A Dyke A Broad #23

"The women’s movement is the first in history with a war on and no enemy." Screw that.

Hello from Paris!

A couple days ago I got all happy when I ran across this quote in the Lesbian Avenger Handbook. "People have to be able to offer their perspectives openly without being attacked, and to have space to explore and work through ideas.”

It’s not that I’d forgotten how the Avengers could be, especially at the end. But at least we had aspirations to be better. And recognized the consequences of stifling ideas. Now, even civil rights institutions like the ACLU demand we act like worshipers at a tent revival meeting. With everybody shouting, “Yes, Lord” to the dogma of the day. 

Yeah, I got all happy, and thought sadly for the ten millionth time that the problem was that people, especially on the Left, don’t understand how free speech works; there’s been a misunderstanding somewhere. They think they’re squashing their enemies, not their friends, and don’t know that they’re gradually eliminating not just what we hear, but our ability to think at all. Because if you’re afraid of the fish you’re gonna catch, you don’t even dip your line into the water like Virginia Woolf  whose tiny nibble was interrupted. You don’t go near the brook.

Blah blah blah. And then I kind of hated myself. Because I’m such a rube.

Because even if there are kernels of truth in what I just wrote, it’s also largely irrelevant. Because every time I ask in desperation, “Why, why is this happening?”  and put it down to some misunderstanding, I discover the answer is, “It happens because it’s meant to.” Because Power always protects itself. Especially when it comes to the category of women. 

We really only speak out on International Women’s Day. Or when something particularly terrible has happened. Like the recent murder of Sarah Everard in Britain. Which may actually be leading to something different. Because women aren’t asking for the state to protect them, but for men to stop. Stop. Stop. Read the Caroline Criado Perez newsletter to get a sense of what’s going on there. “I suddenly felt so furious that this was how I had to live my life. My one life. And we spend it in fear.”

Women there can’t take it anymore.

Don’t even bring up #MeToo. The whole time it was in the headlines, I used to ask myself (and anybody that crossed my path) why it was so popular. I thought the name itself was counterproductive because it typically focused on the victim (women, females), but not the perp. Unlike the  French version, which is #balancetonporc.  Unmask your sexist pig. Which at least gave women a little power. 

After a while, I concluded that was the point. #MeToo met with broad approval precisely because it distracted us, kept the focus on the victims (even if occasionally named the culprit), while the category of men was off-limits. 

That’s pretty much the state of the feminist nation in the U.S. Which talks abjectly about “toxic masculinity”. Sometimes even abortion. But never Male Power. Never Male Violence. Never Men. Even the phrase male privilege has disappeared unless we’re specifically talking about “straight white cis male upperclass privilege”, exempting everyone else. Which is bullshit. And will bite us in the ass, yes even queers, even the most sex and sexism-erasing gender-embracing radicals of the trans movement. Because you don’t have to believe in gravity for it to bring you down.

Argh. It’s like nothing’s changed since the Seventies. Since that dinosaur Ti Grace Atkinson had her own lightbulb moment when Almania Barbour, a black militant woman in Philadelphia, told her, “The women’s movement is the first in history with a war on and no enemy.” And she had to reconsider everything.

Surely the enemy must have been defined at some time. Otherwise, what had we been shooting at for the last couple of years? Into the air? Only two responses came to me, although in looking for those two I realized that it was a question carefully avoided. The first and by far the most frequent answer was  “society.” The second, infrequently and always furtively, was “men”. If “society” is the enemy, what could that mean? If women were being oppressed, there’s only one group left over to be doing the oppressing: men. Then why call them “society”? Could “society” mean the “institutions” that oppress women? But institutions must be maintained, and the same question arises: by whom? The answer to “who is the enemy?” is so obvious that the interesting issue quickly becomes “why has it been avoided?” The master might tolerate many reforms in slavery but none that would threaten his essential role as master. Women have known this, and since “men” and “society” are in effect synonymous, they have feared confronting him. Without this confrontation and detailed understanding of what his battle strategy has been that has kept us so successfully pinned down, the “women’s movement” is worse than useless: it invites backlash from men, and no progress for women.

I think about that more and more. “The women’s movement is the first in history with a war on and no enemy.” It should be posted on every wall. Every light post. Tattooed on my forehead. It makes me tired. It makes me angry. Furious, really, that we so rarely have the courage to point the finger at anybody. And so quickly disappear when we do. 

And I’m angry at my own limitations. Wonder if it’s even why I want us to play nice as activists and sing Kumbaya. Not because I’m so committed to free speech and  democracy. But because I’ve been taught to flinch at conflict like a good little woman. Or both. Maybe I value democracy because it’s supposed to keep me from getting squashed. Which kind of defines democracy, just on a different scale.

To remember it’s possible for women to fight back, powerfully, joyfully—here’s the 2019 video of a women’s demo in Chile, chanting, “A rapist in your path,” Un violador en tu camino. I’m pretty sure I’ve shared this before, but I needed to see this today. Maybe you do, too. 

Disgruntledly yours,

Really Rageswell

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