Amerikan pseudo-feminist paternalism and one blog
2009 May
As if to agree with something MIWS said in "Is Calvin human? and other annoying questions: "Calvin and Hobbes," zoology, and the oppression of children by patriarchy," a blog advertising "to build a stronger community of feminist law professors" that this writer checks on and off just ran a post claiming that fathers can be feminist.(1) Actually, this is not the position MIWS was arguing, but rather that ideas about fathers as nurturers or not can impact the nurturer female gender ideal that some females might desire to avoid an appearance of confirming or embracing. Still, that is good news from the blog. The closer people are to believing that females in relating to children have no special role (whether viewed positively or negatively by feminists), the fewer excuses there will be for not dealing with children's patriarchal oppression involving general age differences, not just male adult domination of female children.
MIWS does not anticipate sustained interest in children's oppression among Amerikan so-called feminists separate from trying to advance some Amerikan children as an aristocracy among children (or develop them into one) or preparing Amerikan girls for life as gender aristocrats, but it is particularly interesting to see the feminist fathers remark, opening the way for a discussion of children's oppression, on a blog that is openly intended for female career-building in law schools. Clearly, it is not children who are potential applicants to law schools, and neither are children where the money is as legal clients. The fact that the blog has an economic or career interest does not would not make any of its ideas wrong, but the paucity of scientific thinking on children demands an explanation if various reasons for it are not to creep into the communist movement unconsciously. MIWS was curious to see an idea seemingly contradicting that interest.
Notwithstanding the upside of what the blog post says in regard to fathers as feminists, the post gives an impression of Amerikan feminists as being so stupid that they can't tell an ages-old patriarchal attitude when it is staring them in the face, an attitude privileging one's own children. In fact, despite the misleading title of the post ("Does Becoming a Father Make You a Feminist?"), it is not that fatherhood in general makes males feminists, but fatherhood with female children, supposedly. The post finesses the issue by suggesting that fatherhood makes men more sensitive to the struggles of females, but the post sets such a low standard that even a "fascist" can be a feminist if he or she verbally supports gains for females in his or her own country. "Conservative in every way that you can imagine, he is, oddly enough, a wonderful father to his daughters and has consistently told them that they could be whatever they wanted to be in life. We disagree about pretty much everything, but I do believe that he has been a good father and, at the very least, an equality feminist." A corollary of this is that a fascist with liberal attitudes or who is a national social-democrat can be a feminist.
The implication is to seek an expansion of the current world war against Third World nations while claiming to be feminist. This writer finds it unlikely that the female law school career blog will gravitate in the direction of MIWS's approach to Islam. Islam is against backbiting, gossip, and slandering -- at least two of which lawyers thrive on. If by contract or formal structure as under Islamic law there were fewer reasons for backbiting, gossip, and slandering, there might be less need for lawyering.
Amerikan so-called feminists have standards such that a majority of Amerikan males could be considered feminist by political correctness, but even if MIWS were to publish a thousand-page book of substance on gender, not only would some people not be persuaded; it would be regarded as misogynist or female-self-hating for opposing the gender aristocracy no matter how sophisticated and devastating its argument and analysis. Whether it comes to workers or females, that is how Amerikans think, in terms of national self-interest, so thus opposition to the labor aristocracy is regarded as being anti-working-class or hatred of workers by identification of the U.$. labor aristocracy with the global working class (and of opposition with hatred). Telling the truth about First Worlders as gender oppressors is not in the interests of the gender aristocracy of First World female adults, nor of First Worlders in general in needing to unite for exploitation and repression of the Third World. First Worlders have an interest in attacking scientific feminism from Liberal-individualist, postmodern and other angles and running down scientific feminists while representing the modern-day Archie Bunker as unconsciously feminist and more advanced.
The ancient attitude of men privileging their own daughters (and brothers, their sisters) ought to be re-evaluated in the context of the patriarchy's global development. It should be acknowledged that patriarchal protection of one's own daughter has sometimes benefited a minority of females. Amerikan females are a minority of females, and the patriarchy now exists on a global scale, its dynamics, relations and distribution of privilege not confined within national boundaries. It is easier for Amerikan men to be "feminist" than before and easier for female adults to benefit, because the scope of the system has changed. Likewise, it is easier for leaders such as Barack Obama to suggest that Amerikan workers are exploited without causing too much upset.
