Laura Bush, of all people, sounds like more of a feminist than Michelle Obama
And it’s not just because she calls herself a feminist, whereas Michelle firmly rejects the label. Here’s what the former First Lady had to say about the Sotomayor nomination:
“As a woman I’m proud that there might be another woman on the court,” Bush told ABC’s Good Morning America. “So we’ll see what happens, but I wish her well.”
Nice, huh? And easy. Not hard to say.
Would it kill Michelle Obama to say the same thing? Of course we understand Michelle isn’t a feminist, and we understand that she didn’t think it was important for her husband to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. We understand that she believes that women with adulterous husbands aren’t fit to be president. We understand that she didn’t think that having a woman president would represent anything new or unconventional, and we understand that she had so little respect for Hillary Clinton that she might not have supported her as the nominee. Yes, we all understand how Michelle works. Got it. Real clear.
But considering that she’s the First Lady now, and as such is a role model (god help us), would it kill her to at least try to straighten up and fly right?
It’s incredible to me that when Michelle did speak about the Sotomayor appointment, she managed to entirely ignore the feminist issue. For her, the main thing about Sotomayor is her ethnic background:
Mrs. Obama said Sotomayor “said when she stepped on that campus, she said — and this is a quote — she said she felt like ‘a visitor landing in an alien country.’ And she said she never raised her hand her first year because — and this is a quote — she ‘was too embarrassed and too intimidated to ask questions.’
…Mrs. Obama said her husband, Barack Obama, “a biracial kid with a funny name from Hawaii, of all places,” overcame feelings of self-doubt to win the ultimate prize in politics.
“We all felt a little like you might feel right now. We all had doubts. We all have doubts,” said Mrs. Obama, who graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School. “But in the end we were all more than ready.”
“You are more than ready,” she told the 98 young men and women awarded diplomas from a city math, science and technology public charter school.
Hey, the Hispanic thing is great. All my Puerto Rican cousins are thrilled about Sotomayor. So am I. But it’s just astonishing to me that we have a First Lady who is so resistant to feminism that she can’t even make the kind of simple, pro-woman remark that Laura Bush did.
49 Responses to “Laura Bush, of all people, sounds like more of a feminist than Michelle Obama”
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sister of ye says:
“a biracial kid with a funny name from Hawaii, of all places,”
It’s supposed to be declasse to be from Hawaii? News to me. And the funny name whine doesn’t impress me. I’m a Polish-American, and while my name isn’t too bad, I grew up with a whole lot of other kids with “funny names.”
What drives me crazy - infuriates me, actually - is the Obamas’ attempt to have it both ways. They want the liberal/feminist props for having a “strong woman Ivy League lawyer,” yet conservative cred for her converting to being “traditional.” They denigrate, subtly and not-so-subtly, women like Clinton and Palin who have successfully managed career and family.
Kind of like Phyllis Schafly, who made a magnificent career out of telling other women to stay home and shut up.
I guess it’s okay for Sotomayor to be a Supreme Court Justice since she’s not married and doesn’t have anything better or more important to do.
Congrats to Laura Bush for a low-key but classy statement.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:38 pm EST -
madamab says:
That Michelle Obama is a mess. She just can’t say one nice thing about another woman.
Remember Hillary’s statement when Sarah Palin was chosen as McCain’s running mate?
“We should all be proud of Governor Sarah Palin’s historic nomination, and I congratulate her and Senator McCain. While their policies would take America in the wrong direction, Governor Palin will add an important new voice to the debate.”
That’s how it’s done, Michelle darling.
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madamab says:
Whoops, forgot to close the tag. Hate when that happens!
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Violet says:
Fixed!
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Elise says:
Since, as I’ve already admitted, I lean right, I found the phrase “of all people” kind of amusing. I’ve known for quite a while that Laura Bush is a feminist. Furthermore, there are an amazing number of conservatives who are far more supportive of women deciding for themselves what to do with their lives than most liberals realize.
