Sending a Message, Doing It Better
Jessica's delightful and on-point comment-riposte this afternoon, coupled with Emily's reflections about effecting change in the sexual culture, have been making me think about one of the big issues feminists and progressives face in working on these issues: it's hard to express complex messages about egalitarian, liberationist goals in clear, succinct, media-friendly ways.
The more complicated the statement, the easier it is to twist around, misquote, and mischaracterize. The more complicated the statement, the harder it is to remember.
There is enormous power, as the ad industry has been showing us for a couple of generations now, in statements that are short and simple enough that people will repeat them verbatim. Likewise there is huge power in having your statement be memorable. (If you need a refresher: "Yes we can.") Crafting statements and slogans that are distinctive and catchy buys shares in the public imagination. The more of the public imagination you can buy, the less work it is to sell your agenda.
One of the things the virginity movement has done, and done quite well, has been to make its messages short, memorable, and effective. ("Control your urgin', be a virgin.") Soundbites and billboard copy are easier to generate when the message is both simple and simplistic, of course. And certainly it helps that the virginity movement is looking to reinforce a retrograde message that we have all heard a thousand times before, because all it takes is a mnemonic: "True Love Waits," for instance.
Treading newer ground, as feminists and progressives do, is more difficult, and often requires -- or at least seems to require -- more explanation, more elaboration, more argument. But in a lot of very important ways, this is not an arena where explanations and arguments are the best tools for effecting change. If my work as an historian of sexuality has taught me anything, it's this: most people, most of the time, do not think about sex very much at all, they feel and believe about sex.
As smart and thoughtful and knowledgeable and beautifully articulate as Jessica and Emily and our colleagues are (and you bet that I am including myself in this), the vast majority of folks are not out there reading our well-researched, deftly argued feminist/progressive books or blogs about sexuality. Or for that matter, anyone else's. They're watching network TV, getting their news from the headlines on their Yahoo! homepages, and squinting nervously through a fog of fear, desire, and inherited myths whenever sexuality comes up for examination.
Part of the progressive "prescription for change" with regard to the virginity movement is going to have to consist of changed tactics. We're going to have to do better at encapsulating our feminist and progressive goals with regard to sex. We're going to have to do better at presenting them in the language of emotion. We're going to have to do better at providing people not just with repressive bad guys to boo at and mock, but clear and comprehensible things they can believe in, too.
"...our feminist and progressive goals with regard to SEX".
I think this is the least effective strategy for this movement, because it dedicates its very existence to the cultural stereotypes and as a result will face additional hurdles due to culture wars.
The movement would be much more effective if it recognized that sexual norms in society are consequences of deeper and more complex issues; if it identified those issues and developed an impactful strategy on that front - as opposed to fighting what to the general public would be religious and cultural values.
Further to the point I made in another post, economic equality is a far better strategy in my opinion. Anybody in America, regardless of their views on sex or morality, can identify and sympathize with issues of equality and dignity.
"Equal pay for equal work" has a direct relevance and appeal to the public at large and it's direct parallel to the Constitution is the most devastating argument to advance to social conservatives.
A victory here would inevitably lead to a major advance in the "sex" issue.
And while I agree with the need to fight stereotypes, I also think that celebrating positive confident successful women as role models will be far more effective than a fight about sex per se.
April 8, 2009 9:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
As a man just shy of 50, I have to say that in many ways I have lost track of the feminist movement. I'm sure it is partly my own fault for not paying closer attention, but I also note that when I have tried to pay attention, I have had difficulty discerning positions and goals emanating from the newer feminist discourse that strike me as at the same time clear, coherent, intellectually compelling and socially urgent.
I also don't understand what the "movement", if there even is such a thing anymore, is asking me to do. I can get a grip on a political agenda: educational or economic policies that I am asked to vote for or vote against. But the contemporary discourse seems dominated by a conversation among people much younger than I, very single and very sexually active, about rather amorphous cultural or attitudinal changes they would like to occur, mainly among people of their own age. It doesn't engage me very directly. If I had a daughter, it likely would. But I don't.
