Choosing a Path That's Clear

“You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill; I will choose a path that’s clear – I will choose free will.” - Rush

I may be flogging a dead horse here, and I’m sure not many care about this, but I love these kinds of arguments. Bear with me, or just skip it!

I’m still stuck on this post in which Earlbecke brings in words from Bitch Lab to further her own point on societal pressures on women’s appearance. I thought I was done with it, but then my guy bought me a huge plant for Mother’s Day to replace all the plants that have died on me and still sit rotting in their own filth in our living room.

The ungrateful snot that I am, I had the gall to complain, “I can’t make this live. I can’t take care of indoor plants. It’s going to die like all the others.”

“You’re choosing not to be able to make them live.” He insisted.

He’s right. I’m choosing not to read about houseplants, or put them higher on my list of priorities, or research what ails them. Nevertheless, I explained, “But I have no intention of adding plant care-taking to my list of thing to learn, so I will choose to let this plant die too. Then I’ll feel really guilty because it’s a gift from you and Bee.”

“Well then, I’ll take care of it for you.”

I’ll keep you posted on how well that works out!

Both Earlbecke and Bitch Lab suggest that we are not free to make real choices in our oppressed society – I suspect they’re wrong. Now, I know Earlbecke’s real issue is with women having to deal with pressures to look a certain way, and she’d rather not get into the question of freedom so much, but she throws out so many good lines, I can’t just ignore them! She claims to agree with my points, but she also agrees heartily with Bitch Lab whose ideas on this front are antithetical to mine. Curious.

Perhaps Earlbecke just really wants to feel in agreement with people. Earlbecke, you can’t please everyone! I can like you and still think you’re wrong. Geez, you like Mulholland Dr. and you own ferrets. If you lived on my street I’d want to hang out at your place every day. But I still disagree with so many points you seem to be making even if they are tangential to your primary argument.

In a previous post I established that a need to conform to a set appearance dictated by the social group of choice (fashion or feminism) is fear-based approval-seeking not a withdrawal of freedom. I explained the slippery slope being made from influence to force and suggested that we’re strong enough to stand up to cultural influences. But that post just assumes that the claim that we have the will to choose differently when we’re about to put on some make-up is true. I believe it’s true, but that belief doesn’t make it so.

So, for your entertainment or as a sleeping-aid, I’ll endeavour to explain some problems with the view that we lack free will and illustrate how, if we can’t prove the existence of free will or an authentic self, the mere belief in such is beneficial to an anti-oppressive feminist agenda. I’m not containing myself to just discussions from connected posts. I’ll be flying off on my own direction here and there. For those with little tolerance for philosophical musings, I included headings so you can skip to the oppression and feminist stuff nearer the end. For those with a love for philosophy, this might be old hat. I'm just relating my own thought-processes underlying my personal beliefs. This is really, fucking long!


SOCIAL CONDITIONING

Earlbecke says,

“We’re the sum of our biological and genetic legacy, our culture and its history, our families, our friends, our enemies. To argue otherwise is to basically invalidate any anti-oppression work.” Then later adds, “To assign an authentic self is to be resigned to predestination, essentialism, determinism.”

I’m a bit confused that she shows disdain for determinism regardless that her view of human nature mirrors its very definition. In brief, determinism holds the view that "freedom is an illusion since behaviour is brought about by environmental and genetic factors.”

But she uses Bitch Lab’s words to explain further:

Preferences or desires “…carry with them the mark of a structurally oppressive society. That society shapes our preferences and desires. We aren’t free. Our freedom is constrained by the demands of the system.”

An issue I have with this short passage is the leap from “society shapes our preferences” to the conclusion, “We aren’t free.”

I believe we are more than just the effect of culture and genetics, and therefore free to act against these imaginary restraints. We’re more than cogs in a perfect machine deluded in the belief we’re free. I can’t buy that we do not do as we please, but instead do as nature and nurture please. I believe the only constraints that act on freedom are force and ignorance. But just wanting it to be true, or feeling it to be the case, isn’t much of an argument, so I’ll try a bit harder.

