Tag: feminism

Women Are Turning Away From Religion

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

Great news:

Since 1991, the percentage of women attending church during a typical week has decreased by 11 percentage points to 44 percent, the Barna Group reported Monday (Aug. 1).
Sunday school and volunteering among women also has diminished. Two decades ago, half of all women read the Bible in a typical week — other than at religious events. Now 40 percent do.
The survey also found a marked stepping away from congregations: a 17 percentage increase in the number of women who have become “unchurched.” “For years, many church leaders have understood that ‘as go women, so goes the American church,'” wrote Barna Group founder George Barna, on his website. “Looking at the trends over the past 20 years, and especially those related to the beliefs and behavior of women, you might conclude that things are not going well for conventional Christian churches.”

I hope that women are finally catching on to the sad truth that the Fundamentalists only see us as baby-incubators who should give birth, breastfeed and shut up.

I strongly believe that women will be a lot happier if, instead of the Sunday service where they will be told how inferior they are to men, they’ll just get extra sleep, read a book, take a long bath, sunbathe, or blog about how hateful organized religions have always been towards women.

Let’s hope this wonderful trend continues!

Feminism and Capitalism

~ Clarissa ~ 103 Comments

“Why don’t we hear more feminist voices criticizing capitalism?” a reader asks.

“Because there is no feminism without capitalism,” is my answer.

Before I explain why I say that, I want to clarify my definitions of both capitalism and feminism.

Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, usually in competitive markets.

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women.

I took both definitions from Wikipedia to make our lives easier with simple, unencumbered, unemotional definitions.

Women have historically been subjected to men for two physiological reasons:

1. Women are smaller physically and can be overpowered by the greater physical force of men.

2. Women are limited by the birth cycle. If you spend your entire life pregnant, giving birth, nursing, pregnant, giving birth, and so on, this will put you in a position of dependence towards somebody who is not similarly limited.

This is all explained in detail and beautifully by the great Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex.

Now, capitalism is a system where your physical bulk becomes completely and utterly irrelevant. A tiny, feeble, bed-ridden person can easily be the master of 10,000 giants who will follow the small person’s every command. This isn’t the feudal system where brute force rules everything and everyone. In capitalism, money becomes the decisive factor. As a result, the smaller size and the lesser physical strength of women becomes completely irrelevant. The liberatory potential of this is huge.

In a similar way, capitalism frees women from the dependence on the birth cycle. As a system driven by profit above all, it comes to fulfill the huge demand for birth control. Capitalism is always driven by competition. Which is why any product that is in demand, that can be potentially sold to a big enough group of people, will keep getting developed, improved, and offered for consumption. Birth control, formula, breast pumps, day cares, nurseries, etc. have all liberated women from depending on their physiology.

It is no coincidence that feminism and capitalism developed at the same time and at a similar pace. If the capitalism hadn’t come into existence, I am convinced that we would still see the feudal society where women had to be hidden and closely guarded or be raped routinely.

This is a topic where I welcome all kinds of disagreement because I want to see whether and how this argument can be taken apart.

A Sad Evolution of a Former Feminist

~ Clarissa ~ 15 Comments

It isn’t easy to understand a writer who tells you that “Bachmann can summon the spirit of McCarthy to raise the equally bizarre specter of socialism’s tentacles.” A spirit that raises a specter is too convoluted an image for my liking.

It is equally difficult to decipher the writings of somebody who believes that the Tea Party movement and feminism have a natural affinity because

the core of feminism is individual choice and freedom, and it is these strains that are being sounded now more by the Tea Party movement than by the left. . . Feminism is philosophically as much in harmony with conservative, and especially libertarian, values – and in some ways even more so.

But the most frustrating thing of all is seeing how a formerly brilliant feminist journalist has degenerated into a semi-literate, bumbling defender of the “true feminism” of Palin and Bachmann. This is precisely what happened to Naomi Wolf. You can find her most recent exercise in celebrating the supposedly feminist Thatcher, Palin and Bachmann here.

Those Horrible Male Chauvinist Pigs

~ Clarissa ~ 74 Comments

A feminist blogger has published a truly offensive letter she got from a male reader. Here it is for your perusal but, please, prepare to be shocked. This male chauvinist is completely out of control in his desire to demean a feminist blogger:

While I am a dude, and disagree with a lot of your worldview, I’d like to let you know I really enjoy reading your blog. You’re a very good writer and your posts are entertaining and thought-stimulating. Please keep up the good work — there is a paucity of actual quality content in the blogosphere, and I daresay that you’re propping up the mean.

