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alixtii1. Libraries as represented by the ALA oppose filtering. Libraries which filter in order to preserve government funds are indeed giving in to the Man and cooperating with a moral evil--although in very many cases the lesser moral evil, i.e. it's better to give in to the Man in the short term than keep people who need information from it completely (works of mercy get in the way of social action), and this should not be read as a direct criticism of those who have to make this or other difficult decisions. Making it easier for libraries to censor should not be paraded as a moral good, however.
2. Private corporations can censor. Think of a television station--who are the people who make sure you don't say bad words on the air, even if it's cable? Yep, they're called censors. It's not a freedom of speech issue when private entities censor--or rather, it is a freedom of speech issue but not a first amendment issue, and we have don't have a right to freedom of speech from private entities. That said, private entities whose sole function is to provide people with a platform for otherwise undifferentiated communication and still engage in the curtailment of free speech within their area of control may still be engaged in a moral evil. Just because something's legal doesn't make it okay.
3. It is not illegal to make protected speech available to minors on the internet. I could be wrong about this: certainly Congress seems to be passing a new law, and the courts striking it down, every six months or so. IANAL, but my talking point is that it is not illegal, and insofar as it is illegal (which it very well may be this week) the laws making it so are unconstitutional. That's not saying much--I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU and there are a whole lot of laws I think are (or should be) unconstitutional, and for the most part I just have to suck it up and abide by them anyway, because the battle was lost back in 1847 or something. But there's some indication that at least in previous years some courts, including the Supreme Court, have actually agreed with me on this issue. And if this is true, people engaged in certain types of moral evil cannot even have the excuse that it was legally compelled of them.
4. As said in #1, cooperating with moral evil by obeying an unconstitutional law can be absolutely necessary--morally required, even--if you are Rural Village Public Library which absolutely depends on federal funds to give poor children access to reading material. Not so much if you're a million-dollar private corporation out to make a buck. Just saying.
5. Sex being separated from other things which are "adult" (whatever that means), like having a job or caring about politics or falling in love, as something from which children need to be protected is, without a doubt, a form of misogyny, which is a moral evil.
6. I'm wondering if using the terms "NC-17" and "R" to rate fic according to sexual explicitness and other spectra is cooperating with a moral evil. It certainly isn't intended to mean "No children under 17" or "Restricted" when I use them, but that is their etymology and that meaning is out there and there is the (mostly) value-neutral alternative (if less precisely graduated, if you can get less precisely graduated than the MPAA system) "Not work safe" available. I'm thinking no--etymology isn't destiny--but it is food for thought.
2. Private corporations can censor. Think of a television station--who are the people who make sure you don't say bad words on the air, even if it's cable? Yep, they're called censors. It's not a freedom of speech issue when private entities censor--or rather, it is a freedom of speech issue but not a first amendment issue, and we have don't have a right to freedom of speech from private entities. That said, private entities whose sole function is to provide people with a platform for otherwise undifferentiated communication and still engage in the curtailment of free speech within their area of control may still be engaged in a moral evil. Just because something's legal doesn't make it okay.
3. It is not illegal to make protected speech available to minors on the internet. I could be wrong about this: certainly Congress seems to be passing a new law, and the courts striking it down, every six months or so. IANAL, but my talking point is that it is not illegal, and insofar as it is illegal (which it very well may be this week) the laws making it so are unconstitutional. That's not saying much--I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU and there are a whole lot of laws I think are (or should be) unconstitutional, and for the most part I just have to suck it up and abide by them anyway, because the battle was lost back in 1847 or something. But there's some indication that at least in previous years some courts, including the Supreme Court, have actually agreed with me on this issue. And if this is true, people engaged in certain types of moral evil cannot even have the excuse that it was legally compelled of them.
