F 'em!

by Jennifer Baumgardner

  While Dowd’s book has some feminists of my acquaintance furious (“I don’t recognize the world she is describing at all,” a 35-year-old editor at the Washington Post told me), Levy’s is more dangerous. Intentional or not, Levy contributes to that mean finger, pointed only at girls, that says “You think you are being sexy, you think you’re cool and powerful, but you’re not. You’re a slut and people are making fun of you.”

  Feminism has given me a powerful lens with which to view the world. What I needed as a young woman, and what I think women need now, are not more critics shaking their fingers, but more models and examples of the free, powerful sexuality that Levy says she advocates.

  —Originally published in Alternet, November 2005

  EPILOGUE

  It always feels odd to critique a well-written feminist book, but Ariel Levy’s best-selling opus on raunch really got under my skin. I rail against the idea that there was once a pure, better, more unified women’s movement (it was just smaller and less diverse), and I hate how much women and girls are punished for having sex that is outside of a pure, good, traditional relationship. Levy’s position was a feminist one I recognized and had spent a decade learning how to disagree respectfully with.

  I now realize that the impact of the book on me—it made me angry and inspired—is evidence that hers was and is a powerful book. Female Chauvinist Pigs is a book that begs a huge question: What would female sexual freedom really look like? Would Dionysian rituals like spring break be celebrated or eradicated if women were treated as full human beings? What if they were allowed to assert their sexuality in the truest possible way? I ask myself that question a lot, because it seems like people are great at pointing out all of the ways that female sexual expression is screwed up or inauthentic, but we have very few examples of this vaunted genuine, healthy, feminist-influenced sexuality. We know what incorrect female sexuality is, but what’s correct?

  Months after this piece ran, I wrote to Levy and we had a truly fun evening of drinks. She was smart, gorgeous, witty, and acerbic—part Fran Lebowitz, part Emmy Rossum. Our grand first meeting remains a great lesson for me: On the flat page, we were opposed; in person, we immediately saw all that we had in common. One profound thing we shared was a deep regard for the feminist movement and all it had wrought. Over the warm buzz of cocktails on a wintry Manhattan night, I realized that Ariel Levy was an ally, even if we didn’t think alike. In fact, maybe she’s a better ally because of that fact.

  SUSTAINABLE FEMINISM

  At Q & A’s after lectures, beleaguered activists often ask me if I have any tips for avoiding burnout. After all, it can be very demoralizing to be a feminist who is trying to change the world into one that conforms more closely to her ideals. First, there is the political backlash—the foes we oppose, from right-wing ideologues to people who pervert religion to justify prejudice. Draining. Then there is the work of activism itself—organizing petitions, protesting, going to meetings, donating one’s time and energy. All this work is unpaid (wasn’t feminism about getting women paid for their labor?), requires working collaboratively with really opinionated (or hostile) people, and is likely to garner very little acknowledgment, from the media or anyone else.

  More over, most social justice campaigns are long. That, too, can be undermining. Take civil rights, for instance. Ninety-four years passed between the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted free men of color the right to vote, and the Civil Rights Act that began to make good on the claim. Moreover, the victories are often far from solid or unequivocal. Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in all cases through the first trimester, yet a slew of restrictions were hurled at women within three years of that historic decision. These restrictions were aimed at the very poor and young women who needed Roe most. Lack of access to abortion is almost like not having the right to it at all. All this energy spent, with precious little plugged back into its host, can result in estrangement from the same movement that was once so attractive and inspiring.

  I used to recommend that people who spent so much time doing good give themselves a break once in a while. “Go shopping, do yoga, eat junk food, get off the LISTSERV,” I’d counsel. But now I think that sustainable feminism—that is, a feminist practice that can be nourished throughout one’s life—requires looking beyond some of the more traditional ways of organizing. But before I get to what that looks like, let me tell you a bit about how I became burned out.

  Growing up in Fargo, I was proud that my family dinner table was the site of discussions about abortion, gay rights, and the merits of Geraldine Ferraro’s nomination for veep. I liked that my parents weren’t afraid of controversial issues and that they were, to my mind, on the right side of those issues. Our family was so pro-choice that even my Barbies had abortions.

  In college, at Lawrence University, a handful of dramatic actions defined not only my time there but also the trajectory of my life. There was the ongoing conflict I had with a group of philosophy majors who wore clown outfits every day and picked fights about feminism. A typical exchange might include Mark, the goth clown, asking me to explain, using much-bastardized Aristotelian logic, why if a man could rape a woman, he shouldn’t. I would counter by grabbing a broom and yelling, “Tell me why if I can shove this broom up your ass, I shouldn’t!”

  And then there were the protests, two in particular. The first was freshman year, against the Sig Ep fraternity for hosting a Rape-a-Theta party. This party involved no more rape than any other party on campus, but the crude title, coupled with the frequency of the real thing on our campus and virtually every other college campus in America, inspired me to employ the Second Wave term “rape culture” for the first time. The Sig Eps assumed everyone knew that by “rape,” they meant “party with”; I understood that these guys joked about rape because they weren’t afraid of it, the way I was. The protest, which resulted in the fraternity’s one-year suspension, certainly ensured that the Sig Eps were afraid of offending feminists, but did it attune them to the contours of rape culture?

