Guest post: Feminism requires saying “This is not for you.”
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Because Feminism is Hated.
The philosophy professor said that she will now speak from outside the academy so [that] she is not being constantly watched for a mistake.
It might be more accurately called a misstep than a mistake. The latter implies, as in logically implies, fault. The former allows for mere transgression.
Feminism is so disliked that apparently a large percentage of girls and young women refuse to wear the label. I suspect this’s primarily because they want to be cool, not the uptight fun police. Feminists are harpies, witches, bitches. They want to say yes, to be inclusive, to be liked. They don’t want to be “boomers”. Unfortunately, the very essence of feminism is incompatible with this impulse toward social approval.
Feminism is (duh) supposed to be about the flourishing of female people, requiring at minimum being able to distinguish between the sexes. Otherwise, it’s impossible to focus attention on females or to recognize sexism when we can’t tell who’s male and who’s female. You can only say that people are affected by some phenomenon. (Some might argue that such language would be intrinsically good due to its inclusivity.) The same problem arises from completely ignoring race: it’s impossible to recognize racism when we can’t tell who’s one race and who’s another. Feminism requires not being inclusive of males. It requires telling someone, “This is not for you.”
Being a vocal feminist means pointing out when something constrains female flourishing, but the “cool girl” who fits in with the guys would never do that. It sometimes means standing in opposition to what others in your peer group deem acceptable. It means telling people from whom you probably want approval that their actions or beliefs are wrong, even harmful. Few things are more likely to shrink popularity than that. Marking exclusion immoral assuages the cognitive dissonance that this all generates.
Thus we see the metamorphosis of feminism into its modern form, that ridiculous movement for all oppressed groups, because for females to have their own movement wouldn’t be sufficiently “inclusive”. “No, guys,” it says, “we’re not like those ugly, old, boomer bitches. We’re young and cool and always DTF.”
Ironically, the feminism-is-for-everyone feminist seems to have appropriated the I-am-woman-hear-me-roar attitude of the 70’s feminists, though they’re rather cagey about the advisability of the word “woman.” They stand with their fists in the air, chanting various versions of Be Kind. Be Kind, you scum. Be Inclusive, you bitches. Be open to ALL the kinds of women there are, especially the ones with dicks who transgress the boundaries of our oppression with their own oppression which is EVEN WORSE. YOUR beliefs are harmful. Trans rights are human rights. No TERFS on our turf.
In Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye there’s a detailed description of the incredible cruelty girls can exercise on each other, making escalating demeaning demands on their targets for no discernible reason but power and status. I’m reminded of the mean girl dynamic whenever I notice how many of the angry voices shouting at and down women are coming from other women.
I once read an essay by a high-profile feminist in my country about the complicated relationship between feminism and socialism in the 20th century. There was once a slogan that went “No Feminism Without Socialism”. Consistent with the Marxist idea of basis and superstructure, it was thought that the only real conflict was the one between labor and capital, and what appeared on the surface to be conflicts about sex, ethnicity, religion etc. were really just labor vs. capital in disguise. Hence treating, say, the discrimination of women as a problem worth fighting in its own right was (cliché alert!) “treating the symptoms rather than the disease” and bound to fail. Instead, what women had to do to gain full equality was to give unlimited power to this bunch of ultra-sexist old men in the Socialist Party* so they could dismantle the capitalist system (the basis), and sexism, racism etc. (all parts of the superstructure) would inevitably go down with it.
While there is a lot less talk of socialism these days, there is still the idea that you’re supposed to be a “leftist” first and “feminist” second. Meanwhile the perceived source of all oppression seems to have moved from the capitalist class to straight white men (or, more recently, ‘cis’ white ‘karens’). Never mind that there is no consensus as to what even counts as “leftism” these days, and never mind that women can be both racist and homophobic, non-whites can be both sexist and homophobic, homosexuals can be both sexist and racist etc. Anyone who is not straight, white, ‘cis’ (whatever that’s supposed to mean?) etc. is somehow supposed to be on the same side and engaged in the same battle to end all oppression everywhere, hence attempts to portray Islamist terrorists as heroic “freedom fighters” etc. If history should have taught us one thing it’s that not wanting to be oppressed yourself, does not amount to universal opposition to oppression.
At the risk of mansplaining (if so, don’t hesitate to call me out!) I suspect there has also been a mistaken tendency among feminists to think that “if we support other marginalized groups and social justice movements, they will reciprocate and support us in return”. If history should have taught us two things, it’s that this rarely if ever happens. Helen Staniland has said that if there’s anything good to come out of the Gender Wars it’s that feminists will never again be fooled into lowering their guard and trusting the men on the Left to have their backs. I hope she’s right or I’m afraid the next online fad or craze or moral panic will have a distinct flavor of déja vu.
* If you tried to argue that giving unlimited power to anyone was a terrible idea, you might be told that the thirst for power – or the inclination to abuse it – was in itself part of the superstructure of capitalism and hence could not exist outside the capitalist system.
I think the problem there, Bjarte, is that Capitalism and Socialism are both “dominator” structures. According to Riane Eisler, the ideal to strive for is the “partnership” model. So the struggle is framed as Left v Right, when it really should be framed as trust v demand, or order v mutual respect. I realize that what Eisler is referring to is an ideal form of society, and I’m not sure that we are capable of reaching for it as we are presently driven towards power.
