'Who lost the Sex Wars?' Amia Srinivasan asks in the New Yorker. The answer, of course, is the Left- particularly the paranoid nutters who ranted about Capitalism and Imperialism and Racism and so forth.
The Left also lost the Gay Wars and the Trans Wars and the Class Wars and Cold Wars and Hot Wars and Ideological Wars and so forth. Why? Oppressed people want to be rich and free- not lectured incessantly on why they should ally which some other bunch of losers to support failed policies and cut their own throats. But the same is true of non-oppressed people.
For Tambrams- like me and Amia- Education won the Sex Wars. Talent won the Sex Wars. Entrepreneurial elan or just plain Perseverance won the Sex Wars. Look at Mamta Bannerjee- a girl from a poor Brahmin famil- who over threw the wealthy gerontocrats of the Communist Party who had ruled Bengal for 30 years. Look at Jayalalitha, a Brahmin girl who ruled our native State with a strong anti-Brahmin ideology for many years. Look at Indra Nooyi- a Tambram just like Amia- who became the CEO of Pepsi Cola. Then look at me. I've achieved zilch because I'm lazy and stupid and ignnirint. Having a dick no longer means Tambram males earn more or have better life-chances than Tambram women. Girls don't have to learn to cook and clean and do Bharatnatyam. They can actually achieve more than men because women tend to have better 'soft skills'.
Why are some people oppressed and exploited? The answer is that they have low 'transfer earnings'- i.e. their next best occupation doesn't pay much. Education gives you more choices as does good character and being a nice person and all that other shite I never bothered with. This means you can't be exploited- no 'surplus value' can be extracted from you coz your supply curve is elastic. That means no Marxian 'alienation' or 'false consciousness' or other shite is possible.
Kiran Mazumdar qualified to be a brewmaster- like her dear old Dad- in Australia. But 'enlightened' Bangalore wasn't ready to give a woman a factory floor job back in the Seventies. So Kiran got a job in Scotland which can't afford to harbour any fucking prejudice because it competes on open markets- (unlike License Raj India). However, an Irish entrepreneur spotted her potential and partnered with her to set up a biochem unit in India. She became a billionaire. I should mention, her husband- who was very liked in India- is Scottish.
Where is the Racism or Sexism here? Scottish men are plenty macho. But the Scots are good people. So is most everybody. True, Scots went out of their way to find opportunities so that their country and their people could come up. Yes, some Scots were probably nasty pieces of work. But like the Irish and the Welsh and the Geordies and Jamaicans and Cockneys and Calcuttans and most every type of folk, given half a chance, the Scots and the South Indians have been able to dis-intermediate the nasty geezers by finding alternative sources of demand for their effort or supply for their wants.
That's all that's needed. Not Revolution, but alternatives. Suppose my wife had stuck around waiting for Society to change so I'd change into someone who wasn't ugly, stupid and annoying to be with, she'd have fucking topped herself long ago. Instead, her pursuit of education gave her better and better alternatives. She might have felt a pang or two for dumping me but Society was on her side. A hubby is not a kitten. The fat fuck should learn to pick up after himself. Even the most Catholic countries approved of women kicking losers to the kerb once everybody could see families do better by 'downsizing'. But this great truth was revealed in the Chandogya Upanishad three thousand years ago! Women don't have to stick with losers. Sadly, they do have to be winners. Why? They are now obliged to compete with each other for good quality sperm. In the old days, girls could just hitch their DNA to a guy from the dominant group and then exploit a 'grandmother effect' to ensure differential reproductive outcomes- though this involved shite like caste and class and so forth- but now the game has changed. Most men are like me- piss poor protoplasm. We won't have kids or wives. G.fs sure. Every woman deserves to spend some time with a loser man-child. It's a rite of passage.
Is this a good thing? Yes. Loser men will revert to matrilocality- investing in their sister's progeny- the way nature intended. This is good for eugenics and it is good for soteriology. It is definitely good for the Environment. Fewer people- fewer ways for us to fuck up Gaia.
