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feminist-ravings · 4 years ago

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Arguments Against Terfs (#1?)

"Transwomen are men appropriating womanhood" Trans women are women, obviously. But TERFS believe that biological sex is the only thing that matters and gender was created by men to oppress women. I agree that gender is a construct that many times can be harmful. But that doesn't mean we should attack people for identifying as a gender outside of their assigned sex. If we want to encourage gender not mattering in society, shouldn't we support trans identities? If you truly are for gender abolition, you should support the construct of gender expression opening up more because then there is more room for nonconformity. The abolition of gender immediately is impossible, so a slow and gradual ending of gender norms is a good thing for feminism! Gender nonconforming people and trans people should be supported, and trans people are just as valid because sex isn't the only factor in gender based oppression. A trans woman who passes as a cisgender woman definitely experiences misogyny in her day-to-day life just as much as any cis woman. A trans woman who does not "pass" as a cis woman likely experiences transphobia and trans misogyny, and trans women who don't pass are at risk of high rates of assault and murder. And yes, while trans women didn't experience the oppression of female socialization, they experience misogyny as adults and need feminism just as much as cis women. And when you deny non sex-based misogyny, you are ignoring many cis women AND trans women's reality. Think about how much misogyny we face in our daily lives as cis women that is about gender roles rather than our biology, and could also be applied to trans women as well. While there are many instances of misogyny pertaining to our biology such as restriction of reproductive rights and period shame, there are also incidents unrelated to biology such as slut shaming, sexual harassment, male abuse, dehumanization, objectification, and more that aren't exclusive to cis women. Misogyny affects us both, we should be working together. Trans women are women because they live as women and experience the world as women, and in a sense that's what it means for gender to be a contruct. For some of us, it’s assigned at birth, and for others it’s something they chose. But if woman is an oppressed class created by men, trans women certainly share our oppression.

"Trans women should not be in women's spaces." Trans women are women, and experience misogyny just as much as cis women. They need safe spaces just as much as we do. Trans women are especially vulnerable to male violence according to statistics and need access to shelters, yet are denied due to prejudice. But there is no evidence of trans women being more violent than cis women. There is no reason for trans women to not be allowed in women's spaces, because again, they are women. Trans women in women's restrooms is not a problem, and we know this for sure because trans people have always been using their preferred bathrooms, and so far society has not collapsed. There is no evidence of trans women assaulting cis women in restrooms, and certainly not of it being a reason people transition. A rapist does not need the permission of a sign to commit rape, and trans women aren't the threats here. "Puberty blockers are child abuse." Puberty blockers are only given after a long-lasting history of gender dysphoria or discomfort in your body and extensive therapy and are completely reversible because all they do is delay puberty until the child is mature enough to make a choice. No life altering decision is made yet. "Trans men are women with internalized misogyny who transitioned to avoid the struggles of womanhood." It appears to me like the reason behind many of the misconceptions TERFS have about trans people is projection. I have seen countless gender non-conforming TERFs say that they believe that if they were young during the current age of increased trans visibility they would have chosen to be a trans man to escape the oppression of womanhood. All I can think of when I see this is, "your struggles are not universal." Not everyone has the same experience as you, and you're assigning the reason YOU would have transitioned to every trans man. When you're operating under this assumption, you won't genuinely listen to their experiences because you're too busy projecting your own onto them. Trans men have a different experience to trans women. That story is for a trans man to tell, but I can say that the experience of a trans man is not transitioning to escape misogyny or because of internalized misogyny. Many trans men are infantilized treated to misogynistic stereotypes because they are trans men, and transphobic people see them as women, so transitioning certainly doesn't free you from the clutches of the patriarchy. No, being a trans man is more about feeling more comfortable living as a man than hating womanhood from what I've seen from trans men. I suggest actually listening to the voices of the people you claim to empathize with, instead of supplementing your own voice. "Women's liberation and trans liberation cannot coexist." We share the same oppressor. Trans rights are not a threat to feminism, and fighting against trans rights is not only a waste of time for feminists, it holds us back. Time and time again so-called "gender critical feminists" ally with the far-right with the sole goal of bringing down trans women, not caring that they are working with groups that actively fight against women's reproductive rights, and gay rights. Many TERFS are too blinded by their bigotry towards trans women to even do what's right for their fellow women. All in all, TERFs are pouring their energy towards the wrong group. If any TERFS happen to be hate reading, quit spending all your time harassing a virtually powerless marginalized group and work towards criticizing powerful men again, and the patriarchy. Put your righteous anger towards the right place.

