"The Searchers" and white nation gender chauvinism
The Searchers
Directed by John Ford
Starring John Wayne
C.V. Whitney Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures
119 minutes
1956
2008 July
Considered so-racist-it's-actually-anti-racist, "The Searchers" is in some ways easy to criticize, though it was neither the first nor the last movie dealing with abduction of white children by First Nations people during "murder raids." By 1956, John Wayne had starred in numerous westerns. In "The Searchers," Jayne plays Ethan Edwards, back from the Civil War, whose niece Debbie is taken by raiding Comanches, who massacre the whole family at home except Debbie and her sister and have "massacred" the Edwards' ancestors and the Edwards' adoptive son's ancestors. Edwards works with his brother's adopted son, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), to search the plains for Debbie. Following clues, Edwards and Pawley look for years, but as the movie progresses it becomes apparent that Edwards would be willing to kill Debbie if she has been assimilated by the Comanches. In contrast, Pawley isn't biologically related to Debbie, but wouldn't think of harming her. Pawley has Cherokee ancestry ("the rest is Welsh and English"), and Edwards makes clear his reluctance to cooperate with him, disowning Pawley as his nephew, and calling him a "blanket head" and other things. Wayne's character in this movie has been described as bordering on "insane" at times.
MIWS won't dispute claims that "The Searchers" tries to be anti-racist or anti-chauvinist. "The Searchers" wouldn't be the only western that has purported to represent the cowboy gunman as a lonely/lost, morally ambiguous or complicated figure, that amerikans have surpassed in their development as a nation. Amerikans can watch "The Searchers" and think that they are no longer like that, or that Ethan Edwards is a caricature. The whole question of how much responsibility has for his actions, which include desecrating corpses, or whether Edwards is prone to going "crazy" (as Pawley says), reflects an individualist way of thinking about history that would suggest that murderers of First Nations people were just a few bad apples among whites. The idea that Ethan Edwards represents Euro-Amerikans who didn't settle down on the farm when they were supposed to is also a way of justifying current and past white oppression. Lists place "The Searchers" among the top best westerns and the top best amerikan movies.
MIWS noticed some differences between the "The Searchers" script it has and the movie as filmed. In particular, dialogue and visuals suggesting that Edwards, in the time between when the Amerikan Civil War ended and his coming home, had plundered Mexican gold during the Maximilian War, were replaced with dialogue and visuals suggesting that Edwards had stolen from the u.$. North. MIWS hasn't bothered looking into the details of this change because they are not particularly important. What MIWS would argue is that sticking to the script wouldn't really have improved the film. In the absence of a thoroughly villainous role, John Wayne's roles are heroic or protagonistic by default. Had John Ford gone with the script MIWS has on the gold parts, the John Wayne fan might have thought "so what" and even approved of amerikans' taking control of Mexican resources.
Instead of talking too much about the obvious, MIWS will focus on gender issues in and surrounding "The Searchers" and why amerikans have not really advanced since the movie appeared half a century ago. By way of beginning this discussion, this is a transcribed excerpt of the scripted interview with Natalie Wood (who plays the older Debbie Edwards in "The Searchers") during one of the promotional "Behind the Cameras" segments of the "Warner Bros. Presents" program broadcast on television (1955-1956):
Gig Young: Into this land that time forgot, John Ford brought men and equipment to film "The Searchers," to capture the color, tradition and echoes of the past, the danger and excitement of the days when the fierce Comanche Indians cut a bloody trail through the West. The now-peaceful Navajo have a war-like history of their own and even today are considered the finest horsemen in the world. So, all it took was a little war paint to convert them into hard-riding, blood-thirsty Comanches. And here comes one of the prettiest little Comanches of them all, Miss Natalie Wood.
Natalie Wood: Hello, Gig. Welcome to the reservation.
Young: Well, thank you. It's nice being here. And congratulations, Natalie, on your recent Academy Award nomination for "Rebel without a Cause."
Wood: Well, thank you very much.
Young: You're very versatile. We've just enjoyed your performance as [unintelligible], and now here you are as a Comanche, but despite the costume you don't really play an Indian in the picture, do you?
