If the divine is what causes appearances and does not appear itself, then man's inner organs could turn out to be his true divinities.

Hannah Arendt

Gloria Steinem on Why Women Aren't Successful At Brainwashing

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Monkey Children: Biology and Gender Identity

Astrid, your questions about my last essay on Ma Vie en Rose were really great, thank you so much. I've finally found the time to write some answers.

1. Have you read Julia Serano's 'whipping girl'?

I have read some of Julia Serano's text. Honestly I didn't finish it, because at the time I found it a little hard to read, both in terms of clarity and in terms of the emotional response it evoked in me. Also the cover of the book really turned me off, although I've heard she disliked it herself. I remember singling out a specific line in which she was talking ostensibly scientifically about the relationship between testosterone and aggression. I don't think the best biology we have confirms that there are any such definitive, or even “on average” links between sex hormones and behavior. Have you read Natalie Angier's 'Woman?' I really recommend it. I think it's arguably one of the most important books for feminism since The Second Sex

2. [Whether there is a strong sense in which we can 'know' that we have a continuous identity...”] ...would seem to be another place where faith comes in. or...hmm, that doesn't seem to fully grab it. there does seem to be a point where believing in something (a self, i am thinking here, one's self) can no longer even be described as believing because the conviction is deep enough to warrant feeling a knowing, (cont...)...which translates into a more passionate (read: effective, affecting [?]) action)

I think you're right here, about the faith to knowledge transformation. You make a good point, and it's something I've been thinking about lately with regards to the issue of trusting in other people, temporarily bracketing the question of self-relationship: If we could absolutely guarantee the other person's continued existence, or if there were some definitive plan which could guarantee someone being trustworthy, then “trust” wouldn't be required to begin with.

In a sense I think what is usually called “circular reasoning” is useful here. It does not work on paper, but what works on paper doesn't always work off paper. I think that it is not only true but necessary of identity that it not be knowable in a fixed way – in order for it to really exist and thrive, not in order to discount the idea. The assumption I am making is that we make a provisional leap, a faith, like you're saying, which allows us to perform the action of identification which creates the identity to begin with. I believe that identities (including gender identities) are knowable and real the same way a law is. What is important to me isn't destroying the basis for belief in the self (like you find in Buddhism, say), but on the contrary, simply emphasizing that it is always open in the future to revision, if one should want that revision. Which brings me to the next question.

3.“Even though i realize your discussion involves self-conception, it would be lacking to say that trans people's existences stem solely out of self-conceptions. while i acknowledge that you may not intend to frame things this way, .it seems like your essay implies that the only good that comes out of cross-gender (-sexed? potentially?) identification (not mentioning, that i saw, body modification), is binary-smashin', or rather, moving that we might move again later. this seems like a circular exercise used to get someone out of the habit of stagnation and into a habit of movement, of productivity. it ignores the very specific intents of most trans people, the ends to which are usually personal peace.”

I can't make any claims about what is right or wrong in someone else's identity. “The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have the right to exist! There is yet another world to be discovered—and more than one!” In that sphere, and as I often do, I think an aphorism or two from The Gay Science is helpful --

"One thing is needful.— To "give style" to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added, there a piece of original nature has been removed:—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed, there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views:—it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small: whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose,—if only it was a single taste!— It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relents in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature; even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.— Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned:— they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits—and they may be of the first rank—are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature—wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself—whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art: only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge: and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy."

Also, Astrid, what do you mean more specifically when you say “it would be lacking to say that trans people's existences stem solely out of self-conceptions?” What else do you think is involved?


5. Obviously no individual person is responsible for helping everyone else see the binary smashed through their own personal lifestyle. i just feel like the "can be" above is...dangerously vague. (which may only be because of the slew of feminists that have held trans people, and queer people in general to strict double standards).

Your point about double standards is a good one. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to be honest and possibly politically incorrect here, but I think the result will be helpful, because I think these kinds of dialogues are helpful. I think these double standards against transwomen exist because of a fear of antibiotic-resistant sexism, to put it as simply as I can. It is really, really difficult for a woman to see any woman who lives “the dream” of the 1940's housewife and grant them their “feminist” freedom to determine their own path. And sometimes, I think, in asking themselves questions about their own identity, transwomen, like all women, look to popular culture for images through which to find the identity they feel they share with other women. To begin the long task of finding a self-concept that gives them peace of mind. This is really what my essay was about – the possibility that sometimes trans identity or queer identity can be just as sexist or dangerous as any cissexual or heterosexual identity.

The important thing for me is not to legislate any protocol specifically for trans or queer people. I want to talk openly and calmly about what is a huge question: Do we have the freedom to give up our freedom? When do we stop exercising freedom in choosing an identity (housewife, for example), and start becoming totalized by that identity? To what extent does the totalized/unfree identity of one woman negatively impact those around her? Does that impact mean we have an obligation to be free, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of all women?

There is, and I'll be frank, a fear among many feminists of the transwoman as a “symbol,” in some parts of the feminist community. I need to be clear: I do not think this symbol has anything to do with transwomen at all. It's just as ridiculous as any symbolic image of women -- virgin, whore, and all the rest. However, what I think this specific fear may be growing out of, is the fact that the patriarchy is an “enemy which has outposts in our own minds.”

We live in a society which fetishizes lesbian identity as a trope that exists for male enjoyment, which attempts to reduce female identity to nothing but a conglomeration of sexualized imagery that has very little to do with the interior life of any human being. That reduced female identity is artificial in the narrow sense. It can be taken off and put on easily (as I did in that photo-montage), and in the end, I think, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with women at all. The women we see in mainstream pornography, for example: those are images "of men," in one sense, because misogynistic men are the ones producing the images. In this sense, ironically, I think there is some truth to that lunatic Republican politician's claim that "all pornography is homosexual." Where I disagree with him is that I think mainstream pornography is homosexual in a way that is reserved especially for the sadistic, misogynistic, heterosexual men who produce it -- and NOT the gay community at large.

Because of all this, is a scary symbolic value which I think some feminists mistakenlyattribute to transwomen. To take one example of how this fear can take form –- what if misogynistic men decide that, since they hate women's over-emotional, inferior minds, anyway, transwomen are actually superior to ciswomen, since they have “the mind of a man and the body of a woman?” One person I heard about actually said this. On a more formal level, plenty of historians have tried to suggest that Joan of Arc, who was nearly peerless among women in her time in terms of political resistance, had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. For those historians, this would mean that she was therefore, technically, "really a man," and therefore didn't threaten their concept of the inferiority of women -- although this theory has not been taken very seriously.

