Trish: “I first learned about Valerie Solanas as an art student when I wrote a paper about Andy Warhol. She wasn’t part of the feminist movement, and she was the founder and lone member of her “organization,” SCUM. She was trying to break into the entertainment/art scene. She shot Andy Warhol because he wouldn’t produce a script she had written. I don’t know why men’s rights activists constantly cite her as a feminist, because she wasn’t one.”

Amanda: “Ah yes, crazy Valerie Solanas, the spokesperson for all feminists in the fantasies of anti-feminists. By the same logic, Charles Manson is the spokesperson for the hippies of the 60s.”

Well, to be fair, Valerie was not part of the organized Women’s Liberation movement (the SCUM Manifesto predated the first WL actions), but some prominent early feminists defended her — Flo Kennedy and Robin Morgan in particular — even though the ideas in the SCUM Manifesto, if taken seriously, are quite different from what they believed at the time. That’s why, e.g., Morgan refers to Solanas a couple of times in “Goodbye to All That” and why excerpts from the SCUM Manifesto are anthologized in “Sisterhood is Powerful.”

One of the problems with Valerie is that she was both clearly a deeply disturbed woman who slid into paranoid schizophrenia but also someone with a wicked sense of humor, and it’s hard to tell which parts of the SCUM Manifesto are satirical, which are seriously meant, and which are the products of madness. So simply treating the Manifesto as if it were a straightforward statement of Valerie’s opinions (or reading her later paranoid delusions back into the whole thing) is problematic at best. Of course the other problem is that no matter how many feminists publicly defended her, that doesn’t mean that their views were the same as her views in the first place.

(Also, to be fair, The Weathermen — a violent splinter of Students for a Democratic Society — did at one point cheer Manson as a hero.)

Robert, much earlier in the thread:

EC prevents the implantation of a fertilized embryo into the uterine wall. It is an abortifacient. (At least some forms of it work this way; I hear conflicting reports that there are non-abortifacient ECs but I haven’t seen details.) This, by many of us, is abortion, albeit about the most attenuated possible form of abortion. So, EC is abortion, EC is abortion, EC is abortion. There, now we’re functioning at the same discursive level.

No, it’s not. “Abortion” is a medical term, referring to the premature termination of a pre-existing pregnancy (when that termination doesn’t result in live birth). Emergency Contraception works in one of two ways, depending on matters of timing and chance: either it prevents ovulation from happening at all, or else it prevents a blastocyst from implanting in the placenta when it reaches the uterus. (Pregnancy — another medical term, mind you — does not begin until implantation.) In neither of these cases is there a pregnancy to be aborted; in neither of them is there an abortion. EC does not cause abortions; it is not, therefore, an “abortifacient.”

You may think that Emergency Contraception has something morally in common with induced abortion; you may oppose it for precisely the same reasons, and so think that there should be a common term to cover everything that you oppose for whatever those reasons are. That’s fine; innovation of that sort is something that competant speakers of the language do all the time. But “abortion” is a term that already has a perfectly good meaning, and making up new meanings for it to inject into public discourse, without making it very clear that this is what you have done, amounts to telling lies about EC in order to try to get people on board with your agenda.

Telling lies is wrong.

Q Grrl said:

As a feminist, however, I don’t think that the personal agency of women or their bodily integrity is up for debate. It simply isn’t.

Will responded:

Excuse me? Since when does a topic suddenly get closed to debate?

When a woman decides what she wants to do with her own body. Women’s bodies belong to them, not to you and not to “the public”. You can keep talking about what other people ought to do as long as you want but you haven’t got any right to demand that a woman listen to what you have to say about it. Period. Sorry.

I’m sorry, but any policy that affects my rights, or will affect the society I live in will always be up for debate.

Great. I think that male anti-choice commentators should be forcibly sterilized and publicly branded with hot irons because of their immoral political beliefs. This clearly affects the society I live in. So let’s debate! Let’s put it up for a vote! You’re not against democracy and intellectual discourse, are you?

Jen: “There are no domestic violence shelters for men only in the US.”

This is a lie. See, for example, Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project of Massachussetts and Battered Men’s Helpline.

