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

2007-01-23 00:22:13

Carpenter asked me a question off-blog. Seeing as how a Bitch can, for a change, breath a little, I decided to catch up with various things that have been put off in the search for jobs and gigs. Among the backlog of things to be done was slog through email. I had a huge problem that meant I had to trash my email filters and rebuild my filter rules from scratch. Hence, everything was landing in a pile in my inbox. With 1500 email a day, not fun. It’s why it took me a while to find Carpenter’s mail — and also why I recently replied to an email from a reader who sent me some papers to read … months ago. *sigh* Anyhooty dewdies, Carpenter wanted to know more about ‘pinky sex’ – which has no basis in a literature. It’s a term of (Belledame) art, used to mock and deride some positions taken in the lesbian sex wars, as well as the broader sex wars, over what consituted egalitarian lesbian sex. Basically, she used it to mean something like lying side by side (no one on top!), staring lovingly into one another’s eyes (mutual gaze, no objectification of body parts!), and locking pinkies (no penetration! and god, please, the pussy is moist and messy. Body fluids. ewwww. Infantilized women lock pinkies. It’s HAAWWWWT!). Alternatively, it could stand for Paris Hilton’s Pinky Sex Wave. While I gave Carpenter some pointers to material already housed at Queer Dewd, I decided to look up “lesbian sex wars” on google (results). I about died laughing. Did you know? The sex wars ended by the 90s. Well, I thought so, ’cause I was shocked when I hit Bloglandia to learn that they were still going on strong. It made me feel as Berube said off blog once: like he’d been hurled back to the 1980s, the decade that brought us scrunchies and padded shoulders and stuff. Is there any other reason to watch St. Elmo’s Fire on a Saturday afternoon — I mean, if you can’t find a Planet of the Apes film festival on the t00b instead? That’s why I would watch it: for the scrunchies and padded shoulders. And an A-cup Demi Moore. EnEEEEway, this is what I read that made me laugh. It confirmed my claim, but still made me laugh:

Subsequent feminist scholarship continued the exploration of female sexuality in the context of pleasure and danger. Over the next decade, radical feminist analysis was eclipsed by the theoretical paradigms that emerged from the conference, and the fierceness of the sex wars subsided.

So, could we get the memo out and circulating again? Pretty please? With cherry and whipped cream and nuts on top? Stupid sex wars are over! Radical feminism lost! The other thing I wanted to provide carpenter with was some material from Robin West’s Caring for Justice about the importance of using the mother-infant dyadic relationship as paradigm for all sexual relationships. I do not kid. From Split Decisions, Janet Halley writes that, unlike MacKinnon, West

knows a difference between morally good and morally bad sex. Virtuous sexuality is feminine sexuality, and it has a decidedly infantile, lesbian, and caring shape. West relies on Adrienne Rich’s decisive 1980 article, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ to derive a redemptive feminist, intrinsically lesbian, sexuality from the ‘woman-to-woman bon’ of a girl with her mother and other girls. As West put it, “a young girl’s natural, early, fierce, loving, erotic and caring identification with women and girls is shattered by the pervasive patriarchal institution of compulsory heterosexuality.” It is nevertheless there to be recovered through feminism, and West renders it as infinitely redemptive. Embodied childhood innocence — female variety — is the reference point for adult sexual morality. The details are beautifully embedded in West’s example. It comes from the autobiographical reflections of Ellen Bass, the coeditor of an important feminist anthology on incest who had become a stripper (for men) in her effort to grapple with the way in which “our pornographic, incestuous, and sexually abusive culture shatters women’s natural, playful, and affective eroticism”. West trandes the breaking point in Bass’s infantile development to a moment when she eagerly disrobed for a trusted doctor, only to face her mother’s and doctor’s collusive joke objectifying her as a destined stripper. Equally decisive was her subsequent encounter… with a calendar showing a housewife struggling with grocery bags as her shirt was blown upward and her panties fell to her ankles, “her rosy buttocks exposed.” (Note: Vargas is, apparently, the pinup artist most known for this series of dropping underwear. As this site notes, he also seemed to have a thing for celery.) “Notice, “admonishes Bass, “next time you are shopping, the covers of magazines at children’s eye levle.” Feminist consciousness-raising, implies West, enabled Bass to discover, or rather recover, a redeemed sexuality: “the original desire, that of sharing who I truly am with my lover, both as a gift and as an affirmation of myself.” That is the sexuality which West’s cultural feminism validates and diametrically opposes to the harms of invasion: it is original, innocent, mutual, sharing, giving, and affirming.

