Since there are now something like 300 posts in the thread Heart started, I thought I’d extract an exchange Heart and I had in that thread to start a new post.
In response to that, I wrote:
However, if I understand your argument correctly (and maybe I don’t), you seem to be saying that this sort of comparison shows men to be better off “across the board,” and therefore we should understand “sexism as the first or root or foundational or core oppression, with all other oppressions … racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, modeled after this one.”
Here’s where I’m confused: Couldn’t you say the same thing about virtually any other kind of widepread oppression? For instance, I’d argue that the correct way to evaluate white supremacy is to compare whites and blacks who are similarly situated in all ways other than race. Doing this will show whites to be better off than blacks “across the board.” Does it therefore follow that racism is the root oppression, and all other oppressions are modeled on it?
And Heart responded:
First, I think if we compare black people and white people who are similarly situated, we do not find that across the board, white people are worse off than black people. I think we find, for example, that black men, in general, earn more money than white women and have consistently for a very long time. I think we find that black men were, for example, enfranchised as citizens in the United States 70 years before white women were. And I think we find, for example, that black college-educated women earn more money today, than similarly situated college-educated white women. I have written about this in some depth here.
I think we can say that male supremacy is the first, or root oppression, because men, throughout history and in every culture, first oppressed women, before any man, or any tribe or culture, ever oppressed anyone on account of race, class or whom someone loved. Racism, classism, homophobia, are recent inventions compared with the subjugation of women to men because we are women. The first oppression — oppression of women because we are women — occurred wherever women were assigned the tasks of sexual servicing men, reproduction for the benefit of the tribe or people group, and wherever women were assigned the tasks of the care of infants and children for the benefit of the tribe or people group. This goes back to the very earliest civilizations in all and every part of the world, without respect to race, ethnicity, religion, people group. Students of black history — which I am — know, for example, that in the 10th, 11th centuries, kings in African people groups exchanged women, wives, concubines, with kings in white European people groups. And the African kings were as racist in the direction of European royalty as was true, vice versa. A good book to begin with for those who are unfamiliar with this history is Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America by Lerone Bennett.
Male supremacy was the very first “othering,” the very first objectification by one class of people, men, of another class of people, women. Men’s otherng of women occurred, again, across the boundaries of race, culture, class and history. The othering was enlisted in the service of specific goals, i.e., the sexual servicing of men, the bearing of children, creation and perpetuation of family dynasties, and all of the caretaking and labor involved in these efforts. In the othering of women, men learned the usefulness and efficacy of dominance hierarchies. Power-over was eroticized and celebrated. Over time other people groups were othered, in later periods of history and in various cultures, for specific reasons, most of them having to do with the amassing of wealth or the preservatin of dominance hierarchies. But the techniques by way of which a class of people — women — were made the servants of an upper class — men, were honed in the earliest relationships between men and women. And for this reason, among others, radical feminists attend to the *way* women as a people group continue to be objectified and othered by men as a people group. Other otherings are important and the subject of the attention of all feminists, including radical feminists, but radical feminists attend first and foremost to this one, which is so central in so many ways.
Heart
So that’s where we stand. I do intend to respond to Heart, but it may be hours before I can do that, because I’ve got things going on in the meatworld right now.
Hey, you guys, is it too stupid to wish a happy new year to everyone, REALLY radical feminists, really radical feminists, somewhat radical feminists, not-so-radical etc? Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful year ahead!
Your-ex-really-really-feminist-reader,
Audrey H.
Happy New Year to you, too!
Amp, I agree with you on this one. Heart’s examples actually did the opposite of what they were meant to do, because they don’t compare opression across the board.
I think we find, for example, that black men, in general, earn more money than white women and have consistently for a very long time.
An across-the-board comparison would be to ask whether white women earn more money than black women, and whether white men earn more money than black men. An across-the-board comparison would hold one variable steady as it changed all the other variables, but in this case, both variables are being changed, and therefore the example says nothing about whether racism or sexism is the root of other oppressions.
I think we find that black men were, for example, enfranchised as citizens in the United States 70 years before white women were.
Again, an invalid comparison, because it doesn’t hold one variable constant while changing all the others.
And I think we find, for example, that black college-educated women earn more money today, than similarly situated college-educated white women.
This is the only example that would prove something one way or another about the relative position of whites to blacks across the board (i.e. while controlling for all other opressed-group statuses).
Aside from that one example, if it is true, it does seem that at least in America, blacks are worse off across the board than whites, controlling for age, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.
The rest of Heart’s points are interesting, though. I still don’t agree with her that sexism is the root of all other oppressions, but it’s a discussion worth having. I might post more later after I think about it more.
Amp: For instance, I’d argue that the correct way to evaluate white supremacy is to compare whites and blacks who are similarly situated in all ways other than race. Doing this will show whites to be better off than blacks “across the board.” Does it therefore follow that racism is the root oppression, and all other oppressions are modeled on it?
Amp was disputing my statement that sexist oppression was the first oppression and the model for all following oppressions. To prove this he was saying that where we control for race (as opposed to sex), whites will be better off than blacks across the board, just as when we control for sex, men are better off than women across the board. This isn’t true, and I’ve given some, but by far not all, reasons it isn’t true. White skin alone doesn’t privilege white people over black people. White skin *plus maleness* privileges white people over black people. In the instances I’ve offered (and there are many more), both black men and black women enjoy some privilege over white women.
I will not be actively participating in this thread. Hopefully some of my radical feminist colleagues will be, though.
Happy New Year to all!
Heart
But since black women have to deal with both sexism and racism, don’t they face greater obstacles, and have less privilege, than anyone else? I just can’t believe that black women actually have more privilege than white women.
I hate the primacy arguments, although I only ever have them with my Marxist friends. I just don’t think they matter.
I don’t think we have enough evidence about the many different societies people have formed to say that the first surplus productive labour was always extracted before the first reproductive labour was extracted (or vice versa), and I don’t think it matters to our struggle today. It wouldn’t suprise me if societs in different times, different places and dealing with different problems developed class and gender hierarchies differently. It also wouldn’t surprise me if they sometimes developed together – one informing the other.
For example, I could be persuaded that racism developed significantly later than class or gender hierarchies (I don’t know enough about the subject, but since you have class hierarchies as soon as you have even some surplus labour, and you have gender hierarchies as soon as reproduction became controlled by men, I wouldn’t be surprised if (at least sometimes)these happened as communities were developing, and therefore before it was possible to say that someone belonged to a differnet community), but it wouldn’t mean that I would think racism was any less important to fight, any less entrenched, or affect my analysis of racism in any way whatsoever.
Cheryl I think comparing black men to white women in a ‘who is worse off’ contest is both sexist and racist (and apparently Sojurner Truth still ain’t a woman). I would also like some evidence to back up your claim that black women enjoy some priviledge over white women (the link you provided isn’t working).
Your arguments comparing black men to white women are intellectually shoddy. In New Zealand there were limits on Maori franchise long after women won suffrage in 1893 (and quite frankly to say that black men were enfranchised before white women in the states is bullshit, because in significant number of states almost no black men (or women) could vote until the 1960s, and there are still quite concerted efforts to disenfranchise black voters today). If a white woman can vote and a non-white man (or woman) can’t – does that prove anything? If it doesn’t then the inverse shouldn’t either.
Oh and while I’m being grumpy can I point out that I hate the term ‘classism’ the fundamental problem with class isn’t discrimination (although that can and has been an additional problem in certain times and places), it’s extraction of surplus labour. It’s the fact that someone gets rich off someone else’s back that makes the class system a problem, not just the fact that they make fun of their accents while doing so.
According to this definition by Heart, I am a radical feminist. I don’t identify as such because of differences with some radical feminism about where to and how to from there., but I have absolutely no dispute with this statement.
I’m confused about how black women are privilidged over white women, and hope for an eccsplanation if it’s not a diversion, because it’s interesting. (My keyboard has disappeared the letter ‘eccs’, so please bear with me as it appears thus…)
This is kind of how I see it. Possibly. Based on the essential differences between males and females: that females give birth to new life and males don’t, and that males are, in general, physically larger and stronger than females, males, suffering from womb envy if you like, or just because they could, have determined everywhere, in seperate groups, that everything else of importance will be undertaken by them, and this has been enforced in the beginning through superior strength and brute force. How else could the universality be eccsplained? (if you don’t accept, as I don’t, that this has ever been a ‘natural order’…with regard to the full range of human capabilities and desires of both male and female human beings.)
I think it was the anthropologist Margaret Mead who wrote that in every society she studied, whatever the men did – whether it be hunting or cooking and sewing baskets, (as in Bali at the time), that activity was regarded by the whole society as more important than whatever activities the women did. I’d be interested to hear others interpretations of this observation of Mead’s, or of ‘how it all began’.
Following the ‘beginnings’, and put very simply, having everywhere given only themselves the right to ‘make meaning’ of the world and society, men have piled on layers and layers of rationalisations, ‘proofs’ that this is the natural order, through centuries of patriarchal education, religion and – in short – all avenues of ‘knowledge’ and power. So I guess what I’m saying is that I believe the oppression of women is the ‘original’ oppression and still the most universal. I’m still wondering whether that makes it the root of ‘all’ oppression though. Or are other oppressions parallels, or ‘different’ oppressions.
This is my first post here, and I’ve only been reading for a few days. I’d been looking for an active feminist discussion board through google, and kept skipping this one because the phrase ‘anti-feminist’ was prominent in the few lines written there. (about the new moderation as it turns out..) Finally, I found a link to here on another feminist site. I’m very happy to have found y’all. I eccspect I’ll learn a lot here.
I don’t have an actual stand on this issue, but I think I can at least defend Heart’s argument a bit.
If we’re trying to prove that one type of oppression is actually stronger, we have to look at different information. If we’re holding variables constant, all we will know is that there is 1) oppression based on sex and 2) oppression based on race. But it won’t tell us anything about which has a stronger influence. Perhaps oppression based on sex is twice as potent as that based on race. Or maybe it’s the opposite. How can you tell? One way to start would be to compare white women’s status to black men’s status and control all the other variables like class, education, etc. So she was completely right to start in that direction.
The reason I don’t have an actual stand on this is because a) I don’t have enough evidence to honestly know “who has it worse” , b) I’m inclined to think that the root of oppression goes even deeper than gender or race – that the only true way to overcome both has to do with channelling our human instinct to rank each other so that it’s not based on superficial criteria like how someone looks.
Not saying we’re going to get there tomorrow (or ever!) but it’s worth pushing in that direction…
Barbara, I think you may be onto something there. As far as I can see oppression goes like this:
1) Identify people who are like you (in some way).
2) Identify people who are not like you and who are vulnerable (in some way).
3) Enlist the help of group 1 in oppressing group 2.
4) Enjoy the spoils.
The process may not be deliberate or even conscious.
I think I agree most with redecca that (a) it’s not clear it matters “which came first” sexism or racism or that (b) we can ever really answer the question definitively, particularly for prehistoric societies that no longer exist in any meaningful way. This doesn’t strike me as a fruitful way of discussing feminism or feminist issues, and exactly why does it matter that there exist some category that we can all agree on that constitutes “radical feminism” in such a dogmatic way? In order to be in the club, one must make assumptions about subjects of which one has virtually no knowledge, i.e., one must “take it as a matter of faith” that sexism is the root of all oppression. Cerainly, one can agree that where it exists, as it most assuredly does in nearly every cultural context I can think of, subjugation of women is wrong, even if one can’t say definitively that such subjugation took place in all cultures in every location for all of history. And I hate primacy arguments too.
Much has been written (not that I can find any of it at the moment) about the male instinct to preserve his genes by getting as many women pregnant as possible. In this context it’s easy to see male subjugation of women as simply controlling the means of reproduction. It’s also easy to see other kinds of subjugation and oppression as rooted in survival instinct — I’m afraid I won’t have enough, so I’ll take some of yours if I can, and if I can I’ll institutionalize that by controlling the means of production and/or based on your alleged inferiority so my kids can have more (=better survival chance) than your kids.