The same blog containing the feminist daughter-fatherhood post contains other ideas that reinscribe patriarchy while seeming to oppose gender roles and inequality. The Mother's Day post on the blog calls Mother's Day a "monument to gendered parenting," but suggests that gay men with children are maternal.(2) "Even the most maternal man doesn't get honored today. He waits for Father's Day. . . . Perhaps more pertinent now is the dilemma faced by homes in which there are no mothers -- single fathers or gay male couples who are parents. What are they to do today?" The idea is that things that mothers have traditionally done, if fathers do them, they are maternal. Gay or straight. Traditional Mother's Day practices exclude them. But the post's author is not "against Mother's Day, per se," the celebration of females who are mothers (the reader is left to wonder whether the author is against Father's Day per se), and some readers may come away from the post with a renewed stereotype about gay men as fulfilling nurturing roles. The post does not explicitly discuss the situation with a straight male in a different-sex relationship who takes care of children more than the female or does more of the traditionally maternal tasks. If people do not talk about straight males in heterosexual-relationship families as performing nurturing, and yet they do not say that sexual orientation will disappear and do not say that straight male parents will be in mostly single-parent families, there is going to be a lot of straight male parents who will need to be handled somehow in making progress against how care and nurturing are gendered. That is, unless the family disappears, but even in a society with communal childcare, either females, males, or both equally, would be caring for the children. Unless gay males will become the majority of males, feminists cannot sow too much doubt about straight males' nurturing ability and then earnestly expect females to not suffer from gender roles. Ideas about male carers of children (those without medical degrees -- medicine and nursing have been gendered in different ways), or the elderly, the disabled, the ill, or orphaned children, as being either gay, stereotypically feminine, abusive or corrupt (if not incompetent) must be rejected without ambiguity. They are patriarchal. (First World female adults have gender privilege compared with children and Third World people, but there are obstacles to achieving equality and changing gender roles even in the First World. Because First Worlders, including females, are gender oppressors, they have not figured out a way to end patriarchy even as it manifests in the First World.) Among legal academics, there is a debate concerning how to avoid invoking patriarchal ideas about females and care in making arguments on behalf of females, when men may do less caring for children and that is relevant. Perhaps law schools and law societies are not the ideal vehicles for generating scientific knowledge on certain issues.
In the First World, the most worthy beneficiary of questioning straight males' caring ability might be the struggles of non-straight people in marriage and adoption. In the long term, though, ideas confluent with ideas about care as being the domain of females and non-straight males work against the struggles of non-straight people against patriarchy, not to mention ignoring children's oppression.
As if to respond to MIWS's "Calvin and Hobbes" article, the same Mother's Day post mentions females who are the household disciplinarians, as if household disciplinarian were an alternative to nurturer deserving celebration on a more inclusive Mother's Day. Household disciplinarian has become a part of so-called diversity, to be celebrated in the midst of what is actually a transition of First World females to relationships, practices and outlooks befitting a gender aristocracy. Another alternative, suggested in an article to which Feminist Law Professors links, is to not bear children.(3) In situations where people complain about children when they had an opportunity not to have them, that is not a choice to be discouraged. But the article, like most writings on mothers and children, speaks of children primarily as objects of nurturing or reproduction decisions. In this case, the article suggests that some females lack a gene for wanting to reproduce. The article purports to talk about children themselves neutrally, in terms of hared and judgments of individuals.
"Many parents seem to regard my happy embrace of childlessness as a personal critique of their choice to have children (newsflash: this particular choice is about me not you!); as an indication that I simply hate children (when in fact I regard children the same way I regard any age group: some kids are cool, others are assholes) . . . ."
On the contrary, if there were a noble reason to not have children, it could be that children are hated by society. If wimmin are hated, children are also hated, at least other people's children past a period of infancy. Feelings about children, positive or negative, don't necessarily say anything about whether one has a scientific approach, but the merit of the above is that it separates personal family questions from attitudes to children. If people discuss children's oppression with others, the initial response often will be as if one believes that, one must not hate children, and if one doesn't hate children, then one must not have any. It could have all the nerve of, "If you had to take care of children, you'd want to sock the brats and little bitches in the face, too."
