'Free Love,' Etc.

d-m-c at worldnet.att.net d-m-c at worldnet.att.net
Thu Feb 11 16:21:10 PST 1999


Paul writes:


>I know all about it, K. But by all means post it for the benefit of
>others. Just so's you don't use it to erase everything else that was
>going on -- including the empowerment of women (after all, they not only
>got pissed, they got ORGANIZED, remember?)

if you'd like to continue to be a pisspot, by all means. don't forget that frances and i practically built the soapbox for you, 'kay?

i'd rather not post the excerpts. since you know all about it.... in the meantime, we, the unwashed untutored grubby grungy young'ins would rather continue to drop some shitty acid, smoke waaaaay better grass, engage in transgressively safe sex, and watch the flickering shadows of MTV and BET on the cave wall while others do everything for us. hey, living well is the best revenge.


>To my mind, BTW, the most salient point here was not that men were
>sexist going into the whole 60s scene (like, what else is new?), but
>that they FAILED to capitalize on the critical space opened up by
>feminism. Men's consciousness-raising groups did sprout up here &
>there, following the feminist model, but most died out real quick, and
>that was about the LEADING edge.

yeah, so why is that. didn't that fellah--the one really into the men's consciousness raising--turn tail pretty quick. can't recall the details, one of my diss advisors knew him well.


>I'm afraid you misread my intentions, so I apologize for lack of
>clarity.

well no i didn't misread the subtext which was: don't bother to let frances flesh out her ideas. rather, jump in tell her that she is engaging in simplistic analyses without giving her the benefit of the doubt. now *that* was the problem. you've done it several times to me, to angela, now frances. now this is typical list activity and is great for getting threads moving in interesting directions. but when what you're doing is precisely the problem under consideration, well then the issue needs to be raised. if you'd jumped in to tell frances she didn't know a lick about william james, that would be quite different than jumping in to tell her that she really doesn't understand the issue on a thread that is largely circling around the sexism/generation gap issue.


>I was trying to point out the underlying conditions -- beginging with
>the solidly material, then working through to the softer, cultural --
>precisely to take AWAY from the self-centered tendency to see it all as
>something that people around at the time were responsible for creating,
>and therefore could take credit (or get blame) for. This, IMHO, is the
>most pernicious of common assumptions that routinely gets us all mucked
>up. To be around in a certain time is simply an accident of history.
>What you do with it is something entirely different--which is where one
>can be credited or blamed, but even only within the context of large
>forces.

i don't believe anyone said anything of the sort. there were no accusations made about sexism stemming from anything other than social structural processes. to speak of suburbanization and commodification is hardly ignoring these, in fact pointing directly to them. frances may be a grrRl and all but a pretty smart one so i really don't think that she was saying that sexism was the fault of the 60s movements or the individual women & men involved. i think you were making a lot of assumptions about what frances knows and doesn't know, about her theoretical orientation and analyses all based on what? two or three posts, and rather brief ones at that.


>We should be able to talk about a complex subject such as this without
>getting reflexively bound up in these personalistic issues. Ain't that
>what systemic critical thinking is for?

yeah. i agree. do you?

Kelley, the ill-mannered who never apologizes for excessing the limit



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