Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Y’know how it is with stereotypes? You hear someone’s a boomer-generation anti-prostitution crusader and a women’s-studies professor at a New England college and you just assume she’s part of a tradition of radical, 70’s-era feminism that was hardened by constant battle with a culture that wanted women, and men, right where they’d been for up to 6,000 years: subservience for women, domination by men, men providing goods and services in the domestic sphere, women providing obedience, clean socks, children, and sex whether they want it or not. You also tend to assume a couple of other things. That they’re going to be race, age, class, and orientation tolerant. That while they’re going to be impatient with and sometimes exasperatedly hostile to the clueless sense of entitlement expressed by “librul doods” they’re nevertheless generally supportive of progressive political policies. And you generally expect them to be somewhere between suspicious of and viscerally opposed to traditional, privileged, patriarchal institutions.

Superficially Professor Donna M. Hughes appears to fit that bill. But as I’ve said often enough on this blog, while stereotyping is probably unavoidable, falling unconsciously for stereotypes makes one an assholes. I fell for the stereotype. This makes me an asshole.

But I am not the only asshole in this story.

Having fallen for the stereotype I made what I believe, passionately, to be the right case to attempt to unify that brand of “old school” activism with more contemporary activism in hopes of reducing a destructive schism in gender activism that’s moving into its second century in America.

And having fallen for the stereotype I made an assumption that if Hughes was making common cause with regressive, patriarchal institutions it was in error… an error driven by a perhaps understandable but nevertheless unnecessary blind sense of urgency, anxiety, and powerlessness.

What I didn’t consider until I started digging even deeper than I had previously, was that rather than being a dupe of social conservatives, the religious-right, and neoconservative political activists she might herself actually be a right-wing neoconservative activist! Rather than being a “useful idiot” of neoconservative and religious-right activists who made the conscious decision to use trafficking as a partisan Republican “wedge issue” against progressives, Hughes might instead have been right up there on the front row cheering them on.

Y’know how she’s lately been calling Maymay a pedophile, a sexual predator, and a sex trafficker?

Turns out that put him in extremely rarified company.

Back in 2002 Hughes wrote a post in that renowned bastion of human rights, the neoconservative National Review Online denouncing participants of an anti-human-trafficking conference organized by political opponents of the Bush administration.

There are some wolves in sheep’s clothing among those who claim they are fighting the trafficking of women and children. In their disguise they speak loudly against trafficking as one of worst human-rights violations in the world — which it is — to conceal their goal of normalizing and legalizing prostitution and the transnational flow of women into sex industries.

...

The upcoming conference in Honolulu “The Human Rights Challenge of Globalization in Asia-Pacific-US: The Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children,” scheduled for November 13-15, offers an example of this phenomenon. ...

If the listed keynote speakers, which includes Hillary Clinton, remain true to past form, they will passionately denounce the trafficking of women as a modern form of slavery, but steadfastly avoid mentioning prostitution as the demand that drives the trafficking.

...

These presenters and their colleagues couch their arguments in terms of human rights and women’s rights. But that is a smokescreen for their true agenda. They do not represent the interests of women and children. Normalizing prostitution and the transnational movement of women for prostitution does not advance women’s status or rights in the world. Instead, it turns women and children into sexual commodities that are raped, beaten, and exploited for the profit of a few.

She said it here, in the fucking National Review!

Yup. Maymay and Hillary Clinton, they all look the same from NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez’s office.

By the way, Kathryn, I should mention that National Review Online played an important role in shifting the focus of the trafficking and prostitution debates. In October 2002, NRO published my article entitled “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” which exposed the agenda of some of the liberal feminist, leftist anti-trafficking activists. They were using the anti-trafficking debate to advance their efforts to legalize prostitution.

She said it here.

Yup. Us liberal feminist, leftist anti-traffickers just looove us some pimps, and brothels, and madams, and traffickers. Like Hillary Clinton and Maymay.

Anyway, without getting too personal about anyone else I’ll just reiterate that I’m not the only asshole referenced in this post.

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Nor, I ought to add, am I the only person to fall for stereotyped assumptions about what it means to be a women’s studies professor at a New England college. Without naming names I’ll just say that more than one person has pointed to Hughes as an emblem of what’s “wrong” with feminism. And, especially, what’s wrong with “radfem” radical feminists.

