radical feminism

The Irony of Talk of "Post-Feminism" More Than 150 Years After Senica Falls

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2010-06-10 05:14

If I had another day here in New York I’d probably take a train up to Poughkeepsie. Turns out that because my great-great-grandfather was the first president of Vassar College they’ve got a lot of personal diaries and other family history.

Echidne of the Snakes on why original radical feminism (not necessarily the similar-sounding “radfem”) needs to be an authentic, independent concern:

...men who are oppressed on ethnic or racial grounds can easily see their own fight for equality as a righteous one but at the same time regard women as people who should be oppressed on religious or cultural grounds. Not seeing this can lead to cases where a person works for the rights of a group which then would like that person to have fewer rights.

Feminists discuss some of this when addressing racism within the movement. But the same arguments also apply in reverse. And in many other cases.

She said it here.

Yup. Going back in the U.S. at least as far as the campaign to pass the 14th Amendment (where they reluctantly agreed to drop inclusion of women’s suffrage in order to make voting rights for recently-freed slaves easier to pass) and as far back as the 1st Century (where they were expected to submit to Church “fathers” they both supported and sometimes sheltered) women have been asked or expected to sacrifice their own interests for the “greater good” of ethnic, social, political, labor, military or anti-military, and (somewhat quirkily) even sexual and reproductive causes. While almost never making space at the table for women themselves.

As it turns out my great-great-grandfather was a passionate advocate of both abolition and suffrage. Family history says in the 1860s he and some other prominent abolitionists dared authorities penalize him for advocating disobedience after the infamous Dred Scott decision. He also strongly supported suffrage, although — illustrating Echidne’s point — even he couched his support in earnest but patronizingly genteel Victorian terms.

After the 14th Amendment passed, newly enfranchised African American men, including my great-great-grandfather’s close friend Fredrick Douglass, ran away from their prior commitment to return the favor women had paid them and support a similar amendment enfranchising women. With the result that feminists like Susan B. Anthony, with whom he’d previously had a good working relationship, bitterly fell out with him.

Clue? It’s not just that there’s more to feminism than the priorities of the almost exclusively white*, cis, hetero, middle-class feminist great-great- and great-great-great grandaughters of Senica Falls attendees**. The realities in different communities and cultures really aren’t one-size-fits-all.

But that said we’re not going to have a post-feminist anything till we reach the point where “women’s nature” is no longer assumed to mean “naturally waits patiently till everyone else has been served.” This was true nearly 50 years ago when Shulamith Firestone wrote about the problem of “ladies’ auxiliaries” being kept at arm’s length from full inclusion by political, social, and labor organizations. And when she wrote the trend was already nearly 100 years old.

Yeah, awesome new possibilities really have opened up since then. But there are still people… still women… being requested to wait, expected to wait, or deciding to wait. When you can see such tolerance of deference happening in your own family tree, 150 years is a really, really long time.

* Somewhat ironically considering future events, Fredrick Douglass was the only African-American attendee at Senica Falls. His newspaper carried the original conference announcement and he spoke with some passion about the need for women’s inclusion in politics as both activists and, more radically (even for some conference organizers like Lucretia Mott), as voters.

** Right-wing commentators are actually correct to say that by today’s standards some of the original founders of feminism were socially far more conservative than former half-term Governor Sarah Palin.

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Radical Feminism, Violence, Autonomy, and Maps of the World

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-12-29 20:51

Lillie Yifu of 2nd Sex, inspired by Julie Bindel’s column, says

Sexual violence is a pervasive part of almost every woman’s imaginary world, even those who have never expereinced more than the most mild forms of it, because I don’t think any of us can say we’ve never experienced any of it. This is because the threat of it is all around us, and it is a fear that pierces into the core of our most hard won possession. That is, namely, our sense of personal bodily control. Autonomy is won in slow hard steps, and sexual violence, the threat of it, and the imagination of it, destroy hat autonomy.

There is also the other part, and that is that pregnancy and reproduction necessarily involve the loss of this very same thing. As a result, sexual violence stares back at us from our fantasy life. Where and how to draw the line of the push in, is no easy thing.

