In seventh grade a guidance counselor divided us into boys and girls to talk gender. What questions would you like to ask the other gender? A boy I liked asked, “Why do girls wear low-cut shirts if they don't want us to look at their boobs?”
“Hm…good question,” the counselor responded, and we girls were left to think about it.
A standard feminist answer might be that young women receive many oppressive and conflicting messages: display your bodies, because you have worth if boys pay attention to them, but then be coy, and retreat from that attention, because it’s harmful.
That’s part of the reason we wore those shirts and pushed boys away. But there is also this: we liked to take one piece of an identity, but not another. We always heard of this mythical kind of girl called the slut, who wears low-cut shirts, invites and loves the attention, and wants boys to talk about her and touch her (or at least doesn’t mind).
There were some parts of that identity we wanted. We found our bodies beautiful or interesting to display, we enjoyed the performance of girliness – the makeup and tight pants getting together to dress up – and some of the flirting. But there were times when boys took it too far, assumed that if we wanted on piece of that identity then we wanted it all; we wanted always to be touched and stared at. And we didn’t.
Ten years later, in our college class, we are all about deconstructing identities that may seem fixed. We humans have not always divided ourselves into heterosexual and homosexual, or even so neatly into male and female. If we accept, as Thomas Lacquer argues in Making Sex, that biological sex is a social construct, because historically we have not always agreed that men and women are especially different biologically, and that heterosexuality (and, by extension, homosexuality) is a recent “invention,” as Katz argues, then our present identities can blur into confusion. It’s all made up! We don’t have to fit our identities into categories like slut or not, because those labels are only a product of our local and temporary environment.
But what happens when we try putting things back together, reconstructing our identities the way we want them? Although Katz writes hopefully of Gayle Rubin’s view of a “androgynous and genderless” future, in my ideal world (which already exists), we play (like McClintock describes in her discussion of S&M in Imperial Leather) with the scraps of identity we like and the ones that are oppressive, to create our lives the way we want. We can’t just pretend that we didn’t grow up with gender roles, that there isn’t something about them that we love. We get to take what we want from these roles, and start our reconstruction.
A recent Senate candidate constructed her public image with gender roles from a variety of identities: the pretty girl, the public-woman politician, the anti-sex Christian.
Christine O’Donnell, who just lost her campaign in Delaware, was most famous for her anti-masturbation Public Service Announcement, which ran on MTV in the early 90s. A pretty college student with big hair and red lipstick, she told MTV viewers, “The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. Well, you can’t masturbate without lust!”
Critics mocked O’Donnell for her views, which are anti-science and pro-creationism (“Call it ‘the theory of intelligent design,’ she urged her opponent, who refused), and her admission that she “dabbled” in witchcraft (and her subsequent everywoman response, “I’m not a witch – I’m you!”), but the anti-masturbation theme drew the most ridicule. Material circulated from her many appearances on the show Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher in the 90s. For a relaxed and attractive young woman to come out in public (on the not-so-chaste MTV or the ultra-liberal Politically Incorrect) and advocate a puritanical view of sex proved to be to many contradictions for many viewers, and for Maher himself, who treated her most harshly for her views on sex.
Reading Maher’s 2005 book New Rules, a collection of short, pithy rules for how things should be in culture and politics, Maher’s worldview becomes clear. He’s an unabashed liberal: anti-religion, anti-Iraq war (and excessive militarism), and pro-gay marriage – he even ends the book with a focus with a piece on gay marriage. But (maybe to compensate for being pro-gay anti-military?) he’s also rigid in his views of anti-feminine masculinity: men should not act like “chicks.” (“New Rule: No cuddling…The only time a man should say ‘I need a hug’ is if he’s choking.”) To further establish himself as a heterosexual man, Maher writes that he’s sick of studies linking homosexuality to genetics, because it’s so obvious. “And all this time I thought my aversion to fisting and rim-jobs came from a persuasive essay in The New Republic. Of course it’s genetic.”
Despite supporting the right to marry someone of the same sex, he views marriage as a useless trap, damaging to his one great love: sex. His pro-choice stance seems to arise at least as much from him being pro-sex-without-commitment as it does from a pro-women or pro-liberal ideology. He even views sex as the solution to terrorism: “If we really want to stop terrorism, we have to get Muslim men laid” to curb their anger. He is pro-sex not so much because he wants to allow people the freedom to enjoy sex, but because normal healthy men, which he insists he is, need sex, and deserve sex. (I don’t remember finding that he had anything to say on female desire.)
