Feminism: C or D?

For some reason I get the feeling Dave is actually interested in discussing this question. The fact he introduced the topic in his own special way can't be a surprise to many people...

(/me ducks and runs)

Ie. women's *right to work* being an illusion since women have historically usually HAD to work, and the *right* was only ever for those with the luxury of choice, to escape the social conditioning which expected them to remain at home? ie escape for posh, bored wives? Is this a distraction from the right of EVERYONE regardless of gender to have employment?

Ony askin'...

I'd be lying if I said I didn't sometimes wonder about some of this myself, even as a self-identified feminist. I was talking to someone last week about the problems of teaching feminism to students who mostly combine a convication about absolute sexual difference with an insouciant faith in rhetorics of equal opportunities. And I came out thinking why do we bother? Do we want to make them like us, ie still caught up in daily struggles with body image and the power of romance narratives, still shaving our legs and anticipating career/motherhood trade-offs - but now with added FEMINIST GUILT? (comes free with your arts/humanities degree!!).

But I don't really think that's good enough, and it maybe suggests some responses to dave q's question. That is, I think insofar as feminism has 'succeeded' in some parts of the world it's done so by creaming off the somewhat palatable liberal individualist parts which have, by luck or judgement, coincided with broader shifts in global politics/economics, and the logic of the labour market in particular, without attending to the rest of the agenda. So, divorce/abortion: feminism = women's right to control their fertility/sexuality/romantic lives, but the 'naturalness' of the nuclear family and its attendant gendeer roles remain largely unchallenged?

Final point (because I'm burbling and flailing really badly here): holding 'feminism' responsible for this:

" [a]cultural shift from Enlightenment rationalism to intuitive' new-age murkiness (with corresponding emphasis on the 'personal' sphere leading to the solipsism which led to the sort of foreign policy America is famous for)"

is pretty nonsensical, I think. Feminism, like most identity-politics, has a much more ambiguously interesting relationship with the enlightenment and modernity, insofar as it simultaneously depends on a discourse of rights *and* seeks to challenge the unprecedented power and historical truth of its presumption to speak a universal truth. And secondly, the withdrawal into personal politics has its roots in a much wider set of cultural forces, not least the implosion of (male-dominated) countercultural politics in the early seventies.

I can't believe I'm about to submit this mess, but...

i guess the point i'll ultimately end up making is that holding feminism responsible for all the ills in society is wrong and short- sighted, and even in this day and age, women can't win. if they have a nervous breakdown due to over-work, feminism has "failed them" and by implication they have failed themselves by following the feminist dream rather than staying home like a good little wifey. if they achieve success they are obviously ballbreakers who have done so at the expense of their lovelives. etc, etc.

i guess the point i'll ultimately end up making is that holding feminism responsible for all the ills in society is wrong and short- sighted, and even in this day and age, women can't win. if they have a nervous breakdown due to over-work, feminism has "failed them" and by implication they have failed themselves by following the feminist dream rather than staying home like a good little wifey. if they achieve success they are obviously ballbreakers who have done so at the expense of their lovelives. etc, etc. and this is not feminism's fault at all, nor the fault of the women who belive that a homelife and a work life can both be theirs. it's the fault of a society (or, more specifically, a media) that, when all is said and done, is still for the most part hideously biased against women.

The problem it seems to me is a problem in the two-stage argument. Stage 1: The current power structure oppresses women. Stage 2: Women must achieve equality within this power structure. But of course the current power structure exists as it is precisely because of the reduction of women to an at-home servant-class: equality on the terms of the existing power structure leaves a vacuum which can only be filled by further economic exploitation. Of course this is pretty basic stuff (I've never read any feminist writings) and it's no fault of women or feminists that the power structure evolved in the way it did, but implicit in Dave Q's question is the question of whether the object of feminism should be/is to change this structure or simply to allow individual women to better exploit it.

don't believe me? read any corporate document championing 'diversity,' or the explanations tv news producers give when they're asked why they only hire babes to anchor their 6pm newscast, or even the whole crock of shit that is 'compassionate conservatism.'

how many feminist ideas are truly ingrained in the vernacular? look closely and you'll see not many, and it seems like gender politics are just sliding back further and further every day, from women-as-accoutrement in every fucking video to the new public persona of courtney love to the fact that my friend's brother-in-law took his 3 year old son to hooters for his birthday.

the 'how far do you want to go?' question has been one that's been a contentious point between all strands of feminism since its beginning, and it keeps coming up. and i guess the question that goes along with that is 'how willing are you to lose everything for your cause?' the problem from my point of view is that a lot of feminist leaders are already in a position of power, whether it's within the movement or within the culture at large (although it's usually both), and i'm not so sure how willing they'd be to give up those positions.