Obviously it does both transwomen and ciswomen a disservice to take this stance, because transwomen are women, not men in female bodies. I think that ought to be self-evident to most people, but right now political conditions are such that it generally is not. I think that what happens is that feminist ciswomen feel threatened by this "men in female bodies" possibility, too. I think, actually, they are threatened because of the same old “all women are your jealous competitors for male attention, not your allies, friends or lovers” trope that keeps all women in general from forming effective friendships, sexual relationships, or political alliances very often. The difference is that in this case the jealousy and antipathy and fear is directed at a specific group of women, i.e., transwomen, in a way that undermines their very right to be women, so it becomes the form of transphobia I described in the first essay. It's a painful, serious, and tangled situation that really needs to be remedied. The mortality rates among trans people are absolutely dismal; particularly dismal are the mortality rates as a result of violence.

6.

So, ultimately, my concern is that the re-evaluation of the gender binary that I'm talking about needs, to be consistent, an admission that if gender is performative, no one is --a priori, anyway -- “objectively” any gender at all. They can obviously identify with one very narrow gender identity and it will be quite certain and true that they do so, but this is something they are doing of their own freedom, and not because fate has forced them into it. Related to this "Fate" issue is the argument in pop culture that queer people deserve equal rights because “they can't help being gay, it's genetic.” I think this argument, while it might be politically expedient, is dangerous, because it implies that if they could help it, they would and should. And on some level it might be true that some people would prefer if they themselves were not gay. It's obviously not very easy in this society to be gay. But so long as the question is phrased this way, I think it leaves open the possible interpretation on the part of "well-meaning" moderates or republicans that queer or gender-variant identity is an immoral condition, even if it is not a choice.

On the topic of the gender binary, I want to say that destabilizing the gender binary doesn't mean, for me, that no one can choose to simply identify as 'man,' or 'woman.' The destabilization aims to do something very specific – to create a radical concept of freedom that doesn't destroy these choices, but actually includes them as some choices among many choices. In one sense, the structure of the basic concept of man or woman, in all its fabulous, caricatured glory, fundamentally untouched. The important thing is not whether they are presented as choices at all, but whether they are presented as the only possible choices. If we change that, these binary options lose their power to:

--impose horizons on anyone,
--to conceal their status as just that, an option,
--to thereby in their enforcement (an enforcement that in my opinion, functions and has reality the same way a law does) create a totalitarian effective reality.

7.

The biological question of sex can accommodate this. There is nowhere in biology any rigid, universal and absolute rule by which we have been able to reliably “distinguish between the sexes.” There is intersexuality, and all of the related biological diversities, in our own species. There are frogs that begin as one sex and spontaneously transition to the other over the course of their lives. There are worms for whom the male lives out his life as a small part of the female's digestive system.

We can try to say things about specific cases; we can generalize about numbers of cases that resemble each other. But the fact of the matter is that if you inject a chimpanzee (or preferably, bonobo, since they are the bisexual vegetarian matriarchal pacifist ones) sperm cell into the heart of a human egg cell, you could hypothetically create a viable human-chimpanzee hybrid (not that I am advocating this). We have cloned from single animals, or from two female mice. There is a potential evolutionary future in which we are a parthenogenetic species, as unlikely as it may be. Our biology in the end is as changeable as any “social construct,” and its horizons, as far as I can tell, are determined by the trends in the evolutionary accumulation of the stylistic choices all of us make, over time.

Heteronormativity and Transgendered Identity

Ma Vie en Rose

Trailer:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0b0F8HAJgI
Relevant Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eINgc4N7JmI


1.
I found this movie, like XXY, to be surprisingly heteronormative. It is sexist in spite of, and not because of, its positive portrayal of a gender-variant character. The film could have been reworked, albeit quite thoroughly, to accommodate a space for thinking about the intersections of all sexism, and not merely transmisogyny. It could have taken an emancipatory theme forall women, and not only transwomen. If a more general and affirmative concept of womanhood, one that includes both transgendered and cisgendered women, isn't articulated in this film or any film with female protagonists, this doesn't merely disadvantage ciswomen. It also leaves transwomen vulnerable to the attack one finds in patriarchal transphobia-- the reading that a transwoman is simply an extreme incarnation of an effeminate homosexual male.

If transwomen cannot ally themselves with cissexual women, if cissexual women cannot ally themselves with transwomen, then the heteronormativity which affects us all -- even the heterosexual, cissexual women who are portrayed so critically in the film -- will still be permitted to reign.Just as feminism needs the support of men to succeed, we also must ensure that even heterosexual ciswomen are aware that they are not, in our current global society, being guaranteed basic human rights because of the same reason that transgendered people are oppressed.

However, we cannot think of oppression as 'being deprived of access to' a certain, unproblematic, unquestioned identity possessed by men, or in this case, ostensibly possessed by ciswomen. I argue that the cissexual woman in a patriarchal society is atno advantage in this regard; is affected just as negatively by patriarchy. This means something positive. It means there is a shared experience, a point of solidarity between transwomen and ciswomen. Any generalized concept of womanhood is always something that is achieved performatively, it is never something you are born with, it is not something you were born lacking – it is always something you become. This partiality is the source of the danger of stereotypes. Yet it is also the frontier of our new, futural identities.

Before I go any further, I need to responsibly to distinguish my criticism of the limited representation of gender-variance in Ma Vie en Rose from transphobia generally, because there are some uncanny similarities. To begin with, I would say that I am only criticizing a specific concept of the transgendered person: one which reincarnates sexist ideals. This is one which puts both the transwoman and the cisgendered woman at a disadvantage. If I don't want to see a transgendered woman feel that her only path to financial stability is through heterosexual marriage, sex work, or otherwise capitalizing on her femininity or her appearance, this is not in order to renounce her femininity as such. It is because all women, not only cisgendered women, are affected by a common kind sexism, although there are clearly additional specific forms it takes.

In fact, I argue that if the media suggests that a transwoman can participate in a heterosexist ideal [of housemaking, marriage, heels, hyperfemininity, et cetera] without being oppressed herself, the media is implicitly suggesting that the transwoman has a special status, which can only be explained by her having been born as a male. The only way a transwoman could find a 'liberation' of her identity in being permitted to participate in a subordinated, if traditionally female role, would be if a transwoman is 'not really a woman.' This is because it is the only way one could be immune to the injustice that oppresses any and every woman who is put in a similar situation. This insults transwomen and all women. We cannot suggest that the problematic stereotype of the transwoman, the "drag queen,*" reincarnating all of the problematic ideals of femininity with jubilance, is accurate. Not without undermining the transwoman's very status as a woman – or without compromising our assertion that we live in a patriarchal society in which women are oppressed, and that women are oppressed in a systematic way by these very stereotypes.

