check this one out:
http://www.msmagazine.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=14;t=002627I invested years of my life in the movement, I believed in it that much, but the movement is so fucked up leadership-wise and organizational- and focus-wise right now that those years of my early adult life are in the toilet. No woman who believes in and fights for feminism deserves to find herself in the same situation simply because she believed in feminism as an ideal. Feminism as an ideal is not the problem. The movement itself as it currently operates is the problem.
I wish a woman had warned me that the practice of many leaders is not what they write in books, and that all those years of my life literally would be wasted with no progress made whatsoever on any front in this supposed "movement." That by making sacrifices for the movement I would become ripe for viscious personal attack -- by feminists! In the name of feminism! That I would be treated like shit. That the movement has no apparent focus anymore for its activism except when it comes to discrediting, demonizing, and destroying feminists whose views we do not agree with.
Think of the Ms. boards as one specimen of the current movement. Put in a petri dish, with all the current conditions infecting the movement, we have watched exactly the same things occur here that have happened in the larger movement. Exactly the same things. We have "banned" feminists based on their political views because even though they are feminists we can't tolerate diversity in feminist approaches. We have watched as posters have fled in response to jaw-dropping bigotry and hateful behavior practiced here in the name of feminism, disbelieving what they were seeing and wanting no connection to such behavior. Look at how Women of Color have reacted. Look at how Third Wave feminists have reacted. Banned, or fled. Look at who is in control of these boards now, wearing the name "radical feminists". These are not dynamics specific to the Internet or this particular board. These exact same scenerios have played themselves out in the "real" movement -- what, does the "real" movement include everything BUT actual real interactions of real feminists? These exact same arguments have taken place and have led to the same outcome in the larger movement. Ms. is just a microcosm of the bigger animal.
On the subject of sterile words written in books, so much of feminism today is known ONLY through these books that we have educated posters here not even recognizing that this is indeed one of the movement's venues, Internet though it may be. They would argue that this place and its dynamics isn't real, that these interactions of self-proclaimed feminists who voluntarily come here are not part of what makes up the real movement. The movement is words in sterile books, according to these posters.
You CANNOT understand any movement or politics if you believe that the sterile word alone tells you what the theory is and the politics surrounding it. You cannot read the U.S. Constitution and think you "get" the founding politics of the United States -- the personalities and personal dramas that compelled the politics of the time and the inclusion and nonappearance of various protections in the Constitution. You cannot think you know the dynamics of current politics in the United States just because you can recite the U.S. Constitution verbatim and provide citations. It doesn't work that way. Why on earth so many posters here think that they can grasp the current state of the U.S. feminist movement WITHOUT understanding the internal dynamics and fights and dramas that have brought the whole damn thing to the form it is practiced now is absolutely beyond me. But anyway.
The fact is, many many GenX women today and women of color are indeed feminist -- they just no longer work with the movement. Do we want or need a movement? I don't know. But if we do, and we want it to be effective and not a waste of a woman's life to be part of it, then it needs to change. I don't want any other woman to make sacrifices in her own life and submerge herself in the movement as it currently exists, not with how fucked up the movement is right now. It is to throw away her own life. That is not the way the movement should be. Something is fundamentally wrong with the movement and its leadership right now.
We have to think about these things and realize where some of the most problematic behaviors most of us agree are with us in the movement came from -- and then pinpoint who is fostering this behavior, what leadership examples they have given their followers, and question whether the underpinning theory they have used to foster this behavior is even in accord with basic tenets of the politics they say they espouse, because often it isn't.
[ 12-21-2003, 05:14 PM: Message edited by: Laylalola ]
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From: D.C. | Registered: Nov 2000 | IP: Logged |