Tag Archives: feminism

quick hit: feminist cognitive dissonance

13 Tuesday Apr 2010

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So just last Saturday, I blogged about wrestling with how to live out feminist values in the real world. Then yesterday, Amanda Hess @ The Sexist wrote about what she calls “feminist cognitive dissonance,” or the fact that

a simple awareness of feminist issues can’t magically negate the power of the culture in which we live. Here, validation is still dispensed based on how well you conform to the ideal.

Some of us desire that validation more than others, or need to conform in some places in order to, say, keep our jobs in order to pay rent — while completely disregarding them in others (say in the privacy of our own bedrooms). Complicated shit.

Hess quotes from a piece on the difficulty of giving good sex advice in a fucked up culture.

Nagoski [Hess writes] notes that “most of the time it takes more than normalizing statistics to liberate someone from the burden of fear.” In other words, simple awareness that our cultural ideal has been hoodwinking women into hating ourselves isn’t enough to make us stop. “What can an educator provide? Sadly, most often it’s advice about how to conform more to the cultural lie. Which makes me feel like a fraud,” she writes. “It’s like trying to send the message that weight doesn’t matter, and then giving dieting tips.”

You can check out the rest of the post at The Sexist under the title of Female Orgasms, Skinny Girls, and Feminist Cognitive Dissonance.

feminist values: calling on people to have some thoughts

10 Saturday Apr 2010

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Cross-posted at Feministing Community.

Hanna and I have been talking lately about feminism and feminist politics, comparing our very different experiences with various incarnations of feminist theory and feminism as a political movement. One of the things that we’ve been talking about is the question of hypocrisy: if someone (a feminist in this case) critiques a certain behavior, beauty ritual, book/song/movie, word/phrase, cultural belief, etc. and yet still engages in (possibly even takes pleasure in) said behavior/ritual/belief, does that make the person hypocritical? Or are they just being pragmatic or realistic? And if so, does that mean that there’s no point to engaging in critical feminist analysis, if in the end we all end up pragmatists: does that mean that the status quo wins out in the end anyway?

There was a time in my life when I would have answered with an unqualified “yes, absolutely.” I will always remember the conversation I had about shaving my first year taking college classes (I was seventeen) when I had just discovered theoretical and political feminism as something that — rather than being of historical interest — was of living, breathing political relevance. I had this Creative Nonfiction professor (whom in retrospect I would say I had a huge crush on) whom I met with to discuss an essay I was working on, and in the course of the conversation I said something to the effect of:

“Anyone who shaves their legs is supporting the patriarchy.”

Yes, I did. I really did.

And my professor, bless her heart, gently suggested that given that we live in a complicated, messy, real world in which actions have multiple meanings and sometimes you do a thing for complicated, messy, personal reasons — given all that maybe, just maybe, it was possible to shave your legs because it made you feel less self-conscious about your body, or shave your legs because you enjoy the ritual of shaving, or shave your legs because it makes it easier to lotion your dry skin and none of these things makes you less of a feminist. I was skeptical.

But I didn’t forget what she said. And, over time, I’ve learned to live with the dissonance that is a fucked up world that — try as hard as we might to improve — is never going to be perfectible (and we should probably be grateful for that!). And living “within and against the rules” of that imperfect world (to borrow a phrase from theorist Sidonie Smith) is hard. Because we’re at one and the same time unique individuals and products of our culture; our desires, our like and dislikes, or comforts and discomforts, they are often a confusing jumble of “me” and “society.” Figuring out when Society is worth resisting, because it compromises my Self too much to be borne — that’s practically a full-time job. An important one, but an endless struggle. Sometimes even more difficult are those times when my Self and Society appear to be in accord: do I just think they’re in accord? Do I want that because I’ve been encouraged to want it? Or do I want that because that luminescent Self at the center of my Being desires it?

Or is it a combination of both? And when, oh when, does it matter — discerning one way or another?

