I understand your point about doing whatever you want not being inherently feminist.
What would it take though, for women to be able to make any choice they want? How would such a world be different from the one we have now? Can men make any choice they want?
No, it doesn’t. Unless you can prove actual duress, then a woman is simply getting a job same as any other. Some folks are attempting to at least to bash her for her sexual choices, if not outright limit her options. If we don’t cast female sexuality as some sort of sacrosanct entity, then a woman choosing to work in porn, as a stripper or as a prostitute is no more an issue for “feminism” than it would be if she was a janitor. Moreover, while fetishizing female sexuality itself, the same argument demonizes male sexuality. After all, to ‘submit’ to male sexuality is seen as somehow being an inherent violation of… something or another. We should no more bemoan the fact that women are ‘forced’ to earn a living by selling their bodies then we should lament the fact that construction workers are ‘forced’ to earn a living by selling their, or that teachers are ‘forced’ to earn a living by selling their minds.
First, that may very well be the worst Onion article I’ve ever seen, ever. The Onion is normally pretty funny, but that was neither funny, nor insightful, nor witty. It was also hamfisted and dumb. Second, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being turned on by one and only one characteristic, be that tits, personality, or gymnastic ability. Moralizing about what gets someone turned on is just about as tawdry an activity as can be engaged in without actually snooping into someone’s bedroom.
Further, of course there’s a “wide area” devoted to “sexual objectification” in feminist literature. That’s also a wide area devoted to The Truth About 9/11 in Truther literature. If a man treats his committed partner as a sex vending machine then that would be objectionable (and it would be equally objectionable if it’s two men in the relationship, or two women, or a woman treating her man that way), but that’s an issue of humanism and not feminism. Now if we’re not actually talking about a committed relationship, then hell no there’s nothing wrong with it. Wanting to go out and find someone to fuck, and not caring about their opinion on whether Mozart or Beethoven was is in no way, shape or form objectionable as long as it’s agreed to between two consenting adults. It’s no more wrong for a man to look for a willing woman who he finds attractive than it is for a woman to look for a man to fuck and then be done with.
Everybody is required to make a commodity of themselves in order to make money. That’s what working is. Construction workers make commodities of their bodies. As a teacher I make a commodity of my mind. Am I being “objectified” because my school district only cares about how I can teach students and they couldn’t give a fuck if make great penne ala vodka? Should a construction worker be upset if his boss only sees him as someone who can build stuff and he’s never asked about what types of poetry he enjoys?
At the point where empowering individual women and allowing them to make their own choices is no longer “feminism”, then feminism has lost any claim to be a coherent, valid philosophy. The idea that we should struggle for women to be allowed to be complete equals with men and to make any choices they want, but if they make choices A, B or C they’re betraying feminism? It’s jabberwockian nonsense. All you’re doing is swapping sets of totems and taboos and deciding that hell no men shouldn’t be in charge of women, women should be in charge of other women.
The only scenario you’ve given which is actually counter to feminism would be a woman working to overturn women’s rights, as that’s a choice about how other women should or should not live their lives (I detect a pattern). But a woman who chooses to quit work and stay home to raise her children is following the dictates of (rational) feminism as much as the woman who decides she hasn’t got time for a family because she needs to climb the corporate ladder.
The point at which feminism no longer becomes about empowering individual women to make any choices they want is the moment is stops being a philosophy about freedom and equality and becomes just another form of control.
This is absolutely hilarious. So it’s really not about nudity or sex or any such thing, the important thing is that you’re defying men and doing the opposite of what they want you to do.
At least now we know the correct strategy for dealing with feminists.
What part of Sarahfeena’s posts are you responding to, here? She didn’t say those women were being “anti” feminist, she just said that their actions were not necessarily feminist, just because she’s doing what she wants to do. I don’t see how that makes feminism an incoherent or invalid philosophy. Indeed, the position that you seem to be arguing (and my apologies if I’ve misread you) seems much more incoherent: if any time a woman does something that she wants to do is “feminism,” then you’ve defined “feminism” so broadly that virtually everything short of being a victim of criminal assault becomes feminist in nature.
