Wolf writes: "Surely reporting on fresh information about female sexual response is an obviously feminist thing to do?"
Portrait, author and activist Naomi Wolf, 10/19/11. (photo: Guardian UK)
My Feminist Perspective? Knowledge Is Power
12 September 12
any critics and readers, including many feminists, have welcomed my book Vagina: A New Biography. Some critics, though - feminists too, of another kind - are accusing me of a form of contemporary heresy.
Vagina is an account of the latest neuroscientific and other findings that markedly update our understanding of female sexual desire, arousal and orgasm, at a time when conventional wisdom about female sexual response is arrested in research from Masters and Johnson, decades-old; at a time when, even in a hypersexualised society, 30% of American women self-report not reliably having orgasms when they wish to; in a year when 2,000 British women with normal labia requested labiaplasties. Surely reporting on fresh information about female sexual response is an obviously feminist thing to do?
But these critics' contention is that this reporting is "essentialism" - that I am re-grounding gender "back" in the body, which is a contemporary feminist-theory sin. To mainstream readers, this argument may seem arcane. So a primer: some contemporary feminist theory's primary orthodoxy asserts that gender is always, everywhere, entirely "socially constructed" - that is, only real in the mind or in social attitudes.
But critics who attack me from this position don't seem to know how recently their position was created in feminist intellectual history. The "essentialism" versus "gender theory" wars emerged only belatedly, in the 1980s, as legal activists sought to downplay any potential biological differences between women and men in pursuit of equal treatment in the workplace and, elsewhere, academic feminists were inspired by post-structuralism to create a discipline that cast gender as existing only as a social norm.
But the radical new findings on which I report have to do with the female body and with female sexual response. The new findings are updating our understanding of female pleasure and the mind-body connection in women on many levels. Some new findings are important for understanding the harm of sex crime more fully, and others have to do with the numbing effects of porn on desire. In a time when porn co-opts young men's and women's responses, is it "feminist" to withhold new data about its potentially addictive nature and depressive effect on a habituated libido?
Should we not know about this data? I come from the feminist school that believes knowledge is power. Knowing about the science of the brain-vagina connection - a concept that is not my construction but rather an everyday fact for the scientists at the forefront of this research - simply means we are willing to engage with the modern world; the brain-body connection is being thoroughly documented in hundreds of ways, from cardiovascular health research to the role of stress in illness.
Problematically for my critics, this book is not an opinion piece or a polemic; it is mostly a survey of this new science. These critics, to truly carry their points, can't simply attack me - they really need to take issue directly with the findings of the dozens of studies that I cite.
Their hostility towards looking at any new neuroscience of female sexuality and at any data on the mind-body connection is unsustainable - and will only, as time goes on, make some feminist theory seem more and more out of touch with contemporary human learning.
I would say, too, that this particular critical attack on Vagina - as somehow abandoning feminism's "higher agenda" by giving women new information about such "trivial" issues as their sexual responses, arousal and orgasm - is remarkably historically shortsighted. I am actually standing not in opposition to feminism but squarely in one (temporarily submerged) intellectual tradition, part of a long tradition of women who saw the empowerment of women as being linked to their having good, solid and fearlessly presented information about their sexuality.
My critics show some historical amnesia; because a robust feminist tradition of pro-sex information defined a long tradition of feminism until the 1970s - dating back to 17th-century midwife Jane Sharp and through to Victorian physician Elizabeth Blackwell, motivating contraceptive activists of the 1920s Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, and reaching a high point in the second wave.
In that era, pro-sexual-awareness feminists added the speculum to encounter-group activities so women could see what they looked like. Germaine Greer looked at biology and culture in The Female Eunuch and insisted, in a 1970 essay, Lady, Love Your Cunt. Judy Chicago made her confrontational Dinner Party - a piece of artwork that represented famous women in the archetype of various vaginal images. Lesbian activist Tee Corinne made a vagina coloring book; Betty Dodson made movies showing various vulvas and teaching women to masturbate; Shere Hite insisted (to familiar howls of outrage) that the Freudian model of vaginal intercourse alone was not enough to please two-thirds of women. And a generation of women's health and sexuality activists created revolutions - from which we still benefit - in sex education, women's reproductive rights, and access to information about desire and pleasure. Pussy Riot and Lisa Brown of the Michigan state house are surely descendants of this inspiring tradition, which defied ridicule and sometimes prison to empower women sexually.
By writing frankly about female desire and shining a light on the now well-established brain-vagina connection and the new science of female pleasure, am I departing from the greatest feminist tradition or honoring it? I believe it is the latter. Perhaps, unlike some of my critics, I have learned to trust my readers. By confronting the body I am not saying women are just the body. Rather I am respecting my readers' intelligence: some situations are socially constructed, some are biologically based, and my readers are smart enough to assess their world moment by moment.
The feminist mission remains the same, even in the light of new data about the vagina, female desire and the female brain. New data should not derail us from fighting for a world in which all individuals are valued equally, and all differences treated with respect. Yet if we are to have intellectual integrity we must not flee from new insights but engage with them. I for one prefer to look at the new evidence directly, not avert my eyes from it - knowing that the truth always empowers - and meanwhile to keep up the age-old fight for women's freedom.
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This makes it seem like the only ones out there are the "post modernists" (i.e., the post structuralists) and ignores the radical/marxist feminist theorists who argue that the whole nature/nurture biology vs. social construction dichotomy is false to begin with and that you cannot separate natural from the social (or the mind from the body) and that the key is to look at the relationship between the two. They also argue that one cannot look at "gender" alone without also looking at and understanding its relationship with other "systems" of power such as race and class.
