“My Daughter’s Vagina” is the title of an essay I wrote about five years ago that was published online here but that I have never really felt comfortable with as a finished piece. Not too long ago, I came up with the idea of serializing the essay on my blog as I revised it, and so here I am. I originally had in mind that I wanted say a few things about the nature of the essay, but I think that, for the most part, it’s better that I just let the piece speak for itself. I will say that “My Daughter’s Vagina” is long, around 27,000 words, and so I will have to ask for your patience in letting the piece unfold at the pace that I am able to set for revising it; and I will also say that the goal of the piece is not to argue any particular position, but rather to raise questions about gender, sex and sexuality and explore them from within my own experience as a man in this culture. The narratives in the essay are deeply personal and very revealing, and do not always show me in the kindest of lights. I hope you will understand, therefore, that while I am perfectly comfortable reading and discussing good faith critiques of how I understand my experience in the essay, I am not going to tolerate any comments that even remotely resemble personal attacks on me or on anyone else who chooses to comment. Other than that, I am, for now, going to leave the comments section open to all comers. So, here goes:
My Daughter’s Vagina, Part 1
The first time a woman opened her legs long enough that I could look for more than the few seconds it took to bend to her with lips and tongue, or to climb up blind into her and start moving, I crouched between her thighs to get as close as I could, and I remember even now how the words began to list themselves in my head: pussy, beaver, twat, slit, fur, love muscle, muff, quim, cabbage, snatch, box…and all of them but one felt inadequate; and that was the one I wanted most not to use, not even to think, the one I’d come to understand as degrading of my lover by its very existence; and yet, somehow, no other word but cunt captured in my imagination the wet and hairy wildness, the pungent and disheveled and untamed and multi-shaded pink and red and brown and flesh-colored and even deep violet beauty of what I was looking at. I’d seen pictures of course, plenty of them, had discovered as a young teenager that I grew hard at the sight of them, but those images of carefully coiffed, sometimes completely shaven, meticulously arranged specimens of female genitalia were, I suddenly understood, so obviously composed, so clearly intended as artifice, that I felt, looking at my lover, as if I were seeing a cunt for the first time.
The more I stared, the more uncomfortable she became. “What are you looking at? Is something wrong down there?”
And when I didn’t respond right away, “Answer me!”
“You’re beautiful,” I answered, and I know it sounds like something out of a romance novel, but the words came in a whisper, and I looked up at her and I smiled, and then I tried in everything I did next with fingers and my lips and my tongue to make sure she knew I meant what I’d said; and when she asked me to fuck her, her words, not mine, tears–but how do I write this without sounding like I’m bragging? How do I make you see that this memory, even more than it makes me feel good about myself (which of course it does), humbles me and fills me with awe and gratitude–tears were filling her eyes. It was, she explained as we lay together afterward, the first time a man had told her she was beautiful “down there,” much less made love to her in a way that convinced her he really meant it.
“And all those other times,” I wondered to myself. “What had I meant then? What had she understood my meaning to be?”
///
The fundamentally alien universe that a woman’s experience of sex is to me. That mine is to her. So fully do we romanticize heterosexual lovemaking as a communion of souls, a synthesizing of opposites, the fulfillment and expression of our deepest emotional needs, that it’s easy to forget just how inaccessible the interior landscapes of male and female sexual embodiment are to each other. Or, perhaps more to the point, how strongly this romanticization invites our forgetfulness, encourages, even mandates that we refuse to see just how deeply, when it comes to sex, physical differences divide us.
When I began this essay, I was teaching an independent study project in creative nonfiction with two women, each of whom wanted to write about gender and sexuality, exploring specifically the meaning and consequences of the childhood sexual abuse she had survived. One of the books I asked them to read was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, which is too often, and inaccurately, understood as arguing that heterosexual sex is by its nature–man penetrating, woman penetrated–a tool of the patriarchy and therefore exists almost solely to demean and exploit women. Given the way Dworkin writes, this is not a difficult misreading to come to, especially for college sophomores who are encountering her ideas for the first time, and so when my students asked me whether Intercourse should indeed be read that way, I suggested we discuss the following quote from the section called Occupation/Collaboration: “The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people–physically occupied inside, internally invaded–be free […]?”
Easy to misinterpret and dismiss–after all, how can a woman who willingly has intercourse be understood as having been occupied and invaded, with all the connotations those words carry of warfare and colonization?–Dworkin’s question is less about any given woman’s personal experience of intercourse than it is about the nature of female identity. For while a clear distinction exists in most people’s imagination between a woman’s experience of rape and her experience of the kind of intercourse to which the term lovemaking is meant to refer, focusing on that distinction tends to obscure the fact that heterosexual intercourse is also generally understood in our culture–perhaps along with menstruation–to be the defining moment of femaleness and womanhood. More to the point, and this is what I understand the crux of Dworkin’s question to be, if a woman cannot be understood to exist fully as a woman until her body has been “physically occupied inside, internally invaded” by a man, then it doesn’t really matter how tender and/or loving and/or intensely pleasurable intercourse is for her. The freedom of her body was already compromised, by definition, not merely before she had sex, but even before she was born. If, in other words, intercourse is what makes a woman a woman, or, perhaps more precisely, if what makes a woman a woman in patriarchal culture is her capacity for being genitally penetrated–which means intercourse is both an expression and confirmation of her gender–then the question arises whether the difference between the kind of intercourse most people describe as lovemaking and the kind we call rape can accurately be described as one of kind. Maybe, Dworkin is asking, this difference is more properly described as one of degree, since in each case a woman is fulfilling the mandate of her socially prescribed gender identity.
