Such Devoted Sisters
All I?m going to say about this bit of ridiculousness at Pandagon and similar discussions at various other feminist blogs is – as much as I admire many of your ideas and much of your writing, who died and made you Boss of Us?
Amanda:
All I?m going to say about this bit of ridiculousness is that if you?ve actually gotten married, you?re in no place to be the self-appointed police of demanding women live as you think we would if there was no patriarchy. I don?t care what you wore to your wedding; marriage is a patriarchal structure and if you think that remaking traditionally male dominated institutions into egalitarian institutions is impossible, you sure as hell have no business being a wife.
So you tell someone off for being prescriptive while…. being prescriptive.
God, I’m so sick of youngish, American, self-described feminists re-inventing the wheel, fighting the same old battles all over again, self-centeredly and sanctimoniously deciding who’s in and who’s out in terms of their own understanding of what feminism is; an understanding that’s necessarily filtered through their own, generally white, US-centred world of relative economic and political privilege. I don’t care how nice they are individually, or how well-meaning they are, that’s a hump they can’t seem to get over.
It’s as though no other social system or way of living exists but that of the white-ish, thirty-ish, middle-class American female liberal. It’s as much a state of purdah as any outside the US – a metaphorical burqa if you will.
Witness the fuss when Amanda was called on for using the aforesaid burqa in a graphic, thereby inadvertently implying that to be a veiled Islamic woman is to be some kind of subhuman pity-object.
Despite plenty of evidence being put forward to the contrary (the fact that the pictured burqa was empty is neither here nor there) – when challenged, both she and her commenters wilfully misunderstood the discourse around colonialism, Islam and gender that was put to them, even when it was spelled out politely; because it challenged their smug preconceptions of themselves and their society such an analysis was not to be borne, and what’s more, it was those uppity women of colour who put the argument. How dare they.
I don’t wish to pick on one particular blogger; Amanda’s posts are just an example. There’s a clique of self-described feminist bloggers and commenters who continually visit each others blogs, comment there, link to each other and reinforce each others views. They act as an echo chamber and if your face or opinions don’t fit you’re ripe for attack. That’s who piled on those who made the colonialist argument. That’s hardly egalitarian, let alone feminist and worst of all it’s all so bloody parochial.
Take L’affaire De Les Grand Tetons for instance. When those bloggers who had been invited to meet Clinton were challenged about the lack of racial diversity at the event they became very defensive, and they fell on Ann Althouse’s snipe about Jessica’s breasts like it was manna from heaven. Far easier to to attack Althouse than to be forced to examine one’s own assumptions. Tits or racism? It was no contest.
Perhaps US feminist bloggers could turn away from their big feminist circle-jerk for a moment and see just how bogged down in trivialities they are. They’re bickering about makeup and a photo pose and shaved legs (didn’t we sort that one out in the seventies?) while women in the rest of the world are worrying about actual survival.
JOHANNESBURG (WOMENSENEWS)–For Betty Sgawuka, water is life, but it’s also backbreaking work. As a young child, she rambled after her mother with a small bucket; half a century later, now a grandmother several times over, she still makes multiple trips a day to a nearby stream.
Much has come to Sgawuka’s village during her 54 years: apartheid, freedom, AIDS. But eight years after South Africa’s first free, multi-racial elections, the only water that flows through Luphisi is the stream that nature put there.
[…]
But for millions of women like Sgawuka, clean water and access to sanitation also mean increased freedom and dignity.
“It’s women and girls who bear the brunt of the lack of clean water; it’s women and girls who are intimidated and humiliated by the lack of sanitation,” said Sir Richard Jolly, head of a new United Nations campaign called WASH–Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for All, speaking in Johannesburg. “Remember, the amount of water the African or Asian carries on her head is roughly equivalent to the amount of luggage most of us will bring home from Johannesburg, roughly 20 kg.”
In most of the world, it is a woman’s job to collect water for cooking, cleaning, drinking and sanitation. Girls often begin collecting water from a very young age and because the burden of collecting water is often so onerous, many are forced to drop out of school.
“The provision of clean water is particularly important because it has a liberating effect on women and young girls,” said Kul Gautam, deputy executive director of UNICEF. “In many rural areas, the average woman spends one-quarter to one-third of her time fetching water.”
Gautam also said UNICEF studies have shown that lack of water and sanitation are major factors leading to the high dropout rates of girls. In addition to the girls who drop out because their labor is needed at home, many girls also leave school because of inadequate sanitation at schools themselves.
Feminism is what you do, not what you say and what many of these bloggers’re saying is typically self-obsessed and narrow. A blog post, like any talk, is cheap; actually doing something to change the status quo is a bit more inconvenient than the transient thrilll of sniping at other women online.
Some allegedly feminist bloggers out there could perhaps stop obsessing over their own self-image and their status within the narrow confines of the blogosphere and pay a little attention to the real issues facing women worldwide. Because those women are the ones propping up that freedom to self-obsess they’re enjoying so much.
