THE SOBA PRIVILEGE OF THE FEMINIST BLOGGER
LONG AGO, IN the pre-awareness days of the feminist blogosphere (which is to say, in 2009), Courtney E. Martin, of the blog Feministing, wrote a post called, “Day in the Life of a Feminist Writer/Activist.”1 In it, Martin described a range of activities—blogging, yes, but also working on a grant application of some kind, and a conference proposal, and writing articles, and fielding a media interview, and responding to what sounds like quite a bit of e-mail, and just generally … working. A flexible workday, for sure, and a relatively enviable one, in that “feminist writer/activist” is, after all, a media job. Yet nothing compared to the sorts of accounts one reads in, say, a women’s magazine, where a socialite will describe a day split between having her hair blown out and gesturing at designing a handbag. The most upscale dropped reference in the post is to takeout noodles. A day in the life of Carrie Bradshaw this was not.
For reasons that are not immediately obvious—but that foreshadowed oh so many later episodes—the post caused controversy. The problem? Martin’s privilege was, apparently, showing. As best as I can tell, with all my many blind spots and limitations, Martin comes across in the post not as rich, but privileged, if according to the then-fairly new definition of someone who isn’t entirely destitute, but who has failed to ostentatiously acknowledge the existence of those with less. As did so many of us, circa 2009, before it was generally recognized that a reference to one’s own life required such disclaimers.
Commenters—some of whom claimed to be less privileged than Martin, others of whom were merely speaking on behalf of such individuals—wanted her to be aware that not everyone gets to slowly ease into the day with yoga and fruit. (The first clear work task mentioned is some 11:00 a.m. blogging. A workday that starts late, even if it ends late as well, is, apparently, privileged.) A commenter identifying herself as a female lawyer and single mother chimed in to say that this daily routine seemed “immature.” Another mentioned being unemployed, and having little sympathy for the plight of too much e-mail. The thread more or less turns into a YPIS pile-on about how some other people have much longer workdays, many more dreary responsibilities, or, conversely, not enough work to pay the bills. All true points. But what of it?
There were—and there always are—just enough details that a YPIS brigade might pick up on. The noodles, for example, were “soba” and came “from yesterday’s overpriced sushi order.” Ooh, fancy! Most people can’t afford expensive Japanese takeout! Clearly she’s a gazillionaire! Or not, but YPIS isn’t about properly classifying people in socioeconomic categories. It’s about picking up on clues that suggest someone is wealthy and oblivious, and just kind of going with that, free-associating until what emerges is a portrait of the author that’s so over-the-top that she’s baited into setting the record straight.
Which is what ended up happening with Martin, who wrote a follow-up post, citing another blogger’s description of her as a “caricature” of bourgeois feminism. While she accepted the “privilege” charge with about as much enthusiasm and self-flagellation as one could expect, she took issue with some of the particulars. Specifically, with another feminist blogger accusing her of being that wealthy, coastal mom who’s concerned with finding the right nanny … despite Martin not being rich, coastal, or a mother.2 She knew better, it seems, than to use this mischaracterization as a jumping point for a denial of privilege. According to some greater truth, once you’ve been deemed privileged, you just sort of are That Person (more to the point: That Lady); any quibbling over details is the petulant rant of the privileged.
FEMINISM CONFRONTS “PRIVILEGE”
CONFLICTS WITHIN—AND about—feminism over the past several years have all revolved, in one way or another, around the notion of privilege. The concept has its origins in feminist academia, and took hold early on in feminist online activism.3 Every sub-debate organizes itself along “privilege” lines—that is, with the different sides having different takes on who wins the privilege trumps. Take the eternally hot-button issue of sex work: Is it about male privilege, or is the relevant form actually rich-women-who-have-no-idea-how-it-goes-for-sex-workers privilege?4 Or the relatively recent arrival, topicwise, of transgender rights: Should we be focusing on cis privilege (that is, the privilege of the not-trans), or the marginalization of those born, and currently presenting as, female?5 And where even to begin with the issue of street harassment: Is it “privilege” to expect to be left alone in public spaces? No. Is there racism inherent in how the topic gets raised? Yes. Which leaves us where?6
All these topics converge over the question of whether a white, straight, cis, middle-class, or wealthy woman is nevertheless, by virtue of her gender, a member of a marginalized caste? The term “feminism” would suggest that yes, according to the feminist movement, she is. That would seem to be a given. Within feminism, however, there are doubts. So, too, in society at large.
Courtney Martin would, in 2011, be one of the first writers on the left to publish a piece critical of the privilege-acknowledgment phenomenon.7 She’s also one of the activists who Michelle Goldberg wrote about in her important 2014 Nation article, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars.”8 The 2012 story that Goldberg opened with was basically a large-scale version of the 2009 YPIS-fest I’ve described: Martin and Vanessa Valenti, another feminist blogger, organized a feminist meeting that strove for inclusivity, but, according to critics, wasn’t inclusive enough. Goldberg put this and other intra-feminist conflicts into what strikes me as an accurate and indisputable framework: “There’s a shorthand way of talking about online feminist arguments that pits middle-class white women against all the groups they oppress. Clearly, there’s some truth here: privileged white people dominate feminism, just as they do most other sectors of American life.” Which should be challenged, Goldberg agrees, but it’s not entirely clear that that’s all (or most of) what online feminism’s call-out culture is about. As she writes, “[I]t’s not just privileged white women who find themselves on the wrong side of an online trashing.” She cites the example of Katherine Cross, a Puerto Rican transwoman, who’d blogged about having had enough of the online accusations of “‘being an apologist for this, that and the other privilege.’”9 Goldberg also offers a damning anecdote about a black feminist who’d participated in that meeting getting called out online by white feminists who, among other things, wanted to school her in the “fact” that there hadn’t been any women of color at the meeting in question. Oops.
Indeed, impatience with online feminism’s call-out culture has been around about as long as online feminism itself. As far back as 2012, writer Roxane Gay published an essay (also appearing in her 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist) that, though supportive of the general idea of privilege checking (“if you cannot recognize your privilege, you have a lot of work to do; get started”), was quite critical of YPIS:
Too many people have become self-appointed privilege police, patrolling the halls of discourse, ready to remind people of their privilege, whether those people have denied that privilege or not. In online discourse, in particular, the specter of privilege is always looming darkly. When someone writes from their experience, there is often someone else, at the ready, pointing a trembling finger, accusing that writer of having various kinds of privilege.10
In other words, Martin’s day-in-the-life, in all its blogging-and-buckwheat-noodle-privilege was perfect fodder for a “privilege” pile-on.
IN FEMINISM AS ELSEWHERE, YPIS IS AN INTRA-PRIVILEGED DEBATE
THE PROBLEM WITH YPIS isn’t—as is too easily imagined—that getting called out by feminists of color or trans activists causes thin-skinned privileged feminists to feel sad, and is therefore toxic. Rather, it’s that YPIS takes on a life of its own, getting aimed in all directions, and winds up damaging every feminist cause. The buried lead in “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars” is that YPIS isn’t about intersectionality or inclusivity. It’s about a bunch of privileged “White Ladies” instructing one another on etiquette: “There are also rules,” writes Goldberg, “elaborated by white feminists, on how other white feminists should talk to women of color.” Goldberg has tough words for the “[p]reening displays of white feminist abjection” that have—and oh, they have!11—come into fashion.12 Yet this is what YPIS has amounted to.
