Let's talk about Rick Warren

Everyone seems pretty clear on the fact that Rick Warren is no advocate for same-sex marriage. He's also strongly against abortion. [Warning: this interview contains a fairly offensive comparison of pro-choice people with Holocaust deniers: link.] So, as feminists, just how angry should we be about his invitation to give a prayer at the inauguration of President-elect Obama?

I'm going to suggest the answer is "not very," for two reasons.

First, Obama and his campaign have been clear that Pastor Warren's invitation is not a tacit wholesale endorsement of his politics.

The second reason is even more important, though: Pastor Warren, for all of his socially conservative and (to me) offensive beliefs, also has an agenda I can get behind. He wants to end poverty, for example. He's an advocate for health care and for education. These are the kind of things that I, as a feminist, care about. He's definitely not on my page about everything, probably including how to carry out these very agendas, but he's not a scion of evil either.

I'm starting worry that those of us sitting over here on the progressive bench have forgotten about an important quality of coalition building: you don't have to feel like everyone working with you on issues of hunger and poverty is your soul-sister. You don't have to agree with her about religion, abortion, or whether to stay home with kids, as long as you can both agree to show some tolerance. Tolerance is a liberal value, remember?

It's true that there are some things on which members of a coalition probably need to basically agree: it's important not to discriminate based on identity, which includes race, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, class, and religion. And it's important not to impose our choices -- or ideas about what makes someone acceptably progressive in terms of politics, dress, or anything else -- on others. (Check out this brilliant article on how middle-class progressives alienate their working-class allies with tofu for some great examples and even greater suggestions.)

In the end, what it comes down to is this: if we insist that we can't talk to Rick Warren -- that the only people we can work with are people who are just like us -- we're going to prevent ourselves from making the kind of alliances that will get things done, choosing instead to stay on our high horses. And there's nothing progressive about that.

Audre Lorde and the train

Audre Lorde says that one mistake often made by those of us who don't totally identify with the dominant end of every axis is this:

"Those of us who stand outside [...] power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing."

Because I think she's right, I want to share with you all one of my favorite "ism" exercises. I did this for the first time when I was 21 and learned a whole lot, but I still find it useful in many circumstances. It is also ridiculously simple: just imagine you're getting on a train, and think about how you decide who to sit next to.

Of course, this doesn't reflect everything you think about all of the kinds of people who might be on a train, but it does point up at least a few things. For me, one of them was what characteristics I was most likely to read as indices of danger. (The fact that I think of trains as dangerous itself is interesting, in fact, and surely has something to do with both my mother's anxiety about me riding them and my own suburban upbringing.) Another was the ways in which I blur cultural markers into markers of class.

Anyway, I'm curious! Who do you sit next to on the train?

What I Wish Gloria Steinem Had Said

I've been annoyed a lot lately by Gloria Steinem's recent NYT op-ed. If you read her generously, Steinem seems to be saying "hey, let's not pretend that women aren't discriminated against. It's time to get over that and elect one." If you read her somewhat less generously, perhaps she's saying "hey, women are more oppressed than anyone else. That's why you should elect one instead of an African-American man."

She's right, of course, that women are discriminated against. She may even be right (although in a different sense than the one I think she intended) that "[g]ender is probably the most restricting force in American life." But here's what I wish she'd said instead:

We all know -- or I hope we do -- that sexism and racism are still going on, that people of color and people of gender (that is, those who aren't both biologically and socially male) are discriminated against in ways great and small all the time, and that nothing short of significant social change is going to alleviate the suffering this causes. Still, it is not a small achievement that both a black man and a white woman are potentially viable candidates for President.

But let's not forget a few things here. Let's remember that discrimination is still an everyday reality for thousands of people, both in our country and around the globe. Let's remember that people have multiple identities that may privilege or endanger them, and that both of these candidates are privileged in some very important ways: they are wealthy and well-educated; they are Christian and present as straight.

Electing either candidate will have advantages: people's politics are shaped by their experiences, and one experience these candidates doubtless share is that of discrimination and oppression. How big and impact that will have -- and how much the White House is the place from which meaningful social change can originate -- remains to be seen.

The question of which one to elect, if you're thinking in these terms, is less clear. Who will be inspired by the election of either one, and to what? Who is more likely to advocate for those who are being discriminated against on multiple axes, to work to ameliorate suffering, to encourage the kind of systemic social change that can really lessen oppression?

Of course, there are dozens of important issues in any election, and many things to consider. But I hope that for all of you, this is one of them. I know it is for me.

Who's radical now?

Radical feminism. In the 70s, it meant resisting marriage and, if you were really out there, suggesting women needed to be freed from reproductive labor.

Today, though, I think it means something different. When I say I'm a radical feminist, what I mean is this: no law we can make, no practice we can encourage, no policy we can enforce that will create real gender equality. This is because I believe that oppression is not about what men and women are allowed to do or not do, or how they are allowed to act or not act.

What gendered oppression is about is having to be men or women, and the absence of any gender that is not in relationship to these. Even if that relationship is rebellious, as far as I can see, there's no escaping the basic gender binarism and the tying of those beliefs to body parts. And that is, we all remember, essentialist.

The belief that men and women are essentially different is one of the two major factors that I think limits the change people can envision, and therefore desire. The other, the belief that equality has basically been achieved, will have to be saved for a later rant post.

Back on the horse: sex does NOT make you dirty

A recent column in the San Francisco Chronicle wants us all to know two things.

