bell hooks, Asexuality, and Otter Pops

Having both read Communion, Ily and I sat down for a chat. We may or may not have . . . drifted some, but I think the results are entertaining anyway. It was tons of fun to do, for sure, and we plan further interactive readalongs for the future–if you have suggestions, I’d sure love to hear ‘em. Without further ado, here’s Part One of our epic bell hooks chat–head over to Asexy Beast for Part Two!

Fellmama: So: bell hooks, thumbs up or thumbs down?

Ily: Thumbs up.

Fellmama: Most definitely.

Ily: But…did you find it at all vague?

Fellmama: Yes, I felt like it was very much like she had a very clear roadmap in HER head, but she wasn’t drawing it out so clearly for the rest of us.

Ily: I think the book would have been almost perfect if there had been a “practice” section added. As it is, it’s mostly just theory with a bit of personal experience.

Fellmama: Yes–I wonder if she was deliberately trying to avoid sounding self-helpy,

so no exercises or structure.

Ily: I thought about that. But she’s talking about how we need to help ourselves!

So it ends up being a little contradictory in that way.

Fellmama: Help ourselves to looove…

Yeah,

something she definitely seems concerned with is applicability,

and that may contribute to the sense of vagueness, too.

Fellmama: It’s not a book for middle-aged women, it’s not for straight women who want to land a man, it’s for EVERYONE.

Ily: Like, universality?

Fellmama: Yes! That is, in fact, the word I was searching for.

Ily: That’s a good point. She’s trying to speak to (and for, which is a little problematic) ALL women.

Fellmama: I actually thought a lot of you when I was reading this.

Aside from the obvious that you chose it and all–but when she would go on about sex and yadda yadda.

And she seems to emphasize that celibacy is okay, but as a ~midlife~ choice.

Did you also get that vibe?

Ily: Hmm, I dunno. I felt like she was speaking more for her own cohorts in the “sexual liberation” era. Overall I wouldn’t say that I felt alienated or excluded by the book.

Fellmama: Passages in particular like this one:

Page 225: “Celibacy is often a liberating self-loving choice among women for whom the search for sexual pleasure has consistently led them down a self-sabotaging path.”

Even though she’s completely behind celibacy as a choice, she seems to assume that one needs to be sexual before one can renounce sexuality.

Ily: Yeah, she does assume that everyone is sexual, but honestly I expect that. [The book was written in 2002, when asexual visibility was quite a bit lower than it is now.] At least she doesn’t privilege sexual/romantic love over other kinds of love. That’s what I think makes this book fairly ace-friendly, even if she has no clue that some people aren’t interested in sex.

Fellmama: That’s true; it comes across as very much a “whatever way you do it works for you” philosophy.

I personally was very pleased with her insistence that a romantic partner can’t be everything to you.

Ily: Me too.

Fellmama: And not just in the usual sense of “Oh, you need your friends for venting” or whatever, but in the sense that a romantic partner can’t be the source of all the love in your life.

Ily: Yes, I think women really need to hear that.

Fellmama: That was sort of a /facepalm moment for me, because it’s something I’ve always believed but never seen articulated.

Ily: Going back to the midlife focus, I was kind of like, “Well shit, are we supposed to hate ourselves until midlife”??!! [hooks writes that midlife can be a time when women find greater self-acceptance.]

Fellmama: Haha yeah.

She really has it out for Sex and the City feminism, doesn’t she?

Ily: At least I recognized her examples!

Fellmama: lol! I felt the same way! “Wow, I am culturally relevant!”

Ily: The [SATC] characters needed to read this book.

Fellmama:I SO agree.

I have my own problems with the presentation of “feminism” on shows like SATC and so forth, but I think hooks has the sort of second-wave disapproval of fun thing going on, and it shows there. Kind of surprising from a person who wrote a book called “Feminism Is for Everyone”.

Ily: Could you elaborate on that–Like, the disapproval of fun?

