Losing Focus or Honing In?

I never can decide which it is I’m doing when I choose to emphasize the words and behaviors of the women who surround me, rather than those of men.  Am I losing sight of the men who ultimately benefit from the struggles between other women and me, or am I taking feminist advice to center women to its logical conclusion?

I think that at a certain point, it does become necessary for the oppressed to deal with the inequalities amongst ourselves – whether we are disparately favored siblings, unequally tolerated racial minorities, varyingly rewarded class strata – before we are able to confront the oppressors of us all as a united force.  (Well, as united a force as is possible given the fact that I now see men’s-women as being as much the enemy of women’s freedom as men themselves.)  I think it is important that we all face up to the fact of our having been used – our very physical beings having been used – by this hierarchy in the oppression of others.  Just by the fact of our very existence within this framework, we have been used; we are being used, at this very moment.

My body, marked as it is in all of the socially meaningful ways in which it is marked, is itself a tool, elevating and debasing others as a result of the comparisons that are constantly being made in patriarchy.  Everywhere I go, someone’s lighter or darker, smarter or slower, taller or shorter.  Under these circumstances, it is absolutely imperative that those of us oppressed and oppressing by these measurements *acknowledge* the lies that have been told, the exaggerations that have been boasted, the belittlements that have been spat on behalf of this system.  We have to do so in order to learn the truth about ourselves and each other.

We have to learn to see ourselves and each other all patched up, as if patriarchy had never happened to us, with the self esteem all there, and the confidence and the love and the inquisitiveness that’s been drained or beaten out of us.  We also have to learn to see ourselves broken down in ways, too, broken down in ways that patriarchy built us up.  We have to learn to see ourselves and each other with the smirks wiped off, with a wrench in our swagger, with us taken down that peg or two patriarchy stole from someone else on our behalf.

So many “feminists” want to reclaim self esteem lost to patriarchy, but don’t want to renounce any of the self-satisfaction it brought, especially the self-satisfaction of a belief that one has done it all for oneself, with no help from privilege or social status.  It’s that self-satisfaction, I think, that prevents the privileged from learning from the oppressed.  Why should they start listening to what anyone else has to say now when they’ve pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to this point, after all?  It’s a shame they don’t realize that a “knowledge” bereft of the insights of the oppressed is simply more of what the patriarchy had planned for them all along.

Perhaps it’s an abdication of some feminist obligation for me to focus on women doing each other dirty for a crumb of stolen self-satisfaction, rather than the men who sit back and laugh at us all, whether we’ve been tossed a crumb or not.  But I don’t know.  I think the only way we’re going to get ourselves out of this situation – fighting over crumbs and being laughed at while we do – is to work together.  I hardly think appealing to the men from our splintered factions is going to get the men to take their boot off our neck.  Not when there’s – at the very least – entertainment value in letting us women scrap it out.

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