Pull down your skirt, Iqra'i, your Freudian slip is showing.

Monday, cigarette #2

Nicola's post on patriarchy keeps the spoonful of sugar and forgets the medicine:

...it seems like this kind of feminism only actually differs in the world of theory, not of policy, yes? Still down with paid family leave, non-discrimination, access to contraception and all those good things?

Generally, yes.

Uh-oh.

Nicki seems to think that nice, well-behaved gender roles only limit women's desires whereas bad ones place limits on their "ambitions, rights, and very souls." Unfortunately, the average citizen of Postmodern, U.S.A. can't tell the difference — Every attack on my desires is an attack on my identity, etc. — so this distinction is rhetorically problematic.

Which is not to say the substance isn't problematic, too. Where is it written that gender roles shouldn't be allowed to change our "very souls?" It's better that they should; otherwise they're just masks. The extent to which a society's gender roles are trending away from "constraining" and toward "suffocating" is, of course, something to keep a weather eye on, but once we've picked out a catalogue of acceptable gender roles we ought to give them some teeth. (As for what picking out a catalogue of acceptable gender roles should look like, it's a tall order, but I imagine it has a lot to do with studying the history of femininity.* If only one were actually able to major in That, rather than in An Upside-Down and Self-Undermining Version of That...)

In policy (so Noah doesn't have to ask), this looks like "Eliminating employment discrimination allows women to be exceptions, but paid family leave encourages them to do so, so if we have the vaguest gut instinct that our vision for a mother's relationship to her young children is incompatible with a full-time job, then we should forget about the latter." On a smaller scale, this looks like something Rainer Werner Fassbinder said: "I find women more interesting. They don't interest me just because they're oppressed — it's not that simple. The societal conflicts in women are more interesting because on the one hand women are oppressed, but in my opinion they also provoke this oppression as a result of their position in society, and in turn use it as a terror tactic."

*This book is a fun way to start, as is this one.