phlogma

Notes on Catherine MacKinnon, “Pornography: On Morality and Politics”
264
In contemporary industrial society, pornography is an industry that mass produces sexual intrusion on, sexual access to, possession and use of women by and for men for profit. It exploits women’s sexual and economic inequality for gain.
This understanding of the reality of pornography must contend not only […]

Notes on Cheshire Calhoun,“Standing for Something.”
[Against the background of some contemporary conceptions of integrity as a virtue, Calhoun will argue that this virtue, whatever private merit it may have, is in the end a “master” social virtue not only because of its deployment of so many other virtues but because of its critical role in […]

Notes on Virginia Woolf and Otto Weininger
In the October 2, 1920 issue of The New Statesman (p.704), Desmond MacCarthy, writing as “Affable Hawk”, reviewed Arnold Bennett’s just published Our Women. MacCarthy mentioned in passing, and somewhat in support of Bennett’s views, Otto Weininger’s Sex & Character, which first appeared in English in 1906. (A book […]

In Woolf’s story, “A Society”, from the early collection, Monday or Tuesday (1921), a group of young women set out to investigate and evaluate the world by forming “a society for asking questions”.
Clorinda says,
…We have gone on all these ages supposing that men were equally industrious, and that their works were of equal merit. […]

Notes on:
Virginia Woolf, A Room’s of Our Own.
[Paragraph, not page, numbers appear in brackets.]
Chapter One
[1]
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of […]

Notes on:
Carole Pateman, “Defending Prostitution: Charges against Ericsson.”
[See also Ericsson on prostitution.]
561-2
Feminists do not see prostitution as unacceptable because it distributes benefits and burdens unequally; rather, to use Ericsson’s language of inequality, because prostitution is grounded in the inequality of domination and subjection. The problem of domination is both denied by and hidden behind Ericsson’s […]

Notes on:
Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes.
3
The element of indeterminacy due to androgyny is the exception, sexual identity is the rule.
4
“Mixity” is the state of being governed by both principles. [It points to a universal bisexuality. Cf, Aristophanes (in part), Fleiss, Freud, Weininger, etc. But Agacinski’s concern is largely with mixity external to the individual […]

Notes on:
Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes.

21
Nature gives the two; cultures invent a multiplicity of possible variations of this duality. Humans are very imaginative in front of the sexes.
[Weininger asserted that even nature gives us the two in a vast multiplicity of variations: No two sexed individuals are sexed in quite the same way. Sex, […]

Notes on:
Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes.
[Agacinski, in this chapter, critiques Simone de Beauvoir. She does so, in our view, with considerable accuracy. Beauvoir is complicit, like J. S. Mill before her and many since (Susan Miller Okin, in particular, here, since Agacinski mentions her by name), in buying into a central doctrine that has, […]

Notes on:
Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes.

61
What is really universal in a logical sense…is…the fact of being sexed: all humans are either ‘men or women.’
62
…abstract egalitarianism affirms the irrelevance of sexual difference
and is untenable in many areas including judicial and political.

63
…the problem is to know at what level of abstraction a category is theoretically or […]