Feminism is much, much older than the 30 years Dave estimates. And the work of feminists is *far* from done, particularily in the developing world. In the developed world, ensuring that a female CEO earns as much as a male one is no different or less important than ensuring equality of access to any other thing, be it education, human rights, recourse under the law.

T-T raises an excellent point, in identifying the tendency of elites to reclassify a problem as a gender issue to make it less of a priority to the larger society. This bullshit happens all the time, particularily within areas where there is an assumed liberal bias. I have been in a number of situations where I have been debating points with a man re. feminism, and when his chips are down, he asks, 'what about racism?' or 'what about classism?' My answers have always been, 'Well, what about them? All of the 'isms' of the modern age are all about a privileged group trying to hoard privileges for themselves and their sons by any means necessary.'

What I cannot bear is to see the boys of the intellectual working class manifest their resentment for those with any kind of privilege by indulging in ideas which only serve the need of the privileged to divide and rule the so-called lower orders. Dave, if you attack women for the chaos of trying to make things properly equal, you are doing exactly that and you are a bigger TOOL of the establishment than you realise, even though you like to affect a general air of nonconformity.

To comment on some of the issues raised by Dave's questions - I don't think that feminists typically exhibit tendencies towards "new age murkiness" in a manner that's stronger or different to, say, Marxists, or even Dubya, for that matter. Surely Enlightenment rationalism = built on murk, albeit of an occasionally less generous kind? At any rate, the tendency towards meaningless sweeping statements seems to be more to do with the fact that a) the 'debate' has been dumbed down generally; and b) identity politics often inspires people to say stuff without really thinking it through first.

Katie: I suppose by absolute sexual difference I meant the easy acceptance that girls will be girls and boys will be boys being the unquestioned starting point of discussion - which gets more paradoxical, I think, as men increasingly articulate their own frustrations with them. And an insouciance about an underlying reality of an equal rights rhetoric that bears little relation to the choices women have to make, and the ways in which they're making them - and men too. However strong any individual's conviction of the existence of equality, and determination to live it, is, my baseline is always the structures and patterns of inequality and difference, and my job is to undermine their assumptons about unlimited agency/free will (joking - mostly).

Unless you work in a call centre, workers' rights have evolved from the indentured servitude you describe. This is about civil rights, which feminism makes great contributions to. First rule of feminism is it's there to make society better for everyone, as we are all indicted if anyone has their rights suppressed, including feminists.

*chortle chortle chuckle GUFFAW*

I have Asian friends who complain bigstyle about it, because their behaviour is monitored by other family members and they are threatened with issues of 'izzat' (pride) if they do something 'odd' eg. seek out non-arranged partners (one of my best friends, Satinder, is from a large and influential Southall family of big-in-the-gurdwara Sikhs and she worries about even being seen on the Tube with her WASP boyfriend). But if those parameters are not in effect then it's pretty cool.

I think I'd still be paranoid. It might be a matter of personality, but me, my parents and my sister were all I needed -- the rest of the relatives around would have slowly freaked me out, ick.

Ummmmm...no. At least not racism; that's far more complex than such a pat explanation can address. (For instance, though a white lesbian activist and an African-American male activist might well agree that they share a common enemy in white male heterosexuals, I daresay many of them also see each other as a priori enemies as well. And what about what some African-Americans think of Jews, and vice versa?) And I resent the chronic implication that majority = oppressors = "haves" = bad, minority = victims = "have-nots" = good. These sorts of arguments lack sophistication in their understanding of human nature.

