On feminist collaboration with the state

As a veteran of the Watergate era, which I obsessively studied as a young pup, I am so deeply cynical and skeptical of our government, that I initially did not even believe these alleged rape-victims of Julian Assange truly existed. I am still profoundly skeptical, until I see an interview with Barbara Walters or equivalent. (I'll settle for a big blue dot over their faces, as was necessary for Patricia Bowman.)

As I have written before: Deja Vu all over again. The disintegration of the leftist/liberal coalition is in full swing. Obama is a one-termer, as was Jimmy Carter. History repeats itself, almost to the letter, but I can't quite figure out if this is the tragedy or the farce?

When I get confused, I flash back to 1979 and the disintegration of the 70s coalition. And then, it all makes sense.

Feminism was wild, woolly, crazy, brash, overbearing. The refrain was: I am woman, hear me ROAR. Not purr. Not blink our waterproofed-mascaraed eyes and meow nicely. ROAR. As the 80s dawned and Reaganism took over, roaring not only rated patriarchal punishment, but outright banishment. Get with the program, bitches, was the new refrain. 70s feminism became an embarrassment to the new careerist women of the 80s, who bleated incessantly, I'm a feminist but I love men! I love men! I don't hate men! I'm a feminist, but... and then finally FEMINISM as a term, as a philosophy, as a politics, was banished, too.

And something happened.

This phenomenon was first controversially chronicled by a woman I have since been told is "anti-feminist"--which is odd, since she was one of the few women who seemed to understand what the hell was going on. I refer to Katie Roiphe.

From The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism by Katie Roiphe:

The image that emerges from feminist preoccupations with rape and sexual harassment is that of women as victims, offended by a professor's dirty joke, verbally pressured into sex by peers. This image of a delicate woman bears a striking resemblance to that fifties ideal my mother and the other women of her generation fought so hard to get away from. They didn't like her passivity, her wide-eyed innocence. They didn't like the fact that she was perpetually offended by sexual innuendo. They didn't like her excessive need for protection. She represented personal, social and psychological possibilities collapsed, and they worked and marched, shouted and wrote, to make her irrelevant for their daughters. But here she is again, with her pure intentions and her wide eyes. Only this time it is feminists themselves who are breathing new life into her.

Self-described feminists ran to the state, to the patriarchy itself, to local police forces and courts that had never given a shit about women, to punish other men. Without apology. In fact, quite proudly. No political equivocations or similar excuses were given, i.e. we need mean guys to police other mean guys. Battered-women's shelters became beneficent arms of the therapeutic culture; police were suddenly seen as the good guys, keeping an eye on those other dangerous, brutal men. (The most horrific suffering in these situations came from battered women married to police officers, since those particular men had easy access to locations of safe-houses.) Radical volunteers at these shelters, even women who had initially organized them (such as Sue Urbas, R.I.P.) were suddenly persona non grata in the places they had started themselves. The experts and the social workers, acting as arms of the state, stepped in. (You can almost hear John Wayne: We'll take over now, little lady.) And they did. By the end of the 80s, they were in the process of doing the same thing to Alcoholics Anonymous and various other self-help organizations. The state, massive apparatus that it is, does not take well to being left out. And men, in particular, were NOT going to be left out of the project, any project.

By 1999 and the advent of LAW AND ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, the whole concept was solidified. The law is Our Friend. The state will bring sympathetic justice to raped women. We can trust them. This pro-state, pro-government propaganda has never abated.

If you grew up during that time, you don't know any different. You believe the government is there to help women. You do not believe that the government has its own agenda regarding feminism and women. If you say such things to young women, they will furrow their brows: but there are women police officers, they say. (Mariska Hargitay is popular for a reason, you know.) The concept of the state as an agent of repression, is utterly foreign to them. To say otherwise renders you some kind of lefty/anarchist nut, or worse, a conspiracy theorist. Not a realist.

As a result, the entire invasion of Afghanistan was given a properly feminist spin: Women are being abused by the Taliban! Of course, we must invade. Mavis Leno and other billionaire Hollywood feminists unabashedly called for military intervention.

