IWD

It's a little past midnight on International Women's Day, and Kathryn Bigelow just became the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar (yaay!).

I'm just saying. There are times to be dismissive of tokenism, but this is not one of them.

Fear

"what I feel when I am told that my neighborhood is dangerous is not fear but anger at the extent to which so many of us have agreed to live with a delusion - namely, that we will be spared the dangers that others suffer only if we move within the certain very restricted spheres, and that insularity is a fair price to pay for safety.

Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared."

-Eula Biss, from Notes from No Man's Land

The trouble is: fear is not invented but inherited. And the fears we are socialized into are fears we cannot empirically disprove, because there is never enough evidence, and what there is is biased by selection, and therefore self-fulfilling. And there is always, underneath that social fear, a second more private anxiety - of looking foolish, of being ashamed.

Identity without ideology

"But, if feminism becomes a politics of identity, it can safely be drained of ideology. Identity politics isn’t much concerned with abstract ideals, like justice. It’s a version of the old spoils system: align yourself with other members of a group—Irish, Italian, women, or whatever—and try to get a bigger slice of the resources that are being allocated. If a demand for revolution is tamed into a simple insistence on representation, then one woman is as good as another. You could have, in a sense, feminism without feminists."

- Ariel Levy, Lift and Separate, New Yorker Nov 16 2009.

Exactly.

Identification without ideology means power without purpose; you end up with a louder voice, but with less to say.

The really treacherous part of this is that the impulse towards identity politics is generally well-meaning. It's tempting to be inclusive; after all, there's strength in numbers. But that strength can only be used to achieve the lowest common agenda, and every new constituency you include diminishes the scope of that agenda further, so that in the end you're left with a mass that is all gravity, and no force. In a sense, identity politics is a local optimum - any movement from the status quo comes with an immediate cost and an uncertain (though potentially significant) benefit.

United we stand for nothing, and very still.

The Malignant and the Maligned

In other news, you may have seen this story about how couples are substantially more likely to get a divorce if the wife gets cancer than if the husband does, which has been doing the rounds.

What I find interesting about most of the discussion surrounding the story is how there's an implicit assumption that the 'proper' state of things would be for the partner to stick around. Personally, I'm a lot more shocked that more women don't leave, and can't help wondering if the difference isn't so much that men are that much more evil or selfish, but that women are that much more likely to be financially dependent on their spouses and therefore less able to walk away, or just that much more socialized into seeing themselves as doormats. In a truly gender equal world, would more men stay, or more women leave?

Something

Measure the magnitude of an injustice by the smallness of what counts as a triumph.

Not a victory, then, but an achievement, a giving way.

How obscene to have to celebrate this; to have to celebrate the fact that having sex with someone you love no longer makes you a criminal.

And for that reason alone, how necessary to celebrate it.

It's good to know that India has finally arrived in the 20th century. Here's hoping it doesn't take till 2109 to get to the 21st.

An embarassment of Rich

"Applied to a particular historical subject, the feminist passion yields conclusions which, however true, are extremely general. Like all capital moral truths, feminism is a bit simple-minded. That is its power and, as the language of Rich's letter shows, that is its limitation."

- Susan Sontag

Via Book Bench, a link to a glorious exchange between Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag, which, in my opinion at least, Sontag (no surprise!) wins hands down.

Next you'll be telling me they're turned on by Bono

By now you've probably seen this Sunday's NY Times article about research into female sexual desire. A brief bout of bonobo envy [1] and some low-grade speculation about hooking all the readers of this blog up to plethysmographs (SO much better than Stat Counter numbers), the thing that really caught my attention was this bit:

"And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more."

Two questions immediately suggest themselves. First, is the disconnect between mind and report or between mind and genitals? Are these women aware of being excited by what they're seeing but choosing not to report it, or are they so thoroughly conditioned to see certain forms of arousal as appropriate that they are genuinely unaware of their own physical response?

Second, and more interestingly, if it's the latter (and let's say, for the sake of the argument, that it is) then is it accurate to say that these women are aroused? How do we define sexual excitement? Is it genital or mental? If you do not consciously experience any desire but your plethysmograph shows a positive reading, are you really aroused?

[1] There's a phrase you don't get to use often

At Stake

More required reading on the election: The New York Review of Books election special. Predictably intelligent, articulate and (consequently) Democrat. It's always a joy to read Didion, and I also enjoyed the Dworkin and Lelyveld pieces.

