This confusion sucks up a lot of mental energy
Sometimes being a feminist is a strain, because there is reality and then there is feminism and there can be a quarrel between them.
Michelle Goldberg points out the trap this can lead to.
Because sexism is so interwoven with how we live our lives, it sometimes feels like the transformation of our personal lives is demanded by feminism. This is extremely exhausting, leading to a neurotic level of analysis and justification of our own preferences, motives and interpersonal relationships. Two kinds of personal essays, repeated with nearly infinite variations, manifest this neurosis. One is confessional: I’m a feminist, but I enjoy X, in which X is some traditionally female thing like not working, wearing makeup, being submissive in bed, or doing all the housework. The other is tautological: don’t judge me for doing this traditionally female thing, because it makes me, a feminist, feel good, and thus must be more feminist than it appears.
We live in the real world; sometimes doing the feminist thing is too damn much work, so we don’t. That’s life.
Often doing the conventional thing is the path of least resistance. (That’s why it’s the conventional thing.) It is not easy—it might be impossible — to live a productive life while bucking social expectations at every turn. It’s too bad that so many young women have gotten the idea that feminism expects them to.
Or even that feminism expects them to apologize for failing to. (I expect that, but that’s not feminism, it’s just me. I’m a shithead.)
This confusion sucks up a lot of mental energy, leading to guilt and defensiveness. It turns feminism—the demand that women be recognized as full, equal human beings, legally and socially—from something libratory into another thing for women to feel like they’re failing at. It becomes, ironically, a source of gender inequality, since men, by and large, don’t spend so much time second-guessing their romantic decisions and aesthetic preferences. Changing your name is not a feminist act. You have not betrayed feminism if you change your name. The same is true for staying home with your kids, wearing high heels, or getting Botox. Women live in a sexist system, and contort themselves to negotiate it, picking from a menu of mostly bad options and then hating themselves for choosing wrong. The problem is the system, not the women. That’s what the personal is political is supposed to mean.
I feel better about these pink socks I’m wearing now.
Another issue is that many of us who are older (that would be me) have seen feminism change so many times it can be hard to keep up with what people expect of feminism at any given time. When I started my first professional job, the feminist women only a few years older than me were horrified at the idea of women cooking, because that was the “female” thing to do. I like to cook, I do cook, and I don’t apologize for it, but I don’t make a fetish of it, either. That seems to have changed again. I’m not sure if it’s OK to cook now or not, but I cooked when it wasn’t OK, and I’ll keep on cooking if it starts not to be OK again. If we could just agree that feminism was about liberating women and empowering them, and not policing every single individual choice to the max, I think we’d all be a lot more OK. There are some things that are clearly anti-feminist and some things that are pro-feminist. But it seems to me that a lot of things are feminist neutral – they don’t really help or hurt, they just are. And those are often the things where we are people, and not exclusively women. (My husband cooks, too, so people cook, not just women, for instance).
I think Goldberg’s writing is excellent, and also allows us to extend to other analogies. Take her text above, and substitute atheist values for feminist values. Then do the same for various other -isms. Pacifism. Humanism. Veganism. Homosexual egalitarianism. After doing each Mad-Lib, i start to realize Goldberg’s wisdom applies in numerous ways.
Ophelia, Please feel free to move this post to another existing thread if you feel it matches the topic better.
I’ve just had a quick look at MA Melby’s Blog and some comments on a couple of the recent posts. Not for the first time I’ve done the self test. I’m still not convinced that ‘we’ are the baddies. For that matter, while I disagree strongly with things I’ve seen written by a number of people, I don’t believe that everybody on one side or the other are necessarily bad at all. I do believe that there has been a large dose of stating ideology as fact on the one hand (combined with unnecessary othering in my view) and some pretty aggressive defence of intellectual analysis on the other. That has led to some balkanisation to greater or lesser degrees for individuals. It’s also obvious that, rightly or wrongly, I’ve chosen a side of the fence. that is in large part because I don’t know the grand answer, but also because I value exploration of ideas as a means of finding answers, as opposed to accepting someone else’s truth.
