Happy Ash Wednesday to one and all.
We had a great turnout last night at our Feminist Coming Out Day Panel here at Pasadena City College. (If you click here and scroll down, you can see me with two of my great student organizers and speakers.) I was one of six speakers talking about feminism on a panel moderated by my wonderful colleague from the speech and rhetoric department, A.C. Panella. My fellow panelists included Myra Duran from Feminist Majority Foundation, Dinah Stephens from Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, Phoebe Brauer from Planned Parenthood Pasadena, Kathy Heintzmann, a teacher at nearby Arcadia High School who developed Women’s Lit courses on that campus, and my wonderful student Ahlam Hope Hariri, a Muslim-American feminist.
Our students worked tirelessly to put on the event, and KPFK radio taped the entire panel discussion for future broadcast. (I’ll have a link when available).
I was reminded, yet again, that we live with feminisms. There is no single code to which we all subscribe, beyond a conviction that sexual equality is worth fighting for and is a cause to which we have dedicated our lives. Oppressions intersect, as we so often say, and the fight for sexual justice is linked to other fights. It is always good to be reminded of that, particularly when you’re a middle-aged white male, tenured and cis-gendered and married and veritably dripping in unearned privilege!
I made one point last night that I always try to make. So much of my writing and teaching focuses on issues of sexuality and self-esteem, around pop culture and body image, eating disorders and perfectionism. Often, the more radically (or globally) inclined suggest that these are middle-class concerns. As one young man asked me recently, “How come you spend so much time talking about body image when we’ve got women suffering and dying in the Congo? Are eating disorders as bad as the rape epidemic going on there?”
Justice, I reminded him, is not a zero-sum game. Critiquing “princess culture” among middle-class American girls doesn’t mean that one has no interest in the plight of less fortunate women in the Congo, Afghanistan, or in undocumented migrant communities right here in Los Angeles. Furthermore, as I said last night, our personal liberation is a prerequisite for being a truly effective agent for change in the lives of others. As I learned in Twelve Step eons ago, “you can’t give away what you haven’t got.” Young women who are struggling with eating disorders often find that the disorder sucks up a tremendous amount of psychic energy. Sexual shame limits our capacity for compassion. If the privileged young women and men of America (and compared to the Congo, even working-class Americans of color are privileged) are beset by anxiety and self-doubt then they’re not going to be able to do as much as they otherwise might do for those who are suffering elsewhere.
So teaching sex-positivity and a responsible, pleasure-centred sex-ed curriculum is vital justice work. Equipping young women to extricate themselves from relentless perfectionism is part of healing the larger world. It’s not bourgeois myopia to focus on sex and the body — rather, focusing on these intensely personal issues is the gateway to building a more peaceful, equitable, light-filled world. Shame leads not only to self-absorption but to a sense of personal powerlessness. Empowering young people in the most intimate aspects of their lives gives them the tools and the energy and the excitement to go out and do the vital work of Tikkun Olam, healing the world.
Personal empowerment and collective liberation are not at odds. Giving young people the first is what inspires them to be effective agents for bringing about the latter.
Speaking from my own experience, I have to agree – when a person is burdened by personal shame and perfectionism, attempts to educate that person about his/her privileges just feel like piling on, and provoke a defensive reaction. Maybe we have to feel others’ compassion for us, close to home, before we can envision extending it to others who are far away.
‘Feminisms” is one of those demeaning words that I hate coming out of “gender studies.” You don’t say there are civil right(s) — there is one standard for civil rights. There is one standard for feminism as well. It is about the end of male supremacy as we know it on the planet. The purpose of the feminist movement is to resist the patriarchal ownership and colonization of womens’ souls and bodies, and everything else stems from that.
I would be highly surprised that anyone would ever advocate a “civil rights coming out day”– the fact that feminism is demonized in the past indicates the length male supremacy will go to keep women in place, and to keep heteropatriarchy in power.
