Professor Zizek’s article that has recently been published in Russian Times with the title Sex in the modern world: Can even a ‘yes, yes, yes’ actually mean ‘no?’” provides a sound framework for rethinking on the impasses of nowadays feminism. At the end of the article, Lewinsky’s statements as referred by the Professor, exemplify the main theme of the #metoo movement. This theme is typically as follows: there is always a “strong” man on stage … either a famous businessman, or artist, actor, TV commentator, a man with a career and wealth or so … and the campaign is typically aiming to judge the man’s using his power on women for sex.
For cases in which the allegations do not match the (criminal-legal) definition of “sexual harrassment” an alternate term, that is, “sexual misconduct” is being used. This points to the fact that the current legal framework is unsatisfactory… In order to reach criminal judgment in modern criminal justice systems, the indictment is sought to be clear and selective in the text of the criminal law, that is to say, the “crime typification”. There is no room for comment. As we have recently seen with the accusations targeting the famous conductor of New York Metropolitan Orchestre, James Levine, the use of the term “sexual misconduct” which corresponds to a gray area outside criminal law aimed to harm the suspect’s reputation, professional life within the norms of “customs and traditions“.
It is the feminist strategy operating in this gray area that Professor Zizek points out its contradictions: Monica Lewinski’s declaration, “ yes, I might as well wish for it, but he should not have used his seductive charm and attraction with me , follows the same line of reasoning with the fundamentalist Muslim’s argument: “ yes, the male may have not held himself, but the woman should not use her charm by opening her head.“
The feminist trouble here, however, is not limited to #metoo campain. We need to think about a much larger scale derailment in the history of feminism, that is, about the transition to the “second wave” in the ’70s. And the change in Monica Lewinsky’s own view on her adventure with the president is to be read as a typical example of this general derailment.
Lewinsky Event
In 1998, Monica told on the phone her friend Linda Tripp, a Pentagon employee, about her sex adventures with President Clinton, two years ago when she was 22 years old intern at the White House. Then Linda Tripp makes Monica’s gossip to Lucianne Steinberger Goldberg … Lucianne Goldberg convinces Linda to record her phone conversations with Monica. “Do not let her twig, and do not worry, this is not a crime here in our state” she tells Linda, who is in doubt. Linda believes that. Linda encourages Monica to tell her all the details. Monica comes to the neck, telling her the slightest details such like the President’s cigar box, the stains on her blue dress and so on. These recorded phone conversations take 20 hours!
Coincidentally, a woman named Paula Jones had been accusing Bill Clinton that he harassed her when he was in Arkansas. Lucianne Goldberg is determined to give Bill Clinton a good lesson, which she thinks he has a bad habit to walk to every women working for him. She again persuades Linda Tripp to bring Monica’s phone records to Paula Jones’s lawyers. The lawyers tell Tripp that she might be prosecuted of hiding evidence should she doesn’t carry the voice records to prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Poor Linda believes it (she is once again deceived). She goes to the prosecutor, gives the records and tells the prosecutor everything she listened from Monica … Of course, the evidence obtained illegally is not accepted as evidence (“the fruit of the poisonous tree becomes poisoned”). So the prosecutor can not accuse Bill Clinton for the content of illegally obtained records, but he accuses him of lying to the court (under oath) because he said he did not sleep with Monica. The court and the public then began discussing whether the events in question occurred in a horizontal-sleepy position or in a vertical-awake position … Bill Clinton pays Paula Jones $ 850,000 to settle the deal. The case falls. That day to day, Paula Jones keeps saying “Bill harassed me” and Bill Clinton continues to say “I did not harass her.” As for Monica, he says, “I did not sleep with that girl, but we may have had some inappropriate contacts”.
As seen from the polls, the US public has not considered the incident as “scandalous” and has not been interested so much in the case. On the people’s base the commonview was more like “ what happened between Bill and Monica would not concern anyone other than Hillary “.
Hereunder we list the events in chronological order, that can neither be claimed as related nor unrelated:
- 1991 – According to Paula Jones’s assertion, Clinton harassed her on this date. But Paula has not yet filled a complain, she was waiting…
- 1992 – Lucianne Goldberg publishes her book “Madame Cleo’s Girls”. The book tells the story of a Parisian mom who sells escort girls to famous and rich men.