The British feminist Julie Bindel—like Michelle Goldberg—used the word “toxic” to describe parts of contemporary feminism, and arrived at similar conclusions: “The focus on individuals, however vile they may be, signifies a shift away from the more difficult, long-term work of making institutions … accountable.”13 In 2013, looking at debates within British feminism, Guardian writer Zoe Williams arrived at a similar view of feminism’s self-defeating purity competitions:
[I]f only the authentically poor are welcome on the left, that considerably depletes our numbers. If only the truly marginalised can speak as feminists, that depletes our numbers too. And if people “with a platform” are disqualified for being part of the power structure, that leaves us without a platform. This criticism started on the right for a reason—because it withers the left. We should think a bit more strategically before we internalise it.14
Williams is very clear that feminism needs to focus on the most marginalized women. Her concern, which I share, is with the fetishization of powerlessness.
The privilege turn has not brought about an inclusivity revolution. It would be wildly inaccurate to say that intersectionality has somehow “won.” It most obviously has not when it comes to discussions of feminist issues in mainstream society. We hear plenty about the plight of female CEOs. And stories about the more “photogenic” (but still legitimate) women’s-rights issues—that is, the ones that can be illustrated with a photograph of a young, pretty white woman—continue to get disproportionate attention. (Models, too young and too thin. Female Ivy League college students, unsafe at parties.) And then, of course, are all of the nonscandals over which ingenue singer or actress identifies as a feminist, to be illustrated with a photo of the beautiful woman in question, ideally scantily clad. The feminism story hasn’t budged.
What’s happened is that a shared sense has emerged on the far left and far right that mainstream feminism has rendered itself obsolete, with many elsewhere on the political spectrum coming to that same conclusion: straight, cis, white, middle-class women, all can agree, are doing just fine. If anything, a bit too well, at the expense of equivalent men (say the far right) or of men and women of color, as well as gay and gender-nonbinary individuals (that would be the far left).
THE WHITE LADY
THE TRIUMPH OF “privilege” in feminism is most clearly seen through discussions of a fictional composite of sorts: the White Lady. “Like the late aughts’ ‘hipster,’” writes editor Ayesha Siddiqi in the online magazine The New Inquiry, “‘white girl’ is a label applied either dismissively or self-consciously. The tastes, habits, and concerns of the white girl, like those of the hipster, are often punch lines used as self-evident definitions for the label.”15 How true, how true. Except for the fact that hipsters are a subculture, not an enormous and internally diverse demographic category. Ah, but one can mock white women freely—it’s a punch up! Well, depending on who’s punching. “Only outprivileged by white men,” continues Siddiqi, “the white girl’s assumed universality lets us project onto ‘white girl’ our attitudes about race, gender, class, and the behavior appropriate within those parameters.” Is this true? Do white women “outprivilege” nonwhite men? According to a YPIS framework, at least, I should think so.
The surprise, I suppose, is that Siddiqi grants that the White Lady is not, in fact, the most privileged of all. I think the White Lady gets at this more than the “white girl,” because of the implied class component. The pros and cons of a White Lady mocking progressivism in some ways seem to mirror those of left-wing efforts to otherize white men: On the one hand, there’s fun in turning the tables on a have, but on the other, you wind up keeping the focus on exactly the people who already get plenty of attention.16 Except, however, the White Lady isn’t quite that, because she’s only partly a have. She does not—pardon the expression—have it all.
The White Lady, as is generally the case with abstractions, is a malleable concept. She may be rich, but middle class and college educated might suffice; it’s more about obliviousness than wealth. And it’s also, as Siddiqi notes, about cultural consumption. A middle-class White Girl may be more pumpkin-spice latte, her schmancier counterpart more green juice. The White Girl likes Ugg boots, sorority parties, and hooking up with an “exotic” European on study abroad. The White Lady of a certain age is more prone to pearl clutching (that is, to the prudish, easily shocked attitudes possessed by the sort of old people who were never actually young), and to petulance in customer-service situations. There’s the White Lady striver, a copy of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In downloaded onto each of her many devices, as well as the White Lady stay-at-home mom, whose main concern in life is whether it’s organic. There’s also the “Nice White Lady,” who takes a self-sacrificing job at an inner-city school to “save” some troubled youths.17 There’s even the “woke” White Lady, encompassing everyone from the overly enthusiastic ally to that Hungarian woman who (moronically, need this be stated) had herself photographed in blackface in order to raise awareness of African tribes.18 (The genuinely anti-racist, enlightened White Lady is simply a white woman; no cliché necessary.) At any age, the White Lady is probably straight, but a femme-presenting19 bisexual woman could very well qualify. She’s definitely cisgender, although she may not be familiar with the term.
And she may not even be white, although this is less negotiable. Comedian Sarah Haskins’s Target: Women sketch, the one mocking yogurt commercials, included the following (spot-on) observation: “Yogurt eaters come from every race, but just one socioeconomic class: The class that wears gray hoodies. It’s that, ‘I have a masters, but then I got married’ look.”20 The yogurt lady is a proto-White Lady, for sure, but the sketch is from 2008, and therefore pre-awareness. The White Lady’s icon, in more recent years, might be Gwyneth Paltrow, Amy Schumer, Taylor Swift, Lena Dunham, or Emma Watson. Her preferred politician: Hillary Clinton, obviously.
A HILLARY INTERLUDE
HILLARY CLINTON—MORE than any public figure—embodies the kind of second-wave feminism that feels stale, to some, in the Tumblr age.21 It’s not exactly that she fails on awareness grounds—if anything, she was viewed as the stronger of the two main Democratic contenders when it came to addressing racism.22 It’s more that there’s something stale about the idea that electing a rich white woman—especially this one, ahem, Bill—as president would constitute a vital civil-rights victory. As of this writing, it hasn’t happened, but it feels almost as if it has, given how present Hillary Clinton has long been on the national and global landscape.
In an October 2015 blog post, Sanders supporter Matt Bruenig hoped/predicted that younger women would share his views, and for the following reason: “The new feminist emphasis is not pushing the top 1% of women even higher, but instead lifting the worse off women out of the cellar of society.”23 Supporting female executives or ordinary women is, as Bruenig presents it—even before offering a dubious but earnest explanation, relying on Bill Clinton’s record, for why Hillary Clinton is the enemy of the poor, as versus a Democratic candidate an inch to Sanders’s right—an either-or proposition. There’s something sinister, in his presentation, about anyone being too successful, and nothing remotely progressive about gender equity at the top. And so went the eternal question of whether younger women would embrace Clinton’s candidacy. Or were we, the millennials, so over those concerns, so evolved in our thinking that we couldn’t possibly conceptualize any sort of –ism hurting a woman like HRC?24
A lot has been written (and, gosh, tweeted) about the so-called Bernie Bro phenomenon—where Democrats who maybe supported Sanders or maybe did not (and maybe were young men, and maybe were not) were offering sexist reasons for opposing Clinton. Count me as a Bernie Bro agnostic. Yet Rebecca Traister’s New York magazine piece, “The Bernie Bros vs. the Hillarybots”—despite what the title suggests—isn’t really about accusing Clinton’s opponents-from-the-left of harassment.25 Rather, it’s a case for … feminism. The boring, old-school, unqualified kind whose starting principle is that women are, as a group, oppressed. And given women’s representation in US politics, political representation would be a fine place to make that point:
Where is the reckoning with the fact that the dearth of female leaders in America isn’t just some quirk of electoral politics, but a reflection of long-standing economic, political, social, and sexual inequities on which this country was built and which current representational inequity further exacerbates?