There was a theory about a maternal/paternal 'arms race' re. weight of the baby at birth. The notion was that there might be a 'male brain'- autistic, hypomentalist, hypermechanist- which tried to get the mum to divert resources to the embryo in a manner which endangered her own health. I think women's genes have an epigenetic way of fighting back, which is why the first baby may be heavier than subsequent kids, but we now have the nous and tech to put an end to this arms race. Perhaps, by itself, this will tend to make Society nicer. Dunno. Fuck I care. I'll die soon as a Schopenhauerian 'small winner'- i.e. a guy with no progeny in this shitshow of a world.
That's another way to win the Sex wars. But, it would be a shame if Iyengar girls embraced it. They are very good people- fearless, frank and a force for the good.
But, also stupid and ignorant- if that is what their profession requires.
Thus Amia writes- Fissures in the feminist movement should not be buried as signs of failure but worked through as opportunities for insight.
Does she mean the 'fissure' caused by nutters? Is she saying women should not worry about 'intersectionality'- i.e. the requirement for Black women to slag off White women- but should concentrate instead on substantive issues which affect all women?
Does she accept that immigrant women who aint really 'bleck'- like her and Rafia Zakaria- should not be allowed to pretend they are 'subaltern' as opposed to opportunistically elite migrants?
No. Don't be silly. The woman has been hired for a shitty job and she is shitty enough to do that job in a shitty style.
Ruskin College, in Oxford, England, was founded in 1899 to serve working-class men who were otherwise excluded from higher education, and went coed in 1919.
Higher education is for adolescents. Some men may retrain in College. Plenty of working class origin men decided to become priests or missionaries and studied Divinity at Oxford or Cambridge or other such places. There were also a few Solicitor's clerks who saved up enough money to go to University with a view to qualifying as barristers. Medicine and Engineering too began to attract more and more such men. Ruskin College didn't achieve much in this respect. Like John Ruskin- it was a bit shit. By contrast, my alma mater- the LSE- achieved a lot as did Birkbeck and so forth.
In 1970, it was the site of the inaugural National Women’s Liberation Movement Conference.
What else happened at that time? Mrs. Thatcher became Education Secretary and canceled Labor's policy of turning Grammar Schools into Comprehensives. She had struck the first blow against the 'Butskellite' consensus. It is true that she was very cautious but she was quietly staking a claim to the Leadership- which she achieved 5 years later. On the other hand, Thatcher had been forced by the Treasury to get rid of free milk for primary school kids (Labor had already axed milk for secondary schools). This earned her the 'milk snatcher' sobriquet. She considered resigning. However, non-public school Tories rallied to her because they believed she now had no option but to move to the Right.
However, Thatcher was initially a pragmatist and hoped to rise by appearing soft and fluffy. It is interesting that, in backing Barbara Castle's Equal Pay Act, she drew attention to statutory changes which weakened the position of the half of adult women who were house-wives. The Women's Institute had taken note of the Conservative Party's 'Fair shares for the fair sex'. . Meanwhile, the crazy Lefties were provoking a popular backlash against 'Women's Lib'.
Heath imposed a State of Emergency to deal with Trade Union strikes. The head of the Civil Service took off all this clothes and rolled around on the carpet of Number 10 screaming about Communist infiltrators. It was becoming clear to British women that they would have to shoulder the men aside- very politely, of course- because they were about as much use as a wet hen.
Obviously, women who went to University- unless, they studied Chemistry or other STEM subjects- were just as useless as Oxbridge educated wets like Wilson and Heath.
Women’s-liberation groups had already been meeting across Britain, inspired variously by the high-profile women’s movement in the U.S.; anticolonial and pro-democracy struggles in Europe, Asia, and Latin America; and working-class women’s strikes closer to home, in Dagenham and Hull.
Dagenham Man voted for Thatcher who completely rolled back the Left agenda. The Soviets helped Thatcher by dubbing her the 'Iron Lady'.
But the Ruskin conference was, for the women who gathered there, a heady moment of consolidation. One participant, the playwright Michelene Wandor, described Ruskin as an “exhilarating and confusing revelation . . . six hundred women . . . hell-bent on changing the world and our image as women.”
They failed. Thatcher succeeded.