Wood: No, that's right. I play a white girl who was captured and brought up by a fierce Comanche tribe.
Young: Oh, I see, and how do you get along with the Indians?
Wood: Well, in the picture, fine. But here on location, I think I sort of amaze them. You see, the Navajo keep covered from head to foot, and they regard my sunbathing in a swimsuit as rather immodest.
Young: They've become over-civilized. And their forefathers used to run around in considerably less than a bathing suit, and they were considerably less friendly, too.
Wood: Yes, that's right. The raids of the renegade tribes were the greatest dangers that faced the frontier people. And it is on just such a raid that I get captured as a child.
Natalie Wood's and Gig Young's discussion of modesty still resonates today with larger imperialist narratives about sexuality in oppressed nations. Wood's and Young's comments are not just about some clothing. Rather, they concentrate ideas that, combined, present oppressed nations as backward and potentially in need of white guidance to overcome cultural barriers to social progress and economic development. The above portion of Gig Young's interview with Natalie Wood directly followed a presentation, by Young, on how the Navajo nation had remained economically, socially and technologically unchanged in the midst of surrounding progress in the world and specifically the united $tates. The Navajo have changed, but Young and Wood talk about the Navajo nation's changing in terms of culture. First, the Navajo people were warring; now, they are "peaceful." Before, the Navajo were shameless; now, they are too modest. First Nations' struggle against the Euro-Amerikan settler imperialist nation, and their gender and sexual practices, are represented as being contingent on culture divorced from social circumstances, relationships and struggles. First Nations' cultures are portrayed as existing and changing in isolation from larger changes.
Today, in the public opinion and diplomacy arenas, it is the modus operandi of Western imperialists to concentrate on alleged cultural backwardness in oppressed nations particularly with a focus on gender. Gender is not just about culture, but that is how it is treated. Sexual and other gender oppression in its sharpest forms is seen as taking place between individuals in close proximity, who if they had different ideas would act differently. Gender oppression on a larger scale is treated as the consequence of policies created by politicians with backward ideas. Islam as a whole itself is viewed as an obstacle to further feminist progress in Muslim nations. More basic differences, situations and structures that give rise to oppression are ignored.
It is important to recognize that the whole question, as raised by people in the First World, of feminist progress in oppressed nations targeted by imperialism is a smokescreen for imperialist war. However, it's also important to recognize that the First World hasn't really advanced in gender liberation. The principal contradiction is between imperialism and the oppressed nations, but it's not that the Third World could ever follow the First World as a model for gender struggle. First Worlders still participate in gender oppression, as oppressors. Not only has progressive gender change stopped in the First World; there is nothing unique to the First World in regard to gender that people in the Third World should try to emulate.
Middle-class urban people in amerika seem to have more liberal ideas about females. Females have different looks, buy different things, etc., but supposedly are not to be denied or discouraged from doing anything that males are allowed or encouraged to do. So, taking a Liberal perspective where absence of oppression is individual females' being treated the same as individual males, the international onlooker watching amerikan movies and TV shows or touring u.$. entertainment and shopping capitals could get the impression that amerikans are more advanced, if liberal culture is seen as a simple indication of liberation. Reality is different.
Though less than half of executives and managers are female, one could easily have a female boss or supervisor of some kind in a major city, need to work with female colleagues at the same level in a corporate hierarchy, or need to do business with female counterparts in another company or others in a decision-making position. So, the male employee has to be politically correct for career and business reasons. Also, the amerikan male worries about girlfriends leaving him for another male or nowadays (with more awareness and sensitivity about homosexuality) a female, or losing interest in sex. And, parents worry about having fewer people to take care of them in their old age. So, in dating and family matters, males are also compelled to be politically correct. It boils down to amerikan females' having more privilege and mobility than they used to and not being tied down to one man and the kitchen. Yet, there has not been a feminist revolution, nor an anti-capitalist revolution that resulted in an elimination of gender oppression. What has happened is that a minority of females, concentrated in the First World, have gained economic and gender privilege while the majority of the world's females have remained oppressed. Far from having a group that can act as a vehicle for eliminating gender oppression, both males and females in the First World support imperialism and patriarchy.
