Ici, quelques entrées, classées chronologiquement, abordant des sujets divers qui nous touchent tous, ou pas.
Earlier today I’ve been digging into Anita Sarkeesian’s entries, and I mean those previous to the rather well-known Tropes vs women in videogames. In case you haven't heard of Ms. Sarkeesian, it might be good to remind that she has been the target of quite a lot of machist attacks since she kickstarted her show. But despite the title of this article, this perticular point is not the one I am interested in commenting ; for that, you can go there.
While listening to Sarkeesian, I couldn't help but think of a recent France Culture broadcast about feminist men that consisted of interviewing said feminist men. It was very troubling that the animators judged fit to conclude this hour-long broadcast by saying there were so damn few feminist men around. Because I mean : why should there be any ? Hopefully you have raised an eyebrow.
Having personnally grown up in a mostly feminine environment, I consider myself one of those modern men who are able cook, wash dishes, advocate gender equality, and even one of those most willing to do so (except maybe the second one, that is). Why is it then that I would never call myself a feminist (even though I spent the past months teaching young adults about the representation of men and women in early cinema) ? It is because this cause is not my calling. All of the men interviewed by France Culture in that previous broadcast were intimately tied to the cause by personnal relations with this or that person or event. People only take the label of a cause when they are in direct relationship with it, right ? It is then a logical necessity that most of the feminists be women.
Coming back to Sarkeesian, I couldn't help but listen to her wondering exactly who she is addressing. Obviously, this being a web-show implies she addresses a public already willing to listen. The question at hand, here, is when it comes to feminism, or gender equality, which speech is best served to which audience ? As a matter of fact, I can't really shake the idea that Sarkeesian is preaching to the wrong choir, as they say, but then again she does it by documenting rather accurately a number of socially embedded representations, giving to the adept more intellectual elements to grasp the current state of men-women complex relationships. I rather like her shows, as you may guess, and I think she avoids most of the traps many feminist I've listened to fall in.
These traps I refer to basically come down to the rhetorical problem of "which speech is best for which audience". When any cause is raised in a speech to some kind of priority, in order to call upon attention about a world-wide problem, might it be biodiversity, climate-wise, economic concerns or feminist claims, the nature of speech itself and emphasis even more bring the necessity of not mentioning worse problems. You don't raise funds to fight copyright infringement by mentioning World Hunger to a crowd of philanthropists, right ? You give them weeping actresses.
Why is it then, that so many feminist speeches are engineered in such a way that they feel not as if they were aimed at women but at men, telling them : "it is a given fact that you own the reins, so could you please not behave like such a jerk and let me, let us, women, hold one of the reins ? Maybe both ?", when a rein-holding-man will not give the reins to someone who does not take them by force with enough confidence and mastership that the man can feel safe, driven by another ? I wonder. I like much more the feminists who like Simone de Beauvoir address directly the women, telling them to be strong in the face of adversity, and how to be strong in an efficient way. It isn't chance who made de Beauvoir such an influencal lady to the feminist movement : she describes in her writings a new, modern woman she also incarnated at the time, giving to the women around the world a beacon of hope and a model towards which aspire.
Back to Sarkeesian again, I got deeply troubled by her video about the fembot trope. Although I can admit that beer-drinking women have good reasons to take offense from the Heineken advert, the one about the razor lady seems to me highly different. Here you see the application of the problem I raised earlier : men razors being designed differently than women's for questions of biological differences, it can safely be said that the Philips advert is exclusively targeted at men. EXCLUsively, like in "excluding" : not only does it not care about what women think about it, it also plays on a comfortable feeling of male-male complicity, like in an abstract sports room of some sort where all the men are gathered, in order to flatter the viewer's masculinity. Notice how it basically is a clip about a beautiful male showering, and how the man himself is poorly eroticized. See ? Male-male shower bonding. There is a lot of irony to that.
But moreover, if the Philips advert seems to me quite harmless, now that we've established that it is targeted to a male audience and playing on exclusively masculine values, it is precisely because it uses the objectification of women to such an extreme extent. Sounds paradoxical, eh ? But here the Figure of the objectified woman is given a face, it is not lied about, rendered realistic, or vaguely humane, or plunged into some hardly probable but live-looking creature like it is the case with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl for instance. And objectification itself is the stuff fantasm is made of. Although, sadly, you cannot stop publicists from using their knowledge of how the human mind works in order to bring customers to buy their products, the real point here is that women objectify men just as much as the contrary. Sure, society being what it is, that part of the female psyche is not so prompt to show up in advertisements, but lately more and more female-targeted TV-shows and movies have been revealing it to the male audience. I could for instance mention the recent Warm Bodies in which the male character plays out not much more than a glorified emo-looking poodle. I am nowhere near contesting that the balance of power leans in favor of men, understand. I'm a nearly pointing out a recent phemonemon that (quite ironically, I admit) made the Twilight saga into a feminist weapon able to be heard by the industry of entertainment. The point is : things are changing.