- 1994 – Paula Jones sues President Clinton on May 6th, only two days before the prescription deadline. But this complaint had not yet reflected in the press and public sphere.
- In the same year director Barry Levinson’s Disclosure film is released. The film is about a strong businessman who is accused of harassment by a woman she works with.
- Also in the same year Lucianne Goldberg publishes the book “People Will Talk”. The book is about the stories of women who use their sexual attraction to scale up in New York society and intellectual circles. With this book Lucianne Goldberg seems to harbinger todays #metoo campaign.
- 1995-1996 winter – Monica Lewinsky did internship in The White House.
- 1997 – Paula Jones’s lawyers resign from the case filed against the President . Their reason is that Paula has rejected an attractive agreement offer from the President. The case is undertaken by another law firm.
- Meanwhile, director Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog is filming.
- 1998 – On January 9, Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog film is released. The film talks about a sex scandal involving the US President in connection with a young girl.
- Lewinsky’s “scandal” breaks out in the days following as fabricated by Lucianne Goldberg.
Linda Tripp to whom Monica told about her adventure with the President is a Pentagon employee. Prior to Pentagon, Tripp had served in the military intelligence unit at the Fort Meade military base in Maryland. During the Bush era she use to work in The White House too.
Lucianne Goldberg who orchestrated the “scandal”, the film-maker Barry Levinson, and Monica Lewinsky, they all come from Eastern European and Russian immigrant families. We have already told before, in the 86th paragraph of our previous article that Russian and Eastern European immigrant families have a special position in the American establishment embedded by the neo-con and left-wing Trotskyist ideology (we have also explained that the deep Russian hate is actually a family heritage in this institutional order. Of course, every 22-year-old girl who has recently graduated from college in the USA would not have the opportunity to practice internship in the White House. It is said that Monica’s parents put her fellow family friends in charge to arrange her internship at the White House.
There are speculations and conspiracy theories asserting that, from Paula Jones’s accusation to the arrangement of Monica Lewinsky’s internship in the White House, the involvement of the young girl with the President, the eruption of the scandal, all this chain of events, were designed to break the resistance of Bill Clinton and to put pressure on the President for running some operations in Middle East politics. Such claims neither support nor negate the problems we deal with here about feminism. But still, they should all be kept in a corner of mind. The main thing is to note all claims without getting caught up in escamotage and to catch the intersection points in the chain of events on which the claims are based.
University of Washington Department of History lecturer Prof Andrea Friedman points to the fact that, Monica initially did neither describe the incident she lived with the President as “harassment” nor as “inappropriate behavior”. Monica was 22-25 years old at that time (1995 – 1998) and she does not see sex as an “abusive” relationship between the sides, but on the contrary, she sees it as an “equalizing” relationship. Monica says that the sexual sharing of two mutually-desirous people suspends the social status and power gap: In an interview she gave to Time magazine, she maintained that “mutual desire, intimacy, and pleasure could transform the “president and the intern” into “a man and a woman.””
But the media ignores that way of understanding of Monica, it even censors…
So here we will ask this question:
Shall we consider Monica’s understanding of the event as an “equalizing experience when she was 22 years old – as she told to Times magazine at that time?
Or shall we evaluate it as an “ abuse as she shifted now when she is 45?
Which attitude is to be considered as the true feminist consciousness?
And if the feminist view has historically evolved from the first attitute towards the second attitude, what is the momentum behind this change?
Conversion of Feminism to its Opposite
In the first period from the beginning of the century stretching till the end of 60’s, demands for equality in the public arena and in law, economic opportunity, were in the forefront. Power relations in private life were not questioned – except struggling against women’s economic dependency, the function of free home labor as part of capitalist labor exploitation, etc.). The feminist project of this period saw the emancipation of women and sexual liberation as parallel and interdependent processes. Malinowsky’s anthropological studies, Charles Fourier’s notion of chastity in marriage as double prostitution, Engels’ arguments about parallelism between family and private property, Freud’s libido theory, Vera Schmidt’s kindergardens, Wilhelm Reich, even the Frankfurt School and Marcuse, evaluated sexual repression as the spiritual background / encoding that operates class society, discipline for work, and affirmative ideology. According to this approach, sexual repression is the key momentum for the reproduction of patriarchal morality in the family. This repressive encoding, on the other hand, enables fascist regimes to mobilize and discipline masses for social mobilization in times of crisis.
