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liskantope · 6 years

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“Can” vs. “can’t” feminism

At the American Democrat activism event I attended last week, several political clips of commentary and satire were prepared and shown, with the chosen finale being the recently viral song of otherwise-little-known artist Lynzy Lab called “A Scary Time”. I sat a bit uncomfortably in my chair, having avoided commenting on that choice of clip when it was being discussed in the email exchange beforehand. It occurred to me that my issues with the song reflect one of my main issues with modern feminist rhetoric which I’ve probably alluded to on this blog several times and was planning to write more of an effortpost about eventually. This song so perfectly illustrates it that I might as well do that effortpost now, I suppose.

Let me start with some disclaimers so as not to be misleading about my general position: I think that the song exhibits a very well-done form of satire that I respect to the point that I’m willing to overlook the uncharitable portrayal of men’s fears (because a little uncharitability is fair game in that type of satire, I think); I find the president’s “This is a scary time for men!” comment that inspired it to be asinine (at least using that precise phrasing in that context); and I’m all for women rising up and voting this November 6th in opposition to this asininity as the artist implores them to do at the end of the song.

However. [Long post to follow, loosely organized and written over several days.]

The other organizers of the event where this song was shown heaped lavish praise on it for “making such a good point”. And the thing is, I’d probably agree with them and see the song as completely unobjectionable -- or maybe a little hyperbolic, but what the heck, it’s satire -- if it weren’t for the context in which I place that feminist message among the general flavor of feminist messages I’m receiving on a daily basis that the other people there possibly aren’t. Age might have something to do with it; the other organizers are a generation older than me and I was clearly the youngest in the whole party. I make this speculation because I’ll be mentioning age and different generational perspectives later.

Anyway, without further preamble, what bothers me about this song, in the context with one of the general themes of today’s feminist rhetoric, is (to put it maybe overly bluntly) the particular way it portrays women are weak and/or even promotes weakness in women.

As far as I can tell, feminist rhetoric didn’t used to be this way. A generation ago, it was pretty much all about how women are strong and able and capable of doing anything a man can do. It was a “women can” type of feminism. This more modern type of feminism seems to be all about “women can’t”, as evidenced by a song written and sung by a woman who starts out every line with “I can’t”. Of course, this is an uncharitable way to look at it. There’s an obvious well-intentioned reason for all this I-can’t-ism*, which is that in order to get the message across about how serious a particular form of oppression is, it’s sometimes necessary to highlight how badly the victims are affected by it in a way that often boils down to them being unable (in some sense of the word) to do things that those with more privilege are able to do. But however noble the intentions behind the rhetoric are, I still have the right to be annoyed and worried about the consequences of taking it too far.

Since I consider the song such a useful example, I’m going to pick into some of the lyrics so as better to explain on a concrete level exactly my beef with all this.

If you want to quickly get to the main point of this post, feel free to skip this part. (Actually, I feel like the tone may detract from my real objective and am hesitant to leave it in. But aside from enjoying expressing the occasional snark, I’m curious to hear any responses/explanations from someone with some typical women’s experiences.)

Let me start by saying that a few of these lines, if not taken too literally (especially the “I can’t” part) seem probably valid, e.g. can’t go to the club just to dance with friends (if you don’t want to be hit on); can’t leave drinks unattended (at least in many bar/club scenes). Maybe some others are valid as well and I’m blinded from seeing that from male privilege, in some sense of that term. Certainly there are a couple of lines that just seem bizarre and make little sense to me, perhaps because I’m a man: “I can’t wear a mini skirt if it’s the only one I own” and “I can’t be wearing silk pajamas when I answer the door”.

The very first line similarly had me scratching my head: “I can’t walk to my car late at night while on the phone”, specifically the “on the phone” part. After thinking about it for a while, I realized it probably reflects a notion that one is safer from violent assaults when both hands are completely free to defend oneself. I’m not sure that this makes sense from a purely physical point of view (we’re talking about a small but heavy object that one can drop or throw at a moment’s notice), and I’m definitely skeptical that it makes sense when one considers that being on the phone makes it easier to call for help. In fact, I think the main reason I’m so confused is that I remember in my early days of walking outside late at night, in situations where I felt uncomfortable and worried for my safety, I remember my then-girlfriend suggesting to me that talking on the phone would make me safer; a potential assailant would be more worried about the consequences of attacking someone who might have a friend or family member on the other end of the line. I’m not sure that is entirely valid either. It’s just not clear to me what the safest approach is. But that song lyric suggests to me that, validly or not, at least since the time that my girlfriend was trying to help me stay safer over a decade ago, The Womanhood has come to the consensus that it’s unsafe to walk in the dark while on the phone and maybe my ex-girlfriend now knows this and if I were a woman I’d know it too?

