Sunday, September 21st, 2008...10:49 pm
The Great Feminist Denial – more than just pole dancing and brazilians, although they do feature
MUP sent me a copy of The Great Feminist Denial, by Monica Dux and Zora Simic, which was nice of them. Here are some thoughts about it. I would have liked to been able spend more time thinking about it, but life intervened.
As a young woman, I would identify as a feminist if asked, but it wasn’t something that I foregrounded. I grew up in an explicitly feminist, activist and very middle class household, and so did my partner. I expected that I was entitled to be treated as a human being, and that I wouldn’t be passed over or denied opportunity because I’m female. What made me more strongly identify as feminist was getting older entering the workforce and learning a bit more about the world. Since I started blogging I’ve ramped up my feminist identification again after seeing misogyny and feminist-blaming in the blogosphere.
So I’m not the target market for this book, which attempts to pick apart why young women are so alienated from feminism.
The authors relied on an informal survey, which they say is not meant be scientific or statistically valid. But they don’t give us much information about it and it all ends up coming across a bit like a Cleo article. In fact, most of the first half of the book has that feel, leading me to wonder whether tighter editing could have woven the two author’s contributions together more seamlessly (and got rid of the typoes and a few other infelicities – for example talking about “‘control crying’ and ‘attachment mothering’” rather than “controlled crying” and “attachment parenting”. )
Dux and Simic say that the feminist that lives in the imaginations of young women as channelled through the mass media “is a feminist who hasn’t kept up with the times, an anachronism that overshadows the way women perceive contemporary feminism”, and that those negative stereotypes persist because there are so few positive images of feminists about. It’s a problem, but the answer can’t be this ahistorical rejection of an unpretty, serious and passionate form of feminism:
“While the ideas of the radical lesbian feminists might seem threatening to many, their power is largely illusory. Their influence on the feminist movement in Australia has been about as significant as that of an eccentric opposition backbencher in our federal parliament.”
Particularly when they have correctly identified the media’s tendency to discuss feminism without feminists, why are they doing this?
Grrr. And there’s a lot more grr in a long thread at the Hoydens’ in response to a recent op-ed in the Age by Monica Dux, including comment from Dux. The op-ed serves to highlight the book’s problems with tone and to show up how an ironic authorial voice only really works when your reader already knows what you mean and is inclined to agree with you. Irony is actually easier to use successfully in the context of blogging because bloggers are more enmeshed with their readers. Also we have smilies 
The authors point to lively feminism on the web and include a lengthy interview with tigtog and Lauredhel from Hoydens About Town. The interview is weirdly tacked on the end of a chapter in a grey box and not contextualised or developed. And why don’t they consider whether the online world might be a better vehicle to inform young women about feminism than a mass media that shown it doesn’t care to?
The tone of the second half of the book is more sober and analytical, and I found it much more persuasive. They canvas a number of media debates where strawfeminists have been invoked – in respect of single women, mothers in the paid workforce, raunch and the positioning of feminists as neglectful or uncaring of Muslim women by the “noisy sisterhood” of female MSM columnists such as the late Pamela Bone and Miranda Albrechtson. Angela Shanahan gets a thump too, which earnt my hearty approval.
These descriptive sections are fairly solid, but their attempts to reframe the debates seem underdone in the face of the relentless volume of their earlier material. For example in their discussion of mothers they suggest reframing the conversation as one about “rights” rather than “choices” but don’t acknowledge how rights discourse almost inevitably resolves into a contest of asserted rights. They claim that “choices made by labouring women are a little like confessions extracted under torture”. They ask whether the lower c-section rates and better perinatal mortality (I wonder whether it’s actually morbidity; no reference was cited) enjoyed by Dutch women are a result of robust health attributable to clog wearing. I know, I know, it’s a joke, but it’s not funny and it detracts from the seriousness of the argument.
See also a post by Helen from Cast Iron Balcony, who liked the book more than I did. I wish I had liked it more, but I think the problems with tone and clarity hobbled their attempt to persuasively address misrepresentations and misunderstandings of feminism.
17 Comments
September 21st, 2008 at 11:48 pm
What a great post. I really enjoyed reading this.
(Much more than I would the book, by the sound of it.)
September 22nd, 2008 at 6:03 am
I guess I was just carried away by my pathetic gratitude at seeing a book in the mainstream which wasn’t following the Feminist Gorn Wrong / OMG we must rethink this working outside the home path so popular in the early noughties. And “yay hoydens!” The bit about the grey didn’t occur to me.
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:13 am
I dipped into a tiny bit of Zoe’s copy, and indeed felt like I was reading a Cleo article. Not sure if I want to read the rest, since I’m obviously not the right target age group.
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:49 am
The Netherlands have very good perinatal mortality and morbidity stats, so could have been either.
And it’s CLEARLY because midwives look after healthy women with normal pregnancies. It makes me so mad when women who call themselves feminists dismiss the issues that pregnant and birthing women face – they’re real and enormous issues, not something to make jokes about.
Torture! Pah!
Do either of the authors have children, as a matter of interest?
I don’t think I even want to know what they said about “control crying” and “attachment mothering”.
September 22nd, 2008 at 10:11 am
Thanks, Pav. I discarded two thirds of what I wrote, which I find helps
Helen – yay Hoydens alright. If I was trying to persuade a young woman why feminism was a good idea I’d send them there and to I Blame the Patriarchy, rather than give them the book.