I was pretty much uncritically liberal until early last year when a number of incidents including - quite prominently - Andrew Sullivan’s hatefulness toward Hillary Clinton made me start reading on “the dark side”. What I discovered was that very few conservatives think women should stay home, barefoot and pregnant. Contrast what George Bush said about women during his speech in Egypt last year with what Obama said about women during his speech in Egypt last week.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t think Obama would even mention women in his speech so he gets points from me simply for bringing it up. But Obama’s comments on women are so wrapped in nuance that I doubt even Osama bin Laden could object to them. Bush’s remarks are far stronger:
Building powerful economies also requires expanding the role of women in society. This is a matter of morality and of basic math. No nation that cuts off half its population from opportunities will be as productive or prosperous as it could be. Women are a formidable force, as I have seen in my own family — (laughter and applause) — and my own administration. (Applause.) As the nations of the Middle East open up their laws and their societies to women, they are learning the same thing.
Not just basic math, but morality, too. Bush then goes on to tell the story of a woman in Bahrain who overcame the restrictions of her society to build a very successful business. He concludes with:
And America’s message to other women in the Middle East is this: You have a great deal to contribute, you should have a strong voice in leading your countries, and my nation looks to the day when you have the rights and privileges you deserve.
I cannot in my wildest dreams imagine Obama saying anything that definitive about women in Muslim countries.
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Nora says:
I read that Obama had to interview and approve of Michelle’s boss before she was “allowed” to accept her Chicago Hospital job. If this is true, and I understand it was on Obama’s website during his campaign, then I believe that says something about a women who would marry such a controlling man. I find women like that are extremely threatened by feminists. I do not understand, with her attitude, why she went to law school since she seems to have simply wanted an MRS degree.
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yttik says:
Elise addressed some things I completely agree with.
My secret nightmare is that Obama will wind up making Bush look like a real feminist. It’s not an irrational fear, we’re halfway there already.
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JeanLouise says:
Yahoo has a pictorial of the Obamas in Paris. They note that Michelle is wearing a fetching scarf and that she and the girls stayed behind to shop while Daddy took AF One home alone. It was so Ozzie and Harriet that it made me ill.
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bluelyon says:
a biracial kid with a funny name from Hawaii, of “all places,”
Excuse me…but I grew up in Hawaii, and bi-racial and multi-racial kids are a dime a dozen there. In fact, people took pride in being multiracial. We didn’t think it unusual, nor did we look down upon anyone who was of mixed ethnicity. Obama was not disadvantaged by growing up in Hawaii. In fact, he would have just been one of the crowd there (his “autobiography” musings, not withstandint). It would have been far, far more traumatic for him to live on The Mainland as a biracial child. Michelle needs to get her head out of her a$$.
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Nadai says:
Nora, it wasn’t the hospital job, but a job in Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s office working for Daley’s deputy chief of staff, Valerie Jarrett. It was mentioned in a Chicago Tribune article, and Obama does have it up on his site, so presumably he thinks it makes him look good. The anecdote is about halfway through the article.
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salt h2o says:
Strip abortion from the equation and I think we’ll soon find that it is the conservative party that truely embrasses feminism in it’s pure sense.
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kaija says:
you say, “strip abortion from the equation” but since Obama is a closet anti-choicer…
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Sharon says:
I have to say, having returned from giving a conference to hispanic and black women in Dallas, that I find women of color tend to be more concerned about racial discrimination, particularly for their corresponding men, than they do about oppression of women. That’s a blanket statement, I know, but somewhere along the line they’ve gotten the message that propping up men of color is more important in the long run than advancing their concerns as women.
They seem also to feel that feminism is really about and for white women of privilege, and doesn’t really address their particular concerns. African American women have started the womanism movement as a response.
I was particularly stunned when I had to explain an Alice Walker quote on womanism to women of color who had never heard the term. The conference organizer interrupted me to reassure the women in the audience that you could actually be feminist without hating men, and this seemed to reassure the audience, who looked a bit concerned when I started talking about feminism.
It was an eye-opener for me, but perhaps it’s also offering a small explanation for why Michelle Obama seems more intent on advancing her husband than advancing any cause for women.
If that’s the case, then it seems to me we ought to be a little less critical of her, and a bit more self-reflexive about whether feminism is as inclusive as we think it is.
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madamab says:
salt h20 - Sorry, but I’m not willing to go there with you.
I cannot strip reproductive rights from the equation. The religious right, which has a firm grip on both the Republican and Democratic Parties now, has spent decades eroding my right to control my own body; in other words, denying me my civil rights. Why don’t they spend decades trying to control how often men can come? Why aren’t they trying to block the sale of Viagra? Golly gee, what could the reason be?