...

The bunker mentality is easy to come by, but I can only imagine what it was like to be part of radical feminism in that time. But the bunker sensation, that sensation where it seems that there are wolves with teeth and fangs in every direction, is common to every time and place I think. Little Red Riding Hood survives as a story, because there are so many woods to travel through.

She said it here.

Yifu’s in an awesomely interesting position. A woman in technology in real life, a virtual sex worker in the commercial virtual reality 2nd Life, she encounters a great deal of… men attempting privileged leverage in not just one but two dimensions.

Anyway her post lays out, in terms that may work really well for a lot of men, how a lot of women experience us. It explains bluntly why notions of “post-feminism” are premature. And it explains very clearly where radical feminists were coming from when they concluded that women are “the sex class.” (This doesn’t change my refinement that actually men imagine themselves the sex class and construct women as the no-sex class. Nor does my articulation of the “no-sex” class paradigm refute the core of radical feminist analysis.)

And finally, while Yifu doesn’t identify as a radical feminist I think her post nicely illustrates the frustration, irritation, and anger “radfems” express when it seems like no matter where they turn they find themselves assessed for suitability as instruments for sexuality before they’re ever acknowledged as humans with their own sexual autonomy.

Yifu is also right about what things were like when the original radical feminists began producing their most incendiary work. For instance when I was a kid, sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s it became a bit of an on-campus “fad” for men to corner and rape students from the nearby nursing school. It went on for nearly a month, helped in very large part by an almost party-like “those whacky college kids” attitude in the press and popular conversation. At least in our (major university) town that seriously radicalized feminism.

Anyway, I completely get what Yifu meant when she say sexual violence is part of every woman’s mental map of the world.

She concludes her post with

I am sorry for her that [Bindel] did not have the ability to have friendships with men until late in life. I am also even more sorry for a world where I understand how it happened.

And could happen tomorrow to a young woman trying to be herself.

Yeah, that too.

If men really wanted a real sexual revolution and not just more of the same old crap with maybe just a new balance of power even further in our favor we could start one tomorrow such that, over time, women didn’t need to map the world in terms of limits on their physical and sexual autonomy. I don’t see it happening, at all, but past a certain point it’s in men’s hands.

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The Food Issue and Evolution: Maybe Way to a Man's Heart Bigger Brain Was Through His Stomach

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2009-06-11 23:27


Photo by Flickr user Lord Jim. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I heard an interesting tidbit in a radio interview (sorry, can’t remember what show) with Richard Wrangman, author of the new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

His (possibly too catch-all) thesis is that human evolution… what really accelerated us towards intelligence, tool manipulation, and so on, has been profoundly shaped by the development of cooking. Without going much deeper I’ll just say that without having read the book it sounds plausible enough.

But what was interesting to me was this little piece he kind of tossed in where he said, approximately, that where previously very early men and women had been obliged to spend much of their days seeking and chewing raw foods, once cooking was developed it meant that a woman, staying at home, could process enough food to keep a man. Which, he said, let men go out and do other stuff.

Since I identify with Sulamuth Firestone’s (genuinely) radical feminist thesis that domestic gender oppression was the original form of oppression (in the sense that it could occur equally in castle, hovel, or cave) I’m untroubled by Wrangman’s proposition. Again it sound plausible enough.

What’s interesting though, is that from his perspective it’s not that men “domesticated” women into cooking in order to provide themselves free labor, or that men heroically went hunting in order to feed the whole family (including the dependent partner and offspring) by “bringing home the bacon.” Instead, at least the way Wrangman put it in that interview, women undertook cooking in order to attract and keep men! Which, all things considered (note: the interview was not on All Things Considered) may not have worked out so well in the long run but in the short run might have made a great deal of sense.

The fly in the ointment being the classical surplus-labor argument that once freed of individual subsistence provision men could go out and, among other things, decide they were entitled to come home to a good meal instead of, oh, say, feel darn lucky to have someone to come home to. They’d also have time to talk, politic, conduct warfare, and generally hone their skills for organization and violence such that over time women no longer had a say in the matter of who should provide and who should be provided for.