(See, for example, my reflections on the sex and gender roles in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series)

I’m pretty sure all of you thoughtful people out there on the internets have examples of these difficulties in your daily lives. And I’m curious how y’all manage to navigate the perilous waters of Self and Society, to make a meaningful life for yourself “within and against” the rules of to culture as-is, while you’re striving to live as if the world was the place you wanted it to be. Is living “as if” even practical? Is compromise always hypocritical? How do you have compassion for yourself (as a human being) who sometimes has to make the best of an imperfect situation? How do you hold on to your vision of a better world while slogging through the everyday? How do you make sense of the desires you have, or the actions you take that are, on some level, counter to your core values?

Please consider this an open thread for discussing any of these questions. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you’ve brought together feminist values with life in the world.

quick hit: america’s earliest sex survey

05 Monday Apr 2010

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The latest issue of the Stanford Magazine (April/May 2010) carries an awesome, thought-provoking article about the earliest-known sex survey that documents the habits and attitudes of American women around the turn of the twentieth century.

In 1973, historian Carl Degler was combing the University archives, gathering research for a book on the history of the family. Sifting through the papers of Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, who taught in Stanford’s hygiene department around the turn of the 20th century, he came across a mysteriously bound file. Degler nearly put it aside, figuring it was a manuscript for one of Mosher’s published works, mostly statistical treatises on women’s height, strength and menstruation. But instead, he recalls, “I opened it up and there were these questionnaires”— questionnaires upon which dozens of women, most born before 1870, had inscribed their most intimate thoughts.

In other words, it was a sex survey. A Victorian sex survey. It is the earliest known study of its type, long preceding, for example, the 1947 and 1953 Kinsey Reports, whose oldest female respondents were born in the 1890s. The Mosher Survey recorded not only women’s sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children and contraception. Perhaps, it hinted, Victorian women weren’t so Victorian after all.

Continue reading The Sex Scholar, by Kara Platoni in the Stanford Magazine.

quick hit: favorite april fool’s post

02 Friday Apr 2010

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Well, to be honest my favorite April Fool’s Day joke might have been Google Translate for Animals (thanks to my sister, Maggie, for bringing this to my attention via Twitter).

But a close second of the day was Amanda Marcotte’s Sex Tips for Feminists. Parodying the dating advice of faux sex-positive feminist spokeswomen like Laura Sessions Stepp and the Independent Women’s Forum, Amanda offers some guidence to those feminists who have “settled” for a man who might (let’s say) be a tad suspicious of her political inclinations. What, oh, what is a girl to do if she wants to have her man and her feminism too?

Talking about feminism. There’s no need to do this. Obviously, this seems hard to avoid, since it’s an important part of your life, until you realize that you don’t really need to talk to your man-child much at all. The vast majority of comments you make should affirm what he’s said or be sexy talk, though you’re obviously okay if what you say has to be said in the shortest but most ladylike way possible. “Not to nag, but perhaps you shouldn’t step on that rattlesnake,” is okay under most deadly circumstances.

But don’t worry! If you feel bottled up, that’s why god invented blogging. You can spill all that stuff on your blog, and don’t forget that you’re allowed to talk to your friends on nights when he’s doing something else and isn’t any the wiser.

Books. Being a feminist, you probably have a lot of these, and many of them have man-child-startling titles that could provoke unpleasant discussions, which as you know are strictly forbidden. But don’t worry. Your best friend here is one of those fat markers, the kind you use when labeling boxes. With a few quick edits of the cover, even the most forbidding feminist tomes can seem like sexily unthreatening, empowerful even. Don’t forget that men-children can get antsy if women are more successful than them! But your friend the marker plus some ingenuity can do a quick un-sexing of most female authors’ names.

