I’m going to post here what I said over at Apostate’s:

I see Sarah Palin as an ordinary modern Republican woman with feminist leanings — about as feminist as Republicans get.

I do not think she’s evil, anymore than I think most ordinary Republicans are evil. I believe she — and they — are mistaken about many things. I do believe to some extent they are tools, because they’re misled.

To go beyond that, and paint all Republicans as fascists with black hearts of evil, is a mistake. I know it’s a mistake, because I — like most Americans — have Republicans in my family. Lots of them. I know these people. I know women like Sarah Palin. In fact, every time I see or hear Palin I think of a cousin of mine, who’s that same kind of conservative Republican go-getter woman.

We gain nothing for the cause of liberalism when we fail to see the humanity of everyone, including our political opponents.

Meanwhile, Erica Jong has a piece up in Huff Post in which she refers to Sarah Palin as “white trash” and as a “redneck.”

If you really can’t figure out what’s wrong there, then you need to go back to remedial feminist class.

Some of Apostate’s commenters are saying things like “feminism doesn’t mean we support women just because they’re women.”

Actually, here’s what feminism means: it means we stick up for women against sexism no matter what, even when the women aren’t on our side politically.

All these soi-disant feminists who think that because they disagree with Palin politically, it’s okay to revile her and call her trash and attack her with misogyny and sexism — nope. Wrong. Sorry. That’s not how feminism works.

Posted by Violet under Election 2008, Comments that should have been posts on September 5, 2008, 3:56 pm EST

1 Comment »

I’m in the habit of carrying on substantive conversations with people in the comment threads, so it sometimes happens that my Serious Opinions About Major Issues end up being expressed not in posts, but in off-hand comments. Which is fine, except that whenever people ask me stuff like “where did you say that thing about x?”, I can’t remember. It’s not in a post. It’s buried in some comment thread. So I’ve invented a comment rescue category, and whenever I run across (or someone points out to me) some comment that really should have been post, here’s where I’ll put it.

Yesterday Julia asked about what it was like during the Women’s Liberation Movement and how it was different from today. Here’s what I said:

Julia, I became a feminist (an adolescent one) in 1971, when Women’s Liberation (as it was still called) was cresting. You know what it was like? It was like every single woman in the country was having an Ah Ha! moment, like HEY WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT? It was like the scales were falling from a million eyes.

The big question, though, which would take a long time to discuss, is why that happened THEN and not before and not since. Because what had always happened before — and what has always happened since — is that the scales-falling-from-eyes is instantly squashed by a million contradicting impulses and inputs, as I’m sure you’ve experienced yourself.

It’s not discrimination, it’s just nature and

no no you’re exaggerating and

ooh feminism is icky those women are scary and

you women belong with your menfolk (insert race or nationality) rather than ganging up with those other women, those other women (insert race or nationality) are our enemies and

what’s wrong with being sexy? and

why not learn to play the game and stop making a big deal? and

do you hate men or something? and

what are you complaining about, don’t you realize how good you have it? and

women don’t suffer nearly as much as (insert any other group) and

a better way would be to wait quietly and ask nicely instead of antagonizing men and on and on and fucking on.

So why didn’t that happen circa 1970? Zeitgeist. The pill plus the sexual revolution plus labor-saving devices multiplied by the Baby Boomer generation and then raised to the 10th power by a series of movements for human equality and justice beyond the traditional old tribal allegiances that usually keep women apart.

Will it ever happen again? I wonder.

I’ve bolded the bit I want to expand on. We can’t re-create the social and historical conditions that gave wings to Second Wave feminism, but we can notice the extent to which women — most definitely including feminists — have subsided back into tribal and clique allegiances, rather than standing together as women.

Just today I was reading an essay questioning why on earth black women would support a white woman for President, even if Obama weren’t running. Yeah, it’s not as if black women and white women have anything in common.

That kind of anti-ecumenicism is perhaps the single most salient aspect of Third Wave feminism. To some extent it is a good thing, even a great thing: understanding that women’s experiences are different, that the black woman’s experience is different from the white woman’s, and from the Native American woman’s, and from the Iranian woman’s, and so forth. And the queer experience, that’s different too, and then there’s the poor woman’s experience, and the immigrant experience, and the disabled experience, and the fat experience, and all of it intersects in a zillion different ways: a Chinese menu of oppression and privilege.

All of which is extremely valuable and important. Give everyone a voice; let everyone tell her story. No shoehorning into a dominant narrative, no assuming that every woman’s experience is synonymous with that of the middle-class white women who spearheaded waves one and two and who themselves were the beneficiaries of several types of privilege built on the backs of less fortunate women.

What has been lost, though — and this is as plain as day to me, though it’s apparently bad manners to point it out — is the sense that we are all women and that we all suffer in particular ways as women. Feminism is supposed to be about combating the oppression of women qua women, and so for it to work we have to think beyond more immediate allegiances.

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.

For all their differences — and women are as different from each other as men are — women all over the world share a set of common obstacles as women. And that will be true as long as patriarchy exists. But getting a bunch of humans to cross boundaries of culture and tribe and race and nation is hard. Way hard. I guess what disturbs me today is that almost nobody even seems to be trying. The Third Wave commitment to multiple feminisms seems to devolve all too often into the basest of human impulses, which is essentially fuck you, stranger.

And so we have the essayist who believes that black women and white women have no common cause. We have queer feminists who feel like they’re on a different planet than straight feminists. We have pro-porn feminists who seem to think that their worst enemies are anti-porn feminists. And don’t even get me started on the chasm between Western feminists and non-Western feminists.

Some people will tell you that it was like that even in the early 70s; that the ecumenicism of Women’s Lib was an illusion. That Women’s Liberation was just middle-class white girls and it only looked like universality because other women’s voices were silenced. In fact, I suspect that’s becoming the dominant narrative. Certainly it’s believed by a whole bunch of young feminists who weren’t even alive at the time.

All I can say is that in my experience it wasn’t like that at all. The feminist circles I was exposed to in the 70s were made up of women of all races and nationalities and backgrounds. What we talked about, what fascinated all of us, were the commonalities between us. A middle-class Jewish girl and a Lakota woman comparing notes. A privileged wife and a prostitute realizing that they were both fucking for their supper. Black women and white women talking urgently together about their menfolk, about the “race traitor” business and that whole godawful clusterfuck.

And through it all the realization that if women were ever going to be liberated, it would be because we’d done it ourselves, working together as women. That we couldn’t rely on any other justice movement to do it for us. Not humanism, not Marxism, not pacifism, not the civil rights movement — nothing. Because no matter how hard women worked or how much they threw their hearts into those other quests for liberation, at the end of the day it was mostly just the men who got free.

Yep, we knew all that then. And those days are gone. Gone, gone, gone. Gone, she said. Gone.

I have no idea how to bring them back. But I think we need to try. I think if feminism is going to have a fourth wave — if the dream of women as fully human is to survive into the permanent consciousness of the species instead of being embalmed as a quaint relic of the 20th century — then we’d better figure it out.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Feminist Theory, Gender Issues, Recommended, Election 2008, Comments that should have been posts on February 23, 2008, 1:11 am EST

47 Comments »