Against White Feminism

by Against White Feminism (retail) (epub)

  Dating, finding, and keeping a man were the main concerns of Cosmo editors under Brown, and the magazine’s transactional vocabulary was a giveaway as to how women were being encouraged to look at romantic relationships under the rubric of a sort of economics. As Moira Weigel has so astutely pointed out in her book Labor of Love, women were encouraged to “shop around” and “not to settle” and play “hard to get.”

  Cosmo sex had no political or intellectual overtones; it was instead another product, something in which women could engage but that centered first on their making themselves more attractive to men with the help of the magazine’s advertisers. And the disingenuous emphasis on sexual freedom tamed a more radical version of feminism to fit capitalist society. Instead of taking on the thorny business of how sex itself replicates patriarchy in complex ways, sex was made into a commodity that could be consumed by both men and women. And if sex was understood as a commodity that women were choosing to consume, then the morally problematic objectification of women could be replaced by the apparently morally neutral objectification of sex. Women chose to purchase makeup or high heels or bigger breasts, not to please men but to enhance their own self-esteem and their capacity to enjoy the liberation of sex. At the same time, the focus shifted away from oppressive institutions of the state and law to the woman herself as a consumer. She carried the power of self-definition and self-determination in her wallet.

  The problem was that the “choices” women had were largely constructed by market capitalism. Women, now seen as consumers, were repeatedly accosted with questions of whether they wanted this lipstick or that one, this purse or that one. But even as these specific choices were being presented, the actual realm of choices available to women was shrinking. Even as they became more powerful as consumers or even as decision-makers in their professional spheres, they became less powerful in defining the choices that they wanted. Women now could choose among multiple brands of laundry detergent, but deferred or neglected opportunities to organize politically to demand free childcare for all women.

  Consumer capitalism beguiled with choices. These choices presented the illusion of power and control in the constant this-or-that, which is the basis of shopping. And the shopper is always an individual woman. She can choose to buy this car or that car, this house or that house, exercising economic power even while women’s collective power beyond consumer choice slips away. Capitalism relies on the individual, and therefore it valorizes the individual. It finds politics, with its agitation and collectivism, a threat to its colonization of all human activity for the purpose of profit, and so it demonizes it. In the tug of war between two strands of feminism, the radical feminists, women who had organized collectively and whose demands for equality had been expressed collectively, and the cash-happy Cosmo Girls interested largely in amassing power in the form of economic capital, the latter had won. By the time Helen Gurley Brown retired in 1997, radical feminists had all but disappeared from the feminist firmament.

  The cult of the individual became the norm, along with its accompanying expression of power through consumer choice and accrual of capital. The focus of feminism had shifted: instead of aspiring to develop consensus and build solidarity based on what was good for all women, women were rewarded and even celebrated for looking out for themselves. The “self-made” woman rose to take her place as companion to the “self-made” man in the Western mythos of success. But while consumer choices increased, large corporations rather than small businesses dominated the making and selling of products that women used, concentrating the actual power generated by this profit in a small number of corporate executives at the helm of enormous multinational companies.11 And even as the individual was muscled up as agent of purchasing power, her power as an employee of those corporate bosses dwindled. Meanwhile, female-targeted self-help books proliferated, encouraging women to conclude that any sense of dissatisfaction was their own individual problem—one that could be solved, like everything else, by buying something. One written by Gloria Steinem herself was titled Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. In its pages, Steinem turned away from the politics of organizing women to defining the problem as an inner one of women’s self-image.

  Sex remained at the heart of this vision of a modern feminist, birthing an easygoing, pop-feminism crystallized in the hit television show Sex and the City. In particular, Samantha’s infamously voracious sexual appetite was lauded as testament to the equality that the Sexual Revolution had “won” for women. Sex and the City was so enduringly popular and considered such a landmark of feminist progress that it has subsequently become a frame through which white, Western feminists measure the relative empowerment of other countries too. As recently as 2018, almost fifteen years after Sex and the City finished airing on TV, the New York Times reviewed An African City, a Ghanian comedy-drama in which five women look for love in Accra. The Times delighted in the fact that the show’s characters “fit perfectly into Carrie- or Miranda-type boxes” and are “as free and liberal about sex as their American foremothers.”12 Other similarities receive less attention; the article does not mention that the characters’ lifestyles are more or less a work of fantasy, economically near-impossible for most viewers. But issues of class do not concern the creators of Sex and the City and its successors; as long as characters make sexually provocative statements and model high levels of feminine consumption, who wants to worry about the realities of women’s lives? Delusional aspiration to the lives of upper-middle-class white women from one of the most financially unequal cities in the world, whose great achievement is acting out the myth that sexual freedom is the sum total of empowerment and liberation—a hollow feminism based on consumerism with a bit of sexual liberation thrown in as distraction—that’s an American product that can be exported internationally.