When gay and lesbian people ask me to support their right to marry, so that they are not denied the opportunities available the straight couples of developing sexual intimacy in a natural way into the foundation for a profound lifetime relationship, that is something I get, and that seems very important. Compared to that political demand, the demand for the mere right to get laid, and the right to pursue shallower sexual pleasures seems, while not entirely insignificant, just not very important.
Maybe I'm just too jaded or priggish. But the freedom to have sexual fun just doesn't seem like a high priority in the current lineup of pressing social needs. In a world where the most pressing desires for billions of the world's people are the desire not to be exterminated by powerful weapons or genocidal campaigns; the desire not to live in utter squalor in urban mega-slums; the desire not to have one's reproductive choices mandated and dominated by others; the desire not to see one's tribe or nation wiped out by disease; the desire not to have one's savings wiped out; the desire not to be enslaved; the desire not to see one's life exhausted by exploitative, unrewarding work - in such a world, the desire of some well-off Americans to have a good sexual time without being called a "slut", just doesn't get my old progressive juices flowing.
I gather some of the political dimension of this debate concerns educational policy. I very much support the fight against ignorant superstitions about virginity as "purity", and the cult of unreality and denial in the use of contraception. However, I am not sure I understand what positive message I am being asked to put in its place.
April 8, 2009 10:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, I think it's pretty simple. What connects the gay marriage movement to the feminist movement for sexual freedom? It is primarily about the right to privacy, the same right that is at the root of the abortion controversy, as well as previous controversies (now mostly gone) over contraception.
I think liberalism has privacy, especially as it relates to sex and relationships, as one of its core values. Unless there is a clear interest (e.g. protecting children) that would indicate otherwise, people should be able to do whatever they want in the bedroom and form whatever sorts of relationships that make them happy and it should be no one else's business, especially the government's.
That ought to be something that even white, straight, middle-aged suburban family men like me (and you, I guess) can get behind.
April 9, 2009 1:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
I disagree with this somewhat. The right to privacy is a legal strategy, nothing more.
If you take this legal argument to its logical conclusion (right to do what you like with your own body without government intrusion) than this right should also be equally relevant when discussing government-mandated health care.
This way of cherry-picking when the right to privacy applies and when it doesn't makes the whole strategy suspect and open to charges of hypocrisy.
The most fundamental goal behind this and other civil rights struggles is the issue of equality, especially access to resources (education, equal pay, etc).
I think real gender equality is a much stronger legal and moral value strategy and has a better chance of gaining widespread public support.
April 9, 2009 8:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, the right to privacy is the right to be left alone by government. It is difficult to think of any right that more profoundly affected the founders of this nation than that right. That is why they found it necessary to enumerate it in the 4th amd. The people have the right to be safe in their person, paper and property from government seizure without a warrant. Either women are entitled to that privacy and protection from government control of their bodies or they are not - if they are not, then they are indeed slaves.
THAT's the material point.
April 9, 2009 3:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't see a disagreement anywhere, do you?
April 9, 2009 3:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is too priggish to suggest that the right to get laid is a "mere" right. Think about what the right to get laid really is:
*The right to own your own body (which includes the right not to have sex if you don't want to)
*The belief that pleasure and joy are part of human life (and what's this all about if we can't enjoy it?)
*The belief that women are full human beings like men, who are capable of making our own decisions
*The right to healthy, happy relationships with joy between you that you can bond over
*The right to define your relationships with others---this isn't just a matter of sex partners, but of women's right to define their boundaries with colleagues, parents, passers-by, a right that's usually not given to us
I could keep going on, but when someone say sex is a shallow pleasure, I just feel sorry for them. The knowledge of yourself, the deepening of relationships, the joys in letting go---it's far from a shallow pleasure, and handled correctly, it's widely assumed to be the greatest there is, having physical and spiritual and emotional benefits that are hard to measure. (That's why we jokingly describe other pleasures as better than sex, but never mean it.)
How can you call it a shallow pleasure? For most adults, this "shallow" pleasure is the most obvious thing that sets apart their most important relationship---with their romantic/sexual partner---from all other relationships.
