August 6th, 2008
As the blogosphere turns
So the video of Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck getting into it over the “n-word” is, like, so three weeks ago, I know. But I’ve been thinking since I first saw it, because my initial reaction to it was that it was tragic. I think I reacted that way because I’ve been in both those seats. I’ve been like Whoopi, trying to explain to straight women, or thin women, that in fact I do not live in the same world they do, and been frustrated with their unwillingness to hear, let alone understand. And I’ve been like Elisabeth, trying to protect myself from realities that loyalty to whiteness asks me to ignore, by insisting on my principles or my pain, by wanting to jump over differences into an understanding, love and trust that don’t yet exist. I haven’t really found a way to deal with that dissonance–it’s like a constant grinding of gears inside my head, errrrrk! there’s the privilege, errrrk! there’s the oppression! Every time I read any of the 100+ comment threads that float around so often, I retreat into months of blogular silence or flower pictures and pretty poems. Imagine me curled in the fetal position with my thumb in my mouth and the cat in my armpit, and that’s a pretty good indication of where I often go when I’m not here.
One time, I let frustration get the better of me, and it’s recently come to my attention that part of what I wrote from that frustrated place has been quoted on someone else’s blog. Funnily enough, the part that’s quoted isn’t the part I’m most ashamed of; that part is this:
And I think it especially sucks when otherwise intelligent people end up becoming totally reactionary and defending incredibly regressive and conservative politics because, all protestations to the contrary, race trumps everything to them, and they’d rather defend a conservative man of color than a radical white (Jewish) feminist…
I’ve been pretty proud that, when I read back through my blog archives, I can still stand by everything I wrote, back to the beginning. This comment, though–no, I’m not proud of it, and I don’t stand by it. I’ve since made what I hope is a kind of peace with the person it was directed at, and I’ve stated my disagreement with some of the more egregious things that were said by others in that time/space. I didn’t understand what was happening there at that time, and I was wrong. The other offenders involved were also wrong, they willfully persist in being wrong, they said some pretty nasty things when I disagreed with them (though privately, of course), and as such they no longer have my support or my attention.
While I’m quite clear about that, I’m left with plenty of other questions. For example, the term “white feminists” or “white feminism” still confuses me. I’m white, in that I am of western european descent — WASP, to be specific. And I’m a feminist. But I’m not sure if “my” feminism is “white feminism” since, whenever “white feminism” is explicated beyond epithet, it doesn’t resemble anything I ever believed or espoused. (See Marcotte, Amanda, or Valenti, Jessica.) And then I’m reminded of the whole “if the shoe doesn’t fit” thing which I myself have said many a time, and heck, my thumb is back in my mouth before I even realize it. (The better to stop me from spouting stupid crap, so really I ought to be grateful.)
With so many amazing writers declaring themselves not feminists lately, I keep wondering, why is radical feminism, to its detractors, always associated with one of a handful of folks who consistently behave badly? Why, for example, am I not the radical feminist poster child? Sure, I have my shortcomings (see above), but really, I’m not a bad sort, I’m educable, I hardly ever call names, I only occasionally come over a bit brusque. Perhaps this is one of those inevitable dynamics that isn’t limited to intrafeminist conflict, considering how christianity always gets associated with people like Jerry Falwell instead of the decent, relatively harmless folks who beat their swords into plowshares, resist their taxes, and litter their blood on nuclear weapons and such. Perhaps I just have to accept it as the way things are and get on with it already.
But I do wonder what might have happened if (white) lesbians had listened to Betty Friedan with her “lavender menace” and whatnot and said, well, fuck you, we’re not feminists then, we stand on our own. Pretty much every article in the library would not exist. Thousands, maybe millions of women wouldn’t have found their way out of boring marriages and into lesbian feminism and sweet, sweet lesbian lovin’. Lots more women wouldn’t have a women’s shelter or rape crisis center in their town. Lots of poems, treatises, novels, and songs would never have been written. There’d probably be almost no women’s music festivals, anywhere. Some people probably don’t care about that, and maybe they shouldn’t, since a lot of that stuff wasn’t the justice they needed–but I keep thinking that it’s all still important to lots of people, changed lots of women’s lives seriously for the better. Just like, when I get most discouraged about what I do (or, more like, don’t do) in the world, some woman sends me an email and tells me she liked what I had to say. She describes to me the specific if miniscule way what I did changed her life. The fat/lesbian feminists who came before me made a space for me to be within (radical) (lesbian) feminism, they carved this damned torch, and I honor their struggle by clinging to it despite the ones who are racist, despite the ones who think fat is just soooooo unhealthy (not to mention unsightly), despite the ones who say lesbians are rapists and selfish and full of shit and want to be like men, despite the ones who are cluelessly heterosexist, despite the ones who are narcissistic, hypocritical, inconsistent, self-hating, damaged, and just plain mean.
