These past few days, info
Well. No new Miu Miu has appeared in my wardrobe and my shit, I think, is in the same place I left it last. But nonetheless, it seems, the failure to immediately denounce any opponent of feminism is seen as little short of madness.
Truth be told, I have no interest in redeeming myself as rational. But I do, after some days of discussion, feel I have a small stake in giving Women Against Feminism some analysis that goes a bit beyond the very simple and dominant critique of “those bitches are dumb”.
Let it be said. Some of the Women Against Feminism advocates seem thicker than a bowl of quinoa porridge. Their scrawled complaint urges, on occasion, for a return to “traditional values and families”. Lol. Good luck with reorganising a western economy that does not just permit but demands female participation in an organised workforce, girls. I’m sure you can fundamentally change the shape of labour and return to your rightful place at the hearth making cakes and giving exquisite blowjobs using only a cardboard sign and a nice foundation garment. Knock yourselves out and if you have any handy hints about how the women of the world should feed themselves and their issue on a single income generated by a man, I am, after twenty-five years of wage slavery, all fucking ears.
Just to be clear. Women Against Feminism contains a volume of Stupid so great that if it were converted to quality top soil would be sufficient to transform the dust bowls of Africa into arable farmland.
But. You know. This doesn’t mean that Women Against Feminism does not (a) have something instructive to tell us about anti-liberalism generally and (b) that the Feminism it attacks is not, at times, also as dumb as a bowl of porridge.
What we have here in part is a case of dumb and dumber. What we have is whole lot of selfies of women in their best lipstick holding up signs opposing signs held up in selfies of women in their best lipstick. It is illiterate anti-feminism talking to an almost identically illiterate feminism.
Of course, this is not how the Feminist Internet sees it.
These past few weeks, a thousand Strong Women™ have decried the mini-movement. I’m going to list the major critiques before I get to the bit where I suggest that Women Against Feminism, like other anti-liberal populist groups, deserves a second look.
The first account of Women Against Feminism is that it is part of a long tradition of opposition to feminism. Slate says, “there’s nothing new about women being marshaled to attack feminism” in one of many pieces that links the young women to a tradition exemplified by Pyllis Schlafly, an ultra-conservative teacake who spent many years building and then burning down a fictional feminism made of straw and Stupid. One of the emails I received said, similarly, that Women Against Feminism was just more “backlash of the type that Susan Faludi described”.
For mine, this is not completely true. Certainly, there has been a tradition of opposition to feminist ideals as old as feminist ideals. And certainly, some of these have taken the form of traditional right wing idealism that wants women back at the hearth giving headjobs between plumping up soufflés. But it is worth remembering the constant assertion by feminists that feminism itself is a “broad church” and that the objections to it—even within Women Against Feminism— are similarly disparate.
Let’s consider the early injunction by socialist women of suffrage. Real red-ragger women didn’t encourage it. Take, for example, this 1909 claim from women in the British Socialist Standard that suffragettes were “a few deluded individuals who have conceived the brilliant idea that the vote, per se, is all that is necessary for the ushering in of the millennium.” They opposed the vote because they opposed The System and fucking good on them, frankly. Why partake of the illusion of democracy? It was, they said, counter-revolutionary.
A little softer but not really structurally indistinct was Germaine Greer’s cry against liberal feminism. She has been unwavering in her 1971 claim that she wanted to change the whole system and not just confer more advantage to women within a system she saw as corrupt. Marking the difference between a feminism of liberation that rejects all hierarchies and a feminism of equality that simply rejects patriarchy is another critique of feminism. And one that has nothing to do with a “long tradition” of right wing women clinging to a nuclear family fancy.
And one, by the way, that has been mentioned by some participants in this newest anti-feminist action. This young Women Against Feminism on YouTube, urges for a politics that extends beyond gender equality.
She seems frustrated with a movement that sees gender equality as the foundation of social change. “I am for equality for everyone,” says the young woman, who also says that she supports equal rights for women in law. Her thesis is not evolved, but her irritation with feminism is worth analysis.
So. In short. To say that the claims of Women Against Feminism form part of an ongoing right-wing feminine self-loathing ignores history. Which brings us to
Our second account of why Women Against Feminism suck in the view of Internet Feminism.
HuffPo bemoans “the lack of understanding of the history” of the mini-movement. The Daily Wife urges for an “education in history” to remediate the stupidity of these young women. WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THE THINGS FEMINISM HAS DONE FOR YOU? demand a number of sites.
Well. To that I’d say, since when in the name of sweet fuck has any popular movement consisting chiefly of young people—including popular feminism—been big on history books? Further, I would say that it is impossible to claim, as most of the writers do, that feminism is a “broad church” which has no rules for membership while demanding that Women Against Feminism establish a liturgy and definite rules for membership.
Again, Women Against Feminism is opposed not to a broad historical understanding of feminism but to a new feminism which gives it a run for its insufficient intellectual funds. It is women with cardboard signs answering other women with cardboard fucking signs. We’re not going to get Marx reinterpreting Hegel, here. Or Butler re-reading Foucault if you want to get all femmo. What we have is ahistorical, antipolitical young women answering other ahistorical antipolitical young women. It’s a recipe for double-shit-chip cookies.
And fuck off telling young people they need to read history. They never will. I’ve been doing that for years. I even have a book about it due for release in December. Everyone keeps telling me, quite rightly, to get fucked. History. Young people. They’re as compatible as a rat and a snake.
If anyone needs to get down with a big old library of poisonous ideology, it is, perhaps, feminists. Which brings us to the
Third account of why Women Against Feminism are a noxious force of titty little lady birds who need their wings clipped and their mouths bound up with Rosie the Riveter do-rags.