If one had children or daughters, one would love them or be feminist. If one doesn't hate children, one must not have any. These are flip sides of the same coin where things are about how one feels about children in personal relations and how that supposedly has something to do with children as a group. Few Amerikan "feminists" today would admit to thinking, "Men with wives or girlfriends don't hate females," but that is the level on which many think about children besides discussing them almost exclusively in terms of oppression of females. (For a long time, counterrevolutionary Archie Bunker-chasing so-called communists and so-called feminists did disseminate the idea that homosexual males in particular hate females, until it became fashionable to stop doing that. The damage may have been done, because Barack Obama, a straight man married to a female and who has daughters, was elected in some people's minds as a "feminist" while same-sex couples were disenfranchised.) Friedrich Engels' biography notwithstanding, most First World "Marxists" would regard with instant ridicule the notion that employing a worker makes one a socialist, yet somehow an analogous idea about children is plausible. Failure to treat gender questions the same one treats class questions derails the scientific process into a haze of sentimentality and subjectivism.
As one might expect, pseudo-feminism being an exclusionary Amerikan female advancement project has an interest in paternalistic ideas about children and love. How can anyone seem to question someone speaking "as a mother" who "loves" her children, even when a discussion of a general relationship between age and abuse is long past due? Again as if to respond to MIWS (before MIWS had published "Is Calvin human?" because it was checking some things about Islam, but after MIWS had written), Feminist Law Professors, which earlier objected to linguistic treatment of "Octomom" as an animal, had a post literally comparing children to "companion animals" and criticizing the U.$.-based animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for discouraging Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to octuplets as a result of using reproductive technology and has insinuated that some of her critics hate children, from getting an intelligent pet.(4) Not only is there not to be a discussion throughout society of how many children there should be and how that is to be accomplished, and exploited Third World people (left out of discussions of Suleman that discuss classism or racism, but not global class structure and global racism) experiencing population control and technological deprivation can't criticize decadent exploiter Amerikans (rich or "poor") for having children. But now a female-biology adult's "decision" on the matter of having a pet is private and sacrosanct, another Choice; so says Liberal-individualist pseudo-feminism. Another post on Feminist Law Professors seems to criticize a comparison between Suleman and animal-hoarders, but ends up reinforcing the idea that children are like animals, in this case as things requiring care and work.(5)
Since PETA's pornographic advertisements have irritated some alleged feminists, PETA should be praised for separating animal rights from feminism. Various animal rights ideas occupy too much space in feminism, as MIWS began to discuss elsewhere.
Pseudo-feminist use of statistics
There are paternalistic ideas regarding both children and females on Feminist Law Professors. Once again as if to reply to MIWS, the blog excerpts a story, about alleged stoning in Iran, that uses sex-specific counts of people sentenced to stoning as part of an argument that stoning "is more a women's issue."(6)
"Currently, in Iran, there are nine women sentenced to death by stoning on charges of adultery, compared to two men for the same offence -- highlighting the fact that this barbaric mode of execution is primarily a women’s issue."
First of all, those who have a rudimentary familiarity with statistics know that when you have two counts corresponding to two minuscule percentages, and that is all you have and know, it is hard to arrive at a conclusion of statistical significance without making highly tenuous assumptions. From reading the story, one would not even know that Iran has more than 35 million females and more than 35 million males, which means that a comparison is being made between something like 0.00003% and 0.000006%. Those are two tiny proportions (based on categorical data), for one snapshot in time. To add a spatial dimension to this as a demographer, epidemiologist or even a bourgeois crime analyst might, Iran has thirty provinces. It has hundreds of cities and tens of thousands of villages. Even if the stoning sentence were carried out in all cases, the majority of provinces would have zero stonings during a period of years. It is a different matter when there is a whole distribution of national incarceration rates, the United $tates is at the top year after year, and U.$. city after U.$. city has an incarceration rate greater than the world average. Iran has an incarceration rate less than a third of the U.$. incarceration rate. To buttress its interpretation of the two sentencing counts, the article excerpted by Feminist Law Professors discusses an alleged hanging (not a stoning) of a sixteen-year-old female convicted four times for prostitution. The article also suggests that married males can and do easily lie about having temporary marriage contracts to evade adultery convictions, but does not discuss how temporary marriage may result in fewer adultery convictions in general and fewer prostitution convictions.