Could you believe the gall? Those pigs feel they can just insult a female writer in this horrible way for the simple reason she is a woman. This is what the brave feminist responded to the offending reader:

When women write me, they never, ever tell me that I am “a very good writer” and to “keep up the good work” because there isn’t enough decent writing on the Internet. Women say things like “that post on consent changed my life,” or “Now I know I’m not alone/crazy/hysterical.”

Dudes, on the other hand, always feel compelled to inform me that they disagree with me (this is a non-negotiable component of dude fan mail), but that they are nevertheless are willing to be entertained by me. They usually include a couple of 25-cent words, like “daresay” and “paucity.” “Keep up the good work” is another essential element. Thanks for the dudely encouragement, dude! Because I was totally thinking about packing up shop and opening up a pole dancing studio at Whole Foods.

You go, sister! This will show them chauvinists how to compliment one’s writing. Jerks.

Of course, in the spirit of full disclosure, I received two similar emails from readers in the past week. The word “paucity” wasn’t used but the compliments to my writing were worded in a very similar way. Those readers are women, though. So now I don’t know how to interpret their emails. A terrifying suspicion has crept in: might they be wolves in sheep’s clothing, i.e. dudes in disguise?

Should We Celebrate Sex Workers or Condemn Prostitution?

~ Clarissa ~ 53 Comments

I have been planning to blog about this for a while but then a blogger whose work I follow beat me to it. Here are the opening paragraphs of his brilliant long post on the subject:

By now I am getting extremely annoyed with a certain discourse around sex work that has become popular amongst some sectors of the North American (and occasionally European) left.  Originally a discourse that was limited to lifestyle [and predominantly male] anarchists, as well as a few hippy sex fetishists, the political assertion that sex work is liberating, and that the liberating potential of sex work should be treated as part of a radically progressive politics, is now being embraced by the broader left-wing population and gaining the support of so-called feminists, socialists and communists who should know better.  Indeed, the unqualified pro-prostitution position is being treated by some as a litmus test for numerous radical commitments as it is now attached to, and turned into a falsely essential component of, feminism, queer and trans liberation, and other anti-oppressive political positions.
Before going any further I want to emphasize that I believe that sex workers should have the right to unionize and that prostitution should be decriminalized.  The normative status of sex work, the so-called “oldest profession”, in capitalist society is clearly a result of patriarchal hypocrisy that preaches sexual puritanism on one hand and then reinforces this puritanism by, on the other hand, allowing sex to proliferate on the black market and in especial sites.
Choice feminism insists that every “choice” should be equally respected and valid. Of course, it’s easy to forget how many choices are made because no other option is available and how often oppressive systems coerce people into enthusiastic participation in their own oppression. More and more often, I see my blogroll polluted by posts from pseudo-feminists that condemn any critical analysis of prostitution as anti-feminist and non-progressive. It is especially annoying to read something like the following on a feminist site:
When I was working in public health, I heard about an amazing Brazilian anti-HIV campaign called Maria Without Shame, which featured pictures of a sex worker accompanied by slogans like: “You need have no shame, girl. You have a profession.”
Notice that this “amazing” campaign is addressed exclusively to women. Also, observe how the word “profession” is being used in this context. Of course, the pseudo-feminist who gushes about the campaign is not in the least concerned why a patriarchal society with horrifying levels of poverty like the Brazilian society is so interested in selling prostitution as a legitimate and respectable profession to its women.
Instead of “celebrating sex work”, I believe we should analyze the underlying causes of prostitution and address them. This cannot be done unless we drop the inane “every choice is valid” kind of reasoning.

How Feminism Helped a Bad Student

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

A reader just wrote in to say that she enjoys my stories about the Soviet Union. (Thank you, kind reader!) So I decided to share yet another story. It is post-Soviet but still fun.

In Ukraine, I was a university student at the Department of Foreign Languages. The way the system worked was that an oral final exam counted for 100% of the final grade. You had to show up a the exam at the end of the semester, choose a random piece of paper among the many on the professor’s desk, take a few minutes to prepare, and speak on the 2 or 3 topics on your paper. In some courses, you needed to write a final essay to be allowed to take the exam.

