Tag Archives: Feminist Pedagogy

Biology still isn’t destiny: on creating safe childhoods in an age of ever-earlier puberty

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I’m easing back in from hiatus with a fresh post.

In 2006, I wrote about the historic drop in the onset of menstruation and the rising age of marriage. It’s a topic familiar to many of my women’s history students. The basic premise is that the average age of first menstruation (menarche) dropped by about five years (from about 16 to about 11) between 1900 and 2000 in America, while the average age that women first married increased from about 21 to about 27. Meanwhile, studies have shown that the average American girl (if there is such a thing) loses her virginity around age 16.

What’s the interesting point? Call it the “constancy of five”. Today, the “average” American girl first has heterosexual intercourse approximately five years after menarche. In 1900, if we can make the dangerous assumption that at least a fair percentage of American young women were virgins when they wed, they too were having their first intercourse approximately five years after they began menstruating. The five year gap is the one constant even as all the other variables have shifted.

This is statistically intriguing, but has huge implications for those who wish to foist nineteenth century morality onto twenty-first century minds and bodies. Parents who expect (as many parents from traditional cultures expect) their daughters to marry as virgins, but to only marry after finishing a degree and starting a career, are asking their girls to “wait” three times as long as women “waited” a century ago. When the old folks lament the “declining morality” of the younger generation, they miss the fact that what they’re asking their daughters to do is considerably more than was expected of their great-grandmothers.

I thought of all this when the study came out last week showing that girls are continuing to enter puberty earlier and earlier. Since 1997, when Joan Brumberg’s indispensable Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls was published, the percentage of girls aged 6-8 who exhibited early breast development has doubled among whites and gone up 50% among African-Americans. (Thelarche is the term for the beginning of secondary breast development, btw.) There has been a corresponding increase, other studies report, in the percentage of girls who have their first period before their tenth birthday.

Whatever the reasons (obesity, a diet heavy in meat, etc.) there’s little question that the real challenge for feminists is to focus on the needs of this very vulnerable population. There’s no question that fifteen year-olds are better (if imperfectly) equipped to deal with the challenges of menstruation and changing bodies than are girls five years younger. There has been no concomitant rise in the rate of emotional maturation to go along with the declining age of menarche. As school nurses across the country can attest, adapting advice about menstruation to an ever younger group of girls presents special challenges, the anxieties of parents not least among them.

It’s important to remember that earlier maturation doesn’t need to lead inexorably to premature sexualization. We need to distinguish these as two separate issues. Physiological changes that cause preteens to develop breasts and hips do not cause adult men to leer. The fetishization of young women (pedophila chic, as some have dubbed it) is a cultural response to men’s anxiety about women’s increasing power. Part of the anti-feminist backlash is the sexualization of the very young. For those who fantasize about a pre-feminist world in which women are pliable and submissive, it makes perverse sense to focus desire increasingly on the very youngest girls whose capacity to set boundaries and to exercise agency is obviously limited. The growing physiological reality of early puberty serves as justification for sexualizing preteen and “tween” girls. The vulgar expression “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed” dates back at least as far as the Second World War (and may be much older) — but read in the light of a dramatically falling age of menarche, it becomes more unconscionable to repeat with each passing decade.

We can start to carve out safe space for this vulnerable population of pubescent youngsters by committing ourselves individually and collectively to a zero-tolerance policy on their sexualization. This doesn’t mean forbidding your eleven year-old daughter from wearing a miniskirt. It means holding adults (parents, teachers, strangers on the street, Uncle Bert) responsible for seeing these girls in women’s bodies as children still. It means watching our language; for some, it may mean watching their eyes. It means sending a message to girls and to everyone who interacts with them that their bodies are theirs and theirs alone. It means redefining our notion of development so that ten year-olds who have already entered puberty continue to be allowed to be children safe for as long as possible from the harassment, the leers, and the judgment that is so much a part of female adolescence in our society.

The next time you hear an adult man make a sexualized remark about a teen girl –even a celebrity such as, say, Miley Cyrus — call him on it. Make it clear that a girl in what appears to be a woman’s body is still a girl, and that adult men are fully capable of distinguishing between eroticising a well-developed 13 year-old child and a woman twice her age. Men are not so weak, so stupid, or so blind that they cannot make these distinctions in their actions, in their words, and in their very thoughts. Now, more than ever, we need to commit ourselves to empowering a generation of girls who are confronting unprecedented challenges. And we empower them by giving them the safe space to mature emotionally at their own pace, regardless of the ever-increasing speed at which their bodies are developing.

