feminist blogs in english

When long-time commenters write to tell me they’re confused, then I know that what we have here is a failure to communicate. The topic in question is Sarah Palin (who else?), and the scene of confusion is this thread.

So let me quote part of what I emailed to one commenter:

What drove me crazy about the third-wavers, which I guess I didn’t articulate well enough, was their insistence that feminism could only possibly be an attribute of far left liberals. People said things like “of course Hillary isn’t a feminist! She’s too mainstream!” It drove me nuts.

Regarding the “faux feminist freakazoid”: I should probably clarify that I was talking about being “on the road” to that — because in my mind, the end point of this kind of thinking is that you (not you personally) turn into Amanda Marcotte. Which is actually what I almost said, and substituted fff for that rather than name names.

The point I keep trying to make is that feminism is very simply about women’s equality. There are conservative feminists, liberal feminists, communist feminists, libertarian feminists, etc. — and that’s just on our western political landscape.

The other point I keep trying to make is that both policy and representation matter in the business of ending isms. It’s ideal if a political candidate combines both — which is why Hillary was great. But this is not always going to be the case. Which is what we have with Palin.

People keep trying to resolve the paradox, but it’s not resolvable.

I see this almost irresistible urge to resolve the paradox from both sides. People who detest Palin’s politics seem to feel compelled to conclude that she’s also a bust in terms of representation — she’s no good for women in any way at all, not a feminist, certainly not a role model, that her election wouldn’t represent anything special, that her running for office isn’t anything special, etc., etc.

On the other side, people who acknowledge Palin’s role as a representative and pathbreaker seem to feel compelled to conclude that her politics are also good — or at least okay, or at least not too bad.

In both cases, I think what’s really going on is that people are trying to resolve the paradox. But you can’t do it. As I said in the thread (and yes, I’m just going to quote myself here because I don’t have time this afternoon to write out a whole essay):

It’s entirely possible for a woman’s political aspirations to represent a blow for feminism (trying to be the first woman president) while her political positions spell bad news in other respects (which is true of most of what Palin espouses, in my opinion).

***

Things frequently have mixed results. Especially when we’re talking about something like ending racism or sexism or other isms, where both representation and policy matter.

Barack Obama, for example, is not doing much for Black America in terms of his policies. But that doesn’t mean that his election — the election of the first black president — didn’t represent a triumph of a sort. It was good thing in the sense of breaking barriers, etc.

***

I think that for the most part, the black community is better at recognizing that racial equality is a thing unto itself — better, I mean, than women are at understanding feminism. At least women today, in our post-Second Wave era.

There’s this attitude nowadays — and it really became painfully apparently in 2008 — that feminism is a subset of liberal Democratic politics. And if you’re not a liberal Democrat, or you don’t ascribe to that whole agenda, then you can’t possibly be a feminist. Which is just ridiculous.

Feminism means equality for women. It’s vastly bigger and simpler than some bullet point on the DNC platform. You can be a feminist and be an Inuit seal hunter, for chrissake. You can be a feminist and be a Peruvian miner or a Nicaraguan nun or a Chinese office worker. Or an American member of the GOP.

The civil rights movement in this country maintained a focus on racial equality that allowed — and still allows — everyone to ascribe to it, regardless of their other political beliefs. Most black folks may roll their eyes at Michael Steele, but they’re not going to say, “well, he doesn’t really believe in racial equality. He doesn’t really believe in civil rights. In fact, he’d re-institute slavery if he could!” You can argue that Michael Steele is not doing anything for black folks and the GOP is a joke, etc., or even that he’s a craven opportunist — but you’ll still acknowledge that in his own way, he obviously believes in civil rights.

For some reason, women can’t seem to do that. It’s all or nothing. Don’t like Sarah Palin? Hate her Republican politics? Fine. But for heaven’s sake, you can still acknowledge that in her own way, she obviously believes in equal rights and considers herself a feminist. Even if you think the disastrous effects of her politics would outweigh any glass ceiling-breaking she might contribute.

But no — instead we get people claiming, like Jessica Valenti, that Palin is against everything feminism stands for. Everything!

Or even worse, people saying that she can’t be a feminist because she doesn’t like polar bears or something. For heaven’s sake. They’re separate things.

