Grizzle, yes, gender roles reelly used to benefit people a long time ago, when we lived a different way, in pre-history, about 100,000 years ago. Now, not so much.
In what sense, then, can an "unconscious bedrock in the Id" be parlayed into power?
In what sense does a postively charged proton get "parlayed" into power? It doesn't. I don't really understand what you're asking, but I also don't believe power "gets parlayed" on the level of the unconscious. I don't believe it's eternal either--it's unstable and moves around a lot and we don't really understand it yet, sort of like particles on the quantum level.
You're assuming power is only an effect of rationalist subjectivation. I strongly disagree with this assumption.
Lorde has an account where eros supports the construction of an agentic selfhood, knitting together something that can know itself and exercise agency, by convolving elements of experience that would otherwise remain separate and compartmentalised (life of the senses over here, life of the mind over here). Her account is strongly conditioned by organicist assumptions, so that the end-point of this process of construction is a "whole" and "authentic" self; and I'd want to inflect that in the direction of a more truth-procedural account, in which the coming into being of the erotic subject isn't a repair job done on a broken whole but the unfolding of something novel and slightly monstrous.
However, I would think of this unfolding as a coming to truth (as the coming into being of a truth) rather than a coming to power (the actuation of a latent force, "sexual power" as a form of energy stored in the id and waiting to be released). Libidinal bricolage is not a power among earthly powers, a force capable of acting on or against the forces that shape our social world. Its strength lies in its ability to bind together an integral being that is not plastic to those forces, not readily reshaped by power, without the integrity of that being depending on its relationship to any ground or unifying principle (it hangs together somewhat like a poem, or a theorem).
Weren't you just the one blowing your referee whistle over fanciful metaphysical language? There's nothing in the world more frivolous than this mumbo-jumbo about "truth procedures", especially when you, as you are doing here, try to somehow smuggle "libido" (which you've already claimed you didn't believe in) into the mix through the backdoor, and in probably the most peculiar, convoluted manner imaginable. What is "libidinal bricolage", anyway? I've never heard this term before. If libido has no power, how does it "bind" anything? What you're saying seems pretty incoherent. Poems don't "hang together" in any meaningful sense, either. This is very typical of you, though--resort to great big metaphors where you can't explain something so they can do all the work for you.
One important insight of the 2nd wave was that the real battle was not between a sexual mainstream and this or that sexual counterculture - that the countercultures and the mainstream were already in a symbiotic relationship, and shared many of the same constraints and assumptions - but between female intelligence and misogynist stupidity. They forcibly shattered the constraints of tribal loyalty that bound them to stupid misogynists in the peace movement, on "the left", and in radical circles generally. They stopped agreeing that it was as cool to be fucked by those guys as those guys thought it was.
The retort this disloyalty earned them was that they'd gone over to the other side, become stuffy moralists and "strange bedfellows" with the Right, stopped being true radicals or whatever because of their hostile, unnatural, probably "bourgeois" and "counter-revolutionary" habit of valuing their own intelligence and trying to use it to its fullest extent. This was always a pretty shabby accusation, but it's been useful over the years in helping to enlist countercultural intellectuals to an anti-feminist backlash. A lot of the milieu in which 3rd-wave feminism (such as it has been) took form was shaped by this backlash; which is one of the reasons I think why there is so little real understanding of the context and import of 2nd-wave feminist thought, and so much polemical misprision along the lines of "Andrea Dworkin said all heterosexual intercourse was rape".
Errr...no. Not even close. Which country are you talking about here? Not the U.S. Nobody accused the second wave of being bedfellows with the right at the time when their wave coalesced, and in fact they quickly ascended to become the power structure within the movement--in fact, they remained there for a good 20 years. Once they'd reached the top, they shouted down any viewpoint that didn't serve their interests, they actively worked to keep minorities out (because these women tended to disagree with them on key issues like sex work and porn), and they have a long history of being anti-trans bigots. You have no clue what you're talking about here, but it's a nice effort.
People say Andrea Dworkin said terrible things (including, on several occasions, telling people to their faces that, if they were in heterosexual relationships and having penetrative sex, that they were "rapists or whores") who
knew her personally, Poetix. I went to a college where half the faculty had known her to some degree, been friends with her, or worked with her in some capacity for years. She said and did some really mindbogglingly weird things, including becoming a cheerleader for different brands of colonialists, in her later years. Many people within the movement actually thought she'd gone certifiably insane at a certain point in her life. Which is sad, especially because she did initially have some good points to make. I mean, I know you like her, but come on, how blind can you be to the faults in her logic...