Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

This is really interesting and makes clear why MacKIinnon should NOT be confused with people who find Ev0l in Teh Cock! However, I think what she does show is how MacKinnon nonetheless draws on their arguments in her legal work in ONCALE. If you don’t know of the case, here’s a little information about it from PBS. So, what am I babbling about? This quite excellent discussion of cultural feminists. Now, as I’ve often said, there are people who call themselves radical feminists — such as the 67 or so authors of Radically Speaking who deeply resent Alice Echols’ appellation, ‘cultural feminism.’ I don’t blame them for disliking having a name pinned on them but if they, in fact, do break significantly from earlier radical feminists, what then….? At any rate, I think this discussion here can really help us to see why folks get upset when they hear someone argue that MacKinnon attributes some sort of Ev01ness ™ to Teh Cock ™. There are feminists who do, but you won’t find it in MacKinnon’s text, though I think what Halley does show is that in the alliance with a cultural feminist framework in her legal work, MacKinnon does end up validating their claims. What is also incredibly excellent about Halley’s work here is that she gives scholarly grounding to the claim Foolish Owl, Anthony, Sheldon, and I have made about the fact that, ultimately, in these modes of thinking, MacKinnon’s and cultural feminism is its sexual subordination mode are essentially Liberal political theory in radical Halloween Costumery. MacKinnon is thus dressed as Count Copula! ($1 Belledame) I will refrain from a Boo Berry joke in the same sentence as the name, Andrea Dworkin. (R made me do it.) So, without further adieu ….

The Moralistic Male/Female Model. For two reasons I am going to sketch cultural feminism rather than exemplify it in one of its exponents’ work. First, it has so many exponents in feminist legal theory that selecting one would seem arbitrary. Second, although it has generated many different “takes” on same-sex harassment, all of them bear such a strong family resemblance that a general rather than particular description should suffice for my purposes here. Cultural feminism holds that women have a distinct consciousness and/ or culture. In some versions, this distinctiveness derives from their biological situation; in others, it emerges from their historical oppression by men. Some versions emphasize women’s reproductive experience; others focus on their situation in sexuality.

I think it’s important to point this out: Halley uses the phrase, “biological situation.” For me, that signals not a biological imperative, but a situation. Here, what she probably means is the situation women find themselves in in a society where they are defined largely as the bearers and caretakers of children. She continues:

What makes a feminism cultural feminist is not its position on the essentialist/social constructivist divide, but its dedication to the propositions that women’s feminine attributes amount to a consciousness or culture, that their consciousness or culture is improperly devalued, and that the reform goal is to revalue it upwards, until it has cultural status equal to or perhaps superior to the culture of men and maleness.

Essentially, she’s talking about “pinky sex feminism” that Belledame has often described, though Belledame also acknowledges that cultural feminism has also been an important inspiration to her — if you can leave out the pinky sex stuff. :) New paragraph:

How does cultural feminism differ from and repeat the male/female model as MacKinnon deploys it? It’s not a structural theory. Male domination is not perfect; women escape dominance much or some of the time, have agency, are authentic, and so on.

OK. So here’s an important distinction: women do have agency on this model. And her discussion here also reminds me of a recent post at Pandagon where I took issue with the way Carol Gilligan was represented. Now, the interesting part of this, to me, is that someone like Linda Nicholson in The Second Wave calls a group of theorists Gynocentric: Catherine MacKinnon, Carol Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow, Nancy Harstock, and Patricia Hill Collins. This is because she sees them as arguing that women have a unique place in society by virtue of their oppressed status — subordinated, to use Halley’s language. For MacKinnon, in her early mode, this meant that Consciousness Raising was THE feminist methodology. The goal was for women to work with women to develop a theory of their lives, but the first thing they had to do was figure out how, under extreme structural conditions, women could even know to begin with — if that makes sense. For recall that MacKinnon says, according to Halley, that no one under conditions of patriarchal domination can know the world without the distortions of patriarchal ideology. Not men; not women. We cannot know the difference between rape and sex because we do not know what truly consensual sex looks like. For MacKinnon we are all like the people staring at shadows on the cave wall in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. All of us. But it lies with women the task of creating communities through which to start the process of figuring out how women can begin to know. Once we can figure that out, we can begin to understand the world as women actually know it and build theory from women’es lives and experiences: this is building feminist theory from the ground up. (This idea — which was a big part of the early second wave thinking on what CR was all about — heavily influenced a lot of feminist methodology in the social sciences, by the way.) As an aside, this is why I’ve said that claims about “intervention” as something like consciousness-raising are bullshit when such interventions are not conducted in the context of a community. That was always crucial: community. Not some idealized, I’m OK-You’re OK bullocks claim about community. It was, yes, an agonistic community. But it was the kind of agonistic community that we have, say, at a blog among its core participants: there is some level of knowing, trust, respect (even if grudging). But most importantly, there is something beyond or greater than the individuals which binds them together. OK. Sidetrip over.

Indeed, women have more of every kind of virtue than men, including the epistemological and ontological ones of knowledge and existence.

I realized that people probably don’t know what these words mean. Put simply:

• epistomology: a theory about how people know, who can know, and the limits of that knowledge.
• ontology: a theory about what it is that we know, often conceived of in terms of being and existence. Basically, it’s the reality that we are trying to apprehend or know.

Moving on

And while MacKinnon’s theory attributes sex inequality to powerâ€â?male domination, for her, is “not a moral issue” 19 â€â? cultural feminism is intensely moralistic.

I think this distinction is very important.

