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.

“Feminism Depends On Hairy Choices”

An excellent article from Rachel Funari of The Sydney Morning Herald:

Feminists should fight the hairy-legged lesbian stereotype because it alienates the young ones, says Monica Dux, the co-author of The Great Feminist Denial. I say the problem with Australian feminism is not hairy lesbians, but the movement’s penchant for replacing them with suburban mums.

If it seems feminism is a bit old hat – or that it’s losing more of its battles – perhaps it is not because the average girl-child is scared of hairy legs, whether belonging to a lesbian or not.

Perhaps it is because the type of girl-child inclined to be feminist finds it difficult to get excited about work/life balance, or equitable housekeeping, or any movement that would call her a girl-child.

I, for one, will scream if I have to sit through another panel discussion about how this country devalues mothers and motherhood. This country thinks motherhood is the most important thing in the world. It’s so important, we ensure women do it despite discrimination, inequality, financial dependency and abuse.

What is devalued is women who do other things than just raise the next generation of consumers. Where despairing feminists such as Dux go wrong is to assume the average young woman would be a feminist if feminists looked just like her. But the average woman, young or old, has never identified with feminism and isn’t likely to any time soon.

Feminism is a movement of revolutionary change. It demands women take full responsibility for their lives, financially and emotionally. It requires the personal to be political, which means the good of the community, the world, our fellow women and each other’s children may demand that we give up individual desires that are in conflict with this larger good.

Feminism is not easy. Perhaps that is why many women, young and old, find it difficult to rally around it. But making it easier by limiting women’s choices – mainly whether to work or not while raising a child – dangerously dilutes its power.

What is the point of attracting young women to feminism if feminists become simply a bunch of waxen, anorexic, botoxed mannequins, with badly-behaved children, complaining their husbands don’t do enough housework?

Arguing the Western media undermined feminism by narrowing its field to a misrepresentation of the radical feminist is hardly new, and it seems awfully like accepting the imaginings of a misogynist mainstream than a fight against them.

Ditching the hairy-legged lesbian not only capitulates to a culture that requires the traditional family unit to uphold the inequalities of contemporary capitalism, but it also ditches a core message of feminism, that a woman’s value should not be in her beauty, proscribed femininity or heterosexual availability.

More at the Morning Herald‘s site.

“There are some feminists who are really obnoxious.” No, there aren’t.

Many people aren’t feminists. Many more are, but are too craven to admit it. “Sure, I believe in equal pay and [insert feminist value here], but I’m not a feminist.” Then there are the feminists who do admit it but are happy to tell you that they aren’t one of those obnoxious feminists, you know, the really arrogant kind who just think they’re righter than right itself and never listen.

This last group, too, is craven.

Would they ever say, “Sure, I believe in civil rights, but between you and me I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of blacks are really uppity.” Would they ever say, “Some of my best friends are Jews, but you know it is true that….” No, of course not (one fervently hopes, anyway).

You know what? There are a lot of people out there who are obnoxious assholes, just as there are a lot of people who are uppity and a lot of people who are stingy. The minute you assign that trait to one group, you’ve made a bad move.

Every feminist who eagerly cheeps that she isn’t obnoxious like those other feminists should shut up and stop verbally marrying obnoxiousness and feminism, as if feminism were obnoxiousness’s only lover.

Obnoxiousness is a whore and deserves castigation; feminism is something good and decent, and doesn’t. Period.