Billie Jean
Michael Jackson
Live at Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever (1983)
Look at that moonwalk. Goddamn.
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Edit: As solidad pointed out in the comments, “conservative Islamic theocracies =/= larger muslim population”. I just want to make it clear that Islam is diverse and that the conservative element in Islam is not all, or even most, of Islam. No matter what certain talking heads and politicians would like us to believe. Thanks solidad!
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken in support of a potential ban of the burqa, the body length garment that conservative Muslim women are forced/choose (depending on your point of view and the specific circumstance) to wear. This has elicited polarized points of view. Some in support of the ban say it will help liberate Muslim women from the tyranny of fundamentalism. Others say that it is trampling over those same women’s personal sovreignity by taking away their freedom to choose.
The first stance, I think, gets quite a bit right. The burqa effectively erases the woman beneath it; she is wholy subsummed into Islam. Under all that cloth, the person is essentially stripped of their own identity. Featureless, formless, and completely submissive before the patriarch Allah and his representatives on Earth, the father, the husband, the imam. As for stripping away a woman’s choice… well, consent never mixes well with oppression and it is obvious that in Islam to be female is to be a member of an oppressed class (and so it goes for Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc.). It becomes hard to unravel where personal sovreignity ends and where tremendous pressures familial, societal, spiritual, economic, and physical begin. It is often impossible to come to a clear understanding of what is coerced and what is consented to.
But of course the immigrant Muslim culture in France doesn’t have a monopoly on the wholesale coercion of women. French culture does that constantly all on its own, although this might be obscured by our banal familiarity with it. I do not see Sarkozy proposing a ban on runway modeling, despite the deadly eating disorder epidemic created by the couture culture of “Thin as Beautiful”, both for the models on the catwalk and for the women and girls who are constantly beaten down by advertisements. I don’t hear any talk of banning films and shows and music that reinforces women’s class as the sex class, from the moment they open their eyes. Are they going to outlaw cloistered nunneries? The French government is not doing a damn thing about any of the West’s homegrown misogyny. Instead it is focusing on the minority Muslim population. And so I am left thinking that France’s anti-burqa campaign is not motivated by feminist emancipation at all, but xenophobia, Islamophobia, and racism.
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Michael Jackson, age 50, died today. At one point a child prodigy bigger than Mozart, he quickly ascended from his family band roots into a solo wonder, the king of pop. He sold millions of records, penned classic songs, and danced so well that it impressed Fred Astaire. I was born too late to appreciate any of that, however. Instead, I am part of the generation that grew up knowing him as Wacko Jacko.
Michael Jackson is something of a tragic figure. Here was a supremely talented man, who was once a supremely talented boy, who never really had a childhood. Exploited by his father, he was set to work before he hit puberty in the family business, the Jackson Five. Constant performances, rehearsals, and marketing will take their toll on a person, and I think it’s no surprise that so many child stars lead such troubled lives when they’ve grown up. By all accounts, Michael had it harder than most of them. And so it came to be that the King of Pop was still very much a child, long after he, by most standards, should have become an adult. He said he identified with Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.
In my lifetime, Michael was used by the primarily white media as a battleground to further the institutionalized white supremacy of the United States. MJ was a black man, and he did things black men are not supposed to do in this country. He was more feminine than African American males are supposed to present themselves as. When he suffered from vitiligo and lupus, his medical treatment lightened the pigment in his skin. This was turned by tabloids and gossipers into the scandal of a black man trying to become a white man. It was speculated that he underwent plastic surgery, and though this is something we demand our celebrity women to go through if they are going to remain relevant, Michael Jackson was turned into a freak for it. When allegations of inappropriate behavior with young men and boys began to surface, Jackson was quickly crucified for it, in a way other, more privileged celebrities were not. His body became a warzone, and our white patriarchal nation was ruthless in its onslaught. Mos Def may have said it best in his song “Mr. Nigga” off the album Black On Both Sides:
You can laugh and criticize Michael Jackson if you wanna
Woody Allen molested and married his step-daughter
Same press kickin’ dirt on Michael’s name
Show Woody and Soon-Yi at the playoff game, holdin’ hands
Sit back and just bug, think about that
Would he get that type of dap if his name was Woody Black?