It’s ironic to me that I, of all people, should have to keep pointing this out. Ironic because I personally am extremely liberal. Far left radical feminist. But feminism is not just a subset of my political agenda. It’s one of the fundamental questions of human existence.

The recent Tea Pary Conference seems to have gone over well with many people.  After all, it had former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo adding to his already famous rants against illegal immigration by showing that he is also a racist.  The Tea Party attendees cheered when Tancredo said that “people who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.”  In other words, Tancredo was telling the cheering Tea Party’ers that the reason “Barack Hussein Obama” was elected was “mostly because I think that we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country.”  Of course, literacy tests were one of the basic forms of discrimination for a long, long time.

With “orators” like Tancredo and Sarah (“Energy. Budget Tax cuts. Lift American spirits.”) Palin, the Tea Party is doing well.  In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent said they had a positive opinion of the Tea Party movement.  That is higher than the 35% in the same poll who said they had a positive opinion of Democrats and the 28% who said they had a positive opinion of Republicans.

However, I imagine that few of the people who have a positive opinion of the Tea Party’ers have anything other than a vague idea of what the movement is actually about.  The broad idea is probably summed up by a statement made by “Tea Party Patriots” national board member Mark Meckler that “[b]oth parties need to re-dedicate themselves to the principles of our founding fathers and remember that this should be the government of ‘We the People’ and not of special interest groups or pork-laden politics.”  But Meckler’s statement that “[a]lthough we are conservative in political philosophy, we are nonpartisan in approach” is laughable.  Given the low-poll numbers for Republicans, it is certainly in the Tea Party’s interest to try to separate itself from the Republican Party.  But, the Tea Party Patriots are no different, in most respects, than the far right-wing of the Republican Party.  As the editorial in the Nation says, “we should not fool ourselves into seeing this as anything but a right-wing reactionary movement, one whose themes (jingoism, militarism and a cult of victimhood at the hands of sundry nefarious betrayers) are as old as the John Birch Society.”  How is the Tea Party movement any different than the Republicans who want to shut down the federal government by their constant shout of “less taxes,” (while simultaneously during the Bush years increasing spending so the government would be placed in budgetary jeopardy), by their opposition to anything proposed by Obama or Democrats (even if they previously were on record as supporting it), and by their unprecedented use of the filibuster in the Senate.  Those “shut down the federal government” actions are the same as the basic (vague) goals of the Tea Party movement.

The movement claims to be grounded in “distrust of and disgust with America’s main institutions, particularly Wall Street and Washington.”  It probably is.  But so is the militia movement.  The Southern Poverty Law Center is the most-respected source for documenting “hate” groups in the United States.  In an August 2009 publication titled “The Second Wave: Return of the Militias,” the SPLC wrote:

The 1990s saw the rise and fall of the virulently antigovernment “Patriot” movement, made up of paramilitary militias, tax defiers and so-called “sovereign citizens.” Sparked by a combination of anger at the federal government and the deaths of political dissenters at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the movement took off in the middle of the decade and continued to grow even after 168 people were left dead by the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City’s federal building — an attack, the deadliest ever by domestic U.S. terrorists, carried out by men steeped in the rhetoric and conspiracy theories of the militias. In the years that followed, a truly remarkable number of criminal plots came out of the movement. But by early this century, the Patriots had largely faded, weakened by systematic prosecutions, aversion to growing violence, and a new, highly conservative president.

They’re back. Almost a decade after largely disappearing from public view, right-wing militias, ideologically driven tax defiers and sovereign citizens are appearing in large numbers around the country. “Paper terrorism” — the use of property liens and citizens’ “courts” to harass enemies — is on the rise. And once-popular militia conspiracy theories are making the rounds again, this time accompanied by nativist theories about secret Mexican plans to “reconquer” the American Southwest. One law enforcement agency has found 50 new militia training groups — one of them made up of present and former police officers and soldiers. Authorities around the country are reporting a worrying uptick in Patriot activities and propaganda. “This is the most significant growth we’ve seen in 10 to 12 years,” says one. “All it’s lacking is a spark. I think it’s only a matter of time before you see threats and violence.”

