I got lucky, I think; Steve Himmer, responding to the Halley Suitt post that also got responses from Burningbird and Jen of Nonsense Verse, articulated the same question I was asking myself:
Is ‘girlism’ a backlash or the fruit of a hard-won position? Is the recognition and exploitation of an apparent double-standard (eg, using crocodile tears to get out of a speeding ticket, as a girlfriend of mine proudly did once) an act of resistance or an enactment of being controlled?
I don’t think any of the posts thus far answer all these questions. I certainly can’t do it. Halley, as best I can tell, implies that girlism is a reaction to the failure of feminism to level the playing field—“if I can’t get what I want by playing it straight,” says the girlist, “I’ll consciously adopt the image of the desirable woman in order to manipulate men.” This is, to me, both “resistance” and “being controlled.” Men invent the image; women use it for dirty pool.
(If girlism exists. I regret that using the word risks reifying the concept, since I’m actually with Burningbird on this—I don’t personally know any girlists, though I know plenty of women who could so construct themselves if they cared to. On the other hand, what was the original Doc Searls flap about, if not a form of girlism? And I don’t deny Steve’s story about his girlfriend’s crocodile tears, either.)
Jen says that the problem is that power and constructed personal pulchritude (if I may be permitted the shorthand) are not permitted to coexist in the same woman. Burningbird rather angrily insists that girlists are a myth; real women are playing it straight, and to say otherwise plays into groundless male fears and allows such fears to set women back.
(I apologize for any mischaracterizations of the arguments, by the way. I’m not exactly a privileged reader here; I’m as likely as anyone else to have got it wrong.)
Now, Halley very carefully—and I think some of the discussion has missed this point—refrains from expressing approval of girlism. “We learned how to stop playing fair” is not exactly a ringing endorsement; if anything, I read it as a pretty strong condemnation of the atmosphere that makes these tactics both effective and necessary.
And that, my friends, is a condemnation I can completely get behind. Indeed, my wizened grunched-out little soul rejoices at it. See, gentlemen, the way to fix the problem—I rather imagine you consider the manipulative aspects of girlism a problem, yes?—is to do what I’ve been screaming at you to do all along: de-sexualize the public space. Quit falling for this sloppy, age-old trick. Just stop rewarding it. Find other things about women to reward. You know they’re there. If you don’t, it’s well past time to learn.
That isn’t to say that women will suddenly stop constructing themselves according to prevailing images of physical pulchritude when it doesn’t earn them brownie points (or more substantial gains), by the way. Some will, yes. Others will live in what I suppose to be Jen’s ideal world, free to construct their physical selves however they like without its impacting either positively or negatively on their careers and their other relationships (including those with other women).
It does say, I think, that the public space will open to a lot more women, and a lot more types of women. It says that men will have to find new ways to talk to and about women (and about time, too, say I). What the heck, we might even (re)discover some new forms of pulchritude.
Of course, the other possibility is that with this source of power denied them, women will be denied any power at all. I’ll take the other side of that bet, myself. I know too many non-girlist women who have done all right, even with a sexualized public space.
Which leads me to Steve’s students, and their discomfort with what they call “angry feminism.” I think a lot of things are operating here. Part of it is youthful idealism and inexperience. They genuinely want to believe everything is all right, and resist messages to the contrary. I daresay most of them have never had any direct and irrefutable experience otherwise; I hadn’t when I was their age. I didn’t even recognize my first (and, thankfully, only) sexist boss for what he was until two years after I’d left the job.
I mean, hell’s bells, I didn’t even reify my discomfort with being grunched until I started Caveat Lector. You can’t expect your students to act like disillusioned 30-year-olds, Steve. It don’t work that way.
Part of it is that many -isms, sexism certainly included, have moved underground. They are honestly harder to ferret out and examine than they used to be. Cut your students some slack; they don’t know how bad it can be, how bad it was—how can they possibly understand how bad it still is?
Perhaps it’s my personal disengagement with theory talking, but I think the way to grip them is to tell true stories. Talk about your girlfriend’s crocodile tears, my college GM, the girlist sections of the blogsphere. Make them reexamine some of their experiences. Try for a Brechtian distance. I think reality will grab them a lot harder than feminist philosophy, important as that latter is. Philosophy is what I turn to when I can’t explain my own experience.
