If you want to see why modern feminism is in crisis, look no further than Michelle Goldberg’s piece in the latest New Yorker.
She describes how transgender activists are protesting the gatherings of the group “RadFem Responds” with “acts of vandalism — stealing electrical cables, cutting water pipes, keying cars in the parking lot, and spray-painting a six-foot penis, and the words ‘Real Women Have D–ks,’ on the side of the main kitchen tent.”
Wait. What?
The radical feminists are under attack because they don’t accept in their ranks people born as biological men but now convinced they’re women. The RadFemmers argue that the transgendered just aren’t oppressed enough to gain membership.
Goldberg explains their position: “Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman — and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position — the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like.”
Got that?
Yet the RadFem women are apparently in the minority. Most young Women’s Studies majors consider the transgendered to be whatever the transgendered say they are. As Goldberg also reports, an abortion-access group staffed mostly by 20-something volunteers recently “voted unanimously to stop using the word ‘women’ when talking about people who get pregnant, so as not to exclude trans men. ‘We recognize that people who identify as men can become pregnant and seek abortions,’ the group’s new Statement of Values says.”
If you’re not sure which side of this intrafeminist debate sounds more absurd, you’re not alone.
It’s no wonder the hashtag #WomenAgainstFeminism has become so popular. It’s not because, as one Daily Beast column argues, these women “don’t understand feminism.” It’s because they understand feminism and so know that this ideology has nothing to do with their lives.
Jessica Valenti, writing in the Guardian, expressed outrage that more and more women seem to be jumping the feminist ship. How could they? “Anti-feminist organizing is based on a deep hypocrisy and selfishness — an ideology built to assure conservative women that as long as they are doing just fine, other women will make do.
“And they’re putting up roadblocks to progress right in the middle of a renewed feminist awakening, with retrograde sexism that’s ultimately not too different than that of their male counterparts.”
Actually, most conservative women don’t think women are doing just fine. We think that women have suffered as a result of a culture that sees casual sex as empowering, as a result of a liberal project in which government attempted to replace men in the home and as a result of female leaders who undervalue the jobs that women do in the home and then spill gallons of ink wondering why women can’t have it all.
The good news is that more and more women may simply see feminism as irrelevant if not downright harmful to the interests of women (and families).
Even the label “pro-choice” is falling out of favor, as Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, told The New York Times last week: “I just think the ‘pro-choice’ language doesn’t really resonate particularly with a lot of young women voters.”
“Choice” used to be the pithy encapsulation not just of women’s desire to have unlimited access to abortion, but also of feminism more generally. Interesting that it’s just not doing it for the younger crowd any more.
The Times chalks this up to the idea that younger people don’t like “labels,” yet there’s not much evidence that the term “pro-life” is suffering. Perhaps it’s because “pro-life” implies you value something beyond individual autonomy.
But just like the rest of feminism, the term “choice” is fraught with contradiction:
We want you to value individual autonomy above all else — except when we want you to reject certain choices you might make in favor of solidarity with other women.
We want you to see women as victims of everyone and everything — even though feminism is supposed to be empowering.
We want you to express your true nature as women — except we’d prefer you throw the men and children in your lives under the bus.
All of this doublespeak may simply be too much for the younger generation. And so, to the feminist leaders out there, I can only say: Keep talking, ladies.