4. As said in #1, cooperating with moral evil by obeying an unconstitutional law can be absolutely necessary--morally required, even--if you are Rural Village Public Library which absolutely depends on federal funds to give poor children access to reading material. Not so much if you're a million-dollar private corporation out to make a buck. Just saying.
5. Sex being separated from other things which are "adult" (whatever that means), like having a job or caring about politics or falling in love, as something from which children need to be protected is, without a doubt, a form of misogyny, which is a moral evil.
6. I'm wondering if using the terms "NC-17" and "R" to rate fic according to sexual explicitness and other spectra is cooperating with a moral evil. It certainly isn't intended to mean "No children under 17" or "Restricted" when I use them, but that is their etymology and that meaning is out there and there is the (mostly) value-neutral alternative (if less precisely graduated, if you can get less precisely graduated than the MPAA system) "Not work safe" available. I'm thinking no--etymology isn't destiny--but it is food for thought.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-01 10:20 pm (UTC)I'd be interested to hear you elaborate on your reasoning for considering anti-sex anti-woman.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-01 10:46 pm (UTC)I'm not sure how often we do that, though. I think we ignore a whole lot when we rate fic: how often do we see a fic with a high rating for action-adventure violence, drug/alcohol use, or curse words? It all comes down to sex.
Non-con gets rated more highly than consensual sex of equal explicitness, granted, but I'm not 100% sure there's not a coherent spectrum along which such a judgment is taking place, even if it's not as simple as mere "explicitness"--unlike the vague mishmash of continua along which the MPAA seems to be doing its rating (insofar as one can detect any rhyme or reason whatsoever).
Is there a value judgment at work here? If so, I might (at first I said I would, but you've created doubt in me) argue that it's our values, insofar as we can be said to communally hold any values as a fandom (and I think we do) that are at work, not the MPAA's. But I think the judgment might ultimately just be a practical one: noncon parent/child fic with breathplay is more likely to get you in trouble at work than vanilla fic is.
As for anti-sex=anti-woman, it's not something I'm sure I can elaborate upon further than I did for Amy above (or for Grace on the IJ mirror of this post). If we assume systemic injustic exists, it does so (I say? feminist theorists say?) by associating certain characteristics with oppressed groups and devalorizing them. So men are pure, rational, almost sexless beings, and women are icky and embodied and sexual and emotional--and if you've never heard these tropes before, I can find plenty and plenty of instances of them, but of course I can't "prove" it's systemic. It is simultaneously the case that a) these are bad things because they are stipulated to describe women, and b) women are inferior because they are characterized by these bad things. Taking part in the devaloring of traditionally female/feminine characteristics like sexuality and physicality is being partially co-opted by this system of patriarchal oppression.
And, arggh, I'm so not describing it well, but in large part it's one of those things that seem so frankly obvious to me I flail when trying to argue it.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-02 11:33 am (UTC)I'm sure you've also heard of the trope of men as sexually aggressive = normal, desirably manly, whereas women as sexual aggressors = dangerous, evil, undesirably mannish (or pathetically laughable -- see: stereotype of slasher as frustrated housewife). I'm pretty sure the negative evaluation of physicality and emotionality is not inherently a sexism issue given that those qualities are also attributed to other non-powerful categories such as racial minorities.
Phrases like "coopted by this system of patriarchal oppression" make me twitch, because, in my mind at least, it implies that somewhere out there is my monolithic malevolent enemy, The [Straw] Man, waiting to be struck down by the forces of righteousness, and because I've heard it too many times in the context of people who are, if you'll allow me to quote a lyric which in its original context falls between a racist stanza and a sexist one, "idiots who praise with enthusiastic tones every century but this and every country but their own".
I know what you mean about flailing. I also wish I could stay out of gender discussions, but I'm not very good at that. Where's a good old ship war when you need one?
