Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters (23 page)

Party quotas are voluntary; political parties guarantee that a certain percentage of women will be selected as election candidates. Political parties in Austria, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Mozambique, Norway, Sweden, and South Africa use this system.

Legal quotas make it mandatory for political parties to set aside a certain percentage of parliamentary seats for women. If parties don’t comply, they can be disqualified from the election or have government campaign funding withdrawn. Legal quotas are used in Argentina, Belgium, Costa Rica, France, and Rwanda.
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I don’t think the United States will be implementing quotas anytime soon—and I don’t even know if this is the answer for us—but I wanted to put it out there.

The thing is, the idea behind achieving a critical mass of women in political decision-making positions comes from the
idea that there is policy change when there are more women in politics. Some say that this is that kind of “good” sexism: like, women are not corrupt, or we’re cooler on issues affecting other women. It kind of presupposes that just by having vaginas, we’re going to make good policy decisions. Kind of makes me uncomfortable.

But that said, there seems to be
some
truth to this line of thought. Countries with the highest percentages of women in politics tend to have great policies affecting women’s lives.

Sweden, for example, which has one of the highest percentages of women in political office in the world, has amazing policies for women: Because of employment laws, women’s salaries are, on average, 90 percent of men’s,
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and the country has an amazing public childcare system.
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But then again, who’s to say that’s not because the government is more progressive as a whole? It’s debatable—so seriously, look into these things and figure out what you think for yourself.

So the moral of the story is that yes, sometimes politics truly can suck for women (voters and politicians). But that doesn’t mean we can just wash our hands of the whole thing.

Women can create change on all sorts of levels (my favorite being straight-up activism), but electoral politics is something we
must
be involved in. So get your shit together and start figuring out what you’re going to do about it.

A great place to start is the White House Project. Not only does it have fantastic resources, but it also runs campaigns designed to get more women to run for political office.

Its Vote, Run, Lead campaign is particularly cool. The project aims to get younger women involved in the political process through training, media campaigns, and grassroots organizing. There are additional resources in the resource guide, but you get the idea. It’s time that young women took some initiative; we have to stop letting other people talk for us and about us (and calling us
Sex and the City
voters!). So let’s speak for ourselves.

I’m not a big fan of waxing academic, which is why most of the chapters in this book are informal (and, I know, slightly potty-mouthed). But if there’s one thing—something ridiculously important—that can’t be missed, it’s this.

Some folks call it intersectionality; others call it multiple oppressions; some call it the intersection of oppressions. Whatever you call it, the point is that different kinds of “-isms” (sexism, classism, racism) all intersect in a truly fucked-up way. Yeah, academic or not, my cursing just won’t quit.

There used to be a whole bunch of infighting among feminists—I guess there still is, to some extent—about this idea of sisterhood, that we’re all in the same boat sexism-wise. Because no matter how different we are, or how different our experiences may be, we’re all oppressed as women, right?

Not so much. This idea of common oppression among all women almost always negates the lived experiences of actual women—because we don’t all experience sexism in the same way. Classism, racism, ageism, homophobia—you name it—all come into play in the ways sexism is acted out against women. And while the idea of sisterhood is nice, a sisterhood that’s built on the idea that we’re all oppressed in the same way tends to erase things like race, class, and sexual orientation. Because, unfortunately, when feminism is talked about, it’s still positioned from the experience of a white, middle- to upper-class, hetero gal. It just is. And if that’s the only way we think of feminism, then we’re essentially erasing the existence of any other woman who doesn’t function within those confines. Yeah, not so cool.

Audre Lorde (whom I had a massive academic crush on in college) wrote a lot of great stuff concerning the intersection of oppressions, but my fave essay of hers by far on this topic is “Age, Race, Class, and Sex.”

So, ignoring the differences between women—whatever they may be—is hindering the women’s movement. Terribly.

In comes the idea of intersectionality as a tool to discuss and create change within feminism and feminist activism. The cool thing is, this idea of intersectionality isn’t just an abstract idea in academic feminism—it
is
being used in a real way. In the work that’s done by the United Nations on behalf of women, for example, the intersection of oppressions is often talked about:

The idea of intersectional oppressions was even used in the Beijing Platform for Action and other documents related to the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women. (Translation: That’s a big deal.)

