Over the last few weeks it's seemed that there was something of a generational divide emerging in the Thursday-night Feminist Supervixens series and elsewhere. In some cases it's gotten fairly acrimonious (as in the accusation my title refers to, explained in full below), while in others it seems to be a case of people talking past each other or not quite getting each other's points but remaining cordial.
But, despite widely differing life experiences and levels of embrace of feminism within any given age group, there seems to be a growing discourse in which younger women here are being framed by older women here as being too conciliatory to men, too sexualized, too ignorant of feminism to fully understand the choices we make.
As one of the younger women here (I'm no teenager, but IIRC the average age of dkos users is like 46), I'm a little disturbed by the many comments I've read in these discussions attributing blindness to or ignorance of feminism to younger women. It's not that I take it personally, or that I think younger women are immune to those things. It's that I find it dismissive in a politically harmful way. I don't believe that only the struggles of the past are worth learning from (though they
are worth learning from), and in several cases the dismissiveness has carried the distinct implication that there is only one legitimate feminism, or one legitimate set of struggles - as if younger women haven't encountered the old struggles as well as new and different ones - and anything else is somewhere between intentional harm and false consciousness.
I've seen comments like this one reading in part
I was sincerely disappointed in what happened (0 / 0)
there with the younger people, especially the discussion of using words and what part they have played in repression. They are getting their knowledge of feminism from books and making up a lot of it themselves from what they read, not what they have experienced.
--snip--
No, you are not crazy. If the old feminists weren't around to at least try to explain things and give some history, god knows where we would be. We have to keep trying no matter what. It is good to know that some of them at least come to those diaries, even though they seem to be traveling back in time. At least they do show some interest.
I believe this is sincere and that the people making such comments really want to see younger women reap the benefits of feminism and of a non-sexist society, that they wish younger women only the best. But I remain frustrated by the implication that we younger women automatically have more to learn and less right to claim feminism as our own, and that our only access to understanding sexism or feminism is through books, as if we don't have our own set of experiences. I also feel that there's a bit of amnesia going on here, since feminist movements have always been characterized by fierce debates and often by bitter disputes over what constitutes legitimate feminism.
In "A Gender Diary," Ann Snitow's classic work of feminist theory, Snitow dissects one such debate, that over the way
a common divide keeps forming in both feminist thought and action between the need to build the identity "woman" and give it solid political meaning and the need to tear down the very category "woman" and dismantle its all-too-solid history.
Although what's going on here at dKos is not centered around that divide (though I bet we could have a hell of a fight about that one, too), I think Snitow's observations of conflict in feminism are relevant and deeply important.
By writing of the varied vocabularies and constructions feminists have used to describe the divide, I do not mean to intimate that they are all one, but to emphasize their difference. Each issue calls forth a new configuration, a new version of the spectrum of feminist opinion, and most require an internal as well as external struggle about goals and tactics. Though it is understandable that we dream of peace among feminists, that we resist in sisterhood the factionalism that has so often disappointed us in brotherhood, still we must carry on the argument among ourselves. Better still, we must actively embrace it. The tension in the divide, far from being our enemy, is a dynamic force that links very different women. Feminism encompasses central dilemmas in modern experience, mysteries of identity that get full expression in its debates. The electricity of its internal disagreements is part of feminism's continuing power to shock and involve large numbers of people in a public conversation far beyond the movement itself. The dynamic feminist divide is about difference; it dramatizes women's differences from each other--and the necessity of our sometimes making common cause.
I believe firmly in dialogue. It's why I'm here at Daily Kos. I've profited immensely from it here and elsewhere.
Hoping to work on a dialogue around these moments of conflict, I wrote to hrh, the founder and coordinator of Supervixens, volunteering to host a diary in the series. I asked for her permission to quote her email; she responded by giving me permission to quote the following one without giving a direct answer about the first, so I will paraphrase: She said no, because I disagree with her about things and because (she feels) I personally attack and insult her and other real feminists, so I should write my own diary.
When I replied that I would do so, she suggested the title "Little Sisters of the DKos Frat House"--which I did use, reconfigured slightly. As explained by Mindy Stombler in a 1994 article in the journal Gender & Society
Fraternity little sisters, sometimes called "sweethearts," are undergraduate women affiliated with a men's social fraternity; they typically serve the fraternity in a "hostess" or "booster" capacity. Fraternity men select women to be little sisters on the basis of beauty and sociability, following a rush process modeled after fraternity men's rush.
--snip--
Little sisters participate in selected activities and certain rituals of a specific fraternity, but they enjoy neither full membership status in the fraternity nor the privileges and levels of participation that accompany it.
As Stombler goes on to detail, there are also highly sexualized connotations to little sister status. So this is a view of my and others' participation here as radically disempowered, a weak auxiliary to the full dkos membership of men. And not just weak auxiliaries, but ones specifically here for either the sexual gratification of men or the appearance that men are sexually dominant. It's funny, because I don't feel that way. Am I fooling myself? Is that how others see it?
That's how hrh sees me, at a minimum, as she made more than clear Thursday night when she replied to a male commenter's intervention in a dispute between us by asking (hidden)
What's up, are you fucking Miss Laura?
That was clearly over the line, which is why the comment ended up hidden. But that was not the impetus for this diary, which I had actually already begun writing at that point. Instead, her comment was an extreme version of exactly the thing I was already thinking about - I think this is a more pervasive issue between some older and some younger women on this site lately, as suggested by this comment
Check out the comments. Elise comes on a few comments down, and Mike S. does some himself, and someone else. What I see (online yet--I never thought I'd be discussing people whose typed ideas are all I know about them!)is Mike S. doing the same thing he did on the rb diary--he makes a really ugly remark and then does a "just kidding" thing. And Elise is coquettish with someone that uses a male handle.
I don't want to suggest that that comment was intended in at all the personally nasty vein of hrh's suggestion - I'm quite sure it wasn't and in fact I believe that the people involved have corresponded and come to a better understanding of each other - but I do think that the common thread is worth noting and trying to understand, as those two have done one on one. It seems that some of us in our late 20s who identify very strongly as feminists are being read as, I don't know, participating in our own objectification? Flirting so as not to threaten men?
Of course, at this point I've gone on pretty interminably, so I'll turn it over to comments. Is there a generational divide? Is is "real" or a matter of perception? What issues does it center around? Why do older women seem to be more vocal about it? What's with the focus on sexual issues?