Radical feminism and PIV

[EatsBrainsAndLeaves]

Hi just wanted to ask radical feminists and their allies their views of piv sex, I have no one I can ask in RL about this.

I can understand why PIV sex is inherently unsafe and that viewing PIV sex as the goal of sex is misogynous. But I really can't fathom the view that PIV sex is inherently abusive. Can anyone explain it very very basically? And do all radical feminists think PIV sex is inherently abusive?

Thanks

"I think you're confusing entitlement with want.

You reckon?"

Thats a really well thought out response, i can you truely have grasped an understanding of rad fem.

Xenia, my description of "hook up" sex came from two young women who graduated with good degrees from Cardiff and York Universities respectively a few years ago. They very much fit the mould of what you would probably call "clever girls." They did describe the quite ingenious strategies they used to avoid having sex with men when they didn't want to have sex with them from imaginary boyfriends back home to pretending to be drunker than they were and trying to get the men to drink more so they'd be too drunk to do anything. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Both had experiences that meet the legal definition of rape, although neither referred to it as that.

Surely though, young women shouldn't have to employ elaborate strategies to avert sex with men when they don't want sex. Surely they shouldn't be in a Hobson's choice position. Surely the young men who don't want to coerce women into sex they don't want shouldn't be pressed to conform to this indicator of masculinity, else be labelled gay and/or risk abuse from their peers.

And, there is something deeply unsavoury about the way you've referred to "vulnerable young women" with whom I work. It's true, they don't all benefit from the financial, educational and class privileges of the "clever girls" nor do they always have the positive family and social support networks that may help them avoid or at least employ useful strategies so they aren't coerced into sex they don't want.

Is it that the "vulnerable young women" are just collateral damage to preserve male sexual entitlement - that it's acceptable for them to put out, particularly if it saves the "clever girls" from having to deal with unwanted sexual attention? You suggest they "give sex to any man going," as if this is something to be expected, par for the course for "vulnerable young women," so nothing to get aerated about. Hmmmmm.

Interesting people get so squawky over one radfem with no real power speculating wildly about eliminating male foetuses. Has it escaped their notice that people who are far more fucking mad than Femonade are coming out with suggestions that, for instance, women whose foetuses have died in utero should be forced to carry those dead foetuses until their due dates, because Abortion Is Wrong? Or that, in cases of rape or DV and not in any other type of violent crime the victim should not be referred to as a victim in legal proceedings but as the 'accuser'? Or that women who miscarry should be charged with murder and face the death penalty? Thing is, the nutters who are saying this sort of thing are nutters with power. They are elected officials with the ability to propose changes to laws and have those proposals seriously.

I thought courts referred to either claimants or complaining witnesses in all cases?

Eclectic: when I am told I am confused because I dare to offer an opinion I really can't be arced to give a considered response. Life's too short.

KRI, that is not the correct interpretation of my posts. I said most girls in the UK these days are very good at being assertive. It's one of the nice things baout our culture today compared to how it has been in the past. That does not mean I am complacent about girls (or boys for that matter) who may feel coerced into sex. It means I am a happy optimist and rightly so.

I am certainly glad I live in a country where women can express different views whether that be fundamentalist Christianity or Islam or that the planet would be better off with the elimination of most men and only a sperm bank. Indeed I think that may be our ultimate position as the male chromosome is gradually dying out anyway although I think the time line is about a million years and humans probably won't be on the planet by then.

cheery post to read first thing in the morning xenia!

the male cromosone is dying out? i have heard that sperm count is slowly falling year by year, but not that.

either way, unless we find a way to manufacture sperm without the use of testicles it will mean the end of the human race, not just men unless the trends reverse.

Time doesnt stop.

Hence my name.

Some say www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5360172/Men-on-road-to-extinction.html but I expect we will no longer be on the planet by the time it happens. I am not a female supremist but men certainly have a lot of the defets, 92% of prison populations, more colour blindness and a variety of other problems than women and do worse in GCSE, A levels and degree results although they seem to manage to obtain positions of power much better than women.

Of course sperm can be stored.

I am not sure humans have been very good to this planet. It may be better off without us. It's a rather human supremist argument for those who always suggest the world is better for having humans on it. Philosophically that is not necessarily justified. We are here in a sense for the blink of an eye and certainly penetrative sex has ensured we have stuck around.

EatsBrains I just thought something about your OP. You asked the question do all radical feminists think PIV sex is inherently abusive?

I meant to ask you earlier and forgot - where did you get the idea that radical feminists in general may think that PIV is inherently abusive?

I ask because IMO this is a misinterpretation/vast over simplification of radical feminist analysis.

