ramana wrote:Rudradev, Are the Brett Kavanaugh assault allegations reverse Contra Power?
Ramana, on some reflection I think it is more than that.
If we look at the history of gender relations in the US, there is usually an uprising (by women/feminists), a counter-reaction (by the traditionalists), and then some accommodation or compromise brokered by the Establishment. Then people on both sides of the divide grow progressively more disenchanted with the new status-quo established by the accommodation, and the cycle repeats itself (usually with a new uprising among women).
In the 1920s, after a long struggle by suffragettes, women in America got the right to vote. This was a great victory for the first wave of feminism.
However, there was turmoil in the following decade. The depression era of the 1930s was a very "emasculating" time for American men... long accustomed to being the masters and sole providers of the household, they suddenly could not find employment, so they had to get used to the idea of their wives and daughters joining the workforce for the sake of the family's survival.
Then in the 1940s came WW2: and a time of war, traditionally, is one in which the status of males in a society is greatly exalted. The heroes who fought Hitler/Tojo and saved the world were all men; women were the ones who maintained civilization back home and kissed the soldiers and sailors when they returned. Even though women working in the military-industrial complex of America had contributed hugely to the war effort (Rosie the Riveter was an icon of those times), traditional gender roles had been re-established somewhat after the war. This continued through the prosperity of the 1950s, when a return of the adult male to the sole-provider role became (once again) the norm.
The second wave of American feminism exploded in the 1960s and 1970s, and the fight this time was for equal pay, access to abortion & birth control, and fairness in educational & economic opportunities. We are all familiar with the feminist thinkers of this period: Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Susan Sontag etc. Along with the sexual revolution and overall cultural upheaval of the time, the second wave of feminism transformed the US much more irreversibly than the first one had.
The reaction to this came in the late 1970s and 1980s, particularly among young men who were high-school/college age at the time. Brett Kavanaugh (whether or not he actually did what he is accused of) is a product of those times, when sexual conquest and domination of women (newly admitted on many college campuses) became a sport among a certain class of educated white men.
American society's response to this reaction, of course, depended on the perceived offender and victim. Middle-class-plus white, Judeo-Christian men could (as always) get away with murder. Non-white male on non-white female sexual assault was mostly ignored; if mentioned at all, it was cited by leftist cultural critics complaining that economic inequity sustains patriarchical oppression in immigrant/minority communities. And of course, a Non-white male even vaguely suspected of sexually assaulting a white female could expect jail or worse.
Then came the accommodation by which a "cold peace" was achieved between Second-Wave Feminism and the traditionalist counter-movement that opposed its demands for reform. The accommodation (1990 to present, approximately) was socially engineered by the American Establishment, and took three forms:
1) The broadening of the Feminist Movement towards OTHER issues than conflict between two binary genders. This included the birth of Third Wave Feminism... the same ideologies ("reversing the gaze", etc.) proposed by de Beauvoir, Greer and others were redirected towards a whole range of other groups perceived to be "oppressed". These included racial minorities, LGBTQ/non-binary people, minority groups perceived to be oppressed in other countries (e.g. Palestinians), animals (as with veganism and PETA), and most recently Muslims.
This diversion (which came along with the establishment of "gender studies" departments in Universities and the transmission of their ideas to the media) served two purposes for the American state. One, it *diluted* the strictly male-female dialectic of feminism by turning its energies towards other targets. Two, it created constituencies for Wilsonian intervention by the American state... the very same "leftists" in academia and media who decried American imperialism in Vietnam, would now favour American military intervention on the behalf of Bosnian Muslims, East Timorese Christians, Iraqi Kurds, etc. etc. Sometimes the American deep state would use these narratives to justify its interventions... in other cases (e.g. Tibetans) it would make the right noises and do nothing.
Muslims in the USA have very cleverly latched themselves (via organizations like CAIR) on to the train of eternal victims in this modified/accommodated "third-wave feminist" narrative. They have re-branded things like hijab, burqa, and female-genital-mutilation... ghastly practices that serve only to oppress women... into symbols of cultural uniqueness and pride. These days, their "allies" in the feminist left come rushing out to protect them from "Islamophobia" at the first sign of criticism. Meanwhile genuine reformers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tarek Fatah are reviled by the feminist left as pawns of the "alt-right". This is how successful the "broadening of feminist narrative" has become.
2) The delivering of the occasional bakra. Every now and then, the old-school grievances of second-wave feminism had to be sated by throwing to the wolves some iconically powerful male figure who oppressed or exploited women. The best example of this was Bill Clinton. If a sitting President of the United States could be impeached and forced to endure public humiliation for what he did to a young female intern, then obviously nobody was above the Law... and the Law of these great United States, ensuring liberty & justice for all, was on the side of gender equality. The days when John F. Kennedy slept with any woman of his choice any day of the week were long gone. Or so women were expected to believe.