I'm a little surprised, and disappointed, that there's no real feminist take on the election (I guess Frances Fitzgerald comes closest, but it's not very close, is it?). Women's rights are certainly at stake in this election - overturning Roe vs Wade will be a major blow, no matter what Wills may say - and with a 'woman' candidate on the Republican ticket, and all the noise about Clinton's disgruntled supporters (some of whom are apparently now supporting Palin - are these women deaf and blind?), surely gender is an issue.

But I think there's more to it than that. I think there was a point when this election had the potential to represent a turning point in gender politics. Remember Naomi Wolf's assertion that the Clinton victory in '92 was at least partly a result of the working of the new female power - the conversion of outrage over Anita Hill into a resounding defeat for the forces of patriarchy and conservatism? The path to real power for women, Wolf argued, lies in their becoming a critical constituency in the national elections - the more critical women are as a vote bank, the more women's issues become central to the political agenda. If the Democrats (who are, after all, the logical choice to be the champion of women's rights) can use the gender card against the old Republican race / class card, then both Democrats and women stand to benefit - the former can parlay women's votes into political victory, the latter can use the decisive nature of their support to ensure their demands for equality are met. That, after all, is how democracy is supposed to work.

And not so long ago, it looked as though this election could be the one where female power finally ended up front and center. In the days leading up to the Palin nomination, the importance of capturing the female vote was a salient part of the larger narrative of the election, so that it seemed that both candidates would finally have to start caring about women's issues. In recent weeks, however, we have heard relatively little about the women's vote, partly, I suspect, because the Palin nomination has sufficiently obscured the issue, and partly because the financial and economic crisis has ended up taking centre stage.

It remains true, however, that the outcome of this election has important implications for the feminist movement, at least in the US. If McCain's gambit of picking Palin succeeds in getting him a disproportionate amount of the female vote, that will only serve to validate the cynical tokenism involved in choosing a female running mate who stands against everything that feminists have fought for all these years. It will send the message that women's rights per se do not matter - as long as you have a few token women on your side, you can continue to pursue your old patriarchal policies, and women will vote for you anyway.

But the implications of this election for the feminist movement go beyond the question of who ends up as president. Even if Obama wins, but wins with more or less equal support from women as from men, that victory will represent, in some sense, a lost opportunity in the battle for gender equality. Because the real opportunity for women in this country coming out of this election is the opportunity to make themselves heard. If the results of this election show that women's votes played a significant role in ensuring victory for whichever candidate eventually ends up winning, that will mean that for campaigns to come candidates will invest time and effort into wooing women voters - time and effort that (assuming tokenism has been shown to fail) will involve thinking seriously and closely about gender inequalities. Imagine an election where the discussion focussed not on the concerns of Joe Sixpack and Joe Plumber but the concerns of Jane Single Mom and Jane Rape Victim. Imagine an election where the analysis wasn't focused on who was ahead in the swing states, but who was ahead with women. All of that seemed possible just six weeks ago, and may still be possible, come 2012, if and only if the results on Nov 4th show Obama winning thanks to an overwhelming proportion of the female vote. The time for women to act as a class for themselves is now.

Abort! Abort!

Another weekend, another protracted and pointless discussion on Ultra Violet. My own fault for trying to scratch beneath the surface of these posts instead of just nodding along, I suppose. I don't know why I bother [1].

This one involves a post by one Sharanya Manivannan which is intriguing only for how little it says and how long it takes to say it. Ms. Manivannan starts by telling us that even though we are entitled to have our own opinions on whether abortion is right or not, we must recognize that illegal abortions put women at risk and therefore it's important that women be permitted to choose - an argument she dwells on for a bit before concluding that it isn't particularly relevant in a country (India) where women have the legal right to have abortions.

This little digression over, she finally gets to what she really wants to say, which is to claim that women choosing abortions still face social disapproval. She describes this disapproval by saying that she can't remember the last time she heard a conversation about abortion that didn't involve "a hushed whisper, a disapproving tone or cluck of the tongue" by which what she really means is that women who choose to have abortions are seen as 'loose women' and that "The easiest way to damage a single woman’s reputation in India is to spread a rumour about her multiple abortions", though she doesn't, of course, say this (or says it only after a protracted comment exchange), simply expects us to somehow infer it.

