feminist critique

[piranha]

one in a long if casual series illuminating "why i am not a feminist, but an egalitarian humanist".

this was originally written as a comment in somebody else's LJ, but i decided not to post it because the thread was too old, and because i went off on a tangent. the post that started it regarded a feminist protest of violence against women and children as "duh, like who's in favour of violence these days other than psychos". then there was a reply saying that feminists are doing it because people need to have it pointed out, that everyone accepts violence by strangers as the real thing, but domestic abuse is somehow not viewed as just as bad. and that didn't ring true for me -- but i wonder whether i am now too far removed from the mainstream to have a good feel for what they think. i'm judging mostly by what i read on mainstream news and social commentary on blogs.

i've been straining my brain and i cannot think of any people nowadays openly claiming domestic abuse against women isn't a serious problem, anywhere i read. nobody (in any significant numbers that i can see) wants women be injured by their husbands [*]. i think some feminists might be misreading a reaction against broadening the term "violence" as a denial that abuse happens. i myself do make a distinction between "violence" and "force" (and lots of acquaintance rape uses force, IMO, not violence), but i think either is inappropriate in a supposedly loving relationship; i don't make the distinction in order to trivialize acquaintance rape -- i think it is by far a more serious problem than stranger rape. i think that such protests are done simply because domestic abuse keeps happening. (i'll keep my thoughts about their efficacy for myself just now so this doesn't become about that.) i don't know a single person who thinks domestic abuse is ok, not even a little bit (excepting self-defense).

what i can think of however, is plenty of people who're upset at violence against women, who are outraged at pedophilia -- but they think spanking is ok, and is somehow a totally different thing, not violence at all, not even inappropriate force. and frankly, i don't see feminists at large actually having this on their agenda -- when they do seem to care about children as a matter of policy, it's all about pedophilia as well, and the incredibly common woman-on-child violence is a dirty little secret that is swept under the rug. google some time for hits about spanking and feminism, and you'll find vastly more hits about BDSM and its defense, together with conservative rants against all of what allegedly destroys the family (where feminism and anti-spanking movements are named separately), than you find feminist critique of spanking. i consider feminism's silence on the issue of spanking to be particularly suspicious, since it doesn't happen to fit well with the idea that men are the aggressors and women the victims.

maybe feminism shouldn't be about children but just about women; that'd be sort of ok by me -- though i find some issues hard to separate, especially in the areas of sexual abuse, and well, the battle of equality starts long before the age of majority. but then take children off the signs that purport to be against violence. it's long struck me as a token effort, and i dislike tokenism, especially when it uses children.

i agree that it seems harder for people to empathize with domestic than with stranger violence. i see it in myself; i do empathize just as much initially (if not more; i find abuse by loved ones so much more destructive than abuse by strangers), but i have difficulties maintaining that empathy when somebody stays in an abusive situation (assuming no death threats are involved), when somebody falls more than once for the abject apology route after the abuse, when somebody says "but i love him!". if anything, i think feminism needs to support those women more, because they obviously still have very bad tapes running in their heads with "stand by your man" as the soundtrack, and some fundamentally horribly damaging ideas about what love is.

and i wonder how much spanking has to answer for regarding those tapes, how much it is responsible for bad boundaries, and how much it has to do with raising men who become abusers. how can this possibly not be a feminist concern? at least be on the table for discussion?

[*] upon rereading i remembered that i've read sean connery is purported to have said that some women need slapping around. but upon googling this i see that that's not what he said. and while what he did say is questionable, i'd really like to see the full context for it before i count it as evidence.

Comments

[ailbhe]

Just a thought - have you googled for feminism and smacking, rather than spanking? Because I don't think the word spanking is used much in that kind of discussion in the UK or Ireland, but I haven't checked.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, i googled for all the alternative terms i could think of, and while there are of course some relevant hits (especially in places where there's pending legislation, such as in ontario and NZ), it's dead quiet compared to BDSM. and when i see it discussed on blogs, there is always an immediate backlash by defenders of "discipline" who appear to consider themselves feminists.

it amazes me.