Wait, how did you get from “woman working to overturn women’s rights” turn into “woman choosing to be a housewife”? I’m fairly certain that no one (particularly not Sarahfeena) is arguing that women choosing to be housewives are overturning anyone’s rights.
At no point in it’s history has feminism ever been about empowering women to make any choice they want. It has always been about giving women the same range of choice and opportunities available to men. It is entirely possible to be a feminist, and to feel that their are choices that should not be available to women (or anyone else), or that should be available but discouraged.
So you’re saying sex trafficking importers allow the women in their custody a vast array of occupational choices.
Drug dealers too, a masculine enterprise, have no sway on the choices a woman must make to satisfy an addiction.
I think just as a line needs to be drawn between “a choice that feminism argues should be allowed” and “a choice that furthers feminism” there needs to be a parallel line drawn between “an objection to a choice that is sexist or anti-feminist” and “an objection to a choice in good faith.”
I don’t think a lot of people have an objection to a woman being a “skank” because they hate women, or think they shouldn’t enjoy sex. My personal objection to anybody who would want to do porn, stripping, etc (male or female) is the same objection I raise with visible tattoos – are you REALLY sure you want to do this? Whether or not our cultural attitudes about sex are too puritanical, if you get too old, meaning either you personally outgrow the profession or they kick you out because you didn’t gracefully develop into a MILF, it might be really damn hard to move into the job.
If you were primarily a porn star for 5 years, on the “job history” section of your resume, either you’re making up a good story for why you weren’t employed for 5 years, or you’re risking the employer objecting to your previous career (justified or not). Likewise, while I’m sure a lot of the industry is scrupulous and well run, there are definitely seedier parts. I’m sure it’s very easy to unintentionally fall into the worse half of the industry, where you get abused, used, get terrible contracts, whatever. And I’m fairly certain the industry is worse about it to women than it is to men.
So I don’t think somebody saying “Guys, I dunno, I really don’t think women shouldn’t become strippers and porn stars” is necessarily (though obviously could be) saying “a woman shouldn’t have the right to enjoy sex and choose her career” so much as “I’m not sure that’s rationally the best choice to be making, given the risks involved.”
I’m personally in that camp, if somebody I knew wanted to become a porn star, I’d probably object. Now if they really thought about the risks, and accept them, knock yourself out. Hell, I support the right to choose even without considering the risks, but I don’t think people who say “women shouldn’t be <x>” is necessarily trying to undermine a woman’s right to choose, some of us are just giving the same objection we give to the drunk friend who wants to go dirt biking like RIGHT NOW.
That’s fairly unusual though. Anti-porn feminism is more associated with radical feminism, which diverges strongly from Marxist feminism in seeing patriarchal gender relations as the fundamental source of women’s oppression. I think MacKinnon tends to a certain amount of sympathy toward this view, too, notwithstanding Marx’s influence on her theory.
There’s a lot of hypocrisy surrounding sex, and I think the feminist anti-porn thing is mostly a case of “It triggers my disgust response, so it must be immoral…I just need to figure out why”.
From “Ever Since Darwin”, page 32, 1987 printing, Chapter 2…
[QUOTE=Gould]
One evening, Fitzroy told Darwin that he had witnessed proof of slavery’s benevolence. One of Brazil’s largest slaveholders had assembled his captives and asked them whether they wished to be freed. Unanimously, they had responded “no”.
[/quote]
It’s an old trope.
Right, but that’s a strawman.
Uhm, I think the entire point of Marxist reasoning is that wage slavery in its endemic form isn’t really voluntary. If it existed in a rather benign form, where an individual could freely move from indentured ownership to wage labour to communal property, then it wouldn’t be such a problem. I think feminists and Marxists ultimately want to end up at a point where neither female or male sexuality are fetishised. Perhaps the rhetoric is counter-productive, but I’m going to assume the Catholic Church has a bigger hand in sublimination. At any rate, such a society is very likely not possible until rape loses its potency and becomes indistinguishable from any other form of violence and there is no longer a market for things like this (no nudity or bodily fluids, but NSFW - humiliation and degradation).
