Bitch|Lab’s post on how the current argument about whether feminism or technology have done more to free women from the “drudgery” of housework ignores dimensions of race and class as well as the historic construction of notions of cleanliness and morality brought to mind an essay I wrote long ago. At the turn of the 20th century, middle-class women engaged in what was essentially a missionary effort directed towards poor immigrants, establishing “settlements” in poverty-stricken areas like the Lower East Side and offering instruction on diet, hygiene, and good citizenship, all with a healthy dose of moralizing.
Among the lessons settlement house workers aimed to teach was how to be suitably poor. While immigrants bought lavish furniture and decorations, often on credit, in part as an attempt to accumulate and master the symbols of American affluence, settlement house workers created “model homes” furnished in Shaker simplicity and devoid of clutter — and, for many immigrants, devoid of any semblance of human occupation.
I’ve posted the whole essay — it’s long (about 30-odd pages as written, probably about half that without the double-spacing) and covers a lot more than just standards of cleanliness, but I think all of it is fairly relevant to Bitch|Lab’s point.
Uptown/Downtown: The Settlement Movement and Jewish Immigrants, 1880 – 1920
Twisty of I Blame the Patriarchy offers the flipside of my recent discussion of BDSM in two posts about the patriarchy-affirming nature of even the safest, sanest, and consensualist BDSM sexplay.
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Via Shrub comes this post by Mahlia Miles, a self-described “pretty woman in a wheelchair”, who writes of the way her physical condition feeds the male body, both as a physically limited female body (and thus simply an exaggerated version of the female body’s helplessness in general), and as a (with a nod to Sarah Jones) 3-foot blowjob machine, a twisted version of the “grateful ugly girl” whose mouth is forever set at groin-height:
I fucking HATE the fact that men have used my disability and “need for help” to get close to me. The next fucker who puts his hands on my chair, trying to get his good-citizen jollies and maybe a phone number, is going to get yelled at publicly on a city bus. I hate the feeling of looking over and realizing that the guy who’s been staring at me for the past fifteen minutes, trying to get my attention, is now three inches away from my face because he’s “trying to help” get the buckles off my chair. HE’S TOUCHING MY CHAIR, which is a hell of a lot like TOUCHING ME.
As part of my class preparation, I often write essays about the topics I plan to lecture on. I don’t read them directly in class, but it helps me get my thoughts together to write out what I want to talk about. This is the essay I wrote for my upcoming lecture on “social construction”.
Human beings are not passive observers of the world around us, but are active participants in it. Our perception of the world is not merely the objective recording and labeling of things “out there”, but instead the product of a complex and often invisible interaction between our needs at the moment, our culture, our personal history, our creativity, our class background, our educational achievements, our desires and our fears. What we see (or hear, or understand, or experience in any way) is not the “raw” stuff of reality but reality as processed by our minds. The categories that we put things into – gender, race, class, and so on – do not exist “out there” in the world, but are instead ways of organizing the vast number of stimuli our brains receive into some sense of order, some state that will allow us to act on and in the world.
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This is where I, the blogger, ask you, the reader, for your input. I’d like to put together a booklist of works relating to sex and gender. Not non-fiction — that’ll come later — but works of fiction that deal with these issues in interesting and useful ways, the kind of stuff you might assign a class on “Sex and Gender in Literature”. For instance, Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God explores the the way blackness and womanhood shape the lives of both men and women in the rural South, as well as offering at least one avenue towards empowerment (as I recall — it’s been over 15 years since I read it). Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises deals with a particular kind of (Hemingwayian) emasculated masculinuty. What titles would you recommend to someone, and why? What would you put on your imagined syllabus?
PS I’ll ask about movies sometime soon — but given the number of movies based on books, consider something a “book” if you’ve read it, a “movie” if you’ve only watched it.
