SANDRA LEE BARTKY
PITFALLS AND POLITICS OF “WORLD-TRAVELING”
A Comment on Linda LeMoncheck’s Loose Women, Lecherous Men: A Feminist Philosophy of Sex (Accepted 31 July 1997)
Linda LeMoncheck has written a wise, compassionate and brave feminist philosophy of sexuality (Brave? Anyone who will undertake a guarded defense of promiscuity in this political climate is certainly brave!) LeMoncheck attempts to get beyond the current and prolonged stalemate in feminist theory around issues of sexuality – what Ann Ferguson (and others) have called “the feminist sex wars”.1 “Conceived as a fluid, variable, and often unstable relationship between her sexual oppression and her liberation, a woman’s sexuality may be both oppressive and liberating over the course of her life, often simultaneously so.”2 LeMoncheck proposes that we abandon the idea that a detached and objective perspective, i.e., “a view from nowhere”, can illuminate the reality of such a life. What she proposes instead is an empathic understanding of the life of the Other, a certain going out from my world, a provisional suspension of certain conceptual and normative dimensions of my world and a traveling to her world – the idea of “world-traveling” comes, of course, from Maria Lugones’ classic paper on this topic.3 My own point of departure, then, has no particular privilege; it is just “the view from somewhere different”. This meeting of worlds will produce in Loose Women, Lecherous Men a dialectical interchange between quite different points of view, and a nuanced and complex understanding of the instabilities, ambiguities and contradictions of female sexual experience; this method yields a series of extraordinarily fruitful discussions of such difficult topics as sexual violence, consensual sadomasochism, prostitution and pornography. In the remarks that follow, I want to explore the pleasures, pitfalls and politics of “world-traveling”.
Philosophical Studies 89: 387–393, 1998. c 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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A question: to whose world ought we to travel? Successful world-traveling involves some considerable investment of time and attention, some, perhaps a good deal of background reading, a willingness to reveal myself, just as I hope the Other will reveal herself, a temporary suspension of my judgment regarding the Other’s motives or behaviors and certainly, the cultivation in ourselves of what Max Scheler called “feeling-with” (Mitgef¨uhl), what some call “empathy”. So who ought to be our empathic partners? This decision, I venture, within the context of feminist theory, is always political. LeMoncheck’s decision to travel to the worlds of the prostitute, the “loose” woman, the sado-masochist and the pornographic film actress is premissed on a rejection of much that feminists have written about these women and their lives and a willingness to let them tell their own stories in their own words. But there are many such stories. Whose stories are the stories that genuinely open up a world? Clearly, LeMoncheck has rejected the version of the world of porn stars that one encounters in the writings of Dworkin and MacKinnon; she has also determined that the voices of actresses that echo in these writings – the voice, for example of Linda Marchiano, the “Linda Lovelace” of Deep Throat who describes the making of this film as, for her, a prolonged nightmare of terror and torture – are untypical. The decision to whom to lend one’s ear is political; the decision which informants to believe is also political. I think that this is unavoidable. How can one travel without luggage? Differently put, the choice of what to take along already colors somewhat – even before we arrive – aspects of the world to which we are traveling. Furthermore, the decision whom to accept as an informant is based, I think, on another prior decision, namely, the decision to stand in solidarity with those who inhabit the informant’s world, in this case, with prostitutes in their (suitably reformed) prostitution and porn stars in their porn. So LeMoncheck’s methodology does not deliver itself innocently of “dialectical” (I would say “dialogic”) solutions; the methodology, to some extent, is employed in the service of decisions – political decisions – made prior to its employment. I think that LeMoncheck makes this point in somewhat different language; it seems important enough to restate. Anyhow, I think that feminists should stand in solidarity with sex workers, as we should with other
