The XX Factor: What women really think.

Linda Hirshman: I Didn't Call Anyone at Jezebel a Slut

A guest post from Double X writer Linda Hirshman:

In responding to my column, “The Trouble With Jezebel,” Jaclyn Friedman writes that I "said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts." 

Friedman says she is paraphrasing. Definition: "to rephrase, summarize, reword, interpret, translate, restate." Only problem: Something like the words used to paraphrase must be there in the first place. I have never... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Blame Rapists for Rape, Not Women

A guest post from Double X writer Jaclyn Friedman:

Last Tuesday, in the debut of Double X, Linda Hirshman said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts (I'm paraphrasing here, but not as much as I wish I were). Latoya Peterson responded by rightly pointing out that screeds like Hirshman's give feminism a bad name. The internets erupted. And now, just what we needed, the Observer has swooped in to Explain It All To Us, clucking their editorial tongue about the whole "infighting" mess.

With Feminists Like This, Who Needs the Patriarchy?

A guest post from Double X writer Latoya Peterson:

You know, screeds like Linda Hirshman's in Double X are why I waffle so much about identifying with the feminist label.

Sheltering Women: Linda Hirshman Responds to Hilzoy

A guest post from contributor Linda Hirshman:

In response to my Slate essay "Crazy Choices, Crazy Love," Hilary Bok, a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins (hilzoy to bloggers), generated many words on why women stay with abusers and why I should not have even asked the question. Less articulate opponents invoke her posts as evidence of the error of my ways. Instead, she demonstrates how important it is to ask the question and how easily the discussion becomes derailed.

As to why women stay, Bok offered 1) the story of her own abuse and 2) her experience working in a shelter. Individual stories eventually add up to evidence, true, but a personal, revelatory anecdote tends to abort what is supposed to be a political conversation.  If we are to discuss the politics of abuse, we need to resist this rhetorical move.  It would be churlish of me to downplay the suffering of this well-known intellectual with many friends in the blogosphere. How can I say, he never laid a hand on you, what are you talking about? But other than evoking sympathy, her story actually makes my point perfectly.  He screamed at her once; the second time, she packed her bags. In explaining why she left, she says, among other things, "I'm a feminist."

Mining her shelter years for more data, Bok suggests that being attacked by a lover is so shocking it deprives you of your capacity for judgment. Utterly unexpected and incomprehensible, it's like having the car turn into an elephant, she explains. The  imagery is compelling, until one remembers that from the Farah Fawcett movie, The Burning Bed ,to Rihanna's swollen face on the internet, everyone on this planet has been exposed to evidence that "lovers" can attack. The many comments about my essay also reflect how much warning attackers often give and how many victims come from backgrounds of abuse. Why, of all human experience, can women not learn of the reality of domestic violence from what they see, read and sometimes live through?

Bok also tries to explain why I should not be asking (and implying) that women should leave their abusers.

Philosophers usually don't argue against asking questions, so, Bok argues instead that I didn't ask the question right. I implied that women are natural victims, and I was just using battered women as a battering ram against "choice" feminism.  If there's one take-away message in my piece, it's that women are not natural victims. Which means there must be a way to reduce or arrest battering. Silent sheltering and waiting isn't enough—that leaves between 600,000 and 2,000,000 women battered right now. If that prescription is all feminism has to offer, I am certainly blaming . . . us. But it's not. As Debra Dickerson brilliantly put it in her piece at Mother Jones, asking is in the long tradition of feminist awareness. "Have we forgotten how many millennia of consciousness-raising it's taken to acknowledge the domestic violence, first, exists and second, is wrong? Feminism is a roadmap . . .[It's] leaving a man who makes you weak in the knees. When he isn't hitting you." 

Katha Pollitt Responds to Linda Hirshman

A guest post from the Nation's Katha Pollitt, responding to a recent piece in Slate by Linda Hirshman.

