tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65106244765852304342024-03-13T18:41:49.394+00:00It's Not A Zero Sum GameMarina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.comBlogger105125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-44733195274731178762020-07-16T13:34:00.000+01:002020-07-16T13:34:59.076+01:00Some sort-of answers to a difficult question<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've been really sad and depressed about social media and online discourse recently. It has felt increasingly as if in the winner-takes-all attention economy of Twitter, any attempt to think or talk in anything but the argot of the dunk and the pile-on is just pointless: dissipated into the void, unremarked. It's like yelling into the abyss, except the abyss turns around and calls you a bigot.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But this afternoon something happened which made me remember what Twitter has going for it, and why however miserable it becomes I'm probably stuck there until it eventually collapses under the weight of its own financially non-viable business model: I saw a tweet that made me think. Like, really think. To where I wasn't satisfied with just reaching for the stock response to This Kind Of Tweet (of which there is a vast and ominously prescriptive lexicon by now), but kept thinking well, it's this - but also it's partly that, and then of course there's the other... And I'm grateful for the opportunity to think like that, because it's released something which either the pandemic or the political situation or both have had bunged up inside me like a bad case of constipation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway. Here is the tweet with the question that made me think, and below are what I think are possible answers to the question:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #8899a6; font-size: 12px; text-align: center; white-space: nowrap;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
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Why is it a courtesy to call people by their preferred pronouns and not doing so is sometimes called bigoted, yet calling people 'cis' when they don't want to be called that is not seen like that? <a href="https://t.co/1VT6EqZk4z">https://t.co/1VT6EqZk4z</a></div>
— Jeremy Duns (@JeremyDuns) <a href="https://twitter.com/JeremyDuns/status/1283716473005932544?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 16, 2020</a></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<b><u><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A sort-of answer No. 1:</span></u></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>It's about epistemological safety</b>: it is comparatively
easy to find out how an individual person wishes to be spoken about – you just
have to ask them. Regardless of their pronoun preferences, the speaker can feel
safe that they are not offending them by using those. Whereas with large
groups, or entire populations, like women, the answer is basically unknowable. You
can’t ask all women whether or not they find the term ‘cis’ offensive – for one
thing most of them would probably respond with a confused ‘huh?’, but for another,
there is a lot of very serious disagreement among women on this topic. So
anyone claiming to know for sure whether women as a whole find the term welcome
or alienating is going to pretty quickly get themselves into hot water, and find
themselves having to discuss instead the substantive issue of gender identity, whether
it is universal, how it operates, what obligations it places upon us etc. That
is not comfortable ground for the sort of person who by using preferred pronouns
and deploying the term ‘cis’ are essentially signalling their complete allegiance
to one side of that debate (or, to use the language current in those political
milieus, is in fact claiming that there can be no debate to begin with).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<b><u><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A sort-of answer No. 2:</span></u></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>It's because of sexism</b>: most of the people who
are called cis and most of the people who strongly object to being so called
are women. As I have written before, the issue of naming and categorising women
is not a mere formality but a profound, foundational element of the patriarchal
construction of women as lacking autonomous subjectivity. Where I think we get
a good example that it’s not really about the ‘what’ (pronouns, ‘cis’), but
about the ‘who’, is the very common occurrence of gender nonconforming women,
especially lesbians, having either male or plural pronouns applied to them,
regardless of how they say they prefer to be spoken about. In fact I know of
anecdotal cases within my acquaintance of lesbians being berated for strongly
asserting their preference to being seen and referred to as women. Partly this
is because the assertion of this kind of preference by a female person is seen
as threatening to the patriarchal assumptions underlying most political
interactions even inside feminism, but partly it’s also about the next point,
which is:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<b><u><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A sort-of answer No. 3:</span></u></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>It's an expression of people's prior ideological commitments</b>: people
who use this sort of language are adherents of a pretty comprehensive
ideological view. It encompasses a really broad spectrum of ideas and beliefs people
have about themselves, and when spelled out is actually pretty worrying in its
presumptions. This ideology, which I haven’t seen described in anything but quite
derisive ways that don’t take it seriously, actually has really noble aims: it’s
about equality, justice, restitution, respect. And they’re all aims that liberalism,
on the surface shares, and Marxism at least respects as existing alongside the class
struggle, but which both ideologies have just completely failed to deliver. So it’s
actually not unreasonable to look at the mess that was the 20<sup>th</sup>
century and think: “you know what, this is not primarily about liberty and not
primarily about the economy. We get the bad
outcomes of liberty only for some, and of an economy that only delivers
results for a minority of people, all in spite of the ambitions of liberalism
and Marxism. And it makes sense to attribute those failures and those perverse
outcomes to something that’s really inherent to people, something deep in human
nature that just exists and the only way of getting better outcomes is to
grapple with those deep things and get them out into the open”. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m not unsympathetic
to these impulses, but there is a runaway element to the investigation which I
think is not being grappled with. We are piling up identities, everyone
fragmenting into further and further pieces of what constitutes their real
self, like Voldemort creating horcruxes: I am a woman, and I feel my Jewishness
in a way that’s quite salient to me, but these days I’m supposed to also think
of myself as cis, and as white, and as an immigrant, and as heterosexual, and
as employed, and as childless (or child free, depending who you listen to – and
if you think the cis wars are gruesome, you haven’t seen anything), and as
having a class (probably middle), and as Israeli or British or Russian
depending on which part the person prodding for an answer is most curious
about, and as a Karen, and frankly I don’t even know what else but I am not in
control of the list and therefore no longer in control of my sense of self. And
again, I’m someone who, as a feminist, a believer in the political salience of sex,
is quite sympathetic to the political aims of the ideology that got us to this
dead end. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Or maybe the correct metaphor is not a dead end or a dead drop, but a
vast river delta: a diffuse and shifting vastness of rivulets, pools and sandbanks
that dissipates almost imperceptibly into the sea without there being a clear
sense of arrival, of completion. That political wetland isn’t just ineffectual,
it’s also really scary to a lot of people who refuse to subscribe to the
ideology and therefore its aims for that reason. And the people who do
subscribe to us get very angry, because if you don’t agree with them then surely
you must be against justice, against diversity, against wellbeing and
flourishing and acceptance for all. Which is why they insist that when you refuse
to use one of the linguistic tokens of the broader ideology, that must make you
a bad and bigoted person, where when they themselves use those linguistic
tokens overzealously or wantonly or against people’s stated wishes, then that’s
probably mostly OK, because they are doing it out of good motives, and their ultimate
intentions are positive.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">***</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I think if you sat down and really talked honestly and with complete empathy and authenticity to people, these are the kinds of things you would come up with. I think only the middle one - unacknowledged sexism - is completely bad. Both the standpoint theory claim of believing people about their own experiences and the identitiarian progressivism claim of solving political conflicts by bottoming out on who people really are come from a completely good place that I respect. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I still fucking hate being called 'cis'.</span><br />
<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #8899a6; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: center; white-space: nowrap;"></span>Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-24845506947735967202020-02-16T08:59:00.001+00:002020-02-16T12:06:12.815+00:00Some observations on the differences between femaleness and womanness<span style="font-size: large;"><b> </b></span><br />
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<b><u><span style="font-size: 18pt;">A non-exhaustive list of what it means to be a woman:</span></u></b><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Being interrupted more during conversation
and at work; having a statistical chance of being paid less for the same work
performed by a man; having one's pain not believed by medical professionals and
taking seven years on average to have pain conditions properly diagnosed;
having a high lifetime chance of suffering sexual assault; having a high
lifetime chance of suffering intimate violence; having one's clothes and
appearance relentlessly policed; spending more money and time than men to
achieve a presentation that is considered professional; paying more for lower quality
and less well-fitting clothes than men; being called on less in educational
settings; having to overcome implicit, explicit and institutional biases about
our innate abilities and talents in educational settings; being much less likely
to have either celebrity or closer role-models who look and dress like us in
positions, either professional, political or social, of power and influence;
being offered predominantly sexualised role-models that emphasise our role as
objects of desire for men than any other quality or capability; being highly unlikely
to have role models of any kind who deviate from the white, able-bodied and
youthful ideal of desirability; being expected to minister to men's feelings
and either control, absorb or be blamed for violence performed by them; having
to undertake the majority of child-rearing labour; being expected to perform
more housework than men and being blamed, openly or implicitly, if the
cleanliness, tidiness and aesthetic appearance of our living quarters do not
meet the arbitrary standards set by our social milieu; assuming responsibility
for the wellbeing and medical treatment of any children, adult men, or elderly
people in our immediate or in-law families; being likely to have much lower
lifetime earnings due to the burden of the above responsibilities; being likely
to hold significantly less inherited or earned wealth than men; having a much
higher chance of falling into old age poverty due to the above factors; having
our testimonies of discrimination or abuse disbelieved by individuals and
institutions; being held to a much higher standard than men when we perform
journalistic, activist or academic work which aims to demonstrate and analyse
the above list of disadvantages; being required to subordinate the struggle for
the elimination of these disadvantages to political movements that include, and
therefore prioritise, men; being punished and threatened with expulsion from
our own political movements when we insist on the priority of our struggle for
liberation as women.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<b><u><span style="font-size: 18pt;">A complete list of what
it means to be female:</span></u></b><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Producing, or having the kind
of body with the potential to produce, the large non-motile gametes in sexually
reproducing organisms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-37139543488020944012019-02-27T14:12:00.001+00:002019-02-27T14:15:28.307+00:00What does Dr 'James' Barry have to do with Satanic Panic?<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Xfc-_a_xhMk/XHabb1Jz6JI/AAAAAAAAFKc/KTv9ES5NAc017dBCIubS87Nj7yM1t47zQCLcBGAs/s1600/satan%252B-%252B9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="500" height="238" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Xfc-_a_xhMk/XHabb1Jz6JI/AAAAAAAAFKc/KTv9ES5NAc017dBCIubS87Nj7yM1t47zQCLcBGAs/s320/satan%252B-%252B9.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Tweeter <a href="https://twitter.com/lascapigliata8/status/1100721135749160960" target="_blank">@lascapigliata8</a> today shared a 2013 paper by Dr Richard Noll in the journal Psychiatric Times discussing the so-called ‘Satanic Panic’ of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s from the point of view of someone who was, at the time, a sceptic. Noll’s main thrust is that since the panic subsided and the diagnosis of ‘multiple personality disorder’, along with ‘recovered memories’ of extreme and ritualised sexual abuse subsided in the 1990s, the psychiatric profession has done its best to pretend like none of it ever happened. He offers and account of the main events from inside the profession and expressed a hope that psychiatrists may now be ready to discuss the issue rather than shuffling their feet and change the subject (I see no evidence to support such an expectation). Scapigliata, in turn, uses the paper to draw parallels with the development and spread of the diagnosys of ‘gender identity disorder’ in ever-younger children, the huge spike in such cases referred and diagnosed over the last decade or so, and the blanket social acceptance of GID as both real and treatable.<br />
<br />
Looking at the paper with a historian’s eye, however, what stood out to me was the following passage, about how history was tendentiously reinterpreted to explain the mushrooming of ‘Satanic’ abuse cases as something which has, had we but known, always been there:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘Sally Hill, a social worker in private practice in Chicago, and Jean Goodwin, a psychiatrist and professor of medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, presented a paper which attempted to validate Braun’s claims by citing historical accounts of allegations of “the Satanic black mass” and other obscene cult behaviors going back to at least A.D. 100. Reproducing these accounts without regard to context, these clinicians read them as fundamentally true reports of actual events. Professional historians who specialize in those eras tend to interpret such material as a discourse of propaganda aimed at undesirable minority groups, whether real or imagined. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A few months later, in March 1989, this conference paper was published in Kluft and Braun’s journal, Dissociation. It quickly became a citation success in the SRA literature as evidence in favor of the historical continuity of Satanic cults and their rituals. The message to the public and the mental health professions was clear: elite members of the American psychiatric profession seemed to be sanctioning the SRA moral panic. Satanic cults were probably real, had probably been around for almost 2 millennia, and were abusing children and creating the MPD [multiple personality disorder] epidemic.’</blockquote>
<br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oqPEnvEVIMw/XHaaGZhJi9I/AAAAAAAAFKA/cp0ayaTlrUsfi4x3lVcza5LSao2yp34UgCLcBGAs/s1600/D0WYLSXXcAAjTY1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="541" data-original-width="1200" height="144" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oqPEnvEVIMw/XHaaGZhJi9I/AAAAAAAAFKA/cp0ayaTlrUsfi4x3lVcza5LSao2yp34UgCLcBGAs/s320/D0WYLSXXcAAjTY1.jpg" width="320" /></a>Compare this to<a href="https://twitter.com/littlebrown/status/1100453326431416321" target="_blank"> an announcement</a> from publishing firm Little, Brown and Co about a forthcoming novel about the life of Dr 'James' Miranda Barry, a woman who pretended to be a man in order to pursue her ambitions as a medic, and who incidentally performed the first caesarean section in which both mother and baby survived (representation matters kids!). Under the guise of ‘sensitivity’, the pronouns used for Dr Barry are, presumably, to be changed to the masculine, and her cross-dressing reinterpreted not as an expedient but as an expression of a deeply felt inner identity as a man (who just happened to fancy being in a profession that no woman could aspire to at the time). How such a history of the life of Dr Barry can be made coherent is not explained: surely the novel will have to be completely re-written if the very crux of the story is not ‘woman does whatever she needs to to become a doctor’ but ‘doctor bravely lives out inner gender feeling in the face of, well, not that many professional or economic obstacles, really’.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u8oKrYr2_AQ/XHaaOpH8-5I/AAAAAAAAFKE/D-96s5uA3cElesJDmm5hOMCvJyOO_fJvQCLcBGAs/s1600/Seated_Statue_of_Hatshepsut_MET_Hatshepsut2012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="597" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u8oKrYr2_AQ/XHaaOpH8-5I/AAAAAAAAFKE/D-96s5uA3cElesJDmm5hOMCvJyOO_fJvQCLcBGAs/s200/Seated_Statue_of_Hatshepsut_MET_Hatshepsut2012.jpg" width="165" /></a>Or again, see <a href="https://twitter.com/littlebrown/status/1100453326431416321" target="_blank">this tweet</a> by the UK branch of Amnesty International’s LGBT Network (they call themselves ‘LGBTI’, but the forced inclusion of intersex people is so enraging to me I simply refuse to participate in their nonsense), where they imply that Hatshepsut, who usurped her son’s power and ruled as the Egyptian king for over 20 years, is trans because she was born a woman (she was born a baby, but OK) but ‘presented herself as a king’. The fact that no alternative framing suitable to female power existed in either the language or social organisation of Egypt at the time does not figure: it is again the case that a king happened to be trans, rather than that a woman happened to be king. (<b>Not </b>‘Pharaoh’. That word did not come into usage until ~300 years after Hatshepsut’s reign, and so is entirely inappropriate and anachronistic. And yes, this is the hill I will die on, why do you ask).<br />
<br />
In both these cases history is being re-written in order to explain something which is happening in the present yes – but it is also being re-written so as do disguise something else which is happening in the present, something which the medic-psychiatric establishment is incapable of either confronting or solving, and which it therefore prefers to invisibilise through inventing and back-dating an alternative interpretation of contemporary manifestations of distress. In fact, of course, neither satanic rituals nor trans identity are long-ignored historical phenomena. Both are contemporary creations of psychiatric patients, in whose delusions psychiatric professionals end up colluding, and which collusion in turn they mask with the trappings of institutional power and official reification.<br />
<br />
Psychiatrist and social workers in the 1980s and 90s knew, on some semi-conscious level, that sexual abuse of children and young people was rife, especially in religious contexts. Now, thirty years later, we have the evidential basis for this knowledge: the Jimmy Saville revelations, the ongoing and continuing exposés of rape grooming gangs from Rotherham to Rochdale to Oxford, scandals in children’s homes, and of course, overlaying and underpinning it all, the record of systematic enabling and cover-up of sexual abuse of children by Catholic (and other) priests. In 1989, nobody could prove this stuff. Like Freud and his short-lived recognition that ‘hysteria’ in women was a response to rape, 20th century psychiatrists shied away from looking their society square in the face, and sublimated their suspicions of widespread rape of children in lurid accounts of satanic rituals.<br />
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Psychiatrists, educators, social workers and GPs today know perfectly well that children are miserable living in the gender apartheid, the rigidly segregated world of pink and blue, the cleaving of children from their own interests and personalities by fiat of a McDonald’s Happy Meal or a Kinder egg that we force them to grow up in. We are bringing up children, literally, in aisles: narrow corridors of circumscribed choices with no exits, too tall for children to see over the top of to the possibilities in the neighbouring, differently-coloured valley. Simultaneously, we feed them a diet of extreme sexualisation, constant surveillance through electronic devices, a consumerism-first-and-only approach to personal development, and a built and online environment saturated in images of masculine violence and feminine malnourished passivity. Of course children hate living like this. Of course many of them express their desire to break out of this prison. But, acculturated to the toy shop aisle in the mind, professionals and well-meaning parents can think of only one place to the send them: the other-coloured aisle.<br />
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Future studies and historical accounts will, I am absolutely certain, view the extreme gendering of the public and consumer sphere with the same uncomprehending derision as we view the slap and tickle ‘humour’ of the 1970s and 80s that camouflaged and legitimised the huge number of children and young people, mostly young women, victimised by men in positions of power or even mild relative cultural authority. They will likely also point to online pornography as a major vector of mental ill health, self-victimisation, trauma, and damaging and violent practices moving from the screen into the lives of young people. Whether anyone will be making the connection between that and the spike in GID that followed, I do not know. The author of the above paper does not make the connection between actual, existing sexual abuse of children and the willingness of professionals to believe in historical, imagined abuse. Perhaps in the future it will continue to be easier to pretend that the two phenomena were unrelated; that the complete capitulation of psychiatry to the ideology of gender identity was an unexplainable instance of social contagion, best studied in its turn in psychoanalytical terms.<br />
<br />
To this likely future, I say, no: satanic panic, MPD, false memories – these were all ways to channel the fear of people in the caring professions, and to allay their guilt at not being able to protect their patients from the effects of untrammelled sexual predation. And GID and the medicalised pathway increasingly pushed on teenagers (especially girls – also always over-represented among MPD patients) are a contemporary way for them to divert responsibility from themselves, as adult citizens in the society that harms these young people and makes their own bodies unliveable for them, to some internal flaw in the children themselves – one that can be medicated away. And no amount of re-writing ancient history will prevent it from having been a thoroughly modern story all along. A story about the pains, humiliations, traumas and struggles of today – not of comfortably alien Victorian England, or of ancient Egypt, slumbering under the desert sands. To help young people struggling to live with and in their bodies, we must look to today’s world, or risk ruefully wondering thirty years from now what mass madness had overtaken us.<br />
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-76004028085920651512019-01-22T17:05:00.004+00:002021-01-02T14:15:27.747+00:00'The freedom to be, or become, a gender'<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="para1"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><i><b><span style="color: #073763;"> </span></b></i></span></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="para1"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><i><b><span style="color: #073763;">[W]hat does not change is the importance, even the centrality, <o:p></o:p></span></b></i></span></a></div>
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<i><b><span style="color: #073763;"><span style="mso-bookmark: para1;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">of gender in any individual’s sense of self.</span></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></b></i></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><i><b><span style="color: #073763;">--
Baroness Hale, President of the Supreme Court</span></b></i></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">In 2016, writer Sara Ahmed <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1363460716629607">interviewed</a>
American academic Judith Butler for the journal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sexualities</i>. The interview meanders around various topics, such as the
formation and performance of sexual identity and the construction and institutional
boundary policing of academic disciplines, but rebounds repeatedly off the
central item of interest to both interviewer and interviewee – namely, Butler
herself. In response to a question about professional, academic vulnerability, Butler has
this (among much else) to say about how early in our lives we become vulnerable
to the labels and expectations of others.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="color: #073763;">If,
for instance, we think about gender assignment as ‘being called a name’ then we
are affected by gender terms before we have any sense of what they mean or any
understanding of what kind of effects they have. Indeed, this follows, I think,
from the fact that we are affected by the ways we are addressed, and those
modes of address start early and against our will; they are there, as it were,
from the start. </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #073763;">Sometimes those modes of
address embrace and animate, but they can inaugurate a chain of injury as well.
</span><o:p></o:p></b></span></i></blockquote>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">In this passage, the labels and
expectations that matter to Butler are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gendered</i>.
On Butler’s view, our vulnerability is universal, but not everyone who is
vulnerable (i.e. subject) to gendered modes of address is injured by them. A
problem arises, for Butler, not with gendered terms, but with the imposition of
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">incorrect</i> gender terms. On that
view, I am not intrinsically harmed, there is no injustice done against me, by
the imposition of certain gendered terms of naming which go on to shape and
channel my psychological development; I can only claim to have been so harmed
if I grow up to strongly disidentify with the specific terms assigned me. To put
it more plainly: if someone calls me a bitch, that is an injustice only inasmuch
as I strongly feel I ought to have been called a bastard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XIqUnrklo5o/XEdNB7Rl9jI/AAAAAAAAFEM/uVbGd6VNPIo2_h2VeVOlOzuTXX-0BNVkgCLcBGAs/s1600/butlerpope.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="398" data-original-width="659" height="193" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XIqUnrklo5o/XEdNB7Rl9jI/AAAAAAAAFEM/uVbGd6VNPIo2_h2VeVOlOzuTXX-0BNVkgCLcBGAs/s320/butlerpope.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">This line of thinking is again plainly
evident in Butler’s <a href="https://t.co/OpjqrSBbV3" target="_blank">recent New Statesman piece</a>, where she repeatedly references
‘gender freedom’ as the ability to choose one’s gender: ‘one may be born a
female, but become a man.’ The problem, on this view, is that we ought not to
force gendered modes of address on children and young people because we don’t
know whether they will grow up to identify with the terms we choose (typically
the terms aligned with their sexed body). We should wait and find out from the
child themselves how they choose to identify in future.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">This approach seems perhaps eccentric
but basically innocuous: what’s wrong after all in not imposing our ideologies
on infants? But it betrays a way of thinking about gender that is not simply
misguided, it is deeply injurious to the absolute majority of people –
especially women – who don’t go through a process of pointedly rejecting their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">identification</i> with the feminine gender
and don’t take steps to switch to the opposite, masculine gender (become men)
or to the still ill-defined and ambiguous “non-binary” identification. To illustrate
by analogy:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Say you happen to be a Nazi bureaucrat
during the 1930s in Germany. If, as part of your administrative role, you slap
a yellow star on a non-Jew, the injustice does not reside in the
misidentification. The non-Jew might object that he is ‘not one of those people’
and feel aggrieved – they have been, to use a parallel construction to ‘misgendered’,
‘mis-raced’. From outside the logic of Nazism, however, we see that the problem
here is not that there are ‘those people’, the abject and inferior ones, whom
it is our responsibility to correctly sort into the proper category in order to
achieve a just disposition of racial identity. The injustice, instead, resides
is the existence of a system of thought that divides people into castes, and a
system of symbols that enforces the division. If you wanted to make sure that
no non-Jews were ever injured by being forced to wear a yellow star, you'd
abolish the yellow star.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">If you keep the system but enact a
bureaucracy to help non-Jews avoid the injury of being forced to wear a yellow
star, you're not protecting them from harm: you are legitimising a system in
which their humanity can be abolished by a piece of yellow (or pink, or red) cloth.
