Ron Suskind's brand new book, Confidence Men, portrays the Obama administration as an old boys club in liberal garb.
I've been waiting for this sort of book, and narrative, to emerge, because it describes within the administration a growing estrangement between liberalism and feminism that I've sensed percolating from the ground up for a while now.
There are plenty of feminists who think like liberals; there are also many liberal feminist organizations, such as the Feminist Majority and NOW.
While most feminists still think like liberals, it doesn't follow that most liberals still think like feminists. It seems to me that many don't.
My feeling as a feminist isn't one of being disowned so much as being only selectively and expediently owned, like that nerdy, uncool friend who doesn't get claimed in public, and whose gratitude for any scrap of attention from the boys is assumed, such that they know she'll be there come election time.
And, since any politician is bound to be more feminist than a Christian conservative evangelical, our fidelity is pretty much assumed. Where else can a feminist go?
In the late 1970s, things were different. You could argue (and I have) that feminism was the muse of the liberal conscience writ large. In 1977 The Nation saw great promise for feminism as the unifying worldview for liberals and the left. "The women's movement has become a bridge," they wrote, "between groups that represent very different social interests" within the liberal ranks. In a more prosaically tactical way -- and, for better or worse -- pro-choice donors filled liberal coffers. Liberals sounded the depths of notions like "equality" and justice through the treatment of women in the workplace and home.
It wasn't just that most feminists were liberals, but that most liberals thought like feminists, with intuitive ease.
Today, feminism is getting marginalized in the liberal conscience at just the moment when it should be more central to it. Geopolitics are often a proxy story of women's status and misogyny. Among many other examples, misogyny and the control of women is central the brutalizing views of the Taliban, al shabaab and other extremist movements; regional wars in Congo are fought through rape, an efficient weapon by which to weaken communities and shred the social fabric; authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn argue persuasively in their galvanizing book Half the Sky that lasting progress internationally hinges on the improvement of women's status.
Now, especially, we need a liberal conscience that understands that women's and feminist issues often are a, if not the, big issue at play.
Instead, liberals sound, think, act, talk -- and, if Suskind's correct, comport themselves -- less like feminists than before. Among other examples of feminism's newfound expendability, abortion rights were bartered in health care negotiations; the administration talks about a "good Taliban" and "bad Taliban" strategy; and, now, Suskind takes us inside the boys' club culture of the administration itself.
How and why would feminism recede in the liberal conscience at the moment when potentially it's more relevant to the liberal worldview than ever?
One reason (and there are many -- I'm just talking about one here) is tactical. In national campaigns from the 1980s onward, Democrats became fixated on the display and assertion of what I think of as liberal muscularity. This was an intuitive tactic to combat "bleeding heart" charges of weakness and a (too feminine) sentimentality toward society's less fortunate, or the non-millionaires.
This liberal muscularity campaign began in earnest when Michael Dukakis cartoonishly donned combat fatigues and a helmet and rode a tanker to inglorious defeat in the 1988 presidential campaign. He fooled no one.
The campaign for liberal muscularity continued with Bill Clinton's assertion of his no-mercy bona fides on a death penalty case, and his politically pivotal repudiation of Sistah Souljah in his first presidential campaign.
Then, John Kerry flanked himself with his Vietnam War comrades and marshaled the uber-virile Bruce Springsteen as stagecraft. And, while I didn't entirely share their view, critics of President Obama alleged vehemently and not at all unreasonably that his campaign and supporters committed routine, casual misogyny against opponent Hillary Clinton.
The tactical purging of the feminine in pursuit of liberal muscularity has diminished the place of feminism along with it. The skirmish in October, 2009 over President Obama's all-male basketball games and all-male golf outings seemed a relatively trivial intimation of the larger and more consequential trend that Suskind's work is now describing: it illustrated visually that liberalism and feminism aren't as close as they once were.
