The Costs of Antifeminism: Ruminations on Access to Feminism

Originally posted at http://jmwinck.wordpress.com
In “I’m Not a Feminist, But…” Penny Weiss examines familiar stereotypes of feminism and feminists. She points out that “[f]eminism is unaccepted by too many with too much power,” and that powerful meaning-makers who are antifeminist often determine what feminism is. Consequently, “much less visible to too many with both too much and too little power are the costs of antifeminism.” While Weiss offers a few, “rape, domestic violence, self-hatred, poverty, and lost potential,” many costs deserve greater consideration, as women have long suffered because of antifeminism’s stubbornness.

I’m sure many antifeminists would disagree that stubbornness determines what philosophies and policies they will and will not embrace; but taking a look at a few proposals aimed at giving women anything from greater legal strength against the inevitability of harrassment to a greater, safer range of medical and reproductive options, we would see that it is often downright refusal to entertain women’s betterment that shuts down conversations and keeps many women and communities suffering. Recently a young girl asked Republican presidential nominee John McCain about his vote against equal pay for women. He said the only people likely to benefit from this proposal would be lawyers. Too many lawsuits, he said. Compare this with too many women forced to have too few options, with substantial and ignored consequences.
Something else to consider: am I too generously labeling antifeminists as I see them? What if those I call antifeminist are ignorant of feminism, and would not identify as such? They are, instead, anti-welfare, anti-lawsuits, anti-abortion, etc. Sometimes people believe feminism has nothing to do with it.
Still, they should not be excused from the responsibility of fully examining the consequences of their “ignorance.” Certainly it is ignorant to accept that you just don’t know and just don’t care to know how your votes, or your positions, disproportionately affect certain groups of individuals. It is worse when this ignorance is made a permanent blind spot in people’s minds simply because antifeminism has required it to be so: “Feminism is radical, I don’t know anything about it. It is so out there that I can’t even consider implementing it into my personal philosophy.”
If feminism was what antifeminists say it is, I wouldn’t be able to accept it, either. Who defined “antifeminism,” anyway? Feminists, or antifeminists? Ironically, we feminists can identify antifeminists/ism without necessarily fully defining feminism; and antifeminists, in quite a lot of detail, can identify feminism and unifyingly exercise their resistance against it. Is this antifeminism’s failure to embrace complexity, nuance, and contradiction, and/or is it an indication that feminism might be relying on what it is not to represent what it is? We feminists have long had difficulty defining feminism as one or even a few specific things. We rely on explanation, examples, personal narratives, wide-ranging theory that might require an extensive commitment to understanding the nature of oppression, dominance, hierarchies.
Definitions are diverse even as we all claim the same name. We embrace nuance and contradiction; those who have most power in making meaning don’t often use complex outlets to present knowledge. Is there a feminist news channel? Would it just be “our version” of the news? Would it be scorned the way women’s studies in the academy is scorned? We all want to believe we are presenting the truth, somebody’s truth, against the persistent accusation that we only seek to indoctrinate and become the dominant class, even as we consistently envision a world without dominance.
In a couple of months, I will begin leading a college class called Women, Culture and Society. Is it ideal that feminism is explored in the classroom, under the guidance and explanation of a feminist professor? Perhaps students would understand sexism more fully than if they overheard a boiled-down version from the news, where a white woman still supporting Hillary Clinton can be heard talking about a stolen election. The terms she uses, “sexism” and “oppression,” are part of a code, a type of shorthand that eliminates huge bodies of knowledge so that we are able to say what we mean in the few minutes that we have.
When I experienced my own feminist transition, one of the first things to change was the way I spoke about the world. I learned the language; I implemented it to speak about even trivial things, in otherwise meaningless interactions. Perhaps I wanted to show off what I was learning. I was, I see now, observing the social world through a different lens, one that I was proud to know other women had brought to light in many important books. I came to feminism through them. I used both the classroom and my everyday life to perfect an aggressive, unmodified feminist lifestyle. This was, of course, based on what I believed feminism to be. It changes radically all the time. For instance, I don’t believe feminism to be a lifestyle now. Being only a personal solution at the time, feminism bolstered me in many ways. I had greater confidence as someone who had always suspected, but wasn’t ever certain or entirely proven right, that people treated me differently because I was a woman.
Feminism is still a personal solution for me in many ways, but continuing to read and learn about feminism has shown me that many feminists stop fighting for other women once they see their own personal solutions don’t solve other women’s problems.
So how do we explain our message given only a short amount of time? (While, of course, continuing to perfect our message.) We are in the front of the classroom, or at our retail jobs, or in the back of the classroom, or interacting with friends and family. Can we, and do we, do it without beginning at the root every time?