"Pro-sex feminism" as a paradigm for a left-populist moral consensus.

Girldrive
An article in the Chicago Reader discusses a new book that offers a fresh approach to understanding salient commonalities and contradictions in contemporary American feminism. Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism is a travelogue that compiles the testimony and experiences of feminists (not necessarily self-identified as such) across the 'lower 48' states of varying racial, cultural and socioeconomic profiles. Kind of an interesting idea in itself. But what interests me most about the project is the identity of one of its young co-authors and the overarching political project that is implicit in much of her work.

It should be said that the story of the book's creation -- at once inspiring and tragic -- is as complicated and worthy of attention as its content. I won't dwell on it here except to mention that what's tragic is that co-author Emma Bee Bernstein took her own life before the book was completed and that more can be learned about this by reading the article in the Reader.

Aronowitz: Nona Willis and father Stanley
The other co-author is Nona Willis Aronowitz, who is the daughter of two intellectuals, both of whom were prominent figures in the American Left in the 60s and 70s. For many years, I have admired the scholarship of her father, the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, particularly for his politically engaged work in the sociology of education and his pioneering inquiries into the sociology of the workplace.

Since, in my limited understanding, issues of economic disparities and social class have played so central a role in Aronowitz's scholarship (as opposed to stuff like identity politics), it was with some surprise that I discovered that he was married to the late Ellen Willis, the feminist writer and critic. Willis was opposed to the puritanical stances that sometimes emanate from feminist circles, and is associated with what has been called "pro-sex feminism."

Ellen Willis and "pro-sex feminism"
The meaning of "pro-sex feminism" can be discerned through the following quotation from an article that Willis contributed to the Village Voice in 1981 (titled "Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?"):

While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order. [...]

My god, that observation was prescient. I bet feminists in 1981 could not in their wildest dreams have imagined the ascendancy of theocracy under Bush and Cheney; even today the courting of religionists is common practice among politicians of every political stripe. And despite the fact that "feminism" is no longer the salient assignation that it was in the early eighties, the din of anti-(hetero)sexuality/anti-sex rhetoric can still be detected in a percentage of feminism's present-day manifestations. Willis categorized the practitioners within the feminist tendency of what she called "sexual conservatism" into two groups: (1) the monogamists and (2) the separatists:

These apparently opposed perspectives meet on the common ground of sexual conservatism. The monogamists uphold the traditional wife's "official" values: emotional commitment is inseparable from a legal/moral obligation to permanence and fidelity; men are always trying to escape these duties; it's in our interest to make them shape up. The separatists tap into the underside of traditional femininity – the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims. These are the two faces of feminine ideology in a patriarchal culture: they induce women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power. [...]

I don't care who you are and what your attitude toward feminism is (if you're like me, you support feminism and might even be a feminist, but you basically almost never think about it and tend to devote more attention to certain sets of systemic injustices that are preventing human and political emancipation along lines of socioeconomic class, race and ethnicity), the above passage is really well written and thought-provoking and makes you wonder: why aren't people writing stuff like that these days? Is it partly because "alternative weeklies" like the Village Voice and the Chicago Reader are now owned by evil, corpora-financial interests?

A de facto feminism that is already out there, waiting to be described
Anyway, it's encouraging to see that Ellen Willis's corpus of feminist writings, including especially her "pro-sex" stance, have informed the work in the burgeoning career of her daughter. Nona Willis Aronowitz is still (very, for a journalist about whom I'm bothering so much as to blog) young, and the jury's still out on whether she'll become a writer of the talent and insight of her mother.

What's most encouraging is that she already understands the tidbit of wisdom that I believe to be indispensable to a future for the American Left: it must get the hell out of American's self-styled, middle class-bohemian echo chamber and start giving a voice to the people who are getting screwed worst of all in this country: poor people, both whites and minorities and both from the inner-city and the Great Plains. Nona Willis Aronowitz is spot-on when it comes to the necessity of this outreach. Behold the following quote from the Reader article:

[...] "Feminism, [says Aronowitz] for me, is women owning up to realities of sexism—but feminism as identity is less important than realizing those things and having gendered consciousness [sic].

[...] "Some of the most badass feminists we met were raised in conservative families or oppressive communities. I couldn't believe the urgency of women working in Fargo and Louisiana, the Bible Belt and Austin—they were way more passionate than a lot of women in big cities with big feminist communities."

These subjects—clinic defenders, Chicana activists, community organizers, and other women helping women on the ground—inspired Aronowitz and Bernstein to change their tack. The book's initial outline had been somewhat autobiographical, but as they put more miles between them and Chicago, they realized the stories that needed to be told weren't necessarily their own. "These women don't have a chance to be heard," says Aronowitz. "It started to feel urgent to let them speak for themselves."

