Although they’re from a couple of months ago these are probably the best paragraphs I read that week. They’re from Megan Carpentier of Jezebel on how she stopped calling herself a feminist and how she started again. I think it gets to the heart of why so, so many people (mostly but not always women) say “I’m not a feminist but…”
The professor was, apparently, a pro-life and pro-choice feminist, who believed that abortion was a moral wrong outweighed only by the moral wrong of sexism. And, once sexism had been conquered, the world would be perfect and abortion would no longer be necessary.
I thought she was cracked, but I was 19 and didn’t realize that “feminism” meant many different things to many different people, or that there was more than one way to be a feminist. Having been raised in a religious environment in which we were taught that there was one gospel, one Church and one way of looking at a set of issues, it didn’t occur to me that a political and social movement would or could be more multifaceted. I figured if she was a feminist, and feminists believed that about abortion, then I was obviously not a feminist.
But the March for Women’s Lives made me realize, very concretely, that there was more to it than what I’d been told: more people, more ideas, more ways of looking at the issues, more ideas of what was or was not a feminist issue. And I came back to the idea of calling myself a feminist, and what that meant, and the kinds of ideas, attitudes, disagreements and fights that the movement could both be and embrace.
I think this is a great example of the “I Can’t Be A Feminist Because Feminists Believe X” trope precisely because it is so rare to find dyed-in-the-wool feminists who also believe abortion should (at least eventually) be illegal. It sure beats the more common misconceptions that one somehow can’t be a feminist if, for instance, one wears lipstick or shaves one’s armpits or otherwise misses some item on an imagined mile-long checklist of requirements.
Since I still hear someone say they’re not a feminist because of this or that at least a couple of times a year I’d like to propose a good checklist item of my own: If you’ve ever felt compelled to say “I’m not a feminist but,” chances are very, very good that you actually are.
This is in part because
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Tue, 2010-06-22 22:55.This is in part because “feminist” is something of a dirty word. So are “liberal”, “hippy”, “socialist”, and the like. I wouldn’t be surprised if things like “lutheran”, “luddite”, or “abolitionist” were dirty words back in the day. It seems like any social movement that tries to change the world for the better (regardless of their eventual impact on history) which becomes sufficiently popular will find their term of self-identification transformed by their enemies into something which no reasonable person would want to be associated with – even if they agree with most of the underlying concepts that the term stands for. While it happens more often with “progressive”-style movements, this is not always so – the most current example in the US, “tea partiers / teabaggers”, a popular conservative movement, is rapidly achieving “dirty word” status.
Well, I covered this at my
Submitted by Sungold (not verified) on Tue, 2010-06-22 23:17.Well, I covered this at my blog a few weeks ago – and Carpentier’s Jezebel post is really very tame. She (re-)published a substantially different post at HuffPo, where she threw lots of red meat to the antifeminists. If you’re interested in how she’s trying to play different audiences to different effects, you might be interested in my take-down of her original article (the one that predates her Jezebel post).
I’m all for constructive criticism, but frankly Carpentier’s HuffPo gig struck me as self-promotion without a single truly constructive avenue of engagement with feminism. It’s full of cheap shots. She’s smarter and better than that.
[Not sure what the deal is with HuffPo or, for that matter, Slate’s XX, but I think if you want to write for them (and get paid more than the $5-10 dollars a post Jezebel pays) you gotta hew to their editorial stances. Which for all their (mostly genuine) progressive natures seem to be essentially troglodytic about feminism. And yeah, about those readers! Anyway, I strongly preferred her Jezebel post and wouldn’t have responded to her HuffPo post the same way. At all. Thanks, Sungold. —f]
What bugs me way more than
Submitted by maymay (not verified) on Tue, 2010-06-22 23:58.What bugs me way more than people saying "I'm not a feminist but" are people who say "You're not a feminist because…" or "You can't be a feminist if…."
