The History of Feminism

Camille Paglia version. Her views tend to be ones I agree with on this topic, but then I'm not a feminist, a woman, or a student of the movement. Reading this, I suspect she might find something to agree with in my notion of Floride Calhoun and her sorority as one strand of what made up American feminism.

If You're Not

following this, you're missing the fun.

"Come on, Dover, move yer bloomin' arse!"

[Posted by reader_iam]

Right up there in my list of favorite lines from musicals. But pretty early on (and I mean as a kid, in the '60s), I determined that she'd've been better off ending up with Freddy who, following the scene which produced the quote in question, is refused audience with Eliza because she doesn't want to be seen ever again and basically replies, "But why? I thought she was marvelous!"

Trivia quiz question: Why, specifically, was "My Fair Lady" chosen as the name for the musical version of George Bernard Shaw's play, "Pygmalion"?

And, man oh man, wasn't Audrey Hepburn just generally a marvel?--among other things, an excellent argument for not getting too caught up in details.

Ideological Blind Spot

Sarah Baxter's critique of the current condition of anti-war feminism, is so good as a whole it's difficult to excerpt one chunk and say, "this is the gist." It's all gist. Possibly because she knows the British women's anti-war movement well, grew up in it in the 1980s, and reveres its capacity for positive change.

All the more damning, then:

The peace movement lost a foe in Reagan but has gone on to find new friends in today’s Stop the War movement. Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now” and Muslim extremists chanting “Oh Jew, the army of Muhammad will return.”

For Linda Grant, the novelist, who says that “feminism” is the one “ism” she has not given up on, it was a shocking sight: “What you’re seeing is an alliance of what used to be the far left with various Muslim groups and that poses real problems. Saturday’s march was not a peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it’s a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the wrong side is winning.”

As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews.

On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of “I am woman, hear me roar”, there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush — “the world’s number one terrorist” as the marchers would have it.

Women are perfectly entitled to oppose the war in Iraq or to feel that Israel is brutally overreacting to Hezbollah’s provocation. But where is the parallel, equally vital debate about how to combat Islamic fundamentalism? And why don’t more peace-loving feminists regard it as a threat? Kira Cochrane, 29, is the new editor of The Guardian women’s page, the bible of the Greenham years, where so many women writers made their names by staking out positions on the peace movement. She has noticed that today’s feminists are inclined to keep quiet about the march of radical Islam. “There’s a great fear of tackling the subject because of cultural relativism. People are scared of being called racist,” Cochrane observes.

...

Looking back I think I was wrong about Reagan and too sympathetic towards the Soviet Union. There were plenty of fellow travellers in the peace movement who were cheering on the Soviet Union under their breath. I can remember making a lot of silly excuses about it myself. But the fear of mutual assured destruction was genuine enough. As long as it worked, Mad was a plausible strategy. Were it to fail, the results would be catastrophic. As President Dwight Eisenhower said after the testing of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s: “Atomic war will destroy civilisation.” If war came, “you might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself”.

The situation today is very different. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, Bernard Lewis, the noted scholar of Islam, pointed out that Iran’s messianic rulers are not constrained by such fears. According to their theology, the day of judgment will be glorious. “At the end of time there will be general destruction anyway,” Lewis writes. “What matters will be the final destination of the dead — hell for the infidels and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, Mad is not a constraint, it is an inducement.”

Hassan Nasrallah, the Shi’ite cleric who leads Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, regularly issues bloodcurdling threats against the Jews. “If they (the Jews all gather in Israel,” he has said, “it will save us the trouble of going after them on a worldwide basis.”

For some on the left such words are merely understandable hyperbole, provoked by decades of Israeli ill-treatment of the Palestinians, but I prefer to take Islamic fundamentalists at their word when they spout insults about Jews being the descendants of “pigs and apes” and launch their chillingly apocalyptic tirades.

Why? Because they not only talk centuries-old nonsense about the place of women in society, but they also purposely oppress the female sex whenever they are given the chance. As regards their treatment of women, there is no discernible difference between their acts and their words.

...