Fellmama: Here I’m thinking specifically of books like “Full Frontal Feminism”

and other third-wavers who are big on introducing feminism as something that will let you keep wearing makeup and a bra.

I think a lot of second-wave feminists feel like they fought really hard for the right not to have shave their armpits

and they feel, if not betrayed, annoyed at younger women who don’t see it as a big deal either way. Or feel that worrying about whether you can wear makeup and still be a feminist as trivial when women still make 76 cents on the dollar.

Ily: I get ya. I guess I don’t see makeup and bras as “fun” so far as they remain compulsory.

Fellmama: I don’t see them as especially fun myself.

But I also don’t see anything wrong in getting young women interested in feminism by telling them they can still wear makeup, either.

Ily: Then once we hook them, we can get them to stop shaving their armpits! Muahahahaha!

Fellmama: The hope is that they’ll come through on the other side and end up with the rest of us reading The Beauty Myth, but . . .

lol, yes.

For me, it’s like, I shave my legs, I wear makeup if I feel like it (which is very seldom), but that doesn’t define me as a feminist one way or another.

And rather than have a conversation about how buying stuff at Clinique Bonus Time makes me a Dupe of the Patriarchy, I’d like to have a conversation about how I can’t have an abortion, please.

Ily: I don’t think it’s an either/or type of situation.

But I agree with hooks very much that the dreams of feminism have not been fully realized. And yet people keep saying feminism is “over”.

Fellmama: Yes! because we have . . . full gender equality in all areas?

Riiiiiiiiiight.

One of the things I really enjoy about hooks’s writing is her insistence that feminism is for everybody, in the most literal sense:

That we’ve all been emotionally wounded by the patriarchal culture, and we all need healing.

Ily: Same. I like how she talks about feminism’s failure to convert men without getting all, “What about teh menz?”

Fellmama: Yes! It was a pretty stinging critique.

Ily: It was…I found it very refreshing. Like a sour otterpop, perhaps [Fellmama at an earlier point was consuming such a thing. It was delicious.]

Fellmama: For example:

(page 65): “Our male comrades’ refusal to change their thinking about sexuality, especially sexist conditioning socializing them to believe that women existed to satisfy their desire on demand, made it clear that they were not willing to give up all the privileges accorded them by patriarchy. Their refusal to adequately confront the ways sexist socialization had denied them access to emotional and spiritual growth was yet another arena of betrayal.”

Which I think is an excellent summary of exactly what you were talking about. She lays it out pretty clearly where feminism failed to reach, but she doesn’t make it a big “and therefore feminism is dead and GONE”.

Ily: But then hooks brings up this major problem…where are the feminist men?

In terms of the health of the movement, but also in terms of relationships (platonic or romantic).

It’s like 1,000 women looking for one man!

Fellmama: and 10,000 more of us settling for guys we hope will see the light one day.

I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty much whenever I scratch the surface of one of my “progressive” male friends, it comes up pretty sexist.

I live with four guys, so I have a lot of opportunity for this kind of interaction.

To all of their credits, it’s not like they go around making pronouncements about how women just don’t know how to drive or can’t do physics or what have you.

But in a way, it’s that much more insidious, because they genuinely think of themselves as egalitarian and even feminist

Ily: So what sexist things do they say?

Fellmama: So I don’t know if you’ve ever seen “Fraiser”?

Ily: Actually, no

Fellmama: I haven’t/hadn’t, but the Irishman has been watching it over the past few days.

One of the running jokes is that you never see the character Niles’s wife, Maris; she’s like Mrs. Columbo.

But she’s always calling Niles or getting him to do something absurd or what have you.

Anyway, so he gets this phone call and says something to the effect of “That was Maris–she wandered into the kitchen and I had to talk her out of it”.

Ily: Mmhmm…

Fellmama: Which of course got a big laugh, because haha women should be in the kitchen that elitist bitch amirite?

I sighed pretty loudly, TI asked what was up, and I said that the joke wasn’t funny because it was sexist as hell

Ily: I don’t understand the joke.