Of course the easy explanations aren’t necessarily the right ones, and it gets complicated quickly.
As is subjugation of any other group. I don’t like trying to decide which came first either; I’m more likely to say let’s work to end all oppression.
I disagree w/Heart on the universality of male domination. Egalitarian societies have certainly existed in many Native American and Oceanic societies. I recommend the works of Riane Eisler, Peggy Reeves Sanday, and Pueblo Indian feminist Paula Gunn Allen for further exploration of cultures and societies where women are valued and considered equal to men.
The problem I have with “male dominance is universal” arguments are first, they tend to portray men as brutes and women as patsies. I don’t think that Man As Universal Brute and Woman As Universal Doormat is a healthy dichotomy, nor is it going to get us far in achieving equality for women in the here and now – how can we, if the genders are as polarized as this?
Second, I detect a whiff of racism in the argument that I am sure is not intended. Western feminists have already shot themselves in the foot when they have the attitude of uplifting their poor, oppressed sisters. I don’t need to detail the numerous arguments by feminists of African and Native American descent who note that a) they DO have traditions that empower women and b) white, middle-class feminism does not work for them (hence “womanism”).
The late archeologist, Marija Gimbutas, wrote extensively about egalitarian Neolithic cultures becoming much more violent and male-dominated in the Bronze Age. With the evidence of her and others, we can’t say with any confidence that prehistoric societies were patriarchal. And to say that every society that ever existed was male-dominant – even the ones which have disappeared with little to no trace – we would have to say not only that there is “no evidence” for egalitarian societies (not true) but also that there is compelling evidence that an egalitarian society could not exist. So far I don’t think anyone has found that – not to my satisfaction, anyway.
I have been hesitant to post here since the discussions started on Heart’s thread. However, this comparison actually puts in context my discomfort or rather clarifies my issue with the discussion Heart started.
Barbara and reddeca are going in the direction my thoughts are going. I think that sexism, racism, and any other type of oppression stems from the same place in the human brain- fear and hatred of other or difference and desire to maintain power and priviledge. I think these are two drives are natural human tendencies.
I think even Heart’s desire to have rad fem or feminist only spaces is about that. Heart’s thread seemed to have an underlying implication that if you aren’t a radical feminist as she defines (and others who agree with her) then you are feminist enough. That is, if you are different, have different beliefs or experiences, then you don’t fit in her space which I understand and respect to a certain extent. I think carving out safe space for yourself is important. However, I think dismissing and invalidating the beliefs of others who don’t hold they same beliefs is not okay. I think the nastiness and vehmence of some of the posters on that thread in their own spaces is a good example of that. (Please note, I am referring to the dismissing of other feminists, not trolls and other people who seem to enjoy starting trouble.)
I think that it is wrong to try equate types of oppression or identify which originated first because it ends up making a competition about who is more oppressed and worse off. Primacy arguments ultimately result in a competition and distract from the real issue which is where we are today.
I think we have to accept that oppression comes from similar places and ultimately can have similar solutions, but are parallel. I understand that it is a complex and difficult think to tease out the different strands. I think you will have different permeations of oppression depending on who is in power and what culture you are dealing with. I think sometime it is hard to separate oppression. Which is more damaging and oppressive for a woman of color- racism or sexism? Does it matter which is more damaging and can you even separate the damage? When someone is given the message from all quarters that she is lesser does it matter whether it is her skin color that makes her lesser or her sex which makes her lesser?
I also don’t think we can or should try to equate experiences which are impossible to equate. You cannot equate the experience of being a white woman to a black man while they both may experience similar forms of oppression and the results might be similar in some ways- ultimately, they are dissimilar experiences because there are so many different variables.
I think it is important to understand the history behind the different types of oppression because it gives us a context, but I think concentrating on solutions is a much more worthwhile venture. Understanding the root causes and working toward solutions which short circuit those roots is the goal I want to be working toward.
I think that whole exchange was an indirect commentary on my comments in one of the early posts on that thread. Let me dissect this statement a little because it is wrong in many ways. Here is the quote,
I think we find, for example, that black men, in general, earn more money than white women and have consistently for a very long time. I think we find that black men were, for example, enfranchised as citizens in the United States 70 years before white women were. And I think we find, for example, that black college-educated women earn more money today, than similarly situated college-educated white women. I have written about this in some depth here.
First, let me reject the idea of comparing only people who are “equally situated in the class structure.” The first problem with that statement is that we are not equally situated and racism and sexism contribute to that, so comparing earnings for WW (white women) and BW (Black women) with college degrees ignores the fact racism makes it much harder for Black women to get degrees. (For a detailed discussion about the connection between racism and class, I wrote this blog entry a while back http://www.rachelstavern.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=46&m=9&y=2005&d=1&s=month.) It is also unfair to reduce this issue to earnings alone, obviously racism and sexism manifest themselves in other ways. For example, BM (Black men) who work full time year round do earn more than White women, but if add the number of Black men incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses into these figures I suspect that the gap would close entirely and perhaps WW would earn more. These Black men are no more likely to abuse drugs than Whites, but they are the one in jail. This is the product of structural racism in my view.
I would also like to challenge some of the data above. Any family sociologist knows that we need to look at not only individual earnings but household or family earnings since most adult workers live in households. Middle class heterosexual white women often benefit from their White male partners’ earnings–these relationships are still patriarchal, but things like good quality education, health care coverage, safe housing, and general economic stability is afforded to these White women through their spouses, in fact, some of the women in this group do not work inthe paid labor force at all.
So let’s look at ffamily (not household–it’s a different measurement) incomes in 2000 for Non-Hispanic Whites($56,422), Blacks ($34,129), and Latinos ($35.054). This compares with median individual earnings for full time year round workers–Non-Hispanic White men ($42,365), Black men ($31,422), Latinos ($26,218), Non-Hispanic White women ($30,658), Black Women ($25,937), Latinas ($21,362).
Incidentally, when you compare full time year round median incomes for college educated (BA)women–Non-Hispanic White ($39,122) and Black ($38,017). Thus, White women do earn more than similarly situated Black women.
Anyway, gender based oppression was one of the earliest and is probably the most universal, but I’m not so sure it is the origin of all others, especially class based oppression, which may indeed be more universal than gender. You know it’s funny radical feminists say sexism caused racism and Marxist say class inequality caused racism. I don’t agree with either of those contentions, but it seems like many people want to put the type of oppression they experience first, as the most important. Therein lies much of the problem here. I wish people would do a better job putting themselves in other shoes–unfortunately, most of my fellow White feminists are not too much better than others.
If you want to access this data here is the link….. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/income00/tableindex.html (Sorry for all of the typos, in advance.)
Crystal said:
I’d just like to add that arguments that deny or ignore the existence of such cultures can tend to add strength to those who would argue that feminism is impractical because of human nature. Recognizing historically egalitarian cultures gives us something to point to and say, “No! Look! This is not impractical. This is not impossible. This is not ‘just how men and women are.’ Sexism is a choice we have made as a culture, and it is an unnecessary one.”
—Myca
Peggy Reeves Sanday noted in the afterword to her “A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape On Trial” book that oppressing women was unlikely to contribute to the good of the species or society – that if you want to talk about “evolutionary advantages” then it’s gender egalitarianism, not male dominance, which is productive of the most well-adjusted, likely to thrive societies, at least up until agriculture and the plow.
We must also remember that much of what seems to have been construed as male dominance and female oppression in tribal societies was filtered through Western eyes. First, Westerners assumed (and still assume) that “those people” are brutal to their women because they are “primitive.” Second, the 19th century saw the “angel in the house” ideal, aka “MY wife doesn’t have to work.” So Western men saw non-white women working hard gathering food, growing crops, etc. and assumed they were oppressed because they were working, not idle as in the angel-in-the-house ideal. Most feminist anthropologists now take the idea of the “poor, oppressed tribal woman” with a grain of salt because of this. Lilian Ackerman, in Women and Power in Native North America, says that “complimentarity and egalitarianism are more appropriate terms than domination and inequality in understanding tribal cultures” (1995, p. 77).
So yes, definitely, the concept of universal, timeless male domination needs to be taken with a small Siberian salt mine. It’s hard for Westerners to get away from the idea of dominance, subordination, and diametrically opposed genders, since they have been part of our culture since ancient Greece. But many other people in the world do not see the genders as eternal opposites and eternal enemies in the way that we do. Nor do men and women hate and fear one another.
(x-posted w/Myca) Exactly, Myca! Elizabeth Cady Stanton said the same thing; she noted that the existence of egalitarian societies gave modern women a sense of dignity and of new possibilities.
And guess where Stanton, Lucretia Mott and the other women who met at Seneca Falls in 1848 got many of their uppity, radical ideas – from Native American women in matrilineal, egalitarian societies. Sally Roesch Wagner documents this in her book Sisters in Spirit.
I sort of want to participate more, but I’m feeling less welcome on Alas than before so I’m just going to remind people no feminist in history has infamously been called anti-feminist more by of her fellow feminists than radfem Andrea Dworkin (has Susie Bright ever been called anti-feminist by a prominent feminist author?), and drop off this 1982 quote by a boat-rocking heroine of mine, Shirley Chisholm:
“I’ve always met more discrimination being a woman than being black. When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men.”
I haven’t read all the 300+ thread. So apologies if this is naive:
I’m really not sure I agree.
Think about a society where there are 50 rich people, 10 of whom are women; and 50 poor people, 40 of whom are women. Women would be disadvantaged in that they are more likely to be poor than men. Now imagine that the reason people are poor is because they have childcare responsibilities, and 40 women are parents whereas only 10 men are. Looking across society women as a whole are disadvantaged relative to men, but “all things held equal” they’re not.
Sorry for the contrived example, but I want to try and isolate the point to make it as clear as possible. I think it’s of relevance to debates over the “pay gap” and so on. You can treat people the same, but injustice against a particular group can still result. Suppose men and women with degrees earn the same, but fewer women have degrees – because being pregnant stops them. “All things held equal” there isn’t a disadvantage, but the situation still clearly disadvantages women.
This is obviously the roots of a clash between (some forms of) liberal though and (some forms of) feminist thought. There’s a lot of things that “all things held equal” and “similarly situated” hide.
redecca wrote:
I don’t see why one should distinguish between mockery of accents and surplus labor. They are part of one continuum. Or the accent and the way it’s regarded by the powerful is both symptom and proof of oppression. Discrimination in education and housing, for example, contributes to the existence of a “funny” accent. This accent then becomes proof and/or reason (to the powerful) that he/she who has the accent belongs doing endless menial labor at somebody else’s whim. Somebody with a different accent.
Apart from that, I agree with you. The trouble with arguing “which oppression came first,” in addition to being unproveable, is that it all too quickly becomes “my oppression came first so it has to be dealt with before yours.” They’re all important, they all need to go, and attacking them in isolation from one another won’t produce anything (at best) but superficial results anyway. Case closed.
has Susie Bright ever been called anti-feminist by a prominent feminist author?
I might be wrong–I can’t recall where I read this–but I think Andrea Dworkin, who I’d certainly call a prominent feminist author, has at the very least implied that Bright is anti-feminist. I’ve definitely heard less-prominent feminists make that accusation.
And Chisholm’s experience is her own. Personally, I’ve had the opposite experience when it comes to racism vs. sexism in terms of discrimination, hateful words and violence. I definitely wouldn’t use this to say that racism is somehow worse than sexism, though. I agree with Alsis and Reddecca that ranking one kind of oppression as “worse” or more “rooted” than another is pointless.
I don’t have much else to say but I’m really learning a lot reading this discussion.
