Peter Tomaz Dobrila on Tue, 17 Jun 1997 12:06:08 +0200 (MET DST)


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Re: <nettime> Translation: The vagina is the boss on internet


Hi there!

> I just wanted to note briefly, that there is hardly any statement that I
> find more insidious and offensive, when not outright simplistic and
At the end I wrote i.e. - in example. So I didn't mean just that, there
is others personal shit as well. But you can't blame it on the whole world
populations.  

> Feminists are reponding to *institutional* sexism, and fighting against
> sexism constitutes neither the airing of dirty laundry nor the promotion of
> sexism itself.   Many people are feminist before they even have any
> "partners" to be "angry" about -- for example, my first feminist awakening
> involved the way that *teachers* treated me in math and science classes in
> my pre-teen years.  There's no bitterness over boyfriends there; rather, it
> is justified anger at a world that assigns females a presumption of
> incompetence while assigning males, at the same time, a presumption of
> competence.   The goal is to break down barriers and promote equality, and
> I think that you badly misrepresent feminism as it is known to the great
> majority of people, both male and female, who identify as feminist, by
> insisting otherwise.
Alright. You don't like *teachers*. I don't like some of them either. You
can identify as you like. Feminist is O.K. I'm Marsian, two heads and
wings, little green creature. But on the other hand I'm Peter Tomaz
Dobrila and nothing else. Please to meet you Rebecca. Give those teachers
names. Some car drivers are even worse. So what to do?
 
> That said, I did actually have an objection to the circulated "Vagina"
> post.  In my opinion, as well as my best understanding of the nature of
> biology and human sexuality, the female body part that is most analagous to
> the penis is the *clitoris* rather than the vagina.  It is a fairly common
> complaint among feminist scholars (and has been for a while, in particular
> in reaction to Freud's terrifyingly absurd assumptions about female
> sexuality) that a focus on the vagina, rather than on the clitoris or the
> vulva in general, looks at female sexuality from the point of view of a
> penis in search of a hole.  This is not to insist that the vagina is
> irrelevant to sexuality for all women, but rather, it is to make the
> argument that, if you are going to reclaim space for women, and then
> identify women with the sexual organ where their sexual response is
> generally considered to be located, the clear choice would have been
> clitoris rather than vagina.
Great! Sigmund Freud was a wanker. But debate about penis, vagina and
clito is unfamiliar to me. Don't we have more in our bodies? Toes, liver,
heart, brain, arms, legs, feet, head, kindeys, eyes, ears, smell,
voice, touch, etc. Isn't it all involved in our whole behaviour, work,
sex, etc.? 

Best,
Peter

   

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