Who needs philosophers when you have musicians

I may have posted this before. I don't remember. Anyway it's good so watch it again.


Sun Ra Arkestra - Retrospect (1990)
by Pigasus_Power

Spike versus Lifetime

If you ask me, they both fail pretty epically. But this article makes a good point. If men are what Spike thinks they are, it's a sad, sad world. Based on the vagaries of gendered programming, the author of the article constructs a fantasy day-in-the-life for men and women according to TV.

We can, from these observations, construct the perfect day as imagined by a gal and by a guy.

In the gal’s perfect day she is kidnapped on the way back from putting the kids on the school bus but vanquishes the kidnappers in time to go for a fattening lunch with her single-mom pals, at which they lament their lack of dates before donning designer gowns to go to a school board meeting where they successfully address all major educational problems.

In the guy’s perfect day he awakes and, still sleepy, sticks his hand down a running garbage disposal trying to retrieve the bottle opener he has dropped in it; an ambulance crew made up entirely of strippers rushes him to the Hospital for Advanced Trauma Care and Stripping, where naked but highly trained female surgeons sew his hand back on, then take him home and wash his entire house as well as his car with their breasts while answering questions like: Does being spanked make a woman want to have sex?

So, clearly, members of one sex are living in a sad, unrealistic fantasy world, trying in vain to compensate for the drabness of their day-to-day lives. Members of the other are living a rich life of the imagination, at peace with their self-image and excited by what the future might hold. Which is which goes without saying.

A comparison between We or Oxygen and Spike might not have faired so well, however. Bridezillas and The Bad Girls Club are basically Manswers-caliber entertainment for women.

Marriage is still socially sanctioned prostitution

This is a continuation of the previous post, although I'll have to depart from discussing Valenti here, because I'm simply not familiar enough with her work to know what her thinking is on sex work. (I do know, however, that she's well-known for discussing her own decision to marry in public. Oh noes! That stuff should be kept private. Like menstruation, sexual preference, and health care.)

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What I'm responding to is the by-now very familiar strawman characterization of third wave feminists and ('fourth wave') queer theorists as vapid cheerleaders who mindlessly promote and tout classically "immoral" sexual behaviors like pole-dancing as a path to female empowerment. Not only is this insultingly shallow and off-base, but it's also a little too convenient in a lot of ways; it helps to simplify a whole world of economic issues that women would otherwise have to face together, ultimately falling back on the good old "if a man gets pleasure from it, it's degrading to women" bit of patriarchal common sense. So that's that, then; just never behave sexually in public, and don't exist as anything other than a stereotypical female emo-bot who dreams of nothing but a loving long-term commitment. Then there'll be no exploitation of women!

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Yeah, probably not. Would that it were so easy. In reality, women do anywhere from 70%-80% of the world's work for less than 5% of the world's income. It's widely observed that women who marry and have children actually penalize themselves by working outside the home, since they will still end up doing the vast majority of domestic labor for the family on top their time spent out in the workforce. Any domestic work is, of course, unpaid, because it's a woman's place to rear heirs for man and country, after all. Why should women expect financial and social independence in life when they could have the connubial bliss that is indentured servanthood instead?

When it comes to the transactional nature of heterosexuality, I'm certainly not the first to suggest that marriage isn't the moral alternative to prostitution but a socially accepted, lower-cost, better-value-for-your-buck subtype of it. (Engels famously theorized that it was marriage that was the central institution of capitalism, as the unpaid labor of women fueled the system and kept it running.) In fact, I would even go so far as to say that, given the extremely low hourly rate of economic return that most married women settle for, it's even closer to sex slavery than prostitution is. If there's any doubt in your mind about whether marriage is still structured in transactional terms in Western society, take a look at this Forbes Magazine article on The Economics of Prostitution. It's pretty clear, economically, that the only difference between prostitution and marriage is the latter has a potentially reproductive benefit while the former doesn't. Women either sell their sex commodity or their reproductive commodity— often both at once— but they're always selling.

