Radical feminism bums me out.
I was reading through r/feminisms today and stumbled upon Imaginary Feminism 101 by Holly at The Pervocracy. It was a good read, echoing conversations I’ve had in the past about the imaginary feminist bogey monster that most men “opposed to feminism” are afraid of.
One of her points is that feminism is a diverse ideology - that not all women (or men) that consider themselves feminists (or feminist allies) agree on just what that means. She lists a number of the radical feminist scholars, (Solanas, Mackinnon, Dworkin, et al.), but it was the last member of the list that caught my attention: that person who wrote those weird articles about Firefly.
And thus, I spent the next few hours reading the linked article, written by a woman named Dani, and the associated comments and linked blogs and relevant Wikipedia articles. And now I’m just bummed.
Not because I really, really loved Firefly. In fact, I didn’t even really like it that much. I like space and science fiction, I like cowboys and westerns, I like political struggles and underdog narratives and anti-heros like Mal and the gang. I just didn’t like Firefly that much. I mean, it wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t part of the letter writing campaigns when it got cancelled.
The thing about Dani’s article is that I see where some of it is coming from. I will wholeheartedly agree that the Mal/Inara dynamic makes me very uncomfortable much of the time. And I think that the apotheosis of River Tam in the nerd world says some seriously weird things about nerd gender-relations.
But what about this stuff:
“Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Joss uses his own wife in this way. Expects her to clean up his emotional messes. Expects her to be there, eternally supportive, eternally subservient and grateful to him in all his manly glory. I hope the money is worth it, Mrs. Whedon.”
And:
“I feel awful for Joss Whedon’s wife. From what I’ve read about him and the interviews I’ve watched, I’m fairly certain that he rapes his wife and abuses her in various other ways.”
I mean, aside from the fact that I’m not keen on making baseless assumptions about Whedon’s personal life (or that of his wife’s) it’s the degree of hate apparent in her speech that bums me out. It’s not just these passages, it’s that everything she says is dripping with acid. The tone is downright vitriolic.
I feel like hating anything this much can’t possibly be a good thing.
Now, I want to be clear: I understand that this brand of feminism is not part of “the mainstream.” Radical feminism is exactly what it says: radical. We should all take Holly’s point very seriously… Just like the vast majority of Muslims don’t want to blow anybody up, the vast majority of feminists don’t consider The SCUM Manifesto good feminist policy. In fact, in my daily dealings with women who self-identify as feminists, I’ve never come across a single one whose definition of rape meshes with Dani’s (“I would argue that most ‘sex’ between men and women, in the contemporary ‘sex-positive’, pornographic, male-supremacist culture, is rape.”)
But radical feminism is still a total bummer. Because assholes like the Men’s Rights Activists are going to stumble upon “that person who wrote those weird articles about Firefly” and use it as grist for their indignation mills. And women who are still afraid to proudly call themselves feminists will point to the contents of those articles and say, “but I don’t agree with this, so I must not be a feminist.” And that totally sucks.
