Nipposexual 3: Damned if you do...

[imomus]

artysmokes raised a very interesting point in our discussion of nipposexuality yesterday. "Personally, I've never fancied a black woman, but I'd be horrified if someone levelled accusations of... racism at me [for that]," he said, pointing up a simple but puzzling Catch-22: it's both racist if you do fancy someone of another race, and racist if you don't. The only way out of the accusation of racism is to say that race plays no part in your attraction to, or lack of attraction to, the otherly-raced person. And so we get the somewhat absurd spectacle of someone trying to pass off a big tangled knot of historical, cultural and racial features as nothing more than personal attributes. "It's not her Japaneseness that I like, it's the fact that she has lovely dark hair and eyes, and makes great sake teriyaki, and wears lovely kimonos at obon... In the end, though, she's just a unique individual, and all the other stuff is just a bonus."

I often think it's terribly sad that the identity politics movements of the 60s and 70s, which were all about discussing matters of race and gender and using them as criteria for analysing the world, became, in the 80s and 90s, the complete opposite: a way of saying "Shut up!" If Artysmokes risks being called a "racist" for either fancying or not fancying a black woman on account of her race, all his accuser is really saying is "I don't want racial considerations to be an issue in this conversation at all. My use of the term "racist" is the final statement in which race is the structuring concept that I want to hear in this discussion. Shut up about race!" And so identity politics, which in the 60s and 70s was very much an invitation to have a discussion about race and gender, became, in the 80s and 90s, a way to close those same discussions down. What started as an initiative to foreground and spotlight the concepts of race and gender became a call to sweep them under an extremely large and dark carpet. Far from advising you to join the Black Panthers and structure your entire life around racial struggle, today's conservative liberationist wishes to liberate you from the concept of race itself; he will often tell you that race, as a scientific concept, doesn't exist at all.

But wishing don't make it so. Race and gender are sociological facts, whatever they may be to science. After being foregrounded by identity politics in the 70s, they were deconstructed in the 80s. Then, by means of benign-sounding ideological tropes like equality of opportunity, the uniqueness of individuals, the commonality of all humanity, and blindness to race, colour or creed, race and gender were shown out of the hotel lobby, frogmarched down the service corridor, and set to work in the kitchen, out of sight. It's not that these things instantly stopped determining the lives and histories of people. It's just that we didn't talk about them, because we felt strongly that they shouldn't determine the lives and histories of people.

So successful were concepts like "racism" and "sexism" at taking race and gender off the conversational agenda that attempts were made to create other taboos in their image: "rockism" was meant to make rock music go away, and "homophobia" to make either prejudice against gays, or, more sinisterly, gays themselves in all their difference and particularity, disappear into the woodwork. But think of all the neologisms that weren't coined! All the missed opportunities to stigmatize! Nobody has invented the reproach "marketist" for anyone who attempts to say that marketers have specific attributes rather than being "individuals, same as everyone else". No, marketing is "unproblematical" and doesn't need to be deconstructed. Carry on marketing! Nobody calls "businessmanist" those who single out businessmen and say they have unique attributes, either good or bad. You're still allowed to say "I want to marry a businessman" rather than twist yourself up in knots with constructions like "He needs to wear a suit and be savvy with money and go out daily to wheel and deal and bring home the bacon, but I wouldn't say that necessarily means I'm saying he needs to be a businessman. I mean, there are lots of people who meet those criteria who aren't businessmen at all. I'm not being businessmanist about this. You know, scientifically speaking there's no evidence to say that a businessman is different from any other human being. And people who say businessmen are hot are being just as offensive, reductive and patronising as those who say they're not."

In aggregate, then: deconstruct everything or deconstruct nothing. Make everything taboo, or nothing.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I know your busy, busy schedule has prevented you reading all the comments, but I have actually dealt with this question. I don't think you've sufficiently deconstructed women's rights (or in fact the concept of "rights" itself) as they manifest in the West. And yes, I would be happy to see a Japanese daughter brought up Japanese: if a Japanese upbringing produced the kind of woman I'd want to marry, why on earth wouldn't it produce the kind of woman I'd want to raise? Then again, I don't think having mixed parentage would make that possible, however desireable it might seem.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Just to recapitulate what I said on the weekend threads:

* I don't believe that any culture is behind any other culture. We all have different ways of organising things like femininity.
* The idea of "rights" is similar to the idea of "equality of opportunity". It's a smokescreen to hide actualities and specificities: the lived experience of people in that culture.
* Patriarchy is universal in human societies. Sure, some societies have claimed to combat it by legislating a strategic blindness to gender. The question is, did they also legislate a blindness to femininity itself? Are they, in other words, like people who want homosexuals to be treated like hetereosexuals because they hate the idea of difference?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Let me put this another way. You're reading an article about "the new Japanese woman" in a Western magazine. It's about how the new Japanese woman is better than the old Japanese woman, and more different than ever from her Western counterpart. WAIT! DOES NOT COMPUTE! SURELY SOME MISTAKE? The fact is, you will never read this article in the Western press. You will only read an article which assumes a "convergence model" between East and West, with the hidden subtext "West is best" (but of course, a tourist brochure kind of uniqueness is allowed to connote "good difference", mostly confined to an idealised, spruced-up cultural past, UNESCO-protected). So the article probably says "The new Japanese woman is better than the old Japanese woman, more like her Western counterpart... while still preserving her unique cultural heritage, blah blah blah..."

