This is some of the thought process behind the carnival. I just totally yelled at Shannon, and I feel like I should clarify. I’ve struggled with this topic for a long time. I don’t want to derail, and I don’t want to come off as insensitive to the larger issues that everyone’s trying to talk about, and I don’t want to sound as though I don’t believe that sexism is important or pervasive. I recently came across a pretty obvious example, albeit one that illustrates the conflict over speaking up at all:
I remember clearly what I wanted to say to him. I wanted to suggest to this privileged young man at one of the United States’ most elite universities that we conduct an experiment. I wanted to ask him to come to the front of the room and take off all his clothes in front of the group, lie down on his back, put his legs up, and make his anus as open and available as possible. Then we would ask if other men could volunteer to do a double anal on him, and he could then report back to us about whether that experience felt degrading. It would have been inappropriate for me as an older man with a professor’s status to be so harsh to a student, and I was more measured in my response. But that’s what I wanted to say to him: Why don’t you come up here and we’ll let two of the biggest guys in the room fuck you in the ass at the same time so that you can tell us from direct experience whether a double anal is inherently degrading.”
And I said,
This guy just made a really heterosexist analogy, and managed to use a gay-ass sex act as one of its points of comparison. So do I point that out and engage in what he’ll see as nothing but a derail, or do I smile and nod and ignore it?
Would it be wrong to use it as a starting point for another discussion?
What the hell?
So. Does anyone else see anything wrong with this analogy and its place in this story? I suppose the response would be, “Well, we’re not talking about gay men. We’re talking about straight men.” Except, why are we talking about straight men when we’re introducing an argument about sexual preferences and value judgments through an analogy about one guy blowing another guy while he gets fucked up the ass by yet another guy?
This is a reflection of a larger dynamic, one which parallels the way this analysis treats women’s subjectivity. A few commenters in the Fetch Me My Axe and I Shame the Matriarchy threads summarized the argument as, “DP is inherently sexist.” I think it’s more complex than that, but not much better. The argument is not that it’s inherently sexist or objectively sexist, but that male subjectivity should take precedence, and that women should care more about that than about anything else. In other words–and Jensen makes this explicit–there doesn’t have to be a claim that it’s inherently sexist, since it is sexist by the only standard that matters.
That’s what bothers me. It’s problematic to assume that your perspective is the only one. It’s infinitely worse to argue that these other perspectives exist but have no worth. The argument is that this interpretation–the one they attribute to men in general, the one that reads DP as erotic because it degrades and subjugates women–is the dominant one in our culture and therefore the important one to the discussion. What Jensen, Goff, et al. aren’t getting is that this argument re-centers male subjectivity not merely for scrutiny, but also at the expense of acknowledging subaltern perspectives. In other words, they’re helping to maintain the unchallenged dominance of the very system of meanings they purport to deconstruct.
This system inevitably filters down in earnest into their speculation on queer sensibility as gleaned from outsider perspectives on queer acts. They don’t merely insist that heterocentrism is important to understanding the reception of queers to our culture (not contested), but that it makes sense to assume that queers themselves are heterocentric, and to automatically dismiss anything that can’t be broken down into its ostensibly straight components. And it’s no coincidence that Jensen is happy to support the idea that queers exist as unconscious fodder for interpretation rather than theorists in their own right.
Butch/femme is defined in exactly the same way: the two women occupy an incontrovertible place within patriarchy–that is, as members of class women–but are replicating and referencing a different patriarchal structure in their relationship–the masculine/feminine pair, with all its rules. Dorothy Allison is Stella Kowalski. Gay male relationships, to the extent that these people are even willing to acknowledge their existence, get the same treatment. The whole point is, you can never ever get away. Ever. Except, well, you know.
Here’s an excellent example, from Dim Undercellar:
On the homosexual female side of things, one person is the ‘man’ in every regard – I have yet to meet a lesbian female BDSM couple in which the ‘butch’ was the submissive and the ‘femme’ was the dominant.[*] The pattern is identical in the homosexual male part of the “scene”; the submissive takes on an effeminate, womanly role. In the end, three-fourths of the BDSM “scene” (Male/female, Male/male, Female/female) turn out to simply mirror “vanilla” society’s associations between men and women in an extreme way. The remaining fourth (Female/male) mirrors what society sees as the end result of women attaining “liberation”; the oppression and emasculation of poor, hapless, “submissive” men.
And the problem I have with all of this is not so much the idea that oppression is not something any one individual can simply escape–although the ways in which it manifests, I think, are more complex. My problem is with the fact that a small group of theorists with a pretty seamless perspective trust themselves to see all of the meanings which the individual players are assigning to these acts, or indeed may insist that any other or subcultural meanings are negligible beside the dominant ones. That logic constitutes marginalization, and it means that minority interpretations will always be dismissed out of hand or chopped up for parts. Dim doesn’t know my community better than I do, and doesn’t get to elide reality in order to create a more unified theoretical framework.
The responses to any attempt to complain about this dynamic or alter its course usually take one of these forms:
1) Well, you just insert Tab A into Slot B….
2) That’s different. It just is. (Extra points for supporting this
argument with the same non-evidence that anti-feminists use to excuse sexism–and you
win the unintentional-irony internet sweepstakes if that same non-evidence is
explicitly rejected by queers on the basis that it’s both reductive and
homophobic.)
3) Listen, we’re talking about reality here, not airy-fairy postmodern
abstractions/tiny minorities/lesbian communes/magic bubbles/you people/those people.
4) Why do you hate queers so much?
5) Huh?
And lest I give the impression that I’m only complaining about people on the basement level, look at Marc’s brilliant analysis of porn marketed to and consumed by gay men:
Don’t want to play along? Well, if you’re a woman, I think you get the idea. If you’re a man, don’t think you’ll get off easy with a raping of your woman. You pussyboys are also on the hitlist via GayViolence:
Swallowing, sucking and sticking down in the dirt is what these pussyboys want. It’s the base desire to be fucked like a woman at the hands of a violent virile stud who has no regard for the laws of man or even simple, common decency!
6) Fuck common decency. Right in its tight, bruised asshole.
“You just insert Tab A into Slot B…”
I’m having a lot of trouble differentiating these responses from conventional ignorance of queer people andmarginalization of queer people. Call me cynical, but I’m wondering if there is much distinction to be made.
This one-note analysis isn’t just alienating, but dangerous. If there’s no way to discuss details of queer affect under patriarchy, there’s no way to talk about, say, sexism among butches. (And, hell–if every butch is Stanley Kowalski, how does a butch talk about surviving domestic violence?) If there’s no way to differentiate between feminine and femme, there’s no way to talk about the special ways in which homophobia targets femme women. If there’s no way to discuss misogyny as it actually informs gay male sexuality, never mind a place for the experiences of actual gay men, the fems and the bottoms and the bois cannot protect themselves from it. It’s not theoretical, either–think domestic abuse, rape, unsafe sex. This isn’t an attempt at a digression–it’s the desire to bring all these things home, to give us something to do besides smiling and nodding or, more often, simply walking away.
*BWAH HA HA HA HA HA HA. Wooo! Whatever you say, sweetie.