Some Cliche or Other

While Anne Frank may be the face of the Holocaust of European Jewry, the memory of the experiential reality of the Holocaust is male. The way we conceptualize and remember the concentration camp experience is constructed by male narratives. More Jewish men survived the Holocaust than Jewish women. Due to attitudes towards education in the interwar period, more male Jewish survivors had the education and literary capital needed to craft enduring narratives of their experiences than did female Jewish survivors. There are three foundational male Holocaust survival narratives: Night by Elie Wiesel, Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, and Maus by Art Spiegelman about his father’s Holocaust experience. Never have I seen those three men and their narratives used as a joke, or a meme, or a cheap narrative device, or as self-promotion by an American pop star. These men are revered, and their narratives taken extremely seriously. And none of them, none of them have been used in a prop in a story about terminally ill gentile American teenagers. They survived, in perhaps the type of heroic arc a John Green protagonist would yearn for. Yet Augustus doesn’t look to them. He doesn’t share a kiss with his girlfriend at Auschwitz. He shared a kiss with her in the Anne Frank House. Anne Frank is not a prop. She is not a symbol, she is not a teenager who happened to die of an illness, and she is not one of the canonical Jewish male survivors. She is one of many millions of Jewish women and girls who were industrially murdered like livestock, incinerated, and left in an unmarked grave.

"Isaac Newton, in his famous aphorism … "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," expressed the mode by which the thought of men was shaped into the major concepts of Western civilization. Men created written history and benefited from the transmittal of knowledge from one generation to the other, so that each great thinker could "stand on the shoulders of giants" … Women were denied knowledge of their history, and thus each woman had to argue as though no woman before her had ever thought or written. Women had to use their energy to reinvent the wheel, over and over again, generation after generation. Men argued with the giants that preceded them; women argued against the oppressive weight of millennia of patriarchal thought, which denied them authority, even humanity, and when they had to argue with the "great men" of the past, deprived of the empowerment, strength and knowledge women of the past could have offered them. Since they could not ground their argument in the work of women before them, thinking women of each generation had to waste their time, energy, and talent on constructing their argument anew. Yet, they never abaondoned the effort. Generation after generation, in the face of recurrent discontinuties, women thought their wayaround and out from under patriarchal thought."

Women generally don’t get to think of men as less than human, not because we’re inherently better people, not because our magical feminine energy makes us more empathetic, but because patriarchy doesn’t let us. We’re really not allowed to just not consider men’s feelings, or to suppose for an instant that a man’s main or only relevance to us might be his prospects as a sexual partner. That’s just not the way this culture expects us to think about men. Men get to be whole people at all times. Women get to be objects, or symbols, or alluring aliens whose responses you have to game to “get” what you want. This is why Silicon Valley Sexism. This is why Pick Up Artists. This is why Rape Culture.

When you ask [Socialists] how domestic work can be organized, they answer: “Each can do ‘his own work.’ My wife manages the house; the wives of bourgeois will do as much.” And if it is a bourgeois playing at Socialism who speaks, he will add, with a gracious smile to his wife: “Is it not true, darling, that you would do without a servant in a Socialist society? You would work like the wife of our good comrade Paul or the wife of John the carpenter?” Servant or wife, man always reckons on woman to do the house-work. […] Why has woman’s work never been of any account? […] Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity to think “of those kitchen arrangements,” which they have rayed on the shoulders of that drudge-woman. […] Let us fully understand that a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words Liberty, Equality, Solidarity would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.

In effect, blaming women for their own suffering is marketed as an innovative yet ancient cosmic insight, the secret to becoming ‘conscious’. Self-blame becomes the spiritual evolution of the Self. Blaming other women is transformed into a generously loving act, an act of wisdom and friendship, a sharing of enlightened consciousness, This ‘empowering’ cult of victim-blaming cuts women’s political consciousness off at the knees. Feminist consciousness is implicitly framed as declasse, a sign that one is not ‘conscious’ or spiritually evolved, that one belongs to an emotionally inferior class of women that one is not ‘feminine’. In order to evolve one’s consciousness (and succeed in love and work) one must not only distance oneself from feminism, but also secure one’s status within the evolved group by diagnosing the suffering of women as an individual failure to take responsibility for their lives. The goal is a mass cleansing of the female mind of all revolutionary thought, of critical thinking, above all of a feminist consciousness which does not forget, which does not forgive, which seeks collective justice.

