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ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   36732 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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The wording (doubtless there are many) I recall is, "a system of gender roles which is harmful to men and women" or some such. Some might say that this definition smuggles in a claim: that gender roles are harmful.

This is not very representative of the feminist definition, at least of the academic kind which forms the basis of patriarchy theory. I'm sure you can find a street feminist to offer such a definition though.

The most robust concise definition of patriarchy I've seen offered by a feminist, which I believe essentialises the concept for feminism as a whole quite well is the one offered by Sylvia Walby in Theorising Patriarchy (1989): "a series of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women." This really does encapsulate what feminism, all feminism, means by patriarchy at least at a basic level. Often bits and pieces are tacked onto it later, often to band-aid or cover-up over issues with their theory (e.g. "patriarchy hurts men too"). Walby's work on patriarchy is pretty foundational to feminist academia today, even though in some sense she was just formalising a lot of threads that existed previously.

You see, a man who is motivated by sex is simply not committing rape as a matter of definition.

The radical feminists make no distinction. They see the male sexuality as inherently linked to violence and oppression against women, and therefore basically all sex between a man and a woman is men raping women. Catharine McKinnon's Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989):

Male dominance is sexual [in the context of sexuality]. Meaning: men in particular, if not men alone, sexualize hierarchy; gender is one. As much a sexual theory of gender as a gendered theory of sex, this is the theory of sexuality that has grown out of consciousness raising in the women's movement.

Male power takes the social form of what men as a gender want sexually, which centers on power itself, as socially defined. Masculinity is having it; femininity is not having it.

Male sexuality is apparently activated by violence against women and expresses itself in violence against women to a significant extent.

A theory of sexuality becomes feminist to the extent it treats sexuality as a social construct of male power: defined by men, forced on women, and constitutive in the meaning of gender. Such an approach centers feminism on the perspective of the subordination of women to men as it identifies sex-that is, the sexuality of dominance and submission-as crucial, as a fundamental, as on some level definitive, in that process. Feminist theory becomes a project of analyzing that situation in order to face it for what it is, in order to change it.

The major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.

The later, more contemporary intersectional feminists tempered or moderate this perspective, but ultimately they are cut from the same cloth and you can see the same principles underlying it, even if they're supposedly 'sex-positive' (that is, male sexuality, or male sexuality under patriarchy is linked to the need to dominate, and therefore oppress women). For example, bell hooks' Feminism is for Everybody (2000, but still extremely popular in contemporary feminist circles):

Many women and men still consider male sexual performance to be determined solely by whether or not the penis is hard and erections are maintained. This notion of male performance is tied to sexist thinking. While men must let go of the sexist assumption that female sexuality exists to serve and satisfy their needs.

even if they're supposedly 'sex-positive'

The impression I have gotten is that sex-negative feminism won the ideological battle, but sex-positive feminism won the branding battle. "Sex-negative" probably sounds too much like "anti-fun" to make headway with the public, so I suppose that all but the very most extreme can consider themselves (more) sex-positive (than somebody.)

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