Enjoy the whole post over at Pandagon.

feminist values: commenting on comments

01 Thursday Apr 2010

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Just before I left for Oregon, I got into a conversation with a commenter, aHuman, on my post about discussing feminism with anti feminists. The conversation got interrupted by my research trip, but this past week after I came home I stumbled across a comment thread at Feministe that touched on an issue similar to one that aHuman brought up toward the end of our exchange: what is the nature of a feminist value system?

More specifically, aHuman responded to an analogy I made about “feminist” being an umbrella concept kind of like “Christian,” in that self-identified feminists don’t necessarily agree with every single other feminist, yet they share a few core tenets (for more, see the comment thread). In response, aHuman wrote

I find it very revealing that you draw parallels between feminism and Christianity. Well there are very good reasons for why religion is kept strictly out of politics and law in all western democracies (certainly the USA). So I’d like to call for an equal treatment under the constitution of feminism with all other religions. That meaning mostly, that anyone can be a member and believe in it or not, but it cannot and should not have any say in politics or education.

Religions are belief systems, not a theory and not an academic discipline.

Actually I’m not that harsh with feminism. I don’t classify it as a belief system but as a political ideology. If anything, I’d compare it with Marxism. Either way, it certainly is not an academic discipline or even a theory.

And this underlines my point about the radical members of feminism. If feminism was an academic discipline or a scientific theory, then those radicals would have been treated far more harshly and critically than they have been. They would have never had enough attention to get a public voice.

There is a lot to unpack in this comment, obviously. For starters, in order to determine whether feminism is a “belief system,” “theory” or “academic discipline” we’d have to decide what we meant by each of those terms and whether they were mutually exclusive. I have no final word on this, but I do have a very personal response that has to do with how I think about feminism (my primary political identity) in relation to my academic work, and how I think about feminism in relation to metaphysical belief systems (religion). And I’m going to try and share some of them. But first, I offer a second comment from Jill over at Feministe who was responding to a commenter in the comment thread of a blog post on dating while feminist. The commenter asked

It’s an interesting point. Is feminism even more integral to feminists than their culture and their religion (or lack thereof)?

And Jill replies

I’m sure the answer to that question differs from feminist to feminist. For me, my culture and my religious beliefs have probably shaped me as a person more than or at least as much as feminism has. But when I’m looking for a partner, shared values vis a vis feminism are much, much more important to me than shared cultural or religious backgrounds/beliefs. Feminism is distinct from other opinions or traditions that I hold because it is a lens that I choose to use to view and pick apart and critique the world around me. It is, for me, the way in which I can maintain my sanity in a place that often feels really fundamentally unfair and ass-backwards. I need a partner to be able to understand that.

I particularly like Jill’s description of the feminist lens as what she chooses “to use to view and pick apart and critique the world around me. It is, for me, the way in which I can maintain my sanity.” I like it because, for me, this was why conscious, political feminism (a conscious critique of cultural frameworks and social structures, as opposed to my childhood “girls and boys are equally capable, worthy human beings” feminism) spoke to me as a teenager. I could feel what was wrong, but I didn’t have the language to articulate it effectively, particularly in the face of conservative Christian adults who were arguing that queer sexuality was immoral and women should be subservient to men, at least spiritually if not materially. Feminist theory provided me with a language to talk about these feelings, and a political framework through which to try and change what was making the world feel (on the worst days) uninhabitable.

My very first academic class that specifically incorporated feminist theory was an intro level theology class on Christian Feminism, taught by a member of my liberal arts college’s Religion department (mostly Reformed, protestant Christian theology and history, although with some ecumenical and world religion offerings). Because of this, I’ve always been kind of taken aback by people who suggest that feminism is a religion. I heard a conservative Catholic faculty member — at a different institution — once argue that feminists couldn’t possibly be Christian because they held heretical religious views that were oppositional to Christian values. However, most of the self-identified feminists I’ve known personally over the years would identify themselves as religious — and often that religious identity is distinct from their feminist identity (that is, when asked about their spirituality, they would say they are Christian or Jewish or Muslim, or Wiccan, agnostic or atheist — not Feminist).