Blah blah blah Because we’re women. Because equal pay. There’s still a struggle. Blah. Look. At this point, I am boring even myself and I’m not going to link to any more god-awful precious shit about the Feminist Struggle against twenty-year olds with cardboard signs because fuck me, I can’t take any more bad discourse.
Look. What all these Women Against Women Against Feminism are saying about their nemeses is that they don’t understand that women are being oppressed. Particularly economically.
Now, if we go back to our relatively sane young woman on YouTube who cries for the inequality of all, I think we can begin to say that this populist movement has half a point.
If you are not a middle class young woman, imagine that you are. Imagine that you have just left university and that you are confronting not only the bruising reality of your debt but the likelihood that you and all your age-mates will spend the next thirty years living with your parents. Imagine that you have been raised in a time with the deadening ideology of You Can Make It Only If You Try and the crushing experience of having tried and knowing that you’ll never work in your field of study. And, in fact, that a job in any field is hard to come by.
Add to this a cunning marketing culture that pulls at your desire to consume but gives you no means to do so. And the suspicion that the world is choking thanks to the over-production of all those things you can’t buy. And, perhaps, if you are a mildly political person with some economic nous, you might be troubled by the idea that the labour of dependent trade nations makes possible the portable affluence of your iPhone. You might know, vaguely, that one of the last gasps of your western wealth came from Foxconn in China and mines in Africa. And imagine that in addition to the sense that liberal democracy can no longer deliver you the things it gave your parents, it’s closed its doors on your male friends as well.
And amid all of this, you hear a bunch of your peers baying for more blood out of a stone. They want equality from WHAT? A system predicated on inequality? A system that all reliable economists tell us what we all suspect: that the era of high-flyin’ western good times is fucking over.
And you hear women demanding that the Taliban stop its oppression of Our Sisters. But you wonder about the men that the War Lords and the Taliban is screwing and think, perhaps, that even if they don’t have to wear a particular item of clothing, that they are denied sanitation and subject to the brutality that your iPhone owning culture caused. And you see friends Facebook statuses which decry Muslim treatment of women generally and you think, well, that seems a bit racist. And you might wonder if the US drones that hover over Pakistan and Yemen “discriminate” on the basis of gender. And you think, quite rightly, that a military death is a military death. Whatever its gender.
And Michelle Obama holds another cardboard sign saying “Bring Our Girls Back”. While her husband orders more drone attacks. And these drones don’t discriminate.They kill children, too.
Drones don’t discriminate like they are supposed to. And your democracy and your economic system doesn’t discriminate. Your men friends are as fucked as you are. You’re all just scrambling for a living.
And you see women advocating for more political representation. Why? So they can join a political class that accelerates your decline into poverty. .And you hear women advocating for more positions on boards. Why? So they can make the decision to send more manufacture off-shore so that your iPhone 6 can be made in a feudal factory complex that contains more slaves than Abraham Lincoln ever freed. And you see women demanding for a “broad church” approach to their physical representation on cat-walks and in magazines. Why? So they can advertise more shit you can’t afford to buy. So they can liberalise the “right” to be looked at for all women? As though being considered pretty by a mass audience was as precious as the right to free assembly.
These are the suspicions that can motivate someone to hate feminism as it has become. And don’t give me It’s A Broad Church when it is very largely a mate to liberal democracy and the economies it legitimises. What feminism largely wants is equality for women in an era and a system that are as inevitably predicated on inequality as your iPhone 6 is on slavery. There can be no equality in our western democracies and the countries they enslave. And if women aren’t getting short shrift, some other poor fucker of a social class certainly will. And even if the handful of people who decide our economic fate happen all to be white men, there are a bunch of other white men who get zip and will live at home until their parents die.
Imagine being a young woman and imagine how these thoughts might occur to you.
So. Women Against Feminism may be apolitical and unformed And just because they are a bit stupid and trollish doesn’t mean they don’t have a point. Like the kids of the London Riots, they don’t know what they were rebelling against. But they were rebelling against something. A consumer culture, perhaps, that blared temptation at them but denied them the means to partake of it. They couldn’t articulate it. But this doesn’t mean that their actions weren’t eloquent.
Why not listen to what their pathologies have to say without dismissing these girls as naughty little things who aren’t good at history? They are rejecting a bourgeois movement of stupid whiners who demand “equality” in a system that cannot ever provide equality.
Feminism as it is largely expressed cannot imagine much beyond liberal democracy. Feminism is Francis Fukuyama and it asks the End of History Daddy State to fix the grievances it has but rarely questions the economic forces that fuck most of us. And will keep fucking us, if Stiglitz and anyone with a clue is to be believed.
Women Against Feminism, thick as it is, is, at the very least, saying, on occasion, Something Is Very Wrong. And it’s not just that some men have “bad attitudes” but that capital is a monster without any moral logic. And that asking it to behave like a nice guy is like asking a bowl of quinoa porridge to taste good.
It can’t hear you. And it sure can’t read your cardboard sign.
96 thoughts on “Women Against Women Against Revolution”
How do i say this without sounding like a douche? ah the hell with it! I love reading your work because I often disagree with you as much as I agree with you but I appreciate the way you put your arguments and the fact you stand up behind what you say. I honestly disagreed with you at the beginning of this article, however your final points make a great deal of sense to me and I feel a bit like i just got woken up ( or kicked in the pants you choose which) So, Thanks again!
Reading the subsequent waft, I feel the need to add to my ‘ not really part of this discussion’.
The woman Angela Lenfranchi, also spouts ‘the pill kills’ rhetoric. She is to speak at World Congress of Families in Melbourne 30th Aug. An unfortunate aspect that should concern reasonable people is that senior politicians are supporting this event, including Kevvie Andrews.
Young women of Australia don’t need this type of misinformation endorsed by government ministers.
