Women Can Be Terrible Too
I was minding my own business on a perfectly pleasant International Women’s Day, when I ran across this intellectual cow patty of feminist discourse from Meta (ugh) CFO and war-crime apologist, Sheryl Sandberg. Of course Ms. Lean In has some strong opinions about the magic and peace that would come with a women-run world, again flattening womanhood into an upper class sorority instead of a complex yet disregarded framework of human existence. Despite all of this, Sandberg remains a credible representative of Feminism™️, the white-centered variety that is crafted by the resentment that its adherents are not allowed the depravities and exploitation that men commit as a matter of course.
So naturally she would promote an idea that women are naturally softer and kinder, that our management style is inherently more collaborative and conciliatory, that we lack the aggression and tendency towards violent resolution that men — with all their upper body strength and toxic masculinity — must be inclined to. But this is to forget Empress Wu and Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great and Victoria, Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi. This is to treat femininity as something special, distinct and wholesome, something that lives in opposition to masculinity and the humanity it represents, something elevated above those base instincts.
This perspective on womanhood — that it is purer than the patriarchal world it inhabits — is the difference between feminists who are in it for gender essentialism and feminists who are in it for liberation. The former believe that patriarchy oppresses them because women would otherwise display their superiority; the latter believe that the patriarchy oppresses us because we mirror the genderless truth of humanity.
These two perspectives are different responses to the same problem, but only one actually resembles an answer. The thought of an essential, pure, sacrosanct womanhood was the core of (white) women’s liberation in the West from the organizing and unpaid labor of women during the Civil War, to the Progressive Age of Reform, to the suffrage movement, to the Third Wave feminist movement. It is what white girls are taught as feminism, and what white women promote as such. It is the heart of “choice feminism” and “strong female characters” and the shallow and empty efforts at representation that populate popular media and corporate diversity initiatives.
Then there are feminists who believe, as I do, that womanhood — no matter what body it is cloaked in — is personhood, and deserves the inherent dignity that entails.
This is the problem with placing all women under the same framework, trying to narrow down feminism to a set of buzzwords and vibes instead of a living process that focuses entirely on women as people — messy, flawed, selfish, rounded, complex people, who are driven by the same motivations that any person could have. The shallowness of social media feminism is why white, wealthy women easily and happily exploit the labor of others. It is why they need to compare and contrast themselves against women who have received less and accomplished more (especially if those women are Black). It is why the women at the top of the Feminism Industrial Complex insist that the systemic problem of finding femininity less worthy, less valuable, less enriching than masculinity can be solved with a heaping of individual motivation. You aren’t being paid less because you’re a woman; you’re being paid less because you’re a woman who won’t lean in.
It’s just another reminder that white women can’t be trusted in a movement based on solidarity. Just because we all know we’re degraded doesn’t mean that we’re all equally informed as to why.
