I happen to find feminist theory extremely interesting. I also happen to find discussions of feminist theory in the rationalist community extremely frustrating, because a disproportionate number of rationalists seem to be under the impression that the feminist movement consists entirely of Arthur Chu, people trying to get techies fired, and whatever clickbaity Jezebel articles they saw on Facebook. So here is a book list to get interested people up to speed.
This list is intended to provide background on third wave feminists/social justice/intersectional feminism/sex-positive feminism. It does not teach you much about radical feminism, feminism that happened before the 1990s, or feminism in the academy (which is its own weird thing). However, it should teach you the strongest arguments behind the beliefs currently perpetuated in watered-down and popularized form by the feminists you are most likely to encounter online.
Excluded, by Julia Serano. The first part is a bunch of inside baseball about feminist and queer movements of dubious interest even to feminists and queers; skip it. (Do you care about whether the word bisexual is binarist? Neither do I.) The second part, however, is one of the best introductions to social justice I’ve read. Her models of marked and unmarked traits and holistic vs. homogenizing models of gender were enlightening to me as someone who has read feminist theory for years. Her cataloguing of different kinds of double binds is a helpful tool for analyzing a variety of situations.
If you like Excluded, you should also check out Whipping Girl, which is one of the foundational works of transfeminism.
Feminism Is For Everybody, by bell hooks. This is the shortest book on the list, and probably the best to read if you just want to find out what feminists actually believe; in my experience most feminists would endorse most of the policy proposals made by this book. (Hence why hooks is considered something of a demigod.) On the other hand, if you’re reading the other three, it’s probably skippable. But why would you? It’s like a hundred pages.
Black Feminist Thought, by Patricia Hill Collins. This is the best introduction I’ve read to a lot of basic aspects of third-wave feminist theory from one of the women who was involved in theorizing them. This book will teach you about intersectionality, which is the idea that you can’t pick out one oppression and analyze it on its own; black women have a qualitatively different experience of sexism and racism compared to black men or white women. It’ll also explain the epistemology behind concepts like “privilege”, “lived experience”, and “listen to women.” (I also like Collins’s concept of a controlling image; it’s a really helpful reframe of the concept of stereotypes, in my opinion.)
Yes Means Yes, edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti. A basic introduction to What Sex-Positive Feminists Actually Believe. The Yes Means Yes laws everyone keeps complaining about are named after this book.
Latoya Petersen’s The Not Rape Epidemic (available online here) is one of the most powerful essays I’ve read about compulsory sexuality. Thomas Millar’s Toward a Performance Model of Sex and Heather Corinna’s An Immodest Proposal present excellent positive visions of sex-positive sex. Of particular interest to my commenters is Julia Serano’s essay, which uses feminist theory to talk about the famous female desire for assholes.
Thing of Things 
I very much wish that Serano would extract from *Excluded* the theoretical model, and move it away from queer-specifics. It *really is* about the best model for this stuff that I’ve seen, but I fear it will get stuck in “trans special interest” space.
Furthermore, it would be nice to her her collaborate with someone more versed in economic justice. I think her model works really well among middle-class queers, where *perception* is dominant. However, she does not analyze the actual material conditions of life. It is one thing to be “marked”; it is another to be malnourished. I’d like to see the relations between those things discussed.
But in any case, yes yes yes. Read those books.
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Ooh, thank you! As someone with executive dysfunction things as a major barrier to self education I would really like to do, this is awesome!
(As someone who is trying to get better at honestly assessing stuff she doesn’t seem to be able to do even when she feels like she should be able to and stuff – do you have any recs for people who can’t read books, by any chance?)
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Unfortunately, I have a hard time processing information that isn’t text, so I’m not sure that I can help.
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Text is good! Text is preferred and stuff! It is long things that are not broken up into smaller content-labeled-or-better-described pieces that are difficult. (Hence why I can read blog posts so much :))
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There was a period on the Yes Means Yes blog where the comments threads were rich and interesting and the implications of the suggested changes well debated. That was, what, four years ago? Looking at their last post now (wow it’s really been a long time since I read that blog), what happened to them?
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Speaking AS one of those rationalists: Thank you for doing this! I will read some of those sources.
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This might seem odd, but as a person who has similar frustrations with a similar bunch of misunderstandings, the thing I most commonly link people to is a piece by a beautiful film critic: http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2013/11/14/we-need-to-change-how-we-talk-about-rape
It addresses many if the places feminist thought deviates from what one expects to be good sense.
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The comments look promising, but I don’t see an actual article there. Do other people see the article?
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I do not see an article.
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I can’t find the original article, but someone de-capsified it at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VdJHq2hgEvaqKr3-H539HEMHP3P50q_T42ZGdiP0kZY/
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They must have lost the article when they reformatted their site: http://web.archive.org/web/20150102114236/http://badassdigest.com/2013/11/14/we-need-to-change-how-we-talk-about-rape/
Also, if I may suggest, don’t read the de-caps-ified version unless the original creates actual discomfort. A lot of his affectations don’t work as well there.
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Speaking as someone with similar frustrations, I usually link people to this absurdly long piece by one of my favourite film critics: http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2013/11/14/we-need-to-change-how-we-talk-about-rape
He explains many things that feel counter-intuitive to people about feminist opinions.
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Man, I generally really like Hulk, but I found that article incredibly frustrating. On one hand, I think it does a great job of highlighting a bunch of cultural factors which can fuel sexual violence and make rape victims feel even worse than they already would, and makes a few really fairly sound suggestions-for-action based on those premises (treat rape victims kindly, don’t say things which strongly suggest that somebody deserved to be raped, make people more comfortable talking about sexual assault.)
At the same time, his essay is filled with some false assumptions about who gets affected by rape (as our host has pointed out time and time again, men actually do get raped pretty frequently, and most of those rapes are committed by women) and makes the really horrifying suggestion that we should basically abandon the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for rape trials, which would likely lead juries on rape trials to just convict on the basis of whether or not the defendant fits their stereotypes of who bad people are (see: the Scottsboro boys, more recently the Duke rape hoax– although a lot more people who are black or poor would be screwed by this than people who are rich or white). In light of this, I really hate his injunction against people focusing on logic and reasonability in discussions of rape– we need these things precisely so we can understand the scope of the problem and think through the actual implications and consequences of measures that we take to solve it, which he totally fails to do.
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I wasn’t able to find the passage you’re referring to here (it’s a very long article!).. Can you give me a search term, or some other guide, so I can find the specific passage about abandoning “reasonable doubt”? Thanks.
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Quote (from the de-capsified version posted below):
“There are very practical systemic things we can do. We have to recognize the fact that even though a he said / she said dynamic of sexual assault may seem ‘unfair’ to you, we absolutely have to take rape testimony seriously because so often there is no other mode of evidence or recourse. To dismiss it, would often serve to dismiss the legitimacy of rape itself. ”
Basically, he’s saying here that an accusation of rape should constitute evidence sufficient to convict somebody (which is why he brings up the absence of other evidence). The result would, de facto if not de jure, be an abandonment of the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, since most people agree that doubting an uncorroborated accusation is reasonable.
(I think that we could do some useful cultural work around rape testimony by working to remind people that a “not guilty” verdict usually just means that the epistemic status of the defendant’s guilt is unclear, not that they’ve been officially proved innocent, or that the person who accused them is definitely lying. Making some basic information about law part of public education curricula would probably help a lot with this. A lot of people seem to think that the US legal system works like the one in the Ace Attorney universe.)
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er, the de-capsified version is above, not below.
To further clarify my position: I do think that sexual assault is a really serious problem that we should work hard to solve, or if that proves impossible, mitigate. I just think that abandoning due process and normal evidentiary standards would be a solution that would carry lots of horrifying costs. In relatively recent historical times, normal standards of evidence in rape trials actually were abandoned for certain populations in some parts of the US– blacks in the Jim Crow South. Sanguine people who think that nobody would abuse the ability to convict people on the basis of a single accuser’s testimony alone should do their historical homework and see how that turned out in reality. Black men (and other marginalized groups like the poor and the non-neurotypical) in the US still get a pretty unfair deal from the criminal justice system. I’m not convinced that they wouldn’t face horrifying abuses if the few legal protections they do have were taken away.
I do think that there are lots of valuable things we can do, though– encourage people to talk about sex more openly, eliminating language which suggested that people deserved to get raped, encourage vigilance and bystander interventions, work on easing the social pressures surrounding sex for both men and women which Hulk talks about in his piece (the best part of the essay, I think), try to change the norms surrounding how we treat people who got raped to reduce the harm caused by the act (responding with empathy and compassion, not treating them as fundamentally broken or ruined– the way that we usually treat people who suffer severe assaults today might be a good model), making some kinds of “character” evidence inadmissible in rape trials (somebody being promiscuous or smoking marijuana or something really shouldn’t be relevant to the case), etc.
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Thanks for the quote. But…
Hulk didn’t make that suggestion. You’re mistaken. Badly.
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Henry- I almost hate to back up ampersand here because… Yeah. But.
You can have a conviction under a beyond a reasonable doubt standard based on nothing more than one persons word against another, with literally no supporting or corroborating evidence. All you need is a jury that listens to them and says, “yeah, that one is definitely telling the truth and the other is lying.”
That shocked me a bit when I learned it in law school- I still have trouble imagining a circumstance where I, personally, could be so swayed by that sort of evidence as to not even harbor a reasonable doubt. My upbringing in the skeptic community saw to that.
But it’s how the world has always worked.
Now in real life, we rarely have a case that barren of data. But if we did, it could, in theory, lead to a conviction. It might not- get me on a jury and it probably won’t- but it could.
It is in that environment that film critic hulk is encouraging people to put more trust into raise accusations. Nothing about this is a call for more lax standards of proof. Taking one witness more seriously than before is not changing the due process of the case.
