WHAT YOU SEE & WHAT YOU GET

During the course of working in customer services I have been sent on a number of courses by employers. Although most of them have just dealt with the matter of how to please customers (subservience), a couple of them have been useful to me and I’m going to recount a scenario from one of them.

The workshop leader asked us to discuss how a person makes their status known to others. She then took four of the participants aside, gave them each a role and instructed them to play out a given scenario but not before randomly according them each a status (ranging from high to low) of which only each individual was aware.  The rest of us had to rank each other participants according to status and not one of us got it wrong.

What this showed me is that we bring ‘hierarchies’ to our interactions with others without such hierarchies ever being agreed upon, spoken about openly or even acknowledged. 

At times, previously understood dominance/submission within relationships is brought to the fore in such a way as to render it undeniable. Undeniable but, still, unspeakable. The illicitness of discussing hierarchy (where there is supposed to be none) keeps this hierarchy in place or destroys the relationships built upon it.

So, I’ve had these thoughts about power dynamics between women in grass-roots activist groups and I remembered a feminist essay in Amy’s Feminist Reprise archive. ‘The tyranny of structurelessness’ by Joreen Freeman really helped me make sense of many of my experiences of working in groups and I do recommend reading it. She ends with a set of ‘principles we can keep in mind that are essential to democratic structuring’:

1. Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. Letting people assume jobs or tasks by default only means they are not dependably done. If people are selected to do a task, preferably after expressing an interest or willingness to do it, they have made a commitment which cannot easily be ignored.
2. Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to all those who selected them. This is how the group has control over people in positions of authority. Individuals may exercise power, but it is the group that has the ultimate say over how the power is exercised.
3. Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with many others in the process of exercising it. It also gives many people an opportunity to have responsibility for specific tasks and thereby to learn specific skills.
4. Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person’s “property” and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have time to learn her job well and acquire a sense of satisfaction of doing a good job.
5. Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group, or giving them hard work because they are disliked, serves neither the group nor the person in the long run. Ability, interest and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of “apprenticeship” programme rather than the “sink or swim” method. Having a responsibility one can’t handle well is demoralising. Conversely, being blackballed from what one can do well does not encourage one to develop one’s skills. Women have been punished for being competent throughout most of human history–the movement does not need to repeat this process.
6. Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one’s power. When an informal network spreads new ideas and information among themselves outside the group, they are already engaged in the process of forming an opinion–without the group participating. The more one knows about how things work, the more politically effective one can be.
7. Equal access to resources needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible, but should be striven for. A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press or a darkroom owned by a husband) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources. Members’ skills and information can be equally available only when members are willing to teach what they know to others.

from ‘The tyranny of structurelessness’ by Joreen Freeman
 

‘TRANSPHOBIA’: THE NEW ‘MAN-HATING’

What would you measure if you were to somehow quantify women’s inequality? This is an important question to me because it only occured to me recently that I took for granted that we are progressing towards equality. Even the so called backlash against feminism is something I considered part of this progress (two steps forward, one step back).

What I hadn’t considered until I read Dale Spender’s ‘Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them’ is that patriarchy can accommodate whatever ‘advances’ women make; that new and different ways of exerting power over women are forever replacing old ones. My thoughts on this are that men’s control over women is becoming increasingly invasive and relies increasingly on women’s cooperation.

We cooperate when we don’t question our roles as women (gender). We do not question roles that are different from those of men as long as we believe that we are different (gender is innate). Evidence for this innate and gendered difference is immaterial because it is, after all, not being questioned. Evidence is irrelevant to the medical and legal establishments and professionals acting on the self-diagnosis of male and female patients claiming to possess, respectively, a female or male gender, when they perform so called sex re-assignment.

The medicalisation of gender as an endogenous condition is bad news for women because gender is the expression of our oppression as female persons. Those of us who understand the implications of gender being treated as a medical condition have a few things to say about how this development both justifies and maintains, if not strenghtens, male rule. Predictably, we are called haters. I would not expect anything less when the only acceptable way for women to exist is in relation to men - by submitting to men, seeing their reality ours and denying our own.

