Posted by Bitch Lab at 4:10 pm and filed under Rants, So 1998 ::
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Possum rescue Watergirl for the football team Fedora
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For what itâs worth, I donât like Bitch Lab, I donât read her, I donât think sheâs very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didnât author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Donât like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and donât read her. Read the women she rips off instead. Theyâre better.
So: Donât like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and donât read her. Read the women she rips off instead. Theyâre better.
09-09-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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I sincerely resent that question mark. I am always right. :P
Hey!
I bothered to get into this blogging deal b/c you were the straw that broke the camel’s back of resistence when I decided to read the About Lauren and About Jill pages and you declared your liberation from typho-shaming!
1) Nice pic
2) I see that you have adopted RB’s “two-pound shitburger” trope, even as i now realize i used your “left labia” one, somewhere in the midst of my primal scream at Pandagon last week
3) who the fuck is this assclown anyway? she asked rhetorically (yes, i know who she is)
4) “worrying,” or you know “paying attention” to those huddled masses yearning to breathe free, here in the You Ess or elsewhere, rilly ain’t the same as “nothing counts until everything’s perfect for everybody;” but then i suspect the disingenuous little twit knew that.
5) believe me lady, no one here is accusing you of having higher moral capacity than anyone
6) BL, ever read “Top Girls,” by Caryl Churchill?
did i already ask you this once? godam motherfucking deja vu is beraking my ASS
7) yah, i never read the “trickle down” business as anything but a nonconsensual golden shower either, and frankly don’t get how anyone DID
Wow. Feminist poli-blogging *and* porn for piss fetishists! You’re certainly all with the efficiency today.
Well, this brings up the classic Marxist criticism of feminism: it’s about middle class women co-opting a movement for the rights of women in general. That’s what the middle class does, and that’s what liberalism is for.
Her idiotic suggestion that Walmart cashiers — i.e., people who work for wages — are the lumpenproletariat is simply stupid at the bare level of words. But her point is that working class women are incapable of agency, and that only the middle class is capable of political action.
Yes, she’s on the road to Hitchensville. But so is the middle class in general.
Less elitism that banal wannabe plutocratic narcissism. After having passed judgment in the Pandagon thread, I’ve been actually reading Hirshman. She’s absolutely rife w/ this kind of gratuitous expression of contempt for poor & working-class women. It’s like a tic. And only slightly less contempt for anyone (they’re all ‘leftists,’ which is bad) who might consider their interests. (You’ll be pleased to learn that The New Republic is a leftist rag.) And beyond the nastiness, the whole structure of her argument, esp. her staggeringly hollow concept of human flourishing, amounts to little but worship of rulership. It’s unclear whether she thinks most people, men or women, have the capacity for anything more than animal-like, inferior lives.
On Belledame’s #3, had anyone heard of her before last December? Not me. I can’t imagine she personally could possibly be of any lasting significance for feminism (for a lawyer, she argues her case incompetently), but she’s evidently struck a chord w/ a lot of women. (It’s another matter that most of them aren’t upper class, Ivy League future rulers. Used to be that most Americans called themselves middle-class; a lot of us now seem to have promoted ourselves to the elite.)
wow how about that line that her advice is for women ‘before they end up at Walmart’? As if it is avoidable. It seems to me that in order for society function as is does, where the rich control an enormous portion of the wealth and the rich get rich by paying people less, and the service industry employs a ton of people because there arent that many stable middle income factory jobs, and the working poor need somewhere to buy things cheap becuase they all have service industry jobs, someone always has to end up at Wal Mart, in fact lots of people have to end up at Wal Mart. It seems Hirschman has contempt for low payed workers that make the high payed work she wants women to do possible. Its not like everyone within this system CAN wind up a proffessor or a lawyer.
Last weekend I posted the following comment at Linda Hirshman’s website at:
http://www.gettoworkmanifesto......rking.html
This afternoon, oddly, Hirshman deleted the 1st half of it (I’d posted it in 2 parts) & posted a reponse that depends for its effect on readers neither seeing the deleted passage nor even knowing it had ever existed. She simply attributes an argument to me that, as is clear from the deleted passage, I don’t make, & herself repeats a claim that I addressed at length in the same passage.
