Backlash! Or, Feminism is Good for Men.

The Fword reports on the most recent backlash against women’s rights, leading to a discussion of whether women will ever lose the rights we have gained, perhaps especially cogent in the recent attempt to reduce abortion access. While I think that it is very possible that women’s rights may be reduced, and we should be careful to protect them, I don’t think we shall ever go back to previous age.

Why? Because feminism is good for men.

In the patriarchal societies in the past, male power was balanced with considerable responsibility. In a world where women’s economic opportunities were limited, either by domesticity or unequal wages, men were responsible for providing for wives, daughters and other unsupported women, such as orphaned sisters or widowed mothers. They were expected to keep them in ‘ the manner in which they were accustomed’. Feminism made the responsibility for provisioning households more equal.

This restriction within patriarchal societies, in part, justified stringent or non-existent divorce laws. Men, who separated or divorced their wives (and for most purposes this was the practical economic result), were expected to provide for them throughout the remainder of their lives. This alimony was considerably larger than contemporary settlements that expect women to work after divorce. Feminism brought divorce and separation legislation.

In patriarchal societies, women’s behaviour was a reflection of their husbands or fathers. In many cases, this meant that women could impact on a man’s career, reputation, and social standing. In some cases, it meant that a man was criminally responsible for his wife’s crimes (and she wasn’t). Men were meant to be able to control women and an inability to do so reflected on their masculinity and particularly their virility. A gossiping, idle wife was a reflection on her husband’s inability to control her, which was closely related to his ability to pacify her through sex. Feminism removed male responsibility for their wife’s behaviour.

Under patriarchy, a man’s children were his own property, not his wife’s. This may sound good to some men, but it meant custody always went to men. They couldn’t leave their wives and children for a new wife and family. They couldn’t walk out on their responsibility. Wives didn’t get weekend custody- men had 100% of the children 100% of the time. They were also responsible for any ‘illegitimate’ children and more than just financially. Feminism removed the burden of providing for children exclusively from men and shared it with women.

Before feminism, men had to marry a woman to have sex with her. While prostitutes were available, they cost money, frequently had VD, and could ruin a man’s social standing and reputation (chastity wasn’t just for women). You certainly couldn’t try before you buy (ok, I am generalising about social customs here, but generally marriage either preceded or closely followed sex). The sexual revolution wasn’t just for women.

Feminism came with contraception. Enough said.

Feminism reduced male responsibility, by recognising women’s humanity. And this wasn’t a bad thing. Men no longer had to shoulder the burden of power, the stress and responsibility, alone. The buck no longer stopped with them. They were no longer forced into a restricted role of husband and father, because society expected it. They had greater freedom to choose what they wanted to do with their lives (occupationally and otherwise) as they no longer (or less frequently) had to think about other people in making their choices. They could take greater risks; behave more frivolously. When they married (or didn’t!), men could choose to do so for love, knowing they could share intimacy and responsibility for the household with a partner, rather than worrying whether their choice could land them in jail or destroy their social standing. They could have conversations with an educated and informed equal. They could choose to spend more time with their children and even be house-husbands. They had the choice of divorce when things didn’t work out. They could ask for help when they needed it and it wasn’t a sign of weakness.

A backlash against feminism sucks as much for men as it does for women.

Rape Stats.

There are numerous discussions over the webosphere at the moment about rape and rape statistics. In the more misogynistic areas, it is suggested that rape can never be proven and that our incredibly low conviction rape, of 5.7%, is all we can expect, as rape is always a he said-she said situation. (Let’s ignore that fact that this is true of most crimes where a victim reports a crime, and the defendant claims not to have done it). So I was quite interested to hear that rape convictions were as high as 33% in the 1970s. Being a historian, I wondered whether the 1970s were an anomaly, or whether it is our current situation that is odd. And handily I had article close by that detailed the rape cases tried at the Old Bailey between 1730 and 1830 (hardly the most enlightened age when it came to women’s rights, I might add). Now, it seems that over the hundred year period, we averaged a conviction rate of 17%, with the conviction rate reaching 38% in some years. More interesting perhaps was the attempted rape conviction rate (say that ten times fast), which averaged a 47% conviction rate across the period, with a high of 83% in the 1760s.*

Now there are good reasons why attempted rape was easier to prove than rape in this period. To prove rape, you needed evidence that a penis fully entered the vagina (and at certain points in history that ejaculation occurred). And as the death penalty was imposed for full rape, but not always for attempted rape, juries were always a bit queasier about finding guilt (seriously by the way- the death penalty was known to make juries cautious, especially for crimes they personally condoned or for situations they could imagine themselves in). But, it is interesting, once cases came down to attempted rape, which perhaps more closely followed the ‘he said, she said’ type situation (that are claimed to happen today- let’s ignore that most cases that are taken to court usually have additional evidence –both then and now), that the juries took the women’s side almost half the time!

