[Peace-discuss] Feminism under capitalism

[C G Estabrook]

[This brilliant comment by Prof. Luciana Bohne is far better than the article it graces. It exposes a paramount example of identity politics: substitute IDENTITY for CLASS as the object of Left concern - shift attention from exploitation to discrimination - and the 1% needn't worry. "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers” (Thomas Pynchon).]

Keep it simple, is propaganda's #1 rule.

So we have these women in the 70s, asking for equal pay, maternity leave, remuneration for housework and pensions and child bearing, child benefits, free childcare--and all this cuts into profits. So, let's get them to switch focus from the body politics to plain bodies: fixate them on the body--pleasure and violence.

Ipso facto: postfeminism.

In capitalism, especially neoliberal capitalism, the body, like everything else--nature, for example-- is a marketable asset, something one "invests in" Detach feminists from their focus on the economic, social, and political--and restrict it to the personal and the individual. Mission accomplished in the 1980s--the backlash, posing as sexual liberation.

But, of course, if you get women to demand freedom for their bodies, the state no longer matters. The state is not the problem. So who is? Men. Thus women no longer challenge the state. Mission accomplished: target deflected; women blame men. Divide and conquer.

So, now, there is a backlash to that division, further dividing the men/women dichotomy. What is it: Menism. That is to say, women who oppose women who blame men for their sexual victimhood.

As I said: rule #1 of propaganda is simplicity. Women resent men; men resent women. They cannot bother the state no more. They're too busy fighting each other,

Here we have an example: the author of this article is a member of the American Enterprise think-tank, a neo-con body. She takes Andrea Dworkin, who represented an essentialist version of feminism called "radical feminism." This essentialism simply inverted the older patriarchal paradigm men/women in which women were the subjected, lesser part of the dualism--and made it women/men. A paradigm of subjection. Somehow, matriarchal societies would be better because women BY NATURE are genetically morally superior to men. You can't be more unscientific than this. But millions buy it. It's simple, you see. Sexism is no longer a category that benefits capitalism. Sexism is no longer, like racism, a strategy of profit and exploitation. No, capitalism gets off scot-free.

Dworkin represented only a branch of feminist theory, but this author presents it as feminism tout court. Straw man argument, I'd say.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11527238/Meet-the-feminist-who-is-sticking-up-for-men.html <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11527238/Meet-the-feminist-who-is-sticking-up-for-men.html>

###
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20180801/e29341ad/attachment.html>