Thanks for the info (and reminder: I’d run across references to performances in Seoul, but forgotten to update this post.) Were the show in Seoul, I’d probably go just to see how it was handled. I’d guess earnestly, for what I know of Korean feminism. (… as well as the involvement of earnest-seeming foreign women in previous performances. Not a criticism, just a stray summary characterization.)

I think you’re right about the paradox, and it’s probably rooted in biology, but it’s worth noting that violence indeed is on the decline globally. It looks like things are getting worse, but this is mostly because our tolerance of violence has declined constantly. Steve Pinked gave a fascinating speech about that at TED, which I am pretty sure I linked somewhere around here… ah, yes, near the end of this post.

And yeah, the solutions were facetious.

And actually, your comment is timely: in my forthcoming article at Cahoots, I address what I consider sensible and realistic strategies for dealing with what I think is, in the end, the insoluble problem of sexual violence (because, as I argue, biology dictates that there will always be violent/rapine/sociopathic outliers in any human group beyond a basic size or level of complexity). The short answer: approaches that don’t rely on the eradication of rape as a social ill, because that’s a doctrinaire sham. Arming women with non-fatal defense tools (pepper spray) and training them in its use. And some of our old-fashioned manners, like never letting a woman walk to her car alone at night.

(Which, of course, doesn’t deal with the fact most victims know their assailants, but I think social network solutions work better there, too.)

A paradox I always notice when talking about violence against women is that we—as a society perhaps or as a species—have created incredibly violent worlds for ourselves. When we talk about violence against women, it begs the question “what about men?” And I know what talks about quote-unquote violence against women are getting at—bad court decisions, bad marriages, bad gender roles, etc.—but I always do a double-take and say well, you know we’re at war, right? You ever read the newspaper at the murders, beatings, and shootings that happen each night in your town? When we don’t seem eager to end violence at any level, talking about ending violence against women seems like preaching to the choir, to those who already don’t care for it. No doubt there have been legislative developments, and I suppose that can pull the cart, but the fact remains we simply live in violent times. Even your hypothetical solutions to sexual predators—arming women or castrating offenders—answer violence with violence, and though I think you were being facetious it does speak to the dichotomy we often come up against and then ignore.

Funny, I was thinking and eventually figured it was some other monks. Ah well. :)

Maybe it was the link with the University. Or, well, my mom has always had great regard for social workers; her own sister is one in Montreal. Anyway!

My parents both worked at Youth Services program, which was affiliated with the University Hospital. They were both social workers who specialized with adolescents- mom was actually one of the first people to get into working with teens who were sexually abused, and Dad did family counselling. They were both pretty involved with social and community programs in the city and did workshops on working with adolescents. My mom actually got a centennial medal because of her work with sexually abused teens.

Well, IF Im remembering this right, my mom seemed to know who your family was, and quietly announced your presence to my family in the hushed and reverential tones she usually reserved for pointing out professors and their families, at some performance of Tibetan Monks at U of S. I have no idea how my mom would have known [of] your folks, but I’m pretty sure she did. Thus, I always thought they worked at the U of S.

And those monks were nice guys. They let me try their shawm. It squawked something horrible, though, when I blew into it.

Having tried to do serious writing with people talking around, I understand. No worries, and feel free to clarify later if you like.

Joanna Russ had some pretty interesting things to say about this in What Are We Fighting For? — actually, as far as I remember, she argued that there was insufficient awareness of the role that race and class and sexual orientation and the like play in Western patriarchy. (And suggested, if I recall correctly, that mainstream North American feminism was really mainstream white middle class feminism, quite exclusive of blacks or Hispanics and quite dissociated from the kinds of issues that those women confront).

But I guess I’m not really clear on the difference between “part of ” and “anchored to” what I think you’d call any particular “construction of patriarchy” (and what I simply would call “a patriarchal society” and, since we don’t have any major societies that aren’t patriarchal, I refer to in the shorthand of “society”).

I didn’t know your parents were retired, or that they’d been social workers. I was under the impression they were professors or something.

(It’s a long story how I came under that impression, but it may be my bad memory, so I’ll just ask: Did you ever attend a Gyuto Monks performance at the U of S Music Department at some point?)