[ailbhe]

Mm. I talked once about smacking in my LJ and was backlashesd so hard I still have welts.

But I've still never had to smack Linnea, and though Rob did once, he didn't *need* to and he didn't think it was justified. It was just instinctive to him, because, well, his parents did it.

I can't imagine "having to" smack her now, since she's capable of understanding "No! Not safe!" and so on. I can see times when it would, briefly, be easier.

But seeing Rob instinctively swipe at her has really brought home how insidious smacking is. (She was biting him very hard. Reaction to smack? Bite much, much harder. Hah! Come and see the cycle of violence inherent in the system).

Feminism and me

[crazed-lynn.livejournal.com]

I am no longer affiliated with any organizations that claim they are feminist groups precisely because they paint everything the same dark color and with the same broad brush.

I am still using the term "feminism" from time to time to describe myself.

But I am not interested in creating instittutions design to protect women from abuse or violence. Where the law hasn't caught up to the notion that assault is assault and battery is battery reguardles ot sex, sexual expression or gender orientation, I still protest the inequity.

But I am not a feminist in order to make things better for women. I have never been a feminist for that reason. I am a feminist to make things better for men. Inequality based on sex traps everyone. Just as inquality based on sexual orientation and gender expression.

I am not interested in being the protector of women and children. I resent it strongly when some women expects me to be her champion especially if I don't know her.

My brand of feminism is pretty old school. I want women to be empowered and weaned from the social "need for men." I am disheartened, though.

I see it at Rocky Horror all the time. It is the rare young women who acts on her own behalf when the going gets tough. There is an expectation of chivalry (even if it's a mutated form) in all the teenagers I know.

Feminism as a movement seems to have lost its mind and, therefore, its direction. And women are paying for it (in the US) with the the newest battles against woman's basic right to determine her own destiny.

My brand of radical feminism isn't tolerated in the feminist communities anymore. :)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Much of this is the same as my outlook. I can't count the times I have said or written that as long as we define "violence" as something men do to women, we have no hope of stopping it, because we haven't identified the problem.

I'm still waiting to hear any feminist who says that the very first time a man hits a woman, she should leave him, also say that the very first time a woman hits her child, the child should be taken away. (I'm not arguing that the woman shouldn't leave, nor that she should, just that there's an inconsistency here.)

[ailbhe]

Well, it's pretty much my take on it - the parties should immediately be seperated until it's figured out what the hell happened and why.

That's not to say that a legal seperation procedure should take place, but it's certainly a huge red flag to me that something's wrong.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

completely with you on defining violence. there's a book out i've had on my wishlist for a while, Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse by Linda Mills. have you read that by any chance? it sounds like it is dealing with this issue outside of the currently popular box.

the power imbalance between an adult and a child is so much larger than that between a grown man and a grown woman, and yet i see no acknowledgment of that. if a man hits a woman at all, regardless of the level of resulting inhury, feminists are screaming about it (generally with good cause, mind you; i am deeply opposed to violence other than for self-defense). but a woman can hit a small child, and that's apparently not worth at least questioning unless the injury is significant -- rashes and welts do not count. nevermind what it does psychologically to a child who is much more dependant on zir caregivers than any women is on a man, to have that caregiver act violently towards zir.

it boggles my mind that this isn't seriously examined.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I think there are at least two relevant differences.

Firstly, children have a strong emotional dependence on their parents which is a normal part of healthy childhood development. Because of that, removing the child from the care of the parents - even abusive parents - is likely to cause adverse psychological consequences which have to be weighed against the psychological and physical benefits of ensuring the abuse does not recur. An emotional dependence of the same strength between domestic partners does sometimes happen, but it is not healthy, and might indeed even be an additional reason for recommending that the woman leave.

Secondly, the contrast between the words "removing" and "recommending" in that paragraph is significant. Barring conduct on her partner's part which is so extreme as to result in imprisonment, a woman has a choice about whether or not to leave her partner, and the act of exercising that choice can be therapeutic in itself. Children in most cases have no such choice, and the trauma of being taken from their family against their will can exacerbate the harm caused by the abuse.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I won't argue with your essential points, but this bit caught my eye:

i've been straining my brain and i cannot think of any people nowadays openly claiming domestic abuse against women isn't a serious problem, anywhere i read.