Feminism, as a lens through which to understand the world, does not attempt to answer questions about the metaphysical realm (what happens to us after death, whether there is a God, etc.). Feminist theology, regardless of the religious tradition from whence it springs, tackles these questions from a feminist perspective — but it is not in itself a spiritual orientation toward the world. Or, at least, I have not yet come upon a feminist who understands it as such. Feminism, as a analytical tool, attempts to understand how women and men are constrained by various cultural assumptions of sex and gender; as a political movement, feminism seeks to counter inequalities between human beings related to sex and gender (as well as supporting a wider range of intersecting issues such as race, disability, age, etc.) It is a values system, in that feminists make certain judgments about what is right/wrong, healthy/unhealthy, moral/immoral (whatever terms you choose). For example, feminists belief that human beings should all be valued equally. That is a value judgment.

However, it is not an inherently religious value judgment: one could make such an argument without drawing on any metaphysical beliefs whatsoever.

When it comes to my feminist self and my academic self, I would say that feminism informs my academic work, and is often the subject of my academic work, although the methodologies that I use depend on the project at hand. aHuman suggests that religion (and feminism, if it is treated as a religion) has no place in schools, yet I would point out that the study of religion and theology are both important academic disciplines, as are political science and philosophy. All of these disciplines understand the world through a particular framework (or frameworks), and yet all of them are seen as legitimate fields of academic study. Feminism, to my mind, falls into this category of something that can both be studied and serve as an analytical framework through which to study other subjects. In this way, it is similar to, say, postmodern philosophy, liberal economic theory, or Marxist theory. So I disagree with aHuman that feminism is something ill-suited to intellectual inquiry or academic research.

Returning to Jill’s reflections on the primacy of feminist values, or a feminist orientation toward the world, I am reminded of a paper I had to write in undergrad for our mandatory Senior Seminar (a capstone seminar that was supposed to help all final-year students integrate faith, scholarship, and vocation) in which I basically argued that I hold religious practice accountable to my feminist beliefs: that is, in my worldview, feminist humanism trumps religion. I don’t care (at least not a lot) whether someone chooses “feminist” as a political identity — but if they’re not acting in ways I believe reflect a fundamental belief that women (and all human beings, no matter how marginal) are human beings worthy of our care and attention as fellow persons, then I’m not okay with that. The same goes for any other religious or political philosophy: does it incorporate a conscious critique of power relations and a belief in the worth of all human beings? If not, I’m out.

In that way, yes. Feminism, both as a theoretical framework and as a political stance, trumps my religious/spiritual beliefs and also my cultural background as a core part of my identity. At the same time (bear with me) I’d also argue it’s somewhat incidental: an accident of time and place. While I believe that culture is a powerful force in shaping our identities, I am not enough of a postmodern purist to argue that we bring nothing unique of ourselves into the world. Feminism, as I encountered it, spoke to me, my Self. It suggested a world in which I could thrive. And I have yet to encounter another theory or movement for social change that offered a similar world: a world in which I was invited to be my Self, in the company of other Selves. This includes religion, which often demands of us not compassion and attention to valuing individual human beings, but policing behavior and judgment that diminishes Selves and our connection to God (if you believe in God) or the metaphysical world.

This isn’t to say I believe feminism is the “final word,” as in a closed, finished philosophy — it is ever-evolving in both theory and practice, and I feel I continue to grow with it. But I will say that feminism is my starting place. And so far, it hasn’t disappointed.

requiem to a companion: "don’t make me go back. please. don’t make me go back."

30 Tuesday Mar 2010

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Warning: SPOILERS.

This post is about the Dr. Who two-parter, “End of Time,” in which David Tennant finishes his tenure as the 10th Doctor. If you care about watching the episodes before reading what happens DO NOT READ FURTHER.

