>Anyway, there being no necessary damage in a young woman falling for an
>older man, and vice versa,
no one said there was damage with regard to individuals. what we said was that IT IS A SIGN of a deeper social problem. and we said that it reinforces already inscribed patriarchal relations and oils the cogs of capitalism. we showed how it was so by making it continue to be acceptable for women to depend on men, for making women competing for a smaller pool of those men because those men have a bigger pool. the practice and the greater social acceptability of older men with younger women--much older--and that there was a disproportionate number of male older couples than there are female older couples, particularly with vast disparities in age --these are markers, signs, signifiers of a signified. what is it a sign of. several things.
1. a hangover from an eons old practice that might have been rooted in biological imperatives [but that i think anthropological evidence actually refutes this assertion] but i'll grant us this one. d eal?
2. relatedly, that practice has clearly contributed to structural inequalities such that women are systmatically paid less. we live in a society that valorizes the great american dream of upward mobility, of doing better than your parents, etc since men have, on avg, better paying jobs than women, they have more power in the dating market *on average*. this shapes women's ideals about what to expect in a partner --her ideals are more diverse in terms of beauty than his. his ideals about the earnings capacity of a partner are more diverse than her restricted ones. there is tons and tons of research on that. there something wrong about a situation in which our choices are deliminted by disparities in income and status. the obvious point is that, in a world in which money matter, he has more power. he doesn't do anything nor does she to make the situation that way to begin with. however i would argue we all hold responsibility for not doing something about it.
what would that entail? obviously getting rid of capitalism. but the problem with that is that the system of patriarchy --what ever you want to call it--is not ensconced wholly in capitalism. it is not unlike doug's wall st in that it had an oriiginary moment and now it's operations are effectively unmoored and floating and there's a big gap betweent he company and the stock price--the floating signifier of race and gender at they say in the cult studs depts. it takes on a life of its own. and does not depend on capitalism. marx surely recognized this since he talked about the contraditciton between the forces of production and the social relations of production. so this isn't about discourse theory, it's about marxism rob. that you insisted continually that i was talking about discourse theory was odd -- a little marxist semiotics maybe.
now, we can argue that we should focus on class struggle and only that. i'm not sure. or we can, as carrol argues, make sure that class struggle entails gender/race. i myself am not so sure and why i quote the young marx's letter to ruge where he says that theory doesnn't dictate practice, that there are no slogans that we hoist and direct ourselves and the people with some blueprint/ rather, it's all very pragmatic. moreover, he says, we can't imagine that we can stay out of politics. that is not the solution he says to ruge thought it was best to avoid bourgeois poliitics as fruitless. rather, we must take a side in existing poltical struggles. i
in this situation we can take a side right now on various matters. for me that would be to engage insocial criticism of media images. i think this is important because we know that the media has responded to those critiques. i'm not arguing that the gender inequalities in pay will go away. i am arguing that without those kinds of interventions in all sorts of places, just brining about class revolution will not guarantee that we over throw those social relations of production that make gender so all fired important. historical record of communist countries is enough to convince me of that. and it's plainly important to address some of the things that make the capitalist machinery run so smoothly. [because we need to expose the contractions between the forces and relations of production right? this is one way of exposing them --educating.]
none of the above means that the relationships are bad. it means the conditions that provide the fertile soil within which they flourish and are naturalized are bad. and so the point is not to get rid of the relationships but to get rid of the conditions in which they thrive and disadvantage people while privileging others. so they could ultiamtely decide in freer conditoins what they really wanted. that would take work on capitalism and on media images and educating us about anorexia and our obsesson with beatuy and body imagie and all sorts of things.
in this case, it reflects some long established social conventions that no longer serve a purpose. it also reflects gender inequalities right now in so far as older het men find it acceptable to marry for youth and beauty alone because they can and younger women don't have such delimited ranges of what they consider attractive in this case, it also reproduces inequality and has everything to do with a history in which men had more social power than women, in which men have a wider array of choices and freedoms than women now and all of it taking place in a society that places a great emphasis on how much money you have. so women who systematically make less than men are going to be attracted to stable men with good job and near the peak of their earning capacity and are quite willing to overlook less than perfection physically as a trade off for the secure income.
there's no harm in the relationship. there's harm in how it came about that the above happened and reified a set of social interactions that tip the balance in favor of men and disadvantage women. and they do so in a way to reinforce and make capitalist machinery run much smoother.
now, what makes you think you have an edge on the materialist explanation. this is one thing i dont' understand. you plead for room for the biological as the material but i've never udnerstood how physical tangible look and see things are the only things that are material.
that's just the point that i thought marx was trying to undermine when he maintained that, in meeting our biological needs, we create new needs that come to have a powerful role in what we then do, which is set about to meet those new needs. and further, he was actually arguing that we move away from the biological imperatives of meeting basic human needs for food, shelter toward the cultural realm in meeting 'higher' human needs for things like art, beauty, leisure, entertainment, love and so forth. he was trying to argue that those things were just as much needs as the need for food.
a marxist materialist social constructionism is quite different from judy. indeed judy is not all social constructionisms by a long shot because after all habermas makes much good use of social constructinist arguments --mead, goffman, garfinkel, simmel are all considered social cosntructionists right?
>
>I reckon it's important to remember that all kinds of people can make all
>linds of arguments which appeal to all kinds of definitions of 'nature' for
>all kinds of reasons. We can't afford to trash the lot coz some of it
>militates against what we see as human interests.
but how can you imagine that the materialist feminist anthropology drawn on
in that accoutn of the western euro family is not based on a dialectical
analysis? sure it wasn't clearly laid out but it was surely hinted at.
and i personally sketched out a materialist feminist analysis of how it is
the case that it's acceptable for men to marry younger women when it's not
vice versa. the argument since you haven't heard it i guess is this: yes
biological procreative imperatives may have once played a role in men's
choices in younger females. indeed the fact of women dying in childbirth
may well have contributed to same phenom. may even have contributed more.
cutlural practices grew up around those behaviors and became reified and
they are with us long after the point at which they were useful or
meaningful. sketchy, but clearly dialiectically materialist.
>
>Now, I agree with Marx, and most here, that nature/physical reality is, to
>all intents and purposes, sensuous human activity. What that means for me
>is that 'raw nature' is never to be invoked as an unchanging, untouchable,
>external conductor of the human orchestra. And, as Kelley suggests (I
>think), it does not mean our consciousness and relations are usefully to be
>regarded as outside nature.
well this, then, is just the flip side of catherine's claim that the womb is wholly discursive is it not? it's all discursive, it's all natural. --both of them with these qualitfications. the first one, the discursive makes no claims about ingoring biology. and yours, "that nature/physical reality is...sensuous human activity, with the qualitfication that you don't mean one that isn't historical conditioned. what is different there?
nothing that i can see, both are reductive. makes no difference in terms of totalizing does it? or am i misunderstaning.
That social conditions might condition our
>brains, for example, seems a wholly sensible idea to me. But this need not
>mean that the complicity of very old (evolutionarily functional?)
>instinctual tendencies in our behaviour need be jettisoned either.
evidence for how biology influences us in terms of the partners we choose? i keep patiently and sincerely asking...?
kelley