The Power of the ‘No’.

A while ago, Twisty suggested that women should no longer be understood to be always consenting to sex, but instead have a default position of ‘no’. The simple premise behind this idea was that men had to ask permission before having sex or it would be rape. This would differ from the current condition where women are expected to say no when they don’t want to have sex. Now, I didn’t think this was that revolutionary a concept, because naively I believed that men were supposed to ask permission from the women they wanted to have sex with. But it caused a huge controversy over at IBTP, taking up several hundred comments as people debated the pros and cons. And all the while, I couldn’t get why such a simple idea caused such as fuss. Then, I read a post over at Girly Thoughts, where judgesnineteen talks about the difficulty she finds saying no to men, and it reminded me of a conversation with my mother where she told me about how she had been brought up to believe that if was her role to help anyone that asked, and thus she now finds it difficult to say no.

Now I see the power of NO.

Women are socialised to put the needs of others before their own. As a result, they find it difficult to verbalise their own needs, especially when those needs (like the need to say no) come in conflict with the ‘needs’, or perhaps the desires, of someone else. ‘No’ becomes a word that is difficult to articulate. Furthermore, the act of saying ‘no’ puts you in direct conflict with another person; it’s seen as rude. This is difficult for women who have been taught that it is unfeminine to be assertive and especially aggressive or angry, and then run the double-bind of being described as ‘irrational’ or ‘emotional’ if they appear aggressive or angry.

Having the right to say ‘no’ is part of being human. The iconic symbol of slavery is the black woman or man who responds ‘yessir’ to her or his white master. That ‘yes’ is not true consent; it is the inability to say ‘no’. It represents the lack of power that the slave has within slavery and the removal of her or his humanity. The idea that women have the right to say ‘no’ is frightening because it symbolises their right to be fully human.

Saying NO is powerful. As women, we need to learn to use the word no and to recognise its power.

Feminist Theory for a Feminist Revolution.

Today, I was going to post about the need for a feminist theory for a feminist revolution and then I made this comment at Twisty’s in a discussion about ‘sexy-feminism’:

The point is that it doesn't make any difference whether you pose nude or don't pose nude, because you damned if you do and damned if you don't. Under the patriarchy, they can be no truly feminist act; there can be no feminist sex. Because patriarchy is not (just) a behaviour that is performed and thus can be not performed; it is a way of looking and interpreting the world. That is why the removal of patriarchy needs a revolution; it needs us to entirely transform how we understand gender. As Firestone argues, it is not just about removing gender privilege; it's about removing gender distinction.

One of the key problems in my mind is the inability of the current feminist movement to envision a post-patriarchal world- to envision life free of gender distinction. This something that the RadFems of the Second Wave at least made an effort to do, and, yes, they were shot down for their inability to incorporate different world views (notably race and class difference) into their new hegemony- but they tried to do this. Part of the pro/anti sex debate is actually a discussion about the role of sex in post-patriarchy- but a debate that has failed to transcend the boundaries placed upon it by the patriarchy. We need to think bigger, broader and, yes, more radical. Because otherwise we aren't moving forward.

Feminists in academia are often accused of ‘not doing anything’; of being all talk and no action. And this is not always an unfair criticism. But if we want to get rid of patriarchy, we need to have a strategy for moving forward- and this is something that academic feminists engage with. Yet, we are still much better at unpicking and analysing the nature of the patriarchal system, of highlighting how it operates, and what parts need to go, than we are at envisioning a new post-patriarchal future. Part of the problem of course is that there is a feeling, especially amongst feminists in academia, that their vision will never be all in encompassing, and, creating a new hegemony, it will trample on the rights of others. Perhaps, we need, however, to envision a future that is not hegemonic, but is also free of gender distinction. This is not an easy or a straightforward task, but the time is right to start the revolution- we know we need it- and we know it needs to be done sensitively- and that is a start.

I know that this is a call that is easy to make, but less easy to achieve. So to that aim, I am going to give serious thought to what I, as a Feminist, want from the future and if I come up with anything revolutionary I'll let you know. Suggestions are welcome.

Procrastination.

When trying to do some work, do NOT google procrastination. Then, do NOT realise what a time suck that was and decide to warn other people by blogging your advice, thus procrastinating some more.