A totally unrelated question: are you a library student?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-02 12:35 pm (UTC)System of patriarchal injustice vs. systems of patriarchal injustice is something I'm working through right now, actually. Systems is more flexible, and sometimes avoids the monolithicness when, yeah, it does sound a little absurd. OTOH, hegemony is part of the concept of patriarchy, and moving it to systems plural is in a way moving away from the idea of systemic injustice itself and towards isolated acts, which would be a bad thing.
I'm pretty sure the negative evaluation of physicality and emotionality is not inherently a sexism issue given that those qualities are also attributed to other non-powerful categories such as racial minorities.
Absolutely, it's an injustice issue, and all forms of systemic injustice are intersectional with each other. I'll often use "patriarchy" to use the entire complex of systemic injustice--sexism, racism, antisemitism, ageism, ableism, classism, etc.--and "feminism" to mean theoretical approaches which identify and work against these forms of systemic injustice, but I am trying to move away from this usage because it privileges sexism over other forms of injustice in a very second-wave feminist way. (Many or at least some second-wavers argued that all forms of injustice other than sexism were in fact merely symptoms of sexism, a view I once found extremely persuasive.) But while racism operates in similar (but not exactly mappable) ways to sexism, I think the specific dynamics discussed here are more sexist than racist or classist, insofar as the types of systemic injustice can be separated out from each other (which isn't very far).
My masters program is interdisciplinary and my undergrad majors were English and philosophy&religion. Does that answer your question?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-02 06:48 pm (UTC)But are you really saying that all systematic injustice is related to the rule of men? That's what such usage implies to me. I've got enough 2nd wave in me to be more interested in how few the non-socially-constructed differences between men and women are than in celebrating differences. Fandom discussions have helped me reassess the value of traditionally feminine things, which I needed to do, but I'm not going to drop my position that those things are only feminine by tradition, both the negative and the positive. Thus when women are forbidden to vote, when women drop their own name for their husbands -- that's the result of male-dominated systems. There is nothing inherently male-dominated in a system sneering at "trailer park" accents or calling for separate drinking fountains or neglecting to build ramps.
Frankly, I would be happiest if sex and gender were taken out of the equation entirely. We could have unisex bathrooms and, hell, why not reproduction by budding? "PWP": Pollination Without Plot.
My masters program is interdisciplinary and my undergrad majors were English and philosophy&religion. Does that answer your question?
I was wondering because you mentioned the ALA. It was a pretty random thought. *shrug*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-02 07:13 pm (UTC)I've got enough 2nd wave in me to be more interested in how few the non-socially-constructed differences between men and women are than in celebrating differences. Fandom discussions have helped me reassess the value of traditionally feminine things, which I needed to do, but I'm not going to drop my position that those things are only feminine by tradition, both the negative and the positive.
I agree absolutely, although everything you say there sounds like it would fit perfectly comfortably in my understanding of the third wave, perhaps even more so than in my understanding of the second wave. (Obdisclaimer that a) wave terminology erases history between waves and is not to be reified, and b) my understanding of the history is hardly authoritative.)
There is nothing inherently male-dominated in a system sneering at "trailer park" accents or calling for separate drinking fountains or neglecting to build ramps.
No, but there are hierarchies of power at work here. I used to argue that all binary hierarchies of power were implicit projections of the male/female binary, but I no longer argue that, because it privileges sexism over forms of systemic injustice in a way that I now find problematic. I do believe that a society in which one sex did not hold power over the other would not exist in a world with sneering at "trailer park" accents or calling for separate drinking fountains or neglecting to build ramps; they're all interconnected in the Rule of the Father.
Frankly, I would be happiest if sex and gender were taken out of the equation entirely. We could have unisex bathrooms and, hell, why not reproduction by budding?
Come the feminist utopia ("justice utopia" just sounds weird, but I will disclaim that I don't believe you can have a feminist utopia without an anti-racist utopia, etc., because all forms of systemic injustice are linked), I think that will be exactly what happens (possibly not the reproduction by budding, although why not?). In the meantime, constant vigilance is required to detect male privilege where it exists (everywhere!), because attempts to take sex and gender out of the equation more often end up as (are coopted to become) excuses to ignore real gender inequalities. But I do think that we will be able to be post-feminists in the post-patriarchy (but I despair of that being anything more than an eschatological vision!).