Calling it a shallow pleasure is inherently sexist, because it buys into the sexist view that sex is just a filthy thing you do to those filthy, inhuman holes we call women. Saying it's a shallow pleasure is buying into the view of sex presented by Maxim magazine and anti-choice nuts alike, who reduce women to our reproductive organs and shun sex's deeper pleasures, which can be had within or outside the context of a committed relationship, if you have the imagination for it. (The kind of imagination treated in the lad culture as disgustingly feminine.)
So, yeah, you sound like a prig. The American assumption that you can immediately degrade something's value by pointing out that it's pleasurable needs to end. A life without pleasure is a life not worth living.
April 9, 2009 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, Amanda sounds like the moralizing prig to me. If Dan thinks sex is a shallow pleasure what's wrong with that? I mean shouldn't Dan have complete freedom to relate to sex any way he wants? Maybe sex is something of earth-shattering significance to Amanda. But if Dan thinks it's just a mild diversion for a summer's afternoon, who's to criticize him? Why does Amanda want to define for Dan what sex should and shouldn't be? Doesn't this put Amanda in the same position as the conservatives she criticizes? What gives all these people the right to be arbiters of what is and isn't an acceptable attitude toward sex?
April 11, 2009 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Once again, the argument is reduced to the harmless disparity between the sexes as to who can have most fun.
What this is about is the need to deconstruct women as sexual creatures who are valuated on their experience of lack of experience.
This isn't about women being as promiscuous as men or having as much fun as men, it is about the perception in society that a woman's value is based on her sexuality as though there are no other components or parts to our lives that are as valuable or hold any value at all. We're commodities to be traded, sold or used for breeding purposes.
Now if you value women as a commodity, it implies ownership and the right to trade and/or sell. If you own a commodity, then you also have the right to control that commodity and the use of that person as a thing rather than a person. This is why in war, women are raped and subjucated - to show other men that their property is vulnerable and can be seized and used by others in their absence. Women aren't human beings, they are things to be used or destroyed, they aren't objects to be paraded by patriarchal figures as a valuable property to be displayed as a new car at an auto show, just as all debutante right of passage balls and other such nonsensical societal "traditions" are - "look at what I have, do you want to buy or would you like an option to trade?"
It is demeaning to women and it sends the message that women, like children, "belong" to someone else, that they have no life or rights outside of that ownership and that it is perfectly okay for them to be used and abused.
Over and over again, the argument put forth by the women who are blogging about this book, is reduced to the ridiculing, unserious claim that women want only to be "equally promiscuous" or "equally irresponsible" as though first of all, men are irresponsible and promiscuous and deserve to be by society and women are such silly creatures that this what they must want.
Honest to god, it's like drilling through concrete with a butterknife...
April 9, 2009 4:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
p.s. "they are objects to be displayed".
April 9, 2009 4:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you treat this stereotype as a starting point of the debate and the people who argue with you (probably including me) treat this stereotype as a consequence or byproduct of something else.
It almost sounds as if the two sides of the debate have the same end goal in mind but they see the solution differently and that results in complete misunderstanding of each other.
But i haven't seen anyone on this blog defending or justyfing the stereotype, rather trying to understand it.
April 9, 2009 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
I get it. Everyone's too boorish to read your well-researched books? Your opponents are the virginity-movement? C'mon. Leave those people alone to freely choose how they want to live and use their First Amendment right to call others to join them in purity.
You ought to be busy about rescuing underage girls from pimps and human traffickers with your 'well-researched' info brokerage. Wouldn't your money be better spent?
Look, you guys are trying to do to Bristol Palin (not even Sarah) what was done to Bill Clinton. It's revenge, I see it. But you know, Bill was married to your Sec. of State when he double-standardized his intern, and Bristol didn't cheat on anyone or abort her kid -- she owned up, married and is undertaking what she risked. Why aren't you spending time pointing out what's right with that? Or is she not a free woman too?
April 9, 2009 1:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bristol married? News to me.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bristol+palin+wedding&btnG=Search
As far as I can tell, she told her baby's daddy to take a hike, now that his usefulness as a prop for the phony "family values" of the McCain/Palin campaign has ended. Now we're being subjected to the spectacle of a sitting state governor engaging in a sniping contest with a 19-year old over who lied about what. Not exactly a strong advertisement for your side in the debate.
