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
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I tried to post a comment at Feministing but, as usual, was bitterly rebuffed by Typekey, which thinks I’m a Soviet spy. So here’s the question I want to ask about this post:
What is the empirical foundation for the claim that “creating a culture which values genuine female sexual pleasure can help stop rape”?
Every study on rape that I’m aware of links it to male dominance and low female status. It’s an expression of misogyny and control, not a case of crossed signals about sexual enjoyment.
Anthropological analysis shows that levels of rape and other male violence on women are strongly correlated to the level of male dominance in a society (Sanday 1976, for example). Repression of women’s sexuality is also a symptom of male dominance, of course, but any correlation between that and rape is secondary. Counter-examples prove the point. The Minangkabau, for example, are quite restrictive of women’s sexuality, but rape is virtually unknown because women in their society have extremely high status (they traditionally refer to their culture as a matriarchy). On the other hand, there have been male-dominated societies where female sexual pleasure was assumed to be normal and good (no puritanical body anxiety at all), but rape was still common because women’s status was very low.
Valuing female sexual pleasure is a good thing. But how is it going to stop rape? The corollary to your thesis would seem to be that men commit rape because female sexual pleasure isn’t valued. And I would really like to know what the evidence is for that.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Feminist Theory, Rape on January 8, 2008, 4:51 pm EST
21 Comments »
The mayonnaise thread over at Twisty’s morphed into a discussion of why women in a patriarchy justify their own oppression. A commenter named JR mentioned Social Justification Theory, which other people in the thread at first thought was the same as Stockholm Syndrome. Here’s my comment, which I’m dragging over here in order to continue the conversation:
System Justification Theory is not quite the same as Stockholm Syndrome. The latter is basically “please the captor to ensure survival,” as Twisty summarizes. Social Justification Theory is not really about bonding with the powerful oppressor, but about accepting the intrinsic moral validity of the situation.
But SJT didn’t need to be invented; many feminists (including me!) independently recognized quite a while ago that this sort of psychological justification explains how women accept their status under patriarchy. Look: if patriarchy is all you see and there’s no way out and everybody in the world (including the people you love) thinks you’re an inferior piece of shit whose destiny is to serve men, then believing in your own worth would provoke an unendurable storm of cognitive dissonance. It would just hurt too fucking much. So, unless you’re Mary Wollstonecraft or something, it’s much more comfortable to simply believe that everyone is right — you ARE an inferior piece of shit — and no injustice is being done. God’s in His heaven and all is right with the world.
SJT and Stockholm Syndrome are not mutually exclusive, of course. But for some women in some situations, Stockholm Syndrome really doesn’t explain their complicity in their fate; there is no bonding with the oppressor, no escape from suffering, no silver lining (even an imaginary one). There’s just shit. Yet they justify this situation to themselves as “natural,” inevitable, part of God’s plan. An analog is the psychology of some low-caste Hindus and Untouchables, who endure their situation by believing that it is karmically just.
An interesting point is that it is often the most disadvantaged people in a social system who have the most psychological investment in justifying it. This justification is deeply precious to them, the only thing that makes a grotesque situation endurable. This is part of the explanation for the paradox that some women are even more reluctant to embrace feminism than some men. Psychologically women under patriarchy have a great deal to lose by acknowledging the injustice of the system. Men potentially have something to lose as well, but their psychology is different. High-status men in an entrenched patriarchy (historically the class which has occasionally produced pro-feminist men) enjoy a sense of abundant, unquestioned privilege which they may not be consciously aware of, but which influences their behavior. Obviously many of them sense the vulnerability of their superior position and defend it against any challenge, but others — a few — are like rich kids born into wealth who don’t know the value of the dollar. These are the ones who say, Sure, why not give the little ladies the right to vote? No skin off my nose! It’s easy to feel generous and benevolent when you’ve got millions in the bank. Needless to say, this money-grows-on-trees mentality can rapidly give way to a scarcity model once the threat to male privilege becomes real.
Another point to be made is that in order for the closed loop of social justification to be broken, there has to be an alternative on the horizon. In my comment at Twisty’s I alluded to the hopeless outlook for a young woman in an entrenched patriarchy: if that’s all you see and all you know and all there’s ever been, then there’s no way out. Psychological complicity is almost guaranteed unless you’re an exceptionally strong-minded individual. There have doubtless been feminists in every single human generation since the dawn of patriarchy, but unless feminist awareness reaches some kind of critical mass, it’s destined to flicker out. The feminist alternative has to be real enough and credible enough for the great mass of women to take the enormous psychological risk of believing in it. Hence the importance of consciousness-raising, of feminist role models, of criticism of patriarchy, and of a feminist vision for the future. And then the revolution doesn’t happen overnight, obviously; forty years after the start of the modern feminist movement in America, there are still plenty of women who find it easier to drink the patriarchy kool-aid than to believe in their own worth (though at our current juncture I think Stockholm Syndrome is probably more important than Social Justification Theory in explaining the mentality of the most vehemently anti-feminist women in America.)
