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common sense?
I am amused. When I took my "Gender and Human Rights" class, I felt like a traitor to the feminist cause because I was too sex-positive. But when I read most third-wave feminist stuff (or what passes for it these days -- I think we might be onto the fourth wave by now) I feel like a crotchety old Republican. I just can't win.
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Right there with you, babe.
I'll go ahead and warn you that it actually just gets more complicated if you become a mother.
I'm a college-educated stay-at-home mom which makes a lot of feminists think i'm a traitor to the cause and am wasting the opportunities granted to me by feminism. HOWEVER...if I go to work full-time and put my son in daycare, then I'm a horrible mother whose neglecting my child to pursue selfish goals. </head desk>
oh...also the whole 3rd/4th wave "feminists are hot and love sex!" thing apparently applies to moms now too. you must strive to be a MILF or Hot Mom as well. imho, people feel really free to comment on your physical appearance once you're a mother. Nick is now nearly a year and a half and I still hear the, "Wow! you don't look like you've had a baby!" thing from people. i know it's supposed to be a compliment but it's a weird one. am i supposed to look like a frumpy heifer now or something? it's just so confusing and frustrating.
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what about the current wave (for lack of a better term) or recent feminist scholarship/theory/politics bothers you? i'm just curious. while i take some umbrage with what i perceive to be a far too heavy reliance on identity politics and the continued policing of language, i think this is a really interesting, albeit not-so-visible time for feminism. all the postmodern, transnational stuff i've read makes me excited to be a feminist. even some second wave writers like audre lorde and bell hooks and june jordan keep me coming back for more, just 'cos they tend to acknowledge the erotic, the practical, the tangible. i think you need a balance of reimagining the world AND being realistic about it.
i guess i'm just curious what you find frustrating. there are certainly many frustrating things for me too.
(i'm using this icon because i haven't used it before. and it's fun to jab at dobson. it's only slightly related to this topic. erm, well, not really. um, anyway. :P)
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I get what she's saying; it's unfair that we live in a world where sexual assault happens. They refer to the story about the girl who went clubbing in Hell's Kitchen, wandered off drunkenly down the West Side Highway so that her parents wouldn't find out that she was drunk, and got raped and murdered. I'm not blaming the victim at all, but it seems dumb not to take something away from that and say to your children, "This is why you DON'T GET RIP ROARING DRUNK AND STAGGER DOWN THE WEST SIDE HIGHWAY!" It's just imparting a little bit of common sense. Should all women have the right to get as drunk as they want to be, and dress how they want to dress, and walk where they want to walk? Of course. But just because you have the right to do something doesn't necessarily mean it's the smartest thing in the world to do. Honestly, I have equivalent numbers of girl and guy friends who have been physically assaulted in my neighborhood. Why is it OK for me to see where my guy friend got mugged and say to myself, "Oooh, I guess I shouldn't walk there at 3 in the morning", and not OK to say the same thing about where my female friend got mugged, because of some sort of righteous, principled indignation? Do you see what I'm saying? Or am I just being a crotchety second-wave feminist, or anti-feminist, or something? Don't let your idealism put you in harm's way, is what I'm gettin' at. I can't have a philosophical conversation with a rapist if he attacks me. I just have to do my best to avoid situations where I would be more at risk. If that makes me a sell-out, or a traitor to some sort of cause, then, OK, well, I suck.
Also I don't think that young girls flashing their tits on Girls Gone Wild videos is equivalent to sexual empowerment, and I think we need to do a better job of teaching our femaie children that you can be sex-positive and enjoy sex and make all of your own decisions about when, where, and how to have sex, and that DOESN'T mean you have to sexualize yourself at every turn just to make some point to the patriarchy. Those are my thoughts at the moment.