I’ve always felt ambivalent about pop culture. It is often a beautiful, transcendent thing that simultaneously draw attention to pressing social issues while making them a little easier to bear. But it is also steeped in racism and sexism, and it is where some of the most vicious hate-mongering against the oppressed is carried out. The last years of Michael Jackson’s life were subject to just that. Rest in Peace, MJ.
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Let me preface this by saying that I would be naive, as a privileged male who is comfortably insulated, if I felt like I was saying anything new in this series. All I write here about the Patriarchy I learned from women far smarter than myself, who looked unflinchingly into the nature of their oppression and saw horrible, undeniable truths that none of the Great Men of Western Thought (TM) could, or cared to, grapple with. The majority of the philosophical and political knowledge I have gained over the past year can be directly accredited to them. This is my no doubt insufficient attempt to synthesize my particular understanding of libertarian-communism and radical feminism, and how the two are significantly weaker when separated from each other than when they stand united.
If I were to compile a list of reasons why I do not consider myself a Marxist, the first thing I would write would be “Patriarchy”. Marx, well-versed thinker though he was, has little to say about the oppression of women, and when he does touch upon the subject, he seems to get it completely wrong. One of the few works he specifically mentions women as a distinct group is the Communist Manifesto, where he rather stupidly declares that with the abolishment of capital, so to will disappear the family, as we know it, and seemingly the exploitation of women in general(!). So too with Engels, though he has rather more to say on the subject of women, or rather on the subject of family. The key issue, when discussing family, sex, love, or child-rearing ought to be, almost always, Patriarchy. But these Great Men simply didn’t recognize that it existed. The oppression of women by men appeared to them to be a direct result of economic conditions. Quoth Engels, “The supremacy of the man in marriage is the simple consequence of his economic supremacy, and with the abolition of the latter will disappear of itself.”1
Simone de Beauvoir astutely pointed out the problems inherit in this economy-centric view in The Second Sex, looking at how Man sets himself up as human, and Woman is foreign, the Other, “the sex”. Shulamith Firestone goes deeper, indeed, she feels she has to. “Sex class is so deep as to be invisible,” as the opening of the brilliant The Dialectic of Sex goes, and a little later: “we shall need an analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism was for the economic revolution. More comprehensive. For we are dealing with a larger problem, with an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.” And this is why Marx and Engels got the oppression of women so wrong. Economic class does not predate sex class, nor does it define it. Sex class predates economic class; the first oppressor was male and the first of the oppressed was female.
Despite what some radicals would like us to believe, primitive, propertyless societies were not idyllic gardens of bounty and peace, free of class antagonism. Sex class has been woven into all of us, even those who might have existed in that prelapsarian dream of the primitivists, by the amoral pragmatism of biology itself. The original sin of the Patriarchy can be found in the first insemination resulting in pregnancy. With this one half of the population’s strength is drained, and when it comes time to give birth, that same half faces infection and death. And thus we have the first division of labor, women encumbered and enslaved as the propagators of the species. At the very start women are at a disadvantage, held hostage by an evolutionary past and a future generation. Men are not so burdened, they can without much issue hunt, and make war, and thus amass political power.
Sex class stretches back to a time before language, to a time before our species even existed, and the abolishment of economic class will not eradicate it. We can however, draw parallels. Just like the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will not be solved until the two classes cease to exist, so goes sex antagonism. Sex, by which I mean the distinction between male and female, needs to be made functionally and symbolically nonexistent.
- If you care to learn more about his opinions on the subject, you can read his Origins of the Family. [↩]
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Two Weeks
Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest (2009)
Sorry for the absence. Mothers’ Day was particularly unpleasant this year, as it was the first after my mom passed away, and, well it sort of knocked me down for the count. Now that I’m up, I’ve been quite busy starting my own business. More on that later, when things start to blossom.
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Everything With You
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (2009)
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Today is May Day, a holiday celebrated in solidarity by working people the world over, with the glaring exception of the USA and Canada (Too close to home?). It commemorates the ongoing struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor, but it pays particular reverence to the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886.
