(The discussion we're having here
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... reminded me of an e-mail I sent a friend at Feral Scholar a few years back, in response to some rather Jungian articles about the "fun" of Peak Oil. I'm sure Mr. Bliss is a very nice man and I have enormous respect for Carolyn Baker, but I heartily disagreed with their comments regarding these issues.)
"When the masculine and the feminine work well together, they can get more accomplished then when they are apart, separate, and isolated from each other, or competitive and hostile to each other. Plus that, it can be more fun, especially if we are facing what James Howard Kunstler describes in his book as “The Long Emergency.”" (Shepherd Bliss)
Bliss and other Peak Oil writers, however unwittingly, have danced around or completely ignored the pervasiveness of male sexual violence and dominance in everyday life, as if it will miraculously disappear in some global conversion experience. Here's what worries me, in no coherent order. . . .
In the West at least, several 20th century technologies preceded consciousness-raising in reducing the work traditionally demanded of women, and greatly improved women's reproductive health and freedom. What technologies can be sustained post-peak? Will we revert to traditional divisions of labor that increasingly push women back into the domestic sphere? Communications technologies, for example, have been critical in the battered women's movement. Transportation has helped women escape abusive homes and enables them to travel distances independent of male supervision without exposing their bodies to sexual predators (and this is quite serious--as any woman who's simply walked on the side of the road will tell you, and I believe this is worse for minority women. This, in the "non-combat" zones of North Carolina, although we all know that most rapes still occur in the home.)
I'm just not very hopeful about sustaining women's freedom and safety, which comparatively speaking, at least in some pockets in the West, are still greater than they have ever been, for all the suffering male dominance still inflicts . Historically, all "frontiers" have meant open season on women, and the tradeoff has almost ALWAYS been the protection racket of a community where women's sexual, reproductive, social, and intellectual behaviors are policed. Over time cultural narratives incorporate these power structures and mystify their origins. Mothers become some of the primary agents in the policing to ensure their daughters remain "protected" (meaning owned by one man). Maybe I'm just describing contemporary Afghanistan, but I just don't have a lot of faith in the ability of the collective class of humans with penises (however courageous their individual exceptions) to give up sexual access to females on-demand, or to relinquish the deference and domestic labor that becomes more required of women as their communities polarize into the protectors/hunters and the keepers of the hearth.
All this talk about "the feminine principle" in new communities just underscores my point--that among those who survive a throwback to 17th century (pre-industrial) technologies while living in unprecedented global climate crises, the drift into historically traditional roles will be irresistible. And we already see this with the contemporary glorification of women as having some deeper connection with the Earth because we can become pregnant, nurse, and menstruate. How insulting to men. And Bliss equates the feminine with "emotions," as if learning to read the massuh early on doesn't beef up one's intuitive skills considerably. (I believe African Americans have been called "closer to the earth" as well.) Leadership by women is one thing--I'm all for it--but I'm not interested in this supposed yen/yang nirvana these authors keep offering up. The tone of the Bliss article makes me wonder if he has any conception of what it's like to live in fear of contemporary sexual control and violence, let alone the terrifying scenarios of the post-carbon age. Does "more fun" mean getting laid? Carolyn Baker seems to think that women will get to choose between "abstinence" and new forms of sexuality. Hell, most women can't meaningfully make that choice under pre-peak conditions. Are the majority of gun-toting males, in or out of "intentional communities," suddenly going to explore their sensual sides? Especially when the literal patriarchal authority they feel they have lost over the past 50 years is suddenly within reach again?
I don't see post-peak as an opportunity for men to get in touch with their "feminine sides." We can't figure out, with all the luxuries of the early 21st century, how to drive a wedge into the generational reproduction of boys' defensive reactions to differentiation from their mothers in early childhood--and then how to grow those boys into a system without a pre-existing class of males policing each other to maintain sexual and political dominance over females. Why do we think it's going to be easier when somebody's got to sew the clothes and catch the rain and make the soap and cook all goddamn day and can the extra tomatoes and have a fourth baby in so many years cause your mate just wants to have "more fun" but there's no birth control, while nursing a sick child and chasing the others around and knowing that you might die in labor? And that's a slow day. One under 90 degrees. Without hurricanes.
Institutionalizing our strides in women's rights into emerging, post-peak conscious communities makes a lot of sense, but I'd like to see it emanate, as Stan (Goff) has suggested, from the realities of our lives today. Why all of these Goddess and ecofeminist utopias never resonate with me is that they seek a connection with a power greater than ourselves out there in the future, rather than beginning with fully inhabiting and accepting the reality of the present, the only place that IMO such a source can exist. Yes, I get that those very male ego boundaries, out to continuously prove their rigidity--that very male dominance--has driven much of what is decimating the planet. But positing this false binary, in which the coping strategies of the oppressed, and their caricatures by their oppressors, become congealed into the "eternal feminine," perpetuates this system in the name of overturning it.
I always have a frozen smile on my face when the conversation turns to this "new paradigm" crap. When there's no semblance of police, how do I keep my daughters from being raped? Will my comparatively smaller frame keep me fully dependent on a male protector, and what independence must I relinquish thereby? Will my community support me if I need to leave a battering partner, or subtly push me back in because they need his labor and want to minimize conflict? How do I, or children, get away from abuse without safe transportation? How do I keep my women friends from dying in childbirth? How do I keep my children from dying of any number of previously preventable diseases? Will my lesbian friends have to go back into the closet, or give up their lifestyle entirely, in a highly connected community that might revert to more traditional principles of male dominance? As these issues are worked through, new paradigms will come. Constant elaboration of the "new paradigm" is like the team that substitutes endless strategic planning meetings for action. Dreaming up utopias by fusing false archetypal binaries isn't going to get me there any sooner, and waxing eloquent about the "eternal feminine" may even hasten a reversion to traditional divisions of labor.
LT
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