The conference produced several demands: equality in pay,
To be fair, Labor had pushed the Equal Pay Act through. But it would have had to come in once Britain voted to join the EU in any case.
education, and job opportunities; free contraception; abortion on demand; and free twenty-four-hour nurseries. Yet these demands (though still largely unmet) undersell the radicalism of what the women at Ruskin were trying to achieve.
They achieved nothing. Nobody gives a shit about Ruskin College or Buskin College.
As Sheila Rowbotham, a feminist historian and one of the Ruskin organizers, writes in her new memoir, “Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s,” such measures seemed readily attainable and unambitious. “The reforms did not address the underlying inequalities affecting working-class women,” she writes, “nor the diffuse sense of oppressed social dislocation which many young university-educated middle-class women like me were experiencing.”
Who has heard of this Rowbotham? Who hasn't heard of Thatcher? If Priti Patel is Home Secretary it is because Thatcher inspires her. Who gives a shit about people inspired by Rowbotham?
For Rowbotham and the other socialist feminists who dominated the British women’s movement, women’s liberation was bound up with the dismantling of capitalism.
Back then some people believed that young girls had taken power from old men in Mao's China. There were also those who thought the Miner's Strike might lead to 'Syndicalism' or Worker Management of Enterprises. In this case, it made sense for women to have a list of demand prepared beforehand.
The Seventies saw a breakdown of the Post War straitjacket which had kept primary products cheap and permitted redistribution to the median worker. The Tory victory in 1970 showed that the median voter didn't want more equality. They wanted a strong pound so as to enjoy cheap holidays in Franco's Spain.
Over the course of the Seventies there was a tremendous transfer of wealth to Brown and Black people in former colonies or protectorates. The upper class had to get inventive though some remained 'wet'. But the upper working class too was feeling its oats. Prices and Incomes Policy was anathema to them. They were perfectly prepared to tolerate Great Depression level unemployment rates provided they themselves did well out of it. Even in Scandinavia, 'solidarity wages' collapsed. Once women's wages started to equal men's, they too lost any incentive to pander to the Leftist nutters. During the 80's, it was obvious that Thatcher wore the trousers in her Cabinet. Feminism wilted and withered as Thatcher laid about her with her handbag. True, there was Greenham Common. But it was a joke. The Cruise Missiles left but some of the women stayed. This wasn't militancy. It was dottiness of an endearing kind.
But it also required—and here they departed from the Old Guard left—a rethinking of everyday patterns of life, relating to sex, love, housework, child rearing.
The Pill had done that already. Why buy the cow etc? Thatcher came out against the permissive society in 1970.
The most iconic photograph from Ruskin is not of the women but of men: male partners who had been tasked with running a day care for the weekend. In the black-and-white photo, two men sit on the floor, surrounded by small children; one of them, the celebrated cultural theorist Stuart Hall, clutches a sleeping toddler to his chest, looking meaningfully into the camera.
Denis Thatcher went the extra mile. He supported his wife to qualify as a barrister and rise as a Member of Parliament.
Among many contemporary British feminists, especially those who lived through the arc of the liberation movement, Ruskin evokes both regret and hope—a promise that was not delivered but might be delivered still.
By whom? BoJo? Priti Patel?
In February of last year, an event was held at the University of Oxford to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Ruskin conference.
Feminists vs trans activists- no wonder the Red Wall collapsed.
There is no iconic photo of the event, but there is an infamous YouTube video. It shows attendees demanding to know why Selina Todd, a feminist historian who teaches at Oxford and who had originally been scheduled to give remarks at the gathering, had been “deplatformed.” In fact, she had been dropped after other speakers threatened a boycott, owing to her involvement with Woman’s Place U.K., an organization that advocates the exclusion of trans women from women’s spaces.
Like prisons. People with male physiques and male genitalia who are in prison for raping women should not be locked up with women. Apparently 50 per cent of transgender people in women's prisons have been convicted of sexual offenses.
This is a battle women will win. Everybody likes transgender people. Nobody likes the tiny fraction of them who commit sexual offenses.
(A few months after the conference, it was revealed that a project Todd led at Oxford, on the history of women and the law, had paid Woman’s Place a “consultancy fee” of twenty thousand pounds, the group’s largest source of income between 2018 and 2020.)