So! Is the story true? I dunno. I regularly mock other evolutionary-psychology/sociobiology “just so” stories so I’m not going to roll over and celebrate this one just because it appeals to my sensibilities. But it does appeal to my sensibilities. Not least because it’s the first time I’ve heard an established male anthropologist or paleoanthropologist give women credit for initiating civilization, let alone evolution from neotenous apes to human beings.

This would be, incidentally, an invisible 4th-dimension to sociobiologists since it goes against contemporary standards of gender wherein all human behavior is driven by men trying to get pussy from otherwise reluctant women, and making sure women’s adultery didn’t, well, adulterate their “large investments” in helping to rear their own, as opposed to interloper’s, offspring.

Worse for the standard model of ev-psych/sociobiology, there could even be a sexual component to women taking up cooking for two in order to keep men hanging around. There weren’t light bulbs back then, so they didn’t need men to help change them. And by definition if they were able to gather and cook enough food to feed prospective partners then they weren’t driven by that need for male “providers.” So what could they have wanted to keep men around for?

No, couldn’t be! Nowhere in The Flintstones (sociobiology’s source for primary research) does Wilma keep Fred around for the occasional roll in the hay. So it can’t be true.

Er, well, it could be true. It just doesn’t fit any of the standard models.

—-

Heck, I’ll even do a little theory unification here and say those well-fed-looking paleolithic “venus” figurines they keep digging up and calling cave-man porn? If Richard Wrangman is even fractionally correct then a more likely explanation would be that the figurines served as reminders not so much hot sex as hot supper!

(Doh! Money quote via Tyler Cowen’s preview of Wrangman’s book “...a bachelor is a sorry creature in subsistence societies…”

And for the record, modern anthropologists say in most “primitive” pre-agrarian, hunter-gatherer societies women generally contribute anywhere from 50% to more than 90% of calories consumed by the community. So again, Wrangman at least has the benefit of plausibility. Which is more than can be said about the latest ev-psych “research” trying to winnow meaning out of statistical noise about men’s allegedly “evolved” preferences for waist/hip ratios of exactly .7.)

Going a step further into “evolutionary” explanations for everything, you know all the myriad theories about why women have bigger boobs, bellies, butts, thighs, and in-general curves compared to other primates? What if the appeal for men wasn’t so much youth or virginity or (for boobs) “this end up” reminders of buttocks for really (really!) primitive men. What if curves on women are “meant” to singal an increased likelihood that not just her offspring but her partner won’t starve?

Hey, you can make up all sorts of sociobiological/ev-psych “just so” stories that don’t look much like today’s dominant paradigms at all!

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The Limits of Adversarial Rhetoric

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-05-05 09:47

So an anonymous donor has granted a big chunk of money to colleges run by women, stipulating that the money be given as scholarships to women and minorities. NPR Claudio Sanchez reporter evidently asked whether colleges run by men would get any money.

Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy response illustrated two things it’s really important to know about her. First, she understands (heck, she taught me!) that the goal of radical feminism isn’t so that women can gain access to the slightly nicer cage men are trapped in, it’s to get everybody out of the damn cages. Second that she thinks hyperbolic misanthropy is the best way to explain radical feminism.

No, Claudio. I’m afraid men are shit out of luck. It’s the Law of the Conservation of Human Dignity, which states that, within a social order based on dominance and submission, the total amount of human dignity must remain constant. In other words, whenever women are treated with an iota of decency, a reciprocal diminishment of men’s humanity must obtain.

A consequence of this law is that whenever a girl gets to kick a soccer ball, somewhere a boy will be made to play with Barbies. Whenever a woman exercises sovereignty over the contents of her internal organs, somewhere a man will have to wear a frumpy 19th century calico dress and do the family laundry by hand. Whenever a woman publishes a paper on particle physics, somewhere a man will be waterboarded for a week before being shot by a firing squad of hairy humorless feminists. Etc.

Read the quote in context here.

Another way to put that first paragraph would be that no, the donor probably noticed there are plenty of schools who’s presidents are men, and plenty of scholarships available to men, and so no, there will still be plenty of money for men in academia.