Also, I love your "why aren't we talking about more important things, like human trafficking?" attempt at misdirection. I dunno, maybe because that's not the subject of this particular discussion?
April 9, 2009 2:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
"There is enormous power, as the ad industry has been showing us for a couple of generations now, in statements that are short and simple enough that people will repeat them verbatim. Likewise there is huge power in having your statement be memorable. (If you need a refresher: "Yes we can.") Crafting statements and slogans that are distinctive and catchy buys shares in the public imagination. The more of the public imagination you can buy, the less work it is to sell your agenda."
This is dead wrong. That's not how advertising works. It's amazing how the most intelligent people stop reasoning when it comes to advertising. Please read a few books by Bill Bernbach, Howard Gossage, Jay Chiat to understand advertising better. Or google the blogs of Faris Yakob, Ed Cotton, David Pollinchock etc etc.
April 9, 2009 3:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Great post! You're right that the virginity movement has certainly adopted some catchy and memorable rhetoric. I also like how Jessica points out in her book how they're so good in couching their anti-feminist moves in such pro-woman vocabulary - the Independent Women's Forum, Women's Right to Know laws, etc. Unfortunate and damaging.
April 9, 2009 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's interesting that the sexual purity issue is the one that brings the TPM right wingers together. This is the first discussion I've noticed so many in one place. Which points to a problem in this analysis, I think: the readings of purity etc have so far focused on economic/power issues, with the virginity movement as a sort of conscious political opponent of feminism/progressivism generally.
I'll grant that in part. But there's a clear psychological aspect as well: Someone really needs to take up how sexualized the purity thing is: how obviously INTERESTED these fathers/TPM trolls are in sex, and virginity--women's only of course-- . The purity ball phenomenon couldn't possibly be any more prurient, could it? These guys aren't simply repressive: they're repressed. And I don't mean that they just need to loosen up and realize sexual freedom. There's a clear way that they are already centrally organized around sex--and get enjoyment from constantly keeping an image of scary non-virgins in view.
April 9, 2009 12:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe you haven't been around long enough yet to discern various patterns of troll behavir.
As a "right winger" on your blog, I just want to point out that the disagreement is not about whether the myth of virginity is good or bad. The disagreement is about what is causing this myth to exist and to persist.
And more than one "right winger" has pointed out that you take the longest and the most problematic path to solution if you reduce the issue to the right to be promiscuous.
April 9, 2009 12:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
On the contrary--I suggested that the myth persists because , as you fail to realize, it serves its proponents in a libidinal capacity--in a way that is quite at odds with their avowed "values." It's telling that you say "right to be promiscuous"--as if that's the necessary consequence of removing obscurantist pseudo-religious rituals and education policy based in deliberate misinformation about risks and options. Typical inability to divorce yourself from the language of purity-filth, all or nothing, that is the basis of the myth, and the central feature of primitive psychological negation.
And maybe you haven't read enough to see how many arguments have actually been advanced so far in these threads explicitly in favor of "taboos," --again tellingly, in that very language--which by definition implies a cultural forbidden zone, with the repressed sexual content actually giving power to the restriction--as opposed to a conscious value. That is, it's funny how in this central area the so-called conservative tendency is to ignore how bizarre and out-of-touch this demi-culture of virginity and weird priestcraft is, and instead advance it as the embodiment of natural or rationally held cost-benefit decisions about mating or health or reproduction.
April 9, 2009 12:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
"...it serves its proponents ..."
Ah, of course.
I should have known better, that this is just another brick in the ideological fight between left and right.
But you don't need to beat your chest so hard, I support equal rights to sex for anyone. I just think there are better and faster ways to go about achieving them.
Have fun fighting for the truth, in the meantime.
April 9, 2009 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Substance free and non-responsive.
April 9, 2009 3:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not on this thread to argue conservative/liberal, sorry.
April 9, 2009 3:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
There have been myriad plausible reasons given...
