Monthly Archives: January 2001

The End of Peggy Kamuf?

Posted on by
Reply

Back in November I wrote about an article that appeared in Salon.Com about a paper, “The End of Reading,” presented by University of Southern California’s Peggy Kamuf at an academic conference. The article by Amy Halloran claimed that Kamuf described learning to read as a violent act that reinforces patriarchy. The article was picked up by a lot of conservative columnists who cited it as an example of how nutty academia has become.

For her part, Kamuf wrote letter to the editor of Salon.Com saying her views had been misrepresented. I bring this up because somebody sent me an e-mail message claiming my original article was “defaming” and providing a link to Kamuf’s paper (in my original article I complained that Halloran only paraphrased Kamuf rather than quoting from her paper verbatim).

Did Kamuf get a raw deal? After reading her paper I’m not sure what Kamuf is upset about. Here’s the quote I pulled from Halloran’s Salon.Com article last November,

She presented a paper (she read it aloud!) to a crowd of about 40 people, most of them academics, in which she insisted that teaching kids to read initiates them into the patriarchal construct of the family unit and society at large. This initiation is, according to her, a brutal and painful rite of passage. It is so painful, she added, that people don’t even recollect learning to read. The memory is repressed, said Kamuf, because the act is violent.

Well, here’s what Kamuf writes about learning to read,

It is not just as an abstract moment of definition that we must deal with this scientific and dominant model of reading. That model is also getting produced and reproduced in reading practices. The common notion of reading as information-extraction sets the principles, and thus institutes the laws and the institutions through which reading practices are maintained, that is, reintroduced, reproduced, and reinforced in each new generation of readers, as we like to think of them. And we do like our dearest common notion of reading to remind us of the whole family scene. Reading is also thereby getting produced and maintained as the site for the patriarchal, paternalistic family’s reproduction of itself. The practice gets passed down, most typically, in the voice of mothers, usually mothers, reading aloud to their children. There where this ancient practice of reading aloud survives, before the child’s invention of silent reading, it is the mother’s voice that has been made to echo with the letters taking shape on the page. I say “has been made to” because the scene is certainly not a natural one. It has also to be produced, reproduced, instituted. With the scene we are evoking of the child learning to read by listening to the mother’s voice, it is the institution of written signs themselves, and thus of all possible institutions that is being passed down. The institution of the family of man takes place in a scene of learning to read. But what we forget, what we have to forget or repress is that this is always also a violent scene inasmuch as it has to repeat, reinflict the violence that wrenches the human animal out of the state of sheer animality, where, as we are taught to believe once we can read, there is no such thing as reading in this common sense, the sense we all supposedly share, sharing thus the belief that only humans read or do what we call reading. Here one would begin to recognize another trait that all of these discourses attribute or contribute to our common sense of reading: that it is only human, that animals other than human animals do not read each other and do not read us, us other animals. Our common sense of reading, and the way we think we should read, the way we teach others to read, is thus also the site on which to reproduce this limit of the family of man, there where we feign to believe that other animals are not also others reading and reading us, no doubt for the most part to their great horror.

As is typical with academics, this is much more long winded and obscure than Halloran’s nice summary, but if anything the actual paper is even nuttier than Halloran’s biting paraphrase.

For example, look at what Kamuf writes about dyslexia. Dyslexia is a neurological disorder which makes it difficult for people to master written words and often other symbolic systems as well (such as musical or mathematical notation). Kamuf, however, complains that “so many powerful discourses” are obscuring psychoanalytic views of dyslexia forwarded by the likes of Paul de Man who, based on Kamuf’s footnote, viewed dyslexia as some sort of revolt by the unconscious against the violence of reading.

Kamuf’s paper ends with a plea for cognitive scientists to read literary theory, but her paper is an example of precisely why they ignore such pseudoscientific rantings.

Source:

The End of Reading. Peggy Kamuf, Paper delivered at the University at Albany, October 12, 2000.

Share

Cathy Young on Bush’s Ending Abortion Subsidies

Posted on by
Reply

The National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood and the other usual suspects were outraged when, after only two days in office, George W. Bush issued an executive order blocking federal funds from going to international family planning groups that perform abortions or provide abortion counseling. But is supporting government-funded abortion really a consistent pro-choice position.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Cathy Young argues that federal funding for abortion is wrong “both as a matter of principle and as a matter of strategy.”