The Price of Shame: on rethinking a harsh anti-porn stance

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I’ve written a number of posts on pornography. I’ve taken a fairly strong anti-porn line, linked to my own admission that for years, I struggled with pornography addiction. I’ve had many years of recovery from that compulsion as well as from so many others. What I’ve had a hard time doing is letting go of the “disease model” for approaching the subject. While I acknowledge that plenty of folks (but not me) can drink beer without becoming alcoholics, I’ve had a harder time acknowledging that the same might well be true for pornography. (See the post linked in my second sentence.)

This tendency to extrapolate from my own experience combines with a traditional (call it Second Wave) suspicion that pornography is always and invariably anti-feminist, even when what is filmed or written seems empowering and redemptive. But in the last two years, the number of emails and comments I’ve gotten from feminist women who regularly view pornography has risen dramatically. Though I don’t ask my students to share this sort of information, the number of journal entries in which students of both sexes talk openly about their porn use has almost, um, exploded exponentially in that same time period.

The anecdotal evidence I’m getting of an increase in women’s use of pornography seems backed up by the evidence. It’s not hard to figure out why. The anonymity of the internet is helpful. In a world where we shame women for displaying sexual interest, there is a much higher social cost to admitting to porn use than for men. The web allows the consumer to avoid going to a physical place to buy or watch erotic media. And equally importantly, the depth and breadth of erotic material online means that women are much more likely to find porn on the ‘net that was created by and for women.

I got a message from a Facebook friend last week that summed up a lot of what I’ve been getting from those who are critical of my anti-porn stance. Artemisia, who is a married mother of teens, wrote:

… I think you have painted both porn and porn consumers with too broad a brush. And the brush you use feels hurtful and shaming. Yes, there are a lot of really vile things out there, but there are some things that are tasteful and even sweet. What really smarts is that your discussion assumes that porn consumers are men, thereby making women who consume porn rare and likely deviant. But, that isn’t true; some research has shown that as much as a third of all online porn is consumed by women. Further, about 17% of couples who watch porn together as a part of their lovemaking. The entrance of women into the porn market as consumers has irrevocably changed that market. The role of porn user has been cast as a guy who is either single or sneaking it outside of his relationship. That is not only untrue; it is a bit gender-biased.

I am, on occasion, a consumer of pornography both online and in print. And I have to say that it makes me really uncomfortable that people assume that I am watching something vile and that only men watch porn. Judiciously chosen erotica (what you call porn because it has live actors) has been helpful in my sex-life with my husband. I/we don’t use it regularly, but it is helpful at times. And it doesn’t drive us apart; it makes us closer and makes our sex better. You said to ask any woman if her husband is a better lover for having been online with porn. I have to say a resounding yes. And, to bring a little gender equality here, I am also a better lover.

It seems important here to really qualify that not all porn is created equally. For example, one of my favorite sites, and one of the most popular porn sites on the web, features average, every-day women of all sizes and ethnicities masturbating to orgasm in an environment that can only be described as respectful. It doesn’t lie; it doesn’t make anything selfish. It educates, and does so well. And I think that the site’s popularity makes an important point: the worst of internet porn is not representative even though it is abundant and flashy. There are fewer respectful, sane sites, but those are the ones that stay around for years and that become profitable staples.

Artemisia suggests what I’m hearing from others out there: female consumers are changing the face of porn, at least to the extent that a significant section of the erotic marketplace is aimed at their needs and desires. What that means is that those of us who launch into traditional critiques of porn as graphic misogyny are making a lot of women feel invisible and shamed. As a feminist ally, that troubles me, as do the letters and journal entries and chats I’ve had with young people of both sexes who insist it is genuinely possible to find porn that is arousing and progressive. Like Artemisia, these men and women suggest it is possible to “get off” in a morally and politically responsible and enlightened way. (I don’t know which web site Artemisia refers to, but I’m told that there are a number of similar sites.)

