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

lord. what a wacky, pissed off muddle of a rant!

I initially wrote this on 01/01/2007

When I started blogging, my first posts were on race. I think they are lost to the winds from the switch from one host to another. I was on about Bill Bennet as I recall. Then I did a series on criminology 101 because, although it’s not a speciality, it became an interest after reading ridiculous posts at a discussion list re: the murder rate, the crime rate, rape rates, and whether or not murders are mostly really between friends, family, acquaintances, and co-workers. As to the latter, it’s a race issue because the specter of the US being violent crime capital of the world (it’s not) is often put forth as a cover for being a racist jackass — only in lefty space. So, I looked into it, particularly in the more racist aspects of collecting crime stats.

If you mouse over the category, ’sex and sexuality,’ there’s a note that says I hadn’t initially set myself up to have a category on that topic. Economics, race, class, queer, disability — yes. Sex? It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d end up becoming known as a sex positive feminist. Socialist, of course. But sex positive? I hardly felt that such an appellation was necessary given that *my* socialist, woman of color, queer, pomo amalgamation of feminismS embraces sex positivity / sex radicality as a no brainer.

Well, *I* and a lot of people I know think so, but there’s a faction of socialists, especially culturally conservative socialists, who disagree. Others have tried to meld socialist analyses with radical feminist analyses and usually end up looking like fools since the two views have completely different understandings of class. Thus, they have to twist themselves into pretzel shapes, capable of performing their own lobotomy, to look like they have something coherent to say. I care about intersectional analyses of race, class, gender, ability, imperialism, sexuality. That is my thing. I believe that white, heteronormative, middle class feminism — all brands — need to be decentered.

Where I think I differ from BfP and maybe others is that I don’t think anything else should be placed in the center. Instead, we should always be conscious of the ways centering happens and actively resist re-centering. What that has meant, for me, is to be both facile in white feminist theory as well as women of color theory. There isn’t much in the way of theory made by and for poor and working class white women because there are few in academia. Those who are there, have the arguable privilege of being able to kill themselves in order to fit in. Which is to say, when you are white working class, you can blend in and completely deny where you came from. Indeed, you will often find a great deal of pressure if you don’t do so, judged as some kind of failure, as Amanda intimated in her conversation with Belledame at Feministe.

Consequently, it tends to be that those who speak to issues of poverty or being on the lower end of the income spectrum are generally white, middle-class /upper-middle-class women or are women of color who may or may not be from that background. I was an African American studies minor because I took a course in which I read the literatures of black people. Reading this literature, I finally heard what I needed: the passionate song of justice. They spoke to me in a way no white feminists ever did. They spoke about their lives, some of which I shared or at least understood and had an affinity with. Of course, I didn’t understand all of it through personal experience. But it was enough.

So, it was through women of color I learned to be a feminist — academically. It was through the sex wars of the 80s that I learned to be a feminist on the ground. I learned the sex wars as seen through the prism of class warfare. There were people telling me and my kind — we’d be called an interracial community of genderqueers today — that we were disgusting embarrassments to the movement. Our sex and behavior were not right. We weren’t women. We weren’t “proper”. This is code for: you aren’t middle class, white, and properly behaved about your sexuality; you’re not women. Some of us were already aware of this growing up. If you are poor and working class, you quickly learn that you are the kind of ‘trash’ with whom certain men will do their thing, the thing they wouldn’t do with ‘their kind’. And when you came out, then you also quickly learned, via campus, white middle-class lesbians, that you, too, were not women. With these women, you learned that there were feminists and women who were the same as men in this regard.

My first “real” relationship with a woman was abusive for exactly this reason. I was that trash from the other side of town with whom she’d do her thing and when I got ‘uppity’ or revealed my financial dependence or my lack of education, I got smacked around and put in my place, called a slutty little tramp, low class, uneducated, disgusting filth to be shat on. Her favorite was spitting. I wasn’t a woman. Because women didn’t have sex like we had. She reserved real, respectable sex for women: her kind. I was young enough and smart enough to get out, but to silence because no one discussed violence among women then. The first time I spoke of it, I was treated to contempt. I shut up after that.

So, you see, who I am cannot be disentangled from that history. I’m not poor. I’m not white. I’m not a woman. I’m not queer. I’m a poor, white, queer woman. They are bound up together.