I’ll just point out that Hughes’s fellow neoconservative, fellow Iraq-war apologist, and fellow Bush/Cheney apparatchik Richard Perle used to repeatedly claim he was “a registered Democrat.” Well fine if he says so. And to the same extent it’s fine if Hughes chooses to think of herself as a “registered” feminist.

But while nearly everyone recognizes that pointing to Perle and saying “that’s proof that Democrats are all evil, nuke-hungry, human-rights-scorning war-mongers like Richard Perle,” it’s actually fairly common to see people like Hughes pointed at as “proof” that the only thing that matters to feminists are other narrow-minded, mean-spirited, privileged, upper and upper-middle-class white women like themselves.

That? That would be another mistake. That? That she might either deliberately or even inadvertently encourage that mistake in others would be a bigger transgression in my mind than all the slander, lible, and neoconservative sucking up in all of Eastern Standard Time.

I’m not the only asshole mentioned in this post.

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Update: And speaking of the accusations of lies and slander Hughes has launched at Maymay (and Hillary Clinton and the whole rest of the panoply of “liberal feminist, leftist” individuals who’s policies for addressing the problem are different from her right-wing and neoconservative cohort?) From George Bush and Dick Cheney all the way down to convicted felon Charles Colson, party strategist Michael Horowitz, and the cast and crew of National Review’s online operation the bread and butter of neoconservative rhetoric is, has been, and because its ingrained in their character probably always will be lies, innuendo, slander, and false accusation, not to mention disproportionate aggression and “preemptive” attacks. These are the people she aligns herself with, and NRO is the media organ she chooses to editorialize for. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

And one last thing: I’m not calling Hughes’ feminism into question any more than I’m calling Perle’s Democratic affiliation or, for that matter, Dick Cheney’s profession of tolerance of homosexuals or George Bush’s religious faith. The just don’t mean very much in the face of the compromises and subordination the political philosophy that unites them demands of its adherents.

When I first heard about this I felt sorry for Hughes for getting tangled up with the Salvation Army. I now feel sorry for the Salvation Army!

Summary: As promised (here: The Perversely Non-Perverse Reason You Don’t Need the Kings Navy to Protect Heterosexuality), here’s why I think the word “privilege” is a perfectly accurate but also in communications terms perfectly lousy term.

The problem with the word “privilege” is that people who have it never get to enjoy it. Or even appreciate it. Or, generally speaking, even recognize it.

Consider the old brain twister “we don’t know who first discovered water but we can be sure it wasn’t a fish.” When you’re totally surrounded and supported by something it’s literally invisible to you.

Viewed objectively it makes total sense that the technical term an observer would give it would be “privilege.” After all it’s visible only to those who don’t have it.

Rhetorically, though, it’s a total catastrophe. Because the term’s non-technical usage implies knowing luxury — one the recipient experiences knowingly, not unconsciously. Sort of like my grandfather talking about his childhood in Scotland in the late 1800s when instead of plain oatmeal three times a day his family had oatmeal boiled with bits of mutton in it for Sunday dinner after church. He thought that was pretty wonderful.

Ok, so now we’re getting to the point: Imagine that the only protein in your diet, every day, was oatmeal boiled in dead sheep. You probably couldn’t imagine the tedium of having to live that way. Until just now it might never have occurred to you that anyone would daydream about living like that.

My grandfather, who was 5’1” tall and had legs as crooked as a goat, and gazillions of other people throughout history, would snort at you with contempt. (As he would snort at his grandchildren, including me.)

The privilege part isn’t not eating the diet, or not being so well-fed you wouldn’t look forward to it the way my grandfather would have. Privilege is having it so far removed from your reality you’re not just unaware of it, you can’t even imagine it.

That you can’t even imagine it is precisely why calling it “privilege” is such a lousy choice: people who have it don’t have the experience of, well, experiencing it! Even though its existence is glaringly obvious to everyone who doesn’t have it.

If you want to try and discuss such a very, very real thing with… anyone who’s got it, you’re going to have to find a way to communicate their condition such that they a) get it but b) are not alienated by it. For instance if I see you popping open a Yoplait and call you privileged you are you’re going to totally eyeball-roll me. Nor would you be mollified if I then tried to explain that that the very fact of your eye-rolling was an exercise of your privilege. It’s not that I wouldn’t have communicated it to you. And (as, for instance, my grandfather or roughly 10,000,000 Hatians could tell you) it’s not even that you’d be very, very mistaken for thinking having an 89-cent yogurt didn’t make you privileged because anybody can have one any time they want. It’s that by naming your privilege I’d have alienated you to a point where further communication was shut down.