A majority of female adults in the First World are gender oppressors, not oppressed. But, differences and dynamics remain in place in the First World such that, if the Third World were removed from the picture without a struggle transforming the First World, those differences and dynamics would become more visible, and some forms of oppression would re-appear. Already, children in the First World are oppressed under patriarchy. The Third World isn't about to disappear to turn MIWS's thought experiment into an actual experiment, but the notion that First Worlders have somehow separated themselves from patriarchy is wrong. First Worlders continue to be involved in gender oppression as oppressors of children and people (both female and male) in the Third World, something that various people saying that First World females have become like First World males or masculinized (or that males have been demasculinized) do not understand. Just the idea that amerikan females have become like males, at least in behavior, isn't an invention unique to revolutionary feminist communists and isn't as controversial as one might think. What is controversial is the idea that amerikan male and female adults together oppress other people in a gender system.
In the First World, liberal ideas about females are mixed up with liberal ideas about sex in general and pornography. It's a liberalism that says it is OK for two females to have a threesome with a male or for females to swap partners at a swinger party. So, pornography and an abundance of unabashed sex in various forms themselves become associated with female liberation, for those who simplistically equate liberal culture and liberation.
In other words, whatever co-exists with liberal ideas about females in the First World becomes associated with female emancipation. There was a time in the united $tates when having liberal cultural and political beliefs about females didn't have anything to do with females' publicly sunbathing in a swimsuit. That has changed. In China, females' gaining suffrage and no longer having to have arranged marriages didn't mean adopting First World sexual culture. Yet, First World-centeredness equates female liberation with today's First World sexual culture.
First World self-perception shapes how First Worlders see other oppressed nations. Thinking about the reaction of the Navajo cast members and other people at the filming location of "The Searchers," Gig Young and Natalie Wood compare those Navajo people to whites in the surrounding "civilized" country. Whites are assumed to be neither "over-civilized" nor under-civilized. Not only do Wood and Young compare Navajos and whites in terms of their attitude to public sunbathing in a swimsuit; they connect this to civilization and development. What white people are doing and thinking sets the standard.
Amerikans' bedtime stories about their nation's creation involves virtuous, heroic theocratic Puritans fleeing repression in England. The word "puritan" today is synonymous with prudishness and overly negative attitudes to sex. Early in the colonization of the Americas, it was common for Europeans to remark on how indigenous nations were supposedly immodest and libertine in appearance and sexual behavior. Today, an image of naked or half-naked people running around, prone to having sex in the open in front of anyone, is common in portrayals of historical indigenous people. Even contemporary First Nations people outside of a casino context are imagined to be half-naked, partly because of a focus in amerikan education and discourse on early interactions between First Nations people and Europeans. Contemporary First Nations people are alternately imagined as half-naked and clothed from head to toe.
Gig Young's statement that the Navajos have become over-civilized raises how Europeans wanted to clothe the backward and hostile "naked savages," "childish" and "rebellious," to assimilate them. Encountering a group of Navajos with more clothing than whites, Gig Young can explain this only as an aberration from civilization. It is a deviation from "normal," white clothing practices. The clothing is too much. Too much for what, one wonders. It is too much with respect to a white-skinned actress' need to sunbathe in a swimsuit in the middle of the Navajo reservation. Natalie Wood has a style to maintain and the Navajos just don't understand, so backward they are, getting in the way of her tan. These Navajos have left naked savagery, but they are backward in comparison with the modern white female and male who know their right to have a style.
Observations about clothing and modesty upon European contact with non-Europeans were so common that, everywhere one looks, one tends to see a familiar pattern. Whether it is Africans, First Nations people in the united $tates, or Indians, there is the same comparison using Europeans as the standard. Prior to the 1900s, one can find English people remarking in writing on both half-naked Persians and Persians who are too modest about nudity. Gig Young gives the impression that there has been a simple change in perception of colonized people, but people who are now part of the Third World were getting it both ways in the 1800s, either immodest or too modest. Imperialists have long concentrated attention on the veil, but recently there has been an emphasis on clothing considered excessive and burdensome. Iranians, both female and male, but particularly Iranian females, are considered to dress in a way that is both physically and socially oppressive. Hindu Indians are actually thought of in a similar way but, but at this time imperialism targets Iran. Currently, Hinduism has a reputation as a peaceful religion friendly to Westerners and fit for incorporation in Western New Age culture found in such movies as "The Matrix" and "Star Wars." But if imperialism were preparing public opinion for an invasion of India, one can be sure one would hear talk of Hindu oppression of wimmin in India, Hindu fundamentalist violence against wimmin, the horrors of Hindu and Indian patriarchy, etc.