[I'm not even going into designation of others because it calls into question not only the source of one's own opinions but those of somebody else's. Not that its not important(!!!) but because it's more complex than I can be coherent about. I'll just say that outside declarations can definitely affect one's self-definitions... but you can't necessarily let someone else's "purity" (or, more significantly one's own *perception* of *their* purity) dictate whether you could or couldn't be one yourself. Compare it to, say, vegetarianism. One could say (as some people do) "well, I can't be a *real* vegetarian because sometimes put honey in my tea." Or one could say (as some people really do) "I'm a vegetarian so I only eat meat one meal a day." At *some* point you're probably just fooling yourself but it's probably way further along the curve than the most-extreme terminus. And sure, to an ethical as opposed to practical vegetarian if you eat meat at all you're not actually vegetarian at all... no matter how sympathetic or "wannabe." But a practical vegetarian might say at least you're sympathetic and pointed in the right direction. That just helps illustrate the point even further -- there are different schools of thought on vegetarianism, on porn, on open source, on business practices, etc. One can't consistently embrace the entire spectrum on any of those things. What matters instead is that you can embrace elements that really are significant. Thanks, MayMay. --fl]
I don’t call myself a
Submitted by Dw3t-Hthr (not verified) on Thu, 2010-06-24 13:40.I don’t call myself a feminist because calling myself a feminist pushes me as close to suicidal as I’ve ever been, personally. THis makes me really twitchy about a lot of “You are too a feminist” commentary because it carries, due to of my history, a subtext of “I would rather have you miserable, maybe dead, and in my club than happy and alive and not giving me allegiance.”
I know I’m not alone in this; mainstream feminism has been so epically awful on a lot of intersectionality issues that a lot of women cannot safely identify themselves with it. It’s not the shallow “Boys will think badly of me if I call myself that, so I won’t, tee-hee” thing that’s the pop consciousness of “I’m not a feminist, but,” or the “But I totally like shaving my legs” thing either.
Keep in mind that when you try to convince people who say “I’m not a feminist, but” some fraction will be people who have been driven out by racism, transphobia, ablism, or other real, genuine reasons, and no amount of “But different feminists believe different things” will make institutional feminism work for people it is hostile to.
The first feminist who actually listened to me when I tried to talk about why I was conflicted about the word rather than belittling me, well, she doesn’t call herself a feminist anymore. I … think that means something, y’know?
I remember your blog post on
Submitted by makomk (not verified) on Wed, 2010-06-30 08:17.I remember your blog post on this. Technically it’s not an exclusively feminist problem, but it is pretty bad. Most of the feminists I personally respect seem to have either become ex-feminists or lost that respect over one or more of these issues at this point.
[Yup. Another example would be the word “liberal,” which also got redefined as a bad word by opponents such as Ronald Reagan’s radical conservative allies but even more so by the first George Bush campaign. With the result that, as with feminism, about 60% of the population would probably say “I’m not a liberal but…” Even though they’re virtually identical to it they can’t withstand the conservative framing. So yeah, I can see how people feel the same way about the word “feminism.” But in both cases? Score one for conservative framing. It’s a lovely divide-and-conquer method that for whatever reason people on the left are extraordinarily vulnerable to. Thanks, M. —fl]
figleaf, I really don’t
Submitted by Dw3t-Hthr (not verified) on Wed, 2010-06-30 11:16.figleaf, I really don’t appreciate you calling my life experiences “score one for conservative framing”.
The whole point I was trying to make, and apparently I’m just too fucking incompetent to make it, is that this is not something that I adopted because someone told me to or because I wanted to fit in with some ideology or framing.
And yet you keep posting gleefully about how that’s proof that “they” have reframed the word badly – when from my perspective it was listening to actual feminists, or at least people who said they were feminists, that makes me hate myself and want to die.