It is up to men to end rape, and for the most part, it is up to men to end the sexual violation of women and girls. It is up to men to make walking on the PCC campus completely safe from other men naturally. You don’t need to go abroad, you need to end rape right in Pasadena, and the civil rights you are advocating are about the complete liberation of women. Feminism is about liberation, and there can be no compromise worldwide until men stop their oppression of women.
Yes, yes, and yes! Oh man, so much love.
What Jendi said: “Maybe we have to feel others’ compassion for us, close to home, before we can envision extending it to others who are far away.”
I think, too, that it can be easy to act condescending or patronizing when we have not come face-to-face with our own struggles and broken parts. Only when we realize that we’re just broken people helping broken people can we approach one another in a spirit of true equality and compassion.
I spent two summers in Mississippi in the Sixties dong civil rights work. I got to know my colleagues pretty well and followed up with some of them over the years.
I can guarantee that if we had staffed only with people who had gotten right with feminism and their own sexuality and all that other stuff, nobody would have gone.
When someone tries to tell me that my concern about this or that inequity is “trivial”, I point out that trivial wounds can get great big infections, and one germ can multiply into millions enough to bring someone down. Or else I say that little myths can grow into whopping big lies, little customs/rituals of nastiness can accrete into bigger ones that can stink up a whole culture.
But I also think Hugo and Jendi nailed it about the need to crawl out from under that burden of perfectionism or whatever else it is that even us privileged ones can find ourselves under. I was so lucky in some ways, but not lucky at all in others. Things have gotten better since then, and I’m trying to work on the compassion now.
I think it is so interesting that you say only when one one is truly “healthy” are they able to devote energy to healing the world; it is something that I truly never thought about until this second, but it makes absolute sense. Before one can reach out to others, they have to reach out to themselves first.
I don’t think anyone means waiting until you are perfectly healed–that might not happen till you are dead–but working on it steadily. Not perfection, but excellence.
I just deleted a comment that was coming up on 300 words because I wanted to make sure I’m grasping some of the subtler nuances of your very loaded term.
To an agnostic who’s really close to that atheist line, even one with some background in anthro and philosophy and access to google, the term Tikkun Olam carries way too much potential for long-winded thread-hijacking squabbles.
Hugo, could you give us a little more context? Let us know what Tikkun Olam means to you?
Really simply, Xena, it means what it means literally: bringing about the healing and transforming of the world. It’s not about waiting for God to do it; atheists and agnostics alike can surely believe we’re here to make the world a better place. I use religious language because it is part and parcel of my rhetorical style, not because I think that only religious people can do this work!
I get that part, Hugo. I wouldn’t bother with your site at all if I thought you were one of THOSE Xtians.
I was just wondering if all of your religion and philosophy background had given you a specific perspective on the concept, or if you were using the term in its popular context.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs gives a brief explanation of the debates between Jewish scholars here, with her own synthesis of 4 main schools of thought:
http://www.zeek.net/706tohu
Oh, you’re the second person to send me that link THIS WEEK. Small world! I started using it years ago when Michael Lerner first started Tikkun Magazine up in the Bay Area, when I was still at Berkeley. 1987? ’88? I was at that point thinking about the priesthood (and teaching sex ed), and I heard Lerner give a lecture about Jewish social ethics and Tikkun Olam. I was riveted. I know, as Jacobs points out, that some people think Lerner dumbs it down too much — but it has become one of those stock phrases that now has a meaning that transcends its origins.
So yeah, I use it the Bill Clinton/Cornel West way!
I’ll never knock the power of a ‘dumbed down’ spiritual message. Whatever works. My first adventures in the social sciences and humanities came to me through a godessawful excuse for an anthropologist who wrote under the name of Starhawk. Her interpretation of the fossil record and the paintings in the caves at Lascaux make me cringe!
But her words on femininity and self acceptance were exactly what I needed to hear at the time, and her meditation techniques were very helpful, whether or not I or anybody else can agree with her use of myth and metaphor.
