 |
By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
|
No some feminists are great...it's the loud media savvy types who are poisonous when given a mainstream media voice.
Some good stuff from jessica crispin here.
Making feminism a universal pursuit might look like a good thing,” author Jessa Crispin writes, “but in truth it progresses, and I think accelerates, a process that has been detrimental to the feminist movement.”
Crispin has written a polemic titled Why I am Not a Feminist, in which she laments the banality of contemporary feminism. Her thesis is simple enough: At some point, feminism lost its political moorings; it became vapid and toothless in its quest for universality. Feminism became a catch-all term for self-empowerment, for individual achievement.
Feminists, she believes, forsook their values for the sake of assimilation, which is another way of saying they were co-opted by the system they once rejected.
“If you have women in positions of power behaving like men do,” Crispin says, “that is not a defeat of the patriarchy. … That’s just patriarchy with women in it.”
A feminist politics is, according to Crispin, necessarily anti-capitalist. Patriarchy is bound up with capitalism, and thus the two must fall together. She’s not the first person to criticize feminism in this way. Socialist feminists have long argued that feminism demands the dismantling of capitalism. Crispin’s rejection of universalism and individualism, though, feels somewhat new, or at least it’s stated in more urgent terms.
In this interview, Crispin and I discuss her contempt for consumerist culture, which she says has pervaded feminist ideology and poisoned its roots. Since she considers patriarchy and capitalism as features of the same system, I ask her if feminism, rightly understood, is a revolutionary project.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sean Illing
Your book reads like an indictment of our entire culture. Is that the spirit in which you wrote it?
Jessa Crispin
That’s right. I think part of it was feminism used to be outside the culture. It used to be a way of criticizing the culture. It used to be a way of imagining a different kind of culture. But somehow in the last 10 years or so, feminism became another part of the culture; it became as vapid and selfish as everything else.
Sean Illing
In many ways — and this is part of the argument you make in the book — feminism became apolitical, or divorced from its political roots.
Jessa Crispin
Yeah, and that was really frustrating as someone who became politically conscious through my engagement with feminism. It was disappointing to see feminists abandon their value system for the sake of assimilation and power. It was deeply, deeply disappointing to watch.
Sean Illing
So let’s talk about those forgotten values and what replaced them. When you object to new feminism, what are you objecting to exactly?
Jessa Crispin
I’m objecting to feminism as it currently exists in the mainstream. Certainly there is a tradition of radical feminism. There are still people working within radical feminism, but they are not the people who are being allowed to speak for feminism. When anybody is asked to write an op-ed in the New York Times or the Washington Post or whatever, it's not coming from a radical political awareness. It's coming from this very mainstream feminism and they're taking up all of the space.
So the conversation has been co-opted by people who have no idea what they're talking about. It's about personal essays. It's about what's a good television show. It has nothing to do with how do we actually improve the lives of all women, not just women in New York City, not just young, pretty, not just mediagenic women.
Sean Illing
But you go much further than that in the book, right? It’s not just that feminism has been co-opted or defanged — you say that it’s now doing the work of patriarchy.
Jessa Crispin
This idea emerged that if we just put a lot more women in positions of power, somehow that would defeat the patriarchy, not understanding that the patriarchy has nothing to do with men. If women in power behave like men do, that is not a defeat of the patriarchy. That's just patriarchy with women in it. And patriarchy is one of those really dissatisfying words because everybody uses it and there's not a general understanding, a shared understanding of what the word means other than anything that is keeping you down.
Sean Illing
How do you define patriarchy?
Jessa Crispin
My working definition of patriarchy is a society that's structured by hierarchy. So unless that is reformed, unless we reform society so there are no hierarchies, because the hierarchy used to be white, property-owning men at the top of the hierarchy and everybody else in varying positions underneath that, and now it's just money and power. So women can easily attain a high position on the hierarchy, but that's not the end of patriarchy.
Unless we get rid of the hierarchy and stop structuring our society around it, the patriarchy is not defeated.
Sean Illing
It seems to me that you’re making an argument against capitalism as such, or the values that undergird capitalism. If we replace “patriarchy” with “capitalism” does your analysis change at all?
Jessa Crispin
No, but this isn’t new. Second-wave feminism, even first-wave feminism, noticed that patriarchy was intertwined with capitalism. So there isn't a way of defeating one without the other. And also capitalism is also one of those words, like patriarchy, that everybody uses these days without a full understanding of what the word means. I’m probably guilty of that, too. Some of my philosopher friends say that I occasionally misuse the word, but I try not to.
The point is that patriarchy and capitalism are of the same system. They support one another and one cannot be removed without the other.
Sean Illing
So you see feminism as a casualty of capitalist or patriarchal culture insofar as women have internalized these values and come to define their success in these terms?
Jessa Crispin
Yes, and that's a problem for almost any marginalized group when assimilation becomes the goal. It's much easier to criticize corporate culture when you're not allowed to be in the higher levels of corporate culture. As soon as you're allowed to be a CEO of a large company, then it's like, "Oh, we'll just reform it from within. We don't have to destroy it. Now that I'm running it, it's fine.
So it is a kind of abandoning of principles because power feels really good. And as long as the system is in place, and as long as women are benefitting from that system, it's going to be harder to have these conversations. The better women do, the less likely we are to have these conversations under the guise of feminism
|
Let's build the bomb fires and burn the lot. That'll teach 'em!