Thus Wolf is able to wind up saying "some situations are socially constructed, some are biologically based" as if the two are separate and unrelated. If only "some" situations are socially constructed which ones aren't? And is "biologically based" completely separate from the social? If so, then shouldn't, for example, all social groups be prone to getting the same biological illnesses at the same rates?
So, while much of her response to her critics is very good, Wolf's position is greatly hampered by her own analysis and by ignoring a alternative and very vibrant strand of feminist thought.
Not if the biology is different which it is between male and female. It is a known fact that men are much more emotional than women. Thus women tend to be able to perform better under stress then men.
the point is that biology is affected by environment (the social) and vice versa so these are never completely separate categories.
And, "it is a known fact that men are much more emotional than women"? Known by whom?
To that I would add, which day of the week, what time of day, what season of the year, and so on.
I think the focus needs to be on the fact that we are, first of all, and above all, human beings. All categories we put people in are simply sub-headings below the main one, which is human being.
Our options, our possibilities, all become less limited when we start from that point of view.
I think it was Dear Abby who quoted a woman who said that she and her husband had a great marriage because they treated each other as human beings first, as male and female second, and thirdly as husband and wife.
Change the point of view, and the expectations and responses all change as well. As the band Sister Hazel said, "If you want to be a different person, change your mind."
If you keep cutting the lawn, eventually plants may not thrive in the spot that's been shorn away. The analogy is that the strident focus on logic and linearity causes parts of the brain (like the plants too often cut back) to close down. It becomes a virtual dead zone due to a lack of use like a muscle that atrophies for lack of exercise.
My point is that it's not an altogether male or female thing; rather, it has a lot to do what cultures deem important and which portions of the brain are regularly used and which parts essentially abandoned.
Isn't it true that human beings are alleged to use an estimated 10% of their brains? I liken this "organ" to a vast computer where unused files go into stored, if forgotten memory. It's plausible that such things as soul memory or racial memory are coded and retained in portions of that 90% of brain space that's left virtually untapped.
You could say the same about race or class distinctions.
Because there IS a hierarchy, and because the privileges attendant on a few (over many centuries) at the expense of so many continues to reverberate, your concluding statement is about as viable as my stating that life would be great if Repubicans AND Democrats didn't have to dance for the same deep pocket donors even if that's the bottom line within a corrupt political culture, one that grants the only real representation to vast sums of wealth.
On top of that, no woman I've ever been involved with has said anything to me regarding that issue. I don't know if they were afraid of hurting my pride, or if they just didn't know either.
A case of GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. Bad, or no information equals bad decisions. "What we have here is a failure to communicate," based on a lack of knowledge, rather than on a lack of wanting to change or get better.
And then there are people in power like Mr. Akin who continue to hold the kinds of ignorant opinions that support the kinds of expectations and responses people have about such things as rape, which is not about sex at all, but having power over someone else.
To me, that is one of the main problems we now face, and that is the people in power wanting to have power over others, rather than power with others. And that is the way they approach their relationship with nature. They want power-over it.
This reduction of life's value is also found in the systems of war propaganda that turn the enemy du jour into something less than human. The desecration of the female birth canal is like trampling upon the sacred wearing storm troopers' boots. The assault on The Divine Feminine extends to the way so many treat the Beloved Earth, Mother to all life forms, including our own.
So it doesn't surprise me that female PLEASURE would be absent from porn. This idea of "double penetration" strikes me as a particularly hostile form of misogyny. The female only exists as a membrane separating 2 males. In my view, it's a covert form of homo-erotic projection.
Because right wing religious factions, be they America's fundamentalist Christians or the Taliban both place a premium on suppressing female sexual pleasure, it can be inferred that the control of the female is central to both doctrines because they rely on the dangerous illusion of male supremacy. That vile forms of disrespect for the Intended Partner are not only taught, but also institutionaliz ed explains why the world is wounded by war in so many places with love too often made rare
I also had to take a class in assertiveness, before I was able to practice it. Prior to that, my choices were the flip side of the same coin - being passive or aggressive. That's what I learned growing up.
Has anyone ever thought what this world might be like if kids in the lower grades were taught those two courses?
I've often thought the best teachers upported curiosity in students. How much do schools now support curiosity, as compared to confomity, don't rock the boat, be seen and not heard? To me, that is part of the dumbing-down of America (and the world?) and would explain why there are so many blindly and unquestioningly people in this culture.
Also, according to Anne Wilson-Schaef ("When Society Becomes An Addict) we live in a society that supports the learning of addictive norms, and then people wonder why things get so crazy. This also supports the idea that people learn to be blind and unquestioning.
And, here we are, with all the problems we are dealing with.
It is not true that ten percent of the brain is used. Charlie Rose had a series of shows on brain science in the past year. He had the best in the world talk about the brain. The conclusion, we use the entire brain.
I am analytical, but also creative and artistic. That requires both sides of the brain, left brain linear, right brain intuitive and creative. Creative people have been proven by studies to preform thirty points about their I.Q. if they are creative (right brain thinking) rather than intelligent (left brain linear thinking) so there is a definitive difference. If you are like me, and other people I know, you are special and I think have a responsibility to help and heal the world.
Ms. Wolf says that knowledge is power. Some people feel that lies disguised as knowledge bring power. She says her book is based on scientific studies. Who did those "studies"? Janice Raymond? Melissa Farley? Judith Reisman?
There are some activists who come up with "scientific studies" that somehow always manage to support whatever ideological point they are trying to make. As one example, Judith Reisman, who got hundreds of thousands of dollars from the US Congress to support her "studies", came to the conclusion that viewing pornography creates "erototoxins" in the brains of the viewers that cause brain damage.
I will withhold judgement on Ms. Wolf's book until I read it, but I am skeptical.
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