Tag Archives: Human Rights

Philosophy and Early Feminist Thought

Posted on by

Ernestine Rose and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two founders of modern feminism, are the subjects of my recent traveling philosophy series. While their advocacy for women’s rights, abolition of slavery, religious liberty, and other human rights issues was so important, wasn’t their work more about politics than anything else?

Why write about feminist activists for a philosophy blog?

It’s true, their focus was on achieving political goals: to establish laws protecting and empowering women and other classes of human beings in their property, their person, their range of opportunities, and their enfranchisement. But to accomplish this, they needed ideas: not only of their own, personal beliefs about the world and the way it should be, informed by facts and supported by reason; they needed to convince others that their ideas were not only interesting and desirable to themselves but good, true, and conducive to flourishing for all human beings.

The laws of their time, which barred most women from owning any property, which subjugated them and their children to husbands, fathers, and male relatives, and which failed to protect women as they sought to engage in traditionally ‘unwomanly’ activities such as voting, receiving a full education, pursuing any occupation other than housekeeping or teaching, speaking in public, taking leadership roles, and so on, were based on certain widely held ideas and beliefs about the nature and proper roles of women. 

Women in some states, especially married women, had few political rights in the era when Rose and Stanton began to agitate for them. In fact, many women in the United States, legally, had as few rights as many slaves did, which may surprise many of us today; I know it surprised me as I did my research. Not to suggest that slaves were better off: far from it. Cultural expectations required better behavior toward and treatment of (non-slave) women. Most husbands, then as now, treat their wives with respect and try to make them happy, and they had a degree of power and influence in the home in her position as mother and keeper of the house. Many states had laws protecting women in cases of abuse, and some had laws requiring men to provide for their wives in a ‘decent’ manner. And adult single women legally enjoyed a degree of personal liberty a slave could only dream of. But it was extremely difficult for any woman to earn a decent wage or find an interesting, full-filling, non-menial job, and women were generally denied access to a full education. 

While some states offered better protections for women than others with fairly liberal laws (for the standards of that time, not necessarily ours) concerning divorce, remarriage, and a woman’s right to some control of property she brought into a marriage, in many other states, women lost their individual identity upon marriage under coverture. The legal doctrine of coverture meant that a women’s identity was absorbed into, or ‘covered by’, that of her husband, and her rights were subsumed under those of her husband. In other words, they disappeared. As a result of coverture and other laws, if a married woman felt the desire or need to leave her husband for any reason, including abuse, cruelty, neglect, etc, she had no right whatsoever to her children, to any of her property besides the clothing she wore and utensils to cook with, or to keep any wages she would earn. Not only that, if she was apprehended, she could legally be forced to return, echoing the cruelty of the Fugitive Slave Law (Mistress of Herself, p 93-94, 185-86). It’s no wonder, then, that the early feminist movement rose out of, and in partnership with, the abolitionist movement, since many of the arguments in favor of emancipation of slaves applied to the liberation of women as well. Rose and Stanton’s sister feminists identified with their enslaved fellow women in this: married women had no identity as individual persons under the law, and all women were barred from choosing their own professions, fulfilling their intellectual and other capacities, and subject to laws to which they could not consent because they were not full citizens, or citizens at all.

And nowhere were women of any status permitted to vote. So how could they better their situation?

 Rose, Stanton, and other human rights activists and reformers of their era recognized that laws and practices of their time that oppressed women, blacks and other racial minorities, religious dissenters, and immigrants, were all there, more or less, because of the same ideas. So to change the law, they had to change minds, not only with logical, well-supported, eloquent arguments, but with passion, which revealed the conviction behind the words. Their ideas inspired them, and in turn, inspired others. That’s where their philosophy comes in.

So what were these old ideas they wished to supplant? Why did they wish to supplant them? And with what?

Here are some of the most important ideas that underlie Ernestine Rose and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s work; not comprehensive, to be sure, but central to their goals of attaining legal and cultural liberty and equality, and to their beliefs about human nature and what constitutes the good:

~ The nature of rights, and where they come from

Ernestine Rose and Elizabeth Cady Stanton both have similar, though not identical, views on the nature of human rights. Stanton believes in a divine creator*, and that all human beings are created with certain endowments and dignities, so to transgress against human nature was to transgress the divine will. Rose doesn’t believe in a divine creator, and doesn’t think it an important question in matters of ethics, law, or everyday life, as it would involve understanding a reality incomprehensible to the human mind. Since we can only comprehend this world, we are only responsible for life within it, and we must put all of our effort in making this life the best we can. For Rose, human nature is a product of nature, no supernatural explanation useful or necessary. To both of these thinkers, however, human rights are indissolubly linked to human nature, and one could no more be legitimately denied than the other, by the simple fact of the existence of human beings whose qualities and aspirations are clearly discernible to anyone. And both think that reason is all we need to describe these rights and put them into law. As Stanton says, ‘…Viewed as a woman, an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the same; individual happiness and development. ‘(Solitude Of Self)

Whether Rose and Stanton think human nature is primary and human rights are derived from it, or whether they think both exist equally as qualities or attributes of a human person, I haven’t been able to discern. For myself, I think human nature is primary, and rights are derived from it; that’s why we must formulate, fight for, and protect human rights, not merely observe them as facts of nature. Either view is consistent with Rose and Stanton’s writings, yet I suspect they perhaps would agree with me, or at least see my point, if we ever had a chance to sit down and thrash it out. What a delightful and invigorating afternoon that would be!