The truth is that oppression is a political reality. It is a state of power arrangements in which some people are on the bottom, and they are exploited and used by people who are on the top, or who are on top of them. In this country, where everything has to be psychologized, and also used by sociologists, we don't talk about oppression as a political reality. Instead, we talk about people being victims. We say so-and-so was victimized. So-and-so was a victim of rape. And it's an all right word. It's a true word. If you were raped, you were victimized. You damned well were. You were a victim. It doesn't mean that you are a victim in the metaphysical sense, in your state of being, as an intrinsic part of your essence and existence. It means somebody hurt you. They injured you. And if it happens to you systematically because you are born a woman, it means that you live in a political system that uses pain and humiliation to control and to hurt you. Now, one of the things that has happened to us is that a whole bunch of people have said not that we are victims but that we feel victimized. We feel it. It's a state of mind. It's a state of emotional overreaction. We feel it. It's not that something happened to us; instead, we have a state of mind that's bad. And feminists are responsible for this state of mind, because we make women feel victimized. When we point out that there is a rape every three minutes, that a woman is beaten every eighteen seconds in this country, that's very bad for women because it makes them feel victimized. And we're not supposed to be bad and make women feel bad. This is the ultimate mind fuck. It takes away all the ground that we can stand on to say: "We have a political problem. We are going to find a political solution. And we are going to have to change the society that we live in to find it." If you take a bunch of people and suddenly you find out that one is being beaten every eighteen seconds, that one is being raped every three minutes, that ten billion dollars a year now is being spent on watching them being raped for fun, watching them being exploited and objectified and violated for fun, and you don't feel a little bit put upon, I mean a little bit frazzled around the edges by that, it seems to me that one would be not only a victim but half dead, totally numb, and a true fool. Exploitation is real and identifiable, and fighting it makes you strong, not weak. Sexual violation is real, and it is intolerable, and fighting it makes you strong, not weak. Woman hating is real, and it's systematized in pornography and in acts of sexual violence against women, and fighting it makes you strong, not weak. And the right and the left both - whether it's Phyllis Schlafly lecturing on how if you had been virtuous you wouldn't have been sexually harassed or the left explaining to you that you should celebrate your sexuality and forget about rape, forget about it, don't have a bad attitude, don't feel like a victim - they both want women to accept the status quo, to live in the status quo, and not to organize the political resistance that I talked about earlier. Because the first step in resisting exploitation is recognizing it, seeing it, and knowing it, and not lying about where it is sitting on you. And the second step is caring enough about other women that if today you are fine, and yesterday you were fine, but your sister hanging from the tree is not fine, that you will go the distance to cut her down.

Predictably, several men rushed in to inform me that it was “just a joke.” Yes. I am aware. It’s the kind of “joke” told by people who think rape is funny, who think rape is a punchline for them to wield for sport, who think the threat of sexual violence is a fitting punishment for mouthy women. It’s not a joke that skewers the atrocity of rape. It’s not a joke that somehow exists in a contextless vacuum, unrelated to the climate of dull, throbbing fear that circumscribes women’s lives. In fact, this “joke” is entirely dependent on the weight of the word “rape” and the sick flutter it stirs up in women’s chests. It says, “Quiet, sex thing.” It says, “Your humanity is illusory, it is conditional, it is ours to mete out as we please, and we can take it away if you don’t behave.” It’s the kind of joke told by rapists.

… The self-depreciation which inclines women individually and collectively to find every cause more important than our own is deeply connected with the myth of feminine evil. Women have been conditioned to see any act that affirms the worth of the female ego as blameworthy. Female ambition can “pass” only when it is diluted into vicarious ambition through the male or on behalf of patriarchal values. To counteract this mass-produced self-depreciation, women will have to build female pride, raising up our own standards of how it is good to be a woman. Our failure has consisted in not actively affirming the female ego. If we must feel shame, it should be for this. The raising up of women’s new image and pride means giving prime energy to our own cause and refusing to see this as an illegitimate rival to other causes. It is not a rival to any truly revolutionary movement, but goes to the root of the evils such movements are trying to eradicate.

These men don’t seem to be afraid in that rational, “Shit, I could really hurt someone! Better be careful” way. They seem afraid in a reactive way, almost out of spite–“See, look how much you’ve fucked up my life! Happy now?” They seem afraid because they keep interpreting consent education in the most negative and life-fucking sort of way. They seem afraid because they still don’t understand that their female partners are human beings with their own subjective experiences, experiences that they would do well to listen to and try to understand. ...I want them to let us write the story together with them, rather than writing each chapter themselves and then handing it to us to read, perhaps accepting some critique if they are especially gracious.

The exploitative sexual caste system could not be perpetuated without the consent of the victims as well as of the dominant sex, and such consent is obtained through sex role socialization - a conditioning process which begins to operate from the moment we are born, and which is enforced by most institutions. Parents, friends, teachers, textbook authors and illustrators, advertisers, those who control the mass media, toy and clothes manufacturers, professionals such as doctors and psychologists - all contribute to the socialization process. This happens through dynamics that are largely uncalculated and unconscious, yet which reinforce the assumptions, attitudes, stereotypes, customs, and arrangements of sexually hierarchical society.

