Comments Elsewhere

B/L:

O.K. I misunderstood you, then. I wasn’t trying to argue that some particular argument of yours in particular was in fact a “cheap shot;” I was asking about your intentions and the standards to which you’re holding yourself, given your own description of what you were doing. People often make cheap shot arguments knowing that they are cheap shots, or not caring whether the arguments are cheap shots or not, if they’ve decided that the situation doesn’t demand being “fair” or “reasonable.” (If you asked Robin Morgan, for example, whether she meant to give a serious presentation of cultural feminist thought in her one-paragraph mockery of it in “Radishes…,” I’d bet dollars to donuts that she’d say that she didn’t.) But since you didn’t intend by that description of yourself what I thought you might have intended by it, my bad.

That said, do you realize that criticizing the conduct or views of a vaguely-specified, undifferentiated mass of opponents — e.g. “rad fems” at large or “rad fem representatives in the blogosphere,” etc. — without making clear who and what you’re referring to, is exactly what you criticized Catharine MacKinnon for doing in your own post? I think I have some idea of who and what you have in mind, but I hope you realize that you are on much stronger ground when you’re referring to specific arguments that (say) Robin Morgan or Renate Klein or Heart or ginmar or whoever made than when you make these kind of statements.

gayle,

I agree about the smear on “rad fems,” etc. in the comments above. But it is unfair to compare the sort of intra-feminist criticism that B/L is doing, even when it’s mean and even if it’s unfair, to the hack anti-feminist polemics that are pumped out by Katie Roiphie, Warren Farrell, and the rest of the professional blowhard brigade.

In some sense it’s true that any criticism between feminists involves “attacking feminists,” but then, that includes plenty of radical feminist books and articles that criticize other feminists, or other radical feminists. Some of those criticisms are well-founded, and worth making, others much less so. (The Redstockings’ Feminist Revolution, to take one example, has plenty of both kinds, and at times gets a lot nastier than anything B/L has done so far.) The criticism can and should be assessed on its own merits, not on who the targets are.