Academic attainment and feminism?

[suwoo]

I have wanted to start this thread all day but have been scared that it is stupid or I will be flamed. I want to ask if people feel there is a correlation between academic attainment and feminist principles. Is that a valid question?
I had no idea that I was a feminist. I knew I had these thoughts and principles but didn't know what they were or the significance of them until we did feminist literary theory this semester- it was like an epiphany and my whole world made sense

Had I not gone to uni at the grand old age of 35, maybe I would never had these revelations.

What do you think? Those of you that identify as a feminist, what level of education do you have?

Ok: so were you responding to my post? Yes.

Were you criticizing how I expressed myself? Yes.

So how is this not about me?

I have already gone through that sentence several times. We don't have to agree, but I have tried very hard to explain what I meant. I have also said several times that I acknowledged I'm expressing myself badly. You seem to think that it's ok to carry on saying 'ooh, you idiot, you're expressing yourself really badly, ha ha'. Well, no, it's not. It has nothing to do with your discovery at university that you were the smart one.

I think you can't separate out human thought, and narrative structure. You may disagree. It's why I think teaching lit. crit. skills is important.

I did not say any of that rubbish!

I have already said, when dittany explained about some people thinking that they can pretend rape is somehow 'open to interpretation' , that I think this is wrong. Experiences are not narratives, nor are empotions. I've said this already.

I think you have read something I said and not actually thought about it - you saw it looked a bit like a theory yyou disagree with (rightly), so you assumed that was what I was saying. I wasn't aware of that theory, so can only apologize for not making it clearer from the offsett that I wasn't talking about it. But now we've established that - wtice - could you see your way to stopping bashing me ab out it?

It is personal when you attack the way I expres myself and not what I said. Especially when you then misrepresent what I was trying to say and don't acknowledge me telling you repeatedly that I'm aware I'm not saying it very well.

I really don't give a fuck about whether you think that would be acceptable in academia. If it is, that sounds to me like one more thing wrong with academia.

It is personal to attack the way I am expressing myself. It's usually considered rude and petty. You don't make it non-personal by saying so repeatedly while still taking the piss. You did not understand something. I did not express something well. You decided the answer was this.

I will probably get slated for this, but you mentioned the word 'bully' and I think it fits you to a T. You made a nasty twisted argument about how I was saying 'nothing' and you were better because you had the backing from a nice authoritative academic bloke. Your first response to my post was just to take the piss.

I don't know you at all but I do not understand what you expected to get out of all of that other than to make someone you don't know feel like crap.

Well, I think this discussion pretty much exemplifies what is wrong with radical feminism and why it isn't the way forward. 'I will be sisterly if you agree with me in every tiddy respect'.

On Dworkin and her Intercourse; of course I've read it, and the tiresome pornography rant too (Gail Dinen is far better). Heterosexual relations, Dworkin writes, are at base a structure of domination, and women who 'want it' with men or in such relationships are psychologically unwell. Pathetic ranting rubbish, frankly, and I'm astonished that intelligent women can fall for its Baptist tones. I use this simile advisedly, as some MN readers might not know about LaDworkin and La Mackinnon's alliance with the Christian Right in an effort to ban pornography. We all know how egalitarian they are; we all know how fragrant Saudi society is, where porn is banned and women are not allowed to drive a car. GIVE ME A BREAK.

I tried - I think a lot of us did - to fall in with the mainstream radfem thinking in the early 1980s and the view that any proper feminist would reject all male contact* and that porn was the theory rape was the practice and that we should all really be living in a post-Greenham separatist paradise. And sorry, like Sieglinde, I cannot buy into that in its entirety any more not least because a lot of the women I knew were so damn terrified of the world outside their doors (because that world was full of rapists and bomb-builders) that the terror characterised their lives. And also because I find myself, these days, living with a man (who has just hoovered the house and has taken the kids to their swimming lesson). Of course I'm a feminist. But I am not, in the rather narrow framework being defined on this thread, a Good Enough Feminist.

*(this was slightly difficult in my case as I had a boyfriend but I used to refer to him vaguely as 'this bloke in my house').

Actually the point I was making was that (a) quite a lot of us have been around the block a few times with all this (b) it was not my terror of the world, it was one espoused as part of a general viewpoint which ultimately many of us couldn't be part of.

No, it's just saying that one kind of feminism is not the only kind. If it's not radical feminism it doesn't mean its anti-woman or anti-feminist or the mouthpiece of patriarchy.

Well, that was my experience of it like I say, the world was full of rapists and bomb-makers and men who might want to have penetrative sex with you.

It was a pretty mainstream misinterpretation, I can assure you. Which is my point, really.

And, to cite the Dworkin linked to by Dittany above:

'Intercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is pervasive and incontrovertible. The context in which the act takes place, whatever the meaning of the act in and of itself, is one in which men have social, economic, political, and physical power over women. Some men do not have all those kinds of power over all women; but all men have some kinds of power over all women; and most men have controlling power over what they call their women--the women they fuck. The power is predetermined by gender, by being male.

Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over women. Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the society when pushed to admit itrecognizes as dominance. '

'Despite all efforts to socialize women to want intercourse-- e.g., women's magazines to pornography to Dynasty; incredible rewards and punishments to get women to conform and put out...'

It's quite an easy 'misreading' to make, frankly.