's Suffrage Association meeting squelched a resolution suggested by a black womyn: "We women are a helpless disenfranchised class. Our hands are tied. While we are in this condition, it is not for us to go passing resolutions against railroad corporations or anybody else" (p. 118). According to Davis, "The meaning of this incident was far deeper" than the issue at hand. "This gesture definitively established the suffrage association as a potentially [no, concretely -MIM] reactionary political force which would cater to the demands of white supremacy" (p. 118).
MIM and Davis disagree on some very important points. The most glaring example being the question of the white working class: Davis considers it a revolutionary vehicle at this time while MIM does not. There are several passages in Women Race and Class in which Davis half-heartedly asserts that the interests of white and Black workers are united - after giving pages of anecdotes illustrating the different material conditions which led a split in "the" working class in North America.
When Davis wrote Women Race and Class, she was a member of the Communist Party-USA, which puts forward exactly this kind of head-in-the-sand dogmatism, as we have explained previously (see a review in MIM Theory 10, for example). A vestige of the CPUSA's earlier, correct line that Blacks within the U.$. form a distinct nation in need of national liberation shows up the chapter called "Communist Women." In fact, Davis recognizes that it was exactly this line that allowed the CPUSA to address issues affecting Blacks in the 1930s better than the Industrial Workers of the World or other organizations which clung to the idea that nation was unimportant. But the CPUSA dropped their recognition of the Black nation in the 1950s, and by the early 1980s idealist class-reductionism was standard CPUSA line.
Readers of Women Race and Class should refer to J. Sakai's Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat for a correct perspective on how the split in the "American" working class developed (available from MIM for $10).
Similarly, Davis fails to recognize the material basis for the split in the feminist movement, despite all the documentation for it she herself provides. She believes that the white-chauvinism in the white wimmin's movement is a result of misleadership, and that somehow white wimmin have acted against their own interests by "capitulating to racism." This leads her to soften her appraisal of reactionary movements. On the other hand MIM looks at 150 years of consistent white-chauvinist pseudo-feminism and says: "Where there's smoke, there's fire." The material benefits white wimmin gain from imperialism and the gender privileges they enjoy as a group over men and wimmin from oppressed nations create a real split between white wimmin and oppressed nationality wimmin. The manipulation of Black men's sexuality inherent in the myth of the Black rapist and forced sterilization programs for oppressed nationality wimmin are tactics for the preservation of imperialism - and patriarchy - and those groups that depend on imperialism for their privilege. Because Davis ignores the basis for the split in the feminist movement, she ultimately can't defeat the white-chauvinism she exposes.
Despite all its shortcomings, if we understand Davis's errors, Women Race and Class is a good resource for revolutionary feminists.
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This is a thorough Liberal feminist defense of pornography. We do not recommend the book, unless the reader is not familiar with the debate between free speech defenders and those wishing to ban or cut back pornography. For MIM readers, the debate should be old hat, but in case it is not, this book is quite detailed, factual and up-to-date.
MIM distributes and studies intensively Catharine MacKinnon's great book Feminism Unmodified. Strossen flays MacKinnon and her comrade-in-arms Dworkin throughout the whole book as the principal enemies. If readers ever had any doubt that MIM was right about MacKinnon's reformist and counterproductive individual practice, then it will be necessary to read this book to see why what MIM said about MacKinnon has come to pass. MIM's predictions about MacKinnon's individual practice are not so much rooted in a science just of gender but from general political experience in the communist movement.
To summarize MIM's opinion of MacKinnon, we believe she has made relatively great contributions to feminist theory, while contradicting herself in her reformist legal and academic practice. She also does not work with a party, so the pornographic grenade-throwing that she and Dworkin do has worse than limited impact. It actually sets back her cause, because inflaming religious and sexual passions without methodical political and educational work only makes things worse in a country where the basic structure and people are not progressive for the wimmin's movement or anything else.
In the case of Strossen, MacKinnon has unleashed Liberalism of the variety that says the problem of pornographic views of sex is only a problem of interpretation.
