Let's Talk about White Feminism

Not all choices are feminist choices. But we all make choices from our unique cultural standpoint. Wearing makeup and shaving my legs is not a feminist choice but I do it because I am not prepared to go against societal expectations. We all have to battle against our social conditioning and we don't always win. And the stakes for Muslim women who choose not to cover (in some communities) are much higher than the stakes are for me so how can I judge their choices, even whilst acknowledging they aren't ideal and supporting ways to dismantle the expectation.

We all make compromises but we are happier to judge the compromises women from 'outsider' communities make than look internally at our own choices.

Or to run with the sex work analogy I believe prostitution is VAWG and detrimental to the status of women in society. There are very few women who freely choose prostitution, the vast majority do so because of all of the shitty options available to them It seems the least shitty. Lib fems would say it's their choice and argue that rad fems take away agency from prostituted women by saying that they don't make free choices. What rad fems actually say is a choice between three different types of shit is a false choice so they want to work to increase the number of choices available to them and reduce demand from the men who think they have the right to pay to abuse someone who has limited other options.

nauticant, thanks. We were not living in the uk at the time (military serving overseas) and so didn’t really see any of the uk tabloid coverage. It certainly wasn’t a reason discussed in military circles, but I can see that media coverage might have chosen that angle. (Equally - there is of course always bias in military propaganda machines - not my intention to suggest that they had any more veracity than the red tops)

Ok. So all choices made by women are feminist choices. That works for the hijab, but what about working in the sex trade? If it was never an acceptable choice, it would be easier to ensure no woman is exploited in porn, prostitution, stripping etc.
I'm a novice at feminism, I'm afraid.

pickle because we shouldn’t be fighting for the right to dress in less modest way but for the right to dress the way we want, if possible wo any judgment either way (too modest is being uptight/very religious and not modest at all being a s*t)

What about when some women's right to self expression creates an environment that allows others to be abused? Some women think sex work is a legitimate career choice, meaning that it's harder to legislate to protect the majority who are exploited. Women who freely choose 'modest' dress, make it easier to pressure those who would like to dress differently.

How does that work? Please don't think I'm being goady. I'm learning!

MagnificentDelurker
First of all thank for that post. Unlike some posters, I found it very clear and insightful.

It’s amazing how the fights women fought at home (so here in the U.K. or the us or France etc etc) has created a template for all other countries to follow. And yes that means considering women vote and education as the norm rather than something to fight for.
The fact that feminists (white) have had that sort of power in their country has allowed massive changes in other places in the worl where I wouod have been harder to implement.

But I do hear you on he (very big) risks for (white) feminists to then think that their way of looking at the world is THE right one. And therefore to impose certain ways such as not having to cover yourself because it’s just the expression of the (over)power of men on women.
I’ve actually had a few discussions on that subjects with other women and I’ve always struggled to explain WHY for eg Muslims women are not ‘enslaved’ by the simple fact they are wearing the hijab. Probably because, as a white woman, I don’t know enough to be able to explain it!

So THANK YOU.
Thank you for reminding us that being a feminist doesn’t allow us to dictate to other women how to live their life. That some customs that we, in our culture, we can sometimes see as ‘bad’ and ‘degrading’ (a word I have hear often about the hijab for example), do have the same meaning to you/others.
Thank you for reminding us that we can suffer from the same privilege blindness that men can suffer from too.
And that we need to LISTEN and not judge. Listen and accept that this is someone else experience, even if it grates (to hear some of our ideas/behaviours are actually wrong/racist).

nauticant, I agree it was a pretext. And I don’t think it’s accurate to say ‘white feminism’ was advocating for it. Most feminists I know wouldn’t be into invasions, broadly speaking.

I didn’t find it coherent. What do you want me to say? I can’t prove I wasn’t being disingenuous.

But on one of the rare occasions we actually get a poster who talks about being from a significantly different background, everyone piles in to tear her apart over totally imagined insults. Do you honestly not see how terrible that looks?

Could you be confusing me with other posters? I wasn’t tearing her to pieces over an imagined insult. I didn’t feel insulted, I was questioning a particular thing she’d said; you interpret that as a fixation, fine.

If you can, for a moment, accept I was in good faith, would you have me disagree differently on account of the OP’s different background? (Difference being difficult to qualify and quantify.)

I wasn’t implying you’re a man or trans I just realised I’d made an assumption based on nothing.

During the run up to the invasion of Afghanistan there was considerable coverage of how awful the regime was to women and how great things could be once the regime was overthrown. For example many stories about the attitude of the Taliban to the education of girls.

This was just one pretext among several that was used to sell the invasion to a particular constituency, ie the liberal left. But it was definitely put forward in the media and would have been hard to miss at the time.

I could imagine women in Afghanistan being pretty pissed off at hearing this "reason" and then watching the allied forces bomb their country to shit and leave utter chaos and suffering behind.

I think some of the responses on this thread are an example of why some women of colour feel ignored and alienated by 'white feminism'. A white man on twitter crying 'white feminism' is a totally different thing to a woman of colour explaining how she feels marginalised.

@hipsterfun you're being highly disingenuous with this "I just agreed with what she said about her own post!" nonsense. Unless you truly have no experience of how social interaction works, you know fine well that you were massively rude and dismissive and it was uncalled for.

