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Often when arguing about feminism on the internet, I hear from my opponents – well there are just sooo many types of feminism – how can my brain handle all this variation. Let’s just simplify the notion a touch. There is the feminism that pleases men and there is the feminism that doesn’t. The feminism that does not please men has held on to its political character and theoretical basis.
bell hooks describes these two flavours of feminism:
“Lifestyle feminism ushered in the notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism. And the assumption prevailed that no matter what a woman’s politics, be she conservative or liberal, she too could fit feminism into her existing lifestyle. Obviously this way of thinking has made feminism more acceptable because its underlying assumption is that women can be feminists without fundamentally challenging and changing themselves or the culture.”
-bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody.
“By some mysterious process all that pertains to sex in this society has been separated off from politics, even by those who would consider themselves socialist and radicals. In order to make sexual practice a private enclave of individual delight, sexuality has been seen as somehow removed from the effects of sexism, racism, any oppression in the world outside the bedroom, and considered to have no effect upon or relevance to that world. In fact sex plays a crucial part in fuelling and regulating the oppression of women and racist oppression. There is nothing pure about sex nor anything which might claim for it a special exemption from political criticism.”
— Sheila Jeffreys, “Sadomasochism: The Erotic Cult of Fascism”
“Feminism requires precisely what misogyny destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power.”
-Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating.
What is gender and how does if affect our society? Lierre Keith provides some insight and clarity regarding the topic while casting some shade on the po-mo obfuscation of said topic.
“I find it metaphorically resonant that a pregnant woman looks like she’s just sitting on a couch, but she’s actually exhausting herself constructing a human being. The laborious process of growing a human is analogous to how a woman’s work is seen. It’s hard to recognize, because a man’s work has such extravagant evidence – skyscrapers, for instance – while a woman’s work just makes the world quietly turn.”
-Ani DiFranco
It is always nice to get some quality writing about that mysterious realm of Living as Female in our society. Joanna Russ wrote this in 1975 it is chilling how much still applies.
In the United States, [pornography] is an $8-billion trade in sexual exploitation.
It is women turned into subhumans, beaver, pussy, body parts, genitals exposed, buttocks, breasts, mouths open and throats penetrated, covered in semen, pissed on, shitted on, hung from light fixtures, tortured, maimed, bleeding, disemboweled, killed.
It is some creature called female, used.
It is scissors poised at the vagina and objects stuck in it, a smile on the woman’s face, her tongue hanging out.
It is a woman being fucked by dogs, horses, snakes.
It is every torture in every prison cell in the world, done to women and sold as sexual entertainment.
It is rape and gang rape and anal rape and throat rape: and it is the woman raped, asking for more.
It is the woman in the picture to whom it is really happening and the women against whom the picture is used, to make them do what the woman in the picture is doing.
It is the power men have over women turned into sexual acts men do to women, because pornography is the power and the act.
It is the conditioning of erection and orgasm in men to the powerlessness of women: our inferiority, humiliation, pain, torment; to us as objects, things, commodities for use in sex as servants.
It sexualizes inequality and in doing so creates discrimination as a sex-based practice.
It permeates the political condition of women in society by being the substance of our inequality, however located – in jobs, in education, in marriage, in life.
It is women, kept a sexual underclass, kept available for rape and battery and incest and prostitution.
It is what we are under male domination; it is what we are for under male domination.
-Andrea Dworkin, Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography, and Equality, 1985
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