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women workers. The failure of the U.S. women’s movement to develop an adequate and compassionate political practice to address the oppression and super-exploitation of prostitutes is, to my mind, a disgrace. Another question. What if she (the Other) doesn’t want me in her world? Or what if my efforts to enter it are met with abuse? This question has particular relevance for me. First, I’m a native Chicagoan, living and working in Chicago. Chicago is the current political home of black separatism of the sort developed by the Nation of Islam. It is not uncommon to enter a taxi and hear Minister Farrakhan instructing your driver. Of course, separatism takes many forms: the black and white students on my campus have instituted virtually a total self-segregation, almost as if it had legal force. Second, it has been difficult to make friends with African-American female faculty members as well. This is, in part, the legacy of an historically cultural nationalist Black Studies Program (this is changing now) that wanted little to do with Women’s Studies, indeed, that saw Women’s Studies as little more than a competitor for scarce funding. The poisonous racial atmosphere in this city, indeed, in this country, makes world-traveling to African-Americans very difficult for a white person. I know of no city-wide multiracial organization in which I could play a meaningful role. I was part of a city-wide multi-racial and cross-class feminist organization that, after a number of promising beginning years, collapsed for a number of complex reasons. In the absence of friendship, joint political work and what Vicki Spelman calls “apprenticeship”, we read.4 We read imaginative writing and theoretical writing. But how do we know that what we are reading is world-disclosive? There are after all, many worlds in this world; the problem of who is to be the representative informant surfaces again. I was told that working-class African-American women tended to side with Clarence Thomas against Anita Hill; many of these women, whose men are dead or in prison, thought that she was crazy to resist the advances of such an attractive man – and they resented what they saw both as a campaign to deny a Black man a very good job and an unseemly washing of the community’s dirty linen in public. African-American professional women, on the other hand, sided with Anita Hill and believed her. The entirely African-
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American clerical staff in our Philosophy Department (one of whom virtually runs the program) and in Women’s Studies believes that O.J. was framed, as did his jury. Their world is as riven with internal contradictions as is the white world: what to do? Some African-American feminist theorists speak calmly but eloquently and most perceptively about racism (but should this be my judgment to make?) I’m thinking now of such writers as Angela Davis, Patricia Williams and Deborah King; there are, of course, a host of others. But some, perhaps the most widely read, scold us over and over; here I am thinking of bell hooks. I am thinking too of racial convulsions within the National Women’s Studies Association. White guilt encourages those of us who are white to accept only the most damning denunciations of our theory, “white feminism”, and our allegedly racist political practise. Might it be the case that these scoldings, when prolonged, are a form of self-indulgence for the scolder, not so much a constructive critique as an acting out of rage in an entirely safe venue? A great rage is of course a part of the world to which I’m trying to gain entry; it is difficult to know how to disentangle it and to see how it is related to other kinds of discourse, e.g., cultural and political critique. I do not think that we should accept uncritically the idea that the most denunciatory things that can be said about white feminists and their writings are necessarily the most accurate and reliable. The great evil that is racism does not automatically bestow epistemic authority on behalf of every woman of color, who speaks out against it. I take heart from LeMoncheck’s propensity to take unpopular stands and I now venture to ask an unpopular question. The oppressed: have they no reason to travel to my world, i.e., the world of the white middle-class feminist? Of course, women of color inhabit the world of the mainstream as well as worlds of their own, but how much of the psychology of their potential coalition partners do separatist or non-separatist women of color understand? The collective sense of guilt of white women who are feminists is so great that we can be gotten to do almost anything to shed “our shameful livery of white incomprehension”.5 I have seen counterproductive manipulations of this guilt, but surely, there are intersubjective processes that can lead to progressive results as well. Our guilt and anguish can be harnassed politically by someone smart
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enough to figure out how to do it. I have attended conferences at which whole roomfuls of largely white feminists were spoken to as if we were members of the Ku Klux Klan by young women of color who were in diapers when some white women in the audience were risking life and limb on picket lines in the Civil Rights Movement. It is not productive to charge us over and over again with racism without starting a dialogue about how in this situation, yes, this situation here and now, we ought to behave, what we are to start thinking or stop thinking, what we ought to start saying or stop saying, what strategies we ought to adopt and how we ought to implement them. A final question: LeMoncheck claims that one of the ways that women can actively undermine the sexist attitudes that reinforce the sexual intimidation of