Traister’s piece gets at the essential, which is the difference between being fine with a theoretical woman candidate as president, and seeing it as evidence of tremendous injustice that none has been thus far. And—crucially—she demolishes the argument that Clinton’s privilege is such that there’s no glass ceiling left to shatter:
How do the men who confidently disqualify Hillary as a meaningful history-maker on account of how she’s a wealthy white woman [there, she links to Bruenig] explain that we’ve never had a female president of any race or class?26
How indeed? Yet this indifference to sexism (except when it intersects with other forms of discrimination) is what the privilege lens has contributed. Being someone who “merely” experiences misogyny has gotten recast as a position not just of relative advantage (as is completely accurate), but of objective, tippy-top privilege. Supporting Hillary Clinton “without apologies” is something female progressives, like Joan Walsh, evidently felt that they had to do.27
In all arenas, “privilege” involves a permanent quest to sort out who’s the most marginalized, but in a way that gives the impression that all the less-dire battles have already been won. This came through especially clearly in Harvard senior Molly Roberts’s Politico piece, “Why Millennials Don’t Care That Hillary Clinton Is a Woman.”28 The millennials, Roberts explains, are so over the tired, antiquated concern that was sexism, and have moved on to the really important concerns: “The focus on hardship has shifted from sex to privilege as the country has moved forward on gender equality.”
First question: Since when does “sex” not fall under the “privilege” umbrella? Gender, on its own, is no longer enough to count. Second question: Is this really about the country having “moved forward”? Or—as I suspect—is this about a new framework that casts anyone who doesn’t have it the absolute worst as privileged? What Roberts’s piece reveals—perhaps inadvertently—is that “privilege” can now be given as the reason not to care about a particular form of injustice. And there’s still quite a way to go on the “gender equality” front; a Jezebel post from that same day reported on a study with rather bleak findings for the respective prospects of fathers and mothers in academia, and that’s just how it goes in the cultural elite.29 Old-school sexism, the sort it’s so last season to care about, the kind involving concerns that are, in one way or another, “bourgeois,” may no longer be cool to call out, but the problems themselves remain. The “privilege” framework, then, is about referring to a state of it-could-be-worse with the very same term as one would use to describe absolute advantage. And so, rather than bringing about perspective, use of “privilege” winds up erasing a whole host of struggles that, for some reason, didn’t make the cut.
The absurdity, in the case of Hillary Clinton and the 2016 elections is, or ought to be, obvious: How can the need for a female president have become obsolete before we’ve even had one? How does that work? We’ve somehow leapt from “being a woman is always an obstacle” to “women as such no longer face oppression,” without pausing in the sensible, accurate middle ground, the one that would involve agreeing that white women have it easier than nonwhite women, but acknowledging that gender-specific obstacles face not just wealthy white women, but even white women married to former presidents. Again, it’s not exactly that the privilege lens favored Sanders over Clinton. It’s more that it has made it suspect to get too revved up about Clinton. It’s not permitted to be excited about the possibility of a female president without painstakingly disclaimerizing. And then there’s the debate where some view it as “sexist”30 to vote for Clinton because of her gender, which doesn’t make sense. Or, rather, it only makes sense if we’ve recast “woman” as a privileged category.
Women’s support for Clinton gets filed under women being politically oblivious. If only they knew the real issues at stake. If only they knew some history, they’d realize what a disaster Clinton would be, which is about where I’d place the reasoning behind the following tweet from controversial academic Steven Salaita: “Supporting #Hillary on feminist grounds fully negates Black, Iraqi, Latina, Palestinian, Pakistani, Native, Afghan, Yemeni, and poor women.”31 There’s been a sea of if-only-you-knew, as if the moment Clinton’s supporters learned that she was to Sanders’s right (or that in the 1990s, the Clintons failed to live up to 2015-era social-justice standards), they’d run screaming.
There’s also—although it’s generally implicit—a sense that Hillary Clinton’s gender would not be a legitimate reason to vote for her. Not because an insufficiently left Democrat is just as bad as a Sarah Palin or a Carly Fiorina. It’s more that gender, in and of itself, isn’t seen as enough. Writer Hamilton Nolan’s November 2015 Gawker post on the elections, called “There Are Only Two Issues,” makes precisely that case.32 The two issues? Economic inequality and climate change. An accompanying illustration, by Jim Cooke, depicted two businessmen, with smokestacks for heads, shaking hands. I’m not one to use the expression phallic imagery at whim, but … yeah.
It’s not just that Nolan brushes aside reproductive rights and gender equality, including only “abortion” in the long list of also-serious issues that he’s arguing, as side notes. It’s that he doesn’t even address the possibility that some would, for progressive reasons, go with the Democratic candidate who’s a woman.
“WHITE FEMINISM™”
THE WHITE LADY is wrapped up, in all kinds of symbolic ways, with entrenched racism. “It was, and remains, necessary for white women to decry the violence that is done in our name,” writes Chloe Angyal in a New Republic essay about the Charleston, South Carolina, massacre.33 The white woman who protests that the White Lady is a stereotype, and that none of us white women asked that evil idiot to shoot black people in our name, is borderline buying into the notion that reverse racism is real.
The essential quality of the White Lady is that she must think she has it tough, when reality would suggest otherwise. The only struggle the White Lady knows is White Lady struggle: the plight of taking a small rather than an extra small at J.Crew, or of not being able to simultaneously take the dream job and stay at home full time with the dream children. Something—a rich father or husband; the benefits of an Ivy League education; or just society smiling on her and handing her one seemingly random stroke of good luck after the next—is keeping her in the lifestyle to which she feels entitled. She experiences public spaces as hers, except when faced with the omnipresent threat of a lower-class and/or nonwhite man hitting on her. The White Lady is ambivalent about social justice, convinced as she is that those men are invading her personal space. The essential is that she be oblivious to her whiteness. This whiteness, though, can be a stand-in for other forms of slight or extreme advantage—wealth, cis-ness, thinness, resemblance to a supermodel, actually being a supermodel …
And this obliviousness, in turn, informs White Feminism, often referred to as White Feminism™, the trademark symbol used (as in, Nice Guy™, for the men who think that because they held the door open on a date, or were unpopular in high school, they’re owed sex) to indicate a reference to an irritating type.34 White Feminism is not the feminism of women (or the otherwise gendered) who happen to be white, but rather, at least in principle a version of feminism that rejects intersectionality, and whose focus is on the relatively minor complaints of women who almost have it all. It’s the Tumblr-era version of the expression “bourgeois feminism.”
In a perhaps unsurprising twist, the cliché of White Feminism converges quite neatly with misogynists’ grievances against women, specifically against the kind of women whose romantic attention they believe they’re entitled to. So one winds up seeing things like, on noted misogynist blog Return of Kings (in the men’s-rights/“game” end of the spectrum), a post entitled, “Why Modern Feminism Is White Woman’s Privilege.”35 The title might suggest a from-the-left check on Taylor Swiftian/Sheryl Sandbergian feminism; the context reveals a site aimed at men who want to pick up white women, and who exchange creepy, hateful strategies for how to go about doing so.