I just want to offer a slightly different perspective. As a graduate student many of the feminists around me became intoxicated with the work of Luce Irigaray (me included). Irigaray argues that sexual oppression is the root of all other oppressions too and then, in her later writings, posit that we need to build a new concept of woman that is not dependent on the concept man.
This can be alluring because in part it simplifies things. But, after years of moving away from Irigarary’s view, I realize how insufficient and problematic it is. In fact, I think beginning in Women’s Studies course with the view that women’s oppression was in the beginning the first oppression can lead to reinforcing feminism as a white woman’s movement. The discussions all presume some common experience as women, which is generally the white woman’s experience. And the substance of discussion focuses on sexuality. It is often not that difficult to get a classroom of mostly white students to get interested in issues of sexuality: rape, objectification, pornography, etc.
What is really hard, and I speak from experience, is to get a classroom of mostly white students to get interested in the problems of (a) structrual adjustment on third world countries, (b) anti-union tactics in third world countries that fundamentally target women who are seen to be inferior and less likely to fight for wages, (c) the disappearance of the middle class, (d) the rates of incarcertation of african american men, (e) the high rates of alcoholism among Native Americans, (f) the relationship of white middle class African American women to third world women, etc.
The point of this partial list is to illustrate a “women’s studies” class that doesn’t put white women from the US at the center. If you start looking at problems of oppression and identity from a totally different perspective than your own, which is the case for many of my students, then you tend to feel rather alienated from the subject matter. I found that at the end of my last course on WS, the students had scrambled for the whole semester to show that the US wasn’t unfair in its foreign policy, treatment of people of color and nor were they in any way racists or classist. In fact, I remember distinctly how irate they were after reading a piece written specifically on class.
So, the danger in arguing that sexual oppression is the locus from which to study all other oppressions is that your account of what counts as sexual oppression gets pretty abstract or it starts to look a lot like the problems of white women (not impoverished). IF you want to articulate a radical feminist position that consistently and concretely takes seriously the above problems then I am interested in seeing what that looks like.
I really liked reddecca’s comment.
The primary factor that seperates my views from radical feminism is that I tend to see class oppression (in the surplus extraction sense) and gender oppression (in the reproductive sense) as developing roughly simultaneously out of the two essential functions of any society from a historical materialist perspective (production and social reproduction) and both can, in my view, roughly be dated to settled agriculture. Beyond that my own views are pretty close to a (non-determinist) historical materialism of gender (that is, to distinguish myself from socialist feminist thought, I don’t see gender oppression as a consequence of class oppression but rather as a seperate oppression that must be understood in its own terms).
In other words, I reject primacy for methodological reasons, but also because I don’t see it as productive. From my point of view it doesn’t matter which came first, not even for theoretical or methodological purposes. I see nothing inherent in a historical materialist understanding of class or gendered class that requires primacy. Of course, other strands/threads of radical feminism disagree on this point or even on using historical materialism as a methodology for understanding gender oppression.
Linnet, I find your counter that probably but you don’t know where or what was said Andrea Dworkin called Susie Bright anti-feminist wholly unconvincing in its attempt to deflect the well-known truth of how Dworkin, and radical feminists in general, have been constantly maligned by mainstream feminists as delusional right wing patsies working against feminism.
I would never claim radical feminists are the most knowledgeable people on matters of race because feminists as a whole are woman-centered-women necessarily (hence the fem prefix), but I think as far as seeing the underlying forces that work together behind the institutionalized oppressions of gender, race, age, class, able-bodiedness, nationalism, etc. radical feminists have keener insights than most other kinds of feminists.
I read a lot about progressive politics and a lot about feminism, and I have read just about every book, essay and website about radical feminism I’ve come across. I say that because there is one essay by a long-time lesbian radical feminist that is, in my opinion, possibly the most important and best-written essay about capitalism, globalization, imperialism, and gender written in the past ten years. Words fail to describe the oppression-integrated awesomeness that is D.A. Clarke’s 2004 essay, “Prostitution for everyone: Feminism, globalization and the sex industry” appearing in the book Not For Sale: Feminists resisting prostitution and pornography. All progressives, feminist or not, should read this essay for its genius critique of imperialistic neoliberal free marketism, but I dare anyone to read this essay and suggest radical feminists are out of touch with racial, economic, and nationalist oppressions.
Now that I’m looking at the table of contents for Not For Sale, a book co-edited by an American Indian woman, there are essays from black radfems (“Prostitution and the new slavery”) and Asian radfems (“Nobody’s concubine” and “Pornography, prostitution and women’s human rights in Japan”). There’s an essay from Robert Jensen linking militarized racial aggression to pornographized sexual aggression (“Blow bangs and cluster bombs: the cruelty of men and Americans”) and from Gail Dines on racism in pornography (“King Kong and the white woman: Hustler magazine and the demonization of black masculinity”). There’s an essay linking the racism of Canada’s First Nation’s colonization to the ignored murders of more than 60 prostituted women in Vancouver, where 52 percent of prostitutes are native women in a city with a native population estimated at 2 percent to 7 percent (and if you didn’t know that fact, but you did know about Robert Pickton’s pig farm, ask yourself why the feminist source you heard about it from left that information out.)
If you think radical feminists aren’t paying attention to race, nationalism, militarism and the intersections of these oppressions with women’s rights it could be you haven’t read enough about radical feminism in the new millennium to make that assumption.
Linnet, I find your counter that probably but you don’t know where or what was said Andrea Dworkin called Susie Bright anti-feminist wholly unconvincing in its attempt to deflect the well-known truth of how Dworkin, and radical feminists in general, have been constantly maligned by mainstream feminists as delusional right wing patsies working against feminism.
Don’t put words in my mouth. I wasn’t trying to “deflect” anything or to argue that Dworkin hasn’t been maligned. I know she has. I was saying that Susie Bright has received hatred from radical feminists as well.
Samantha: but would the authors of those essays self-describe as radical feminists, and agree that the oppression of women is the root of all oppressions? Would they agree that black men are necessarily privileged above white women?
I’ve read many radical feminists who are aware of ” race, nationalism, militarism and the intersections of these oppressions with women’s rights,” as you put it. But my contention (and many others’ too, I suspect) is with the claim of women’s oppression being the most oppressive and the root of other forms of oppression.
I don’t know that the writers of those essays would “agree that black men are privileged over white women,” although most of those Samantha listed I recongize as self-identified radical feminists. And I haven’t made any statement that “black men are privileged over white women.” I have said that privilege attaches not to whiteness alone but to maleness plus whiteness, and that is evident in that while white men earn more money than men or women of any other race, the same cannot be said about white women. Which is a statement about the way race privilege is a function of sex privilege, which is a statement about sex privilege as “root” or central, not “more than.”
What I do know the writers Samantha cited to would agree to is, for example, that without regard to race, men bond over the objectification and exploitation and degradation of women in pornography in a way women, without regard to race, do not bond over the similar objectification and exploitation of men of any race. And I know they’d all agree that although white women are treated “best of all” when it comes to, for example, how women are depicted in pornography, that just means that what is done to white women can be done to all women, and then some, or as one writer puts it, “This is what privilege as a woman gets you: most valued as dead meat.” When radical feminists speak in terms of root oppressions, we’re not talking about “more” or “greater” oppressions necessarily. We’re more talking about what all men can and do do to all women, without regard to race, which women can’t and don’t similarly do to men, again without regard to race.
Heart
You know, Susie Bright has email, we could just, I dunno, take the radical step of asking her.
Or would y’all rather fight with each other over who’s really feminists?
And how the hell did we get onto Dworkin and Porn again? I thought this thread was about the root of oppression.
I think he idea of gender oppression as being the root has some valid reasons for looking at it as a good hypothesis. IMO, oppression ties in to gender on a near universal level. Going back to the beginnings recorded history, almost all societies, even isolated ones, have a history of gender based opression. It’s certainly a universal experience.
I hate going in to evolutionary psychology, because I think it’s mostly bullshit, but it’s obvious that teritoriality is a strong trait among almost all animals, including teritoriality of one’s mate. Is it possible that this is the root cause of opression in general, and gender based opression in specific?
I think it’s facinating that we humans have so little social mechanisms built to supress that mechanism, but so much to supress, say, the urge to kill the jerk how cuts you off in traffic. Both have a biological component (if I’m right) but opression is actually helped along by society’s rules.
What?! *This* is what Heart has been doing instead of sending me that “This Advice Sucks” column she promised me?
Heart!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Josh Jasper wrote:
This is a great discussion thread, I’m enjoying it very much. I’ve been lurking pretty regularly at this blog for a couple of years (possibly longer), but haven’t ever posted anything substantive. (I once posted a link some time ago in a marriage equality thread under a different handle.) I’d like to participate more in the discourse, and the recent changes Ampersand is experimenting with regarding limiting certain threads to feminist, pro-feminist, & feminist-friendly only make me feel far more comfortable doing that. These conversations are becoming the sort that I feel are worth participating in.
As to topic, count me in as another feminist who thinks the detriments of the primacy arguments outweigh the benefits. Along with what others have already posted — specifically regarding the history of egalitarian societies that has gone unnoticed and/or erased — it seems to me that this is a question we can never answer definitively, and that therefore it becomes an argument of belief or faith between feminists; and the moment one group of feminists uses it in an attempt to discredit, negate, or even criticize another group of feminists’ brand of feminism or “way of doing” feminism, it then becomes just another power struggle, another site of arbitrary oppression that serves to detract from furthering the generally feminist goal of achieving gender equality. My own personal belief regarding the constitution of “the core oppression” is that it varies depending on context, but this is not something I’d assert as objective or provable.
Regarding Luce Irigaray, I have heard her style described as “strategic essentialism”, with the suggestion that she does not really write from an essentialist place so much as she utilizes essentialism as a strategy to elucidate concepts in a world where essentialism is a primary underpinning of the binary oppositional gender frame in which she argues that women have been defined by men to be their opposites…this interpretation reads right to me, based on my read of Luce Irigaray’s work, but I cannot read her in her native French so I’m open to reinterpretation.
Urgh. I don’t know how that happened, that only my block quote posted. The rest of my message got cut off and with it was lost most of my point.
Because I don’t feel like typing out the whole long damn message again, I wanted to reiterate that male dominance is NOT universal. Gender-egalitarian cultures existed and continue to exist. Space does not permit me to give an annotated bibliography, but the works of Riane Eisler, Marija Gimbutas, Paula Gunn Allen, Barbara Mann, and the archeologist Sarah M. Nelson are some of my suggested readings.
I do not believe that male dominance is the default setting for our species. I think it is caused by social and cultural factors, not some kind of Brute Gene residing on the Y chromosome – or a corresponding Patsy Gene on the short arm of the X. Evo-psycho rationalizations for “universal male dominance” have somehow taken the place of Judeo-Christian religious ones in the philosophies of the educated and the secular. In fact, primatologist Robert Sussman has debunked the “man the hunter, man the killer” theory on just such grounds – that this is not science, but an ideology masquerading as science.
I have always called myself a feminist, but to be honest I don’t know about the “radical” part – perhaps I should categorize myself as a Pollyanna feminist! At any rate, I think it’s important to establish the existence of egalitarian societies. As Myca pointed out above, denying the existence of egalitarian societies is a tremendous setback to the feminist cause. It robs us of credibility, and gives ample ammunition to those who say that feminism is doomed because it’s somehow against human nature.
HA!!!
Hey, you know what happens when I start tweaking things, flea…
;)
Heart
I don’t disagree with that at all. I just think using the term ‘classism’ implies that discrimination, rather than extraction of labour, is the primary problem. Sexism means discrimination on grounds of sex, racism means discrimination on grounds of race, in both these cases we actually have supplementary terms to describe what else is going on (misogyny, and white supremacy). But to talk about ‘classism’ (particularly using that your only term to talk about class), to me, puts too much emphasis on discrimination.
