Kell, thanks for taking the time to answer and for providing the link to the boi article. I've read somethin similar in the SF papers.
"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."
OK, I understand that we're grownups now and can see shades of gray. The question that remains is whether role playing, or lesbians trying out a multiplicity of roles, is liberating.
" 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.)"
Yes, thank you, that was good, but I still don't understand how liberation is connected with what you call something/someone. I've had male lovers, I've had female lovers: why do I have to call myself a particular thing? How I act towards a lover has to do with how I relate to that particular person, not with acting out a pre-set script.
"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."
OK.
"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."
I'm a little lost here. We're all born into and conditioned by social notions of gender/sexuality. In fact, I think female sexuality and gender is much more fluid than male sexuality/gender. The reaction against socially defined roles is just that, a reaction, not the end of the story....and not in itself liberating until it is seen as a reaction. At a certain point adolescents do stuff for the simple reasons that their parents hate it. When they actually grow up, assuming they ever do, they manage to do things that have nothing to do with their parents: neither identifying, introjecting, or reacting.
"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.)"
Well, but since you're complaining about essentialism, the above sounds essentialist to me. There is the fact of sexual attraction. Then there is the mental operation that interprets that attraction, that labels it, categorizes it, proclaims that there are two genders, one gender, five genders, etc. Why is that mental operation necessary? Why can we not love or even simply desire and then do what we will?
"Maybe the relationship between sex/sexuality/gender is a lot more complicated than we've acknowledged."
Why concern ourselves about the relationship between sex/sexuality/gender? Why not concern ourselves with the quality of the relationship between two human beings, and leave it at that? Why do we want to evaluate a relationship between two peole in terms of the degree to which either party fulfills a predefined role (when when there are more roles to choose from)? : "if you were a good woman, you'd iron my shirts, suck my cock, etc...if you were really a good man, you'd earn a lot of money, fix the plumbing, take me out to a romantic dinner..."
"There's nothing about being a lesbian, for instance, that necessarily means that lesbians are naturally more loving, egalitarian, anti-objectification.
Of course not.
"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."
OK. But it's not enough to say that. I mean you go to the supermarket and you find out that toilet paper now comes in colors, but it's still toilet paper. OK. not a great example. I guess I'm saying that having more roles to choose from doesn't really make that much difference. Each role sets up a "me" and a "not me" -- it just puts a different spin on it. In the article you quoted, each role seemed to come with its own prejudices, blinders, rules. That's the opposite of liberation. If there really were gender fluidity, the first thing that would happen is that people would stop worrying about labels.
"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."
Agreed.
"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."
OK.
"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."
Well, sex is sex. Nothing defiles it, assuming we're talking about sex both people want to have. I think what I've objected to is more like people saying that strippin/watching strippers is liberating or that prostitution is liberating.
"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."
But here you're talking about mutually desiring playing subjects. The "objectification" is metaphoric. The attraction is already there, I seek as a lover to give more pleasure.
As for M, the stripper. What she finds liberating isn't the stripping but the money that she gets for it, money which, in a capitalist society offers us comfort and more choices. She has nothing to apologize for, but there's a distinction between comfort/choice and freedom.
"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."
Well, OK. I did say it was a crappy scene, but that was in response to the claim that it was "liberating."
"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."
The bois do as the bois do. Mutually consenting adults do what they want to do. To say that there are degress of consciousness and unconsciousness does not imply that there is a natural sex/sexuality/gender buried beneath ideology.
Joanna