Guest post: Unilaterally redefining “feminist”
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A substantial cohort of self-identified feminists.
For the first time in over thirty years, it makes sense to me to reconsider what feminism means.
Well, that says more about you and what you think “makes sense” than it does about feminism.
Trans people have been illuminating sex and gender in new and insightful ways.
And right here, we have something that makes no sense. Trans people (can we have a definition, please?) are mostly saying that the physical, material, biological basis for the oppression of women means fuck all, and can be “identified” into and out of willy nilly. Men can become women, and women can become men. While certainly “new,” it’s not so much an “illuminating insight” into the meaning of feminism as its complete negation. This is at the heart of “feminism is for everyone.” Game over, case closed, turn out the lights when you shut the door.
…a substantial cohort of self-identified feminists have opposed trans peoples’ existence as trans.
The implication being that these “self-identified feminists” aren’t really feminists at all. Yet being a feminist only requires that a woman espouses and upholds a particular set of beliefs and principles grounded on the idea and goal of the liberation of females from patriarchal oppression. You’re attempting to deny that they are feminists by unilaterally redefining what the word “feminist” means. Well congratulations; you’re making their point for them, as men who claim to be “self-identifed” women can only be so by redefining what the word “woman” means.
Unlike feminism, which any woman can claim as her own, there are no beliefs or principles that a man can hold which will make him a woman. He might as well (and with as much success) claim to become invisible through sheer force of will. A man can no more identify into being female than he can identify out of maleness. Maleness is a life sentence into which one is born, a condition as ineluctable as being made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons of ordinary matter. One is no more “assigned” maleness than one is “assigned” one’s molecular structure. That’s not how these things work, and to pretend otherwise is delusional. This is the “illuminating, insightful” view of sex and gender that trans people have to offer? It is a narcissistic fantasy. Utter bullshit. To defend such a nonsensical view and enforce others’ adherence to it is wicked and harmful.
Because the material state of reality is forever out of reach, trans identified males have nothing but the costume, cosmetics, and mannerisms of patriarchal “femininity” to proclaim as the essence of “womanhood.” They’re like the brutalized rhesus monkeys clinging to the ersatz terrycloth covered wire “mothers” for some semblance of comfort, and god help anyone who tries to explain that their wardrobe and comportment do not make them “women.” If they weren’t so bloody-minded and bullying in their demands for access to female single-sex spaces, one might almost feel sorry for them.
I’m reminded of the trend in modern film & television to make “complex” antagonists and villains by way of humanizing them. Most commonly, it’s a tragic back story; e.g., natural disaster, violent crime, abuse, etc. We’re supposed to say, “Yeah, he’s a serial murdering psychopath, but he was abused as a child, so he can’t really help it,” or something. Our pity and empathy are supposed to override our reason. It’s insipid.
So, ‘self-identifying’ is something men are entitled to do, not women?
When a man ‘self-identifies’ as something that it is physically impossible for him to be, women must pretend to believe him, and let him have and do whatever he wants; but no-one has to believe a woman whatever she says she ‘self-identifies’ as, however plausible, because women aren’t really real humans.
New misogyny just like the old misogyny, right?
Thanks for clarifying that!
As an aside, I don’t remember when I first learned about the Rhesus monkeys, some of whom were given soft cloth “mamas,” and some of whom were given the wire-bodied “mamas,” but no matter what the point of the experiment was, I was angry at the cruelty to the wire-mama monkey infants. Around the same time, I remember seeing film footage — maybe both instances were part of the same film — of a baby monkey who was kept wrapped in a cape. He was fed and otherwise cared for, but he never saw his own arms. Then they sat the monkey with an array of shiny objects in front of him, and took away the cape. He wanted the pretty shiny things, but he did not know how to work his arms to reach for them. I simply cried, heartbroken about what the “scientists” did to that poor monkey. “Educational” film indeed.
Exactly. MacKinnon was using “self identified feminists” as a term of derision and contempt. Yet when men self identify as women it’s to be considered the Holy of Holies of Personal Expression and Authentic Existence. The extra-legal introduction and enforcement of gender Self-ID as the de facto law of the land was one of the main goals of Stonewall’s end-run around the actual provisions of the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act. “Stonewall Law” was very close to becoming British Law, and it is thanks to the efforts of these “self identified feminists” that it did not.
“self-identified feminists have opposed trans peoples’ existence as trans.”
