VIDEO TEXT: Gender, Integrity and Your Body

Here is the text of February’s video, for perusal, dissection, discussion, debate, and the like.

(Apologies for any undetected last-minute changes.)

GENDER, INTEGRITY AND YOUR BODY

Integrity. What exactly is that?

In modern usage the word has two distinct meanings: I want you to consider how intimately they’re related.
1. firm adherence to a code of values, either moral or artistic—a kind of ethical coherence.
2. the state of being whole, complete, sound, undivided.

Integrity is related to integer, the Latin for entire, which we also know as a term for a whole number. So because of the way these two meanings are entwined in our heads, your integrity is suspect if you are not whole.

This is why, up until very recently when we started to pay attention to the effects of such unconscious assumptions, an amputee character in a film or book—that is, in the stories we tell ourselves—was almost always a villain.

It’s also why it’s so easy to destroy the credibility of women politicians—because not that far below the surface, our society doesn’t entirely believe that women can actually have integrity.

Why not?

Well, because, rightly or wrongly, human bodies are regarded as a fundamental measure of who and what we are—but more to the point, their metrics are interpreted through a patriarchal lens.

Women’s bodily boundaries are more… porous than men’s. You can’t draw an outline around us and say, as men can and do, this is where I begin and end, none shall pass—because for women that line is… crossable. Penises go into us, babies come out; we suckle, we bleed, we ovulate in unison; we share physical intimacy in ways very different to those traditionally approved—or even available—for male bodies. We don’t fit the patriarchal template for a person.

In other words, hidden behind the smokescreen of twentieth-century modernisation, down beneath western civilisation’s reluctant loosening of patriarchal control, something about western culture’s value judgments hasn’t changed in millennia: you’re not truly whole if you have a hole.

Now, I am not the first person to make this observation. In fact, in 1987 American feminist Andrea Dworkin had this to say:

“She, a human being, is supposed to have a privacy that is absolute; except that she, a woman, has a hole between her legs that men can, must, do enter. This hole, her hole, is synonymous with entry. A man has an anus that can be entered, but his anus is not synonymous with entry. A woman has an anus that can be entered, but her anus is not synonymous with entry. The slit between her legs—so simple, so hidden….—that slit which means entry into her—intercourse—appears to be the key to women’s lower human status. By definition, as the God who does not exist made her, she is intended to have a lesser privacy, a lesser integrity of the body, a lesser sense of self, since her body can be physically occupied and in the occupation taken over.”

Dworkin, obviously, was an atheist, but you can see her wrestling here with the religious basis of misogyny: the belief that structural disadvantage is both the will and the moral judgment of a Divine Creator.

But she’s also intent on making us see that there is no structural disadvantage quite so radical as womanhood.

“There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonised cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag. There is nothing exactly the same, and this is not because the political invasion and significance of intercourse is banal up against these other hierarchies and brutalities. Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also fundamental to continuing human existence.”

She sounds obsessed, and she was, but it’s this alien, inalienable truth that transfixes her: in no other condition of subjugation is human existence, broadly speaking, dependent on the compliance of the subjugated.

Then she asks the question that occupies all of her phenomenal body of work:

“The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people—physically occupied inside, internally invaded—be free; can those with a metaphysically compromised privacy have self-determination; can those without a biologically based physical integrity have self-respect?”

Today we know the answer to that is yes—at least to self-respect—because in the thirty-five years since Dworkin posed that question, women have shifted the axis on which western society turns and commanded respect. They have reshaped marriage and the family, the workplace and the economy. There are now more women employed, more women tertiary-educated, more women running their own businesses, more women in positions of power, and many more women contending for roles of global influence than there were in Dworkin’s day. Women have carved out roles for themselves as players in the world men built on their servitude, and in the process we have changed that world. But that change—that progress toward what has to be

(if there is to be a future at all)

a global network of just and sustainable societies—is far from complete—and masculists want it reversed.

Of course, Dworkin writes of freedom and self-determination from within an era when these were still plausible ideals; we live in a time when self-determination is reduced to the nomination of pronouns and freedom to the accumulation of weapons.

But it was 1987, so Dworkin also writes from within the patriarchal universe—that is, from a western-imperial perspective. Dworkin gained her degree from a prestigious liberal arts college, and (like all of us) was a product of her times. In the ‘80s, America had barely begun to listen seriously to its own Other, let alone to consider the legitimacy of cultures, knowledges, and entire complex societies wholly or partially outside the empire.

The question of what women really are, of how they might function in a world unconquered by patriarchy, of how different the world might look if you step outside the mindset of the white man’s cosmos, of how values are formed in a universe humans have sung into being that does not elevate the Masculine to superiority, that does not conceive of feminine vulnerability as the origin of human shame—that question was un-askable, or at least unanswerable.

Today, we have vast networks of answers—more, it seems, than we can process. We know patriarchy’s view of women isn’t the first, last, or only word. We know there are ways to build and sustain egalitarian societies. We know gender, when tethered to biology, is really just sex roles—a patriarchal attempt to reduce people to units of reproductive function. And we know women can survive occupation, mystically retain privacy, and redefine integrity.

There’s an argument that Dworkin overstated the significance of sex-act dynamics in what we understand men and women to be, but I find it unconvincing. Besides porosity of bodily boundaries, the female reproductive role entails several other compromises to autonomy and mobility—smaller stature, breasts, menstruation, gestation, nursing, childrearing and so on: there is no denying that women, that is, female bodies, entail a structural vulnerability that in our culture is symbolised—metonymised, even—by their penetration. Don’t make me remind you of that 2019 video of private schoolboys singing about “ladies” being holes in the road.

[short clip of video]

OK, we’re reminded. That’s a US military cadence—a kind of song soldiers chant to focus their minds on training. Somehow, men under patriarchy have tangled the meanings of killing, fucking, and… roadbuilding. But there’s something even more disturbing about those overprivileged schoolboys—taking an army war-cry out of context, into the streets, onto public transport with a captive audience of women. It was a teenage assertion of patriarchal right, certainly. But was it an unconscious, or perhaps naively aware, declaration of war?

This, then, is the politics of penetration. The problem of the integrity of the penetrated. The brutal hierarchy of earthly diversity under patriarchy. And the project for the restoration of integrity, agency, power, and even divinity, to the Feminine.

Subscribe to be notified of our next video, Gender, Identity and Power, in which we look at why some people with female bodies have no wish to change them, but also don’t see themselves as women.

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