So the question really is why we (juries) are so willing to give men the benefit of the doubt today, when we haven’t been so forgiving in the past?

*Antony Simpson, ‘Vulnerability and the age of female consent: legal innovation and its effect on prosecutions for rape in eighteenth-century London’, in G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds, Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, (Manchester, Manchester U.P., 1987), pp. 181-205.

Desire.

Agent of Desire recently posited an experiment (which I discussed briefly in the last post) where women should take of the trappings of femininity and go out into the world as ‘sex agents’, looking to objectify men. She suggests:

Consciously look the men on the carriage and analyse how attracted you feel to them. This will feel quite predatory, almost as though you are looking through the sight of a gun. You may well have a lot of resistance to this as you don't want to treat others in a way you don't want to be treated, but don't worry for now - this is your theraputic exercise. [...] Really indulge in your own sexually preditory nature and enjoy feeling the power of choice this gives you. This is a power men enjoy the feeling of daily, even if it is delusional. As a woman, it is not a delusion because you are female and men aren't naturally as selective as women when it comes to sex, because nature gave you the power of choice over them because you are the one with the womb.

The basis for Agent of Desire’s experiment is that women ‘in nature’ should be the objectifiers, because men are not particularly selective about who they mate with, and women carry huge risks (pregnancy) through having sex and so should be the selective mate. She argues that men have conspired to remove women’s right to objectify men and have reversed the natural order. Her experiment is meant to give power back to women.

Now, there are some obvious problems with this post. First, is the notion that all women perform a particular type of femininity (discussed in the post below), and, second, this post is very heteronormative. But, in other ways, I think that she is right that for heterosexual women to engage so actively in objectification is quite a challenging thing to do and so might be an ‘interesting’ experiment, in the way that ‘new’ experiences are.

But, the experiment actually raised some much bigger questions for me about the nature of desire. As feminists, we are usually happy to recognise that gender and sexuality are both constructions, but, when it comes to desire, we fall back on a narrative that claims desire is ‘natural’, ‘innate’, ‘biological’. After-all, the purpose of the human race is to have babies, or something like that. As a result, we never fully condemn objectification. Time and again, I have seen feminists telling men that they are allowed to objectify women, but just not overtly, or, perhaps, not without permission. (And this is despite the fact that we will all agree that not all women want babies, that not all women want to have sex with men (or for that matter vice versa), and that rape sure as hell isn’t about sex drive). But, heaven forbid, we suggest that people can’t get their jollies through looking at hawt bod (with permission and in an unexploitative context).

Ultimately, the problem is that we have is an inability to reconceptualise desire. And I think as feminists we really need to. Reclaiming objectification for women is problematic for just the reason’s Agent of Desire promotes it. Objectification is predatory; it promotes an unequal power relationship between the viewer and viewed, and it removes the humanity of the ‘object’. Do we really want to be introducing inequality into our personal lives, even if we are in the seat of power? Does a good sex life have to require the removal of one partner’s humanity?

Can we learn to appreciate the physical body without objectifying it?

On Being Born a Woman.

One of the debates that accompanies the transgender wars is how one becomes a woman. Most feminists are agreed that no one is born a woman. At least in the twenty-first century West, ‘woman’ is a classification that is placed on people with particular sex organs and which is expected to be manifested in particular behaviours- behaviours which most people recognise are taught and some think are innate. Currently, we believe that there are only two genders, which are often conceived as polar opposites from each other, despite this being a very contrived binary.

The classification of ‘woman’ did not always follow sex organs as tightly as it does today. In the European past, gender was closely related to sex organs, but was not a direct consequence of them. Under a humeral model of the body, women were people who were cold and wet, men were hot and dry. It was men’s greater body heat that expelled the sex organs from the body. Some people with female sex organs, however, were otherwise very manly (they contained considerable heat); they just didn’t have enough heat to expel their sex organs. This could allow ‘hot’ women (no not like that!) to take on many of the functions and status of men. Similarly some men were colder than normal and so more effeminate. It was even possible for women, who got too hot, to transition to full men if they managed to expel their genitals (and there are recorded instances of this happening).