Then there’s the question of where White Jewish Ladies—my people—fit into the mix. On the one hand, many of the Ladies cited as embodying these traits are Jewish. Clearly, being Jewish doesn’t prevent someone from appearing or identifying as “white” in twenty-first century America. Nor does Jewishness prevent a woman from being well educated, entitled, or into upscale or “basic” things. (I could dig this hole further if I were more the autobiographical sort.) On the other, why do White Feminists act as if there are on the one hand, women, and on the other, people of color, without getting that half of those people of color are women? I’ve heard/read too many “Jews” vs. “women” discussions not to see, in some small way, why this obliviousness to gender can get annoying. That, and there’s a part of being a White Lady that involves a blithe ignorance of the fact that one can be hated for one’s gender and race simultaneously, and in intersecting ways. If you’ve been called a JAP (Jewish American Princess), that sort of ignorance is not really an option. And on that note, there’s substantial cliché overlap between the White Lady and the JAP. Which gets confusing. The traits for which I’m to invite a gentle punch up are the very same ones that, in a slightly different context (and context won’t always be clear) constitute a slur. I suppose what I’m getting at is, I have my own specific, if not altogether personal, reasons for balking at the cliché, and for not viscerally receiving it as progressive.
However, my main beef with White Lady rhetoric is more general. Any and all sexism becomes suddenly acceptable once the entity one opposes isn’t women, but the White Lady. A woman should be ambitious, should demand equality and equal pay, of course! And sure, that includes white women. But the moment it’s a White Lady we’re talking about, any criticism goes. Women shouldn’t be dismissed as vapid whiners. White Ladies, however, are fair game. The entitled White Lady, for whom feminism means ambivalence toward changing her name upon marriage to Douchey Muffington III, is the ultimate villain for all. As with Siddiqi’s hipster analogy, no one thinks they are that thing, so white women get to join in the fun. There are all sorts of White Lady self-parody and self-critique, crossing various genres.36
And the concept of White Feminism, in its various incarnations, does get used by white feminists, and not just self-proclaimed allies who see themselves as the aware exceptions. There’s also a growing discontent among, for lack of a better umbrella term, contrarian feminists with a feminism that’s too focused on the frivolous, although opinions differ on what frivolousness consists of. The libertarian feminist writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown used “White Feminism” in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, explaining that “progressive circles” use the term “as a pejorative to critique the sort of bougie, classist, navel-gazing activism favored by folks like Sheryl Sandberg and those who think cat-calling should be criminalized.”37 Brown invokes the term to explain the problem with focusing on Twitter hate that female British politicians received for suggesting bombing Syria, rather than paying attention to the actual bombing of Syria question.
Anti–White Lady complaints are standard-issue online, but it’s often ambiguous where they’re coming from. Where they’re coming from, that is, both in the identity sense—that is, the race and gender of the person making them—and in terms of the politics involved. Sometimes, it’ll be clear enough—a black woman has, understandably, had it with White Feminism. For example, in a Dame Magazine piece, “White Women, Please Don’t Expect Me to Wipe Away Your Tears,”38 Stacey Patton expresses frustration with certain white female friends and acquaintances on Facebook (not all, she spells out) whose response to black anti-racism is to get dismissive. The headline is, as is often the case, not so nuanced, but it’s clear form the piece itself that the reason Patton singles out white women is that she’s encountered more of this behavior, anecdotally, from white women than white men. She’s referring to specific white women in her life.
I’m thinking, too, of writer Jamilah Lemieux’s Gawker post, “Sandra Bland: A Black Woman’s Life Finally Matters.”39 In particular, the following passage:
There’s no joy in watching white folks and black men demand justice for Sandra Bland (white feminists are still M.I.A., but that train is always late, if not absent), nor should there be joy following a senseless loss of life. Yet, for me, there is this strange—satisfaction may be an overstatement—awareness that finally, finally a black girl lost matters to a great deal of people.
These are criticisms that may sting, that may inspire defensiveness, but that need to be heard. And the disproportionate attention paid to white feminists is, if not always fair (in Lemieux’s case, it would seem she was referring to what she’d observed, not to every last white feminist), understandable. It’s not that there’s a greater problem with racism within feminism than without. It’s that the same level of insensitivity that seems normal when coming from someone conservative, or just politically apathetic, reads as hypocrisy from a self-identified progressive. If you’re all about representation and righteous causes and so forth, but your conception of justice ends where your own personal grievances do, you can’t be surprised if you get called out for self-centeredness or hypocrisy.
THE REACTIONARY CRITIQUE OF WHITE FEMINISM
THERE ARE, THOUGH, these other criticisms, appearing in left-leaning threads, but where it’s unclear why, exactly, white women are being singled out. “White women never acknowledge the ridiculous privilege they have. They are every bit as privileged as white men. They’ll never admit it though,” writes one Salon commenter. “They’re far more privileged,” counters another.40 And here, from a New York Times Magazine reader: “It’s endlessly amusing to me how unaware white women are of their own special privilege that eclipses even that of straight white men.”41 The most out-there—not surprisingly—comes from a Gawker thread that exploded into a White Lady bashathon:
[W]hat the heck happens to the perky, upbeat 18–28 year old white ladies to turn them into retail anger-o-holics after they marry, get some cash money and shit out a kid or two?? And the best part is that they call themselves liberal too. And liberal white middle/upper middle-class women have this big stick up their ass about “compassion”. But this demographic is consistently the most snotty around service workers.42
Let’s attempt a close reading of … whatever that was. Was it a protest against liberal hypocrisy? Or was the complaint that women begin to droop (that is, to become less “perky”) after age twenty-eight? Because it was clearly both of those things. And so it becomes that much more confusing whether, in any given case, one is looking at a progressive or reactionary White Lady critique. As well it would (just as critiques of Clinton that looked like they were from the left were actually coming from the right43).
A further reason I prefer “White Lady” to “White Girl” is that the real (purported) “privilege” only ever kicks in when the woman in question ceases to be conventionally attractive, if indeed she was ever thus. The White Lady, crucially, isn’t as hot as she thinks she is. That’s central to the concept’s underlying misogyny. It’s about condemning the entitlement of the woman who has some sort of money or power or influence but is not even a swimsuit model, so how dare she! I’m thinking, of course, of conservative writer Kevin D. Williamson’s grotesque and grotesquely illustrated National Review article, “Pathetic Privilege.” The piece opens with “a list of things in Lena Dunham’s life that do not strike Lena Dunham as being unusual,” the gist of which is that Dunham grew up relatively wealthy in New York and has failed to demonstrate, to the universe’s satisfaction, that she’s aware that not everyone else did.44
Yet the clincher in this regard has to be Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker article about Edith Wharton, who was—at least according to Franzen—not much of a looker. (She looks fine enough in the accompanying photo, the one with the caption that reads, “Wharton’s many privileges make her hard to like.” With that said, it would never have occurred to me to wonder what Edith Wharton looked like.) In the piece, Franzen observes:
An odd thing about beauty … is that its absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do. To the contrary, Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy; and nobody was more conscious of this capacity of beauty to override our resentment of privilege than Wharton herself.45
It’s a curious passage, because it’s not entirely clear if Franzen’s simply stating facts (namely, that YPIS gets hurled more at the plain) or if he’s saying that he judges Wharton more harshly for her “privilege” because she wasn’t gorgeous. Another line that jumps out: “No major American novelist has led a more privileged life than Wharton did.” True? Impossible to fact-check, since Franzen admits that “she was seldom entirely free of money worries,” and is using a subjective definition of privilege. One that—oh so coincidentally—places a woman at the top of the privilege hierarchy.