I’d come to class prepared with references to passages in my students’ own essays that helped to demonstrate the validity of Dworkin’s question, but something in the
ir eyes told they’d already gotten it and that to say more than what I have paraphrased above would have been both superfluous and self-serving. For now matter how important I thought Dworkin’s question was, it would never mean the same thing to me as it did to them, and so I fell silent, letting the room fill with the gap of otherness that had opened between us; and it was in this silence, watching the faces of these two women who had placed their trust in me both as a teacher and, given what they wanted to write about, as a man, that my imagination made the leap that was the starting point of this essay: Had I lived a different life–that of my parents, for example, who married when they were in their very early twenties–one of those two women was young enough that she could’ve been my daughter. I don’t mean that I felt fatherly towards her, or that she saw me as a father figure, but this abrupt awareness of the age difference between us brought me back to a conversation my wife and I had been having about whether or not to conceive a second child. I thought about how, if that still-hypothetical offspring turned out to be a girl, she would grow up–I would have to raise her–in a world where the validity of Dworkin’s question inhered, inescapably, in the fact of her body. I thought about how I would, from the first moments of her life, face this daughter across the same terrain of difference that was separating me from my students, and I thought about how, precisely because she would be my daughter, that silence would not be an option.
“And so what,” I almost asked myself out lout, “what will I say to her?”
Cross-posted at It’s All Connected.
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Since I’ve read this (the whole piece), I’ve been meaning to write you. This made me cry several times. It’s the most intense piece of writing I’ve read in a long time. Thank you for writing and sharing it.
Thanks, Mandolin! That is always good to hear. By the way, I have edited the post so that there are dashes instead of question marks where the dashes should have been.
More to the point, and this is what I understand the crux of Dworkin’s question to be, if a woman cannot be understood to exist fully as a woman until her body has been “physically occupied inside, internally invaded” by a man,
Well, I’ve never read Dworkin’s books (I’ve seen a couple of short essays online) so I can’t judge the context of this. But is this something that’s a product of specific sexist issues of society? Or is it more simply that people aren’t considered to have crossed the line into full adulthood until they’ve had sex? There’s certainly a viewpoint that a boy isn’t really fully a man until he’s had sex with a woman. Is it all about “physically occupied, internally invaded” (or “physically occupier, internally invading”), or is it just a line that both boys and girls cross to become men and women? You talk about being reluctant to raise a girl child up in a world where Dworkin’s question is valid, but I’m not at all sure that it is valid.
It’s been quite some while since I’ve read Dworkin herself, but I believe the point the OP is raising is…
If the world we live in is one in which the definition of “woman” and “being a woman” is predicated on the act of sexual intercourse and her position as invaded/occupied during that act,, then for any given woman —whether she enjoys sex or not, whether she’s ever had sex or not— her identity, on account of being a member of the class “woman”, is predicated on her status as invaded/occupied.
…As for the validity of the argument, that depends first on the premise of whether our definition of “woman” depends on sex (to which the answer is a resounding yes), and second on the conclusion of how the nature of the act of sex consequently affects the perception and identity associated with “women”.
A lot of people leap to the second but I think the first is essential to not misstating what the argument is actually saying. It’s a philosophical argument, albeit with very real consequences, not one that has to do with specific people or instances. That is, it’s not that every specific female human is violated, nor that every specific female human must have sex to be called a “woman”, nor that every act of sexual intercourse violates a human female, rather it has to do with our societal definitions of “women” and “sex” and the unseen connections they have to subjugation and violation (which specific acts may serve to elucidate).
Invasion and occupation seems a very odd way to view sex; at least, presuming that it’s consensual. You have to wonder about someone who has such a worldview.
RonF:
Well, winterkoninkje said it very well, but I would point this out. In your first comment, you said this:
Note that this is a definition of full adulthood that is predicated on a woman’s being heterosexually penetrated; in other words, by this definition, a non-heterosexual woman cannot be considered an adult. If that is the case, then in social/cultural terms, heterosexual intercourse is, for women, compulsory if they want to be considered adults–and please do not tell me that it is also the case for men; it may be, and that too may be a worthy topic to discuss; but I am talking here about women–and if heterosexual intercourse is compulsory on that level (which of course does not preclude the requirement that the act of intercourse which makes any given woman an adult in these terms should be consensual; she, in other words, gets to choose when and with whom to enter this adulthood), then the only way in which occupation and invasion would be inappropriate words to use is if you cannot conceive of a woman who might wish for a different kind of adulthood for herself, one that is not defined by the requirement that she, at some point, take a man’s penis into her vagina.