In any case, Rose says, one needs only to observe the world to discover the truth of the matter, and the evidence is available to anyone, anywhere, whatever one’s culture or belief system. In fact, one needs no education at all (though it helps!) to recognize what to her is so plain, if only one would put aside their biases for a moment. A young man once challenged Rose during a speech, claiming that divine revelation and authority are in opposition to the Women’s Rights movement platform and supportive of the traditional view of women’s rights and women’s ‘sphere’ in the home. Rose replied: ‘…I will show him the revelation from which we derive our authority, and the nature in which it is written, in living characters. It is true we do not go to revelations written in books… That revelation is no less than the living, breathing, thinking, feeling, acting revelation manifested in the nature of woman…Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are but dead letters’ (MOH, 227)

~ Individual identity

The legal doctrine of coverture, inherited from British law, remained more or less unchallenged in the United States until the early feminists, with Rose and Stanton, agitated for and finally pushed through laws protecting the property rights of married women in the mid-nineteenth century. Rose began the petition to the New York State Assembly in the 1930’s, where she was soon joined by other activists; Stanton’s efforts led to success in 1848, when the first Married Woman’s Property Act was passed into law in New York (MOH, 12). Coverture was widely justified on a Biblical basis: passages such as Ephesians 5:22-5:24 ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church…Therefore as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything’ was used to demonstrate divine support for complete control of husbands over their wives. And not only wives: Stanton goes through the Bible line by line, and finds and critiques a multitude of verses in support of the idea that all women should be subjugated to men (The Woman’s Bible).

As we have seen, Rose does not accept the idea that any sort of ‘revelation’ trumps the evidence of nature, so she scorns the idea that a woman’s identity could be absorbed in another’s. ‘From the cradle to the grave she is subject to the power and control of man…At marriage she loses her entire identity, and her being is said to have become merged in her husband. Has nature thus merged it? Has she ceased to exist and feel pleasure and pain?…What an inconsistency, that from the moment she enters that compact, in which she assumes the high responsibility of wife and mother, she ceases legally to exist…’ (MOH, p 93). Since a woman feels her own feelings, thinks her own thoughts, and experiences her own selfhood, she is fully an individual as a man, whatever her relation to him. And since she is an individual person, she should have all the rights of an individual person, to the same extent as a man, and for the same reasons. Stanton concurs: ‘The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul; our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment; our republican idea, individual citizenship’ (SOS). 

What drive Rose and Stanton is that same idea that drive all feminists to seek full human rights protections: the inner experience of our own selves as human persons in the fullest sense of the term. The differences between women and men, as they repeatedly point out, are of minor significance compared to the similarities.

~ The intellectual, emotional, and moral equality of women and men

All able human persons, say Rose, Stanton, and their fellow feminists, enjoy and experience an inner life made up of the same components: reason, emotion, and the moral instincts chief among them. While there is some difference in degree and quality from person to person, and some minor differences in tendencies between male and female, women and men are the same kind of being. Rose, again, appeals to the evidence of experience: ‘What has man ever done, that woman, under the same advantages, could not do? …Even now, where her mind has been called out at all, her intellect is as bright, as capacious, and as powerful as his…And do you ask for fortitude, energy, and perseverance? Then look at woman under suffering, reverse of fortune, and affliction…’ (MOH,  99). She recognized, as her fellow reformers did, that the intelligence and ability they found in their own selves contradicted the claims underlying the rigid belief system of her day regarding the ‘proper spheres’ of men and women. 

Instead of thinking of intelligent, ambitious, entrepreneurial, and independent women as ‘unwomanly’ freaks of nature, and women as subservient mother and housewife as ‘natural’, Rose and Stanton think of women as complex and rich in their interior lives as men, and have similar needs. For example, Stanton reveled in motherhood and was one seven times over, but she often felt stifled by the way motherhood, in her day, relegated her to a narrower arena of activity and intellectual stimulation than suited her. She is restless and curious thinker, deeply intelligent and active by nature, and while her family lived in Boston, her busy social life kept her satisfied in mind and body. When her family moved to Seneca Falls, a small town in upstate New York, however, her new life of a full-time homemaker often made her feel trapped (Jacoby, 88). Stanton doesn’t recognize herself as confined to a ‘sphere’, or conforming to the ideal of ‘true womanhood’ of the time. She thinks these ideas are not divinely inspired, but are human creations, derived from men’s need to carry on their legacy and keep the mothers of their children obediently at home under their control (TWB, Jacoby 195). Instead, like Rose, Stanton recognizes in herself and her fellow woman the full human intelligence that needs to be satisfied and developed, and the range of needs, desires, and challenges in life that, like men, can only be addressed by protecting and furthering their chances of pursuing their own goals, in law and cultural practice.

(I felt this very same way, growing up, regarding ideas about women I was brought up to believe. Beginning in my mid- to late teens, the ideal of the ‘proper sphere of women’ of the very traditional, conservative religion I was brought up in, felt alien to me. I just couldn’t believe that most, let along all, women wanted more or less the same things, and though I recognized that lifestyle made many women happy, it was not so for all women. As an adult, I’m much more interested in the experiences, the day-to-day joys and challenges of my friends and family who are mothers, yet I still don’t feel the desire to live that life myself, especially that of a homemaker, and it’s increasingly undesirable to me personally as the years pass. Yet I’m glad that so many women now have a choice: they are not forced into it, or out of it, by the state, and less and less by overbearing families or isolationist, fundamentalist communities.)