Just for the record I’m enough of a materialist to believe it’s nothing to do with our psyche’s and dislike of the ‘other’. Oppression happens because it benefits the groups who perform it, and because they find sustainable systems to do it.
reddecca, I think the stumbling block for me here is that there is no disconnect for me between “extraction of labor” and “discrimination.” Hell, a major pet peeve for me is the deification in this country of the 40-hr+ work week. One of the reasons I decided to quit my job is because I decided that my superiors’ interest in keeping me stuck in that particular rut– to the detriment of other goals I might have– was intolerable. Did they discriminate against me by making it crystal-clear that my only option if I wanted an alternative was to quit ? No. Did they exercise power-over as members of higher class (leaving me to make a decision that has far more material risk for me than it would for one of them) ? Yes.
Truthfully, I also don’t see any disconnect between the concept of “othering” a traditionally subordinate gender/race/class and the benefits accrued by doing so. Obviously “othering” feeds the status quo by making it seem ordained and innate, and the conditions of the status quo in turn reward the superiors in any caste system for practicing “othering” in the first place.
Maybe it’s hard for me to see where you’re coming from because I’m from the U.S., which is legendary for pretending that class doesn’t exist, and that anybody who tries to bring it up worships Stalin or Castro or whomever. In other countries, class is one more tool in analyzing power relationships. In the U.S., it’s dirty pool. >:
Oh, and just for the record, both the superior who made it impossible for me to change my work schedule and the one who threw up her hands and would not get involved when I had a male co-worker routinely harrassing me for years were female. Which to me says that “core oppression” isn’t the more important question in my day-to-day life. The more important question is how to practice the feminist tenets I believe in when the other “sisters” in my life either never got the memo, or prefer to reap profits for themselves at my expense by ignoring it.
I’m not certain if this is the place for this particular comment and I apologize if I’ve errored.
I think sexism is more entrenched because it is not possible, at least yet, for women and men to distance ourselves from each other and continue to exist as a species. People have lived without “the other” for years, for whole lifetimes, and survived as nations/tribes what have you. That doesn’t mean that “the other” hasn’t contributed greatly to the scope of world knowledge and progress; but in day to day lives we can survive.
No tribe/nation etc. could survive without both sexes.
Fear is at the heart of all prejudices. That could be a rational fear or irrational one but it is still fear.
Anyway, I don’t think sexism is the cause of all other prejudices; but it is and will be the hardest to end.
You could be right (although New Zealand is also quite good at ignoring class, for many of the same reasons as the US is).
I guess I see discrimination as quite a weak tool of analysis, which doesn’t necessarily include any analysis of power. So white people can call affirmitive action racism, and men can call the family court sexist.
I forgot to add some of my critique of this statement:
I think we find, for example, that black men, in general, earn more money than white women and have consistently for a very long time. I think we find that black men were, for example, enfranchised as citizens in the United States 70 years before white women were. And I think we find, for example, that black college-educated women earn more money today, than similarly situated college-educated white women. I have written about this in some depth here.
I the idea that Black men were able to vote before White women ignores the fact that the 15th Amendment to the constitution was not enforced until the 1960s–hence the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For the most part White women were voting before Black men. I’ll have to look at historic income tables to compare BM and WW, but obviously Black men earned nothing under the system of slavery.
Anyway, this is my last comment on this particular thread. I can only read so many “gender is the root of oppression” posts in one day. To be frank, it angers me when we try to place these isms as more or less important. When I’m around White feminists, who focus on their own oppression, without giving significant attention to other forms of oppression it makes me mad, and when I’m around some of my Black male collegues/friends and I have to make the case for focusing on sexism I feel the same. I figure someone has to standup (and I see a few others did as well) for a more integrated perspective.
I just wanted to second or third the commenters who noticed that based on hearts definition of radical feminist in the first paragraph, I am one–ie, I believe that we live in a male-supremacist society and that in our current historical moment, male-supremcay is as universal as anything can be. But I don’t think that “therefore gender oppression is the root of all oppression” necesarrily follows from that argument.
I would further argue, that, leaving aside the oppression progression that took place in the distant sands of time, we now live under a (fairly recent) global regime of capitalism. I would argue that much of the gender oppression we face now takes the form of extraction of surplus labor, made possible by widespread “discrimination,” though I wouldn’t favor that term. I’d replace it by something like “dehumanization” or something similar…
K
Crystal: I’m not asking you to argue for the existance of a negative (ie. Prove that the gene does not exist!), but teritoriality and social ranking is something that primates do frequently. If there were no propensity towards some sort of teritoriality in humans, I’d find it totaly at odds with our closest genetic relatives.
I’m also not saying that, if it exists, it’s a good thing. I’m classing it on the order of our urge to murderous violence. If it exists, it’s better off supressed.
I’m also quite willing to accept a good argument that it does not exist, and that the urge to dominate comes from cultural reasoning, and pure greed. I’m certainly not an expert on anthropology either.
As for egalitarian societies, I’d be happy to admit they existed. I think there are even some female dominated societies out there as well, but they’re not the norm.
Wow, I’m feeling woefully underread, but I’ll throw my two cents in…
I’ll ditto several people above: we simply don’t know enough about human civilization before, say, three thousand years back to difinitively identify a root cause. I would tentatively suggest that if gender discrimination were the prototype of discrimination, we would expect for that to change before any other kind of societal change can take place. But in the period I study (mainly late Republican/early Imperial Rome) we see that economic changes preceed alteration in gender roles: namely, in this case, that increased economic power for women led to greater societal power and a relaxation of gender roles, and specifically an alteration in marriage customs that allowed women to remain legal entities separate from their husbands.
Not, of course, from their fathers, but then again, noone was ever legally separate from their paterfamilias.
I’m happy to concede the existence of egalatarian societies re men and women, as evidence has been offered. I’ve certainly never believed the most universal inequality is ‘the natural order’ in any case. You only have to have felt the resentment and strain, as a girl or a woman living under and fighting against limitations to know that – even if you were in total ignorance of discussions such as this.
This is the first time I’ve been to this site. Pity I haven’t found it before, its great! I’ve enjoyed reading the discussion. There is a lot I would like to add, but I don’t want to make it too long and I’m sure that the discussion will continue for quite some time.
However, let me start by saying that I disagree with what I see as the key components of Heart’s argument. 1.)I don’t agree that gender was the first othering and therefore the original oppression. 2.)I don’t agree that the best way to fight oppression is to focus on a ‘root’ cause, and 3.) I don’t feel that radical feminists have to agree that sexism was the original oppression.
To briefly address the first disagreement, I’d like to point to Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat. Her work addressing absent referents could easily be construed as evidence that the first instance of othering was that of humyns declaring themselves superior to the natural world (she speaks specifically of animals). And that this othering has been used throughout time to furthering the oppression of other groups.
However, I’m not about to argue that therefor the root (or radical) target of oppression is speciesism. Trying to cling to a specific type of oppression as the ‘root’ of all other oppression is a very slippery slope, and one of dangerous consequences. First off, it ignores the intersections of identity, asking a persyn to seperate themselves into tiny pieces and then decide which piece of their being is more important or more oppressed. That dehumynization is exactly what I want to fight against, whatever form it takes. I think if we are ever to end oppression then we must recognize that oppression is oppression and needs to be fought in whatever way necessary (not whatever way we feel comfortable).
And the third argument is one that I find particularly dangerous. Setting a hierarchy of dedication is guaranteed to do nothing but discourage the majority of people from getting involved. This isn’t just true with the example of radical feminism that was given. Take for example the activists that feel they are more radical because they are involved in sit-ins or window-breaking. This attitude (one that I briefly danced with not so long ago) alienates those that are doing what they are able to at the moment; whether that be letter-writing, passing out fliers, or blogging. In my opinion, anyone that is challenging themselves to stop Male Supremacy, White Supremacy, ableism, or any other form of institutionalized oppression is taking a positive step and doesn’t deserve to be treated as an intellectual inferior. That doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting letting people get away with minimal actions. I’m a strong advocate of continually challenging ourselves and others to take further action (we are all hypocrites). I just don’t think we need to degrade others and their struggles in the process.
The problem with invoking “human nature” with respect to male dominance, or for that matter racism, classism and all other “isms” that many of us hope to minimize or eradicate – is that I see “human nature” used as a cudgel by conservatives to beat liberals about the head with. Not just feminists, but anti-racism activists and other progressive sorts get fingers wagged at them and told, “It’s human nature to be sexist/racist/whatever. You can’t change human nature. It’s futile. Give it up. Boys will be boys, and whites will be whites.” And when feminists (or whoever) protest or rebut such arguments, we’re told we suffer from “biophobia.”
The thing is, I don’t believe that it is “human nature” for men to oppress women, for whites to oppress people of color, for genders and ethnic groups to hate each other forevermore. It’s certainly something we are prone to under certain environmental and societal conditions. But the idea of an innate evil and destructive human nature has been traced by Sussman and others to the Judeo-Christian idea of original sin – not to science.
For what it’s worth, I do not believe that the oppression of women was the “original oppression.” I believe that social classes and slavery originated first (in most cases) and that the Othering and oppression of women was a way for elite men to maintain control over the social hierarchy. We can’t have a noblewoman falling in love with a handsome serf and upsetting the applecart, now can we? Also, by othering women (and gays) and labeling them inferior and loathesome, this made true friendship, companionship and love between men and women less possible – another way of saying “divide and conquer” as well as keeping men’s hearts pure and austere in the name of serving state/royal interests.
While there are a few societies that are basically classless and egalitarian and yet oppress women (the Inuit, for example) and others which are gender-egalitarian yet have social classes and even slavery (some Native American, Asian and Polynesian societies – and note that often, the slaves in these societies were from the same ethnic group as their masters or very close) – I would say that, by and large, where you find gender oppression you find other kinds of oppression – by class, race, sexuality, etc. – as well.
Crystal, I’m not saying it’s human nature to explain any particular “ism”, or that it can’t be fought, I’m saying that it’s the nature of almost every mamal to have some sort of teritorial impulse, much in the way that the urge to violence as a response to anger is a part of animal behavior. These certainly can, and should be resisted in most situations.
I do recognize that the argument ahs the potential to lend it’s self to the sort of political and social views that feminism fights against, but I don’t want to abandon it as an argument just ebcause it’s politicaly inconvenient, I’d rather abandon it if it were untrue. So far, I’m not convinced, but I should look into those books you mentioned. I examined the “Man the hunter debuked” link, and while it’s compelling, it’s not proof of a lack of teritoriality within a social group. Lots of herbivores are teritorial.
My view has come to be that whether or not pre-historic or extra-historic (to coin a term) societies have been egalitarian or not is interesting but irrelevant. People seek this information because so often tradition and “nature” are used to oppress women. I think that this sort of archeology misses the happy elephant in the room: that the most stable, peaceful, educated and wealthy societies today are the ones in which women have the highest status and power, even if it’s still less than men’s. So maybe women’s oppression is the most basic in this way: it’s the one whose abolition brings about the highest standard of living for everyone.
“But the idea of an innate evil and destructive human nature has been traced by Sussman and others to the Judeo-Christian idea of original sin – not to science.”
I think humans have an instinct to survive and compete, and that in certain circumstances, these can lead to oppressive systems. These aren’t “evil” instincts in themselves, but it depends on context, of course.
I remember reading once about different “cultures” among a certain primate (Unfortunately, I don’t remember details here – maybe they were baboons? – It was years ago, and I think it was a Newsweek article.)
Anyway, on one coast of Africa, this species of primate had plenty of resources (food, water, etc.) and had very “egalitarian” societies (both socially and by gender). On the other coast, with the same species, resources were more scarce and the males were very dominant of the females and very prone to “warlike” behavior. I thought it was fascinating in that we could look at culture to some extent as a natural occurrence. It implies that in some ways, both egalitarian and patriarchal societies could result from basic human nature, not just “higher order thought”.
A few points.