1. Sex makes you dirty. More specifically, casual hookups "too often" result in "emotional pain and physical disease."

Is casual sex a health risk? Of course. So is sex in the context of a relationship. And eating in a restaurant, and traveling in cars (which too often results in serious injury -- bad things don't have to happen very often to be too often). And emotional risks? Having a relationship is full of them! The bottom line is that we all take dozens of risks every day, and we all take steps we consider reasonable to ameliorate those risks, like wearing seatbelts.

More broadly, I'm willing to consider that sometimes, people hook up and regret it. It seems likely, even. I don't think, however, that telling people sex is dangerous is the solution. Instead, how about trying to change our culture about sex so that people -- men, women, genderqueer, and everyone else -- can have the freedom to figure out what it is they really want without any baggage or bullshit?

2. Women suffer more from hookups (because of a hormone called oxytocin, released during sex, childbirth, and nursing, that may promote attachment), and therefore Real Feminists (TM) should recognize that men and women are just different and "promote protection for women."

As far as I can tell, the belief that oxytocin produces bonding is based on some research done on prairie voles. (Those voles are, by the way, generally monogamous; the same chemicals do not have the same effect on more promiscuous voles, whose receptors for them are in different areas of the vole brain.) You're going to have to give me more than that to convince me that I'm hormonally doomed to fall in love with my sexual partners.

In summary: I don't care if you don't want to have casual sex, Kathleen Parker, but please, cut it out with the claims that I'll be contributing to a mental health crisis if I do.

The problem with difference

Difference feminism, sometimes called "gynocentric feminism," strives to address the inequalities faced by women by asserting that the things women are said to be are, really, perfectly okay. This approach has some obviously sexy qualities: it claims things women have accomplished (raising children, keeping homes, building communities) as just as valuable as the things men have accomplished, for example. Nonetheless, I don't think it's a viable way to think about how to approach gender. Here's why:

Difference feminism is essentialist. To say that women are different from men involves saying two problematic things. The first is that there's a clearly identifiable and relatively unproblematic group, "women." Feminists today challenge this not only on the basis that gender is pretty widely accepted to be culturally constructed, but also because the analytic category "women" ignores the diverse experiences of actual women, who experience varying levels of even the most basic aspects of privilege and oppression based on their race, sexal orientation, class, and other factors.

The second is that women are something. Being a woman means something beyond having the right bits or chromasomes or hormones or what-have-you. It constitutes a way of being in the world that should be considered valuable, according to difference theorists. And that triggers my feminist red flag, because as soon as you say women are anything, you're limiting possibilities.

Difference feminism inscribes the status quo. Leaving aside the basic problems with saying "women are," it is probably something that's possible to say reasonably accurately for smaller, relatively more homogenous groups of women. But in doing so, you limit women to being always what they are now. Given that most feminists accept that one of the things that most women are now is "shaped by systematic discrimination," this seems like a problem. Even if you don't want to say that women are nuturing or intuitive or lovely, it seems like pretty much any common experience or trait of a group of women is going to be a result of cultural construction and shared experiences of life as a marginalized group, and not something anyone can be sure is part of how women "really are," whatever that might mean.

In the end, difference feminism relies on the idea that being a woman conveys something about you besides your likely genitalia: something about personality, culture, or values. And until I find convicing evidence to the contrary, I'd rather think that women can be or do pretty much anything that that they are or do any particular thing.

America hates babies!

No, really. Having a baby seems like a set up for social pressures that don't allow anyone to win, male or female, regardless of what choices they make.

If you are a heterosexual couple, and neither of you is self-employed or works for a small business, you are both guaranteed unpaid "family leave" under the Family and Medical Leave Act, for up to twelve weeks. Not so great, but hey, at least your boss can't give your job away!

If you are a woman and your family has enough resources that you do not need to go back to work, you are faced with tremendous pressure in two different directions: going back to work (which makes you a bad mother and too career-oriented) and staying home (which makes you a victim of social pressures and not career-oriented enough). Of course, if your family doesn't have those resources, you may have no choice except to go back to work, in which case you urgently require childcare, an expensive commodity.

If you're a man, you're also faced with tremendous pressure, but nearly all of it is in the direction of taking minimal leave and going back to work as soon as possible.

If you are not a heterosexual couple, there are additional obstacles in assuring that you and your partner are even legally established as parents of your child, thereby gaining access to important rights of which family leave is only one.

Feminism both helps and hurts in this scenario. I absolutely believe that in a perfect feminist world, everyone would have the resources and freedom from social pressures to choose freely about whether they wanted to stay home with children or work outside the home, and would have a lot more flexibility about how both of those things could happen. I also believe there are women who now make this choice in ways that are deeply meaningful to them and that reflect their personalities and desires: in fact, I know some.

It seems unfortunate to me that feminism is sometimes used as a lever to exert social pressure on women, particularly progressive feminist ones, to continue to work outside the home while raising children, regardless of their personal wishes. But despite the progress made so far, I still think there's a great deal of social pressure for women in particular to stay home and raise kids and men in particular to work, and so I feel firmly that feminism's work in this arena is not yet done. To me, the missing piece is an acknowledgement of those pressures and the ways in which the mainstream world still conditions us to give in to them. To acknowledge this is to confirm the value and validity of both the feelings of individual women and men and of the feminist project of continuing to advocate for the widespread aceptance of a wider range of solutions to the combined demands of career and children for everyone.