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Gayle says:
“. . .somewhere along the line they’ve gotten the message that propping up men of color is more important in the long run than advancing their concerns as women.
They seem also to feel that feminism is really about and for white women of privilege, and doesn’t really address their particular concerns.”
Yeah, that got that idea from men. Men in Iran pulled the same thing on women during their Revolution, only with a twist– “feminism is a decadent western woman concept, no proud Iranian/Islamic woman should adopt it.” Then they proceeded to eradicate all of their rights.
How would you propose feminists become more inclusive?
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octogalore says:
Nice contrast.
I think Laura’s more of a feminist than meets the eye, however.
She is publicly pro choice, has been an advocate for Afghani women (although of course, recent politicians who’ve stood up for their right to wear hijab get much better press), has advocated for human rights in Burma and provided aid to Burmese refugees, has been a breast cancer activist internationally, and a whole lot more that for some reason, never got much coverage.
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Gayle says:
I just read American Wife in my book club. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a fictionalized account of Laura’s life.
It does paint her as a pro-choice woman from a family of Democrats. If the book is to be believed, she’s a very solitary/private person who prefers to work on her projects away from the limelight.
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Sharon says:
Gayle,
You ask a good question. This has long been a problem for feminism, especially 1st and 2nd wave. They had the notion that by advancing the rights of all people, women’s rights would be advanced. Didn’t work out real well.
I guess first I think that sometimes we come off as academic, and we tend to make others feel that we need to stick to the ‘real’ concerns of feminism, even when there is not agreement on what that is. For example, I get pissed watching the Latinas in my neighborhood get trod on, have multiple babies, and stay stuck in a cycle of poverty. Yet when I talk about it, and tell them it could be different they look at me in horror.
So clearly you can’t do a whole heck of a lot of liberating when the people you want to liberate think things are just fine as they are. I guess that would be the Bush / Cheney model.
Next, without ceding ground that advancing women’s issues is what we’re about, I think we need to open that definition up a bit. We saw with Palin that certain feminists had an image of a feminist they were working with, and other women need not apply, thank you. Palin didn’t fit their mold, and they threw up all over it. But you know what? Palin was a good case of a feminist woman because she is an EMPOWERED woman. She has a high position, solid family, her own ideas on what needs to be done, and the way to get it done. I would say little is holding her back. And this made some of our liberal feminist sisterhood CRAZY. It’s like there was this equation:
Feminist = liberal, pro-choice, well educated, predominantly white, career-minded female who sometimes has children, and men who are friendly to our ideas
But Palin’s feminism = empowered, self-motivated, able to achieve high-ranking positions, blue-collar, plainspoken, pro-life, mother of 5 with stay-at-home-husband
So, some of the liberal feminists that tore her apart don’t see her as one of us, though other than the pro-life mother of 5 bit, I feel like she embodies my brand of feminism. And I went to engineering school, not a liberal arts college up north or out west.
But I would have said that being elected to higher offices, being empowered, being able to make choices about family structure to advance one’s own career rather than just the husband’s - this IS the feminism I would have embraced, and do fight for.
So clearly, in the Palin example, we need to be more inclusive of others who don’t look or sound necessarily like us because there are feminists that are pro-life, and that’s ok.
We also need to realize that sometimes our discussions aren’t really relevant or salient to what a woman of color might be experiencing. My understanding is that black women in particular get hit with racism, sexism, and classism all at once. It would be hard to focus on improving their lives by only tackling one of those three - they experience them all at once. So when we work on advancing the rights of women, somehow, you have to work classism and racism in there as well.
My thoughts on this are still hazy, and I bet there are smarter people than me out there working on this, but it’s a landscape I feel we need to enter, and soon.
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Violet says:
My understanding is that black women in particular get hit with racism, sexism, and classism all at once. It would be hard to focus on improving their lives by only tackling one of those three - they experience them all at once. So when we work on advancing the rights of women, somehow, you have to work classism and racism in there as well.
Which of course explains why the Civil Rights movement was so powerfully pro-feminist. Not. And why the NAACP focuses as much on sexism as racism. Not.
It also explains why the gay movement simultaneously tackles racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, seeing as how so many gay people are also black, brown, female, Jewish, etc. Not.
