>Obviously no girl or woman is safe from the evil that lurks behind
>every zipper, struggling to be free ....
honestly, chuck, are you trying to channel the spirit of David Hawkes here or what? what is the point of ridiculing this situation, exaggerating the concerns so as to further contribute to the stereotype? -----------------
There, there, Kelley.
But, yes, you're exactly right. I was thinking of David Hawkes. Forward it to him on Bad if you like. It was an homage to his wonderfully slimy postings to young women on Bad who attempted to raise the feminist banner of moral outrage at various points. The way he would take up the cudgel in their defense with all the sickening intimacy of a serial pedophile was truly uncanny and creepy in the extreme.
As long as we are discussing this on a personal basis, try reading the post to your son and see what he thinks--the soap, cold water and brush part should make him flinch. I forwarded it to my kid in Houston for a laugh after I sent it to LBO. I also read it to the guys in the shop at work, who flinched and laughed at the same time.
And, I can assure you that 11 year old boys (speaking for myself back when, my son, and every one I've known since) think of very little else than getting it in. In 'what' isn't too clear, but the 'in' part is.
In any case, if every warm blood creature I tried to mount as a boy immediately ran off screaming to the police (neighborhood pets included), I'd still be in jail today. I thank the olde purple one-eye in the sky and his beneficence that my childhood was then and not now. And, no, even my mother wasn't safe, although her bemused and disgusted swats kept me at bay.
Okay, enough of the confessional. I consider these little sketches amusing and absolutely common place, i.e. a social norm.
Place that theoretical norm next to Heartfield's post on the rape case in the UK, or pick any one of a dozen cases here. For example, here in the Bay Area two boys 10 & 12 in San Jose, CA were convicted of rape about five years ago. The ten year old was put on some kind of counseling, but the twelve year old was shipped off to CYA (California Youth Authority).
Now ask this question. In what sense were these impulses, intentions, and behaviors not within a norm? There is also a question of what is normal, compared to what is moral and what is legal. None of these categories have to overlap at all. Do we really need the 'facts', that is, the details on who did what, was there penetration, and so on in order to make a moral judgment? No, moral judgments do not depend on facts at all. On the other hand, determining what constitutes a social norm is supposed to require empirical facts, and at least theoretically, legal judgments are supposed to require a finding on facts.
Moral judgments do not depend on facts in the sense that facts on one side or the other do not certify the correctness of a moral position. That is the beauty of moral thought--it needs nothing but a measure of fidelity with its own categorical declarations. This is how a serious adult crime which we might all agree on as 'serious' and 'adult' can be conflated with disturbing but childish bad behavior. It is the moral universe itself which provides for these transformations and turns one context and its actions into the equivalence of an other.
When you say rape and harassment are immoral what have you said? If I say they sound fine by me, what have I said? What if it can be demonstrated empirically that what is legally defined as rape or sexual harassment has no connection with current social norms? How do we proceed, along moral lines?
When the argument is constructed this way, I think we can return to our now long standing disagreement. You believe it is possible to construct a morally just society. I don't. Not only don't I believe in this as a concrete possibility, but I am beginning to believe it might not just lead to hell, but be the notorious road itself.
I think that we are living in the mist of an historical period that has been constructed by a spectrum of moral judgment--and all of it has been profoundly destructive of the society, its political processes and institutions. Much of it has been manufactured as a crude ideology to promote not only the consent of the governed and oppressed, but also to wrap the amoral world of capital and economic power in a diffused fog of nonsense. Forget the Right or mass consumer culture for the moment. Consider the Left.
The two big movements that brought me into political awareness were both constructed through moral arguments: civil rights and the anti-war movement. I now think this moral construction was a profound political and strategic mistake. I think in some way I haven't figured out yet, the separation between the various factions of the Left has been determined by these moral constructions and I think as long as we continue to partition moral ground, we will never find any theoretical or concrete unity. In my lexicon, there is only one use for moral argument and that is to manipulate its stunning ability to evoke strong emotional reactions. So, it is a consummate tool of propaganda, of ideological motivation, and of course the absolute center for developing the motivation to buy the capitalist consumer dream--i.e America purity. Of course, I don't intend that it is just a moral ground, but also an aesthetic one as well--a kind of convolution of these, the moral and the aesthetic--the good and the beautiful.
I think when we sense that writers have sold out--not just the vicious feminists or stalworth Marxists--what we are sensing is the intimate connection between the moral and the aesthetic worlds of thought--and the vast difference between those worlds and concrete existence. To sell out, is to not match thought with deed, writing with reality, to take advantage of a privilege while denouncing such a presumption by others. But this form of critique itself is a moral and aesthetic argument. As we follow its lead, we devolve into a labyrinthine maze, parsing our way toward some realm of absolute purity.
In your post, you mentioned Hegel. Well, it was by way of reading Butler and then going to Hegel, and then to Marx, that I came to the position I am trying to define here.
The moral-asethetic universe is complex and the center of all sorts of thought and form. But, it doesn't belong to the world of the concrete, the arena of public space in quite the way we automatically assume--that is as a guide to public conduct. Rather, there is something wrong with this automatic assumption and I think we are discovering that in actuality, the pursuit of moral rectitude leads to evil, not to good.
I am not sure how or why this can be so, but I am convinced it is so. This idea comes from Machiavelli and Arendt and I haven't quite put it together with the thread that follows Hegel to Marx, but I think the linkage in all of this is the dispossession of the bourgeois sensibility itself. This is suggested by the linkage between the French romantics following the revolution, and the combined effect of both the revolution and the romantic reaction on Hegel. But Marx was also a dispossessed bourgois, as were almost all the political and cultural figures who became the background or intellectual foundation for 20c revolutions and cultural reactions.
Distrust of the dispossessed bourgeois is part of the justification for believing in a revolution of the prolitariat. But this distinction is blurred by the moral configuration of the masses--that is the idea that they are somehow a pure moral force. These arguments about the masses have been transferred into a series of groups, minorities, women, gays, etc. But a clearer way to put it is that the masses have more at stake, a more concrete interest in the success and fairness of a revolution or transformation of society than any other class. On the other hand interest is not the same as a moral right.
I think the transformation from concrete interest to moral right, is the problem or the foundation of this discussion.
Chuck Grimes