Tag: proletarian feminism

So I’m thinking about anti-capitalist SWERFs and how like 1. Their readings of anti-capitalist thought are shallow af 2. How even leftists (of a bourgeois or “respectable” proletarian type) often buy into bourgeois mythology about working class women, and their sexualities that plays into patronizing bullshit.

Like I think one of the reasons 19th century bourgeois feminists/moral campaigners were so concerned about sex workers was because A: It was a more attractive option than domestic work or factory work in many cases, meaning that it drew away potential servants, B: The desire to control and regulate social reproduction for capital, and C: As part of problematizing and pathologizing working class women to leave them eternally backfooted and having to prove they aren’t ‘the problem’ thus keeping feminist spaces controlled by the bourgeois

And like I think a lot of leftists, even important theorists have bought the “OUT OF CONTROL” or even “Mindless victims” bourgeois propagated myths about working class femininity

Like Beverley Skeggs touches sort of the edge of this issue in the introduction of Formations Of Class and gender but doesn’t cover it in depth.

I wish there were a term for working class feminism

Separate from feminism because like feminism has a long history of focusing on the ideas and interests of bourgeois women, and ignoring or pathologizing working class women’s needs and so like a lot of women (rightly) associate it with stuff that does no good for them and also it would be nice to be able to find each other without ending up in a sea of bougie bullshit.  Femmunism? Lady’s Class War? gyno-communism?  Ladyism?

Like I Don’t Think You Can Really Tell If A Woman Is Being Objectified By Looking At The Behavior Of The Woman

And I don’t think you can stop women being objectified by changing women’s behavior, like there isn’t a way to behave that will make men treat you as a real person on an individual level.

Like you can tell if men are objectifying a woman, and then like the issue isn’t making her stop doing whatever so they stop objectifying her, the issue is making them stop objectifying her.

Which is why I get so mad when sex worker exterminatory reactionary feminists see men making nasty comments about like Sasha Grey or whatever and are like “This is why choice rhetoric is bullshit, men will objectify you anyway” but like here’s the thing, in a patriarchal society men will objectify women whether or not there’s hardcore gangbang porn, the existence of Sasha Grey isn’t the reason men are making shitty gross misogynist comments about women.  If you shift societal modesty standards towards something more conservative, that won’t eliminate patriarchy.  If the most erotic piece of media you can get is the Eileen Fisher catalogue they’ll just make horrible comments about the models in that.

You can’t change men’s behavior by changing women’s to comply with whatever shitty standards they set in order for you to be treated like a person, they’ll just shift the goal posts, all you can do is fight them head on.

I Think That The Excessive Focus On Sex In Feminism Is Rooted In Bourgeois Concern Over Regulating Sexual Morality

arobotstolemyuterus:

thepeacockangel:

I’m not talking about the focus on rape, that’s an act of violence.

I’m talking about how the whole “how should a feminist fuck?  who should a feminist fuck? Is porn feminist? Can you be sexually submissive and a feminist?  Is this underwear feminist? for what reasons can a feminist acceptably fuck? What sex positions are feminist?” is making feminism a matter of individual sexual morality, and of regulating the sexual practices of women.  By making feminist (aka: moral) sexual practice a central concern for individuals, it distracts from collective organizing, and revolutionary practice.  Like bourgeois concern over proper sexual practice and regulating the sexualities of working class women and sex workers is just transmuted into the language of bourgeois feminism.  Like whether you’re condemning it or proclaiming loudly that “This porn is feminist” or that “strippers are feminist” you’re still putting yourself in a position of determining sexual morality and giving the discourse of sexual morality central importance.

It’s similar to locating moral practice in the dietary or body regulation habits of individuals.  It’s a bourgeois distraction from the project of actual gender liberation.

I largely agree. I mean, I think a lot of feminism that gets mainstream attention is so focused on individual choices (to shave or not to shave? Work outside the home or take on the domestic work? etc.) that it ignores collective action or systemic factors. 

That said, I’m not sure we should completely get rid of all feminist conversations about sex. Like, I’m really skeptical of feminism that asks nothing of men and I’ve encountered too many men with misogynistic attitudes towards sex over the years. So, like, I agree with every that you’ve said, but I do think we should address misogynistic attitudes toward sex. It’s not entirely incompatible with anything you’ve said, though, but I’m not sure how it fits in exactly.