The Koran is known for giving wimmin property rights and other rights that European females once didn't have. In Iran, though, which has some pre-capitalist economic forms, one may wonder whether females have less access to property rights. And, as with any country, one may look into whether females have less institutional power, whether females are in fewer positions of power. One might think about child-rearing and childcare arrangements and anything that might disadvantage females. One might also wonder whether imperialist exploitation has something to do with the position of female Iranians. But, instead, First World "feminist" discourse on Iran, other Muslim countries, and Korea, centers on such things as the brutality and chastisement adolescent females in these countries would suffer if they were caught reading "Cosmopolitan," "Vanity Fair," "Vogue," and "InStyle." Stories continue to be spread about punishment, in some cases physical, of Afghans and Iranians for wearing nail polish and Western or eye-catching clothing.
What "feminism" has to say about females in Third World countries in the cross hairs of imperialism has nothing really to do with violence against females in the abstract. In the first place, in the most "developed" First World countries, there are various forms of femicide and violence against females. Most female adults in the First World themselves oppressors, but there is little effort to compare femicide in the Third World with femicide in the First World concretely; First World chauvinism rules automatically. While the First World so-called proletariat, actually an exploiter-majority labor aristocracy, and the imperialists disagree on how much class exploitation takes place in the First World, it is relatively easy for First Worlders to agree that gender violence and rape are concentrated in the Third World, because of how the gender situation in one place isn't connected to the gender situation in another place in the minds of people with an individualist and crime-centered mode of thought when it comes to gender matters.
The First World gender aristocracy -- the privileged minority of females benefiting from the global patriarchy -- as it moves upward socially has an interest in calling itself exploited and oppressed. At the same time, it cannot be seen as being too oppressed, because that would contradict the justification for the very real privilege it has, compared with females in the Third World. The gender aristocracy needs to defend that privilege.
Again, readers' who are familiar with what MIWS and others have said about the First World bourgeois labor aristocracy should be aware of some differences in how some things are conceived in regard to the gender aristocracy, which does not exactly parallel the labor aristocracy in every way. The First World working class can claim to be the most productive workers on the planet and simultaneously the most exploited, and have its cake and eat it, too, because its high wages supposedly don't represent less exploitation. The gender aristocracy does not have a seemingly simple factor such as productivity to explain why it is the most exploited, but should have more of what it already has. The gender aristocracy's way of justifying its privilege is more complicated.
When it comes to white First World females appearing on TV waving around "Cosmopolitan" and "Vogue" in the Third World as some kind of litmus test for gender oppression, if regulation and repression of females is not the real issue, then what it is is the First World gender aristocracy's justifying its gender privilege while preparing public opinion for war with the Third World for First World nationalist reasons. The gender aristocracy justifies its gender privilege by portraying Third World men as the enemy of females who would subscribe to fashion, lifestyle, sex and relationship magazines.
First Worlders are literally disturbed by the response to these specific leisure magazines in the Third World, from India to Iran. However, in discussing females in Afghanistan and Iran, sex, romance/boyfriends, and style, in general, are common topics. By some reviews, the main appeal of "Persepolis" (2007) is in its exposure of the repression of Iranian adolescents for pursuing interests in boyfriends/girlfriends and rock 'n' roll. It is hard to overstate how self-centered it is to assume that rejection of First World culture indicates rejection of more advanced gender relations. Iranian wimmin already wear makeup. Last year, the Western media was talking about controversy over temporary marriage (permitting people to have sex without a permanent commitment) in Iran and the compatibility of temporary marriage with Islam. Islamic temporary marriage involves formalizing what would otherwise be informal and specifying certain obligations and limitations up front. Whatever one thinks about temporary marriage, it would be wrong to look at all of this and only say that it is happening within a repressive or culturally restrictive framework. Yet, First Worlders contrast First World fashions with Third World restrictions without acknowledging the specific ways in which culture exists and develops in oppressed nations. Failing to find Western lifestyle individualism in a Third World place, First Worlders can only see backwardness or oppression when there are differences between mainstream First World lifestyle and practices in the Third World.