Here’s the thing. I’m not going to spend a great deal of time sampling what’s “out there”, any more than as a sober alcoholic, I’m planning to go wine tasting. Part of recovery is learning one’s limits, and while I don’t get uncomfortable with sexually explicit material these days, I also want to acknowledge my own boundaries. That said, I also want to reiterate my concern that much of mainstream porn — particularly the sort of thing that young people first discover online — is degrading and misogynistic. I’m not yet convinced that for many if not all, habitual porn use doesn’t play a part in encouraging dissatisfaction with a single partner. (The longing for everlasting novelty notion.) I hear from many of my female (and a few of my male) students that porn has badly distorted their understanding of sexuality and the ideal body, impacting the kind of sex they think they “ought” to be having. As for “feminist porn”, I worry that at least some of that empowerment is slickly oversold, as with the ultra-hip “Suicide Girls” site, which was bought by Playboy. And lastly, while I acknowledge that not everyone who encounters porn will use it addictively, I think a great many people clearly can become unhealthily addicted. All this concerns me.

But having made all that clear, let me also say this. I’m not going to ignore the Artemisias of this world. There are few things I’d less like to do with my writing and my lecturing than instill shame. I know that I’ve done that around this issue, particularly with my decision in 2008 to assign my Men and Masculinity students Robert Jensen’s famous Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, a book about which I wrote a laudatory three-part review here. I loved Jensen’s thesis (read the previous link for more). Many of my students did too. But some of my students of both sexes who told me they viewed porn felt overwhelmed, shamed, guilt-ridden as a result. One young woman told me she had stopped looking at porn but felt guilty about the arousing images that still popped into her head. Another young guy, one of my best students, told me that he felt as if he’d been set up for failure, as if Jensen and I were positing abstinence from pornography as the sine qua non of being a decent male. “If I masturbate to porn can I still be a good man” was the question I got from more than one anguished participant in the class. And if several of the students were willing to divulge such private pain to me, I can only assume that still others felt the same way but kept silent.

I’m going to reconsider assigning “Getting Off.” I love Jensen’s book – it resonates with me. But unlike any other text I’ve ever assigned, its stridency wounded some very sensitive and reflective kids. And my stridency on this issue wounded Artemisia, a friend whose kids are almost the age of most of my students. I grieve that, and need to take action around that, finding a way both to point out what is so terribly problematic about so much pornography — and to acknowledge that at least for some, the use of visual and written erotica can be joyous, liberating, and fully compatible with a vision of justice in which human beings are not objectified. The latter was not my experience, but I cannot in good conscience continue to extrapolate universal truths from my own memories of compulsiveness.

It is almost universally acknowledged that with the possible exception of race, there are few issues more divisive within feminist communities than porn. Allies who agree on everything else find themselves bewildered at a friend’s views on internet erotica. Somehow, we’ve got to do a better job of listening to each other’s stories, of honestly sharing our own, of doing everything possible to avoid shaming and belittling each other. The knowledge that what I’ve said or written about this topic has proved deeply hurtful troubles me, as well it ought. I can’t avoid the issue altogether, nor can I responsibly avoid raising the concerns I’ve always raised about porn. But I can do a better job of creating a space where we who want a world that is both just and joyous, safe and shame-free, can find common ground.

Contra Arizona: in defense of ethnic and gender studies, and in defense of resentment

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I’m in San Jose Airport, waiting for a flight back down to Southern California. It’s been a whirlwind three days with family and friends in Carmel, San Francisco, Yountville and several places in between.

Much has been made, and rightly so, of Arizona’s recently passed law banning the teaching of ethnic studies courses in public schools. The wording of the bill, signed by Governor Jan Brewer, barred the teaching of courses that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people; are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group; advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals”.

The second of those three points is a valid one, but it’s a straw person. In my quarter century in academia, I’ve never seen an Ethnic Studies course that wasn’t welcoming of all students — including those whose ethnicity was not the subject matter. I took a number of Ethnic Studies classes at Cal in the 1980s (particularly in Chicano Studies, where I took courses with Cherrie Moraga, Norma Alarcon, and Gary Soto); in at least one of those, I remember being the only white feller in the class. And I was never made to feel unwelcome, nor did I ever get the sense that the courses were filled with “insider information”. I loved my Chicana Feminism class (taught by Alarcon), and appreciated that I was neither ostracized nor patronized by the professor or my fellow students. The work I did in those classes began with my willingness to suspend my own suspicion, to avoid the temptation to be defensive, and to recognize the multipliciities of privilege that had shaped my worldview. I bring the insights I learned in those courses into my own teaching every damn semester. Teaching a student body that is close to 80% non-white, I can say with certainty that I would be a much poorer and less imaginative professor had I never taken those courses.

