Why I Am Not a Feminist Read online

  Compare her to the shiny pop stars who have discovered the market for feminist girl power and who use the word loudly while displaying regressive ideas, images, and messages. The word feminist acts as a shield from criticism, and many of these women are celebrated as heroes. If you use the proper word, then all is forgiven. You get a free pass. If you do not use the proper word, this overshadows all the good work you have done in your life.

  Why is the label, then, so important, if it is not about putting more interesting, complicated, brilliant women into the world? In a word: comfort.

  If you are surrounded by people who agree with you, you do not have to do much thinking. If you are surrounded by people who identify themselves the same way you do, you do not have to work at constructing a unique identity. If you are surrounded by people who behave the same way you do, you do not have to question your own choices.

  How do we come by new feminists, then, if that is what we need? Two ways. The first is by rebranding. Make feminism less threatening and more palatable. Create a way of showing women that no matter how they live their lives, they are already feminists, all they need to do is change their own labels.

  In order to do this, we have to kill the dominant idea about what feminism is—and the image we all carry around about what feminism looks like comes to us from the second wave. It’s a lot of anger, a lot of body hair. In rejecting this version and refusing to put it into context, feminism helps to erase its own radical past. By trying to distance themselves from the bra-burning, hairy-armpitted bogeywoman, they disown and forget all the good this generation of women did.

  It is therefore important to state publicly, as many current feminist writers have, that at certain points feminism “went too far.” All those scary women like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, Shulamith Firestone and Germaine Greer—who are condemned by this younger generation of feminists much more often than they are read—become scapegoats as their work is willfully misunderstood and misrepresented in an attempt to convince readers and potential feminists of the universal feminists’ reasonableness. You can, they insist, still be a feminist and shave your legs, fuck men, consume misogynistic culture. Look, we’re doing it, we call ourselves feminists, you can too.

  Next, create a friendlier version of feminism where political and sociological understanding of the pressures under which women attempt to live their lives is replaced with personal choice. For example, everything about our culture may be pushing women toward marriage—from romantic narratives in movies and television to health insurance policies and tax benefits granted by the government. And marriage has historically been a way to control women and reduce them to being property—the visuals in marriage ceremonies and the words of wife and husband are still heavy with this symbolic meaning. Yet, if you want to get married and you choose to get married, and you identify as feminist, then your getting married is automatically a feminist act.

  Once feminism is transformed from a system with which we can interrogate our societies, our relationships, and our own lives, and imagine and create new ways of being, into a method of self-empowerment and self-improvement, then feminism can become universal. Almost any action or any person can now be labeled as feminist.

  The second way to increase feminist ranks is to convince women that their lives will be better if they call themselves feminists. In this way, feminism becomes just another self-help system, another voice telling women they should be having better orgasms, making more money, increasing their happiness quotient, wielding more power in their homes and workplaces. The goal here is self-empowerment, a word that many feminists toss around these days. The ability to live a life of one’s own choosing, without any focus on what that life could or should be.

  Self-help culture necessarily removes the individual from the societal context in which she lives. We decided to think about our problems in a psychological context rather than a sociological context so that we could at least feel some modicum of control. In this mode, you alone are responsible for your happiness and that happiness is within your control. Self-help culture is also a culture of anxiety. There is always an area of your life that could be improved, and one easily falls into a state of constant assessment and comparison. How is my sex life? I thought it was okay, but this person’s sex life seems way better. I wonder if a similar sex life would make me happier. I wonder what she did that I am not doing, how do I make myself deserving of that sex life, she has thinner thighs, if I had thinner thighs I bet I could finally feel really uninhibited in bed.

  Women and men who fall into the trap of the self-help mindset spend their time working on their “faults,” their weak points, in order to live their best possible lives. Feminism in the self-help mode becomes, then, just another metric to measure, just another process of assessment. So we have books called Sexy Feminism, scientific studies about whether feminists have a more satisfying sex or romantic life, personal essays about how feminism helped me get that promotion/have better orgasms. And while there is a vague notion that there is something called the Patriarchy keeping you down, there are few ideas of how to counteract it, except through individual achievement.

  Now that we have removed all meaning from the word feminism, our ranks have swelled. We automatically (presto chango) have created an egalitarian society, right? Things have improved all the way around, not just for women but for all people, right?

  Converting women to feminism under these conditions does not result in a more fair society or a safer world for women. It is often supposed that acceptance of the feminist label will also result in the acceptance of the meaning behind it, but the meaning has been drained away by this psychotic marketing campaign. A woman can now take up the feminist label without any true political, personal, or relational adaptations whatsoever. It’s just another button on her jacket, another sticker on her bumper. The inner contents remain unchanged. All this proselytizing begins to resemble the Christians trying to convert the pagans. (“Really? You have a fertility-related spring festival centered around the egg, the symbol of new life and the powers of procreation? That’s so funny, us too.”) It does not just soothe the minds of feminists who are experiencing doubt. It also keeps the movement as a whole from questioning why women may not want to associate themselves with it.