Toward a Left-populism
What I find most compelling about Aronowitz's characterization of the project of her book is that it stands as a paradigm for precisely the program of left-populist thought and activism that stands the best chance preserving the foundations of civil liberties, self-governance and checks-and-balances enshrined in the Constitution.

To my mind, a Left that is premised upon a project of democratic emancipation cannot sustain itself -- and if not in the United States, with its vital republican constitution and traditions, then where? -- without being willing and able to take the form of a no-bullshit, intelligent Left-populism.

It is way too easy for the Left to fall into the same habits of the past thirty or forty (or more) years -- among them: defeatism, self-pity, pedantry, the fetishization of 'expertise', the fetishization of credentials, excessive intellectual and moral balkanization, regionalism, etc. --, but to pursue such a course would mean ceding all of our political autonomy (not just existing, but potential) to the reigning plutocracy (and a succession of future real- and potential-plutocratic [re-]configurations).

A Left-populist moral consensus cannot be prudish, because real people aren't prudish
We have to start, just as Aronowitz and Bernstein did, with the people who are already out there doing it. Furthermore, we need to bear in mind that a Left-populist moral consensus can only emerge around themes that that everyday people really do care about. Not an imagined version of morally upright, pious, unselfconscious 'everyday people': that's bullshit and pandering and a lie.

It's easy to know what people care about, because even if they don't always come out and say what it is, they do, inevitably and frequently, talk about it.

Here's a perfect example: sex. It's really easy to tell that human beings care about and think about sex because they talk about it all the time.

Karl Rove wanted everybody to think that there's this unimaginably enormous population of far-Right Christian religionists that constituted the largest and most monolithic voting block in the history of the universe. And for a long time, he succeeded. But, before long, everyone came to realize that it was actually a bunch of smoke-and-mirrors. And eventually, that becomes replaced with another bunch of smoke-and-mirrors -- the birther-movement, the tea-bagger movement, the neo-Nazi resurgence, etc., etc.

Maybe what I'm trying to say here is this: I'm as put-off by the smoke-and-mirrors shows as anyone else. But the response of the Left should not be to call for bans on smoke-and-mirrors shows, to denounce entire red-state populations on the basis of such spectacles, or to mount opposing smoke-and-mirrors production numbers!

It should be to call it what it is, to say: what a bunch of fucking loonies and point out how they are a playing perfectly into an ongoing succession of time-wasting distractions that muddy political discourses in our current landscape of consolidated media and micro-commerce. If a Left-populist movement puts real effort into doing precisely this, if it insists continually upon exploding mythologies rather than perpetuating them, it will make friends, not enemies out in the American countryside as well as deep in the American cityscape.

What say you?

Polemic of the day, from Downbeaten Wife Contributed by Jenny Ludwig

Taking a break between loads of Tom's laundry this morning, pondering my (post?)modern femininity as I scrubbed the corners of the kitchen with my fingernails and chopped onions with the other hand, I suddenly recalled this video clip of Palin at her most pious and most stubborn, responding to questions about her stance on abortion with that perfect Miss Congeniality smile, giving the interviewer nothing but sweetness yet refusing to give an inch:



Palin responds to several successive interview question as if there were no--and indeed is not ever any--gray areain sexual politics, as if being "pro-life" were equivalent to what she calls "choosing life" (and this video dates from long before McCain picked her for duck-duck-grey duck). As she flatly refuses to even acknowledge the differences between the situations that the interviewer offers, repeating "I would choose life" with the complacency and saccharine kindness that only the self-righteous can muster, it occurred to me that, unlike other conservative thinkers that I have known--indeed, unlike even the zealots and near-Nazis that I've known--Palin actually thinks that her deeply warped ideas describe the world, that you don't need anything more than an adage and a strong will to make the world as you think it should be, and, most importantly, that if you govern the world as you would govern the world you want, that the world will come to match the government you offer. Palin has forgotten that it's the dealer's game, and the odds are with the callous world, which invariably overpowers the insufficient and brittle structures we invent. The repeated lesson of history is that reality's great gambit is to overpower and undermine attempts to contain it through description; it wins every time against the theorized, the dreamed, the written, the desired, the proclaimed, the denied, the imagined and the depicted.

What has this to do with gender politics? you ask. Amber made a great quip last night, which she meant as a kind-of serious throwaway: When I said "pro-life," she responded, "Or, as I like to say, anti-choice." This reversal of the key terms of the abortion debate reveals the degree to which (as per far too often) it is the "anti-choice" lobby that has established the terms of the debate. Who, after all, wouldn’t "choose life"? It is primarily Sarah Palin's complacency--the complacency of the chosen-—that makes me so fucking angry about her nomination, but also the way that central questions about gender politics and government are obscured by the tepid debate about Palin's gender, womanhood recast as the glory of motherhood, which makes a woman stronger rather than weaker. Palin trumps Clinton through her ever-productive womb and her mobilization of the sexual appeal of that fertility through the production of an ahistorical femininity. In this arena, a world whose changes are immaterial to the highly motivated, women’s rights (rather than her own nomination) are a kind of affirmative action; if women had been strong enough, they would never have been kept down by unchecked fecundity.

