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A pox on you Game of Thrones for pushing my summer reading to the margins. Just look at the great stuff that has been gathering dust in my book-pile. This is an excerpt from Susan Brownmiller’s work titled “Femininity”.
“Nancy Henley, psychologist and author of Body Politics, has written, “In a way so accepted and so subtle as to be unnoticed even by its practitioners and recipients, males in couples will often literally push a woman everywhere she is to go – the arm from behind, steering around corners, through doorways, into elevators, onto escalators … crossing the street. It is not necessarily heavy and pushy or physical in an ugly way; it is light and gentle but firm, in the way of the most confident equestrians with the best-trained horses.”
In this familiar pas de deux, a woman must either consent to be led with a gracious display of good manners or else she must buck and bristle at the touch of the reins. Femininity encourages the romance of compliance, a willing exchange of motor autonomy and physical balance for the protocols of masculine protection. Steering and leading are prerogatives of those in command. Observational studies of who touches whom in a given situation show that superiors feel free to lay an intimate, guiding hand on those with inferior status, but not the reverse. “The politics of touch,” a concept of Henley’s operates instructively in masculine-feminine relations.”
-Susan Brownmiller, Femininity. p. 200
Sociological experiment time ladies and gents. Let’s test the politics of touch in real life and be aware of how your partner interacts with you on the street. Is the gentle steering there? The quote mentions that this is close to being an imperceptible phenomena, so hike up your conscious awareness to 11 and observe what happens.
For extra fun why not try and lead your partner, or be lead to see how the role reversal works out?
Susan Brownmiller has a remarkable talent for framing slippery sociological concepts. This quote is from the introduction to her book “Femininity” and it lucidly describes the nature of the viscous catch-22 women experience for the crime of being born female.
“Femininity always demands more.
It must constantly reassures its audience by a willing demonstration of difference, even when one does not exist in nature, or it must seize and embrace a natural variation and compose a rhapsodic symphony upon the notes. Suppose one doesn’t care to, has other things on her mind, is clumsy or tone-deaf despite the best instruction and training? To fail at the feminine difference is to appear not to care about men, and to risk the loss of their attention and approval. To be insufficiently feminine is viewed as a failure in core sexual identify, or as a failure to care sufficiently about oneself, for a woman found wanting will be appraised (and will appraise herself) as mannish or neutered or simply unattractive, as men have defined these terms.
We are talking, admittedly, about an exquisite esthetic [sic]. Enormous pleasure can be extracted from feminine pursuits as a creative outlet or purely as relaxation; indeed, indulgence for the sake of fun, or art, or attention, is among femininity’s great joys. But the chief attraction (and the central paradox, as well) is the competitive edge that femininty seems to promise in the unending struggle to survive, and perhaps to triumph. The world smiles favorably on the feminine woman: it extends little courtesies and minor privilege. Yet the nature of the competitive edge is ironic, as beset, for one works at femininity by accepting restrictions, by limiting one’s sights, by choosing an indirect route, by scattering concentration and not giving one’s all as a man would to his own, certifiably masculine, interests. It does not require a great deal of imagination for a woman to understand the feminine principle as a grand collection of compromises, large and small, that she simply must make in order to render herself a successful woman. If she has difficulty in satisfying femininity’s demands, if its illusions go against her grain, or if she is criticized for her shortcomings and imperfections, the more she will see femininity as a desperate strategy of appeasement, a strategy she may noe have the wish of the courage to abandon, for failure looms in either direction.”
-Susan Brownmiller. Femininity p. 15-16
There are no just wars. The death, the depravity, and destruction should never have pretense of being a noble endeavour. War is like being dragged face first through fifteen kilometres of shit, nobility and honour be damned.
We’re going to look at a “bad” war, that is a war that we did all the things we usually do, but couldn’t manage to spin a victory or even a “Mission Accomplished” out of the briny wash. Vietnam seems to cause soul-searching in the US. The Vietnam War should do that at the barest of minimums. I wonder how much “soul-searching” the Vietnamese do considering it was their country that was systematically raped, poisoned and bombed into a moonscape.
War kills people, like you and like me. Not the Enemy, not the “evildoers” but women, men and children. Families, friends, acquaintances are all maliciously erased by the callous hand of war. The article from Alter.net that excerpts a book by Nick Turse is about the humiliations, gang rapes and murders visited upon the women of Vietnam by the invading American troops. Make no mistake, this happens in every war and is committed by almost every military.
“In 1971, Major Gordon Livingston, a West Point graduate who served as regimental surgeon with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, testified before members of Congress about the ease with which Americans killed Vietnamese. “Above 90 percent of the Americans with whom I had contact in Vietnam,” said Dr. Livingston, treated the Vietnamese as subhuman and with “nearly universal contempt.” To illustrate his point, Livingston told his listeners about a helicopter pilot who swooped down on two Vietnamese women riding bicycles and killed them with the helicopter skids. The pilot was temporarily grounded as the incident was being investigated, and Livingston spoke to him in his medical capacity. He found that the man felt no remorse about the killings and only regretted not receiving his pay during the investigation.”
War makes us forget who we are and what we value. Once we strip the humanity from our enemies, anything becomes possible.
“General George S. Patton III. Son of the famed World War II general of the same name, the younger Patton was known for his bloodthirsty attitude and the macabre souvenirs that he kept, including a Vietnamese skull that sat on his desk. He even carried it around at his end-of- tour farewell party. Of course, Patton was just one of many Americans who collected and displayed Vietnamese body parts.” [..]
Some soldiers hacked the heads off Vietnamese to keep, trade, or exchange for prizes offered by commanders. Many more cut off the ears of their victims, in the hopes that disfiguring the dead would frighten the enemy. Some of these trophies were presented to superiors as gifts or as proof to confirm a body count; others were retained by the “grunts” and worn on necklaces or otherwise displayed. While ears were the most common souvenirs of this type, scalps, penises, noses, breasts, teeth, and fingers were also favored.”
