As per usual, Rachel Kramer Bussel makes a helluva lot of sense in her latest Village Voice article (“Feminism and Fucking”), and she pulls no punches. So you can understand my surprise when I saw Amanda’s response at Pandagon.
What has happened to Amanda? For a long time she has been one of my favorite sex-positive feminists because of her no-bullshit eloquence, but lately I’ve observed her inching closer and closer to the radfem camp. What’s up with that? Is there a secret handshake that gets one on the radfem payroll, and I’m just unaware of it? Or, is her mind elsewhere and she honestly missed the blatant sarcasm in Rachel’s statement, “We can choose to be celibate or to have someone come on our face.”
The Pandagon post smacks of a deliberate misreading and contorting of Rachel’s words - something that I’m used to seeing Amanda skewer others for. I feel so let down.
The one part of Rachel’s article that I do take issue with is the reference to “choosing to be [a sex object] under certain circumstances,” because I think “sex object” is not the right choice of words in that case, and is in fact contradictory. This is why I think it’s important that we come to an understanding of a common vocabulary if we’re going to have any sort of constructive dialogue among feminists. But, that’s a tangent to be expounded upon at another time. My point is, overall I think Rachel’s article is awesome.
Anyway, read both pieces, and decide for yourself. I’ll leave you with some words of wisdom from Rachel’s article:
I encourage all men and women to make the sexual choices that are right for them, regardless of what’s “cool.” I can’t tell you how to fuck. Instead of looking to gurus, activists, porn stars, and how-to books, you’d be better off looking inside, spending some quality time with your fingers around your cock or pressed against your clit figuring out what sets you off. Forget about the judgments of your friends and neighbors (who are probably just as wild in the sack as you are).
Seriously, how in the world could anyone (short of a Godbag) argue with that?
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26 Responses to "Example #4,592,1875 of people needing to own their shit"
i am just not at all clear on what the problem is with facials. honestly. i always call that sort of thing “alternative branch bank deposits”. i mean, come on, no one but me is fascinated with the wild force and velocity of ejaculant? come on. and no one gets at all turned on by having it land on your chest and then he collapses on you and licks it all off. and then kisses you afterward. this is so awful and it’s not loving or an expression of love between two people.
god. why did you make me go to the thread. it is quite irritating.
i think amanda got hung up because she didn’t understand the context of Rachel’s article. Rachel is rejecting the claim that women who find sexually submissive acts enjoyable are, a priori, male identified sexbots who are blinded by idelogy. Hence, the focus on things like ‘doggy style’ etc.
And I am very sorry that people don’t understand that doggy style is enjoyable for some of us. e.g., it’s massages my g-spot and gets me off. I fucking LIKE it and it has little to do with submission and everything to do with the fact that I have a fucking awesome orgasm! Jesus!
What’s annoying is that, what’s going on here, are two different understandings of the relationship between individual and society. With Amanda, it becomes clear that society is this determining thing, that no one ever gets out from underneath the oppressive weight of a sexist society and if they claim they do, then they are immediately set up as dupes of the patriarchy.
This kind of thinking is simply not supported by evidence. I’m not saying people can completely shed society. We are never free of it. I am saying , though, that the whole thing is set up as an either/or that is wrong to begin with.
but anyway, yeah, I think Amanda is a very cool radical feminist who still likes shopping, shoes, and pocketbooks. At least she’s a reasonable radfem! YAY
been meaning to write a post on this related issue. i read something the other day at feministing where a commenter put it the way i’ve sometimes seen it but didnt’ have presence of mind to save and link to.
The problem said this woman was that when some of us (like me) enjoy facials, then if I sleep with the guy, then when she gets ’round to sleeping with him, then he’ll expect her to like them too.
*rolls eyes*
i mean, she said it in different terms, but what else could she possibly mean?
Oh, I know, that if we actually DISCUSS what we like and don’t like — in our sex radical attempt to break down the taboos surrounding these things so that we have more knowledge and mroe fulfilling sex lives (nodding to your other post here) then, if men hear that some women like facials, they’ll want all women to like facials.
*sigh*
instead of imaginging that the information might be discussed as, “Well, it’s like the clitoris. All women tend to like it stimulated, but how it’s stimulated, well women aren’t alike. Same thing with facials, deep throating, and fucking your male partner with his favorite dildo.
some women like it all (me) others like none of it, some like 1 or 2 but not the other(s).
I’m currently with someone who doesn’t like anal that much. Too religious an upbringing. HE likes the stimulation for himself from me, but he doesn’t like anal sex as the penetrator. Funny huh?