Maybe, as with any other long-term relationship, feminism and liberalism simply grew to take each other for granted. Maybe we feminists got lulled into a false sense of security that liberals are our natural, stalwart and obvious allies, and wouldn't display misogyny or old boys' tendencies. It's understandable, but a gravely simplifying loyalty and trust, if so, because misogyny is something that all of us can struggle with or exhibit -- whether male or female (women engage in women-hating, self-loathing, and sexuality-hating behaviors, too), and whether liberal or conservative.
It's all sadly ironic, this quest for Democratic toughness, because second wave feminism was a very muscular thing. It's one of the most successful anti-feminist gambits of the last three decades that it gets associated today with a sensibility of victims and not with the feisty, sexy heroism of the Gloria Steinem generation.
The opposite of victims, second wave feminists audaciously did something and, in the frontier spirit of American self-reliance, claimed responsibility for their own lives and happiness. A feminist story of heroic strength has gotten re-written into a sensibility of weakness -- as if to be a feminist is to be a whiner, buffeted passively by circumstance and mean men that we dully condemn and vilify at every chance.
Somehow the feminist rallying cry of the 1970s, "I am Woman, Hear Me Roar" has slipped into the misperception, "I am Woman, Hear Me Whimper."
The new generation of self-respecting young female liberals don't want to appear flaccid any more than newly-muscularized liberal males. Who would? Two very disparate sources -- one a woman in her mid-20s, and the other a liberal man in his 50s -- explained feminism's diminished urgency among liberal women in almost exactly the same terms to me: young women want to show that "they can take it" instead.
It's an evocative phrase. A man in his late recently 20s confessed to me that he was "appalled" by the shabby and sometimes marginally abusive ways that young women allowed themselves to be treated by men in public. They apply the calloused perseverance of the boxing ring to their own bad treatment, as if they can secure a prized status as one of the boys by not complaining. Everyone is so toughened up that they've forgotten what it's worth being tough for.
Undergraduate women at Yale University are fighting back, and claiming a hostile environment, after undergraduate male pledges paraded through a residential quadrangle chanting, "No Means Yes." But as Yale women tell it, this was only the final straw of a sad history of women "taking it" from men before this point, and tolerating an enervating, low-level din of sexual bullying, assault and disrespect at one of those Ivy League bastions, on paper, of the northeastern liberal intellectual elite.
If you raise the questions I'm raising here -- or that they're raising st Yale -- you'll look prissy, humorless or naïf as a liberal, to be inquisitively perturbed. You'll look stodgy if you dust off the feminist liberal chestnuts of women's "exploitation," "violence," "subjugation" or "oppression."
Still, I think we're beginning to notice the omission, and miss the old consciousness: with the wistful regret of the heartbroken, 1 in 3 of us wish we could have Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office -- surrounded not by the all boys' golf and basketball club, but by the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits instead.
Jonathan Dudley: Evangelicals Don't Believe Life Begins at Conception
But, because it was so important to some activists, and because some folks need a role and/or a job, feminism was reluctant to simply accept victory and retire. As feminist ideas of gender equality became mainstream, feminism itself was forced into positions more and more outside the mainstream. The liberal devotion to keeping the feminist movement alive has been a big mistake, providing a wedge issue conservatives have used to split off a segment of the traditionally liberal populace.
It isn't the case, as the author suggests, that liberals are no longer adequately feminist. It is the case that almost no one wants to be affiliated with a generally irrelevant movement that won't admit it won.
no.
i don't think i have ever witnessed any such thing,. not in my lifetime or in any examination of the historical record.
when i think of feminism i think of a radical anti-patriarchal analysis.. nothing of the sort has even been employed by liberals or by any other aspect of the right wing. (YES,.. the 'right wing')
when i have seen lots of over the years,.. are liberals and other right wingers employing the WORD "feminism" or "feminist",.. but they usually misuse the words to reference female inclusion in the patriarchy,.. never in terms of a radical undermining of patriarchy.
instead they present the female CEO as 'feminism'.. as in "look, women can dominate and oppress as well as any man can." it is a sad sad state of affairs
feminism should mean undermining domination,.. not 'excelling' toward participation in ongoing domination.. female CEOs does not equal feminism,.. LESS CEOs of whatever sex would be the appropriate expression of feminism.
but of course this is the united states, where 2 + 2 = 93, and where right-wing corporatist presidents are called "socialist".. so much for the lexicon, eh?
feminism involves a 'root' (radical) analysis and critique of a specific hierarchy; patriarchy.. i don't see liberals making that examination. i will watch for it though,.. cause that WOULD be something to see, in so many spheres of experience.