Lauren is leaving Feministe. After bringing on Jill last year and a couple of new full-time writers (apprently from the pool of guests that’s filled in from time to time over the last couple years), the site, I’m sure, can stand the loss — but for me, Lauren is Feministe (no offense to Jill and the others). She was one of the first bloggers I read regularly, one of the handful that it was important to me, when I started blogging, to get the attention of. My understanding of gender and feminism and all things related (even knitting!) has been considerably deepened by Lauren’s sharp and often very personal analyses. Hers is a voice I will sorely miss and, for entirely selfish reasons, I wish her the worst of luck in keeping up her commitment not to blog.
Emily Jenkins in Salon writes on sexual moderates, people who like sex just fine but don’t obsess over it, don’t feel the need to define every aspect of their lives in relation to sex — and the way our culture marginalizes what is probably a pretty normal attitude about sex as weird, dysfunctional, frigid, etc.:
People in our culture wonder about people who don’t have sex: Are they strung out? Anorexic? Fanatically religious? Or are they in some way neuter, cut off from their urges because of some childhood trauma or deep personal failing? As Abbott writes, sexuality is equated with normalcy in this post-sexual-revolution age, and abstinence is “tantamount to being branded as an emotional deviant, an errant soul in a world where adult sexuality is a mark of mental health and a measure of social adjustment.” Therapists, she notes, even try to restore the fearful or asexual to a state of sexual interest, rather than affirm celibacy as an acceptable way of living. In any case, to be celibate is to be called into question; it is not, in this day and age, normal.
Given the tremendous pressure our society puts on us to be full-time consumers of sex — the commercials, the magazines, the billboards, the “girl-talk”, the locker-room bonding, the sit-coms, the Viagra and Cialis and birth control and condoms, the spam — it’s no surprise that, for many, sex has become less a pleasure and more a duty. In the face of this pressure, more and more folks are turning away from sex altogether (or, rather, going public with their indifference to it), and even wearing their asexuality proudly as a slap in the face to our consumerist culture.
I’m Pro-Choice and I Fuck by Rachel Kramer Bussel
Bussel doesn’t so much review as meditate upon Cristina Page’s How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex (Basic Books, January 2006). Although on the face of it much of the rhetoric of the pro-life* movement is centered on the very difficult and perhaps ultimately unknowable question of thepoint at which potential life becomes actual life, the subtext is very often a moral argument against sex and sexual pleasure. Especially where the inheritors of a specific Western/Christian** ideology about the body, sacrifice, and duty are involved, the notion of sex as a means of bodily pleasure divorced from reproduction is anathema. Now, this could be an extreme extension of the argument over where life begins (Every sperm is sacred!), and that’s the way particularly the Catholic Church has framed its position, but given the anti-sex arguments of the early Christians, for whom even sex within marriage was sinful — a position that was easy to live with if you thought the Second Coming was a matter of years away — that predate any modern notions of pregnancy, sexuality, etc., the argument about where life begins or might begin seems rather more of a rhetorical flourish on much deeper notions of Original Sin. In this framework, the opposition of programs that might directly reduce abortion rates or safeguard human health — sex ed., birth control, STD innoculations, etc. — is consistent with the opposition of abortion.
One needn’t look far to confirm Page’s argument that sexual freedom and reproductive rights are intimately entwined. In the eyes of the pro-life movement women are designed for making babies, and men’s pesky sex drives are something to be suffered or used to procreate. According to culturejamforlife.com, “Abortion enables the woman to become a reusable sex object without any idea of fidelity, and it gets the father out of having to pay for child support.” Someone recently posted to a Pro-Life America website, “There is no such thing as an accidental pregnancy. Pregnancy is the outcome of sex and is the sole purpose of sex. Sex is not a game and is not for pleasure only. If it were . . . then pregnancy would not be an outcome.” Even the group Feminists for Life (feministsforlife.com) points to women as the kinder, gentler, less horny gender: “No one can deny that women have always had a higher biological investment in sexual union; abortion seeks to undo that tie. Is the ideal a world wherein sex can be (and often will be) commitment-free?”