This gave me chills. I’m looking forward to the next installment.
Note that this is a definition of full adulthood that is predicated on a woman’s being heterosexually penetrated;
If by “this” you are referring to your quote of my statement, I point out that my statement said “had sex”, not “had heterosexual sex”.
and please do not tell me that it is also the case for men;
I already did. That’s part of my premise; that there’s nothing unique to women here.
then the only way in which occupation and invasion would be inappropriate words to use is if you cannot conceive of a woman who might wish for a different kind of adulthood for herself, one that is not defined by the requirement that she, at some point, take a man’s penis into her vagina.
My point is that you are equating vaginal/penile sex with “occupation and invasion”, which seems to me a rather distorted and limited way of viewing it.
I also wonder how common the “you’re not an adult until you’ve had sex” paradigm is. After all, there are a number of people who have lived their lives in a celibate manner for one reason or another, and I wouldn’t say that people don’t regard (e.g.) nuns and priests as not being adults. It does seem that sex is a “rite of passage”, but I’m not sure I can support an insistence that either boys or girls are not considered men or women by society at large unless they’ve had sex.
RonF–
I am not so sure there is anything to be gained by our going back and forth over this. We come at the question from very different and most probably irreconcilable points of view. For example, you were the one who introduced the language of adulthood into the discussion, not me; neither my post nor winter’s restatement of the underlying philosophical question says anything about adulthood: rather we each talked about “being a woman” and the relationship in patriarchal culture between heterosexual intercourse to the state of “being a woman.” You read “being a woman” (or whatever specific language we used) to mean “as opposed to be a girl, i.e. not an adult.” So my comment was about what I understood to be your definition of adulthood, not a further elaboration on what I meant when I wrote that heterosexual intercourse is the defining moment of “being a woman” in patriarchal culture. (Also, while I am willing to accept that you did not have, specifically, heterosexual intercourse in mind when you wrote, “Or is it more simply that people aren’t considered to have crossed the line into full adulthood until they’ve had sex?”, given the context of your question, it is, I think, disingenuous to suggest that I was misreading you.)
One other thing: While it may be true that priests and nuns are considered adults even though they have taken vows of celibacy, that is not the same thing as saying that they meet our culture’s definition of what it means to be a “real” man or a woman, given the fact that they have taken vows of celibacy. Think, for example, about the stereotypical response you see in some movies where male characters are confronted with a nun who happens to be physically very beautiful, especially if they don’t know at first that she is a nun. There is, at least in the movies I have seen, almost always a moment of “what-a-pity”–which may, now that I think of it, be not so different from the “what-a-pity” moment that happens in movies, and that I have seen happen in real life, when some men are confronted with conventionally beautiful lesbians–and that moment of “what-a-pity,” in its paternalism, its failure to accept difference, its implicit assertion that the woman is available but that the man is choosing not to force her to be an available woman–aboslutely contains within it the notion that a woman who is not sexually available/who has not been sexually penetrated by a man is not a “real” woman.
I’m not expecting you to be persuaded by this. I am trying to point out that while you are arguing from the assumption that womanhood=adulthood; I am proceeding from the assumption that that state of patriarchally defined womanhood, of being a woman within patriarchy, is a good deal more existential and even metaphysical than that.
The post is beautiful, but I have to say the analysis of sexual experience across genders as mysterious doesn’t resonate with me at all. Perhaps it’s because I’m queer. Perhaps it’s because I prefer penetrating people to being penetrated and I can’t imagine I feel profoundly different, in some deep way, from cissexual men when they do it. Perhaps it’s because I’ve both been penetrated and penetrated my partners, and honestly my male partner’s description of his feelings as I did this matched up so exactly with the words I’d use, myself, to describe g-spot stimulation that it struck me as utterly uncanny.
All this makes me think we’re quite similar.
What I don’t understand and do find wondrous is the people who get such fulfillment, in a deep way, from being penetrated. I don’t, really. I mean, it’s nice, and it has its own unique sensation to it, and yes there are times that that goes with some intense emotions and feelings. But they’re not feelings that fulfill me, as a person, the way the others do when it’s the other way around.
That for me qualifies as a wondrous contrast and a very sexy one, and maybe it’s the same thing you experience (it sounds like in your personal life you’re never receptive and she’s never the giver) but for me… it’s about what acts and what roles are most comfortable for me and who matches them, not some deep essential mystery.
I’m a top who likes bottoms, usually. But who’s to say I couldn’t be someone who wasn’t interested in polarities at all, who liked knowing exactly what my partner thought and felt and why and thought mystery was for novels? :)
**It’s been a REALLY long time since I’ve read intercourse, so please remember that, and I don’t remember much of the details other than I thoroughly disagreed with Dworkin’s position.**
I also think the piece of writing was beautiful, and I look forward to the next installment.
