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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.
Another neat part of holding a minority viewpoint is that when talking with those still in the matrix, your arguments can be dismissed out of hand as whining or mere supercilious handwaving. This short video paints a slightly different picture and should be part of your 101 level knowledge of what Feminism is about.
Brilliant post about the shit women have to put up with a daily basis. Some highlights here, but follow the link for the entire post, it is must read material.
[Captain Awkward responding to letter:]
“Dear Creeper, No Creeping! and Creeped Out:
I’m not slithering around on the floor and hissing with my forked tongue when I say that the situations described in these two letters are pretty good examples of what Rape Culture is and why it is so insidious.
Step 1: A creepy dude does creepy, entitled shit and makes women feel unsafe.
Step 2: The women speak up about it to their partners.
Step 3: It gets written off as “not a big deal” or “he probably didn’t mean it” or “he’s not a bad guy, really.” Any discussion of the bad behavior must immediately be followed by a complete audit of his better qualities or the sad things he’s suffered in the name of “fairness.” Once the camera has moved in and seen him in closeup as a real, human, suffering person, how can you (the object, always an object, as in “objectified,” as in a disembodied set of tits or orifices, or a Trapper Keeper, or a favorite coffee mug or a pet cat) be so cruel as to want to hold him accountable for his actions? Bitches, man.
Step 4: Everyone is worried about hurting creepy dude’s feelings or making it weird for creepy dude. Better yet, everyone is worried about how the other dudes in the friend group will feel if they are called out for enabling creepy dude. Women are worried that if they push the issue, that the entire friend group will side with creepy dude or that they’ll be blamed for causing “drama.” Look at how LW #323 put it: ”how can I approach this subject with my boyfriend, and make him understand a) how serious this is, and b) that he is not responsible for Ben’s reactions, without making him feel defensive?”
Wouldn’t want someone who covers up for and defends a proto-rapist to have to have SADFEELS, right? (LW, it’s not your fault you’re asking the question this way, it’s just that our culture sucks about this and your boyfriend and his friends have been giving you constant messages that Ben is to be coddled while you are to be shushed in the hopes that it will all blow over).
Step 5: Creepy dude creeps on with his creepy self. He’s learned that there are no real (i.e. “disapproval & pushback from dudes and dude society”) consequences to his actions. Women feel creeped out and unsafe.Some of them decide to take a firm stand against creeping and not come to parties anymore. They slowly slide out of the friend group. Some of the woman decide to just quietly put up with it, because they’ve learned that no one will really side with them and it’s easier to go along than to lose one’s entire community. The whole group works around this missing stair.
Possible Step 6: Creepy dude rapes someone. If he does, there’s a less than 50% chance that the woman will report it. Why?
Could it be that all the people who surround her have taught her that if she speaks up nothing will really come of it anyway? Could it be that she doesn’t trust her friends and the people who love her to have her back on this? I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY. They couldn’t even kick this dude off their weekly trivia team.
Could it be that the authorities, the police, and the court system will treat her like this is something she caused to happen? Worse, will the dude’s history of being creepy come up and, instead of being used as evidence of a pattern of behavior, be used as evidence that the victim tolerated his advances in the past?
So, yeah, I wanted to be very clear that these letters are part of a larger cultural paradigm that is a direct outgrowth of male privilege. Can women be creepy? Yes, for sure. They are human and capable of anything that humans are capable of. But when they are creepy, they don’t have an entire culture backing them up and explaining why their creepiness isn’t that bad.”
I get these great ideas and I say to myself, “Hey Arbourist, you should write a primer on feminism so you do not have to explain and reexplain 101 material until you turn blue”…then (as usual) someone else has already done it and done it better than I could do. So, many thanks to Thinking Girl for her concise definitions :) –
Feminism is a way of looking at the world, a framework or lens through which other issues can be examined. The basic premise of feminism is that societal structures are based on a false assumption that men are superior to women, and that this state of society is unfair and unfounded and causes gender oppression.
