Another reader feedback session. Yvette writes (names obviously changed, much as I wish I knew someone named Yvette) in response to the most recent posts:
oh but the other thing i wanted to tell you is that i read your blog, as you know and the queerfeminist in me had to cringe a lot even though i do really like it
The instances she was talking about, insofar as I understand her critique (and we didn’t really get to talk about it too much), are that my discussions of seduction reproduce both gendered and hetero-normative discourses of seduction. In addition, I think she would argue that my writing had a certain universalizing tendency, that it claimed to represent a sort of authentic and ubiquitous male experience. While I would perhaps quibble on some smaller points (and clearly, the fact that I have here in this blog a platform for expressing my thoughts where she can’t means that I can quibble pretty effectively), I think that her critique is for the most part very right. So, this entry is sort of like an open letter to her and sort of like putting myself on blast.
In any case, I started to think about this critique a little bit, and my initial reaction was quite defensive: I consider myself relatively enlightened and relatively queered in my gender politics and was reluctant to concede that I had made such a blunder, but I also consider Y. very smart and very insightful, particularly in the spheres of politics and gender. Thus, a bit of an impasse: these two thoughts appeared to be in conflict with each other (and I do think that both statements, narcissistic as this may be about myself, are correct). How was I to reconcile them? My initial rhetorical counter-thrust was precisely an attempt to walk this line, a Foucauldian/post-structuralist argument which basically avoids taking responsibility by outsourcing the question of agency, something in the vein of what Barthes writes about subjectivity in S/Z:
This “I” which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)… Subjectivity is a plenary image… whose deceptive plenitude is merely the wake of all the codes which constitute me, so that my subjectivity has ultimately the generality of stereotypes.
The implication of this, as I read it, would be that at a fundamental level, we are individuals in society, we are made individuals through society: in essence, we are socialized in specific codes (through various means: our parents, our schooling, cultural artifacts like film and books, advertising) that pass on to us our ideas about gender, about heteronormativity, about what seduction is, who can do it and when. Thus, the argument would go, there is a male/female gendering and a heteronormative aspect to seduction, both in literature and in real life, because that is how it has been talked about and passed down for several thousand years. Y. tried to offer me a way out in this direction, saying that I was to some extent constrained by what counts as canon in terms of taking literary examples, but I think that it’s probably the flip-side which is true: what counts as canon, what has been enshrined in these discourses of seduction is both symptomatic of this gendered power structure and (re)productive of it, in the sense that it’s written in books which become popular because people think like that, which reproduces this in the sense that the next generation reads these books and accepts that manner of thinking.
So far, so good in my dodge of her critique. The second part of my self-defense would have been the assertion that because of the way in which discourses of gender and sexuality work in “our” (American?) society, various ideas about women and men’s sexual desire, who can have sex with whom and how often, etc., the playing field is gendered in such a way that predominantly men end up trying to seduce a woman. I’m bracketing queered seduction here, given that these instances are already transgressive and thus constitute thesmelves to some extent directly in opposition to these majority discourses about “proprietous” courtship.
So, why might one argue that you predominantly have men trying to seduce women and not vice versa? In some sense (in many senses), I think this is very true: men have much less to lose through being perceived as sexually desiring or promiscuous (both in terms of social perception and, in pre-contraceptive days, physically: I’m thinking of the examples from H. Mann’s Der Untertan, where a woman sleeps with a man (for the first time) before the marriage proposal, becomes pregnant and is subsequently dropped because she is no longer a virgin and thus no longer marriageable [and yes, Mann points out precisely the logical contortions necessary to think like this]). As such, lots of reasons and discourses encouraging men to sleep with almost all women they’re attracted to at least once, while the reciprocal is not true. Thus, gendered discourses of seduction emerge alongside other historical discourse formations regarding virginity, the question (pre-Freud) of whether female sexual desire even exists, etc. (and no doubt there’s also a link to gendered discourses on rhetoric and respect/acclaim awarded for being a talented speaker coming down to us from Antiquity; were women even allowed to speak in the polis in ancient Greece?).
The counter-claim here might be something like “Ah, but as 21st-century, gender-aware individuals we don’t have to give in to this, we aren’t condemned to just mindlessly submit to these codes, we make our own choices, etc.”, which is what I initially thought Y. was telling me when she said “if you actually think about your experiences and those of your friends do you actually think those rules, ways of thinking and acting apply?”, and which I would tend to think over-privileges conscious, individual action and overlooks underlying structures that work below the level of conscious, willed thought. An example of this might be something like the feminist Ryan Gosling tumblr, which basically throws a nod towards feminist theory, saying “yes, we know de Beauvoir, Butler, Spivak, etc. and since we know the theory it’s not a problem if we reproduce traditional structures in our actions” (e.g., Gosling always starts with “Hey Girl” or gives her flowers or says that instead of talking they should go watch Buffy in bed or whatever). Clearly, this is problematic, because it basically just lets us legitimize bad behaviour patterns in our personal lives by invoking sort of abstract theoretical critique that lets us off the hook, thereby reproducing those structures without the guilt (I’m thinking of a theoretical basis for this like what Zizek talks about with respect to Pascal in the Sublime Ideology book).
Continued in pt. 2 here.
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