Look: feminism is about ending the oppression that women experience as women. As such, it is a movement that is relevant to all women everywhere in the world, whether they’re in Thailand or the Yukon. Obviously women in any particular social setting will adapt their feminism to their circumstances, since there is a multiplicity of issues and oppressions.
And that’s it. To say that feminism itself needs to be about something other than sexism is both logically and practically absurd. And people who argue that feminism needs to be about everything else in the world — racism, homophobia, whatever — need to ask themselves why sexism is the one issue that somehow doesn’t warrant a movement of its own. Gee, why could that be?
Could it be because it is, in fact, the most pervasive and deeply ingrained oppression, and one that many otherwise enlightened people (civil rights activists, gay activists, etc.) have no interest in removing?
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Violet says:
If that’s the case, then it seems to me we ought to be a little less critical of her, and a bit more self-reflexive about whether feminism is as inclusive as we think it is.
Yes, and we should also do some soul-searching about how anti-porn feminists are anti-sex prudes who want to rob artists of their First Amendment rights.
I’m sorry, but statements like that are red flags to a bull, and I’m the bull. This propaganda drives me NUTS. And that’s what it is — propaganda. The fact that many women today believe it doesn’t make it true; it just means propaganda is really, really effective.
Feminism has always striven to be inclusive. You can read the minutes of the New York radicals in 1968, the conversations white women were having with black women. Black women were very drawn to feminism, but they were in the midst of a civil rights struggle, too, and they felt like they needed to stay with that. Which of course they did; the civil rights movement was a great uprising of a people. Unlike feminism, which is immensely more complicated because it requires us to interrogate the fundamental structures of our own families.
At any rate, while black women were in sympathy with feminism, black MEN were not. The civil rights movement was notoriously patriarchal and sexist. Some of the first feminists I knew were black women who were in essence refugees from that movement, having learned to their heartbreak that black men had no interest in elevating women. Black men considered feminism a threat — both to their own patriarchal hegemony, and to their civil rights mythos of The Struggle of the Black Man. They accused white feminists of being racists who were trying to brainwash black women into hating their men. They accused black feminists of being race traitors.
It was ugly and mean and wrong, but you know what? Those fuckers won the propaganda war. Those assholes wrote the history books. And now young people actually believe that the Civil Rights movement was all sweetness and light and equality for all, while Second Wave feminists were white racists.
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Nora says:
I cannot watch Obama on any news channel because I find him revolting on so many levels. But today I saw a news clip of Obama and Hillary Clinton before the ‘big’ speech, and was shocked. Hillary Clinton was wearing a head scarf which I see some moderate Muslim women wear in public. I have never seen one of our women leaders don this headgear. Can someone enlighten me? My initial reaction is that Obama made her wear it and, coming right after hearing the Supreme Court lifted the Chysler stay, filled me with deep sadness and dispair.
We are lost.
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Nora says:
Oops, “despair”. I hate when I do that.
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KendallJ says:
Here, Here Violet at 8:03pm and 8:15pm!!!!
Thanks for so clearly and accurately articulating the fucking truth!!!!!! I am so sick of this bullshit!!! Blaming feminists for not being enclusive! It’s fucking infuriating bullshit! This propaganda has been one of the most successful divide and conquer strategies used against any movement in modern history. This propaganda bullshit it exactly why N.O.W. has spent the last 30 years chasing its tail while standing in place. N.O.W. has been so brow-beaten with this shit that they are everyone’s advocate, but women’s. Go to their website. There is more support for gay marriage than there is for equal pay.
Is AL Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, or the NAACP marching with outrage over every little girl whose mangled body is pulled out of a ditch! NO!!!! NOT EVEN FOR THE LITTLE BLACK GIRLS, UNLESS OF COURSE THEY THINK A WHITE MAN DID IT!!!!THEY AREN’T SPEAKING OUT FOR THE LITTLE BLACK GIRLS RAPED AND MUTILATED IN AFRICA EITHER. NO, ITS THOSE EDUCATED UPPITY WHITE BITCHES SCREAMING ABOUT THE CONGO RAPES AND THE GENITAL MUTILATION AND THE ISLAMIC HONOR KILLINGS, ETC!!!!
NOW WHOSE NOT ENCLUSIVE ENOUGH?
Please, I’m of a mixed racial background and my daughter is multi-racial, and I will not sell her, myself or any other women short for any man of any race. I suggest that if women of all races hold themselves in high regard, they won’t either.
