by Hooks, Bell
At the peak of the contemporary feminist movement, a Virginia Slims commercial showed a woman shifting roles, moving from gender equality in the work force to traditional femininity in the home. Those of us who remember it can see that to some extent this ad was prophetic. As the white woman portrayed shifted roles, signified by the changing of clothes, stripping off her work suit for sexy lingerie, she sang: “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and never let you forget I’m a woman.” The words and scenario fit neatly with the version of feminism women such as Paglia, Wolf, and Roiphe advocate. (Although if such an ad were airing today it would include the image of a cook making dinner so that the only role the “power feminist” would need to shift from is that of hardcore work equal to soft feminine sexual partner).
In most of her work, Paglia makes the female body the site of her insistence on a binary structure of gender difference, particularly in relation to the issue of sexuality, of desire and pleasure. Without ever using words such as inferior and superior, she implies the naturalness of these distinctions with statements that affirm hierarchy:
Sexual freedom. Sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first. There are hierarchies in nature and alternate hierarchies in society. In nature, brute force is the law, a survival of the fittest.
Or
The identification of woman with nature is the most troubled and troubling term in this historical argument. Was it ever true? Can it still be true? Most feminist readers will disagree, but I think this identification is not myth but reality. All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics, and politics were invented by men … Every human being must wrestle with nature. But nature’s burden falls more heavily on one sex. With luck, this will not limit woman’s achievement, that is, her action in male-created social space. But it must limit eroticism, that is, our imaginative lives in sexual space, which may overlap social space but is not identical with it.
It is this revamped patriarchal logic passing for “new feminism” that the mass media hypes, and that sexist men and women cheer.
Paglia’s conservative sense of gender is coupled with an equally conservative take on race and the issues of multiculturalism. Embedded in all her statements about African American culture is the age-old white cultural elitism that acknowledges sports and music as domains where black genius has appeared even as she discounts through a process of non-acknowledgment black contributions in all other arenas. Superficially, it may appear that Paglia was supported by sexist men solely because of her antifeminist stance; however, that support is linked as well with her Western white nationalist stance, particularly in relation to education, attempts to critique biases in curriculum, and so on. Mass audiences fascinated with Paglia mainly heard sensational sound bites that often appear radical and transgressive of the status quo, or clever negative put-downs of feminism, so it may not be as apparent to these groups that many of her agendas are utterly conservative. And even those “new feminists” who claim no allegiance to Paglia take pride in their support of a traditional curriculum in the academy. Despite the hype that implies that students, particularly those in Women’s Studies, are in danger of not knowing “great white Western” canonical works, these subjects continue to dominate the curriculum everywhere. No one is denied access to them. Contrary to what some folks would have us believe, it is not tragic, even if undesirable, for a person to leave a liberal arts education not having read major works from this canon. Their lives are not ending. And the exciting dimension of knowledge is that we can learn a work without formally studying it. If a student graduates without reading Shakespeare and then reads or studies this work later it does not delegitimize whatever formal course of study that was completed. Obviously, Paglia’s academic conservativism was welcomed, encouraged, and supported by the existing power structure—and it did influence public opinion. If nothing else, it created a space for other self-proclaimed “feminist” leaders to follow in her foot-steps. Progressive thinkers, especially feminists, often dismissed Paglia’s antifeminism without identifying the specific ways she undermines feminist movement and progressive struggle in general. Issues of exploitation and oppression never surface in Paglia’s work. This absence is especially appealing in an antiintellectual culture that urges everyone to feel that all intense critical thought, especially that which promotes radical political activism, crushes our capacity to experience pleasure. This thinking is at the heart of the assumption that supporting feminist politics means being antisex and ultimately antipleasure. Yet progressive critical thinkers, especially feminists, who are only concerned with exchanging ideas within academic circles, concede the space of popular cultural debate to those individuals who are eager to have a turn at stardom. This concession helps promote the rise of individuals like Paglia.
Not every point Paglia makes is inaccurate. Indeed, she has been difficult to dismiss precisely because her ideas often contradict one another. There is often a conservative and radical mix. This ambiguity notwithstanding, most of her primary ideas are rooted in conservative, white supremacist capitalist patriarchal thought. Shrewdly, Paglia avoids public appearances with individuals, myself included, who might undermine the negative representation of feminist thought she has helped popularize. Radical/revolutionary feminist thought and practice must emerge as a force in popular culture if we are to counter in a constructive way the rise of Paglia and those who eagerly seek the same spotlight. This means that we must work harder to gain a hearing.
There must be more effort to write and talk about feminist ideas in ways that are accessible. Those of us who already have been successfully working in this way must strive individually and collectively to make our voices heard by a wider audience. If we do not actively enter the terrain of popular culture, we will be complicit in the antifeminist backlash that is at the heart of the mass media’s support of antifeminist women who claim to speak on behalf of feminism. This speaking is really a seductive foreplay that intends to provoke, excite, and silence. The time has come to interrupt, intervene, and change the channel.