Progress aside, feminism needs to consolidate on basic reproductive rights and autonomy. A science based refute is needed to make this misinformation seen for what it is. The sponsorship by church and state of nonsensical practices does not need a re-run.
This is not in doubt. But I guess I see the antique Christian ultra-right is not perhaps as much of a threat as you do. They’re extreme and the uphold ideology that most people recognise as useless ideology. Again. The problem is capital.
With unfeigned respect. This much-publicised hootenanny of teacajes has little to do with this post or my concerns generally. For me, these people are execrable but not a real or powerful enemy. Fortunately, we have never really seen a decline in reproductive autonomy in AUstralia and I don’t think we’ll start now. And I think this ultra-vigilance and concern that we will soon live in the Handmaid’s Tale is a bit much. People like indulging simple fantasies of future horror. The real horror is that we don’t notice the inequality of capitalism.
I love it when you go all Mike Carlton on readers.
Great story about the suffragettes and the clash with the British Socialist women. I did not know that – very edifying. Is it just me or do we keep having the same conversation again and again. Fuck those feudalists, they’re very canny.
Razer mentions Zizek. I thought my night could not be better than that margherita pizza, but there you go. If only Jennifer Lawrence had fed me that pizza while reading this column out loud in Zizek’s voice.
God I love him. I don’t care if he’s he’s populist and cheap.
Just wanted to get back to Helen’s post about outing Young Liberals and their misogynistic rants.
What type of women would enter the Liberal party with young men like that?
Secondly, what kind of female ends up marrying them and why ?
Status driven or just plain stupid.
Jane, I really feel strongly that “outing” people’s “misogyny” is a sideshow.
I think the real evil in the world inheres in the everyday business of capital and I feel that looking for moments of “proof” and “calling out” as people tend to do these days is actually less a form of activism than it is a form of entertainment.
As for why someone would be a member of the LNP. You got me.
“As for why someone would be a member of the LNP. You got me.”
You can say that again!
Solution: Anarchy
Dont laugh ;)
More than a solution anarchy is the acknowledgement that there is no one size fits all solution and that individuals require self determination to work with their communities to find the solutions which best address their particular needs. To put it another way there will always be assh*les, you cant do anything about that so the best way to limit their ability to abuse others is to not give them access to centralized power structures. which is to say do not have centralized power structures to begin with.
have you read any of these names? Emma goldman, Voltair de Cleyr or L. Susan Brown?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcha-feminism
Anyway thanks for the interesting reading!
Carolyn. .you are spot on!
In this neo-liberal world, the history book has been replaced with a business text.
It’s been an uphill battle.
Self-entitled privileged women that are part of a clique.
Thank you both – Helen Razer and Eva Cox – for addressing the core issues/misconceptions.
Interesting analogy re class consciousness. But, this isn’t an opt-in, grab the leaflet on your way out, phenomenon. It’s feminists mainly talking amongst themselves self righteously and sometimes shaming non feminists.
There is very little point to history without critical analysis, the propagandistic history we are taught in school is largely uncritical. Knowing feminist history and critiquing feminist history are two very different things. Feminism and its history is not above critique. History is largely read uncritically and is, as a result, bunk. However, learn how to read it critically, and it is a vital tool.
Go on The Drum and speak to that audience about it!
Love to see you as a regular along with Dr Leslie Cannold
“As for women against feminism being conservative? No more than liberal feminism.”
There’s plenty of conservative (do you mean right wing?) or capitalist feminists. Yeah I was linking that young lib story – those air heads were all men. My point was we still need feminists when the future of the libs is a bunch of soulless men who want to return to the 1820s.
I think the cats may be winning – I can only hope. I like Kitty Flanagan’s rant on the Project too. She covered a fair bit of it. I think we still need history and maybe Australian culture and history should include the history of women’s rights so that these young women can learn why we still need feminism.
How would history help?
Given that the history we are taught at school presupposes that liberal democracy is awesome and doesn’t even explicitly mention that Australian wealth is built on the theft of land, how would this help, precisely?
Please engage with the idea that the whole system is broken. And that reformist measures like “”calling out” or giving lip service to the fiction that suffrage changed much at all has nothing to do with anything I’m saying.
How clear do o need to be? The systems which govern us all are fucked. Inequality is something men now experience. The real pay gap is.not between men and women.
Please address the post. Please understand what I believe have said unambiguously. Which is that a feminism that wants to reform a system that is necessarily predicated on inequality is conservative.
Or, liberal or pro-capitalist or whatever you prefer.
Please reread. And you’ll understand how no high school curriculum can liberate us so long as it accepts the terns of the current system.
Feminism accepts the terms of the current system. It just wants women to participate more fully in it. This is my entire point.
And some of the WAFs recognize this point.
Please reread.
As for linking to the latest Twitter outrage. How can I be clear that these examples of so-called misogyny show us little of the true banality of power. By all means, get excited about this or that imaginary gotcha moment on your own time. But don’t expect me to agree it’s meaningful.
As fur fear of going back to the past. That never happens.
Christine Lagarde has spoken extensively about the nasty corporate culture she witnessed in her legal career which made her comment about quotas more significant.
Women adopting those male traits to get ahead is just as problematic and continues the vicious cycle of ruthless leadership
It’s very difficult to come up with solutions unless you start by asking the right questions, the challenging questions. Rather than searching for piecemeal and often symbolic forms of “equality” within our current capitalist system (that is fundamentally based on the perpetuation of inequality and will inevitably fall), our questions need to challenge us to think on the level of systemic change.
To ask the right questions you have to learn to read history, a skill that is not only undervalued, but that we are actively discouraged from acquiring.
Thank you Helen, for asking the challenging questions.