Similarly with gender, if you protect gender as a system, but enact a
bureaucracy to help some people avoid the injury of being coerced into a
specific status, you are seeking to protect the hierarchy in which some
people's humanity can be abolished by perceived reproductive potential. And yet
the demand Butler reiterates in her NS piece is for ‘the freedom to be, or
become, a gender.’ The system, overall, remains unreformed - but a certain
amount of movement is permitted between categories. This is the epitome of
confusing movement with progress.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">In other words, gender theory is
not a solution to the problems of coercive gender, but merely a loophole. A
loophole that allows some people to opt out of gendered expectations and
judgements at the price of people's humanity remaining held cheap. Because if
there is no greater majority – or at least some stable group of people – who live
the normative gender expectations to the full, including the physical and
psychic violence that makes them legitimately subject to, there can be no subversion
of a repressive norm such that ‘gendered life can be an expression of personal
or social freedom.’ There is no need for a bureaucracy that, in Butler’s terms,
would help avoid injury for the few people who feel they have been harmed
through mis-designation to the wrong gender category. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="color: #073763;">At
issue as well is a question of autonomy, conceptualized not through
individualism, but as an emergent social phenomenon: how do I name myself, how
can I establish my status within the law or within medical institutions, and to
what extent will my desire to live as a particular gender or within an
established gender category be honoured by those who claim to ally with me but
who position themselves against my desire to be named and recognized a certain
way?</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Now clearly, if you conceive of
yourself as an autonomous individual in a world of autonomous individuals,
there is no problem there: in theory <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everyone</i>
could use the loophole described above. But once that move is made, one
forfeits the right to speak and think about ‘political freedom’, as Butler does.
Because politics exists only between connected, embedded people. There is no politics
of one. Conceptually, an ethic that depends on atomisation for its enactment
has no business claiming the mantle of ‘justice’, let alone ‘social’.
Pragmatically, the escape hatch of transition-for-some only embeds others more deeply
in a system of violent repression.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Butler’s conception appears to be that
oppression, at its root, is an injury to the self: the nature of oppression is
in that it limits the individual from expressing their authentic self. This is
in contrast to the traditional conception of oppression as a material framework
of deprivation or curtailment which limits people’s ability to live a maximally
flourishing life in material and economic terms such that they can, within that
enabling framework, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">choose</i> to
actualise their self. It’s a kind of inverted Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with
food, shelter and security taking a lower rung to self-actualisation and
fulfilment. In the example of Nazi Germany, the reason that the injustice, for
Butler, would properly reside in the non-Jewish person being made to wear the
yellow star is that they are being denied the freedom to ‘have their desire to
live as a particular race within a system of race’ is respected. The properly
Jewish person – in Butler’s conception, the person who ‘self identifies’ with
Jewishness without coercion – is left to their own devices: there is no place
in the self-actualisation framing to decry the fact that their material
wellbeing, their right to work and participate in civic life, is being
curtailed: the key moment of oppression is not in what a system does to you,
but what it calls you while so doing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">The current debate about the amount of
movement that should be allowed to individuals within a violently oppressive
system – gender – is a distraction from any consideration of reforming or even abolishing
that system. The ease and rapidity with which our institutions of power – epitomised
by the epigraph to this post, which is a quotation from <a href="http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2017/72.html">this</a> Supreme Court
judgement regarding a transgender woman’s right to contact with her Orthodox
Jewish children – have adapted to accommodate gender ideology should add a
pinch of salt to any claims about its revolutionary potential. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">As linguist Deborah Cameron <a href="https://debuk.wordpress.com/2019/01/03/2018-the-year-of-the-war-of-the-w-word/?fbclid=IwAR02RDTv_Wgv9pUboHAQOQTEdpkjH5iVGf9qTvf3APDHUNeXHGzKuL8oCdA">notes</a>,
while we argue about who should and shouldn’t be called a woman, the assumption
that men are the default human beings is going entirely unchecked – and ‘a
gender revolution that does not challenge the default status of men is not a
feminist revolution.’ While Pope Francis calls for gender essentialism and Judith
Butler calls for ‘gender freedom’, feminists should, and do, call for complete liberation
from gender and its attendant coercive apparatus. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-12668835938093714082019-01-10T15:43:00.001+00:002019-01-10T15:57:28.991+00:00First, catch your hare: on biological explanations for differences in sex roles<br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i> </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>‘A knife is a weapon or a tool according to whether you use
it for disembowelling your enemy or for chopping parsley’<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b><i>Elaine Morgan</i></b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b><i>“Would innate psychological variation (on average) between
the sexes be incompatible with radical feminism? If there was a degree of such
innate variation, what would the implications be for radical feminism and
gender criticism?”</i></b></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When faced with this question (or something very like it – I had
the original questioner help me reconstruct the phrasing) last week, I swerved
in what was probably an infuriating way and said that not only is the question
itself not answerable with current knowledge, it is ‘une question mal posée’ –
a question which interrogates premises that are themselves incorrect or
inconsistent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is important to understand what the main objection of
radical feminism to the social system of gender is. I have written about it
<a href="http://notazerosumgame.blogspot.com/2014/02/what-gender-is-and-what-gender-isnt.html" target="_blank">here</a>, but to summarise: the moral and political problem, for radical feminists,
rests not in men and women having different roles or exhibiting different
tendencies and behaviours, but the hierarchy of value that we have attached to
any perceived differences, before then naturalising those (perceived)
differences and making the value judgements a de facto class system. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I emphasise ‘perceived’ differences, because any
conversation about the average tendencies or capabilities of people rests on
observation of their behaviour. And the main problem with saying anything
definitive about gendered behaviours is that we don’t have any stable idea which
behaviours are which. In what follows below I attempt to demonstrate by example
that our collective judgements are simply too unreliable to be able to correctly
identify average variations between the sexes, never mind interrogate their origins.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Consider that when girls in childhood play with small anthropomorphic
figurines made from wood, plastic and fabric, we call them dolls. When boys play
with anthropomorphic figurines made of the same materials, we call them action
figures. When men use natural materials like marble or metal to create objects
of aesthetic value, we call it art. When women use natural materials like wool
or clay to create objects of aesthetic value, we call it craft. This is true
even in cases where men and women are using the same materials to create the same
types of objects: in traditional Moroccan practice, for example, weaving
carpets by hand is a women’s job but weaving fabric by hand is a men’s job. The
men’s job, because it is performed by men, who anyway control the majority of
financial resources, was more highly valued and more invested in, creating a
discrepancy in availability of materials and complex tools which led to the
development of the brocade industry. Brocades could then be made with silk and
gold thread (because the men making them had more capital to invest), making
them more lucrative and perpetuating the economic discrepancy. The result is
that carpet weaving is considered a crude domestic craft, but brocade weaving
is an elite industry. Both ‘roles’ involve putting threads in rows and then
pulling other threads through.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Nor do we demand consistency of ourselves when we tell
ourselves stories about why certain seemingly-related tasks are associated with
men and bring financial rewards, whereas other tasks are associated with women
and bring no financial benefits and the expectation of more free labour. Consider
the prevailing narrative of our prehistoric ancestors. Most lay people (and a
not-inconsiderable portion of experts, too) have a picture in their heads of a rigidly
segregated savannah on which men hunted and women gathered. Hunting was
dangerous and prestigious. Gathering was easy, opportunistic, and taken for
granted. The fact that at least as much knowledge must be invested in distinguishing
between ripe and unripe, or safe and poisonous plants, or knowing which parts
of the environment they favour in different seasons, is at least as great as
the expertise needed to track an animal to it lair. Or even the fact that
hunting is an uncertain activity and it is likely that gathering supplied the
majority of critical calories to the group and staved off starvation if hunting
failed. That’s low hanging fruit. Here are two much greater paradoxes with the
standard ‘<a href="https://aeon.co/essays/we-still-live-in-the-long-shadow-cast-by-the-idea-of-man-the-hunter">man
the hunter</a>’ narrative:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When we think of prehistoric hunting, we tend to think of
stuff like mammoths and bison – big game, basically. But the majority of
hunting done by hunter-gatherer groups is not running pell-mell after giraffes;
it is trapping (rabbits, monkeys etc.), netting birds or raiding their nests
for eggs, and fishing. That’s true of even modern hunters, who only do it for
fun. Many more people fish or rabbit course than ride to the hunt. This type of
hunting doesn’t require big time investments, stamina or going too far afield.
Certainly your average rabbit is not that much more exotic a foodstuff than
your average apple. And guess what, it turns out that women <a href="http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/BooksOnline/He3-95.pdf">did
a lot of this kind of hunting</a>, as you would expect – <a href="http://www.paleoanthro.org/static/journal/content/PA20080091.pdf">as well
as participating in the stereotypical big game kind</a>. You can certainly
check a couple of lobster traps with a baby on your back, or whatever limiting
function w imagine held women back from hunting (evolutionary vegetarianism,
perhaps?). Well, guess what again: when activities such as catching small rodents
were recorded among hunter gatherer groups, they were called… Gathering. Because
women gather, men hunt. So if a woman is doing it, it’s got to be gathering. I
haven’t heard of anyone calling climbing for coconuts ‘hunting’ just yet, but
what do you want to bet that someone somewhere has written about it as a more
complex, more intrepid, altogether more Manly activity than mere collection of yams?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">[Two examples of the above classification practice can be
found in <a href="http://jambo.africa.kyoto-u.ac.jp/kiroku/asm_suppl/abstracts/pdf/ASM_s33/6.%20Ngima.pdf">this
one paper</a> about the Bakola of the Congo region: while gathering is ‘reserved
mostly for women and children’, ‘the important tools regularly used for
gathering include machete, which functions at the same time as a weapon for
killing animals’ – but no mention is made of these animals being ‘hunted’
(earlier in the paper the author also talks about reptile meet being desirable
but mostly killed by happenstance upon bush clearing, another activity
undertaken by the ‘gathering’ women). Honey collection is classified as ‘gathering’
in the paper, but when describing the honey gatherer the author uses the pronoun
‘him’, without explaining what observations led to this seeming discrepancy
with other gathering activities. Other examples abound in the literature.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The second paradox has to do with agriculture. The standard
picture or the development of agriculture is that it was a technological
advance made by men. Certainly by the time the dust settled on the Agricultural
Revolution (if it can be said to have settled yet, which is by no means
certain), men in the majority of known cultures controlled not only the surplus
produce of farming, but the rights to declare ‘ownership’ of land and of the
people who work the land. Further: at some point before or during this process,
men have arrogated to themselves the right not just to farm vegetables, but to
farm people. By controlling and trading the reproductive potential of women,
men guaranteed not only the food supply, but the labour supply too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here’s a question nobody seems to ask: how the hell did they
do it? How on earth did men go from running after bison to knowing which
grasses had kernels that were good to eat and which were, well, grass? How did
they know which berries didn’t kill you and where in the forest they grew? How did
they know what the ground looked like above a promising bit of tuber, and how
deep to dig with their digging sticks? Did women write some sort of Neolithic
Encyclopaedia of Gathering and, I dunno, gift it to men?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The fact is that if we accept the man-the-hunter,
woman-the-gatherer narrative, we’re pretty tied up with the idea that the first
cultivators of crops – even in a small way, by clearing a few weeds around a
promising patch of vegetation – were women. That agriculture was invented by
women. Agriculture is possibly the greatest human revolution of all time, a way
bigger deal than writing or putting people in silly suits on the moon.
Agriculture changed the entire world, rearranged species, transformed or
destroyed or created whole ecological niches. And if we believe that women were
doing the less prestigious activity in the Palaeolithic, we have a pretty big explanatory
gap to fill with regard to how come they suddenly lost their interest in plants
by the Neolithic. It’s the carpet/brocade thing at wok again: whichever is the
more valorised and lucrative activity, it is instinctively ascribed to men.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">These two paradoxes are central to a wide complex of stories
we tell ourselves about the past (others are connected to things like pottery:
if women were in charge of cooking, they are likely to have been the nes to invent pottery, and therefore to have been the first to use kilns. Then why do we think the technical improvements to
kilns that set the stage for ore smelting were made by men?). The doll/action
figure duality is a problem with the stories we tell ourselves about the
present. But the inconsistencies in how we look at nature don’t just affect how
we look at human behaviour. We even gender basic inanimate processes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Everyone knows that sperm are mobile and eggs are motile,
and that sperm race towards the egg and all compete to be the ones who
fertilise it, right? Well now. What if I told you that the egg, sensible
creature that she is, actually sits there serenely and uses a complex
biochemical mechanism to first attract, then identify the most viable sperm,
and once identified, actively seizes and envelops it? The ‘<a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/choosy-eggs-may-pick-sperm-for-their-genes-defying-mendels-law-20171115/">choosy
egg</a>’ hypothesis is slowly beginning to gain ground among experts, and the
fact that it’s only happening slowly, on top of the fact that nobody has ever
thought to actually check what the egg does, from the beginning of
embryological science until now, tell a woeful story about not only our ability
to interpret what we see, but our willingness to even look.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I am a rationalist and a materialist; I believe in evolution,
in biology, in systematic archaeology and in careful evidence gathering as a
means of arriving at, if not The Truth, then at least a fair enough
approximation of a correct interpretation of reality to enable us to successfully
operate in the world and continue to improve people’s material circumstances. As
such the stories above are not a rejection of archaeology, or biology, or even
the toy industry (although the latter can go to its room and think about what
it’s done with regard to the Pink Apartheid of girls). But when people
challenge me to definitively say which parts of our behaviour are Nature and
which are Nurture, how much of sex difference in behaviour is capital-E Evolution and how
much is capital-S Socialisation, I always want to take them back to the
beginning and say: define 'behaviour'. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It’s only once we understand that we interpret
data through stories, and that those stories can be distorting, contradictory,
or absurd, that we can really start the work of picking through the evidence to
decide whether there even are significant behavioural changes between the
sexes. And it’s only once significant behavioural changes consistently isolated and defined that we can start asking ourselves, and developing the complex
methodologies for answering, the question ‘how much of sex difference is
genetic?’ Until then, we’re dealing with mythology, not fact. Mythology, let’s
be clear, is much more powerful than fact. That is why my personal efforts are
directed at busting the myths than ‘proving’ any new facts about women’s brains
or maths skills. And that’s why I give people annoying and seemingly evasive answers
to their reasonable-sounding challenges about sex difference.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-90487401861473533572018-11-20T12:27:00.000+00:002018-11-20T13:36:33.081+00:00It's always about toilets. It's never about toilets.<br />
When I was in fifth grade, we had a debate during ‘social hour’ (a weekly lesson with our main teacher, usually dedicated to discussing topics that touched on life and interpersonal skills) about whether it is OK for the popular kids to have class parties and only invite the other popular kids. An unpopular kid myself, I was squarely in the camp that demanded inclusion of all as a condition of membership in the micro-society that was my class. It seemed not merely unfair but frankly monstrous to me that lack of possession of this elusive, indefinable and rare quality, ‘popularity’ could prevent a child (namely, me) from being accepted as a full member, and on that basis excluded from communal activities. I was a pretty formidable debater even at ten years old, and my classmates and teacher had quite a job refuting my passionately expressed (ahem) arguments. Nevertheless, needless to say I lost that particular battle. People get to be friends with whomever they choose to be friends with; even people with otherwise circumscribed civil rights, such as ten year olds, cannot be mandated into recognition of non-existent affective relationships. Where this does sometimes happen – for example where children are pressured to be more affectionate than they are comfortable being towards relatives or friends of the family – progressive social observers usually see this as coercive in a way that not only disrespects the dignity of the child but exposes them to potential harms.<br />
<br />
We don’t get away from these issues as we age. One way or another, most of us at one time or another will have felt some resistance to what we perceived as ‘cliquishness’ in others, will have felt slighted by exclusion from an invitation we thought was our due, or will have resented not being asked to participate in activities or groups which we think our pre-existing social ties entitle us to inclusion in. it’s very hard to be made to feel like you’re not wanted. Harder still if you were an awkward child, one with limited social skills and few friends, a child who felt alienated and marginalised by more ‘successful’ children. Nevertheless, most of us grow up to understand the setting of one’s own and other people’s social boundaries as a fundamental entitlement. However much we might sneer at the shallowness and empty-headedness of ‘the popular girls’, and however we might privately agonise about our inability to penetrate ‘the clique’, few of us are ever actively moved to try and prescribe our own social inclusion through social sanction – much less, through the law.<br />
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In recent years, however, a new mega-clique has emerged, the contestation of whose right to exclude non-members has gone out of the realms of the interpersonal and into the national discourse of identity contestation. The ‘popular girls’ of the current political moment are not just any girls, or specific girls: they are all girls, or more specifically all female born people. I see my furious, righteously indignant ten year old self in much of the current debate about who does and does not get access to the spaces and categories designated ‘for women and girls’. The injury and the sense of injustice go hand in hand; one feels that one’s pain is exacerbated by an underlying fundamental act of discrimination, of deliberate and malicious erasing of how one sees one’s self. Faced with an open refusal to accept one’s own image as fact, the impulse to force the withheld acceptance is a powerful one. Most ten year olds – indeed, most of us in our everyday lives – do not have the material or discursive resources to force this shift in others' behaviour towards us. But some of us do, and some of us are currently trying to make the impossible demand that other people see us – genuinely, authentically see and perceive us – exactly as we see ourselves, into a legal mandate.<br />
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I took this photo in the shiny new Business School building of the University of the West of England. It designates the ‘all genders’ or ‘gender neutral’ or ‘unisex’ toilet, depending on who you ask: I think the administrators of the building simply gave up the looming linguistic battle and went for safer pictorial representation instead. The space thus designated is not, in fact, any single space at all: it is an area with no communal facilities, containing a series of identical doors which lead to identical cubicles, each containing a toilet, a basin and a hand dryer (I rather tipsily – I was there for an evening function – forgot to check for the presence or absence of sanitary bins).<br />
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Two things struck me about this arrangement. One was the way the pictorial designation of the space so perfectly mirrored everything I see as wrong with the concept of ‘equality’ as a progressive aim. In the name of ‘inclusivity’, here humanity is cleaved neatly into exactly two parts, each represented only by the most recognisable stereotype for one half of the mammalian order: the dress and the pair of trousers. Inclusion, this emblem implies, consists not in seeing and recognising each individual member of society for the unique set of capabilities, needs and ambitions they are, but in making proportional and sufficient space for the ambassadors of the generally recognised and rigidly delineated ‘types’. This is, in a single image, the ‘diversity problem’: the increasingly recognised fact that simply admixing members of under-represented groups such as The Disabled Person, The Woman of Colour, The Working Class Man etc. does not, in and of itself, ameliorate the underlying material challenges which underlie their under-representation in the first place. In fact this approach often risks either flattening the ‘representative’ into a stereotype or erasing their difference altogether, co-opting them into the norms and values dominant group while providing same dominant group with grounds for self-congratulation.<br />
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The other thing that struck me was the way in which the physical removal of a community space was presented as progress. This toilet block had no communal area at all; it offered privacy in isolation or nothing. No congress, no socially useful interaction can have been presumed to have taken place in the spaces which were once contained behind each of the two doors designated M and F. No space for solidarity can have been conceived of as necessary – only a private space for one’s private (and least socially shareable) functions. What such solidarity might have consisted in is either unknown to the designers of the new toilet block, or perceived by them as frivolous, unnecessary, or at the extreme of modern progressive thought, exclusionary (and therefore prejudicial or bigoted).<br />
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Solidarity that excludes those to whom it does not see itself as legitimately due is just as painful as friendship that is not extended those who see themselves as human beings worthy of it. Both wound the same fundamental part of our psyche which depends on the recognition and reflection of others to know and feel oneself as a fully realised subject. I am not tying the issue of toilets to my own ten year old outrage in order to belittle it: I am doing so in order to foreground the authenticity and depth of that pain.<br />
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There is a reason why feminists and trans activists at odds with each other always come back to ‘the toilet question’. And that reason is not, as is sometimes claimed, safeguarding. True, feminine males, non-passing trans men and trans women may be put at risk in male-only facilities. And true, the inclusion of males bodied people in hitherto female-only facilities represents a potential risk to women and girls. But if that were the only problem, the issue would be solved by gender ‘neutral’ toilets such as the one described above, or by the creation of what Holly Lawford-Smith & Emily Vicendese, in their <a href="https://conatusnews.com/gender-identity-preclude-male-violence-reply-finlayson-jenkins-worsdale/" target="_blank">recent response</a> to <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4090-i-m-not-transphobic-but-a-feminist-case-against-the-feminist-case-against-trans-inclusivity" target="_blank">earlier work</a> by Lorna Finlayson, Katharine Jenkins, and Rosie Worsdale, call ‘third spaces’: facilities located adjacent to all-female and all-male ones, targeted at trans, gender non-conforming, and gender non-binary people, but open for use by all. Lawford-Smith and Vicendese “see third spaces as a workable solution to the fierce debate over female-only spaces”, and reject the argument that the use of such spaces would force people to ‘out’ themselves as trans.<br />
<br />
That argument, as advanced by Finlayson et al. as an objection to third space provision, is indeed spurious. However it is spurious not because, as Lawford-Smith and Vicendese would have it, we could incentivise non-trans people to use such facilities in sufficient numbers that they mask the presence and identity of trans users, but because the original problem only arises in the first place for those who are self-outing as trans by virtue of their inability or unwillingness to pass. You can only out yourself as trans by entering an all genders bathroom if it is the case that you would be recognised as trans were you to enter an all-female bathroom. If we put aside the risk to trans people as a result of male violence in all-male spaces as a problem to which the reduction in all-female provision cannot ethically be the solution (as I think we must, and as almost no-one is), then the chances of a trans woman being challenged in or removed from and all-female bathroom by dint of not being female and the chances of her being ‘outed’ as trans by some feature other than which door she walks through are exactly statistically the same. And yet Finlayson et al. do advance that argument, and Lawford-Smith and Vicendese engage it on its own terms.<br />
<br />
Both teams of writers are, I think, distracted by the safeguarding rhetoric, and overlook the psychological structure of the original claim that led to the contestation they are engaged in. The reason that third spaces – or indeed gender-neutral spaces of the type I described above – are repeatedly rejected by trans activists as impractical, unworkable, unnecessary, offensive etc. is because what is being truly, fundamentally demanded is not access to plumbing: it is access to solidarity and recognition.<br />
<br />
It is not incidental, and has never been incidental, to the structure of this discourse, that it is these quotidian, ubiquitous resources that are the first, the main and the enduring locus of contestation, of demands for access and refusals to grant it. The concerned mothers and the terrified trans women (much as both have something genuine and frightening – namely, men – to be concerned about) are in reality contesting not the practical question of who should be able to enter female toilets, but the much harder one of who should be seen as having a right to do so.<br />
<br />
The shared space of a female toilet has a long-term cultural status as a venue for tantalising female mysteries. Those not allowed access to them are forever wanting to know what goes on inside: why do you always go in groups? What do you talk about in there? Do you do each other’s makeup? Are you talking about us?! Incel and MRA communities have hilariously lurid fantasies not only about the illicit activities (read: ones that exclude men) which women get up to in the loo, but also the luxurious facilities and undeserved comfort with which they are provided at the expense of men’s. A hard-won resource that enables the participation of women in the public sphere, sex-specific toilets were a contested and potentially threatening space from the earliest days of public sanitation.<br />
<br />
Entrance into these very spaces – not inferior versions which have all the practical accoutrements but lack their most vital feature, the entrance-by-recognition requirement – is what is at stake.<br />
The kind of pragmatic and generous all-inclusiveness proposed as a practical solution to what is a recognition problem by Lawford-Smith and Vicendese is the opposite of what is being really, genuinely demanded by trans activists and their allies. All-inclusiveness or gender neutrality are like a school dance organised by the teachers: not the same thing at all. Sure, you come and you dance and all the popular kids are there and they have no choice but to share a space with you, but you have not gained entrance into their ranks. You’re still an angry little girl they laugh about in private: not recognised for the interesting and valuable human being you know you are inside.<br />
<br />
But it is impossible to mandate recognition. Not impossible as in ‘wrong’ or ‘illegal’, but literally impossible. We do not control the insides of other people’s heads. If we want to be seen by others for what we think we truly are, we have no choice but to be that person as well and as hard as we can, and hope for them to recognise us. And as angry as this makes people, as unfair as it seems, as absolutely contrary to the simple – for many but not all - fact that Trans Women Are Women, this cannot change.<br />
<br />
I will give the last word to <a href="https://twitter.com/Kinesis" target="_blank">@Kinesis</a>, a trans woman who made some of the <a href="https://twitter.com/Kinesis/status/1062872297143336960" target="_blank">best observations</a> about assimilation, acceptance, recognition and allyship I’ve seen in a while on Twitter: “We need support. But true support, the kind that actually helps, never comes from people who feel forced into placating you. It doesn’t work.”<br />
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-60696327607491562452018-03-16T12:51:00.001+00:002018-03-16T12:51:44.937+00:00What's in a word? Why I don't care and neither should you<br />
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Last night I attended an
excellent panel discussion organised by the redoubtable <a href="https://womansplaceuk.org/" target="_blank">Woman’s Place UK</a>, on
the subject of the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to allow
for legal sex changes to be certified by the state on the basis of self-certification
or, also known as self-declaration. Self-certification is being demanded by (some)
transgender rights organisations as a replacement for the current system of
medical diagnosis and social transition followed by approval by a special government
panel. I oppose these changes, but will not rehash my objections to them here. The
WAPOW <a href="https://womenanalysingpolicyonwomen.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/women-only-spaces-and-proposed-changes-to-the-equality-act-and-gender-recognition-act/" target="_blank">submission</a> to the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee
Transgender Inquiry is still a relevant and useful resource to understand some
of these objections.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The atmosphere in Birmingham last
night was collegiate, inclusive, and for the most part optimistic, which made
me really happy. There was, however, disagreement, not among the panel funnily
enough, but between the panel and the audience, about a point made by the first
speaker, <a href="https://rebeccarc.com/" target="_blank">Dr. Rebecca Reilly-Cooper</a>, about the importance – or as you shall see,
lack thereof – of the focus on the term “woman” and the question of who is and
is not a “real” woman. This is a question that exercises both feminists and
trans thinkers, and views range from the patently circular “a woman is
anyone who says they are a woman, therefore anyone who says they are a woman is
a real woman” to the more intuitively compelling but nevertheless
unsatisfactory “a woman is an adult human female and an adult human female only”.
