Sentences I Cannot Figure Out

[walkitout]

The context is the idea of a person as an individual, and that that is a Bad Thing from a certain branch of feminism's point of view. The argument against self-defense for women is that they might start to buy into this idea of a person as an individual, and then they just become part of the problem/display false consciousness/wtf. I actually understand _that_ part of it. Here is the counter argument, which confuses the hell out of me.

"Women who learn self-defense do not and cannot pretend to learn it as gender-free subjects." What McCaughey means by subject (I am certain of this) is like, the subject of a sentence. NOT subject as in dominated. So, you cannot learn self-defense in a gender-free way. You learn it _as a woman_. On the one hand, it is kind of a duh thing (I learned it. I am a woman. Therefore, I learned it as a woman.). On the other hand, it's another one of those things that people who believe in binary sexual identity do as part of their privilege that is fucking infuriating. There really are people who routinely identify theirself as gender free (some of them use alternative pronouns -- I don't mean to impose my choice on them), and telling those people they can't do this one particular thing in their usual identity way is pretty oppressive. THAT also is not the main problem I have with this sentence.

What part of self-defense is women-specific, more so than individual-specific? Your height matters. Your reach matters. How well you can aim and how hard you can kick and punch matters. Your fine motor skills matter. Your understanding of physiology matters. Your ability to manage your emotions in a wide context of highly stimulating interactions matters. Self-defense is _NOT_ generic. But I don't get which part of this is woman specific. I can't pretend to understand what self-defense would be like for a man ... because I can't even generalize my experience to be what is it like as a woman.

Apparently this is another one of my autism moments. (Rant: neurotypical people are the worst, especially when they get on one of these gender difference things.)

Not to be an ass or anything (YES I AM BEING A PAIN), but what about if you are the I in LGBTI and learning self-defense? And believe me, that's a really good idea for you. What about if you are the T in LGBTI and learning self-defense? LIKEWISE.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I think it's important to how I would respond in such a situation (a) that I have been socialized as a woman (that is, as what a woman is supposed to be in my culture), (b) that others have been socialized to see me as a woman. It's not that every woman would react the SAME way; it's that every woman with that socialization is likely to react DIFFERENTLY than if they had not been thus socialized. I think all she's trying to say is that you have to be conscious of how your socialization has affected your behavior (and also of how other people are likely to think of you, as it might affect in what way they attacked -- though of course there you're playing more of an odds game with what another person's stereotypes might be).

After all, if you had been brought up, say, Italian, you would undoubtedly be different in some way than you are now, but you wouldn't be just like every other Italian any more than you're just like every other American.

In my particular case, one great difficulty would be to get past the "freeze" reaction (vastly more likely in me than either fight or flight). I'm sure that's partly temperament, but I'm also sure that my temperament in that respect has been greatly reinforced by traditional gender roles.

ignoring the tautological case

[walkitout]

(That is, I was a woman before, during and after taking martial arts classes.)

Okay, I'm not saying that no one comes to martial arts training from a gendered perspective. Some people clearly do. But that's not what she said. She said, "Women who learn self-defense do not and cannot pretend to learn it as gender-free subjects." That is an incredibly strong and exclusionary absolute.

To take your example, of having a "freeze" reaction, or of nervous laughter, which comes up a lot in a martial arts context. If one has that reaction, does that mean one's gender is ...? If one does not have that reaction, does that mean one is a different gender? If it is probabilistic, then how does the absolute of McCaughey make sense?

I can't figure out what she means. If it hadn't been so absolute, I could have made sense of it. But not with it so strongly worded. Well, unless I'm really not a woman. ;-)

The biggest area where this bothers me is the idea that women come to self-defense primarily concerned with rape and sexual assault, or intimate partner assault. And that was never my primary concern. Does that make me a man? I doubt it -- no one ever thinks I am a man, or "one of the guys" or any of many other You Don't Act Like a Woman memes. This has actually been a point of confusion and deep curiosity to me since it was pointed out by T. years ago. She had her own strong reasons to want to figure out how I could violate virtually every rule of Acting Female and still NEVER confuse anyone about actually Being Female.

In any event, there's a lot of reason to believe that the socialization process didn't take very well on me, for a whole lot of reasons (autism spectrum in the family, raised JW, etc.). And I'm sure not alone.

Re: ignoring the tautological case

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I suspect she's reacting pretty strongly toward people who really didn't understand that they had to deal with some of their socialization baggage in order to get anywhere. Yes, she probably phrased it a bit too absolutely, but I didn't have any trouble parsing it.

