Speakable antifeminism.
Antifeminist discourse often has to be implicit today because one of feminism's largest successes has been in transforming public language about the place of women. In a fundraising letter for his Christian Coalition organization ("Women, Aug 26"), Pat Robertson wrote that
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians (qtd. in off our backs).
Robertson's letter was widely quoted in the news media as an example of outrageously extreme views. What was unspeakable in the publications that made so much fun of this quote was that Robertson's antifeminism was not unacceptably extreme, simply unacceptably phrased and outspoken. Talk of women's "proper place" in public culture has become almost as unspeakable as openly racist talk of Blacks, but this change in form does not mean that racism or sexism is any less present. Television commercials continue to typically propagandize the image of "housewife and mother," just as Hollywood continues to usually cast Black characters as comics, sidekicks, criminals, or cannon fodder.
Twenty years ago, Robertson's letter would have gone unnoticed among other diatribes against "bra burners" and "strident lesbians." That his seriously intended letter was ridiculed reveals an ongoing discursive failure, a gap between the customary language of fundamentalist culture and the language that has become acceptably speakable in public culture. To say that America should return to "traditional family values," an undefined catch phrase that evokes images of dad at work and mom in the kitchen, is acceptable. To explicitly say, as Robertson did, that women should only be conservative mothers and housewives has become unacceptable outside of a small and shrinking audience. In public discourse today, traditional antifeminist values must be promoted in a covert, unarticulated manner.
Ideology.
In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman suggests that underlying the level of discourse that Foucault studies is ideology, specifically a set of "dominant fictions" that are based on an unconscious, Lacanian "symbolic order." Ideology, she argues, is extradiscursive and unarticulated, emerging into texts only metaphorically and symbolically. Since it is unconscious, the symbolic ideology of a particular text can contradict the logic of the text's conscious discourse, so that, for example, a feminist can unwittingly accept or even promote an idea whose ideological symbolism is antifeminist. False memory syndrome and satanic abuse discourses are packages for ideologically antifeminist metaphors of this sort.
Both fables (satanic abuse and FMS) are new versions of two old cultural mechanisms--linked packages for reactionary symbolism that I call "scapegoating" and "nostalgia." Nostalgia is the yearning for an imaginary ideal past when "things were better" than now. Scapegoating blames all the imagined degeneration from that past on a group or thing that supposedly did not yet exist "back then." In the context of today's "culture wars," satanic abuse is an unusual form of scapegoating in that the blamed groups mostly do not themselves exist, but instead metaphorically stand for a host of supposed ills. Accused parents who claim their grown daughters suffer from FMS, on the other hand, describe themselves in ways that wrap them in the nostalgic mantle of the perfect 1950's nuclear family, when "we" were all white and monoculturally middle class and when the host of supposed ills (divorce, gays, abortion, or child abuse) supposedly did not yet exist.
I encountered a good example of both scapegoating and nostalgia in a graduate course in women's autobiography at New Mexico State University. Nancy Mairs's anti-Cartesian memoir Remembering the Bone House was one of the assigned books. Mairs's own multiple sclerosis causes her to reject the usual memoir of intellectual life, instead integrating body and mind by writing the story of her body, or "bone house." For example, she describes her depression in terms of the revelation that her mind's unhappiness can be cured physiologically with an antidepressant chemical. Sex is bodily, and Mairs discusses her sexual experiences in detail. She says that when she was five, a teenage boy rubbed his penis on her vagina; she was "puzzled and aroused," but forgot about it at the time because she had no words to describe what had happened (20). She tells about being raped by a former boyfriend in college, and how she convinced herself that it had meant nothing because it had happened to her body, not to her (167). And she details her extramarital affairs, including some lesbian ones--telling us that she had and still has an open marriage and that her husband knew.
Class discussion of Mairs began when a student said that Mairs was depressed because she had not been born again in Christ. She went on to say that Mairs's sexual sins (promiscuity, infidelity, homosexuality) were caused by the trauma of being abused as a child. She did not get much argument (other than from me) because the class as a whole disliked Mairs's unapologetic sexual frankness. Someone said that the class was engaging in an ad feminam attack, and the born again student agreed, citing the old excuse Christians use for their bigotry--that we should "hate the sin and love the sinner." Several students in the class nodded their heads at this tired hypocrisy. By appealing to their dislike of Mairs, the born-again student got the class to effectively agree with her unspeakable position that only straight, married sex should be allowed. This is how scapegoating works.
