Where Have All the Feminists Gone?

“Demi,” she said in an incredulous tone, “do you really think there are any feminists anymore?”

I’d just returned from a conference and was telling a colleague what my panel had presented on. The word “feminist” in the title made her roll her eyes. How foolish of you, Demi, to think that such a thing exists.

I told her, of course, there are still feminists, and she challenged, “Well then where are they? I don’t see them anywhere.”

I started pulling out examples as fast as I could. Women like Neda who was shot for advocating freedom in Iran. The Egyptian women who were attacked in Tahrir Square because they protested for more political rights. The Afghan women pursuing their education even at the risk of death.

And I had some bad ass feminist friends in the States. Really, I did.

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I was at the conference with two of those bad ass friends. I mean, here are two women who, for as long as I’ve known them, might as well have had “Fight-the-Patriarchy” as their middle names.  Smart, strong, assertive, carrying out their discourse with action. I’ve always respected the ways they’ve been able to stand so strong in advocating change.

One of those friends spent almost the entire time on the phone with her new husband.

And it wasn’t love-dovey talk. He thought it was “inappropriate” for her to stay out late drinking with her colleagues on the first night of the conference. That night they were on the phone until 3AM, him castigating her, her trying to defend herself.

I was just dumbfounded. Here was this woman who used to be the kind of person to say “fuck you” and hang up if a boyfriend tried to tell her what to do, and yet here she was, wasting hours listening to her husband judge her choices.

What had happened?

But at least my other friend would strongly maintain her feminist principles. I knew it. But then she started saying some strange things. She told me about how she and her boyfriend had been fighting all week because she was going to the conference. She asked me if I was “allowed” to smoke weed now that I’m with Nico (weed is very important to her, lol), and I was taken aback. Why would Nico’s views affect my personal choices? Why would he control me? (As it was, the question was rather ironic because if Nico’s job didn’t forbid it, he’d *totally* be smoking weed.)

And then, as we were coming back from a giant corporate party, this same friend started waxing about how much she wanted a wedding, and all the presents, and the bridesmaid dresses, and the wedding dress . . . you know, when she’s always been very staunch in her position that she would never get married because she is ideologically opposed to the institution.

What happened to my friends?

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I was just on Facebook before I came over to my blog. At least there were some strong feminists over there. Like C. She’s bad ass. Very active in the gay community, volunteering her time to an organization that helps young adults when they are first coming out. She has always challenged patriarchal institutions. Like marriage. Like monogamy. She lived out her politics in her life choices.

Today she had a new profile picture. Of a disembodied hand wearing an engagement ring.

She started dating a woman a couple of years ago, and as that woman made the move from being called “she” to “he,” the dynamic started to shift. My bad ass friend started to become more dependent upon her “boi” the more manly he became. She deferred choices to him, starting arranging her life based upon his wants. And I guess, technically, she was giving up her lesbianism for him because of the sex change . . . but that’s a murky line, I know.

Now, here she was, once the staunch anti-monogamist, making her engagement ring her profile picture.

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I know we are not static; our life experiences continually reshape us. I like that we’re always changing. Truth be told, I’m changing too. Here I am with a man who doesn’t mind if I’m out late drinking with my friends at a conference because he trusts me, a man who is proud of me for being at conferences and sharing my work because he loves my “big brain.” Being in an egalitarian relationship like that changes a person, and Nico and I have had some conversations about the possibility of marriage . . . someday.

But what unsettles me is seeing friends give up the principles that have always mattered most for the sake of men. I’m standing here looking at my friends, wondering if my colleague was right about all the feminist being gone.

My Condolences

(Honey, if you know who I am writing about, shhhhhh.)

It was just supposed to be sex.

And cliché sex at that, the graduate student carrying out a secret affair with a junior professor. But it wasn’t supposed to be more than that. Just sex.

My friend was a jaded feminist after all. After a failed marriage and a failed attempt at living with a boyfriend, she had sworn off heteronormativity, sworn off the institution of marriage. It was a patriarchal invention designed to subjugate women.

And yet I had the invitation to the bridal shower. Two and a half years later the affair that was supposed to be nothing more than hot sex was acquiescing to heteronormative forces (yes, of course, going on the market in search of a spousal hire was a factor in the choice, but still).

I was at Hallmark, scanning the rows and rows and rows of cards, trying to find the right one. And my eyes came across the “In Sympathy” cards. Without a hint of sarcasm or humor, I thought it was an appropriate choice.

I know I am a bit jaded. I confess it freely. Yet I still mourned for my friend because I felt she was losing something. The defiant feminist principles she’d passionately embraced for years, her disdain for marriage and all it stood for, were lost in the wreckage. She seems to mourn it, too, and voices doubt of the institution while embracing it because it’s the best thing for them professionally.

I’d like to think that there is such a thing as a feminist marriage where both partners can be equals, but I wonder if such a dream naively overlooks the power of ideology. As much as I’d like to think that with all of my training as a feminist scholar that I’d be able to make marriage something different, I wonder if someday I would find myself conforming to habitus, getting pissed at my husband because he hadn’t done the “manly” things like mowing the lawn.

I hope still that my friend can find that sort of feminist marriage, even while she doubts it herself.

When do we start questioning the model?

Over half of the marriages out there end in divorce. And that’s even with an entire industry based on helping individuals make those marriages succeed. People can go to relationship consellors, attend marriage conferences, and buy thousands of self-help books. Somehow, though, the nation seems to be struggling to make the one man, one woman concept work.

Yet we still idealize it as a culture. We think there’s something wrong with us if we don’t make it work.

Huh. Do we ever stop to think that maybe it’s the model that’s fucked and not us?

Perhaps we’ve believed in the concept of marriage because it’s “the way it’s always been.” You know, the whole Adam and Eve thing. But that’s a lie. If you look at history, the model of a man and woman creating a household is not universal. Some ancient Greeks didn’t have traditional marriages; women tended to live with women in cities, and men tended to live with men as they wandered from city to city fighting. Sex wasn’t limited to marriage, or to a partner of a particular gender.

Even if you look in the Bible, the text that has so much power over contemporary marriage constructions, it wasn’t a one man, one woman system. People lived in clans, not two-parent households. Men had multiple wives.

Some of the healthiest relationships I’ve seen don’t fit the cultural construction of marriage. One female friend lives with her female life partner. They aren’t lesbians, and they have their own male lovers, but they are deeply committed to one another and raise a child together not because of sexual attraction to one another, but because they have deep love and respect for one another. Another female friend shares a home with her ex-husband. They get along and parent a child together, but they don’t share a room or their bodies with one another. It works for them. Another female friend lives with her female partner and maternal aunt. Those three women have created the most life-filled, supportive home for the children they raise together, and the children are the most grounded, intelligent, and caring children I’ve ever met.

The other day in Barnes and Noble I heard some people gasping indignantly at Jenny Block’s book Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage. How dysfunctional, they said. But I found myself wondering if the model most of us buy into–that we should find one person to fulfill all our needs and stay with that person forever–isn’t a bit more dysfunctional.  Can it really be healthy to pin so much of our hopes on one individual forever, someone who might change, or who might not change when we grow and change?

I don’t know . . . it seems like perhaps we should be interrogating this model more.