Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

  And even in our social justice movements, we will easily replicate many of the oppressive social constructs we’ve been subjected to—especially when those concepts are deemed “outside” the core focus of the movement. But over generations, feminism has grown and changed. There is still what is called “white feminism”—the tendency for white feminists to center themselves at the expense of women of color—but at least now we have a name for it. And in naming it, we can think about how to move beyond it. Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us the term “intersectionality” and a framework to bring our feminism into a more inclusive and less harmful space. While we debate what issues we should prioritize, how to avoid harm, and what exactly our end goals are, we also continue to steadfastly push for fundamental issues like ending pay discrimination, interpersonal violence, and sexual assault.

  We’ve agreed and disagreed. We’ve stood in solidarity by the hundreds of thousands in marches. We’ve undercut each other when we needed support the most. It is hard to be a woman, and at times it can be even harder to be a feminist woman. And in the midst of it all, we still have to deal with dudes. The dudes who don’t want us to have political power. The dudes who don’t want us to have jobs. The dudes who don’t want us to feel safe. The shitty dudes.

  But there are good guys. The male feminists who have read Sister Outsider and wear their “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirts. And they seem really great. Except when they are interrupting us in group discussion, or telling us what they think we should read to become better feminists like them, or trying to sleep with all our friends. And if you look at these good guys and wonder, “Were they always this shitty?” Yes. Yes they were.

  Not all male feminists are shitty, but all of them—like all of us—have internalized misogyny that they are (or are not) working through. And working with these men while they process their misogyny can be annoying, harmful, and sometimes downright impossible. It’s hard enough with the men who genuinely want to do better, even if their mere existence gives one hope that we might be making progress. But there are also some dudes who clearly got into this whole feminism thing because in it they saw a new opportunity for personal gain. These dudes can do a lot of damage to feminist movements and the women they interact with there, and the ones who can do the most damage are often white men (not because shitty men of color don’t exist in feminist movements, but because men of color usually lack the social and political power that allows white men to make everything about themselves).

  Although we might think that “woke” bros are a new phenomenon, they’ve actually been taking credit for feminist ideas and taking up space in feminist circles since there was feminism. Consider Greenwich Village in the early twentieth century. Writer-activists Floyd Dell and Max Eastman were at the center of a new movement in the 1910s: socialist feminism. Born of an elite bohemian age, it melded the desire for female social and political power with the free-love experimentation of the art world and the socialist struggle against capitalist exploitation.

  The brother of prominent socialist feminist Crystal Eastman, Max Eastman was a natural fit for this world. Tall, physically attractive, and with the added distinction of prematurely white hair, Eastman turned heads. Once he had your attention, his words were eloquent, passionate, persuasive. He never wasted an opportunity to showcase his sharp intellect and elite education. Eastman was known to be “irresistibly charming, even when on the offensive.”1 He was soon known as one of “the hottest of the radicals” of his time.2 Floyd Dell was slighter in build and dark-haired, raised in the Midwest rather than on the East Coast. He didn’t have the brashness of his friend; instead, he was equipped with the quiet confidence of a self-taught writer. Dell was not, however, a dull sidekick. He had a talent for organizing writers and thinkers, and he was known for his many love affairs with women in the bohemian crowd.3 Both men were introduced to socialist feminism by women—notably Crystal Eastman and Ida Rauh (whom Eastman would later marry). The new movement deeply appealed to Dell and Eastman; they wanted to demonstrate to other men why they should be socialist feminists as well.

  Eastman and Dell had a problem with the patriarchy. And while today we may easily talk in some circles about toxic masculinity and the ways in which the patriarchy hurts men and boys by pulling them away from their true selves in favor of an artificial masculine ideal, there weren’t a lot of men who were openly voicing dissatisfaction with the patriarchy in 1910. But Eastman and Dell’s problem with the patriarchy was a little different than the issues we talk about today. Socialist feminism—at least how Eastman and Dell understood it—rested on the concept that capitalism was not only exploiting women; more importantly, it was turning them into exploiters of men. By forcing women to depend on men for the financial well-being of themselves and their children, patriarchy was trapping men in the vice of capitalist exploitation. There was no way for men to be free, they argued, if women were not free.

  The solution to this problem, Eastman and Dell maintained, was the deconstruction of capitalist exploitation and the removal of the sexist societal restrictions that prevented women from entering the workplace—and carrying their own financial weight. While many feminists today recognize that the restrictions on women in the workplace actually aided capitalism in the exploitation of their labor for the direct benefit of men (why pay women at all when you can make them work for free in the home to provide bedrock support for our economy?), Eastman and Dell saw women’s freedom only as a means to men’s freedom. Women, the notion went, were the oppressors of men, who were kept in wage slavery.

  And what did freedom look like to Eastman and Dell? A lot of what seemed to appeal to their vision of a feminist future revolved around their dicks.

