Hillary Clinton’s speech in Beijing at the UN Women’s Conference in 1995. It gives me that righteous quiver.
I remember the thrill of saying it as a kid–the word held a kind of power kids weren’t allowed to have, and saying it felt strong. It wasn’t about rebellion; it was about being a real person, being taken seriously, that whole horrible struggle to be seen and heard.
I bristled at it later used to refer to sex, but then came to like it around the same time I began to pursue (and enjoy) casual sex. It was a way to talk about sex that meant that it was casual, my coolness and flippancy denoting what I felt as power in the form of invulnerability. It was also about not letting a word scare me, using it so I wouldn’t be sensitive to it (and thus risking being hurt).
But this summer I read a passage by John Stoltenberg that keeps arresting me. I think of Audre writing about how learning can be incited, and it is starting to feel like this: ideas enter my mind, grow, compel and disturb me, and cannot be unrooted. It is hard to un-see. I don’t have the Stoltenberg passage–I’ll amend this when I’m back in California–but he points out how troublesome fuck is. That the same word is used to mean sex as is used to mean messed up (fucked up), ruined (it’s totally fucked), beat up (they fucked him/her up), as a usually negative exclamation (fuck!), an expression of giving up/in (aww, fuck it), taken advantage of (fucked over, get fucked by), as an order to go away (fuck off), and as one of our culture’s ultimate verbal expressions of contempt and disrespect (fuck you). If you’re tempted to call it a fluke, he reminds the reader of the similar ways screw is used.
HELLO. You can’t really get more rape culture than equating sex with violence and/or domination.
This post on tumblr brought the issue to mind again this morning:
How often do you use “fuck you” or hear someone else say “fuck you”? I’m guilty of it, I do it quite often. I’m always spewing out “fuck that!” or “fuck hate!” or “fuck (insert unpleasant concept/thing/person here)” But only lately have I begun to analyze my use of that language. “Fuck” represents the act or acts of having sex, intercourse, oral, WHATEVER. Sex. When we apply that to things like “fuck you,” and especially when we say “fuck you” because we don’t like something/someone, we are implying that through fucking someone we can ruin it/get rid of it. We are implying that we are going to do something that will be unpleasant, undesirable, and harmful to someone else in the hopes that it will make them upset or make them disappear. If my nose is working correctly, I think I smell a pot of rape culture brewing up. This is what rape culture is: perpetuating and implementing violence through sex. We are going to hurt people through sex, whether it being physically, mentally, or emotionally. And you can say, “hey it’s just a word” but it’s not. We must treat this like we’d treat any other racist, sexist, heterosexist, anti-trans, xenophobic, etc slur out there. By saying things like “fuck prop 8” or “fuck racism” we are using a tool that rape culture apologists use; we are negatively sexualizing unpleasant things with the mentality that we are combating inequality, hatred, and overall bad things. But we are simply using violence. We are implying that it is okay to apply violence through sex to get rid of something or someone. It is not okay. Saying “fuck you” is not okay.
This has been incubated in my brain a few months now, and I keep bringing up this question with Max–is it best to claim the word for one meaning (violence) or the other (sex)? If so, which one? Do we drop it all together? Thoughts?
June Jordan, in “Where is the Love”:
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect. It means that I must everlastingly seek to cleanse myself of the hatred and contempt that permeates and surrounds my identity… It means that the achievement of self-love and self-respect will require inordinate, hourly vigilance…
bell hooks in “Lorde: the imagination of justice”:
…they will not understand that it is the most militant, most radical intervention anyone can make to not only speak of love but to engage in the practice of love. For love as the foundation of all social movements for self-determination is the only way we create a world that domination and dominator thinking cannot destroy. Anytime we do the work of love, we are doing the work of ending domination.