I think you are a role model for me. Be who you are, do what you want. I like most of your choices and I find many of your shared thoughts inspiring. But I am also my own person and I will make my own decisions about what you do that I like or not. I don’t think you get to choose who find you inspiring. You just have to be well known (I loved Helen and Mikey on JJJ – still like you both when you reappear on the media from time to time). Or even not so well known – just willing to be out there and not a complete hermit.
The hermit option can be tempting but I’d have to give up the internet…
If you had the solutions I am sure you would share & not keep them to yourself! I know I would. Keep raising the issues, asking the questions, starting the discussions & talking possibilities. We all need to do this. Thanks Helen for, once again, putting it out there & challenging us
I agreed with the latter part of what you were saying. I read the whole thing. But I don’t think it helps to disparage young women for not reading.
Clinton right? started off strongly with the first post, but rapidly faded. Since Marx is getting a good thrashing, the economic arguments favouring equality of outcomes and universal respect of rights, whether by gender, role or ability, could be boiled down to the simple maxim ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’. This would probably solve everything.
There are bigger picture issues in feminism than the narrow ‘wage equality’ economic focus that were critiqued here as limited and self-obsessed although certainly apparent, such as why men go to war, should there be more women in politics to stop men going to war, the practice of capitalism is largely a ruthless and psychopathic race to the bottom male endeavour, women are more compassionate and caring than men and less aggressive, this is probably all the fault of evolutionary adaptations in the Pleistocene in order to catch more meat, etc etc. Yes to all that, as long as there are intelligent responses to this problem of patriarchy and violence and oppression of women and minorities, largely occurring outside of the first world. While we see ‘little’ manifestations of this still around us, and they were much greater and more visible up until, say, the 1980s, largely due to the feminist movement, there appears to be a huge battleground in other societies about which very little is being done. Except occasionally threatening to bomb them back to the Stone Age if they don’t hand over their resources now. This being the argument that recognition of equality of rights trumps cultural relativism.
This is pretty much the only thing I’ve read about the whole latest Them Against Them thing because this.
Begging licence to commit horrible crimes against grammar, punctuation and writing style.
I just wish the person who came up with the idea of posting a selfie with a ‘hashtag-on-a-piece-of-cardboard-as-a-protest’ would contract mumps, shingles, and allopecia areata all at the same time.
Great they’re rebelling against what they perceive as oppression, that’s what younger generations do, as dumb as their signs are, I think it’s brilliant that their stupid is helping bring the discussion of what feminism is, isn’t, could be, and where to from here to the attention of the masses (I mean they read the daily life ffs!). Fuck, if that is what is needed to discuss not only feminism, but class struggles, the economy, social movements, bring it on. We must talk about what capitalism has done. It is time for a major shift in economic practices, alas! I am sadly convinced it will not happen in my life time.
And a perfect example is Greece.
The country was a product of financial statutory rape by corporate elites and a corrupt political class.
What do you think they’re feminist movement is like today after all the crises?
Very positive and intellectual.
They have learnt to love and forgive.
They’re going to reinvent the wheel out of necessity.
i’m looking at the world, everyday,
it’s not an essay my life, it’s an observation,
if you think that equilibrium is a natural state then i put it to you that you are mistaken
You’re not getting it. You keep thinking from a foundation of z”this is how humans are”.
I’m saying that this antique thinking is not good. To say that we are by nature only social has nothing to do with”equilibrium”.
Again. Your views are rooted in a foundational idea of how humans are. Mine aren’t. I’m talking possibilities. You’re talking nature as though the way we now live is the single functional expression of human society. This makes you a Fukuyamaist.
Read him. I hate him. You won’t.
Again. This is at cross purposes and I don’t think you’ve got the fundamental point.
Please stop.
no, you are the one quoting this person and that person, your argument relies on others before you,
why?
doen’t you have your own ideas?
nevertheless, i;m not looking for answers, because i can sit back and watch the world evolve with what i view it as,
you seem to want the world to evolve with what you wish it to be, which is some socialist eutopia where everyone gets their sprout but they have to do nothing,
Mate. Stop it.
For the nth time.
This entire fucking post is NOT ABOUT ANSWERS. it’s about asking better questions of activists.
And if you believe you are capable of thinking originally and well about the nature of social structures without reference to 300 years of great thought written duwn, good luck.
I’m not sufficiently arrogant to think I could do better.
Look. You’re not getting me. Go away.
All I’ve bothered reading here is Dumb. Women. dumb. women. Which unfortunately, might be the smartest thing most women could ever say, but of course, do not. Look in the mirror ladies and make a positive personal, spiritual type change for a better character from within. The reality is, far too many feminists are ridiculously unselfrealised, super angry and incapable of actually thinking the whole picture through and it looks pathetic. Make it EQUAL. look that up in a dictionary. “equal” It really makes me sad that so many potentially wonderful humans, can be so so wrong.
Oh Jesus fuck.
Let me make you a deal.
Try to “change from within” and quit your half-arsed New Age pseudism which holds that an entire group of persons can change their lot for the better through positive thought (bu this logic, the African continent is just not spiritual enough) and I’ll look in the mirror.
Try to engage with the material. Or just fuck off to The Secret forums.
FFS. Make some sense and quit this “now now little ladies get along” shit gobbing.
What has any of this bilge to do with the conversation at hand?
no, you look at the lions, you look at all of life (the baboons the centipedes the worms the ants), progress comes from inequality, it’s only in the human world where we look to all people and say “Yes, that person is ……”
helenrazerquotes: “ls don’t ask for solutions or say that an answer is necessary before asking the right questions.”
so what are the right right questions? what do do i ask? are everyone the same regardless of the effort they put in? someone i know has gone through an engineering degree is the same as someone who has done nothing but swept a broom?
please tell me what the right questions are,
Read. Read the history of western thought.
I write for a very specific audience. That is, people who already have basic authentically leftist ideals.