The concept of privilege is, it starts to seem, gendered female. A man or woman can be rich, but to be privileged is to lounge, to leech. Critic Ginia Bellafante got at this phenomenon brilliantly, in her New York Times response to the mini-controversy surrounding Wednesday Martin’s book, Primates of Park Avenue:
Making fun of women who don’t eat carbohydrates and buy lots of handbags seems to get a far wider cultural buttress than making fun of, let’s say, the guys who came up with mortgage-backed securities. Sexism, in many cases, has become our preferred mechanism of venting frustration toward the rich.46
On June 3, 2015, Bellafante took Martin and her fans to task for aiming at rich housewives and not the husbands. On June 4, Wednesday Martin herself appeared in The Huffington Post making effectively the same argument, speaking out against “an entirely unexamined, reflexive contempt for and anger against women who are or seem privileged.” Evidently not seeing her own work as part of the housewife-deriding genre (a fact not lost on the commenters), she offered the following:
[O]ur zeal in seeking out modern-day Marie Antoinettes is an insidious, widespread, and totally accepted form of misogyny, one that masquerades as engaged cultural critique while rehearsing and repeating the very same sexist salvos most enlightened men and women have long banished from their vocabularies.47
Well, yes. Setting aside Martin’s own role in perpetuating this sort of thing (note that she, like Franzen, uses that ambiguous first-person plural), she’s right, but she could have been even more so. She briefly alludes to the fact that not all targets of these campaigns actually are privileged, but she then segues into a full-on defense of the maligned One Percent-ettes. And while I do think she and Bellafante are right about rich women (self-made or otherwise) drawing more hate than rich men, if this were simply about a gender disparity in the resentment inspired by the equivalently, fabulously privileged, that would still be a problem, but not one that all too many people could get worked up about. The bigger issue, I think, is the readiness with which “privileged” gets applied to women who aren’t all that privileged. The privileged girl is a type, in the way that the privileged guy is not.
THE AWARENESS DISCLAIMER
WRITER JESS ZIMMERMAN’S Hazlitt magazine essay about leaving her husband and starting over at thirty-two, “A Midlife Crisis, By Any Other Name,” is by no means a privilege confessional of the what-my-summer-job-taught-me-about-my-privilege variety.48 Its literary value is clearly of a different order, and it’s far more nuanced than the self-flagellations churned out on the online magazine xoJane and the like. It is, in other words, good. Yet the privilege turn still guides the piece, and the prospect of YPIS hovers in the not-so-distant background. The essay is Zimmerman telling the story of leaving her husband in her early thirties, at the very age when society (or, at least, lifestyle media and inquiring distant cousins) expects women to be settled down or striving to get there. It’s an interesting story told well. However, it wouldn’t do to just point out that it’s new and unusual for a woman to have a midlife crisis, for a woman to voluntarily chuck the stability of a good-enough marriage so as to see what else is out there. Leaving it at the novelty of the situation would be evidence of a blind spot, and those won’t do, so we get this interlude:
[M]aybe the classic midlife crisis really is the province of a certain kind of privileged, sheltered male. As defined by psychologist Elliot Jacques in 1965, the midlife crisis stems from recognizing one’s mortality for the first time—a position arguably reserved for those lucky enough to have avoided facing mortality from an early age. (Imagine a black man living anywhere with a police force who makes it to 40 without realizing he could die.) Concerning yourself with existential problems like, “Have I done enough with my life?” also suggests that you don’t have more pressing, acute concerns: feeding children, keeping or finding a home, avoiding being physically brutalized for being the wrong color or expressing the wrong gender at the wrong time. Even the ability to indulge a crisis is a privilege—it means you can put your life on hold.
We can’t just hear how Zimmerman feels. Nor is it enough for her to acknowledge that the desire to feel fulfilled is a luxury. We have to also hear how a theoretical black man might feel, and to get a digression that suggests black men don’t have midlife crises. Other categories of people who apparently don’t have them: anyone with kids, anyone with a need to pay for housing, anyone of color, and anyone gender nonconforming.
All of this anticipates the criticisms the piece would have otherwise gotten (and very well still might get). Not every thirty-two-year-old woman can just pick up and leave! Yet thanks to that paragraph and another somewhat self-flagellating one that follows, Zimmerman can’t be typecast as one of those writers who thinks everyone shares her privileges. Sure, she might still wind up getting accused of privileged obliviousness (when was a female essayist ever not so accused?), but she will at least have some passages to point to in her own defense. Except in these same passages, she opens herself up to another criticism, namely that she’s cast doubt on the full humanity of an array of Others: She assumes members of various marginalized groups don’t care about being happy, and don’t ever leave partners who no longer excite them.
Later in the essay, Zimmerman keeps up the “privilege” motif, but taps into something far more interesting. Speaking of her own female friend group, she writes, “We have the privilege to care about feeling fulfilled, but we don’t always have the freedom to try—and by the time we’re old enough to realize what we might want and believe that we deserve it, it feels too late.” And then comes the excellent sentence: “At some point, the privileged man realizes that he can’t keep going forever. At some point, the privileged woman realizes she forgot to start.”
Aha! Here’s the feminism, but also, in the apolitical sense, here’s what the essay is about.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that things start getting interesting—and not bogged down in hand-wringing—once Zimmerman returns to the personal part of her personal essay. Hers is a specific story, not that of women generally. Its resonances extend beyond her own life, but not to absolutely everyone on the planet. Her “privilege” digression announces limits on who will or won’t relate. Why exclude potentially receptive audiences? That said, maybe the privilege digression, in this specific case, was a brilliant literary strategy. It diverts attention away from the more commonplace accusation a personal essay like this one might get, namely that it’s insensitive to the feelings of the husband who got dumped, both to dump him and to write about it. It distracts, in other words, from the more obvious reason a midlife crisis gets cast as self-indulgent.
Whenever one reads a feminist first-person essay these days—and I’m intentionally only writing here about ones that otherwise have a lot going for them—it’s only a matter of time until one arrives at the awareness disclaimer. That’s the place where the writer (probably a cis White Lady,49 probably straight or bisexual, probably living in Brooklyn, definitely well educated, but not necessarily well-off) interrupts the usually scheduled programming to duly note that the issues she’s describing may not apply to a transwoman in Papua New Guinea; to a black or working-class woman; or, more generically, to a woman who isn’t quite so privileged.
