On Being and Not Being a Feminist

I am a feminist.

And I am not a feminist.

Both of these statements are true.

I am a feminist, even though I do not typically choose that language to describe myself.

Female human beings are absolutely and equally human beings.  Their value lies in their inherent personhood.  Oppression of women, be it in the workplace or in education or in relationships?  Unacceptable.  Violence against women is violence, and assaultive/predatory behavior towards women is both monstrous and wrong.

I reject, completely, the idea that women are in any way subordinate to men.  Women have been and will be my teachers, and my mentors, and my spiritual guides.

Women should be compensated equally for equal work, and a just society should be structured in such a way that this is possible.  Women with the gifts for leadership, and there are as many as there are men, should be in leadership.  Women who choose to nurture and raise children as part of a traditional family structure should be honored for that choice.  Women should be lawyers and doctors and artists, counselors and engineers and programmers, legislators and pastors and owners of small businesses.  What matters is that they are pursuing their best vocation.

I reject the idea, in point fact, that any work is inherently "women's work."  Women, being, you know, human and all, are called to do many things.  And work is work.   In the quest for a balanced and sane existence, I have been willing to seek my calling in part-time work, allowing my driven, smart, and highly-capable wife to pursue her career.  So I do laundry, make dinner, do dishes.  I changed diapers, I vacuum, and care for and help nurture our kids.  A task is a task.

I see how women and girls are treated in our culture, objectified and commodified, and I recoil.  I see their basic personhood diminished or delimited, and I will not stand for it, or allow that way of thinking to take root in the boys my wife and I are raising.

In that sense, meaning the practical, material, actual commitment to the rights and personhood of women, I am a feminist.

But I am also not a feminist.

I am not a feminist because I have stood in close encounter with feminism--not as an interpersonal and cultural practice, but as a system of thought arising out of academe--over nearly two decades of engagement with higher education.  Having studied and engaged with academic feminism, I do not share its semiotics or its worldview.

Though I can speak it, the language of academic feminism is not my language.  I do not find it either compelling or transformative.  I do not talk about patriarchy as a way of framing all oppression, or view the entire world through the lens of gendered discourse.  I do not conceptualize the good in gendered terms, with the feminine as proxy language for the good, and the masculine understood as inherently oppressive.  It seems...counterproductive.

And joyless.  And drab.  And devoid of rhythm, power, and poetry.  Having studied faith, such a radicalized and binary view is alien not just to my faith, but also to those indigenous faith traditions that embrace the divine feminine and its lifegiving relation with the divine masculine.

The worldview of academic feminism is also not my worldview.  Academic feminism as I have encountered it manifests as an ethic of radical particularity, of fragmentation, a house endlessly divided.  Part of this is, frankly, a function of academic discourse, in which seeking and creating "new" categories is the only way to get published.  But when that reality is applied to a philosophical and ethical system, that has impacts.  Academic feminism is a fundamentally particularizing ethos, meaning it understands "truth" as residing in the particularity of socially mediated identity.  Men cannot understand women, because they are not women.  Women privileged by education and the absence of oppression cannot understand those who are not, because they do not share their social position.  White women cannot understand women of color, because they are not women of color.  Cisgendered womyn-born-womyn cannot understand gender-variant women.  And so on, and so forth, in an endless fractal splitting.

Then there's the "liberality" of it.  For all the fulminations of the reactionary right wing, feminism isn't liberal.  It may be leftist, but it is also fundamentally and explicitly illiberal, viewing individuals through the lenses of the categories they inhabit and not as who they are as sentient, self-aware, and free beings.  Take, for instance, the manner in which this perspective may be dismissed on the basis of a sequence of labels.   I am a privileged white male, speaking from a hegemonic patriarchal perspective.  I am a contextual node. What I am not is a person.

And yes, I know, this was done to women for millennia.  It's my turn to sit down, shut up, and listen.  But that assumes I have not been listening, and that I, as a human being, am just representative of a category. It returns evil for evil, as my faith tradition puts it, which is sort of a no no.

Contemporary academic feminism speaks the language of othering, explicitly and intentionally devoid of the universals that provide the conceptual bridges for the heart's compassion.  It is a mass of triggers and umbrage, harder to negotiate than a minefield.  I do not find it gracious, welcoming, or useful.  How could I, when the concepts of "utility" and "purpose" are fundamentally antithetical to academic feminist discourse?

So I am, and I am not, a feminist.  In the abstract, academic, philosophical sense?  No.  I am not.

But yes, yes I am, practically and materially and interpersonally, socially and culturally.

Given that doing and being is more important than abstractions and semantics, I think I'm comfortable with that.

Delicious Meat

Two different threads of popular consciousness drifted across my feedreader this last week.

Meme number one was the lingering phenomenon of the neofeminist Slut Walk.  These events are a response to a particularly stupid and ignorant comment made a while back by a law enforcement officer in a rape trial, who suggested that a victim of a sex crime shouldn't have dressed provocatively.   Typically, the marches involve young women who are standing up against that completely unacceptable statement by affirming that women have the right to dress as hott and sexyyyy as they want.   Many of the march participants wear intentionally sexualized clothing, showing that they are empowered to do what they wish with their own sexuality.  They're also trying to make the point: Wearing clothes that are designed to draw sexual attention...or even being sexually forward...does not constitute permission to assault or violate.

