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Fruitless

Categories: media tool kit, rhetorical devices

Welcome back, ducks. You know, when you’re in the blog business, one of the things you do when casting around for a post is to comment on another blog. It’s all part of the content-creation racket.

Yesterday I found out that even famous columnists like David Brooks do that:

Every day, I check a blog called Marginal Revolution, which is famous for its erudite authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, and its intelligent contributors. Last week, one of those contributors asked a question that is fantastical but thought-provoking: What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth that happened to be facing the sun?

Wow. OK, I’ve read science fiction, some of the post-apocalyptic variety, and that’s a familiar enough scenario. An interesting space of speculation. Let’s see what Mr. Brooks comes up with:

If you take an individualistic view of the world, not much would happen immediately. […] People would still have an incentive to go to work, pay off their bills and educate the children who were already with us. For 20 years, there would still be workers flowing into the labor force. Immigrants from the other side of the earth could eventually surge into the areas losing population. If anything, the mass-sterilization might reduce the environmental strain on the planet. People might focus on living for the moment, valuing the here and now.

Hey, that makes sense! After all, plenty of people don’t want kids anyway, so I’m sure that…oh, wait, there’s more:

But, of course, we don’t lead individualistic lives.

I sense a sermon coming on…

Material conditions do not drive history.

Unless you’re a Marxist! Or, you know, poor.

People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives. If, say, the Western Hemisphere were sterilized, there would soon be a cataclysmic spiritual crisis. Both Judaism and Christianity are promise-centered faiths. They are based on narratives that lead from Genesis through progressive revelation to a glorious culmination.

Of course, both those religions believe in a culmination where people won’t have kids anymore, but that seems to be besides the point! The point is, uh…crypto-racism?

Some people might try to perpetuate their society by recruiting people from the fertile half of the earth. But that wouldn’t work. Immigration is the painful process of leaving behind one culture and way of living so that your children and children’s children can enjoy a different future. No one would be willing to undertake that traumatic process in order to move from a society that was reproducing to a society that was fading. There wouldn’t be the generations required to assimilate immigrants. A sterile culture could not thrive and, thus, could not inspire assimilation.

This makes sense because…because…because America isn’t a nation founded on immigration! No, wait. Because there wouldn’t be any bountiful and fertile white people around to assimilate people! Or something. I have no idea; I thought the beauty of America was that it was supposed to be an idea each generation reinvents for itself–that the ideals of the American republic were supposed to be available for all humankind. But maybe it’s like baseball, you can’t really get it unless you were born here.

Or Taiwan.

Now, the thing is, I know something about posterity and sterilization. Because, you see, I’ll never reproduce.

I didn’t say, I’ll never have children, because I don’t know that; maybe someday I might adopt, or become a parent in one of the many ways that don’t involve my own DNA. But the traditional way is closed to me, as part of my GRS.

Some trans women freeze their sperm before they have the surgery, but I wasn’t one of them. Even when I was married, I was extremely ambivalent about having children, and since I’m primarily attracted to men these days, it didn’t seem all that important to have my own genetic material lying around. So I didn’t bother, and it mostly doesn’t bother me now.

There was a point, not long after I got back from Thailand, when I did feel a twinge of regret over not being able to let my genes carry on after me; I like my genes, I think they’re a good mix, and it did seem a bit of a shame to not be able to do so. But that passed, and I’ve not felt that twinge since.

And you know what? I carry on just fine, even knowing that no part of me (except this blog, of course) will carry on after I’m gone. I still plan for the future, still make my plans, still am excited and engaged by life. And while yes, I have a niece who is related to me, I think I’d feel the same whether or not she existed or whether or not she was adopted; if I have a compact with the future, it is with the future of humanity as a whole, not my own personal bloodline.

Maybe that makes me odd. I don’t know; but of my four closest female friends, only one of them wants children, and I’ve met a bunch of other people who are childless by choice in my travels. And somehow they go on living life just fine.

Maybe mass sterilization would change how I and the others feel; I don’t really know, though it’s interesting to speculate about it. But somehow I don’t think it would mean the end of the world or even the end of America, given the number of people I’ve met who’ve adopted children from other parts of the world.

Within weeks, in other words, everything would break down and society would be unrecognizable. The scenario is unrelievedly grim. An individual who does not have children still contributes fully to the future of society. But when a society doesn’t reproduce there is nothing left to contribute to.

Except, you know, the future. Even if it doesn’t look exactly like you.

ETA: The comments on the Times’ site are fascinating. Some folks seem to feel that Brooks is writing about the declining white birthrate in the U.S.; others call him out for not seeing (or purposely ignoring) the displacement of the American First Nations by the European invaders; others call him out on his weird take on Christianity; and many just think he’s being ludicrous.

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Letter to a Young Commentor, Part II

Categories: kyriarchy, mailbag, oh no not teh menz, vive le feminisme

Greetings, Ducks! Sorry I fell off the face of the earth for a bit. But while I was away, reader Tamogochi was kind enough to respond to my reply to his previous comments.

I would like to answer you on why I’m not outraged.

That is because I see mistreatment as universal problem in our world: it happens in families, at workplaces, due to gender, race, social status, religious differences and ultimately between nations. It begins when one side expresses some kind of want/need towards the other. For example some people of the white race wanted to have free labor and had enforced slavery on another race. Similarly some men had been oppressing towards individual or all women. For them it didn’t seem like a problem at all because they felt entitled to that (I think your term “privilege” might fit here). The other side wanted quite a different thing – not to be oppressed and equal rights. That seemed quite reasonable and fair to them but presented a real problem to the oppressors. And thus a conflict was born.