…the really funny thing to me in FCH’s nearly illegible tirade was the part where he argued that rape isn’t ambiguous because it always involves someone saying no and someone pushing past that no. Welcome to Team Shitlord, Film Critic Hulk. We don’t have cookies, people keep asking us if we want them but they never pay out.
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Thanks for the clarification Patrick– it seems like I might need a little more education about the law myself– although kind of judgment you’re describing sounds like a bug in the legal system which we should try to fix posthaste. Thank you for actually explaining this rather than just condescendingly posting a dismissal like Barry did. (Barry, if that wasn’t just an impulsive anger-reaction, I’m revising my prior that you’re discussing things in good faith downward.)
Of course, even if adopting Hulk’s suggestion doesn’t change the law itself, it will make it more likely that courts will come to the sort of pathological judgement which Patrick talks about more frequently, which would have the same sort of negative social effects, so my broader point about this line of argument being shitty and inconsiderate of possible consequences still holds. The minor error that Patrick explained is ultimately irrelevant.
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Henry- I don’t think it’s a bug. The fact that a poorly supported judgment isn’t literally impossible is not a bug. Decisions have to be made, and the fact that twelve people (or applicable number) must unanimously agree that they have no reasonable doubts is a pretty big deal. If you set aside genuine runaway juries (who could presumably vote as they please no matter what the rule says), then a good faith guilty verdict in a true lay evidence free he said she said case implies a unanimity of certainly that is so unusual and so astounding that I’d actually be nervous condemning it.
The goal isn’t an infallible measure. That’s not possible. The goal is a really good one, and “not even one person had even on reasonable doubt” is pretty strong. It’s not perfect- scores of overturned rape and murder convictions speak to that. But it’s what we have. And questions like how credible we find this or that person when they say this or that thing are part of the democratic process that undergirds the very concept of a jury system.
There is ultimately nothing that different between FCHs belief that society discredits rape victims and should put more faith in them, and my belief that society over credits testimony of all kinds, particularly eye witness testimony as to details of emotionally charged events.
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Henry:
1) Saying that you’re badly mistaken – which is literally all I said – is not condescending or a personal insult.
2) The idea that I’m writing in bad faith because I said you were mistaken… “I’d call that a radical interpretation of the text.”
3) In the first draft of my “you are badly mistaken” comment, I wrote a long response trying to explain in detail why you were mistaken, but I stopped because you’d never outlined your rational, and so I felt was responding in detail to an argument that you’d never explicitly made.
I decided it would be best to simply point out that Hulk hadn’t said what you claimed and get out, leaving it up to you to defend your claim, after which I could respond to your actual argument, not an imagined argument.
4) I didn’t mean to insult you; I in fact agreed with much of what you wrote, other than the one part I objected to.
5) I wouldn’t call falsely accusing someone of advocating an extremist position that they don’t actually hold, and never even came close to stating, “a minor error.”
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@Barry: Ah, okay– I tend to pattern-match a brief “you are wrong” without explanation to dismissal, because in most contexts, it is. Thank you for clarifying your actual position.
Re your point 5: I honestly don’t see a material difference between holding the position that we should do away with do process and holding a position which would materially have the exact same consequences as doing away with due process. I’m actually curious about how you interpreted Hulk’s passage– I kind of think that if it’s not extreme (ie: “take an alleged victim’s testimony their rape case more than you would take the testimony of the accused seriously”), it’s kind of trivial, since the accuser’s testimony is already part of the body of evidence in rape trials (albeit not a conclusive one). Since Hulk is advocating for sweeping societal change and tries to pre-empt objections about unfairness, I figured that he wasn’t just being trivial here, or perhaps, he was motte-and-bailying with the trivial position as the motte and the extreme position as the bailey. (This corresponds with the first, correct use of Motte and Bailey which Ozy uses when explaining things in “Against Motte and Bailey,” since I’m talking about one person’s possible equivocation rather than talking about a “motte cop, bailey cop” or political cover-type social dynamic.) Er, does that help make my position a bit more clear and easier to present critiques of?
@Patrick: I think that I probably just model juries in my head very differently than you do. From the evidence which I’ve encountered, it seems to me that in real life, most juries are full of people who frequently vote in accordance with their cognitive biases and are easily misled by dishonest prosecutors who want to raise their conviction score so they can get elected DA, or prevent their friends on the police force from looking bad. So, I think that twelve ordinary people consensusing around an epistemically dubious position is actually really likely, and we should strive to make it more difficult for them to do that. Juries’ democratic voting process seems like a useful mechanism for preventing certain abuses of state power, but it doesn’t appear to be a particularly strong guarantor of truth.
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1) As Patrick said, even if Hulk was referring specifically to how criminal trials should be decided, that doesn’t mean that Hulk was calling for getting rid of the “beyond a reasonable standard” requirement at criminal trials.
2) I’m not even sure Hulk was necessarily referring to criminal trials. The main link to the concept of criminal trials was the word “testimony,” which might have been a purposeful reference to criminal justice reform, but also might have been a not-ideal word choice. Not-ideal word choices are hardly unlikely to occur in a 20,000+ word blog post.
3) In real life people sometimes use “testimony” to refer to anyone claiming a crime has been committed or accusing someone else of a misdeed, not just to claims made under oath at a formal trial. (Try googling the phrase “testified to police,” for example.) I suspect this is how Hulk was using the word, because the passage read as a whole is not about criminal justice reform.
3) So how can we understand what Hulk meant, if we admit to the plain fact that sometimes words have more than one meaning, or are carelessly chosen? By reading the words in the larger context. Hulk wrote:
“There are very practical systemic things we can do. We have to recognize the fact that even though a he said / she said dynamic of sexual assault may seem “unfair” to you, we absolutely have to take rape testimony seriously because so often there is no other mode of evidence or recourse. To dismiss it, would often serve to dismiss the legitimacy of rape itself. And more importantly, as hulk has hopefully proved to you so far the system of ethics behind rape is so desperately unfair that we have to try and fix it. We have to augment our collegiate systems to stop stonewalling investigations and keeping cases hush hush. We need to create systems that more readily recognize the environments where sexual assault thrives (and not tell women the way to solve it is by not drinking and avoiding them). And while workplaces are getting much better at sexual harassment, the reason it feels so staid is because most workplaces are really only doing it to cover their ass. They’re not addressing cultural stuff that’s causing it. So really, the issue behind all these things is that we need a new mode of adoptive thinking.
The question is, “where do we start?”
Let’s take the advice of someone who can most definitely help us. Do you know what the one thing was that alice sebold wanted us to take away from her experience? No, she didn’t want us to learn that her rape was some horrible, unspeakable thing and that we have to be amazed she survived. She wanted something far simpler…
“i want the word ‘rape’ to be used easily in conversation. My desire would be that somehow my writing would take a little bit of the taboo or the weirdness of using that word away. No one work is going to accomplish the years of work that need to be done, but it can help.”
The main thrust of that simply isn’t about criminal trials or standards of evidence. What Hulk is saying is that we should have a general reform of how we think and talk about rape.
And yes, that would include taking victim’s testimony seriously (including but not limited to at trials). It’s even possible Hulk meant to refer to criminal trials, although I don’t think that’s at all certain.
But that there’s such a huge gulf between “taking testimony seriously” and “an accusation of rape should constitute evidence sufficient to convict somebody” that I don’t think your claim is even remotely defensible.
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Re your point 5: I honestly don’t see a material difference between holding the position that we should do away with do process and holding a position which would materially have the exact same consequences as doing away with due process.
1) Hulk said we should take victim’s testimony seriously, full stop.
You then extrapolated from that to “it will make it more likely that courts will come to the sort of pathological judgement which Patrick talks about more frequently,” which is your unproven theory, not a factual statement. That is then expanded to “which would have the same sort of negative social effects” as doing away with the “reasonable doubt” standard, a second step that is just your opinion, not a factual statement.
Your argument doesn’t account for the obvious truth that reasonable people can disagree with your unproven, nonfactual extrapolations.
There is a HUGE difference between “Hulk said we should do away with reasonable doubt,” which is a claim that Hulk said something unreasonable, extreme and frightening, and “Hulk said something which, in my opinion is will someday lead to something else which I believe would have the same effects as doing away with reasonable doubt, although I can’t prove any of that.”
Acting like the two are the same thing is completely indefensible.
2) I agree with Hulk that we should take rape victim’s testimony more seriously – in society in general. I also think we could often be taking testimony more seriously in the legal system – not just at trial, but also at all the levels that come prior to trial. (Note: This is not the same as me claiming that the legal system NEVER takes any rape accusations seriously, nor is it the same as me denying that false convictions of rape ever happen.)
It does not follow from that, that I want to, either explicitly or in effect, do away with “reasonable doubt.” I think that taking rape victim’s testimony seriously is compatible with reasonable doubt (because it’s possible to simultaneously take testimony seriously and also bear in mind that sometimes testimony is false or mistaken).
3) I’ve often noticed anti-SJWs claiming that such-and-such a feminist said X, and then – when called on it – producing a tortured rationalization explaining why it’s okay to say a feminist said X even though she didn’t. That’s just bullshit.
Hulk never made the extreme and horrible claim you said Hulk made. Therefore, claiming that Hulk said so is wrong. You can’t rationalize your way out of that.
4) You wrote:
I kind of think that if it’s not extreme (ie: “take an alleged victim’s testimony their rape case more than you would take the testimony of the accused seriously”), it’s kind of trivial, since the accuser’s testimony is already part of the body of evidence in rape trials (albeit not a conclusive one).
