Hang up those clitorii girls, the under 30’s set is coming to town
Published by R. Mildred August 29th, 2006 in Feminism, Sex, Shame on you for being a womangiven that Randombird has apparently taken lessons in “feminist theory” at college, and yet is also inexplicably unaware that performing sexual acts you do not want to do is rape, I am left with this simple question, and do please excuse this non-college going fem for her ignorance…
But WTF do they actually TEACH women in those feminist theory classes?
Because someone obviously forgot the basics in that syllabus.
Seriously, what do they teach in those classes, anyone who’s taken them want to inform us plebs?
Because rather than inexplicably blaming entire age groups (in this case the evil demons like me who have been lauching our asses off while the boomers and Xers spent our childhoods fighting constantly over who’s got the bigger zeitgeist) I’d like to ask the fundamental that should be asked: Why the fuck is my generation so prone to RandomBird’s stupid bullshit? Why is “I’m a sexual person” automatically phrased, more often than not, as “I wanna subsume my wants, desires and personality beneath a gentle tide of blowjob spit and objectification, STARE AT MY TITS DAMMIT, STARE. AT. MY. TITS!“, like female sexuality that is all about men being pleasured and gently titillated whenever a woman is present was only invented as a result of the mythic feminist destruction of the patriarchy in the 1960’s, and it is the only way for a woman to be sexual dontyaknow.
Oh wait second, now I remember: Patriarchy.
Yes, that old pal of ours has been hard at work, teaching a generation that women are sexual, but that women having sex has nothing to do with women getting off, I mean it’s nice when that happens but not neccesary by any way of measuring such things.
Now one thing I’ve noticed in all the fights since the bussel fraca is that my critics tend to be either 1) over 30 and prone to using the term radfem as an insult or 2) under 30 and prone to waffling endlessly about their “sexuality”, which tends to just happen to, by some freakish coincidence, revolve entirely around providing men pleasure as the be all and end all of their sexuality.
Of course, one does get the impression that many of women who most loudly and publically spew this patriarchal conception of female sexuality are about as feminist as the Raving Athiest was ever actually an athiest, call me funny, but when faced with people who routinely pump out views and opinions that entirely contradict the self-identified labels they’re affixing to themselves, like when an athiest fights valiantly for legal recognition of sperm magic, I smell something amiss, and then I point and call bullshit.
Because more often than not a huge steaming cow has dropped a huge steaming cowplop on the rug, and who the fuck is going to clean it up I wonder.
Anyhoo…
I mentioned, way back in the day, that:
To my understanding and personal experience of it, sex positive feminism is all about an active rejection of the patriarchy’s rape culture, while still being sexual because you are a sexual creature, this means that you have to reject anything obligatory, coercive, forced, abusive or just plain creepy (to whatever the hell standard of creepy you decide on) in sex if at all possible.
Now I still will call myself a Sex-Positive Feminist, because Sex-Positive Feminism is useful because it (ideally, Mea Culpa: I’ve not been perfect on this score myself) doesn’t go on about what actions are empowering or not empowering, it goes on about what actions people enjoy, and criticises activities that leave women and men strung up and tied down with patriarchal obligations, self-denial and bullshit power imbalances.
Now the simple reason reason that Sex Positives shouldn’t go on about empowerment all the time is because they don’t need to! An activity that is empowering is merely something that a woman enjoys without reservation.
The trouble with activities and clothing that are labelled as “empowering” however is that, generally speaking, the women doing them Do Not Actually Enjoy Them.
Take high heels for instance (prompting the readers to groan, “not highheels Mildred, for the love of god, not high heels again” you cry, to which I hit you over the head with a rolled up newspaper and tell you let shut up and let me finish, you goddamned backseat bloggers), the main defense of those bizarre bits of foot apparel is simply that “they’re empowering”, and if anyone mentions that they hurt your feet, the wearers will note that, yes, they are painful to wear and can permenantly disfigure your feet, but they like them anyway because they’re empowering.
This is where I draw the line with post-modernism personally, when it stops being sarcastic and witty and just ends up resorting to bizarro sophistry.
because an activity cannot be empowering because it’s empowering, it has to be something that you just like, entirely.
So what do women (and men) like about highheels, what is it that makes them wear the damn things?
Well there’s the height increase for one, something that while acheived through other forms of footwear, those are generally only worn in niche sub-cultures, and so the woman who likes to feel a bit taller in her work life or elsewhere, generally has to resort to highheels.
Which are painful and awkward to wear.
But women wear the heels instead of the sensible shoes with the lifts because, duh, heels are empowering! And women are expected to wear them, there’s no harm (socially) in wearing heels because it’s acceptable and normal. But they still hurt.