What we're not supposed to infer, meanwhile, is that she would like to see a world where abortion was a casual act, free of any trauma or regret for the people involved. It's not that she doesn't believe this - she does. Or might. In any case, we're not supposed to infer it.

The summary of her post (as far as I can tell) is that it would be nice if women didn't have to face social censure over their choice to have an abortion - a pretty, if somewhat trite sentiment, which comes without any discussion of how this is to be achieved, particularly if it's acceptable for people to hold the view that abortion is wrong (as she seems to accept at the start of her post).

The problem, I think, is that Ms. Manivannan is confusing acceptance with approval. It is unrealistic to expect that the large numbers of people who see abortion as wrong or unethical are going to change their mind about it anytime soon. Indeed, it is not clear to me why they should (they're entitled to their opinion, after all) and I certainly don't think it's going to happen if we simply dismiss their issues as irrelevant. We can certainly expect and demand that their disapproval not be allowed to interfere in a woman's exercise of her right to have an abortion, or that it not be allowed to take that right away from her. And we can hope, in the name of a civil society, that they not harass women who have had an abortion (not 'honor' their choices, perhaps, but keep silent about them), and that they distinguish between disapproving of the act and disapproving of the actor. Though even that may be hoping for too much.

The real issue, of course (which is mentioned in Ms. Manivannan's post, but which she never really discusses) is that in a patriarchal world where women are often not economically empowered, and are therefore dependent on social approval, they may not have the ability to make independent choices that fly in the face of social censure. This is a valid concern - to the extent that it is true (I personally have no idea how serious the social taboo against abortion really is, I'm taking other people's word for the fact that it is serious), but the solution to it is is not to expect social attitudes to magically change to approve of women's choices. That's putting the cart before the horse. The solution to the problem of lack of real choice (with abortions, and more generally) is to work towards empowering women so that they can exercise their rights without having to rely on the approval of others. That empowerment, is also, of course, the way to change social attitudes themselves, but their key role is not to reduce social disapproval but to make it irrelevant. If empowerment doesn't happen, social attitudes won't change either. If it does, then social attitudes will probably change as well, but by then they won't matter that much anyway.

Of course, creating empowerment is a long and difficult process, but it's not like there's an alternative, is there? Certainly legitimizing the dependence of women on social approval while dreamily imagining that social mores will change doesn't help. As I've said before, I believe that those who oppose abortion should have every opportunity to state their case, and to do whatever they can to influence a woman's decision to have an abortion. If we disagree with them, and want to counteract their influence, we need to do so by creating a counter-community of people who support and celebrate a woman's right to have an abortion - which, of course, is what the pro-life vs. pro-choice dynamic, that Ms. Mannivannan so airily dismisses, is all about.

Finally, on abortions as a 'casual' choice. It seems unlikely to me that we'll ever get to the point where choosing to have an abortion will be an easy choice for the majority of women to make. I think it's safe to say that for most women choosing to have an abortion is a difficult, traumatic decision, and I think it would be even without the threat of social censure or the taboo (such as it is) around abortions. We can debate whether this emotional involvement comes from some kind of physiological maternal instinct, or from socially conditioned beliefs in the sanctity of life and parenthood. It certainly goes much beyond the threat of reprisals over the fact of having had an abortion, and beyond any narrow definition of gender role. Whether we want to see abortions become less of an emotional issue is a function of how important we see some of these factors being, but it's worth noting that the social values involved are deeply embedded in our social fabric, and imagining a world where abortion would not, by and large, be an emotionally charged choice, means imagining a world with a social and ethical superstructure dramatically different from the one we have today. Can such a superstructure be imagined? Yes, I think so. But I'm unsure that it would lead to a better, more egalitarian world than the one we've got now. At any rate, the whole question strikes me as being somewhat irrelevant to the immediate issue at hand. In any reasonably foreseeable future, abortion will remain a traumatic and emotionally troubling choice for everyone concerned, and therefore one that is difficult to talk about, even for those of us who don't disapprove of it.

