Sarah, a boi, says: "What I want is to have a job, and have a life, and I want a partner with a job and a life to come home to" and "at the end of a hard day, I would like to come home from work and have my wife suck my cock." <http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/features/n_9709/>
Deb resisted casting liberation as an either/or -- either we're liberated or enslaved. Rather, she cast it as a continuum. The progress she saw was one of furthering the liberation of women's sexuality (as sexual object, sexual subject, and everything in between and beyond) by way of more diverse expressions of gender.
I think there are two places where there's a miscommunication--boi and objectification--though it may just be that we're espousing irreconcilable premises.
The conversation sprung from a discussion of bois (among others) who go to strip clubs. The term is probably not widespread enough, so miscommunication. Plus, it points at a very fluid phenom. (erm, as if terms aren't usually pointing at fluid phenom !!)
Deb seems to want to distinguish between sexuality and gender, but in order to move beyond the way feminists have usually defined the terms, where sex=female/male and gender=women/men (one is not born a woman (or man), an' all that). It seems to me that what Deb is saying is that there may not be a one-to-one pointer-reader relationship between sex/sexuality/gender expression among lesbians. There never really has been, in my book, but I would concede that there have been struggles over the variety of gender expression in the "lesbian community." (This is why I posted that lengthy mini-history of struggles over what is "correct" sexual behavior and gender expression among lesbians.)
When deb spoke of liberation, she was talking about movement or progress toward liberation. Not because a strip club or the act of stripping/watching strippers (not to mention the many other things that go on between strippers and patrons) are, in and of themselves, liberation. What Deb was getting at was a progress that might come out of a better understanding of how gender and gender expression "work". Perhaps the very obvious fluidity of gender expression is starting to unravel the presumption of a pointer-reader relationship between sex/sexuality/gender. Feminists of various stripes have tried to unravel it, but it kept knitting itself back together in the form of essentialist claims about lesbian sexuality and gender expression.
Maybe there aren't just two genders (let alone two and only two sexes!). Maybe there are manifold ways of expressing gender and--lo!--they might not have a whole lot to do with sexuality! (And no, I'm not talking about some namby-pamby, can't we all be individuals, as if the why and wherefrom of that individuality is opaque to us ('coz otherwise, we wouldn't be individuals damn it! The article, above, questions whether this is a reasonable conclusion to draw, fr'instance.)
Maybe the relationship between sex/sexuality/gender is a lot more complicated than we've acknowledged. There's nothing about being a lesbian, for instance, that necessarily means that lesbians are naturally more loving, egalitarian, anti-objectification. Hell, contrary to popular belief, being a lesbian doesn't mean you're naturally know how or want to eat pussy.
[I'm reminded of a closing scene in the L-word where the state trooper stops Tim, the guy
who's just found out his wife slept with a woman. Tim explains his heartbreak. Given that
you saw the trooper in the opening scene busting a gay man in a West Hollywood bathroom,
only to force the guy to give him a hummer (no kissing!), you might expect the trooper to
be a hypocrite and go on about the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Instead, he says that
gays are a threat to society: "Two people with the same equipment know how to treat it. How
can someone of the opposite sex compete?" (I had a disagreement with a friend. She said that
the bathroom bust was role playing, not real. I only caught the show once and I tend to get
sleepy at that time of night, so anyone else -- thoughts?]
If gender expression is fluid, slipping along the signifying chain, then it's not so easy to put people into boxes and "cut into their psyches" ("you will find I'm done before starting with you" -- Imperial Teen).
Look at how fluid the expression of gender "boi" is in that article. It surely doesn't fit neatly into, say, Wojtek's recent claim that gays and lesbians play husband/wife because, somehow, that's unavoidably what _has_ to happen when two people get together. What? One is always the sexual aggressor who, after a long hard day of earning the, uh, bacon, gets her cock sucked? I think not. Not to mention that what that might signify for this boi, Sarah, may not at all be what it signifies for a hetman. And once you ask that, it's important to ask: does "getting your cock sucked" mean what everyone thinks it means? Is it really stable or fixed for hetmen? I think not.