The only positive consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution was that it taught this “repressive hypothesis” to the public. The wars heavily decimating the male population and the obligation for women to undertake all kinds of work outside the house also contributed to the advance of enlightenment of Soviet woman.
Prior to 1917, Kollontai and a group of women issued a women’s magazine called “Rabotnitsa” in Petrograd, following Lenin’s instructions and by Inessa Armand’s financing. Among other women who were organized around the magazine, the leading names such as Konkordiia Samoilova and Vera Slutskaia were covered after 1917. These women were never mentioned again in the Bolshevik and Socialist official history. Despite the resilience of the retrograde Bolshevik wing pioneered by names such as Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, the notion of sexual liberty in Kollontai’s rhetoric and the need to foster a revolutionary pedagogy as administered by the minister of education, Lunatcharsky, were still embraced among the lower rank revolutionaries and in the daily life of youngsters in the cities. Kollontai’s inabllity to restrain her envy to Inessa Armand and Krupskaya and her bad habits like pilfering ballerina Mathilda’s dresses had been used as a pretext for her exclusion outside the ruling – so-called revolutionary – elite. Lenin and Trotsky always stood distant to Kollontai. In 1923 she was appointed as the ambassador to Norway, being put on the shelf.
During the Great Purges of 1933 and 1937, the periods of Statist restoration eliminating the retrograde-Bolshevik gang, Kollontai had not been prosecuted and managed to survive thanks to her clean and consistent position kept since the pre-revolution times. She died a natural death In 1952, at the age of 80, in Moscow.
Another important point to note about Kollontai is that, despite Lenin’s attempt to sabotage Robert Grimm’s peace plan, before the Zimmerwald Conference on January 11, 1917, she was resolutely defending peace. In this period, Kollontai stood also distant from Luxemburg + Liebknecht couple. Lenin and Trotsky’s tensions with other women of Kolontai’s “Rabotnitsa” magazine in Petrograd, whose names have been erased from the history are still in darkness and this is still a topic to be investigated by historians.
After the Soviet experience, Western societies could only reach this level of consciousness in the 60’s that brought feminism together with socialism, sexual freedom together with the search for a new pedagogy.
Right after, however, when it came to the 70s, another retrogade process called “the second wave “, but the “wave” in the sense of a strange ramification and disintegration within the feminist movement with a strange enclosure reflex has begun. This breakthrough – in particular – has started with some names who although are said to had come from within the organized public struggle but actually out of facts which are incompatible with the “usual course” of events. To understand the weirdness here, let’s first look at the second wave feminist mantra: “the private is political”
The initial form of the mantra was “The Personal is Political!“. It was then transformed into “The Private is Political!“. The claim was: power relations are deeply embedded into everyday life. Individuals reproduce these relationships, because they can not reach the awareness of their actions in the flow of everyday life. In order to break this vicious cycle, it is necessary to speak about and share daily practices and experiences. This is the way feminist awareness will rise, out of which a resistance strategy can be developed. The personal experiences shall be told in closed meetings in order to discuss possible counterattack strategies. The common strategy against male dominance can be organized by its finest details in such closed, intimate meetings…
It is controversial who first used this mantra. It was first written in a 1970 dated text by Carol Hanisch, but both Hanisch himself and Shulamith Firestone, Robin Morgan and other leading names such as Gloria Steinem they all refuse the term was their own invention as a show of modesty, claiming that it had had a long history in group meetings. Even if we accept their humble refusal, we can still see that the term had been abstracted from psychoanalysis in a way to also reject psychoanalysis.
The movement is based on the lessons they share in sharing personal experiences in closed discussion groups they called “Consciousness Raising Groups (CRG)”.
The problem is that the “privacy” here is not promoted under the auspices of an authority which doesn’t identify itself with the problem and equipped with negotiation rights with the “outside”. The group is configured for closed-circuit sharing, and there is no any neutral i.e. a non-feminist agent.