This history is also why I found it offensive when issues surrounding sex and gender were and continue to be dismissed as “white mainstream feminist” fluff. And even when I do speak about issues that are supposedly far more important, then I become a poseur who is using the issue to, as any good freelance agent provacteur would do, slip my real interests into the mix. Thus, when writing about the upheavals in the blogosphere, Chris Clarke attributes this to rightwing thuggery.

My sense of this latest threat is that it sprung from the same source from which, I’ve decided, much of the seemingly pointless internecine warfare in the progressive blog community in recent weeks derives: deliberate pot-stirring by rightist thugs.

Perhaps I should be Queer Thug instead of Queer Dewd? eh?

Because, lord knows “my” issues aren’t also anyone’s who doesn’t share them. Because lord knows “my” issues are white mainstream middle class feminist fluff. So, heaven help me if I dare speak to something that has profoundly fucking shaped my life and the lives of men and women I love: being sexually marginalized, being erased, having to hide who I am or watch others do so, having to listen to all manner of bullshit.

So, when I dare talk about anything that matters to me, why, I’m a fucking pro-pornstitution feminist and/or white mainstream feminist — if I’m lucky to be called a feminist at all. If I’m even lucky to not be called a man. Because, after all, what it is really all about as I learned a year ago is that I’m all about my moist pussy and my vast, vast, vast, vast porn collection. (oops sorry. Channeling Heart)

Erased. Deleted. Evaporated.

My identity, my past, who I am, who my friends are — it doesn’t matter — because I am immediately assumed to be engaged in the issues of concern only to white middle class women or, conversely, a male-identified, patriarchy-fucking, freelancer provacateuring for the right wing. (Damn. Wish I knew who the rest were. I need to do some benchmarking on my competition.)

Because lord knows there are no poor, white, queer women.

It often seems that the only way to have anyone take us seriously on this issue is to focus on extreme marginalization or the fact of poverty, rather than examining the everyday acts of silencing and erasing. If it involves bodily harm or extreme psychic harm, that’s important. But if it’s the harm done to women like RenEv by the way they are treated in this society, then it is *piffle*. If it’s the harm from having your sexual identity erased and you are bisexual: big fucking whoopee. And for christ’s sake don’t you even dare talk about taking pole dancing classes and how that’s personally empowering for you given your working class, Southern, conservative, Christian upbringing. There are more important things in the world and obviously poverty supercedes that.

Except. It. Doesn’t.

Because I (or Amber, or any other woman) can’t be pulled apart into those baby block beads that are discrete from one another, that can be snapped back together after examining each one: one bead poor, one bead queer, one bead woman, one bead white.

I am sex positive because I don’t know what else to call a feminist who fights against the instantiation of elitism and classism in mainstream society and among feminismS, an elitism and a classism that is so subtle virtually no one sees it, and who rails against the way this normalization of class warfare revolves around, among other things, sexuality and sexual representation. I don’t know what to call a feminist who cares about the way these same issues are racialized, who cares about the way sex and sexuality are subject to the same normalizing hegemonic institutions as any other oppressive system we are all supposed to struggle against and dismantle.

It’s time for an interlude with bell hooks on the topic, to give this some grounding:

Equating feminist struggle with living in a counter-cultural, woman-centered world erected barriers that closed the movement off from most women. Despite sexist discrimination, exploitation, or oppression, many women feel their lives as they live them are important and valuable. Naturally the suggestion that these lives could be simply left or abandoned for an alternative “feminist” lifestyle met with resistance. Feeling their life experiences devalued, deemed solely negative and worthless, many women responded by attacking feminism. By rejecting the notion of an alternative feminist “lifestyle” that can emerge only when women create a subculture — and insisting that feminist struggle can be wherever an individual woman is, we create a movement that focuses on our collective experience, a movement that is continually mass-based. Over the past six years, many separatist-oriented communities have been formed by women so that the focus has shifted from the development of woman-centered space toward an emphasis on identity. Once woman-centered space exists, it can be maintained only if women remained convinced that it is the only place where they can be self-realized and free. After assuming a “feminist” identity, women often seek to live the “feminist” lifestyle. These women do not see that it undermines feminist movement to project the assumption that “feminist” is but another pre-packaged role women can now select as they search for identity. [...]

