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.

Open Thread: Feminism, Sexual Orientation and Social Hostility

This thread is a response to a comment from Astrodyke in the Suggestions thread:

I don’t see tags for “lesbian” or “sexual orientation”. It’d be nice to have some FAQs about lesbianism and how it relates to feminism.

There are the straw questions, “Don’t all feminists hate men?” or “Aren’t all feminists lesbians?” But there are also questions like, “Why is the word “dyke” used by some men to insult women? Why does that insult work?”

These are all fascinating questions and I don’t have particularly cogent responses to them (although we do have an FAQ addressing the manhating strawfeminist). Lesbianism has been both embraced and demonised by different segments of the feminist movement at various times, and lesbians have often felt ambivalent about the heteronormative focus of liberal feminism as well. Sexual identity as well as sexual orientation is also a source of hostility: the controversies about transexuality continue to excite various anxieties, and trans women especially are subject to high rates of violence and murder due to hostility about their departure from “the norm”.

So I’m throwing the question open to the readership: what is your analysis and experience of the relationship between lesbianism and feminism? Other sexual orientations/identities and feminism? How do assumptions of sexual orientation due to political beliefs act to belittle and intimidate feminists?

FAQ: Some feminist said/did something offensive/stupid/crazy/evil, so isn’t feminism a failure?

A: No. No one person represents the whole feminist movement, or all feminisms. Not this feminist, not any other feminist.

Often both the people asking this sort of question and the responses conflate two separate arguments:

1. Did the person actually commit the alleged offensive/stupid/crazy/evil action?
2. Does committing that offensive/stupid/crazy/evil action reflect badly on feminism?

Trying to turn those two separate debates into one single argument is sloppy.

Argument 1 can rage on indefinitely, contradictions and speculations can multiply on and on. But no matter what conclusions are eventually reached in Argument 1, they are still separate from Argument 2. People can do wrong things while still doing other right things. The right things don’t cancel out the wrong things, and vice versa. They are separate acts, separate aspects of people’s characters, because people are complex.

Some feminists may defend another feminist accused of offensive/stupid/crazy/evil actions because they don’t accept the allegations against them. If the allegations are later proven, that still means nothing about the feminism movement as a whole, or any particular branch of the feminist movement that the accused might have self-identified as.

Feminists don’t have to defend any alleged offensive/stupid/crazy/evil actions of someone in order to defend the positive social movement of feminism.

Or should we conclude that every offensive/stupid/crazy/evil act done by Fred Phelps reflects badly on all one-time civil rights lawyers, or that every offensive/stupid/crazy/evil act of Dick Cheney reflects badly on every father of a lesbian, or that every offensive/stupid/crazy/evil song of James Blunt reflects badly on all one-time officers of the Household Cavalry Life Guards Regiment?

Feminism Friday: SotBO (Statements of the bleedin’ obvious)

Rational people often assume that some opinions and judgements are so obviously part of their worldview that they really don’t need to be said. Unfortunately, some maliciously disruptive people take delight in assuming that if something has not been clearly stated then they are safe in assuming the worst of others, even when such assumptions are logically perverse and deliberately inflammatory.

It seems a transparently clear expectation that if a person already knows that one supports issues A and C and opposes issues X and Z, then they ought to conclude that one is likely to also oppose issue Y and also support issue B. Indeed, it is a textbook example of logical inference.

However, some folks, for ideological reasons, are so invested in performing a gloating gotcha dance that they ignore all the precepts of logical inference and triumphantly announce that they have caught one out, oh yes indeed, in not jumping through the denunciation hoops with sufficient spangles and spotlights that they couldn’t possibly miss it. Silly feminists, we forgot to drumroll the denunciations.

So, just for the benefit of ideologues (and you know who you are) here is a non-exhaustive list of things that feminists denounce/decry/despise:

FAQ: Aren’t feminists just sexists towards men?

AKA Aren’t feminists just “reverse sexists”?

Short answer: Neither feminists as a group, nor feminist theory, engages in sexism or “reverse sexism” against men. Often times the feminist focus on women’s issues, as well as their recognition and continued efforts to correct the imbalance of power (see male privilege), are seen as looking to privilege women over men, but in fact are simply attempts to level the playing field between men as a class and women as a class.

Call for links: debunking the malicious stuff

Mandolin had a suggestion I’d like to highlight and get some input on:

Andrea Dworkin/Germaine Greer/someone else said something complicated, and I have a reductionist summary of that which comes out to “men hate women” / “all sex is rape” / “something else catchy” … why am I wrong? Only, competently stated.

The competent concise statement is always the tricky part, but I though while I’m working up to that some links to specific debunkings would be useful. Here’s my favourite for debunking the “MacKinnon/Dworkin said all sex is rape” myth.

RadGeek (Geekery Today): Misquotation in Media: Catharine MacKinnon never, ever, ever, ever said “All heterosexual intercourse is rape.” Ever. Ever. (posted 19 February 2006)

Elizabeth Anderson, in a post quoted by RadGeek, said this:

Here’s a measure of how much a group is despised: how much malicious absurdity can one ascribe to its members and still be taken as a credible source on what they say and do?

So what’s your unfavourite piece of malicious absurdity and what are your favourite debunkings of malicious absurdities about feminism?

FAQ: But men and women are born different! Isn’t that obvious?

That idea is known as “essentialism”: the belief that there are uniquely feminine and uniquely masculine essences which exist independently of cultural conditioning. Both actual (minor) and alleged (major) differences between the sexes have been used to justify inequities and constraints which harm women emotionally, financially and physically.

Even where (and if) such differences do exist, why should such differences justify sexist oppression? *

Biological determinism is one form of essentialism which has been used to argue for male superiority for all of recorded history: that men are naturally stronger, smarter, more rational and more trustworthy and thus are entitled to rule both politically and domestically. The more science discovers about biology the more this male biological superiority is shown to be utterly without foundation: for any quality measured there is far more variation among the group of all men and among the group of all women than there is on average between individuals of opposite sex.