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prolapsarian · 7 years ago

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‘Cat Person’ and Character-Analysis

My ill-advised tuppenceworth on 'Cat Person':

There was a peculiar history in the twentieth century in which, in psychoanalysis, the analysis of the ego turned towards an emphasis on quantitative factors (that is, towards an analysis of ego strength and ego weakness) at key moments. It happened in 1921 in 'Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego', the sister book of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' now not amid war but instead subsequent social and economic ruin. It happened again in the writings of Reich, Fenichel, and Freud in the 1930s. Indeed, you can see a longer history of this sort of quantitative ego-analysis as significant to attempts understand the Nazi phenomenon reaching through to the late 1940s. And it appears once again in the 1970s. Needless to say, these are turns that have been made necessary - albeit through the darkest and most labyrinthine paths - by social and economic crisis. And more significantly they have come about as those economic crises have instantiated dominant social modes of the hatred of women, not so much by some abstract patriarchy but by new developments of homosociality, bound up in warriorship, male cliques and confraternities. And needless to say too that these developments have prospered in particular in circumstances of male mass-unemployment or the mass fear amongst men of unemployment. In short, this whole analytic nexus is bound up with women at work ("taking the jobs of men"), and how in periods of economic crisis masculinity can triumph through new extra-liberal communal modes of (anti-)social organisation founded on the hatred of women and violence against them, and from which women and their work is excluded. But from a psychoanalytic view, they are also stories about how these "new communal modes" are founded, in truth, on regression.

The great victory of stories like "Cat Person" - and perhaps the reason for its popularity - is that they inaugurate this question in the time of our own economic crisis - and in particular amongst a generation of men who, over the last decade, have graduated university into a collapsing economy. And although this story might speak in more lulling tones than, say, Jelinek did in the 1970s, the violent backdrop is even more extreme: one of Elliott Rodger-style massacres and the mushrooming of nasty 4chan-based chatter about a "beta uprising”, of “pick-up artistry” and the belief that being a “good guy” is the world’s best justification for being a pig in bed. That is, this story asks the crucial questions: “what are the burgeoning modes of the hatred of women amongst the male precariat? And how do they find their violent expressions?” In one particular way, the story’s diagnosis is extremely precise: in the moments in which it dwells on Robert’s fantasy of Margot’s return to a high school romance. Indeed, the present regressions in male mass culture (especially of the American variety) are founded on an almost constant return to schoolyard identifications, and the paired homoerotic sado-masochistic figures of jock and nerd. Just to add, as I will come to it in more detail, this doesn’t mean this should be responded to by a hatred of homoeroticism - which this regression will turn into; nor does it mean kids straightforwardly enjoy being bullied - and raped, symbolically or otherwise - at school; and nor is it to condemn as barbaric either childhood eroticism in general or sadomasochism. But these schoolyard identifications have been hardened by the discovery that they are already so strong that they present the perfect marketing opportunity to mass-cultural producers. This isn’t to deny that there is a long history in American film and television about the fantasy of the nerdy guy who - by dint of cunning - gets with some conventionally hot woman, who is invariably the butt of all the jokes because she is stupid, and therefore apparently deserves everything that this cunning metes out to her. That history runs from Woody Allen through to The Big Bang Theory. But this type of cultural production - by men, for men - is enormously more prevalent now than it has been at any time before, and it both produces and fulfils these regressive tendencies. They remain the most enormous source of profiteering.