Sometimes lesbians have sought to equate feminism with lifestyle but for significantly different reasons. Given the prejudice and discrimination against lesbian women in our society, alternative communities that are woman-centered are one means of creating positive, affirming environments. Despite positive reasons for developing woman-centered space, like pleasure, support, and resource-sharing, emphasis on creating a counter-culture has alienated women from feminist movement, for such space can be in churches, kitchens, etc. Often emphasis on identity and lifestyle is appealing because it creates a sense that one is engaged in praxis. However, praxis within any political movement that aims to have a radical transformative impact on society cannot be solely focused on creating spaces wherein would-be-radicals experience safety and support. Feminist movement to end sexist-oppression actively engages participants in revolutionary struggle. Struggle is rarely safe or pleasurable. …

The suggestion that the truly feminist woman is lesbian (made by heterosexuals and lesbians alike) sets up another sexual standard by which women are to be judged and found wanting. Feminist activists need to remember that the political choices we make are not determined by who we choose to have genital sexual contact with. Feminist activists must take care that our legitimate critiques of heterosexism are not attacks on heterosexual practice. As feminists, we must confront those women who do in fact believe that women with heterosexual preferences are either traitors or likely to be anti-lesbian. … “

It’s worth pausing to think hard about those words, I think, because over twenty years ago, smart women were telling us what happened when heterosexual practice was attacked, rather than heterosexism. It was not working out well then and it is not working out well now.

————

I read brownfemipower gripe the other day about women who “act like men” by burping and belching. And I thought it hilarious because the woman she was talking to — shock! — has revealed moments when she “acts like men,” engaging in and — gasp! — actually discussing bodily functions “like a man.” That sexuality and bodily comportment and clothing styles are normalized into proper and improper, into visible and invisible, etc. means they are legitimate objects of analysis in anything that calls itself “intersectional analysis of oppressions”.

But somehow, we lose our way on this topic. Things don’t quite converge. Mostly because we’re human. But perhaps it’s also a consequence of the fact that we aren’t really on the same page. I haven’t figured out the right questions to ask my answers on that one. I might get back to you when I do though.

I remember about 9 months ago or so someone expressed surprise that marginalized white women — even gasp! the horrid sexpos — easily embraced issues of concern to women of color. Not all of them, of course, but she was surprised that so many did. I asked her then if she felt that it was surprising that, as a woman of color, she could identify with issues of concern to those who feel their sexualities are marginalized. Would she be insulted if I said such a thing to her? This memory occurred to me while reading the Chasingmoshka/ Heart / Transgender fiasco over at brownfemipower’s.

My interlocutor privileged one form of oppression. How? By giving the bearers of that oppression epistemological privilege that others didn’t have in her view of the world. Similarly, while Chasingmoshka says she doesn’t privilege one system of oppression over another, she really does. It’s a contingent privileging of one system over another, race over anything else by virtue of the nature of a society where white privilege is central. It’s a privileging nonetheless.

When I moved here I met a woman who helped me move furniture. She is considered “not a woman” and is constantly called a man. When people are not overtly bigoted and imagine they are progressive, they whisper things like, “but look at the clothes she wears. And the hair. It’s so big. Why does she have to put lipstick on like that? This is why *shudder* I never understand these people. They are cartoons. Can’t she see how other women dress? Can’t she try to be like that?” They are cartoons. She’s a working class intersexed woman who wants to ID as a woman. She’s built like a fullback. She can’t afford surgeries and treatments, so she dresses in ways to signal that she’s a woman. But no one will accept her that way. She is not a woman, not just because of the Adam’s apple and facial hair for which she is forgiven because she cannot change those.

She is not forgiven for what she ostensibly can charge: her clothes, her makeup, her style, her taste. She is a failure in a very personal way: she is deemed a failure because she has either chosen to dress like this in direct violation of social norms of proper womanhood. Or, they decide she is so socially backward she is incapable of observation and imitation — and thus, she is a social failure.

In either case, she’s not a woman. In one case, she’s judged a freak of nature. In the other case, she’s a failure and a failure of her own making and thus, even more contemptible than if she couldn’t help it.