*Note that this is a criticism of the idea of a “drag queen” as a misreading of the transwoman's identity, which is different from renouncing from the lifestyle of an actual drag queen, i.e., a male-identified person who performs femininity.


2.
I want to call to mind the situation where feminists against exploitative pornography and coercive sex trafficking get lumped in with extreme, right-wing, and usually Christian groups. In that case, the right-wingers believe pornography and sex trafficking should be censored because sexuality in general is evil. The feminists, on the other hand, believe that pornography and sex work should be radically re-envisioned becausesexual exploitation, not sexuality in general, is an ethically problematic scenario. Similarly, feminists who criticize any sexist normativity among communities of transwomen can be easily mistaken for patriarchal misogynists -- for, it is true, in each case the critique results from a desire to destroy a certain concept which threatens the strength of one's own self-concept.

However, there is a difference, which I will argue is similar to that between the anti-sex-trafficking feminists and the anti-sex-trafficking Christians. We believe that a concept of transsexuality (broadening the definition here even to include cissexual homosexual men and women who play into sexist butch-femme relationships) which recreates, almost parodically, heteronormative ideals, should be radically redefined (specifically,broadened) because heteronormativity, and gender normativity, amonganyone, is an ethically problematic phenomenon.
So yes, the anxiety that feminists experience in the face of sexism is similar to the anxiety that sexists feel in the face of feminism. Each feels threatened in their own self-concept. However, feminism must work to ensure that its response to this threat, this anxiety, is not to attempt to recover a sense of identity that has been defined on patriarchal terms -- i.e., a fixed, stable identity. As Judith Butler says,every attempt at inhabiting a specific gender fails at least partially, and that is a good thing, because it is what gives us freedom over these ideals – it is what allows us to choose from among the identities we are offered – and what allows us to create new ones if we like none of the options.

As an aside, I believe this is a basic philosophical state of affairs about what it means to be a self, beyond just a question about sex and gender. I don't think there is a strong sense in which we can 'know' that we have a continuous identity. Memory or consciousness, are, of course, part of what allows us to posit the concept of identity to begin with. But it should be noted forgetting is just as important. With an excess of consciousness, or memory, we begin to lose our sense of self again. We have to be willing to 'forget' our mortality and finitude, our smallness re: the rest of the universe, in order for the selective memories we hold on to about our personal identity to make sense.

Although I think this means in some sense there is no static, unchanging, unified 'true self' behind the process of creating and holding onto memories, I don't think that the 'falsehood' of it is a bad thing. I think that it our finitude, what allows us to be incomplete, also makes us open to new experiences, to learning from others, and to a future that we absolutely cannot predict based on our memory of our past self alone. I am pretty sure that if we could have a 'true' concept of the self, and/or know exactly what was going to happen in the future, it would probably mean that we were dead.

3.To speak more specifically of the content of the film -- as I said, there are really no positive portrayals of cissexual women. And while the need to criticize the complicity of cissexual women in patriarchal modes of identity is urgent, the only way the depiction of cissexual women in the film could be consistent would be if Ludovic's dreams about becoming a Barbie-doll housewife were subject to a similar criticism. And they're not. But oh, what befalls the cisgendered women who find her problematic! The very first interaction with a young cisgendered girl we have is when she is jealous of Ludovic for getting the attention of a mutual male friend. (I should note that in the film XXY, the intersexed protagonist was also exclusively attracted to men).The primary ways, from the outset of the film, that we even learn Ludovic is 'gender-variant' is through an over-the-top depiction of her interest in dollhouses and neon pink dresses.

There is also a schema set up where all women, cisgendered or transgendered, primarily exercise power through their ability to manipulate men sexually. The character of the boss' wife is repeatedly subordinated to Ludovic's mother because Ludovic's mother (whom Ludovic herself clearly envies the influence of), is willing to wear short skirts, style her hair, and otherwise sex it up. The stereotype of the frigid, envious, sexless woman watching from the sidelines is so blatant it doesn't really merit analysis. And when Ludovic does receive support from other women in her community, it comes primarily from this strange, drag-queen-esque version of Barbie, who at one point literally ties up Ludovic's mother, and the mother of Ludovic's love interest, so that Ludovic and the Drag Fairy can fly away together to a brightly colored land full of dollhouses, where weddings never end.
It is certainly true that heterosexual women do a lot of the enforcing of gender roles. However, it is not enough to re-create derogatory depictions of sexism as it exists. In order to effect change we need to create new concepts of friendship. We need new kinds of political solidarity. And, I would argue, we need new kinds of sexual relationships between women. Throughout the film, the tired dynamics between sexually jealous women get recycled over and over. Even if the gender-variant version of femininity self-actualizes at the end of the film, without the solidarity of all women, this is not really a success. The demographic of cisgendered women who unabashedly support a critique of gender identity is not represented at all. Even less can we imagine the possibility of lesbian relationships between cisgendered or transgendered women, in any combination, based on the set of premises the film provides us with. And I argue that it is not merely a personal urgency but a serious political urgency that these diverse forms of lesbian identity become widely represented and legitimized.

Instead, the schema we find in the film suggests that perhaps the problem with the social structure Ludovic finds herself in is not with the heteronormativity itself, but merely where she is located in it. The only ally she finds in her peer group is a girl who is similarly interested in transitioning across the binary, but in reverse: into manhood. In this sense, we see that "individualist" questions of personal identity, wherein a transgendered person says they are 'objectively' one sex while being intersubjectively treated as the opposite sex, can be quite dangerous. They allow us to feel successful in a reform of who gets to participate in which heteronormative identity, but it leaves a necessary, revolutionary abolition of the very concept of a normative gender binary untouched.

In the film, for example, we only ever see men using athleticism to relieve stress. Further, Ludovic's ineptitude at sports seems to imply for her something of her 'fatedness' to the status of woman. Again, the problem with this depiction is so obvious it doesn't merit analysis. While at times Ludovic receives good support from her sister, it is fleeting. The real female alliance remains with Pam, the Barbie doll. All other adult women are depicted as varyingly frigid -- even the scene in which Ludovic's mother cut her hair smacked, to me, of the myth of the 'castrating woman.' And lest I be accused of questioning Ludovic's gender identity by saying that, let's not forget that women can be robbed of their sexuality just as well as men through a metaphorical 'castration' -- in fact it is the rule and not the exception in our society, and all too often we all feel 'castrated' by the other women in our lives.

