“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg. ” –Abraham Lincoln
Thus falls another bulwark, the final impetus for me to start antagonizing the Obama faithful on my own turf. Megan at Jezebel says, somewhat typically, that the critics are the real sexists, which works, if you misrepresent them as not allowing men to be feminists, or if men were an oppressed class in society. I have been trying to figure out since the beginning of 2008 why so many feminists think Barack Obama is one of them. He hadn’t said so until recently, in a private meeting:
When the chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation board, Peg Yorkin, and I met Barack Obama, he immediately offered “I am a feminist.”
That he said this doesn’t much surprise me, but I’m not inclined to take it at face value, or even assume he meant it, considering his record. I’m not sure why they had to use a frankenimage for the cover, as many men and women have put that t-shirt on for Ms. I’m sorry, but saying privately that he’s a feminist doesn’t mean he didn’t utilize misogyny as a winning campaign strategy. It doesn’t mean that he didn’t retain Jon Favreau, who would have been fired from many less important jobs for sexual harassment. It doesn’t mean that he hasn’t ignored the outcry against Rick Warren, who has said that abused women have no right to leave their husbands and pro-choice people are like the Nazis. It doesn’t mean that Obama didn’t say that we should roll back the mental health exemption for late-term abortions. It doesn’t mean that he has done one thing that would require him to stick his neck out and represent feminists/progressives.
Smeal herself says that we need to speak out and hold his feet to the fire. To bad Ms. hasn’t done that at all in this past year. Again, saying it doesn’t make it so. I wish more of his supporters actually wanted to do that, instead of relying on their faith.
The pervasive culture among the faithful has been to insist that sexism isn’t sexism when it comes from him and any criticism of him is ruining feminism. Supporting him has, for many third-wavers, become synonymous with feminism, with major blogs like Feministing, Feministe, Jezebel and Pandagon ignoring sexism to become Obama propaganda vehicles. I was attacked more than once in various forums for identifying as a Clinton supporter during the primaries, by people who claimed that Obama was the only option for real feminists. The cover looks like it was done with similar reasoning. That’s why Smeal explains it with a mention of his approval rating; it might be a bid to stay relevant. I’m not really satisfied with this answer, though. Asking “Why do you see Barack Obama as a feminist” has, to me, always been answered with a dodge “McCain is worse!”, a non sequitur “I’m not going to vote for Sarah Palin just because she has a vagina”, or something so vague one needs the faith to understand like “I just believe he is a feminist because of all that he has said and done”
I still want to know what he’s done to have been given all this feminist street cred. I want to know like I want to know why people are religious. Maybe that’s the best answer there is.
Will this be continued? Pretty sweet discussion of Obama (I agree), but will the Q in the title be addressed more directly? Because I am curious.
Thanks for the feedback, Ryan. I’d like to write more on feminism and the fourth wave soon in more depth, though I’m working on something a little different for my next post.
I grew up in the midst of the backlash and the third wave, which to me always seemed a bit embarrassed by the anger of it’s foremothers and reticent to appear too strident, itself. I think that has something to do with the feminists who, in the past year identified their support of Obama with feminism and resisted explaining the reasoning behind it.
I think feminism(and the left as a whole) has been too much tied to the Democrats. They take us for granted and they don’t support us back. What the fourth wave is about is getting back to advancing gender equality. That to me necessarily involves calling out sexism, whether it comes from Barack Obama or it’s directed to Ann Coulter, and holding our elected representatives accountable on feminist issues, no matter what party they belong to.
More on this to come, I hope.
Marge, well, I’m second-wave and was very pro-Obama during the election–a lot for simple mercenary reasons: I don’t believe Hillary could have been elected. And admittedly, I personally like Barack Obama more than I like Hillary, on a personal level. But certainly, I would have voted for either one.
I want to know like I want to know why people are religious. Maybe that’s the best answer there is.
And as a religious person, my standard answer is: I am religious because I enjoy it, it’s who I am, I want to do it, etc. Along these lines, then, that would be why feminists are calling Obama feminist.
Would like to hear more about a fourth wave also.
Hi Daisy,
Lard knows we’ve had many explanations/interrogations of who we all voted for at this point. I don’t mean to go down that road.
The faith thing, as you probably know, can’t be critically engaged with. You want to believe; you choose to believe; you feel the presence of god in your gut? As a congenital agnostic and general skeptic, it’s beyond me how I could simply choose to believe anything. I imagine it’s a comforting thing to feel that one can always trust in something, but when that something is a politician, it becomes dangerous.
I think too many feminists have abandoned principle in favor of cheerleading for Obama. I’ve had other conversations with his supporters where they amended their own prior beliefs to fit his(e.g. “Well, maybe women should consult with their husbands and pastors before they get an abortion”) instead of checking to see if his principles were in line with theirs. Now that he’s elected, many who promised they would hold his feet to the fire at this point are showing their unwillingness to do so. That’s bad news for the movement, especially coming from folks like Smeal.
I have little interest in feminism that boosts one political party in the hope of getting crumbs while they hold our rights hostage every election. The fourth wave is non partisan, it rejects the illusion that any of us are genderblind, or that sexism is acceptable from any feminist, or directed toward any woman. Check out The New Agenda if you haven’t already:
http://thenewagenda.net/blog/