It seems that your own ideas are a bit distant from these. And that you are looking to a state of nature account for answers.
I’m afraid I agree with Aristotle that human beings are by nature social. This habit of looking at natural inclinations (see Foucault who smashes this idea down) is not something that informs me.
But it informs you and that’s fine. I just don’t think there is much of a conversation we can have if we are not fundamentally agreed on some basic foundations.
Just in case the women against women needed some help, the lib juniors have waded in with their bored first world problems… Half of what they write as “insult” – I’m thinking “you say that like it’s a bad thing”. I think Berlin would be proud to take that title from London…
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/misogynist-rants-from-young-libs-20140809-3dfhw.html
Of course third world feminist problems are trying not to be jailed or stoned to death for being raped… Either way saying we don’t need it reflects ignorance and arrogance.
Not sure if you read the bit where I said that this was an ignorant movement.
And please don’t tell me you’re linking to that story about young Liberals? I’ve had enough “calling out”. It’s a sideshow.
As for women against feminism being conservative? No more than liberal feminism.
I agree with Karl by the way
and you :)
it’s not that that i like capitalism, i only like the incentivism which drives it, but i really don’t know any thing else,
but neither do you for that matter,
where does progress (broadly: evolution) occur if there is no opposition? is there any opposition in a fully socialist society?
Marx is very clear about capitalism being an efficient basis for production. One can’t argue that it drives certain industries and the development of goods forward. But my point is not purely one of Marxist historiography where I say the state is withering as the dumb logic of capitalism takes over and in turn consumes itself.
But I don’t think the historical materialist view is completely out of order as a means of understanding our current era, either.
All I am saying is what the world’s major economists are which is that the way we do things is not sustainable. And people, like WAF or feminists, who are politically engaged might ask new questions about what a workd (not necessarily a socialist one) without liberal democracy would look like.
As for your ideas about incentives and “progress”. Enjoy having them. If you have a state of nature account about how humans Really Are or a liberal view of self-improvement, id say read some twentieth-century thought because it ain’t the Enlightenment any more.
Pls don’t ask for solutions or say that an answer is necessary before asking the right questions.
As for going on about what I don’t know like knowing everything is a prerequisite for writing a blog post, whatever.
Go and argue with some Trotskyites.
All in saying is that people on the left need to ask some new questions and remember some of the old ones.
And I’m also saying the world’s economies are no longer functional ib the way we’d like to believe they are. Even if you believe in capitalism and incentives and progress (and again I’d urge you to think out the ideology behind these ideas) it is changing. It hsd its own logic. No matter what you believe.
IMO (which of course is the only opinion I have) Marx may not have had very much to say specifically on the oppression of women & hence little to offer by way of a solution because he was all for getting rid of the capitalist profit-focussed economy which is the driver of most forms of oppression
and so what’s the solution? if people can’t produce units of worth then they should be implicitly supported? why? why does a person need to be lifted or supported by the greater population?
you may have guessed i am in a sense against rampant capitalism which destroys everything in its path, but also i think everyone being given the same things regardless of their effort is wrong,
the incentivism of capitalism i like, but its heartless view of social structure i have a problem with
Okay. I am not offering a solution because I am not a genius. But there will be a “solution” to capitalist economies whether we aim for one or not because they’re breaking down.
But this is not about solutions anyhow. It is about imagining a world beyond liberal democracy and its partner economies. Which we once did in the west. Now, to quote Zizek, we can imagine the end of the word more easily than we can imagine the end of liberal democracy. SO the “solution” such as it is is to think beyond liberal democracy. And people do whether they mean to or not.
It is nice that you like capitalism but we can’t have the substructure of capitalism without the ideology or inequality that supports it.
Anyhow. We’re all going down.
jesus, this was brutal. as brutal as the raw reality men are given on a daily basis that “If you don’t succeed in life then you you can die” and don’t pretend this isn’t what men are dealt, it has been since the birth of capitalism. don’t get me wrong, incentivism drives innovation, but the idea that people should be discarded if they cannot produce units of worth is wrong,
It is totally what men have been tested with since the birth of industrial economy. But given that women were seen as surplus to the needs of production, they were also construed as lesser.
And now in an age where so many of us are looking down the barrel of uselessness, the psychic and economic effects men have borne directly for so long are now felt in a new moment of crisis by all.
Helen,
Since I am beyond an intelligent comment after many wines, can I just say, fuck yeah! Thank you.
fuck yeah you can
Nice work, Helen, and I have a tangential set of observations to make on the economic drivers for this thing called ‘feminism’ in our society. I gave up reading the piece after the 3rd para, as is my wont in these short concentration span days, but I think I got the gist of it. Look, I agree, there is a delicate sociological balance being disrupted here in the wage chase, the demand for equal wages as though every adult is a completely autonomous financial being who lives apart and alone and never forms a wage-earning family unit of 2. If this were the case, then the feminists would be correct — everything there is would be unjust.
However, there’s a bigger, nastier elephant than this in the living room, which Helen has touched on in her piece within the first 3 paras at least, I’m not sure about the rest (for reasons stated above). It’s the double income dilemma that has come about from a couple of waves of feminism first in the 50s, postwar, when women who had been doing men’s jobs realised they were good at them and quite liked the wages and didn’t all want to go back to home and hearth right away necessarily, and then in the 70s of course the second wave which we all know and love — the Greers and Friedmans etc.
And now, we have post-feminism or counter-feminism or the sentimental yearning to return to sending hubby out for 10 hours to make a crust while wifey potters around at home and looks after the children which is a lot more fun than the office, and she’s not sure she wants to wear power suits and give up all her time for workplace stress etc anyhow.
