Intersectionality simply means calling a woman a bigot
Glosswitch ponders the way purity politics on the left ends up meaning misogyny just doesn’t matter enough to do anything.
Misogyny may be deplored in theory, but when you look at actual women, they are never good enough to merit protection. Men are. Men always are. There’s not a man on earth who doesn’t benefit from the unpaid labour of women, but that is only natural. As Andrea Dworkin put it, “God is the right, nature is the left.” There’s always a moral reason for hating women. Ruth Smeeth worked for an evil corporation, as have I. Screw us. While men’s humanity is not in question, women only get one humanity token and we blew it.
Today’s left wing men have their own bastardised version of intersectionality to use as an excuse for continuing to dismiss women’s issues and needs. I don’t think for a minute any of them have read any Crenshaw, yet they consider themselves experts when it comes to lecturing their female peers on privilege. Crenshaw had an important point to make about the way in which intersecting oppressions require specific analyses and practical responses as opposed to one-size-fits-all solutions. As far as your average lefty male is concerned, intersectionality simply means calling a woman a bigot whenever she seeks to articulate the material nature of female oppression.
It’s so thrilling for them when they get to do that.
Only a whorephobic bully objects to the sex trade. Only a transphobe considers abortion and surrogacy to be women’s issues. Only a middle-class bitch shirks the housework and pays another woman to do it. It’s funny, isn’t it, how the left-wing intersectional ideal ends up being not the liberation of all women, but ensuring all woman remain barefoot and pregnant, serving men.
…
And I’m pissed off with this. I’m pissed off with the fact not only that purity costs money (very few of us can afford to quit a job in moral pique) but that it imposes a specific, unacknowledged tax on women. We’re meant to shut up about rape threats for the sake of party unity. We’re meant to carry on cooking, cleaning, caring, serving, because it would be “exploitative” to expect anyone else to do it. We’re meant to pretend that Hillary Clinton is the same as Donald Trump even though Trump clearly thinks all women are scum. We’re meant to perform the exact same role capitalist patriarchy has always expected us to perform only don’t worry, girls! Come the revolution you’ll be scrubbing floors and sucking cock in a socialist utopia!
And nobody will ever utter the word “misogyny” again.
This bit about not paying other people to do it really burns me. I have friends who make a living only because there are people who pay other people to clean. They have few other options. Learning disabled, unable to get those high level jobs that everyone would supposedly have if we all just picked up after ourselves…and I myself survived the 90s because there was a woman willing to pay me to clean her house. I didn’t feel degraded. I didn’t feel oppressed. I felt liberated because I could feed my son and pay my bills.
I saw an article one time (might have been Barbara Ehrenreich) that suggested everyone should empty their own trash and sweep their own floors, and then the people who are doing that will also be able to be doctors and teachers and lawyers. I honestly wonder where people get this. I have family members who are learning disabled enough that they would never be doctors, lawyers, or teachers, but are quite functional, and able to support themselves through custodial work. And proud…proud because they are good custodians, and can take pride in a job well done.
I do not pay someone to do my housework, but I also have a husband who pitches in his share (more than his share, but he’s retired and feels since I am the money earner, he wants to take some of the burden off me). A lot of women do not have that. They are judged by how clean their house is, how well put together their children are, and are expected to do all that while working outside the home. Then people come along and tell them they shouldn’t have anyone helping them for pay; when was the last time someone went on a rant about men having someone helping them (usually not for pay, either)?
Sorry about the rant. I guess I’m just getting tired of the anti-woman garbage that gets spewed at us from every side. I’ll sit down and shut up now.
This is the weirdest anti-Corbyn rant yet. The Blairites are getting desperate.
I’m one of those ghastly middle class women who pays other people to clean her house. Why? Because I’m a tenure track professor at a research university and I’m freaking busy. My husband is an IT professional – he’s also freaking busy. So we do the minimum and pay someone else to do the rest.
We also pay people to maintain our yard and pool. We pay people to perform maintenance on our cars. Is that any different? Not as far as I can tell, other than those people are (mostly) men. My husband and I are both capable of doing all of these jobs ourselves, but there’s only so much time in the day. And we don’t even have kids, which would add additional time pressures on us. When we pay people to do these jobs we’re essentially purchasing back hours of our time. I’ve never understood what’s so wrong about that.
@ iknklast
My father is an intelligent man, but he left school at fourteen to join his father’s construction company. Later, when the business folded, he stayed in construction because he liked the work and was good at it. He went back to school in his forties and got a degree, but after a few years riding a desk, he was back to blue collar work. Not because he wasn’t capable of the brain work, but because people management and paper pushing made him miserable. He liked working with his hands. Even now he is retired, he’s always fixing things for neighbors, constructing things in the yard, doing his own maintenance on his car and other things some would consider manual labor but he finds tremendously satisfying. He never would have wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher. It’s not just the learning disabled who need job opportunities that don’t require much education or training. Lots of people, for a variety of reasons, need those jobs.