I understand from reports on social media and from friends who attended that a feminist event held the previous night in Parliament to discuss similar issues took the latter claim very seriously, and that
strong points were made in support of the position that we must never relinquish
our identity to activists seeking to colonise the language of womanhood. It’s a
very live topic, in other words. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I was one of what seemed like a
minority in the room to agree with Rebecca that the preoccupation with this
issue of terminology is a tactical mistake; furthermore I believe that is a
political irrelevance. Given that this is such an important issue for many of
my sisters, I thought I ought to set out my arguments in support of this view. To
wit, my conviction rests on two pillars:<o:p></o:p></div>
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I.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The critical underlying
contention of anti-feminist and anti-woman thinking is not that women aren’t
really female or biology is not a thing or that penis can be non-male: it is
that <i>women do not have a coherent existence as a political class</i>. This contention
is age old and absolutely not an innovation of the trans debate. As Gerda
Lerner points out in her seminal <i>The Creation of Patriarchy</i>, one of the main
deprivations inflicted upon women by patriarchy is the denial of history: not
only is the telling of human history monopolised by men and the cast of
characters largely male, but women are seen as not having any intergenerational
continuity that could be woven together into a history in the first place. We
are cast as material, fleshy, and of the here and now. The illusion of the “naturalness”
of the reproductive function to which women have been forcibly limited is
maintained, among other things, by the insistence on the fact that there is no
shared womanity that is intergenerational, heritable, collective and narrative.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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A group without a shared history has
no shared identity, and no ability to organise as a class. The denial of
history serves <i>a deprivation of politics</i>: it shrinks women’s concerns to the
personal, the domestic and the individual. There is a reason why two concepts
were keystones of the 1960’s women liberation movement: “the personal is
political” and “women are a sex class”. Those women understood extremely well
that the first and most important obstacle to overcome when fighting for our
rights and liberation is the one that says there is no “we” and therefore no “our”.
What had been cast as the narrow personal concerns of atomised individuals is
in fact a large scale political injustice against a recognisable class. The fact
that this insight was both contested and incompletely inherited by future
generations of activists is substantially responsible for the parlous state we
now find ourselves in, whereby self-styled "feminist" men see our rights and
recognition of our humanity as personal favours they can bestow upon individual
women rather than a legitimate political demand of a class that makes up half the human race. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Even before the most recent bout
of contestation of language and definition we were, I believe, distracted from
the critical project of revitalising and strengthening the legitimacy of women
as a political constituency with diverse but interlinked demands and needs:
safety, dignity, personhood. Now that we are taking this already-diminished
momentum into contestation of language, we have fewer resources still to
spend on policy-driven demands such as universal childcare, proper operation of
the justice system, recognition and support of unpaid labour, the abolition of the sex trade, equal participation in reproductive effort as
far as possible by men and so forth. When we are fighting about what we are
called, or about what another group is allowed to call itself, our eyes are off
the ball and we risk missing (and I think <i>have</i> been overlooking) the danger of
having not the descriptive term, but the legitimacy of that critical starting
point, the “we”, kicked out from under us. It doesn't matter what anyone calls us; what matters is that we don't lose sight of the fact that there is an "us".<o:p></o:p></div>
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II.<o:p></o:p></div>
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On every step on the ladder of escalating
demands from people purporting to represent all trans individuals, there has
been an intense contestation about language. It is almost 5 years since <a href="http://fwsablog.org.uk/2013/08/08/three-objections-to-the-language-of-cissexuality/" target="_blank">I first wrote something</a> against using the term “cis”, and though I still believe it is a
degrading and victim blaming insult to women, I think that I was blind at the
time to the fact that objecting to it is a distraction activity from the
broader threat. “Cis” is now completely mainstream; it’s made it into the style
guides of the Guardian and the New Yorker, into government guidelines and court
judgements, into handbooks for clinicians and educators. The ship has sailed.
But the armada didn’t go home: the next battleground that opened up was about
the legitimacy of the word “female” (I am aware that there were additional skirmishes
along the way, but do not intend a full history of the language wars here). <o:p></o:p></div>
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Almost none of us had encountered the argument “binary
biology is outdated” or “humans have more than one sex, deal with it” before
about 2015. It just wasn’t a widespread thing. But when the battle over “cis”
was won, from the point of view of certain people whose priority is to encroach
upon the political cohesion and sense of solidarity of women, the war
continued. Us radfems tried every trick in the book to avoid falling into the
holes dug for us when describing women’s bodies: we used “natal women”, then “females”,
then “biological females”. Meanwhile at the other end of the spectrum usage shifted
from “cis women” to “non-men” to “uterus-bearers” and “lactators”. The
quicksand of allowable terminology never seemed to have a bottom.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Well, I’m calling it: there <i>is</i> no end
game to this arms race. The point of it is not to correct or perfect the
English language into some recognised ideal of inclusivity and
intersectionality, the point of it is to waste our time and energies on an
ever-escalating one-up tournament in which every time we think we’ve found a
new word that, will, at last, get us left alone, we get attacked again and have
to start over. Some feminists responded to this insight by planting their flag on the word “woman” and not budging: simply refusing to
acknowledge any changes in what is considered socially legitimate language, and insisting on the objective truth of the language we used in earlier decades.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I completely understand this
approach, and am very sympathetic to it. It is natural to think that,
regardless of where one is in a campaign, the original frontier is the one we
should never, ever have retreated from. But there’s a practical problem in trying to live by this dictum, because if the enemy is outside the walls of your city, it’s pretty tricky to
somehow sneak out and go back to defending the border of your province or
country; it’s just not where the war is, and you’ll be fighting shadows. </div>
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More importantly to me, however, is the fact that this particularly idiotic war is not of our choosing. I see us being like WWI soldiers, dying in the trenches for the sake of a few yards of muddy
flatland neither side is going to gain anything by possessing. I say (and this
of course is where the land war analogy breaks down irreparably, and a good
thing too): <b>let them have the bloody Somme</b>. Let’s just walk away from this
battlefield we didn’t chose and go back to working on what we need to be
working on: thinking and writing about women, our social and medical needs, our
subjective experience, our history; lobbying governments, cities, schools,
universities and hospitals to institute and enforce policies that are needed to
make the material conditions of our lives better; and being in sisterhood with
each other across our differences and disagreements. This war was designed from the start to be unwinnable by either side, because its ultimate purpose is not to gain ground but to bog women down in one place to prevent them from attacking more strategic positions.</div>
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You will notice, I hope, that
such a tactical retreat would by no means impede or slow down the fight against, to pick a current
example, the inclusion of self-declaration in any reform of the GRA or against the
removal of the single-sex services exemption in the 2010 Equality Act. The vital
work of protecting legislation which, as Debbie Hayton convincingly argued last
night, is also important for the safety and acceptance of trans people, does not depend on us all agreeing on the terminology we like best,
or on policing other people’s use of terminology to describe
themselves, however silly or even offensive we find those uses to be.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p>...</o:p></div>
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“Language creates reality” is the
natural terrain of postmodernists (#NotAllPostmodernists), queer theorists and dilettantes
too idle to reform anything other than what words other people get to use on
Twitter. It’s not where radical feminist should be making some desperate last stand.
It would make me very sad to see us not manage to move past this business of “who
is and isn’t a real woman whatever the hell that even means” to continue our work
of creating a world in which the patently real, objectively wonderful, commonsensically
recognisable political class Women can flourish and thrive.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-144780484050876072017-02-15T12:40:00.001+00:002017-02-15T14:05:24.990+00:00How do they know who to kill?<div class="MsoNormal">
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A video is doing the rounds, in which a white person with a lifetime of male
socialisation behind them – in other words, someone at the apex of human
privilege – gives great fanfare to the banal observation that science is an
activity rather than a phenomenon and that classification is the imposition of
more-or-less imperfect linguistic concepts on a more-or-less well understood
underlying physical reality. On the basis of this stoned undergrad level of
profundity, this person now exhorts us to lay aside our childish attachment to
the classifications “male” and “female” and admit that, given that sex is a
“social construct”, then it’s just frankly not real, and our attachment to
those categories is an old fashioned piece of bigotry that oppresses the
minority who wish it to be known that their sex tracks their gender.<o:p></o:p><br />
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There are several rejoinders that it is immediately tempting
to make to this muddle-headed claim. For example, one could pat the young
person on the head and reassure them that very few people today are such
through-going Platonists that they go about their days imagining that our
language described immutable categories based on underlying metaphysical Truth.
Or one could remind them that money is a social construct, too, but claiming that makes it unreal
wouldn’t help you at the till in the supermarket, haha. Or that “trans” come
from “transition”, and if there is no sex with which the gender of the person
is misaligned, then in what sense are they transitioning, and from what to what? And of course there's the perennial problem that saying "I don't judge gender by physique" is to feminism what "I don't see colour" is to racism (the latter is also based, by the way, on the sound observation that race has no underlying biological basis, first made to delegitimise so called "scientific" racism).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Good, if well worn arguments, but none of them is the one I want
to make today. Here is why I reject, with the greatest level of rhetorical
emphasis words can lend me, the self-serving pretence that sex is a meaningless
category, socially, medically or (especially) politically:<o:p></o:p></div>
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In her <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwoe_0gPGVQ" target="_blank">speech</a> at the Washington Women’s Match in January,
Gloria Steinem remarked that for the first time in history, there are now
fewer women than men in the world. I haven’t dug into the data, but it seems
like a reasonable extrapolation from a trend first analysed by Amrtya Sen in
the 1990’s. Back then Sen estimated that there was at least <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/12/20/more-than-100-million-women-are-missing/" target="_blank">one hundred million women missing</a> from the world – aborted before birth, killed in infancy, or dead through differential parental investment in food and medical
care. There is no reason to suppose that number has not continued to grow in the intervening decades. While Steinem’s point went very much uncommented on, it speaks to an absolutely monumental shift in human
demography. Men’s greater propensity to violence through war, as well as the greater spontaneous miscarriage rate of mal fetuses and the greater vulnerability of male neonates to disease, has always kept th ebalance of male to female people in the world more or less even (despite the fact that more male embryos are conceived than female ones). In the present day, a combination of economic and medical progress, coupled with absolutely no meaningful progress in the eradication of woman-hating, is tipping that balance: turning women into a minority as well as a disadvantaged group. The consequences of this are hard to predict, and probably don't belojng in this post; but there is no question that they will be extraordinary.<o:p></o:p><br />
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It seems to be almost too obvious to need pointing out
that dowry is a social construct; son preference is a social construct;
sex-selective abortion is a social construct; and patriarchy as a whole is a
social construct, Goddess help us. But anyone who can sit at the tippy-top of human
safety and luxury, the historical 0.1% of all humans since the pleystocene, and
lecture others that medical classification is actual violence, is just going
to shrug their shoulders and say that people shouldn’t do bad things anyway, so it's not their problem. Fine.<o:p></o:p><br />
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However. Here’s what I think anyone pushing the “sex is a social
construct and therefore it is up to me to decide if my reproductive organs are
male or female” has an absolute moral duty to account for: if sex is not a
“real” and meaningful political or economic category, on what basis did the
parents of the hundreds of millions of women and girls lost to femicide know who
to kill? This is not state mandated, low-resolution social engineering: each
individual family, each individual father, and sometimes mother, has made a
decision to abort <i>this</i> baby, but not <i>that</i> baby. Each individual village midwife
or grandmother or mother in law in a village somewhere has decided to take <i>this</i>
child and leave them by the side of the road to die, but not <i>that</i> child. These
people are not scientists and they are certainly not feminists. They didn’t get
their decisions out of a Janice Raymond book, so give me a fucking break, use your educated-beyond-its-capability brain for a second and<b>
think</b> about it: if sex doesn’t really exist, <b>how do they know who to kill</b>?<o:p></o:p><br />
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The organised killing of girl children is the greatest act of
murder in the history of humanity. No one has ever suffered more deliberate
elimination than the female neonate; not Jews, not soldiers in the WWI
trenches, nobody. It’s not genocide, because it is not an organised crime aimed
at eliminating a particular national group in order that a collective “Us”
should fare better. In some ways it’s worse than genocide, because each individual killing is
intimate, private, a unique rejection: I, me this real person in the world, do
not wish you, a potential or existing individual, to exist. The
hatred is tiny in each case, maybe not even a hatred at all, just a small
preference, a little nudge in a particular direction. And it has a basis. Is
that basis justified? Of course not. Is that basis immutable, or always diagnosed
correctly at first? Possibly, given the state of modern medicine, not. But does
that basis exist? Yes, yes it does. Because none of these killings are <i>random</i>. <o:p></o:p><br />
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Let’s say we live in some future world in which “gender
identity” has been identified as a real determining factor in physical and
psychological development, instead of the politically instrumentalised subjective feeling we
have every reason to believe it to be today. Imagine that in that world it is
possible to measure the gender identity of an embryo in utero, like it is
possible to examine their physical characteristics with ultrasound today. Do the
people who parrot the “sex is a social construct” cliché as if it were some
clinching “gotcha!” believe that in that world, those who practice femicide
today would agree to base their candidates for selective abortion or
infanticide on that reading, rather than the characteristics of the body? Never
mind whether that would make the mass murder OK. Just answer: do you think the
same people who kill girl children today will agree to switch to killing only
girl-identified children instead?<o:p></o:p><br />
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It's a rhetorical question. Nobody who is sufficiently invested in sex discrimination and the devaluing of women to kill babies gives a shit how you identify.<br />
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The obscenity of sitting on top of the technological,
economic and medical heap and lecturing those below that a thing that is
responsible for the deaths of literal hundreds of millions of women and girls <b>in our world today</b> should no longer be counted as a thing that exists because you’re
clever enough to have read the words “social construct” in some A Level paper
is beyond my ability to describe in words. I have nothing but contempt for the
person who recorded this video and for the self-styled “progressive” Everyday
Feminism team who are providing it with a platform. Brushing aside the most lethal characteristic any human could ever, and can ever possess in order to score some woke cookies off the back of
a few well-meaning white women in rich countries is not feminist. Frankly, it’s
not even really human.<o:p></o:p><br />
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-48109805021268476902016-11-04T13:25:00.001+00:002016-11-06T21:05:22.102+00:00"TERF" was always going to go mainstream<br />
So, <i>Glamour</i> went there. It printed a piece in which women are called "TERF".<br />
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It was inevitable that the word "TERF" will become mainstream. The feminists slammed with this "description" are the most unforgivable of activists: women who stand for women, as women, and women only. Women wihout a modifier, women as members of no class other than their own, women as completely divorced from any political association with men.<br />
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To cover its own profound and endemic misogyny, the Left allows certain kind of feminist activity - anti-racist, anti-homophobic - to flourish, so long as the gains from that activity are likely to benefit some men, too. And of course anything that <i>might</i> benefit some men in practice ends up benefiting <i>mostly</i> men - advantage flows up the power gradient, that's not news to anyone.<br />
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Radical feminism doesn't operate within that narrowly permitted sphere. It kicks at the traces: it says no, women as women and women only and with no relationship (mother, sister, daughter) or affiliation (black, gay, poor) with men of any kind we are worthy of political consideration, we have interests, we have rights, we have power, we have thoughts and talents and capabilities and we. Are. Oppressed. As women.<br />
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That a "women's" magazine (in reality, a publication whose aim and purpose is to inform the subordinate class about the terms on which its subordination is to be carried out) should be among the first mainstream media organs to legitimise a word that is used as a cover for lurid fantasies about inflicting snuff-like violence on these insubordinate, obstinate, monstrous women who continue to insist that "women" means something and that women matter, is not surprising. It's not even ironic. It's completely predictable.<br />
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Women's magazines exist to tell us what we are not allowed to be. Fat. Hairy. Ugly. Old. Ambitious. That a women's magazine should take it upon itself to thickly hint that one additional thing we are not allowed to be is partisans for our own political class - that we are not, in fact, allowed to insist that we are members of a political class that really exists and has a right to organise and agitate on its own behalf - is one hundred percent in accordance with the mission statement of such a publication. In a world in which it has become socially gauche to tell women outright that feminism will be stigmatised and punished, a workaround has been found: narrow the definition of permissible feminism down such as to exclude almost all serious political activity, then call women who don't conform names.<br />
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Oh but it's not a slur, says the (soon to be rather beleaguered I think) intern in charge of Glamour's Twitter account. It's a <b>description</b>. Well, "fat" is a description too. "Ugly" is a description. "Manhater" is a description. "Spinster" is a description. "Nasty woman", of course, is a mere description. I don't know quite how to break it to people whose jobs, ostensibly, are to choose and use words, but: how you choose to describe someone matters. And you've chosen to describe women in the oldest, hoariest way possible: as hateful harridans, eldrich witches whose inattention to men and their needs makes them a legitimate target for both symbolic and actual violence.<br />
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<br />Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com95tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-52109858383537839352016-01-28T15:56:00.001+00:002016-01-28T15:56:17.308+00:00The Olympics, Maria Miller, and sleeping under bridges<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Let me just say at the outset: I don't really care about sports all that much. I don't watch it, much less play it. The only reason I'm even talking about it now is because it's a hugely important aspect of modern culture, in terms of both the passion that individual people invest in it and the multi-billion part it plays in the global economy. But as a person, I don't really have a dog in this fight. I didn't even watch the Olympics when they were in he UK, meaning in my timezone and not at some outlandish hour in the middle of the night, so. </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Having cleared up any confusion about my Olympic aspirations, let's have a look at what <b>equality</b> in sports looks like for trans men and trans women. </i></span></div>
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The International Olympic Committee recently released the guidelines from its November "<a href="http://www.olympic.org/Documents/Commissions_PDFfiles/Medical_commission/2015-11_ioc_consensus_meeting_on_sex_reassignment_and_hyperandrogenism-en.pdf">Consensus Meeting on Sex Reassignment and Hyperandrogenism</a>", in which it asserts a commitment to "ensure insofar as possible that trans athletes are not excluded from the opportunity to participate in sporting competition". This is a pretty decent goal in and of itself, taken in isolation. It's not clear to me why the commission is especially concerned with trans athletes; even at the largest estimates, they constitute a tiny proportion of the population. The crossover between people who are trans and people who are good enough to try for the Olympic games must be infinitesimal indeed; but OK, it's the trendy minority right now, and the Caster Semenya case is still ringing in everyone's ears, so fair enough.</div>
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Having said all that, here are the guidelines that the Commission recommends for trans athletes to be allowed to enter competition under their declared gender:</div>
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<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Those who transition from female to male are eligible to compete in the male category without restriction.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Those who transition from male to female are eligible to compete in the female category under the following conditions:</li>