How can it be resolved? The easiest and the most popular way throughout the history has been by the use of force. The predator eats the prey and the strong enforces the weak. Men had been doing it for ages and they enjoyed the privilege they granted themselves even if they did not admit to having it. But there’s also another and a much better way – cooperation/symbiosis. It happens when parties peacefully agree: you provide us what we want and we provide you what you want. That way rights and responsibilities are born.

So far, I’m with you. I myself tend to believe that a more communalist society would probably work better than our current system that places so much emphasis on the individual, and specifically tends to value people by how much dominance they have acheived; it’s often quite subtle, but it’s a nearly-universal part of our society. Take, for example, how people who are highly talented and skilled at some kind of operation–programming computers, analyzing budgets, designing ad campaigns–are pressured to enter management (tellingly, to have people under them), where they will direct other people to do the things that they do instead of doing them themselves; and if they don’t go into management, they ultimately lack the respect and/or compensation of people who do go into management. Dominance, not necessarily talent, it what commands respect; the recent fiscal crisis has exposed just how little talent some of these people had.

And now we come to the issues of feminism. The way that I understand it is this: it’s an organization that focuses on the problems of women and tries to solve them. Whether actively standing for women rights when necessary or trying to encourage them to reach more and to realize their full potential. And here I see a fundamental problem: if you focus your attention only on one side of the conflict you become subjective and might start to mistreat others. Then it’s very easy to slip into a mode: you give us (women) what we want (rights, respect, power) and we don’t care about your (men) problems. And they can get away with it because now they have a real power of an organization at their side that no single man can oppose. The way of enforcement of privileges in other words and the very thing feminism swore to fight.

I’d not call feminism an organization. (It reminds me of Will Rogers’ famous line: “I don’t belong to an organized party; I’m a Democrat.”) Feminism is (or ought to be) a movement, but as part of that movement there will be many organizations, and many different points of view.

I think you are building a strawfeminist here. Somehow we are to suppose that by advocating for the rights of a specific oppressed majority (sorry, here in the US women are 51% of the population), you must ignore or even oppress another group: as if equality was a zero-sum game where you can only win if everybody loses.

I don’t believe that; I think that equality and freedom are things that can be shared with all people, and that taking away a privilege is not the same as oppressing people.

I also have a few issues with how you frame this paragraph. First, you have women asking to be given rights. Which isn’t the case at all, at least how I see it: women are demanding that their rights be respected. That is, the rights already belong to us; they can’t be given–only respected.

Second, isn’t telling that in a discussion of women’s rights you immediately start talking about how this affects men? I mean, for real? It’s so frustrating to time and time again bring up the troubles of an oppressed group, troubles that get ignored because the dominant group marginalizes all issues that don’t directly affect themselves, and then have the dominant group show up to make it all about themselves! (In the feminist blogosphere, this argument is called but what about teh menz?)

“But we don’t oppress men and only want to have certain rights and responsibilities for women” you might say. Is it too much to ask after all we do for them? We want to cooperate but men sometimes are not willing to participate and we have no other option than to fight.

There must have been a less sexist way to phrase that, don’t you think? Again: women aren’t asking for rights because we serve some social role well; we demand the rights that belong to us as human beings.

Let’s look at an example of what’s really happening: a problem of verbal abuse at the workplace. The conflict is obvious: men want to use certain sexually loaded words towards the other gender and women don’t want that happening (or to be more specific they want respect and equality for themselves). And the solution for it? Feminist movement gathers enough political strength and a law is passed that prohibits that kind of discrimination. A great victory for the human race. But is it really?

What most tend to overlook is that it has really solved the problem only for one side of the conflict. Men did not have a problem of verbal abuse from women so the law solves nothing for them. And did anyone care to listen to what they really wanted? What has caused them to be sexually abusive in the first place? Nobody was interested in that. It was much easier to put a label “animals”, “primates” and not to care at all. What took place afterwards is that men pushed their unsolved problems deeper and it has resulted in a more sophisticated and undetectable ways to discriminate women. The women once again retaliated. And now I, as a man, am viewed as a potential abuser everywhere I go – like I am responsible for what others of my gender had done in the past. I constantly hear things “men are pigs, aggressive, insensitive, uncaring, unemotional, bloodthirsty” and so on. This passive form of discrimination hurts me and makes me feel like a second rate human even if I’ve never done an abusive thing towards women. Come to think of it I too might easily become outraged because of this. I might even go as far as join a movement of masculinists who fight feminists. But what another senseless war would ever accomplish?

There really must have been a less sexist way to put that. Sigh. Let’s start from the beginning.

I’d love to have some real sympathy for how you feel. And in fact, I do: I don’t like it when anyone is called names, or anyone has assumptions made about them because of how they look. But. In the specific case you cite–give me a break. If you think it’s hard to be called a predator, try actually being the prey. You forget, perhaps, who you are talking to. I am a trans woman. I’ve walked down dark streets as a man, as a cross-dresser, and as a woman. I’ve been called a faggot, whistled at, had lewd suggestions made to me on the street. I’m a double target: first for being a woman, and then for being trans; for many women like me, rape is only the starting point.

You clearly don’t understand that. I won’t say can’t, because I think you can–I think anyone with a conscience and the willingness to listen to other peoples’ stories can gain an understanding of what it is like to feel constantly targeted.