Madonna gets it

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This doesn't mean that I think every woman would do better to work the streets rather than live with a partner for the sake of feminism. But it casts in sharp relief a deep ideological (and just plain logical) inconsistency on the part of the 'sex-negative', anti-sex work branch of feminism. The failure of certain feminists to support sex workers in their fight for legitimation, legalization, and the right to police protection effectively plays directly into the hands of patriarchal madonna/whore logic, where (as Valenti discusses in The Purity Myth) "good girls" guard the value of their sex commodity in order to get a higher price on the marriage market and "bad girls" devalue their sex commodity by exchanging it for cash/favors/pleasure rather than commitment.

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The irony of this way of thinking is, of course, that sex workers actually make much more than married women who work "straight" jobs, simultaneously minimizing their hours of unpaid labor rather than maximizing them. Unmarried sex workers are much freer economically than married women are, in every conceivable sense of the word. So it's very odd to me that feminists who constantly call for more structural analysis, more emphasis on global, economic matters choose to ignore exactly these factors when they discuss sex work. Instead, they focus on a moralistic reading of female behavior founded in an essentialized notion of what women are and should want. It turns out that, ultimately, these feminists really believe that women are "naturally" inclined to be what patriarchal society always insisted they were: intellectually feeble, irrationally emotional, dependent creatures who really just need to cuddle and have sweet nothings whispered into their ears, and are therefore all too easily taken advantage of by men. Women never, ever take advantage of men in this scenario; the relationship between men and women is a subject/object relationship. An actor/receiver, active/passive dyad forms where men are always on top.

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Any woman who departs from this prescribed gender role, or from stereotypically feminine sexual behavior, is instantly pathologized by these budding feminist folk psychologists (that's not really ok with her, they'll insist—she's just doing that because her evil pimp talked her into it... or some other man must have manipulated her into it. She was probably molested as a child and now she's psychologically damaged. Etc. Tellingly, no such assumptions are made of male sex workers.) Where this logic reigns, the double-standard for sexual behavior is reinforced as women (and men) try to convince themselves that getting married is primarily a private, romantic undertaking, rather than an economic and social one. At the same time, the structural underpinnings of sex work are ignored in favor of an individualistic, "moral" condemnation of the actions of sex workers and their customers. How, exactly, is this supposed to be good for the movement? I'd love to know.

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To my mind, the only way to avoid furthering a patriarchal logic where women are commodities is not to criminalize or stigmatize sex work according to a moralistic (read: phallic discursive) set of imperatives: the only way forward is to push for solidarity among all female laborers while refusing to settle for policies and cultural values that would continue to promote female economic dependency on men. There's no place in feminism for easy answers that would further privatize the frame around female sexuality. There's no time for pretending that it's only sex workers who are economically or sexually exploited under capitalism. It's time to acknowledge that, until there are no markets left, all sexuality will be commodifiable. And then we need to find a way to do something about it.

American feminism is not a monolith

I just caught wind of the Power/Valenti debate, and at the risk of actually making things worse, I’d like to try to mediate. (No, really...humor me just this once.) I actually think there’s more common ground here than some may believe. I also think an interesting opportunity has presented itself for productive dialogue between factions that, if we‘re honest with ourselves, ultimately will need each other if they are to ever achieve their goals.

First— yeah, that Guardian piece by Valenti (and from what I understand, most of Full-Frontal Feminism) is pretty damn revolting in its cutesy tone and even thinner on substance. I doubt Valenti would argue with you there, at least on the former count, since the point of her work has always been to reach out to the generation of young women who are graduating high school and matriculating college with all sorts of received notions about the ills and failures of feminism already firmly rooted in their minds. FFF and her journalistic pieces were, in fact, a sort of hypercolor PR campaign aimed at the Seventeen Magazine reader demographic, and amazingly enough, they succeeded in drumming up new interest in what people were calling “dead” feminism. I think this was ultimately a good idea, at least in terms of strategy. The websites co-founded by Valenti have become a major hub for close to a million feminists in the U.S. (I like to read Feministing to keep up with news I wouldn't otherwise be exposed to, not really for the "writing"...) That’s a significant little corner of the internet.

