“If your first response is what about me, there is clearly something that you are missing.”

I just read a great post on Womanist Musings that I keep mulling over in my mind. It’s about how being an ally is not an easy job, and how despite our best intentions and deep commitment to progressive politics/activism, our thoughts, statements and actions can still be colored by the colonization of our minds by the patriarchal social order. The first step to activism is consciousness, yet it can still be difficult to monitor ourselves all the time especially when you have been socialized by patriarchy that there is a lot of internalized shit that we can’t always keep track of.

For instance, I have heard friends say “I’m so gonna rape him/her one day” when they talk about someone they are attracted to. Of course they don’t mean that they are going to force penetration of any bodily orifice of that individual. They’re just throwing the word “rape” around in a way that discounts its severity and bears witness to how pervasive rape culture is, that we can just joke about raping people without thinking about what rape entails. It’s difficult to point these out to people because they may think you are getting too hung up on one word or they may just be like “gosh, I obviously didn’t mean it, and you know it.” Abusing language like this and refusing to participate in dialogue about why it’s wrong to say things like that just reinforces rape culture and gives people a green light to not deal with the true implications of their speech.

A quote from the post:

When you grow in a racist, patriarchal, homophobic, classist, sexist culture your way of thinking becomes infused with ideas that are necessarily counter to freedom and basic human respect. Even the most conscious amongst us will continually revert to patterns of behavior, thought, or speech, that are counter to our stated beliefs.  Due to a constant desire to privilege our experience and our existence over another often we do not even recognize these lapses.

The last sentence really rings true to me and reminds me of people I know who are very open-minded, progressive and concerned about social justice issues who try to speak about oppression for oppressed people. How can you articulate exactly what oppression feels like for an unemployed black queer man, or a Japanese trans-woman, or a low-income, physically handicapped woman of color if you’ve never experienced it? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important for everyone to learn about the different forms of oppression and how they intersect, but you can’t be an advocate for a marginalized group if you’ve never quite experienced the oppression they’ve experienced. You can be an ally, but you can’t claim their oppression as your own if you’ve frankly never experienced it.

We can never fully understand the experiences and struggles of marginalized individuals if we ourselves have never been marginalized in the same way. The oppressed do not have many spaces where they can constructively and honestly engage in conversations about oppression with others who may be more privileged. Sometimes the experiences of the oppressed are not validated by the less oppressed unless they have statistics or academic research backing it up, which is ridiculous because what can be more validating than experiencing oppression every single day?

If you are gay or lesbian you’re an expert in heterosexist culture and how it marginalizes the various sexualities because for the entirety of your existence you have had to negotiate it to be able to survive.  If you are of colour you are an expert on white privilege and racism because for the entirety of you life you have been assaulted by it.  If you are differently abled you are an expert on abelism because for the entirety of your experience you have been denied access by others, or told to capitulate and remove yourself from any and all social actions.  The oppressed are experts because we live it every damn day of our lives.

It is insulting and infuriating to continually have to repeat the basics to others because they refuse to see beyond their experience to validate the life of another.  If your first response is what about me, there is clearly something that you are missing.  Not every conversation needs to focus on the socially dominate bodies. To demand that the few spaces that are dedicated to fighting oppression continually regurgitate 101 basics stunts conversations and amounts to the tyranny of the majority.  If you are a privileged body most of what you will see, read, and hear is already dedicated to you.  From mainstream media to every other agent of socialization the message is clear; unless you are necessarily white, cisgender, male, and heterosexual your life is inconsequential. (Bold emphasis mine.)

For me, the bold parts of the quote are right on point and are the answer to all the “Why isn’t there Men’s Studies if there is Women’s Studies?” or “Why isn’t there Heterosexual Studies if there is Queer Studies?” or “Why isn’t there White Studies if there are all these cultural studies?” questions I’ve heard over the years. It frustrates me because I’ve had wealthy, straight, white males ask me why there’s no space for them and I just want to scream UM, IT’S CALLED THE WORLD!

It is definitely legitimate to understand privilege (especially white, heterosexual, upper-middle / upper class male privilege since that is at the top of the patriarchal hierarchy) and how that enfranchises a small portion of the population while disenfranchising the others, but at the same time since mainstream society favors such a small fraction of society it’s necessary that the marginalized groups can carve out a space for themselves where their oppression is recognized and validated. When you’re up against a rigidly patriarchal society, you need these arenas and tools in order to educate and enact social change.

“Open Sexuality” and “Orgasmic Meditation”

If you search the New York Times “fashion and style” section, you are sure to find interesting information about women that has absolutely nothing to do with fashion or style. One such article, published yesterday, stood out to me as especially intriguing.  In San Francisco, Nicole Daedone has founded the One Taste Urban Retreat Center.  This live-in co-ed commune focuses explicitly of female sexual pleasure, separate from love and romance.  The center also offers classes for men and women focusing on relationships, communication, and spirituality.

