Letting The Side Down

Increasingly I've come to regard my decision to call myself a feminist as being similar to my earlier decision to call myself a lesbian when I knew I was strongly attracted to men as well as women.  Calling myself a lesbian was a personal, political choice: an attempt to manage other people's impressions of me and a prescription for myself as a sexual radical.  But it was essentially dishonest, and so it was not only problematic for me personally but harmful to the sexual identity I was trying to establish solidarity with--what was the lesson of my love life but that dykes just need the right man to come around? 

I think feminism is super important of course, and the legal, social, and political equality between genders it aspires to are fundamental human justice issues that are far from resolved in even the most progressive circles of even the most privileged areas.  I'm incredibly grateful to my feminist forebears, who ensured that I wouldn't be compelled to whelp live young if I didn't want to and could go to university and all that.  And it gives me pause to even consider dissociating myself from an important social justice movement that has fallen on hard times. 

But I get exasperated with the unfalsifiable doctrine that wherever there are men and women, women must be getting the worst of it.  I get mad whenever "men" is used as a synonym for "patriarchy".  I get offended when media representations of white women are treated with greater seriousness than the actual lives of black and brown ones.  I get irritated whenever I see the implication that the advancement of women consists of getting them to catch up to men, and that men's lives are a fixed measure by which everyone ought to be judged.  I can't subscribe to the idea of a zero-sum game between one half of humanity and the other, and I don't feel that I'm different enough from penis-havers to automatically side with my sisters against my brothers.  And, lordy loo, I'm tired of having that one argument about rape.  

It's not just that my knee-jerk reaction in any situation is to also consider a male perspective before coming to a snap judgment.  I have selfish reasons as well.  I'm tired of how I react emotionally to mischaracterizations of feminism, feelings which seem distressingly near to patriotism or sports fanaticism.  I'm tired of dealing with the fallout from a 60-year disinformation campaign anytime I want to convey to someone what I believe generally.

What I want is a word that doesn't imply that I hate sex and jokes and men and domesticity, but which ideally implies that I hate God.  I want to go back to what I knew was the right term for myself the first time I read it as a child: humanist.  Secular humanist if you're nasty.  I want to define myself as pro-human and resolve to be in solidarity with humans. I know it's very white-privilege of me, but I just want my affiliations and opinions to be by choice rather than by default.

My beloved, let's get down to business

Can it really be so?  Have I actually decided I have something to add to a discussion of that hyperinflated term, empowerment?  Well, yes, I'm afraid that time has come.  Strap in. 

What put me over the edge this time was watching Music, Money, and Hip Hop Honeys--which I dearly hope will have the distinction of being the only show produced by the BBC to feature a presenter asking a sexual assault victim to explain how her clothes influence rapists and jurors.  What happens in the show is, one of the women (who refer to themselves as 'video girls') gets quite bubbly and animated when she puts on revealing clothing, so the presenter concludes that, far from feeling exploited and unhappy and used while performing sexually, some women find it empowering. 

Then the presenter discovers that most women performing in videos don't get paid, and that they have shockingly unrealistic expectations that they are about to be 'discovered' while gyrating, and that being so discovered would make them super-rich.  She concludes that, while some video girls may feel empowered, the power actually rests with the people making all the decisions that affect their lives, and that this power relationship is not substantially affected by their gyration. 

That seems to cover the ways I generally see "empowerment" used in discussion.  So what I want is to tease out some of the meanings and assumptions when different people talk about empowerment.  I made a chart. 

As Twisty classically pointed out, the term has been co-opted by advertisers, tied firmly into the ideals of consumption.  At some point, "empowerment" was decoupled from the actual substance of power in capitalist society, namely the ownership of money and property, which is handy because open discussions of wealth do not benefit capital.  So the main way empowerment's used today is to describe feelings. 

Now, I am sick to death of empowerment discourse which is about personal feelings and not substantive measures of social power (i.e. money, i.e. redistributing money more evenly among existing humans, i.e. people pissing and moaning about the status quo but if you try and change it suddenly you're a communist).  Personal feelings pay for jack shit. 

Moreover, it seems that people who want to talk about feelings of empowerment are happy to imply that individual empowerment is simply collective empowerment at a smaller scale.  Individual empowerment is plainly not the secret to collective empowerment: I may gain a great deal of personal power by marrying a billionaire, but that does fuck-all for the rights of any group I purport to belong to.

What also tends to happen, as is very much the case in Hip Hop Honeys and in Twisty's worldview, is that empowerment then becomes the disempowered individual's responsibility, neatly removing oppression from the equation.  Anyone who comes to the table pre-empowered--whether by an accident of birth, lucrative work, or bald calumny--will be treated as though power is their birthright, while anyone trying to get somebody's boot off his face will have to prove both faultless and meritorious to be granted the right to occupy the ground he's being crushed into.

Mostly, though, "empowerment" is used to talk about women and sex.  What kind of sex would empower women?  What kinds of acts would sexually empowered women get up to?  What positions would be most empowering for them?  Would it be more or less empowering if the women were very attractive and young?  Would adding additional young attractive women to a sex act make it more empowering?  These questions and so many more like them have been discussed in tedious detail in the media for some reason. 

The position of third-wave feminists, if I may generalize, has tended to be that THEY are deeply afraid of a woman's pleasure, and as such every orgasm amounts to sticking it to The Man, even when you obtain it quite the other way around.  But this association of pleasure with power is problematic.

One of the themes of this blog is that pleasure is, at best, limited in its capacity to change power relationships: there's a lot of pleasure and peace in complying with society's plans for your ilk.  And unlike Homo Economicus, we often do things to get along, or to impress a lady, or to be sociable, or to have self-respect, which may not garner us or our identity-politics group greater social clout.  Making empowerment a stand-alone measure of whether an action is morally positive collapses a bunch of relevant factors into a black-and-white caricature of human lives, emotions, and social relationships, which I guess explains why it's so widely used.