Being a liberal feminist is not a very difficult task. There is no need to change anything, there is no need to challenge dignity and there is no need to blame men. In other words, everything remains the same and the search for individual enlightenment and generosity is becoming the key.
One of the most well-known slogans of the second wave of feminism is ‘My body, my decision’. This is because many of the successes of the women’s liberation movement have been highlighted by the lack of choice in women’s lives. There was little or no opportunity for women to talk about marriage or children, or even about sex and pleasure. Feminism created a landscape in widening the practice of women’s choice. But later, adding liberalism to the concept of ‘choice’ meant tacitly recognizing harmful practices that were beneficial to men.
Ask yourself:
What would it be like for women to walk around naked, just like men? On a hot day, he used to walk around naked in the street? Or the desire to sit in the park naked to buy such clothes in the store? If not, what is the reason? In fact, in New York City, it is legal for women to walk around naked, but no one practices it.
When the realities of women’s and girls’ attire and their way of life come to the fore, the notions of choice and equality in support of liberal feminism result in terrible contempt. For example, I myself have seen anti-female genital mutilation campaigners being harassed through social media for using the term ‘female’ to describe these human rights violations. The genitals are only for women – apparently, this indicates Transphobia.
Buying unbearably high heels, pole-dancing as part of bodybuilding, breast augmentation surgery, posting nude photos on Instagram, and ‘sex workers’ are all classified as women’s empowerment. But where is the similarity between these submissive practices? All this is for the entertainment of men. And all this is supported by liberal feminists.
Feminism was. It was a sacrosanct anti-capitalist movement aimed at recognizing the full dignity of a woman in her otherness and irreducibility concerning man. Today feminism is no more. Or, better still, it survives exclusively as feminist individualism, favorable to the abandonment of the paternalistic model in view certainly not of the noble ideal of universal emancipation. But the integration of the female population into the global market of flexible and precarious labor; integration itself was made possible by the deconstruction of the traditional family model.
Business without reserves
In this sense, feminism becomes the vector of post-bourgeois and post-proletarian capitalist modernization and its integral subsumption of the world of life in the logic of unreserved corporatization. It is anything but accidental that, in the order of the dominant discourse, the female question never appears as a scandal of inequality and wage super-exploitation, but always and only as of the individualism of the uprooting of the old bourgeois forms (indiscriminately dismissed as paternalistic, male chauvinists and sexists) and as the triumph of the new female manager emancipated from the constraints – themselves demonized as obsolete and intrinsically authoritarian – of motherhood.
Globalized compliance
The liberal variant of the career woman manager coexists, as an opposite expression of the same phenomenon, with the anarchic and new global figure of feminism in the fashion of anti-bourgeois and ultra-capitalistic bad girls (Pussy Riot, Femen, and numerous other post-modern icons of the globalized conformism falsely protesting and, in reality, the essential ideological completion of class globalization).
Right of Money and Left of Customs, the liberal side and the anarchist side, continue, even in this case, to act as the bulwarks of the criticized, post-bourgeois and post-proletarian system of needs.
Nude sculptures of women will not work for feminism, feminism will not stumble. All we need for women is to wake up and be brave; and most importantly, reject the subject matter imposed on us.
Liberal feminists need to be reformed.