~ Women, men, and their capacities

In the period in which Ernestine Rose and Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived, the ‘myth of true womanhood’ held that each woman naturally has a specific and narrow set of capacities and tastes, all of which confine her to the choice of a few roles, the first two being primary: wife, mother, homemaker, and/or teacher (of children and other women, not of men), craftsperson in the ‘daintier’ arts, and nurse. But Rose and Stanton see things differently: while they allow there may be some differences in temperament and ability on the average, especially when it comes to physical strength, as we have seen, men and women are far more alike than they are different (intellectually, emotionally, and morally). Since women and men have similar capacities and aspirations in accordance with their human nature and their individual proclivities, so each individual should have equal opportunity to make the fullest use of them. The first and arguably most important method of developing ones capacity is a quality education, and the goal of their education should be to expand and fulfill the intellectual capacity of each individual person to the utmost.

And all persons should have full and equal access to engage in any occupation that suits their own tastes. As Rose says, in response to an influential lecturer who argues that women’s natural talents were confined to the ornamental arts, housekeeping, and the care and education of children, ‘…the great difficulty is, that …certain taste and adaptation or peculiar faculties are required for proficiency in any art or science…then it would be just as reasonable to expect all men to be painters, sculptors, or chemists, as to ask all women to be scientific cooks [chefs]. If men and women were educated in accordance with their predilections and tastes, it might so happen that some men might have the best capacity for the science of cooking, and some women for the science of government…’ (MOH, 115). In other words, preordaining and then imposing narrowly defined roles is, in fact, unnatural, and systematically wastes human potential.

~ Marriage and relationships between women and men

Rose and Stanton both believe that the traditional hierarchical view of marriage was wrong. It was still generally believed in their time that a marriage could only survive harmoniously if one partner was ultimately the authority figure, and many people in the world still believe that today (as in Paul’s doctrine of men as the ‘head’ of the family, for example, outlined in the Ephesians quote we considered earlier). Rose and Stanton, to the contrary, believe that sort of arrangement to be not only non-conducive to harmony (since it builds resentment, reduces serious consideration of the wishes and solutions to problems of the ‘subject’ partner, and encourages bullying in one and passivity in the other), but a to vow of obedience in marriage is to renege on one’s responsibilities as a moral agent:

Ernestine Rose has much to say about this subject. She was happily married for 57 years to a man who, like her, was radically egalitarian for the time, and also considered marriage a partnership between equals. She says, ‘But I assert that every woman …is bound to maintain her own independence and her own integrity of character; to assert herself, earnestly and firmly, as the equal of man, who is her only peer. This is her first right, her first duty: and if she lives in a country where the law supposes that she is to be subjected to her husband, and she consents to this subjection, I do insist that she consents to degradation: that this is sin…Marriage is a union of equals’ (MOH 275-276). She critiques the idea that blanket submission is a virtue: ‘Blind submission in woman is considered a virtue, while submission to wrong is itself wrong, and resistance to wrong is virtue alike in woman as in man’ (MOH 93). And she considers the vow of obedience in marriage not only wrong, but a lack of civilization:‘…who knows but the time may come when man and woman will be so far civilized as to agree to differ in an amicable and friendly way whenever they should not be able to agree?’ (MOH 119)

Stanton demonstrates her own commitment to the idea of marriage as a full and equal partnership not only in her writing, espousing the same principles as Rose, but likewise through action. She kept her own name upon marriage, adding her husband’s at the end. She thinks that referring to a married woman by ‘Mrs’ tacked onto the husband’s name, while leaving out hers, was a much a symbol of denigration and ownership as it was to refer a bondsperson by the name of their plantation or master. She agrees wholeheartedly that the vow of obedience was retrograde and against the true ideal of marriage as an equal partnership (Eighty Years 72). She lived a life of as much independence as her situation would allow during her years raising dependent children, and reveled in her freedom in later years, becoming more active than ever in her work for women’s rights.

~ The role of reform and progress in morality

 Rose and Stanton hold somewhat different views of religion: to Rose, most religions oppressed women for so long, and their holy books contained so many anti-woman passages, that religions, in general, could only be considered more harmful than helpful, and were pretty much all antithetical to the women’s rights movement. Stanton is mildly religious, in the sense that she doesn’t identify with any particular sect of Christianity, and openly criticizes most of them for their support of retrograde laws and practices in respect to women. Yet she admires Jesus Christ himself, as a friend to the poor and oppressed, as a revolutionary, and as a promoter of tolerance (the story of Magdalene’s interrupted stoning, the Good Samaritan parable, and apostleship of the tax collector are some examples.) Both of them, in their day, would have been called freethinkers, and Stanton would also have been called an atheist by many, since that term was often used to refer to anyone who did not agree with orthodox ideas about God.

Many of the major religions go through more or less the same cycle: inspired by one (probably) historical figure who was some sort of inspirational radical (Abram, Siddhārtha Gautama, Jesus of Nazareth, Muḥammad ibn `Abd Allāh), evolving oral traditions and hagiography transformed these figures into gods or sacred beings with special moral authority (Abraham, the Buddha, Christ, The Prophet). As well as encouraging good behavior in their believers and often radically changing cultures for the better with their progressive ideas, eventually these belief systems rigidified, and were pressed into political service to enforce power structures which adopted them. Over time, culturally and legally, these religions were transformed from their reformist roots to dogmatic systems which enforced othodoxy of belief and rigidly proscribed behavior, with promises of reward and/or threats of punishment, by the divine and by the state. Sometimes this was beneficial to promoting pro-social behavior and attitudes; sometimes it led to such evils as religious wars, persecution of heretics, witch-hunts, and pogroms. Rose cites the cruel treatment of dissenters as one of her main criticisms of religion (MOH 76-77).

