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Ah, friendly readers, behold the surreal world of MRA ‘reality’ compared to what, in fact, is reality.
Nice of Deep Green Resistance to illustrate what Patriarchy is for women.
“Female socialization in patriarchy is a process of psychologically constraining and breaking girls—otherwise known as “grooming”—to create a class of compliant victims. Femininity is a set of behaviors that are, in essence, ritualized submission.
We see nothing in the creation of gender to celebrate or embrace. Patriarchy is a corrupt and brutal arrangement of power, and we want to see it dismantled so that the category of gender no longer exists.
… Patriarchy facilitates the mining of female bodies for the benefit of men – for male sexual gratification, for cheap labor, and for reproduction. To take but one example, there are entire villages in India where all the women only have one kidney. Why? Because their husbands have sold the other one. Gender is not a feeling—it’s a human rights abuse against an entire class of people, “people called women.”
Warning – Crusty Second Wave Analysis ahead :>
OK, let’s say your plane crashes on a desert island, where a mysterious group of Others brings you to a temple. They give you two options: One, you can stay with them and have all your needs met, as long as you wear a little bikini and feed them grapes. If you don’t like that, you can go back out into the jungle. You’ll probably survive, but life won’t be easy; you’ll be cast out from the only society existing on the island, and you’ll miss out on a lot of comforts, and you might get eaten by a polar bear.
One castaway, Claire, has genuinely always wanted to wear a tiny bikini and feed people grapes. She’s hot, she’s maternal: it’s perfect. She still doesn’t really get to make that choice freely, because it’s the only one available that lets her stay in society — when the options are “cake or death,” it doesn’t really matter how much you like cake. But at least she lucked out! She’s not just making the best of a bad situation; she’s actually enjoying it.
Sun, on the other hand, didn’t spend the whole first season becoming self-actualized just to take a job at Dharma Hooters. She flips the Others the bird and goes back out to the jungle, and once she’s there, she joins forces with other jungle-dwellers to destroy the Temple and its unfair restrictions.
Guys, this would be a WAY better show than “Lost” ended up being! But that’s not the point. The point is, it’s not fair for Sun to judge Claire — the problem isn’t her, it’s a society whose main rule is “You must be decorative and servile or be cast out.” Claire’s just trying to get by, and enjoy her luck at actually liking the thing she’s supposed to do anyway.
But if Claire rolls her eyes at poor humorless Sun — “I love wearing bikinis, you buzzkill” — she’s missing the point. Wearing a bikini because you love it is great, but that choice is diminished when it’s the only one available. Making it OK to wear other kinds of clothes and do things besides serve fruit won’t keep Claire from passing out grapes in a bikini, if that’s what she likes. It’ll just mean that she gets to do it solely because she wants to.
The real world, being many times the size of the island and also not magic, is significantly more complicated. But the same basic principles pertain: If there are only a handful of options available to you, then it’s damn fortunate if you like one, but that doesn’t make it OK that there aren’t more. If your favorite pastimes are dieting, getting shiny hair, and having your legs looked at, hallelujah: You will receive plenty of support in doing the things you like best. But liking your limited options doesn’t mean your choice is free. It’s still constrained — you just happen to be lucky.
So you should go ahead and do things that are patriarchy-approved, if you want to.
But don’t fool yourself that you’re doing so of your own unconstrained free will. Until the woman who doesn’t want to be seen as sexually available can go out with certainty that she won’t be harassed or ogled, your choice to turn heads and revel in attention is a privileged one. Until the woman who doesn’t prioritize appearance gets taken just as seriously in just the same contexts, it’s a privileged choice to achieve certain standards of beauty. You may be doing what you love, but you’re also doing what you’re told.
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Damn women getting all uppity and full of agency, the nerve…
“Men celebrated our sexual liberation — our willingness to freely give and enjoy blow jobs and group sex, our willingness to experiment with anal penetration — but ultimately many males revolted when we stated that our bodies were territories that they could not occupy at will. Men who were ready for female sexual liberation if it meant free pussy, no strings attached, were rarely ready for feminist female sexual agency. This agency gave us the right to say yes to sex, but it also empowered us to say no.”
— bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
This message brought to you on behalf of entitled, scared men everywhere… (see more on the ‘equality trap’)
I do love my subscription to the OED word of the day mailing list, and metagrobolize is just too good a word to forget; thus I need to use it a bunch and get it implanted into my vocabulary, pardon my logophilia.
I’ve been reading with much more frequency as late definitions of feminism in which the stated goal of feminism is for women to achieve equal rights with men and then, once this goal has been achieved, *poof* the need for feminism is over. It would seem a large proportion of male commentators (and some females as well) believe that we have reached this post-feminist age and women should just STFU already and revel in how damn good it is for them.
I find this analysis of feminism problematic because if focuses on the individual struggle rather that the broader struggle women face as class in patriarchal society. Bell Hooks does an admirable job of describing exactly what is problematic with the focus of much of what liberal feminism is all about.
“Like revolutionaries working to change the lot of colonized people globally, it is necessary for feminist activists to stress that the ability to see and describe one’s own reality is a significant step in the process of self-recovery, but it only a beginning. When women internalized the idea that describing their own woe was synonymous with developing a critical political consciousness, the progress of feminist movement was stalled. Starting form such incomplete perspectives, it is not surprising that theories and strategies were developed that were collectively inadequate and misguided. To correct this inadequacy past analysis we must now encourage women to develop a keen, comprehensive understand of women’s political reality. Broad perspectives can only emerge as we examine both the personal that is political, the politics of society as a whole, and global revolutionary politics.
[…] By repudiating the popular notion that the focus of the feminist movement should be social equality of the sexes and by emphasizing eradication of the cultural basis of group oppression, our own analysis would require an exploration of all aspects of women’s political reality. This would mean that race and class oppression would be recognized as feminist issues with as much relevance as sexism.”
-Bell Hooks: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, p.26-27
The equality trap is quite endemic in liberal feminism, it is easily derailed by dudes into making feminism about them and their problems (many a precious male tear has been shed about specific instances where they happen to get the short end of the stick, thus proving that if you were *really* about equality you would fix this problem too). Past the problem of dudes (MRA’s in particular, whose goal seems only to be a race to sully as many comments sections as possible with their misogyny) that other problem is that much of liberal feminism largely ignores the structural features of society that reinforce, replicate, and promulgate the patriarchal norms of society that what are causing the problems in the first place.
How does one achieve ‘equality’ when the normative features of society intrinsically promote systemic inequality? Ignoring the power gradients and class structure of society in feminist analysis is essentially reinforcing the status quo. Dudes love much of what liberal feminism offers as their power and status in society is not threatened in the very least by much of what liberal feminism advocates. Grrl ‘power’ and exercising your ‘right’ to express your femininity may feel very empowerful as an individual, but does it advance the cause of women as a class (see also much of the dude positive, sex-positive ballyhoo that’s floating around)? This is not intended as a smackdown of any particular brand of feminism because engaging in any sort of feminist activity is in itself a revolutionary act.
However, sometimes a different tool-set is required to identify, undermine. and ultimately smash the toxic patriarchal constructs our society is based on – reading people like Bell Hooks, Gail Dines, Andrea Dworkin are a great place to start.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…