Loose Women, Lecherous Men (53 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

Tags: #Social Science, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #test

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Page 212
just as destructive to her self-esteem or self-confidence as the quid pro quo variety. Because hostile environment harassment represents an abuse of the social and sexual power men have over women without the more obvious economic or political hierarchies of quid pro quo harassment, for men to understand hostile environment harassment requires that they understand the ways in which social institutions are hierarchically constituted simply by the gender of their members. Thus, the "world"-traveling implicit in care respect may motivate judges and juries to listen with new political sensibilities to what individual women consider a hostile work environment, rather than relying on overly generalized and apolitical standards of what a "reasonable man," a "reasonable person," or even a "reasonable woman'' would find harassing. Furthermore, a man who treats women with care respect in the workplace or academia will not automatically assume that a woman's friendliness is a sign of sexual attraction to him and so will not respond to her attentions in ways that are in fact harassing to her. Former U.S. senator Bob Packwood actively supported equal rights for woman during his congressional tenure yet allegedly sexually harassed his secretaries and political aides over a period of many years, In the language of care respect, Packwood's failure to "world"-travel to individual women's economic and social situation or to take responsibility for his sexuality under conditions of institutionalized male dominance made it possible for him to depoliticize his very personal attentions. Care respect for women who are sexually harassed also means developing policies and procedures that reflect women's preferences for handling disputes and that recognize how a woman's lower position or economic clout within a company hierarchy may make purportedly gender neutral grievance procedures work against her. Men may also realize from this perspective that while
men
might lie about others' sexual harassment of them to rationalized poor job performance or to punish supervisors unwilling to promote them, a woman rarely does so, if only because of the tremendous emotional and economic price she often feels she must pay for her accusations.
160
Pamela Foa suggests that once woman and men begin really listening to each other, coercive sex will no longer reflect the norm of many women's heterosexual experience. If men were to treat women with care respect, men might begin to understand the social pressures many women (especially young women) feel to say yes to sex when they would rather say no; the desire of some women to be partners with men for social comfort, affection, and companionship but not sex; and the pressures men often feel to "score" or to make their partners' sexual needs secondary to their own.
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Women and men would begin to realize that there are compelling alternatives to the often debilitating and destructive courtship customs that require that when men "shell out" for a date, women must "put out," making rape and battery a common feature of heterosexual sex. Women would begin to see ourselves as worthy of respect in our own right and less in need of acquiescing to a man to maintain our self-esteem or social image. By asking "What is it like to be me in their eyes?," men would recognize how much more threatening, controlling, and violent they often appear to their wives and girlfriends than they seem to themselves. Compassion and kindness in sexual relations would replace selfishness and cruelty if women and men treated each other with care respect, where compassion, according to Lawrence Blum, involves an "imaginative dwelling on the condition of another person, an active regard for his good, a view of him as a fellow human being, and emotional re-
 
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sponses of a certain degree of intensity," and where kindness, according to Tom Regan, implies "to act with the intention of forwarding the interests of others, not for reasons of self-gain, but out of love, affection or compassion for the individuals whose interests are forwarded."
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Challenging Social Hierarchies and Gender Role Expectations
Many feminists claim that eradicating men's violence against women over the long term means eradicating the unequal power relations between the sexes. This eradication would demand a total restructuring of the family, with men and women taking equal responsibility for child rearing, domestic maintenance, and financial security.
163
The successful dismantling of the patriarchal family would also require the widespread acceptance of caring and cooperative alternatives to the heterosexual nuclear family, as well as radical changes in the workplace and traditional child care. However, if feminists are to be successful in teaching men care respect for women, then feminists must dislodge many men's (and women's) gender role association of masculinity with power over women, for unless they do so, men will regard feminists' demands for egalitarian relationships as emasculating. Yet if men's public lives continue to demand that they value and pursue hierarchical social power and authority, then men may find it difficult to give up such pursuits in their personal relationships or may resist doing so altogether.
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This is one reason why socialist feminists claim that women's liberation requires not only a revolution in our sexual and reproductive institutions but also the dismantling of any political economy that requires human relationships to be defined by the dominance of an elite and wealthy few over an impoverished and oppressed majority.
As with sexual harassment law, "reasonable woman" standards in self-defense laws pertaining to battered women reveal that lawmakers are making an attempt to "world"-travel to the situations of battered women. Judges and juries are being asked to try to understand a woman's fear for her life from her perspective rather than from a man's, who may only have bared his fists or may not have been provocative the moment she assaulted him. Men who treat young girls with care respect will begin to realize a girl's pain, humiliation, confusion, and outrage by being abused and not believed, or by being consistently raped yet asked to feel affection and respect for her abuser. Men will begin to see themselves as adults in whom many young girls place an enormous amount of trust but whose betrayal of that trust can have devastating effects that can last a lifetime in young women already socialized to dependency and self-doubt. In short, for a man to treat women with care respect means
not
objectifying, universalizing, or rationalizing women but trying his best to particularize and empathize with women's daily experience of sexual intimidation by men,
including himself
. Men cannot be women, of course; but men can make every effort to acknowledge, understand, and promote women's sexual lives as women would define them, not as men might wish women to define them.
Therefore, the caring and respectful treatment of women should be understood not as treatment encouraged only under the most sexually intimate conditions but as treatment that should exist in the workplace, in education, in the law, and in the
 
