Recent Thoughts on Gender

Last week, Friday night - what did I do? I went to an SFU conference on gender and video games. It was uncanny, because it brought me back to a point in my life when I didn't really have time for women (so I told myself) and gamed or watched TV by myself. Experiencing pleasure in my control over information didn't really involve much emotional depth, maturity, or meaningful affect, so I see this as a typically masculine experience. Fine. The past may be another country, but it's not a prison. After this, and after having two really good, mutual encounters (conversations) with women at a bar the next night, I started to reflect more on gender.

There's no question that women have greater affective expression and skill with gestures than men, and in a way our alienated society would be better if that was encouraged. But I don't think it means abolishing the concept of masculinity in favour of feminity, as some radical feminists such as Jessica Valenti have argued (Full Frontal Feminism). You can oppose the common-sense that naturalizes gender as a product of sex and 'instinct' (biological reductionism), without ignoring the meaning of 'nature' and bodily differences that shape different dispositions and needs of men, women, and other gender and sexual experiences.

While the women's movement has taken great steps in making women's experience meaningful, and in raising women's standard of living and quality of life, I sense an ambiguity. The issue is that, historically, welfare and communitarian values have underlied women's suffrage and women's isolation from men in self-protecting groups. The first feminists had conservative or traditional values (and not only because of their race and class), taking advantage of gender segregation: this 18th-19th century perspective suggests that women are weak and need to be protected, that they need to be included because they would otherwise be subject to scandalous forms of exploitation. However, public scandals or moral panics around violence against women  rest on an implicit paternalism: it is a notion that uncivil men constantly threaten to harm a valuable piece of private property. Protection against harm has long been part of the modern liberal-communitarian tradition, dating back to John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and The Subjection of Women in the mid-19th century, and even to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft in the late-18th century. Back then, women were strongly associated with welfare: i.e., both caring work and the need for protection by institutions. Today, the turn to family values, i.e., strengthening "women's domain" according to conservatives, is posed as the solution to social problems in the public sphere. I don't mean to be too critical, but .States today boast that they protect women's rights, protect LGBTQ rights, as part of their legitimacy 'domestically' and internationally, as a pretext for foreign interventions. But they negate (exclude) what they aim to include. On that note, the concept of the nation as a 'domestic sphere' or 'motherland' is interesting. I want to avoid allying myself with this when I try to be an ally of women.

When feminism is based on mistrust of men, and a priori fear of sexual assault, it seems like it is playing into patriarchy. I can see this in the idea that women shouldn't go out to bars and social events, or the notion that female sexuality is auto-erotic - independent of men, or a power-over men (rather than an independent potential for themselves). When a modern feminist asserts her bodily autonomy (which she should have the right to do), or hides herself from the male gaze, this to some extent relies on the traditional discourse of femininity, which says that women 'play hard to get,' choose their partners carefully, and play a passive role outside private life. Let's imagine, and this does happen, that a liberated woman chooses a stereotypical 'alpha male' or very attractive male as her partner: this would be realizing her freedom to choose, but at the same time, would be contradictory. It might also be classist, though that's contentious. Having the right to choose does not give you the right to support other oppressive hierarchies such as those based on physical appearance, income, or the unequal possession of emotional capital. I don't think these problems are exclusively to do with intersectionality, but with the idea of rights as exclusively individual (which is not necessarily even modern). Feudal and aristocratic societies were also intensely individualistic (within a Christian framework), based on personal relations of domination rather than abstract power.

I think that movements that are based on defense and protection end up being contradictory and potentially even statist, and I sometimes wonder if movements - whether feminism, labour, civil rights, environmental - can only really be recognized by the State if they embody the paternalistic logic of protection assuming public benevolence. Defense of the public sphere and of 'rights' is inadequate because it conceals oppression. This  is the ambiguity I sometimes feel as an ally.