As Young writes,

The most powerful pro-choice argument is that a woman’s decision about something so personal as whether or not to bear a child should be free from governmental interference. A fundamental belief in individual rights has led a majority of Americans, however uncomfortably, to support legal abortion, at least in the early stages of pregnancy. But asking the government to finance abortion is a very different matter.

In fact it is absurd for pro-choice activists on the one hand to argue that an abortion is essentially a decision that must be solely left to a woman and her doctor, but then drag the rest of us along into the doctor’s room by demanding we open our wallets to subsidize other people’s choices.

If a woman wants to have an abortion, I have no problem whatsoever with that, but I do have a problem when NOW and Planned Parenthood says I should be required to pay for abortions.

This sort of hypocrisy highlights one of the main problems at the core of big government feminism. On the one hand we are told that women are independent and capable of making their own decisions, thank you very much. In the next breath, of course, NOW and others inform us that women’s independence can only exist so long as women have access to a whole bevy of government programs.

Which is it — are women independent creatures or are they wards of the state?

Personally, I don’t think Bush went far enough. He should have forbidden all federal funding of abortion, period. That’s the only consistent pro-choice position.

Source:

Choice Yes, Subsidy No. Cathy Young, The Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2001.

Share

Why The World Will Never See an Anti-HIV Microbicide

Posted on by
Reply

If you believe Chicago Tribune columnist Donna Bozzo, you’ll never see an anti-HIV microbicide on the shelves of your local pharmacy because the drug companies simply don’t care about women’s health. A more likely explanation is that women wouldn’t use it and even if they did, the company foolish enough to market such a product would get taken to the cleaners in the form of product liability lawsuits.

Bozzo writes that currently the only way women can avoid AIDS is by asking their partners to usecondoms (Bozzo forgets to note that not sharing drug needles and abstaining from sex with partners whose HIV status is uncertain are also good prevention methods for members of either sex). Bozzo speculates that anti-HIV microbicides may be viable within a few years,

But research indicates it would be possible to develop topical products that could help protect women from STDs…

Researchers are working to develop gels, foams, creams, or films that women could apply intravaginally before having sex. In theory, a microbicide treatment would protect a woman from HIV and other STDs by creating a barrier against viruses, killing viruses or bacteria on contact, or preventing virus replication.

But will such a product ever see the light of day? Probably not, but Bozzo’s reasoning is suspect.

Quoting Amy Allina, program director for the National Women’s Health Network, Bozzo alleges that pharmaceutical companies think that there is simply no market for an intravaginal microbicide, but in fact, “advocates have done surveys, including one by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, indicating that 35 percent of women would use a microbicide to protect themselves from AIDS.”

The problem with this claim is that it runs straight into reality. Women might tell surveys and focus groups that they would gladly use a foam or cream intravaginally, but compliance rates for such regimens tend to be dismal. Women simply tend to find products inconvenient and/or difficult to use and tend not to buy them when alternatives (such as condoms in this case) are available and are more convenient.

Second, given the legal environment in the United States, any company that marketed an anti-HIV microbicide would be putting itself at enormous risk. Such a product would almost certainly come with warnings that it cannot guarantee 100 percent effectiveness and should be used in conjunction with condoms and other preventative measures, but none of that would stem lawsuits from the company by women and men who claimed the product failed to prevent their HIV infection. In fact a pharmaceutical company would probably not have to wait more than a few years to begin facing such lawsuits.

Once in court, the company would face a huge predicament. Squaring off against a sympathetic AIDS victim would be bad enough, but then in order to defend itself properly the company would have to pry into the intimate details of the AIDS suffer’s sex life which would certainly not earn it a lot of good publicity. In fact I can almost imagine the first such plaintiff’s feature story on 20/20 with Barbara Walters doing the voice over about how a greedy pharmaceutical company failed to protect a nice young woman against AIDS.

