Australia, June '94 - March '95 :: Fueling the Bonfire.

Subject: Fueling the Bonfire.
Date: March 3, 1995 04:08

13:37 Kingscliff, New South Wales-Australia :: 27 FEB 95

Jim Cash was good enough to recently forward to me this little tidbit, probably an 'urban legend':

>  An English professor wrote the words
>  "woman without her man is a savage" on
>  the blackboard and directed his students to
>  punctuate it correctly.
>
>    The men wrote: "Woman, without her man, is a savage."
>
>    The women wrote: "Woman: Without her, man is a savage."

Personally, I think both sentences are correct.

It's interesting how, when I'll be concentrating on understanding a topic, relevant information seems to seek me out. I've been reading Naomi Wolf's best-seller "Fire With Fire". Among the first pieces of eMail I received after replacing my computer was Jim Boritz's brief introduction to the feminist author bell hooks' work "Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations". His eMail related a few of the issues hooks identifies in the initial chapter, "Power to the Pussy: We don't want to be dicks in drag." That proved to be the beginning of a rather fascinating, lengthy and ongoing discussion. Just like the 'men we are', we've taken the adversarial position of 'defending' our authors. I side with Wolf, but not simply because she uses my favoured British spellings, as below.

This is a typical scene on college campuses: several white women sit in a circle on the floor, feeling miserable because they are all white. 'We want to be diverse in our group, but the women of colour refuse to join us.' Several women of colour sit in another building, feeling irritated: 'They want us to come and integrate with them; they want us to teach them. But we're tired of having to explain ourselves all the time. We need a place of our own.' The assumption is that everyone must join in a big circle and 'have it out', 'talk things through', and 'clear things up' before the groups can join together for specific actions. To anti-racist white women, the impasse is a devastating rejection, like a lover's. 'Aren't we listening?' they ask. 'Aren't we trying to address the issues?' To Black women that very articulation of the problem is often annoying, for it sounds as if white women believe that their good intentions will make racism disappear overnight, at which point everything will be fine. White women's wish for intimacy and love from Black women often carries the implicit hope that they will be magically absolved; the 'egalitarian' assumptions of feminine intimacy seem to whitewash the inequities of race.

Fire With Fire
p. 309

It is the final paragraph that struck me most strongly in this passage. It relates to an issue Jim brought up in his initial email. To make it fit that issue better, I altered some words to change the points of view and came up with the following:

To anti-sexist men, the impasse is a devastating rejection, like a lover's. 'Aren't we listening?' they ask. 'Aren't we trying to address the issues?' To women that very articulation of the problem is often annoying, for it sounds as if men believe that their good intentions will make sexism disappear overnight, at which point everything will be fine. Men's wish for respect and camaraderie from women often carries the implicit hope that they will be magically absolved; the 'egalitarian' assumptions of common cause seem to whitewash the inequities of gender.

After marking up the paragraph with my changes, I was quite surprised to read the first sentence of the next paragraph:

If we learned to substitute respect for intimacy and teamwork for sisterhood, these tensions would not paralyze women's organizational efforts to such an extent.

Fire With Fire
p. 309

Respect for intimacy; teamwork (what I mean by camaraderie) for sisterhood (love): learning these substitutions would go a long way towards minimizing the tensions between men and women in the 'gender war'.

The topic of possibly the most heated discussion with Jim represents the "impasse" implied in my paraphrase. This topic is the annual exclusion of male participation in the Take Back the Night march. More than a simple case of reverse sexism, this is a condition of drawing battle-lines between two sides in a war.

When women's groups tell men that men's groups cannot exclude women while some of these women's groups exclude men they deliver a mixed message. Already it has been made clear that men are the enemy. It is men that are waging the War Against Women. It is 'male ways of thinking and relating' that are responsible for all the oppression against women. It is the exclusion of women from male bastions of power that leave women in a powerless position. No male escapes the taint of this brush, at least it's difficult for any male to feel they are individually excluded from the image of being a male oppressor. Many men are trying to lift themselves out of that image, to not be "one of them" but by being excluded from the fight against male violence men feel the brush strokes spreading on another label of "oppressor".

It is an emotional response, not much different from the one women feel when they are excluded from opportunity or choice. But it packs a different punch. Men ask: 'Aren't we trying?' 'Aren't we listening?' 'Didn't we let you into our groups?' 'What must I do to clear myself of this label?' And they say, "I'm not like that!" And true enough, most men aren't. Most men aren't violent toward women.

I think it's OK that women should form groups containing no men, just as men should be able to create groups without women, Jews without gentiles or people with big noses without button-nosed people. The current political climate does not allow this. Until the women's movement conclusively lifts the effective total ban on men kibitzing together, men will continue to respond negatively, emotionally, to being excluded from women's groups. People should be able to choose whom they associate with. What we need now is a language that allows recognition of differentiation in sub-communities without perceived threat to those excluded.

On the other hand, heterosexuals are not excluded from participating in the Gay Pride parade.

0:38 Brisbane, Queensland-Australia :: 2 MAR 95

At the outset of this piece I remarked how information relevant to your current condition has a way of finding your attention. It's probably some spin-off of Jung's 'synchronicity', the idea that seemingly coincidental events have meaning to the observer or subject.

17:13 Malaysia Air flight 126, Brisbane->Kuala Lumpur :: 2 MAR 95

What I began to say yesterday was that I've discovered Michel Foucault, or more precisely I found the book "A Foucault Primer: Discourse, power and the subject" [Alec McHoul, Wendy Grace; Melbourne University Press, 1993]. The name, Foucault, I've encountered as belonging to an esteemed modern philosopher but it was the second part of the title that caught my attention, having just finished Naomi Wolf's treatise on 'power feminism'. However, it was the following little tidbit I found inside the book that prompted me to cough up the $20.

Another aspect of Foucault's critical method is that it locates power outside conscious or intentional decision. He does not ask: who is in power? He asks how power installs itself and produces real material effects; where one such effect might be a particular kind of subject who will in turn act as a channel for the flow of power itself.