Strangely appropriate if you are familiar with Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:
Mandrake is marched out of Ripper’s office at gunpoint by the gung-ho Guano to the main gate. Sexually-anxious like Ripper was, Guano assesses the situation and blames not the Commies – but “preverts” [his assessment is absolutely correct – Ripper was a prevert!]. He suspects that Mandrake is one of them:
“I think there’s some kind of deviated prevert. And I think General Ripper found out about your preversion and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts….All I was told to do was get General Ripper on the phone with the President of the United States.”
As next in command after Ripper, Mandrake insists on talking to the President by phone in a nearby phone booth. He threatens Guano:
“And I can assure you, if you don’t put that gun away and stop this stupid nonsense, the court of Enquiry on this’ll give you such a pranging, you’ll be lucky if you end up wearing the uniform of a bloody toilet attendant.”
What’s your theory for why there are so may preverts in the Republican Party?
Hey Boo- Before I try to give you an answer to the question, please post an answer to my question- who has a transcript of the chimps speech that he gave today in NO at that school? Please help. Now to your question—there are probably quite a few preverts in the other party but they aren’t so conflicted by their religious upbringing. And therefore, they and do learn where they can SAFELY go to find others that want to share their lifestyle!
Unless the requirement for becoming a gooper representative is sheer stupidity- what other reason could there be? They are more daring? Puhleeze!!!!!!
Please help me with my request or anybody !!!!!!
Uh, ‘cuz the sexualization of power leads to really screwed up erotic associations.
I don’t know enough about this to be able to hazard explanation. I for the life of me can’t understand how someone can be gay and yet promote a virulently anti-gay agenda.
But surely the fact that gay people are “born gay”, and the fact that, until recently at least, mainstream American society was quite homophobic, must have something to do with it.
I for the life of me can’t understand how someone can be gay and yet promote a virulently anti-gay agenda.
Because they don’t identify as “gay”. Yes, they like the man-on-man sex, but that doesn’t make them a “faggot”.
We all have desires that need keeping in check – like wanting to overeat fatty foods, or laze around and not get any work done. As animals, we are extremely pleasure prone. Many men who like sex with men simply cast their sexual desire for other men into this “excessive” category. They may want it, but they shouldn’t have it. But who on a diet doesn’t splurge sometimes?
But back to my original point, the way western patriarchal society has so sexualized imbalances of power leads to a higher likelyhood that people will eroticize “inappropriate” people and situations. If kissing up to the power structure, gets you hard, so will playing the “outlaw”. Good guy power or bad guy power, it’s still power. And to quote that very sexy guy, Henry Kissinger, “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”.
That’s really interesting if they really do think that they’re not really “faggots”: I had read that some black gays think that way.
As for your main point, some have suggested that there was an erotic or even homoerotic element to Nazism, Lucino Visconti for instance in The Damned.
I would argue that all patriarchal societies are homoerotic – at least where men are concerned. Men who love and worship masculinity and revile femininity (while still deeming it the appropriate affect for women) hold their deepest love and respect for other men. It’s one of the reasons wars are so popular, they allow men to deeply bond with and love other men.
Men look up almost exclusively to other men, men are mostly taught (at the university or trade level) by other men. Women are objects of desire.
I don’t doubt true love between men and women, but that’s not main thrust (if you will) of patriarchy. In fact, romantic love between men and women became a social meme precisely when women were starting to have some economic independence from men. It was meant to pull women back into the heterosexual fold, not men, who have the distinct advantage of getting a lot of unearned benefits from their relationships with women.
To be clear, homoerotic is necessarily not homosexual. The ancient Greeks practiced male homoeroticism, as the Lover, a man, and the Beloved, a boy, were still supposed to have sex with women and father children, etc. It just that women were not worthy of true love.
You make some excellent points. I have seen some heavily-male-dominated university departments which clearly manifested homoeroticism. I guess it’s hard for me to discern the homoeroticism at the political, national level because it is so dominated by hicks from the South now whom I find completely unappealing. It is much easier for me to relate to the homoeroticism (which spilled over into homosexuality) of the Brownshirts as depicted in Visconti’s film. (German fraternities are also very homoerotic of course, but I could never take that culture seriously, with its fetishization of facial scars from fencing wounds.)
When the term first became widespread, or at least when I first became acquainted with it, in the 1980s, I thought that the concept of patriarchy was a complete red herring when it came to modern society. But there’s been a tremendous amount of backsliding since then, especially in the English-speaking countries, so now unfortunately it is a very useful concept.
