Comments Elsewhere

Irfan: “Don’t quite see how schoolchildren have carte blanche to say what they want on school time while receiving an important guest.”

I don’t quite see how schools have carte blanche to use institutionalized force to compel students to attend “visits” from “important guests” that they’re not interested in. Since the schools have men with guns to back up their rudeness and the students generally don’t, I tend to find the former a lot more worrisome than the latter, and am also a lot less inclined to find fault with the latter when it’s in response to the former.

I also don’t see what any of this has to do with the “importance” (to whom?) of the guest. If shouting down a speaker is inappropriate in a given context I can’t for the life of me imagine any reasons that would make it more inappropriate just because the speaker is “important.” In a republican polity government functionaries are people just like you and me. They are not owed special courtesies that aren’t owed to other ordinary people.

Irfan: “A school is not a municipality, its rules are not laws, and one would think that the school has some standards of decorum, which ought to be upheld.”

This would be more convincing if both attendence and funding of government schools were not compulsory. But it is. So what difference have their edicts got from laws, other than the point of origin?

JenK:

I never looked for ‘gay’ men’s shelters, only men’s shelters. There still are no men’s shelters for straight men. … And the second is a hotline, not a shelter.

If you’d bothered to follow the link, you would see that Battered Men’s Helpline has built a shelter providing refuge services to battered men. The scheduled opening was on April 15. In any case, there are several shelters already existing for gay and trans men besides the one I pointed to in Massachussetts and it’s a bit irresponsible to categorically claim that there are no shelters for battered men without having done enough of the basic homework to find this out.

Me:

Primary funding came from local women’s groups, private donors, and some national nonprofit groups like the Ms. Foundation for Women.

JenK:

And where do you think this money came from?

I just told you. From local women’s groups, private donors, and some national nonprofit groups like the Ms. Foundation for women.

Women were not working at this point in large enough numbers to support this. This money came from male donations to charities, or widow’s donations, which amounts to male donations.

You have absolutely no evidence for this claim whatsoever. As it happens, the paid workforce participation rate of women in 1972 (the year that the first modern shelters opened in the United States) was 44% (Source: BLS). That’s fewer women than are in the paid workforce today, but it’s certainly a lot of women with a steady paycheck. If you have some empirical evidence to demonstrate that women were not, in fact, the primary funders of local women’s liberation groups or the Ms. Foundation for Women (for example), you’re free to cite it, but in the meantime I don’t see much reason to take the suggestion seriously.

There is no shame in knowing good men fought along side women for a cause which obviously needed doing. Just as there would be no shame in having good women fight alongside good men.

Nobody denies that “good men” helped in the development of the early battered women’s shelters. However it is quite obvious that men—whether private citizens or men in government—were neither the primary advocates, nor the people actually doing the work of building the shelters, nor the primary funders. Women did that, and (not to put too fine a point on it) feminist women did it. (Some Brits supported the American Revolution; that doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate to say that Americans were the ones who made it.)

The women who fought for these shelters also had free time-they were not working. Men today do not have that luxury. Feminism has always been a white, upper middle class project.

This is, frankly, nonsense. If you would take the time to study the history of the battered women’s movement, you would know that it is nonsense. Most of the early shelters were founded by battered women themselves (Boston’s Transition House, for example, was started in Chris Womendez’s and Cherie Jimenez’s apartment. Womendez and Jimenez had moved in together after fleeing abusive relationships). We are talking about women who fled beatings themselves, worked outside of the house to keep a roof over their heads, and turned over their own apartments and homes to help fellow battered women. (You might point out that they got a lot of help from women’s liberation groups that included many women who had not been battered. That’s true; it’s also true that the women in those WL groups were mostly unmarried and working on their own to keep roofs over their heads.)

I know that you, like most people in our culture, have been given a set of lenses through which to view the history of the women’s movement, and that one of those lenses is the stereotype of feminism as a response to the existential crises of bored white housewives. I think that’s actually uncharitable to Betty Friedan, NOW, and the other liberal feminist targets it’s aimed at, but when I say that feminists build the battered women’s shelter network I don’t mean liberal feminists in the first place. I mean the radical women’s liberation movement. More than one early shelter was formed directly out of a WL consciousness-raising group (the c-r group provided an understanding of battery and also a group of contacts for funding and volunteering). That’s not to say that the radical feminist movement didn’t involve lots of people who had their own forms of privilege; it is to say that if you’re going to try to identify what sorts of privilege aided their success, you’re going to need a different set of templates than the ones you use to talk about NOW and liberal feminism. And if you want to talk about the feminists who played a leading role in the movement to build battered women’s shelters, you are going to be talking about WL, not NOW.

Badger:

Is it not interesting that of all the hate speak quoted above the only person they selected out of all to address was Valerie Solanas. All others were conviently ignored as if they didn’t exist. Says alot.

