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Daly and Limbaugh's Peculiar Dynamic

Wed, 2010-01-06 16:23 — figleaf

By the way, you know who I think is going to be more sad about Mary Daly’s passing than anyone in feminism or on the left? Rush Limbaugh. In the last 30 years he’s made on the order of billions of dollars tarring all of feminism with her supremacist, separatist spew. When he said “feminazi” he meant her and a very small handful of people like her.

This is not to say Rush Limbaugh was her responsibility — if it hadn’t been her he’d have picked someone or something else to demonize. But she believed largely what he accused her of believing. Advocated largely what he accused her of advocating. And he called that all of feminism. Nor, since she agreed, would she have disputed it. She, in turn, would have been able to point to Rush Limbaugh and say look how he proves my point about men. And of course Limbaugh would gloatingly agree as well.

Even though both were wrong it’s been in both their interests to maintain the fiction that everyone who disagreed with them were wimps, sellouts, or dupes and agents of their opponents. At the expense of many other kinds of feminism.

When you see a million grown men rolling their eyes and wetting their pants about “teh femininiminists” I think Daly had something to do with that. When you see a million grown women saying “I’m not a feminist but…” or “I’m a feminist but…” or, especially “feminism doesn’t speak for me.” I think Daly was a big part of that too.

And yeah, maybe that’s a little harsh. Fine. She’s the one who, as an individual, thought her would would be a better place if I, and half my children, as a class were “decontaminated” from the Earth. So I, as an individual, am sincerely sorry she’s passed away. As I would have been sincerely sorry had Rush Limbaugh passed away during his recent health crisis. I just as sincerely hope that, having passed away, their particular assumptions, ideas, and dreams of world transformation pass away with them.

Wed, 2010-01-06 22:52 — Red (not verified) #permalink
Actually it’s an open question whether or not essentialist feminism really is feminism per se. There’s a cogent argument saying that it isn’t. Some definitions of feminism include the contention that sex roles are mostly a matter of convention rather biology, and are hence mutable. Which puts Mary Daly and other “difference feminists” shaky ground. As for whether or not this sort of phenomena has “alienated middle America”, or whether she can be blamed for young women who claim that feminism doesn’t “speak to them”. I think most of the blame for the latter is about either misinformation, or women who DO hold patriarchal values even if they work, own bank accounts etc. And what I think that boils down to is depoliticization of society, consumerism, and frankly just poorly developed value systems. As for the former I consider the term “Middle America” to be at best a loaded word and at worst an act of geographic/demographic gerrymandering, I think a lot of people who even more firmly reject feminism actually do hold very essentialist views of gender, so you really can’t blame essentialists like Daly for alienating them.

[I certainly agree there are more anti-feminist gender essentialists than feminist ones. Although as ChrisJ points out (and I remember very well) difference/essentialist feminism dominated a great deal of early feminist thought. Including early “2nd-wave” thought. One thing I think is peculiar is that she’s designated a “radical” feminist. My understanding is that radical feminism got its start with folks like the Redstockings who argued gender was more a construct related to class and power dynamics than immutable “masculinity” and “femininity.”

As for Daly and Limbaugh, I’m not saying she consciously set out to alienate anyone who wasn’t as separatist as she was. I’m saying that Limbaugh used her and others like her to brand all of feminism. To the extent she colluded with the accusation it would be that she didn’t dispute the characterization. Thanks, Red. —fl]

Thu, 2010-01-21 12:52 — makomk (not verified) #permalink

“ My understanding is that radical feminism got its start with folks like the Redstockings who argued gender was more a construct related to class and power dynamics than immutable “masculinity” and “femininity.””

That’s one of the really odd – and possibly quite ironic – things. While radical feminists do argue exactly that, often the results are almost exactly the same as gender essentialism except with biological inevitability replaced by social inevitability. ([trigger warning] A particularly spectacular demonstration of this is the virulently transphobic radfem blogger factcheckme, whose arguments based on social constructivism are essentially indistinguishable in form and effect from good old gender essentialist ones. I’ve read her posts and comments, and they really are that bad. Most of the radical feminists aren’t quite so nasty and are more subtle about it.)

The key difference is that radical feminists claim that the distinction between masculinity and femininity can be destroyed (but only by radical feminists like them, who must additionally all be female since only women can see what needs to be done). Basically, in a hypothetical feminist dictatorship, it’s the difference between all the men being rounded up and sent to death camps and being sent to re-education camps.

[From what I learned in a women’s-studies class the confusion is mostly about naming. The Redstockings were radical in a formal sense of “center of the issue,” which (as Shulamith Firestone put it, for instance) meant the original model for all forms of oppression was when women were forced into the domestic division of labor. Which pretty much implies gender is or should be a bogus distinction. On the other hand the people you talk about who are often identified as “radical” or “radfem” in the loose 60’s/protest sense gender essentialists (in 70’s/80’s parlance) or “cultural feminists” in the parlance of my women’s studies texts. In that sense “radfems” believe men are irredeemably evil while formal radical feminists think men, and women, would be better off if we all got off the gender bandwagon. (Technically Firestone advocated developing artificial wombs so that women didn’t have to bear 100% of the burden of reproducing humanity, whereupon gender and even binary sexes would become irrelevant. Which isn’t “radfem” in the least.) So anyway, that’s why I think it’s a shame there’s so much confusion between the terms “radical feminist,” which was pretty gender-busting and “radfems,” which is all about gender. Thanks, makomk. —fl]

Fri, 2010-01-22 07:57 — makomk (not verified) #permalink

“The Redstockings were radical in a formal sense of “center of the issue,” which (as Shulamith Firestone put it, for instance) meant the original model for all forms of oppression was when women were forced into the domestic division of labor.”

