EMANCIPATION VS. FREEDOM PT. 1

In this blogpost, responding to one of THE BEAT's superficial attacks on so-called female objectification, I wrote:

The whole "who's exposed more" question should never have been one of pure equity.  Equity is something to be observed in the workplace or the boardroom, but not in fiction.  Fiction is a place where fantasy reigns, and as I said in the essay, it's simply a lot harder to sell hyper-sexualized fantasies to women than to men.  I tend to think that this is because in general men are hornier bastards than women, but others' mileage may vary.

Equity should never have been the question because equity of this sort is not feasible.   There will probably always be more sexualized female characters in pop fiction than sexualized male characters-- but that doesn't mean that the latter don't occur at all, or that one can slough off all the chiseled chins and buff bodies as manifestations of "idealization."

I've not written much about "equity," but now I want to see it in a continuum that relates to a wider concept I will term "the ethic of emancipation." Equity, the theoretical fair treatment of everyone in a society, is a modern concept that has come about in democratic societies largely because these tend to subscribe, at least overtly, to the ideal of emancipating those who are enslaved, disenfranchised, and so on. The ethic extends back through human history, but in modern times the United States has become the country most intimately associated with emancipation, beginning with the country emancipating itself from England. Radical ultraliberals ceaselessly cavil about the false ideals purportedly put forth in the Declaration of Independence, in which "all men are created equal" is said to have connoted "white men only" (which argument Stephen Douglas made explicit in 1858). However, the nation's commitment to emancipation still exceeds that of many if not all other nations since the States' formation, and one of the many liberations that made far more progress here than elsewhere than in other countries is that of women's suffrage.

The problem, however, is that often those who rise do so by making someone else fall. Ultraliberals in recent years have gone beyond the sensible demands of early liberals, and have chosen to stigmatize what they are pleased to call "straight white males" (and occasionally "straight white females" as well) in order to carve out new terrain for the non-meek who shall usurp the earth. The less vitriolic ultraliberals take the position that dull straight white people will be much improved by this exposure to diversity, so it's all good.

However, in THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, Francis Fukuyama explored, among other things, some of the problems with the idea of "universal recognition"-- Fukuyama's Hegelian term for the idea of a emancipation from all hierarchies that bar the goal of total equity.

For Nietzsche, there was little difference between Hegel and Marx, because their goal was the same, a society embodying universal recognition. He, in effect, raised the question: Is recognition that can be universalized worth having in the first place? Is not the quality of recognition far more important than its universality? And does not the goal of universalizing recognition inevitably trivialize and devalue it?


In Part 2 I'll address some of the ways current popular fiction devotes itself to universal recognition/equity without showing any insight as to the "quality" of said emancipatory representations.