Feminism, like women, is not homogenous. There are many, many offshoots of feminism which hold different theories about the nature of gender inequality, how to achieve gender equality, theories about the relationship between gender inequality and other forms of inequality such as racism, homophobia/heterosexism, classism, theories about the relationships between gender inequality and the environment, etc. Some of these include:
- Radical feminism
- Marxist feminism
- Lesbian feminism
- Black feminism
- Postmodern feminism (including queer theory)
- Post-colonial feminism
- Third World feminism
- Socialist feminism
- Liberal feminism
- Ecofeminism
- Equity feminism
- Gender feminism
- Sex-positive feminism (including anti-pornography theory)
What is Patriarchy?
A mainstay in feminist theory is patriarchy, a relationship of power existing between men and women in which men are in control of socio-economic political power and women are subordinate. Patriarchy informs all other social systems and relationships between men and women, men and other men, and women and other women. Patriarchy is the root of gender oppression. Patriarchy is insidious and runs very deep. It is The MATRIX. It is not always immediately visible to the naked eye. Feminist analysis exposes the ugliness, existence, and persistence of patriarchy, even in seemingly innocuous situations.
What is Oppression?
Oppression is the wide-spread social privileging of some groups over other groups through social structures and institutions. An important thing to understand is that oppression consists of two inter-related phenomena: subjugation and privilege. They live side-by-side. Dismantling oppression means dismantling BOTH of these phenomena.
Something else that is important to understand is that oppression is not discrimination. Oppression is about systems and relations of power, and exists in social structures and institutions. Oppression is wide-spread subjugation of one group while simultaneously privileging another group. This means that those groups who are subjected to oppression are not in a social position to oppress people belonging to the dominant group. There is no such thing as “reverse” sexism, racism, homophobia, (dis)ableism, classism, etc.
Ah yes, tokenism at its best. Just imagine the dudely outrage when called out on this particular trope. See! See! We have a female character… oh wait.
*update – textual goodness*
Take note of the Male-to-Female ratio.
“I’m the only girl.”
— Marzipan, Homestar Runner
— Marzipan, Homestar Runner
For any series not aimed solely at females, odds are high that only one female will be in the regular cast. The Smurfette Principle is the tendency for works of fiction to have exactly one female amongst an ensemble of male characters, in spite of the fact that roughly half of the human race is female. Unless a show is purposefully aimed at a female viewing audience, the main characters will tend to be disproportionately male. In many series, men will have various different personalities, but women will always be The Chick. Thus, by the Law of Conservation of Detail , you only need one. In other cases, the women are feminized versions of existing male characters. This trope has lessened over time, but even now it often applies to animated fare aimed at boys or a general audience. This is especially serious when the regular cast is full of synthetic entities or other species which have a voice or are sufficiently humanoid; these will always be more masculine than feminine, with any feminine examples receiving special attention, suggesting that women are merely an unusual subtype of men. Why does this trope happen? Often, the problem lies with the source material — the work’s an adaptation of something written or created decades before equal recognition for women started to gain momentum. Sometimes, however, writers will try to correct this problem by inserting a few more female characters or at least an Affirmative Action Girl. When the time for merchandising comes, unless the cast is all female, manufacturers won’t create as many figures of the female members as they would males of the franchise even if the series is Merchandise Driven (or at least, until the mid-90’s). This creates a vicious cycle in which The Smurfette Principle is upheld by both toy manufacturers and TV writers, each reasoning that the other will enforce it anyway. This may be because, statistically, companies believe that action figures of female characters don’t sell as well as the male ones, all evidence to the contrary. Of course, the shortage of female action figures to base those figures on can lead to another vicious cycle. In classic comedy animation or shows, especially slapstick, women are often absent because hitting a girl just isn’t considered funny. (In the case of harmless Amusing Injuries, this isn’t always the case.) This trope can also be justified by its unfortunate accuracy in certain contexts. It is fairly realistic for armies, police forces, adventuring parties, and similar groups to be predominantly male, especially if set in a non-Politically Correct History. As noted in the examples below, this trope is nearly universal in all forms of media. Most writers try to balance this out with Positive Discrimination, making the girl more intelligent and level-headed than everyone else, but it still doesn’t change the simple fact that there’s only one of her. Usually, all it does is turn her into a Mary Sue for everyone to loathe. Writers who recognize the problem after a season or two may expand the cast with Affirmative Action Girls. This is usually more effective. Interestingly, this can extend to Mooks and the Monster of the Week with Monogender Monsters, to avoid the Unfortunate Implications of violence against women. The name of this trope was first coined by an article in the New York Times printed April 7, 1991, called “The Smurfette Principle”
. The article discussed the negative message which this trope gave its young audience: that males are individuals who have adventures, while females are a type of deviation who exist only in relation to males.