I don't read this position much of anywhere, but I see it not infrequently in the blue-collar town where I live. I overhear it at bars, in supermarket checkout lines; I've heard the local "Christian" radio station broadcast entire discussions claiming domestic abuse is a trumped-up liberal myth, and that women who know their place don't have to worry about it, and isn't it a shame that men get accused of such terrible things. And the "she asked for it" meme is still alive and well in the letters to the editor of our local newspaper, any time some guy gets hauled up on charges of bashing on women.

And yes, it seems to follow with child abuse, too. I hear a lot more outrage about "the system tearing families apart" when physical/sexual abuse cases come up than I do at the people who commit the abuse.

This is not some outpost in (fill-in-the-stereotypically-redneck-locale of your choice). It's a medium-sized, working-class town in "progressive" Western Oregon.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, i had that possibility at the back of my mind, but didn't want to be blatantly classist on a hunch. i have become much more insulated from all of mainstream, including blue collar circles now that i no longer volunteer anywhere, or work outside of the home business; my time spent in supermarket checkout lanes is too short to overhear much, and what i do overhear is just never of this kind. the local newspaper has no such letters. i don't listen to christian or country radio stations. i don't go to bars. but this is very much a blue collar town, and those of my acquaintances who work in blue collar jobs; my landlord, their friends, their kids and kids' friends, our boat builder, and his hires don't hold those attitudes. i wouldn't claim that means no canadians hold them, however, just that those canadians who do don't surface on my radar. it could be, though, that it is overall a less acceptable attitude to have in canada than in the US; that wouldn't surprise me. canada is by no means free from sexism, and "she asked for it" still appears in discussions about college girls who get drunk at frat parties, but for example, i've never ever heard the kind of christian radio station up here that i heard down there. maybe it exists in alberta?

ignoring the mainstream is really good for my blood pressure, but the disadvantage is that i don't have a finger on its pulse, if that pulse doesn't make itself somehow felt on the internet.

these people from whom you hear this sort of crap, are they at all likely to be woken up by a feminist protest? i strongly suspect they're prejudiced against all things feminist anyway, and write such things off as simply more male-bashing.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I imagine your suspicions are correct wrt the futility of feminist arguments to that mind-set. I just thought it important to offer some counter-examples to the appealing idea that such attitudes are things of the past.

I'm actually pretty much OK with living among my working-class neighbors. We mostly talk about things like lawn care and the weather, and avoid politics. Sometimes we surprise each other. And once in a great while, I've been able to open someone's eyes to thinking about an issue like domestic abuse, or queer rights, in a way they hadn't thought about it before. Usually not when I'm *trying* to make a point, but by saying something in passing that causes them to ask questions, and then answering them in a friendly way.

I do call myself a feminist, proudly, but I don't presume to suggest how anyone else should self-identify.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*nod*. i didn't mean to imply that i thought this was comfortably a thing of the past -- obviously domestic violence is by no means past. just that ... hm. how to express this vague thought best ... that we're past the mass-consciousness raising stage of it, and that there are issues regarding domestic violence that are more important to work on now, and that people who walk around with signs protesting violence against women and children are preaching to the choir.

we do talk a fair bit of politics, my blue collar acquaintances and i, though it does come second to gardening (and woodworking :). political discussions aren't something to be avoided, because we often agree -- here a lot of the working class people vote NDP, which is to the left of the federal liberals. i think it's the farmers who are more likely to be socially conservative, and i have no connection there.

This turned out long...

[saluqi.livejournal.com]

Re mainstream culture: I think there are more references to smacking wives and girlfriends around in music lyrics. The most obvious ones I can think of off the top of my head are the Prodigy's "Smack my bitch up" (and to be fair, the resulting brou-hahaha with the Beastie Boys) and Eminem rapping about cutting up his ex-wife.