In other cultures, gender is assigned based on social role. In certain tribes in New Guinea, women are people who grow crops; men are people who hunt and fight. Most people born with female sex organs tend to grow crops, but some have a desire or an aptitude for hunting and fighting and are accepted into ‘male’ society as full members, and vice-versa. When members of particular gender are on the low side (perhaps because of not enough male-sexed children being born), this fluidity becomes even more common as female-sexed people make up for a shortage of men, and vice versa. Female-sexed western anthropologists who visit these areas are often assumed to be male due to their lack of knowledge about rice and crop-growing. In Albania, as a recent study shows, a shortage of male-sexed people allowed for female-sexed people to become men and take on many of the rights and responsibilities of men. In some societies, gender is not, or has not been, so closely linked to sex organs and, in some, ‘transitioning’ between different genders at least had a generally accepted conceptual framework (or cultural explanation) to make it easier. (As does our own, by equating gender with sex organs and so allowing people who change sex organs to change gender).

But back to the question at hand, if we all agree that ‘woman’ is a category (not a reality), then what is to stop anybody declaring that they are a ‘woman’. What makes someone a ‘woman’? Some people argue that it takes a life-time of socialisation to be a woman and that sex organs or desire are not enough. Yet, even those of us who were born with the female sex and have a lifetime of socialisation that taught us what it is to be ‘woman’ are often not very ‘good’ women. Agent of Desire recently proposed an experiment where feminists should:

Instead of putting on make-up, styling your hair, wearing 'feminine' shoes or clothes that emphasise your figure, leave the house with none of the paraphernalia of objectification. Instead, don't put in contact lenses if you wear them, go for glasses instead, wear a loose coat that is not tailored to the waist, wear no make up or distracting jewelery, wear straight-cut trousers, tie your hair up or put it under a hat, and don't clutch a dainty handbag - put your keys, phone and money in your pockets. If you have manicured and polished long nails, wear gloves. This may be very difficult to do, because you are constantly told by the media that being sexually desireable is the most important thing about you, and that your sexual desireability depends on this paraphernalia, which is not true.

Her overall experiment (which is about objectifying others) is quite interesting, but it fails to realise that many women match her description already. If you were to describe me most days: I don’t wear make-up; I don’t always wear particularly ‘feminine’ clothes (although I do have a female body underneath them and this is certainly harder to disguise now I am a bit ‘rounder’ than when I was a size ten); I wear glasses (not contacts); I often wear hats and tie my hair up; I frequently use my large, shapeless army jacket with pockets as a handbag- and, more often than not, I have a rucksack if I need a bag. A lifetime of socialisation and I clearly didn’t learn many of my lessons particularly well. I am also not deferential. I certainly don’t keep my opinions to myself. I am not retiring. And yet, I don’t think I have ever been mistaken for a ‘man’. Furthermore, I have female-sexed friends who are androgynous enough to be regularly mistaken for men, yet their ‘passing’ does not make them men (and they have no desire to be ‘men’).

So, what does this mean? Does this tell us that being a woman is all about sex, and nothing to do with socialisation in our society? And, yet (like it or not), much of society will not accept male-sexed people who have ‘gender reassignment surgery’ as women, even if they are much better at performing femininity than me. Is it simply our classification on birth that makes us women?

The category of woman is a fiction. As it is a fiction, there are no women. There are people who are designated women and others who desire to have that designation (and not always because they think there is such a thing as woman). People accept or reject that designation to different degrees. There are characteristics that are associated with ‘woman’ and some people (regardless of their sex organs) have or perform those characteristics better than others. In the same manner, there are no men.

