Comments Elsewhere

Hugo: As always, some (including this blogger) want to define feminism broadly; we’re the “big tent” folks. Others worry that we big tenters are “dumbing down” feminism, or setting the bar so low that virtually anyone (even those with ugly sexist rhetoric) can define themselves as feminists.

Hugo, this is an old argument but I don’t understand how this argument comes into play in the comments you’re discussing. The comments critical of you have generally been about your comment moderation policies and the way that you allow explicitly anti-feminist commenters to act on your website. Not about how broadly or narrowly you define “feminism.” Is there something that I’m missing?

Soulhuntre: Of course “don’t insult me” is generally followed by “but I demand the right to insult you pivileged mysoginist scumbags!’ – so it tends to lose a little of it’s impact. I know, I know… thats not rudeness or ignorance, thats the righteous anger of the vitim and it is “anti-feminist” to question such things.

You know, whether this is a fair representation of what the specific folks you’re referring to say and do (I don’t think it is), you haven’t actually offered anything, other than the tone of facile sarcasm, to show that there’s anything wrong with conducting yourself like this. Most people make a distinction between (1) righteous anger in response to a genuine wrong, and (2) belligerence that isn’t justified by the circumstances. There may be cases in which that distinction happens not to be relevant; or you might think that feminist women’s anger at anti-feminist men isn’t, actually, justified by the circumstances. But you can’t expect feminists to agree with you about the latter, and you’ve done nothing to demonstrate the former. You’re just trying to get by on sarcastic references to different standards, as if that just by itself proved the difference to be unfair.

It doesn’t.

stanton: Even the most essentialist of feminists (MacKinnon? Gilligan?) acknowledge the role of genetics/nature in gender.

Elinor: Saying that gendered behaviour is NOT essential (MacKinnon) is essentialist?

My suspicion is that “essentialist feminist” is being used here more or less as a synonym for Christina Hoff Sommers’ “gender feminist.” That latter was itself pretty clearly used as an attempt to mean something like what is meant by “difference feminist,” which is why Gilligan gets included and also why you might think that the whole program can be described as “essentialist.” The problem, of course, is that “gender feminist” was also intended to mean something like “any feminist whose views Christina Hoff Sommers regards as too radical,” so it ends up meaning nothing coherent at all, and stridently anti-essentialist radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinon also get included on the list.