I’m concerned that the Arizona law represents a serious threat to Women’s Studies as well. It’s obviously impossible to teach my primary gender course, Women in American Society, without talking about the ways in which women — as a class, and not merely as individuals — have been oppressed. What many consider the founding document of First Wave feminism, 1848′s Declaration of Sentiments opens its third paragraph with words that might cause trouble under the Arizona diktat’s first requirement, that resentment ought not to be promoted against any particular group of people:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

The use of the singular is a rhetorical device, modeled on the Declaration of Independence. But it drives home the point that sexism has been both institutional and highly personal: it has been taught in the schools and in the home; it is promoted and defended in public, and lived out cruelly in private. Men as a class — and men as individuals — have oppressed, exploited and marginalized women for centuries. This is as much a fact as two plus two equalling four; no rational person, confronted with the evidence, could deny that fact. The degree to which that sexism remains a problem in the Western industrialized world is a subject for debate, but that it existed at all, and existed for a very long time, certainly isn’t. And no one, perhaps particularly a woman, can absorb the history of how women of all classes and backgrounds were brutalized and silenced by systems and by loved ones without being filled with something very much like resentment.

The very word resentment is important: it comes from the Latin sentire, “to feel”, and from re, meaning “again”. Resentment means to feel again — or, more loosely, to be reminded of old injuries. To teach history well, we who serve Clio must be agents of resentment, stirring up anger and grief as we demand that the wounds inflicted in the past be remembered, and even felt, again. To be a woman or to be black has historically meant a particular vulnerability to injustice. Those students who have no sense of the past (which is to say, almost everyone before they study history) need to connect themselves to the experiences of their ancestors, feeling their pain as well as their joy. That is what it means to “resent.”

Conservatives ask that students take pride in the accomplishments of the Americans who came before; the authorities in Texas have done all that they can to rewrite our history to encourage uncritical adulation of manifest destiny and the American project. To encourage pride is to encourage an emotional response to history; to encourage resentment is the same thing. Whoever we are, we can find much in the history of our forebears to give us pride. But an honest account of the American experience will make clear that for most of our history, those who weren’t white men generally suffered far more than those who were. To ask that the less-pleasant aspects of the past be expunged for fear of stirring up negative emotion is profoundly irresponsible and profoundly at odds with the job of the historian, which is to invite both intellectual and emotional responses to the narrative of what was.

If we Americans are who we say we are, we are surely secure enough to lay open the books and tell the darker aspects of the national story with the same rousing passion with which we tell of our triumphs. And if we do that, there will be a great deal of resentment on the part of those who identify with the abused, the victimized, and the ignored. That is exactly as it should be.

I’m a history and gender studies professor. I stir up resentment. The day that stops happening is the day I’ve begun to fail at my job.

“Male feminists are mostly gay”: more on myths of lust and humanity

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I’ve posted many times before on the stereotypes male feminists (or, if one prefers, male feminist allies) encounter. Nearly a quarter-century after I first took a women’s studies class, and after more than a decade and a half of teaching the subject, I still regularly encounter the following assumptions:

1. I’m gay
2. I’m straight and sexually predatory, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, using the class to “pick up chicks”.
3. I’m filled with masculine self-loathing, desperately using feminism to get validation from women.

Most male feminist allies encounter at least one, if not all three, of these fairly often. In this post, I’d like to tackle the first stereotype.

The assumption that men who teach women’s studies (or merely express a strong interest in gender work and activism) are gay is a deeply held and pervasive one. Of course, it’s a different stereotype from the other two on the list. There’s something wrong with a man feigning feminism in order to get access to women; there’s something unhealthy about adopting feminism as a strategy for winning approval. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with being gay, and by constructing this list, I don’t intend to suggest that there is. (There’s an analogous stereotype about female feminists, that they are lesbians and man-haters, but that’s another topic.)

