spikenard

sometimes I believe that Derrida is philosophy on the edge of your seat.

sometimes I believe that Derrida – and not the situationist international – represents the best attempt so far to escape the twentieth century and that there is no way of thinking that is more relevant or closer to the future.

most of the time i don’t but

sometimes I fear that Derrida is a weary pedant, that by studying him I am just training myself to become a weary pedant, and that the proof of this is that I now find weary pedantry exciting.

sometimes I fear that although there have been attempts to consider Derrida and the political – as if through a simple conjunction Derrida’s philosophy and the political would mate with each other – that to introduce Derrida to the political would involve waterboarding his way of thinking until it eventually gives up and stops struggling.

There are those

who speak

of the discipline

of philosophy

that are keen

to make of me

a be liver in reason

but I have never cared

for the discipline

in love and wisdom

and have more

important things

than reason

to be be living in.

There has been a lot of talk on blogs lately about Kyle Payne. See for example this blog. Basically this guy was a prominent anti-pornography feminist and it recently emerged that he broke into a woman’s room at college when he was an RA and photographed her as she was unconscious. This is a creepy episode to find out about but I’m a little concerned about the “hang em!” attitude of some of the blog discussion on this.

Kyle deliberately engaged in threatening non-consensual behaviour – invasion of a private space without consent, removal of clothing without consent, photographing without consent. The woman has clearly been sexually objectified in an threateningly invasive manner. I would not want to find myself in a similar situation and she has my sympathy.

What Kyle did was wrong and quite creepy. It certainly wouldn’t endear him to me as a person. He’s a kind of anti-role-model for the kind of person I feel that I ought to be.

I am however concerned at the articles attempt to close debate on this matter (eg. the title of the above linked blog entry is “Kyle Payne: There is no debate here, this is wrong”). I agree that it’s ethically very important to acknowledge what Kyle did was wrong but I think that arguing against debate is itself also wrong because it simply gives a kind of carte blanch to polemic. There should be a debate but we need to find the right locus of the debate. The locus should not be located around whether what Kyle Payne did was right or wrong but rather around how wrong it was or how it relates to the rest of his life and work.

I’m not apologising for what Kyle actually did but I think there is a need for (1) perspective about how we understand what he actually did. (2) question the manner in which everything else he has ever done has been interpreted through this rather creepy episode.

Firstly, Kyle didn’t violently rape this woman in the way so many other women have been violently raped. I’m not saying we should give him a gold star for not being worse but I argue that the severity of our condemnation should be in proportion to how we understand the awfulness of what he did. I don’t think it’s necessarily useful to polemically conflate many different kinds of problematic behaviours with the most violently awful kinds of rape. As feminists we oppose all these problematic behaviours but being objectified in the street is not the same as being raped at knifepoint and what Kyle did seems to be somewhere in between these two points.

Just to re-affirm a few points in case people misunderstand me: what Kyle did was wrong and he deserves criticism for it, the woman whose privacy and consent he violated deserves our support, Kyle didn’t rape anyone at knife point here and shouldn’t be treated as if he had just because as feminists we condemn both rape and knife point and what he actually did as patriarchal aggression against women.

Secondly, I’m not sure we can just rewrite the entire history of this persons life and writing through the lens of this creepy episode. If we’re to criticise Kyle for what he did then that implies that we believe he did it deliberately (as against viewing it as some kind of improbable accident) but to condemn everything he ever did on the basis of this action implies that this creepy act was the only deliberate thing he ever did in his whole life and the rest was a kind of elaborate charade.

I don’t really buy the psychoanalytic reading that has been offered where Kyle is understood to be working as a feminist in bad faith. It’s certainly embarassing for Kyle to have done this creepy thing and to work against patriarchy but I think that in some sense he can do both. It looks like a logical contradiction but I think people can act differently at different times (the asshole in your office might be the biggest sweetheart to his children) or even, dare I say it, change.

I don’t think that finding out that someone has done something wrong means that they are evil to the bone and that we should reconsider everything else they have ever done looking for further evidence of the evil essence that has supposedly been uncovered. I believe that there are relatively few true sociopaths that could be considered “evil” (that overly religious term). If you’re going to burn everyone at the stake that ever does anything wrong then that’s something I can’t relate to. I’m an atheist but religious terms – like forgiveness, atonement, and charity – still spring to mind.

It’s not that what someone does doesn’t matter. What Kyle did is now firmly part of the public history of Kyle and that is a kind of punishment in itself that should not be sneezed at.

