Dealing With Cretins

Feminism, while not easy in theory, in way easier in theory than in practice. In practice, you have to deal with cretins on a pretty much constant basis. These leads to dilemmas, like:

“How to I tell Uncle Willy to bugger off about my not changing my name?”

“How can I  deal with the guys who tell sexist  jokes?”

All of these dilemmas – there are tons more – are dilemmas because of some unspoken assumptions. One is, “I should educate them.” Another is, “I should be polite while doing it.”

Here’s a different way to deal with the  cretins. First of all, take a tip from a French saying and save your saliva when it comes to incorrigible cretins. When it comes to ones who may not be incorrigible, forget politeness. It’s Quiz Time:

“So, so-and-so, how many feminists can you name?”

“Hmm, interesting. Ever actually read, say, Gloria Steinem?”

The answers to these questions are always a) “Uhh…” b) “No” or c) ["smart"ass remark].

Your counter-response: a contemptuous pursing of the lips and something along the lines of “So, you actually have no idea what you’re talking about” or “figures.”

And there you go. Uncle Willy and dumbass acquaintances / co-workers will at least keep their mouths shut around you from now on.  And if every person takes this tack, eventually, they’ll have no-one to make their dumb remarks to.

Feminists Don’t Have to Be Pro-Choice

If there’s one thing that the doomed selection of Sarah Palin has proved, it’s that feminism has become abortionism – both to most anti-feminists and to many feminists as well.

What was the most common criticism of Palin, after the chuckling over her multiple, shall we say, faux pas? Something along these lines: She’s not a feminist because “she wants to take away a woman’s right to choose while banning sex education in schools, so that essentially the only choice left for a girl is to become an uneducated teenage mother” (Bi-College News).

Come on now. Susan B. Anthony couldn’t get a legal abortion and certainly never had sex-ed, yet somehow she managed to do OK-ish.

The real problem is deeper than this one hyperbole, however; over and over, in the past weeks, the response to the idea that Palin is a feminist has been “she can’t be because she’s against a woman’s right to choose!”

Let’s be clear: Palin is hardly a feminist role model; only smart women get to be feminist role models. But this insistence that one be pro-choice to be feminist stems from a fundamental ignorance of basic ethical philosophy.

Pro-lifers are all, whether they know it or not, members of the deontological school of ethical thought, that is, they don’t take the consequences of their decisions into account. This is not an insult; all it means is that, if a woman’s life is hard hit financially or emotionally by having a baby, a pro-lifer may (or may not) feel badly about that, but the consequences to the woman don’t alter their decision. The idea here is that you should do what’s right come hell or high water. In most contexts, this is undisputably noble: Antigone insisting that she bury her brother even though she knows she will be sentenced to death for it, for example.

Pro-choicers, on the other hand, are utilitarians. Utilitarians think that you can’t possibly judge whether a deed is good or not without looking at all of its ramifications. Pro-choicers judge the ramifications of legalized abortion to be better than the ramifications of abortion being illegal.

For too long, people who argue about abortion have treated it like it’s a special case, a debate unto itself. It’s not. It’s one more example of a fundamental (and pretty tangled, the more you look into it) philosophical problem.

NF is solidly pro-choice. But NF also recognizes that a problem in philosophy that has attracted minds like Kant, Bentham, and R.M. Hare is not one with a definitive answer. Nobody, therefore, should treat those who disagree with them on this with hatred, as long as the disagreement is an intellectual one (raving loonies don’t count). And no feminist is required to be a utilitarian; therefore, no feminist is required to be pro-choice.

“The Yellow Wall-paper” is NOT about post-partum depression!

The Post-Partum Depression Theory of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is tiresome and wrong-headed. The popularity of this stupid theory showcases how deeply reluctant people are to engage a feminist story on its own (pretty unsubtle) terms.

The protagonist has, it is true, recently given birth. But she struggles with no feelings of conflict regarding that fact, or the baby. Frankly, she doesn’t seem to give much of a damn about the baby one way or another. She mentions that it’s cute and she would spend more time with it except that she gets “nervous.” Her nervousness, however, is linked in the story, NOT to her child, but directly and repeatedly to a conflict over writing - she wants to write, her husband doesn’t want her to. She is not conflicted about being a mother; she is largely uninterested, and also un-allowed — as long as her interest in writing continues, she is cut off by her husband from the privileges of immersion in the domestic sphere and is instead “treated” by a forced reversion to childhood and dependence (symbolized by the nursery), the idea being that if she is “cured” by becoming more child-like, then she will be fit for, and allowed to join, the domestic sphere as a wife and mother.

In every way, this is a feminist short story. The post-partum depression theory has been seized on, consciously or not, by people who just can’t wrap their heads around the twin ideas that: 1-motherhood is not necessarily a profoundly emotional experience, and is not even necessarily part of the adult experience, and 2-chicks do things for reasons OTHER than their wacky biology.

Our editor teaches college and has tried to be tolerant of this viewpoint. No longer – it is not an innocent viewpoint, but one that is mendacious, sexist, and above all shockingly inattentive to the actual story.