FoolishOwl:

“I think that overcoming sexism will require both women and men, together — and that sexism hurts women and men, although not equally.”

Do you think that overcoming capitalism will require both workers and bosses, together — and that capitalism hurts workers and bosses, although not equally?

If so, why? If not, what is it about sex that you think makes the relevant difference from economic class as you understand it?

Kait Williams:

DT was, in fact, different from its predecessors in an important thematic way: the sexual satisfaction of the female protagonist was the issue; unlike the run-of-the-mill porn movie, male pleasure was not of paramount importance.

During the Victorian period, one of the most popular forms of pornography was the Turkish Harem story, in which a white European virgin is abducted and sold into sexual slavery in the harem of a Turkish Sultan. The pornographic content is a story of repeated rape; the arc of the plot invariably involves the once-reticent virgin coming to love being sexually violated. Sometimes a European rescuer comes along at the end of the story; the rescued woman is often reluctant to leave the harem.

These stories were told from the female protagonist’s point of view and are superficially about her sexual pleasure. Do you honestly think that that makes a story like this one in which “male pleasure was not of paramount importance”? Do you think that Deep Throat — a story based on a wild anatomical fantasy that makes the “female protagonist” take orgasmic satisfaction from sex acts that are normally only sexually stimulating to men — is different in any important respect? If so, how?

Given that Traynor was frequently sent away from the set, Lovelace’s tales of being forced to work at gunpoint beggar belief.

How is this any different from demanding of any other battered woman “Well, why didn’t you leave?”

Was she manipulated by him? Certainly, but it should be noted that her subsequent tales of violent abuse only surfaced after her failed foray into mainstream movie making, when she was fading into obscurity.

How is this any different from smearing any other woman who testifies that she was raped as a “gold-digger,” “publicity-slut,” etc.?

Whether you believe what Linda Boreman said or not, using these kind of smear tactics in order to discount her testimony is, frankly, despicable.

Amp,

It’s true that the payoff to Maggie Gallagher are unlikely to be a substantial influence on her stated views. But I don’t think that’s really the issue. The issue is the use of taxpayer funds to subsidize useful journalists and columnists—whether or not the money are going to change their views substantially, they do funnel taxpayer money to people solely on the basis of their agreement with the administration on controversial political topics. (If the Bush administration decided to send $100 from the DoD budget to everyone who publicly supported the Iraq war in print prior in March 2003, this would be deeply objectionable—even though it couldn’t possibly change the views that have already been expressed.)

Yeah, I know that Gallagher was doing a “job” for the federal government in return for the pay. Ho ho ho. In reality it seems pretty transparently a sinecure granted to her in return for her views.

A couple further questions:

1. Why marginalize or abandon Robin Morgan? Of course, everyone has a mind of their own and people shouldn’t have to answer for every wack thing that another person who shares their political convictions says, but it would be a serious mistake to suggest that Morgan—who played an instrumental role in founding New York Radical Women and WITCH, putting on the Miss America protests, organized abortion speak-outs and put together Sisterhood is Powerful, and has been a formative influence on outlets such as Ms. Magazine—is some kind of nutty fringe figure. She’s a radical figure, yes, but “radical” isn’t necessarily a term of criticism, and radical feminism has always been an absolutely essential part of Second Wave feminist theory and practice. Any story of the movement that doesn’t centrally involve her in her role as an organizer, writer, and editor has got to be a seriously distorted one.

   And—let’s put the cards on the table after all—I can’t think of a single quote by Robin Morgan that the Men’s Rights bully-boys drag out that actually has anything at all objectionable in it. What specifically is the point on which she shouldn’t be defended against her accusers?

2. While we’re at it, what is supposed to be wrong with man-hating, anyway? If some feminists do hate men, would that mean that there is something wrong with their position?

   I, for one, hate men. Not all of them, but lots of them. And I hate them precisely because they act like men are supposed to act. I.E. because they are controlling, exploitative, rude, callous, and/or violent, just like they were brought up to be. I hate men who act like that and I hate myself when I realize that I’ve acted that way. I don’t think it’s because I’m a neurotic bundle of self-loathing or because I’m aiming to become one; it’s because I think that all of us men have a long way to go to break ourselves out of habits and beliefs that keep us from acting like decent human beings as often as we should. We grow up thinking that we have the right to do a lot of fucked up stuff and then we usually go on to do it at some point or another. Often at many points throughout our lives.