She also seems to suggest that she won’t permit me to post a further response. I leave to others to decide whether either of these maneuvers is consistent with the minimal demands of intellectual integrity, & just ask B|L her indulgence to post the offending comment here:
ââŹĹââŹÂŚ the amazingly banal column castigating feminism for not solving the problem of the lefties’ favorite icon, the minimum wage Wal-Mart cashier (which all other progressive movements had solved long ago, right).ââŹÂ
When an important moral & social problem is described as some special or parochial groupââŹâ˘s ââŹĹfavorite icon,ââŹÂ thereââŹâ˘s reason to ask whether itââŹâ˘s being trivialized. If someone had called any of the great moral crises of the last century ââŹĹthe leftiesââŹâ˘ favorite iconââŹÂ & parenthetically mentioned that theyââŹâ˘d been around since time immemorial, a lot of people would have concluded that she mightnââŹâ˘t be entirely morally serious. If sheââŹâ˘d dismissed expressions of concern for the plight of European Jews under the Czar, or subject peoples under European imperialism, or American blacks, as a rhetorical device so predictable & unoriginal as to make her wonder whether theyââŹâ˘d been produced by some automatic mechanism, readers would be right to wonder about her moral priorities. One neednââŹâ˘t reject your view of socialism & the left (or of TNR as a leftist magazine), or believe the problems of poor women (the vast majority of all women) are as urgent as those of these other groups, to have questions.
ItââŹâ˘s a commonplace that the problems of nonelite & poor women neither ever have been nor could be ââŹĹsolvedââŹÂ in one revolutionary stroke. All enduring problems ââŹâ those of elite women no less than of poor ones ââŹâ require patient, persistent, committed effort; but the fact, if it is one, that we have the poor always with us, that their problems werenââŹâ˘t ââŹĹsolved long ago,ââŹÂ neither is evidence that incremental, pragmatic progress against them isnââŹâ˘t possible ââŹâ itââŹâ˘s both plainly possible & the way all social problems are addressed in liberal democracies ââŹâ, nor preserves you against moral scrutiny of your casual response to them now. Least of all does it justify bland assurances that theyââŹâ˘re so intractable as to justify directing our attention elsewhere, to the choices elite women make.
ItââŹâ˘s not a criticism that an author writes about one subject & not another, but legitimate questions of priorities do naturally arise. ItââŹâ˘s not enough simply to dismiss the question of priorities by saying that the existence of one problem shouldnââŹâ˘t prevent you from addressing another. (ItââŹâ˘s just as true, & unhelpful, to say that we shouldnââŹâ˘t wait until the problems of elite women are solved before addressing those of the nonelite majority of women.) Feminism is largely a practical moral project. You wrote a feminist book, & made claims about what feminism & its priorities should be. Other feminists, & nonfeminists, have a right to ask whether your judgments & priorities are right. In any event, your subject isnââŹâ˘t separable from this other one. Far from it. Poor women are a looming, albeit mute, presence in your analysis.
ItââŹâ˘s to your credit that you donââŹâ˘t wait for the millennium of gender equality within the family, that you offer advice for the world as it is. But in this world, you make choices, set priorities, draw invidious distinctions. In the world as it is, your proposal presupposes a ready supply of servants to do the domestic work you tell elite women to shun. The work wonââŹâ˘t disappear, nor will the elite husbands of your elite women do it all, not in this world. It will largely fall to poor women. Does anyone doubt that? Nor will it become any less animal-like, unfit for intelligent, capable humans, less inimical to their flourishing, any less characteristic of a lesser life. But your complaint isnââŹâ˘t that itââŹâ˘s immoral or unfitting for poor women to do it. Far from it. And if, adventitiously, poor women lack the capacities ââŹâ wealth, position, education, proximity to rulership ââŹâ that make it so horrifying & immoral for upper class, Ivy League women to do it themselves, then is it more fitting that they be relegated to the role of hewers of wood & haulers of water? Your vision makes objective (or objectivizing) use of poor women as a means to other peopleââŹâ˘s ends, without adequately considering their own needs or projects.
An alternative, equally pragmatic feminism, one that takes the needs & capacities of all women equally into account, by pressing for measures to afford poor women better alternatives than domestic service in elite households, potentially comes into conflict with your feminism, by calling into question the easy solution to the problem of getting good help that it presupposes. ItââŹâ˘s neither banal, nor naĂÂŻve, nor dangerous, nor socialist, for feminists to demand that feminist ââŹËadviceââŹâ˘ cast its net more widely than the concerns of upper class, Ivy League, society page young women, the ones who see as the logical potential rulers of the rest of us. Those Wal-Mart cashiers arenââŹâ˘t just some leftieââŹâ˘s boring, unoriginal rhetorical device. Like the vast majority of other women, theyââŹâ˘ll never have their marriages announced in the TimesââŹâ˘ Sunday Style section, much less become the ââŹĹrulersââŹÂ of any hierarchical society, but their capacities & projects & dignity are as worthy & as real as any womanââŹâ˘s, & any feminism that doesnââŹâ˘t start from that fact is dead at the root.
KH –
indulgence?
hell girlfriend, you can have a guest account and post away any time you feel like it!
:)
I couldn’t email you before to ask, but can I post this as a blog post since plenty of people don’t even bother to read the comments. shame, too, since all the good stuff gets said in the comments.
Please, bless you my child. This nitwit now is officially on my shit list.