I worked hard to make a living when I was a student. For this reason, I rarely showed up at the university. Normally, I’d just read the textbook the day before the exam and get a top grade as a result. The quality of education was pathetically low, and I saw no reason to waste my time coming to classes where the professor did nothing but read the same textbook out loud.

One of the courses I had to take was Sociology. I didn’t attend a single lecture or seminar. At that point in time, I was busy finishing a big translation for the Academy of Arts and Sciences of the Russian Federation. There had been an accident a little while before where I had suffered severe burns to my arm. I still had to type up my translation for hours each day, which I did while shrieking in pain from my damaged arm and hand.

So, of course, the Sociology course was the last thing on my mind. I didn’t even find an opportunity to go to the library and take out the textbook before the exam. For my final essay, I went to the British Council, took out several books on feminism, and used them to write my essay. I translated the sources and even quoted them. I was very interested in feminism at that point and cared little that nobody around me had any knowledge about what the word stood for.

When I arrived at the exam and took the paper with my questions, I realized that I had not the slightest idea what the terminology used in the questions even meant. I had no textbook or notes or anything with me. So, of course, I prepared myself to failing the exam very spectacularly.

The professor in the course was a young, nerdy-looking guy. Since I had never come to class, that was the first time I saw him. Now I not only had missed every single day of class and came to the exam unprepared. I had also handed in an essay that passionately defended feminism to a male professor in a rabidly patriarchal society.

As I was sitting there, staring despondently at my questions, the professor suddenly asked,

“Which one of you is called Clarissa?”

“Me,” I answered in a tenuous little voice.

“You are the student who handed in an essay on feminism, right? It was absolutely brilliant! I loved it,” the professor suddenly announced. “You can go now, I will give you an A for the course.”

As I crept out of the room, I mused that feminism was even better than I’d thought before.

Changes in the Ways of Making a Living

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

If people whose main form of entertainment is to whine about how everything is getting worse were simply to add “for men” to their statements, I’d have no problem with them. They never remember to do that, though. I see examples of this bemoaning of some vaguely defined prelapsarian moment when sugar was sweeter and salt was saltier on a regular basis. Here is one such article that attempts to tell us how horribly difficult it has become to make a living in Canada as opposed to an unnamed “before” when everything was so much better. I took the statements the article makes and applied them to the lives of women before the feminist revolution of the 70ies.

The old world was marked by full-time jobs, stable work environments and long-term employment.

For women, it was marked by either full-time housewifery or endless sexual harassment at work and inescapable discrimination in the job market. What a jolly place that old world was.

The new world, however, is characterized by short-term jobs. You may be on contract; you may be a temporary employee; you may work part-time. But the key is that you will probably be hired for a very short period (“just-in time work” is the moniker) and then “let go when the work is done.”

How is this new? Women were employed on precisely this basis pretty much forever. If anything, the situation has gotten better in the sense that now you are less likely to be stuck in the cycle of short-term employment based on gender.

You will have no pension, no benefits, no vacations, no sick days.

This was always the reality of women whose only way of making a living was to get married.

How do you find a job? The labour market is like a fish market: You are selling a commodity — in this case yourself.

In order to snag husbands who would feed them, women had to spend their formative years trying to sell themselves. They did it in ways far more demeaning than what today’s job applicant in Canada has to experience during the interview process.

And just as a fishmonger might wrap his mackerel in a fancy package, so you must make your labour power attractive to prospective buyers.

Women had to make themselves look as pretty, dumb, chirpy, and passive as possible in order to find a good, paying customer.

Constant retraining (what politicians call education) is a necessity in this new world. But it never allows you to escape; it just lets you keep up.

In order to retain the paying customer’s interest and avoid being swapped for a younger, fresher model, women read tons of crappy manuals that taught them to wrap themselves in transparent plastic, have the dinner always ready, and be constantly smiling.

People like this journalist can go on whining and moaning about the loss of paradise. For women, however, no moment in the past was greater than today. And tomorrow will be only better.

