How I Got Bored With Feminism

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be? Read the other responses here. [2]

Feminism in 2009? At the question, I confess, a certain mental tumult reigns.

On the one side, like one's middle-aged spread: one's middle-aged disillusionment.

Back in the slogan-spouting Sisterhood-Is-Powerful days of the early 1970s, I was in college and as Amazonian and labyris [3]-wielding as they came. (To judge by photographs, frighteningly so.) My feminism—ardent, quixotic, fairly lame-brained—was linked to my budding homosexuality. I actually believed that radical lesbian separatism was a Superb Idea and would necessarily lead to the happy meltdown of the system of male domination. Woman, man, fish, bicycle—that sort of thing. Snake priestesses. All of it wore off, of course—especially as one lived in the world a little and discovered, indeed, that individual women could be just as venal, self-interested, and wicked as individual men, if not more so.

Over the course of the 1980s—despite the fact that I became a scholar-academic who taught and wrote about [4] English and American women writers—I gradually jettisoned any urge to say I was doing "feminist" research. By the 1990s, the term itself had started to turn the students off in a big way and I was getting pretty sick of it too. "Feminism" had come to seem, well . . . just the teeniest bit tiresome. An enthusiasm of one's youth. And even now, as a pawky and jaded 50-something English professor, I remain fairly alienated from the ossified feminist rhetoric that one still finds in university settings. Women's studies programs often strike me as comical Jurassic throwbacks: bizarre cultic redoubts in which small cadres of now-gray-haired secular nuns devote themselves to recreating some swampy dream-past in which Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Ti-Grace Atkinson [5] roamed the earth.

Ironically, my lesbianism had something to do with this disenchantment with mainstream or "institutional" feminism. There was always a difficulty, of course (even in the 70s one had puzzled over it): namely, what one's straight "sisters" were going to do. How would they ever reconcile a putative belief in women's emancipation with what so often seemed an utterly depressing erotic and psychological fealty to men? No doubt the fact that one was often trying—quite literally—to entice these poor benighted ladies away from various annoying husbands or boyfriends and squire them off to Lesbos intensified one's incomprehension and dismay.

The other day I pondered the theme again. I was clipping out a magazine photo [6] of the great French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar [7] (1903-1987), taken not long before she died. She was wearing a sort of men's dressing gown and ancient slippers and was reclining full-length in haut-butch fashion on a window seat in her house on Mount Desert Island. She glared at the camera; her hair was greasy and unkempt; her face mottled and intransigent. She didn't give a fuck. She didn't look like a woman; she didn't look like a man; she didn't look like anything but a late-station model of herself.

I loved it. It reminded me of one of the most famous, if also sibylline, statements of the High Feminist Era: Monique Wittig [8]'s notorious 1978 declaration, "Lesbians are not women." At the time nobody—not even us lil' baby dykes—could quite figure out what the brilliant yet gnomic "Théo" was driving at. But now it seemed stunningly obvious. Yes, I thought. That's exactly how it is. Somehow one had never resonated—at all—with "Woman" as a category. And now that one was getting older, and like Lady Macbeth, ever more un-sexed (physically and mentally), it seemed one never would. Of what concern to me were the problems of would-be feminist straight women?

I had no emotional purchase on their vexations. I didn't mind getting wrinkly—or even being sort of ugly. I didn't have to hold down a miserable poorly-paid job while also caring for children. I'd never had some slob beating me up or threatening me with a knife. Perhaps because in the deepest psychic sense I had never felt myself to be female, many of the classic so-called women's issues remained ultimately opaque to me: something to be encountered, dare one say, in the most displaced and denatured way. My own recent real-world activism, slight though it is, only seemed to confirm the inner reality. The social and political issue most preoccupying me of late has not been abortion rights, or women's health care, or even something middle-class like the notorious glass ceiling, but the legal push for lesbian and gay marriage.

Immediately looming up on the other side, however: the inevitable feelings of shame and guilt and cowardice and fecklessness and vanity and privilege and selfishness and moral amnesia and goddamn it all to hell.

For this, too, is a part of my life now: perusing the latest horror-installment in the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof [9]'s epic, ongoing account of women's lives in various abhorrent corners of the globe. The corners turn out to be everywhere. Pick a country—the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, Cambodia, Thailand, Egypt, Mali, Rwanda, Haiti, Russia, China, even the good old United States—he's been there and he's found it: wife-burning, dowry murders, female sweatshop slavery, enforced clitoridectomies, pandemic female HIV infection, untreated fistulas, gang rape, sexual torture, child kidnapping and prostitution, malnourished mothers and children, appalling numbers of women dying in childbirth, and on and on and on.

Kristof should be given the Nobel Peace Prize. He is, one might venture, the greatest feminist journalist in this country today and perhaps the most passionate and effective media advocate for women's and girls' rights the U.S. has ever had. He and the extraordinary people he writes about—such as the 300 impossibly brave Afghan women who risked stoning and death threats last week in Kabul in order to protest a new religious law requiring Shiite women to submit to their husbands whenever the latter demanded sex—make me want to hang my head.

For all the jokes, the cynicism, the tedious, world-weary pose, the Yourcenar twaddle—indeed, for all the ponderous lady-pooh-bah stuff which takes up so many of my days. He's a better man than I am, and a better woman too.