[ETA: (more proscrastination) FYI when you google procrastination, it gives you advice for writers who are avoiding writing. Google can see into my soul.]

Official: Having a Vagina is Now Immoral.

Via The Curvature, a report that in Canada women are being denied cervical smears due to ‘conscience clauses’ that allow doctors to refuse medical treatment (usually abortions) on moral grounds. Now, call me naive, but as I understand anatomy, the vagina is just another body part that can get cancer. Cervical smears are a test to ensure that cervical cancer is caught in a timely fashion and that any pre-cancerous cells are treated before they progress to full-blow cancer (saving lives and money in the long-term). How, by any stretch of the imagination, can it be immoral to require such a test?

Now, it is true that women who have sex have a higher chance of getting cervical cancer, but remaining a virgin does not entirely remove the possibility. But, even if this was true, how is having sex immoral? Certain religions restrict ‘moral sex’ to marriage, but married women still require cervical smears. Marriage is not a protection against cervical cancer. Furthermore, how moral is it to punish women who have sex outside marriage to death by cancer?

The only reason that cervical smear could be refused on the grounds of ‘conscience’ is if having a vagina is itself immoral. Women, there is no point in living a holy or a moral life, because you are damned by your vagina. Remember your vagina is your destiny and your destiny has decided that you’re less than human. Basic medical care does not apply to vaginas, because they are immoral. Heaven forbid that a doctor defile himself by treating one.

Now if women are the opposite of men and vaginas the opposite of penises... what does this say about the penis?

Aesthetic Enjoyment Blogging.

For your viewing pleasure, I present an oak tree.

Infantilisation Nation.

Scotland is a nation in love with alcohol. It is a love story with a long history. Look back at the shopping lists of our ancestors and the amount of alcohol purchased is striking. It is a love story that often ends in tragedy. People in Scotland are twice as likely to die from an alcohol related death as elsewhere in the UK. It has always had a contested role within our culture. There have been huge anti-drink movements, such as the Chartists in the nineteenth century and teetotallers in the twentieth. Yet, the extent to which people defined themselves as drinkers or non-drinkers says as much about the importance of alcohol to our culture than anything. In the past, drinking alcohol has been linked to degenerative behaviours, the working class, ill-health and poverty, and currently it is associated with young people, anti-social behaviour and high-mortality. The truth is, however, that while drinking patterns do change with age, drink is a problem amongst all social groups and all age-groups. It is at the heart of our culture. Drink is brought out at all social occasions, whether organised by families, institutions or the state, often with no alternative given. It is given out as a reward or bonuses in the workplace based on an assumption that everybody drinks alcohol. Not drinking alcohol can exclude you from a large part of Scottish social life, and, if drink is calculated at cost, refusing alcohol can be refusing a (sometimes significant) part of your wage. Alcohol is at the heart of Scottish culture and it’s costing us as a nation.

So, what is the solution? Well, the Scottish government has suggested raising the drinking age to 21. Because criminalising behaviour is always the solution to social problems. Underage drinking is already a fact of life in Scotland. Raising the age limit just criminalises the behaviour of another group of people with no real reduction in behaviour. Let’s face it. The people who make a drunken scene on a Friday night in most Scottish city centres are by no means exclusively aged between 18 and 21. Indeed, most studies on the effects on alcohol on anti-social behaviour either classify young people as anyone under 24 or anyone under 35. There are no studies that have pointed to this age-group as particularly culpable compared to any other group under 35. If this change in legislation is about health benefits, then, yes, younger people tend to drink more than older people, but again I am not aware of any studies that say alcohol consumption peaks between the ages of 18 and 21. Indeed, in my experience, people in my age group (mid to late twenties) drink more alcohol overall as we have more disposable income and have not yet got the responsibilities of family.