Radical feminism encompasses two big ideas:
1. Gender inequality is a deep-structure issue, interwoven with the very fabric of society. Confronting it means confronting the core values of the patriarchal culture. Legislative remedies alone won’t do the trick (which is what liberal feminists hoped); even when legal barricades to women’s advancement have been removed, the hearts-and-minds stuff (gender stereotypes and expectations) will get in the way.
2. The oppression of women is the root oppression in human society, both typologically and historically; all other oppressions stem from it.
Number one is something that a great many modern feminists would agree with, even if they don’t consider themselves “radical” feminists. Personally, I would argue that #1 has been proven empirically correct; it is an accurate description of reality.
Number two, on the other hand, is a conjecture. It may or may not be correct. Gerda Lerner elucidated the standard approach in “The Creation of Patriarchy.” This is a towering work but, in my opinion, suffers from Lerner’s focus on the rise of civilization in the Near East, which she takes as the model for human social development. It needs to be read against anthropologists like Peggy Reeves Sanday (“Female Power and Male Dominance”) who offers a fuller picture of the range of human cultures, from extremely androcentric to almost purely egalitarian. One of Sanday’s key findings is that female oppression, social violence, class hierarchy, and warfare always seem to be a package, even in the most “primitive” societies. (The obverse is that gender equality and relative peacefulness also go hand-in-hand.) So it’s rather a chicken and egg question as to which kind of oppression came first, since they’re always found bundled together. And asking which came “first” may not even make sense. My point is that the question of origins — which is extremely interesting from an anthropological and historical perspective — is an evolving discussion that can and should be separated from the analytical insights that radical feminism offers about the world we live in today.
As for whether there is a feminism that can unite women across racial, class, or cultural divides, I think feminism suffers from the same problem as classical Marxism: it is descriptively correct, but prescriptively incorrect. That is to say, Marx argued that peasants in different societies had far more in common with each other than with their overlords. And he was right! But he was wrong to think that these same peasants would cross national or cultural boundaries to find common cause together. National and tribal affiliations always trump.
It’s the same thing with women. Across the globe, women face the same issues, the same types of oppression, the same struggles. Yet they rarely see this — and even if they do see it, any kinship they feel with those strange women can’t begin to trump the powerful affiliation with one’s own family, tribe, nation.
Hi. Long time lurker, first time poster. I normally wouldn’t way-in as I am woefully uneducated as far as the literature on feminism goes. However, I am a Primatologist and consider myself to be most assuredly feminist (which is not a small thing when you work in science).
There is a lot of variation in primate social systems and a lot of variation within the same species. It is absolutely the environment that shapes these differences. Baboons are a great example, as Barbara pointed out above, in some stressful environments males have harems that they aggressively control, yet in other environments males and females mix freely, albeit with an established female dominance hierarchy (which is present to some degree in all primates, giving females plenty of opportunity to be mean to each 0ther). Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, also have a ‘mixed’ community structure, but they are one of the most aggressively territorial primates and, within the group, practice focused and horrifying violence againt females.
That being said, I could care less if it is in our nature to be crappy to each other. If there is one thing that separates ‘man’ from the animals, it’s that we can recognize our biases and therein have no excuse for them. I think our ‘nature’ is irrelevant, because we are intelligent enough to be responsible for our behavior.
Also, I think aspazia’s comments were excellent. We cannot remedy the issues in the US while turning a blind eye to what all Americans are doing to women in the rest of the world.
Very interesting posts, Elena and Barbara. My first reaction to Elena’s post was to wonder if the cause and effect might go the other way: maybe stable, peaceful and wealthy societies foster better conditions for women (both absolutely and compared to men), and maybe this has to do with having climbed up the Maslowian hierarchy far enough to have stopped worrying about food and shelter (I would argue that if you’re starving you’re oppressed by definition, and second what a couple of people have said about US- or Eurocentric views). That this happens with other primates as well as people suggests that it’s very much tied in with survival and/or reproductive instincts.
Barbara and Prairie, I agree that it’s incredibly enlightening to study this from the animal perspective. Personally my own inclination is always to start with the animal basis and work “up” (as it were) to human cultural variations. One difficulty with most social theory (including feminist) is the tendency to view humans as if we exist in a vacuum, divorced from our animal natures.
However, having said that…. the potential pitfall with the animal-behavior approach is that it all too often devolves into evolutionary psyschology/sociobiology, in which the patriarchal status quo is interpreted — and invariably defended — as the “natural” state of women and men. That shouldn’t have to happen, but somehow it always does. One minute you’re studying mating strategies across primate populations, and the next minute some EP is arguing that it’s just plain natural and right for women to stay home and take care of babies while men rule the world. I’m not saying we should jettison the animal perspective — I actually think it’s critical to any genuine understanding of human gender relations. I just find myself being careful about introducing it because it’s so easily misused.
One of the challenges of modern feminist theory, I think, is to develop a Big Picture theory of gender relations that successfully integrates modern findings from evolutionary biology, history, archaeology, anthropology, political science…
A lot of people have at least touched on what I want to say, but I want to say it again:
“Is The Oppression of Women The Root Of All Oppressions?”
I regard the question itself with suspicion.* It smacks of “There Can Be Only One” thinking. The radical feminist viewpoint may suggest useful ways to fight oppression. So might other viewpoints. (We’ve mentioned some in this thread.) Unless some of these viewpoints lead to testable predictions, I see no compelling reason to prefer one view to another. Even if some do fit the rules of the ‘science game’ or scientific viewpoint, that doesn’t strike me as a reason to reject all non-predictive theories — it sounds like a reason not to treat them as science. Whenever one viewpoint suggests a course of action, we could examine the proposal from other viewpoints (preferably including the perspective of science) and see what they say. Focusing on one point of view to the exclusion of all others seems horribly dangerous to me.** In fact, it seems like another possible “root of all oppressions”. We could (if we chose) see racism, sexism and “essentialism” as examples of people seeking One True Way of looking at phenomena. (See Lu, comment 8, and note the use of the ‘is of identity’ in the first two steps.) I hope this helps to explain why I avoid the verb “to be” whenever I want to think clearly.
*Though for all I know, Amp agrees with me about this.
**I don’t mean to say that anyone here definitely does this. I do mean to say that we all tend to make this mistake if we don’t watch ourselves, and the search for one root cause sounds a major warning note for me.
I don’t know much about the theory of feminism (I admit to be in the process of learning about it though). I have always focused more on the “how to change it” versus the “why it exists” when it comes to dealing with racism, sexism, and oppression in general.
To me IMO, it matters little if racism preceeds sexism, sexism preceeds racism, or classism or surplus labor preceeds them both. To me what matters is looking at how all the various oppressions intersect and how they function in modern society in order to determine how best to mitigate them and eradicate them.
I have found this discussion interesting from an intellectual point of view, and I’m always interested in learning about the historical, social, and possible biological origins of some of man’s group dynamics. (Note: though I can and do appreciate that homo sapian is an animal, our reasoning skills give us the advantage of being able to change, ignore, and otherwise rise above our basic biology).
Violet socks says:
Heh – I totally agree. Hopefully this “feminist, pro-feminist, and feminist-friendly” space will allow some freedom to explore this idea without the patriarchy-defending devolution you speak of. Yay!
And I agree with Prairie O that talking about our “natures” says nothing about what people should do. In the realm of the moral, there is never any kind of excuse for cruelty or oppression of others. Problem is, you hear a lot of evolutionary biologists making exactly this statement (I guess to sound more credible or something). So at first blush, they seem feminist neutral or even feminist-friendly. Then you get a different impression from their “just so” theories that make feminist ideals seem like so much wishful thinking. (a la: “Oh dear, we know people shouldn’t pee in the street, but if you just look at how chimps act, you’ll realize that it’s a Sysiphean task, and it might hurt people’s bladders if we’re too oppressive about it…”)
All that aside, here’s my personal theory on nature/origins of patriarchy, etc. (not based on anything scientific – i.e. take it or leave it)
1) patriarchy stems from certain natural instincts
2) egalitarianism stems from other natural instincts (cooperation, social cohesion)
3) the right mix of bad environmental conditions can give rise to a “natural patriarchy”
4) when a group of people uses “patriarchy” as a “strategy” for survival, it is similar to defecting in a prisoner’s dilemma type game. It gives one group a survival advantage over the other with it’s warrior ethics and high birth rates. Of course, when all groups adopt the strategy, everyone is worse off.
5) this explains why patriarchy is so prevalent in many cultures; and why cultures that didn’t start out patriarchal became so when they came in contact with ones that were.
6) As in the prisoner’s dilemma, all societies are truly better off without patriarchy/dominant hierarchies, even in conditions where there are limited resources. But an environment of limited resources puts the human race “at risk” of patriarchy and oppression. (sort of like a wet shower is at risk for mildew…)
7) Combatting patriarchy is a combined effort of appealing to morals, and also paying attention to people’s inherent natures and their incentive structure.
8) In conclusion: Both patriarchy and mildew are natural parts of human life. But neither one benefits humans in any way.
9) Addendum: A “feminist” is someone who is allergic to patriarchy. :o)
Really enjoying the discussion, and see good points made on all aspects.
Perhaps a missing piece of the puzzle is -*why* do radical feminists consider it important to acknowledge (suspend disbelief for a second if you need to) that the oppression came first & is the root of all other oppressions?
I don’t know the answer to this myself, and hope others here have some thoughts.
Elena :
Oh hell yes. I wholeheartedly agree. It’d be interesting to look at the psychology and anthropology of *rejecting* egalitarianism as well. Are there any students and/or academics out there who can point me to some resources on the topic?
Tracking back to the whole ‘benefits of living in a rape tolerant culture for men’ concept, there’s undoubtably a short term benefit to rejecting agamitarianism on an economic level, but a huge long term deficit.
hf, not to pick on you, but your comment #52 seems to incorporates two misconceptions that keep cropping up in this discussion. These drive me nuts, so if I don’t say this I won’t be able to sleep tonight (and I apologize in advance if I come off too harshly here — I’m not trying to tear down any person’s point of view on this thread, just state my own case as clearly as I can):
Misconception #1: The attempt to define “radical feminism” (or “feminism”) is an oppressive attempt to create an orthodox club and exclude heretics.
No, it isn’t.
Definitions are a necessary foundation of rational discourse. We cannot discuss something unless we know what we’re discussing. To say “anybody can call herself a feminist/radical feminist if she wants to” is intellectually absurd.
More specifically in the case of feminism, there is an ongoing need to maintain a working definition because there is an ongoing attempt to sabotage feminism from within by anti-feminists who call themselves feminists. This isn’t about maintaining membership in an exclusive club or banishing dissent; this is about resisting a right-wing attempt to co-opt the movement and destroy it from within. And this is true of not just feminism, but of almost every liberal ideology today: environmentalism, civil rights, you name it.
It’s like when the logging companies get control of the US Forest Service and claim that they’re implementing a new, more “practical” and “reasonable” form of environmentalism — one that, amazingly enough, involves clear-cutting of old-growth forests and a repeal of pollution legislation. The key thing is to call themselves “environmentalists” and convince the public that that’s what they are — because the public is overwhelmingly in favor of green policies. So the logging companies-cum-phony environmentalists pose as new, more practical environmentalists, complain that the real environmentalists are a bunch Hard-Line Old-School Fuddy Duddies who won’t think outside the box, and thus co-opt the whole fricking movement.
That is EXACTLY what anti-feminist “feminists” like Christina Hoff Somers are doing. They’re even funded by the same right-wing organizations. They insist that they favor equal rights for women (because the public wants that, even if it fears the word “feminist”), all the while sabotaging every single gain the feminist movement has made in the past 40 years. Unfortunately, their job is made immeasurably easier by the fact that academic feminism is — contrary to the propaganda — the most non-dogmatic of disciplines. Feminists are extremely sensitive to the oppression of orthodoxy, and almost always strive for maximum inclusiveness and diversity of opinion. So when confronted with the phony cry of “But you’re stifling my dissent!”, they all too often retreat (as has happened on this blog, I note). And when they do try to call the anti-feminists on their bullshit, to an uninformed onlooker it looks like those Old School Feminists are just hung up on maintaining orthodoxy/keeping the club exclusive, and those new “feminists” are free-thinking heroines! Either way, the phony “feminists” have won another round.