If your privilege is based on the exploitation of others and you *realise* that but do nothing, then you're just as bad as the CEO of Nestle.

Anyone for shades of grey? Moral ambiguity? Nuance? I don't buy the above at all -- it's the sort of (by implication) you're-with-us-or-you're-against-us thing that I can' t stand.

Feminism as an agent of the emancipation of women from sociocultural prescriptions and sexual violence/harassment = classic. Feminism as an agent of critically examining gender roles and their relationship to who we are and how we behave = classic, at least sometimes. (Feminism as perspective and agent = classic. Feminism as ideology = dud, but so are all ideologies. Skepticism = classic.)

Where certain branches of it trip up, as do so many movements from every part of the philosophical spectrum, is its portrayal of the world purely in terms of power dynamics (which is (1) extremely limited if not just plain inaccurate and (2) utterly and totally joyless) and its frequent reliance on the identification, blame, and vilifcation of the "evil Other" -- a thing which basically DOESN'T EXIST (the occasional sociopath aside, perhaps), and the search for which (and punishment upon its presumed discovery) is responsible for a pretty high percentage of the woes with which the world is plagued by agencies ranging from the Nazi party to the church to nearly-any-case-of-racial-violence-you-care-to-name. "All men are rapists and that's all they are" (Marilyn French) = "the Jews poisoned the water supply and gave us the Black Plague" (commonly held opinion back then) = Godhatesfags.com. This is overstating it a bit, of course, but I trust my point is clear.

The thing is though that the logic of "making things properly equal" should lead to "nobody gets to have it quite so good anymore" rather than "now women get to have it just as good".

Doesn't technology trump that argument in the end, though? At least with wealth, and I don't follow your argument vis-a-vis power.

I think there is a degree to which this is true of, say, porn stars and strippers, who appropriate the language of feminism to say: "I am doing with my body what I choose to" -- but what they are choosing to do it put themselves in a situation that sometimes only serves to fuel misogyny and the thick-headed view of 'women as sex objects'. this is certainly *NOT* to let men off the hook for this manner of thinking, but merely to propose a possible way this 'appropriation of language' takes place.

I am not some trustafarian who adopts a do as I say, not as I do attitude with regard to others. I do actually walk it like I talk it.

And I mean that's a distant unreachable goal if there ever was one, at least in this life on Earth. So maybe I just expect that life is full of ideals to aspire to and I'm okay with that, it's the journey not completion, blah blah.

Hah. Angry is probably an exaggeration, just how I sometimes perceive you in these type of threads, which, I repeat isn't a (negative) criticism, more... an admiration. I know this is the worng (contorted?) perception, because, like you just said, you aren't like that in "real" life. Still I find it admirable when people are gung ho (?) about their beliefs. I sort of gave up once I entered my 30s. :-( Which I know is a shitty attitude, because I am condoning a lot of shit I would have stood up against if I was younger.

Nathalie: main computer.
Stevie Nixed: every other comp. I couldn't remember my main password, only the Stevie Nixed one.

Killfile away. :-)

Nathalie, if we were all waiting to understand a thing perfectly in order to live it, would anything ever get done? If you refused to get pregnant until you were sure you could be a perfect parent, or refused to get married unless you were sure you and your spouse would never be unfaithful or fall out of love, where would you be? Etc.

For me feminism isn't an ideological impossibility that I must look to the academics to tell me about before I can vote for it, it's speaking up in my daily life and trying to make choices that support women and other people whose rights aren't respected, and questioning the gender/social/political/religious status quo.

Which mostly isn't that terrible living in NYC b/c the bulk of my peers here are not going to be all "WOMEN IN POSITIONS OF LEADERSHIP?? POPPYCOCK! PLS TO FOLLOW GOD'S PLAN" like what I felt where I grew up. But there's still no shortage of bullshit.

Yr good people Laurel.

For me feminism isn't an ideological impossibility that I must look to the academics to tell me about before I can vote for it, it's speaking up in my daily life and trying to make choices that support women and other people whose rights aren't respected, and questioning the gender/social/political/religious status quo.

