Cutting the Best Deal You Can

There's always so much to think about, especially when it means avoiding cleaning those things that sit under the burners on the stove. I've been thinking about Liz Phair, all y'all, and cooters*. The Professor and I had lunch down at Murphy's Loft and I had their delicious chicken salad wrap. (Now that I've said I like it, they will probably discontinue it, as they did with their other chicken wrap with the rice which I loved so much.) And we were talking about third-wave feminism--the feminism that loves to fuck--and its failings. And I was telling the Professor about this awesome article I read about Phair over at PopMatters, which links Phair's career ups and downs to the ups and downs of third wave feminism. The most important part** of the article comes in the last paragraph where Berg says

Is Liz Phair a female chauvinist pig? When Levy writes about young women being female chauvinist pigs, she's not necessarily pointing the finger at them for pro-sex-industry feminism gone awry. She is simply not taking their word that stripping is beneficial for women just because it's marketed as being feminist. When Phair sings in the new song "Table For One" that "I want to bring down all those people who drank with me / Watching happily my humiliation," I hear the women interviewed in Levy's book question the binge fucking that hasn't made them happy but don't know who to blame for feeling degraded. I hear myself at the strip clubs I used to visit, joining with men in humiliating other women on sexual display, happy to not be the target of such judgments for a short while. I believe that Phair, like many women, cut the best deal with patriarchy a talented, attractive woman can make, and she shouldn't be cast off as a sexed-up sellout any more than other women forced to navigate the choppy, pornified currents of our time.

There are two separate, but closely related important points in this paragraph. One is that going to strip clubs and watching pornography is always a loaded proposition for feminists. Yes, on the one hand, we are sexual beings and have a right to express our sexualities freely. But on the other hand, wow, is this complex. Think of the feminist women watching strippers, because we've decided now that stripping is empowering for women. I'll admit up front that I don't think being a whore is bad. I think trading yourself for material goods is fucked up and an indication that you might need therapy, but I don't think there's anything morally wrong with it as a life strategy. I think it becomes a problem only if that's one of two modes of being available to you--which, unfortunately, is still very much the case in many ways. And, since the Madonna/whore paradigm is still in place, going to watch strippers is superficially subversive. You aren't a "good" girl, because good girls don't hang at strip clubs. But you aren't a "bad" girl because the bad girls are up there on the stage. But it's not like you're showing solidarity with those women, if what Berg says is true (and, obviously, I suspect it is), that part of the thrill of going to the strip club is to join "with men in humiliating other women on sexual display, happy to not be the target of such judgments for a short while." I suspect that one might rightly critique third-wave feminists for not doing enough to realize the ways in which their brand of sex-positivity still trades on what men have designated as fulfilling sexual behavior. In other words, both the dancer and the female observer have cut the best deals they can with the patriarchy. And cutting deals with the patriarchy is some shallow kind of feminism. Our favorite old man is all the time offering me sage and paternalistic advice about how to land a man, the gist of which seems to be that one should play coy and not directly state one's feelings or desires. Frankly, this continually baffles me, as I wonder just how one is supposed to get what she wants if she doesn't articulate it. I'm left with two guesses. One is that maybe one is not supposed to actually desire anything, but to prop herself up like some blank beautiful canvas onto which someone might project all his desires, so that it's really just a matter of men searching around for the canvas most likely to yield the most aesthetic object as a result of his attentions. The other seems to me to be worse, that one should view getting men into relationships as trapping them and so one should pretend to be something she isn't long enough to fool a man into choosing her, and then, once she's hooked him, she can spring her real self on him. Both alternatives seem to me to hinge on the idea that no man would actually like the real me. Now, obviously, Sarcastro is my friend and he likes me well enough and he knows the real me, so I don't think that's actually what he's saying. But it reminds me of the problems of third-wave feminism, this idea that there's this game that men and women play with each other (let's call the game Patriarchy) and that most people aren't even aware that they're playing it, which--it seems third-wave feminists are saying--is fine because, as the failings of second-wave feminism have shown us, there's no real way to escape from the game and it's useless to try. Instead, the only really powerful thing we can do as feminists is to be aware that we are playing the game and to play our parts knowingly. Maybe it just goes to show that I'm some kind of old-fogey feminist, but I find that to be a pretty shitty conclusion to come to. *Kleinheider, I can sense you rolling your eyes, even now. In celebration of once again talking about cooters, I will tell you that my favorite euphemism for one's cooter is "jelly roll." Old fashioned and yet so oral-sex-friendly that it never loses its ability to delight. ** I'll just warn you up-front that Berg doesn't get "Johnny Feelgood," which, as far as I can tell, means she's not quite self-aware enough for her own good.