Feminism Friday – “Feminists Look for Stuff to Get Mad About”

originally posted on Shakesville by Melissa McEwan | Monday, February 25, 2008 as Feminism 101: “Feminists Look for Stuff to Get Mad About”

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[This is a new series in which I'll be addressing misconceptions or answering questions about feminism and/or feminists. There are certainly old posts that would naturally fall into a Feminism 101 series, like Rape is Not a Compliment, Animal House, or On "Bitch" and Other Misogynist Language (reposted here on FF101 last week ~tigtog), but, increasingly, it's apparent we need a collection of posts on critical theories and prejudices, to which we can point here and elsewhere to succinctly deal with recurring themes, so here we go. If you have a topic you'd like to see covered in this series, email me.

Note that I won't tread on Jeff's territory in defining key terms with his "Explainer" series: MRAs, Gender Feminists and Equity Feminists, and Nice Guys^TM. If you need something defined, email him.]

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“Feminists Look for Stuff to Get Mad About”

Of all the condescending, dismissive, and factually incorrect accusations used by concern trolls (or hostile trolls) to attempt to silence, shame, or in some other way discourage feminists from addressing sexism in all its manifestations, perhaps none is quite so stupid as the charge that feminists are “looking” for things about which to be offended—as if feminism is a product that will go out of production if there aren’t enough buyers and sales are waning because sexism is, like, so over, dude.

This notion is ridiculous for a couple of reasons. For a start, misogyny is so pervasive that no one has to look for it. That said reality is even remotely in doubt is laughable, given that any YouTube comments section on any video featuring a woman will be rife with misogynist swill.

More Feminism Friday posts: two from Melissa at Shakesville

I just left this link in comments to the previous post, but it deserves greater visibility.

Feminism 101: Calling Out Fellow Progressives for “Sexism Prevents Unity on the Left”

Melissa comprehensively debunks this pernicious silencing tactic.

Just one little part:

There are too many progressives who view social change like conservatives view economics: Make everything as splendid as possible for those at the top and the benefits will “trickle down” to everyone below.

Well, it’s bullshit when we’re talking about tax cuts, and it’s bullshit when we’re talking about equality and opportunity.

ADDIT: Melissa also wrote another great Feminism 101 post earlier this week (can you tell that I’m only just catching up with my feed-reader?):

Feminism 101: “Feminists Look for Stuff to Get Mad About”

Of all the condescending, dismissive, and factually incorrect accusations used by concern trolls (or hostile trolls) to attempt to silence, shame, or in some other way discourage feminists from addressing sexism in all its manifestations, perhaps none is quite so stupid as the charge that feminists are “looking” for things about which to be offended—as if feminism is a product that will go out of production if there aren’t enough buyers and sales are waning because sexism is, like, so over, dude.

Two from Melissa as well as two from Jill. We’re very spoilt for Feminism Friday style posts this week. Read any other great posts that display the Feminism Friday sensibility recently?

Feminism Friday: When women who advocate for women’s rights reject the label “feminist”

2nd May 2008: This post has been updated in light of the recent flare-ups in the rounds of discussion about how mainstream feminism remains inadequate in engaging with matters of race. See footnote.

There are many critics who view “feminism” (and the progressive movement generally) as focussing too much on the West, and too much on the experience and goals of the white middle-class, to the detriment of the experiences and goals of non-white women, poorer women and non-Western women.

It’s hard to deny that the most public faces and voices of the feminist movement – popularisers and academic theorists – have been and remain mostly white, middle-class Western women.

[link no longer valid]¹brownfemipower describes how she first realised this as a student:

But Andy started class off with something different. She asked us to tell her everything we knew about feminism. We told her all about Seneca Falls and Susan B. Anthoney and Gloria Steinem–and some of us even told her about NOW or Feminist Majority or bell hooks or Alice Walker. One person mentioned Adrienne Rich.

She asked us what we knew about “the waves” of feminism. At least half of the class raised their hands.

Then she asked us what we thought women of color were doing during all the ‘waves’.

All of the hands went down and we all just stared at each other. One person finally said, “Well, we said Alice Walker,” to which Andy replied, What do you know about Alice Walker?

Everybody replied “The Color Purple” and then we lapsed back into silence.

Then the big question came. “Why do you only know about white women?”