MIM has referred to MacKinnon as our Hegel for gender theory. In Feminism Unmodified, she establishes gender oppression as being structural. She is the first to say in so many words that feminists should be asking "whether women have a chance, structurally speaking and as a normal matter, even to consider whether they want to have sex or not."(as quoted in a review of her work.) We call MacKinnon our Hegel because she has defined the patriarchy -- the system within which oppressed people's sexuality is appropriated by gender oppressors without consent -- for us as Hegel defined the dialectical motion of all things for Marx.
But just as Hegel failed to follow dialectics into materialism, MacKinnon turns from defining rape and sexual harassment as structural facts of patriarchy to attempting to legislate some types of rape and sexual harassment as being better than others. MacKinnon defines patriarchy as a system, which is what MIM treasures in her work. Thanks to her, we have an objective understanding of sexual oppression. But in defense of her own legal career, she argues for a subjective standard by which some forms of sexual appropriation are criminalized and others are not.
MIM recognizes MacKinnon's and Dworkin's political problems, because we have the same ones in the narrowly focused supposed Marxist movement concerning class struggle. There too we have people who can spout some Marxism but then turn to reform or individualist solutions. Hence, MIM stresses that we have to put MacKinnon's iron ore into the furnace of Leninism and Maoism before we can distill its revolutionary content. As Lenin excoriated the "economists" of his day claiming Marxism, we must likewise destroy the lifestyle movement garbage surrounding MacKinnon's work.
Gender aristocracy
The labor aristocracy is a group of people of worker origins that becomes petty-bourgeoisie according to Lenin. In the imperialist countries, reformist struggles create this petty-bourgeoisie. Likewise, MIM holds that there is a gender aristocracy dominating the imperialist countries. Almost all adult wimmin are gender aristocracy in the imperialist countries, which is to say sexually privileged, lower-rung gender oppressors.
Without the "labor aristocracy" and "gender aristocracy" details about the social structure, Marxists are reduced to arguing that conservatism decade after decade is "false consciousness." MacKinnon goes about arguing that wimmin in the United $tates exhibit false consciousness which is why they oppose her line. In general, other reformists counter MacKinnon's reformism by saying that certain phenomena are "genuine" and not "false consciousness;" therefore, most of the criticisms of MacKinnon address her but do not touch MIM's line.
Nadine Strossen has no difficulty finding numerous wimmin who say they enjoy sex, enjoy watching pornography (over 40% of adult video rentals being wimmin in couples or alone p. 144), enjoy being prostitutes and enjoy making money as exotic dancers much beyond other jobs available. Echoing the very common position of straight men that says feminists and lesbians "just need one good fu**," Strossen goes on the offensive and documents that some wimmin have supported MacKinnon, because they lived sheltered lives. For example, Lisa Palac is now editor of "Future Sex" magazine and she recounts that she was a MacKinnonite until she actually encountered some pornography (pp. 143-4) and underwent transformative sexual experiences. A womyn writer in Satanist circles named Nakived frequently writes to MIM on similar subjects regarding sexually inexperienced or brain damaged wimmin. (See the MIM web site on MacKinnon and communist feminism) MIM would say that since Palac was never gender oppressed, she always had the potential of moving from being a gender bureaucrat for MacKinnon to being another kind of gender bureaucrat.
MacKinnon would say Palac now exhibits "false consciousness." In contrast, MIM holds that adult wimmin in the imperialist countries hold sufficient privilege to experience gender oppressor pleasure, male pleasure; hence, MacKinnon would have more luck with her approach if she worked with real gender oppressed people, people in prison, children or the adult wimmin of the Third World.
We doubt that all the U.$. wimmin that Strossen found talking about heterosexual or lesbian rape fantasies and various other fantasies are deluded fools or liars. The argument of "false consciousness" should never be overused or it results in idealism, an excuse for our own poor scientific efforts.
