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Re: All boys are rapists

Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-April-2 02:04:28, Tuesday
In reply to All boys are rapists posted by Etenne on 2024-April-1 12:05:34, Monday

At the risk of confirming Diogenes preemptive strike ("the apologists for MeToo and feminism who seem utterly incapable of seeing that sucking up to our oppressors is not going to do us any good whatever.... For God's sake, get your heads out of the clouds, stop pretending that it's still the 70s."), I will make a few cautionary points.

1. The Daily Mail. Really? We would be justifiably skeptical of anything appearing in that publication about sex between men and boys. What makes them more credible when they are confirming the masculinist biases of some BC posters?

2. This account comes from the boy's mom. It's plausible enough that she has good reason to avoid identifying details. But that doesn't make her unbiased. We know, and apparently can know, nothing of the circumstances beyond what she asserts.

3. The #MeToo movement concentrated on the complaints of a racially and economically privileged class, and there are indications in this story that this family shares many characteristics of that group. (The mom is able to get her account published; she is able to access therapy and eventually alternative schooling for her son; her son was preparing for the GCSEs, part of a still classist UK system of limiting higher education to the children of the already priviliged; she was a plane flight away on business at the time of one particular crisis.) While this type of feminism is likely the one most familiar to many BC posters, who are also members of this class, in numerical terms its reach is very limited. Working class women and children, not to mention those outside the US, Europe, and Australasia, mostly continue to live under the same conditions as before #MeToo emerged. Significant voices within feminism, such as Mary Harrington (Feminism Against Progress) and Rafia Zakaria (Against White Feminism) have pointed out and vigorously objected to this disparity.

4. This account comes from a women, and therefore is, if credible, itself additional evidence that the sex negative narrative of #MeToo feminism has achieved limited acceptance even among the privileged social class whose interests it sought to advance.

5. For a long time -- a very long time -- sexual behavior by adolescent boys that dehumanized girls was excused as "boys will be boys." If the pendulum, within a small segment of the socially privileged, has swung too far the other way, that does not mean this legacy of historical injustice to girls has been sufficiently remedied in the larger community.

6. It's very possible her son is, if not a rapist, a boy who has absorbed a prevailing sexual ethos that treats girls who are receptive to their sexual advances as sluts. Etenne himself is one of our most prolific posters of evidence of how prevalent this ethos remains, #MeToo notwithstanding.

Despite all these reservations about reacting to this post in the way most here have, I found this account overall encouraging. Sex negative feminism is hegemonic within feminism today, and when a women is willing to take a strong stand against it, as this mom has done in advocating for her son as a sexual being, that gives me hope for the future of feminism and for our own movement, which depends more than anything else on sex positivity. Or, as it might be called, the ethos of "the 70s," which Diogenes, in my view, is far too ready to discard.

hugzu ;-p


Pharmakon

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