From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Queer Kids and the.. "Just this," "Just that?" ???
Date: Sat, 2 Aug 1997 20:02:35 -0500 (CDT)


Malgosia writes:

  <SNIP>
> But what is "just sex"?  I think that the idea that one can isolate
> from sex -- in all its psychological, social, political, what have you,
> dimensions -- something that is "just sex" and doesn't include them, is
> a bit shoddy.  And so, I suspect, is the idea that when women are treated
  <SNIP>
> -m 

	One of the chief differences, I should say, between M-I and
M-Fem on the one hand, femecon-l on the other hand (to which I also
subscribe) is that in the former (on the whole and with some jarring
exceptions), the formula "Just This" or "Just That" is almost never
accepted, substitute what you wish for "this" or "that," and that
whenever the formula is used it requires extensive justification.
I triggered the earlier debate on abortion by insisting that abortion
was "just" a technical, even whimsical matter, and that the woman
should not be pressured to think of it as a "moral choice." That
led, properly, to considerable debate. (I notice Boddhi is trying
to start that issue up again, but I haven't read or replied to him
in a year or so, and don't intend to now.)

	On femecon-l (feminist economists), they tend to assume
(or to take for granted without even noticing that it is in
fact an assumption) that something exists which is, as it
were, "just the economy." That one can focus on something called
"History of the American Economy," as though it existed in some
sort of a vacuum not only from daily life but from the rest of
the capitalist world. And in connection with this they got into
a long discussion of how one could "prove" discrimination to
neoclassical economists. The condition of such "proof" having
to be that it is presented in (apparently) purely economic terms. (About a
year ago someone on that list complained that both capitalists and
marxists reduced life to purely economic terms!)

	I still don't have any very strong opinions on prostitution, and
want to say on the margins of that debate, but in speaking of *selling*
"just sex" what is loudly and insistently there is the act of sale and
purchase itself, which (regardless of what is being sold) is profoundly
different in a medieval village, a 17th century colonial settlement in
America, or in contemporary NYC. And as Tracy herself has pointed out, it
seems to make a profound difference whether the *act of purchase* is
carried out over the phone or in direct bargaining on the street. 

Carrol