Taking a Marxist Sledgehammer to Mad Men and the Problem of Transactional Sex
by zunguzungu
To the extent that we take freedom as the ideal form of political and economic justice, it’s hard to define justice as anything more than people’s right to choose what to do with their labor and their commodities and their selves without external compulsion. When people dispose of their property freely, classical liberalism tells us, justice has been achieved. Marx thought this was bullshit: under capitalism, he argued, laborers are not only forced by a variety of silent mechanisms to sell their labor at exploitative wages, but the very system of property was a means of rendering those without property un-free in a very particular sense. It wasn’t that wage laborers were slaves, exactly; certain kinds of choice certainly did exist. But their freedom to choose was so basically and systematically limited to a particular set of crappy choices that talking about the “free market” was a cruel joke and a means of making people un-think the kinds of coercive systemic processes that were actually in place.
It occurs to me that this distinction is useful if we want to think about whether the au pair in this weekend’s Mad Men was raped or whether the sex was “merely” transactional, and what, exactly, that distinction might mean. In a variety of important ways, after all, the difference is totally irrelevant, and we need to start with that: she had no interest in having sex with Pete except insofar as he made himself unavoidable, and in that sense the sex was clearly coerced. His strategic and unscrupulous use of the power over her that the situation gave him certainly allowed him to commit what was, clearly, a violent act. Again, as clearly as possible: Pete committed an act of violence on her and she was the victim of an act of violence, one which committed by him.
Rape, however, is a legal term, not an ethical one. And in a legal sense, some forms of unethical violence are allowed while only some are not. Which is why I’m struck by how the language of “transaction” (and the fact that the au pair consents in an important sense) can only function to legitimize the violence that Pete deploys: arguing about whether or not she consented — whether she freely chose to enter the transaction with him — simply makes the many silent forms of coercion he uses on her disappear from view. After all, when Pete forces his way into the apartment and kissed her, the fact that she puts her arm on his and kisses him back is irrelevant; he hasn’t threatened violence precisely because he doesn’t have to, because she already has no choice. Pete is able to produce a situation where she cannot not-consent: she can’t make any noise in the apartment or she’ll get in trouble with her employers, and given that she is an immigrant of uncertain status, being raped might very well be a less awful outcome than being fired. At the point where the law would require her to protest forcefully, it is true that she “consents” and they have sex, but the point of that scene was that this means precisely nothing. It was rape and she did consent; Pete coerces what kinds of choices she’s able to make such that the choice to not have sex is unavailable to her.
In this sense, the fact that putting the burden on her to vocally “not-consent” can only vindicate him (while making it next to impossible for her to do the same) has to be a judgment on the legal system and the theoretical justification for it, not on her. And dramatizing a situation where a character consents to be raped shows us what that the legal language of “consent” (and the implication that sex is a commodity we freely choose to transact in) functions to render unthinkable, the manner in which a system of silent coercion works to legitimize what was — by any standard — a violent, vicious, inhuman act. For Pete, violence is a protected privilege: he would never be accused of rape, then or now, because not only the act of allowing him into the apartment but the fact of not having yelled “NO!” (or something) could be (and would be, depressingly) taken as inarguable proofs that she didn’t not-consent. And putting the burden of proof on the accuser to show that the transaction was unfree only causes the fact that practically no transaction could be free in these circumstances to become unthinkable, while the silent force behind Pete’s explicit statement that she owes him something disappears from the discourse.
In that context, talking about consent as if it matters is really just a way of vindicating the rapist, and making the impossibility of the victim’s dilemma appear to be her own fault. Which is why, just as Marx argued that free labor is, in a capitalist system, a contradiction in terms, the same reasoning would force us to think about the ways “consenting sex” is, in a system of radical inequality and both implicit and explicit coercion, just as impossible. Yet it’s important that the ideal disappears in neither case: Marx wasn’t against “free labor,” he argued that the system as it then obtained was nothing of the sort as a first step towards figuring out what actual free labor would look like. And to observe all the ways that sex in the world of Mad Men is always at least a little bit like rape is precisely to observe the difference as crucial, to maintain the ideal of non-coercive sex as a way of navigating toward it. Acknowledging the silent coercion implied by her consent, after all, is precisely how we reach a point where we can call it rape, thereby to think about what would be necessary for consenting sex to not be rape.
I ask this question in a completely honest, non-snarky tone: Is there a reason to use a Marxist sledgehammer instead of a feminist scalpel?
