Are Feminists Too Nice to Anti-Feminist Women?

[CKDexterHaven]

This post has been inspired by reading some of the non-FWR threads on Mumsnet and by the responses of women to even the mildest hint of feminism on them.

Sometimes, even in feminist spaces, it feels that if you criticise some women and their actions you will be accused of victim-blaming, lacking understanding or divisiveness. But why do we have to be so non-judgemental of women whose choices negatively impact the lives of other women?

I'm not talking here about women who truly have no options but about those women who use the limited options and powers women have in patriarchal society to always prioritise pleasing men over bettering the lives of women. I know all the arguments about women being the victims of socialisation and adopting survival strategies for living under patriarchy but any fight for human rights comes at a personal cost and, I have to say, sometimes I see women who put their own popularity with the power-wielders above fellow women as cowardly and dishonourable.

If we see men as an occupying power and women as an enslaved population, there are some women who compete with other women to become the master's favourite slave and other women who are working to end the slavery. The group of collaborators have decided to make the occupation work for them and will betray, attack and subjugate the resistance group in order to please the masters at any opportunity. If feminists really were a resistance group maybe we would see that in order to free all women we would have to cut some loose along the way.

The type of comments I am tired of seeing are -

1 - Feminists are as bad as men when it comes to telling other women what to do.
Well, feminism is a political ideology and political ideologies tend to have an opinion on how people live their lives. So, yeah, we have an opinion.

2 - Feminists judge me for my choices and are really shaming and mean.
Well, sometimes we are just analysing your choices and why you made them, but if you do make choices that sell out other women then why shouldn't we judge you?

3 - Men are 100% responsible for the patriarchy. Blaming women is victim-blaming and focusing attention away from the real villains.
Men are responsible for the patriarchy but women cheerleading for it are helping to prop it up. Either you want the patriarchy to end or you don't.

4 - In-fighting and criticising other women is divisive and unproductive and we have to work together to further the cause.
Well, constantly having to accommodate the views of women that are antithetical to your aims is also unproductive and unhelpful.

5 - I need feminists when I hit the glass ceiling at work or can't find reasonable childcare but how dare you bitches suggest my husband is a misogynist for watching porn! How dare you make me challenge things in my life!
Make the connections, dear.

Do you think feminism might move faster if we stopped trying to win over anti-feminist women and convince them feminism is necessary or do we need to swell our numbers?

He's also a past regular. Asks the same questions, makes the same comments, is as disparaging in the same ways every incarnation. Can be safely disregarded and ignored.

Back to the thread....

I think that often women carry on/support the patriarchy and that quite a few of them have the brains. They might feel the patriarchy suits them and I think sometimes it does, depending on the woman, appear to look fine...for them. Women aren't stupid and there will be some who feel the system benefits them, whether they recognise or describe it as a system or not. And I don't think we're an enslaved population but we're systematically discriminated against in the country, and we do better than 90% of women around the world (and that's depressing).

I think unfortunately we are currently in a climate where political analysis is disparaged as "judging". And being judgemental is just about the worst thing one can be especially if you are a woman.

To my mind, this is part of the backlash and a resulting culture of individualism, neo-liberalism, queer politics, postmodernism, the personal being personal and not political, third wave feminism, the pornification of society, etc. Plus a culture of rampant capitalism and consumerism.

If you cannot make class analysis because there is no such thing as class, but only "the individual", "agency" and "choice", then you cannot consciousness raise, you cannot organise, and you cannot rebel with the strength of numbers.

This is the modern face of patriarchy and it is very cunning and much more subtle and slippery than previous incarnations which used more obvious and concrete means of control.