Recently here a rugby league player punched a woman in the face at a service station and broke her nose. He was banned for life and received a fairly heavy periodic detention penalty. After a string of PR disasters with gang rapes and whatnot, the League establishment is trying to come to grips with the problem of players attitudes to women and said as much. Most commentry I heard in the office and in the media was about it being worse to punch a 19 y/o girl, but at least the key message was "this time you don't get away with it". But they still have cheerleaders and women's rugby is considered a joke by many. To me that encapsulates a number of angles of the problem of women, equality and violence, especially as he is being seen in some quarters as the "whipping boy" for the issue.

There is also the option that people, including feminists, genuinely have a blind spot. I had one about the spanking issue until you just mentioned it. Not a wilful one, I just stupidly had not thought of it, although it seems obvious now.

In the end for me it comes down to a judgement about whether or not being aligned with a progressive movement is going to fix more than it damages. And my view on that certainly can change with time (the gay one is in flux at the moment, I think I have more in common politically with deliberately unmarried hets than my queer peers who want to get married)

Re: This turned out long...

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

ah yes, the violent music lyrics, especially in rap and hiphop. i totally spaced on those, thanks for reminding me. being as i am a dead loss to songwriters' efforts because i don't listen to lyrics that's maybe not surprising, but i did read about the controversies.

certain sports and domestic violence / sexual abuse seem to go well together too, alas, yeah. hockey players and rape, hockey coaches and pedophilia are pretty well known issues here. but it's definitely not seen as ok (anymore). it's not entirely clear to me whether it was ever actually seen as ok, just that the shamefulness of talking about it happening to you was so great that people would simply not do that, and so it all happened underground, with few people shining a light into the dark corners.

it comes down to a judgement about whether or not being aligned with a progressive movement is going to fix more than it damages

that's a useful attitude. i am just not a good joiner to start with, and find it easier to align or distance myself on individual points, rather than a whole agenda.

[snippy]

I never spanked or hit my kids, and they managed to stay out of serious trouble. Never drank poison, or ran into the street, and so forth. Learned not to touch my favorite art, to look with your eyes at the museum (not with your hands), to use a knife and fork and napkin at table.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

to look with your eyes at the museum (not with your hands)

*heh*. oh man. this is SO HARD for me! and hands-on exhibits which are usually designed for kids are what tends to draw me like a magnet in any museum.

but yes. i've by now seen many parents who manage entirely without spanking, and whose children are not spoiled in the least, but have instead grown up to be perfectly fine teens and adults. with less trauma, and less notion that might makes right, and that violence is an acceptable way to solve problems between individuals -- it's all good. and the arguments by spankers that they have no alternative lest they spoil the child or let zir get run over in traffic are unimaginative at best, specious rationalization at worst.

[redbird]

If you don't know anyone who thinks it's okay for men to use force to control their wives and children, that's probably at least in part because social groups are self-selecting.

I don't know anyone personally who argues that whites are superior to non-whites and should get first shot at jobs and places in good schools, or who advocates segretation of residential neighborhoods and keeping blacks out of trade unions. That doesn't mean such people no longer exist, that discrimination no longer happens, or even that thugs never firebomb homes sold to black families in previously all-white neighborhoods.

I see a lot of very casual advocacy of spanking online, usually of the template "I saw a parent [usually but not always a mother] in a public place with a rowdy or disobedient child(ren). The child should have been immediately spanked and taken home." I have no way of knowing what percentage of the people saying these things have children themselves, what percentage of them were spanked when they were children, nor yet how seriously they mean it. But there's plenty of "children who behave inappropriately should be spanked" (for widely varying values of "inappropriately," and for values of "chidren" ranging from infants up to early teens).

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

when i said "i don't know anyone" i wasn't talking about my social circle; i know that is extremely selective, more so than most probably. sorry, the "know" was imprecise and probably misleading.

i was talking about not encountering anyone who thinks male-on-female violence is ok. i do encounter racist and sexist people all the time (the net is full of them), so it's not like i live entirely on cloud nine.

i also don't mean to imply that me not knowing any means they don't exist -- *boggle*. why would you even think that? shouldn't you know me better by now? maybe not. i was wondering just whom such a protest was designed to wake up, and whether it was likely that it could, because those people seem to not exactly be hip to college protests.