Just a few “-isms” that need to be in our heads whenever we’re thinking about feminism:

Women of color shouldn’t be expected to separate out their oppressions:
Well, let’s see, was he judging me because I am a woman, or because I am a black woman?
There’s no way
to do that, to separate out your gender and race in your lived experience. But the idea of universal sisterhood in oppression almost necessitates that—from a white perspective. That, my friends, is what we call some ill white privilege.

Peggy McIntosh has a widely used (in women’s studies) piece on white privilege that you should read in its entirety if you ever have a chance. She talks about how, through feminism, she’s seen men’s unwillingness to admit that they are overprivileged, and then relates it to race:

McIntosh goes through a list of privileges that being white affords her. Just a few: I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented; I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection; when I am told about our national heritage, or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is; I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race; I can choose blemish cover-up or bandages in
“flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin; I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.

You get the point. It’s insanely important that white feminists are acutely aware of their white privilege—in life and in feminism. It’s not the responsibility of women of color to “teach” white feminists about their experiences. As Audre Lorde said (I told you I love her), “Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressor their mistakes. . . . The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility. . . .”
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I’ll tell you a little story about something that made me acutely aware of classism—it was the craziest wake-up call ever. I went to a public high school in New York that tested students for entry (it was kind of a dorky math and science school). The majority of my friends in high school were Jewish gals from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They had awesome apartments and college-educated parents who were professors, artists, judges, and so on. I grew up in Long Island City, Queens, which at the time was not considered the best neighborhood in the world. My parents grew up in Queens and Brooklyn, got married when they were still teenagers, and never went to college.

But hey, it was all good to me. My friends were my friends, and we were all the same. Then one day, after a couple of my girlfriends spent some time at my house after school, one of them remarked, “Your mom is so cute! Her accent sounds so . . . uneducated!” They all laughed. I don’t think she meant it to be cruel, or even realized what she was saying. But after that moment, it was difficult to be around my high school friends. I had this overwhelming feeling of not belonging. I didn’t know if they were laughing at my potty-mouthed jokes because I was funny, or because I was playing up to the Italian Queens girl stereotype. I wondered, when they told me they didn’t like something I was wearing, whether it was because of a difference in taste, or because they thought I looked “trashy.”

Later, in college (at a private Southern university—I lasted a year before transferring back to New York), I would try to tone down the behavior I thought marked me as “lower class.” I tried to drop cursing so much, the Queens accent slowly disappeared, and I continued to hang out with kids who had gone to boarding schools and to pretend I knew what the hell “summering” was. But you can’t pass for long. I would later realize that a lot of the hellishly sexist experiences I went through in college were completely tied up with classism. I was called a slut not only because I had the gall to sleep with a guy I was dating, but also because I dressed differently, talked differently (no matter how I tried to hide it), and was seen as the trashy Queens girl on scholarship.
So I know this is a little more personal than academic, but hey—the personal is political, right?

In the same way a woman of color can’t divvy up her oppressions, neither can a gay woman—or a gay, black woman, for that matter. There isn’t a “double oppression” or a “triple oppression”; it’s just an intersection of oppressions that plays out differently in every woman’s life.

By the way, I know the word “homophobia” is used a lot—but the term “heterosexism” isn’t nearly as common. So, just a quick explanation: “Heterosexism creates the climate for homophobia with its assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual and its display of power and privilege as the norm.”
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In other words, when you see couples in magazines or TV shows, they’re almost always going to be straight. And if they’re not straight, a big deal is made out of said couple’s being gay. It’s not just posited as the norm. When a gay couple kisses in the street, or holds hands, they’re rubbing the gay in our faces, but when straight couples do it, it’s cool. I’d say that heterosexism is far more insidious than homophobia—because it’s more accepted.

Something on homophobia and hetereosexism that I always found interesting is how they’re so ridiculously related to sexism. In Suzanne Pharr’s essay “Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism,” she writes that when women are called
dykes and lesbians, it is almost always because they are believed to have “crossed the line” in some way. Kinda why so many people label feminists as lesbians.