A key difference this time is that the federal government — the entity that almost the entire radical right views as its primary enemy — is headed by a black man. That, coupled with high levels of non-white immigration and a decline in the percentage of whites overall in America, has helped to racialize the Patriot movement, which in the past was not primarily motivated by race hate. One result has been a remarkable rash of domestic terror incidents since the presidential campaign, most of them related to anger over the election of Barack Obama. At the same time, ostensibly mainstream politicians and media pundits have helped to spread Patriot and related propaganda, from conspiracy theories about a secret network of U.S. concentration camps to wholly unsubstantiated claims about the president’s country of birth.

Don’t let anyone tell you they support the Tea Party movement without getting them to tell you what—exactly—the party stands for.  And, if they have any idea of what it stands for, ask them how that is any different than the far-right-wing of the Republican Party.  And you might even ask them to tell you how it is different than the militia movement.  Of course, they will tell you that the Tea Party is not calling for violence.  But, especially given the cheering for “Patriot” Tom Tancredo’s racist comments, would it surprise anyone to see the so-far non-violent Tea Party movement become more like the violent militia movement?  Would anyone say that this past summer’s health care “town hall meetings” were not violent?

It’s time for another edition of “comments that should have been posts.” I’m elevating this one to post status because a) it’s true, and b) it’s the kind of thing that gets our stomach acids going for days here in the Smoking Lounge.

At any rate, over in the Hillary poll thread, Alice P. said of Sarah Palin:

I cringe at the idea of someone who is a fundie being the first woman president.

And I said:

A factoid that’s bandied about is that the first woman leader in most countries is usually a conservative. Somehow that eases the path, since it means that she’s not threatening the patriarchal status quo completely.

Hillary was our nation’s best chance to avoid that fate. She was and is a feminist Democrat. She’s to the left of Obama.

Which of course is why it was such bullshit for the faux-feminists to pretend that they couldn’t support Hillary because she was so “right-wing” or “not feminist enough.” As opposed to Barack Lieberman Obama.

Ironically, Palin really is the right-wing woman that the faux-feminists claimed Hillary to be.

Sarah Palin is a gifted politician. She may be crazy and wrong about a lot of stuff, but she’s still a charismatic leader. Read, for example, this thoughtful comment by Ciccina — who, I assure you from secret personal knowledge, is as much a radical feminist as myself. As Ciccina says, “she’s their Hillary.”

Sarah Palin is running for president. Whether she’ll still be running for president in 2012 is anybody’s guess, but I’m betting she will. And there’s a very good chance she will become the Republican nominee.

That will make her the first woman candidate for president on a major party ticket. Bite that.

So I’m wondering: what will Hillary do? I’m wondering it so much that I decided to make a little poll here and ask you all what you think.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Will it never end? Tonight the news is full of yammering about Sarah Palin writing on her hand. This is apparently more evidence that she is a moron bimbo from outer space, etc., etc., etc.

I used to have a boyfriend who wrote on his hand. I thought it was a rather juvenile habit for a grownup, but whatever. (I used to ask him why he didn’t just buy a fricking notepad. He insisted that hands were more convenient.) The thing is, nobody ever accused him of being stupid because of it. He had a graduate degree or two and was a successful executive in the financial industry.

What kinds of things did he write on his hand? The same kinds of things I write on my notepad. Words. Names. Reminders that are meaningless to anyone else.

So Sarah Palin writes on her hand. Just like my ex-boyfriend. Big whoop.

People seem particularly excited about this because the words Palin wrote on her hand — “energy,” “tax,” “lift American spirits” — were topics of her speech, or maybe of the Q&A afterwards. Shouldn’t she already know such simple things? the excited people ask indignantly. How absurd for her to need reminders!

Ahem. Anybody else remember “Message: I care”? (If you don’t, look it up.) People ridiculed Bush for being phony and insincere, but nobody suggested that he needed the reminder because he was actually too stupid to hold the thoughts in his head.

But then, President Bush had a penis. Which makes all the difference. My ex-boyfriend had a penis too, now that I think of it. Funny how that works.

Oh, I forgot: I titled the post this way because I also see that Palin is acknowledging that she might run for president in 2012. That means we have years of this to look forward to. Years and years.

I’m not really paying attention to the Super Bowl news, seeing as how I’m still busy with my secret new women’s group thingy. Actually I wouldn’t be paying attention even if I weren’t busy, because jesus, who gives a shit? In fact, I was surprised to realize today that the stupid game hasn’t happened yet. Isn’t it always in January? Aren’t we now in February? Has there been a wobble in the region of space-time occupied by the NFL?