I think that it is to Ludovic's immense credit that, given the pressure to be gender-compliant, she chooses to pursue what feels right to her. The biggest problem, though, which again, only Ludovic seems to recognize, is with patriarchal masculinity, which harms all women – and men. There are scenes where boys fight and she doesn't want to participate. There are scenes where she is beaten up. While these may be pivotal experiences for a transgendered person, it is also important to note that they can have very similar significance for a cisgendered woman, or even a cisgendered man. Together, we are all realizing that something is profoundly wrong with the role that is being forced onto transwomen -- the same role that is forced onto anybody who was raised as a male.

It does not threaten the concept of transgendered identity to suggest that we need to make a decisive critique of this naturalization of male violenceas it is. If Ludovic goes on to "live the fairy tale" and marry a heteronormative man, cisgendered or otherwise, she is highly likely to find herself in the same scenario -- of being adversely affected by the decaying, mythological gender binary as it executes itself through individual human beings. To say that a transwoman would be any less hurt by a fairy tale wedding than a cisgendered woman could only suggest that transwomen aren't 'real' women, and are thus immune to the conditions which have held back all women for millenia. It is not for the sake of delegitimizing the identity of transwomen that we must criticize the limited representations of cissexual women – or of lesbianism – in media that deals with gender-variance. We must criticize these representations because it is only by uncovering and cutting the vast network of roots which anchor the tree -- in all of their intersections -- can we finally reach their source, and fell the blighted forest.

Follow-Up on George Sodini Note Below

Justin, thanks for your comments. You write:

A. On Schwarzenegger -- 

I am in broad sympathy with this. Here are a few quick comments and questions. You write, “In cutting all funding for domestic violence shelters [Schwarzenegger] is directly leading to the death of people who did not need to die.” I’m willing to concede this point in a certain sense. But I want to clarify that sense. It is the same sense as the sense in which you and I are responsible for the deaths of who-knows-how-many little boys and girls that we could have sponsored for a dollar a day in Liberia or Bolivia (and practically all of us – even those of us on welfare in this country -- *could* sponsor at least one more child than we presently do [we could move into a single room with 10 other people, invariably rely on free clothes, work three jobs, eat only at soup kitchens, etc.])…
…As Singer or Unger might put it, we have “let such children die” rather than “killed them”. Of course, it could be argued that there is no morally relevant difference between killing and letting die. But that would have to be argued. It isn’t obvious that all of us have the same moral standing as someone who shoots a convenient store clerk in the face merely because we’ve let die more children in Uganda or whatever than we absolutely had to. By the same token, it isn’t obvious that Schwarzenegger is a murderer because he decided to prioritize whatever he decided to prioritize over the possible prevention of certain forms of violence against women (I’m not claiming that you suggested that he is).

First of all, he is the governor of California, and can affect lives in a manner and scale that I cannot replicate, and that it doesn't make sense for everyone to try to replicate. Society can't be composed entirely of politicians, and nor do I have the private wealth that would enable me to undo the effects of his funding decision. 

For my part, I do give at least a dollar and usually more, per day, to the homeless people who live on my block. I do this despite not really having an income beyond what I need for rent, food, and basic healthcare. I agree that we could all be doing more in this vein. 

Two more interesting points on this topic --

There is a minimum living standard beyond the necessary which I don't think we should ask people to sacrifice. This is the living standard which makes, broadly speaking, civilization possible -- scholarship, art, and other cultural practices arise in part out of leisure and the celebration of leisure. I think we do have an obligation to give when giving makes all of us stronger (and as long as I am able to handle it emotionally I will be volunteering as a rape crisis counselor and hospital advocate). The government of CA, I believe, could certainly find some way to cut other costs besides basic security measures for women. One of the main reasons the cuts are being made to begin with is the fact that Californians, wealthy or otherwise don't like taxes.

There is a fundamental sense in which I think you're right here, and ultimately I can't give a reason that this case of human suffering deserves specific attention over the myriad, equally problematic ones that deserve our care today. I can only say that it is an issue which I am personally highly motivated to impact, and one which I think tends to be under-estimated and under-represented due to a certain backlash against feminism that is happening to day (see Pat Buchanan telling Rachel Maddow that electing Sotomayor meant discriminating against white men, and see also the common argument that women in the United States shouldn't complain, because things are worse elsewhere. Not only are things just as bad for some lower-class women here as they are almost anywhere else, but despite the problem of upper-middle class white entitlement feminism, it doesn't make sense to compare and contrast oppression, any more than it makes sense to stop prosecuting rapists because a rape victim was "lucky he didn't get murdered.")

Lastly, Arnold Schwarzenegger has given women in California no reason to trust his motives. In a much-publicized video, he announced the budget cuts by waving a knife around and suggesting "cuts must be made." He claims it was a joke, but -- whatever his reason for the video or the budget cut itself -- this betrays an incomprehensible level of insensitivity towards the struggles of the women whose lives he is affecting in this budget cut.

B. On Censorship -- 

You write, “A cursory glance at cable TV, YouTube, or the movie theatre reveals that the mistreatment of women, and quite often their outright rape and murder, gets sexualized…” Is your view that we should censor movies so as to avoid sexualized depictions of violence against women?

I'm not sure why so many people take away from my writing that I want censorship to happen. There are many reasons censorship is a terrible idea, not least of which is that it simply won't work. And yet, one person went so far as to tell me repeatedly that I believe that "pornography is murder and the TV kills people." This is certainly a problem for some feminists. People like Andrea Dworkin do go, in my opinion, a little too far. Even the pornography documentary I linked to in the previous piece, I think, overstates the case by comparing BDSM pornography to waterboarding. My problem isn't even as much with things like BDSM pornography, when it is quite clear that they are participating in a consensual subculture/lifestyle decision, but rather where things like date rape or "raping to seduce" are naturalized into the 'everyday' life of heterosexual and 'vanilla' people. And again, no filmmaker is directly responsible for the actions of their fans. Even an ostensibly feminist depiction of a rape still gets misinterpreted by some people. (http://bitchmagazine.org/post/mad-men-i-love-you-but-your-fans-are-freaking-me-out) 

The resemblance to the Christian right among "all intercourse is rape" feminists is uncanny and significant. But it is also important to realize that one of the most common stereotypes against feminists is that they are humorless, frigid shrews, and to avoid giving that stereotype any more attention than it merits. 