However, I have a feminism 101 type question here… is it true that the definition of womanhood is about sex? Heterosexual or otherwise? This does not ring true for me wrt personal experience, but then I’ve always been an odd duck, so I’m willing to concede that it may be true more broadly. But I don’t know…I just don’t know if I think patriarchy is ultimately about sexual oppression, and I think that’s what the whole womanhood defined by hetero sex thing is about.
Patriarchy is real, and a real problem for women. There is absolutely gender oppression, there is absolutely sexual oppression of women – I don’t question any of that at all. I do question whether the root of patriarchy is about sexual oppression (which is what I understand Dworkin to be saying… please correct me if I am wrong).
I’m sorry for such novice questions – they are genuine and not meant in any kind of snarky way. I have always had trouble with this concept… and I’m hoping for some new perspective.
“However, I have a feminism 101 type question here… is it true that the definition of womanhood is about sex? Heterosexual or otherwise?”
It’s been a long time since I read the book, but from what I gather the idea is that a very big part of what “woman” and “man” mean, socially, is tied to their supposed roles in sex. If a woman is expected to be submissive sexually, fulfilled by a man, and to have a certain kind of permeable sense of self, as shown by penetration, all that means men can expect women to easily be usable/takeable/theirs in other arenas as well.
It’s not something I buy — particularly since even though she is asserting this is how the world looks as socially constructed now, I find that reading it it seems to me that biology keeps creeping in (woman as permeable in an unavoidable way, because of the vagina.) As a female and a top who knew she would be at a very young age, a lot of this is documenting a game I’m not really playing in the same way as I think D expects everyone to be.
If I’d found the book before I’d found a community of perverts who like me just the way I am I’d probably have liked it more — it would, back then, have played on fears I really did have about what would be expected of me if I had sex with men. (And actually I do have some fear of sex with men outside kinky circles, as I worry they’re more wedded to the Other Game.)
I do question whether the root of patriarchy is about sexual oppression (which is what I understand Dworkin to be saying… please correct me if I am wrong).
Yeah, I take both MacKinnon and Dworkin to be saying something like this: that men’s and women’s roles are taught to us most strictly and in their most basic sense in sexual arenas. This is also why they’re so anti-porn: porn is, for them, the propaganda of the system, the way people are taught the dominant or subordinate roles.
Trinity:
This, actually, is not true, but the fact that I enjoy being penetrated does not mean that a woman’s experience of vaginal pentration is still not fundamentally alien to me. I might be able, based on my own experience, to imagine what it is like, the words that I use to describe my experience might be remarkably similar to the words she would use, but all of that is based on imagination and metaphor (which are absolutely crucial mechanisms in humanizing an Other; so please do not read me as dismissing them). The actual experience of vaginal penetration is, however, by definition, since I do not have a vagina, closed to me.
Once you step out of a patriarchally defined heterosexual binary (including the romanticization that I talked about in the essay), I think the physical difference I am talking about becomes less and less important, while at the same time the ways in which we imagine ourselves across that difference become more and more important. (Which I think is the point you make in your comment.) But it was at least true for me in my own development that acknowledging that male and female embodiment creates an essential difference between the people who have those bodies (not a hierarchical difference; just an essential one) helped me to step outside the binary, because it suddenly seemed pointless to try to define myself over and against something that was, ultimately, unknowable. This is part of why I focused in the paragraph you question on the notion of experience and embodiment–which I think can be talked about more or less objectively: one does or does not have a vagina (including a surgically constructed one) or a penis–and not pleasure, which is far more subjective.
I don’t know if that makes sense, and I would not argue that what I have just written–assuming it makes sense–is in any way evident in the essay itself. You have picked on the paragraph that is, for me, the weakest in the piece; I left it unrevised because it functions in several ways in the piece as a whole. Though it may be that I will need to return to it again in a future revision.
I also wanted to add: For me, Dworkin’s strenght, the power of her work, is in the accuracy of her description of what the world looks like from inside patriarchy; I often don’t buy where she goes after that description–though I also have not read her in a very long time, and so I can’t think of any specific examples off the top of my head–but reading Intrcourse was, for me, an uncanny experience: Even as I rejected the way in which it seemed to me that she was saying, “This is how you feel as a man about women and fucking, etc. and so on,” because it was very clear to me that I did not think and feel that way, I also had to admit that it was just as clear that what she was describing was what I was supposed to have felt, was the lesson I was supposed to have learned.
“It’s not something I buy — particularly since even though she is asserting this is how the world looks as socially constructed now, I find that reading it it seems to me that biology keeps creeping in (woman as permeable in an unavoidable way, because of the vagina.) ”
This is a large part of my issue with the argument as well. I find it incredibly close to biological determinism and I’m VERY uncomfortable with that line of thinking.