Well, I’ll deal with that. But if he didn’t like going down on me, we wouldn’t be together. That’s something I like. And, if he were the kind of guy who thinks that cramming my head down while I’m playing the skinflute is the thing to do — when I haven’t already indicated I’m game — then he’d be kicked to the curb pretty fast.
Is that so freakin’ hard?
I can understand that they might be saying, “Well, yeah, it’s hard for some women to assert themselves like that.”
I can even dig it that, at 17 or 22, I might have been a little less capable of kicking someone to the curb. In fact, when I learned, after we were married, that my husband turned into the boring old fart, I didn’t kick him to the curb b/c we had a kid on the way.
but the solution to that kind of thing seems to lie elsewhere: in making sure women are earning decent livings, social safety net, acceptance of single parenting, etc. It does not lie, it seems to me, in deciding we shouldn’t discuss sex and what turns us on or in deciding that every time someone like something submissive they are some bizarre male ID’d patriarchy fucking woman who’s somehow the enemy of feminism.
blah.
i think three posts in a row count as “obsessed”. heh.
Well, maybe,but you made kick-ass points in all three comments!
I’m about to head home, but I’ll get around to responding in more detail later.
and th eother thing that I didn’t get across: some men don’t like the things that people think all men like.
i’ll never forget running into an old high school sweetheart. I’d never slept with him then, but we did have a wild 6 week fling.
As h.s. sweethearts, I recall one night have a convo with my best friend, dating his best friend. We wanted to know what their fave positions were. giggle giggle tee hee. high school stuff. neither my friend nor i were interested in actually having sex yet, but we sure were curious about it. so, we asked and compared notes.
that was my first introduction tot he term ‘doggy style’. huh.
so, 4 years later, we sleep together. later that weekend, i indicated that of course we should do that — in the subtle way you do that in bed. nope. he wasn’t interested.
at another point, I wanted to give him a good luck fuck before he went hunting. it was like 4 a.m. and he was getting ready to go out for first day deer hunting. (I grew up around that life and I love opening day. worked night shift in diners for awhile, totally love serving ‘em all coffee as they wipe the sleep out of their eyes.)
ANYWAY, went to go down on him and realized he wasn’t interested either.
I never got to the bottom of why, just accepted it as. Well, huh, I guess the things they say all men like aren’t necessarily the things all men like. My guess that, his stint in the Navy introduced him to something that turned him off both acts. Since he had sex mostly with prostitutes while in the Navy, who knows. And, I also learned that what someone might like at one point in their lives istn’t what they like later or vice versa. People grow.
Men aren’t shaped by some monolithic entity called society that turns them all into cookie cutter versions of one another, either. that doesn’t meant that are anythign they want to be willy nilly,it just means (as I said above) that this either/or is the wrong way to look at it in the first place.
so, seems to me that, if the powerful ones in this society aren’t uniformly alike in their sexual proclivities and that, even in a lifetime or a few short years, their tastes can change, then sexual desires aren’t stamped on us in this uniform, everlasting, never changing way. And, when it comes to sex acts that people like to say are the be all and end all for men — and it turns out that they aren’t for all men — don’t we have to stop and think about how simplistic these views are? how very simplistic it is to say that the only way to read and experience facials as acts of submission.
and what the fuck happened to love? really. what the fuck happened. can people not understand love and sexuality and that, in those contexts, it’s not necessarily being read and experienced as domination and submission by all of us.
of course, this gets immediately read as some pollyanna bs. where i’m denying social structure. as a trained sociologist, all i can say is: ha ha ha to whoever reads it that way. really: tee hee.
Come on Amber, you know that there’s a secret handshake that gets you into the radfem club. Because even though there are only three members in this secret cabal (well, if Amanda gets in that will make 4) you know that with the power and influence they exert, they’ve got a stranglehold on society. The salary is beyond your wildest expectations, so how can just anyone be let into the club? We must stop the radfem cabal before it gets to 6 members, or we’ll all be lost! Lost!
Seriously, for all bitch/lab’s pissing and moaning about how it’s so “tiresome” that mean, mean feminists deride other feminists as anti-feminists because they don’t tow the party line, you guys seem to do enough of it yourselves, make up a strawfeminist and bash her. It’s okay! Nobody’s trying to take away your facials or your shoes, we promise! Amanda will do whatever she has to to reestablish her non-rad fem (but it’s so hard, it’s so pervasive) bona fides.
You guys make some good points, but they’re points that come out in the course of a discussion that’s been started in the midst of all this hysteria, with the strawfem bullet points and the “No! No! Don’t talk about that! To talk is to judge!”
Eh?