Fellmama: Maris is presented as helpless, upper-class, and out of touch.

So it’s supposed to be funny because she’s never seen the kitchen before; that’s where the servants are.

Ily: I see.

Fellmama: Anyway, TI said essentially that I was wrong and it was a class joke.

I point out that having it be the kitchen is specifically gendered; if the joke were “the closet” or “the attic,” the emphasis would be on her helplessness, not her gender.
Ily: Anything about class is also about gender, since women are the “sex class” or lower class. [I realize this is a broad view of the concept "class"] [Fellmama fully agrees with this view of class.]

Fellmama: Yeah, that’s another level, but I try not to go full-on kyriarchical theory most of the time with TI. He doesn’t have any background and so it devolves into me womansplaining at him.

So anyway, the point is, instead of saying “Huh, I don’t get it, how is it a sexist joke?” or even “I disagree, I think the joke is primarily about class,” he just says “You’re wrong”.

Over and over about five times; “you’re wrong”.

And this is the primary problem I have with my housemates in general:

They literally would rather believe their own uninformed opinions than acknowledge that observed sexism exists.

Ily: This seems like a super-common behavior for heterosexual men in general, about anything. It just seems to be something about how men are socialized in this culture. Women seem taught to be more unsure about our judgment.

Fellmama: the reason I notice it especially in that context, I think, is that none of them have done any reading or taken any classes or even ~thought~ about any of this (and this actually includes my female housemate).

But they all start from the premise that I’m wrong and they’re right, because they “don’t see it as sexist” or whatever.

And they will say WACKTACULAR things on the basis of no evidence.

For example, one of my housemates asserted the other day that although far more men than women commit domestic violence, the number of women and men who commit domestic murders is roughly equal.

Because you don’t have to be super strong to kill someone in their sleep or some bullshit logic like that?

Ily: Didn’t cite any sources?

Fellmama: Haha…

Well, we were walking somewhere,

so he didn’t have ready access to the internets!

Ily: Yes, you need to cite sources in order to converse with an asexual.

Commit them to memory if you must!

Fellmama: I actually managed to crush that argument before it began.

Just by saying, “Bullshit. The leading cause of death for pregnant women is homicide.”

And because he’s not actually a monster, just a clueless dude, that one made him think.

But! we have once again drifted from bell hooks.

Who I think would agree with us that mansplaining is unpleasant.

Oh, there’s something that actually bothered me about the book a little.

What did you think of her assertion that gay/bi men are more empathetic and ready to take women seriously than hets?

Ily: I’d say it’s based on her own experience, because I haven’t necessarily found it to be true.

Fellmama: Yes, I’d imagine so.

Because based on MY personal experience, gay men are often misogynists and more often not willing to even talk to women half the damn time.

Note: most of my quasi-professional interaction with gay men came in academia,

so your mileage may vary.

Ily: In my limited experience, a lot of gay men seem to feel like women are just irrelevant.

Fellmama: Yes,

and not just sexually irrelevant, either.

Ily: Yeah…but in our culture, sexual partners are deemed the most important, so it may follow from that.

Fellmama:I had a seminar, with, let’s see… it was myself, another woman, the professor, a married man, and four gay men.

One of the gay men was a friend of mine, and he and I talked a lot.

The heterosexual married man, the prof, and the other woman and I were quite friendly.

I don’t think the other three men ever said a word to me

ever.

Literally, they would ignore me if we ended up in the elevator together.

I was hesitant to blame this on their gayness, in that obviously it’s not the root cause of Being a Dick.

Ily: That makes me feel a bit better, because I always had this feeling that gay men didn’t like me. Maybe it’s nothing personal.

Fellmama: I’ve more often felt it’s not so much that they don’t like me so much as, like you say, they find me irrelevant.

So if I have something about me that they find particularly interesting or whatever, I wander on to their radar.

(and I will note that I was particular friends with the one guy because we both played the pipe organ, so . . .)

(insert dirty joke here)