Faludi's Feminist Backlash

So, I finally looked at the article.  

The one where Susan Faludi misrepresents my argument from Jane Sexes It Up (which she clearly did not read, but depended instead on Astrid Henry's misrepresentation of same), which appeared in Harper's magazine last October.  The cover story.  

I responded to it with one of my main go-to solutions.  I ignored it.  I avoided it.  I left the magazine on the coffee table and averted my eyes from it each time I walked through the living room.  But finally I looked at it this morning.  

Here's what Faludi says:

Sex is the movement’s Mason-Dixon Line, now as it was in the Eighties, when battles over pornography were known as 'the sex wars.' Those old skirmishes have now been reimagined by third wavers too young to have been part of them as a generational showdown—even though second-wave feminists were on both sides of the Eighties fight. Sex isn’t the source of the divide between feminist generations so much as its controlling metaphor, used, Astrid Henry noted, to conflate power and prudishness, as when third-waver Merri Lisa Johnson casts feminism as 'a strict teacher who just needs to get laid.'

The irony of this misrepresentation is almost too much to bear.  Here is what my original source says:

When I first imagined this project I thought that in writing it I would force feminism's legs apart, liberating her from the beige suit of political correctness.  I wanted feminism to be bad like me.  A young feminism, a sexy feminism.  I found myself saying things like, 'I'm not that kind of feminist, all sly innuendo and bedroom eyes.' Early in my research, however, I discovered that that kind of feminist is mostly a media construct -- oversimplification spiced with staged cat fights. . . .

[R]evolutionary ideas about sexual politics are consistently misrepresented or simply 'disappeared' in most narratives of U.S. history.  This face of feminism [referencing Carole Vance's anthology, Pleasure and Danger] -- the smart-ass take-no-shit anarcha-orgasmic-feminist persona Gen Xers thought we invented -- is suppressed in the mainstream media. . . .

Whatever conflicts exist within feminism, the first lesson for each generation must be about the politics of representation (which histories are handed over, which are not, and why); for it is frequently against representations of feminism as puritanical or anti-male or just plain crazy--not against feminism itself--that many young women posit our sexy "new" brand of feminism.

Rather than forcing ourselves on feminism, then, the Jane generation means to reconnect with our movement.  The women who confess their desires in the following pages diverge purposefully from the path of 'patriarchy's prodigal daughters' (young women trading on chic renunciations of feminism) to form a feminist sexual identity informed (not imprisoned) by the women whose writing came before us.  Feminism -- addressed by many young women as a strict teacher who just needs to get laid -- is a name we [third wave feminists] want to reclaim for the intersection of smart and sexy within each of us.  A theme emerges as several writers arrive via various routes at the same negotiation between feminism's most trenchant critiques of sexual politics on one hand and it's devil-may-care libertinism on the other, finding fragments of desire and indignation in each direction, and piecing together the usable past.

From there, I go on to say that third wave feminist sexual politics are positively informed by the sex radical politics of second wave feminism, and that Jane Sexes It Up aims to theorize sex positivity to work in a more nuanced way with ideas most vocally advocated in the late 1990s by women outside academia (e.g., Susie Bright, Carol Queen), and, in the legacy of feminist scholars like Jane Gallop who provided the Prologue to Jane Sexes It Up, I hoped to encourage third wave feminist academics to generate more theoretically sophisticated yet still thoroughly embodied and situated articulations of sexual agency, ambivalence, and lived experience because sex positive women outside the academy articulated these positions as if they were antithetical to feminism.  

I wanted to fix that problem.  

Regarding a round-table of these lusty vernacular theorists, I positioned my own perspective and anthology apart from this rejection of feminism, and I speculated that the idea of a politically correct sexuality sanctioned by feminist thought was a red herring distracting young women from the life-saving, world-changing intellectual history of feminist sexual politics.  My hope for that collection and for much of my publication record since then was to intervene in the pleasure/danger binary that organizes this intellectual history, and to reconfigure the conversation as one that can attend to pleasure and danger without polarizing discussions of sexuality (a position that characterizes some of the most important works of third wave feminism, including Heywood and Drake's Third Wave Agenda and Lynn Chancer's Reconcilable Differences).