Over time, new reformists would spring up, challenging the more ugly, oppressive, or retrograde beliefs and practices religions had accumulated over time. Dissenters came from the fringes of that tradition (in the West, liberal anti-clerical Protestants such as Stanton, Deists such as Thomases Paine and Jefferson, Quakers such as Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony, and Unitarians* such as William Lloyd Garrison) as well as from the outside (freethinkers, atheists, and agnostics such as Rose, Robert Ingersoll, and Charles Darwin). Time and time again, it would take these reformers, and the moral and rational arguments with which they won over popular opinion, to convince these the old religions to reform themselves, to become more liberal and to adopt more humanistic beliefs and practices, in order to stay relevant. This process has advanced much more with some religions than with others; it’s not hard to recognize which ones, by the standard of living and the human rights protections in those countries in which those religions are most dominant.

Rose and Stanton, despite their differences of opinion of the existence of the divine, think that dogma is antithetical to morality, properly understood. The capacity of a culture or a belief system to be reformed from outside, or better yet, contain within it ideas that generate self-reform, is a sign of its superiority, since it can adapt to solve problems in a changing world. A rigid, ‘eternal’ system, by contrast, is necessarily harmful, since it’s immune to new evidence, and attempts to solve new problems with old ideas that don’t apply. In Rose’s and Stanton’s day, science had made a major breakthrough, illuminating how natural laws can explain the evolution of human nature and in turn, human morality. In Biblical times, for example, a relatively rigid, harsh moral code, centered on sexual dominance, tribal loyalty, and the accumulation of property (be it through farming, herding, dowry, or plunder) evolved to aid the survival of small nomadic tribes in a similarly harsh landscape. In a modern industrial society, such a code no longer appropriate. But aside from the usefulness of a moral code, Rose and Stanton think that morality should be drawn from observations of human nature, and as human nature expands and evolves, so does morality. Religion, they think, has this backward: it codifies some idea about what human nature is and should be in relation to a wider reality, and this rigid system is then imposed upon everyone, regardless of how poorly it’s equipped to deal with any particular circumstance or new problem that arises, or how poorly it fits with the personality, interests, or abilities of particular individuals.

In sum: Rose, Stanton, and the ideas of the early feminists are as relevant and as important today as they ever were, since they so eloquently and convincingly make the case for the equality of legal rights for women, and for a cultural and religious reexamination of the predominant ideas about women in their time. The debate over the ideas that they opposed, and the better ideas with which they convinced most of the Western world, is still raging today. In many parts of the world, women are still subjugated to men, for many of the same reasons as they were in Rose and Stanton’s time, though the holy book these oppressive laws are often based on now is more often a different one.
And in the modern Western world, the rights of women to control their own bodies and their own minds is still under attack from some quarters. For example, traditional views about women still lead many to attack President Obama’s recent remarks on such reform by deliberating misrepresenting his views based on a grammatical unclarity in one sentence of a speech that otherwise promoted the economic rights of mothers. The reforms he was calling for in that speech would ultimately support a women’s right to choose to be a full-time stay at home mother, by limiting the negative economic impact such a choice would have on her future prospects. But the fervor of some traditionalists against the idea that a women’s choice to remain childless, or to be a working mother, or pursue other goals altogether, is a valid one, can lead to blanket opposition to all women’s rights reform, however just such reform appears on its face. Opposition to full rights for women is alive and kicking, as is opposition to full human rights for immigrants, prisoners, atheists, and other minority groups, so it’s important to keep the ideas of Rose, Stanton, and the early feminists alive since they still apply, in essence, to all of these.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Note: it’s a little tricky to pin down Stanton’s religious views: she was, from early life, a liberal Protestant Christian, a believer in God and an admirer of Jesus Christ. Yet she was a fierce critic of the mainstream organized religions of her day which opposed rights for women, which were most of them, and did not consider the Bible the ultimate authority on questions of human rights or on morality generally. As she once remarked to Susan B. Anthony, she grew more radical in her opinions over the years, and later in life, may have been closer to a Deist or freethinking Theist than a Protestant (Eighty Years 44, Jacoby 194)

~ Listen to the podcast edition of this essay here or here in iTunes

Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sources and inspiration:

The Bible, King James version

Cassidy, Jessie J. ‘The Legal Status of Women’. New York, The National-American Woman Suffrage Association, 1897. Obtained from the Library of Congress website

Dorress-Worters, Paula. Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader.  The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2008

Duke, Selwyn. ‘Just Say No to Stay-At-Home Moms‘. The New American. Nov 2nd, 2014.

‘Elizabeth Cady Stanton‘. (2014, November 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

‘Ernestine Rose‘. (2014, July 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Gordon, Ann D. ‘Elizabeth Cady Stanton‘. American Natinal Biography Online.

Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Owl Books, 2004.

