Tuesday, November 12, 2019
For-show female empowerment & gender fluidity are simply the latest instruments of corporate capitalism (By Slavoj Zizek)
Slavoj Zizek
Should women unashamedly wear
mustaches? Should men abandon their masculinity because it’s ‘toxic’? This is
all just a smoke screen capitalist overlords use to hide real issues and stay
in power, philosopher Slavoj Zizek believes.
Step towards de-sexualization?
I think this is a part of a
larger phenomenon, which follows this logic: if women try to be beautiful or to
obey the models of beauty in a traditional sense they objectify themselves for
men. So women should re-appropriate their bodies in the sense of admitting them
in their everyday ugliness – hair, fat, whatever – to de-mystify their bodies,
to show that a woman’s body, especially sex organs, is not what they are for
the gaze of men but has its own positive function that should be appropriated
by women because women cannot be reduced to being objects for men.
One the one hand, I agree with
the women’s feeling of oppression but I see a problem with this logic. Let’s
face it: sexuality as such involves a certain degree of self-objectification.
For example, when I engaged in sexual activity, when I embrace a naked person
that I love, I abstract (and that is the imminent logic of sexuality) from all
the nasty things that are part of the human body – bad odors, remains of dirt
etc. I minimally idealize, in a way, the other’s body. Without this, we
approach de-sexualization.
In spite of all the talk about
free sexuality liberated from binary heterosexual restraints, what we are
basically dealing with here is an attack on sexuality as such.
Push for imaginary sexual
freedom will only lead to worse oppression
We all know that human
sexuality is not just something biologically predetermined – as the traumatic
experiences of transgender people prove. In your psychological identity, you
can be a woman trapped in a masculine body, and you are ready to suffer quite a
lot to change your body so that it fits your inner psychological identity. All
this happens. There is no direct biological determination here.
Yet, to make a big jump from
here to a claim that sexual difference is just one among the oppressive
constructs of those in power and that we should playfully engage in multiple
sexual identities, that it is just a game, and that everything is open and that
if we just get rid of the binary heterosexual oppression we will enjoy full
free sexuality, is a great mistake. It obliterates the basic lesson of Freudian
psychoanalysis, which is that sexuality in itself is something pretty dark.
It is not a happy domain. It
is a domain of deep traumas, masochist reversals and so on. That is why it is
not enough to claim that if we get rid of this big masculine-feminine gender
duality and, to paraphrase Mao Zedong, who said that thousands of flowers
should blossom in us, to say that thousands of identities should blossom and
all will be happy and live a satisfied sexual life. No, human sexuality, again,
is inherently traumatic. It is a big mess, there is no simple formula here.
As experience with political
correctness demonstrates, if you try to liberate sexuality in this simplistic
sense and get rid of this heterosexual normativity and let all the different
forms proliferate, you end up in an even worse oppression.
Everyone should be free to
objectify themselves
What many people do not accept
is that the problem is not objectification as such – it is not the whole game
of sexual seduction, flirting of men and women - it’s that, in some sense, you
precisely objectify yourself as you want to present yourself as seductive. The
problem is not that there should be no objectification – the problem is that
each sexual agent should have the right to control his/her/their
objectification.
Let’s not forget that with all
the feminist protests against objectifying women what bothers fundamentalists,
for example, in Muslim countries is precisely when a woman plays with her own
objectification... For example, imitating fellatio, playing with a banana in
their mouth. What bothers men is that a woman, in this situation, is not
objectified by men, but objectifies herself playfully enacting her
objectification for her own pleasure.
Instrument of capitalism
As it is usual with such
events, we should not underestimate the degree to which this is a relatively
marginal phenomenon. Be sure, most women will not want to grow a mustache and
if they want to – let them do what they want. I often detect in these
transgender new identities something that I do not like. It is that as once
heterosexual standards were imposed oppressing other identities, now, if you
read all these texts, in some of them you find the idea that if you are still
within the traditional heterosexual sexuality you are somehow retarded. To be
truly free, you have to play with your identity and blur all the lines.
I do not agree with this. This
idea of freely rearranging, changing your body and playing with identities is
something that perfectly fits today’s consumerist capitalism with its infinite
dynamics. There is a chance that big companies are already playing these games.
Probably some of our readers remember a Gillette ad from about a half a year
ago, where a father helps his ex-daughter, who is now a boy, to shave herself
for the first time with Gillette. There is absolutely nothing subversive in
this ‘play with different identities, experiment with yourself’ attitude. It is
simply a perfect form of sexuality for the late consumerist capitalism.
A lesson that we should take
from all of this, not just from commercials, which are then sold to us with a
progressive twist, but also the fact that – remember two or three years ago
transgender movement exploded in the US with this big campaign for toilets that
should be open to all sexual identities, not just masculine/feminine – how the
entire big corporate US – all the big names like Tim Cook or Zuckerberg – all
passionately followed this path and supported it. Unfortunately, this type of
struggle for free sexual identities is something that can easily be used as a
part of capitalist machinery to oppress more dangerous popular demands, even
and especially the authentic feminist protests.
Elites seek to divert female
emancipation drive away from changing political status quo
On the one hand, (and I
wholeheartedly celebrate and support this) there is some kind of awakening of
women. There are forms of feminine subordination, which are part of our
tradition from even before class societies, from tribal societies – like woman
is passive, subordinated to men. As it is always the case, the establishment
tries to redirect this awakening in such a direction that it will not really
change power relations. We will get a quota for women, women will be presented
in the media more respectfully. But the same power relations will persist in
our society. That is what all these fighters against patriarchy do not often
get.
In the developed West, the
ruling ideology is no longer a patriarchy. It is a kind of false openness which
also functions as a way to avoid radical mobilization and radical solutions.
When we are focused on whether a woman can wear a beard or a man can put on
lipstick, no one wants to talk about the continuing terrifying oppression of
women, of the exploding rape culture in Mexico and South Africa. Let’s
focus on the struggles in which the real freedom of people will be decided.
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