A Dyke A Broad #43 The Olympics Edition
Plus thoughts on the always decontextualized Monique Wittig.
Hello from Paris!
I’ve been futzing around for days, distracting myself from finishing a couple of projects first by watching the Tour de France every afternoon for weeks, then by watching the Olympics and thinking about bodies, female bodies, male bodies, but also the bodies of athletes like bicyclists who have shaped themselves to serve their sport.
Obviously, basketball or soccer players are also fit, but almost as important is how they infuse their game with constant bursts of creativity, whimsy, and cunning. Cyclists, meanwhile, become almost machines— legs churning, churning, churning for hours, for days, for weeks. They are nothing but motion, and endurance, and pain, too, especially in the final kilometers when they sprint to the end and practically fall to the ground, their massive calves and muscly thighs reduced to mush.
I’m not sure why it fascinates me. Watching bike races. Thinking of the training that goes into them. I might be trying to understand endurance, and forward motion. I get mentally caught in every eddy, am easily thrown off track. I moan and complain and beat my head against the nearest wall. They just—continue—legs churning away systematically, calculating the most efficient line on winding roads.
Of course, one difference is that they know what they’re up against: the other racers, the road, their own bodies, the bikes which are an extension of them, the rules which govern them all.
Being a dyke, trying to create space for myself, for others, is a lawless proposition unless we’re talking sod’s law or Murphy’s. Or my grandmother’s even, in which “No good deed goes unpunished.” In activism, the only rule is that perfectly useful observations will gradually or rapidly float free of their contexts, and entirely change meaning. Like most of what the French feminist Monique Wittig wrote. Including her more or less metaphorical statement, “Lesbians are not women.” A line from a 1978 speech given to the Modern Language Association’s annual conference.
This is increasingly embraced as literal by members of an LGBTQ+ movement riddled with gender theory and its belief in the performativity of everything, who seem all too eager to distance themselves not only from the social construct of women, but the losery female body on which it’s based. I admit that sleigh of hand freed me, too, for a while. The idea “I’m not a woman, but a dyke” gave me permission to abandon what used to be seen as “women’s” issues. Suspend compassion for people like my mother who was tormented, and tormented her daughters in return. I also left behind all the lesbophobia of the broader U.S. women’s movement which couldn’t see past reproductive rights, and wasn’t particularly sorry to see the back of one more angry, not entirely middle-class dyke.
Few people care that Wittig’s broader quote reads, “Frankly, [the definition of woman] is a problem that the lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective. 'Woman' has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual, economic systems. Lesbians are not women.” In short, that final statement has a social, political, and economic context that I’ll talk more about in a second.
While literal about this conveniently truncated phrase, Wittig quoters interpret as metaphorical other of her statements which are, at least to some degree, quite literal.
For instance, I went to a panel a couple of years ago at New York University in which the two presenters denounced Wittig as racist and colonialist for repeatedly comparing women to slaves, including here: “In a desperate situation comparable to that of serfs and slaves, women have the 'choice' between being fugitives and trying to escape their class (as lesbians do), and/or renegotiating the social contract on a daily basis, term by term. [...] The only thing to do, then, is to consider oneself right here as a fugitive, a runaway slave, a lesbian.” These lines from her introduction to the French version of her collected critical essays, echo her 1981 essay, On ne naît pas femme, One Is Not Born a Woman.
The panelists didn’t ask themselves why she might use the word slave. Maybe because they didn’t bother to consider its definition.