‘Married Women’s Property Laws‘, American Memory: American Women. Library of Congress website. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awlaw3/property_law.html

Obama, Barack. ‘On Women and the Economy‘ speech, Oct 30th, 2014. Retrieved from the White House website, Office of the Press Secretary

Salmon, Marylynn. ‘The Legal Status of Women, 1776–1830‘. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (website)

Stanton, Elizabeth et al. Declarations and Sentiments / Proceedings of the First Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, 1848.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. Eighty Years And More: Reminiscences 1815-1897.  New Jersey: Mershon Company Press, 1897.

Stanton, Elizabeth. ‘Solitude of Self‘. Address Delivered by Mrs. Stanton before the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Congress, Monday, January 18, 1892.

Stanton, Elizabeth et al. The Woman’s Bible, 1898.

Pornography

Posted on by

Recently, I read a post on Facebook where my cousin’s wife woefully reported that my cousin’s new anti-pornography site had to be taken down due to a huge negative reaction (though he received much support as well). The site is (was?) called ‘Her Name’, and it’s a forum where you assign a name (first name only) to a woman whose dignity had been affronted through pornography: women you know, women you’ve seen but not met, and so on. By naming these women, their humanity, their individual worth is re-affirmed, and all are reminded that each woman a life and a story beyond the simple object of gratification that pornography portrays them as.

That was what I was able to gather from the description of the website and from  my cousin’s wife’s post. But I didn’t find many details of why many objected strongly to the website, in the blog review and discussion of ‘Her Name’ I found on Patheos, nor on Facebook. Nor was I able to discern clear arguments in support of the claim that women are, in fact, dehumanized or injured in other ways by pornography.

Here’s what I gathered about the nature of the angry comments: by providing a forum to name these women, my cousin was (inadvertently, I believe) also creating a handy tool for ideologues to shame women taking part in pornography, or to ‘out’ women who want to keep their porn careers private. And here’s what I gathered from the discussion overall: pornography is bad, especially for women, period.

I’m glad that my cousin feels passionately about the issue insofar as he is concerned with promoting the dignity and freedom of women. And I’m glad that he’s taking part in the public discussion that we should all continue to have about pornography. It’s such a complicated subject, to which the blog reviewer doesn’t do justice: she offers no arguments to support her assertion that porn dehumanizes women. She simply claims that it’s a tool of the devil to destroy souls by denying their existence without explanation as to why or how.

Another thing: the overall characterization of porn, on the site and the blog post, was almost exclusively about the victimization of women, yet both sexes are involved in its production as well as the consumption, to one degree or another. I presume that the assumption is that men are making most or all of the decisions, and the women are all victims and dupes. I have serious doubts about both of these claims, if they really are such. Be that the case, let’s keep in mind that while I offer primarily offer women as examples in the discussion here for consistency’s sake in comparing the arguments, most of the points made apply to all sexes involved.

Based on his replies to the blog review comments, my cousin’s objections also appear to be based primarily on his religious beliefs: lust is sinful, tempting another to lust is sinful, sexual intercourse outside of marriage is sinful, and so on. These claims will have little meaning for those not adherents to particular dogmas. Yet we can infer broader points from what he has to say. For one, the anonymity and secrecy surrounding pornography, of the actors and the viewers, indicate that shame, an instinctive reaction to pornography, indicates there’s something wrong with it. Secondly, porn, by its very nature, dehumanizes the participants by reducing them to a collection of parts that have no purpose other than to gratify sexual desire. And thirdly, supporting the sexual gratification market that is porn, also supports awful practices as sex slavery and rape by validating the general idea that it’s okay to view some women, or all women, as nothing but objects of lust.

Those who subscribe to the ideas of the growing sex-positive movement, however, would not recognize this wholly negative portrayal of pornography. Sexuality, they say, is not only natural, but as valuable a characteristic of the human personality as reason or creativity. It originates from the best parts of human nature: empathy, sympathy, cooperation, our rich emotionality, the urge to create new life. It’s one of the most exciting ways that humans can bring each other joy, and unite in one of the most emotionally intense, intimate ways that we can. In short, sex is beautiful, and the ways in which we enjoy it can be, and should be, as variable as is the range of human personality itself. It’s precisely because of patriarchy and religion, in fact, that human sexuality has been shamed, perverted, twisted, and portrayed as ugly and exploitative in all contexts outside of the confines of male-dominated monogamy. That type of sex-negative religious view, in turn, is a regrettable inheritance from our evolutionary ancestors, who felt the need to exert control of women’s sexuality in the competition to successfully procreate with limited resources. When religion and patriarchy lose their influence, sexuality can again be freely expressed in all its joy and beauty, and the religiously-imposed shame will melt away. After all, as Mark Twain says, ‘Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.’ 

Pornography, then, in this view, is to sexuality as academia and the scientific community are to intelligence, and sculpture and novels are to creativity: an expression of our sexual nature. There’s bad pornography, and good pornography, just as there are harmful scientific theories such as eugenics, and clunky, tacky, poorly written novels such as ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and ‘Naked Came the Stranger’, and lousy art such as Dan Lacey’s pancake and unicorn paintings (though hilarious!)

So why is sex the one part of the human nature whose expression and gratification we consider most taboo even as it’s most alluring? Why single it out this way? We don’t consider gratifying hunger and thirst as shameful, nor other needs and desires such as art, music, or intellectual stimulation. What is it about sex that engaging in it, and portraying it, is considered dehumanizing in all but the very narrow context of marriage, when it’s such a very human thing for all to do and to desire? Why is considered so good and yet so bad? 