LADYFEST NEWCASTLE PORNOGRAPHY DEBATE 2006

Below are some concrete examples of arguments put forward by women defending pornography. I’ve posted, below, some audio clips and transcripts from a debate that took place during a Ladyfest event in Newcastle, UK, 2006. All the audios and transcripts are of the speeches made by Avedon Carol of ‘Feminists Against Censorhip’ (FAC). Apart from the 7 interruptions made by Carol during the anti-pornography representative’s speeches, this account comprises Carol’s contribution in its entirety.

Carol argued in favour of the motion ‘Can feminists enjoy pornography?’ and those arguments speak for themselves - both with regard to their validity and why they are being made. Anyone prepared to actively listen and think critically about the claims Carol makes will become aware of the incongruity between those claims and what she actually says about herself, her relationship to women, how she feels about pornography and why she defends it. Her speech is a good illustration of male-dominant attitudes and the rationalisations that are employed to not only defend such attitudes but label them as ‘feminist’.

IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING

It goes without saying that most of what we say and write has been said and written before, and has been said and written better. Even this fact, has been expressed before - and expressed better. The point of speaking with and listening to women is not to make never-before-made discoveries or to put into words what has, until now, not ever been said.

When I read one of Marilyn Frye’s essays in ‘The Politics of Reality’† one thing really stuck with me. She concluded at the end of a beautiful essay that a lesbian is a woman that sees other women. I say it to myself and I test it in different contexts. It is always true. I think there is necessarily a difference between how we communicate with someone we do not see - someone who doesn’t exist (women do not exist) - and someone who is - being in her own right. To me, what that means is that the point of speaking with and listening to each other is to wake up, wake up together and wake up to each other. Part of this waking up is about really becoming aware of other women for who they are. For that reason I think that communication is an end in and of itself. For the same reason, it is difficult and cannot be anything other than difficult.

† It’s on loan to a friend so I don’t know the name of the essay.

SISTER SOLIDARITY

This is a sort of mantra for me. It’s something I say to myself as a reminder that all women are women and, as women, are all subjected to sexism; that all divisions between women are created and maintained, by and for men; and that none of the compromises women make in order to survive under patriarchy protect them from male violence.

IN HERE

I don’t go outside and that has a lot to do with men being outside. I stay indoors for days on end. The more time that passes the less I feel able to act, the more powerless I feel and the more unbearable life, as it is, becomes. This is what is called depression: the cheerlessness that male physicians tell me is keeping me from finding married bliss and that they prescribe medication for. I try to stay safe by sleeping and avoiding consciousness. I lay in the bath, asleep, several times and several hours a day. The water is too hot. I raise my legs above the water, towards my head, and rest them on the sides of the bath. He is there.  I am aware of having and exposing an in between my legs - I am inviting rape. In a locked bathroom, inside a locked apartment, inside a locked building, men are there.

I feel homesick for a place where men are not. But then, I know that their ever being present and that their invading me at any and every level is significant; that confrontation is the answer; that separatism must not be about respite but about resistance, not about still calm but about conflict. Still, I find it so hard to break through the avoidance and find the strength to act.

FEMINISM AS SELF-ACTUALISATION

By self-actualisation I refer to the idea of persons striving to achieve their potential (once, of course, their other, and more ‘basic’ needs, are met). Self-actualisation presumes an ideal self - the one striven for. For example, to realise ones potential is to achieve and excercise the finest of human qualities: intellect, creativity, reason, moral judgement etc. If these all sound like qualities attributed to men, it is because the idea of self-actualisation is a male idea formulated to justify male rule.

I have found the idea of self-actualisation useful when considering the contradiction in promoting the so-called sex-industry in the name of feminism: it may, actually, not seem such a contradiction to anyone who thinks of feminism as women’s right to strive for and achieve their ‘potential’. With this in mind, the justifications offered by ‘feminists’ for the legitimisation of the sex-industry make sense - well, at least, as long as, for women, self-actualisation is the realisation of sexobjecthood. Any lack of support, from the sex-industry lobby, for the option not to be a sex-object makes sense for the same reason: the prostitution of women is the ideal mode of interaction between men and women. Every pro-prostitution argument I have ever heard is consistent with this thesis.

COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY

In keeping with my promise to promote lesbianism for all women, I am pasting in, below, Adrienne Rich’s paper ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’. I also recommend Sheila Jeffrey’s ‘The Lesbian Heresy’ and the articles listed by Amy at Feminist Reprise.

WHY I AM NOT A ‘RADFEM’

Something deeply bothers me about the term ‘radfem’ and althouth I don’t fully understand why it bothers me, I hope that an attempt to articulate it will help clear things up. The use of ‘radfem’ seems to refer to a woman as the embodiment of a politics of women’s liberation and sets her aside from other women who, supposedly, are non-’radfem’. I see both the idea of politics-as-status and the differentiation of women as contrary to feminism.

Feminism†, to me, is the conceptualising of male dominance that most closely approximates the reality of male dominance‡. Feminism, as resistance to male dominance, is, therefore, the liberation of women. As individuals, none of us have accumulated the experiences necessary to allow us an overview of male supremacy but collectively we do own a body of knowledge that describes every aspect of it.

We resist based on what we know. Our knowledge is flawed. We learn. Feminism is a progression towards the collective knowledge of women. But the term ‘radfem’ describes a stasis - one that can be shared by some women, but not others.

It did occur to me, more than once, that perhaps I’m being petty but the word ‘radfem’ keeps popping up as a group-identity signifier and sometimes in decidely anti-feminist contexts.

†I think it was Catharine MacKinnon that said ‘radical feminism is feminism’. As an affirmation of this, I say ‘feminism’ rather than ‘radical feminism’.
‡ Men’s own concept of their dominance is based on a false justification and is therefore false.

CAN I GRADUATE NOW?

For the last few years I have been reading a considerable amount of feminist theory in the form of books and articles. All this reading, together with my forever thinking about and re-evaluating what I know about male domination, is helping me develop a woman-centred perspective and shaping my practicing of feminist values. In the last few years I have separated from all male friends, dumped my male partner of 13 years, rejected heterosexuality and come out as a lesbian. Right now I’m feeling very isolated because the only separatist/lesbian feminists I know are in other parts of the country/world. 

So, I’m a) on the look-out for other women that put women first* and b) continuing to promote separatism and lesbianism for all women. I hope that by this time next year the isolation will be broken.

* I think this best sums up the practice of feminism for me.

NON-ARGUMENT 2

Here is another argument I do not use:

You wouldn’t like it if it were done to your daughter/wife.

First, this statement is directed at a male audience. Already, we are limited to talking only to men and only about things that are within men’s grasp; things that are part of their experience. 

When we say to a man that he wouldn’t like ’it’ if ’it’ were to happen to his daughter or wife, we are trying to evoke this man’s emotions of loss or pain should ‘it’ happen to a woman he has feelings* for. Then we ask him to project this feeling of loss or pain onto other women - women he doesn’t know. This argument is based on the expectation that men will not consider women as persons in their own right but see them only as they relate to him. These are terms we should not agree to.

The above argument presumes that women and girls are harmed by men unrelated to them and that the men in their lives want what is best for them. In reality, fathers, brothers, husbands and other male relations are often the ones to beat, rape and prostitute women and girls. The ones that don’t still place their male dominance above the well-being of all women, including women they have feelings for.

Our arguments must not take the shape of something that is palatable to men. What we say must be true to women’s lived experiences - as experienced by women.

* I say feelings because to say love about men’s relationships to women is a reach.

NON-ARGUMENT 1

 

There are some arguments I would steer clear of. One of these is along the lines of:

This practice wouldn’t be tolerated if it was done against ethnic minority people.

I’ve used this argument before and I’ve both been told and read about why I shouldn’t. Even so, it took me some time to actually understand and question the belief underlying it.

When white western women try to point out the injustice of a certain sexist practice by stating that its race-analogue would not be tolerated if it concerned people of an ethnic minority, we are saying that ethnic minority women are not women or not of ethnic minority - either way they don’t exist. The comparison is basically between white western women and ethnic minority men.

The very idea that women should argue their case by comparing the injustices done to them to injusticies against another social group - men, in other words - assumes male experiences and a male value systems as the benchmark, and betrays the belief that women’s experiences, as seen from women’s own perspectives, are not valid in their own right.