If it’s the case that we’re all unable to see real choices because of our oppressive society, how have we been able to work against oppression thus far. People conditioned or brainwashed successfully will be unaware of the brainwashing and disbelieving of their own condition. Having this debate in the first place indicates a profound awareness of the manipulation used by the machine influencing us. How is Bitch Lab aware that we’re all brainwashed if she, herself is able to see the conditioning. Then either we’re not conditioned, or just not all of us are conditioned. When it comes to influences on fashion, once we’re aware of an influence or cognizant of media coersion, it’s short work to undermine it. Once we can see the system and question it, then we’re free to choose to work within it or against it.

I’ve seen marked attitudinal shifts in the past thirty years. Since attitudes change, then we mustn’t all be the direct product of the culture, or else we how could we see the alternatives and bring them to life. The women I’m arguing against here imply that nobody is free. But it seems that we, at least, are standing far enough from the system to see it for what it is. Since some people are able to choose alternatives outside those deemed appropriate by the powers that be, then at least some of us must be operating freely. We’re not conditioned by a culture if we can conceive of not being conditioned, but have independent agency to conceive of difference, even if acting on that difference is uncomfortable.


PROPERTIES OF THE MIND AND BODY

The idea that each of our actions is merely an effect caused by biology and culture, is based on the notion that the physical world operates in a cause and effect manner. But do our minds and bodies follow the same principles? Unlike Earlbecke, I don’t believe we have a soul, but I do believe that thought processes are different than physical processes. Our bodies are predictable. We can guess that a loyal couch potato will be easily winded in a race, and we’ll be right. But we can’t make similar predictions of thoughts.

If someone watches Fox News loyally, we can guess they’ll believe in the glory of George Bush. But our assumption here could be horribly mistaken. Ideas coming into the brain hit a barricade or filter that breaks the cause-effect link allowing a change in course. So, Fox News can create a spectrum of effects dependent on the filter. I think the filter can be gaping wide allowing every cause to have a direct effect on the thinker (or non-thinker as the case may be). Or it could be tightly closed forcing every incoming stimulus to stop for a thorough investigation.

The type of filter people have is dependent on their childhood, education, approval-seeking nature, and skeptical inclination. The filter is affected when a child is taught compliance instead of critical thinking. Education that’s completely one-sided with no alternatives presented has a different effect than a broad learning environment. A personal drive to be liked may be stronger or weaker than the drive to come to a clear, logical conclusion. And a general will to question rather than accept new ideas changes the amount of information carefully screened. I suppose people trained to be compliant with a wide-open filter who are seen as easily led or naïve, could be construed as having deterministic minds in which there’s a direct link between cause and effect.

Now, I’ve just outlined the causes of filter types in people, and isn’t it so clearly the case that it’s all due to their specific culture and genetics! So, I’m really back to square one. I’ve seen people change; they start out sucked into the dominant ideology, then often go to the other extreme of anti-conformity before finding their own space. But this too, might be the effect of the filter being affected by new information in the culture or changes in the person’s biology. Isn’t this fun! I’ll get to this conundrum a bit later.


ON SHAPED PREFERENCES VS BRAINWASHING

Whether manipulation is a force against freedom or a mere annoyance is as dependent on the victim’s background and disposition as on the manipulator. Educators in my circle often talk about teaching critical thinking skills to students. “Don’t just teach them to regurgitate ideas, teach them to really think.” It’s been my experience that, like it’s the case that some students just don’t have an eye for drawing, some students just don’t have the ability to think for themselves. It’s not something that can be brought out of them, or maybe I’m getting them too late, or maybe I’m just completely ineffective. So, for these people, mere influence may be a force obliterating freedom. But let’s focus on the rest of the population. This is not to invalidate that people feel pressure to conform to certain standards, but to explore why some people feel more pressure than others.

Some people don’t seem to see a lack of make-up or hairy legs as an option; it’s true. I wrote elsewhere about my colleague for whom going to work with hairy legs is the same as going to work naked. Hairy legs are an abomination in her eyes. But it’s not a matter of social brainwashing, but familiarity. Sure marketing machines keep certain images in front of our faces to persuade us to find them beautiful; if all beautiful women have smooth legs (or faces), then we might eventually buy into it. But creating familiarity in images only reduces freedom to have a “real” preference if we have no faculty for critical thought, if we have huge gapping holes in our filters letting in all images without question.