~*~

To review: The US government is a repressive, carnivorous force.

Ask the women of: Japan, Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Iraq and Afghanistan. (I'm sure I'm missing a few interventions; how could we possibly keep track of them all?) And that is only a half-century's worth of military meddling. As I have written here before, the US government has had its fingers in the business of so many countries, only God knows the extent of it. And by giving our blessing to the state, by running to the state to settle our conflicts and making sure Mariska Hargitay and company have jobs and plenty of work to do, we collaborate. As US residents, we can't help some collaboration (if you don't pay the IRS and fund their wars, they will put you in jail for tax evasion), but other, more insidious forms of collaboration CAN be directly avoided.

Yes, the word for today is COLLABORATION.

The feminists who are currently mouthing well-intentioned variations of: Yes, we know Julian Assange has a big red target on his back placed there by the US government for exposing war crimes against unnamed dark women in Asia with (waving impatiently) smart bombs and stuff, but we must hear out the complaints of these (Daisy first believed nonexistent) Swedish white women who are accusing him, because, well... what would Mariska Hargitay do? What have we been TAUGHT to do?

Listen to the women!

Well, I do listen to women. I listen to the victims of US repression and violence. I listen to the victims of rape in other countries, women who claim their country and governments have been totally destroyed by an advanced, high-tech military campaign financed by MY money, MY government, without MY consent. Have you written about that, American feminists? Have you denounced war, made in your name? Have you profiled THOSE rape victims? Have you believed those victims and made them the centerpiece of your political campaigns? And why haven't you?

Certain feminists have actually written more about Michael Moore declaring the rape allegations are "hooey" --than they have against the war(s) and US imperialism against the unnamed dark women of the world, which is certainly NOT hooey. They seem far more upset over Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann saying predictable and stupid guy-shit on TV, than they are about the wholesale rape and assault of entire fucking countries. Because you know, American feminists should have the right to watch TV without being offended! (Since when?) The fact that these feminists are going after two erstwhile progressives, is pretty gross. Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly trash women and feminism every single day, but somehow, that isn't quite as upsetting.

This disgusting state of affairs has made DEAD AIR almost too nauseated to continue. And then, yes, dear readers, Daisy rallied.

What made me rally? I saw a picture. I decided to share it here. The photo above is of one Dorothy Wetzel Hunt.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, does anyone remember Dorothy Hunt, the wife of E. Howard Hunt?

Dorothy Hunt died. Dorothy Hunt was expendable. Just like all those women in Afghanistan are considered expendable. And the women of all the countries I listed above, were also expendable. American women deserve to live in comfort, and goddamn anybody, male or female, Michael Moore or Dorothy Hunt, who stand in the way.

I can only remember one feminist, Robin Morgan, mentioning Dorothy in a poem. Period. No other feminists gave a shit. She was probably a Republican, after all. No question, she was a CIA agent:

Just before Hunt boarded the aircraft she purchased $250,000 in flight insurance payable to E. Howard Hunt. In his book Undercover (1974), Hunt claims he was unaware that his wife planned to do this. In the book he also tried to explain what his wife was doing with $10,000 in her purse. According to Hunt it was money to be invested with Hal Carlstead in "two already-built Holiday Inns in the Chicago area".

Nixon administration figure Chuck Colson told TIME magazine that "I don't say this to my people. They'd think I'm nuts. I think they [the CIA] killed Dorothy Hunt."[2]Also killed in the December 1972 plane crash was CBS News Correspondent Michele Clark and Illinois Congressman George W. Collins.

"This was probably the most investigated airplane crash in history" said Deputy Cook County Coroner John Haigh. [3] National Transportation Safety Board ruled it to be pilot error. [4]

Sure it was. (Holiday Inns! Ohhh, that is perfect.)

And how thoughtful of Dorothy to purchase all that life insurance just in the nick of time to pay her husband's lawyers! What a nice lady.

