Barbara,

I agree with you that different rhetorical postures are appropriate to different circumstances. My point in quoting Garrison was to reply to Uzzah’s claim that “If you have to resort to the angry rhetoric to make your point, maybe its a point that doesn’t hold much water.” I think this is false, and obviously so. Sometimes it’s worth pulling punches to get a point across and sometimes what the matter deserves is more severity and harshness in our language. When that’s the case it does absolutely nothing to undermine or to delegitimize the point that you are making, whether or not it makes individual listeners more or less likely to agree with you. (As I take it you agree, from your comments.)

I also think it’s worth noting, though, that whatever sort of language is most conducive to persuading people, the point of feminist writing is not always to convince sexist men to become less sexist. Persuading more men (or for that matter more women) to become feminists is one way that feminism can make progress towards its goals, but it’s not the only way, and sometimes neither the most important nor the most beneficial.

Hugo,

I don’t think that sophonisba was claiming that there’s a conflict between faith and reason in general, or accused you of denying that people can come to feminism through the exercise of natural reason. But she can explain and defend her own argument better than I can. I was just trying to mention it by way of explaining why I didn’t understand your claim that this post replied to her point.

Uzzah: If you have to resort to the angry rhetoric to make your point, maybe its a point that doesn’t hold much water.

Oh please.

I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.

It is pretended, that I am retarding the cause of emancipation by the coarseness of my invective, and the precipitancy of my measures. The charge is not true. On this question my influence, — humble as it is, — is felt at this moment to a considerable extent, and shall be felt in coming years — not perniciously, but beneficially — not as a curse, but as a blessing; and posterity will bear testimony that I was right. I desire to thank God, that he enables me to disregard “the fear of man which bringeth a snare,” and to speak his truth in its simplicity and power.

—William Lloyd Garrison, “To the Public,” from The Liberator No. 1, 1831.

Hugo,

While this is a perfectly interesting reply to Steve, I can’t see how anything you’ve said here engages with the points that sophonisba raised. I don’t see anywhere in her comments where she criticizes a lack of overt anger or sarcasm in your writing; she objected to what she saw as the presentation of feminism as a form of faith (when actually it’s a political program that ought to be obvious by the light of natural reason), and to the presentation of it as uncomfortable, difficult, cold, suffocating, etc. I don’t see how that has anything to do with your tone, or your style, or whether your self-expressions happen to be genuine or prideful in any given case.

Numbers added for expository purposes.

Gonzman: Thing is, too, I’m not claiming – I’m pointing out [1] that ya’ll are claiming it, that people take the most radical rhetoric and hold it as representive of all feminism, [2] that it produces the “I’m not a feminist, but…” women because they are afraid of being associated with it. That such things are an issue speak loudly of a public image and perception problem.

Look, I don’t like it when feminists do this, because I think it’s a destructive tactic that caters to anti-feminist baiting. (On the other hand, I’m biased, because my sympathies lie with radical feminism anyway.) But in any case, (1) and (2) are separate claims, and, in my experience, most feminists who do say this sort of thing make claim (1) but not claim (2). The main people who blame radical feminists for fence-sitting or anti-feminist attitudes are the fence-sitters and anti-feminists themselves. Most actual feminists who make claim (1) are simply making the point that feminist thought isn’t a monolithic hive mind, and they blame anti-feminists, not radical feminists, for treating it as if it were. Now, maybe the opinions of fence-sitters and anti-feminists are signs of “a public image and perception problem,” and maybe they aren’t, but even if they are, I don’t think it’s accurate to claim that it’s feminists rather than you who are stressing this point. But the point of feminist theory and practice is not necessarily to persuade more non-feminists to become feminists. So how seriously to take such a “problem,” so far as it exists, depends on a lot more than just the reactions of non-feminists to radical feminist rhetoric, where it is aired.

Anyway, I don’t know that you’ve understood my original point. People (women, mostly) who actually identify themselves as radical feminists don’t generally feel that their views are widely aired or discussed, and that their positions and contributions have been marginalized and continue to be marginalized. Not only by others IN the movement, but also by those OUTSIDE the movement. (They are widely “quoted” by certain factions within the anti-feminist movement, but that’s itself a minority faction.) Maybe you think they’re just wrong about the content of the discussion. But, really, which of the following do you think is better known and more widely discussed outside of feminist circles?

• Betty Friedan, or Shulamith Firestone?

• NOW, or the Redstockings?

• The Feminine Mystique, or Sexual Politics?

• Ms., or off our backs?

(N.B.: if you think that, in any of these four pairs, both are examples of the “radical” or “extremist” tendency in feminism, then you’ve made it pretty clear that what’s going on is that you have a very different picture of what constitutes radicalism than self-identified radical feminists do.)

Hugo: Rad, do you honestly believe that Q Grrl’s whopping generalization about all Christians was less offensive than my reply?