We cross-posted, so I think I’ve already mostly answered this in my previous post. But I’ll add that 1) the paraphrase of Hulk’s words between quote marks isn’t how I’d interpret what Hulk said, or imo a reasonable interpretation of what Hulk said, 2) maybe you didn’t intend it to be? I’m not sure, 3) It’s okay if many of the minor supporting statements in a 20,000 word post are, taken by themselves, “trivial,” 4) I think you underestimate the extent to which the legal system, as well as society in general, sometimes fails to take victims’ testimonies seriously.
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@ Ampersand–
You’re right that I failed to consider that “testimony” might not be working in its legal sense in the passage.
I came to the conclusion that it was because of Hulk’s vigorous application of disclaimers. I figured that it was actually kind of obvious that discussions about rape in the public sphere would sometimes involve allegations which, while uproveable, don’t suggest that we should dismiss the people making them. I figured that he would only need to bring up the “it may seem unfair to you” disclaimer if he was suggesting something that a big chunk of a reasonable audience would think was unfair. I suspect that I may have significantly overestimated how much he had me or somebody like me in mind when he wrote it. It can be really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that stuff you encounter on the internet was written for you, especially when it’s written by somebody you really like, who has written a lot of other stuff that speaks to you (which Hulk has for me, in his writings on film and storytelling). It’s a cognitive bias which I should be more aware of in myself and work to mitigate.
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Henry –
That’s fair. Thanks for your comment. ( <—— No snark intended. )
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I’ll put these high on my list of “books to read when I’m not doing work, but don’t just want pulp,” although that still doesn’t guarantee I’ll get around to them any time soon, sadly.
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Her models of marked and unmarked traits
That is certainly encouraging to hear, even without the rest of the sentence! It seems like so much of the discussion just groups a whole lot together as “privilege” and doesn’t worry about whether it’s the result of marking or lack of marking.
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“This is the shortest book on the list, and probably the best to read if you just want to find out what feminists actually believe.”
False. If you want to find out what feminists actually believe, you need to listen to what feminists say.
A book by bell hooks about feminism tells us what bell hooks, as a feminist, believes.
Jessica Valenti wearing an “I bathe in male tears” shirt tells us what Jessica Valenti, as a feminist, believes.
Can we please stop conflating “what feminists are supposed to believe” and “what feminists actually believe”, forever, please?
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Speech acts are clearly not equivalent to beliefs. (Valenti does not bathe in male tears, economic realities being what they are.)
>Can we please stop conflating “what feminists are supposed to believe” and “what feminists actually believe”, forever, please?
I feel this reply is doing the post a disservice. Reading influential works provides information regarding the implicit meaning behind ideological vocabulary. Ozzy is not making any such conflation.
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Eh… kinda? Reading Burke and Chesterton may help you understand conservatives, but it will also give you a far better view of real life conservatives than they probably deserve.
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True, depending on the conservative. Honestly, analyzing ideological movements is more-or-less anthropology and probably requires some pain-in-the-ass holistic approach.
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I see no evidence that the majority of feminists are using that ideological vocabulary in such a way as to conform to those implicit meanings.
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@Patrick- spot on. It’s a rehashing of the “Ignore all those people calling themselves feminists, Real Feminists think these things.” argument.
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Anon: Ms. Magazine, America’s largest-circulation feminist magazine, did a reader survey of the best feminist books. Feminism Is For Everybody was #1. It looks to me that all those people calling themselves feminists seem to have resoundingly endorsed ms. hooks.
Patrick: Yes, the intellectual giants of a social movement will give you stronger arguments than some dumbass with a Twitter account. To me, that seems like an argument *in favor* of engaging with the intellectual giants.
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@Anon
>I see no evidence that the majority of feminists are using that ideological vocabulary in such a way as to conform to those implicit meanings.
Eh, I dunno. “Women can’t be sexist against men” is a true claim using certain academic terminology, but an asinine one. Using common terminology, the sentence is obviously false. Yet, many feminists will argue for the truth of the statement, without disagreement on empirical matters. It seems in that case, an understanding of their intellectual ancestors can be of use.
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But that exactly explains my point: When the tumblr feminist says “Women can’t be sexist against men,” she’s using sexist in the common vernacular. When an academic feminist says “Women can’t be sexist against men,” she’s using sexist in a precise, academic fashion.
Hence, what the first feminist believes and what the second feminist believes are two totally different things – the latter believes women do not have the political or legal power to influence legal or institutional bias against men, the former believes that women being shitty towards men “just doesn’t count, cause I dunno patriarchy or something.”
All these resources tell us is what all these terms and concepts *are supposed to* mean and how they’re *supposed to* be used, not how they actually are.
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Speech acts do, however, unless they are totally impulsive, tell you something about the actor’s beliefs: They tell you that the actor believes something that made doing that seem like a good idea. Where “doing that” = “wearing a ‘I bathe in male tears’ shirt,” this is rather informative.
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Ozy- Generally speaking, the arguments are stronger because they are different arguments for different conclusions.
I can spend all year learning about Arminianism and I won’t get a stone’s throw closer to understanding even one of the Methodists I know in real life. If anything, I’ll understand them less.
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@osberend: Precisely. We can all go ahead and read about how feminists oppose traditional gender roles for BOTH men and women, and support men being openly emotional.
Doesn’t mean shit when a high profile feminist like Valenti wears a shirt celebrating “male tears”.
Really wish she would have just drowned in that ocean.
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Anon: Please do not wish death on people in my comment section.
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@ozy: “It looks to me that all those people calling themselves feminists seem to have resoundingly endorsed ms. hooks. ”
Of course they suggest that we read books about how kind and rational and calm and loving and equality-seeking and peaceful feminism is.
Do you think capitalists are going to suggest you read Atlas Shrugged, or a book about the effects of income inequality on a society?
Do you think christians are going to tell you to read about jesus healing the sick, or about lots daughters raping him? Or a book about growing up LGBT in Utah?
Would bell hooks wear an “I bathe in male tears” shirt? Would bell hooks say all men are rapists and that’s all that they are? Would bell hooks kill someones dog for opening DV shelters for men? Would bell hooks pull a fire alarm because someone was giving a presentation on men’s issues?
I’m sorry, I’m just not buying this whole “Real Feminists TeeEm” stuff.
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If I want to find out why capitalists believe what they believe and the strongest arguments in favor of capitalism, of course I’m going to read Milton Friedman. Reading a book about the effects of income inequality on society will explain to me what anti-capitalists believe. I am, presumably, interested in both topics.
If you’d like to create a reading list of the best of anti-feminism, feel free! I am sure lots of people reading this would appreciate it.
If the worst things you can come up with for a social movement are a tasteless shirt, someone pulling a fire alarm and a quote from a fictional character which the author did not actually endorse, I’d say we’re doing really well.
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@ozy: I apologize, it will not happen again.
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“If the worst things you can come up with for a social movement are a tasteless shirt, someone pulling a fire alarm and a quote from a fictional character which the author did not actually endorse, I’d say we’re doing really well.”
I guess you missed the “killing someone’s pet” part, but anyway, those were things I thought of off the top of my head – and the point wasn’t “see, feminists are the worst people ever” – the point was “see, feminists do things that are totally at odds with bell hooks, who they claim represents them”.
As for “worst things feminists have done”, how about influencing the government to adopt a definition of rape that allows people with vaginas to rape people with penises with relative impunity?
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Actually, just disregard that last comment – this is getting too far off track and I don’t want to derail your post further. I apologize.
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Hmm. So, which will give be a better ability to predict Christian’s actions in the sphere of charity; reading the Bible and noting Jesus’s commentary, or doing a survey of people who identify Christians and seeing how many of them actually do sell all they have and give the proceeds to the poor? And how many people who believe in the Prosperity Gospel do I need to run into before I’m safe to say “OK, someone saying they’re a Christian does not actually predict their charitable actions very well.”?
I think this academic stuff is important, but a lot less less important than going out and doing the research if you actually want to learn about feminism. Feminism isn’t an academic discipline, it’s a social movement; you need to interact with the people who make it up to know what it really is.
Of course, a big confounder is that a lot of people who hold generally feminist beliefs don’t want to call themselves feminists on account of the widespread terrible behavior under feminism’s banner, but if everyone’s internalized what feminism says it’s about, and what feminism actually is now about is completely different, then we should know that, and you can’t know that just by reading the books.
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>As for “worst things feminists have done”, how about influencing the government to adopt a definition of rape that allows people with vaginas to rape people with penises with relative impunity?
The question to ask is: was it better before feminism? Did the definition of rape include rape by envelopment, and then the feminists changed it? Or was it (explicitly or implicitly) limited to rape by penetration, and feminists then failed to improve it?
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@Susebron:
You tell me what it is when renowned researcher on rape and feminist Dr. Mary P. Koss writes this on how to do prevalence studies on rape:
In Koss’ case it clear that it’s not a matter of failing to include male survivors, but rather an explicit effort to keep male victims excluded.
That paper was written in 1993. In a radio interview just last week Dr. Mary P. Koss was asked what she would call it if a woman drugged a man and had vaginal intercourse with him while he was unconscious. Her reply was that she would call it “unwanted contact”.
This view permeates much of the rape discourse – a discourse feminists have a strong voice in. My impression is that much of the research and prevention work on rape and sexual violence is firmly placed in a feminist framework. We see the same dynamic when it comes to domestic violence and male victims. A lot of feminists not only fails to include male victims, many work pretty hard to exclude them.
I have recently I’ve seen some feminists work to include male victims. Lara Stemple is one name that comes to mind – there are others. I am thankful for those.
So the label “feminist” is not by itself a reliable predictor whether someone will exclude male victims (Koss) or not (Stemple).
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Well, turns out male tears are great for the complexion, so provided everyone consents i don’t see the problem.
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I thought that was the blood of female virgins?
