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“Pregnant woman” is not an identity. It is a social reality. A pregnant woman’s ever-contracting rights – whether she can choose to end this pregnancy, whether she will risk imprisonment for drinking too much, whether she will lose her job, whether she will be murdered by her partner – can only be seen through the filter of her inferior social status: that of woman. She neither chooses nor identifies with this status and it matters that the restrictions it places on her and others be fully acknowledged. Hundreds of women died today because of the way in which pregnancy intersects with their political and social status as women. The term “pregnant people” denies them the specificity of their deaths and masks the cause.
What gender-neutral pregnancy campaigning has achieved is wholly negative, making it impossible to articulate why there exists a class of people who are not granted full sovereignty over what lies beneath their own skin. It has located the abortion debate (which should not be a debate at all) back where conservatives want it: on the status of the foetus, not that of the gravida. It has allowed the misogynist left to consolidate their definition of woman as “passive fantasy girl with tits” as opposed to “person with independent physical functions, emotions and needs.” Above all, it has created the illusion of an opt-out to being placed in the inferior sex class. Well, there isn’t, at least not until you can be bothered to challenge the fundamental idea that half the human race is inferior (oh, but that’s so much harder than messing about with words!).
Well, it is picture and story time. Here is the picture –
And here is the artful rejoinder provided by “blackswallowtailbutterfly” (I think, tracing tumblr sources can be tricky at times).
“Was…was that it? Was that the “valid point against sex-based oppression” you wanted witwitch to see? Because, um, fail.
Females have ovaries that produce ova and a uterus that sheds its lining once a month. Because of the ova production and a uterus with the potential to support a foetus, our reproductive rights are restricted. Because of the monthly shedding, we are mocked, bullied, and in some countries actively ostracized until the bleeding stops. If we become pregnant, we are considered murderers if we abort, defective if we miscarry, abandoning our child if we adopt, milking the system if we’re poor and we keep the child, unable to properly raise a child if we’re a single mother, etc..
Having vaginas ensure that we are expected to serve males sexually, even if some of us are completely repulsed by males. Although the vagina can tear if we aren’t aroused or natural lubrication isn’t sufficient, we are expected to take it until the man is satisfied. Our vaginas are considered icky, our natural smells wrong. Males who are perceived too feminine are often compared to our vaginas (“pussy”, “mangina”).
We also have clitori and labia, and depending where we’re born we may have our clitoris and/or our labia cut off. Even if we live in places where that’s not legal or condoned, porn ensures a good number of women will be dissatisfied with the size or shape or colour of the labia, and may be ashamed if their clitoris is “too big”. Only recently was it discovered that the clitoris is far more than the visible glans, that most of it is internal, and yet the inner working of the penis and testes has been fairly common knowledge for decades.
We lack a prostate, but males expect us to simply give in to anal sex because they want to try it. We are expected to do this even at the risk of pain and tearing.
Our bladders are tipped, which makes us much more likely to get bladder infections, yet we are not given extra bathroom breaks.
Males are seen as the default humans. Symptoms listed for various conditions are those that males experience, but not females. Female symptoms go completely ignored unless a women’s health organization covers it.
We also have breasts, which are treated as sexual objects for male pleasure, which overrides their actual function, and even the lives of the women. Breastfeeding in public is considered inappropriate, but full frontal nudity of females is commonplace in multiple media. Campaigns against breast cancer are called “Save The Tatas” and the like.
Females on average are weaker than males, having less muscle mass and lesser bone density. Males use this difference to intimidate, terrorize, beat, rape, and even murder females.
tl;dr If you think acknowledging sex-based oppression is seeing women are “walking vaginas”, you are actively ignoring the myriad ways our bodies are used against us under patriarchy. Also, no radfem belief will ever reduce women to our parts more than “vagina-haver”, “uterus-bearer”, “clitoris-owner”, “pregnant person”, “person with a vulva”, etc..”
And thus endeth the lesson on what (a small fragment of) sex-based oppression is like.
Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.