I don’t know if I would accept race and class as elements of patriarchy. Elements of the social construct, yes, but not necessarily tied to patriarchal systems.

I see class, gender, and ethnic as elements that are independent, yet interdependent, sort of like the Olympic rings.

I think I read “The Vagina Monologues” in undergrad, and then saw the performance when I was probably in my mid-20s at the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon, done by a group at the U of S. I remember liking a few of the performers and not liking others. The friend I went with had a similar reaction to the show. I also think that I might not be the ideal target market, since I grew up in a very liberal, sexually health home, where I read all sorts of stuff on sexuality. (My mom was a sexual abuse counsellor and social worker, and she had a lot of books about sex and sexuality etc, around the house that I read when I was quite young. My dad was also a social worker.) They’re both retired now.

Yeah, I imagine it’s probably the same for anyone who isn’t right now an undergrad just discovering these issues. (Or stuck in that mode. “What would your vagina wear?” was like, well, amateur dada or something, to me…) Did you see it live, or just read the book?

I didn’t really highlight the fact that I suspect lots of sensible (type 3, by my categories) feminists, like you, see what I claim is common sense (as do men who are, well, whatever a man can call himself without the put-on-ness of calling himself a “feminist” — it’s like blood in water for attracting personal criticism, a man describing himself that way).

The one thing I didn’t touch on is a somewhat mounting suspicion that “the patriarchy” is really too much a spectral, phantom-like antagonist which, no matter what, can be blamed for everything and which can arguably never be vanquished. (Sorta like “terrorism.”)

I see its usefulness as an abstraction, but a couple of things give me pause. One, a controversial and slightly misanthropy-fueling one, is the possibility of inborn nature playing a part in the widespread nature of patriarchal cultures; physically-enforced male group dominance among other primate species makes me wonder whether we’re just hardwired for essentially patriarchal societies, at base, and quite possibly to our chagrin. (I’m not arguing that patriarchy as we know it, or in any form, is good or “natural”, inevitable or predestined, but wondering if it’s so widespread for some other reason than is currently imagined. Like slavery was for so long, in part because of the way humans innately categorize humans into “us” and “them.” Slavery’s not predestined, and I’ll never defend it, but the practice and social structure are easily reconciled with — and likely are possible because of — deeply-embedded human instincts to categorize fellow humans into groups deserving of more or less empathy, trust, and proximity that we developed over millions of years of living in relatively small groups… tendencies notably present in our closest primate relatives.) The other thing is that I’m always drawn to issues of class. (Perhaps this tendency itself is a product of my being male and thus perceiving primarily the hierarchic structure more directly concerned with, and relatively like to be disadvantageous to, myself.)

The commonly-accepted feminist stance as I understand it regards socioeconomic class and race and so on as subsidiary components of “patriarchy”; am I correct? Because honestly, I have a growing suspicion that to whatever degree we can make escape velocity from that system, it’s through the cultivation of radical class shifts.

(Kind of like how Korean women now are getting [relatively] much more empowered about life decisions, marrying less, deciding for themselves whether to reproduce to an increasing degree, and it cannot be credited to any direct pressure to erode the patriarchy… those have been relatively less active since the 70s, and the pendulum backswing has been quite apparent to the few older, politically minded women I’ve occasionally met. But it does seem to have a lot to do with the generally positive economic circumstances here, and the bootstrapping of much of a very impoverished population (a few generations ago) into a largely middle-class or, at worst, lower-middle class existence.)

But I suppose, since these are all abstractions and models, we could see multiple sides of the same coin, depending on our focus.

I enjoy the discussions of female sexuality, but some of it was just too “cutesy” and “out there” for me.
I ended up feeling slightly nauseated.

Oh, and I believe feminism is for men too. This is going to be overly simplistic, but I think that men and women should be able to celebrate themselves and their differences. Part of the problem with the patriarchy that society has created is that it has created limited range of expressions of masculinity as well as femininity. In my opinion, patriarchy and its construction have imposed unhealthy constructs on both men and women. Some of these (but not all of them), can be dismantled through feminism.