We do not believe that there is such a shortage of jobs in the imperialist countries that we should disbelieve the majority of sex workers who say they chose their line of work and oppose all laws to criminalize them. Yes, and Strossen talks about the one example of a snuff film in which the womyn supposedly killed making it reappeared later to prove she hadn't been. (p. 191) Likewise, MacKinnon's beloved Linda Marchiano "Deep Throat" case was a case of a husband forcing her wife into the sex industry, not the sex industry's use of force.(pp. 182-) Despite what sheltered people might think, most of the imperialist country porn industry is not literally created through physical force, and that is not to mention casual non-profit porn pervading society the way it is right now. MIM does not want to be associated with the barrage of lies that become necessary to defend weak reformist causes like MacKinnon's. We urge our readers to read MacKinnon and implement the feminist revolutionary solution through work with a proletarian party, not with MacKinnon and Dworkin. Of course, we also urge MacKinnon and Dworkin to become more radical and less posturing toward the lecture and porno circuit.
The reason even scholars and feminist activists lie is that they feel they are in a weak position where the truth does not mobilize a strong force. When activists find themselves in this position, they should check themselves. Are they lying to the enemy or the people? MacKinnon sees no revolutionary vehicle to accomplish her goals; hence, she is willing to be part of lies to the people on the most important issues concerning wimmin's liberation.
Perhaps the most key lie told in the imperialist countries is an exaggeration of oppression where there is none. Such lies discredit the wimmin's movement everywhere. There is plenty of oppression in the world, but when MacKinnon says Western pornography is the "slave trade"(p. 85) in wimmin, she deserves to be shackled and permanently auctioned off so that she knows what slavery really is. Teenagers or foreigners kidnapped and used as prostitutes or literal sex slaves are protected by existing laws that need enforcement. Pornography has nothing to do with it.
In addition to lies, there is also cover-up of entire issues affecting millions. Dworkin single-handedly prevailed in getting a book to excise a reference to a false rape charge. Yet, Strossen's book does well in pointing out the intersections of rape with other gender issues, not just nation and class. While Dworkin covered up the pre-Roe truth that abortion was illegal except in some cases where a womyn claimed she was raped, Strossen points out that that to this day, attacks on Medicaid funding for abortions leave poor wimmin few choices but to claim rape to attain funding for an abortion.(p. 211)
Priorities
MacKinnon sees no revolutionary vehicle, partly because she does not concern herself with the causes of most of the world's violence. Instead she focuses on the sexual conditions of the imperialist country gender aristocracy.
When Nadine Strossen attacks MacKinnon for favoring "we should trade in our free speech rights to promote women's safety and equality rights,"(p. 248) MIM pleads that we are guilty too. We would trade in free speech rights of primary interest to the middle-classes and intellectuals in exchange for an end to more serious oppressions involving violence. Like most ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) type libertarians or political Liberals, Strossen is boring to read in the political sense, because she takes for granted her own freedom from starvation, homelessness and easily preventable disease. She is more concerned with things the middle-classes aspire to like free speech. We would say Strossen does not have her priorities straight and does not even have the best answer for promoting free speech--a stateless, communist society being held back by those who deny the oppression of class, nation and gender today.
There is one case where Strossen is correct about her priorities. She lambastes MacKinnon and MIM by implication for setting up the atmosphere in which the Christian Right instigated a crackdown on sex education. Again, MIM pleads innocence, because we do not involve ourselves with MacKinnon's harebrained reformist schemes: "In Oklahoma City, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) represented a doctor who was prosecuted for displaying a safe-sex poster on the windows of his AIDS clinic, which was located in an area frequented by gay men."(p. 20) Let us be clear that we agree with Strossen's priorities here, to the point where once the revolutionary party comes to power, there will be executions of religious nuts who attempt to block sex education, because sex education can be a life and death matter, especially in this day of diseases like AIDS. No child or teenager shall die a death of ignorance because of stupid, bigoted or religious views of some adults. If someone like MacKinnon arises in the socialist government structure and orders something counterproductive to sex education, she too will be executed under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
To some extent, because of the proletariat's need to prioritize life-and-death matters, MIM can form an alliance with the gender aristocracy, because a large portion of the gender aristocracy comes to its male pleasured state by passing through childhood with sex education. One pro-sex Liberal gender bureaucrat says, "In many years of teaching and talking sex, I have never had a man come up and say, 'I don't know where my penis is, and I've never had an orgasm.' . . . It's feminists who've put the Clitoris on the map."(p. 167) Hence, as girls become wimmin and pass from one sexual stage to another more privileged stage, many will place a value on sex education. Without it, apparently some wimmin would truly remain as gender oppressed children based on some holdovers in the superstructure from days when wimmin were more economically dependent on men. Of note in this regard, the book "Our Bodies, Ourselves" faced some banning trouble in Helena, Montana and in the case of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective that publishes it opposed a MacKinnonite law proposed in 1985.(p. 204)
Why reformism does not work
Strossen does not offer the Marxist reason for it, but she explains that the reforms MacKinnon seeks to implement cannot be implemented by the patriarchal imperialist government. In other words, legal theorists like MacKinnon may say and intend one thing and even get their ideas passed by legislatures, but those laws have no chance of being implemented as intended. Of course, this is no surprise to revolutionaries who realize that the state has to be smashed and replaced.
