We create beauty culture and celebrity gossip . . . because that’s what we’ve been socialized to do. It’s nothing inherent in the gender, it’s every bit as much a social construct as race.
But more than that . . . the culture emphasizes these aspects of feminine creation because *it makes money*. Countless billions of dollars have been made by making women hate each other, by making us hate ourselves. It is a very sound financial strategy.
Divide and conquer.
Keep us so busy hating ourselves and each other that we don’t have the energy or the community to change the status quo.
I used to rail against feminism, too. Why?
Because it earned the approval of men. Men who had control of the politics that governed my communities. Men who had control of the economics that governed my living conditions.
I was kissing the pope’s ring, and I was rewarded with trifles and trinkets, and then screwed over just the same.
But those men? Were laboring under illusions, too. Were, in a different way, being exploited just as I was.
I have learned to be deeply wary of women who say they’re not feminist, of women who say they “don’t get along with women,” who “just want to be one of the guys,” who “don’t do girlie things.”
Because I have been one of them, and I know how damaging they are, because of the damage I did my own damn self.
Identity politics came about because it was *necessary*. Because until we really, truly examine the wedges that the dominant culture has driven between us, we haven’t a chance in hell of destroying them and becoming “just human.”
It took working in a male-dominated field, in a community that was mostly not-white, serving people who didn’t look like me, didn’t talk like me, but hurt every bit as much as I did when they lost someone they loved, for me to start examining this.
And what I found made me mad as hell.
We are so awful to one another. And that keeps the dominant powers in place, making them a metric buttload of money in the process.
There has got to be a better way. Feminism, and especially intersectional feminism, looks like a much better way from where I stand.
And not just for women. Patriarchy hurts men every bit as much as it does us. Look at the current suicide statistics, look at how many middle-class white men are offing themselves in recent years, if you don’t believe me. Constructs of masculinity and femininity are harmful to ALL of us.
I love men. What I’m fighting against is the culture, not the people suffering in it.