F 'em!

by Jennifer Baumgardner

  “Shouldn’t we ask if doing everything men have traditionally done is necessarily better than what women have traditionally done?” Debbie says. “Are these things really better, or do we as a culture give them more value because they are male?” Sexism is reproduced not politically or economically so much as by our culture, Debbie would say, so she wants to create a better culture for women. Like Riot Grrrls before her, she believes that women stuff is valuable—and “girl” is indisputably good.

  Jennifer: Why fight sexism via culture?

  Debbie: Because, in general, the culture devalues everything that women do. My grad school dissertation was about the influence that the media has on women’s perception of their own power. I had the choice to go out and teach or actually try to make some different culture for women. I tried to make a magazine that was a girl’s-eye view of the world. It’s a feminist magazine in that it’s rooted in this feminist idea, but it’s not really about feminism. It’s just an at tempt to make something more positive by putting women and their concerns at the center of the world. Movies are always about a man who did this man thing and he’s a man in a manly world. Contrast that with the second Sex and the City movie, which was from a woman’s perspective. This was a movie about older women who were not particularly gorgeously attractive like we usually see in movies. The men were the set dressing in Sex and the City. On NPR, I heard one critic complaining that the men in the movie have to be successful and rich to get the attention of . . . Sarah Jessica Parker—and she’s not even that pretty. I thought, Welcome to the world of women watching media. You have to be as gorgeous as Catherina Zeta Jones to win the love of . . . Michael Douglas?

  J: You like Camille Paglia. How does she fit in with your feminism?

  D: I love analytical thinkers who come up with new solutions or point out things that we may have taken for granted. I first loved Simone de Beauvoir. Then I thought Camille Paglia was awesome because she’s a real shit-stirrer. She truly has a different perspective on certain taken-forgranted feminist paradigms. There’s no clear solution to this puzzle of how we become an egalitarian society. You may disagree with Paglia, but she gave a new perspective to add to feminist thinking. Feminism needs that so badly.

  J: Camille Paglia is a lesbian. I think that many of the conflicts around being a woman and feminist dissipate when you’re a lesbian because—

  D: Because you’re not trying to figure out a way to be desired by men. Virginie Despentes [the French feminist and creator of the rape revenge film Baise-Moi] said it in King Kong Theory. She said, “You can’t really be a liberated feminist and be straight; as long as you have to interact with men, you’re not going to be able to be free of these restrictions of femininity.” Once she realized that she was a dyke, she was free from this straitjacket of feminine display that seems necessary to be desirable to men. Okay, I believe her. But what’s the solution for straight women? There still has to be a solution.

  I was in a hotel recently. At three o’clock in the morning, I woke up to the people next door having sex. Well, I heard the woman. She was like, “Yessss! Yesssss!” Someone’s been watching When Harry Met Sally too much. I was tempted to go next door and knock on the door and say to the guy, “Are you buying this? Because this is ridiculous; nobody orgasms this way.” For straight women, even your sexuality and sex are a performance of being desired. There’s very little encouragement—maybe none, even—for girls to really figure out what gives them pleasure. I always say that if a guy requires holding a meatball in one hand and a stuffed pony in the other in order to orgasm, he’ll make that situation happen. But if a girl needs a little bit more clitoral pressure, she won’t ask for it.

  J: So true.

  D: If you made a graph of who has the most orgasms—like, the most sexually satisfying life—between straight men, gay men, lesbians, and straight women, straight women would be at the bottom. That’s a big issue and it is important that we deal with it.

  J: I’m with you. Here’s another big issue: You had a stay-at-home mom who was a very skilled homemaker. She knew how to sew and bake and crochet. You, in turn, became a leader in a cultural shift that looked at crafts like sewing and knitting as sites of feminist empowerment. You loved that book Home Comforts, and you see the value in keeping house. Do you see women claiming homemaking and being stay-at-home in that feminist way that you are describing?

  D: I don’t have kids and I don’t want all the stay-at-home moms to hate me, but I think this is complicated. What’s that Allen Ginsberg line, like “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation . . . ?”

  J: Ummmm, “I saw the best minds of my generation ruined . . . ”2

  D: And I’ve seen the best minds of my generation ruined by being stay-at-home moms. [Laughs.] Not really, but many of the women I went to school with are now stay-at-home moms. And I think our current idea of stay-at-home mom is really problematic. My mom stayed at home, but she had a lot to do. Being a stay-at-home mom was a big job. She had laundry, cooking, shopping, keeping the house clean, and taking care of us. Today’s stay-at-home moms—it seems at least like the highly educated ones that I see in my neighborhood in Brooklyn—have made staying home their career. Yet so many of them have cleaning ladies and order out. I see them in restaurants all the time. I see them having breakfast in cafés with their kids, and I can imagine that that’s really fun, but if the argument is that being a stay-at-home mom is such a difficult job and is the hardest job you’ll ever love and blah blah blah blah, why do you have all this time to sit in cafés or blog?

