Cherchez la Lesbienne

The other day at the public library book sale I picked up a charming book I've been wanting to read for a long time: Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend (Firebrand Books, 1988) by Yvonne Zipter, an informal look at lesbians and softball.  I just finished it, and enjoyed it all the way through.  Zipter, a freelance journalist and poet, had found softball a helpful community builder and enjoyable recreation, so when a friend suggested she write about it, she came up with this book.  It's not a monograph, but she did read up on women in sports, circulate questionnaires, and interview people.

Zipter spends some space on friction between jocks and feminists, though one of the book's virtues is that Zipter recognizes that the groups are not mutually exclusive, and is more interested in doing justice to the variety of views and politics among lesbians rather than finding a unifying essence despite everything.  (After all, the dyke cartoonist Alison Bechdel -- several of whose drawings illustrate the book -- has celebrated lesbian softball as played by her strongly feminist characters.)   But I was brought up short by this quotation excerpt from one of the questionnaires:

Stephie: "What do you mean by feminist?  When I think of feminists, I think of hairy armpits, hairy legs, ERA all the way ... I believe in equal pay, yes.  [But] if I was straight and went out on a date with a guy, I'd still want the guy to open the door for me.  I don't think I'm a feminist.  I believe in equal rights -- don't get me wrong -- and I believe in equal pay, but ... I know some women are feminists but I'm not like that" [139].

Hairy armpits?  Hairy legs?!  Why, they sound like a bunch of lesbians!

Let me remind the reader: the person quoted here is herself a lesbian.  Yet she deploys the crudest and most laughable stereotypes of lesbians to distinguish and distance herself from feminists.  (Her evident assumption that "ERA all the way" is an extreme radfem slogan is equally wack: the Equal Rights Amendment was a liberal-feminist project.  And. of course, it was meant to enforce the "equal rights" that Stephie claims to support.)  I wonder who holds the door for whom when Stephie goes on a date with another woman?

My first thought as I tried to resolve the cognitive dissonance this quotation ignited was that Stephie was an unreconstructed femme, but she could just as easily be a butch with hairy armpits and hairy legs herself.  One happily effeminate gay man I met in my first year in a gay community said, when he learned I was involved in the campus Gay Liberation Front, said to me: "The GLF? Aren't they all -- you know -- [hand wiggle] effeminate?"  He promptly burst out laughing, acknowledging his own queeniness, and I have never been able to decide whether Reggie was serious or was just performing one of his little comedy routines (he had several).  Later, though, I met other less-than-butch gay men who denounced other GLB student organizations in the same terms: Oh, they're all just a bunch of screaming queens.

If Stephie were a straight woman, even a straight feminist, she might use the same stereotypes to establish firmly that she's not a lesbian.  (The trope about holding the door open is still, astonishingly, with us, and invoked by women as well as men.)  Zipter also discusses the anxiety of women athletes trying to fend off the stereotype that they are lesbians -- even when they are lesbians.  That's the irony of Stephie's remarks: she's not really talking about feminists, she's talking about lesbians, even if she shaves her own legs and armpits.  It's a fascinating example of someone tripping over her own stereotypes, and of the difficulties people have with thinking about principles and politics.

Some Choices Are More Equal Than Others

While I was looking for some discourse about black women's hair the other day, I found this item at Angry Black Woman.  And this comment:

I don’t think that removing the hijab so that people won’t harass you makes you ‘free’. This documentary seems a bit misguided or problematic. Muslim women should be able to wear what they want, hijab or no hijab, but the hijab is not a sign of oppression, PEOPLE are the oppressors. Instead of fixing racism (which it won’t) by removing your Muslim head cover, maybe we should fight a xenophobic nation.

This set my brain to teeming.  I agree that "removing the hijab so that people wont harass you" doesn't equal freedom, and I don't believe that women who wear the hijab should be harassed in countries where Islam isn't the dominant religion.  But the commenter gets sloppy in her third sentence: "The hijab is not a sign of oppression, PEOPLE are the oppressors."  There's a crucial difference between "a sign of oppression" and the identity of the oppressors.  To give an extreme example, there's no contradiction in saying that the pink triangle is a sign of oppression, and that it was imposed by Nazi oppressors.  Of course, now the pink triangle is too often a fashion statement, and the hijab is an ambiguous sign.