To see how and why this became a theoretical and practical problem, let’s look at the usual-Hegelian-legal logic of private sharing of personal information: within the relationship of an attorney-principal or doctor-patient or teacher-student relationship, the former bears a public duty and thus, as a result of this public duty that s/he is kept responsible for protecting privacy (of the principal; patient; student and so on). This pledge of privacy is legally warranted to protect the objectivity of the relation of the principal with the “outside”, that is called as the prohibition of identification with the case“. This rule, contrary to what is believed, is not in the interests of the counterpart, but it is in the interests of the principle! Privacy, then, can produce solutions to problems that are only under the mediation of a subject who is not a part to the problems expressed, able to preserve the objective view.
Consciousness raising groups, however, are not equipped with such a “non-feminist” (which strictly doesn’t mean “anti-feminist”) mediator bearing the right for negotiation. Therefore, the dialectical logic remains suspended and these shares become ineffective. Eventhough nobody intends “to make someone other” (using that stupid nowadays idiom) sunderances become inevitable.
The consequence is pathetic:
First, black women leave themselves saying “our problems are worse” – In 1973 they found National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). Then, lesbians are separated from heterosexual feminists.. then black lesbians are separated from black heterosexual feminists by saying “our issues are different than yours”… In a few years a large number of organizations pullulate as cell division geometric proliferations, female, lesbian, black, indian etc. organizations, each describing their own issue more or less differently than others – Combahee River Collective, ERAmerica, Women Employed, 9to5, Women’s Action Alliance, Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights (RCAR), National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), National Conference of Puerto Rican Women, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU), Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, Inc. (BPW), National Association for Female Executives (NAFE), American Association of University Women (AAUW), National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW), Young Women’s Christian Association of the U.S.A. (YWCA), National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), Church Women United, National Council of Catholic Women, and many others…
Now let’s look at where we came from:
When it comes to the end of the 70s, this landscape resembles the “fellow countrymen associations” in backward Middle Eastern countries rather than idealist progressive political organisations. In cases where certain races (black, Indian, Hispanic, etc.) are accumulated in certain regions, feminist associations differ according to district too. It even appears some women’s organisations advocating the ban on abortion for religious reasons.
This point has come after the common “civil disobedience” movement which -just a decade ago- had encompassed all the black, the worker, the unemployed, the student, etc.
When we are wondering how this conversion was proceeding in the face of perception manipulations, we rather see Gloria Steinem on the scene more than Carol Hanisch, symbolizing the mantra of “private is political! “.
Steinem, a very beautiful, attractive woman, was a living example of perfect female image, which, according to Rachel F. Moran’s statement, was emotionally independent, able to manage her own way of life, single, free, as she had always been seen with different and attractive men. Steinem was an idol, the object of desire that divides and breaks the feminist movement. These divisions were so grave that some black “feminist” women have even argued that Steinem’s defense of abortion was aiming black genocide.
Facing Steinem, we again see this familiar name as the object of hate of feminists, the founder of anti-feminist organisation Pussycat League standing on the opposite edge of the Women’s Liberation Movement Lucianne Steinberger Goldberg! Goldberg’s “Pussycat League” says something similar to what Hülya Avşar (a mediatic figure in Turkish popular culture) has recently said: “woman’s weapons are already and only effective within the existing patriarchal order and its private sphere.“.
As we have seen, while feminism was one of the main organic components of the dissident social movement covering a very broad spectrum, linked to the mantra of “civil disobedience” against the Vietnam War, racism, sexism and ultimately against capitalism in the previous period, is then trapped in the paradox depicted by the hereunder visual: the so-called “second wave” women’s “victory” for getting recruited in the army and the Pussycat League making fun of this situation …
Let us note that as the anti-feminist Goldberg, the prominent names of such second wave feminists like Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone and Robin Morgan, they all come from immigrant families of Russian origin who hold a key status in American establishment.
According to Prof. Andrea Friedman, the second wave feminism’s “private is political!” has also differentiated and classified sexual practices either as humiliating or non-abusive for woman. Prof Friedman points out the practices serving male pleasures are considered to be unilateral and therefore unapproved.
