The Dictionary Gambit
You may have gathered from the previous post, if you gathered anything at all, that I am not a feminist. "Ohhh, yes you are," the Punch and Judy chorus pipes up, "Look, here, it says in the dictionary..." OK, I seem to have a free paragraph or two, so let's just get that out of the way:
If you are a woman scanning the personal columns for a date, and you see an ad from a bloke who defines himself as "Aryan male, 40, single, seeks..." my guess is that you will give this man a wide berth, if you're at all sensible. If you do not, and end up in his bedroom, you would still be well advised to check in his wardrobe for swastika armbands, and my money's on you finding them (try the top drawer of the dresser if not). Now, no one here is claiming that "Aryan" means "Nazi". It doesn't, and no one to my knowledge has ever claimed that it does. As a self-identification (as opposed to, say, an obsolete linguistic term) it presumably means something as unexceptionable as "white, tallish, blonde, blue eyes, kinda Nordic looking": a not unappealing set of characteristics, you would have thought, though tastes will vary, and there may be a bit of schickelgruberian wishful thinking in there, discoverable upon visual acquaintance. The real problem is that there is only one kind of person likely to use that word with that particular meaning, and that kind is a (neo-)Nazi. In other words, broadly speaking, the difficulty with the word is not one of denotation but connotation. The problem with the word is not what it (allegedly) means, but the kind of people who use it, or publicly identify with it. The problem with the word is the baggage. You want a peaceful life, you don't date words like that. Especially when there are perfectly innocent words like "Nordic-looking" which would have served just as well, and have none of the baggage.
Now map that over to feminism. If I see an ad in a personal column from a woman defining herself as "Feminist female, 40, single, seeks...", I naturally expect the date in question to be prickly, touchy, snooty, self-righteous, humourless, hectoring, to have a gargantuan sense of entitlement and a conspiracy-theory view of the world, and to talk exclusively in clichés and buzzwords - not because any of this is what the dictionary says the word means, but because, increasingly, it's the sort of baggage that, in weary experience, the word comes laden down with. After all, what's wrong with, say, "gender egalitarian" - other than the fact that saying this is equivalent to stipulating that you have opposable thumbs?
OK, so that's stereotyping, and I should give her the benefit of the doubt (note that this means you should give your self-disclosed "Aryan" the benefit of the doubt, too: do you really want to?). Fair enough. My feminist date, dictionary in hand, need not necessarily subscribe to all the paranoid claptrap, the Patriarchy Theory, the Rape Culture, the Wage Gap, Objectification, the Duluth Model, etc. But even so, I think it's fair to say that, just as calling yourself an Aryan is indicative, at the very least and even without the goose-stepping and the Lebensraum, of a rather unhealthy preoccupation with racial categorization, and is rather suspiciously redolent of a smug belief in racial purity and/or superiority, in exactly the same way, calling yourself a feminist is (surely?) indicative of an unhealthy preoccupation with self-righteous ideological purity, and suspiciously redolent of a belief in gender privilege and/or gender warfare. And the sad thing here is that, in certain social strata at least, such preoccupations and beliefs are so widespread as to count as normal. Which would not be the case with our oddly fearless Aryan friend, at any rate.
So no, the fact that I believe in gender neutrality before the law does not "make me" a feminist or oblige me to accept that ugly and divisive label, any more than having blue eyes makes me, willy-nilly, an "Aryan". You don't get to define my identity for me, sorry. Only I get to do that.
If you are a woman scanning the personal columns for a date, and you see an ad from a bloke who defines himself as "Aryan male, 40, single, seeks..." my guess is that you will give this man a wide berth, if you're at all sensible. If you do not, and end up in his bedroom, you would still be well advised to check in his wardrobe for swastika armbands, and my money's on you finding them (try the top drawer of the dresser if not). Now, no one here is claiming that "Aryan" means "Nazi". It doesn't, and no one to my knowledge has ever claimed that it does. As a self-identification (as opposed to, say, an obsolete linguistic term) it presumably means something as unexceptionable as "white, tallish, blonde, blue eyes, kinda Nordic looking": a not unappealing set of characteristics, you would have thought, though tastes will vary, and there may be a bit of schickelgruberian wishful thinking in there, discoverable upon visual acquaintance. The real problem is that there is only one kind of person likely to use that word with that particular meaning, and that kind is a (neo-)Nazi. In other words, broadly speaking, the difficulty with the word is not one of denotation but connotation. The problem with the word is not what it (allegedly) means, but the kind of people who use it, or publicly identify with it. The problem with the word is the baggage. You want a peaceful life, you don't date words like that. Especially when there are perfectly innocent words like "Nordic-looking" which would have served just as well, and have none of the baggage.
Now map that over to feminism. If I see an ad in a personal column from a woman defining herself as "Feminist female, 40, single, seeks...", I naturally expect the date in question to be prickly, touchy, snooty, self-righteous, humourless, hectoring, to have a gargantuan sense of entitlement and a conspiracy-theory view of the world, and to talk exclusively in clichés and buzzwords - not because any of this is what the dictionary says the word means, but because, increasingly, it's the sort of baggage that, in weary experience, the word comes laden down with. After all, what's wrong with, say, "gender egalitarian" - other than the fact that saying this is equivalent to stipulating that you have opposable thumbs?
OK, so that's stereotyping, and I should give her the benefit of the doubt (note that this means you should give your self-disclosed "Aryan" the benefit of the doubt, too: do you really want to?). Fair enough. My feminist date, dictionary in hand, need not necessarily subscribe to all the paranoid claptrap, the Patriarchy Theory, the Rape Culture, the Wage Gap, Objectification, the Duluth Model, etc. But even so, I think it's fair to say that, just as calling yourself an Aryan is indicative, at the very least and even without the goose-stepping and the Lebensraum, of a rather unhealthy preoccupation with racial categorization, and is rather suspiciously redolent of a smug belief in racial purity and/or superiority, in exactly the same way, calling yourself a feminist is (surely?) indicative of an unhealthy preoccupation with self-righteous ideological purity, and suspiciously redolent of a belief in gender privilege and/or gender warfare. And the sad thing here is that, in certain social strata at least, such preoccupations and beliefs are so widespread as to count as normal. Which would not be the case with our oddly fearless Aryan friend, at any rate.
So no, the fact that I believe in gender neutrality before the law does not "make me" a feminist or oblige me to accept that ugly and divisive label, any more than having blue eyes makes me, willy-nilly, an "Aryan". You don't get to define my identity for me, sorry. Only I get to do that.
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