Knocking Debbie

I know that Marshall McLuhan has been saying for years that the printed word is a totally fucked form of communication, but it took Debbie Jone's article in last week's Salient to finally prove that point. Since some of it referred directly to me I'd like to clean up some areas of difference.

1) I thought I'd said in the last bit of my article that because I had personal doubts about much of the women's movement I wouldn't put in print any final suggestions. According to Debbie Jones though I am the "type" (?1) of "radical man who insists that he agrees with women's liberation but spends a lot of time trying to give us good advice". About the only thing she got right there is that I am a male. I'm not a type, I'm not a radical, I don't insist on agreeing with anyone, certainly not women's liberation and I can't remember any advice I gave that was much good to anyone.

It seems to me Debbie Jones is dipping into those categories that as an upfront emotional person she claims to reject. I write for Salient she thinks; therefore I must be a radical. My article was not 100% antagonistic to women; therefore I must be patronising them, or (paranoia, paranoia) making a superficial identification only to I can shape it to that page break "theoretical framework" I'm supposed to have. Let's liberate ourselves from these categories, huh Debbie? I'm an individual. You're an individual. But nah, I don't want to ball you.

2) Debbie (I hope you don't mind me calling you Debbie) says my article "arose in part from a compulsion to fit feminism into a theoretical framework". Now I don't want to make anyone suspect their "gut level identification!" but I thought my article was a protest against the damage that rigid theorising does to reality. I wanted particularly to complain about the way people, especially dead ones, get the reality of their lives twitted to fit the theories and needs of other people. That's one reason why I'm not a radical, even though I confess to knowing Roger Steele.

3) It's good to hear from Debbie that there is no card carrying women's movement, no elite leadership, nor even "primarily any ideological or tactical analysis" beyond "learning to trust and act on our feelings". Sort of like "in your heart you know you're right", as Barry Goldwater used to say.

But I get confused. Because while Debbie says at one point that "women have no common culture and few adequate models" at another place she says that women's revolutionary spirit derives from "a shared consciousness of pain and oppression". And in one small article she can cite, with approval, four females as models of one kind or another. Similarly, after telling us how the women's movement is a product of "extremely distorted" male views she begins the next paragraph with "now, about our beautiful Janis". Who's "us"? Not that illusory women's movement I hope, actually I didn't realise anyone had taken out ownership papers on Janis.

But the really interesting part of Debbie's article comes when she gives an example of how a truly liberated woman conducts a sexual relationship. Its Janis again; she was playing at a concert with this guy and dug him, so she told him she wanted to ball him. In Debbie's scornful words "he fled". Seems he just couldn't handle "a woman who doesn't play games".

If you want to see how wierd this reasoning is just reverse the sexes. You'll get the typical Saturday night party scene, guy moving in on chick, she refuses, he assumes she must be frigid. According to Debbie Jones this is the model we should look to with approval.

So how can any male avoid being at least patronising and at worst downright antagonistic to feminist rhetoric? White males have been on the other end of two little consciousness raising scenes in the last year or so. Playing Mister Charley to the blacks and Pig Oink to the feminists. It didn't matter too much that these groups were trading in stereotypes, creating non existent enemies and so on, because the point of the rhetoric was internal, not external; to raise the morale of the troops. The hope was that blacks and women would one day be secure enough to see white males as something other than enemies, patronising conmen and take-over artists. But that stage never really arrived. The blacks have collapsed into phallic fantasies and revolutionary posturing, and I don't really see much point in going through the same crap with the feminists.

Finally, if as Debbie says "women face a conflict between the desire to be loved and protected and the desire to be free" then that's for the individual to sort out. You can't have independence and Prince Charming as well. But this desire for maximum experience and minimal responsibility (if I can avoid sounding Muggeridge) crops up again and again. It seems so easy to confuse the problems of being a woman with the problems of being alive, period. Society doesn't have an obligation to resolve the loneliness of the individual. That kind of pathetic "love me, I'm just doing my thing" is what finally messed up the hip movement. And as Midge Dector says (New York Times Magazine Sept. 1973) it was also the story of Janis Joplin.

Gordon Campbell