So I’m gonna be upfront here and say I’m a relative newcomer to the whole Dr. Who universe. For the perspective of a lifelong fan, I defer to Hanna’s own reactions to “End of Time,” “i don’t want to go,” posted over at …fly over me, evil angel…; I’m not gonna try to do the same level of analysis she does there — but there’s something (or, more specifically, someone) I really need to write about here.

And that’s Donna.

More specifically, it’s about how Donna needed to die.

Let me explain.

Donna is, hands-down, my favorite Dr. Who new-series companion. Not to diss Rose and Martha (both of whom I like for their own sakes), but from the minute Donna Noble appeared on the Tardis in “Runaway Bride” and slapped David Tennant’s Doctor upside the head for, well, being himself, I was sold. Donna is to the Doctor what you’d get if you crossed an exasperated big sister (“bite me, alien boy“) with an adoring niece who’s favorite Uncle had just given her the opportunity to walk away from her infantalized existence (trapped in dead-end temp jobs, dominated by her demanding, unhappy mother) and take on the universe.

After the Doctor rescues her from a wedding gone wrong in “The Runaway Bride,” Donna packs the boot of her car packed in readiness for interstellar space/time travel and seeks out the Doctor by following suspicious, potentially alien activity, in hopes that she can reinvent herself as his companion.

By mutual agreement, theirs is not a romantic or sexual relationship. Though there is, by the end of Donna’s tenure, a deep, deep love that would have been believable (at least in my mind) as sexual intimacy if the writers had chosen to take it in that direction. But they didn’t and it worked just as well (possibly better) without the simmering sexual tension that is at present an over-used trope in television serials. The relationship between Donna and the Doctor was on some level unequal (which is where the “cool uncle” part comes in; he’s a nine-hundred-year-old Time Lord, for goodness’ sake!) while also being entirely egalitarian (big sister who doesn’t take any crap from her little bro).

And I also think that, more than either of the companions immediately preceding her, Donna was unequivocal about the fact that joining the Doctor on the Tardis was her decision from the start. And one about which she had no second thoughts. Possibly this is because when we meet Donna she is older than both Martha and Rose, both more certain of who she is and wants to be in the world and also restless, full of unrealized potential. She’s ready for a challenge, and realizes it. Which is why she packs that suitcase and goes looking for her spaceman.

So on the one hand, it’s completely understandable, given this love between them, that the Doctor — faced with Donna’s imminent death as the result of a human-time lord meta-crisis (no, I’m not exactly sure either) which saved the universe from invasion by Daleks — makes a quite human mistake. Given the choice of either allowing Donna to die with dignity — in full knowledge of who she is and the choices she has made — or “saving” her by wiping her memory, the Doctor chooses to put her on the Time Lord equivalent of life support, a medically-induced coma, if you will. She becomes a shell of her former self, with no memory of the life she had in which she was a Self with agency: in which she acted in the world.

What the Doctor did to her, even in the name of salvaging her physical existence, was a violation. In writing this post I sat down and watched the scene in “Journey’s End” where the Doctor erases Donna’s memory. She tells him no. Repeatedly. “Don’t make me go back,” she pleads with him, “please, don’t make me go back.” And he does it anyway.

This is NOT OKAY. Understandable, maybe, in a broken, human, bad-decision-in-a-time-of-crisis sort of way. But NOT. OKAY.

So when it became clear that Donna re-appeared in the “End of Time” two-parter, both Hanna and I were hopeful that the writers had realized the error of their ways and were going to, finally, screw up the courage to do what they’d failed to do in the first instance, and that was let Donna die. After all: for all intents and purposes, she had died already — as both Donna’s grandfather and the Doctor acknowledge in the opening scenes of “End of Time.” As Hanna writes,

bernard cribbins does a(nother) great turn [in “End of Time”] as donna’s grandfather, really providing the companion for the show and doing a fantastic job at it, too, keen to see the doctor again, eager to help, but also desperate to understand why the doctor abandoned donna and why the doctor, seemingly so lonely and at loose ends, won’t just take donna back travelling with him.