8
DISSIDENT HEAT
Fire with fire
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books. Even when profound experiences alter my sense of reality, those lived moments usually return me to ideas I have read or lead me to further reading. My critical engagement with feminist thinking began with books. And even as an undergraduate, during the heyday of my involvement with Women’s Studies courses, consciousness-raising, and moments of organized rebellion, I always felt the need to ground these experiences with careful reading and the study of written work. Whenever I am asked by anyone about feminist thinking or feminist movement, I refer to books. I never encourage them to seek out individuals, to follow feminist “stars.” Cautioning them against idolatry (and that caution extends to my advising them against placing me on a pedestal), I urge them to grapple with feminist ideas and to read, interrogate, and think critically.
As a young feminist thinker, I was deeply moved by the emphasis many radical feminists placed on anonymity. It fascinated me to read feminist work where writers used pseudonyms as a strategy to critique both the sexist thinking that pits female thinkers against one another and also as a way to emphasize ideas over personalities. Certainly my choice to use a pseudonym was influenced by the longing, however utopian, to be among a community of feminist thinkers and activists who were seriously committed to intellectual development, to a dialectical exchange of ideas rather than opportunistic bids for stardom.
The institutionalization of feminist thought in the academy, along with the megasuccess of popular feminist books, fundamentally altered the focus on anonymity. As with any other “hot” marketable topic, feminism has become an issue that can be pimped opportunistically by feminists and nonfeminists alike. Indeed, there are so many successful feminist writers that it is easy for readers to
forget that the vast majority of feminist thinkers and writers work years without seeing any material reward for their labor. Concurrently, much of the work labeled “feminist” that is now produced and marketed does not emerge from active struggle and engagement with feminist movement, or even from collaborative feminist thinking. Many authors feel quite comfortable pushing their brands of feminist thought without feeling any need to relate that thought to feminist political practice.
In the past, more so than today, many feminist thinkers, myself included, developed our ideas in various public locations of social interchange—whether consciousness-raising groups, classrooms, lectures, or one-on-one debate. I still relish the hours of intense debate, disagreement, and critical exchange I had with feminist comrade Zillah Eisenstein when we first met at a conference. We were both working on new books. Our friendship grew out of the intensity of that exchange. Or the fierce debates that took place in Donna Haraway’s feminist theory classrooms and the long hours of discussion and processing that took place after class. Many of the women I encountered during that time—Lata Mani, Ruth Frankenberg, Katie King, Caren Kaplan, to name just a few—have gone on to make significant contributions to feminist thinking. Rigorous in our critique of ideas, we wanted to subject our work to an intellectual alchemical process wherein thoughts that were self-indulgent, wasteful, or harmful to our shared political project—advancing feminist movement—would fall away. We never talked about wanting to be recognized as hotshot academics or famous feminists, not because status did not matter to us, but simply because we were more preoccupied with the issues. We were concerned about our relationship to women and men outside the academy, about writing books in a style that would reach wider audiences, and we were genuinely possessed and driven by the longing to create feminist thought and theory that would transform our lives, and the lives of all women, men, children. We yearned to be part of a feminist community that would create new visions of justice and freedom for everyone.
It is difficult not to be nostalgic for that camaraderie (we were not all white, not all straight, not from the same class or national backgrounds, some of us were deep into spiritual stuff and others had no use for gods) watching young college-educated women come to feminist thinking without an engagement with feminist movement, lacking a commitment to feminist politics that has been tested in lived experience. It is tempting for these young women to produce feminist writing that is self-indulgent, opportunistic, that sometimes shows no concern for promoting and advancing feminist movement that seeks to end sexist exploitation and oppression. It is equally tempting for this new group of thinkers and writers to seek to shield themselves from critique by setting up a scenario that suggests they are being crushed or harshly judged by older feminists who are jealous of their rise to power. Many established feminists would testify that throughout feminist movement there has been an effort to engage new work critically and rigorously. Such critical interrogation maintains the integrity of feminist thought and practice. Reading work by new feminist writers, I am most often struck by how this writing completely ignores issues of race and class, how it cleverly makes it seem as though these discussions never took place within feminist movement. These attitudes and assumptions are given voice in the recent work of Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf.
Unlike Roiphe, whose book The Morning After has been harshly critiqued by many established feminist writers and thinkers, Wolf’s work, Fire with Fire, strategically manages to avoid rigorous critique even though it has been subjected to some very negative reviews. Given the visceral response many feminists had to Roiphe’s work I was fascinated by the fact that they seemed not to be equally disturbed by Fire with Fire—especially since many passages in Wolf’s work could easily have been excerpts from The Morning After. For example, in the section entitled “Harassment and Date Rape: Collapsing the Spectrum,” Wolf recalls her sense of empathy at the many stories she heard about rape at a rally, only to highlight her awareness of stories that struck “a false note.” She recalls, “In one of those moments, a grieving woman took the mike and recounted an episode that brought her shame, embarrassment, humiliation, or sorrow, an episode during which she was unable to vocalize ‘No.’” Wolf tells readers:
My heart went out to her because the event had felt like a rape. There had, doubtless, been many ways in which that woman’s sense of self, of her right to her own boundaries, had been transgressed long ago. But I kept thinking that, as terrible as it is to be unable to speak one’s claim to one’s body, what the sobbing woman described was not rape. I also thought of how appalled I would be if I had had sex with someone whose consent I was certain of, only to find myself accused of criminal behavior.