3) A bright, happy campaign of media spin to advance the narrative of how successful women had become in every sphere of life. This extended from many "first women to do ____" stories in the soft-news, all the way down to popular culture movements like "Chick-Lit" and "GRRL POWER" with their own poster-children in the spheres of music, television, and films. As Oprah Winfrey, a key figure in this campaign, would often say to her constituents: "You go, girl!"
In essence, the "accommodation" of second-wave Feminism amounted to a series of concessions and perceptional/rhetorical shifts aimed at
managing the wrath of this movement, and containing its potential to disrupt long-standing male-dominated power equations in the United States.
That went on from about 1990 until the mid-2010s. But all the time, disaffection had been brewing under the surface, on both sides.
Notwithstanding the bakras and positive spin, women began to question if things had really become all that much better for them. They still made only 82 cents for every dollar a man earned in the same job; there were still glass ceilings that applied to their careers; and even paid maternity-leave could not make up for the years of career advancement a woman would lose (vis-a-vis her male peers) while raising a child. Abortion rights were constantly under threat, despite Roe v. Wade. The final straw, of course, was that many men continued to behave as they had in the late '70s and '80s (Kavanaugh's school days)... from Harvey Weinstein to Blake Farenthold, across the entire Liberal-Conservative spectrum, a great many individuals in positions of power repeatedly abused it to express sexual dominance over women. Whether Hollywood mega-stars, national-level politicians, university professors or night-shift supervisors at the burger joint, nearly every woman in the workplace had a story to tell about some man who had leveraged his authority to sexually exploit or humiliate her in some way. And that was the beginning of #MeToo. No longer would any "statute of limitations" be deemed to apply for crimes of sexual assault, in the realm of public discourse if not the law.
On the other side, different groups of the pre-feminist Establishment were nursing their own grievances. Traditional Christian Conservatives opposed abortion, but also felt that in general a woman's place was in the home and an LGBTQ person's place was in the closet. Men's Rights groups coalesced around a number of topics... mainly opposition to divorce laws, which almost always gave child custody and visitation rights to the ex-wife while the ex-husband had to fork over alimony/child-support. As the 2000s became the 2010s, many male movements began in specific opposition to what they felt was an excess of power in female hands; from Gamergate (protesting women in the video game community) to MGTOW (protesting the advantages of women in long-term relationships and marriages) to Incels (protesting how hard it was to get a woman to sleep with them willingly). All of this bled into the wider arc of neo-conservatism represented among sections of the Trump electorate: Alt-Lite groups like the Proud Boys advanced a strong counter-feminist narrative in addition to their overall championing of White, Judeo-Christian/Western Identity.
The match to this tinderbox, of course, was our friend Donald Trump. The Access Hollywood tape (of "grab them by the p___y" fame) did not swing the election in Hillary Clinton's favour. However, it has left a psychological scar amongst American women... not just leftists and feminists, but all American women, that will never be erased. Even conservative women were appalled by that, and on a mass level, it has been difficult for them to reconcile their support for the Republican Party's other cultural and political causes with such clear evidence of misogyny. It was the beginning of what is likely to unfold in the 2018 mid-term elections: huge, unprecedented numbers of women running for elected office, indeed from both parties.
And in Kavanaugh, all of this manthan has found its focal point. The Kavanaugh accusations have become a litmus test for American women: how committed are you to the cause of your gender, to the feminist movement that brought you the rights you have as a citizen, vs. any other concerns (cultural, social, economic, political) that you may have? This is where the stand will be made. It may not be exactly fair to Kavanaugh (after all, there were probably thousands like him who behaved the same way or worse towards women at the time)... but the very notion of what constitutes a sex-crime has been redefined by the #MeToo movement, and the man is not seeking some ordinary job, but lifetime confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice. The counter-feminists, meanwhile, have realized that the Kavanaugh issue has the makings of a permanent precedent... if this man can have the nomination snatched away from him over allegations of sexual assault from 35 years ago, then from their point of view, no man is ever safe from being targeted in the same way.
So a battle royale is in the making. From our point of view we should recognize that we have no dog in the fight. Second-wave feminism was not our enemy. It was the American Establishment's social and political engineering to create an
accommodation between second-wave feminists and their opponents, that resulted in the emergence of viewpoints toxic to India and Hindus in US academia and media... the deliberate diversion of this movement's focus away from women's rights to "oppression" of Dalits, Cash-meerys, Rohingyas, etc. etc.
In fact we should welcome the #MeToo movement and the Kavanaugh spectacle... because it re-orients the feminist movement away from all these self-serving distractions imposed on it by the American interventionist deep-state, and returns the focus to where it originally belonged.
So sit back, grab some namkeen, and enjoy
THAT was the comedy moment. Naxalites anyone?
