Playing the get out of male free card
Glosswitch has a fiendishly brilliant post about the old sexism and the new.
Back in the olden days, sexism was so straightforward, even a person with a uterus could understand it. It was the belief that men were superior to women — more intelligent, more important, more human — and while it affected different groups of women in different ways, feminists were in a position to identify who benefited from it and who was harmed. Of course, nowadays we can see that this was a very simplistic way of understanding gender-based oppression.
So dreadfully crude, isn’t it? Probably, as she says, because women thought of it. But now we have a better kind.
These days sexism is different. It isn’t about the appropriation of female sexual, domestic and reproductive labour or anything so crude. These days we’ve realised that the people who do this unpaid work are privileged enough to want to do it, freeing us up to focus on the more important task of validating everyone else’s sense of self.
Women’s sense of self doesn’t need validating, you see, probably because women are so busy doing the unpaid work they don’t bother to have a sense of self.
That also means women are out of touch, so they still think some things are sexist.
Porn is one area where they make this mistake, stupidly assuming that men getting off on women being abused could be in some way related to men getting off on women being abused. Drag is another. There are proper, long, thinky explanations as to why porn and drag subvert the very systems that those with an old-style understanding of sexism think they reinforce. Haven’t read said explanations? Then simply take your gut reaction and assume the direct opposite.
Take pantomime dames, for instance. Yes, a grown man calling on all of the misogynist stereotypes of the older woman — vain, bitchy, sex-starved, deluded — and playing them for laughs might look bad. But to think it actually is bad would just be too obvious. You don’t want to look like one of those stupid women who still bases her feminism on things that she feels are wrong.
Oh god no. No no no no no, never. It’s only nonbinary and genderqueer and trans people who really understand gender. The problem with drag and pantomime dames has nothing to do with women – what a silly idea! It’s all about transphobia and erasure and mocking people’s sacred identities.
“That looks a bit … off,” you might say, whereupon some young non-binary type, playing his — sorry, their — get out of male free card for all it’s worth, will ask you whether you’ve read up on the long, colourful history of drag as resistance to gendered norms. Because believe them, they totally have, back when you were too busy washing underpants and cooking fish fingers and all the other crappy, boring things women like you do because you’re lucky enough to have no inner life.
“get out of male free card”!!!
It’s worth remembering that drag works both ways in pantomime, the male lead is played by a woman.
This bit is ‘problematic’ too. Has she not noticed that a huge amount of porn involves men without women? And is so much of it about women being abused? I don’t habitually look at porn but I have seen it over the years and none of the porn I have seen involves abusing women.I think that is a bit of a niche thing, actually.
These days, whenever I read the ideas of a feminist woman described as ‘problematic’, I hear it in Dalek ‘voice’.
“McKee’s content analysis of best-selling adult movies found violence, physical or verbal, in less than 2% of scenes.
In striking contrast, when Ana Bridges and colleagues conducted an analysis of the content of 50 popular pornographic movies (according to sales and rental lists) in a similar period in the US, they found that nearly 90% of scenes contained physical aggression.”
The possible reason for the above disparity is discussed in the link below:
“https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/september/1365560803/cordelia-fine/porn-ultimatum”
Recent news and discussion with an angle on porn/violence against women:
http://www.feministcurrent.com/2015/11/30/james-deen-was-pushing-sexual-violence-and-rape-culture-long-before-recent-allegations/
I had no idea who James Deen was, but apparently he is quite popular.
Yeah, I know – TERF SWERF yadda yadda.
That discussion by Cordelia Fine is interesting (although, as ever, she has a thumb on the scales and isn’t quite to be trusted) but it assumes we are talking movies and I think for most people porn is pictures, and the case for 90% violence is very weak. It is absurd to call spanking an act of violence if it gives pleasure to the person being spanked. If we don’t accept that we teeter on Dworkin territory where any penetration of a person by anything is violence. Fine and many of her point of view seem to find a lot of sexual acts disgusting and struggle to think that anyone can genuinely find them fulfilling.
Dworkin never said that. Stop it. You don’t get to just use everyone’s favorite whipping feminist and repeat straight up lies about her work.
