#saying that most radical feminists are either married and/or with children is just me stating a fact

[1yyyyyy1]

It should be common sense at this point that radical feminism is a movement by and for male-partnered women.

In lieu of getting to know the movement better, I was frequently prompted to read the works of its prominent figures like Gail Dines and Andrea Dworkin, so I did. What I saw was a mixture of uninformed reformism and severe lesbophobia. Their writing is completely in line with the notions that circulate radical spaces. It would not be uncalled for to assume that the marital status of the poster children is the reason they are admired and quoted; it affirms women's life choices.

[ladyloveandjustice]

OK, it’s bugging me, because I need to talk about Grant Morrison vs Original Wonder Woman and how Morrison failed at homaging it. 

It ties into stuff that’s been discussed elsewhere, like with the Star Trek reboot- if you really want to capture the spirit of something that was socially challenging 40 or 70 years ago, you can’t just reproduce that thing. Because what was groundbreaking or shocking 40-70 years ago isn’t socially groundbreaking now. Instead, you’ve got to look at what IS groundbreaking in today’s society and go with that. 

Wonder Woman was genuinely controversial when it came out in the 40s.Some parts of it were standard for it’s day- the jingoism and racism was typical bigoted white guy bullshit that dominated most of media- but the core message of it was genuinely shocking. Emphasized over and over again was this idea women are just as good as men but society was holding them back, that women can break free of that and be strong if the help each other, that they don’t have to aspire to being submissive to a man, that they can be dominant. It depicted marriage as a form of oppression, it has a main character whose WORST NIGHTMARE was being married to a man, if was dripping with so many queer implications Frederick Wertham declared it the spawn of Satan and the worst of all comics.

The bondage stuff was also genuinely pushing the envelope as far as controversy goes, people were very upset about it and believed it would encourage perversion. Sex wasn’t talked about openly back then. But the feminism and gay panic were just as huge. Marston would explain the deep (and often bullshit) psychological reasoning behind all his decisions with the utmost sincerity. He truly believed the bondage thing was essential  

Letters came pouring in. Professionals denounced it. The editor was constantly frantic and concerned, he kept talking to psychologists to make sure this was okay. He friggin’ interviewed Lauretta Bender, the head child psychologist at Bellevue hospital, who was so impressed by the feminist aspect she didn’t even mind the bondage aspect and espoused the then-radical idea that kids can’t “learn” to be kinky or “perverted” from media, it just makes them aware of desires they already had. If they aren’t actually interested in bondage, this comic will not awaken that interest and they likely wouldn’t even really notice the bondage. What was more important to her was that the comic taught kids women and men should be equal, since she did very passionately believe comics could educate, comfort children and teach morality.

In contrast, another women thought the sex stuff was unforgivable and the feminism aspect was uncomfortable. But note how women were consulted about this. Note how Alice Marble, a female editor, was bought in, and it was her idea to do a back-up that highlighted “Wonder Women of History” which gave information about badass historical ladies to further inspire girls and impress on boys women have always been awesome (there is even a later story where a young boy complains to Wonder Woman he hates studying women in history because “girls are sissies”, so she makes him time travel with her and introduces him to all the amazing, overlooked things women have done, at which point he changes his mind and becomes interested in women’s history).  

So let me say it first- if Morrison really wants to reproduce the feel of 1940s Wonder Woman, he has to involve women in the process somewhere, because even in the 19-fucking-40s a woman was involved with producing Wonder Woman. He also would have to tie his comic deeply with the modern feminist movement. Stuff in Wonder Woman was deliberately evocative of first wave feminism and tackled first wave feminist issues. But those issues aren’t as relevant today. You can’t just have a stereotypical gross guy make some sexist comments and have Wonder Woman throw him to the ground and be like “there i’ve addressed feminism just like Marston did”. It has to be GENUINELY CONTROVERSIAL FEMINISM. For today, that would mean weaving in commentary about abortion, about toxic masculinity, about rape culture, trans issues- being blatantly opinionated about stuff that’s genuinely controversial.

Depicting bondage isn’t controversial in modern day comics. it’s been done. Writers have put their kinks blatantly on display for quite a while. Depicting two women kissing in a super sexualized way isn’t controversial or pushing any envelope, we see it all the fucking time. Having the heroine ditch her girlfriend and literally stomp her in the dirt so she can mack a dude is not controversial either. Nothing in Wonder Woman: Year One by Grant Morrison is genuinely controversial. Women will be groaning about it because they’ve seen this bullshit so much, not because it’s new and shocking. It isn’t pushing any envelope.