But back to the elephant. The thing that has come out of the at least partial emancipation of women in the workplace has been the linkages to house prices, mortgage sizes, childcare costs, etc etc. A study of personal debt in Australia and the US and who knows where else indicates households have taken on record personal debt largely in the shape of bloated mortgages. At the same time, mortgage stress keeps double income households from even seeing their children from 0-5 except briefly, you know, the period you are supposed to be enjoying looking after them, instilling them with morals or something like that. Now they are just an expense and a commodity like running a yacht as a vanity that you seldom actually get to see or use. Australians were so reluctant to reproduce given the cost of housing and buying an extra bedroom that Peter Costello had to bribe them with a baby bonus — and even then the birthrate hardly went up, and they went back to ramping immigration. (We need more consumers! Don’t ask why.) Then they had to offer a generous First Home Owners Grant, and back it up with an even more generous First Home Owner Boost to try to stave off the market forces in housing — grants which of course were even more obviously inflationary if someone with an IQ of 50 were to look at it. But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the banks and the real estate agents remain happy. That is why the banks are returning record profits year on year while retail is in recession, unemployment is up, jobs are shaky, and we’re in austerity mode. In fact, the banks collectively CREATED the GFC and recession by their runaway lending practices, and they have been gaming all of society in this fashion for quite a few years now. They’ve cracked the easy money code, exploiting people’s deepseated need to buy their own home. Every time they write a larger and larger mortgage on a property that a single income family used to be able to buy fairly comfortably in a previous, forgotten generation, they are actually CREATING new money in the economy, and lots of it — neo-classical economists don’t want you to know that the banks are endogenous money creators, THE endogenous money creators in the economy, and instead of investing in productive industry or only creating enough to deal with population increase, they are pushing all the new money into inflating housing bubbles. And APRA and the RBA really don’t care about this, they see their sole job as attempting to keep the banks solvent, and they don’t do that all too well in a revolving door industry either.
Hence all this angst amongst fairly thoughtless feminists that if they DON’T get equal wages, and stat, they’re doomed in the housing market going it alone, and semi-doomed even as an earning couple. They, and everyone, have actually been gamed by the banks creating credit (i.e. money) and real estate agents immediately exploiting the new money and haven’t realised it — to them, the profiteering actions of the banks are like the wind and the rain, accidents of nature outside of their control. They never think to turn on the banks and the real estate agents and their indifferent, laissez-faire governments and demand affordable housing that doesn’t rise every time their household income goes up half a jot. The compromised mainstream newspapers with their massive real estate advertising revenues celebrate every price rise as though someone is now much richer and there are no losers in a housing bubble.
So in fact the feminist push in a way has just made everyone’s lives harder, as everything else is gamed by market forces. In the 50s and the 70s it was NICE in a couple to be able to work part-time and make a little extra money, and you didn’t want to see the kids that much anyway as they grew older, but now it’s become a necessity — all the supposed financial gains of feminism have been capitalised into inflated house prices and jumbo loans and soaring rents.
OK, but what of social justice? What of the single woman who needs to work and deserves the same wage as a man doing the same job? (And, indeed, why are we all earning different wages anyhow?) Back in the day, women were expected to leave their jobs as soon as they got married! See how it worked? There was a kind of social expectation. Now, double income families can earn whatever they want. Be an aspirational. Be all you can be. So you now have a spectrum of families of no breadwinner, 1 breadwinner, 1.5 breadwinners or the crowning achievement of 2 F/T breadwinners, all with x number of kids.
With all this family unit wage inequality, the cries of feminists, to me at least, become secondary to social justice for families, of whatever size. Wage inequality across gender can become wage inequality across families and skillsets, and it all gets capitalised into higher housing costs anyway.
What is really needed, and what should satisfy BOTH the feminists and counter-feminists, is a new enforced social contract around the provision of affordable housing to families of any size — there is no particular social need for house prices to soar out of reach, except to feed the banks — record profits in a recession, remember. Socialised housing, if you will, taken out of the chaotic capitalist marketplace. Then the breadwinning wage earning angst might go away a little — once everyone wakes up and realises that the market forces controlling their individual lives is not like the wind and the rain after all. Basically people are being treated as you would be treated in a completely non-unionised workforce when it comes to buying housing — divide and conquer and make all compete against all is the rule.
If you want some solutions to the housing affordability dilemma, I’ve put in a 50 page 20,000 word submission to the recent Senate enquiry into affordable housing:
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Economics/Affordable_housing_2013/Submissions
and
http://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=1723c407-850f-49dc-9b46-766ed7fcacfa&subId=205862
See my BlogSpot cited above and you can attempt to contact me on my little read gmail account cited there if interested to discuss further!
Seriously, it’s time for the workers of the world to unite and stop being screwed on housing prices, you have nothing to lose but your chains, and gain an increase in your quality of life and disposable income. Stop fighting for higher wages by arguing on ‘feminist’ principles, and start getting together and lobbying the government to stop the ridiculous rip-offs and mark-ups and land value speculation in housing.
So feminism is a response to more or less unbridled capitalism, and the need to put a roof over your head, or your kids in a better school, or to have a few more nice things. It’s time to wake up and see that that’s principally what it’s all about. The solution is not to eternally fight against patriarchal oppression but to fight against the banks, and demand a better social contract from your government!
[quote] “Women Against Feminism does not (a) have something instructive to tell us about anti-liberalism” [end quote]
Load of bollocks.
Only 6% (maximum!) of Women Against Feminism messages are discernably anti-liberal or conservative Pyllis Schlafly-like.
See two statistical surveys here looking at WAF messages by category:
Women Against Feminism – a snapshot of concerns: http://gynocentrism.com/2014/08/07/women-against-feminism-a-snapshot-of-concerns/
Prima Facie Motivations of women against feminism: http://newbossoldboss.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/how-much-of-women-against-feminism-is.html
Anti-liberalism doesn’t necessarily mean conservatism douchey.