At any rate, the reason I’m aware of the impending Super Bowl at all is because of the hilariously offensive anti-abortion ad sponsored by Focus on the Family. (It’s hilarious to me, at least; personally I long for an ad in which a mother explains how she was advised to get an abortion and refused — and now her grown son is a serial killer. If only I’d aborted the little creep!) Some muddled souls are saying that this ad is about “choice,” but it’s not. It’s about patriarchy. The whole Super Bowl is about patriarchy: the game, the cheerleaders, the commercials, the ritual, the whole thing.

The number one rule of patriarchy — the guiding principle, the foundation of it all — is that women are the sex class. They aren’t individual people, like men; they aren’t full members of the human race. They are appendages. Their role is to give birth to men, to nurture men, to marry men, to fuck men, to serve men, and so on. The only real people in this setup are men. The world belongs to men and is their sphere: theirs to fight over, dominate, settle, destroy, remake. Women are simply adjuncts, like talking pets or livestock.

The Super Bowl is a precise reflection of this world view. In that sense, the Focus on the Family spot is a perfect fit. It’s all of a piece with the whole scheme. The only thing new here is that abortion is considered a “political” topic — unlike dressing women up as prostitutes or reducing them to sex toys, which is the usual Super Bowl approach.

Which is not to say that I think the appropriate response here is just to wave in vague disgust at the general misogynistic nastiness of the world as we recline on our sofas in the opium den. Eh, whaddya gonna do? Pass me that pipe. Patriarchy has to be disassembled brick by brick, and the Super Bowl ad is as good a place to take a stand as any. As Jaclyn Friedman writes in The Nation:

The ad becomes even more disturbing when we consider who it’s trying to reach. Assuming that Focus on the Family operates with the same mindset as most Super Bowl advertisers (and there’s really no evidence to suggest otherwise), it’s also safe to assume that men are one of the primary targets of this spot. So now what we’ve got is an ad telling men that it’s wrong for women to abort their potential children, lest those children not get the chance to grow up to be famous quarterbacks who paint Scripture references into their eyeblack. In light of new research revealing that about a third of women who report partner violence also report that their partners try to pressure them into pregnancy and motherhood (as do 15 percent of women who had never reported relationship violence), this male-targeted argument is particularly chilling.

Unfortunately, I missed all the excitement last week with NOW and Sarah Palin and NOW again and all that. (I heard Terry O’Neill did great on Larry King, though.) As usual, the self-delusional rhetoric from the pro-lifers serves to obscure the real issue. “Messages like this empower women!” says Sarah Palin in defense of the ad. Empower us to do what? Have babies? Uh, Sarah, we’ve got that covered. Having babies is Job 1 for women under patriarchy. A commercial telling us to have babies is about as empowering as a commercial telling us to take up sewing. Or cooking. Really: the baby thing? We’ve got that down.

Nor is this an improvement on the “be a sexbot” message emanating from the rest of the Super Bowl effluvium. “For too long women have been made to feel like sex objects in our ‘modern’ culture,” Palin says, and she’s absolutely right. But being made to feel like baby machines is the same fucking deal. Get it? Get it?

In regards to this article from the American Spectator and every other news organization and person out there who seems not to understand what the "big deal" is with the Pam Tebow Super Bowl ad:

No one -- I repeat, no one -- is upset that Pam Tebow (or Sarah Palin or whoever else) chose to give birth to their respective children. What this article and others never seem to mention is the obvious: THEY HAD A CHOICE.

Had Pam Tebow acted on her doctor's advice and had an abortion, she could have, because abortion is legal. (Well, not in the Philippines, but in America, yes.) Sarah Palin could have chosen not to give birth. The fact that they did give birth is fine. Good for them for doing what they felt was best for themselves. The point is, if abortion were illegal (and I'm pretty sure they would like it to be illegal), they would not have had a CHOICE in the matter. They would have had to give birth, by law. Pam Tebow's doctor could have said "this pregnancy is complicated and may result in your death," period. Because if abortion were illegal, that's all he or she could have said. The doctor couldn't recommend an abortion, regardless of the medical situation, if abortion were illegal.

The reason these women and others can pride themselves on "choosing life" is because THEY HAD A CHOICE. Without legal abortion, there would be no legal choice but to give birth.