Now let’s move on to what strikes me as the most preposterous line in the whole song: “I can’t use public transportation after 7pm”. Wait... what?? After the end of the political event where the video was shown, which was sometime past 10pm, I went home on the metro and -- lo and behold -- there were plenty of women on board. Sarcasm and overly-literal uncharitableness aside, suggesting that women have to face some intolerable risk or nuisance just by taking a bus or metro in the early evening seems like a reckless exaggeration. Maybe the artist just wanted a two-syllable number so that the line would scan better, but replacing that number by 10 or 11 wouldn’t affect the scanning that badly and in fact “past 11″ scans as well as “after 7″. Clearly, aiming for something that doesn’t sound ridiculously exaggerated (or that doesn’t scare girls inexperienced enough not to know how ridiculously exaggerated it is) was not one of Linzy Lab’s priorities.

(Just imagine if that line were really true, and the drastically restricted lifestyle a city woman would then be forced to have! If there were a legal 7pm curfew for women (the kind of thing some women within my radar hint they would like to see for men), that would practically amount to women being second-class citizens, and even without legality behind it they would still be right to feel that way in essence. Which I guess is precisely the sentiment the artist wanted to convey.)

One more line to pick apart before I move on. The final “I can’t” of the song is “I can’t ever speak earnestly about all these fears”. I’d be interested to know how everyone who endorses this line interprets it. As referring to not being able to speak out about one’s fears in some sort of uber-conservative bubble that routinely dismisses all concerns about women’s physical safety? How many Lynzy-Lab-type artists or American Democrats are stuck in that bubble? Again I suppose I wouldn’t know, but I can guess that most women with the fears expressed in the song speak earnestly about them on a regular basis with their woman friends and (this is important!) may well have gained some of those fears from other women or the general rhetoric in whatever left-wing circles they’ve hung around. And Lynzy Lab herself is performing an entire song earnestly expressing those fears in a YouTube video, one which immediately went viral and got her a performing spot on Jimmy Kimmel!

The way I feel about I-can’t-ism based on evidently exaggerated dangers boils down to this: when citing evidence to make a point (however valid or important), one should aim to convey the truth, exactly the truth, and nothing beyond the truth. (I suppose this is a variant on opposition to the “arguments are soldiers” mentality.)

Here are what I see as the main consequences of straying beyond the truth:

1) Possibly strengthened fervor of the cause (witness the effects of the president’s constant delusional fear-mongering).

(This is positive from the point of view of whatever cause one is fighting for, I suppose, but to the extent that the cause is based on claims that aren’t factual I’m not entirely in favor of it, and we’re going to be better equipped to go about actually fixing whatever the problem is if the fight to fix it is based on facts.)

2) An at-least-equal and opposite strengthened fervor in opposition to the cause. In particular, the more blatantly far from the truth the fearful rhetoric is, the more ammunition the opposition is given.

3) Overblown fears among the community one is trying to protect, and greater limitations because of those fears, especially among younger and less experienced members of that community. (I wonder how many more teenage girls just setting out into the world of being independent now have an idea that violent men are lurking around every corner and they mustn’t use public transportation past 7pm because they watched Linzy Lab’s song.)

4) Less strength in dealing with and worse reactions to everyday dangers or the ambient fear of them. I once discussed this a bit more at length.

I suppose (4) deserves a bit more delving into, in the context of Lynzy Lab’s song. One naïve way to criticize it is to point out (as I already pointed out in passing with some lines) that every one of the “I can’t” lines refers to something that women can do and in fact women do do... all the time! A defender of the song might reply, “Oh don’t be so pedantic and literal-minded! Obviously when someone in that context says, ‘I can’t X’, what they mean is ‘I can’t X without running the risk of suffering Y’.” But in my opinion, for questions of agency and ability it’s conducive of clearer thinking to start by taking “can’t” statements as literally as possible, because that sets us up for the above opposing point, which exposes that a potential question of the degree of risk and suffering has been obfuscated. “I can’t X” is essentially shorthand in many contexts for “Doing X puts me at an unacceptably high risk of an unacceptable level of suffering.”

And we should be able to consciously acknowledge that the amount of risk and the amount of suffering are tricky things to evaluate and might be up for debate. I’ve already focused on the amount of risk often being exaggerated or less clear than many activists make out that it is. Evaluating the amount of suffering as a result of various oppressive behaviors (e.g. catcalling, minor sexual assaults) is much more fraught with potentially insensitive and obnoxious discourse, and I just want to make clear that the type of reaction a woman (or anyone else) has to these things varies depending on the woman herself and an array of background circumstances** which are largely outside of her control and not her fault. But it might be helpful for women (and non-women) to see a possibility that they won’t necessarily suffer in the worst possible way from the range of horrible behavior they might face, that their degree of suffering depends on a lot of individual factors and if those are favorable might even be quite minimal.