Stepping outside of the dominant culture’s religious practices opens so many possibilities that blind acceptance or blind rejection just don’t open. We can approach questions like Is this true? or Is this fair? from somebody else’s worldview, and draw conclusions that our previous stuffy mental models kept us from seeing.
When our notions of ‘spiritual purity’ or other types of ‘propriety’ degenerate into pointless asceticism or self torture, it’s time to rethink our values, and who’s really benefitting from our self loathing. It sure as shit isn’t us! Being a female anti-feminist is like being a black anti-abolitionist. We hamstring ourselves with our own slut-shaming, class divisions and infighting.
As for my deleted 300 words, blind pedantry is just as bad as religious dogma. I do spend some time thinking about women’s empowerment and global healing, contemplating the question, is this debate about cultural relativism vs. western intervention for real? Or is it just the joint apologist bullshit of a bunch of power hungry mullahs, militiamen, corporations and slacktivists who are trying to protect their own financial interests? After hmm-ing and haw-ing and deleting several slants on the example you brought up, I’ve decided to just spit it out. I honestly don’t know if there is a light that can breach the darkness and the horror that is the DRC right now. Using that bloodbath to knock what you do is a bit of a red herring when nothing short of a massive assault force will stop it. Unless your critics are suggesting you should be training your young women for war, I don’t even know why they bother. There’s a place for gentle feminism and there’s a place for soldiers. The DRC would fall into the latter category. (No, Richard, I never claimed to be a pacifist–I only have a problem with mercenaries who fight for greed–putting an end to genocide is an entirely different matter.)
Let’s compare apples and apples already. Here is an amazing story from another part of Africa that demonstrates Hugo’s point beautifully. A group in Ethiopia’s Kembatta Tembaro Zone has demonstrated the power of teaching women to enjoy and respect their bodies. 97% of men and women in the region are opposed to the practice of FGM. Now that they’ve been given a voice, there has been a corresponding 97% decrease in the numbers of women maimed by this practice over the last 10 years.
(I have to give Dr. David Slutsky at UConn a nod for bringing this one to my attention. He’s another one of my favourite male feminists.)
http://www.kmgselfhelp.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2&Itemd=5
Sometimes mastery of that old 12-step adage about having the wisdom to know the difference between what we can change and what we can’t lies in knowing when we’re addicted to ‘fixing’ other people’s problems. KMG is a wonderful example of what happens when we step off and let ‘those poor souls’ speak for themselves. We can love our own bodies, we can teach by example, but the key to empowering another is to listen to what they truly need, and to work together for it.
Oops, it’s daybreak way east where I am, and I haven’t slept yet. I can’t believe I forgot the concluding sentence in that last comment.
You’re absolutely right, Hugo. To listen, empower and work well with others, we do have to be whole, healthy, functioning human beings. If all we’re hearing are negative messages about ourselves, we can’t possibly hear what another person is saying about what she needs, can we?
Amen, Xena, amen.
Xena.
If somebody says “I need math remediation.” can I hear her if I’m not entirely whole myself? Presuming I knew math, could I provide math remediation if I’m not whole myself?
Well, Richard, that all depends on whether or not some big oppressive dude beat you with a math textbook, how hard, and what kind of nasty names he called you in the process.
A woman who’s been told all her life that she needs to pay a plastic surgeon thousands of dollars to mutilate her breasts, wear shoes that destroy her back, vote for some republican asshole who wants to ignore her kids’ sex ed needs, and been told that she shouldn’t work or vote, so she can be a better fucktoy for the dood she’s supposed to marry for her livelihood can’t possibly understand what a woman from another country’s asking for when she asks for liberation from her abusive FGM proponent husband.
Oh, and I’m hearing you loud and clear on your need for remediation in sociocultural anthro and primatology fieldwork techniques. Kindly don’t quote Jane Goodall in my presence if you’re going to get your info from Creationist blogs!
Pingback: More on tragedy and powerlessness and teaching sexual justice at Hugo Schwyzer