The feminist who didn’t make me blush
(Though I know what feminism has done for me, my boobs wouldn’t be where they are today without the proper use of brassieres.)
I realize that Rebecca Traister is trying to help, but her article in Salon, The Feminist Who Made Me Blush, made me blush.
I never knew Katha Pollitt was a feminist because I have a blissful ignorance about certain personalities, not having lived in the United States for most of my adult life. That means I’m able to read and hear things without knowing who the author or reader is to, for example, a lot of curmudgeonly, more-militant-than-thou feminists. Who did I think Katha Pollitt was? I thought she was a very interesting human being.
But since it has become apparent that easily embarrassed feminists have been objecting to her writings as “indulgent,” confessional fodder for ditzy women who don’t know how to drive (I don’t know how to drive either—but that’s because I like public transportation and all the money and carbon points I don’t spend by not owning a car), I’d like to pipe up about a few things:
No. I do not think Katha Pollit is self-indulgent, and this is why. She is is being indulgent for us. Us women. I do not think that a woman writing about her “soft underbelly” is doing the feminist movement a disservice. I think that modernity (and perhaps feminism, indirectly and accidentally) has done women a disservice. I think there are very few oral traditions (and I don’t mean oral sex in the morning, a detail from a Pollitt essay that Traister seems fixated on) that get passed on, mother to daughter, woman to woman, anymore. When women write in detail about their experiences in life, they are doing other women a favor. I think it’s pathetic that women must now buy books in order to learn about their bodies, sex, relationships, money, childbearing. Well, we have to learn about it somewhere, don’t we? If our grandmothers and mothers don’t teach us (or if we don’t listen to them anymore), if our friends won’t tell us, then if intelligent women like Katha Pollitt don’t do it, who do we have? Candace Bushnell?
Next time Rebecca Traister gets asked to review a vibrator, maybe she should ask herself how many of her “smart, confident” friends know anything about vibrators, and how many would like to know more from someone as smart and confident as she is? High horses can be so much fun, but they’re no help to smart, confident women who are too squeamish to ask their friends personal, revealing questions. So as long as women are trapped in silence for fear of embarrassing themselves, or raising the ire of feminists, or calling forth the scorn of The Patriarchy, we need Katha Pollitt and her like. So a few men will cry “man-bashing alert!” Boo-hoo for them.
Do all women believe everything they read? I hope not! Hearing Pollitt describe her ex-boyfriend as a psychopath makes me wonder how likely is it that he really was a psychopath, since that’s how we all describe our exes! Maybe they’re all psychopaths! Or maybe we just don’t get it. My favorite adage is this: if men are all alike, then what’s our excuse for not learning how to get along with the predictable little psychopaths? Shouldn’t it be easy for us by now? Either way, when a woman like Pollitt is convinced her ex is a psychopath, one must ask oneself a few questions about the nature of relationships between men and women, or more simply perhaps, the pathological relationship between the loved and the lover, the “kisser” and the “kissed,” as they say in France.
By the way, I had NO IDEA I was supposed to be administering oral sex to my boyfriends in the morning all these years! No wonder things never worked out! Silly me!
And also, I didn’t think Katha looked all that “austere” in her picture in the Times.