feminist critique

[piranha]

one in a long if casual series illuminating "why i am not a feminist, but an egalitarian humanist".

this was originally written as a comment in somebody else's LJ, but i decided not to post it because the thread was too old, and because i went off on a tangent. the post that started it regarded a feminist protest of violence against women and children as "duh, like who's in favour of violence these days other than psychos". then there was a reply saying that feminists are doing it because people need to have it pointed out, that everyone accepts violence by strangers as the real thing, but domestic abuse is somehow not viewed as just as bad. and that didn't ring true for me -- but i wonder whether i am now too far removed from the mainstream to have a good feel for what they think. i'm judging mostly by what i read on mainstream news and social commentary on blogs.

i've been straining my brain and i cannot think of any people nowadays openly claiming domestic abuse against women isn't a serious problem, anywhere i read. nobody (in any significant numbers that i can see) wants women be injured by their husbands [*]. i think some feminists might be misreading a reaction against broadening the term "violence" as a denial that abuse happens. i myself do make a distinction between "violence" and "force" (and lots of acquaintance rape uses force, IMO, not violence), but i think either is inappropriate in a supposedly loving relationship; i don't make the distinction in order to trivialize acquaintance rape -- i think it is by far a more serious problem than stranger rape. i think that such protests are done simply because domestic abuse keeps happening. (i'll keep my thoughts about their efficacy for myself just now so this doesn't become about that.) i don't know a single person who thinks domestic abuse is ok, not even a little bit (excepting self-defense).

what i can think of however, is plenty of people who're upset at violence against women, who are outraged at pedophilia -- but they think spanking is ok, and is somehow a totally different thing, not violence at all, not even inappropriate force. and frankly, i don't see feminists at large actually having this on their agenda -- when they do seem to care about children as a matter of policy, it's all about pedophilia as well, and the incredibly common woman-on-child violence is a dirty little secret that is swept under the rug. google some time for hits about spanking and feminism, and you'll find vastly more hits about BDSM and its defense, together with conservative rants against all of what allegedly destroys the family (where feminism and anti-spanking movements are named separately), than you find feminist critique of spanking. i consider feminism's silence on the issue of spanking to be particularly suspicious, since it doesn't happen to fit well with the idea that men are the aggressors and women the victims.

maybe feminism shouldn't be about children but just about women; that'd be sort of ok by me -- though i find some issues hard to separate, especially in the areas of sexual abuse, and well, the battle of equality starts long before the age of majority. but then take children off the signs that purport to be against violence. it's long struck me as a token effort, and i dislike tokenism, especially when it uses children.

i agree that it seems harder for people to empathize with domestic than with stranger violence. i see it in myself; i do empathize just as much initially (if not more; i find abuse by loved ones so much more destructive than abuse by strangers), but i have difficulties maintaining that empathy when somebody stays in an abusive situation (assuming no death threats are involved), when somebody falls more than once for the abject apology route after the abuse, when somebody says "but i love him!". if anything, i think feminism needs to support those women more, because they obviously still have very bad tapes running in their heads with "stand by your man" as the soundtrack, and some fundamentally horribly damaging ideas about what love is.

and i wonder how much spanking has to answer for regarding those tapes, how much it is responsible for bad boundaries, and how much it has to do with raising men who become abusers. how can this possibly not be a feminist concern? at least be on the table for discussion?

[*] upon rereading i remembered that i've read sean connery is purported to have said that some women need slapping around. but upon googling this i see that that's not what he said. and while what he did say is questionable, i'd really like to see the full context for it before i count it as evidence.

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I won't argue with your essential points, but this bit caught my eye:

i've been straining my brain and i cannot think of any people nowadays openly claiming domestic abuse against women isn't a serious problem, anywhere i read.

I don't read this position much of anywhere, but I see it not infrequently in the blue-collar town where I live. I overhear it at bars, in supermarket checkout lines; I've heard the local "Christian" radio station broadcast entire discussions claiming domestic abuse is a trumped-up liberal myth, and that women who know their place don't have to worry about it, and isn't it a shame that men get accused of such terrible things. And the "she asked for it" meme is still alive and well in the letters to the editor of our local newspaper, any time some guy gets hauled up on charges of bashing on women.

And yes, it seems to follow with child abuse, too. I hear a lot more outrage about "the system tearing families apart" when physical/sexual abuse cases come up than I do at the people who commit the abuse.

This is not some outpost in (fill-in-the-stereotypically-redneck-locale of your choice). It's a medium-sized, working-class town in "progressive" Western Oregon.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, i had that possibility at the back of my mind, but didn't want to be blatantly classist on a hunch. i have become much more insulated from all of mainstream, including blue collar circles now that i no longer volunteer anywhere, or work outside of the home business; my time spent in supermarket checkout lanes is too short to overhear much, and what i do overhear is just never of this kind. the local newspaper has no such letters. i don't listen to christian or country radio stations. i don't go to bars. but this is very much a blue collar town, and those of my acquaintances who work in blue collar jobs; my landlord, their friends, their kids and kids' friends, our boat builder, and his hires don't hold those attitudes. i wouldn't claim that means no canadians hold them, however, just that those canadians who do don't surface on my radar. it could be, though, that it is overall a less acceptable attitude to have in canada than in the US; that wouldn't surprise me. canada is by no means free from sexism, and "she asked for it" still appears in discussions about college girls who get drunk at frat parties, but for example, i've never ever heard the kind of christian radio station up here that i heard down there. maybe it exists in alberta?

ignoring the mainstream is really good for my blood pressure, but the disadvantage is that i don't have a finger on its pulse, if that pulse doesn't make itself somehow felt on the internet.

these people from whom you hear this sort of crap, are they at all likely to be woken up by a feminist protest? i strongly suspect they're prejudiced against all things feminist anyway, and write such things off as simply more male-bashing.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I imagine your suspicions are correct wrt the futility of feminist arguments to that mind-set. I just thought it important to offer some counter-examples to the appealing idea that such attitudes are things of the past.

I'm actually pretty much OK with living among my working-class neighbors. We mostly talk about things like lawn care and the weather, and avoid politics. Sometimes we surprise each other. And once in a great while, I've been able to open someone's eyes to thinking about an issue like domestic abuse, or queer rights, in a way they hadn't thought about it before. Usually not when I'm *trying* to make a point, but by saying something in passing that causes them to ask questions, and then answering them in a friendly way.

I do call myself a feminist, proudly, but I don't presume to suggest how anyone else should self-identify.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*nod*. i didn't mean to imply that i thought this was comfortably a thing of the past -- obviously domestic violence is by no means past. just that ... hm. how to express this vague thought best ... that we're past the mass-consciousness raising stage of it, and that there are issues regarding domestic violence that are more important to work on now, and that people who walk around with signs protesting violence against women and children are preaching to the choir.

we do talk a fair bit of politics, my blue collar acquaintances and i, though it does come second to gardening (and woodworking :). political discussions aren't something to be avoided, because we often agree -- here a lot of the working class people vote NDP, which is to the left of the federal liberals. i think it's the farmers who are more likely to be socially conservative, and i have no connection there.