I’ve seen the Mona Lisa and been told it’s a beautiful piece of art by many professors. Yet I find it to be drab and dull. Bor-ing. I’ve had delivered to me myriad professional opinions on paintings, but always manage to freely agree or disagree with prevailing attitudes. I seem to have within me an ability to determine preference counter to authoritative opinion. Discourse demands that we be able to see multiple perspectives. If we’re unable to freely develop our own opinions, this discourse wouldn’t exist.

I hang laundry on a line in my yard, including cloth diapers. My neighbours generally think I’m crazy; I’m making work for myself unnecessarily. But I believe the right action is one that reduces fossil fuel consumption. But further to the point, some neighbours are actually upset that I’ve sullied their landscape with my clean clothes drying in the sun and wind. I think a laundry-line is beautiful, photo-worthy even. My preference has not been created from media images, but from knowledge and thoughtful consideration of all the options. They’d prefer a backdrop of vinyl siding fronted by a sea of toxically uniform grass. They act on auto-pilot reinforcing one another’s views.

How is a laundry-line so distasteful even in the wake of our own Rick Mercer’s One-Tonne Challenge? There’s been a lot of media attention focusing on reducing non-renewable energy consumption, so why hasn’t there been a general drone-like following of the advertising? I think it’s because people aren’t being brainwashed by advertising to look or act a certain way, but are freely acting out of common human characteristics of greed, vanity, and sloth. They’re picking and choosing to follow the campaigns that best suit their own needs then blaming society for their choices. I think my neighbours attack my laundry-line because they feel guilt for using a drier, but it’s easier to shake their heads at me, collectively, than to examine their own, potentially unseemly, motivations.

Popular definitions of freedom describe a free act as one that arises from thought, belief, and desire; it’s free if a person wills it and could have done otherwise. Examining freedom is unpleasant. We don’t want to believe we freely choose to buy Nike products, but that we’ve been conditioned to shop for them even in the face of evidence of child labour. The commercials and jingles force us to eat at McDonalds and turn a blind eye to their destruction of the rainforest and numerous animal habitats for the sake of cheap beef. The teenagers in my class all learn about the environmental impact of cosmetics, but still come to class slathered in the stuff. They’re making an informed choice. Most of us are. We’re not conditioned. What we are is often too damn cheap, vain, and lazy to try alternatives or go without.

I agree with Bitch Lab that it’s not possible to create a world where everyone wears what they please, not because of social constraints, but because many people just don’t care to think for themselves. Many prefer to be told what’s fashionable than explore their own desire. It’s too much work to be introspective.

We might have a preference for adornment that’s been influenced by society, but we retain a choice to adhere to the preference or explore outside of it.


THE DETERMINIST CONUNDRUM

I believe that I have the freedom to translate my beliefs into voluntary actions, otherwise my writing this is just a product of genes and environment, and I’m not actively choosing to debate the existence of free will. But maybe our genes and environment have us operating on either side of the fence on this issue.

Am I merely the product of a genetic code that includes enjoyment of antagonizing people by being non-conformist? Do I only refuse to follow demands because it’s part of my personality to do the opposite of mainstream. In other words, am I genetically the antithesis and most people (dominant culture) are genetically the thesis – following what’s already happening. Eventually we’ll come to some synthesis – probably not androgyny because that would be to ignore each side rather than bring them together into something new. Perhaps a mediocre arrangement will take hold, sometimes following mainstream images of beauty, other times creating new alternatives.

I can look at why some identical twins raised together are radically different, but even then they likely had slight variations of care or environment that altered the effect of their upbringing. We have the ability to choose alternatives and switch directions mid-stream. We seem to be able to initiate new causal chains, like gods of our own internal worlds (masters of our domain), but perhaps we’re merely connecting previously learned ideas together that seem new. We are often unpredictable and seem more complex than a programmed computer, but I think this complexity can still be seen as an effect of our nature and nurture.

I don’t think it can be proven that we have or don’t have free will. Perhaps, then, it’s better to ask, is it useful to believe we’re the products of genes and culture?


THE AUTHENTIC SELF

Earlbecke discredits the idea of authentic self,

“who we are is deeply connected to other people and our environment....Ten years from now I won’t really have anything left of the person I used to be; the original tissue of my skin and organs will have all been replace by new growth.”

