Posts by giovanni tiso
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I've often said that ideology is the end of thought, but I'm now not so sure.
Besides the fact that there is nobody as ideological as the people who claim not to be ideological, you mean?
There's nothing like the presence of a few sticks to make the carrot option look more palatable too.
Quite. And to the extent that radical movements have had any success in the west, there's always been a stick there somewhere. The civil rights movement, the struggle for abortion back home, the Springbok Tour movement here all had an insurrectional element. A demonstration isn't democratic: the people on the street may well be a minority, but they say look, I believe in my cause more than you believe in the status quo, and I'm quite prepared to make your life as miserable as I can until you accept my demands.
The idea that men may not be needed at all may be a sort of stick too, and as such it has a function that goes quite beyond its specific merits or its tenability.
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Carrots are actually better for a great deal of behavior change.
And sometimes there's nothing like forcing somebody to change at pitchfork-point, once you're done asking nicely. Who says feminists need to convince men of anything?
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you're Damaging Your Cause By Being Angry (TM)?
Hah. Well, yes.
Can't believe it took me so long, but this is the part where I plug Nina Power's brilliant recent book One Dimensional-Woman, which is an invective against consumer feminism but also and more generally a most useful pamphlet on the state of feminism. I think the conclusion is most apposite here:
The political imagination of contemporary feminism is at a standstill. The perky, upbeat message of self-fulfillment and consumer emancipation masks a deep inability to come to terms with serious transformations in the nature of work and culture. For all its glee and excitement, the self-congratulatory feminism that celebrates individual identity above all else is a one-dimensional feminism. It is the flip-side of the image of the one-dimensional worker who is expected never to let herself or her company down by dressing badly, not being enthusiastic or, worst of all, getting pregnant. The feminization of labor and the laborization of women will continue to run adrift on the major contradictions of capitalism and the opportunistic sexism that accompanies it, and no amount of sticking-plaster pleasures will compensate.
The sheer crystalline simplicity of [Toni] Morrison’s insights into the relationship between class, race and gender, and the memory that sex, cinema and alternative modes of living once held great promise, should remind us that feminism was at one time a great generator of new thoughts and new modes of existence. With the shattering of certain economic ‘certainties’ comes the questioning of other supposedly ‘natural’ modes of behaviour. If feminism takes this opportunity to shake off its current imperialist and consimerist sheen it could once again place its vital transformative political demands centre-stage, and shuffle off its current one-dimensionality for good.
We need radical thinkers - I'd rather they be socialists and feminists personally, but whatever shakes your tree - to imagine different worlds, so long as they are just worlds, inhabitable by all. Bindel obviously fails on that account.
(Many will know Power for her blog, infinite thØught. And on the subject of the intelligibility of theory, Ben will like the sentiment she expresses in an interview with taz she just posted.)
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Men don't need to learn guilt at the hands of polemicists, they need the carrot instead, to take the time to enjoy childcare, to see the values of various women in the workplace, to learn that a shared life isn't all about power. It's meant to be about love.
Feminism isn't just a struggle for more equality in the care of the children and work opportunities. Are you suggesting to way to get society to take rape more seriously is to offer men a carrot? Certain fights demand that a certain amount of anger be brought to them.
I was hoping there'd be some robust defence of Bindel. I'm interested in hearing a case for her.
She's pretty hard to defend. I'd be happier to mount a defence of Rich, or Dworkin. Bindel is just vile, and self-servingly so.
ETA: Curse you, Danielle, you could have paged me before clicking on Post Reply.
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you are no more compelled to play rugby as you are to be bi or gamble. you want to have sex with the same gender, sweet, im cool with it but dont act as though you need to, its not a biologically determined physical addiction. thats such a fucking copout.
And that's different from acting on your compulsion to be heterosexual how exactly? No, wait, don't tell me. I think I'm done trying to follow your "arguments".
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Selfishly, if it moves to Comedy Central then it will make recording it along with Colbert a little easier. But yeah, balls, especially for our Skyless brethren.
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Fuck it, she rapes me.
Oh, come on now.
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In which societies is heterosexuality not prevalent?
I meant not as much, pardon me. (Without getting into the argument of whether in certain societies bisexuality might have in fact been the norm.)
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I struggle with feminism that argues that heterosexuality is a mere social-political construct "imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force". It fails on the science, for one thing.
Still, it is radical thinkers like Rich who taught us that heterosexuality is also and not insignificantly a social-political construct. And hey, if it wasn't, how would you explain why it's so prevalent in some society and not so much in others?
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Whether purposefully or not I'm unsure, but Deborah has published today a highly pertinent installment of her Friday Feminist series.