And I have to ask the question: why are you angry at me, at feminists, at women for demanding that predatory behavior–even things as seemingly trivial as being called names–be punished? Why are you angry at us, instead of them–the predatory guys, the jerks, the ones who benefit from the threat of violence and violation that constantly surrounds women in this society? Don’t act like you don’t have a stake in this fight; you’ve already shown that you do, because you’re complaining about the results.

I mean, why be angry about the last century of slow, very incremental female empowerment and not pissed off about the hundreds of centuries of female oppression? Why not take on the assholes who are ruining it for the rest of you?

I don’t think it’s fair that people are calling you names and making unfounded accusations. I also don’t think it’s fair that you’re comparing what’s happening to you to the kind of toxic environments that harrassing speech such as the kind that is prohibited by law, because that can be much, much worse. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the “outrage” you might feel about your treatment to the outrageous way that women continue to be treated throughout the world. As if because you don’t get outraged over name-calling, I shouldn’t be outraged over how one in four women in South Africa is raped before she even turns 16.

I don’t get outraged because of name-calling; I get outraged about hate speech that damages men by making them think that it’s okay to denigrate women, that it’s okay to look upon women as things or objects, that it’s okay to continue the fundamental inequality of the human race.

It could have been a much different outcome if both sides listened – men and women cooperated towards solving their shared problems. Maybe what was best in
the situation was not to punish the abusers but to provide them help in dealing with their emotional problems? Maybe what needs to be done is to change how women treat men (in removing that passive discrimination I spoke about) and how are they up-brought by their mothers by teaching them a value of empathy and compassion? If we really thought about it we would have probably came to even better ideas than that.

How was what happened not cooperation? I mean, the last time I checked, there’s not a legislative body anywhere in the United States that isn’t majority male, so somebody cooperated to write the laws. And why shouldn’t we punish people for breaking the law? You won’t get an argument from me that many laws (drug violations, for example) might benefit from alternatives to incarceration, but people don’t generally go to jail for sexual harrassment. Instead, the company and individuals have to pay a person for causing her damage; it’s a matter of civil, not criminal law.

I think you’re the first person I’ve encountered who feels that girls aren’t brought up to feel empathy. I mean, isn’t that the stereotype? Guys aren’t allowed to have feelings, but girls are supposed to be so good at them?

And again, seriously: if these are shared problems (they are), then why do so few dudes care about them?

That’s why I feel being outraged is not good – it hinders our ability to listen and see the situation clearly and invites us to mistreat other people just as we have been mistreated ourselves. I don’t consider myself feminist or masculinist – I would rather be humanist.

Well, I disagree–I think the natural response to seeing people being oppressed should be outrage, and that my outrage helps me, inspires me, keeps me working on helping people.

And I’m a humanist as well; I don’t think there’s a need to be either a feminist or a humanist. My advocacy for one part of the human race doesn’t diminish my advocacy for the rest of it; it just shows where my main interest lies.

Thank you again for responding–I know English isn’t your first language. I do hope you continue to think about these things.

Very best,

C.L. Minou

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Letter to a Young Commentor

Categories: i heart oppression, mailbag, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all, vive le feminisme, Your RDA of Outrage

Greetings, ducks! In today’s edition, I answer comments, specifically this comment from new reader Tamogochi! Hello, Tamo–let’s hear what you have to say:

I’ve followed to your blog from INFJ forum. It seems that feminism is quite a big portion of your life and the article you cited is indeed stupid.

You are correct on both counts–I congratulate you on your perspicacity!

My comment is more on the general topic.

Uh-oh. Nothing good ever follows a lead-in like that.

What I don’t get about that whole feminist attitude is why are you so infuriated (as it’s in a subtitle of your site)? The aggressive feminism worked a 100 years ago, but now is quite outdated.

Why am I so mad?

Well, first, am I all that mad? I don’t think I come across as indiscriminately angry. No. I choose my words (or try to) with great care, and there’s a reason I chose infuriated. For me, my fury is a low-grade, constant resentment of how messed up the world remains, of how we continue to play primate dominance games imported out of our misty prehistory, of how our culture plays lip service to the ideas of equality, justice, and change while trying to keep everything the same.

That is the source of my fury, as I documented previously, here and here, and it is why I am an implacable foe of unearned privilege.

Also, we live in a world where an ESPN reporter is filmed changing inside her hotel room and it gets thrown all around the internet (and the coverage never fails to note that But She’s Totes Hot and Playboyz Luvz Her so she kinda was asking for it, right?) and you’re telling me that my fury is out of date? That I shouldn’t be outraged a lot? That given the racist, sexist, classist imagery spoon-fed to us every day on television and radio and the internet that I shouldn’t be–I dunno, upset?

Perhaps this will clear a few things up:

That aggressiveness is the very thing that turns men away instead of trying to help women with their problems. It actually acts as an excuse. And a lame one.

Oh, Tamo.

It’s amazing what you managed to do there–pack so much privilege into a few short sentences. You are to be commended!

OK. First. Women aren’t asking men to “help them with their problems,” as if feminist concerns are issues that apply only to women. Feminism is not the “Sanitary Aids” aisle at the supermarket; it–or at least, the feminism I believe in–is a movement that must by its very nature try to bring true freedom and equality to all humanity, male and female. Feminist women need the help of feminist men, sure–we need everyone to realize they are trapped in a system that is forever geared towards generating inequality and systemic discrimination. But feminists are not begging for help, not wheedling like a 50s sitcom character trying to get her husband to buy her a new dress. Feminists are standing up as proud activists trying to realize their dream.