Linda Hirshman seriously misrepresents both me and my book Learning to Drive. In brief:

1. Linda equates me with a battered woman who stays with her abuser. My actual situation, unambiguously described in the book: I discovered AFTER MY PARTNER LEFT ME that he had been unfaithful many times. Linda strongly implies I knew about this all along and stayed out of sick romanticism. In fact, I would never stay with a philanderer, much less an abuser. I have never been in an abusive relationship. Learning to Drive cannot rationally be used to explain why a battered woman would stay with a violent man. Because that is not the situation it describes.

2. She compares me with the excessively romantic (her view,  Flaubert's is a little more complicated!) Emma Bovary, who killed herself (actually not for love, As Linda implies, but because of debt). My book is about getting over a subtly infantilizing, undermining relationship and painful breakup by becoming a more independent, self-aware and skeptical woman, a woman less prone to denial, which, again IN THE BOOK, is connected to other kinds of rose-colored glasses (about politics, alcoholic parent, motherhood, etc.).

3. She ignores the fact that Learning to Drive is not a flat-footed piece of journalism, it is a book of essays which use various literary strategies, like, um, humor, exaggeration, irony, whimsy, verbal play, and self-satire.  Every single quote she uses she takes literally, when they are all comic, i.e., calling my philandering partner a "psychopath." Obviously, he wasn't really a psychopath, he was a garden-variety manipulative charmer. "Psychopath" expresses  rage and frustration in an over-the-top way that is meant to suggest maybe there's something funny about finding oneself in this pickle. It's not a clinical diagnosis. Similarly, obviously,  when I describe his hat and coat in a romantically exaggerated way I am aware that it is a romantic exaggeration.

It's English 101: There is space between the autobiographical narrator and the autobiographical subject. As in fiction, the writer knows more than the character. Emma Bovary didn't write Madame Bovary! I can understand why that would be too subtle for Linda, who sees everything in black and white and whose main aim in life seems to be proving herself the world's only true feminist.

Edging Right Up on the Literary Cliché ...

Emily I don’t think anyone disputes that hideous instances of sexism have been stirred up in this campaign. Nor does anyone dispute that Ms. Clinton is entitled to address it, which she has done very deftly at times. The question is whether she’s entitled to reduce her entire failed campaign to sexism—which has the practical effect of splitting women into those-who-are-angry-about-sexism, and those who what? Think it’s acceptable? There’s one other practical effect that warrants mentioning, and that is that it reduces a complex, brilliant, and talented candidate to a big whomping cliché. My friend Susannah writes: “I find it increasingly unbearable to watch Hillary. It feels like she has become the archetype I find most painful to see in women—a high-maintenance, delusional, and "difficult" woman who feels entitled to do whatever she likes. ... Meanwhile, Obama is forced to tiptoe around essentially just humoring her. There is a pathetic "Yes, dear" quality to the way he is forced to react to her these days.”

This mirrors a sense I’ve had that we might have finally crossed the Hirshman line. Linda Hirshman argued persuasively that all powerful, ambitious women are at some point dismissed as “hysterical” or “insane.” Too true. The problem now is that when Clinton behaves irrationally, we can’t call her out for it because it would be sexist. If we can't call irrational behavior irrational because the character in question is a woman, then it’s a short hop from here to a Tennessee Williams play ...

Oprah and Linda

Oprah Winfrey declares victory for the cause: "Now look at this campaign: The two front-runners are a black man and a woman," she said at a California rally she headlined with Michelle Obama, Maria Shriver, and Caroline Kennedy. "What that says to me is we have won the struggle and we have the right to compete." The New York Times continues: "[I]nstead of seeing a painful choice, voters, Ms. Winfrey urged, should see a moment when they 'are free from the constraints of gender and race.' "

Meanwhile, in an essay loaded with great-looking data, Linda Hirshman points out that "if men are Republican enough, the Republicans need not care whether the women are less enthusiastic about them than men are." Which helps to explain the question I asked the other night. In discussing the effects of the question you were discussing, Dahlia and Rachael, about why women consume less political news, Hirshman points out that single women tend to be the least checked in—and so the most up for grabs.