My response to: Is the feminist sisterhood more sorority than social justice?

Alternet

Jessica Valenti has a post up on Alternet. Here's my comment.

I don't think the issues are related at all.

I've never been sure whether I'm Second Wave, in which I'm too young to have participated, or Third Wave, considering that I'm now middle aged. Let's not make the mistake of underplaying the impact of what this sorority has done.

The Sorority is expressing the new wave of fascism in America. In Bush country, it's ok to be racist, elitist, and superior. It's all the rage in the Ivy Leagues to make fun of immigrants and minorities. "KKK" is derived from the Greek, too, a joke started by well-educated, middle class men. Paul Campos covered the racist implications of weight prejudice in his book, The Obesity Myth (2004). Women are becoming obsessed with the values of the Anglo elite, to the detriment of their own comfort and health. Getting women to worry about their weight is a great way to get their minds off making 74 cents or less on the dollar.

It's as absurd to exclude someone from a panel for being too young as it is for being too old. If you have something relevant to say, that's all that should matter. The feminist institutions are populated primarily by upper class, well-educated women. They function academically, have to put an emphasis on grants and fundraising to stay in business and they want desperately to be taken "seriously." That last point is the key.

Not taking someone "seriously" is a form of oppression. To dismiss someone's concern about issues of economics or politics for an arbitrary reason like gender or age is a way to avoid the content of their complaint. The feminist movement should be the most inclusive group of all. It should cut across barriers of age, race, class, ethnicity and gender. Among reasonable people, it would also cut across political lines. The idea that it is somehow radical to consider women to be human and therefore endowed with natural rights is absurd. That women should be paid less than men, or that they should be denied access to any institution or profession solely because of their gender, or should be subject to sexual coercion are equally absurd ideas. Our media paints our common sense positions as extremist and we let them.

The feminist blogosphere, like any other group, has its exclusionary ways as well. I've gotten to the point that I refer to myself as a matriarchist to make it easier for the "proper" feminists to distance themselves from me, and I'm sure there are others who feel the same way. One of the iconic feminist blogs recently invited "young women" to apply to write for it, apparently excluding older feminists from consideration.

Like it or not, there's an arrogance that exists only in the young. I had it. I grew out of it. Older feminists often lack patience with younger women not because they're threatened, but because they've fought this fight before. The opinions you fight for at 25 are often the ones you look back at when you're 40 and wish you'd known then what you do now because you'd do it all differently. It can be just as frustrating for younger, more-technologically savvy women to deal with older women who aren't making the most of new media. We're all going to have to get along. If we can take hard-won wisdom from those who have it and combine it with the energy and intensity of younger sisters, and make an effort to include all voices instead of just the cool or popular ones, we can successfully address the needs of old and young, male and female and everything in between, which is the point.

It's a struggle, to be sure, but let's not associate that struggle to the rampant bigotry of some spoiled rich girls. If we were doing our job, they'd be ashamed to behave this way publically. That's what we need to focus on. Fascism is being passed off as simple exclusivity and that is an attitude too dangerous to go unchallenged.