I mean yeah, I think we do need to address that, but like making it about women’s choices or behavior on an individual level is weird.  Like “Is what she does sexually undermining feminism” is like a way to divide women into “fucks right” and “fucks wrong” which is just like “madonna” and “whore” or “healthy” and “frigid”.  I don’t think we should never talk about sex, but it seems like sexuality is the primary area we look at when determining if a woman or piece of media is feminist.  Like the whole discussion of like every female popstar ever (which like I don’t think is super useful anyway, because media is more symptom than cause) is “Is she sexually empowered or sexually objectified?” and like really why is that the question we ask?  Why are we asking that?  Why are we assuming that like women are in charge of how a society like ours receives any image of them sexual or not?  Like isn’t the problem how people respond to those images more than which ones are created? Why aren’t we asking “why aren’t people treating women regardless of attire or sexual behavior as fully human?” because like James Bond can be a horrible human being, run around in a speedo and have sex with everything that moves and he’s a power fantasy not a sex object and that’s partially because of how society perceives him, not because of what his behavior actually is.  And so like liberate women, stop objectification, I think.

Like I think we need to organize together to demand shit from men, because like an individual woman asking an individual man to quit being such a dickhead involves a massive power differential and is ineffectual.

Like if we have mass organizations that are ours, and don’t include them in any positions of power we can do things like making sure everyone knows when a dude is a street harasser, or says shitty things about women or has misogynist entitled sexual attitudes or whatever and we can collectively come down on the fucker.

I guess I feel like:

A: misogynist attitudes towards sex are indicative of misogynist attitudes in general, like it’s hard to think women are sex objects if you actually think women are people in general, like at best they’re conditionally people, and like it’s been proven that men who exhibit high levels of hostile misogyny see scantily clad women as objects but it’s like they already exhibit high levels of hostile misogyny, a dude’s not going to be mr. actually a good feminist and then only bring out the misogyny in the sack.  If we fight misogynist attitudes in society

overall, we’re probably helping to deal with misogynist attitudes towards sex

B: I guess I don’t feel like feminism can really ask anything of men, because like that’ll only get the ones who are already listening and they’ll still think of it as doing us a favor rather than doing the most basic “don’t be a piece of shit” stuff.  We have to demand change from a place of strength.  We need to have consistent mass organization with a structure and strength that allows us to demand change from men and to preserve past gains (like we’re losing reproductive rights left and right, and most feminists live in states where we don’t have to worry too much about that, or in liberal bastions and have resources to travel to get reproductive care and our lack of mass organization has allowed misogynist shitheads to trample on rights we won decades ago).  Asking doesn’t get systemic change, concerted collective effort and organized resistance do, you know what I mean?

Like working class femininity scares the fuck out of the bourgeois for some reason

the-moneyhungrywhore:

thepeacockangel:

Otherwise they wouldn’t expend so much time regulating and mocking prole women’s expressions of femininity, and so much time on policing prole men’s masculinity, like gnc dudes are only ever depicted at all if they’re bougie or villainous.

and like think about it, the effete aristocrat dude doesn’t scare them, doesn’t shock the system really, but street queens and the new york dolls are some rumbling revolutionary undercurrent that terrify people

Have u noticed how ugly old money fashion is? The classy modest style is always seen as the highest form of a woman respecting herself. But when the working class make up their own style old money starts to call them things like hoe and slut so theyll conform to their boring fashion standards

Like I think that it’s more than that by being the arbiter of what is “self respecting” and what is “tasteful” but also making that shit fucking complicated they prevent the incursion of outsiders but also regulate working class people and especially working class women’s behavior, also by putting working class women in the box of “sexually accessible” but also “promiscuous” and “not the sort a gentleman marries (because of her supposed promiscuity)” it makes working class women sexually accessible to bourgeois men, but also prevents working class women from marrying up into the bourgeois, and dissipating dynastic fortunes.

But like also by denigrating working class women’s expressions of femininity (because like the definition of femininity that currently reigns is something codified by the 19th century bourgeoisie, and they’re in a position of cultural authority) and telling us we’re getting femininity wrong I think like maybe like we’re put in a position of like A: Competing with each other for scraps of respectability 

B: By saying we’re an inferior or incorrect imitation of them they make it harder for us to recognize and value as ours culture that we’ve created, also by making it a matter of good vs. bad taste (and perpetuating the idea that style is purely individual and not connected to class) they perpetuate the myth that our status in society is because of personal failings rather than systemic injustice, and like taste is an especially good one because they can always adjust it to exclude things we do and cannot be objectively evaluated so we can never be sure we’ve “gotten it right” and it’s also harder to argue “No my taste IS GOOD” with someone who has that kind of social power over you.