I am an emotional creature. I love that I do not take things lightly. everything is intense to me. The way I walk in the street, the way my mama wakes me up, the way it is unbearable when I lose, the way I hear bad news. I am an emotional creature, I am connected to everything and everyone, I was born like that. Don’t you say all negative that it’s only only a teenage thing or it’s only because I’m a girl. These feeings make me better, they make me present, they make me ready, they make me strong…
This is not extreme, it’s a girl thing, what we would all be if the big door inside of us few open. Don’t tell me not to cry, to calm it down, not to be so extreme, to be reasonable… You don’t tell the atlantic ocean to behave. I am emotional creature, why would you want to shut me down or turn me off? I am your remaining memory. I can take you back. Nothing’s been diluted, nothing’s leaked out.
I love this defense of emotion. I love that she reminds us that to have integrity–literally, to be whole–includes being open to emotion and intuition, and respecting them as important sources of information. She also reminds us that empathy is the basis of felt ethical responsibility, the motivation for this responsibility. Most major religious traditions talk about this, i.e. the Judeo-Christian “golden rule”. Eve (Ensler) says:
I love, hear me, I love that I can feel the feelings inside you, even if they stop my life, even if they break my heart, even if they take me off track, they make me responsible.
To the extent that women may be, in certain circumstances, more “ethical” or less violent than men, I think it has to do with the way boys are trained to murder their emotional selves (this is good preparation for being a soldier) and girls are allowed to keep (more of) theirs.
h/t Nick
bell hooks, in The Will to Change, p. 113-115:
Many of the New Age models created by men reconfigure old sexist paradigms while making it seem as thought they are offering a different script of gender relations. Often the men’s movement resisted macho patriarchal models while upholding a vision of benevolent patriarchy, one in which the father is the ruler who rules with tenderness and kindness, but he is still in control…
Clearly men need new models of self-assertion that do not require construction of the enemy “other”, be it a woman or the symbolic feminine, for them to define themselves against…
Undoubtedly, one of the first revolutionary acts of visionary feminism must be to restore maleness and masculinity as an ethical biological category divorced from the dominator model… we must define maleness as a state of being rather than as performance. Male being, maleness, masculinity must stand for the essential core goodness of self, of the human body that has a penis. Many of the critics who have written about masculinity suggest that we need to do away with the term, that we need “an end to manhood.” Yet such a stance furthers the notion that there is something inherently evil, bad, or unworthy about maleness.
It is a stance that seems more a reaction to patriarchal masculinity than a creative loving response that can separate maleness and manhood from all the identifying traits patriarchy has imposed on the self who has a penis. Our work of love should be to reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be held hostage to patriarchal domination… those of us who committing to ending patriarchy can touch real men where they live, not by demanding that they give up manhood of maleness, but by asking that they allow its meaning to be transformed, that they become disloyal to patriarchal masculinity in order to find a place for the masculine that does not make it synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.
I saw these My Strength posters around Brown campus a few years back, and that line–”Mi fuerza no es para lastimar” or “My strength is not for hurting“–stuck in my head.
And my first reaction is to love them. Yes! A call to integrity without moralizing, and without shaming, which is disenabling. One answer to the need for alternatives to patriarchal conceptions of masculinity, the need to embrace strength, ability, positive visions of men, rather than demonize all “masculinity” and power exercised by men. A better answer to the question of power for what? There is an affirmation of masculine power as something to be used for good, as something protective of others rather than defensive or against.
But now I wonder–does working on the old patriarchal ideals of masculinity lead to anything better than paternalism? And paternalistic masculinity values care, protection, gentleness–but also infantalizes women, is still a system of power-over, a class system, competition between men, men struggling to protect their property. Maybe kinder, gentler versions of patriarchy are necessary stop-gap measures in the struggle for our collective liberation, but ultimately gender as a role or performance seems irredeemably problematic.
***
Channeling Kate Bornstein: “Sex is fucking. Everything else is gender.”
Soon after publishing This Hunger, Anais Nin wrote this in her diary:
(Volume 4, p. 89)
…my illusion of the adolescent world satisfying me was gone. I carry a deeper hunger, which adolescents cannot fulfill. They can only distract me from deeper troubles…
This hunger is what I recognized in Frances and wrote about, and which we both alchemized into a giving to others what we wanted so much ourselves: uncritical and deep love, passion, help in creation, faith, loyalty.