My complaint isn’t that activists arguing for social change don’t always cite justification perfectly factually or that they might go a bit overboard in expressing their genuinely-held beliefs. It’s that pretty much nobody ever seems conscious of the risks in (1)-(4) above or at all mindful of a “don’t exaggerate” self-checking that should be present alongside “don’t downplay” and “don’t be timid and hesitant about telling it like it is”.

Is it really the case that feminism has evolved from focusing on “women can” a generation or to ago to the “women can’t” that seems prevalent today?

It’s hard for me to say, because while I’ve certainly noticed a change over the last 15 years, I wasn’t around for the feminism of the 60′s or even of the 80′s. I have to rely on the way I hear old-school feminism described by older people (it would also be nice if I read some feminist literature or followed some more layman-oriented discussions from those periods). I do often think back to something one of the middle-aged female professors in my old math department said to a group of us who were meeting to organize a department seminar to discuss diversity issues. I can’t remember her precise words or the context in which she brought this up, but to my best recollection it went something like this:

The whole time I was growing up and going to university and studying mathematics and engineering, it seemed like everyone was telling me all the ways I could be like a man. All I ever heard was “Women are as strong as men!” and “Women can learn and understand anything that a man can!” and “Women can do the same work that men can!” And then one day I woke up and had the sudden realization, “But wait a minute... I’m not a man! I’m a woman! Why should it be my goal at every turn to be more like a man?”

That speech touches on some other issues, and I don’t mean to shoehorn it too hard into the thesis of this post, but it’s an example of what I see as a “women can” mentality of women’s-lib-era (maybe second-wave?) feminism. Other anecdotes, along with the general way that older people in my life talk about women’s issues, suggest the same.

So why did feminism change from an emphasis on “women can” to “women can’t”?

One reasonable explanation that comes to mind is that the civil rights issues for women have themselves changed. (This would also apply to a similar evolution in the rhetoric for other social justice causes.) Sixty years ago, feminists were fighting for women to have legal rights to do things and societal acceptance of them doing those things. This lent itself to a message of “women can do everything men can do, don’t assume someone is incapable because she’s a woman”. Nowadays those rights have mostly been secured in the West, and the main grievance on the part of women is having to deal with various kinds of oppression (of a sort of that doesn’t involve society disallowing women to do something on the grounds that they’re incapable because of their gender). This can be overly-simplistically divided into opposition to reproductive rights (which has nothing to do with a perception that being female makes someone incapable of doing something, it’s just an oppressive restriction on what one is allowed to do and so we’re just left with “women can’t”), and having to deal with oppressive behavior (mostly in the department of sexual harassment/violence, which again leads to “women can’t”).

While that is part of it, I’m convinced that the evolution from “can” feminism to “can’t” feminism is part of a much more general movement being led by younger generations -- specifically, my generation of millennials and the generation just below mine -- which is tied in with the largely internet-driven de-stigmatization of mental illness, identity politics, preoccupation with labels, and other things. Those who have read other posts of mine probably have an idea of where this is going, and for me to fully explain where I make the connection would be another post in itself, but this is my theory about what drives the culture gap between generations as well the clash between old-school feminist rhetoric and the modern kind. It still makes sense to say, okay, why has this general change been brought about? I would posit that it’s a combination of what I suggested in the last paragraph, plus an increased understanding and culture of accommodation for emotional suffering and trauma which is naturally part of the arc of progress that carries us in the direction of Niceness, plus the usual dash of “rise of social media” thrown in. The result, in this case, is a somewhat ironic tendency for younger activists to characterize America as a much more terrifying place for women than older women who remember objectively scarier times do.

I don’t mean to fault “can’t” feminism entirely, of course. To some extent it makes sense, for reasons I already gestured at. But I do feel that if it’s dominating the rhetoric to the point that a woman’s song with two entire verses of lines starting with “I can’t” is representative of the discourse on gender oppression, then it might be time to revisit the roots of feminism as conveying the (I would think more empowering) message of how strong, capable, and independent women can be.

* I’m also in the habit of using a different term which is alluded to in the tags.

** I’ll be just obnoxious enough to suggest that one of these background circumstances is how much fear-inducing rhetoric one has been exposed to!

#feminism #Our Current president #2018 midterms #high vs. low agency #millennials on the internet #not as charitable as I could be

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