   There are many men that I love and mostly trust but I love them and mostly trust them for the demonstrable steps they’ve taken away from the way that men are normally expected to act. And I’m doing what I can to help the efforts to change those expectations and those actions—in myself, and in others when I can reach them—but I can’t say I blame a woman at all if she doesn’t like most men or doesn’t necessarily trust our motives straight off the bat.

   That doesn’t strike me as unreasoned bigotry; it strikes me as a rational response to the empirical evidence.

Citizen 382-22-0666:

In fact, though feminism was one of the most important influences on my intellectual development, I no longer identify myself as a feminist. I was told in graduate school—repeatedly and vehemently, by women active in feminist causes and scholarship—that males could not be feminists.

Since I wasn’t there when you had the conversation with these people, I can hardly be positive, but usually when feminists say things like this they aren’t claiming that you as a man can’t support the feminist political programme. They are telling you that they don’t want you to cash out that support by calling yourself a “feminist,” and would prefer a term more like “pro-feminist man.” Roughly, because feminism isn’t just some set of abstract policy positions that anyone can sign on to; it involves some policy positions but it’s mainly something that you live, and as a man you (and I) necessarily stand in a very different position to the movement and to the living of feminism than women do. One reason they worry about this is because of how, historically, feminism has been co-opted and marginalized by liberal and Leftist in the name of an allegedly “broader” program (as if women’s liberation weren’t good enough on its own)?

I think it’s a pretty compelling argument. But whether it’s compelling or it’s complete nonsense, it’s not, as you have portrayed it, any kind of argument against boys helping out in the movement. What it is is an argument about how boys who do support feminism should act, how they should identify themselves, and how they should think of themselves in relation to feminist activism. It’s a call for humility, something which I’ve found, frankly, to be in sadly short supply amongst white Leftist boys. In any case, the fact that the argument is compelling doesn’t mean that there might not be other compelling reasons to reconsider the conclusion (I’ve tried to take up some of these issues and explain why I usually identify myself as a feminist anyway in That Feminist Boy Thing); but I can’t for the life of me find “It hurts my fee-fees when they yell at me for calling myself a feminist” among them. The fact that you as a man may not enjoy a practice, or that it might “alienate” men who are otherwise sympathetic to the movement, is no argument at all for feminists to forswear it. If feminists never did anything that didn’t hack some of the boys who claimed to be their allies off, there never would have been a feminist movement at all.

Robert is comparing “Set A” (people who have sex exclusively with members of the same sex) with “Set B” (Roman Catholics). The contrast is supposed to show that there is some relevant sense in which Catholic people are grouped together in a way that gay people are not. Unfortunately, I find the putative contrasts confusing. I also don’t understand what they have to do with the context in which Robert brought the comparison up. So let’s look a bit closer at it. Here are some different types of contrasts that Robert makes, a bit out of order:

1. The group (does/does not) have a formal history of existence as a defined group:

Set B has an extensive formal history of existence as a defined group. Set A could aspire to such a history and may achieve it in the future, but does not have it at this point in time.

I’m not entirely sure what Robert means here. The idea that there is a distinct group of people—the gay ones—goes back at least to the late 18th century, and the modern language of homosexuality was firmly in place more than 100 years ago (unfortunately, not in the context we might like; it was used to pick out people falsely believed to have a common psychosexual disorder). That’s at least as good a stretch of history as, say, “Americans” (there weren’t any until 1788) or “Christian fundamentalists” (early 20th century) have. Since sexual orientation, as a notion, has been around, and been an important part of how people talk about themselves for several generations now I don’t see any salient differences between the two. It’s not like “gay” was a neologism we just made up last Thursday.

2. Membership is/is not centrally coordinated:

Membership in set B is expressed in group terms. A person who says I am a Catholic means that they are a member of the organization. Membership in set A is expressed in individual terms. A person who says I am gay is describing their individual self.