What I have not seen is any evidence that regular commentators here wish any harm to trans people, align themselves culturally or politically with obvious TERFs, pretend than being trans isn’t actually a thing or are so stuck in old-persons feminism that they can’t accept a new paradigm. Neither do I have the sense that trans people who comment here are somehow traitors to the trans cause – I mean, in any case, how would I judge that?
Have I totally misjudged the company I’m keeping? I don’t want people to feel unsafe answering, because I’m damn sure this will be noted and screen capped, but I would be really interested in feedback.
Is anyone here antagonistic to trans rights?
Does anyone here deny that being trans is a thing?
Does anyone think that trans women should be excluded from feminist spaces and that trans men should be excluded from male only spaces?
For the record, my answers are:
No, I’m not.
No, I don’t.
As a man it’s not my place to tell women how to organise their spaces. I would have hoped that trans women and cis-women interested in feminism would some spaces they could occupy together, but that if some spaces for some people on each side need to be separate that is for the individuals involved to determine. Sorry, not a yes or no. And that is my short answer.
There are two other things I want to note right now. Firstly, apparently finding humour in anything is a crime. I laugh at things that make me angry and bitter, I laugh at things that make me sad, I laugh at things I want to mock and I laugh at things I find funny. I have a whole range of other emotions, but humour is adaptable and comes naturally to me. It’s stress relief. It’s a good coping mechanism. In some circumstances it makes a point better than anger or tears. Admittedly on the internet, without facial expressions and voice inflexion, humour is more uncertain and requires the reader to be open to context and a reading of the person that MAY NOT BE READILY AVAILABLE ON THAT PAGE. If you lack that skill, maybe you should suspend judgement of others who do. Maybe you should actually assume a more charitable reading of the person (pointless here since the die was cast a long time ago). Maybe you can’t comprehend any humour or nuance or disagreement no matter how slight; in which case you are an ideologue defending an assumed position with whom there can never be dialogue.
The other thing is this business of saying that ‘those’ trans people are traitors. That ‘they aren’t really trans people’. That ‘they hate themselves’. I’ll have no part of that. Who are any of us to judge the validity of another persons genuinely expressed feelings, experience or identity? It’s especially shameful coming from a bunch of people trying to force Ophelia, and by extension the rest of us, to accept a point of view that is quite clearly not black and white. I can’t even find the right words to describe just how repugnant I find it to call the trans people who have commented on this blog, or been quoted from their own blogs, as self loathing or self hating. Especially with self harm and suicide rates amongst trans people so ludicrously high. It’s pretty obvious that taking an ‘approved’ stance on trans activisim doesn’t suddenly make all of the doubts/hates/dislikes/issues disappear, or we would already have the magic bullet answer. Unless you somehow believe that upon the epiphany of coming to the ‘approved’ point of view means that the suicide risk remains unchanged, but the causes suddenly swap from being self hatred (internal causes) to cultural hatred (external causes). Because if you do, that would be magical thinking on a par with anything I’ve ever witnessed from a crystal waving, god bothering homeopath.
Rob #3
Well, me neither. But who is in the business of making such claims? You say that it’s “coming from a bunch of people trying to force Ophelia, and by extension the rest of us, to accept a point of view that is quite clearly not black and white”. Reading you, my impression was that your remark refers to the comments from Melby’s blog. So I gave it a (cursory) look but I can’t find such comments.
Admittedly, it was only a glance, not a thorough search. Still, I’m curious: is that what you had in mind? Were you referring to Melby’s commenters and if so, where are these comments?
Back on the topic of this post:
The thing about cooking, housework, etc. is that these things are not, in their nature female. They are things. Do I cook? Yes, I like to eat and cooking is an economical way of ensuring that I can keep doing that. Unlike most daily tasks, cooking can be inventive and pleasurable. Do I clean my house? Yes, I don’t like living in filth.