Don’t get me wrong, though: the rise of a watered down self-esteem and pop psychology centered feminism a la Oprah has become quite a problem in the U.S. in the past 20 years. I don’t believe, and never have, that academic feminism is inherently elitist, or incompatible with activism. It's as important as it ever was to have active feminists in academia. But it’s also very important to understand a few things: 1) the cultural milieu in which “Sex & the City feminism” sprang up as a reaction to the meteoric rise of the religious/neo-conservative Right in the U.S., which manufactured an extreme anti-feminist backlash, especially vis-à-vis Red State/Blue State political tensions, 2) the fact that Valenti’s approach to activism involves teen outreach and (yes) motivational speaking, and 3) that Valenti’s book The Purity Myth (read portions here) is actually a decent introduction to points 1 & 2, and has already rallied and mobilized a huge number of young American feminists behind it.

Whenever I read harsh criticisms of people like Valenti on the part of European or British feminists, I always immediately think “they just don’t understand how bad the situation is over here, do they?” The current neo-sex-positive strain of feminism formed in direct response to, and is ultimately a loud and proud rebellion against, the rising popularity of things like purity balls in the U.S. For those of you who are unfamiliar, these are formal dances where conservative and largely Christian (a 75% majority here) fathers dress in tuxedos and take their coiffed pre-teen daughters to publicly pledge their fidelity to their fathers and their commitment to sexual abstinence till marriage, in a spin on traditional debutant balls. I’m talking truly creepy, not-even thinly veiled patriarchal shit like that. The rise in vaginal rejuvenation surgeries for women who want to feel more “virginal” to their partners, many of them for religious reasons (see also the “Born Again Virgin movement“). A constant barrage of Mommy Wars propaganda suggesting that any child whose mother choses to have a career will grow up to be a serial killer and any woman who has an abortion will get breast cancer and “post-abortion trauma syndrome“ (no I am not making that up--they did). I see at least 5 ads per day for the Gabriel Project that cite flagrantly fabricated statistics about the risks of abortion. Worst of all, there was the global Abstinence Only Education debacle, an ideologically driven set of legal and political “reforms” that ultimately contributed to the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa and other undeveloped countries, not to mention the unprecedented rise in teen pregnancies, abortion, and STDs right here in the USA.

You absolutely have to understand that this was the cultural backdrop behind the rise of “girl power” feminism, for better or for worse. You had a huge gap forming between the cultural values of liberal dems, educated middle class whites and minorities on the Eastern seaboard and the West Coast in "Blue America," and the proto-Sarah Palin Red State Right made up of extremely high and low income whites who lived (largely) in middle America and the deep south. These differences hit hard where feminism, racism, and civil rights were concerned, turning back the clock on years of hard-won legal and social battles. So when a British feminist starts berating women for enjoying vibrators (as if this is a uniquely capitalist indulgence while, say, plastic tampons aren’t), what an American feminist hears sounds extremely conservative and repressive, and in fact echoes the conservative response to the shows like Sex and the City, which featured female leads in non-traditional roles. The portrait of the liberated female depicted in SatC drew ridiculous "What's happening to the nuclear family??!?" alarm-ringing from conservative organizations like Focus on the Family. (How dare the communist media assault our values with such heresies as women living without men and having sex for pleasure rather than reproduction!) It echoes the legal injunction against talking about masturbation/self-stimulation in health classes at public schools, because that would promote "promiscuity" among the girls.

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Is the real problem here vibrators themselves, or a culture that encourages us to define ourselves through consumption? You’re not going to convince American feminists that vibrators are some kind of big deal, when something like 6% of reported rapes result in convinction. It just won’t happen.

Of course, none of these points are meant to be an excuse for the deficiencies in certain strains of American feminism, and I would be very glad to see American feminists open themselves to more global issues and move away from a limited focus on civil rights legislation at home. But I do hope that people in other countries realize that there are as many Sandra Hardings and bell hooks in the U.S. as there are Jessica Valentis. More mainstream “girl power” feminists have been made more visible in the media than academic feminists due to their vocal, direct engagement in the battle against neo-cons for control of the airwaves and the legislature. What annoys feminists here is the suggestion that you can’t be a “real” feminist and be fully engaged in political battles on the ground— this is, I think, where the charges of elitism are coming from. I don’t think there’s anything “elitist” about books like One Dimensional Woman, but I do think it offers a rather one-dimensional view of what feminism is about in the U.S. Frankly, it is quite annoying to see Americans constantly stereotyped, misrepresented and/or harangued by people who don’t always have the deepest understanding of what’s going on over here. It gets old. It really does.