But that’s the trouble, true empowerment would come, first and foremost, from a woman not having to accept and put up with stuff that she doesn’t enjoy to enjoy herself, her enjoyment should be front and center in her life, and if that happens to involve making a man feel good then so be it, but if that pleasuring of men comes at the cost of her own pleasure, or involves doing stuff she doesn’t actually want to do - that ain’t empowerment, no matter how much any of these so called “empowered” women are willing to put up with, the various pains and aches and the rapes and the abuse, because here’s the thing:
WOMEN DO NOT NEED TO PUT UP WITH CRAP FROM MEN AND SOCIETY TO BE EMPOWERED, we really don’t.
In fact if you are putting up with crap then you’re not empowered because you do not have to compromise or give up a bit of yourself to enjoy yourself, but you may have to *gasp* actually think about what you enjoy, and explore a bit, and find a way to enjoy yourself that doesn’t involve that compromise to patriarchy.
I know, I’m so harsh, but there you have it.
This is why I don’t even for a second think that my anorexia is “empowering”, yes it makes me feel sexy, but I also feel woozy and sleepy alot of the time, and I’m starving myself ffs.
No woman should have to starve herself to feel sexy, nor should they wear crippling shoes or be throat raped. They should be themselves, and do what they enjoy and that’s it, they shouldn’t have to put up with anything, because if it’s empowering to do what you enjoy, then if a woman is doing something she does not enjoy it is… anyone? Thank you, NOT empowering.
Call me controversial is you will.
But women are taught, as all oppressed classes are and always have been, that they have to make sacrifices, and shouldn’t be unreasonable and expect too much from the oppressor classes, they shouldn’t expect fair treatment in life or to not be abused a least a little bit in their sex life. Shut up, stop striving and accept your place as soceity’s universal untermenschen.
The core onus of feminism is that women are People, and the thing about people is that they will not put up with crap from other people when they don’t have to.
And women do not have to put up with this crap. We can choose not to, but we have to make that choice, and we have to choose to notice the problems are so prone we putting up with also.
Because the first step to finding a solution to something is to admit that you have a problem you need to deal with. From there comes the healing.
22 Responses to “Hang up those clitorii girls, the under 30’s set is coming to town”
- 1 Trackback on Aug 30th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
- 2 Trackback on Aug 30th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
*bows down to R. Mildred*
Sing it, sister.
?????? I’m confused, or maybe I’m just too old… I do not now and never have in any way whatsoever found high heels on women to be ‘empowering’ in any way, shape or form - OTOH, given all my girlfriends over the years with nasty, twisted, deformed feet (caused by wearing those damn ‘fashionable’ shoes, BTW), I have always asked them to wear comfortable shoes that fit well. They were the ones who insisted on wearing the expensive torture devices! (male, 50) Or perhaps it IS me, I have always seen women as people, albiet people I usually find more interesting then my own gender.
Because rather than inexplicably blaming entire age groups (in this case the evil demons like me who have been lauching our asses off while the boomers and Xers spent our childhoods fighting constantly over who’s got the bigger zeitgeist) I’d like to ask the fundamental that should be asked: Why the fuck is my generation so prone to RandomBird’s stupid bullshit? Why is “I’m a sexual person” automatically phrased, more often than not, as “I wanna subsume my wants, desires and personality beneath a gentle tide of blowjob spit and objectification, STARE AT MY TITS DAMMIT, STARE. AT. MY. TITS!“, like female sexuality that is all about men being pleasured and gently titillated whenever a woman is present was only invented as a result of the mythic feminist destruction of the patriarchy in the 1960’s, and it is the only way for a woman to be sexual dontyaknow.
Oh wait second, now I remember: Patriarchy.
Well, more specifically because since the sexual revolution was co-opted to ends of patriarchy there have been two competing patriarchal hegemonic conceptions of women’s sexuality; the old one that women don’t have a sexuality vs. the new one that women’s sexuality consists of performing for and being objectified by men.
The modern patriarchal conception of women’s sexuality has been relentlessly thrown at young women, from birth, from every aspect of the society and culture except the reactionaries (who still want to make the old conception hegemonic again), and feminists (at least those who oppose both of these conceptions).
Young women today have faced a 30 year campaign to make this conception of women’s sexuality into the convention wisdom, that it has enjoyed considerable success should come as no surprise.
Well, more specifically because since the sexual revolution was co-opted to ends of patriarchy there have been two competing patriarchal hegemonic conceptions of women’s sexuality; the old one that women don’t have a sexuality vs. the new one that women’s sexuality consists of performing for and being objectified by men.