At this point, it is easy to say that the experience of being designated women from birth ensures that we can never be men (no matter at what age we choose to transition?). And it may certainly be true that no one who was designated female at birth will have identical experiences to someone designated male. But, the truth is that there are very few people designated woman that have the same experiences as other people designated woman. Other designations such as race and class ensure that all women are not alike. Furthermore, there is no universally agreed, model of ‘woman’ that we are trying to achieve and which the rest of us fail to live up to (although some models may have more power than others). Women have a vast range of experiences, desires, backgrounds, upbringings, levels of power and privilege and outlooks. Similarly, men are raised with different levels of privilege and power. Some are even raised in feminist households and taught to critique their privilege and the naturalness of their gender. Some are better or worse at being men than others. In some cultures, people born with male sex organs are raised as women. We are all individuals with different experiences, even as we share others. Why, as feminists, are we holding on to ‘born with female sex organs and socialised because of them to be women’ as so central to our identity when we all agree that no one is born a woman, when we all know that being male or female is a construction and we are all socialised differently, when in our own lives we recognise that it is impossible to be an ideal woman because she doesn’t exist?

A Pretty Good Week.

Well yesterday I finally graduated, 11 months after submitting the thesis. Yeay for me! So, you can now address me as Dr Feminist Avatar! (Just kidding- we don't hold with formalities here).

Don't really have much of substance to say today.

Transwars, Part 67458.

[This is a post that I have been reluctant to write because I am not trans* and don’t feel that I can talk for trans*people’s experience. But, the latest round of transphobia that has manifested in the latest Carnival of Feminists has made me want to say something. So, I apologise in advance to trans*people if I get it wrong and I direct non-trans* readers to here and here to talk to people who actually know something about it.]

Once upon a time, many, many moons ago, a famous philosopher said, ‘I think, therefore I am’ (only he wrote it in Latin). Descartes’ words are often flung about, but the larger point he was making at the time was to have significant repercussions for centuries to come. Descartes posited that there was a distinction between mind and body. The body was fallible and the senses flawed, but the mind was capable of deduction and so able to transcend the limitations of the physical. His model of mind and body led people to distinguish between the inner and outer body. The mind, or soul, was the person, where the humanity lay; the body was a mere vehicle for the mind and of little real significance other than as a means of communication. This differentiation led to a medical science that deals with the body and psychiatry/ psychology that deals with the mind. All that was important and real came from within; physical acts and behaviours were either inconvenient biological necessities or forms of communication controlled by the inner being.

‘Twas not always this way. Once a long time ago, and still today in some distant lands, the body and mind were not seen as separate, but the human operated as one, her mind and body in sync. Indeed, even in times and places where a Cartesian model was in place, not all people could free themselves from their bodies. Only the rational, the superior, the male, could truly rise above their physical beings. Women, with their hormones and menses and wombs and too much water and small brains, found it very difficult to make the separation between mind and body. They were never truly rational, never completely separate from nature, never fully human.

Then one day, feminism came along and women were allowed to be rational, our minds fully separated from our bodies. We ignored our menstrual cramps and swollen breasts and embraced Cartesianism. We determined that the body was a static model on which we placed meaning. Gender was a construction of the inner, not the outer (and sometimes the outer was constructed too). And as feminists, we built theories and more theories and some theories, and a bit of activism, and some more theories, but, all the while, the easy distinction between body and mind wasn’t all that easy.

We knew that gender was a construction, but we couldn’t quite figure out why our bodies continued to bug us. They niggled and wobbled and we ran and we ran, but still they followed. And then in twenty-first century came The Transpeople™*. They said our inners don’t match our outers and we want it fixed! And, the feminists cried, but your inner is constructed, so if it doesn’t match your outer, then you change it, not your genitals! And, they said, but my outer looks wrong. And the feminists cried, but gender isn’t real, so your genitals shouldn’t matter.**

But still the genitals mattered. And the Cartesian model allowed no in-between.

So we need to rethink the link between mind and body. My body is me. It is not just a vehicle that carries me. I love my body in all its lumpy, imperfect perfection. When I look in the mirror, it is what I expect to see and I expect people to react to me in particular ways because I have this body. I know that having this body led me to be raised to behave in particular ways and that as a result of this body, people respond to me differently from how they respond to other people. But, ultimately, I would not change this body. It is me.

Now, what if, one day, I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognise the person looking back at me? It would fundamentally change who I am, both because I would be a different person, and because the world would react to me differently. Now, imagine that for as long as I could remember the person looking back at me didn’t feel right, for whatever reason, and then wonder what I might try to do to get my body to feel right. Women do this every day. They put on make-up to cover up the blemishes and wrinkles that aren’t them. They lose weight, and more weight, and get implants and surgery to try and make their bodies match who they are. And for many, the feeling of being right never comes.

