Sisterhood Powergrab
We don’t need a dystopian novel to understand women’s cruelty to women
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I haven’t read Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale”, but I didn’t read “1984” or “Brave New World” either. Having been brought up in the Soviet Union, I prefer realist fiction like “Ivan Denisovich” and “House on The Embankment” or memoirs like “Hope against Hope” to the dystopian, well, geekery.
Why am I, the reader, being invited to imagine what totalitarian nightmare might look like if I can ask my grandparents?
Not all “Russians” share my attitude, of course. Orwell was banned in the Soviet Union for a very good reason, because people could recognize their reality in his novels, and because it was encouraging to know that there is a foreigner who gets it. Still, I’ve met Iranians who share my opinion on the genre.
Yet progressive cheerleading the eve of the premiere of Hulu’s “Handmaid’s Tale” miniseries piqued my interest. Not because Trump’s America is anything close to Atwood’s Gilead or some other silliness, but because of Sarah Jones told us that “Handmaid’s Tale” is a warning to conservative women.
The novel’s villianess Serena Joy, Jones explains, is inspired by the late conservative women’s leader Phyllis Schlafly, and the book is about dynamics of power between women:
But The Handmaid’s Tale does more than present a possible future: It asks us to consider how we’d end up there. A form of feminism that celebrates power for power’s sake, instead of interrogating how it is concentrated and distributed, will usher us into fascism. Feminism means something. Some choices oppress the women who make them, and some beliefs, if enforced, would oppress everyone else, too. Allow an antichoice woman to call herself a feminist, and you have ceded political territory that you cannot afford to lose. Stripped of political meaning, “feminist” becomes an entirely subjective term that anyone with any agenda can use.
If Jones’s point is that women can be incredibly cruel to each other and get to the top of the pole at the expense of their supposed “sisters”, I wholeheartedly agree. Only we don’t need dystopian novels to understand it.
Last week, for instance, two doctors in Michigan were arrested for performing female genital mutilation, or FGM, on girls. One doctor was a woman, another was booked together with an assistant, his wife. With full support of their mothers, prominent women were harming helpless girls.
FGM should be a feminist cause if there ever was one. And yet it’s not just that the women do it to each other or take their daughters to be assaulted in this manner, feminist movement today is all zipper lips about it.
Barbaric ritual is a growing problem in the Western world. As the news about the Michigan doctors was coming out, BBC reported that last year a case of FGM was discovered every three days in Wales. This is a continuation of a trend: In 2016, a children’s charity Plan UK warned of a new case every 109 minutes countrywide.
Euros are far ahead of us, as always, but we are heading in the same direction — we are accommodating:
The New York Times Health and Science editor explained Friday that the paper did not use the term “female genital mutilation” in a story for fear that it would “widen the chasm” between Africa and the West.
A Times reader wrote in to complain about the headline and body of an April 13 story on the arrest of a Michigan doctor for performing a procedure the author referred to as “genital cutting.” The letter caught the eye of Times public editor Liz Spayd, who asked the story’s editor Celia Dugger to explain.
One would think the Sisterhood would be all over this one, and one would be wrong. Jumping to the defense of black and brown girls does nothing in terms of expanding Big Feminism’s influence in the American society. It would put them at odds with immigrant communities and the progressive mainstream without necessarily getting much in return (things like greater representation in DC or monetary contributions).
Second Wave feminism was, for the most parts, a white middle class movement, and a highly successful one. Somebody has to be white middle class and the white middle class has to have its movement, so no shame there. Only today mainstream feminists are not willing to use their power for the good of other women. Instead, in an effort to diversify, they are inviting the likes of Sharia advocate Linda Sarsour to their rallies and making Sarsour one of Essence magazine’s “100 Woke” women.
It’s often said that American society is becoming increasingly ideological, but feminism today does not look ideological at all. It’s all but a naked power grab. What ideology can put Madonna and Sarsour under the same roof? Yet both were official speakers at Women’s March on Washington in January. If, as Jones insists, one’s position on abortion should define a feminist, then I don’t see how a strict Muslim can be allowed in the movement.
And if, as Jones insists, “[s]ome choices oppress the women who make them”, then Madonna, Lena Dunham and pretty much every celebrity should be banned for setting a wrong example for our daughters. Yet so much of feminism today is celebrity-driven. (Celebrity feminism is not as helpful to them as they assume, but it is no less true.)
Power grab is inherent in the Second Wave “personal is political” mantra. If women are to band together and live their lives a certain way for the good of the womankind and the future of our daughters, how is anyone free to make any choices? It just so happens, that the life choices preferred by feminists work better for some women than others.
Sacrificing family life or parts of family life might be worth it for some women, but most professions are not that interesting. There are women, like Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO who rose to fame as a feminist author of “Lean In”, a book that advises women to keep up with both family and career, about which Karol Markowicz writes:
Sandberg is encouraged, however, by “Lean In Circles,” groups of women who get together to espouse Sandberg’s philosophy. If I wrote a hit book and rubes were getting together to promote my brand, I might be similarly encouraged.
Though perhaps I’d feel a twinge of guilt over plumbing eager women’s expendable income to boost my book sales.
It’s not hard to notice that women at the head of feminist movement have better careers than you and me. We can be lawyers, librarians and cocktail waitresses, but they are the ones on TV, they are traveling the country giving fiery speeches, shaking hands with congressmen and telling educators what to teach our kids. We would rather stay home to rock the cradle. We want kids; they want followers. “Be like us!” — They say. “We lead by example.”
I’m no dystopian, I wouldn’t call it fascism, but it is naked power grab. It’s done at the expense of ordinary women, and, unfortunately, the power that feminist leaders had accumulated over the past half a century is not being used to improve condition of the women in this country, let alone around the world.