How very sinister! But 'Woman's Place' does do research on that area. Why should they not be paid for it?
One of the irate audience members was Julie Bindel, a radical feminist who
men like because she wants fair treatment of women jailed for fighting back against violent partners. That's self-defense right there. The truth is men don't like rapists or bullies who knock their wives about. Anger flares up more especially where kids are involved. That why 'nonces' need protection in male jails.
campaigns against male violence, sex work, and trans rights. (“Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease.”)
Cool! What's not to like about John Travolta and Olivia Newton John? Bindel could be writing for the Daily Mail when, with wry humor, she classes herself as one of those ideological killjoy who wanted to take all the fun out of being gay- When I were a lass, new to feminism and lesbianism, I was among the brigade who would sit in the women's disco wearing vegetarian shoes and staring in disbelief at the butch/femme couples, mainly because they were having a better time than me. "Oh, but they're emulating heterosexuality!" we would gasp in horror as the butch ran her Zippo up the femme's fishnets. "What's the point of being a lesbian if you're going to behave like that?"
This strikes a chord with Middle England. We secretly like 'Grease' but is it quite proper?
Twenty years ago, when I worked on an advice line for lesbians, I would take call after call from self-hating, suicidal women who had experienced horrific homophobia. Thanks to feminism and gay liberation, that situation has altered radically. What a disgrace, therefore, that our legacy amounts to this: if you are unhappy with the constraints of your gender, don't challenge them. If you are tired of being stared at for snogging your same-sex partner in the street, have a sex change. Where are those who go berserk about the ethics of genetic engineering yet seem not to worry about major, irreversible surgery on healthy bodies? Also, those who "transition" seem to become stereotypical in their appearance - fuck-me shoes and birds'-nest hair for the boys; beards, muscles and tattoos for the girls. Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease.When feminists suggested that the true "gender outlaws" were those who didn't give a toss about conforming to masculine or feminine norms, it sounded so persuasive that even some straight people took it up. When it got to the stage where my mum was wearing jeans and trainers rather than her usual skirts and heels, I started to feel a bit like the wonderful Daffyd from Little Britain. Too many straight women looked like they might be lesbians, and I wanted to be the only gay in the village!
She said, “How do you think it feels for a feminist who has advocated all her professional life . . . on behalf of disenfranchised women to be told that she is too dangerous and vile to speak?” The audience held a spontaneous vote, and overwhelmingly supported letting Todd speak, but by then she had left the premises.
Back in 1970, ordinary people thought College was for smart people. In 2020, is considered a PONZI scheme. 'Leaving the premises' is the best thing you can do if you want to have a political impact.
Those who protested Todd’s deplatforming tended to think that the event’s organizers had violated the spirit of the original Ruskin conference.
Which was about getting sex-criminals with dongs into women's prisons- right?
John Watts, the chair of Oxford’s history-faculty board, thought so, too: “We believe it’s always better to debate than to exclude. This seems to us a key principle of 1970.” Yet Ruskin had its own exclusions. Like the 2020 conference that commemorated it, Ruskin was overwhelmingly white and middle class. One of the few Black women who attended, Gerlin Bean, has said that she “couldn’t really pick on the relevance” of the event “as it pertains to Black women.”
Black women had scarcely existed in the UK twenty years previously. In 1970, it was by no means clear that Blacks and Asians might not be forcibly repatriated. Fortunately, the Brits could see for themselves that dusky folk work hard and are prepared to do the jobs nobody wants. It turned out the West Indians had great music while that stinky curry the East Indians liked tasted rather good after a few pints of lager.
(Bean would go on to co-found the influential Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent.) Whether or not the divisiveness of the 2020 Oxford conference was in keeping with the spirit of 1970, it was certainly in keeping with the spirit of later episodes in the British movement, as its fault lines grew more visible during the seventies.
The Tories came together after getting rid of the deeply silly Enoch. Thatcher ended up delivering something he could never have dreamed off- viz. putting the Soviet Union on the slippery slope to dissolution.
They were visible on the other side of the Atlantic, too.
This silly woman doesn't get that America was always racially diverse. England wasn't.