Second–seriously, dude, weak is just as good a four-letter word, conveys the same sense, and doesn’t offend anybody. Using lame is pretty weak.

(See how easy that was?)

How can you ever achieve anything genuinely positive if you just fight for one side and treat the other as disposable objects? That seems so wrong to me because feminists repeat the same old mistakes of patriarchalism. The only thing different is that roles are reversed now.

And how are we supposed to achieve anything genuinely positive if we hide our anger, stay meek and demure, and never demand anything? How the hell are we supposed to become equal if we stay subservient?

As for repeating the mistakes of patriarchalism–speak for yourself. That’s not the kind of feminism I support and advocate for, and it never has been on the short history of this blog. I firmly believe we have to tear down the entire privilege system and find something better–and soon, before the human race lurches into its final chapter.

And seriously, roles reversed? Are you saying women are more powerful than men? Cause that might actually make me mad.

Given the horrors our mad world continues to lurch through–the endemic poverty, the billions who are hunger, the millions who are starving, given how the First World continues to support itself on the slavery of the Third, given how even here in the Wonderful West we are plagued with massive amounts of sexism, racism, religious bigotry, looksism, and countless other oppressions, I think the question isn’t: why am I outraged?

It really should be, why aren’t you?

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A Declaration of Rights and Responsibilities

Categories: double bound, teh tranz, the transsexual empire strikes back, vive le feminisme

I’ve been thinking about privilege lately. Not exactly a surprise, there.

One thing I’ve been pondering is this idea: that privilege is rights without responsibilities.

That’s not completely accurate: another important definition of privilege–at least , you know, the oppressive kind–is that it is unearned. But they both point to important features of privilege.

That is, to accept something as given without any responsibility to pay for it is a privilege.

You can see this in action in one of the more pervasive defences of white privilege: “I’m not a racist, I never owned slaves, I didn’t vote for Jim Crow laws, so why should I have to accept affirmative action/learn about African-American culture/give up one iota of what I have?”

The answer is, because you were robbed.

You were robbed, because your ancestors stole from other people and passed the bill along to you. You were robbed, because they got to have something without paying for it, and now the bill is come due. And you’ll keep getting robbed, as long as people like Pat Buchanan still insist that great American experiment involved only hard-working, superior white folks–as if the very temple of democracy in this country itself, the U.S. Capitol, wasn’t built with slave labor.

My post today at Shakesville has me thinking about another side of this question: when does a person have the right to claim membership in a group? Or more specifically, just who’s a woman, anyway?

For me, the answer is simple: if you claim to be a woman, I’ll respect that claim. It’s not because I believe in some mystical gender essentialism and can recognize a “spiritual sister” because of my super-special TrannyvisionTM. I believe that there are about 6.75 billion genders in the world: that is, each of us has a gender unique to ourselves. That doesn’t mean there aren’t classifications that can be made, anymore than believing in human individuality means there aren’t Buddhists or Frenchpeople or…women.

Rather, my feeling is that if someone wants to claim the title of “woman,” I’m perfectly happy to agree. But then it is my feeling that I will apply to them the same standards I apply to other women (and myself.) Is she a feminist? Does she help break down oppression, or support it? Does she support other women, does she support sexist stereotypes, is she, in short, helping?

Just as I would never question the gender of a woman whose politics and personality I loathe–say, Sarah Palin–I wouldn’t question the gender of a trans person. (That is, I wouldn’t use bad woman to mean bad at being a woman. Heck, I wouldn’t use bad woman at all, I think.) Or to put it another way, judge my claim for a right on how well I live up to its responsibilities: look at what I do and what I believe, what I fight against and what I stand for. And I’ll do the same.

It’s the only human thing to do.

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Headesk Is A Verb

Categories: don't get your panties in a bunch, douchebaggery, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all

Greetings, ducks! Sorry about the delay since yesterday’s post, but I had to call a carpenter in–it seems my (quirky, writerly, rolltop) desk had developed a mysterious dent ever since I started using Google Reader to search for stories with the keyword “feminism.” Oddly enough, the dent seemed to fit my forehead perfectly, and got deeper after each one of the mysterious headaches I seem to be suffering from–strange.

However, in any case, I now have a nice shiny new desktop, and it’s time to take a look at what Google brought me today–oh. Oh, dear. Something titled “Hating Feminism.”

Well, let’s not be hasty; maybe it’s a feminist response to people who hate feminists! My heart leaps! See, it starts well:

I know to a degree where she’s coming from. A lot of the feminist-bashing is nothing more than people taking their personal problems and putting a political spin on it. But, of course, NOW is not responsible if you can’t get sex or can’t get your wife to respect you.

Well, not great, but not bad.

We’ve all seen those people. All their stories are about someone taking advantage of them. But even before the stories started, we knew just by looking at them that we are about to deal with a loser.

But that doesn’t negate that feminism has become a cancer. Many of the complaints against the feminists are the same as against Civil Rights warriors.

Oh dear.

Women will acknowledge that a big, tall man who’s in great shape is stronger than they are. What they don’t realize is that a 5-foot-3 110 pound high school boy is still vastly stronger than any woman who’s not taking steroids (aka male hormones).

Riiight…I forgot, that high school kid can whup Laila Ali one hand behind his back–because he’s stronger than every woman in the world.

Women get into an aggressive pose if you ever say that they can’t do something as well. But of course you can’t do some things as well, and you can’t do anything on an exceptional level (historic inventions, Nobel prizes).

Even when you look at things that women do much more than men (write poetry, cook, design clothes), almost all the great ones are male.

