Confession: I did not vote for Hillary because she is a woman. I voted for Hillary because I have never seen anything dumber, less qualified, and more deplorable than Donald J. Trump. In my resistance journey, however, I discovered many friends who voted for Hillary because she was a woman. Because the election of a woman to the executive signified hope to them. Those conversations have been interesting and illuminating.
Enter Jessa Crispin's controversial new book, Why I Am Not a Feminist (excerpted in New York Magazine):
In order to withstand the pressure of a culture constantly telling us that women are only meat, only sex, only property, we create this idea of our specialness. We as women are naturally more compassionate, more loving, more authentic than men. This idea shores us up against the constant degradation caused simply by living in this particular time and place.
Sometimes we as women are special in our compassion. For people to be able to survive on the margins, they often must be. They must form alliances, they must look out for one another. They must develop some characteristics and attributes because they have to create networks of solidarity and mutual care to withstand the experience of marginalization. Those characteristics are developed by facing hardship and opposition. We also have to find ways of convincing our oppressors not to hurt us, not to kill us, to bother keeping us around at all. That can make us clever.
But these attributes are not innate. In fact, the idea that women are naturally more empathetic and nurturing originates with men. They used it as an excuse to keep us at home, tending to the children. They used it as an excuse to dismiss us intellectually. Don’t try to be smart, sweetheart, it’s not your strong suit. And yet we adopted this belief because it suits us to believe it about ourselves.
“The [most common] online feminist response to being disagreed with or ‘attacked’ is, ‘We don’t have to do any work on ourselves, we are amazing, we’re perfect as is. Because of the patriarchy, we get to do whatever we want.’ It makes us special.
What should make us feel special instead is our method of survival. If we believe these skills are born into us we will lose them once they are no longer needed. We can still use the lie as a cover, as a way to avoid questioning or reckoning. “Oh, I’m a woman, so of course I’m going to be a better listener, more emotionally attuned, I am definitely not going to abandon these principles and work in my own self-interest given the first opportunity, just like everyone else.”
Currently, I see this as women line up behind female politicians, their support thrown behind them almost solely because they share a gender. Despite a long history of supporting military intervention, I watch women talk about these politicians’ natural diplomacy and how they’ll keep us out of war. Despite a long history of gutting social services, I watch women talk about these politicians’ understanding and attention to poor women and children. Despite a long history of money grabbing and corruption, I watch women talk about these politicians’ sense of fairness and economic justice.
If the genders were reversed, that support would be withdrawn. There would be no assumption that these politicians would act more ethically and compassionately than their male counterparts unless these women had convinced themselves that these qualities are inherent in all women.
The extent to which empowerment feminism mobilizes Kellyanne-style accommodation is depressing. The extent to which Trump's victory prevents women from pushing the Democratic Party further left is a story of silence-- how we agree to keep mum if a sister is standing on the podium. How we mute ourselves for fear of "disempowering" a sister. How the myth of empowered womanhood creates problems of its own, not the first of which might be this notion of "solidarity" (quickly trotted out when a woman wonders aloud how butt implants are truly saving the world);
It’s easier to complain about the power you don’t have than to think about how you are wielding the power you do have. Simply re-creating the exclusive systems and inequities that the industry had when it was male dominated — with the only difference being that a small subsection of women are inside rather than outside — has not made the industry fairer. And because they are able to blame the creators of the system, their own actions can go unquestioned, despite their efforts to retain that exclusivity and unfairness.
Women, because they are humans, work and operate as humans, which is to say, in a clannish mode. But with the added emphasis on identity in today’s society, with identifying yourself as a woman first and a human second, this clannishness becomes entrenched. Solidarity becomes not about all womankind, but about the women in proximity to you, the women you can see yourself in.
The gender socialization continues to privilege rigid masculinity. It's that look on a boy's face when someone tells him to "stop acting like a girl". It's the glow in little girl cheeks when her daddy proudly declares her "his little princess" but also a "tomboy":
One of the reasons self-empowerment leads us to these places of dehumanization and exclusivity and narcissism is because we are still operating with patriarchal values and patriarchal definitions of what success is, what happiness is, what the meaning of life is.
Much of contemporary feminism uses the language of power. Girls need to be “empowered,” women need to fight for “self-empowerment,” “girl power,” etc. There is little conversation about what that power is to be used for, because that is supposed to be obvious: whatever the girl wants.
But growing up in a system that measures success by money, that values consumerism and competition, that devalues compassion and community, these girls and women have already been indoctrinated into what to want. Without close examination, without conversion into a different way of thinking and acting, what that girl wants is going to be money, power, and, possibly, her continued subjugation, because a feminism that does not provide an alternative to the system will still have the system’s values.
For centuries, the patriarchal system has defined happiness as having someone else subject to your will. You had someone else to hold all of your shit for you, so that you would not have to acknowledge its existence.
If women are one-upping one another in their competition to gain a seat at the patriarch's table, at what point do we sit back (stop leaning it, just STOP leaning in) and say the table sucks? Why do we only agree to say the table sucks if we're not invited? These are burning questions for feminism, and Jessica calls them. She is relentless in her interrogation.
And then there's the Jezebel interview, when it becomes clear that Jessica is everything you feared-- an unapproachable, iconoclastic bibliophile that could hardly care less about your approval:
...this is not where I insist I am not a feminist because I’m afraid of being mistaken for one of those hairy-legged, angry, man-hating feminists who are drawn up like bogeymen by men and women alike. Nor will I now reassure you of my approachability, my reasonable nature, my heteronormativity, my love of men and my sexual availability—despite the fact that this disclaimer appears to be a prerequisite for all feminist writing published in the last fifteen years.
If anything, that pose—I am harmless, I am toothless, you can fuck me—is why I find myself rejecting the feminist label. All of these bad feminists, all these Talmudic “can you be a feminist and still have a bikini wax?” discussions. All these reassurances to their (male) audience that they don’t want too much, won’t go too far—“We don’t know what Andrea Dworkin was on about either! Trust us!” All of these feminists giving blow jobs like it’s missionary work.
How could I do anything but sigh and exhale small love bubbles after reading this? I might even be tempted to say, "Amen sister", if I hadn't heard the same expression used to buttress two-for-one pedicure self-care sales at the local "look seventeen" spa.
Criticisms of this book have focused on attacking the lack of "alternate strategy", but that's not the trajectory of the book. This isn't self-help for the feminist movement. She isn't offering a strategy or checklist for modern feminism. Instead, Jessica wants to know why the hell it has become so hard to talk about audre lorde and Adrienne Rich without sounding like a sexless granny.
Maybe, like me, she wants to know how the hell shitty sex became the model for sexual liberation. How porn became the picture of freedom. How golden showers became a national security dilemma. For all the toxic masculinity we've socialized, there's a huge market for toxic femininity that no one wants to address. Because calling it toxic would be a form of disempowerment. And conceding Lena Dunham's indie-chic "sex-positive" sitcom would be nothing if not for the lame, disappointing sex. The normalized disappointment of the unhappy American female sex life.
We are so good at selling things. Have you been sold? Are you buying this app?
Why does a feminist have to insist she likes sex? Why is questioning the cum-shot-socialization considered a form of un-liberated prudish?
Sex-positive-- as a label-- is primarily defensive, a response to the slander that a feminist is one who hates men and sexuality. I regret using the word "sex-positive" to insulate myself against criticisms of prudery. And I don't regret my lack of prudery or my enormous appreciation for sexual pleasure.
Here's the rub: the "sex-positive" label has become a form of religious marketing. "Sex-positive" talk is all I heard in the halls of megachurches and evangelical marriage seminars where any sex, all sex, every sex is positive inside the cage of heterosexual marriage. Why can't we assume that feminism wants good sex for females? Is it because some feminists (especially self-styled evangelical marriage counselors) presume men are by nature wired to want rape or bad sex or aesthetically-repulsive porn? If men are wired to "want" bad sex, then porn shouldn't matter to the religious right-- boys will be boys and porn doesn't affect it.
The boxes and false dichotomies are facile escapes; we can plug in without the burden of re-imagining an alternative. We can accept our aspirations and herd behaviors while enjoying the hubbub of the stadium. We can continue to struggle inside the system while toasting pinot to the next wave, the one we expect others to build for us. We can write a book and hope a small press will publish it. We can have these conversations and believe in the possibility of an unwritten future.
"I don’t feel hopeless because I know how quickly things historically change. One day there’s a Berlin Wall and the next day there’s just fucking not. One day there’s a dictator and the next day there’s just fucking not. Change is possible, but we’re in a weird place where people on the left, particularly writers and artists, have lost their imagination of how things can be different."
For feminists that would take her to task for ignoring the intersectional debate, Jessa says:
I don’t feel like feminist acts are just making posters and knitting caps and marching in the street. As a writer, it’s become increasingly important to me that everything I write lines up with my value system and not make work that doesn’t or write for publications that don’t line up with my value system. I do feel like we’re in a place where even at the baseline, we don’t know where to find value. We used to get our value from religion, but that was bad so we got rid of religion. But where do we get it from now? Do we get it from the capitalist culture that values greed, competition and selfishness?
Where do we get it from? I think that we think that we can figure that out on our own, but we can’t. Human beings are not that smart. We’re not that logical and rational. We absorb shit just from observing, so really rethinking and understanding that our values need to be recalibrated is really important—especially for feminism, which has, if anything, taken on patriarchal values. In the last 20 years, feminism has embraced competition and greed, like, “I’m making in-roads if I make six figures a year because I’m a woman.”
We can do more. We can demand more. And we can ask questions.
Why Shikha Dalmia gets paid to whine about International Women's Day is a measure of how accommodation skews the market for independent thought. After slamming the "Day Without Women" for its "cheesiness", Shikha reveals her complete disconnect from the crowds that massed Trump stadiums:
The reason a show like MadMen lampooning the sexist treatment of women in the 1960s office was even conceivable at this point was precisely because we have overcome such regressive attitudes. This progress was neither automatic nor inevitable. It required constant struggle and "consciousness raising." Nor is it over. There are plenty of "women's issues" still left to be tackled.
No, Shikha-- the reason a show like MadMen was successful is the same reason that Lena Dunham and "The Apprentice" earned high ratings, namely, misogyny sells. Female self-loathing is a buyer's market. Breitbartian bigotry and Trumpist Christo-fascists were nurtured in the womb of the Men's Rights Activist movement, after traveling through the tubes of America's thriving neo-Nazi fallopian complex.
Shikha can afford her convoluted complaint cycle. She can afford to nanny her menses and self-care her split ends. And she can end an opinion piece the following fluff-off that completely ignores how "the women who really need a day off" are currently living right here, in these United States, caring for toddlers, sweeping her gutters, processing dry-cleaned clothes, baking cafeteria food, and so on:
....a Day Without A Woman that calls for a mass strike on behalf of women who have cushy jobs in plush Western offices is just plain obtuse. The women who really need a day off -- day laborers on construction sites in Inida, rice pickers in paddy fields in Bali -- can't afford to give up a day's wages. Hence, all this holiday will do is impose the Western woman's understanding of women's problems -- and their solutions -- on all women.
Single motherhood and low-wage labor is not just a Bali problem-- it's an American problem.
It's an Alabamian problem.
It's a perma-temp labor problem.
It's a Right to Work problem.
It's a facet of how much silence we can stand in our nanny-privileged echo chambers.
It's also why so few minorities will participate in the Day Without A Woman, since the working poor can't afford to risk their job for a principled statement or position. It's an absurdity that Shikha feels the need to look across borders in order to describe what is happening in the nail salon across the street. And it's a pity that her position of whoa-there-let's-not-ruffle-feathers has become a debate among women who rely on their privilege to assert their decidedly successful female voices.
Perhaps we should scrub the "feminist conceit" from our own faces before paying a Vietnamese immigrant to do it.
MORE TO SWALLOW:
Hadley Freeman on how "empowerment feminism" lost its meaning.
Jessa Crispin on Planned Parenthood and boredom as incubators for consciousness raising.
Maria Bustillos' semantic issues with Crispin.
Jia Tolentino on how the market for empowerment earned its niche.
Jessa Crispin on the blah of American literature and why monetizing Bookslut was not an option.
