Clarissa says

I thought I heard every pseudo-feminist piece of insanity under the sun but, never fear, there are always new and inventive ways to make feminism sound completely ridiculous. A pseudo-feminist blogger recently announced that her blog will be a male-free zone. Men will not be allowed to post comments if they insist on identifying as male:

Source: Clarissa's Blog

The blogger who's closed her comments to men is Jill, a.k.a. Twisty Faster. She's neither the first nor the last to do so. This is a two part post, first on the idea of my-team-only spaces, the other on the idea of labeling this or that faction as "pseudo-feminists."

First: I think it's fine to create people-where-you-are spaces, even when I'm not one of the people where you are. For instance there are quite a few "pickup-artist" forums that are actually quite closed to outsiders. There are feminist and womanist spaces, obviously. There's some tremendously angry guy in Portland who runs a closed anti-porn site. Glenn Beck types have their spaces. Trans people have theirs. Gay conservatives have theirs. Angry divorced men have theirs. And so on.

In each case, for better or worse, having a space where you can stand down from your belief that you must present your "unified public face" and actually talk about stuff you feel really vulnerable about. (The friend who told me about the PUA sites said, for instance, that it provides a critical space for men who are really worried about masculinity to safely *question* their masculinity.

So the question for me isn't so much that people have themselves-only spaces, or even that they brag about it. What matters is whether they *stay* in it. You sort of get to see what happens in, say, the whole Fox News "epistemic closure" phenomenon, and that sort of echo-chamber/amen-chorus effect shows up in places like IBTP.

But hey, there's a point in almost any consciousness-raising processes where frustration and impatience with the status quo boils up. And while it happens to be, I think, a huge mistake to stay angry, I think it's also problematic if you never get angry at all.

(Case in point that only seems completely off the wall: kid I was in high-school with maybe 40 years ago now still walks with a limp from the injury he got putting his whole heart, soul, and body into not losing the homecoming game in his senior year. Playing with unreported broken bones can evidently do that. At the moment, though, school spirit and winning that game was that important to him. Would he do that today? No, almost certainly not: he's gotten perspective. It's not that community isn't important to him -- I'm sure it is. It's that he, like numerous teammates who weren't crippled by zeal, were, well, so full of zeal they were willing to cripple themselves. And not to put too fine a point on it, if he hadn't felt the future of his team, his school, and his life were about to be lost to an opposing team he might not have hurled himself so thoroughly into harms way. My point is that people experience zealous feelings, and thrive on opposition. Particularly when they feel they're in an easily extinguished minority. When they can find a safe place to spread out their thoughts without opposition nearly all of them are eventually able to move on. Without feeling obliged to virtually set themselves on fire.)

So there. That's my pitch for tolerating and even encouraging safe-space venues for people to air out their demons. First, it's actually good for most people. Second, the more outsiders push, the more zealously they risk irreparably windmill-tilting themselves. When someone's in that space all the reasonable chiding in the world won't help.

Next: About the pseudo-feminist thing. I'd just point out that feminism is a very big tent -- big enough to hold the almost diametrically opposite Twisty Faster and Sarah Palin, not to mention everyone else in between. Where "in between" isn't even a single file but wide field. Considering the breadth of the field almost everyone on it can be branded a pseduo-feminist by one or more others on the field. Nor is it the case that the field slopes upward from, say, a least-feminist Palin to an ultimate-feminist Mary Daly.

sInstead I think the way to look at feminism, as with most other fields, is to look at their impact on the rest of the field rather than their authenticity. By that metric the Palin and the Daly factions are both noisy and noticable, but for all that they're neither terribly influential and thus, for all their visibility, not very significant. (Even though, referencing the "angry" stage, above, many or even most feminists may at one point or another go through a transitional Palin or Daly phase.)

Anyway, that's why I'm less inclined to call one group pseudo-feministst: it reinforces the idea that there's one single "authentic" feminism one could belong to instead; it allows us to imagine that the definition we're using to judge others is, in fact, the most authentic. Both of those require more authority than pretty much anyone has -- not me, not you, not Palin, not Twisty, not bell hooks, not Shulamuth Firestone, not Caitlin Flannagan, etc.