2. The attempt to locate the origin of gender oppression within the matrix of human development is a veiled (or not so veiled) attempt to create some kind of hierarchy of victimhood.
No, it isn’t. It is an authentic intellectual project, of deep interest to those who study the evolution of human culture. To concern oneself with deep- structure cultural issues is to take on the question of how these structures came to be. The purpose isn’t to score points or establish some kind of primacy. The purpose is to gain knowledge. Greater knowledge can lead to better insight and more effective actions for change, but it is also a goal in itself. It’s what scientists and historians and philosophers do: try to figure stuff out.
For some reason I’m having a hard time posting, and the above thingy got messed up. My item number 2 should be:
Misconception #2: The attempt to locate the origin of gender oppression within the matrix of human development is a veiled (or not so veiled) attempt to create some kind of hierarchy of victimhood.
hf, could you clarify what you found objectionable about my comment (8)? (I am being serious here: I had trouble following your line of argument.)
Not to pick on you, either, Violet. However, I’ve been on the recieving end of the “sabotage” bit. In another feminist space, my offense at an anti-Semitic comment by another feminist made me a de facto trojan horse for the Right-Wing –according to the women in the commenter’s idealogical camp, who felt that her cred was beyond question and that the Jewish women’s anger at her attitude was the trojan horse, so to speak.
It’s fine to want to guard a definition. But I think that we all need to beware the point at which guardianship becomes an inability to acknowledge that not every feminist comes from the same background or has the same boundaries. I think we need to beware of pretending that all kinds of “–isms” get dragged into the brave new frontier of sisterhood, even if we didn’t start out with the intent of bringing them along.
AAAARGH !!
Paragraph 2, Take 2:
*********************
I think we need to beware of pretending that all kinds of “”“isms” DON’T get dragged into the brave new frontier of sisterhood, even if we didn’t start out with the intent of bringing them along.
I didn’t even think of those positions when I wrote my comment. I didn’t notice anyone else in the thread making those claims either. Hoff Summers did not enter my mind, nor did I think anyone wanted to exclude heretics. And you keep mentioning motives in your comment, whereas I talked about habits of thought.
It’s what scientists and historians and philosophers do: try to figure stuff out.
Yes, and sometimes they get caught up in their favorite theory, to the exclusion of all other viewpoints.
Lu: hf, could you clarify what you found objectionable about my comment (8)?
Wow, I must have expressed myself really badly. I liked your comment, and cited it as an alternative way of looking at oppression (one of many that may bear useful fruit).
violet,
i agree that we must have definitions in order to know what we are fighting for. i identify as a radical feminist. but to me, radical means attacking the roots of a problem (in this case, the institutionalization of Male Supremacy) and not necessarily agreeing that sexism is the root of all problems. By the definition that you stated, I’m not a radical feminist. Does this mean you’re not willing to work side by side?
Sorry, hf, got it now. I think I just had an MMC (Moment of Massive Cluelessness). :)
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hey hf, I really wasn’t trying to accuse you or anyone of anything. I was just trying to focus on two underlying worries that keep cropping up — and actually other commenters expressed them far more explicitly than you. (And I accept that I may have misunderstood you.)
What I was getting at was this urge — and it’s a very female tendency in our society — to minimize disagreement, to say, “now, let’s not argue over who was first,” and “let’s not fight over who’s right, let’s all agree that we’re all right to some extent…” I’m not mocking — I do this myself, and it’s a great way that women have of cooperating. The thing is, that’s a wonderful way to build an action plan, but not so wonderful for sharp intellectual debate. The one depends on cohesion; the other depends on finely-grained differentiation.
Maybe we ought to make more of a distinction between Action Feminism and Theory Feminism. In the 70s, action feminism was queen, and it was incredibly empowering. Women weren’t arguing over theories; they were sharing their life experiences and discovering commonalities. Thirty years later, Theory Feminism is a well-established, multi-branched academic field — but it’s only tangentially useful for feminist activism on the ground. Locating differences, debating origins — all that stuff is critical to theorizing, and feminist theorizing is every bit as legitimate and important as any other theorizing. You wanna see fierce intellectual arguments, go look at the post-structuralists!!! Those people rip each other to shreds, all in the interest of honing their understanding of whatever it is they’re trying to understand. I think the problem is when this kind of academic debate gets mixed in with an activist movement — like feminism — where people are trying to forge a common understanding.
Am I making any sense?
And vegankid, my personal understanding of radical feminism is actually identical to yours, and is why I’ll also accept the label. I’m not endorsing the thing about identifying sexism as the root oppression. It’s simply an historical fact that radical feminists did that (and most still do).
my two cents. sexism and racism are equally harmful forms of oppression. i want to voice support for what samantha pointed out, that the majority of women in prostitution and particularly sex trafficking are from ethinic minorities (this has a lot to do with poverty among women of color). i support a lot of what Heart says about sexism being the first (at least chronologically first) form of oppression, but there’s no way I’d concede that most college educated black women are better off than white women of the same status. black women almost always have it worse than anybody.
I have to say, regarding Susie Bright and Dworkin, as a radical feminist who deals with proporn liberal fems on a pretty much daily basis, I hear Dworkin bad mouthed by the pro sex industry folks WAY more than the otherway around. The other day I stopped by a bookstore hoping to pick up a Dworkin book. I asked the woman behind the counter if she could tell me where the feminist/women’s studies section was. She pointed me in that direction. All they had was a copy of “Intercourse” which I’ve already got. After seeing me looking for a long time, she asked if there was something specific I was hoping for. When I said “Do you have anything else by Andrea Dworkin” she kind of narrowed her eyes and said “No.” Then she paused a few seconds and added, “But, Andrea Dworkin’s not a feminist.” I said, “Excuse me?” and she said “Andrea Dworkin was not a feminist. She was an unstable person who needed to take her meds.” I asked about her opinion a little more and she said Dworkin wrote about women as though we were victims, and that I would be better off reading Susan Sondheim or Susie Bright or, in her words “somebody more grounded.” I said, “You know, Andrea Dworkin was a survivor of rape and prison abuse and prostitution. And she spoke about it. I think anybody who could say she was not a feminist doesn’t deserve to be called a feminist herself. And the reason she said women are victims is because WE ARE. The only way you can stop being victimized is to acknowledge it’s happening, to let yourself be aware of it.” She rolled her eyes and said “Yeah, but why would you want that.”
I had another woman poet I met, a personal friend of “Susie’s” tell me I was “simpleminded” for being antiporn, that other feminist had “moved on to more important issues.” Then she patted me on the shoulder (dismissively) and walked away. That’s not feminism in my book, and if radical feminists want to call somebody like Bright, who tries to legitimize porngoraphy, antifeminist, well, I say they’ve got a point.
I have the same understanding of radical feminism as vegankid and Violet Socks. Hence my question (and own admitted ignorance) regarding the why of point no. 2, the primacy of women’s oppression.
I was kind of hoping for a more speficic/detailed reply than the obvious (not quoting anybody) ‘understanding the origins informs our understanding today’ kind of answer.
I really hate the bashing of Dworkin.
Myriad, you’re asking, “why do some theorists really think it’s true that women’s oppression is primal?” (not “why do they want to think that”)
Quick answer: because males and females are the two different kinds of humans. It’s the core difference. Take it all the way back to our paleo past and beyond: there aren’t rich people and poor people, there aren’t different races interacting, there aren’t trans-gendered bisexuals, there’s no social structure — there’s nothing but a small clump of hominids, foraging for food and huddling in a tiny group. That’s the nucleus of any human society that’s going to develop.
Now you look at these hominds clumped in their little group, and there are two ways to distinguish them: adults versus children, and males versus females. The adult/child relationship changes as children grow, but the male/female distinction remains. That’s why theorists keep getting back to gender relationships as central.
My take above is flavored with evolutionary biology, but the traditional post-Marxist radical feminist analysis (god that’s a mouthful) came to the same conclusion from a completely different perspective. They concentrated on the Neolithic phase of the story — village life, beginnings of specialized economies — and located the male-female distinction as the primal class distinction. The idea is the same: hierarchical structures must surely have been developed on the basic gender level before being ported to bigger stuff like other races, other tribes, etc.
Anyway, that just my quick and dirty recap.
thanks :-)
Word, Prairie O. Excellent post. Actually, this whole thread has been terrific.
I think one of the reasons why we’re even having this discussion is because we have several different ways of heading toward the main goal – we have the “let’s fix it now!” people (who come in subgroups, including “let’s at least do something now and worry about perfection later” and “let’s do it right the first time”) and the “we need to understand how and why things are the way they are in order to fix it” people (who also have subgroups). And sometimes we belong to two or more subgroups at the same time.
Maybe the most important thing we need to take into the New Year is to keep the main thing the main thing and not get distracted into fighting amongst ourselves about how to get there. Even anti-feminists have their uses, if only as devil’s advocates.
I think it is very difficult to look at radical feminist thoughts on this and *not* conflate it with current models of oppression — and come to erroneous conclusions in the end. I do think it is possible to say that the objectification of women, specifically along sexual lines, is the model of objectification and othering that has historically, and currently, created our society. It is one of the primary underpinnings of how we view our world. To say that it began with the othering of women does not insist that women today have it worse than anyone else, or that there is a hierarchy of oppressions. I was reading Derrick Jensen’s “The Culture of Make Believe” this weekend and he very succinctly points out that the major underpinning of our culture is objectification. And he says it in a way that even non-feminists would agree with him. What I see radical feminism doing is naming where and how that objectification started and how deeply wed to this original objectification we are in our culture — usually to the degree that we can’t even accurately name it, the oppression is so transparent that we think of it as normative and natural.
Great discussion – I’ll have to do some printing off and thinking because there’s so much information here.
I have to say, going back to our evolutionary roots, I got pretty eccsited (no ‘eccs’ on keyboard, sorry)) by becoming aware of our closest ape relatives, the pygmy chimpanzee or bonobo. They’re the ones that live a short distance from other , larger chimps in the Congo. They had plenty of food resources, and developed a largely, certainly comparatively, non-violent society, dominated by groups of females. These groups nip individual aggressors activities in the bud, by the power of female bonded numbers. In fact younger females kind of ‘partner’ with older females from neighbouring bands. This appears to be the strongest social relationship, after mothers and their young. A scene I recall being speculated was that if two bonobo’s began squabbling over a banana, say, they might have a small skirmish, put the banana down, have seccs, and then share the banana. There is a lot of seccsual activity, ‘hetero’ and ‘homo’, in our terms, and bonobos have face to face seccs like humans do as well. There is a book that created some controversy called ‘The Demon Male’,written by two geologists, (Dr Richard Wrangham and Dr Dale Peterson, Bloomsbury Books)) which discussed the implications for humans arising out of the comparatively recent full discovery and study of bonobos and their social structure – particularly in comparison with that of the more familiar and much more violent chimpanzees.
I guess in the absence of human matriarchal , or non-patriarchal societies, at least that I was aware of, this discovery spoke to me of possibilities. It certainly demonstrated that a ‘natural order’ arguemeent for patriarchy, despite its almost total universality, could be challenged from our own evolutionary path in the natural world. For anyone who’s interested, here is a website with more information. It was set up to help save the bonobos as they’re currently in danger of eccstinction.
Apologies in adance for not doing the link properly so it has to be copied and pasted into the address bar. I didn’t check the link instructions before starting to type and I’m afraid I’ll lose what I’ve written if I attempt to do that now.
http://www.bonobo.org/index.html
Wow, the link worked anyway…Bonus!