Thus the question Freud never asked is the question that defines sexuality in a feminist perspective: what do men want? Pornography provides an answer. Pornography permits men to have whatever they want sexuality. It is their “truth about sex”… It shows how men see the world, how in seeing it they access and possess it, and how this is an act of dominance over it. It shows what men want and gives it to them. From the testimony of the pornography, what men want is: women bound, women battered, women tortured, women humiliated, women degraded and defiled, women killed. Or, to be fair to the soft core, women sexually accessible, have-able, there for them, wanting to be taken and used, with perhaps just a little light bondage. Each violation of women- rape, battery, prostitution, child sexual abuse, sexual harassment- is made sexuality, made sexy, fun, and liberating of women’s true nature in the pornography. Each specifically victimized and vulnerable group of women, each tabooed target group- Black women, Asian women, Latin women, Jewish women, pregnant women, disabled women, retarded women, poor women, old women, fat women, women in women’s jobs, prostitutes, little girls- distinguishes pornographic genres and subthemes, classified according to diverse customers’ favorite degradation. Women are made into and coupled with anything considered lower than human: animals, objects, children, and (yes) other women. Anything women have claimed as their own- motherhood, athletics, traditional men’s jobs, lesbianism, feminism- is made specifically sexy, dangerous, provocative, punished, made men’s in pornography.

“Why should women live in anticipatory dread and hypervigilence?” she writes in the book’s concluding chapter. Would it not be just, Sheehy asks, “to shift the risk of death to those men whose aggressions have created such dehumanizing fear in their female partners?” ...Battered women can justly kill abusive partners “because a woman in that circumstance has already lived in captivity,” she said. “She’s already lived in a form of imprisonment and enslavement in a relationship like that.” Sheehy likened women in abusive relationships to prisoners of war. “We would never say of a prisoner of war that it’s not just that she or he kill their captor to escape. It is just to kill to escape that kind of enslavement.” ...Charging battered women with murder is “so arbitrary when you know that there’s no other way that a woman can spontaneously defend her life,” Sheehy said. “Men can kill women with their bare hands, and they do. Women almost never kill men that way. They can’t,” she said [...] “It’s not fair to characterize it as the most heinous form of murder, because it may be their own route to survival.”[...] “When women kill to save their own lives, they assert that they matter, that their lives count — even more than the lives of their abusers.” After all their abusers have done to them, “they have somehow taken a stand for their own humanity and saved themselves.”

Pornography also eroticizes male supremacy. It makes dominance and subordination feel like sex; it makes hierarchy feel like sex; it makes force and violence feel like sex; it makes hate and terrorism feel like sex; it makes inequality feel like sex. Pornography keeps sexism sexy. It keeps sexism necessary for some people to have sexual feelings. It makes reciprocity make you go limp. It makes mutuality leave you cold. It makes tenderness and intimacy and caring make you feel like you’re going to disappear into a void. It makes justice the opposite of erotic; it makes injustice a sexual thrill.

Performing femininity serves a dual purpose alongside misogyny: it’s also a class signifier. A woman’s appearance and dress has always been tied to social status. Corsets, crinolines, heavy dresses, elaborate hairstyles, foot binding - all of it has enforced one clear message: the feminine ideal is that of helplessness. The less able to breathe, to walk, to run, and therefore to work, the higher a woman’s status. Fashion is classism applied to a woman’s appearance.

Abortion foes force a brain-dead woman to stay on life support to incubate her fetus An Irish woman described by her physicians as “clinically dead” is being kept on a ventilator against her family’s wishes — all so that she can function as an incubator for the 16-week-old fetus she was carrying when she died.

Dear Dad, I want to let you know first of all that I love you and forgive you for what this has done in my life. I also wanted to let you know exactly what your porn use has done to my life. You may think that this effects only you, or even your and mom’s relationships. But it has had a profound impact on me and all of my siblings as well. I found your porn on the computer somewhere around the age of 12 or so, just when I was starting to become a young woman. First of all, it seemed very hypocritical to me that you were trying to teach me the value of what to let into my mind in terms of movies, yet here you were entertaining your mind with this junk on a regular basis. Your talks to me about being careful with what I watched meant virtually nothing. Because of pornography, I was aware that mom was not the only woman you were looking at. I became acutely aware of your wandering eye when we were out and about. This taught me that all men have a wandering eye and can’t be trusted. I learned to distrust and even dislike men for the way they perceived women in this way. As far as modesty goes, you tried to talk with me about how my dress affects those around me and how I should value myself for what I am on the inside. Your actions however told me that I would only ever truly be beautiful and accepted if I looked like the women on magazine covers or in porn. Your talks with me meant nothing and in fact, just made me angry. As I grew older, I only had this message reinforced by the culture we live in. That beauty is something that can only be achieved if you look like “them”. I also learned to trust you less and less as what you told me didn’t line up with what you did. I wondered more and more if I would ever find a man who would accept me and love me for me and not just a pretty face. When I had friends over, I wondered how you perceived them. Did you see them as my friends, or did you see them as a pretty face in one of your fantasies? No girl should ever have to wonder that about the man who is supposed to be protecting her and other women in her life.

…it is contrary to reason and experience to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner.