Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Girl cell feminism

Eve Ensler has written a new feminist work titled "I am an emotional creature". At first, I thought it a departure from the usual feminist approach. Eve Ensler appears to be arguing that women are more emotional and intuitive and less intellectual than men and that this is something that gives them a special knowledge and experience of the world:

I AM AN EMOTIONAL CREATURE

I love being a girl.
I can feel what you're feeling
as you're feeling it inside
the feeling
before.
I am an emotional creature.
Things do not come to me
as intellectual theories or hard-shaped ideas.
They pulse through my organs and legs
and burn up my ears ...

I know when a storm is coming.
I can feel the invisible stirrings in the air.
I can tell you he won't call back.
It's a vibe I share.

This doesn't sound like the orthodox feminist position. Usually feminists push an "anti-essentialist" line. This means that they reject the idea that men and women have distinct masculine and feminine natures.

There are a couple of reasons for feminists to be anti-essentialist. First, feminists usually accept the liberal idea that autonomy is what matters. This means that feminists are committed to rejecting whatever is predetermined in favour of what is self-determined. Our sex is predetermined, so it can't be accepted as something that naturally forms a part of a person's identity. At best, it can be something that an individual chooses to "perform" as a kind of subversive act.

Second, feminists have looked on the traditional feminine role within the home and judged it to be less autonomous, and therefore inferior, to the male career role. This then leads feminists to reject the idea that the traditionally feminine role is natural, which then leads to the idea that "the patriarchy" created sex roles as a social construct in order for men to benefit from women's oppression.

So the feminist emphasis is usually on the idea that masculinity and femininity are limitations or restrictions imprisoning the individual, and/or that femininity is an oppressive social construct foisted upon women by the patriarchy which should be abolished forthwith.

Some feminists have even gone beyond this by denying that humans can be divided into two sexes, male and female. The most influential is Anne Fausto-Sterling, the academic referred to by Leonard Sax in the following quote:

A tenured professor at Brown University recently published a book in which she claims that the division of the human race into two sexes, female and male, is an artificial invention of our culture. "Nature really offers us more than two sexes," she claims, adding, "Our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits." The decision to "label" a child as a girl or a boy is "a social decision," according to this expert. We should not label any child as being either a girl or a boy, this professor proclaimed. "There is no either/or. Rather, there are shades of difference."

According to Anne Fausto-Sterling it is a "cultural conceit" to believe that humans are born either male or female. Eve Ensler, on the other hand, not only believes that a feminine nature does exist, she appears to consider it a positive aspect of a woman's life.

The two positions seem poles apart. Unfortunately, they are closer than you might think.

It turns out that Eve Ensler has the following argument. In every one of us, male and female, there is a grouping of cells, the "girl cells". These are central to human evolution and the future of the human race. But the patriarchy has decided to oppress and kill off the girl cells, thereby threatening the continuation of life. The girl cells are responsible for empathy, openness, vulnerability, intuition and relationships. Vulnerability is our greatest strength and girl cell emotions have inherent logic which leads to radical and saving action. It is the patriarchy which has brought up people not to be girls.

It is the suppression of girl cells by the patriarchy which has led us to the complete destruction of the earth and to mass rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Boys have been treated harshly by the patriarchy because their girl cells have been suppressed. If men cried like girls and could enjoy their girl self there wouldn't be violence, as bullets are hardened tears. Men just pretend to know things and they hide that they are in a mess.

Girls are oppressed everywhere by the patriarchy. They're silenced, sold, killed, enslaved, raped, and robbed of being the subjects of their lives. But girls are the key to the future of the whole of humanity. Girls will determine whether the species survives.

It's wrong for girls to be feminine and to want to please. This has been forced on them. They should be re-educated to want to confront, deny and agitate. This is "engaging your girl". We should admire girls who demand to have their faces covered in tattoos, or who sail solo around the world, or who live by themselves in the wild, or who stand in front of tanks, or who violently defend themselves.

Can you see the problem here? Eve Ensler does not accept masculinity and femininity as they really exist. Masculinity she rejects as something hurtful and hateful which threatens existence. She wants men to live instead by their girl selves.

And although she says some nice things about "girl cells" and talks positively about empathy and intuition, she doesn't really like feminine women. She doesn't like it when girls aim to please and she is uninterested in women as wives or mothers. The qualities she actually admires in girls don't sound very girlish at all. Furthermore, she thinks that girls can be socially reconstructed to be the way she wants them to be.

There's a gnostic undertone to her argument. She portrays the world as a false one which has inverted reality. We can undergo a transformative, redemptive experience, conquer evil and save the world from destruction by understanding the "girl cells" key to knowledge.

It has an air of unreality to it. She is in campaigning mode and masculinity and femininity are treated in terms of her campaign and not on their own terms.

She is not in a serious and consistent way a gender essentialist, even if she does offer a variation on the usual feminist arguments.

13 comments:

  1. "This doesn't sound like the orthodox feminist position."

    Yes, but. I hear quite often how there is a masculine "vertical" way of thinking that uses reason to build methodically and logically from abstract theory, and a feminine "lateral" way of thinking that arrives at conclusions based on feelings, group consensus, and intuition.

    This "women's way of knowing" is allegedly superior to the male way because it seems more natural to them.

    To me it just sounds like an excuse to be sloppy and irrational, and as a vehicle to legitimize decisions based on emotion and feelings.

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  2. Wait, how can there be a patriarcy when there are no men? We all have men cells and women cells and so we are all both opressor and opressed!

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  3. Why do men set up such patriarchies? Is it some ESSENTIAL aspect of men that causes them to suppress the feminine?

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  4. A tenured professor at Brown University recently published a book in which she claims that the division of the human race into two sexes, female and male, is an artificial invention of our culture. "Nature really offers us more than two sexes," she claims, adding, "Our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits." The decision to "label" a child as a girl or a boy is "a social decision," according to this expert. We should not label any child as being either a girl or a boy, this professor proclaimed. "There is no either/or. Rather, there are shades of difference."

    I always wonder whether goddamned fools like this have kids of their own. My sons needed no encouragement whatsoever to be fascinated with trains, planes, trucks, and automobiles, and to want to spend a lot of time running, roughhousing, and competing with other boys.

    If these moronic professors do have kids, I pity the poor little things.

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  5. My "girl cells" are telling me to put tattoos all over my face and stand in front of a tank.

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  6. My "Girl cells" are telling me to smash the evil system by not doing my fascist and oppressive homework.

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  7. The irony of anti-essentialist individualism, is that it's actually more of a marker of individual insecurity and dishonesty than it is any kind of genuine individualism.

    Women who deny there is an essential feminine nature, are basically saying, 'I am less feminine than the average woman, therefore to make myself feel less of a misfit, I will argue there is no essential feminine essense to which most women aspire. However, you only have to look at a few women's magazine covers to see such a view is patently false.

    A true individual doesn't really care what others think, they just act themselves and accept that the majority is not like them.

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  8. I think we give insufficient credit to Mark Richardson for doing what few of us could bring ourselves to do: actually force himself to read this "girl cell" stuff (not to mention the collected ravings of Swedish governments' family ministers etc) en bloc. Frankly, if forced to choose between studying the collected masterpieces of Eve Ensler versus cleaning Fido the Labrador's dinner bowl with my tongue, I've got a fairly good idea which irksome duty I'd select.

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  9. Rob Stove, it only hurt for the first few years.

    Nowadays the worst I get is a twinge, as when I watched the Eve Ensler video I linked to - it ran for ten minutes which was a bit challenging.

    I just don't know how the men in the audience could sit through it. On YouTube you can flick a switch and stop it if you really need to. No such luck for men in a live audience.

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  10. "Women who deny there is an essential feminine nature, are basically saying, 'I am less feminine than the average woman, therefore to make myself feel less of a misfit, I will argue there is no essential feminine essense to which most women aspire." - Mike Courtman

    You nailed it Mike.

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  11. Ensler has always been about exaltation of her own version of "the feminine". The Vagina Monologues were all about that, too. I think from her perspective, there are two things going on at once.

    The first is that she is out to "redefine" what is "feminine" from the perspective of a woman. Ensler would undoubtedly argue that what is seen on magazine covers is merely the patriarchy's misogynistic, constructed "femininity", which is foist upon women, rather than something women would come up with on their own. So Ensler sees her role as being about redefining what it means to be feminine.

    The other thing that is going on, which has pretty much always been clear from Ensler's writings, is that she is a female superiorist and a misandrist. Ensler has never hidden her utter contempt for the "masculine", and really sees no need for it -- in either men or women. She wants, instead, people to be "girls", which she redefines to not be akin to "the patriarchal feminine", but rather a smushing together of faux strength (more of an in-you-face defiance and pushiness than real resolute strength) and "girl values" like empathy and openness and so on. Men and women will melt into an androgynous muddle with basically one combined "gender" (regardless of their sex), the only variances between individuals being based on individual choices, with different units having different genitals and copulating on whatever basis they wish to, since they are all one gender now.

    So it's not truly "essentialist" in that she claims men and women are different in essence. What she is saying instead is that men and women both have "girl cells" and that the problem with both men and women is that the patriarchy has suppressed these. If we were to liberate ourselves from this patriarchal oppression, we would all float together in mushy androgynous bliss, as everyone would be dominated by their girl cells. In Ensler's mind, the only reason why this isn't the case is because of systematic suppression of these girl cells in men and women alike. So as far as I can tell from her various writings (much of which are rather muddled, I must say), she isn't arguing on the basis of essential *difference* between men and women, but rather on the basis of universal suppression of a universally present, in men and women alike, "girl cell". So it's "essentialism" in a sense, but that essentialism is not an essentialism that defines itself by sex difference, but rather by the lack thereof -- as in, men and women are essentially the same.

    That's a pretty mainstream feminist perspective, I think, even if Ensler comes at it in a very roundabout way.

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  12. So it's "essentialism" in a sense, but that essentialism is not an essentialism that defines itself by sex difference, but rather by the lack thereof -- as in, men and women are essentially the same.

    Novaseeker, that's very good. Yes, Ensler does arrive in a roundabout way at the desired liberal end point that you describe above.

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  13. ""A true individual doesn't really care what others think, they just act themselves and accept that the majority is not like them.""

    Which is why "Gamists" are a little pathetic. They define themselves totally by others.

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