The women’s-liberation movement in the United States,
failed. Second Wave Feminism had got the Equal Pay Act through in 1963. Female lawyers and legislators and administrators and journalists and so forth worked hard behind the scenes. Then some silly Leftists made a ruckus which caused as a backlash. But women succeeded simply because they were better at doing useful and vital stuff.
from its beginning in the late sixties, had been characterized by tensions between socialist feminists (or “politicos”) who saw class subordination as the root cause of women’s oppression and feminists who thought of “male supremacy” as an autonomous structure of social and political life.
Complaining about men is cool. What's more, most men don't like men- at least not enough to marry them. Any way, 'penis envy' is a real thing- though only men like me suffer from it.
At the same time, there had been growing tensions between feminists (like Ti-Grace Atkinson and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) who embraced separatism and, sometimes, political lesbianism as the only acceptable responses to male supremacy,
Why not embrace lesbianism coz lesbians are really nice?
and feminists (like the “pro-woman” members of the group Redstockings, founded by Shulamith Firestone
who went mad
and Ellen Willis,
who was perfectly sane. She attacked Left anti Semites
in 1969) who rejected such “personal solutionism” for its rebuke of heterosexual desire and its tendency to alienate “non-movement” women.
Why did crazy women not get to fuck up Women as a whole in the manner that crazy men have always been able to fuck up Men as a whole? The answer is that women instinctively compete as to who is more kray kray.
In 1978, the tenth National Women’s Liberation Movement Conference was held in Birmingham, England. Self-identified “revolutionary feminists” submitted a proposal to cancel the demands established at previous conferences, insisting that it was “ridiculous for us to demand anything from a patriarchal state—from men—who are the enemy.” Revolutionary feminism had been baptized the year before, when Sheila Jeffreys, in a lecture titled “The Need for Revolutionary Feminism,” chided socialist feminists for failing to recognize that male violence, rather than capitalism, was the root of women’s oppression. At the Birmingham conference, the revolutionary feminists’ proposal was left off the plenary agenda, and, when it was finally read aloud, chaos erupted: women shouted, sang, and wrenched microphones from one another’s hands. Many attendees walked out. It was the last of the national conferences.
The problem with telling women that men are the enemy is that it is easy to kill men. But who then will put the garbage out?
What happened at Birmingham prefigured what happened at Barnard College, in New York, four years later. At that point, a lightning rod had emerged for the contrary currents of feminism: pornography. “Antiporn” feminists saw in pornography the ideological training ground of male supremacy. (“Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice,” Robin Morgan declared in 1974.) Their feminist opponents saw the antiporn crusade as a reinforcement of a patriarchal world view that denied women sexual agency. In April, 1982, the Barnard Conference on Sexuality was held, in one organizer’s words, as “a coming out party” for feminists who were “appalled by the intellectual dishonesty and dreariness of the anti-pornography movement.” In the conference’s concept paper, the anthropologist Carole Vance called for an acknowledgment of sex as a domain not merely of danger but of “exploration, pleasure, and agency.”
Also, you could make money of it. Money matters. Without it, 'exploration, pleasure and agency' start to pall quite quickly. The difference between a hippy and a hobo is access to a Trust Fund.
A week before the conference, antiporn feminists started calling Barnard administrators to complain, and administrators confiscated copies of the “Diary of a Conference on Sexuality”—a compilation of essays, reflections, and erotic images to be given out to participants.
Colleges are supposed to be about reading boring books- not looking at porn. At least that is what I was told when I complained about the low class of my degree.
At the event, which drew about eight hundred people, antiporn feminists distributed leaflets accusing the organizers of supporting sadomasochism, violence against women, and pedophilia.
Just as the ancient Greek founders of paideia intended. Cool.
Feminist newspapers were filled with furious condemnations of the conference and indignant replies. The event’s organizers described an aftermath of “witch-hunting and purges”; Gayle Rubin, who ran a workshop at the conference, wrote in 2011 that she still carried “the horror of having been there.”
A horror we share. The fact that bitches be kray kray is part of their charm but there can be too much of a good thing. Still, if mud wrestling had been introduced as a way to resolve ideological issues, the thing could have turned a profit.