I have often imagined how Dorothy felt, boarding that plane and suddenly GETTING IT. What was it was like to know you had that giant red target on your back (the same one now on Julian's back) placed there by the US government? This was the entity she had worked for, sacrificed for, and thoroughly believed in. A lot like The Mafia. It's your life, and then, finally, it is your death.

And so, I write this for Dorothy Hunt. We will never know the truth about your death, Dorothy. And I apologize for all the feminists who didn't bother to investigate. Mariska Hargitay-on-the-trail does not apply to everyone.

This is for all the feminists who believed in ((cough)) "pilot error"; all the feminists who shrugged because you had the wrong politics and the wrong husband.

Similarly, we see that liberal white US feminists are currently picking and choosing which victims are more important than others. Millions of victims of US carnage should rightly rate a few more blog posts than Michael Moore acting like Michael Moore, you know?

My question to all of you is: why haven't they?

As I said, I am profoundly skeptical. I see the hundreds of probably-astroturfed blog post replies with all of the not-linked commenters predictably stating RIGHT ON, we are glad you are standing up to Assange the bully-rapist! How many of these posts are by government plants or right-wing apologists? Are you absolutely certain you are pursuing the right course of action? Do you see that you are (coincidentally!) weakening the individual who has exposed the war crimes of the government? Do these war crimes bother you at all; have you READ the Wikileaks documents? Women's bodies are littered throughout. Do you care about them? (And if you do, why have you not written about them and said so?) Julian's organization, Wikileaks, has exposed horrific war crimes. Why are you going after him, with the blessings of your repressive government? Is your attack on Julian ultimately going to endear you to the women of the world, women unfortunate to have been born on the wrong side, women who have been left without running water and whose children have been blown up?

Oh, please.

They are using you.

And they will continue to use you with aplomb and make sure you get lots of attention, blog links and air time. They will flatter your ego and put you on radio and TV. In fact, you can work for the government right up until the moment of your elimination, when you are no longer useful. Ask Dorothy. Ask her as she was standing at that airline desk, her heart pounding, purchasing all that life insurance.

I'm sure Julian has purchased his.

Andrea Dworkin on Transgender

Photo from The Boston Phoenix.



There has been a lot of heated discussion among Second-Wave radical feminists, concerning when transphobic theory "took over" the discourse. Women who claim to be of the hard-core Andrea Dworkin school of radical feminism, steadfastly adhere to the concept that trans people are not the gender they say they are and will not use preferred pronouns; some go so far as to edit comments on their blogs and change the pronouns, for example. Many of these Second-Wavers believe it is reactionary to "endorse" (for lack of a better word) the gender identities of trans folks. Much talk about the "gender binary" (male/female, historically constructed as mirror images, opposites, yin and yang) and how transgenderism "upholds" this binary, etc etc etc.

For many of these feminists, the late Andrea Dworkin is something of a patron saint. One well-known radfem uses a quote from Dworkin on her blog, to let it be known she is a "take no prisoners" sorta gal. I have read many, many quotes by Dworkin on Second-Wave radical feminist blogs.

But it is telling that they carefully leave out the quote(s) below, even though they claim to have all of her books.

In conversations with trans feminists, I have continually assured them that many Second-Wave radical feminists were NOT transphobic, and actually empathetic to trans people. However, I've had trouble finding any proof, other than my own memory and a few trans friends of Kate Millett's. Depressingly, the more I searched, I found much more proof that radical feminists were mean and vicious (i.e. Robin Morgan's lynch-mob rhetoric concerning trans women in her book titled Going Too Far). The Janice Raymond/Robin Morgan/Mary Daly faction seems to have "won" the transgender round of radical feminist theory, by default.

And so, it brings me great pleasure, after a very long search, to finally have the following quote IN MY HAND, not just from memory. Thank God for Amazon.com and the used books option, since this is long out of print.

The book is WOMAN HATING, copyright 1974, EP Dutton, New York City, ISBN 0-525-47423-4. The book jacket contains approving blurbs from: Phyllis Chesler, Ellen Frankfort, Florynce Kennedy, Audre Lorde, Kate Millett and Gloria Steinem.