Weeell, she said something very close to that, and the point still stands. I like Dworkin actually, but she was mad as a box of frogs.
No, that’s not acceptable, and no “the point” does not “still stand.” Dworkin’s views were much, MUCH more complicated than she is given credit for. It’s not OK what you’re doing. Please reconsider it. I say this as someone who, like most people, thought forever that they knew what Dworkin said. I repeated what turned out to be misrepresentations and actual lies without knowing it at the time.
Where did she say something very close to that? Please quote it.
Pinkeen:
1: You are astoundingly ignorant of Dworkin if you’re peddling that tired old debunked BS. (Well, ignorant or lying. Both, as always in such circumstances, is a possibility.)
2: In the age of broadband internet, actually, porn has little to do with still pictures and a LOT to do with videos. And many of the stills are simply taken from movies. And where Fine was talking about pornification of culture, she’s drawing specifically on the images taken from movies being applied to popular fads. (You did hear that Playboy has announced that their magazine is no longer going to even include nude pictures, right? They make all their porn-based money off of online video content these days.)
3: On spanking and other forms of aggression in porn, did you just completely skip the point about the fact that the women are paid to pretend to enjoy it? Let’s walk through it:
A: Porn regularly features aggressive forms of sex, including spanking, hair-pulling, choking and so on. This is a simulation of pleasure; most women in porn are simply acting as if they are aroused.
B: Studies show that adolescent males and young men who consume a lot of porn become increasingly convinced that porn depicts an accurate view of how sex is and should be.
C: These young men then go into sexual situations placing demands on their partners to engage in these acts, because they think that’s how sex should work. Many will initiate these practices ‘cold’–that is, without any prior discussion of their intent or desire, because they think this is what all women want, or at least are willing to accept.
D: Even in cases where a woman might like a particular act, this lack of communication is likely to produce a situation where the man is using more force than she finds desirable, or includes acts to which she has no desire at all.
For the record, going over the line with force is called assault, and initiating a non-consensual sex act in the middle of otherwise consensual sex is, in fact, rape. And porn, as it is now, encourages such. If you fail to see the problem with that, please take a few minutes to inform your parents that, faced with the obligation to bring a decent human being into the world, they have failed.
Yeah, I know that as a feminist woman I’m expected to distance myself from Dworkin in order for others to at least pretend to take me seriously. But actually, I think she was amazingly insightful, eloquent and brave.
Not ‘acceptable’ to who? It’s acceptable to me. And the point still stands because it doesn’t need Dworkin to make it. But here is some of what Dworkin said about heterosexual sex:
Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has, in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, … The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people–physically occupied inside, internally invaded–be free; can those with a metaphysically compromised privacy have self-determination; can those without a biologically based physical integrity have self-respect?
I think a reasonable, in fact the natural, reading of that is that heterosexual intercourse is violence against women. Otherwise you have to argue for a non violent form of occupation through invasion. She also said that intercourse was a synonym for violation, of course.
All actors are paid to pretend, that is what acting is. The point is whether they are pretending to take part in a violent act or not. Consensual spanking is not, to my mind, an act of violence against women. I think you need to think harder about this before adopting the condescending tone.
You’re kidding. Women are paid to pretend to enjoy being spanked; the point is whether they are pretending to take part in a violent act or not; you don’t consider consensual spanking an act of violence.
Argue in a circle much?
From an interview with Michael Moorcock:
Michael Moorcock: After “Right-Wing Women” and “Ice and Fire” you wrote “Intercourse”. Another book which helped me clarify confusions about my own sexual relationships. You argue that attitudes to conventional sexual intercourse enshrine and perpetuate sexual inequality. Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven’t found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?
Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever. There is a long section in Right-Wing Women on intercourse in marriage. My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse–it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman. I said that when we look at sexual liberation and the law, we need to look not only at which sexual acts are forbidden, but which are compelled.
The whole issue of intercourse as this culture’s penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the “all sex is rape” slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don’t think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.
It’s important to say, too, that the pornographers, especially Playboy, have published the “all sex is rape” slander repeatedly over the years, and it’s been taken up by others like Time who, when challenged, cannot cite a source in my work.