Now, I’ll admit, at that point, I was feeling very very defensive. Most of the women in the class were women of color–I think there were a total of three white women in the class if I remember right. Every other person was either black, native or Latina. But in spite of this diverse class dynamic, I could tell most of us were feeling pretty defensive. We’d just been shown in the period of about 10 minutes how much we’d been completely bought into a particular definition of “feminism”–and even more so, we’d just been exposed to our vast ignorance of our own histories.

So, does this mean that the feminist movement is defined by these white, middle-class public faces? If that is the movement’s history and current “branding”, must it continue to be?

Feminism Friday: that “why are Western feminists such cowards about atrocities in other countries?” lie

Shorter Pamela Bone: feminists are such cowardly hypocrites for being against FGM and rape in war whenever any culture does it instead of just specially castigating Islamic societies where such brutalities occur.

I posted over at Hoyden About Town a few days ago with more background to Bone’s article about how she bravely spoiled a literary evening by insisting on asking the keynote speaker, Professor Germaine Greer, a question about Darfur that had nothing to do with literature. I also noted how real live feminists are actually supporting and financing the efforts of grassroots organisations in cultures with traditionally oppressive traditions, to reform those traditions without having to reject the entirety of their culture, exactly along the lines of how abolitionists gradually persuaded Western societies that the Biblical verses traditionally used to support slavery could be set aside as incompatible with the larger tradition and without having to reject Christianity entirely.

Persuading people that rejecting harmful cultural traditions doesn’t mean having to reject cherished positive cultural traditions is the only way that has ever and will ever work when proposing great social change. (Well, that or bloody conquest which totally eradicates the traditional cultural hierarchy, but given the civilian casualty rate and forceful property acquisition habit in bloody conquest, how is that really going to help oppressed women rather than harming them more?)

Columnists such as Bone ignore the genocides and rapes of Rwanda and the Congo as they point to Darfur as some sort of particularly Islamic excess of brutality, just as they point to genital cutting in Egypt and ignore it in Burkina Faso. There is absolutely no need to especially denounce Islam qua Islam for practises which shared by many groups and which are oppressive to women no matter what religious/tribal/cultural justification is made for them.

Note: title changed as per Helen’s suggestion in comments.

Feminism Friday: Humour as a tool for shaming and silencing

Last week’s Feminism Friday post was on why Rape Jokes Just Aren’t Funny, based on a series from Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, and at the crosspost on Hoyden About Town Bernice made a telling comment.

Humour – the final frontier of colonialisation. You really now you’ve co-opted someone into the frame of dominance from which you work, when you can get them to laugh at jokes insensitive at the least, vicious in the usual. Which is why it’s so important to berate those humourless one who fail to laugh or worse still dare to complain – they’re obviously not with the programme.

Liss, via an extended photo-essay (warm up your scrolling finger), provides the hook for our Feminism Friday post again:

For the Discerning Gentleman: You, Too, Can Decorate Your Life With Disembodied Boobs

(Some pictures may be NSFW)

After the “fun” part, Liss gets down to the point, which echoes Bernice’s comment.

Feminism Friday: The origins of the word “sexism”

Although it has long since become a household phrase, the origins of the term “sexism” are not widely known. In researching this article, I found that the term is most commonly dated to the 1968 paper “Freedom for Movement Girls – Now”, however there are actually two other known appearances of this word prior to the publication of that article.

Pauline M. Leet’s “Women and the Undergraduate”

According to Shapiro (1985) the term was most likely coined on November 18, 1965 during the “Student-Faculty Forum” at Franklin and Marshall College (p. 5). The word appears in Pauline M. Leet’s forum contribution entitled, “Women and the Undergraduate”, where she defines it by comparing it to racism:

When you argue…that since fewer women write good poetry this justifies their total exclusion, you are taking a position analogous to that of the racist — I might call you in this case a “sexist”… Both the racist and the sexist are acting as if all that has happened had never happened, and both of them are making decisions and coming to conclusions about someone’s value by referring to factors which are in both cases irrelevant. [p. 3]

[Leet (1965) in Shapiro (p. 6)]

Caroline Bird’s “On Being Born Female”

Shapiro also documents the first time the word appeared in print: Caroline Bird’s “On Being Born Female”, published on November 15, 1968 in Vital Speeches of the Day (p. 6). In using the phrase Bird also expanded it; both explicitly connecting it to the act of judging a person based on their sex and highlighting hierarchical imbalance by talking about how sexism has helped to keep power in the hands of those who already have it:

There is recognition abroad that we are in many ways a sexist country. Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn’t matter.