The awareness disclaimer is everywhere. A sampling: Writing on Jezebel about a clever experiment she did, indicating that it’s easier to get fiction published as a man, Catherine Nichols included the following nod to the even less fortunate: “My name—Catherine—sounds as white and as relatively authoritative as any distinctly feminine name could, so I can only assume that changing other ethnic and class markers would have even more striking effects.”50 Philosophy professor Carol Hay, writing in The New York Times Opinionator blog, described an unpleasant and not entirely unfamiliar-sounding phenomenon, whereby college students, male and female, see their female instructors either as girlfriends or mothers, but not as professors. Hay includes a quote from “Patricia Hill Collins, a philosopher of feminism and race,” who “has argued that women of color face even more rigid limitations on their social roles.”51 Does Hay’s essay explore those limitations? Not really. But an acknowledgment has taken place!
Writer Nona Willis Aronowitz offers a similarly jarring aside in another otherwise moving and powerful essay about how, at a time in her life when she was caring for a parent and a partner, she found herself drawn to luxury spending: “I recognize that I’m lucky—even though I can’t really afford this stuff, a well-paid job has made my coping mechanism a short-term setback rather than a financial catastrophe. But retail therapy cuts across class lines,”52 she explains, with a digression about how one really shouldn’t judge poor people for spending beyond their means.
Oh, and there’s a Lena Dunham privilege disclaimer, from Dunham’s speech at an endometriosis fund-raiser. Yes, she suffers from the condition. It could be worse, and she is, let it be clear, aware:
I’m also in a position of extreme privilege. I can create my own schedule, I have the financial resources to seek medical care outside of my insurance network, and I even have insurance in the first place. I can take the time I need to recover without worrying about rushing back to my minimum-wage job to feed my children.53
While more obvious in Dunham’s case, perhaps, than others, there’s a sense in which the awareness disclaimer isn’t so much a display of sensitivity as a preemptive deflection of (likely) accusations. (I’m thinking of the much-quoted line spoken by Dunham’s Girls character Hannah Horvath: “So any mean thing someone is going to think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me, probably in the last half hour.”54) It’s a display of self-awareness, but a self-serving one.
However, for a woman to privilege-disclaim, she doesn’t need to be especially privileged. Consider this statement, from one telling New York magazine piece about the writer’s unplanned pregnancy, at nineteen: “As a white, privileged, middle-class stripper, I committed to using my resources to become the best mother and ultimately the best role model I could be.”55 While there’s plenty to be said about socioeconomic differences in the experience of sex work, barring some royal connections we don’t know about, a pregnant nineteen-year-old stripper is not “privileged.” Nor was the author of an essay on The Billfold from 2012, “Young, Privileged, and Applying for Food Stamps,” even if she had gone to college and spent $1.50 on a coffee.56 There’s a subgenre that hovers between the privilege nonconfession (that is, where a self-evidently not-privileged person refers to their tiniest advantages as “privilege”) and the more straightforward White Lady apologetics.
It’s no mystery where all these disclaimers come from. White Feminists (or white feminists trying not to be White Feminists?) who fail to affix disclaimers—that is, who, through genuine ignorance or a poor choice of words, speak out about feminism without so much as a nod to intersectional feminism—do get called out for this. In Tablet, writer Jamie Kirchick offers the example of the actress Patricia Arquette, whose 2015 backstage Oscars speech asking for members of other marginalized groups to stick up for women may have been intended as progressive, but quickly led to what felt like the entire Internet reminding her that some women are black, some women are gay, some women are black and gay.57 Fellow actress Julie Delpy got the same lesson around the 2016 Oscars, after making still more tone-deaf remarks about women having it tougher than African Americans.58 These types of comments inspire social-media and think-piece avalanches, the sort an A-list celebrity might bounce back from, but that might go over less well for someone less prominent.
So—either because they’re more socially aware than certain celebrities (and thus aware that not all women are rich or white), or because they fear these pile-ons, or both—the best of today’s successful white female essayists (and let’s throw in Dunham, who’s something of a multimedia personal essayist) spell out that they do not think all women are rich and white. They are aware. Aware, that is, both of their own nonrepresentativeness, and of the near certainty that critics will call them out on that nonrepresentativeness.
Yet there’s also a particularity to the personal-essay form that’s at play. In today’s literary landscape, an essay will generally need to make some kind of point.59 It will require a news peg, say, or statistics demonstrating that we’re not (horrors) reading just about one person’s experience, but are in fact getting some kind of broader, quantitative truth about society. These editorial requirements put personal essayists in a bind. It will seem as if they’re claiming to be speaking for everybody, because no one will print them unless they claim this. So they make the claim, which—because no, the essay doesn’t tell a universal story—demands a disclaimer.
Awareness disclaimers are, at any rate, not unique to the female-confessional genre. At The Awl, writer Matt Buchanan regularly affixes a tag to his articles about upscale New York restaurants that reads, “Around Every Single Conversation About Food Culture There Should Be a Huge Set of Brackets in Order to Convey That Almost All of This Is Restricted to the Fairly Privileged.”60 The “brackets” approach contends that if you just add a perma-disclaimer, you somehow negate the schmanciness. As if it’s totally fine that restaurant reviews now only have practical use for oligarchs, as long as nonoligarchs are informed that the reviewer is aware of the issue. Awareness disclaimers, then, are baseline irritating and sanctimonious, if understandable from an author or (attuned) editor’s perspective.
However, these disclaimers pose specific problems in the feminist personal essay genre. Women speaking their truths on what used to be quaintly known as women’s issues must now tack on references to the possibility that other, less privileged women will not relate to their problems. Awareness disclaimers, in this context, are pleas to the reader to not take the author’s concerns too seriously, because other women, the author insists, have it worse.
Take the disclaimer in Alana Massey’s personal essay about writing women-oriented personal essays.61 She makes a bunch of interesting points about how to subvert the sexism of journalism’s pink ghetto, and then suddenly, this statement:
I must stop momentarily with the admission that the reason I was able to write about these topics is not a matter of my courage and my skill at doing so. I am a young, thin, white, cis gender woman whose inner turmoil is often seen as poetic rather than dangerous. My conclusions about the culpability of men are met with less of the suspicion and vitriol that women without these privileges receive. This advantage cannot be ignored and it must not endure if we are truly committed to unwrapping the white male stranglehold on power in the world.
I suspect this assessment is accurate, but there’s still something frustrating about a female, feminist62 writer insisting that neither “courage” nor “skill” have entered into her success.
What these disclaimers do is dismiss a particular woman’s feminist concerns (that is, the woman with these concerns) as unimportant. It’s certainly true that feminism shouldn’t—doesn’t—begin and end with The Feminine Mystique plight, or the Madame Bovary variant. It isn’t just about suburban wives who wake up one morning and realize that yoga and lattes (Jess Zimmerman namechecks both) aren’t enough. Yet it also isn’t not about that situation. And the fact that second-wave feminist complaints continue to play out in the twenty-first century is at the very least curious.
These disclaimers amount to a pushback against second-wave feminist bravado, against the feminism that encourages women to speak up proudly about their accomplishments, same as a man would do. The privilege approach asks women to hold back from engaging in unapologetic self-promotion, and to consider—aloud—every aspect of their accomplishments that could be attributed to some systemic injustice. It also asks women with personal narratives of challenges they’ve faced as women to qualify those narratives with an acknowledgment that “mere” gender concerns are actually nothing important, and that the real struggle lies elsewhere.
The disclaimer, in theory, preempts the charge that the essay ignores the experiences of women who aren’t the author. The essay will do just that; it will also, disclaimer or no disclaimer, get this criticism. So why provide one? To me, it comes down to two options: Either we say that such concerns are too small compared with, say, police brutality, and simply stop discussing them, or we encourage self-contained essays along these lines, while simultaneously promoting writing by a more diverse pool.