Because cells of the body regenerate every few years, doesn’t mean the person is completely different. If I change each brick of my house with a new brick that’s a different colour, I’ve changed one aspect of my house, but most of the interior has remained constant.

I could list a litany of characteristics and attitudes I’ve maintained since childhood. We can alter behaviours, but not certain portions of ourselves. Personally, I can become very easily addicted to anything (including blogging). As a child I ate all the cookies in a sitting; as an adult I will drink every last beer in the fridge. My “off” switch only registers when I run out of whatever I’m getting into. I can affect my behaviour by never having beer or cookies in my house (almost never), but I can’t change my addictive nature. We’re not static beings, but that’s not a necessary criterion for authenticity.

In my understand of the term, authentic self refers to having total honesty with ourselves for all our choices, and taking full responsibility for all our actions. The authentic self has no scape-goats; there’s no blaming society or biology. It means not saying things like, “It’s patriarchy’s fault that I don’t feel comfortable with an unadorned face.” It recognizes that I choose to neglect my houseplants; I don’t have an inherent inability to care for them.

But it’s a lot of work to take responsibility for our ideas, attitudes and actions. Personal responsibility and lucidity diminish the extent of the lies we tell ourselves. We lie to ourselves to avoid responsibility, “I can’t take care of plants.” The process of becoming authentic is a matter of living in a state of self-awareness. Most of us don’t, but the option is open to everyone to choose to live the examined life questioning our own motives, or to live a life of blissful ignorance blaming society for our quandaries.


FREEDOM AND OPPRESSION

Earlbecke claims that arguing that we’re more than a product of biology and culture is to “invalidate any anti-oppression work.” So, if I believe I have free will, that my actions aren’t a mere product of biological and cultural efforts making their way to this point, I’m basically negating efforts to stop oppression? I believe the contrary is the case. We can’t choose to fight oppression if we don’t believe we’re free to make choices because we’re all too oppressed to be aware of choice. Working for change requires a belief that we are more than just the result of our genes and social constructs in order to have the wherewithal to act against the dominant ideologies of our direct environment. Fighting oppression often necessitates fighting dominant cultural attitudes.

Oppression comes in many forms and influencing women’s fashion is one we can fight freely in many parts of the world. The illusion that we have no real options might make us give up the fight, but we can still choose to make our own road. Oppression reduces some freedoms via discriminatory practices: to get the corner office, to make a fair wage, to fund birth control and cancer reseach, but not the freedom to choose whether or not to shave our legs.

But accepting that we have authentic desires or free will is necessary to beginning to escape systems of oppression because free will and authentic desires are often the cause of oppression. It’s through the greedy desires of corporate heads to refuse to pay decent wages to all their employees. If I believe that society removes my choices, that it’s not my own lack of will or concern or courage that I can overcome in order to fight the perceived need to wear make-up, then it follows that I have to accept it’s society making company owners suck up profits while employees suffer. If I’m personally blameless for my actions because I have no free will to make choices, then so are they. But I want to hold them accountable for their actions, so I’ll hold myself accountable for my actions as well.

Now here I’ve taken leave of the original post that sparked this argument. The original claim focused on the oppressed lacking free will due to their very oppression. The corporate big-wigs are at the top of the heap, so, by this stance, they’d have total free will. They’d be responsible for their actions even though the oppressed aren’t. I’m choosing, rather, to explore the necessity for a general belief in free will within a deterministic universe.

In our tolerant society, real barriers to freedom are from concerns for safety and sustenance of self and loved ones. (I wish a real barrier was concern for safety of all children everywhere. Imagine if so many people just could not bring themselves to shop at the Gap because it pains us to harm children even indirectly. But guilt just makes us feel bad, and that makes up want to escape, by shopping!) Even poverty doesn’t necessarily restrict free choices. Poverty once kept me from a wider choice of products media tried to convince me I need, but I refused to listen to that noise. I was better off at the time than my wealthy sister trapped in a consumeristic addiction with more rooms in her house than they could possibly use, but struggling to afford baby formula. We have to take responsibility for deciding what we really need even while saturated with external notions of potential desires.

Like Belledame says,we need to focus on the question,

“What do you want? I keep coming back to that again and again; it's so important, so hard for so many of us to claim….For all the talk about "objectification," what's forgotten is that the counterpart to being an object is being a subject. The subjective. As in, your perspective. Your interior life: it's yours, no one else's. yours. not Big Brother's, not Big Sister's, not anyone else's. Your voice is yours. Your desire is yours no one can name it and claim it but you. god, it's so fucking important!”

