Jim heartfield wrote:
>Of course, Liza is right that I haven't read all the authors she cites.
>I can only speak about what I do know.
which means you share same flaw as kate: generalizing, rather uncritically in her case, from particular subjective experiences of feminism on her campus and her limited reading range to denounce Feminism as this and that.
ham-handed scholarship, though perhaps fine for a list where you'll be called on the carpet for your claims and probably won't reach a mass audience. i mean, if no one ever said silly things on listserves what possible fun could they be?
But I agree that Alice Echols
>stuff on pornography was very good (but I think it dates back some time)
>and Ehrenreich's book The Hearts of Men is also pretty remarkable (but
>published in 1983).
and isn't this the point--that folks have been working on these issues for quite some time. ehrenreich's text is a classic, still published, still being used in college courses. roiphe says nothing new in her criticisms of a certain variant of feminism, but she does argue it rather badly. honestly, look at how ehrenreich structures her argument in HM: she makes a claim, provides a theoretically sound, though not uncontestable, reason for examining 'cultural artefacts' produced by professional middle class men, and systematically analyzes, with humor and lucidity, various aspects of popular culture and science: popular novels, magazines, playboy, medicine, psychotherapy, film.
roiphe bothers with none of this. she provides no reason for focusing largely on her experiences at harvard/princeton or among the circles of the eastern literary establishment. she provides no argument for how she can generalize from her expiences to Feminisms in general. she paints extremely biased caricatures of feminist classmates and never explains whether these people are real, profiles, character types, if she interviewed them officially, how she came to know them, what exactly her relationship with them was. though we get some clue later, they are rather acrimonious it appears.
oh sure, i'm applying social science standards to a work of fiction i suppose....it's got to be fiction because a journalist is taught to have higher standards than this....
i think it highly inappropriate to maintain that roiphe's got to be accurate in her claims just because 1] she says it is so and 2] what she says fits into your view of the world.
>I don't think there is any need to caricature feminism that so readily
>caricatures itself.
i'm sorry, have you not heard of marxist feminism, socialist feminism, black feminism, black feminist thought, etc?
I am thinking of Bea Campbell (Britain's Dangerous
>Places, read it and weep), Catharine Mackinnon (Only Words - I saw Liza
>Jardine in the papers today boasting of the way that feminism had raised
>the issue of rape crimes in Bosnia, one of the more grotesque pieces of
>war propaganda stirred up by Mackinnon), at the University of North
>London's Child and Women Abuse Study Group the argument of the continuum
>of male violence (you know the continuum, from paying compliments
>through rape to snuff films) with Liz Kelly and Jill Radford (see their
>'Women, Violence and Male Power', with Marianne Hestor), or if you want
>to see a feminist argument against the pill, see Sheila Jeffries article
>in her collection The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism.
ok, but this hardly constitutes the entire canon of feminist scholarship. there are many feminisms and types of feminist scholarship--they have different analyses of "what the problem is" and "why the problem is" and "where to go from here"
>Of course there is a lot of very good writing and research in feminism -
>in one sense there is bound to be since this is the cutting edge of
>contemporary social theory. But good as the theorising is, the tendency
>is reactionary. So for example, I'd happily agree that Carole Pateman is
>one of the most important writers in political theory, but the truth is
>that her books on the social contract are well argued cases against
>democracy and freedom.
let's say, instead, that it's a well-argued case against a certain understanding of democracy and freedom. certainly there is no absolutely clear cut agreement as to what these to concepts mean or refer to.
> That's what makes Roiphe's
>contribution original. She is analysing the repressive ideology of the
>present, not the one that was in place twenty five years ago.
analyzing? i see absolutely NO analyzing or arguments being forged in _TMA_. i see assertions. i see opinions. but I do not see reasoned, documented, footnoted arguments.
>The first is that feminists broke down the definition of rape from
>forced sex, to sex regretted, because they saw all heterosex as
>violation, with rape on a continuum with heterosex. (The Morning After)
well i stayed up late to make sure the three ankle-biters having a slumber party weren't surfing porno sites; so i took the opp. to read TMA, as it had just languished on my bookshelf for the past two years. so, i can only speak to that text.
firstly, the claim above is patently untrue. not only are there many many arguments against this position, what seems to me a minority position w/in feminisms, but many feminists that i've read and/or know are virulently opposed to mackinnon, dworkin, et al. what can you possibly make of this:
"women's don't want to pretend to be weak and passive. and we don't want phony, weak, passive acting men any more than we want phony supermen full of bravado and little else. what women want is for men to be honest. women want men to be bold--boldly honest, aggressive in their human pursuits. boldly passionate, sexual and sensual. and women want this for themselves. it's time men became boldly radical. daring to go to the root of their own exploitation and seeing that it is not women or 'sex roles' or 'society' causing their unhappiness, but capitalists and capitalism."
carol hanischm 'men's liberation' 1975,
i could provide endless quotes refuting this claim that some sort of unitary body of theory called Feminism supports the claim that all hetsex is violence and/or that it exists on a continuum with rape.
it's just astounding to me to read this sort of stuff. i have *never* encountered a flesh and blood feminist who ever said that all sex is violent, nor even on a continuum with rape. feminists have all sorts of concerns and violence against women is part of it, but rape or date rape isn't the *only* concern. what they *have* said, often enough, of sex is that film, tv, commercials, adverts are often structured around rape fantasies--that's a lot different from saying that sex is on a continuum with rape.
secondly, i have taught women's studies courses in several different uni`s and i've not yet encountered one woman who thought like any of the women roiphe caricatured. indeed, every single one was hostile to any attempt to equate hetsex with rape. indeed, the more steeped in feminism the more likely the woman was to support varieties of sexualities and argue for sex positive feminisms, rather than denounce all forms of sexual imagery as pornographic violence against women. what's also rather pathetic is that while she complains that her fictional Feminism portrays women as passive and weak, she paints women and emerging feminist as dopes, sheep mouthing whatever they hear or read, as if they can't think for themselves. hop on the women's studies listserv and you'll discover that women's studies professors hardly encounter this phenom. in their classrooms. there is a lot of resistance in the women's studies classroom, and students creatively reappropriate what they learn there.
roiphe, it seems to me, fails to understand that feminists *become* feminists in a continual process that never really ends and that feminisms are dynamic processes, continually shifting in a process of internal and external critique. this is the beauty and agony of feminisms, it seems to me, something that a lot of marxists might take a cue from --though not because i think it'll resolve the acrimonious sectarian disputes. failing to understand this, she fails to grasp the pscyhological stages that feminists go through--often enough, at first, they are angry, seeing the world entirely through a lens that structures everything in black/white oppositions.
she also fails to acknowledge that her experience is indeed confined largely to a college age, elite group of women and campus feminists. that matters a great deal. of course they flip out over date rape, etc.... what other problems do these women face on those campuses? are they women who worry about always living on the edge of poverty? are they women who are worried about labor market segregation? are they women who live in worlds in which the family is often seen as a source of identity and solidarity against the world of workplace exploitation, oppression, domination? are they women who realize that the men in their lives often experience similar kinds of oppression and exploitation on the workplace or in encounters with the state, police, etc?
no, women at harvard and princeton don't worry about these things because they generally aren't exposed to them. this rape crisis that she thinks she's discovered is very likely an effect of the institutions she went to and the social circles she's traveled in. it may well be real --there and then--but this does NOT make it an accurate, generalizable claim
kelley