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

[tarandfeathrhim.livejournal.com]

In the future there will be cars fuelled entirely on liberal guilt...

...and I'll be the first one driving.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Did you know they just isolated the "businessman gene"? So it's not okay any more to criticize them for making a conscious lifestyle choice; they just can't help it, the poor things. Lay off them!

[(Anonymous)]

momus, if you're still reading these replies, you have the patience of the grand canyon. I haven't been so patient as to read many replies. Still, I brazenly repeat what I imagine someone else has said.

It's not the race per se that your interested, I think. After 3 generations of integrating socially if not genetically in the states, many full blooded japanese people become the generally pudgy, boorish, unkind people that make everyone else dislike america. They're still japanese racially, but culturally, they're kansas. I doubt you'd feel more attracted to this "japanese" person.

The problem is that your choice of cultures to fetishize means you've selected a country where womens rights are a not really what they are in your country of origin or residence.

Another appropriate question I think is whether you would want your imaginary future daughter to be raised as a japanese woman. If that seems like a flippant or ridiculous question, you're not thinking hard enough about it.

[tarandfeathrhim.livejournal.com]

I hear that next they're working on "guy with awkward moustache who hangs around local indie venues and buys three red bulls a night gene".

[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..."

[encyclops.livejournal.com]

I don't even know what circles we're talking about anymore where "I want to marry a businessman" isn't a really strange idea to express. Maybe it's just a peculiar leftish-American idea that people want to marry a person they fall in love with, and in other countries and socioeconomic situations men still marry mostly good cooks who make them horny and women still marry good earners who make them comfortable. From where I'm sitting I can't really tell which idea is happier.

Anyway, you're starting to sound a little peevish. It seems as though you dared us all to be offended by your sexual predilections, and however halfheartedly we rose to the challenge you are now taking us all to task for it. I personally don't see the point of celebrating or condemning your feelings on the matter; just who are you trying to justify yourself to?

Your evaluation of "homophobia" and the result of the other "isms" seems curiously reversed to me too. Surely the effect of all of those things is to highlight the prejudice, to reify it and foreground it, to lift it from the default common ground of society. It's not that racism and sexism make race and sex taboo to discuss; it makes them difficult to discuss by socially legislating a single point of view. It's perfectly okay to damn someone for whiteness or maleness, for example. Likewise, it's perfectly okay to take you to task for fetishizing Japanese women, but not okay to praise you for it.

Finally: you're still not discussing it, unless it's in the comments which have grown far too long to keep up with. You're just mentioning it, and justifying it in abstract terms. I still don't know exactly why you like Japanese women, just that you do. I assume it's their beauty, perhaps their contradictory nature as you see it, and probably in large part your perception that they represent a culture you're madly in love with.

You can't make love to the entire country of Japan, so you make love to its women. As long as everyone is happy, why deconstruct it? And if you're going to protest its deconstruction, why in the world begin by inviting exactly that?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The reason this topic is so interesting to me (and, judging by the number of comments, to other people) is that it crosses so many of the papered-over cracks in our cultural logic. We're not talking any more about "whether I have the right to date a Japanese girl". We're talking about problems and contradictions within the West's very arrogant ideology about others of all kinds.

Your belief that the stigmatisation of homophobia "is to highlight the prejudice, to reify it and foreground it, to lift it from the default common ground of society" doesn't take into account that the stigmatisation of homophobia might also be the stigmatisation of homosexuality itself, ie of difference. By the same logic, to ban golly dolls may remove an insensitive image of a black person from the culture, but it also removes an image of a black person from the culture. It's worth seeing the creation of new taboos as a part of a project to banish difference and make "the default common ground of society" a bland, samey place where there are women, sure, but they're really men with a twist, and gays, sure, but they're really straights with a twist, and other cultures, sure, but they're really ours with some more exotic scenery.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

The thing is, one can choose to be a businessman or not; one cannot choose to be black, white, (fe)male or gay.

