I’ve been thinking about this thread over at Shakesville all evening and even woke up this morning still thinking about it, so I thought I’d mull some things over here.
I’ll just say up-front that I’m not that interested in the specific “WTF, Pandagon?” turn of the comments. I mean, I think it’s safe to say that many, many of us have had a “WTF, Pandagon?” moment and made a decision, for better or for worse about what to do with that moment.
I, for one, stopped reading Pandagon. I don’t know that that’s the right choice, but it’s the choice I made.
And I agree with the commenters who like Shakesville because it’s a smart, feminist-centric place, where racism, sexism, and other bullshit-isms aren’t tolerated. That’s why I like it. I sometimes think I should make some effort to make TCP that kind of place, but the truth is that I, myself, am full of racist, sexist, and other bullshittist nonsense and I don’t feel remotely qualified to start building walls against that here.
But the other thing that I’ve been thinking about is that there is a lot, lot, lot of intergenerational stuff going on among feminists that I feel in no way qualified to address. I’m not a second-wave feminist, though my feminist role models and the women who taught me to feminist are, for the most part. But I’m not a third-wave feminist, either. Frankly, I’m too old and though I see that they are right about the necessity of focusing on intersectionality and complimentary modes of oppression and giving proper respect to a wide range of thinkers, they do that stuff with much more deftness than I do.
I still think, though, that the most damaging thing white privilege does to the feminist movement, over and over and over again, is that it has trained us white women to see being powerful as a proper end goal, to see being a leader as a direct reflection on our worth. In other words, we still think (I think) of feminism’s goal as making us equal to men, without really asking ourselves if we really want what men have got.
I mean, yes, men have leadership and power and influence, but I think we can all look at the prices men pay for that–time away from family, alienation from their own emotions, enormous stress on material successes as a measure of a man’s worth–and wonder if that’s really all that worth aspiring to.
Wondering, fundimentally, if “aspiring to” is really the right goal to have.
And I don’t know. I can’t answer that. I just know that I’ve always felt pushed not only to do as good as I can, but to look for opportunities to take charge.
Now, as I’m older, I can see that there are three main reasons people take charge in any situation–because they believe they are a good candidate for being in charge and someone needs to; because there’s a distinct lack of leadership and someone needs to; and because they benefit from being in charge.
None of these are, in themselves, bad reasons to take charge.
But, when it comes to feminism and whiteness, it seems to me that we white women have this problem where we hardly ever sit back and ask ourselves why it is that we should lead. Instead, it’s almost as if, in any feminist movement, you can watch the white women jostle our way to the front of the parade, as if we somehow should always be the ones who decide where it’s going.
I recognize that impulse, constantly, in myself, so I’m speaking from that position, as someone who recognizes in others what she sees in herself–that desire for you to teach me all you can so that I can better serve you.
See how pretty that impulse is?
And yet, it’s hard to remember to question why you think, automatically, that you should be in charge, running things, moving things around so that everyone benefits.
I have more thoughts, but I have to get in the shower.
Filed under: Fun with Feminism
but the truth is that I, myself, am full of racist, sexist, and other bullshittist nonsense
We all are, Aunt B. The trick is recognizing it, taking responsibility for it and working to change it. As you do.
Great post.
Bill
It’s funny you should be talking about this. The last 3 jobs I had, everyone thought I should apply for a lead/supervisory position. I would be so good at it, they said, because I knew so much about the job and what it entailed and how to train people to do the job. No way, I said. I like doing my job, I like training people, but no way in hell do I want to supervise those same people. I have high expectations of myself, for how to do my job, and there is no way I want to push those expectations off on other people (if they don’t want to perform to the company’s standards, let alone mine, I don’t want to be the one to fire them, and fire them I would if I were a supervisor with that power). Being in a lead/supervisory position is more responsibility than I want in a job. I want to be able to go in, get my work done, and go home without taking my job home with me. People in positions of responsibility can’t always do that. I believe that if women want that kind of power, can deal with that kind of power, and are responsible in wielding that kind of power, great. But I sure don’t expect every woman I meet to want it. If everyone who is capable of being in charge were put in charge, how many support people would be left to do the grunt work? And it’s the grunt work that takes more bodies to accomplish than the supervisory work.
If women want to lead, then by all means, they should. But that doesn’t mean that all women have to want to lead just because some want to. I think that the opportunity to lead should be available to all women who want it, regardless of color, and not something that only white women have a right to do. This is something I’ve thought about for a long time. I’ve lived in Illinois, Washington state, and Minnesota, and held probably 15 different jobs (and by different, I mean everything from car-hopping to garment factory to rebate processing) in the last 39 years. In every damned one of those jobs, even though the work force might have been racially diverse, never was the lead/supervisory personnel diverse (they were always white male/white female). I never understood that, because a lot of the POC who worked with me knew more about the job and responsibilities than the supervisors/leads did. Was it because the whites pushed their way to the front or was it because the opportunities were never even offered to POC (or a combination of the 2)?
Seems like even though progress may have been made, it’s not enough progress, and we still have a long way to go, on all fronts. That’s sad.
B, I dunno … I hate this “why do we aspire to power when it takes such a dreadfful toll on those who wield it?” attitude. It reminds me of “why do you want to work outside your home when it will coarsen your delicate emotional fibers?” and even of “why do you want to tax your pretty little head with all the dreadful book-learning that we men have to do?”
(Some) women, as human beings, ought to aspire to power because (all) women, as human beings, live in a world where the holding and not holding of power has a direct impact on how (most) women, as human beings, live their lives. The laws that are passed, the way those laws are or aren’t enforced, the way workplaces function, the support the community offers women as workers, family members, everything — all these depend on who has (access to ) power.
Yeah, we can aspire to power at the same time that we try to change what having/wielding power looks like, and the effect it has on those who have it. And we can aspire to power even while we recognize that if we define ourselves only as ourselves-and-those-just-like-us we need to be sure that human beings other than ourselves also get power, too. But there’s a big gap between saying “I personally don’t want to be in charge of things” and saying “it’s not worth it for women to want to be in charge of things” or even “it’s not worth it for white women to want to be in charge of things.” Just so long as we don’t get into “I am the only one who ought to be in charge of things,” I think we’re OK.