DA BONEYARD

Abort/escortchat

bthny:

The clinic where I usually escort was dead - 2 protesters & 8 escorts. Apparently lila rose is in town for some fundraiser & all the protesters are going to be at the planned parenthood. So I biked over to pp but I guess pp opens later than the other clinic so I’m way early. Anyway, lilah rose. Whoo.

I see a lot of hyperbole in your future.

For everyone keeping score:

Here’s what I was (at least partially) serious about in the past day or so of paying tribute to the radical feminist theory of yesteryear, and what I was not so serious about:

From Jeffreys: I’m not surprised that nobody picked a fight about Sheila Jeffreys. I don’t think this is the case in every heterosexual relationship ever, but as a one-liner I agree with it. Similarly, I was hoping more people would pick up on the excerpts from Mackinnon (here and here — the latter is possibly my favorite one-liner to come out of the anti-porn era of feminism) but nobody did.

From Dworkin: I absolutely think that sexuality and sex is used as a weapon against women. It’s probably borderline absurd to not think that if you are at all sympathetic to the project of feminism. I’m on the fence about treating all men as a unified class — in general, I think that local discourses and knowledge systems are too powerful to be able to treat men as a general category. I am not sure where exactly the balance is between acknowledging local systems and dealing with the broad systematic issues — it’s a classic Huge Problem in political thought and I’m sure we’ll never get a straight answer. (This comes up a lot in the Robot-heart discussion too.)

Believe it or not, I don’t really have any strong opinion on pornography as an institution. Early on, username bthny made a remark distinguishing between pornography and erotica, and I’m not totally clear on where the distinction is. I absolutely don’t buy boredintheburbs’ argument that porn is about appreciating beauty of human bodies, but I’m not sure it’s a good analogy for gender relations in general. I tried pounding home that these arguments were not just about pornography but about sexual pleasure in general, but I’m not sure it stuck with boredintheburbs or Robot-heart (probably due to my own ‘kitchen-sink’ style of thinking about this sort of shit).

Dworkin’s stuff on intercourse as an expression I’m on the fence on. I don’t think that the existence of heterosexuality prevents women from ever flourishing, ever — I can’t think that and still put value in local systems of knowledge. (I read a lot of Foucault in school.) That said, whenever someone brings up a complaint that some way of looking at things denies women agency, my normal response is “and?” My opinion is, like I said, sometimes things really are that terrible for entire classes of people.

From Solanas: I don’t think all men are walking abortions, nor do I agree with most anything Valerie Solanas ever wrote (unless she wrote ‘I should have worked on my aim,’ which I wholeheartedly agree with). It was a lot of fun to defend, though. I think calling Y chromosomes incomplete is an interesting inversion but it’s got the same basic inherent flaws (specifically, biology as destiny) that the televangelist’s argument has when he complains that we shouldn’t let women outside or whatever.

Here’s why I posted a whole series of really inflammatory one-liners by famous radical feminist thinkers:

I noticed that a whole bunch of people who were starting to subscribe to this miserable blog were a) like sixteen years old and b) had a bunch of remarks about how they hated feminists on the front page of their blogs. I thought to myself ‘why are a bunch of people openly against the project of feminism following this miserable blog’ and so I posted a bunch of radical feminist shit and proceeded to clog everyone’s feed by defending it via huge verbose writing. Usernames boredintheburbs and then Robot-heart both took the bait, which I appreciate. (Thanks, guys.) My hope was that people not supportive of the project of feminism unsubscribe; I think this was, ultimately and unfortunately, a failure.

My only regret was that Robot-heart did not continue the back and worth, as I was planning on eventually making a post comparing all men to Hitler using the political thought of Catharine Mackinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and German philosopher Carl Schmitt, and it would have been wonderful to see how well that went over. But for now, if you are generally against the project of feminism or if you think feminists are all bra-burners and man-haters to the last woman, I recommend you unsubscribe from this blog immediately and go outside.

Jeanne-Claude (of Jeanne-Claude and Christo) dies

I have Christo on my deathpool list and his wife dies? Come on, baby needs username muppetpants to buy me pizza at the end of this calendar year because I predicted more deaths than he did.