A few ideas on this topic. I actually have used depictions of sexualized violence against women in my own art. And I enjoy some pieces of art that do the same (Videodrome comes to mind). Think of the song "Strange Fruit" -- we can talk about violence beautifully, and quite powerfully, without thereby encouraging it. Art is, I think the barometer of a culture, and thus it is all the more vital that it not be censored so that we can come to terms with how sexist ours really is. If anything, we should be more transparent about it. 

However, I think it is undeniable that there already exists a certain "positive censorship" when our systems and markets are rigged to allow the Judd Apatows of the world to make all the money. Sex sells, right. But undoing this involves undoing discrimination on the level of the industry, in pay gaps, and opportunities for female and feminist filmmakers -- it doesn't involve standing in the way of Judd Apatow (far be it from me). There is also a lack of positive media about women. The onus here is on the feminists to produce a positive result, rather than censor the negative ones. Ultimately we should be able to create a self-regulating system where depictions of Hillary Clinton cackling like a witch, or throwing a "temper tantrum" or having a "gigglefest," are just as rebuked as the watermelon or monkey jokes about Obama (for the record, I don't necessarily support Hillary Clinton's politics, and I think racist jokes about Obama are tolerated too much). But this involves, as I said, positive media, and also education about the historical context which creates the political implications of these depictions (psychiatric diagnoses of female hysteria, Salem witch trials, et cetera).

One more reason censorship is not good -- there is a distinction between a) depictions of sexualized violence that are therapeutic or cathartic for sufferers, b) that which is depicted for pedagogical reasons (to spread awareness), and c) that which is gratuitous or unexamined. There is no way we could create a bureaucracy to distinguish between these, and I don't think we should try. The problem isn't with the inert media itself, but with the lack of an education which would allow people to critically examine their media (in all spheres, not just feminist ones). 

C. On Power and Violence -- 

You write, “Clearly these homicidal actions, like (if not the same as) the violence of the patriarchy itself, like all of the fantasies about violence against women that do exist in media today, stem from a feeling of powerlessness in the face of women.” I wonder what your evidence is for this (it’s not clear to me). Is you view that all violence against X arises from a feeling of powerlessness *in the fact of X* (as opposed to a feeling of powerlessness under God, in the face of one’s boss, etc.)?

Where Mao Tse-tung says "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," Arendt suggests that "power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent." The important thing is that every time a group feels its power decreasing, there is an "open invitation" to violence. I think that any oppressing group does run up against this conundrum when facing its "dependence" on the service of the oppressed group. There is violence against women for many reasons, but I believe one of these reasons is a feeling of powerlessness against women. If we don't have the power to gain non-violent assent from the women we oppress, then the only way to reinstitute the patriarchy is by force. I think similarly of hate crimes against homosexuals -- they are pinpointed because they are seen as a threat. If they really were "less than nothing," it wouldn't be necessary to attack them. And it is a serious and open question why people get killed for "walking like a girl," to use an example of the randomly motivated homicide of a gay teenager that Judith Butler discussed in a documentary I saw recently.

I definitely overstated the point by saying that *all* homicidal fantasies against women stem *directly and only* from a feeling of powerlessness in the face of women. Obviously it happens for many reasons. The reason I thought it was important to highlight this specific cause is for the sake of women readers --- instrumental to taking back power over oneself is realizing that one has it to begin with. Instrumental to that is realizing that every enemy pays a compliment to the person he attacks by suggesting that this enemy is worth attacking.

George Sodini

As someone who has survived serious sexual violence on a few different occasions, I live with a fair amount of hypervigilance and fear for my safety. On the street I very routinely get harassed (not just like "take care of those gorgeous legs baby," which doesn't really bother me, but things like "I had better put my eyes back in my head because I am going to get arrested for what I am thinking about you right now." this would be a direct quote). Now, the fact that all of these men are not psychotic or homicidal is precisely the point. Rather than speculate about whether George Sodini was insane, (he clearly was) or even whether he should have gotten a long prison sentence (in a world of ideal penal reform he probably should have, but I am undecided here), the only responsible thing to do is to think about how to prevent this violence. 

If it turns out that a culture of sexism encourages the likelihood that crazy people will kill women, it is irresponsible not to examine that. The psychological and physical well being of the women being victimized is just as important as that of any man -- and I have an inkling that the feeling of persecution straight men may get from this critical examination is not as serious as the situation for women in California, who, for example, recently had all funding for domestic violence shelters -- all of it -- cut by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who again is not a psychopath. But indirectly, in cutting all funding for domestic violence shelters he is leading to the death of people who did not need to die.

A cursory glance at cable TV, YouTube, or the movie theatre reveals that the mistreatment of women, and quite often their outright rape and murder, gets sexualized (in everything from Judd Apatow films [he blames anti-semitism for the criticism that Knocked Up is sexist], to the treatment of Hillary Clinton's recent trip to the Congo to talk about her $17 million dollar program to keep women from being raped with the barrels of guns, to basically every horror film ever, except perhaps this... http://www.teethmovie.com/ ). 

The naturalization of male violence is not backed up by scientific evidence (see Pulitzer-prize winning biologist Natalie Angier's text 'Woman') . Recognizing this is good for both men and women, because it means men don't have to be violent. What it also means is they have effective free will, or at least a serious obligation to continue assuming they have free will. And when we realize how extensive the positive depictions of the rape of and violence against women are in our culture, it is obviously more important to subject "their" media to critical examination than to blindly disavow any possible linkage whatsoever and thus save face.

You do not need to say that any man is directly responsible for George Sodini's actions other than himself to say that critical examination of media is called for. And by the way, I don't think that these straight men you are talking about should have any sort of monopoly over "their" media, as you say. The lines are not so clean. The pornography industry is responsible for all kinds of violence against women and their economic oppression. One of the main men in the pornography industry today is also a major movie producer and has ties to the KKK ( http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=235&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html) 

This doesn't mean that pornography viewers are murderers any more than casual cocaine users directly cause the guerilla warfare which they support with their purchase, but it does mean there is a linkage.