First of all, it wasn’t moralising, it was an issue of definition. I didn’t impart any moral judgement (apart perhaps by linking the Onion article). That said, I don’t see why morality shouldn’t be discussed in relation to this. Is there equivalence between being aroused by someone’s personality and being aroused only by their breasts? I don’t think so. The first issue is that personality is multi-faceted, encompassing things like conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion and neuroticism. Secondly, I remember reading, but don’t remember the study, that the biggest predictor to the success of a long-term relationship is similarity of outlook. That’s one of the most stable elements of an individual’s personality too: religious and political beliefs are the most heritable traits and rarely change in an individual’s lifetime (though there is a generational trend towards progressivism and a tendency for a wife’s views to better match those of her husband). In comparison, being attracted solely to breasts is a mechanistic response. I’m reminded of Dan Savage’s response to another issue, since that’s the level of reciprocity assumed.
There’s a difference between recognising the components of physiological attraction (the best predictor of short-term relationship success) and espousing that a woman’s worth is only the extent of her appearance. Precisely what the Onion article was about, I think. Oh, the comparison to 9/11 truther literature is unwarranted. Where the literature is good, it recognises that these things negatively impact men as well. Not only in the reverse scenarios where men are objectified, but also when advertisers make base assumptions about men or companies produce services like this. As for whether we should transcend feminism and embrace humanism: I consider myself a humanist, but I’m also a pragmatist and I recognise that the world as a whole is not sufficiently “post-feminist”.
Well, I addressed this earlier in the post and implicitly addressed it in the original post.
I think it goes into the reason behind the act, not the physical act. This makes it difficult to define in hard terms but let’s give it a go:
If I woman is under the direct control fo a man, that is what feminism opposes. So when a woman does something like pose nude because she is employed by a man, that they oppose and say is bad.
If a woman poses nude because she decides independently she desires it, this would seem good.
But now we get into the sticking part. If the woman is defiant under control of a man, this has the appearance of good but is really bad and is just another form of control. This is where feminism unfortunately seems to be. In other words she doesn’t pose nude because she is defying the control of the man who is paying her instead of deciding on her own if she wants to.
This seems a bit confused to me.
The women in the OP aren’t employed to keep their clothes on.
And conversely, most feminists would not be against a woman doing as she’s told within the remit of a job. Employment often involves this, for both genders.
As I said, I think porn is treated differently because it triggers some people’s disgust reflex, and some people have difficulty separating out that reflex from morality.
Fallacy of false analogy. We are talking about free citizens able to make economic contracts. Comparing them to slaves is an absurdity. Claiming that there is an isomorphism because both workers and slaves can be content with their roles is a whitewash of slavery and demeaning to hard working adults who do jobs they don’t love in order to be socially responsible and provide for themselves.
You are now, it seems, non-ironically talking about Marxist reasoning and honestly using a phrase like “wage slavery”. The fact that I must work in order to earn my bread is no more slavery than the second law of thermodynamics is oppressing me.
Yes. People, both men and women, are allowed to find individual traits appealing or a constellation of traits or multiple traits. Attempting to delegitimize individual sexual choices is truly the word kind of paternalism.
I don’t really see a difference between claiming that a woman, making her own free choices is “non-feminist” and claiming that she’s acting “against feminism” or that her choices are “anti-feminist”. Perhaps people who believe one or all of those three would like to expand on their reasoning. Now, feminism is supposedly about empowering women. That does indeed mean it must be about allowing women to make their own choices as individuals, otherwise it is not about empowering but controlling/corralling/coercing women. A philosophy of empowerment which then seeks to explicitly or implicitly limit choice, especially one that attempts to trade male-enforced gender role for female-enforced ones, is indeed incoherent and invalid. Now, I don’t think you’re all that far off as to what I’m arguing. And yes, is it necessarily broad as it must by necessity cover the sum total of free and voluntary behaviors that a woman may engage in.
Additionally, I did not point out the issue of housewives as an example of overturning women’s rights, but as an example of people who are often criticized by feminists as acting in an “unfeminist” or “anti-feminist” or “reflecting badly on women-as-a-class” manner (again, someone can parse the specifics of class-politics if I’m using them incorrectly).