I’ve followed my desires to do many unconventional things, to bear children unwed, to own limited clothes, to never own a car, to call myself feminist even with long hair even when the word is seen as negative, to have a baby at 39 and an abortion at 26, to live with and love a man younger than me, to bare tattooed arms and legs at work, to have close male friends that raise suspicious eyebrows of my neighbours, and to go back to work leaving my guy at home with the baby. Our choices are skewed by our consumer-driven society, perhaps, but freedom constrained, not at all.

Why I’m lamenting this notion so strongly is because of the implications of the claim. Insisting that persuasive social conditions obliterate our freedom of choice makes a mockery of real constraints to freedom: violence, imprisonment, confinement, threats of torture, etc. I have a hard time believing we have real constraints to freedom when I have had such an easy time making choices contrary to dominant ideals, choices around my own fertility for instance.

When I was first pregnant and single and a new high school teacher, people came up to me in droves with insistence, begging me to re-think having the baby and/or marrying the dad. “You’re a role model! Think of the message you’re sending your students.” I ignored their advice. They stopped talking to me. For quite a while whenever I’d walk into the staff room, the room would become suddenly silent. I had carefully considered the message I’d be sending, and I think it’s a good one: Screw all those stereotypes of unwed moms being idiots; here’s what a single mother can look like. Don’t get married just to save face. Don’t have an abortion when you’re mentally and financially prepared to have a baby just to stop the wankers asking, “Haven’t you heard of birth control?” Ignore popular opinion in order to make the right decisions. Do good for the sake of the good, never for the sake of honour or popularity.

I was quite friendless at the time. My mother was dying, and I had just moved, so I had few supports. Every person in my life thought I should abort the baby. Apparently pre-marital sex is okay only if nobody knows about it. If I can do what I think is the right thing to do, if I can make my own choice about becoming a single mother in the face of every single person I know fighting against me, then I think I’m free to choose whether or not to wear high heels. If people are afraid to make these fashion choices, they need to take a good hard look at themselves. A glare or a nasty comment is not on the same level as a public stoning.

Earlbecke cautions me, “

Denying that there’s any coercion I think is damaging to a lot of women who already have poor self-image — it can be very real to some people and it’s hard to escape once you’ve internalized it. I’m sorry it’s not as easy of a choice for some people as it is for you. That shouldn’t invalidate their experiences simply because you don’t share them. It doesn’t mean that the pressure can’t seem much, much greater than it actually is.”

I think insisting there’s coercion at force in fashion leaves us helpless. It’s a very disempowering stance. If we have no free will to make choices, we can’t actively change things. If, however, it’s not the case that’s we’re coerced, but that we’ve merely been convinced to look a certain way, and we’ve never fully explored our motivations for our own actions, then we have a place to work from. Believing it’s from our own will that we do something, even when it’s against our better judgment, is a more empowering stance in that we can act on it, take charge, and change our own situation.

Believing this statement, “I keep shaving my legs regardless of other feminists’ claims that I shouldn’t buy in to marketing ploys, because I’m being coerced by an oppressive society; I want to stop, but I can’t,” keeps the speaker in a place focused on others. Instead consider these statements that, I think, dig a little deeper into the speaker’s personal desires and motivations: “Even though other feminists don’t think I should shave, I actually prefer the feel of smooth legs.” Or “I like when my partner pays attention to my legs more, and smooth legs do it for him.” Or “I feel sexier with shaved legs.” These views keep the responsibility for the action on the speaker. Responsibility might seems like a burden, but this very shift brings power to the speaker. It brings the person making the choice back to their own personal desires.

I have a friend who never shaved her legs. Then she got wind that her husband was on the verge of an affair. Suddenly she had smooth legs and make-up. She really felt like she was selling-out, and she made up all sorts of stories about why she changed her look. I don’t think she needed to. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to say, “I need to feel sexier these days, and this is what does it for me, personally.” There’s nothing unfeminist, in my eyes, with trying to be attractive to another person. My guy really likes me in a short skirt and workboots. I can please him from time to time without losing myself in the process. Likewise, I appreciate that he cut off his dreads for me. (I liked the look, but they felt like straw and smelled worse.)