I know that a lot of feminists are up for locking up everyone that has ever raped and throwing away the key but that’s just the easy way out – a way of abdicating our responsibility to them as people (though perhaps necessary when a true sociopath exhibits an ongoing threat to other people). Not caring for women as people is one of the levels on which rape is morally wrong. Putting someone in prison is not the same as rape (unless prison rape is considered part of their sentence) but just because someone has done something wrong doesn’t imply that how we treat them doesn’t matter. It’s a lot harder to think about learning to live with these people in spite of what they did rather than to think about just shooting them. We need to avoid the dreadful stalinist simplicity of the “No man: no problem” solution. It’s easy to have a will to power over people that have exercised power so violently over others…but power is not the solution, it’s the problem. So my question is this: if you’re not going to kill them or lock them up then how are we going to treat them? How are we going to live in the same world as them?

These questions might be too hard to face for women that have been raped and it is with these women that our first concerns must remain. Their anger is understandable but their anger is not simply a gift that helps them. The true gift is of course having no reason to be angry in the first place and this is a luxury that rape survivors don’t have. They are angry because they have suffered and their anger is part of their suffering. It can be a kind of penance that traps them in the significance of the awful thing that they have lived through. I don’t think that retribution necessarily solves the suffering of this anger. Retribution operates on the reality of what has happened and cannot undo what has happened. Nothing can. History is inescapable except by living after it. In spite of it. Without it. The possibility of change is important to survivors too.

If anyone reading this thinks that it isn’t my place to say these things then I respect that.

My mother went back to work after being the prime carer for us as babies and infants. Like a lot of people these days I just grew up with women working without thinking too much about it. I just kind of assumed equality of pay between men and women and didn’t really think about how the involuntary “career break” of having four children, or how working the double shift of being the primary carer and housekeeper even when working outside the home, might affect something like that. It’s only thirty or so years in Ireland since women were forcibly retired from government jobs when they got married but you’re not born knowing something like that. I think that I grew up in a society that had more or less absorbed the lessons and limitations of first wave feminism  – the theoretical legal and political equality but with all these matters of culture and attitude that still get in the way of that. I became conscious of things a lot of the time only after they had already happened – like when there was the media coverage around the first prosecution for rape within marriage in this country. That’s not something I had heard about before then or had thought about as a teenager.

I came into contact with feminist theory at college. I was doing a course on gender in film. It was the first time that I’d actually come into contact with feminism calling itself feminism. To be honest, at first, I didn’t take to the theory like a fish to water. I was a bit frustrated that “gender in film” seemed to mean “women in film”. All the classroom discussions and all the secondary texts we were prescribed were about how women were portrayed in film and I thought that was a bit biased or something. We were talking about femininity all the time and never talking about masculinity and I thought that was weird – wasn’t masculinity a gender as well? I felt like the course wasn’t as meaningful to me as it could be. Of course, now I recognise the irony in the feelings I had because this is how women must experience the vast majority of college courses that talk about nothing but dead white males worrying about dead white male stuff! I was experiencing the absence of the male privilege of having the world tailor itself to me as a man and I was so unaware of that privilege that I actually thought that I was the one who was being slighted!

That’s not entirely true I suppose. The course did address me as a man but not in a flattering way. The course was trying to convict me of being a man after the feminist critiques of what that means in our society. That’s not an easy lesson to learn. I already considered myself an anarchist (naive and ignorant though I was/am/trying-not-to-be) and I resented being cast in the role of the authoritarian patriarch. Privilege operates by making itself invisible and I’m always amazed at how we find reasons to feel hard done by – like feeling the pinch of being constantly broke as you work your way through college amidst the incredible privilege of getting to go to college at all and enjoying all this white male privilege without having to think about it because only women and people of colour are forced by their experience of inequality to think in those terms.

We were working with a lot of second wave feminist film criticism working with psychoanalytic theory and this was a barrier for me coming to identify as a feminist. I still have a problem with it. Having a very essentialist understanding of gender in the manner of the second wave is problematic. The point of feminism for men is to make them aware of male privilege and get them involved in overcoming their privilege and tackling it as a social and political problem. An essentialist theory of gender can sound like “if you are a man then you are a patriarch and a patriarch is all you can ever be”. This is true on some level but it’s also depressing and depression prevents action. It makes it sound like feminism has nothing to offer men. I think that feminism is more encouraging for men if it avoids some of the confrontational rhetoric of the second wave that talks about men as the problem. It’s more encouraging to men if we theorise the problem as one of social relations so that we say “you’re a man but you don’t have to act like a patriarchal asshole”. This is different to the essentialist understanding because it criticises how men act and live in society rather than what they fundamentally are. Men need the hope of not being condemned to being a patriarchal asshole forever because they don’t want to be assholes and feminism can help them not be!