Given the poor history of intravaginal treatments as well as the enormous legal liability, it should come as no surprise that there is little interest among pharmaceutical companies to create such a medication. This has everything to do, however, with the legal environment and past history of such products in the United States rather than any bias against women’s health on the part of pharmaceutical companies, who would love nothing more than to find a blockbuster product to market to any segment of society.

Source:

Politics puts some drugs on the slow track. Donna Bozzo, The Chicago Tribune, January 24, 2001.

Share

Saudi Business Women Defy Restrictive Gender Laws

Posted on by
Reply

The BBC reports that large numbers of women are beginning to ignore Saudi Arabia’s strict prohibition against men and women working together.

Under Saudi Arabia’s Islamic laws, it is illegal to have mixed sex workplaces. Many business women, some having spent time abroad in the West, are ignoring the law in order to hire the most qualified worker regardless of sex. The BBC quoted one business woman saying, “I wasn’t brought up in a way or even used to a way in the United States where I would have to be constrained by choosing a female worker if I think a male is more qualified, or is more helpful to me.”

Under Islamic law, it is also frowned upon for women to interact with male customers. Women in Saudi Arabia are getting around that stricture by turning to the Internet where they don’t have to meet their customers face to face.

Women are still forbidden by law to drive cars and can’t leave the country without written permission from their husband or father, but their growing economic clout might force changes in those rules. Where once the number of businesses owned by women was negligible, today an estimated 10 percent of private business are run by women.

Source:

Saudi women defy business curbs. The BBC, January 21, 2001.

Share

Abortion Foes Are Winning

Posted on by
Reply

Being pro-abortion, I do not want to see the right of a woman to obtain an abortion disappear. It is clear, however, that this is what is slowly happening and the road map is clear — conservatives are finally embracing the paternalistic, Big Brother solutions of their liberal counterparts. A case in point is the nomination of Tommy Thompson to head Health and Human Services.

Thompson is anti-abortion and was asked what, if anything, he would do about RU-486, the so-called abortion pill. RU-486 suppresses a hormone required to continue a pregnancy in the early stages.

Rather than wax on about unborn children and abortion as potentially being a murderous act, Thompson had a ready made answer. He would review the drug to make sure it was “safe.” According to Thompson,

I do not intend to roll back anything unless they are proven to be unsafe. It’s a new drug. It’s contentious. It’s controversial. And the safety concerns, as I understand it, are something that’s in question. And I think it’s my role to review the safety concerns for women in the United States on that drug (and) all drugs.

This is a clever repackaging of traditional anti-abortion views. Having lost the debate over whether or not it is moral to ever abort a pregnancy, anti-abortion activists will emphasize safety and health concerns and gradually chip away at support for legalized abortion. The beauty is that liberals, who otherwise support abortion, have laid the groundwork for this assault on abortion rights.

Liberals have established a very amorphous standard of “safety,” for example, and proclaimed that the state has a moral duty to intervene to afford citizens such safety, even when they don’t want such protection. Conservatives are preparing to deftly turn the regulatory state against abortion rights, and when the dust is cleared they will probably succeed in establishing a good deal of onerous restrictions on the procedure.

Source:

Bush Cabinet Nominee Says to Review Abortion Pill. Adam Entous, Reuters, January 19, 2001

Share

Covenant Marriage and Pre-nuptial Agreements

Posted on by
Reply

A few years ago the idea of covenant marriage was all the rage, but some people are finding out the idea might not have been the panacea they hoped for.

In a covenant marriage there are strict, legally enforceable limits on the circumstances under which either partner can obtain a divorce. Convenant marriages are currently available only in a handful of states.

In Louisiana, for example, a covenant marriage can be dissolved only if a spouse is convicted of a felony or sentenced to prison or death; if a spouse is physically or sexually abusive; or if a spouse is habitually intemperate. That’s it. Couples wanting to get married under the covenant law are required to undergo pre-marriage counseling and go through a long counseling session before divorce even if one of the above conditions applies.

The idea was that making it more difficult for couples to divorce each other would ensure that people would be more likely to work hard to preserve a faltering marriage. An alternative view might be that a marriage so troubled that it requires such strong legal intervention might not be the most desirable marriage to begin with.

So far, though, no covenant marriage in Louisiana has ended in divorce, although there are some pending.