I think it's been adequately demonstrated that you don't necessarily need a conspiracy to end up with bad results.
April 10, 2009 11:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
TYVM
April 10, 2009 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
I've been saying for a long time that more than almost anything, anti-feminism is the central organizing force of the modeern conservative movement. It may not seem like that---they may differ, for instance, on abortion rights---but when you start talking concepts, all of a sudden you see how it's all about maintaining rigid gender roles. The differences are in tactics, but not in the goal of keeping women as second class citizens.
We want to believe women's rights are a secondary issue to economics, etc., but what's interesting is that, if it weren't for anti-feminism and the fear of racial minorities, the Republicans wouldn't really exist as a party. All these people who voted for McCain against their own economic interests did so mainly out of hostility to women's liberation (and to racial minorities having economic access). If you took away the Republican party's ability to market itself as the pro-patriarchy party, they'd be left with a bunch of rich people wanting tax breaks, which is like 2% of the population. Not enough for a party.
April 9, 2009 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
This comment is deliberately hostile and immflamatory (apart from being untrue and uninformed).
April 9, 2009 2:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
"which is like 2% of the population."
You think so, huh? Then how do we explain the incessant Republican lying about Obama's stated tax policy last summer/ fall?
April 9, 2009 2:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure it's anti-feminism per se. But there's a clear political unity based in an apparently satisfying psychic structure native to, for example, modern evangelical Christianity and Southern mass culture folkways, etc. It's obviously pervasive when folks can read this... (shudders):
"...a dad gives his daughter a gold rose pin with the note, "You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage in pre-marital sex, a precious petal is stripped away. Don't leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain...."
...and decide that represents an opportunity to mount a defense of socio-biological imperatives, rational choice or game theory, smart dating advice, or considered "conservative" views about teen pregnancy. It's the psychic structure that's being defended, not these views.
But it's well worth the laugh to see a whole group reflexively respond to a critique of a "Christian" papa's deep investment in a little girl's beautiful rose with a series of rationalizations or fears about promiscuous women: talk about your id showing.
April 9, 2009 3:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
How about we think up some slogans? Here's mine:
'Preaching abstinence is preaching ignorance.'
April 9, 2009 3:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I could keep going on, but when someone say sex is a shallow pleasure, I just feel sorry for them. The knowledge of yourself, the deepening of relationships, the joys in letting go---it's far from a shallow pleasure, and handled correctly, it's widely assumed to be the greatest there is, having physical and spiritual and emotional benefits that are hard to measure. (That's why we jokingly describe other pleasures as better than sex, but never mean it.)
Well, it's entirely possible I am just more shallow than you. I have had profoundly good sexual experiences that lived up to that kind of billing, others that were just as profoundly bad, but many more that occupy a vast middle plane of somewhat satisfactory but entirely forgettable and ephemeral mediocrity.
At this stage of my own particular life, both fantasies and experiences of sexual pleasure are much less frequent than they once were, while several other kinds of pleasures have assumed a much more prominent role. Personally, count this as a blessing.
How can you call it a shallow pleasure? For most adults, this "shallow" pleasure is the most obvious thing that sets apart their most important relationship---with their romantic/sexual partner---from all other relationships.
The most important and profound pleasures I experience these days with my wife are not sexual. Of course, I can't and won't speak for her.
Calling it a shallow pleasure is inherently sexist, because it buys into the sexist view that sex is just a filthy thing you do to those filthy, inhuman holes we call women.
Well, now you just don't know what you are talking about. I assume women are just as capable of men of finding their sexual experiences ephemeral and only minimally satisfying, and it's not because they think they are filthy holes. I don't find sex filthy at all - just not infrequently boring.
And I have never read Maxim magazine, so I wouldn't know what you are talking about there.
So, yeah, you sound like a prig. The American assumption that you can immediately degrade something's value by pointing out that it's pleasurable needs to end. A life without pleasure is a life not worth living.
Of course. I didn't diminish sex because it is a pleasure. I diminished it because it is often a shallow pleasure. But again, it might just be me who is shallow.
April 9, 2009 6:22 PM | Reply | Permalink