“major underpinning of our culture is objectification”
Socialist feminists might argue that the “objectification” you are talking about and experiencing is a historically specific variety extant under capitalism, and which developed wiht the developement of commodities more generally. Which is not to say that women (and other opressed people) were not oppressed before capitalism, just that the structure of feeling of that opression then and now is different enought that ‘objectification’ is an anachronism when used to describe older forms of gender oppression.
I’m not sure if I think that, but I thought I’d throw it out there as a possibility.
I just want to go back to something Josh Jasper wrote earlier – what could possibly be the origins, as it were, of a denial that egalitarian societies exist or ever existed? What purpose does that serve?
I believe that a good part of this boils down to wanting to make Western women feel uniquely privileged – so uniquely privileged that they will cease making their uppity, feminist demands. “Men are biologically programmed to be brutes! Don’t you gals know how lucky you are? Now quit your whining!” If we Western women can be made to feel that this is as good as it possibly gets – then maybe we’ll shut up and go back to the kitchen or something.
I also believe an often unacknowledged racism is at work. Male dominance probably (we cannot know for certain) developed in Europe and the Middle East before it took root anywhere else. All of the existing egalitarian societies – the Iroquois, Moso, Minangkabau, Khasi, Vanatinai – are people of color. A Latina/Native American feminist poet wrote in Transforming a Rape Culture – and I don’t have the book to hand, so I can’t remember her name or the title of the article; I’ll try to find it – that making Euro-American women feel “superior” to “lowly women of color” is absolutely one of the cornerstones of Euro-American civilization. Now if it turns out that there are women of color who have it better than white American women and we Westerners might have something valuable to learn from these non-white, non-Western people – *flush* goes the illusion of Eur0-American chivalry and supremacy in that regard.
Finally, denial that egalitarian cultures ever existed is a handy way of keeping women in their place, across the board. And it demonizes men of color, too, as Sharon Tiffany and Kathleen Adams pointed out in their article “Anthropology’s Fierce Yanomami: Sexual Politics in the Amazon,” as Micaela di Leonardo pointed out in her review of Derek Freeman’s attack on Margaret Mead, and there are other voices in the chorus. I may be cynical, but I suspect that the rising rate of interracial marriage has some white men running scared – if white women no longer have to choose them, willy-nilly, then they won’t. So there is an interest in making men of color look bad.
And if Euro-American women question their exalted status at the top of the world’s female heap, and start finding out that there are other cultures which value women and treat them much better than ours, what if they start questioning the whole edifice of Western civilization? Oh oh, anarchy – mustn’t have that…
Bonobos are also cited often in polyamorous circles, Cicely, for their practices of group sexual sharing and close sexual relationships with multiple partners.
For my part, I don’t actually think that this means that humans are naturally matriarchal and polyamorous, any more than I would think that monogamous, patriarchal bonobos would indicate the converse . . . but I also don’t think that it matters. The most important criteria (for me, anyway) is not whether a certain practice has a biological origin or not, but whether that practice is one that ‘works,’ leading to a healthier, more well-balanced culture. It’s clear to me that our current culture is not one that works, and our strong adherence to patriarchial ideals (and monogamy, IMHO, but that’s another thread) is a big part of the reason.
Even if it turns out that we evolved from animals that engage in rape and murder regularly, we’ve got big brains now. Let’s act like it. Let’s use them. We’re not mindless beasts.
—Myca
Had to copy your complete post Myca, just to say I kind of agree with all of it, which obviously includes the bit about our strong adherence to monogamy, which is another thread. I didn’t know that bonobos were cited in polyamorous circles – but – of course!
I guess I think we can’t say though that there’s absolutely ‘no’ connection between humans and our evolutionary path, but there are also severe limitations in the application of that knowledge given what sets us apart from our ape ancestors and ‘relations’. What is biological in origin, and just perhaps unchangeable, (at least in an individuals lifetime) and what is not is a hornets nest I think I’ll avoid for the moment.
cicely
I must not be awake yet. I don’t know why the quote didn’t appear…
I think you are defining one type of radical feminism as THE radical feminism. Barbara Ehrenreich, the well know socialist feminist would certainly consider herself a radical feminist, but does not consider opression of women primary in the sense you mean.
She has a hypothesis (not a theory – not enough evidence to make a or break theory on the subject, but a hypothesis) that:
1) The creation of gender, class, and race oppressions (and war) happened simulataneously. (not new – Engles suggested this).
2) That this creation happened much earlier in history than is usually considered, not with the invention of agriculture, but in the transition from forager to hunter/gatherer.
For detail I strongly recommend her book Blood Rites – which deals with this. I find the subject fascinating and would be glad to give a precis if anyone wants, but in contest of this conversation, I suspect it would be a derailing of the thread. The key is Ehreneich does not fit Hearts definition of radical feminst – yet by most definitions is radical and not merely a liberal feminist.
There is also a pragmatic argument to be made that no one type of opression is the magic thread which can be pulled while ignoring all others. Yes of course reducing opression of women reduces other types of opression as well – class, race etc.
But that is true of other opressions as well. The Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela has reduced class oppression greatly (and unlike a lot of other class based revolutions and radical reforms done it without eliminating democracy or civil liberty.) Feminism is very much not at the heart of it; it is an extremely macho revolution, and (for example) has left in place extremely barbaric rape laws – ones worse than the U.S. had in the 50’s. And yet, just as a side effect of the reduction in class oppression, women are much better off than before Chavez’s time -having much greater participation in politics, in the workplace and even better enforcement against day to day abuse, and reduction in violence against women. But I would never argue that this means that class is “primary” in the sense Heart argued that gender is primary. If a strong feminist movement in Venezuela does not force Venezuela to become more feminist, women will never win equality there, and the and class opression will remain, and the experiment in Latin American social democracy will fail.
But the same thing would happen in a nation that tried to implement a feminist revolution without class equality or tried to ignore racial equality. You cannot end one kind of oppression without ending all of them. IMO, concentrating on one, leaving the others in place you will end up with your gains being eaten by inequality in other areas. Eliminate gender inequality while leaving class oppression in place, and class oppression will soon become gendered again. Leave racism intact, and you will soon end up with class divisions as well. In short I don’t think you can seperate these struggles – except in the sense of division of labor; some people obviously will understand gender oppression better than others, some race, some class. But I think real understanding has to include the understanding that no one is primary that they are linked and co-equal.
Clearly, if there is an urge for domination of people (based on gender or not) as a biological impulse, it’s one that’s able to be overridden, and might actualy have counter biological impulses like the urge to form stable, peaceful social groups.
Also – Amp, can you run another porn feminists vs. Dworkin feminst thread so I can specificaly avoid it everywhere else? I think it’s flame bait.
Heart,
I agree that examining the histories and contours of oppressions is a serious and important project.
However, I find your system of comparitive benchmarks disengenous and burdened with racism.
I, like others above, would like to see convincing evidence that Black women earn more than white women. The same study that you cite at your link also finds that
Rachel S. points out that the 15th Amendment was not enforced until 1960s. Moreover, countless Blacks and their allies were murdered for attempting to exercise their rights. Countless more lost their jobs (earning power), were not able to get loans, had their property foreclosed upon, suffered harrassment and beatings, and more for attempting to exercise their right to vote. Untold numbers of adults and children starved to death in Leflore County, MS when, from 1962 to 1966, the Klan and the White Citizens Council pressured county officials to cut off distribution of federal food subsidies, in retaliation for Black voter registration activities. Current voter disenfranchisement tactics are directed along racial and class lines, with little attention to gender. Are women, as a class, still fighting for the vote today? People of color, especially Blacks, are.
I enumerate these things not to compare oppressions but to say that your assertions about who got the vote first read as glibly dismissive of such realities.
Same goes for the other point Rachel S. made about incarceration. The prison crisis, which white people have the privilege to ignore if they wish to, wracks Black communities in countliess ways. When it comes to prisons, Blacks have it worse by every measure:
Most of the metrics I can think of show Black women to be worse off than white women. When it comes to incarceration, that is most definitely the case.
We should have analysis of violence against women, as well as analysis of violence against Blacks, through police brutality.
In order to work for a society in which neither Black single mothers nor white single mothers are forced to live in poverty, we must have feminist analysis.
I prefer a non-segregationist analysis that sees the forms of oppression together, without the burden of saying which one comes first.
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Heart’s statements are ludicrus and not rooted in the real world. And your own study sited refutes you assertions.
This reeks of some sort of racist resentment towards black men and women.
Black women earn “slightly” more than white women because we usually working harder and longer hours and hold more jobs. We also work more hours but earn less of a base salary than white women. We are raising children in single household on a rampant scale and are living in poverty 26% to a white woman 9%. Our unemployment rate is double what it is to white woman. And white women earn degree almost double that of black women.
Black women also die earlier than white women, suffer more untreated depression and have less male/father support.
So how are we better off than you?
Black men had voting rights but were murdered, mutilated, and harassed before trying exercise it.
These types of attitudes are what turns many black women and women of color away from mainstream feminism and adopting their own brand of it or out right reject it. There is too much of a disconnect and unreality. Black women cannot relate to your assertions Heart because we aren’t experiencing things they way you are presenting them. Black women have seen white feminist come off as bored privilaged white women and that have taken in racial oppression and homosexual oppression and class oppression to wrap it into their fight against male oppression when all these issues should be treated as seperate issues. After all white women(and women period) perpetuate racism againt men and women and they perpetuate oppression of homosexual men and women
. The situation of black men , women, and children consist of historical economical and social variables that aren’t compatible with that oppression of white women and women in general. And it should never been used as a comparison for female oppression.
Just like the oppression of the western female (the most unoppressed women of oppressed women) should never be compared to women living under harsh religious and social oppression in places such as India, the Middle East, and Africa.
Sorry about the spelling and grammar errors I was rushing to get this out
1. Hierarchies or primacies of oppressions is more an academic issue than a practical issue. IRL, we have multiple types of power structures and oppressions functioning at the same time in the same people (eg, wealthy closeted gay white man working for conservative employer who would fire him if he were indiscreet. Said gay man employs a Mexican-national female migrant worker to clean house for him. That woman has left her kids at home with grandmum, so she can come to the US and send money home).
2. There is relatively little unambiguous and untainted information available for a great many pre-literate or document-poor cultures. This is a severe limitation for academicians who wish to determine whether gender oppression predates, co-originates with, or postdates class oppression. (I will assume that racial oppression postdates most other oppression simply because racial classifications require some travelling between communities).
Archaeology does not necessarily tell you how to interpret power relations – the woman statuette may be a subordinate goddess, may be the prime deity of the civilization, may be an honored ancestor, may be a queen who runs the community, may be a queen who is subordinate to a king. Anthropology done by white men, at least until recent times, tends to interpret the culture as run by men, with passive women holding little power, a view that may not reflect how the participants in that culture view themselves. Feminist anthropology postdates most or all first contacts with isolated communities. Colonists and ministers have gotten there first, to instruct the locals in the superiority of male dominant systems.
I agree with most of what Hart says, but I think her position regarding male supremacy as a “foundational” oppression is confused. What, exactly, does it mean for oppression A to be “modeled after” oppression B? It’s a claim too vague to be subject to be refutation.
I’m not sure that I am clear on what it means to say that sexism is the “root ” of all oppression. One may, if it is useful for some purpose, choose to analyze racism, for example, as a riff on sexism. It may, on other occasions, be as useful to analyze them on the basis of fundamental differences.
As to whether sexism is more important than racism, I suppose that depends on whether you are a victim or student of one, the other or both. Is it suggested that the conquest or understanding of sexism would entail the conquest or understanding of racism?