In an illuminating retelling of this period of American feminist history, “Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era,” the political theorist
i.e. cretin
Lorna N. Bracewell challenges the standard narrative of the so-called sex wars as a “catfight,” a “wholly internecine squabble among women.”
Sadly nobody cares enough about Bracewell- who looks like a young Log Cabin Republican man- to pull her hair or try to scratch her eyes out- maybe because she looks like the sort of young Republican man you can bring home to your parents only for them to fall about laughing coz he's so obviously gay.
For Bracewell, that story omits the crucial role of a third interest group, liberals, who, she argues, ultimately domesticated the impulses of both antiporn and pro-porn feminists.
by wanking, right?
Under the influence of liberal legal scholars such as Elena Kagan and Cass Sunstein, antiporn feminism gave up on its dream of transforming relations between women and men in favor of using criminal law to target narrow categories of porn.
If these guys are against kiddie porn- good luck to them.
“Sex radical” defenders of porn became, according to Bracewell, milquetoast “sex positive” civil libertarians who are more concerned today with defending men’s due-process rights than with cultivating sexual countercultures. Both antiporn and pro-sex feminism, she argues, lost their radical, utopian edge.
AIDS changed things in the Eighties. Believe me, it was scary shit.
This sort of plague-on-both-their-houses diagnosis has gained currency. In a 2019 piece on Andrea Dworkin, Moira Donegan wrote that “sex positivity became as strident and incurious in its promotion of all aspects of sexual culture as the anti-porn feminists were in their condemnation of sexual practices under patriarchy.” Yet the inimitable Maggie Nelson, in her new book, “On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint,” sees a “straw man” in such dismissive depictions of sex positivity. She says that skeptics forget its crucial historical backdrop—the feminist and queer aids activism of the eighties and nineties. For such activists, Nelson writes, sex positivity was a way of “insisting, in the face of viciously bigoted moralists who didn’t care if you lived or died (many preferred that you died), that you have every right to your life force and sexual expression, even when the culture was telling you that your desire was a death warrant.”
Attitudes to homosexuality changed when ordinary people could see that the Gay community was able to come together not just to look after its own but to help others- even in far off countries where AIDS was a heterosexual disease affecting dark skinned working class people- and to do so in a rational and scientific manner.
Both Bracewell and Nelson raise an important question about how disagreements within feminism are seen.
No they don't. They come across as careerists educated beyond their intelligence- in Nelson's case this involved reading too much Foucault.
Where the famous rifts within the male-dominated left—between, say, E. P. Thompson and Stuart Hall over Louis Althusser’s structuralism—
Fuck could either fuckwit say about a fuckwit who killed his wife? Marxism is an economic theory. Structuralism is a mathematical research program.
are regarded as instructive mappings of intellectual possibility, as debates to be “worked through,” feminists tend to picture the great “wars” of their movement’s past as warnings or sources of shame.
Very sensible of them. But it would be more sensible to take the road of a Thatcher or a Merkel. Incidentally, East German women were ahead of West German women in some respects. It seems it is perfectly possible to almost wholly eliminate a repugnancy market for female sex work. That's something all decent peeps can get behind. It makes sense for women to take the lead on this because you know that any man involved is gonna get caught with his trousers down.
This is not to deny that feminist debate can have a particular emotional resonance. Sheila Rowbotham, though not averse to relitigating old arguments (especially with Selma James, a founder of the Wages for Housework campaign), admits that “connecting the personal with the political” could pose a particular problem for the movement: “when ruptures appeared these proved all the more painful.” She explains, “Theoretically I did not hold with the notion that because we were women we would wipe away political conflicts, but emotionally, like many other feminists, I was attached to a vision of us birthing a new politics of harmony.”
Okay. Teaching History makes you stupid. Still, most women don't teach History.
As a professor, I detect a similar hope in the students who take my feminism classes, especially the women (as most of them are).
A hope they soon lose. But that would be true of a student taking any course Amia teaches.