Hence, we should draw revolutionary conclusions from Strossen's critique of MacKinnon for giving the patriarchal state too much credit in practice on pornography and sexual harassment issues. 1) Pioneering feminists and birth control advocates were prosecuted under anti-obscenity laws. (pp. 31, 226-7) 2) The National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) has been steered toward non-controversial art that is pornography free, because work that does not provoke benefits conservatism, not because the NEA is effecting wimmin's liberation. (pp. 101-102) Thus, the NEA is not "neutral;" it is biased towards conservatism. 3) The only people actually sanctioned for racism under the University of Michigan's unconstitutional code of speech aimed at preventing harassment were Black or speaking for Blacks. (p. 223) Similarly, the only actual hearing held on any hate speech had a Black defendant. (all as the MIM Ann Arbor chapter predicted despite Black comprador-wannabes favoring the code before the code was temporarily imposed.) 4) Nude sculptures in Menlo Park, California came down and the city attorney said that the new policy was to "display only 'pleasant, non-controversial art.'"(p. 136) A female city worker had claimed she felt "violated" and hence the attorney warded off a sexual harassment suit by closing down the art exhibit. 5) Most egregious of all is the February, 1992 Supreme Court of Canada's "Butler" decision. This has resulted in attacks on gay, lesbian and feminist bookstores. Books have been banned and confiscated. Regular novels have been seized at the border. MacKinnon and Dworkin had sung the praises of the "Butler" attack on pornography.(p. 229-) The original pseudo-feminists in Canada for the Butler ruling have since admitted "'since . . . Butler. . . Canada Customs, some police forces. . . and some government funders have exploited obscenity law to harass bookstores, artists, and AIDS organizations, sex trade workers, and safe sex educators."(p. 241)
The misery of MacKinnon's reforms has not gone entirely unnoticed. Law professor Jeanne Schroeder hits MacKinnon for not being radical enough: "'What at first blush appears to be a postmodern sociological theory. . . is actually a modern liberal theory of the individual grafted onto a premodern Christian concept of the body. MacKinnon's . .. . analysis devolves into a conservative paean to the potency of masculinity as traditionally conceived.'"(p. 117) That last bit about the potency of masculinity is true of all the many wimmin-as-weaklings and helpless victim theories. Strossen also points out that weakling wimmin in the pro-life movement take advantage of the victim view. One pro-life leader said she was "forced" to have an abortion because of "pressure" from an "abortionist."(p. 196) This again demeans the oppression of Third World wimmin who really do face forced sterilization.
Unfortunately, Strossen quotes a variety of opinions, but her own opinion is Liberal tolerance of supposedly biological drives. Indeed, she believes in the "fuck-yourself-to-freedom" line that MIM satired in MT2/3. "Sex itself has enormous power to break down individual and social boundaries." (p. 176) She points out all the pornography that shows "'servants fucking mistresses, old men fucking young girls, guardians fucking wards. Class, age, custom-- all are deliciously sacrificed, dissolved by sex.'" (Ibid.) Hence, Strossen is aware of the revolutionary critique of patriarchy and quotes facts that would back it, but she herself does not hold the revolutionary feminist position. Rather she has more faith in lifestyle changes as creating social change.
