This other idea that I have, which is not quite fully formed, is that another mistake we make is assuming a common timeline for “feminism” instead of recognizing that we’re all in different places.
I most immediately see this with sex positive feminism (though I think we’ve moved away from that dreadful term; I’m using it because most folks have some immediate sense of what I mean). You have some feminists arguing that Dworkin’s admonition that all heterosexual sex is rape is bullshit and that part of being a feminist is having sexual autonomy and feeling free to enjoy one’s body. Then you have other feminists who are all “what the fuck? Dworkin never said that.” And you have feminists saying “Being sexy makes me feel powerful and feeling powerful and in control is indeed feminist” and you have feminists saying “But buying into this notion of ’sexy=powerful’ is going to leave you without much power at all once you aren’t sexy any more.” And so on. You can pretty much see this debate play out for yourself by asking “Is a blow job feminist?” and waiting.
But I think the difficult truth is that all those things are true–that what is an utterly feminist act for one woman is not for another.
For young girls coming up, I have a great deal of sympathy. Though there’s always been a great deal of emphasis on “just don’t have sex and everything will be okay,” it seems to me that it’s been decades since we’ve seen young women placed under so much pressure to not have sex and decades since this has been accomplished by lying to them in ways that puts them at risk. I mean, just for a second, feminists my age, think–do you think there’s anything wrong with using birth control?
I imagine that you, like me, grew up getting the message “Don’t have sex, but by god, if you’re going to have sex, let’s get you on the Pill.”
Now, just twenty years later, young girls cannot get accurate information about sex from their schools, about what actually prevents pregnancies, and how to use those things. They’re faced with healthcare workers all along the line who want the right to withhold information and medications from young women and to inflict their religious views on others.
In that climate, having and enjoying sex is radical. Understanding and flaunting your own body and pleasure is radical. It is feminist.
It’s not what I needed when I was their age. I needed to hear that I was good for something else other than fucking, other than my value being bound up in whether men would want to fuck me, about whether I was keeping myself in the most attractive state for my future husband. And it’s not what I need now.
But I’m not growing up in the world those girls are growing up in.
And I think the same is also true with women older than me–that the things they need from feminism are not the same, that there the emphasis on leadership and assuming roles of power and having and achieving financial freedom are not just assumed, but still are fresh wounds.
I’m thinking, I guess, that I want to be a part not of the feminist movement, but of a feminist movement. Just when I’m too inwardly focused, I want to turn and move outwards, and just at the moment when I have almost lost sight of myself, I want to turn back in.
That, to me, seems the best way–leading when it’s my turn and following in turn as well.
Filed under: Fun with Feminism
Being a feminist as a process, not a status. I like this.
And this is so cool that I almost hate to quibble, but it is still me, so I’m gonna quibble anyway. Which is that (1) abstinence-only sex-ed, at least in the mainstream, is only 8 years old, not a couple of decades, but (2) in addition to the falsehoods of that education, girls are faced with increasing pressures to become visibly sexualized at increasingly early ages. I have no idea how they navigate through this, but I’m not sure that the sex-positive attitudes are a freely-chosen alternative/rebuke to the anti-sex crowd; sometimes it seems to me that it’s a choice between different models, without trying to figure out a third way. But that is easy for me to say, since I grew up at a different time.
Perhaps its because I have a much stronger background in anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist thought then in feminism, but my personal opinion has been “keep your damn politics out of my bedroom.”
I don’t want you telling me I have to be beautiful and sexy, but I don’t want to be pinned in by your belief that something I do with my spouse in my own privacy is somehow demeaning to you and womanhood as a whole. I extend this to other people (I have no more right to tell them how to behave than the reciprocal) by telling them to educate themselves in every way possible about the repercussions of their choices, and then making their own decisions. I’ve just started to enjoy my life, and I don’t feel the need to be sacrificed on any alter, feminist or patriarchal.
I do find the radfem mindset of “sex as bad for women” ironic, given the (very VERY valid) complaints about slut shaming and victim blaming.
**gets off of her soapbox**
Polerin, you hit on something here that strikes a chord with me in that I think we all see how, as feminists, we need to promote women’s bodily autonomy. But boy do we still want to be able to slam women for making choices other than the ones we’d like them to make. It’s as if many of us get the one part–that women should be free to make our own decisions–but we cannot get the other part–which means free from even our meddling.
If I ever get a tattoo, I’m going to have to work this bit in. Heh, at this rate, I’m going to look like a walking library of congress, but at least I’ll be covered with useful and pithy advice!
(Don’t mind me, I just decided to tackle the backlog, well, backwards. *whistles as she works her way back to when she drifted off the internets*)