Feminism in the 21st century is primarily sub-continental feminism (almost one in four of all women are from the sub-continent), Chinese feminism, South East Asian and African feminism much more than it is European or American feminism where, truth be told, the thing is played out. What is global feminism about? The answer has to do with raising the female participation rate in a secure, environmentally sustainable, manner. Consider Bangladesh which has raised the participation rate. It has only 1 prostitute per 10,000 head of population. India, with lower participation rate has 5. Venezuela, where the economy has collapsed, has 325. On the other hand, Latvia has 150 while Estonia has 7. Apparently, Riga is the center of a massive sex-tourism industry. I suppose a lot of the women are brought in by gangs. Estonia, it seems, is a source and transit point for such women. I hope the Baltic countries will take concerted action to stamp out this vile trade. Their economies are growing. Medical tourism will bring in much more money than sex tourism.
You may say that since measures to raise the participation rate benefits men as much as women, the thing isn't feminism at all. Feminism is about demanding the banning of dicks. Yet, the fact is, very few women are currently demanding any such things. So far as I can see, it's just me and the neighbor's cat who however may not be a Feminist at all.
Fellow South Indian, Amia Srinivasan wrote a book about the Right to sex in which she completely ignored the Feminism of Indian women and African women and so forth.
Moreover she did not understand that, since we can have sex with ourselves, this is a right whose remedy we can supply for ourselves though, no doubt, we may not be allowed to do in public places.
Is Amia's entire book stupid? Yes. She is a cretin. Consider the following list of quotations from her book on 'Goodreads'.
“Feminism cannot indulge the fantasy that interests always converge; that our plans will have no unexpected, undesirable consequences; that politics is a place of comfort.”
Like other 'isms', Feminism is free to indulge in any fantasy it likes. In particular, it is in its own interest to have a better fantasy about what can be achieved and how quickly and relatively costlessly this can be done.
“Feminism is not a philosophy, or a theory,
It can be. Anything at all can be.
or even a point of view. It is a political movement to transform the world beyond recognition.
No. There is no Feminist party anywhere in the world. However, it is true that in countries like India, rising participation rate will transform beyond all recognition the life-world of hundreds of millions of women. Demographic transition might mean that fifty years from now, countries like Bangladesh will look very different. Let us see whether Modi's granting of reservations to females in Parliament will have a positive effect. The fact that India, not Europe or America which has taken this step suggests that Feminism is only important in the Global South.
It asks: what would it be to end the political, social, sexual, economic, psychological and physical subordination of women?
Indian laws or proposed laws enable us to answer this question. No child marriage. No ban on widow remarriage. No 'right to conjugal rights'. No dowry demands. No bar on education, employment or holding political office. The list goes on. There are clear policy objectives and clear methods of monitoring progress in achieving targets.
It answers: we do not know; let us try and see.”
If you don't know what it is how will you know it when you see it? I suppose what Amia really means is 'Feminism achieved its goals in the First World. Believe me, I know because I'm from a shithole. Still, if I get paid to bang on about Feminism that's what I'm going to do even if the thing is pointless.
“Sex” in this second sense is also said to be a natural thing, a thing that exists outside politics.
Everything that isn't politics exists outside it. Politicians may seek to interfere in something outside politics iff there is a collective action problem. If there isn't, they are merely virtue signalling or talking bollocks.
Feminism shows that this too is a fiction, and a fiction that serves certain interests.
Feminism, like UFOlogy is a fiction. It is some stupid shit, stupid shitheads pretend to teach or to study.
Sex, which we think of as the most private of acts, is in reality a public thing.
In which case so is shitting.
The roles we play, the emotions we feel, who gives, who takes, who demands, who serves, who wants, who is wanted, who benefits, who suffers: the rules for all this were set long before we entered the world.”
Very true. If you benefit by pissing or shitting, and if others are harmed by your farts, the rules for all this were set long before we entered the world. This shows that Shitism and Pissism are important political philosophies. We may not know what it is they want to achieve but we must continue to develop these important philosophies while waiting to see what they will lead to.
“This is the deep contradiction at the heart of the incel phenomenon:
if they really are smart, they can get lots of money and buy as much sex as they want. Peeps too shite to get paid don't deserve to get laid.
incels oppose themselves to a sexual market in which they see themselves as losers, while being wedded to the status hierarchy that structures that market.”
They are like Socialists or Feminists or other people who don't want to have to pay for what they want.