Ah yes, even this very day, we boldly proclaim our civilization and our humanity to all of those who would listen. Can you imagine the rage and indignation of those who have suffered at our hands?
I’m finishing Brownmiller’s book, Against our Will. Funny how the arguments really have not changed and are still regularly trotted out by ‘feminist allies’ and critics here in 2012. As Brownmilla concludes, she thoroughly brings the noise and lays it all down on the table with bon mots like this:
“Critics of the women’s movement, when they are not faulting us for being slovenly, straggly-haired, construction booted, whiny sore losers who refuse to accept our female responsibilities, often profess to see a certain inexplicable Victorian primness and anti-sexual prudery in our attitudes and responses. “Come on, gals,” they say in essence, “don’t you know that your battle for female liberation is part of our larger battle for sexual liberation? Free yourselves from all your old hang-ups! Stop pretending that you are actually offended by those four-letter words and animal noise we grunt in your direction on the street in appreciation of your womanly charms. When we plaster your faceless naked body on the cover our slick magazines, which sell millions of copies, we do it in sensual obeisance to your timeless beauty – which, by our estimation, ceases to be timeless at age twenty or thereabouts. If we feel the need for a little fun and go out and rent the body of a prostitute for half and hour or so, we are merely engaging in a mutual act between two consenting adults, and what’s it got to do with you? When we turn our movie theatres into showcase for pornographic films and covert our bookstores to outlets for mass produced obscene smut, not only should you marvel at the wonders of our free-enterprise system, but you should applaud us for pushing back the barriers of repressive middle class morality, and for our strenuous defense of all the civil liberties you hold so dear, because we have made obscenity the new frontier in defense of freedom of speech, that noble tradition. And surely you’re not against civil liberties and freedom of speech, now, are you?”
The case against pornography and the case against toleration of prostitution are central to the fight against rape, and if it angers a large part of the liberal population to be so informed, then I would question in turn the political understanding of such liberals and their true concern for the rights of women.”
[…]
Once we accept as basic truth that rape is not a crime of irrational,impulsive, uncontrollable lust, but is a deliberate, hostile, violent act of degradation and possession on the part of the would be conqueror, designed to intimidate and inspire fear, we must look toward those elements in our culture that promote and propagandize these attitudes, which offer men, and in particular impressionable, adolescent males, who form the potential raping population, the ideology and psychologic encouragement to commit their acts of aggression without awareness, for the most part, that they have committed a punishable crime, let alone a moral wrong. ”
-Susan Brownmiller quoted from her book Against our Will p.389-390.
The words are Susan Brownmiller’s. Her noble goal, to end the exploitation of women –
“But my horror at the idea of legalize prostitution is not that it doesn’t work as a rape deterrent, but that it institutionalizes the concept that it is a man’s monetary right, if not his divine right, to gain access to the female body, and that sex is a female service that should not be denied the civilized male. Perpetuation of the concept that the “powerful male impulse” must be satisfied with immediacy by a cooperative class of women, set aside and expressly licensed for this purpose, is part and parcel of the mass psychology of rape. Indeed, until the day is reached when prostitution is totally eliminated (a millennium that will not arrive until men, who create the demand, and not the women who supply it, are fully prosecuted under the law), the false perception of sexual access as an adjunct of male power and privilege will continue to fuel the rapist mentality. ”
-Susan Brownmiller, Agianst our Will. p.392.
Susan Brownmillar examines the role of the justice system with regards to rape. Or perhaps more accurately the “male-justice” system.
[On raping a minor under the age of consent]
[…] States with a high age of consent usually employ the chastity standard for the upper-age limits. In some states the burden of proving prior chastity, that is virginity, falls on the prosecutor; in others, the burden of proving prior unchastity falls on the defense. Previous unchastity on the part of a young victim means there can be no conviction for statutory rape.
[…] According to the Yale Law Journal, “Evidence of the complaining witness’s consent to previous acts of coitus with the defendant may be admitted, via the theory of ‘continuing state of mind’ to prove her consent to the act in question. Also, evidence of her general moral character is usually admissible. Courts apparently reason that a reputation of ‘loose moral character’ probably has a basis in fact and that a girl with such a character is more likely than not to consent to intercourse in any given instance.”
All jurisdictions allow testimony regarding previous acts of intercourse between offender and victim. In addition, many states allow testimony as to specific acts of intercourse between the victim and other men at other times in her life in an effort to prove her “loose moral character.” Some states restrict admissible testimony to a general appraisal of her “reputation for chastity in the neighbourhood in which she lives” from any number of witnesses, to be answered by “good” or “bad.” Still other jurisdictions allow testimony concerning a woman’s prior sexual history on the grounds that such information has a bearing on her “credibility.”
-From Against our Will by Susan Brownmiller p. 370-371.
Mad yet? You should be.
Here is a quaint idea that deserves some legal traction. Consent has fuck-all to do with “moral-character” or any sort of antediluvian notion of “chastity”. The first pico-second that a woman decides in any situation that activities need to stop signifies the end to her consent. Anything after said consent is removed is assault and/or rape.
Still reading Against Our Will, but found this quote on the internets –
”I wonder if the ACLU’s position (on pornography) might change if, come tomorrow morning, the bookstores and movie theaters lining Forty-second Street in New York City were devoted not to the humiliation of women by rape and torture, as they currently are, but to a systematized, commercially successful propaganda machine depicting the sadistic pleasure of gassing Jews or lynching blacks? Is this analogy extreme? Not if you are a woman who is conscious of the ever-present threat of rape.”
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