Andrea Dworkin, Catharine Mackinnon, Pornography, Etc.

robot-heart-politics:

catbus:

These contextual reforms would then provide for the possibility that intercourse could be experienced in a world of social equality for the sexes. These reforms do not in any way address the question of whether intercourse itself can be an expression of sexual equality…

By Dworkin’s words, intercourse is not something that has no place in a world where women aren’t inherently subjugated, but just because it can exist in this world doesn’t make it an expression of equality. In other words, everything that exists in Happy Equality Land doesn’t necessarily reinforce happiness and equality, the same way political organizing in a democracy doesn’t necessarily reinforce democracy (see: white supremacist movements in the US). Dworkin, by my reading, is making a crucial distinction between ‘thing happening in a world of social equality’ and ‘thing being an expression of social equality’. If this is in fact what she means, then I genuinely agree with it.

I think you read Dworkin incorrectly. You highlighted one sentence, but then apparently ignored the one that came directly after, which I have bolded above. Dworkin in fact argues that penetration itself (even in a totally equal system) is an abuse of the female body.

I don’t think I’m reading Dworkin incorrectly — I highlighted that sentence as one question, and then regard the second one as a related but different question. The first I regard as being ‘can intercourse occur in a world of equality’ vs the second as being ‘can intercourse occur as an expression of equality,’ and I’m not sure an answer in the negative to the latter is necessarily abuse. I’m having a tough time thinking of a good (nonsexual) analogy for something that can occur in a setting but cannot be an expression of it. Maybe taxation in a setting of financial equality or justice?

I’m open to being proven wrong on this point, as I haven’t looked at Intercourse in years (ha ha feminist theory joke, next stop tenure) and (to show my hand a little bit) I am not that familiar with the rest of Dworkin’s body of work outside of a few specific points. I also recognize that Dworkin is unlikely to ever state that intercourse is a culturally healthy act, but I guess this discussion is not entirely about Dworkin.

a) I can swing with this argument until the last line, regarding suppression of desires, etc. One of the central points in radical thought in general is about your desires and how they’re influenced by the social structures around you. If someone’s desires are being influenced very strongly — and likely, they are — by systems which not only don’t have their best interests in mind but are actively seeking to harm them, is it necessarily a bad thing to suggest they suppress these desires? I don’t think it is.

In case I’m not being clear enough, let me also phrase it this way: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with questioning people’s desires to see if they’re wrong or should be suppressed. Desire is not a totally innate thing, immune to pollution or influence from outside — how many men think women should resemble Barbie dolls? It is really important to look at your desires and think about whether or not they’re bullshit, and I don’t think that there’s anything special about sexual desire that should exclude it from this questioning process.

While I agree with your statement that desire is influenced by our social structures (of course it is), my question is: how far do we deny or suppress our desires because they are in part based on unequal social dynamics? Does it end at watching porn? At S&M? At blow jobs? At sexual positions where a woman has her back turned to the man? At missionary with man on top? At all male-female intercourse (as Dworkin argued)?

It’s one thing to tell people, “You should really stop and think about your desires, where they come from, and what they might mean.” It’s another thing to tell consenting adults, “Hey, you shouldn’t do this in your bedroom or in anyone else’s, because it’s wrong.”

I am making a somewhat polemic argument here, as I am trying to base my arguments from within the radical feminist tradition. But, to stick with Andrea and Cathy…

In my opinion, it’s not unreasonable to dictate right and wrong actions for others in sexual arenas in the name of preventing widespread harm. Under the same banner, we punish sex crimes against minors regardless of consent, and I don’t think there’s anything special about adults in a state of mutual consent that says folks should stay out of their business.

To answer your question on how far we suppress all this, I would say ‘until we hit that state of equality’. If we have to get rid of woman-on-top to achieve a world where women’s relationship to sexuality is not inherently characterized by harm, I hardly think it’s unreasonable to press toward that as a goal. There’s nothing wrong with telling people I don’t think there’s anything special about sexual relations that make them fall into a special state of exception, detached from regulation. We do this in other arenas all the time with mandatory vaccines, for example. There’s nothing wrong with putting in serious regulations for the public good or to prevent massive, widespread harm to half of the population.