  If feminism really did make women happier and give them better orgasms and stronger marriages and more money, then the proselytizing would be unnecessary. The fact that it does not do these things, by the way, does not speak poorly of feminism.

  Breaking away from the value system and goals of the dominant culture is always going to be a dramatic, and inconvenient, act. Surface-level feminism—feminism that requires only a swapping out of labels and no real reform—requires nothing so strenuous from you. To understand how surface-level contemporary feminism really is, we need only note that the most common markers of feminism’s success are the same markers of success in patriarchal capitalism. Namely, money and power. Our metric is how many women are the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, how many bylines at The New York Times are women’s, what percentage of medical school graduates are women.

  We assume the patriarchy will automatically be dismantled if we just manage to get all women to call themselves feminist. A woman CEO can proudly stand up and proclaim her belief in feminism—after all, it got her to this position of power—while still outsourcing her company’s labor to factories where women and children work in slave-like conditions, while still poisoning the atmosphere and water supplies with toxic run-off, and while paying her female employees disproportionately low salaries.

  Worse than any of that, however, is the tendency of contemporary feminism to see women in power as an inherent good, women like Hillary Rodham Clinton (who, as a senator, dismantled social welfare programs to the severe detriment of poor women and children, as well as supported international interventions that resulted in the deaths and suffering of thousands of innocent civilians), GM CEO Mary T. Barra (who oversaw the cover-up of t
he safety issues of her company’s products, which led to more than a dozen deaths), and other prominent women whose behavior feminists would be condemning if only their genders were different. Women who conduct themselves as ruthlessly and thoughtlessly as their male peers are not heroes, they are not role models. They may call themselves feminists, getting themselves a free pass by many, but that does not mean they should be celebrated.

  This is what happens when feminism gets hollowed out: anyone feels free to take up the mantle, and terrible things are done in its name. What needs to be restored, and can be restored, is a feminist philosophy, and new ideas of what it means to be moral, what it means to participate in the world, and what it means not simply to destroy something, but to build something new.

  2

  Women Do Not Have to Be Feminists

  There is a tendency to look at women who have rejected feminism and decide they must be pitiable. Poor silly cows, they don’t know what’s best for them. Choosing dependency and subjugation, choosing sad lives of imprisonment and enslavement. When will they awake from their slumber?

  It’s always going to be easier to pity someone for making different choices than you than to try to understand why they made the choices they did. Otherwise you might have to question your own choices and deal with the possible regret of not having chosen differently. You proselytize to rid yourself of doubt, not to spread the good news.

  We speak for these women instead of listening to them. This must be their character: they must be lazy, deluded, greedy, stupid. These must be their reasons: they must have daddy issues, they must be gold diggers, they must think men are actually superior to women due to some sort of religious indoctrination, they must be doing this because they think it makes them hotter to guys. This must be who they are: uneducated, lower class, evangelical Christians, pampered suburban moms, twits.

  It’s really not that difficult to see why someone might choose not to be a feminist. To understand that, all we really have to do is take a look at what the feminist revolution has, and has not, offered to women.

  When we all decided to be feminists, it was because we were looking at what was denied to us. We had historically been shut out of masculine spaces, like public life, the workplace, and education. Our traditional realm, of the home and the family and the nursery, looked like prisons.

  What feminism thought it was offering its followers, then, was escape. It was an expanded life. A life of independence, of adventure, of work.

  But in order to believe that, we have to forget that women have always worked. Many women have always had to. The unmarried, the widowed, the poor, the disadvantaged have always worked. When feminists decided to fight for the right to work, what they meant was the right to become doctors, lawyers, and so on. Women have always scrubbed toilets and floors, have always been paid to touch other people’s bodies as nurses and assistants and sex workers.

  Nor were women fighting to work in the jobs of poor men, the laborers and miners and slaughterhouse workers. Right from the beginning, the assumption was that work was a good thing, a fulfilling thing, that we were missing out on. Not a soul and body–destroying thing that can kill you off young or make you wish it would.

  Some women have historically had an out from the realm of work. That out was through men. If they found the right man with the right situation, they could exit this soul-destroying work world and retreat to the relative comfort of the house. The house might be a prison, but when freedom looks like wiping up someone else’s vomit and urine under migraine-inducing fluorescent lighting, can you actually blame someone for asking to be let back into their cell?

  Poor women are not the only women who would prefer not to work, of course. Highly educated women working in ambitious fields also decide to check out. That “opting out” as the feminists call it, is considered something of a betrayal. Women should work! To help their sisters out! And yet, opting in means prioritizing long hours at jobs over any sense of community or family. Because in this age of precarity, work and money are so elusive that cutting back hours can mean a slide into irrelevance or unemployability for many.

