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                                             February 24, 2015

Some bits of followup from comments to:

  EXPLAINING_FEMINISM

When posted to the dailykos, that piece accumulated
even more criticism than I expected, and a lot of it
was of the form of questioning my understanding and
memory of the history of feminism.  I was saying things
like this:

     Something like this went down when the 70s feminists
     encountered the third wave: all of a sudden the            WAVICALISM
     feminist's somewhat rigid doctrines about sexual
     roles were challenged by both the mainstream
     defenders of tradition and the "pro-sex" feminists
     that came out of San Francisco in the 80s and 90s.

This got responses like "you disrespected
the history of 20th century feminism with   (The phrase "disrespect" came
this wild-eyed nonsense"--                  up several times, actually...
                                            I have the sense that might be
                                            a bigger crime than being wrong.)

This aside got a lot of
questions that surprised              What got me interested in writing this
me (for perhaps no good               stuff was the feeling that young
reason):                              feminists had forgotten some hard won
                                      lessons... so maybe I should've spent
  (In these porn-fried days it        more time on history, explaining what
  might be hard to remember the       I've seen go down over the years.
  kind of ideas that were taken
  seriously among feminist
  activists back then... consider
  that strap-on dildos were
  regarded as evil because they
  supposedly suggested there was
  some truth in the Freudian
  theory of "penis-envy". Real
  women get by on clitoral
  stimulation alone.)

That received a barrage of questions like:

   "What 'rigid sex roles?' Who are those
   'defenders of tradition?' And when was
   the Big Women's Question concerned with
   fucking strap-ons?"

My response:

Allow me to asterix myself here: the
women's movement no doubt has many                   I should've said:
accomplishments, and I'm not interested in
living in the 50s, and never have been.                I do not now, nor have
                                                       I ever, had any desire
But I was around in the 70s and there were             to live in the 1950s.
feminist factions with some really odd ideas.
It would be hard to say how "central" they were        ASTERIX
(maybe not very) but they were at least listened
to respectfully-- they were then abruptly
jettisoned as "extremists" when it looked like
they were a political liability.  Maybe the
clearest example there is Dworkin and MacKinnon,
but I didn't want to bring them up again.

About the strap-on business: The Big Women's
question had to do with the neglect of the
clitoris until around the 70s or so (cunnilingus
used to regarded as a Weird Practice, you know?),
then there was an overreaction and some went as
far as to claim that the vagina didn't matter
(there's no such thing as vaginal orgasm!)-- the
great G-spot craze came in some years later.

And yeah, the whole point is that stuff like
whether you like strap-ons would seem to be
completely irrelevant-- nevertheless there was a
faction that regarded them (and everything else)
as having some great symbolic significance.
                                                  
Oh, and "rigid sex roles". Just to pick one:      
dresses. You would get some feminists implying not     
just that women shouldn't have to wear dresses,        
but that they shouldn't do so ever, even if they       
themselves want to. That no doubt seems trivial        
too, but the simple ones are easier to talk about.     
                                                       
More generally: that women should be forcibly         
confined to traditional feminine roles is clearly
bad; but that women should not be *allowed* to
adopt those roles, I think that counts as Rigid.



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