I exist. I don’t exist “as” anything. I might try to “live” as something but that’s performance. If you can’t understand that you’re not going to be able to understand anything else.
Maddog #3.
It was not just the monkeys with wire ‘mamas’ who were treated cruelly. The monkeys with the soft cloth ‘mamas’ were also being treated cruelly. Those experiments were – to use a word I do not use easily – evil. They were appalling, as is that photograph. I find it unbearable to look at. And what was learnt from the ‘experiments’ that could not have been learned from a little observation, a modicum of imagination, and an absence of arrogance on the part of people who supposed they were being scientific and that therefore that their cruelty was justified ?
I think lots of people learn about Harry Harlow’s “experiment” in beginners’ classes on psychology and/or ethics. He’s why there are now rules governing animal experimentation.
There’s an irony here because the experiments were horrible but the findings led to more humane treatment in all sorts of institutions.
And the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment is one reason we now have rules governing human experimentation.
How some scientists can still believe that animals are just creatures of naked instinct and no real emotional feelings like humans have is beyond me. Fortunately, it is now a small number.
Nullius @# 1:
Precisely. And that line of reasoning gets Adolf Hitler off the hook.
My conclusion: We all have to take responsibility for our choices in life; with no excuses.
OB @# 7: Harlow’s experiments on monkeys can of course be viewed the other way around (in the light of Gestalt theory I suppose) in which Harlow himself emerges as the subject under study, which in turn becomes one on human indifference to animal suffering. Harlow in this light can be seen as a few steps down the road which leads him to eventually become an iteration of said Adolf Hitler.
#Nullius in Verba. I remember an essay in an American academic book on Shakespeare to which I contributed, in which an actor wrote about playing the part of Claudius in ‘Hamlet’. He spoke about how he had delved, in good ‘Method acting’ fashion, into all the attractive aspects of Claudius; in particular, his profound love for Gertrude, which had, alas, prompted him to murder his brother. This was supposed to make him a rounded and complex character. I thought the approach merely sentimental. Claudius is a power-hungry, treacherous, and despicable man who seeks power. No doubt this actor would have endeavoured to discover the attractive aspects of Iago’s character, had he been asked to play him.
That said, I see no reason to suppose that a recognition of the damage childhood abuse does necessarily over-rides our reason and prevents us from insisting that a person who is guilty of terrible crimes should be held responsible for them. It seems to me (forgive me for saying this) that yours is a false opposition.
Tim Harris, I once read some of the original legends about Gertrude and Claudius, and have never been able to see the play quite the same since. Gertrude forced to marry a husband who was mostly away on his wars, finding some degree of companionship with his brother, who had a much better personality. Does it change the play for me? Actually, yes. It makes it better. It gives it a complexity beyond even the extremely complexity already present. We see Hamlet’s view from Shakespeare’s pen, but there are other possible views, and I have no problem exploring them.
As to thinking we should not hold people responsible for their actions because of their abused past? Actually, yes, that is proposed. Holding us responsible for our choices when we’ve been abused? How can we help it? My response is that I managed. I was abused, and I grew up determined not to abuse. But there are people who will not condemn awful behavior because “childhood abuse”. And what makes it worse is that no evidence is needed that they HAVE been abused. If they are an awful person, the default assumption for some is that they were abused.
@ Tim Harris #6
Yes, agreed, cruelty to all the experimental subjects. Who in their right mind, or who has ever had a pet and knows of their feelings and range of emotions, could ever have devised such sadistic experiments?
Dear Iknklast. Well, I do have an English translation of Saxo Grammaticus on my shelves. All it says of the wedding is:
‘On the strength of their friendship, Orvendil wooed and obtained (King) Rorik’s daughter Gerutha for wife.’
And then, after Fengi murders Orvendil, he ‘covered up his foul deed with such presumptuous cunning that he manufactured an excuse of kindheartedness for his crime, and gave the murder a colouring of scrupulous conduct. He made out that Gerutha, though she was too mild to do anyone the slightest harm, suffered such violent loathing from her husband that he had removed him only to preserve her….’ And: ‘The villain showed no hesitation in turning his murderous hands to unlawful embraces, pursuing both these sacrileges with the same viciousness.’
I probably have ‘Ambale’s Saga’ among the Icelandic sagas in my possession, but they are in a box and rather ungettable at! I don’t know whether the Chronicon Lethrense tells a different story.
