Jean Garnett: The Trouble With Wanting Men; Or: Whatever Happened to Political Lesbianism?

Well, there's this.

    It's easy to make fun of such stuff. Whether there's any insight to be had from it, I don't know.

    One thing the essay illustrates pretty well is the overlap between middlebrow NYT-op-ed-level thinking (or at least writing) and thinking (or at least writing) in the weaker regions of academia. For one thing, they love coining new words, all with basically the same quasi-scholarly ring to them: 'heteropessimism,' 'heterofatalism,' 'hermeneutic labor,' 

Domestic pessimism (they still do less of the housework and child care); partner-violence pessimism (femicide is still gruesomely routine); erotic pessimism (the clitoris and its properties still elude many of them). And the petulantly proud masculinist subcultures that have arisen, at least in part, as reactions to these pessimisms keep coughing up new reasons to fear, rage against and complain about “men.”

References to "writer and gender scholar" x, "sexuality scholar" y and philosopher z pepper the essay. And, in fact, in amidst all that is a paragraph that illustrates on sad, dead-end trail branching off from the main trunk of bullshit studies that's been all the rage of late in academia: turning personal gripes into areas of "scholarship":

Is “heterofatalism” a useful concept? I took it up for a while, considered the positions. The writer and gender scholar Sara Ahmed has advanced the idea of “complaint as feminist pedagogy,” arguing that to bitch is inherently transgressive, a form of resistance, while the philosophy professor Ellie Anderson suggests that women venting their dating woes constitutes a kind of negativity as rebellion. Was that what my friends and I were doing over dinner? Rebelling?

Bitching as a political act of rebellion...perfect. There's a slice of the academic-middlebrow-media worldview for ya.

   Back in the day, there was a movement called political lesbianism: the view that women ought all to be lesbians for purely political reasons, regardless of anything about their innate sexual desire. One motive for this view was to prop up societism/blank-slatism: even sexual desire isn't natural, but merely culturally determined/inculcated. Another motive, of course, was to strike a blow against men, the hated oppressors. Never mentioned, of course, was that lesbian feminists wanted a bigger dating pool... (A similar motive lurks just barely beneath the surface of transanity...) But the stated motive was: women should just separate themselves from men. Why? Because men basically exist to rape and murder women, and women's only hope of avoiding these things was separatism.

   I never hear anything about lesbian separatism anymore...the new tactic is to keep pursuing men...but to complain about them all the time.

   I wonder whether maybe lefty women should take another look at separatism...it might be less irritating for all concerned...