For the final class we presented either a term paper or our own autobiography. I know that the head nodders would have disagreed with the born again student's unspeakable positive statement because they were sympathetic when I presented a paper on the autobiographical writings of a lesbian feminist, Dorothy Allison. In her autobiographical presentation, the born again student again attempted to promote the unspeakable, this time through nostalgia. She began by describing her white middle class intact nuclear family, showing us some photos and memorabilia. Then she talked about her experiences as a public grade school teacher, and cried as she described how hard it was to be unable to help all the children she met who had been sexually abused in their (unspoken: poor, broken, presumably Hispanic) families. In short, she portrayed her own Godly 1950's family as happy and perfect, and implicitly contrasted it to the dysfunction of families that were sinful and imperfect. That many of Southern New Mexico's public school students are Hispanic added an appeal to the mostly white class's unspeakable, unconscious racism.
Ideas of child abuse.
It was no accident that both of the born again student's unconscious strategies used discourses of child sexual abuse. Such discourses provide a good environment for unconscious ideological metaphors. While other social issues, such as abortion, are vexed by disagreements over whether they are problems at all, no one disagrees that child abuse is a problem. At the same time, however, the definition of abuse is nebulous and its discourses irrational. "Abuse" covers a variety of maltreatments, but Debbie Nathan notes that beatings (when arbitrarily distinguished from spanking) and neglect are correlated with parental poverty and unemployment, which are seen as racial problems, so that preventing child battering requires people to address unspeakable issues of class and race (Women 117-118). The result is a tendency in child protection discourse to conflate the general "child abuse" with the specific "sexual abuse," ignoring nonsexual abuse.
But sexual abuse, as it actually occurs, is even more unspeakable. The overwhelming majority of child rapes are committed by the child's father, or by other adult male relatives or family friends. Moreover, this intrafamilial abuse is so common "that it seems practically endemic to the family as a social formation" (Nathan, Women 118). To look at the causes of incest is to question the discourses and symbolic ideologies that comprise the patriarchal nuclear family--possibly the central social arrangement of American cultures and a keystone of oppression, sexual or otherwise.
Discourses of child abuse are similar to discourses of rape. In public culture, concern about rape of women by strangers stands in for awareness of the more ideologically uncomfortable problems of wife beating and intramarital rape. At the same time, however, the symbolic ideologies that unconsciously legitimize rape, aided by religious discourses that equate sex with sin and shame, claim that only women who are asexual or at least passive in their desire can be raped. Similarly, the ideologically uncomfortable "child abuse" becomes "sexual abuse," while "sexual abuse" is narrowed to exclude "incest" in order to avoid an unthinkable questioning of the paterfamilias's rule. Roman custom treated children as the property of the father or paterfamilias, who could murder them if they disappointed him. Today such naked approval of rule by physical coercion is rare (prompting Foucault's contention that psychological coercion has replaced threats of death or torture), but it is still very much a part of unconscious symbolic ideology. That ideology, combined again with discourses of sexual sin and shame, has redefined children as asexual and "pure" or "innocent," making it harder for them to resist their fathers' sexual ownership.
While public discourse thus shifts child abuse into the narrow, "apolitical" problem of sexual molestation by extrafamilial, pathological strangers, in the therapy self-help culture, incest has become a supposed bane, the cause for everything from severe psychoses to routine unhappiness. The resulting tension between therapy and the larger public culture has created the specific forms scapegoating and nostalgia have taken in child abuse discourse. If someone's father was a satanist, then that becomes the explanation for his incest, sidestepping any inconvenient questioning of the family institution. If someone's memories of incest are false, then there is no need to ask how such a "perfect" institution as the family could promote harm to children.
One reality of abuse.
