>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.
But the utter impossibility of separating these 'images' from their 'context' makes this pretty pointless.
>>>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.
Of course not. I was pointing to the ludicrousness of this division between Anglo-Saxon and European feminists. It's ludicrous in several ways, but to begin with no one here, a group you are inferring to be Anglo-Saxon, could certainly be described as that, and said description would say nothing whatsoever of their positions on this issue. Despite your explanation here, Anglo-Saxon doesn't describe any 'locality' now does it?
>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.
You could I guess describe me as Anglo-Celtic-Norse Australian. But why? I was going to write that this was more trivial than my previous point but I'm not sure it is. The fact that my East-Anglian father sees Saxon as an insult; that my adopted father would have wanted me to write Irish not Celtic; and that my Norwegian great-grandmother would literally have hit me for putting the Irish before the Norwegian in that description but would have embraced me for prioritising Australian, is in fact part of a pretty substantial point. Surely in Australia we know enough of the dangers of either casual or very bloody serious use of these categories to not need to repeat them? And as a description of political positions in particular, I would have thought.
Catherine