History of Feminism

I'm a straight white guy from the South; I can't begin to describe the seduction of pretending where I am is because of what I did. That's the problem, isn't it? The system hides it. It has to. I was lucky that I had parents who taught me about Seneca Falls in addition to my school's teaching me about the Declaration of Independence.

I'm not penning some apologia here; as Lionness pointed out in GD, this takes work -- a lot of work. But as someone who was groomed up as the "supreme" side of things, I can't stress enough how absolutely transparent the supremacist process is made.

From my view in the cheap seats, the synthesis is this:

* sexism is a moral flaw
* I am a moral person
* accusations of sexism against me cannot be sincere, because I am manifestly moral

From its own standpoint, that's a fair synthesis, which is exactly what is so dangerous here, because it completely undermines the entire concept of overcoming oppression. To use race as a proxy for sex, it's not the case that my many relatives in Mississippi (whom, by the way, I love) were immoral people in the 1950's and became gradually more moral as time went on: they were perfectly normal people in a very, very sick system in the 1950s which became gradually less pathological over time (and still has a lot of work to do).

This (again, from the cheap seats) is the unfortunate result of making sexism "about" the sexist. It was what could be done, back in the day, but it ignored the fact that making oppression "about" the oppressor still does oppression's work. If the task of antiracism is to "redeem" racist people, then it's no longer something I care about that much; ditto antisexism and sexist people. We don't need more redemption stories about the privileged guy who finds his way to being a good person thanks to the spunky intern. We need stories that really aren't about us (the privileged guys) at all. If I get redeemed along the way, fine, but as long as that's the point, it feeds more of this unfortunateness.

Anyways, I'm not a frequent HOF contributer though I own the name "feminist" and appreciate feminist history, but I wanted to propose something of a thesis, if possible:

To the extent that sexism is presented as an attribute of the individual rather than of a social or cultural system in which that individual lives, that presentation will fail because of the (false but persuasive) synthesis I outlined above. I know you all probably know that, but I haven't actually seen that stated in what I've read and I think it's worth considering.