This is very true. Even if I believed in some feminist utopia, I'd have to admit that it isn't very likely to happen during my lifetime, so trying to change little things in my everyday life, plus going to demonstrations and working with feminist organizations is the best I can do. I don't think anyone needs to devote her whole life to feminism to be a proper feminist, just recognizing the power structures around us and speaking up when you feel you should is enough. The fact that gender affects almost everything around us may feel overwhelming, but it also means resistance can be done everywhere. Sexism is much more about (often unnoticed) everyday practice than about some conspiracy of men.

some feminist utopia

sounds interesting....pls describe...

(Reason I ask is cos I relate to environmental issues better because the imagined outcome is less abstract to me...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnJxqRLg9x0&feature=player_embedded

Video 90% otm!

On Twitter wars between feminists -- seems familiar.

Yet even as online feminism has proved itself a real force for change, many of the most avid digital feminists will tell you that it’s become toxic. Indeed, there’s a nascent genre of essays by people who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in it—not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists. On January 3, for example, Katherine Cross, a Puerto Rican trans woman working on a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote about how often she hesitates to publish articles or blog posts out of fear of inadvertently stepping on an ideological land mine and bringing down the wrath of the online enforcers. “I fear being cast suddenly as one of the ‘bad guys’ for being insufficiently radical, too nuanced or too forgiving, or for simply writing something whose offensive dimensions would be unknown to me at the time of publication,” she wrote....

(T)here’s a norm that intention doesn’t matter—indeed, if you offend someone and then try to explain that you were misunderstood, this is seen as compounding the original injury. Again, there’s a significant insight here: people often behave in bigoted ways without meaning to, and their benign intention doesn’t make the prejudice less painful for those subjected to it. However, “that became a rule where you say intentions never matter; there is no added value to understanding the intentions of the speaker,” Cross says.

There are also rules, elaborated by white feminists, on how other white feminists should talk to women of color. For example, after Kendall’s #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag erupted last fall, Sarah Milstein, co-author of a guide to Twitter, published a piece on the Huffington Post titled “5 Ways White Feminists Can Address Our Own Racism.” At one point, Milstein argued that if a person of color says something that makes you uncomfortable, “assume your discomfort is telling you something about you, not about the other person.” After Rule No. 3, “Look for ways that you are racist, rather than ways to prove you’re not,” she confesses to her own racial crimes, including being “awkwardly too friendly” toward black people at parties.

http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars

The left will always eat itself to some extent. Just gotta own it.

Morbius

Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

http://womenagainstfeminism.tumblr.com/

Discuss.

http://33.media.tumblr.com/faade5ac24ba94974ff7e3fc50942216/tumblr_nce677RTC71syitgfo1_500.jpg

I honestly don't even know where to start with these idiots.

i dont need feminism because:

--I dont understand what structural inequality is
--I am on the winning side of patriarchy (for now)
--sometimes men are nice to me?
--i have little to no historical consciousness

Yes.

https://twitter.com/NoToFeminism

ryan otm

http://40.media.tumblr.com/09198f29a631af61191f2397c4fff802/tumblr_na866cAJx61syitgfo1_500.jpg

This doesn't even make any sense. None of them do. Brb I need to go kill myself now.

That twitter account. Dying.

Anyway, women's rights battles are for those ppl too, whether they acknowledge it or not. Feminism has given them the opportunity to be in a position to say those things, to not experience or not perceive that they experience discrimination. That's okay. Odds are at some point in their lives they'll fall out of that protected status because of something, and their views may change.

maybe there is some site where you can pay people to hold up handwritten signs with nonsense of your choosing and all of these people have been hired by reddit

that's unusually optimistic of you nakh

I wonder if you asked Ms. Guns & Coffee there why her shirt happens to be pink what her answer would be.

I'm going to totally make an educated guess about this woman because of the fact she has SEVEN CHILDREN and looks to barely be on the other side of 30 — religious fundie tea partier.