  Socialist feminism would be great for men, Dell and Eastman argued at length in many essays with titles like “The Emancipation of Man.”4 Women, obviously intellectually disadvantaged by the capitalist patriarchy, would become more intelligent and interesting in a socialist feminist society. Freed from sexist ideas of marriage and propriety, women would also become more sexual. Imagine: intelligent, beautiful (and yes, Dell and Eastman regularly voiced assumptions that these women would be beautiful), highly sexual women that you could have sex with, make babies with—even make conversation with—without having to buy them dinner?

  I am, of course, being slightly reductive here to make a point. Dell and Eastman were on the right side of a lot of feminist issues. They spoke up for women’s suffrage and birth control, for civil rights, for people of color. But they also really, really liked the idea of feminism that offered them sex with women who were “not like other women,” and they used these promises repeatedly to try to recruit other men to socialist feminism. And both men hoped to find the feminist marriages that would bring them their own personal utopias.

  For years, Dell had searched for a wife who would fulfill his socialist feminist fantasies and thought he had found her in Margery Curry. Curry was an older woman, experienced, a respected feminist with her own income. The two wed in 1909. Dell was by all accounts very happy at first. Curry was intelligent, connected, and a great wit. But Dell wasn’t very physically attracted to her. At least not as much as he was to other, younger, more adoring women.

  Luckily for Dell, he was in a liberated marriage. This meant he could have affairs. And boy, did he. Dell quickly fell in love with another woman, and then another, and another. Each time, his wife (whose idea of a liberated marriage did not seem to include lies and infidelity) would be heartbroken. She even offered to divorce him. But Dell didn’t want a divorce, as for some reason this marriage with an unhappy woman that he didn’t love and wasn’t physically attracted to was still working for him.5 Curry endured Dell’s affairs for years. When he found himself sleeping with not one but two of his friends’ wives, he decided that perhaps remaining in a loveless marriage was complicating his life a bit too much. After four years of marriage, Dell left his wife in search of a more fulfilling love.6

  M
ax Eastman’s marriage had started out even more promisingly than his friend’s had. After a long search for the right woman to begin his sexual and intellectual adventures with, Eastman found his partner in Ida Rauh—feminist, artist, socialist, and friend of his sister Crystal. Rauh introduced Max to her socialist friends and helped deepen his understanding of Marxism and feminist theory. They were married in 1911, and Rauh gave birth to their son the next year.

  There were a few problems early on. The first was that, although Rauh was the feminist and independent artist and thinker Max was looking for, she didn’t seem to adore him enough. She was critical of him, “stingy with praise,” and gave him “no admiration at all.” The second problem was that Eastman immediately discovered that he (like Dell) wanted to have sex with other women—and girls (apparently one of his first temptations was his seventeen-year-old neighbor, a girl he had watched grow up. Eastman was twenty-seven at the time).7

  Eastman moved through multiple affairs and, like Dell, was disappointed to find that his wife was not nearly as enthusiastic about his dalliances as he was. Max and Ida separated for a time and then tried living in the same house but with separate quarters. Ida remained unhappy with Max’s continued affairs. Max had dedicated so much time and energy to the idea of socialist feminism, and yet here he was, unhappily stuck with a wife and kid.

  This chapter in history is not only about how two self-proclaimed male feminists ended up being shitty husbands. They were also kind of shitty feminist leaders. Max Eastman was a founder of the New York Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, which sounds pretty cool, right? However, one of the first things Eastman did was make a promise to the men who signed up that “no member would be called upon to do anything. The main function of the league would be to exist.”8 In the battle for women’s suffrage, in which women literally fought and died, men become heroes by simply existing.

  At the helm of the socialist magazine The Masses (founded by the Eastman siblings) and later The Liberator, Eastman and Dell provided a platform for socialist feminist writers and thinkers to share their vision of a new future. A lot of great writers and thinkers were published in The Masses, like Mary Heaton Vorse and even Langston Hughes. But as editor, when Dell did publish women, he tended to focus on the work of women who he thought exemplified his ideal feminism. And that feminism was not nearly as concerned with economic or political rights as it was with sexual and artistic liberation. Dell and Eastman weren’t shy about critiquing the politics of other women. Dell wrote about his favorite feminists in his book Women as World Builders, in which he differentiated between the women he viewed as serious feminists—those who theorized about how much the world needed to change—and the “courtesans,” who were only interested in finding their personal joy. Both Dell and Eastman wrote at length about how feminism would benefit men, but if women focused more on advancing their own needs and causes, the two men openly disapproved.

  Eastman and Dell did not see any hypocrisy in critiquing the looks or personalities of their female peers. Both men were huge fans of the dancer Isadora Duncan, who focused on liberating dance from the rigid confines of ballet. Her celebration of the woman’s body was certainly a feminism they could appreciate and enjoy. When Duncan was not onstage, however, Eastman found her “didactic” and “assertive.”9 Dell described feminist writer Cornelia Barns as an “elf eyed girl” who “came through the door of The Masses like a child into a playroom.”10

  Their ideal feminist was a woman who was sexually and intellectually liberated for the pleasure of men like Dell and Eastman. She would be beautiful and pliable—open to the teachings of feminist men. In an article for The Masses titled “Feminism for Men,” Dell wrote not of how patriarchy took away women’s agency or denied them economic and political freedom, but of how it made “sweethearts” into “wives”—depriving men of exciting romantic relationships:

  First observe what it means to be a sweetheart.… She is not shut out from his society by reason of differences in habits or tastes. The assumption is that their habits and tastes ought to be alike. If she doesn’t understand baseball, he explains it to her. If he likes golf, he teaches her how to play. If he loves poetry, he sits up and reads her his favorite poets.… If she has been brought up with the idea that it is wicked to drink, he will cultivate her taste in cocktails. He will give her lessons in Socialism, poetry, and poker, all with infinite tact and patience.…

  When you have got a woman in a box, and you pay rent on the box, her relationship to you insensibly changes character.