Maybe it means you want to be wanted--Oh, now fuckme, I can't get the Cheap Trick out of my head!--which is a very different way of looking at it. Wanting to be wanted, desiring desire, isn't the same thing as itch/scratch sex. It's not about desiring a sexual object that doesn't desire the sexual subject.
Wanting to be wanted is actually a pretty vulnerable place to be, when you stop and think about it. And this is, btw, why men can see women as powerful in a pr0n flick. A lot of pr0n is about the fantasy of being desired. It's not just about turning women into objects for your gratification, regardless of what women want. Maybe wanting to be desired isn't desiring to be desired as some "whole being" but as sexually desirable -- which is wanting to be desired as an object of someone else's sexual desire.
and then there are unknown unknowns.... heh.
Which brings us to something Deb said, which is probably another fundamental premise which makes having the conversation pretty difficult. If you think that sexual objectification is bad and that it defiles the the act of sex, then you end up putting yourself in the position of trying to define when, where, why, how objectification is acceptable. What's the demarcation point? What happens when we take position that liberation/unliberation as an either/or where some magic line is crossed and--*voila*--we are all liberated?
I think there's no such thing as sex without objectification. Sex involves a fluid shifting between beloved/lover, desired/desiring, aroused/arousing. It isn't two-dimensional, either/or. One is aroused by another person's appearance, scent, laughter, hair, the angle of a shoulder, tee shirt, sweat, anger, vulnerability, wrists, skin, fuckme pumps, muscles, demeanor, eyes, the feel of a thigh beneath a nice pair of slacks, intellect, carriage, the curve of a hip, humor, and even by the object of one's desire desiring someone other than you.... When the other notices that arousal and responds, the other recognizes that s/he is being objectified--sexually desired by an Other. Responding with arousal makes the aroused subject into an arousing object, eh? We willingly, joyfully turn ourselves into objects of an Other's desire even while they are objects of our desire.
My son's gf babysits for M's son while she strips. Last night, my son's gf showed up earlier than expected because M decided not to go into work. M makes 300-600 a night stripping. She has regular patrons and, like anyone else, she's ambivalent about her work. Sometimes she thinks about going to school to be a dental hygienist but then she thinks about what that would require.... It certainly wouldn't bring in $600 on a Friday or Saturday. Is that a 'crappy scene'? Well, both are crappy scenes, but I'm not so sure that one is crappier than the other. M gets to just not show up to work. How many dental hygienists would just not show--could afford to not show? She didn't even bother to call in, she just didn't show.
M isn't a drug addict. She wasn't/isn't abused. But she damn sure likes to say, "I just bought a house and I'm getting a new car. I did it _by myself_." Why must M grovel and excuse her participation in class society, apologizing for the fact that she makes her money off what has been described here as false sex. Why must she do so when my son's gf doesn't have to grovel, apologizing for the fact that she makes money from "false parenting."
What I'd like to see happen in this conversation is an end to what has gone on before: the suggestion that anyone who questions whether it's a good idea to define the scene as uniquely crappy is, therefore, someone who is crappy, has crappy sexual values. It's moralizing. It's logical fallacy. I see know reason why, in order to enter the conversation, I have to prove my cred by saying, "_I_ would never engage in boi gender expression. Me, I don't like to objectify strippers. Me, I prefer monogamy and mutuality."
Why? This just sets up the cycle where _I_ enter the conversation by _enjoying_ the distinction I set up between myself and those Others who don't share my way of being in the world. I'm not prepared to, say, judge bois as falsely conscious, engaging in some "fake" act of gender expression, of being duped by gender ideology as if there is some natural sex/sexuality/gender out there to express, buried beneath ideology.
Kelley