[redbird]

I wasn't sure what you meant by "don't know anyone," and thinking also that people with opinions that they consider unpopular may be more likely to express them privately, to people they consider friends, than in googleable contexts.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yes, that's definitely much more likely.

hey, at least those opinions are unpopular now. that's progress.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I have to say that I see spanking children as a completely separate issue from abusive relationships between adults. There are a few parents who can actually do a good job raising their kids without ever spanking them, but I think that the message that you must never strike a child leads to more cases of badly raised children than sensible use of spanking ever did in the days before anyone questioned whether it was a bad idea.

I was spanked as a child. Very rarely, but often enough that I knew I could be spanked, and knowing that I could be spanked backed up my parents' and teachers' authority. I am very respectful of rules and authority -- probably excessively so -- and I probably wouldn't have turned out that way if a bunch of people had told my mother she was committing child abuse if she ever spanked me. But I grew up into an amazingly non-violent adult. I have never deliberately hit another person since I was in grade school. I'm not sure I'd be capable of it, even in a situation where my intellect told me I should do it.

Sensible use of spanking as a parental tool is very different from beating your kids all the time. I have no truck with child abuse; parents who abuse their kids should have them taken away and not get them back. But I do not accept the idea that any spanking is abuse.

I'm posting on a borrowed computer, so please don't melt it with the flames.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

I think that the message that you must never strike a child leads to more cases of badly raised children than sensible use of spanking ever did in the days before anyone questioned whether it was a bad idea.

no flames. just -- try to think outside the box with which you grew up. i am not trying to condemn your mother as a child abuser. i claim that hitting another human in any cause other than self-defense is abusive in its meaning of "misuse causing harm" -- i once got so drunk that i fell down; i was abusing alcohol. it doesn't make me into an alcoholic -- that would require an overall pattern. i have empathy for parents -- i took care of my younger brothers for several years largely on my own, and i am pretty aware of how difficult it is to raise children. i don't want to condemn, i want people to be better educated, to have better options.

and i strongly believe people must think much harder about the things they do to children if we are to stop the cycle of violence in which we are mired.

how about some evidence about what you said above? first off, the vast majority of parents still hit their children, so how do "badly raised" children (how is that defined, and who measures it, and how -- cites?) mean anything? would you concede an argument that states the worst-raised children are those who turn criminal? have you had a look at the statistics for their childhoods and how they were treated? do that some time. it might be an eye opener.

there is oodles of research about the harmful effects of hitting children, your anecdotal evidence notwithstanding (in fact it doesn't necessarily withstand it at all, as you yourself note; yeah, maybe you have too much of a respect for authority). we're also not talking about simplistic A->B causation. of course not every spanked child turns into a violent offender. some of us turn rather strongly away from violence. i don't hit people in large part because i hated being hit. but i can tell you in detail what hitting taught me, and it wasn't anything that my parents actually wanted to teach me. it was ineffectual for those things. me, i like to use the right tool for the job, not a jury-rigged one. i'm all about elegance as a programmer too. :)

thirdly, abuse is a continuum, not an on/off switch. breaking your child's bones is worse than causing bruising is worse than raising welts. but we don't cotton to hitting at all from other adults anymore; slave whipping went out of fashion a while ago -- should i give you a good slap to the face if you behave truculently? it won't even hurt you much; it'll just get your attention. if that's not ok with you, then ask yourself why it is ok for a 150 lb adult to hit a 30 lb child.

the fact that so many parents don't know any better is a sorry excuse, not a rational justification. they should learn better parenting! why does anyone assume one sucks in those capabilities automatically? we get training for any other difficult thing we do, but oh, parenting, that's all done the "natural" way. how silly is that? human society isn't about what's natural. if it were, we'd still be hitting each other over the head with stone axes and drag women, the spoils of battle, to our caves by their matted hair.