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Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
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“Women, under separate masters, are the most divided of oppressed groups. And men prefer a willing slave to a forced slave, hence the necessity to enslave the mind. When one considers the natural attraction between the sexes, the dependence of the woman on the husband, her achievement of identity only through him ‘it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar feminine education and formation of character’. Resignation of will and meekness become part of sexual attractiveness. What is now called the nature of women is eminently an artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others…no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relations with their masters.”—Charnie Guettell, from Marxism & Feminism (1974)
Domestic violence is an issue that deserves more time in the basket labeled “things society cares about.” I am only one generation removed from a time when women were widely thought as of the property of their fathers, then their husbands. Then Radical Feminism got into the mix and started to analyze, deconstruct and protest this unacceptable situation. Andrea Dworkin from Women Hating Right and Left:
Putting ideas and concepts together so that they can be shared, and more importantly passed on, to the next generation is so frightfully important, yet it is not being done. I did not even know about Andrea Dworkin and her writing till very recently. Outside of a few tumblr’s and few Woman’s Studies courses that haven’t drunk too much of 3rd wave kool-aid you just won’t find mention of one of the key figures in feminist history.
I’ve read a lot of Dworkin and sometimes it is really all over the place, but at others (see the above quote) she focuses in like a laser to give words and then understanding to the the problems facing women. Dworkin’s insights must be handed down and shown to the next generation(s) of women – lest we invoke another historical chestnut – those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it blah blah blah.
Are we repeating?
I’d like to see in my time the quote from above (and others like it) get into the history books and stay there.
The Neo-Liberal dogma that attempts to shroud us from the realities of the world is on display in not one, but two cartoons for your edification.
Ah, here we see Neo-Liberalism invade our thinking. The thoroughly naive notion that we are all equal in society and if we just acted “nicer” (by ignoring systemic inequalities society) things would be peachy-freakn’-awesome. In dogmatic Neo-Liberal thought we are just individuals making choices – no class, no sex, no position in society. The structural factors of society are simply ignored.
Boom! Class analysis based in a grounded historical perspective. Radical Feminist/Political theory appreciates this notion and uses it in analyzing our society. On the contrary our choosy-choice 3rd wave Liberal Feminists/Liberals almost always overlook the insidious nature of the neo-liberal agenda and its toxic effects to community and people. Choices are never made in a vacuum.
A big thank you to Francois Tremblay over at The Prime Directive for such a clear and concise break down of why its okay to hate prostitution and work to end it. He knocks this one out of the park in his post titled “The assumption sex is power“.
“In prostitution and pornography (which is, after all, organized prostitution), the imbalance is, at least on the surface, financial in nature; johns and porn directors trade money for sex, either with themselves or other people (and for those who object that pornography cannot be prostitution because porn directors don’t make actresses have sex with them, some johns have prostituted women have sex with each other too). Prostituted women and porn actresses are often coerced into unwanted sexual acts so they can get the money they need, and are exposed to high risks of sexually transmitted diseases, extremely high death rates, and extremely high percentages of PTSD (equal or higher to that of war veterans).
As has been pointed out by feminists, making women have sex with you by giving them money means they wouldn’t want to have sex with you in the first place. They’re doing it because they need the money, which makes it non-consensual. Furthermore, if consent is granted beforehand, and cannot be given or revoked for specific sexual acts as they happen, then it’s not consensual either, simply because it’s then very easy for a john or a porn director to decide to add new sexual acts and force the woman to do them under the threat of not getting paid.
And all of that is predicated on a capitalist society which makes work contracts and organized prostitution possible, as well as normalize the position that everything is potential property, including people’s sexuality.
But the more profound power imbalance, I think, is psychological: psychologically healthy men who have no qualms exploiting women who have been abused in childhood and devalue their own sexuality, or otherwise have bought into their “womanly” duty.
I can already hear the pro-prostitution advocates hissing like the snakes that they are, “see, you do hate sex workers!” I don’t hate prostituted women, I listen to the voices of ex-prostituted women who speak up about their experiences and who tell us that it was their devaluation of their own sexuality that led them to accept prostitution as a way of life. Pro-prostitution advocates tell us to listen to the voices of prostituted women, but they want you only to listen to the privileged white women who got what they wanted out of prostitution and then joined pimp-led advocacy groups. Of course such women have a vested interest in hiding the truth.
But to pro-prostitution advocates, anyone who disagrees must hate “sex workers.” To pro-pornography advocates, anyone who disagrees must hate porn actresses. As if hating an industry means hating the people who work at the lower echelons! Hating capitalism has never meant hating the workers, it means hating the institutions that exploit the workers. I hate prostitution and pornography and the people who defend those institutions, not the women whose sexuality is exploited by them. The power is generated by those institutions, not by a woman taking her clothes off.”
Go over to the Prime Directive and check out the rest of FT’s work, you won’t be sorry.
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