</ol>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The athlete has declared that her gender identity is female. The declaration cannot be changed, for sporting purposes, for a minimum of four years.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The athlete must demonstrate that her total testosterone level in serum has been below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to her first competition (with the requirement for any longer period to be based on a confidential case-by-case evaluation, considering whether or not 12 months is a sufficient length of time to minimize any advantage in women’s competition).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The athlete's total testosterone level in serum must remain below 10nmol/L throughout the period of desired eligibility to compete in the female category.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Compliance with these conditions may be monitored by testing. In the event of non-compliance, the athlete’s eligibility for female competition will be suspended for 12 months.</li>
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In short, trans men (who were born female) face virtually no restrictions on entering events as men; they get in practically on their own say-so. Trans women (born male) also get to compete in events on their own say-so, but there are some extra rules put in place to prevent mischievous declarations of womanhood, presumably to avoid cheating. <i>[Side note: if you think there is no cheating at that level of sport I have two words for you: Lance Armstrong]</i></div>
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If one is an equality-minded person who is not an expert in Olympic history, this ought to give one pause: why, one might ask, do trans women come under all of this extra suspicion? How is it fair to put additional burdens on trans women compared to trans men? Isn't this, when all is said and done, <i>sexist</i>? Or worse - isn't the Commission tacitly accusing trans women as a group of being especially mendacious? </div>
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These sorts of questions are often levelled, mostly in the form of accusations, at feminists (or rather <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/maria-miller-says-only-hostility-to-transgender-report-came-from-women-purporting-to-be-feminists-a6830406.html">"purported" feminists</a>, according to Maria Miller) who seek to have extra clarity and regulation around access for trans women to other previously female-only institutions, mostly services such as rape crisis centres, women's shelters, women's prisons and public changing rooms. The fact that little attention tends to be paid to trans men in what is sometimes derisively called "the toilet wars" is often offered as evidence of simple bigotry on the part of the people (nearly all of them women) who raise these concerns rather than allowing themselves to fall into complacent progressivism.</div>
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<a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CZy_kiWWcAAUqYC.png">Lots</a> and <a href="http://thefederalist.com/2016/01/27/allowing-transgender-olympians-is-unfair-to-women/">lots</a> has already been written about the fact that allowing pre-op trans women to compete in women's Olympic events is a bad and unfair idea. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brynn-tannehill/do-transgender-athletes-have-an-unfair-advantage_b_4918835.html">Lots</a> and <a href="https://thefeministahood.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/sex-segregated-sports/">lots</a>. But if I'm honest, I'm a bit baffled by the outrage about this specific new provision. I mean, you don't shot putt with your willy, do you? It doesn't seem super relevant to me what you've got in your pants during the 100 meters race or whatever. Because the tricky thing here is not the legal gender (as recognised - or not - by the bewilderingly diverse set of countries who participate in the Games) or genitals of the various participants, but other things like stride, strength and reach that are set at puberty and don't recall change much with testosterone levels and the like. On that score, trans women have had an advantage over females for donkey's years, and this new concession is just a piece of PR on behalf on the IOC.</div>
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In any case, if testosterone is such a game changer in athletics, then why did the IOC set the maximum level of the hormone at roughly three times as high as naturally occurs in the female population? Does that mean that female athletes can now take the (banned) hormone as a supplement to enhance their performance in line with their trans rivals, and be exempt from the doping rules? Yeah, right. I didn't think so.</div>
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I could go on at some length about bone density, grip strength and all that sort of thing, but I'm not a physiologist and to be honest that sort of stuff bores me, so here's a picture instead of a thousand words: see if you can guess which, among the two groups of sportspeople below, are the trans individuals:</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gMp54dI0I_Y/VqoxcKb7KvI/AAAAAAAAAps/G-dfUFIpIDQ/s1600/IOC.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gMp54dI0I_Y/VqoxcKb7KvI/AAAAAAAAAps/G-dfUFIpIDQ/s320/IOC.JPG" width="294" /></a></div>
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OK? OK.</div>
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What we have here with this new and trendy IOC guidance is what <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3922/pg3922.txt">Anatole France</a> satirically alluded to with the quip that "in its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." In other words, absolute equality imposed on an unequal situation, which ensures that the people who stand to lose out are those already most disadvantaged. That is also what Maria Miller, <a href="http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2016/01/26/equality-for-trans-people-must-not-come-at-the-expense-of-wo">in the asinine report that she's been defending with such po-faced self righteousness</a>, is trying to achieve: gain a reputation for being an advocate for equality by taking away every provision that is seen as either especially onerous (GRC process) or especially necessary (the so called spousal 'veto') and letting everyone play on a level playing field. Only it's kind of funny that the equalising provisions always seem to be getting rid of things that one particular group dislikes, and that another particular group is very defensive of. I wonder what those two groups might be called! And whether they share any other biological, social, economic and political characteristics!</div>
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The thing is, the playing field is not level. It's never been level, and short of something like Aamer Rahma's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw_mRaIHb-M">definition of Reverse Racism</a>, it's not going to wake up being level anytime soon. It's easy to hide hostility to women's humanity behind this cant of equal treatment, in which we treat everyone equally by strenuously resisting any changes to an unequal status quo. Keith Vaz was at it when he recommended that (overwhelmingly male) <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/why-rape-suspects-should-not-remain-anonymous">rape suspects be granted the same anonymity</a> as (overwhelmingly - I know, who'd have thunk it! - female) rape victims. A million neck-beard fedoras are at it when they bemoan the fact that feminists don't really believe in equality or they'd be allowed to punch women. Everyone who's ever objected to women-only shortlists, boardroom quotas, scholarships for women and BME students, US-style affirmative action and so on is at it. It's the very very cosiest of perches: you're an upstanding member of a liberal society who just hates inequality! The fact that you hate the kind of "inequality" that might take the shine off your own silver spoon is, well, let's just not get into that. Look! Over there! Feminists are being hateful!</div>
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The funny thing with this whole hoo-ha of course is that sport is the very last thing that's about equality. Sporting competitions of all kinds are a celebration of extraordinary, rare, and unequally distributed talent (as well as tenacity, perseverance, and luck). Not that this stops the IOC from zealously enforcing equality as much as possible in areas other than gender: everything from drugs to special swimsuits to Oscar Pistorius's blades has been banned by the IOC before now, in an attempt to make competition as fair as possible. When there's a serious chance that male athletes might come up against a competitor who is using some technology or ability they've had no access to, it's all canvassed in deadly earnest. But when it's only a bunch of girls coming up against people half again their height, body mass and testosterone level? Oh, c'mmon. Don't you care about equality?</div>
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-19324339191566525702016-01-06T12:12:00.001+00:002016-01-06T12:59:51.421+00:00What the Cologne mass sexual assault tells us about culture - our own<br />
One of the only times I physically intervened between a man and the woman he was assaulting was in Munich. A young man had made a remark to a young woman passing him; when she ignored him, he grabbed her arm; when she jerked her arm away, he grabbed her handbag, talking at her all the while; by this point she was more begging than demanding to be released, more terrified than angry. That was when I got between then and pushed him away - he let go more out of surprise than because I was anything like his physical match, and the girl took the opportunity to scurry away.<br />
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The reason that I have no illusions of having actually physically bested this man was that he was a strapping Teutonic specimen of clear brow, blond hair, and a goot 6 feet of hulking entitlement. He was not "of Middle Eastern or Arab origin", as the hundreds of men who appear to have gone out on an organised orgy of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/05/germany-crisis-cologne-new-years-eve-sex-attacks">assault and harrassement in Cologne on New Years Eve</a> are described as being. He was not an immigrant "unfamiliar" with the normas of behaviour expected of men in German culture. If anything he was all too familiear with them, and rightly confident that those norms are such that no passer by of German nationality would think to object to his manhandling a pleading woman outside a crowded McDonald's in Munich's heaving central train station.<br />
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He was right of course - it took the random presence of a bossy feminist from the same Middle east that is supposed to harbour so many rampant sexists to get between him and German culture. He wasn't the only man I saw behaving in ways that I consider blatantly illegal. Myself and my partner had arrived at the central train station late one night during Oktoberfest, and had a bit of a wait until the departure of the next train in our journey. We were both utterly shocked by what we saw, and left the city with one firm resolution: never to visit it during a public holiday. Gangs of young men (why do they always travel in packs?) were jeering at young women, grabbing at them, blocking their retreats or escapes. The station was jam packed and well lit, with police, stations staff and staff from the shops and businesses (all open) everywhere. In two hours of sitting and watching this "world" go by, we saw no one make any sign that this behaviour looked aberrant to them.<br />
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As <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2016/01/how-deal-new-years-eve-sexual-assaults-cologne-and-hamburg">Musa Okwonga writes in the New Statesman</a>, there is no point getting into an argument about whether the 500-1,000 men assaulting women in Cologne were Muslims. Racist gonna racist, and pointing out to people who go on about Rotherham that similar gangs of rapists <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-24385557">were white</a>, and that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/nov/29/childrensservices">many other cases of white men abusing children en masse</a> have been investigated, won't change their minds. What's important to understand though is not that immigrant men behave in these ways because they don't understand the cultures in which they have found themselves: they behave in those ways <b>precisely because they do</b>. Those men in Cologne and elsewhere in Germany, assuming they really were all "foreign", have understood perfectly well that they find themselves in a country where alcohol and pubic revelry equal a free-for-all on women's bodies, which in any case can be legally bought in mega-brothels all across the country. There were extra police officers deployed in the city on NYE (a female police officer was hreself reportedly assaulted). There were just as many German men getting off those trains as women. Where were they? Why did their presence not make it seem unsafe or at least impolitic to behave in ways that every adult, regardless of country of origin, knows perfectly well is illegal and indecent?<br />
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It is a telling fact that, when put on the spot by a journalist, the best advice the (woman) mayor of Cologne could give to women in the city was to "<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/cologne-attacks-mayor-women-keep-men-arms-length-germany">keep men at arm's length</a>". Her knee-jerk instinct to place the responsibility of stopping crime against women on women themselves speaks volumes about the fact that neither she nor the German public consider sexual assault the responsibility of the men who overwhelmingly perpetrate it. Whatever cant we hear now from German racists (and their rhetorical opponents) about so-called German culture and its respect for women, what this incident makes plain above all else is that this culture is only shared by half the population of the country. And that makes it no kind of national culture at all - no more than the culture of any other European state that winks at street harassment, fails to prosecute rape properly, fails to protect children from predation, and allows men to legally exploit women for sexual access for money.<br />
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At a time when <a href="http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/northumbria-police-defended-domestic-abuse-10685611">60% of respondents</a> believe that police awareness campaigns targeting female victims are "sexist", it's time we admitted that the real fear of Muslim and African refugees is not the culture they bring with them, but what they expose about our own cultures right here in the comfortable, rich Global North.Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com45tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-81424601312660105432015-06-13T12:10:00.002+01:002015-06-13T12:10:53.882+01:00Jen<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This evening I’ve been thinking about Jen. I met her when we were both 17, as part of a Roots program – a summer trip to Israel for US-based Jewish kids, cross-sponsored by their parents and some Jewish agency or other. I liked Jen, though we weren’t close; she was a smiling, friendly girl, petite and pretty, and the kind of hairless, fair skinned white-blonde you rarely see in Israel. Through the haze of decades, I only have one clear memory of talking to her. We were discussing how everyone had got on the program, and Jen told us that her stepdad is Jewish, and because he raised her and she loved him, she considered herself Jewish too, hence the desire to connect to her ‘roots’. I remember thinking – and I wouldn’t be surprised if I said it, too, I wasn’t the most tactful teenager – that this is obviously wrong. You have to be born Jewish or convert to Judaism, you can’t just be Jewish-by-association. It’s not a family club membership! But I didn’t resent her for it or anything, like I say she was a very nice person and we all sort of shrugged our shoulders and accepted her strange desire to be associated with something that to us spoke most strongly of war, conflict, struggle, even genocide. But you know, different strokes, right? These Americans drove to the synagogue on Shabbat anyway, they were all a bit weird as far as we were concerned.</span></span></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-91120351-ec91-a5d3-9819-7568600c889f" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We had a kind of collective Bat Mitzvah ceremony one weekend. We all went to (I think a Reform) synagogue in Jerusalem, dressed appropriately in long skirts and modest t-shirts (it was the Indian fringed skirt era, if anyone remembers that – we all looked as if we were wearing a strange hippy uniform) and did ‘aliya laTorah’ – basically a reading from the synagogue’s big Torah scroll. Actually I think I may have gotten out of that one on the grounds of being an atheist, but again, it was all sort of taken in stride and we had a nice day. For some of the girls it was quite emotional and meaningful, and so again, we didn’t judge them for it.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I suppose in retrospect, it could have been that Jen’s presence on the program was problematic. What if another kid, maybe from a less affluent Jewish family, missed out on their place on the program because she got to go? What if some more religiously minded people were really troubled by her participation in intimately Jewish ceremonies, felt perhaps that her inclusion was disrespectful, or even desecratory? But that at the time none of this troubled me; I sort of filed it away in my head as “not really Jewish but if she wants to be called Jewish and do Jewish things, it’s no skin off my nose”. She obviously had some life experiences, and family circumstances, that made her really attracted to this tradition and culture, and meeting that emotional need seemed perfectly fair enough to me. I myself had never ‘felt Jewish’ or had any concept of what it would be to be Jewish outside of a shared history and family ties, so how different was Jen to me, anyway? And if she did ‘feel’ Jewish in some way, or insisted she had a Jewish soul, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">neshomah</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in Yiddish, well, I didn’t care – nobody has a soul anyway, so she’s not that much more wrong than anyone else making that claim.</span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have two political identities that are ‘marked’, or non-neutral (the default, unmarked identity being that of the white male): a racialised one and a gendered one. And in respect of my gendered social identity I never felt any different than in respect of my racial one: I don’t ‘feel like’ a woman, I don’t have a female brain or a female soul or female intuition. I am treated by others as women in my society are treated – I get doors opened for me, I’ve been sexually harassed at work, I am referred to as ‘she’ when I’m not in the room. I look more or less as a woman in my society is expected to look, and have many of the interests that women in my society are expected to have, not because of some deep female essence, but because a mixture of peer interests and overt pressure has slowly streamed me into those avenues. I also have the kind of humour that Jews are expected to have, and many of the interests Jews in my society have, not because of some inherited predisposition, but simply because that is what I heard and saw around me all my life.</span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In terms of people who choose, for whatever reasons to do with their family background, personal experiences, personality or circumstances, to identify themselves with the same gendered identity I’ve been slotted into, I feel much the same as I did towards Jen: I might not really understand it, but it’s no skin off my nose. Why should I care what anyone wears, or how anyone wants to be referred to? Seems easy enough to just be kind and polite, really.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can’t fully understand why <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2015/jun/12/rachel-dolezal-black-identity-civil-rights-leader">the reaction</a> to the revelation that Rachel Dolezal was not born Black is so much less indifferent than mine was to Jen. I have some intuitions, to do with the exploitation of Black people in slavery and the enormous historical wound that is, to do with the appropriation and repackaging of Black culture for white consumption, to do with the persistent racism and inequality that dog and mar the lives of African Americans. To do, in the final analysis, with trust, community cohesion and honesty in public life. I don’t fully understand it, but I get it.</span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I’m not here to say: hey Black people, it’s no skin off your noses. Because it is. It’s a big, big deal when a marginalised group discovers that someone belonging to its oppressor class had potentially infiltrated their ranks under false pretenses, especially if that person is in a position of power.</span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">am</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> here to say is: spare a thought for women who feel just as strongly about the fact that the ‘<a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/martine-rothblatt-transgender-ceo/index1.html">highest paid woman CEO</a>’ in the US was not born a woman. That the person <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/06/caitlyn-jenner-bruce-cover-annie-leibovitz">on the cover of Vanity Fair</a> this month was not born a woman. They became women and all power to them – whatever it was in their past, their upbringing, their experiences, that made them feel that they need to make that huge change in their lives, I don’t know it and I don’t judge it. But it is hard for members of a marginalised group to see people belonging to its oppressor class rise to positions of power within its ranks. Whoever that group happens to be.</span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I know that people reading this are shaking their heads right now, saying “but it’s not the same thing at all! Can’t you see how different it is?!” No. I can’t. Like I said I have two marked identities, and the only way I can form opinions about this is by introspecting about both of them. Mostly because nobody will say or write anything about </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">why</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> it’s so different. People <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/12/comparison-transgender-people-rachel-dolezal">assert</a> that it is, with great vehemence, but nobody will say </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>why</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Well, I’m left to make up my own mind then, and in my own mind, there is no why. There are clear similarities and analogies between different people reacting to their own lives by changing or transforming their social and political identities. And that doesn’t make Rachel Dolezal suddenly a saint, or Caitlyn Jenner suddenly a sinner: but it does call for perhaps a continuation, rather than a suppression, of this conversation that I’ve been having with myself this evening.</span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I wonder what became of Jen. She really was a nice person.</span></span></div>
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-45480257218479799912015-04-13T17:46:00.001+01:002015-04-13T17:46:10.603+01:00Dr Christian and the Cartesian Dualism of the Gender Identity Debates<div class="MsoNormal">
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Implicit in the discourse of gender identity is the
understanding that the mind, or inner feelings produced by the mind, is who we “really
are” – the body is at worst an irrelevance, at best a malleable vessel or tool
for the expression or performance of the true person within, a person who has a
distinct and stable “identity” irrespective of the physical conditions imposed
on it by the incidental body. This view is called dualism, specifically Cartesian Dualism, after the philosop<span style="font-family: inherit;">her <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes">René Descartes</a>. There is</span> a hierarchy built in to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29">dualism</a>: the mind is the real human being, the seat of reason and conscience. The body is just so much dead meat. To alter the mind is a violation; to alter the
body, a trifle.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But it turns out the body and mind don’t work like that. The former is
not some inert <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Golem.htmlhttps://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Golem.html">Golem</a> for which the latter is the magic, animating scroll. To the
best of our current understanding, the mind is an emergent property of complex
interactions within the brain that are entirely and completely physical. No special
substance, no stuff of thought, is circulating around your scull cavity, “being”
you. Your mind is not something that <b>is</b>,
it is something that your brain <b>does</b>.