MissClairol: radfem isn’t so pervasive in the wider society. the attitude that women can’t possibly like *that* (or if they do they’re whores er “sexbots” excuse me) IS.
so yeah it pisses some of us off to see it reproduced even in these little circles.
particularly when it comes coupled with “you’re not really a feminist anyway” (yes, people really do say that, and worse). sure, feelings will recover; but why on earth should people just sit there and take it?
maybe, you know, there’s a REASON why radfem (or whatever you care to name this school) is marginalized. besides the uber-oppressive patriarchy, I mean.
p.s. y’all don’t really need an etymology lesson on “hysteria,” right? didn’t think so.
MissClairol,
You seem to be missing the point. The concern isn’t about mean ol’ radfems “taking away” our facials and shoes. (Which, for the record, I can’t get very excited over either facials or shoes, so that seems to just be another reinforcement of a false dichotomy - the same kind of thing Rachel was mocking as unnecessarily limiting and unrealistic. Not to mention heteronormative, wrt facials!) The point is that for many radfems, religious conservatives, and regular everyday (wo)man-on-the-street types, the discussion is infused with judgement and shame. And if you think I am creating a “strawfeminist” by not naming specific names wrt those 3 groups I mentioned, well, I’m sorry you feel that way; but it is very early and to name names would take quite some time, and it’s just not worth it to me at this hour.
Also, no one has ever suggested that we should not talk about issues of sex/sexuality in the larger social context. On the contrary! However, my point is simply that there is no reason for the discussion of these issues to contain “ew, gross, you’re a tool of the patriarchy” finger-pointing. It’s pointless at best and counter-productive at worst.
I’m gonna keep saying this, I think:
why is this not being reframed as a larger problem with abuse? because it seems to me that that is the crux of the anti-___’s passion, pretty much; and as such it makes a lot of sense to me.
But why not, instead of trying to be our sisters’ keepers so damn much, take it back to the abusive/entitled assholes where it belongs?
Seriously: someone forces you to give head the way they saw it in the porn flick. it is a nightmare; you are sick afterward.
Do you blame:
1) the porn flick
2) the other people who make or “use” porn, women included
3) an amorphous patriarchy
4) the fucktard who raped you?
and if more than one, *on which do you put the brunt of your focus*?
Consider this, before you dismiss this one as way too easy and obvious:
Who’s easier to get at? The asshole who fucked you over, stalked you, threatened to kill you? and has money, connections and lawyers up the wazoo on his side? Or some woman on the Internets who says she likes giving head?
I’m completely enamored with b|l’s point that guys aren’t all stamped from the same mold (or that, since we change with life experience we’re not stamped from a mold at all.)
I think Amanda is manefestly not stamped from a mold and, so, is pretty consistent but not always predictable. Like the parter from b|l’s 6-week fling she may have specific issues with certain acts that are only tangentially related to any particular ideology (even though she may react from the context of an ideology close to hers.)
figleaf
My response to the Bussel piece was the same, though it happened the opposite way. I read Amanda, and then read Bussel, and I was like “wait, this sounds all feminist and pro-sex feminist, and pro-feminist-because-feminists-are-pro-sex!”
Anyway, thanks for posting your thoughts on the issue. I agree with Amanda on most things, but it’s good to have confirmation that I’m not crazy when I don’t.
(Wooh! Talk about posting comments before you’ve had your coffee!)
What I was trying to say earlier was that I’ve always seen Amanda as a deeply (and not shallowly) radical feminist and that if she unloads on a particular heterosexual sex act it may or many not have a basis in her ideology and might instead be — as with b|l’s partner who declined fellatio and rear-entry intercourse –based on personal experience.
And now that I’ve re-read Amanda’s post with properly coffee-adjusted eyes I see that her objection to Kramer-Bussel’s column isn’t based on a distaste for facials and/or doggie-style sex.
Instead Rachel said “Feminists are just like any other women, with a range of sexual desires and practices from doggy-style to bukkake…” Amanda rather tartly points out that this would be a pretty narrow range of possible desires. I have to agree.
I know you could make the case that a wide spectrum exists because bukakke can be seen as an ultimately submissive, conceptually-but-not-clitorally stimulating act while (as b|l hints) rear-entry intercourse can be seen as an ultimately pragmatic, non-submissive, stimulateable-surface-area–maximizing position. But that wasn’t how I read it and I’m guessing it’s not how Rachel wrote it either.
And so while I might not have unloaded quite as fiercely as Amanda did, I do think Rachel might have chosen better examples.
figleaf
Okay. No offense meant, figleaf, but seriously: why are people not getting this??