So what if man claims to be “passive” in such a “unilateral” and therefore “humiliating” practice (e.g. unilateral oral sex as in the case of Lewinsky)? Furthermore, what if he even claims of being abused? Bill Clinton said he was passive. What’s more, Monica told that she greatly enjoyed the President’s “unilateral” pleasure. This is called “cunning of reason” (Hegel) or “wrong account returns from Baghdad” (Turkish idiom meaning that a mistake, sooner or later, shall definitely reveal itself): Feminism has turned into its opposite by judging and categorizing bedroom practices and has come to the same position as anti-feminism attributing fix roles to manhood and womanhood. With that impass extending the scope of harassment into “customary law”, it has also made Bill Clinton (“world’s most powerful man” in the expression of Monica) a victim of harassment in Oval Office.
Thus, when we look at this line of feminism beginning in the 70’s from the end of the 60’s, we can understand that Monica’s own views evolution toward the current #metoo view was the consequence of her “chastening“.
Private cannot be politicised
Prof Andrea Friedman detects this lugubrious transformation but can not explain the falsehood in the doctrine. The first part of Professor Zizek’s article is about this point:
It is impossible for the parties to obtain a full and definitive consent for sex. Direct and explicit invitation to sex never works. The reasons for this are not simply our practical habits or cultural and moral conditionings. The theory that explains the structure of sexual identity confirms this impossibility: sexual identity is based on lack. A state of being “opposed” to the opposite sex is not completed when one is combined with the “opposite” sex. It is an incompatible opposition, that is, an “antagonism”. Their togetherness, the man and the woman, without any pretext such like a forbidden apple, etc reveals the Truth that they both are not completed both as individuals and as couple. For this reason, flirting needs always a mediation of a complement, a surplus, making this lack invisible:
MF+.
The ‘+’ sign here is the extra element that camouflages the lack. Direct invitation to and / or direct approval for sex suspends this camouflage and therefore is nauseous. This is the reason why the logic of flirt always operates through mediations and since it is not possible to obtain any definitive confirmation, it is always open to denial afterwards.
It is therefore essential that the principle of criminal typology, i.e. the assessment of consent be limited to certain rules, legally defined in accordance with clear and specific written regulations. Otherwise, the accusations will expand to include all kinds of interactions between individuals and will gradually transform the public life into a totalitarian oppressive regime. As a matter of fact, the historical and philosophical overlap of the rise of neo-conservatism with the rise of the second wave feminism is obvious.
Again for the same reason the intimate/private area can not be politicized and this false struggle has driven by countless ramifications of feminism and “LGBT +++ …”. This complementary ‘+’ never satisfies the multiplication of gender forms, since it functions as a supplement fulfilling mutual imaginations, in other words, the ‘fantasies’. The reveal of fantasy (the expression of the ‘+’, i.e. its symbolisation) is nauseous, traumatic, since it only functions as a veil to the Real in the unconscious. Thus, in that private / intimate environment of consciousness rising groups, individuals or groupings tend to rewrite new stories seeking to form new particular areas through which to maintain the stability of their identity. As a general rule there is no kind of grouping that raises consciousness. Collective actions, on the contrary, derogate the aggregate intelligence and consciousness. The same goes for consciohsness rising groups: the politicization of privacy, rather than seeking a common denominator, makes its activists more inclined to embrace their fantasies. Let’s remember Professor Zizek’s discussion with Sam Kriss. Messing up psychoanalysis, Sam Kriss relies on fantasies to form a leftists project. The lesson psychoanalysis, however, is exactly the opposite: fantasy shall be traversed. This is a task where one is only able to achieve him(her)self – or at most, with the assistance of a neutral authority to share his(her) privacy. And for sure, group meetings are not the right places for it.
Let’s recall now NARO (Nuri Alço Revival Organization) movement, that stormed Istanbul streets over the years following the Lewinsky incident. The NARO movement was an exceptional warning that pointed to the same fundamental impass of the second wave feminism: we might think of the drug drop that Nuri Alço (*) adds in the drink as the supplement that the flirt game needs to function. In fact, we know that science has not yet invented any drug to turn woman on (if it did, humanity would not struggle to go to the Moon, Mars, and further). But even if the drug has no physiological effect, it may still have a real function as filling the gap for both man and woman. Nuri Alço purrs with pleasure “I am with the most beautiful girls in the city, I think I have the luck of the devil” as he knows by contrast that he does not have the luck, but indeed the lack he needs to substitute for seduction. This symbolic “surplus” (the signifier) that Nuri Alço adds to drink might have also been an invitation for a cup of coffee, a bouquet of flowers, a business card, a cake… that overrides the lack by provoking the imaginary. Because “sexual relationship has no link to sexuality” (Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel – Lacan).