But then, women who don't wear the hijab shouldn't be harassed either, whether they're living in a non-Muslim country or a predominantly Muslim one.  And there's the rub, because they too often are.  (There are also "signs of oppression" for men in some Muslim countries: under the Taliban men in Afghanistan were "harassed" for not wearing a beard, for example.  In the sixties, American men who wore their hair too long were subject to attack and forcible haircuts by police in many areas.  Similar abuse occurred in other parts of the Free World.)  Does wearing a headscarf so that people won't harass  you make you 'free'?  Apologists for Islamism have said so.

A couple of days after I saw the comment I quoted, I read about American women travelling to Muslim countries being advised to be more "modest" in dress and demeanor, both as a good-will gesture and to avoid harassment.  (It was probably in Gay Travels in the Muslim World, come to think of it, referring to female Peace Corps volunteers.)  That's fair enough, I suppose, but shouldn't it work both ways?  Shouldn't Muslim women who live in America modify their dress and demeanor to be less "modest," so as not to give offense?  True, the US is supposed to be a pluralist society, but we do have our own quaint customs and gender expectations.  Why shouldn't visitors or immigrants (or American converts to Islam) show courtesy to us and our folkways?  This seems to me very similar to what some Americans have said in my presence (and many more seem to assume): that foreigners coming to America should learn English, because we speak English here; but foreigners in their own countries should learn English to talk to us when we travel there, because English is the dominant world language, especially for business.  The double bind is the same.

Thinking about this sent me back to a review, by the American feminist Christine Stansell, of a book about the resurgence of the veil among Muslim women.  She wrote:

Around the world past and present, women cover their heads before God and man. That is, they veil. A dispassionate list of veils would include nuns' cowls, saris, lace mantillas for Mass, peasant babushkas, brides' veils, church ladies' Sunday hats, the wigs and headscarves of Orthodox Jews, and the headscarf my mother (middle class, Midwestern, Protestant) threw on in the 1950s when she ran across the street to the corner store. All these forms of veiling refer, religiously or secularly, to the old idea that women have something that should be hidden. Call it modesty, or propriety; but at heart it is about the sexual shame that women incur if they reveal themselves in public. In this regard, culture and tradition may be more decisive than religious belief: my mother wore a scarf because "ladies" didn't go bareheaded in public, not because the Apostle Paul told women in the early Church to cover.

But despite all that these many veils share, there is only one kind of veil that is widely seen as a barbaric imposition, and that is the Muslim veil.

Fair enough -- to the point where Stansell deploys the blind passive, "is widely seen as a barbaric imposition."  Widely seen by whom?  A good many feminist writers have mocked the hypocrisy of European and American imperialists who saw "barbarism" only in the way brown-skinned women were treated by their men.  "Western" feminists generally criticized the sexism of their own society first.  They've been attacked by conservatives, as expedient, for either ignoring the oppression of women in other countries, or for trying to make those women over in their own lesbian, baby-killing, sluttish image.  Similarly, "Third World" feminists have routinely been attacked by their countrymen for supposedly borrowing the values of the decadent, man-hating, immodest harridans of the West.  And then there have been incidents like this, in Israel, where ultra-Orthodox men attacked and harassed women who didn't fit their standards of modesty.  (And then, when they drew criticism, whined that their [Jewish] critics were Nazi oppressors.)  If it will make Stansell feel any better, I'll be happy to say that spitting on an eight-year-old girl and calling her a whore, no matter how she's dressed, is barbaric.  So is the misogyny of American men.  (The question I raised about Muslim women also applies to the ultra-Orthodox: If majority values rule, shouldn't ultra-Orthodox women be required to "dress like prostitutes"?)

On the other hand, "barbaric" is a red herring.  Originally it simply meant "foreign," with the added assumption that foreigners are less civilized than one's own country.  I just did a quick search of this blog, and it doesn't appear I've ever used "barbaric" as an epithet; it turns up only where I'm quoting someone else or referring to ethnocentric attitudes about foreigners.  I don't need that word or that concept to oppose unjust social structures and practices.