  Beneath the popularity of Sex and the City lay the white feminists’ belief that they were the ones to discover the idea of women’s sexual pleasure and its liberatory potential. In this mythology, women everywhere through all time were sexually repressed until white women discovered female sexual pleasure and set about teaching it to the rest of the world’s women. Once the limitations of this individualistic, consumerist version of feminist progress were set aside, the other problem with white feminists’ export of sexual liberation is their fervent belief that they are indeed exporting it to parts of the world that have barely heard the word “sex” before white culture arrived to smash the taboo. In 2019, the New York Times reviewed a Senegalese show called Mistress of a Married Man, which is typified by moments like the one where protagonist Mareme points to her own crotch and remarks, “This is mine. I give it to whoever I want.” Making sweeping assumptions about Senegal, the Times writer contrasts the revolutionary, norm-challenging model of sexual liberation handed down by Carrie and Samantha with “a culture where women’s sexuality is behind a curtain of discretion.”13 But Senegal, a former French colony, was once far more sexually open and permissive than either the United States or Europe; in the nineteenth century, French administrators lamented the permissive “moral education” and the “corrupting influence of local populations.”14

  India, the country that gave us some of the world’s most ancient sexual texts, gets no better treatment. “There’s plenty of casual sex,” enthuses the New York Times reviewer of an Indian show, Four More Shots Please, while predictably describing the series as India’s own Sex and the City. But to maintain the implicit hierarchy of the Western “mainstream” and the limited “progress” made by India, the journalist considers it necessary to mention that “conservative viewers have complained that the show has too much sex.”15

  Sex and the City traffics in the myth that sexual liberation was “discovered” by pioneering white women who like high heels and date emotionally unavailable men. The assumption is that as a society evolves it becomes more sexually liberated; white, Western societies, having evolved, are further along in the march of progress than non-Western ones. And
yet the very sexual conservatism that is lamented as a sign of backwardness in non-white societies was in fact a gift of colonizing white and Western powers. Just as white Westerners are now eager to liberate women from sexual prudery and repression, they were eager to enforce sexual constraints on the cultures they colonized a mere century and a half earlier.

  Before British colonialization, it was normal for people in India to enjoy nonmonogamous relationships. There were Hindu sects in which women had multiple partners, as well as Muslim men who married multiple women for life or even contracted temporary marriages for just a short-lived dalliance. All of these arrangements recognized the limitations of the monogamous marital relationship that was the only form of marriage known to and recognized/enforced by colonizing Europeans. And of course other sexual relationships took place between consenting adults, such as a rich merchant taking on a dancing girl as a mistress or a widowed or unmarried woman of means taking a younger lover. Homosexual and transgender relationships also existed in plain view, something that was quite alarming to British colonists. Some transgender individuals worked inside the women’s quarters of wealthy homes and others in some of the pleasure quarters of Indian cities like Lucknow and Delhi, where the Mughal court had once provided reliable clients.

  By contrast, in the same period in Britain, monogamous heterosexual relationships conducted within marriage were the only acceptable form of sexual contact. Unlike India with its many religions, sects, and modes of belief, Britain in the same period was a religious state with its governance closely connected to the Anglican Church; heterosexual monogamy was part of a Christian moral code, not, as some white people unthinkingly assume, a “natural moral code.” During their two-hundred-year period of control of India, the British were intent on “civilizing” their domain by enforcing their own social and cultural norms—including those around sex.16 If the colonial British were to come up with a television show based on their beliefs and norms around sex, it would have been called Punishing Sex in the City. Just as modern Westerners caricature all non-Western societies as grotesquely sexually repressed and stunted, so nineteenth-century whites assumed that non-Western societies were too promiscuous.

  In both cases, the desire is nothing to do with the true knowledge and understanding of another culture, and it’s not even anything to do with sex. It is about domination of the other. In the absence of any real evidence of these imagined dangers, the white colonizers simply changed the rules and set about creating “crimes” with which to indict the local population. Once native women were classified as sexual deviants, their moral inferiority was established in the eyes of the British public, giving the colonial presence the imprimatur of being reformist. Under British colonial rule, the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 and the Cantonment Act of 1864 were passed to control and criminalize a vast array of Indian women’s sexual behaviors by creating spaces of race-based segregation. Some of the clauses of the Cantonment Act required Indian prostitutes who served white British soldiers to live in quarters adjoining the cantonment so that they were separated from the local population and had sex exclusively with white men. The British also created classifications of “prostitution” through legislation whose vagueness and breadth would give them power over the largest number of women. High-caste Hindu polygamy, Brahmin widowhood, orders of female religious mendicants, various forms of public performance and even Muslim marriage practices suddenly fell into the realm of “prostitution” because they did not mimic the heterosexual, monogamous marriages of the white colonists themselves. In the view of one British magistrate, Alexander Abercrombie, Muslim women “were more sexually brazen than their Hindu counterparts with their insatiable sexual appetites and a dangerous promiscuity.”17 And prostitutes existed “as a result of the insatiable sexual nature of Hindoo women who were unable to restrain themselves despite strict Hindu strictures because of their love of excitement.”18