Recognizing that, rather than trying to deny it for the sake of some ideology, is actually critical to taking the first steps towards opposing the kind of social censure that Ms. Manivannan claims is common. Much of the trouble, I suspect, is that the only people who freely declaim their views on abortion are those who don't recognize that it is a difficult choice for the women making it - and these are almost always the people who not only disapprove of abortions but have managed to convince themselves that the women who choose to have abortions treat them casually (hence their indignation). It's not clear to me that public opinion is really so staunchly anti-abortion. I think it's possible that it simply seems that way because those of us who are sensitive to the trauma involved find it awkward to talk about, so that all the air time goes to the anti-abortion zealots, leaving women who have abortions feeling victimized. The question to ask then, as I've said before, is not what we can do to change the minds of those who are against abortion, but how we can find ways to express our support and solidarity with women who do have abortions so they don't feel so alone. I'm not sure what the answer to that question is - maybe abortion support groups, maybe new pro-abortion depictions in the arts / media, maybe clearer, more concise blog posts - but it certainly seems to me that that is the right question to be asking.

[1] Actually, I do know why I bother - because I think the underlying issues are important, and deserve more careful consideration than they typically get - but I think I need to be less obsessive about it, don't you? From now on I'm making what I'm going to call the Falstaff Resolution. I will write one comment critiquing what I see as wrong with a post, and unless I get an intelligent, constructive response which suggests that the person is actually interested in engaging in a real discussion, I will LET IT GO! There. And I'm asking you, the reader, to help me stick to this resolution. If you see me going on and on about something [2], either on this blog or elsewhere, please call me on it - just leave a comment saying: 'Vade Retro Falstaff' or something along those lines. Seriously.

[2] After this post, obviously.

Women Patriarchs

It's been a while since I pontificated, hasn't it? Well then.

Reading this post over at Ultra Violet made me think (somewhat tangentially) about a kind of reverse-sexism we're often guilty of - the assumption that a woman, any woman, will naturally be sympathetic to / concerned about women's rights issues.

The logic behind this bias is not hard to see. All women are, to a lesser or greater extent, victims of patriarchy, so it seems reasonable to assume that a woman will have greater empathy for the plight of her fellow-victims and will be prepared to make common cause with them.

Except, of course, it doesn't work that way. If the history of oppression teaches us anything, it teaches us that victimization at the hands of a common oppressor does not automatically lead to unity. Instead, class consciousness takes time and effort to achieve, and collective action requires a level of coordination that is truly astonishing when you consider how much the participants have to gain. This is true even when the oppression is explicit and clearly perceived, let alone when it comes disguised in a superstructure of tradition and community 'values' so that those oppressed may not even recognize themselves as such. In fact, because the oppressed have access to little power / resources as a class, they end up seeing each other as competition, and fight amongst each other for what little privilege is allowed them, instead of trying to work collectively for more. And those who do manage to secure status / privilege for themselves now have a vested interest in maintaining the social order and often end up working to support the oppressor rather than to help the oppressed.

It's not hard to see this at work where gender is concerned. Pick any patriarchal institution and you'll find scores of women serving as its agents. Attempts to deny women the right to abortion, for instance, have widespread female support, even though such legislation means taking away women's right over their own body and granting it to the state. Women are perpetrators in dowry deaths and genital mutilation and, as we have seen, are often active advocates of the idea that women can avoid being attacked / harassed if they dress properly, stay at home and generally 'behave responsibly'.

None of this is to suggest, of course, that women are not, as a group, more likely to be concerned about women's rights than men (or, in other words, the probability that a given individual will be sympathetic towards gender issues is higher if that individual is a woman). That, sadly, is still true. But one must guard against the fallacy of division that ascribes this property to every woman. That's why the notion of the 'first woman president' is a largely meaningless one [1]. We have little or no reason to expect that a woman who is president will be, simply by the fact of being a woman, more responsive to gender issues than a man would be in her place [2].

In her post, Indhu says that "we should subject all political offices and the state to a feminist scrutiny". I agree. And I think a key starting point there is moving beyond the tokenism that sees electing women to political office as being somehow a victory for women's rights. Electing feminists to political office may certainly help, electing women per se is unlikely to. The flip side to subjecting male politicians to the same scrutiny or expectations (as Indhu suggests) is recognizing that our expectations from female politicians should be no higher than those from their male counterparts. In both cases, we should demand much, but (realistically) expect little.

[1] This is not to say, to take a different context, that if Hillary were to become President she's unlikely to pay attention to gender issues. Given Hillary's background, as well as her probable need to keep women voters happy if she wants to be reelected, I'd expect her to be responsive to women's concerns. But I'm not convinced, for example, that she'll be more responsive to them than, say, Obama.