And far from the bygone era of the nineteenth century, when phallocentric values were so deeply entrenched that many wives throughout Europe didn't even raise their own children, I am ready to see in the recent proliferation of women-objectifying images some kind of nostalgic celebration of a soon lost domination over the beautiful gender. We end up ourselves being the ones asking, with the puppy eyes : "can you please not act like such a jerk and let me, let us, men, hold the reins for a little while longer ?".
So, in a word, objectification is good stuff that should be toyed with on a more or less artistic level, this is what I believe. I long to get more gynocentric perspectives on anything and everything, and I'm quite confident that this will not happen through repression of the gross masculine psyche, but instead through the liberation of the feminine grossness. On that matter, Anita Sarkeesian, I must say : I do like your name much, and I do like your words, but I especially love your mouth.
On top of that, I would restrain feminist speeches to women, in order to keep the spirit of struggle going : one has to feel set apart in order to wage war truly. Serving men speeches about equality remains good, but it won't help as much as if you girls start farting. And hit boys who complain. I know it may sound tough, but y'all ladies would understand all that fairly easy if you just had the balls.
Les récents « débats » sur le droit des couples gays à l’adoption ont amené à mon attention un point amusant : on entend beaucoup d’hommes s’offusquer des rapports homosexuels masculins (touchés en profondeur qu’ils sont par le thème de la sodomie), et beaucoup de femmes s’ériger contre le droit des homos à être parents (adoption, procréation médicalement assistée, etc.), et pratiquement jamais l’inverse. Qu’un homme puisse se faire pénétrer ne choquerait pas les femmes, qu’une femme puisse se passer des hommes non plus, quant à la procréation ou l’adoption par les gays, j’aurais tendance à supposer que les opposants masculins à l’homosexualité n’en conçoivent même pas réellement la possibilité empirique – évacuant la question hors du champ du débat public.
Je caricature évidemment : dans les rassemblements publics contre le mariage pour tous, quantité d’hommes sont présents, mais de ce que j’entends à la radio ou vois à la télé, les journalistes semblent prendre un malin plaisir à ne donner la parole qu’aux dames. De fait : ce sont elles, dans leur rôle de mère, qui sont les premières menacées, de même que la seule pensée d’une bite dans leur trou à merde menace la psyché des mâles névrosés, héritiers des cultures religieuses monothéistes qui placent toutes le phallus dans la main droite de Dieu. Tous se réunissent sous une unique bannière, mais comme dans tant de manifestations, les causes abondent en vastes nombres.
Ce qui m’offusque ici, comme toujours, ce sont les amalgames vaseux. En premier lieu : l’amalgame d’individus derrière la cause prétendument commune de l’aspiration à la cellule familiale traditionnelle ; un amalgame à l’intérieur duquel se cachent des hommes craintifs de voir leur bite ou leur anus souillés voire, pire, leur sexe rendu inconséquent dans un monde où les femmes se font jouir entre elles, et les femmes, justement, craignant l’avènement du jour où, concurrencées par des utérus artificiels elles seront contraintes de n’être plus qu’objets sexuels pour hommes et/ou femmes matérialistes et portés sur la chair – comme si le fait qu’on veuille parfois les engrosser faisait d’elles autre choses que des potiches (creuses). Et la position de parent, dont on aime à faire courir qu’elle existerait à un niveau congénital chez les femmes (« instinct maternel ») mais pas chez les hommes (on ne parle jamais d’« instinct paternel »), sans que ne semble jamais être entendu le (pourtant bien admis et copieusement dénoncé) conditionnement des demoiselles dès la plus tendre enfance à s’occuper de gamins. Je maintiendrais, une main dans le feu, qu’il n’y a pas d’instinct naturel et congénital au fait de devenir parent, simplement un conditionnement social.
Ça n’est même pas le côté rétrograde et bassement conservateur de ces attitudes qui m’irrite, parce que je sais que les générations passées sont vouées à la disparition, et que le vingt-et-unième siècle m’apparaît comme porteur de révolutions sociales drastiques et encore à venir, une fois les rebuts du vingtième siècle évacués – auxquels j’appartiens moi-même, faut-il dire. Non, je pense que tout cela va se passer très bien. J’ai confiance. Qu’est-ce alors, qui m’irrite ? Les amalgames, je l’ai dit, et tout ce qui brandit l’argument de la nature, de dieu, et de l’ordre établi, pour défendre des intérêts largement égoïstes qui ne se regardent pas en face ; tout ce qui invoque le bien public pour parvenir à des biens privés ; tous ces putains de demeurés enfoncés dans leurs valeurs au point de ne même pas percevoir leur propre hypocrisie face à eux-mêmes, j’ai nommé : la mauvaise foi.