Readers could easily ignore passages which echo Roiphe’s rhetoric because Wolf spends so much time trashing Roiphe’s work. This skillful manipulation of ideas and allegiances, the blatant juxtaposition of contradictory opinions, characterizes much of Wolf’s writing in Fire with Fire.
Even though she is critical of “insider feminism,” Wolf has used power garnered after writing the bestselling The Beauty Myth to network, to create a support structure that makes feminist individuals fear reprisal if they publicly criticize her work— power that could have been used to establish forums for progressive debate and dissent. Evidently, Katie Roiphe lacked such powerful, established, feminist backing. Even though Wolf claims to support dissent, declaring that “it is not dissent that is harmful to feminism, but consensus,” her work reveals no evidence that she constructively engages ideas that are different from her own. Indeed, the false dichotomy she constructs in the section “Victim Feminism versus Power Feminism” allows her to set up a competitive area (again quite similar to the competitive tone in Roiphe’s work) where all feminists who do not agree with her thinking are either shown to be lacking, lined up in a kind of metaphorical firing squad and shot down (she summarizes the work of Adrienne Rich, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon in compact sections of one or two paragraphs), or simply ignored. Given this standpoint, Wolf’s contention that “sisterhood is problematic” makes sense. Any reader schooled in radical or revolutionary thought would understand this insistence on competition to be a mirroring of internalized sexist thinking about power, about the way in which women have traditionally been socialized to relate to one another in patriarchal society. Rather than offering a new vision of female power, Wolf transposes the old sorority girl, dog-eat-dog will to power away from the arenas of competitive dressing and dating onto feminism.
Meeting Naomi Wolf when I gathered with a group of feminist thinkers to engage in dialogue at the behest of Ms. magazine, I did not realize that I was in the presence of “power feminism.” I did see that I was in the presence of a young feminist who has come to power without in any way interrogating the way her body-politic and speech patterns negate possibilities of meaningful dialogue. Rapid, aggressive speech, a refusal to acknowledge others who wish to speak (recognizing them only after they interrupt and talk over you), and not listening are all tactics that remind me of the strategies for power outlined in patriarchal manuals that teach folks how to win through intimidation. These same strategies were used by Wolf when she appeared on the Charlie Rose talk show to discuss date rape. Appearing on a panel with women and white men, she seemed to find it easier to aggressively interrupt the black woman speaker while patiently listening to the words of white male speakers. A critical examination of this video would be a useful way to illustrate the practice of “power feminism.” When Wolf and I were introduced at the Ms. discussion she told me that she had been using my work to inform the writing of the then unpublished Fire with Fire but that she had to “stop reading it because of anxiety about influence.” At the time this seemed to be a rather backhanded compliment. I responded in my usual direct manner by sweetly stating, “I hope you won’t be like other white women who use my work and never acknowledge it.” She assured me that this was not the case. And any readers who choose to pore over the copio
us notes at the end of Fire with Fire will find my work cited and long passages quoted. In the prefatory statements to Note 180 Wolf writes:
“Victim Feminism”: Many feminist theorists have addressed the issues I raise. bell hooks’s work in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center on sisterhood, victim culture, “trashing” and differences, has been particularly influential.
The long passages from my books Wolf appreciatively cites in her notes (which are not correlated numerically to specific passages in the main body of her work) seem to belie the fact that the one time my work is mentioned in the text its meaning is distorted and it is evoked as part of a passage that is meant to illustrate wrongminded thinking. Wolf contends, “Rather than bringing mainstream women to feminism in what writer bell hooks calls ‘a conversion process,’ insider feminism should go to them.” In actuality, I used the phrase “conversion process” to speak about the experience we undergo to become revolutionary feminists—when we give up one set of ideas to take up another. Concurrently, in the context in which this phrase was used I was emphasizing the need for feminist thinkers to create feminist theory that speaks to masses of women and men (not simply “mainstream women,” which seems in Wolf’s work to be a comfortable euphemism masking her central concern with women from mostly white and/or privileged class groups).
Throughout Fire with Fire, Naomi Wolf skillfully manipulates the meaning and message of much feminist thought so that she stands heroically alone as the “power feminist” with the insights and the answers. In a critique I wrote of Katie Roiphe’s work, I shared that I was compelled to write about The Morning After because I was so struck by the erasure of progressive feminist standpoints that recognize race and class to be factors that shape what it is to be female, and by her gratuitous attack on Alice Walker. Symbolically, I saw this attack as a form of backlash against those women within feminist movement, particularly women of color, who challenged all women and men engaged in feminist politics to recognize differences of race and class. It is as though privileged young white women feminists, unlike their older counterparts, feel much more comfortable publicly dismissing difference, dismissing issues of race and class when it suits them. As though given their own competitive vision, they see themselves as heroically wresting the movement away from issues that do not centralize the concerns of white women from privileged classes.