"Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t"

[bloom]

With all of these men who take such pleasure in aguing with women in the Women's Rights - it seems like a good time to post a rant about them...

Thursday, May 4th, 2006
There's a phenomenon I've noticed about certain critics of feminism. These are people - usually men - who identify as "liberal" or "leftist", and thus, allies of the common good. Since the left nominally is opposed to overt sexism, leftist men cannot bring themselves to directly attack the goal of feminism, which, as any non-moron knows, is to attain legal, economic, and social equality for women. So instead, they attack on other grounds. One attack in particular I like to call "Less Ethnocentric Than Thou". LETT can be used in one of two ways:

1. An American feminist woman writes or says something opposing an offense against women abroad - for example, the horrific practice of female genital mutilation, where little girls, sometimes even infants or toddlers, have all or part of their genitals removed. This can range from "merely" removing the visible portion of the clitoris (thus virtually ensuring that sex will NEVER be pleasurable for her), to removing the clitoris, labia, and sewing her vagina shut (thus not only ensuring that sex will be miserably painful, but also greatly increasing the likelihood that she will have a difficult or fatal childbirth experience later in life.) LETT users then protest, "Ah, but you just don't understand the CULTURE that comes from!" "Women there are the main proponents of continuing this practice!" "You can't judge someone's religion!" "Boys are circumcised too!" Never mind the hypocrisy and obvious overstatements involved here - namely that leftists criticize other's cultures and religion all the time when it affects them negatively - criticism of American fundamentalist Christians and their attempts at establishing an American theocracy being just one of the many examples I could use - or their deliberately ignoring the fact that male circumcision, while it may well be cruel (and I believe it is), in no way impairs sexual function or causes lifelong health problems. They want to criticize feminism because they don't really believe that women are people deserving of equality with men, but they know if they say that, their misogyny will be exposed, so they hide behind a self-righteous veneer of non-ethnocentrism.

Another example is one that I personally experienced in my personal journal. You may well have heard about the misogyny of the Bush administration and its supporters slipping from behind its facade when, several months ago, they were talking about the new Iraqi constitution and how it does not guarantee the rights of women to vote. And an administration apologist explained that gee, we had a nice democracy here in America for a long time and women couldn't vote until the early 1900s, so what's the problem? Naturally, I was enraged by this, as it shows how little they think of women as people - if democracy is "government by the people" but women, who are slightly over half of people, can't vote, there is no democracy. Well a self-righteous "true liberal", who "really cares" about the poor and gays and minorities, took me to task for "trying to shove Western Feminism down Iraqi women's throats." "Those women" don't care about feminist issues (like us spoiled Western women, who have it all yet don't appreciate it or misuse it) - they care more about their culture! They have no problem with being subservient to their men and not having a voice in their government because they have more important things to worry about - like whether or not their men are free. He went so far as to tell another feminist (who called him out for his ridiculous assertions) that "Reading Lolita in Tehran" was not representative of how Middle Eastern women felt - of course he, as a white American man, knew much more about what women in the Middle East really feel and really want than - a woman who was born and raised in the Middle East. He went on to accuse any women in Iraq who wanted to fight for their own rights to vote and otherwise continue to have the freedom they had before the US invasion as "spoiled" and "elites" whose opinions weren't worthy of consideration.

2. LETT is also used when American women are NOT talking about women's rights in other cultures. Whenever a leftist man feels a feminist has gone "too far" in demanding equal treatment, the LETT guilt card comes out: "How can you be so focused on your little insignificant problems when women are so much more oppressed in other places?" American feminists are supposed to immediately drop this carping about abortion rights - after all we still have some rights (although there is little access to abortion outside of major cities and pharmacists are being given a free ticket to refuse up birth control and several states have laws in process to try to outlaw abortion entirely) and drop our selfish career climbing and focus on women in other countries with REAL problems, like… FGM and not being able to vote. We do so and the whole cycle starts again. Yet leftist men have no problem with focusing on relatively insignificant slights to their privileges positions, such as fighting for "sexual freedom" (i.e. the right to have no negative consequences from buying pictures or movies of women being humiliated and hurt, and the right to fuck 14 years olds without consquence because hey, she looked 18 and besides, she wanted it) or fighting for the right to travel by aircraft without having their bags unneccesarily searched or their IDs checked, or the right to consume recreational drugs in their own home without being arrested. They don't expect to be maligned for focusing on their needs while people in other cultures suffer much more stringent restrictions on their civil liberties. Yet when women fight for something "insignificant", like equal pay or contraception access (which is hardly insignificant to any woman I know), it suddenly becomes a criteria for accusations of being "spoiled".

While they don't want to admit it, leftist men are almost as misogynist as right wing men. Just because their sexism is cloaked as humanitarianism or communism or civil libertarianism doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Don't buy the guilt trip.

http://amananta.wordpress.com/tag/leftist-misogyny/