LJ: land of the sex pollen
Date: 2007-12-02 11:22 pm (UTC)(Obdisclaimer that a) wave terminology erases history between waves and is not to be reified, and b) my understanding of the history is hardly authoritative.)
Of course. :) I was just using the terms as shorthand, not having studied the history of feminism, but luckily you understood what I meant.
In the meantime, constant vigilance is required to detect male privilege where it exists (everywhere!), because attempts to take sex and gender out of the equation more often end up as (are coopted to become) excuses to ignore real gender inequalities.
Sometimes. But I think constant vigilance can turn people into nervous wrecks. And I don't think my unisex dream is so far out there; in a more limited setting such homogeneity is easy to acquire. LJ fandom approximates it, this place where we're all assumed to be (and mostly are) the same gender. Sure, there are still issues with our source texts ("How can the canon treat xx character that way?", or "How can you call xx character on that behaviour when xy character does it all the time?"), but that's abstracted somewhat, and I really enjoy it here. In a similar way I find the Tintin books relaxing in their almost complete lack of women.
What is it like to suddenly be the non-default?
Re: LJ: land of the sex pollen
Date: 2007-12-02 11:57 pm (UTC)feministjustice utopia--which I think will be marked more by radical plurality than by homogeneity (assuming it is actually realizable).It's certainly disorienting being in an environment where male privilege doesn't work as one is used to, where everyone assumes one is female (well, I meta enough that that doesn't happen as much as it used to), where the gendered experiences one has had aren't spoken to and the specific gendered needs aren't catered to (when one has been so used to all of these things being the case that one takes them for granted), and there have been notable instances of male fans complaining about feeling fandom to be exclusionary. Do I think they are full of their own privilege? Absolutely. But the fact remains that LJ's space is unproblematic because it stands in relation (and resistance!) to a stronger, more problematic space, giving an oppressed class a female space in which to breathe. Take that away and it is hardly what one would strive for.
The problem is imagining a unisex society where everyone isn't just being (the social construction of) female (even if some are what we would call biologically male) or (the social consruction of) male (with vice versa) but truly unisex. I'm not convinced it's possible for someone over the age to be able to imagine such a world. Compare the difficulty of imagining a racially integrated "melting pot" world (in terms of cultures, not just legal rights) that's not just all the non-white people assimilated into what has been traditionally "white" culture. What would it look like? How would people speak? Think? Worship? It's the "everything would be okay if they just acted exactly like me" issue.
Re: LJ: land of the sex pollen
Date: 2007-12-03 08:15 am (UTC)I don't see why lack of gender would be so difficult to imagine. For example: I was raised in a household where women and men wore roughly the same clothes, (except for underwear and my father's neckties), where both women and men would do the same chores, where both women and men could specialize in the same academic fields, enjoy the same genres of entertainment. Would it be weird for me to have a peer environment similarly lacking in those aspects of gendered behaviour? Quite the opposite, of course. Why do you think gender in general is inescapable?
Re: LJ: land of the sex pollen
Date: 2007-12-03 10:47 am (UTC)I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that in your household where everyone wore similar clothing, the men didn't wear skirts (although if they did, awesome!); instead, most likely, the "unisex" effect was achieved by the elimination of traditionally female clothing--everyone dressed "like men." Do you see why I would find that problematic?
LJ: injust erasure of jocks
Date: 2007-12-04 08:12 am (UTC)I also look forward to the day neither he or I have to watch shows we once enjoyed reduce the roles of characters of our gender to only love interests, which is what I'm getting at.
Re: LJ: injust erasure of jocks
Date: 2007-12-04 02:41 pm (UTC)