Open Thread for Personal Stuff: October 2014 Dog Walk Dog Edition

It just seems to me that it has become fashionable to conflate passion with aggression.

That’s true. It’s easy to jump from “Anger doesn’t delegitimize your opinion” to “Anger is the standard way to express your opinion.”

I ran into a young woman about 5 years ago who, in complete sincerity, argued that if you feel empowered, that means you are empowered. It actually came up in the context of (get this) FGM. There are a lot of reasons to criticize the Western response to FGM, but “it makes these ladies feel so empowered! so it would be immoral to make any effort to stop it!” is not a criticism I would have listed.

Decoupling the word “empowerment” from objective power is so damaging that I have actually wondered if this has been implanted by those who benefit from the status quo. It brings to mind Steven Lukes’ “third face of power,” in which you get someone to internalize that doing something counter to their own best interests is the correct move, and in that manner exercise power over them.

@grumpyoldnurse

LOL it’s called the “third face” because of earlier work that had identified two faces of power. Once someone has started talking about power in terms of different faces, it’s a logical continuation to keep doing that and identifying more faces.

It’s interesting looking at how you guys discuss feminism. I guess without thinking too hard about it I’d always considered my general idea of feminist ideals to be 3rd wave (primarily because of the importance of intersectionality to me, which if I recall correctly was a response to critiques about 2nd wavers not addressing the concerns of LGBT people, WoC, etc).

I find a lot of people my age and younger have adopted a mindset that the “feminisminess” (a word I just made up) of something hinges more on individual agency than it does on the act itself, e.g. if a woman’s choosing to wear high heels/lipstick/makeup because she wants to, and not because it’s expected of her, that’s not in itself an anti-feminist act. I know that’s a really, really difficult knot to untangle because of both societal influences and internalised sexism.

It’s an interesting PoV. Not sure to what extent I subscribe to it.

Groovy is right!

OT: I’m trying to track down a cat mystery set in a theatre (can’t recall the title) and happened on this Slate article about cat mysteries in general. I love this last paragraph (written, take note, by a servant of the Furrinati):

Cat Pee. Of course, the real reason people love cat mysteries could just be that the cats have infected our brains. Maybe we’re putting up with bad punning titles and storylines that revolve around cats trapping murderers in spiderwebs of yarn because of brain parasites. After all, what do scientists call the chemical attraction to cat urine shown to occur in toxoplasmosis-infested rats? “Fatal feline attraction,” of course.

Source

Agreed GON. I guess this is why sex work and porn are always going to be thorny issues for feminists – it’s almost impossible to determine where individual agency stops and catering to the male gaze begins in many situations. I leave those conversations to people who are far more conversant in feminist ideas than I am. 🙂

I ran into a young woman about 5 years ago who, in complete sincerity, argued that if you feel empowered, that means you are empowered.

Oy vey. This is something that bugs me, the “I choose my choice” flavor of 3rd wave. No, not every choice is a feminist one, nothing happens in a vacuum.

@grumpyoldnurse

If this interests you, I would suggest that you read the following in order:

http://www.columbia edu/itc/sipa/U6800/readings-sm/bachrach.pdf

http://www.yale edu/macmillan/shapiro/Lukes_comment.pdf

https://www scribd.com/doc/89322263/Digeser-thefourthfaceofpower

I broke the URLs due to fear of embedding. The first one is a paper which is the original source of the idea that power comes in more than one variety. There are other discussions, but that was the first and best. The second is a sort of summary/analysis of Steven Lukes’ book. The third one discusses Michel Foucault. That will let you dip into it without a deep time commitment or having to buy books that you may or may not enjoy reading.

I guess that there really are sex workers who “choose their choice”, it’s just that so much of what I have seen, personally, has been terribly exploitive. I have a fairly narrow sample range, though, so if someone with a broader perspective wants to speak up, I would welcome it.

Vancouver is a beautiful city, in so very many ways, and I am very glad, and grateful, that I lived there for as long as I did, but the seamy underbelly is terrifying. I have stories that would curl your hair! And, on the prairies, where I live now, there’s a horrible racist element to the sex trade that just sickens me. Fat, middle aged red necks in big pick-up trucks trolling for First Nations girls who mostly look underage is so gross!

Again, my experience is limited. I worked at St. Paul’s. For those not familiar with Vancouver, it is the downtown hospital. It services a few nicer neighborhoods and the Downtown East Side. The DES is skid row. It is a very bad skid row. Most of the patients that I dealt with who were in the sex trade were from there, so I saw a huge classist side to prostitution in Canada. The exploitation was heartbreaking. I did meet a few higher end call girls, but few of them had really had much choice in engaging in sex work, either. I met one patient who was pretty positive about her choice, and I knew one former prostitute socially, who had also mostly enjoyed her work. Both of them had had bad experiences with both tricks and pimps, though. To the best of my knowledge, I have never met a porn actor or stripper either personally or professionally. I say all this to reinforce that my sample is narrow, and biased. So, if anyone has a broader perspective, I would love to hear about it. But, from what I have seen personally, sex work is exploitive and harmful to the people who engage in it.

Thanks, PoM! Checking them out now.

Also, since apparently we’re having that kind of conversation – what bothers me most about certain aspects of the Third Wave is the way they tend to shut down any sort of systemic analysis. Like, talking about sex work – I’ve known a few people who’ve done it by choice and come out OK. Know what they all had in common? Lots and lots of privilege going in, and the ability to leave if they wanted to. Does their experience represent the industry norm? Hell no. Which doesn’t mean it’s not a real and valid experience, just that it’s not the average person’s experience.

With the Third Wave way of approaching stuff like this, though, if we can find even a handful of people for whom Generalization X doesn’t apply then Generalization X is deemed to be a. bullshit in a general sense, and b. motivated by a hatred of the people to whom it doesn’t apply, and btw why aren’t you listening to them? Attempting to explain that you are listening to them, it’s just that you’re listening to the other 90% too, gets shut down as X-phobia. This dynamic favors the most privileged voices, since they’re the ones who get heard most often, and marginalizes the least privileged. It also renders systemic analysis (upon which any sort of successful political analysis and organization depends) almost impossible.

And this is why the older I get and the more I see, the less patience I have with that approach.

Yup. Any criticism of sex work, or the sex industry, gets called “slut shaming” (and do I ever wish the word slut would get dropped from these conversations; I think it’s irredeemable). It’s like misogyny isn’t acknowledged if it’s coming from people in certain demographics, even if it’s in-your-face violence; bring it up and you’re a fill-in-the-blank ‘phobe.