In Britain there is the polemicist Julie Burchill, who has written incisively about the desire of terrorists to commit acts “not so that innocents may have the right to live freely on the West Bank, but so that they might have the right to throw acid in the face of innocent, unveiled women”. Well, the outrageous Julie has always been bonkers, hasn’t she.

Then there is “mad” Melanie Phillips, the Cassandra of our age, banging on that “if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around”. Of course she would say that, wouldn’t she. She’s Jewish, and anyway didn’t you know that she is crazy enough to believe in two-parent families? In America the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin died last year virtually unmourned by women on the left in part, as her friend Christopher Hitchens remembered, because “she wasn’t neutral against a jihadist threat that wanted, and wants, to enslave and torture females.

“That she could be denounced as a ‘conservative’,” he concluded, “says much about the left to which she used to belong.”

In Italy Oriana Fallaci, the 77-year-old journalist famous for interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini, recently went on trial accused of defaming Muslims. It is true that many of her comments about Islam — “a pool that never purifies” — are undeniably offensive, but no more so than comments routinely made by Muslim extremists about “the Jews”. In her cancer-stricken twilight years, the once glamorous Fallaci has been written off as a deranged old bat.

Fallaci has grown accustomed in recent years to living with death threats, as have the formidable Muslim women critics of Islamic extremism such as Irshad Manji, the Canadian feminist, Taslima Nasreen, the exiled Bangladeshi writer (and critic of the Iraq war), and Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose film Submission resulted in the murder by Islamic militants of Theo van Gogh, the gay Dutch film director.

Hirsi, after enjoying a brief succès d’estime, has been virtually hounded out of the liberal Netherlands and is due to arrive in America next month, where she has been offered a perch at the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank. It is too easy to say she has sold out to the right. Where, one might ask, are her friends on the left? Something has gone badly wrong with a politically correct feminism that prefers to take aim at the United States, a haven of free speech and relative sexual equality, than to tackle the threat posed to women by Islamic fundamentalism. Just as the existence of Thatcher, the Iron Lady, at the helm of British government in the 1980s failed to impress the women’s peace movement, so the presence of Condoleezza Rice, a black woman who grew up in segregated Alabama, as US secretary of state has not dimmed the cries against American “racism”.

For this the 1980s peace movement must take some of the blame with its overbearing emphasis on the evil Reagan empire and soft-pedalling of the Soviet Union. But I am surprised, all the same, by the persistence of the ideological blind spot that has led women who are so quick to condemn the failings of the West to make transparent excuses for the behaviour of some of the world’s most anti-feminist regimes.

Recently Kate Hudson, chairwoman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, wrote a breathtaking apologia for the Iranian nuclear energy programme, which took at face value Ahmadinejad’s claims to be developing it for “strictly peaceful” purposes. (Since when, by the way, has CND regarded Britain’s nuclear power plants so benignly?) Never mind the preposterous dancing with enriched uranium around the doves of peace nor the missiles marked “Tel Aviv” paraded in the streets.

Andrea Dworkin, Conservative?

There's something in the image of a self-identified celibate lesbian lecturing the world that "heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies" that carries, to me, the quality I reject in celibate priests lecturing young betrothed couples about the nuances of intimate married life.

Yet she was right, where a host of more liberal, and softer, minds were wrong: sex is, at bottom, an expression of power -- not always contempt, but power; often an exchange of powers unreachable except through the otherness of the lover's body. That's its magic. Where there is total equality, there is no sexuality. Lust and power move the same pistons in the brain, and if you try to disentangle them into one and the other, you find yourself holding indistinguishable threads in each hand.

Her obituaries, even in the liberal media outlets like the "Washington Post," descended into cattiness for long paragraphs. The conservatives were hardly less unkind. The Times (London) showed the weasel's tooth early on in its summary of her:

With probability-defying regularity, she herself fell victim to the violence, misogyny and bias that supplied the primary theme of her speeches and more than a dozen books.

That's good. It's also vicious. The Telegraph, meanwhile, resurrected Camille Paglia's zinger: "Dworkin pretends to be a daring truth-teller, but never mentions her most obvious problem, food." Again, undeniably true, and undeniably cruel.