After all, it’s not like feminists haven’t discussed the problems of consensual sex in a rape culture for a few decades now. And it’s not like the writers of Mad Men aren’t aware of that literature, based on the interviews and extra features…
Maybe, maybe not. I’d be delighted to be told in what ways a feminist scalpel can be more precise; do you have a specific sense of what is lacking? I don’t think I need to specifically defend the use of Marxist terms of analysis, since what I’m trying to do is connect the two, not replace feminism with marxism. In fact, part of my interest in this line of thinking is my sense that Marxism actually provides a really nice theoretical toolkit for thinking through these kinds of questions. An awful lot of Marxists have been feminists and vice versa, and I think there’s a naturally affinity in some important ways; both, for example, might be seen as rejecting the notion that “ownership” is a natural or sufficient basis for thinking through problems of justice (whether the thing being owned is the means of production or a woman’s sexuality)
I also think the phrase “rape culture,” already misidentifies the problem by making it a “cultural” problem rather than a question of power. Not that feminists haven’t provided some of the best analyses of the ways that gender inequality is produced from structural causes, of course, but that sort of thing is what Marxism does best, and for which the toolkit of concepts provides a lot of assistance: what causes Pete to be able to rape with impunity isn’t a question of attitudes or prejudices or whatever, but is a question of who has power over who in what situation. And in this case, the question of what kinds of rights people have over their and others’ sexuality is already a product of a particular liberal discourse on property, something Marxists have spent a lot of time critiquing.
So…a cultural question isn’t a question of power?
I think what might be giving Buster pause, and me too, is the disclamatory effect of calling your own fundamentally feminist critique a “Marxist sledgehammer.” As if it were somehow over-the-top (or new) to notice that the rhetoric of consent implicitly places the burden of preventing their own rapes on victims of assault.
Misnaming your critique subtly rhymes with “I’m not a feminist but” disclaimers. I say own it.
I am a feminist! I am a marxist! I am a feminist marxist! I am a marxist feminist! I am large! I contain multitudes!
I’ll give a more nuanced answer after I’m done teaching and after I finish grading these papers, but for the moment, that will do.
Natalia got most of the point that was behind my question. It’s not just the failure to name your work as feminist that confused/irked me. Rather, it was the failure to acknowledge the long line of Marxist & feminist analyses and the decades of intellectual, political, and community work around the issues of rape and patriarchy. In fact, I imagine it was precisely this work that made that scene in Mad Men possible.
I’ll stop there and not indulge my dark side with any sledgehammer jokes.
“failure to acknowledge the long line of Marxist & feminist analyses and the decades of intellectual, political, and community work around the issues of rape and patriarchy.”
I find myself bemused. In a short post that sort of vaguely cited one person and talked about one tv show, I have a responsibility to do a lit review? I mean, I’m delighted if my omissions provoke someone like you to come along and tell me who said it better, who I should read, etc, but failing that, is it really helpful to criticize a blogger (of all people) for not having produced the proper hat tip to the proper people? In a completely honest, non-snarky tone, I’m confused: what purpose does that gesture of acknowledgment accomplish that its absence would be such a “failure”?
A follow up post is on its way, btw.
I don’t think this was a “you must be aware of all internet traditions” thing, Aaron, but please understand that there’s a long-standing problem of feminist thought being ignored until some dude Marxist comes along and says the exact same thing in a more longwinded way, at which point it’s celebrated. Anything that smacks of that, however unintentionally, is bound to touch a nerve.
Look, I can sympathize with that reaction; 95% of everything written about Africa comes from people that don’t even begin to suspect the decades of scholarship they’re ignoring, and issues around white employment/emplotment of “native” knowledge are a big part of what I’m writing about. But look at what Claire Potter did to Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist who has been celebrated for having pretended to have invented the wheel:
“Venkatesh’s heroic view of himself as a “rogue” academic depends in part on everything he has written being new and fresh, which it is not, particularly when you consider that he is writing about Chicago, one of the most intensely studies cities in the country. And while some of his more academic work might be path-breaking, his desire to be seen as roguishly cutting edge in this book causes him to be self-serving in ways that are more than borderline unethical. For example, he fails to acknowledge any significant work on black poverty that preceded his own, except allusions to contributions in the field by his advisor, William Julius Wilson. One thing a knowledgeable reader with even light acquaintance with his field will see is that nearly all of Venkatesh’s insights about the role women play in the informal economy of the Robert Taylor Homes can be found in Carol Stack’s All Our Kin, originally published in 1974. Nowhere in the book (there are no footnotes and no bibliography) is the work of this path-breaking feminist anthropologist mentioned; nor do we see any acknowledgment that Black feminists like Johnnie Tillmon have been theorizing the condition of Black women on welfare since 1970. One might also point to the work of anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown or historian Annelise Orleck. There is no reference to any memoirs like Doreen Ambrose-Van Lee’s memoir of growing up in Cabrini-Green (another Chicago Housing Authority project), Diary of a MidWestern Getto Gurl; or reference to accounts of black urban poverty by sociologist Elijah Anderson and journalist Alex Kotlowitz.”
