re: Catherine Deneuve says men should be 'free to hit on' women
Catherine Deneuve says men should be 'free to hit on' women
When you see an article with a title like that, it's not unreasonable to suspect that the person being quoted is being misrepresented, taken out of context, or their perspective squashed down to an oversimplified soundbite conclusion.
Be that as it may, unless the article in the Guardian contains misattributed quotes and lies, Deneuve did liken the #metoo activists and affirmative explicit consent proponents to "puritanism" and accused them of conducting a "witch hunt" against men. She, along with other signatories to a public published letter, has apparently stated that "trying to seduce someone, even persistently, is not [a crime]", and has asserted that "the sexual urge is by its nature wild and aggressive".
Reading this, I was reminded of an article in Time from nearly 30 years ago, and had to go look it up.
Journalist Stephanie Gutmann is an ardent foe of what she calls the date-rape dogmatists.
"How can you make sex completely safe?" she asks. "What a horribly bland, unerotic thing that would be! Sex is, by nature, a risky endeavor, emotionally. And Desire is a violent emotion. These people in the date-rape movement have erected so many rules and regulations that I don't know how people can have erotic or desire-driven sex."
- Nancy Gibbs, "When is it Rape?"
(Time, June 3, 1991)
When I read these things, my mind conjures the image of two women (representing two opposing factions) with their backs firmly turned to the other, both of them trying to proclaim some kind of universal law about appropriate sexual behavior and neither of them being fully candid and explicit about what they're talking about.
(That may not reflect well on me, I suppose, that I see them in such a condescending way and dare to think I understand them beyond what they're actually saying. But bear with me here, at least momentarily. You're welcome to lambaste me for my own chauvinism afterwards).
Perspective A The #metoo activists, proponents of explicit affirmative consent and so-called "date rape dogmatists": That sex should be equal and egalitarian and that that, therefore, means that there is no excuse and should be no tolerance for power imbalance at any point in sexual behavior. No one should ever feel pressure, no one should be exposed at any point to someone who is more concerned with their own sexual interest in them than they are with the autonomy of the object of their sexual interest. Hence explicit consent at each point.
Perspective B Stephanie Gutmann, Camille Paglia, Catherine Deneuve, and the other people who signed the letter referenced in the article: That sex inherently involves power, that it is wild, violent, fierce in its intensity and expression. And that to try to tame that would be to castrate sexuality itself and make it bland and boring.
And the sense in which they aren't being fully candid and explicit about what they're talking about here? Gender. Notice that neither of the perspectives (at least as I've summarized them) references gender or gender differences. That's because the rhetoric that I've summarized is mostly rhetoric that tries to put forth a universal standard, not a standard that would apply only to one sex. That, in turn, is because a universal standard, if we can get everyone to agree with it on principle, is more easily applied to the sex that is transgressing the principle (or, in the case of B, exemplifying it).
But embedded in A is the concern for women, who are less powerful in the situation, being coerced into things they don't really want to do. And embedded in B also is the familiarity with men, specifically, as the wild violent and fierce sexual aggressors.
What do we lose and what do we gain by yanking down the modesty panel and being explicit about exactly whose typical behavior we're either defending or condemning here? Because, yes, even if you think it is also wrong for a female person to be pushy and put the moves on someone with a lack of caution for that person's unimpeded autonomy and comfort level, or even if you think it is also natural and intrinsically erotic for a female person to be implacably intense in her pursuit of sexual intimacy, and hence OK for her to be aggressively wild in her attempts, it is male behavior that the Perspective A people wish to curtail, and likewise male sexual behavior that the Perspective B folks worry is being unfairly attacked and made criminal in folks' minds.
Original classical second-wave feminism from the 1970s held that if something is sauce for the goose, it's sauce for the gander as well - that if a behavior is right it is right for everyone; if wrong, wrong for everyone. So it does make sense from that standpoint to want to establish some universal axioms about OK behavior and them apply them to the behaviors of the gendered / sexed people after that's already been established. Because we certainly don't want to argue that something is specifically wrong if a guy does it. We've done our stint with separate expectations and rules for the sexes and we've agreed that isn't fair.
But let's keep in mind Anatole France's aphorism: that it is illegal for rich people as well as poor people to sleep under the bridge, to steal bread, or to beg in the streets. People are in different situations already - in the case of sexual behavior, gendered situations - and it isn't fair to pretend to blindness and obliviousness in designing and applying a new rule or code of conduct.
