So, for the record, Sarah Palin is not a feminist… I’m sorry, but you don’t just get to say you’re a feminist and automatically be one. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not allowed. (menstrualpoetry)
NO. Not on, not right, just no. You DO, in fact, just get to say that you are a feminist. It won’t make me automatically agree with you (and we’re talking about Palin – a woman with whom I share not a single grain of common thought). Hell, it won’t make me do or think much of anything, really.
However, someone standing up and announcing that a woman has to pass some shibboleth, some test of correctness before they can be allowed to use the word? SO NOT ON. You know why?
Patriarchy is all about telling women what we are supposed to be, what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to do it, and how we are supposed to feel while we are doing it. I don’t care what you call yourself, if you’re doing any of the above, you are feeding into the power structure you claim to be fighting against. (Or maybe the feminism fairy gave you special I-get-to-be-in-charge pixie dust.) I call bullshit.
You want to know what happens when feminist women become overly-concerned with gatekeeping? You keep out the wrong people. Beating your womanist breast over Sarah Palin calling herself a feminist will have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on Sarah Palin, but will absolutely have an effect on women who might agree with some of her politics, who might self-identify somewhat with her. It will make them reject everything you stand for and maybe you’re thinking that that’s just fine and dandy, right? You don’t WANT women like that in your precious and pure movement, disagreeing with your politics and questioning your -isms.
It means that maybe those women (whom you do not deem worthy of using the word feminist) won’t ever question their own internalized misogyny, (like I didn’t all though my 20′s) that maybe they’ll pass on that same awful internalization to their daughters. But that’s ok right, because they failed your litmus test, because they don’t conform to YOUR vision of what a feminist woman is supposed to be or do. Because you might not have the power to make the world better, but you sure as hell have the power to kick people out of your little corner of it.
I spent a significant chunk of my life rejecting the term feminist because according every feminist I came across in the 80′s and 90′s, almost everything that I liked or did was incompatible with then-current feminist theory, (porn, casual sex, geek/tech-culture…) and even the things that I did agree with/fit into were presented in such a black and white, us vs. them mode that I wanted nothing to do with them. Second wave feminism did very little but tell wee!me I was wrong, bad, and a complete failure at feminism. You think this fed into my internalization of female things equaling things that were worthless? You bet your ass it did. (Well, if I suck at being female* anyway, then I might as well reject as much of it as I can.) For third wave feminism to run to the other end of the field and do the same damn thing makes me want to… well, you saw the post title, right?
I find Palin’s politics horrifying, and her personal and public actions to be every bit as reprehensible as any fear-mongering, demagogue-leaning, anti-intellectual male.** I die a little inside every time I run up against anyone who thinks she’s ever-so-great, but the solution to people not agreeing with me is not to turn my back and kick them out of the club house. I want to leave a slightly better world for EVERYONE, not just for the people I happen to agree with. On a less idealistic note, telling a not-at-all-small percentage of the women in this country that, by association, they are not good enough to come into the feminist clubhouse is no way to sway them to your cause.
*This came from both ends, BTW. I failed at “correct” feminism, and I utterly failed at makeup-wearing hetro boy-dating femininity, so I said to hell with ALL of it in favor of just trying to figure myself out. The fact that this involved a whole hell of a lot if internalized misogyny wasn’t something I would realize for a long time.
**Srsrly, if you’re going all second wave anyway, you might want to take note that she’s done exactly what the second wave told my mother’s generation they could do, which was: anything a man could do. Just in this case the man happened to be Bill O’Riley. So congratulations!