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familyindeed,
everywhere
that women and men congregate. There are few such places that do not provide ample opportunity for men's sexual intimidation of women, and few relationships between women and men that could not benefit from the combination of esteem and empathy that an ethic of care respect describes. At the same time, a sexual ethic of care respect should not be understood as giving men blanket permission to intrude on women's sexual lives with the excuse that they are "just trying to get to know women better." What a sexual ethic of care respect recommends is that both women and men be sensitive to the social location and the needs of each individual, a sensitivity in which listening to each other's particular voices is a value. In this way women and men can begin to assess how far their imaginative understanding of another's sexuality should reach and how much effort should be spent promoting the interests of others. An ethic of care respect is grounded in a fundamental respect for persons as self-determining moral agents and so can morally circumscribe the parameters of such efforts with minimum standards of moral conduct below which no one must fall. However, this ethic is deliberately flexible in its decision procedures for particular cases in order to appreciate social context and individual eccentricity and to avoid the distortion of a purportedly more exact ethical theory that advocates the application of universal and abstract moral principles to a wide variety of cases. An ethic of care respect can thus appreciate both the ambiguity and the clarity of the woman described by Robin Morgan, who awakens for the first time to her own sense of herself: "She still doesn't know 'what must be done,' but she is on her way to doing it, and she has no time to waste on those who insist they know when they don't."
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Furthermore, just as men must take responsibility for accepting a socially constructed male sexuality often dictated by cultural expectations of dominance and control, so women must take responsibility for acquiescing to our own gender expectations of sexual compliance and understand the complex social pressures that encourage many men unreflectively to dominate women sexually. Thus, neither sex is "off the hook" from the "view from somewhere different," since both women and men who adopt this perspective not only seek to resist making presumptions about the other's sexual needs and preferences but also recognize the difficulties of doing so in a world whose social expectations put pressure on both genders to conform to a hierarchical status quo. The creative collaboration and opportunities for real affection that may result from such efforts, however, may encourage men to give up a power base that they may otherwise feel too vulnerable to relinquish. Yet as I write this, I realize that it may be a question not of losing or gaining power but of transforming the meaning and value of power in sexual relations that will make them personally rewarding for all. Intimacy and shared responsibility without the fear of falling down a notch in a gender hierarchy may create opportunities for individual women and men to understand more clearly their own needs and values.
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Lesbian and gay relationships would certainly benefit from a perspective that advocates care respect as would any sexual practice that deviates from traditional heterosexual norms, since sadomasochistic as well as vanilla sex can be nonoppressive sex using such a model. If power-transforming, nonintimidating, compassionate, and passionate sexual relationships are both possible and desirable, then we must not only redefine for adults as well as our children the moral parameters of sexual desire under
 
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the rubric of care respect; we must also continue to demand that our economic, political, and cultural institutions neither instantiate nor reinforce the sexual intimidation of women. The latter task defines the continuing need for a feminist activism that publicly recognizes and resists the victimization of women. The former task asks women and men to share the responsibility for redefining human sexuality in terms that facilitate the sexual exploration, passion, and pleasure of both sexes.
Conclusion
The "view from somewhere different" is a perspective from which I have claimed that men's institutionalized sexual intimidation of women and women's capacity for determining the meaning and value of our sexual passion and pleasure combine to reflect the dialectic between gender and sexuality that is at the heart of women's sexual experience under patriarchy. This perspective encourages women to understand the pervasive and structural ways in which women are sexually victimized by men in a society that reinforces men's domination and control of women. I have argued that this perspective is vital if individual women are to defend themselves against their sexual harassment and abuse and to liberate themselves to define a sexuality suited to their individual needs. The "view from somewhere different" can accommodate those who believe that feminists victimize women by overemphasizing women's institutionalized oppression; according to the "view from somewhere different," women's sexuality is an active and responsible one that women have the capacity to define in our own terms, yet such definitions are viable ones only when women recognize the extent to which our sexuality is also a function of social institutions structurally biased to advantage men.
Thus, for women to eradicate men's sexual intimidation of women requires profound and difficult changes in women's and men's sexual attitudes that must be incorporated into, and reflected by, the social institutions under which women and men live. Such a perspective in turn recommends that a promising method of resistance against men's sexual intimidation of women is to encourage women and men to treat one another with care respect. This perspective advocates treating all persons as moral equals as well as treating each person as uniquely situated in a way that allows women and men to recognize, understand, and promote the particular and self-determined interests of each other. The intentional ambiguity of how to assess those interests is one of the strengths of this perspective, since it requires women and men to explore actively and communally which actions best suit which contexts and needs within the parameters of moral equality.
On the other hand, the "view from somewhere different" is a frustrating perspective for many, because it is paradoxically noncommittal in its insistence that there is no one epistemological or moral voice that can speak about women's sexual experience in all times and places. What this perspective gains by this approach, however, is a way of understanding women's sexuality that accounts for the variety and complexity of individual women's sexual experience, affords women and men a way of evaluating that experience using an ethic of care respect, and gives each woman the double prism of her patriarchal oppression and her capacity for sexual self-definition from which to discern the meaning of the erotic in her own life.

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