THE HAVE-IT-ALL-ERS ARE ALSO AWARE
WHERE AWARENESS DISCLAIMERIZING really takes off, though, is in the great discussion of women, work, and motherhood. Any topic in this realm, even tangentially, demands awareness. Maybe not an extended digression, but a nod. Something. A discussion of the challenges of finding decent maternity clothes isn’t complete without an acknowledgment that “[f]or gender non-binary people, finding maternity clothes is tricky on a whole other level, a deep compromise between different kinds of comfort.”63 The (doubtless substantial, I feel compelled to note, thus doing the very thing I criticize) difficulty that population of pregnant individuals faces isn’t brought up because the author identifies as gender nonbinary, but precisely because she doesn’t—it’s an it-could-be-worse: a requisite affirmation of the existence of still-greater struggles.
In this arena, privilege in the sense of socioeconomic inequality is, straightforwardly, a big deal. Journalist and novelist Jessica Grose, writing at The New York Times’s parenting blog, explained that although she and her husband both work, she thinks of the money she earns as specifically destined for childcare. She explains that her attitude toward her family’s finances isn’t simply (or directly) because she’s the woman in a heterosexual couple, but also because of the sort of work she, a writer without a day job (apart from childcare, that is!), does. Work that she explains in terms of what else: “My hours are also more flexible, and I work partly from home. By virtue of this extreme privilege—for which I am very, very grateful—my entire orientation is more domestic.”64 This did not satisfy commenter Tom from the Bronx: “I realize this is a blog, and probably editor-less. But looking through the comments, I’m not seeing anyone else appalled by the piece completing [sic] lacking in self-consciousness about privilege.”65 It could be—stranger things have happened—that this newspaper commenter skipped over the sentence where Grose acknowledged her privilege and labeled it “extreme.” Yet it could just as well be that Tom was annoyed not so much by the unexamined privilege as by the privilege—that is, by the fact a newspaper frames a relatively well-off married woman’s feminist hand-wringing as a serious work-life balance issue.
A larger-scale version of the Jessica Grose-“Tom” conflict played out in response to Princeton professor and public intellectual Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic cover story, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Slaughter was as up-front as she might have been about the piece’s specificity: “I am well aware that the majority of American women face problems far greater than any discussed in this article. I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place.”66 Nevertheless, The Atlantic later published a follow-up interview, “Anne-Marie Slaughter Answers Her Critics,”67 with an entire section called “On Privilege,” in which Slaughter affirmed that she is privileged and aware of it, but privilege is unavoidable if what you’re asking is why there aren’t more female professional elites.
It is a problem that certain topics—in the Grose and Slaughter cases, work-life balance issues—tilt so heavily toward upper-echelon professionals. Given all the topics at stake—paid parental leave, adequate health insurance, class disparities when it comes to two-parent households—it’s just plain true that privileged families, privileged women, have it easier than poorer women. Yet is it really a problem of insufficient privilege awareness? Is the problem that Grose and Slaughter didn’t reflect enough on what makes their experiences unusual? (Which they most assuredly did.) Or is it that the trend for first-person accounts means that we end up reading about the experiences of women at the top of their professions? What would actually work: a return to traditional reporting (minus the personal-essay component), and greater socioeconomic diversity in media. Neither of those developments is forthcoming. It’s much more affordable to get an essay from a rich woman, and then to host some reader-generated content wherein commenters debate whether she has properly reckoned with her advantages.
There’s a subtle, from-the-right aspect to many of the work-life criticisms. Take Caitlin Flanagan’s 2004 Atlantic essay, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement.” Flanagan wants women of her caste—that is, wealthy women; the great swath of partnered women who have professional careers but also work because they want or need the money, and who don’t have additional household help for things like changing the sheets, effectively doesn’t exist—to “acknowledge that many of the gains of professional-class working women have been leveraged on the backs of poor women.” As Flanagan notes—and I can remember 2004 well enough to know this would not have come as a surprise at the time—upper-class two-parent households tend to employ poor, often immigrant women to take care of their children. A feminism that focuses solely on the women newly in the professional workplace, while ignoring those who are taking on those women’s household duties, is … but wait a moment. Did those duties ever really belong to those mothers in the first place?
The should-be-obvious question: What about the fathers? If one sees it as an injustice that, until relatively recently, only men were allowed high-powered careers, isn’t the husband-and-father in these scenarios equally responsible for the employment (and labor conditions) of any household help? Flanagan asks that her peers “demand that feminists abandon their current fixation on ‘work-life balance’ and on ‘ending the mommy wars’ and instead devote themselves entirely to the real and heartrending struggle of poor women and children in this country.” An alert reader will wonder whether improving feminism is actually Flanagan’s goal. Buried in the piece are standard-issue gender-essentialist arguments about children needing their mothers at home with them, and—gratuitously but tellingly—about women typically falling in love with every man they sleep with. (Oh really?) It’s not for me to say whether Flanagan or anyone else truly cares about the plight of female domestic workers. Yet what’s clear enough is that within her essay, that plight serves a particular purpose, which is to condemn the desire of wealthy mothers (including, confusingly, Flanagan herself) to work outside the home.
Arguments against bourgeois feminism exist on the left as well, of course, but tend not to be phrased as condemnations of wealthy-women-but-not-men for existing. In a 2013 Dissent magazine article, Sarah Jaffe makes the case against “trickle-down feminism” and demands that feminism turn away from stories about CEOs and focus instead on low-income, female-dominated labor forces.68 Jaffe argues for a shift in priorities, noting that greater gender equality at the top doesn’t seem to translate into better labor conditions for the vast majority of women. In a 2015 Guardian piece, author and academic Alison Wolf takes that line of thought further, arguing that “boardroom quotas” in the UK and elsewhere “are of a piece with much of the modern feminist media: a combination of elite self-interest and preoccupation with imagery.” Yet Wolf doesn’t merely question mainstream feminism’s focus on the relatively well-off. She dismisses gender equity at the top as not actually a type of diversity: “[W]hy should it be so good for women, or indeed society, to give seats to women who are mostly middle class and Oxbridge educated at the expense of middle-class and mostly Oxbridge men?”69 It’s clear enough why this wouldn’t be optimal diversity, but have we really reached the point, when it comes to gender, where elite women are just as privileged as elite men?
And there is—as there always must be—a Hillary Clinton angle. In Slate, Michelle Goldberg—yes, the author of the piece on “toxic” online feminism—discusses female midlife invisibility, and explains how her own life experiences lead her toward relating to Clinton.70 Goldberg acknowledges that hers is a plight felt most strongly by women who were thought cute in the first place, a category with all kinds of racial and socioeconomic components:
[I]n my own, admittedly very privileged experience—it’s only as I approach middle age that I’m aware of what being a woman has cost me. In my twenties and early thirties, I felt that I enjoyed the same professional attention and opportunities as my male colleagues. I didn’t realize at the time that being treated as an ingénue and being treated as an up-and-comer are not the same thing, and that only one comes with a continuing skyward trajectory.
I want to be convinced by Goldberg’s point about a specific injustice. And I am. Yet it feels wrong to agree with her argument, when she’s also just instructed the reader that she’s “very privileged.”