But the great power of Obama's promise is that he can roll with the punches, that he is going to look around before he decides what to do, that--in contradistinction to my vision of Palin--not just government but ethical behavior and responsible relationships with other people overall depend on the capacity to look at what is actually outside of you before you decide what to do or say. To be certain, Palin's gender has no relation to her politics whatever and it's more laughable than insulting to imagine a Hillary Clinton supporter voting for this Stalinist bitch, but she is being presented as someone who is able to cope with the modern world without giving up her value system. [NB: Palin doesn't, of course, describe herself as a feminist and as this quite elegant discussion on Slate points out, this is not what our mothers fought for--for our right to choose; to return to work the day after giving birth and to be so fucking awesome we neither want nor need any physical, household, bodily, familial or emotional help]. But, aside from the fact that--and I paraphrase from The View--you can't exchange a vagina for a vagina, even one whose fertility is unchecked, the larger point is that Sarah--and Bristol--Palin''s rights and abilities to have the children they want, to keep the babies that may not have been foreseen, to decide that motherhood is what they want, that they don't want to use birth-control or wouldn't ever terminate a pregnancy, are never and have never been in jeopardy. Pro-choice is not (as my Dad is unfortunately though occasionally wont to say) "pro-abortion"; rather, it supports the right to choose either way.

This occurs to me partly because I--like most of my peers--spent decades understanding Roe v. Wade as central to my own life. I never lived in a time or a place when I didn't know that free, safe and private advice, support, and--did I so want--an abortion were available to me. When I was seventeen (or twenty-seven), if I had gotten pregnant, I would have gotten an abortion, as most of my friends who got pregnant did. Now, however, at the grand old age of 33, when I am much less likely to make such grand mistakes than at 17, I know that I would never have an abortion. My relationship with Roe v. Wade has shifted; the rights it endows are for mychildren and grandchildren, not for me. And, of course, for Sarah Palin's three daughters.

The idea that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is related to Sarah Palin's parenting is absurd; the Christian Right finally got one thing right when they admitted that seventeen-year-old girls get pregnant all the time, in every country in the world, every state in the Union (even those that might want to secede), and even in the most evangelical of evangelical households. And, frankly, most seventeen-year olds get pregnant because they don't use birth control even when they do have sex-ed classes, curfews, moms who don't work or regale their children with stories of when they marched on Washington and piles of condoms for the taking in guidance offices and clinics.

But, Palin's "I am pro-life" goes far beyond the question of an unplanned pregnancy, elaborating a policy stance into a lifestyle choice. Her daughter, therefore,--her seventeen-year old high-school senior of a daughter--is not just having this child, she is getting married and raising that child. I'm going to show my age, but, in my day, if you didn't want to get an abortion (and in my parents, when you couldn't), you went to stay with Aunt Susy for a year, to attend a different school and get some "rest". Then you came back and finished high-school. If Bristol Palin was sacrificed for this campaign, it is not only in that her personal life was made public for her mother's benefit, nor even that she "chose" to bear this child—and I don’t think any of us believe she had any real "choice"—to ratify her mother’s ethical stance, but because she "chose" to marry and keep the child, to extend the Palin clan to a third generation. Her entire life was sacrificed for Palin’s ideals. And that, perhaps, is my point. I think Sarah Palin was lucky as hell that Bristol was the one who got knocked up. She seems like a sweet kid, but very much sculpted by her mother and bearing the brunt of the intense parental scrutiny, protectiveness and pressure that only the oldest girl in a family can feel. So, she said she'd keep the kid and marry the boy, and, frankly, she probably wasn't going to leave Wasilla anyway.

But Sarah Palin has three & daughters, and one of those daughters is going to show her, in the worst and most painful way possible, how much her ideologically-restrictive, Stalinist, depressingly provincial tight-fist rule costs. If Bristol were a slightly different child, was given a bit more or a bit less freedom, went to better or even worse schools, spent her childhood in Anchorage or Washington, was a year or too older or younger, she wouldn't have agreed to bear that child; she would have run away, or aborted it by herself or drank and smoked herself and it into oblivion; and one of Sarah Palin's daughter is going to be that child. Piper Palin may spend the next ten years of her life in Washington; it will be 2015 or so before she's thinking about sex, and we don't even know what the world will look like. But Sarah Palin, who will not let herself or is not able to imagine any kind of world that she can't control if she is given a chance, will still be laying out the same rules and the same reasons and expecting them to resound as they did before.

