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Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

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Alison Phipps

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“For a few months, the political catastrophe seemed so dire that one's music and movie preferences were no longer considered the ultimate markers of one's moral fitness to fight fascism. Which became, incredibly, a buzzword. Though we could always 'do more' or 'do better', there was a sense that our embarrassment of privileges could be set aside to focus on the task at hand. Though what that task was, I wasn't really sure.”

“Capitalist forces have looked to depoliticize as many spheres as possible. To create a feminist politics of solidarity, women have to recognize the forces that push them apart and push them into meaningless competition, by keeping them from collective understanding and engagement. Individuality within the capitalist framework is an antidote to politics and solidarity.”

“Sitting in that class, with other women who expounded on their opposition of housework, I dared once to ask, “Who will do the housework then?” Seventeen pairs of eyes turned to me, and I continued: “If men don’t do it and women don’t do it, who will? It has to be done. Do you propose that we hire other women to come and do it? Other women who clean people’s homes because they have the opportunity to do nothing else?” Silence greeted my question, as I had expected. I realized then that most of the women in the class were upper-middle and middle-class white women—and I felt like a complete outsider. -Susan Muaddi Darraj”

“The scroll slowed on a post from Madison. Predictably, she was sharing more pregnancy content. Today's post was a column graph about maternal mortality rates, accompanied by the caption: This makes me so sad. Growing a human is hard enough. We shouldn't have to fear for our lives on top of that. Mae frowned. The graph was cut off. It showed rates for All, White, and Hispanic, but there was a sliver of what looked like another bar on the far right. Under it, the only part of the word that didn't get cut off was Bl. Ordinarily, Mae wouldn't have wasted any time on this. It was just Madison being Madison, thinking of herself and no one else. But after learning about her grandma Doris's racist past yesterday, it was hard to look past anything about the Parkers anymore. A reverse-image search turned up the original article, titled Black women three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. The full graph showed that the column for Black women towered over the other columns Madison had posted. Anger and annoyance rising within her, Mae returned to Madison's post and started typing. You'll be fine. If you'd read the article and shared the full graph, you'd know the point of the piece is that Black women are way more at risk. Or do you not care about that?”

“I understood that to be a woman in the world was to spend so much time trying to act the right way. Be loud enough, but not too loud. Stand up for yourself, but pleasantly. Beauty was everything, but you shouldn’t rely on your looks. Always, always I was trying to get it right, to find the balance, but here around this circle, naked but not sexualized, together we could flail and scream and open ourselves raw without worrying about anything else at all.”

“The Women’s March had restored my faith as I am sure it has introduced the young generation to the new wave of feminism. A feminist movement that was made up of both sexes and all ages and creeds, one that did away with the arguments and stood arm in arm for a greater cause, a cause which the Arab media did not wish to project.”