I don’t mind if folks question my sexual identity. I make it clear that I’m married to a woman and that we have a child together, but I don’t go any further to establish heterosexual bona-fides. I call myself Eira-sexual, and explain why here and here. But there is something about the assumption of homosexuality that troubles me deeply, and that’s the implication that men who are sexually drawn to women are incapable of seeing them as true equals.

The notion that gay men and hetero women are natural allies is deeply held — and reinforced by countless films and television shows. These friendships are indeed often very precious and enduring. But the problem with our discourse about these friendships is that they reinforce a number of assumptions, chief among the the idea that sexism is rooted in heterosexual desire. As many women know well, gay men are perfectly capable of the same degree of sexism as their straight brothers. The problem of misogyny is rooted in something that runs deeper than desire. We can, it turns out, despise what we aren’t attracted to as much as what we are. And while I certainly don’t think my gay brothers are especially sexist, I reject the notion that their queerness gives them any particular insight into or empathy with women’s experience. Those who are acculturated as males will have to overcome a hell of a lot of sexist programming, almost entirely irrespective of the direction of their libidos. Continue reading →

Audio files of women’s history lectures available

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Mon-Shane, one of my wonderful women’s history students, has been tape-recording my lectures. Now she’s begun putting audio files online for download. So for any of my readers who want to hear a few of my women’s history lectures, here is the beginning of a small collection. Each has a separate link, and honestly, I can’t remember the topics of each, but they are free to the public domain until someone tells me we’re violating some obscure college ordinance.

March 9 women’s history lecture.
March 11 women’s history lecture
March 16 women’s history lecture (this one is the famous clitoris and masturbation talk)
March 18
March 23 (yesterday’s lecture on the New York Female Moral Reform Society and whether changing men ought to be a key aspect of the feminist project)

More to come. By the way, I’m always bewildered by colleagues who don’t want their lectures taped. Are they afraid to have their words recorded for posterity?

“The Fountainhead”, Muggledom, and a road to feminism: why I both loathe and appreciate Ayn Rand

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In my reprint of a post about young conservative students, I made a crack about Ayn Rand. Since Rand has been the subject of a pair of recent biographies, and has been much discussed on the right as a kind of ideological mother figure of the so-called Tea Party Insurrection against the Obama Administration, I think it’s time to say a bit more about her work.

I discovered Ayn Rand at 16. A friend of mine finished “The Fountainhead”, and came to me one morning before class: “This book has changed my life, Hugo, and it will change yours. Read it!” I liked and respected Lisa, and accepted the thick and battered paperback she proffered. I took it home, and showed my mother, a philosophy professor. She took one look at the book, grimaced, and then said “Darling, I won’t say anything. Make up your own mind.”

It wasn’t until I read “American Psycho”, many years later, that I had a comparable experience of near-instant loathing of a text, an author, a prose style, and a worldview. I was a young lefty at 16, struggling through John Rawls and Herbert Marcuse. My favorite novel that year was Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle” one of the most polemical works that the great local writer (I grew up on the Monterey Peninsula) wrote. Rand was ideologically and stylistically abhorrent to me at 16, and though it’s been years since I’ve picked up any of her work (I finished “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” through sheer acts of will in my youth), my general feeling of disdain on every imaginable ground remains.

But I’ve met many young people, more often women than men, who — like my friend Lisa in high school — find great inspiration in Ayn Rand. Generally, there’s a specific type of teen who falls in love with either “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged”. She’s usually very bright, raised to one degree or another with the “pleasing woman discourse” (what I call “the Martha Complex.“) She often finds her classes dull and her teachers pedestrian. She suspects she’s destined for something extraordinary, that she’s somehow different from everyone else — but unlike the immensely talented dancer or athlete or actor, she doesn’t have one specific skill that stands out as a ticket to stardom. She vacillates between feelings of intense superiority — and feelings of equally intense guilt for the way in which she looks down on so many of those around her.

