>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 02/12 2:56 A
Charles: Between this phase and the 60's there was a wave in John Reed's
period in Greenwich Village as one focal point. This is portrayed in the
movie Reds. In fact , the Movie Reds portrays the sexual feminism of
Elizabeth Bryan (?) and Reed on the same level almost of the Communist
Party /Russian Revolution story. Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman are also
portrayed as leading feminist thinkers in the Village. This phase is more
radical and Marxist than the Woodhull group. Of course, elsewhere Inessa
Armand was critiquing Lenin's position on free love and living with him and
Krupskaya ( I don't know whether it has been definitely established that it
was a menage-a-trois).
Yoshie: Among them, only Red Emma could probably be called a direct foremother of today's sex-positive feminists. Sanger was not in favor of the right to abortion, I recall. _____
Charles: We might want to pin this down. My undestanding from Angela Davis' discussion of Sanger in _Women, Race and Class_ is that at the end of her career, Sanger became a eugenicist, which would imply she was for abortion, or at least for some people :<( In fact, as I recall the movie _Reds_ with its reminiscences of living figures from the period , one of them said they recalled marching for birth control rights with Sanger. Actually I just read it here in Angela's book. Sanger coined the term "birth control". Sanger at the end of her career severed ties with socialists and became part of the imperilalist movement against socalled white race suicide. She turned her birth control advocacy to support for control and limitation of the births of "coloureds" and "working class" people, out and out racist, classicist eugenics. (chapter: "Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights")
Yoshie: (As we also should remember, both of them were influenced by a socialist version of social Darwinism [and I don't mean this too negatively] as well, as in 'working-class babies must become healthier,' which complicates their support for contraception.) The 20s did undergo a sex revolution of sorts, with Bohemianism you mention and the growth of mass entertainment, where young working-class men and women could mingle relatively freely. At that time, many working-class women's wages were so low, however, that to go out and enjoy movies or to frequent cafes, arcades, dancehalls, etc., they often had to rely on their male 'friends' for 'treats,' thus blurring the distinction between dating and casual prostitution. Also, check out the writings by Meridel Le Sueur or women like her. With the vogue of pop Freudianism in the Bohemian milieux, many young women intellectuals, according to their testimonies, had to suffer the indignity of their male counterparts smugly telling them, 'Oh baby, you are sexually repressed,' if they were to say, 'I'm not interested.' Older feminists who lived to witness the 20s sex revo were often disgusted by it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a good example of such older feminists who saw mainly a new form of oppression and sexual exploitation in it. (Hey, this already foreshadowed what was to come during the 60s. You know, the kind of stuff Frances was telling you & Paul about. The problem was simply more intense during the 20s due to the restricted access to contraception and abortion.) ___________
Charles: Yes, the last is a contradiction, THE problem, IMO.
However, in fact, women do a lot more of the chasing than the stereotype allows. It is not at all true that the main initiators of flirtation are men. Women are more subtle and discrete, in general; and on the other hand the social rules allow them to be more overt sometimes. But the "custom" that men do the chasing is very misleading. One expression is " a man chases a woman until she catches him". The idea that the 60's sexual revolution was mainly men's idea and action is very false.
_______________
Charles: Yea, I didn't mean to say that those posts were comprehensive discussions. I was speaking more specifically of the 60's sex lib movement, and of the dimensions that don't seem to be discussed anymore. It's like they have been silenced or tabooed. People don't even talk about it. It is an amazing example of sexual repression and thorough counterrevolt.
Yoshie: I do agree that there has been a conservative reaction against sex lib. Have you seen _Boogie Nights_ (a movie about the porn industry during the 70s). What about _The Ice Storm_ by Ang Lee (a movie about suburban families at the tail end of sex lib)? Both are examples of the Cinema of Sexual Reaction that have us believe that all that swinging, swapping, experimenting, celebrating-sexual-expression stuff was only done by people who could not find Love at Home! Yikes! However, not all critical comments on what actually went on during the 60s come from the same political instinct. A simple fact is that having lots of sex (even far-out experimental stuff), if it's not good sex, was not and can never be liberating.