But doesn't that seem unlikely? Maybe Piper won't want to give up her scholarship to college or just because mom says so. Maybe one of Palin's daughters will be raped in the big city, or some older boy or relative will use her and leave her. For whatever reason, if Sarah Palin makes her two younger daughters live in a world
where sex-ed is unnecessary and abortion is illegal, one of them won't want to have the child that will inevitably be conceived. And Sarah will watch her world--the one she has constructed so painstakingly and bolstered with the center of her arrogant little soul--, along with any other worlds she could even imagine, come smashing down around her head as she watches one of her daughters bleed out on her pale-pink bathroom floor, with a hanger sticking out of her cootch, because there wasn't a single goddamn doctor or nurse in Alaska who would give her an abortion.

__________________

* A good friend of the author and of the author's husband, too. -- Ed.

McCain campaign, in bid to more closely resemble reality TV show, chooses airline stewardess as would-be VP.

Are you fucking

kidding me?

Reasons why McCain's selection of a quasi-Canook cocktail waitress as his running mate is either an act of desperation or cry for help:

• She's a cocktail waitress.
• Or a airline stewardess, or whatever.
• She's dumb.
• Her political career -- such as it is (and it isn't!) -- consists of mayoral offices in towns with populations equal to the number of people currently standing at the Belmont El stop, and having done so at the behest of oil companies that use her as their little doe-eyed puppet to screw the American people out of their own natural resources.
• Her husband looks like a child molester:
  
  
• Not only that, but he works for BP.
• She has no qualifications and in fact has never set foot outside the United States. Check out this -- sorry, it's difficult to type because I'm laughing so hard -- time line in the The New York Times, which documents her lifetime of formidable achievements -- which include graduating from journalism school at the University of Idaho, playing Division 3 basketball at some piece of shit Alaskan college, and apparently (winning I'm not kidding about this) some kind of local beauty contest. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
• The number of disgruntled Hilary-supporters who would actually vote for this woman, who's rabidly "pro-life" (and even though she's not hypocritical about it -- what with the five babies or whatever, and the baby recently born with Down's syndrome -- she's still pro-life which is hella-NOT what Hilary supporters are). Plus any women with even a vague feminist impulse can't support this biatch. Why? Because she's obviously dumb as a goddamn brick!
  
• They look terrible together. As if McCain's fucking Botoxy socialite bitch of a wife didn't make him look bad enough, now he looks even more like some creepy old man, collecting young girls to stand next to him (and make him look old, which doesn't help him). Observe:
  
  Say NO to this, America! It's so fucking creepy!
  
• She's .... uh ... not qualified to be president. And as Rahm Emanuel pointed out, it's not like ol' Johnny's not #1 in the most likely to die while in office category.
• I mean, seriously, could you imagine if this bimbo became president? And no, I'm not equating "looks" (which she supposedly has? says somebody, not sure who) with stupidity. I'm equating stupidity with stupidity.
• And I'm not equating inexperience with unsuitability for office. I'm equating the combination of inexperience and stupidity with unsuitability for office.
• And, you see, Barack Obama -- to the extent he's "inexperienced" -- is also smart, inspiring, on-the-ball, the galvanizer of a nationwide movement....I mean, he's Barack Fucking Obama, and this chick is just some dumb cheerleader from butt-fuck nowhere, with a dumbass husband who looks like he's inbred or something. I don't want that motherfucker anywhere near the White House. He would stain the furniture just by looking at it.
• Isn't America sick of all of this fucking Conservative Christian bullshit? Can't all of the Fascists-For-Jesus people just go away?
  
• She's into hunting and NASCAR and all that other redneck bullshit. Isn't America sick of all the redneck shit yet? I mean, come on.
• And also the fucking oil people? Aren't we sick of having motherfuckers who work for oil companies setting our fucking foreign policy? Examples in the current Administration of people who RECENTLY WORKED for oil companies (off the top of my head): Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush. AREN'T PEOPLE SICK OF THESE FUCKING ASSHOLES? You want more of this shit, Conservative Christian America? Need more oil CEOs setting your policy for you?? We are a country of dumbass masochistic assholes, and we seem to get what we deserve.
• Apparently John and Sarah hadn't spoken to one another until like a couple of days ago, and then, only briefly. No surprise.
• Just no.
• Were the two of them to win the presidency, satire as a form of humor and communication would cease entirely to be distinguishable from reality. It's already close enough now, with Bush and his cowboy hats and his "Mission Accomplished" airplane stunt.
  
• She's Dan Quayle in drag.*

* Not my joke. I can't remember where it came from. But it's good, no?