MUSINGS ON THE DIFFICULTIES OF CRITIQUING THE VERY SOCIETY THAT HAS SHAPED YOU

Being a feminist has been a relatively easy path for me because there is (for the most part) very little conflict between my feminism and the rest of my identity.  But for many women out there, being a feminist means to reject or to live in contradiction with their culture or their religion.  For example, it is no sweat for me to be heavily critical of the culturally, religiously and legally mandated system of gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia.  But what if I were a Saudi feminist?

If I were a Saudi feminist, I would, as a feminist, recognize that my culture and nation are predicated upon a deep malevolence towards women.  But I would find myself in conflict because the very culture that I recognize as so very hostile to me would be the same culture that shaped me and made me who I am.

Over the past couple of days, I have been pondering the fact that this sense of internal contradiction is outside the scope of my experience.  Except I realized in a flash of insight this morning that it is not outside the scope of my experience. 

I am the daughter of a man who routinely ridiculed and terrorized me throughout my childhood.  I recognized at a very young age that my father was my Enemy.  I left for boarding school at age fourteen clicking my heels because I was so glad to be free of him.  Throughout most of my teens and twenties, he was mostly out of sight and out of mind. 

But in my thirties, I have realized that I am not free of him, nor will I ever be free of him.  I have his coloring and his features.  When I look in the mirror, it is his face I see looking back at me.  I have the same mannerisms and gestures and vocabulary.  His history is my history.  I inherited many of my cultural and religious attitudes from him.  We even had some good times when I was growing up.  He and my mother and I spent many long hours around the dinner table talking about ideas and books from the time I was very little.  As a child, I was completely and totally dependent on him.  There were times when I cravenly courted his approval, and positively basked in it when I got it.  And I am even proud of him at times -- his intelligence, many of his values, and his professional accomplishments.

In a very real sense, my father made war on me but he also created me and shaped me.  Even as I recognize that he deliberately harmed me, I am also unable to escape the fact that he is part of me.  I wish -- oh how I wish -- that I was born into a family with a father who would never have dreamt of treating me the way I was treated.  But if I had been born into a different family, I wouldn't be me.  It is a quandry and a contradiction. 

I can't speak for women who come out of highly misogynist or sexist families, cultures or religions.  But I imagine there are women out there wrestling with feelings about their culture that are very similar to the internal contradictions with which I struggle.  Perhaps, to the extent that sexist assumptions seem to be in the very air we breathe even in the most "enlightened" circles in the U.S., we are all struggling with these contradictions to one degree or another.    I can't pretend that it is especially easy or that I have any solutions. But I think that a clear-eyed recognition of the contradictions one faces is a good start. 

Comments

[L.]

I have a similar answer when my feminist friends ask me, "Why are you still Catholic?"

[The Happy Feminist]

I was actually thinking of Catholics and Mormons when I wrote this post!

[David Thompson]

His history is my history. I inherited many of my cultural and religious attitudes from him.

No. His history is his own. Your history and attitude are the summation of your own experiences, and while he may have played a role in some of those experiences, he played no role in many more of them and had no role in your perception of those experiences.

[Staircase Witch]

Any feminist who grew up in a conservative environment with inflexible ideas about what women should and should not do struggles with this to some extent. I call it being "wired" a certain way over the course of one's childhood. You're not born wanting a doll instead of a toy truck, or feeling that you should be the one who sacrifices your life goals for your partner, or that there's something wrong with you because you aren't a mother, but you're wired to believe those things by your parents, your religious institutions, your teachers, and your cultural environment. You may be exposed along the way to alternate views, but they never really take hold.

(I was raised Methodist, but in a rural area where most people were one fundamentalist Christian flavor or another.)

I started to break free of those things when I was in my twenties, but it's still a struggle. And it's hard to explain to my husband why I still feel responsible for most of the housework and why I still view his happiness and satisfaction as more important than mine. It's nothing compared to what Saudi or Iranian women have to deal with, of course; I look at them and I feel ashamed for not being able to overcome what are minor difficulties in comparison. But the guilt is always going to be there, and to a certain extent, the alienation from my family and a lot of the people around whom I grew up.

It's a point of contention between us. My husband, who was always encouraged to think of himself as able to do anything, understands only intellectually why I don't believe that about myself. He thinks you can just flip a switch and see the world and your relationship to it differently. I know it requires rewiring, and I haven't figured out how to rewire myself.

[TangoMan]

but you're wired to believe those things by your parents, your religious institutions, your teachers, and your cultural environment.

and

why I still view his happiness and satisfaction as more important than mine.

Why restrict your thinking on these question to strictly environmental inputs? The brain chemistry of men and women is different:

tinkering with brain chemicals can take an additional toll, blunting emotions and interfering with intense romantic love and long-term attachment.

Or see this:

Oxytocin is the hormone that tightens the parent-child bond. Knock out the oxytocin gene in female mice, and they lose the ability to nurse their young. Inject oxytocin into animals, and they show grooming behaviour and an increased faithfulness to one mate.

My point is that even if you diligently work on re-engineering your social environment to something more to your ideological liking and you still find yourself believing certain things, acting in certain ways, or feeling certain thoughts, all of which are not congruent with what your ideology tells you should be the case, then perhaps you've reached the limits of social re-engineering and you're now butting up against biology.

[The Happy Feminist]

Are you testing me, Tango Man? I hope not. I really hope that the readers of this blog will try to abide in good faith by the spirit of my stated rules and guidelines for discussion. That having been said, your comment is off-topic. Nature vs. nurture is not the topic of this thread.

[David Thompson]

The brain chemistry of men and women is different...

No, they are distinct but not different. Believing they are different is something you were taught.

[t. comfyshoes]

When I read this post, the connection it made for me was not so much on the macro level, as the micro level of my own life: I love the person I am, and even though I'm struggling with depression I know I'm extremely fortunate to be where I am, and with the people around me. So when I look back at some of the rotten things that have happened in my past, or my family's past, what can I say about them?

If I wish that my mother and her first love had stood up against their parents' opposition and gotten married anyway (she was Christian, he was Jewish) and she hadn't ended up stuck with my dad, that's wishing myself out of existence.

If I wish any of the bad things that have happened to me didn't happen, I may not be wishing myself out of existence, but who knows what all else would be different.

I guess what I'm trying to say in a roundabout, not-making-sense kind of way, is that if you embrace the present, you have to embrace the past that lead to it, no matter how bad parts of it are. All you can really do is work on the future.

I can't accomplish much, for example, by getting all bent out of shape that anti-Semitism kept my mom from the man who may have been her true love. However, I can work for a future where that kind of thing doesn't happen, regardless of the fact that prejudice was literally necessary to bring me into existence.

[The Happy Feminist]

My weekend plans got canceled, so I'll be watching the threads! No porn or ethnic slurs after all, as Will had suggested! Thanks comfyshoes for keeping the thread back on point.

[Deborah]

But for many women out there, being a feminist means to reject or to live in contradiction with their culture or their religion.

As I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, I certainly can relate to this struggle. A lot of things in my religion made me feel sick to my stomach, but I didn’t want to abandon my culture and people. After all, there are a lot of things about Judaism and Jews that simply take my breath away and make me swell with pride.

Fortunately, oftentimes this struggle isn’t as "gory" as it seems to be. I, for example, simply shifted towards the left of my religion — Reform Judaism — and managed to preserve both my feminist and Jewish identity.