It depends what you mean by 'autonomous' teeavee. Really, who on earth is autonomous in the current culture we live in? These are all fine arguments in ideology and in principle and I understand their academic worth, but it?s almost like people who literally don?t live in the real world pose them. When it gets down to the nuts and bolts of actually living your life in a society that is institutionally disposed to repressing you (and both men and women fall under this, I see it as a class distinction rather than a gender one, and Walter is always writing from a particularly middle class perspective - although I'm not challenging the fact that sexism and misogyny exists either, those are my pet projects as a matter of fact).... how do they help anyone other than academics form fabulously complicated academic arguments? It just seems sometimes that the emperor has no clothes coupled with the problem that feminists like Walter fall foul of the naturalist fallacy again and again, thus undermining their own argument before they?ve even took a breath.
The excluded middle in all this is that just as society represses it also facilitates. Without the current laws on discrimination, women?s lives would be much harder and the ?autonomy? we enjoy now would be the ideal we were striving for. Those laws just appear to not go far enough, and that?s because it would demand hundreds of years of revolution, conflict and war to even get close. The current economic system would need to be turned on its head, and a form of political revisionism practiced not seen since the Cultural Revolution. Generations of misery and horror, whose idealistic autonomy is worth that? It?s never going to happen, the fight is in the detail.
Why does 'equality' feminism always come down to spurious claims about biological determinism though? I'm arguing from a 'liberation' feminist perspective, which accepts that we are all repressed by the current systems that drive society and that gender identity is central to reforming any response that might elicit something resembling a 'contented, happy' life. Which realistically is also impossible to achieve but we are constantly disappointed because we are also constantly bombarded with images and information about how to be forever happy ? an unattainable goal and no one advocates a pragmatic path which is the only way to achieve any real goal, through negotiation and compromise.
I think as a society we?ve simply forgotten how to settle for less, and in doing so will never get anywhere near it. I know that will seem inflammatory to many ? I certainly don?t mean that we should accept our lot and be brutalised and discriminated against in any way. But there seems to be a collective misunderstanding about he very nature of life, even as around the world hundreds and thousands die on our television screens we see it as some anomaly. But it?s not, we are the anomaly. Western culture and its cosy illusions are the exception not the rule. Biology doesn?t discriminate, people do and they always will. That is a fact. We can develop a strategy from that fact only if we accept it. Otherwise we?re just tilting at windmills.
What the hell do I know anyway..it just depresses me to see these arguments rise up again and again just to be dismissed (and rightly so) so putting women on the intellectual back foot again.