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Sharon says:
Ok ok, uncle.
Or aunt, if you will, already.
I wasn’t trying to ignite a firestorm. Hell I preach to the choir more than many on this site.
And because I am working with women of color, I am seeing something here that gives me pause, and makes me think to myself, ‘hey, why aren’t they into doing something about this?’. All I am trying to point out is that feminists do not come in one-size-fits-all packages, and further, that women of color get hit by multiple forces of oppression at once, and so picking out just one doesn’t ’speak’ to them as much as some of the others.
Now, having said that, I didn’t mean to imply we need to take on racism and classism in addition to sexism. As I said, first and second wave feminism tried that - it didn’t work. I think sexism is THE problem and needs elevating to a visibility level akin to, say, the Second Coming or something equivalent. However, in that fight, I think we have to recognize that to some we would like to enlighten and get to take up the cause, the tidal wave, if you will, don’t feel sexism is the only issue they face, and given some of the struggles they have, they might place it low on the list of priorities to be attended to.
Ok, nuff said.
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Violet says:
However, in that fight, I think we have to recognize that to some we would like to enlighten and get to take up the cause, the tidal wave, if you will, don’t feel sexism is the only issue they face, and given some of the struggles they have, they might place it low on the list of priorities to be attended to.
I understand that, and in fact, I am not in the habit of wondering aloud why women of color don’t place more emphasis on sexism. I know why.
But Michelle Obama is the First Lady, and is in a position to speak for all American women. That’s why I think it would be awfully nice if she would publicly embrace feminism.
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Violet says:
Hillary Clinton was wearing a head scarf which I see some moderate Muslim women wear in public. I have never seen one of our women leaders don this headgear. Can someone enlighten me?
It’s my impression that Western women have long donned head-coverings as a diplomatic courtesy, particularly in mosques.
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Violet says:
To clarify my remark upstream, I’m going to be boring and point people to a post from last year:
Look: women are not a natural group. There are no families of women, no tribes of women, no nations of women. Humans organize themselves around kinship and language and culture, and other types of alliances are inevitably weak in comparison. The Marxists discovered that a century ago, though they kept up the “workers of the world, unite!” self-delusion for decades more. German and French peasants in 1914 had vastly more in common with each other than with their parasitic overlords, but when war threatened all the German people — peasants and parasites together — voted happily to blow the fucking heads off all the French people. It was ever thus.
I expanded on this theme somewhere else, I think, but I can’t remember where. At any rate, the point is that human groupings that are organized around kinship and ethnicity are vastly stronger than groupings that cut across those lines. And by “groupings,” I’m referring to both privilege and oppression, as well as movements for change.
People who are involved in an ethnic struggle usually prioritize that above any other liberation movement (whether for individuals or a class of individuals) that is in any way in conflict with the ethnic alignment. Man, that sounds like math, but the bottom line is, black women and black gay people are more likely to hang with black male patriarchs to demand racial equality than demand their own liberation within the black community. And Pakistani women are going to stick by their men when their country is invaded, rather than join an international feminist consortium. Ideally they could do both, but when push comes to shove — and it does, because patriarchs are patriarchs — the ethnic struggle takes precedence.
People who wonder aloud why American women never show the kind of voting solidarity that, say, black Americans do, are completely misunderstanding how this stuff works. Women are not an ethnic group, not a separate culture. They will never be unified the way a folk grouping can be.
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Kiuku says:
The headscarf is a cultural symbol of women’s oppression. Anything that women have to do different than men will be construed in a Patriarchy as a circular argument for their oppression. Women have to cover up. I am in Jordan right now. I’ve been here three months. I no longer wear a headscarf but I did at the beginning to see what it was like and to make friends with women who wore it/be nice to them. It can be a diplomatic courtesy but I think westerners place more importance on it than they should/they think it is weird for non-muslims to wear a headscarf. If you wear it you’ll get a ton of questions about why you are wearing it. If you don’t, they will just be disappointed and just somewhat bothered by someone they can’t really enforce a hijab on. But that is just Jordan, and Jordan is liberal.
Oh yea, the Patriarchy is alive and well here. You don’t get American sexism, but try to get good service anywhere and you’re doomed. Male entitlement here is strong, despite the glaringly obvious. If he has a penis, it doesn’t matter what job he is doing or how much money you have, he feels he should be above you.