do you hit your dog? i doubt it. i've never hit mine. why not? because it isn't necessary. surely if you can make your authority understood to an animal who doesn't even have language, people can learn to do so towards a human child. and since there are other parents who can do it, why not learn from them how? that would seem to me to be the sensible approach.

spanking is quick, easy, requires no thinking, and parents can still get away with it while society slowly wakes up to how garbage in produces garbage out. there is no good reason to do it.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I don't have anything to cite; I don't read social science literature for fun, and I'm very poor at literature research. However, I don't think we should need a large body of scientific papers to realize that people who hit their kids a lot are doing something wrong. Is there actual science that claims to compare the outcomes of parenting where spanking is used very rarely, but the family understands that it is an option in some cases, to parenting where it is genuinely never used?

I don't hit my dogs, but I will, under certain circumstances, dominate them physically (flip them over on their back and growl in their face), and I'll treat them roughly if I have to to break up a fight. It's not a moral question; hitting dogs doesn't *work*, and it creates psychological problems because the dog doesn't get why he's being hit.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

Is there actual science that claims to compare the outcomes of parenting where spanking is used very rarely, but the family understands that it is an option in some cases, to parenting where it is genuinely never used?


i don't know, but i doubt it. and i think there is no incentive to study that, since what's rarely used is likely not as influential anyway (unless it also happens to be hugely traumatizing, which a slap on the butt doesn't qualify as).

but while we shouldn't need a large body of scientific evidence that people who hit their kids a lot are doing something wrong, what evidence we do have is apparently far from enough. because people who spank their kids a lot are common, and remain common in the face of evidence that says "this is not effective", nevermind "this is ethically questionable". while pubic attitudes about hitting other adults have changed, they've got a much longer way to go when it comes to children.

hitting dogs doesn't work in the same way hitting young children doesn't work, but you will find lots of people who defend either with the same arguments.

[firecat]

I think it's kind of sad when "feminism" and "egalitarian humanism" are set up as an either/or choice. I used to say that, but now I claim both labels.

I am not happy when some feminists focus on things done to women to the exclusion of the same things being done to other people, but (a) I don't think such a focus is inherent to feminism and (b) I think that in some areas women are still discriminated against in specific ways and we need to keep working on that.

On the feminist blog carnivals I have read about the situation of women in countries other than European and US/Canada, and in some of those countries it does appear (if these blogs are accurate) that a lot of people think domestic abuse of women and children is OK.

That still doesn't make a protest against violence against women in the US or Canada the most useful thing one can do with one's activism energy, though.

And if feminists are suppressing discussion of child abuse because it's perpetrated by women, that's a problem worth addressing.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i don't think it's an either/or choice per se. for me personally, years of trying to work within feminism have left me disillusioned and cranky, and i just don't care to associate with the movement anymore. while i've not moved one inch from the "radical notion that women are people", i really, really, really couldn't abide 3 things anymore: the man hatred, the unwillingness to look closely at women's own transgressions as part of the problem, and the anti-TG sentiments, and i now prefer a label that encompasses women's rights instead of focussing solely on them. i know, those things are not universal, and are not part of any reasonable definition of feminism, but they're just too prevalent for me.

*nod* as to the domestic violence situation in other countries. definitely a problem. but i look much, much closer to home nowadays, working from my roots. because if i can't solve violence problems in my community, i can't possibly solve them in locales where i don't even understand the dynamics because i am a stranger.

[firecat]

the man hatred, the unwillingness to look closely at women's own transgressions as part of the problem, and the anti-TG sentiments

I think the first and last are much less prevalent than they used to be, or at least there are huge pockets of feminism that don't truck with them and those are the pockets I primarily have contact with. My primary route into feminism these days is via Wiscon. Maybe Wiscon is unusual in that although it calls itself a feminist science fiction convention it's really a feminist class-conscious race-conscious TG-conscious size-conscious science fiction convention. (Even if it does break out into ugly arguments about cultural appropriation and race sometimes.)

I haven't seen a whole lot of the second within feminism, though.

I agree with working for change at home. I also think it's good to stay aware of what's going on elsewhere. The bloggers about domestic violence in other countries that I respect a lot are natives of those countries or are at least living there if they aren't natives.