Many of them come to feminism looking for camaraderie, understanding, community. They want to articulate the shared truth of their experience,
I can understand that. At my age, I often stop to talk to other old geezers and to 'articulate the shared truth of our experience' that 'it turned out sunny again' or 'fucking pissing down- innit?'
and to read great feminist texts that will reveal the world to which they should politically aspire.
Fifty Shades?
They want, in other words, something akin to what so many women of the second wave experienced in consciousness-raising groups. As the British feminist Juliet Mitchell put it in 1971, “Women come into the movement from the unspecified frustration of their own private lives,” and then “find that what they thought was an individual dilemma is a social predicament and hence a political problem.”
Women were not being paid equally. They needed to get together to figure out a way to gain countervailing power. That is perfectly rational. However, you have to kick out the crazy nutters or Philosophy professors etc.
But my women students quickly discover, as an earlier generation did, that there is no monolithic “women’s experience”:
Yes there is, if women are paid less than doing the same job as men. All women are looking at their wage slip and going 'is that all? How come the bloke next to me at work gets more money? Fuck is going on here?'
that their experiences are inflected by distinctions in class, race, and nationality, by whether they are trans or cis, gay or straight, and also by the less classifiable distinctions of political instinct—their feelings about authority, hierarchy, technology, community, freedom, risk, love.
Crap. Money is money. True some nutters will turn up at any meeting whatsoever to demand we overthrow Capitalism or get rid of penises or whatever but chasing away nutters is
My students soon find, in turn, that the vast body of feminist theory is riddled with disagreement.
It is shit.
It is possible to show them that working through these “wars” can be intellectually productive, even thrilling.
If you are easily thrilled- sure.
But I sense that some small disappointment remains. Nelson suggests that looking to the past for the glimmer of liberatory possibilities “inevitably produces the dashed hope that someone, somewhere, could have or should have enacted or ensured our liberation.” Within feminism, that dashed hope provides “yet another opportunity to blame one’s foremothers for not having been good enough.”
There it is! True Feminism consists of saying 'Mummy's place is in the wrong. Fuck you, Mummy! You fucked me up but good.' Of course, in the old days, women used to say to their boyfriends 'boy, did your Mother do a number on you!'. But men soon got wise to that. They'd say 'I'm Mummy's special special little boy. You're mean. Boo hoo!' Women would then try to bring up the Oedipus complex but by then Freud was known to be a Fraud. Loving Mummy is perfectly okay. Furthermore, sons are low maintenance compared to daughters. Also, sons can put the garbage out and pop down to the grocery store and such like. Daughters are perpetually on the rag and regard their mothers with a baleful eye if household chores are mentioned.
Today, the most visible war within Anglo-American feminism is over the place of trans women in the movement, and in the category of “women” more broadly.
This is a sideshow. The real battle is over Roe v Wade.
Many trans-exclusionary feminists—Germaine Greer, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond, Robin Morgan—trace their lineage to the radical feminism of the nineteen-seventies: thus the term “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” usually shortened to the derogatory “terf.” But the term can be misleading. As young feminists like Katie J. M. Baker and Sophie Lewis have suggested, the contemporary trans-exclusionary movement might have as much to do with the radicalizing potential of social media as with the legacy of radical feminism. In the U.K., trans-exclusionary activists have worn buttons proclaiming that they were “Radicalised by Mumsnet,” Britain’s largest online platform for parents. On message boards, mothers, justifiably aggrieved by a lack of material support and social recognition, are encouraged to direct their ire at the “trans lobby.”
The lobby is shite precisely because everybody already loves genuine trans people. I have to stop quoting Amia now. I am older than her. I know more. Still, this silly sausage is selling something for which there is a market.
The fact is, 'compliance costs' seemed elastic. They weren't really. Still, by increasing them, wimmin thought they'd done something wonderful. The truth is they merely transferred a portion of a Rent.
Michael Crichton wrote 'Disclosure' in 1994. But everybody smart had already adjusted their behavior to lay off that particular risk.
Amia is regressing rapidly. Her excuse is that her students need a soft shoulder to cry on for terrible injustices like not being able to pee standing up and Mummy not giving me enough breast milk jus' coz I don't got a dick. Or maybe I do. I'm keeping it secret till I get sent to jail for not being able to pay my taxes.
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