Jessi Fischer of The Sexademic, who’s just received her masters degree in sexuality from San Francisco State University says
This blog has seen its fair share of feminist bashers, quoting Valerie Solanas and Andrea Dworkin as if they represent a synthesized doctrine of Feminism. But those fools have it all wrong. In all the gender studies and women’s studies courses I took I never once read those women.
You want classic feminist theorists? Try Mary Wollenstonecraft. Try Virginia Woolf. Try Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Try Sojourner Truth. Try Simone de Beauvoir. Fuck, how about John Stuart Mill, Frederick Douglass or Henrick Ibsen? How about our modern feminists like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem or Susan Faludi?
Feminism is not about man-bashing, porn-censure or making sure every woman works outside the home.
Feminism is about choice.
And because we are individuals with vastly differing opinions, feminist theorists contradict each other and argue with each other. There is no unifying feminist doctrine except choice.
That sounds about right. There are a lot of ideas about what feminism is all about. And even more ideas about how best to express feminism. And yeah, some of them can be as bitterly and sometimes even violently in conflict as any other broad social and political philosophies as broad as Christology to as (seemingly) obscure as taxonomy.
The other major element in her post is a pean to condoms, which she introduces with…
I know what you’re thinking. Condoms? Yes. My contraceptive method of choice allowed me to take control of reproduction and, consequently, my life.
I try to imagine worlds where sex with a man often leads to pregnancy. Or worlds without protection against STIs. The freedom to learn and develop my mind could be hindered by childrearing or health complications.
If you had a very narrow or, particularly, a very conservative notion of feminism (where “conservative” refers both to the right-wing conservatism of, say, Nikki Haley or the separatist conservatism of Mary Daly) you’d might raise an eyebrow, at least, at the idea of sex with men, let alone sex with men using the iconically “male” condom as contraception. Eh. Maybe so. Some schools of feminism really do balk at the idea of contraception (Haley) or men (Daly) let alone using contraception while having sex with men. But just as it would be a mistake to confuse their thin-ice edges with the more-literally-central ideas it would be an even bigger one to pick either one of those arguably doctrinally choice-limiting extreme cases and decide it represented the whole.