[saluqi.livejournal.com]

My Australian experience pretty much aligns with this.

One thing working in a straight job for the last ten years has demonstrated to me tho' is that women's attitudes are a big part of what keeps sexism running the way it does. Few of those female co-workers would self-describe as feminist tho', in fact they are more likely to subscribe to notions of equal access without admitting a context of systemic discrimination.

Recently on feminist_sex there was a discussion about humbled_females, specifically that a valorisation of traditional gender roles seems to be happening in the BDSM community absent a context of what things were (are) really like for sexually subjugated women.

I think the issue is less pointy and obvious in vanilla circles, but it is still there in all sorts of ways (taking a man's name at marriage for example, or not making regular contributions to housework a condition of a relationship). And women are a big part of why it's still there - people must find some aspects of sexism rewarding on some level.

re: valorisation w/o original context

[eagle]

specifically that a valorisation of traditional gender roles seems to be happening in the BDSM community absent a context of what things were (are) really like for sexually subjugated women.

Oh, yeah. But this is also par for the course, not just in BDSM but also in fantasy in general, so I'm not surprised that people play with it. BDSM in particular can be about playing with the forbidden and exploring the erotic attraction of taboos. Not just traditional gender roles, but also the valorisation of slavery absent any context of what slavery was really like.

And even in the broader world, consider the rampant valorisation of medievalism, feudalism, and similar social structures in the fat fantasy novel genre. I'm stepping out on a limb a bit here with a generalization, but it's my impression that many of people's fantasies and much of people's fantasy life involves picking up on pieces out of context and enjoying the pieces they like without the surrounding context and drawbacks that in real life would naturally follow. BDSM certainly seems to me to be build strongly around this concept.

(And, as a result, discussion of it can be strange because in order to dive into that aspect of BDSM, one has to step outside the fantasy, since the discussion from within the constructed fantasy sounds completely different than the discussion outside of that fantasy. I've seen conversations about BDSM go horribly haywire just because one person was presuming the discussion was happening outside of the fantasy context and the other person was unwilling to meet them there.)

Re: valorisation w/o original context

[saluqi.livejournal.com]

The problem I have with it is not the playing, but the valorisation, especially when coupled with people who like to theorise the world into their bedroom.

That is different to the business of making a little walled garden for oneself and one's partner where one's demons can play without disturbing others.

For me it's a boundary issue as much as anything else. And so my reaction is "I understand that's a nice fantasy for some people, but I'd prefer not to live in that kind of world, thanks, so leave me out of it".

Another angle ganked from a recent discussion: It wasn't this fantasy time when women got consensually taken by fantastically hot, dominant men. It was a time of marital rape and "wifely duty".

I'm interested in unpacking the business of being inside or outside the fantasy when discussing it, but I'm also conscious that the fishie probably doesn't want BDSM geeking in zir journal. In any case, I've just friended your journal's feed, I'm Morag from alt.poly.

Re: valorisation w/o original context

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

no time to write much right now (i have torx, and i must screw!), but i don't mind y'all geeking about BDSM here. it all helps to desensitize me. :)

and yeah, i don't have a problem with the playing at all, but the 24/7 stuff that so happens to look just like pre-enlightenment marriage, that makes me wonder. especially since i get the impression that it's overwhelmingly copy-cat gender-stereotyped as well -- i'd probably be less suspicious if a majority of the "masters" were female.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i think wiscon sounds like a shining exception, but i also admit to not having tried much again after originally trying quite a bit to find a more fitting place for myself within feminism here in noram (i fit just fine in europe when i first became a feminist). feminism itself in the wake of dworkin and mckinnon wasn't going in my direction. and then i got shell-shocked by people like the michigan womyn's music festival supporters and other groups that, to me, simply perpetuate discrimination. i just got tired of it all.

[firecat]

Yeah. I don't know if I try to find a place for myself so much as speak my mind, and that includes speaking against Dworkin/McKinnon attitudes insofar as they are anti-all-heterosex-and-all-porn, and against MWMF anti-trans attitudes.