A <i>process</i> is a better way of thinking
about it; or even, according to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained">some philosophers</a>, a mostly illusory <i>effect</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Brains, as we all know, are not <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat">independent agents</a> knocking
about in the world. Your brain lives inside your body, is an inseparable part
of the complex system of interactions and symbioses that make up the entire
animated, sentient entity that is you. Your brain eats the same food as you, it
breathes the same air as you. It gets sick when you are sick. It goes through
puberty when you go through puberty – worse, in fact, the whole damn thing is
its fault, because it kicks it off to begin with. Your brain “hears” everything
that is said to you. It is a full participant in the process of conditioning,
education, learning, trauma, memory, preference building and socialisation that
you undergo. The brain does not “store” who you are – it <b>becomes</b> who you become.<o:p></o:p></div>
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When you learn a new skill, like how to do Sudoku or even something
much much simpler, like the exactly correct level of pressure it takes to push
a thumb tack into your particular office wall with its unique density &
resistance, your brain physically changes. It doesn’t change “in order to”
store the leaning, or “as a result of” the learning. Learning <b>is</b> a physical change in your brain. A small
group of cells inside your head is creeping towards other cells as you read my
words, making minute contacts, touching in ways that were not happening before,
creating tiny chemical bridges that hadn’t existed before. These tentative
little gropes towards learning will be reinforced in the future by a teeny tiny
release of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n706_qp20Mk">dopamine</a> if and when you remember the words I typed here: your brain
bribes you with little chemical highs, that’s how it gets you to continue to
learn throughout your lifetime, navigating new roads, figuring out the timer on
new microwaves, remembering the names of new nurses in the nursing home –
unless something goes seriously wrong (as in the case of Alzheimer’s or CJD),
your brain-that-is-you is a hive of cell growth and reconfiguration every day
of your living life, every bit as much as your gut is (more, if anything,
because so much of what the gut does is outsourced to your <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbiota">microbiome</a>, whereas your
brain is mostly you).<o:p></o:p></div>
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So to say that you were born with an “identity” that is
immutable and fixed, and that your body needs to change in order to be
congruent with this identity, is just incoherent. Your identity is a product of things that go on in your mind, which is a product of things that go on in your brain. Your sexed body and your personality or sense of self are not two things independent of each other, but aspects of a single process of cumulative interactions with external and internal stimuli gradually builds up through complex sets of action and reaction to become expressions of a unitary entity which is the complete human animal that you are.</div>
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Changes to other parts of your body will, eventually, <b>become</b> changes in your brain. It will
learn to feel itself anew (although it can sometimes struggle with that, as in
the case of phantom limbs – and it really should be investigated whether post-operative
trans people ever suffer from that debilitating condition). It will reconfigure
itself (I hate the term “rewire” – such a limited, stunted metaphor for the
virtually infinite curlicues and arabesques the brain/mind is capable of) in
order for you to walk a certain way, talk at a certain pitch, use particular
hand gestures. Your body will not magically “fit” a pre-existing image of
your true self in your mind: if you change some parts of your body, another part of your
body – that part of it that is in your skull – will continue to change until you
can preform the gestures and mannerisms you consider appropriate to your new body
seamlessly and without deliberate effort, like a skilled pianist plays scales
or an experienced driver goes through the motions of the familiar morning
commute. This level of so called "unconscious" skill is the result of well-developed pathways in the brain, which is just a fancy way of saying that your brain has physically changed a lot in order to facilitate them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If you change your body, your body will change. There is no
other “you” out there – or in there – for you to model those changes on. If you
really believe, like Dr Christian, that the talking cure is a kind of “conversion
therapy” for one part of your body, then the “chopping cure” is exactly the
same thing – just conversion therapy, trying to force your body to be something
it currently isn’t. And that <i>includes</i>
the part of your body that generates your mind, or the amorphous, nebulous
thing that is your “identity”. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-66079559723150177212015-03-26T15:49:00.002+00:002020-08-25T12:54:54.924+01:00Censorship: it's bad, because it can happen to men <br />
Having <a href="http://notazerosumgame.blogspot.com/2015/01/freespeechisforwhitemen.html">recently written</a> about what qualifies as free speech and who we generally take to have a right to it, I was grimly amused to read <a href="http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/5981/full">Nick Cohen's Standpoint piece</a> on censorship in the Left.<br />
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It's not so much that I disagree with the main thrust of Cohen's argument: I signed the original letter to the Observer expressing concerns about the creep of no-platforming on British university campuses, which I do think is both a symptom of a worrying conservatism among young people too buffeted by (often unacknowledged) worry about the future to be able to meet opposing, confusing or upsetting information head-on, and a cause of further narrowing and blunting of public debate. No, it's more the fact that in setting out a narrative for the self-destructive descent into Orwellianism, Cohen chose to place its beginnings at the door of Katharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.<br />
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It was only thank to the United States' superior legal protection against censorship, Cohen writes, that<br />
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The US Supreme Court duly struck down an ordinance MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin drafted for Indianapolis City Council in 1984 which would have allowed women who could say they were harmed by pornography to sue.</blockquote>
The proposed ordinance, Cohen claims, was but a censorship tactic seized upon by disgruntled feminists, frustrated by their inability to prove that pornography was harmful to either its consumers, its performers, or the public at large. Legally allowing women to <i>openly test in court</i> their contention that they had been harmed by pornography is censorship. Going all the way to the SCOTUS to <i>prevent</i> them having their day in court is protecting free speech.<br />
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This seems both very silly and very telling. Cohen, neither a misogynist nor, ordinarily, a stupid man (only one guilty of what all men are guilty of: thinking he understands women's issues based on no research, because hey, it's girl stuff, how hard can it be?), here falls neatly for two of the dumbest and most pervasive conservative tropes of the backlash age:<br />
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1. Feminists are themselves to blame for the social ills they now complain of, from the second shift to rape to, in this case the silencing of feminist voices: had we only not meddled with traditional values, men would be more respectful, women would have to work less hard, and reactionary tendencies in society would not be expressing themselves through surveillance and censorship. You made your bed, ladies, don't cry over unintended consequences<br />
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2. When women fight for their human rights, they necessarily and by design deprive men of theirs, in a zero sum game (after which this blog is named) that positions every gain for women as a direct attack on men. More women in the workplace are at fault for fewer men being able to earn a decent wage (the collapse of the unions had nothing to d with it apparently). Better justice for victims of male partner violence is really an attack on Fathers' Rights. And, in this case, a right for women to bring civil suit for damages done to them is an attack on the freedom of speech of the men who create and consume the majority of pornographic material. Hands off our Hustler, girls, what is this, North Korea?<br />
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To be anti pornography is not to be, by necessity, pro censorship. I should know, because that happens to be the position I hold. I don't want Page 3 to be banned: I want to expose its irrelevance and misogyny, as the NMP3 campaign repeated ad nauseam. But of course nobody listened - it was always "they want to ban P3", never "they want the Sun to reconsider it". Because the idea that feminists are fun-sucking, humourless, totalitarian granola munchers is so ingrained, even respected columnists who remember to mention Mary Waterhouse later in the piece feel like a coherent narrative of suppression must, somehow, start with them.<br />
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-65916148719010188462015-01-21T12:09:00.001+00:002020-08-25T13:00:20.721+01:00#FreeSpeechIsForWhiteMen<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZbbKFeMghwk/VL-M7IW0SEI/AAAAAAAAAnY/6xWiJVEGPNA/s1600/If-liberty-means-anything.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><br /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZbbKFeMghwk/VL-M7IW0SEI/AAAAAAAAAnY/6xWiJVEGPNA/s1600/If-liberty-means-anything.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="115" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZbbKFeMghwk/VL-M7IW0SEI/AAAAAAAAAnY/6xWiJVEGPNA/s1600/If-liberty-means-anything.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Today is the anniversary of the death of George Orwell, so
it seems like a good day to tackle a topic that he is famous for defending:
free speech.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’ve never read much Orwell, I must confess. Donnish and,
despite his internationalist aspirations, unremittingly English, he is not as
revered outside the English speaking world as he is within it. If you asked the
average French person who their emblem of freedom of expression was, they're much more likely to say Voltaire. Were you to pose such a question to a Russian
intellectual, they may very well say <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn">Solzhenitsyn</a>. Or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vysotsky">Vysotsky</a>, as like as not.
Or “what is this free speech you speak of”.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But anyway, Orwell is famous for free speech, right? Everybody
knows that: Big Brother, surveillance, thought control, language manipulation,
bad bad stuff. So, here we are.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It happens also that today is when the always hotly anticipated satirical news magazine Private Eye's latest cover comes out, and this is the image they’ve gone with:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UUwl2Y9MSv4/VL-Nzv6gFdI/AAAAAAAAAnk/YIRD9vh7V14/s1600/B721LhzCYAAds8K.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UUwl2Y9MSv4/VL-Nzv6gFdI/AAAAAAAAAnk/YIRD9vh7V14/s1600/B721LhzCYAAds8K.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>
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Oh, those rascally World Leaders! So hypocritical in their
solidarity with the French Nation after the massacre of free-thinking,
free-wheeling satirists, when in their own country they imprison and kill
journalists themselves! How comical! Let’s all be wry and cynical about it in
the best tradition of English humour!<o:p></o:p></div>
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Funny, that (not funny ha-ha): that this joke is coming from such a
<i>very</i> English publication. After all, similar criticism could have been leveled
at the assembled country heads from the Asian-British humourous weekly, or the feminist
Viz, or the… Oh wait. There is no Muslim Private Eye. No Arab Charlie Hebdo. No Afro-European Viz, no Feminist Rory Bremner, no Orthodox
Jewish (or, God forbid, Zionist!) Voltaire poking fun at the post-WWII pieties
of a prosperous Western Europe, sanguine in the knowledge that we’ve done the
Holocaust now, it’s so 20th century darling, We Shall Remember and It Will Never
Happen Again.<o:p></o:p></div>
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One does rather wonder. Well, no, actually, one really doesn’t.
White men have the vast majority of the money, power, influence and education
on this continent (sorry Brits, I’m lumping you in). They always have done. They
get to say what goes, and frankly they get to say what’s funny, too. And even
if it were to so happen that an Afro-French comedian were to amass the money,
the following, the influence and the media visibility to really start taking
the piss, well then he’d just… What’s that? <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/14/dieudonne-arrest-facebook-post-charlie-coulibaly-paris-gunman">Get arrested</a>, you say? Barely days
after the whole world was up in arms about freedom of speech & how
important the French tradition of irreverent humour was? Surely not!<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m Jewish, which means there’s not really much love lost
between myself and Dieudonne M’bala M’bala. Frankly, he creeps me out. But I am
unquiet to a degree unmatched by the many self appointed (male, white)
champions of freedom of expression that France is expiating its <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/french-law-treats-dieudonne-charlie-hebdo-differently">Dreyfus &Vichy guilt</a> on his particular African back. Like, thanks and all that, but no
thanks. I’ll handle my own anti-Semitic comedians – the nice gentlemen of the
security service could perhaps better employ their time providing Hebdo-style
round-the-clock security to my sisters who are speaking truth to male power and encountering
the terrifying <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-liswood/the-hecklers-veto_b_731476.html">Heckler’s Veto</a> of death threats backed up by publication of
their own and their families’ addresses, employment details and banking
information.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s not as if women in aren’t killed by men on any given day,
is it. Or for that matter, it’s not as if Muslims aren’t killed by drones,
occupying armies and so called “peace-keeping” forces sent by the West, like, all the time. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jan/20/why-american-snipers-historical-dishonesty-misleads">Atleast 160 by just this one guy</a>, according to a Clint Eastwood flick that opened <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/21/american-sniper-global-box-office-seventh-son-birdman">"surprisingly strongly"</a> at the weekend despite being the most blatant, virulent
anti-Muslim propaganda seen in years. And Clint wasn’t even trying to be funny.
Why, one wonders, aren’t Iraqis living in the US provided with NSA bodyguards?!
I’d sure want one if I were them!<o:p></o:p></div>
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But then again America is a law unto itself, with its constitutionally enshrined free
speech and its tradition of free press and its absence of laws
banning any kind of speech or expression. I mean yes, if you’re a black
protester holding his hands up and chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”, then the
police will tear gas and arrest you. And you’ll get called a terrorist by
<a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/01/us/ferguson-nfl-st-louis-rams/">people on TV</a>. And your protest will be reported <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/ferguson-riots-pregnant-woman-loses-4711023">as if it had been a riot</a>. But look, if you’re a large corporation run by white men, then
your freedom of speech is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC">protected by the Supreme Court</a>, so it’s all good,
right? Freedom of speech is obviously A Thing! That exists! And people have it!<o:p></o:p></div>
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Yesterday I saw <a href="http://www.ouest-france.fr/apologie-du-terrorisme-un-lyceen-nantais-poursuivi-pour-un-dessin-3119401">this news item</a> in passing, about a teenager
arrested in France for sharing this spoof Charlie Hebdo cover (I have my own suspicions about what colour teenager that was):<o:p></o:p></div>
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I thought it was rather good, mostly because, unlike almost
all the Charlie Hebdo cartoons I’ve hitherto seen, it’s <a href="https://medium.com/@hugorifkind/there-is-a-difference-between-being-brave-and-being-funny-af2f33ded10e">actually funny</a> (especially <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B70cW8VCYAA6KBd.jpg">in context</a>). Freedom
of speech, it says, is no protection against actual violence. The pen is not
<i>literally</i> mightier than the submachine gun. And as if to prove the point, the
lovely chaps of the Nantes constabulary hauled in this kid for sharing this on Facebook.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I mean, c’mmon. The double standard here is so
eye-bleedingly blatant I can’t even find words to write about it. It seems so thumpingly
obvious that freedom of speech must be extended to all lest it be functionally withheld
from all that I actually don’t know how to bring this paragraph to a close now.</div>
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Except, I guess, to say this. If, in the immediate aftermath
of the Charlie Hebdo murders, your instinct was to mount an impassioned defence
of the right to offend in the name of freedom of speech, then you weren’t only defending
an ideal: you were also defending a status quo. And in that status quo, actual freedom to speak is not an equally distributed resource: rich
white men like Rush Limbaugh and Nigel Farage have it, and
pretty much everybody else doesn’t. </div>
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Satirical magazines like Charlie Hebdo and
Private Eye stand for that status quo at least as much as they stand for the
principle which they nominally embody. I’m sure the men who run these
publications are perfectly nice liberal guys who think that freedom of speech
is a splendid thing, Orwell, Voltaire, yaddah yaddah. But this doesn’t change
the fact that they are heard that much more loudly and clearly against the
background of silence from all the people who are not them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-89763164663564942832014-10-23T14:50:00.001+01:002014-10-23T16:19:57.809+01:00What is sex?<div>
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The word sex has many meanings. From the OED: </div>
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<b>1</b><br />
a.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions; (hence) the members of these categories viewed as a group; the males or females of a particular species, esp. the human race, considered collectively.<br />
b.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In extended use, esp. as the third sex . A (notional) third division of humanity regarded as analogous to, or as falling between, the male and female sexes; spec. that consisting of: (a) eunuchs or transsexuals; †(b) humorously clergymen (obs.); (c) homosexual people collectively.<br />
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<b>2</b> Quality in respect of being male or female, or an instance of this; the state or fact of belonging to a particular sex; possession or membership of a sex.<br />
a.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>With regard to persons or animals.<br />
b.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>With regard to plants<br />
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<b>3</b><br />
a.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>With the. The female sex. Now arch. or literary.<br />
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<b>4</b><br />
a.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The distinction between male and female, esp. in humans; this distinction as a social or cultural phenomenon, and its manifestations or consequences; (in later use esp.) relations and interactions between the sexes; sexual motives, instincts, desires, etc.<br />
b.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Physical contact between individuals involving sexual stimulation; sexual activity or behaviour, spec. sexual intercourse, copulation. to have sex (with) : to engage in sexual intercourse (with).</blockquote>
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For the purposes of this post, we are going to ignore the OED’s definitions 1b and 3a+b, as it these are pertinent mostly to literary as opposed to everyday usage. Having done so, we are left with four main definitions:</div>
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1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A division into two groups by reproductive function<br />
2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Membership of one of these two groups<br />
3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The social and cultural distinctions stemming from such membership<br />
4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Actually bumping uglies</blockquote>
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OK, let’s go ahead and ignore number 4 above too. Not that the definition of what constitutes sex is uncontentious, but it’s not the subject here. It is the subject <a href="https://rootveg.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/whose-weapon-is-it-anyway-part-2/">here</a>, and I think you should go ahead and read that cause it’s good. But I digress (already!).</div>
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So we’re left with three things to unpack: what it means to declare a division into two groups; what it means to be a member of one of those groups; and what it means to create or be subject to social and cultural distinctions based on these two groups.<br />
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I’m going to start from the last one, because it’s the easiest to deal with: by and large, social and cultural distinctions stemming from having two groups of people divided by reproductive function are unbalanced with regard to power, and as such kind of bad things. It’s a very narrow and opportunistic definition of ‘culture’, but let’s say for the sake of this argument that culture is, at least in part, the assignation of value and meaning to the material world. Human beings use culture to interpret and represent the natural world to themselves in ways that are coherent and universally legible (within the group or groups that subscribes to that culture). Any such act of representation entails an assignation of value; even the act of representation itself is a value judgement, because in what we include and what we exclude from cultural representation there is inherent a really important sifting of what we consider important and significant versus what we do not.</div>
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To give an example relevant to the topic of this post, we do not have any representations of blood groups. Blood groups are a biological fact of how our bodies work, but we don’t see them as important, and so we don’t really have any meaningful cultural ideas about people with specific blood types, and we tend to not even know what our own blood type is unless it’s as a result of medical issue. We certainly don’t display our blood types on our bodies or signal them to other. They’re <i>a culturally irrelevant biological reality</i>.</div>
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This is not true for sex; sex is probably the most visible of all biological realities. And the sad truth is that almost all of the cultural ideas and representations to do with sex assign a higher value to one group and a lower value to the other. Combatting this value assignation is what feminism does. Different strands of feminism take very different approaches to this task. One strand, liberal feminism, says that all would be well if we were to assign exactly equal value to the two categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’. Another strand, radical feminism, says no, let’s get rid of any value assignations altogether and make sex as meaningless a biological reality as blood types. Both of these approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, and are more or less practical and realistic in different ways. Both are needed in order for us to make progress towards the eventual aim, which is that membership of, or assignment to, one of these groups, will no longer carry automatic benefits or detriments in regard to a person’s human rights and access to social goods and human flourishing.</div>
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Then there is a third strand of feminism, I’m going to call it postmodern feminism but to be honest it’s not a particularly well defined school of thought. This strand of feminism contends that the problem is not that we assign different cultural value to members of the two biological groups of male and female, but that we artificially divide human beings into male and female to begin with. On this view, ‘male’ and ‘female’, the two categories with which definitions 1 and 2 from the OED above are concerned, are not material realities at all: they are words, social constructs that we impose on a neutral underlying biological reality, thus creating the problem we are purporting to describe and combat. The following tweets are not a bad summary of this position:</div>
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In a nutshell: A penis is a biological organ. As soon as you call it 'male' you have assigned a social value to it. There is nothing><br />
— Gillian Love (@gillienoncarne) <a href="https://twitter.com/gillienoncarne/status/524829791875510272">October 22, 2014</a></blockquote>
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>inherently 'male' about it. That's what socially constructed means - not that biological sex isn't 'real', but that it's based on social><br />
— Gillian Love (@gillienoncarne) <a href="https://twitter.com/gillienoncarne/status/524829967491035136">October 22, 2014</a></blockquote>
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>values and meanings.<br />
— Gillian Love (@gillienoncarne) <a href="https://twitter.com/gillienoncarne/status/524830028992098304">October 22, 2014</a></blockquote>
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It can be hard to spot the mistake in this line of thinking straight away, because it uses two implicit facts that we are all well familiar with: that biology is morally neutral, and that language is a social construct.</div>
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Let’s deal with the neutrality of biology first: it is of course undeniably true that nothing in the natural world carries with it a moral, cultural or personal value. Description is not prescription, and to fall into the naturalistic fallacy is a pretty bad philosophical error. However, what that doesn’t mean is that objective biological realities don’t interact with each other in ways that are filtered through our understanding of them in certain ways. So, for example, it’s is true that a penis is not ‘inherently’ male (it in fact exherently male, in that it is an organ that is found almost exclusively on male individuals – but more on that anon). It is equally true that a human penis is not ‘inherently’ human. </div>
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There is no such thing in biology as something that it is to be inherently of one species or another (no, it's not "hard wired into our genes". Go wash your mouth out with soap). But it is nevertheless the case that the speaker in these tweets above is referring to human penii and not those of fruit flies or sperm whales. Why? How, on her apparent view of what it means for a biological property to be real, does this cash out? There would clearly be a serious practical difficulty if we tried to treat the penii of sperm whales as biologically indistinguishable from the penii of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Just think of the chafing!</div>
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So, clearly we must assume that at least underlying biological realities exist in some form, even if the speaker above is advancing the notion that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are not among them. But is that true? What does it mean, to be either male or female, and what properties does it entail?</div>
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To understand that we must go back to the beginning and pick up where we left off with the three definitions of ‘sex’ from the OED. What does it mean to declare a division into two groups and call them ‘sexes’? And what it means to be a member of one of those groups? This is something that a lot of people, and I suspect quite a few people in the humanities, have only a very hazy grasp of.</div>
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The first thing to say about sexual reproduction is what it actually is: the combining of genetic material from two individuals in order to make more individuals of the same species. This is the only absolutely necessary condition for reproduction to be considered sexual. You gotta have two critters getting involved. The second thing I’d point out is that sexual reproduction is not universal. Bacteria and many other organisms do not make more of themselves via mixing and matching genetic material with others of their species. They just copy themselves in two, niftily avoiding the whole problem of the dating scene and making awkward small talk over cocktails. </div>
