[lbo-talk] Feminism and the False Memory Syndrome

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 10/20/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> [formatting and graphics pushed this to 62k]
>
> From: "Jesse Lemisch" <utopia1 at attglobal.net>
> Date: October 20, 2006 12:12:57 AM EDT
> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Subject: Herbert Aptheker: A False Memory Syndrome Redux?
<snip>
> It's tragic that discussion should begin on so smart a list as LBO
> with the above subject heading. In debate so far, there has been a
> solid mostly male wall (including right wingers who detested
> Communist Party theoreticianHerbert Aptheker but whose sexual
> politics trumped their anti-Communism), from David Horowitz to
> Communists and former Communists, united in seeking to focus on how
> that vixen, Bettina, either seduced her father at the age of three,
> or has, in order to sell books, invented a memory of Herbert sexually
> molesting her for a number of years; how he would never be proved
> guilty in a court of law (as if the law was friendly to women in this
> situation), or that this is another "he said, she said situation," so
> we can never know (as if historians had never dealt with partial and
> conflicting evidence); and how sad it is that she reveals this after
> he is dead (as if it would have been nicer for her to reveal this
> while he was alive), or as if historians had to prove guilt beyond a
> shadow of a doubt. We have heard that Herbert (who I knew for some
> forty years and defended in a noted academic freedom case) was too
> much of a gentleman to fuck his three year-old daughter (this reminds
> me of Dumas Malone, the biographer of Jefferson, telling his graduate
> class at Columbia in 1957-1958 that Jefferson was too much of a
> gentleman to have sex with a slave) --- in short, the entire arsenal
> of archaic bigoted views about the lives of women, masked as
> psychology, views which some of us thought had fallen into various
> dustbins, but which seem to be thriving, both on left and right –
> even, so far, on LBO.

My skepticism of "recovered memory" has nothing to do with the gender
of those who say that they, well into adulthood, suddenly "remembered"
having been repeatedly raped as teenagers.  Nor does it have anything
to do with the character of Herbert Aptheker, whom I never met in
person.

Whether the accuser is male or female, whether the accused is a
left-winger or a right-winger or a chicken-winger, a Catholic priest
or an atheist, a seemingly asexual or a known serial rapist, I'm not
credulous enough to take the story of "recovered memory" at its face
value.

As far as I'm concerned, feminism in general ought to be about
combating gender inequality, and feminism on the Left in particular
ought to be about combating capitalism and gender inequality.
Feminists are not obligated to believe _anything and everything_ a
woman says if the woman says she was raped, for sometimes that is true
and other times it isn't.  I am of an opinion that too many feminists'
hasty embrace of questionable "recovered memory" is a sign of
feminism's intellectual decline and puts the credibility of feminism
into jeopardy.

More fundamentally, sex is one of the important issues that feminists
must tackle, but it shouldn't eclipse all other concerns, such as
women's labor rights (quotas for women in male-dominated professions,
etc.), women's social rights (education, abortion, health care in
general, social programs such as paid maternity leaves and old age
pensions, etc.), women's political leadership (few political parties
and states on the Left have ever been led by women, even while the
Right and the Center -- even in culturally conservative countries --
have learned to embrace women as their top political leaders), etc.
But the most prevalent school of American feminism has tended to
become preoccupied with sex at all other issues' expense, in tandem
with the Left's decline in society in general.


> The "false recovered memory" line is inapplicable. This is not the
> childcare false memory stuff that was dealt with in various areas of
> the literature and in Ofra Bikel's PBS documentary (e.g. McMartin pre-
> school). This is a not a case of little children being manipulated by
> shrinks: Bettina is a woman in her sixties, who retrieved painful
> memories while in her sixties,

Adults are perfectly capable of having "false recovered memory."  The
false memory syndrome started in the 1980s, and many cases led to
lawsuits by adult sons and daughters accusing their parents:
<http://www.fmsfonline.org/fmsffaq.html#WhatIsProb>.  The panic about
"ritual Satanic abuse" at kindergartens is just one variant of the
false memory syndrome.  This is a very American phenomenon --
Americans LOVE to hate sex scandals, especially ones in which children
are victims -- aided and abetted by the country's addiction to
litigation, but it is not unknown in other countries either.  Here's a
British society dedicated to contesting the false memory syndrome:
<http://www.bfms.org.uk/>.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>