Posted by Violet under Feminist Theory, Recommended on December 12, 2006, 7:12 pm EST
40 Comments »
I do not hate Hugo Schwyzer. I don’t think he’s evil, I don’t think he’s a bad person. I just think his idea of feminism is extremely problematic, even detrimental to the cause of women’s liberation.
Our story so far: Hugo wrote a post detailing the advice on feminism he gave to a student, and a bunch of people objected, including me. In my post I wrote:
Apparently Hugo’s approach is to acknowledge that feminism is indeed difficult and unpleasant — he compares it to AA — but nonetheless a noble undertaking that should be attempted once you’re through having fun in life and feel ready for the hairshirt (or turtleneck). This doesn’t strike me as a winning strategy. In fact, I would go so far as to say that perhaps one reason Hugo’s young charges are less than enthused about feminism is because their role model is a turtleneck-wearing youth minister who likens feminism to AA.
Yesterday Hugo responded to his critics, but he didn’t challenge my observation that he appears to be teaching his students that feminism is some kind of hairshirt. In fact, he confirmed it:
My students always hear me, for example, compare becoming a feminist to getting into a cold swimming pool: a few will find it easiest to just dive in, but most of us will climb down, step by step, shivering all the way, only gradually becoming comfortable. And none of us can fully immerse ourselves forever; we all have to keep a head above water in order to breathe.
So feminism — that is, the belief that women are fully human — is a pool of cold water, an unnatural environment for the human body and hard as hell to get used to. And we can never fully embrace it, because we’ll always need to poke our heads above that suffocating water to breathe the air — air presumably representing our natural human milieu in which women are inferior.
This is a women’s studies professor, folks, and a popular self-described feminist blogger. God help us.
The swimming pool analogy is so bizarre, so far off the mark, that it took my breath away (pun intended). Feminism isn’t cold water; it’s not something unnatural and uncomfortable. It’s liberation! It’s joy and life and freedom! It’s half the human race being unshackled from the bonds of oppression! Feminism means the recognition of women’s fundamental humanity, the opportunity for us to seize our birthright as full citizens of the human community. Feminism isn’t the cold water; it’s the air.*
But you won’t hear that from Hugo, who never fails to remark on just how difficult it is to be a feminist, particularly a feminist man. “[L]iving life as a pro-feminist man (particularly in college) isn’t a cakewalk!” he says. He says that a lot.
But you know what? Hugo is the only feminist man I know of who harps on this. The only one. Most enlightened men I know consider feminism a given — of course men and women are equal — and a liberation for everyone, including themselves. Yes, men sometimes stumble on how to cope with their male privilege, just as white people have to work on being aware of white privilege and racism. But acknowledging white privilege is very different from believing that treating blacks as equals is like getting into a pool of cold water that you can never fully immerse yourself in because, you know, it’ll suffocate you.
Can you even imagine a white professor of Black Studies teaching racial equality this way? A cold swimming pool you have to ease into? Uncomfortable, unnatural, something you can only do part-time? What the fuck?
But Hugo seems heavily invested in this model. He seems very wrapped up in notions of struggle and penance. He’s a Christian, of course, and it goes without saying that sacrifice and suffering are big themes in Christian thought. I realize that it’s a bit rude to psychoanalyze someone I’ve never even met, but I can’t help wondering if there isn’t an element of martyrdom at work here. Feminism is hard! I’m doing this for God! You can do it too, but only if you’re strong!
This may also explain why Hugo always sounds like he thinks feminism is optional. If it’s something everyone can do, or if it’s just the right thing to do, then it’s not very saintly is it?
Of course Hugo has the right to his own opinion, and if feminism for him is painful penance, so be it. I also believe, truly, that Hugo is a good person and sincerely well-intentioned.
What bothers me is that Hugo is both a women’s studies professor and a fairly popular blogger. So he’s influencing thousands of people with his version of feminism: not a joyous liberation, not even simply the right thing to do, but some kind of penitential path only for the strong of heart. Beyond the fact that this is deeply insulting to women, it’s also just not a real great way to promote the movement, you know?
*After I wrote this post last night I read some of the comments at Hugo’s, and discovered that Sophonisba had the same reaction to the swimming pool analogy as I did.