C. By calling us excessive and unable to self regulate they cast righteous anger as evidence of our inferiority, and place us in the position of an endless self regulatory, panoptic project

D. By making us ashamed they make us quiet and obedient.  If we fear humiliation, we will be quiet.  By hypersexualizing and pathologizing working class women they make it harder for them to speak because to speak is to risk humiliation and makes it easier to dismiss them when they do.

E.  I think this is because working class femininity and the femininity of other oppressed groups if unleashed has profound revolutionary potential, I can’t quite explain why.  It may have something to do with patriarchal masculinity inherently being prone to recreating power structures that serve to preserve it, but also maybe femininity that isn’t of the socially approved (pure, bourgeois) kind involves a kind of difficult to regulate community and solidarity, like by enforcing masculinity on prole men, they’ve made emotional closeness harder to create and easier to regulate, femininity involves emotionality and close friendships, by creating something we must prove we are not (and we are guilty until proven innocent and then we’re still under suspicion) they create fear and strife.   They also make us deny our identity as working class women to avoid being categorized as deviant non-women (which makes it easy for them to turn working class men against us) which is a big obstacle to class consciousness.

Or like that’s what I think?

I Think That The Excessive Focus On Sex In Feminism Is Rooted In Bourgeois Concern Over Regulating Sexual Morality

I’m not talking about the focus on rape, that’s an act of violence.

I’m talking about how the whole “how should a feminist fuck?  who should a feminist fuck? Is porn feminist? Can you be sexually submissive and a feminist?  Is this underwear feminist? for what reasons can a feminist acceptably fuck? What sex positions are feminist?” is making feminism a matter of individual sexual morality, and of regulating the sexual practices of women.  By making feminist (aka: moral) sexual practice a central concern for individuals, it distracts from collective organizing, and revolutionary practice.  Like bourgeois concern over proper sexual practice and regulating the sexualities of working class women and sex workers is just transmuted into the language of bourgeois feminism.  Like whether you’re condemning it or proclaiming loudly that “This porn is feminist” or that “strippers are feminist” you’re still putting yourself in a position of determining sexual morality and giving the discourse of sexual morality central importance.

It’s similar to locating moral practice in the dietary or body regulation habits of individuals.  It’s a bourgeois distraction from the project of actual gender liberation.

This Book On Working Class Women Makes Me Think A Lot Of Stuff About Class Consciousness and Womanhood

It gets into all the ways working class women get shat on by society, and all the shitty unpaid labour we’re made to feel guilty for not doing, and basically all the guilt and shame that gets piled on us. (The book is Formations of Class and Gender by Beverley Skeggs)

I think you don’t see more women in leftist movements a lot of the time because the class self consciousness societal messages force us to internalize make us too uncomfortable to admit we are and what that means, because the stigma around working class womanhood is SO nasty and intense.

Like for men admitting working class status doesn’t undermine their gender and can in fact be seen as enhancing masculinity (although prole men still exist in a subordinated and shitty position) whereas for women it calls womanhood into question and our class status means constant scrutiny of our sexual behavior, of our mothering, of our housekeeping,of our appearance, of everything, and working class women are utterly and completely pathologized as deviant, hypersexual, uncaring, vain (taking time for the self for the sake of yourself as opposed to for others), bad mothers, strident, demanding, unable to “keep a man” because of the aforementioned traits, essentially as pathological non-women, Lilith to the bourgeois Eve.

We’re utterly back footed, put on the defensive from day one, society sees us as a potential revolutionary threat, and so we are made to justify ourselves as decent, as respectable, as human every moment of every day.  Unconstrained working class femininity is seen as a profound threat to capitalist order, or there would not be so much effort put into repressing it.  Think of “teen moms” and “welfare mothers” and “sluts” (all class and often racially coded terms) being blamed for every social ill, for the collapse of society, and while society isn’t currently collapsing and if it is it certainly isn’t our fault,  I think that if we fight back against their attempts to guilt trip us and shame us into compliance and silence, working class women might just be able to collapse this mess of a society if we get together and try, and that would be a damned fine thing.