Rebekka, what struck me about their discussion of mothering is that it’s very reactive. Instead of focusing on midwifery care and talking about how it needs to be expanded, they focus on medicalised care as the norm. They don’t support that, but their writing lacks the subtlety their project needs. That said, I appreciate that it’s a hard to achieve that in a book responding to media representations.
One of the authors, Dux, has a child. I haven’t got the book with me (at work today), but from memory they only mention controlled crying and attachment parenting very briefly.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that they dismiss issues around birth; but it’s very easy to take that away from their writing because of their tone-deafness.
September 22nd, 2008 at 10:33 am
I think that Age article was a brilliant example of PR Gorn Horribly Wrong. If I hadn’t read that I might have been tempted to read the book. Then I read the Hoydens thread with Dux’s comments and moved from “not interested” to “definitely opposed to reading this not even if I got a free copy and someone I loved asked really nicely”. The whole exercise seems to have been rather illconsidered and half arsed.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:09 pm
‘The whole exercise seems to have been rather illconsidered and half arsed.’
Kate, this was what I thought too. Insofar as it is possible when one has not actually read the book, I agree with Helen about the pathetic gratitude thing; someone needed to write a book like this, and now someone has, and I am glad.
But I was thinking when I was reading Zoe’s post last night that the ill-consideredness and half-arsedness seems to lie largely at the feet of MUP, not so much Simic and (especially) Dux, who have taken a fairly merciless blogospheric beating. It doesn’t sound to me from Zoe’s description as though the book was even adequately copy-edited, much less structurally edited for continuity and sense — a good editor would have picked up the problems with irony and tone and have had suggestions about how to fix it.
It sounds to me as though the book was kind of rushed out. (The two-covers stuff is weird, among other things, as is the grey-box thing.) I think MUP may have put this book out half-cooked.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:17 pm
It needed a really tough editor, Pav. I don’t see how you can address misunderstanding and misrepresentation other than through knowledge and authority. It needs clarity and precision. Righteous rage helps too ; )
When I was reading it I thought how much I envied the expertise of people such as yourself and Laura who would be able to see and describe the technical problems precisely. I would have liked to be able to do that, but don’t have the chops.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:30 pm
All of the MUP books I’ve read recently have been badly in need of decent proof reading, never mind any form of editing. There were spelling mistakes in the last one I read – there is no excuse for that, ever.
Media representations of birth ‘norms’ are something that badly need a feminist critique – where better to do that than a book that supposedly critiques media representations from a feminist perspective?
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Zoe, don’t sell yourself short. You explain very clearly how the book strikes you.
September 22nd, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I am one of those old wave feminists. Often my legs and underarms are indeed hairy. I’m happy that whatever wave of feminism we are up to ‘allows’ me to wax/shave/pluck to my heart’s content. I can wear lipstick and pretty frocks and be a feminist. I may also flirt and be sexy with any gender. Go the revolution!
But in all these years things haven’t really improved for women. There is still a massive disparity in pay and domestic labour. Childbirth has become increasingly medicalised to the point that women are encouraged to lower their expectations of a natural birth and go with the flow if a c-section suits their private obstetrician better. Now the worst women-haters seem to be members of our own gender and I’m not sure from all the reviews of this book that I read that this is taking us any further to equality.
Great review Zoe. I’m just feeling nostalgic for the good old days when we marched the streets together and formed collectives.
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Maybe we all need to start wearing some feminist t-shirts this summer so that other women can tell who we are?
I suggest this work of genius, from torsopants:
and this is a fave from the Californian branch of the National Organisation of Women:
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 pm
I’ve got a fave t-shirt I wear to the gym (when I go …) — it says POST-FEMINISM: KEEP YOUR BRA AND BURN YOUR BRAIN.
Everyone gives me a wide berth, which is a great thing in a gym.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:45 am
I’m rather wishing this was a t-shirt:
September 25th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Hmm well you’ve piqued my interest in the book. I’ll have to look out for a copy.
October 4th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
What is MUP?
Also: Editing? Ahahahaha… don’t get me started. There’s a lot of sh!thouse editing these days, so it’s no surprise this book is as sloppy as it sounds. There is no excuse: it is sheer laziness. That, and appalling lack of grammar not having been taught in schools for the last… ummm… 30 years or so. I can has adjective now? I can’t remember the last book I read published in the last decade where I haven’t wanted to thump it on the table and get a red pen. My personal theory is that Editors are in fact employed solely to increase the page number for a nice fat-looking book, and spelling, coherency or clarity of vision be damned.
Ahem.
Now… where were we?
Feminism.
Something which has disappointed me lately (aside from the woman-hating) has been… the apathy. I can’t believe how little some teenage girls/young women actually couldn’t give a toss. Perhaps you don’t have to carry a torch, but, you know, a little bit of care and/or passion would be nice. It seems to go hand in hand with political and social apathy in general. It saddens me.
I know a number of 18 year old girls who have recently had babies. I don’t deny them their right to start a family, although I think some of them are being outrageously naive. I just have a feeling that their eyes are going to be opened quite wide quite quickly to how they are going to be categorised and dismissed. That saddens me too. Are they just going to continue to be apathetic and accept it?
January 10th, 2009 at 8:40 am
[...] of the Australian feminist blogosphere has done a review of it – see here, here, here, here and here. It is mostly an exploration of the contradictions I described above – [...]
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