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and i don't think that makes you an anti-feminist. if anything, your view assumes that women have agency and reasoning abilities and that, if they are in a situation that warrants it, they should use their good judgement. we agree here, too, i think... it's be problematic to teach - either directly or by inference - that you should be able to do whatever you want wherever you want and that there will be authorities or other people around to save you from attack. this definitely perpetuates the "women as inferior beings who need to be protected" crap we've heard for centuries.
i've recently read some interesting stuff about the conflict between sex-positive and anti-porn camps. (if you're interested, "sex wars" edited by lisa duggan and someone else whose name eludes me at the moment, is a really good collection. it's mostly writing from the 1980s and 1990s, so you have to keep that in mind. but it does get into these issues.) i think the problem is that there's still such an incredible amount of conflict about who women are and who they're supposed to be. i think the way in which many women (including myself when i was in my 20s) sort of hyper-sexualize themselves has a lot to do with that conflict and what we're taught is the only way to get what we want sexually. we're taught that we can either have intimacy and horrible sex OR we can be sluts and be sexually satisfied at the cost of meaningful relationships. we just don't have a society (yet) where we're able to integrate all of this.
i'm not sure that i've heard arguments that girls gone wild is empowering to women, although i'd be curious to see any current writing on the topic just to see what other feminists think. perhaps some women find taking part in girls gone wild to be somewhat liberating, but i'd argue that they're just drunk. ;)
at any rate, it's good to hear your thoughts. i definitely think you've pointed out some failures of feminism, or at the very least, issues that third or fourth wave feminism isn't dealing with adequately.
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Well, that was sort of where the discussion started with me and Maggie, and then in the Salon/Feministing article that I linked to, when the topic comes up, Valenti sorta brushes it aside. "I don't think that phenomenon is as widespread as people make it out to be" or "Why are we tsk-tsking those girls when there are bigger issues" or such like. It IS a big issue. I think it's incredibly important to teach our daughters that sex can be amazing and empowering, but it isn't always, and that you have to use your agency as a sexual being to make good choices -- that ability to CHOOSE is what's empowering, not sex-across-the-board. It's a difficult subtlety to get across to young girls, and obviously it takes a long time to work out for yourself, but the point needs to be made.
The reason I like talking to you and Maggie about this stuff is that you both see a lot of nuance to all of these issues, whereas I feel like most political or philosophical talking heads/figureheads like to paint things in broad strokes so that they're newsbyte worthy. There's no money to be made or publicity to be had in point-by-point rational discussion. :/
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i think there are two things going on here:
1) there's something about valenti's statements in that interview that make me feel like she's peddling a pop culture feminism. i mean, i do think it's important to make feminism easier to digest and more available to all types of women (and men). at the same time, isn't this why we're in the boat we're in now, where feminism is essentially so deradicalized that nothing gets done and we're trapped debating whether some women, especially celebrities, are feminist icons or whores? why aren't we out there demanding equal pay, demanding reproductive rights, demanding stiffer penalities for rapists or other sex offenders OR alternately, changing the culture to ostricize them? where is the radical politics!? personally, i'd like to see radical feminism and postmodernism work together for good and not evil, but that's just me.
2) i agree with valenti that there are women who won't admit to being feminists or buy into stereotypes about feminists and that bothers me. i've encountered that a lot on my campus and i think it's sad because it is often mired in homophobia more than anything. i think, to a certain extent, we have to redefine feminism, but not at the cost of recreating a lily-white, straight feminism of the 1970s. there has to be a better way. i haven't read valenti's book, but i'd like to, just to see how she proposes we do this. i agree with her that it's vital... but i'm just scared that myth-busting always comes at the cost of marginalizing other women just to prove that not all feminists are lesbians.
i also enjoy discussing these things with you. i think these issues are way, way complex and i don't propose to have all the answers. i think feminism will always be a contested ground, as long as american feminists view themselves as the epicenter of women's movements. we need a non-essentialist, postmodern, transnational movement and we need to link our struggles to those of women all over the world. again, just my three cents. :)
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Hey!
I just bought Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781580052016&itm=2) by Jessica Valenti and Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780743287968&itm=1) by Courtney E. Martin. I'm telling you this so you don't buy them. You can totally borrow them (or maybe even keep them...i need less books) once I've read them. Ironically, I purchased these books with the shipping funds I was repaid for mailing books to people so that I would have less books in the house. i need to go to book rehab.
in other news, i re-read about 98% of Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs last night. I think I've got like 15 pages left now. It's such a quick read. The first time I read it I (think I) read it concurrently with Kipnis' The Female Thing. They went well together. I may have to re-read the Kipnis now too.
When the Valenti book arrives, I think I will sandwich it on my bedtable between a Dworkin book and a Brownmiller book. ;-)
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