Exactly – and that’s one of the big problems with radical feminism and most of its descendents. By firmly centering all other oppression as being rooted in the more fundamental oppression of women, they avoided having to deal with issues such as their own racism and transphobia. (This is also why it’s wise to be cautious when a radfem complains about the Oppression Olympics: generally it’s meant not in the usual sense, but instead as a complaint about racism etc being treated as important issues just like sexism.)

I’m guessing this is also the sense in which Mary Daly was a radical feminist: she apparently argued that male oppression of women was a fundamental, deeply-rooted and ancient aspect of society just like the radical feminists. The difference is that she either didn’t think that men could be reformed or didn’t think they should be.

“On the other hand the people you talk about who are often identified as “radical” or “radfem” in the loose 60’s/protest sense gender essentialists (in 70’s/80’s parlance) or “cultural feminists” in the parlance of my women’s studies texts. In that sense “radfems” believe men are irredeemably evil while formal radical feminists think men, and women, would be better off if we all got off the gender bandwagon.”

Except that an important aspect of the “radfems” I’m talking about – probably even factcheckme – is that, for the most part, they don’t believe men are irredeemably evil and do think that everyone would be better off if we got off the gender bandwagon. (In fact, there’s a common and really nasty transphobic argument based entirely on the importance of ending gender.)

Despite this, their views rely heavily on the gender binary and are almost indistinguishable from gender essentialism. For example, instead of arguing that all men are violent, dangerous rapists because of biology, they argue that it’s because of equally inescapable socialisation. Or they argue that women are better and more capable than men for the same reason. (The most spectacular demonstration of this is, again, the treatment of trans people: they can’t exist, not because biology prevents it, but because socialization does. There’s no way someone brought up as a man can “really” be a woman, nor vice-versa.)

As I said, men can be redeemed, but only by rejecting their own views and unquestioningly embracing radfem viewpoints in their entirety. Said viewpoints may only be determined by radfem women, since they’re the only ones who both have the upbringing needed to actually perceive gender issues and put in the effort to figure them out. Once enough men do this, the gender constructs and oppression will supposedly collapse and leave us with true equality. (I don’t know much about the Redstockings, but their Wikipedia page suggests they actually had a similar approach.)

In the meantime, what gender roles men are allowed to adopt is determined by what radfem women consider OK: for example, anything too masculine is likely to be considered perpetrating the patriarchy, whereas anything too feminine may be seen as slumming.

Side note: The treatment of women who don’t agree with radical feminism generally varies from unwitting dupes of the Patriarchy to deliberate sell-outs. Allegedly the Redstockings held the latter view but considered it an understandable reaction.

Sat, 2010-01-23 20:55 — Iamcuriousblue (not verified) #permalink

A couple of comments on the discussion:

Contemporary radical feminism largely grew out of 1970s cultural feminism, with a core body of theory added by Dworkin, Mackinnon, and their followers. Following the lead of Dworkin, of them flipped from radical essentialism to radical social constructionism (Mary Daly and Sheila Jeffreys being the notable holdouts) while basically changing no other aspect of their theory or practice in spite of what was a foundational change to their theoretical basis. Hence, a lot of radfem theory basically retrofits some very essentialist ideas upon radical social constructionist foundations. To my mind, this is yet another sin of later radical feminism – not only does it embrace a highly reactionary kind of politics, it’s theoretically shoddy as well.

Thanks for the mention and link to the Redstockings page, Makomk – that was largely written by me, largely based upon Alice Echols and Ellen Willis’ writing on the subject, and with some corrections added by a member of the tiny current remnant of Redstockings. I still consider it one of my better Wikipedia contributions. Redstockings basically fell out somewhere in between radical feminism and what today would be called socialist feminism. It took some odd turns after that, though, including into outright homophobia, both toward gay men and lesbians – basically, they fell into the same trap that lesbian separatists did in treating sexual preference as ideological practice, but came to opposite conclusions. If you have a look at their anthology, they ended up embracing some very weird half-baked ideas, and I almost get the impression that a fair number of their writings from the 70s were basically written while stoned. They also had an all-too-Marxist tendency toward sectarianism.

Ellen Willis was their best-known theorist to come out of the group, but her political ideas developed and matured considerably during and after her involvement in Redstockings. Its quite telling that “Beginning to See the Light”, the anthology of her 60s and 70s writing, contains virtually no political essays written before the late 70s. However, her jaundiced take on “cultural feminism” (aka, modern radfeminism) was a legacy of Redstockings, which was very critical of the increasing essentialism and mysticism in the radical feminist movement as the 70s wore on. This, in turn, is pretty much the starting point for Alice Echols analysis of the subject.

[I’ll have to take your word (or someone else’s) on a lot of that, IACB, but it sounds about right. I stopped feeling uncomfortable calling myself a feminist after reading Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex. As you suggest it didn’t sound essentialist at all. Which sort of stands to reason — they were certainly Marxists back then. Freudians too, of course, but in 1968 Marx and Freud were a big part of the lingua franca of leftist social activism and not specific to the Redstockings. That so much of it now sounds really archaic just goes to show how long ago that really was. Thanks for dropping by. —fl]

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