I also don’t find that many of the discussions of sexual oppression ring very true for me personally. And, I’m a pretty vanilla heterosexual woman. And while I understand not everything is about personal experience, it seems to me that the argument is something like ‘if you aren’t recognizing your sexual experiences as part of an oppressive system of patriarchy you just have a false consciousness’ and I’m REALLY uncomfortable with that. The only sexual oppression arguments that I find resonate with me personally are rape culture discussions – and that’s less about heterosexual sex oppression for women and more about violence and power imbalances…
“is in the accuracy of her description of what the world looks like from inside patriarchy”
This is interesting because part of my biggest problem with her was that her description of what the world looks like from inside patriarchy was not at all how I had experienced it. Not at all. Not even a tiny bit. And I was annoyed at the implication that if I wasn’t seeing/feeling those things then I was just duped by the patriarchy and that felt really condescending and, well, patriarchal. ‘I know what I’m talking about, so listen to me rather than your own lived experiences.’
“I might be able, based on my own experience, to imagine what it is like, the words that I use to describe my experience might be remarkably similar to the words she would use, but all of that is based on imagination and metaphor (which are absolutely crucial mechanisms in humanizing an Other; so please do not read me as dismissing them). The actual experience of vaginal penetration is, however, by definition, since I do not have a vagina, closed to me.”
Sure, but the actual experience of having blue eyes is closed to me because I don’t, but that’s not relevant to much at all. I think people have a tendency to assume they couldn’t possibly understand some experience they don’t have simply because they don’t have it, and leave things at that. I’ve never understood that at all.
“I also don’t find that many of the discussions of sexual oppression ring very true for me personally. And, I’m a pretty vanilla heterosexual woman. And while I understand not everything is about personal experience, it seems to me that the argument is something like ‘if you aren’t recognizing your sexual experiences as part of an oppressive system of patriarchy you just have a false consciousness’ and I’m REALLY uncomfortable with that.”
Yeah. I mean, I had a similar experience to Richard hearing some of her comments on intercourse (I read and understood snippets long before I read and understood that book itself). I thought “Yeah, this is what I feared I’d find.” So I do think she’s on to something. At the same time, it’s very much not what I found.
But she’s on to the cultural idea more than she’s on to people’s experiences in general — very few people would misinterpret her so wildly and be so angry upon reading if most people thought she was actually describing them.
And I also think there’s a generation gap issue as well. I think a lot of people in the ’70s weren’t necessarily exposed to quite so much sexual variation as we all are now. Even if we’re vanilla and straight and man penetrates woman and never anyplace but the cunt in our personal lives… most of us have heard of variations, sometimes in detail. Many of us have been raised to think of being gay as a natural variation, even if we’re not kinky folk who know the finer points of fisting. Most of us know what BDSM is sort of, even if only from occasional Dan Savage articles.
Where I think in Dworkin’s day — yes, you found some kink in some of the porn she critiqued, but I don’t gather from what she was looking at in skin mags that people understood variations in sexual needs — so, for her, it was just one more example of the crazy things pornographers try to make their Men Oppress Women message even more blatant.
…and I especially don’t understand how Men don’t understand Women Being Penetrated since everyone I’ve penetrated is so different.
What do they all have in common? Well, some have cunts and some have butts, so it’s not that, and I guess I’m supposed to think there’s something radically different… well, what’s that Mean Grandiosely?
and all of this confusion on the part of me… maybe it Means I’m not a bottom, but I never have been. So is my being vaginally penetrated The Same in an important way to someone who is? Why? Why not? What parts of the experience are “shared” and what parts are not, and how would I even know they are in the first place?
I can’t even map my experiences onto that sort of biological essentialist framework. I don’t mean this as any kind of insult; I mean they just *don’t map.*
Which tends, interestingly, to happen in quite a lot of situations in which someone else’s point is supposedly obvious and elementary… hmm.
Yeah, I’d say it’s probably a mapping issue. Meaning: what we think sex IS, and what we think the biology does.
I think our biology is pretty damn close: we’ve all got the same bits, arranged prenatally in different and relevantly interesting configurations.
From how I (perhaps mis-)read Richard those configurations are, seemingly, the fundamental part — the fact that it’s all the same stuff is an odd coincidence.
neither my post nor winter’s restatement of the underlying philosophical question says anything about adulthood: rather we each talked about “being a woman” and the relationship in patriarchal culture between heterosexual intercourse to the state of “being a woman.” You read “being a woman” (or whatever specific language we used) to mean “as opposed to be a girl, i.e. not an adult.”
Ah. Well, you have characterized my viewpoint correctly, and I seem to have misunderstood yours. Sorry about that. In that case, then, I don’t understand what your concept of becoming a woman means. In what sense is a female not a woman unless she has engaged in intercourse?
There is, at least in the movies I have seen, almost always a moment of “what-a-pity”–which may, now that I think of it, be not so different from the “what-a-pity” moment that happens in movies, and that I have seen happen in real life, when some men are confronted with conventionally beautiful lesbians–and that moment of “what-a-pity,” in its paternalism, its failure to accept difference, its implicit assertion that the woman is available but that the man is choosing not to force her to be an available woman–aboslutely contains within it the notion that a woman who is not sexually available/who has not been sexually penetrated by a man is not a “real” woman.