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Branjor says:
Re Violet #27, “women are not a natural group” etc. Maybe women aren’t a “natural group” now, in patriarchy, but we were originally. Women bonded with other women out of affinity, for support, for communal child rearing, and the men with whom they reproduced were on the margins of the matrix, not central to it. Women, mothers, quite naturally formed families with other women, and the man/woman (nuclear) family, ethnic groups consisting of these families, nation-states, were only a much later development.
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Violet says:
Maybe. That’s speculation. No one knows what hominid and early human social systems were like.
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yttik says:
“They will never be unified the way a folk grouping can be.”
It’s true. But also there is a concerted effort from day one to keep women divided. Separate, divide, control. You can see it begin on the playground, boys learn to rally around each other in gender solidarity, girls are more likely to be busy learning how to single out and persecute other girls.
We ridicule women in this culture for sport and entertainment. The media never fails to provide us with a new target, to rally people against women like Palin, Perjean, Pelosi.
Women have not yet figured out how to fight back against this successfully. We tend to look at the particular woman being ridiculed and victimized by sexism and decide that it’s okay because she isn’t like me. She’s a conservative like Palin or a Miss California or a Cynthia McKinney or a Hillary Clinton. We seem to forget that misogyny hurts all women, that it’s a beast that cuts across racial lines, class, religion, it doesn’t care what group you belong to.
We aren’t ever going to have complete solidarity and unity as women because there are just too many forces against us, but we could do a whole lot better.
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Kali says:
They will never be unified the way a folk grouping can be.
That’s true and very unfortunate. It’s a big reason why the patriarchy has been so successful in keeping women oppressed. But, my perception is that male solidarity is significantly greater than female solidarity. Why is that?
Why is male solidarity in oppressing women so much greater than female solidarity in fighting that oppression? I find it extremely frustrating. -
Branjor says:
***But also there is a concerted effort from day one to keep women divided. Separate, divide, control.***
Exactly. Why does there have to be a “concerted effort” to divide women when our division, by family, ethnic group, race etc. is supposedly so “natural”. Here’s a hint - it’s not so natural. I don’t have to “speculate” to know that women did not always bond primarliy with males. I just have to know something about my own and other women’s feelings and processes to know what has to be done to bring us to that point, and it is a LOT.
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Branjor says:
***They will never be unified the way a folk grouping can be.***
Men are unified more than a folk grouping ever was. Witness the white “progressive” men who supported Obama’s candidacy over Hillary Clinton’s because O was a man, the hell with their white mothers, wives and daughters. When women get around to it (again) we can be just as unified.
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octogalore says:
Violet — wise words about the logical groupings. I recall I asked you about your thoughts here way back when, and what you said then helped greatly in clarifying my thinking.
I think it’s allied to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The intra-family/immediate community alliances that women feel with the men in their lives are stronger than the inter-family/immediate community ones with other women, because the former are perceived as more connected to the survival and comfort needs, in addition to the higher leve lneeds. The alliances with other women are more on the higher-level psychological or self-actualization level, which is connected somewhat to both independence from men and also privilege.
So women with less cultural or class privilege may prioritize those alliances which seem immediately critical.
That’s understandable. But I think until feminism is given equal priority, the independence from men that’s required to get to the upper levels is difficult to achieve. So I’d argue that deprioritization of feminism can be self-defeating.
I think there are some justified criticisms that the feminist could be more inclusive, but I think this can be addressed by giving attention to concerns of women of all races and classes, NOT by incorporating various lefty movements where they aren’t connected to issues of women.
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Violet says:
Why is male solidarity in oppressing women so much greater than female solidarity in fighting that oppression?
I would unpack that into two questions. The first would be: why is it so easy for men to maintain their solidarity in oppressing women? Because maintaining the status quo is always easy. It’s incredibly hard to overturn social systems. There are rewards for conforming and harsh punishments for rebelling. That’s true whether we’re talking about sexism or slavery.