She picks up Rand, and suddenly it all makes sense. She is superior, one of the elect. She isn’t what a far more interesting and talented writer would call a “Muggle”. She has an exalted destiny, just as she had suspected. Rand inspires her; telling her that it’s time to throw off the chains of obligation and guilt which have left her confined and miserable. In an odd way, Rand — who would be exceedingly difficult to classify as a feminist — is often a gateway into feminism for some young women. It’s through reading Rand that not-insignificant percentages of young women begin to think seriously about what they want for themselves rather than what others want for them. Young women who have the false impression that feminism is about collective victimization find temporary inspiration in “The Fountainhead” — and in due course, when they encounter real sexism in the real world, they reluctantly concede that perhaps those nasty old feminists had a point after all. I’ve met a hell of a lot of strong young progressive feminists in their twenties and early thirties who were enchanted by Randian philosophy in their teens.

So yes, I think an infatuation with Ayn Rand is developmentally appropriate for adolescents. She flatters and inspires the bright and the isolated and the uncertain; she’s useful for helping some young people, girls in particular, break the deadly people-pleasing habit. So if reading “Atlas” or “Fountainhead” is what it takes to inspire the lonely, the introverted, and the insecure — then may the God that she rejected bestow blessings upon that poor unhappy soul that was Ayn Rand.

This post has been altered from the way it originally appeared earlier today, ill-considered references to comic books, Star Trek, and New Kids on the Block were deleted.

Men, feminism, and suspicion: a report on our NWSA panel

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I’m in Atlanta, taking a break from presentations at the National Women’s Studies Association meeting. (I also need to get away from the exhibitor’s hall, before I buy so many books that I won’t be able to fit them in my suitcase home.)

Brian Jara, Tal Peretz, and I were the panelists for a discussion entitled Men in Anti-Sexist Activism: Problems and Potential. Brian teaches gender studies at Penn State; Tal, a graduate student at USC (and former student of Brian’s) is writing a dissertation on men doing feminist work. Our panel ran from 8:15-9:30AM — which meant a 5:15AM start for those of us whose body clocks are on Pacific time! The three of us had anticipated having ten to fifteen folks come to hear and participate; we were thrilled that more than forty showed. At the beginning, we asked the audience to pose questions for us about men and anti-sexist activism. Most of the questions asked for suggestions for more ways about recruiting men into doing anti-sexist (and explicitly feminist) work; others asked about ways to address the “white knight” or “pedestal” phenomenon, the dynamic in which men expect praise merely for being males doing this kind of work.

Brian noted that he’s fundamentally suspicious of men who come into his women’s studies classes and get involved in feminist clubs on campus. This isn’t out of his territorial desire to be the only male feminist (the one who can soak up the approbation); rather, it’s rooted in his experience of seeing so many men come into this work with motives ranging from the sexually predatory to the expectation that women’s studies is an intellectually undemanding “easy A”. Tal and I echoed Brian’s concern, acknowledging our own experience encountering men in feminist spaces whose motivations for being there are less than salutary. At the same time, we stressed the importance of encouraging men to explore feminism and start doing feminist work. The point, as I emphasized in my brief oration from the table, is to frame the reality of that suspicion as a reason for more men to get involved in anti-sexist campaigns in the classroom, on campuses, and in the “real world.”

I’ve written before about the “guilty until proven innocent” dynamic, most recently in this post on the “Schroedinger’s Rapist” question. We’ve got to recognize two things, I reiterated today: first, the reasons to fear men are legitimate, grounded in tragic reality more than in unjustified paranoia. Second, that sense of being feared, of being viewed as a potential predator at worst and cluelessly insensitive at best does real damage in the lives of an extraordinary number of men. We underestimate the degree to which young men are cognizant of the way in which they are constantly viewed with suspicion, and we often fail to take account of the toll that exacts on psyches and self-esteem. A great many young men work desperately hard, with varying degrees of success, to prove their “safety” and trustworthiness to a select handful of women. (Frequently, though not always, there is a sexual agenda that drives that effort.) Few young men recognize the solution lies in transforming an entire culture; an individual commitment to being a “good guy”, no matter how sincere and consistent, will do little to change a world in which many, perhaps most, women are raised to fear — again, with good reason — a great many, if not most, men. What’s “in it” (anti-sexist work) for men is not of course just the chance to be trusted, what’s in it for all of us is freedom from sexism, objectification, harassment and sexual violence. Continue reading →

“Penetrate” v. “Engulf” and the multiple meanings of the “f” word: a note on feminist language

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Years ago, I wrote a brief post about feminism and language, but it didn’t go into very much detail. Here’s a new version, with a bit more detail.

