Last night, I saw a man dressed up as a woman dancing at a Halloween party. Over the course of the evening I observed something disturbing. Without any invitation, women and men frequently came up to the costumed-man in question and either lifted up his skirt, slapped his ass, jokingly had sex with him, or did a similar such action. This revealed something pretty horrific to me. The social relationship to the materials for the construction of femininity is a violent one. Isolated on a man's default-sexed body, the aesthetic aspects of the gender of the feminine are subourdinated, even when a person of the female sex is not present.
Of course it is very difficult to detach nature from nurture, and similarly detach the female body from it's socially imposed characteristics. Nonetheless, last night made me wonder whether it is not just the hatred of the sex of women that is being targeted in many sexual assault cases, but rather the feminine gender's association to the material world. Perhaps our society's dominant opinion of the commodities that "feminize" a body is at least as negative as the opinion of female bodies themselves.
This makes me believe that perhaps, alongside other initiatives, attempting to reclaim our society's relationship to certain commodities associated with women should be an important part of anti-violence activism.
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