I think that the whore part of virgin/whore is a bit older than that. Most of the things used as shorthand for female sexuality under patriarchy–high heels, fishnets, receptive joyfree sex–were expected of women prior to the sexual revolution.
I have worn heels exactly once in my life (well, twice if you count trying them on in the shoe store). I’ve been living in the same pair of increasingly ratty clogs for three or four years, recently moved to Big City, and decided to find heels as my new interviewing-for-Big-City-job outfit. And I guess I knew they were uncomfortable and difficult to walk in, but I’ve never been any more offended by them than by, say, hair dye - an available option, but not one I’d tried, and not one that particularly interested me. Until this time, of course.
Now, I realize that it is possible to learn to walk in them and all that, but seriously? Coming back from my interview, I was actually scared. Because I coudn’t walk, and anyone with half an eye could tell I couldn’t walk. It made me feel out of control and helpless, because (and this is my issue, because I’m a transplant to Big City from Super-Rural Farm Area where you can trust the people because you’re all a little more worried about the bears) I still don’t know how to deal with the whole eye contact with strangers thing, or the inappropriate comments from bums thing, and it was just one more layer on the awkward and uncomfortable cake.
The whole thing was a paradigm-shifting experience for me, because it had never occurred to me before then what exactly I was doing when I got dressed that morning. What’s that thing Twisty always says, everything done by an oppressed class is a political act? Funny how that became clear to me at the exact same moment as I became aware of the privilege that had allowed me to ignore it for so long.
I forget what the point of this comment was. Just wanted to put it out there.
piny,
I think that the whore part of virgin/whore is a bit older than that. Most of the things used as shorthand for female sexuality under patriarchy–high heels, fishnets, receptive joyfree sex–were expected of women prior to the sexual revolution.
Right, but women weren’t expected to get off on sexually performing for and being objectified by men before the ’sexual revolution’, that performance was simply considered women’s duty, not an authentic expression of her sexuality, if that makes any sense.
Right, but women weren’t expected to get off on sexually performing for and being objectified by men before the ’sexual revolution’, that performance was simply considered women’s duty, not an authentic expression of her sexuality, if that makes any sense.
I see the distinction, but I don’t agree with it. The idea that some women were “asking for it” was the prop for pre-sexual-revolution beliefs about rape. Women were frequently defined as lascivious so that they could more easily be used.
I love high heels, but there is no doubt that that I love them because they’re “empowering”—i.e., give me access to the small amount of power women have to be sexy and riveting to me. No, they are not real power. Luckily, I’m wise enough to know the damn difference between “empowering” and actual power. You know, like the male power to not even have to know that the shoes are painful.
Hmmm….
So do you see the only difference in that today the performance conception is considered empowering rather than deviant? Certainly, at the very least, we can agree that the message that performance represents the authentic and empowering expression of women’s sexuality dates from the sexual revolution?
I might be inclined to go further and argue that the difference is also that the ‘asexual’ conception was dominant before, by and large, with women who ran afoul of it being labeled deviants while today the performance conception is becoming dominant (while still being resisted by reactionaries) and those who run afoul of this ‘empowered’ sexuality are also labeled deviants, though it seems you’d disagree with this as well?
Amanda brings up a good point. The empower, as it were, is sort of like fool’s gold. You get a few free drinks and feel pretty good, but when you get out of the bar, you go back to your crappy job, debilitating shoes, and guys who think that shoving a woman’s head down is reasonable sexual behavior.
Most of the things used as shorthand for female sexuality under patriarchy–high heels, fishnets, receptive joyfree sex–were expected of women prior to the sexual revolution.
No. This is a gross oversimplification and/or demonstration of ignorance of most of world history.
Women not being supposed to enjoy sex? You’ll find the opposite held true from Aristophanes to Lady Murasaki to Chaucer to Shakespeare to various raucous ballads of insatiable dockside women whose “itches could ne’er be scratched” - this idea that women can’t/don’t/shouldn’t enjoy sex really comes out of the late 1800s - and only the upper classes. Wilkie Collins’ heroines discreetly alluded, but alluded in no uncertain terms, as to how much they longed for, and subsequently enjoyed, the sex with their lovers in bestselling novels of the earlier 1800s. The women in Lysistrata can just barely manage to keep it together as the sexual, and political, siege wears on. No! Sex! Argh! Can’t! Cope! is just as true for them as it is for the men with their, um, scrolls…and insatiable young wives with impotent old husbands have been a subject of comedy for as long as arranged marriages have existed. The pop culture of the 1600 and 1700s is full of humorous dismay about how girls these days don’t need guys to get off, they take care of it themselves or for each other with beeswax candles instead!