I don’t know what you mean here. It’s true that a person who identifies herself as a Catholic is, inter alia, saying something about a formal organization (that she is a member of it). And it’s true that who and who is not a member of that organization is coordinated by a central authority, or by a centralized structure of authority. But that’s certainly not all that she’s doing—she’s also, as you said, stating that, inter alia, she personally adheres to the articles of the Catholic faith, participates in the sacraments of the Church, etc. Which of these two descriptions is the primary function of the statement “I am a Catholic”? Well, I don’t know. I imagine it depends on the context in which it’s uttered. (If you say, “I’m a Catholic, so of course I believe that abortion is wrong,” I imagine that the second function is more important; if you say, “I’m a Catholic, so I need to be at Mass on Sunday and can’t go with you to the picnic” then I imagine that the first function is more important.)

It’s true that a person who says “I am gay” is only saying something of the latter sort, not anything of the former sort—there isn’t any centralized organization to appeal to. But so what? What follows from this? It’s true of Catholics, but that doesn’t extend even to other denominations or religions (there is no central institutional structure for Pentacostals, or Christians, or Muslims, or Jews). Surely the particular bureaucratic details of how the Roman Catholic Church works are not a significant issue here.

3. Membership (does/does not) derive from adherence to a common framework of beliefs and practices:

Set B has a common philosophy. There is some disagreement within the set about the philosophy – debate and dissent, etc. – but all adult members of the group are passingly familiar with the philosophy. Set A does not have a common philosophy.

Set B has a common spiritual culture. Set A does not have a common spiritual culture.

Set B believes in the transmission of membership in the set to descendants. A member of set B with offspring generally attempts to instill the tenets of set B membership into the offspring. Set A members do not attempt to transmit membership to the next generation.

Set B believes in the evangelization of membership to non-members. Set A does not believe in the evangelization of membership.

Sure; this is indeed a point of contrast between Catholics and gay people. But see the discussion below.

4. Membership is/is not defined in behavioral terms:

Membership in set B is defined in nonbehavioral terms. Membership in set A is defined in behavioral terms. A single change in behavior is not generally sufficient to disenroll someone from set B; it is sufficient to disenroll someone from set A.

I think this, actually, has got to be false. It is in direct contradiction, in particular, to the contrasts made under heading 1. Being a Catholic essentially involves facts about your behavior: for example, if you stop believing in God, you are no longer a Catholic; if you convert to Islam you are no longer a Catholic; if you withdraw from all Church sacraments, you are no longer a Catholic. (If you take one common interpretation of canon 1398, then if you have or procure an abortion you are also by that very fact no longer a Catholic.)

So what hinges on this question, anyway? Well, Robert will have to say more about his purposes in giving the list of contrasts before I can say anything definitively—and if what I say here does not represent Robert’s views, then I look forward to being corrected—but one reason that people commonly make a distinction like this is to argue something like: “Look, homophobia is importantly different from common examples of politicized hatred such as racism or misogyny because whether homophobic attitudes are wrong or not, you can avoid homophobia just by not sleeping with members of your own sex.” That is true and it is important, but it’s not a point of difference between Catholicism and homosexuality: Catholics have always been able to escape persecution just by converting to a different denomination or different religion. (I don’t think, incidentally, that any important ethical consequences follow from this distinction. Religious persecution and homophobia are both wrong, and just as wrong as racism and misogyny are. The difference is only important to understanding the differing nature of the oppression, not its oppressiveness.) In this respect, members of persecuted religious groups and gay people are more alike one another than either is like victims of racism or misogyny: we could avoid it, by denying an absolutely essential part of our lives in order to pass and so pacify the bashers. But why in the hell should we have to?