Stansell also wrote in that review that "American feminists have no problem seeing fundamentalist Christianity as a broad-based movement that harbors lethal views at the edges, but they will bend over backwards to avoid criticisms of radical Islam, even at its most hateful and murderous."  I think this is, at best, an oversimplification of American feminists' views of fundamentalist Christianity, and of their views of fundamentalist Islam.  As I indicated before, American feminists were working with their counterparts in Islamic countries before the September 11 attacks, but they were widely accused of ethnocentrism by conservative men until George W. Bush declared a fatwa against the Taliban, and poor oppressed Muslim women became worthy victims again.  This standard is still being waved under the Obama regime, defending our ongoing war in Afghanistan as a defense of women against the brutal Taliban; that our allies the Northern Alliance are also radical Islamists who commit violence against women is less likely to be admitted.

In 2009, Katha Pollitt wrote of President Obama's speech in Cairo:

You would think the biggest issue for Muslim women is that someone is preventing them from wearing a headscarf: "The US government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it," he said. "I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal." Fair enough, but that woman is choosing. What about Saudi or Iranian women, who are forced by law to cover? Obama noted that countries where women are well educated tend to be more prosperous and promised American aid for women's literacy and microloans. These are both good things, especially in desperately poor and underdeveloped countries like Afghanistan; but face it, to become full participants in modern societies women need more than a grade school education and a sewing machine. They need their rights.

What I'm trying to do here is not to declare one side or another the bad guys, but to stress the complications and contradictions of these issues.  Following Noam Chomsky and Martin Luther King Jr., I hold that the faults and crimes of my own country should get my first attention; but that doesn't mean I shouldn't also notice the faults and crimes of other countries too.  And what if the crimes of other cultures come here?  When the Tonton Macoute visited American shores and assaulted Haitian refugees, should I have withheld judgment on the ground that it's their culture and I can't judge because American crimes are as bad or worse?  I don't equate the hijab with death squads, but I don't think I'm obliged to respect Islam any more than I respect Christianity or Judaism.

As for moves to ban the headscarf in various places, I have mixed feelings about them.  On the one hand, they are a restriction on religious freedom, and I object to that on principle.  But then I read about a television debate where a French Muslim teenager said she supported the headscarf ban, because without it her family would force her to wear one. Of course apologists for the headscarf might argue that she doesn't want to wear it because she's been influenced by her peers, and that might be true, but it's irrelevant. (Such an apologist should tread carefully though, because the usual next step is to vilify the peers and the host culture for immodest and decadent values.) When she grows up, she might decide she likes her parents' values after all and put on a scarf. Till then, however, it should be her choice.

Which is why it's a mistake to invoke individual choice in controversies like these.  It isn't always the women themselves who want to wear a scarf, but their families and their communities who want to make them do it. This is ironic for families that have come to the West to escape certain values in their home countries that they consider oppressive, but more important is that individual choice isn't really the issue: it's the right of certain members of a group -- usually but not always older males -- to make choices for the others.  The recent ruckus over a Federal requirement that employers include contraception in their health care coverage is an example of this: the objections overwhelmingly came not from lay Christians but from senior clergy, who demanded the authority to deny access to contraception to Catholic and non-Catholic employees alike.  Another example would be the exemptions from educational requirements that Amish communities in the US enjoy: it's not a protection of the rights of the kids, but of their parents and their religious superiors.  Such community leaders may pay lip service to the American value of individual choice, but they're really hiding behind it.  Individual choice, for women or men, is the last thing they want.

There is no need for a pluralistic society to respect the wish of religious or ethnic leaders to impose their will on those they want to control,  no contradiction of the general commitment to diversity.  The limits on parental rights are controversial, but they aren't written in stone either.  Parents don't have unlimited power over their children, nor should they.  And it's disingenuous to present the controversy over the hijab as a dispute over individual rights and choices, either in the West or in Muslim societies.

The Intractable Woman

I forgot to include this in last night's post. From Kate Millett's Flying (Knopf, 1974); while Millett was in London, her friend and host the filmmaker Nell O'Rourke told her (312):

"They have taken our anger from us, it's the biggest crime perpetrated against women. Got in touch with mine through that group therapy business. Men and women behave differently in group therapy, you know. Men discover their fear. Women their hostility. Paul was physically attacked in the first group we joined. Look, learn to get angry, stop being humble and calling yourself queer. There are dead people shouting inside you. You have got to shut up your mother. There she is, quivering away inside you, screeching at you." I hear her voice on the phone, hear her voice at thirteen. "The family is a dead area inside our skulls," O'Rourke resumes. "Drop your endless capacity for punishment. Let yourself. Do. They cannot punish you, the voices inside. Stifle them."