The sad thing is that in Western society, it is not that hard to “dismantle” patriarchy. All you have to do is make women equal players at every level of society. I think the Scandinavian countries, with their good state supported child care etc., and high proportion of women in parliaments, do a pretty good job.
And I would argue that to dismantle partriarchy you would need to dismantle society in it’s totality, and start over. It’s no good just letting women in as “pseudo men” to societal structures so long formed by and to men’s wants and desires.
Our societies are not “OK”, except for the sexism, racism, heterosexism, ablism, etc. Our societies are intrinsically those things – they cannot be removed without a complete revisioning of the social compact. Nothing, and a do mean nothing, in an apartriachal society would look, sound, or feel even remotely the same as to what we (or even Scandinavian countries) have now.
Yes, I detected a Utopianism in one of your comments on the other thread.
Here is the problem I have always had with radical feminism. (I hope you won’t mind that I call your position that; I don’t know what else to call it. Since I haven’t looked at radical feminism for a long time, I’ll just define it as what you just said, that the structures and institutions of modern society are inherently patriarchal.)
Across human history, society has been structured or differentiated in three basic ways. First, by region. You have tribes living side-by-side, with little interaction between them, and little internal structure, other than sex roles etc. The main form of differentiation of later societies is hierarchical. Marx called this form of society “feudalism”. People at the top control, participate in, or have access to just about everything: money, power, science, religion. The final form of differentiation is functional. Hierachically differentiated society allow for much more societal complexity than regionally differentiated ones, and functionally differentiated societies do the same compared to hierarchically differentiated ones.
The main forms by which our modern societies are structured are organizations and functional subsystems. Thus you have governments, the economy, science, religion, and families or intimate relationships functioning more or less autonomously from each other, according to their own principles. Allowing each subsystem to function according to specialized principles and norms allows it to achieve a greater performance than if it were less autonomous. Thus, modern science is effective because it studies problems only with respect to what is true about the world, as opposed to what is morally desirable, approved of by religion, or profitable. An autonomous legal system unaffected by political or economic interests (something that has virtually disappeared in the US) leads to a higher level of trust and effective resolution of conflicts. Similarly, formal organizations (corporations, universities, government bureaucracies) allow a division of activities that can handle much more complex tasks than a simple group of people working together. (There are exceptions of course. Better software is produced by people making spontaneous contribution over the Internet than by Microsoft. But then the state (research developing the Internet was funded and directed by the Pentagon), corporations, and universities are what made creation of the Internet possible.)
Now, you say that “Nothing, and I do mean nothing, in an apatriarchal society would look, sound, or feel even remotely the same as to what we (or even Scandinavian countries) have now.” It sounds to me like that means abandoning functional differentiation and organizations. But those are the only forms that allow for the level of societal complexity that we are accustomed to.
In my view, there is nothing patriarchal about functional differentiation or formal organizations. Any kind of modern society must be based on those two things. But then, a non-patriarchal society cannot be radically different from the one we have today, which you claim it must be.
I am not at all utopian, in fact I ascribe to Structural Materialism, amongst other schools of thought.
But taking what “is” (or more correctly what we think “is”), and extrapolating backwards only answers the questions we can pose from where we are.
There have been other ways of being human. And there will be yet again. I’m choose to be open to those possibilities.
Hmm, Structural Materialism. Hadn’t heard of that one. Does Baudrillard fall under it? I was really into him for a while.
French theory is very exciting and playful, but if you want to find a bridge between what is and what ought to be, you need to turn to the Germans (and I don’t mean Marx). The theory I was outlining in my previous post is Niklas Luhmann’s. That his theory is not more widely known is an indication of the present barbaric state of sociology.
I will, in my feminist/utopian/”whatever” way, take your suggestions of what I “need to turn to” and continue to view things as I view them, thank you very much. Btw, I’m 3/4 German (and speak German moderately well – the other 1/4 is Danish) and am therefore well steeped in German philosophy.
I’m also very much a pragmatist, so I don’t expect humans to be radically different than what they are. That being said, I think that societies can seek to place limits on power and especially power-over, or they can embrace it, the devil be damned. Patriarchy opts largely for the later. I would opt for the former, and I don’t think that means what you, or most people, can envision. That doesn’t make my world view “superior”, just mine.