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Now, one other thing that can be a bit awkward about sexual reproduction is that it’s stubbornly binary. Oh, I know there is probably some exotic species of snail in the Amazon that needs genetic input from three parents in order to reproduce, nature always has tricky exceptions like that, but in every single case I can actually think of, what we are talking about is <i>specifically two</i> individuals contributing genetic material towards the eventual offspring. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And in actually really quite a lot of species, including snails as it happens, there’s not a lot of difference between the individuals themselves. They’re pretty similar, and frankly any two of them can get together and make little baby snails. But not all species work like that, and before I circle back to the whole ‘you can’t claim penis is male’ argument, let me just point out that not all of them even need a penis. If you’re a species that makes its living in the sea, for example, all that’s needed is that both partners release their genetic material – contained in special cells called gametes – into the watery medium. They touch each other, they fertilize each other, boom, little baby critters. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In land based species, however, there’s the additional logistical problem that if you just squirt your genetic material willy-nilly, it’s unlikely to be light enough to just be carried by the air to the right place to mix itself up with the genetic material of somebody else. Plants have found lots of ingenuous solutions to this problem, via sycamore seeds and dandelion fluff and bees, and so they don’t need penii either; but the majority of animals have found that it is safer and more effective to actually get together face to face and deliver the gametes in, as it were, person. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Up to and including this point, we have not really needed any kind of distinction between ‘male’ and ‘female’. After all, there’s nothing inherent in the need to have two individual organisms for reproduction that means that those individuals have to fall into two groups. It could just be an undifferentiated free for all. We don’t really know why sex itself evolved, even though there are all kinds of theories about it (and actually as I said before the majority of the earth’s biomass doesn’t even use it), and we really really don’t know why sexual dimorphism – the thing that says critters fall into one of two distinct groups with a different approach to the mechanics of reproduction – evolved. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We never really know why anything evolved, and most people who try to say different are selling something (patriarchy, quite often). But anyway. In observing the world around us, we see that many of the species that evolve by combining instead of duplicating genetic material (i.e. those who reproduce sexually) exhibit certain stable differences in morphology (shape) that fall into two groups.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
You will notice that I have not yet said anything about insertion and penetration; when I was talking about combining genetic material in a land based environment, I coyly referred to ‘getting face to face’. But actually, missionaries and bonobos apart, most animals get face to back, and the way they actually accomplish the delivery of one individual’s genetic material to the gametes of the other individual is by insertion of a specially evolved body part into a different specially evolved body part and, not to put too fine a point on it, squirting. The special body part that evolved for the purpose of <i>being inserted</i> into the body of another is called a penis (sometimes it isn’t, zoologists like their fancy terminology, but if you called a spider’s dongle a penis instead of a pedipalp, they’d know what you were talking about. On a side note, spiders are fucking weird). This is, in fact, the only thing that is ‘male’ about a penis: not its shape, not the fact that it usually comes attached to all kinds of other sexually dimorphic traits like tusks or manes or big fancy tails, but that its function in reproduction is to squirt gametes. Specifically, to squirt <i>sperm</i>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now, I hear you say, why would you say that? There is nothing about a penis that means it has to squirt sperm! What if it’s an egg-identified penis? You’re limiting the self-expression of the penis in a really oppressive way! To which I would say, yeah, but it just so happens that the penii I happen to be familiar with do, in fact, squirt sperm. And you wold say, we how do you know it’s sperm? Maybe it identifies as eggs? And I would say, because it is, er, small.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
That’s it. We have finally come to the basis of the biological distinction between male and female, and it’s all about size. Sorry chaps.<br />
<br />
Here's what it looks like in humans:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--HV6bNeYDU4/VEkLqTtO46I/AAAAAAAAAWs/f0Py5RvdO7I/s1600/spermmeetsegg-l.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--HV6bNeYDU4/VEkLqTtO46I/AAAAAAAAAWs/f0Py5RvdO7I/s1600/spermmeetsegg-l.jpg" height="236" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And in mice:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XznwxH_PiNk/VEkL0KkJC7I/AAAAAAAAAW0/sicggcOu1eU/s1600/images%2B(5).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XznwxH_PiNk/VEkL0KkJC7I/AAAAAAAAAW0/sicggcOu1eU/s1600/images%2B(5).jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
And even sea urchins!<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6fjQ6cBTzlU/VEkL6Vgc1pI/AAAAAAAAAW8/PnMotzgM0Uc/s1600/SEM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6fjQ6cBTzlU/VEkL6Vgc1pI/AAAAAAAAAW8/PnMotzgM0Uc/s1600/SEM.jpg" height="250" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br />
See? Tiny.<br />
<br />
So biologists, and in fact farmers and pet owners and whatever, have long observed that in the species they study (I exclude snail farmers from this discussion for the moment, sorry snail farmers!), it is very often the case that there is one group that has larger gametes (sex cells) and another group that has little tiny ones. And whenever they see this difference, they call the group that has larger gametes female, and the group that has little dinky ones male. That is literally it. Any other traits that individuals in groups possess are incidental. In a lot of species, the male is larger than the female; but in a whole bunch of others, it’s the other way around. In a bunch of species the male is gaudy and colourful, but in many many species, it’s not. Some males are more aggressive than females, whereas some others are tiny and meek and actually let themselves get et by the females. But all of these little dudes have one thing in common: they have the smaller gametes, called sperm. And if they have a penis to deliver those sperm, <i>then that penis is male.</i> </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In human beings, we have one group of people that have large gametes, and we call them female <i>because they have large gametes.</i> Not because they are on average smaller (some aren’t) or because they menstruate (some don’t) or because they have two X chromosome (there are edge cases) or anything else. We call them female because they have large gametes and a specially evolved organ into which little gametes can safely and conveniently be squirted (I mean safely and conveniently from the point of view of evolution, not necessarily from the point of view of the individual female – see R for rape). Inasmuch as that organ had originally evolved for the purpose of having gametes squirted into it, it is a female organ: even if it is not and never has or never can actually receive said gametes. And the exact same (but in reverse) goes for males, penii, and sperm.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
OK let’s take stock, because this has gotten super long now. </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>All male mammals have smaller gametes than female mammals, because that is what ‘male’ means, from the point of view of biology<br />2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Any organ that has evolved specifically to serve as a delivery mechanism for male gametes is ipso facto a male organ<br />3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This does not entail or necessitate any cultural judgement whatsoever – not even the most basic one that says that, unlike blood group, organs whose purpose is to deliver gametes should be noticed in the first place<br />4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sadly that is not how patriarchal societies see the issue</b></blockquote>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We can disagree either about the details of 3 and 4 above, or about the relative importance of them, or about what to do to change or ameliorate the social conditions that they cause. But there is literally no point in disagreeing about 1 and 2, because size is size and isn’t particularly amenable to language. If we called it Green and Wednesday instead, it would still be the case that some are always small and come (hurr hurr) by the million, and some are large and are almost always expressed individually. <b>What we call things is socially constructed: their relative size is not.</b></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The names we give to factors of biological sex are socially constructed, and most assuredly the different values we assign to it are very socially constructed, and in fact badly so, so let’s have a revolution and get rid of them. But it is incorrect in the kind of incorrect way that arguing with gravity would be to say that “biological sex isn’t ‘real’”. Because all of the following things are real:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>You need two gametes in order to make a new human being<br />
2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>These gametes are – outside of the test tube – always of two varying sizes<br />
3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Small gametes are always – outside of the test tube – delivered to the site of the large gamete<br />
4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Small gametes are called ‘male’ and large gametes are called ‘female’</blockquote>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
That’s it. That is all the contention behind the ‘penis is male’ argument. It is male because it is an organ evolved to deliver the smaller gametes in a sexually reproducing species, in the same way that ‘down’ is down because it is the direction the Earth’s gravity is pulling us in. There is no ‘down’ in space, but if you walk off the top of a skyscraper on that basis, well, it was nice knowing you.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It's not my intention to make fun of postmodern feminism here; I think language is really important, and it’s really crucial to examine and critique the ways in which see traits that really are there (large gametes) and make the logical leap that other traits must also be present (like a caring nature, nurturing instinct or passive, nonviolent personality). We need to change the second half of that equation: which traits we assume ought to be there that really aren’t. But it is neither correct nor, in the end, very productive to try and combat the latter by insisting that the former just aren’t real. </div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-26325257616253353922014-09-16T16:51:00.000+01:002014-09-16T16:51:16.418+01:00Radfem panic: when demands for inclusivity are a cover for moral disgust <div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">‘70% of communication is nonverbal’. I really hate that
cliché, because I’m a words person. To me, carefully chosen and logically constructed
verbal arguments should take precedence over all of the attendant (and extraneous) signals like tone, posture and facial expression. That’s what I
like about the internet: it strips people’s mannerisms away and leaves them
with only words at their disposal. It comes with all kinds of problems for
interpersonal situations, but in the absence of trolling and abuse has been
fantastically useful for thought, discussion, argument and idea exchange. I’ve
always thought that was a good thing. I never had reason to doubt that the affect I’m missing on-line mostly conveys information that is of no
interest to me as someone who is primarily interested in analysing ideas, not personalities. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">So it came as rather a surprise to me to encounter a really
powerfully emotional, non-verbal situation, which translated to a strong
intellectual insight occasioned by a person’s affect and not their words or
arguments.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I was on a panel discussing women’s spaces at the <a href="http://fwsablog.org.uk/">FWSA</a>
conference <a href="http://fwsablog.org.uk/2014-conference/">'Rethinking Sisterhood'</a> last weekend, along with my friends and sometimes co-activists <a href="http://sianandcrookedrib.blogspot.com/2014/09/re-thinking-sisterhood-conference-and.html">Sian</a>,
Helen and Shabana. All brought some really valuable insights into the question
of women-only organising and the possibilities for interpreting and enacting
sisterhood in that context; I won’t get into them here, but do follow the link to Sian's blog. The part of the
conversation relevant to this post came relatively late in the session, when an audience member raised the question of trans inclusion: does the panel
think that women-only spaces should be open to all self-identifying women, or not?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Well. You can just about imagine nobody wanted to touch that
question with a fricking barge pole. We all know what happens, right? Either
what you say is interpreted as being bigoted, transphobic and exclusionary, or
it gets interpreted as anti-woman, patriarchy appeasing and callous. No middle
ground, no way of pleasing everybody, and frankly a lot of the time no way of
pleasing anyone at all. So there was a certain amount of foot-shuffling as we
all tried to think of a way to not let the issue completely derail the
remaining part of the session, and in the end I offered the following
observation:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The important point, for me,
about exclusion and inclusion in safe spaces, is not so much who they include
and who they exclude, but that, as feminists, we keep ourselves obliged to the
principle of consent. What that means is that even if a group of women wants to
exclude us, on any grounds whatsoever, however spurious those may seem to us,
our first duty as feminists is to respect their boundaries and not try to
breach them or cause them to be breached.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I illustrated my argument by
putting up my hand in a sort of “Stop!” gesture, palm out towards my audience, and
saying: “the magic (i.e. feminist politics) doesn’t happen on this side
of the hand or on that side of the hand. The magic happens <b>at</b> the hand: <b><u>praxis is
saying ‘no’ and having it respected”.<o:p></o:p></u></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><u><br /></u></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">On the whole the argument was well received; though at least
one radical feminist in the audience thought that this was a fudge and an
insufficiently direct engagement with what she saw as the real underlying
question: ‘what/who is a woman?’. The question of what is prior, definition or
action, is a complex one and one I think that is being worked out as praxis
within feminist communities rather than ever being resolvable by pure reason.
So it will remain unaddressed here. What I wanted to get to was a particularly
powerful response from one other member of the audience. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This woman (I’m going to call her Angela) opened her
statement by describing her own emotional state: she said that she was very
upset, that she was surprised by the level of her own emotional reaction to
this issue. Angela described the physical symptoms of the reaction to us: her
legs were, she said, jelly, her heart was beating, she felt flushed and
panicky. She was basically telling us (I think mostly me personally, but I
might be being a bit self-centred there) that our words have induced some kind
of trauma response in her, a fully-fledged psychic distress event. She then
went on to say she simply can’t understand how I could be so lacking in
empathy, that I could reject someone out of my space who wants to be there is
she is claiming fellowship with me as a woman. She also said that she finds my forbidding,
stopping hand ‘incredibly aggressive’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">My first reaction was to be irritated: here I am, trying to
make a careful argument for something I think needs to be calmly talked about
and discussed, and this woman is trying to one-up me, to exploit her own
obvious distress by manipulating my emotions. How illogical! How childish! How,
well, rude! But later, in that over-intellectualising way I have, I couldn’t
help thinking and trying to really understand what just happened in that room.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To explain what I think did happen, and in fact does happen
a lot in discussions about lesbian separatism, radical feminism, women only
spaces and other politics of women’s autonomy, I need to refer to
three concepts: moral disgust, the uncanny valley, and gay panic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The first of those is quite a familiar concept. We’ll take
as a guide the definition proposed by Michael Hauskeller in a 2006 <a href="http://www.ethical-perspectives.be/viewpic.php?LAN=E&TABLE=EP&ID=998">paper</a>: “the
expression of a very strong moral disapproval that cannot fully be captured by
argument”. Liberals <a href="http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/7/23/is-disgust-a-uniquely-conservative-moral-emotion.html">pride themselves</a> on their low levels of moral disgust, in
particular in relation to the sexual practices of others. This is why we tend
to conceptualise the objections of the right to certain things like
homosexuality as “phobias” – irrational fears stemming from an underlying moral
disgust. It’s also why the “phobia” frame has so successfully, and without any
problematizing interrogation that I could see, migrated to be applied inside
the social justice left, in terms like transphobia, whorephobia, fatphobia,
femmephobia and so on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But here was a person literally, in every physical sense of
the word, exhibiting a phobic reaction. Angela was terrified by me, terrified
of my implacable “Stop!” And much like conservative activists seeking to
criminalise or marginalise homosexual relationships, she was using the very
viscerality of her own reaction as a strong progressive/liberal moral argument:
you have upset me, therefore I am right. What was going on?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To explain that let’s look at the other two concepts: the
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdAIPoh8a4">uncanny valley</a> and <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Gay_panic_defense.html">gay panic</a>. The first comes from the world of humanoid
robotics. Researchers working with robots found that people react emotionally
to with high levels of comfort to robots that look completely non-human,
somewhat non-human, and absolutely believably human. But at the point on the
scale where robots exhibit almost-but-not-quite believably human features,
there is a dramatic dip in the levels of comfort people experience (the
‘valley’ of the name). There are a lot of theories as to what could be the
reason for this, and no conclusive explanation, but that shouldn’t concern us
here; all I want to point to is the discomfort associated with confronting an
object that doesn’t fall neatly into one of two categories (machine/human),
exhibiting insufficient characteristics of both but not seeming to be fully
either. This concept can be useful in thinking about reactions to trans
people and the different ways people in general view drag queens or pantomime
dames (obviously not female and therefore not triggering discomfort), passing
trans women (completely female-looking and therefore not triggering discomfort
even when we know they are trans), and non-passing trans women and cross
dressers (not quite fitting into either definitely-male or definitely-female
category and therefore the focus of a lot of the hostility and discomfort from
the general population). It’s a hypothesis that needs testing, more a hunch of mine
than a proven phenomenon of course, but I think it’s worth thinking about.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Lastly, ‘gay panic’ is a legal device employed (sometimes
successfully) in the </span>defense<span style="font-family: inherit;"> of men who commit violent crimes against gay
people. The contention is that when discovering someone is gay (or
transgendered – the use of this </span>defense<span style="font-family: inherit;"> has transferred to the category of hate
crime against trans people too), some people, in practice men, are overcome by
an uncontrollable sense of panic, that functions like temporary insanity and
drives them to react violently and seek to destroy the cause of their panic by
beating or killing that individual. In essence this </span>defense<span style="font-family: inherit;"> legitimises violence
based on moral disgust, claiming that its visceral power is such that it can
lead to irresistible defensive (and therefore aggressive) urges. Why these men
don’t just run away if they’re scared, don’t ask me – I don’t think it’s a very
convincing argument at all, rather an excuse to make male violence seem
inevitable and unavoidable (what else is new etc.). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I think when liberal feminists and trans activists talk
about transphobia, they are accusing radical feminists of a type of ‘trans
panic’, a desire to enact violence on or at least distance themselves from
trans women based on a moral disgust associated with the uncanniness of their
sometimes ambiguous presentation. I think this is a mistake: there is, as I was
saying above, a rational argument to be made for the need for female only
spaces in all kinds of different situations, and radical feminists are seeking
to make that argument, rather than simply deny trans people full rights and
humanity out of a culpable, in the progressive worldview, sense of repugnance.
I think that mistake leads people to respond to radical feminist argument the
way Angela did: we react with ‘radfem panic’, a kind of moral disgust that
‘cannot fully be captured by argument’, but just is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Why? What about women seeking to define, defend and police
their own social and sexual boundaries causes that visceral, panicky reaction?
It seems such an innocuous thing to ask: just leave us these small spaces. Go
on with your lives, think, write, organise, work alongside us, ally with us,
but respect our demand for some spaces where we would like to be alone. I mean,
put like that, it seems completely incomprehensible to refuse, doesn’t it? Who
else but women would be denied a small private space to discuss their
experiences of childhood sexual trauma, for example? What can even be gained
from breaching those boundaries and enforcing unwelcome inclusion in those
spaces?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Welp, here’s what I think: I think (and I know this sounds a
bit grandiose, but I’ve had a Big Emotions sort of weekend) that the argument
between radical and liberal feminists about the inclusion of trans women in
women-only spaces boils down to Angela’s reaction to my hand saying “Stop!” And
the reason that happens is that the </span>non-compliant<span style="font-family: inherit;"> woman falls, for many of us,
into the uncanny valley of gender, just as much as the non-passing trans woman
does. The woman who insists: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“I am not permeable, penetrable,
all-containing. I have a border, a definition, a limit to my physical and
psychic self which you are <b>not allowed
to enter</b>. I contain an authentic subjectivity to which <b>you are not privileged</b>. I get to decide who to empathise with and
who to reward with my nurture and my effort; <b>you do not get to claim them</b> as your due. I have an “I”, a real and
embodied experience which belongs only to me, which is understood only by me,
which I insist must be controlled only by me. <b>I am as fully human as a man</b>. I am a person, and I demand you
respect my personhood by respecting my right to set boundaries. <b>Thou. Shalt. Not. Pass.</b>”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">That woman is a monster of sorts, an aberration for which we
have no language. She is uncanny; she is neither a man nor fully a woman, for
to be a woman is to be the opposite of all of the above. To be a woman is to be
permeable, accommodating, open, <i>inclusive</i>.
Femininity <i>is</i> inclusion. The aggressive
hand raised in a gesture of prohibition is the antithesis of femininity, and to
see someone like me, who for all other intents and purposes looks and acts like
a woman, enact that transgression, is disorienting and potentially frightening.
All the more frightening when many women, whole groups of them, communities of
women stand up and say: no more. We shall not contain. This is our space and we
get to say who comes and goes here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">None of the above pertains necessarily to the hoary “are
trans women women or not” debate. Who knows what a woman is? I sure don’t. A
more badly defined concept hardly exists in the history of Western thought,
mostly because for at least the last 3 millennia it was not considered worth
bothering with. Everybody knew what a woman was: she was that formless Other that
contains as its very function, the repository and source of all life, passive
and mute in her fecundity. She has no right to ownership, because her borderlessness
lets all property slip through and out. She has no right to know, because she
cannot control what thoughts flow into her and what thoughts emanate. She has
no right to say who comes and goes in her body and on her body and out of her
body; her body’s function is only to receive and contain. She can only feel,
and include. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When it turns out that other views are available, is it
really a surprise that those views cause ‘rad-panic’?</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-64315868073058266962014-08-11T15:43:00.002+01:002014-08-11T15:44:33.231+01:00More on work, women, and who is expected to do what<br />
I wrote about <a href="http://notazerosumgame.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-womans-work-is-never-done.html">women's work</a> recently, and ever since then people have been sending me examples of how that work is hidden, ignored, defined out of existence and so on. It's really a fascinating subject: a dedicated ethnographer could make a life's work out of it. Random example: a <a href="https://royalsociety.org/events/2014/dorothy-hodgkin/">Royal Soceity lecture</a> about Dorothy Hodgkin (Britain's only female science Nobel laureate), her career, and why X-ray crystallography is considered "women's work" within the sciences. Another notable expert in this field is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin">Rosalind Franklin</a>, the woman whose work was indefensible (and uncredited) in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.<br />
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It's interesting finding out about women in the past whose work went anacknowledged and unrewarded, but it can be equally instructive to find clues as to hat is considered work int he first place. This morning I worked at my desk stnding up for 3 hours, which we are all supposed to be doing now because it's so much better than sitting down blah blah blah. I unashamedly admit I'm only doing it to burn extra calories so I can sneak a slice of cake at lunchtime without losing my patriarchally approved sice 10 ass, so don't look to me as a source of healthy lifestyle inspiration.<br />
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Anyway, I Googled around to see how many calories three hours of standing burns (answer: 99. Hardly worth the trouble), and in the process I found a calorie calculator on the website of the <a href="http://www.bhf.org.uk/heart-health/preventing-heart-disease/calorie-calculator.aspx">British Heart Foundation</a>. In order to be able to calculate how many calories you've burned, you need to choose an activity from a pre-determined range, divided into headline topics - dancing, running, sports etc. - illustrated with cute little animated GIFs. I'll give you one guess what image was chosen to illustrate the "household and garden" category.<br />
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It wasn't the little dude with the bicycle, let's just say. Anyway, that wasn't the most unpleasant surprise (in any case one could argue the BHF are only reflecting, rater than creating, an unfortunate social reality in which the majority of domestic labour is performed by women). Once selected, the category unfolds into a long list of activities - cleaning, vacuuming, cooking, playing with children, and... Well, see for yourselves.<br />
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I admit even I did a double take here. I mean, how likely is it that the British Heart Foundation is channeling Dworkin's claim that sexual access is something men extract from women as unpaid labour, by force? Well, not very, right? I don't know that there's been a separatist radical feminist take over in any major UK charities lately.<br />
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No, what's more likely to be going on here is this: the BHF is slotting "Sex" in with house painting for two reasons: they think only women would be interested in anything to do with housework, and they think women would only be interested in sex as it pertains to weight loss. They'r really playing up to two negative stereotypes about women: that we are the natural performers of housework and domestic labour, and that we don't really like sex, lacking an authentic libido and engaging in sexual activity only as a means to achieving secondary aims such as securing the affection of the men in our lives or, as in this case, losing weight (probably as well as securing the affection of the men in our lives).<br />
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What's interesting though is that in this case a middle of the road, quite anodyne adherence to popular myths about women has inadvertently lead the BHF to reveal a much deeper and mroe disturbing truth, namely that sex is something men demand and expect from women, and if we don't provide it willingly ('willingly' meaning in this context passively - enthusiasm is not seen as a plus), they often see themselves as entitled to take it by force. Sex is work for many women in this society - not just the ones who turn to it as an actual source of cash income, but also the ones who lie there time after time, staring at the ceiling and thinking about all the house painting and child playing they will have to do tomorrow, hoping that at least he might finish quickly so they could get some sleep. That hackneyed description of a sexually unhappy relationship is not just a picture of commonplace unhappiness: it's a portrait of what it is when one's very body and mind are subordinated to the work one is expected to perform on behalf of others.<br />