[...]

OK. So the bottom line is that West’s cultural feminism has a sexual ethics for everybody, derived from women’s vital, infantile, and generative sexual experience. The naive expressiveness of the aboriginal self, the erotic disposition to give and receive in mutuality, the happy embodiedness of the unshamed female form and of the idyllic symbiosis originally experienced by mother and daughter — this is the stuff of ethically good sex. It’s got every thing that the invasive harms (of the penis – my clarification) would erase. And if everyone had sex this way, the invasive harms would disappear from the face of the earth.

Get that? If we had sex this way, everything would work out ok. Talk about believing that you can change the world through changes in your personal behavior! And not surprisingly, if you believe this, then a lot is riding on making sure people enact it — as many as possible! Women’s lives are riding on it! Ohyessiree jimbob, we do have some moralizing here, doncha think? It gets better when West tells us about the express and inevitably wonderful goodness that is mothering. Quoting West now:

[I]t is simply not true — it is emphatically not true — as many women know… that oppressive ‘power’ in any of its manifestations is the necessary consequence of inequality and hierarchy and that the end of hierarchy is therefore the necessary root of morality. Women of all cultures routinely though not always, respond to their utterly unequal and hierarchic relationships with their infants and children with nurturance, care, and love rather than power, narcissism, and the imposition for the sake of ego gratification of the stronger’s will upon the weaker’s fate… The physically unequal mother in all cultures typically breast feeds and protects, rather than bullies or browbeats, the vulnerable infant and child. The powerful mother nurtures so as to give life and create growth in the weak. She does not impose so as to inscribe her will. (p 277)

Notice the univerasalizing, moralizing tone: “all” “emphatically” “in all cultures” “any”. West goes on to say that moral and legal theory should rest on this foundation from whence comes an ethic of care — an ethic of care that should underpin a rather powerful social institution, the law. Halley writes of West’s project:

This is the happy face of cultural feminism: the love shared in mutuality by mother and infant can be the model for sexual love between adults, and a redeemed adult sexuailty becomes imaginable…, the altrusitic care almost organically bestowed by the powerful mother on the infant and on the child can become the model of every hierarchical relationships throughout social life. Nothing could be less like MacKinnon’s dark vision of wall-to-wall domination than West’s ready access to a core of pure ethical goodness, and her optimisim that modeling the rest of life on it is an imaginable — indeed, doable — project. To get there, West has to indulge insome pretty extreme female supremacist thinking. When altrusim escapes the context of patriarchally induced fear, it becomes not just one among many, but the sublime human good capable of being “the foundation” of moral and legal theory. (side note: West argues that most altruism and selflessness, now, is performed by women out of fear. Halley quotes a passage in which she describes pretty much everything women do, from having sex to having children, is done out of fear.) … Only a woman can give suck, only a woman can remember being the daughter of a mother, and thus only women can “form the foundation of a feminist, maternalist (and humanist) moral theory” or recall the innocent mutuality of redeemed sexuality. Though West has argued that a fully complete human ethics can arise only in the ‘overlap’ of justice with care…, the population capable of excising from justice the detritus of patriarchy is going to be the population capable of — possibillty also experienced in — maternity.

[...]

Not only is West’s political project female-, feminist-, women-and-girls-, maternal-, and feminist-supremacist; not only is it total in its aim to “heal the world” through this supremacy, it is “total” as well in the intimate depth of the moral changes it seeks to achieve. … West’s cultural feminism would rule, from horizon to horizon and from the pinnacles of institutional power to the smallest, deepest stirrings of the human spirit.

I have more to come but my hands are hurting me today. It’s rainy and they are acting up, wicked.