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Male tears is an euphemism for sperm in many languages. And indeed, bull semen is used in some cosmetics for its antioxidant properties.
(not whale semen as you can sometimes hear, though, the confusion arise from the use of ambergris from sperm whales)
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@thirqual I feel like this thread is in need of some levity, so can we briefly put aside the foundational texts of modern feminism and discuss the phrasing “an euphemism”? I mean, it’s not quite as egregious as praising eggplant, but… just no. There’s a clearly pronounced if unwritten consonant at the head of the word….
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@Matthew: I believe this may be a British/American distinction?
thirqual: Are you a limey?
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@osberend The British thing is to write “an history,” but that’s because they pronounce history wrong*, not because they don’t understand articles. The reverse of this case.
*More levity, people, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
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@matthew
Sorry, not a native speaker, and I learned English mainly from reading books. So my instinctive pronunciation of “euphemism” was completely off (starting with /ø/ instead of the correct /ju/).
In English, if I hear it, I (almost always) know how to write it, but if I read it I (most often) am not sure how to say it.
In French, it is basically the contrary. Simple pronunciation when you can read the words, complicated to spell correctly from what you can hear.
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Ah, that makes sense. There’s the distinction between euphemism — a way of expressing something indirectly — and the more specific eauphemism, which is, I suppose, when one scares the gullible with the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide poisoning.
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The elision of ‘atiches at the front of words is a hallmark of the cockney accent, which made its way into Estuary English (see Monty Python, Sir Alan Sugar, Jonathon Ross). As such, words like ‘ospital and ‘alibut end up starting with vowels.
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But there are lots of feminists, and the ones you’ve been listening to aren’t necessarily representative. Clickbait articles are the most shallow as well as the most far-reaching after all. Also see: all the commenters who seem to think Ozy’s feminism is especially atypical (it’s not).
Plus it’s useful to find *a* variety of feminism that you can agree with, so that if needed you can disagree with feminists on feminist terms. I suppose that’s what LW would call reducing inferential distance?
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It’s impossible to disagree with feminists on feminists terms, because they’re designed with implicit conclusions.
You can’t agree we live in a rape culture and also disagree that we don’t need to “teach men not to rape”, because the definition of a rape culture is one where men rape women with social (and usually legal) impunity.
You can’t agree we live in a patriarchy and also argue that men’s issues are as important and as harmful to men as women’s issues are to women. You can’t agree we live in a patriarchy and also argue that women have power, because a patriarchy, by definition, is a society where women lack power.
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There’s only so much you can do with inside criticism, when what you actually disagree with are the premises. The best you can do then is to point out internal contradictions, but even that’s unlikely to convince anyone except mathematicians and unusually sharp philosophers.
And straight up disagreeing with the premises means that a discussion is impossible except at a very high meta-level that’s unlikely to ever have practical consequences.
This tends to leave you with subversive methods only. And those are, by definition, not conclusive arguments and can thus only affect the yet undecided audience.
A nice book I can recommend on this (to anyone who reads German) is “Wie man mit Fundamentalisten diskutiert, ohne den Verstand zu verlieren” by Hubert Schleichert (roughly “How to debate fundamentalists without losing your mind”; I don’t know if it was ever translated).
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@anonymous,
See, you’re saying it’s impossible but I see feminists disagree with each other all the time. I think this is a sign that you have a pretty limited sample of feminist views. I started reading the bell hooks book and the first section seems to be entirely about how she disagrees with a bunch of vaguely specified feminists.
@Autolykos,
That is more fair. Nobody ever said that internal feminist critique would solve all the problems. Although I disagree with your implicit foundationalist view. Worldviews are not built from premises upwards, not even when they purport to be so.
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@anonymous:
Wikipedia has the following:
I find it entirely possible that one could believe that patriarchy (a term I’m ambivalent about, but whatever) is responsible for men’s problems without thinking that it makes men’s problems unimportant or less important. The key would be thinking of the things that happen to men who fail to be masculine or dominant enough as being analogous (though not equivalent) to the things that happen to women who aren’t feminine or subservient enough.
Granted, saying I can imagine this viewpoint isn’t the same as saying I endorse it—I don’t know enough to say I do or don’t. I’m mainly taking aim at this:
In fact, I damn well can. Should I?
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In any other field, in order to understand a subject, one would in fact read influential works to discover the actual roots of the movement.
I mean, there is a genuine reality to the notion that books read and promoted as fundamental by a vast number of the people holding BLANK ideology will give you a much better idea of BLANK theory than what some random BLANKist on their blog says.
In addition, it’s a very valid point I found in rationalism that in order to properly reject a theory you need to engage with its strongest arguments and not simply disprove some weakman.
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If you ask a random person on the street what Schrodinger’s Cat is, they will almost certainly give you an incorrect answer. This is because the actual idea is complicated, and people tend to simplify things.
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I look forward to reading Feminism is for Everyone. Very cool that it is online!
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Thanks for this. I’ve gotten about halfway through feminism is for everybody. Most of it seems pretty agreeable, except the bit where Hooks enumerates all possible types of domestic violence
Yes, that is literally every kind if DV that happens, nothing conspicuously absent at all.
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..but..but…feminism is about equality!
Just not *that* equality.
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I like how apparently violence by parents against children is by definition “patriarchal.” Not loading the language at all, no siree.
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Hmm. In my experience, the people who explicitly endorse hitting children as correct parenting do seem to be pro-patriarchy. But on the other hand, individual abusive parents can, of course, be of any ideological persuasion.
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Firestone develops the argument that it really mostly is – not quite by *definition*, but the particular ways heterosexual two-parent families come to be abusive to their children, and the ways parental abuse is gendered..
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In fairness, she also wrote this:
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Yeah, I wrote this reply before I got to that bit, but couldn’t edit and didn’t feel like a subordinate clause inside parenthesis was worth adding a new reply. I still feel like she addresses the topic insufficiently, but she does at least mention it.
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Even setting aside the obvious missing item, that’s some weirdly passive constructions to describe the violence committed by women.
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I think a relevant concept here is Arnold Kling’s idea of “folk beliefs.” There are many ideas that have both academic and “folk” versions. The academic versions are the books written about them, the folk versions are crude parodies of those ideas that have permeated popular culture. For instance “folk Keynsianism” is the idea that the government spending more money will somehow make the economy better. “Folk Marxism” is the idea that rich people are evil and conspiring to oppress the working class. “Folk Anarchism” is the idea that blowing stuff up, rioting, and assassinating politicians, will somehow overthrow capitalism and the government.
Most rationalists are complaining about Folk Feminism, not Academic Feminism. Obviously it would be a good thing for them to be familiar with the academic variety. But on the other hand, I’m not sure that Academic Feminism has much relevance to their complaints about Folk Feminism. If someone holds a horrible belief the fact that that belief is a distorted caricature of a reasonable belief might be interesting history, but it’s not super-relevant now.
Or to put it another way, if I complain about people who think wasteful government programs stimulate the economy, telling me that “The General History of Employment, Interest, and Money” actually says something very different and much more reasonable won’t necessarily help me deal with those people.
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“Or to put it another way, if I complain about people who think wasteful government programs stimulate the economy, telling me that “The General History of Employment, Interest, and Money” actually says something very different and much more reasonable won’t necessarily help me deal with those people.”
Especially in a social climate where “You’re either a Keynsian or you’re a fascist, there is no in between!”.
Which is the problem I, and many others, have with feminism:
Feminist claims feminism is about all these Good Things (gender equality, ending sexual violence and DV, etc)
Feminist say and do Real Asshole things (lie, erase male victims, generally act like assholes).
People criticize feminists/feminism because of the Real Asshole things feminists do.
Feminists claim that those criticizing them are against the Good Things feminists purport to stand for.
Critics of feminism/feminists are attacked by a general population that believes feminism/feminists actually stand for the aforementioned Good Things.
Feminists continue to be Real Assholes, even moreso because they know anyone who is critical of them will be tarred and feathered for it.
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I’m halfway through Feminism is for Everybody and have been finding it very confusing. Some parts of it make feminism sound uncomfortably cult-like. Other parts seem to rely on dubious unsupported background assumptions. There are very large inferential gaps here.
Page 11 (of the pdf version) deals with “the demand that females confront their own internalized sexism”. My question: what if somebody (male or female) doesn’t HAVE “internalized sexism” they need to root out via “consiousness-raising” sessions? Is that logically impossible? Can we sensibly differentiate her implied claim that EVERYBODY is sexist from, say, the Scientologist claim that EVERYBODY has “body thetans” they need to root out via “auditing” sessions?
The claim (page 12) that all women know they had been “socialized as females by patriarchal thinking to see [themselves] as inferior to men” – do modern feminists really still believe this? It seems kind of nutty. As does her assumption that men just automatically support each other and support the group over the individual – basically are more pro-social and cooperative than women are – this doesn’t gibe at all with my experience or any stereotypes I’d previously been familiar with.
Hooks has both an explicit definition of feminism and an implicit one. The explicit one seems simple and unobjectionable: “Feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression.” My take on that: Great, I’m all for it! That’s a fine motte! But the implicit definition is revealed by the rest of the book – she seems to define every random policy she happens to agree with as either something that IS “feminist” or something that WILL BE “feminist” once we restore/rehabilitate/renew feminism and take it back from all the people who have been misusing the term. On the flipside, every random policy she doesn’t like is either part of “patriarchy” or due to – once again – all the people who have been misusing the term.