One of the worst jobs, characteristically, comes from Britain's Independent, which manages to get in all the obligatory digs at Fascist Amerikkka while at the same time revealing its utter ignorance of American history in the 1920s and '30s, confusing it with its own vituperative cartoons of Bushworld:

Her father was that American rarity, a committed socialist who was appalled by racism and discrimination, and was an unwavering supporter of organised labour.

The Independent also singularly omits that Dworkin's experience with being an abused spouse, which it describes, happened in Europe at the hands of a radical European husband. It also identifies her critics as "mostly male," overlooking the numerous feminists, including Paglia, who have taken her to task, and felt in return the lash of her wrath.

The neo-con-ish New York Sun has a pretty fair review of the woman and her work, and goes further even than the WaPo in scotching the widespread belief that Dworkin had ever said all heterosexual sex is the same as rape.

Several of the obituaries point to the insightful comments of Susie Bright, who explored many of the same topics that obsessed Dworkin, but who comes across as Glinda to Dworkin's Elphaba:

"She was the one who got us looking at porn with a critical eye, she made you feel like you could just stomp into the adult bookstore and seize everything for inspection and a bonfire. The funny thing that happened on the way to the X-Rated Sex Palace was that some of us came to different conclusions than Miss Dworkin."

Of course, as Bright notes on her site, "This is a woman who called for my 'assassination' on previous occasions," which makes it hard to feel entirely outraged at the cattiness of some of the obituaries.

Bright was hardly alone in the honor of being on Dworkin's hit list. Allen Ginsberg, once Dworkin's idol (when she fled the New Jersey suburbs to New York City, she had a copy of "Howl" in hand), once had this exchange with her:

Ginsberg: "The right wants to put me in jail."
Dworkin: "Yes, they're very sentimental; I'd kill you."

The pundit nation's attempt to classify her as a "progressive" or a "conservative" resembles a game of hot potato.

Certainly she found a sympathetic reader, and a friend, in social conservative Maggie Gallagher:

Yes, I received a gift from Andrea, the kind of gift which, intellectually speaking, you can receive only from someone with whom you profoundly disagree. From the opposite ends of the political spectrum, we had each glimpsed a piece of the same truth. Against the backdrop of a pornographic Playboy culture that tried to teach us that sex is just a trivial appetite for pleasure, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote that "sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal." I was not alone! Andrea saw it, too.

It's also no accident that one of the very few places to pass Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon's proposed law defining pornography as a civil rights violation against women was red state capital Indianapolis (in 1983; the law was overturned by the courts).

As the woman who had famously claimed, "I really believe a woman has the right to execute a man who has raped her," Dworkin wrote as one of her last published pieces an article in the "Guardian," calling for the death penalty for Scott Peterson, shamelessly defending American popular support for the death penalty in that bastion of British liberalism, and even refusing to condemn the law passed in the wake of the case that would criminalize harm done to a fetus in an assault on a pregnant woman, even if the bill poses a threat to Roe v. Wade.

It is hard, in following the harrowing story of Laci and her unborn son, not to think of Conner as a child nearly born, a life destroyed. This is especially true because Laci saw Conner as her son.

But it would be a mistake to call her a conservative. She followed her causes, consequences be damned. It's usually a tactic of one's enemies to take your sane proposals and stretch them out to absurd consequences -- reductio ad absurdum. Dworkin had no problem with that; she often did the work for them.

I think Salon's summation of her life hits the right note on that:

Though holdovers from the counterculture of the 1960s will probably hate to hear it, Andrea Dworkin, who died over the weekend, was one of their own. The rosy lens of intervening decades has softened many people's memories of those times, so that it's become easier to see the '60s as a time of righteous, liberal-minded protest movements and groovy celebrations of pot and casual sex.

She was a pure product of America, after all, and as another New Jersey writer always reminds us, The pure products of America go crazy--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum--
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

Well, I think Andrea would understand that. And if we can take it from Bill, we ought to hear it from her, too.