Charles: Of course, this is true. Better quality as well as quantity. However, the participants in the 60's and 70's definitely debated and raised this and all of the issues on this thread. People were hip then too; even hipper. There was a direct connection made between the sexual revolution and the whole political agenda of social conscience of the times. Having a social conscience was a main theme and master discourse of the period. The bourgeoisie worked real hard to change that to a self-centered , "me-generation". _Sexual Politics_ was written in the 60's. Sensitivity groups, rap sessions, all nighters, LSD trips, altered states of conscisouness a plenty made for intense examination of every issue that people are thinking of on this thread. I hate to say it, but we have, on balance, gone backward from where we were then. Instead of learning from the errors of the time, we have thrown out the baby and KEPT the bathwater. It is not Generation X, the hip hoppers fault. I tell my young friends. Y'all got fucked over by Reaganism. You are the children of Reaganism. They made sure you did not complete the revolution we started. Diverted you all off into all types of bullshit. We had won a lot more than we realized. We were not conscious of it, but the ruling class was. And the ruling class took decisive and thorough action in reversing all trends of that time.
>Yoshie:
>(See _Intimate Matters: A History of
>Sexuality in America_ for more info on this. If you don't have enough time,
>read at least "Part III. Toward a New Sexual Order, 1880-1930.")
>
>Charles: Yes, I would like to try to get this reference.
Yoshie: Why don't you e-mail me your mailing address off-list? I'll give you a copy.
Charles: A lot of my data on the period is from direct "interviews", discussions, etc. with people who were actually doing it. I don't want to exactly say I wasn't doing it. But what I mean is I had lots of friends, .. you know how the grape vine works, the movement has its own spontaneous social science especially in the universities where it was really big. It was part of the whole hippie ethic: Peace and Love. I remember I had a button "Make love, not war". You know the whole flower children scene. The Beatles. Yoko and John in bed in front of television cameras. Aretha Franklin singing "Respect" and "Doctor Feelgood" when she came out of the church. Marvin Gaye and 'Sexual Healing". That whole trip.
Yoshie: My best informant on the whole 60s deal is Michael Hoover. And he says that what is memorable and memorably bad about the hippie scene is men calling their girlfriend 'my old lady.' More generally, men calling women 'chicks' and stuff like that. That said, I'll simply invite him to put in his two cents on Sex, Drugs, R&R....
Charles: Let me say I agree that the period had many problems and weaknesses, of course. It was not "the" revolution. However, on balance what I am saying is that I think it was politically better than any other time in the 20th Century than the '30s , (simpleminded decade way of dividing things up). And more importantly, the ruling class has succeeded in creating mass amnesia for the most progressive aspects and exaggerating the weaknesses. If the trends of that time had been continued and practically criticized, we would have "the" revolution, a uniquely American revolution. The ruling class realized that and we didn't. We were to spontaneous and "free", anarchic. We had no way of consolidating the gains, correcting the errors and carrying them further. The ruling class, on the other hand, got together one hell of a counter-revolution. I am still amazed at how thorough it has been.
Charles: Yes, I think these dimensions of sexual liberation are thoroughly discussed by contemporary commentators. However, I think what they leave out is the direct liberation of heterosexuals. I don't hear anybody talking about that, except me. Of course, a lot of people are just doing something about it and not talking about it. The objective movement is going on whether it has theoreticians or not. It's a real rank and file controlled movement.
Yoshie: Sure enough. For instance, all my male students just love being put down by me and/or female students in the classroom. It's a sign of some change in sex/gender/sexuality dynamics in public space. I think it's related to the desire for divestiture I can see in the Race Traitor thing with regard to whiteness. Similar changes must be happening in private as well.
Charles: Yea, romanticism is one of the banes of sexuality going way back to what, St. Valentine? Or at least how that myth has been appropriated by the dominant ideas.
Yoshie: On the other hand, stripped of its straight prescriptive power, courtliness may make a comeback. Nowadays, romanticism is pretty much dead in het love scenes in films. However, lots of people seemed to love it when it was staged between a racially ambiguous drag queen and a shaggy-dog ex-IRA man in _The Crying Game_. Or Rupert Everett dancing with Julia Roberts in _My Best Friend's Wedding_. Both movies are about making gayness safer for straight audiences, but those movies also signal a kind of nostalgia for courtliness.
>Charles: Be my Valentine. Just kidding !
send me some flowers,
Yoshie
Charles: And candy ( with dirty pictures inside of course)
Charles