MIWS is not saying that oppressed nations are actually in some way the same as imperialist nations culturally, or that First Worlders should focus on similarities, rather than differences, with other people. The point is that it doesn't matter what oppressed nation is being talked about; First World chauvinists treat oppressed nation people's disagreement with First World culture as backwardness. This is the case even where attitudes to First World culture don't involve repression.
The whole point of the fashion magazine is to show what is trendy or what is becoming trendy. When white people wave "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" in Third World people's faces and make comments on the contrast between First World liberalism and restrictive Third World culture, implicit in that is an assumption that Third World people would (if uninhibited) or should embrace whatever latest fashions are coming out of London, Milan, New York, and Paris. Liberalism for First Worlders means being open to doing what is trendy, where what is trendy is determined by First Worlders and fashion marketing. Most of a fashion magazine functions as advertising in the first place. Those with less access to First World styles and appearances (particularly whiteness as a beauty standard) would be at a disadvantage under this liberalism. Talking about fashion, currently there is reportedly a trend in the united $tates of showing less cleavage. Styles that were clearly "in" not too long ago are now considered "trashy." "America's Next Top Model" host Tyra Banks has made famous the idea of walking the fine line between sexy and sleazy/slutty, an idea that involves clothing, not just posing. What is in style is subject to change. One can go to a clothing store and measure changes in cleavage and necklines. When cleavage is on the upswing, First Worlders are apt to wonder why the Third World seems to lag behind.
The stereotypical Western female political conservative is someone who is also conservative style-wise. The female conservative herself may not dress liberally, but benefits from the reputation of the West as a liberal place. Also, the female conservative thinks of herself as having more style freedom than the Third World female. There is much diversity within the West as far as what styles are considered acceptable, but style liberalism is useful both internationally and within Western countries. Within Western countries, the ideology of style liberalism connects the more liberal Westerns to warmongering via lifestyle. It's a way of bringing hipsters and purveyors of chic, some of whom might otherwise be apathetic, on board with imperialist war and bashing Muslims.
In "Behind the Cameras," Gig Young and Natalie Wood discuss a difference over time, from savagery to "over-civilization." Supporters of sexual and other lifestyle liberalism at this time, though, imagine a contradiction in Third World people's public and private attitudes to sex. Ideologically, this imagining draws from a combination of Freudianism and ages-old colonialist ideas about Eastern people. It is thought that Muslim people are publicly prudish and ascetic, but privately or secretly engage in wanton debauchery, abuse, and prostitution. It is both that Muslims obstinately refuse First World culture, and that Muslims are particularly oppressive.
Only the most ignorant would deny that "The Searchers" portrays First Nations people as threatening to frontier white females. But "The Searchers" and westerns with similar themes are just part of a pattern of Euro-Amerikans' representing oppressed nation people as sexually backward and sexually threatening to whites. Whether it is Blacks, Central and South American migrants, Afghans, Iraqis, or Iranians, it is the same thing over and over again. The white female, beautiful and pure, is under threat of violation by everyone.
In reality, First Worlders, including female First Worlders, sexually exploit and oppress oppressed nation people. When First Worlders don't want oppressed nation people for sex, or to do work in inside the imperialist country, they control, repress and imprison them.
"The Searchers" is misleading in that it combines white nation gender chauvinism and an alleged anti-racist message. Central to this is the Martin Pawley character. Martin Pawley is attractive, charming and is more likable than Ethan Edwards. Pawley is there to both help find Debbie and stop Edwards from hurting Debbie. The interaction between Pawley and Edwards reveals Edwards' conflicted attitude toward rescuing Debbie, growing older as the years go by and raised by Comanches. However, Pawley's relationship with his sweetheart Laurie Jorgensen, and his short-lived relationship with Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky, Comanche, function to show a contrast between whites and Comanches in gender relationships and ideas, as does older sister Lucy Edwards' relationship with Brad Jorgensen.