I wrote this back in March on these phenomena, and my views haven’t changed so much, but it gives a more *political* view of how new forms of illiberal male violence play out in this scenario, and how the two figures find themselves bound together: “For people of my generation a lot of what is on offer in the way of websites, TV shows, music separates itself along the lines of "nerds vs jocks." Mass culture finds its market in taking sides in an enormous process of regression: marginal pre-pubescence is the scene of eternal fixation. What follows is some crude sociology: it is intriguing to see how this plays out as a collaboration between the two sides in the strains of contemporary misogyny - on the one side the Jockish Trump type, non-consensual hands everywhere, and on the other the Nerdish misogyny that has developed I guess through trends like "pick-up artistry", the hatred of women because they don't love you unconditionally. Maybe this collaboration between these two types, founded on a single type of psychic formation, marks out also the uneasy collaboration of Government and the Internet alt-right, an army of hateful hidden nerds, who think they are probably just using the likes of Trump and Bannon as avatars. But perhaps what is most striking here is the strength of self-righteousness founded on the feeling of oppression long ago, each side by the other. However much the internet warrior might have a nicely paid job and plenty of resources, he feels hard done by in a culture that seeks to perpetuate forever the violence of the school yard. He sees himself as a figure of vengeance, however little he might be oppressed. Mass culture becomes an arena in which the tensions and contradictions of something like a regressive anality are played out, in a world frozen into unambivalent sado-masochism. Be a man, be ego-weak, the TV bellows!”

Part of what has been most reported, and most interesting about Cat Person story has been the establishment of a sort of culture-war in the responses to it. What has been less spoken about, though, is how those responses have been conditioned by the complex of genitality within a mass-culture that thrives on pre-genital identification. What might in fact be the most provocative moments in this story for a lot of the men who have responded are the depictions of the failing penis: “At the end, when he was on top of her in missionary, he kept losing his erection, and every time he did he would say, aggressively, “You make my dick so hard,” as though lying about it could make it true.” What makes this so provocative is that the regressive forms of mass cultural play on the hyper-ambivalence developed in age towards one’s own pre-genital fixation within the culture. What is constantly produced and sold to and by a generation of men are sorts of cultural objects that both catch them in a homoerotic moment and then fantastically - and aggressively, violently - disavow it. This is to say, that today’s regressive male mass culture, despite being homosocial and indeed homoerotic, is at the same time very deeply homophobic. Yeah, that’s an old story from the 1930s too, but it also explains something of why a lot of people get very jumpy about it, especially when the women’s true fantasy is depicted as being with another guy who shares in laughing at the first’s failed genitality. It turns out, with that laughter, that she hates his anal fixation just as much as he does. Not that this is her fault either.

So who, in the end, is to blame? Maybe all of this sounds like a dodge too (or some verbose resistance) - no doubt it to an extent is, and the message of this little story is more straightforward: it tells men to reflect a bit, be more sensitive to how women are feeling; it adds to the perennial refrain that men need to “work on their shit.” And it does this well - I too found myself reflecting. But I worry that this also misses the mark in certain respects - and most extravagantly in its willingness to submit to the prevailing psychological doctrine that all matters of character can be exchanged for questions of behaviour. All of this, I think, raises the question of what we do about prevailing ego-weakness and its violences today. Traditionally in character-analysis the answers have been pretty poor: there is a hope - and one can read is quite clearly in late Freud - that this sort of illiberal male mass violence in crisis can be solved by the “return to work”. But here I can’t help but to think he is wrong. Yes, the experiment in the west of full-employment liberalism did, in effect, reduce the immediate power of male confraternities and armies over society, but it did this by allowing this violence to quietly return to the home, and by pushing women straight back into the unremitting violence of the home too. This is the history of the 1950s and 1960s, and it was not until the next crisis of employment that the pent up rage against it, by those women who had survived it, was able to be given some expression. Indeed, for all of its hopes of some kind of peacefulness, prevailing liberalism in periods of boom most usually simply institutes processes of social repression - privatising violence within the family - where psychological repression leaves off; while the forces of that violence remain intact. Meanwhile other solutions proffered have been “a new olympic games” (Ernst Simmel), new freer forms of communalist and more sexually free lifestyle (Reich), or simply “education” (for an Adorno immured in the post-war boom).

It seems to me that all of these answers are useless in one way or another - and that the culture does truly require a feminist response. One would hope that it would be as psychoanalytically sensitive as it is violent. I guess to invoke all of this history of character-analysis is rather unfashionable too. Not least because these sorts of arguments fell out of fashion because all sorts of terms - for very good reason - fell out of use. Things like “penis-envy” (and as I quietly have suggested here, in many ways I think this was often a misnomer for work-envy), or “repressed homosexuality”. Nonetheless, these sorts of discussions do - even deprived of vocabulary - offer some scope for addressing the problems of how the crisis of our age is rebounding into hatred and violence against women on a mass scale. In any case, basically I'm well up for a fierce critical discussion of ego-weakness and mass culture. F-Scales at the ready.

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