Belief in free will and awareness of maintaining an authentic self offer an empowering way to look at the self instead of a victimized defeated perspective. How does it help stop oppression by insisting we’re so caught up in it, we can’t choose our own way out?

I understand that for many people it’s not an easy choice to act against social pressures to conform or live up to a group’s standards. I feel that kind of pressure when it comes to mothering adequately. But for me to write off my feelings as part of something larger happening to me from external sources, rather than examining my own set of culturally shaped values conflicting internally, is to escape doing some real, authentic work that can take us much further down a much wider landscape. If I maintain that my feelings around motherhood are due to unrealistic demands of my society, I can hide from the nitty gritty of my fears and self-loathing. But my inadequacy doesn't diminish; it just gets whitewashed. Far more useful to me is to examine the effect my own greed and slothfulness, my own choices, have had on my children (she says, typing faster instead of stopping to make dinner). It's personal responsibility and hard thinking that takes a lot of work and determination that will get us somewhere in the end.

If people want to stop doing something they’ve always done, but they claim they just can’t, I think they’re better served by opening forums for honest discussion of specific, personal barriers than by being stamped with the word “oppressed” on their foreheads. Maybe they don’t really want to stop shaving their legs at all, they just think they should want to stop because of all the feminist rhetoric about it. And the oppressed becomes the oppressor.


ON FEMINISM AND FREE WILL

Bitchlab laments

“pressure on feminists to wear a kind of uniform. Anyone who wore make up or a dress? She had to have a really good fucking reason to get away with it and it would only be something temporary…” Then asks, “What seemed to make it impossible for us to not reproduce taste and style, even a feminist taste and style, which was enforced with its own judgments about what was feminist and what wasn’t, who belongs and who didn’t? Why, in spite of wanting to get away from that, did we reproduce it?”

Pressuring people to look a certain way to fit in with the group? That’s not feminism as I understand it. I know feminists who shut out women who change their name at marriage. That’s not feminism to me either. As soon as we put artificial boundaries around behaviour that has nothing to do with safety from harm, we’ve left the realm of feminism and entered the hierarchical practices of patriarchy. But that’s not to say it’s impossible to get away from patriarchy. We can clearly remove ourselves from that domineering attitude by remaining honestly and acutely aware of our actions and motivations.

If we want feminist groups to be inclusive of all people who believe men and women deserve choices, then we better make them that way. Call people on anti-feminist rhetoric whenever they exclude someone for reasons of fashion or otherwise innocuous threats to the movement: “I think she’s a strong voice for the cause regardless of her choice of name. It is her choice, isn’t it?” Be careful not to get sucked in again by shutting out the people claiming a narrowly defined feminism, but continue to engage them in debate. My feminist principles are not contingent on appearances, but I won’t stop listening to someone who’s are.

I wonder about feminists who are adamant that women should look a certain way. I wonder if maybe some women want all feminists to stop shaving because they believe it’s the only way to stay in a market to attract men. If none of us shave, then the guys will have to accept it. But it’s so much easier to just be who you are and maybe you’ll happen upon someone who appreciates that. They are out there. It’s always best to be who you want to be to attract someone who likes it, or else you’ll end up trapped in a pretense in order to maintain a relationship.

I do agree with Earlbecke when she says,

“We need theories which are pragmatic and work in the real world, the way that people actually live their lives, without being unnecessarily judgmental or divisive, attempting to address not only the theoretical roots and causes of oppression, but also dealing with the practical effects of inequality here and now.”

I’m just not convinced insisting we haven’t the freedom to make real choices helps us in this effort.

The important choice is not between mainstream fashion or feminist ideals, but a choice to have courage to explore our own desires and wear what we like, to go outside all the little boxes. Do or wear whatever you like, but have the guts to say it’s your preference. Even if what you prefer is to avoid hassles, or what you prefer is more attention from certain people. I have no issues with either of these routes, but only with the claim that the choice evades us, that in a portion of the world that's tolerant of difference, details of our own personal appearance are not within our power to determine.

Don’t wait for someone to grant you freedom. Develop the courage to take freedom for yourself. Take small risks a bit at a time until you’re no longer so afraid to act in your own best interest. It’s easier that you think.