[(Anonymous)]

just for clarity, I'm not reading about the new japanese woman, I'm talking with them, and dating them.
I don't specifically fetishize japan, but I can indeed see why a person would like culuturally japanese women, or at least a larger swath of j-girls than american or european women.

I'm also working in schools and seeing the ridiculously uneven treatment of male and female students by the staff (especially the female staff), and the sometimes nauseating servility of otherwise smart confident women in the face of entirely inept men at the same level in the workplace. yeah, yeah, I'm an outsider, I'll never get it. But if you ask the same women what they think, a lot of them hate it, but feel compelled or are literally compelled to behave that way.
That's the thrust of the japanese daughter question.

[i-am-a-hot-sale.livejournal.com]

I mean, are you actually arguing that it is quite alright for Japanese women to be paid less for doing the same job as Japanese men, or to not even have the option of doing said job?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The fact is that pay inequalities between men and women are currently shrinking in Japan, whereas in the West they're growing. At the moment men and women have more parity in the West, but on current trends that won't be the case for long. Meanwhile we can predict with some certainty that in both societies men and women will have different life experiences and expectations, and that these will be tied up in complex and multi-dimensional ways with their different cultures. For instance, Japanese women not only live longer than Japanese men, but live significantly longer than women in the West. But when did you last hear that Western women's longevity was "behind" Japanese women's, or that this represented a sign that there was a problem with the role of women in the West? That's right, you didn't.

[i-am-a-hot-sale.livejournal.com]

That's right, I didn't!

I've always wished I was a Japanese woman, I don't want to date them, I want to be them.

[(Anonymous)]

You use "growth rates" when they help your argument and then claim that we should only look at "current states" when growth rates don't help your argument. Japanese gender-based wage inequalities have always been way behind the West, and just because they aren't as bad as they've been in the past doesn't mean that everything is hunky dory on a global scale.

If you follow your own advice, just take this wage inequity as part of the system - don't fight it. Women get paid less because that's the way the system works. That's what contributes to their overall feminity. Stop being on the defensive if you really believe Japanese women shouldn't be expected to treated the same as Western women.

I somewhat believe in universal values and ethics (at least for societies claiming to be democratic), but you don't. So stop hedging your bets.

Marxy

But I did!

[(Anonymous)]

'But when did you last hear that Western women's longevity was "behind" Japanese women's, or that this represented a sign that there was a problem with the role of women in the West? That's right, you didn't.'

Actually, these differences are often identified in both the mainstream and alternative (health and medicine) press in North America -- perhaps not specifically with regard to "the role of women" vis a vis health and longevity, but definitely in terms of differences in diet and stress management. North America is frequently deemed to be "behind" in these areas, and plenty of potently critical studies, reports, articles, and columns (and even documentaries and movies) negatively compare the overall health of American women with that of women in other cultures.

Of course, some of these net effects could be the result of cultural practices that Western women find to be discriminatory and would therefore want to take the good that they like (e.g., a healthier diet) without taking the possibly oppressive elements that make that good effect more likely to occur. For instance, the fact that married women in Japan may be denied opportunities to work outside the home would result in lower levels of job stress or commuter stress, and such women would not feel compelled to eat high-fat, high-sugar junk food "on the go" because they would have the time to shop at multiple stores for the freshest food and spend time preparing it. This can be seen as a relative good, or a good at the expense of another good (for example, more freedom to choose a lifestyle or career, if that's what they desire). If Japanese women were encouraged to play sports, could that not result in another opportunity for increased longevity? They could be even healthier than they are if they!

The point is, every culture has strengths that are not directly comparable with those of another culture. Maybe women in Japan are healthier but less happy, overall, about the role of women in their country. (I wish to make this distinction: Not less happy with their lives, but with their perceived opportunities.) Maybe women in the West are less healthy but happier with their developing parity with men in terms of opportunity.

It seems that you may be suggesting that because you enjoy the company of Japanese women, there is nothing to criticize about their role in society. It seems that you are saying that you like Japanese women as they are, thankyouverymuch, and any changes, regardless of whether they come from within Japan or are part of a "Westernization" process, will only muck up your ability to be attracted to Japanese women. That sounds kind of like a short change for them.

Also, is the desire for parity between men and women inherently "Western"? Should Eastern women (and African and Arabic women, for that matter) shun developments in increased opportunities for women and children because they are tainted Westernizations? Perhaps, on those grounds, women in Kuwait should rescind their (recently won) right to vote?

And finally, I know that someone pointed this out, but no one seems to have answered: Why does nipposexualism (or nipposexism, as I'm sure some would say) exist? What are the specific characteristics of a Japanese woman that make some men want to date them exclusively?

[(Anonymous)]

The Tuareg are matriarchal. The boys have to cover up and the women bang the drums and sing the poems!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that. Interesting.

American Indian tribes were at least partially matriarchal in nature, especially the Algonquin tribes, if I'm correct. When Huron couples married the husband went to live with the woman. There are also some herding tribes in the Himilayas where women practice polyandry, not to mention the numerous African tribes in which the females pick the males for husbands. The Lovedu in South Africa are especially matriarchal. Historically speaking, many cultures in Southern India were also matriarchal, and I think one still exists in Kerala. In Ghana, the tribes are matriarchal in terms of how lineage and inheritance is passed down. The Mosuo people in China are also matriarchal.

W

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

* Patriarchy is universal in human societies.

I hate to correct you on this, but there are a handful of naturally ocurring matriarchal cultures still alive in the world. There always have been. Pre-christianity, there were more and they were larger.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

I know I wouldn't be keen on my 12 year-old daughter having sex with businessmen for money, but then again, I'm businessmanist.