Nuri Alço skillfully uses the flatterer language (both voice and body language) to save that imaginary mediation without challenging to (“feminine”) and this makes him sympathetic to the audiances unlike his mate, Coşkun The Raper (**): Nuri Alço helps the woman play her game while playing his own game. Here is the depth of the NARO movement that is fed from Zizekian philosophy: it aims to restore the flirting game that the second wave feminism has narrowed down by putting new boundaries: it makes fun with the stupid spectator watching the Nuri Alço film with the concern “Oh my daughter, never ever drink anything offered by a stranger” in the head.
“Sexual Violence” which is not Sexual
As a final examination, let’s study some examples of situations where this ‘+’ that protects the identity is disabled. The claim of perfectness based on such a self-identified “identity” perception (as a general disease of identity politics and in particular of feminism) brings with it a search for freedom that suspends every kind of ethical concern. The Viennese sociologist Ramazan Yaylalı investigated this ethical vacuum to associate it with the rising wave of violence in contemporary world, pointing out that this is not necessarily linked to patriarchy.
According to sociologist Yaylali, male violence is only a manifestation of a more general and all-encompassing wave of violence. The main reason is not related to sex at all, but to a general dissociative trend that distorts identity stability. The identity politics becoming the mainstream is far from producing solutions to the problem, it is rather the symptom of scant leftist policies on facing the problem. I’ll expand the scope, starting with the following examples:
“Daniel and Katja are a young, educated couple who have lived together for a long time and come from prosperous Austrian families, both of upper-middle class. Daniel is appointed to work in Graz branch in the bank he works. He rents a house and settles there. Katja goes to Graz often in weekends.
The couple have always been honest and open to each other.
Katja sleeps with a man he met on a weekend when he was not going to Graz, in a night club she went to enjoy. This is her first sexual adventure ever since he met Daniel. Katja is not comfortable because Daniel and she were always open and honest to each other. She gets permission from her work, goes to Graz right on Monday and tells Daniel what happened. She tells Daniel that she would also like to continue together should he gets over this incident.
Daniel wobbles… they try to continue for a while. Katja’s narrative creates lot of question marks in Daniel’s mind. He asks Katja details. Katja, who wants to maintain her “faith and honesty”, gives full and complete answers to Daniel’s questions.
The relationship breaks down in the following weeks.
After this, there are some changes in Daniel: the starts working out in a gym, pursues a much more disciplined way of life. However, in addition to these positive changes in his body, there are some drawbacks in his mental health: Daniel comes from an intellectual and left-tendency family culture, totally aloof and against xenophobia. But one day when a group of black tourists passing their way through Mariahilfer Street, “what are these apes doing here?!” he says. Friends around him stand aghast …“
Daniel is a European who does not even imagine using violence against women and has grown up in a way that has embraced the morality of full respect for women’s free choices. The passages with Katja seem to follow an extremely civilized communication pattern. According to sociologist Ramazan Yaylalı, this “civilized” trait obscures the deeply functionning of another kind of violence: it is a symbolic violence that goes with “honesty” within the descriptions by Katja. The details Daniel asks is the continuation of this symbolic violence. The discipline that Daniel has raised in his private life, is facing this violence with another kind of violence against his body (that we totally appreciate this, but…), this has not been enough and another exhuberance of violence in the form of xenophobia has emerged. The following event similarly exemplifies the mechanics that transforms the symbolic violence into open violence:
“Cintia and Gabriel are both the children of well-established and educated families in Vienna. They have been together for a long time since university years. Despite good agreement on their shared interests and ways of life, in the 7th year of their relationship Cintia realizes that she wants to have different sexual experiences. She has long been crush on a Gabriel’s close friend. But she also wants to continue with Gabriel “if possible”. As they are always open and honest to each other, Cintia finally chooses to be open explaining her desire to Gabriel: she suggest Gabriel to have a threesome with his friend. Gabriel refuses the idea saying that he does not even want to think about something like that. Cintia then proposes to split. In the face of Cintia’s determination, Gabriel rethinks the concept … and convinces himself that a variety of sexual desires and experiences come to pass for a couple who really loves each other. And he accepts Cintia’s proposal.