“women’s autonomy, even if it spares men a good number of problems, will also deny them many conveniences;
Very true. Many women are actually washing machines. Well, they tend to sit on washing machines when they are on spin cycle. This voids the warranty. Also women leave you, if your washing machine no longer works.
assuredly, there are certain ways of living the sexual adventure that will be lost in the world of tomorrow:
Unlikely. Ways of living the sexual adventure are likely to become more diverse- if the market can afford it.
but this does not mean that love, happiness, poetry, and dreams will be banished from it.”
There is no necessary connection between 'sexual adventure' and any of these things.
“It is absurd to contend that … vice, ecstasy, and passion would become impossible if man and woman were concretely peers;
No. It is possible that if both men and women had an equal chance of getting pregnant, there would be a lot less sex. At some point, we might be replaced by a more fertile species. It may be that a genetic change such that all forms of gender dimorphism disappears leads to population collapse.
the contradictions opposing flesh to spirit, instant to time, the vertigo of immanence to the appeal of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of oblivion will never disappear;”
they disappeared long ago when people realized that any shithead could gas on in that vein. Stuff stupid pedants refer to as 'contradictions' or 'aporias' or 'paradoxes' tend to be nothing of the sort. Incidentally, vertiginous immanence is Deleuzian shite. Immanence has no mise en abyme. It can feature no singularities.
“Specifically, pornography performs the speech act of licensing the subordination of women,
No. That is why when the Taliban took over, their speech acts banning women from schools and work-places did not cause lots of peeps to jerk off and jizz profusely.
and conferring on women an inferior civic status. Like the stampede that follows my shouting “Fire!,” porn’s effects on women are not just, anti-porn feminists think, the expected result, but moreover the whole point of pornography.”
Nonsense! People pay for porn so as to jerk off. There is plenty of gay porn. If you want to confer inferior civic status on women, pass laws to that effect and then beat or kill women who disobey. It isn't the case that the Ayatollahs make porn videos so as to get women to observe proper hijab.
“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.
Amia's parents may hoped the 'yes' within herself would have to do with studying the sort of stuff which made Vivek Ramaswamy so very rich. Sadly, her deepest craving was to recycle the warmed up sick of the early Seventies.
But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered.
Sadly, it is too late for Amia to go back to college and get ahead in a STEM subject.
The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.
No it isn't. Suppress the truth about who farted and it gains no great strength or power. You may say, it is psychically costly to suppress aspects of yourself- e.g. I'm not really a teen aged Beauty Queen from Tamil Nadu- and sooner or later the truth will out. But that has to with the weakness of the suppressing mechanism, not the strength of the 'truth' which is thereby revealed.
The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined.”
Unless we are externally defined as rambunctious and disloyal and only fearful of not finding distortions in ourselves- right? That's the problem with talk of how we've been objectified or trapped into specific roles. Why should not the exogenous power force us to something useful- like prove the Reimann hypothesis- instead of convincing us we should bathe regularly and not shove our smartphones up our arses?
“But these feminists might counter that they are responding to another, equally real choice, which proponents of sex workers’ rights ignore: the choice between making life better for the women who sell sex now, and bringing into existence a world in which sex is no longer bought and sold.”
In other words the choice between helping some one who has fallen down to get back on their own feet and working for the repeal of the Law of Gravity.
“Indeed, what is remarkable about the sexual revolution—
which one? There have been several.
this is why it was so formative for the politics of a generation of radical feminists
i.e. shitheads who ended up teaching shitheads
—is how much was left unchanged. Women who say no still really mean yes, and women who say yes are still sluts. Black and brown men are still rapists, and the rape of black and brown women still doesn’t count. Girls are still asking for it. Boys still must learn to give it.”
Women are still being burnt for witchcraft. Men are still able to rape women with their eyes and get them pregnant. Did you know that 97 percent of all Female mathematical physicists still don't have a brain? Yet, female Professors are still expected to 'publish or perish'! How can you demand of a woman who has been burnt to death and who never had a brain in the first place to publish journal articles?
“Think back, she asks straight women, to the first time you betrayed your best friend for male attention.
How can a straight woman, who generally speaking would already have been burnt at the stake and who never would have had a brain, think? The thing is impossible. Also, women can't have best friends. This is because they are kept in suitcases by men.
Was that natural? Inevitable? Or something demanded of you by the infrastructure of male domination,
just as writing this shite was demanded of Amia by male domination. I have said it before and will say it again, Feminism is too important to be left to the women.
which fears most of all the absence of female desire,
Fuck would men want that for? We don't ask our cars to be horny for us and which man prefers a woman to a car?
and with it the end of men’s presumed access to women’s bodies, labor, minds, hearts?”