Right, because of ten millenia of denying women access to education, devaluing all work they do, and institutional sexism wherever people (read: men) do work for money that women traditionally have done for free, that in no way invalidates your argument. It’s all about the biology, right? I can take comfort in that, scientifically proven….wait a second.

I’m not exactly all about the biology, you know.

The worst outrage (other than the claim by feminists in Sweden that men should be forced by law to sit on toilets like women rather than stand) is the feminist demand that all men’s room become unisex while the women’s bathrooms remain for females only. The logic is that women always have to wait in line and men don’t, so that’s just unfair.

Okay, seriously? Do not take a trans person on about the bathroom.

No society treated women as well as the West. White men didn’t put you in wooden shoes to make your feet unnaturally small, didn’t cut off your clitoris, didn’t “Honor Kill” women for being rape victims. Whether a white woman chose to be a nun or a prostitute or anything in between, she was treated with at least some level of respect.

I’m going to laugh here. Because this has to be satire, right? Because we all know how well prostitutes are treated in our society, right? I mean, they have respect, which is why so many upper-class women have traditionally turned to prostitution; you know, Victorian gentlemen went on the Grand Tour, Victorian ladies went On the Job.

Is there any way you could make your satire richer?

(Update after this was already written: I was originally thinking of writing “whore” instead of “prostitute”, but decided not to because I thought people would react to it negatively. Upon re-reading this, I realized that this in and of itself made my point – Westerners do not accept gratuitous degradation of even the lowest class women.)

I think…I think you need to, I don’t know–I was going to say “take a women’s studies course” but I think I’ll start with, “meet a woman.”

I’ll just…just read a little more…I’m feeling woozy…

Just as blacks have a very special way of looking at things (black-dominated NBA is good, but white-dominated swimming is an outrage), so too do the feminists. That they dominate the Angry Bitch Studies and departments like Sociology is just taken for granted, but all hell breaks loose every time feminazis find out that engineering or physics departments are mostly male.

*thump*

Wow, look at that–there’s already a new dent in my desk.

I think I better keep that carpenter on speed-dial.

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Bastille Day

Categories: Allusions, kyriarchy, vive le feminisme

1. At the Porte Saint-Antoine, 14 July 1789

Independence Day celebrates a revolution–however important its future would prove–that was inaugurated to protect the rights of the entitled. I prefer Bastille Day, the start of the French Revolution, the first struggle to try to break the shackles of the Agricultural Revolution, to radically reshape the human destiny. It is the French, not the American, Revolution that haunts the Western consciousness, a bloody ghost shrieking of ways not taken and tyrannies unfought.

The starving and enraged sans-coulottes who gathered near the Porte St. Antoine that hot July afternoon knew nothing of the finer points of either revolution or democracy. They knew not whether they were Rousseau’s ennobled primitives or Hobbes’ mindless mob. Nor did they care. They gave not a sou for the National Assembly’s parliamentary debate on the proper techniques to constitutionally cage a monarch: they knew only that they were oppressed, and sick of it, and incapable of letting it stand any longer.

Behind the walls of the ancient fortress were only seven prisoners–but they were the symbols of an entire regime. Never extensively used as a prison, the Bastille remained nonetheless the notorious symbol of absolute monarchy, the place those who dared speak against the Crown were warehoused. It was against this symbol, more than anything else, that the mob struck; but they had a more immediate goal. The Bastille was also a gigantic gunpowder depot.

By 5:30 in the afternoon, after four hours of fighting, it was all over. The commander of the garrison–mostly disabled veterans and a small contingent of Swiss mercenaries–had surrendered, and then intentionally provoked his own lynching, apparently unable to live with the dishonor. The powder was seized, muskets were charged, and the Royal Army abandoned Paris to the sans-coulottes. In time, those muskets would carry the Revolution (and more, the Revolutionary spirit) across the Rhine and into the rest of Europe. Nor would the vintage laid down that day ever completely fail, even after the force of revolution was channeled into a new tyranny and the blood of patriots was wastefully spent in defence of Empire. As much as Bonaparte and his successors might try, the power unleashed that July afternoon could never fully serve autocrats.

I wonder, though: what did the garrison see that day, as the mob burst into the outer courtyard of the fort, as the air grew opaque with gunpowder smoke–what flashed accross the sky for them that day? Portents of the ceaseless wars France would plunge into? Of the civil unrest and the great Terror to come? Or a presentiment that the world would never again be the same, that from now on the voice of the oppressed would never be stilled, try as they might to suppress it?

Today I choose to make my witness.

2. The Patriarchy Is Not Enough

For feminists, for people who struggle against sexist oppression, that set of privileges and oppressions we call patriarchy looms like the Bastille over the landscape of our lives. The comparison is apt: because patriarchy is both more and less than it seems.

Patriarchy is claimed as the father of all oppressions, the most common prejudice, the heaviest burden, the source of all tyrannies. Patriarchy must be nearly transhistorical–it certainly must go back as least as far as the Agricultural Revolution–and like a dark star, it bends all other forms of oppression towards it, warping them into its own mold. But like the Bastille, its symbolic presence is greater than its actual oppression, vast as that may be.

This is not to minimize the pervasive and insidious force it exerts: nothing I say could alter that, because it is an inescapable fact of every society extant on the earth. But. Patriarchy is only one of the oppressions. Others exist, and still would exist even without it.

Imagine, if you will, that we could wake up tomorrow in a world where sexism had finally been eliminated and true equality of the sexes reigned. Certainly many other oppressions would be greatly mitigated, because in eradicating sexism, fundamental inequalities of privilege and access would have to be extirpated.