Ultraleftism and right opportunism
Often times activists of watery Liberal views sense that their movement is getting nowhere and they buckle down for simplistic ultraleft views based on the same underlying assumptions of the impossibility of revolution. Rather than study the structure of society and attack that structure, the ultraleftist like the right individualist opportunist attacks individual behaviors with militant-sounding lifestyle guidelines. An example is an attack on the lesbian magazine "On Our Backs" by other lesbian activists and pseudo- feminist bookstores. Dawn Wan (of Asian descent) decorated herself in flames at a party for lesbians. When the magazine put her on her cover, the rest attacked the pornographic image and said the message was to burn Asian wimmin.(pp. 149-)
The purer-than-thou image of ultraleftists comes apart when we learn that their approach is always selective and unenforceable more generally. The University of Michigan through the work of Catharine MacKinnon succeeded in censoring an exhibit it invited on sex workers at an academic conference on sex workers.(p. 214) Strossen does not call it censorship, but she failed to note that the University of Michigan is a public school--a government-run school. Thus, something that is a multi-billion dollar industry was censored in academic representation, as an individual instance, not through radical structural change. It left everything untouched but made some people feel like they did something--by banning something they asked for! In contrast, MIM exposes individual instances of oppression in order to connect them to larger issues and approaches. We do not claim it is possible that our prison struggles or immigration or even our anti- militarist struggles can succeed in and of themselves, and certainly not as a series of lifestyle choices.
In contrast to some of the things MacKinnon unleashes that are both rightist and ultraleftist, Strossen is way too far to the right for MIM. She tolerates the rape fantasy movie "Swept Away" that came out in 1975 (pp. 151-3) and MIM reviewed elsewhere. As a typical libertarian, she sees nothing in art that could possibly cause evil, or at best, she believes there might be some evil that can be rebutted through free speech; even though speech is not free and not everyone can direct a Hollywood movie like "Swept Away."
On the other hand, we can see that the ultraleftists are in the same discourse as people like Strossen-- seeking to change actions one at a time instead of by changing underlying structures that influence all the millions or billions of behaviors at once. Abolishing production for profit and unemployment will do more for the struggle against pornography and sexual harassment respectively than all the ink spilled by Liberal feminists and ultraleftists combined. There won't be much professional pornography left if there is no profit and bosses will have no power to coerce workers into sex if workers are always guaranteed jobs. Instead of scrutinizing each worker-boss interaction, MIM seeks to change the balance of power across-the-board. Likewise, setting up sex education and public child-rearing for children untrammeled by religious freaks or sick parents will enable children to defend themselves.
MIM also does not care for Strossen's attacks on MacKinnon's and Dworkin's motives. Yes, clearly Dworkin in particular is a demagogue searching for the limelight, a pornographic fiction writer herself. Yes, MacKinnon admitted to reviewing more pornography than anybody in her Princeton lecture hall in one speech in 1992.(pp. 155-6) That does not mean she is wrong. In fact, Strossen starts the game of saying that some attack pornography because they have seen too little of it (sheltered), but others attack it because they are too interested in it (MacKinnon). Apparently the just-right exposure to pornography (whatever that is) results in libertarian views. ("Do as they say, not as they do," pp. 155-6) That is how the Christian individualist thinks, not how a scientist thinks. MacKinnon and Dworkin are two drops in the bucket. They have both said they don't mind being censored themselves for the right cause. Dworkin's own books have been stopped at the Canadian border for being pornographic, but apparently she approves of that.(p. 205) In the days of the U.S. Civil War, all adults had grown up seeing Blacks as slaves. The victory of the North did not suddenly change that. It was too late for the adults. Radicals and revolutionaries understand that point. The system has to change and then the individuals can. MacKinnon said, "'If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality.'"(p. 161) Although that sounds terribly Liberal because of its use of second-persyn pronouns, it does not mean MacKinnon does not believe all people's sexualities are conditioned by pornography. From MIM's revolutionary anti-Liberal perspective, it means no one has the right not to change.