[2] The assumption that women will be naturally more sympathetic to other women also leads, of course, to a backlash against those who do not conform to this expectation, with people feeling disappointed and betrayed when women behave in patriarchal ways. My point is that the expectation that leads to this sense of betrayal is erroneous, and we'd be all better off if we recognized that once and for all, instead of being repeatedly surprised when it didn't come true.

Update: Reading through this again, I realize that I missed a 'not' in the last but one paragraph. This is why one should not write posts late in the night after an evening at the local pub. It's still a terribly constructed sentence but hopefully you know what I mean.

A tear in time

[Warning: Wild, unsubstantiated speculation follows. May bear no resemblance to any persons living or dead.]

So Hillary won New Hampshire.

Watching the results come in yesterday, and reading about the Hillary turnaround, I couldn't help wondering how much of this had to do with her little 'breakdown' on Monday. And by extension, just how spontaneous that breakdown was.

I could be, and probably am, wrong. It's entirely possible that Hillary would have won NH even without the coffee-shop incident. And it's likely that her little outburst was genuine. It's just that the whole thing looks a little too neat to my twisted, cynical mind. Candidate has reputation for being heartless. Candidate's campaign is not going well. Candidate has much publicized emotional moment a day before an important primary. Candidate wins said primary by a narrow margin. Isn't it just possible that the Hillary campaign managers decided what she needed was to show a little emotion, and she did?

Don't get me wrong. This is not a criticism of Hillary. On the contrary, if she really did pull off a stunt that clever and calculating my respect for her just went up. What saddens me is the idea that people may have needed to see Hillary break down and cry in order to be able to relate to her. As though there were something wrong with a woman who wasn't vulnerable, or, more importantly, who wouldn't show that vulnerability in public. It doesn't really matter whether Hillary's breakdown was staged or not - the point is she shouldn't have needed it at all (which, of course, she may not have - but we'll never know now, will we?).

You could say this is not a gender thing - that men have been shedding tears on the campaign trail as well. True. But aside from the fact that men don't risk being labeled weak or hysterical as a consequence, I can't help feeling that showing emotion is a choice for male candidates, not a necessity. If a male candidate behaved the way Hillary does, I suspect he'd get labeled 'the strong and silent type', the assumption being that he felt deep emotion but just didn't want to put it on display. When Hillary refuses to show emotion she gets described as unfeeling and cold and unlikable, the assumption being that if she doesn't show it, she's not feeling it.

Look, I'll be honest. I'm not a huge supporter of Hillary per se. But when I see the sexist way the media reacts to her - when I read front page profiles in the New York Times that talk about how she may be "too hardened to inspire", or see / hear the endless stream of cartoons and jokes that riff off her being a woman, it makes me hope she'll win anyway, just to show them. And I can't help wondering how many other people, if any, feel that way.

In Fire With Fire, Naomi Wolf attributes the success of the first Clinton campaign (in 1992) in part to the Republican's bungling of the gender issue. She writes:

"the media tended to put the governor's wife [Hillary] in a harsh light....("For better or worse, an awful lot of Americans have taken a negative image away from their experiences with her. How you explain that?" Bryant Gumbel asked on the Today show, inadvertently providing the explanation himself.) ...misreading the press's warmth toward Barbara Bush and hostility to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a reflection of the feelings of the electorate as a whole, rather than a reflex on the part of the male-dominated press, the GOP cued its themes to that contrast, and did not understand that a significant portion of Republican women saw their own lives reflected more fully in the lives of the Arkansas governor's wife"

Wouldn't it be ironic if all the sexist commentary on Hillary were actually helping her? And if she ended up winning, inspite of herself, precisely because she is a woman (not that I'm saying it's going to happen, or that she needs it)? I'm still trying to decide how I'd feel about that. On the whole, I suspect I'd be happy.

***

Meanwhile, to commemorate the season of primaries, I've been watching State of the Union. It's not Hepburn and Tracy's greatest film (actually, it's not even average) but it makes for interesting viewing given what's happening in the presidential race. It's especially fun, in the context of the Obama campaign, to watch the character Tracy plays mouth off about how "we need to pull together or we'll end up pulling apart" and talk about how he'd like to break away from conventional politics. It makes you think how much of the Obama campaign could have been directed by Frank Capra (with, presumably, Angela Lansbury as Hillary).

P.S. Some of you may notice that this post marks the introduction of a new label on 2x3x7. I figured it was time I stopped being in denial. And what better day to inaugurate a 'Gender' label than the birth centenary of Simone de Beauvoir