As to how to be with non or anti feminist women - I'm not sure but I think we need to be detached from accusations of "judging". I've said before on here that I think we are in the 4th wave of feminism now, the one where there is only really radical feminism left. Classic liberal feminism has been eaten by third wave and neo-liberalism. We need our own backlash. I hope it will come when the current generation of young women reach child bearing age/and or the age when you become invisible due to not having the sexay any more and there will be a realisation that all this individualism is a con.

there's a spectrum isn't there?

a lot of the time, life is pretty hard for a lot of women of different backgrounds and experience, and they are struggling to keep their heads above the surface, so they make the decisions that make their lives easier in the short term and will often retrospectively justify that in a way that is non-feminist (men are crap at xxx, women are innately better at yyy etc). because they simply don't have the energy or wherewithal to make their own lives more difficult in the quest to make things better for other women. i totally understand that and i will admit that in many ways i do the same, though as a feminist i don't justify my decisions in the same way and will openly acknowledge that i have made a non-feminist choice. i have enormous admiration for feminists who do put themselves more frequently in positions of discomfort and danger and hardship for the benefit of womankind, i don't think i do that as much as i should.

then of course at the other end of the spectrum there are women who attack doctors who carry out abortions for example. i will criticise and campaign against this behaviour, but like others i can see how and why it comes about. and other examples like those women who have (limited) power but use it to put down women without the same opportunities

i generally try to focus my time, money and energy on the damage done by male violence (and the threat of it), though in many ways that can be linked to almost all aspects of inequality so hard to know where to start!

i agree with beachcomber's comments about the current generation of young women. with i think for women like me (white, educated and with educated and solvent parents, non-disabled, heterosexual, no children yet, mid-twenties) life is the easiest it has ever been. it's easy to say that we don't need feminism any more if you have that life experience, provided you still jump through the hoops society expects of you. my brothers who are a couple of years younger than me accept that there is inequality in broader society, but don't see it among their peers and have said that for their own generation they believe the problem has been "solved". i suspect there will be disillusionment among their female peers when children come along, or even if they don't but the women of childbearing age still encounter the assumption that they will go off and have children, and when the sexist benefits of appearing youthful tail away.

but of course they (we) still experience the assaults, which are brushed away as a part of life, or ignored because to pursue legally will put the kibosh on future plans. there is still an expectation of the provision of sex and wifework as part of a hetero relationship, though it may not be apparent at first.

and it feels like getting the benefits of the hard work of feminists past, then closing the door behind us on other women without the class, race, sexuality and education advantages. only to take up the feminist cause again when it has a direct impact on us

i sometimes get upset when feminists here and in other places comment on the behaviour of "young women/feminists" as i have done, and i want to say NAYWALT. but sadly i think a lot are

well that was long and rambling!

Not at all Petula, I was nodding throughout

"When a woman acts in a way that undermines feminism, she should be called out on it in the same way as a man."

i agree in principle, but i could never apply this as a blanket rule, even if that makes me by extension a crappy feminist. because sometimes the situation is woman trying to get through life as best she can with the limited resources she has at her disposal, and i'm not going to make her feel like shit because of the choices she has made within a limited range that probably aren't what she would have chosen in an ideal world either.

(i think we're basically agreeing here?)

"You only need to look at the % of board level women, or the pay gap, or the number of women who give up work to raise children compared to the number of men..."

the response to that was (paraphrasing) that those inequalities are due to women's choices (made in a vacuum natch) and/or that basically they were a bit shit!

One of the things you have to look at, when a woman says or does anti-feminist things, is: where does this woman get daily material and social support from? It is often the case that a woman's closest relationship is with a man, sometimes the day-to-day manageability of her life is directly predicated upon his support (perhaps he is the only earner for instance).

This man is likely to be explicitly and implicitly sexist.

It is far harder for her to openly disagree with him than with you, because if she disagrees with you she isn't going to find herself homeless and penniless.

I don't think we should force people into corners where they have to come out on one side or the other, because they will pick the side their bread is buttered. Let's be a bit more socratic about it; let's lead people to make their own realisations (at the same time as working towards the means of women's material self determination, so that there are more women free to disagree with whomever the hell they like)

I know that looks really patronising and a cascade of non-feminist women is now going to go, "how dare you suggest I don't know my own mind". Oh well. Whatever.