It is all about context - the context being patriarchy. If we didn't live in a male supremacy, PIV would be a whole lot less problematic, indeed perhaps totally unproblematic (difficult to theorize and imagine a non male dominated society though...).

I suspect that you have picked up the 'inherently abusive' notion from the misrepresentations and decades long rumours about the works of both Dworkin and MacKinnon.

If you want to really get to grips with the foundations of the political analysis of radical feminism with regards to PIV, I would recommend reading MacKinnon, in particular, Toward a Feminist Theory of The State.

The following quotes are from an interview but they sum things up pretty neatly;

"The assumption," she says, "is that women can be unequal to men economically, socially, culturally, politically, and in religion, but the moment they have sexual interactions, they are free and equal.

Also

Doesn't what you have said, I ask weakly, make any heterosexual act problematic? "It problematises those that take place under conditions of sex inequality, yes." But they all do, don't they? Certainly, according to MacKinnon's philosophy. "In a certain structural sense. In the same way that, say, friendships between black people and white people in societies that are racist do."

Perhaps there's an innocent space, I ask hopefully, where men and women can - she interrupts: "Yes! People work it out with great difficulty. But the first step is not to deny that it's there." The "it", I presume, is sexual inequality.

This might be of interest to you too, it isn't about PIV as such but more about how human sexuality is a tool and foundation of male supremacy.

www2.law.columbia.edu/faculty_franke/Certification%20Readings/catherine-mackinnon-feminism-marxism-method-and-the-state-an-agenda-for-theory1.pdf

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most
one's own, yet most taken away. Marxist theory argues that society is
fundamentally constructed of the relations people form as they do and
make things needed to survive humanly. Work is the social process of
shaping and transforming the material and social worlds, creating
people as social beings as they create value. It is that activity by which
people become who they are. Class is its structure, production its consequence,
capital its congealed form, and control its issue.

Implicit in feminist theory is a parallel argument: the molding, direction,
and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes women
and men-which division underlies the totality of social relations.
Sexuality is that social process which creates, organizes, expresses,
and directs desire,' creating the social beings we know as women
and men, as their relations create society. As work is to marxism, sexuality
to feminism is socially constructed yet constructing, universal as activity
yet historically specific, jointly comprised of matter and mind. As
the organized expropriation of the work of some for the benefit of
others defines a class-workers-the organized expropriation of the
sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. Heterosexuality
is its structure, gender and family its congealed forms, sex roles
its qualities generalized to social persona, reproduction a consequence,
and control its issue.
Marxism and feminism are theories of power and its distribution:
inequality. They provide accounts of how social arrangements of patterned
disparity can be internally rational yet unjust. But their specificity
is not incidental. In marxism to be deprived of one's work, in feminism of
one's sexuality, defines each one's conception of lack of power per se.

From the same link, these extracts might help.

"Penetration (often by a penis) is also substantially
more central to both the legal definition of rape and the male definition
of sexual intercourse than it is to women's sexual violation or sexual
pleasure. Rape in marriage expresses the male sense of entitlement to
access to women they annex; incest extends it. Although most women
are raped by men they know, the closer the relation, the less women are
allowed to claim it was rape. Pornography becomes difficult to distinguish
from art and ads once it is clear that what is degrading to women is
compelling to the consumer. Prostitutes sell the unilaterality that pornography
advertises. That most of these issues codify behaviour that is
neither countersystemic nor exceptional is supported by women's experience
as victims: these behaviours are either not illegal or are effectively
permitted on a large scale. As women's experience blurs the lines
between deviance and normalcy, it obliterates the distinction between
abuses of women and the social definition of what a woman is."

"Sexuality, then, is a form of power. Gender, as socially constructed,
embodies it, not the reverse. Women and men are divided by gender,
made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of
heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and
female sexual submission. If this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of
gender inequality."

men aren't going to die out after all

Although I agree with Xenia, humans haven't been good for the planet. Once we die out, it might recover hopefully.

I certainly think to imply most feminists (as no one has here by the way) are against penetrative sex simply seeks to ensure they are marginalised and discounted. In the same way that if you try to tar the Orthodox Jews, Fundamentalist Muslims and Christians with those who aren't with the same brush you do the same. If you phrase the question as you do you agree that women and men should have equal rights in law and fairness at home most men and women then agree with you which is what I believe it the essence of feminism. ALthough there is no harm in discussing more radical or extreme versions of housewifedom or let us kill or men or whatever anywhere. Freedom of speech uber alles.

Xenia, do you personally believe 100% of what you write?