When we talk about politics, we tend to fight each other based on the notion that either “right” is good and virtuous, or “Left” is the virtuous side, when neither is good nor virtuous. So, until we can rid ourselves of the dominator hunger for power, we will continue to struggle to find any sort of achieving equality for the minorities whehter they are sex, race or cultural. Authoritarians need to have someone to blame for their struggles in order to get more authority, and authoritarians populate nearly all of the ideologies on the left-right continuum.
When left-wingers talk about how evil capitalism and colonialism are, they conveniently ignore the coercion that it takes to convert a society from monarchy to a socialist society, as in China and Russia. And with XI’s moves to retain power over the weekend by purging those who were not his allies, we can see that even a capitalist-communist hybrid is not immune from being a dominator society. The Soviets made this clear when they told people that their usage of force was necessary in order to evolve into the New Soviet Man.
Pressing for diversity makes people feel good, but in the end, there is an aspect of coercion that is required. Whether it’s justified, as in bringing racial and sexual minorities into the power structure, or not justified in the examples of pressing for fake pronoun usage and male access to women’s private spaces, there is still a power exchange.
Eisler, being a futurist, is certainly aware that we can’t force a partnership culture (that would certainly be antithetical, that we perhaps have to evolve into it. I think that once we stop thinking of our possibilies as being limited to a left-right scalar, we will nudge towards that, but it’s so hard to talk about politics as they are without devolving into it. The reason that I remain a Democrat despite their capture by the TA’s, is that most of their social programs align with my perceptions of my needs and the needs of people I know about. But I recognize their limitations and am active so that I can try to influence them from a local standpoint.
Transactivism is a function of male domination, which is why it’s accepted and pushed by left-leaning men. It’s a socially acceptable aspect of male domination, and if conservative men figure that out, they’ll support it, too. We know that if affirms the gender structure, they haven’t figured it out yet.
Feminism at its ideal is in tune with the partnership model, which is why it struggles so hard to gain traction even among women. I see so many women who are mistaken in thinking the purpose of feminism is in using oppression to seek special favors in society, It’s hard to get through, because the dominator model is the medium we swim in and depend on, much as fish depend on water.
We can’t fix all this in ours or the next or the next generation, since we currently see through the lens of a balance of power. Once we get past that, in however many centuries from now, then we can advance as a society. In High School, the Catholics taught us that we need a “second Copernican revolution,” but instead of in technology, we need it in terms of a societal change in how we see each other. I had hope for the Church as a Catholic teen, but then realized in a confession one day, just how authoritarian it will always be and must be, because they are nothing without power and will never give it up willingly.
I don’t think a revoluttion could move our world into a partnership model, I think only evolution could do that. Revolutions are coercive, and you end up being in a battle against counterrevolutionaries to maintain what you achieved. But partnership is an ideal we can strive for now, if peope can discard their reliance on a left-right model where all your political opponents are “extremists” on one end or the other. It’s still a hunger for power either way.
[…] a comment by Mike Haubrich on Feminism requires saying “This is not for […]
Forgive me for saying this, but there are societies who have arrangements that are reasonably fair, and that were not created through mass-murder and purges – what are known as social democracies. I wonder at your Manichaean distinction between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’, and wonder also how many people who are not complete ideologues (and do not belong to the ranks of those who make much of the distinction for cynically political reasons) even suppose that the distinction is in any way true or of any explanatory value. I recommend ‘The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone’, by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett; it is a splendidly dispassionate examination of why inequality is not a good thing if a society is to be politically stable and to flourish, and does not descend into reciting tropes about the ‘Right’ or the ‘Left’. There are also Thomas Piketty’s books.
Sorry, this supposed to be a response to Mike Haubrich#4, and not to Nullius’s’ original post.
Also, Mike, China was not a monarchy when the Communists seized power, but a country that had been at war with the Japanese for years (and earlier with Western colonialists) as well as in a state of civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists. (It is very much more complicated than that, but that will do for the present.) I might add that if one looks at the remaining monarchies in, particularly, Northern Europe, they are in the main social democracies, and became so without any of the huge loss of life that occurred in the Russian territories.
My comment #2 was referring back to Nullius’ formulation about “the metamorphosis of feminism into […] that ridiculous movement for all oppressed groups”, or as I have previously put it, “for everyone except the people formerly known as ‘women'”. To me the defining feature of “Leftism” is siding with the underdog (i.e. all oppressed groups*) as one sees it (whether rightly or not). It’s natural to think of the feminist struggle to end the oppression of women as part of the same general battle for social justice as anti-racism, gay rights etc. From there it’s only a short step to the idea that feminism is only the logical consequence of a general commitment to social justice and perhaps two steps to the idea that we should be “leftist” first and “feminist” second (the latter as a consequence of the former).
My point was that once you have subordinated feminism to whatever passes for “leftism”, other concerns tend to dilute and even supplant the original struggle for women’s equality – even turn it into its polar opposite. As we have seen, “leftists” are no less prone to tribalism, group conformity, deference to authority, groupthink, cowardice, or even just plain old sloppy thinking than anyone else, and who counts as the “underdog” often has more to do with who shouts loudest (and will make your life hell if you don’t give them what they want) than any objective assessment of oppression. And not only that, but the oppressed are no more likely to be virtuous than anyone else. Just because other groups don’t want to suffer oppression themselves, doesn’t mean they don’t want anyone to suffer oppression, and just because you scratch my back doesn’t mean I will scratch yours.
* In socialism “all oppressed groups” ultimately meant the working class. The oppression faced by other groups was just a random side-effect or part of the superstructure.