  Mimicking the gender-based double standards of Britain and to ensure the cooperation of native men in the colonial project, heterosexual male sexual behavior was left alone. Meanwhile, the colonial administration subjected its newly created “prostitutes” to forcible genital examinations., making the bodies of a majority of Indian women subject to literal scrutiny by the British colonial administration. Even while the laws against abortion in England at the time were rarely if ever enforced, the crimes of infanticide and feticide were created as legislative categories with criminal consequences in India, where they were vigorously enforced.19

  Similar legal restrictions, and the associated violations of human rights, were put in place by the British in Hong Kong. Women were assigned different places to live within and outside the cantonment areas based on which men they “served.” The women who serviced white European soldiers had to live within the cantonment and had severe restrictions applied to their freedom of movement. They were also subject to forced genital exams. These sorts of ordinances were still being implemented by British colonists as late as 1939, sometimes as punishments for protests. In that year, a group of Herrero women in central Namibia held a “protest” in which they declared that their country was infected with a poison that could only be removed by a healer. The British decided that the poison referenced in the protest was venereal disease and immediately instituted laws that required unmarried Black women to submit to forced genital examinations for the purpose of rooting out venereal disease.

  A variety of strictures and laws toward controlling female sexual behavior were enacted all throughout the British Empire under the pretext of “civilizing” the local female population. The reasons, beyond the overt misogyny of it all, was that the British needed the cooperation of males in order to rule; for example, Indian soldiers served in the British Army and quite literally permitted the vast machinery of the empire to function. Limits on what they could do would thus have been a greater problem for the British, perhaps even fomenting more rebellions in the late nineteenth century and onward. The consequence was that the sexual regulation of Indian society by the British state occurred almost solely through the control and classification of women.20

  The case of Kally Bewah, a high-caste Hindu woman who was found dead in a shack near her home in colonial Calcutta, is an example of how even the body of a dead Indian woman could be used as evidence of her moral depravity and inadequacy as a mother and a woman. The story is illustrative of how the bodies of women who may simply have died during childbirth were made into specimens that testified to their inherent inadequacies as moral subjects.

  The body of Kally Bewah had been found nude and partially decomposing with bloodied clothes lying under her head. The coroner of West Bengal, a man named E. M. Chambers, conducted the autopsy sometime before December 14, 1885, and then summarized his findings in a letter to the Jury of Inquest.21 Chambers conjectured that Kally Bewah, being an upper-class Brahmin widow, must, as a very ordinary matter of course, have been “unchaste” and engaged in illicit sex, then hidden the fact that she had sex outside marriage by trying to procure an abortion. If Kally Bewah was dead, it was because she more or less deserved to be. Her body was not the basis of any actual investigation into her cause of death; it was only proof that Hindu culture made its insatiable women into baby-killing sexual deviants.

  Unsurprisingly, the jury of white colonial officials agreed with this interpretation, writing, “We are of the opinion that Kally Bewah was really pregnant and the inflammation of the womb from the effects of which Kally died was the result of criminal abortion or miscarriage.” They concluded that in doing so Bewah “committed a rash and negligent act for which she should be committed under Section 304 of Indian Penal Code” and for “concealing birth” under a separate code.

  Kally Bewah was already dead and obviously could not be committed anywhere, but that was beside the point. At the time the laws against abortion in England were rarely, if ever, enforced, and yet the crimes of infanticide and feticide were vigorously enforced by the British in India, as furth
er illustration of the moral contrast between the local population and the paragons of virtuous white society.22 The objective of the autopsy was never to collect evidence and find Bewah’s killer. It was instead to collect evidence to indict her culture, to garner support for the fantasy that Indian women were sexually promiscuous to the point of criminality and could only be “reformed” through colonial intervention.

  Wrapped up with this assumption of self-abortion was the implication that Brown women were inherently deficient mothers, prone to neglecting and even killing their children. This assumption about mothers of color, contrasted with the Victorian archetype of the white matriarch as “the angel in the hearth,” persists today. Within the United States, Black mothers have been typecast for decades as “crack mothers.” This is simply another criminalizing framework baldly used to prompt assumptions about the moral worth of a racial group. In the modern version of this rhetorical sleight of hand, it also conveniently obscures the economic conditions, created by white people in power, which drive the very cycles of poverty, addiction, and crime that those white people then condemn as intrinsic. Likewise, Latina mothers are characterized as “breeders”: having many children but unable to support those children—another symptom of economic suppression by white people that those white people then weaponize as evidence of inferiority. And following exactly the same pattern, Native American mothers are stereotyped as alcoholics, associated in the white imagination with fetal alcohol syndrome beyond all proportion to reality, and with no consideration paid to the white-authored conditions that drive up addiction rates within a financially and culturally dispossessed community.23