Yes, I'm doing this when I should be doing something else...

[textualdeviance]

But I'm riffing off of something kyooverse said on the Post From Hell...

I consider myself a traditional feminist in many ways-- primarily in that I believe traditional gender roles are harmful to women (and to men, too.)

But one of the things traditional feminism missed is the notion that women are not All Good.

Absolutely women, as a sex, are still second class citizens in most of the world's cultures. Some worse than others, and some subcultures worse than others, too.

But where traditional feminism went wrong is in assuming that men are the ones solely responsible for this, and that men are therefore The Enemy, and the ones to be blamed, to be feared, to be held accountable. In training women to be aware of male power and to find ways to avoid being harmed by it, women were led into this false sense of safety and security with each other.



Case in point, the oft-discussed Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (and other women-only spaces like that.) The women there believe that they will be safe so long as an adult penis does not cross the boundaries of that space. And yet that's definitely not the case. While they may be safe from being raped by a man, or otherwise subject to male-specific violent or oppressive acts, they are still not safe. Women are not inherently non-violent. They are generally not as physically violent as men, but to assume that women are all nurturing, totally loving creatures who would never harm each other is a dangerous myth.

Who is it that enforces the practice of FGM? Women. Who is it that pressures girls into eating disorders? Women. Who is it that tells women they may as well not exist if they don't have male approval? Women. Who is it that ostracizes girls who are not gender-compliant? Women.

It may be true that the reason women do this is because of the outside pressure from the larger, male-dominant culture (particularly consumer culture) but that doesn't absolve women as a whole from culpability for the role they play in continuing the cycle, and it certainly doesn't absolve individual women from responsibility to not engage in activity which is damaging to other women, assuming they're in a safe enough position to do so. If you don't have a gun to your head, and won't lose your job or your house if you cease oppressing other women, you have no excuse. The women who do FGM have an excuse for what they do. Some arrogant teenage fuckwit nagging the school fat girl does not. Some mother clucking about how her daughter should really grow her hair out and wear something prettier does not. Women who merrily feed the corporate beauty and fashion machine, regardless of the deaths those industries are responsible for do not.

Women constitute a majority of the US population. Women now hold a great deal of power positions in business, politics, science and the arts. If women were indeed only pawns of the patriarchy who know not what they do, then feminism should have cured that, and we would all be free now. The strength in numbers and actual power we carry now, while still not ideal, is enough to set us free if women were in fact fighting for our rights as a group.

But obviously, that's not happening. Certainly, some women are too afraid of the consequences of bucking the system to suddenly stop feeding the sexism machine. But others know better, and are either too lazy, or have a twisted idea that they're benefitting from the subjugation of women as a group to bother. The fact that so many women with power insist on using that power to continue the abuse of other women is appalling. And those women absolutely should be held responsible for what they do.

One of the reasons Blank's original post pissed me off is the notion that femme space is somehow some special, magical place where one is fully loved and accepted and intimate with everyone there, because you're all mututally bonding over shoes. That's a pretty myth, but it's just that. The message of femme space is not "all are welcome here" but "you're welcome here if you are Femme or if you are Butch and support Femme." Sisterhood is not open to all with a cunt. It is open only to those women (and men) who will play along and do their part to reinforce harmful gender stratification.

No, we women are not safe with each other. Women-only spaces are not magical, mystical safe houses where no one will ever be harmed. Women in power has not ended sexism, and in fact in some ways is reinforcing it, because the only women who have thusfar been allowed to come to power are the ones who play the game. The concept that one will recieve unconditional love, safety and support merely by associating solely with someone whose genitals or gender identity you share is simply not actual fact.

Women can be just as nasty as men, and in some ways nastier because they're more subtle about the damage they do. And I'm supposed to just grin and say how great it is to be a chick, and how great other chicks are?

Hardly. No one is my "sister" just because she and I both have cunts.

Comments

[thefirstalicat.livejournal.com]

But where traditional feminism went wrong is in assuming that men are the ones solely responsible for this, and that men are therefore The Enemy, and the ones to be blamed, to be feared, to be held accountable. In training women to be aware of male power and to find ways to avoid being harmed by it, women were led into this false sense of safety and security with each other.

I'm a bit apprehensive jumping into this (having read most, but not quite all, of the Post From Hell), but I want to make an historical point, from the perspective of a 46-year-old woman, who was not quite old enough for the Second Wave that began in the 1960s after the introduction of The Pill, but who is old enough to remember, as a teenager and young adult, the climate of the culture supposedly post-freedom for women. I admit, to start, that my experience is from the Bay Area in the early 1970s, probably as much the hotbed of feminism as any place in the world at that time.

And from that perspective, I will tell you true, that neither me nor my peers nor most of my elder sisters believed that "men are the only ones solely responsible for this." We knew, very clearly, that there were women who chose to keep their lives tranquil, or to further their ambitions, by being relatively "compliant." We knew that there were men who saw how women as a whole were treated, and rebelled against enforcing the stereotype that their male leaders told them was "normal." And we knew how individual we were; again, granted that we're talking Berkeley High School (the only public high school in Berkeley) in the early to mid 1970s; perhaps that was abnormal in the rest of the country, but you wouldn't know that for that time and I never met anyone in my peer group from other parts of the States who weren't aware of this reality then.

One thing I want very much to say is that my "enlightenment," in those times in that place, came from a man. A musical mentor, really, a jazz musician/steel drum artist, Andy Narell. Who was an early "male feminist" in about 1973 or so; he strove to explain feminism to the then-14-year-old me, by trying to rile me up about being denied stuff because I was a girl. He tried several tactics - university places, jobs - until he hit on, "suppose you were told you couldn't play your music, because you're a girl?" And I replied, "then I'd walk away from whoever told me that, fuck you!" And he said, "yes, but today you are being told that"; and as of that day, I was a feminist.

So you can't tell me that men are enemies, or that women in the Second Wave in the 1970s believed that. My example is by no means the exception; modern feminism has never declared Men Bad Women Good. It is simply not true, and to start your thesis by saying there was a "mistake" made in "traditional feminism" 30+ years ago is to simply mis-represent the facts. Yes, I will agree that women's rights have progressed far too slowly since the Second Wave began (women still make, what, 74 Cents per men's dollar in the same job?); but I think more men have started to think that's unfair, and have started to consider equality between the sexes as a right, not an aberration as I can attest it was only 30 years ago.

None of this addresses the various sub-cultures of which you're engaged at the moment, I know; but I felt it important to set the record straight, feminist movement wise, from someone who lived it first hand.

[nat-does-lj.livejournal.com]

"Women who merrily feed the corporate beauty and fashion machine, regardless of the deaths those industries are responsible for do not."

Make-up and fashion KILL?

Pray, do tell how.

As for sisterhood, it can be found quite easily, all one has to do is open their eyes and minds. No need to lock up the penis endowed.