These boards are dominated by the perspective of relatively affluent, often older, women raised in majority white communities in the UK. Their perspectives are valid. I belong to the same group (well, late 30s, so depends how one defines "older"). But on one of the rare occasions we actually get a poster who talks about being from a significantly different background, everyone piles in to tear her apart over totally imagined insults. Do you honestly not see how terrible that looks?

And you need to stop fixating on the invasion thing. Another poster has linked you to information about this and you've ignored it and continue to wilfully miss the point. What are your other criticisms of the OP, exactly? You keep coming back to this one thing - that you clearly have not understood - as a justification for your rudeness.

I think you're implying that I'm a man or possibly trans in your last post, though I'm not sure what I've done to make you think this?

To be fair, it's usually the Daily Mail saying that we are invading to free the poor oppressed hijab wearers. The rest of us know it's all about oil.

I like your job, kittens. I may join you!

I do think western women can have a habit of telling other women how to live. Presumably it's better we empower each other to make our own decisions. I'm also afraid that we can encourage rebellion which brings with it severe punishments in s9me countries. The young people dancing to 'Happy' who ended up imprisoned, for example.

I'm happy to lend support to other women, I can't set their agenda. Only the women affected know if they want to be allowed to drive more than they want to tackle their dress code.

I've been on twitter today for the first time in ages and I see how 'white feminism' is used there, often by white men, but I don't feel particularly inclined to react against the term. Yes, I'm white and feminist and middle class and I have a fuck ton of privilege and a million blind spots. But I'm a woman and I'm queer so that's where I focus my efforts. I can't speak for women of colour because it's not my experience. I can listen and I can try not to get in the way. But I can't authentically be anything other than a white feminist. If my blind spots are annoying to women of colour I'm pleased that they feel able to tell me, because i need to know where I'm missing something important. If I'm annoying white men I'm just doing my job.

but I don’t think it’s accurate to say anybody, never mind white feminists, advocated an invasion ‘to free the women’.

There is no way anyone said that unless they had an agenda about feminism...

Or he is entitled to his feelings. Or they/their.

Speaking only for myself, firstly I agreed with the OP that her OP lacked coherence.

Yes there are times that what is called as white feminism can transgress. But those are not the times when white women are fighting for rights that might only affect a subset of women they belong to in short term. They transgress when they advocate to invade my birth country to free the women.

Particularly the last bit about white feminism/white women (and it’s not clear here whether the OP meant one or other, or was conflating them) transgressing when advocating to invade a country to free the women. I’d agree that the freedom of women may have been talked about in the lead up to the invasion of Afghanistan, for example, and used as some sort of secondary (and spurious) justification, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say anybody, never mind white feminists, advocated an invasion ‘to free the women’.

Secondly, while it’s not my business to defend the OP, I said telling her to FO was uncalled for.

Thirdly, I don’t think I’ve transgressed too badly on this thread, and not enough to warrant another poster saying they’d like to hear less from me. But she is, of course, entitled to her feelings.

Interestingly, it's fine to say that majority people can't speak for minority people, but not that minority people can't speak for majorities. So a black TIM can speak on all things LGBT, but a white middle class woman can't possibly speak for anyone else, because privilege.

Simplistic and rough, I know, but that's what it looks like sometimes.

????

Yesterday, a black transwoman was called in to be the Labour Party's new Equalities advisor. A person, born a man, who called all white people racist. And who also produced an article, again yesterday, telling women how they are doing feminism all wrong.

Women are attacked at all angles, by all sorts of people with agendas.

I think "White Feminism" as a phrase also has a specific US centric context (or at least it did when it was coined) that isn't reflected at all in how it is used by the SJWs. It refers to specific events such as some white American suffragettes refusing to support the 15th amendment giving black men the vote because they were instead pushing a different amendment giving universal suffrage. Or the questionable eugenics beliefs of Sanger. Or the marginalisation of Black womens concerns during the second wave that led to the womanist movement (a concept that has been utterly overshadowed by intersectionality but is IMO incredibly useful moving away from the concepts of axis of oppression and instead viewing feminism as being intrinsically linked to a woman's wider cultural experiences and vice versa)

The context in Britain was and is different. There wasn't the same history of domestic slavery or the same stratified social divides that grew out of that. The history of racism in the U.K. is a history of colonialism and it has a different, though still harmful, narrative that requires different analysis.

As usual though these issues are hugely complex and can't be reduced to woke sound bites. Undoubtedly white feminists were and are racist both consciously and unconsciously but it doesn't mean that all they did should be discounted. Not every person is 100% good or bad. Sanger thought that poor people reducing the number of children they had would ultimately improve the fitness of the human race. She also thought that the best way to do this was to give women control of their bodies and their fertility and she devoted her life to this.

We are all a product of our time and our culture. We can't escape it, the way we have been brought up is the way we will always default to seeing the world. All we can do is try to do our best to leave the world around us a little bit better, or at least not worse, than it was when we got here.

@TellsEveryoneRealFacts - "What if white feminists start identifying as feminists of colour?"

????

Phew.

But I have to say, all this reasonable apology stuff is probably why the MRAs and TRAs are making more headway than women. It's much easier to fit 'You Are Wrong End Of' statements on a t-shirt.

What if white feminists start identifying as feminists of colour?