After a misunderstanding while trading with a separate group of Comanches, Ethan Edwards tells Pawley that he has "bought" Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky. Pawley's sweetheart Laurie discourages Pawley from looking for Debbie, saying that Pawley would just be bringing home "the leavings" of "bucks," sold to the "highest bidder." This implied bride-selling and prostitution is juxtaposed with the love-based relationships between Pawley and Laurie, and Brad and Lucy. Pawley and another man actually fight over Laurie. The Martin Pawley-Laurie subplot involves Pawley's leaving a potential wife to go find his sister. Pawley sacrifices a chance at marrying a white woman worth fighting over -- someone who suggests that Ethan should kill Debbie, for her mother's sake -- and ends up with a "squaw." Pawley's marriage to Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky is through a misunderstanding, but the difference is clear. In parallel, Brad loses his own sweetheart, Lucy, to the same Comanches who have taken Debbie. The Comanches take Lucy away and threaten to take Laurie away from Pawley in another sense. First Nations' resistance to white settlers is portrayed as a violent erosion of white mating culture. The Euro-Amerikan settler frontier is also a frontier for white gender relationships. Love-based relationships are replaced with blatant prostitution and what viewers will interpret as selling children to be married. Martin in his letter to Laurie describes Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky as younger than Laurie, who herself appears to be a teenager. Pawley appears naive, not realizing himself that he might have "bought" a Comanche wife, but it is not true that a frontier settler would never have intentionally married a First Nations womyn. Whites married First Nations people for sex and to do work, and it is the whites who were the oppressors.
Apparently, "The Searchers" expects people to believe that frontier whites and the females themselves would have been OK with young white females' kissing boyfriends alone without family supervision, and that white females would not have minded' seeing males nude before they were even engaged to them. Pawley is mortified when Laurie barges in on Pawley, bathing, to handle his underwear. Whether "The Searchers" is here historically accurate isn't particularly important. The fact is that many urban amerikans in 1960 would have found the movie's portrayal of frontier and rural white people's attitudes believable or at least empathized with the white characters in "The Searchers." In 1960, dating without a chaperon was "in." Those who might have questioned the movie's accuracy and thought that dating around the 1860s was significantly different than in "The Searchers" would still have treated differences between Euro-Amerika and oppressed nations in 1960 as backwardness requiring white leadership. The 1960s are remembered as a period of intense liberalism in lifestyle and progressiveness in politics. One of the worsts result of the '60s counterculture, though, was confusing people outside the First World about the nature of later cultural trends in the First World and creating a group of pro-imperialists who identify with pot-smoking, sexual liberalism, and rock. Amerikans may occasionally fantasize about being Mayflower Puritans and frontierspeople, but when oppressed nation culture appears to be stagnant Euro-Amerikans put forward their involvement, and their whole system and way of doing things, as the answer to oppressed nation people's problems.
Amerikan males have a vague idea that female and male adults should be treated equally. It is a Liberal idea of equality "under the law," and even then lacks concreteness and in practice tends to apply more to individuals in certain situations. The politically correct male in a heterosexual relationship believes that the female should have the "opportunity" to enjoy penetrative sex as much as the man. Imperialists regularly bring up claims that females and males are treated differently in adultery and other sexual situations in Muslim communities. The male and the female amerikan, however, is so busy enjoying sex and has so little concrete knowledge of adultery in Muslim communities that the legal differences involved in adultery are likely to sound like fine points not worth getting agitated about. What does excite amerikans, because of self-centeredness and a pornographic interest in anything sex-related, is the idea of Muslim wimmin's being denied "Cosmopolitan" and other things to which amerikans are accustomed. That is why various imperialists agitating against Iran and other Muslim Third World countries reach out to the marijuana-smoking and free love crowds. The goal is to get amerikans riled up to attack Third World nations on an extremely unscientific, chauvinist and lifestyle-centered basis. One change from the 1960s is that, in addition to rock, there is now hip hop. So, today, hip hop fans and whites with "ghetto" chic can be brought on board with carrying out wars in Muslim nations in which hip hop and "ghetto" styles are alleged to be absent or repressed.