[No problem. Even though in my experience it’s a diverse enough philosophy that there are guaranteed to be far more certifiable feminists who’d disagree bitterly with whatever rantings you were subjected to, you, personally, have been pretty harshly scarred by people who call themselves feminists. That makes it fine that you, personally, would rather not be identified as a feminist just as, thanks to my own experiences, I’d prefer not to be identified as religious. That doesn’t change the fact that millions of other people have less direct, more socially-manipulated reasons for failing to identify with philosophies or movements that very-closely resemble religious principles, liberalism, or feminism. Or, on the right, racism, nihilism, and totalitarianism. And I’ll stand by my assertion that, people like you and me not withstanding, pretty much everyone who uses the phrase “I“m not an X but…” is very likely indistinguishable from some characterization of X in everything but name. —fl]
figleaf, you appear to be
Submitted by makomk (not verified) on Mon, 2010-07-05 08:23.figleaf, you appear to be missing the point again (though I expect Dw3t-Hthr will correct me on this shortly). In practice, diversity within feminism on issues like those Dw3t-Hthr encountered is narrow enough that there are only two noteworthy groups. Firstly, there’s the assholes with the awful viewpoints themselves. Then there’s the damage control squad who step in to protect feminism’s good name (but not to actually stop the assholes).
Damage control’s first line of defense is always the old “it’s you’ve fallen for evil anti-feminists in the media redefining feminism to give it a bad name” argument. When that fails – usually because the person in question has based their views on actual experiences – there are several common next steps:
Firstly, the “diverse ideology” argument: since feminism is so diverse, they say, no criticism can be made of it and any problems are the result of specific bad apples. Trouble is, it isn’t – actually challenging the assholes tends to be harmful to your reputation as a feminist and position within the movement. Most of the older big-name feminists are generally active members of the Asshole Group for this reason! (There’s also the hypocrisy issue: many feminists actively insist everyone tolerate nasty claims about much more diverse groups, such as all men.)
Now, there are a few feminists who do actually take on the Assholes, but there are generally far more ex-feminists and not-feminists doing so. Being a feminist is in many ways a hindrance, another weapon that can be used against you.
Secondly, the “not really feminists” or “no true Scotsman” argument. The issue here is twofold: the people in question only cease to be considered feminists for as long as it’s expedient to do so (saying this when it’s not expedient tends to make you cease to be considered a feminist for real), and they’re sometimes so prominent in the movement that it’s a patently absurd claim. For example, someone tried this to excuse Julie Bindel’s actions recently!
Finally, the “you’re really a feminist anyway” argument. I’ve no doubt Dw3t-Hthr and the other deliberately-not-feminists are “indistinguishable from some characterization” of feminism. More specifically, they’re indistinguishable from the superficial characterization (e.g. women are people too) that the Assholes would like to claim leads inexorably to their Assholishness. Which is why distinguishing themselves from feminists is so important – where they can’t do so, they’re unwillingly helping to support people who are actively harming them. That’s what makes this such a nasty argument.
(Replace “assholes” with specific examples such as “transphobes” where necessary. The particular brand of Asshole doesn’t matter: it’s always the same pattern.)
[Eh. At the end of the day there are only two kinds of people, those who divide everyone into two kinds of people and those who don’t. Sounds like we’re in different groups. I’ve never really bought slippery slope arguments of the form you propose — not for porn (it’s actually not all snuff plus damage controllers), not for sex blogging (it’s not all sex-toy salesmen plus damage controllers), not for liberalism (it’s not all red-flannel Communists plus fellow travelers), not for homosexuality (it’s not all pedophiles and damage controllers), and so I don’t buy the argument that feminism is Mary Daly’s ghost plus damage controllers either. Which leaves us basically in the same boat, just facing different directions. You’re saying a lot of people who think they’re feminists but really aren’t because they’re not transphobic, or not anti-porn, or anti-sex, or anti-men or whatever your definition says is a mandatory condition of being a feminist. —fl]
Of course people who aren’t
Submitted by makomk (not verified) on Thu, 2010-07-08 08:39.Of course people who aren’t transphobic, or anti-porn, or anti-sex, or anti-men should be able to think of themselves as feminists. Unfortunately, it’s entirely reasonable at present for them to conclude that it’s not useful for them to identify as feminist.
