Feminist Bodies and The Beauty Taboo

Sarah: Thanks for these links, I will definitely check them out. I had heard about that odd moment in history where Dworkin and MacKinnon teamed up in a coalition with the Right wing conservatives in order to ban pornography… an interesting meme analysis could be done on that alone(-:
I don't know as much about Dworkin, and perhaps it was her that made that exact quote (My gender and politics teacher ascribed it to MacKinnon); either way I would argue that MacKinnon shares similar views. For instance the following quote from “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State” (1989). 

“A theory of sexuality becomes feminist methodologically…to the extent it treats sexuality as a social construct of male power: defined by men, forced on women, and constitutive of the meaning of gender. Such an approach centers feminism on the perspective of the subordination of women to men as it identifes sex–that is, the sexuality of dominance and submission–as crucial, as a fundamental, as on some level definitive, in that process.” (p.128) 

She then goes on to say,
“This approach identifies not just a sexuality that is shaped under conditions of gender inequality but reveals this sexuality itself to be the dynamic of the inequality of the sexes.”

That said, I haven't read a ton of her work so if you have other thoughts on her I'd love to hear them. I think it is important to debate these scholars and make sure we understand their stance properly.

Maze: Thanks for your comments on this. I agree that in order to develop as women (and as men) there has to be a radical shift in consciousness (you've labeled this “mind”, but I would argue it also intimately involves the body). But this radical shift in consciousness requires an understanding of development, one that acknowledges our developmental capacity to evolve into wider and more inclusive perspectives. This is also true for our embodiment, which for me, requires that we go beyond simplistic “flatland” views of reality.
 
To argue that everything should be flat, is to loose all ability to make qualifying distinctions about consciousness itself. For instance, we probably both agree that a worldview that sees women's equal legal status as a political imperative (The modern stance of John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft), is a more desirable and embracing perspective than a world where women have no legal status because they are not reguarded as equal citizens, even amongst many women themselves! (Traditional socieites); thus, we are making a claim that one worldview is “better” than another. This implies a hierarchy, albiet a natural evolutionary heirarchy rather than an oppressive heirarchy.

An evolutionary model also implies that we get out of blaming others for where we are and instead see ourselves within an evolutionary context of growing to goodness, growing into wider circles of care and responsibility.

Although the idea that everything should be “flat” looks appealing on the surface, I would argue that it actually is a deep diservice to our potential for growth because we loose our ability to make proper discernments in today's complex world of multi-perspectives. In particular relevance to my post, it doesn't allow us to make qualifying judgments about different feminist approaches to “women's equality” (i.e., 1st, 2nd, and 3rd wave feminism). The idea is that all these perspectives can be included (which I think is what you where trying to get at when you wrote of wanting to eliminate hierarchies), and yet at the same time, the develpmental model gives us a wider view to be able to recognize that all these views are also partial. A developmental model gives us the tools to be able to recognize when these partial truths overstep their boundaries and try to make themselves the only perspective, or the whole perspective.

Does that make sense?

Thanks for posting this Maze, and as I said, I think you raise many important issues that can and should be addressed. I'll try to touch on some of the things you said and also bridge out more on what I mean by an developmental/integral perspective, and how it might allow us to look at the issue differently. Of course, this topic is so HUGE, that I will inevitably fail to address or answer all or any of your concerns, hopefully it will keep the dialogue going though.

So to start, I totally agree with you about the trend of women (especially in business and politics) to enter into masculine dominated systems only to end up becoming more like men than really bringing a feminist critique or a more “feminine” approach to these largely male dominated work feilds. It is interesting because this is also true for many of the women who entered the art world back in the 60s and 70s. The art world had been pretty much male dominated and as women first began to enter it, they were encouraged to mold themselves into accepted male styles of painting. That is why I am so interested in these rare women in the 60's and 70's who really blew the art world wide open by using their naked female bodies as their art material, a truly vulnerable and courageous act at the time.

Anyways, the point is that the issue for me isn't so much about “men” and “women” (in this sense that: men=patriarchy, oppression, and women=matriarchal nurturance, loving) I am more interested in how both men and women have co-created what we term the “patriarchal order” by virtue of the positions they have taken in up in society throughout history, as well as how both sexes maintain this system by their own choice (i.e. women becoming men). I am also interested in how that “patriarchal order” can be shaken at the foundation through new emergences in growth and consciousness (on both the part of men and women).