And they are right.  Nothing excuses sexual assault.  Ever.  Period.

And here's meme number two.  Today there was another droplet from the endlessly spewing firehose of pop culture irrelevance circulating the interwebs.   In a pitching-the-movie infotainment industry interview with Chia LaBeef, star of the latest round of Michael Bay summer blockbuster Transformer loudness, he shared that one of the reasons that co-star Megan Fox may have bailed from the series is that she'd grown tired of being used as flagrant eye-candy to draw in adolescent or perennially-adolescent males.   To quote:

This is a girl who was taken from complete obscurity and placed in a sex-driven role in front of the whole world and told she was the sexiest woman in America.  And she had a hard time accepting it.  When Mike would ask her to do specific things, there was no time for fluffy talk.  We're on the run.  And the one thing Mike lacks is tact.  There's no time for 'I would like you to just arch your back 70 degrees.'

The "article" goes on to dish over the actress selected as the replacement lump of womanflesh, calling her...apparently as a compliment...a "sexy, delicious piece of meat."

These two things are related.  

The problem I have with the SlutWalks is not with the point they're making about sexual assault.  It's that the new and sexualized version of feminism feels like it has uncritically embraced the mass-marketization of women's sexuality.   The point they're making is fine.  But the reason the events get media attention is the same reason that Michael Bay dangles succulent pulchritude in front of the slavering permadolescent American masses.  And I ain't down with that.

Women do not derive their value as human beings from their sexual desirability.  Being able to present yourself as sexually aggressive and desirable means exactly nothing.  

What gives a woman value as a person is her intelligence.  Her warmth of heart.  Her insight.  Her thoughtfulness.  Her life-gained wisdom.  Her independence.  Her musicality.  Her creativity.  Her depth of spirit.  Her way with words.  Her kindness.  Her gentleness.  Her tough-as-nails resilience.  Her ferocity.  Her hard work.  Her boldness.   The wisdom of King Lemuel's mother may be several thousand years old, but it remains an excellent metric of what bold, empowered women really look like...and what, if they are wise, men should admire in a woman.  

None of those things correlate with the firmness and desirability of their young, exposed, marketable flesh.

Clothes Make the Woman

As Washington DC smothers under a blanket of intense heat and humidity, my little family has been sheltering in place from the ongoing heat tsunami. We've spent the last few evenings in the cool comfort of our basement, watching movies together. Through the joys of streaming Netflix, we've been indulging in some blast-from-the-past cinema, delving into some of the best that the 1980s had to offer.

The boys, particularly my tweener, are often reluctant to explore the cinema of this era. It's old! It's stupid! The music is terrible! Their hair frightens me, Dad!

As I've not seen most of these movies in twenty years, I'm always a little reluctant to trust my memories of their quality. Sometimes, I'm pleasantly surprised, as when we watched the still delightfully entertaining "Little Shop of Horrors." Sometimes, I can't believe I paid money to see a particularly wretched movie, as in the case of the stinktacular "Conan the Destroyer." We ended up having to turn that one off when our brains started to bleed. Usually, though, I'm able to successfully predict whether the kids will like a film or not.

Last night, we settled in with "Short Circuit," a amiable bit of 80s fluff about a robot that comes to life. I'd predicted that the boys would love it, and I was dead on. The humor was right up their alley. But what struck both me and the missus was the lead actress. Yeah, it was Ally Sheedy, which was a blast from the past, but that wasn't what got us.

It was the way she was dressed.

She was the love interest. From the dialogue, it was clear that the men around her...and the robot...thought she was attractive. And she was. But her clothing was remarkable in it's modesty. Long flowing skirts. Comfortable, loose-fitting blouses. Long slacks. This was not a prudish movie, either. It had rather more profanity than I'd recalled. It's humor was indistinguishable from the humor in a contemporary action comedy.

Yet the female lead wore clothes that nowadays would identify her as a Mennonite.

The image portrayed of women and what constitutes dressing attractively was radically different less than a generation ago. I watched a smidge of Top Gun the other day. In that 80s-fest, Kelly McGillis was supposed to be over-the-top sexy. But she mostly dressed...well...rather demurely by today's standards. When I go back to pictures of that era, the yearbook images of the girls I knew who were wild , provocative, and a tiny bit dangerous...the clothing that at the time was so...err...intriguing...looks like a burqua compared to what I encountered the last time I went to the mall.

Back in the 80s, the area around my home church was one of the seediest places in DC, a meat market of porn shops, drug dealers, and prostitutes. The clothes that teen girls wear today to go out..and sometimes even to go to church...show more skin than those on the streetwalkers who'd sometimes solicit me on my way back to my car after I left the church. I don't say that by way of judging the character of the young women who wear them. It is simply an objective assessment of the amount of fabric involved.

I do wonder what impact the significantly increased sexualization of women has on our culture. Even a significant portion of modern feminism seems to have conceptually acquiesced to the market-driven idea that women are primarily sexual beings. Sex is, or so the argument goes, an integral part of a woman's empowerment. That it is useful for selling product is just a side effect.

I don't quite buy that. I think...and not just because I'm an old fuddy duddy, dagnabbit...that the sea change in cultural expectations about women's appearance isn't a positive development for 1) the psyche of women and girls and 2) the way in which men and boys learn to view the women around them.