Let’s explore the problem of treating sex differently than other aspects of human nature by considering a rather extreme example. I read an opinion piece the other day about Somaly Mam and her apparently now-dubious credentials as an advocate against sex trafficking. The author makes what I think is an excellent point: Mam would ‘liberate’ sex-workers only to place them in what many might call ‘honest’ work: jobs in the apparel industry, where in Cambodia, as in many other places where sex-trafficking is a big problem, it’s a free-for-all. There are few to no human rights protections or regulations, and the women work long, back-breaking hours for little pay in awful conditions. It’s that, or starve, so there’s no real choice for most of these women. So what makes the sweatshop job more ‘dignified’? In both cases, the women have little to no autonomy, and are treated with contempt (perhaps, one might argue, more so in the sweatshop job, since the woman is not even considered a ‘possession’, and therefore of some personal value to the owner!) Is it the only the fact that it’s there’s sex involved that makes the latter condition of miserable servitude somehow better than the former? We would probably hear many on the anti-pornography side of the argument say that, of course, both are examples of terrible behavior of the slavers and of the sweatshop owners, but I would wager that they would not be impassioned advocates of labor unions, minimum wage laws, and regulations as they might be anti-sex-work activists.

The porn industry does not, for the most part, resemble the terrible practice of sex slavery, so considering them side by side is only useful insofar as it helps us recognize our own often inconsistent attitudes about sex and respect for our fellow human beings. So let’s return to a less dramatic example, where autonomy is not in question. Does the dehumanization lie in portraying a woman in such a way as to present only one aspect of her nature for the satisfaction of the audience, in this case her sexuality? How about when she is ‘reduced’ to another aspect of her person, say her physical appearance? Let’s take the example of a model for fine art, or for fashion photography. She is chosen because she is beautiful (or interesting-looking, for fits the chosen profile, or whatever), and is paid to stay still while the artist captures the outward appearance of her body, and is dismissed when the work is complete. Is she dehumanized then? How about any interaction in which a human being is only considered in the light of the narrow role they play in the other’s life in that moment, the waiter, the conversationalist at the bar, the cashier, the barista, the taxi driver, the person who makes the clothes one buys, the arms dealer? They are anonymous, or will be except during that particular transaction, and they will never be seen again. Are they dehumanized too? Why is it that interacting with another person in only their role as a sexual being more dehumanizig than interacting with them only insofar as they play a different role?

One may reply, that sex is deeply intimate and meaningful, where a painting a portrait is not (necessarily, anyway), nor is ordering food or coffee or buying stuff, nor chatting up a stranger at a bar. But why must sex always be intimate and meaningful? Just as conversation can be intimate and meaningful, it can also be casual, or meaningful but not lasting (that fascinating, intelligent fellow traveler on an overnight flight who shared the best stories and ideas you ever heard which stayed for you for life, while you never see them again), or baby talk that the infant will not remember, or part of the larger conversation a committed pair have over their shared lifetime. Yet all of those types of communication are an important part of a full life. So it goes with all other parts and products of human nature. Just because it can be deeply intimate and meaningful and long-lasting, doesn’t mean it has to be; there’s room for simple, easy, non-committed encounters as well, isn’t there?

Again, what’s so special about sex?

For the last half-dozen paragraphs, I’ve offered arguments and counter-examples from the sex-positive perspective against the anti-pornography view I (admittedly briefly) summarized at the outset. (Since I outlined only those arguments I could muster that have a broader-than-religious applicatio, it was necessarily relatively brief). Intellectually, I sympathize with the latter, since they not only harmonize best with a naturalistic philosophy most informed with verifiable evidence, but are more consistent with the values of autonomy and liberty. Yet anti-pornography advocates makes some valuable points, too, as we shall see.  

Thus far, we’ve considered arguments in favor of anti-pornography and pro-pornography (or at least anti-anti-pornography) ideas. But how do they play out in real life? Is pornography really as nasty, destructive, and shameful as some say, or as pro-human, life-affirming, nature-celebrating as others say? What does porn really look like out there, and what is its actual effect?

Here’s where I think the anti-pornographers have a point: much of the actual, mainstream pornography doesn’t seem to celebrate the same degree of respect for autonomy, diversity, and positive-body-image values that the sex-positive community has. Mainstream porn seems to chew women (and men) up and spit them out in the same way as Hollywood and the tabloids do (and these days, even Fox News and CNN!). The only people that are considered sexy enough to be featured are the hard-bodied, perfectly evenly tanned, straight and/or blonde haired, fake-white-teeth, heavily made up, simultaneously tiny-waisted and big-titted (or -cocked) stars of Barbie and Ken’s dreams. If you want to be a porn star and aren’t born with this set of attributes, under the knife and chemicals you go! There is porn made for people with other body types who wish to act in it, but as of yet, it’s generally of the boutique, Good Vibrations variety (G.V. is like Whole Foods, for the socially-conscious and horny). As of now, the body-positive attitudes celebrated in those wonderful You-Tube manifestos have not yet influenced the mainstream porn industry, just as they have not influenced Hollywood or news outlets.

I wish the porn industry overall actually looked more like the sex-positive activists’ vision, I really do! One day it may, when people grow tired of the monotony of seeing people of a only very few body types represented. Real-girl-next-door, all-natural, widows, Wallendorf Venuses, seniors, divorcees with empty nest syndrome, all of these may one day be represented as widely, and more personally, in mainstream porn as they are in people’s actual day to day fantasies and moments of curiosity. But I doubt it will happen anytime soon, if beauty magazine covers and increasing rates of plastic surgery are any indication. When it comes to body-shaming, it seems the narrow conception of beauty that informs mainstream pornography, as in all those other aforementioned public arenas: the only beauty that is celebrated is of such a rare type, and so many slice and paint themselves to artificially achieve it, that most women and girls are left to feel self-conscious and in some way not valued, since most don’t look like that standard. So they binge and purge, cut and paste, and smash themselves into ill-fitting clothing and tottering shoes.

