So, to address the original essay: I find it pretty hard to believe that anyone, even Naomi Wolf, seriously considers the main problem with veiling women in Muslim societies is that it impairs their sexuality. I thought it was pretty obvious that veiling is all about defining women in terms of their sexuality. It is because their sexuality is so all-encompassing that their entire lives must be lived "appropriate[ly] channeling" it. That, it seems to me, is the problem: it would be nice if their lives could be about something beyond sexuality.
Also, about Wolf's insipid adventure wearing a salwaar kameez to the market in Morocco -- I have a few salwaar kameez outfits, and wear them in the summer because they are comfortable. But it's basically a long tunic with baggy pants and a scarf. It's just not that different from the other summer clothes I wear as a person who sunburns easily. If Wolf got a novel sense of freedom from wearing a salwaar, I have to wonder what the hell she is sporting the rest of the time. Salwaar kameez is not niqab, burqa or chador. It's a fricking pantsuit. If you feel exploited in the clothes you choose, should you be writing about choice at all?
But the main issue that Wolf's essay and the subsequent discussion brought into focus for me is this: When something is used in the vast majority of instances as an integral element of a system that dehumanizes, exploits, deprives, and abuses women, celebrating it as a feminist "choice" is dangerous. Eliding the exceptional occasions when its adoption truly is a "choice" with the much larger system of oppression provides political cover for a host of abuses, and risks blaming the victims of that system for their own exploitation -- their "choice".
My discomfort with celebrating the veil has given me some insight into my trés un-chic discomfort with celebrating pornography and sex work. For every Jenna Jameson who controls her own career and becomes a millionaire, there are hundreds of girls and women worldwide kidnapped into sexual slavery. And as simplistic and old-fashioned as it is for me to equate pornography in the US to the larger sex trade, it is also simplistic to pretend that a few dozen Jenna Jamesons mean sex work is an empowering, feminist "choice". Mostly, it isn't.
And I'll confess that it's this context that gives me the creeps about some aspects of sex-positive feminism. If for the most part women's sexuality is still used to victimize them, to limit their choices in education, vocation, reproduction, and even movement, then it is, at the very least, short-sighted and self-centered to adopt the symbols of sexual exploitation as if they were merely another option for self-expression.
It is true that women should be free to express their sexuality and not be exploited for it; but is adopting the frank symbols of exploitation really the expression of our own sexuality? It makes me wonder if we will ever know what a real expression of our own sexuality might be. I think not in my lifetime.
I turned 13 in 1970, and as far as sexuality and feminism go, that was more or less the moment when being treated as a combination of support staff for, and spoils of, "the revolution" awoke social-activist women to the necessity for second-wave feminism. I ended up with a mix of leftover 60s pro-sexuality and a feminist belief that I should not allow myself to be treated any differently than a man. I wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper asking to get drafted so I could flee to Canada.
When I was a teenager, I trotted myself off to Planned Parenthood and got an IUD because I wanted to believe that women's sexuality would be the same as men's if it weren't for the risk of pregnancy. (This was before the AIDS epidemic, and the known STDs appeared to have been well-controlled by antibiotics. The Golden Age.) And then I really tried to match the sexual opportunism of my male friends. I felt an obligation to the ideals of both feminism and freedom to set aside squeamishness and romantic illusions.
What I found was that this left me vulnerable to other kinds of exploitation; despite having taken care of the risk of pregnancy, it wasn't that much fun to have sex just because it was offered. Being naked with another person was some kind of personal, and it turned out there were people I didn't want to get that personal with.
In college, I was exposed to the argument that heterosexuality is bad feminism because "it attempts to convert men one at a time." I objected, because I felt, and still do, that sexual attraction is not innately ideological. (What I said then was that it is about "who makes your socks roll up and down.") We have come to accept this argument about homosexuality; it doesn't seem like that big a stretch to extend it to heterosexuality.
But I will be the first to admit that conducting feminist heterosexuality in practice is not always easy. I appreciate the sexual jolt of the forbidden, of the secret, of the transgressive -- and I appreciate that as social conventions shift, what is forbidden, or secret, or transgressive becomes a moving target. Indeed I worry that the normalization and mainstreaming of so much sexual activity will take all the fun out of it.
But I also think, in choosing our playthings, we who are rich and well-fed and well-educated and well-protected have two competing responsibilities. One is, without doubt, that we should use our position to take greater risks, to play artistically at the edges of danger. I assume that's what Wolf was doing in her essay, and what my friends who write erotic fiction or perform in burlesque shows are doing -- raising the intellectual challenge that we consider what is sexy about these things and why. But that kind of artistic challenge to convention seems to me a relatively rarefied act, something that can lose its meaning, as well as its artistic edge, when it becomes commonplace. Worse, it can cause us to forget the larger world in which women's sexuality is still used against them -- and to forget that at any moment, that "larger world" may include the very place where we are standing.
For me, the responsibility that seems more appropriate to everyday use is the second one. In choosing our playthings, I think we have an obligation to be careful not to make toys of what are still first and foremost weapons. It will be time to treat the the veil (and other symbols of sexual repression) and prostitution (and other symbols of sexual exploitation) as toothless toys only when women are no longer their daily victims.
No comments:
Post a Comment