[drpsycho.livejournal.com]

dear momus, i read you since a very short time but i've been very delighted by this your series of posts on cultural and racial specificity.
very insightful, really.
thank you for this opportunity of discussion:)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This point keeps coming up, and I really don't see what it proves. You know, just because they haven't yet found the businessman gene yet, who says it isn't genetic? And just because they may have found the gay gene, who says homosexuality has to be? And just because something is or isn't genetic, who says it therefore is or isn't guilty? All this stuff is changing fast anyway: parents are on the point of being able to choose their children's gender; every transsexual has chosen a gender of destination. As science and globalism open more conscious choices to us, we have to stop saying that choice makes something guilty whereas fate makes it innocent.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What's more, it makes no sense to say "scientifically there is no such thing as race" and "race shouldn't be taken into account because it's scientifically determined (ie genetic)". This contradiction (race is unmentionable because it's simultaneously nothing and everything) matches the banality that everyone is different, yet we're all the same. It's nothing more than an expression of anxiety at the intermediate levels of difference: the levels of difference where "difference really makes a difference".

[(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.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

While we're here, can I just say that MY MOST HATED LYRIC OF ALL TIME is this one, by P. McCartney:

"We all know that people are the same wherever you go
There is good and bad in everyone"

("Ebony and Ivory")

[(Anonymous)]

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

[(Anonymous)]

I think that it is ok to fancy people of other races.

Trevor

[nickink.livejournal.com]

"By the same logic, to ban golly dolls may remove an insensitive image of a black person from the culture, but it also removes an image of a black person from the culture."
I've been following all of these comments with fascination and want to say thanks for providing another thought=provoking forum. By and large, I'm with you on most of the points you're making, but I'm having trouble accepting this trend of thought. Isn't the point about golly dolls and the like that they are representations of (and offensive to) one group but created by another ? Isn't it better to remove that image in order that space be available for the group to represent itself ? I am reminded of a reasonably recent post of yours which indicted the use of western models on Korean and Japanese billboard ads.

[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?

[(Anonymous)]

Awh, c'mon that's a lovely lyric. Lighten up.

[(Anonymous)]

" 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."

yeh, but it was quite important to explain, once and for all, to really thick people, that we are all the same biological machine with minute differences such as skin pigmentation. before that, you had these morons thinking that blacks hadn't evolved from the apes. okay, there is SOME moral policemen stuff in there too, granted, but that inconsequential in comparison with hammering the point in

[(Anonymous)]

it's not as bad as 'I wanna sex you up' and 'don't go chasing waterfalls'

[(Anonymous)]

so you'd be quite prepared to discuss it for 3 whole days on the internet, would you?

-clarky

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Still, some things are more a matter of choice than others. Even if they do find a "businessman gene", it will be more a certain set of motivations and aptitudes, and by no means predestined to wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Similarly rockism; nobody is born for or against rock music. (Whether rockism is a code for straight-white-male privilege/prejudice is another issue.) However, if you are gay or straight, changing to the other sexual orientation for whatever reason is a very difficult matter (and some would say impossible). This isn't necessarily genetic, but it doesn't have to be; the fact that it's difficult to change is enough. Similarly skin colour, ethnicity, and so on.

My point is, people have more control over some things than others, and the more control someone has over a trait or attribute, the more one stands to be judged on it, positively or negatively. These days, praising or condemning people for their skin colour/ethnicity is (thankfully) not on, and the same applies to sexual orientation (at least in the more cosmopolitan places). However, elective lifestyles are not accorded as much protection from judgment.

[(Anonymous)]

I've yet to meet a Japanese women I didn't wish to shake. They look, act and converse like children. They think 'cute' is an admirable trait, without questioning the lack of social pressure for men to be 'cute'. Feminity as the subtle odour of submission, for men who haven't got the guts (flair, imagination and sense of responsibility) to be true dominants, settling for conservative-dominant and culture-dominant. I dislike cute, therefore, because it is such a middle-of-the-road and forgettable thing. It is stuck, stale and the sort of simpering to the male gaze and the male ego (or the nearest approximation they can get of it) that has been doing the rounds for centuries.