Comments Elsewhere

alexander: Oddly enough, Ayn Rand denounced libertarians as right wing hippies who want to throw bombs, use drugs and disband the FBI.

Well, she objected to the name “libertarian,” and to some individual people who described themselves as such. But Tuccille is right about libertarianism; it usually did begin with Ayn Rand, and her reception among, and influence over, the growing libertarian movement of the time was certainly very different from her reception among, and influence over, the growing conservative movement of the time. (And many of the members of “conservative” groups who were influenced by her ended up leaving — e.g. in the departure of the libertarians from YAF.) Incidentally, I don’t think there’s any correct sense of “conservatism,” no matter how broad, that includes free markets as a matter of moral principle, let alone militant atheism or hostility to cultural traditionalism. But this is well off the topic by now; in any case, Rand’s (astonishingly reactionary) attitudes towards sexuality and women’s proper relationship to men are fodder enough for the point you wanted to raise, quite apart from any questions about “conservatism” proper.

alexander: Well, that is like saying that people who object to communism owing to their experiences in the USSR lack any genuine knowledge of Marxist ideology. (Or people who had a bad experience with the Inquisition lacking any knowledge of christian doctrine.)

I hope that you understand that comparing whatever bad experiences a man in the United States may have had with feminism, or with something that he thought or imagined to have something to do with feminism, to the reign of terror in the Soviet Union, or in Europe under the Inquisition, is insulting. Not just to feminists, but also to the victims of Communism and the Inquisition.

We have to deal with the reality, not the theoretical.

That’s fine, but someone who has not taken the time to so much as, say, read a sustained discussion by a feminist of feminist thought and action, or a serious book-length memoir or history of the feminist movement — and, to be clear, this encompasses every anti-feminist I’ve ever met who based his or her position on bad run-ins with something he or she took to be related to feminism — has not done the basic homework necessary to understand the reality. Basic facts about the positions advocated by major feminist thinkers or the actions and historical trajectories of important feminist groups are an important part of what the reality of feminism is.

Vacula: Rad Geek, I’m not saying it’s justified for MRAs who’ve had bad experiences with one or more feminists to hate all feminists or reject all feminist theory. I was appreciating Hugo’s awareness of the danger in looking to personal (bad) experiences as the most effective motivation for feminists. That’s an approach that fails to really trust that the ideals of the movement are worth pursuing on their own merits. If a feminist can say “all MRAs are personally biased against feminism because they don’t understand it and have had bad personal experiences with unworthy feminists,” what prevents an MRA from discounting feminism (if primarily motivated by bad personal experinces) as a movement of “angry women who resent men because they’ve been taught to feel victimized”?

Well, fair enough; unreflective appeals to personal experience or testimony can be dangerous. But I think there are some important differences between the appeals that some feminists make to first-hand experiences of victimization by men and the appeals that MRAs (for example) make to first-hand experiences of what they take to be bad treatment at the hands of what they take to be feminism. One difference being that women can be pretty sure when their victimizers are men whereas MRAs often seem to have a very confused idea of when they are encountering feminism at all (e.g. the frequent identification of bad experiences in family court with oppression at the hands of some kind of congealed feminist power-structure; it’s not just unrepresentative feminists, but also people who have very little relation to feminism at all that MRAs take to be victimizing them in the name of the mythical feminist hegemony). Women’s first-hand experiences of victimization by men generally also include a number of things that are indisputably wrongs (e.g. rape, battery, street harassment, overt prejudice against women, etc.) whereas MRAs first-hand experience is at best a mixed bag (whether or not you were treated unfairly in family court is a much more complicated question than whether your husband was wrong to beat you; other common objections, such as the purported anti-male bias in education, are simply delusory). There are a lot of other distinctions that can be drawn. Broadly speaking, I don’t think that “starting from personal experience” means “treating everyone’s say-so as equally decisive in political questions,” which is important, since treating everyone’s say-so as equally decisive is obviously a dead-end strategy. (I also don’t think that starting from personal experience means not trusting the ideals of the movement to be worthwhile on their own merits; I do think, though, that trusting women’s first-hand experiences is — as the Redstockings, for example, argued — both an important ideal of the movement and an important way of discovering what the further ideals of the movement should be. (To be clear, I don’t think that Hugo was arguing against either of these things, or that you were; I’m just trying to clear up where I’m standing.)

All that said, I think that you make an excellent point above when you point out (among other things) that the sort of first-hand experiences that feminism should be interested in are broader than women’s first-hand experiences of victimization by men, and that among other things women’s first-hand positive experiences of (e.g.) sisterhood ought to be given attention as well.