I hadn't looked at this passage in a long time, probably more than twenty years. What I remembered was what O'Rourke said about anger, but when I first read it I was struck just as much by what she said about the punitive "voices ... "screeching at you" inside your head. These are not (necessarily) the kind of voices that go along with schizophrenia; I took them metaphorically as the echoes of everyone -- not just adults: peers too -- who do the job of keeping us within bounds. You can't think that. You can't say that. You can't do that. You can't dress like that. Boys don't cry. Nice girls don't do that. What are you, a fag? What are you, a slut? What are you, a nigger-lover? What are you, a commie?

Especially after having read Staub's book, I now detect echoes of Laingian antipsychiatry in O'Rourke's speech. At my age I'm less inclined to want to blame my family, or anyone else, for my inhibitions and guilt. Maybe I should read Laing, because I'd like to know if he took into account the fact that human beings are a social species; our vulnerability to our families comes from our prolonged infancy and childhood. We can't survive without the support and input, but also constraint, of other human beings. Those "voices" hold us up as well as crush us. From Staub's account of the antipsychiatrists, I gather they overlooked this.

I credit Dorothy Dinnerstein for at least implying this in her The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976), a flawed but still powerful book that had a big influence on me. She pointed out that infants and young children want everything, and with the best will in the world the most nurturing mother couldn't give them everything they want; they're too young to understand why they can't stay in the toy store forever, or run out into the street as they see grownups doing, or take home the things they see and want. This means to me that if growing up healthy means never being frustrated, no one could grow up healthy. And, of course, our parents also have their own wounds, and their own needs, they're the products of their own upbringing, so if I'm not to blame for my problems, neither are they.

Taking all this into account, O'Rourke's advice still looks good to me. For one thing, we selected the voices that screech at us from inside our heads. (Parents are often shocked to learn what their children remembered, as well as what they forgot.) This passage was a voice I kept in my head, and it helped me along through my later twenties and into my thirties. We also need to learn to ignore them, stifle them, outgrow them. Accept our anger, accept our fear, learn not to be stopped by them.

But this is also the problem with "mental illness," whether it refers to mild discomfort or major dysfunction, let alone dissenting opinions or personal styles that people too easily call "crazy." At the same time, though, becoming irrational and allowing oneself to rant and call for pitchforks and torches is considered proper behavior all through our society, provided we pick the right occasion and target for our craziness. (Staub discusses the way that mainstream commentators indulged in facile armchair psychoanalysis of student and other political dissenters in the 1960s, though most empirical studies showed student radicals to be well adjusted [for what that evaluation is worth]). Whether you view mental illness as a medical reality or a social construct -- which, again, are not mutually exclusive categories -- its boundaries are highly subjective, as are the possible remedies.

Which reminds me, here's a fine example that shows that the overreaching of scientists on social issues is still with us, and still good for news coverage. More about it later, if I get around to it, but for now, those researchers are obviously too dumb to be taken seriously; trust me on this, I'm an intellectual.

Father Knows Best

I just finished reading Michael E. Staub's Madness Is Civilization: When the Diagnosis Was Social, 1948-1980 (Chicago, 2011), which is an interesting account of the clash between the medical model of mental illness and the "social diagnosis" model in the United States during the decades right after World War II.

It just occurred to me that there's a parallel with the essentialist / social constructionist debates going on here, though Staub doesn't refer to that terminology. At times Staub seems to believe that the antipsychiatry movement of the Fifties and Sixties, exemplified by R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, held that there was no such thing as mental illness, though he also shows and seems to recognize that this is, at best, only partially true. There has been a lot of confusion about that question, though, as shown by a declaration Staub quotes from the Icarus Project, a "mad pride" collective: "Are we delusional and dysfunctional, or is it the culture we live in?" (192) As Staub documents throughout the book, this is a familiar idea: it weaves back and forth between denying that the concepts of madness and sanity/normality have any meaning at all, and declaring that I'm not sick, you are! -- which seems to concede the reality of "mental illness", but tosses it back and forth like a hot potato.