(So far, the people who are misusing “feminism” apparently include:
– the young, who are insufficiently appreciative
– middle-class white women, who have the wrong preferences
– successful working women, who adopt feminism as a fashion accessory or a way to improve their economic position without understanding it )
Hooks’ implicit definition of proper feminism seems to include free (FULLY tax-provided) abortions on demand, feminist classes at the primary-school level, renewed commitment to “consciousness-raising” classes every week patterned after AA meetings, feminists going door-to-door sharing the good news like Jehovah’s Witnesses, an explicitly feminist TV network, and low-income feminist housing co-ops. (I’m sure I’m missing some but those were particular highlights for me)
Hooks also seems to think overweight people only want to be thin because of the “white supremacist patriarchal fashion and glamour industry” and she seems to credit ALL positive changes in medical treatment of women (but no negative ones?) to feminism.
Hooks is firmly committed to the “73 cents for every dollar” claim and (incorrectly) believes young people today haven’t heard of that sort of claim. The fact that some young people think equality has been achieved is something I find *hopeful* but I get the sense that it’s somehow *definitionally impossible* for her.
Still slogging through…
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I don’t know how you get
from someone who wrote
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I got it from everything *else* she wrote related to eating disorders. Including references to the “feminist struggle to end eating disorders” and comments like “certainly it was in the interest of a white supremacist capitalist patriarchal fashion and cosmetic industry to re-glamorize sexist-defined notions of beauty”
But even if we just look at the part you quoted, it suggests that “sexist body self-hatred” is the dominant narrative about weight – one which she is virtuously trying to reject and lose weight *despite*.
(Though you’re right that I should have said “mainly” rather than “only”)
Speaking a technophile, I agree that it’s a big problem that most people who take trying to be thin seriously have to starve themselves to do it. And I even agree that women tend to have this problem more than men. But this is a technical problem much more than a social one. We really DO collectively need to lose weight – a lot of it! – and we really DON’T know how to do so. Something big changed in the last 40 years. One day we’ll figure out what it was and find a solution for it. A pill, an innoculation, a treatment. Until that day the problem remains. But the problem isn’t an artificial one ginned up by “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal industry” – we really *are* fatter than we used to be and fatter than is healthy for us and it would be a good thing to lose some weight if we could figure out a way to do so that worked more reliably than the methods now available.
What I took from this whole section is that for Hooks, blaming stuff on “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal society” serves roughly the same role as blaming stuff on “the devil” does for Christians. If we have some problem that we don’t know how to solve – any sort of human suffering – it feels better to have a NAME for some entity you can BLAME.
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Okay, I have to ask. Why on earth does bell hook’s name have no capital letters?
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She prefers it that way.
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Turns out I still alieve that there is such a thing as stupid preferences…
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Possibly related question: Why does “feminist movement” have no articles (or capital letters, for that matter) throughout her writing?
This woman is a native speaker, right?
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Oh, more weirdness signalling in a book called “Feminism is for everyone”. That does not really strike me as the smartest thing to do.
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Because she’s subverting the oppressive Grammarchy imposed by those of us with competence in English.
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I’m pretty sure that the idea is that she wants to differentiate between “the” feminist movement in the sense of a specific political movement existing in a given time and space, and the platonic concept of a feminist movement, which exists in all times and places where its ideas are instantiated.
Her whole shtick is to be a sort of shaman-figure for feminism, speaking timeless truths of great depth, so it’s important to speak in meaning-laden universalist terms.
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@Patrick: That could be it. Of course, to me, that schtick comes off as “she is speaking in the feminist equivalent of literally translated ChiComm banner slogans” . . .
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I think the operative noun is “movement”, with “feminist” taking adjectival form. “Feminist movement” here means “movement [or progress] that is feminist”. Doesn’t seem so weird to me.
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Skye, the point is that the lack of an article renders the sentence ungrammatical, unless “feminist movement” is used as a proper name, which is a) weird and should b) at least result in it being capitalised.
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I think you’re misunderstanding what Skye was pointing out: “movement” is the head noun here, with “feminist” being a modifying adjective, and since this is a mass noun it doesn’t take an article. Consider these syntactically analogous sentences: “when rapid movement renews itself”, “future rapid movement will not make this mistake”, “without males as allies in struggle rapid movement will not progress.” It’s grammatical, although definitely an unusual phrasing.
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But “movement” in the sense of “social movement” (and that’s the only kind of movement that can, for example, make a mistake or have allies) isn’t a mass noun.
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I think it cannot be understated how harmful and toxic Jezebel is. They combine the attention-grabbing style of professional junk-media with an extremist ideology. I used to read it when I was most depressed to confirm myself how despicable and devout of understanding humans are, and it never disappointed me.
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I think the dynamic goes like this: There really are men who despise any empowerment of women, and these men are loud and sadly commonplace. Furthermore, they are often deeply insecure in their masculinity, and thus behave in appalling ways. Their grievances never end.
The latest stupid little spat: http://www.themarysue.com/mra-to-the-max/
Anyway, it’s tempting to write those men off as marginal idiots — and surely they are. However, they are not unique, but only extreme. Men commonly resent the empowerment of women, and in particular sexual empowerment. This includes men who do not consider themselves sexist.
It is this: their default assumptions about the roles of men and women are deeply sexist, and thus when women do not play that role the men are *upset*, and this becomes resentment and grievance.
This is often buried down in system-1 thinking. Many of these men believe in true equality in their system-2 thoughts, but deep-down an irrational dislike remains.
So anyway, #notallmen and all of that. Sure. But it’s a lot of men. I’d say most men.
(And actually a lot of women also, but that’s another topic.)
Anyway, imagine being a feminist woman in this environment. How are you going to regard the endless grievances of sexist men, who fill your inbox, you interrupt your talks, on and on, in your face, barking men who barely conceal their violence?
Right. You’ll get tough and callous. You’ll mock “male tears.” You’ll write articles that brace women for this onslaught.
And yeah, you’ll be oversensitive, cuz you have your own system-1 nonsense to overcome.
So round and round it goes.
But feminists are correct. We deserve equality, and sexist, insecure men need to figure their shit out. Their crappy lives are not our fault, and they need to step back.
Jezebel is a mess. I don’t read it. I don’t need it’s nonsense to make my life work. On the other hand, if Jezebel stands out as *particularly* bad, beyond all the other terrible nonsense on the Internet, enough that you single it out, that says something about you and your grievances.
“I want to get upset on the Internet today. I think I’ll go read some strong, outspoken women.”
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“I want to get upset on the Internet today. I think I’ll go read some strong, outspoken women.”
I think this is a strawman, not just an exaggeration
The reason jezebel is aggravating is not because it’s women being wrong it’s because it’s people acting smugly morally impeachable acting wrong and hyper dismissive which is frustrating as heck. It’s also explicitly written with an eye towards being hateread. It feels like a kafka-trap to say “the only reason you are so upset by social justice writings in particular is because you have internalized Xism”. I’m also not especially convinced it’s the relevant quality, many of the same people who hate on jezebel hate read Arthur Chu. The relevant quality seems to be bad at social justice and super smug about beliefs.
I can’t speak for other people but half of the pain of hatereading is the smugness and caricaturing of well presented argument by people who seem like they should be within inferential difference of you. Reading Return of Kings or Redstate of Christian answers, or radical lesbian separatism for me, doesn’t have this effect instead it’s either, “yes, you chose another group of mine to hate success for clustered errors” or “oh god, oh god, please don’t accidentally convince a random misogynist of this, that would be really bad” which for me are both rather different emotions than xkcd duty calls.
If something is posting under a guise of feminism or social justice I feel like I’m compelled to take their argument seriously, or else I’m being sexist. Similarly if somebody posts something stupid and smug while arguing against social justice it’s good hate reading. Dumb and smug articles which sometimes occur Feminist Current and Salon and Reason and Jezebel and Pz Myers blog and Richard dawkins and anti-GMO/anti-Vaccine advocacy groups all hit this urge and all seem within inferential distance to me and all have the relevant smugness and I’m unconvinced the reason I find Meghan Murphy/Feminist Current obnoxious is fundamentally different than the reason I find Pz Myers/Free thought blogs obnoxious.
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Veronica:
>You’ll get tough and callous.
>…And yeah, you’ll be oversensitive
Please.
(The way to resolve the contradiction is, IMO, to replace “oversensitive” with the more accurate “itching to blow off steam and looking for any excuse”. I get that often too. But please, no coy euphemisms about nasty feelings.)
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There’s no contradiction, as humans are psychologically complex. You become callous in that you refuse to engage empathetically with people different from you. You become oversensitive because you are quick to perceive offence and threat.
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“One of your editors heard her boyfriend flirting on the phone with another girl, so she slapped the phone out of his hands and hit him in the face and neck… “partially open handed.” Another editor slapped a guy when “he told me he thought he had breast cancer.” (Okay, that one made us laugh really hard.)”
Jezebel
The strong and outspoken women working for Jezebel, folks.
But you are right, it does not stand out that much.
See in the Guardian:
“Some females might have periods in their life when they get “slap-happy”, primarily when socialising, maybe when attention seeking, usually when drunk (guilty!). ”
Or on the Good Men Project:
“She may scream, punch, take advantage or just quietly manipulate you.
The stereotype may be used against you by being told to provide or take care of needs; making you feel guilty, ashamed and less of a man—but please don’t feel this way.
It may have nothing to do with you or maybe you did do something to provoke; either way how do you handle the attack?”
(removed since, but you can find the full text here)
It is really strange that some people would feel threatened by publications that normalize, joke about or excuse violence towards them.
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@ veronica
1)In any case, I take away that you agree Jezebel is plain awful.
2)Jezebel indeed stands out, since it seems more “generally accepted” as a more or less normal part of the online media landscape, being one among several, more normal Gawker News Blogs, where they are frequently crosslinked from. In comparison, the MRA sites which play in the same league regarding awfulness are (as far as I know) all independent and people are aware that they should be avoided.
3)The only comparable phenomenon I can think of might be extreme conservative/christian news sites. I have to admit that I just don’t take those seriously enough to get upset over anything they write, but if anybody feels like getting agitated over those, that would be understandable.