* Labels are not necessarily descriptors. As an anthropologist, I have grown used to accepting the labels that people use to describe themselves, even where such desriptions may be ideologically driven, as I believe the choice of “pro-life” most certainly is. However, it would be a denial of the agency and even humanity of those who oppose abortion for me to choose or adopt other, equally ideologically-motivated, labels. Although I may say “anti-choice” or “pro-death” in explicitly activist contexts (I generally don’t, but I reserve the right to) this site, while it may be political (how can it not be?) is not meant to be such a context. [BACK]
** I don’t mean to single out a particular contemporary religion here — as Max Weber notes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Christian political, economic, and cultural power has been such that all Europeans — Catholicals, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims — can be said to share certain basic cultural beliefs. Although the ideas I’m talking about here originated in the early Church (and technically are pre-Christian, though not by very long), their power comes from their integration into the Church (and by extension every European state until the French Revolution) and into the cultural fabric that even non-Christians lived in. [BACK]
The Gender Politics of Housework
One key concept to understanding how housework is political is to grasp the concept, developed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, that housework is work. It is valuable yet undervalued labor because it is unpaid. And the bulk of this unpaid labor, even in dual-career marriages, is done by women, without recognition of this fact.
On Chivalry
Nice piece on how “traditional” male politeness towards women constrains and undermines women’s participation in the public sphere:
I like to pay my share of the meal, or treat my [significant other] to a movie on occasion. I like to be involved in major decisions, outside of perhaps a couple surprise parties or whatever. I like being a partner in my relationships, both intimate and friendly. I’m not a delicate flower, and to treat me as such is the deepest insult to my personhood. It is a dismissal of who I am and what I stand for. It is not courteous, it is rude.
My own objections are similar, though as a man I’ve often felt the expectation of chivalry to be as limiting as some women find the application of its “politeness” to them. It’s a weird thing to realize that, however much you love or respect someone, unless you participate in certain to-my-mind exceedingly corny rituals — the jump to get the door, the red roses, the heart-shaped chocolates, diamonds on special days, casually getting the check, tasting the wine, etc. — you are somehow hurting that person.
But my big objection is the classism inherent in chivalry. Today’s chivalry dates back to the Victorian era (with some changes — for instance, the commenter whose brother demanded to stand between her and the street “to be polite” was protecting her from mud splashed by passing carriages; these days, though, the man is supposed to stand on the other side, to protect the woman from would-be attackers who might leap out of dark alleys or doorways and snatch her purse) and is the embodiment of the disdain for women’s bodies as weak and non- or even dysfunctional, and the concomittant conception of women as a man’s property the value of which needed to be protected.
The thing is, these notions demanded an income high enough to support them, high enough to allow women to indulge in weakness and delicacy. Poor women had no such luxury, embroiled in the demanding and often unsafe and unsanitary work of keeping a home (e.g. making soap with lye and rendered fats is neither safe, clean, nor delicate work) or the even less safe, less sanitary, and more physically demanding work ofered by mills and factories. While the upper-class women of Massachusett’s Mandarin class endulged in months-long “laying up” periods while pregnant, swooning, and the late 19th century romanticization of consumption made possible by medical care that could keep a consumptive woman alive for years, even decades, the working women of Massachusetts, like the millworkers of Lowell, has an average life expectancy of 23-25 years, faced police and even military truncheons when they striked, and were forced off the line in their early 20s when their bodies gave out — often disabled by the same consumption (tuberculosis) that gave their upper-class “sisters” their bright eyes and pale complexions.
The standard of female treatment encoded in Miss Manners-type rules was a luxury reserved for women who could afford them — or for members fo the working and nascent middle classes whose notions of “class” were shaped by the emulation of their social “betters”. For a Lowell millworker or Lower East Side sweatshop worker or Iowa farmwife, the trappings of chivalry offered empowerment, for themselves and their “uncouth” men, and the hope of advancement; of course, the upper-classes profited from the additional expenses that working people were willing to take on to be “classy” while remaining comfortably protected from workers clearly identifiable by the obvious (to them) gap between emulation and habitus.
[Via The Uncommon Man]
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