And another way to put that first paragraph would be that it’s probably not a zero-sum endowment. Given the nature of the grant the choice probably wasn’t between women vs. men in academia but instead a choice between advancing women in academia vs. advancing, say, women’s health, reproductive rights, or political freedom. Therefore the endowment is just as likely to have increased the sum of money available to academia rather than shifting it from men to women.

And another way to put that second paragraph is that no part of feminism, especially radical feminism, is a zero-sum game with men where for every gain a woman makes a man must lose.

If you want to put it hyperbolically one might perfectly correctly say an endowment for women in academia isn’t a blow to men because advancing feminism isn’t about redistributing deck chairs on the Titanic, it’s about getting everybody safely off the Titanic! And not just because the Titanic is gonna sink under a combination of bad design and bad management. It’s because once you get off the Titanic there’s a whole rest of the planet’s worth of possibilities.

Putting it any of those ways, though, demonstrates that including misanthropy in one’s argument isn’t necessarily the most effective way to make one’s case.

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Call Me Radical But... Oh Wait! I *Am* Radical!

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2009-05-02 18:20

Via a Maymay on Twitter, Virginia Prince said in 1967

The human male is in a cultural cage, though most of them don’t know it.

Original source can be read at Google Books

While Price was talking about transgender issues I think that’s a good way to summarize what’s wrong with men not participating in feminism. Because for all our ostensible lordly privileges of gender it still amounts to life in a somewhat nicer cage than everyone else gets.

The problem with traditional, classic liberal feminism is that seeking equality with men limits all of us to getting to spend time in the bigger cage. The problem with traditional male superiority is it’s all and only about getting to stay in the nicer cage. The trouble with a lot of progressive male superiority is that it boils down to “ok, I said you ought to be allowed into the nicer cage, now can I have a cookie?” And the problem with the traditional debate about what men’s role in feminism should be is that it’s all about why on earth men should let women into the nicer cage. With or without a fight.

The great thing about radical feminism is that it’s about getting everybody out of the damn cages! And the benefit of that particular ambition is whatever cage you’re born or raised into isn’t nearly as important as “how do we get outta here?”

Call me radical but… oh wait, I am radical!

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Über Rad-Fem Firestone on Erotic Beauty

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2009-05-01 15:51

Even further follow-ups on Kink in Exile’s post about erotic appeal and men. Shulamith Firestone, one of the original 60’s-era radical feminist and author of Dialectics of Sex actually has some seriously cool stuff to say about beauty and eroticism. In a way that pushes forward her agenda, not at all backing it off. Check it out.

And eroticism becomes erotomania. ... From every magazine cover, film screen, TV Tube, subway sign, jump breasts, legs, shoulders, thighs. ... Even with the best of intentions, it is difficult to focus on anything else. ... But in all this barrage of erotic stimuli, men themselves are seldom portrayed as erotic objects. Women’s eroticism, as well as men’s, becomes increasingly directed towards women.

Hmm… no wonder critics accused Mathilde Madden and Kristina Lloyd of being “‘hard-headed feminists’ ‘do gooders’ and, um, ‘lesbians‘” for thinking erotic photos of men are hawt!

Firestone continues

I want to add a note about the special difficulties of attacking the sex class system [Note: seriously, “no-sex class system” would have been better nomenclature —fl] through its means of cultural indoctrination. Sex objects are beautiful. An attack on them can be confused with an attack on beauty itself. Feminists need not get so pious in their efforts taht they feel they must flatly deny the beauty of the face on the cover of Vogue. For this is not the point. The real question is: is the face beautiful in a human way – does it allow for growth and flux and decay, does it express negative as well as positive emotions, does it fall apart without artificial props – or does it falsely imitate the very different beauty of an inanimate object, like wood trying to be metal?

I say “no-sex class” is more appropriate than “sex class” precisely because women as ideal sex objects are projected as wood or stone — faces and forms frozen… literally “statuesque,” eyes on the horizon, jaws tilted and knees locked just so. (One wonders whether the seemingly enforced breakdowns of… almost exclusively… women at Kink.com is fired by desire not so much to see them break down as to see how much they can “take” before they do.)