RKB was using two extreme examples to illustrate the limited sexual choices offered to women by society-at-large. Through sarcasm (and there’s actually a more accurate word for this rhetorical device, but I can’t think of it), she is pointing out that the binary worldview presented by much of contemporary society is ridiculous and unrealistic.
Notice a later sentence in her article: “Having a full range of sexual options should be a high-priority feminist goal.” See? She points to her earlier examples as an example of not having a full range of sexual options.
Furthermore, as Bitch|Lab pointed out in a comment at Pandagon:
I got it. I guess very few other people did?
(Again, no offense meant, figleaf. I’m not attacking you!)
No offense taken, Amber, but I *really* don’t read it that way. She says “range of desires from doggy-style to bukkake” which is sort of like a range of cosmetics from mascara to eye-liner. Not good, not bad, but very, very narrow as ranges go.
Anyway, the point is that Marcotte seemed to be seeking a *wider* range of desires for feminists than the one Kramer Bussel first proposed.
figleaf
Well, then I guess we’re just going to have to agree to disagree. I just don’t see her “range of desires from doggy-style to bukkake” as saying, honestly, these are the choices women have, and isn’t that great! Quite the opposite.
And I find it hard to understand how someone could not get that from it. Is it too nuanced? I didn’t think so. But clearly other people have different interpretations of the article, so like I said, I guess we’ll agree to disagree.
Ahh. See, I just saw RKB as focusing on submissive sex because that’s the kind of sex that the Blow Job War had focused on.
So, she continued to focus on submissive sex throughout, including on men who want submissive sex. If they exist and they’re het, then het women exist to dominate them. Thus, women obviously have a range of desires.
I think the charitable reading was to have understood that RKB, as a feminist, hardly thinks that the only thing women like is submissive sex. Obviously, she knows this isn’t true. And, to assume she does is, well, it’s just not particularly fair to RKB.
I agree that the article should have been worded differently. She should have signalled a clear focus on submissive sexual acts and she should have signalled why she was limited her article to those things — because it was written in the context of the BJ war where feminists in the blogosophere did seem to want there to be some sort of intrinsic, inherent meaning to sexual acts.
R Mildred, in her latest post at PunkAss blog wants to pretned that you can assert, without an argument,that some things are simply objectively patriarchal. Look. If you take that veiw seriously, then a society will _never_ change. There’s no way out. No escape.
And this is an absurd position for a progressive to take.
irony. my rhetorician friend, George, says that sarcasm can only very rarely be conveyed in writing. to do it, you have to use typographical devices.
e.g., If I type “riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight” then you know what I mean in the context of a wider social world that has given that expression meaning verbally. That is, you have to have heard someone saying is sarcastically, for the typography to convey the sarcasm in writing.
With all due respect, I think it’s because you’re projecting something onto RKB’s text that isn’t there.
Huh? Here’s what RKB wrote:
Nothing in that paragraph, or in the paragraphs around it, indicates either sarcasm or irony. I think it’s entirely reasonable for Amanda and others to have not “gotten” the layers you’re seeing in the paragraph, because they ain’t there.
I do agree with a Bitch, however, that what’s probably going on here isn’t that RKB has such an incredibly blinkered view of sexuality, but that’s she focusing on submissive behaviors in particular. But I also agree with Bitch that this is a charitable reading, and that RKB should have clarified this.
I also felt that RKB could have given Levy, for one, a much more charitable reading. Criticizing Girls Gone Wild does NOT mean that Levy - how did RKB put it? - “proffer[s] a false choice: Be the next Jenna Jameson or support Hillary for president,” or that Levy believes “there’s no room for a lusty woman in office.” That’s why I think Amanda is correct to say RKB is beating a strawfeminist - or at least has chosen her examples of feminist prudes poorly, and without much in the way of supporting quotes.
By the way, the entire screen shakes every time I press a key - I love the blog design as a whole, but your live preview function is making me seasick!
Amp,
While it’s true that I am possibly misreading, I am simply stating what I got out of reading the article. This was my first impression and remains my reading of it. Obviously others disagree, and that’s their right. However, I would leave the final analysis up to Rachel herself, since she wrote the thing. Until we hear from her (and I’m in no way saying she has any obligation to tell us anything; if I were her I’d be more than a little pissed over this shitstorm), we can’t definitely say “this is the way it is” one way or another. If that ishow my blog post came off then I apologize, it was simply a rhetorical device (and laziness bc I get sick of always having to write “I think” and “my opinion” after I’ve said it once).