What it says is that there are diminishing marginal returns to spending a long time discussing each and every quote on a lazily cut-and-pasted “horror file” list of arbitrarily selected quotes from arbitrarily selected women, some of whom are feminists and others of whom aren’t. I’ve already discussed several of these “quotes” elsewhere; besides the Solanas quotes, the list includes several quotes which are dishonestly selective (including at least two quotes that are taken from characters in novels but dishonestly attributed to the author of the novel) and at least one which is completely fabricated. It’s not worth spending a lot of time arguing back and forth about this or that quote and this or that author’s position and influence unless there is a basic level of honesty on the part of the person citing the quotes. So far people spewing out these cut-n-pasted “horror file” lists have not risen to that basic level of honesty.

Well, Debbie Stoller and Bust magazine deserve mention, even if I infinitely prefer Bitch and the late, lamented HUES.

I still just don’t get the demand for declaring a “Third Wave” though. I mean, quite independently of the worries about “waves” to begin with, if you take those historical categories perfectly seriously, it just hasn’t been long enough. The “First Wave” as conventionally dated refers to at least three generations of feminists who had lots of internal differences and some pitched fights over tactics, organization, goals, class, race, sexuality, ideology, etc., and those conflicts often took the form of intergenerational conflicts between the older leaders and young upcoming activists. Whenever the “Third Wave” language gets brought out I always just wonder why we can’t at least put a good 72 years of work into the Second Wave before we declare a new one.

Alina:

The problem is that labor unions have just elevated a new type of management to the forefront— namely, the AFL-CIO management. I don’t think unions are doing their members any favors when they push for legislation that ties health insurance to jobs, thereby decreasing labor mobility and competition. In fact, it’s hard to say how the labor union managers really help American workers by keeping them in assembly line jobs.

Well, there’s a distinction to be made between the AFL-CIO and labor unionism as such here, just as there’s a distinction to be made between corporate capitalism and the free market. I don’t have a very rosy view of the AFL-CIO; on the other hand I don’t have a very rosy view of the GEs and GMs and Exxon-Mobiles of the world either. Both are largely the Frankenstein creations of State patronage. Pretty much every complaint you lodge against unions here is more or less directly attributable to the incentives for labor negotiators created by centralized, managed unions organized by shop floor and using collective bargaining and single-shop strikes as their main levers. But of course none of those points is the only sort of labor organizing on offer; there are lots of other ways that workers can and have organized themselves in the past other than the AFL-CIO model, and the fact that AFL-style unions are as widespread as they are is directly attributable to government patronage, from the Wagner Act onward, rather than any particular virtue of the model for ordinary workers.

Jason:

Well, I’m no expert (which needn’t be mentioned at this point, I’m sure), but isn’t the AFL-CIO just one of the only ones to survive attacks—violent and otherwise—from the business community? I’m not sure that’s the only form a union can take and possibly has taken (I’ll have to do some investigation).

It isn’t so much a matter of surviving attacks (although there were plenty of attacks). It’s more a matter of government patronage. The AFL and CIO grew rapidly at the expense of other models of organizing (e.g. unions that rejected collective bargaining, and the decentralist and syndicalist organizations favored by unions like the IWW) during the 1930s because the Roosevelt administration passed laws (especially the Wagner Act in 1935) which gave special government privileges to unions that followed the AFL and CIO models. The special privileges allowed them to extract more short-term gains from the management, at the expense of hamstringing freedom for rank-and-file workers and conceding some areas of traditional labor demands wholesale (e.g., worker self-management). But it’s perfectly reasonable for rank-and-file workers to prefer to join unions that offer short-term gains rather than those that don’t offer short-term gains; so the NLRB patronage system amounted to an unbeatable subsidy for AFL-style unionizing. Which is how we got to where we are today: a few unions with extremely conservative methods and declining membership, which mainly serve as protection rackets for already-unionized workers, and union bosses and senior workers within the unions, at the expense of non-unionized workers and rank-and-file or junior workers. It didn’t have to be this way, but as long as organized labor remains colonized by the government, it’s likely to stay that way. One can only hope that the steady decline in the influence and membership of the “official” unions will eventually bring new wildcat unions to the fore.

“To any reasonable person, quotes such as these coming from a variety of radical feminist writers should make it quite clear that modern radical feminism is an ideology of pure hate as virulent as any hatred that has been unleashed against racial minorities in this country.”

I must be an unreasonable person, then. Part of the problem, of course, is that several things that you have cited here are completely irrelevant, wildly misinterpreted, and, in a couple of cases, complete fabrications. (Repeating wildly misinterpreted selective quotations is a form of dishonesty; repeating complete fabrications is telling lies.)

For example, in the “completely irrelevant” column:

“In my own life, I don’t have intercourse. That is my choice.” — Andrea Dworkin

What in the hell has this got to do with anything? Lots of women don’t have intercourse by choice. Hell, lots of men don’t; some of them are called priests or saints. What does this show? Nothing at all, except that the compiler of the quotes is apparently a busybody who feels free to deride women based on how they do or do not choose to have sex.