Think about why there’s so much emphasis on people actually identifying as feminist rather than merely supporting women’s rights using the exact same arguments under another name. It makes a statement: that the feminist movement is OK, that it has wide support, that its critics are wrong. Conversely, criticising the movement or its important figures too much affects whether your identification is seen as valid. Short of a large-scale campaign to reclaim the word, identifying as a feminist can only achieve what other more influential feminists want it to achieve.
So the issue’s rather subtler than all feminists being either assholes with awful viewpoints or doing damage control for the assholes. There are feminists who are neither, but generally they don’t continue identifying as feminists if they’re politically active on issues treated dubiously by mainstream feminism. Taking on these issues can mean spending nearly as much time fighting with feminists as fighting for feminism, and identifying as a feminist is a weapon that can easily be used against you by those with more influence within the movement.
(This is also the key difference between feminism and your examples: only feminism and liberalism are political ideologies, and any political ideology worth its salt exerts some political control over its members. In fact, the liberals example isn’t entirely absurd – for example, it was apparently a big no-no within the UK liberal left in the 1930s to criticise Stalin. The other big difference is that the anti-porn, anti-sex blogging, and anti-homosexuality arguments are about the acts themselves, not just the identities. There’s nothing intrinsic about blogging about sex, or having sex with people of the same gender, or making images designed to sexually arouse that causes any of that. Not any more than believing in women’s rights inherently makes someone a man-hating, sex-hating transphobe.)
This is all still, apparently, a huge and hard-won improvement over how things used to be… just not enough of one.
“Taking on these issues can
Submitted by figleaf on Thu, 2010-07-08 10:33.“Taking on these issues can mean spending nearly as much time fighting with feminists as fighting for feminism, and identifying as a feminist is a weapon that can easily be used against you by those with more influence within the movement.”
Evidently, one can also spend as much time fighting over terminology with people who… seem to sympathize with 80-90% of the consensus objectives of feminism. So if damned if you do and damned if you don’t I say do. I say do on two bases, one contemporary and one pushing 250 years old.
First, I say do because it’s a branding thing. When queried on the individual points a majority of Americans support the majority of feminist-instigated initiatives including equal pay for equal work, reproductive rights, acceptance of LGBT rights, freedom from sexual harassment and sexual assault, etc. Only a small fraction of Americans support a handful of other feminist-instigated initiatives including unisex bathrooms, unisex clothes, transphobia, male infanticide, female supremacy, or wool socks and Birkenstocks. Which is fine because only a small fraction of feminists support those things either, and in fact more feminists than non-feminists think those things are either stupid, bad, or wrong.
So in branding terms if a majority of people support gender-related principles instigated and promoted by feminists, but those policies are routinely and actively opposed by a minority, it makes sense to create a clearly-recognizable brand that proponents can recognize and identify with. You don’t want to call it “feminism” that’s fine. What branding term do you suggest instead that’s both equally specific that won’t offend you quite so much?
Second, as Ben Franklin said roughly 250 years ago, “if we don’t hang together we’ll most certainly hang separately.”
“...any political ideology worth its salt exerts some political control over its members.”
Sure. Assuming feminism was an ideology like Stalinism or Teabaggerism, which it’s not. But yeah, if it was then you’d be right. Of course if it was then I’d be receiving my little daily talking points from, I dunno, the ghost of Valerie Solanas or the withered neoconservative-feminist soul of Donna M. Fucking Hughes and dutifully passing them along as if I’d thought them up myself.
Actually I suppose it could be an ideology in the sense that, say, industrialization or public sanitation was an ideology — a broad but generally-coherent set of sensibilities and tactics that generally trended towards a common objective. And we’d both quickly agree that as with feminism both industrialism and the sanitation movement had their excesses. But I think it would be silly for someone to say that only the excessive behavior should be called “industrialism,” or “sanitation,” and I think it would be stupid to say only excessive behavior should be called “feminism.”
