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From: gazit@cs.duke.EDU (Hillel Gazit)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: It's too late (Was Re: umm...silly question, but...)
Summary: A little bit long.
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Date: 7 Jun 89 17:40:26 GMT
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In article <11866@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> annmh@blake.acs.washington.edu (Ann Harrington) writes:

>You men, always talking about power and control!  :)

What *exactly* do you try to tell us?  Do you try to induce guilt feelings?

>just one as an "oppressor" is likewise narrow-sighted.  Over and over it
>has been shown that placing blame is all well and good for making people
>feel righteous and just, but it doesn't get any changes made.

Placing blame is a powerful tool to manipulate people.  Do you think that you
(feminists) could achieve AA without inducing guilt feeling on men?

>   It is often easier to blame it all on outside forces, "other" groups,
>but we also have to change  ourselves, and that is often harder.    

You got it right, but you got it too late.  Every revolutionary
movement (and feminism was one) has two stages.  Stage 1 is when the
movement is looking for justice.  The people are mostly young, and
they are attracted to the movement's ideology.  They want to change
the world and create a better place.  The message is loud and clear,
but there are *open* debates about the details.

Stage 2 is when the movement has some power, and it is willing to lose
some of its ideology to keep the power.  In that point the "message"
is not universal anymore, but there are different messages to
different groups.  The rationalization is something like "it's true
that what we do is wrong (on ideological level), *but* the final
result will be good, so it's OK".

In that stage the movement is dominated by older (above thirty)
people.  Young people can't develop this rationalization fast enough.
They may be part of the movement, but not in the decision making
level.

I see several of the stage 2 signs in feminism:
1) It supports unequal treatment of people by gender (AA and so on).
2) It shuts up about unequal treatment of people as long as women don't hurt
   (registration to draft, custody battles).
3) The message to the outside is not clear.  Try for example to ask
   a feminist a question like "for how long AA will last?"
4) It tries to manipulate men by slogans like "men dominated the world for the
   last 3,000 years".  The idea is not to help men to grow out of their sexism,
   but to induce guilt.  Men are always presented as a group, not individuals.

Every movement that enters stage two sure that it is temporary, but it
is not.  Sooner or later it loses the people who are interested in
ideology, and have only a group of power-hungry people.  Feminism is
in the beginning of this way, and I think that we have a chance of
"once in a life time" to see the deep changes in a movement in real
time.

I don't think that feminism has (even though it had) a chance to have
a real partnership with men.  Because it did not want to and 1) and 2)
were around long enough to break the any trust.  We can see it in the
battle of ERA.  Men did very little for either side, they were in a
state of apathy.  From one side most of us don't trust feminism, from
the other side we have the guilt feeling.

BTW Note that in most of the feminist debates about "why ERA failed?" the
    apathy of 47% of the population is not discussed as an important subject.

As a result feminism has to serve women or lose power.  It serves
women by 1) and 2), while the men resistance is reduced by different
messages to men (3) and 4)).  I think that this is a process that
keeps itself going (positive feedback) and there is no chance that
feminism will get back to stage one.

My summary is that Ann got it right, but she got it too late.  No
movement in stage two is willing to lose power (regardless of the
price), and looking inside "when there are so many important problems
around" is a sure way to lose some power...

>-Ann

Hillel                                  gazit@cs.duke.edu

"Morgan opens a window of thought and action that lets us move out of a
male-centered politics of Thanatos - the romance of death - into a feminist
politics of Eros, a loving life force." ---  Ms. magazine, March 1989





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