Kontextmaschine

21st January 2018

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'Babe' Turns a Movement Into a Racket →

So, thoughts about this Caitlin Flanagan article:

First, it’s kind of scattershot:

Hollywood is self-serving but at least Oprah lent this movement authentic legitimacy, but… post-Jezebel new media feminism has discredited it all by… posing women as vacuous drama-queen redpill stereotype flibbertigibbets… for example using the same breezy tone to discuss how terrible it is when men disregard your desires to use you as a sexual object and how sexy it is when men hold you down and use you as a sexual object… in the name of attention- and profit-seeking.

As such it REALLY resembles the common criticism that Caitlin Flanagan is more committed to the project of putting down #MeToo in the name of feminist principles than in any particular feminist principles themselves.

I was around and aware in the ‘90s for the last culture war, or at least the mopping-up operations, how part of that was coopt the appeal of “feminist” as an identity by propping up a (good, libertarian individualist) “equity feminism” against a (bad, left-identitarian) “gender feminism”. Like, we’re talking the exact same players from the old “Independent Women’s Forum” set, Caitlin Flanagan and Kaitie Roiphe and Christina Hoff Summers, don’t think I don’t notice that.

Second, if your goal WAS to squash the momentum of this “moment”, and I and everyone else saw a counterattack coming from the get go, this is probably the right time and point to strike. A few days prior the bluecheck goodthinkers were openly trying to threaten Harper’s over running a potentially critical piece on the media men list, clearly thought they still had command, but now moving on to the Ansari stuff, they’re just huffing and puffing to explain how actually, it’s not an issue, there’s no problem here.

Now I’m not going to say that “if you’re explaining, you’re losing” – as a descriptive statement I’m not sure that’s true, and as a normative one it’s anti-intellectual and obnoxious – but it is a sign that you’ve lost tempo, you’re not setting the terms of battle anymore, you’ll need a good push to get it back, and if they get one first you might have to retreat.

Third, you know what this reminds me of? The 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

A New York Times #1 bestseller made into a 1977 film with Diane Keaton and Richard Gere, it was quite the conversation-starter but largely forgotten now because its concerns were so of-the-moment. That moment being the immediate aftermath of the sexual and feminist revolutions, figuring out how to incorporate the new “liberated woman” into society. New “fern”, or “singles” bars flourished as new places for people to meet for sex or companionship.

(Or rather, new places where respectable women could seek them on their own terms as patrons, rather than provisional guests or employees somewhere on the sex work spectrum.)

The plot of the book is basically this: a kindergarten teacher in New York City falls into the habit of trolling singles bars for men to have one-off masochistic sex with. That’s more or less it. I know I’ve said that before pornography was an established genre of its own, mass-market novels came a lot closer to erotica, maybe thinly masked as some sort of moral lesson, but it’s not stroke stuff. The sex isn’t that sexy or all that frequent, most of the time in between she just worries about her life - are her confidence and assertiveness too much? Too little? Is this an okay way to live? Are what she wants in bed and what she wants in life compatible?

If it’s any kind of exploitative pulp it’s true crime, starting off as an article about a 1973 killing in the Upper West Side, because the moral lesson is she gets straight-up murdered at the end.

She brings some new random home, he isn’t satisfying her so in the middle of things she just tells him to stop and leave. This is kind of presented as her finally, comfortably claiming agency. When he rolls off her and moves to finishing himself off she starts berating him, angry that he expects her to physically deal with his semen (and thematically, HIS sexual desire). Enraged, he chokes her to death with an electrical cord.

So yeah, that’s what I’m reminded of, the hit parable from the LAST time we went through this part of the cultural cycle:

“All this chase-your-desire sexual liberation is a way for women to degrade themselves as sex objects. And even if they do interpret it as empowering, they’ll mistake themselves as toe-to-toe equals with the bestial aggression of male sexuality and just get themselves hurt.”

Tagged: amhistsame as it ever was