4)You probably state correctly that my emotional reaction is triggered by women being, as you describe it “strong and outspoken”, while I would describe it as women taking pride in being as annoying as the more annoying men. While it is sexist to require they shouldn’t be, but rather should be nice and agreeable, as society does, I think it is reasonable to think they shouldn’t actively try to be. I always felt feminism should be about making men more agreeable (=everybody wins) instead of letting women be more annoying.(=everybody loses)
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>“I want to get upset on the Internet today. I think I’ll go read some strong, outspoken women.”
That’s some excellent Jezebel-grade rhetorics right here, well done.
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@The Smoke: “ women taking pride in being as annoying as the more annoying men,” and claiming political justification is definitely a thing, and infuriating.
I once saw an argument about the Dykes on Bikes component of a particular Pride parade. Some other folks had complained that (a) the Dykes on Bikes circled around excessively, delaying the progress of the following components to an unreasonable extent, and (b) they revved their engines excessively loudly and often in what was, after all, a populated area, creating noise pollution and annoying people. Their supporters (including, I think, some of the Dykes on Bikes themselves) replied that women are socially expected not to take up time, not to make noise, and not to annoy people, and that women deliberately taking up time, making noise, and annoying people is therefore a revolutionary act that it is sexist to criticize.
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@thirqual – Good post, I’d like it if I could. I wonder if anyone who has read all of the suggested materials could point us in the direction of the passage that mentions how feminists condone domestic violence and engage in victim blaming, please?
Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?
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@multiheaded: There is no contradiction in terms. The Devil’s Dictionary lists “callous” as “endowed with great fortitude to bear the misfortune of others”, which is, as usually, pretty darned accurate.
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How much value do I lose if I read only bell hooks, rather than everything except bell hooks?
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Having read about a third of bell hooks so far, I certainly hope that there’s more to Serrano, at least.
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I re-read Feminism is For Everybody, and either I’m much harder to impress than I was fifteen years ago, or I’ve been corrupted by the patriarchy in the interim. It read like a cross between polemic and anecdote, with the worst of both; her frequent references to others’ beliefs and statements without any form of citation were particularly galling, and in some cases clearly inaccurate.
A naive reader would get very little sense from the book of what feminists actually believe. It’s more concerned with tracing hooks’ personal take on the development of late-twentieth-century feminism, with the theoretical models left to inference and allusion. (To anyone who hasn’t read Frantz Fanon or his intellectual heirs, the chapter on colonialism would be mostly gibberish.) As far as “policy prescriptions”, I didn’t see any — the proposals she advances are more like mission statements. The book’s greatest value would be to someone already familiar with second-wave feminism, but interested in third-wave criticism of it. Even then, there are probably better-articulated and less vague examples.
Particularly ironic was her insistence that feminism should not be limited to an intellectual “in-group”, in a book filled with unexplained jargon, non-standard uses of terms (“white supremacy”), and odd rhetorical tics of unknown significance, like omitting the articles before “feminist movement”.
I appreciate her titular insistence on including men in feminism. It’s just not clear what she expects us do once we are. Her conception of feminism as “consciousness-raising” is almost mystical, sometimes condescending, but never really informative.
TL;DR — Not a Feminism 101 book, and of questionable value even to the well-acquainted.
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I concur! Frankly, I feel like our gracious host’s blog is among the best places to start instead, actually.
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I started reading a bit of Feminism is for Everybody and I’m also a little disappointed. It starts with a bit of a folk history, but I can’t even tell what decade it’s supposed to be. She disparages a bunch of “reformist” feminists, but the ideas are too vaguely defined, for all I know she’s simply unfairly characterizing views that I hold.
We also clearly have very different epistemological norms. She talks about “being committed to feminism” and how people who are *really* committed should do this or that. Even though I am a feminist, I don’t believe in being “committed” to it. I believe in assessing ideas one by one, and after the fact maybe I can use a label to describe my general conclusions.
I’m on the fence on whether I should read further.
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There seems to be discussion of what is representative feminism. I have read a decent amount by Valenti, hooks and Serano including the cited books and here is my opinion:
1) bell hooks and Jessica Valenti are very representative feminists. If you are going to criticize feminism as a movement then your criticisms need to be applicable to Valenti/hooks. bell hooks is unusually “nice” and very pro men identifying as feminist but she is arguably the most representative feminist there is.
2) Julia Serano writing manages to avoid almost all of the usual feminist failure modes. I do not actually think criticisms of “feminism” should have to work as criticisms of Serano. Serano is a well liked feminist but she is nowhere near as influential as hooks or even Valenti. And several of her positions are significantly more liberal than the mainstream feminist position (for example her extremely permissive preferred definition of trans).
—-
Imo if one wants to talk about being “pro-feminism” or “anti-feminism” then bell hooks and Jessica Valenti are very good examples to discuss. Their feminism really is the mainstream stuff, for better or for worse. Julia Serano imo is in the tier of “actual best feminist writers” but while this shows how good feminism can be she isn’t really representative. Of course it should go without saying Catherine Mackinnon is not representative either (even though both Serano and Mackinnon have influence).
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So just today I was reading about how Valenti recently tweeted that she was on a train (or bus maybe), and she started reading over the shoulder of a man who was checking his twitter. Since she saw many of the same people she follows on twitter on his feed, but no women, she declared it “casual sexism”.
Clearly this representative feminist believes women are entitled to be invasive with men, reading their private cell phones/computer screens, and that a man can be declared sexist based on the fact that his twitter screen does not, at that exact time, show a sufficient number of tweets from women (which, again, was found by creepily reading over his shoulder on public transit).
Mainstream feminism indeed.
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source
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My as-charitable-as-possible reading of this is that she doesn’t think the guy necessarily dislikes women, just that “society”, or the Twitter popularity hierarchy, or some other undefined cause, makes it easy to miss women’s thoughts even in (presumably) left-leaning ideological spaces.
I still have problems with that way of thinking, but it is distinct from branding this particular guy with a scarlet S.
The actual invasion of privacy was pretty minimal, something I’d venture to say we’ve all done at some point.
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Well, when I am squished in next to someone on the subway, sometimes I notice what is on their phone. I mean, I try not to gawk, cuz that’s rude. But on the other hand, if I noticed some Twitter icons of people I know, I’d probably take a closer look.
I mean, MAYBE THEY FOLLOW ME! Or something. Or a close friend. Maybe I follow them and I can say, “Hey, sorry to interrupt, but are you so-and-so? Cuz I like what you said the other day about establishing a matriarchy and forcing men to feed us grapes…”
Or you know, whatever we feminists like to talk about.
In any event, I don’t think it’s a terrible thing to notice that someone follows the same folks as you do. They show up as little pictures on a screen right beside you. It’s hard to fully block that information out.
#####
There is a lot of evidence that men get more media attention than women, particularly in “serious” things — we’re not talking romance publishing here. (Not that there is anything wrong with romance publishing, but I digress.) And yes, this means that women’s viewpoints get less attention than men’s viewpoints.
Which is no big deal in math, cuz a theorem is true regardless of gender. Likewise discourse around theoretical physics should rightly be gender free, or so it seems. But in social stuff, yeah I think there is a difference in what women see versus what men see (on average), and thus if women are heard from less, then our insights will get less attention and thus be considered less salient, and this will have social costs.
And so yes, this is considered a form of sexism — in the sense of a social phenomenon. It is not that the person in question is actively avoiding women’s viewpoints. It’s that social structures and preconceptions make it easier to *end up in a place* where one mostly hears from men. Feminists would like for people to be aware that they do this, and to take some steps to achieve more balance.
You might disagree, but this seems a poor source of grievances against feminism.
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Veronica: Huh. I wonder if we can blind-audition social media stuff like we do orchestra auditions, to see how much of the different impact is moment-of sexism (people choosing not to read stuff by women) versus far-upstream sexism (women getting different social pressures from childhood onward that pushes them away from jobs like being an author), to actual biological difference. Who knows, maybe the ability to string words together in a way to hold attention really is distributed unevenly between men and women.
I’m pretty sure you can’t just declare differing attention paid to be sexism. I mean, are the dearth of female serial killer arrests evidence of sexism in the criminal justice system, evidence of being less likely to be under the specific upstream pressures that lead people to serial-kill, or just that men’s brains are statistically more likely to break in the way that makes people serial kill regardless of environment or sexist investigation of serial killings?
I’m pretty sure it’s a combination of all three for the serial killers. I’m similarly sure that all three are factors for attention in social media, and I’m also fairly sure that in social media, the first two factors weigh in a whole lot more heavily. But since I think that there are statistically-significant differences in the behaviors of men and women on average that are not culturally determined, I can’t be confident that a given difference in outcomes between men and women on average is necessarily due to sexism then and there.
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@veronica: So, this seems to fit into a pattern I’ve observed among SJ folks generally, but I’ll focus on the feminist aspect:
1. Feminists observe a phenomenon P whose individual instantiations can be explained equally well by sexist or non-sexist motivations and/or behaviors.
2. No data exists on what fraction of instantiations of P are in fact due to sexism.
3. A feminist observes a man instantiating P.
4. She then posts this observation on the internet, followed by “sexism is real!” or some similar remark.
5. Men (whether anti-feminists, non-feminists, or dissenting feminists) observe that this directly implies (in that it is a non-sequitor otherwise) that the particular instantiation she observed was due to sexism, and protest that she is making unjustified assumptions about the dude in question.
6. Other feminists leap to her defense, on the grounds that instantiations of P motivated by sexism exist, so obviously it’s reasonable to allege that a particular instantiation of P is motivated by sexism!