A University of Virginia study of 700 couples entering into covenant marriages found that for the most part it is the woman who tends to be the dominant partner, while in traditional marriages the man is the dominant partner. This fits nicely with speculation by those who pushed covenant marriage that women would use it to gain the protections that marriage had traditionally afforded prior to the rise of no fault divorce.

The biggest problem with covenant marriage, however, is that it only offers one option. Either couples enter a standard no fault marriage, or they enter an extremely Draconian covenant marriage. A better solution would be to allow couples to craft whatever agreement they want prior to marriage and give that the force of law.

Thanks to the Michael Douglas/Catherine Zeta-Jones marriage, pre-nuptial agreements are back in the news. The rumored pre-nuptial agreement between Douglas and Zeta-Jones is an excellent example of using contract law to solve difficult problems.

Douglas, who is much wealthier than his new wife, didn’t want to lose a good deal of his wealth in a divorce settlement if their marriage turned out to be a short one. Zeta-Jones, on the other hand, was apparently concerned about Douglas’ notorious womanizing and concerned about their daughter. According to rumors, the solution the couple arrived at was a clause in the pre-nuptial agreement giving her a small one time payment (well, small by Hollywood standards) in the event of a divorce. If, however, Zeta-Jones can prove that Douglas cheated, then the whole of his assets are exposed to a traditional divorce settlement.

Whereas the options of a standard or covenant marriage wouldn’t have satisfied either party’s concern, by explicitly contracting the terms of their marriage complete with penalties for early withdrawal, they’ve crafted a mutually agreeable way of addressing their respective concerns.

Unfortunately pre-nuptial agreements still tend to exist in a quasi-legal area in the United States, where it’s not always certain that such an agreement will be upheld by a court.

Australia recently amended its laws to explicitly give pre-nuptial agreements the force of law provided that some minimal requirements are met. Specifically, each party must obtain independent legal advice on the agreement before signing. As long as they meet the requirements, if the couple gets divorced they bypass traditional Family Court and instead the property settlement agreed to in the pre-nuptial agreement is enforced.

The United States would do well to follow suit and make it clear that pre-nuptial agreements can be enforced in this country provided they meet some minimal standards.

Sources:

No-cheating clauses in pre-nuptials. Bruce Butler, The Sunday Times (Australia), December 31, 2000.

‘God hates divorce’. Siobhan Roberts, National post, December 30, 2000.

Share

Camille Paglia on NOW’s “Flush Rush” Campaign

Posted on by
Reply

Like me, Camille Paglia is apparently still receiving letters from the National Organization for Women begging for money for their “Flush Rush!” campaign. After all of these years trying to get Limbaugh off the air waves without even a modicum of success, I would have thought NOW would have long ago moved on to something more productive, but alas such is not the case.

As Paglia recounts, the rhetoric in the NOW letters borders on hilarious.

NOW believes that Rush Limbaugh is truly a dangerous man. We need the help of every progressive person to expose the hateful, divisive fanaticism of Rush Limbaugh.

As opposed to the hateful, divisive fanaticism of an organization that rejected a resolution affirming the importance of fathers in children’s lives as being far too right wing.

As Paglia notes, whatever one thinks of Limbaugh, he is successful precisely because he has tapped a broad spirit of populism.

I don’t quite agree with her positive assessment of Limbaugh — “His daily radio show is the one reliable place ordinary citizens can turn to for a different perspective in the blizzard of propaganda and disinformation from the Northeastern media establishment” — but her description of NOW is on the money,

…a group that should be impartially devoted to the advancement of women is shamelessly whoring for the Democratic Party by trying to shut down alternative political points of view.

Source:

The peevish porcupine beats the shrill rooster. Camille Paglia, Salon.Com, December 6, 2000.

Share

Women Join German Combat Units

Posted on by
Reply

In January 2000, a female electronics specialist sued in the European Court of Justice claiming that the German armed forces’ policy of not allowing women to join combat units violated the European Union’s principle of sexual equality. She won and in July Germany changed its constitution to allow women in combat positions.

According to the BBC, 1,900 women have applied to join the German armed forces since the constitutional change. The first 244 women were accepted on January 2, 2001, most of whom joined the German army and air force.

Source:

Women join German fighting forces. The BBC, January 2, 2001.

