I'm O.K., You're O.K.
[In the following excerpt, Stark criticizes what she views as Wolf's lack of concern for socioeconomic disparity and argues that Fire with Fire reflects Wolf's implicit interest in preserving existing power structures.]
Naomi Wolf's Fire with Fire takes its title from the proverb, which is juxtaposed on the opening page with a quote from Audre Lorde: “The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house.” Wolf's polemic begins with Anita Hill's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which, she says, marks a major turning point in women's history, one that directly caused “a train of events that led American women into becoming the political ruling class—probably the only ruling class ever to be unaware of its status.” According to Wolf, the only obstacle women as a “class” now face is to recover from their deep-seated insecurities and embrace power and money, sex and beauty. Her motto: Feminism is “easy, fun, and even (forgive me Karl) lucrative.”
In the world according to Wolf, three “obstacles” block the path to a so-called equitable society: “Many women and their movement have become estranged; one strand of feminism has developed maladaptive attitudes; and women lack a psychology of female power to match their new opportunities.” All three are women's very own problems and have absolutely nothing to do with the educational system, informal gender socialization or the larger social and economic order. If women don't earn their equality, “it will be because women on some level have chosen not to exert the power that is our birthright.”
Wolf's conviction that women stand in their own way to power rests on her claim that since 1980 women have outvoted men, and that in the 1992 elections women accounted for 54 percent of the national vote (which itself represents only a fraction of the population). But how much of a difference does it make who's in office when so much of the discrimination and violence that confront women happen in the business and politics of everyday life? A small margin of majority in national elections does not translate into a great stride toward equality for all humans. Wolf tells us that “when women voters get enough political clout and use it, politicians will have to do their bidding, whether sincerely or not.” Undeniably, women and families would get a fairer deal if there were more women among our governing elite, but politicians can't change prejudice. Thirty years after the civil rights movement's greatest legal successes, America remains profoundly racist.
Besides the power of votes, Wolf expects women's money to change the world. “According to the Census Bureau, there are 99,202,000 women in the United States in 1993. … Six dollars from every adult woman would raise $600 million and earn us the political firepower equivalent to twenty-five hundred women leaders,” she reasons. The Census Bureau doesn't have any statistics yet for 1993 (including the ones Wolf cites), but in 1992, 16.3 percent of American women of all races earned incomes below the poverty line. And statistics cannot tell us how many American women have control over their paychecks. Wolf's persistent indifference to women other than those in the professional-managerial middle class proves that she recognizes those women as her constituency (rightly so; they have enough money to buy hardcover books). It also displays her vision of equality and power as sadly exclusive.
Fire with Fire attacks academic and radical feminisms, which Wolf lumps together under the nicknames “club feminism” and “insider feminism.” These categories turn out to encompass anybody who disagrees with her. Like Roiphe, Wolf makes herself out to be a commonsense girl seeking pleasure, battling puritanical and irrational ideologues. Wolf recounts conversations with women all over the country who attend her lectures. They are getting their feminist ideas from mainstream culture (Oprah, Thelma & Louise, Fried Green Tomatoes), she says, and like her, these women feel that those irrational pedants who appear in small groups at Wolf's talks, hurling anti-capitalist epithets and smug disapproval, have nothing to offer them. The funny thing is, while Wolf narrates arguments with such unreasonable women (obviously) in her own favor, Ms. magazine recently printed a conversation among Wolf, Urvashi Vaid, bell hooks and Gloria Steinem that contradicts Wolf's tales. In the transcript, Wolf egregiously argues with her own straw women, inserting her own catch phrases and issues, not really responding to what is actually under discussion, until Vaid and hooks (“insider” feminists, in Wolf's term) ask, “I wonder, Naomi, who are the women you are talking to?” Vaid means, Who are your audiences?, but her question applies equally to their own conversation.
Following her pop psychology, Wolf insists women must claim their dark side. She discusses how young girls are socialized out of their animalistic, self-centered, aggressive behaviors quite early (based heavily on her memories of an empowered childhood), while boys are indulged in their tendencies. Wolf takes issue with the idea, currently identified with Deborah Tannen and Carol Gilligan, that men and women have fundamentally different ways of acting in the world. She advocates a “power feminism,” asserting that (middle-class) women should use their money, their votes and their inner nature (as aggressive as men's) to play equally in the arena of power. She says this is not a call to be “like men” but to “[lay] claim to our humanity, all of it, not just the scenic parts.”
Wolf traces two separate histories of feminism, the “victim” school, whose beginning she locates in nineteenth-century morally superior separate-spheres reformism, and early “power feminism,” which includes the Seneca Falls convention. Rather than recognize that from their earliest stirrings, women's campaigns to gain independence, respect and cultural power have been varied and diverse (as they remain today), Wolf constructs a good parent/bad parent dichotomy. But another way to characterize differences in feminisms is to distinguish between the quest to gain a place in the male power structure and efforts by women to change that structure to a more humane and communal society. Wolf's conception of power, which includes money and an electoral majority, leaves out culture and ideology. Wolf argues with Audre Lorde, saying, “It is only the master's tools [the electoral process, the press and money] that can dismantle the master's house; he hardly bothers to notice anyone else's.” But Wolf isn't talking about dismantling at all, she just wants to occupy that house. And she wants the master('s) bedroom.
Roiphe and Wolf share room in the master's house because the foundation of both writers' arguments is the self-help-style conviction that women are actually powerful in the world, that if women will just wake up and act like winners, all the supposed obstacles will crumble. Both envision a “natural order” that is structurally unchanged from today's power relations. Consider whose interest is served when Roiphe and Wolf (“one of the best-known feminists in the country,” according to Newsweek) constitute feminism in the media's eye. In claiming that things are basically O.K. and that women should just fight harder, Wolf and Roiphe collude with the social order that the women's movement historically threatens. Feminism in the past ten years has increasingly come to focus on women as victims—of rape, abuse, battering, incest, harassment. This focus has met argument from many fronts. While the left critique acknowledges women's oppression but asserts that male sexuality itself is not the source of oppression, the liberal response insists that women are not victims at all. Like good liberals, Roiphe and Wolf present critiques that support rather than subvert the existing power structure.
At a time when much of the organized women's movement has elected to speak the academy's cryptic language, Roiphe and Wolf's brand of feminism sells. In a world of real complexity, they have the talent (or handicap) of making things deathly simple. But we should emulate their commitment to communicate accessibly. We must learn, as Stuart Hall says, to shape culture and educate desire, since “politics is either conducted ideologically, or not at all.” We need a popular feminism that seizes on the contradictions in women's lived lives to reconstitute common sense, not writers like Roiphe and Wolf who reproduce its ideological givens.
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