Hugo on steroids, definitions of feminism, and what it might mean "to believe in women"

My respiratory infection is only slowly getting better. I am now taking Prednisone, the powerful steroid; it worked the last time I had such breathing problems in 1999. It has a remarkably stimulating impact on my appetite, and it keeps me awake at night -- but today I feel better than I have felt in two weeks, and that is progress. I'm hoping I will be able to run later this week -- as any readers who are exercise addicts know, there are few frustrations comparable to being deprived of the opportunity to sweat recreationally!

Here comes the Monday rant/essay:

Last week, Rhesa from Creative Slips sent me a terrific e-mail, asking about feminism. With her permission, I'm going to make the attempt to respond publicly. Here's an excerpt from what she wrote:

For the past few days I've been re-reading your posts
while trying to get a clear picture of what a modern
feminist is and what s/he believes in. Frankly, it's
hard. For the most part, I'm really curious about
feminism because I don't call myself a feminist...

What I'm looking for are
answers, basically. What are the goals for today's
feminists? And I don't mean for this to sound
condescending at all, but why should I care?

These are excellent questions, and they aren't at all dissimilar from the questions my students in Women's History classes ask regularly. At the beginning of each semester, I always ask students in that class whether or not they consider themselves to be feminists. For the past decade, the response rate has been more or less the same: 20% say "yes", 20% say "definitely not" and the majority offer some variation on the time-honored phrase "I'm not a feminist, but..."

Part of the problem is that the media has distorted the image of what it means to be a feminist. Despite the fact that "bra-burning" never took place publicly during the 1960s or 1970s (though there were public demonstrations where women discarded uncomfortable undergarments), my students still associate feminism with this non-existent practice. They also, as one of my students put it succinctly, see feminists on TV as "hairy, ugly, smelly, and angry". Above all, they have become convinced that to be a feminist is to dislike men -- both collectively and as individuals. Overwhelmed by media distortions, the majority are understandably reluctant to claim the mantle of feminism!

Another problem is that the word "feminism" encompasses an astonishingly broad range of theories and practices. There are "radical" feminists; there are "Marxist" feminists; there are "liberal" feminists; there are "separatist" feminists; there are certainly "Christian" (and Jewish, Islamic, etc.) feminists; there are many different varieties of "academic" feminists. Googling any of these terms can provide one not just with one definition, but with many -- often contradictory ones at that.

Still another problem is that the organized feminist movement in this country has chosen, in recent years, to associate itself almost exclusively with the abortion issue. Last month's March for Women's Lives is a fine case in point. The title of the March was vague indeed, but the intent wasn't. The Feminist Majority foundation not only has the web address feminist.org, but their agenda revolves almost solely around reproductive rights issues. (There are small pro-life feminist organizations, including the wonderful Feminists for Life, to whom I donate monthly.)

(On a tangential note, I'm always struck by the silence of pro-choice organizations on the primary use of abortion in India and China -- as a means of sex-selection, where it is routine to terminate the lives of healthy girls in utero. Clearly, it is access to abortion -- not the absence of abortion rights -- that is literally the biggest threat to "women's lives" in the two most populous countries in the world. But I digress).

So far, we're not doing a great job of making the case for feminism! Rhesa's final question, "Why should I care?" has yet to be answered. Well, if Rhesa sees preserving access to abortion as the great struggle of her life and of our time, then she has a cause to join. But polling shows that most young women are increasingly ambivalent about abortion, a cause for either celebration or alarm depending upon one's views. So what else is there to feminism in general? Let me make the case here I make to my students:

To be a feminist is, at its core, to believe in women, and to believe them to be deserving of equal treatment at the hands of legal, cultural, economic, and religious institutions. (Let's note in passing that "equal" does not mean the same thing as "identical".) To be a feminist is to look back into the past, and note that for most of recorded human history, women have been accorded less influence, less power, and access to far fewer resources than men. Indeed, in most instances women have been -- until recently -- seen as the legal property of fathers and husbands. To be a feminist today is to undertake the task of making oneself aware of how far we in the prosperous West have come from a world where women were chattel. To be a feminist today is to honor our feminist forebears by remembering the names and re-telling the stories of those who struggled for equal opportunity.

To be a feminist today, however, is not merely to remember the "bad old days" and offer hosannas of thanksgiving. To be a feminist today is to be aware that acquisition of the right to vote, the right to education, and the right to own property (the three great goals of 19th-century feminism) are alone not enough to give women genuine equality in the public and private spheres. Modern feminists are concerned that we live in a society where "poverty has a woman's face" (see here for some stats). Modern feminists note that in a world where women outlive men, and in a world where women remain the overwhelming majority of those who provide for the basic needs of the elderly, that the ageing of America is itself an issue with huge repercussions for women's lives. Modern feminists also note that in much of the developing world, women remain in virtual slavery, sexually and economically exploited.