The event proceeds like Cintia’s wish, but for Gabriel it happens under different emotions and high tension. After the event they stop seeing each other. After a while Gabriel disappeared. The lost proclamation is granted. Examination of his social media accounts reveals that Gabriel has gone to Syria by communicating with ISIS (Islamic State). Gabriel’s father tries to reach his son, goes to Syria to look for him. He finds his son, but he can not convince him to return. No further news received from Gabriel.“
These particular examples reveal that we are faced with a problem that accounts neither for unemployment, nor capitalist exploitation scheme and even neither for sexual hunger. We are talking about the geography of Europe, where young people can travel the world with their unemployment salary, where the possibility of starvation or death of a simple disease are completely eliminated.
The Germanwings disaster also showed that we were faced with such a unique kind of violence. The so-called experts, the bourgeois psychologists, have related the phenomenon to the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz’s depression (a non-sociological, individualist explanation). But again, when we examin the depression of Lubitz, who again comes from a high-educated upper-middle-class family, having no any ideological, religious, political affiliation, we can see that we are faced with a very grave sociological condition behind the seemingly depressed young people. It turned out that he bought an expensive gift, a new car, to his ex-girlfriend, Kathrin Goldbach, who left for about 6 months before hitting to Alpine Mountains and that she was pregnant during the incident.
On the one hand, while Europe was receiving immigration from the 4th World, it’s also exporting thousands of young people going to fight and die in ISIS ranks to the 4th World. The inadequacy of reactionary feminism was shown as it exhibited simple xenophobic defense reflexes against an unfounded perception of manhood based on another unfounded conception of womanhood (remember: every gender identity is based on lack) instead of providing conclusive thoughts and politics on the problems created by these two immigration phenomena. Hereunder we see German and Scandinavian women who joined #metoo campain complaining about the attacks of the migrant men. Although they tend to avoid using a direct racist rhetoric, their statements like “the ones who came from archaic cultures where women’s rights are absent shows that their mental state was already on the shores of racism:
When we look through all these explanations, it is then necessary to discuss whether the reactionary feminist movements like the #metoo campaign do aim to produce solutions or on the contrary aim to aggravate the problem.
Let’s roughly scan the sexual assault news in domestic press: If the victim is a college student, this feature is over-emphasized on the basis of her (or him, but mostly her) plans for her bright future, the department she studies, how she could be beneficial for society and so on.. feminist project should question what this imaginative provocation is for and its associations for discriminated, excluded, desperate population.
On the attacker side of the incident there is usually a male, such as a minibus driver, who is presented as “an animal that can not reign back his sexual drive”, usually an unemployed or half-unemployed, tramp who couldn’t have seen a university even in dreams.
As we have seen in the video above, the European version of this attacker type is the migrant.
Are these attacks called as “sexual assault” really sexual?
Professor Zizek already wrote in the 90s that the rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslavian Civil War were not linked to “sexual drive” and that these attacks were actually aiming at attacking the privacy values of Muslim women, that is, they had a symbolic meaning. This notice also applies to Turkey today. Many events seen as sexual assault are in fact attacks against the values of life, a form of life in which the attacker subject himself desires to take place in but excluded. For this reason, defense strategies based on “female” identity will not work.
(*) Nuri Alço: 70’s and 80’s famous Turkish cinema actor. He tricks women with his sweet language, bring them to his nest, add drugs to their drink and have sex with them. Women shout, cry and get ruined the next morning when they understand what happened to them.
(**) Coşkun The Raper: Nuri Alço’s contemporary and his films’ peer, another bad character. He doesn’t use refined and mediated methods like Nuri Alço, he directly attacks and rapes whenever he finds the opportunity.
Engin Kurtay
engin_kurtay@yahoo.com