Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 19:23:13 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: M-TH: "Victims" of Feminism and Agency of Men


While seething with resentment agaist those who Dumain says are passing
women off as "helpless victims" (since he thinks women are not oppressed
any longer), Dumain cannot help but cast men in general and male advocates
of women's emancipation in particular as "helpless victims" of feminist
propaganda.

Dumain writes:
>You obviously recognize
>this too or you would have not raised the question, but the fact that you
>are so tentative and timid indicates the malicious brainwashing that
>feminist ideology has itself instituted among progressive people.

It seems that, in Dumain's mind, while women already have enough agency to
resist patriarchal and capitalist domination, progressive men have so
little agency that they can't resist the "feminist ideology" and its
"brainwashing." It appears that it is Dumain's mission to "protect helpless
male progressives" from analyses that consider how capitalist exploitation
and patriarchy/sexism constrain women's agency.

Yoshie

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

Dumain wrote:
>Rob Schaap begins to ask the relevant questions in response to Yoshie's
>pernicious stalinism-feminism, but like everyone else on this list, backs
>away in the nick of time.
>
>At 12:01 PM 1/24/98 +1100, Rob Schaap wrote in response to Yoshie's:
>
>>>Shouldn't you also historicize the fetus? When and how did some people
>>>begin to make emotional investment in the fetus? Why? For what purpose? To
>>>what effect?
>
>the following:
>
>>Yeah.  I should do that, for this emotional investment does come into
>>society as a tyrrany.  'Trouble is, my knowledge of the relevant history is
>>non-existent.  Is the emotional investment in the foetus a transhistorical
>>fact of humanity that is being exploited to oppress people, or is it an
>>invented phenomenon?  I dunno.
>
>This is of course the key question, which you are too wimpy to explore
>further. Framing this decisive question as an either-or question is
>precisely what makes Yoshie's thesis possible.  Secondly, the word
>"transhistorical" both fingers and somewhat confuses the issue.  The word
>"intrinsic" would avoid the more questionable connotations of
>"transhistorical", which indicate an empirical invariability which may never
>have really obtained.  Not only is there a historical variability to the
>valuation of the fetus, but there is obviously a synchronic one, manifested
>not only in the abortion debate, but in the highly variable emotional
>investment that exists, not only among individuals, but within the same
>individual at various times, towards any given fetus.  The question of the
>value of the fetus to any of us, however, is not merely a question of social
>imposition and brainwashing, though that is a part of it, but of a larger
>existential question at the heart of human choice.  I assure you I am
>immeasurably unromantic in my attitude about breeders, but I am not going to
>trivialize the value of human life by assuming that procreation is a
>completely meaningless act without any existential implications over and
>above the brainwashing that turns us into breeders.  You obviously recognize
>this too or you would have not raised the question, but the fact that you
>are so tentative and timid indicates the malicious brainwashing that
>feminist ideology has itself instituted among progressive people.
>
>Hence:
>
>>Like all of us, I'm capable of feeling
>>hegemonically imposed tendencies with as much passion as essential
>>tendencies.  Given my modernist respect for rationality (whether my
>>attempts to exercise it amount to 'fluff' or not, Ralph), a convincing
>>historical argument could upset my current convictions, sure.
>
>But one cannot seriously emend one's convictions if one doesn't have them in
>the first place.  Why not show the courage to pursue those convictions and
>not be so worried about being un-pc?
>
>>>I venture to say that to the extent that people make emotional investment
>>>in the fetus, people disinvest from the ideals of women's agency,
>>>self-determination, sexual freedom, and emancipation.
>>
>>I do realise this.  In our world, this is absolutely true.
>
>No, this is bullshit, even in our world.  Mind you, nobody is more cynical
>than I about procreators, but to suggest that the desire to have children is
>absolutely a function of the negation of women's autonomy is the worst sort
>of stalinist-feminist horseshit, and should be rigorously opposed.
>
>It also denies the high degree of feminine agency that actually and
>concretely exists in today's world.  Yoshie's nonsensical statement reflects
>the fundamental assumption behind all middle class feminism: that women are
>helpless, delicate creatures to need to be protected, esp. by chivalrous
>male feminists, who are so oppressed that they can't make any decisions for
>themselves, that they can be neither autonomous nor responsible nor
>accountable for anything they do.  The class prejudice behind such a
