Letters to the Editor
-
the trite-ification of feminism
thanks, curvy. i'm more than a little surprised that only a few commenters in this supposedly progressive forum care more about miller's offhanded pro-rape comment than they care about some jerk's self-promotion at a party. i mean, i've written twice now that i was raped by a guy operating on miller's assumption that no means yes, and yet most commenters are still fixated on someone getting insulted at a party. perhaps i need to bandy about my physical attributes and educational credentials to get the star-master's attention, but i need my privacy.
it is sad that some women feel dirty and ugly all the time no matter how many products they consume, and it's important to figure out how to fix that. but this article was trite beyond words, except for the horrifying assertion that sometimes no means yes. does miller think that men go around saying no and meaning yes, or is it just women whose stated views should be ignored?
-
do you really think that most rapes occur because of a sincere misunderstandng of the meaning of the word no
I doubt very much that that is the case. If every "no" uttered by a woman meant that everything stopped and never started again until the woman explictly and unabiguously asked for it then no one would ever have sex. Of course, to a rape victim this is certainly preferable to what happened to them. If someone really doesn't want to have sex, or for that matter does, there is a lot more information than the word no to go on.
-
oh, right. it wasn't enough rape.
anon, even one rape based on the misunderstanding laura miller is promoting was one rape too many for me.
the word "no" should always be enough, although in my case the struggling to get away also should have been a clue.
but i suppose i'm being silly. it's men like you, anon, who get to decide when it's rape. should i have scratched, bitten, given him a black eye? perhaps i should have broken a limb? i didn't think it would be necessary.
know why? because I SAID NO.
-
there's a tendency more and more I think for men and women not to socialize at all unless it is understood that sex is on the agenda
i suppose this is an inevitable and desirable development given your discription of the way things are.
-
"no"
It is clear in the contect of the first paragraph of the article that Kipnis' doesn't mean to say that "no" doesn't mean "no"--just that in our society, women play into the old, dangerous idea themselves and use coy or ambivalent behavior in a sexually coded way, which sends those "mixed signals" men have such a hard time reading. Of course, if you're enough of a troglodyte that you don't take "no" for an answer (and really, you'd have to be a tremendous coward with no pride or dignity not to), there's obviously deeply pathological shit at work on the deepest level. Still, it seems obvious to me that she's mostly referring to the shrill way in which college campuses take date rape as far as asserting that a woman who's alcohol blood level is past the legal driving limit is too drunk to be able to give consent.
-
Anna,
I haven't read the book, but points like the ones it raises about ambivalence and "wounded bird femininity" seem terribly important and current to me. I think they throw a lot of light on today's feminism and changing relations of the sexes (as I said in my first post on this article). Don't you? I'd really like to know why you don't think those things are important, if you don't.
As to Susan's party experience, the guy was rude and stupid in a classically sophomoric way. He is obviously an immature young man attempting to cover for his lack of experience. To me there's not much more to it than that. And, as with all things sophomoric, it's simple to put it where it belongs (in the toilet)and forget about it.
To me, the ideas of the book are much more engaging than the remarks of a jerk, or Susan's inability to deal with them.
-
The specter of the feminist scold...
I fail to see how Kipnis's latest provides any real alternative or challenge to feminism. The article implies that feminism doesn't work because it doesn't acknowledge our "inner woman" -- a neurotic obsessed with a clean house because she is afraid of her menses. Um, no thanks.
Kipnis seems to belong right along side Caitlin Flanagan, Camille Paglia, Rush Limbaugh and others whose main challenge to feminism relies on the idea that feminism doesn't work because women are inherently neurotic, weak, and ambivalent... you know, feminine.
Meanwhile Miller join these writers in characterizing feminists as shrill harpies ready to scold any woman who strays from the feminist orthodoxy. Miller cheerfully trots this image out: "Then there's the matter of dancing through the eggshell-littered territory of contemporary feminist thinking, knowing that legions of your putative sisters are poised to thrash you for the slightest variation from their (sometimes mutually contradicting) positions. If you anger them, chances are your own life will be dragged out for intensive and merciless scrutiny. If you don't, most likely your caution has made you fatally dull."
Huh? Who is this fascist regime Miller refers to as "them"? I don't find that reflected anywhere in the feminists I know or read.
I'm getting pretty tired of the specter of the feminist scold being used to justify the new anti-feminist writing. The fact that feminists represent a range of opinions and debate ideas among themselves and in the public arena is healthy. I can't think of another social movement that doesn't include debate and discussion of complex ideas. But the bottom line is that feminism is about equality of women in society, not about "intensive and merciless scrutiny" of one another. But making it look like the latter sure is a clever way of diverting the issue.
Stating that there are "Putative sisters poised to thrash you" doesn't make that true any more than me writing "Santa Claus exists" makes it so. Why not engage with examples of what feminists are actually writing and saying? Today feminists are writing about ways that we can help others better negotiate a world where all people, both men and women, are feeling pretty darn ambivalent about how to negotiate the demands of work, home, sex, family, and community.
By attacking feminism, Miller willfully ignores the context of conversations about realities in women's lives. "No means no" didn't happen in a vacuum so that feminists could unite in stridency. Miller is ignoring the context wherein date rape is an all too common occurence and "No" is often not heard or respected when a woman says it.
Likewise, I doubt that what Kipnis terms women's 'obsessive pursuit of a standard of cleanliness' has as much to do with some sort of hang up around our vaginas as the fact that women have been brought up for centuries with housekeeping and child rearing as their primary duty.
Attacking feminism and talking about women's ambivalence may be a diverting article, but at the end of the day it does nothing to help solve real, serious issues in people's lives. Wouldn't it be helping women more to be working on the real problems we're facing today like domestic violence, sexual assault, and inequities in pay and childcare?
I'll take someone who respects me enough to deal with these problems seriously over someone painting me and my inner woman into a dithering, ambivalent corner any day.