Suffice to say, we were desperate to have Donna return to herself (please please please!) and die (in some sort of meta-crisis crisis that would have, in turn, caused the Doctor to regenerate, mayhap?) in what would have been restitution: the knowing death she was asking for at the end of “Journey’s End,” which the Doctor denied her.

But no.

What we had to watch was not-alive Donna getting married in what Hanna and I swear was the same fucking wedding dress the Doctor had rescued her from in “The Runaway Bride.” On the surface happy, but visibly confused, slightly vacant, entirely absent in a performance that must have been the devil for Catherine Tate to play.

Let me repeat. The “happy” ending is the one that puts our heroine back where she was on day one, with no memory of the life-changing experiences she’s had.

The attitude of the writers, it seems to me, is neatly summed up in this ninety-second recap of “the Donna Noble story”:

So . . . Donna gets to go “happily” back to her pre-Tardis existence after being the most important-fucking-woman in the universe with absolutely no memory of the experience . . . and the character we’re supposed to feel sorry for is the Doctor who (boo hoo) has to spend his Christmas alone?

Sorry. Not buying it.

Possibly I have a little issue with memory wipes.

Call me crazy.

I find myself wondering: Did no one on the writing team see this? Did no one realize that for those of us who care about Donna, the End of Time was basically two hours of watching our wonderful, vibrant, life-filled Donna Noble suffocate to death in the life she never wanted in the first place? That we could see that haunted, bewildered look in the back of her eyes in every frame? That having to sit through the “happy ending” that saw her married to a stranger while her grandfather looked sadly on and the Doctor blessed the union and walked away was roughly the equivalent of driving red hot nails through the center of our eyeballs?

While I don’t agree with everything author Philip Pullman writes, I’m a longtime fan of his Sally Lockhart novels, a young adult series in which one of the major characters dies in the second book. I once read an essay (I’m sorry I can’t track it down!) in which he reflected on the decision to kill the character. In earlier drafts, he acknowledged, he hadn’t had the guts to do it, merely causing the character disfigurement. But a friend told him the character had to die.

Because people die. Good people die. And if fiction doesn’t deal with the death of people who we wish didn’t die, it’s not true.

And you end up writing a poorer story.

You end up doing more violence to your characters than you would have if you’d let them be true to themselves — even to the death.

Donna should have died. And Doctor Who was less true, as a piece of fiction, because she lived.

It’s going to be a while before I’ll be able to think about forgiving that.

And I’ll sure as hell never be able to forget it.

quick hit: jo walton reviews ‘gaudy night’

27 Saturday Mar 2010

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Thanks to Hanna who pointed me toward this lovely review of Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night, posted by Jo Walton @ Tor.com. If you haven’t ready Gaudy Night and don’t wish to know certain key plot points, don’t click through. However, I encourage all those who have read and loved the Lord Peter/Harriet Vane novels to check out Walton’s astute analysis. I offer these two paragraphs up as a sampling.

This is a book about women — culprit, victims and the primary detective are women. Annie’s closest mirror is Mrs Goodwin, also a widow with a child away at school, who has trained as a secretary. We also see two old students, one whose marriage has ruined her mind, and one who has made a team with her husband and works with him. Then there’s the young don Miss Chilperic, who is engaged to be married, and will therefore leave the college. It was actually illegal for married women to teach in Britain before WWII. Sayers doesn’t say this because she assumes her readers will be utterly aware of it and can’t imagine things being any different, but if ever there was anything that should be footnoted for a modern audience, this is it.