Other people’s bodies are not sexed in the way they feel they should be. And sometimes they do things to try and make their bodies more like they believe they should be, whether dressing differently, taking hormones or having surgery. Indeed, if it was not because our genitals are what are used to separate us into two different genders, having genital reassignment surgery would only be more radical than breast implants in the degree to which it is a more complex surgery.

As it is however, the powers that be have determined that certain sexual organs come with certain behaviours. So when people choose to change their genitals, we assume it is because they are buying into the belief that gender exists and so reinforcing this binary. And, perhaps, sometimes this is true. Perhaps (and this is where I am a bit uncomfortable talking about experiences that are not my own), for some people, trained from birth that certain sex organs come with certain behaviours, when you change genitals, you also need to take on the traits of that sex- the two things come together. After all, it is only natural; it’s what we’ve been taught our whole lives. Certainly, this seems to be the line the medical profession takes. Want genital reassignment surgery, then you better act like a man/women (delete as appropriate). Lisa Harney in a comment over at Questioning Transphobia describes her experience thus:

In order to be diagnosed in the first place, I had to disavow any attraction I had to women, and state that I was attracted to men. In order to be prescribed hormones, the psychiatrist wanted to see me in a dress or skirt. The therapist I was seeing for voice work (and she was an awful voice therapist) insisted that I always wear dresses and skirts to her office. Even years later when I needed to see her about something, she insisted I wear a dress for the appointment, and not show up in my preferred (at the time) jeans.

And this wasn’t just something I experienced. Psychiatrists involved in the early days of gender clinics talked about assessing whether trans women would be attractive enough as women after they transitioned, and required a specific narrative to diagnose trans women that emphasized femininity. Since trans women are just diverse as cis women, a lot of us had to misrepresent ourselves as more feminine than we would have preferred just to get the treatment that would help encourage us to not kill ourselves, or at least not live out our lives in depression.

Some trans*women were forced to become feminine to justify their desire for surgery, whether or not that was how they personally wanted to behave (and of course the reverse is true for trans*men). Because genitals were never just genitals, they were the basis on which gender construction lies. If you want the outer characteristics, you damn well better have the inner ones too. And the thing is because gender is constructed and not natural, it becomes very difficult to decide what behaviours are natural/normal, and it all becomes very confusing. How much more so for people whose bodies do not feel right? As ciswomen, we spend so much time worrying about whether our behaviour/dress/bodyshape is feminine or too feminine or, better yet, is it feminist?

The thing is all behaviour is taught. There is not hidden or innate you (or me) waiting to emerge once we get rid of gender, like a heavy blanket holding us down. If we want to get rid of gender, we need to start normalising a much wider range of behaviours and questioning why certain behaviours are tied to certain biological characteristics- we effectively need to increase choice. This will not make behaviour ‘natural’, but will hopefully allow people more freedom in their identity. As feminists, we also need to challenge why power comes with certain traits or behaviours and why others are oppressed because of their characteristics. We also need to rethink the place of the body within identity. It is more than weight around our neck, pulling us down and restricting us.

Trans*women are like other women, except their situation is more complicated. They know that they are women whose bodies don’t fit with their expectations, and they have the same problem as the rest of us, trying to figure out what the hell it means to be a women, to dress like a women, to be a feminist women. Because, just like the rest of us, they have a very limited choice in what it means to be a woman (and because sometimes that choice is further constrained by the medical profession) they endorse models of femininity that are problematic. They are just doing exactly the same thing as every other woman, every other day.

*Please note that this is hyperbole. Gender non-conformity of all sorts has a very long history.

** Please also note that I realise that people who are transgendered are not all about the genitals and that not all transgendered people can or want to have genital reassignment surgery. The genitals here is a shorthand for a much wider range of behaviours.

Calling People Who Know English.

My gym has replaced the sign on the women's changing room door to 'female changing room'. This really annoys me, as my immediate thought is 'the changing room is a woman? Who knew?'. (Then, I go down a path of troubling moral ambiguity asking whether, as the changing room is female, I need her consent to use it?...) Anyway, I know that female can be used as a noun or as an adjective (although I personally HATE seeing it used as a noun). But, if we assume that in this context 'female' is used as a noun, would it not be grammatically correct to write "females' changing room"? Yet, this sounds ugly. So what is good grammar here? Does female used as an noun assume possession, like the pronouns 'her' or 'its'? And if it does, would it still need to be plural in this instance?

People who know English, help me out, please?