"Women Against Feminism" was much more pro-women in the old days of Women's Lib - those women didn't argue that women were weak and inferior. Just that they didn't need liberating, OR women's domestic role should be celebrated etc. this new breed is so submissive - anti-empowerment!

oh right, guns and coffee, that makes sense.

coffee gun pow pow pow

those poses are redolent of the mid 2000s 419 scammer counterscams where people were tricked into holding up pieces of paper with humiliating written messages

http://img71.photobucket.com/albums/v215/lowbridge/gloria.jpg

this racially dubious internet subculture was mostly based in the uk so if you gis 419 scammer you see a lot of west african and sometimes south asian people holding up signs saying 'twat' and 'wanker' and so forth

since then it has become a staple of 'progressive' movements the world over yet they always remind me of 419 baiting

Don't know where to put this, now I'm putting it here. Feminism vary classic imo.

Just finished Living Dolls - The Return of Sexism by Natasha Walter, and highly recommend it.

The first part of the book deals with the sexism of popular, sexualised images of women in contemporary culture and features interviews with, amongst others, "glamour models", editors of "lads' magazines", former lap-dancers, young women who feel excluded from society for distancing themselves from these images. It makes a convincing case that the sexualised representation of women is harmful for gender equality. These are not necessarily controversial points - although some of them may be dismissed by sex-positive feminists - but Walter's journalistic approach makes for an emotionally engaging read.

The second part of the book deals with biological determinism. It's very well argued and feels extremely relevant - basically it debunks a lot of the legitimacy from biology/evolutionary psychology etc. that sustains popular sexist discourse in the media. Walter's approach is again journalistic. After documenting the way biological determinism works in popular media Walter looks up the sources and finds that there is no documentation that testosterone, oxytocin etc. contributes to stereotypical male/female behavior, and that research into male/female cognition has yet to find significant differences between the sexes - points that are supported through interviews with biologists, psychologists, linguists etc. While it may not come as a surprise that biological determinism is bullshit, Walter's book is full of great examples of exactly how these myths arise, how they're supported by popular media etc. Pretty handy to know the scientific fallacies in studies about female/male spatial cognition next time someone suggests that women can't read maps bcz that's just in the genes lulz.

Anyway, I'd like to reread and memorize a lot of the points - but instead I'll look up some of the interesting books recommended by Walter throughout Living Dolls: Brain Gender by Melissa Hines, The Myth of Mars and Venus by Deborah Cameron and Myths of Gender by Anne Fausto-Sterling.

lol very* classic

what does ilx think of this woman's opinion?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/why-are-young-feminists-so-clueless-about-sex/article26950887/

uh oh!

The only context to discuss anything from Margaret Wente is to understand that she in Canada's leading anti-science, anti-environment, populist troll.

even looks like Katie Hopkins

not that on this of all threads a woman should be judged on her appearance

"It’s hard to take anybody seriously when she’s droning on about oppression, colonialism and imperialism, especially when she’s uptalking."
-Margaret Wente

Wente's been caught plagiarising others so frequently that now she just repeats herself. Trots out a column lecturing us about hook-up culture etc every couple of months. Usually name-checks Gloria Steinmen then asks what went wrong with feminism, then explains why young people are so unhappy. We got this last when Trainwreck came out. This old lunatic needs to retire.

read as far as http://www.theglobeandm...

i need to know what the nutcases are talking about. you know, keep your friends closer, enemies closer type of thing.

peggy is out of control, though. was wondering if what she was talking about was even a dialogue feminists were having these days, but she seems out of the loop.

Dumb article, but I have to admit I had a similar reaction at least to the opening of the NYMag piece in question -- wasted sex is more likely than not to be bad and perhaps an anecdote about it is not the best setup for an article about how gender power imbalance results in bad consensual sex.

What is the origin of all these "No, Women Can't Have it All" pieces that pop up ad infinitum? Was there once a piece that said "Women Can Have it All?" The first time I remember this coming up at all was in the context of some mainstream news magazine cover asking "Can Women Have it All?" already kind of challenging the idea, and I want to say it was at least 15-18 years ago that I remember seeing that.

"Women Can Have it All?"

there's a book iirc

that was supposed to read "Can Women Have it All?" obvs. It just feels like people are beating a dead cliché at this point, so to speak.

1982
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fbackstorywriting.files.wordpress.com%2F2012%2F08%2Fhaving-it-all.jpg&f=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-complicated-origins-of-having-it-all.html

huh, well that p much explains it, thx