Femininity, Part III

~ Clarissa ~ 16 Comments

Now, the way things are is that some people enjoy enacting femininity. You will be shocked but many of us enjoy it not because we want to attract men* but simply because we enjoy it. I, for one, definitely don’t want to attract anybody because I’m in a very happy ultra-monogamous relationship and my partner adores me no matter how I look, what I wear, and what gender identity I choose to enact at any given moment. I know there is a crowd of pseudo-feminists who will rush to suggest that I’m too stupid to understand my own enslavement. For them, enacting femininity is always about pleasing some guy. This says a lot about them and nothing about me.

Culturally, spending an hour doing my make-up and lying in a bath-tub for two hours with my favorite mask on is my way of stating that I have a right to my time. My number one priority in life is enjoying myself and I’ll be damned if I feel guilty for not serving anybody else’s needs every second of my life, as the preceding generations of Soviet women did. On a personal level, I just dig it.

It is perfectly OK not to enjoy enacting your femininity in a very traditional (or any other) way. A decision not to enact it, however, does not make you any more feminist. Just like the decision to do it doesn’t make you any less so.

*In case you don’t believe me, check out this post by a lesbian autistic who loves enacting femininity and sharing this experience with her trans girl-friend.  I’m sure we can all agree that no male gaze is being targeted by this couple’s practice of femininity.

Femininity, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

As a result, women had to assume the role of bread-winners and protectors. The myth of a weak, traumatized man who needed to be taken care of came into existence.

Of course, the demographic imbalance was corrected in the next generation. The myth of men’s scarcity and male weakness, however, persisted. Two generations later, this model of male-female relationships is still in place.

“What do you mean you are sick? You are a woman, so just suck it up already.” “He’s a guy, he’s fragile. It’s your duty to educate him and help him learn to be more mature.” (I know that it sounds like the repetition of the Angel in the House myth, and how weird is that?) “Well, what do you expect? He’s a guy, so obviously he is whiny, fickle, and unreliable.” “Of course, he can’t hold down a job. What do you expect from a guy? You are a woman, just deal with it. Can’t you provide for the family on your own? No? What kind of woman are you, then?”

This is what women kept hearing from the day they were born.

For generations, women in my culture saw permanently immature, cossetted and babied men and powerful, strong women who had to provide for the family, find food (we are still talking about the Soviet Union, remember?), tend to the house, bring up children, and take care of older relatives. Enacting femininity became a rare luxury. You had to be extremely rich to afford to think about new tights (I keep forgetting the American equivalent for them, sorry!), a lipstick or a tube of mascara. Dresses were impractical because you had to work all the time. High heels, too, for the same reason. And everybody despised the profligate female who would waste money on a hair-dresser instead of cutting her own hair with kitchen scissors over the sink (after the needy husband and the kids were put to bed, of course).

(To be continued. . .)

Femininity, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

Femininity has a bad rap in North America nowadays. High heels, dresses, skirts and make-up are a sign that you are a miserable Evangelical victim in search of a husband to validate your existence by marrying you.

I’m not North American, though. I come from a different culture. And I believe that my feminism is as valid as anybody else’s. I don’t think that I have to modify who I am because of other people’s struggles, issues, and complexities. I totally get it that, for North American women, not enacting their femininity is a feminist achievement. For me, however, it’s the opposite.

As we often joke in my culture, in the year when American women gained their right to become miners and fire-fighters, we gained our right not to. In the Soviet Union, women gained the right to vote and the right (actually, the obligation) to work in 1917. Since then, everybody worked. You will be hard-pressed to find a Russian-speaking woman my age whose great-grandmother, grand-mother, mother and aunts did not work. Not working for any reason was punished with a jail sentence in the Soviet Union.

Outside of the short-lived Stalin-era ban on abortion, abortion on demand was the only available form of contraception. I know women who had over 40 abortions in their lifetime for the simple reason that absolutely no other means of contraception were available. (Except for the ultra-rich, of course.) So the right to an abortion was not the issue Russian-speaking feminists were concerned with either. (Things are changing now, and the corrupt Russian Orthodox Church is spearheading a campaign to destroy women’s reproductive rights in Russia, though.)

On top of that, the absence of any hygienic aides for menstruation and forced gynecological exams made women hate everything that reminded them of their gender.

Our feminist issues were different. The Soviet Union lost a huge segment of its male population to the genocide and the wars. After World War II, we had 1 male per 3 females in the population. The result of this demographic imbalance was that men became a precious commodity to be cherished and coveted.

(To be continued. . . soon. . .)