of blogs and budding feminism
ok, to be clear, my feminism hardly qualifies as budding. it has been in full bloom ever since i first rejected (and then war-painted with nail-polish) my barbies back in elementary school (and then wished i hadn't, 'cause their pretty dresses didn't fit anymore). i have, however, avoided the whole feminist scene, managed to take women's studies courses with innocuous-sounding titles like "gender and war" (ore really, anything with "gender" or "sexuality" instead of "women's" or "feminist") instead of femtexts one and two. i joined "everyone allied against homophobia" instead of the queer alliance, and worked as a counselor, not an educator or activist, at the rape crisis center. my campus feminism was limited to take back the night and the vagina monologues. with all that said, no one has ever mistaken me for someone who isn't passionate about women's rights and gender equality. i just, for the most part, like to avoid the public face of feminism -- i'm deeply troubled by the politics of people like catherine mackinnon, andrea dworkin, and naomi wolf, as much as i can appreciate their contributions to the collective consciousness around gender. i prefer people like ali miller, kate bornstein, foucault, and janet jacobsen, who acknowledge that to study women and femininity is to study men and masculinity. i read bitch magazine as a guilty pleasure.
all of which is a warning tangent to the assertion that lately i've been reading feminist blogs. namely, http://www.feministe.us/blog/ and http://pandagon.net . i blame dan. he called me last week, spazzing out about an interview he was watching on cspan featuring my new arch-enemy, a former uva student and founder of the "network of enlightened women" by the name of karin agness. she was on cspan decrying both the vagina monologues and take back the night for "exploiting women and glorifying rape." while i was unable to find the feed on cspan's website, some google searching (with some help from mom) led me to an article ms. agness wrote about the monologues, and feministe's line by line take-down of said article (read it here: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2006/02/16/the-vagina-warriors-are-gonna-getcha/, though i will and do quibble with the gloss-over on the argument about the coochie-snortcher monologue. the monologue itself is troubling, but there are important reasons for keeping it in. dismissing the conservative outcry over the positive depiction of a rape experience, statutory or otherwise, only causes the folks over at feministe to miss out on the chance to discuss the very real reasons why that monologue was included in the final show.) However, ms. agness' position on the vagina monologues has been discussed, and having not been able to find her comments about take back the night, i'm going to set her and her ilk aside for the moment.
while perusing pandagon this morning, i found this quote:
"Or, to put it another way, I see feminists making this argument often, but I also see it undermined a lot by what I'd call the "inevitability of sex" argument, which I'm guilty of making, too. It's usually in retaliation to the abstinence argument that wingers are so fond of, which is that women don't need reproductive freedom because we can shut our legs and that works 100% of the time. We then counter that abstinence might sound good in theory, but in reality it's not going to work and people are going to have sex.
"That's a defeatist argument. Inevitability is a concept that doesn't make people feel good-after all, the things most commonly described as inevitable are death and taxes. So describing sex as inevitable tends to reinforce the notion that there's something wrong with it, which is what the anti-choicers are saying in the first place. After all, what are they trying to punish women for if not for fucking?* Instead, I think Wardle has a point that feminists need to be more aggressive about our genuinely pro-sex point of view. And I mean "pro-sex" in the sense that all feminists I know are pro-sex, even the ones that are extremely anti-porn.
"Telling women just to abstain is wrong not just because it won't work, but mostly because it's mean-spirited and hateful to women. The best retort to abstinence is that women's increased freedom to have sexual pleasure without fear of pregnancy is a good thing. Abstinence-only arguments are, in essence, trying to say that pleasure itself should be punished. We need to keep anti-choicers on the defensive and ask them bluntly why they are opposed to women having pleasure, especially when it doesn't hurt anyone. Since there is not a single anti-abortion group that I've come across yet that supports contraception, this point is pretty unassailable. What is it about women having harmless fun that pisses them off so badly?"
to read the whole article, go here: http://pandagon.net/2006/10/15/plus-orgasms-increase-worker-productivity/
i like the argument, it's definitely quite good. what's missing, though (and it does come up a bit in the comments, but not nearly to the extent i'd like), is the acknowledgment that abstinence is a battleground in high schools. while the college and beyond abstinence movement is gaining some converts, and getting footholds in surprising places, federal abstinence monies (in the US, at any rate, the US foreign aid money that's spent on abstinence for adults is another long post. if you're interested, check out the Center for Health and Gender Equity, or CHANGE, at genderhealth.org) are targeting high schools. and while it's easy to yell about a woman's right to sexual pleasure, try talking about the teenage girl's right to orgasm. even social liberals tend to blanche at the idea. which tends to be why comprehensive sex ed advocates have, in the past, leant towards the "defeatist" inevitability and control argument. most of us are past that now, though, and are advocating an empowerment model that says that people make better decisions when they have better information. we're avoiding the whole pleasure and age of consent debate and focusing in on the right to information and life-long education. if and when these teenagers start having sex, they WILL need accurate health information, and they're not likely to take adult sex ed at their local community schools. comprehensive sexuality education is therefore designed to provide life-long healthy attitudes towards sex and sexuality, including sexual pleasure. abstinence proponents base their arguments on fear and taboo, and therefore propagate unhealthy attitudes that will leave these kids emotionally and sexually stunted.