Regardless of whether an Iranian authored the story, the story quoted by Feminist Law Professors is racist for trying to whip First Worlders up in a frenzy against the "barbaric" on a flimsy pseudo-feminist basis while making no comparison with femicide in First World countries, not mentioning the incarceration rate of the United $tates, not mentioning the incarceration rate of females in Iran relative to the incarceration rate of Iranian males, not mentioning the incarceration rate of females in Iran relative to the incarceration rate of U.$. females, and not mentioning the death penalty for females in the United $tates at all. (There are more than fifty females on death row in the United $tates, many for killing romantic partners or children. But MIWS has to be the one to point that out. As for incarceration, the percentage of Iranian inmates who are female is a fraction of the percentage of U.$. inmates who are female -- which could be explained in various ways, including with reference to "gender equality," but for some reason so-called feminists need to ignore that international difference while talking about females in the Third World in front of First Worlders.) There are two reasons for avoiding discussion of these things. One is that there may be unfavorable comparisons with other countries' treatment of females. The other is that Liberal feminists cannot appear to oppose the punishment of females too much, because that might imply that females should not have the same freedoms as males, if female exercise of the same freedoms is what leads to incarceration, for example. So, for a warmongering purpose, it becomes necessary to speak of punishment of females in Muslim countries in a circuitous way, by utilizing "stoning" as a symbol for any punishment of females by Muslims. The goal is to stoke up paternalistic sentiment in the First World in a roundabout way for aggression against Muslim nations.
MIWS made a remark on "stoning" in "Is Calvin human?". For that, some people will call MIWS "monsters" -- which implies lynching and massacring Third World people "Lord of the Rings"-style. MIWS also mentioned the firing squad, the guillotine, and execution by sword -- considered more "humane" than other supposedly quick execution methods. MIWS would have mentioned lethal injection, but it might be difficult for people with few resources to implement that method the right way. "Stoning" evokes certain images, but as no alternative method of execution, and no alternative non-lethal corporal or non-corporal punishment, are proposed, it is implicitly used to argue against any punishment of females under Islamic law -- for things like adultery that are of pornographic interest to First Worlders, but which are a hook for making a comment on Islamic punishment of females in general. "Lashing" has a similar function. All punishment or repression of females is sometimes explicitly opposed. If people use "stoning" as a paternalistic anti-Muslim symbol, they can expect "stoning" to be defended, and if actual stoning is going to happen anyway, children might as well participate in it for reasons MIWS has suggested.
Few Amerikan "feminists" would dare say that hanging females for adultery -- or anything else -- instead of stoning would be better. (Even when it comes to murder, one is told that many females convicted of murder in the United $tates were either abused as girls or killed an abusive partner or relative.) But there is no opposition to "painful" or "potentially inhumane" methods of execution in Muslim countries. Neither would they say that lethal injection for adultery is better. Instead, there is opposition to "stoning," which has a particularly Islamic connotation at this time. This opposition is both paternalistic and betrays an opposition to Islam in general, because no alternative punishments for females for any offense are given and stoning and Islam are treated as being coterminous.
MIWS would have expected Amerikan "feminist" legal experts to be among the first Amerikan so-called feminists, if any, to put Muslim country punishment of females in the context of female incarceration rates in the United $tates and Muslim countries. After all, more clients of Amerikan lawyers are Amerikan females, not Third World Muslim females. The Feminist Law Professors blog has posted on the number of females in U.$. prisons (in fact, a dozen posts before the stoning post), so the omission in discussing punishment of females in Muslim countries is conscious. The blog's discussion of the wronging of females here and there conveys a "feminist" appearance and concern, but there is a lack of coherence and method that cannot be attributed to just the blog's having more than one author. "Feminist" legal and criminal experts in the academy know damn well that opposing all punishment of females has a paternalistic implication, but when it suits the gender aristocracy's interests of uniting with the imperialists, all of that knowledge about gender, the construction of femininity and masculinity, and how things have to work out sometimes under capitalism, goes out the window. "Feminism" can oppose gender ideals and scapegoating one day and the next day call on beer-drinking frat boys and football players to kick the shit out of Muslim males and save Muslim females from sex offense punishments that also apply to males.(7) Its final recourse is to abuse statistics evidently or allege that Muslim countries have a non-Liberal culture, needing to be destroyed by imperialism.