Myriad, I thought you were asking ‘why do radical feminists ‘want’ it to be acknowledged that the oppression of women came first?’ This is something I’d like to hear more about because when you asked the question I was reminded of a discussion I once had with a radical feminist about seccsuality. (still no letter ‘eccs’ on keyboard – sorry if this is getting irritating, I’ll get a new one soon…) A debate was going on about BDSM or even just d/s in general, and practioners of same were being challenged on the grounds that this was harmful to all women. I suggested that if the radical feminists didn’t start from the accusatory position that these women were doing wrong, we could begin by asking a not so loaded question like ‘why is the eroticisation of power so pervasive in human seccsuality?’ The radical feminist said it was a good question but that it had ‘its’ loading through omission. She said we first have to ask ‘Where does omnipresent male dominance come from?’ I replied that we only have to ask that question first if we’ve already decided that male dominance is the answer to ‘my’ question.
Anyway, I was getting the feeling that if I didn’t agree that ‘where does male dominance come from?’ was the starting point, I couldn’t have a conversation with this woman. At least I could only have one on her terms, and it was actually a ‘different’ conversation than the one I was wanting to have. (But which I’m not trying to start here…)
Violet Socks wrote that one of the two big ideas radical feminism encompasses is that the oppression of women is the root oppression in human society. So I’m guessing lots of conversation is probably jammed or cut off there as in my eccsperience in this particular case.
I agree with the first of the two big ideas, that removing legal barriers won’t be enough – we need to confront core values of patriarchal culture – but I find the eccspression of some RF ideology (if that’s the right word here), when it operates like this, feels like closing doors to other possibilities rather that opening them.
I still want to know HOW and WHY various types of social oppression began, not because I care which came first or which causes more pain, but because I want to know how to really combat them. It’s way more than just a topic of academic interest.
I see all kinds of gains made in combatting sexism and racism, and then (discouragingly) all sorts of mutations of sexism and racism reappearing. What kind of actions will bring about real, lasting change? What kind of “fight” is this? To what extent are we working against natural instincts? (And, as I implied earlier, in what ways can natural instincts be in favor of feminism or anti-racism?) Another question is – when will we know the fight is over? Does it require “eternal vigilance”, so to speak? (I suspect it does, unfortunately.)
Another poster mentioned the idea that radical feminism has to do with attacking sexism at its roots. This concept makes the most sense to me.
Oddly enough, that definition almost seems too encompassing! I mean, what non-misogynist wouldn’t want to see the roots of sexism eliminated?
cicely,
I find the whole “seccual eccspression” thing rather charming, actually.
:o)
Right, Cicely. Honestly, anytime I encounter someone who wants to condemn all BDSM because they’re viewing it all through the lens of male dominance/female submission, it’s hard for me to take them seriously even a little.
It’s not even that I get angry or hostile, it’s just that I pretty much recognize that they’re coming from a place of deep and blinding ignorance and stereotype. “Oh, that’s so cute. You saw a TV show once that mentioned BDSM and now you think you know what you’re taking about? Awww.”
I don’t know whether my circle of friends are representative of BDSM as a whole or not, but I do know that among us there are Mdom/Fsub couples, Fdom/Msub couples, Fdom/Fsub couples, Mdom/Msub couples, switch couples, bisexual couples, bisexual switch couples, triads in which a man is submissive to his wife but dominant with another man, couples who are mostly vanilla with each other but dominant if they bring an outsider in to play, etc, etc, etc . . . Hell, right here on this board, we’ve had me, a switch male and Thomas, a submissive male (correct me if I’m wrong, Thomas) as two men discussing BDSM. Neither of us conform to the stereotype.
I guess my point is that to call BDSM a representation of male dominance and female submission is both 1) factually inaccurate in the huge and important number of cases where there aren’t any women, aren’t any men, aren’t two people, the woman isn’t submissive, or the man isn’t dominant, and 2) it seems to miss the point even in the cases where it’s not factually inaccurate on the face of it.
What I mean by #2 is that . . . well . . . hmm . . . look, I don’t think that gay male relationships are sexist because they exclude women. In fact, I lose respect for people who make that argument. I don’t think that a relationship between two white people is racist because it excludes black people. Once again, I would lose respect for anyone who make that argument. For me, BDSM is the same thing.
“Excluding women” in the bedroom or in a romantic relationship isn’t the same thing as excluding women outside of it. “Excluding black people” in the bedroom or in a romantic relationship isn’t the same thing as excluding black people out of it. A deliberate choice to play out a power imbalance in the bedroom isn’t the same thing is perpetuating a power imbalance outside of it. Maybe it’s just that I think of sexual/romantic relationships as something “different.” It’s just how we are. We’re attracted to who we’re attracted to. We get off how we get off. Our kinks are our kinks.
—Myca
Black men and women still haven’t won sufferage yet. Remember what happened in various states(i.e. Florida, Ohio) in various elections since at least the 2000 presidential election?
Remember the state police who were stopping Black men and women who carpooled voters to the polls who were cited or harassed for driving a taxi without a license? Black men and women arrested or threatened with arrest at polling places and in their homes, not to mention the latest “investigation” of alleged voters fraud where these “investigators” went into the homes of mostly elderly Black voters to harass them. Macines that spit out ballots with errors on them in White precincts, yet swallow up similar ballots in Black precincts. And the list goes on….
Do they bomb people’s houses if they try to vote, or lynch them in large numbers? No, because they don’t have to do that to chill or intimidate people from voting.
Has the party that has relied on their political support done anything to address this racism? Of course not. They just want Black men and women including elected officials to sit down and shut up.
A good book that addresses this is Policing the National Body, an anthology of issues involving the criminal justice system and women of color.
In LE, there is certainly sexist attitudes against women, but more so especially intertwined with racism, against Black women(although White women get treated accordingly, when associated with Black men, i.e. during racial profiling stops.). Black women are also viewed as being a threat in ways that White women are not, regardless of class(though class does play a role). Black women have been shot dozens of times by officers while in medical distress, holding a cellphone and other similiar situations. Black women of all classes are subjected to racial profiling, while walking or driving in vehicles(or even by being passengers especially if they are with White men). Black and Latino women are subjected to more racist and sexist slurs. There’s a situation in my city involving that problem right now.
Often these behaviors against Black women and men are done with the intent to benefit White women and men in the guise of providing safer neighborhoods in cities. And the behavior of police officers towards Black men impacts Black women as well, who are relatives or in relationships with Black men. Some of the “tough on crime” programs espoused by many White women even feminists have had devastating impacts on men and women of color particularly Black men and women b/c they are so weighted in favor of Whites in their applications. There’s a saying: Serve and protect White neighborhoods by policing Black and Latino neighborhoods.
Violet Socks wrote that one of the two big ideas radical feminism encompasses is that the oppression of women is the root oppression in human society. So I’m guessing lots of conversation is probably jammed or cut off there as in my eccsperience in this particular case.
I agree with the first of the two big ideas, that removing legal barriers won’t be enough – we need to confront core values of patriarchal culture – but I find the eccspression of some RF ideology…feels like closing doors to other possibilities rather that opening them.
cicely, I agree with you, and others who have made a similar point — which is why I followed by saying:
My point is that the question of origins…is an evolving discussion that can and should be separated from the analytical insights that radical feminism offers about the world we live in today.
It’s a historical fact that the insights of radfem came bundled with a theory about historical origins, but we need to keep the one and place the other in the “TBD” category. The origins of sexism and its relation to other forms of oppression is an open question — hell, I’ve worked on it most of my life. I’ve always embraced radical feminism (most of it) while reserving judgment on the associated historical theory.
I’ve never worried too much about labeling myself, but in my own mind I think of what I do as “deep-structure” feminism, rather than “radical.”
I was asking, why do radical feminists think it is critically to acknowledge female oppression as the first oppression from which others derived.
Violet’s answer at least confirmed for me that my understanding of the why was coming from the same place.
However I’d still like to see a more detailed discussion around what is gained by way of analysis from asserting the primacy of female oppression. I want to make it clear I’m not challenging it – I think it’s just as valid as claiming racism is the first – but I think we might all gain a better understanding of how that assertion of the primacy of female oppression informs radical feminist thinking. Sticking it out there as an abstract principle I don’t think gives enough insight – a practical explanation of its application, and what was gained, I think might be more helpful.
With regard to Heart’s first paragraph which is causing the most controversey, I read it and 1) disagreed with it based on my own knowledge and 2) couldn’t for the life of me see how it was pertinent to the following couple of paragraphs outlining the primacy of female oppression. So while I disagree with it, I don’t see it in any way negating the argument that follows.
Dammit, was posting while you were too Violet Socks.
I think between your last post, and your great post on feminist activism vs theory, you’ve extrapolated what I was (at least) looking for nicely. Thanks.
Yes, Myca, I think along those lines as well. I’m not ready to concede that anyone on the planet has the complete answer to the question ‘why is the eroticisation of power so pervasive in human seccsuality?’, and certainly not adherents to any political ideology, even one that I consider myself in harmony with on more than a few issues. I guess I’m just not big on foregone conclusions. I prefer to keep asking questions, especially about other peoples lives and eccsperiences.
In any case, it is not impossible for an individual to work in a battered womens shelter, campaign for better childcare facilities, a more even distribution between the seccses of wealth in society, whatever – i.e make a significant practical contribution to the betterment of womens lives, then go home (or somewhere) and engage in consensual d/s seccsual activity! These things are not mutually eccsclusive.
Myca and cicely,
As a fellow pervert :), I have to strongly disagree with your rejection of the idea that BDSM practice should be subject to radical feminist analysis (cicely, your position seems more nuanced than Myca’s blanket rejection, but I still find it problematic).
The fact that sexual preference is largely not subject to conscious control does not mean it shouldn’t be examined critically. The fact that one can both be a feminist and have BDSM desires (and practices) does not mean that one’s BDSM practice and desire is positively compatible with one’s feminism (one can also be an asshole and a feminist, or a professional torturer and a feminist, so coexistence doesn’t equal validation).
Likewise, that BDSM does not consist of a trivial replication of men oppressing women does not mean that it is unconnected to patriarchy.
While it is possible to have specific meaningful discussions of the basis of the eroticization of power without referencing patriarchal domination, I think that refusing to talk about the relationship between eroticization of power and patriarchal domination (or rejecting such arguments as naive) is crippling to a full understanding of either.
I think treating sexuality as something that just is is a mistake, and I think that trying to understand sexuality under patriarchy while ignoring that the sexuality under discussion exists under patriarchy is a mistake. I also think that recognizing that BDSM sexuality is constructed under patriarchy is not a simply blanket condemnation of BDSM sexuality, particularly not in comparison to unconsidered vanilla sexuality, which is (obviously) also constructed under patriarchy. While it is possible to work to reconstruct one’s sexuality in a direction that is oppositional towards patriarchy (and I think that Safe/Sane/Consensual BDSM is to some extent such an effort), I think that to do so requires recognizing the relationships between one’s sexuality and patriarchal oppression.
Incidentally, my own views on my own sexuality are (strangely enough) strongly influenced by Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (originally by osmosis in the late 80’s, but when I actually read it a few years back I was impressed with how strong the osmosis had been), so I feel strongly that radical feminism can provide useful tools for understanding BDSM sexuality in terms that are more complex than “BDSM is bad”.
cicely, I realize that you commented that you were not trying to start this conversation here, but I think it might be an interesting one. Perhaps it needs a top level post of its own? Amp expressed to me a willingness to have such a top level post, if you and Myca would be interested in going into these questions further.
[and on a total side note, cicely, your substitution of ‘eccs’ for ‘x’ is reminding me very strongly of the Farscape character Aeryn Sun in the virtual reality game episode in which Aeryn is portraying the princess at the top of the tower and is doing a ridiculous fake southern belle accent. Which marks me as very much a geek.]
Very good idea. I was about to post a ‘let’s not talk about this here’ message, but I see I was scooped.
—Myca
[cicely’s post has been moved by Amp to a shiny new thread]