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what is feminism? (Read 411 times)
freediver
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what is feminism?
Mar 31st, 2008 at 5:25pm
 
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ruth_fowler/2008/03/the_antichrist_for_feminists.html

The antichrist for feminists

I used to cringe when my university peers claimed to be feminists. They were usually privately educated, annoying, brash and had spent a gap year breast-feeding endangered turtles in the Galapagos before coming up to a highly privileged educational establishment which qualified them, for life, as a "posh bitch".

Feminism was asserted, perhaps, as a way playing down a certain amount of privilege in life. They may have not been black, Muslim, disabled, short, obese comprehensive school educated and from the north, but by God they were women - and hence soldiers in a war against discrimination. I, of course, had the added benefit of a comprehensive school background that added to my cachet. I was doubly discriminated against - which was a great thing to be in the white, rich, hallowed halls of Cambridge. I often wished for a calliper, a hare-lip and ginger hair as well, but it was not to be.

We were 18 and attended an all-girls' college - New Hall - in Cambridge University. It was all-girls because the college was attempting to redress the inequality in an educational establishment that was biased 60-40 towards men. We were given a pep talk by the President of the College when we matriculated - the wonderful Anne Lonsdale. We were women of the future, or something. We had the chance to change the next generation ... that kind of thing. I can't remember the exact words, though they were enough to make me feel pretty good that I'd given up the opportunity to go to Manchester and sample the cheapest beer in this splendid land, for a concrete building shaped like a breast. It went by default and not examination that we were all feminists, merely by virtue of finding ourselves in this boob-shaped place, our maternal mammary in a sea of skinny-jean-clad Rah boys who'd been educated at St Paul's, or Eton, or Haberdasher's.

There were what I like to call "real" feminists in university. Some did not practise necessary depilation and wore black, some looked just like you or me. They read Gloria Steinem and bell hooks, Simone de Beauvoir and Irigaray. They chose feminism as their cause, as opposed to Palestine, or Tibet, or Zapatistas or what-have-you, when really you couldn't help thinking it could have been any one of these things. I'm not sure what their cause was specifically. Gender inequality? Phallocentrism? Female circumcision? Abortion rights? I'm sure it was worthy, if remote from our unique experience, as - for the most part - white, educated, middle-class women.

One of my tutors was a lesbian who wore man-suits and had a posh accent. She accused me once of discriminating against feminism. "Why do you see it as ridiculous?" she asked with a hint of hostility. "I dunno," I said. "I read that woman, Rebecca West, go on about how Ophelia was a real slut and manipulated by all the men around her, and it pissed me off. I think feminism is about finding things that aren't there."

My tutor bristled slightly, and the conversation ended. It was only months later that one of my other tutors quietly took me aside and showed me a steaming character dissection that she had written about me and placed on file. I was young, conservative, reductive, stubborn, arrogant and prejudiced. I was the antichrist for feminists.

My father, a right-wing scouser, was very proud of me after this. And all these years he'd been despairing over his liberal, left-wing daughter! Cambridge had shown me where my loyalties lay when I myself did not know or care too much - my attitude being that I was a woman - thanks, suffragettes, now I'll go and enjoy my life.

I came to epitomise "working" (as opposed to intellectualised) feminism, in a sense - claiming it as a label because to assert otherwise was a little crass, but not really thinking about it too much, because the battle was over, and what was left to reclaim was remote - historical women in literature, women in strip clubs or brothels, our deprived sisters clad in burqa or genitally-mutilated in Africa.

"Working Feminism" became distorted by lipstick lesbianism, got tangled up with sexual liberation, became only a little about the right to vote, educational equality, non-discrimination in the workplace. It became marred by the numbers of women in the western-educated world who didn't choose to become doctors and scientists and engineers and lawyers, so then we had to find a way to make the stay-at-home mum a feminist too, as well as the Page 3 girl, and the High Class Prostitute, and the crack addict on the corner.

We claimed to have earned the right to spawn kids or remain barren and channel maternal energies into our careers. We could write about our promiscuous behaviour as evidence of our liberation, or declare we're sick of men and strap on the chastity belt for the foreseeable future. If someone denigrated our choices, we could play the gender inequality card. Because we didn't really have a cause as women, we struggled to define one, holding up Katie Price as a shining light of female empowerment one day, exposing Jordan as a brainless slut the next.
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