Can’t you do better than this, Larvatus Prodeo?
Feb 14th, 2008 by Rebecca
I don’t generally read Australia’s left liberal big blog, Larvatus Prodeo, but I was curious about one of the posts linked in today’s Missing Link - and boy, what a doozy. This effort from Paul Norton reads like a combination of garden variety misogyny, existentialism and some sort of acid trip.
Norton sets out to ponder why it is that young feminist voters might be supporting Obama rather than, as he terms it, rather than “feminist icon” Clinton.
Younger women, who are tertiary educated, identify as “liberal” in the US political context, and are sufficiently politically engaged to voluntarily register as Democrats and vote in the primaries, could be expected to be the demographic most likely to have strongly feminist sensibilities. And yet they are voting for Obama, and not for the great symbolic light on the feminist hill of “a woman in the White House”.
Perhaps this might just be because - being feminists - we might prefer a strongly progressive (and nonetheless groundbreaking) man who is going to actually support feminist policies, rather than a woman who, while breaking that particular glass ceiling, would in all probability shill for the right whenever politically convenient, just as she has in her entire political career. Perhaps some of those same young feminists haven’t forgotten decisions like Clinton’s vigorous support of so-called “welfare reform” in the 90s that sent millions of American women to the wall. Perhaps some of us think a candidate who thinks that race-baiting is a good election strategy can’t be trusted to respond to the needs of women of colour. Why should anyone be surprised that we might support a candidate who we actually trust to support feminist policies in office?
He mentions the excellent article doing the rounds by Kimberle Crenshaw and Eve Ensler calling out some of the “you should vote for Clinton if you’re a feminist doing the rounds, but quotes out of context a paragraph to make the “ye old feminists don’t get it anymore” inter-feminist-wave conflict line. He then quotes a piece about, of all things, the debate over the film Juno, and spectacularly misses the point of that debate. If he had actually, y’know, read any of those conversations, he might have realised that the point about films like Juno and Knocked Up is the effect they have on so-called “moderates” - not that they’re magically going to convert all us terribly impressionable young women into being pro-life by virtue of their being popular culture. Alas, that would mess with the “but the old feminists are mean and stuff!” line he seems to be pushing.
As for the last paragraph, I think I’ll just leave that to stand on its own:
For my part, I will simply reiterate where the logic of feminist standpoint theory should lead us: if we accept that women understand their social and existential reality better than men, and therefore should be in control of deciding how and why that reality should be changed, and by what means, it is difficult to resist the corollary that young women understand their social and existential reality better than older generations of women, and should therefore be trusted to determine the terms on which they complete the remaining unfinished business of their own emancipation, rather than being conscripted to support a static orthodoxy.
Quite simply - what the fuck?
If this is what passes for mainstream progressive blogging in the Australian blogosphere, it really is in a pretty dismal state.