Yet it’s not all bad news with mainstream pornography. When women are supposedly more dehumanized than ever through its unprecedented consumption as well as its extreme appearance standards, it’s also the era of unprecedented levels of legal protection of pornography actors, and of moral attitudes against the their oppression, in all categories of sex work. State by state, country by country, developed nations are instituting health regulations, labor unions, and laws that protect sex workers from the disease, exploitation, coercion, and violence that plagued them as long as sex work as existed (as the ‘oldest profession’, that’s a long time!). Sex workers, from pornography actors to prostitutes, need to worry less and less that they will be further victimized by the police or by the courts when they report crimes done against them, and sex trafficking, sex with minors, pimping, and other crimes of coercion (and patriarchy!) are less and less morally and legally acceptable than the sex-for-pay itself. 

So on the whole, I find must side with the sex-positive community in the matter of pornography. Their arguments, as I interpret them, are not only more logically consistent with what we observe in human nature and behavior, but are better aligned with what we actually see happening when it comes to protecting and caring for women and everyone else in porn. But we must keep in mind the nastier elements that are still very characteristic of the market overall, that I think my cousin and some others in the discussion recognized. There is a significant level of disrespect for our fellow human beings in the industry at large, and we must keep up the good fight against all manner of body-shaming, violence, exploitation, and coercion that are still endemic in porn.

P.S. It may seem odd that, throughout this post, I never refer to my cousin and his wife by their names, though they made their names public in the blog post discussion. My purpose is (somewhat smart-alecky, my apologies if my little joke offends!) to illustrate the point: perhaps it’s best to let people make their names public when and if they want to, when it comes to such a still-delicate subject. While it’s true that many porn actors have published their names, it’s often with the understanding that the only people likely to notice are in the porn-making and porn-watching communities, not likely to be seen by grandmas and co-workers who may not understand or agree with their choices due to the stigma that remains. The choice should be left to the porn actors publish their names more widely; it’s up to the rest of us to make the public sphere a more welcome, less harmful place to do so.

************************************************************************

Sources and inspiration:

– Thanks to my cousin and his wife for starting such a fascinating and complex discussion of pornography in the context of naming versus anonymity, which brings to bear so many important and practical issues: human nature, sexuality, morality, the meaning of dignity, autonomy, and so much more

– My husband Bryan, whose intelligent conversation inspired and informed this piece throughout, besides being the most beautiful and sexy man I’ve ever had the pleasure to behold both naked and clothed.

– My sister Therese and my dear buddy Kristin, who also offered valuable insights, and patiently put up with my pestering them with counterexamples and devil’s-advocacy

– Dan Savage http://www.savagelovecast.com/

– Greta Christina http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/

– All whose work I linked to throughout the article

The Value of People’s Lives Versus Our Love of Stuff

Posted on by

The more thuggy-minded among us seem to be taking the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case as cultural validation of their ‘tough-guy’, violence-glorifying, trigger-happy, vigilante mindset, as evidenced by some of the reactions I’ve seen.

And it’s not just the culture of violence that’s being celebrated by so many that concerns me. Racism permeates this case, from the circumstances that led to the original confrontation, to the killing itself, to the conduct of the court case, to the public’s perception of it all. It’s all-important we confront the issue of racism and figure out how to solve the problem, and there are countless passionate and thoughtful people taking this on right now. Here, however, I’d like to address another little-discussed American prejudice exemplified by this case and by the controversy surrounding it.

 

George Zimmerman may have been suspicious of Trayvon Martin simply because he hadn’t seen him before and he fit the description of burglars recently in the neighborhood, or Zimmerman may have profiled Martin as a criminal just because he’s a malicious racist. No one can read his mind, and he may not even know his own; we can only base our judgments of his motivations on our interpretation of the evidence. Since race was a factor in this case and racism has long been endemic in American culture, this has been among the hottest subjects of debate from the outset. But there’s another assumption implied in the public discourse that I wish was also a prominent part of the discussion. Even if Zimmerman really thought that the young man he saw might be a burglar, even if he knew for certain that he was one, why would chasing him down with a gun, provoking a potentially deadly confrontation, be justified in the first place? Since there had been burglaries reported in Zimmerman’s neighborhood prior to the Martin killing, Zimmerman and his defenders claim Zimmerman’s sole motive in pursuing and confronting Martin was to protect the community. Other more enthusiastic Zimmerman defenders try to make the point that Martin was a troublemaker, implying that if Martin had committed property and/or drug crimes before, Zimmerman’s suspicions and actions are somehow validated. Perhaps they see these rumors about Martin’s past as evidence that he was probably given to acting like a stereotypical troublemaker or criminal? But, again, even if Zimmerman has good reason to suppose that the young man he saw was a burglar or a petty criminal, why would this, in any way, justify the actions he took that night?