“In our culture,” says Daedone, “women have been conditioned to have closed sexuality and open feelings, and men to have open sexuality and closed feelings. There’s this whole area of resistance and shame.”

In total, 38 men and women live full-time at the center.  They eat, meditate, and practice yoga together.  The core members also lead workshops for outside groups as large as 60 people.  The “morning practice” ritual is at the heart of the group’s activity, and is closed to all but the 38 core members.  In this ritual, the women lie half-clothed in a room, and clothed men kneel over them and stroke the women to orgasm.  The couples may or may not be romantically involved, and call each other “research partners.”  The residents call the ritual “orgasmic meditation.”  There is no eye contact during the meditation.

The goal of the commune is to help women to be more empowered and public with their sexuality.  Daedone focuses on both spirituality and sexuality, and the center also offers lectures by rabbis and Tibetan monks.

Detractors from One Taste call Daedone a cult-like leader and a master manipulator.  One of the commune’s ex-members warns: “You stop trusting yourself and start trusting Nicole.”  But others view Nicole Daedone as a sort of sexuality guru and an empowering force in their spiritual and sexual lives.  Daedone insists that she realizes the potential for the commune to become a cult, and is making every effort to keep her status humble.  She recently moved out of the living quarters because “Whenever I was in the space, everybody treated me like a guru,” she said. “I’d wake up and people would come sit on my bed.”

In my opinion, reclaiming female sexuality is great.  Teaching classes on female pleasure is a brave and admirable pursuit.  The premise of One Taste empowers women sexually.  I of course cannot speak to the validity of the claims that Daedone is manipulative or controlling, since I have no expertise on the organization.

Although I do not know much about the center’s practices besides what was in the Times article, I do worry that “orgasmic meditation” might be hetero-centric.  The “morning practice” focuses on female pleasure, but the Times article suggests that men are the ones pleasuring the women.  It seems like the center does in fact offer classes on masturbation and self-pleasuring, but what about lesbian pleasure?  I wonder how/if lesbians are incorporated into the community.

Here is an awesome link to the One Taste site, where you can learn more about what the New York and San Francisco centers have to offer.

What are your opinions on One Taste and the reclaiming of female pleasure?  Is a commune focused on female pleasure a good idea, or is the separatist nature of the live-in commune missing the point?  Should we instead focus more on incorporating more emphasis on female pleasure into our relationships on an everyday personal level?  Is One Taste focusing on female pleasure to the exclusion of male pleasure?  Or are the classes that One Taste offers informative and beneficial to all people regardless of sexual orientation, gender, or relationship status?

Saturday Stupidity

Sometimes when you hang around many progressive and like-minded people on a really liberal campus, you forget that there are still many ignorant people who make very ignorant comments that shock you and make you wonder: 1. Wow! Am I really hearing this, here at Tufts? and 2. How the heck did you get into Tufts spewing this kind of nonsense? Instead of just texting or emailing each other what idiotic things we’ve heard, we decided to share it with the larger community and blog about them. Brace yourself for our first post of Saturday Stupidity.

- During lunch at the dining hall one day, one male was talking about slavery and asked, “How dumb must black people have been back then to just let white people buy them and bring them to America as slaves? Like, why would you let yourself be bought, leave your home country and just hop on a ship and go to America to be a slave? They should’ve fought back or done something.”

Um, the definition of a slave is one who is bound in servitude as the property of a person or a household, one who is completely subservient to a dominating influence. No one voluntarily decides to let themselves be bought, leave their home countries, just hop on a ship and go to America be a slave.

-”I wish I were a lesbian. I hate guys.” Or “I wish I were a gay man”

I have heard this a lot, and it really bothers me because this statement completely ignores that LGBT people are discriminated against, stigmatized, and stereotyped constantly in our culture. People who say this usually think of the highly aestheticized aspects of gay and lesbian life that you see on television – the beautiful lesbians in The L Word, the highly commercial, consumer lifestyles of Stanford on Sex and the City, etc. Needless to say these are not accurate representations of the diversity in the LGBT community and is not representative of all LGBT lifestyles.

- I was told (by a male) that date rape or acquaintance rape in Africa does not happen that frequently because in Africa there are no clubs where women can go out, wear miniskirts and low cut tops, get drunk and potentially get sexually assaulted or raped later on by someone she meets at the club or friends she goes to the club with.

Right, because in Africa there are no clubs. Just deserts, huts and giraffes. Oh and Africa is exempt from the fact that most sexual assault/rape survivors are assaulted by people they know because you know, it’s Africa.

And here is the number one stupid pick-up line that I get when I say that I am a Women’s Studies major.

- “I study women too…In my spare time.”

So, just so you know, I’ve heard it like 15 gazillion times and it really isn’t funny or clever anymore.

- “You just haven’t found the right man yet” or “We need to find you a man.”

Not only are these statements completely insulting and ignorant but they are also incredibly heteronormative. They also imply that there is something wrong with you if you are a single woman. Or once you find Mr. Right all of your problems will be solved and you will have nothing left to be upset or angry about. So not the answer I’m looking for.