Whether her claims were correct or incorrect, and whether they are offensive or inoffensive, they are not based out of simple ignorance of Christian feminist thought. I think it was a mistake for you to treat her on the presumption that they were, particularly in the pedagogical tone that you chose to take.

I hope you don’t mean to equate “radical” with “man-hating.”

I don’t. But I have a different view of what constitutes “man-hating” from the view that most anti-feminists have, so I don’t take charges of “man-hating” in their mouths very seriously or feel any particular need to cater to their views by trying to distance myself or others from the “charge,” such as it is.

Amp: Several people have suggested, more than once, that my blog is not a feminist blog because of my moderating policies. A few people have suggested that, by extension, I’m not a feminist. I believe that similar comments have been made about Hugo’s blog, and possibly about Hugo. This brings up the “big tent” issue; is “feminist blog” defined broadly enough to include Hugo’s blog and “Alas,” and is “feminist” defined broadly enough to include myself and Hugo?

Well, O.K., fair enough; but it didn’t seem like that was what was at issue in the thread that Hugo was commenting on, and Hugo seemed to me to be writing about it as if the issue at hand were his attitude towards the claims of third parties to the “feminist” name, not his own claim to it.

That said, the issue has come up explicitly now, so maybe you’re right that it was there all along. Anyway, not much sense in pressing the point now that it clearly is part of the debate.

Hugo: Q Grrl, anytime you want a feminist Christian reading list, let me know!

Hugo, that was a really patronizing comment.

Gonzman: I’ve heard a lot of feminists here complain that they are tired of being regarded as gender seperatist, female supremacist, man-hating radicals.

Hey. I can’t say that I personally know any female supremacists, but some of my best friends are gender separatist, man-hating radicals.

Gonzman: And even though I’m sure someone will point at me as being hostile but I will say it anyway – those are the voices coming loudest from the discourse of the “feminisms.”

See, here’s the thing. All the radical feminists I know feel that their views are unfairly marginalized, ridiculed, and used as rhetorical foils both within the movement and in discussions of the movement from the outside looking in. So there’s clearly a disconnect here. Either (1) you (and whoever it is you’re citing) have a very different impression of the content of public discussions about feminism, or (2) you (and whoever it is you’re citing) have a very different impression of what constitutes “radical feminism” (or “gender separatism” or “man-hating” or whatever) than many self-identified radical feminists do.

Mike: Is it ironic that ginmar exemplifies the negative stereotype of a feminist, and hence undermines the very movement she supports?

Mike, do you think ginmar’s goal is to persuade anti-feminists that the “negative stereotypes” they hold are mistaken? I doubt that it is. Or that it should be.

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.

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.

Ayn Rand, for good or for ill, is pretty decisively not a founding figure in modern conservatism, but rather in modern libertarianism. Many conservatives did read her books at some point or another, but she was and is reviled by movement conservatives, from National Review’s slashing review of Atlas Shrugged, in which Whit Chambers declared “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’,” to their surprisingly nasty obit on the event of her death in 1982. The hostility was over a number of issues, but especially her militant atheism, her hostility to cultural traditionalism, and (according to Rand at least) her willingness to insist on free market policies as a matter of moral principle when conservatives were willing to compromise for the sake of religion or the purchase of political pull.

Vacula: “It’s a very narrow view of oppression that leaves very little room for the negative(/sexist) influence of female anti-feminists on women and ‘bad’ feminists on men, much less the positive impact of male or female pro-feminists on women.”

You raise some important points, but I don’t understand what you are trying to highlight when you mention the “negative influence of … ‘bad’ feminists on men.” Speaking quite frankly, I have never met a man who talked up some kind of hostility or political opposition to feminism on the “bad experiences” he’d had with feminists, who had any genuine knowledge or understanding about feminism as a movement or as a body of theory. Men who make this complaints very typically have had some limited unhappy experience with feminists in their area, or an impressionistic idea of who feminists are and what they do as gleaned from the mass media; have made little or no effort to make themselves less than ignorant about the history or theory or practice of feminism, as explained by the women involved in it (say reading a book, or even keeping up with a feminist periodical over any period of time); and are extremely petulant about remaining in their state of ignorance while also expecting feminists to cater to their delicate sensibilities. Thus when they start talking up bad experiences with “bad” feminists, what follows is a mishmash of anecdotes, caricatures, ignorance, half-truths, dishonesty, and nonsense. Having tried talking with men like this before, I can’t say I’m very much interested anymore in trying to deal with them or take the trouble of educating them; at root, the problem isn’t the fault of feminism, and probably isn’t the fault of the feminists that they’ve encountered either; the problem is that they are not making a good-faith effort at learning or understanding.

Maybe there are men who fit the description you offered but aren’t like this; I’ve yet to meet them, though. Or have I simply misunderstood your point?