More problematically, however, is what criminalising the behaviour of a group of adults based on their age says about our society. At a certain point, we grant people in society the rights of adulthood, which include the ability to make choices about their lives, whether or not they are good ones. What age do we want to set adulthood at? There is already considerable social discussion about the ever-increasing boundaries of youth as people put off marriage and family until their late-thirties, allowing them the freedoms of adolescence for longer and longer. Do we want to institutionalise youth into the twenties? The fact is society has a responsibility to protect its young people due to the fact that we restrict their behaviour. It is the pay off we make for not allowing them full human agency. If we raise the age limit for adulthood, we remove full human agency for a larger group of people and thus we change their role in society. We infantilise them and we cannot expect people who are not allowed to be adults in one area of their life to behave like adults in another. Are we willing to take on that responsibility? Furthermore, should we? If we can agree that, in Scotland, people over fourteen can make legally binding contracts, that people over sixteen can have sex, marry without parental consent, leave school, live in their own homes, be held criminally responsible and tried as an adult, work and pay tax, that people over seventeen can drive, that people over eighteen can smoke and have mortgages, credit card debt and all the other rights and responsibilities of adulthood, then why should there be a separate rule for drinking? Especially when drinking is so central to our culture that to make it illegal would effectively cause people to lose out on work related rewards, prevent them from networking with older colleagues and generally prevent them from being full members of society.

I am not saying that we should be proud of the role alcohol plays in Scottish culture. It is undoubtedly damaging to the nation’s health and frequently to our levels of social order. But we cannot deny it. Raising the drinking age pretends that alcohol related problems are about the irresponsibility of youth, while simultaneously reclassifying a group of adults as young people to solve a fictional problem. Our love affair with alcohol is a widespread social problem, institutionalised into our culture, and effecting people at all social levels and in all age-groups. If we want to reduce the harms caused by drinking, we need to change the significance of drinking to Scottish society, not redefine what it means to be an adult.

The Post-modernist and the Womyn-Only Space.

The Carnival of Radical Feminists is up at Burning Times and it is very thought provoking. In many respects, it is a call to remember the women of second-wave feminism, who after-all are still among us, and the lessons that they have to teach us. This is absolutely right and laudable. I teach second-wave feminism to my first years, introducing them to the range of texts feminists produced, not least of which was Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto. Yet, much of the writing celebrating the second-wave movement compares it with a third-wave feminism that is seen as stifling, pro-porn and anti-revolutionary. Third-wave feminism is defined by its link to postmodernist theories of gender and identity, and, as someone who is a feminist and who actively uses post-modernist theory, I would like to defend my revolutionary credentials. In doing so, I would like to engage with a number of posts, by writers whose blogs I read and whose opinions I respect, in order to discuss the possibility of a revolutionary third-wave.

One of the areas of discussion that has come up in a few times in the festival is the importance of ‘women-only spaces’, whether they still serve a purpose and the place of transwomen within them. Much of this discussion has surrounded real-life (not just theoretical) demands by men and transpeople to enter women-only spaces. A number of bloggers have defended the right to have women-only spaces and, although not exclusively, are defining those spaces as ‘women-born women’ spaces. I have a number of problems with this discussion, but I would like to preface it by saying that I think that there is a place for women-only spaces.

Because as Michelle at Lonergrrrl, says:

Because it is in women-only space that a woman’s voice can be heard on her own terms. In women-only space she is free of the ‘male gaze’, free of the spectre of patriarchal judgement, that in mixed space- aka the ‘real world’- threatens to denounce, silence, talk over, appropriate, or ridicule her voice.

I recognise that the patriarchy is not gone and the revolution has not been won. We need women-only spaces because we live in a world where women are hurt and abused by men and need a safe space. (I will get back to this later).

But I have few issues with this debate. First, I take issue that the questioning of women-only spaces from a post-modernist perspective is anti-revolutionary, as is noted by Michelle:

But this doesn’t relate to most women’s reality. And getting bogged down in these academic arguments, accounting for every subversion/fragmentation, as postmodernists like to do, prevents ACTION. It prevents women from organising because we’ve been curtailed and distracted by academics/postmodernists, who would rather sit there and denounce and ridicule feminist women for giving a shit and wanting to DO something, stalling the very revolution they purport to be striving for.

I take issue with the idea that third-wave feminists within academia are not interested in revolutionary change, as is noted by Dis-Senter:

Allecto’s answer was: that feminism has been leached of power by universities which have made feminism into an academic abstraction, and that feminism has to get back to being a real, grass-roots movement about real women’s lives and experiences, not academics sitting around in grand isolation spouting theories without knowing what the majority of women’s lived realities are.