It gets better though,

To attack eroticism creates similar problems. Eroticism is exciting. No one wants to get rid of it. Life would be a drab and routine affair without at least taht spark. That’s just the point. Why has all joy and excitement been concentrated, driven into one narrow, difficult-to-find alley of human experience, and all the rest laid waste? When we demand the elimination of eroticism, we mean not the elimination of sexual joy and excitement but its rediffusion over – there’s plenty to go around, it increases with use – the spectrum of our lives.

That’s so cool! Everybody thinks radical feminists are anti-sex, or, even better, “sex negative.” It’s more like… you know that old joke “I like both kinds of music, country and western?” Or “We have both kinds of wine, red and white.” Or, maybe more accurately, “We only serve the best beer — if it doesn’t come in a green bottle we won’t sell it.” It’s like they’re objecting to that kind of view of sex — not that there’s something wrong with country music, or beer in green bottles, or even no-strings simulated sex with submissive skinny supermodel sibling sluts from Sweden and Saskatchewan but that that’s the only valid kind, and only if you “pass the test” of either beauty for women or worthiness for men and if you don’t fit you don’t count.

Because great hand-blown hummingbird feeders that view of sex, relationships, and sexuality isn’t just “sexist” or bad for women (though obviously it is) it’s also a desperately, starvingly impoverished view for everybody.

What. Ever.

It’s funny but even though I don’t always feel comfortable or welcome claiming I’m a plain old feminist it’s stuff like this that makes me say, unhesitatingly, that I identify as a radical feminist.

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Revolution vs. "Revolution," Feminist vs. "Sexual"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2009-03-29 09:07

Sungold of Kittywampus has written an awesome analysis of the relationship of feminism and the “sexual revolution.” It’s part of a larger post trying to explain this persistent and knuckleheaded notion that “casual sex” and the entire hook-up culture is a direct result of feminism. Here’s the key part of her “Feminism, Sexual Revolution, and ‘Getting the Milk for Free’”

Where Amy and other anti-feminists blame feminism for bringing on the sexual revolution and leading directly to the shattering of young female psyches, the history is much more complicated, and most of it has little to do with feminism. Heartbreak goes back at least as far as Sir Lancelot and Lady Guinevere. The sexual revolution on the 1960s had its roots in youth culture, drugs, and rock and roll. The advent of the birth control pill in 1961 enabled young women to try out sex – whether in hippie communes, bars or with a committed boyfriend – without fear of pregnancy paralyzing their pleasure.

Second-wave feminism was generally chilly toward the sexual revolution, at least as most young heterosexuals were experiencing it in the 1960s and 1970s. Nowhere in The Feminist Mystique did Betty Friedan suggest that the path to women’s liberation required shagging anything that moves. By 1970, Anne Koedt was assailing men’s sexual incompetence in “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.“ The Redstockings saw men as well-nigh irredeemable; why would you want to sleep with the enemy? While the Redstockings Manifesto (1969) didn’t go so far as to repudiate all relations with men, within a few years political lesbianism and separatism became a major current within feminism. Needless to say, none of these women were advocating casual sex with men, either. Third-wave feminism has generally repudiated separatism and criticized slut-shaming, but that’s not the same as positively advocating hookups and casual sex for all women.

Where feminism made a difference was, of course, in opening up historically new educational and economic opportunities for women. These made it possible for women to defer marriage and to enjoy sex without bartering it for economic security. This, to my mind, was the real sexual revolution. It’s just not the one people mean when they blame feminism for the failings of the hookup scene.

So yes, in a materialist sense, feminism enabled casual sex. But more importantly in the long run, feminism has opened the possibility of for us (men and women alike) to have sex only when we want to, not under duress, and not for economic security or survival. In a perfectly feminist world, no one would stay married against their will, for example, or submit to a spouse’s unwanted advances. We don’t live in that world yet. Plenty of people stay married for economic reasons. (Some of them are men.)