This is not a case, no matter how hard this article and others try to make it out to be, of feminists being "anti-choice" or "anti-birth" or "anti-women" or "anti-babies" or anything even close to that. This is about feminists pointing out that those women HAD A CHOICE in the first place. This is about anti-choicers touting the CHOICE they made as the only one that should be allowed. If they had their way, no one would have a choice.

Are we clear?

By the way, Slate has an excellent article on the Super Bowl ad today.

The big news this week is that Sarah Palin is the latest contributor to Fox News. Christina Chew at Care2 asks what this means for people with disabilities – Palin promised in her campaign to be an advocate for special-needs children, but so far her “advocacy” hasn’t gone far beyond insisting that abortion is bad and special-needs children are blessings. While I’m always happy to see parents of children with disabilities speaking out about the fact that having a special-needs child is parenting all the same and that no child is perfect or easy, there is a major disconnect when “advocates” like Palin totally ignore the societal and structural impediments that make parenting more difficult when your child has disabilities, and that make life more difficult for individuals with disabilities. Chew writes:

Will Palin, who has spoken regularly about her “right to life” stance, make abortion and prenatal genetic testing of her Fox News commentary? (Currently some 90% of parents who find out that their fetus has Down Syndrome decide not to have the child.) Will Palin move beyond such politically charged and very hot topics to look at the real, day-to-day issues facing disabled individuals and their families and those who support them over their lifetimes? Issues like the need for appropriate schools and therapies that can range from speech therapy to medical concerns; like the urgent need for housing for adults with disabilities, not to mention jobs and job training, and—for those unable to work—ways to ensure that they live meaningful lives within the community?

As the mother of an adolescent son who is on the moderate to severe end of the autism spectrum, I am hopeful that Palin will use her new role on Fox News to bring national attention to these pressing issues. My son is growing up all too fast. While once people smiled and told me “he’s so cute” and that we were “blessed to have such a special child,” the world is not so kindly towards an older child who is so tall that he is regularly mistaken for an adult, who is minimally verbal, and who—due to his neurology—struggles with severe behavior problems. Group homes, job coaches, and disparities in access to health care for adults with disabilities are just some of the issues that other parents, my son’s teachers and therapists, and my husband and I think about all the time, however much others try to change the topic of conversation when we bring them up.

Improving on those issues would also make it easier for women to choose to continue pregnancies if their fetus is diagnosed with Down syndrome or other condition. As Dana Goldstein explores in the Daily Beast this week, new genetic testing could make it possible to more exactly identify fetuses with Down syndrome; since the vast majority of women terminate their pregnancies when they learn that the fetus has Down syndrome, the new tests could mean that even fewer babies with Down syndrome are ever born, unless women and families feel that having a special needs child is actually do-able.

I’m obviously very pro-choice, and support the right of any individual woman to terminate a pregnancy for whatever reason. I understand the feeling — or the knowledge — that you are not equipped to handle a child with special needs, or the fear that when you die you will be leaving behind a child with a disability in a society that offers little support. So I want to make it clear that I’m not casting judgment on any individual woman, or any family, who makes the best choices for themselves and terminates a pregnancy because the fetus has Down syndrome or other pre-natal diagnosis.

But. I do find it troubling, in the aggregate, that so many people believe that having a child with Down syndrome is so impossible, or so undesireable, that 90% of those pregnancies are terminated. Again, to clarify, it’s not the belief itself that troubles me — it’s the social reality underlying that belief. It’s the fact that “advocates” like Palin do little to actually advocate for what people with disabilities and their families actually need — holding up a cute baby and talking about how he’s a blessing is nice, but it doesn’t do much to help the parents who are worried about finding adequate schooling for their children, or the adults who need basic access to work or housing or medical care. It doesn’t do much for the women who receive a pre-natal diagnosis from a doctor who assumes that termination is the next step, in a society that seems to only offer two options for women who have to make this choice: Martyrdom or shame. It doesn’t do much for that cute baby when he or she grows up in a society that ostracizes and fears him, and offers no tangible support or assistance.

I hope Palin uses her position at Fox to give a platform to disability-rights advocates. I hope she does it in a meaningful way, that goes beyond, “Look, cute baby!” and actually addresses the structural impediments that oppress people with disabilities. But I’m not holding my breath.