The second question is more difficult: how does male solidarity in oppressing women get started in the first place? And that brings us back to fundamental questions of the origin of male dominance, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. The pertinent aspect here, though, is how male dominance spreads from culture to culture — which it obviously has, like metals or Coca-Cola. I think the competitive nature of men has a lot to do with that. Men in gender-equal and/or matrifocal society are happy, until they come into contact with the men of a patriarchal society, who proceed to ridicule the first group of men for being pansies. We can see that kind of social infection going on right now in the world today, as the few remaining matrilineal tribes in the Himalayan foothills come under the influence of patriarchal Indian culture.
However, I would further point out that the degree of male solidarity in oppressing women has not really been tested. Men are not unified across boundaries of ethnicity, language, etc., any more than women are. (If they were, we wouldn’t live on a war-torn planet.) I think if a world referendum could be held right now on women’s rights, most men would probably vote to keep us oppressed, but they would be doing so to preserve their own status quo.
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Branjor says:
***Men are not unified across boundaries of ethnicity, language***
They are when it comes to keeping women in second place. Which, if their folk groups, families, kinship systems, etc. were the most important thing, would not be.
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KendallJ says:
WOW! Great conversation!
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Branjor says:
Oh, so now the groupings of females with males is “logical” - oh, and “wise”. First “natural”, now “logical” and “wise.” Please, let’s not essentialize patriarchal family and kinship systems. That may be the way it is now, but it’s not “nature”, and it’s not necessarily “logical” and “wise” unless you are a devoted patriarchalist. And, yes, without a doubt, *women* devised some of our early social systems and configured them quite differently from patriarchal systems.
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donna darko says:
You can see how the 2008 Election was a repeat of the 1960s and 1970s. Replace black men with Barack and Michelle Obama and Obama supporters, male and female of all races:
Feminism has always striven to be inclusive. You can read the minutes of the New York radicals in 1968, the conversations white women were having with black women. Black women were very drawn to feminism, but they were in the midst of a civil rights struggle, too, and they felt like they needed to stay with that. Which of course they did; the civil rights movement was a great uprising of a people. Unlike feminism, which is immensely more complicated because it requires us to interrogate the fundamental structures of our own families.
At any rate, while black women were in sympathy with feminism, black MEN were not. The civil rights movement was notoriously patriarchal and sexist. Some of the first feminists I knew were black women who were in essence refugees from that movement, having learned to their heartbreak that black men had no interest in elevating women. Black men considered feminism a threat — both to their own patriarchal hegemony, and to their civil rights mythos of The Struggle of the Black Man. They accused white feminists of being racists who were trying to brainwash black women into hating their men. They accused black feminists of being race traitors.
It was ugly and mean and wrong, but you know what? Those fuckers won the propaganda war. Those assholes wrote the history books. And now young people actually believe that the Civil Rights movement was all sweetness and light and equality for all, while Second Wave feminists were white racists.
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donna darko says:
Any time an Obot says racism was bad as sexism in 2008, I suggest cut and pasting those three paragraphs which explain the misogyny and race-baiting of 2008 and 2009. It helps to know your history and theory. See the last sentence:
And now young people actually believe that the Civil Rights movement was all sweetness and light and equality for all, while Second Wave feminists were white racists.
Just like in the 1960s and 1970s, all the focus on racism and none on the misogyny underlying Clinton’s run for the Presidency in 2008 and the ensuing race-baiting.
For summer reading, I recommend Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice as the problem and Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power and Angela Davis’ autobiography, which combine feminism and anti-racism, as the solution.
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Summer must reads « Donna Darko says:
[...] men” with Obama and Obama supporters and black women with former Clinton supporters in the following three paragraphs: Feminism has always striven to be inclusive. You can read the minutes of the New York radicals in [...]
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Northwest rain says:
I’m going to repost a remark below — because it is so true. And as far as I know 0bama did not use Obama while in High School — he used his step father’s last name which was Asian which would have made him fit in with the mixed race MAJORITY in Hawaii super smoothly. Oh — I also grew up in Hawaii — a blond haoli among the dark haired, darker majority. Talk about sticking out like a sore thumb. And then toss in a couple of teachers who were r@cists and hated white kids. I learned all about r@cism — and today if I dislike someone it is on an individual basis.