In addition to “men not following [many/any] women on twitter,” I have seen this pattern for P = “men not owning [many/any] books by women,” “men putting up pinups/liking pinup-style artwork generally,” “men explaining things to women in a authoritative fashion [‘mansplaining’],” and a bajillion media tropes, all just off the top of my head.
This is, ultimately, defamatory, and I think it’s entirely reasonable for men to get angry about it.
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OK, so I did a kind of fly-by read of “Feminism is For Everyone”, so take this as you will…
…but it was like reading about an alien world where I don’t live. For eg., quoth hooks:
“Males as a group have and do benefit the most from patriarchy,
from the assumption that they are superior to females and should
rule over us. But those benefits have come with a price. In return for
all the goodies men receive from patriarchy, they are required to
dominate women, to exploit and oppress us, using violence if they
must to keep patriarchy intact.”
And phases like this, undefended, to be (as far as I can tell) taken as axiomatic, are repeated through-out the text.
I barely know what to do with this – as a characterization of how I (or any man I know) relates to women, or what “goodies” I get as a man… This is completely incongruous with my experience.
Why should I take this claim seriously?
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It’s also worth noting that, at least in the introduction and first six chapters (how far I’ve gotten), this is the only harm to men that she describes feminism as opposing, that they are (supposedly) compelled by society to do violence to women, and some of them would rather not. Also, for bonus fun, she defines “patriarchy” as “another way of naming sexist oppression” (or something very near that; I don’t have the file open at the moment), but never defines “sexist oppression,” taking it’s meaning as a given!
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Hooks never clearly defines terms such as patriarchy or sexism or privilege but simply uses them and assumes everybody knows what they mean. If somebody disagrees with one of her conclusions she never considers the possibility that they might be using different definitions or have different operating assumptions or that she might be mistaken – she instead claims those who disagree must be “in denial” or “unable to make a logical leap” because her ideas are too “challenging”.
This appears to make her assertions argument-proof and not really amenable to the methods of rationality.
For instance, [pdf] page 32: “all white women in this nation know that whiteness is a privileged category. The fact that white females may choose to repress or deny this knowledge does not mean they are ignorant; it means they are in denial.”
or p.37: when people “are told that domestic violence is the direct outcome of sexism, that it will not end until sexism ends, they are unable to make this logical leap because it requires challenging and changing fundamental ways of thinking about gender.”
My reaction to those two: (1) I don’t know if “whiteness” is a privileged category because you haven’t clearly defined what constitutes a “privileged category”, so I doubt “all white women” know it either. (2) I don’t know if DV is the direct outcome of sexism mainly because you haven’t clearly defined sexism, and I’d kind of like to see some *evidence* on the question of whether one entails the other and that one will “end” when the other does, given that you seem to think this is an important claim with which “most folks” disagree.
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That quote about white women sounds kinda like something a religious cult leader would say…
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Re assertion #2:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth_model
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This method of arguing might explain why SJ never really takes hold with STEM people. When you tell someone who groks quantum mechanics and topology or is fluent in LISP and Assembler, that the reason they don’t understand your argument is that they’re too stupid, they will laugh straight in your face. On a good day.
The most charitable interpretation would be that you did a horrible job of explaining it – at the very least worse than most science textbooks, which is already a pretty low bar. The likely explanation is that you’re talking nonsense.
Now, there are actually a few people who are talking sense about these topics (most notably, our host). But their conclusions differ from the mainstream SJ opinion often enough that this is compatible with the rest of the movement mostly spouting gibberish of varying loudness and angryness.
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I’m in STEM and fluent in LISP — in fact in my day job I write mostly LISP — and I’m pro-SJ. Of course, I find most STEM people are *not* fluent in QM, nor particularly adept at things like LISP or Assembler, despite that they want to think of themselves as the super brainy elite. Which is to say, I find people in my field are often quite smart, but often overestimate how smart they are. Likewise, they overestimate how effective their analytical skills are at dealing with messy, hard-to-abstract things, like social stuff. They build towering abstractions that are deeply wrong, but to which they cling desperately.
It takes a genius to be so stubbornly wrong.
So yeah, conversations between such people and social justice advocates can go really poorly, but I would not suggest that is because of the *strengths* of STEM folks. Often it is as much about our flaws.
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I would guess that most SJ belief systems are about as “true” as Christian Science. If someone from STEM has built himself a “theory” about social interaction that probably plays in the same league, but will sound even more stupid, because generally someone coming from hard sciences is less experienced in writing arguments that sound more convincing than they actually are.
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I feel this is probably a thing about bringing methodologies and standards of evidence that work well in one field (or set of fields) into places where they don’t work nearly as well. I mean, I might be wrong, but I don’t think anybody asks for formalized logical proofs (that one might see in math or logic) when talking about things that require experimental evidence. And yet people frequently demand that the social sciences use the same methodologies, heuristics, etc. as the natural sciences, despite the fact that they’re dealing with very different matters that require very different sorts of evidence.
On a semi-related note, I went to the Collins book rather than the hooks book after reading this (having already skimmed Feminism is for Everybody a few years back), and I’m wishing more of the other people in this thread had done the same. She actually talks explicitly about the epistemological issues at work in her feminism, which is pretty darn useful. bell hooks’s book is pretty good for getting a grip on what she believes, but not quite as great at providing an explanation for why she believes it. Which is fine—I think it’s intended more as a programmatic piece than as an academic one, and it works well in that regard—but the result is less useful for the crowd here, methinks.
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I found the experience of reading bell hooks sufficiently puzzling that I just spent some time delving through wikipedia, wherein it is claimed that hooks is “postmodern” and “post-structuralist”. I don’t really speak either of those dialects, nor do I speak marxist. My impression is that hooks just says stuff that “sounds true” to her (and similarly “sounds true” to some of her readers) but she doesn’t have what I would consider a “theory” underlying it and isn’t really interested in arguing for the validity of any of the claims she makes – they’re just “true for you” if they *feel* true. If you want to find a justification for the crazier-sounding parts – or even enough context for it to seem less than crazy – this isn’t the right book for that. (Though she wrote 30 books, so maybe some OTHER book of hers is better in that regard?)
The main thing of use I got from this book is reinforcement of the impression that there are lots of different competing strains of feminism and they collectively believe a lot of (often conflicting) weird things.
Something else I noticed is that in the rare case that hooks IS arguing against a specific stated opposing view, it’s that of either (a) “conservative pundits”, or (b) other feminists (often “middle-class white women”). For all I know, she might be scoring major points in these conflicts – I’m affiliated with neither (a) nor (b) so I couldn’t say for sure. What is pretty clear is that she’s never arguing *against* anything even vaguely resembling “skeptical” or “rationalist” views. There probably SHOULD be a book called _3rd-wave Feminism for Rationalists_ but I don’t think it’s been written yet.
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@Veronica D: I agree that the STEM people might sometimes actually be wrong and not understand the argument. But telling them that’s because they’re too stupid *will* end up even more poorly than with anyone else. Smart people being used to being right is only part of it, though. The main issue is that we are used to having easy ways to check who’s right.
It’s even worse when SJ people are also using words with a definition that differs from the one found in the dictionaries or are trying to be deliberately obtuse in other ways. In natural sciences, this is a reliable warning sign of cranks, but it is also depressingly common with social sciences “elites”.
To sum the position up as drastically as possible: Arguments need to be logical, even when they are about people who sometimes behave illogically. If you can’t form a string of logical arguments based on known facts and proven (or at the very least provable) by observations, you don’t even know enough about the subject to be entitled to an opinion, let alone make anyone listen to it.
That may sound incredibly arrogant, but any scientist worth their salt will hold themselves to that standard, and is IMHO well justified to apply it to others as well.
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But telling them that’s because they’re too stupid *will* end up even more poorly than with anyone else.
Such as telling a highly honored Black professor that her arguments are poorly-thought nonsense? To me, that’s something that could easily be taken the wrong way.
But yes, telling someone they’re wrong because they’re stupid – or even because they’re “mindkilled” – is unlikely to go well. I agree.
I don’t know if you identify with Less Wrong or not. But this is certainly my experience of trying to read LW, and often of having disagreements with LW people; there is an extremely heavy reliance on LW terms of art. I wouldn’t say that they’re being “deliberately obtuse” (and neither are SJ people), but I would say that overreliance on terms of art can be a real problem when talking to people who are not part of your bubble.
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Exactly. I’ve seen the anti-SJ side make some profoundly stupid arguments, and plenty of those people consider themselves “STEM.”
I mean, I don’t know if they are badass Assembler programmers or whatever (I doubt it), but they have all the petty elitism of the STEM crowd.
For the record, Julia Serano is a biologist, which makes her (strictly speaking) STEM.
(Which actually I think is a big part of why she is so good. She knows how to communicate like a scientist. This matters a lot.)
Anyway, blah blah blah. Both sides do it. But both sides actually do, and criticizing SJ cuz we use words with technical definitions — that’s just a bad argument. Myself, I often find the way SJ people use their vocabulary to be sub-optimal, but we should want to believe true things, even when talking to people who don’t use their words all that well. You can find SJ advocates who use words more skillfully. I would expect smart people to seek them out.
Just as I argue with my opponents *here* rather than on stupid Reddit forums. I could spend quite some time talking about the positively idiotic things the anti-SJ crowd says on Reddit, but how would that be worth my time, or yours?
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The point I was trying to make about the “you don’t get my clever arguments because you’re stupid” thing was not primarily that it’s a bad idea to insult people you’re trying to convince. What I was getting at is that it is a very poorly covered rhetorical trick to make your argument immune to refutation – and anyone with some basic exposure to logic will know it for what it is.
On technical terms used by LWers: Yes, they sometimes like to use technical terms when plain English would suffice. But at least they have the decency to invent new terms so you don’t confuse them with something that already has a meaning. And I have yet to see one of them create confusion on purpose just to call their opponent ignorant. Actually, this is precisely why I like to talk with the LW crowd: They expect you to know all the rhetorical tricks and won’t insult your intelligence by trying them on you.