The idea all along has been that women were supposed to be all things to all men, as men deemed appropriate - the madonna in the kitchen and the whore in the bedroom, beautiful and faithful and sexy to her owner/s, pretending to enjoy it if she didn’t so as not to dampen her man’s self-esteem was assumed, yes, but only because it was assumed that a normal woman would *not* be “frigid” and if she was, there was something wrong with her (and maybe she needed a good friendly rape, as per the pop-culture wisdom of the 20s and 30s, some rough sex to shake her out of her fear and self-absorbtion - see GWTW for a classic example of this.) The tension between wearing too much and too little has always depended on local cultural norms and the male vanity of a) not wanting other men to “have” his woman even visually, and b) wanting to show off how beautiful a woman he possessed, so that other men would envy him. Look at the outfits worn by the respectable wives of society leaders and the actresses portraying them from the 1800s through the 1950s, the amount of cleaveage and shoulder and back and varyingly leg allowed, the amount of bling displayed on bosom, by all these decent matrons of the Good Old Days.
Lorenzo
The sexual revolution began in the 1920s.
The virgin/whore dichotomy was around before that.
there’s an interesting book called “Making Sex” by Thomas Lacquer. In it, he argues that the dominant understanding of gender prior to the emergence of capitalism and the liberal enlightenment was that there was only _one_ sex. Females were simply inferior copies of males. He cites various thinkers to make his point.
He goes on to argue that capitalism and with it, the enlightenment ideal that people are all human entitled to certain rights, called into question the way we’d put women in their place and men in their’s according to a natural metaphysics of god > King > aristocracy.
To fight off the response of educated women of the day who asked, particularly during the French revolution, “So, what about it boys? What about the women?” they responding by erecting these elaborate theories of a binary dualism where there were two sexes and two corresponding genders. These arguments were intended to elide the demands by naturalizing male and female as compelementary, but very different, sexes — which then justified the who ideology of True Womahood during the Victorian era.
And, as you correctly point out, those who weren’t proper middle class white women were seen as women who had an animalistic sexuality. All women had such a sexuality. And at the time, this really wasn’t “for men”. In fact, men wanted it to be put in it’s place such that, if it existed at all, it existed only among those defined as ‘that way”: the white working class and slaves in the plantation south.
What made you are model of True Womahood was that your pious Christianity made you resist that animalistic nature and strive for a higher spirituality. For that higher spirituality was what kept men in line — for otherwise men were always only people who lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short. (This was buttressed by claims about the nature of the polity and the market as especially competitive. What men needed to check this competitive, self-selking, self interested behavior of pursuit of their own self interest in the market and political forum was the pious wife to whom he returned. She soothed his savage soul, providing a haven in a heartless world.
But industrial development lead to a breakdown and challenge to those ideals with the 1920s. Why? Well, if you’re into a marxist materialist analysis, this was because capitalism could meet everyone’s demands for the basics. But how would comanies make profits if everyone was happy with their 55 hour work week, their basic goods. According to a survey from the era, people wanted more time off, not more money with which to buy more stuff. (just as an example of the crisis captialism faces whern it becomes so productive, everyone has enough stuff.)
In order to keep the economy humming, companies had to produce desire and, thus, expand their markets. This was all helped along by mass communication technologies which enabled the advent of marketing and advertising.
Also, developments in technology broke down old dating patterns — where the front parlor was the scene of romance in 1880, by 1920, for the wealthy, it was the rumble seat, the movie house.
Youth culture emerged as children were increasingly kept out of the labor force and protected from the world of adults. They were age segregated to protect them and encouraged to engage in sports, 4 h, girl scouts, etc. This threw people together in what some think was a misguided attempt to protect children, but which also helped encourage along what they call the “social construction of adolescence”. (See Joseph Kett’s huge survey on the history of schoolin and youth)
Industrialization and rapid social change borke down older, agrarian based ways of life.
Etc.
By 1950, Barbara Enrenreich argues, men started chafing aginst the breadwinner/homemaker model which was what had become of the remnants of the ideal of True Womahood.
The first call to arms was Playboy. Men, in the first issue of Playboy, were asked to join a revolution. They were asked to become Play boys, essentially redefining what it meant to be a man: enjoying products and things — consumption. Booze, art, cigars, tobacco, music. This was the life of the Playboy.
But, Ehrereich argues, there was such a demand to be a man via the breadwinner role, anyone who departed form that model to be a bachelor was immediately considered gay. She calls up a lot of pop pscyhology at the time, as well as pysch textboooks and the like, to show how men’s fear was that they would be called homos.