The other academics might as well be nuns, they are devoted not just to scholarship but to virginity. This is said explicitly—and really in 1936 those were the choices. Marriage meant giving up the work, and not marrying, for women, meant maintaining virginity. This leads me to Harriet. Harriet lived with a man in Bloomsbury without marrying him, somebody else murdered him, and she was tried for the murder and acquitted because of Lord Peter (Strong Poison). Because of the notoriety of the trial, Harriet’s sexual status is known to everyone—and some people consider her utterly immoral because she had sex without marriage. This attitude—that people would care—is completely dated, gone like the dodo, and I have to work at understanding it. Harriet, in her thirties and unmarried would be presumed to be a virgin were it not that her cohabitation had been gossip in the newspapers after her lover’s death. Now the fact that she has had sexual experience is public knowledge, and affects people’s behaviour towards her.

As I said, you can check out the entire review on Tor.com.

quick hit: Heather Corinna’s casual sex survey

06 Saturday Mar 2010

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The awesome sexuality educator and activist Heather Corinna, recently interviewed by Chloe @ Feministing, is conducting a survey on attitudes toward, and experiences of, casual sex. The survey is web-based, anonymous, and takes about 20-40 minutes to complete (depending on the speed of your computer and how much you want to write in the open-ended questions). Anyone over the age of sixteen who has ever had a sexual experience involving another person (so anything other than masturbation) is encouraged to respond.

Heather Corinna is trying to gather information on multigenerational attitudes toward casual (not in the context of a commited relationship) sex and how those who engage in casual sexual encounters feel about those experiences. The current media panic about young adult “hook up” culture focuses almost exclusively on heterosexual white women and assumes that casual sexual encounters are threatening to young women’s sexual pleasure and ability to form (if desired) more lasting relationships. Corinna hopes to provide a more nuanced perspective of the actual practice of casual sex without the burden of these moralistic assumptions. As Corinna herself writes:

There’s a lot of buzz right now about “hooking up,” the newest term for casual sex, though casual sex isn’t new at all — nor does it only belong to the current generation, despite often being presented that way. Unlike a lot of the buzz out there, I’m not interested in telling anyone how to have sex or in presenting any one kind of sex as the one ” best way.” I’m just looking for what’s real, both in sexual attitudes and personal experiences.

Rather, I’m doing this study to try and gather data on multigenerational experiences and attitudes with/about casual sex so as to discover and present a more diverse, realistic and non-prescriptive picture of people’s sex lives and ideas about sex. The data will ideally be used for publication, but your answers are completely anonymous and will only be used anonymously.

Since the study will be most informative if the respondants are drawn from a diversity of political, cultural, generational, etc., background, I encourage you to take the survey and pass it along to anyone you feel comfortable introducing the project to. Yes, this includes your socially conservative grandmother, your teenage brother, or your Church pastor.

friday fun: "the great race"

05 Friday Mar 2010

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I’m not sure what was more awesome about The Great Race (1965), the fact they thought Tony Curtis needed to spend the entire film in all white (including, in one scene, a white coat with a fur collar that would have done Bernadette proud) or the fact that Natalie Wood plays a thinly-veiled Nellie Bly “equal rights for women” character while dressed in some of the most outrageous costumes money could buy. Here, for your Friday viewing pleasure, is a six minute clip in which Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood) “interviwing” The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) in a luxuriously appointed tent.

in which I offer some (solicited) advice

04 Thursday Mar 2010

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Max @ Feministing Community posed a question last week which I was unable to respond to directly in comments (site malfunction). So instead, since I thought his question was an interesting one, I’m offering a response in the form of a post here on my own blog.

I recently got into a debate on Facebook with a woman who identifies very strongly as anti-feminist and who argues that 90% of what feminism does is detrimental to society. Although she advocates for gender equality and stiffer penalties against those whose commit violence against women, she considers most of the movement to be ridiculous. She also had this to say:

“I’m not marginalized anymore. I am a woman. I do not fucking belong to a marginalized group anymore.”