The image of Muslim Third World nations that imperialists are trying to manufacture is one in which girls are executed for wearing the wrong-color eye shadow and getting caught with something like "Teen Vogue" or "Cosmogirl." A rumor has circulated that simply wearing eye shadow is to risk death in Tehran. The truth or falsity of a particular story about repression of females isn't what is crucial here, though amerikans are quick to latch onto anything negative they hear about Islamic or Muslim country lifestyle repression. Whether it is executing people for having the wrong hair style or executing people for having a drunk orgy high on drugs, the one constant is that reactionaries tap into white nation chauvinism to attack oppressed nations, which have been singled out.
Reactionaries would not openly say that violent punishment is OK for some lifestyle offenses in Islamic countries, but wrong for other offenses. However, the reactionaries focus on elements of the Islamic countries' cultures that differ from what is currently popular or common in the First World, and this is one the clearest indications of an attempt to use lifestyle to stir up people for war. Right now, premarital sex is acceptable in First World places and little effort is made to hide it. Although, the assumption that people in the Third World unconsciously or secretly desire the same things as First Worlders has led arrogant First Worlders to call for people in the Third World to read Freud and Wilhelm Reich. It is put forward both that people in the Third World are different and that they could benefit from supposedly universal gender and sexual ideas.
There is nothing feminist about supporting imperialism in the Third World and spreading Freud's ideology in Iran or Afghanistan. After threatening to bomb Muslim countries, air-dropping Reich or even Betty Friedan should be called "psychological warfare." It has nothing to do with opposing patriarchy and is simply First World chauvinism. Imperialist invasion or no invasion, expecting people in the Third World to copy things in the First World on an unscientific basis, without overthrowing imperialism, has a neo-colonial result. The same ideology that works for privileged First Worlders may perpetuate the inequality and oppression that exists on a global scale.
People in the Third World are right to be generally distrustful of First World ideologies that are difficult to implement scientifically anyway and often consist of vague concepts. Westerners also deserve their reputation as people bringing rape and prostitution to the Third World and otherwise worsening the situation of females in the Third World. In the abstract, the idea of a brother's protecting his sister, or a father's protecting his daughter, from males outside the family has a patriarchal function. In reality, though, First Worlders haven't advanced beyond that idea either despite 1960s and '70s "feminism." If the choice is between Third World men's protecting their brothers and daughters from amerikan invaders as rapists (as in "The Magnificent Seven"), and First World men's trying to sell "Cosmogirl" to girls in the Third World as gender liberation, to line up on the side of the First World is reactionary. That is how First Worlders themselves, trying to improve the reputation of First World soldiers (both male and female), present the choice. Reality is more complex, but people in the Third World can advance toward ending patriarchy independently of the First World.
At this time scientific communism might have more standing in the Third World, but because of First World revisionism Marxism has a pseudo-feminist and imperialist reputation. White nation gender and lifestyle chauvinism isn't unique to "conservatives" and in fact has more dangerous forms among "liberals" and "leftists." Even in its militant left wing, the white nation hasn't gone beyond "The Searchers." As a "radical leftist," it is possible to support bombing the Third World for the most militant-sounding "feminist" reasons and in connection to "radical" lifestyle and culture. At the same time, though, "liberals" and "leftists" differ little from "conservatives" in terms of basic Liberal and individualist ideas about gender and sex. Laura Bush may not use the words "feminist," "patriarchy" and "male supremacy" as much, and her arguments may be less lifestyle-oriented, but many so-called leftists' ideas pertaining to gender differ little from Laura Bush's ideas despite their criticism of her husband on the Iraq War. When so-called radicals have no scientific gender theory, but have the same underlying gender line as Khaled Hosseini fan Laura Bush, it would better to stop using the "communist," "socialist," "revolutionary" or "leftist" label and do something that doesn't require one to claim to be fighting wimmin's oppression.