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Where feminism went wrong
Posted by Pharmakon on 2025-January-2 17:25:15, ThursdayIn reply to Re: Man-Boy Love and Feminism (Thorstad) posted by diogenes on 2025-January-1 15:14:56, Wednesday
In a piece written some 36 years later, Thorstad explains that not just feminism, but all the liberationist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, met a similar fate (what I call "gentrification"):Gay liberation as a radical sexual freedom movement went out pretty much in tandem with the rise of the “LGBT” “movement.” Of course, gay lib wasn’t the only movement of the countercultural 1960s to fade into a pale version of its original self. That was true of all sixties movements. Some, like the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, were murdered into extinction by the authorities. Others, like the women’s movement and the gay/lesbian movement, were co-opted, their more radical elements vanishing or dying off. AIDS killed off many gay male sex radicals. Gay pride marches became corporatized folkloric displays and capitalist advertising venues. Feminism veered off into antimale campaigns demonizing porn, prostitution, public sex, pederasty—the four evil “P’s.”... The Left sank into near irrelevancy following its heyday during the anti-Vietnam War movement and the sixties rebellion. Labor union membership dwindled to 11.3 percent in 2013, compared to 20.1 percent in 1983, and never escaped its stifling ties to the Democrat Party. Of all the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, only an environmental movement continued to show signs of life. Now, almost a decade after Thorstad wrote that, it appears likely the environmental movement too will be beaten into submission as it becomes apparent it would cost the elites of Europe and the Anglophone settler nations their privileged lifestyle to do anything significant about it. The implication of Thorstad's argument about the fate of the 1960s and 1970s movements for social change is that they should be accounted failures. This view, which I share, sharply contrasts with your claim that: "Contemporary women are not any less free than men from any kind of societal oppression." If that claim is correct, either women were not oppressed to begin with, or the women's movement succeeded in eliminating any such oppression. My contention is that the changes in the status of women brought about by feminism have been largely cosmetic, consisting mostly of new language codes and additional positions for elite women in the middle (NOT upper) ranks of economic and political power structures. As Arota correctly observes in a comment linked below, contemporary (gentrified, in my terminology) feminism obsessively focuses on securing participation for females in the labor market for what Musa al-Gharbi calls "symbolic capitalists" and has less (though not quite, as Arota claims, nothing) to say about childcare and childbirth issues, which (especially in the US -- I concede European social democracies have done more) remain central to women's oppression outside of elite circles. #MeToo is an elite movement that has conspicuously failed to address the needs and concerns of working class women. But the targets of its wrath have also been elites. Some, like Matzneff, deserve sympathy and demonstrate a need for more rationality about age, sex, and youth agency. (Tom O'Carroll attempts to bring such rationality to bear.) Others are more like Weinstein (though even in his case the New York appeals court that reversed his convictions properly highlighted the unfair use of uncharged offenses to prejudice a jury against a defendant, a tactic routinely used against MAPs, and one it is hard to believe the court would have dared to challenge had Weinstein been fucking little boys instead of grown women). Sexual victimization of women by powerful and entitled men is exaggerated and sensationalized by the "hegemonic narrative" around #MeToo. But the phenomenon is not invented. Such things do happen and always have happened. Today's feminists are not wrong to raise objections to this kind of behavior. Abandoning struggling working class mothers, not persecuting men of means and privilege who, like Gabriel Matzneff, can well look out for themselves, is the failure for which we should be indicting today's gentrified feminism. And this requires an understanding of feminist movement history that explains how and why it failed, not one that argues it achieved too much success and needs to be rolled back. hugzu ;-p  |
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