I also think that the "old boys" network is only part of the problem. The other part is the increasing influence of the religious right on fundamental issues like women's health care and reproductive rights. Couple that with corporations sidelining women when they have children, and you have a generation of people who question whether it's even possible to achieve their ambitions regardless of their smarts and education. The deck seems very much stacked against them.
Few of the "advances" made on behalf of all women by this self-styled "feminist" leadership group has appealed to a majority of actual women. The antipathy towards children and child bearing did not escape notice of the average young woman, the majority of whom, want a husband and family.
Don't worry though, with quotes like huffpodc's below, " the real issue was a counterreformation by those vested in tribal primitivism and its focus on fear of weakness" and " repeated lesson that cultures that rely on an egalitarian structure of individuals grounded in their inherent rights and bonded by a consciously, and rationally, formulated sense of common purpose routinely overcome much larger cultural groupings that rely on hierarchy and dominance for momentum."
...how could we resist joining the parade?
On this issue we can look through history and observe the repeated lesson that cultures that rely on an egalitarian structure of individuals grounded in their inherent rights and bonded by a consciously, and rationally, formulated sense of common purpose routinely overcome much larger cultural groupings that rely on hierarchy and dominance for momentum. The largely chairborne warriors of the last 30 years of reaction don't read much though so they wouldn't know. We'll see what happens, cause it ain't over till its over, fellas.
And yet, even if not all women or all feminists have overcome their own conditioning to polarized gender roles, we are all flawed, and those who start the work are already several rungs higher on the evolutionary ladder, even if they haven't yet found all the answers. The question is, are they working on it, or are they satisfied with, or don't even notice, their received conditioning, and in either case, do nothing to change it in all its defectiveness. Your notion that women enjoy the fruits of generations of human development (where wifey stayed home and made sure that hubby had a hot meal, a clean house and an occasional romp with the lights out, so that he could go to his job with the boys building the human future) without thinking, knowing or caring about how all the things we take for granted came to be, is a general illness of the species right now which men suffer from just as much as women. The question can be legitimately raised, where would we stand now if women had had equal access to participation in that development of the species outside the home, for all the millenia that they didn't ?
We stand on the cusp of finally rising above nature's randomness and the conveniences of power relations derived from subsistence tribal living, and we're going to move on when enough people do enough work on the question I state.
instead i read a weakly substantiated diatribe (a male fraternity pledging ritual as the representative sample of liberalism, honestly?) about how liberals are a mean boys club who hate the blameless feminists.
I'm male, liberal, straight, and feminist. Thanks for nothing, Pam.
You don't just sit there and take it. If you do, that is all you will get in life. If you want more you have to fight for it.
http://tinyurl.com/Boudica-of-the-Iceni
The movement's lack of notable success in major legislation may have doomed it in the eyes of people who only count beans and not the entire bean stew--the numbers of women in the workforce, where those women have gone, what level of responsibility they have achieved, has a lot to do with the successes of the modern feminist movement. It's greatest successes, though, have also been part of its more recent undoing.
The freedom to be a woman in a male dominated society is also the freedom to be "the" woman in a male-dominated society; feminism allows the choice to accede to one's husband just as it allows one to refuse to obey a husband in marriage vows. The reaction against wearing bras was a great act of political theatre, but feminism is not inherently, to my mind, against the informed choice a woman makes to either dress or not dress by societal norms.
"Question Authority" and "Trust People" while Liberals now own:
"Only government knows best for you and me!".
The majority of the right - agree with you about liberals. The feisty, the real feminists, the open minded, the people that trust in people regardless of race now populate the right. I know that's against your grain, but keep in mind that there are forces that keep you blinded.
The tides have really changed.
Don't wait for them to fight for your basic human rights. They never will.