Pause. Rewind.

Remember how Amanda (and probably all of us) think about people who don’t try to get the hell out of being working class and poor as fast and as far as they can. They get an extra heaping of condescension in an extraordinarily cartoonish description of their lives that tries to pass itself off as compassion. And yet, the implication is that anyone who doesn’t get out of or isn’t trying to get out of it is… a failure. Incapable of observation and imitation. For one would never, ever want to write a comment about having a working class background without quickly pointing out that it is something that one must dump and quickly as possible. Because class is not about anything other than your willing decision to be in it or out of it, right?

See the connections?

But back to my acquaintance. She’s not a woman but a cartoon because of her clothes: they are trashy, over the top, way overboard on the feminine. (Those aren’t my judgements, but those of others) She embarrasses other so-called progressive people because she doesn’t dress properly. She has ‘low-class’ tastes, in other words. She doesn’t ‘get it’ and doesn’t properly observe how to be a woman. And, to me, this is no different than the dynamic when people mock women for dressing like tramps or whores or sluts. All the words: fembot, trash, tramp, ho-bag — all of it — they are stand-ins for saying: not a woman. They are classist and racist slurs meant to identify the person in question as a failure. These words are reproductions of a gendered, racist, capitalist, imperializing system.

So, I hit bloglandia to reviews of Ariel Levy. In comments, I’d read ho-bag, trashy, trampy, slutty on all the mainstream feminist blogs. I was disgusted. (And thanked Jill at Feministe for finally raising the issue.) I read the book at the bookstore one day, taking notes. Eventually got my hands on a library copy. I was appalled at the way she attempted to reproduce the same system, under the guise of “proper sexuality” and “improper sexuality”. People were applauding this. No one noticed it. No one noticed it because it’s completely acceptable. What I happen to consider a covert form of racialized class warfare was completely and utterly ignored.

Given my background, it smacked of what I’d been through over and over: This sexuality over here is ok because it about your natural born womanness or about your adherence to movement gaols which everyone, of course!, agrees to. This ‘other’ sexuality over there, the one the policing agents of feminism didn’t like, that is a sexuality that comes from the patriarchy and a desire to please men or become men. That is what the middle class lesbians from campus told us, the disgusting townie queers who practiced butch/femme or who were just white working class and working class women of color and, therefore, we “acted like that” (slutty, trampy) and, therefore, were the people with whom the campus lesbians snuck across town to be with so they could get some of “that kind of sex.” In the daytime, it was back to androgyny for them. No gender, no roles, no lipstick, no Levis, no white t-shirts with cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve, no butch boots, no dolled up long hair, no high heels. (There were a lot of older femmes and they liked dippity doo which was funny, to us, because you were supposed to be all “natural” then. Gel? Eeeuu. :) (I tell you this to remind everyone that we had our very own forms of ‘distinction’ which just didn’t see it.)

So, I started writing critiques of the crap that went on out there. Then, one day, I took issue with claims about what sex-positive feminism was supposedly all about: apparently we think political liberation is in a thong or in performing burlesque. We also think that everyone should have sex, sex, sex pushed on them. We think that anyone who doesn’t have sex or is squicked out about certain kinds of sex is a prude. Or something. Well, this struck me as nonsensical, since the whole issue has zip to to do with how much sex you have. It isn’t about being a Victorian prude about what you like and don’t like personally.

No one cares about *your* sex life.

What they care about is, among other things, the way the some factions of the feminist movement tried to take away your right to be considered a woman on the basis of claims about the inherent oppressiveness of certain sex acts or sexualities. If you didn’t agree, you were male-identified. It was about subverting the idea that somehow, your political identifications as a progressive or radical or feminist or some combination can be given or taken away on the basis of what someone does or doesn’t do sexually. It’s about trying to claim that someone is politically beyond the pale if they engage in sexual practices that some group or someone has deemed politically incorrect.

Someone can be very sexual, talk about sex all the time, and have sex 10 times a day; when they run around deciding that how and with whom you fuck is a marker of whether you are a feminist or not (or human or not), then they are sex negative.