Nearly two years I blogged about Asymptotic Gender. I talked about how the world tends to approach gender equality but slows down and slows down and never quite gets there because the closer you get the less vivid the polarized differences you're complaining about (so people stop listening and taking it seriously) and, more centrally, that we end up all living in a world that contains some egalitarian-minded people and some traditionalist-sexist people, and so when we formulate our expectations of people we average between those two likely possibilities, and that's an average that always, by definition, lies between egalitarian and the traditional side. And when we apply that to gendered people, it means we continue to gender them: we expect of a male person that he may be egalitarian (or androgynous) or that he may behave in a traditionally gendered male way (masculine, and/or sexist) and our expectation averages out to somewhere between those points, which is to say somewhat masculine and/or somewhat sexist. Likewise for female people.
(Yes, I'm going somewhere with that. Just hold onto that concept for a moment, OK?)
I think it is OK for sex to be wild, violent and fierce and desire-driven when the seekers of sex are not in a position of more relative power than those they so aggressively seek it from. It is less obvious that it is OK for sex to be that way when the seekers are in such a structured social position, though: it's more worrisome and problematic when it's that way.
Catherine Deneuve and Stephanie Gibbs may be sexual reactives. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with being a sexual reactive (he says, acknowledging that he, himself, is a sexual reactive). But because they are female people, they should take a moment to contemplate what Catherine MacKinnon once said:
"...our subordination is eroticized in and as female; in fact, we get off on it to a degree, if nowhere near as much as men do. This is our stake in this system that is not in our interest, our stake in this system that is killing us. I'm saying femininity as we know it is how we come to want male dominance, which most emphatically is not in our interest"
- from Feminism Unmodified
It's not the behaviour on an individual Catherine-and-Stephanie level that has to change, or that is politically problematic and should be labeled as a social problem - it's the backdrop. I would make the same point about being a sexual submissive or a "bottom" in the BDSM world: female BDSM participants who are submissives or bottoms are in a politically worrisome position, not because egalitarian principles mean no one should ever be a bottom or a submissive but because of the gendered backdrop.
And the pushier and more emphatic forms of male sexual initiative are going to remain politically charged and problematic until and unless sexual initiative is not overwhelmingly a male behavior. Not portrayed as an invariable male behavior, as a behavior that is invariably male, as a component of all successful sexual behavior on the part of a male, as the stimulus to which female sexual behavior is a consent (explicit or otherwise) or the lack thereof.
Context does matter.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
When you see an article with a title like that, it's not unreasonable to suspect that the person being quoted is being misrepresented, taken out of context, or their perspective squashed down to an oversimplified soundbite conclusion.
Be that as it may, unless the article in the Guardian contains misattributed quotes and lies, Deneuve did liken the #metoo activists and affirmative explicit consent proponents to "puritanism" and accused them of conducting a "witch hunt" against men. She, along with other signatories to a public published letter, has apparently stated that "trying to seduce someone, even persistently, is not [a crime]", and has asserted that "the sexual urge is by its nature wild and aggressive".
Reading this, I was reminded of an article in Time from nearly 30 years ago, and had to go look it up.
Journalist Stephanie Gutmann is an ardent foe of what she calls the date-rape dogmatists.
"How can you make sex completely safe?" she asks. "What a horribly bland, unerotic thing that would be! Sex is, by nature, a risky endeavor, emotionally. And Desire is a violent emotion. These people in the date-rape movement have erected so many rules and regulations that I don't know how people can have erotic or desire-driven sex."
- Nancy Gibbs, "When is it Rape?"
(Time, June 3, 1991)
When I read these things, my mind conjures the image of two women (representing two opposing factions) with their backs firmly turned to the other, both of them trying to proclaim some kind of universal law about appropriate sexual behavior and neither of them being fully candid and explicit about what they're talking about.
(That may not reflect well on me, I suppose, that I see them in such a condescending way and dare to think I understand them beyond what they're actually saying. But bear with me here, at least momentarily. You're welcome to lambaste me for my own chauvinism afterwards).
Perspective A The #metoo activists, proponents of explicit affirmative consent and so-called "date rape dogmatists": That sex should be equal and egalitarian and that that, therefore, means that there is no excuse and should be no tolerance for power imbalance at any point in sexual behavior. No one should ever feel pressure, no one should be exposed at any point to someone who is more concerned with their own sexual interest in them than they are with the autonomy of the object of their sexual interest. Hence explicit consent at each point.
Perspective B Stephanie Gutmann, Camille Paglia, Catherine Deneuve, and the other people who signed the letter referenced in the article: That sex inherently involves power, that it is wild, violent, fierce in its intensity and expression. And that to try to tame that would be to castrate sexuality itself and make it bland and boring.