Furthermore, mental illness doesn't happen in a vacuum. Nor is it a necessary fact. If it is remotely possible that we can create a culture that doesn't encourage men to think of violent or hyperaggressive behavior against women as sexy -- which is a situation that hurts plenty of men too, by pressuring them to demonstrate their "straight male" macho-ness in a way that leaves millions deeply emotionally and psychologically wounded (http://community.feministing.com/2009/07/why-pornography-hurts-men-repo.html) --if we can help to prevent people like George Sodini from feeling so boxed-in by this caricature of masculinity that he suffers a mental breakdown and commits heinous acts of murder against innocent people, I think we have a huge obligation to critically examine whether it is possible. It makes just as much sense to deny that as it does to say that a man who murdered a black man after watching casual racism in some movie over and over doesn't obligate the filmmaker to even ask himself once how he could have depicted race differently. We will save so much more time, money, angst, and innocent life if we do this than if we wait for psychiatric "cures" and prison sentences after the fact. The "after the fact" concern only helps George Sodini -- it doesn't help the women he killed.

The one point where I do agree with you, Steve, is in saying that people like George Sodini need help. Psychiatric help, but not only psychiatric help -- also help through cultural education. As Hannah Arendt says, violence can only exist in the absence of power, and power is precisely the ability to effect change without stooping to the use of force. Clearly these homicidal actions, like (if not the same as) the violence of the patriarchy itself, like all of the fantasies about violence against women that do exist in media today, stem from a feeling of powerlessness in the face of women. Women, after all, are these "inferior" beings upon whom even sexist men inevitably have to depend in order to, at the very least, perpetuate the species. And no man was always independent of his mother.

It's funny, because in creating a caricature of women who use sex, not violence, to effect the changes they want to see in the world, the patriarchal media has, like Midas, unwittingly projected into women a weird cartoon version of what they wanted all along: the power to impact the world without being so desperate as to stoop to anger, or force.

Thought Of The Day

I recently read that a woman is unlikely to orgasm during intercourse unless the distance between her clit and her vag is less than one inch. In that case, it is more likely that she will not be able to comfortably accomodate the average-sized wang. This is certainly not true for all women but the majority.

Some evolutionary biologists contend that the clitoral orgasm (despite being, strictly speaking, the only orgasm that exists*) is an evolutionary "holdover" that serves no discernable purpose and is on its way out. However, given the clit-vag distance conundrum, in addition to the fact that, strictly speaking, male orgasm is no more necessary for reproduction than female orgasm -- cf. preseminal fluid -- I am forced to conclude that, unfortunately, it is not the clit but the vag which is the gracious holdover of the female body which, all things told, would do perfectly well for itself reproducing parthenogenetically.

*There has been much 'scientific' debate about whether there is a "vaginal orgasm" in addition to the clitoral one. However, a simple look at female anatomy shows us that the average clitoris** is actually 7.5 inches long and wraps in two prongs around the pelvic bone and hence the vagina. This is clearly the source of female pleasure during intercourse, and allows us to conclude that female pleasure is female pleasure -- which, biologically speaking, develops out of exactly the same erectile tissues as male pleasure. 

**For a sweet picture of a giant mothership vagina and also one that looks suspiciously like the virgin mary please consult Wikipedia.

to see mad tom of bedlam

i give so much money to the birds and the cats and the homeless people who live behind the whole foods by my house. really, we are becoming friends. there have never been homeless so regular as to provide me with the rare opportunity of saying i have made their acquaintance. i want to be able to say i know what their lives are like in the form that they will share it to me. but not yet. right now all i know is that they tell me i have nice shoes, that i can't help but give them five, one hundred dollars whenever i see them.

i haven't opened a philosophy book in too long. simultaneously afraid of and nostalgic for nietzsche, like a father. like a father equally as angry and tyrannical and influential as my own. my paintings are the only ones with whom i have improved my relationship since i left new college, a newfound patience and trust in the internal logic of the images which i couldn't have anticipated and cannot thank enough for the existence of -- particularly for the fear that the discussion of them will make them vanish into the night, a cadmium will-o-wisp. i loved those when i was little.

i was unabashedly un-urban when i was young. i gardened not because it was the proper actiivity for women but because i could lord over a world there, create things that inspired my own attention, find privacy that is rare here. i am glad i didn't get to work on the farm in massachussetts because the multiple emergency root canals which several years of white person poverty created in the recesses of my teeth, but the privacy is still waiting for me. there is a zen monastery here waiting for me to build sheds for them, live off lentil soup. there is a world waiting for me to be its exhibitionist, its subject of controversy and disconcertment. fashionable dismissal.

to see mad tom of bedlam ten thousand miles i'll travel.

Sex Tourism in Thailand

I recently had an exchange with a friend of mine about the conditions faced by sex workers in Thailand. I was quite surprised by the casual acceptance of the situation that this friend expressed, along with being greatly misinformed about the extent of the problem. I think lack of information about the experiences of those whose lives are radically incommensurable with our own privileged experiences is the main reason people don't feel compelled to alter the situation both internationally and locally. I have been reading reviews of the recent book by Richard Bernstein on this subject, "The East, West, and Sex," and am realizing that people on a large scale seem to think about the issue in a similar way to my friend. So thought I would transcribe the correspondence below. I have cited the articles I consulted at the end, and there is also a blind five-year-old Korean girl playing "Für Elise." Enjoy.

My friend writes:

I was thinking more of how laid back, socially accepted, and relatively healthy the flesh trade is. There is an open recognition of a dividing line between women who market their sexuality and those who don't, and those who do are more or less all considered "bar-girls". They're not hookers, per se. It's more of a lifestyle. They're loose girls who hang at a certain bar and will sleep with you if 1) they like you and 2) you give 'em some money.

Of course, the dregs of desperation arise there as they do in any field, but for the most part there is no stigma. No one looks down on them, although few young ladies aspire to be a bar girls, admittedly.

As often as not, they land a white whale with the grisly, poison barbed harpoon of marriage, get them to pay for a village and transfer their money into a Thai bank account, then empty the account and disappear to live as upper class ladies. That's how a good number of Thai families make their upwards economic transition.

When the potential for exploitation is even on both sides, I think it's just called... business. Or politics.

My response--

I do see your side of the matter regarding this. I think that decriminalizing and destigmatizing sex work internationally is a huge part of solving one of the many problems that exist in sexual culture globally, along with the problems of women's rights. However, I don't think that either of us really can claim to know what the life of the average sex worker in Thailand is like. I grew up in a working class family. My father painted houses. When I moved out of the house at fifteen, my parents, who have two other children, weren't able to provide me with financial support, and I really struggled a lot of the time, especially when I left school. I pitied myself and felt plenty desperate about my economic situation, but I have never experienced the situation in question here, because I have never been faced with a choice between death and sex work.