The awareness-disclaimer ritual in women’s personal essays and other first-person journalistic writing if anything reinforces privilege, with the (in these cases) wealthy or middle-class white woman asserting that they know what a woman from another demographic will or won’t identify with, and preempting a woman from one of those demographics, who might otherwise have not called her out, exactly, but told another story, one showing that not everyone shares the same experiences. Or that, in some cases, everyone does. (Repeat after me: heartbreak is not a First-World problem.)
One of the Arquette call-outs Jamie Kirchick mentions came from feminist writer Amanda Marcotte, who summed up her grievance with the fellow white woman as follows: “Arquette’s political grandstanding played into every ugly stereotype about ‘feminism’ being about little more than some privileged white women trying to become more privileged.”71 While that should not be feminism, in its entirety, it absolutely needs to be a part of it. The word “privileged” doesn’t cancel out the “woman” bit. Feminism means that every woman should feel entitled to more.
THE AWARENESS DISCLAIMER MEETS IMPOSTOR SYNDROME
IN A 2015 post on New APPS, an academic group blog, Catarina Dutilh Novaes announced her promotion to full professor of philosophy.72 The post, called “What It Takes to Succeed in Academia,” took the form of a privilege self-flagellation. In it Novaes grudgingly admits to having worked hard to get where she was, but takes the opportunity to point out that “[i]t takes an incredible amount of luck and, yes, privilege, for things to work out.” Novaes then took the reader on a tour of her myriad advantages, beginning, as such tales so often do, with an aside about struggles overcome. What follows is a bit long, but privilege acknowledgments often are:
While I am a woman in a male-dominated field, and while I had to overcome hurdles related to coming from the “periphery” of academic action (originally from Brazil, and then developing my career in the Netherlands, which is ok but frankly not Top of the Pops), for the rest I’ve been extremely privileged. My parents were both academics (my mother still is), so in terms of academic support at home I was particularly well served. For a number of reasons, I also never had to worry about economical hardship and financial stability, and thus I could choose the risk of an academic career without having to worry whether one day I’d have no food on my plate. And, last but not least, I am white, not differently abled, cis, and I fit reasonably well within certain stereotypical standards of beauty.
Fair enough, one might say. It’s easy to imagine how someone who lacked Novaes’s advantages and didn’t do well on the academic job market might resent someone who had those advantages and landed a good job. The question is what self-flagellation along these lines accomplishes. For someone other than the self-flagellator, that is. Is it helpful to hear from a wealthy and beautiful woman that she’s wealthy and beautiful, and also that she can walk, and is white, and has a biological sex that’s in sync with her gender? Does it make those without the same privileges feel better? Does listing your achievements and calling them privilege make the people who didn’t win life’s lottery feel better? It’s certainly not the same as abandoning the position.
The blog post in question is an installment—albeit a highbrow one—in the genre known as #blessed, a humblebrag cultural trend sufficiently entrenched in our social-media lives as to have received its own New York Times Style section takedown.73 (I chose Novaes’s post rather than others precisely because I don’t know the author, and because it was a public pronouncement; I have seen similar, behind privacy settings, from acquaintances.) What is frustrating about these types of post is that they jump in front of whichever envy an audience might experience. Specifically, they preempt YPIS venting from those who haven’t had it so good. The privileged person is saying that she knows she’s privileged, and that she doesn’t actually think her good fortune makes her a better person … and yet is revealing her goodness through the very act of confessing. The privileged person who gracefully acknowledges her privilege grates because what’s added if not an aura of saintliness? Here’s someone with the nerve to be privileged and likable.
Yet the most obvious question about the post is: Would a man have written something like it? Do reasonably good-looking cis white male professors whose parents are also academics write blog posts apologizing for having effectively stolen the jobs of the more talented and hardworking? Not generally. They take for granted that they deserve whatever they’ve achieved professionally, and reflect only upon why, despite being supremely deserving, they haven’t been given more.
Which brings us to why the privilege approach is such an odd fit with feminism. A feminism that asks every woman to enumerate her unearned advantages, but that makes no such demand upon men (if only because they’re outside this conversation), inevitably reinforces the gender divide. The privilege framework, which defines ever-greater segments of society as “privileged,” asks all the many privileged-loosely-defined women to apologize for taking up space, for speaking their mind, which women already do, copiously.
And the privilege-awareness ritual is nothing more than a repetition of the impostor-syndrome thought process. According to the Caltech counseling Web site, impostor syndrome includes “the tendency to attribute success to luck or to other external reasons and not to your own internal abilities. Someone with such a feeling would refer to an achievement by saying, ‘I just got lucky this time’…”74 Whether the women who write these posts actually experience pathological self-doubt, only they know for sure; at any rate, it seems misguided to conflate humblebragging with self-sabotage. What concerns me is the newfound veneration on the left of that way of presenting female accomplishments. Feminism was, for a time, all about shedding impostor syndrome, but that’s going out of fashion. In 2015, on New York magazine’s women-and-style blog, editor Molly Fischer wrote a piece called “I Hope I Never Get Over My Impostor Syndrome,” arguing in favor of self-doubt over being a “blowhard.”75
The privilege self-critique thus has a way of reinforcing what many women already think—that factors other than their own efforts explain everything that’s gone right for them academically or professionally. The hand-wringing that so many women already do matches up precisely what the privilege framework demands. It’s not that this hand-wringing is based on pure nonsense—of course whiteness, wealth, beauty, and connections impact which women and which men get ahead, but it just doesn’t seem as if men are decompensating, to nearly the same degree, over their unearned advantages. And why should they? Women already have the framework for thinking our successes aren’t earned.
A RIGHTEOUS MISOGYNY
LET ME BE clear. The problem is not that women of color have gained platforms and made white women’s grievances look relatively minor. Women of color continue to be marginalized, even with all the awareness floating around (remember those all-white Oscars?), and white women’s grievances are relatively minor. So, too, with critiques of “bourgeois” feminism, centered more on class than race. It is ridiculous to present the challenges of female Harvard Business School graduates as the be-all and end-all of feminism. If privilege awareness simply meant a nudge toward remembering that wealthy white women aren’t the only women, and aren’t the most oppressed, then fair enough. That’s not how it’s worked out.
The problem, rather, is that the very same stance—White Ladies, so entitled!—exists both as a from-the-left check on mainstream feminism, and as from-the-right misogyny. The same punch, as it were, can be both of those things, depending upon the speaker, depending upon the context. And the context isn’t always clear. So we have to make a guess: which of these things is more likely, more often? Absent a specific context, what would we think is going on?
For me, what it comes down to is this: the people most vocally riled/threatened/whatever by white women/White Ladies/whatever, and the ones with the most power, are male sexists (who aren’t especially keen on nonwhite ladies, either), not, say, working-class transwomen of color unconcerned with whether white female CEOs are getting enough quality time with their 2.5 kids. And the White Lady? Not always privileged, not always even white. A rhetorical strategy that can sometimes serve a purpose within the confines of internal activist debates falls apart upon reaching a broader audience. And with the Internet, there aren’t so many “confines” to speak of. Thanks to the privilege framework, it’s possible—no matter who you are, or why you’re doing so—to bash women and be given the benefit of the doubt. Well done, privilege framework. Well played.