Jen: “Women did not build women’s shelters. Women ‘complained’, made known a need, and men built the structures, men and women both allocated the funds, and men and women both paid for them through our taxes. So the only thing that women really did on their own is voice a need. “

This is also a lie. See, for example, this discussion of the early history of battered women’s shelters, this timeline, and the chapter on the battered women’s movement in Susan Brownmiller’s In Our Time. The modern network of battered women’s shelters was built by grassroots women’s groups, mostly in the period 1971-1979 following the public emergence of Chiswick Women’s Aid in London. (There were some earlier shelters that focused on women married to violent alcoholics, created by women’s Al-Anon groups in the mid-1960s.) Primary funding came from local women’s groups, private donors, and some national nonprofit groups like the Ms. Foundation for Women. Government aid was mostly nonexistent until the 1980s (by 1979 there were already 250 operating shelters in the US) and was not committed in any systematic and coordinated way until the passage of VAWA in 1994. The vast bulk of funding for shelters still comes from private donors, not from tax-funded grants. Shelters were not the kindly gift of enlightened men or progressive legislatures. Women built them themselves. If MRAs want to be taken seriously then they had better be willing to do the work on the ground that feminists did with less money, less lucrative social networks, and far less media and political influence. They might have more time and money to do this if they stopped wasting so much time on futile lawsuits that attempt to force existing women’s shelters to admit men.

Amp:

Forgive the digression, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t true – I’ve been meaning to do a post on the subject. For instance, Haven House in LA began taking in wives of abusive alcoholics starting around 1964.

Fair enough; but part of this is just a terminological question over what comes up to the “modern” battered women’s shelter. I mean, you can find records of refuges for “unhappily married” women going back to 16th century Italy, and while it’s clear that they have something distinctly in common with the modern battered women’s shelter it’s also clear that there are some distinct differences. In the case of Haven House (and Rainbow Retreat in Arizona, which I believe was operating around the same time and doing the same things), one difference is their growth out of Al-Anon and their primary focus on helping spouses of violent alcoholics, specifically, rather than battered women as such and domestic violence as we understand it today. My understanding (which could perfectly well be mistaken) is that the network of shelters which women built over the course of the 1970s modeled itself mainly on Chiswick, not on the pre-existing U.S. examples, so that while there are some pre-1971 institutions that look interestingly like modern battered women’s shelters (and which did similarly important work in their home communities), there was a significant break with the 1971-1972 shelters, and that these new developments were vital to understanding the huge growth in local shelters between 1970 and 1979.

Whatever the case may be, it’s a fascinating history and I haven’t been able to find nearly as much about it as I’d like. With some of the activity that’s been going on for the past several years in writing feminist history I hope that more of it may be available in the near future.

I look forward to your post on the topic!

Sloopy:

Right, Ampersand. Feminists (men and women) stood up and made lawmakers take notice and take action. Why is it unthinkable, why is it bad, when other people do the same?

Feminists (and, let’s be honest, most of them just happened to be women) created the modern network of battered women’s shelters in the 1970s by forming their own groups and buying property on short money from local women’s groups and the support of larger feminist organizations such as the Ms. Foundation. The first modern battered women’s shelter was probably Chiswick Women’s Aid in London, which began offering refuge services in 1971. The next year, the first battered women’s shelters in the United States were started with a similar model in the United States. These shelters were started in nonprofit storefronts, squatted spaces and women’s homes. They built fundraising networks from Women’s Liberation groups, Al-Anon meetings, whatever formal or informal networks they had at their disposal. With time they managed to purchase houses and begin to offer more comprehensive services. Cooperation from law enforcement was minimal and government funding mostly nonexistent until the 1980s, and not provided in any large-scale and coordinated way in the United States until the passage of VAWA in 1994. You should note that by 1979 there were over 250 shelters operating in the United States, even without any particular help from the government. You should also note (as Bean mentioned earlier) that shelters continue to receive the vast bulk of their funding from private donors, not from grants, today. The battered women’s movement did not come about by “making lawmakers take notice” or by extracting government funding. Women did it themselves and carried the torch for years without any help.

Men today have more money, more valuable social networks, and more political clout than women’s liberationists had in 1971. If MRAs were working to use the resources that they have in order to boost funding and availability of resources for battered men, rather than filing suits to try to force women’s shelters to be defunded, or filing suits to try to force existing women’s shelters to admit men, or whining to the legislature to try to get them to give men’s shelters a cut of the very limited government funds that are currently appropriated for women’s shelters, then it would be much easier to take them seriously and I would applaud their efforts. As it stands, though, they mostly don’t seem to be interested in doing the work for themselves and they mostly seem interested in zero-sum legal maneuvers that will only profit men’s shelters at the expense of women’s shelters. To hell with that.