I was reminded of this insight from Jean Baker Miller’s toward a new psychology of women:
(p. 18-19)
In a situation of inequality the woman is not encourage to take her own needs seriously, to explore them, to try to act on them as a full-fledged person…
…women are encouraged to do two things. First, they are diverted from exploring and expressing their needs (which would threaten terrible isolation or severe conflict not only with men but with all our institutions as they are arranged and, equally importantly, with their inner image of what it means to be a woman). Secondly, woman are encouraged to “transform” their own needs. This often means that they fail, automatically and without perceiving it, to recognize their own needs as such. They come to see their needs as if they were identical to those of others–usually men or children. If women can manage this transformation and can fulfill the perceived needs of others, then, they believe, they will feel comfortable and fulfilled… The trouble is that this is a most precarious transformation; it hangs by a delicate thread, and I have seen many people, who, it could be said, have broken this thread.
(p. 64)
…women feel compelled to find a way to translate their own motivations into a means to serve others and work at this all their lives.
And this is certainly true for me. I see myself trying to take on the role of care-taker, nourisher, healer, some cross between the mother and the sacred whore. Part of why I make commitments, why I try to affect healing, to practice love that is unconditional, is because I am so badly in need of those things myself. The best I can do to taste the unconditional love I crave is to experience what it’s like to (attempt to) give it to others. And the interest in sexual submission is part of this–yes yes yes I love you no matter what and I’ll prove it. Jack writes about surrender to God in an analogous way in The Problem of Pain:
(p. 97-98)
We cannot therefore know that we are acting at all, or primarily, for God’s sake, unless the material of the action is contrary to our inclinations, or (in other words) painful, and what we cannot know that we are choosing, we cannot choose. The full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination.
And the attempt at alchemy is driven by something dark and young and scared and unhealed, a great fear of loss, a sense of annhiliation in disconnection. But I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It’s not just pathology; there is something innocent mixed in, too, an attempt at knowledge–thinking about how we want to be loved ourselves is one of the ways to start to imagine how others want to be loved, and to act towards giving them that love. And something beautiful, too: wanting to spare others the devestation of abandonment, the saltless hands, o los manos rotos, wanting earnestly to give the nourishment that we want ourselves, because we have intuited its power and goodness.
J. once wrote to me, “So if Kate is an S/M Gender Outlaw, who was once a transgendered lesbian woman born into a body with a penis, and I think she’s hot, what does that make me?“
Kate’s book Gender Outlaw was my introduction to queer/feminist thought, and it changed everything. From chapter 11:
It’s time to call the persistent clash of genders what it really is: a class conflict within a dangerously invisible and pervasive cult-like class system. Gender is indeed a group, a club, a church–but it operates as a class system, pervasively, throughout culture.
The continued oppression of women proves only that in any binary there’s going to be one up and one down. The struggle for equal rights must include the struggle to dismantle the binary.
I got real curious about my position as former-man and not-quite-woman. Where did that place me in the gender/ class struggle that was daily spinning itself out in our culture?…
In the either/or gender class system we call male and female, the structure of one-up, one-down fulfills he requisite for a power imbalance… Without the structure of the bi-polar gender system, the power dynamic between men and women shatters. People would not have gender to use as a hierarchical framework, and nearly half the members of the bipolar gender system would probably be at quite a loss… What I’m talking about is what’s been called “male privilege.” And I think this is the crux of the gender issue; this is what’s holding gender in place: people who have and exert male privilege just don’t want to give it up. I think that male privilege is the glue that holds the system together.
People ask what it was like to have had the kind of privilege, what it was like to lose it, why in the world did I give it up. To have it was like taking drugs, to get rid of it was like kicking a habit. I gave it up because it was destroying me and the people I loved.
