Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 16:51:57 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: SV: M-TH: Re: M-FEM: All Work and No Play? No Way!


G'day Thaxists,

As many of you may remember, I'm troubled by the suspicion that there are
reasons for us (males included) to be concerned about abortion that are not
necessarily motivated by some 'will to power' (consciously or
unconsciously), but we've gone through all this before (in, I might add,
most comradely terms), and I'm not after another go at it (it may be my
bourgeois morality - I've a goodly deal of that, I'm afraid - and I fully
realise how an anti-abortion stance plays out in our current societies).

Anyway.

Justin reckons:

>It's useful to have someone around the house to cook, wash, clean,
>take care of the kids, and be available for sex on demand. So it;s not
>hard to figure out why men have these desires. Not all of them do. But the
>problem is less the desires than the relations of of oppression, as with
>class oppression.

Who wouldn't want someone around the house to do all this?  The fact is,
neither strictly Marxian notions (his largely implicit but absolutely
crucial spectre of the unalienated human, nor a notion I like -
intersubjectivity - would allow such an instrumental, exploitative
relationship [a subject-object relationship for Habermas]).  If you see a
moral dimension here, it's immoral.  If you don't, it's still socially
divisive, and constitutes a contradiction tending towards traumatic
transformation.

As I contend there's no natural difference between the sexes when it comes
to the nice idea of having the cooking et al done for one, and having one's
itches scratched by the wantonly available other, I must agree there exists
a decisive relation of oppression where one sex gets the goodies and the
other doesn't.

I have to go home now - to inform my wife that the historically bound power
relations currently pertaining between the sexes entitles me to sex on
demand.

I'll report back when I get out of traction.

Cheers,
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

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'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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