It bugs me no end that Mrs 0 took advantage of the battles fought by the real feminist — so that SHE could attend formally boy’s schools. Yet she never EVER has acknowledged that her way was made easier by hard fought battles of feminist — she is stomping on heads of feminists. I feel sorry for her daughters.
bluelyon says:
a biracial kid with a funny name from Hawaii, of “all places,”
Excuse me…but I grew up in Hawaii, and bi-racial and multi-racial kids are a dime a dozen there. In fact, people took pride in being multiracial. We didn’t think it unusual, nor did we look down upon anyone who was of mixed ethnicity. Obama was not disadvantaged by growing up in Hawaii. In fact, he would have just been one of the crowd there (his “autobiography” musings, not withstandint). It would have been far, far more traumatic for him to live on The Mainland as a biracial child. Michelle needs to get her head out of her a$$.
ABSOLUTELY TRUE!!!
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Urocyon says:
Sorry for the late comment, but I just ran across your blog a couple of days ago.
The pertinent aspect here, though, is how male dominance spreads from culture to culture — which it obviously has, like metals or Coca-Cola.
This is one of the things I’ve been thinking about rather a lot, recently. (I’ll have to search for some of what you’ve written on this theme, since you mention it in your comment.) Have you looked into Jack Forbes’ concept of the highly contagious wétiko psychosis? He may not have created the metaphor, but he certainly articulated it very well, pointing out how so many types of cannibalistic behavior tie in together. My own variation on that theme is the best working model I’ve found, so far.
We can see that kind of social infection going on right now in the world today, as the few remaining matrilineal tribes in the Himalayan foothills come under the influence of patriarchal Indian culture.
You don’t have to go that far to find it. I’m Tutelo/Cherokee from the Virginia mountains, and things have been getting increasingly ugly over the past couple of generations, AFAICT. Entitled attitudes among younger men/boys–not to mention their results and ramifications–horrify me, and I’m only in my mid-30s. It was hard enough 20 years ago. I feel sorry for the girls coming up now, getting conflicting messages about almost everything *except* victim blaming. The more traditional side: “You need to nip bad behavior in the bud, by any means necessary.” Of course, this places more blame if you can’t, much less if you have internalized the idea that you can’t really say no. A personal example of where this leads: for better than five years, I just didn’t talk about being date raped my first year in college, because I couldn’t take hearing all about how I should have kneecapped the dude well before that point.
When my mom was growing up, in the ’50s, there was only one noticeably physically abusive man in the neighborhood. The houses are close enough together that you could hear violence and shouting–and I did with depressing regularity, growing up in the same neighborhood. Neighbors kept intervening, for all the good it did (in both time periods, come to think of it). That man got hauled off by the cops, told in no uncertain terms to stay away, and was further ordered to keep paying the mortgage and spousal/child support. Women may not have owned the property anymore on paper, but still had de facto ownership. Apparently, he did not return to collect his things, much less try to kill her and the children, probably judging that he couldn’t get away with it. Abuse and rape were still not viewed as inevitable even then, from talking to older women; even a couple hundred years ago, they were not tolerated at all. Now, we’re just supposed to flee and abandon our houses, and give the abusers access to our children. We get blamed for the situation by both cultures, on rather different grounds.
The main change I see? Mass media bombardment steeped in backlash, vitriol, and vulgarity. Stereotypes aside, we weren’t exactly isolated before, and we’ve been under pressure to assimilate for a good long time now in the East. (Living outside London these days, I dread to think of gender/race/etc. relations back home catching up with the state of things here.) The promise of power, however hollow and destructive, is dangled in front of male noses every day, along with the One True (Truly Poisonous) Model of gender relations. Too many of them bite, in part for the reasons you describe.
I didn’t mean to go on and on here, but trying to figure out the hows and whys of this subject has become important to me–with the aim of finding reasonable strategies to help turn things around!
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Urocyon says:
Sorry, I forgot to attribute the quotes in my previous comment to Violet!
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lambert strether says:
So, what are the implications of this conversation for the Diocletian conversation?
WO vs. WP?
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Branjor says:
Yeah, lambert, good catch. The implications are obvious.
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lambert strether says:
Thanks, branjor, but they’re not obvious to me. So for the slower and less conversant people like me, it would be good to have the implications worked out.
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Branjor says:
Lambert, it just means that women are not so easily classsifiable as feminist or nonfeminist, woman supportive or not woman supportive, based on where they fall (left, right, center) on the male political spectrum. Laura Bush may very well be more of a feminist than Michelle Obama in some(or many) ways and not so much in other ways. The implications are the same for other women of different political persuasions.