That's why I've always been ambivalent about this idea. I've read a fair amount of literature which holds that in an insane society, it's sane to be insane. (That's the premise of Doris Lessing's 1971 novel Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, for example, though it's also a theme in much of her fiction.) I'm inclined to think that sanity and normality may be relative to the situation, like Darwinian fitness: a trait that's adaptive in one environment may be maladaptive in another. But it also seemed to me that if the "mad" are really, as some have suggested (the questions are often more rhetorical than serious), gifted and superior beings, they should be able to function more successfully in an "insane" society than those of us who are putatively normal. Or maybe not: the real problem is that sanity and insanity are not very well-defined concepts, and even professionals are far too quick to label others as insane or mad or crazy -- not a whole lot better than laypeople. (As Staub also shows, "schizophrenia" is an ill-defined, hard-to-diagnose condition to this day, despite the ongoing claims that it's a medical, biological illness with a genetic base. I've long suspected that it will ultimately be defined circularly, as whatever condition responds well to a given treatment, and other conditions that don't, but which would have been confidently labeled schizoid in the past, will be defined as something else.)

Anyway, there's a lot of useful information in Madness Is Civilization, with a whole chapter largely devoted to the feminist revolt against the psychiatric/psychoanalytic establishment.

With disarming candor the psychoanalyst Theodore Reik – who had been trained by Sigmund Freud and who founded the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York – repeatedly revealed that his female patients were unwilling to accept his insights into their states of mind. “When you listen to me a long time without saying anything, I often have the impression that what I say is silly woman’s stuff and without value,” one patient told Reik. “It is as if you do not consider it worth your while to speak to me.” Reik recollected how another female patient responded more sharply to his interpretations: “Goddam, I don’t know why I am here. Fuck yourself!” And a third female patient had this exchange with Reik: “When I told a patient in her forties that she had wanted to be a boy like her brother, she began to curse and abuse me, saying ‘Fuck you!’ and ‘Go to hell!’ and other unladylike expressions.” But these challenges to his authority did not cause Reik to doubt his own judgment. At no point did Reik allow for the possibility that outbursts from female patients reflected the legitimacy of their frustrations with him. (It was left to radical feminist Shulamith Firestone to point out that Reik’s commentaries read “like a Freudian jokebook.”) Yet by the early 1970s even the densest of analysts and other MDs could see that an extraordinary number of women were increasingly uncomfortable with their treatment.

Women in therapy were reportedly becoming so uncooperative that a proposal in 1971 sought to introduce a new diagnostic phenomenon. Called “the angry woman syndrome,” it described patients who took “fiendish delight in deriding their husbands” and who exhibited a “baleful disregard to decency.” These women were superficially well adjusted and successful in their lives, but they nonetheless “strike out blindly, frightened by any threat to their not being the sole center of attention.” In short, their behavior revealed patterns that “at times border on psychotic with paranoid and aggressive overtones.” In 1972 there was a second proposal for another new category of client called “the intractable female patient.” These were women who initially presented “exactly the kind of patient with whom the young resident in particular hopes to work.” But looks could be deceiving. In reality these women were supreme manipulators who used their feminine wiles to turn psychotherapy “into a quagmire from which escape is ever more difficult.” The psychiatric solution for the intractable female patient was for therapists to “set a firm discharge date reasonably early” and to insist that the husband “assume a posture of strength and resolution – especially toward his wife.” This was because the intractable female patient most desired to be dominated by men, the essay concluded, and though she might repeatedly test the resolve of men to dominate her, “she really hopes that she will not win” [144-45].

Here are some good examples of what I wrote earlier. Women who were angry at being confined by the narrow strictures of 1950s American femininity were not just labeled as sick, they were borderline psychotic. And you know it had to be true, because this was a scientific medical diagnosis, by the intellectual heirs of the Enlightenment and its values! Only an irrationalist would reject the authority of these men of science! In much the same way as today's evolutionary psychologists are embarrassed by and try to dissociate themselves from the racist and sexist eugenics of the earlier twentieth century, today's scientific psychiatrists probably prefer to forget this period in their field. The question for the layperson, though, remains what it was sixty years ago: how am I to tell whether today's practitioner really has a sound basis for his or her diagnosis -- or will it look just as embarrassing a few decades from now as "the intractable woman"? It's like asking a theist why I should believe in his or her god, but not in someone else's.

I'm not rejecting the medical model of mental illness out of hand, you understand. It may well be useful in some cases. But the burden of proof lies on the person who advocates the medical model, and a sharp, informed skepticism toward such a person's claims is not just appropriate, it's obligatory.