Post-Backlash Feminism

Last week I was honored to spend a wonderful day with Women's Studies-affiliated women and men at IPFW. My visit was intellectually stimulating, enlightening--and a whole lot of fun.

The chair of Women's studies and her staff arranged a luncheon book talk and an evening key note. At both events folks from the university and the Ft. Wayne community gathered to discuss not only my work, but also issues concerning us all, like breast cancer awareness, violence against women on campus, the American beauty culture, and the language of gender. I am flattered by their attendance and grateful for the opportunity to learn from these good folks.

The men and women I met were generous, interested and engaged with the issues we take up everyday in the study of women and culture--and that's a credit to the culture of IPFW and the work of the Women's Studies faculty. The tone and tenor of the conversations I had (both formal and informal) during my visit affirmed for me how important intellectual work on women is, how urgent and necessary. These conversations also confirmed for me that this work, done well (as it is plainly done at IPFW), has the effect of bringing people together and reminded me of why I undertook this work in the first place.

Thanks to everyone who had a part in my visit., especially Janet, Linda, Mandy, Liz and Jen.

Thank you.

"Rethinkbreastcancer.com" had a great idea: get men to care about breast cancer by filming bouncing breasts. I'm not kidding.

In a public-service-announcement style video published on the website, young (ostensibly cancer-less) breasts are fetishized and marketed as toys for men.

First breast cancer awareness gets pinkified, with cancer victims and survivors infantalized and obscured behind giant pink bows and teddy bears.  Now this.

The message of the video: men's fascination with "the boobs" should motivate young women to take care of the breasts they have. Keep those toys perky and healthy--for the pleasure of others.

The video suggests that If you don't get involved in cancer awareness for the good of women's health, maybe you will if we show you lots of boobies. Breast cancer is a woman's disease, attacking women's bodies and potentially destroying their health. So, shouldn't we all, men, too, be concerned about breast cancer?

Apparently the kind women at this site don't think so. We've got to make the disease a threat to men (it is; it takes daughters, mothers, sisters, partners friends everyday). Hence, a public service announcement warning of the darker danger of the disease: fewer "boobs" to ogle and fetishize. (The insult to men is equally inexcusable.)

Check it out; this ostensibly woman-center, woman-run website offers it up without apology: http://www.rethinkbreastcancer.com/boobyball-cruise.html

"Rethinkbreastcancer.com" essentially devotes itself to bringing younger women into the conversation about breast health. The site offers lots of information about prevention and support. All good things.

But this PSA is not a good thing. It ignores female bodies at the heart of cancer awareness. It insults women surviving and suffering from the disease (not to mention those who love them) . And, piling on the insult, replaces the reality of cancer with sexist portrayals of women; we're worthless without the bouncing playthings so lovingly photographed in the video.

Further, the video reminds us that women envy each other's breasts, and we feel bad when ours don't measure up. The video features a young women in a bikini strutting around a pool where an array of men and women watch her walk. Close ups of her breasts dominate the one-minute piece, wider shots show men's admiration and women's envy. So: women should take care of their bodies in order to please men and make other women jealous? Seriously?

We can't even get respect from our own gender; even our (very serious) health concerns are turned against us in pernicious and sexist ways.

It's so tiresome, isn't it?

According to Jamie Oliver, Huntington, WV overflows with fat, unhealthy people who don't know enough to feed themselves properly. Oh, but don't worry, the snooty Brit doesn't think we're "ignorant" or "stupid." Imagine our relief.

Seriously? The reality TV star comes here to film a show that has made him rich and famous, he arrives fully cognizant of this town's status as most overweight in a country where we rank among the poorest states, and he feigns alarm on glimpsing a typical family's poor diet. *Yawn.*

I have two suggestions: First: I'd like to ask Oliver to join my family and me for a typical meal at our home. I have managed to uncover a cache of fresh fruit and veg (sshhh: it's in the giant Kroger on rte. 60) to prepare for his visit.  Also, I recently taught myself to read, so I can finally use one of Gramma's old cookbooks that we keep in the outhouse (I promise to ignore any recipe that calls for lard or ramps). Oh, and for your comfort, I'll teach my teenage children to use knives and forks. I really think, Mr. Oliver, you will feel right at home.

Second: I'd like to ask Mr. Reality Star to endow a community garden in the center of our town so that we can grow the kinds of foods that might encourage good habits, and he can leave something useful behind (besides the shadow of his giant ego).