That’s going to be exactly the same experience when you tell a man he’s privileged because he can walk down the street without ever noticing that nobody’s checking out his ass, let alone groping it. Or, more specifically, if you try to tell a white one he’s privileged because he can walk down the same street completely oblivious to whether he passed a police officer, let alone whether the officer noticed his passing.

It’s not that there’s something to be communicated. It’s just way more tricky than you probably imagine.

Thus even though technically it’s a marvelously accurate word we need a better one for actual communication.

Via Tyler Cowen Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree points to an interesting-looking social psychology paper on entitlement and selfishness as it relates to a sense of victimization.

Does feeling like a victim make you selfish?:

Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Experiment 1, participants instructed to recall a time when their lives were unfair were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter with a supplementary task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored. In Experiment 2, the same manipulation increased intentions to engage in a number of selfish behaviors, and this effect was mediated by self-reported entitlement to obtain positive (and avoid negative) outcomes. In Experiment 3, participants who lost at a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason, and this effect was again mediated by entitlement.

via Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – Vol 97, Iss 5

Barker said it here.

Quick note: Barker may have been citing the print version. For whatever reason, though, the the article appears online in JPSP Vol 98, Issue 2: Victim entitlement to behave selfishly Zitek, Emily M.; Jordan, Alexander H.; Monin, Benoît; Leach, Frederick R. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 98(2), Feb 2010, 245-255.

I’m not going to cough up ~$12.00 to read the gated version but while digging around for more information it looks like the same results turn up quite a few similar studies of selfishness, fairness, and sense of entitlement. I ought to add it makes sense because it’s been my intuition, stated repeatedly online and in real life, that privilege and entitlement (stereotypical male in particular, kyriarchal in general) derives more from insecurity and resentment than the stereotypical spoon-in-your-mouth aristocratic sense of “the peasants are revolting.” And finally makes sense because I’ve been around my children and their friends for 13 years now… although that experience might be unscientifically anecdotal. :-)

At any rate, assuming the research supports the conclusion, and assuming it confirms similar prior research, it’s going to supports my contention that those who exercise privilege tend to perceive their actions as defending themselves from unfairness or attack. With the result that asking, say, men to “give up” their privileges never seems to work (and, when it does sort of work, seems really wimpy, half-hearted, or passive-aggressive. Or chivalrous, which would be by far the least productive!)

I think it also supports my developing strategy of attempting to recruit “oppressive” classes with the entirely reasonable (and often easily-observed) point that conditions that are worse for someone don’t necessarily imply that conditions are better for you.

So I was over at Jill’s I Blame the Patriarchy a couple of minutes ago and she made the point that even BDSM submissive men have privilege.

...whether he likes it or not, when Nigel hoists up his Dockers and saunters out of your dungeon into the public square, he’s enjoying the privileged status he has had the pleasure of internalizing all his life. You are not.

Read the quote in context here.

This is, of course, true in the same sense that her Nigel enjoys privileged status whether he’s sauntering out of a dungeon, sauntering down the aisle of a church, sauntering through the produce section at Whole Foods, or sauntering (or maybe wheeled on a stretcher) out of an alley where he was beaten and robbed.

Anyway, “privilege” is one of those words where I know it’s used in reference to imbalance of privilege — something you’ve got that I don’t, or I’ve got that you don’t. Or we’ve got that they don’t, and so on. And of course one of the fun things about the idea of kyriarchy is that depending on context privilege can be something almost anybody can have next to someone who doesn’t have it.

So what makes my question dumb is that I can’t figure out whether the idea, when the term “privilege” is used to indicate power imbalance, is to extend privilege to those who don’t have it, or take it away from those who do.

Incidentally just because it’s a dumb question doesn’t mean it’s a trivial one. Or a “just semantics” one. In theories of politics there are some pretty strong disagreements about privilege in the context of, say, rights vs. opportunities. For instance to turn an old cliché on its head, even when rich and poor alike have the right to sleep under railroad bridges — or give lap dances in Detroit — it’s generally considered a privilege not to have to do so.