Now you are insulting me. You write that you opt for “placing limits on power and especially power-over”, but that you don’t think that that means something I can envision. You also write that you can speak German moderately well, that you are 3/4 German, and that you are “well steeped in German philosophy”. (That’s weird. I couldn’t figure out why I was bringing up my Germanophilia in my reply to one of your posts, when I thought that you were an Australian guy. I figured that was triggered merely by your associating political power with homoeroticism.)
To the best of my knowledge, it is German idealist philosophy that gives the only concrete and understandable means for the limitation of social and political power: reason. What defines the human condition is freedom, and what makes freedom possible is reason, according to this philosophy. (OK, both Kant and Hegel didn’t see women as fully rational creatures, but that doesn’t affect their basic argument. We can just update it.)
Has your feminism articulated a better and more effective means for constraining power? (Please keep in mind that what allows patriarchy and capitalism to increase their colonization of us is the British empiricist-liberal philosophy that was created to legitimize capitalism, which denied that reason in the proper sense of the word is possible.) If so, I’d like to learn about it. So far, we have been interacting within the realm of rational debate and discourse, which are nothing but the social manifestation of reason. So I would like to learn what this better means for making the world a good place is that I cannot envision.
You have said that the very nature of our social institutions, as opposed to how they are run and by whom, is patriarchal. Do you think that reason itself is patriarchal? (Again, keep in mind that our society has rejected reason, as is all too obvious.) Or do you think that there are two different kinds of reason, a male and a female reason? I myself have never been able to accept this latter option, because that would mean that our bodies place an insurmountable limitation on our minds, and thus make it impossible for us to be free.
All the answers you seek have been better articulated by the many scholars of feminism readily available to all. Do a Google search and avail yourself of what you find.
Women, myself definitely included, spend far too much energy just trying to navigate a male dominated world for us to be additionally saddled with schooling men about the realities most of them don’t really want to know about anyway.
Take offense if you will, you won’t be the first of the last man to claim offense at a woman’s unapologetically feminist assertions.
I have really been enlightened by this discussion even though a good 90% has been over my head. I knew you were smart, keres, but sheeee-it!
And thanks for keeping it civil, both of you.
Why shouldn’t it be civil? I was attracted to keres’s comments because she writes about things like “patriarchy” very soberly.
Nothing personal – I just meant in light of some other discussions that we’ve had on here that got personal. You two have been very informative and respectful and that’s one of the main reasons I stay on this site.
I didn’t take offense. I meant “you are insulting me” ironically, in a friendly way. I thought that would be clear because I didn’t dwell at all on being “insulted”, but maybe I should have used a smiley.
Please forgive me, but if you “opt for” is something that I, “or most people, can [not even] envision“, then I don’t see how it can ever be realized. And that makes it Utopian by definition.
And I have read feminist theory, Luce Irigaray being my favorite. I’ve also read Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, although she would not generally be considered to be a feminist.
And I would argue that to dismantle partriarchy you would need to dismantle society in it’s totality, and start over. It’s no good just letting women in as “pseudo men” to societal structures so long formed by and to men’s wants and desires.
That’s the crux of it all, isn’t it? And I would imagine that it’s also no good just letting in:
People of color as “pseudo white”
Homosexuals as “pseudo straight”
Differently abled as “pseudo abled”
Elderly as “pseudo young”
and on and on and on. There’s a nexus there if we could ever all come together.
I feel the same way about women who continually work against women’s rights. I just don’t get it.
Why women are Anti-Women:
I’m sure I could go on, but it’s actually more puzzling as to why people step out of line than it is as to why people toe it.
Color me simplistic but after living on the outskirts of a town where there were 12 churches for a population of 3,000; no dancing in public (yes like Footloose), no liquor sold within town limits, grass on lawns measured by town employees to be certain it never outgrew the city father’s structure, no work except to milk cows on Sunday & no businesses open on Sunday.
The town had the highest rate of incest in the State, but by God there were no perverts living in that town…right. Instead, the town suffered through the most elaborate jungle of calculated & hidden back room lifestyles imaginable, including, as I found out, the most prestigious head of the founding church.
The town was strictly Republican…no joke.
Just a personal belief but I saw what could have been a healthy town, but the people were so suppressed that when they acted outside the rigidity of their society, their transgressions were exaggerated & hideous. I can’t help but wonder what a good dose of freedom of expression could have brought to them.