And by the way, just how many racists does it take to discredit an entire movement? In my last post but one, I sniped at the oft-wielded accusations that “second-wavers” were racist and classist. Yes, some of them were, and that’s reflected in (some of) their work. (See Brownmiller, Susan.) And some of them were not, which is also reflected in the work, such as the piece I quoted, sniping. And I’m just wondering if I’m going to have to read and analyze every book, pamphlet, broadsheet, and periodical of the time and make a big spreadsheet to see if the racists cancel out the antiracists. (As above, I’m probably not the best person to do this, because racist arguments have been known to pass me by completely, but it’d be for the cause, don’t you know.)
I still don’t know what to think when one woman of color says “That’s racist!” and another woman of color says “No, it’s not!” Because a while back I opined as how white women oughtn’t to disagree with women of color about racism, and I still think that. But ought I to settle in my mind on agreeing with the person who agrees with my assessment of any particular incidence? (Marcotte’s book was indubitably racist, IMHO, and IMHO the cartoon wasn’t.) Do I conclude that it doesn’t matter what I think, at all? Do I blog about the stuff I know and take my lumps as just another member of the all-white women’s club? Do I try to blog about racism and come across all, you know, self-flagellating and whatnot? (I know there have to be other choices but I can’t figure out what they are.) The library doesn’t have a section on “race,” it has a section on “whiteness,” because I’m white. If I post the work of women of color, is that being “inclusive” — and is being “inclusive” a good thing or just more evidence of my white-centric perspective? — or is it appropriation and tokenizing? And though I and others have been rightfully called out for overquoting Audre Lorde, how come I rarely see quotes from Black, Asian, Native and Latina lesbian feminists/separatists like Anna Lee, Jacqueline Anderson, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, Anita Cornwell, Paula Gunn Allen, Jamie Lee Evans, or Naomi Littlebear Morena anywhere but this humble blog and site?
Oh, and also, if a woman calling another woman a “shithead” is misogynist, is it misogynist for a man to call a woman a “transphobe”? If calling someone a “retard” is ableist, is it also ableist to call a person or their ideas “lame”? Not to put too fine a point on it, but is stuff only misogynist/racist/ableist/classist/wrong/bad/and horrible** when people you disagree with do it?
Just asking.
Because I was pretty amused when I noticed that the people who were so righteous in calling out the theft of ideas (or whatever) by Amanda Marcotte were many of the same people who, a year before, bordered on abusive in dismissing accusations of a similar of theft of ideas — in that case because the accuser was a widely hated radical feminist “transphobe” and the plagiarizer (or whatever) was a celebrated blogging transperson.
When I first started blogging, some of (what I consider) my best work was sparked by reading what other bloggers wrote. I came in with passion and spirit and almost always felt that, even if we disagreed about specifics, we feminist bloggers could build something together that might inspire us all to real life, collective, large-scale movement again. Unfortunately, a lot has changed in the blogosphere in the last four years, and not for the better, because more often than not reading other blogs leaves me mute rather than fired up. It seems like the sum total of online feminism is atrocity blogging and calling out the badness du jour of feminist bloggers on the other side of whatever hairline crack of a chasm we can identify between what we do (good!) and what they do (double plus ungood 
). Although I’ve done both (the latter in this very post even!), neither of those options interests me all that much over the long term.
So I’m genuinely, honestly confused about what is happening with me, as a feminist, as I swing from feline-soothed curled-around-my-tender-vitals thumb-sucking to 2:00 AM full-on cranky rant, and most likely back again. Is my haphazard, on-again off-again confrontation with white privilege and white supremacy — as represented by my own thoughts, attitudes, behaviors and choices as well as everything going on around me– going to lead me through this spotty silence into becoming a stronger, more aware advocate of justice for all women — as I always thought I was? Will I continue to be a kind of blogular loner, writing about the stuff that interests me and seems irrelevant (at best) to just about everybody else? Or am I on the fast track to frustrated burnout, worn down by the ceaseless circular arguments and general atmosphere of bitterness, cynicism and hypocrisy that characterizes the greater feminist/womanist blogosphere? What defines my feminism — my waspiness, my lesbianism, my superfatness? All of the above, since we know sooooo well that we can’t possibly separate out the bits of who we are? And who decides? And whose opinion ought to matter to me, and why?
Just questions, few answers, today.
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**And just to whine for a moment, how come ageism — rife in a blogosphere dominated by the young — and sizeism/fat hatred, for example, so rarely get called out in these virtual slugfests? Trust me, it ain’t because they ain’t there. Everybody’s got a radar that some shit can fly under, believe me.