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<br />Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-35720804017160672782014-07-08T15:04:00.000+01:002014-09-03T09:56:19.918+01:00A woman's work is never done<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On a recent visit to Stockholm, I was amused to encounter an exhibit in its excellent historical museum titled </span><a href="http://www.historiska.se/template/RelatedImagePopup.aspx?parent=21278&image=21281" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“The Bäckaskog woman”</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This woman’s well preserved remains were excavated in 1943 and were found alongside grave goods such as fish hooks, carving blades and other paraphernalia indicative of a an active life of living off the land through hunting and fishing. The remains were immediately interpreted as those of a man and took pride of place among Sweden’s archaeological exhibits as “The Barum Fisherman”. It was not until 1970 (!) that some enterprising physical anthropologists thought to actually </span><a href="http://samla.raa.se/xmlui/bitstream/handle/raa/2096/1970_281.pdf?sequence=1" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">examine the skeleton</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in detail, whereupon they were staggered to discover that, based on the condition of the skeleton’s pelvis, the Barum ‘man’ had given birth to at least six children in ‘his’ life!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the face of it, this is a familiar tale of sexist academics and their blinkered view on prehistoric gender roles; in fact </span><a href="http://notazerosumgame.blogspot.com/2013/05/heres-some-basic-reality-for-ya.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve written before</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about the illogic of most of our assumptions about who made the milestone innovations like the harnessing of fire, plant cultivation, pottery use and so on. But what especially intrigued me about the modern exhibit was that it is now named “The Bäckaskog woman”. Not “The Bäckaskog fisherwoman” or “The Bäckaskog huntress”, just… “Woman”. Even while being restored to her rightful identity, this long dead ancestress of the progressive Swedes is deprofessionalised, her survival activity subsumed and invisibilised within her gender identity. The status of the work this woman had undertaken in order to provide sustenance to herself and her children was lowered from that of a named occupation to the default activity we as a culture have always expected of women, and continue to expect of them today.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other angles on this phenomenon abound. In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>The Human Condition</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Hannah Arendt writes of productive versus reproductive labour: speaking of the attitudes to political and intellectual involvement of citizens in the life of ancient Athens, she describes their division of activity into the private and the public. The private sphere contained the activities that were necessary to the sustenance and reproduction of the body. Food production, textile work and sexual services (as well as the provision of offspring both as heirs and as slaves) were tightly enclosed within that realm. It was only the person who could afford not to worry at all about these necessary activities, who was free to assume that they will be performed for him as his right, who could properly speaking be ‘free’ to engage in the (morally and intellectually superior) public activities of law making, philosophy, political debate and art. I’m sure I don’t need to pain you a picture about just how much choice the people relegated to the necessary drudge work of the private realm had in the matter, nor what gender they (if freeborn) exclusively were.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before Arendt, the German thinker Thorstein Veblen in his seminal essay </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Conspicuous Consumption</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (on a side note, if you haven’t read it, it’s currently in print as part of Penguin’s ‘Great Ideas’ series, and is some of the most eye-opening 100 little pages I've read in a long time) lays out a theory of development of human societies from the earliest (as he sees it) hunter gatherer phase to the modern consumer society. There is much that we would dispute in Veblen’s description of human cultures as existing along a progressive developmental spectrum form the ‘primitive’ to the ‘modern’, but it is of high importance that he describes the gendered division of labour at each stage and provides a useful schema for thinking about how the gradual subjugation of women may have become embedded in human cultures. In particular Veblen distinguishes between what he calls ‘drudgery’ and ‘exploit’: the former, a form of activity or labour that acts on the self, on the bodies of human beings and on the bodies of live organisms with which we coexist in order to support and enable human survival; the latter, a form of activity that acts on the inanimate, inert objects around us in order to extract something – wealth, value, use – which is of no immediate necessity for survival. “[T]he distinction between exploit and drudgery” he writes “is an invidious distinction between employments. Those employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable, noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit … are unworthy, debasing, ignoble”.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Debasing, ignoble, secluded and unseen: these are some of the ideas that underpin our collective understanding of what work becomes when women do it. In practice the logic is circular: women do unworthy work because they are unworthy; work primarily down by women is unworthy because it is done by women. Under this condition it seems only fitting that the activities or employments of women remain hidden, unspoken of, unaccounted for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Literally unaccounted for, in fact. In her January </span><a href="http://www.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2014/01/20140115t1830vHKT.aspx" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lecture</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> at the LSE, “The Reproduction of People by Means of People”, Professor Nancy Folbre described what she sees as an accounting problem in modern economics: the fact that we have no means of accounting for the labour (which in economic language we would class as ‘transfers’ once it had been converted to a money value) performed within families, predominantly by women, in order to support the economic activities of the other family members. Feminist readers will be immediately put in mind of the bill for ten years of domestic service in marriage that Myra presented to her cheating husband upon their divorce in Marylin French’s classic </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>The Women’s Room</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">; but more prosaically we can think of a woman’s taking maternity leave and forgoing her full wage for (say) a year as a transfer of her lost wages to both the child she is taking care of and the husband who is not losing his wages in order to care for the child during the same period. Form an accounting point of view, and in a manner which is congenial to our economics obsessed intellectual landscape, child bearing and child rearing can be conceptualised as straightforward transfers of cash from women to men – but in fact our current economic models do not count them at all. They are, to us as a society, invisible.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To what is this rambling jaunt through history and economics tending? To the fact that the invisibility of women’s work is a key stumbling block even within feminism itself, let alone outside of it. I was moved and concerned today to read </span><a href="http://fishwithoutabicycle.com/2013/07/09/an-open-letter-to-my-community-regarding-the-michigan-womyns-music-festival/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this piece</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and the fact that it is coming under attack these days. Now, any women’s space that is being threatened with annihilation should be of concern to feminists; we have seen, especially in the wake of the financial crisis and subsequent austerity policies, many women’s services, women’s book shops, libraries, mother’s groups, as well as refuges, rape crisis centres and homeless shelters disappear or seriously curtail their activities due to lack of funding. This is a trend that should be a worry to us all: our continued safety and the flourishing of our movement cannot be relied upon in the absence of physical places in which to congregate and share our knowledge, our skills and our vision.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What struck me especially about Sara St. Martin Lynne’s essay, though, was the detailed, loving way in which she described the decades of hands-on, feet-wet elbow grease that has gone into sustaining the festival:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[MichFest] is a music festival that has repeatedly forgone corporate sponsors and still manages to provide the nutritious meals that are included in the price of a festival ticket for every single woman who attends. This all-inclusive ticket also entitles every woman on the land to community health care, childcare, emotional support, and workshops. ASL interpreters interpret every set of every single stage at Michfest. Every communal space is wheelchair accessible, made so by women who get on their hands and knees in the blazing sun (or pouring rain) and drive nails into the ground through upside down carpets. Great effort is taken to make sure that every woman on that land knows that she is wanted, that she is welcome and that she is precious among us. It continues to be a place that prioritizes the environment and care for the land that the festival is built on. Every single piece of garbage gets picked up by hand. In the months between festivals there is not a trace of festivity left behind. I almost resisted the urge to contrast this to some of the disgusting messes I have seen in the wake of some of our Dyke Marches and Pride Celebrations, but I will not. We take pride in cleaning up after ourselves. Yes, we have a great time in those woods, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>but oh how this community has worked and continues to do so.</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (emphasis mine)</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reading this passage put me in mind of the Occupy camp in Bristol in 2011: women in the kitchen, women laying out furniture, women taking notes, women creating a free coffee corner, women printing flyers. Men? From what I saw, lighting fires and posting YouTube videos of their thoughts, mostly. What thoughts would they have had to post if there had not been women there to make sure that the camp, as a physical thing in the world, was able to exist? And for that, women were raped, ridiculed online and to our faces, sexually harassed, ignored, belittled. Occupy was the Manarchists’ movement – and for that reason, it failed. (Parenthetically, one of the flyer-printing women that year was me, trying to get this very message through their thick skulls)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The theory of <a href="http://socialdifference.columbia.edu/files/socialdiff/projects/Article__Mapping_the_Margins_by_Kimblere_Crenshaw.pdf">intersectionality</a> has brought a lot into feminism in terms of how we conceptualise the lives and oppressions of women who are suffering under more than a single axis of domination. Gender interacts with race, sexuality, health and so on in unpredictable ways, creating specific and individual oppressions for the women positioned at their intersections. What has often been lacking from the intersectional conversation, however, is the issue of class. Clearly poor women experience gender oppression differently than well off women – but apart from the occasional nod in the direction of material poverty, I have rarely seen a strong engagement with the topic of economic class in intersectional writing. Partly this is an issue of the Left: class politics is out, identity politics (in the proper, and by no means pejorative, sense of the word) is in, and mentions of class smack of a Marxist universality that fails to take the relational particularities of colonialism, compulsory heterosexuality, physical ability etc. into account. This is in itself not an always unfair criticism; but it does leave a lacuna where a conversation about work ought by right to be being held.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The feminism of the 1970s and thereabouts is often described as overwhelmingly white and ‘Middle Class’ (almost the only time class comes up in intersectional discourse), its concerns the concerns of affluent women disaffected by being kept out of the most lucrative professions and most senior positions in the corporate hierarchy. As Laurie Penny once said, we talk about maternity leave for professional women, but what about the concerns of their cleaners and nannies? This is of course ahistorical: from the match girls to the Dagenham strikers, gender and labour politics have gone hand in hand throughout the 20</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;">th</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> century. It is only now, having rhetorically separated them into non-interlocking realms under the atomising influence of neloliberalism, that we can look back at the seeming failure to explicitly link the two together and criticise it as lacking. In fact, the question would not have computed for your typical 60s radical: labour rights and gender rights were obviously interwoven, starting from Marx and Engels themselves, and onwards through the intellectual tradition of the Left.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If labour in general is invisible on the contemporary Left, then the labour of women is many times more so. As </span><a href="http://nataliacecire.blogspot.de/2014/07/on-neoliberal-rhetoric-of-harm.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Natalia Cecire</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> writes, “neoliberal exploitation succeeds by ramping up and extending the ways that women have typically been exploited under earlier forms of capitalism”; such is the extent of cooptation of women’s work that it might be harder than ever to see it for what it is - even if it is no longer confined to the inner, hidden spaces in of the home or the nunnery. We don’t have a language in which to praise the sore backs of MichFest volunteers or the long and diligent hours of planning, writing, chairing meeting, washing dishes, baking brownies, painting placards, printing flyers that goes in to the reproduction of the physical thing that is feminist activism. And having no language in which to praise them, we disparage them as frivolous, contemptible, disposable.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In fact the labour of women has always been disposable. In part this is inherent to the nature of reproductive labour, which in the end produces nothing more glamorous than the wastes of the body: mothers are the makers of corpses; farmers are the makers of shit. The hours of painstaking craft invested in a patchwork quilt, a meal, a baby, a music festival, do not ennoble any of these things. Women’s effort is not counted towards the value of women’s productions: the work is of no value in itself. Ignoring or at best denigrating women’s ignoble labour is the economic foundation of patriarchy; and in any case it’s not really work, because we do it as a natural, inescapable outcome of our base natures. Women are ‘caring’. We are ‘multitaskers’. We are ‘better at planning’. We are expected to perform the domestic, social, emotional and bodily labour that enables the current society not as an occupation but as an emanation. Like silkworms excrete silk, women excrete labour; therefore all our work is, literally, crap.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In turning a blind eye to the graft that women put in just to keep the world looking (never mind smelling) tomorrow the same as it does today, we are plugging in to a tradition that goes back millennia; so </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>there is nothing progressive about wantonly destroying the labour of decades</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in closing down MichFest once and for all. Nothing enlightened in dismissing the diligence and tenacity of women working to safeguard other women form poverty or violence. Without a theory and practice of accounting for, appreciating and foregrounding women’s work, no feminism can be either possible or desirable. We need to start building such a theory, even when talking and thinking about the work of women we disagree with. </span></span></div>
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-4502386285040251832014-04-03T17:41:00.003+01:002014-04-03T17:56:17.436+01:00Patriarchy cannot be Breached: Normalising nudity in a pornified world<br />
China Mievile's <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/30/china-mieville-fiction">The City and The City</a> is a novel whose plot happens in two cities that occupy the same physical space. Interleaved and interwoven - in some places completely separate, in others "cross hatched" so closely that adjacent inch-wide stripes of a street or a park bench belong in two different cultures, economies, nationalities and states - the two enemy city states of Beszel and Ul Quoma jostle for autonomous existence in a double-occupancy street-scape. These two conjoint twins, however, refuse to allow any recognition of their points of intersection. While passing buildings, cars and people from the other city on the street, citizens of both are strictly indoctrinated from birth to Unsee their counterparts, to refuse by force of intellectual will and disciplined inattention to enter into the Other's presence. To do so, even in a moment of fleeting recognition, let alone an open movement, would be to Breach - to commit the worst and most heavily punished crime in either city.<br />
<br />
Towards the unravelling of the thick whodunit plot, we are introduced to the possibility of Breaching without moving from the spot. A certain path in a park that is shared by both cities (under different names and for different uses) co-exists equally in both. It is not cross-hatched, but fully shared; while in it, Breach is a matter of nothing but a shift in consciousness; one can illegally cross a heavily militarised border simply by moving one's awareness from Beszel to Ul Quoma or vice versa.<br />
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When I look at, and read about, the #normalisingnudity hashtag on Twitter (warning: some very, very nasty trolls have invaded the tag and are spamming it with extremely disturbing imagery. Use caution when investigating), I think of Breach, the possibility of moving between two world simply by willing the transition.<br />
<br />
The idea of #normalisenudity is not much different from mid-20th century Naturism: to reassert the unclothed human body as a thing that transcends sexualisation, shame and desire, but is rather an everyday thing, a vessel, tool or object that everyone possesses and has equal rights to the enjoyment and use of. This is not in itself controversial, except inasmuch as religious doctrines that fear and hide the body under mantles of modesty and godliness would probably object to the view of naked human bodies in principle.<br />
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What's more controversial about the idea of #normalisenudity in the current climate is not the nudity it seeks to increase, but whose nudity it tries to reassert the normality of. Nudity as such is something we are, if anything, awash in: one cannot enter a newsagent or watch a movie without being flooded by more images of nudity than in a shower room with floor to ceiling mirrors. But the nude bodies we are almost battered with are very particular kinds of bodies: predominantly female, overwhelmingly young, almost universally hairless, thin, healthy and unblemished, as well as, of course, mostly white. To reclaim the right of other, not-patriarchy approved bodies of being seen int he public sphere would be nice work, if you could get it.<br />
<br />
But you can't. It is not possible in our world to Breach into a reality in which a naked nipple means anything other than sexual object for (straight) male gratification. The semiotics of breasts, vulvas and penises in a culture quite as belligerently pornified as ours is too rigidly fixed to be tampered with; no amount of posting photos on Twitter can shift the meaning now. The Signified of the body, and especially the female body, is policed with at least as much vehemence in our world as the Unseeing of Beszel and Ul Quoma is policed in their own. It would take a thoroughgoing political, cultural and economic revolution to women's nakedness from male desire - trying to achieve that revolution by insisting that people See our bodies as we want them seen is a recipe for frustration.<br />
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We cannot expect the pedestrians of Porn Boulevard to see our Empowerment Street road markings. The worlds - that of patriarchy and that of feminism - are too rigidly separated, too violently border-patrolled, too deeply ingrained in people. Posting a naked selfie on the internet can have only one meaning in the semiotics of patriarchy, and that meaning is exhibitionism. I applaud the efforts of some women and men to get out from under that language, but they can't. And sadly, their attempts will bring the likes of hateful 4Chan trolls down on their heads.<br />
<br />
Empowerment cannot lead to revolution; without revolution empowerment is illusory. True empowerment of the female authentic material reality is the end goal of, and not a tool towards, feminist liberation. Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-71518396904462072662014-03-06T15:37:00.001+00:002014-03-06T15:39:37.790+00:00I know how I feel about catcalls, thanks: a response to Paris Lees<div class="MsoNormal">
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Dear Paris,<o:p></o:p></div>
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Let me tell you a little bit about what street harassment –
or “catcalling” as you term it – has meant in my life. Perhaps it will help you
understand why some women have found <a href="http://m.vice.com/en_uk/read/enjoying-catcalls-paris-lees-column?utm_source=vicetwitteruk">your VICE piece</a> so disquieting, and if it
doesn’t, well, all I’ve done is laid bare my vulnerable past and upset my mother, so NBD (sorry mom).<o:p></o:p></div>
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When I was about 11, a boy in my neighbourhood was in love
with me and wanted to “go steady”. He was a very attractive boy and I was very
flattered, until one afternoon he insisted on exposing himself to me. He just wanted
me to “look at it”. I said no – I was scared and embarrassed and I didn’t want
to look. I ran away. This boy and his best friend then turned sharply from
admirers to haters: they started yelling abuse at me if they saw me on the
street, sometimes chucking stones, and once they actually grabbed me, but
that’s a story about sexual assault and not catcalls so never mind it for the
moment <o:p></o:p></div>
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At about the same time, two other boys (why do they always
work in pairs?) were also paying me and a (different) friend attention. At
first we were flattered, they were older boys and I actually had a crush on one
of them anyway. But then, during swimming sessions, they started to get
intimidating. They would dive and come up between our legs. They’d playfully
threaten to undo our bathing costumes. They’d corral us in the deep end and
leeringly ask us personal questions. Long story short, I can’t swim to this
day, and one of those boys, who lived on my street, also ended up yelling
things and chucking stones at me. Stone chucking, it turns out, is a
surprisingly common experience among pubescent girls. Leviticus was onto
something.<o:p></o:p></div>
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These were probably my earliest introductions to catcalling
and the interface between it and actual violence.
They are only two among many more, but they stick int he mind.</div>
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You’re probably getting ready to say that my
experiences are not “true” catcalls, that this is not what you were talking
about at all, that the examples you gave are somehow qualitatively different
from my experiences. I’d like to ask you – how? If there is a clear difference
between what those boys were doing when they were menacing me at close quarters
and what they and other boys and men were doing when they were shouting at me
from a distance, what is it? Can you describe it, other than telling me that in
some of the cases I was right to be afraid, and in others I was wrong, and
should have been flattered?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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But wait, that’s not the end of my story, so before we get
into further judgements about how I should just relax and learn to like street
harassment, let me just tell you that I grew up to <b>love it</b>. I reveled in catcalls; they were daily (and believe me,
they were daily) reminders that I’m desirable, that I am seen, that I am <b>noticed</b>. In a world where boys at
school would start hissing if I tried to speak in class, where my father and
other men in authority explicitly told me I had no right to speak, being seen
was at least better than being ignored completely. It was <b>something</b>. An
indication, however small, that I am making a connection with people in
the world. I treasured it. Some days, smiling back at a catcaller was the most
genuine emotion I was empowered to express to a man. Not because I’m a timid
shrinking violent, but because they were <b>not
listening</b>. They only gave a fuck about what they wanted to, well, fuck. <o:p></o:p></div>
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What changed my mind, I bet you’re wondering? Was I
eventually raped in some sufficiently filmic way that my attitudes experienced
a redemptive turnaround? Did I get old and fat and stop being attractive to
men, subsequently becoming embittered? <o:p></o:p></div>
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Well, not exactly. I did get older, of course, everyone
does, but male attention mysteriously failed to disappear. I’d turned against
the casual street Romeo a lot earlier than you’d think, though. It started
when, aged 22, my then-boyfriend playfully ordered me to get up and take a
twirl for a friend of his at a party. I was wearing a very short dress and
looked, if I say so myself, fucking unbelievable, and he wanted to show me off. I did not know the friend, and felt shy. Without analysing my feelings, I said no. He went on badgering me. I said no again. He wouldn’t stop. It went on
and on and on, without resolution. He was ‘nice’ about it, smiling and
complimentary. Nobody told him to knock it off. The evening just trailed off
like that - I don’t have a neat little parable of how we had a huge row and then
broke up over it; we didn’t. It hadn’t been an avalanche, but the fluttering of a few snowflakes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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That was probably the first time in my life I consciously
declined male attention. A man wanted to admire me and I said no. This was, to
my surprise, not the winning answer. The second and more dramatic time was while
I was working as an archaeologist in a small town up north. Archaeologists are
not known for their glamorous work attire, but we – a visible minority of
outsiders – were often remarked on and called at on the street. One night we
were walking back from the pub and a car full of young men drove past and
shouted something obscene at us. I don’t even remember what. I just remember I
was tipsily flourished a middle finger at the car’s retreating lights by means
of a mild protest.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The car screeched to a halt and went into reverse. It
slam-stopped alongside us and the driver leaned out of the window and started
threatening me: I’m going to rip your face off, I’m going to fuck your mother,
you fucking ugly bitch; the usual. My colleagues quickly pushed me to the back
of the group, not to protect me, but so that they could apologise to the
obviously violent thug in front of them to make him calm down and go away. I
was strongly given the impression I should shut up and not make any more
trouble, before everyone gets the shit kicked out of them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was a scary and educational experience, a bit like the
stone throwing; but even after that I didn’t start rejecting all catcalls.
Sometimes they made me smile. Sometimes they were mildly annoying but no big
deal. Sometimes, like a few years ago on New Year’s Eve, they quickly
degenerated into open attempts at sexual assault in a public but dark and
secluded space. But one thing is absolutely constant: if I reacted negatively,
it escalates. Straight away. No exceptions.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Catcalls are a bit like make up (or any other synecdoche for
femininity) in that respect: they are totes a choice, until you try to choose <b>not to</b>. Once a woman pushes back
against catcalls, the underlying violence, the resentment and hatred simmering
just beneath the surface, quickly becomes apparent. If you think that’s
far-fetched, do a little experiment: next time you get “eye-fucked on the way
to work”, tell the guy to stop staring at you. See what he says, or whether he
continues to look at you with admiration. I’ve got a strong hunch that the
response you’ll get will be a tad less than empowering.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you don’t have the trauma of my pre-teens to teach you to
be afraid of male attention, then I can only be glad for you. It’s not
something I would wish on anyone. But it would make me challenge even more
strongly your assertion that feminists who say that street harassment <b>is</b> harassment, and is not acceptable, are
“teaching women to be constantly afraid”. Who are you to tell me what made me
afraid? Of course different women will feel differently about this uninvited public
attention, and that’s fine. I’m not trying to police women’s reactions to harassment.
What I do insist on is that it is never a compliment, always a power play. Oh,
you can “make a choice”, as one of your interviewees did, to be “empowered” by
it (empowered to do what?). But you can <b>not</b>
choose to avoid it. If you so much as question a man’s right to impinge upon
your privacy in public, you’re in for abuse. That doesn’t sound like much of a
choice, does it? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No one had to teach me to be afraid, really. No tales of
Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf were necessary to instill timidity and
caution in me. I didn’t read the <a href="http://www.everydaysexism.com/">Everyday Sexism</a> blog 30 years ago and think “oh
wow, all these hundreds of women really hate it when men yell at them on the
street or stare at them on the underground, so I’d better get upset about the
heavy breather rubbing himself against me on the bus yesterday!”. If anything, the problem was that the people around me refused to take my fear seriously,
like you are refusing to take women’s fears seriously in your piece today, implying
that your personal enjoyment of catcalls should erase or negate the deep-seated
and perfectly reasonable fears of others.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Boys showed me that I had better be afraid, not feminists.