If Morrison wanted to be genuinely controversial and groundbreaking, he could have had trans amazons. He could have had Wonder Woman take her girlfriend with her on her adventure and tell Steve she was going to have to accept she was polyamourous and her gf wasn’t going anywhere if he wanted a relationship. He should have done a story full of political commentary. He could have hired an artist who was involved in doing pro-feminist cartoons, because Harry Peter, the original Wonder Woman artist, caught Marston’s attention because of his pro-suffrage cartoons. He shouldn’t have hired someone who draws women like they’re constantly orgasming. 

No stereotypical cis straight male is gonna read WW Year One by Morrison and feel threatened. They may feel pretty turned on by it, but it’s gonna be another in the pile of comics they masturbate too, no big deal. 

And you know why they won’t feel challenged? Because Morrison doesn’t sincerely believe that people can find freedom through loving submission and bondage is the key of happiness, he doesn’t genuinely believe women should take over the world and also sexually dominate men, he isn’t a person with a lot of connections to the feminist movement and he doesn’t publish controversial opinions about queerness.

Marston once published an book that claimed “homosexuality” shouldn’t be treated as abnormal and being “perverse” was healthy. That was genuinely a huge, unusual, shocking opinion to have in the 1940s. Marston took a risk in publishing it. Has Morrison done anything like that? Is he living an “alternative sexual lifestyle?” No. 

Morrison doesn’t actually buy Marston’s politics, which could be said of most people today and is largely a good thing because they’re deeply flawed even if they were groundbreaking in their day in some ways. Yet he still tried to reproduce them beat for beat and it resulted in a garbage precisely because he wasn’t sincere. He doesn’t actually believe in this shit. Marston’s sincerity is what made Wonder Woman groundbreaking, but it isn’t present in WW Year One.

Instead, he amps up the fetishy aspect, throws queerness in there solely for titillation, show a women being chained up and threatened with rape as sexy and alluring and there is no substance to any of it. It’s a shallow, rote recreation of the 1940′s comics with none of the good elements of it present, because the guy behind it doesn’t understand he has to be sincere for this to work. 

You want to know how badly Morrison missed the point and doesn’t get what the original comics were doing? He states that he thinks it’s boring the relationships between the women in the original comics were so supportive, so he’s going to add in some antagonism.

 Despite the fact “women supporting each other brings out their truth strength and if they do that they can overthrow patriarchal society” was THE MAIN POLITICAL MESSAGE of the original comics and is STILL so controversial today that every single adaptation really downplays it and tries to present the Amazons as “bad” for relying on each other instead of men. Even the movie drastically downplayed that aspect by having Diana mostly only interact and form bonds with men after leaving the island, with Etta getting only a bit role. It’s also why the "daughter of Zeus” thing has replaced her original origin, even modern day people cannot fucking stand the idea of a woman who doesn’t need a man to be involved in her life and to be the source of her power. 

But no, Morrison thinks that part is bullshit and wants to depict women as holding each other back.He thinks “female oppression” should be depicted as some random woman being put on a leash by a guy as she sexily eats from a dog bowl with her ass on full display, and it shouldn’t get more nuanced than that.

If you really want to pay homage to Marston and reproduce what Wonder Woman means, you have to take risks. You have to trumpet a feminist idealogy you SINCERELY BELIEVE IN. You have to tie it deeply into the modern feminist struggle. 

Morrison did not do any of that, and that is precisely why his comic failed at paying any kind of meaningful tribute to Wonder Woman and is instead an offensive mess.

[theresgloryforyou]

It’s a really good idea for all Radical Feminists to remember that we are part of a philosophical movement.  Feminism, in it’s true form, is a philosophy, and a philosophical stance.  One of the biggest failings of liberal feminism certainly is the complete inability to commit to an actual position-- and a total inability to articulate good reasons to commit to those stances.  This is why it is inconsistent and, frankly, useless, and imho isn’t actual Feminism at all.

(A long time ago a former colleague of mine sneeringly said to me,  “Oh, do you know who Andrea Dworkin was?”  and I said,  “You mean the Feminist Philosopher?”  and he was completely nonplussed.  He was taken aback.  He was unable to respond.  Because of course that’s exactly what she was, and yet no one is really used to seeing any women, much less Radical Feminist Womyn, as PHILOSOPHERS.  That’s, um, that’s a MAN’S job, you can almost hear them internally screaming.  Try it sometime, it’s a hoot.)