The psychoanalytic bits of the second wave feminist texts we were working with also brought problems. Freud had a nasty streak in him about gender. Freuds holds that women have this envious experience of men based in not having a penis. Freuds notion of penis envy is nonsense but I suppose this theory was useful to some feminists at one stage because it is a theory in which women are resentful of men and examining how women’s resentment manifests itself in different films is interesting for feminists. Of course, if women are resentful of men its because of the male privilege that they exercise over them not because women feel the loss of not having a penis! So Freud is far from an unproblematic source for feminist criticism.

The problem with Freud goes deeper than the mere nonsense of penis envy. Beneath the idea of penis envy is the idea that women can be understood as men who happen not to have a penis and wish that they did. This way of understanding women as men but missing something is fucked up. It’s based in a commitment to a binary gender opposition between men and women in which men are privileged. This leads to all sorts of misunderstandings – such as the homophobic argument that gay men are victimised because they are feminine or feminised men. Of course, gay men aren’t victimised by a homophobic society because they are women – they’re victimised because they are gay. Historically homophobic cultures may have denied a masculine identity to homosexual men but its important for feminism to recognise that these are male victims of patriarchy on a grounds other than female gender and that patriarchy does not always operate across a neat gender binary or in the same way.

I ended up doing a paper on how fucked up the portrayal of masculinity is in Hollywood movies and exploring the flipside of second wave feminism. I wrote about how the male body is most visibly present in action movies when it is being tortured or beaten. That’s a weird relationship to the masculine body in cinema. The male body is so rarely presented in a sensuous way in film and this is the flipside of the objectification of the female body – the male body is not eroticised half as much and while this means that it’s not so subject to the opinions of strangers it also means that it is not that-which-is-to-be-celebrated. This is dangerous ground because it is a more nuanced take on objectification than feminists often take but I think it also says something meaningful about how I have been sexualised as a man in our society: to not feel sexually desirable but only sexually desiring. It was difficult for me to negotiate a lot of confrontational feminist theory as a man. My paper might have sounded much more defensive than I would be now because my comfort zones in this area were different – but luckily my course leader had some patience with me, took my ignorance alongside the earnestness and gave me a good grade anyway. By this stage I was starting to realise that the kind of treatment of masculinity in film that I had attempted would have been impossible without the feminist politicisation of gender and its exposition in relation to how women are portrayed. I think that this is a great gift of feminism for men – men would be helpless to understand their own gender situation without feminism and feminism therefore enables men as well as women.

I found second wave feminism as I first encountered it fairly off putting at first and I actually came to identify myself as a feminist through my encounter with queer theory. Queer theory just blew me away. It has all the incredible insight of earlier feminism while being much more subtle in some ways that allows it to avoid many of the things that I felt blocked me in the second wave stuff. I came to value the second wave after absorbing some queer theory. Flaws can be off putting at first but you come to love things for the flaws in the end. Now I love the aggressive anti-male rhetoric of the feminist separatists in the seventies. Those women kick ass! I understand them much better now – where they were coming from, their admirable audacity and determination to live in a different way and be real gender radicals. The rhetoric still excludes me but I’m more comfortable with being excluded by feminism and feminists sometimes now – I understand more about why that is necessary and feeling a bit excluded now and then as a man is experiencing something that women have to cope with all the time. A lot of feminists don’t bother with queer theory – they think its too abstract or academic or something – but I think that it is really important for understanding what it means to be a male feminist.

Spending time with people who were more feminist than I was has also helped me recognise not only the truth of feminism but also the real need to stand up for feminism and its importance in my life. My loving feminist partner has been a huge influence on me in this respect. Working as a feminist activist around access to abortion has also brought me into contact with wonderful feminist people and helped me really get my head inside the importance of feminism at a macro social level and not just the micro social level (the level of me and my relationships) or as mere theory.

In a funny way another great thing that helped me get into feminism is feminist infighting! I don’t fully agree with everything that calls itself feminist and probably never will. Margaret Thatcher aint no feminist to me. Sex and the City doesn’t look like empowerment as I understand it. I’ve already tried to explain my problems with some aspects of second wave feminism such as the appropriation of dubious psychoanalytic theory and some of its underlying assumptions from time to time…but thanks to widespread feminist infighting I realise that my reservations are ok! Feminism is tolerant enough of difference to let me make up my own mind about things as long as I’m willing to explain where its coming from and talk it out with others.