And the sense in which they aren't being fully candid and explicit about what they're talking about here? Gender. Notice that neither of the perspectives (at least as I've summarized them) references gender or gender differences. That's because the rhetoric that I've summarized is mostly rhetoric that tries to put forth a universal standard, not a standard that would apply only to one sex. That, in turn, is because a universal standard, if we can get everyone to agree with it on principle, is more easily applied to the sex that is transgressing the principle (or, in the case of B, exemplifying it).
But embedded in A is the concern for women, who are less powerful in the situation, being coerced into things they don't really want to do. And embedded in B also is the familiarity with men, specifically, as the wild violent and fierce sexual aggressors.
What do we lose and what do we gain by yanking down the modesty panel and being explicit about exactly whose typical behavior we're either defending or condemning here? Because, yes, even if you think it is also wrong for a female person to be pushy and put the moves on someone with a lack of caution for that person's unimpeded autonomy and comfort level, or even if you think it is also natural and intrinsically erotic for a female person to be implacably intense in her pursuit of sexual intimacy, and hence OK for her to be aggressively wild in her attempts, it is male behavior that the Perspective A people wish to curtail, and likewise male sexual behavior that the Perspective B folks worry is being unfairly attacked and made criminal in folks' minds.
Original classical second-wave feminism from the 1970s held that if something is sauce for the goose, it's sauce for the gander as well - that if a behavior is right it is right for everyone; if wrong, wrong for everyone. So it does make sense from that standpoint to want to establish some universal axioms about OK behavior and them apply them to the behaviors of the gendered / sexed people after that's already been established. Because we certainly don't want to argue that something is specifically wrong if a guy does it. We've done our stint with separate expectations and rules for the sexes and we've agreed that isn't fair.
But let's keep in mind Anatole France's aphorism: that it is illegal for rich people as well as poor people to sleep under the bridge, to steal bread, or to beg in the streets. People are in different situations already - in the case of sexual behavior, gendered situations - and it isn't fair to pretend to blindness and obliviousness in designing and applying a new rule or code of conduct.
Nearly two years I blogged about Asymptotic Gender. I talked about how the world tends to approach gender equality but slows down and slows down and never quite gets there because the closer you get the less vivid the polarized differences you're complaining about (so people stop listening and taking it seriously) and, more centrally, that we end up all living in a world that contains some egalitarian-minded people and some traditionalist-sexist people, and so when we formulate our expectations of people we average between those two likely possibilities, and that's an average that always, by definition, lies between egalitarian and the traditional side. And when we apply that to gendered people, it means we continue to gender them: we expect of a male person that he may be egalitarian (or androgynous) or that he may behave in a traditionally gendered male way (masculine, and/or sexist) and our expectation averages out to somewhere between those points, which is to say somewhat masculine and/or somewhat sexist. Likewise for female people.
(Yes, I'm going somewhere with that. Just hold onto that concept for a moment, OK?)
I think it is OK for sex to be wild, violent and fierce and desire-driven when the seekers of sex are not in a position of more relative power than those they so aggressively seek it from. It is less obvious that it is OK for sex to be that way when the seekers are in such a structured social position, though: it's more worrisome and problematic when it's that way.
Catherine Deneuve and Stephanie Gibbs may be sexual reactives. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with being a sexual reactive (he says, acknowledging that he, himself, is a sexual reactive). But because they are female people, they should take a moment to contemplate what Catherine MacKinnon once said:
"...our subordination is eroticized in and as female; in fact, we get off on it to a degree, if nowhere near as much as men do. This is our stake in this system that is not in our interest, our stake in this system that is killing us. I'm saying femininity as we know it is how we come to want male dominance, which most emphatically is not in our interest"
- from Feminism Unmodified
It's not the behaviour on an individual Catherine-and-Stephanie level that has to change, or that is politically problematic and should be labeled as a social problem - it's the backdrop. I would make the same point about being a sexual submissive or a "bottom" in the BDSM world: female BDSM participants who are submissives or bottoms are in a politically worrisome position, not because egalitarian principles mean no one should ever be a bottom or a submissive but because of the gendered backdrop.
And the pushier and more emphatic forms of male sexual initiative are going to remain politically charged and problematic until and unless sexual initiative is not overwhelmingly a male behavior. Not portrayed as an invariable male behavior, as a behavior that is invariably male, as a component of all successful sexual behavior on the part of a male, as the stimulus to which female sexual behavior is a consent (explicit or otherwise) or the lack thereof.
Context does matter.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts