Archive for the 'Feminism' Category

“Divided you fall”: the myth of male weakness and young women’s internalized misogyny

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 09, 2010
in Feminism, Friendship and Myth of Male Weakness
. 26 Comments

I’m thinking once again about the “myth of male weakness” this morning.

Jonah Goldberg has a piece this morning with the whoppingly patronizing title “Where Feminists Get it Right.” (Don’t get excited, folks. Hell remains unfrozen.) Jonah concludes his piece, which largely focuses on the now-familiar yet ever-depressing litany of abuses against women in the less-developed world, with this gem:

Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow. “Liberate” men from those expectations, and “Lord of the Flies” logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.

Give Jonah credit. He’s not blaming women directly for their failure to civilize men. Rather, he’s blaming certain cultures that fail to give women sufficient authority with which to do their civilizing. But that doesn’t change the basic problem in his argument, based as it is on pseudo-science, Victorian sentimentality about women’s “nature”, and a William Golding novel about pre-pubescent boys.

As I sigh at Goldberg’s piece, I think about an email I got from my friend Emily. She recounts a Facebook exchange she had with a female friend of hers, a fellow Christian. Em’s friend posted on her status update that she was “really disappointed w/the female human species.” When Em inquired why, and whether her friend was also disappointed in men, she got this response:

It appears as if men are weaker when it comes to sex, money, power. With that I am realizing that it is the women that should be held at a higher standard because we need to set the tone for our weak counterparts. If women looked at themselves as holy temples and didn’t allow anything less than excellence this may force men to step up their integrity and priorities…

We could go through the gospels, pointing out over and over again the places where Jesus demands that men show self-restraint comparable to that demanded by women. But I’m not just interested in responding to a fellow Christian. Rather, what concerns me here is one of the most troubling aspects of the myth of male weakness: it creates an atmosphere in which both men and women feel justified in policing other women’s behavior.

If men cannot control themselves, and women can, then it is (as Emily’s friend suggests) women’s task to set the limits for men which men cannot set for themselves. All bad male behavior, it quickly follows, is invariably a woman’s fault. We’re all familiar with the loathsome notion that a cheating husband or boyfriend deserves less ire than the woman with whom he cheated. (The “he couldn’t help it, but she ought to have known better because she’s a woman” theory). The end result is a culture of mistrust and hostility among women.

A great many of the young women I work with claim to have trouble liking other women. Call it the “most of my good friends are guys” phenomenon, which is sufficiently common as to merit a word other than “phenomenon”. Many young women — even in feminist spaces — will list the countless ways in which they have felt judged, policed, or betrayed by other women. Many will say things like “I expect men to let me down. But when a woman hurts you, it’s worse because she doesn’t have an excuse.”

The point that feminists try and make in these discussions is that the myth of male weakness is at the very root of this internalized misogyny. The logic is inescapable. The less self-control women believe men have, the less they hold men responsible. The less they hold men responsible, the more responsibility they ascribe to themselves and to other women. The less they believe in men’s capacity to self-regulate, the more hostile they are trained to become to any woman who seems unwilling to engage in the rituals of female self-policing. At its most extreme, every mini-skirt becomes not only a threat to the fragile order women have established for mutual protection, it is perceived as an act of both betrayal and hostility towards one’s sisters. The hisses of “slut”, “whore”, and “bitch” soon follow. Continue reading ‘“Divided you fall”: the myth of male weakness and young women’s internalized misogyny’

Good Girls Marry Doctors: a new project about daughters, feminism and the diaspora

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 16, 2010
in Books, Ethnicity, Family and Feminism
. 2 Comments

This past weekend I got an email from Josephine Tsui, a Mills and University College London alumna. Josephine and Piyali Bhattacharya have started a web project called Good Girls Marry Doctors, a site for diasporic women from East Asian, South Asian, and other non-Western backgrounds who are working to reconcile their feminism with their family traditions. Josephine and Piyali are putting together an anthology: Retaining Control, Negotiating Roles: South and East Asian Diasporic Women and their Parents, and are looking for submissions. Here’s their call:

Are you a good girl? You know what we mean: you listen to your parents, there’s no gossip about you in the “community.” Or are you a bad girl? Were you caught smoking in high school? Did you marry that white boy against your parents’ wishes?

We ask you to contribute your story to a forthcoming volume: “Mama Says Good Girls Marry Doctors.” This book focuses on the pressures on South and East Asian women who have grown up in North America to be “good girls.” It seeks to collect the stories of such women, and their traumas, victories, and defeats as they face the control that their immigrant parents try to exercise over them in relation to the choice of a partner, or a career, or their freedom. We want to know how negotiating these pressures affects young Asian diasporic women, their relationship to feminism, to their parents and to their partners or siblings.

We do not seek academic essays, but creative non-fiction pieces, narratives, reflections and personal histories and memoirs. You can tell your own story or that of a friend or relative. As Asian women who have experiences such issues ourselves, we want this volume to bring a range of stories out in the open and available to other women who are facing these issues.

More details at their website, and make sure to check out the blog Josephine and Piyali have started.

Josephine kindly notes that she found this post of mine from early 2009 to be particularly helpful: Peer mentoring, young Armenian feminists, and mapping a route out. It was a post of which I was proud at the time, and am happy to say that I’ve had some good success putting young women from that particular culture together to share strategies for negotiating a path to both freedom and cultural preservation. I got some very nasty emails after that post appeared, mostly from young Armenian men (and a few parents) who were incensed at what they saw as a crude assimilationist agenda. (One of the only times I’ve ever received a physical threat serious enough to consider reporting it to campus police came in one of those emails.) I emphasized to them what I emphasized in my post: it’s not cultural betrayal to insist that women’s individual happiness matters. It’s not cultural betrayal to offer support to young women from traditional backgrounds assistance in discerning what of modern feminism they want for their lives — and what they don’t. It’s not ethnocentric to encourage slightly older women who have had some success in mapping a route “out” to mentor younger women who are unsure of the way. If I can quote myself from one of the posts below:

… if feminists can agree on one thing, it’s this: the collective sacrifices of your parents, ancestors, and culture do not trump your own personal right to be happy.

Some related posts of mine:

Some lengthy thoughts on feminism, traditional families, contingent happiness and daring to disappoint

Dating to Disappoint: the Bulworth Solution

Dare to Disappoint: Cheering on Sandra Tsing Loh

“Kindly Remembrance”: of faith, ancestors, and debts to the past; a long post in response to Daisy B.

Claiming the name

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 07, 2009
in Feminism and Male feminists
. 11 Comments

I got a message on Facebook from Delia, asking a familiar question:

I’ve got a good friend of mine, a man, who is absolutely supportive of feminist causes. But he really dislikes the word feminist, and prefers to call himself (and me) an “egalitarian”. To him, “feminist” sounds too exclusionary. I’ve tried to give him a good answer as to why focusing on women matters, but am not having much luck. Perhaps you could respond?

First off, let me recommend the indispensable Feminism 101 blog, a wonderful resource for answering all sorts of questions about feminism. Delia’s friend’s problem is addressed in this pithy answer, and it’s well worth the read.

I think it’s vital to “claim the name” of “feminist”. As the Feminism 101 site explains, refusing to use the term in favor of more general words like “egalitarian” obscures the reality of misogyny. While there’s nothing wrong with a commitment to egalitarianism as a principle, to use it to title an ideological perspective implies a false equivalence between the sexism that is directed towards men and that towards women. If someone were to say, “Oh, I believe blacks should be equal to whites, but I don’t feel comfortable calling myself an ‘anti-racist’; I’d rather just be an ‘equalist’”, we’d hear the statement for what it was: a refusal, probably motivated more by ignorance than malice, to accept the reality that black oppression in American history far outpaces that of whites.

As it says at Feminism 101, these are not mutually exclusive terms. One can be a feminist and believe in egalitarian principles. One can be a feminist and a Christian; one can be a feminist and a Republican, or a Democrat, or a defiant independent. To claim the name of feminism doesn’t mean rejecting all other names; it means, simply, that one acknowledges the reality of misogyny and one commits, in whatever way one can, to struggling against that ugly reality.

I call myself a feminist. I was once wont to call myself a “pro-feminist”, largely because in the 1980s, when I first began to do academic feminism, there was considerably more skepticism about men doing this work than there is today. As I’ve written before, younger feminists are much more willing to accept — and demand — men’s full participation in anti-sexist activism. A new generation of men has grown up, sons of mothers (and occasionally, fathers) who were steeped in feminism. The notion that a “man simply can’t get it” seems to be one that divides many feminists generationally, with those under 30 particularly unlikely to believe that essentialist view.

Men don’t get cookies merely for calling themselves feminists. But it is important that we do, at least as long as we are willing to strive to match our life to our language. We send a message that this disease of misogyny has done damage to us all, but especially to mothers and daughters, sisters and wives, partners and pupils and professional acquaintances. When we call ourselves feminists, we remind ourselves and others that the belief in the inferiority of women is the Great Crime. We renounce our complicity with that crime, and pledge — imperfectly — to work to build a world beyond misogyny. But we can’t build that world if we don’t accurately identify that which we fight for, and that which we fight against.

A long way from the summit: some thoughts on feminism, women in politics, and the new Leslie Sanchez book

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 03, 2009
in Books, Feminism and Politics
. 4 Comments

It’s been a year since the most exciting election in my memory (and, according to my septuagenerian mother, a certified political junkie, of hers as well.) The books and documentaries about the 2008 presidential campaign have arrived full force in the market place. One focuses on the trio of women who helped define this extraordinary moment in very recent history: You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe by Leslie Sanchez, a Republican activist and CNN contributor. Sanchez looks at the way the media and the nation itself responded to Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Obama — and what those responses say about the state of feminism at the tail end of the first decade of the 21st century.

(Other feminist bloggers have already reviewed YCALWM, including Clarissa, Amelia at Equal Writes, and Stacyx.)

As a registered Republican and liberal feminist who longs to see a return to progressive values within the GOP (the party of Millicent Fenwick, a political hero of mine), I’ve admired Leslie Sanchez as a sensible voice for inclusion and moderation within a party that has far too few such voices. Hers is a welcome perspective, and the fairness with which she treats both Clinton and Palin is perhaps the book’s strongest suit.

Sanchez, no supporter of Hillary, explores the pivotal question of why so many younger women saw a vote for Barack Obama as a far more revolutionary act than a vote for the first of their sex to have a serious shot at winning the presidency. She suggests that Clinton tied herself too closely to older white feminists, commonly identified with the Second Wave, and lost a generational connection with younger voters. Sanchez is right about this, I think; there’s no question that the gap between Second and Third Wavers (represented by women over and under 45) about Clinton was a significant one, much covered in the press and lamented in the feminist blogosphere. But Sanchez, whose feminist credentials are slight at best, is too dismissive when she talks about the “brashness and tired agendas of the women’s rights advocates (backing Clinton”. It wasn’t the agenda that was wrong — it was the generational disconnect that doomed the junior senator from New York. Continue reading ‘A long way from the summit: some thoughts on feminism, women in politics, and the new Leslie Sanchez book’

Privilege conceals itself from those who possess it: of feminist epistemology, marriage, and “standpoint theory.”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 28, 2009
in Class, Family, Favorite Posts 2009, Feminism, Feminist theory, Race and Relationships
. 20 Comments

The discussion below this post has grown heated, with the topic of debate being less the original post itself and more feminist epistemology and what is sometimes called “standpoint theory.” SamSeaborn quotes Elizabeth Andersen, who writes:

Feminist standpoint theory claims an epistemic privilege over the character of gender relations, and of social and psychological phenomena in which gender is implicated, on behalf of the standpoint of women.

Sam wants to know how that impacts my marriage (which I labeled as “feminist”), but he also seems to be asking how this “standpoint theory” affects the role of male allies in feminist settings. Though he kindly takes me at my word when I note that I don’t go through my married life with an apology for being male always on my lips, he wonders how a male feminist cannot help but defer to what, according to Andersen, is the “epistemic privilege” of a woman’s perspective. Sam gets a vigorous, and to my mind, very effective response, from commenters Oldfeminist and Mythago, and I recommend folks check out the whole thread.

I may be the son of two philosophers, and I may have done a graduate field in medieval scholasticism many moons ago, but I am no theorist. Phrases like “epistemic privilege” make my head hurt, and I must bite back the urge to plead, “But I am a bear of very little brain.” I’ve labored through Cixous and Irigaray and Butler because they’re important and necessary, but feminist theory ain’t my bag. I defer to the many wonderful folks in the blogosphere whose intellectual capacities exceed my own, and whose talent for explicating in plain English the difficult philosophical nuances of feminist theory is infinitely greater than mine.

That said, I do have some thoughts on standpoint theory and its practical application.

Epistemology is the study of how we know things. In a relationship between two people who are of different sexes, classes, or ethnic backgrounds, it’s reasonable to assume that each person’s knowledge of the world will have been shaped in no small part by their status. Class and sex and race and faith are some of — but surely not the only — prisms through which we see and interpret the world. Patriarchy, the complex system through which male identity is privileged in an extraordinary number of ways, impacts everyone. Yes, as the famous phrase notes, it “hurts men too.” But one particular thing that patriarchy does is warp our understanding of everything around us, particularly things like power dynamics, sexuality, and how we communicate with one another. Feminists point out the deeply obvious: the class of persons most likely to be discriminated against by the system are also those most likely to be aware of the system itself. This “greater awareness” is the epistemic privilege to which Andersen refers.

Epistemic privilege means that in a heterosexual relationship, it is generally — though not universally — the case that the woman will see gender-based power imbalances more clearly than will her boyfriend or her husband. This isn’t because of “feminine intuition”, it’s because folks in an historically oppressed class are always required to be more aware of power dynamics than those who belong to the dominant group. The same epistemic privilege can occur in race and class relations, regardless of the sex of the people involved.

Obvious example: rape and parking lots. Both men and women are cognizant of the reality of rape, and most understand that it is men who generally do the raping and women who are generally the ones attacked. But because of his privilege, a man can walk into a parking lot by himself at night and forget about rape, because his maleness affords him the luxury of remaining unobservant of the possibility of sexual danger. A woman walking alone in a parking lot at night will have a different experience, rooted in her vulnerability as a member of a class targeted for sexual violence. Not only is she more vulnerable, but her very understanding of the issue is superior to that of a man walking in the parking lot. He has the privileged luxury of ignorance; she’s forced to reflect, constantly, on rape and its threat to her. That means that when the discussion of women’s vulnerability to assault comes up, women ought to enjoy “epistemic privilege” in the conversation. Continue reading ‘Privilege conceals itself from those who possess it: of feminist epistemology, marriage, and “standpoint theory.”’

Lot’s daughters, and ours: on sexualization, feminism, and the absence of agency

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 15, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Teaching
. 43 Comments

For the first time in three years, I’m teaching my humanities course on “The Dysfunctional Family and the Western Tradition.” (More about that course here.) We use the work of John Bradshaw as a tool with which to interpret four great masterpieces: the book of Genesis; Euripides’ “Medea”, Ibsen’s “Doll’s House”, and Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” I’ve been teaching the course periodically for over a decade, and it’s one of my favorite classes to offer.

Yesterday, we talked about Genesis 19; the famous story of the destruction of Sodom — and of Lot and his daughters. Since the last time I taught the course, I’ve read Robert Polhemus’ dazzling (if occasionally exasperating) Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority. Polhemus’ book covers not only the story of how the incestuous relationship between these young women and their father has been interpreted within the Abrahamic traditions for millenia, but he touches on some of the ways in which non-incestuous older men/younger women relationships in popular lore mirror the Lot story. (The book is already dated, focusing as it does near the end heavily on the Hillary-Bill-Monica triangle that was so fascinating in the late ’90s; the biblical parallels are there, but to my students who were barely into elementary school at the time, the story doesn’t resonate.) In any case, I recommend Lot’s Daughters with enthusiasm.

The outline of the story ought to be familiar: Lot, Abraham’s relative, offers hospitality to two angels who come to his hometown of Sodom. A crowd of locals besieges Lot’s house, demanding the opportunity to rape the (male) angels. Lot tries to calm the crowd by offering his two virgin daughters instead, but the crowd isn’t interested; Lot ends up being pulled back inside the house. The city is soon destroyed by God, with only Lot and his family permitted to escape; Lot’s wife (the women, of course, are unnamed) makes the fatal mistake of looking back at her burning hometown — and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters end up taking refuge in a cave, where the girls decide to get their father drunk and have sex with him so that he can father their children. The eldest daughter conceives a son who will be the first of the Moabites, the people from whom the great figure Ruth comes. Since Ruth is an ancestor of David, and David an ancestor of Jesus, Christ himself is (if we accept Matthew’s lineage) a descendent of a line begun in father-daughter incest.

We all have a question, reading this story: why do the daughters do it? From a feminist standpoint, it’s a perverse twisting of the reality of incestuous abuse; the literature on the subject reveals that parent-child incest is, in reality, always initiated by the former. The victims are turned into the victimizers, and the male authority figure is absolved (through his drunkenness) of responsibility. Read literally, it’s infuriating in its familiarity; heck, it even fits in as an early example of the “myth of male weakness” against which we’ve so often railed on this blog. Lot gets to pass on his line, and he gets to do so with young, nubile women rather than with his barren wife. (Salt, strewn in fields, destroys fertility — you don’t need to be a graduate student in English to figure out that turning a pillar of salt is a metaphor for the undesirability and absent fecundity of ageing women.) Lot gets to start this blessed line –one that will include Ruth, David, and Jesus — through a sexual act for which he was not responsible. In Genesis 9, Noah curses his son Ham for catching his father drunk and naked and exposing the secret; ten chapters later, Lot remains silent when his daughters get him drunk and naked. (Polhemus has a fascinating section in which he details the ways in which centuries of Christian and Jewish theologians devised ways to absolve Lot of what ought to have been a profound sin).

But here’s the angle Polhemus doesn’t touch on, and one we did explore yesterday in class. The first we learn of Lot’s daughters is when their father offers them up to be raped by a mob. Lot wants to use the sexuality of his own children as a bargaining chip in order to protect the men who are his guests. Read in modern terms, Lot is doing what older men (sometimes fathers, often not) continue to do to adolescent girls: reduce their worth down to one thing. Their value lies solely in their desirability, in their imagined purity, in their youthful fuckability. Scripture doesn’t tell us what the girls thought when they heard their father offer them up to the crowd, but it’s not hard to see the impact on their lives. From a feminist and a family systems standpoint, we can’t understand why the girls seduce their father until we understand the impact of his earlier betrayal upon them.. Continue reading ‘Lot’s daughters, and ours: on sexualization, feminism, and the absence of agency’

Legal and topless: on myths of male weakness, and the virtues of feminist legislation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 09, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification, Feminism, Modesty and Myth of Male Weakness
. 64 Comments

A reader named Tracy sent me a link to this Meghan Pleitcha piece that originally ran on Nerve and was then reprinted at Alternet: What Happened When I Legally Exposed My Breasts in Public. This summer, Pleitcha took advantage of a New York state law that permits “gender equity” when it comes to baring chests in certain public settings; she sunbathed topless in Central Park, and wrote about the reactions she got from men, from women, and from her inner voice. It’s a thoughtful piece, and Tracy wanted to know my thoughts on female public toplessness and how that issue connects to the “myth of male weakness” about which I have written so often.

I’ve got a whole category of posts about modesty, and the ways in which our fears about uncontrollable male sexual desire result in our shifting the responsibility for self-control from men to women. I don’t want to keep rehashing points made over and over again, so let me offer just a few links:

In this post, we looked at the word kosmios (the koine Greek term, translated as modesty in the New Testament) and how it has nothing to do with showing skin, but instead refers to refraining from lavish displays of wealth.

In this post, the “argument from testosterone” is considered and rejected.

And I posted about breasts and the notion that men can’t help but stare here.

Though some might not regard the right to bear one’s breasts in public as the single most pressing issue on the feminist agenda, I do support the expansion of the already-extant New York law mandating gender equity when it comes to the exposure of the human chest. What “must be concealed” is a societal variable which has evolved over time. As we read in the news this week, Sudan canes women for wearing pants (something for which women were arrested in this country little more than a century ago.) In some societies, women’s hair has tremendous erotic value, perhaps as much as breasts themselves; in many cultures, concealing the top of the head is mandatory. And as anyone who has watched National Geographic specials or spent time on the beaches of Europe knows, the idea that female breasts are universally arousing to men is silly — what we find arousing is almost entirely culturally conditioned, and has far less to do with our hard-wiring than the peddlers of pop-evolutionary biology would have us believe. For reasons of fairness, as well as for the reason that the male lack of self-control is a construct rather than an immutable truth, it makes good sense to change our laws to permit women to go shirtless in public. Continue reading ‘Legal and topless: on myths of male weakness, and the virtues of feminist legislation’

Feminist Harpies Deny that Babies are Fun, a response to Katie Roiphe

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 27, 2009
in Feminism and Parenting
. 6 Comments

Amanda Marcotte has her customarily devastating take-down of this Katie Roiphe piece that appeared on DoubleEX on Tuesday: Why won’t feminists admit the pleasure of infants?

First off, it’s a confusing title. I read it and thought, for a second, that Roiphe — a first-time mom to a baby boy — worried that advocates for women’s equality go around denying that little babies experience pleasure. Of course, she means something else:

One of the minor dishonesties of the feminist movement has been to underestimate the passion of this time, to try for a rational, politically expedient assessment. Historically, feminists have emphasized the difficulty, the drudgery of new motherhood. They have tried to analogize childcare to the work of men; and so for a long time, women have called motherhood a “vocation.” The act of caring for a baby is demanding, and arduous, of course, but it is wilder and more narcotic than any kind of work I have ever done.

Amanda has done an excellent job unpacking the absurdities in Roiphe’s argument, and Amy Bloom points out all the feminist authors who did write about adoring their offspring, writers whom Roiphe either hasn’t read or ignored. There’s no question, of course, that Roiphe is not alone in experiencing this extraordinary sense of joy in being with a baby. My wife and I have had our lives turned upside down in the most delightful way by Heloise’s arrival. My wife seems to crave the baby physically; when she’s been away from Miss Mouse for more than a few hours, she goes through what she describes as “withdrawals”. For me, who did not carry this baby inside of me, the addiction is less physiologically intense, but it is powerful nonetheless. Roiphe’s feelings about her child ring true to us, as I imagine they would to many other parents.

Others have made the case that Roiphe is wrong about feminists, and plenty of folks agree that she’s absolutely right about the joy that babies can bring. But that pleasure isn’t felt universally; not every woman bonds with every baby she gives birth to in the ecstatic manner that Roiphe describes. And the problem, of course, is that she writes from a position of the very sort of privilege that feminists have fought for. She writes:

Of course, in my drugged baby haze I do occasionally recognize that the baby will not always be six weeks old, that I will one day sleep more than two hours at a stretch. I also recognize that if you had a newborn every day of your life you would die. But for now, I feel like closing the shades and staying in the opium den. I know somewhere out there is a great world where people talk and think and write, but I am not interested in going there yet.

Newsflash, Katie; many mothers — many people, period — never get to spend much time in that “great world where people talk and think and write”. I get to be in that world, Katie Roiphe is in that world, but far more mothers have jobs outside the home that are dull and not particularly intellectually stimulating. And when you’re on kid #3, and the first two are still young and clamoring for your attention, there’s no time to stay in the “opium den”, no chance to close the shades and retreat into a world of oxytocin-infused bliss. And just to be clear, who is fighting for paid maternity leave so that more mothers have the time to close the shades? Those very same feminists Roiphe despises.

In the end, one excellent reason why feminists don’t over-exert themselves in paeans to motherhood is because so many other forces in our culture already do do just that and do it well. Feminists know well that for women, opportunity quickly becomes obligation — telling women that having a baby will be the peak experience of their lives marginalizes those women who genuinely have no interest in being mothers, repeating the old and ugly lie that a woman who doesn’t grow life in her tummy has somehow failed to fulfill her most important destiny. Feminists know that some women — many women — don’t respond as Roiphe does; the greater our rhapsodizing about the joys of having babies, the more we shame those who don’t find the process as ecstatic as they were led to believe.

As individual parents, feminist writers (Amy Bloom named several) have written a great deal about having children. Roiphe seems to have only heard of the books in which feminists expressed ambivalence about motherhood, or emphasized the toil that comes with reproducing and raising the result. In the blogosphere, plenty of feminists write about their love for their children and their joy in being mothers or fathers (I think of Lauren Bruce, one of my blogging heroes and designer of this blog.) There is no feminist consensus that demeans motherhood, unless you consider making the case that having babies isn’t the sine qua non of a woman’s existence to be demeaning.

To be fair, Roiphe’s condemnation in DoubleEXisn’t as full-throated as in her far more destructive The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism , a now-dated tract that functions as little more than a defense of rape. But the piece does end up titled “Why won’t Feminists Admit the Pleasure of Infants?”, and given that tack, it is not surprising that a great many feminists (including those who happen to be parents) roll their eyes.

The fathers were wrong: a response to Kathleen Parker about Walter Cronkite

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 23, 2009
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Feminism and Mass media
. 7 Comments

I have little love for Kathleen Parker, author of Save the Males and the latest in a long line of conservative female pundits to sell books by suggesting that feminism has gone too far. But it would seem that there would be little to which to object in her piece yesterday paying tribute to the late Walter Cronkite. Clearly, what ended up in the Post was over or under-edited, as the piece jumps from a meditation on Cronkite’s comforting image to a discussion of whether or not his reporting on Vietnam ushered in an era of overt media bias. It’s a bit incoherent as printed, and was probably better as written.

But I don’t write much about the media. (As for Cronkite, I liked him, but ours was an ABC household; the favorite anchor of my childhood was Peter Reynolds, and I was always a big David Brinkley fan.) What I’m interested in is Parker’s reflection on Cronkite as a particular kind of male icon:

Our nostalgia for his passing isn’t only for the death of a familiar and mostly admired individual, but also for a certain kind of man — an iconic reminder of a time when fathers knew best and the media were on the home team.

He had the looks and voice of the sort of man one could trust for good directions. Nonthreatening and, it seemed, untempted by vanity, his prevailing affect was of seriousness and humility.

It is doubtless difficult in these post-metrosexual, celebrity-driven times to grasp the preference that Americans once held for people who weren’t “all that.” Male figures, also known nearly ubiquitously as “fathers,” were especially admired in those days for substance over style.

What’s so exasperating about Parker’s analysis is that she correlates Cronkite’s absence of vanity and consummate gravitas with his status as an icon of an era in which women were seen as frivolous and incapable of similar seriousness. Cronkite’s greatness lay in his professionalism, a quality entirely unrelated to his sex or to his absence of an intense curiosity about fashion. (Taking a wild guess, I’d say Kathleen Parker probably has an unhealthy and bizarre animus towards dear Anderson Cooper.) Cronkite, who mentored his successor Katie Couric (and was apparently far better disposed towards her than to Dan Rather) was by all accounts committed to greater inclusion for women in broadcast journalism; some have suggested that Cronkite’s behind-the-scenes influence led to Rather’s hasty departure and to the elevation of Couric to be the network’s first female anchor.

Cronkite’s bravest reporting, as Parker herself notes, came in his courageous willingness to expose our policy in Vietnam as disastrous; he had the guts to question the decisions that the “fathers” — presidents like Eisenhower and LBJ — had made in Southeast Asia. Rather than reinforcing the worshipful acquiescence to patriarchal authority that characterized so much of 1950s culture, Cronkite played a vital role in undermining that blind and unthinking trust that far too many Americans put in their national “father figures.” Vietnam showed Americans that fathers didn’t know best; Cronkite showed millions of Americans the truth about Vietnam, and in doing so, helped us to adopt a healthier skepticism towards paternal authority. For that, he deserves our gratitude.

Parker seems to suggest that substance and style are mutually exclusive, as if flair and grace are evidence of a reduced IQ. Of course, she casts “substance” as masculine, with the unwritten but unavoidable implication that “style” is feminine, lightweight, and unserious. Shorter Parker: “I miss my Daddy and my Mommy spent too much time shopping, so I wish I could find more men like my Papa, except that they’re now all shopping too. I feel unsafe.” But there was nothing particularly safe or virtuous about the rigid straitjacket of 1950s gender roles. Men were robbed of the chance not only to wear color, but of the chance to be vulnerable and open, complex and complete. Women were robbed of the chance to be ambitious, intellectually curious, and economically independent. We were half-people

What Parker and her ilk celebrate as a world of certainty, comfort, predictability and roles in harmony with “nature” was, for far more people than we realize, a world of spirit-crushing conformity and cruel repression. The end of the so-called “happy days” is to be celebrated rather than lamented, and to the extent that avuncular Walter Cronkite played a part in bringing those days to an end, he is to be honored as well.

“First, Last, Security Deposit”: Women’s savings, feminism, and the steps to getting a room of one’s own

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 21, 2009
in Favorite Posts 2009, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy and Money
. 5 Comments

This summer session in my women’s history course, I’ve been more conscientious than usual about suggesting proactive solutions for young feminists to use as they navigate their way through a difficult and misogynistic world. I’ve got a compendium of tips, all of which ought to be collected into a single blog post at some point. But one suggestion I’ve made repeatedly, and which I’ve seen proven useful again and again, is that young people of both sexes (but especially young women) set aside money for themselves.

It comes from something I heard years ago from a feminist colleague of mine. She remarked, apropos of nothing that I can remember, “You know what freedom is? Freedom is having first, last, and a security deposit.” (Most landlords require a first month’s payment and a last month’s payment in advance before renting an apartment; most require a security deposit, often equal to another month’s rent.) For young people living in unhappy home situations with repressive parents, or for women in abusive relationships, the ability to leave and begin a different life is tied to access to money. Feminists rightly celebrate the importance of “choice” and “autonomy”, but we must always acknowledge that it is far easier to exercise these two fundamental goods when one has resources over which one has direct control.

This is not a new point, of course; Virginia Woolf said as much in her indispensable “A Room of One’s Own.” Some years, I’ve given my students excerpts from Woolf to read; many identify all too well with the famous point about Shakespeare’s sister. But whether they read it in Woolf or hear it from a professor or pick it up from their friends, it’s vital — particularly for those from families with few resources — that women start putting aside money that will be theirs and theirs alone. Perhaps, yes, money with which to rent a room of one’s own; perhaps money with which to buy a car. Perhaps money with which to take a life-changing trip abroad. The freedom to become who one was called to be is considerably easier with money of one’s own.

This all sounds obvious, of course. But for many of my students, setting aside even small bits of money is very difficult. The “pleasing woman discourse” is pervasive, and it makes it all too easy for whatever amounts of spare cash are accumulated to be offered to the invariably needy and demanding multitudes that surround far too many young women. In some families, young women are expected to contribute to their parents’ rent and to the grocery money; for many of my working-class students, particularly in the current Great Recession, living at home is as much about helping their family survive as it is about remaining under the control of overly-watchful parents. Continue reading ‘“First, Last, Security Deposit”: Women’s savings, feminism, and the steps to getting a room of one’s own’

Sarah Palin, liberal culture warrior

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 06, 2009
in Feminism and Politics
. 23 Comments

Sarah Palin’s surprise Friday announcement of her impending resignation proved to be a central topic of conversation among my nearest and dearest as we gathered for the Independence Day weekend. My large extended family includes members at virtually every point on the political spectrum, though most do tend to occupy the center. And among those of the blood and their guests, the Alaska governor had her vehement supporters and her equally vehement detractors.

I’ve always been ambivalent about Palin. I wrote two posts last year, well before the election: Shattering the glass ceiling of complementarianism: some thoughts on Sarah Palin, John Knox, and the difficult position of the Christian social conservative, and a few weeks later, “Backwoods Barbie” and white rural feminism: of Dolly Parton, 9 to 5, and Sarah Palin. In the first post, written the week she was selected as the GOP VP nominee, I wrote:

If you believe that women should submit to men, shouldn’t have teaching authority over men and so forth, then you are going to have a hard time accepting Sarah Palin as vice-president. To be a complementarian, after all, is to embrace the idea that men and women were created for distinct roles. Palin, who seems eager to court Hillary Clinton voters, sends a message with her life and her career that neither her sex nor her status as a mother of five should serve as a barrier to holding what could quickly become the most powerful post in the world.

That’s what excited me about Palin. I found her politics crudely reactionary, and still do. But I was and am troubled by the way in which some of my fellow progressives have failed to recognize that, in many ways, Palin’s popularity with the “base” reflects a radical cultural shift among our conservative brothers and sisters: with some notable and defiantly troglodytic exceptions, most on the right were and are quite comfortable with the idea of this woman, a mother of five, serving as president. This reflects nothing less than the happy truth that, for the most part, we on the left have won and are continuing to win the culture war. A generation ago, far more pastors and conservative pundits would have railed against a mother of young children pursuing a very public career outside the home. Her ambition would have been decried; her husband Todd’s primary role as caregiver to the younger daughters (Willow and Piper) would have been blasted as a tragic refusal to submit to God’s plan for the human household. And though some on the very fringes of the far right did indeed make noises to that effect, I was pleased that a clear majority of conservative voters repudiated those traditionalist sentiments. Continue reading ‘Sarah Palin, liberal culture warrior’

A note on harmonious disagreement, “commitment within relativism”, and the feminist sex wars

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 01, 2009
in Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Friendship and Politics
. 17 Comments

It might surprise some readers that the students in my women’s studies classes are as politically and religiously diverse as the students in my other general education courses. The widely-held stereotype that feminist-themed courses only appeal to those on the left-hand side of the spectrum has not proven true, at least not for me here at Pasadena City College. (And is it possible that this fall I will begin my seventeenth year of teaching here? Where does the time go?) Though my women’s history classes do tend to attract slightly higher numbers of white students, and correspondingly lower numbers of students of color compared to the college average, those students who do take the class and submit journals and participate in discussions do run the full gamut.

Creating opportunities for honest, non-condemnatory and respectful dialogue isn’t particularly easy, particularly when the issues we discuss (like abortion rights, or the merits/drawbacks to abstinence, or the intersectionality of race and gender) are so potentially explosive. As diverse as my students are, most come from backgrounds where women are conciliators and peacemakers; many come from the “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” school. And as a result, while we sometimes have very charged discussions in class in which emotions run high, my students tell me that outside of school, they tend to seek out friendships with those who are ideologically like-minded. The young woman committed to abstinence until marriage, for example, seems to find it hard to form a honest frienship (rather than a mere civil acquaintanceship) with the young woman who volunteers as a sex educator and talks openly about the physical aspects of the relationship she has with her boy — or girl — friends.

Labels like “prude” and “slut” have genuine power to wound. (Some women, of course, are unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of both.) Those on opposite sides of the “abstinence divide” frequently imagine that it’s harder to be wherever they are; those who advocate for or live by a more progressive sexual ethic often carry the scars from words like “slut” or “whore” or even the surprisingly not-yet-dated “tramp.” Those who remain virgins (or who become born-again virgins) insist that theirs is the tougher cross to bear, that living in a sexually permissive environment where the pressure to fit in is enormous requires courage and resilience. There is an element, I note of the old “suffering Olympics” problem, in which various constituencies compete for the title of “most maligned” and “most deserving of sympathy.” Continue reading ‘A note on harmonious disagreement, “commitment within relativism”, and the feminist sex wars’

Feminism, fatherhood, and enduring male privilege

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 15, 2009
in Father, Feminism, Housework, Male feminists, Parenting and Working
. 41 Comments

This post by Jessica at Feministing, responding to this risible Neil Lyndon piece in the Daily Mail has revived many of the familiar arguments about feminism, the men’s rights movement, and gender essentialism. It’s all part of a response to the latest flurry of op-ed pieces (far too numerous to which to link) suggesting that feminism has proved a failure, largely because so many women today (especially middle-class American and European women, presumably those most likely to have benefitted from the movement) report being exhausted, overworked, anxious and, well, unhappy.

If you follow the feminist blogosphere, this topic has been debated over and over again in one form or another since the earliest BBS discussions of the mid-1990s. I’m not interested in rehashing the arguments, though the latest round of anti-feminist bromides seem unusually poorly constructed. Most are guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: if women are anxious or frustrated or unhappy after the coming of the first three waves of feminism, then they are anxious and unhappy because of the first three waves of feminism. One might as well make the same argument about the arrival of the cell phone, electrolysis, or the designated hitter rule. Repeat after me, class: correlation is not causation.

What made me want to write today was the comment thread below the Feministing piece, a thread in which a number of classic MRA (men’s rights activist) arguments were raised. The basic thesis: feminism has created a world hostile to men (at least in the industrialized West). Feminists have co-opted judicial, political, and educational institutions in order to advance what the MRAs call a “victim ideology”. Men and boys are alternately harangued and ignored, viewed by the feminist elite as either dim-witted oafs or dangerously calculating and predatory. Men are dying earlier and committing suicide more frequently because of their alienation from these woman-centered institutions, say the MRAs; the legions of young men hooked on pot or porn or Playstation (or all three) are the inevitable result of their cultural and social emasculation at the hands of a shrill and craven matriarchy. Or so say the MRAs.

