So as I read more about my various feminist idols, almost invariably I come across people attacking their form of feminism, a lot of the time by other feminists.
On one hand this is completely bewildering as to why any feminist would want to do this. Why would you attack someone that is largely in agreement and alliance and support of you? On the other hand I am not even slightly surprised by this. When you look at any form of politics or dichotomy of freer, forward thinkers vs. traditional conservative thinkers, the conservatives tend to invariably align under simplistic slogans that they don't have to (or even can't) think about too deeply, while the progressives are much more likely to start nutting out details and actually get into the often conflict evoking business of translating beliefs into actions.
Now I'm not talking about criticism. Criticism is different, in that it is constructive and offers and olive branch of change and personal growth on the part of the one being critiqued. Attacks, however, are simply people saying you're not up to snuff. You're not good enough. You are less of a feminist because of X. That just seems totally unhelpfully and counter-productive.
It seems to me that if I was to reject all feminists who failed to be totally inclusive of all experiences when discussing feminism, I wouldn't have any feminists left to call idols. That just seems impossible to achieve. There is often a criticism of second wave feminism that it was overly focused on the white, middle class woman's experience. I agree, absolutely, but I also wonder what the white middle class women who were in the spotlight could have said without sounding like they were trying to tell lower class women of colour what their experiences were. In a recent criticism of Lena Dunham's 'Girls' it was stated that it was completely white washed, and while I think that is certainly a valid criticism, in Dunham's response, that she was a middle class white woman and didn't really want to be telling the story from a place she had zero experience with, it seems like a pretty reasonable point. Arguably the issue is not with the program 'Girls' not having enough women of colour, but rather an issue with television in general that there are no programs by women of colour, telling their own stories.
Maybe this seems like a totally privileged thing to say. I do understand that it is much more difficult for a woman of colour to get the kind of recognition and success that Dunham has achieved, and so she should use her privilege to help get those stories out there. But I can't help but think of all the criticism of television in the past (and present) that is criticised for using tropes and shallow characters when including characters of colour, or women, or queer folks, particularly when the show is being written by a white person, or a man, or a straight person respectively. It just kind of seems like a lose-lose situation. Which is worse, only including characters that reflect your personal experiences, or including characters so outside your personal experiences that they are unlikely to reflect reality?
I would say that the solution to this neither, just have the industry include a wider diversity of writers, instead of attacking the writers because their experience doesn't reflect our own. We need to push the big wigs that run the television channels, and book publishers, and film producers and so on, to hire a more diverse group of people, particularly women, being so under-represented, and even more particularly, women of colour and queer women. It would be nice if, when asking the average person to name as many black actresses as you can, to not be able to count them all on one hand.
Speaking for myself as a strident, intersectional feminist, I find it extremely difficult to talk about feminism in any personally relateable way. If one was to draw a Venn diagram of privilege, I would be just about smack bang in the middle. I grew up in and live in an affluent western country, I'm a man, my genitals match my gender, I'm white, I'm pretty much straight. Looking at my life it would seem like there is absolutely no personal benefit to me being a feminist. And if someone was to say that to me, apart from a few minor issues to do with how boys and men are socialized in a way that makes it difficult to form meaningful relationships (basically because that would be 'girly'), I would say you are pretty much right. But it does seem a little unsporting to look at how the game is set up to offer me such distinct advantages. It just seems unfair to me, and I know I certainly don't deserve such a head start for virtue of being born with a particular arbitrary arrangement of biological features.
Anyway, I've kind of gone a little off topic from my original point, which was to say, criticising a women telling stories based on personal experience for not being inclusive of other women's experiences. Or criticising the values and beliefs of one woman's feminism because it doesn't match another. The thing is, it is pretty hard to truly understand the experiences of a group that you aren't part of. The best you can ever get is second hand information, which is not nearly as powerful an impact on the pathways that form in your brain and describe how you think as actually, in the flesh, living it. There is always that existential aloneness that comes from only ever being able to experience your own reality, and some people are more alone than others.
I know that in my own attempts at trying to understand the female experience, all I can do is read, voraciously consuming books and articles, particularly those detailing the personal thoughts and experiences of women, by women. As a side note, I think that men and boys are particularly more shit at this sort of thing than girls and women, since the masculine experience is the default, so women kind of forced to get inside the head of characters more removed from their own experiences than boys. Girls don't really have enough media made for them to just ignore media made for boys, but boys certainly do.
What I'd like to advocate is Individualist Feminism. Not as a replacement of Intersectional Feminism, but as an idea that can run along side it. This idea that every human being's experiences on this earth are truly unique, and nothing can compare, when it comes to forming your values and beliefs and just what you think about on a day to day basis, than your own personal experience. That is not to say, that is a free pass on not giving a shit about things that don't affect you personally, quite the opposite in fact. Rather it is simply to recognize that, in order to even get a picture of the experiences of another human being, it's going to require a bit of extra effort and in order to get someone else to understand your own experiences, it's going to require a little bit of forgiveness. It is one thing to know something in a kind of academic, information and graphs kind of way, but it is a whole other thing to really, really, get someone else's personal feelings and experiences, and even then it is distorted through the lens of our own experience.
So I guess, in conclusion to this weird, not-entirely-sure-how-coherent-this-is, rant I'd just like to say, yeah be critical. Demand more stories that reflect your own experience. But just keep in mind that it probably isn't all that reasonable to demand that from those who don't actually have the ability to do so. Rather, we should be demanding that there is a greater diversity of story tellers, rather than a greater diversity of stories. With diverse story tellers, those stories will follow naturally instead of being awkwardly forced out of people who aren't really qualified to tell them.