Unfortunately, that is commonly the case globally and domestically when it comes to sex trafficking. I have linked you to two articles. In the first one, you will see that in Appendix I there is a list of trafficking incidents in the US (which is not comprehensive, it goes from 1999-2001 and only refers to those that police actually busted. In about half of these cases, each of which sometimes involves 700+ women and children being forced to pay off 'immigration debts' of $40,000 or more, the women originated from Thailand, or Laos. No other country contributed as often.

Here is some analysis I have done with information from the first article. The article suggests that there are 50,000 women annually trafficked into the US., and 12,000 into Thailand. However, the population of Thailand is one-fifth that of the United states. So this means that 1 out of 5,000 women in Thailand is trafficked. In the U.S. the number is 1 out of 60,000. This means 12 times as many women per capita are trafficked into Thailand, leaving aside the number of women who are already imprisoned or who are being trafficked internally.A 2004 estimate by Dr. Nitet Tinnakul from Chulalongkorn University gives a total of 2.8 million sex workers in Thailand, including 2 million women, 20,000 adult males and 800,000 minors under the age of 18. This means that about 2,800,000 women and children, out of a total population of a little more than 30 million Thai women, are involved in sex work. This is nearly 1 in 10. Studies (done, yes, prior to concerted public health efforts on the part of the Thai government) have suggested that 44% of Thai sex workers are HIV positive. The majority of Thailand’s HIV infections (around 80%) occur through heterosexual sex. HIV prevalence among pregnant women, which reached a peak of 2.35% in 1995, had fallen to 1.18% by 2003. Studies have shown that men in Thailand and the United states will consistently pay more money for sex without a condom than with one. Nearly 50% of the time they pressure women not to use one.

Most of the women who are trafficked into Thailand come from Myanmar. They are either forced by crime rings, lured by the promise of legitimate employment -- or they are fleeing one of the worst absolute military dictatorships in the world. They do not usually work in places that Westerners frequent, so you probably would not have seen them were you to visit. However, most of the criminal organizations which control sex trafficking also run larger rings of prostitution. Most women who are in sex work or trafficking are undoubtedly almost never there because of their own volition. They are there because of their pimps, US military servicemen and tourists (who often marry Thai women, and bring them back to the United States in order to force them into prostitution here) or pressure from their families, as you said, to become economically upwardly mobile. Again, the sex trade is ubiquitous, diffuse throughout the entire country -- every major city and province in the country -- not merely large cities like Bangkok, Pattaya, and Phuket. So, while some women in larger cities may indeed be willingly working at bars, this is by no means the rule, but the exception. And even then, willing dancers and bar-girls usually only get 2-3 days off per month.

Thai elites tend to be polygamists, and men are considered to have a right to as many mistresses as they like. My close family friend, Mrs. Cho, is originally from Myanmar. While in Myanmar she was forced to have an abortion by her family while drugged because she had run off with an impoverished Buddhist man she wanted to marry, rather than the extravagantly wealthy Muslim one they had arranged for her. As you said, she is not by any means considered a sex worker. However, she remains with the wealthy man in the United States and is not permitted to even go out to dinner without his permission. And he does not grant that permission. As you can see, the cultural lines between sex work and "legitimate" marriage are not always so clean. There are usually no other "employment" opportunities save marriage or sex work for large numbers of uneducated rural women -- who deserve other options.

You are totally right. Some forms of acceptance of and honesty about the sex trade are a huge improvement upon the Ted Haggard style sexual hypocrisy that reigns supreme in the United States. It is certainly good to not blame a woman for taking the best available economic opportunity. But there is no reason for this to extend to not blaming the customers for continually creating the demand that permits this economic stranglehold to remain the status quo. Western customers are encouraged -- by the government -- to visit Thailand and pursue sex workers and slaves, because such a huge portion of the Thai economy has come to rely upon sex work after various forms of economic depression (including opium suppression programs). It is not at all clear to me that this is a good thing. There is no simple or moralistic solution to the problem -- it is cultural and economic, and yes, a large portion of the work must be done by the women themselves.

However, among trafficking victims the women never even see the money they make. The Yakuza consistently deceives women -- mostly Thai -- into coming to Japanese brothels, either under the guise of legitimate work or at least sex work under humane conditions. There have been reports there of wealthy Western businessmen paying to rape and kill young children. There have been reports in the U.S. and abroad of women being locked in hotel rooms, drugged intravenously, and having their clothing stolen from them so that they cannot leave their hotel room. They are then forced to service men indefinitely for artificially low prices in order to pay off an arbitrarily defined "debt." This is all recounted in the last article below.

In the United States, thousands upon thousands of Asian "massage parlours" operate, staffed by illegal immigrants who are strictly forbidden to provide sexual services to any non-Asian men who frequent them so as not to blow their cover. People who think they are being hired for legitimate secratarial, au pair, or even stripping gigs arrive illegally, illiterate or at least not speaking the language, totally dependent upon their traffickers, only to get raped and beaten. 52% cannot speak English. In Thailand, women have reported being kept by armed guards in squalid conditions at their brothels. They have, in both Thailand and the United States, sought help from the police only to find that the police force is one of the main customer bases for the pimps, who then bring them back to their brothels. Or they have been considered hysterical since they arrive half-dressed and cannot speak English, and end up in psychiatric wards. While they are enslaved, these women are shipped from city to city continually, sleeping on concrete floors in the backs of massage parlours and often being woken up at four in the morning with no warning, and forced to other sides of the country -- lest any given customer base lose interest in a parlour for its lack of variety of women.

Sex trafficking always operates through the front of a legitimate business, such as these bars you mention. Even if all bars are not involved in sex trafficking, all sex trafficking tends to operate either as a legitimate bar, strip club, or massage parlor, or an organized criminal network with governmental collusion. The burden of proof should not be upon those who feel that the two (sex work and sex trafficking) are related, but those who feel that they are not.

Child sex tourism is a multi-billion dollar industry currently enslaving 2 million children under the age of 18.* Thailand is widely known in the United States as the prime location for this practice. There are frequent stories of pedophiles and traffickers fleeing the United States to seek "asylum" (a phrase not without some irony here) in Thailand, which again shows that being content to remove the social stigma from sex work can have terrible repercussions. Bangkok is one of the primary destinations along the main smuggling route for Asian sex traffickers. Further, no trafficking organizations internationally, except possibly some in Russia, can compare to those in Asia with respect to scale, scope, and sophistication. In the U.S., trafficking operations are usually limited to one- or two-man operations. Most of these traffickers also traffic general male and female laborers into conditions of slavery which are every bit as significant as sexual slavery. We have heard at New College, for example, from the Hispanic, Haitian, and Mayan Indian Immokalee workers in Florida (www.ciw-online.org). In the city where I live, San Francisco, the "yellow slave trade" has been around at least since the 1800's and possibly longer.