My American History book in high school, and I see my younger brother’s does the same upon checking it now, rarely mentioned anarchists or anarchism. One of the few times it did so was when it talked about the Haymarket Riot. It stated that the anarchist newspaperman and immigrant August Spies was giving a speech to a group of workers, it explained that Chicago had become the center for workers agitating for the 8 hour day, and it told of how the workers began to clash with police. A bomb was thrown, killing a cop. Some anarchists were found guilty, and executed. And that, my history text declared, was the end of the Anarchist movement in the US.
I’m sure those who wrote the textbook wished it were so, but they must have known otherwise. It is the event that Emma Goldman, the greatest of the American anarchists, says radicalized her. A widow of one of the martyrs, Lucy Parsons, would go on to create the Industrial Workers of the World, an anarcho-syndicalist inspired union still active today. The country had yet to watch with horror the sham trial of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, who would be immortalized in folk song and legend, and become yet another rallying event for workers, exposing the pervasive injustice of the state. There would be many more acts of protest, wildcat strikes, and propaganda by the deed to come in this country, and many of the players would be inspired by the Haymarket Affairs.
The United States likes to whitewash the movements it throws a few bread crumbs to. Middle class feminists forget that there would be no Margaret Sanger without Emma Goldman. We do not learn that the Million Man March was organized by communists, and that Martin Luther King Jr. was successful in part because power holding whites saw him as a preferable alternative to Malcolm X. The anarchists that campaigned ceaselessly for the eight hour day, who committed acts of sabotage in the mines and factories, are forgotten, while moderate unionists like Gompers and the AFL receive credit. Who remembers that FDR enacted so many social programs because he feared revolution and social unrest from below unless he did otherwise? The US has a selective memory. It has to. It cannot let the people know that every single bit of progress has not come as a gift from above, nor an exchange between the state and the owners with some well behaved concerned citizens, but at the gunpoint of collective action with working class, with women, with people of color and queers and anarchists and communists pressing their finger ever tighter round the trigger.
This May Day, remember the radicals. We get shit done.
To read more about the Haymarket Affair and May Day, look here.
You can read August Spies’ autobiography, written from prison while awaiting his execution, here.
Please do everything you can to support the Employee Free Choice Act, the most important piece of workplace legislation in my lifetime.
Alderson Warm-Fork has a good post about the Haymarket Affair at his blog Directionless Bones.
I’ll leave you now with a brief selection from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem The Mask of Anarchy. In the poem, Shelley uses the apolitical meaning of the word, that is wanton destruction and chaos. But in an interesting twist, the bloodstained character Anarchy is not lawlessness, rather it is the embodiment of Law. As the poet writes, “On his brow this mark I saw - / ‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’” In any case, here is the most famous portion of the poem, and the lines that I hope you will hold in your hearts, not just today, but every day:
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.
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I woke up with an idea today. It follows, for your viewing pleasure and your dutiful consideration: Before one goes about stereotyping an oppressed group of people (example: women are bitchy, blacks are stupid, mexicans are lazy, the poor lack initiative and talent, the list goes on and fucking on) and dag nabbit that’s just the way god/genetics made ‘em, one should conduct a little experiment.
STEP ONE:
Give the oppressed class who you want to malign power for, oh, I don’t know, let’s say three hundred years or so. Let them direct and select the discourse, control capital, mandate legislation, philosophize and theologize, define standards of beauty, police that which they decide is worthy of policing, and command armies; this list also goes on and fucking on.
STEP TWO:
Check back with me and report if they still fit the stereotypes you’re so eager to assign them.
I think this is a pretty good idea. Get to it.1
Alas, this probably isn’t going to happen. In today’s economy, getting funding for this sort of research is more or less impossible. We are left with only one reasonable option: Don’t assume that people fit into your naive little caricatures, don’t assign blame for negative traits, imagined or otherwise, on immutable factors when they could just as easily be a product of societal factors, if they exist at all, and, most importantly, don’t try to use unfounded stereotypes to justify maintaining the industry standard of hierarchy and oppression.
- This goes for you too, Evolutionary Pop Psychologists. Dammit, you people are supposed to be scientists; you should love this sort of rigorous study! [↩]
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