I find it interesting that Morgan did not provide a blurb, since she and Dworkin were good friends. (Was this passage the reason?)

Note: In the 70s, at the time of this writing, the accepted terms were "transsexual" (instead of transgender) and "hermaphrodite" (instead of intersex)--and these are the terms Dworkin uses.

~*~

First, Dworkin believed that the human race is multi-sexual, and to maintain patriarchy, these multiple genders must be "contained" within the two-gender binary. Transgendered people, then, are the people who have fallen through the cracks, so to speak, who do not fit into this rigid system.

These excerpts are all from the suitably Dworkinesque-titled chapter Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking and Community:

Hormone and chromosome research, attempts to develop new means of human reproduction (life created in, or considerably supported by, the scientist's laboratory), work with transsexuals, and studies of formation of gender identity in children provide basic information which challenges the notion that there are two discrete biological sexes. That information threatens to transform the traditional biology of sex difference into the radical biology of sex similarity. That is not to say there is one sex, but that there are many. The evidence which is germane here is simple. The words "male" and "female," "man" and "woman," are used only because as yet there are no others.

She discusses the facts that there are intersexed people, hairy women, feminine men, indistinct genitalia, etc.

We can presume then that there is a great deal about human sexuality to be discovered, and that our notion of two discrete biological sexes cannot remain intact. (Note: The following sentence is underlined repeatedly in my used copy.) We can presume then that we will discover cross-sexed phenomena in proportion to our ability to see them.

In addition, we can account for the relative rarity of hermaphrodites in the general population, for the consistency of male-female somatotypes that we do find, and for the relative rarity of cross-sexed characteristics in the general population (though they occur with more frequency than we are now willing to imagine) by recognizing that there is a process of cultural selection which, for people, supersedes natural selection in importance. Cultural selection, as opposed to natural selection, does not necessarily serve to improve the species or to ensure survival. It does necessarily serve to uphold cultural norms and to ensure that deviant somatotypes and cross-sexed characteristics are systematically bred out of the population.

Later in this section, she makes a statement in italics, for emphasis:

We are, clearly, a multi-sexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.

And then, we get to the section titled Transsexuality, which she starts off by quoting "a transsexual friend":

How can I really care if we win "the Revolution"? Either way, any way, there will be no place for me.

Keeping in mind there were far fewer uncloseted transgendered people in the 70s, I find the following paragraphs to be pretty radical and trans-positive stuff:

Transsexuality is currently considered a gender disorder, that is, a person learns a gender role which contradicts his/her visible sex. It is a "disease" with a cure: a sex-change operation will change the person's visible sex and make it consonant with the person's felt identity.

Since we know very little about sex identity, and since psychiatrists are committed to the propagation of the cultural structure as it is, it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgement that transsexuality is caused by a faulty socialization. More probably, transsexuality is caused by a faulty society. Transsexuality can be defined as one particular formation of our general multisexuality which is unable to achieve its natural development because of extremely adverse social conditions.

There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency as a transsexual. There are 3 crucial points here.

One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition.

Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised.

Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disppear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.

~*~

I have noticed that many radical feminists latch on to her third point, overlooking the first two. Further, they make the third point prescriptive, rather than descriptive. Dworkin obviously meant that transgenderism will "disappear" after her androgynous feminist revolution, not that we should make actual trans people disappear RIGHT NOW. I think she is very clear on that.

When trans feminists initially read these words in the 70s, it is understandable that they felt welcome in the feminist movement. When they attempted to take their place among us Second-Wavers, they were rejected, trashed, outed, and accused of being "rapists" simply for being trans persons. Feminists who loved what Andrea wrote about pornography (including her legal activism), seemed to overlook what she said about trans people, and/or assume she had the views of Morgan, Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, et. al.

No.

Let the record show, once and for all, that she did not.

~*~

Everyone is welcome to discuss this post, regardless of your views. But the ground rules are: RESPECT FOR EVERYONE, including preferred pronouns. No trans-baiting and yes, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

Make Andrea proud, and show some empathy for those people in a primary emergency within patriarchy.

Thank you.