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Pandora's BoxMay 23, 2006 I'm trying so hard to resist calling "Fundamentals of Feminism" the feminist fundamentalism panel. Sometime between now and Sunday morning, when the panel is scheduled, I'm almost certainly going to give in, even though I'm the moderator and am probably supposed to set a good example. Whatever "good" is. Anyway, here's the panel description:
Trouble is, I have a hard time speaking for, or even speculating about, "most if not all feminists." The older I get, the harder time I have generalizing about anything. For sure generalizations are useful. I drive down the road expecting that nearly all of my sister and brother motorists will stop at stop signs and signal their intention to turn right or left. But call me suspicious: I'm always watching for signs to the contrary, as when I'm waiting at the top of Skiff Ave. to hang a left into the Edgartown Road and a car coming up the hill from State Road starts to slow down. No turn signal's showing (driver forgot? doesn't know it's burned out? isn't sure what road this is?), but do I proceed on the assumption that the car will be out of my way by the time I'm in the middle of the road? I do not. What principles are core to most if not all feminists? Distilled down, my first principle goes something like "A feminist is someone for whom women are always in the foreground." This perspective is much, much harder to maintain than it would seem. Around the world and through the centuries women are so often in the background that a visitor from a non-patriarchal society (imagine that!) might sensibly infer that "in the background" was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for defining "woman." Note, however, that "in the background" does not mean "powerless." Note also that imagining women in the foreground does not limit one to "women's issues," which for too many people these days means issues directly or indirectly related to reproduction. Every issue affecting human beings is a women's issue. Feminism isn't a laundry list of issues. It's a method of identifying and approaching any issue: keeping women in the foreground. A while back some experts discovered that the most successful methods of controlling population growth and improving health in very poor areas of the world started with educating the women. Give women time, options, and a few tools and previously immovable objects will start to roll. Why doesn't this happen more often? It seems a no-brainer: give women their heads and there's no problem we can't solve. Better world, here we come! Trouble is, you give women time, options, and a few tools and there's no telling where we'll go with them. The patriarchal fundamentalists grasped this a whole lot sooner than the liberals and progressives (many of whom still don't get it). Loose the passionate ingenuity of women on the world and pretty soon many of those certainties said to be underwritten by God or otherwise self-evident start to look a little shaky. The patriarchs have known this for a long time. What was Eve's big crime, after all? Opening her eyes; opening Adam's eyes. Pandora's box was supposed to contain war and pestilence and famine and all the other uglies. What if it contains, say, a mirror that reveals that all female bodies are beautiful and all female minds capable of creating wonderful things? What if it contains a big blue bottle whose elixir makes you immune to fear-mongering politicians and advertisers? No wonder they don't want us to open it.
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