Share

Penn State Feminist’s Show How Far Feminist Movement Has Fallen

Posted on by
Reply

Disclaimer: This article includes descriptions and quotations of events that occurred at Penn State that some readers might find offensive. Unfortunately events filled with shocking and/or offensive displays are considered cutting edge by radical feminists.

Pennsylvania State University became embroiled in controversy after a November 18th program sponsored by feminists at the university. The program, “CuntFest,” was paid for entirely by student and taxpayer funds.

Sponsored by Womyn’s Concerns and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, the program garnered $10,000 from Penn State’s University Park Allocation Committee (UPCA), which is responsible for disbursing student fees and general funds earmarked for promoting student activities on campus.

UPAC claimed afterward that it was deceived about the nature of the activities, but as Eric Langborgh of Accuracy in Academia noted, what exactly did UPAC think it was getting when the two groups submitted a description that said the event would “feature woman-centered, cuntlovin’ fun entertainment”?

The events of that evening would be unbelievable if there weren’t so many precedents — and if the feminists who sponsored them didn’t immediately defend them against “right wing” attack.

(Again, this description is going to get very graphic because what happened at Penn State was very graphic.)

Langborgh wrote a long description of the events that he witnessed,

Walking in the host building’s door, potential audience members and other students just going about their business were unwittingly confronted with a four-foot tall ceramic model of a vagina. Conference organizers would then offer what appeared to be fruit juice poured from a spout just underneath the “clitoris” to passersby by asking, “Would you like some ‘pussy juice’?”

The event’s title takes its name from Inga Muscio, who read from her book, “Cunt: A Declaration of Independence,” as well as a new book she is working on.

In a new novel she is writing, for example, Muscio portrays a women who is gang raped and then becomes a serial killer who victimizes six families killing all of the fathers and sons while leaving the women untouched, with the protagonist saying, “They should not have mated with the beast. I left them their daughters.”

That was nothing compared to performance “artist” Jess Dobkin. Dobkin performed partially nude and clearly aimed to shock and titillate her audience rather than enlighten. Here’s one of the less explicit scenes that Langborgh describes,

Innuendo then took a back seat to nudity when she removed her top to reveal her breasts which she had painted to look like smiley faces with her nipples acting as a noses. Coupled with audible gasps from the crowd, she proceeded to suck each breast; presumably to enable her to subsequently thread strings through her pierced nipples. These strings were then used to maneuver her breasts like puppets as she stood behind a prop made to look like a brick house with two holes cut out for her breasts so they could “talk” to one another.

Later Dobbin showed a film she made called Butt-F—ing Bunny which featured paper puppets engaging in various sexual acts including the one described in the title.

Crude? Lewd? According to its organizers, as well as some of the participants, this sort of stuff is empowering for women and anyone who questions it is part of a right-wing backlash against the women’s movement.

Muscio, in particular, pointed out the presence of AIA’s Langborgh saying,

Your school is under attack by this group. They want students to not have access to funding unless it is something Accuracy in Academia thinks is okay. Personally that’s scary, and to me that’s scary as a human being. For you all, and for other people going to school, I’m really scared. It scares me to think that people would prefer to silence someone rather than just let everybody be, you know?

That claim really captures just how much feminism has degenerated from its original goals of sexual equality to a radical faith that seems to be largely unprincipled.

Where once the cry was to end oppression by removing discriminatory barriers to entry in universities, today the campus feminists claim that they are oppressed and silenced unless the state agrees to pay for their four-foot tall replica of a vagina and their speaker who will have her breasts talk to one another.

Sources:

Feminists festival upsets student, state legislator. Daryl Lang and Erica Zarra, The Digital Collegian [Pennsylvania State University], December 7, 2000.

Penn State Feminists Stage X-Rated Event on Students’ Dime. Eric Langborgh, Accuracy In Academia, December 2000.

Unfair attention is given to recent event on campus. Jared S. Cram, Letter to the editor, The Digital Collegian [Pennsylvania State University], December 8, 2000.

That Festival. Jeffrey A. Budney, December 7, 2000.

‘Cuntfest’ Promotes Rights, Responsibilities. Erika Dunsen, December 2000.

Share