Domination means that you have access to bodies and labour. Fuck you care about minds or hearts- unless, in the latter case, you need a transplant.
“Women sell sex, on the whole, because they need money; to give sex-less men money with which to pay for sex presupposes that there are women who need to sell sex to live.”
Men sell sex. If women were forced out of prostitution, trannies would take their place. To give money to a person who lacks something does not 'presuppose' there is a market for that thing. A sex-less man who is given money may refuse to use it to hire a hooker. He may use it to make a down payment on a sports car.
“As Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici pointed out in the 1970s, and Nancy Fraser has argued since, the family as a site of feminine care serves capitalism by giving men emotional and sexual compensation for the coercion of market relations.”
But large parts of the world were Communist in the 1970s. Anyway, the family isn't a site of feminine care though Mummies may indeed look after their kids. But so might Daddies. Still it is true that Jill Biden is serving Capitalism by caring for her senile husband. Sadly, Trump would serve Capitalism better as would Stormy Daniels. Why is she not the Democratic candidate?
“But many, perhaps most, wrongful convictions of rape result from false accusations levied against men by other men: by cops and prosecutors, overwhelmingly male, intent on pinning an actual rape on the wrong suspect.”
Very true. Also the cops are continually making up stories about me being a bad driver. They are in cahoots with the lamp posts which keep jumping out into the street to crash into my car.
“The central insight of intersectionality is that
if you don't have a dick and are also dark skinned then you should be paid double.
any liberation movement—feminism, anti-racism, the labor movement—that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of color, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.”
No. Such movements help those who aren't oppressed at all but who do relish the chance of oppressing the fuck out of others.
“The question, from a feminist perspective, is why sex crimes elicit such selective skepticism.
No. The question is why all men don't chop off their own dicks. The existence of dicks is a sex crime. Why does the Law not understand this?
And the answer that feminists should give is that the vast majority of sex crimes are perpetrated by men against women.
But the biggest serial rapists are prostitutes who cater to Middle School boys in Delhi. They could easily get through 50 little cocks over the lunch recess.
Sometimes, the injunction to “Believe women” is simply the injunction to form our beliefs in the ordinary way: in accordance with the facts.”
Which is why nobody believes Feminists even if, like me, they have a dick.
“But Indians are such civilized people,” he said.
He was making a joke. Indians are as poor as shit. It takes money to be civilized.
I wanted to tell him that there is no civilization under patriarchy.”
Which is why we can be sure there was no ancient Greek or Chinese or Arab civilization.
“When you are a woman and a philosopher,” wrote the French philosopher Michèle Le Dœuff,
You are as stupid as shit.
“it is useful to be a feminist in order to understand what is happening to you.”
No. It is useful to pretend to be a feminist in order to teach people as stupid as yourself. To be clear, what happens to philosophers is that they end up teaching stupid or crazy people. Being a Feminist inures you to this fate. After all, men have prevented almost all women from having a brain. The rest of the sex have been burnt at the stake.
“Once we take it as given that under current economic conditions many women will be compelled to sell sex,
to each other because men would rather save up and buy a sports-car.
and that under current ideological conditions many men will buy it,
Did you know that men with the right ideology are given money to buy sex from ugly ho-bags?
the most important question remaining is: what can we do to strengthen the hand of women in this bargain?”
Women with stronger hands can give more efficient hand jobs. It is nice to think of Amia and her fellow Feminist philosophers helping prostitutes reduce turn-around time by providing them with grip strengtheners.
“Asked whether the criminalization of clients makes prostitutes more vulnerable, one of the campaigners said: “Of course it will! I am not scared to say it. But think of the abolition of slavery, it also made life bad for some former slaves. We need to think about the future!”
Criminalizing an activity means only criminals will go in for it. This should improve the safety of prostitutes- right?
“After all, in countries where prostitution has been decriminalized, the size of the sex work industry has not substantially decreased,”
Decriminalization means the thing can be taxed. Also there are economies of scope and scale in brothel management.
“As anti-prostitution feminists might see it, though, decriminalization is at best a reformist measure, which marginally improves the lives of sex workers while shoring up both patriarchy and the neoliberal commodification of sex.”
Not to mention its shoring up Feminist ranting. Still, it is true that under patriarchy there would be less prostitution because girls won't put out if they know their Daddy will get all the money. Pimps are a different matter.
