alyx once again works her radffem magic. She has an uncanny ability to capture what's foremost on my mind time and again when I encounter her superb wordsmithery.
http://madsheilamusings.blogspot.com/
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Why This Sheila Likes Sheila Jeffreys
One mildly rainy afternoon, when I was surfing the Net, picking my nose and probably engaging in some other unsavoury activities in my absent-minded, zonked-out state, I happened across something that set my ‘Shrew’ Meter on Full Shrill. En route to the Net’s nether regions (read: ‘kiddie site choc full of puerile potty humour’), I decided to check out Lavartus Prodeo (the site of Aussie progressivism) and see what the people over there were up to.
That was a mistake. Had I known the progressive peeps at LP were chucking some Jeffers on the barbie for a good flame grillin’, I probably would’ve continued on my merry young way to Poo Humour Central. At least there the commenters’ Shit Talk is somewhat informed.
The excoriation of Sheila Jeffreys, the woman who devoted her life to radical feminist resistance to retro industries from Bridal to Brothel was, suffice to say, unexpected. However, in this culture of puritanical patriarchal prurience—one that worships porn merchants, has a newly boob-implanted mother and daughter duo in the Big Brother house, and celebrates a repressively capitalist brand of sexuality that has about as much in common with genuine adult sexuality as Pope Ratzi* does with a riot grrrl—the attack on Jeffreys is entirely appropriate. After all, if you’ve spent your entire life invested in shaving, lipsticking, tottering around on bunion-breeders and otherwise maintaining Mandatory Femininity through various consumptive practices, you’re going to be pretty pissed off when some killjoy feminist dares suggest that all those things aren’t the saucy subversion of white male morality you thought they were.
And I guess I also shouldn’t have been surprised when a couple of Male Ho-Users’ Rights Advocates showed up to steer the thread towards the *hideous* radical feminist neglect of prostitutes. “Sheila Jeffreys is anti-sex worker,” one opined, clearly mistaking an opposition to the web of sexist capitalism with contempt for those caught up in it. Another weighed in with, “The thing I don’t like about Jeffreys is that she denies women any agency.” Now, I would’ve thought having a random dude rent my pussy, mouth or arse out for an hour in order to provide friction for his venereal-scabbed prick would be the real agency-denier here, but then, I’ve never felt the unbearable weight of a heavy feminist text that whispers “oppression” in my ear while it’s sweating and grunting on top of me, so maybe I lack the experience needed to address this issue properly.
But I digress, as usual, because I wanted this to be about my favourite patriarchy-refusenik.
Jeffreys has always gotten a bad rap in the Lefty press. Always casting a critical eye on the industries that enshrine female oppression, always producing those interminable, theoretically-dense texts that chronicle same, and never willing to be photographed in lipstick and a miniskirt, Jeffreys was never—and will never—be Mainstream Feminism’s Posterchick of Choice. It’s doubtful she’d even want that title anyway. Unlike the media-anointed feminists, Jeffreys’ activism isn’t limited to the nice (but superficial) orgasmo-centric pursuits of Ruth Ostrow, nor is it all about the ego-gratification and aggressive self-promotion of a Liz Wurtzel or a Camille Paglia. Jeffreys’ only satisfaction is derived from helping the women who can’t help themselves, the women both conservative Christians and sex radical liberals like to think are acting of their own free will. Jeffreys won’t get that lucrative book deal or be a popular presence on some international university speaking tour, but her earnest-if-bleak brand of radicalism (which recalls Andrea Dworkin’s quote, “I’m a feminist—not the fun kind”) does rip the cover off society’s so-called ‘respectable’ institutions in a way that Make-Nice Media Feminists could barely bring themselves to hint at. And that’s something.
As I cast a patriarchy-blamer’s eye over our increasingly stupid social arrangement—one in which the friends I have who aren’t taking their clothes off for older men are marrying the older men (Marrying! At my age! 24, 23, yep, even 22 years old! Come on girls, play the field a bit more! Don’t you know what your 20s are for!?)—I feel the level of disdain that a Republican/Liberal MP would feel when looking at a single mother. Young women hurl themselves toward our cultural understanding of Adulthood (read: ‘Marriage, Husband, Suburbs, etc.’) like lemmings off a rocky outcrop, oblivious to the impending responsibilities, restrictions and sacrifice of self that these things entail to a greater or lesser degree. And I can’t say I feel happy for them: To me, it just seems like so much of what passes for bona-fide Adulthood these days seems more like a boner-fide sexist’s paradise. The alternative—the saucy, strippercize-loving BUST girl, enamoured of dolls, dildos innumerable items of kink and kitsch, a grown woman trapped in perpetual girlhood by choice, a post-feminist Peta Pan—seems eerily like the pre-feminist Cosmo Girl, the woman who wasn’t dependent on men for anything—except approval. For any Mad Sheila—that is, any semi-functional shrew with more than a smidge of self-respect—neither option seems very attractive. Or very grown-up.
So what does Jeffreys have to do with all this? Well, navigating the frigid, often tumultuous waters of the so-called “post-feminist” sea of modern culture, we Gen Y women sometimes need someone who’s “been there, done that” to tell us that having a firm arse and a firmer financial portfolio is really not the pinnacle of human achievement (or female achievement for the former) they’re made out to be. And occasionally, it wouldn’t hurt to be reminded that shopping and fucking, fun activities though they may be, doth not a liberated lass make. No sheila has ever shopped or fucked her way to equality.
But BUST won’t tell you that. Nor, for that matter, will YEN, Chik, Frankie or Jennifer Baumgardner. If you’re looking to have your perpetual adolescence validated by a bunch of vacuous vixens who sell Feminism Lite™ (99% Male Accountability Free!), or alternatively, looking to get down and dirty with the divas of deconstructionism, then you’ve no shortage of patriarchally-palatable princesses to choose from: Julia Kristeva will entertain you with her essay on the abject, Judith Butler will use Foucauldian notions of discourse to defend hate speech (sorry, free speech), Jen Baumgardner will write about the pleasures of publicly being ‘in control of [y]our sexuality’ (whatever that means), and Susie Bright will preach to the perverted about the joys of S/M sex. Or just turn to any Gen X academic, who’s probably killed entirely too many trees writing about the politics of pussy power in the performances of Madonna (note to any Gen Xers: I’m sorry, but the Kabala-kook is passé. We Gen Yers really don’t give a blind toss about Madonna, and frankly, the idea that this Machiavellian egomaniac could parlay her 15 minutes into another 15 decades scares this Gen Yer a great deal.)
Bottom line: If you want solipsistic satisfaction sans accountability, Wendy McElroy’s libertarian feminism is the place to find it. If you want to do the retro married-with-kids thing, then Caitlin Flanagan will ardently defend your right to dependency. And if you want sexual fulfilment sans substandard shtupping from a human partner whose damn humanity gets in the way of you pursuing the ultimate goal—orgasm at any cost—then the Toys In Babeland girls are always willing to give advice on how to expand your remedial repertoire. The post-feminist world is dedicated to giving its customers what they want.
And that is why we need feminists like Sheila Jeffreys: As a young third wave feminist who loves Buffy, loves pop culture (discerningly), and loves to entertain the notion that there are no limits to what I can achieve if I set my scone to it, Jeffreys’ whispering like The Ghost of Feminism Past about the Dark Age atrocities that still plague women in our modern world is often not what I, nor any of my Gen Y cohorts, want.
But sometimes, it is exactly what we need to hear.
*Yeah, I know, he's "Pope Benedict" now. But to me, that piece of woman-hating Nazi excrement will always be Pope Ratzi.
alyx