giggly guys

Rob Schaap rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au
Sun Mar 21 20:41:47 PST 1999


G'day Catherine,


>Therefore, without any other quibbling, this is a continuing issue for
>feminism and attests to a set of obstacles to women having diverse social
>positions and relations available to them.

Sure, and I thought I'd said that. Representation as passive sex object would seem to me an issue for feminism where alternative representations are limited, but might not be where they are not. I was trying to suggest the possibility that such images are not in themselves sexist - that context determines this. A pretty ho-hum suggestion now I read it back to myself, but then I was after some clarification of which were the issues that were exciting the discussion. I was finding it difficult to get to the nub of the discord.


>>It occurs to me that Anglo-Saxon feminisms take this stuff more seriously
>>than do their continental European counterparts, anyway.
>
>And I'll thank you not to call me a Saxon.

I didn't, Catherine.

And I was merely giving voice to a general (but not really casual) impression I got after some time in my native Netherlands, where sex, sexuality and feminism seemed to me to align and interact in very different ways than I was used to here. But then, it also seemed to me, going on everyday social intercourse in pubs and the like, that relations between men and women were much less strained, socially scripted, and hierarchical than here (where they seem better than when I was a lad, but still short of the comfortable milieu I'm talking about). Feminisms respond to whatever the salient local problems are, I guess - and even in a country full of pornography - where even the commodification of female sexuality is itself commodified (the 'street of windows' near the Amsterdam Central Station), these issues did not seem to count as salient.

And would white blue-eyed Dutch folk be Saxons? I reckon they might be. Anyone got the history on this?

Cheers, Rob.



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