Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about lately– the usual kinds of things– excerpted & adapted from some letters I’ve written recently. Putting them here to keep track of the things I’m thinking…
From one letter:
“When women do certain kinds of labor it’s supposed to be non-labor… supposed to be invisible… supposed not to ‘count’ except when it goes undone. And that’s, you know, a totally soul-draining way to live in the world, I find. And yet, that’s a large part of the cultural definition of what it means to be a ‘wife.’ To do all sorts of drudging labor and also not to appear to be doing any labor at all. To re-characterize labor as non-labor by calling it ‘love.’ (‘Raising children isn’t work. It’s love. Because work requires skills, and there’s no skill in raising children– just love.’) Yeah. Right. And then that starts making love more difficult, too, I think. And that really sucks.”
I’m including this here in order to remind myself to think about the issue of “skill” (and its cultural opposition to “love”) when writing about nannies, governesses, maids, and so forth.
And from a different letter:
“I think you were acknowledging some of this when you talked about ‘the perspective widely held by men that women actually have all the power, and when backed into a corner, they lash out, taking the power back.’ But it sometimes seems to me that many men equate women ‘having all the power’ with women having any power. But, yes, I am struck by your insight that some men perceive ‘perpetrating sexual violence against women’ as ‘an admission of defeat.’ But then… doesn’t that get at the root of some more pervasive, more subtle violence? I mean, it seems to place consensual sex and sexual violence on a very close continuum… like the continuum between buying an expensive watch and stealing one. They seem different, but they both stem from tying one’s identity to acquiring property. To the right to have access to objects. It’s just that the stealing reveals something about a feeling of being entitled to have a certain kind of identity that comes from having a certain kind of property… I mean, it’s not that the feeling is any different… it’s just that some people can afford expensive watches. So, there’s a way that saying, ‘Men want sex and women sometimes give it to them,’ sounds little to me like the sentence, ‘Men like watches, and sometimes watches are affordable,’ and stealing a watch is just an admission of not being successful enough to buy one. I mean, the watch doesn’t get to want. It’s just accessible or it isn’t. That’s not really what I think of as power. (But maybe that’s kind of the idea you were expressing?)”
The key idea here that I want to remember is the connection between (a) the status of being property (or– the same kind of thing– the status of not having a “property-owning” identity), and (b) the ability to want. This continues to reinforce my idea that privileged identity is not only associated with the (fictional) ability to regulate one’s “wanting” in culturally appropriate ways, but also with the ability to “want” at all.
And both of these are tied, in ways that I need to continue to delineate, to the cultural differentiation between labor and affection (and how that differentiation is used to oppress women).