Claudius is in fact a complex figure: he lets out on occasion that he feels some guilt about what he has done (though fear of being found out seems to drive his sense of guilt more than anything), he faces down Laertes magnificently, but then there is the scene in which he grooms Laertes into performing a treacherous revenge – if one has any respect or pity for the man, it ceases at this point. But as I said in my essay on the play (it was about Peter Brook’s cut-down version of the play with very good Adrian Lester playing Hamlet), the chief problem for the director of the play, to my mind, is to ensure that in Claudius Hamlet has a ‘mighty opposite’, since as Granville Barker rightly wrote, ‘Hamlet so dominates the play that we are too apt to see things through his eyes’ , and to avoid reducing the play to Hamlet. The best ‘mighty opposite’ I have come across is the Claudius in Kosintsev’s great film of ‘Hamlet’.
I have no doubt that there are people will not condemn awful behaviour because ‘childhood abuse’, and I certainly disagree with them very strongly. My point was simply that recognising the baleful effects of childhood abuse and holding people responsible for what they do are not mutually exclusive.
I’d like to add that Kosintsev made his film of ‘Hamlet’ after Stalin’s death (it was not allowed to put on, or film, ‘Hamlet’ during Stalin’s rule, or at least later on it, for reasons that be readily imagined); and that the splendid actor Innokenty Mikhailovich Smoktunovsky, who played Hamlet, had been imprisoned under Stalin. Kosintsev understood the politics of power (as Shakespeare did) far better than the Anglo-American world has understood it for centuries.
I love all this Hamlet-wonkery. I’ve been a bit of a Hamlet-wonk myself in the past.
Thank you, Ophelia. I love Hamlet. Perhaps I should add that my annoyance with the actor’s ‘Method acting’ approach to the role of Claudius stemmed from its a-historical approach. One need only think of Henry VIII & his marriages, or Mary Tudor’s marriage to Philip of Spain, not to mention all those Habsburg marriages, to realise that dynastic marriages were not for love, but were concerned with consolidating power and with ‘duty’ (particularly of course in the case of women). Gertrude, having lost her husband, old Hamlet, was in a very weak position; she would have recognised that, and Claudius would have played on that. Also, Claudius was well aware that Gertrude’s agreeing to marry him would strengthen his position, particularly vis-a-vis Hamlet. Hamlet’s anger with Gertrude has much to do with a very male sense of betrayal. The women in ‘Hamlet’, Gertrude and Ophelia, are pawns in a game of power and they are both destroyed by it.
Similarly, in peasant societies throughout Europe (and certainly elsewhere), it was important what dowry the woman might bring, and if her family’s land was contiguous with yours (the man’s), that was best. Stuart Hood, once the best of the Programme Controllers of the BBC and a wonderful translator, fought after escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp with the partisans in Italy, and describes, briefly & tellingly, in an Afterword to his fascinating book, ‘Carlino’ (which is about his experiences as a partisan – it is one of the most honest books I know), marriage customs among the northern Italian peasantry.
It is not as though such things are not present today, The belief that we are all individuals, with an ineluctable and ‘individual’ identity, and that we choose our partners freely because of ‘love’ is a sentimental myth and obscures realities. Look at marriages among the very wealthy – it is very rare that a monied aristocrat or otherwise wealthy person, whether female or male, in Britain, or somebody from an old or newly wealthy family in the USA, will marry someone from from the lower middle-class or the working class, or, for that matter, someone of another ‘race’ or nation – one may think of the revolting attacks by the British press, and such as Piers Morgan, on Meghan Markle. They marry among their own class, and race.
Of course, this has to do with the circles they, of whatever sex, move in, but the fact that they move within such circles and share, usually unthinkingly, the same values, and recognise also, again mostly unthinkingly, both the strengths and weaknesses of their positions, is a force that constrains their choices.
I think the most appalling part of ‘Hamlet’ is after Hamlet stamps out, having told Ophelia to bugger off to a nunnery, amongst other things, and Claudius & Polonius appear from their place of concealment and ignore Ophelia’s obvious great distress. She’s just a girl, her feelings are not important and, since she is a girl, shallow – she’ll soon get over them. We’ve got more important matters, political matters, to discuss.
What I objected to in that actor’s account of playing Claudius was his inability to see all that was clearly there, in the play, and his reduction of what is there to what is in fact a petit-bourgeois belief in the ‘individual’ and a petit-bourgeois inability to recognise realities, both in the world he lives in and in the imagined world of ‘Hamlet’.