You are incorrect. Following emphases mine.
I think kanicbird’s got it, actually.
“I’m taking my clothes off because this man will pay me if I do,” <----not feminist. I think we all agree on that.
“I’m taking my clothes off because it feels empowering and liberating to do so,” <----this is where the controversy lies. Some feminists will say, “Yeah! You go, girl, you beautiful empowered goddess, you!” and others will say, “It only *feels *empowering and liberating because you’ve bought into the male dominated paradigm. By taking your clothes off to show your power, you’re not rejecting that paradigm, you’re actually enforcing it. Taking your clothes off can only ever be a feminist act when the empowerment and liberation is gone. When taking off your clothes is entirely neutral, we’ll be in a post-feminist society and it will no longer be enforcing the male dominated paradigm.”
Think of it this way: when I was doing Weight Watchers, I’d often be “good” in the days before a meeting. Then I’d weigh in and get a number I was happy with, and on the way home, I’d stop at Taco Bell. I felt liberated. I felt like I was giving the middle finger to my eating problems and I felt on top of the world. Was I really free of those eating problems? Absolutely not. My going to Taco Bell wasn’t liberation, it was actually reinforcing the eating problems that I felt so liberated from.
Breaking the rules still means that you buy into the rules.
I was from my first post in this thread, precisely because you think that working for an individual is freedom and disparaged the Marxists that argue that it isn’t. I accept that there are contiguous levels of freedom, but I explicitly reject that subjugation is as natural as the second law of thermodynamics. Working in order to earn bread isn’t the point of contention, providing surplus labour so that another person that had prior access to the means of production can have bread without working is. The homology (since they originated from the same historic conditions - lack of worker ownership of the means of production) between wage labour and slave labour was commented on by Lincoln, along with the suffragettes and many others.
I’ll ignore the hyperbole. You’ve advocated that people should be free to judge others on their appearance or their personality. I agree. I think people should be free to judge people on the basis of whether they judge people on their appearance or their personality and to draw inferences about people from their judgements. For example, this can take a methodological form by determining whether relationships based on similarity of moral reasoning are more likely to be successful in the long term. I’m sure this conception is used in marketing campaigns too, regardless of antiquated notions of “dignity” or “rational choice theory”.
This is the problem when you draft 3 billion people into your cause against their will. You get differing viewpoints about what the movement should be. When you stop trying to think of Iranian women and American women as being in the same class, you won’t have these problems anymore.
“The Man” means “The Management”, not “The males.” You probably meant that, though.
Yes, I meant it to be a pun. Not a very good one, though. 
I look on this as similar to the censorship argument–I can be pro-free-speech, be against an effort by the government to silence someone, and work to reduce that same person’s audience via reason or sponsor boycotts or whatever, and still have a consistent moral philosophy.
Similarly, I can be a feminist, support the right of a woman to choose to work in pseudo-exploitative pornography, and also think that working in such a field is anti-feminist.
Eh… you can be pro free speech and say that certain types of free speech are odious to you, but not that they’re anti free speech.
You can be a feminist, and claim that you personally find certain types of free choices that women engage in to be odious, but not that they’re anti-feminist.
At least, you can’t claim those things if you’re being logically consistent.
Pierogies, however, are always logically consistent.
… just saying.
Oh, I wholly disagree with this.
If you say “I believe the government should censor all speech critical of the current President.”, then you are using your free speech to be anti-free-speech.
I don’t know what my wife did with the recipe book. =P
Yes, exactly. If someone is actively working to oppress a group/eliminate a freedom/take away someone’s rights, they’re against it. Someone is anti free speech if they want to criminalize free speech, for example. By the same logic, a woman engaging even in exploitative pornography isn’t “anti feminist”, nor is her behavior, or her attitude, or what have you, any more than Nazis marching down main street are “anti free speech”.
I am now sad.
If you can find it, please tell your wife that she is awesome.
Then you should apologize to her for me because I just think she’s awesome due to her pierogies.