O.K. Let me paraphrase to see if I understand you correctly. You hold that when in a movie a man comes across an attractive woman who is sworn to celibacy, or in real life when a man comes across a heterosexually atrractive lesbian, the man’s reaction is that the woman is not a real woman? Additionally, you hold that the man in question still considers the woman in question available to him but is choosing not to have sex with her (and it’s hard to see how he could do so without it being rape) out of … actually, I’m not sure what you consider his motivation to be.
Am I correct?
Trinity:
Just because something is alien to me doesn’t mean that I cannot achieve some, relatively accurate, understanding of it; just because an experience is inaccssible to me does not mean I cannot try and, in part, succeed in conceiving of what that experience might be like; but the minute I pretend that my understanding renders irrelevant/meaningless the difference that creates the alienness or the inaccessibility then I have crossed the line into presuming that my experience is the Other’s experience; that the other’s experience is mine.
This seems to me to be what patriarchal male heterosexuality does to women: it has come to its own understanding of what female sexuality is, of what a woman’s experience of her own body is, and it renders irrelevant and meaningless the fact that female sexuality/a woman’s experience of her own body exists on the other side of an experiential line that men cannot cross.
What you call the “different and relevantly interesting configurations” of our “same bits” are significant not because they have any meaning beyond their difference, but simply because they are different, and I think it is only to the degree that we respect the fact of that difference that we can respectfully explore the similarities in all the myriad boundary blurring/streatching/breaking ways that one might be able to imagine.
And in terms of the essay, I will say this again: explicitly acknowledging the inherent alienness of female embodiment was, for me, a way to disentangle myself from the heterosexual binary.
Ok. Part 2 coming soon.
RonF:
I hold that when there is a “what-a-pity” moment the “what-a-pity” contains within it the assertion that the woman is not fulfilling/has not fulfilled the role prescribed for her as a woman.
Hmm, this may be outside the scope of the conversation, and pardon me if it is, I’m genuinely curious. I’m curious as to how this, for lack of a better word, philosophy, would apply to a male-to-female post-op transsexual and also, to someone with an intersex condition identifying as female, but who may or may not be regarded either by society or parents as wholly female (someone who is 45,XO Turner Syndrome, for example) or who may have male bits but a clear female identity (low grade AIS, XXY female identified). Those are the conditions I can think off the top of my head that may complicate matters.
What can be complicated is how someone who has not a female genital configuration may (I’m not generalizing to everyone, as I know not everyone feels that way) be attracted to the thought or idea of penetration, but have no way to express it to satisfaction, lacking the right equipment.
I’m only speaking theory of course, since, by the theory presented here, I would not be a real woman (since I’m virgin) or a real man either if it applied in reverse.
KateL. wrote:
“This is a large part of my issue with the argument as well. I find it incredibly close to biological determinism and I’m VERY uncomfortable with that line of thinking.
I also don’t find that many of the discussions of sexual oppression ring very true for me personally. And, I’m a pretty vanilla heterosexual woman. And while I understand not everything is about personal experience, it seems to me that the argument is something like ‘if you aren’t recognizing your sexual experiences as part of an oppressive system of patriarchy you just have a false consciousness’ and I’m REALLY uncomfortable with that. ”
I find that sort of argument “You agree with us or you’re lying/not honest” to be reminding me of the BBL theory and it’s unfalsifiability (which is a big reason for it’s discreditation as scientific). I’m not saying this theory has to be scientific, but I’m also uncomfortable with theories that tell me “It’s this or you’re lying”. I’ve seen it happen with others (doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists) trying to tell me what *my* experience is.
What’s scary in this is that, if we don’t know, it’s easy to rely on their opinion (I used to worship a psychiatrist’s opinion, thinking it was well-thought-out and they had empathy and all that…until I saw firsthand that I was so naive to ever believe that. I’m still hoping SOME shrinks can be understanding or empathic, but I lost faith in the ‘they’re all good’.
—
Oh and I think this is my first time posting on Alas.
Hi, I’m Sara, and I often go by Schala or Schala Zeal.
I’ve read more than a few posts on various topics and I find those on this blog to be very interesting and insightful (if sometimes long reads, like 430 comments).
“I’m not saying this theory has to be scientific, but I’m also uncomfortable with theories that tell me “It’s this or you’re lying”. I’ve seen it happen with others (doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists) trying to tell me what *my* experience is.
What’s scary in this is that, if we don’t know, it’s easy to rely on their opinion (I used to worship a psychiatrist’s opinion, thinking it was well-thought-out and they had empathy and all that…until I saw firsthand that I was so naive to ever believe that. ”
Same here.
“And in terms of the essay, I will say this again: explicitly acknowledging the inherent alienness of female embodiment was, for me, a way to disentangle myself from the heterosexual binary.”
That’s funny, because a lot of feeling sexually liberated for me happened when I realized we’re all so much the same.