Anyway, here’s a good summary of the history of Feminist Anarchism and the contributions of Voltairine de Cleyre specifically.  A small excerpt:

Voltairine’s importance as a feminist rests primarily on her willingness to confront issues such as female sexuality and the emotional and psychological, as well as economic, dependence on men within the nuclear family structure. Though a few other writers, most notably socialist feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, dealt with issues of the family and women’s economic dependence, much of the organized women’s movement of that time was far more wrapped up in the issue of women’s suffrage. Mainstream documents such as the Seneca Falls Declaration had raised important issues about the nature of marriage and several prominent feminists, including John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, even entered into written marriage contracts to repudiate existing law and custom, but Voltairine’s radical anarchist individualist philosophy took the analysis of marriage a step beyond.

Voltairine and the anarchist feminists did not just question the unfair nature of marriage laws of that time, they repudiated institutional marriage and the conventional family structure, seeing in these institutions the same authoritarian oppression as they saw in the institution of the State. Though some, like Lillian Harman, daughter of anarchist publisher Moses Harman, were willing to participate in non-State, non-Church private wedding ceremonies and others, like Voltairine, denounced even the concept of a private ceremony, all were united in their opposition to State-sanctioned and licensed marriage.

Voltairine, while not rejecting love, was among those most vehemently opposed to marriage of any kind, a theme best explicated in “Those Who Marry Do Ill.” In an age when men had almost total control over the family as well as the wife, when most women were economically dependent on men, and when women’s chief duty was to her husband and family, even to the point of self-sacrifice, Voltairine understandably viewed marriage as slavery, a theme she developed further in “The Woman Question.”

Voltairine’s fierce advocacy of individual autonomy, “the freedom to control her own person,” was the cornerstone of her denunciation of marriage, an institution that she saw as crippling to the growth of the free individual. “It is the permanent dependent relationship,” Voltairine writes in “The Woman Question”, “which is detrimental to the growth of individual character to which I am unequivocally opposed.” This advocacy led her to a position more radical than all but the most radical of contemporary women — a call for separate living quarters. Seeing dependency as a sure way to lose one’s individuality, she even advised against living together with the man one loves in a non-marriage love relationship if it means becoming his housekeeper.

This desire for autonomy, “a room of one’s own,” a separate space to grow and explore one’s own individuality, though appearing as early as the late 18th century writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, is a theme still being examined today among mainstream feminists. However, though many feminists may now eschew formal marriage in their love relationships (at least till children come along), relatively few of them have been willing to emulate the example of feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir when she decided not only not to marry her livelong lover, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, but to live separately from him as well. Voltairine would have understood her motivation very well, not only because of the issue of individual autonomy but also because she believed that love could only be kept alive at a distance. Though many feminists have thought about the potentially negative psychological effects of living together in a love relationship, the issue is still very much alive, often unresolved in individual women’s lives, and certainly deserving of more consideration.

Opposition to the economic dependence of women

An integral part of the anarchist feminist opposition to institutional marriage was their belief that the chief source of women’s oppression within marriage was their economic dependence on men. This was a theme explored frequently by many anarchist feminists in the pages of anarchist journals such as Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty and Moses Harman’s more avowedly pro-women’s rights Lucifer. In “The Case of Women vs. Orthodoxy,” Voltairine asserts that material conditions determine the social relations of men and women, suggesting that if economic conditions change, women’s inequality would disappear. Though she, like her compatriots in both the communist and individualist camps, deplored the wretched living conditions of the working classes in the big cities and had a negative view of the capitalism of that time, Voltairine blessed capitalists for making women’s economic independence possible. As unpleasant as the jobs might be, at least they were jobs actually available to women, a rarity in that time.

The relevance of Voltairine de Cleyre’s views on marriage today

In today’s more socially enlightened times, Voltarine’s opposition to marriage and even living together may seem anachronistic and unnecessary. We need not, however, espouse living alone to see that her stance raises important questions about the extent to which individual autonomy is possible in a relationship that involves not only living together but the inevitable compromises of family life. Is it possible to maintain individuality within the confines of family obligations? Are family obligations distributed equitably or is it the wife or mother who must inevitably bear the major burden of responsibility for childcare and household work and the husband or father the major economic burden? Is the division-making power distributed equitably or is the one who is most economically independent the one who has the most say? Can autonomy be maintained if either the woman or the man is economically dependent? In a conflict, how can a woman maintain her autonomy without sacrificing either others in the family or herself? That issues are still a problem in many modern households is clear from studies such as sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift, which shows that women still do most of the domestic cleaning and childcare even when they have jobs outside the home.