Gee I wish I had said in the text that not all WAF women were like Phyllis and had linked to some examples of women who weren’t oh wait I did.
“This young Women Against Feminism on YouTube, urges for a politics that extends beyond gender equality.”
Do you not understand “liberalism” or is your reading comprehension at the cleaners?
How could you miss the point made over and over again that WAF is a “broad church”?
The. Entire. Fucking. Post. Is. About. How. WAF. Is. A Decent. If. Occasionally. Misguided. Thing.
Your apparent failure to understand that this is a reading of WAF as a valuable response to feminism that deserves analysis and respect is stunning. You’ve really embarrassed yourself, Toots. What a dumb thing to say.
I only came across the ‘new feminism’ concept this week, when looking behind the Eric Abetz story. The woman he holds as a reference, Angela Lanfranhi, is on a speaking tour of Australia, hosted by religious and right to life groups. As a retired medical practitioner I can only find her whole article* totally weird and uninformed.
If this represents ‘new feminism’ its feeding here on good old religious guilt. *http://www.newfeminism.co/author/angela-lanfranchi/
Not really part of this discussion but hilarious nonetheless.
The Australian media is a sad indictment of a lazy and selfish fourth estate that assisted in putting in a p.m that’s as charismatic as a wet tea towel with conservative values as well.
Your people are part of the problem not the solution Helen.
You’ve all benefited enormously from successive governments that assist your careers whilst you secretly put your own darlings through private schooling.
Greedy hypocricy reigns with professional feminists as well.
Listening to mainstream media is akin to watching emotionally stunted adult men
that haven’t left their old private boys
school.
It’s time you all grew up!
lololol “benefited enormously”.
What does this have to do with the price of fish, btw?
You’re a beautifully bored member of the bourgeoisie .
Be grateful for that business class seat next time Helen.
Love you heaps xxx
You really have no fucking idea that journalism is in the same state as the car manufacturing industry, do you? And has long been a low paid trade. Jesus. And if you haven’t noticed, this is a blog. And I am a freelancer you ignoramus.
And fuck me. Nothing you say, apart from the fact that it is ill-informed and untrue, has anything to do with this post.
And have you heard of argumentum ad hominem? I could be a blob made of jelly. It wouldn’t make any difference to the veracity of my claims. Which you seem to have ignored in favour of saying some weird untrue shit about Australian media which has not paid its workers well for more than twenty years and even then, did not. Get a clue. Or hush.
Fuck me you inane trolls who come here to wilfully misunderstand. No one is forcing you over to my blog. I am very glad to discuss the substance of my post. But fucking read it first or fuck the fuck off back to fuckytown
OK Helen, but you are to me :)
Sicko!
Helen, you are one brave, bad ass, inspirational woman. I have worshipped you since I used to listen to you on JJJ with Mikey. You are fucking funny and damn smart and you are a brilliant role model for me and I’m sure many many women who don’t have the guts to speak out like you do. In the cyber world and in the real world, there is so much scary bullying and the like….but you don’t let it wreck your spirit, or beat you down into a depressed state. Thank you, keep going!
I am SO not a role model!
#cleaneating
Whenever I have writing issues (this week a reflective journal on ethical issues in medicine), I always head over to your blog for a shot of inspiration. Thank you.
This pop feminism thing has been troubling me for some time. You’ve managed to put a substantive framework around the issue whilst at the same time using some searing wit and wonderful vocabulary to make so many valid points.
For what its worth, I’ve thought for some time that the biggest threat to feminism are self aggrandising ‘feminists’ who pop out intellectually sloppy and at times downright bizarre columns, in response to issues that completely miss the point. Imagining myself as a middle class woman, I can’t think of anything more off-putting as feminism presented by these ‘feminists’. That is pubic hair, movies from the 80s that are sexist and 70s rock songs that are all about rape culture.
I’d be more interested (as you’ve eluded to) why our current generation of ‘leaders’ are so insistent about locking the doors to opportunities that were gifted to them on a plate – e.g. getting rid of free education and free health care, inversion of the tax system and restrictions on human rights and privacy that would make the Stasi blush. Whilst gender plays (and will increasingly) play a role should many new policies be implemented, I too would reject the brand of feminism peddled by some *cough* Daily Life *cough*, for something perceived to be more substantial and relevant to my social and economic situation and the flawed system which underpins those problems (hmmm, sounds familiar …). But then, these were the same things that attracted me to feminist theory when I first studied it properly as a 3rd year law student, so I’m not stretching my imagination too far.
Thanks Helen. I think I can now take on a deconstruction of health economics before a beer at 6pm. :)
Thanks, Jacob.
I think it’s good to look at how inequality is growing in all social classes. To ask for “equal pay” for women in a system that casualises labour and devalues education and skill all ’round just seems peculiar to me.
That is why I am careful not to align myself with the broad church of feminism, anyway. Not because I don’t read but because I do.
Sorry to burst your bubble Helen, but young people read and involve themselves in political struggles just as much as any other generation. You don’t help young women become empowered by saying we’re all stupid and don’t read. Although I’m sure I read somewhere that you are allowed to be a feminist and talk about feminism even if you don’t have a liberal arts degree majoring in gender studies. You might find this article interesting http://theconversation.com/images-of-australian-youth-from-symbols-of-hope-to-disposable-lives-27126. We’re only as stupid as everybody else. I’m afraid I reject glass ceiling feminism because instead of more women in boardrooms, I think there should be less boardrooms. Glass ceiling feminism leaves the majority of women (and men) behind while the likes of Gina Rhinehart hold self congratulatory “feminist” dinners that cost enough per plate to feed a family for several years. Wealthy glass ceiling breakers get a spread in the Good Weekend and talk about how women can have it all, without talking about the small army of childminders and cleaners they have employed while the peasants run from their wage slave jobs to their childminding duties to their elder minding duties and wondering how they’re going to do it all again tomorrow.The feminism I’m interested in is a radical feminism that liberates everyone, not just middle and upper class white women.