My mother, Mary, grew up in the 1950's in an intact Catholic farming family in which the father "disciplined" his children, with or without cause, by severely beating them, rarely with his bare hands. Other relatives incested her. At age sixteen, Mary was sent to a "home for emotionally disturbed children," and was in and out of hospital psychiatric wards seventeen times in the following thirty years. Psychotropic drugs took the edge off her emotional instability, but even on them she still cut and burned her wrists with razor blades and cigarettes, hit her hands with rocks, and only four years ago was beating on her legs with a hammer. Contrary to the current fad in therapy self-help culture, there was no single source, child abuse or otherwise, for Mary's problems. She was abused and beaten, but her brain also suffers from neurochemical imbalances that are exacerbated by brain allergies to various foods, pollens, molds, and chemicals. Her diet, allergy serums, and a new, more effective regimen of antipsychotic medication had essentially cured her before she began treatment to recover memories of incest.
When she was going through puberty, one of Mary's brothers was constantly looking through windows trying to see her naked, pinching her growing breasts and touching her genitals. Like Nancy Mairs, she had no vocabulary to describe what was happening at the time except that he was "teasing" her, and she did not relabel it as sexual abuse until recently. When she confronted him about his behavior a year ago, he apologized, and said "you were a girl, and that's what I thought girls were for." In other words, he had accepted the symbolic ideology that women are sexual chattel. Mary's cousins also thought "that's what girls are for"--she first suspected she had been sexually abused when she began having flashbacks, during physical therapy, of being raped by them.
The literature of marriage obsesses on the transfer of ownership of the woman from father to husband. The husband's ownership is metaphorized in the symbolic ideology as sex, but sex with daughters (a logical corollary at the symbolic level) is forbidden in discourse by incest taboos. In a study of late 19th and early 20th century cases of incest recorded in child welfare agency records, Linda Gordon found that the incest occurred in families with very rigid traditional gender roles, in which fathers incested their daughters as part of the process of making them into "second wives" (254): sex with their fathers was an inseparable part of their housework duties. In Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres, the daughters take over the dead wife's role in housework and nurturing; when they do, their Godlike patriarchal father logically has sex with them to claim a husband's ownership. In Mary's case, she now remembers that her grandfather used her for sex after his first wife (and Mary's namesake) died and again, years later, after his second wife died.
Mary had nowhere to turn. She thought she had committed a terrible sin in playing doctor, so talking to a priest or nun at her Catholic school was impossible. At home, her father beat her for the slightest infraction, while her mother, when Mary spoke with her last year about the incest, said "I guess I was awfully naive." Mary "dissociated" the incest, forgetting it so well that in college she realized that she could not remember a two year period from fifth to seventh grade. When my mother began to look for a therapist to help her go over her flashbacks and discover what else had happened during that time, one therapist told her that it sounded like she had been abused in satanic rituals, and referred her to a specialist. The specialist, Noreen McCarrick, fortunately disagreed with that diagnosis. Using the same methods of trance-state age regression by which most satanic victims recover their "memories" of satanism, McCarrick helped Mary recall rapes by her grandfather and cousins, among other events.
Dominant Fictions.
Mary's cousins and grandfather raped her in part because the symbolic ideology called for it. The same symbolic ideology reinforced her sexual shame and silence, keeping others from noticing anything inconvenient to the prevailing ideology and discourse of "family values." Silverman's book looks at the way symbolic ideology selectively combines with discourses to compose "dominant fictions," comforting stories told to cover up an unpleasant truth. The FMS and satanic abuse fables function as a pair of dominant fictions.
Satanic abuse is an extreme form of the convenient idea that incest is done by evil, abnormal bogeymen instead of all-American people "like us." The satanists are cannibals, infant human sacrificing devil-worshipers who practice orgiastic rituals of torture and sex. The problem with such an approach is that if all the abusers are evil "others," then, regardless of exact statistics, the number of incested women (and men) suggests a nation of evil incestors. False memory syndrome resolves the problem by claiming that repressed memories such as my mother's simply do not exist, and all such recovered memories are the work of incompetent therapists. Child abuse doesn't happen, the FMS Foundation asserts, in intact, white, middle class all-American families "like us," only among those "others" who are less white, rich, or Christian. When Mary finished telling her mother about the rapes of her cousins and grandfather, her mother asked, "are you sure you didn't make it all up?"
In "Truth and Power," Foucault talks about "truth claims," things which are said often enough and loudly enough by people with the right kind of perceived authority that they become accepted as "true" regardless of their actual veracity. The satanic abuse and FMS fables are truth claims about child abuse, and unfortunately they have very little to do with the actual truth of abused children.