“A vexed question: when is being sexually or romantically marginalized a facet of oppression, and when is it just a matter of bad luck, one of life’s small tragedies? (When I was a first-year undergraduate I had a professor who said, to our grave disappointment, that there would be heartbreak even in the post-capitalist utopia.)”
First year undergraduates become very disappointed when they find out that Death won't be abolished any time soon.
“As Rebecca Solnit put it: “Sex is a commodity,
No. That's why I won't be able to fund my old age by becoming a gigolo. The plain fact is there is no effective demand for sex with people who look like me.
accumulation of this commodity enhances a man’s status,
No. We are very polite and sweet to those with money or power. We don't give a shit about rent-boys who have take a dozen dicks up their arse in order to buy themselves a Happy Meal.
and every man has a right to accumulation,
Also men have a right to have a brain. Women have been cruelly denied any such thing.
but women are in some mysterious way obstacles to this, and they are therefore the enemy as well as the commodity.”
They are not just the enemy, they are also urinals. Moreover, if you carefully tear the head of a woman, you can shit down her neck. Females are inured to such treatment. Indeed, they might look askance at you if you fail to regularly use them as a receptacle for your turds.
Incels, Solnit says, “are furious at their own low status,
i.e. they are almost as abject as women
but don’t question the system that allocates status and commodifies us all”
otherwise they would become Feminist philosophers and thus Amia would be out of a job.
“Judges routinely decided that workplace sexual harassment was a “personal” matter, or that it was discrimination not “on the basis of sex” but on the basis of something else, like being the sort of woman who didn’t want to have sex with her boss—a characteristic which, unlike sex, was not protected by anti-discrimination legislation.”
Judges routinely tear off the heads of women who report sexual harassment and shit down their necks. Why are there no laws prohibiting this insanitary practice?
“Feminists of this era fought to make the courts see what is to many of us now obvious: that far from being a merely personal matter, or a matter orthogonal to gender, sexual harassment expresses and reinforces women’s political subordination.”
As does the routine tearing off of the heads and the shitting down the necks of women by judges, G.Ps, postal carriers, Presbyterian Ministers, and all Costco members. Look at what happened to Theresa May and Liz Truss!
“A famous philosopher once said to me that he objected to feminist critiques of sex because it was only during sex that he felt truly outside politics, that he felt truly free. I asked him what his wife would say to that.”
Assuming he was actually doing her, she would have objected to his feeling outside politics when he was in her vagina. This is because she was renting out that space to the Democrats for their Campaign Headquarters. Still, it is true that men ought to be thinking of Donald Trump when they penetrate any orifice.
“Feminists have long dreamed of sexual freedom.
Men have long dreamed of proving the Reimann hypothesis.
What they refuse to accept is its simulacrum: sex that is said to be free, not because it is equal, but because it is ubiquitous.”
If a dude sticks his dick into a chick's twat, why is she not allowed to shove her fist up his bum? A thing which is not scarce is free. The supply is too great for it to be rationed by the price mechanism. But the fact that something is free does not mean everybody can benefit from it equally. Thus if there is no shortage of cock to suck, those who don't like sucking cock gain nothing.
“on the contrary, it is when the slavery of half of humanity is abolished
which would end the ubiquitous practice of tearing off the heads of females so as to shit down their necks
and with it the whole hypocritical system it implies that the … human couple will discover its true form.”
as some boring shite.
“And yet, if the aim is not merely to punish male sexual domination but to end it, feminism must
ban dicks. Nothing less will do.
address questions that many feminists would rather avoid: whether a carceral approach that systemically harms poor people and people of color can serve sexual justice;
Yes. Poor women of color benefit if their rapists are incarcerated. The same is true of their would be murderers.
whether the notion of due process—and perhaps too the presumption of innocence—should apply to social media and public accusations;
No. However, there may be legal penalties for libel or slander or the fabrication of evidence or the pressing of false charges.
whether punishment produces social change.
Yes, especially Capital punishment. Large classes of offense can disappear overnight if entire criminal populations are exterminated. The Bolsheviks showed that if it is a crime to own land or to employ labor, those guilty of such crimes could disappear entirely from the social scene.
What does it really take to alter the mind of patriarchy?”
Money. If women can earn a good wage, Patriarchy suddenly thinks that women should go out to work. Otherwise, it tears off the heads of women and shits down their necks because, face it, that's what Neo-Liberalism wants us to do.