Posted by Violet under Feminist Theory, Gender Issues on June 16, 2006, 2:14 pm EST
50 Comments »
Over in the Today’s lesson thread, which drifted into a discussion of Dworkin, rape, and male dominance, Mandos made the following comment:
Frankly, whoever rocks the cradle rules the world. Whoever has control over reproduction has a lot of power. Under conditions of noncoercion, women have control over reproduction and hence massive social power simply due to that fact. Men are necessarily peripheral in at least some subtle way. The only society I know of in which marriage does not at all take place (the Moro?) demonstrates this relatively well—as well-off or badly off as it may be, men are still somehow psychologically secondary due to the lack of social control over reproduction.
Did it take rape to create a system in which men are no longer peripheral? This to me is the disturbing question.
What we’re getting to here is the origin of male dominance, which is one of my favorite questions. I’ve been noodling over it for most of my life. What Mandos is saying, I think, is that motherhood gives women automatic power that renders men somewhat peripheral in the natural order of things. And indeed, four out of five anthropologists agree (that’s a joke; actually I think most anthropologists agree). But does that lead to male dominance? And is male dominance inevitable?
To answer the last question first: no, male dominance is not inevitable. And several decades of anthropological work have made it possible to sort out the social conditions under which it arises.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Violet under Feminist Theory, Random Pedantry, Gender Issues, Recommended on May 7, 2006, 12:19 am EST
156 Comments »
Chris Clarke has a post up with the heart-stopping title, Why I’m Not A Feminist. Heart-stopping because surely if any man is a feminist, it’s Chris Clarke.
Chris’s point is that because he is a man, he is not entitled to call himself a feminist: “I am a sympathizer. I am a fellow traveler. At my best, I am an ally. But I am a member of the class against which feminism is aimed.”
In the comment thread that follows, the wonderful Dr. Virago takes issue with this:
Feminism is a political position that can be held by anyone. “Woman” is (perhaps) an identity that only some can claim. You are not a woman, but you are a feminist, given your political claims above.
My sentiments exactly. I grew up believing that feminism was the only possible stance for an enlightened human being. I expected any enlightened man to identify as a feminist, just as I expected that from any enlightened woman.
I was shocked the first time a man close to me eschewed the feminist label. “I’m a man, so I can’t really be a feminist, can I?” he said. I understood the argument intellectually, but emotionally I felt betrayed. It felt to me as if he were saying, “I wish you luck and everything — I’ll be waving from the sidelines — but it’s really not my problem, is it?”
Since then I’ve learned that it’s women themselves (some of them) who insist that men can never be feminists, only “pro-feminists.” Men like Chris Clarke are honoring this position when they refuse to claim a mantle that some women say can only be ours. I’ve adapted to this sensibility in discourse, and acquiesce by using the locution “pro-feminist” to refer to men. But I hate it. It rankles. It feels completely, utterly wrong.
If feminism means dismantling sexism, if it means transforming the world so that males and females participate equally in humanity — which is what I think it means — then by definition it is not the purview of women alone. It is men’s struggle as well. The two halves of the human race must work together to remake our relationship to each other. We’re not talking about just a jail break from Patriarchy Prison. Feminism means the inmates go free, the wardens hang up their keys, the jailhouse gets demolished, and everybody joins together to say, “let’s not build any more of these shitpiles, okay?” It’s not gonna work unless everybody gets in on the act.
Furthermore, when men stand outside of feminism instead of identifying with it, their absence plays into the right-wing propaganda that feminists are just a bunch of man-hating feminazis. Christ almighty, the movement is already marginalized; the last thing we need is to make it even more exclusive. What do we gain by restricting the label “feminist” to women? Or for that matter, to only those women who are activists, or who happen to share our particular brand of feminist politics? Feminism needs to be seen as part of every enlightened person’s mental furniture, not as the radical rantings of a few fringe-dwellers.
Or as Tomato Nation said in far fewer words:
If you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist.
Yes, you are.
So to Chris Clarke I say: You are too a feminist. Yes, you are.
Posted by Violet under Feminist Theory, Gender Issues on March 29, 2006, 10:13 am EST
43 Comments »
The following is cross-posted from the ongoing discussion at “Alas,” where I fear my comment may have been swallowed and rejected by the cyber gods. So here it is, unswallowed and unrejected:
Radical feminism encompasses two big ideas:
Gender inequality is a deep-structure issue, interwoven with the very fabric of society. Confronting it means confronting the core values of the patriarchal culture. Legislative remedies alone won’t do the trick (which is what liberal feminists hoped); even when legal barricades to women’s advancement have been removed, the hearts-and-minds stuff (gender stereotypes and expectations) will get in the way.
The oppression of women is the root oppression in human society, both typologically and historically; all other oppressions stem from it.
Number one is something that a great many modern feminists would agree with, even if they don’t consider themselves “radical” feminists. Personally, I would argue that #1 has been proven empirically correct; it is an accurate description of reality.
Number two, on the other hand, is a conjecture. It may or may not be correct. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Violet under Feminist Theory on January 2, 2006, 1:47 pm EST
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