But would the world change all that much? Would not the great mass of people on the planet still be mired in poverty, disease, starvation, and near-slavery? Is it really patriarchy that keeps women and children bent over the clothing mills of Indonesia and Vietnam to satiate the developed world’s lust for cheap clothing? Or is it not still the case that colonialism, racism, imperialism, classism, militarism and a host of other oppressions would stalk the earth even without sexism, their staunchest ally?

I think that they would.

This is not to diminish the importance of the struggle against sexism; as bell hooks says:

Sexist oppression is of primary importance not because it is the basis of all other oppression, but because it is the practice of domination most people experience, whether their role be that of the discriminator or discriminated against, exploiter or exploited. It is the practice of domination most people are socialized to accept before they even know that other forms of group oppression exist. This does not mean that eradicating sexist oppression would eliminate other forms of oppression. Since all forms of oppression are linked in our society because they are all supported by similar institutional and social structures, one system cannot be eradicated while the others remain intact. Challenging sexist oppression is a crucial step in the struggle to eliminate all forms of oppression. (Feminist Theory, pp. 36-7)

The struggle against patriarchy will necessarily be a struggle against other forms of oppression. But that does not mean that it is sufficient in of itself to struggle only against patriarchy, or that all forms of oppression can be reduced to questions of sexism. Oppression is not something that has a simple binary, top-down nature; oppression takes many forms and has many axes of attack. To force all analysis of privilege to that of patriarchy is to engage in a privileged behavior: the privilege to ignore the effects of other oppressions. It is not accidental that much work in this vein has been done by people who are white, Western, and middle-classed, for that very reason.

The struggle against sexism is a vital step in liberating the human race; but it is not the only one or even always the most important one. The patriarchy is not enough.

3. A Wrinkle In Privilege

I use the term kyriarchy somewhat differently than most people.

Kyriarchy–“a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and derived from the Greek words for “lord” or “master” (kyrios) and “to rule or dominate” (archein)”–is usually defined like this, (courtesy of Sudy at A Woman’s Ecdysis ):

When people talk about patriarchy and then it divulges into a complex conversation about the shifting circles of privilege, power, and domination — they’re talking about kyriarchy. When you talk about power assertion of a White woman over a Brown man, that’s kyriarchy. When you talk about a Black man dominating a Brown womyn, that’s kyriarchy. It’s about the human tendency for everyone trying to take the role of lord/master within a pyramid. At it best heights, studying kyriarchy displays that it’s more than just rich, white Christian men at the tip top and, personally, they’re not the ones I find most dangerous. There’s a helluva lot more people a few levels down the pyramid who are more interested in keeping their place in the structure than to turning the pyramid upside down.

Most people tend to visualize this as intersecting pyramids of power, which certainly follows the meaning of the word. But I tend to think of a different geometric form: the tesseract or hypercube, a four-dimensional cube.

Take a line in space; that’s one dimension. Draw a square; now you have two dimensions. Now make it a cube; that’s three dimensions. Add another dimension, and you have a tesseract:

Even though it is a difficult image to grasp, I like to use it–not the least because it is a difficult image, and our privileges often are just a difficult to analyze. I like it too because it exists, like we do, in four-dimensional space–and forgetting about our fourth dimension, time, often leads to mistakes in analyses of privilege. And maybe most of all, I like it because it is impossible to accurately visualize in three-dimensional space–and I think the same about privilege.

That is, it is possible to draw a tesseract or even make a three-dimensional model of it–but that will only be one way of looking at it. Likewise, we can analyze a person’s relative oppression in terms of all sorts of axes: racism, sexism, religous bigotry, etc. But that will only be one way of looking at it, one way of rotating the tesseract; for another person, in another time, it will look completely different. All forms of oppression are linked.

And that is the essence of kyriarchy: we are all emeshed in it, all trapped not only by our oppressions but our privileges as well. If oppression is the negative force, pushing us down, privilege is the positive force, raising us up; both of them keep us tied to the system itself. The only escape is to break free of it all: to fight oppression and to abjure privilege. To break the fierce equilibrium and experiment for the first time in radical freedom.

Some feel that the way to do this is homogeneity: to end sexism by abolishing gender, to end religious bigotry by abolishing religion, etc. I disagree. I think that diversity is an essential element not only in the biological success of all species, but an important component of human creativity. I think the world is heightened by distinctions–as Hopkins says:

All things counter, original spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim…

What I want is a world where those differences are as about important as the music you prefer to listen to: something you might get passionate about, something that might inspire you or help you find other like-minded people to form a community with, but never something that you would kill or die for, or use to oppress other people.

I’m not sure that a human society truly free of hierarchy is possible or even desirable (even I think there is a place for some kind of privilege, just not unearned privilege.) But my fervent hope for the human species is a radical restructuring of how we organize ourselves, and soon too: because we’ve gone so far to destroy ourselves and now our planet with us.

4. Bastille Day

Two hundred twenty years ago, after the spasm of violence, order improbably returned. The National Assembly resumed its deliberations, and wisely stood by while the people of Paris dismantled the fallen prison, stone by stone and brick by brick, until nothing remained except a few foundation stones that lay buried for more than a hundred years.

Reached at Versailles a few days later, the King reacted to the news with a start. “Is it a revolt?” he asked.

“No, Sire,” was the response. “It is a revolution.”