Second, Dworkin would probably argue that the very institution of consent in sexual relations is a myth anyway, which is why sex as an expression of equality is such a tough sell. (I recognize that you and the corpse of Dworkin are unlikely to agree so I won’t get into too much detail, in favor of the more controversial stuff.) One of the things that an agreement hinges on is both parties being honest — a party willfully deceiving the other will prevent the other from being able to genuinely consent, the same way a slave is not consenting if he signs a contract to serve a master as a butler, only to find himself in salt mines a day later. If sexual relations are characterized by hurting, exploitation and victimization of one of the parties, how can both parties be in a state of mutual consent? Exploitation and victimization seem, by their very nature, to be deceptive and thus nullifying of actual, real consent between two parties.

b) I have also never been one for dismissing conclusions based on how unpleasant they are (joke about Carl Schmitt goes here). If the social institutions around us limit healthy expressions of sexual desire to zero under present circumstances, then that sucks; the fact that it sucks and doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room doesn’t make it invalid. (In other words, I’m not easily persuaded by the ‘few options’ argument — when it comes up in writing I tend to dismiss it as trying to think your way out of the unpleasant realities. Sometimes life really is that bad.)

Even if the chances of being able to have or to express sexual desire sans patriarchal influence are at zero, the question is what do you intend to do about that? You’ve attacked porn, but what about the rest of heterosexual sex? What about marriage, or romantic relationships in general, or being friends with men, or working with men? Because with all of these social interactions, you are existing within and reconstituting, to some extent, patriarchal oppression. There’s no way around it. You live in a patriarchal society. You couldn’t stop existing within those dynamics even if you tried.

So what do you attack? What do you call ‘bad’ and what do you call ‘not good, but permissible’? Is porn bad, but heterosexual sex that takes place within the confines of one’s bedroom and with only one partner not good, but permissible? Is marrying and having children with a man bad, but having a heterosexual relationship that is committed but not recognized by the state not good, but permissible? Is wearing heels and make up bad, but giving your female child a traditionally female name is not good, but permissible?

If you’re going to make these sorts of arguments, you have to think them through to their logical end. And you have to have a strong argument for why you choose to attack one thing but not another, when actually they all stem from the exact same thing. It’s been my experience that people tend to attack the things they are most uncomfortable with (e.g. porn), and give a pass to the things they are more comfortable with (e.g. heterosexual sex in general), even when the problematic aspects of both are largely the same.

This all started with a quote attacking sex and pornography (via Mackinnon and Dworkin) and has kind of morphed into criticism of sexuality and all doing it. I’m okay with that, and I’m okay with viciously attacking anything which reinforces structures which have been proven to harm people on a widespread level.

Again, this is quite a polemic argument, but consider the mother teaching her daughter about makeup and heels. These serve to reinforce harmful standards of beauty whether the mother means to or not — these standards of beauty for women are tied to harmful norms for women, which include standards to the effect of ‘you are worthless if you do not resemble Barbie dolls or Beyonce’. Even if the mother pounds into her daughter that her self-worth is not based on how large her breasts are, the fact is that her daughter is going to go outside at some point and get hollered at by someone driving by in a car. I’m hard-pressed to come up with a good solution, but widespread mass-murder of all men might be a good start. 

The NHL Network

was just showing some classic footage from the 90s where the entire Red Wings team, inspired by Darren McCarty attacking him straight off a faceoff, attempted to simultaneously beat Claude Lemieux into a pulp. Which culminated in Mike Vernon and Patrick Royskating across the ice at each other and letting fists fly. This was the first time I had ever seen goalies fight and may very well be my earliest clear sports-related memory.

I was watching the game in a sports bar with my dad because hockey was on ESPN at the time and my dad hated the idea of cable TV. He has since gotten a satellite dish package to watch the Tour de France and other bicycle tour races.