In 2002 I hosted an Obesity and Poverty conference that was supposed to address contemporary global health crises in terms of class, and especially of the delegation of bad health to the poor and the socially marginal. A psychoanalyst came and talked passionately about middle class girls' body dysphoria (the opposite of euphoria) all over the globe and my first cranky thought was, oh, the anxieties about thinness amongst the middle class hold no candle to the global unhealth of the expanding working classes. Apparently, the middle-class gets to have mental health crises, while the poorer are just bad self-managers. But my second thought was that my own lack of respect for middle-class-white-women-studies was itself a kind of misogyny--not against all women, but some. When we learn compassion for some, we are also learning coldness towards others. When we say, as Michelle does, that people should aspire to "women's equality," what's the relation of the forms of equality we care about and the kinds of inequality with which we remain comfortable?

The analysis of power and disempowerment in many of our posts posits women and men as unified classes that have clear hierarchical statuses with respect to each other, when of course all of us know better. Sometimes when we talk about women in general we mean "poor women"; sometimes we mean "women during their reproductive years"; sometimes we mean "women of color in a white-privileged society"; sometimes mean "our friends"; sometimes we mean "those poor women in barbaric societies that are less liberal than ours"; and sometimes, say, girls who, as minors, are seen as incompetent to making fully-enough informed decisions about being sexually active. Sometimes we mean "heterosexual women" in general as though that's a homogeneous category. We seem rarely to be thinking about lesbians, although much of the political terrain has shifted to LGBT families and kinship networks, and rights to support for reproduction either biologically or as adoptive parents.

So I'm finding the absence of talk about class, race, and sexual preference variations on the relation of gender and freedom dispiriting in the usual way. But I also think someone has to say something here about sex. Things are bad for women all over, but not uniformly, even within one geopolitical region. Sometimes women are still dominated into secondary or tertiary status in all walks of life, including as sexual servants. More often their status is contradictory: for example, educational privilege and emotional idealization but legal constraint over sexual sovereignty. In some places women have lots of legal equality but are still sexually abject, although not exactly dominated. Sometimes women are seen as the emotional prime agents in their families, but better not get too sexually controlling. Sometimes women are seen as too sexually demanding--or too uninterested. In short, the bowl of porridge is rarely just right, it seems. So often people get very threatened in the face of sexual sovereignty: it is as though confidence equals a will to dominate. Sometimes it does! But mostly even thinking about sexual confidence just makes you aware of your own anxiety and vulnerability. Both genders feel miserable about being supplicants, when they are. I am covering a lot of ground here. But I just want to open a discussion.

The battle over reproduction is, indeed, what Katha Pollitt says: "The battle against women's rights, and gay rights, is often used by politicians as a distraction, to keep people's minds off far more important issues, such as poverty, public health, corruption, pointless wars like the Iraq adventure, etc, ad nauseum." But it is also a way of not talking about what's right next to reproduction: sex, sexual appetites, sexual anxiety, and ambivalence. Erotophobia (fear/hatred of sex) gets played out against anyone associated with sexuality, whether that anyone is in the LGBTQ category, or just straight women, or, frankly, straight men. I include the latter in this letter because I am always astonished by how quickly so many characterize "male sexuality" as a horrible and distorted thing, a monster. It is as though we hadn't learned yet that erotophobia makes everyone worse at intimacy both in everyday terms, popular culture, religious dogma, and legal or administrative contexts. Heterosexuality is unusual because the relations of disparagement and disgust do not produce separatism but take place in the context of familial or emotional interdependency. Reproduction politics are not only important, therefore, because the suppression of women's sexual sovereignty produces downward mobility and destructive tendencies in an entire society, along with the destruction of nature. It is also important because it is also an indicator of how frightening a loss of control over the terms of sexual value can be to those who would be willing to destroy the world in order to maintain their control over sex, which is fundamentally disrupting.

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Read Berlant's blog here.