Sexuality, feminism, and ambivalence

At the end of last month, a news item reawakened my ongoing ambivalence about feminism and sexuality.

Salon's Broadsheet has a good summary of the current event, which basically began with Naomi Wolf's op-ed for the Sydney Morning Herald, "Behind the veil lives a thriving Muslim sexuality", followed by Phyllis Chesler's spirited rejoinder "The Burqa: Ultimate Feminist Choice?" followed by about 500 reader comments, and David Horowitz and several conservative pundits piling on.

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.

Scary thoughts on race

Frank Rich, as always a bit too honest for comfort, today holds forth on what he's calling "racial and nativist panic" among the likes of Brit Hume, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and William Kristol, in reaction to the demographic and political fact that "an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for".
The piece is, as usual, insightful, well-reasoned, and sharply written. And it made me pause for a moment to realize that I don't really have a clue which aspects of my life are made possible entirely by what sociology departments used to call "white privilege". That's the problem with privilege; you get to take it for granted. It's hard enough to cope with age and injury, the way those things disrupt what I thought was just the way the world worked and always would. It's hard enough to cope with the changes in my profession, and the devaluation of some of my best skills. I hadn't sat down lately and thought about what happens when the issue isn't, "how fair am I to ethnic minorities?" but, "how fairly can I be expected to be treated when I am the ethnic minority?"
My one experience in this role, being among the 10% of white kids bused into the city's one all-black elementary school in fifth grade, in 1968, to meet integration quotas, was not pleasant: it included being beaten up on the playground, having my lunchbox stolen, being mocked for my facial asymmetry, and once getting punched into my desk in math class by a classmate who thought I was laughing at him.
It also included having to go back to school after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, dressed irremediably in my white skin. I wished the weather would stay cold so I could keep wearing mittens and a hat, to cover my face and hands and hair, and maybe not be a target from quite so far away. It gave me the revelation that this was probably something like what my black classmates felt every time they left their neighborhood and set foot in the rest of the city; 15 years later, it allowed me to respect the way my husband went on alert in some parts of Boston. In situations with the potential for racism to turn violent, you are the race you look like from 50 feet away.
One inherent benefit of fairness as a system is that it offers the hope of decent treatment when you are not the one in power. Even if you lack empathy, at some point self-interest ought to suggest at least considering what happens when the table is turned. But I guess if you have enough privilege to draw on, you can pretend there isn't even a table. Anyway, Brit, Rush, Newt, Bill, et al should calm down. They'll be dead before they have to give up very much.
But Rich's essay also included an historical reference that grabbed me.

"The escalating white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist panic."

When I was in pop culture school I did a bunch of research on the way panics about drug abuse coincided with nativist and racist panics. The temperance movement was, to some extent, a reaction to wine-drinking Southern European immigration; anti-Chinese and anti-black sentiments were exploited in support of the Harrison Act; later rounds of anti-drug legislation parallel waves of black American relocation to Northern cities. There's some kind of panic that connects drug use with demographic change; and the measures introduced in an attempt to control drug use and trafficking also get used to control non-majority populations. It is not entirely a coincidence that the US currently has the highest incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world, nor that our prison population quadrupled since the 1980s as a result of mandatory sentencing enacted as part of the "war on drugs"; nor, finally, that some 70 percent of those imprisoned are "non-white"--including 10% of black males in the United States between the ages of 25 and 29.
So I'm thinking there's one thing that Rich got wrong. His conclusion was this:

The one lesson that everyone took away from the latest “national conversation about race” is the same one we’ve taken away from every other “national conversation” in the past couple of years. America has not transcended race. America is not postracial. So we can all say that again. But it must also be said that we’re just at the start of what may be a 30-year struggle. Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own.

But it looks like a certain segment of the white establishment has been working on its response for 30 years already. And maybe it's time conclude that this is not the path that will keep us safe on the playground in 2042.