>dishonest axiom has struck me only recently, in my unpleasant many contacts
>with left intellectuals.  With all this fraudulent whining about female
>helplessness, you would never know that the USA in 1998 is not the USA of
>the 1950s, or Europe of the 19th century, or the Middle Ages, or the Japan
>of today, or Saudi Arabia.
>
>>The price our
>>society pays for the 'personhood of the foetus' claim is substantial and
>>falls squarely on women.
>
>What implications are to be drawn from this?  Do you think that those whose
>behavior, imposed on them or not, shows that they are the ones who most
>value human life and are willing to make the sacrifices to sustain it, mere
>dupes?  Would they show more human agency were they to dump their newborns
>into trash cans, as a few do?
>
>>Under MacKinnon's feminist world or my socialist
>>one (and Carrol is right about one thing, we shouldn't seek to write
>>cookbooks for the future - I was doing this for the purposes of necessary
>>abstraction in argument) the agency of the woman is assumed, such that the
>>responsibility for her actions may justifiably lie with her.
>
>MacKinnon's fraudulent social-fascist career is predicated on the total
>non-agency of women, a non-agency that no more exists than a managerialist
>feminist fantasy world.
>
>>Unfree woman is no more responsible for
>>any abortion in our world than the rest of her unfree fellows.
>
>I think I agree with this proposition as a free-standing assertion, in spite
>of the lame framework in which it is encased.  This would be a true
>statement even if abortion were morally wrong, just as a hungry person's
>stealing bread would be a morally supportable decision even if theft in
>general were wrong.  However, people who do all sorts of "wrong" things are
>not devoid of the consciousness of the seriousness of the moral choices they
>make.  I have known people who have stolen out of hunger, and they have no
>less strong a sense of right and wrong than anybody else.  Pure amoralism is
>a conceit of intellectuals.
>
>>Obviously my argument is predicated on the personhood of the foetus.  And
>>hence the killing of a foetus is wrong everywhere and all the time.  But,
>>destroying the life of a woman is equally wrong.  And under patriarchal
>>capitalism, that's what a prolife stance adds up to.
>
>Though I wouldn't take a pro-fetus position in se, this is a serious
>argument.  Now, if technology were to advance to the point that a fetus
>could be removed from the womb and brought to term artificially--or, let's
>consider the real practical possibility of surrogate motherhood)--then the
>ethics of the situation change.
>
>>Society is at fault.  In an unfree world, it is difficult to
>>apportion blame to individuals.
>
>I do agree ... up to a point.  However, one must be as cynical as the
>cynical age in which one lives in order to survive in it.  This is what I
>mean: we live with concurrently existing ideologies of total personal
>responsibility and total personal irresponsibility.  The latter comes about
>as moral collapse when faced with the impossibility of the former.  People
>get to the point where they don't think they are responsible for anything
>they do.  Hence, the reaction to a reactionary political environment is a
>disavowal of any personal responsibility, esp. when one can take on the
>protective moral status of the sacred victim: blacks can't be racists; women
>are too helpless to be blamed for their stupid and thoughtless stupid
>actions and misdeeds.  Who believes this shit?  You do.  Reminds me of a
>Phil Donahue show I saw a few years back: "I'm not sorry I beat you to a
>bloody pulp, Reginald Denny, I'm just sorry it happened to you."  I live to
>oppose this filth, and to oppose the left for supporting it.
>
>Now before all the caterwauling starts about what a "sexist" I am, there
>should be no question about my position on women's rights, a rather
>different matter than the status of feminism as an ideology.  If this really
>were the nineteenth century, or Japan, or Saudi Arabia, or Somalia, I'd be
>the most militant and rabid of feminists.  But it is not, and the
>presumption of female helplessness, which seems to be shared by just about
>everyone on all of these lists, is the presumption I most ruthlessly oppose.
>It is so much a presumption that I will bet that Rob, the cavilling wimp
>that he is, tolerant to the point of violating the very charter of thaxis,
>which is to keep out m-int and m-g, would immediately do a turnabout and
>expel me from this list for making one "sexist" remark, just like that
>pathetic cowardly hypocritical little piece of shit Hans Despain did on the
>Bhaskar list because I referred to Mother Nature as a bitch, (which She--if
>it's a she--surely is), shocking the shit out of that cabal of prissy
>mediocre academic parasites.  These dogmatic presumptions of the middle
>class intellectual left are what I am determined to fight to the end.  You
>got a problem with that?--go fuck yourself!  Go fuck yourself!
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---





     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---