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.

The following words are gleaned from letters received in response to a questionnaire…which asked women to reveal where we have been victimized by violence; where we have fought back; and where we have victimized others–children, other women, animals, ourselves…

One thing that strikes us about these letters: every woman who wrote to us mentioned ways she had resisted violence. Every one. As Flying Clouds wrote, “In a way my whole life now is fighting back.” It seems obvious: if you talk about violence, you talk about resistance–those of us who live have lived through something. Women wrote about resistance not only as simple defense against simple aggression (he tried to grab me and I punched him in the nose–and broke it). Women wrote about resistance as a complex aspect of a woman’s life, as varied as the violence resisted–and way more inventive.

The fact is, most of the violence women face and must deal with is not “simple” street violence (though there’s plenty of that). Women are attacked and abused inside the structures of ordinary life, marriage, and family. And inside these structures, women — and girls — resist. Children hide under the table; run away. A young woman wrote about being raped by her boyfriend; she left (to get away from him), but came back (to take the comfort she needed); later, she left him for good. A woman married for 26 years wrote of withdrawing love from her husband because of his violence (though not leaving him). Resistance can take the form of a commitment not to perpetrate violence. Vegetarianism, many women’s choice, to resist violence against animals. Many women beaten as children choose not to have children, lest they repeat the violence they learned.

We could cite example after example. The more sensible thing to do is to let the women tell their own stories.

______
From “Survival is an Act of Resistance” by Michaele Uccella and Melanie Kay, in Fight Back! Feminist Resistance to Male Violence, edited by Frédérique Delacoste and Felice Newman (Cleis Press, 1981), p. 14.

Self-defense, that is, direct resistance to male violence by women, has become a neglected topic in feminism recently. Somewhere along the line advocating for women to be as strong and self-protective as we can be became equated with blaming victims of rape, battering and abuse — which it most decidedly is not. The quote I put up some weeks ago was meant to demonstrate the ways in which patriarchy keeps us believing in our own physical helplessness in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Will every woman be able to fight off an attacker? No, and no woman should ever feel guilty for being attacked or hurt, since complete responsibility always lies with the attacker. Will knowing self defense help a woman protect herself within an ongoing battering relationship, or when facing systemic violence, such as attacks by prison guards or INS agents? Maybe not. But what if men became only half as worried about being hurt by women they attack, as women are all the time of being attacked and hurt by men? That, to me, is a fascinating scenario, perhaps the point at which a real anti-sexist revolution finally becomes possible. Because, as I and others have said over and over, power and privilege, and those who hold them, aren’t going to give anything away. We have to take our freedom, and we have to take it together. The women who wrote Fight Back! had some strategies for doing that that we’ve forgotten, or never learned in the first place.

So, the first quote, from the “Preface” of my new love:

We cannot give our work away…proponents of the right wing have no problem with the existence of shelters for battered women, they simply do not want feminists directing them, or any hint of a feminist analysis of patriarchal violence at the core of the programs. Shelters and rape crisis centers that have purged Lesbians, tokenized or ignored Third World women, and censured politically experienced feminists no longer challenge the status quo. Lesbians, Third World women and activist feminists do challenge the status quo. We are our greatest resource in creating true havens of safety from patriarchal violence, and in preventing the humiliation and suffocation inherent to the hierarchical nature of the “social service” analysis of shelter and rape crisis work. Likewise, we cannot unwittingly become tools of racism by looking to the state for solutions to male violence. We must be conscious that giving unlimited power to a racist, classist, and violent judicial system perpetuates our own oppression.**

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*Yes, Cleis Press did do some awesome feminist stuff before Felice Newman went all )butterfly daisy sunshine marshmallow( on our asses.

**Yeah, those second-wavers — no understanding of the intersection of oppressions. Whatta buncha racist classist jerks. Snort.

…people can exert a level of control over their weights long-term within a 10- to perhaps, 15-pound range. Many people spend their lives losing and regaining the same dozen or two pounds, believing with each new diet that this one will be different. Naturally thinner people also believe that since they can lose 10-15 pounds fairly easily, that a fat person can just step and repeat that ten times, but it doesn’t work that way. A naturally fat person’s set point kicks in exactly like a thinner person’s…

Consistently, even with the most restrictive, rigidly-followed diets among the most motivated people, weight is lost for about 6 months and then regained. As the FTC’s expert panel and every expert review of the evidence has concluded, weight regain is the rule and virtually everyone regains all of their weight by 5 years. It is well acknowledged among obesity researchers that no dietary and exercise intervention has been shown to work long-term in virtually anyone…

Read the whole thing.

Laboring to Learn: Women’s Literacy and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era by Lorna Rivera: “The American adult education system has become an alternative for school dropouts, with some state welfare policies requiring teen mothers and women without high school diplomas to participate in adult education programs to receive aid. Very little has been published about women’s experiences in these mandatory programs and whether the programs reproduce the conditions that forced women to drop out in the first place. Lorna Rivera bridges the gap with this important study, the product of ten years’ active ethnographic research with formerly homeless women who participated in adult literacy education classes before and after welfare reform. Analyzing the web of ideological contradictions regarding “work first” welfare reform policies, Rivera argues that poverty is produced and reproduced when women with low literacy skills are pushed into welfare-to-work programs and denied education.”

Order here.

Via WELEARN.

We got a late start, and used the wrong soil, but it still tastes like zucchini.

________
Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (University of New Mexico Press, 1903) p. 11.

Cynthia McKinney won the Green Party’s Presidential Nomination at its Chicago Convention, taking 313 of 532 first round ballots in an eight way contested race to lead the 2008 Party’s Peace slate.

Once securing the nomination, she asked the Convention to also nominate as her running mate, Rosa Clemente, Bronx born activist, journalist, scholar and organizer who helped to found the HipHop Political Convention. Clemente said, “I chose to do this, not for me, but for my generation, my community and my daughter. I don’t see the Green Party as an alternative. I see it as imperative.”

Read more at the campaign website.