Ironically, the aggressively anti-religion Maher’s insistence that being gay is obviously biological leads him to a kind of pre-ordained determinism (to conservatives who say coastal elites “don’t get” them, Maher replies, “you guys don’t get us either: we need sex”), whereas O’Donnell challenges us humans to shape our sexual lives.
As O’Donnell rose to prominence, Maher released many clips of her statements on his show. He capped it off with a greatest-hits montage (which, maddeningly, HBO removed for copyright reasons) of the dumbest things O’Donnell said on the show. Eager to find more to ridicule – on The O’Reilly Factor, for example, O’Donnell said that scientists were splicing genes and creating “mice with fully-functioning human brains” – viewers instead found a video in which O’Donnell actually says very little, but Maher and other guests make fun of her, compliment her breasts, and try to sleep with her. For arguing that we can and should shape our sexual lives for ourselves, and we should do so by exercising extreme sexual restraint, invitations to sex became punishment for her opinions.
Some feminists have criticized the new crop of right-wing female politicians, O’Donnell included, for “appropriating” the feminist label, because they oppose abortion, comprehensive sex ed, and many social services for women. But maybe a feminist is someone who challenges and complicates the limited roles assigned to women, whether that role is a sexy but silent video ho, a bored stay-at-home mom, or a loudly pro-sex activist or leftist genderqueer.
Much of what O’Donnell has said is ridiculous – she’s wrong about the mice with human brains – or offensive – no one deserves AIDS for engaging in supposedly risky behavior. These dangerous and misleading ideas deserve to be challenged and marginalized, and characterize her as unfit for the Senate. But when a 20something Christine O’Donnell earnestly told young people not to have sex or masturbate, she challenged Americans to rethink our assumptions about young people and sex – could we begin to be more thoughtful about sex, just as we are growing more thoughtful about where our food comes from and our dollars go? – if only we would take the challenge, and if we disagree to articulate ourselves, rather than punishing her.
Reconstructing our sexuality today poses so many problems; everyone will have a different view and opinion, as well as a valid (or so they think) reason for their construction. It is unavoidable in our society, as much as we liberals at Oberlin College like to think it is. Many of the students here don't see a need to label themselves as hetero, homo, or even transgender - we are what we are, and there is no need to question it.
ReplyDeleteHowever, people are forced to categorize themselves everyday, maybe even without realizing it. For example, going to a gay club. If you saw someone you know walking into a gay club or bar, many people would automatically assume she/he was gay. Their sexuality is already constructed, simply by walking into a building with a rainbow flag outside of it.
We say we don't construct or label sexuality, but society - more times than not - already does that for us. Cultures and subcultures have been created out of categories of sexuality, as well as labels, terms and new words. There have been parades, books, exhibits, and even fashion centered around sexuality. Can we really expect it to change? in a perfect world, we would like it to. However, changing the construction of sexuality would create a domino effect of changes, and it remains to be seen if any society could handle that.
I would also like to comment on McClintock's (Imperial Leather) concept of "playing with scraps of identity" in order to reconstruct a new identity. While reading Imperial Leather, I was particularly intrigued by McClintock’s research on Hannah Cullwick. Cullwick often played “dress up” with her male lover of over 20 years, sometimes donning the silk and lace of an upper class female, other times cropping her hair to resemble a man, and sometimes even darkening her skin to play a slave. Cullwick’s male lover was especially aroused to see her in the filthy rags of a female maid and to enact the role of master and servant. Cullwick insisted on always displaying her “slave-band” prominently on her wrist. She even addressed her lover as “Massa.”
ReplyDeleteIn cross-dressing/role-playing for the pleasure of her lover, was Cullwick assuming the role of subordinate? In constructing her identity, Cullwick appropriated many symbols/elements associated with servitude. Was she another oppressed woman of the 19th century, another “unambiguous victim?”
McClintock argues that Cullwick was, in fact, the one in the relationship with true agency. She played along with her lover’s desires but was the one in control of them. She played the role of servant, but only in the context of consensual S/M. She also insisted on payment for her services and refused to marry her lover because doing so would mean losing her salary (a wife did the cooking and cleaning for free).
Cullwick played with scraps of identity and appropriated many elements of the servant identity but in no way wanted to be viewed as the subordinate or assume a servile nature. What can be said of those who partake in S/M practices or pornographic videos in the 21st century? Are these actors just objectified victims or do they too have agency too? McClintock seems to argue that these actors have agency. While this might often be the case, I think society must walk a fine line in issuing such generalizations.