Octogalore writes here about women and power and sexuality; Renegade Evolution responds here.
I am going off on a complete fucking tangent.
I was raised in a reasonably affluent progressive family. My parents are both college-educated; both of them have taught at the college level. There was the whole "You can do whatever you set yourself to" rhetoric, vigorous attempts at egalitarianism in upbringing that were partially thwarted by myself and my brother being extremely different people.
And one of the subtextual messages that I picked up, whether intentionally or no, was that I ought to want to be powerful -- in the sense that I think Octogalore means when saying "I think the only real power comes in leverage. Being able to leverage your time and create something bigger than yourself." Some of this is class privilege -- being affluent, white, progressive, educated, the encoding was you-are-one-of-the-proto-movers-and-shakers-of-the-world. And some of it was a twisted-lens imposition of leftist nanny obligation: as a professional-class woman, I was supposed to be one of those people who Improves The World For Women. As someone who was good with maths and sciences, perhaps, I should be out there being one of those women who proves that there's nothing about having a cunt that precludes producing science. Failure to have this ambition, to strive towards this sort of power, was ungrateful at best, and seen as actively anti-feminist at worst.
(I want to be clear that Octogalore makes clear that this is not the position she is trying to express. I own my own shit here.)
The thing is, the affluent-progressive-live-your-life-as-an-example-to-others trip makes me miserable. Trying to get onto that ride is a big chunk of why I went mad and dropped out of school and never got the degree that would qualify me to be an Educated Class Social Activist By Example. I lost myself trying to figure out what I should be doing to please my parents, to uphold the values of my social class, to be a good little liberated woman. I don't have the fucking ambition to pull off living on a grand scale that way, and back when I tried to hold that as a value it mostly made me crazy.
The thing with leverage for myself and women that follow me, that large, weighty sense of desire to construct legacy, is that that approach to the world robs me of all sense of power. That was where I was supposed to be by now, right? What all my background was gearing me towards, and yes, it was all "You can choose to do what you want", but the frame was that that would serve the Greater Good, that I would want power -- educating the next generation in a university, or advancing the study of astrophysics, or something that could be held up as a Good Example. And so if I look that way, look that way at all, I'm a catastrophic failure, too crazy to hold down a job as a legal secretary let alone pass the bar, unable to manufacture sufficient ambition out of obligation to Class Woman to bring the weight of my privileged upbringing into the service of the whole.
And this is why I ruminate on power a lot, on recognising things like the power of the submissive role, of the caretaking parent, of all these things -- because I don't want to embrace a model of power that leaves me intrinsically powerless, whether an abject failure, a traitor, or a pawn of Teh Patriarchee. Maybe somewhere down the road I'll be the one to make a difference, working on the scale where I am -- what Little Light referred to as the two little hands -- but I can't live for being that, or even count on knowing when it happens. Field too large.
07 May, 2007
Power, Redux: Revisiting the Last Paragraph of "The Personal Is Political"
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"Dw3t-Hthr" (Duat-Hether) is a title of various female temple officials in ancient Egypt. It means "Worshipper of Hathor" or "Adorer of Hathor".
4 comments:
heh. that links in with a few of the things I've been talking about lately.
I really fear our society sometimes. We've taken the role of nurturer and cut it out of what's expected of men, and now we're trying to cut it out of what's expected of women, too.
But we all need nurturing.
(and I'm a similar failure if I use the same measure of success. Clearly, I gave that measure up.)
Hi. I appreciate your qualification that my point wasn't that all women need to want a particular thing. I agree with you, any heavy parental or societal expectations about duty or role are far too arduous to be healthy or productive.
But I think the expectation that both women and men should be equally invested in being leaders or owners -- people who don't have anyone to report to. That could mean either a company president, an owner of a strip club, a high school principal, or someone running a non-profit. Not that everyone needs to want this, but that if women and men are equally invested in these things, more women will have them, which will IMO be collectively good for women.
But it's not an obligation that should rest on an individual woman's shoulders.
Take your example -- you were good at math and sciencem, your parents suggested "should be out there being one of those women who proves that there's nothing about having a cunt that precludes producing science. Failure to have this ambition, to strive towards this sort of power, was ungrateful at best, and seen as actively anti-feminist at worst."
In my case, I was good at math and science, but my parents' suggestion was instead that the humanities were a purer, more academic, more humanitarian discipline. The idea of doing something that would have leadership or financial implications was vulgar to them. I had to rebel to even go the engineering, business and eventually law route.
So I think that if women and men were given an equal starting position, without any "you must be grateful and do this" BS piled on, that would be the ideal scenario. I don't think "must because you're female" is right, but I don't think "shouldn't (for whatever reason)" is either.
It's a case of assumptions. It was generally assumed that I would go forth and do something worthwhile and 'powerful' by my family; because my family's progressive attitudes framed that partially in terms of egalitarianism, and because of the professional-class feminist attitudes I encountered, I picked up -- again, from the way people expressed their assumptions -- that it was my obligation to do such things. The negative terms that people (largely outside my family) used to frame professional-class women who did not pursue powerful roles made it clear that these were not acceptable paths.
I've come around to the opinion that embracing such a narrow vision of power is a bad idea. Back when I was working an hourly wage job, what power I wanted was a) to pay my rent and b) to have a job I could leave in the office so I could have my life in the rest of the time. When I left that job, in part because b) was no longer the case, I wound up a wreck because I was too hooked in to the notion that my employment defined my power, and that my power to leverage change in the world on the large scale or generational scale was my value.
I've needed to learn to embrace and respect the forms of power that actually work for me and what I do rather than define the 'only real power' as something that I am unlikely -- for situational and character reasons -- to accomplish. I worry when I see people using narrow definitions of power about the kids like me who might come away with the impression that they need to be lawyers, or power executives, or scientists, or whatever else, in order to make a difference in the world.
It was generally assumed that I would go forth and do something worthwhile and 'powerful' by my family; because my family's progressive attitudes framed that partially in terms of egalitarianism, and because of the professional-class feminist attitudes I encountered, I picked up -- again, from the way people expressed their assumptions -- that it was my obligation to do such things. The negative terms that people (largely outside my family) used to frame professional-class women who did not pursue powerful roles made it clear that these were not acceptable paths.
we are sisters under the skin in this regard.
thanks for this post.
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