One of the first gender studies courses I ever took at Berkeley was an upper-division anthropology course taught by the great Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It was in a class discussion one day (I think in the spring of ’87) that I heard something that rocked my world. We were discussing Andrea Dworkin’s novel “Ice and Fire” and her (then still-forthcoming, but already publicized) “Intercourse”. I hadn’t read the books at the time (they were optional for the class). One classmate made the case that on a biological level, all heterosexual sex was, if not rape, dangerously close to it. “Look at the language”, my classmate said; “penetrate, enter, and screw make it clear what’s really happening; women are being invaded by men’s penises.” Another classmate responded, “But that’s the fault of the language, not of the biology itself; we could just as easily use words like ‘envelop’, ‘engulf’, ‘surround’ and everything would be different.” The discussion raged enthusiastically until the next class irritably barged in and chucked us all out. I was electrified.

My classmates were having, as I came to discover, a classic intra-feminist argument: to what extent is the sexual domination of women by men part and parcel of our biology, and to what extent is it a construction maintained by language that deliberately disempowers women? The consensus seems to weigh more heavily to the latter position, particularly within the contemporary (so-called “Third Wave”) feminism which was very much still in its incubation when I was discovering Women’s Studies in the Reagan years.

In every women’s studies class I’ve taught here at PCC, and in many guest lectures about feminism I’ve given elsewhere, I use the “penetrate” versus “engulf” image to illustrate a basic point about the way in which our language constructs and maintains male aggression and female passivity. Even those who haven’t had heterosexual intercourse can, with only a small degree of imagination required, see how “envelop” might be just as accurate as “enter”. “A woman’s vagina engulfs a man’s penis during intercourse” captures reality as well as “A man’s penis penetrates a woman’s vagina.” Of course, most het folks who have intercourse are well aware that power is fluid; each partner can temporarily assert a more active role (frequently by being on top) — as a result, the language used to describe what’s actually happening could shift. Continue reading →

Both saint and sinner: against teaching only half the story

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Last week, Renee (of Womanist Musings) put up a guest post at Feministe that has elicited a huge response: Thomas Jefferson, the Face of a Rapist. Below an image of our third president, she writes:

Americans look at Thomas Jefferson and see the one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, a statesman, a former president and one of the founding fathers,’ however; when I look at him, I see the face of a rapist.

Renee makes the compelling case that Jefferson’s well-documented sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, a black slave who was perhaps fifteen when their “affair” began , constituted rape because of Hemings’ age and her complete inability to provide meaningful consent. Consent, Renee argues, can only be given when the right to say “no” exists equally alongside the right to say “yes”. That makes good sense, but it also makes it difficult to argue that any woman — slave or free, white or black — in eighteenth-century America could consent. A husband’s right of access to his wife’s body was as inviolate as a slaveowner’s right to the labor of his slaves. That doesn’t mean that wealthy white women suffered to the same degree that black slave women did, of course, but it does render our modern notion of enthusiastic consent radically anachronistic. And reminding ourselves of this historical truth gives us all the more reason to celebrate the achievements of the feminist movement, which has fought for more than a century and a half to give women of all races sovereignty over their bodies and the right to say “no” as well as “yes.”

As a feminist historian, however, I want to deal with another aspect of Renee’s post. Renee rejects the defense, offered regularly during discussions of the transgressions of the late and great, that they were men (or women) “of their time” and that we “shouldn’t judge” past behavior by modern standards. There’s a lot to be said for that forgiving attitude towards the past. After all, who among us wouldn’t be enraged by the sexism of our great-grandparents? Forget Jefferson; think of one’s own elderly relatives. Few among us don’t have older folks in the family who hold abhorrent views on a variety of topics, and in many instances, those relatives have matched their actions to their views. To judge everyone by a contemporary standard of what is ethical would make inter-generational community far more difficult.