  The second protest came junior year. We called ourselves the Lawrence Guerilla Theater Collective, and, excited by tales of 1960s radical theater from our drama professor, we posed as terrorists and invaded Downer Commons during dinner on the eve of the first Gulf War. Brandishing realistic-looking prop guns and nylons over our faces, we took hostages, screamed into bullhorns, and destroyed the ice cream sundae bar.

  Twenty years later, Rape-a-Theta parties sound tame compared with the 2010 incident of Yale Delta Kappa Epsilons marching through campus, bellowing, “No means yes!” and, “Yes means anal!” (This incident provoked a federal Title IX complaint against Yale in 2011.) Meanwhile, a theatrical terrorist attack sounds unspeakably inappropriate post-9/11. But even in 1990, my strategies—both borrowed from the 1960s and 1970s—had limited effect. They riveted me at the time but all these years later seem as inadequate as wearing a thong to avoid panty lines.

  Protests adrenalized me—I felt alive and powerful and righteous—but they didn’t have the same effect on the populace I was attempting to educate. In fact, I succeeded more often in alienating people. I raised awareness about the existence of rape and terror, but the protests offered little insight into how to address the issues. After a while, I burned out on protests. Was I becoming—gasp!—apathetic?

  In fifteen years or so of traveling around giving speeches, I’ve visited hundreds of schools. At virtually every school, I observe the student body’s anxiety about their apathy. They fear that they are not angry enough. They compare themselves with the 1960s, still mythologized as the one time when students were active. The achievement of the 1960s and 1970s did push civil rights and women’s rights into the main, taking our society from one of extreme inequality based on race and gender to one of inequality based primarily on class. Still, I question some of the blueprints for change and whether they would be best for the current climate. The job of each generation is to make sense of its own era, to understand what
is needed now. The vaunted volatile protest is just one factor—perhaps a very early or immature factor—in movement building, as well as individual growth as an activist. An angry, outraged environment can be powerful and can start a movement—think the Big Bang—but it isn’t sustainable. It’s too hot and it burns out.

  For me, this trajectory played out over the issue of abortion rights. As evidenced by my Barbies’ activities. I never knew a time when abortion was illegal. However, I have also never known a time when it wasn’t one of the most polarizing issues one could raise in polite company, guaranteed to provoke anger and misunderstanding. After years of doing what I thought was the right thing—escorting, debating, going to marches, quoting Gloria Feldt, writing letters to the editor—I achieved burnout on abortion.

  I began to feel frustrated and suspicious of the people on my side; they were as inflexible, it seemed to me suddenly, as the people on the other side. For years I quoted the heads of organizations, but never once did one of them admit that she’d had an abortion herself. It seemed that feminists had gotten away from placing themselves in the issue, even as they advocated loudly for the issue. Abortion rights slogans such as “Keep your laws off our bodies” and “Pro-choice is pro family”—once veritable Zen koans of righteousness to me—began to feel hollow and generic. I wondered whether the assumptions I had made for years were even true. Is the main thing a woman feels after an abortion relief? Is a twenty-week procedure truly the same as an eight-week one? These new feelings disturbed me. Was I secretly pro-life and had just never known it? I decided to stop writing about abortion.

  Soon after I burned out on writing about abortion rights, I chanced on a new project that changed my perspective and inspired me in a profound way. While its genesis was pro-choice “propaganda,” providing an opportunity for women to say, “I had an abortion; I’m not sorry,” it soon evolved into a project where I simply gathered women’s stories of their procedures. The goal of the I Had an Abortion Project became to simply listen to hundreds of women tell their abortion stories—no editorializing, no use of terms like “feminist” or “pro-choice.” It was just the raw narrative, in all its glorious ambiguity.

  Listening served me in several ways. The first was by deepening my understanding of the issues around abortion. For example, while it is true that many women feel relief, it is sometimes followed by confusion, shame, sadness, and guilt. Older women often feel powerless to stand up against the stigma around out-of-wedlock pregnancy; younger women beat themselves up for getting in trouble when they “knew better.” But listening helped me to see how crucial it is to tell one’s story. Shame is never good for women—and much discrediting is directed at women simply because they have sex and a reproductive system. I began to see that to tell one’s story is to rebel against that shame.

  In order to draw out these stories, I developed a better ability to communicate, and, most important, I learned how to tune in, rather than to convince. Listening to women’s, and later men’s, abortion stories shifted the issue for me. It was no longer a debate with two intractable sides: right and wrong, black and white. Each story was more complicated than the next, and I found myself having epiphanies about why reproductive freedom is so essential to women’s human rights. Not the received wisdom I had inherited simply by being born when I was with the family that I had—this was a comprehension of feminism that I discovered myself. It drew from other’s experiences, from history, from my political knowledge, and from my own life as someone for whom two of three pregnancies were unplanned and one ended in abortion. The power of telling stories and speaking personally as the basis for political theory was a revelation to me. I had deployed the phrase “the personal is political” for years, but I felt its potential anew, not merely for consciousness raising (and subconsciousness raising), but for connecting people to form a movement.

