Ken wrote:
>Satisfying needs
>is good only if it leads to human flourishing, not just individual
>flourishing but of the individual within a commuinity where the flourishing
>of one is bound up wiht the flourishing of alll. Looked at in this manner
>many basic needs for health, shelter, food, etc. are not met within a
>capitalist community while needs are satisfied
>of those who have money that do not really help the individual flourish, may
>be damaging to the environment, and may use scarce resources in a wasteful
>manner.
Tampons & sanitary napkins may be "damaging to the environment."
Besides, they mainly help individual women flourish, having only a
slight direct impact -- if any -- upon individual men, let alone "a
community." Nonetheless, few women who have used tampons & sanitary
napkins would want to go back to the days of perhaps a more
ecologically sound practice of washing & reusing rags. Katha Pollitt
posted on M-Fem a couple of years ago:
***** ...It has always interested me that the Communist countries
were so puritanical -- fabulous ignorance of sex, very macho
attitudes among men, feminism a dirty word. And with the govt
controlling the press, and also production, education, etc there was
no way for a challenge to these ideas to be mounted. A small
example: the nonexistence of tampons and sanitary napkins throughout
the Eastern bloc. Plenty of vodka, plenty of cigarettes and
friendship pins and tee shirts and bouquets of flowers -- but when
women got their periods, they used old rags like my grandma back in
the shtetl in l914. (the Yugoslav writer Slavenka drakulic has
puckishly suggested that the absence of tampax was what made
communism fall -- such a clear proof of the indifference of the govt
to the people's needs). It's so barbaric -- humiliating for women, a
real slap in the face. But there was no space in the system for
women to demand attention to this need -- no space even for them to
organize on their own behalf, or to articulate their own wants to
themselves, or even to know, most of them, that something better than
old rags existed!to demonstrate, leaflet, form a political group --
all forbidden.... <http://csf.colorado.edu/m-fem/98/0376.html>
*****
I think that Katha exaggerates the extent of puritanism of the former
socialist nations in post-revolutionary periods (Stalin & beyond) for
her rhetorical purpose, so I disagree with her on that score.
Nevertheless, I think that she has a point when she attributes the
absence of tampons & sanitary napkins to the lack of democracy &
feminism: women in socialist nations were not empowered to have their
needs & desires recognized and to demand products that only women
need.
Given the Yugoslav experience, which did not provide tampons &
sanitary napkins effectively either, I think, pace Justin, that
market socialism does not necessarily meet women's needs better than
planned socialist economy. For women to have their needs met, there
must be _democracy & feminism_, especially _a powerful mass movement
by & for women_ to press for social recognition of women's needs &
desires.
In addition, I believe that Green asceticism, for all its Earth
Goddess worship, is likely anti-feminist in consequence, in that
women's needs & desires tend to be seen as frivolous luxuries.
Yoshie