“Male privilege” is assuming one has the right to occupy any space or person by whatever means, with or without permission. It’s a sense of entitlement that’s unique to those who have been raised male in most cultures–it’s notably absent in most girls and women. Male privilege is not something that’s given to men in this culture; it’s something that men take… Combine male privilege with capitalism (which rewards greed and acquisition) and the mass media (which, owned by capitalists, highlights only the rewards of acquisition and makes invisible its penalties), and you have a juggernaut that needs stopping by any means…. Male privilege is, in a word, violence….
For me, I just wasn’t aware of any general impunity when I had it. I can understand men looking baffled when women accuse them of exercising male privilege…
I didn’t “lose” my male privilege so much as I made a conscious decision to get rid of it, and I didn’t get rid of it all at once; it’s an attitude that is insidiously pervasive. Right now the point where my vestigial privilege surfaces is when I’m driving: I can be quite a terror. Sigh.
It took my becoming a woman to discover my “male behavior”–that is, exhibiting male privilege. When I was first coming out, I used to hang out mostly with women. Any act of mine that was learned male behavior stuck out like a sore thumb. Things like leaping up and taking charge, even when it wasn’t called for; things like using a conversation like a sledge hammer; things like assuming everyone owed me special consideration for my journey through a gender change–I still shudder at my arrogance. Some might say none of that’s male. Well, I learned it when I was a guy, and I was the only one exhibiting that behavior when I was in the company of women, so if it’s not exclusively male, it’s real close…
I noticed I didn’t have much remaining male privilege by the slow dawning of peacefulness in my life. That may sound flaky, but the fact is I’m nowhere near as territorial and possessive as I used to be… I use force infrequently now. For me that’s a perk of having gotten rid of male privilege. The shortcomings are obvious: lower pay, less security, more fear on the streets, less opportunity in the job market. All those drawbacks made me look at the value of what I’d lost. Do I really want to take part in a culture that places a higher value on greed and acquisition than on peace and shared growth?
I’m not sure how much of her take on gender I agree with, though when I first read it (five years ago?) it really resonated. Now, though, I read it more critically, and it seems like she’s leaving the responsibility to changing/ fixing things up to men–but the rest of us can’t just sit around waiting for men to give up privilege! And in this chapter Kate ignores how much women are indoctrinated into deferring to men, discounting themselves, perpetuating patriarchy, the confusion between assertion and aggression, passivity and receptivity… The whole phenomenon of internalized misogyny which must be addressed.
***
Regardless of my criticisms now, when I heard her speak in college, she spoke with tremendous honesty and compassion. “Do whatever you need to do to make live worth living,” she told us. “Whether it is immoral, illegal, self-injurious. Just don’t be mean. I’ll do your time in hell for you.” And then she gave us these cards, as a promise. As a friend in the dark.
(This is why it’s an addendum). From Jean Baker Miller‘s classic towards a new psychology of women:
…In order to pursue the male identity, they had learned to close off large areas of their own sensibilities; one important area is responsiveness to the needs of others.
It is not that men do not serve others, in fact, and in many ways… The point is, however, that the need to serve others is not central to a man’s self-image. It is a luxury he may desire or can afford only after he has fulfilled the primary requirements of manhood. Once he has become a man, by other standards, he may choose to serve.
It is clear that a large element of human activity that involves doing for others has been separated off and assigned to women. When this is com
bined with the fact that what women do is generally not recognized, we end up with some very strange theories about the nature of human nature. These strange theories are, in fact, the prevailing theories in our culture. One of these is that “mankind” is basically self-seeking, competitive, aggressive, and destructive. Such a theory overlooks the fact that millions of people (most of them women) have spent millions of hours for hundreds of years giving their utmost to millions of others. While this fact has important consequences for women, in an ultimate sense it has equally serious implications for men and for the dominant culture’s theories about the nature of human beings. Since man is the measure of all things–and man, literally, rather than human beings–we have all tended to measure ourselves by men. Men’s interpretation of the world defines and directs us all, tells us what is the nature of human nature.
To put it all very simply: all we human beings have is ourselves and each other… We all need both ourselves and each other. Our troubles seem to come from an attempt to divide ourselves so that we force men to center around themselves and women to center around “the other”. From this division both groups suffer…