The dynamic between men and women on American campuses tends to be, as a friend recently put it, "thoroughly ensconced in pre-feminist thinking." The American Academy is a sexist world and women must relentlessly lobby for themselves and their female students against the misogynist advances of academic policy in general, academic men in particular.

Trained in the wake of the Political Correctness movement, my academic career has occurred along side discussions of sexual boundaries on campus, free speech, multicultural sensitivity, and power dynamics between professors and students. The latter is especially charged, as one might imagine, but I can remember thinking that some rules of restraint had been made pretty clear: no ogling students in class, no touching students in one's office, no pornography in class, no sex between professor and student(s)...

And yet, those things regularly take place. In fact, nothing has really been wholly resolved, in this regard, and now I think of it, the American university is awash in sexual predation and harassment--and policies so porous that tenured men get away with pretty much whatever they want. As a post on Feministing.com recently commented, "male entitlement," is nearly inescapable?particularly within the halls of the American university.

But what about outside the university? What happens when female students and male professors move their relationships into virtual spaces, like Facebook?

In my institution one particular male professor has a highly performative, deliberately provocative, often pornographic presence on Facebook, and this persona emerges in his relationships with young female "friends." His profile is public (one does not have to "friend" him to see it or comment), and he is part of the institutional network, so happening on his offensive posts is not difficult, and, frankly, happened accidentally for me.

The flavor of his offensive posts: he offers to "come tackle" one young woman's "sweet ass"; routinely posts his desire to "c-m" when he finds a pic particularly pleasing; and posts double entendres, like finding a woman's photo "fetching" and wishing he were twenty years younger so he could "show [her] what he means." Finally, he posted the results of a quiz he took determining which body part he might be. Turns out--I am not making this up--he was a "dick." He was delighted, and posted a celebratory reaction, describing himself ejaculating.

While none of his FB friends is to my knowledge currently enrolled at the university, this professor maintains professional relationships with at least some of them. For example, one young female FB friend is currently awaiting a letter of recommendation from him.

His behavior is offensive by any measure; he is clearly trolling FB for young women in order to establish flirtatious (to say the least) relationships with them. That he's targeting ex-students is disturbing, and suggests an investment in exploiting whatever measure of power he had over them in the classroom. That one is beholden to him for letters of recommendation probably violates EEOC policies, and would certainly act as a deterrent to her reporting his posts or asking him to behave.

That he is performative and entirely public about this behavior suggests a glib indifference to taste and restraint grounded in seniority and tenure. Not to mention gender. Finally, that he announces himself as an employee of this institution and is linked into its network puts his very public behavior out there for prospective students and their parents to stumble across.

Would I send my daughter away to an institution I knew tolerated such offensive (and abusive, according to the rules of FB) behavior? Under no circumstances. Will this profile discourage other parents and students? There is no way to measure. What one can say for sure is that until such sexism and predation ceases within the halls of academe, we have little chance of stopping it elsewhere. Perhaps the only upside in cases like this one is that in virtual spaces like Facebook folks often expose themselves for who they are?and as individuals we ought to avoid.

Reading feministing.com today I came across a blog post and series of reader comments that offer more examples of post-Backlash style woman-on-woman aggression, where feminism is divided into narrower and narrower camps until the movement itself is all but lost.  This kind of rhetorical turf warfare takes place daily throughout the blogosphere.

The topic of today’s feministing.com post was sex-positive feminism and a reaction against it the blogger called “anti-sex-positive” feminism, which was further parsed as a subset of  “radical feminism.” You see where I’m going, right? (Here’s the link: http://community.feministing.com/2009/08/the-irony-of-anti-sex-positive.html) The blogger further stated that most arguments against sex-positive feminism are bound to patriarchal notions of female sexual helplessness and utilize “the master’s tools.”  

This blog event enacts the stereotypes that work against feminism: 1) women can't sustain reasoned arguments and often fall into name calling (ad hominem) attacks against each other; 2) all women identifying as feminist freak out about porn (whether they are for or against); 3) and the feminist movement is all but dead and now so-called feminists just argue among themselves.

So much of the disagreements listed in this blog and within all the comments afterword would dissipate with some clarification and term defining.

I want to dial down the ideological anger/passion/ alarm and make a few comments/suggestions.