SF - I know it is completely off topic but surely the judgment of whether humans are "good" or "bad" for the planet only has any meaning in the context of human based value judgments. The universe has no such concerns, a ball of ice, a gas giant, a neutron star, a black hole - all are equally valuable (or valueless). Life will come and go in various places at various times and all of it in a metaphorical blink of an eye on a universal scale (and even the universe itself appears to be winding down until one day it will be cold and black).

It only has meaning and beauty because we find it meaningful and beautiful. Once we are gone some life may thrive for a while but other life will certainly suffer. Who are we to say whether in the final reckoning it can be judged good or bad? All we can really say is that it will change.

As you were (and of course ignore that if you are religious!).

Even if men do die out, isn't there at least a theoretical basis for humanity being able to carry on perfectly well without them; something to do with egg-splittinhg(am not a biologist but I'm sure I read there was a way to do this).

SGB, you may be thinking of parthenogenesis - not a viable option in the wild for mammals (as explained here) but there might be some technical ways to get round it in specific cases. Building a strategy to make sure that a whole human society could reproduce this way would be rather a big ask - certainly a science-fictional sort of question.

Re your earlier comment (25-May-12 23:17:25) "Interesting people get so squawky over one radfem with no real power speculating wildly about eliminating male foetuses." The reason people were commenting about the author of that link's views was surely because it was potentially being held up as a statement of plausible radfem views about PIV (as opposed to a view potentially held by an extremist in the area). The squawking wasn't IMHO about saying "how shocking, how could anyone ever hold these views" (because as you say the actual power wielded by people who hold the massively patriarchal polar opposite views is much more of a real question).

Yes, I only mentioned the men dying out issue in case we wanted to getting female supremacist stuff (and I knew the other study suggesting it were not so too). Mind you China is doing pretty well in the other direction - The Times shows a massive matchmaking session (as I think something like 50m Chinese men will never be able to marry (as so many families abort girls nad there seems to be some kind of standard fee of £8000 a man has to make to his future wife's family to secure a bride which many families cannot afford.

I assume if men died out our species might adapt to fertilise itself like snails.

As for whether it is good to have humans on the planet who can say. It simply is. It's always been my point about why fuss over global warming if we are here for a tiny blink of an eye and could go if there were a big asteroid or changes off the planet which mean.

I seem to have taken the thread away from the issue of where a man sticks his penis if indeed he sticks it anywhere.

Perhaps we can worry about aborting of male babies on principle when more cultures do that than abort girls... We would have to reverse China/India's appalling record on female abortions first. Actually in theory as people get more educatd and girls do better than boys and given many Indian adverts for spouses want both to have an MBA etc earning power of girls (China has more female millionaire entrepreneurs than anywhere) we might get to a position when a woman is a better financial bet than a man and we have to pay families to take low earning boys off our hands. All good stuff.

I find it a bit strange that consensual piv sex can be a feminist issue. Is all piv considered wrong (by some feminists)? Or just when not in a long term relationship when there could be health issues. The thing is I don't consider piv to always be an essential part of sex but my wife does. That is what gives her most pleasure. So surely it is best for every couple to find what works for them both. Why I find it a bit odd as well is surely their can't be many things more natural than piv. None of us would be here without it and this is MUMSnet after all.

PS
The answers are probably in this thread. Only when I posted did I realise it was thirteen pages long. I read the first page and thought that was it. Will have to get reading.

I find it odd that in a world which disrespects the female body and belittles it, so much of the PIV discusssion talks about the vagina as if it is just a corridor to the womb. How negative. I am more then a case for my womb.

The vagina is an amazing part of the human body, self lubricating, self cleaning, packed with nerve endings, but because it is an orifice, rather then a flat piece of tissue, to explore it, it needs to be penetrated (which can be done in a variety of ways, not just by a penis and yes, some lesbians do like penetration too). Much of the PIV conversation seems to grudgingly admit that some women like PIV, but will claim that most don't and I find that to be body negative and a denial of the pleasure women can experience.

Oh goodness that FCM link! It's terrible and hilarious in equal measure. Thanks to whoever posted that.

GAG, I don't really understand why orifices need to be explored. I don't explore the inside of my ear.

Is the vagina packed with nerve endings? I thought that was just the bit around the vulva, which you can stimulate without penetration anyway. I can't feel a tampon once it is in, so I'm assuming my vagina is not packed with nerve endings.

I am more concerned that a lot of people don't understand that an engorged clitoris is the same size as a penis, where it is located or how to stimulate any part of it other than the tip. The sexual element of the vagina, while having its own unique pleasures, is a secondary concern for most women when it comes to having an orgasm.

I don't think that is grudgingly admitting people enjoy PIV sex - I think it is just putting the level of sexual pleasure in some kind of context.