  I think stay-at-home parents need to contribute something to the picture. Even if your contribution is saving money for your household because you’re doing the laundry, cooking, childcare, and cleaning your own house.

  J: That makes sense. But there is something about tedious labor that doesn’t mix well with being unpaid. I think working out of the home is important. Being a corporate drone may not be a fulfilling life, but that paycheck can take the sting off of it. It’s important to life to find meaningful work. I subscribe to the idea that work for pay is meaningful.

  D: Why do you subscribe to that idea?

  J: First, because we live in a world where unpaid work does mean unvalued work. Second, I believe in being a productive member of society. Truly being a full-time stay-at-home parent sounds very isolating, which I think is unhealthy. For me, working has, in addition to giving me a paycheck and allowing me to support myself, enabled my creativity and my sense of self to develop—

  D: Well, it’s enabled your sense of self to develop, I would argue, because that’s what our culture values, and so in order to be valued by the culture and also valued by yourself, you sort of have to follow this path of making contributions to the world. But why do you see having a career outside of the home as the only way to be a “productive member of society”? In Holland, the comforts of home, and the housework that goes with it, are revered and are considered very valuable. As a result, women are more fulfilled in that role. There isn’t such focus on career, because Holland is a relatively socialist country. Nobody can be really poor, and nobody can get really rich. Basically, everybody is a postal worker and gets good vacations. The whole work culture in the socialist country is different. People are just going to do the bare minimum of what needs to be done.

  J: That sounds awful to me.

  D: Why stay at work late? Is it really, really so much more fulfilling to work and have that book published and have some people tell you that they really like it than it would be to go away every winter for an entire month or have four months of vacation every year and do that much more living? I think the reason that having that book out there and having people tell you that they think the book is great is more fulfilling because that’s what our culture values.

  J: Yes, and those books and projects are links with other people and to feminism and a community of like-minded people. Those links then enable me to problem-solve around abortion and rape and queer issues— />
  D: And that’s more fulfilling to you than—

  J: Than going on vacation? Yes.

  New topic: You and I were on a panel together at which we were asked to comment on whether Third Wave feminism is just as racist as its predecessors. I think we both felt we flunked the question.

  D: There is this whole issue in feminism I always find really difficult and touchy. I don’t even know if I can broach it. But I feel like trying to struggle for feminism, just feminism, is almost impossible, because all of these other causes get placed in front. If you look at the democratic convention from the 1970s, when women agitated for equal rights, then the feminist cause became the lesbian cause. Gay rights are absolutely important to me, but gay rights are not feminism. And neither are civil rights. I mean, these are all important things, but they’re not central to feminism. When we are talking about gay people’s right to marry, we don’t also start talking about women’s position in marriages and independence and yada yada yada. When racism is in the news, people don’t also start talking about women’s rights. Central to feminism is figuring out the inequalities between men and women and how to equalize them. Instead, there is this feminine thing of, “Oh, no. You go ahead. You go ahead of us and we’ll just, you know, wait.” It’s a difficult thing to say, because it sounds like you don’t care about other issues—

  J: Not just that you don’t care; it’s that you don’t see that they are completely entangled. You see them as discrete movements?

  D: I do. People say, “But that’s just middle-class white women’s problems, and working-class women don’t have those problems.” But I totally disagree. I think that women, whether working class or middle class, get overly sexualized and have their sexual desire placed last. They face all the same cultural forces and the limitations of how our society sees women.

  When I was in college, there was a lot of talk about how women of color were never presented as the beauty ideal. Coincidentally, you’d hear how women of color are so much more comfortable with their bodies than white women are. Currently, we have a beauty ideal that is completely based on the ideal woman of color—a large butt and big lips. These are traits that are more common in ethnicities other than white, qualities that white women can’t even achieve. There’s a lot of corresponding male objectification of women of color. You already are seeing that women and young girls of color are having the same body image issues that white girls have had, because that same lens is pointed at them, whereas they were excluded from it for a while. I see this as a collection of issues and problems that intersect with class and race, but you can separate out the particular issues that we all face as women.

  J: Can you talk about the existence of a Fourth Wave?

  D: Yes. I don’t see a Fourth Wave yet. There’s definitely a younger generation of feminists. The thing to me that defined the Third Wave was a different set of strategies. The First Wave had a particular set of causes. The Second Wave had a new set of causes. The Third Wave pioneered new strategies—using popular culture, since we recognize the importance of that in our lives, and the idea of reclaiming.

  J: Right. Reclaiming things like knitting, makeup, and Barbies, and words like “girl” and “slut.”

  D: I don’t yet see new strategies coming out of younger feminists. In fact, what I see a lot in the younger generation is sort of a reversion to the Second Wave.

  J: Give me an example.

  D: It’s about being politicized and not nearly as much reclaiming. Third Wave strategies didn’t get that much press, so I don’t know if they ever filtered down to a lot of those younger women. When you look at the textbooks that they’re reading, I don’t know if there’s anything Third Wave included. I know that when I see a notice for a feminist lecture series, it’s all the usual suspects from the Second Wave.

