Amanda over at Pandagon has a great post up today riffing on my recent ‘plaint that the writing in the feminist blogosphere is too activist-minded and not personal enough for my tastes. Talking about a letter to an advice column in which a feminist wonders why she’s bothered by her boyfriend’s use of porn, Amanda writes:
Let me put it this way: If I had written that letter above on my blog about myself, it would have threatened a ton of men for whatever sexist reason, and then the comments would start coming. I am just hysterical. I’m just jealous, and no wonder, since I’m such an ugly bitch. If feminists didn’t run men off with their loud mouths, they wouldn’t have this problem. Your boyfriend must be a big pussy to “let” you write this stuff. Basically anything to make sure I’d know that whatever else, my feelings are not valid and I don’t deserve to have them. Under such an onslaught, it’s fairly difficult to muster the energy to speak up.
And I’m the lucky one, I think, because I feel I could write something like that. I’d have to walk around my apartment a couple of times, stifling my fear that it makes me look like a jealous, carping, hysterical bitch, but I could do it. And that’s mostly because after a few years of blogging, I’ve been told that I’m repulsive and bitter and crazy in so many ways that it’s lost some of its sting. And because I know from experience that it would be like uncorking a bottle and I would soon be reading a wave of comments from women talking about their experiences and solidarity and understanding would deepen. But on a blog with less traffic, the warm comments-to-abuse ratio wouldn’t be so high, and without having had years thickening up my skin, the barbs about how I don’t deserve my feelings, much less the right to feel good about myself, would go in deeper. So I imagine that a lot of feminist bloggers feel that way, and that makes it easier to stick with the posts about ideology and activism.
But the thing to realize is that when we’re intimidated away from telling our stories by the abuse and sexist stereotypes, we’ve been deprived of feminism’s best rhetorical weapon. Stories are how people link the personal and the political, which is why our political enemies are hell bent on depriving us of those stories.
My sense is that that’s right — contemporary feminism isn’t availing itself of stories as much as it might — but I was hesitant to say so in my original post because I don’t have enough of a grasp of where the movement is right now to confidently generalize about it, and also because my concern wasn’t for the efficacy of the feminist movement; I was writing out of a purely selfish desire to see more of a certain kind of writing, because that’s the kind of writing in which I’m most interested.
I was also trying (and failing) to pre-empt a potential line of attack, which is nicely expressed in this sentence from one of Amanda’s commenters.
I wasn’t, of course, asking this of any particular women. That would be invasive (or maybe it wouldn’t be invasive to ask, but it would be presumptuous to expect). I was asking it of the feminist blogosphere in general, because what’s the point of this whole blogosphere thing if not to engage in constructive dialogue? I had a point I thought I was worth making, and I made it, and opened myself up to contrary views and criticisms. Criticisms like, for instance, this one, which came at the end of a very eloquent comment:I don’t understand why he thinks he has the right to ask this of women if the women don’t want to expose themselves emotionally.
So put THAT in your “what I miss — what I want — ” pipe and smoke it, Mr. “You feminists aren’t answering the questions I WANT ANSWERED, dammit.”
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ADDENDUM: Hi to any Pandagon readers who’ve made their way over here. If you’re interested in what a representative masculinist has to say about porn, read this essay by Jamie about his fetish for peep shows. It’s good, I promise. Not asshole-ish at all.