And I would like to question the notion that I was born a woman, because as that famous second-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir: ‘One is not born, but becomes a woman’.

I see postmodernism as potentially revolutionary, although just like not all people are feminists, neither are all postmodernists. But post-modernists feminists are feminist and they are revolutionary. For me being post-modernist is about recognising that all experience is viewed through a lens that shapes how we interpret it. It does not deny physical experience. It does not deny that women are raped; that their bodies bleed; that the live in a world where they suffer pain and horror. It says that the meaning placed on that experience is entirely socially-constructed. It says there is no ’truth’ or ‘nature’ that defines who you are or what you will become. It says that who you are is a product of your society and culture and that even your physical experience is given meaning by the social.

This is not stifling, but liberating. Postmodernist feminism says that, if we could destroy patriarchal society, you could become somebody different, somebody who is not oppressed because of a socially constructed gender assignment, somebody with choice. It says that there is no structure restricting our potential. It says that the way the world is, in all its unfairness and inequality, is not inevitable. It is able to change, because what we are and how we view ourselves and the rest of the world is learned. It also says that how we construct our world is through language. That how we define terms and the meaning we give to words, things and people in our language is recreated in society and in the way we behave. It says that we need to think about ideology or discourse, which is also created through language, but which is much larger and is the over-arching theories, or systems of logic, that help us make sense of the world. Patriarchy is a great example of an ideology or discourse that shapes how we see the world.

Postmodernism can be seen as stifling because it points out that patriarchy is not a thing, but a way of looking at the world. It points out that there are no easy choices, because in almost all situations you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The pro/anti porn debate which I discussed below is a case in point. BUT postmodernist feminism does not have to stop there. Postmodernist feminism says you need to recognise that ‘you’re damned if you do’, but that if it makes women’s lives better then it is for the good. It recognises that there are differences between the long-term, when we will transform how we understand the world through removing gender distinctions and all forms of privilege, and the short-term where we live in a state of war and have to do the best under the circumstances.

Women-only spaces have to be seen in this light. Women-only spaces reinforce gender distinctions by their very nature. For the postmodernist in me, this is problematic. We need to work towards a world where gender distinctions are removed and so we need to be very careful of how and why we use such spaces. But, we do live in a world where women are hurt and abused and need to regroup and plan for change. In this time of war, we need women-only spaces.

However, as a post-modernist feminist, I think we need to be very careful how we use them. Women-only spaces not only reinforce gender distinctions, that we are trying to overcome, but can act to privilege certain groups and exclude others, and, by doing so, they are re-enacting the same male behaviour that has been happening for hundreds of years. Defining women by their genitals is essentialist and it is what men do to us every day when they treat us badly and exclude us. There has to be a place within the feminist movement for transwomen, because otherwise we are just another privileged group telling other women what they are or are not.

Now I have to say that I sympathise with Charliegrrrl’s protest against certain individuals, in the name of trans* politics, who insist on entering women-only spaces:

The very reason why they force themselves into our women only spaces is indicative of their political aims, not for the liberation of trans and queer people under patriarchy, but for the colonisation of women only spaces [...].

The purpose of women-only spaces is to allow women to regroup and feel safe in a space where male domination is limited, and such behavior, whether by a man or a woman, removes their purpose. This is about power and domination, but so is excluding women who do not meet an arbitrary definition of womanhood that was a creation of patriarchal culture. Every time we create a woman-only space, we need to question its purpose, who it includes and who it excludes and seriously consider the political consequences of our actions. We need to ask whether the needs of the women in that group at that moment are bigger than the needs and aims of the movement as a whole. This may well be the case, but we should be careful that such rules and definitions should not be arbitrary or for all time. Furthermore, we need to be very careful of what groups have a narrow definition of women-only. The feminist movement has came a long way and certain groups, especially those that organise large events and have political clout, can be influential in wider society and impact on government policy. Excluding women, and perhaps even occasionally men, from the right to have a voice in that political process is highly problematic and needs to be carefully considered.

Feminism does not need to have absolutes, rights or wrongs in all and every circumstances. That is a lie fed to us by philosophy that relies on essentialist notions of gender; that sees a ‘true’ and a ‘false’, a weak and a strong, a powerful and a powerless. Context is everything.