Rotating Bitch wrote:
> >Even with the destruction of male supremacy , there will still be sexes.
>
> really? wow! I didn't know that. Why do you suppose it is that whenever you
> say such a thing to even leftist men who should know better,
O come now. Everyone forgets sometimes. Anyhow, Charles, do you remember Yoshie arguing that in a post-capitalist culture there would be one sex and many genders? If anyone wants Gould's review of Laqueur post me off-list and I'll send it to you.
>
> At 01:25 PM 11/16/2005, Charles Brown wrote:
> >Rotating Bitch :
> >
> >Do we win capitalists to our side by arguing that socialism will benefit
> >capitalists? No, we argue for the destruction of capitalists and capitalism.
> >Thus, we call for the destruction of Gender -- Men and Women as they exist
> >in class society. BOTH Men and Women.
> >
> >^^^^^
> >CB: Are these two struggles completely analogous in the way you imply ?
>
> If you disagree, please elaborate. I look forward to it, because it's an
> endlessly fascinating question, isn't it? We also try to elide the problem
> with these pansy-ass solutions and simpering little constructions where we
> claim there's no primacy to class analysis -- just to, on my view, placate
> the little bitches -- but there's really no seriousness in it.
Do you think the denominator or the numerator of fractions is more important to mathematical progress?
But anyhow, for at least one human activity (from which millions of humans over the millenia have gained much enjoyment) the physics of the four elements is the correct physics: the game of 21 questions (animal, vegetable, or mineral?). That is, one cannot argue the truth/falsity of any system of classification but only the usefulness of a given classification in a given context with a given purpose.
Why, sometime during the long 18th c. did the two-sex model of human biology replace the one-sex model which had been more or less standard for a couple millenia? I suspect an answer to that question will require giving "primacy" to class analysis. One has to understand how hierarchy as a cosmic 'given' gave way to individual "merit" as the legitimation of all kinds of subordination, including sexual subordination. Prior to the late 18th century one could acknowledge a woman's intellectual superiority while in the same breath emphasizing how proper her subordination was. (See Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life.) That appeal to hierarchy (for reasons grounded in class struggle) dissolved, and you get such nonsense as attempts to prove that the female brain was "lighter" than the male and other pseudo-scientific reasons for female inferiority.
How do we explain Aristotle's judgment that Sparta was a polis ruled by women? (His judgment was wrong but not without grounds.) Again, we have to talk about class relations, not gender, to answer that question. If you have a social system grounded in a form of serfdom (helotry) but the men don't live at home, someone has to manage the shop as it were. To an Athenian that looked like women were the rulers.
And why did Aeschylus, dramatizing 'world' history as culminating in Athenian democracy choose as his myth one that justified matricide? That explanation too needs to be offered in terms of class struggle rather than of sex/gender. That is complicated, but the complications all have their roots in the elimination of all gradations between liberty and slavery and the freedom of the peasantry from all forms of service to the 'aristocracy.'
I think you confuse, to some extent, strategy and tactics of emancipatory struggle with historical understanding of the social relations which generate the struggle. That is one route to the sterile debate over whether we should 'privilege" denominator and numerator. To argue over whether class or gender is "primary" is neither wrong nor right but simply meaningless.
> in the end,
> it's class all the way down and everything else exists on top of it like
> some false store front that tries to get your attention while still serving
> up the ugly frame house underneath.
Here you fight a will-o-the-wisp. There are real misunderstandings to contest here, but you don't confront them unless you describe them accurately rather than with a caricature. And it is also irrelevant if some people fit the caricature -- you are still wasting your polemics on them. For example:
You write in a more recent post, responding to b.s.: "As John said, your comments about DNA are so wrong it's hard to know where to start. But more, you are talking about sex characteristics and DNA, gender and DNA, sexuality and DNA -- all in one big confused mishmash that indicates you've done so little reading in this territory it's unbelievable." The trouble is that when you take up really ignorant arguments to refute you distort your own arguments, just as marxists who write long posts debating the likes of Hitchens begin to distort their position. Argument can be even minimally rational only when the disputants share some basic premises, and we don't share any premises with b.s. and his biological fantasies.
> but [Charles] you're not like that, so I'd like to hear what you have to say.
>
> >Even with the destruction of male supremacy , there will still be sexes.
>
> really? wow! I didn't know that. Why do you suppose it is that whenever you
> say such a thing to even leftist men who should know better, all they can
> imagine is i want to cut off their cocks and duct tape my rack into androgyny.
>
> That, Charles my man, is a problem. Especially when
>
> 1. You've read me for about 7 years now.
> 2. I dropped numerous klews in the two sentences you quote above.
>
> >Nothing wrong with appealing to altruism, but in this society probably have
> >to appeal to self-interest too, if you want to succeed.
You and Charles are both sinking into dogmatism here. (By dogmatism I mean the assumption that there is a direct and unproblematic link between theory and practice.) Hence you both in effect assume that the struggle for women's emancipation is to be won through proving some abstract set of propositions. Both of you know better, but you are writing as though you didn't. Charles can't really believe that in practice you can get rid of racism by winning a high-school debate contest by showing whites that they will be better off without racism! And you can't really believe that winning an argument over biology with b.s. is going to make him a feminist!
> do you appeal to capitalists' self interest? what happens when reform
> movements appeal to those self-interests?
>
> Shit happens. That's what happens
Yes indeed. But the debate over false conceptions of gender & sex, an important debate within the right framework, simply has no _direct_ relevance here, and by mixing a debate over fundamental theory with a debate over tactics, both get fucked up.
Carrol