This is not to deny real biological differences between men and women (something that postmodern feminists often do when they try to make sex and gender into a pure social construction). There are “real” biological differences, like the fact that men have more than 10X the testosterone running through their veins than women do which creates a very real biological “aggressiveness” at the earlier stages of development. We also can't deny the biological realities of women that make them more “dependent” on men to take care of them due to pregnancy and lesser physical strength. And it is true that these biological realities are a very big part of forming male/female relations at the earlier stages of  our development in history.

Of course, as we grew/developed into modern societies we began to see the first real call for gender equality (i.e, John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft). And in postmodern societies (60s onward), we saw the rise of feminism truly gain strength because of techological advances like the Pill, which made women able to be “more than mothers”. These conditions allowed women to begin entering more and more into the male dominated feilds like work and intellectual inquiry.

Part of what you point to is what became the “assimilation” of women into patriarchal systems. This is true, if you think of that 1st wave of feminism it was really working on getting women out of the private realm and into the public realm. There was a huge focus on women developing their reasoning faculties and entering into the political realm (voting and working). In some sense it was an argument to “free” women from the oppressive constraints of the home and get them into the all important public sphere.

Now, in the sixties and seventies we saw the 2nd wave arising out of more activist imperatives (the time of the civil rights movement, etc.) The second wave became concerned with just the issue you are raising: by bringing women out of the private into the public realm aren't we just assimilating them into the male system, and also devaluing the female position in the home as “less mature, less important”. So this was really the beginning of more social movements that played outside of the sphere of the “central political realm”. This is also where we hear the first famous statement “the private is political”. In essence, women are different and should seek to transform public institutions (which are patriarchal and unhealthy) by integrating “women's nurturing and communal way” into all forms of the public sphere.

Now just for fun, we could look at these two waves (leaving out the third wave for right now) from a developmental standpoint. The first wave brought women into the public sphere, which was essential before they would be able to even see the importance of integrating the private with the public. We could refer to the public and private as relating in some way to “masuline” and “feminine” approaches/orientations within the realm of work and relationships. And the feminist movement, at its best was attempting to better integrate the two (although many feminists in the 2nd wave often went the other extreme and tried to eradicate the masculine).

But perhaps the most important aspect to note from the developmental standpoint, is that the “masculine” and “feminine” orientations themselves grow and develop. Thus, at the earlier levels masculine modes of relating (aggression, domination, etc) seems synonomous with “men” and feminine modes of relating (nurturing, dependency) seems synonomous with “women”. But the masculine and feminine modes of relating and knowing are not static, they actually develop as we do, bringing more depth in pespective, more inclusiveness and more flexiblity (see Carol Gilligan's work on male and female moral development for a really good understanding of this). Ultimately, as we move from pre-conventional, to conventional to post-conventional to what Gilligan called “Integrative” stages of development, we also are able to integrate the masculine and feminine within us. In this way we can move more easily between both masculine (abstract thinking, autonomous self orientation) and feminine (relational bonding, intuitive reasoning) orientations, modes, etc. Biology still exists, as well as those earlier issues of aggressivemess and dependency, but they are also subsumed within an ever expanding growth in consciousness that continually changes the nature of relations between the sexes.

And of course at the ultimate levels, the masculine and feminine (Shiva and Shakti in the Hindu Tantric tradition) are nothing but two sides of of the same coin: Consciousness and Light, inseparable aspects of nondual consciousness. Here masculine and feminine become completely integrated, ultimately realized as never separated. Think of Yin and Yang, the basic integration of force and receptivity, willful discipline and surrender, deemed necessary to any spiritual approach.

So you can see, even in this very rough outline of generalizations, that approaching the issue of sex and gender is dynamic, not static. You can really take this all the way up and all the way down, and “masculine” and “feminine” will mean something different depending on which standpoint you look from, which level of consciousness you are asking the question.

All that said, I have to ask: Do these rough generalizations actually help here?
Do you think the developmental view could be useful for a background context in which we could address your questions Maze? I ask because I still so much struggle to take the massive amount of information I read and try to congeal it down into relatively sizable summaries that are easy, clear and useful for others. I sometimes wonder whether trying to do these big overviews is really all that useful on forums like these or whether I am being too “ambitious”.