If Amerikan "feminists" are going to approach numbers on punishment, repression and violence in a racist way, they should butt out of international issues. It would be better for them to stick to anatomical/chromosomal quota projects and things like breastfeeding alternatives, birth control pills, and menstrual suppression pills (marketed as ending biological differences between females and males, even as a way of ending discrimination -- bizarrely reproducing stereotypes about menstruating females), which could be zoological priorities; it is fitting that pseudo-feminists oppose apprehension about reproductive technology in the context of Nadya Suleman. They should just stop calling themselves "feminist." Amnesty International's numbers are useful for warmongering and diplomatic maneuvers against Third World nations, not for ending patriarchy.
The point in talking about female incarceration and violence against females in the First World is neither to uphold paternalism nor to deny that the majority of First World females are gender oppressors, but to oppose racism. At the same time, since there are more gender-oppressed people in the Third World, whose people are oppressed by and resisting imperialism, it is possible that there are more things in the Third World that are vehicles for feminism. The First World has not rid itself of patriarchy; it has reconfigured it to exist on a global plane (and within the First World, primarily in age -- children's oppression). First World females are at the forefront of propping up patriarchy and defend it even if it means that a minority of First World females suffer gender-related violence and death. Similarly (but for not entirely analogous reasons), U.$. citizens are exploiters though it is a fact that the incarceration rate even for whites is among the highest rates in the world. That the majority of First World females are gender oppressors The abuse of feminist rhetoric for racist and repressive purposes and oppressive First Worlder advancement must be opposed.
MIWS has detected some confusion even among those seeming to agree with MIWS on the gender aristocracy. The fact that First World females are either gender-privileged or gender oppressors would not mean it is OK to unite with those, including "communists," telling racist stories about stonings and alleged gender violence in the Third World -- something that people with a poor grasp of gender questions could find themselves doing if they are not careful. That would be a twisted way of seeing gender oppression as concentrated in the Third World, leaving out the First World role. Racism aside, gender oppression is concentrated in the Third World in the sense that First Worlders are at the top of the gender hierarchy. Gender contradictions between Third World people are intra-oppressed contradictions. The lack of revolutionary feminism in the First World is not because patriarchy is absent in the First World, any more than than the lack of genuine communism in the First World is because capitalism is absent in the First World. MIWS has said the majority of First World females are gender oppressors, and that unambiguously means that they extract gender benefits in a global system of patriarchy, that they do so as beneficiaries within a gender system whose boundaries encompass both the First World and the Third World. As gender oppressors and not in a situation of uniting with the gender-oppressed in other struggles, First Worlders do not seek a solution for ending patriarchy and thus cannot offer one to the Third World. A consequence of this lack of progress is that gender differences and contradictions persist in the First World, though the majority of First World males and the majority of First World females remain gender oppressors. Equalization of gender privilege in the First World on the backs of Third World people exists alongside continuing gender contradictions in the First World, somewhat analogous to the persistence of wealth and power differences in the First World connected to capitalism. These contradictions do not generate a feminist movement, but rather are a source of migrant-bashing and warmongering against Muslims by First Worlders speaking "as a female," for example. Gender progress in the First World has been replaced with reaction against the oppressed in the Third World, retention of gendered occupations benefiting females financially, defending relationships between power and the erotic, psychological counseling of females for individual advancement, and more.
Lastly, any detention or punishment under capitalism is suspect as being repressive or perpetuating a repressive state apparatus, but categorical opposition to detention and punishment and selective opposition to repression of certain categories of people can lead to paternalism and even racism. This is true particularly outside contexts of colonialism and occupation, but even in the context of the imperialist occupation of Iraq, saying in the First World that Iraqi females should not be incarcerated could be paternalistic and sustain the image of First World soldiers as being benevolent to females. Instead of incarcerating them, First Worlders may use some occupied and captured females as prostitutes and pornographic actors instead.(8) Scientific communists do not say that there should be a moratorium on incarceration of females, but not male workers, gays, male non-whites, etc.