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Adventures in Transition: Everybody Cut Footloose Edition

Categories: all about me, teh tranz, This Was My Life

Greetings, ducks! Yesterday I decided to drag myself out of the cave also known as my apartment and force myself to have some of that dreaded “social interaction” people are always on about–specifically, I decided to jerk myself around to a syncopated rhythm while obeying patriarchal orders and occasionally crashing into people.

Yes, I went dancing.

Here in the Metropolis, there is a series of Sunday dances down on a pier during the summer. I used to go to these things long ago, long before my transition–hell, long before my brief metrosexual days. I enjoyed going–I had been one of those people who never thought she could dance, until my then-girlfriend convinced me to take some lessons, and I discovered I could do it, after a fashion. And that I liked to do it.

This time, however, would be different.

This time I was going to be there as a woman.

I managed to miss the free lesson they give before the dance, which was a shame, because not only was I rusty, I haven’t danced that much swing as the follower, and I had to sort out which leg went where. That was one worry.

The other worry was whether or not anyone would actually want to dance with me.

As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to get anxious around highly gendered spaces–and you don’t get more highly gendered than a partnered dance. (To be fair, I did see some women dancing together, but I have no idea if they were queer or just straight people without partners; I know for a fact I didn’t see any men dancing with each other.) So I had my usual uncomfortable thoughts: what if people read me? am I too tall for anyone to want to dance with? am I not pretty enough for people to want to dance with me? will I suck? (that last one wasn’t all that gendered, but an anxiety is an anxiety.)

Fortunately for me, plenty of people did end up dancing with me, some good, some bad. It was interesting to see the various styles of leading–having been a leader, I know how hard it can be to do well. One guy I danced with was maybe the best lead I’ve ever danced with–I always knew exactly what he wanted me to do–but the experience left me a little cold because I felt like I never got to do anything creative; I like to do some of my own moves when in open position, for example.

It was an interesting counterpoint to when I had first started to go out to dances as a man, and had to overcome decades of painful shyness and ask people to dance with me. I’m not sure which is easier, to be honest, to ask or wait to be asked.

I also ran into my ex-wife and her fiance. Which was a little weird; we’re on good terms, but it was definitely an odd interaction. Even weirder is that we met at this very same dance all those years ago (we met movie-cute.) I suppose I cold have upped the ante and danced with her, but I think we both felt that would have pushed the awkwardness skyward.

My anxieties then were mostly for naught. More than that: at one point I stood watching the sunset behind the bandstand, listening to the music and feeling the breezes blow on me, and I was just so damn happy–because this is how I wanted it to go, to finally feel at peace with myself and my body and who I wanted to be, to bask in the same beautiful weather I had enjoyed all those years ago when I went to my first dance, except this time it was so much better, so much deeper, so much more right.

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O Brave New World, That Has Such….No Men In It

Categories: media tool kit, vive le feminisme, world without (g)end(er)

Greetings, Ducks! As many of you may have guessed by now, this is a blog about gender. (Well, and privilege. Primarily privilege. In fact, when I renamed it, I should have just gone with “Privilege Privilege Privilege…blah blah blah, Privilege!”–but that would have been an even worse url.) As it turns out, however, soon I may need to stop writing here–because my work will have been done!

That’s right, ducks–it seems that scientists have created synthetic sperm! And that can mean just one thing:

Synthetic sperm’ from stem cells raises hope for male infertility

Wait, no, that’s not it! (Though wow, I’d never guess that the first take on this would be how it could benefit men.) No, what everyone is talking about is this:

Synthetic sperm brings mad feminist dream a step closer

The idiotic internet blather following the creation of artificial human sperm evokes the writings of mad feminists who dreamed of a world without men.

Now, let us leave for the moment that there are plenty of women and feminists (and even a lot of people who are both) who like men, just not how so many men behave. (Because of, you know, the oppression.) Actually, don’t leave that, because that’s the whole fucking point: it’s not exactly a mainline feminist viewpoint to advocate for the genocide of one half the human species, except in the mind of Neil Lyndon. (Hint: Maureen Dowd–Maureen Dowd–isn’t exactly an unimpeachable source for your “feminists hate men and want to get rid of them” argument.)

I mean, this is so Old School, so “bra-burning feminist hippies” stuff–I’d almost expect to see a Gloria Steinem reference.

…et voila:

Q: What do you think 21st-century feminism looks like?

It looks like you. It looks like each self-respecting women in the 21st century. It’s not for me to define; the message of feminism is that each of us, as female human beings, define ourselves. There are some generalities that you can see. It’s much more international, I’m happy to say. I think clearly most of the country now understands that women can do what men can do; the problem is that they don’t understand that men can do what women can do, which as I was saying, is the reason why women still suffer from having two jobs

Now, I’ve been reading bell hooks a lot lately, so I’m not such a huge fan of Steinem and some of the other more prominent Second Wave leaders who focused their attention almost completely on the issues of white, middle-class women. Still, the comments section is painful:

Can we have dismissiveness?

A broad with a narrow mind…
Shouldn’t they call themselves “masculinists“? Seems more appropriate.

Mrs. Steinem, please exit stage left…
Thanks.

If you really want to have an honest, cerebral look into a ‘real feminist’s’ mind you should google…Melinda Jelliby
(warning: don’t)

Howabout sexist fauxgressiveness?

You poor saps just can’t take the thought of a woman being smarter than you. I would think you would be used to it, judging from your comments I would say just about everyone above the age of three is smarter than you. Its one thing to be stupid, its another to revel in your stupidity. This guy thinks Gloria is a complete dish and always has been.

Just plain sexism?

woof!