For those of us who aren’t trapped by economics, feminism allows us to say no to the sex we don’t want, and an enthusiastic, lusty, happy yes to the sex we do want. That’s revolutionary, all right. It’s just not identical with “the sexual revolution.” It’s also antithetical to the idea that anyone needs to participate in hooking up.

Read the quote in context here.

It’s totally fine to stop right here. One of the peculiarities of reading text is that my reaction, which follows, can seem like an immediate reaction to what Sungold wrote. It’s not. I’ve been thinking about it, a lot, for several days. Nor is the following text likely to be my final reaction. If you want to read the rest of this post feel free to read it as a snapshot. And not necessarily any more relevant than a pundit’s color commentary on an original work.

—-

For the record, by all accounts “hook-up” culture predates the 1960. I’m sure people can chase the beginning as far back as they like.** Suffice to say, though, that since sociologists estimated that one in three first pregnancies in the decidedly non-feminist 1950s were conceived in the backs of cars I’m going to say the only “revolution” part of the sexual revolution was that men didn’t have to worry as much about getting their hook-ups pregnant. So nope, no particular feminism=casual-sex hookup connection there.

Sungold didn’t mention Andrea Dworkin but, yeah, from roughly 1968 (the Redstocking Manifesto) to 1986 (Dworkin and MacKinnon’s testimony before Ed Meese’s Attorney General’s Report on Pornography taskforce) mainstream feminism was more interested in curtailing men’s sense of innate entitlement to sex with women than encouraging hookups. So nope, no particular feminism=casual-sex hookup connection there either. (Yes, there was dissent in feminism let by 70s stalwarts like Erica Jong and 3rd-wave vanguards like Susie Bright, but note the implication of the standard definitions of “mainstream” and “dissent.”)

And through all that the (frustratingly slow, multi-generational) accumulation of social, political, economic, and legal power led to an alteration of expectation of equal power in feminism (even if not yet exactly or always reality of equal power) resulted in members of newer generations feeling… well… entitled to make their own damn decisions about who, what, when, where, how, why and if they have sex. Or work, go to school, walk, worship, eat, drink, play, think, make mistakes or fail, vote, reproduce, spend, date, marry, volunteer, read…

Of course there really are people who think that entitlement make decisions a big mistake. And there are plenty of people who would dearly, dearly like to roll that back — either out of fear or cultural fundamentalism. And for them, surprise, women having Teh Sex would seem like the biggest affront…

But here’s the trick with that: the actual “sexual revolution” was about only one thing and that was, basically, attempting to eliminate as many obstacles to women granting “consent” as possible. And while it might have had some interesting and productive side effects that’s about it.*** So I’m going to say that contemporary anti-feminist objections to the “sexual revolution” are actually part and parcel of the culture that produced it.

Meanwhile feminism has indeed produced a revolution. But as Sungold so elegantly lays out, sexual activity is something closer to a side effect… and “as well,” rather than the main event. And for all the residual sexual-revolution echos about “obtaining consent,” or even “obtaining enthusiastic consent,” the real revolution of feminism is about being able to decide. Where the decision can include sex but isn’t limited to it.

Oh, another thing? As Sungold says, unlike the “sexual revolution” the feminist revolution is not limited to creating more consent… to sex initiated by men. Including “casual sex” and “hookups.” The feminist revolution is about women’s power to decide to participate. Or (the big threat to anti-feminists and an even bigger threat to the “sexual revolution”) not to.

Failure to distinguish the difference between the “sexual revolution” and the feminist revolution is not limited, by the way, to anti-feminists.