I just want to know how, as a man and therefore a member of the privileged class, I should go about tackling these issues appropriately. I mean, if she says she is not marginalized as a woman, it would be very paternalistic of me to deny her lived experienced.

There is the argument that I should not engage in these arguments at all for this reason. I’m mindful of some recent cases where members of a privileged class claimed to advocate for a minority’s rights but completely ignored their voices and thus further marginalized them. However, it also didn’t feel right to just ignore the very powerful anti-feminism, since I believe that feminism is very, very important to our society.

So what should I do in future cases like this one? Would the differing levels of privilege mean I should simply back away from this topic? Or was I right to engage her as long as I was careful to respect her lived experience?

Hi Max!

Hope you don’t mind that I’ve taken your question and turned it into a post on my own blog. I hopped on over to the Community blog from my Google Reader to respond to your question for a couple of reasons, and then the comment feature was disabled so I thought I would write back here.

First of all, I sympathize with the frustration that comes from trying to have debates with anti-feminists online, particularly women whose response to your arguments is “well, I haven’t experienced oppression as a woman and therefore this power imbalance you talk about doesn’t exist.” I’m not sure I can offer you any advice that will help you change this person’s mind (or the next person’s mind). I’ve had very little success in changing minds, at least in the short-term. In my experience, it’s only extended, personal relationships that have caused people to revisit their values and change over time. But reading your question I did have a couple of observations I wanted to share. Observations that might help you, at least, articulate your own beliefs in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you’re being paternalistic.

I’m most concerned about the fact that you don’t seem comfortable speaking from a feminist position because you’re a guy. You write that, as a man, you are “therefore a member of the privileged class.” Well, yes and no. Yes, you have certain privileges because you move about the world in a male body. And clearly, the framework of feminism has helped you be more aware of the way society confers those privileges on you. Kudos for paying attention to that. But there are ways in which binary, oppositional gender roles rigidly confine you as well. Think about the reasons you identify as a feminist or as pro-feminist. Not just because of how it might create a better future for the women you care about, but also because of how it might create a better world for you and other men.* You write that you believe feminism is “very, very important to our society.” Think about why it’s very, very important to you. That way, you are grounding your argument in your own lived experience of gender roles and their limitations, rather than talking about women’s experience in the abstract.

You write that “there is the argument that I should not engage in these arguments at all” because you, as a man, are in a position of privilege relative to women. I realize that is one way of looking at things that many feminists, particularly feminists in the mid-twentieth-century, articulated. And I think they often had valid personal reasons for making that claim. There is certainly a discussion to be had about whether or not it’s appropriate to make a time/place for women to discuss their experience as women. But if you were having a discussion with a self-identified anti-feminist on Facebook, I’d argue that you have every right to assert your feminist beliefs in response to her anti-feminist ones, regardless of your own gender. You weren’t walking into a space that was defined as for women only and asserting your right to speak authoritatively on feminist politics; you were engaging in a debate in an online networking space that was not specifically designated as women-only space (a concept I recognize is, itself, deeply problematic). I really encourage you, if you identify as a feminist or pro-feminist, to speak up for your beliefs. They are yours, and the fact of your gender doesn’t make you a less legitimate feminist (I realize not all feminist women agree with me here, but for what it’s worth I don’t think being a feminist is gender-specific).

Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean that I necessarily have a right to make more abstract claims about gender oppression than you do — like you, I am constrained by the authority of my own experience. I can choose to make more abstract arguments about how institutionalized oppression works, but in making those arguments I’m in the same position you are: I am speaking beyond my own direct experience. Other women can (and have) stepped in and contradicted those arguments, refusing to accept my interpretation of how sexism works (or that it even exists!).

So, speaking as a fellow feminist, I’d like to say thanks for speaking and trying to refute anti-feminist rhetoric! I hope that you keep on talking while staying mindful of the power dynamics at play between people whose experience of privilege and marginalization are often radically different.

Peace,
Anna