I have female cousins who grew up in Catholic Ireland and who are now in their late 20s/early 30s. I would class them as anti-feminist in the sense that they most definitely do judge women who do not conform to patriarchal ideals. One in particular is pregnant with her third child with a husband who basically just exists near her (and has sex with her clearly) but who takes no active role whatsoever in his family's life.

They are lovely women who are fantastic mothers and I love them dearly. I simply cannot judge them. They grew up in a world that devalued them entirely. For them to become feminists they would have to look at their own (beloved) dads and mums and reassess their entire lives. They would have to see the horrible sexism that meant their mums never had a day off for the entirety of their childhoods while their dads suited themselves. They'd have to look at their brothers' facebook pages and realise that the posts and links they have their indicate not just disrespect for women but open hatred with a side-order of rapist ideals. They would have to dismantle and disown everything they've ever believed in and trusted. I can understand why they don't do that, and why they rail against feminism.

I have had to leave that world, and much of my family, behind. It's bloody hard.

I want to pick up on the point that radical feminism is an ideology. Fine it is exactly the same as Conservative, Lib Dem, Labour, EDL, UKIP. People taunt and poke fun at ideologies so next time someone takes a potshot at the ideology accept it as that is what every other ideology faces. Sometimes I think certain aspects of radical feminism play the victim card far too quick where if it was aimed at EDL or UKIP no one would blink an eye.

But all those things you mention above are political parties. They also all have some degree of organised political power (whether they are in office or not). And they are not made up of oppressed minorities trying to escape oppression and its consequences. They are organizations which wish to be in government and make decisions for the running of a state and its citizens. They are nothing like radical feminism.

People poke fun at political parties as a form of political commentary. And they do so because political parties have power over the people and generally have ambitions to gain more power.

Feminism is a social justice movement. Why would a decent person want to taunt or poke fun at it?! Do people think rape is funny? Or that domestic violence is a subject for mockery? Or that people fighting for human rights should be taunted (sometimes by people who already have those rights)? Do people find inequality amusing?

Gee, those feminists have no sense of humour, right?

Good post, beachcomber.

In my experience and from what I've seen on online forums, no, feminists are not 'too nice' to anti-feminist women.

I actually think the OP has set up a false-dichotomy, in part by using the examples shown. Even within those examples the person stating:

Feminists judge me for my choices and are really shaming and mean

could be anti-feminist, or might be someone who is doesn't actively label themselves as feminist and has had an experience that would reinforce her choice. (I'd also question your choice of wording OP - it's interesting that you have the supposed 'anti-feminist' using rather childlike wording. Rather like, y'know, some misogynists might suggest all women express themselves.)

There must be a distinction between:

• Someone who actively labels themselves as anti-feminist (where or not they understand what that means)
• Someone who does not specifically label themselves as feminist
• Someone who labels themselves as feminist but proceeds to behave in a way that you think is not coherent with that label
• The perfect feminist (who doesn't exist)

I don't think feminist need to be nice to self-proclaimed anti-feminists. I do think it's in everyone's interests to be inclusive towards women who are nervous about the feminist label. I don't think it's particularly useful to call out other feminists on their behaviour unless you know for sure they are being hypocritical or the behaviour is clearly and unequivocally anti-feminist. Grey areas / areas of disagreement between schools of feminism are surely better seen as areas for debate rather than personal attack?

I'm not sure Buffy where I'm painting this picture of this trigger happy feminist?

I'm suggesting that the OP is using the label anti-feminist in a context where I don't think it's sufficiently nuanced to cover the arguments she describes. I'm also suggesting that the choice and use of language used to demonstrate the complaint of the female 'adversary' (who may or may not choose to label themselves anti-feminist) is somewhat patronising. (Bearing in mind this is the women's rights board and OP has canvassed opinion).

I don't think feminists are too nice to anti-feminists, nor should we be. I do think that there are pockets of women who are unsure about the feminist label for whatever reason, or don't think it's 'for them' and that it's worth trying to reach out to those women, especially as this appears to be common perspective.