“To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.” — Valerie Solanas, Authoress of the SCUM Manifesto

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.” — Valerie Solana [sic], SCUM founder (Society for Cutting Up Men.)

The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness…can be trained to do most things. — Jilly Cooper, SCUM (Society For Cutting Up Men, started by Valerie Solanas)

These quotes are irrelevant because there is (contrary to the implication) no such organization as “SCUM” and the “founder” of this non-organization, Valerie Solanas, was not a radical feminist. She was a writer and actor in New York City who wrote the SCUM Manifesto in 1967, a year before the modern radical feminist movement started, who gained some notoriety in the press after she collapsed into paranoid schizophrenia and shot Andy Warhol in early 1968. She was a member of no WL organizations (when interviewed, years later, she said that SCUM was not an organization but rather a “frame of mind”) and her “Manifesto” (in which it is hard to separate what is seriously meant from what is put forward as dark humor—which you’d know if you’d read it) was not an influence on subsequent radical feminist writings. (I haven’t got any idea who Jilly Cooper is or why she is associated with the non-organization “SCUM” here; if you could provide a source for that quote it would be helpful.)

In the “wildly misinterpreted” column:

“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.” — Andrea Dworkin

And:

“All men are rapists and that’s all they are” — Marilyn French

You may or may not know this, but these quotes are cherry-picked out of the mouths of characters in novels — Ice and Fire and The Women’s Room, respectively — not from a speech or a treatise or essays. Taking quotations from fiction, without context and without any commentary on the characters or how they are presented, as if they accurately represented the author’s own views, is really a bit much.

In the “complete fabrication” column, there is possibly this:

“All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.” — Catherine [sic] MacKinnon

I have never encountered this sentence in any essay or book by Catharine MacKinnon, and no-one I’ve read repeating it on the Internet has bothered to give any source for it. (I’ve e-mailed some of those who did to ask about it and have not gotten any response.) Now, that doesn’t mean that the quote doesn’t exist. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. If you have a source for it in her writings then you ought to provide one. If you don’t have a source for it in her writings, then you have absolutely no more idea than I do whether she said it or not.

On the other hand, I do know where this comes from; it is certainly in the “complete fabrication” column:

“In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.” — Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies.

This is not a quote of Catharine MacKinnon. Daphe Patai and Noretta Koertge, the authors of Professing Feminism, wrote it. It is their attempt at a summary and interpretation of Catharine MacKinnon’s position, not something she said. (Note that they never claimed that it was something she said, either; that lie was started by Cal Thomas in a March 1999 column, and has been spread, unattributed, on the Internet ever since. See the Snopes article on the quote for an example. It is also a wildly inaccurate summary of MacKinnon’s position, as MacKinnon herself has made clear and as anyone who has read, for example, Chapter 9 of MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (which is one of her main extended treatments of rape law, coercion, and consent), ought to know. Of course, you may not have read Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. If so, that’s no sin; everyone’s time is limited and I’m not interested in telling people what to read. But if you are going to make confident pronouncements about the nature of MacKinnon’s views, or those of radical feminists in general, then it is totally irresponsible to hold forth on them when you clearly haven’t done the basic homework of reading what it is that they have to say, in context, rather than mindlessly repeating these sorts of “horror file” selective quote lists.

Quite apart from all of these issues, I don’t doubt that there are points of substantive disagreement between you and some of the radical feminists that you have named here. Hell, I know for a fact (because I have actually read them) that there are points of substantive disagreement between some of the radical feminists that you’ve named here and other radical feminists that you’ve named here. But a serious discussion of whether their statements are true or false, and whether their arguments for those statements are cogent or uncogent (which is, I think, a much more interesting question to resolve than whether they are “bigoted” or not) will have to wait until there is at least an honest and accurate presentation of what the views under discussion actually are, and not a series of wild caricatures that you cut and pasted from other people’s lists.

Well, there’s nothing unusual about it. The problem is that the blowhards with the loudest bullhorns in the Democratic Party — liberal educated professionals and college students — tend to combine a sanctimonious sense of self-worth with a lack of any real class consciousness. So they tend to use their privileged position to spread idiot notions like the idea that college campuses, of all places, have been the center of antiwar sentiment in the past few decades (in fact, likelihood to support both the Vietnam War and the Iraq occupation has been directly proportional to the level of educational attainment), or that poor people (in the South, particularly) are responsible for Bush’s win in 2004 (whether through their own depravity or through the Democrats’ failure to “reach out” to them and mainline enough of the opiate of the masses). The thing is it’s all claptrap, and it’s destructive claptrap that may satisfy comfortable liberals’ sense of embattled superiority in enclaves like Portland or Ann Arbor, but actually cripples any chance at offering a serious alternative to the Republican Moloch. Pointing this out was the major point of the post.

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!