Regarding Levy: I spent 2 hours at Barnes and Noble last night reading the first few chapters of Feminist Chauvinist Pigs and came away very annoyed. I got from it exactly what Rachel mentioned: Levy “proffer[s] a false choice: Be the next Jenna Jameson or support Hillary for president.” Levy does make some good points in a few places, but they’re overshadowed by the way she repeatedly implies that being a strong, accomplished woman and being openly sexual are mutually exclusive. I thought that was exactly the kind of stereotypical, madonna/whore BS the early feminists sought to eradicate.
As for the comment preview shaking - I assume you are using IE or an early version of Firefox. I haven’t experienced the problem in Firefox 1.5, Safari, Opera, or Mozilla.
Amp wrote:
I’m not sure. I’ve read Levy three times now and I really think she has serious problems with women who exhibit lusty sexuality of the type RKB means.
For instance, in her chapter on bois in lesbian culture, she finally comes right out and says that she has an issue with csual sex among lesbians. She things casual sex is, utlimately, degrading.
She doesn’t make a compelling case as to why this is so — mostly because she doesn’t leave room for that in her book. She just lets it ride since it is a very common thing for people to think.
And the reason why I think her view is a problem is also tied to the bomb she drops in her confession early on in the book, where she reveals that she sees connected, and as of a piece, the following things:
1. an English department that no longer teaches the great classics of Western literature becayse such classics reflect racism, sexism, and heterosexism.
2. a college education that focuses on the “troika of race, class, and gender” which, in her mind, is a problem becase we don’t learn about how there is a objective status to the classics of literature in one. Taht there is something out there that makes something a classic of literature, part of the canon, and that is and can be dissociated from systems of oppression.
3. the rise of porn studies on college campuses.
4. the rise of the female chauvinist pig who display a lusty sexuality in public. even in lesbian communities, the enjoyment of go-go dancers is read as wrong. even in lesbian communities, the casual “giving away” of sexuality with no strings attached is condemned in Levy’s book.
she never connects the dots. This is a confession in her book, but it’s a very huge confession.
—
Coupled with the repeated references to even the women she observes and meets as bimbos — which is a diret attack on their cognitive capacities — I seriously don’t think Levy believes that anyone who is a porn star or anything like that is someone who is on our side. She’s explicitly calling women who are porn stars or dancers or even just taking pole dancing classes as male identified enemies of feminism.
———
And just to correct a misunderstanding. I don’t think it’s being charitable to assume from the get go that RKB recognizes a full range of sexuality.
It is just plain hostile to assume otherwise. I explained why on my blog.
Yes, RKB’s piece was poorly written in the sense that she should have forestalled those criticisms, but seriously? Those criticisms, the assumption that she thinks the only range of sexuality is from one kind of submissive sex to another, are uncharitable and indicative of a person who doesn’t want to give RKB the benefit of the doubt.
That refusal, to give fellow feminists the benefit of the doubt, as with Abysstohope’s recent attack on me, is really pretty tragic.
This “And just to correct a misunderstanding. I don’t think it’s being charitable to assume from the get go that RKB recognizes a full range of sexuality. ”
Should be this:
And just to correct a misunderstanding. I think it’s being uncharitable on the part of her critics to assume that RKB DOESN’T recognize that there is a wide range of sexuality for women and that she somehow thinks all women only like submissive sex.”
(I mean seriously: she talks about men wanting to be dominated and be submissive. Just from that one section, you have to assume that het women are out there who enjoy dominating submissive men.)
I think I must concede the point on Levy, since I’m too lazy to go and reread the book. If what you’re quoting is accurate, then I agree that Levy’s views are pretty distasteful.
Ampersand,
That is not an accurate reptresentation of Levy; please do not rely on it.
Okay, I think I’ve found the passage a Bitch is concentrating on - page 76-78, right?
I do agree that a lot of what Levy says here is dubious at best, bullshit at worse. Even if it’s true that the head of the Wesleyan English department refused to allow any courses on classics (a claim I frankly doubt the truth of), Levy’s implicit claim that this was the general state of college education in the 1990s is absurd. Similarly, some of her other claims (group sex was obligatory?) seem more likely to be hyperbole than truth.
And her entire chapter on bois was nonsense; she never even attempted to rise above her own prejudices.
But none of that fairly supports the claim that Levy “proffer[s] a false choice: Be the next Jenna Jameson or support Hillary for president,” or that Levy believes “there’s no room for a lusty woman in office.”
Amp,
I distinctly remember a section in the book where Levy talks about Hillary Clinton, adn then juxtaposes her w/ porn stars, Girls Gone Wild, etc. I’ll have to go back to the book, tho, and find the actual passage. Will do that asap!