I can’t imagine wanting sex with someone who sees my body the way you seem to. The bit about your lover’s cunt being beautful was lovely, but being in bed with someone who sees my flesh as alien…
…I think I’d run screaming.
In what sense is a female not a woman unless she has engaged in intercourse?
To put it more bluntly, RonF, the defining characteristic of a woman, in a patriarchal culture, is that she is fuckable. You will note that our culture and language see receptive sexuality as demeaning, and penetration as dominating–all the heterosexual male anxiety about the ‘finger in the butt’ doctor exams, “getting fucked” as a synonym for being abused and treated badly (with “fucked in the ass”, “BOHICA” and so on if you really want to emphasize it), and so on.
I found much of Intercourse completely unreadable, and I don’t mean in the “I disagree” sense, but I really don’t get how anyone misses the notion that contempt for women and the notion that what they’re for is accomodating a penis go hand in hand.
…Re KateL:
That’s my synopsis of Dworkin (and MacKinnon) as well, and is precisely why I disagree with their brand of radical feminism. When you get to the point where “anyone who disagrees with me is only proving my point”, you slip into the realm of religion and out of the realm of science. Social sciences may not need to be as rigorous as physical sciences, but if there’s no way to disprove a theory then it’s vacuous and should be discarded.
…Re Schala,
I think that your question about intersex and transgender —while fascinating and relevant to gender/sexuality studies in general— is not a valid question for Dworkin and her brand of feminism. For extreme radical feminists, the distinction between gender and biological sex usually doesn’t exist; a transman is therefore just a woman who’s defected to the patriarchy, and a transwoman is just a man who’s wielding his male privilege once again to invade the safe spaces of women. As for intersex and other biological variation, that blurs the lines between “men” and “women” so it doesn’t exist mm’kay
I strongly disagree with that position, however it does seem to be the only position consistent with Dworkin’s view of the patriarchy, or at least the only one I’ve seen adopted. Personally, biological variation and psychological variation for the same physiological configuration are what makes gender/sexuality so interesting to study. While I think Dworkin goes off the deep end of feminist analysis, there is some merit in having such extreme views around because occasionally they do highlight what more reasonable analysis would let slide.
Re sex as the definition of woman…
First, in talking about “women” we’re talking simultaneously about all women (including girls, old ladies, etc) and the idea of femininity, but also we’re talking only about the visible class of women. If you go and walk down the street, or ride the bus or subway, or read magazines, or go shopping, you’ll encounter many images of women. These images represent what society considers to be all women. (As do media images of men represent our ideals about men, and so forth.)
These images have been predominantly white, though now there are a sizable number of unidentifiable but nevertheless ‘ethnic’ women (very light skinned mixed, asian but not too asian, etc; to counteract this, they are invariably on the younger end of the spectrum). All these images, unless they have a specific reason not to be, will be of women aged ‘eighteen’ to early thirties, i.e. physically (but more important: legally) mature but not at all old, i.e. of a nubile and sexual age. Additionally they will be made up to be sexually attractive (never, say, stern and authoritative). Many of them will be not just sexily but indeed scantily clad. They will be depicted as friendly, outgoing, flirtatious.
When a woman in an ad is selling something, she is always selling it with sex, either offering it herself to a male viewer, or demonstrating how the female viewer will be enjoying it as she herself is. When a man in an ad is selling something, sometimes it’s selling sex (e.g. for cologne, razors, underwear, etc), but often it’s selling power, authority, knowledge, brawn. When a woman looses her breast to cancer she’s considered half a woman at best. (When a man looses a testicle, he’s also emasculated but he isn’t forced to prostheses before he’s allowed to attempt reclaiming his place in society.) When a woman goes through menopause she becomes only questionably feminine. If a woman gets to a certain age and doesn’t have kids yet it’s acceptable to harass her about that fact, regardless of whether she’s unmarried, not in a relationship, or a lesbian. In television and movies, a woman is always married or the wooing of her is a core part of her character’s plot. If a woman goes out without makeup, without shaving her legs, or otherwise improperly coifed it’s a major faux pas which any random stranger can comment on; when a man goes unshaven, uncombed, or otherwise scruffy it’s only a problem if it exceeds certain bounds. Et cetera et cetera et cetera.
I don’t think that every woman (nor even most women) feels her sexuality is the defining characteristic of her being a woman, but that’s not what feminism is claiming when it says that our definition of “woman” is tied essentially to sex. I think that women’s experiences of living in the patriarchy are rather similar to men’s, much despite the vastly differing rules of engagement. But even so, to attack those rules of engagement effectively we must attack them at their root. So long as “being a woman” means exactly “being sexually available to men”, then women will never make as much as men do, even if they don’t mind the makeup and shaving (though many do). Women’ll never achieve equal treatment as human beings so long as their existence is tied to their biological function rather than to sociological and intellectual functions. Hence, the ideal to assault is the one that says women are sex.
one thing that is both valuable an disconcerting about what some folks here are complaining about w/r/t MacKinnon and Dworkin (the agree with me or you’re lying issue):
the fact that sexism continues and thrives so well can’t be explained merely by the power of evil sexists. It can’t only be explained by the existence of conscious malice plus great power to inflict that malice. No power would be that great, for one thing, and malice is hard to sustain in a vacuum. Sexism is perpetuated, at least partly by complicity on the part of women (and men) who may not think of themselves as sexist.