Gloria Stinem is some kind of gal }:>

Aaah, Gloria! You’re still hot but you’re no Sarah Palin. Now that’s a “self-respecting” woman!

Bonus round: a Jane Fonda reference?

I won’t take any gratuitous personal attacks on this woman even though she is nothing more than a mouthpiece for flowery quips and idioms from some 60’s hippie manifesto (which started decades prior to the 60’s actually).

I honestly look at Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and their contemporaries (sp?) today as ironically exploited and in no way empowered whatsoever.

BINGO! What’d I win?

You know, after all that, maybe I’m changing my mind, and we really should look into this world without men thing–I wonder what it would be like:

And why would any of us want a world with no men anyway? Who would carry our heavy luggage up the stairs after getting home from a vacation? After the jump, 15 things we’d miss about men if they ever became extinct.

  1. Their 5 o’clock shadow.
  2. Intercourse and outercourse.
  3. How cute and vulnerable they look first thing in the morning.
  4. The way they reassure us we’re nothing like our mothers.
  5. Their ability to reach the high shelves at the grocery store.
  6. Taking it like a man when we have a PMS outburst.
  7. Their cute little nicknames for us.
  8. Reassuring us we’re nothing like the bitches their friends date.
  9. How well they lie about the size of our ass in our skinny jeans.
  10. How they always know where all the wires go.
  11. The way they look in a suit.
  12. How good they are at killing the bugs.
  13. And installing the AC window unit.
  14. The sound of their voice in the dark wishing us “good night.”
  15. The way they look holding a baby.

Ah, fuckit. Let’s just skip to the whole life after men and women thing then; the planet will thank us.

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Baron Cohen: Glorious Privileges For Amusement Of Elites

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, hipster irony must die, media tool kit, Outrage

I can’t say that I’m a Sacha Baron Cohen fan. (Now, Simon Baron-Cohen, I can totes get behind.) My niece liked his song in Madagascar, I’ve probably seen Ali G a few times, and other than that I’ve been pretty much indifferent to him.

But that hasn’t been much of an option of late, thanks to this:

A lot of people–led by Liss over at Shakesville–have talked about the, oh, FAIL risk inherent about using homophobic humor to expose…homophobia. Hell, even the New York Times–not my usual stop for cutting-edge progressivism–says as much in a well-balanced review by A.O. Scott:

The film demonstrates, at a fairly high level of conceptual sophistication, that lampooning homophobia has become an acceptable, almost unavoidable form of homophobic humor, or at least a way of licensing gags that would otherwise be out of bounds. An early sequence that graphically shows Brüno and his lover exerting themselves in various positions and with the assistance of, among other things, a Champagne bottle, a fire extinguisher and a specially modified exercise machine, derives its humor less from the extremity of their practices than from the assumption that sex between men is inherently weird, gross and comical. The same sequence with a man and a woman — or for that matter, two women — would play, most likely on the Internet rather than in the multiplex, as inventive, moderately kinky pornography rather than as icky, gasp-inducing farce.

Exactly.

However, here at The Second Awakening, we don’t just do analysis: we do analysis of privilege! (It says so somewhere in the mission statement, which I think The Grey Mouser is using as a pillow right now.) So what can we say about the privilege used, abused, hidden, and sickeningly visible in Baron Cohen’s work? And is that the reason why no matter what, you always feel vaguely icky watching it?

To answer the last first: Yes. Yes it is.

The thing is, both Borat and Bruno1 are humor for privileged people. They let you, the privileged person, laugh at other people who aren’t as privileged as you. To make it funny, of course, we use multiple axes of privilege: so Borat spent a lot of time lampooning white people of different educational or cultural backgrounds. (Most egregiously, the Romanian villagers who provided the backdrop for the movie’s early scenes.)

The way that both these movies mitigate any privilege guilt you might have about laughing at other people (please, please tell me you have privilege guilt for laughing–not everybody does) is by selling you the ultimate privilege: you’re in on it. Unlike the hapless buffoons of the movie’s universe, you get the joke. You know all along that Borat isn’t really a Kazakh journalist, that Bruno isn’t really a gay fashionista–that Baron Cohen is using these guises to draw people out of their shell and show their true colors. Which are inevitably ugly or laughable. As A.O. Scott says,

They — Americans just like you but of course nothing like you — were exposed as bigots either for being outraged at the things Borat did or for politely agreeing with his misogynistic, anti-Semitic or otherwise objectionable statements. Any twinge of guilt you might have felt on behalf of the actual glorious nation of Kazakhstan was quickly soothed by the spectacle of American intolerance and idiocy that “Borat” purported to expose.

That’s not to say that this isn’t a time honored technique (Jonathan Swift, for example, used it to great effect.) But I have to feel that there’s a fundamental difference in, say, attacking the powerful by pointing out they were essentially eating the children of the Irish by oppressing them into starvation, and getting a laugh out of a few ordinary citizens who aren’t hip that they’re being lampooned.

I mean, it’s not like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia (my personal fave) or anti-religious bigotry needs much encouragement to come out; nor is it likely that using a horrid charicature of gayness to draw people into overt homophobia is going to do much to alleviate homophobia. Instead, it’s more oppression masquerading as liberation; a joke for those “good” enough to be in on it, a joke on everyone else.

‘Cause not having privilege is hysterical. For them who have it.

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1. I refuse to use the idiotic umlauts; that’s not how you spell the name in German. And you don’t spell “Borat” that way in Cyrillic, which is odd given that the DVD box actually spelled out the English title in Cyrillic characters. Yes, I am a hopeless pedant; you knew that already.

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