  This is part of the problem of creating a unified front for feminism: the median feminist is generally going to be a middle-class, educated white woman. Her desires and needs cannot stand in for the needs of all women. And yet we’ve focused on facilitating her dreams for much of recent feminist history. Our goals have been things that would make her life easier, like equal pay, removing barriers to higher education, delaying childbearing through birth control and fertility treatment developments.

  The workplace and capitalistic society has become increasingly hostile. Not only to women, but to men, too. By keeping the focus on how women are doing in the marketplace, rather than how human beings exist under this system of competition and precarity, our thinking remains very small. How are women faring in the job market in comparison to men? Does that really matter when due to overwhelming student loan debt, sharply decreased job stability, the gutting of social services and work benefits, rapacious CEOs and boards of directors, and globalization, the world of work and money is hurting everyone?

  But sure, stick with it, sisters! We must prevail because of … something.

  One thing we are told we must persevere for is independence. The independence of women is important. Independence from men, sure. If only because dependence on men is not what it used to be. The deal was, I give up my freedom and my body and you offer me protection from the outside world. That arrangement would last until you died.

  Now of course, romance is as unstable as the job market, and just as competitive and demeaning. Unless you decide to black widow a few rich guys in a row, looking to men to provide the stability and protection you desire is unlikely to work out in a lifelong kind of way.

  So it’s important to have a Plan B. But why is our Plan B to manage all of it on our own? To have to, as individuals, make our money, set up our homes, bear and raise children, cook our meals, develop and maintain a sense of style and taste, decide how we spend our free time, and on and on until we die. In the name of freedom, we broke out of communities and towns and tribes and created families and blood lineage. In the name of freedom, we broke out of families and blood lineage to create a nuclear household. In the name of freedom, we broke out of nuclear households to become individuals. And yet at no point along that way did we put serious consideration into creating a social equivalent of the support system those larger groups provided to us.

  True, a lot of those systems were built explicitly for the oppression of women. Community can often seem like a system for controlling behavior and insisting on conformity; family can often seem like a method of keeping women docile and tamed. But we’re all so eager to overcorrect. We toss out entire systems because they once hurt us, without taking a moment to reflect on how, so often, they helped us.

  Now independence is hailed as a feminist virtue. The ability to stand on one’s own, outside of family or men. And now we have all the freedom and independence we desire, like the freedom to go bankrupt, to be socially isolated, to be homeless without any social support network, to labor all your life with nothing to show for it. As long as feminism is still infected with the Protestant economic determinist mindset—the idea that your station in life is determined by how virtuous you are or what you deserve—we’ll continue to put our time and energy into breaking down social structures rather than creating new, more empathetic ones.

  And so of course a significant number of women are going to look at this atomized, capitalistic world that feminism offers to them like a gift and ask if they can take it back to the store and exchange it for something a little bit more old-fashioned. Women everywhere! Leave the comfortable confines of traditional life and enter this brand new world of struggle, despair, and uncertainty! Thanks, and fuck you, but no.

  Not every woman, or man, is ambitious. Not every woman is determined to make her mark on the world. Not every woman gets satisfaction out of w
orking eighty hours a week just to watch some young Harvard asshole get promoted above her to a job she didn’t really want but would pay her a little better. Not every woman longs to participate in the consumerist mindfuck that is the culture we live in, filling the holes in her heart and soul with shoes and limited edition crop tops from Topshop. It’s feminism’s fault that these are the two options we have available to women. Either you can let a man take care of the financial and outer world side of things while you spend time with your children and shop for overpriced organic blueberries, or you can work until you die to buy stuff you don’t need and fight for every square inch you exist on. Either that pays off for you in the end or it doesn’t.

  When—let’s call them “traditional”—women “feel sorry” for feminists, they’re doing pretty much what we do to them. We are using pity as a self-defense mechanism. We feel sorry for someone so we don’t have to assign value to anything they say or do or believe. We do not have to listen to their complaints about our beliefs.

  And yet if we were able to sit down, without judgment, and ask what we’re not offering these women, we might actually be able to get somewhere. Not along the lines of conversion. We need to stop thinking that way. Instead, we could see the limitations of our own project; that we’re not as smart as we think we are; that maybe the ways these women are unhappy line up with the ways we are unhappy.

  If you look at what is missing from today’s society, much of it falls within traditional feminine values and pursuits. Carving out space within the masculine realm, in the work and public spheres, meant in part abandoning the feminine spheres of home, care, and community. There was no equal effort to make space for men in the feminine pursuits. As a result, what you see is a kind of hyper-masculinized world, where women are participating—and absolutely expected to participate in this world by feminists—in patriarchal values.