On the other hand, Robert might have wanted to stick with Type 3 differences—even though his (false) claim of the Type 4 differences contradicts it—because of another conventional tack he might try to take: the status of people-who-only-have-sex-with-people-of-the-same-sex as a group is hard to pin down because those people, unlike “Catholics,” don’t necessarily have anything intellectually or culturally in common with one another, and don’t participate in any kind of common formal organization as in the Type 2 contrasts. True; but so what? “Black people” (or even a more restricted grouping such as “African-Americans”) certainly are not defined as a group by adherence to any common beliefs or spiritual culture (they don’t evangelize, and the fact that they transmit membership to their children has nothing to do with their intent in the matter). There is no formal Black organization and no centralized coordination of membership. But no-one could reasonably argue that, for example, Black people in America don’t constitute a single group that have something importantly in common. What they have in common, if nothing else, is how they are (have been) treated. Racism just means making race politically relevant; even though most everything racists say about Black people’s alleged common traits is false, the legacy of racist political power in the United States is such that Black people do have something importantly in common with each other—they were all treated as niggers. In this respect, gay people are more like victims of racism and misogyny than they are like victims of religious persecution: what we have in common is, mainly, that we are all treated like fags and dykes. Our commonalities as a group are defined more by the attitudes and practices of the people around us than by anything positive attribute that we all have on our own. But so what? Why in the world would anyone think that groupings mainly imposed by outside pressures are somehow less real or less politically relevant than groupings that come from commonalities we bring to the table ourselves? Certainly this isn’t true in the case of race; why would it be true in the case of sexuality?

(N.B.: I actually reject the definition, stipulated at the beginning of this discussion, of “gay” as meaning “a person who only has sex with members of the same gender”. In fact, exclusive sexual contact with members of the same gender is neither necessary nor sufficient for being gay: for one, you can be gay and a virgin; for two, you can be gay and closeted and have heterosexual sexual contact; for three, for the same reasons, you could be heterosexual and due to unusual circumstances end up only having sexual contact with members of the same sex. Further, I think it’s actually a mistake to define bisexual people out of being “gay”; certainly, as a bisexual man, I am treated like a faggot by homophobes regardless of the fact that I also am sexually and romantically attracted to women. But I’ve set that aside here; I don’t think that much important hinges on the differences between “gay men and lesbians” as a class and “men and women who only have sexual contact with members of the same gender” as a class, and this was a stipulative definition that Robert agreed to, not something that he insisted on, anyway.)

Amanda:

Of course, even the “can’t count intoxication” argument strikes me as being really disingenous. I would say that raping drunk women happens all the time. There’s borderline cases, of course, but plenty of men prey on drunk women full well intending to rape and then try to pass it off as bad drunk sex.

Good points. I definitely agree with you that this line of criticism is bunkum. For one, it rules out a lot of indisputable non-borderline cases of rape in which men rape women after they have passed out or been physically disabled by alcohol or date-rape drugs. For two, the criticism is usually based on distortions of Koss’s question—which was not whether the woman ever had sex while she was drunk / intoxicated, but whether a man had ever had sex with her when she didn’t want to, after he had given her drugs or alcohol. That’s pretty clearly a predatory dynamic, but Koss’s critics prefer to whitewash it by changing the question. And for three, it seems to be part of a larger pattern of acting as if feminists have to rule anything that passes for normal het male dating behavior as therefore out of bounds for criticism. To hell with that!

It’s just also worth pointing out, I think, that even if you concede all the cases they complain about, the numbers stay very close to what they were, whether in Koss’s study or in later studies such as the National Violence Against Women Survey, and that these numbers are very easy to find, and that the Men’s Rights bully-boys and professional antifeminists don’t bother to even look around for 5 minutes to check them out. Not everyone who’s skeptical of Koss’s findings acts like this, but many of them are very clearly interested in dismissing entirely by innuendo and armchair speculation, rather than looking at the readily available data. And that’s pretty indicative of how they are approaching the subject.

Amanda:

I still cannot figure out what they hope to gain by insisting that rape is slightly less common than Koss’s study indicates. Okay, so what if we find one day that only 1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted. Does this mean anti-rape campaigns are a sham? If 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 people had a car stolen, we sure as hell wouldn’t be quibbling over the numbers, but would be looking for solutions.

I fear that what they think they have to gain is explained by the simple fact that they are not acting in good faith. I try to keep conversations civil with people who repeat the hatchet-jobs on Koss (most of them copied, directly or ultimately, out of Katie Roiphe’s hatchet-job in The Morning After), but a lot of them are more interested in indiscriminately throwing mud on the survey (and therefore not having to discuss how prevalent rape is at all) than they are in finding out what the truth of the matter might be.