[** My vote for the beginning of the sexual revolution has always been the introduction not of the pill in the 1950s or 1960s but of penicillin in the 1940s. Remember that until herpes and then HIV reached critical mass in the 1980s antibiotics handily cured all significant STDs, reducing them from serious chronic and often life-threatening illnesses to minor nuisance. —fl]

[** Consider that “but you’re not going to get pregnant now that you’ve got the pill” happens to be a very good excuse to grant consent. And the benefits of being able to manage one’s fertility beyond one’s ability to more safely consent to sex are manifold. But if you read most of the popular literature about the pill in the 1950s and 1960s anything that wasn’t about “regulating periods” or “controlling acne” was about enabling sex. Now why would this seem more women-centric? One clue would be that men (at least, and even women) didn’t start “discovering” things like “foreplay” and women’s orgasms till nearly a decade into the “revolution.” And I’d like to argue that that even that wasn’t as much about feminism as that the next factor limiting consent after pregnancy fear of pregnancy was women beginning to ask “so what’s in this for me anyway?” And even then, soon after that, in men’s eyes anyway, conversation about one’s ability to “give” orgasms became another metric of male prowess. Rather than, say, women’s opportunity, or affirmative, self-motivated interest in enjoying it more. (And people wonder why I call myself a prudish libertine!) —fl]

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"Human Beings" vs. "Same *As* Human Beings"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2009-03-02 14:52

Serenity Valley of Feminist Mormon Housewives has a nice piece about the conflict noted (strongly!) by Shulamuth Firestone’s 1968 “The Dialectic of Sex” between feminism on the one hand and multiculturalism on the other.

I’ve just been doing some reading for school, and I came across this article by Susan Moller Okin: “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”, published in a volume by the same name and edited by Okin, Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum. In this piece, Okin defines feminism as the belief that “women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can.”

Read the quote in context here.

Valley (and others elsewhere in the blogosphere) have rightly pointed out Orkin’s point that deference to cultural traditions that subordinate women are problematic. Activist Kimberle Crenshaw (who I posted about here) and others have clearly articulated how “rescue” policies are often no more helpful, or respectful, or less oppressive than sub-cultural oppression itself.

And any number of people have pointed out the complications of equality-based rhetoric when speaking about women in any culture, dominant or not. While in Kyriarchy it may be impossible to eliminate oppression and othering I think it’s possible to drastically limit the scope of such complications.

Orkin says “that [women] should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men.” I’m… pretty sure an awful lot of the ambiguity about how, exactly, different cultures might interpret terms like “human dignity,” “equals,” and “that of men” by replacing the clause, and underlying sentiments … and indeed much of Orkin’s preceding and following clauses, with “women should be recognized as human beings.” Or, even more tersely, accurately, and evidently radically: “women are human beings.”

This collapse of language to it’s indivisible core has twin benefits: It Disambiguates what “the same human dignity as…” might really mean. And it pitches the “accusing” or “rescuing” cultures into the same pot as “accused” or “in-need-of-rescuing” cultures since “other” cultures are not alone in reducing of some of its members to the status of objects, nor of sacrificing those members for the convenience of more intra-culturally valued, objectifying members.

To the… best of my knowledge none would defer to a subculture that claimed it needed to bring itself good luck by strangling servants in oak groves. We would not defer because servants are human beings and we would have to note that strangling in oak groves would be extraordinarily bad luck for those servants!

Similarly you can’t sew women’s pee-pees shut and claim “but it’s for the traditional pleasure of men in our culture” because it rather curtails the traditional pleasure of other human beings in that culture. Nor can you legislate that some human beings die involuntarily from preventable complications of late-term pregnancy to salve the consciences of different human beings who treat their own children abominably because that conflicts with the right of human beings not to die involuntarily.

Given this understanding multiculturalism can be in conflict with feminism only to the extent that we fail to recognize women as human beings. Not “like” human beings. Definitely not “having dignity equal to human beings.” As human beings. (Radical I know. Get used to it.)

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Stuffy Nonsense

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-09-22 21:32

I’ve usually felt a little uncomfortable about playing what’s usually called the “what about the menz” card while talking about men, feminism, and sexism. It’s a problem, in part, because… well, first of all it’s a perfectly naive but also perfectly natural reaction. (10,000 times more people are sexist than want to be sexist.) But, more problematically, it’s also the refrain that Men’s Rights Activists air-horn into virtually any forum they stumble into. With the result that I wind up feeling apologetic when I try to say that sexism really does hurt men too! So what to do?

Enter Hugo Schwyzer with a critical point about the line drawn most often by MRAs:


“men are victims too, and it’s mostly feminism’s fault”

Read the quote in context here.