Echidne: “In some ways Gates is advocating more choices for American firms at the expense of American workers. Under his scenario firms could outsource jobs or import workers, whichever turns out to be more profitable, and the U.S. workers would have to compete both at home and abroad with foreign workers.”

But I wonder why I should care about the condition of American workers specifically rather than the condition of workers as a whole. I mean, yes, relaxing immigration restrictions does cut into the benefits that American IT workers enjoy by bringing more non-American qualified professionals into the labor market. But so what? That represents a net gain for Indian workers (for example), and I don’t think the fact that they’re Indian makes their well-being less important to me.

I’m also not sure what the traditional worries about globalization and authoritarian regimes (e.g., the effects of “competition” with literal slave labor or labor in countries with widespread government repression of workers) have to do with Gates’s proposals in particular. I mean, yeah, there may be reasons to worry about that when we talk about offshoring of textile production, but (1) it’s not at all clear this is much of a problem in the IT sector, and (2) H-1B visas don’t have anything to do with offshoring anyway; the workers they bring to the United States enjoy all of the labor standards prevalent in the United States (they do get treated poorly by the immigration bureaucracy, but that’s La Migra’s fault, not the boss’s, and the answer there is surely liberalization rather than restriction).

ken melvin: “What right thinking person would spend $100k and up for an education that leads to a $40k/yr job (about what Gates wants to pay)? Offshoring, illegal immigration, H1-B, they all have the same effect on american workers.”

I try hard to resist the urge to simply paint IT protectionists as a bunch of pampered crybabies, but it’s hard not to when you see things like this. There are a lot of people in the United States, let alone in the developing world, who would kill for a $40,000 / year salary, particularly if that salary came with a white-collar work environment. Even if the cost of making that were $100,000 spread out over 4-5 years. You’d have made your money back within 3 years. That’s assuming that you were the one actually paying the $100,000, which kids going to $25k – $35k / year schools almost never are (most of the money generally comes from a combination of scholarships and funds provided by mommy and daddy).

I don’t think that immigration restriction is ever the appropriate response to labor problems, no matter what industry we’re talking about, but the attempt to lump IT professionals in with industrial workers and minimum-wage service workers (for whom unemployment and wage cuts may make the difference between having or not having a roof over their heads or healthcare for their kids) and say that their situations are all of a piece is frankly ridiculous.

Elena: “There are Chinese chain restaurants that pile Mexican workers into vans and shuttle them around the country, paying them a flat rate of $300/week. They rent cheap apartments for their workers as an added incentive.”

Well, good for them. $300 / week is decent pay if your employer is also covering your rent as a benefit. It’s very good pay compared to what the workers would be making if they stayed back in Mexico. I mean, look, there are lots of reasons to think that employers hiring undocumented immigrants are often sleazebags. They often are. But the fact that they pay them and provide housing for them is not among them.

Elena, again: “The noble intentions of immigrant rights groups that want amnesty for workers who do work Americans “won’t do” play right into the greedy hands of business leaders who want to circumvent fair labor practice for their workers. The fact that Bush wants immigration reform should be a red flag. It’s not because he loves Mexicans.”

I could say just as easily that the noble intentions of those who want protectionism and immigration restriction for the sake of labor are playing right into the hands of the nativist hard Right and the abusive immigration bureaucracy. But the interesting question isn’t who does or does not happen to share your policy conclusions; it’s which conclusions are true and what policies we have good reasons to adopt. So what reason is there to think that escalating the immigration cops’ assault on immigrant workers, or even leaving it in its present state, is going to do any good for immigrant workers? Or, if you think that it won’t do good for them but it will do good for American workers, what reason is there to think that American workers’ lives and livelihoods are more important than (say) Mexican and Central American workers’?

Well, it sounds like there was a lot interesting and worthy of attention in Shiva’s talk. But I’m getting a bit hung up on this:

“There are 25 different written languages in India. Each region has its own newspaper. Thus Indian citizens aren’t subjected to media saturation of constructed political issues. Dr. Shiva notes how, according to the U.S. media, abortion and gay marriage are more important than the war and the economy. Television serves as a tool of distraction from the concerns of our real lives.”