Oh the legions of butthurt MRA’s and Nice Guys are trolling the comments on this particular video. “Dear God!,”they say,”what about the men?” can be heard reverberating the intertubes. Wednesday is going to be an examination of the series on video games from a feminist perspective. Enjoy the ride.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Spot the Question.
August 23, 2012 in Education, Feminism | Tags: Awesome Comments I steal from the Internet, Feminism, Patriarchy, Rape Culture, Spot the Question, Understanding Feminism | by The Arbourist | 13 comments
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“Not surprisingly, I have a story? It’s pretty long, and I’m sorry. My husband, Doctor Glass, recently went on a weeklong workshop. The participants worked on teams, slept in a dormitory, shared meals and spent all day together. While there, Dr Glass acquired a strikingly beautiful female friend, who was absolutely luminous – like a fallen star or a revolutionary. She was also just about to enter university, making her very much younger than Dr Glass. They were on the same team, had much in common, and seemed to enjoy each other.
However, there was a twenty-something dude on the course who, according to Dr Glass, “made things awkward.” Immediately, he tried to make the workshop all about his pantsfeelings for Luminous Girl. Although he was on a different team, he was constantly buzzing around Dr Glass and Luminous Girl, getting in their way (which was dangerous and distracting, as they were doing physical labor) and trying to get her to talk to him, work with him, come over and look at his work, etc. In return she tried to ignore him, laughed him off politely, repeatedly referenced her desire to do her work, physically moved away whenever he got close to her, and stuck like glue to Dr Glass; saying NO in all those thousand little pleasant ways that women are trained to do. Awkward Dude tried to impress her with physical activity, but Dr Glass cut him off because he was being distracting. Confused and annoyed, Awkward stepped up his Game, trying to impress her with his intellectual cred, and it went down like a lead zeppelin, with Luminous and Dr Glass resuming their own work and conversations. So Awkward started loudly asking wasn’t Dr Glass married?!
At this, Awkward Dude attempted to kill Dr Glass with his laser-eyeballs at every turn, lurking and glaring and pining like a bad Snape impersonator. (Dr Glass wasn’t sure why he was suddenly the target of the resulting animosity, as he clearly had no romantic interest in Luminous, until I explained it to him: Dude had decided that the reason Luminous Girl was not sleeping with him was because she was the Possession of Another Male, and further, a Male who Already Had His Fair Share of Females; thus Dr Glass was the enemy for not shunning her and leaving a clear path for fellow males. “Oh,” said Dr Glass in sudden revelation, “That makes sense, I guess.”)
But the guy persisted – it wasn’t that Luminous didn’t like him! It was that she was clearly in thrall of my husband. The solution was to get her alone! So whenever they sat down to a lecture, Luminous, practically dragging Dr Glass by the arm, would move like lightning to position herself between him and a safe wall – with her lovely admirer circling them and glaring, loudly asking Dr Glass about his Wife Back Home. Awkward Dude implied that Dr Glass was creepy and odd for always hanging out with a girl half his age. Awkward Dude was annoyed that the course director, an older woman who should presumably know better, had assigned dorm space based on teams, so that Dr Glass and Luminous bunked in adjacent rooms (while he, Awkward Dude, was in the wing with the married couples!) because it was inappropriate and wrong to place a married man next to a teenaged female. On a particularly cold day, Dr Glass noticed that Luminous did not have warm clothing, and lent her an extra hoodie. It happened to have his name on it; Awkward Dude practically ignited, to the point where even the other people on the course were laughing awkwardly at him and saying “Uh, she’s… allowed to wear clothes?”
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