It seems to be that Americans are so obsessed with property rights, are so attached to and in love with the stuff we own, that we assume that anyone who messes with it is ‘asking for it’: deserving of physical harm and even death.  Another controversial case, of a man who picked up a knife and chased down a man for stealing his car radio , killing him, then being excused on the basis of ‘Stand Your Ground’ legislation, provides another telling example of this common American attitude. The controversy over the latter case, it’s true, does include more dismay over the fact that a man lost his life over the comparatively minor infraction of stealing such non-essential luxury items as radios. And the stabber’s argument, that he feared for his life because the thief swung a bag of radios at him, appears ludicrous to most, myself included.

To be clear, there are times when theft can mean life-or-death to the victim of it, such as horse-stealing in the frontier days when a horse was essential to one’s livelihood, or when someone’s life-saving drugs or medical equipment is stolen. In this sort of case, there is much more justification for aggressive defense from thieves. But I’m quite certain such cases are relatively rare. And, of course, there’s armed robbery, which is different, because in this sort of situation the thief is the one who first introduced the life-threatening element to the situation. I would agree there’s much more justification for self-defense here. But, when you consider two important pieces of evidence, that widespread gun ownership does not correlate world-wide with low rates of gun deaths (as deterrence theories would predict), and that most people, in conditions of stress, are terrible shots and often mistakenly hit innocent people, it seems clear that avoiding confrontation, if possible, is more often the way to preserve the lives of everyone involved. But, we do have a strong instinct for self-preservation and for defending the lives of our loved ones, and I argue, the right to do so, so self-defense cases such as these are not what I’m talking about here.

I’m talking about the very idea that it’s okay for people to defend their non-essential property in such a way that someone might be killed as a result. If evidence was presented that the burglaries in Zimmerman’s neighborhood resulted in a life-threatening situation because of the thieves, we can place this in the frontier-horse-stealing category. Same would go for the second case, if we found out that there was some crazy science-fiction scenario going on where the radio in the man’s car was the one thing that kept him alive. Now, no-one, myself included, would argue that thieves should be allowed to go on stealing to their heart’s content, unmolested by anyone. They should be captured, put on trial, made to pay restitution, and jailed if that’s what it takes to protect others from being preyed on. We rely on our police force rather than vigilantes to make sure people are forced to take responsibility for their actions, so that the protectors of society are well-trained to preserve human life whenever possible, and are publicly accountable if they abuse their power. (As we’ve seen with some historically corrupt police forces, such as the LAPD, we sometimes need to do a much better job at keeping them accountable. Most police officers, however, I think are in fact honorable and do care about the well-being of their communities. But we don’t hear about the good ones in the news, just the bad ones, so many have a distorted view of the police community as a whole.)

I hope the DOJ does prosecute Zimmerman, as the NAACP is urging, for the very reason that Zimmerman took it on himself to go out and chase down a man he suspected of stealing, with a gun at his side. This was a grown man, who should have been old enough to know better, who made decisions that resulted in a minor’s death. Zimmerman disregarded the instructions of the police, our trained and accountable public representatives, not to confront anyone. He thought that his own private evaluation of the situation was more important than other considerations, and it appears to me that he placed Martin’s, his own, and potentially, innocent passers-by’s lives at risk because he thought that some stuff being stolen justified his doing so. And not enough people, it seems to me, are willing to question this one aspect of Zimmerman’s whole mess of unjustified assumptions.

But, sadly, Americans as a whole are just too obsessed with stuff, and so much so that we’re not likely to consider whether getting and keeping the stuff we want is worth the cost to others. (I can’t speak for other cultures as well as I can for my own, perhaps we’re not unique in this sort of perverted set of priorities. Some cultures tolerate or promote killing to preserve their own honor, for example.) It’s not only these ‘stand your ground’ cases. We all thoughtlessly consume products that we know or suspect are made in conditions where the workers are treated horribly and work in dangerous, even deadly, circumstances. We buy our cheap fashions and chat on our smartphones, never demanding that companies that make these things improve their factory conditions and stop polluting, and even worse, keep giving our tacit consent to the whole system by pouring our consumer dollars into it without a murmur. I just went and checked right now in my underwear drawer, and confirmed that some panties I bought were indeed made in Bangladesh, even though I have several pairs I started making and set aside. Sewing underwear is tedious, and it was so much easier to just run out a buy a few cheap pairs. I bought them as thoughtlessly and innocently, American-style, as anyone else, even though I should know better. I’ve been an indie fashion designer for years and decided I didn’t want to be part of the mainstream fashion industry after my research revealed that cheap fashion is among the most polluting, wasteful, and human-rights-violating industries in the world, worse than coal, I’d argue. But there it is, I bought those panties anyway.

I’m not making the point that buying a smartphone or panties made in Bangladesh is like gunning a young man down. I’m making the point that perhaps we Americans, indeed, all human beings a little too obsessed with stuff, need to reassess our priorities. I’m making the point that our attitude about stuff, that we are entitled to have as much as we want and can afford, has led us to make some very misguided moral judgments. I think it’s made us too blind to the various ways in which our love of stuff, from everyday purchasing of goods we suspect but don’t know are made in miserable sweatshops, to the well-phrased philosophical argument that there’s an essential link between property rights and liberty, have made us thoughtlessly accept some things we shouldn’t accept. Whether we think we can or can’t condemn Zimmerman because we think he’s a racist or lawless vigilante, I think we absolutely should condemn his and all of our attitudes that place the acquisition and protection of our stuff as more important that the lives and safety of our fellow human beings. Trayvon Martin was not, arguably, only a victim of racism and vigilantism: he may also be a victim of our love of stuff.