Though such questions have been explored by contemporary feminists, the issues raised are far from settled. This is not merely a matter of such superficial questions as “can a woman have it all?” that surface frequently in popular women’s magazines. It is a fundamental question about the nature of the family structure as we know it. Though the issue of autonomy is a much discussed theme within feminist writings, the questions raised by Voltarine’s analysis are far from being resolved in actual practice within the family.

Nor do such questions deal with another fundamental and related issue raised by the anarchist feminists: should the State be involved in the institution of marriage? A few feminists have commented on the legal and often unknown and unwanted baggage that comes with the State license but most have not confronted the question of why the State has the right to set the terms of what is essentially a private relationship and whether this interference results in more harm than good.

[madfootpsych-blog]

Portfolio Assignment, Chapter 1

Which of the life-span theories do you think best explains your own development? Why?

My development was shaped by two dominant forces: my home (family), and my school. I am still untangling multiple neuroses and harmful patterns of behavior by reaching back to my early development, a process I return to every ten years or so, and it helps a lot. This leads me to conclude that Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory is the best lens through which to examine my development.

Bandura’s theory “emphasizes that cognitive processes have important links with the environment and behavior” (Santrock, 24); that is, a child learns by observing the behavior of others, trying out various versions of this behavior, and adopting the ones that work best for him.

In my childhood, I saw my mom being dominant at home and often being verbally aggressive with my dad and with us kids. I grew up to have what was called a “smart mouth,” because that was what I knew. When I started dating, boys objected to being spoken to that way, and I learned to temper my responses to be more polite. I was bullied at school, and was miserable; the first time I went away to sleep-away camp, I turned on the friends I went with and became the bully. It was a short experiment, and a huge failure. I now understand that I was just trying out what had worked for the most powerful people at my school. I had to force myself to learn to be a good friend, and I’m still chagrinned when I think of my behavior that summer. The part where I examine and adapt my learned behavior to new situations is the “cognition” part of this process.

You and your parents grew up at different points in time. Consider some ways that you are different from your parents. Do you think some of your differences might be due to cohort effects? Explain.

The cohort effect is what some people think of as “generational differences” or “the generation gap” (does anyone use that term anymore?). The theory states that experiences shared by a wide range of people in a particular culture leave an indelible mark (Santrock, 32-33). These shared experiences create a sort of time-sensitive culture that can seem alien to the next generation. This is why you hear people say things like, “In my day, we never would have …” or “These kids today! They have no idea …” It’s true. They have no idea.

My parents were born in 1932 and 1935; I was born in 1967. I can think of several times when the effects of our relative cohorts led to us not seeing eye-to-eye. The first is when my sister Sarah got her ears pierced in college, around the year 1980. Our mom literally screamed at her that she was “a savage!” She had a huge collection of clip-on earrings and never dreamed of putting holes in them. Lo and behold, within a year her own ears were pierced, so I guess she was a savage too. Interestingly, when I got my nose pierced about ten years later, she had a similar reaction, declaring that she was “going to go upstairs and weep.” But she did not get her nose pierced the next year. I guess there’s only so much adjustment one can make.

Another example was when the same sister made the decision to have a baby without being married. This was in the early 1990s, when there were plenty of women making this choice – heck, Murphy Brown, a TV character, had made this choice on the sitcom of the same name, which led to some tsk-tsking from conservative politicians, but no real ill effects on society. Again, our mother wailed and wept and said dreadful things, and I was absolutely horrified. Another of my sisters, Elizabeth, pointed out that Mom had grown up in a very different time, when being born out of wedlock really did make you a social outcast and led to neighbors shunning and shaming you; in our mom’s day, if you were pregnant out of wedlock, you either found a doctor to give you an illegal abortion or you were sent to a home to have the baby and had it taken from you, a process that was devastating for both mother and child, as described in the book The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (Fessler, 2006).

My mother raised me to be a feminist, but what that meant to each of us differed radically. For my mom, in the ‘70s, lesbians asking to be included in the feminist agenda were annoying and distracting. It took years for her thinking to evolve, while for me it was instinctive to put those issues at the forefront. My dad, too, wanted me to be a strong woman, but admitted recently that he would have pushed us, his daughters, into more competitive professions if he had realized we’d be breadwinners. It didn’t occur to him that women would become so economically powerful and achieve the kind of career satisfaction that became possible from his 20s to our 20s. It’s important, as we age, to consider how each new version of society can challenge the notions we took on and to re-assess our core beliefs. Gotta keep evolving. 

References:

Fessler, Ann. (2006). The girls who went away: The hidden history of women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade. New York: Penguin Press.

Santrock, J. W. (2015). Lifespan development (15th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.