In fact, in the late Seventies and early Eighties, when Wittig was producing much of this work, French women were still struggling for basic civil rights, and autonomy in a deeply conservative society. Born in 1935, Wittig was already 10 years old when women in France finally earned the right to vote (1945). Married women were only allowed to have their own bank account, to own property or get a job without their husband’s consent in 1965. Men had complete parental control over their children until 1970. Women only got the right to abortion in 1975. Women did not have full access to divorce until the same year. It would still be legal for a man to beat and rape his wife or partner for another decade or two, and even now, French women face an elevated rate of “domestic violence”. On Sunday, the French government announced that last year, 102 women were killed by male partners or exes (142 in 2019). And cops had to intervene 400,000 times to protect violently abused women (and often their children). That’s one intervention every minute and a half. And that doesn’t include the unreported cases. A tightening-up of policies to curtail femicides and domestic violence was promised.
Wittig grew up knowing that once a woman got married she was pretty much the legal property of her husband. They could fuck you when they wanted, because rape wasn’t rape if your husband did it. If you left, you gave up all rights to your kids, and you would probably be penniless and end up on the streets because your husband owned your years of work, and all the money and property were his. In fact, if you tried to escape he could pretty much kill you and get away with it. So yeah, slave. Literally, “a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.”
It’s why Wittig didn’t suddenly emerge as a lesbian shero, but got her start in the feminist movement which was concerned with ideas, of course, about what women were, but above all their material conditions. Their economic independence, their bodily autonomy—two things lesbians require to survive in a life apart from men, (or even imagine it), and two things women are still struggling for. We ignore this at our peril. Ditto that for Wittig, words like “woman” and “lesbian” were both an identity that an individual could have, but also a class (a group with shared characteristics, shared problems). An individual alone, she thought, was powerless.
This means that despite seeming like a kind of absolution, the de-contextualized phrase, “lesbians are not women” is profoundly, perhaps dangerously, misleading at a time when “women” is being dismantled as a class, and not just by conservative, authoritarian, nationalist movements who want to restore the central role of men, banishing women from public life, and returning them (us) barefoot and pregnant to the kitchen.
Self-proclaimed progressives, too, would like to erase women, (starting with dykes) along with the economic, political, social and mental consequences we face for being born into a class characterized by these messy booby bodies which are nevertheless so indigestible that even the size of our hearts, and the rate at which they beat, refuse to conform to the male default ones.
In more Olympic News
The singer Pink offers to pay fines for Norwegian women's beach handball team after they refuse to wear bikini bottoms.
German female gymnasts are also in revolt.
A Korean archer is getting hassled for her unwomanly haircut, which is not surprising considering how absolutely hysterical Korean men get at the merest suggestion they are anything less than gods, freaking out even at symbols, real or perceived, of South Korea’s Gender War.
SEOUL — One day, she was an ordinary working woman in South Korea, married with a son and designing ads for one of the country’s largest convenience store chains. The next day, she was branded a man-hating feminist on web forums popular with men, a “cancer-like creature” among an “anti-social group” of “feminazis.”
The hostility centered on an ad the woman had designed for camping products. It depicted a tent, a forest, a campfire and a large hand about to grasp a sausage. With its thumb and index finger pursed, the hand image is much like the pinching-hand emoji, a symbol often suggesting something is small.
Many men were furious, convinced it ridiculed the size of their genitals.
They threatened to boycott the multibillion-dollar company, called GS25. The woman, whose identity has been withheld by the company for her safety, desperately tried to defuse the situation. “I do not support any ideology,” she said in an online statement in May. She denied that her design was a veiled “expression of hate for men.”
Nonetheless, GS25 disciplined her and publicly apologized.
What happened to the woman was the latest salvo in South Korea’s war against feminists. It seems that men there need merely to express an affront to their male sensibilities, and businesses will bend over backward to soothe them
…
The animosity has intensified recently as Korean men grapple with a new wave of feminism that since about 2015 has achieved hard-won gains against a deeply entrenched patriarchy. The backlash, coupled with the ascension of a conservative political party angling to knock out its incumbent opponents, presents a serious danger to women’s rights and gender equality.
Well, that’s it for this week.
(Slightly) Disgruntedly yours,
P.S. Think about upping your subscription. Just think about it. Don’t do it. That would put too much pressure on me.