In fact, you know what? I really, really liked the very-feminist Lindsay Beyerstein’s point that there’s such a thing as bad feminism. And when you look at it that way Sarah Palin is certainly within her rights to call herself a feminist, or to be called a feminist. She just happens to be a very bad feminist. Same with Donna Hughes. Same, I’d argue, with Valerie Solanas. Same, I’d argue with whatever monsters tried to drive Dw3t-Hthr to suicide. They’re not just feminists, they’re bad feminists. And guess what? Sometimes those bad feminists try and steer feminism as if it were an ideology. Sarah Palin certainly does — she even issues daily talking points! Mary Daly was — she scorned heterosexual women as traitors. Donna Hughes does — she bluenoses her opinions about white slavery and doesn’t give a fuck what befalls the dirty little whores who’s asses she believes should be sacrificed for the purity of her cause. Well fine! They can be that way. They can even be that way without particularly hurting feminism because it’s an idea, not an ideology!
Oh yeah, one last thing. Since feminism is just an idea and not an ideology it also isn’t the end of the world if you categorically reject the title, the people in it, the ideas behind it, or the objectives it’s generally trending towards. It does, however, hurt, a lot, when you say things like the only notable things about feminism is assholes and their enablers. It hurts because it keeps a heck of a lot of people in the closet and thus out of sight for fear of you on the left or Rush Limbaugh on the right branding them as, well, assholes or their women-supremacist/castrating-bitch fellow travelers.
But, again, if you can propose another title that expresses the same specific objectives then get out there and promote it. All I ever hear, though, is “Oooh, feminism is bad, I’m not one of them” and… nothing else, no replacement, no alternative, the status quo is preferable to those horrible feminimistimers, end of story.
fl
“a majority of Americans
Submitted by makomk (not verified) on Mon, 2010-07-19 12:15.Exactly. Which is what makes these aspects of feminism so damn toxic: they’re essentially saying that you can’t support freedom from sexual assault and rape unless you’re for transphobia, against both porn and people having sex in the “wrong” way, and don’t kick up too much of a fuss about male rape victims. That you can’t really believe in equality for women if you’re uncomfortable with the mass murder of 90% of the male population. That supporting LGBT rights requires pushing trans* people’s rights aside (though that’s more the LGBT movement). Etc, etc. Frankly, if the damage can be limited to the word “feminism” losing some of it’s shine, that’s a pretty good scenario.
I don’t, at least not without some way to ensure the new umbrella brand won’t inevitably have the same issues that the “feminist” one did. (Besides, do we really need a word for “not being an asshole”?)
Different movements, different degrees of centralization. Feminism’s traditionally gone more for grand, sweeping ideological arguments. Do you think the use of “the patriarchy hates men too” as a thought-terminating cliche in response to contradictory evidence just spontaneously sprung into existence everywhere? How about the idea that trans* people reinforce the gender binary? Or that female BDSMers have just been brainwashed by the patriarchy and have no genuine inclination in that direction?
Ah, I knew I was missing some common Defense Squad arguments. That’s another one: the “criticizing feminism hurts it” one. Why do I call it a Defense Squad argument? Because it’s almost always people pointing out the assholes who get accused of hurting feminism, not feminists who insist that you can’t be a feminist unless you’re a transphobe and a misandrist and use their positions of influence to enforce this, or feminists like those that harmed D3wt-Hthr. (Indeed, the few people claiming the aforementioned feminists hurt the movement tend to get labeled as bad feminists and supporters of patriarchy pretty quick!)
Note that my statement has one important property: it’s true. The key difference between self-identified feminists and people like D4wt-Hthr is that the former group is filled with assholes and their enablers, and the latter is filled with people who call them out on their crap. That’s because the people calling out the assholes abandon identifying as feminist at an alarming rate. If you don’t like what I said, don’t blame me for saying it, deal with the underlying issue.
See, it’s funny you blame me and Rush Limbaugh for that, rather than (for example) bona-fide feminists stating in the national press that feminists must be against trans* rights*, or those who insist female supremacy is beyond criticism and dictate what women can wear, or the surprising number of people who defend the SCUM manifesto. By “funny” I mean “you’re part of the problem”. If the feminist movement was actually capable of self-introspection, rather than blaming its bad reputation on malevolent external forces, we’d probably never have ended up in this mess.