So let me say this in defense of feminism, not only from the perspective of someone who makes his living in no small part by teaching it, but from the perspective of a new father: my relationship with my infant daughter is, in a very real way, made possible by the critical work feminists did to reframe traditional gender roles. It is thanks to the gains of the feminist movement that I was encouraged and expected to go through every aspect of the pregnancy and birthing process with my wife. It is thanks to the cultural shift initiatied by feminists and male allies that I was able to take the time away from work to be there for my wife (a right alas not yet universal). It is thanks to the feminist movement that a generation of committed and dedicated fathers has emerged, fathers who actively practice co-parenting with the mothers of their children. Though men neither get pregnant nor breastfeed, these biological inadequacies are no impediment to developing the capacity to nurture, something I am living out as best I can every day. Continue reading ‘Feminism, fatherhood, and enduring male privilege’

Marilyn French, 1929-2009: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 05, 2009
in Books, Feminism and People
. 3 Comments

The great Marilyn French has died at 79. Many appreciations are appearing this week, see here for more.

Marilyn French is best known for her wonderful — if now dated — The Women’s Room. It’s perhaps the most important novel to come out of what is commonly known as Second Wave Feminism, and it remains a vital, fascinating, at times infuriating text. In 1986, when I was first beginning to think about doing women’s studies and feminist work, a friend of mine recommended the book to me. “Read it”, she said, “and tell me what you think.” I read the book the fall semester of my sophomore year, and was galvanized by it. Much has been made in the obituaries of French’s anger, and there’s little doubt that in many respects “The Women’s Room” is an angry novel. But righteous anger in the face of blind privilege, reckless entitlement, and crushing social norms is no vice — and I found French’s work to be a powerful and damning indictment. At 19, I recognized aspects of myself in some of her less sympathetic male characters — and in no small way, the book contributed to the beginning of my intellectual journey to (at least attempt to) become a different sort of man.

I also loved her Beyond Power, now out of print. One of the first organized discussions of feminism in which I ever participated (if we don’t count sitting quietly in the room while my mother hosted meetings of the League of Women Voters) came in late ‘86, and the topic was French’s then brand-new and dazzling meditation on patriarchy, resistance, and sexuality over the entire course of human history. Most of my younger feminist colleagues who’ve read the book tend to roll eyes or snort derisively when I talk almost worshipfully of French; for some, she’s the very epitome of a certain kind of privileged Second Waver, the sort whose feminism is often alienating to those born long after Watergate. But it’s still on my shelf, and it’s still a terrific text. It’s influenced more than a little of my teaching.

I confess that “The Women’s Room” and “Beyond Power” are the only two Marilyn French works I’ve read. But like most of the books which have served me well, I take great pleasure in re-reading them. I’ll track down some of her more recent novels soon, and urge those who have never read her work to start with her most important and influential offerings.

UPDATE: Jha has a great tribute here.

Living Christian, living feminist: a note for Mercy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 27, 2009
in Christianity and Feminism
. 15 Comments

New posting returns.

A reader named Mercy (I have a few with that pseudonym, it seems) writes after participating in this discouraging discussion at Christianity Today. Mercy, a young committed evangelical, youth leader, and feminist, asks in an email

How do you deal, as a Christian feminist, with Christians who seem to still believe women are an after-thought of creation, who deny any feminine qualities of God, who think that because birth control wasn’t accepted by a church until 1930 it’s still evil….I could go one and on, but how do you do it? How do you reason with these people? How do you make them see you’re not a pagan, not renouncing Christ, etc, etc.? How do you live your beliefs?

I told Mercy that I could indeed identify with her, and promised to respond publicly.

She raises two of the three issues that Christian feminists routinely face:

1. Hostility from more traditionalist Christians who question one’s theology, one’s hermeneutic, one’s commitment to Christ, and — not infrequently — one’s salvation.

2. The difficulty in getting conservative Christians to consider feminist criticism not only as valid, but deeply congruent with the spirit of Christ and with the Gospel.

Mercy doesn’t raise the last issue:

3. Bewilderment on the part of secular feminist allies who assume that Christianity is antithetical to both reason and egalitarian values, and who wonder how such an otherwise well-informed and committed activist could hold to beliefs like the divinity of Jesus and the promise of eternal life.

I’ve written before about reconciling faith and feminism — see here and here. I have no hesitation about identifying as a Christian and as a feminist (though I do sometimes use the term “pro-feminist” in certain contexts). I’ve lived a long time now with both labels; I don’t need to share the convictions of every other person who embraces either term in order to feel that they describe me accurately. To sum it up in one sentence: I believe in the unique role of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, my Savior; I believe that the multiplicity of gender identities, like the multiplicity of races, is a sign of God’s delight in diversity rather than evidence of a plan for different roles. And just as no race is to rule over another, so too no sex is to rule over another. Galatians 3:28 is Christology, but it’s also a political statement about how the world should be ordered and how the law ought to treat difference.

Mercy’s real question, it seems, is how to live as a feminist in a community of conservative Christians; how can she push past the cognitive dissonance that some traditionalist evangelicals feel when she proposes reconciling radical egalitarianism with a radical commitment to Christ? Of course, part of the answer is that she’s gonna need to understand that there is nothing she can say that will win everyone over. I assume Mercy already knows that, but it’s worth repeating: being an effective witness for either feminism or faith requires a willingness to be misunderstood and mislabelled and dismissed. And if you’re an outspoken woman in a conservative religious community, the chances of being rejected are excellent. That needs to be okay; as we learn from Jesus, if you’re rejected repeatedly in one village, you need to shake the dust of that place off your feet and move on down the road. That’s true in both forms of evangelism. Continue reading ‘Living Christian, living feminist: a note for Mercy’