  J: But social networking and different media tools, those don’t strike you as an innovation or a strategy?

  D: No. I don’t see them using those tools to present a different set of ideas or solutions. I think it’s great to use new tools. Why wouldn’t you? We used zines when desktop publishing became available. I see blogs and Twitter as still just disseminating the same ideas that we’ve been discussing for, you know, a couple of decades now. New ideas? I don’t see that. I think that any new approaches will emanate from issues around transgender—younger people have a lot to say about gender and limitations of gender. Some good solutions could come out of that.

  —Interviewed on June 15, 2010

  THIS IS WHAT A PATRIARCH LOOKS LIKE

  For my entire childhood, my father had a mustache like Isaac’s from The Love Boat. He looked handsome, but also a little bit menacing. By covering his lips with bushy bristles, he appeared to have only one expression: stern. Unless he was guffawing with laughter, he looked ready to discipline, and I grew up somewhat intimidated by my father and his mirthless, mouthless face.

  I also grew up with Ms. magazine, Free to Be . . . You and Me, Judy Blume books on my bedside table, and Judy Collins records on the stereo. I watched the original Sesame Street, the episodes that were so gritty, with a young Jesse Jackson demanding that the child actors repeat after him: “I’m SOMEbody! I may be poor! I may be black! But I am SOMEbody!” The parents of the 1970s appeared to want their kids to have self-esteem, civil rights, and morals. Perhaps they were idealists, or perhaps they thought they themselves were lost causes and wanted to pass the buck of being good people on to their unsuspecting kids. Either way, it wasn’t until I entered college in 1988 that I began to truly dig into my political aquarium life.

  My college years at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, were my first exposure to “-isms”: feminism, but also other vocabulary words that described injustices (racism, ableism, sexism, heterosexism, anti-Semitism). Because I was white, middle-class, able-bodied, and straight (or so I thought), I felt awkwardly implicated in many of the bigotries I was studying. I hadn’t ever seen myself as racist, didn’t want to be, but I believed if I wasn’t part of the solution, I was part of the problem (a favorite bumper-sticker–size belief of the time). “If you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention” was a slogan I repeated, as was “Don’t ask [insert oppressed group] to educate you! Educate yourself!” These axioms felt true to me but also added to my discomfort and confusion about how to be a good person while at the same time being a de facto oppressor.

  That’s when “patriarchy”—the term—entered my life. In 1988, male privilege was evident in ways both local (while the three sororities at Lawrence used the community center as their social meeting place, the five fraternities had dedicated houses in which to live and throw “rum and reggae” parties) and national (there were only two women in the Senate). But when I learned the p-word, like magic, I was reprieved of my horrifying privilege. I wasn’t the oppressor; I was oppressed! Patriarchy was like Levi’s, fit for every occasion. Do you feel silent and shy in class? Well, maybe you are being silenced . . . by PATRIARCHY! Was your best friend roofied and raped? Well, who invites men to violate women and treat them like mere sperm receptacles but PATRIARCHY! Does your boyfriend call you a dumb blond? Do you feel like your essential worth is your looks? Are you afraid to walk home at night? Was your brother sent to Princeton and you to a party school? Who invented marriage? PATRIARCHY!

  “Patriarchy” was a word I jammed into a lot of explanations and solutions to problems that were complicated and convoluted back when I was eighteen. If I hated the way my thighs looked, it was because patriarchy benefited from me (and all women) remaining insecure. While I was worrying about whether my butt looked big, men were making more money than women, using that freedup mental space to compose symphonies and write books. If penises and sex made me anxious, it was because patriarchy propped up the male member to make it seem important, using a system of coercion and rape. I read Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, in which she argues that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all
women in a state of fear.” Men’s lording it over women equaled patriarchy.

  I loved Brownmiller’s words. They allowed me to see and confront the unhealthy behavior I witnessed in college. I could begin to deal with the fact that three of my five closest friends had been sexually assaulted, or that some frat guys made posters making fun of a girl they deemed homely and plastered them all over campus. I could offer a response to that fellow who, during freshman orientation, was asked to consider what he’d do if he came home and his roommate was kissing another guy, and he said he’d get a gun and shoot him. Feminism gave me a firm, orderly frame for the sometimes messy snapshots of my life.

  Of course, patriarchy—that is, the social system defined by powerful males and subordinate females—does play its part in all the problems described above. Women are necessary to all societies, yet are treated as less valuable. They are paid less for their labor, and activities traditionally associated with women (knitting, cooking, child rearing) are demeaned. Women are objectified—i.e. denied autonomy, infantilized, owned by men, treated as interchangeable, violable, and as if without valid feelings (as philosopher Martha Nussbaum defined this feminist complaint). Women are asked to keep silent about crucial parts of their lives (abortions, rape, incest, miscarriages, etc.). Yes, patriarchy was a scratchy mustache, all right. A mirthless, mouthless face that was still intimidating, but also increasingly open to exposure.