Being sex negative is about those who claim that the core of feminism must and can only be about one approach to sexuality and what appropriate sex acts are and aren’t. It’s about that same dynamic as it takes place in the wider society, only there it’s about completely dehumanizing people for their sexuality, bodily comportment, and modes of representing their gender and sexual orientations.

Sex positivity has nothing to do with whether you have sex. You can be celibate for all I care. You can want to be virgin ’til marriage. If it’s your bag, go for it. It has nothing to do with whether you like sex. Sex positivity has to do with accepting the wide variety of sexual practices out there and being very wary of making generalizing claims about what you think you observe. It’s about taking care not to impose your frameworks, understandings, issues on the lives of someone you do not know, whose erotic life you do not understand. If you think that someone is somehow a bad feminist or a inhuman (or even just ‘corny’) because they are into golden showers or spitting or bondage or fellatio or getting shat on (even in their mouths!) or celibacy or virginity or anything else, you are sex negative.

This isn’t about sexual libertarianism — stay out of my bedroom, none of your beeswax. Rather, it is about a distinct, ideological difference over the nature of power, socialization, social structure, and how sexuality fits into all of this.

What is called sex positive consists of myriad people in a hodge podge group:

• They are libertarians who I wouldn’t want to have much to do with because of their unbridled support of capitalism.
• They are socialists who have a critique of the whoredom in capitalism, so can hardly imagine why anyone would want to demonize sex workers or act as if selling themselves isn’t exactly what all of us do.
• They are union women who worked to organize sex workers. (Susie Bright’s, Carol Queen’s, Nina Hartley’s pasts)
• They are genderqueers. They are genderfuckers.
• They are lesbians treated like crap for their sexual identities. and practices.
• They were and are people in the trenches fighting the AIDS crisis.
• They are people who watched mostly gay men beaten, imprisoned, raided, etc over the AIDS crisis.
• They are people who fought back against the radical feminist charge that gay men were the worst example of Patriarchy and their sexual practices the epitome of what life would be like were men to completely rule the world.
• They are sex workers.
• I’m sure there are others who just don’t care about most of this stuff. If they’re out there, I haven’t met them in Bloglandia. I am looking for introductions, though.

In short, there is no coherent philosophy. There are maybe two decent anthologies on the topic and they are old. I used to want to dump the phrase, sex positive. But after rounds and rounds of more or less politely explaining what it was, I realized it didn’t matter. Anyone with a computer could type in the phrase and get a good overview of it at Wikipedia. There, they’d learn that it’s a huge mistake to homogenize and it doesn’t mean supporters like sex and opponents don’t like sex.

And yet, that “sex negative means not liking sex” bogie got raised over and fucking over again. I watched as it got raised at Andrea Dworkin’s memorial by grown — mature even — women who should fucking know better because they are academics and had plenty of time to know the terminology — IF they had one ounce of respect for anyone they actually argue with. Instead, they made stupid comments about how they like sex, so how could it be they weren’t also sex positive. *yawn* You can be pro-pornography all you want, it doesn’t follow that you are sex positive. You can be sex positive, it doesn’t mean you have an unbridled supporter of porn and sex work as they currently exist. Or, it means you really don’t care one way another about porn. You don’t watch it, you just don’t care. But you know that it’s important for others and that there are complicated issues involved and so you are not going to deem others less than human or not feminists or not women because they watch or create porn.

Or, it might mean that you support sex workers and you refuse to engage in anti-pornstitution feminism because UBUNTU rocks.

I’ll leave this angry, pissed off, incoherent rant with a paraphrase of Janet Halley on the topic in Split Decisions:

* Sex affirmative, meaning they endorse and accept human sexuality including its positives and negatives, its pleasures and dangers in *this* world, here and now.

* Shame affirmative, meaning that they accept that people derive pleasure from shame, and from the relinquishment of power in sex and that happens far more than we are willing to admit. (This is a lot more positive than it might seem. She is talking about how the act of sex is an act where our ego — our sense of unique, separate, boundaried self — dissolves in our pleasure.)

* Open to irrationalism, meaning they are open to paradox and uncertainty as sources of insight. Which is to say, there’s a refusal to be pinned down or pin others down in any sort of fixed, permanent way.

* Unhindered by the need to neatly categorize people and define their sexual and political roles by category.

* Politically engaged toward the left.