Regardless, I’m glad people are getting upset about this. These things are important— they have the potential to directly affect the lives of women all over the world. I hope we can turn disagreements like this into an opportunity to discuss our differences and possibly unite on key issues rather than falling into an "attack/react" vicious cycle. Feminism can't afford to be bogged down in a pointless purity test.

Cosmos, a nostalgic voyage

I've been re-watching Carl Sagan's old new agey synth-soundtracked series Cosmos to lull myself to sleep recently. Most of the scientific concepts he introduces aren't new to me, and his relentless optimism about the "progress" of humanity is (adorably) naive, but there's something soothing about pictures of space and his Kermit-like lilt. I suppose it reminds me of being allowed to stay up late to watch Nova when I was a kid.

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I thought the following clip about the Pythagorean cult was particularly interesting. It's not often that I hear scientists refer to ancient philosophy, let alone evaluate any of its claims. Apparently, the suppression of Ionian thinking was not cool with Sagan:



Can't say I disagree with him on this one. I'm not particularly concerned with whether the other hundreds of billions of galaxies harbor planets with organic life on them, though— a question that often preoccupied Sagan. There's enough to worry about on this one.

Slut-shaming: the world's favorite pastime

I've been busy, so I apologize to the people whose comments were left in moderation limbo for the past two months (I wasn't ignoring you, just didn't see them floating there...)

Anyway, I'm done with finals and travels, so this week I finally had time to catch up on some refreshingly non-technical blog reading. I came back to find that the feminist blogs I follow are focused on recent news items and legal cases that involve flagrant, unapologetic slut-shaming. Hardly shocking, I know— but I've noticed that slut-shaming is a subject rarely broached by strictly academic feminists, and yet it's a particularly nasty form of discrimination that's all too commonly experienced by all kinds of women. The Curvature, one of the best feminist blogs for a long time running, covered a couple of cases that caught my eye right away, in part because they intersect with two things I've talked and thought about for some time now: the prevalence of group-sex-based fantasies/porn among heterosexuals (significant, I think, as a kind of mutation of heteronorms) and "sexting" (a buzzword so all-pervasive among fear-mongering media outlets and so scarily sexist in its applications that I get annoyed everytime I hear it).

First and foremost, what both of these cases highlight and underline, for those who may be harboring doubts, is that the consent standard most certainly is vital and should remain central to sexual ethics and the law, not to mention feminism itself. In the first case, a UK woman admitted to a man whom she met over the internet that she fantasized about group sex. Later she went to meet the man in person and, despite her protests, was gang-raped. Her past admission of "arousal-in-theory" was then dredged up in court and cited by a judge as proof that she was somehow unrapeable in the present because the admission supposedly constituted a sort of universal consent from the point of admission onward. If this isn't proof that a woman's sexual autonomy can't be predicated on "shared" social mores regarding sex, these being changeable, subject to religious/personal preferences, and often downright sexist and unfair, but rather that sexual autonomy needs to be based on the ability and right to consent to each and every act— well, I don't know what would constitute better proof.

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Even more, the second "sexting" case demonstrates just how unevenly and unfairly the consent standard is (often) implemented when it IS in fact recognized. I put sexting in air quotes there because the case isn't ultimately about sexting, of course, but sexual harassment so vicious that it eventually drove an otherwise healthy girl to suicide. What's scary is not that teens are experimenting sexually, and using new technologies to do this, but the extent to which reality has yet to catch up with our rhetoric and feminist ideals concerning sex.

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In all of the discussions of the terrifying dangers of sexting that I've seen in the trad media, I've yet to see a single one that focuses on the role of the young men involved (who, as it turns out, are also sending nude pics of themselves in rather large numbers-- it's just that their girlfriends aren't forwarding them to the entire school and violating their consent afterward). Young men and women are bombarded by mixed messages. Sex is a good thing, sex is fun, sex is an important part of a relationship, sex transforms you into an adult, sex is empowering, etc. But then the competing negative messages seem to be targeted exclusively at young women: sex is degrading, good girls don't have sex, girls who enjoy casual sex are whores, whores deserve what they get, you're probably not ready for sex because you're too immature, etc.