I really think it makes no sense to suggest that the potential for exploitation is even on both sides. Although there are isolated cases of sex workers or pimps robbing Western tourists, there is absolutely no ring of Thai women who traffic pudgy white men internationally in order to sap their bank accounts through forced and repeated Cartier gifting. Poor and uneducated Thai women, kathoeys, adolescents, and children really do not have the ability to, via their sex appeal alone, force Asian or Western men to sign away the deed to their house and their children's college funds.

Force is a strong word, and it means something very specific here -- that there is a threat of death through violence, lack of healthcare, starvation, botched abortion, insufficient care during childbirth, or disease. Even if a woman is "successful," and independent, and perhaps persuades multiple johns to support her, there is no reason for any woman's best economic option to put her at a huge (44%) risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, not to mention the risk of violence, kidnapping, or perhaps a simple desire not to sleep with 7-45 men a day (on average). No matter how maligned men who have stupidly involved themselves in sexually dissatisfying marriages, or who have come to Thailand seeking a solution to an Orientalist fetish, may be, there is not even the weakest case to suggest that the disadvantage their blue balls put them at compares to the situation on the end of the sex workers they purchase.

I can envision, and hope we can achieve, a society in which sex work will a healthy part of the cultural life of a country. But the work required to get there should not be under-estimated. It will require radical re-structuring on the level of kinship, global economics, and moral culture -- and would not be quite recognizable in comparison to the world we live in today.

*Here are two obvious, publicly-available examples of girls who have clearly been sold into marriage while under 18. The makers of this website (lifepartnermatchmaker.com) brag that the dock from which their brides (complete with certificate of virginity) leave Vietnam is unowned property so you do not have to worry about being caught.
http://70.85.180.226/~evacom/photo/displayimage.php?album=4&pos=33
http://70.85.180.226/~evacom/photo/displayimage.php?album=4&pos=12

Here is a five-year old blind girl who was adopted out of who knows what conditions, and can play piano by ear. I am well aware that I sound like a late night celebrity voice-over for a Feed the Children infomercial, but I think it is clear that these girls deserve greater opportunities.



If you are interested in reading more, here are my sources:

• Article on the trafficking of women and girls from Myanmar into Thailand
  

• Wikipedia article on sex work in Thailand

• A wonderful, comprehensive, 141 page report by professors at University of Massachussetts, Amherst and University of Rhode Island on sex trafficking in the U.S. as it compares to the international situation


*In short, parrhesia, the act of truth, requires: first, the manifestation of a fundamental bond between the truth spoken and the thought of the perso who spoke it; [second], a challenge to the bond between the two interlocutors (the person who speaks the truth and the person to whom this truth is addressed). Hence this new feature of parrhesia: it involves some form of courage, the minimal form of which consists in the parrhesiast taking the risk of breaking and ending the relationship to the other person which was precisely what made his discourse possible. In a way, the parrhesiast always risks undermining that relationship which is the condition of the possibility of his discourse. This is very clear in parrhesia as spiritual guidance, for example, which can only exist if there is friendship, and where the employment of truth in this spiritual guidance is precisely in danger of bringing into question and breaking the relationship which made this discourse of truth possible.

But in some cases this courage may also take a maximal form when one has to accept that, if one is to tell the truth, not only may one's personal, friendly relationship with the person to whom one is speaking be brought into question, but one may even be risking one's life. When Plato goes to see Dionysius the Elder -- this is recounted in Plutarch -- he tells him truths which so offend the tyrant that he conceives the plan, which in fact he does not put into execution, of killing Plato. But Plato fundamentally knew and accepted this risk. Parrhesia therefore not only puts the relationship between the person who speaks and the person to whom he addresses the truth at risk, but it may go so far as to put the very life of the person who speaks at risk, at least if his interlocutor has power over him and cannot bear being told the truth.

Thus the true game of parrhesia will be established on the basis of this kind of pact which means that if the parrhesiast demonstrates his courage by telling the truth despite and regardless of everything, the person to whom this parrhesia is addressed will have to demonstrate his greatness of soul by accepting being told the truth. This kind of pact, between the person who takes the risk of telling the truth and the person who agrees to listen to it, is at the heart of what could be called the parrhesiastic game. So, in two words, parrhesia is the courage of truth in the person who speaks and who, regardless of everything, takes the risk of telling the whole truth that he thinks, but it is also the interlocutor's courage in agreeing to accept the hurtful truth that he hears.

Now parrhesia contrasts with these different characteristics of prophetic truth-telling in each of these prcise respects. You can see then that the parrhesiast is the opposite of the prophet in that the prophet does not speak for himself, but in the name of someone else, and he articulates a voice which is not his own. In contrast, the parrhesiast, by definition, speaks in his own name. It is essential that he expresses his own opinion, thought and conviction. He must put his name to his words; this is the price of his frankness. The prophet does not have to be frank, even when he tells the truth. Second, the parrhesiast does not foretell the future. Certainly, he reveals and discloses what people's blindness prevents them from seeing, but he does not unveil the future. He unveils what is. The parrhesiast does not help people somehow to step beyond some threshold in the ontological structure of the human being and of time which separates them from their future. He helps them in their blindness, but their blindness about what they are, about themselves, and so not the blindness due to an ontological structure, but due to some moral fault, distraction, or lack of discipline, the consequence of inattention, laxity, or weakness. It is in this interplay between human beings and their blindness due to inattention, complacency, weakness, and moral distraction that the parrhesiast performs his role, which, as you can see, is consequently a revelatory role very different from that of the prophet, who stands at the point where human finitude and the structure of time are conjoined. Third, the parrhesiast, again by definition, and unlike the prophet, does not speak in riddles. On the contrary, he says things as clearly and directly as possible, without any disguise or rhetorical embellishment, so that his words may immediately be given their prescriptive value. The parrhesiast leaves nothing to interpretation. Certainly, he leaves something to be done: he leaves the person he addresses with the tough task of having the courage to accept this truth, to recognize it, and to make it a principle of conduct. He leaves this moral task, but, unlike the prophet, he does not leave the difficult duty of interpretation.
--Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth


/////

So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death.

To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.