  When she has left that box and gone back into the great world, a citizen and a worker, then with surprise and delight he will discover her again, and never let her go.11

  In the end it was marriage that caused Dell to leave feminism behind and join the ranks of the antifeminists. After leaving his unhappy marriage and pursuing various unsatisfying love affairs, Dell was beginning to think that new women weren’t for him. He didn’t want to marry a woman with her own dreams and passions—at least not dreams or passions that didn’t revolve around him. He wanted a woman who would put him and their children above all else. Only one person in a marriage could afford to chase their dreams, and in Dell’s marriage, that person would be Dell.

  Dell surprisingly found the old-fashioned marriage he was looking for in a thoroughly modern woman: B. Marie Gage. Gage was a socialist author and feminist activist who had even been arrested for her pacifist organizing during World War I. But the two fell quickly in love. They were married ten weeks after meeting and moved away from the city to start a family.12 Gage left her writing and activism behind, and Dell eschewed his feminism to concentrate on writing stories and plays. Their marriage was by all accounts a happy one, lasting more than fifty years, until the end of Gage’s life. As Dell settled into domestic bliss, he became further convinced that if feminism didn’t work for him, it wouldn’t work for anyone. Dell still believed in a liberated and valued woman—as in a woman free to pursue her interests in raising a happy home and who would be appreciated for her talents in doing so. Dell’s feminism morphed into support of the traditional gender roles that he had once fought: the man at the head of the household, the woman running the home.

  While Dell may have seemed disloyal in both feminism and marriage, the truth is that his loyalties never changed. Dell was always loyal to whatever belief system or situation best served his interests, for as long as they served his interests. In his later writing, like Love in the Machine Age, Dell—now established in his traditional heterosexual marriage—stepped further away from socialist feminism and renounced his former advocacy of free love, homosexuality, and working mothers. These were no longer the ideals of a free and accepting society; they were the follies of youth, and they would lead to nothing but unhappiness.

  “Do we want to train young people for… living happily ever after in heterosexual matehood, or for living tormented and frustrated lives of homosexuality, frigidity and purposeless promiscuity?” Dell asked.13 Heterosexual love and family—centered around content wives and mothers—were where true happiness lay. Women should only work in their younger years, until they found a husband, and if necessary to help solidify an early marriage in its lean years. But once her husband got his feet beneath him, a woman should stop working and take on her real job, that of wife and mother. This was still, to Dell, a modern marriage, because while on the surface it may have seemed like a regurgitation of patriarchal constraints on the lives of women, it was different because women would be celebrated and supported more than they had been in the past for happily living within those constraints.

  Old friends Max Eastman and Floyd Dell ended up becoming quite disappointed in each other. Eastman was vocally critical of Dell’s rejection of the feminism he had helped pioneer, wondering how his friend had become such a patriarchal traditionalist. I’m sure that Dell’s transition was confusing and surprising, but Dell’s disappointment in Eastman ended up being much deeper, a grudge that he carried into old
age.

  When Eastman finally got away from his wife after six years of marriage, leaving her with their child (whom he would not see again for two decades), he decided to travel to communist Russia to see his beloved socialist revolution in practice. In the two years that Eastman was in Russia, he fell in love with and married Elena Krylenko, the sister of a prominent Bolshevik. Eastman’s socialist dream quickly devolved into a nightmare as Stalin and Trotsky battled for power in the wake of Lenin’s death. As Stalin consolidated his power and began silencing his enemies through mass imprisonment and executions, Eastman was understandably heartbroken and disillusioned. Stalin ended up being another white man who would distort entire movements to serve his purposes—and would take these distortions to murderous extremes.

  As Eastman’s Russian friends were imprisoned and murdered, his desperation to make American society aware of what was happening alienated him from the American socialist community. With nothing left to lose, Eastman stopped talking about what needed to change in Russia’s socialism and decided that the atrocities in Russia proved that socialism was, in its entirety, untenable. So Eastman stopped writing for leftist, socialist magazines and began writing anticommunist screeds for conservative magazines like the New Republic. Anybody who supported communism, according to Eastman, was aiding and abetting the murder and oppression in Russia. Eastman called out the friends and establishments he had worked with in the past. He got really into Friedrich Hayek, an economist whose ideas became favored by archconservatives like Margaret Thatcher. Eastman’s betrayal of the ideals he once held was complete when he began to support Senator Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of suspected communists.