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In reality, most psychologists agree that young women mature faster and have a sharper sense of the potential consequences of sexual behaviors than their male counterparts do. And yet, when young women experiment sexually, and consent to things like phone sex with their boyfriends, the vast majority of people prefer to freak out about the ruined purity of the girls and the "degrading" nature of being looked at, rather than address the unethical and immoral behavior of the boys when they violate consent. This, in effect, contributes to rape-culture in the most disturbing and gruesome of ways: by blaming the victim, questioning the sexual autonomy of the victim, and heaping the responsibility for male behavior upon females. The message this sends to young men is, of course, incredibly damaging to the notion that women are sexually equal, autonomous and deserving of equal protection under the law (...not to mention basic courtesy and respect).

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Really, if I didn't know better, I'd think I just fell asleep and woke up in 1810, not 2010. This is the year to really push the slut-shaming issue, and force the public to see it for what it is, a form of sexual harassment and discrimination that won't be tolerated.

Evidence for analysis

John at Ktismatics has a very nice post up about the empirical basis of psychoanalysis/therapy. According to what the literature I've read on this, it seems that while there still isn't adequate evidence for the Unconscious in a strict Freudian sense, there is plenty of evidence that our cognitive processes are not entirely "conscious." In fact, most sensory information that we take in is interpreted and integrated into our thoughts at a level of cognition that is below the threshold of conscious reflection.

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I can attest to having some of the breakthrough moments he describes while in therapy myself, as well.

Politics and greedy reductionism

I've been sporadically following the recent discussion of politics/ontology and how they relate with some interest. I'm not sure exactly where I'd fall in a debate, but I did think this list by Nick at Speculative Heresy hit on some interesting "fault line" type points.

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One thing I've noticed consistently about the sort of discourse that's prevalent in academic philosophy is that it tends to privilege the "political" (or, alternately, the "social") as a field over and against all other fields, as if forces like physical laws, bio-chemical processes, etc., are simply "mediating" forces that eventually find themselves shoehorned into the King of all Domains, the political. This King of Domains ends up being the field that unifies all others and makes them cohere. I can sympathize with anyone who suggests that this way of looking at the world is anti-realist and even pretty profoundly "correlationist"—mostly, though, I see it as a form of what Daniel Dennett and others have called greedy reductionism.

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The greedy reductionist tends to write off all other possible explanations of how a world/situation works or what constitutes a given phenomenon— excluding, of course, the one that comes out of their own professional discourse— and in the process also tends to see their own discursive bias as the only one capable of subsuming all others under its umbrella. Anyone in the sciences is very accustomed to this sort of scholastic guild mentality: physics is the king of all sciences, no, but math is the formal bedrock, no, biology is how this world actually works, etc.

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The truth of the matter is that the world (if physics has taught us anything) need not be explained solely with reference to one unified field. It's entirely possible that the world is a product of a bunch of forces that work independently of one another and, therefore, that these may never be tidily folded into a discursive whole. So the physicist, the biologist, the politician, the social scientist, etc., are all equally right in describing the world according to their own specific set of reductionist criteria. Problems arise only when one reductionist gets greedy and wants all the powers of explanation for themself. When this happens, Dennett says reductionists slip into "explaining away" competing theories as mere "mediating forces" within their discursive field, rather than giving a positive, constructive explanation of the world according to the strengths and limitations of their discipline.

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I have no problem with people making all kinds of divergent political and social theories about how the world works; just don't try to tell me that these are more important or more politically and socially relevant than scientific ones. Case in point, from this week's world news: P. Leonardo Mascheroni. If this story about an American physicist who boldly sold hydrogen-flourine laser information to Venezuala doesn't fly in the face of every cliche about how science is The Man while theory isn't, or how scientists are too blinded by a naive belief in their own "objectivity" to get involved in politics, while grad students in the humanities are somehow perfect exemplars of what it means to be politically engaged in the world, I don't know what would.