So, do I do these things because I’m a woman or because I’m an adult human being with a limited budget but needs for survival and comfort? The feminist issue isn’t that necessary work gets done, it’s the gendering of the work. Cooking and cleaning are necessary but they are not a woman’s jobs by default. That’s the point. Saying “I love to cook” isn’t a problem. Saying “I’m a woman so I love to cook” or “like all women, I love to cook” is a problem. There is no connection between my gender and cooking. One does not explain or serve as a rationale for the other.
That cooking (and cleaning) have been traditionally defined as women’s work isn’t even the problem, really. The problem is that we devalue the work done by women or work viewed as being the purview of women. That’s why, as a feminist, rejecting traditional jobs isn’t doing women any favours. What feminists must do is recognize the value of that work and demand that others acknowledge the value as well.
I keep referring back to Anita Sarkeesian’s recent quote that “the act of a feminist in not necessarily a feminist act.” Accordingly, it’s not necessarily anti-feminist. Some actions are neutral, in that they may have not been used to oppress women in the past and are not oppressive in nature. Some actions are not neutral. Objectification, even if it’s engaged in willingly by the objectified person is not a neutral act because other people are being objectified in the same manner against their will. All oppressions benefit some members of the oppressed class but that doesn’t make participating in them empowering. The obvious, if offensive, example of this is house slaves being no less a slave than field slaves, even if they were comparatively privileged. Conventionally beautiful women are not empowered by the oppression of beauty. Devout Islamic women who embrace the veil are not empowered by the oppression of modesty – just as devout Christian women who practice “modest dress” are not empowered by the oppression of modesty. They acquiesce to the oppression and derive personal identity from it but that’s not the same as being empowered.
Feminism; it’s simple but complicated.
SamBarge #5 –
Not necessarily disagreeing. But I wonder: What’s our society going to be less reluctant to do? Stop devaluing things that associated with women, or stop gendering things? My suspicion is that it’s the latter.
things that *are* associated, I mean.
Like a horse & carriage and love & marriage*, I don’t think you can have one without the other. So long as we (society) devalue the work of women, we will gender their work.
*That’s stupid, really. You can obviously have one without the other in all those cases.
.
I agree with this totally. The problem is that most people don’t. So many of my feminist friends in the 80s not only refused to cook themselves, but insisted that I was being submissive to the dominant cultural paradigm by doing so myself.
Cooking is not an anti-feminist act. Part of being independent is taking care of yourself. You can cook, or you can get someone to cook for you. Either act is fine, depending on your situation or your circumstances. So my liking to cook, and being a good cook, does not make me a non-feminist, anti-feminist, or anything else (for the record, it doesn’t make me a feminist, either).
The idea of what it means to be a feminist is a constant changing mosaic that in many ways reflects the society around it. Feminism itself is a cultural construct, in that the shape of feminism is in many ways determined by the culture.
SamBarge #8 (please don’t think I’m picking on you! I’m just thinking through things),
I guess I’m not so sure. So we have (A) the relentless gendering of objects, actions, etc., and (B) the devaluing of anything thus gendered feminine. The way I see it, a lack of “relentless gendering” would make “devaluing feminine” rare if not impossible. But a lack of “devaluing feminine” (the act of writing “a lack of devaluing feminine” makes me laugh with hopelessness) would not make “relentless gendering” rare.
This is why I read (from Goldberg)
and I think the solution is to get rid of gender, not to try to convince everyone that chick stuff really isn’t noxious while allowing the gender binary to flourish.
To clarify, I’m not saying that you, SamBarge, are all about allowing the gender binary to flourish. I’m expressing the thoughts raised by a comment you made, but it is definitely not my intent to say anything about what you might or might not think.
Three comments in a row is usually a sign of not-good, which could be the case here. But I’m reconsidering my choice of the descriptor “feminine.” I was trying to avoid “female,” but I’m rethinking. Maybe “woman,” despite not being an adjective, would have been better than “feminine.” I’m open to suggestions.