It’s the names and titles that take the wind out of his sails. And if I were saying “the exact same thing” as someone else, please do enlighten me! I’m not trying to claim any prizes here; I wrote that post because I’m interested in the question, and I used the thought-tools I had ready to hand. And if there really is someone who said the “exact same thing” as I just did decades ago, I’d love, love, love to know about it. But without offering specifics, it just sort of feels like I’m being accused of pulling a Venkatesh without actually having done so. Will get to “rape culture” in a second, though.
Catharine MacKinnon would be an obvious place to start, e.g. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.
Nice. Even available on googlebooks.
I wrote that post because I’m interested in the question, and I used the thought-tools I had ready to hand.
Look, Natalia is saying it all better and more promptly. But I’ll add this: what if your only thought-tools were a sound knowledge of Newtonian physics and basic arithmetic? Would you just use those, or would you look for more appropriate tools?
What I’m getting at–and, again, Natalia has already hinted at it–is that there is a tendency to see work in Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies as basically derivative of the “real” important thinkers. Hence, when one comes upon the problems that these fields have been tackling for nearly four decades, there’s no compulsion to read up before entering the fray. In other words, I didn’t list names and citations because what you were overlooking wasn’t a particular topic, but the entirety of a field of intellectual study and political action. This seemed particularly ironic as Mad Men, as I see it, is a (problematic) representation of its period refracted through the lenses of feminist analyses, among other things.
Agreed, Buster. I named MacKinnon off the top of my head, but your comments, Aaron, made it sound as if you couldn’t quite believe that anybody before you had taken on the problem of defining rape through “consent,” when it’s been such a central issue in feminist thought since the second wave that it’s almost pointless to cite.
It’s as if you were saying, “Oh, so people besides me have problematized authorial intention? Name some of them!” Where, oh where, to begin?
The defensiveness and disbelief with which you demanded citations, more than the original post, suggested a pretty significant lack of familiarity with feminist history. I’m not saying you can’t casually weigh in on the feminist implications of a tv show you happen to be watching — of course not. It was the suggestion, implicit in the post and borne out in the comments, that you pretty much figured that feminists had never thought about this that really rubbed me the wrong way.
I wrote a defensive response, but I’m not going to post it now, if only because I know better than to argue when I’m accused of being defensive. I’ve read what you’ve both said, and I’m trying to learn from you. But I will say this: the kindness of giving me a name and a citation sent me off to read MacKinnon and learn from her; the accusation of bad faith gave me precisely the opposite reaction.
Aaron, you seem to feel besieged. You use “accus[ation]” to describe our responses twice in one comment. But I think I’ve been pretty careful, actually, to diagnose rather than accuse. The diagnosis was relative ignorance of feminist theory; I stand by it, and as far as I can tell, so do you.
Ignorance in itself is no big deal. Nobody has read everything. You’re not well versed in feminist theory; fine. I’m not well versed in analytic philosophy, and I don’t really think of that as a personal failing. It wouldn’t stop me from writing some rambly blog post about Hilary Putnam, either. But I don’t think I would feel moved to claim that I had found the fundamental flaw in analytic philosophy.
Let me sum up what you’ve done.
-With the “Marxist sledgehammer” title you suggested that your reading (with which I basically agreed, by the way) was both new and kind of extreme.
-Then you argued that feminism had totally failed to consider something that feminism is always considering.
-When this was pointed out, you responded with apparent disbelief that there might actually be a whole body of feminist scholarship out there that had addressed an important question or two.
-When I named Catharine MacKinnon, but also pointed out that your demand for names repeated a classic antifeminist gesture, you responded with yet another classic, the “you know, you feminists would get a lot further if you weren’t so antagonistic and shrill.”
You’re feeling besieged because you’re our friend, Aaron, but goodness, are we tired of being diminished, however unintentionally, in the precise ways that the gestures listed above diminish feminist scholarship.
I’m pointing this out because, as someone who doesn’t do that much work in feminist studies, you have no particular reason to know that some of the things you’re saying fit a classic pattern of marginalizing feminist scholars, and you’re someone who can get it, who is prepared to get it.
I guess what I’m saying is that, far from accusing you of bad faith, I consider you intellectually honest, so I’m disappointed to see these antifeminist tropes come out of you, and I’m flagging them precisely because I think that, given some context, you would reconsider them — as I hope you will.
I feel compelled to offer my views on this row.