You note, Lily, that I am talking about the predominant trend on both sides NOT to read. I am addressing the phenom most of press has been addressing. White is to say, cardboard signs.
As for your assertion that the feminism that you are interested in is one that liberates everyone. I thought I just spent 2000 words talking about the need for a radical economic shift?
Nowhere did I say that one must read. But I did say that reading the dissatisfaction as shown in WAF might be a good idea.
Pls reread.
Helen…
Are you at peace with Mia Freedman?
Cheers
??
I agree that we need to take some of the criticism seriously. My feminism has always been the need for a radical rethink of what matters to ensure we recognise those spheres often under-rated because they are/have been done by women. We need to undermines the current Machismo of western public policy and the traditional patriarchal structures that still exist and are sometimes reviving. .
I think too much current feminism public debate is about seeking equality with men, on their terms, which was an idea we considered a very low level of ambition in the seventies. Since then, we got sucked into the myth that more women in top positions will change things, and we complain about violence but don’t really address the inequalities that create it. Women’s groups offer good services to deal with its symptoms and all agree we should not accept violence but it stays at the same levels or deteriorates!
Too much publicly seen feminist debates are about media images, and examples of sexism and too little exploring of the big picture changes we need. Where are those radical feminist plotters working out how to diminish the gender inequity which validates and empower those who promote the macho/masculine values that fail to recognise the social relational sides of humanity. Current beliefs that humans are just self interested individuals who seek control over the allocation /trade of material goods and capital are destructive of good societies and need to be stopped. Marx didn’t get it, nor do markets because neither address issues of gender such as feelings, connections, care and mutual relationships
These gaps may well be the cause of some of the noise coming from these younger females, because they do not define themselves as victims, and have no idea that feminism could include plans for the revolution that can be revived and reviewed. . We need feminisms that offer leadership and produce new ideas for what makes good societies. We need to stop the idiocies of the current leaderships’ macho economistic crap. Abusing our critics for being ill informed will waste energy~. . Let’s offer exciting alternatives not abuse and separate the objectors who have some points to make from the really hostile.
Are you talking about MY poor behaviour, EC?
Nice to see you on the blog, Lady.
Let middle class white women become goldiggers. …that’s their prerogative and Freedom to use and abuse the capitalist system for their own means.
It’s empowerment with a capital C.
That’s feminism in a modern world in my viewpoint.
Um. Dude. “Golddiggers”?
First, I really don’t encourage gendered terms of abuse. Because, you know, why?
Second, you have got the usage wrong. A “golddigger” is a woman who is said to live off men. I am talking about women who live off capital.
And that is quite different.
To be very clear. It is not women I am criticising. It is capitalist ideology. Which is no less abhorrent in one class of person than it is in another.
Hey Helen, Thanks for this. like others I have followed some of the online feminism stuff with unease and an inability to articulate why. Your writing always makes me think. Cheers.
Warm thanks, Katrina
Dear Helen sometimes it feels like you are a voice out in the wilderness alone.Thank you for sharing, look fowards to the book can I have mine signed please?
The feminist internet era I can’t put into words so I don’t, it just shits me to be honest…like fucking windex that glass ceiling on the way out…chix would have had the smarts to have open plan in the first place!
Yes. Fuck the ceiling. The idea that feminism has that ANYONE should be able to break it is just dumb. It relies on an idea of the infinite wealth of growth capitalism.
And you just can’t keep on believing that the world as it is currently organised can keep giving opportunity for all.
Hi Helen, love your work.
I get that the fuckedupness of modern consumerist society and the slice of the pie equality that is popularly described as western feminism, is simply a distraction from the main game of changing the world..
But I suspect you’re crediting these young women with waaaaay to much insight. My own suspicion is that these women are young rebellious and attention seeking..and that they’ve figured out that holding up a sign on the internet bagging out feminism, upsets mummy a lot more than flashing their tits ever would.
With unfeigned respect, Madge, I think you may have missed the bit where I talked about how their actions are a symptom. Not necessarily a fully conscious action.
I also said about twenty times that they were stupid. I never said they had much insight. I said their action did.
yeah thanks kev
Very valuable initial thoughts. Looking forward to the book, I like a bit of history with my dumb porridge ;-)
Thank you. I have been following feminism online, and some in the other camp, and up until this point I have felt useless because I couldn’t verbalise my thoughts. You have hit the nails on their heads with this piece. Will be sharing widely.
Thanks Narelle. I don’t think I’ve encompassed all of it and certainly I haven’t addressed the violence and victim debate going on. But I wanted to make some initial thoughts available.
Hi,
Thank you. Largely agree. The other thing about this bizarre war that’s annoyed me is that many of the women against feminism tumblr/tweets are about refusing a subordinated subject position. They’re not using these terms, but that is the crux behind many. For feminists to then turn around and effectively say “No, you are victims” is interesting. I think, in this particular subset, we’re seeing a discursive break. Both groups have the same or similar goals, but one group is not identifying with/finds ineffective the “woman as oppressed” narrative.
Which, arguably, relates back to your argument re “online feminism” and the kind of discrimination porn it can propagate.
I mean. I don’t think there is anything wrong with telling someone to get some class consciousness. IN a socialist sense, it would be like telling your working class parents who argue for the favorable fuel rebates Gina gets to get a clue and see how their relative poverty engendered through tax and other means support this wealth.
But I just guess I feel that the online feminism is basically wrong. And that consciousness of one’s gender ias oppressed in these quite old terms is not needed. Is in fact surplus and antique.