I am kind of flabbergasted at the idea of you violating "virtually every rule of Acting Female." I don't actually see you that way at all. I see you not taking Acting Female very seriously, but I also see you using quite a lot of the options that are open to you as a woman-in-our-society because what the hell, they work okay, and some of them are kind of fun.

When I say socialization, I don't just mean people being actually forced into acting a specific way. I mean that one's personality is different because of growing up in that environment. Even if one rebelled against socialization, one is shaped by that rebellion. Also there's the other half: how one is seen. Even if you don't personally conform to gender stereotypes, they're going to get applied to you, and that affects how people treat you in an attack situation as much as it does in the grocery store.

Dunno if this makes any more sense.

Re: ignoring the tautological case

[walkitout]

I agree that socialization runs both ways. However, the problem remains. One of the things that McCaughey seems to attribute to how-men-treat-women involved how men reacted when she and other women told the men in their lives that they had taken a self-defense class and/or martial arts, which would seem to be what you are talking about. But I know from talking to a lot of people about martial arts over the years (and from watching other people talk about martial arts), that men-treat-men the same way that kinda freaked McCaughey (and, for that matter, me) out when we were taking martial arts. She thought it was specific to women and meant the men didn't really take the women's training seriously. In practice, it was the men being super dorky, and that's how they treat everyone who says they've been taking martial arts.

This is why I'm sitting here questioning what this sentence could possibly mean. I mean, sure, you could assemble some massive project that involved monitoring and then having graduate students code how women were treated vs men and how men reacted to training vs men and so forth. But what you'd get wouldn't be ALL MEN vs ALL WOMEN, you'd get a spectrum (because, duh, that's what always happens when people study gender difference: the distance within the gender is always wider than the difference between average of one gender vs average of the other).

Absent that, how are you picking?

Re: ignoring the tautological case

[walkitout]

Oh, and before you say, well, then that's an example of how male martial artists test other martial artists and it is still a male socialization thing. Except once you get a larger sample of female martial artists, I'm betting you'll see the same behavior, because I'm sure noticing that a lot of the female-martial-artists-are-not-as-nutty-as-men generalizations I used to make are not holding up any more.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I went and looked at the context on Google Books (because it occurred to me I didn't really understand your first sentence), and man, that is a pile of jargon. I probably agree with somewhat more of it than you do, but it's most irritating to read.

It looks as though she's looking at it from the personal-is-political point -- that is, it doesn't necessarily matter why an individual woman is taking self-defense, in doing so they're still contributing to a general statement that women deserve more agency, public space, etc. But then there's all the stuff about mind-body dualism and the idiosyncratic use of "individualism" as somehow related to the idea of seeing the self as contained by the body and not coterminous with it. That's the bit I really haven't unpacked.

I think she's not saying that individualism in the abstract is necessarily bad, but that it's been used as a way to de facto define only men as individuals, excluding women. But I don't believe I have encountered this particular notion of "liberal possessive individualism" before (or if I have it was called something else), so I may well be misunderstanding her.

aha! We are now talking about the same stuff

[walkitout]

She is engaging with _other_ women's studies/feminist scholars. Some of the _other_ people think that individualism is per se, necessarily bad; she is explicitly disagreeing with that position and spends time explaining why. She _is_ making the personal-is-political argument you perceived, but also a personal-is-personal argument: by taking self-defense, women change the way they feel, think and act, and in directions that are pretty unambiguously good from the author's pro-woman perspective, but more ambiguously from certain theoretical perspectives within feminism.

She spends a bunch of time talking about the male body being conceived of as impenetrable, and as the female body being penetrable, and how this interacts with masculinity/femininity and rape and blah blah bleeping blah. This all gets mushed up with self-defense getting women to actually understand and enforce boundaries. She then takes pain to say, boundaries good, and just because existing categories say boundaries = masculinity and masculinity = bad doesn't mean that self-defense = bad.

Believe it or not, I'm actually on her side in almost every one of these things she takes on. It's obnoxious to read, but I really, really, really agree with her about how self-defense changes PEOPLE (not just women) and that that change is A Good Thing. But then she periodically veers back into crazy town with these assertions about learning self-defense being inherently gendered, and then I go, I have no fucking clue what you mean by that.

ETA: I think it can be really hard, from outside women's studies, to really understand just how flipped the script really is between women's studies and crazy, conservative notions of masculinity/femininity. And while I am all in favor of script flipping to see what that looks like, I do actually totally get that that rarely results in anything substantially more useful than the original, flawed approach. You usually need to do more exploration, and be more synthetic, if you want to truly understand and make progress.