My own concern as a feminist has been with our cultural loathing for women's bodies. I am troubled that we live in a culture where women enjoy unprecedented access to political and economic power, but are increasingly anxious about their own flesh. As I wrote elsewhere, I see no progress in moving from a world where girls undergo clitoridectomies to a world where girls undergo breast implants.

And as a feminist, I believe the whole notion of "choice" to be problematic. One only can "choose" from a limited selection of choices made available at any one time. Choices and desires are very different things, and feminists know this. The choice between an abortion and raising a child on one's own in poverty and shame is not a happy one. Most young women who "choose" abortion might choose differently if our society were willing to provide young mothers with sufficient emotional and financial support so that they were not forced to choose between their babies and their futures. (And many of these young women might choose differently if the father of the child were willing to "step up" and be present for his new family emotionally, financially, and physically.) The choice between cosmetic surgery and being accepted as beautiful is not a happy one either -- what most women really desire is to be loved and affirmed and wanted as they are. Radical diets, surgery, and hyper-sexualization are strategies of desperation rather than choices rooted in genuine desire.

I still may not have answered Rhesa's question. But let me finish this extremely long entry (you can't possibly still be reading, can you?) with this:

I want the women in my life, young and old, to be able to enjoy the same freedoms that their lovers and husbands and brothers do. I want them to be able to walk into parking lots at night without fear of rape. I want them to be able to use their voices in the pulpit, in the professoriate, and someday, lord willing, in the presidency, without being told that they have "stepped out of their place." I want a society where women's bodies are neither feared and shrouded (ala the Taliban) nor reduced to vulgarly displayed commodities to be ogled, fondled, judged and consumed (ala today). I want a society where certain innate differences between men and women are understood and honored, where flexibility in gender roles does not diminish what ought to be an enduring appreciation for women's individual and collective capacity to give life and to nurture. I want a society where young women can laugh and jump and run around and have dreams, where they are valued for their minds more than for their bodies. I want a society where mothers feel that the society around them values their work as much as it values that of the police officer or the insurance agent or the soldier. I want a society where older women, who so often are left alone, are heard and valued and respected and cared for until natural death.

To be a feminist means that I must be committed, in ways large and small, to working to make this into reality. It means working in solidarity with other men and women. But above all, for me as a feminist, I must be willing all to identify those aspects of myself where my language does not match my life, and I must hold myself -- and others -- accountable to change.

Comments

[Anne]

I'm so impressed. Any quibble I have is so minor it's lost in my overall admiration of the way you've explored this issue.

[Elizabeth]

Amen, amen, Hugo. Well said. I am pro-choice, and I still agree with your disappointment that NOW and the Feminist Majority mainly focus on abortion rights. There is so much more to being a woman (as you have covered here) than her right to have an abortion. I think abortion rights are important, but there are MANY more issues to be focused on as far as women's rights are concerned. Body image and our culture's beauty obsession have always fascinated me, and are the main reasons I am a feminist.

Thanks for your great posts, Hugo!

[Jonathan Dresner]

Nice try, Hugo: good ideas, and nicely written. But I'm gonna quibble, anyway:

The "silence is deafening" argument on sex-selection abortion in India, China, inter alia, is a red herring and unfair. The organizations you cited are American organizations, with little or no involvement in international affairs, foreign policy, etc. The only real concern I've ever seen expressed over sex-selection abortion is from internationally-minded feminists (and the odd demographer), and regional experts employing feminist analysis who connect the practice to enduring pre-modern patriarchal traditions which contributed to lower female survival rates (either deliberate infanticide or neglect leading to higher childhood mortality rates), including dowry, patrilineal inheritance, and the general devaluation of female labor and lives. There were differential survival rates for women well before medical abortion (and ultrasound, by the way, which is actually the crucial technology in sex-selection abortion), though the advance in technology has intensified the issue, as it has so many others.

If abortion were made entirely illegal (and by the way, sex-selection abortion is, I'm pretty sure, technically illegal in at least one of those countries), those highly patriarchal societies would develop underground medical systems, or just intensify the existing violence against adult women who bear female children.

[Hugo]

You're correct that it is illegal in India.

Though female infanticide predates modern abortion in these countries, the fact remains that it has become a preferred and popular method of terminating the lives of healthy baby girls. In some instances, women themselves are clearly choosing to have their own daughters killed. The problem for Western feminists lies in the fact that ideologically, for abortion to be legal, the fetus can't be a person. Thus sex-selective abortion cannot logically be of great concern -- because to bemoan its existence is to veer close to assigning personhood to the fetus (which is to hand pro-lifers the trump card we are asking for).

It is easier to terminate a fetus in a womb than to smother a newborn, I assume. Though female infanticide has -- tragically -- existed for a very long time, abortion (and yes, ultrasound tecnology) have made it far easier to be carried out far earlier in life. And the very right that some women in this country want so badly is -- undeniably -- taking predominantly female lives in India and China.