That’s it! Men are victims too but it’s mostly not feminism’s fault, it’s anti-feminism’s fault!

It’s not that “men get raped too,” it’s that anti-feminism creates a context for intimidating or humiliating people by violently sticking penises in them, and, once you’ve established the principle it turns out you can violently stick penises into just about anybody.

But the thing is that sexism really does hurt men. Sure, sexism pretty incontestably hurts women more (for instance when was the last time a family set a man on fire because his wife died of natural causes?) But the net benefit to men really is still negative — which makes it an even bigger tragedy. I mean… someone could conceivably make a case for it if men really were better off than they would be otherwise. But it’s not.

Consider a bunch of people stuck in a stuffy, nearly airless room. People leaning up against door, where a little air slips in around the edges, can be said to be privileged relative to everyone else in the room. But only compared to others in the room!

The problem is that if you were just looking for equality, a perfectly good solution would be to let everybody have a turn sucking slightly fresher air from around the cracks of the door. And you could even see the door people feeling their privilege was threatened, or even just selfishly wondering why they should have to suffer just so everyone else could have a little more comfort. But that’s not what feminism is about — certainly not the much-maligned radical feminism! Feminism is about opening the flipping door. And not opening the door so everybody gets more fresh air. It’s about opening the door so everybody can leave!

The point being that yeah, maybe the immediate concerns seem like shuffling around so everybody can get a far shot of air. But once out the door that would seem like the least of the benefits.

Anyway, in the little analogy of the stuffy room, as with the status quo in the world in general, there’s no doubt that men are suffering — even if they’re not consistently suffering as much as women are. But it’s not feminism that’s keeping them from opening the door and letting everybody out. It’s the anti-feminist urge to maintain the status quo.

I’m not sure why that message across is harder than it ought to be. Because, especially once you start thinking about what’s outside the stuffiness, even here in the “privileged” spot by the exit, is pretty unbearable. And it’s mostly anti-feminist’s fault.

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Cultural Relativism Among Cultural Near-Relatives

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2008-04-17 18:00


Photo Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press

So the other day, on the heels of my posts about the breakup of the polygamy/pedophilia cult in Texas, I got an email from someone in Ghana with an article by Susan Moller Okin called “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” (I found through Google an online version at Boston Review.)

I haven’t finished it but Okin talks about, for instance, the interesting controversy in France over whether school girls could wear traditional Muslim head coverings… and compared to the evidently non-controversy wherein immigrant men are, or at least were, allowed to bring multiple wives into the country. (Okin says this amounted to to 200,000 such families as of 1999.)

On the other hand, Okin caught a great deal of “cultural imperialism” grief for allegedly suggesting that when multiculturalism is incompatible with women’s rights then “...so much the worse for multiculturalism.” (In a follow-up article (PDF version here, Google-cached HTML version here.)

Well. Which brings us to a group that, not unlike allegations made against immigrants to France of North African heritage practice polygamy, wear distinctive but traditional attire, abuse children as young as age twelve in the form of forcing “spiritual” marriage on girls and expelling and exiling “surplus” boys as young as age 13, rejecting anything beyond early-elementary education for women and girls, isolating themselves into enclaves and refusing to integrate or adopt morays of their host country, and even coach each other in ways to best commit welfare fraud to support their “wives.” Only they’re not from North Africa they’re from North America. Their “races” aren’t predominantly Arab or African they’re almost exclusively Anglo-American. And they’re not Moslem “furriners,” they’re home-grown, virtually-all-American, originated-in-the-United-States Mormons.

So. If you’re not a classical, Firestone/Redstocking-style radical feminist, meaning if you don’t believe the original model for all oppression was gender oppression… or even if you do!... then questions about what to make of the Yearn for Zion Ranch, its culture, and its gender traditions seems like a great laboratory for examining assumptions about multiculturalism, feminism, and toleration.

Any ideas? I certainly don’t have any answers for the general case but I do feel extraordinarily comfortable condeming the owl shit out of the specific child sexual assault and expoitation of child labor those men call their “heritage.”

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