Date: Mon, 4 Aug 1997 08:06:08 +0200 (SAT)
From: Peter van Heusden <pvh-AT-leftside.wcape.school.za>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: gender, eros, mastery (was Queer Kids....)


On Sun, 3 Aug 1997, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> Malgosia wrote:
[malgosia's comments on the power relations of buying sex snipped]
> 
> >This has little to do with gender.
> 
> Not so fast! I don't think that you can say that this has "little to do
> with gender." I think that it is not quite reducible to gender, but I do
> think that gender has a lot to do with it.
> 
> There are many women in the world, from a purely economic point of view,
> who have the financial capacity to buy sexual services, but generally
> speaking, they tend not to buy sex. Part of the reason is that there is not
> that much supply. The sex industry in general, not just prostitution, is
> not created with women customers in mind. This is changing somewhat in
> terms of the production of pornography, but in the area of prostitution, I
> think there are much less changes.
> 
> Another part of the reason is that women are, for better or worse, not
> socialized to think of themselves as potential buyers of prostitutes'
> services. (I am speaking very generally here.)
> 
> So these social facts, I think, would influence the way women may eroticize
> mastery.

Indeed. In a sense custom consists of dead social relationships (similarly
to the way capital consists of dead labour). I think, however, that things
are changing - taking e.g. the SA Cosmo article on 'women buying sex' as
an example of this trend.

This comes back to our earlier discussion of the 'double standard' - what
we are seeing is that the entry of women into the skilled (and thus better
payed) workforce from the 1960s onward has resulted in a situation where
the idea of what women do has changed (good old historical dialectics at
work). As this has happened within the capitalist system, the change has
been to set up a definition of women (one amongst many societal
definitions) which has many similarities with the corresponding definition
as men. Whilst this development appears still to be in its infancy, I
think the trend which I seem to be seeing is going to continue, so that in
certain societies at least, class will becomes 'degendered' to a degree -
resulting in a change in the 'double standard'.

This all reminds me of Hugh's suggestions for a class on Marx & Freud -
i.e. a big banner saying 'SEX - MONEY - POWER'.

Peter
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