basically, i guess pandagon and i are on the same page, nit-picking aside. and they're right -- the "control" argument is illogical at its base, and only gets us trapped in rhetorical holes we don't want to be in. but i don't think that advocating the right to sexual pleasure, in the terms she describes, is going to allow sex ed advocates to regain control of the public discourse around teenage sexuality. which is, in my mind, the most important thing we can do. right now we're stuck defending ourselves against fundamentalist histrionics about how we want to teach kids how to have sex. and they're right, we do want to teach kids how to have sex. we also want to teach them how to be empowered and informed enough to make their own decisions about sex, including when they want to have it and when they don't, without preaching to them about marriage and american tradition. i still haven't figured out, however, how it is that we can stand on a public stage and fight that battle.
all of which is a warning tangent to the assertion that lately i've been reading feminist blogs. namely, http://www.feministe.us/blog/ and http://pandagon.net . i blame dan. he called me last week, spazzing out about an interview he was watching on cspan featuring my new arch-enemy, a former uva student and founder of the "network of enlightened women" by the name of karin agness. she was on cspan decrying both the vagina monologues and take back the night for "exploiting women and glorifying rape." while i was unable to find the feed on cspan's website, some google searching (with some help from mom) led me to an article ms. agness wrote about the monologues, and feministe's line by line take-down of said article (read it here: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2006/02/16/the-vagina-warriors-are-gonna-getcha/, though i will and do quibble with the gloss-over on the argument about the coochie-snortcher monologue. the monologue itself is troubling, but there are important reasons for keeping it in. dismissing the conservative outcry over the positive depiction of a rape experience, statutory or otherwise, only causes the folks over at feministe to miss out on the chance to discuss the very real reasons why that monologue was included in the final show.) However, ms. agness' position on the vagina monologues has been discussed, and having not been able to find her comments about take back the night, i'm going to set her and her ilk aside for the moment.
while perusing pandagon this morning, i found this quote:
"Or, to put it another way, I see feminists making this argument often, but I also see it undermined a lot by what I'd call the "inevitability of sex" argument, which I'm guilty of making, too. It's usually in retaliation to the abstinence argument that wingers are so fond of, which is that women don't need reproductive freedom because we can shut our legs and that works 100% of the time. We then counter that abstinence might sound good in theory, but in reality it's not going to work and people are going to have sex.
"That's a defeatist argument. Inevitability is a concept that doesn't make people feel good-after all, the things most commonly described as inevitable are death and taxes. So describing sex as inevitable tends to reinforce the notion that there's something wrong with it, which is what the anti-choicers are saying in the first place. After all, what are they trying to punish women for if not for fucking?* Instead, I think Wardle has a point that feminists need to be more aggressive about our genuinely pro-sex point of view. And I mean "pro-sex" in the sense that all feminists I know are pro-sex, even the ones that are extremely anti-porn.
"Telling women just to abstain is wrong not just because it won't work, but mostly because it's mean-spirited and hateful to women. The best retort to abstinence is that women's increased freedom to have sexual pleasure without fear of pregnancy is a good thing. Abstinence-only arguments are, in essence, trying to say that pleasure itself should be punished. We need to keep anti-choicers on the defensive and ask them bluntly why they are opposed to women having pleasure, especially when it doesn't hurt anyone. Since there is not a single anti-abortion group that I've come across yet that supports contraception, this point is pretty unassailable. What is it about women having harmless fun that pisses them off so badly?"
to read the whole article, go here: http://pandagon.net/2006/10/15/plus-orgasms-increase-worker-productivity/
i like the argument, it's definitely quite good. what's missing, though (and it does come up a bit in the comments, but not nearly to the extent i'd like), is the acknowledgment that abstinence is a battleground in high schools. while the college and beyond abstinence movement is gaining some converts, and getting footholds in surprising places, federal abstinence monies (in the US, at any rate, the US foreign aid money that's spent on abstinence for adults is another long post. if you're interested, check out the Center for Health and Gender Equity, or CHANGE, at genderhealth.org) are targeting high schools. and while it's easy to yell about a woman's right to sexual pleasure, try talking about the teenage girl's right to orgasm. even social liberals tend to blanche at the idea. which tends to be why comprehensive sex ed advocates have, in the past, leant towards the "defeatist" inevitability and control argument. most of us are past that now, though, and are advocating an empowerment model that says that people make better decisions when they have better information. we're avoiding the whole pleasure and age of consent debate and focusing in on the right to information and life-long education. if and when these teenagers start having sex, they WILL need accurate health information, and they're not likely to take adult sex ed at their local community schools. comprehensive sexuality education is therefore designed to provide life-long healthy attitudes towards sex and sexuality, including sexual pleasure. abstinence proponents base their arguments on fear and taboo, and therefore propagate unhealthy attitudes that will leave these kids emotionally and sexually stunted.
basically, i guess pandagon and i are on the same page, nit-picking aside. and they're right -- the "control" argument is illogical at its base, and only gets us trapped in rhetorical holes we don't want to be in. but i don't think that advocating the right to sexual pleasure, in the terms she describes, is going to allow sex ed advocates to regain control of the public discourse around teenage sexuality. which is, in my mind, the most important thing we can do. right now we're stuck defending ourselves against fundamentalist histrionics about how we want to teach kids how to have sex. and they're right, we do want to teach kids how to have sex. we also want to teach them how to be empowered and informed enough to make their own decisions about sex, including when they want to have it and when they don't, without preaching to them about marriage and american tradition. i still haven't figured out, however, how it is that we can stand on a public stage and fight that battle.