Playboy didn’t want wives anymore, but they had lots of women around to make sure everyone knew they were men with the right kind of libidos.
I’ve been meaning to scan this and put portions of Ehrenreich’s chapter online because it dovetails nicely with a recent post about Playboy at Pandagon.
Sorry for typos. hands are tired and I’m a lazy ass. Call it my slack bastard rebellion agaisnt workerism.
* essentially, Ehrenreich’s thesis in Hearts of Men is that men rebelled against older notions of masculinity and feminity in the 50s, before the feminist movement did. She goes on to argue in a piece written around 1980 that there was a problem with our theorizing about women’s condition for we never adequately accounted for “Life without father” — where we forgot to recognize that capitalism plays this huge role in what becomes acceptable and what isn’t. I’ve always seen Hearts of Men as an intervention, not to diminish the role of women and feminism, but to remind us that it was more complicated than patriarchy alone.
As for sexual liberation, feminsts have always been fighting this problem. For one of the first things women did was stomp all over men who were demanding access to women unhindered by appealing to notions that they were square — see the earliest statments of women in the New Left, early 60s, where women call men out on their behavior. it was already part of new left culture — the exual revolution. The earliest feminist statements were for a sexual liberation movement for women and not for men’s warped ideas of what it should mean. I would hate to think that the sexual liberation be thought of as a monolith and the women who supported it as mindless clucks who didn’t have klew.
Most of the things used as shorthand for female sexuality under patriarchy–high heels, fishnets, receptive joyfree sex–were expected of women prior to the sexual revolution.
No. This is a gross oversimplification and/or demonstration of ignorance of most of world history.
Women not being supposed to enjoy sex?
Where in that out-of-context quote do you see the phrase “all women?” Yeah, me neither. I know from the Wife of Bath. I didn’t say that the idea that women are supposed to enjoy sex dates back to the seventies, for one thing, and you’re not the first person to bring virgin/whore into the conversation, either. We’re not arguing about female sexiness as a longstanding tradition, or that people have been thinking about female sexual gratification for some time. I was disputing Lorenzo’s temporal dichotomies, which I’m still having trouble getting behind. “Joyfree” might have been ill-chosen–the phenomenon I was getting at was more the woman whose sexual gratification is defined wholly in terms of her male partner’s–but I’m not ignorant.
That having been said, I’m not sure it makes sense to bring Murasaki–or Sappho, or Catherine de Pisan, or the Venus of Willendorf, or whoever–into a discussion of the impact of the sexual revolution. Does that not imply a temporal limit to the debate in the first place?
The pop culture of the 1600 and 1700s is full of humorous dismay about how girls these days don’t need guys to get off, they take care of it themselves or for each other with beeswax candles instead!
Slow down.
Beeswax candles?
Brava!
You have distilled the very meaning of sex-positive feminism as I understand it, which I can somehow never manage when I try to put it into words.
I just don’t understand how some so-called sex-positive people get an entirely different definition, that as far as I can tell consists of, “All sex is good!” when clearly not all of it is.
Piny,
Where I’m having trouble is that I’m failing to see the equivalence between a discourse that talked about women’s sexuality as ‘animalistic’ and deviant from the ideal vs. a discourse that talked about women’s sexuality as ‘empowering’ and as the ideal, so to speak. The discourse of the sexual revolution, since the 1950’s, has promoted this objectified sexuality as empowering as as the norm rather than as an animalistic ‘itch’ (to borrow bellatry’s phrase) that was acknowleged but also treated as deviant from the social ideal, at least it seems to me.
I don’t agree that women’s sexuality–the desire to have a partner, the desire to please a partner–was always seen as animalistic and deviant; like bellatrys said, I’m a freaking moron and the sexless angel of the house was rather a limited archetype.
I think that the new ingredient isn’t empowering sexuality. I think it’s empowerment, period. I think it’s the idea that independent empowerment for women is something we should be concerned with on any level through fulfillment of any role. Women have been encouraged to be sexy, either as whores or as wives, and often been told that they would reach some sort of fulfillment–sexual, romantic, self–through doing so. The difference is that now women are becoming agents rather than servants, at least on a level that requires adjustment in the calculi used to sell patriarchal sexuality to women. Now, you’re doing it for you.
So many of the pro-”empowerment” women, from strippers to fellatrices, seem to be talking in particular about the “power” to hold men in some type of sexual thrall.
This strikes me as a very old sort of power, and a really poor revenge for second-class citizenship. Further, when does such a woman get to enjoy sexual thrall herself, without being “disempowered”?
Isn’t that the Esther Vilar (The Manipulated Man) school of thought?