First, no one ever wrote, in all seriousness, that “All sex is rape.” Not Dworkin, not MacKinnon. This has become a hackneyed truism of the misogynist mainstream, and it simply is not true. It’s a lie used against feminists objecting to sexual violence against women. That sentence was made up a long time ago and has continually been mis-identified as an accurate quotation or used as a dishonest “gloss” on feminism’s positions regarding pornography.  Let it go.

Second, let's define “pornography,” so we know what we’re arguing about. Both Dworkin and MacKinnon did years ago. The pornography statute MacKinnon wrote defines porn as: “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words, that also includes one or more of the following:

     (1) Women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or

     (2) Women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or

     (3) Women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt,    or as dismembered or truncated or fragmented or severed into body parts; or

     (4) Women are presented as being penetrated by objects or animals; or

     (5) Women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury abasement, torture, shown as filthy or         inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual; or

     (6) Women are presented as sexual objects for domination, conquest, violation, exploitation,       possession, or use, or through postures or positions of servility or submission or display.”

Additionally, the “statute provides that the “use of men, children, or transsexuals in the place of women in paragraphs (1) through (6) above shall also constitute pornography under this section.”

Following the spirit of this definition, porn never means merely ”sexually explicit material.” Or “erotica.” Or art documenting/depicting consensual mutually pleasurable sexual activity.

Also following  the logic of this definition, sex-positive would have absolutely nothing to do with “pornography” and everything to do with consensual sexual activity; likewise, radical feminism is not concerned with limiting consensual sexual behavior and is concerned (quite reasonably) with eliminating  “pornography.”

Of course we’re going to disagree as grown, politically invested women, but to tear each other down in defense of pornography? Here we are eating each other alive, serving the larger culture’s disrespect for us, and confirming the worst stereotypes against feminism—all in one of the most visited feminist venues in media.

“Master’s tools,” indeed.

My step-son hits. When he’s angry, he lashes out. Sweet and funny when feeling safe and unaccosted, this boy turns ugly and violent when he’s provoked. He has a kind face, is handsome as he can be, and his silly jokes make his dad laugh. He is 24 years old.

Since I’ve known him these past four years, he has been arrested twice, involved in no fewer than eight bar fights, and has moved nine times, switching roommates and groups of friends each time—twice, his moves were precipitated by violence between himself and his roommates.

One evening last week, my husband hung up the phone and announced that “Drew is going to stay with us for a few days”  because he and his girlfriend (with whom he now lives) got into a fight. In explanation, my husband had to tell me something, so he said, “He scared her.” Drew was staying with us to protect her, he explained, coming to our place to give her some space and get himself straightened out. He knows he’s got an anger problem, he assured me, and is giving himself time to calm down. What a nice guy, my husband seemed to say, Drew taking care of his girlfriend this way.

What happened? How exactly did Drew scare Trish? “He lifted her up by the shoulders and dropped her into a chair.”

We all know this thread-bare bullshit story of the abuser rescuing the abused—and those who enable them. And many of us recognize what happened next, when I made to object. Noting the look on my face, my husband offered up the condensed version of the “He’s-my-son-and-it’s-my-house” lecture. Many of us also recognize that whatever story we get from Drew about what happened is a lie. If Drew tells us he dropped Trish into a chair, he more likely slammed her into a chair, and also did other things. He broke her stuff or hit her or screamed in her face or pulled her hair.

This situation presents the perfect storm for my marriage. If I do nothing, if I resist my conscience and my impulse to reach out to Trish, I am complicit in the next act of violence. Reaching out to her, however, would probably end my marriage. I cannot imagine my husband tolerating my treating his son’s girlfriend like a victim of his son’s violence. Not only would he not react well, but such an act on my part would force into the open the compromises, the equivocations, the lies we tell ourselves about Drew’s violent tendencies. For without these, we could not go on.

So I wait. For the next phone call, the act of abuse that will be definitive and convince my husband, his ex-wife (Drew’s mother), and the rest of that family, that something must be done. Many of us know precisely what this means: until Drew inflicts enough damage to leave marks, on this woman, scars that cannot be equivocated away, I am powerless to move this family to stop their son.

As an activist, committed feminist, a loving human being a mother with a grown daughter, I feel my obligation to this young woman. And I hesitate, delayed by anxieties about my husband’s anger, his son’s potential for violence. I hesitate, I wait. It’s a misery.

Here we sit watching television in a house we may be booted out of very soon. The economic disaster has eviscerated my husband's small business, and we cannot keep the house on my salary alone. By "eviscerated" I mean ended. Can't make payroll, can't pay bills, gotta close up shop. 