Boys and men taught me that there <b>is</b>
a direct link between violent speech and violent action. They taught me that if
I reject their advances, I will be punished. They taught me that verbal
violence <b>does</b> shade into physical
violence, because it did. These were lessons I learned young, and I learned
them well. That you choose to simply reject that view without offering evidence
to the contrary is not going to change my mind. That’s <b>my</b> lived experience. It is just as valid as yours, and it is shared
by many women. Please don’t tell us that to be afraid because bad things
happened to us is “infantilising”. To be afraid of what is clearly an imminent
danger is a mature emotional response that millions of women are entitled to
have - without being snidely written off as insufficiently “sexual” by those
who refuse to acknowledge our experiences.<span style="font-family: "Corbel","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-no-proof: yes;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-8902914260400890172014-02-17T21:23:00.000+00:002016-02-19T15:46:34.397+00:00What gender is and what gender isn’t<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-6a1cdb5e-41b6-1f3a-3993-05951ddfe913" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br />
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gender is not the straightforward assertion that some people play with dolls while others play with trucks; it is the assertion that playing with dolls is an inferior pastime to playing with trucks. It is the additional assertion that doll-playing people who play with trucks are deviant, and vice versa, and that this deviance must be punished with social sanction. In this way it creates </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a hierarchy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> between doll playing people and truck playing people.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gender is not the straightforward assertion that some people have stronger libidos than other people; it is the assertion that the people with low libidos owe people with high libidos satisfaction of their desires. It is furthermore an assertion that low-libido people who display high libido are deviant and that this deviance must be punished with social sanction and also violence. In this way it creates </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a hierarchy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> between low-libido people and high-libido people, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and a power imbalance</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that allows high-libido people to use violence in their relations with low-libido people.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gender is not a straightforward assertion that some people are always the doctor and other people are always the nurse; it also asserts that nurses are less valuable than doctors. It furthermore asserts that nurse-people who want to be doctors should nevertheless be economically under-compensated compared to doctor-people doctors, and that doctor-people who want to be nurses are economically over-compensated compared to nurse-people nurses. In this way it creates </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a hierarchy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">economic injustice</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and maintains it through the non-arbitrary distribution of financial rewards.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Doll-playing people with high libidos who train to be doctors are highly likely to be considered deviant, to have been subject to violence, and to be on the losing end of a non-arbitrarily unjust distribution of financial rewards.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I will give you a minute to think about what we tend to call to these libidinous doll-playing doctors.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">***</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You may have noticed that I said “gender” and not “gender oppression”. Gender creates hierarchies with unjust power differentials; it is oppression. People are not oppressed “on the basis of gender”, they are oppressed </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> gender. Gender, like class, has two relative positions, whatever Mark Zuckerberg tells you: up and down. Powerful and exploited. Fully human and non-person. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
</span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You will notice that at no point in this little disquisition have I referred to the genitalia of the truck-player-libido-doctor class. Or to anybody’s genitalia, for that matter.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s because genitalia have nothing to do with it. The phenomenon whereby people are sorted into groups, characteristics are said to apply to those groups, and then people to whom those characteristics do not apply are laid in a Procrustean bed of social sanction is in no way, shape, form or meaning biologically embedded. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is arbitrary.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
</span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let me give you a different example[1]. It’s a pretty good example because it shows how a system of domination went from arbitrary to non-arbitrary, and the benefits to the dominators that could be had from that.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the ancient past, (and in some places at present) any person could become a slave. Greeks enslaved Greeks, Romans enslaved both fellow Romans and Gauls, Germans, Britons and Egyptians (to name a few); the Barbary Corsairs raided European shores for slaves and exported some millions of Europeans for slavery in Africa and the Middle East. British plantation owners bought their fellow countrymen who had been sold into slavery by their government after being convicted of a crime.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But at some point during the economic development of what would later become the Southern United States, this changed. For the first time in history, enslavedness ran along colour-coded lines. People with (certain kinds of) dark skin were seen as automatically slaves. This create the paradoxical situation that did for Solomon Northrup: that he was legally a free man in one state but, based on nothing but the colour of his skin, legally a slave in the other. It had nothing to do with him as such; it was arbitrary as regards the individual, but non-arbitrary as regards the group, or class. Slavery became encoded in the racial identities attached to people from African descent and stopped being an emergent factor contingent on war or economic upheaval.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A common hypothesis for why slavery turned from being random to being racially based is class warfare. White and black people resisted the economic and political oppression they suffered together, as in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The policy of placing one arbitrarily in a superior position to the other split their resistance and refocused solidarity along ethnic instead of economic lines. Landowning capitalists: 1, poor revolutionaries of all colours: 0, black people: oy vey.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is nothing, nor was there ever anything, nor could anything ever have been hypothesised to exist, that makes people with black skin more slave-like or slave-prone or slave-worthy than white people. It was and remains one of the profoundest injustices ever committed by man against fellow man[2] for the sake of protecting entrenched economic interests.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nevertheless, the colour of people’s skin (as well as other associated physical characteristics of course) was the ostensible basis on which the dichotomous nature of free vs. slave was imposed. Nothing, I repeat, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nothing whatsoever inherent to the blackness of black people could possibly have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>caused</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> white slave owners to so oppress them; </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nevertheless, it was the colour of their skin that served as the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>pretext</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for dehumanising and exploiting them.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">***</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a similar vein, nothing whatsoever about women’s bodies can justify the historic and ongoing economic, sexual, epistemological, religious and political exploitation, oppression and injustice inflicted on us as a class.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet it is nevertheless the case that our biology – our bodies, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">arbitrary features of our physiology </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that could in no way be said to be relevant to our political, sexual, intellectual, religious or economic ambitions and activities</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> – that were and continue to be used as the ostensible pretext for so oppressing us.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To say that biological sex is at the root of women’s oppression is to state an easily verifiable historical fact. Go back as far as Aristotle or the Jewish Bible, and women are described as inferior, fallible, unclean or subhuman based on nothing other than our ability to gestate and lactate. The connections are clear, unambiguous and unashamed, and they have by no means retreated into a distant and irrelevant past; they underlie and underpin the continued segregation of women as a class into </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a gender – a genre, or type, in the original French – that plays with dolls, has a lower libido, and is better suited for a low paid nurse.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To say that the physical reality of women or of black individuals offers no humanly imaginable justification for their oppression is to make a clear and ethically cogent statement of fact. The true roots of women’s oppression is located in a pursuit of power by small elites through the division of humanity into classes with opposed interests, one of which is constructed as inferior to the other. However, to take a further step into saying that this disconnect between the real and the purported cause of our oppression means </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that the fact that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">served</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as the purported cause does not exist, or is not meaningfully consistent, or is “a social construct” and therefore somehow “not really real”,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is the most craven of attempts to smuggle good old fashioned misogyny by the back door of linguistically obtuse progressive theorising.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even those intellectually dishonest racists who claim to “not see colour” don’t go as far as insisting that therefore differences in colour don’t exist. Race, nationality, religion, and other social constructs such as class and education, all profoundly shape gradients of power, domination and exploitation. So far, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the only ‘social construct’ that is being theorised out of existence by the Left rather than the Right is the oldest and largest </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(in terms of population size) of them all.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sex exists</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[3]. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gender</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> – a hierarchy of the fully human and the merely animalistic, the properly intellectual and the merely emotional, the realised individual and the objectified Other – </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">instrumentalises it</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It does not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">depend</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on it. It is not directly – ontologically or otherwise – driven by it. But it is an inescapable fact of gender that its organising principle, its plausible cause of oppression, its fig leaf of necessity, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is sex</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To theorise sex out of existence is to deny that sexism can exist. It is to refuse to accept that a class of human beings exist who have been economically exploited, raped, murdered, forcibly impregnated, exchanged as chattel, denied a history, a language and a right to their bodies since (literally) time immemorial. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If we deny these people an identity based on the root of their oppression we are saying they, as a class, do not exist</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Have no shared history. No conceivable political mission. No right to recourse. No community. No grievance. No hope.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A more obscene act of woman hatred than to simply refuse to admit that women exist is hard to imagine. Tidier and cheaper than wholesale extermination, more economically self serving than foregoing the reproductive labour extracted from them, the profound hatred of women </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">qua</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> women such an argument betrays is breath-taking. That it is an attitude espoused sometimes by women themselves is no counter-argument, but a - relatively minor - entry in the ledger of the brutalising effects of patriarchal oppression.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[1] I know. You find it “incredibly problematic” that I would use racism as an example because the “overwhelming majority” of radical feminists are “white and middle class”. The fact that that’s how you read people who don’t trumpet their racial or class identity for you to see, because they oppose identity politics, is in no way an indication of your own internalised biases about the sorts of people who go in for radical analysis, but a totes factual reflection of the demographic of a group you disapprove of. This makes complete sense. Have a nice day.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[2] Notwithstanding the women slaveowners of the South, I use the term advisedly.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[3] Oh yeah, there's a paragraph missing, right? The one where I assure the reader that I bear trans women no ill will and am fully committed to their legal emancipation and bodily security? Well, if you think you’ve a right to demand such a paragraph, I have one thing to say to you: fuck you. If you think that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">simply admitting that women exist</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is, absent some explanatory waffle, a form of hate speech by omission, please go away and never darken my blog again. You are too stupid and mean-spirited to be allowed access to the English alphabet.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span>Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com58tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-24800905762393293532014-01-22T18:39:00.000+00:002014-01-22T18:45:14.361+00:00Men: Stop telling us how to do feminism<br />
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Feminism is one of those things everybody has an opinion
about. Women, because it affects them; men, because they <i>think</i> it doesn’t
affect <i>them</i>. The belief that we all know how to do feminism, however, is rooted
in deep and probably completely unacknowledged and unwelcome misogyny: it must
be simple, it’s only something that women do. “How complicated can it be? I’ve
read a few CiF columns and even maybe a book or two on the subject, of course I
totally get it. Plus some of my best friends are women”. Applied to any other
area of life, such an approach would be absurd. Can you imagine <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2014/jan/20/lord-rennard-case-damaging-lack-proportion">a senior Guardian columnist</a> barging into a football supporters’ forum & haranguing
them about the offside rule? Or a journalist marching into a mechanic’s workshop &
lecturing him at length about how it’s the clutch he should be looking at
because obviously tires are of only minor importance in the grand scheme of
things? (Disclosure: I know next to nothing about either football or cars. Not
because I’m a woman, but because they’re both pretty boring subjects. Then
again, the men who lecture feminists about doing feminism know close to nothing
about feminism, so I reckon we’re even).<o:p></o:p></div>
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When women attack feminism, they tend to go for the <i>how</i> (this is one of those enormous rhetorical generalisations to which there are
many exceptions that I haven’t got the energy to fight with you about below the
line, dear reader: just work with me here): you need to do more of this, less
of that, you need to listen more to marginalised voices, you need to be more
inclusive. These criticisms can be intemperate, even hurtful, and they can side-track
the conversation for a while, but they accept the basic premise of “doing
feminism right now is quite an important thing”.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Men on the other hand
have a tendency to concentrate on the <i><a href="http://glosswatch.com/2014/01/21/not-caring-isnt-caring-more-lord-rennard-michael-white-and-feminist-priorities/">what</a></i>: don’t campaign for inclusion,
campaign against rape. Don’t you know there are women who have no access to
education? Haven’t you heard of FGM? And did you hear the government are
instituting cuts that mostly hurt women?! (Nah, I haven’t heard; do tell me
about it, oh wise man, because being but a weak and feeble woman, I don’t
actually read the news or know how it affects me. It’s this crazy thing we
little ladies do).<o:p></o:p></div>
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The difference between the two approaches, which is obvious
when you look at them side by side like this, is that the first approach is
designed to make feminism better; the second is designed to make feminism impossible. We can’t not-campaign for anything because we are currently not
campaigning for everything. The enormity of the systemic discrimination and
oppression of women makes it a priori impossible to tackle it all in one big
go; we have to break it down into smaller chunks and deal with each of those at
a time – not just as individual campaigners, but also as a movement overall. Hence
waves, in case you wondered. Mind you, I don’t really think the men telling us
to go and campaign about <a href="http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/52740">FGM</a> when we’re talking about sexual harassment in the
workplace actually care about FGM (I’d like to see <i>their</i> campaign on it, for a start): it’s just become a kind of
Godwin’s Law of feminist-bashing, a shortcut to the moral high ground for
people who are more interested in shutting you up, because you’re making them feel
uncomfortable, than in mutilated vulvas.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This feminism related Dunning-Kruger effect serves not only
to embarrass otherwise intelligent men by temporarily reducing them to the
level of analysis & insight of Daily Mail commenters; it’s also pretty damn
draining on the limited and already embattled resources of the still-too-small
cadre of brave women tackling systemic discrimination, male sexual violence,
economic injustice and cultural femicide head-on. We know pretty damn well what
we’re fighting for and why, and, actually, much as it might astonish the <a href="https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/425646559796031489">Dan Hodgeses</a> & Michael Whites of this world, we have a pretty solid understanding
of what’s important to us and how it fits into the big picture of ending
sexism. We, unlike you, <a href="http://stebax.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/wanting-to-understand/">get it</a>. Now be a love and let the big girls get on with
it while you sit quietly on the side-lines and maybe learn a thing or two.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-88090157484616032982014-01-15T17:21:00.001+00:002014-01-15T19:00:29.417+00:00My Tragic Tale (Not Really LOL)<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Welp, <a href="http://educationforchoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/sex-selective-abortion-in-news-again.html">abortion is making headlines again</a>. Imaginary abortion, as it happens - since nobody has ever managed to produce an actual real live sex selective abortion in this country anyway. It's all hearsay and supposition, but it won't stop anti-choice, anti-woman organisations from using this scare tactic to try and roll back the clock on women's right to their own body. That's how these things work: there is no good argument in favour of denying women human rights, so antis have to rely on lies and allusions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Personally, I think we don't talk about abortion enough in this country. Well, in any country really. We have a lot of (mostly) men <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/01/biggest-lie-anti-choice-movement-it-they-who-deal-harsh-realities">talking</a> about what abortion is and isn't and what women should and shouldn't be allowed to do with their own hooches, but actual women talking about actual abortion? Not so much. And this silence contributes to the antis' efforts to portray abortion as something shameful and secret, when in fact for most women it's a medical necessity no worse than a root canal.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A few days ago, <a href="http://jeanhatchet.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/choosing-isnt-really-option-sometimes.html">a blogger shared her personal experience of abortion</a>, very bravely I think in the prevailing climate of shaming and judgement (<strike>sadly the post has since been removed for reasons unknown</strike> - <i>restored & linked to! MS</i>). I really admired her, but ummed and ahhed about doing the same, mostly because of What Mom Will Think. But I'm over than now, so below is the story I shared with <a href="http://educationforchoice.blogspot.co.uk/">Education For Choice</a>, who are running a workshop about abortion next weekend and needed testimonials. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">The minute the condom broke I knew I was going to get pregnant. Not that I hadn't had scares before, but this time I just KNEW. The following morning, I told my mom: I think I may be pregnant. She asked me what I wanted to do. I immediately said "have an abortion". We talked about whether to tell dad or not. Decided not to, for the time being.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 21px;">I told my boyfriend. He said if I had the baby he would kill himself, which hurt a lot even though I definitely didn't want to be a mother (then, or ever - I don't have children). I think that was the only part of getting an abortion that really traumatised me, and which I ended up having bad dreams or sad thoughts about - him rejecting the </span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 20.99431800842285px;">pregnancy</span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 21px;"> in such a brutal way. I know it's silly, but it's the truth.</span></span></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">I bought a home pregnancy test and the line turned blue straight away, so I'd been right. I went to see my doctor and told him I wanted to have an abortion; my boyfriend came with me, which was just as well, because after an exam my doctor said he thought I might have an ectopic pregnancy and we had to rush to the emergency room. They did a urine test and announced that I was pregnant (thanks, I already knew, but maybe the people in the next town didn't, do you want to shout any louder please?). It wasn't ectopic, so I had to go through the usual channels to get my termination.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">Before being approved for an abortion, I had to have 2 ultrasounds. One in my doctor's office at exactly 6 weeks after conception, to make sure there was a heartbeat - in those days you couldn't do a termination before a heartbeat was detected - and one at the hospital. The one at the hospital was pretty unpleasant. It was an internal ultrasound - essentially and enormous dildo covered in nasty cold gel. And someone came into the room without knocking while it was being done! I introduced myself to them, which took them by surprise to say the least - but I said, well, since you're going to come into the room when I'm half naked, with legs akimbo and a great big wand shoved up my altogether, we may as well get to know each other. They left pretty sharpish after that. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">I think that was also the day I had my talk with the social worker; you had to, to get approval from a medical board to have a termination. I told her a bunch of lies about how if my father knew he would kill me and all that, playing up a sob story to make sure the board approves my termination. We both knew I was lying. It's a stupid law, as stupid as the two doctor rule in the UK if not more so. Why make women lie?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">The six weeks between when I knew I was pregnant and the time of all of these ultrasounds and the eventual hospital appointment were a nightmare. Whether it was psychosomatic or real, I felt terrible all the time: drained, nauseous, achy and miserable. I couldn't WAIT to be not-pregnant again. Strangely I never really worried that my application would not be approved and I'll be forced to carry to term: I was just so, so certain that I COULD NOT BE PREGNANT RIGHT NOW that it carried me through what might have otherwise been a really anxious period (of no periods, haha).</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 21px;">The day before my appointment for the termination, I had to go into the outpatient clinic in the hospital and have a dilator shoved up my cervix, because apparently if you haven't had children before your cervix is really tiny and needs widening for the scrape to be possible. As luck would have it, it was a teaching hospital and the consultant asked my permission (which was nice of him compared to that ultrasound person!) to let a student doctor do it. I said yes, and then had to stifle my giggles, because the guy was only about my age and obviously terrified. Even though there I was, legs akimbo in a room with strangers again, I was definitely </span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 20.99431800842285px;">the</span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 21px;"> one more at ease!</span></span></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">Did you know that the cervix dilating thing they stick up you is basically a TWIG?! You could have knocked me over with a feather. Anyway, that was fairly unpleasant, physically speaking, and the following 24 hours spent with carpentry up my wazoo wasn't great either.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">My boyfriend and my mom came to the hospital with me. I was put in a gown & given some pills to relax me, then we just waited and waited and waited. There were a lot of other women there, but the only one I remember was a young Arab woman with her partner - boyfriend or husband, I don't know. At a certain point they came to roll us all up to Theatre, after which they parked us in a corridor and we waited again. I was pretty chill at this point, what with the drugs, but my mom was getting impatient as all the other women disappeared one by one. She was just about to go start poking people with a stick when a nurse came out of Theatre, took a look at me and ran back in, shouting "wait! We've got another one!" We nearly died giggling.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">I had a really lovely anesthesiologist who flirted and promised that he will give me nice dreams. I fell under and the next thing I remember is waking up because the Arab girl was crying and sobbing to break your heart. Anesthesia does funny things to your head, so I cried a little too, out of sympathy, but then my mom came in and the flirty anesthesiologist came to check on the dreams I'd had (I complained, there had been no nice ones!), and pretty soon I was ok.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">They put me in a recovery room full of women who had actually given birth, which was very strange if you ask me. They were all super miserable and I was SO GLAD I was not having a baby. After that, I don't remember much, except that I was really hungry so mom got me some junk food from the hospital shop. My boyfriend had scarpered long before I got taken up to Theatre anyway.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">Then after that... There's a bit if a blank in my memory. I don't remember going home or what the following few days were like. I was up and about straight away and was entirely hale and hearty, but had some very serious cramps for about a month afterwards that were so severe I ended up in A&E once. But they said it's normal and the pain will go away, so I just waited, and it did. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">And that's it, really. I never regretted my decision or felt guilty for it. I never even KNEW I should feel guilty, until I came to live in the UK and was exposed to anti-abortion propaganda for the first time. All I felt at the time was euphoric relief. And to this day, I am absolutely convinced this was the best decision to make, for me, for my family, for everyone.</span></span><br />
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6510624476585230434.post-13098414130907224102013-12-05T12:04:00.002+00:002013-12-05T12:04:31.863+00:00Extra, Extra! Scientists misunderstand own research! <br />
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Look below the line on any newspaper
article dealing with women’s equality, and you’re guaranteed to come across at
least a couple of comments condescendingly reminding you that there are differences
between men and women. Sometimes it’s accompanied by the wink-wink-nudge-nudge “apart
from the obvious, haha!”, sometimes it’s a sort of exasperated superiority at
the author’s sheer silliness. Often, it will appeal to scientific authority along the lines
of “research has repeatedly have shown”, or my personal favourite, “it’s proven by science”.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And frankly, you can’t
really blame people, can you? Quite apart from the success of books (and the
myths they engender) like “<a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-02/uor-maf020113.php">Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus</a>” and “<a href="http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=2684">TheEssential Difference</a>”, which one could say simply capitalize on a pre-existing
thirst to have gender stereotypes bolstered by the borrowed authenticity of
science, when actual new research does come out, it’s invariably reported in
the press in ways that hysterically emphasize the parts of the findings that
fit with prevailing notions about the difference between men and women, and
usually utterly ignore the rest.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The reason this week’s
neurobabble scoop is worthy of notice though is not that the newspapers
trumpeted it as the final proof that men are <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-hardwired-difference-between-male-and-female-brains-could-explain-why-men-are-better-at-map-reading-8978248.html">better at reading maps</a> (and should
therefore presumably continue to dominate the higher echelons of politics and
business, not that I’ve ever seen the connection, personally), but that in
doing so they did <b>not</b> misrepresent the researchers’ own conclusions.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Which is quite
remarkable, considering that the work actually <b>didn’t turn up the results the
scientists say it turned up</b>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Two excellent pieces written by people who have the
patience to trawl though the newsprint babble point out two key ways in which
this research did no, in fact, demonstrate that behavioural differences between
men and women are explained by difference in the brain.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-insights-into-gendered-brain-wiring-or-a-perfect-case-study-in-neurosexism-21083">This piece</a>, by Cordelia Fine, brings to light the
interesting fact that the data set these researchers used doesn't show any
measurable behavioural differences:<o:p></o:p></div>
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To give a sense of the huge overlap in behaviour between
males and females, of the twenty-six possible comparisons, eleven sex
differences were either non-existent, or so small that if you were to select a
boy and girl at random and compare their scores on a task, the “right” sex
would be superior less than 53% of the time.<br /><o:p> </o:p>Even the much-vaunted female advantage in social cognition,
and male advantage in spatial processing, was so modest that a randomly chosen
boy would outscore a randomly chosen girl on social cognition – and the girl
would outscore the boy on spatial processing – over 40% of the time.<br /><o:p> </o:p>As for map-reading and remembering conversations, these
weren’t measured at all.</blockquote>
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And this one, by my friend <a href="http://www.jpehs.co.uk/2013/12/03/brain-scans-prove-there-is-no-difference-between-male-and-female-brains/">Paul Harper-Scott</a>, winkles out
the hidden detail that they didn’t find any structural brain differences in
children, either:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Male and female brains
showed few differences in connectivity up to the age of 13, but became more
differentiated in 14- to 17-year-olds.</i><o:p> </o:p>That really is very interesting, to anyone willing to pause
for thought. Let us allow that the observed differences in adult brains are
significant, and that brain science is capable of communicating details of
value (though there is considerable scientific scepticism on this point). Those
differences are not manifested until the age of 14–17. It follows that the
assumption that girls and boys below that age are ‘essentially’ different,
‘because their brains are wired differently’ is unsupported by the evidence. It
is wrong to suggest that boys and girls have a ‘natural’ difference, which can
be traced to brain design, because the study does not support such a claim. On
the contrary, if we think that gendered difference is explicable only by brain
design, we ought to conclude from this study that there should be no
difference, at least no difference occasioned by brain design, between boys and
girls.</blockquote>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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In other words, this new and exciting research, reported to “finally
prove” why men and women behave differently because of their different brains, didn’t
prove either that </div>
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a) men and women behave differently, </div>
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b) they have innately different
brains, </div>
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c) that there’s even a connection between the two.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And yet not only the gullible science journalists and
credulous public, but even the people looking at the data themselves,
interpreted these non-findings in a way that reinforces the dominant
stereotypes about men and women in a post-industrial liberal democracy.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s hard not to feel like the world has gone just a little
bit delusional; like we’re arguing with someone about the colour of the sky,
pointing to it and going “but look, look at it, it’s right there!” only to have
them give us a pitying glance and say “yes, it is indeed yellow, like we told you. Your problem?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s not up to science to prove or disprove the stereotypes
about the sexes and gendered patterns of behaviour, in other words, because as long ago as the 90's, people like Stephen Jay Gould wrote about the persistent under-reporting of brain research studies whose findings showed little or no structural or operational difference between the sexes (over 90% of all such studies, if I recall the quotation correctly). This stuff is not new, and we can't leave it to the assumed objectivity of scientists to debunk decades (<a href="http://faculty.washington.edu/lynnhank/wbgould.pdf">centuries!</a>) of bunk. It’s up to
feminists to get it through these people’s thick lab coats that there are no
differences worth speaking of, and make them get down to the more interesting
work of trying to explain why we so persistently believe there are. Because ingrained attitudes manufacture their own brand of "evidence", in spite of and in the face of everything that we can justifiably advance as fact.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Marina Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14449789093721258516noreply@blogger.com6