"Freedom meant different things to different people"

    Okay, so a lot happened in these readings. There were a lot of names thrown around and a lot of information to take in. I'm going to attempt to bring to light two points that seemed to me to be very prevalent across the readings, and across the course in general.

    Number 1! As I referenced in the title, I think that a big takeaway from The Future that Never Happened was the idea that freedom meant and means different things to different people. To put it into context, the author was referencing the conflicting ideas of sex-positive feminists and antiporn feminists, the latter condemning the former for supposedly allowing men to control their actions and their sexuality. This kind of the divide between women would slow down their cause, which was no longer even one fortified front now that they had been pitted against each other. This is exactly what halts the progress of social movements. We saw it in the civil rights movement, with some blacks assigning themselves to the idea of black power while others wanted simply to be equal to the whites. We saw it in different parts of the women's movement, with women of color understandably pitting themselves against the white women who seemed to forget that women of color were part of the women's rights equation. (As the author put it, they lacked the trust necessary to make common cause) We see it in the gay rights movement (I am forever a gay rights activist, if I see a place to put it in the blog post I'm probably going to, even if it gets redundant and annoying!), with different subsets of the gay community disregarding the lives and needs of other subsets.
    Activism simply does not work when the oppressed groups are not unified. And if it does, it is much more of a slow, painstaking process than activism already tends to be. I kind of got sidetracked, but back to my original point: An oppressed group of people must be able to define their conditions of oppression and subsequently their demands of freedom. They must work together, realizing that while they may have differences, they share their lesser existence and therefore deserve to rise above it.

   Number 2! Which kind of slingshots off number 1… Equally important to there being cooperation within oppressed groups is the cooperation of different oppressed groups. For instance, we saw in Reemergence of the Woman Question that the civil rights movement in some ways was not able to work together with the women's rights movement. If the two oppressed groups, being people of color and women, are not able to set aside whatever problems they have with each other and work as one group, then progress is further halted. We also saw it in The Future that Never Happened, with the sexual revolution eventually coming into conflict with women's movements. Now, I'm not saying that I at all agree with Hefner's goals to represent women in the way that he did and does, but I am saying that to come together would have benefitted the two groups, whereas disagreements between the two only put blocks in front of their mutual progress.

    Moral of the story? Cooperation precedes progress. So, while freedom does indeed mean different things to different people, it is important for oppressed groups to define their own freedom as a whole before attempting to debunk the social ties that hold them down.



    I'd also like to just respond to Shayla's post below… It really bothers me as well that educated sources think it is okay to include racist and sexist "jokes" in their work. Yes, they are trying to make a statement that racism and sexism have been reclaimed, and that by making the joke they are essentially saying the opposite of the joke. But clearly it's not working, and if it offends at least one person, then that is one too many. We can't get caught up in the false belief that sexism and racism are dead and are now nothing more than useful comedic material. They are very much alive, and still require careful attention to remove and reverse.