The standard-issue attack that Koss includes sex while intoxicated, for example, is completely trivial: Koss went ahead and ran the numbers over again with those cases excluded, and found that 1 in 5 college women had suffered rape or attempted rape if you stuck to a definition based only on direct force or threats of violence. Anyone who was honestly interested in the possible limitation of Koss’s figures or in making sure that feminists base their arguments on careful and accurate use of social science results could have found this out by reading either Koss’s primary articles or reports such as I Never Called It Rape. But they don’t, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many of the people who do this—and certainly those who do it in print—are just a bit more interested in cooking up an excuse to dismiss feminist analyses of rape than they are in finding out the truth.

A lot of the attacks on the Koss study are, quite frankly, nut much different from the tactics that rapists’ defenders use against individual survivors in the courtroom: discredit the woman who is sitting there telling you what happened to her as crazy, slutty, unscrupulous, hysterical, etc., and you don’t have to deal with the hard question of figuring out what exactly did happen. It’s slime-and-defend without regard for the truth, whether used to dismiss personal testimony or statistical research.

“The Daily Kos has suggested this web page may be a hoax. If it is, it is a cruel one; no 19 year old woman deserves to be made the center of a political controversy not of her making. If it is not a hoax, and Maya is gay, I understand Alan Keyes even less than I previously thought.”

How is this controversy not cruel, even if she is, in fact, a lesbian? Does she deserve to be made the center of a political controversy if she is really gay? Does soliciting shock about her (real or fictional) sexuality serve any purpose other than reinforcing gay-baiting?

Constitutional law, again: Pangloss replies to my waxing romantic about the content of the Ninth Amendment:

<blockquote><p>Surely the issue is what the Ninth Amendment says, not whether or not the august justices of the Supreme Court make much use of it&#8230;</p></blockquote>
<p>by saying:</p>
<blockquote><p>No, Rad, that&#8217;s the romantic view. The realistic view is how the court, as well as the legislature and the states, have understood, interpreted and applied the Const throughout history.</p></blockquote>
<p>I&#8217;m not sure about the use of modifiers here. Is it in fact &#8220;romantic&#8221; rather than &#8220;realistic&#8221; to say that a law <em>means what it says</em>? Is it &#8220;realistic&#8221; rather than &#8220;romantic&#8221; to argue that whatever people who wear particular sorts of uniforms say about a law must be true of that law?   But these terminological quibbles are not entirely on point. The main thing about Pangloss&#8217;s post that baffles me is how s/he intends to reconcile it with the arguments that s/he made earlier in this thread. Pangloss, remember, objected when lucia earlier cited the Court&#8217;s reasoning connecting Roe and Goodridge (among others&#8211;e.g., Brown v. Board of Education) to the Bill of Rights. Here&#8217;s what the reply was:</p>

<blockquote><p>Indeed, lucia! Which is why I say thank God (if you&#8217;ll pardon the expression) those old white 18th C. men included abortion and gay marriage in the Bill of Rights. You know, those Amendments that prohibit any state from using its police powers to regulate abortion in any way during the first 2 trimesters (trimesters! now, there&#8217;s a hoary concept!), and that mandate the states to redefine &#8220;marriage&#8221; in a completely novel and heretofore unknown way!</p>
<p>Now, let me dig out my copy of the Constitution and give you the numbers of those Amendments.</p>
<p>Bear with me a moment&#8230;</p>
<p>Hmm, they&#8217;re in here somewhere&#8230;</p></blockquote>

<p>So if the &#8220;realistic&#8221; view entails that the Court&#8217;s neglect of the Ninth Amendment is sufficient to gut the Ninth Amendment of any particular legal force, then why doesn&#8217;t the Court&#8217;s established precedent concerning the meaning of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights suffice for <em>those</em> decisions? </p>
<p>Either an appeal to the plain text of an amendment can potentially supercede the positive declarations of the court on the matter or it cannot. <em>Tertium non datur.</em></p>