 

I have not written to Susan Faludi, or to Harper's, but I'm still wondering if I should (or if the moment has passed and it is simply too late for anyone to care, if I should have already) set the record straight.  

My will to do so has been weak in part because when Astrid Henry announced the publication of her book, Not My Mother's Sister (a title that still makes very little sense to me), I wrote a note of congratulations to her in third wave feminist solidarity.  She wrote back to thank me, and to give me a heads up that one of her chapters focuses heavily on my work.  When I read the book itself, I was really surprised and hurt.  I wrote to her and pointed out the misrepresentation and the issue of ethical feminist citation that would suggest she should in some way correct the record.  

She never wrote back.

Something similar happened a year or so before that experience.  Another third wave feminist anthology came out in which Katha Pollitt makes a weird aside about my work (actually, about me) based on a second-hand verbal paraphrase of my position that it is sometimes hard to make yourself change your sexual and romantic practices even when you perceive them as out of step with your feminist politics.  I mention bell hooks' criticism of what she calls "lifestyle feminism," by which she means convenient feminism, or feminist politics you can ascribe to without having to change anything about your practices in the world, and I say, simply, that this is a difficult challenge to face.  I stand by the honesty of that statement.  Without reading it in context, in fact without reading it at all but rather just hearing about it, Katha Pollitt says something like, Just wait till Merri Lisa Johnson marries some asshole and is mistreated by him.  She'll change her tune then.  (I'm definitely paraphrasing from memory, here, so, in the transparency of ethical feminist citation, I am stating explicitly that you will have to check the original source, Catching a Wave, for a more accurate representation of her words.)


I guess what I'm left wondering this morning is whether Jane Sexes It Up might actually be unclear.  There is a certain pleasure in getting up on my high horse and feeling indignant about these unjust representations of my argument, but maybe there was something about the language, the phrasing, or, and this is the one I think is most likely true, something unclear about my use of the common trick in literary nonfiction of using stories of one's former naive self as a device to set up a story about one's coming to consciousness, one's feminist education, using oneself, in other words, as a kind of foil and a double for the uninitiated reader to demonstrate the commonplace misconceptions held about a particular subject, in this case feminist sexual politics.  Astrid, Susan, and Katha all seem to take this device as my 'real' self and overlook the many places where I explain how my ideas shifted, evolved, grew, and became more well-informed.  I probably shouldn't put the three of them in a single category because their errors are different in type.  

• Astrid misread. 

• Susan neglected to check her sources.  

• Katha took hearsay as the real-for-real truth.  

All three errors are surely simple human foibles and not deliberately malicious attacks.  But they are sloppy.  And they contribute to the very social forces that undermine feminist thought by caricaturing a self-identified feminist sister.  Given the stature of Susan and Katha as internationally renowned and widely trusted voices of feminism in the popular press, they ought to be more diligent in their research and representation of other feminist thinkers.

Shame on y'all.

I'm not the first to say this, as Courtney Martin made a more timely response to the Harper's cover story on Feministing in September 2010, as did Jennifer Baumgardner, and Jack Halberstam joined the conversation in October 2010 on Bully Bloggers, but I would like to belatedly echo their frustrations over Susan Faludi's feminist backlash with my own, even though I have typically elected not to participate in such conflicts.  

In fact, when the Oprah show called me to explore the possibility of having me on their show addressing tensions between second- and third-wave feminists, I said I was very interested (who doesn't want to go on Oprah?! especially in the wake of a new publication), but that I didn't want to participate in what I call IN THE BOOK staged catfights.  They decided against having me on the show.  

But I guess the time has come to differentiate in my own mind between staged catfights and genuine conflict worthy of rebuttal.  This one, I believe, is the latter.