1. I think Buster’s first comment is unfair to Aaron and is rather unnecessarily cutting.
“Is there a reason to use a Marxist sledgehammer instead of a feminist scalpel?”
a) Why the “instead” here? Why not simply ask Aaron to articulate a Marxist-Feminist critique? The scene in Mad Men springs from patriarchal relations in a capitalist context.
b) Contrasting a Marxist “sledgehammer” with a feminist “scalpel” gets what is happening in the Mad Men scene wrong (we need to see how Pete’s patriarchal actions are articulated with the capitalist context). Also, I think Aaron’s was a humorous/jokey use of the word “sledgehammer” (perhaps a nod to the caricaturing of Marxist critique).
2. The notion of a “rape culture” is too glib and, in the U.S. context at least, sets off rather unfortunate connotations of cultural essentialism. Aaron is right to critique it because it does not engage with history, mechanisms, power.
3. I don’t know Natalia beyond her blog, but I have enjoyed reading her. And yet it does seem to me that she is often too quick to read Aaron uncharitably. I say this only because I saw too much of it in graduate school. Natalia’s tone comes across as too prosecutorial when it comes to Aaron. It could be something in Aaron’s tone or (personality), but it may be helpful to your continued collaborative work to name it — if it exists.
4. I agree that Aaron should have offered a feminist-Marxist critique. I think the first comment did, though, “poison the well,” at least a little bit.
But then again, I just watched Dr. Phil…
Elijah, this is in no way a row.
I don’t know how Aaron feels about it, but speaking for myself, I find the idea that there is anything but the warmest collegiality between me and Aaron kind of hilarious. If I push on his ideas at times, it’s only because I know he’s not interested in doing slipshod work. I don’t do it frivolously, and I don’t think there’s anything uncharitable about pointing out the very real problems that arise from privilege. These are not personal attacks but intellectual reservations, and in general I think our exchanges are pretty civil.
This debate, as it is, is more or less over for me, and was from the moment, and to the extent that, it became about me. That’s not a statement of anger or rejection; I’m going to take everyone’s comments about how I represented my argument in the spirit with which they were offered, as an important matter for reflection, and far more as an implicit compliment than an attack. But if I don’t see it as a useful topic for conversation, it’s only because the hardening of rhetorical positions that almost invariably follows when the subject becomes “this is what privilege does to how you see the world” tends, in my view, to detract rather than add to that important process of reflection that a conversation should foster. I want to hear what people have to say about what I’ve written, but engaging with what I (perhaps inevitably) see as their misrepresentations of what I meant to say is not helpful, at least to me; I can look with a certain detachment on what I’ve said, but to the extent that the conversation becomes a critique of something deeper (which, at a certain level, it is, but which it also has to), I lose that detachment. However well intentioned, then, it’s very difficult to be “diagnosed” without taking that as an attack, and I dis-engage at that point precisely because I want to think seriously about the assertion. Which is, again, not a rejection, just my sense that it’s not something I can have a useful debate about without losing perspective. After all, if people read it, then in a certain sense I said it, and arguing about what I meant to say (or what was implied) doesn‘t get us anywhere, even if (as is the case in a few places here) I still disagree with the reading itself.
But I do want to add, as clearly as possible, that it’s the personalization of these kinds of disputes that’s the problem, and in that sense, the last thing that should come out of it is the sense that an intellectual conversation has become a personal argument. I look forward to Natalia and Buster telling me exactly what they think of whatever it is I’m going to do with MacKinnon’s fully baked version of whatever it was I had barely popped into the oven; if nothing else, reading her has convinced me that what I was trying to do (argue that Marxism is a good way to do Feminism) really is an approach with legs.
(For example, MacKinnon’s use of a structural understanding of lynching as an analogy for rape is really interesting, precisely because it doesn’t fall into the trap of thinking of rape as simply an expression of the misogynistic brainwashing people receive from Maxim magazine or whatever; it is, instead, a very complex expression of misogyny, mediated far less by the desire to hurt women than to ensure a uninterrupted supply of sex, the same way lynching was not about genocide but about procuring and disciplining massively exploited labor, a kind of violence subordinated by the desire to preserve so as to exploit. In that sense, it‘s a nicely Marxist intervention into an over-simplistic conception of “rape culture” that often still obtains, in that it renders ideology as an instrument to an intuitively understood end, something much more complicated (and useful) than the “culture-as-blindness” paradigm, by which people believe the things they do because their culture teaches them to and forces them to. But the real power of that move, it seems to me, is that understanding rape as the kind of exceptional violence that lynching was, in the Agambean sense, allows us to understand better why it is officially prohibited while normalized and rendered banal in all sorts of subtle every day ways. It‘s necessary, but has to remain unspoken and officially prohibited (which is why Pete will be disciplined but not punished, for example). In that sense, my dissatisfaction with the way people talk about “rape culture” is not with their assertion that such a thing exists, since it manifestly does, but my sense that the “culture” paradigm, unless very carefully taken apart in a Raymond Williams/Stuart Hall kind of way (as she does), is not nearly subtle enough to describe what is going on.)