Further materials towards a theory of the man child

*the characteristics (should proof read)

Shall have a read later of the second link, thank you.

I don't think that what others refer to as a backlash is exactly that, I don't think its revenge. I think its inherent and inevitable because of the way in which the productive forces shape social relations.

The way we perceive the characteristics of something is by acknowledging how it is in relation to something else. Does anything actually have innate characteristics? Are women caring, nurturing, pleasing and smiling? is that innate? or is that it seems so because we are conditioned to judge these characteristics against what we think of as masculine traits. I think that everything has its opposite or antagonist, so one thing changes they characteristics of another.

It would seem to be strange that whilst women are increasingly economically independent, we are at the same time being subjugated. On the surface of things it would seem that doing a job and being paid is a recognition of our work, except for one thing, it is an exploitation. Employers don't add value they appropriate it by paying people less than the value emodied in their work/product. The part that men play seems to be in mediating between capitalist exploitation and women. So women are coerced to want money, clothing, commodities, lip sticks etc, and men are there to ensure this process continues. So women make commodities but increasingly we are commodities into which we pour investment, through education, clothing, networking, paying dating agencies, selling sex and cultivating those traits that capitalism seeks to exploit. We talk about emotional capital, personal capital and think in terms of working upon ourselves so that we are employable, desirable, useful and socially valued. We are deceived into thinking that working harder, earning more (although not more) and buying things is an investment into our happiness. Of course happiness is impossible if you are the lowly tea maker not because tea making is inherently miserable but because its social value is its economic value and everything judged on those values are never equal. So women are exploited, sold, commodified and indebted, that doesn't sound like liberation to me!

Quite why men on the left think that women should get back to the kitchen is beyond me but when women define themselves only through paid work, I despair.

curryeater really interesting, much that I agree with and I have just discovered semiotexte which is really going to be useful for me

"Tiqqun knows and says what the Lifestyle section does or cannot: Today the economy is feminizing everyone............Tiqqun writes, ?one can only expect the cunning promotion of all manner of servitudes.? At times, Tiqqun speaks of this exploitation sympathetically. More often, however, they blame the Young-Girl for opening the floodgates by complying with her own exploitation, thus making it easier for control capitalism to make her attitude compulsory for everyone"

I take issue with this, the civil rights movement, the gains made by feminists during that time, all co-opted into and taken up by capitalism, women's sexual liberation exploited and subsumed into capital in order to make a fast buck, in cosmetic surgery, trafficking, lapdance clubs and pornography. Everything subsumed and repackaged and sold back to us. It seems that "Tiqqun" uses the analogy of the young girl for everything that is not progressive or radical, for what is weak and needy, desiring and naive. It plays right into that idea that women are nature, men are civilised.

Capitalism is making men superfluous to its needs but for one area, the commodity "woman" must have a market and men are the consumers. To what extent neo-liberalism can support non-productive consumers is questionable. The culture machine that generates and encourages sexism and violence towards women, makes men something analogous to the Jews that dug graves, extracted teeth and ran errands for the Nazis. It makes me think of working class people who twatter on about how wonderful Thatcher was. Of course the sexism and violence seems to contradict the fact that women now work, earn and spend but I would argue that what others call backlash is actually just inevitable. It is stoked in order to exploit, because that is what waged labour is.

If men are happy to stand by whilst women do all the unpaid labour and most of this "feminised labour" (is that a cover for work men don't want to do???) whilst they indebt themselves and literally consume women, will they not end up bankrupt, could it be that men are weak, needy and naive too?