Note that the Guardian is the newspaper of the UK left wing, and Julie Bindel is a regular writer, and it doesn’t generally offer an alternative viewpoint except very occasionally for the US market. It’s probably done far more harm to the reputation of feminism in the UK than any anti-feminist ever could.
“That you can’t really
Submitted by figleaf on Mon, 2010-07-19 14:33.“That you can’t really believe in equality for women if you’re uncomfortable with the mass murder of 90% of the male population. That supporting LGBT rights requires pushing trans* people’s rights aside (though that’s more the LGBT movement)”
Huh? You’re pulling the Mary Daly card to condemn all of feminism? Seriously? You’re saying you can’t be a feminist unless you swallow her gender-essentialist crap? By the time Mary Fucking Daly died more than half of all feminists had never heard of her, and most of the other half saw her sort of the same way 19th-Century abolitionists saw John Brown — as an extremist, not a leader. It’s like you’re trying to say you’re not really a vegetarian unless you belong to PETA. But do you get how that’s your definition, and maybe Mary Daly’s, but that’s not most people’s? Do you think I’d call myself a feminist if I thought that meant my son and I should be castrated or killed? Really? What possible motivation would I have for that, M? Why would I possibly be interested in it, for myself, for my family, or the world, if that’s what it really meant? If that’s how most feminists, or even many feminists really felt? Think!
fl
While I can’t speak on what
Submitted by Danny (not verified) on Mon, 2010-07-19 21:28.While I can’t speak on what makomk is thinking I can speak for myself on this. Part of the reason I myself don’t care for the feminist label is because of the double standards and hypocrisy of some of its members. As you condemn the notion of trying to judge all of feminism based on Mary Daly I see this exact same attitude applied in the other direction and its suddenly okay. By that I mean that as far as some feminists are concerned its unfair to judge you all based on the harshest examples while at the same time its just fine for them to judge all MRAs and non feminists based on the harshest examples.
In relation to feminism I call myself a nonfeminist and oddly enough you know who has the biggest problem with my calling myself that? Feminists. I’ve gotten reactions ranging from people telling me that I’m really a feminist and don’t know it (which totally dismisses my own experiences with feminism and presumes that I should just “get over it) to calling me a coward (because apparently claiming the title of feminist is the ultimate act of courage or some shit), to being flatly told that not being a feminists is actually enough reason to dismiss anything I say (as if being called a feminist suddenly adds validity to someone’s words and gives them the vital support it needs to stand because without the feminist label the argument just cannot stand on its own).
Now is this attitude in every feminist space. No. However there is certainly an attitude of, “If you’re not a feminist well then fuck you!” in feminism and until that and the “Hey all the really cool kids call themselves feminists.” is dealt with I am just fine talking to them, working with them, and interacting with them. But don’t expect me to take on the title just so I can suddenly feel like I matter (had to put up with enough of that shit in grade and as an adult I refuse to put up with it now).
When it comes to the whole
Submitted by Danny (not verified) on Wed, 2010-07-14 19:17.When it comes to the whole “you really are a feminist” the thing that really turns me off about the title is just that. Someone coming at me and telling me that I really am a feminist and should therefore take on their title as if feminist is the moral default position. Well as we’ve seen in these comments feminists aren’t all sunshine and rainbows.
I mean hell I could turn around and start telling any feminists that support fathers taking a bigger role in their kids lives that they are really MRAs because that’s what most MRAs are about. Now I’m sure they can think of plenty of reasons to not claim that title just there are reasons that people can think of for not claiming the title feminist.
figleaf:
“What branding term do you suggest instead that’s both equally specific that won’t offend you quite so much?”
Honestly if someone did come up with another title the cycle would probably just start all over. That’s why when it comes to activism I just don’t bother with a damn label.
And frankly while I understand people who take up the label I have to ask why do feminists seem so damn obsessed with making sure things are labeled feminist almost to the point where the label means more than the thing being labeled?