Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
IMHO, a largely homosocial society, which Japan is, is not the same thing as a society of gender apartheid,
I don't know if Japan has gender apartheid or not. (IIRC, I put a question mark after the word "apartheid.") But it seems to me that almost everybody in positions of power in the state and economy in Japan is male. That suggests to me that women are subordinate in the hierarchy. Apartheid is one kind of homosocial organization. It's best to acknowledge that possibility rather than blithely talking about homosocial organization as if there's no possible downside. (In theory, there could be an egalitarian homosocially-split society. Has that ever been seen in practice?)
unless you consider PEN-l to be operating on the basis of gender apartheid, too.
pen-l suffers from not having enough women, yes. LBO-talk is better on that score, but has some other problems that need not concern us here. But pen-l does not have anything like gender apartheid. There are no rules -- either overt or covert -- against women participating as members. There are no rules against women posting messages. Usually women don't participate, but that's not because of men's power as much as men's obnoxious styles. Most importantly, pen-l has absolutely no power, no influence, no import, as an organization. If we men totally dominated it, it would be like being in charge of something more laughable than the Grand Duchy of Fenwick (with no foreign aid and no Q-bomb). Am I right to think that there are feminist and even Marxist-feminist on-line discussion groups? Feminists -- and women in general -- don't need pen-l, and so pen-l has no power over them. Yoshie:
I've never said that "women being in the (paid) workforce would automatically or naturally or somethingily create gender equality" either -- that's a view that you are unfairly attributing to me, with no evidence whatsoever.
let us now recap old messages: Yoshie had asserted:
It will be nice if Iran will get developed into a homosocial
but gender-egalitarian society.<<<<< that would be "nice," but I replied.
with one sex controlling the state and the economy, who do you
think will dominate? being relegated to domestic labor has a tendency to "divide and rule."<<<< Yoshie replied to this:
The female proportion of Iran's labor force has gone up, from 20%
in 1980 to 33% in 2004. Give it a couple more decades, and it will be close to Japan (41% in 2004) and the USA (46% in 2004). <<< I responded:
being in the labor force isn't the same thing as being in power. In
the US, feminists had to fight to break down the walls set up by the old boys network and still haven't succeeded completely.<< then Yoshie responded:
No, but women need their own sources of income aside from what men
bring in if they are to have more bargaining power within families and communities, and getting into workplaces outside homes brings women together with other women and men, which is a better political terrain than household labor that is often solitary in a country above a certain level of economic development.< in this tennis-like game, it seems to me that Yoshie totally ignores issues of power. It seems nothing but the old "feminism of the 2nd international," in which the automatic processes of capitalist development liberate women. I keep on bringing up issues of societal structure and power. I don't deny that "automatic" changes in the labor market create _possibilities_ for women's liberation. But as I said, it requires women's actual struggle to realize those possibilities. -- Jim Devine / "But the wage of sin don't adjust for inflation. It's a buyer's market when you sell your soul." -- Jeffery Foucault, "Ghost Repeater."
