Count me out of your ‘sisterhood’: On feminism and female lifestyle empowerment subculture
This is something that I’ve found difficult to find the courage to write for many months because what I have to say is admittedly unpopular, politically incorrect, and is prone to be misconstrued (and likely misused by those whose ideologies are diametrically opposed to mine). In all fairness, I have spent at least 15 years in various women’s organizing spaces and I was personally invested in feminist theories and praxis; after all, my postgraduate studies have been on feminist theology.
But as I find myself evolving, I’ve also learned from what I have seen, heard, and experienced. Sadly, I can no longer ally myself with, or support, most of what passes today for feminism or “women’s movement.”
In particular, I will discuss here the problems of — and harms caused by — the illusory notion of “global sisterhood” and the subculture of female lifestyle empowerment brands (FLEBs).
One recently published article on Quartz echoes much of their collective sentiment:
First, a successful women’s movement in America must ally the 99% and the 1%, black women and white women, straight women and lesbians. Any activism that pits women against each other is not feminism, because sisterhood is our most powerful tool. The men in charge know this, too — this is why keeping women divided and indulging in catfights in the media is a surefire way to keep women oppressed. As long as women are fighting each other, they are not fighting against the larger structures that maintain and enforce their oppression.
In this line of thinking, women are always right, so we shouldn’t criticize other women (because “sisterhood”!). We should support female political candidates and female corporate executives, right or wrong. Women ought to vote their own sex, even though Hillary Clinton was in bed with corporate capitalists and warmongers. Likewise, we ought to uncritically support Kamala Harris for president, despite her record of supporting mass incarceration and prison industrial complex in California as a prosecutor and California attorney-general. This type of group-think is symptomatic of the female lifestyle empowerment brands in culture and politics that absolve all females of all accountability while promoting a fantasy that somehow all women are united by the biological accident, more so than divided by the race and class.
In so doing, female lifestyle empowerment brands turn blind eyes to actual oppression while also centering and universalizing the experiences of white, heterosexual, educated middle-class professional women in the developed nations as though they speak for every womxn.
Beneath the occasional virtue-signaling and feel-good “sisterhood” exercises, this movement is rife with unaccountable cultural appropriations and plethora of New Age woo-woo that provides a context for spiritual bypassing. The level of tone-deafness I have encountered (and even I was not aware of, until I was called out by several people for my involvement in this) is in retrospect astounding: “Goddess” rituals in which women were dressed in “Gypsy” costumes; white women engaging in pseudo-spiritual group activities that stole from Native American and Afro-Caribbean traditions; “red tent” events that ostensibly celebrated women by reenacting a sanitized and romanticized version of menstrual huts (which is actually rooted in a deeply misogynistic superstition that posited that menstruating females are “unclean” and thus must be segregated from their husbands and from the community, a custom that still persists in Nepal where many women continue to die because of it).
About a year ago, I made a conscious decision to remove myself from all women-only groups and organizations that I was part of. This was a difficult decision that I did not make lightly, and to a degree, a painful choice because I was part of them for the majority of my adult life. I made quite a few friends through such groups, and at times, they were the only social outlet that I had. But I could no longer keep participating in women-only spaces with a good conscience.
The truth is, that I felt no safer in a women-only setting than in a mixed-gender setting. It was always awkward, and I was still an outsider looking in. It did not matter if it included a small, insignificant number of POCs and/or queers — they were just tokens to justify the group’s facade as something purportedly “inclusive.” It never changed the fact that, in the United States (and perhaps also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and much of Europe), whenever there’s a “women-only” space, it is inevitably centered on white, middle-class, heterosexual ideas of “womanhood” and “womanliness,” which in turn is essentialized and universalized as if their narratives of “womanhood” apply to the entire world.
There are very little, if any, in common between the lived experiences of Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, or Ivanka Trump — and those of the inner-city, working-class African-American lesbians in Chicago, for example, and certainly those who live in colonized and impoverished third-world countries.
There is no such thing as a “global sisterhood.” There is nothing in common between Ivanka Trump and a houseless queer Latina youth in the Skid Row of Los Angeles. Or between Sheryl Sandberg and a gender-non-conforming lesbian in Africa who is subjected to extreme violence. Or between Hillary Clinton and a Guatemalan teenage girl who heads north for safety and a better life, only to find herself turned into a sex slave by coyotes. The humanity is divided far more along the racial and class lines than being united by a false, romanticized idea of “shared womanhood” created by those who are part of the systemic oppression.
The very idea that females share universal traits solely because they are females is a form of colonial hegemony that has long been pushed by the white women in the Global North. It’s quite telling that the proponents of such an idea also engage in all kinds of cultural appropriations to market their lifestyle brand.
I am yet to see or hear any critical thinking and genuine consciousness-raising within the white lady woo-woo sisterhood.
For anyone other than white, middle-class, heterosexual women to take part in the white lady woo-woo sisterhood is a sign of capitulation, a sell-out, and assimilationism; one cannot in good conscience do it because to do so means throwing under the bus those womxn and femmes who live on the forgotten margins of society to which they are relegated precisely because they are not profitable or politically useful to the white capitalist interests.
For too long, I had internalized this idea of “womanhood” and “womanliness” as a universal aspirational ideal and the measure of judgment against which I evaluated myself and the others alike. In doing so, I also became a worse oppressor than the oppressors themselves.
When I woke up to this reality, I also felt very dirty, disgusted, and ashamed of wasting a significant chunk of my life actually working against the POC, houseless, queer, non-binary, and trans folks all in a misguided attempt at gaining respectability points.
And I was also left devastated.
I’ve met and seen and worked with too many white “liberal” and “progressive” women who would in private say all sorts of racist, ageist, transphobic, classist, sexist, and xenophobic stuff — and sadly, they did not even possess enough self-awareness to realize what they were saying were unacceptable.
The most telling sign of how this “sisterhood” poses no challenge to the establishment and the predominant capitalist paradigm was seen on the day after the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, in the Women’s March on Washington demonstrations held worldwide. Despite being the largest mass political demonstration in the history of the United States, there was not even one single arrest on that day in Portland, Oregon (where almost every other protest around that time brought down the riot police unit and large-scale arrests). While it can be attributed to a better organizing and good participant behavior, it is also true that the Women’s March on Washington posed no threat to the political and economic status quo, and therefore the police-state apparatus probably felt no need for suppressing it — in the same way how the police has no appetite for suppressing the extremist white nationalist groups protesting in the streets.
No thanks. Count me out of your so-called sisterhood. I’m not interested in your culturally-appropriated “goddess” circles and self-exalting “rituals.”
I’m not one of you.