“You can find SJ advocates who use words more skillfully. I would expect smart people to seek them out.”
Which is exactly what I’m doing right here, right now 🙂
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Re: Collins
I skipped ahead to the section on “Black Feminist Epistemology”. It begins like this:
“A small girl and her mother passed a statue depicting a European man who had barehandedly subdued a ferocious lion.The little girl stopped, looked puzzled and asked,
“Mama, something’s wrong with that statue. Everybody knows that a man can’t
whip a lion.” “But darling,” her mother replied, “you must remember that the man
made the statue.” —As told by Katie G. Cannon”
I was curious, so I did a google image search. The thing that comes up most often is “Hercules fighting the Nimean Lion” from the *Labours* of Hercules myth. Wikipedia:
“According to one version of the myth, the Nemean lion took women as hostages to its lair in a cave near Nemea, luring warriors from nearby towns to save the damsel in distress.”
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@roe: I think it’s also quite telling that “that can’t be right; everybody knows that [uncited categorical statement]” is apparently being treated as a perfectly sensible reaction.
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ITT: Picking nits.
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I’m pretty sure one of the following three options is true. Either:
1) no “nit” picked in this thread justifies either a re-evaluation of trust in the work discussed, or an increase or reconfirmation of skepticism towards the bulk of the claims made,
2) some nits do justify these things, but not enough to warrant significant skepticism in the main functionality of the work,
or
3) there is substance to the points being made in this thread that deserves to be addressed – and if you find this option to be the necessary one, then you’ve been picking nits about picking nits.
If not 3), it seems good form to spell out which of 1) or 2) it is. And no, pointing this out isn’t just nitpicking.
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Feminist discourse, like any body of discourse that gets big enough, contains internal disagreements and factionalism. If one wishes to criticize a feminist work, this fact can be taken advantage of.
ITT: I am pattern-matching the criticism I’m seeing with the sorts of writings that smart freshman philosophy majors create. The criticisms aren’t wrong, but they seem rather weak. They seem along the lines of “I do not endorse this because” rather than “You should not endorse this because”. To use metaphor, they are trying to dissect the corpus with a butter knife, rather than a scalpel.
Why pick a nit, when one can slit a throat?
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Hooks, [pdf] p48: “patriarchal male dominance in marriage and partnerships has been the primary force creating breakups and divorces in our society.”
Me: If that claim were true wouldn’t it predict MORE divorces in the 1950s (prior to the rise of feminism) and FEWER starting the 1970s when femism really got going? And isn’t that the exact opposite of what actually happened?
Hooks, p43: “Future feminist studies will document all the ways anti-sexist male parenting enhances the life of children…”
Me: …assuming there ARE any…
Hooks, p54: “the utopian notion that feminism would be the theory and lesbianism the practice was continually disrupted by the reality that [lesbian couples also engage in domestic violence etcetera]”
Me: Wait, WHAT? It’s not only a “popular slogan” (p49) but is also a “utopian notion”(p54) that feminists should be lesbians and vice-versa?
Hooks, p64:”the safety and continuation of life on the planet requires feminist conversion of men.”
Me: Um, given the *prior* quote it seems like “continuation of [human] life on the planet” might be better served by /less/ feminism…
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I’m about as non-feminist as you can get, but merely stating that something is considered utopian doesn’t mean one endorses it. In a book that is about feminism, the fact that, for a period of time, a non-negligible part of the movement went all segregationist, is expected to be acknowledged.
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I’ve read a about 50 pages of “Feminism is for Everybody”. I think I have to commend bell hooks because given her beliefs about the world the text is quite the olive branch to be handing men. If I take the premises of her text as a given then women are under constant violent threat of men as a result of social distortions emanating from patriarchy. If that is consistent with what many feminists believe then I am definitely sympathetic to their anger. The book is incredibly forgiving on that level in that she says that she’s ready for men to be allies in creating a free society.
I am not much a literary type but I think this is a striking comparison to the oppression present everywhere and infecting people’s minds in 1984 and the type of society that bell hooks describes us as living in. I think that if bell hooks is right then there is ample reason for women everywhere to simply declare war on men. I appreciate learning about what this powerful group of women believes particularly as they have a growing influence on society.
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If I take the premises of her text as a given then women are under constant violent threat of men as a result of social distortions emanating from patriarchy. If that is consistent with what many feminists believe then I am definitely sympathetic to their anger.
Would it not make sense to determine whether the premises are correct before deciding to be sympathetic to the anger? History is full of atrocities committed by people who were full of righteous anger based on incorrect premises.
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I feel like this is a failure mode of a lot of SJ rhetoric around “always listen to victimized and oppressed groups”; namely, that every group claims oppression. It’s only by evaluating claims of oppression against what we see in the real world that we can determine which are worth listening to.
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My argument is not that there isn’t a place for challenging the premises, and accusing an entire gender of committing assault (i.e. imminent harmful or offensive contact with a person) against another gender requires meeting a certain burden of proof. With that said, I have been assaulted in the past and I am deeply sympathetic with such fears. I reacted to my experience by being irrationally afraid of things that did not actually threaten me. Rebuilding my life came from people who first reached out to understand what I was feeling.
The fear implied by a belief in patriarchy that is essentially a deep mistrust of men. I am unconvinced that demanding proof is going to be constructive towards building trust (i.e. see any political conflict anywhere). I would rather do nothing or take steps to empathize and understand.
Additionally, by pointing out that it is a premise then I am implying it is unargued. My desired tone, though, is not one of combativeness but hopefully of intellectual engagement. I would rather draw attention to what the work says about the many feminists that think its an excellent introduction. We all took a look at it precisely because a particular group thinks its important, so I will reflect on what the text means for that group.
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OTH, I’m about 10% of the way through Excluded and I’m finding it very interesting – if I have it right, she has abdicated maleness, while being shut out of femaleness. (I’m respectfully not following Ozy’s advice on the first part because the first bit seems highly personal and narrative-y and, well, it’s a POV that’s entirely foreign to me – maybe I’ll lose patience with it and skip to the second part once Serano dives into the theory)
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I don’t really have time to read the rest of the comments right now so my apologies if this has been already said or already addressed, but–
It seems like, based on the comments I have read, that “Feminism is for Everybody” is not a very good introduction after all. I mean, I get the impression people want different things from an introduction. I’m reminded of an earlier comment of mine — there’s plenty of “feminism 101” etc. FAQs on the internet. If you have any objection to feminism, you can expect to be pointed to one quickly. Thing is, firstly, they never seem to address any real serious objections; and, secondly and more importantly, they all seem to take assume a lot of feminist ideas to begin with, making them useless to anyone who doesn’t already accept those ideas.
So:
#1. What should we read if we want a thorough defense of (some variety of) feminism, that seriously attempts to anticipate all possible counterarguments?
#2. More importantly, what should we read if we want “feminism from the foundations” — something that builds up feminist concepts one by one, justifying each one, with solid argument structure? Like ideally I want something that will allow me to pinpoint the foundation of my disagreement with those feminist ideas I disagree with (unless of course it convinces me of them!).
(…I’m guessing that the answer to the second might end up being “Excluded”. Of course, if that’s the case, what does that say about everything that came before it?
)
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This is probably as good of a place to ask this question as any –
When a feminist says something like “patriarchy benefits men”, how often do they mean that it benefits men relative to women (i.e. it hurts men, but it hurts women more, so men are worse off in net but better off than women) and how often do they mean that it benefits men in an absolute sense?
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There probably SHOULD be a book called _3rd-wave Feminism for Rationalists_ but I don’t think it’s been written yet.
I nominate Ozy to write this book!
(I hope I’m doing italics right.)
I’ve read about half of bell hooks’ Feminism Is For Everybody, and like a lot of the other commenters I am not very impressed. This isn’t to knock hooks’ contribution to feminism as a whole, which I’m sure is in many ways substantial, but I think the book has a lot of problems, especially if it’s seen as an introduction to feminism for newcomers or skeptics.
It’s rather jargony and allusive (which is not inclusive to newcomers), and it’s filled with generalizations and questionable claims (some of which are documented by other commenters), and it doesn’t define key terms very well.
I appreciate her focus on intersectionality regarding race and class, and for her criticizing the feminist movement for its frequent failure to address these issues, and for being very accepting of men in the movement. I also like a number of her ideas in the abstract, such as consciousness-raising seminars and classes, etc. I just wish it all had more meat on its bones. She doesn’t cite statistics or provide concrete examples of the kinds of things she’s talking about. It’s just all very vague and floaty. I’ll finish the book, but I can’t recommend it to anyone.
However, I REALLY like Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl. Now THAT is a good feminism book, period, as well as a good transfeminism book. She defines her key terms and relates them to one another. She explains how numerous kinds of sexist beliefs and attitudes and behaviors and depictions are seen throughout society–always citing specific examples, explaining why they’re sexist, explaining why they’re harmful, and giving some plausible hypotheses for why people are fooled into accepting and perpetuating them. Wonderful. (But as others have noted, Serano’s writing is apparently very weak on issues of race and class.)
Whipping Girl is a rationalist’s feminism book, or very nearly one, and it covers some of the best feminist ideas while also being critical of a lot of questionable rival feminist ideas. It’s the next best thing to a feminism 101 book I know, although I think it’s a bit higher level than 101 so I’m not sure how accessible it is to newcomers.
I will soon read Excluded and look forward to it. (Natalie Reed has hard-hitting criticisms of it regarding race, though. Which is one reason I’ll probably read Black Feminist Thought afterward. Hopefully it’s more specific like Serano, rather than vague like hooks.)
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