And complicity is most effective when it’s unconscious. Sexism does not persist because of evil men and sexist women. Sexism persists because it has permeated everyone’s worldview. This means that (even though there are specific things I don’t agree with) it’s worth considering that I might be mistaken or misinterpreting or brainwashed or whatever you might want to call it. “lying” may even be the word in some cases.
Dworkin’s analysis is powerful and explanatory in ways that many views aren’t. Even just imagining what it would mean if her take on certain things was correct has opened up some new understanding for me. Its also uncomfortable, and I might reject it in many cases. But I have found it too valuable to dismiss out of hand.
Evolution appears to favor sexist societies and cultures; that is, the societies and cultures that have survived and thrived to the present day all appear to be pretty darn sexist, in varying flavors. If fighting sexism is the agenda, it would probably be useful to understand why.
ripley,
It is indeed disconcerting that sexism still thrives as it does. While I do think there are some evil sexists out there in positions of power with an avowed agenda to perpetuate the status quo, there are not very many and they are only a minor force at best. Complicity as well as complacency are more powerful forces than most realize.
The two can be difficult to distinguish, but where steps have been made to end the former the latter often steps in. Few people realize the power and longevity of social forces. Many young people today think of racism and sexism as things which have been solved by the steps we’ve made and think we should get rid of things like affirmative action; few realize their grandparents both black and white were raised and brought up in a world before the civil rights movement. Even when individuals have made steps against them, the mores of that era are still alive and well. The people raised with those mores will still be with us for years yet, and when they pass on there is still an entire generation whom they raised with heavy tints of how their parents raised them.
Again, it’s been a few years since I’ve read Dworkin first-hand, but I do not think her analysis rung more true than the analyses of other feminists or anthropologists. Dworkin’s basis is eerie in it’s familiarity, but she quickly takes it off in a direction which bears no connection to my life experiences. Maybe it’s a generational thing, maybe it’s a gender thing (though I’ve met as many women who disagree as I have men, even if they’re less prone to anger about it), but Dworkin reminds me a lot of Freud: there’s some excellent work if you take it with a grain of salt, but if you try to read it thoroughly or as gospel then you’re in for a very long and strange trip through the rabbit hole.
Robert,
More accurately, sexist (or other -ist) cultural values seem historically to win out against egalitarian values.
Far far back this may have had some basis in biological evolution (favoring those more likely to survive/breed), but I think cultural forces have been more powerful than biological forces for many millennia of humanity’s development. All the same, it would be interesting to discover why the biological seeds of discrimination have held on so tightly through cultural evolution.
Trinity said…”I can’t imagine wanting sex with someone who sees my body the way you seem to. The bit about your lover’s cunt being beautful was lovely, but being in bed with someone who sees my flesh as alien… ”
Yup. I mean “alien but beautiful” is a huge improvement over “women’s bodies are wierd and freaky and gross”, but it still feels a little odd and not-quite-right to me. I don’t think of men’s bodies as alien in any way. There are a few differences in configuration but skin is skin and flesh is flesh and bone is bone and pleasure is pleasure and…see what I’m getting at? The whole idea of mythologising sexual differences seems like just a nicer way to package the idea of men viewing women as a totally different species. And I have a hard time seeing how any real connection can happen between people who see each other that way.
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Mythago:
BOHICA? What does that stand for? Thanks.
Bend over, here it comes again.
Thanks, Myca! I learned something new.
So long as “being a woman” means exactly “being sexually available to men”,
Interesting assertion, but not one I see any particular evidence for.
Role playing games teach me all manner of things.
;->
—Myca
RonF:
Here is where I think, if you are really serious about understanding a feminist position, you need to go out and read some feminist literature and then go talk to women not about how they define what it means for them to be a woman, but about what their experience of being a woman is, about how they feel themselves defined by the culture at large, and make sure you ask women both in and out of the circles you travel in. Please understand: I say this not as an attack and not as condescension; I just think it’s not fruitful to continue this discussion, since it does not appear to me that you are drawing from a database, as it were, that by definition excludes the kind of evidence that you say you don’t see–and so of course you don’t see it.
This comment is directed to RonF,
I’m not surprised you don’t see evidence for it. Part of the problem is that you’re basing your standpoint on white male privilege. You’ll never see it until you educate yourself on feminist philosophy. I think the best thing for you to do is to read some of Dworkin’s writings.
[Deleted by Amp for being off-topic. There is an on-topic thread for discussing that sort of thing, if you want. –Amp]
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wow, thank you for this post.
that’s all.
best.
marina, http://www.objectifythis.com
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shouldn’t that be vulva???