@justinr
Of all the things to take away from that post, your take seems quite odd. Yes, she takes a few shots at Corbyn. I understand how she feels and agree with her. It’s tiresome, if you’re a woman and you’re public about your criticism of Jeremy Corbyn, be prepared to have your entire life examined with a fine tooth comb. I don’t know Ruth Smeeth and have no opinion of her, but to dismiss her concerns because she once worked for a company many disapprove of is ridiculous. And I hate Nestle, but I’m not going to say the everyone who ever worked for them is now and forever is persona non grata. That way madness lies.
Absolutely. I once had a professor who dismissed some comment with the statement that nobody actually wants to be a farmer. Why? Farming is hard work, yes, but I come from a long line of farmers, and many of my family were farmers by choice, because it was what they loved. When my cousin lost his farm in the 90s, he was devastated. He was capable of going to other work, and did, but he wanted to farm. And he was a dairy farmer, which is one of the most intensive, hardest, most time-consuming jobs.
And as for learning-disabled, I didn’t mean to be dismissive. I have a family member who is learning disabled, works as a custodian, and does some highly skilled, technical work in terms of pool maintenance and maintaining highly polished gym floors. In fact, a lot of the work that is dismissed as “menial” is much more highly skilled than people realize. Yes, housework. Housework requires a rather large skill set, and cooking another large skill set. I think it’s ridiculous of people to dismiss this work the way they do. After all, some people are good at it, and some are lousy at it. Why should we try to make everyone the same in the interests of some perverted notion of equality? Isn’t it better just to start valuing that work, and recognizing that the people who do it are performing an extremely valuable service?
@iknklast
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest you were being dismissive. I just wanted to expand on your point.
Yes, I completely agree that housework and cooking are considerable skills sets. Ones that I have outsourced; housework largely to a cleaning service and my husband does 90% of the cooking in our house. If I cook I won’t poison you, but that’s as good as it gets. He’s actually interested and often enjoys it.
As I have observed from many years of working in or with hospitals (I do biomedical research), it’s easy to be dismissive of cleaners, right up until you have an outbreak of hospital-acquired infections. And then suddenly everyone realizes just how important that job really is.
As an aside, a lot of my work involves data wrangling and I write a lot of code and I’m sometimes treated as an oddity (partly because not only do I write code, but I do so in multiple languages and actually enjoy it). These days coding is a male-dominated endeavor and reasonably well compensated. But years ago, my aunt was a coder and the work was considered menial, was not at all well compensated and very much dominated by women. Funny how as the prestige of the job went up, the gender divide flipped. Or not funny at all.
Or was it the other way around? As the gender divide flipped, the prestige of the job went up?
This has happened in several fields – teaching used to be male dominated; secretaries used to be male; etc The minute it is perceived as woman’s work, it is considered less important, and vice versa.
I doubt it in this case. Coding became more important as technology advanced – that drove the demand for people who were good at the job and higher demand means higher wages. Higher wages would attract more men to the field. Once there, they realized it was mathy and technical and quite ‘male’ by that stupid old stereotype whereas previously it had been seen as little better than data entry.
Here’s another oddity for you – my specific field of research (which is small, admittedly) is very female-centric, despite being math/stat driven. It comes up every year at the international meeting of the professional society that the membership is around 65/35 female to male. Nobody really knows why. My (untested) hypothesis is its inclusion in biology made it less attractive than other math/stat fields to men (bio being seen as more of a ‘girl’s science’) and that it was a safe space to be a math/stat/geeky female scientist compared to other fields.
Claire – I read what you’re saying about bio; I have much more math/stats than my counterparts in chemistry, but my field, (Environmental Science) is heavily dominated by women. It is one of the most difficult fields, because it involves multivariate analysis, and is a very physically demanding field as well, but it is seen as being all earth-goddess type of thing (it isn’t; that’s environmentalism, not environmental science), so it remains woman dominated. It is also one of (maybe not one of, maybe the) lowest paid, least prestigious fields in science. It’s also not seen as particularly commercially valuable, which drives part of that. Grants are smaller and harder to get. The work is not as flashy as particle colliders and bubbling beakers.
It is an interesting thing to me, though, that a field with so many men almost always has men as the crucial figures on television shows about the environment. I saw a show about E. O. Wilson that had almost no women even in subordinate roles (wife never mentioned; mother mentioned once in reference to her divorce). The only women seen were a couple of cheerleaders at an important football game, and one woman who kept showing up (non-speaking, of course) in a weird segment as an exotic girlfriend to some exotic looking man. Everything basically made sure the two/three women in the show were “in their place” – no woman scientists here, no, not any, because women can’t do things like multivariate statistics and physically demanding field work. (I did my field work in the heat of a Texas summer)
@2
Ah, the “Blairites”…
http://www.newstatesman.com/2016/07/jeremy-corbyn-and-paranoid-style