Alienated

Rafia Zakaria, October 14, 2022

Unfocused Feminism
The battle lines go beyond the bedroom and the boardroom

Two feminisms. | Christine Osborn / Garry Knight

NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST Michelle Goldberg is sad to think

that young women are not as interested in sex as they used to be.
Last year, she bemoaned “Why Sex-Positive Feminism is Falling
Out of Fashion” when Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s book
The Right to Sex was released. Then this June, she informed Times
readers “The Future Isn’t Female Anymore,” using the “buzzy”
literary magazine The Drift’s collection of essays on “What to Do
About Feminism” as a jumping-off point. The editors noted,
Goldberg wrote, “an ambient feeling that feminism has been
sapped of cultural vitality, even as an anti-feminist backlash is
gathering momentum, and that young people especially were
turning against the movement.” In August, following the Supreme
Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, she reflected on Nona Willis
Aronowitz’s memoir, Bad Sex, which talks about the coercive and
somewhat hollow aspects of the constant search for great sex.
Goldberg provided a teacherly correction about what the author’s
own mother (the sex-positive writer Ellen Willis) believed. “She
believed in the value of erotic pleasure, but she was always clear-
eyed about the coercive side of the sexual revolution,” she writes
tritely.

In all this, Goldberg has shown little doubt that her read on the
feminist present, that of an upper-middle-class white woman, is the
accurate lens through which to consider the question of where
feminist vitality lies. The narrow dimensions of her perspective
have been underscored in recent days as Iranian women, Iranian
girls, have emerged from their homes and onto the streets for the
fourth week in a row in what news outlets are calling a “national
uprising.” They are protesting and burning their scarves in a paean
to reclaiming their bodily autonomy from the state, and in doing so,
they have faced military-grade weapons, bullets, and tear gas.
Human rights groups say that nearly two hundred people have been
killed, including twenty-eight children and adolescents. Two
sixteen-year-old girls, Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh,
were found bludgeoned to death after joining the protests and have
become the latest examples of bravery in the face of repression.
Here is feminist vitality at its purest and best, initiated by women
who would rather die than continue to be told what to do with their
bodies, their lives, and their conscience.

I bring up Iranian women in particular because I hope that their

struggle vis-à-vis a discussion of current American feminist
quandaries reveals the poverty of both the language and goals of the
sexual revolution, which put erotic license above bodily autonomy
more generally. Even within a singularly American context,
movements like #SayHerName, which are led by Black women and
struggle against the bloody excesses of police brutality, would likely
find centering erotic license, particularly as it is experienced by
white, upper-middle-class women, frivolous and limiting.

Goldberg must be aware of this exclusionary dimension of the

sexual revolution, but she seems put off by certain discussions—
such as what sex should and should not be—that break with the
liberationist assumptions of feminism’s second wave. Second-wave
feminists still insist these are debates about individual rights and
mores. Instead of seeing the recategorization of sex as an issue for
moral philosophy (as Srinivasan argues in her book), Goldberg
views it with suspicion. “I started noticing the turn away from sex
positivity a few years ago,” she writes in her review of Srinivasan’s
book, positioning herself as the whip-cracking grand marm of the
sex-positive struggle. If younger feminists are making arguments
against porn . . . well, it must be a part of those “generational battles
over speech” that happen as a matter of course.
 Do upper-middle-class white women have
an accurate lens through which to consider
the question of where feminist vitality lies? 
Goldberg struck the same chord in an interview with Ezra Klein,
who is also a part of the Times industrial complex. In one
memorable portion, she sarcastically noted that “if I wanted to, say,
join a feminist group, I wouldn’t really know where to start.” It is all
in good fun, repartee and all, but it did make me wonder whether
second-wave feminists experienced the electoral loss of Hillary
Clinton as a kind of “end of feminism” moment. Goldberg, not the
most ardent Clinton supporter, wrote a confessional of sorts in a
2016 column for Slate, entitled “Hard Choices: I used to hate
Hillary. Now I’m voting for her.” Begrudging respect indeed, but, as
she wrote, “sometimes it feels like to defend Clinton is to defend
middle age itself, with all its attenuated expectations and reminders
of the uselessness of hindsight.”

But all the begrudging respect from all the middle-aged, second-
wave feminists in the country was not enough to get Hillary Clinton
installed as the first female president. With that goal done for, such
feminists had a moment of regrouping when they got together in
D.C. for the Women’s March, an imagined challenge to Trump in
the month of his inauguration. Carrying on the theme of the sexual
revolution by donning pussy hats, they marched through the streets,
made cheeky signs, and thought themselves remarkably united and
even revolutionary all over again. Then they went home, and
Trump began to rule the country.

Even before the Women’s March was exposed as deliberately white-

centric, discriminatory toward Muslims and racial minorities,
second-wave feminists appeared to have lost their faith—and soon
after, it was back to the “attenuated expectations.” Perhaps they
began to believe that all the things they fought for were either
already lost or soon to be. The recalibration of the position of sex
positivity within the feminist movement, they believed, was not just
that—a revision—but a wholesale “out of fashioning.” A
revitalization of the debate over porn, or the argument that
conversations about sex belong within the ambit of moral
philosophy and culture rather than laws and “rights,” was seen as a
pointless generational phenomenon where the future had to undo
the gains of the past.

Naturally, the Dobbs decision was the ultimate proof to second-

wave feminists that younger feminists have failed to hold the gains
that were won in the 1960s and 1970s. With such cynicism afoot,
no amount of persuasive material concerning the possibility of an
international feminist movement united by the fight for bodily
autonomy is likely to register with them. It is almost as if they were
used to feminism sold in a white upper-middle-class bottle, and any
changes in flavor and packaging they simply discard as not
feminism at all.
Even if my Hillary’s Last Stand theory is an overreach, the general
quizzical mien of feminists in the second-wave tradition is
understandable when considered through the lens of how they
imagined rights to be won and then exercised. The movement that
failed to win an Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and 1980s
had by the 1990s come to focus on the individual woman as the
central figure of all struggles. Soon it was a matter of “leaning in” to
advance in corporate leadership and to break glass ceilings. In many
cases, this woman was specifically a white, upper-middle-class
woman who wished to milk capitalism for her own benefit after
graduation from Brown or Princeton. Naturally, this has led to a
floundering of the political relevance and organizational scaffolding
of the feminist movement. The consequence is the concomitant
advancement of precepts that undermine female bodily autonomy
as a whole and that impose draconian limits on what a woman is
“allowed” to do. Contemporary feminists are searching for ways to
resurrect feminist politics and collective organization, but second-
wave-influenced writers like Goldberg will have to look further than
lit magazines and conversations with others similarly situated to see
the emerging movement, and they may not find themselves
immediately welcomed there. Even while feminism’s gifts are
apportioned unfairly to those already blessed, which is the white
western upper-middle-class woman, the true grassroots battles and
revolutionary struggles come almost always from below—from
women who need feminism to survive.

Hey, one last thing.

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Rafia Zakaria is the author of Against White Feminism (W.W. Norton, 2021) and Veil (Bloomsbury, 2017). She is a columnist for
Dawn in Pakistan. She's written for the Guardian, Boston Review, The New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review.

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