Notes
1. "Does Becoming a Father Make You a Feminist?" 2009 May 20, http://feministlawprofessors.com/?p=10821
2. "Gendered Parenthood On Mother's Day," 2009 May 11, http://feministlawprofessors.com/?p=10630
3. "Lessons for Girls," 2009 May 21, http://feministlawprofessors.com/?p=10844
"Lessons for girls: you don't have to be a mom," 2009 May 12, http://squadratomagico.net/2009/05/12/lessons-for-girls-you-dont-have-to-be-a-mom/
4. "Babies and Pigs in Diapers," 2009 May 1, http://feministlawprofessors.com/?p=10370
5. "Hoarding Babies, Hoarding Animals," 2009 March 23, http://feministlawprofessors.com/?p=9240
6. "Feminists Don't Care About The Women In Iran, And The Sexualized Mockery Of A Powerful Woman Politician Has Nothing To Do With The Stonings Of Women Who Are Deemed Too Sexual," 2008 December 14, http://feministlawprofessors.com/?p=4449
The ostensible point of this post is to defend those criticized for allegedly ignoring females in Iran, paying too much attention to the Jon Favreau-Hillary Clinton photo incident. MIWS actually would prefer the latter to Amerikan pseudo-feminist intervention in Iran. In a funny way, though MIWS agrees with Feminist Law Professors here. Defending Clinton as a female is connected to attacking Iran. Clinton became the Secretary of State and was attacking Iran before that in pseudo-feminist contexts. It is unfortunate that Feminist Law Professors was compelled to prove its feminist credentials and interest in the Third World by idly badmouthing Iran.
7. Even if Amerikan legal analysts want to ignore what the Koran and Islamic jurists say and want to talk about equal protection or due process, that should be at the codification, apprehension or adjudication/conviction level, not the sentencing level unless they are saying there is an indeterminate sentencing problem in Iran discriminating against females. Commentators focusing on heavy punishment of females in Iran, but not proposing lighter sentences, downplaying or even tolerating the same punishments of males for the same offenses, and neglecting the disproportionate conviction and sentencing of other categories of people (including racial and ethnic minorities in the United $tates), expose themselves as paternalists trying to stir people up emotionally.
The IPS article excerpted by Feminist Law Professors tells an anecdote (about one individual and with no discussion of whether a judge could ever err in acquitting females in other cases, and other opposing considerations) casting doubt on whether females convicted of adultery actually committed adultery and on the adjudication process. But Feminist Law Professors chose to excerpt a part to go with its claim of "stonings of women who are deemed too sexual" -- accepting that a law may have been broken, but sensationally fixating attention on the alleged punishment. Readers see sex and punishment and are left to form murky ideas. In the IPS article, it is reported that an Islamic judge stayed sentences (the importance of which act is minimized by Western commentators), but change within Islam would be beside Feminist Law Professors' point. It would appear that the mission of Amerikan soldiers is to save "sexual" wimmin, "sexual" referring to something that cannot be taken care of within permanent or temporary Islamic marriage. Sexually stifled and frustrated females need to be rescued. From whom and for what they are to be saved isn't clear just reading one post, but it is clear that Amerikans have long and widely used titillating themes to rally the troops. Amerikan pseudo-feminism keeps pornography around to attack poor people. The message only gets more crude the farther one goes from academia.
This writer is unfamiliar with the foreign policy position on Iran of the author of the excerpting post. Nonetheless, the post contributes to a climate for diplomatic strong-arming, sanctions, and war, against Iran. Many people who are not calling for military action yet are building for war.
8. "Iranian porn actors could face death," 2009 March 20, http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/03/20/iranian-porn-actors-could-face-death/
"Police in Iran have arrested a group of "beautiful young women" and charged them with making pornographic films -- a crime that carries the death penalty in that country -- according to the pro-reform Iranian website Fararu."
So what are Canadians going to do about it?