women is to encourage men to do the “worldtraveling” required by what LeMoncheck calls “care-respect”.6 This will not be easy nor can it succeed, she says, unless we change the cultural and economic institutions that both create and reinforce sexual oppression. Now it seems to me that we women ought to travel to the worlds of men as well. Many of us who have paying jobs are already in the world of men, but this is not what I have in mind. While they were problematical in some ways, the tours that were organized by feminists of the Times Square porn district in New York were highly illuminating. Few women had ever set foot in these kinds of districts before. I remember thinking a shocking thought: how likely was it that my brother, who had spent four years in the Navy (my darling baby brother whom I still see in his lovely pink and white babyhood) had not hung out here with his Navy buddies, not just in Times Square, but in St. Pauli in Hamburg, the Barrio Chino in Barcelona, the brothels of Thailand? Since some of their world is closed to us – the fraternity house (most of the time), the locker room, the barracks, we need male informants from the dominant male culture to tell us what men say about us and how they say it, the names they call us, the secrets they share. And we need to develop strategies for getting men to contest the sexism of other men in these sites. Traveling to the world of men can be particularly enlightening if we engage in their world in what men do typically and what women so rarely do. An example of such a trip, two trips, actually,
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was narrated to me by my friend P. P, a heterosexual woman, was divorced for a number of years before she settled in once more with a partner. During this time, she had several affairs, most formally initiated, as is usual, by men. But two of these affairs were initiated by P. herself. The second seduction took place two years after the first and it was planned, step by step, as in a military campaign or a Victorian melodrama. Both men were considerably younger than P.; both had been her students some years before. She had reason to believe that both were attracted to her, but she knew she might be wrong. Because of differences in status and the awe that we often feel toward our former teachers, P. doubted that either of these young men would make the first move. So she propositioned them. Sound easy? It wasn’t. P’s heart pounded so hard she thought it might be audible through the wall of her chest. Her mouth was dry: the words she needed came out slowly, with difficulty. Her palms were sweating. Reflecting on this later, P. realized that what she had felt was panic – or dread. But dread of what? Clearly, dread at the possibility of sexual rejection, rejection of herself as a sexed body. But this gave her pause. Her somewhat radical ideas, as much a part of herself as her body, surely she offered regularly to her students and these ideas were, by most of them, just as regularly rejected. The one rejection was no more than an occupational hazard; why such panic at the prospect of the other? She had been involved in many role reversals, for example, in picking up the check after taking a new junior male colleague to dinner. In those situations she sometimes felt awkward, but not panic-stricken. So what was going on here? Whatever the answer, P. felt that she had learned something important about the male condition. She now had an insight into male braggadocio, male objectification and disparagement of women, of the deliberately offensive invitation, “Hey baby, wanna fuck?” of the cruder of their sex. These sorts of behaviors, complexly overdetermined of course, were, whatever else they were, defensive, the self-protection of a self who has exposed a significant vulnerability. It is critical, I think, for women to try to understand from the inside out, the price extracted from men by the imposition of masculinity. Men, too, suffer. But there is some risk in this for us. Is to know all to forgive all? How do we travel to the world of the masculine
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Other, a journey that will require arduous feats of empathy, without losing hold of the righteous and purifying anger that drives us and our movement forward? NOTES 1
Ann Ferguson, Ilene Philipson, Irene Diamond, Lee Quinby, Carole Tavris, Ann Barr Snitow, Autumn 1984: “Forum: the Feminist Sexuality Debates”, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 10, pp. 105–135. 2 Linda LeMoncheck, Loose Women, Lecherous Men: A Feminist Philosophy of Sex (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3 Maria Lugones, “Playffulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception”, in Women, Knowledge and Reality, Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., second edition (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 419–433. 4 Spelman, Elizabeth, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). 5 Husseen Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), p. 135. 6 LeMoncheck: Loose Women, Lecherous Men, pp. 210–215.
Department of Philosophy University of Illinois Chicago, IL 60607-7114 U.S.A.