Sexism is intended to rhyme with racism. Both have used to keep the powers that be in power. Women are sexists as often as men.

Women who get good jobs do it by outsexing the sexism. They persuade the boss that a woman’s intuition is needed. Or that women pay more attention to detail. They know isn’t so, but they use the sexist arguments to get around prejudice.

It is sexist to ask: Could we ever have a woman president? In India they don’t ask because they have a woman chief executive. The question is like “Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?” Now that your daughter might do it, you don’t ask.

It is sexist to ask “What can women do to end violence in America?” Women aren’t any better than men, thank God, and it is sexist to demand that they ennoble the entire population.

Sexism made sense when the only way a woman could make a living was to become a wife, and being a wife subjected her to the risk of pregnancy all her childbearing years. But it makes no sense when a woman has control of pregnancy.

[Bird (1968) (p. 90)]

Sheldon Vanauken’s “Freedom for Movement Girls – Now”

In December 1986, the pamphlet “Freedom for Movement Girls – Now” was written by Sheldon Vanauken. In it, he talks about “the sexist myth”:

A myth. A myth like the racist myths we’re all too familiar with, designed to explain and perpetuate the superiority of one race and the inferiority of another. But the sexist myth is the greatest and most pervasive myth the world has ever told itself- at once explaining, condoning, and perpetuating male superiority and female inferiority, meanwhile denying -craftiest touch of all! – that to be secondary in everything is at all inferior.

[Vanauken (1968)]

The terms “sexist” and “sexism” appear several times throughout the rest of the article without any citation to Bird or Leet, although the oversight does not appear to be intentional. Because of this, however, the erroneous belief that Vanauken was the originator of the term was picked up by several feminist groups at the time, thus leading to the common misconception that he was the one coined the terms (Shapiro, p. 7).

Conclusion

Leet, Bird, and Vanauken all made an important contribution to the popularization of the term “sexism”. Because of their efforts, and that of the women’s groups who picked up the term and ran with it, sexism has become a household term that everyone understands on some level. They should be remembered and honored for their roles in shaping modern feminism.

Recommended Reading:

• Fred R. Shapiro (American Speech, Vol. 60, No. 1 [Spring 1985]): Historical Notes on the Vocabulary of the Women’s Movement, pp. 3-16.
• Lorraine Code (Cornell University Press, 1991): What Can She Know?: Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (pp. 64-65 in particular)
• Sheldon Vanauken (Special Collections Library, Duke University): Freedom for Movement Girls – Now
• Caroline Bird (Vital Speeches of the Day, November 15 1968): “On Being Born Female”, pp. 88-91.

Feminism Friday: Open Thread on gender dominance issues in sexuality, slurs and raunch culture

Where do you point a male feminist ally (whose alliance up until now has been based on largely unexamined egalitarian impulses, but who hasn’t read any theory) to find good introductory analysis of gendered dominance in sexual behaviours, and how attitudes towards and about sexual behaviours play back into gender relations more widely?

Some of his questions:

• Do languages other than English use slurs based on domination by penetration to designate others as inferior or designate events as problems e.g. “we’re so screwed”?
  (I believe the answer is yes, but languages aren’t my forte.)
• If other languages use such slurs, does that mean that the penetration=domination paradigm is not just cultural?
  (I warned him against the essentialist fallacy here, in that acculturation is not just ethnically specific, and shared cross-cultural behaviours don’t necessarily mean an underlying biological explanation.)
• Why is popular culture emphasing acquiescence to brutal domination in sexual encounters as being somehow more satisfying than consensual non-brutal egalitarian sexual behaviours?
  (I said “more satisfying for who?” and pointed him towards Faludi’s Backlash.)
• If the penetration=domination is such a monolithic worldwide point of view, how can subverting that paradigm in favour of egalitarian sexuality be done?

There’s an awful lot to unpack in those questions, which is why I’m a bit stumped.

As a start, I’m pretty happy with Backlash as an overview of much background that will be required before he can fully examine the issues he has raised. He’s old enough to be moderately familiar with a lot of Second-Wave personalities and broad concepts from a pop culture point of view, but hasn’t delved more deeply.

What else other than Backlash?