On the other hand, refusing to condemn the injustices of the past is to minimise, or at least erase, the suffering of very real victims. We can’t know Sally Hemings’ mind — but we make a huge mistake when we adopt the dominant narrative of her life, assuming that in the absence of obvious evidence of abuse that she was Jefferson’s happily consenting paramour. When the story is told, her lack of agency ought to be a focus, and it is not beyond the bounds of thoughtful history to ask what light this grossly disparate relationship sheds on our understanding of the third president. Feminist narrative ought to center women’s lives, and feminist historians rightly insist that Jefferson’s relationships with women form part of the story of his remarkable life. That doesn’t mean devaluing his achievements; it doesn’t mean feminists should picket the Jefferson Memorial or stage protests at Monticello. But it does mean asking hard questions about race and sex and power, it does mean exposing the notion of a “consensual affair” between a wealthy white man and his adolescent female slave as problematic if not risible.

Above all, we ought to chart a course between hagiography and demonization. It’s too simple-minded — albeit immensely tempting — to turn the figures of the past into saints or devils. Jefferson was a great man — and yes, he was a rapist. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the pivotal figure in the civil rights movement and a man who inspired hundreds of millions; he was also a chronic womanizer. Margaret Sanger fought her entire life so that women could have that precious right to birth control, but she repeatedly flirted with racist eugenics. Depending on one’s politics, the temptation is to center one’s focus solely on a partial aspect of a historical figure. When we do this, we make the critical mistake of seeing history as a story of “either/or” rather than “both/and.”

Like everyone reading this post, I have inflicted hurt. The story of my life, like the story of your life, surely contains within it episodes of great kindnesses and incidents of genuine wickedness. (For many of us, the greatest wickednesses we do are rooted in obtuse indifference rather than malice.) A skillful historian could, using only the facts, make virtually any one of us paragons of virtue — or exemplars of cruelty. When it comes to the dead, we cannot allow a respect for their accomplishments to blind us to their shortcomings; by the same token, we cannot allow the magnitude of those shortcomings to erase the legacy of the good that they did. As Thomas Merton’s old axion puts it, “God writes straight with crooked lines.” There is straight and crooked in each of us, and good history tells the story of both.

Can a feminist read Cosmo?

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I’ve been asked the question that titles this post more than once.

Last week I posted this bit about women and the importance of saving money “just for themselves”. It’s one of those tips that I think young women in particular need to hear. Another tip I often give to my women’s studies students regards their consumption of media: if it’s too hard to subtract, add.

To state the obvious, there’s a lot of sexist, misogynistic media out there. Some of it is in the form of crude advertising aimed at men; much of it in the form of “women’s magazines” which focus on beauty and fashion. Television shows like “The Bachelorette” or “America’s Next Top Model”, magazines like “Vogue” or “Cosmopolitan”, movies like “The Ugly Truth” — all send a troubling message about gender, about appearance, and about the capacity of any of us to find enduring happiness outside of narrowly defined roles. It’s not worth reiterating all that’s upsetting and demoralizing about mainstream media’s portrayal of women. But though many of my students find these magazines and television programs and films to be troubling and damaging to their own sense of self-worth, many also find them hard to give up. Over and over again, I’ve heard my women’s studies students describe reading fashion magazines or watching sexist shows (or, increasingly, looking at mainstream pornography) as “guilty pleasures.” And as a feminist, I’m wary of that phrase.

Obviously, we want to work collectively to reshape the ways in which the media portrays women — and men. It’s a given, too, that every dollar we spend is a vote; buying magazines which promote a narrow definition of beauty, for example, rewards and encourages the publishers and the advertisers. To the extent that we exercise choices within our consumer-driven capitalist system, we are at least partly responsible for those choices. The magazines and movie tickets we buy and the websites we visit matter; our behavior is tracked by curious advertisers and marketers eager to know “what works.” They are already rewarded enough for their contempt for women; why give them more of our precious dollars?

On the other hand, the reality is a bit more nuanced. Many women’s magazines which reinforce a narrow and destructive beauty ideal also feature first-rate writing by women on a wide variety of feminist subjects; magazines like Glamour and Cosmopolitan have run serious pieces in recent years on reproductive rights and pay equity; Seventeen and Teen Vogue have addressed eating disorders and sexual harassment. Those articles get more readers than comparable pieces in the feminist media; indeed, it’s entirely plausible that many women first encounter serious feminist analysis (whether they realize that’s what it is or not) within the pages of magazines like these. Continue reading →