  Thinking back over my progressive Fargo childhood, I realized that my family supported abortion rights and gay people until the bison came home, but we didn’t actually know anyone who was gay or who had had an abortion. (In fact, I assumed that no one in Fargo was gay or had had an abortion, because wouldn’t we be friends with them if they were there?) More accurately, we didn’t know that we knew anyone for whom those issues were part of life. There was a gulf between our rhetoric and our reality. Our value system had not been put into action—I’m not sure we knew how to inhabit the political theories we believed. I was politically progay, yet still made homophobic jokes privately, assuming that they affected no one I knew. We claimed we supported abortion rights, but we were unable to signal to women and men who had had abortion experiences that they could reveal themselves safely to us. One of feminism’s most penetrating elements is that it is a theory and movement that asks an individual to bring every part of himself or herself into the room—we didn’t know how to do that yet.

  Social justice has a science to it: The ’60s were a Big Bang. Abortion was illegal, contraception was illegal, black people were actively barred from rights of citizenship and living with dignity—or even living. Women were hostages to a single stray sperm, expected to be educated, but not given a chance to apply this education. So, they protested. The people who were excluded kicked doors open. But that way of being an activist is not as germane today. Our job today is less to kick doors open and more to walk into the rooms—which might look like this: picking up the phone at Ms. in 1993 and saying yes when a woman in Alabama asked if I could help her find a battered-women’s shelter, despite the fact that I didn’t really know what I was doing. Or it might look like Audacia, a young activist at the International Women’s Health Network, who is also a sex worker rights advocate, who argues that sex work is a labor issue.

  Those personal stories of abortion animated the theories and strategies that had become knee-jerk and pro forma to me, but they also forced me to communicate, rather than broadcast. Quiet vulnerable story-telling is how I got my fire back years ago when I lost my will to fight the abortion fight. I continue to protest and organize because those actions are cornerstones of social change, but the conductor of that energy has changed. Now, that current is more often powered by warm, communicative, and sensitive relationships.

  At this point, I might even be able to talk with the clowns without my broom.

  Debbie Stoller

  BUST COFOUNDER AND EDITOR IN CHIEF DEBBIE STOLLER has the same early trajectory as Camille Paglia, the thorny cultural critic who cut such a swath in the early ’90s. They were both raised in working-class families with an immigrant parent, attended SUNY Binghamton, and got their master’s and PhDs at Yale University before upsetting the apple cart of prevailing feminism. Born in Canarsie, Brooklyn, on November 3, 1962, Debbie was the brainy daughter of a domineering dad and a Dutch housewife mother. Picking up on the changes of the day, Stoller referred to her friends as “women,” rather than girls—as in, “Mom, can I have some women in my fifth grade over to play dolls?” To a burgeoning child feminist of the ’70s, “girl” was a slight, not a compliment. In high school, her teacher Ms. Alpern was a feminist and had the kids read Gloria Steinem’s “If Men Could Menstruate.” Stoller loved how Steinem used humor to make her points—and how something as simple as reversing the gender of who was menstruating made the case against sexism in a way that twenty screeds never could.

  After Yale (master’s in psychobiology, PhD in the psychology of women), Stoller held a series of trivial to kind-of-good jobs (she was a great typist) and eventually landed at Nickelodeon as a project manager. Then, in 1993, at the age of thirty-one, she created Bust with her friends Marcelle Karp and Laurie Henzel, surreptitiously photocopying them after-hours at Nickelodeon. The magazine, taglined “For Women with Something to Get Off Their Chests,” was meant to be pro-woman, like Ms.— but funny and sexy.

  Stoller would say there is no money in feminism, despite Bust’s success. After all, her bestsellers have all been about knitting. The founder of a widely replicated knitting circle in the mid-�
��90s called Stitch-n-Bitch, which has spun off into cruises and a yarn line, Stoller has added crafts to the pages of Bust and supported, even fomented, a crafting resurgence. Both Stoller and Bust have had a profound influence on Third Wave feminism, developing and promoting a “girlie feminist” ethos that undergirds any feminist understanding of Lady Gaga or Riot Grrrl.

  Stoller self-describes as a cultural feminist. In the 1970s, this meant radical feminists who believed that women had an essentially different nature from men, one that was more peaceful, nurturing, and healthy—what is now often derided as “essentialism.” These cultural feminists focused on celebrating the activities traditionally associated with women, whether childbirth, breastfeeding, sewing, or baking bread.

  Cultural feminism was often dismissed as apolitical (even destructive, as it seemed to urge women to get back into the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant) and inaccurate. Many Second Wavers aimed to prove that, given the opportunity or necessity, women could do anything men could. Cultural feminism said, “Stop measuring yourself against men; women are good, and women’s activities need to be valuable and visible.”

  Stoller’s version of cultural feminism is a bit different than that. She takes Simone de Beauvoir’s perspective, believing that differences between men and women are culturally supported. She doesn’t so much celebrate female endeavors as ask whether these activities are trivial or, as Steinem suggests with her article about menstruation, only thought of that way because women do them.