Making abortion illegal is never a solution in and of itself. Indeed, like Feminists for Life, I believe a transformation of society to be more woman and child friendly is the key first step to ending abortion. And that involves empowering women sexually and culturally.

[Jonathan Dresner]

I disagree that problematizing sex-selection abortion requires problematizing abortion: it requires problematizing patriarchal values and decision-making (even by women). I think we're pretty much in agreement with that.

The "you can't be concerned about abortion without being against abortion, at least implicitly" is a logical flaw, the exact name of which I can't come up with at the moment, and a rhetorical trick rather than a substantive point, which serves to reinforce rather than bridge the gap between feminists of differing opinions on abortion but similar opinions on women's health and limited choices.

[Hugo]

Indeed, it is a rhetorical trick. But women who support abortion support it because it they believe in the inviolability of women's choices. They don't think that any abortion, chosen by a woman, could be a "bad choice". Indeed, pro-choice rhetoric never admits that there are BAD choices made by women -- because the highest good is the preservation of choice.

Thus if a woman CHOOSES to abort her daughter because of patriarchy, how exactly is that CHOICE less virtuous than CHOOSING to abort her unborn child because she doesn't want the responsibility of motherhood yet? I don't think pro-choice rhetoric is willing to start to attach moral value to individual choices -- though they ought to.

[Anne]

Well, Jonathan has infallibly picked on the one thing in the post I would have quibbled with.

The problem comes with pretending these women have a fully informed 'choice' when they live in a society where a male child is the only choice of, so to speak, choice.

Abortion isn't the problem. Cultural bias against females is the problem. These women abort female fetuses (or drop their female children on a hillside to die after birth) because they see being female as undesirable.

If you outlaw abortion, you'll just increase the number of newborn baby girls crying their lives out alone and unloved for the meagre hours that they survive. I am troubled that you consider this a preferable alternative to an abortion.

[Anne]

I should have added that by wanting to outlaw abortion, it feels to me once again that you're fixated on the symptom and ignoring the disease.

[Jonathan Dresner]

Hugo: The reason the pro-choice rhetorical position is so rigid is that the anti-choice movement (which I would distinguish from a genuinely pro-life position) takes every opportunity to turn reservations about abortion into legal restrictions on abortion, rather than programs or policies or values that would reduce the number of abortions by non-coercive means. I think there's plenty of responsibility (blame, if you like) to go around on this one.

Your question about whether one abortion can be considered "better" than another is, of course, only really meaningful if you allow that abortion might indeed be justified by circumstances, and I have not yet seen you make that allowance anywhere.

[Hugo]

I certainly won't defend the tactics used by my brethren in most of the pro-life movement. Indeed, the best way to reduce abortion is to make abortion unthinkable rather than illegal by changing behavior and culture in ways that empower women both to refuse unwanted sex and to raise those children conceived as a result of wanted sex. This is where the pro-life left breaks from the pro-life right.

But when it comes to legal restrictions on abortion, I support a "both/and" policy. I want to reduce abortion from both ends by restricting access (yes indeed), but also -- and perhaps more crucially -- by providing resources to women to enable them to choose life for their babies. I won't accept a forced "either/or".

[Xrlq]

Jonathan: "anti-choice?" Give me a break. People who oppose abortion are opposed to it because it's abortion; they're not philosophically opposed to choice, per se. Either call both side by their preferred names (pro-choice vs. pro-life), or label both according to some neutral criteria, such as pro-abortion vs. anti-abortion, or abortions rights advocate vs. abortion rights opponent. That's the issue - abortion. Not a philosophical discussion over whether or not choice is generally a good or bad thing.

"Anti-choice," indeed. Might as well accuse the pro-abortionists of being "anti-life" or "pro-death."

[Hugo]

Gosh, XRLQ, we agree again. Stop the presses.

[Avedon]

I never thought we'd been silent on the way abortion is used in China. But there's more to it than that. China is a country in which the state has the right to control people's reproduction - some countries prohibit abortion, but China makes it mandatory after two children. It's the same issue: The state has no right to compel reproductive choices.

[Xrlq]

No, Avedon, it's not the same issue at all, nor even close. At best, it implicates ONE of the two principles at issue here. As the asymmetrical terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" imply, the abortion debate in the free world centers around two issues: life and choice. Nearly everyone agrees that both life and choice are generally good things; the question is what to do when they conflict. In this instance, some err on the side of choice; they are "pro-choice." Others prefer to err on the side of life; they are called "pro-life."

In fact, forced abortions in China are an excellent example of how ridiculous (if not libelous) the phrase "anti-choice" is. If anyone involved in the abortion debate were truly "anti-choice," they would not have any objection to forced abortions. Just so you know, they do.

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