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The War Between the Feminists
Oct. 29th, 2010 10:09 amThe reason the Wonderbra is not empowering, as third wave feminists insist, is that all it gives you is sexual power over others. Validation, agency, human rights and economic parity do not take place, and men think, correctly as it happens, that we can be talked out of our human rights as easily we can be talked out of our pants.
This is the sleeping with the enemy problem. Wasting your agency on sexual power over others, rather than challenging the oppression these same others are enforcing on you within the sexual relationship, is rightly seen as co-optation of feminism. Serial monogamy, in the analysis of such stalwarts as the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb (Not a Feminist), for example, has got to be the biggest co-optation of political agency that there is: Flashmob revolution calling? Can't talk to you now, got a booty call I need to take. That's what happened to Haight Ashbury pacifism and communalism. Hippie chicks fuck, in the immortal locution of Joan Didion (Not a Feminist), and that's seditious.
Second wave het feminists my age are talking privately about how what the movement produced is the Dutch treat -- more sexual privilege with impunity for men, more feminization of poverty as more children go fatherless. Fathers being the people of whose wage women make 38 per cent. Daddy = college education and professional school. I once had a brother-in-law who worked like a dog, and made a huge amount of money, which he needed because all three of his straight-A children were in college, law school, medical school at the same time. These are grandchildren of Hitler refugees, the great nephews of seven exterminated Jewish families, and the riposte, one could argue, to the Nazi genocide. The world is a better place for cultural capital. It is the baby which cannot be thrown out with the bath water of white privilege or classism.
Sleeping with the enemy and pissing away real power is a mistake the feminists keep making, as Faludi demonstrates in her tale of Bernays co-opting the flappers with their right to smoke cigarettes.
You've got your ownproperty tax bill cigarette now, baby. You've come a long, long way.
And, as David Gates says, a hip capitalist? Is a hip pig.
That paying your own property tax is often sexual kryptonite -- I have a friend who tells a story about a man who fled, ran down the porch steps and jumped into his car and drove away in a panic when he perceived she owned her own home -- with or without a Wonderbra, is the great big shit-covered elephant in the living room. There's nothing I can do for you, he muttered as he sprinted away.
It's enough to keep a girl what Julia Cameron* calls a poverty addict all her life.
Or is it?
_______________________________
* Those of us who know Julia personally find her books much the same as Julia -- 30 per cent brilliant and 70 per cent caca. As she herself is a poverty addict, this part of her book, The Money Drunk, sings.
This is the sleeping with the enemy problem. Wasting your agency on sexual power over others, rather than challenging the oppression these same others are enforcing on you within the sexual relationship, is rightly seen as co-optation of feminism. Serial monogamy, in the analysis of such stalwarts as the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb (Not a Feminist), for example, has got to be the biggest co-optation of political agency that there is: Flashmob revolution calling? Can't talk to you now, got a booty call I need to take. That's what happened to Haight Ashbury pacifism and communalism. Hippie chicks fuck, in the immortal locution of Joan Didion (Not a Feminist), and that's seditious.
Second wave het feminists my age are talking privately about how what the movement produced is the Dutch treat -- more sexual privilege with impunity for men, more feminization of poverty as more children go fatherless. Fathers being the people of whose wage women make 38 per cent. Daddy = college education and professional school. I once had a brother-in-law who worked like a dog, and made a huge amount of money, which he needed because all three of his straight-A children were in college, law school, medical school at the same time. These are grandchildren of Hitler refugees, the great nephews of seven exterminated Jewish families, and the riposte, one could argue, to the Nazi genocide. The world is a better place for cultural capital. It is the baby which cannot be thrown out with the bath water of white privilege or classism.
Sleeping with the enemy and pissing away real power is a mistake the feminists keep making, as Faludi demonstrates in her tale of Bernays co-opting the flappers with their right to smoke cigarettes.
You've got your own
And, as David Gates says, a hip capitalist? Is a hip pig.
That paying your own property tax is often sexual kryptonite -- I have a friend who tells a story about a man who fled, ran down the porch steps and jumped into his car and drove away in a panic when he perceived she owned her own home -- with or without a Wonderbra, is the great big shit-covered elephant in the living room. There's nothing I can do for you, he muttered as he sprinted away.
It's enough to keep a girl what Julia Cameron* calls a poverty addict all her life.
Or is it?
_______________________________
* Those of us who know Julia personally find her books much the same as Julia -- 30 per cent brilliant and 70 per cent caca. As she herself is a poverty addict, this part of her book, The Money Drunk, sings.