(For Cultural feminists) (w)omen’s subordination is a moral error, and it has produced women’s moral superiority to men. These two differences produce very different takes on sex and on law. Sex first. Whereas MacKinnon’s theory makes it impossible to know the difference between normal heterosexual intercourse and rape, cultural feminism (when it is about sexuality, not maternity) knows a lot about what good sex between men and women looks like. It has the virtues that have been, at least since the late nineteenth century in the West, associated with women. Good sex is intersubjective, caring, respectful, alert to human dignity, human values, human sensibilities, human sensitivities. Good sex involves taking one’s pleasure in the pleasure of the other, or at least only on the condition of the pleasure of the other. Good sex is expressive; it respects, reflects, and/or constitutes personhood. In the name of these ideals, good sex, to be good, must depress masculinity in either partner and promote femininity in both. And the differences between the male/female model and cultural feminism produce a very different relation to liberal feminism and a different approach to legal reform. Unlike MacKinnon’s theory, cultural feminism has a firm grasp on the categorical imperative in sex.

Categorical Imperative: she’s talking about Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Sometimes, people simplify this as “The Golden Rule.” It’s a little more complicated, but this is a good enough way to look at for now.

It can speak to liberalism about human dignity in a way MacKinnon cannot.

I added the emphasis because I think this is important.

There are people on the planet — women — who are doing life right; we can all model ourselves on them. This is why cultural feminism (though it has its apocalyptic moments) basically has a sunny disposition. If we could let women run things, or convert men to femininity, things would be better. Women’s oppression is episodic; there is almost always light at the end of the tunnel.

This is another important distinction. As Halley said earlier, the structuralism is not so totalizing, so absolute and complete.

Cultural feminism thus fits into liberal feminism without all the angst that attends MacKinnon’s relation to it. It has permeated feminist legal theory, (my emph.) I think, because it is good at designing incremental reforms and maintaining faith in them, and because liberal feminism is hospitable about half of the time to its search for special treatment. For all that, though, cultural feminism shares a lot with the male/female model (by which she means the male/female subordination feminism of someone like MacKinnon–BL). When it is about sexuality, not maternity, it is a sexual dominance theory. That is, it holds that sexuality is central to women’s subordination and that women’s subordination is the central fact in sexuality; that masculinity is dominance and objectification; that femininity is its opposite; that masculinity belongs to men and femininity to women; that this formula states the relevant alternatives so exclusively that, if a man is sexually subordinated, he must be understood to be feminized; [20] and that whenever in sexuality we find dominance it is masculine and morally erroneous. And the moralism of cultural feminism makes it just as radical as MacKinnon’s early theory, though in a very different way.

I want to pause here to emphasize this. She again draws the distinction between the two as one that hinges on morality or moralism: Teh Cock ™ is Ev0l. OK, not necessarily the cock itself, but masculinity as culturally produced — not biologically, culturally, since therefore it can be undone. Masculinity as we know it is notforever and always, but historically and contingently and therefore it can be undone. If not by making all of us more feminine, at least by revaluing women’s ways of being in and knowing the world. The next part is, in a nutshell, a most excellent distinction:

MacKinnon would like to get them by the balls because she doesn’t believe their minds and hearts can follow; whereas cultural feminism has detailed plans for their hearts and minds.

Y’hear that? In one, MacKinnon’s, the point is to get men, figuratively speaking, by the balls. In the other, there is a plan for men.

It is a fighting faith seeking the moral conversion of a little less than half the human race. (emph added)

And here is where I’m going to say that, when we see that fighting faith applied in blogoliciousville, it’s that fighting faith aimed at the “men in our heads.” Since women can internalize their own oppression, the men in our heads must be rooted out and eradicated. And it’s not surprising that it can feel like a proselytizing crusade, a faith, and have all the earmarks of proselytizing religions.

The emphasis on values in cultural feminism has led it to have reform aspirations that are at once minute and diffuse; it knows things like “Lesbians should not wear strap-ons” and “People having sex should be required to ask permission for every new intimate touch,” (that is an essentially Dworkinite sentiment, isn’t it? BL) and “A husband who introduces his penis into the vagina of his sleeping wife has raped her and should be prosecuted.” It can’t stand to listen to Randy Newman’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On.”

heh. HA! the last line slayed me.

It thinks that a man who would joke to a female subordinate at work about pubic hairs appearing on his Coke can has shown himself unfit for high office. It’s easily offended; it is schoolmarmish, judgmental, self-righteous. And here it begins to look not like a species of liberal feminism but like an alien infiltrator in it: we have seen it seeking to clear the airwaves of all endorsements of values it thinks are bad; we have seen it thinking that referring to a value is endorsing it. [21] It can insist that people not only do the right thing, but do it with the right spirit. In short, cultural feminist moralism can trend toward totalitarian regulatory projects. Opposing it makes one sound like a libertarian.

It seems to me that Halley is saying that, if anything, the totalizing, jackboot-like character of these sorts of demands is to be laid at the feet of cultural feminists in their sexual subordination mode and not at MacKinnon’s feet. That’s a lot more subtle than calling up the MacKinnon Monster as someone who see Teh Cock ™ as Teh Ev01. Masculinity as the cultural feminists understand is the problem, not the penis itself. And they do have some idea of what joyous sex ought to look like — supposedly the kind of sex women have: relational, intersubjective, taking place on the ground of equality, etc. What will be important in the rest of the chapter is the feminization of any man who loses his status *as* male when he’s placed in the position of a woman: sexually harassed, made into a sexualized object, no longer in the position of sexual aggressor, but sexual victim. Watch this space for more — if I have time. The rest of the article in Word .DOC format, “Sexuality Harrassment” by Janet Halley