 I now know someone who has lost his "life savings." My husband began socking money away in his twenties, started a business at 40 and now, in his 48th year, it's gone. All of it. It's one of the saddest things I have ever witnessed.

Plans for retirement, helping grandkids through college, easing peacefully, ordinarily, into old age--gone. We no longer talk about the future, look forward with anything like optimism or cheer; we plan for the worst. We get through the day. Cheerful around the kids, exhausted and vacant when we're alone. Our marriage is in abeyance, somewhere else, not this place, waiting for us to reclaim it after the numbing business of getting on with things has been gotten on with.

My husband and I don't have much in common, deal with things in very different ways, but he makes me laugh and when I smell his skin I feel safe, so I dial down my anger, terror, disappointment and watch television after work, laugh with the kids and wait for better days.

This week I celebrate my 45th birthday, so I am thinking of middle things: mid-life, mid-ness, being mid-way. The  first time I encountered the notion of a mid-life crisis, I was 13 years old and my father, who was 41at the time and had recently grown a beard, came home one day with a perm. It was 1977 and we lived in a rainy mid-western city where Dad worked as an underwriter for a life insurance company. Somehow that perm had made perfect sense to him. My mother was encouraging, keeping my brother and me quiet and telling Dad he looked "great."

Looking back, I now understand that her behavior was a defense against waking to find Dad long gone (with a new mistress, a new sports car, a new 'life choice') and saving herself the trouble of taking him back when he came to his senses (and changed his hairstyle). The perm didn't last long. Dad returned to parting his thinning hair down the side and combing it tightly across his head in no time. Seems Mom knew what she was doing.

I don't know if Mom went through anything like a mid-life crisis. We didn't talk about her experiences back then. I came to understand that women have lives they feel, experiences and bodies they care very much about, only after I abandoned the plasticine suburbs for higher education.

Now here I am, a middle-aged woman with a child in college, another in high school, a husband, laundry, shopping, a job, three cats, a dog. And I find myself curious about how my mother got through. Whatever she did was invisible to me. My inclination? Today? Run. Fuck housework. I'm going to sell painted shells on some beach wearing next to nothing and reading novels late into every night. My family? They can come find me. They say they can't do without me, but that's a trick. To keep me here. Keep me fretting over their needs first and continually putting my own needs second (or third, or fourth...). They mean no harm; men and children have been trained into this paradigm of family life and it's cruel distributions of labor.

I've not run, of course--does anyone really do that? --but I am leading, these days, a rather rich fantasy life.

When I'm not thinking about the beach, I am thinking about middle things.What exactly am I in the middle of? Not sure. Have learned not to see life as a long, cruel crawl toward failure--that's good, right? But where is it heading? Ugh, OK. That's not the best question; we all know where it's heading. I guess many of us come to this question at this point due to certain circumstances typical of mid-life: kids leaving home, parents aging. We must rethink how to care for both and face that we, too, are growing older.

I live and teach in West Virginia and have come to understand the prejudices against and stereotypes of the population of this state.  We are a largely underserved population: badly educated, poor, with a history of exploitation by corporate outsiders. When Obama said he understood why some folks would cling to guns and religion, I knew exactly who and what he was talking about.

It is my sincere hope that West Virginia (and the rest of Appalachia) will vote for Barack Obama precisely because of his observation about guns and religion.

Unlike McCain, to whom folks like us are totally invisible, Obama tries to understand how and why people come to their beliefs. Obama does not mock or turn voters against one another; indeed, he understands that some populations feel victimized, helpless and not a little angry. He recognizes that many of us feel overlooked, even abandoned by our leaders.

It is true that some populations are not as sophisticated as others; it is not true, however, that an apparent lack of sophistication and an embrace of guns and religion translates into ignorance, intolerance or stupidity. This long campaign season has proven that only one candidate understands this.

We all cling to markers of security. We all manage our anxieties with faith in things larger than ourselves (intellectuality, art, religion, family values), ideas that allow us to understand forces that not only frighten, but also genuinely victimize, us.

Here in West Virginia we have selected a Democrat for President in 14 of the past 19 elections. We need to make it an even 20.

As a population that has traditionally been either ridiculed or dismissed altogether by our politicians, we owe it to ourselves to elect the guy who sees us.

It�s the best place to start.

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