I mean, since when is abortion (for example) not a concern of our real lives? Real women need abortions every day and legislators who push an anti-choice agenda want to point real guns at them if they try to get one. It’s no less a matter of life and death than the war, and certainly more of one than, say, “the economy” — a nebulous statistical construct that clusters together some issues of immediate, pressing significance to our everyday lives (the kind of jobs that are or aren’t available in your or my hometown) and a lot that are just as remote as, well, the price of tea in China. I know that a lot of people on the Left are leaning these days towards thinking that if they could just try to play up class and downplay “cultural issues” then they could bring in white men who might otherwise drift toward the pseudo-populist hard Right, but it seems like every time this strategy gets spelled out it seems like something that ought to make feminists (for example) feel really queasy.

Michael: “Iraq is fucked and I don’t know how to unfuck it. The occupation has been a disaster. If the United States left now there would be a three-way civil war.”

The best that we can do is leave now. Maybe there will be a three-way civil war and maybe there won’t; there’s no good way for us to know. But that would only count as reason against pulling out immediately if you thought that continuing occupation by American soldiers is going to make that situation better rather than worse.

I mean, could you tell that girl that the occupation is doing more good than harm?

thehim: “For the U.S. to have been successful in a situation like Iraq, we would have had to make huge strides, even before the invasion, to build up that trust.”

For the U.S. to have been “successful” in a situation like Iraq, we would have needed not to slaughter thousands of civilians, even if G.W. had not lied through his teeth, even if he strictly adhered to the truth and spent months on a P.R. campaign. It’s not like the CIA installed a trap-door underneath Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party commanders that would have let us “go in” to Iraq without killing people left and right. Modern total warfare may have victors, but it has no “successes.”

This is an interesting and nuanced picture of Andrea’s life. I think there is also a lot to disagree with here, but I appreciate those who can disagree with Andrea’s work without dismissing her or hurling abuse at her, like some of her critics (on both the Left and the Right) have been fond of doing in the past several days since her death.

A couple of notes.

1. Catharine MacKinnon DID NOT SAY “In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.” These words were written by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge in their book Professing Feminism. They are trying to summarize MacKinnon’s views, but this is their (mistaken, incidentally) interpretation of her views, not anything she ever wrote. Unfortunately Cal Thomas mis-attributed the quote to her in a March 1999 article and the mis-attribution has been running around the Internet ever since. (Snopes has a decent page on this.)

2. You cite a passage from Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Maybe her rhetoric is inflammatory; I don’t think it is particularly, but I’m used to far more strident writers than Brownmiller. But in any case it wasn’t particularly influenced by Andrea at the time. (Brownmiller started writing Against Our Will in 1971. She was already involved in the radical feminist movement in New York, but as far as I know she had not yet met Andrea — who was living as a battered wife in Europe at the time and who didn’t publish her first book, Woman Hating, until 1974.)

3. Above you say: “What Andrea Dworkin got right is that pornography encourages the basest instincts of male sexuality. … What Andrea Dworkin got right is that male lust is intrinsically self-serving. And since nature has made men more powerful than women, sexual liberation inevitably benefits men and hurts women.” Well, Andrea did criticize the effects of pornography on men’s sexuality and she did criticize self-serving male lust. But she did not believe that it was a matter of “instincts,” and she did not believe that men’s lust is intrinsically self-serving or that there’s any kind of biological inevitability about it. Right or wrong, she argued that pornography is part of a conscious, male-dominated political order, that male lust is “self-serving” in our society but that we can and should struggle to build a new society in which men’s sexuality is free from domination and narcissism, and that “sexual liberation” hurt women and benefitted men because it was “sexual liberation” on male terms. (She did not think that the fact that it was sexual liberation on male terms was biologically inevitable; she thought that it was the result of men’s political power, which she thought to be something that could be and should be overthrown.)

Well, my worry about the “Third Wave” terminology has always been primarily that it’s premature. “First Wave” and “Second Wave” aren’t generational terms; when we talk about “First Wave feminism” it’s important to remember that we’re talking about a historical movement that encompassed three generations of women—women spread across a huge array of different organizations and publications and campaigns, and women who at times had pretty intense conflicts within the movement over goals, tactics, ideology, organization, priorities, and (while we’re at it) race; these conflicts often ended up taking shape as intergenerational conflicts between the older leaders and the upcoming young activists.

If we’re going to start using “wave” as a generational term, then we’re not in the third wave of feminism; we’re in at least the 6th (which seems like a bit much). On the other hand, if we’re going to take a bit longer historical view, then we could at least wait until we have put a good 72 years of effort into Second Wave feminism before we start hiving our efforts off into a new “Wave.”