queerbychoice | Sexuality and the Question of Whether or Why or to What Extent It Is Male or Female

A gift from Joxn, Dreamer of Interesting Dreams. Sort of interesting. I don't quite like the ending, though:

The sexuality of the patriarch is less "male" than it is deadly, just as that of the subjected women is not so much "female" as suppressed, devivified -- though, sustaining less damage from its own work of suppression, it also contains the more beautiful possibilities for the future.

There's truth in this, but it also leaves out a lot. Males often "suppress" and "devivify" their own sexuality because of the pressure to eliminate anything about it that might be defined as "feminine." Females are generally under slightly less pressure to "devivify" themselves (e.g., they can get away with wearing most traditionally "male" clothes with no problem, but males can't do the reverse). Klaus Theweleit seems to be trying to acknowledge that males hurt themselves indirectly by hurting female and thus loading themselves down with a guilty conscience (or the necessity of never fully contemplating the implications of their own actions for fear of developing a guilty conscience) but I don't think he quite acknowledges that males also oppress themselves more directly, not simply by oppressing females but also by oppressing the "feminine" parts of themselves.

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I wasn't using the word "repressed" in a sense that implied "unconsciously," and the reason I wasn't is that the word "repressed" is commonly used to describe what most men do to their feminine aspects, and I believe that most men in our society are really very consciously "ripping out" and "slashing to pieces" their femininity. I believe that most men in our society are quite openly afraid of "femininity" (not of "women," that's the wrong way to phrase it because they'd never admit to that), and they do exult in slashing any remotely "feminine" aspect of themselves a bloody mess.

In other words, I believe that most men in our society are fascist. Gender-relations-wise, anyway.

I do think there are considerable changes tking place in certain subcultures and certain generations of males. There are an increasing number of males who, even if they still really are absurdly and horrendously sexist, vehemently deny being so - and I take that as some kind of sign of progress, even though not an especially useful one. But I also know an awful lot of males (and at least in the generations from age 40-ish and upward they certainly constitute the majority of males I've met) who openly ridicule the very idea that women should have any rights at all - not that most of these men are actually out on the street campaigning to accomplish it (most of them are not oriented toward serious grassroots political campigns - they're more the helpless-feeling middle-class guys who sit around complaining without ever feeling there's anything they can do about it), but they express the opinion in a certain tone of "I must vehemently deny that women should ever have gotten the vote, because doing so will prove my masculinity! If anyone in future generations were ever to imagine that I had anything in common with those sissy feminist men I'd roll over in my grave! Feminism is for fags and for female ball-breakers who want to take away my right to wear the pants in my family and be a man!!!"

I focussed on the word "repression" only because Theweleit uses it in its psychoanalytic (Freudian) sense and mounts a major argument against its use to describe what's going on in the minds of these men. (I realize you haven't read the book, so this is just a clarification of where my terminology comes from, not a critique of your discussion.)

(The fascists in the book, by the way, really are openly afraid of women. They don't try to hide any of it. Theweleit's argument ends up being that they just don't have a psyche that corresponds in any way to the classical Freudian ego-superego-id psyche, or any variation on that. (It seems that Theweleit is much more interested in Deleuze and Guattari than Freud, but I have to admit that I'm far out of my depth in attempting to do anything more analytic than absorb the psychoanalytic theory as he presents it -- it's far outside my experience. I haven't even read D&G, and only ever one article by Freud!))

I agree with your comments there. And I think that Theweleit does too, which is what he means when he says that "as a form of reality production that is constantly present and possible under determinate conditions, [fascism] can, and does, become our production. The crudest examples of this are to be seen in the relations that have been the focus of this first chapter, male-female relations, which are also relations of production." (All the italics are in the original, btw.)

Sexuality and the Question of Whether or Why or to What Extent It Is Male or Female

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